Back to Blog
The Great Agnostic by Susan Jacoby6/20/2023 But the book’s penchant for creating and attacking theistic straw men, its proclivity for screed-laden generalization at the expense of factual accuracy, and its lack of philosophical nuance makes it an easily dispatched polemic against Christianity, and a disservice to any greatness Ingersoll might actually have had. So she focuses her biography on those points of similarity between the wars he chose to wage and those currently fought by the New Atheists. The re-popularization and re-appropriation of Ingersoll by the New Atheists is her explicit goal even though that movement’s media heyday seems to be passing, she includes a “Letter to the New Atheists” appended to the end of the book which pleads for the movement to adopt Ingersoll. It recounts the life of Robert Ingersoll, the 19th-century American Freethinker dubbed “The Great Agnostic.” Relatively unknown in most popular atheist and agnostic circles today, Ingersoll, in Jacoby’s estimation, should get much more attention from and even emulation by this generation’s crop of New Atheists than he does. Susan Jacoby’s The Great Agnostic is of the latter category. Others do a disservice to the subject by making, perhaps unintentionally, his concerns seem narrow and his work seem uninspiring. Some biographies praise their subjects so effusively that they seem to take on the status of demigods, full of power, wisdom, and something more than mere humanity.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |