Kersey Graves

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Kersey Graves (21 November 1813, Brownsville, Pennsylvania – 4 September 1883, Richmond, Indiana) was a skeptic, atheist, spiritualist, theological reformist and writer. His parents were Quakers, and as a young man he followed them in their observance, and then later moved to the Hicksite wing of Quakerism. Graves was largely self-educated, and at the age of 19 was teaching in a school at Richmond, a career he was to follow for more than twenty years.

He was an advocate of Abolitionism was also interested in language reform, and he became involved with a number of radical freethinkers within Quakerism, including John O. Wattles. In August 1844, he joined a group of about fifty utopian settlers in Wayne County, Indiana. In the same month, he was disowned by his Quaker meeting due to his neglect of attendance, and also setting up a rival group. The groups he was associated with later dabbled in mesmerism and spiritualism.

In July 1845, Graves married the Quaker, Lydia Michiner at Goschen Meeting House, in Zanesfield, Logan County, Ohio, and they later had five children at their home in Harveysburg, Ohio. They later moved back to Richmond and bought a farm.

The Goschen Meeting House was a centre of the Congregational Friends and were involved with Temperance and Peace, health reform, anti-slavery, women's rights and socialistic utopianism.

Graves' Quaker background conditioned him to the philosophy of the Inner light, whereby all clergy, creeds, and set liturgy in worship were irrelevant, and a hindrance to God's work. This was intensified by Hicks's brand of Quakerism-Quietism where an individual's spiritual life was most important and all outward manifestations were invalid. The Congregational Friends were to the left of the Hicksites, and withdrew further from even Christianity and eventually a belief in God.

Graves held the belief that religion corrupted truth, and he evolved into a writer claiming religious belief false. He wrote The Biography of Satan (1865), The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875), and Bible of Bibles (1881).

[edit] Criticism

His scholarship was, however, quickly criticized by Reverend John Taylor Perry of Cincinnati. He showed that all sources Graves used were Freethought texts, which in turn had synthesised random, mis-understood and half-digested pieces of mis-information. Graves constructed from this a theory that religion was concocted by priests and made up of superstition and myth. This belief was consistent with the movement in Royal Arch Freemasonry then to revive Gnosticism as a challenge to church teaching.

Graves made leaps of logic similar to those of Alexander Hislop. Graves's central thesis that Christendom is a mere retelling of Pagan myths, echoes the similar claim of Alexander Hislop, who wrote The Two Babylons, although Hislop intended only to nullify the claims of the Catholic Church and prove they were serving Satan. As with Hislop, modern scholarship has cast serious doubt on the veracity of such claims, and demonstrated that Graves' scholarship is deficient. Graves massaged his data to fit his thesis, and where he had no data he falsified it.

He often failed to cite proper sources for verification; although, "many of the most important facts collated in this work were derived from Sir Godfrey Higgins' Anacalypsis" [1].

[edit] Present-day readers

Graves' writings today are read by people seeking conspiracy theories, and remain popular in some circles strictly opposed to Christianity as a source of discredition of the claims of the faith. He is also a major source for Acharya S, author of The Christ Conspiracy. His writings even make a brief showing in The Da Vinci Code.

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