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(More customer reviews)Skip the introduction; editor Joshi strays from the topic by questioning Mencken's "fanatical loathing" of Roosevelt, while ignoring similar diatribes he wrote against Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. Page 133 of Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work provides Mencken's rebuttal: "....in all my life I don't recall ever writing in praise of a sitting President. Finding virtues in successful politicians seemed to me to be the function of their swarms of willing pediculae; it was the business of a journalist, as I conceived it, to stand in a permanent Opposition."
Joshi also states that the Baptists aren't behind the Ku Klux Klan. Well, of course not. Nor does the Mormon Church support polygamists, nor the Catholic hierarchy condone killing abortion doctors. But Klan members, polygamists, and doctor-killers are far more pious than their mainstream counterparts. Such activities are where extreme devotion eventually leads.
Besides, the book's title accurately describes its contents. Any additional information can be squeezed onto the dust jacket. Mencken needs no stinking introduction.
Nor does he need my analysis. Despite the introduction, this is now my favorite posthumous Mencken collection. The following quotes are some of the reasons why:
"....men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt."
"That medicine saves to-day thousands who must have died yesterday is a fact of small significance, for most of them will leave no more marks upon the history of the race than so many June bugs; but that all of us have been persuaded thereby to turn from priests and magicians when we are ill to doctors and nurses -- that is a fact of massive and permanent importance. It benefits everybody worthy of being called human at all. It rids the thinking of mankind of immense accumulations of intellectual garbage."
"This doctrine of the goodness of God, it seems to me, is no more, at bottom, than an evidence of arrested intellectual development. It does not fit into what we know of the nature and operations of the cosmos today; it is a survival from a day of universal ignorance."
"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone. All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine. No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world. The minute a new one is launched, in whatever field, some imbecile of a theologian is certain to fall upon it, seeking to put it down. The most effective way to defend it, of course, would be to fall upon the theologian, for the only really workable defense, in polemics as in war, is a vigorous offensive. But the convention that I have mentioned frowns upon that device as indecent, and so theologians continue their assault upon sense without much resistance, and the enlightenment is unpleasantly delayed.
"There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get. On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly."
"No combat set in this world ever grows more furious and extravagant than a combat between Christians. They seem to have a special talent for hatred, almost a vocation."
"Puritanism, in its essence, was sheer brutality; there was absolutely no beauty in it, and very little decency. It revolved around the fear of Hell, and nothing else. In late years there have been many defenses of the Puritans on the ground that, for all the rigors of their theology, they yet lived more or less normal lives, and were not unacquainted with the sempiternal arts of thieving, forestalling, fighting, wine-bibbing and fornication. But all that this comes to is the confession that many of them were hypocrites. Granted. So are many of their heirs and assigns today."
"The Fundamentalist prayer is not an inner experience; it is a means to objective ends. He prays precisely as more worldly Puritans complain to the police. He expects action, and is disappointed and dismayed if it does not follow. The mind of this Fundamentalist is extremely literal -- indeed, the most literal mind ever encountered on this earth. He doubts nothing in the Bible, not even the typographical errors."
"The meaning of religious freedom, I fear, is sometimes greatly misapprehended. It is taken to be a sort of immunity, not merely from governmental control but also from public opinion. A dunderhead gets himself a long-tailed coat, rises behind the sacred desk and emits such bilge as would gag a Hottentot. Is it to pass unchallenged? If so, then what we have is not religious freedom at all, but the most intolerable and outrageous variety of religious despotism."
"To admit that the false has any standing in court, that it ought to be handled gently because millions of morons cherish it and thousands of quacks make their livings propagating it -- to admit this, as the more famous of the reconcilers of science and religion inevitably do, is to abandon a just cause to its enemies, cravenly and without excuse."
"The evangelical churches, in fact, are rapidly becoming public nuisances. Neglecting almost altogether their old concern about individual salvation, they have converted themselves into vast engines for harassing and oppressing persons who dissent from their naive and often preposterous theology. No one hears of them saving souls any more; they seem to devote their whole energies to getting bodies into jail."
"....theologians make a mess of everything they touch, including even religion."
"There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day?"
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No one ever argued more forcefully or with such acerbic wit against the foolish aspects of religion as H L Mencken. As a journalist, he gained national prominence through his newspaper columns describing the famous 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted religious fundamentalists against a public school teacher who dared to teach evolution. But both before and after the Scopes trial, Mencken spent much of his career as a columnist and book reviewer lampooning the ignorant piety of gullible Americans. S T Joshi has brought together and organised many of Mencken's writings on religion in this provocative and entertaining collection. The articles presented here include satirical accounts of a range of the religious phenomena of his time. On a more serious note are his discussions of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the scientific worldview as a rival to religious belief. Also included are poignant autobiographical accounts of Mencken's own upbringing and his core beliefs on religion, ethics, and politics. H.L.Mencken knew that satire, wit, and clever jesting were the most effective ways to battle religious folly, and he used these weapons to their fullest extent in writings spanning almost three decades.
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