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1. an atheist,
2. an agnostic, or
3. a deist?
Well, the author's name is on Wikipedia's list of agnostics. Also, on its list of deists. Hmm. Now go looking for a list of famous atheists, and yup.
So what did Twain believe? Depends on whom you ask. In other words, it's complicated - but not to Colorado pastor Kevin Swanson. Swanson has gotten it into his head that Twain was one of the wickedest men who ever lived, on account of the fact that America's greatest humorist frequently made fun of religious phonies with observations like this one:
Twain also loved shocking the citizenry of his day with witty inversions of their orthodoxy:"In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
Stuff like that gives Kevin Swanson the vapors, so to him, the answer to my lead-in question is"But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?"
4. a Satanist.
True story.
You see, the other day,
The horror!Swanson appeared on TruNews with host Rick Wiles. There, he discussed his theory about how Twain was possessed by the devil. Swanson theorizes that Huckleberry Finn was an "attack on the Christian church" because it exposed Christian hypocrisy regarding slavery. He states that "Mark Twain was probably the strongest apologist against the Christian faith that America's ever seen. ... He mocks Christianity throughout and Huckleberry Finn is an atheist himself."
I would love to mock the good reverend here, but I don't want to open myself up to charges that I'm in league with my Lord and Master Satan. I will say, though, that I'd rather spend an eternity in hell with Mark Twain, than a year in heaven with billions of Ned Flanders-wannabes like Kevin Swanson.Swanson argues that "Huckleberry Finn" "is extremely, powerfully, cynically against the Christian faith. ... Mark Twain himself I believe turned out to be demon-possessed." For that, Swanson cites Twain's "Letters from the Earth." Swanson called [it] "one of the most acidic, horrific, evil books I think ever, ever written by any human being in the history of mankind."
P.S. Letters From the Earth is out in a brand new edition. Amazon.com offers this brief description:
You can order your copy here.Letters From the Earth is a somber collection of essays and stories written by Mark Twain after the death of his wife and one of his daughters. Satan writes a probing letter to his fellow archangels Michael and Gabriel about the inconsistencies of human religious faith, in the title story. In this posthumously published book, Twain uses his characteristic acerbity and lucid powers of observation to investigate the nature of existence.
Typical: projecting his own demons on someone else. And yes, I share this sentiment: "I'd rather spend an eternity in hell with Mark Twain, than a year in heaven with billions of Ned Flanders-wannabes like Kevin Swanson." Marl Twain wasn't an atheist, he simply wasn't Christian in a traditional sense:
"...to trust the true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of His colossal universe is proof that He is at least steadfast to His purposes; whose unwritten laws, so far as the affect man, being equal and impartial, show that he is just and fair; these things, taken together, suggest that if he shall ordain us to live hereafter, he will be steadfast, just and fair toward us. We shall not need to require anything more." – Mark Twain, from Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed, “Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources”. _[Link]