Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Before Dawkins, Hitchens, and their ilk.....
....there was Homer W. Smith, fifty years before, in fact. In 1952 Homer W. Smith published his book, "Man and His Gods." The book is out of print, and is not available from the used-book dealers that Barnes and Noble associate with. Smith was a renal physiologist and was sufficiently notable that he was able to ask Albert Einstein to write a forward to the book.
The essence of the book is that all religion is oppressive and that pure intellect is the saving of humankind. He also tries to make the case that religions are simply warmed-over and co-opted versions of other religions, especially Christianity, towards which he has a particular animosity. He considers Christianity to be co-opted Mithraism. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he cherry-picks the worst cases, in fact he goes in for sensationalism to such a degree that one could characterize the book as, Western religious history as told by The National Inquirer.
Unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, however, or any of the other Evangelical Atheists, he has actually read widely and deeply, including the historical Christian literature. He read with a jaundiced eye, but nonetheless, he covered a lot of detail and presented a highly detailed history from ancient Egypt to the turn of the twentieth century. He writes well, but I often became fatigued by the constant drumming of a point of view that considered all religious leaders to be con artists and in it for power and money, essentially hypocrites. He never fails to provide exquisite detail of the failings of religions, but never once presents any good. His discussion of the use of torture in the Middle Ages is the exemplar, with many pages listing of all the possible tortures that could be applied and the rules by which they were to be used. I also think his numbers of victims are exaggerated.
There are no credits given for the sources of his material until the final semi-autobiographical afterword called "About This Book." There he lists many of the authors and books he read over the years. Notable was that most of them were nineteenth and only early twentieth century. The latest I saw was 1932. This means that his interpretations were definitely out of date compared even to his years of publication. From the 1950's on, there has been a great revisiting of the relationship of religion to society over time. One of the casualties was an author that Smith seems to give much credit to and who appeared to have a great influence on Smith's thinking of the relation of religion to science--Draper. Draper's conflict scenario of science suppressed by religion has been very thoroughly discredited in recent times.
Homer Smith would not be considered as one of the "New Atheists," despite his obvious hostility to Christianity. He is too well-read, and not sufficiently rabid in his rhetoric. He does have the same filters operating on what he takes in and writes about. He, like almost all the intellectual atheists, places science and reason on a pedestal, failing to consider that the intellectual effort they exert to arive at their life positions via reason are beyond most people, nor do most people have the time or inclination to spend their energy on such efforts. They are ideologues for reason, failing to see that life is much messier than they know.
The essence of the book is that all religion is oppressive and that pure intellect is the saving of humankind. He also tries to make the case that religions are simply warmed-over and co-opted versions of other religions, especially Christianity, towards which he has a particular animosity. He considers Christianity to be co-opted Mithraism. Like Dawkins and Hitchens, he cherry-picks the worst cases, in fact he goes in for sensationalism to such a degree that one could characterize the book as, Western religious history as told by The National Inquirer.
Unlike Dawkins and Hitchens, however, or any of the other Evangelical Atheists, he has actually read widely and deeply, including the historical Christian literature. He read with a jaundiced eye, but nonetheless, he covered a lot of detail and presented a highly detailed history from ancient Egypt to the turn of the twentieth century. He writes well, but I often became fatigued by the constant drumming of a point of view that considered all religious leaders to be con artists and in it for power and money, essentially hypocrites. He never fails to provide exquisite detail of the failings of religions, but never once presents any good. His discussion of the use of torture in the Middle Ages is the exemplar, with many pages listing of all the possible tortures that could be applied and the rules by which they were to be used. I also think his numbers of victims are exaggerated.
There are no credits given for the sources of his material until the final semi-autobiographical afterword called "About This Book." There he lists many of the authors and books he read over the years. Notable was that most of them were nineteenth and only early twentieth century. The latest I saw was 1932. This means that his interpretations were definitely out of date compared even to his years of publication. From the 1950's on, there has been a great revisiting of the relationship of religion to society over time. One of the casualties was an author that Smith seems to give much credit to and who appeared to have a great influence on Smith's thinking of the relation of religion to science--Draper. Draper's conflict scenario of science suppressed by religion has been very thoroughly discredited in recent times.
Homer Smith would not be considered as one of the "New Atheists," despite his obvious hostility to Christianity. He is too well-read, and not sufficiently rabid in his rhetoric. He does have the same filters operating on what he takes in and writes about. He, like almost all the intellectual atheists, places science and reason on a pedestal, failing to consider that the intellectual effort they exert to arive at their life positions via reason are beyond most people, nor do most people have the time or inclination to spend their energy on such efforts. They are ideologues for reason, failing to see that life is much messier than they know.
// posted by Bill @ 5:08 PM 
