Guest writer: Charles Dickens on those who do evil in the name of religion
In the last scene I plan to use from Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas (1843), Scrooge assumes the Ghost of Christmas Present is Christ and asks Him why bakers, which poor people use because they don't have their own ovens, have to be closed on Sundays:
...there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their [Christmas] dinners to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much...
"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment."
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?" said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."
"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.
"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.
"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."
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