Much of the writing by secular scholar Joseph McCabe was devoted to the de-mystifying of organized religion. In this trenchant essay, McCabe seeks to disprove the assumption that the religious instinct in humanity was evident from the earliest days of civilization, and that the search for spiritual revelation was one of the primary activities of primitive societies. From an examination of the history of several ‘undeveloped’ races which had survived into the twentieth century, McCabe came to the conclusion that the concepts of God and deification have only been developed in advanced civilizations, and that ‘primitive man’ had no interest in religious speculation.
Joseph McCabe (1867–1956) was a Catholic priest and scholar who abandoned his faith in the 1890s and became one of the most active advocates of secularism and rationality in the early twentieth century. He wrote hundreds of books and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects and published translations of dozens of texts.View all by Joseph McCabe
