Stark: Lang, Schmidt and the original religion

[leading on from a previous post from One True God]

One leading anthropologist did not reject Lang's work when it first appeared.  Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954)...asked himself, What if "the Supreme Being of primitive cultures really is the god of monotheism?"...In opposition to the conventional anthropological wisdom that the many similarities among religions show all religions to be nothing but "just so" stories of obvious human invention, Schmidt proposed that the striking similarities found in religions around the world exist because they derive from a universal revelation dating to earliest times...and although Schmidt's work is based on the theistic assumption, his conclusion is no more faith-based than that of his opponents, all of whom based their work on the atheistic assumption.

p.39&40