Luther Burbank

From Philosopedia

Burbank, Luther (7 March 1849 - 11 April 1926)

An eminent plant breeder, creator of “the Burbank potato,” Burbank was a Unitarian from time to time. That is, he said he went to a church because he liked hearing what the minister might say. He also liked to read E. Haldeman Julius’s Little Blue Books, and Robert G. Ingersoll was one of his favorite authors. In his Why I Am an Infidel (1926), Burbank wrote the following:

• Science, unlike theology, never leads to insanity. Science . . . has opened our eyes to the vastness of the universe and given us light, truth, and freedom from fear where once was darkness, ignorance, and superstition. There is no personal salvation, except through science.
• Most people’s religion is what they want to believe, not what they do believe.
• Those who take refuge behind theological barbed wire fences quite often wish they could have more freedom of thought, but fear the change to the great ocean of scientific truth as they would a cold bath plunge.
• Those who would legislate against the teaching of evolution should also legislate against gravity, electricity, and the unreasonable velocity of light, and also should introduce a clause to prevent the use of the telescope, the microscope, and the spectroscope or any other instrument . . . used for the discovery of truth.
• What is the use of assuring Fundamentalists that science is compatible with religion. They retort at once, “Certainly not with our religion.”
• And to think of this great country in danger of being dominated by people ignorant enough to take a few ancient Babylonian legends as the canons of modern culture. Our scientific men are paying for their failure to speak out earlier. There is no use now talking evolution to these people. Their ears are stuffed with Genesis.

Edgar Waite, a reporter, interviewed Burbank for the San Francisco Bulletin (22 January 1926), and the resultant headline was

I’M AN INFIDEL, DECLARES BURBANK, CASTING DOUBT ON SOUL IMMORTALITY THEORY

The reporter had asked Burbank about Henry Ford’s views in favor of reincarnation. Burbank had replied,

• A theory of personal resurrection or reincarnation of the individual is untenable when we pause to consider the magnitude of the idea. On the contrary, I must believe that rather than the survival of all, we must look for survival only in the spirit of the good we have done in passing through. This is as feasible and credible as Henry Ford’s own practice of discarding the old models of his automobile. Once obsolete, an automobile is thrown to the scrap heap. Once here and gone, the human life has likewise served its purpose. If it has been a good life, it has been sufficient. There is no need for another. But as a scientist, I can not help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don’t want to have anything to do with such a God.

What particularly riled readers who were believers was his statement,

• I am an infidel today. I do not believe what has been served to me to believe. I am a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic. When it can be proved to me that there is immortality, that there is resurrection beyond the gates of death, then will I believe. Until then, no.

Thousands complained, and Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker among others have cited Wilbur Hale as saying that in Burbank’s zeal to respond with letters containing “logic, kindliness, and reason in order to convince and help the bigoted,” Burbank “grew suddenly old attempting to make reasonable a people which had been unreasonable through twenty stiff-necked generations. . . . He died, not a martyr to truth, but a victim of the fatuity of blasting dogged falsehood.”

One of the few men admitted to his house at Santa Rosa, in the few months before he died, was Joseph McCabe. “I found him advanced even beyond the vague Emersonian theism of his earlier years,” Joseph McCabe reported. “He agreed to see me, he said, though he was tired and ill, because of his admiration of my work as a Rationalist. He had just raised a storm by a public declaration that he did not believe in a future life, and his biographer Wilbur Hall repeats this.”

At Burbank’s memorial service, Judge Ben Lindsey addressed an estimated 10,000 people. Maynard Shipley has written, “Several Roman Catholic priests were seen in the audience, but several of them left the open-air services in Doyle Park, offended in their narrow dogmatism by Lindsey’s ringing challenges.” Part of Lindsey’s speech included the following:

• One of the saddest spectacles of our times is the effort of hidebound theologians, still desperately trying to chain us to the past—in other forms that would still invoke the inquisitions, the fears, and the bigotries of the dark ages, and keep the world in chains. The chains of lies, hypocrisies, taboos, and the superstitions, fostered by the dying, but still the organized, relentless outworn theology of another age. They refuse to see that in their stupid lust for power they are endangering all that is good.

{CE; CL; FFRF; Freethought Today, August 1993; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TYD; U; UU}