The Great Atheism Controversy
Fichte THE GREAT ATHEISM CONTROVERSY BY DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS Sunday is a good day to mention Johann Gottlieb Fichte's alleged atheism. Fichte (1762-1814), was a German philosopher, religious thinker, and political radical. After being appointed professor of philosophy at Jena in 1794, he began a series of public lectures on Sundays, from ten to eleven o'clock, much to the consternation of the clerics. A local journal declaimed on Fichte's revolutionary politics, accusing him of subversively substituting the worship of reason for the worship of god. That was a very serious charge in view of the situation over in Paris, where images of the savior and saints had been pulled down in churches - renamed "Temples of Truth" - and replaced with effigies of Reason and Liberty and with paintings of natural objects such as flowers. Atheism was in vogue to the extent that, if a priest bothered to even mention god in church, people openly guffawed. But Fichte had no such mum...