Evolution Without Darwin? America Without Lincoln? A describe of "The Unbelievers"

"The Unbelievers: The Evolution of contemporary Atheism" by S. J. Joshi (Prometheus Books, Amherst, Ny, 2011), contains chapters on fourteen contributors to the evolution of atheism. The fourteen characters profiled are Thomas Henry Huxley, Leslie Stephen, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Clarence Darrow, H.L. Mencken, H.P. Lovecraft, Bertrand Russell, Madalyn Murray O'Hare, Gore Vidal, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

On what basis did Joshi make these selections, omitting so many? No coherent explanation is offered. In fact, the author acknowledges an absence of objective criteria in his choices that span 150 years of dissent from orthodoxy. However, the introduction does contain this surprising stateMent: "I will confess that in some instances I have chosen some thinkers and rejected others chiefly because I do or do not share an intellectual pity with them."

Love Craft

That lame remark is Joshi's excuse for the remarkable omission of Robert Green Ingersoll. This seems odd, given that he acknowledges that Ingersoll was "probably the most predominant American freethinker of the 19th century." I calculate few free-thought scholars would list a few of those Joshi does include, particularly H.P. Lovecraft, Leslie Stephen and Thomas Henry Huxley. Wee in the chapters about their lives and contributions to atheism give the impression that these three guarantee inclusion on such a short list, nor does it seem approved to mix four living writers with those who lived in earlier times. The contemporary authors might good have been described in a particular chapter. A potential explanation for along with Lovecraft can be sensed from the author's Wikipedia page: "S. T. Joshi is an award-winning Indian American literary critic, novelist and a foremost frame in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors of weird and fantastic fiction." That must be it-he favored Lovecraft because he knew so much about him and maybe slighted others, particularly Ingersoll, owing to an inadequate appreciation of his fantastic career.

Evolution Without Darwin? America Without Lincoln? A describe of "The Unbelievers"

Joshi does admit that he "does not share an intellectual pity with him" (Ingersoll). Maybe he should have put that aside. Fantasize a historian on American history omitting Lincoln due to not sharing something about Lincoln's intellectual contributions. This omission undermines the book's value. It's quite appalling, actually, and colors all else. The fact of the matter, in my view and I think most others well-known with Ingersoll's life and work would agree, is that the combined impact of the 14 described skeptics might very well be less consequential to America's improve against the harm of religion than that of many orator of the 19th century. (At the time of this writing, four of the 14 still live, though two-Gore and Hitchens, are barely hanging on.)

A few of the episode profiles contain new and animated information. And the slim introduction describing the history of atheism offers useful perspectives. A few of note contain the following:

* It is rare to find any thinker of note since the 17th century "who does not harbor some doubts about many phases of religious orthodoxy."

* Repelled by centuries of religious warfare, dozens of philosophers in the 17th and 18th centuries made "fervent pleas for religious toleration-pleas that ultimately prevailed in the West."

* By the 19th century, tools brought to bear by a diverse array of thinkers to challenge religion included not merely "logical analysis, scientific discovery and specific scrutiny of religious texts but also...weapons of saTire, mockery and ridicule."

* In the West, with the irregularity of America, "the battle is over-atheism has won" (i.e., over religion). The calculate America remains firmly conjugal and controlled by a religious mindset is the poor state of communal education that "has created an unfortunate cleavage in the middle of the tiny band of intellectual elites and the vast mass of the ignorant and ill educated."

Readers unfamiliar with the 14 worthy figures might benefit from and enjoy this book.

However, anything who knows anything about the impact of Colonel Ingersoll, orator extraordinAire and noted lawyer, political king-maker, champion of liberty and intellectual giant who left behind a prodigious library of profound eloquence, will be off-put in the greatest at his omission.

Evolution Without Darwin? America Without Lincoln? A describe of "The Unbelievers"

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