I was going to write a long post when I read this article in the March 1928 edition of "The Communist" Atheism and "Evolution" by Bertram D. Wolfe because it ties together so many strands of what I've been writing about but most of what Wolfe has to say you've heard me on before. Instead of his diatribe being much about evolution, it's the same old hat about how only atheists are real scientists and that science requires atheism and how an English major like Wolfe knows what science is better than even such eminent scientists of the day such as David Starr Jordan, an eminent ichthyologist and the founding president of Stanford University. Which was interesting, in itself as you'll see.
Along the way he also gets some digs at the Socialists in the form of John M. Work, formerly the Executive Secretary of the Socialist Party and an editorial writer for Victor Berger's paper, The Milwaukee Leader. I'm tempted to go into what he said about both Work and Jordan but you can read that yourself, as well as the article Wolfe slams, since the magazine, Evolution, is also available online. That kind of stuff being available is one of the best things about the internet as it develops. Work pointed out the fact that nothing in science demanded atheism and it couldn't logically tell you anything about the supernatural. A point Wolfe doesn't refute though he heaps up a heap of ideological crap instead of that. Interesting for those who have read a lot of the garbage issuing from the Lysenkoists in the coming decades, lots of the same language is used in Wolfe's attack in the article. Oh, and Marxism is, of course, presented as science.
Wolfe also embodies other things, other than the scientistic, materialist, Marxist bully boy and bossy boots that typifies those I've been writing about. He also was involved with, first a schism that saw him leave the Communist Party. then out of communism and the left as he ended up as a hack at the right-wing think tank, The Hoover Institution at Stanford (what did I say about tying up loose ends) but who didn't leave scientistic atheism as he was also a signatory of the Humanist Manifesto II, for atheists who apparently didn't think that the first one was atheistically pure enough and bossy enough. That Manifesto was written by Paul Kurtz, the henchman of the trustifarian Stalinist Corliss Lamont who had bought out the hard up Humanists about twenty years before then. Apparently Wolfe's anti-communism wasn't sufficient to overcome the attraction of being associated with one of Stalin's agents to that extent. Apparently the enduring aspect of his ideology in 1928 was his atheism and his hostility to religion. I must say, I wonder who funded Wolfe's stay at the Hoover Institute. I'd love to find out that Lamont had something to do with it, as a fan of irony.
John Work, so far as I've been able to gather, always remained on the left until he died in the early 1960s, though he mostly wrote law text books after Berger's paper went under and the Socialists were wrecked by the communists. He was a lawyer (the internet has also taught me that the reasoning of those trained in the law is often better than that of the would-be sciency types). I'm not aware of him ever lecturing scientists on their ideological impurity. I have a feeling I'd have liked him more.
I have to tell you that the more I look at organized atheism the more ties I see with the idiots who tried to push atheism through communism and Marxism while that looked like it might be a viable vehicle for their real interests and the organizations and institutions they started to push it. Since they're the ones who don't believe anything happens for no reason, I don't feel hesitant to come to some conclusions as to why that might be.
Update: Those Massachusetts Unitarians!
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