Louisville Process Theology Network

Clarence Darrow -- Part II

Jan 16, 2009

From ?“Clarence Darrow for the Defense?” by Irving Stone (1941).


Page 80. ?“Before the freethinkers of America he committed the heresy of insisting that if they wished to remain freethinkers they had to make constant explorations into the realm of the spirits and that they had to build their freethinking on the hypothesis that they might we wrong.

When the Atheists Society invited him to lecture he dressed them down for being as arrogant and prejudiced as the Church: religion insisted there absolutely was a God, heaven, and hell; the atheists insisted there absolutely was no God, heaven, and no hell, and neither could prove their point.

One day Hamlin Garland lumber in, threw himself into a roomy chair, and from under his bushy eyebrows fixed his inquiring gaze on Clarence and asked, ?‘Well, Darrow, what?’s your latest slant? ?…?…

You know, you?’re one of the few who changes his mind with the times, and I?’m always sure to so hear some new angle ?– how you?’ve come to completely change your mind about one thing or another according to the turn of word affairs?’ ?….

?‘There no such thing as standing still,?’ nodded Darrow.



Page 500: When he went to speak at the Meadville Theological School, from which his father had been the first student to be graduated, the Unitarian students found him a little old fashioned.

?‘The men always enjoyed his trenchant criticism of religion and the ministry, and their discussions were fierce and hot, with no quarter given; however, I got the impression from their discussion that Mr. Darrow did not realize how emancipated Unitarian ministers were of old theology and clericalism?….

T.V Smith of the University of Chicago debated him frequently on religion, using against Clarence the most modern and advanced theories of philosophy and metaphysics?…?…

After (Smith) had debated Darrow three times on this subject, he finally leaned over in the cab one night, put his hand on (Smith?’s) knee and said, ?‘You know, Professor, tonight for the first time I think I understand what you are saying, and there might be something to it after all.'



Page 91. His interest in why individuals came to be what they are drove him inevitably into a study of the forces that make and control contemporary society?… Once you knew what a man came from, once you grasped the thousands of years of painful and not altogether successful struggle to emerge from bestiality into a controlled social order, it was easier to understand why men did the seemingly inexplicable.

Religion which was acclaimed to be the approach of love, tolerance and forgiveness, said that man sprang from God, was created whole and responsible; anything he did which was adjudged to be bad was entirely his own fault and his own choosing, arising from the deliberate and conscious evil which he elected of his own free will to exercise. Consequently, no one was responsible for him: not society, not the Church, not even God.

Darrow?’s philosophy of mechanism, which was accused of being a cruel, inhuman and godless approach, insisted that there must be a cause for every antisocial act, and once that cause was found and either removed or eliminated, the victim of the cause could be made well and whole again, just as people with diphtheria or typhoid are more whole or well again once the cause of the disease is determined and them wiped out.

In his fight for tolerance, Darrow even went one step further, and it was his next step that brought down the wrath of organized society: that it is cruel and wasteful to punish further people who are already ill ?…?”