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Yet even more friendly pings. Just one I thought could be of use or perhaps of interest to you all, no need to reply.
Going to download it right now! Thanks!
By the way-I have begun reading again...bronchitis lasted nearly two months with me. I still have it, but can work through it!
Thanks. Ethan Allen was definitely an interesting character. I’ll have to give it a listen.
I jumped over to the wiki piece on him and this amused me considering our current controversies:
“He was also called to court in Salisbury for inoculating himself against smallpox, a procedure that required the sanction of the town selectmen”
I knew that like Tom Paine he was an 18th Century atheist and not shy about advertising it. Allen was descended from Puritans, a heritage shared by the Transcendentalists of Boston. They were the woke Hollywood elite of their era.
“In these years, Allen recovered from Thomas Young’s widow, who was living in Albany, the manuscript that he and Young had worked on in his youth and began to develop it into the work that was published in 1785 as Reason: the Only Oracle of Man. The work was a typical Allen polemic, but its target was religious, not political. Specifically targeted against Christianity, it was an unbridled attack against the Bible, established churches, and the powers of the priesthood. As a replacement for organized religion, he espoused a mixture of deism, Spinoza’s naturalist views, and precursors of Transcendentalism, with man acting as a free agent within the natural world. While historians disagree over the exact authorship of the work, the writing contains clear indications of Allen’s style.”
Ping.