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Updated: June 23, 2025
Lastly, the entire ecclesiastical body the formidable phalanx of the endowed, with their patrons dependents, and dupes though they were too dull to perceive and too dense to feel the shafts aimed at obscurantism and superstition, had something more than a suspicion that this book called Don Quixote was a book to be discouraged.
The plain truth is that it would be difficult to find anywhere a more shameful exploitation, intellectual and economic, than that which has been practised on the Ulster Orangeman by his feudal masters. Were I to retort the abuse, with which my own creed is daily bespattered, I should describe him further as the only victim of clerical obscurantism to be found in Ireland.
Most significant of all, Vambéry found even the secluded women of the harems, "those bulwarks of obscurantism," notably changed. "Yes, I repeat, the life of women in Turkey seems to me to have been radically transformed in the last forty years, and it cannot be denied that this transformation has been produced by internal conviction as much as by external pressure."
He had an enthusiastic and credulous sort of anti-clericalism which made him lump together religion especially Catholicism and obscurantism, and see in priests the natural foe of light. Socialism, individualism, Chauvinism jostled each other in his brain. He was a humanitarian in mind, despotic in temperament, and an anarchist in fact.
Determined to have nothing whatever to do, save in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and inclining naturally towards ideals which have long been abandoned in the workaday world, diplomacy is the instinctive lover of obscurantism and the furtive enemy of progress.
But in the long run the popular organism was injuriously affected by this mystic opium. The poison rendered its consumers insensible to every progressive movement, and planted them firmly at the extreme pole of obscurantism, at a time when the Russian ghetto resounded with the first appeals calling its inmates toward the light, toward the regeneration and the uplift of inner Jewish life.
"Science is one religion; prayer is another. Study is better than worship. Go; seek knowledge everywhere, if needs be, even into China." Verses from the Hadith. Amongst us Europeans it is commonly accepted as a proven fact that Islam is merely a religion of obscurantism, bringing in its train the stagnation of nations, and hampering them in that march to the unknown which we call "progress."
Everywhere, the secularization of society’s upper levels seemed to go hand in hand with a pervasive religious obscurantism among the general population.
The ideal was that every Jew must be a scholar, or at all events a student. Obscurantism could not for any lengthy period lodge itself in the Jewish camp. There was no learned caste. The fact that the Bible and much of the most admired literature was in Hebrew made most Jews bilingual at least.
We call this method "propaganda," because a fire is imparted to the statement of one side which cannot, from the nature of the case, be imparted to that of the other; but it is propaganda in which there is no touch of dishonesty or obscurantism. We have said that, while he is presenting his case, the master should be urging his pupils to examine and criticise it.
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