Crushed by Faith

Frank R. Zindler

s in the case of of Pharaoh Akhenaten before him, the name of Vardis Fisher has been “effaced from the monuments.” As with Akhenaten, it is religious prejudice that is to blame for his oblivion. In his heyday, he was a writer who could be compared favorably with his friend Thomas Wolfe or with other famous contemporaries such as William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway. Yet despite the brilliance of his work, Vardis Fisher is all but unknown today. The reason? Fisher was an Atheist who tried to show, in a magnum opus entitled The Testament of Man, that the pet gods of American culture were of purely human manufacture and that the cults that served them likewise were devoid of numinous or preternatural components. Not surprisingly, due to the Atheistic nature of his work, Fisher had great difficulty in finding a publisher for his later work. Hostile reviewers, motivated by religious bias, saw to it that even his earlier work would not be reprinted and would be consigned to the darkling dungeons of literary history. The legacy of Vardis Fisher has been crushed by faith.

Fortunately, American Atheist activist Richard Andrews – a personal friend of Fisher’s widow Opal – has not forgotten this genius of American letters and has contributed an article about him to this issue of American Atheist, along with an excerpt of his writing. Thanks to Mr. Andrews and his fellow Utahn Chris Allen, American Atheist Press is exploring the possibility of obtaining the rights to reissue some of the works of this Atheist Master.

We are also fortunate to be able to offer an essay by noted British Dead Sea Scrolls authority Philip Davies. Being an Atheist, Professor Davies has been able to analyze the alleged “history of Israel” without the illusion-producing spectacles of faith. He has come to the conclusion that much of so-called Old-Testament history never occurred. The “United Monarchy” under Saul, David, and Solomon never existed outside of literature. Naturally, this has earned him the enmity of traditional, religious scholars – some of whom now appear hell-bent in their attempt to crush his seminal contributions to biblical studies – an entire field of study that can be aptly described as “crushed by faith.”

My own contribution to this issue, on the threat to theology posed by cloning, also deals with a field of study being crushed by faith. As we go to press, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission has just made public its recommendation that the ban on government-funded human cloning research imposed by America’s Evangelist-in-Chief Bill Clinton should not only be continued but that legislation should be enacted that would ban all research aimed at the cloning of humans. They are calling for the prohibition of an entire field of study – something not done since the popes of the Dark Ages outlawed the study of mathematics, philosophy, and human anatomy. It is clear that this regressive proposal is the result of religious lobbying within the committee. The New York Times [8 June 1997] reported that the anti-cloning forces in the committee were “those who emphasize the ‘sanctity of life and traditional family values’,” who argue that “cloning is fundamentally different from what is normally thought of as reproduction and that it would threaten people’s notions of what it means to be human, with a unique identity and with well-defined relationships in a family.” The crushing weight of faith is evident once again.

This issue of American Atheist is offered as a small, but hopefully useful, counter-weight to the dead weight of religion. It is an effort to reduce, even if only slightly, the crush of faith.