Kersey Graves

Kersey Graves was a skeptic, atheist, spiritualist, Nontheist Friend, reformist and writer. He was born in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. 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. According to one source, Graves did not attend school for more than three or four months in his life, but another source says that he received an "academical education", 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 and was also interested in language reform. He became involved with a number of radical freethinkers within Quakerism. 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 group 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 died at his home just north of Richmond, Indiana on 4 September 1883.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).