Sloan, Gary. “A Connecticut Yankee in God’s Court.” Skeptic 8.4 (2001): 86-89.

I. Abstract:
A. Focuses on the conflict over the issue on religion involving writer Mark Twain
B. Accounts on the disbelief of Twain on the divinity of Jesus Christ and the immortality of the soul
C. Interest in Darwinism and cosmology
D. Impact of the afflictions for aggravating the anger of Twain towards God

II. Synopsis:
Sloan Gary offers us a brief introduction of Mark Twain’s religious background throughout his life in which Mark Twain’s religion evolves from skepticism to nihilism via temporary piety:
A. Mark Twain’s impiety and skepticism of Christianity in his childhood was attributed to his parents’ heterodoxy and his own empirical proclivities.

B. As an adult, Mark Twain was imbibed with the Christianity of enlightened liberalism congenial with his deistic mind. He discarded heaven and hell, the immortality of the soul, and the divinity of Jesus Christ. For Twain, Christianity derived its authority from the so-called prophets who confined the grandeur of God to the narrow parochial imagination. Sloan holds that Mark Twain considered nature the true revelation. Moreover, Sloan notices that Mark Twain believed that one’s adversity is caused by the law of working: God did not interfere with human affairs, whether God was against the one man or in favor of the other.

C. Mark Twain embraced Darwinism. He was convinced that God did not meddle in human evolution.

D. Mark Twain was also fascinated by cosmology.
[In the Middle Ages, common people are prohibited to study astronomy, for the churched feared that people would get too much knowledge from God through astronomy.]

E. Despite his strictures on the church and Bible, Mark Twain long retained his respect for God. Before his personal afflictions in his twilight years, Mark Twain was still far from the entire negation of God.

F. Prior to the 1890s, Mark Twain’s criticism of religion was more bantering than acrimonious.

G. Buffeted by a series of blows from which he never discovered in the 1890s, Mark Twain fought back at his abusive God by his “words.” He ascribed his crushing afflictions to the malignant God.
[Although Mark Twain is skeptical of and usually pokes fun at God, he subconsciously recognizes His existence; otherwise, he would not give God fresh ammunition after a series of malicious blows in his twilight years.]

H. Mark Twain’s animus eventually spread to the impassive God of Deism, the thought in his youth.

I. Mark Twain, Sloan suggests, implies the Moral Sense of which its sole effect is to enable and to tempt human beings to do evil afflicts us:
Quotation:
Twain deprecated the Moral Sense (he always capitalized it) as a dastardly legacy of the Fall. By allowing humans to distinguish good and bad, its sole effect was to enable and to tempt humans to do evil. Without it, we would live in a state of idyllic innocence, unplagued by a bad conscience. With it, we are inferior to the creatures, spared the accursed faculty: "Whenever I look at the other animals and realize that whatever they do is blameless," wrote Twain, "I envy them the dignity of their estate, its purity and its loftiness, and recognize that the Moral Sense is a thoroughly disastrous thing."

J. Mark Twain sought refuge in solipsism after his wife’s death. He did not believe there was God or universe. For him, everything was in a state of nihilism and annihilation:
Quotation:
His own perfervid blasphemies, Twain recognized, were part of the appointed absurdity. Occasionally, he sought refuge in solipsism. After his wife's death, he wrote Twichell: "There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought." In his grief and despair, Twain arrived at an endgame of utter nihilism.