Reviews for Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

The average rating for Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-27 00:00:00 Phil Laurin Very short, but eye-opening. His atheism is annoying, not because he is one but because he spends too much time attacking Judeo-Christianity in such a short work. In any event he claims that the so-called religion of Japan; Shintoism, was a primitive nature cult dusted off and lifted up by the government in the late 1800s to supplant Japan's popular Buddhist impulse and create a national religion. He also claims that Bushido, the way of the Samurai made popular in America in the 1960s, was also an invention, the name not being used in print before 1900. He saw Japan's government creating an ideology, a mythology, and a national mystique out of whole cloth. I am reminded of the Aztec's inventions about their own history. It is a pretty fascinating polemic. Leads to more research.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-12 00:00:00 Carl Kloeppner Not so well known pamphlet resenting Japan's acculturation from the late XIX century to the first half of XX, due to governmental propaganda and high-class interests. Formerly a mostly secular country, accustomed to independent social interaction and revolts against unjust royal dynasties, Japan population became docile to vertical practices of power, the insertion of Shinto (religious syncretism) and revival of a not so historically successful practice: The Mikado. From there on, most university scholars denouncing this phenomena were ostracized and treated as treasonous liberals. According to the author, Basil Hall Chamberlain -who was a professor at Tokyo Imperial University and one of the foremost British "japanologists" at that time- Japan's history was mostly rewritten on the basis of plagiarized Chinese myths, convenient poetry,outlandish stories of the people of the sun (Nihon / Nippon) and cult to the emperor (Mikado). This social engineering took place in about a single generation, and might be an accurate accounting for Japanese imperial expansionism around the same period of time. The awkward part is this is not a work of fiction. I stumbled into it thanks to Bertrand Russell in his work "Free Thought and Official Propaganda -1922" who, at that time, resented also the fact that this book was out of print. In my own opinion, an easy and thought provoking read that one has to stop by at some point if there is any interest in real history. To paraphrase Adam Smith, divergent paths of history must be accounted for if one is to develop a proper intellectual life. I bought the Kobo version, but -thanks to a free Internet that we are about to lose due to the same propaganda phenomenon- HERE