Pure Ingersoll. The great orator lays out two potential worldviews, and contrasts the view of a supernatural world with that of a natural world. The natural world wins, because the emptiness of the supernatural point of view becomes readily apparent in the hands of a master thinker. There were some moments of unintentional humor (or maybe intentional sarcasm? But I think not) as Ingersoll recounts the things that intelligent men (yes, this was an era where intellect and men was assumed to go hand in hand; though Ingersoll was not among those, the langauge was still riddled with that assumption) no longer believe. Unfortunately, this was unduly optimistic even in his own time, and with the resurgence of fundamentalist faiths, it becomes almost laughable today, in spite of the fact that there is even more evidence in support of the naturalistic worldview than there ever has been.

An easy read. A good reader should be able to complete it in 30 minutes (it is a little blue-book), and the tidbits from Haldeman-Julius at the end contained some priceless moments of arcana from the 1940s - a bit of a blast from the past. A bit disheartening to see that good man suggest that Darwin's ideas had died forty years before, but then, this was just before the Modern Synthesis which resurrected Natural Selection with a vengeance, ( )