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010 _a12021669
040 _aUtSlPG
041 7 _ade
_2iso639-1
050 4 _aBL
100 1 _aKemmerich, Max,
_d1876-1932
245 1 0 _aAus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit
264 1 _aSalt Lake City, UT :
_bProject Gutenberg,
_c2025
300 _a1 online resource :
_bmultiple file formats
336 _atext
_btxt
_2rdacontent
337 _acomputer
_bc
_2rdamedia
338 _aonline resource
_bcr
_2rdacarrier
500 _aRelease date is 2025-05-31
508 _aIris Schröder-Gehring, Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
520 _a"Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit" by Max Kemmerich is a polemical cultural critique written in the early 20th century. It charts how human folly—above all religious literalism and institutional dogmatism—has warped judgment and public life, illustrating its case with pointed historical anecdotes and learned references. The likely focus is on exposing the intellectual and moral costs of unexamined authority, especially where biblical infallibility is invoked. The opening of the book sets a modest scope in a foreword, then argues that treating the Bible as an absolute measure of truth is a test of intelligence: either one renounces verbal inspiration where facts contradict scripture, or one commits a basic error of reasoning. It dissects papal power claims built on “Tu es Petrus,” contrasts clerical shrewdness with secular credulity, and parades the absurdities of medieval scholastic hair-splitting and rabbinic casuistry as symptoms of authority-bound thinking. A long series of early modern and modern examples follows—Protestant tracts on angels as matchmakers, Paradise as a feudal fief, faith in the womb, reasons God gave no savior to fallen angels, the timing and season of Creation, denial of antipodes, global deluge physics, the persistence of geocentrism, “scriptural geology,” and even a biblicized evolutionary fantasy about Adam—showing how blind literalism stifles science and common sense. At the start of the second chapter, the author pivots to asceticism, distinguishing sensible self-discipline from self-destructive mortification, critiquing temperance absolutism and rigid fasting rules. He then sketches striking cases of extreme diet and self-denial among early Christians and Manichaeans, strict Orthodox fasts, and grotesque strategies to combat sexual desire, including self-injury and neurotic avoidance of women. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
534 _pOriginally published:
_cMünchen: Albert Langen, 1912
653 _aSuperstition
856 4 _uhttps://archive.org/details/ausdergeschichte00kemm
856 4 0 _uhttps://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76196
999 _c116921
_d116921