Project Gutenberg 2025-05-31 Public domain in the USA. 416 Kemmerich, Max 1876 1932 Kemmerich, Max Philipp Albert 12021669 Aus der Geschichte der menschlichen Dummheit $aMünchen :$bAlbert Langen, $c1912. Iris 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) "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.) https://archive.org/details/ausdergeschichte00kemm 20181007001719kemmerich 1912 de Reading ease score: 68.4 (8th & 9th grade). Neither easy nor difficult to read. de Superstition BL Text Category: History - Religious Category: Philosophy & Ethics Category: Religion/Spirituality 581645 2025-07-30T07:05:40.556897 text/html 551043 2025-05-31T11:42:17 text/html 339770 2025-07-30T07:05:48.816835 application/epub+zip 344714 2025-07-30T07:05:42.066877 application/epub+zip 278513 2025-07-30T07:05:41.273886 application/epub+zip 512126 2025-07-30T07:05:53.906787 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 450869 2025-07-30T07:05:47.981843 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 493780 2025-07-30T07:05:39.149845 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 473801 2025-05-31T11:42:17 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 13614 2025-07-30T07:05:54.090799 application/rdf+xml 9505 2025-07-30T07:05:41.422858 image/jpeg 2014 2025-07-30T07:05:41.338864 image/jpeg 366791 2025-07-30T07:05:40.609914 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog