Chris's comments (member since Dec 15, 2008)

Chris's comments from the Atheists and Skeptics group.

nathan wrote: "The only reason I wouldn't read Freethinkers is because I read The Age of American Unreason by the same author,
Susan Jacoby.

She is a rather booooorrrrring read."

I strongly disagree with this. I can't speak to her prose in the book you read, but I'm in the middle of Freethinkers, and it's fascinating. I would say that it's even fired my sense of patriotism in a way that few books could nowadays. The greatness of this country doesn't lie in its presidents or military leaders, but in those who have dissented and fought to expand the rights of others to dissent. What Jacoby chronicle in her book is a whole intellectual tradition that is a distinctly American one which the Right has pathologized as treasonous or decadent and the Left is afraid to acknowledge. But it's people like Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll and Elizabeth Cady Stanton that still make America and its traditions worth fighting for, even if their more unorthodox ideas have been unceremoniously tossed down the memory hole by people across the political spectrum.