On This Day in History: March 25

Percy Bysshe Shelley promotes atheism

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“Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.” There are places in the world today where proclaiming such a thing can get you dead. In 1811 England, it got Percy Bysshe Shelley kicked out of Oxford.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: March 25, 1811--

The poem was titled The Necessity of Atheism. Shelley co-wrote it with his closest friend Thomas Hogg. The men were only 18, and knew they were tempting fate with one of the first “This God stuff is fucking bullshit” texts published in England. They’re lucky they only got expelled; people were often prosecuted for breaking the nation’s blasphemy laws.

Let’s talk about those laws for a moment. Up until 1883, prosecution for saying shit about Christianity in the UK was common. After that they chilled on it quite a bit, but there was still the occasional trial. The last conviction was in 1977 for the publishing in Gay News of James Kirkup’s poem about a Roman centurion having hot gay sex with Jesus after he was crucified. The publisher was fined and ordered to pay prosecution costs, and also sentenced to nine months in prison. The sentence was suspended, but the judge said he was sorely tempted to put the publisher behind bars. The law wasn’t repealed in England and Wales until 2008, and not in Scotland until 2021. It’s still on the books in Northern Ireland. Continues below …

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Today, one third of English aren’t religious, but in 1811 Shelley’s claims pissed people off. The claims were based in empiricism. There is a deficiency of proof of God, so we can’t believe in it. He proclaimed this wasn’t a voluntary decision, our minds don’t choose this path, it just is what it is. And therefore, you can’t prosecute us.

But what about all those folks saying oh I saw God God talked to me I saw miracles Jesus rose from the dead etfuckincetera? The authors wrote “Testimony is insufficient to prove the being of a God.” Shelley was also anticolonial and antimonarchic, as both of those things were justified via religion. You know, God chose this king/queen, God sent us to civilize those heathen and savage people kinds of bullshit.

Shelley and Hogg published copies of the 16-page pamphlet in mid-February of 1811 and mailed them to Oxford’s bishops and heads of colleges. They were all the fuck is this shit and burned the copies. Only six copies are known to survive today. Shelley and Hogg were called before the Dean of Oxford and they refused to say if they wrote it or not. So on March 25, 1811, both were expelled.

Hogg and Shelley remained friends after the expulsion. Hogg went on to become a barrister, and while Shelley did not achieve fame in his lifetime, he posthumously came to be considered one of the greatest poets of the age. Percy died at the age of 29 in a boating accident. His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein.

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