A

From Philosopedia

Aakjaer, Jeppe (1866—1930) Aakjaer was a Danish non-theist. A novelist and poet from Jutland, he wrote about Jutland in such of his works as The Peasant's Son (1899) and Children of Wrath (1904). His lyrical poetry is found in Songs of the Rye (1906) and Heimdal's Wanderings (1924). (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

AASH: See entry for Agnostics, Atheists, and Secular Humanists Who Are Infected/Affected with AIDS/HIV Illness.

ABANDONMENT Inasmuch as God does not exist, say the atheistic existentialists, no outside authority is now or has ever been present to account for any meaning to human existence. Thus, mankind has been abandoned only in the sense that previously God had been credited for providing a meaning to life. Now, mankind must take all responsibility for providing a rational meaning for our existence. {AF; OCP}

Abano, Petrus de (1250—1320) A learnèd Italian physician, Petrus denied the existence of spirits and ascribed all miracles to natural causes. Cited before the Inquisition in 1306 as a heretic, a magician, and an atheist, he ably defended himself and was acquitted. Petrus was accused a second time but, while the trial was preparing, he died. He was condemned after death, his body was disinterred and burned, and he was burned in effigy in the public square of Padua. {BDF}

Abauzit, Fiermin (1679—1774) Abauzit was a French writer, descended from an Arabian family that settled in the south of France early in the ninth century. An acquaintance of Bayle, he was consulted by Voltaire and Rousseau. In an essay on the Apocalypse, Abauzit questioned the authority of that work. E. Harwood translated his Miscellanies into English in 1774. Abauzit’s deistic views are expressed in his Réflexions impartiales sur les évangiles (1774). {BDF; JMRH; RAT}

Abbagnano, Nicola (1901— ) A philosophic naturalist, Abbagnano was a chief exponent of existentialism in Italy. He liked the work of John Dewey and wrote Possibilità e libertà (1956). {AF}

Abbe, Ernst (1840—1905) Abbe was an intimate friend of Haeckel, sharing his monism. A distinguished German physicist, he was one of the most famous inventors on the staff of Carl-Zeiss optical works at Jena, of which in 1888 he became sole owner. He reorganized the firm on a cooperative basis, created a noncontributory pension fund, and introduced other advanced ideas that have been influential in shaping thought on the conditions of labor. He invented the Abbe refractometer for determining the refractive index of substances and improved photographic and microscopic lenses. Leonard Abbott in his life of Ferrer wrote that Abbe had “just the same ideas and aims as Ferrer.” {CE; JM; RAT}

Abbe, Karen (20th Century) Abbe is associated with Atheists and Other Freethinkers, a Sacramento, California, group that serves hungry people, not for the purpose of informing people about atheism but merely to provide a service for people in need. {Secular Nation, Fall 1994}

Abbot, Abiel (Born 1765) A Unitarian minister, Abbot is said to have originated the idea of a free, tax-supported public library. {U}

Abbott, Francis Ellingwood (1836—1903) A leader in the dissent from moderate Unitarianism in the mid-nineteenth century, Abbott was an evolutionist. In 1870 he began agitating for organization of an American Secular Union through his Toledo, Ohio, paper entitled The Index. His appeals resulted in the preliminary organization of a few local chapters. He was active in the formation of the Free Religious Association and edited their newsletter. In 1872, he wrote Impeachment of Christianity. Scientific Theism (1885) was based upon idealist and intuitionist philosophy and attempted to replace the old religious radicalism of the Transcendentalists with realism and science. He thought the theory of evolution would throw new light on religion and, in a way, he anticipated process philosophy. Abbott’s work, considered liberal in his day, is, today, admittedly dated and elementary. Darwin, reading one of Abbott’s 1871 tracts that spoke of “the extinction of faith in the Christian confession” and the development of a humanistic free religion, wrote of Abbott’s views, “I admire them from my inmost heart, and I agree to almost every word.” In 1876 the Liberal Congress assembled in Philadelphia, and he was chosen president. The second congress was held in Syracuse in 1878 at a time when Anthony Comstock, the anti-obscenity extremist, had just had D. M. Bennett arrested. The Liberals of New York started a petition for repeal of the Comstock Law, which the Truth Seeker urged Liberals to sign in order to put a stop to Comstock’s national witch-hunts. Abbott, however, took a stand that the law should be amended, not repealed. As a result, Elizur Wright was elected president and Abbot withdrew. W. Creighton Peden has written a biography of Abbott called The Philosopher of Free Religion. In it he describes how Abbot’s “free religion” was a sort of quasi-theism on the fringe of the freethought movement. He was the first President of the American National Liberal League. {BDF; FUS; PUT; RAT; TRI; U; U&U}

Abbott, George Frederick (20th Century) Abbott, a Hellenist, wrote Philosophy of a Don (1911), a work which contains caustic and rationalist views. He deprecates aggressiveness on the genial ground that “the actual Ruler of the Universe compares very favourably with some of his predecessors.” {RAT}

Abbott, Jan (20th Century) Abbott is Vice President of Atheists of Northern Colorado.

Abbott, John Emery (1793—1819) Abbott, a Unitarian minister who died when only twenty-six, believed that “rational” religion should be complemented by an intensely devotionist piety. {U&U}

Abbott, Leonard Dalton (Born 1878) An American journalist born in Liverpool, England, Abbott was President of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association (1910) and one of the founders of the Rand School of Social Science. He edited the American memorial volume Francisco Ferrer (1910). {RAT}

Abbott, Ruth T. (20th Century) Abbott, a published poet, was a humanist activist in North Wilbraham, Massachusetts. To the Humanist Newsletter (September-October 1953), she wrote, “I have written a card to Station WBZA, Springfield, Massachusetts, protesting substitution for our Dr. [Horace] Kallen broadcast this morning–instead, we had a Methodist bishop! I admire Kallen’s humanism from my inmost heart, and I agree to almost every word.”

ABBOT OF UNREASON During the Middle Ages, McCabe states, annual festivals were held which included blasphemous parodies of the Mass in the cathedrals and churches, often in monasteries and convents, even including indecent revels on the streets. One of these was the Abbot of Unreason (also called the Abbot of Misrule, the Abbot of Joy, or the Pope of Fools), during which a layman was hilariously elected and robed as abbot for the express purpose of suspending for a day all rules of discipline and decency. Scott, in The Abbot, describes how the feast was held in Scotland. The clerical as well as civic dignitaries commonly took part, and the occasional zealots who protested were powerless. The details are often obscene, states McCabe, who documents the Feast of the Ass and other such feasts by citing Du Cange’s Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis (1678) and Du Tilliot’s Mémoires (1741). Historians, he adds, have always appeared reticent to include such matters. (See entry for Ass, Feast Of.) {RE}

Abd ar-Rahman III (891—961) Called by McCabe “the greatest of the Moslem Arab Caliphs,” Abd ar-Rahman is said to have “raised Spain from a state of profound demoralization to one of unprecedented prosperity, culture, and brilliance while Christian Europe lay in the darkest phase of the Dark Age.” He built up a strong army and navy, waging war successfully against the Fatimids in North Africa and the Christian kings of León. Abd ar-Rahman III made Córdoba one of the greatest cities in the West. Not only was he an atheist but also he defied the Koran (Qur’an) throughout his lifetime. {CE; JM; RE}

ABDUCTION BY SPACE ALIENS Supernaturalists are often prone to belief in the paranormal, New Age, channeling, and the like. In the latter half of the twentieth century, not only were books published about the alleged abduction of humans by space aliens but also the Journal of Regression Therapy (October 1990) reviewed favorably a work by Edith Fiore, Encounters (1989):

I feel that the discovery of visits to our planet Earth by beings from other worlds and their interactions with humans is the most exciting and significant happening of the twentieth century.

Two American journals, Skeptic and Skeptical Inquirer—both entirely naturalistic in their approach—are devoted to investigating such non-scientific allegations and other follies. {PE}

Abel, Lionel (1910— ) At the time he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Abel was a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He wrote The Intellectual Folies (1984) and Important Nonsense (1987). {HM2}

Abel, Reuben (1911—1997) Abel, a naturalistic humanist who reviewed Buchler’s Nature and Judgment for The Humanist in the 1950s, is author of The Pragmatic Humanism of F. C. S. Schiller (1955) and Man Is The Measure (1976). In 1966, he edited Humanistic Pragmatism. Abel taught for forty years in the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science and in other divisions of City College in New York City. He was versed in eight modern and classical languages, sang with the Dessorf Choirs, and was noted for writing letters to editors about philosophic subjects. Editors of Webster’s New International Dictionary credited Abel with calling to their attention the need to add the word cathect as a verb which described Freud’s meaning, “to invest with libidinal energy.” {Wolfgang Saxon, The New York Times, 14 August 1997}

Abelev, Garry I. (20th Century) Abelev, an immunologist with the N. N. Blokhin Cancer Research Center in Russia, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Abel-Smith, Brian (1926—1996) Abel-Smith, an educator and professor of social administration at the University of London, wrote with R. Titmuss The Cost of the National Health Service in England and Wales (1956); A History of the Nursing Profession (1960); British Doctors at Home and Abroad (1964); and Legal Problems and the Citizen (1973), among other works. In a Guardian tribute to Abel-Smith, Professor Julian Le Grand, of the London School of Economics, quoted Thomas Paine’s “my country is the world and my religion is to do good.” Paine could have been writing about Abel-Smith, Prof. Le Grand stated. {Freethinker, June 1996}

Abell, George, O. (1927—1983) Numerous star clusters, planetary nebulae, clusters of galaxies, and three comets have been discovered by Abell, a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. He is author of Realm of the Universe (1984) and Exploration of the Universe (1991). Abell is a Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s Academy of Humanism. {SHD}

Abelard, Peter (1079—1142) Abelard, a French philosopher renowned for being loved by the celebrated Heloise, was accused of teaching erroneous opinions about the Creation and the Trinity. At the instigation of St. Bernard, he was condemned by councils at Soissons in 1121 and Sens in 1140. Hired by Heloise, the niece of the canon of Notre Dame, to be her tutor, Abelard fell in love at forty with the seventeen-year-old and their affair inspired works of literature, particularly when she gave birth to a son and a secret marriage was arranged by her Uncle Fulbert. The monstrous revenge that followed was described by Abelard:

. . . One night as I lay sleeping in my chamber, one of my servants, corrupted by gold, delivered me to their vengeance, which the world would learn of to its stupefaction: they cut off those parts of my body with which I had committed the offense they deplored. Then they fled.

In shame, he retreated to the Abbey of St. Denis, ordered Heloise to become a nun and spend the rest of her life in celibacy, and was shocked that in her letters she confided that she loved him more than she did God. However, he was accused of heresy and excommunicated, lost an appeal to the Pope, and spent the last year of his life as a monk at Cluny. He and Heloise are buried together in Paris’s Père Lachaise, but rumor has it that when her body was being placed there his arms fell open to embrace her. Hallam observed that Abelard “was almost the first who awakened mankind, in the age of darkness, to a sympathy with intellectual excellence.” McCabe lists Abelard as a freethinker, citing his first principle, “Reason precedes faith.” One Greenwich Village wag has noted that those who jocularly refer to priests as “having no balls” are probably oblivious to the Abelard tale. {BDF; JM; RE}

Abell, Theodore Curtis (1891—1960) According to Sherman Wakefield, Abell in 1929 founded the first Humanist society independent of any church, the second being that of Charles Francis Potter in New York City. Abell’s was the Hollywood (California) Humanist Society, which he led until 1934. In the 1950s, he was minister of the Sacramento Unitarian Church. Edwin H. Wilson has described Abell as “a creative innovator and organizational guide of early religious humanism,” founder of the oldest affiliate of the American Humanist Association. Wilson and Raymond Bragg had not asked Abell to be a signer of the Humanist Manifesto because they thought it not improbable “that Theodore Abell adopted an attitude that one often encounters among the ‘prima donnas’ of any movement: in this case L’humanisme c’est moi! (roughly translated, this means, ‘Humanism is mine’ or ‘I am humanism.’).” Wilson said Abell also was not happy that The New Humanist had purloined the name of his publication, The Humanist, adding that relations with Abell “were not improved in 1941 when our publication changed its name from The New Humanist to The Humanist. However, Wilson considered Abell “a real humanist pioneer.” {EW; HNS}

THE ABERRANT The Aberrant is a free thought journal (PO Box 621746, Littleton, Colorado 80162-1746) edited by Paul D. Roasberry. The work contains fiction and essays that in the main have been written by members of Mensa, the high IQ association. Its first 1994 issue had an article “There Is No God” by Fred Woodworth.

Abgar The alleged letters of Jesus and Abgar, states McCabe, “are such clumsy forgeries, quoting gospels which no one claims to have existed until forty years later, that even the Catholic Encyclopaedia rejects them.” They first appeared in the fourth century in Bishop Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. McCabe cites Eusebius as “a diligent collector of fairy-tales about the early Church.” {RE}

ABIOGENESIS Abiogenesis is theory that living things are, or once were, developed from inanimate matter by what used to be called “spontaneous generation,” or by natural chemical processes. Spontaneous generation has been discredited; for example, nonliving rotten meat cannot give rise to maggots—without a live fly to lay an egg, the rotten meat stays dead meat. However, Dr. Louis Lerman, a geophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, theorizes that bubbles forming on the surface of primordial seas collected chemicals and concentrated them for synthesis into complex molecules. According to his theory, through multistage reactions, constantly repeated by uncounted generations of bubbles, the molecules grow in size and complexity, ready for the transition to living, reproducing cells. McCabe in 1950 said that the position of the rationalist is, like that of biologists generally, that the attempt to show that “life” or “vitality” is an immaterial something which could not have been evolved from matter has failed and it would therefore be absurd to suppose that, while our million species of advanced organisms are the outcome of evolution, the earliest and most primitive of all were not evolved. {CE; RE}

ABORTION Until the early years of the present century, some Muslim peasant women in Upper Egypt reportedly believed it was possible to terminate an unwanted pregnancy by lying face down on the railroad tracks and allowing the next scheduled train to pass over them. Conversely, a woman who had difficulty conceiving would lie on her back on the tracks and pray that the passing train would impregnate her. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) states that, since the first century,

. . . the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. . . . Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. . . . A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae, by the very commission of the offense, and is subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.

In the 1990s, anti-abortionists have satirically taken the stand that enemies of abortion have every right to inflict the death penalty on everyone who is not pro-life. However, in 1994, an ex-Christian minister who murdered Dr. John Bayard Britton was himself sentenced to death for the crime. “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” said Florynce Kennedy, a black American freethinker whose television programs frequently support Bill Baird and the cause of independent abortion clinics. (See entries for James Barrett, John Bayard Britton, and Florynce Kennedy.) {OCP}

Abousenna, Mona (20th Century) Abousenna is Secretary General of the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association and also Secretary General of the International Ibn Rushd and Enlightenment Association. She heads the English Department, Faculty of Education, and Director of the Centre of Developing English Language Teaching (CDELT), faculty of Education, Ain Shams University, Egypt. At a 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, she spoke about the future of fairness for motherhood. She edits Averroës Today.

About, Edmond François Valentin (1826—1885) A French novelist and dramatist, About wrote Germaine (1857) and other novels. In Figaro, he wrote under the name of Valentin de Quevilly and produced several plays. He was a friend of Prince Jerome Bonaparte, who was equally anti-clerical. In 1884 About was named to the French Academy. His drastic rejection of all religious beliefs is seen in his Question romaine (1859), an exposure of what McCabe describes as “the foul condition of the Papal States before 1870,” adding, “and its style moved Shérer to describe the author as ‘the grandson of Voltaire.’ ” According to About, an act of faith is “to close one’s eyes in order to see better.” {RAT}

Abraham No proof is available that such a person as Abraham ever existed. But no one questions that the ancestors of the Hebrews may have come from a certain region or that the final “redactors” of Genesis lived, or had lived, in Babylonia. {RE}

Abrahams, J. (20th Century) Abrahams is on the editorial Committee of The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist.

Abrams, Sol (20th Century) Abrams taught thirty-two years as a teacher and assistant principal in New York City. A retiree in Florida, he is active with Humanists of the Palm Beaches.

Abse, Leo (1917— ) A Labour MP and freethinker, Abse proposed a bill in England to free blackmail victims and make the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions obligatory in all cases of private homosexual acts. His bill was defeated in the House of Commons, 213 to 99. Abse is author of Margaret, Daughter of Beatrice: A Politician’s Psycho-Drama of Margaret Thatcher (1989).

ABSOLUTE, THE In its broadest meaning, the absolute denotes a reality postulated in metaphysics (not proved to exist) that is not related to other realities or definable in terms of them: the ultimate, all-embracing, all-unifying reality. The assumption does not imply that it is a personality or is the cause (or creator) of the realities of which we have experience. But especially in Hegel’s system, it is Mind or Spirit and excludes the existence of material things. Absolutism in philosophy is the opposite of relativism. It means unlimited, unconditioned, or free of any relation; perfect, complete, or total; permanent, inherent, or ultimate; independent, or valid without reference to a perceiving subject. In epistemology, absolute means certain or indubitable as opposed to probable or hypothetical. Theologically, it is synonymous with, or characteristic of, God. Philosophically, it may be considered as the unknowable, the thing-in-itself; as the ultimate nonrelative that is the basis of all relation; as the ultimate, all-comprehensive principle in which all differences and distinctions are merged. In orthography, a “q” absolutely must be followed by a “u.” Relativists, however, point out that even in spelling there are exceptions to absolute rules; e.g., faqir, qaid, qanat, qat, qindar, qindarka, qintar, qoph, tranq, Qantas Airlines. {AF; CE; OCP; RE}

ABSURDISM • Absurdity, n. A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one’s own opinion. —Ambroce Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Absurdism, a philosophy that has affected the various arts, holds that humans live in a meaningless, irrational universe. It then follows that any attempt to search for order can only result in an absurd, pointless conflict with such a universe. John Simon has observed, “True absurdism is not less but more real than reality.” Although the concept has appealed to Samuel Beckett, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, and others, secular humanists are not absurdists, except as appreciators of some of the absurdist creators’ artistic endeavors. Although they find absurdism and irrationality abound, humanists are more involved in practical matters, working out meaningful possibilities for human welfare and developing rational solutions to humanity’s various problems.

Abu Abd’allah Muhammad ibn Massara al Jabali (881—921) An Arabian pantheist, Abu lived at Córdova, Spain, and studied the works of Empedocles and other Greek philosophers. Accused of impiety, he left Spain and traveled throughout the East, returned to Spain and collected disciples whom he led to skepticism. He was the most eminent predecessor of Ibn Rushd, or Averroës. His works were publicly burned at Seville. {BDF}

Abu Bakr Ibn Al-Tufail (Died 1185) Abu J’afar, as Abu Bakr Ibn Al-Tufail was also known, was a Spanish-Arabian philosopher who wrote a pantheistic romance, Hai Ibn Yakdan (translated as The Improvement of Human Reason in 1771). He died in Morocco. {BDF}

Abu Tahir (Died 943) Abu Tahir al Karmatti, the chief of a freethinking sect at Bahrain on the Persian Gulf, captured Mecca (930) with a small number of followers, taking away a revered black stone. He also imprisoned Abissaj, the head of 30,000 men whom the caliph had sent against him. {BDF}

Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’aari (Abu al-Ala al-Maarri) (973—1057) A Syrian poet, Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’aari observed, “The world holds two classes of men-intelligent men without religion, and religious men without intelligence.” Blinded by childhood smallpox, he called himself “the doubly imprisoned captive,” an allusion to his seclusion and loss of sight. He took no pains to conceal that he believed in no revealed religion. For example, he wrote a parody of the Koran (Qur’an), deriding all religions as absurd. Curiously, he was never persecuted by Islamic officials. Perhaps it was because he was eccentric: He opposed parenthood, he declared that to bring a child into the world was to add to the sum of suffering, and he was an ardent vegetarian. His work denies a resurrection, and he is incredulous of any divine revelation. For him, religion “is a product of the human mind, in which men believe through force of habit and education, never stopping to consider whether it is true.” Concerning creeds, he wrote

Now this religion happens to prevail Until by that one it is overthrown; Because men will not live with men alone, But always with another fairy-tale.

Robertson reported that Abu’l-ala-al-Ma’aari has been pronounced “incomparably greater” than Omar Khayyám “both as a poet and as an agnostic.” On his tomb he ordered written, “I owe this to the fault of my father: none owe the like to mine.” {BDF; CE; JMR; JMRH}

Abu-Fazil Abu al Fadhl Ibn Mubarak (Died 1604) Abu-Fazil, called Al Hindi, was vizier to the Emperor Akbar from 1572. Although born a Muslim, he was tolerant of all sects. His chief work, Ayin Akbary, was a statistical account of the Indian Empire. He was assassinated in 1604. {BDF}

Abu-Zaid, Nasr Hamid (20th Century) An Egyptian intellectual, Abu-Zaid in 1995 was branded by his country’s courts as a religious heretic. Legally declared a heretic, he had to flee with his wife to the Netherlands because under Egyptian religious law a heretic cannot be married to a believer. What outraged Islamic militants was the Cairo University professor’s twelve books, in some of which he argued that Muslims must understand the Koran and Islam’s other sacred texts historically. He held that certain Koranic references are not to be taken literally but as metaphors. “I am,” he retorted from Leiden, “a Muslim. It is the militants who are betraying our faith by raising the banner of Islam for their own political project. They are hijacking Islam. My sin is recommending an enlightened view of Islamic thought.”

Abul-Abbas-Abdallah III (786—833) Al Mamoun was the seventh Abbasside, caliph, the son of Haroun al Rashid. He was a patron of science and literature, collected Greek and Hebrew manuscripts, and invited scholars of all nations to his capital. Born in Baghdad, he died in a war near Tarsus. {BDF}

Abulafia, Abraham Ben Semuel (1240— c. 1291) Born in Spain, Abulafia in 1260 searched for a mythical ruler in Israel. Although he gained a large following eager to believe that redemption was at hand, he is illustrative of a fanatic and zealot. {LEE}

ABULCASIS: See the entry for dentistry.

ACADEMY Plato’s Akademia, a word that refers to “the olive grove of Academe,” continued for over forty years after its founding in 386 until Plato’s death in 340 B.C.E. Philosophical schools following its model continued to flourish in Greece and Rome for nine centuries until they were abolished, along with other “pagan” schools, by Emperor Justinian in 529. In 1462 at Careggi, near Florence, the Academy of Florence under the guidance of Ficino was instrumental in encouraging the Platonic revival in Renaissance Europe. In 1582, the Accademia della Crusca, literally the academy of the chaff, was founded as an Italian literary society. Its purpose included maintaining the purity of the language. Leonardo Salviati, Pietro Bembo, and the poet Grazzini formed the group, which later joined two other academies and is still in existence. In 1635, the Academie Française was formed to insure “the purification of the French language.” It is supported by the government, and its forty members promote literary excellence. Among its eminent members have been Montesquieu, Corneille, Voltaire, Condorcet, La Fontaine, and Racine. In 1666, the French Academie des Sciences began when a group of French scientists–Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi–began meeting. They were later joined by Colbert and Huygens, and under the patronage of Louis XIV the Academy was formally established. In 1713, La Real Academia Española was founded in Spain. Like the French Academy, the Spanish Academy serves as an authority concerning what is and is not “correct” in the language. Its motto states that the academy “cleanses, fixes, and adds splendor” to Spanish, protecting it from debasing infiltrators. Although the academy has branches in most Latin American countries, they are subordinate to Madrid. Although not an academy, the American Philosophical Society in 1743 was founded by Benjamin Franklin to “promote useful knowledge” and is the oldest scientific association in the United States. David Rittenhouse and Thomas Jefferson were his immediate successors. In 1863, the National Academy of Sciences, a private organization of leading American scientists and engineers, was founded. Its approximately 2,000 members advise the Federal government on matters of science and technology. Separate sections represent all of the physical and biological sciences and many of the social sciences. In 1904, the American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded and consists of the 250 major artists, writers, composers, and humanists in the nation. The National Institute of Arts and Letters, founded in 1898, served as the parent body for the American Academy, and in 1976 the two were amalgamated. Today, “academy” refers to a society of learned persons organized to advance the arts, science, or literature, and some academics are devoted to archaeology, history, the social sciences, medicine and surgery, and the fine arts. Academies are found in various nations throughout the world. (See entries for the American Academy, French Academy, Greek Academy, and Real Academia Española.) {CE}

ACADEMY OF HUMANISM: See entry for International Academy of Humanism.

Acharya, N. K. (1923— ) Acharya, a member of the Andhra Pradesh Rationalist Association in Hyderabad, India, was secretary of the Indian Rationalist Association from 1967 to 1971. A retired lecturer in physics, he was editor of Indian Rationalist from 1967 to 1971.

Achelis, Thomas (1850—1909) Achelis was a German ethnologist, an editor of Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. He wrote biographies of several German rationalists, held a high position in his science in Germany, and although called a Protestant wrote Adolf Bastian (1892), in which he entirely agrees with Bastian, an eminent and thorough rationalist. {RAT}

ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE Zeno of Elea (c. 490—430 B.C.E.) developed a paradox of motion. If Achilles races a tortoise and the tortoise is given a head start, Achilles can never win, Zeno argued. For wherever Achilles reaches the point that the tortoise has reached, the tortoise will have moved ahead to a new point. And when Achilles reaches that point, the tortoise will have moved to yet a new point, and so on, indefinitely. As Achilles closes a previous gap, the tortoise has moved on. How Zeno explained the paradox is not known, but it is clear he questioned common-sense notions of time and space. {AF; CE; OCP}

Achillini, Alessandro (29 Oct 1463—2 Aug 1512) Achillini was an Italian physician who taught in Bologna and Padua, a philosopher sometimes called the second Aristotle who expounded the doctrines of Averroës and wrote largely upon anatomy. Galen, he pointed out, faced the problems of Renaissance anatomists who presumed the similarity between human and animal anatomy was exact. "In the larger hand there are thirty bones," stated Achillini . "There would be thirty-one if the ninth of Galen was included, but that, however, is a monkey bone." By the time Andreas Vesalius published On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), others could cite numerous errors of Galen in the number and shape of the bones, though Vesalius, too, continued to identify many animal parts as belonging to humans. Leonardo played with the confusion between human and animal anatomy by drawing a fanciful foot of a beast based on a human one, a reversal of the common trend. {BDF; PUT}

Ackerman, Forrest James (24 Nov 1916- ) A freethinker and non-believer, Ackerman is a science fiction writer, the founder of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He wrote Forrest J. Ackerman’s World of Science Fiction (1998) and, with A. W. Strickland, A Reference Guide to American Science Fiction Films (1981). He has written many short stories and edited numerous anthologies.

Ackermann, Louise Victorine (1813—1890) A French poet, Ackermann exhibited in her work that she was a philosophic pessimist and atheist. Her husband, Paul, also an atheist, was a teacher for Prince Frederick William, who became Frederick III. Both Ackermanns were friends of Proudhon. “God is dethroned,” said M. Caro of one of her 1874 poems. She professed a hatred of Christianity as well as its interested professors, and Sainte Beuve called her “the learned solitary of Nice.” “Religions,” she wrote, “impose antiquated and narrow beliefs which are entirely unsuitable for a being who knows nothing and can affirm nothing.” McCabe said Ackermann was “very resolutely Agnostic, without using that word in her Pensées d’une solitaire, and she wrote a poem for her tombstone which begins: ‘I do not know.’ In the strict sense she was an atheist.” {BDF; JM; RAT}

Ackley, Sheldon (20th Century) Ackley, who was fired for atheism from teaching philosophy at Gettysburg College, was recruited by Joseph Blau as the highly successful first Leader of the Long Island Society of Ethical Culture (1950—1959). A university administrator and educator, Ackley was cited by Lamont for his humanism. In 1982, after early retirement from teaching, he became a “Secular Humanist Leader” in New York. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)

Acollas, Pierre Antoine Rene Paul Emile (1826—1891) Acollas was a French juris-consult and political writer. Mrs. Besant translated his monograph, Les Droits de l’Homme (The Idea of God in the Revolution). In 1871 the Communal Government at Paris made him Dean of the Faculty of Law, but he declined. Later, he was appointed Inspector-General of Prisons and was admitted to the Legion of Honour. {BDF; RAT}

Acontius, Jacobus (1492-1566) Giacomo Aconzio, who was born at Trent, became an ordained priest, then relinquished the faith and fled to Switzerland in 1557. Subsequently he went to England, serving Queen Elizabeth as a military engineer and dedicating his Stratagems of Satan (1565) to her. A latitudinarian work, it was listed in the Catholic Index. Milton is said to have read the work. {BDF}

Acord, Gary (20th Century) Acord is author of Heaven on Earth: A Bold Affirmation of Humanist Faith (1977). {GS}

ACOSMISM Acosmism is the disbelief in the existence of a material world. Berkeley, Hume, Sir James Jeans, and Sir Arthur Eddington toyed with the idea. Materialists, however, are not believers in acosmism. {RE}

Acosta Urquidi, Mariclaire (20th Century) Acosta, president of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, has documented in “Under the Volcano” (The Humanist, November-December 1994) the fact that as many as 88% of all people who are detained in Mexico are tortured, this despite Mexico’s having an excellent constitution which allegedly at that time was being disregarded by the executive branch.

Acosta, Uriel (1591—1647) Son of a Christianized Jew and brought up a Christian, Acosta rejected that faith and in Holland published Examen Traditorum Philosophicarum ad legem Scriptam, a work that equally criticizes Moses and Jesus. Excommunicated by the synagogue and imprisoned by the Amsterdam authorities, he suffered many indignities from Jews as well as Christians. In 1647, Acosta the deist committed suicide. His pathetic experience of orthodox charity is recorded in his autobiography, Exemplar Humanae Vitae. {BDF; RAT}

ACTION FOR HUMANISM Action for Humanism (Box 91, Ilisan Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria; or c/o C. D. Brobbey, Nestle [Ghana] Ltd., PO Box 8350, Yema, Ghana), publishes a newsletter, The Sunrays. The group is affiliated with African Americans for Humanism, and its president is Emmanuel Kofi Mensah.

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton [1st Baron] (1834—1902) Although Lord Acton was a nominal Catholic, this Cambridge University teacher of history had two of his books added to the Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1871: Z ur Geschichts des vaticanischen Concils and Sendschreiben einen deutschen Bischof des vaticanischen Concils. By opposing Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors, Acton illustrated his distaste for all forms of absolutism. However, rather than risk excommunication he accepted the dogma of papal infallibility. Secular humanists, who are against all forms of religious absolutism, often quote Lord Acton’s 1887 statement to Bishop Mandell Creighton, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” They also cite his statement, “The principle of the Inquisition was murderous. . . . The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.” {CE; ILP; RE; TYD}

ACTS OF GOD An “act of God” is generally understood to include any extraordinary interruption of human life by a natural cause (such as an earthquake, perils of the sea, tornadoes, a severe flood) that, even with care, could not have been avoided. On the contrary, if events can be foreseen (that, for example, rain will leak through a defective roof and do considerable damage), failure to take the necessary precautions constitutes “negligence.” Legal cases may arise if a fire in a building with lightning rods has been caused by lightning, in which case insurance companies may claim that the fire was caused by an act of God and is, therefore, not indemnifiable. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a leading Baptist minister, objected in 1997 to language describing such natural phenomena as tornadoes and floods as “acts of God.” “I feel that I have indeed witnessed many ‘acts of God,’ but I see His actions in the miraculous sparing of life, the sacrifice and selfless spirit in which so many responded to the pain of others,” he explained. State Representative Shane Broadway, who is aware that the term has been in insurance policies for ages and insists that the term be continued and included, retorted, “I’m just as much a Baptist as the Governor is.” Historically, theists have not complained about the expression. Survivors of events involving an Act of God, such as a hurricane, often respond with “thanks to God” that they were saved, overlooking Who it is analogously that they are blaming for killing the others or else implying that God wreaks havoc without reason. As for those unfortunates who were hurt or killed, shamans or other divines are quick to declare that God is punishing man for something specific, and various explanations are offered as to how now to regain God’s love. Freethinkers, who have no need for such an expression, use the scientific method to elucidate such occurrences. (CE}

ACTS OF GOD, EXAMPLES Governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas wants legal or insurance documents that refer to floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes no longer to be referred to as “acts of God.” A Baptist minister, he wants the phrase to be replaced by, or used in tandem with, “natural disasters.” “Acts of a supremely indifferent and meaningless universe” was rejected: it’s unnecessarily existential. Recent Acts of God involving Muslims include the following:

• 1980: A Pakistani airliner caught fire and crashed after taking off from Jeddah, killing 301; • 1987: In Mecca, when security forces clashed with Iranians demonstrating against the United States, 402 were killed and 649 were wounded; • 1990: Pilgrims numbering 1,426 were killed in a stampede; • 1991: An air crash killed 98; • 1991: In another stampede, 270 pilgrims died as worshippers surged forward for the ritual “stoning the devil”; • 1997: More than 200 were killed and 1,000 injured as fire engulfed an encampment outside the holy city.

Voltaire, commenting on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 in which 30,000 perished, many of them in their churches, wrote, “Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth! / A frighted gathering of human kind!/ Eternal lingering of useless pain! . . . . God holds the chain: is not himself enchained. . . . Under a just God, no one is miserable who has not deserved misery. . . . Why suffer we, then, under one so just. . . . “ He then asks, “. . . how conceive a God supremely good / Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/Yet scatters evil with so large a hand?” {Chemistry and Industry, 8 April 1997; The Freethinker, June 1997}

Acuña, Rosario de (1851-1923) Acuna was a Spanish writer and lecturer. She contributed to Las Dominicales of Madrid, wrote The Doll’s House, and completed other educational works. {BDF}

ACUPUNCTURE “The scientific evidence for acupuncture remains as weak as ever,” according to Gary P. Posner in Mensa Bulletin (June 1999). He commented upon hearing that the Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., which previously classified acupuncture needles as unapproved devices, recently approved them for use by licensed acupuncturists. A physician and national Coordinator of the “Skeptic” M-to-M Service, Dr. Posner adds, however, that sticking the needles does serve “as a counterirritant for localized superficial pain.” He also holds that “the evidence for therapeutic touch appears entirely illusory.” E-mail: <garypos@aol.com>.

ADAM (Born some time after 9 a.m., 23 October 4004 B.C.E., according to Bishop James Ussher) “To condemn all mankind for the sin of Adam and Eve,” wrote W. K. Clifford, “to let the innocent suffer for the guilty, to keep anyone alive in torture forever and ever: These actions are simply magnified copies of what bad men do. No juggling with ‘divine justice and mercy’ can make them anything else. This must be said to all kinds and conditions of men: That if He has visited upon the innocent the punishment of the guilty, if He is to torture any single soul for ever, then it is wrong to worship Him.” If Adam’s sin was that of having eaten of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (and many believers mistakenly think the fruit was an apple), the symbolism is provocative in light of Edward O. Wilson’s contemporary and dour view of mankind as a group which has reduced animal life in lakes, rivers, and even the open ocean. As a result, he observed, “The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.” However, as an eminent sociobiologist, Wilson is a philosophic naturalist. What disturbs him is that humans appear to be suicidally programmed by their genetic heritage “to be so selfish that a sense of global responsibility will come too late,” that “their genes also predispose them to plan ahead for one or two generations at most.” (See entry for Bishop James Ussher, who determined from Biblical sources that Creation was completed in seven days, 4004 years before the birth of Jesus the Christ. Also see entry for Hermaphrodite, which Adam might have been.) {HAB; CE; ER; RE}

A.D. A.D., which Christians use to denote anno Domini, the year of the birth of Jesus, was a term invented by a sixth-century monk named Dionysius Exiguus (or Dennis the Short, not a reference to what some might think but, rather, to his height). “Little” Dennis’s calendar system started with Year One, for Western mathematics had not yet developed the concept of zero. Thus, the first century lasted from 1 through 100, the second from 101 through 200, and so forth until the twentieth century from 1901 through 2000. We must, therefore, remind ourselves that years like 1900 are in the nineteenth century whereas 1901 is in the 20th. Moreover, Herod is now considered to have died in 4 B.C., for Little Dennis failed to get the starting point right. Or, at any rate, biblical stories of Herod’s fear at the birth of Jesus, the tale of the Three Wise Men, and the Slaying of the Innocents would mean that Jesus must have been born in 4 B.C. or earlier. Freethinkers use C.E. to signify “the common era” and B.C.E. to signify “before the common era.” {Stephen Jay Gould, USA Weekend, 19—21 September 1997}

AD HOMINEM ARGUMENT An ad hominem (literally, to the person) argument attacks by appealing to feelings rather than to intellect. For an example: “An atheist who teaches philosophy has to be an immoral individual” (but the argument fails to explain the individual’s immorality and, instead, is an ad hominem attack on someone who is disliked).

Adagio, Affie (20th Century) Adagio is editor in New South Wales of Humanist Viewpoints, newsletter of the Humanist Society in Australia.

ADAM AND EVE • Conversation between Adam and Eve must have been difficult at times because they had nobody to talk about. —Agnes Repplier

• Adam blamed Eve. Eve blamed the serpent. And the serpent hadn’t a leg to stand on. —Anonymous

Adam, Charles (Born 1857) A French philosopher, Adam taught in several universities and became rector of the Nancy Academy and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He edited works of Descartes and in his La Philosophie en France (1894) wrote, “Philosophy and politics leave theses to theology, which digs them up from a remote past, and are modestly content with hypotheses.” {RAT}

ADAMASTOR Phallocentrists are intrigued by Adamastor, whose penis was so monstrously huge that he and the nymph Thetis were unable to have sex. Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532—1562) makes mention of Adamastor, as does Lusiads by the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoens (1540—1580). In 1993, South African novelist André Brink wrote Cape of Storms: The First Life of Adamastor, in which he uses the character to symbolize the inability of his nation’s black majority to engage in peaceful and social intercourse with its white minority. The work was denounced by a British reviewer as being sexist and phallocentric. Similarly, orthodox religionists have publicly proclaimed their shock at Brink’s having written about such matters. Meanwhile, The New York Times Book Review front-paged the novel’s revew. Reviewer Mario Vargas Llosa noted that, although it is not an anthropological essay, it is a wonderfully entertaining work of fiction: “Brink’s beautiful mythological re-creation leaves us anguished over what appear to be its predictions regarding a society where, after a bloody past of injustice and institutionalized racism, different races and cultures are finally preparing to try coexistence under conditions of equality.”

Adamic, Louis (23 Mar 1899—4 Sep 1951) Adamic, a Yugoslav, wrote of his early move to the United States in Laughing in the Jungle (1932). When he proposed that European-Americans be returned to their homelands to educate Europeans in democracy, the scheme led to his conference with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which he described in Dinner at the White House (1946). Adamic’s freethought shows in The Truth about Aimee Semple McPherson (1926) and The World of Satan in the Bible (1928). {GS; TYD}

ADAMITES The term Adamites refers to a radical group of Hussites, heretics who in the fifteenth century rebelled against the Catholic Church. They were said to have gone naked, believing that because their spirits were free they were in a sinless state. The Adamites attacked priests and organized religion. (See entry for John Hus.)

Adams, Abigail (1744—1818) Adams, wife of President John Adams and mother of President John Quincy Adams, was a letter-writer of note whose detailed descriptions provided a vivid source of social history. Some of her letters can be found in The Adams-Jefferson Letters. As the first First Lady to live in the newly constructed White House in Washington, she found the place unfinished and remarked,

I had much rather live in the house at Philadelphia. Not one room or chamber is finished of the whole. It is habitable by fires in every part, thirteen of which we are obliged to keep daily, or sleep in wet and damp places. . . . We have not the least fence, yard, or other convenience, without; and the great unfinished audience-room [now the East Room used for receptions and concerts] I make a drying room of, to hang up the clothes in.

Adams was a member of the Unitarian Church in Quincy, Massachusetts. (In Leonard Bernstein’s Broadway musical, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Abigail and her husband chose a black gentleman—Gilbert Price, on Broadway—to be the caretaker, and this person with his offspring continued to be caretaker of the place during a succession of presidents. Price, visiting the White House during the show’s performances in Washington, joked with President Jimmy Carter about his having had a job there long before Carter. Carter, who said he was a great admirer of the Adamses, joked that Price who had lived in the Broadway White House had earned a nomination for an Antoinette Perry Award, an honor White House resident Carter had never received.) {CE; EG; U; numerous conversations with Gilbert Price}

Adams, Charles Francis (1807—1886) Charles Francis Adams was an American statesman, diplomat, and son of John Quincy Adams. Both were Unitarians, members of the United First Parish in Quincy, Massachusetts. His Life and Letters (1886) shows him to be an agnostic of the Leslie Stephen school. After being President of Union Pacific Railroad (1884—1890), Adams wrote Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (1892). {JM; PUT; RAT; U; UU}

Adams, Clark Davis (July 1969 - ) Adams is an atheist activist in Mississippi. Reared a Roman Catholic who attended a Catholic boarding school, he is moderator of alt.atheism.moderate (an Internet newsgroup) and is the public relations director of Internet Infidels. (On the Web: <www.dnaco.net/~rwdaniel/ex-tian/Clark.Davis.Adams.html>. E-mail: <cadams@infidels.org>).

Adams, Dale (20th Century) Adams is Vice-Chair of the American Ethical Union’s Membership Committee. E-mail: <dalepadams@juno.com>.

Adams, Douglas Noel (11 Mar 1952 - ) A British comic writer, Adams completed a mock science-fiction series known collectively as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1980-1990). Although raised in a religious household, he once listened to a street preacher and realized he was hearing utter nonsense. Asked by American Atheist (1998-1999) if it is accurate that he had been described as a “radical atheist,” Adams responded,

Yes, I think I use the term “radical” rather loosely, just for emphasis. If you describe yourself as “atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean atheist, I really do not believe that there is a god; in fact, I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference), I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one . . . etc., etc. It’s easier to say that I am a radical atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously.

His works include The Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book (1986) and Starship Titanic (CD ROM, 1998). He is a scriptwriter for BBC Radio and was a script editor for the television series “Doctor Who” (1978-1980). An article about Richard Dawkins in The New Yorker (9 September 1996) stated that “Douglas Adams, a friend of Dawkins’s . . . found the experience of reading [The Selfish Gene] ‘one of those absolutely shocking moments of revelation when you understand that the world is fundamentally different from what you thought it was.’ He adds, ‘I’m hesitating to use the word, but it’s almost like a religious experience.’ ” That book was a key event in leading Adams to his position of atheism. {CA}

Adams, Elie Maynard (1919— ) Adams, author of Philosophy and Cultural Freedom (1985) and Religion and Cultural Freedom (1993), explores the contradictions among biblical religions, democratic liberalism, and modern science, showing how religious beliefs over the ages have been reinterpreted in response to cultural conflicts. Adams suggests that a humanistic revolution is at hand, one that will result in a fully accountable and intellectually credible religion.

Adams, Francis William Lauderdale (1862—1893) An Australian poet, Adams wrote novels and poetry. A severe critic of Christianity but an ardent idealist, he wrote in “Mass of Christ” and other of his works about “the bastard God” of the churches. {RAT}

Adams, George (19th Century) In 1842, Adams was sentenced in Bristol, England, to one month of imprisonment for having sold Thomas Paine’s Oracle of Reason. A cabinet maker as well as a radical bookseller, Adams was married to Harriet Adams, also a freethinker. {BDF; TYD; VI}

Adams, Hannah (1755—1831) A View of Religions (1784) by Adams was the first objective analysis of world religions. She is the first American known to have supported herself through writing. A Unitarian, she provided the basis for later scholarship in the study of comparative religion. {U}

Adams, Henry (16 Feb 1838—27 Mar 1918) An eminent historian and the grandson and great-grandson of presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, Adams wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (privately printed, 1904, published 1913), in which he idealized the Middle Ages, showing how the period from 1050-1250 provided a kind of unity through a devotion to the Virgin Mary. His other major work, The Education of Henry Adams (privately published, 1906), was written after he visited the Paris Exposition in 1900. There, in contrast to “the ideal perfection” represented by the Virgin, he observed a huge dynamo that he used as a symbol of the 20th century’s mechanistic power. It is far more difficult now than then to obtain any kind of intellectual peace, he showed. The two works are a tour de force. Adams, after the death of his sister, wrote in his autobiography:

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

He fails to mention, however, his marrying Marian Hooper in 1872 and being tragically affected by her suicide in 1885.

Adams, J. D. (19th Century) Adams became a Unitarian, then a follower of William Johnson Fox of the South Place Ethical Society in London. He was a supporter of Charles Bradlaugh.

Adams, J. P. (19th Century) A well-known London freethinker, Adams with Charles Bradlaugh and Charles Watts helped launch a drive to raise £10,000 to build a new lecture hall, which failed but another hall was built in 1868. Adams supported the National Reformer, which ceased after J. M. Robertson’s editorship following Bradlaugh’s death. Adams contributed to Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner’s publication, The Reformer. {RSR}

Adams, James Luther (1901—1994) Son of a Baptist country preacher, Adams became attracted to John H. Dietrich’s “scientific humanism.” He then studied with Irving Babbitt, the Harvard “neo-humanist,” but upon becoming a Unitarian minister Adams emphasized social engagement in “Taking Time Seriously” (Christian Century, September, 1939). A social ethicist, he has been ranked with Henry W. Bellows and William Ellery Channing as among the three greatest leaders of Unitarianism. In 1965 when his Paul Tillich’s Philosophy of Culture, Science, and Religion was published, he was cited as one of the leading Tillich experts in addition to being an authority on ethics. Adams showed bravery in the time of McCarthyism, by protesting the Vietnam War and by taking part in civil rights struggles. Adams once wrote:

• Very often the person who revolts against fundamentalism or orthodoxy only sets up a new orthodoxy. There are two principal reasons why the critical spirit and freedom of thought are in perennial danger. These reasons may be epitomized in two words: ignorance and idolatry. . . . Perhaps the greatest danger to the liberal spirit, however, is idolatry, the submission to some idea or ideology that is revered as an absolute and exclusive loyalty. . . . The average religious man is one who is hot for certainties, and though the answers he gets are dusty answers, he is inclined to view them as infallible. He wants an infallible Truth, a divine book true from cover to cover, a divine Founder for his religion, a divinely instituted Church outside which there can be no salvation. . . .
• What the orthodox overlooks, however, is this: The most pretentious pride of all is that of the man who thinks himself capable of recognizing infallibility, for he must himself claim to be infallible in order to identify infallibility. He may accuse those who do not accept his “divine” and infallible truths of being proud and of lacking humility. But he forgets that he claims to be infallible when he says he can select an infallible guide. How otherwise can he assert with assurance that he knows the infallible when he sees it?
• It is true that much religion in the world is a racket; and it is absolutely necessary to identify and attack that sort of religion. Indeed, the great enemy of religion is not anti-religion; it is pseudo-religion. It is not materialism; it is pseudo-spirituality, pseudo-idealism. That is why atheism and hostility to “religion” are often of great value and may even be a necessity. {U; U&U}

Adams, James Truslow (1878—1949) Adams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, author of Henry Adams (1933), when asked about humanism, responded to the present author: “I make no pretense of being a specialist in Humanism and have not followed such shifts as Existentialism.” {WAS, 26 March 1949}

Adams, John [President] (30 Oct 1735—4 Jul 1826) “There is no doubt,” wrote Corliss Lamont, “that George Washington, a rather indifferent member of the Episcopal Church, and John Adams, second President of the United States and sympathetic to Unitarianism, were strongly influenced by Deism, both through their colleagues and as a result of the general intellectual atmosphere. . . . It was President Adams, not President Washington, who in 1797 confirmed and signed the Treaty between the United States and Tripoli in which appears the significant statement, ‘. . . the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.’ ” In the Continental Congress, Adams was the delegate from Massachusetts, a leading advocate of American independence. As chairman of the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, he assigned the actual writing to Virginia’s delegate Thomas Jefferson. Upon becoming President, he steered a lonely course between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists, who strongly favored the British, and the opposition Republicans led by Jefferson, who favored the French. Less interested in immediate changes, he designed checks and balances to make change take place slowly and sensibly. When he lost to Jefferson in the 1800 elections, he was so upset he fled the capital before his successor was sworn in, the only sitting president who did not attend his successor’s inauguration. He justified this for a decade, eventually reconciling with Jefferson in 1812. Adams was not a feminist, but he treated intellectually able women as his equals. He opposed slavery, correctly predicting that eventually it could lead to civil war, and he opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which allowed slavery to spread beyond the borders of the South. For many, Adams represents an inspiring individual who can be judged by what he does, not by what he says he believes. McCabe holds that Adams was not a very firm Deist, that in one letter to Jefferson (12 May 1820), he wrote that the Unitarians’ “crowd of skepticisms” kept him awake at night. He defined God (17 January 1820) as “an essence that we know nothing of” and says that the attempts of philosophers to get beyond this are “games of push-pin.” The Incarnation is called an “awful blasphemy,” and he admitted he had no proof of a personal immortality. Further examples: “The question is whether the god of nature will govern the world by his own laws or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles”; and “I almost shudder at the thought of alluding to the most fatal example of the abuses of grief which the history of humankind has preserved—the Cross. Consider what calamities that engine of grief has produced!” Adams is buried at the First Unitarian Church in Quincy, Massachusetts, which he had joined on 3 January 1773. In 1815 he had written to a Dr. Marsh, “Sixty-five years, my own minister the Rev. Lemuel Briant . . . and Dr. Jonathan Mayhew . . . were Unitarians.” In 1816, writing to F. A. Van der Kamp, he wrote, “As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?” In 1817 he wrote that he often was “tempted to think that this would be the best of all possible worlds if there was no religion in it.” On the day of his death, according to his biographer Page Smith, Adams’s last words were, “This is the last of earth. I am content.” {CL; CE; FUS; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU}

Adams, John Quincy [President] (11 Jul 1767—23 Feb 1848) John Quincy Adams was the sixth U. S. President, the first to be photographed. A conservative, he disliked Andrew Jackson, calling him “a hero, a murderer, an adulterer . . . who in his last days of his life belied and slandered me before the world and died.” By post, Adams’s mother had once lectured her son that death was preferable to vice. He is said to have risen often at 4 a.m. to read the Bible and to have advised his son, George Washington Adams, to “Spurn the deadly draught of pleasure.” He is also known to have swum naked in the Potomac River, to have written a book on weights and measures, to have been an exponent of the sciences, to have been an ambassador, secretary of state, and U. S. Senator, and to have been outspoken not only against slavery but also against the Southern politicians who defended slavery. Adams’s best-known achievement, as President James Madison’s Secretary of State, was the Monroe Doctrine (1823). Although his presidency was a disappointment to many, Adams was instrumental in the setting up of the Smithsonian Institution. Gore Vidal has called Adams the hero of the Armistad affair, a reference to his part in an incident involving the kidnapping of several hundred West Africans by Portuguese slavers for shipment to the slave markets of Cuba. Adams aided Joseph Cinqué, a twenty-five-year-old from Sierra Leone who had led a mutiny and refused to become a slave. Vidal has suggested that Congress should, in light of Adams’s accomplishments, hire sculptors with sandblasters “and let them loose on Mt. Rushmore so that they can turn the likeness of the war lover Theodore Roosevelt into that of a true hero, John Quincy Adams.” A conservative Unitarian, Adams deplored his father’s and Jefferson’s deistic views. He was a member of the United First Parish (Unitarian) in Quincy, Massachusetts, as were his son Charles Francis and his father, John. Paul C. Nagel’s John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life (1997), points out that Adams’s mother was a carrier of an alcoholic gene; Adams’s two brothers and, later, his two sons were all to die of acute alcoholism. Adams, however, remained a political activist, “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery,” according to one Virginia congressman. Although he suffered a stroke and weakened, he continued to go to the House. In fact, he was a key figure in the Amistad case, in which he argued before the House and the Supreme Court concerning the rights of mutinous slaves. He also was fond of skinny-dipping in the Potomac, according to Cormac O’Brien’s Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents. On 21 February 1848 he cast his last vote, a “no” in regard to the war upon Mexico. Then, motioning to the chair that he wanted to speak, he rose but staggered, being caught by another member before he hit the floor. Two days later, he drifted in and out of consciousness. “This is the last of earth,” he was then heard to murmur. “I am composed.” Vidal’s evaluation: “Final words. Articulate to the end.” {CE; Gore Vidal, The New Yorker, 10 November 1997; Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams (1997); TYD; U; UU}

Adams, Mary (Born 1898) Adams was an agnostic who headed the Council for the Unmarried Mother. She also was deputy chairman of the Consumers Association. {TRI}

Adams, Phillip Andrew (12 July 1939 - ) Adams, the son of a Congregational minister, has been a convinced atheist from the age of five. He is a popular Australian newspaper columnist who hosts ABC Radio National’s “Late Night Live.” Adams has been chairman of the Australian Film Commission, the Australian Film Institute, Film Australia, the Commission for the Future, the Victorian Council for the Arts, the National Australia Day Council, and other government and semi-government bodies. With Dick Smith and Mark Plummer, he founded Australian Sceptics. He received a Responsibility in Media Award from CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He wrote Adams versus God, Retreat from Tolerance, and A Billion Voices, the latter about Indian politics. With Professor Paul Davies, he has discussed cosmological and quantum mechanical matters in “The Big Question,” a television series,. His columns have appeared in all of Australia’s principal newspapers and journals, as well as in The New York Times, The London Times, and the Financial Times. He is the Australian representative on Index on Censorship (London) and is known for his irreverent columns in The Australian and The Bulletin. The Roman Catholic Church once announced from every pulpit in Australia that it was a sin to read any newspaper Adams wrote for, or to listen to any radio station that broadcast him. “This would have made it very difficult for the faithful,” he has observed, “given that I’ve written for every major newspaper and magazine in this country—whilst being a major broadcaster on a wide variety of commercial and public radio stations.” Adams once declined an honorary membership in The Atheist Society of Australia. In a letter to Kevin Solway (10 Aug 1993), an atheist who complained that Adams had been soft when talking to Templeton Prize Winner and religionist Charles Birch, Adams responded:

Given your growing concern about my credentials as an atheist, I hereby resign as a patron of your Atheist Society. God forbid that I should hang around when I'm not wanted. I've spent a life-time attacking religious beliefs and have not wavered from a view of the universe that many would regard as bleak. Namely, that it is a meaningless place devoid of deity. However I'm unwilling simply to repeat the old arguments of the past when, in fact, God is a moving target and is taking all sorts of new shapes and forms. The arguments used against the long bow are not particularly useful when debating nuclear weapons, and the simple arguments against the old model gods are not sufficient when dealing with the likes of Davies et al. For example, the notion that God didn't exist, doesn't exist, but may come into existence through the spread of consciousness throughout the universe is too clever to be pooh-poohed along Bertrand Russell lines. And if I had the time I could give you half a dozen other scientific theologies that will need snappier footwork from the atheist of the future. [Charles] Birch is, in my view, a pretentious fart whose philosophies are opportunistic and unconvincing. If people can't see that, that's their problem. In the context of a hydra-headed SBS interview, one hopes that he hoists himself on his own petard. Incidentally, if there's one thing more infuriating than a silly theologian it's an arid, doctrinaire atheist. I've had dealings with plenty of them over the years, including a famous monster from the US. To profess atheism is not to prove anything, let alone have intellectual merit. Some of the narrowest, most dogmatic and silly people I've known have been atheists—or have loudly professed themselves Humanists or Rationalists. Let the last contribution of your erstwhile patron be to warn you against intellectual arrogance. I've never believed, for a moment, that atheists have all the answers. Just that they pose better questions.

Adams lives with Patrice Newell and their child on a large bio-dynamic farm in the Hunter Valley. The two have co-authored a series of Penguin joke collections. {CA; WAS, 5 Aug 2001; SWW}

Adams, Robert Chamblett (1839—1902) A Canadian freethought leader, Adams evidenced his rationalism in Pioneer Pith: The Gist of Lectures on Rationalism (1899) and Good Without God (1902). He guided the influential Pioneer Freethought Club in Canada until early in the 20th century. In 1884, Adams was elected President of the Canadian Secular Union. He helped challenge the ban by customs officials on such freethought works as Paine’s Age of Reason and to secure the Dominion Oaths Act of 1893. {BDF; EU, A. Brian McKillop; FUK; FUS; PUT; RAT; RSR}

Adams, Sarah Flower (22 Feb1805—1848) Adams, an English Unitarian, wrote poetry and sermons. A close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, she wrote Vivia Perpetua, which dealt with early martyrs in the clash between Christianity and heathenism. In the third of five acts, one speaker says, “Once have a priest for enemy, good bye to peace.” In London, she attended the independent church (Unitarian) of William Johnson Fox. She contributed thirteen hymns to his Hymns and Anthems. One of them was "Nearer, My God to Thee," which became a favorite at nineteenth century funerals. {U}

Adams, Thomas (19th Century) Adams, born a Congregationalist, was a master baker who became a secularist in the 1860s. {RSR}

Adams, William (18th Century) A friend of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Adams was told by the dying Johnson of his fear of being considered damned. According to W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson (1998), Adams asked what was meant and, in the words of biographer James Boswell, Johnson “passionately and loudly” replied, “Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly.” Adams told his friend he did not believe in Hell, and Johnson abruptly ended the discussion, saying, “I’ll have no more on’t.” {Derek Jarrett, The New York Review of Books, 18 March 1999}

Adams, William Edwin (1832—1906) A freethinker, Adams wrote Tyrannicide: Is It Justifiable? (1858). {VI}

Adamson, Robert (1852—1902) Described by the Cambridge History of Modern Literature as being “the most learned of contemporary philosophers,” Adamson was an outspoken agnostic and a utilitarian in ethics. In his Ethical Democracy (1900), Adamson wrote that even the most pretentious proofs of the existence of God are “intellectually unrepresentable” and that “the world conquered Christianity” instead of the other way about. {JM; RAT; RE}

Adcock, Arthur St. John (1864—1930) Adcock, who became acting editor of the Bookman, was a poet and novelist. He wrote Famous Houses and Literary Shrines of London (1929). In 1920 he contributed to the Rationalist Press Association’s annual journal. {RAT}

Addams, Jane (1860—1935) Addams, winner in 1931 of the Nobel Peace Prize, founded Chicago’s Hull House. In view of her prominent position, McCabe notes, “Miss Addams, who was the aunt of the late Marcet Haldeman-Julius, had to be reticent about religion, but her biographer F. W. Linn says that she never departed from the Rationalism which her father had taught her and ‘just joined the Congregational Church as she might join a labor-union.’ ” She was active in the women’s suffrage and pacifist movements. Although she attended All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Chicago and was briefly an interim lecturer at Chicago’s Ethical Culture Society, she retained a membership in a Presbyterian congregation. Malcolm Bush has written that Addams “was the original secular humanist, rejecting Christianity and socialism alike as formal beliefs though she took inspiration from both.” Strongly supported by John Haynes Holmes and the intellectual Unitarians of her day, Addams has been called, if not a Unitarian, certainly a unitarian. Her funeral, by her direction, was unsectarian. (See entry for Frank Lloyd Wright) {CE; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1993; HNS2; JM; RE; TSV; WWS}

Addis, Don (20th Century) Addis is a freethinker and a cartoonist whose work has appeared in Free Inquiry and St. Petersburg Times.

Addison, Joseph (1672—1719) The recognized master of the English essay, Addison advocated reason and moderation in life. In 1729, his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy were added by the Vatican to its list of prohibited books. However, according to his biographers, although he was called by some a Deist, basically he was a Christian. He once did write, however, “Atheist is an old-fashioned word. I am a freethinker.” Addison was interested in how Augustus, Cato, Seneca, and Thomas More had behaved at their deaths, feeling one should die with a kind of fortitude. When he suspected his own death was near, Addison called for his stepson and announced, somewhat dramatically, “See with what peace a Christian can die,” whereupon he died. Observed Horace Walpole of Addison’s death, “Unluckily, he died of brandy. Nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin.” {CE; ILP; JMRH}

Addison, William (20th Century) Addison of Yorkshire in England, was a lecturer in the early 1900s for the British Secular League in Bolton. {RSR}

Adickes, Erich (1866—1928) A German philosopher, Adickes was a critical empiricist, or moderate Kantian, and he wrote important works on Kant, including in 1895 a Kantian bibliography in German. An opponent of Haeckel, Adickes in his Kant contra Haeckel wrote, “I have no more belief than he in a personal extra-mundane God, a creation of the world by him, or an immaterial soul separated from the body.” {RAT}

Adler, Felix (1851—1933) Adler, the founder in 1876 of the Society for Ethical Culture of New York, was a teacher of philosophy at Columbia University. Influenced by Emerson’s idea of a purely moral religion, he was for a time (1877—1891) president of the Free Religious Association. Radest, in The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, has described how Adler built the Ethical Culture Society, with its schools, obtaining $400,000 from John D. Rockefeller Jr. Adler was a philosophic idealist, and the Society he founded was a religion based on ethics rather than creed and theology. As described by Wolfgang Saxon, “Dr. Adler saw a pragmatic faith without God, a belief in the infinite worth of the individual, the centrality of ethical principles, and the urgency to redeem the democratic promise by improving the lot of the poor and fighting privilege. This, he thought, offered a reasoned approach that reached out to those wanting an attractive alternative to Christianity and Judaism.” The platform he supplied spread to other parts of the nation and continues to inspire those interested in social ethics and free religion. (See the entry for Ethical Culture in which James F. Hornback supplies historical details of Adler’s accomplishments. Also see entry for Walter Sheldon.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Howard B. Radest; FUK; FUS; HNS2; JMR; TRI; WSS; RAT; RE} Adler, Margot (20th Century) Adler, a National Public Radio correspondence since 1979, is the author of Drawing Down the Moon (1995), a study of contemporary paganism and goddess spirituality, and Heretic’s Heart: A Journey Through Spirit and Revolution (1997). She is a member of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. {World, November-December 1998}

Adler, Larry (10 Feb 1914) – 7 Aug 2001) Lawrence Cecil Adler was born in Baltimore, the eldest of two sons of Sadie Hawk and Louis Adler, who was a peripatetic plumber from Russia. The world came to know him as Larry, the harmonica player who left the United States for England, where he became a household name. Because of his advocacy and artistry, he helped elevate what he called “the mouth organ” to concert status. Composers who wrote works especially for him were Malcolm Arnold, Darius Milhaud, Joaquin Rodrigo, William Walton, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Until he was in his twenties, Adler played by ear and could not read music. It was Milhaud who convinced him that he would need to read music in order to understand what composers were writing for him. By the late 1930s Adler had become better known in England than in his own country, so he returned from London, played with the pianist Eddie Duchin, was in some movies, entertained troops during World War II with Jack Benny and with Ingrid Bergman (with whom he allegedly had an affair), and began a performing association with tap dancer Paul Draper. In 1948 at a club in Birmingham, Alabama, after having spoken at a rally for Henry Wallace, the club announced that it was “exceedingly embarrassed” by Adler’s and Draper’s politics. The ensuing contretemps led to many job cancellations. Although he had been earning up to $200,000 annually, Adler now found that few dared to hire him. Moving to Britain, he became a household name and steadfastly denied he had ever supported the Communist cause. “I can’t understand Marx,” he said in 1971. “Communist literature brochures and stuff didn’t mean anything to me.” However, he found it illogical that even a Communist should be deprived of the ability to earn a living. Adler in the mid-1960s wrote Jokes and How to Tell Them and maintained a sense of humor right up to the time of his death. It was not until 1975 that he and Draper reunited for a concert at Carnegie Hall. “Resist the pressure to conform,” he told young people. “Better be a lonely individualist than a contented conformist.” {Richard Severo, The New York Times obituary, 8 Aug 2001}

Admiraal, Aart (1833—1878) Admiraal was a Dutch writer who, first a schoolmaster, became director of the telegraph bureau at Schoonhoven. From 1856 and for many years, he wrote using the anagram “Aramaldi” in De Dageraad. In 1867 he published The Religion of the People under the pseudonym “Bato van der Maas,” a name he also used when writing in other periodicals.

Admiraal, Pieter (20th Century) An anesthetist in the Netherlands, Admiraal is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1995 at Delphi, Greece, Admiraal spoke at the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Dr. Admiraal has received from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) a Humanist Award for his pioneer work in the field of euthanasia. In accepting, he gave a moving description of the last months of one of his favorite patients, an elderly man with cancer, whom he helped to die. After describing the details, Dr. Admiraal revealed that the man was his own father. “It is on behalf of this patient,” he said proudly, “that I accept the Award.” {BDF}

Ado-Dwanka, Niitse Akufo Awuku (20th Century) Ado-Dwanka, a nuclear physicist who spent much of his professional career in Europe, is a member of a rationalist group in his native Ghana.

ADONIS Adonis was the Greek form of the Syrian word Adon (Lord), a title given to the ancient Babylonian vegetation-god Tammuz. His cult, which spread westward to Egypt and Greece, was one of the chief sources of the Christian myth of the Resurrection, according to McCabe. {RE}

Adonis, Byron (19th Century) In 1879, Adonis was editor in San Francisco of the Pacific Coast Free-Thinker.

ADULTERY • It shall be considered adultery to offer presents to a married woman, to romp with her, to touch her dress or ornaments, or to sit with her on a bed. —“Code of Manu,” Hindu law scripture (600 B.C.E-300 C.E.)

• I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the good man is not at home, he is gone a long journey. —Book of Proverbs (c. 500 B.C.E.

• When cheated, wife or husband feels the same. —Euripides, Andromache (c. 426 B.C.E.)

• A man may commit adultery with a woman knowing well who she is, but not of free choice, because he is under the influence of passion. In that case he is not an unjust man, though he acts unjustly.

—Aristotle, “The Nicomachean Ethics” (c. 340 B. C. E.)

• One should reflect deeply before having relations with married women. If it works, what do I risk? Is success possible without taking too many risks? When I have possessed her, what are the risks for the reputation of either of us? —“Jayamangala,” a 12th century commentary on the Kama Sutra by Yashodhara, an Indian writer

• He that is robb’d, not knowing what is stolen, / Let him not know it, and he’s not robbed at all. —William Shakespeare, Othello (1664); Othello is responding to rumors of his wife’s infidelity.

• Adultery is an evil only inasmuch as it is a theft; but we do not steal that which is given to us. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary (1764)

• What we call adultery, like what we call heresy, comes as a natural right. —Victor Hugo (1802-1885), Pierres

• Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot. —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

• The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with a serious affection for another. Everyone knows that this is untrue. —Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929)

• The Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct. —Somerset Maugham, The Breadwinner (1930)

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) states that “adultery refers to marital infidelity. When two partners, of whom at least one is married to another party, have sexual relations—even transient ones—they commit adultery. Christ condemns even adultery of mere desire. The sixth commandment and the New Testament forbid adultery absolutely. The prophets denounce the gravity of adultery; they see it as an image of the sin of idolatry.” Matthew 5:28 describes how looking lustfully at a woman constitutes adultery, the subject of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter. Religious law ordinarily terms the married participant an adulterer and the single one merely a fornicator. Any offspring from such unions were called adulterini. Freethinkers without a zipper problem are often amused that most accused adulterers are said by the adulterers themselves to be theists. (See entry for Lust.) {Alexander Green, The New York Times, 27 December 1998)

ADVENT Christians think of the Advent as the coming of Jesus at the Incarnation, a complex theological view that the Son of God was somehow conceived in the womb of Mary, that her husband was not involved, and that Jesus is both the true God and also a true man. Humanists use the word in the sense that we live in the time of “the advent of personal computers.”

ADVERTISING, RELIGIOUSLY SATIRICAL • [Virgin Mary, wearing denims]: Pure virginal 100% cotton. Soft yet miraculously strong. Our jeans are cut from superior denim, then carefully assembled by devoted Diesel followers. The finest denim clothing. This is our mission. —an ad for Diesel Jeans, in Sky

	• Nine out of ten saviours prefer Dazzle®, with added Radiance®, to any other washing 

powder.

• Saving souls can often be a grubby business—but I cannot afford to have my robes looking anything other than whiter than white at all times. When I took the Dazzle® challenge I was Godsmacked—”Jesus Christ,” I exclaimed, “that’s what I call white!” JC, Nazareth —above two adverts which might one day be seen The Freethinker, May 1999

ADVOCATE, THE DEVIL’S The Devil’s Advocate is the Vatican official who is, in Papal law, styled the Promoter of the Faith (established 1587). His function is, in theory, to find objections against the character or the orthodoxy of those whom the Church proposes to declare “Blessed” or “Saint.” In modern times, the motive is generally political, stated McCabe, and is done to conciliate the country to which the “saint” belongs or involves fees (as much as £10,000). As a result, the office is a mere formality. {RE}

Aenesidemus (1st Century B.C.E.) Aenesidemus of Crete taught in Alexandria and overthrew the doctrines on probability advocated by Carneades. Reverting to the earliest of skeptical forms, he wrote “Arguments Against Belief in a God,” in which he stated, “We skeptics follow in practice the way of the world, but without holding any opinion about it. We speak of the gods as existing and offer worship to the gods and say that they exercise providence, but in saying this we express no belief, and avoid the rashness of the dogmatizers.” Aenesidemus noted that some think of God as corporeal, while others think of God as incorporeal. Since we cannot know His attributes, the existence of God is not self-evident and therefore needs proof.” He also held, states Bertrand Russell in History of Philosophy, that “those who affirm positively that God exists cannot avoid falling into an impiety. For if they say that God controls everything, they make Him the author of evil things; if, on the other hand, they say that He controls some things only, or that He controls nothing, they are compelled to make God either grudging or impotent, and to do that is quite obviously an impiety.” The thinking of Aenesidemus influenced Lucian, in the 2nd century of the Christian Era. {BDF; CE; JMRH}

AEROBIOSIS Aerobiosis is a mode of life that requires oxygen. What many do not realize is that for early forms of life oxygen was a poison, as is the case today for bacteria known as obligatory anaerobes, which survive only in the absence of oxygen. Life in the absence of oxygen is termed anaerobiosis, which is described by the Belgian bio-chemist Christian De Duve, a sharer of the 1974 Nobel Prize, in Vital Dust, Life as a Cosmic Imperative (1995). When oxygen first made its appearance, De Duve has written, “life had no defense against these poisons, and a major holocaust threatened. Fortunately, the process was slow and there was plenty of time for the main strategies of evolutionary adaptation to come into play. Victims probably were legion, but a few survivors emerged to people the world with new forms of life, thus turning an impending catastrophe into a major source of innovation.” The concept is important in discussions as to whether life exists in other parts of the galaxy.

Aeschylus (525—456 B.C.E.) Aeschylus, the Athenian tragic poet, implicitly challenged the popular faith of his time. But, as pointed out by Robertson, Aeschylus dwelt on the gods, the struggles of the gods, and on destiny, whereas Sophocles dwelt on man. {CE; HNS2; JMR; JMRH}

Aesop (6th Century B.C.E.) Herodotus wrote that Aesop, a legendary Greek fabulist, was a slave who lived in Samos and was eventually set free by his master. Others hold that Aesop was the first major African writer and one of the first literary moralists. His fables, stories about animals which illustrate a moral lesson, include “The Tortoise and the Hare,” “The Fox and the Grapes,” and “The Boy Who Cried ‘Wolf.’ ” Contrary to what is found in numerous sophomore essays, according to one Manhattan wag, the fables were not written by Aesophogus. In 1998, in their new translation of the fables, Olivia and Robert Temple wrote that “the fables are not the pretty purveyors of Victorian morals that we have been led to believe. They are instead savage, coarse, brutal, lacking in all mercy or compassion.” Examples:

• THE CAMEL WHO SHAT IN THE RIVER

A camel was crossing a swiftly flowing river. He shat and immediately saw his own dung floating in front of him, carried by the rapidity of the current. “What is that there?” he asked himself. “That which was behind me I now see pass in front of me.” This applies to a situation where the rabble and the idiots hold sway rather than the eminent and the sensible.

• THE BEAVER

The beaver is a four-footed animal who lives in pools. A beaver’s genitals serve, it is said, to cure certain ailments. So when the beaver is spotted and pursued to be mutilated—since he knows why he is being hunted—he will run for a certain distance, and he will use the speed of his feet to remain intact. But when he sees himself about to be caught, he will bite off his own parts, throw them, and thus save his own life. Among men also, those are wise who, if attacked for their money, will sacrifice it rather than lose their lives. {Harper’s Magazine, June 1998; CE; DCL}

AESTHETICS Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the subject of beauty, art, and taste. Aesthetic questions include “What is art?” and “What is meant when we say something is beautiful?” Philosophic naturalists who have written about aesthetics include Brand Blanshard, John Dewey, John Hospers, Horace Kallen, and George Santayana. Bertrand Russell, according to Blanshard, did not write about aesthetics because “I didn’t know anything about it . . . although this is not a very good excuse, for my friends tell me it has not deterred me from writing on other subjects.” (See entry for Beauty.) {CE; ER}

AFFIRMATIONS OF HUMANISM The Council for Secular Humanism has a statement of principles containing the following affirmations:

• We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems. • We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation. • We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life. • We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian élites and repressive majorities. • We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state. • We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding. • We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance. • We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves. • We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity. • We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species. • We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest. • We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence. • We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity. • We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences. • We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion. • We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences. • We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos. • We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking. • We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others. • We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality. • We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

AFRICA: See K. Anthony Appiah’s “Africa: The Hidden History,” a review of John Reader’s Africa: A Biography of the Continent (1998). No satisfactory history of the continent has been written to date by an African.

AFRICA, HUMANISM AND FREETHOUGHT IN: See entries for individual countries, such as Algeria, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, and Zaire. Also see entries for René Depestre (Haiti), Frantz Fanon (Algeria), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Jacques Roumain (Haiti), Léopold Sédar Senghor (Senegal), and Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea).

AFRICAN AMERICAN Citizens of the United States whose ancestors were Africans are referred to as blacks, Negroes, or African Americans. Afro-American, an earlier term, is not widely used today. The two words, when hyphenated as a noun, imply that such “African-Americans” just stepped off a slave ship in the seventeenth century or perhaps arrived from Ghana and received citizenship last week. Many find it illogical for native Americans whose parents and even grandparents were born in the United States to be called “African-Americans.” Analogous usages include Native Americans, Chinese Americans, Irish Americans, Polish Americans, etc. Many African Americans, however, dislike being described as Negroes. Negress is both antiquated and pejorative, in a category with Jewess or actress. The adjectival use, however, takes a hyphen; e.g., an African-American parade. {Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, 1995; Margaret Shertzer, ed., The Elements of Grammar, 1986}

AFRICAN AMERICANS FOR HUMANISM African Americans for Humanism (AAH), POB 664, Amherst, New York 14226, was formed by Norm Allen to bring the ideals of humanism to the African American community. (See entry for Norm Allen.)

AFRICAN AMERICANS, RELIGIOSITY OF In 1960, 82% of 2,000 blacks surveyed said they pray on a regular basis, whether in times of plenty or need. By 1990, only 68% maintained the habit. The latter tended to disbelieve they were actually being heard, different from the 1960s counterpart. Only 62% believe today (1995) that prayer can effect real changes in their lives. Of those with two years of college, 30% said they were skeptical that prayers they heard their grandmother pray aloud did any positive good for their families or the state of blacks in America. With the passage of each decade, black churches experience a 10% decrease in membership and at least that many more lose faith that a universal good exists at all. (See entries for Norm Allen and Wendall Potter.) {Secular Nation, Fall 1995}

AFRICAN EVE: See the entry for Martin G. Bernal.

AFRICAN HUMANISM Wole Soyinka has pointed out that the Bible, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, and other so-called “sacred” books do not expressly state that, for all human beings, human rights should exist. They do in part, “but always in curtailed form, relativist, patriarchal, always subject to the invisible divine realms whose interpreters are mortals with distinct, secular agendas, usually allied to the very arbitrary controls that are a contradiction to such ideas.” He cites Ifa, the corpus of Yoruban spiritual precepts and secular philosophy, which although its origins are lost in antiquity, preserves the human rights concept through Orunmila, the god of divination:

Dandan enia l’ayan ko mu ire lo s’aye . . . Ipo rere naa ni aye-amotan ohungbogbo, ayo nnigbagbogbo, igbesi laisi ominu tabi iberua ota.

Certainly, it is the human being that was elected to bring values to the world . . . and his place of good is the knowledge of all things, joy at all times, freedom from anxiety and freedom rom fear of the enemy. [Irosu Wori] {Wole Soyinka, The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999}

AFRO-ASIAN PHILOSOPHY ASSOCIATION In Egypt, the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association became an Associate Member in 1998 of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

AFROCENTRISM Some Afrocentrists claim that Greek civilization was actually created by black Africans in Egypt. Particularly in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, scholars argued about Martin G. Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Culture (1987), which sought to “lessen European cultural arrogance” by questioning the extent of the Greeks’ achievements to non-European cultures. His and others’ attempts to accept in full the ancient traditions of Greek indebtedness to Phoenicia and Egypt, and then to enlarge them, according to Glen Bowersock of the Institute for Advanced Study, “provoked a storm of protest unprecedented in modern classical scholarship in North America.” Now, he continued, “Mary Lefkowitz’s Not Out of Africa is the definitive statement on the whole controversy and its implications. Her book illustrates why a subject that might seem academic and innocuous turns out to be so explosive. America watchers in Europe have found themselves bewildered by the Bernal phenomenon, even though some of them have been caught up in it.” Meanwhile, it is claimed that Ms. Lefkowitz “systematically demolishes Afrocentric contentions about ancient history.” Bowersock summarized his scholarly evaluation by stating,

Neither Mr. Bernal nor the Afrocentrists seem interested in asking why Egyptian origins or influences should be linked with Africans at all, except in the simple-minded geographical sense that Egypt is part of North Africa. Ancient Egyptians did not consider themselves Africans or blacks, and they consciously dissociated themselves from the blacks of Nubia to the south. The Greeks noticed that Egyptian complexions were darker than theirs, but they never confused Egyptians with the blacks they generically called Ethiopians. Even if there was a parallel goddess to Athena in Egypt, there is not the slightest reason to think she was represented as black. Mr. Bernal, whose intelligence and erudition are as formidable as his judgment is flawed, should have known better.

As for Ms. Lefkowitz, Bowersock remarks,

Her impassioned defense of the Greeks arises from the racial politics of our time. The achievement of the Greeks is not going to go away, whatever the nature and extent of their indebtedness to other cultures. The paradoxical conclusion to be drawn from Mary Lefkowitz’s polemic is that the Greek legacy remains today so rich and attractive that even the most ardent foes of European civilization want to claim it for themselves.

(For a review of Mary K. Lefkowitz’s 

Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1996), see the entry for Martin Bernal; for Paul Kurtz’s negative criticism, see entry for Consilience.) {Glen Bowersock, “Rescuing the Greeks, New York Times Book Review, 25 February 1996}

AFTERLIFE The Egyptians were among the first to invent the concept of an afterlife, as exemplified by their burial customs and rites. The concept was taken up later by the ancient Hebrews. Paul Johnson’s The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage (1996) speculates that the first hell in people’s minds may have been on Jerusalem’s south side, where the city’s garbage burned day and night and resulted in unpleasant aromas. James E. Alock’s “Pseudoscience and the Soul” (Essence 5:1) suggests a reason individuals search for “proof” of an afterlife: “Intellectually capable of foreseeing that they will one day die, yet emotionally too frail to accept that physical death may indeed be the end of their existence, human beings have long clung to the idea that life continues beyond the grave.” Freethinkers generally hold that the mythology of an afterlife, which serves as a denial of death, provides little comfort either for the survivors or for the dying. (See entries for Heaven and Hell. Also note the entry for Epiphenomenalism, a theory that human beings do not survive the death of their bodies in any form whatsoever.) {PE; OCP}

AFTERLIFE, SPECULATIONS ABOUT Camille Sweeney collected some people’s ideas about the afterlife (The New York Times Magazine, 7 December 1997), which 74% of all Americans, according to the National Opinion Research Center in Chicago, believe in:

• I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t even believe in this life. I’m completely unspiritual. If there is an afterlife, I guess I’d use it to return phone calls. —Fran Lebowitz, writer

• I want to be ground up and have my assistants mix my ashes in a vat of oil paint and medium that they’ll disperse into 10 little jars. Then they’ll distribute the mixture to my 10 favorite painters, who’ll use the mixture, me in the paint, to make art that’ll hang in a group show–held in my honor. That’ll be my afterlife, a group show. —Ross Bleckner, artist

• The afterlife’s going to be a life of activity. We won’t be sitting around on clouds strumming on harps all day–although, come to think of it, that would be pretty strenuous. Heaven’s going to look like a big city by a lake, something like Chicago, not at all like Manhattan. —Andrew M. Greeley, author, ordained Roman Catholic priest

• I hope something does happen. Anything. Any kind of consciousness. My fear is that nothing will. I don’t believe in reincarnation–there’s no control in that, and I’m much too ambitious. And a hereafter? I’m not sure what a Heaven would be like, but Hell, Hell might be interesting–a lot like the news business. —Geraldo Rivera, talk-show host, who lists himself as a Jew in Who’s Who in America

• If, at the end, we rejoice in what we did right and regret what we did wrong and wish we could do it all over and better, we earn peacefulness. That’s Heaven. Not caring how we lived is to accept oblivion. That’s Hell. —Ex-Governor Mario Cuomo, New York State, a Catholic

• My hereafter is here. I am where I’m going, for I am mulch. It’s a great comfort to know that in my mulch-hood I may nourish a row of parsnips. —Frank McCourt, writer

• I used to believe there was an afterlife, that we’ll all be reincarnated. Then I had my kids and realized that they’re my afterlife. They are how a little bit of me is going to survive. My brother still believes in reincarnation. He’s going to be born over and over and over again. He really hopes it happens. Not me. He’s still trying to get it right, and I’m trying to get it over with. —Tommy Smothers, comedian

Agarkar, Gopal Ganesh (1856—1895) Agarkar, a social revolutionary, joined with Tilak and Chiplunkar to found the New English School in Pune, the Deccan Education Society, and subsequently Fergusson College. Agarkar is known in India not as a hedonist but as a humanist and secularist.

Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary (1822—1907) According to Louise Hall Tharp’s Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (1959), the Agassiz family attended King’s Chapel (Unitarian). With her husband Louis, the famed Swiss-American zoologist and geologist, she started a boarding school for young ladies who wanted to study high school level subjects. Her experience led her to become one of the founders and the first president (1894—1903) of Radcliffe College. {CE; EG}

Agathias (Ancient Greece) The ancient Greeks, unlike the Hebrews, wrote of earthy matters such as Agathias did in the following dialogue, as translated by Dudley Fitts:

A: Why that alarming sigh? B: I’m in love. A: With a boy or a girl? B: With a girl A: Attractive? B: I think so! A: Where did you meet her? B: Last night at a dinner-party. A: I see. And you think you’ve a chance with her? B: I’m sure of it; but it’s got to be kept a secret, friend. A: Ah. Then you mean that you are not contemplating holy matrimony? B: That isn’t it. I mean that I’ve learned she hasn’t a penny in the world. A: You’ve “learned”! Liar, liar, you’re not in love! The heart struck silly by Love’s shaft Forgets its arithmetic!

And this manifesto:

Let Aphroditê herself, let all the company of Love Curse me, shrivel my sick heart with their hate, If ever I turn to the love of boys. O Goddess, From sliding error and perversion guard me! To sin with girls is sin enough: Pittalakos may have the rest.

AGE • The women of Greece counted their age from their marriage, not from their birth. —Homer

• The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy. —H. L. Mencken

• Women deserve to have more than 12 years between the ages of 28 and 40. —James Thurber

AGE OF ATHEISM A quarterly published by the Atheist Society of India, Age of Atheism is at Pithani Dibba, Visakhapatnam 530 002, Andhra Pradesh, India.

AGNOSTIC CELEBRITIES According to the Internet homepage for Celebrity Atheists and Agnostics, the following might be atheists but, tentatively and without further documentation, are listed as agnostics:

Margaret Atwood, novelist; Richard Avedon, photographer; George Clooney, actor; Alan Dershowitz, lawyer; Phyllis Diller, actress and comedian; David Duchovny, actor; Carrie Fisher, actress; Candace Gingrich, gay rights activist; Mikhail Gorbachev, former President of the USSR; Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist; Matt Groening, cartoonist and producer of “The Simpsons”; Bob Guccione, publisher; Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist; Robert Heilbroner, economist; Sir Edmund Hillary; John Irving, novelist; Molly Ivins, journalist; Robert Jastrow, astrophysicist; Bill Joel, recording artist; Jack Kevorkian, right-to-dieactivist; Larry King, television talk host; Barry Manilow, recording artist; Henry Morgentaler, Canadian abortion rights activist; Iris Murdoch, British philosopher; John Passmore, Australian philosopher; Sean Penn, actor-director; W. V. Quine, philosopher; Geraldo Rivera, television show host; Andy Rooney, television commentator; Neil Simon, playwright; Rod Steiger, actor; Howard Stern, radio personality; Uma Thurman, actress; Ted Turner, media mogul; Gene Wilder, actor; Bruce Willis, actor; Edward O. Wilson, entomologist; Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

More individuals are listed at <http:///www.primenet.com/~lippard/atheistcelebs>. {See entries herein for individuals.}

AGNOSTICISM Some hold that the agnostic is committed to believing in neither the existence nor non-existence of god, God, or supernatural entities. Others hold that the agnostic finds that any ultimate reality–God, gods, supernatural existences–is unknown and unknowable. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994),

• Agnosticism assumes a number of forms. In certain cases the agnostic refrains from denying God; instead he postulates the existence of a transcendent being which is incapable of revealing itself, and about which nothing can be said. In other cases, the agnostic makes no judgment about God’s existence, declaring it impossible to prove, or even to affirm or deny. Agnosticism can sometimes include a certain search for God, but it can equally express indifferentism, a flight from the ultimate question of existence, and a sluggish moral conscience. Agnosticism is all too often equivalent to practical atheism.

T. H. Huxley, who coined the word in 1869, used it to indicate that, while his contemporaries seemed to have definite knowledge (gnosis), positive or negative, about ultimate realities and might be described as Gnostics, he had no such knowledge. Following the principles of Hume and Kant, Huxley held that the mind cannot attain to any truth beyond the phenomenal universe or the world of experience. Hence the original meaning is that man cannot know the truth about God and immortality, and must leave the issues open.

As Paul Edwards has pointed out, the position Huxley called “agnosticism” was much older and had usually gone under the name of “skepticism.”

• Individuals when asked if God exists often respond they are agnostic, adding that believers think He does. Individuals when asked if Pink Elephants exist could respond they are agnostic, adding that many drunkards believe They do. Asked why They is capitalized, they retort, “Why is God capitalized?” (See the entries for atheism, atheistic humanism, and Japanese agnosticism, with corresponding definitions, and definitions by Edgar Sheffield Brightman and T. H. Huxley; also, see the entries for Aristippus, Comte, Spencer, and Kant.) {CE; Paul Edwards, Free Inquiry, Fall 1998; RE}

AGNOSTICS, ATHEISTS, AND SECULAR HUMANISTS INFECTED/AFFECTED WITH AIDS/HIV ILLNESS (AASH) Agnostics, Atheists, and Secular Humanists Who Are Infected/Affected with AIDS/HIV Illness (AASH) was founded in 1992 by Larry Gutenburg, Randy Wicker, and the pseudonymous Allen Windsor. It commenced as an action group within the Secular Humanist Society of New York chapter. Unofficially, it was formed in memory of Fernando Vargas and friends of Gutenburg and Wicker who had died of the disease. However, when the secular humanist chapter’s board of directors appeared uncomfortable with the association, Windsor pulled the group out and, simultaneously, resigned as editor of Pique, the society’s newsletter. Gutenburg, who had been president in 1990—1991 of People With AIDS (PWA), arranged for the group to meet in a Greenwich Village Episcopal meeting room which formerly PWA had been allowed to use without compensation. As many as thirty individuals attended different meetings until, upon Gutenberg’s death, the group was disbanded in 1995. Except for Wicker and Windsor, the members were HIV-positive and exchanged information about drugs they were or were not using, hospitals they preferred, wills, living will proxies, and health care proxies. AASH arranged visits to hospitalized members and get-togethers at brunches and dinners. The Secular Humanist Bulletin (Summer 1995) and Free Inquiry carried items about the unusual group. AASH held secular memorials for Michael Callen, the lead singer of the Flirtations; for author Paul Monette; for Father Andrew DeMasi (who was a Jesuit-trained priest-turned-atheist); for businessman Luke Stanton; and for radio notable Larry Gutenburg. (See entries for Andrew DeMasi, Larry Gutenburg, Wayne Larsen, Luke Stanton, Randy Wicker, and Allen Windsor.)

AGUA BUENA HUMAN RIGHTS Triangulo Rosa, a “pink triangle” association founded with help by ASIBEHU in Costa Rica, was funded with money from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Richard Stern was instrumental in its working with HIV-positives and people with AIDS under the direction of Guillermo Murillo. In 1998, because of problems within the association, the two founded Asociación Agua Buena Pro Defensa de Los Derechos Humanos y Minorias (The Agua Buena Human Rights Association, Apartado 366-2200, Coronado, Costa Rica.).

Agung, Ide Anak Agung Gde (1921— ) The Raja of Bali is a traditional Hindu leader, concerned that his island will be changed by the tourist trade into a commercialized Waikiki Beach. To counter such a tendency, in 1992 he arranged a royal cremation ceremony for his late wife and mother. The ceremony was not to mourn their deaths but, rather, to rejoice over the liberation of their souls and the ascent of those souls into the heavens. Heaven, the older Balinese hold, is a destination much like their earthly idyllic island home. “We believe,” said the Raja, “that on the day of the cremation, the soul is freed and begins its journey to Nirvana.” The raja, who is the 10th head of the House of Gianyar, is one of the traditional Hindu leaders of Bali, now a province of the mostly Muslim nation of Indonesia. During the ceremony, according to The New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, “thousands watched as massive wooden sarcophagi in the shape of sacred cattle were set ablaze. Six high priests shot wooden arrows, tipped with jasmine petals instead of a blade, into the air to direct the souls heavenward.” Inasmuch as such practices wherever followed in the world are unscientific and contribute to a belief in superstition, they are held by non-believers to be of negative value.

AHA: See entry for American Humanist Association.

Ahlquist, Keith (20th Century) Ahlquist in Britain is active with the Greater Manchester Humanists.

Ahlstrom, Sidney E. (20th Century) Ahlstrom in 1951 wrote his Harvard Ph. D. thesis on the subject of the rationalism of Francis Ellingwood Abbott, a Unitarian. In 1987, he wrote The Scientific Theist. {FUS}

Ahrens, Heinrich (1808—1874) Ahrens was a German jurist, a pantheist interested in the work of K. F. C. Krause. He lectured on German philosophy at Paris, taught in Brussels, and was appointed Deputy to the Frankfort Parliament in 1848, where he was prominent among the liberals. {RAT}

AHRIMAN Ahriman, or Angra Mainyu the son of Zuruam, is the personified principle of evil, the one opposed to Orzmazd, in the Zoroastrian religion. Some scholars believe Ahriman and the dualism of evil and good were Judaism’s inspiration for Satan. (See entry for Satan.) {ER; LEE}

AHURA MAZDAH Ahura Mazdah, or Ormazd, was a god in the Zoroastrian religion. (See entry for Zoroaster.) {ER; JMRH}

AIDS HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus), which is believed to be the cause of the disease of AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), is the twentieth century’s plague, one which has killed and continues to kill millions of human beings throughout the world. By the end of 1999, over sixteen million had died. Nature (February 1998) reported that HIV is a virus that has hopped over the “species barrier” and into mankind from another animal. It was thought that the virus crossed from chimpanzees to humans in the late 1940s or early 1950s in Congo. Not until 1999 was it confirmed that the source of HIV-1 is almost certainly a subspecies of chimpanzee called Pan troglodytes troglodytes. The simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that affects monkeys and apes closely resembles HIV-1. Another virus, not that closely related and known as HIV-2, comes from a monkey called the sooty mangabey. According to a team of researchers led by Dr. Beatrice Hahn from the University of Alabama, this central African subspecies carries a simian version of HIV-1. Other than sexual contact, the only way to transmit these viruses is via blood. The supposition is that it was transmitted to humans who had butchered or handled chimpanzee meat. A Bantu man in 1959, living in what was then the Belgian Congo and now is the Democratic Republic of Congo, gave a blood sample that is the first known incident, according to Poz (June 1998). According to Nature, Andre Nahmias of Emory University in Atlanta found that the form of AIDS now spreading worldwide was a “hop” which took place only once, implying that there was a true “patient zero,” not necessarily the Bantu who had given a blood sample to some American physicians but certainly not the previously rumored gay airline steward who had been thought to have spread the disease unknowingly during his wide travels.

	By the end of 1998, AIDS virus infections worldwide had risen ten percent over the previous year. Overall, the number of people infected with HIV, the human immuno-deficiency virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrom (AIDS), had risen to an estimated forty-seven million. 

All but five percent of the infections occurred in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. In five of India’s states, more than one percent of pregnant women in urban areas had become infected. In Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe, from twenty to twenty-six percent of people from the ages fifteen to thirty-nine had become infected. Asked why they had not used an available condom, Zimbabwans have been known to respond, “Would you eat a sweet with its wrapper on?” Some young Ugandan women have been told that without male sperm they will not grow up to be beautiful. Despite such staggering rates, many countries’ officials refused to discuss the situation or even admit it existed, a major reason for the disease’s continuation. In Kenya, as a protest Christian and Islamic groups have burned anti-AIDS leaflets and condoms, explaining that their aim was to reduce promiscuity. In Senegal, forty percent of women under the ages of twenty-five, and sixty-five percent of men, used condoms in non-monogamous sexual relations in 1997, compared with fewer than five percent for both sexes at the start of the decade. Such a shift was attributed to educational programs. United Nations observers in 1998 reported that AIDS had become the number one, malaria the number two, and tuberculosis the number three killer of human beings. An estimated 5,500 AIDS funerals were held daily in sub-Saharan Africa. Observed The Economist (7 February 1998), “an anonymous African who somehow and in some manner that will probably remain forever unknown, tangled with a chimpanzee and came away with more than he bargained for.” In 1999, evidence existed that some individuals might have become infected with the simian strain, known as SIV.cpz, through exposure to blood in hunting and dressing meat. Unexplained is where that simian strain came from. Edward Hooper, in an overly wordy The River: A Journey Back to the Source of HIV and AIDS (1999), suggested that CHAT, a vaccine to treat chimpanzee polio, is somehow connected and that samples at Wistar Institute in Philadelphia need to be tested to see if somehow a link exists between vaccine workers and a Belgian Congo chimpanzee-research station. (See entries for Priests—who are dying at a rate four times higher than the general population—and Plague.) {The Economist, 13 November 1999; NY Review of Books, 2 December 1999}

Aiken, Conrad (1889—1973) A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Aiken when asked about humanism responded to the present author:

Yes, I suppose I‘m a naturalistic humanist, if I’m anything–that, and an evolutionist–I am against all forms of supernaturalism, dogma, myth, church–primarily I believe in the evolution of consciousness as something we’re embarked on willy-nilly, the evolution of mind, and that devotion to this is all the devotion we need. You will find these and other pertinent views in the prefaces to the individual poems in my collected “symphonies,” The Divine Pilgrim, Georgia University Press, 1949.

 {CL; CE; HNS; WAS, 30 March 1951}

Aiken, Wayne (20th Century) Aiken, who introduced the American Atheist Forum on North Carolina cable access television, was recipient of the Outreach Award by American Atheists, Inc. E-mail: <waiken@atheists.org>

Aikenhead, Thomas (1678—1697) A Scottish undergraduate of Edinburgh University, Aikenhead was a martyr of freethought. McCabe notes that, brooding over his bible, Aikenhead came to the conclusion that it was “a rhapsody of ill-contrived nonsense” and said so. After a travesty of a trial, the eighteen-year-old was condemned and hanged for calling the Old Testament “Ezra’s Fables,” ridiculing the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, and expressing the hope and belief that Christianity would be extinct within a century. He had no counsel at the trial, and the only witnesses were those of the prosecutor. Found guilty, he reluctantly retracted what he had said. But Lord Advocate Stewart “called for blood” and the clergy, afraid William III might offer clemency, successfully pressed for Aikenhard’s death. He became the last person executed for blasphemy in Britain, 12 January 1697, in Edinburgh. {JM; JMRH; RAT; RE}

Ainsbury, Len (20th Century) Ainsbury in Britain is active with the Worcestershire Humanist Group.

AIR Along with water, air is one of Earth’s treasures. Both water and air are shockingly taken for granted by most. Air is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. It envelops Earth. It is a gaseous mixture, mainly nitrogen (approximately 78%) and oxygen (approximately 21%), with lesser amounts of argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen, neon, helium, and other gases. Freethinker Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in 1774 was the first to announce that he had isolated oxygen; however, Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) had discovered oxygen in 1772 but not publicized his findings. The fact that the gas is a component of the atmosphere was finally and definitely established by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794)—he disproved the earlier theory of phlogiston, and his Traité él´mentaire de chimie (1789) contained the ideas which set chemistry on its modern path. Most aquatic animals use a respiratory organ called a gill to obtain oxygen by breathing water. Most other animals use a nose. In Australia, scientists have found that a newborn mouse—a marsupial called the Julia Creek dunnart—gets its oxygen through its skin. Its offspring are among the smallest newborn mammals known, about one-sixth of an inch long and weighing slightly more than half an ounce. The young mouse’s skin is hairless and rich in blood, providing a convenient means for gas exchange. For mice up to about four ounces in weight, respiration through the skin exceeded that through the lungs. But as the mice grew more, the lungs took over. (CE; Nature, March 1999)

Airoldi, J. (Born 1829) An Italian lawyer, Airoldi was a Swiss-born freethinker who wrote poetry. {BDF}

Airy, George Biddell (Sir) (1801—1892) Airy, the Astronomer Royal and director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory from 1835 to 1881, made discoveries in theoretical and practical optics, including the cylindrical lens for correcting astigmatisms, an eye defect he himself possessed. His Notes on the Earlier Hebrew Scriptures (1876) rejects revelation and miracles. McCabe notes that Airy “was a Theist but assured the public that he regarded ‘the ostensible familiarity of the biblical historian with the counsels of the Omnipotent as merely oriental allegories.’ ” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Aithen, Martha Chapman (19th Century) Aithen was ordained as Unitarian minister in 1894, one of the early graduates of Meadville/Lombard Theological School. {World, May-June 1995}

Aitzema, Lieuwe van (1600—1669)

	A nobleman of Friesland and author of a suppressed history of the Netherlands, Aitzema was an atheist. He represented the Hanseatic towns at the Hague from 1645 until his death and was noted for his scholarship and integrity. {BDF; RAT}

Ajnat, Surendra (1948— ) Ajnat is author of Critique on Vedas, An Atheist View (1977), Old Testament of Indian Atheism (1977), and Hindu Epics (c. 1977). {GS}

Akbar (1542—1605) Jalal-ed-din Muhammad, called the greatest of the emperors of India, was famous for his efficient administration and improvement of the empire. He showed toleration alike to Christians, Muslims, and to all forms of the Hindu faith. Raised a Muslim, Akbar the Great became a theist, rejected the Islamic religion, acknowledged but one God, and rejected all other dogmas. His Grand Vizier had the same views. Muslims and Jesuits may have called him an atheist, but “If this is the definition of an atheist, the more we have of them the better,” commented India’s Jawaharlal Nehru. {BDF; JM}

AKDITI Akditi in India is known as the mother of gods. {LEE}

Akerley, Ben Edward (20th Century) Akerley, an atheist, wrote The X-Rated Bible (1985). The Christian Bible, he found, was filled with stories about rape, incest, murder, adultery, husband-swapping, misogyny, and perversions of various kinds. Web: <www.FeralHouse.com>.

AKH: See entry for Resurrection.

Akhenaton (14th Century B.C.E.): See entry for Ikhnaton, King of Ancient Egypt.

Akhilananda [Swami] (20th Century) Swami Akhilananda, of the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Massachusetts, reviewed in The Humanist the translation by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood of Bhagavad-Gita (1954). A popularization of the teachings of the Upanishads, the work is one of the basic sources of Hindu religion and philosophy. In it, Krishna gives equal place to unselfish humanitarian work, the path of love, and the path of rationalism, meditation, or knowledge. He also tells that only immature persons make a differentiation among these paths or methods, as every one of them can lead to the realization of the ultimate Truth or Reality. In this respect Buddhism, which is regarded as ethical idealism, shows also that if anyone lives according to the Eightfold Path of right living, et cetera, he can know “the Truth.” Saying the Gita has a non-sectarian attitude which emphasizes that any kind of worship, unselfish work, or any other method can lead one to the state of illumination, the swami adds that a person can have “peace of mind and abiding happiness, whether he is a humanist, agnostic, dualist, qualified monist, or monist.” {WAS, 22 February 1954}

Akkermans, Tony (20th Century) Akkermans writes for the British secular humanist monthly, The Freethinker. He has cited John Toland (1670—1722) as the first Irishman on record as a sceptic and a philosopher. In just four decades, he wrote in Gay & Lesbian Humanist (Spring, 1998), the Dutch Humanist Association has gained considerable status. The prime minister and half the cabinet attended its 40th anniversary celebrations. Humanist counselors are found in prisons, hospitals, and the armed forces. Voluntary euthanasia is widely available. Schoolgirl pregnancies are the lowest in Europe. Furthermore, sixty percent of the population now says it has no religion. {The Freethinker, June 1997}

ALABAMA FREETHINKERS and HUMANISTS • Alabama Freethinker, PO Box 447, Ariton, AL 36311 • Alabama Freethought Association, PO Box 571, Tallaadego, Alabama 35161 (256) 362-8729. They publish a newsletter edited by Temy R. Beal. (See entry for Roger Cleveland.) • The Freethought Forum meets in Huntsville, Alabama, and can be reached at (205) 828-9135. A University of Alabama student, Adam Butler <abutler@uab.edu>, maintains the group’s homepage <http://www.mindspring.com/~alfreethought/>. • O. Andrews Ferguson is coordinator for the American Humanist Association, Mid Atlantic Region (AHA), A-140, 1 College Row, Brevard, North Carolina 28712. • University of Alabama’s Birmingham Freethought Society is found on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University of South Alabama’s humanists: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Alain: See entry for Émile Auguste Chartier.

ALASKA ATHEISTS Clyde Baxley is President of Atheists of Alaska, 3713 Deborah Lane, Anchorage, AK 99504. {FD}

Al Azim, Sadik (20th Century)

Al Azim, in Damascus, Syria, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Albaida, Don Jose M. Orense [Marquis] (19th Century) Albaida, one of the founders of Spain’s Republican Party, was expelled for his principles. Upon returning to Spain, he became president of the Cortes in 1869. {BDF}

Albee, Edward (1928— )

	The American playwright Albee is best known for his Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962; film 1966). The play is about an all-night drinking bout in which a middle-aged professor and his wife verbally lacerate each other. Albee has consistently denied that he originally had two males in mind rather than the married couple, but he has made no secret of his own homosexuality. 

Abandoned at birth by his natural parents, he was adopted by millionaires Frances and Reed Albee who, according to Mel Gussow’s biography, paid $133.30 for him. A rebellious child, he was expelled from three prep schools and a military academy before graduating from Choate. Albee won Pulitzer Prizes for A Delicate Balance (1967) and Seascape (1975). In 1996 he was feted by President Bill Clinton in the White House and received the 1996 National Medal of Arts Award. Salman Rushdie has written that when he performed as an actor on Pakistani TV in Albee’s The Zoo Story (1959), he had to cut a line about God’s being a colored queen who wears a kimono, plucks His eyebrows, and indifferently files His nails. Albee is said by Tribe to be an avowed freethinker. In partial confirmation, Albee told the present author that he is a nominal Quaker who admires the group’s pacificism, that he thinks Jesus lived, that he is interested in Jesus’s outlook, that he does not know about secular humanism, and that although he likes Christianity he does not accept “all that divinity stuff.” {AA; CE; TRI; TYD; WAS, 10 December 1996}

Albee, John (1833—1915) Albee was an American writer who abandoned the orthodox theology in which he had been trained for the liberal theism or pantheism of Emerson. In Remembrances of Emerson (1903), Albee wrote, “Growth ends with the birth of creeds.” {RAT}

Alberdi, Juan Bautista (1810—1884) Alberdi was an Argentine political philosopher, patriot, and diplomat. Because of his opposition to Manuel de Rosas, Alberdi spent years of exile in Uruguay, Chile, and in Europe. When Rosas was overthrown by Justo José de Urquiza in 1852, Alberdi returned and served on a number of diplomatic missions. He major work was Bases y puntos de partida para la organización de la república argentina (1852). Many of his suggestions were incorporated into the Argentine constitution of 1853. After Urquiza was defeated in 1861, Alberdi moved to Paris and wrote political tracts against Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. He and President Sarmiento, however, were both anticlerical and were opposed to the Catholic Church in Argentina. {CE; EU; WAS, conversations with Hugo Estrella.}

Alberger, John (19th Century) Alberger, an American, wrote Monks, Popes, and Their Political Intrigues (1871) and Antiquity of Christianity (1874). {BDF}

Albert, John (20th Century) Albert, an atheist in Phoenix, Arizona, wrote “The Perception of the Prevalence of Belief” in Secular Nation (April-June 1998).

ALBIGENSIANS, MASSACRE OF THE (1211—1215) Innocent III deliberately ordered and directed the brutal slaughter of at least 100,000 men, women, and children, but probably a quarter of a million more, according to McCabe. They were heretics in the central part of the principality of Toulouse. Both Catholic and Protestant historians have failed to report objectively what happened. In an extant letter, according to McCabe, “the Pope instructed his Legates to disarm the Count of Toulouse by lying, and to the end he treated that prince with the gravest injustice. As the ‘Crusaders’ slew 20,000 (including babes in arms) in the first city they took—it is here that the Monk-Legate is reported to have said, ‘Slay all, the Lord will know his own,’ which is at least what they did—and the slaughter continued for three years; its monstrous proportions may be imagined.” (See entry for Catharism, which held that Jesus did not die on a cross, that he married Mary Magdalen. The Albigenses were a branch of the Cathari. A summary of their doctrine of salvation is in the 18th century hymn “Eternal Light, Eternal Light.”) {RE}

Albini, Giuseppe (1863—1933) An Italian physiologist and freethinker, Albini wrote on embryology and other physiological subjects. {BDF}

Alboum, Marty (20th Century) Alboum is secretary of the Humanists of New Jersey.

ALCHEMY Alchemy, with its seemingly magical power or process of transmuting, has over the centuries attracted believers in the supernatural. Once a medieval chemical philosophy, it aimed at transmuting base metals into gold, the discovery of the panacea, and the preparation of the elixir of longevity. Although it fell into disrepute, the searching quests of the alchemists led eventually to the scientific quests of chemists.

Alchindus (Died c. 864) Yakub Ibn Is’hak Ibn Subbah (Abú Yúsuf) was an Arab physician and philosopher. Called Al Kindi, he was the great grandson of one of the companions of Muhammad, the prophet. A rationalist in religion, he was denigrated as a magician because of his scientific studies. {BDF}

Alciati, Giovanni Paolo (Died 1570) A Milanese of noble family, Alciati at first was a Romanist. He resigned that faith for Calvinism but gradually advanced to anti-trinitarianism, which he defended in two letters (1564 and 1565) to Gregorio Pauli. Although Beza claimed Alciadi became a Muslim, Bayle takes pains to disprove this. {BDF}

Alcibiades

Alcock, James (20th Century) Alcock, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada, is on the Executive Council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer. He is author of Parapsychology, Science or Magic (1981) and Science and Supernatural (1990).

ALCOHOL • Alcohol is Satan’s starter fluid. Anonymous, but likely said by a preacher who was absent at seminary when served the Holy Eucharist (the administering of bread and wine to thank God for the work of Christ)

• I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they get up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day. —Frank Sinatra, noted singer and Catholic Alcott, Abigail May (1800—1877) Alcott, wife of social reformer and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, was mother of novelist Louisa May Alcott. She was a member of King’s Chapel, her father having been one of the leaders that changed that church from the faith of the Church of England to become the first Unitarian church in the United States. {EG}

Alcott, (Amos) Bronson (1799—1888) Alcott was an American educational and social reformer who founded the Temple School in Boston. He was a leading exponent of transcendentalism, although he differed with others by being opposed to any doctrine of individualism. His philosophy, mediating between the extreme idealistic and materialistic positions, was summed up in the term Personalism. A Unitarian, he believed that all seemingly separate minds are linked together by a common relation to a central Mind—that is, as he said, “all souls have a Personal identity with God and abide in Him.” Carlyle looked upon him indulgently as a man “bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age.” Emerson said, “As pure intellect I have never seen his equal.” Thoreau agreed, adding that Alcott was “the sanest man I ever knew.” In 1859, Alcott became superintendent and reformed the Concord, Massachusetts, schools, introducing the teaching of singing, dancing, reading aloud, and such novel subjects as physiology. His work in education culminated in the Concord School of Philosophy (1879—1888), which had a profound influence on education through his disciple W. T. Harris and others. Although he lived much of his life in poverty, he was supported by his daughter, Louisa May Alcott, who in 1868 earned money by publishing Little Women, a work based on her family life. {CE; FUS; OCAL; RAT}

Alcott, Louisa May (1832—1888) The author of Little Women (1868)—the daughter of educationalist and transcendentalist Bronson Alcott, a friend of Emerson, and a women’s suffrage activist—was a nominal Unitarian. Alcott is said to have had a lifelong fear of one day going mad, and it is possible that she did suffer from deep anxiety and may once have had a nervous breakdown at the time of her Civil War nursing service. Recovering from typhoid, which she contracted while working in a Washington hospital, she often dreamed she had married a handsome Spaniard who whispered to her, “Lie still my dear!” The experience likely led to the creation of one of her fictional characters, Philip Tempest, a modern villain in mid-nineteenth century dress: “I seem a brute, but it is my love which drives me to such harsh measures,” he moans. Her publisher may have thought Little Women was boring, as she once was quoted as believing, but the work was a publishing success and continues to be her best known. In it, Professor Bhaer lectures her, the one of four sisters who aspires to be a writer, about the sensational tales she wrote for journals. “I would more rather give my boys gunpowder to play with than this bad trash,” the priggish and repulsive man tells her. Alcott observed later, “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience; it’s so inconvenient.” And, as noted by novelist Stephen King, her reflections are followed “by what is surely the most horrible sentence in Little Women, the one that finishes ‘and Jo corked up her ink-stand.’ ” King also liked her A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866), in which Rose, the heroine, disguises herself as a boy and a nun, stays in an asylum (called a madhouse in those days), discovers that Baptiste is a notorious escaped criminal, and in many heated pages arranges a chaste romance with a priest. The work, King noted, “ends on a darker note than any modern editor would be comfortable with, I suspect, but one in chilling harmony with any contemporary newspaper’s front-page story of domestic abuse escalating into madness and murder. Dying by his own hand, Phillip gathers Rose’s sodden corpse in his arms and voices the novel’s creepy last line: ‘Mine first–mine last–mine even in the grave!’ ” King notes that “this is quite a distance from the sunny sensibilities and high moral tone of Little Women.” Marylynne Diggs has written about the homoeroticism in two of Alcott’s stories. In Work: A Story of Experience (1873), Christie and Rachel’s romantic friendship involves a “vaguely described sin.” And in An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Rebecca and Lizzie are “mannish and rough,” a “different race of creatures.” Unlike Emerson, Alcott believed in a personal God, even had paranormal experiences. When her sister Lizzie died, she wrote, “A few moments after the last breath came, as Mother and I sat silently watching the shadow fall on the dear little face, I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air. Mother’s eyes followed mine, and when I said, ‘What did you see?’ she described the same light mist.” Grief-stricken, she went to Theodore Parker’s church after her sister’s death. Alcott was greatly influenced by Parker and by Henry David Thoreau. (One would be hard put now, a hundred years later, to find a Unitarian who has seen light mists rise from the deceased.) Yet, Alcott did not believe in the Christian Trinity. E. D. Walker’s Reincarnation: A Study of Forgotten Truth (1888) quotes Alcott as saying, “I must have been masculine (in my previous life) because my love is all for girls.” According to a biography by Katharine Anthony in 1938, “The Alcott family were what is known among the orthodox as without religious affiliation.” Mrs. Alcott “clung to her old King’s Chapel faith. . . . The family had no orthodox church.” Alcott is buried on a rising ground called Authors’ Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Nearby are the remains of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. (See entry for Bronson Alcott.) {CE; Marylynne Diggs, “Romantic Friendship, Female,” CL; EG; Stephen King, “Blood and Thunder in Concord,” The New York Times Book Review, 10 September 1995; PE; PUT; TYD; U; UU}

Alder, Rodger (1947—1997) Alder, a Labour Party supporter, became deputy leader in England of the Northampton Borough Council and chairman of its planning committee. Alder was a senior lecturer in industrial archaeology at Northampton’s Nene College. A trustee of the Pink Triangle Trust, Alder died of cancer. His Humanist funeral ceremony was held in the Great Hall of Northampton’s Guildhall.

Aldergrove, John Romney (20th Century) Aldergrove wrote Enemies: The Rationalist View of Human Nature (1998). A Canadian, he is critical of religion, politics, and sex, and shows why matters are the way they are. His concern is that rational individuals often remain silent instead of speaking out against irrationality. His book is not about the conflict between religion and rationality, for he accepts the nonexistence of gods as a given, then proceeds. He is negatively critical of psychiatry, the jury system, circumcision, the alleged existence of a “soul,” and other controversial subjects. Aldergrove is aware that both Islam and Christianity may have originated as a consequence of hallucinations accompanying epileptic fits. {The American Rationalist, November-December 1998}

Aldred, Guy Alfred (1886—1963) Aldred was an English atheist and anarchist, the subject of John Taylor Caldwell’s biography entitled Come Dungeons Dark. Royle says Aldred settled in Glasgow “to propagate communism and the views of Richard Carlile.” In 1940 Aldred wrote Dogmas Discarded (1940) and in 1941 Armageddon Incorporated, the True Story of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. {FUK; GS; RSR}

Aldridge, Alfred Owen (1915— ) An English language educator, Aldridge was professor of comparative literature at the University of Buffalo. From 1986—1987 he held the Will and Ariel Durant chair at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, New Jersey. He has taught at Pennsylvania State University as well as in Korea, France, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, and Taiwan. Aldridge in 1959 wrote Man of Reason, the Life of Thomas Paine. In 1987 he wrote Benjamin Franklin and Nature’s God. Starting in 1963, Aldridge edited the Journal of Comparative Literary Studies. {FUK} Aleiri, Vittorio [Count] (1749—1802) Aleiri, a leading Italian tragedian of the eighteenth century, wrote works that ran to twenty-two volumes. In a two-volume work on despotism, Della Tyrannide, Aleiri rejects all religion and says that “the heretics are as stupid as the Catholics.” {JM}

d’Alembert, Jean le Rond (1717—1783) The illegitimate son of the chevalier Destouches and a famous hostess, Mme. de Tencin, Alembert was named for the St. Jean le Rond church where he had been found on the steps. Diderot in approximately 1746 made him co-editor of the Encyclopédie, for which he wrote mathematical, literary, and philosophical articles. Because of his unorthodox views, however, he withdrew from the staff. Just the same, he was secretary of the French Academy (1772) and a leading representative of the Enlightenment. His treatise on dynamics (1743) enunciated what is called d’Alembert’s Principle. He wrote an important history of the Academy (1787). Pensées philosophiques shows his freethought, as does his book on the Jesuits, Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (1765), and the general rationalism of his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopédie. Alembert was one of Voltaire’s staunchest friends, and his work successfully made the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. “As for the existence of a supreme intelligence,” he wrote to Frederick the Great, “I think that those who deny it advance far more than they can prove, and skepticism is the only reasonable course.” He goes on to say, however, that experience invincibly proves the materiality of the “soul.” McCabe notes that d’Alembert “preferred to call himself a skeptic rather than an atheist, thinking that the latter implied an express denial of the existence of God . . . and he is convinced that the soul or mind is merely a function of the brain.” D’Alembert’s last days were spent conversing with friends. He liked to hear others’ views as well as tell stories of his own. Said Condorcet, “He only was able to think of other subjects than himself, and to give himself to gaiety and amusement.” {BDF; CE; FO; ILP; JM; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RAT ; RE; TRI}

Alexander VI [Rodrigo de Borja, Spanish; Rodrigo Borgia, Italian] (1431?—1503) Pope Alexander VI, the successor to Pope Innocent VIII, allegedly was the father of ten illegitimate children, four while he was Cardinal Borgia. One of his children, Lucrezia Borgia, inspired Victor Hugo’s drama and Donizetti’s opera. His youngest son, Cesare, was an important figure of the Italian Renaissance. His mother’s brother, Alfonso, was Pope Calixtus III. The lax moral tone of Renaissance Rome has made Alexander’s name symbolic of the worldly irreligion of Renaissance popes. Although he is known as a political strategist and church administrator, Alexander VI was severely criticized by Girolamo Savonarola. His name has become a symbol of the Renaissance popes’ worldly irreligion. According to McCabe, “Official documents establishing the birth of six of his children were published from the archives of the Duke of Ossuna, and the Vatican then admitted that it had copies of the same documents (birth-certificates, etc.), so that even Catholic writers have yielded.” William Manchester, in A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance, has described some of the Pope’s parties:

Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties already wild, grew wilder. . . . As guests approached the papal palace, they were excited by the spectacle of living statues: naked, guilded young men and women in erotic poses. . . . After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city’s fifty most beautiful whores danced with guests, “first clothed, then naked” [According to the diarist Johann Burchard]. The dancing over, the “ballet” began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, “which,” Burchard writes, “the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles.” Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. “The coupling took place,” according to Burchard, “in front of everyone present.” Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man’s machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes—cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.” {CE; JMRH; RE}

Alexander, Charles and Ezra (18th Century)

Charles and Ezra Alexander, both of whom signed the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, were freethinkers. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)

Alexander, David (20th Century) Alexander is owner of Centerline Press and, from 1990—1992, was editor of The Humanist. Both in the US and in Europe, he has noted, of the estimated 150,000 Unitarians in the US, 75% identify themselves as secular and/or religious humanists. In short, he implies that these people join the Unitarians rather than the humanist groups. Under his editorship he published an extensive interview with Gene Roddenberry and another with Dan Rather (the latter, a television notable, not being a secular humanist). Alexander, whose biography of Roddenberry is “Star Trek” Creator (1994), is a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project, and he writes for The Freethinker.

Alexandre, Brandy (17 July 1964 - ) Alexandre, an adult film actress, when asked if she was a believer, responded, "To start, no, I do not believe in God. There is too much science now that refutes the existence of a supreme creator, at least for me, and the miracles of old are easily explained today. I have always had to 'see it to believe it.' So, I have a hard time engaging in the blind faith required to know there is a god." Her fan club is at P.O. Box 113, Hollywood, CA 90078. Her website is <http://www.kamikaze.org>. [Ms. Alexandre should not be confused with Brandy Alexander, a noted male drag queen during the Stonewall Bar 1960s, who later died of AIDS.] {CA; WAS 1 Aug 2001}

Alfieri, Vittorio [Count] (1749—1802) Alfieri in his poetry and drama attacked Catholicism as well as Christianity. “Born among a people slavish, ignorant, and already entirely subjugated by priests,” he wrote, “the Christian religion knows only how to enjoin the blindest obedience and is unacquainted even with the name of liberty.” His Saul has been prohibited on the English stage, according to Wheeler. {BDF; JMRH; RAT}

Alfonso X [King] (1223—1284) Alfonso X the Wise, King of Castille and of Leon, was a patron of science and a lover of astronomy. Because of his independence shown toward the Pope and his free disposal of the clerical revenues, he was stigmatized as an atheist. To him is attributed the well-known remark that had he been present at the creation of the world, he would have proposed some improvements. {BDF; JMRH}

Algarotti, Francesco [Count] (1712—1761) An Italian writer on science, history, and philosophy, Algarotti won high favor with Frederick the Great, Augustus of Saxony, and even (at first) Pope Clement XIV, who pronounced him “one of those rare men whom one would fain love even beyond the grave.” A friend of Voltaire and a deist, Algarotti had a monument erected to him by Frederick the Great. {JM; JMRH; RAT}

ALGEBRA The branch of mathematics concerned with operations on sets of numbers or other elements that are often represented by symbols was developed by medieval Islamic scholars and was named algebra (after al-jabr, an Arabic word meaning the reduction, the removing of an equation’s negative terms). Jabr wa-al-Muqabalah (The Book of al-Jabr and al-Muqabalah), written approximately in 825 by the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi (algorithm is taken from his name), contains word problems, because Arabic numerals had not yet been introduced, so numbers were represented by symbols. {CE; DGC}

ALGEMEEN HUMANISTISCH TREPUNT Algemeen Humanistisch Trefpunt, POB 1045, 2340 BA Oegstgeest, Netherlands, is an active Dutch humanist group.

Alger, Horatio Jr. (1832—1899) Author of Ragged Dick (1867–1868), Alger was reared by strict Puritan parents, but in 1864 he became a Unitarian minister in the Cape Cod town of Brewster, Massachusetts. However, accused of “the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys,” namely fifteen-year-old John Clark and his thirteen-year-old friend, Thomas Crocker, Alger left town for New York City. Concentrating upon his writing although allegedly “adopting” several youngsters “informally” without any scandals, he wrote popular novels, over twenty million copies of which have been sold. The 130 titles were based on the principle that if a boy struggles against poverty and temptation, he will eventually achieve wealth and fame. His father, Horatio Alger Sr., was a Unitarian minister in several small Massachusetts areas. Alger is buried at Glenwood Cemetery, ten miles southwest of Boston in South Natick. The pallbearers included seven respected citizens, all former orphan boys whom Alger had befriended. {CE; U; UU}

Alger, William Rounseville (1822—1905) Alger was a Unitarian clergyman who wrote Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. In 1990, Gary Scharnhorst wrote A Literary Biography of William R. Alger, A Neglected Member of the Concord Circle showing Alger’s connections with Emerson and the elder Henry James. Although Henry James Sr. alleged that Horatio Alger wrote a biography of Edwin Forrest, it was William, his cousin, who had done so. William, not Alger, had had a breakdown and been at an asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts. Part of the confusion is related to Henry James’s alleged changing of dates, suppression of facts, and rewriting of passages from other people’s letters. {Louis Menand, “William James & the Case of the Epileptic Patient,” The New York Review of Books, 17 December 1998} {BDF}

Algeri, Pomponio (Died 1566) A youth of Nola who studied at Padua, Algeri was accused of heresy and atheism. In 1566 Algeri was burned alive in a cauldron of boiling oil, pitch, and turpentine, courtesy of his loving Christian neighbors. {BDF}

ALGERIAN HUMANISM: See entry for Frantz Fanon. Also see entry for Lounes Matoub, who was murdered in 1998 “for his freethinking and his defiant mountain music.”

Algie, William (19th Century) In Canada, Algie was president from 1885 to 1889 of the Canadian Secular Union. In 1884, small societies were reported in Welland, St. Thomas, and Aylmer, Gananoque, Belleville, and Ottawa. The Toronto Freethought Society changed its name to Secular in the 1880s, and in Ottawa the Pioneer Freethought Club was formed in 1880. {RSR}

Aliabadi, Ali (20th Century) In 1995, Aliabadi and Brie Waters founded the Atheist Students’ Association (ASA) at the University of Maryland in College Park. He also was one of the founders of the Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Alice, Maud Mary [Princess] (1843—1878) The daughter of Queen Victoria of England, Alice was a skeptic. So was her sister, the Empress Frederic. Alice was a friend of D. F. Strauss, the leading anti-Christian writer in Germany, who read his study of Voltaire to her in manuscript and was permitted to dedicate it to her. Prince von Bülow in his Memoirs wrote, “The Grand Duchess Alice was as liberal in politics, and especially in religion, as her sister the Crown Princess.” In 1937, the editor of the Literary Guide revealed that it was Princess Alice who had translated the article by Haeckel that appeared in the first issue of the Agnostic Annual, which he also edited. {RE}

ALIEN ABDUCTIONS “[S]leep paralysis accompanying a waking dream may well be a major factor in convincing some ‘abductees’ they have been examined by aliens,” wrote Joe Nickell (Skeptical Inquirer, May-June-1998). Nickell does not doubt the financial benefits of writing about having been abducted, however, noting “abduction promoters have books to offer. Let the buyer beware.” Susan Blackmore, a Bristol psychologist, wrote in the same issue that the best explanation for nearly four million Americans’ saying they had certain “indicator” experiences and therefore had probably been abducted by aliens “is that they are elaborations of the experience of sleep paralysis.” In a typical sleep paralysis episode, a person wakes up paralyzed, senses a presence in the room, feels fear or even terror, and may hear buzzing and humming noises or see strange lights.

ALIENS FROM OUTER SPACE Voltaire was among the first to describe “aliens from outer space,” doing so in his Micromegas. The aliens came from Saturn and from a planet in the solar system of the star Sirius. Unlike humans with their five or six senses, the Saturnians had seventy-two. The Sirians had a thousand. Contemporary naturalists, who are openly skeptical about all accounts of sightings, cite the negative findings of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which is headed by philosopher Paul Kurtz. (See entry for Voltaire.)

Al-Kindi (c. 800-c. 870) Al-Kindi was an Arab philosopher who was born in Kufa, Iraq. Known as “the philosopher of the Arabs,” he was among the first to spread Greek thought in the Arab world, synthesizing Aristotle’s and other Greeks’ views, with Islamic doctrine.

Al-Kurdi, Husayn (20th Century) Al-Kurdi, describing the Christian Right in San Diego County, California, laments that homophobia is a central facet of the Christian rightist worldview. In Alpine, California, he reports, gay men’s sexual habits are discussed at the County Board of Supervisors meetings. One individual has publicly proclaimed his obsessions with “homosexuals who stick their penis in another man’s anus” and then “want to shake your hand when you don’t know where that hand has been.” He also laments the anti-Mexican, the anti-Islam, and the anti-feminist feelings that the Christian right has fostered in its successful goal of sweeping over sixty candidates into local offices in 1990 in San Diego County.

ALL SAINTS DAY All Saints Day has no relevance to freethinkers. (See Entry for Humanist Holidays.)

ALLAH, OR AL-ILAH: See entry for God. Of interest is that the word is singular and has no plural.

Allais, Giovanni (Born 1847) Allais was an Italian physician and freethinker. {BDF}

Allan, Don (20th Century)

Allan, in “Spiritual Atheism” (Secular Nation, April-June 1998), argues that love, creativity, and the human spirit are atheistic values, adding, “Let us assume our rightful place as atheistic educators and celebrate the human spirit and its triumph over the darkness of superstition and illusion.” He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Allan, James (20th Century) Allan is a senior lecturer in law in the faculty of law at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is author of A Sceptical Theory of Morality and Law (1998), which includes a defense of a sceptical moral theory that owes much to the views of David Hume.

Allbutt, Henry A. (20th Century) Allbutt was a Leeds secularist who published a popular Wife’s Handbook (1884 or 1885) which reached a forty-fifth printing by 1913 and by 1929 had sold half a million copies. Although not prosecuted for its obscenity, he was struck off the register of the General Medical Council. Allbutt’s sin was not only that he advocated birth control but that he advocated it at a cost of sixpence. {RSR}

Allbutt, Thomas Clifford [Sir] (1826—1925) Allbutt was one of the most distinguished British physicians of his time. His works on medicine and the Middle Ages are valuable. He openly criticized the Church for opposing and retarding the progress of science in Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery (1905). In his Harveian Oration, Allbutt professed Agnosticism: “I wonder if we are glad that the riddle of the origin and issues of being, which tormented their eager hearts, is not solved but proved insoluble.” {JM; JMRH; RAT; RE}

Allegro, John (1923—1988) Allegro, an eminent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, edited some of the most important of the Essene documents, including the biblical commentaries. He is author in The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1984), in which he states that the Catholic Church deleted, changed, or suppressed large amounts of the newly found material. The Church also tried to hide the Nag Hammadi library materials discovered in Egypt, because of the Gnostic writings which helped undermine the entire basis of Christian beliefs. John 8:44 is one example of the Gnostic influence, and other Gnostic writings describe homosexual overtones in a particular form of baptism which Jesus knew about but which the Church sought to hide. In the 1984 work, Allegro wrote

Unlike the Jewish Talmudist or “fundamentalist” Christian, the old-time Bible-thumper, we cannot seek in any traditional revelation a detailed code of rules of conduct; we are in the last resort thrown back upon our own inadequate selves for our authoring.

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1992), point out that Allegro, of the original team members, was the only disinterested scholar of religion. The others were Roman Catholic theologians. Chosen because he was one of Britain’s foremost authorities on Middle Eastern languages, Allegro soon found he was denied access to some materials and was not allowed to attend important conferences. After Allegro published material stating that “the origins of some Christian ritual and doctrines can be seen in the documents of an extremist Jewish sect that existed for more than 100 years before the birth of Jesus Christ,” he was discredited by his colleagues, was called anti-Christian, and was removed from the project. He insisted, however, that the ancient myths were being misrepresented as historical fact by the church. Baigent and Leigh, similarly, imply that despite the team’s international character it was highly influenced by the Vatican from the beginning. Allegro was ridiculed for his theory, expressed in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), that Western religions were based on mushroom worship. The volume studied the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East, and he contended that Judaism and Christianity were products of an ancient sex-and-mushroom cult. “The bearing of the phallus was a marked feature of the Dionysiac processionals,” he wrote, “but as we now know, it had more than a purely physiological significance. The penis was not only the sign of human generation but within the mushroom cult it symbolized the sacred fungus itself, the “phallus of God.” The book contains color photos of the mushroom, Amanita muscaria, and after 205 pages it appends 150 pages of notes in various languages, illustrating his erudition and interest in philology. S. Levin, commenting upon Allegro’s suspicion that the whole Paul-Jesus story was somehow tied up with a fungus tale, a mushroom hallucinatory story, has written of The End of a Road (1971) that “in complex philosophical philandering around semen, penis and vulva, he mushroomed everything and everybody into a fungus yarn. Peter was pitriya (Hebrew for fungus), Jonah’s overhanging bush was a mushroom, and so was Jesus. (Allegro) was rightly attacked as way off the historical mark.” However, Levin adds that “Christianity began somewhere in those Greek regions [Ephesus, Tarsus, etc.], and as a consequence of a rumour heard by Paul, and fleshed into brilliance by the effects of LSD.” {Free Inquiry, Fall 1984; New Humanist, February 1996; TRI}

Allen, Charles Grant Blairfindie (1848—1899) Allen, the son of an Irish Protestant minister and notable scholar, was born near Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He enthusiastically taught the views on evolution of Darwin and Spencer, writing Charles Darwin (1885) and The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religion (1897). Using the pseudonym Cecil Power, he wrote a three-volume novel, Philistia, and in 1888 he wrote The Devil’s Die. When George Bedborough was brought to court for selling a copy of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, Allen, along with G. W. Foote, George Holyoake, George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, and J. M. Robertson, formed a Free Press Defence Committee on his behalf. Allen espoused the cause of “free love,” a controversial topic in his day. He agreed with Herbert Spencer concerning the origin of religion, writing, “I believe I had made it tolerably clear that the vast mass of existing gods or divine persons, when we come to analyze them, do actually turn out to be dead and deified human beings. . . . I believe that corpse worship is the protoplasm of religion.” {BDF; RAT}

Allen, Christ (20th Century) Allen is a contact for American Atheists, Inc., in Utah. E-mail: <callen@atheists.org>.

Allen, David (1961- ) Allen, a writer in Washington, D.C., is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.

Allen, Don (19th Century) Allen wrote The Resurrection of Jesus, An Agnostic’s View (1893). {GS}

Allen, Ethan [Colonel] (1738—1789) 

A hero of the American Revolution, Allen in 1784 wrote, “I have generally been denominated a Deist, the reality of which I have never disputed, being conscious that I am no Christian, except mere infant baptism makes me one; and as to being a Deist, I know not, strictly speaking, whether I am one or not.” He found trinitarianism “destitute of foundation, and tends manifestly to superstition and idolatry.” His deistic views were similar to those of Franklin and Jefferson (and to rituals of the Masonic Lodge) as shown in his Reason the Only Oracle of Man (1784). Like a watchmaker, the deists hypothesized, the Supreme Architect created his work, then moved on. Analogously, people who have a watch care little who designed their watch and have no way of determining who actually made it; it is to their benefit to keep the watch repaired and working well–life’s purpose is therefore not to find out which individual or committee made an object, deists explained. They rejected claims of supernatural revelation and of formal religion. With such a philosophy, they skirted the need for a Church of America (inasmuch as the enemy George III could hardly continue to be accepted as God’s representative on earth) and wrote a Constitution placing the onus on man, not outside forces, to rule himself under law. Reason the Only Oracle of Man was the first openly anti-Christian book published in North America, and Allen credited many of its ideas to his fellow nonconformist in religious thought, Dr. Thomas Young. The two planned upon writing the book together, but Young died before they could finish it. The book was widely used by Universalists. Shortly after the printing, a fire broke out in the printer’s warehouse and the fearful printer would not agree to publishing any further freethought books. “Ethan Allen’s Bible,” as the book was called among his neighbors, although it may in part have been written by Young, hit hard at Calvinist theology. Allen “in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress” defeated the British at Fort Ticonderoga, and he was a popular contributor to the secularization and dechristianizing of early American intellectual thought. The story is told by Valery Countryman, a St. Louis author, that Allen defied a state statute that prohibited smallpox inoculations because they were said to be “a sin against God.” At a local tavern Allen convinced his physician, Thomas Young, to publicly inoculate him. Allen was then quickly arrested for the crime of blasphemy. During the trial he cursed the judge by saying, “May (you) be in Hell a thousand years and every little insipid Devil shall come by and ask why.” Ms. Countryman also describes Allen’s decision to remarry after the death of his estranged spouse. “Do you promise to live in agreement to God’s law?” the officiating judge inquired. “Hold on!” Allen complained. “Whose god are you talking about?” The judge eventually was persuaded to amend the offending phrase to “laws as written in the Book of Nature.” A little-known section of Israel Potter (1855) by Herman Melville describes Allen during his period of captivity by the British, when he was displayed in the port of Falmouth, “Samson Among the Philistines”:

Like some baited bull in the ring, crouched the Patagonian-looking captive, handcuffed as before; the grass of the green trampled, and gored up all about him, both by his own movements and those of the people around. Except some soldiers and sailors, these seemed mostly townspeople, collected here out of curiosity. The stranger was outlandishly arrayed in the sorry remains of a half-Indian, half-Canadian sort of dress, consisting of a fawnskin jacket–the fur outside and hanging in ragged tufts–a half-rotten, bark-like belt of wampum; aged breeches of sagathy; bedarned worsted stockings to the knee; old moccasins riddled with holes, their metal tags yellow with salt-water rust; a faded red woolen bonnet, not unlike a Russian night-cap, or a portentous, ensanguined full-moon, all soiled, and stuck about with bits of half-rotted straw. He seemed just broken from the dead leaves in David’s outlawed Cave of Adullam. Unshaven, beard and hair matted, and profuse as a corn-field beaten down by hailstorms, his whole marred aspect was that of some wild beast; but of a royal sort, and unsubdued by the cage.

According to legend, Allen’s wife called for a preacher as he lay dying. The man, although he knew Allen had once stated, “That Jesus Christ was not God is evident from his own words,” attempted to persuade Allen to pray. “Angels are waiting for you,” Allen was told. “Waiting, are they?” Allen retorted. “Well, God damn them, let them wait!” Vermont eventually erected a forty-two-foot high granite memorial topped by an eight-foot angel decades after Allen’s death and at a site where no one was sure where the body lay. A previous marker had been blasted away by lightning sixty-six years earlier. {BDF; CE; EG; EU, Darline Gay Levy and Gordon Stein; FUS; JM; JMRH; PUT; RAT; TYD; U}

Allen, Evelyn (20th Century) In 1995 Allen became secretary of the Northeast Atheist Association.

Allen, Frank (20th Century) Allen wrote In Jesus’ Name (1933). {GS}

Allen, Gina (20th Century; Deceased) Allen, a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, was on the editorial board of The Humanist and was a secretary of the American Humanist Association. She addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). A Unitarian, she wrote Prairie Children (1941), On the Oregon Trail (1942), and Sod-House Days (1945). She was a Humanist counsellor. {HM2}

Allen, Grant (1848—1899) Allen wrote The Evolution of the Idea of God (published 1931). In a Fortnightly Review article entitled “The New Hedonism” (1894), Allen wrote, “It is our duty to think as far as we can think; to get rid of all dogmas, preconceptions and prejudices; to make sure we are not tied by false fears or vague terms; to examine all faiths, all beliefs, all fancies, all shibboleths, political, religious, social, moral. . . . We should each of us arrive at a consistent theory of the universe for ourselves, and of our own place in it.” Allen was a respected figure in the group of late-Victorian agnostics, a member of the Free Press Defence Committee along with George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, Hyndman, Foote, Frank Podmore, W. M. Thompson, Truelove, Holyoake, Robertson, and Herbert Burrows. {Freethinker, December, 1996; FUK; RSR; RE}

Allen, John (1771—1843) Allen, a physician and writer, practiced and lectured at Edinburgh until 1801, then accompanied Lord Holland and his family to Spain for a four-year position. At Holland House, he was known as “Lady Holland’s Atheist” and was “a complete sceptic,” doubting if Christ had ever existed. From 1820 to 1843, Allen was master at Dulwich College. {RAT}

Allen, Leslie H. (Born 1887) Allen edited Bryan and Darrow at Dayton. {FUS}

Allen, Norm R. Jr. (1957- ) Allen edited African American Humanism, An Anthology (1991) and is Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism’s African Americans for Humanism. An editorial associate for Free Inquiry, and that magazine’s director of public relations, Allen speaks on behalf of the secular humanist movement not only in the United States but also abroad. He is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Allen spoke on “What Is the Good Life? A Humanist Perspective.” At the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, Allen spoke on the subject of global humanism and human rights. Allen wrote “Religion and the New African American Intellectuals” in a University of Minnesota publication, Nature, Society, and Thought, A Journal of Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1996). The editor of the African Americans for Humanism Examiner, Allen signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Allen, Ralph Edward (1895—1971) Allen, an Australian rationalist and medical practitioner, was a director in 1938 of the Rationalist Association of Australia Ltd.

Allen, Steve (26 Dec 1921 - 30 Oct 2000) Steven Valentine Patrick William Allen was a noted American humorist, musician, and television star whose “Tonight” telecast contained a blueprint for all subsequent talk shows: first, an opening monologue, a band with a band leader as the straight man (Skitch Henderson was one such), a desk, guest chairs, and casual talk. His guests included such varied persons as poet Carl Sandburg, comedian Lenny Bruce, jazzman Coleman Hawkins, the Three Stooges, The Muppets, and Elvis Presley. In a 1977 PBS series, “Meeting of the Minds,” he made small talk with Sigmund Freud, attorney Clarence Darrow, and Greek philosopher Aristotle. A one-time disk jockey, he starred in the title role of the 1956 movie The Benny Goodman Story. Allen wrote the music and lyrics for Sophie, a Broadway musical based on the life of Sophie Tucker, but it ran in 1963 for only eight performances. He appeared on Broadway and in soap operas; wrote essays, commentary, and more than fifty books, including “Dumbth!” And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (1989), Meeting of Minds (1989), and Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality (1990), in the latter of which he states that he is a “theist” but cannot believe that a just God would have committed all the crimes listed therein. Also, he recorded more than five thousand songs including “This Could Be the Start of Something Big,” “Impossible,” and “Gravy Waltz.” In “Dumbth!”, however, Allen wrote as follows:

Although my own bias on this question (as to the existence of God) ought to be essentially irrelevant to you, I will satisfy your curiosity on the point that I am among the majority who assume that a God does exist.

Then why, secular humanists have asked, is he one of the Council for Secular Humanism’s laureates in their International Academy of Humanism? Is it because Paul Kurtz, his publisher, added his name as a reward for helping raise needed money for Kurtz’s Council for Secular Humanism, as some have claimed? Why is he not better categorized as a being a “theistic humanist” or a “humanistic theist”? Allen’s response is found in Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality,

I am, as a result of the present study, now of the firm opinion that to the extent that the total goodness of God can be defended as a philosophical proposition, the last place to which the devout believer should turn for supporting evidence is the Bible. There is better evidence in Nature herself—in the inherent order, enormous scale, largesse of air, water, food, sunlight, breathtaking beauty, in the human capacity for love and virtue—than in the familiar accounts of assorted slaughters, sex crimes, atrocities, murders of infants, torture, and other abominations we read about in the Old Testament. If all such crimes were committed by men the scriptural authors pointed to as evil, if they were condemned in some manner, some enlightening moral might be drawn. But a great many, the devout believer is told, are performed either by God himself or by esteemed leaders and kings on his personal, clear-cut instruction! Although I, like most believers, interpret the word God as implying perfection, it is more than understandable that atheists such as Kai Nielsen, professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, [would not.] [Allen lists others such as Sidney Hook, Paul Edwards, Michael Scriven, Walter Kaufmann, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm. John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell.] I assume that existence of a Supreme Being; therefore, on grounds that will no doubt seem peculiar to some rigorous scholars, belief in God seems to me slightly less preposterous than its opposite.

He continues that if there is a God,

it is nothing more than a convenience of common speech to refer to that divine being as a masculine entity. Perfectly orthodox theologians invariably describe God as pure spirit. It is obvious that such a spirit can have no physical characteristics whatever, and since masculinity and femininity are physical characteristics, that would seem to settle the question.

When in the 1970s his son Brian joined a cult, Allen in Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults (1982) described the intense and sad effect upon the family. Allen’s first marriage, to Dorothy Goodman, ended in divorce but produced three sons. In 1954 he married actor Jayne Meadows, they had one son, and the marriage lasted for forty-six years. Told by physicians in 1986 that he had colon cancer, he quipped that, yes, his condition was critical: “critical of nurses, critical of doctors, critical of the food, critical of the prices.” When the hospital changed his condition to stable, he joked, “Well, you know what the condition of the average stable is.” At the time of his death from a heart attack, he had eleven grandchildren. Martin Gardner in 1990 wrote that Allen, like Thomas Paine, stirs up opposition by his books, concluding that a careful reading of the Bible by people “to find out for themselves whether every absurdity and horror Allen refers to is really there . . . may even lead a few away from their narrow biblicism and back to God.” Gardner, himself a deist, categorized Allen as a theist, not a humanist. Some classify both men as behind-the-times-deists with a strong link for one reason or another to the secular humanists. Allen, a Catholic during his childhood, might better be classificed as a borderline deist-pantheist, close to being a religious humanist of the quasi-Unitarian variety. At the 1988 Tenth Humanist World Congress he was presented with the Distinguished Humanist Award. A signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000, he strongly supported efforts by the Council for Secular Humanism and on 9 June 1995 helped dedicate the Center’s new building. In Allen’s last interview, with Jon Kalish for National Public Radio, Allen described himself as an agnostic. “All that means is that I really don’t know,” he said. “I assume there’s a God because I can’t figure out how anything, much less the whole universe, could have gotten here with no cause at all.” He then added,

There are all sorts of dumb beliefs that sometimes careless thinkers think and become dignified simply because you put the word religious on them. And that’s a serious mistake. That’ll get you into big trouble. “To me, the whole world seems like one endless straight line. There is an essential absurdity to human life and to humanity itself. One good result of that mind-set is it keeps your humor ever fresh because there are new outrages and new absurdities always. We’ll never run out of them. {Daily News, 3 Nov 2000; HNS2, The New York Times, 1 Nov 2000}

Allen, Steve (1921— ) Allen, a noted American humorist, musician, and television star, is author of “Dumbth!” And 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter (1989). He also has written thirty-five other books, including Meeting of Minds (1989) and Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality (1990), in the latter of which he states that he is a theist but cannot believe that a just God would have committed all the crimes listed therein. Allen, who was a Catholic during his childhood, is one of the Council for Secular Humanism’s laureates in the International Academy of Humanism, and at the 1988 Tenth Humanist World Congress he was presented with the Distinguished Humanist Award.

  In “Dumbth!”, however, Allen wrote as follows: 

Although my own bias on this question (as to the existence of God) ought to be essentially irrelevant to you, I will satisfy your curiosity on the point that I am among the majority who assume that a God does exist.

Then why, some secular humanists have asked, is he a Humanist Laureate? Why is he not better categorized as a being a theistic humanist or a humanistic theist? His response is found in Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion, and Morality,

I am, as a result of the present study, now of the firm opinion that to the extent that the total goodness of God can be defended as a philosophical proposition, the last place to which the devout believer should turn for supporting evidence is the Bible. There is better evidence in Nature herself–in the inherent order, enormous scale, largesse of air, water, food, sunlight, breathtaking beauty, in the human capacity for love and virtue–than in the familiar accounts of assorted slaughters, sex crimes, atrocities, murders of infants, torture, and other abominations we read about in the Old Testament. If all such crimes were committed by men the scriptural authors pointed to as evil, if they were condemned in some manner, some enlightening moral might be drawn. But a great many, the devout believer is told, are performed either by God himself or by esteemed leaders and kings on his personal, clear-cut instruction! Although I, like most believers, interpret the word God as implying perfection, it is more than understandable that atheists such as Kai Nielsen, professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary, [would not, whereupon he lists others such as Sidney Hook, Paul Edwards, Michael Scriven, Walter Kaufmann, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm. John Dewey, and Bertrand Russell]. I assume that existence of a Supreme Being; therefore, on grounds that will no doubt seem peculiar to some rigorous scholars, belief in God seems to me slightly less preposterous than its opposite.

He continues that if there is a God,

it is nothing more than a convenience of common speech to refer to that divine being as a masculine entity. Perfectly orthodox theologians invariably describe God as pure spirit. It is obvious that such a spirit can have no physical characteristics whatever, and since masculinity and femininity are physical characteristics, that would seem to settle the question.

When in the 1970s his son Brian joined a cult, Allen described in Beloved Son: A Story of the Jesus Cults (1982) the effect upon the family. Allen is, although he does not use such labels and tries to avoid all such labels, a borderline deist-pantheist, close to being a religious humanist of the quasi-Unitarian variety. He has strongly supported efforts by the Council for Secular Humanism and was their co-chairman for raising funds to build in Buffalo, New York, a headquarters which has the world’s largest freethought library. He helped dedicate the new Center for Inquiry 9 June 1995. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Martin Gardner in 1990 wrote that Allen, like Thomas Paine, stirs up opposition by his books, concluding that a careful reading of the Bible by people “to find out for themselves whether every absurdity and horror Allen refers to is really there . . . may even lead a few away from their narrow biblicism and back to God.” Gardner, himself a deist, therefore categorizes Allen as a theist, not a humanist. Some classify both men as deists with a strong link to the secular humanists. {HNS2}

Allen, Woody (1935— ) Allen Stewart Konigsberg (a/k/a Woody Allen) is a comic, an actor, a writer, and an internationally known film director. His humorous responses to serious questions are a model of secular wit. Although of Hebrew lineage, when asked if he is a practicing Jew, he has responded, “I’m a practicing heterosexual.” As for God, “Why is man unable to find God, or a plumber, on weekends?” As for logic, “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” As to whether or not he would want to know exactly when he would die, “I would definitely like to know the time and place of my death and if a necktie is required.” As for choosing between being popular while alive or immortal after death, “Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of an adoring public, I’d rather live on in my apartment.” The films he directs focus often on urban characters preoccupied with sex, death, and psychiatry. These include Take the Money and Run (1969), Play It Again, Sam (1972), Love and Death (1977), and Manhattan (1979). In the autobiographical movie, Stardust Memories, his character is called an atheist. “To you, I’m an atheist,” the character states. “To God, I’m the loyal opposition.” To Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian Weekend (29 March 1997), Allen said,

I am a Jew only in the sense that I was born into a Jewish family. I have no interest in the organized religions beyond a certain cerebral historical curiosity. They are all nonsense to me in their basic premises. . . . I’m agnostic, but I have one foot in atheism. {The Freethinker, May 1997} Allen, Woody (1 Dec 1935 - ) Allen Stewart Konigsberg (a/k/a Woody Allen) is a comic, an actor, a writer, and an internationally known film director. His humorous responses to serious questions are a model of secular wit. Although of Hebrew lineage, when asked if he is a practicing Jew, he responded, “I’m a practicing heterosexual.” As for God, “Why is man unable to find God, or a plumber, on weekends?” As for logic, “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night.” As to whether or not he would want to know exactly when he would die, “I would definitely like to know the time and place of my death and if a necktie is required.” As for choosing between being popular while alive or immortal after death, “Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of an adoring public, I’d rather live on in my apartment.” To Gail Zimmerman, who interviewed him in Chicago Jewish News (24-30 Aug 2001), Allen made these observations:

• I was a nice child. I didn’t have a miserable childhood. My parents loved me. I was a very, very bad student, but I was not unpopular. I was a good athlete, the first one picked, not the last one. I didn’t like school at all. I didn’t function in school. But amongst the kids it was fun. • The Jewish culture—people who are Jewish—have certain cultural habits that they’ve formed and one of those habits is an appreciation of theater and music. They like that very much. And since I’m in show business, I would fall into that category of things that would interest them. Culturally speaking, I was raised in a Jewish household and in addition to the negative religious side of it, I was also taught respect for books and respect for learning and respect for the higher professions: medicine, law, and teaching. An interest in films and theater and classical music—these are cultural things that one does associate with values that are promulgated by Jewish families. And I think that’s a good thing. • I don’t feel that I should feel the pain of a Jewish person any more than the pain of a gentile person. It’s not right. • I was raised in a religious home and it was unreasonable and forced religion that turned me off it. . . . I’ve never gotten over that feeling. And I hold a very, very dim view of all the religions.

The films he directs focus often on urban characters preoccupied with sex, death, and psychiatry. These include Take the Money and Run (1969), Play It Again, Sam (1972), Love and Death (1977), and Manhattan (1979). In the autobiographical movie, Stardust Memories, one of the characters states, “To you, I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition.” Allen told a Britisher, Simon Hattenstone of The Guardian Weekend (29 March 1997),

I am a Jew only in the sense that I was born into a Jewish family. I have no interest in the organized religions beyond a certain cerebral historical curiosity. They are all nonsense to me in their basic premises. . . . I’m agnostic, but I have one foot in atheism. {The Freethinker, May 1997; Dennis Middlebrooks, 5 Sep 2001}

Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman [1st Viscount] (1861—1936) A British field marshal in World War I, Allenby was a member of the British Rationalist Press Association. In the course of an appeal for peace (Allenby’s Last Message) at his inauguration as Rector of Edinburgh University shortly before his death, the Viscount ruled out religion as a help. He had waged the last of the great cavalry campaigns by invading Palestine, capturing Jerusalem, and ending Turkish resistance after the battle of Megiddo (1918). From 1919 to 1925, he served as British high commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan. Allenby was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and his Rectorial Address to Edinburgh University, “World Police for World Peace,” is said by McCabe “to be one of the noblest appeals for peace and progress ever made by a soldier.” {CE; JM; RE}

Allende Gossens, Salvador [President] (1908—1973) Allende, the president of Chile (1970—1973), was founder of the Chilean Socialist party (1933). He was the first freely elected Marxist leader in the Americas. In 1971, Corliss Lamont met Allende in the Palacio de la Moneda (the Government Palace). Allende escorted him into his office, talked about being attacked by hostile newspapers throughout South America, then pointed to a picture with the caption, “President Allende receiving the Order of Lenin from a Soviet General.” Asked if he was perhaps a naturalistic humanist in his philosophy, Allende said he did not go in much for labels but that, since he was a Marxist, he was also a naturalist and that his administration was doing many things of a humanist nature. Lamont was then given a copy of The Political Thoughts of Salvador Allende, which was inscribed, “To my friend C. L. from companero Presidente with hearty affection and faith in the victory of the peoples.” In 1973, Allende was overthrown, and he was either murdered or committed suicide when the presidential palace was attacked. Thereupon, a conservative military junta led by Augusto Pinochet took over.

Alley, Robert Sutherland (1932— ) Alley, a professor emeritus at the University of Richmond, is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He also is a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. Alley, who wrote James Madison on Religious Liberty (1989) and School Prayer (1993), is executive director of the James Madison Memorial Committee. He is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism and a member of Americans United’s Board of Trustees. Upon reading work by the Texas-based Religious Right propagandist David Barton, he researched some of the quotations that Barton was making and fundamentalists were quoting. Alley specifically found the following “Christian Nation” statements questionable, if not outright dishonest:

• It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. —George Washington (questionable)

• I have always said and always will say that the studious perusal of the Sacred Volume will make us better citizens.

—Thomas Jefferson (questionable)

• We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves . . . according to the Ten Commandments of God. —James Madison (questionable)

• It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ! —Patrick Henry (questionable)

• Whosoever shall introduce into the public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. —Benjamin Franklin (questionable)

• A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue they will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or eternal invader. —Samuel Adams (questionable)

• The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be accessory [sic] to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer. —Noah Webster (questionable)

• There are two powers only which are sufficient to control men, and secure the rights of individuals and a peaceable administration; these are the combined force of religion and law, and the force or fear of the bayonet. —Noah Webster (questionable)

• The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. —Abraham Lincoln (questionable)

• The only assurance of our nation’s safety is to lay our foundation in morality and religion. —Abraham Lincoln (questionable)

• America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great. —Alexis de Tocqueville (This definitely is not in Democracy in America.)

• Our laws and our institutions must necessarily be based upon and embody the teachings of the Redeemer of mankind. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. In this sense and to this extent, our civilizations and our institutions are emphatically Christian. —Holy Trinity v U.S. (entirely false.)

At least nine of the twelve statements were included in Barton’s The Myth of Separation (1989). In 1995, however, Barton’s group, WallBuilders, issued a one-page document titled “Questionable Quotes,” admitting the alleged statements are false. Embarrassed, Barton revised his earlier book and called it Original Intent. Alley, however, finds that the revision cites sources with inaccurate material. Meanwhile, he continues to speak around the country at Christian Coalition meetings, attacking separation of church and state and advocating union between religion and government. Alley, commenting upon the daunting task of proving that a quotation does not exist, laments that Barton and others are anti-historical. “We likely have not heard the last of this nonsense,” he added, “but it is important to press the new media frauds to document what they claim. Because they cannot do so in most instances, time may ultimately discredit the lot of them.” {Church and State, July-August 1996}

Allgeier, Elizabeth Rice (20th Century) A professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University, Allgeier has written for Free Inquiry. She addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo in 1988. Allgeier is author of Sexual Interactions (1991). {Free Inquiry, Summer 1991}

ALLIANCE OF FREETHOUGHT CAMPUS GROUPS: See entry for Campus Freethought Alliance.

Allibaco, W. A. (19th Century) Allibaco is author of The Philosophic and Scientific Ultimatum (1864). {GS}

Allingham, William (1824—1889) Allingham was an Irish poet and close friend of Froude, Tennyson, Rossetti, and others whose conversations with him on religion are recorded in his Diary (1907). All were skeptics, he shows. Allingham professed to be an atheist, adding that “we cannot in the least comprehend or even think of Deity.” He also wrote, “I will have nothing to do with . . . any form of Christianity.” At his secular funeral, a friend read his words, “Body to purifying flame,/Soul to the Great Deep whence it came,/Leaving a song on earth below,/An urn of ashes white as snow.” {JM; RAT}

Allman, George Johnston (1824—1904) Allman was a professor at Queen’s College, Galway, 1853 to 1893. A positivist, he was unable to take part in the positivist movement because of the academic position he held. {RAT}

Allsop, Thoms (1794—1880) Allsop was “the favorite disciple of Coleridge” and a friend of Robert Owen and the Chartists. He was implicated in the attempt of Orsini against Napoleon III. Allsop’s freethought views are found in his Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. With Holyoake he attended the funeral of Owen. But, when it turned out to be a religious ceremony, Allsop complained of this “mummery of an outworn creed” over the remains of a man who had spent a life freeing his fellows from “the degradation of superstition.” {BDF; RAT}

Allston, Washington (1779—1843) Allston, a painter who was one of S. F. B. Morse’s teachers and was himself a student of Gilbert West, believed that a painting should tell a story as well as contain sentiment. A friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey, Allston was one of the first recognized portrait painters. Allston’s first marriage was to Ann, sister of William Ellery Channing. According to Jared B. Flagg’s The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (1892), “Mrs. Merriam . . . censured [Allston] for leaving the Episcopal Church, of which he was a member, and going with his wife to the Congregational Church to which she belonged. . . . ‘I am neither an Episcopalian nor a Congregationalist. I endeavor to be a Christian. . . . Catholic in the largest sense of the word.’ ” Some Unitarians claim he was a Unitarian in his outlook. {EG; UU}

Allwood, Martin S. (1916— ) Allwood translated numerous Scandinavian works. His Marginal Man (1937) includes a humanistic poem, “Occidental Nightmare”:

My God my God I am my own God My God I am my God My own God my God I am my own God I am my own Own God my God I am my—God I am my strange I am my Own God— God!

I? God? Strange? I. God. Strange.

Am I. Am I? Am I. God—am I God?

God. Own. My own. Strange. I am my own God? My own God Am I.

Asked about his views concerning humanism, Allood responded to the present author:

I am a psychoanalytically oriented sociologist, and I take my starting point in the concept of freedom. As I conceive of freedom as a secular derivative of salvation, I am naturally suspicious of any concept of freedom limited by nature, human or physical. The freedom which can be achieved within the closed system of causality of any “nature” seems to me to be too predictable to be really worthy of the name of freedom. In science, we use the concept of nature mainly to afford a closed system of cause and effect, within which prediction is possible. This does not satisfy my observations regarding the actual freedom of human thought, action, and personality. This actual freedom is such that the future is “open” (to genuine new creation) rather than “closed,” as it would have to be under a system of perfect prediction, i.e., perfect knowledge of cause and effect in social and human nature. A naturalistic humanism is, therefore, to my mind, a contradiction in terms. Naturalism can rest on the earlier 19th Century conception of science as having stable, much unchanging units. Copper is copper is copper . . . and copper cannot achieve freedom from its copper-nature. Therefore, we can predict the behavior of copper. Copper cannot have insight into the fact that it is copper. Human beings can have insight into the fact that they are human. Psychoanalysis is admirable because of its iron determinism, because of its scientifically “closed” system. But the end result of analysis is not slavery to nature but, rather, a profound insight into the nature of our nature. The truth makes human beings free in the sense of insight into the “human condition.” Perhaps I should add, unless this is already apparent, that I am a Protestant in the sense of a firm belief in free thought, “free love,” and freedom from infantile fixations to any authority or authority symbol. At the same time, I realize the possibility of Luciferian motives for the quest of freedom.

{WAS, 2 March 1951}

Allyn, C. Fannie (19th Century) Allyn was a representative of the rational Spiritualistic movement of the 1890s. A secularist, she worked on behalf of freedom and advancement of the world’s humanity. Like Paine, she said, she hoped for “happiness beyond this life.” {PUT}

Alma-Tadema, Laurence [Sir] (1836—1912) Sir Laurence was an English painter who studied in Belgium, where he lived until 1869. Upon going to England and becoming a citizen, he became well known for his paintings of life in ancient Greece and Rome. According to the Hon. John Collier, his intimate, Alma-Tadema had no religious beliefs whatsoever. McCabe confirms that Alma-Tadema’s closest friends said he was an agnostic. {JM; RE}

Almquist, Herman (Born 1839) Almquist, a Swedish orientalist and professor of philology at the University of Uppsala, was an active defender of new ideas and freethought. {BDF}

Aloni, Shulamit (20h Century) Aloni is a lawyer who was culture minister during the Rabin regime, a member of the Israeli Knesset, and Minister of Science during the Peres regime. She heads the Citizen’s Rights Movement and is a secularist. In 1980, she signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. In 1996 she was elected a Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Also in 1996 while a participant at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, she discussed the nature of secular humanism in Israel. As for the myth of Adam and Eve, Aloni noted jocularly that the story shows Eve’s intelligence: “Eve really enjoyed eating of that fruit of knowledge.” {HNS2; SHD}

Alpert, John (20th Century) Alpert, a freethinker in Phoenix, Arizona, has written for Secular Nation (October-December 1998).

Alpharabius (Died 950) Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan (Abu Nasr), called Al Farabi, has been termed by Ibn Khallikan “the greatest philosopher the Moslems ever had.” But he is said to have taught the eternity of the world and denied the permanent individuality of the soul. Rénan adds that Al Farabi expressly rejected all supernatural revelation. {BDF}

Al-Rawandi, Ibn (20th Century) Al-Rawandi, in “Esoteric Evangelicals: Islam and the Traditionalists” (New Humanist, May 1994), discusses the tendency for some Westerners to convert to Islam and describes an influential group who have justified this move on the grounds of a traditionalist and autocratic approach. His conclusion is that the traditionalist dream, even if it were true, “would never overcome or replace the pathetic human need for cultural identity and group loyalty that religion so readily fulfills. Indeed, in the end we can see that traditionalism is itself just one more example of the same phenomenon. Esoteric, Autocratic, Intellectual, The Truth, set over against the rest–the exoterics, the democrats, the rationalists, the infidel.” Al-Rawandi finds it surprising that Westerners are sometimes so tolerant of religion. They overlook, he has written, “the wholly human origin of the Qur’an, the moral and intellectual inadequacies of Muhammad, the wholly tendentious and invented character of the hadith, the sexually-obsessed and anti-feminine nature of the sharia, the Arab empire spread by the sword and maintained by terror, the persecution of religious and intellectual minorities in that empire in the name of Islam, the incapacity of Muslims for any kind of critical or self-critical thought, and the abject intellectual and moral poverty of Islam vis-à-vis the modern secular West.” Despite the way apologists depict it, he has observed,

Islam was spread by the sword and has been maintained by the sword throughout its history, not to mention the scourge and the cross. In truth it was the Arab empire that was spread by the sword and it is as an Arab empire that Islam is maintained to this day in the form a religion largely invented to hold that empire together and subdue native populations. An unmitigated cultural disaster parading as God’s will. Religious minorities were always second-class citizens in this empire and were only tolerated on sufferance and in abject deference to their Arab/Muslim masters; for polytheists and unbelievers there was no tolerance at all; it was conversion or death. {New Humanist, December 1995}

Alsaaty, Faith (20th Century) In 1972, Alsaaty was on the advisory board of the Humanist Society of Greater New York.

Alt, Ludwig (20th Century) Alt edited a freethought journal, Free Humanist (1959—1963). It later became American Atheist with Madalyn Murray (later O’Hair) as its editor. {FUS}

Altizer, Thomas J. (20th Century) Altizer is a theologian who co-authored with William Hamilton Radical Theology and the Death of God, in which is included:

• "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ."

Altman, Morris (1837—1876) Altman, the founder of the Altman’s department stores, came from a wealthy Jewish family and served as a trustee of Paine Hall in Boston where freethinkers met. His house was sometimes used as a meeting place for visiting religious liberals. Before his death at the age of thirty-nine, Altman had given a large amount of money to D. M. Bennett to assure publication of several of the large volumes that Bennett had written. {Gordon Stein, “Freethought Financiers,” Truth Seeker #123:1}

Altizer, Thomas J. (20th Century) Altizer is a theologian who co-authored with William Hamilton Radical Theology and the Death of God. “Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience,” he has written, “can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God’s self-alienation in Christ.”

Altmeyer, Jean Jacques (1804—1877) Luxembourg-born Altmeyer became a professor at the University of Brussels, where he wrote an Introduction to the Philosophical Study of the History of Humanity (1836) and other historical works. The King of Denmark honored his rationalistic work with a gold medal. {BDF; RAT}

ALTRUISM Antony Flew holds that altruism, as a philosophic term, is in opposition to (ethical) egoism. Altruism is defined as an unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others, whereas egoism is a doctrine that individual self-interest is the valid end of all actions. (See entry for Egotism. Also, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Volume 2.) {AF}

Alvarez, A(lfred) (1929- ) A British novelist, essayist, and critic, Alvarez had an unusual childhood, during which both of his parents attempted suicide. He entered Corpus Christi College at Oxford, founded a Critical Society, and later pursued his critical interests as a visiting fellow at Princeton (1953-1954) and elsewhere. His novels include Hers (1974), about a loveless marriage; Hunt (1978), about a woman the protagonist discovers unconscious on Hampstead Heath; Day of Atonement (1991), a psychological thriller; and Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams (1998). In a critique of three books about death, including Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death Revisited, Alvarez commented:

Because I don’t believe in God or an afterlife, it is the finality of death—the deadness of the dead—that matters most to me at funerals. That, too, becomes part of my memory of them.

For the irreligious, in other words, death is strictly the concern of the living, and that means the living person who is about to die as well as those who survive the death. {The New York Review of Books, 24 September 1998}

Amador, Jorge González (1954— ) A Costa Rican humanist, Amador was one of the founders of Iconoclasta, the publication of La Asociación Ético Humanista Costarricense (ASEHUCO). Although his training is that of a lawyer, Amador is known for his aestheticism.

Amalric of Bene (Died c. 1206) Amalric, a follower of the condemned theologian Joachim of Floris, was a heretic who was accused of being a pantheist. His followers are said to have believed that “the Father was incarnate in Abraham, the Son in Mary, the Holy Spirit is daily made incarnate in us. . . . All things are one, for whatever is, is God.” {ER}

Amari, Michele (1806—1889) Amari was a Sicilian historian and orientalist. In 1832 he produced a version of Scott’s Marmion. He wrote a standard History of the Musulmen in Sicily. After the landing of Garibaldi, Amari was made head of public instruction for the island, and he took part in the anti-clerical council of 1869. {BDF; RAT}

Amaury de Chartres (13th Century) Amalric de Chartres, or Amaury, was a heretic of the thirteenth century. A teacher of logic, he wrote Physion, which was condemned by a bull of Pope Innocent III (1204). Amaury is said to have taught a kind of pantheism and held that the reign of the Father and Son must give place to that of the Holy Spirit. He maintained that the sacraments were useless and that there is no other heaven than the satisfaction of doing right, nor is there any other hell than ignorance and sin. Ten of his disciples were burned in Paris in 1210, and his own bones were exhumed and thrown into the flames. {BDF}

Ambedkar, B. R. (20th Century) Ambedkar, who was born into an “untouchable” family, converted to Buddhism. He is an architect of the Indian Constitution.

AMBEDKAR MISSION PATRIKA Ambedkar Mission Patrika is a humanistic monthly journal in Hindi. Its address is Chitkohara P.O., Anishabad, Patna 800 002 India. (For information about Ambedkar, see entry for Ramendra.)

Amberley, John Russell [Viscount] (1843—1876) Amberley, a viscount and eldest son of Earl Russell, entered Parliament in 1866 as a Radical member for Nottingham. In his heretical Analysis of Religious Belief (1876), he examines, compares, and criticizes the various faiths of the world. Viscount Amberley lived and died a Freethinker. According to Foote’s “Infidel Deathbeds,” his will, which stipulated that Bertrand Russell, his son, should be educated by a skeptical friend, was set aside by Earl Russell, “the law of England being such that Freethinkers are denied the parental rights which are enjoyed by their Christian neighbors. Lady Frances Russell, who signs with her initials the Preface to Lord Amberley’s book, which was published after his death, writes, ‘Ere the pages now given to the public had left the press, the hand that had written them was cold, the heart—of which few could know the loving depths—had ceased to bat, the far-ranging mind was forever still, the fervent spirit was at rest. Let this be remembered by those who read, and add solemnity to the solemn purpose of the book.’ ” {BDF; FO; FUK; TRI}

AMBIGUITY Something is ambiguous if it is capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways. Aristotle illustrated ambiguity by using the word “healthy.” Today, a family may have a son who is healthier than a daughter. Living in a high-rent area of Athens may be healthier than living near the Athens garbage dump. However, it does not follow that the son is healthier than the high-rent area of Athens. Bertrand Russell sent the following response to individuals who sent him boring material:

Thank you for your recent communication. I shall lose no time reading it. {AF; Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Vol. 15, #1, Summer 1995}

AMEN A word of Hebrew origin, ’amen means certainly or verily. Believers often utter the word at the ends of prayers or statements with which they want to show they are in agreement. Freethinkers are amused that no analogous word exists to show disapproval during services.

Amenhotep III [King] (14th Century B.C.E.) One of the oldest individuals listed as a “heretic,” Amenhotep III succeeded his father, Thutmose IV, to the ancient Egyptian throne approximately in 1411 B.C.E. and ruled until 1372 B.C.E. He built extensively at Karnak, Thebes, and Luxor. His wife, Queen Tiy, had deserted the gods of Egypt for the solar deity of the Mitanni, an Aryan people of Asia Minor, and she persuaded her son, Ikhnaton (who ruled 1375—1358 B.C.E.), to adopt it. Ikhnaton, five centuries before the first prophet appeared in Judea, therefore embraced monotheism, a fact overlooked by those Hebrews who claim it was the Hebrews who were the first monotheists. For Ikhnaton (whose original name had been Akhenaton), the sun, Aton, was god and god alone, and he was Aton’s physical son. The solar monotheism was absolute, and in his fanaticism Ikhnaton defaced every monument on which appeared the name of Amon, the previous greatest god of Egypt. His subjects and priests were outraged by his destruction of their traditions, and polytheism returned. Amenhetep IV has been called “the Heretic King,” but McCabe and others speak of several rulers at that time as being “heretics.” (See entry for Egyptian Religion.) {CE; RE}

AMERICA Parents in the United States who teach their children that Heaven is up and Hell is down are likely also to teach that stars shoot and that Columbus discovered America. Meteors shoot up in the heavens, but it remains to be seen who first “discovered” America. The actual discoverers of America were prehistoric hunters who may have come from Asia (via the Bering Strait), Europe (via Iceland), Australia (unlikely, but Thor Heyerdahl proposed this), or possibly Africa. Leif Ericsson and other Norse seafarers reached the Americas in the decades after 1000 C.E. Natives from Asia, now variously called American Indians or Native Indians, had preceded Leif Ericcson. In 1996 near the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, a man estimated to be 9,000 years old was found. The Kennewick Man’s skeleton was missing only a few tiny bones. Scientists determined that his was a diet high in marine food and that he may have died from having drowned. “On the physical characteristics alone, he could fit on the streets of Stockholm without causing any kind of notice,” said James Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, implying the individual was not Asian. The bones constitute part of a growing quantity of evidence that Caucasoids, not Asians, were the earliest Americans. In 1997, however, differing theories were being expressed. Eventually, a different and more accurate name might be substituted for the lands of the Western Hemisphere–North America, Middle (or Central) America, and South America. An acronymic name which Samuel Butler used to describe the country between Canada and the United States of Mexico is Usonia, its citizens being Usonians. Such a suggestion does not address how the continents may be re-named, or if citizens of the United States of Mexico will then be called Middle (or Central) Usonians. (See entries for Columbus and Usonia. Also, see entry for Man in Early America, a reference to the finding of a Caucasian skull in Washington that pre-dates “Native Americans.”) {Douglas Preston, “The Lost Man,” The New Yorker, 16 June 1997; John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, 9 Nov 99}

AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS The American Academy of Arts and Letters, founded in 1898 as the National Institute of Arts and Letters and limited to 250 members, was an offspring of the American Social Science Association. The original members, chosen by a committee of the Association, included such creative humanists as Henry Adams, Daniel Chester French, Childe Hassam, William Dean Howells, William and Henry James, John La Farge, Edward MacDowell, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Mark Twain, and two future presidents—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Upon the death of a member, the remaining members choose a replacement. In 1904 the American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded as an inner body of the Institute, with membership limited to fifty persons chosen for special distinction from the membership of the Institute. The first seven chosen were William Dean Howells, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John La Farge, Mark Twain, John Hay, and Edward MacDowell. Henry James was the first of the eight to be selected by this initial group. The Institute was incorporated by an Act of Congress signed by President Taft in 1913, and the Academy was similarly incorporated in 1916 under President Wilson. In 1923 a joint headquarters was established at 633 West 155th Street in New York City in a new building donated by Archer Milton Huntington. (Ezra Pound, who was inducted in 1938, once referred to the Institute in a 1950 letter to William Carlos Williams as “the Institute of Farts and Stutters.”) In 1976, after seventy-two years of separate though related existence, the two groups voted for a merger that made them one institution with a single Board of Directors. In 1992 the Institute dissolved and united into a single body of 250 members, which began 1993 as the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Academy also elects seventy-five distinguished foreign artists, writers, and composers as Honorary Members. Other nations have a national academy. For example, the French Academy dates to the 1630s and has a fixed membership of forty. A large number of Academy members are listed herein. {CE}

AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF ATHEISM (AAAA): See the entry for California Atheists, Humanists.

AMERICAN ATHEIST The American Atheist is a quarterly of American Atheists, PO Box 140195, Austin, Texas 78714-0195. E-mail: <fzindler@atheists.org>. On the Web: <www.americanatheist.org/>.

AMERICAN ATHEIST GENERAL HEADQUARTERS: See entry for Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

AMERICAN ATHEIST NEWSLETTER The American Atheist Newsletter is published by American Atheists, Inc. (PO Box 140195, Austin, Texas 78714-0195). E-mail: <aanews@atheists.org>; and <editor@atheists.org>. On the Web: <http://www.atheists.org> and <ftp.atheists.org/pub/>

AMERICAN ATHEISTS On the Web, American Atheists is at: <http://www.atheists.org/>. See entries for Ron Barrier and Ellen Johnson.

AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC. Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s American Atheists Inc. association was a family-held corporation that published books, a newsletter, and American Atheist. When in the early 1990s she disbanded most of the local chapters and seized their bank accounts and mailing lists, the Atheist Alliance was formed in San Mateo, California. Jon G. Murray became president of American Atheists, Inc. (POB 140195, Austin, Texas 78714), but according to journalist Mimi Swartz, “Many knew [Jon] lacked the smarts and charisma to keep the organization going, but O’Hair was ill and tired.” In 1995, Mrs. O’Hair, who had been in ill health, mysteriously disappeared along with her son and granddaughter. The newsletter was published in 1996, and it stated that the new group that had taken over from the O’Hairs “has gone to considerable lengths” to find the missing principals of the organization but that no new clues had turned up. Dennis Middlebrooks, among others, has lamented the “dirty name” atheists have been given in our time by Stalinist communism and Mrs. O’Hair. The group’s new president is Ellen Johnson, and Spike Tyson is a director. Although she resents “the media’s fixation with numbers,” Johnson told a New York Times reporter that the current membership is 2,500. In November 1998 the Atheist Community of Austin, Texas, rejected affiliation with American Atheists, citing the group’s corporate structure, its lack of democracy, its financial secrecy, its future direction, and an alleged lack of real benefits from affiliation. Johnson, however, has justified the group’s leaders for having taken over the organization after the Murrays and O’Hairs vanished. American Atheists Inc.’s headquarters in Cranford on Christiani Street is at Box 5733, Parsippany, New Jersey 07054-6733. On the Web: <http://www.atheists.org>. (See entries for Ron Barrier, Ellen Johnson, and Madalyn Murray O’Hair.) {FD; Freethought Observer, November-December 1996}

AMERICAN BAPTIST CHURCHES IN THE USA The American Baptist Churches in the USA, organized in 1907, are at PO Box 851, Valley Forge, PA 19482. Web: <http://www.abc-usa.org>.

AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonpartisan organization devoted to the preservation and extension of the basic rights set forth in the U. S. Constitution. It was founded (1920) by such prominent figures as Jane Addams, Helen Keller, Judah Magnus, and Norman Thomas. The ACLU has participated directly or indirectly in almost every major civil liberties case contested in American courts. Included among these are the so-called Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee (1925), the Sacco-Vanzetti case (1920s), the Federal court test (1933) that ended the censorship of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) school desegregation case. On the Web: <http://www.aclu.org/> {CE}

AMERICAN ETHICAL UNION (AEU) The American Ethical Union, a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, is at 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023. Its thirteen-member Board is elected nationally. Currently, its president is Ellen McBride. On the Web: <http://miso.wwa.com/~jej/ves.html>. Also on the Web: <http://www.aeu.org/aeulists.html>. E-mail: <aeuoffice@aeu.org>.

AMERICAN FREEMAN The American Freeman was a freethought newspaper and journal of opinion published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Upon his death, it ceased publication in November 1951. At the beginning it was a socialist paper that favored Eugene V. Debs, who was imprisoned for protesting World War I. While in jail he received one million votes while still running for the office of President, and partly because of Haldeman-Julius’s efforts, Debs was freed. The Appeal to Reason, begun in 1895 by J. A. Wayland, moved from Kansas City, Missouri, to Girard, Kansas. Haldeman-Julius took the paper over in 1919, calling it The New Appeal and in 1919 changing the title to The Appeal To Reason. In 1929 the paper again changed its name to The American Freeman. Originally a weekly, in June 1933 it became a monthly until its demise. During the Depression years of 1932-1933, the journal had a circulation of 30,000. {Hal Verb, Freethought Today, June-July 1998}

AMERICAN GAY AND LESBIAN ATHEISTS (AGLA) The American Gay and Lesbian Atheist newsletter ceased in 1995 when Don Sanders died. In his will, Sanders wrote,

It grieves me a great deal to know that so little concern has been shown by American Gay Atheists Inc.’s board of directors that not one of them is willing to take over the helm of the gay and lesbian community’s most important movement. Therefore, I want none of my estate or property to be rendered unto anyone associated with American Gay Atheists Inc. for fear that it will simply be used to enrich individuals and not to further the cause of Atheism in the lesbian and gay community.

AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION (AHA) 

In 1935, a newly organized Humanist Press Association (HPA) became the first organized national association of humanism in the United States. It was originally inspired by the Rationalist Press Association and, on the suggestion of Curtis W. Reese, reorganized later as the American Humanist Association (AHA). In 1941, the association was incorporated and became the principal organization representing humanism in the United States. Under the leadership of Edwin H. Wilson, one of its founders, the AHA was headquartered in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in the 1930s. It currently is at 7 Harwood Drive, Amherst, New York 14226, and publishes The Humanist, a bi-monthly which since 1951 has presented a nontheistic, secular, and naturalistic approach to philosophy, science, and broad areas of personal and social concern. It focuses on humanistic ideas, developments, and revolutions. In pursuit of free and open dialogue, the magazine strives to air opinions that may not necessarily reflect those of the editors or the publisher, which is the American Humanist Association. The AHA moved its offices to San Francisco after some years in Yellow Springs, then in 1978 moved to Amherst, New York. In 1986 James F. Hornback wrote the following memories of his sixty-seven years of acquaintances within the Unitarian, Ethical Culture, and humanist groups:

Though the American Humanist Association, as such, was incorporated as late as 1943, it was preceded by the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, the Humanist Press Association of 1927 with its New Humanist published by A. Eustace Haydon students Edwin Wilson, Harold Buschman, and Raymond B. Bragg, and the whole array of consciously (and unconsciously) Humanist sermons and books by Unitarian ministers of the Western (“Ethical Basis”) Conference from 1875 on, and by such philosophers as John Dewey, Roy Wood Sellars, and Max Otto. (See Corliss Lamont’s Humanism as a Philosophy, 1949, for the classic overview, and such books as Stow Persons’s Free Religion: An American Faith, 1947, and Charles H. Lyttle’s Freedom Moves West: A History of the Western Unitarian Conference, 1952, for early organizational details. John Dewey’s A Common Faith, 1934, although an otherwise admirable philosophic statement, to my mind gave Humanism a so-far-fatal setback by offering otherwise promising ministers and teachers a provisional definition of God as “the uniting of the ideal and the actual,” which kept thousands of them happy in the perpetuation of the traditional religions and the God-language.) Edwin Wilson performed much the same sacrificial role in the organization of the AHA that George O’Dell (1913—1947) and Burns Weston before him performed in the American Ethical Union. He carried the AHA at the expense of Unitarian pastorates in Schenectady and Salt Lake City, until the AHA set him up professionally in Yellow Springs. His successor as executive director, Toby McCarroll, at first promising, soon led the AHA down the primrose path of Humanistic Psychology (named “Humanistic” or “Third Force” only because of its opposition to Freudianism and Behaviorism). Toby, a speaker in St. Louis and a fellow traveler to the International Humanist and Ethical Union, was soon telling me of the advantages of appealing to priests, preachers, and rabbis. He is Brother Toby again, the head of a Catholic monastery. But many of the same erroneous ideas of pop psychology and mystic humanism (e.g., it’s all in your head, or your head is a model of the universe, so downplay reason and science) are now plentiful in the AHA as well as in the AEU. The AEU always left itself open to such varied beliefs, as did the Unitarians. But the AHA? I had hoped for better. As a veteran of many interrelations between Humanism and Ethical Culture, I have valued the difference: the AHA for rigorous scientific, naturalistic ethics, derived from an ideal projection of real, felt human values and its testing in experience; and the AEU for “the larger humanism” of being ethical in a congregational fellowship, for whatever philosophy you may care to espouse. Philosophically, the differences are important. Structurally, believe me, they are insurmountable.

In addition to Edwin Wilson, the editors of The Humanist have included Priscilla Robertson, Gerald Wendt, Paul Kurtz, Tolbert H. McCarroll, Lloyd Morain, Don Page, Rick Szykowny, Gerry O’Sullivan, and Fred Edwords. As of 1995, the editorial board consisted of Andre Bacard, Joseph E. Barnhart, H. J. Blackham, Bette Chambers, Edd Doerr, Beverley Earles, Albert Ellis, Edward L. Ericson, James Farmer, Betty Friedan, Edna Ruth Johnson, Marty Klein, Marvin Kohl, Jean S. Kotkin, Gerald Larue, Lester Mondale, Lloyd Morain, Mary Morain, Maxine Negri, Suzanne Paul, Howard B. Radest, James Randi, and Ward Tabler. The late Corliss Lamont was always a key figure in the movement of naturalistic humanism, and he was instrumental in contributing financially to the success of the AHA as well as encouraging The Humanist to emphasize a nontheistic metaphysic and to assist in the formation of humanist chapters around the country. The American Humanist Association is a full member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. E-mail: <ap818@freenet.buffalo.edu> and on the Web: <http://www.infidels.org/org/aha/>. The American Humanist Bookstore is on the Web: <http://www.imall.com>. (See entries Corliss Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Priscilla Robertson, and Edwin H. Wilson.)

AMERICAN INDIANS NATIVE AMERICANS • Indian reservations are a parcel of land set aside forIndians,

	surrounded by thieves.

General William Sherman in 1865

The indigenous peoples of both North and South America, as well as their descendants, are variously called American Indians or Native Americans. Although once popular, the terms Amerind and Amerindian are now seldom used. Some do refer to themselves as Indian people, and aboriginal Canadians who are not Aleut or Inuks sometimes call themselves Indians. Rather than using the umbrella terms, many humanists prefer using the names of the specific peoples: the Iowas, Crees, Iroquois, Cherokees, etc. Offensive are terms such as red, redskins, braves, bucks, half-breeds, papooses, squaws, wampum, warpath, etc. (See entry for Native American Religion.) {Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, 1995}

AMERICAN RATIONALIST The American Rationalist (PO Box 994, St. Louis, Missouri 63188) is published bi-monthly. A scholarly publication, the magazine was edited until his death in 1996 by Gordon Stein. Kaz Dziamka is its current editor (PO Box 80182, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87198-0182); C. Lee Hubbell, associate editor; Barbara Stocker, managing editor; A. J. Mattill Jr. and Marge Mignacca, contributing editors; Judith Hayes, Walter Hoops, Frank Mortyn, Bernard Katz, and Eric Rajala, senior writers. E-mail: <rsslbarb@aol.com>. On the Web: <http://www.infidels.org/org/ar>.

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF FREETHINKERS The American Society of Freethinkers, POB 984, Troy, Michigan, is led by Dick Mellen. {FD}

AMERICAN UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION (AUA)

The American Unitarian Association was organized in 1825. The Universalist Church of America dates back to 1793. In 1961 the two denominations, both liberal alternatives to more dogmatic forms of Christianity, merged. Their outlook is based on individual freedom of belief, therefore including agnostics, atheists, humanists, liberal Christians, and unitarian theists. Over the past decade feminist theology has made an impact, the hymn books are gender-inclusive, and half the settled ministers are women. In 1998 there were 1,039 congregations, 1,296 ministers, and 150,413 members. The Unitarian Universalist Association is at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02108. On the Web: <http://www.uua.org>. E-mail for the Rev. Kenneth Torquil MacLean, who is the special assistant to the President for Interfaith and International Relations, is <kmaclean@uua.org>. (See entry for Unitarian Universalist Association.)

AMERICANS FOR RELIGIOUS LIBERTY Americans for Religious Liberty, POB 6656, Silver Springs, Maryland 20916, publishes Voice of Reason. It is dedicated to preserving the American tradition of religious, intellectual, and personal freedom in a secular democratic state. In 1995 the group published The Case Against School Vouchers by Edd Doerr, Albert J. Mendendez, and John M. Swomley. {FD}

AMERICANS UNITED FOR SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 8120 Fenton Street, Silver Spring, Maryland 20910, was started in 1947. It is not sponsored by any freethought or humanistic organizations and is strictly non-sectarian. On the Web: <www.netplexgroup.com>.

Ames, Charles G. (20th Century) A Unitarian minister, Ames once stated, “We are not obliged to choose between a false religion and no religion at all; our choice is rather between the false and the true, or between the lower and the higher. Nor did harm ever come to the man who lets go a creed which he can no longer retain with honesty; such harm may come from heartless conformity and insincere profession.”

Ames, Daniel T. (20th Century) A freethinker, Ames wrote Biblical Myths (1922). {GS}

Ames, Edward Scribner (20th Century) Ames, who taught at the University of Chicago, wrote The Psychology of Religious Experience (1919), Away With God and Christianity (1935), and Religion (1949). According to Edwin H. Wilson, Ames was a naturalist but one who used traditional theistic terms. He once explained, in a brochure entitled “Humanism,”

(Religious) humanists are naturalistic, experimental, behavioristic, humanitarian. They accept the evolutionary doctrine. . . . This sphere (here and now) of human interests and accomplishments is the proper concern of many, according to these humanists. . . . [A] chief point of attack of the humanist upon the old beliefs is the existence of God, and in general the conception of the supernatural which runs through those beliefs. . . . They emphasize the function of scientific knowledge as a means of realizing a better and happier life.

Ames described the literary humanists of the 1930s as “violently opposed not only to Rousseau but to Francis Bacon and John Dewey.” As for the gods, “The gods are not separate from men but are of one nature with them. Gods and men constitute one living organism, one kinship group.” Because of his views on God, however, he was not invited to sign Humanist Manifesto I. For him to have signed, in Wilson’s view, would have opened “the door to a flood of theist apologists.” In his old age, after he retired, his legs were both amputated and he told Wilson, “Here I sit, literally footless, wondering what it would be like if—as I do not believe—it were possible for me to rejoin the wife of my years in an existence other than this.” {EW; GS}

Ames, Fanny Baker (1840—1931) A leader of the Unitarian Women’s Auxiliary Conference, Ames was a suffragist and charity organizer.

Ames, Van Meter (Born 1898) Ames, a professor of philosophy, University of Cincinnati, and author of André Gide (1947) and Prayers and Meditations (1970), wrote of the word humanism: “I doubt if I could say anything more or better on the subject of my naturalistic humanism than I did in The Humanist (Issue 1, 1951).” In The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (March 1952), Ames wrote “The Humanism of Thomas Mann.” He found that “from first to last Thomas Mann thinks in terms of a conflict between unconscious nature and conscious spirit. Yet the discussions between the Jesuit Naphta and the humanist Settembrini in The Magic Mountain introduce something new: in considering science as a possible escape from the verbal squirrel cage.” Ames finds that the work scarcely seems to be a tribute to science, unless obliquely, by letting the reader see the inadequacy of unscientific attitudes and the danger of pseudo-science. Ames also found that, for Mann,

God is the personification of value as found in human experience, refined by the thought and feeling of such men as Ikhnaton, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—and Joseph. God becomes remote, with a mysterious plan that overrides human feelings, when Mann reverts to a dualism that not only reverses the novel’s drift but is anachronistic in attributing to ancient Israel the divorce of nature and spirit, practical life and religion, which came to be assumed by medieval Jews and Christians. Assertion of this divorce makes one wonder how far Mann has come toward the coalescence of the sacred and secular in scientific humanism.

{CL; HNS; WAS, 23 Sep 1956}

AMHERST COLLEGE ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS, RATIONALISTS, AND GODLESS HUMANISTS: Atheists at the Massachusetts college, Amherst, are found on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Amicis, Edmonde de (1846—1908) Amicis was a leading Italian who served in the army against the Pope’s troops and then became, said the Athenaeum, “one of the most extensively read Italian authors of the last three-quarters of a Century.” Amicis professed agnosticism in his Memorie and reported that he was “fascinated and tormented by the vast mystery of life.” {JM}

AMISH: See entry for Mennonites.

Amiel, Henri Frédéric (1821—1881) A Swiss poet and philosopher, descendant of an exiled Huguenot family, Amiel was professor of aesthetics and moral philosophy at Geneva Academy. His Journal Intime (1883—1884) is an expression of a mind that rejected Christianity with pain and regret. “We are always making God our accomplice,” he wrote, “so that we may legalize our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.” Amiel remained theistic and mystic, yet his skepticism was profound. “The apologies of Pascal, Leibnitz, and Secretan,” he wrote, “seem to me to prove no more than those of the Middle Ages.” {RAT; TYD} Amis, Kingsley (1922—1995) Amis, an English novelist known for a satire on academic life, Lucky Jim (1953), was never involved with the freethought movement. However, according to Nicolas Walter, Amis wrote a poem, “New Approach Needed,” and an article, “On Christ’s Nature,” which contained devastating criticisms of Christianity.

Amis, Martin, Author art

Amis writes "Like God, nuclear weapons are free creations of the human mind. Unlike God, nuclear weapons are real." --from "Thinkability", an introductory essay in Einstein's Monsters, a collection of stories about a world where nuclear war is commonplace.

--IZ

---

Amis has been moved to the agnostics section based upon this sent in from a reader:

Daily Telegraph (London), 13 May 2000, page A8

Interview with Martin Amis, aged 50: "...says he has recently stopped thinking of himself as an atheist and has come to see the importance, as he gets older, of having a spiritual dimension to his life. 'Now I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development,

Amman, Hans Jacob (1586—1658) Amman was a German surgeon and traveler who wrote Voyage in the Promised Land. {BDF}

Ammianus, Marcellinus (4th Century) A Roman soldier-historian, Ammianus served under Julian. He compared the rancor of the Christians of the period to that of wild beasts. Gibbon called him “an accurate and faithful guide.” Ammianus died approximately 395 C.E. {BDF}

Ammonius (3rd Century) Surnamed Saccas or the porter, Ammonius was born of Christian parents in Alexandria but turned pagan and opened a school of philosophy. Among his pupils were Origen, Longinus, and Polotinus. Ammonius is thought to have originated the neo-Platnoic movement, which formed the most serious opposition to Christianity in its early times. Ammonius died in 243 C.E. {BDF}

Ammons, Archie Randolph) (1926— ) Ammons, a poet on the English department faculty of Cornell University in New York State, when asked if he found any of the categories of humanism described his viewpoint, replied to the present author, “None of the above. I’m not a humanist. I believe in the way things work, a naturalistic dynamics that includes man and the ways he works.” {WAS, 3 June 1992}

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL NETWORK Amnesty International is a major group with concerns about human rights. On the Web: <http://www.derechos.org/amnesty/aigroups.html>

AMON (Amon Re) Amon, in Egypt, was said to have become king of all the gods. {LEE}

AMORALITY That which is amoral is neither moral nor immoral. A baby is amoral. An amoral choice is to prefer Beethoven to Brahms, cherries to strawberries, or blondes to brunettes. Some, however, incorrectly refer to extreme immorality as wickedness—these individuals mistakenly claim that anyone who does not understand what is generally considered moral or decent is therefore amoral.

Amos, Tori (20th Century) Amos, the daughter of a Methodist minister, had a hit song, “God,” in her 1990s album, Under the Pink. It is forthright in its rejection of Christianity’s patriarchal presumptions. “God,” the song goes, “sometimes you just don’t come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?” Her general work is, however, “spiritual.”

Amram, David (Werner) (1930- ) Amram is a composer, conductor, and musician. He was the first composer-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (1966-1967); composed incidental music for the New York Shakespeare Festival (1956-1967); wrote a Holocaust opera, “The Final Ingredient”; and composed music for such films as “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Splendor in the Grass.” Accomplished on the French horn, he also plays piano, guitar, numerous flutes and whistles, combining symphony, jazz, and folk music with audience participation. For Paddy Chayevsky’s “Joseph D” on Broadway, he was a one-person symphony as well as choir, performing almost all the instruments and singing the soprano as well as the bass voices. Amram’s autobiography is Vibrations: Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram (1968). In it and elsewhere he has described having worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Leonard Bernstein, and all the major Beatnick writers. He was musical accompanist at the historic 1957 first-ever Jazz-Poetry reading in New York with Jack Kerouac. Broadcast Music Incorporated has cited him as “one of twenty most performed composers of concern music in the United States.” He is acknowledged as a pioneer member of world music and multi-cultural symphonic programming. Asked his outlook about humanism and religion, Amram, one of the best-known of the Beat Generation, responded to the present author:

I’m a hyperactive member of the Jewish faith, in the grand tradition of the wandering Klezmer-philosophers, who rejoiced in the beauty of each new day and walked humbly on God’s great Mother Earth. All good things in life celebrate the spirit. I believe I’ll be reincarnated as an eggplant, which is why I’m becoming a vegetarian again, to prepare my new career. {WAS, 5 May 1998} Amram, David (Werner) (17 Nov 1930 - ) Amram is a composer, conductor, and musician. He was the first composer-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (1966-1967); composed incidental music for the New York Shakespeare Festival (1956-1967); wrote a Holocaust opera, “The Final Ingredient”; and composed music for such films as The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass. Accomplished on the French horn, he also plays piano, guitar, numerous flutes and all kinds of bells and whistles, combining symphony, jazz, and folk music with audience participation. For Paddy Chayevsky’s Joseph D on Broadway, he was a one-person symphony as well as choir, performing almost all the instruments and singing the soprano as well as the bass voices. With the author Frank McCourt he worked in 2000 on a musical work, Missa Manhattan. He often appears at benefits, for homeless children and for other causes he finds important to support. Amram has estimated that he has worked seventy or eighty benefits with Paul Krassner, The Realist editor. In his Vibrations: Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram (1968), he describes having worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Leonard Bernstein, and the major Beatnick writers. He was musical accompanist at the historic 1957 first-ever Jazz-Poetry reading in New York with Jack Kerouac. Broadcast Music Incorporated has cited him as “one of twenty most performed composers of concern music in the United States.” He is acknowledged as a pioneer member of world music and multi-cultural symphonic programming. Tina Kelley, in a New York Times interview (8 June 2000) after Amram’s farmhouse in Putnam Valley, New York, was nearly destroyed, was told how important improvisation is in music:

If you stay in the music for the true meaning of the music—which is a celebration of life and a sharing of good feelings and a sensitivity toward others and realizing that like life itself, anything can happen at any moment—your job as a musician, even a composer or conductor, is to turn a catastrophe into something beautiful, and to become, as Muhammad Ali said, a master of disaster.

Asked his outlook about humanism and religion, Amram, one of the best-known of the Beat Generation, responded to the present author:

I’m a hyperactive member of the Jewish faith, in the grand tradition of the wandering Klezmer-philosophers, who rejoiced in the beauty of each new day and walked humbly on God’s great Mother Earth. All good things in life celebrate the spirit. I believe I’ll be reincarnated as an eggplant, which is why I’m becoming a vegetarian again, to prepare my new career. {WAS, 5 May 1998}

AMULETS 

Objects called amulets were designed to ward off the power of any harmful influences. Like talismans, fetishes, or charms, they are thought to have apparently magical qualities for averting evil and ensuring good fortune. The Jewish mezuzah and phylactery are amulets. Christians have used a cross, others have used the rabbit’s foot, and still others use magic squares, abracadabra, the wheel of the sun god, the swastika, or other devices to dispel evil and bring good luck. The harmful influences are said to come from the Devil, who to Jews and Christians is the personal supreme spirit of evil as well as the ruler of Hell. They might also come from some evil spirit or from a zombie, one who has been raised from the grave by a houngan (sorcerer) or hounsie, then tries to enslave you, forcing you to perform evil acts. Amulets or charms, found in commercially successful shops around the world, are popular in santería, voodoo, obeah, candomblé (in Brazil), and similar faiths, all of which state they are on the side of good over bad. {ER}

ANAGRAMS To the religious zealots who object to Santa because it is an anagram of Satan, the non-superstitious point out that evangelist is an anagram for evil’s agent.

Anaimuthu, V. (1925— ) Anaimuthu edits Sinthanayaian, a freethought Tamil publication in India. In 1976 he was a contributor to The Progress of Atheism. {FUK; GS}

ANALOG With the advent of the computer, analog devices (e.g., hands on the clock’s face) were complemented by digital devices (e.g., numbers such as 12:35 to show the time). An analog piano has strings whereas a digital piano operates electrically. Luddites are more apt to prefer the analog. Anyone with a noisy neighbor playing church music prefers listening to the digital piano with the pianist’s earphones being used. (See entry for Digital.)

Anastos, M. Elizabeth (20th Century) With David Marshak, Anastos wrote Philosophy-Making for Unitarian Universalist Growth and Learning: A Process Guide (1983).

Anaxagoras (c. 500—428 B.C.E.) A personal friend of Pericles, Anaxagoras was found guilty of impiety for asserting that the sun is “a mass of red-hot metal . . . larger than the Peloponnesus,” thus conflicting with current religious thought. Robertson calls him “the first freethinker historically known to have been legally prosecuted and condemned for his freethought.” (Philolaos was prosecuted but not condemned.) According to Robertson, he taught that the moon is a fiery (or earthy) solid body having in it plains and mountains and valleys, “this while asserting that infinite mind was the source and introducer of all the motion in the infinite universe; infinite is extent and infinitely divisible.” He also taught that the mythical personages of the poets were mere abstractions invested with name and gender. Athenians saw no blasphemy in his saying that Gê (Gaia) or Dêmêter was the earth, for to them the earth was a goddess. But Anaxagoras challenged the divinity of the sun. The trouble, then, lay rather in his negative than in his positive assertion. He is reputedly the first Greek who wrote a book in prose. Although Anaxagoras was a freethinker according to Robertson, he was cited as being a theist in Shelley’s “A Refutation of Deism.” McCabe notes that Anaxagoras “found––not unnaturally at that time—that the materialistic philosophy of the Ionic School was not satisfying and he introduced Reason or Mind (Nous) into the Universe. This was the beginning of the ‘Design Argument’ for the existence of God, which Socrates and Plato developed and modern theists have used so extensively, but Anaxagoras did not mean a personal God. The irony of his life is that in spite of this service to mysticism he was under the protection of Pericles, for impiety; and the particular impiety that annoyed the Athenians was to say that the stars were white-hot material bodies, not the abodes of spirits.” {BDF; CE; CL; ER; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}

Anaxandrides (Ancient Greece) Gore Vidal has quoted the little known Anaxandrides as having said, “We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing.”

Anaximander (610—547 B.C.E.) A pupil as well as companion of Thales, Anaximander (also called Anaximandros) was, like him, an astronomer, geographer, and physicist, seeking for a first principle (for which he may or may not have invented the name). He rejected the idea of a single primordial element, such as water. He affirmed an infinite material cause, without beginning and indestructible, with an infinite number of worlds. And, showing a Chaldean impulse, he speculated on the ascent of man from something aquatic, as well as on the form and motion of the earth (figured by him as a cylinder), the nature and motions of the solar system, and thunder and lightning. His doctrine of evolution, remarked Robertson, “stands out for us today like the fragment of a great ruin, hinting obscurely of a line of active thinkers.” Further, he believed that only in the Mesopotamian world could the early evolution have taken place. According to Diogenes, Anaximandros invented the gnomon, the first map and globe, and one of the first clocks. {CE; JMR; JMRH}

Anaximenes (c. 548 B.C.E.) Possibly a pupil but at least a follower of Anaximandros, Anaximenes made his infinite and first principle the air. He conceived the earth as suspended. He theorized on the rainbow, earthquakes, and the revolution of the heavenly bodies, mistakenly supposing the earth to be broad and flat. He affirmed the eternity of motion as well as the perishability of the earth. He needed no dogma of divine creation. According to Robertson, Anaximenes “cannot have anticipated the chemical conception of the reduction of all solids to gases: The thesis was framed either a priori or in adaptation of priestly claims for the deities of the elements; and others were to follow with the guesses of earth and fire and heat and cold. Still, the speculation is that of bold and far-grasping thinkers, and for these there can have been no validity in the ordinary God-ideas of polytheism.” {CE; JMR; JMRH}

ANCESTOR WORSHIP An element of religious expression, ancestor worship in Africa and Asia is often a form of respect shown to the deceased. The Pacific Confucianist Chinese burn incense, offer food, and speak to their ancestors as a sign of filial piety. (See entry for Shaman.) {DGC}

ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION: See entry for Greek Religion.

ANCIENT HUMANISM It could be said that in all its various forms, humanism is merely the natural and to-be-expected by-product of mankind’s progression from savage primitivism to an increasingly advanced form of civilization and culture. As the human species has developed, it has become progressively more self-reliant, self-confident, and self-assertive. The early priestly kingdoms allowed people almost no initiative or individuality, and the later feudal and military governments were little or no improvement. From the days of Sargon of Akkad, who united Babylonia approximately 2525 B.C.E., to those of the empires of the Assyrians, Hittites, Persians, Tartars, and Turks, little progress was made concerning betterment of the welfare of mankind or the encouragement of science. However, with the development in the ancient Hellenistic culture of the city-states or polis, a degree of stable civilization came into being and humane government might be considered to have entered into its childhood stage, at least from a Eurocentric point of view. From this Hellenic civilization came a philosophical concept developed by Sophists which held that man was not just another part of the universe, as was believed by earlier Greek philosophers, but that he was the center. Protagoras of Abdera, ancient anticipator of pragmatism and believer in the relativity of truth, accented this change of thought by his maxim, “Man is the measure of all things; of the being of things that are, and of the non-being of things that are not.” Such a concept that man is the measure, that he is capable, within limits, of mastering his own fate, is one which is basic to ancient humanism. It helped turn the study of nature to the study of man and his social relationships; as a result, man came to think of mankind as being capable of changing the universe–in order to improve mankind’s own lot, and as a gesture of the mastery men and women held over their own fate. “Man” in Old English or Anglo-Saxon was universal and referred to all humans equally. Waepman was the word for a male human, wifman for the female human. Although some contemporary feminists object to the use of “man” to include women as well as men, the translation of Protagoras’s “man” is meant to be gender-free. The newly coined pronoun “(s)he” is considered by many to be redundant. In common with many contemporary humanists, the Sophists emphasized the spirit of free inquiry into all knowledge, displayed a marked interest in social legislation and public affairs, and created a furor over their questionings of religion and outright agnosticism. Protagoras, for instance, was banned from Athens on grounds of impiety for having said, “Concerning the gods I am unable to say whether they exist or not, nor, if they do, what they are like.” However, the Sophists insisted that a person’s religious beliefs are entirely his own; and included among their later numbers were such theists as Gorgias, Scopelian, and Julian the Apostate, the last of whom was known for his inconstant adherence to Christianity. Julian, in fact, tried unsuccessfully to reform paganism and reestablish it in the Empire. The Stoics were also ancient humanists. Stoicism, in fact, was a blend of humanism and supernaturalism. However, the Stoics rejected the superstitious and anthropomorphic elements of religion and substituted allegorical explanations in their stead. Believing that reason was the vital principle of the universe, they taught that “all men are of one blood, of one family, and all and each are sacred to one another. Harmony with nature and oneself is the ideal life,” wrote Willystine Goodsell in Conflict of Naturalism and Humanism (1910), a masterful study of ancient humanism. Their synonyms for “God” were Zeus, Providence, the Universal Law, and Nature. Their system of ethics was man-centered. They were concerned not only with making the individual more self-sufficient and independent of externals, but also with making the individual a good member of society and a citizen of the world. In the time of a caste-ridden world, they helped further the cause of humanitarian legislation. The Epicureans were also ancient humanists. Although Epicureanism has been attacked vigorously in the past, scholars today are reinterpreting the philosophy and feel that it offers much more of a positive outlook than formerly had been admitted. The Epicureans were humanists in that they taught men to look to themselves rather than to gods, for they believed the gods were not interested in human affairs. Contrary to popular opinion, Epicurus’s ethical system was not simply one of eating, drinking, and being merry. He taught that one should lead a simple life with few desires, that friendship is the most valuable feature of living, and that prudence is a cardinal virtue. Because he believed that there is nothing evil about death since the dead have no feelings and that for the living death exists not and therefore is not to be feared, he deduced that we should concentrate upon present happiness. His attitude toward fun and merriment has been the most contested of his ideas; however, he did not advocate the complete satisfaction of physical appetites–rather, he stressed the “lasting pleasures of the mind.” Epicurus was the first to have brought forward the philosophical concept of chance in the universe, and he taught that there exist no deities nor is there any immortality. His most important link to contemporary humanists is his calling upon the natural sciences to serve human needs. Also, Epicurus proclaimed that the sole value of knowledge is in relation to action. “Therefore,” he reasoned, “the supreme purpose of philosophy should be to introduce tranquillity and happiness into human life.” His was an outlook that was meant to sweep away the chimeras and religious scruples and superstitions that enchain man and destroy their happiness. Plato stands apart as one who did not agree with Protagoras that man is the measure of all things. He believed that God is the measure of all things in the highest degree—a degree much higher than any mere man of whom the followers of Protagoras talk. Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) as well as K’ung Fu-Tzu (Confucius), Socrates, and Sophocles are among the other ancient humanists. As non-Eurocentric scholars expand their studies, more and more sages can be expected to be added to the list of ancient humanists. {CE; ER}

Andersen, S. M. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Andersen was a correspondent (Denmark) for The Humanist.

Anderson, David (20th Century) Anderson is Secretary of Rationalists United for Secular Humanism.

Anderson, David Daniel (1924— ) Anderson wrote Robert Ingersoll (1972). A writer, educator, and editor, he has taught at Michigan State University. {FUS}

Anderson, Edward B. (20th Century) Anderson, minister of the Second Congregational Meeting House Society (Unitarian-Universalist) in Nantucket, Massachusetts, was asked in 1992 his views about religion. He responded to the present author:

Whatever New Age enthusiasts maintain, gnostics, shamans, and druids will not be the wave of the future. They will, however, be part of its inspiration. The impulse to study ancient religions long ago rejected and replaced is a sign that people are seeking new inspiration, new expressions of belief. This means they already believe differently from what traditional religions teach. Cover-up, secrecy, propaganda have taught us to be skeptical of those who govern, even of government itself. Such skepticism is healthy. It protects our ideas. Without skepticism, those ideals would perish. In the process we have become skeptical of all institutions, law, medicine, education, religion, and those who manage them. We suspect cover-up, secrecy, propaganda everywhere. Our suspicions are well-founded. The impetus to reject dishonesty and hypocrisy contributes to the movement to re-evaluate what establishment liars and hypocrites rejected centuries ago. This means taking a fresh look at gnosticism, shamanism, animism, witches, Albigensians, Manicheans, pagans, and druids. It is a good time to be a heretic, because heresy has been given the edge of idealism.

(See entry for Jon Andersson) {WAS, 5 March 1992}

Anderson, George (1824—1913) Anderson was a generous contributor to the Rationalist Press Association and the National Secular Society. When he tired in 1899 of G. W. Foote’s Freethinker, Anderson demanded back his loans and took Foote through the bankruptcy court. {RAT; RE; TRI}

Anderson, John (1893—1962) Anderson, a Scottish freethinker whose socialist and anti-cleric father had a profound influence upon him, was appointed to Challis Chair of Philosophy, the University of Sydney, Australia, where he taught from 1927 to 1958. A pluralist, he claimed one can never know anything completely, that everything–religion, censorship, patriotism, social conventions–should be critically approached. He founded the Sydney University Freethought Society, circulated the banned James Joyce Ulysses with a cover inscribed “A Book of Common Prayer,” and held that religious influences should be hounded out of education. {SWW; TRI}

Anderson, John C. (1909— ) A humanist counselor, Anderson signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}

Anderson, Marie (Born 1842) A Dutch freethinker, Anderson wrote for De Dageraad and was an editor of De Twintigste Eeuw (The Twentieth Century). She wrote novels and in some of her works used the pen names of “Meirouw Quarlè” and “Dr. Al. Dondorf.” {BDF}

Anderson, Maxwell (1888—1959) Asked about humanism, Anderson, the journalist and dramatist who wrote Winterset, replied, “I don’t know what I think about humanism, and I doubt that what I think is important.” He had, however, once written, “The gods of men are sillier than their kings and queens, and emptier and more powerless.” {TYD; WAS, 15 May 1956}

Anderson, Maybanke Sussanah (1845—1927) Anderson, whose name formerly was Wolstenholme, was an early Australian secularist. A feminist and educationalist, she published and edited a fortnightly paper, The Woman’s Voice, which in 1894 she described as “democratic but not revolutionary; womanly but not weak; fearless without effrontery; liberal without license.” She published articles by Mary Wollstonecraft and Annie Besant. In 1899, she married Sir Frances Anderson. {SWW}

Anderson, Peter O. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Anderson was an assistant professor at Ohio State University. {HM2}

Anderson, Robert [Sir] (19th Century) Anderson, a freethinker, wrote Christianized Rationalism and the Higher Criticism (1903) and A Doubter’s Doubts About Science and Religion (1899). {GS}

Anderson, William F. (20th Century) Anderson, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a humanist counselor. {HM2}

Andersson, Jon (20th Century) Andersson, an accomplished musician and brother of Unitarian minister Edward B. Anderson, is the long-time freethinking companion-model of Paul Cadmus. (See entry for Paul Cadmus).

Andhazi, Federico (1964—	)

Andhazi is a Freudian psychoanalyst of Hungarian descent. In Argentina, he wrote El Anatomista (The Anatomist, 1997) about Mateo Colón, said to have been the first man to discover the female organ. However, when the donor of the $15,000 prize, Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat, learned that the clitoris, and its discovery, were the center of the book’s plot, the Cement Queen, as she has been described, abruptly called off a prize ceremony. Andahazi received the money in a check anonymously pushed under his door. He fictionalized Colón’s life, describing how university anatomists used dead bodies. When necrophilia was whispered about and the anatomists were rumored to be having sex with the bodies, local Italian peasant women were said to pretend to be dead after covering themselves with blankets and lying on body carts. One physician, caught with a body that suddenly squirmed with delight was described as running off while shouting, “It’s a miracle,” and declaring that his semen had brought her to life. The work received negative reviews by Catholic officials. {World Press Review, September 1997}

Andrade, David Alfred (1859—1928) Andrade was an early Australian secularist. An anarchist, bookseller, and magician, he was honorary secretary of the Australasian Secular Association (ASA) in 1884. {SWW}

Andrade, William Charles (1863—1939) Andrade was an Australian anarchist, illusionist, bookseller, and publisher. With his brother David, he opened in 1898 Melbourne’s first book shop specializing in radical literature, freethought, marriage and sex education. With his manager, Percy Laidler, Andrade became the leading Australian first-editions publisher of left-wing, Marxist, and revolutionary books. He described himself as “the name that means magic in Australia.” {SWW}

Andre-Nuytz, Louis (19th Century) Andre-Nuytz wrote Positivism For All, an elementary exposition of philosophic positivism, for which Littré wrote a preface in 1868. {BDF}

Andrew, John Albion (1818—1867) Andrew was the Civil War governor of Massachusetts (1861—1866). An anti-slavery advocate, he was one of the organizers of the Free-Soil party and, later, of the Republican party. While a student at Bowdoin, which required attendance at chapel, Andrew asked permission to attend the Unitarian church, allegedly because the sermons were shorter, and he later became a member in Boston of the Church of the Disciples (Unitarian), whose minister was James Freeman Clarke. {CE; EG}

Andrews, Dana (1909—1992) Andrews, a distinguished motion picture actor, supported various humanist causes and was on the editorial board of The Humanist. A suave Southern leading man, Andrews starred in 1940s classics like Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives.

Andrews, Dana (1 Jan 1909-17 Dec 1992) Andrews, a distinguished motion picture actor, supported various humanist causes and at one time was on the editorial board of The Humanist. A suave Southern leading man, he was never nominated for an Academy Award. Nevertheless, he became well known for portraying average-Joe characters of the 1940s. He starred in classics like Laura (1944, with Gene Tierney, Judith Anderson, Clifton Webb, and Vincent Price), A Walk in the Sun (1945, in which he plays a sergeant who takes over command of his American infantry platoon in Italy when the commanding lieutenant is killed), and The Best Years of Our Lives (called the best picture of 1946, in which he plays the part of an Air Force bombardier who returns home from World War II).

Andrews, James (20th Century) A professor of mathematics at Florida State University, Andrews is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.

Andrews, Jane (1833-1887) Andrews, a Unitarian, was an educator and children’s author.

Andrews, John Arthur (1865—1903) 

“Jack” Andrews was an Australian anarchist, poet, journalist, and editor. Attracted to the ideas of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, he lived a poverty-stricken lifestyle by choice. Author of A Handbook of Anarchy (1894), he was jailed for having failed to include a sufficient address as the printer. He was a co-editor of Reason (1896) and editor of Tocsin, and The Bulletin in 1895 published his poem, “Invicta Spes,” which included the lines

To drivel no religious consolation Take I the pen; no gods or creeds I own, No ghostly faith supplies my inspiration, No metaphysic lore of things unknown. . . . {SWW}

Andrews, Richard (20th Century) Andrews founded the Utah Chapter of American Atheists in 1979, serving as its director or co-director until the chapter closed in 1993. In this capacity he led fights against church tax exemption and prayer in government meetings. Also, he produced a Dial-An-Atheist service. In 1993, he was recognized as Atheist of the Year. He serves on the board of directors for the Society of Separationists and other atheist organizations. E-mail: <rich123@aol.com>

Andrews, Stephen Pearl (1812—1886) An American sociologist and social reformer, Andrews wrote The Basic Outline of Universology (1871) and The Church and Religion of the Future (1886). He was vice-president of the Liberal Club of New York and a contributor to the New York Truthseeker. McCabe reported that Andrews may have known thirty-two languages, that he invented a universal language and a universal (non-theistic) religion. He agitated for making Texas a free state, and he spoke out on behalf of Abolitionism. In 1843, however, he was mobbed, driven from his Texas home in the middle of the night, and given the warning that he would be hanged if he was found in the city limits within an hour. (See entry for Lilian Leland, who married his son.) {BDF; Freethought History #15, 1995; JM; PUT; RAT}

Andrieu, Jean (20th Century) Andrieu addressed the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985).

Andrieux, Louis (Born 1840) A French deputy, Andrieux took part in the Freethought Conference at Naples in 1869 and, in 1870, was imprisoned three months for his attack on the Empire. In 1879 he became Prefect of Police at Paris, after which he wrote Souvenirs of a Prefect of Police (1885).

Andrysek, Oldrich (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Culture (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Andrysek addressed the group. He lived in what then was Czechoslovakia. Andrysek is a senior officer of Refugee Policy with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies in Switzerland.

Anellis, Irving H. (20th Century) Anellis is on the board of directors of the Bertrand Russell Society. He wrote Van Heijenoort: Logic and Its History in the Works of Jean Van Heijenoort (1994).

Angela, Alberto (1962- ) and Piero Angela (1928— ) Italian paleoanthropologists Alberto and Piero Angela wrote The Extraordinary Story of Human Origins (1993, translation by Gabriele Tonne). Our species, they report after focusing on fossils and artifacts of hominid evolution in central East Africa, is a recent product of, necessarily dependent upon, and totally within organic evolution. {H. James Birx, Free Inquiry, Summer 1994}

Angeles, Peter A(dam) (1931— ) Formerly a professor of philosophy at Santa Barbara City College in California, Angeles is author of Critiques of God (1976). With Corliss Lamont and David A. Law, Angeles wrote “Dewey’s Idea of the Religious–Critical Evaluations” in Religious Humanism (Winter 1968). As the editor of Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God (1997), Angeles included rejections of the view that moral values and human purpose require divine sanction. The volume was written by Dewey, Freud, Fromm, Hook, Lamont, Nagel, Russell, and others. {FUS}

Angell, Norman [Sir] (1872?—1967) Sir Norman’s given name was Ralph Norman Angell Lane, and he came to fame with The Great Illusion (1910), in which he detailed the futility of war inasmuch as the common interests of nations made war economically undesirable. In Peace with the Dictators? (1938), he attacked the British Conservative party’s policies, and following World War II he urged unity among the Western democracies. Knighted in 1931, Angell was awarded the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize. “Entreat for peace not of deified thunder-clouds,” Sir Norman wrote, “but of every man, woman, and child thou shalt meet.” {CE; JM; RE}

ANGELS • Angels are just Prozac for poor people. —Paul Rudnick a line in the off-Broadway show, “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told”

Angels, the immortal spirits which in the Holy Bible visited Abraham, Lot, Jacob, and Tobit, are accepted in the traditional belief of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Islam, and other religions. Judaism has no fixed ordering of the classes of angels. However, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, in The Celestial Hierarchy (5th Century C.E.), codified the classes. In his descending order, the ranks of angels are as follows: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, powers, principalities, arch-angels, and angels. Satan (or Lucifer), upon being cast out of heaven for leading a revolt, became an “angel of Hell,” a dark angel, a devil, the evil counterpart of the heavenly host. (Presumably, St. Dionysius checked with God before making public his codification.) Angels have figured conspicuously in medieval Christian art. However, Protestant leaders and the Enlightenment discredited them, relegating them to the domain of poetic fancy. In poetry, John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Divine Comedy have elaborated upon the concept. The Zoroastrians have yazatas, which as described in their sacred book, Avesta, are minor deities or “worshipful beings.” Subordinate to Ahura Mazda and his angels, and mentioned in early hymns of praise such as the Yashts, yazatas are not mentioned in the Gathas, the oldest part of the Avesta, which consists of seventeen hymns arranged into five gathas according to meter. The various gathas are said to be the most authentic of the teachings of Zoroaster, who lived as far back as 1000 B.C.E. The entire concept of angels allegedly was “borrowed” by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the Zoroastrians. Islam has four archangels—Jibrail, Mikail, Israfil, and Izrail (the Angel of Death)—who often act in place of Allah. Two recording angels, the Kiram al-Katibin, according to popular tradition, act as scribes for every individual, the one on the right recording a person’s good deeds, the one on the left recording all the bad deeds. A lower order of angels they call the jinn. Winged guardians or angelic messengers are found in Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Egyptian mythology as well as on their monuments and sculpture. The British geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, however, once made a scientific calculation: “An angel who developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economise in weight its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts.” {CE; ER}

Angelucci, Teodoro (1549—1600) An Italian poet and philosopher, Angelucci advocated Aristotle against F. Patrizi and was banished from Rome. One of the first emancipators of modern thought in Italy, Angelucci made a much-praised translation of The Aeneid. {BDF}

Angier, Natalie (16 Feb 1958 - ) Angier, a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer for The New York Times, wrote an impressive essay published in the January 14, 2001 New York Times Magazine entitled "Confessions of a Lonely Atheist". She points out how tolerance does not extend to godlessness: "In an age when flamboyantly gay characters are sitcom staples, a Jew was but a few flutters of a butterfly wing away from being in line for the presidency and women account for a record-smiting 13 percent of the Senate, nothing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism."

She declares her own lack of belief: "So, I'll out myself. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection."

There is much, much more. Be sure to check out: http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20010114mag-atheism.html

Angiulli, Andrea (1837—1890) Angiulli was an Italian positivist, a professor of anthropology at Naples in 1876. He edited a philosophical review starting in 1881 in Naples. In La Filosofia e la Ricerca Positiva (1869), Angiulli wrote, “The new religious consciousness will be superior to Catholicism, Protestantism, and Christianity, because it will be the Religion of Humanity.” {BDF; RAT}

Angle, Paul M. (1900—1975) Angle was director of the Chicago Historical Society. With Carl Sandburg, he wrote Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (1932). His Herndon’s Life of Lincoln (1961) is cited often because of its clarification of Lincoln’s religious outlook. Asked his own view of humanism, Angle responded to the present author, “One of the few things I’ve learned is to keep my mouth shut on subjects about which I know nothing.” {WAS, 1 May 1956}

ANGLICAN COMMUNION The group of churches that “are in communion” with the Church of England is called the Anglican Communion. This includes regional, provincial, and separate groups bound together by mutual loyalty as expressed in the Lambeth Conference of 1930. In 1992 an estimated seventy million members were members who worshipped in a liturgical fashion regulated by the Book of Common Prayer. Historically, Henry VIII repudiated papal authority by abolishing it. Although his divorce was the pretext, it was not the cause of the Reformation in England. By abolishing the papal jurisdiction and reducing clerical privilege and property, Henry VIII proclaimed the royal supremacy even in the church. In so doing he found strong national support, and although many considered him an unscrupulous ruler he generally was known—according to Canadian theologian Gerald R. Cragg—as one with unusual political perception. He had wanted some kind of papal title like Rex Christianissimus (France) and Res Catholicus (Spain). In recognition of a work on the seven sacraments against Luther, in 1532 Leo X dubbed him Fidei Defensir (Defender of the Faith). The 1534 Acts of Supremacy declared Henry VIII “only supreme head in earth of the Church of England,” legislation repealed in 1554 by Queen Mary but revived under Elizabeth I. Among prominent individuals who were executed for their opposition was former chancellor Sir Thomas More, whose moral idea expressed the reasonableness and open-mindedness of humanism. What the king had started as a period of enlightenment fast became one of bloody suppression. In 1607 the first Anglican church in America held services in Jamestown, Virginia. When Americans could no longer accept the enemy George III as God’s representative, they avoided setting up a Church of America. Instead, they established a separate ecclesiastical body in 1789. Although the British and American groups have somewhat close ties today, the senior warden of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Tucson, Arizona, wrote the following to The New York Times (11 August 1998):

The bishops of the Anglican Communion had a rare opportunity to teach Christian compassion at [this year’s] Lambeth Conference. But these would-be apostles instead chose to heap scorn on 600 million of God’s children who are gay and lesbian. The bishops chose the way of ignorance and arrogance. Surely they remember that Jesus inspired his disciples by offering unqualified love to the persecuted, the despised and the nonconformists of his day. Many American Episcopalians and their churches are determined to welcome homosexual sisters and brothers and support their ordination. The bishops’ pronouncement at the Lambeth Conference can only stiffen that resolve. Anglicans in America flourished for 178 years, from 1607 to 1785, without one bishop. We could do it again if we had to. Then we could give the money we now spend on Lambeth Conferences to the poor, as Christ taught us. {CE; ER}

Angoff, Charles (20th Century) Using the pseudonym Richard W. Hinton, Angoff wrote Arsenal for Skeptics (1934), a sampler of freethought. {FUS}

ANGST Kierkegaard introduced the term angst (or dread) to illustrate that it is to our benefit to take the leap of faith and believe in God. Other existentialists, however, use the term to illustrate man’s not knowing what the future holds, that life’s emptiness is therefore filled by deliberately choosing actions, albeit granting that we do not understand our reason, if any, for existence.

ANIMAL An animal is distinguishable from a plant by the ways in which it obtains food. As a member of Kingdom Animalia, it differs from members of Kingdom Plantae in its capacity for locomotion, nonphotosynthetic metabolism, pronounced response to stimuli, restricted growth, and fixed bodily structure. Philosophically, humanists and freethinkers are aware that they are a fellow animal, not a “lord” over other animals. They also recognize that their species has evolved, as have other species of the animal kingdom. The scientific study of animals is called zoology, and the study of their relation to their environment and of their distribution is animal ecology. The largest and heaviest of contemporary animals is the blue whale, which weighs about 150 tons—as much as 1,750 average American men. It is nearly 100 feet long, about the length of a basketball court. The very largest was a female blue whale caught in 1947—it weighed 209 tons and was 90 feet, 6 inches long. Blue whales can eat about eight tons of krill, a tiny shrimp, each day. The largest land animal is the African bull elephant, which weighs about six tons. The largest was a bull African elephant shot in Angola in 1974, one that weighed 13.5 tons and was thirteen feet tall. Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999) showed that animal sexuality is diverse, that animals are sometimes heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered. “Gay” or “lesbian,” he found, are terms not suitable for non-human animals inasmuch as they carry cultural, psychological, historical, and/or political connotations. Bagemihl cites research indicating same-sex behavior in reptiles/amphibians, fishes, insects, and other invertebrates and domesticated animals. For example, he found some same-sex behavior in bedbugs, red ants, and fruit flies; in sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, pigs, cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, mice, turkeys, and chickens; in apes, dolphins, whales, seals, deer, giraffes, geese, swans, ducks, sparrows, and hummingbirds. “Over the years,” he found, “some scientists have used double standards when observing sexual behavior in animals. If they couldn’t tell the gender or genders of the animals involved, they would assume the pair were of opposite sexes. When observed, homosexuality has been dismissed as aberrant, unnatural, even criminal. To the contrary, Bagemihl found homosexual behavior in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects in his deconstruction of the all-heterosexual Noah’s Ark myth. {CE}

ANIMAL RIGHTS In December 1997, French actress Brigitte Bardot called Muslims “manic throat-cutters.” At a court hearing in Paris where she was accused of inciting racial hatred, she retorted that she is proud of writing that Muslims “cut the throats of women and children, our monks, our officials. They will cut our throats one day and it will serve us right.” She was cheered by animal rights activists who also oppose ritual sacrifice of sheep by Muslims. (See entry for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.)

ANIMISM Religion is said to be based in the main on animism, the ancient view that within all objects dwells an individual spirit, a force which governs those objects. Early humankind did not distinguish between the animate and the inanimate or between the physical and the mental. Each item had its own individuality, whether it was a stone, a woman, a dog, a tree. So did emotions, such as love, hate, ideas, dreams. Among the Melanesians of the South Seas is the idea of mana, a spirit pervading everything, a spirit responsible for the universe’s good as well as the universe’s evil. Some inanimate objects, called fetishes, were thought to possess magical power and included physical pieces: feathers, animal claws, shells, wood carvings, for example. A truly powerful fetish, one which if possessed could ward off evil, was a taboo (a Polynesian word which originally applied to the sacred or to the dangerous, unclean, and forbidden). Taboos could be placed on any object, person, place, or word believed to have extraordinary powers. A taboo was often placed on a totem, or ancestral guardian. If a taboo were broken, the offender would need to arrange some kind of ceremonial purification, lest he or she suffer punishment, even death, through fear of its powers. A taboo could include destroying objects which had been in contact with a corpse, in which case it was taboo to touch such items unless a purification ceremony was performed. Strangers were taboo until made safe by some kind of ritual. Blood of menstruation or childhood was dangerous, demanding rites of purification. Early taboos were common-sense steps or caution signs taken by a group to guard against things or actions which inherently are dangerous. It made sense not to eat putrefying food, for example, so that was taboo. Later, however, religious ceremonies were devised and these provided appropriate ceremonies over which shamans or priests presided. Psychiatrists believe fetish objects often have phallic qualities, pointing to the deformed feet of Chinese upper-class women from the Sung dynasty until the present century. Animistic idols, treated as though alive, might be fed, bathed, clothed, even provided with a sexual partner. Some individuals without a religious orientation are looking at animism in a new, environmental way. “The earliest indigenous peoples of the world,” a letter writer to The New York Times has stated, “treated the earth as a living, breathing organism that created and sustained life. They did not ‘rape’ the earth as modern civilizations do, but gave back in equal measure to their taking and were true ‘shepherds’ of the earth. This is because most if not all early peoples practiced animism—the belief that everything has a soul: people, animals, plants, rocks, trees, water, etc. Inherent in this ‘premodern’ belief is love and respect for the earth and all of its life and beauty.” {CE; ER; RE}

ANIS ANIS is an organization in India which is devoted to exposing “god-men and their tricks.” (See entry for Govind Deodhekar.)

Anneke, Mathile Franziska Giesler (1817—1884) Anneke was a freethought editor, educator, and woman’s rights advocate. She met Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin, fought in the German revolutions of 1848 and 1849, and in 1865 co-founded the Milwaukee Tochter Institut, a German-language girls’ school. “There does not exist a man-made doctrine,” she said at an 1869 national Equal Rights Association in New York, “fabricated expressly for us, and which we must learn by heart, that shall henceforth be our law. Nor shall the authority of old traditions be a standard for us–be this authority called Veda, Talmud, Koran, or Bible. No. Reason, which we recognize as our highest and only law-giver, commands us to be free.” {WWS}

Annet, Peter (1693—1769) A prominent deist in his time, Annet wrote An Examination of the History and Character of St. Paul (1747). The apostle, he declared, had become a Christian for financial reasons and was, in fact, a liar and a hypocrite. In the same year, he wrote Supernaturals Examined, which E. Graham Waring has described as being “a simpler form of David Hume’s argument that evidence on the side of the regularity of natural law must always be greater than evidence on the side of the exceptions to the law.” In 1749, he was made a victim of the then strengthened spirit of persecution, according to Robertson, “being sentenced to stand thrice in the pillory with the label ‘For Blasphemy,’ and to suffer a year’s hard labour. Nevertheless, he was a popular enough freethinker to start a school on his release,” having invented a system of shorthand. In 1761, Annet began publishing Free Enquirer, a publication for which he was tried for blasphemy, convicted, and imprisoned at Newgate. {BDF; EU, E. Graham Waring; FUK; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; VI}

ANNULMENT OF MARRIAGE In the Catholic Church, which does not recognize divorce, the church allows Catholics to be free to marry again by declaring the marriage invalid in the first place. Sheila Rauch Kennedy, in Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church From Annulling Her Marriage (1997), describes how as an Episcopalian married to a prominent Catholic, Massachusetts Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, she found the practice called annulment “hypocrisy” and “nonsense.” The two, she described, were married in a Catholic church by his family’s priest, they previously had attended Catholic premarital counseling, and “both of us understood the principles on which we started our life together.” She had not, she added, considered divorce a moral problem in itself, that it simply is a recognition that a marriage has broken down. “But annulment says you were never married in the first place, at least in the eyes of God,” and it is this which she found immoral. Although in 1968 American church tribunals granted fewer than six hundred marriage annulments, in recent years they have granted almost sixty thousand. (See entries for Joseph P. Kennedy II and for Marriage.)

Annunzio, Gabriele: See entry for Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Anonymous (Died 1539) An English chronicler has described one of the 16th century French atheists:

1539. This yeare, in October, died in the Universitie of Parris, in France, a great doctor, which said their was no God, and had bene of that opinion synce he was twentie yeares old, and was above fouerscore yeares olde when he died. And all that tyme had kept his error secrett, and was esteamed for one of the greatest clarkes in all the Universitie of Parris, and his sentence was taken and holden among the said students as firme as scripture, which shewed, when he was asked why he had not shewed his opinion till his death, he answered that for feare of death he durst not, but when he knew that he should die he said their was no lief to come after this lief, and so died miserably to his great damnation. {JMR}

ANONYMOUS: For books written by anonymous authors, consult Gordon Stein’s God Pro and Con (1990). Many freethinkers have feared writing under their own names, afraid that they would be charged with blasphemy or attacked by righteous religionists.

Ansah, Freda Amarkye (20th Century) A member of the Rational Centre of Ghana, Ansah laments the tribal customs that practice female circumcision to reduce promiscuity and promote fidelity. She also laments the superstitious view that an early marriage is desirable. One of the leaders of a feminist movement in Ghana, she feels women must embark upon vast programs of education to enlighten Africans about the way taboos and superstitions hamper progress and development in society in general and in the lives of African women in particular. {AAH; Free Inquiry, Fall 1990}

Ansbacher, H(einz) L(udwig) (20th Century) Ansbacher, who was a member of the psychology department of the University of Vermont, wrote the present author concerning humanism: “I am much in sympathy with the humanistic orientation in psychology which, fortunately, has been gaining ground in recent years. Allport, Fromm, Horney, and Maslow are all colleagues whose work I very much appreciate.” {WAS, 29 September 1956}

Anshen, Ruth Nanda (20th Century) Anshen was editor of Harper & Brothers’ World Perspective series and author of The Reality of the Devil: Evil In Man (1972). Asked her view of humanism, she responded to the present author:

It seems to me that there is a fundamental error in the attempt to create various categories of humanism. In my opinion there is only one humanism—that humanism which is the spiritual, moral, and intellectual universe in which humanity moves and has its being. It bestows upon the past unity and upon the present meaning. Romans such as Varro and Cicero proclaimed the lasting truth of humanism and denied that it was exclusively an affair of the Greeks and a transitory historical phenomenon. The original meaning of tradition which is embodied in humanism has been buried in the miasma of the prejudices and mores of an established but obsolescent social order. The pristine sense of humanism cries out for the re-articulation of the genuine spiritual and moral heritage of the human race. This heritage is not a dead weight, a heritage that supine acceptance may subdue rather than liberate our minds. Instead its very concept and essence imply the transmission of all of mankind’s sacred possessions, the consciousness of the fundamental achievements of man’s life which have assumed their classical form and corporealization in the works of the greatest sons of the human race. Such works can never perish. Their symbol is the flame of the inextinguishable burning torch which one champion passes on to the next in the pilgrimage for the most sublime reward of human life. Such works teach us as Dante said, “Come l’uom’ s’eterna.” There is a divine fire which works in each of us, though we may not be aware of it. It reveals itself, in the historical life of man, in the rhythm of coming-to-be and passing-away of new individual phenomena analogous to the never-ending flux of Heraclitus. Only within the flux there is contained the unchanging, the permanent, the logos. One cannot step into the same river twice, declared Heraclitus, but he added, “In change is rest.” Apart from the repose of death, change gives us the consciousness of permanescence that we could not have in a static, frozen, congealed world. We are able to have an awareness of change only because of the permanence ever-present in the substructural modes and patterns, rhythms, and recurrences. Humanism thus offers us the spectacle of the constancy of basic forms and ideas throughout a process of continuous social change and intellectual development. And the original form maintains itself through transformation. For the new must contain the older form and preserve it on another level.

{WAS, 16 May 1956}

Anstey, Francis (Frank) George (1865—1940) Anstey was a London-born freethinker, politician, and orator, who stowed away and arrived in Australia in 1876. A foundation member of the Melbourne Anarchist Club in 1877, he was elected to the Victorian Legislative Assembly and in 1910 was the member for the Federal House of Representatives for the following twenty-four years. At the time of his death, he had become disillusioned and disappointed with the parliamentary process. For his funeral Anstey directed that at the cremation there be no “followers or flowers, or praise, prayers, or preachers.” {SWW}

Anston, Oscar (20th Century) 

A freethinker, Anston wrote Jesus, the Son of Nobody (1949). {GS}

ANTENNE A Flemish quarterly, Antenne is by Unie Vrijzinnige Verenigingen at Brand Whitlocklaan 50, 1200 Sint-Lambrechts-Woluwe, Belgium.

Anthero de Quental: See entry for Quental.

Anthony, Brenda (20th Century) Anthony is a freethinker and rap artist. She has written,

We don’t glorify bloodshed, gangbanging, or any violence in our music. . . . In our “Unleash the Beast” (meaning, “let go of the lie”), we bring a message of peace in the “hood,” without God the Bloodshedder. . . . My group, RAZEN KANE, raps about a day of atonement with ourselves and our neighbors, and about stopping the violence and leaving the “spookism alone.” We rap about stopping racism by not pointing fingers and blaming the white man but by checking the man or woman in the mirror. We’re humanists, we’re artists, we’re positive, and we’re proud freethinkers. We’re tired of being stepped on by these God-loving, God-fearing record companies. We notice all of the rappers screaming “Lord, Lord” while their killing, killing is paying off. The record companies are at fault here. They promote violence, God, and death.

{Freethought Observer, Jan-Feb 1996}

Anthony, Brenda Anthony is a freethinker and a rap artist. Of music and her work, she has written,

We don’t glorify bloodshed, gangbanging, or any violence in our music. . . . In our “Unleash the Beast” (meaning, “let go of the lie”), we bring a message of peace in the “hood,” without God the Bloodshedder. . . . My group, RAZEN KANE, raps about a day of atonement with ourselves and our neighbors, and about stopping the violence and leaving the “spookism alone.” We rap about stopping racism by not pointing fingers and blaming the white man but by checking the man or woman in the mirror. We’re humanists, we’re artists, we’re positive, and we’re proud freethinkers. We’re tired of being stepped on by these God-loving, God-fearing record companies. We notice all of the rappers screaming “Lord, Lord” while their killing, killing is paying off. The record companies are at fault here. They promote violence, God, and death.

{Freethought Observer, Jan-Feb 1996}

Anthony, Piers (20th Century) Anthony, a science fiction and fantasy author, stated at the end of his For Love of Evil that he is an agnostic. Piers Anthony, SF and Fantasy Author art

Anthony states that he is an agnostic in the "Author's Note" at the end of his book For Love of Evil. {CA}

Anthony, Susan Brownell (1820—1906) A major feminist, Anthony is author of History of Woman Suffrage (1881—1902). With Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she secured the first laws in New York guaranteeing York guaranteeing women’s rights over their children and control of property and wages. She once called marriage an institution of “legalized prostitution,” and she actively supported the abolitionist movement. Chided by a prominent male abolitionist that “you are not married; you have no business discussing marriage,” she retorted, “and you are not a slave. Suppose you quit lecturing on slavery.” Many hold that Susan, who met the beautiful Anna Dickinson during her anti-slavery work, developed a close and probably a sexual relationship with her. Another of her close friends, Amelia Bloomer, supplied her with a kind of puritanical garment, a kind of pants that then came to be called “bloomers.” An agnostic, Anthony was associated with various liberal religious causes and was a friend of Robert G. Ingersoll. In the presidential election of 1872, she was fined $100 for casting a vote, and she continued her efforts for women’s suffrage until her death. Although nominally a Quaker, Anthony sometimes attended Unitarian churches both in Rochester, New York, and in San Francisco. The Bible, she complained is a “ ‘He-book’ from beginning to end. It has a He-God, a He-Christ, He-angels. Woman has no glory anywhere in the pages of the Bible. Jesus said to his own mother: ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ ” Anthony further observed, “They never seem to think we have any feelings to be hurt when we have to sit under their reiteration of orthodox cant and dogma. The boot is all on one foot with the dear religious bigots.” Traveling home from a National Suffrage Convention in Baltimore, Anthony fell ill and died of pneumonia three weeks later at her home in Rochester. Aware that she was dying, she bequeathed her total estate to the suffrage movement. To her sister, she said in her final days, “To think that I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.” It took another thirteen years before the 19th Amendment was passed to guarantee women the right to vote. She was buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery, Rochester, New York, the epitaph reading, “Liberty, Humanity, Justice, Equality.” What Anthony never could have guessed is that she would be the first woman ever to appear depicted on United States currency. {BDF; CE; EG; JM; EU, Gordon Stein; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; U; UU; WWS

ANTHROPOLOGY Anthropology [Greek anthropos, human being; ology, study of the] is the scientific study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural development of human beings. Differing from sociology and certain other sciences, it emphasizes data from nonliterate peoples and archaeological exploration. It is linked with the philosophical speculations of the Enlightenment about the origins of human society and the sources of myth. It focuses on problems of human evolution, including physical and cultural anthropology, human paleontology, the study of race, the methods of anthropometry, genetics, physiology, ecology, ethnology. For freethinkers, an understanding of anthropology is a key part in the development of one’s personal philosophy. With new anthropological findings, the humanist is eager to change his or her outlook. In contrast, absolutists who “believe” the “sacred” bibles, upon learning new anthropological findings that are controversial, resort to apologetics. {CE}

ANTHROPOMORPHISM Anthropomorphism ascribes human feelings to something that is not human. A horse that talks in movies; actors dressed to symbolize war or death who speak their characters’ lines; a river that rushes “angrily”; a laughing Mickey Mouse—all such examples ascribe human forms and characteristics to non-human entities. A statue at the front of and on the face of St. John’s Cathedral in New York City depicts God as an elderly male figure with a beard. He has two eyes, a head with which he presumably thinks (presumably on a superior level to that of creatures he has created), ears for listening to petitionary prayers, and arms. Polytheists justify anthropomorphism, explaining that there is a need for visual presentation of the gods. Anthropopathism, according to John Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy,” is a term used to discredit any such analogy, however remote, between man and the non-human. Ruskin held that it is illogical to ascribe human traits to things other than man. {CE; ER}

ANTHROPOSOPHY Rudolf Steiner (1861—1925) was a German ocultist and social philosopher, leader in the founding of the German Theosophic Association. Abandoning theosophy, he developed what he called anthroposophy, a philosophy that tried to explain the world in terms of man’s spiritual nature, of thinking independent of the senses. (See entry for Crucifix.) {CE}

ANTICHRIST Literally, an anti-Christ is one who denies Christ. Specifically, the Antichrist is a great antagonist who is expected to fill the world with wickedness but who will be defeated by Christ at his “second coming.” The concept likely was borrowed from the Zoroastrians, whose similar conflict was between Ahriman and Ahura Mazda. Most recently in Christian thinking, Antichrist has been identified with the Roman empire or emperors (especially Nero); with Muhamad; and not infrequently, for example by Wycliffe and Luther, with the Roman popes. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) states that “the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.” Robert Fuller, in Naming the Antichrist: The History of an American Obsession (1996), concludes that when apocalypticism takes the form of “projecting . . . anxiety onto a mythic villain” it is likely to arise among groups who feel a “curtailed sense of agency.” This, according to Andrew Delbanco, author of The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, leads to the following: “What all these self-appointed sentries have in common, in other words, is a sense that the world is arrayed against them, that they have been denied and deprived, that the old neighborhood has been turned into an occupied zone. Since more and more Americans seem to feel this way, and since ‘fear of separation, powerlessness, loneliness, and failing’ are rampant features of modern life, there is reason to worry that the Antichrist will come back soon, and with a vengeance.” “Proof” advanced was that the idea is not a thing of the past. In Colombia on 6-6-1996 (the sixth day of the sixth month of a year that ended in six, feared as a sign of Satan), Archbishop Pedro Rubiano, head of the Roman Catholic Church, ordered priests to forfeit any money they received for performing mass baptisms during a scare about the Antichrist. “Serious harm has been done to the church because of the actions of some priests,” he said. “They have distorted the true image of the church.” However, a wave of baptisms had taken place because of rumors that the Antichrist would put the “mark of the beast” on any child who had not been baptized. Journalists were unable to find how much money had been collected. Further “proof” was shown in the following:

Given: Barney is a cute purple dinosaur. Prove: Barney is Satan

1. Start with the given: CUTE PURPLE DINOSAUR 2. Change all U’s to Latin V’s: CVTE PVRPLE DINOSAVR 3. Extract Roman Numerals: C V V L D I V 4. Convert into Arabic Values: 100 5 5 50 500 1 5 5. Total those numbers: 666 6. Ergo, Barney is the Antichrist!

The Rev. Jerry Falwell, in a 1999 televised speech about the concern people have expressed over the new millennium, said the Antichrist is probably alive and here today: “Because when he appears during the Tribulation period he will be a full-grown counterfeit of Christ. Of course he’ll be Jewish. Of course he’ll pretend to be Christ. And if in fact the Lord is coming soon, and he’ll be an adult at the presentation of himself, he must be alive somewhere today.” That Antichrist, Falwell assured his followers, will spread universal evil before the end of the world but finally will be conquered at the second coming of Christ. No, he was not intending his prediction to be anti-Jewish, Falwell added, saying he meant only that the Antichrist must be Jewish because Jesus Christ was a Jew and “If he’s going to be the counterfeit of Christ, he has to be Jewish.” {Associated Press, 15 January 1999; CE; ER; Internet}

ANTI-HUMANISM: See entry for Postmodernist Criticism of Humanism.

Antill, W. J. (19th Century) Antill was an undertaker who, when English freethinkers had no other place to meet or were too far from the Hall of Science, allowed them to meet in his cellar workshop. The audience sat on planks spread between coffins while the speaker stood on the trolley used to carry corpses. W. S. Ross (Saladin), when he referred to disreputable secularists, rather unfairly called them “plank-and-coffinites.” {RSR}

ANTINOMENCLATURISM: See entry for Labels.

Antipater of Sidon (Died 319 B.C.E.) Antipater, the Macedonian general who was the ablest lieutenant of Philip II and a supporter of Alexander the Great, is remembered for his humanistic list of “the seven wonders of the world.” (See entry for Man.)

ANTIPEDABAPTISM Antipedabaptists, such as Joshua Toulmin, opposed the Christian practice of baptizing babies.

ANTI-SEMITISM In 1969, Bertrand Russell wrote, “Though I know it is not considered the right thing to say—anti-Semitism came in with Christianity; before that there was very, very much less. The moment the Roman government became Christian, it became anti-Semitic. [This was] because they said that the Jews killed Christ, and so it became a justification for hating the Jews. I have no doubt that there really were economic motives, but that was the justification.” Ben Zion Bokser, a rabbi who lectured at the Institute of Religious Studies of the Jewish Theological Seminary, wrote this explanation: “In ancient times, the Jews like the Christians, were charged with disloyalty to the Roman Empire for refusal to conform to the emperor cult as idolatrous. In the Middle Ages, Jews were condemned for persisting as a religious minority. In modern times anti-Semitism has been fostered by various fascist states which have found Jewish universalism inconsistent with their own tribal nationalism. Anti-Semitism has been condemned by the leading ecclesiastical representatives of both Catholicism and Protestantism, as is well summarized in Jacques Maritain’s A Christian Looks at the Jewish Question (1939) and Protestants Answer Anti-Semitism, edited by Beatrice Jenney (1941).” Dagobert Runes, whose mother was killed by Nazis, wrote in The War Against the Jews (1968), “Everything Hitler did to the Jews, all the horrible, unspeakable misdeeds, had already been done to the smitten people before by the Christian churches. . . . The isolation of Jews into ghetto camps, the wearing of the yellow spot, the burning of Jewish books, and finally the burning of the people—Hitler learned it all from the church. . . . Wherever there are Christian churches, there is anti-Semitism.” In 1991 Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster known as one of America’s leading Christian conservatives, wrote The New World Order. In the book he speculated about biblical prophecy and weaved theories of broad conspiracy against American interests by “European bankers” and others (citing Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff, and the Rothschild family). The Jewish Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith claimed this was a veiled reference to Jews and their alleged conspiracy to control world finance. The book sold an estimated 500,000 hardback copies and was on The New York Times best-seller list. Responding to criticism, Robertson said he was arguing against allowing the United Nations to influence American foreign policy and was warning that an international coalition like the one assembled against Iraq in 1990 could one day be turned against Israel. Therefore, “The whole thing was pro-Israel and pro-Jewish,” Robertson reasoned. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (1993), a book published by the Nation of Islam but which has no listed author, received much publicity when at Wellesley College it was assigned to students by Prof. Tony Martin. The book’s theme is that Jews played a dominant role in the slave trade. Martin also published The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (1993), which contains accusations of a conspiracy against blacks. He explains, “Jews, now the richest group in the United States, with one-third of the country’s billionaires as of 1992 (and less than three percent of the population), have made a conscious decision to defend their privileged white status in what they might perceive of as the time-honored way, mainly by scapegoating black folk.” Further, “It may be that the Jewish establishment has concluded that a prostrate African-American population, to be oppressed or paternalized as the times warrant, will continue to be its insurance against a Euro-American reversion to European anti-Jewish activities.” Louis Farrakham, a noted minister of the Nation of Islam, has called Jews “hook-nosed” and “bagel-eatin’.” In 1993, his aide Khalid Abdul Muhammad made a lecture in which he lashed out at Jews, calling them the “blood suckers of the black nation” who control the country’s financial system, including the Federal Reserve. Note that the “Gold”-steins and the “Silver”-steins are appropriately named as sellers of “jew”-elry, he stated, adding phrases such as “Columbia Jewniversity” and “Jew York City.” He labeled the Pope a “no-good cracker” [white] and urged black South Africans to kill all whites. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith condemned such sentiment, saying that anti-Semitism is a hideous form of racial hatred and bigotry, a virulent strand of racism that must not go unchallenged. Khalid Abdul Muhammad not only attacked individuals of other religions but also attacked a fellow African-American, Bayard Rustin, a key organizer in the civil rights movement, who was termed a “boot-licking, butt-licking, butt-dancing, bamboozled, half-baked, half-fried, sissified, punkified, pasteurized, homogenized nigger.” In 1994, he blamed the death of Jesus on the Jews: “It was the white so-called Jews that set up a kangaroo court to charge Jesus with heresy and accepted a thief and a robber named Barabbas over the good black man Jesus (sic), and under a system of capital punishment ordered the death penalty for Jesus, the black revolutionary Messiah.” As for anti-Semitism, Muhammad said, “I want to see my enemy on his back, whining, crying, on his back begging for mercy. No mercy here. If you give the cracker mercy and you turn your back, he will take you out. Don’t give the cracker no mercy. Never will I say I am not an anti-Semite. Whatever he is, God damn it, I’m against him. I pray for my enemy all the time—I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet Earth.” Skipp Porteous, alarmed at what he found in 1994 as the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the Christian Right, named their anti-abortion movement which lists “Jewish doctors” as the leading performers of abortion. He noted that Christian Right leaders link humanism with Judaism, citing Gary North’s The Judeo-Christian Tradition (1989) that “Judaism grew out of the rejection of Jesus Christ and steadily became humanism.” The Sunday (Hackensack, New Jersey) Record ( 21 June 1981) cites the Rev. Bailey Smith, a Christian leader, as saying, “I don’t know why God chose the Jew. They have such funny noses.” The Washington Star (3 July 1980) cited the Rev. Jerry Falwell: “A few of you don’t like the Jews and I know why. He [sic] can make more money accidentally than you can make on purpose.” Porteous, estimating that 500,000 children are being taught by Christians at home or in their private schools (Freedom Writer, May 1994), believes anti-Semitism within conservative Christianity will not only continue as a long-term problem but will escalate sharply. As an example of the continued problem, in 1995 at Swarthmore, the Quaker-founded school in Pennsylvania, several members of the college’s chorus refused to sing Bach’s “St. John Passion,” saying it smacks of anti-Semitism with its tale of Jewish demands for Jesus’ crucifixion. However, the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church specifically eliminates the demeaning and prejudiced descriptions of Jews and Judaism found in the previous book used by generations of Catholics. Pope John Paul II has issued pronouncements against the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. Some rabbis, however, believe the catechism could have helped increase Catholic understanding of Jews had it included specific mentions of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and the modern state of Israel. A revisionist version as to the cause of anti-Semitism is found in The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain (1995), by Benzion Netanyahu, a professor emeritus at Cornell University and the father of Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader of Israel’s Likud Party. Netanyahu holds that the Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert had, indeed, assimilated with the Catholics and were “devoutly Christian.” “Jew hatred,” he then stated, was not started by Christians but can be traced back to ancient Egypt where in 525 B.C.E. the Persian conquerors of the Egyptians enlisted Jews as allies. This led to the Egyptian priest Manetho’s publishing in Greek a 270 B.C.E. History of Egypt which Netanyahu called “the first written anti-Semitic piece to come down to us from antiquity.” Furthermore, the work created a model of “the most atrocious lies and the most absurd libels” which became an idée fixe in the culture of Christendom. The Spaniards in the 15th Century defined the Jews not religiously, but racially, and this inspired others to treat the Jews as an evil race of men, worthy of, in Netanyahu’s words, “a large-scale bloodbath, mass extermination, or, to use the language of our time, genocide.” Indeed, 30,000 converted Jews during the 14th and 15th centuries were burned at the stakes of the Inquisition. (See entries for Pedro Arbués, Charles Lindbergh, Khallid Abdul Muhammad, and Meyer Rothschild.) {Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind; ER; David Gonzalez, “Jews See Signs of Change in New Catholic Teachings, ”The New York Times, 25 February 1995; for the role of the Jews in modern capitalism, see The House of Rothschild by Niall Ferguson (1999).}

ANTI-SEMITISM, THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF: See entry for Hyam Maccoby.

Antisthenes (444?—371 B.C.E.) Antisthenes, founder in Greece of the Cynics and a follower of Socrates, held that cultivating virtue for its own sake leads to happiness. Shun pleasure, live in poverty, disagree with social conventions, and happiness can be achieved in this lifetime, he taught, not in Plato’s next world. Virtue is the only good (not, as Socrates asserted, the highest good), and virtue means a simple lifestyle and an enjoyment of worldly pleasures. Repudiating polytheism, Antisthenes believed in one god but described that god as something unlike anything else man has known. {CE; JMRH}

Antoine, Nicolas (17th Century) A martyr, Antoine denied the messiahship and divinity of Jesus. As a result he was strangled, then burned at Geneva in 1632. {BDF}

Anton, John (1920— ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Anton was a professor of philosophy at Emory University. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. His works include Critical Humanism as a Philosophy of Culture (1981), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy (1972), and Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts, Essays Presented to Herbert W. Schneider (1974). {HM2; SHD}

Antonelle, Pierre Antoine (1747—1817) Antonelle was a French political economist who embraced the revolution with ardor. An article in the Journal des Hommes Libres occasioned his arrest, but he was acquitted. When he died at Arles, the clergy declined to give him the Christian burial, which his relatives desired. {BDF; RAT}

Antony [Father] (20th Century) Father Antony was the name of a Franciscan priest who now is known by his secular name. (See entry for Joseph McCabe.)

Antony, P. M. (20th Century) A playwright and rationalist, Antony was winner of the Kerala Literary Academy Award and author of The Sixth Holy Wound of Christ. When he was imprisoned for being accused (incorrectly) of murder and having written the controversial play, the Indian Rationalist Association appealed and after one decade Antony was released in 1996. The work was inspired by Nikos Kasantsakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It presents the story of Jesus as a depressed suicidal maniac, whom Judas, the hero, makes a willing martyr to provoke an uprising of the Roman slaves against the clergy. The Catholic Church called the work blasphemous, and the Rationalist Press Association stepped in to publish the work.

ANUS The anus is a part of the body that, admittedly, is not a subject for conversation at a Puritan’s annual family reunion banquet. Anyone for whom it is taboo to mention certain areas of the anatomy will hesitate to speak about the waste that passes into the rectum and is then expelled as bowel movements through the anus. Smut, filth, pornography, obscenity, naughty: such accusations arise at the mention of anything anal. Some claim to be unaware, in fact, that the anus can be a point of sexual penetration (paedicatio, when done by Latins), let alone sexual pleasure. They find incredulous the statistics reported by popular magazines such as Playboy and Playgirl concerning erotic uses of the anus. Meanwhile, artists such as Mapplethorpe and Serrano have photographed various items being injected into or ejected from the body’s seventh (for some, the lucky seventh) opening, which some but certainly not all individuals find enjoyable. (Knowing their audience’s probable reactions, comedians enjoy pronouncing the seventh planet from the sun yur-AYN-us, which was named as the earliest supreme god, a personification of the sky, the son and consort of Gaea and the father of the Cyclopes and Titans. Freethinkers find even funnier, however, their telling bibliolaters, “You seem to know more about your Ezekiel than about Uranus.) For those who enjoy “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and tire of using religious references—e.g., “Goddammit, Hell no, for Chrisake!”—suitable alternatives do abound: “No, you arsehole, you ass bandit! You’re no longer my asshole buddy.” However, from the viewpoint of a rationalist, such denigration of a key part of the human anatomy is negatively discriminatory and borders on the oligrophrenic.

APARTHEID

	The South African racial policy known as apartheid (from an Afrikaans word for “apartness” and having a last syllable that rhymes with “hate”) was an ultimate form of inhumanism: a social and political policy of racial segregation and discrimination enforced by white minority governments from 1948 to 1994. With Nelson Mandela’s election as the nation’s first black president, the last vestiges of the apartheid system were legislatively eliminated. {DGC}

APE Mike Howgate is the founder-member of the Association for the Protection of Evolution (APE). He has spoken to the Coventry and Warwickshire Humanists in England.

APHRODITE Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of fertility, love, and beauty, was designated by Homer as the child of Zeus and Dione. Hesiod held that Aphrodite rose from the foam of the sea where Uranus’s genitals had fallen after he had been mutilated by Kronus. She was inseminated by many: Area, for whom she bore Harmonia; Hermes, for whom she bore Hermaphroditus; and the shepherd Anchises, by whom she bore Aeneas. The Romans identified Aphrodite with Venus. She was similar in many of her attributes to the Oriental goddesses Astarte and Ishtar. (See entry for Beauty.) {CE}

APOLOGETICS Apologetics is a branch of theology that concerns itself with defending or proving the truth of religious doctrines. If, for example, “and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had made” is a seemingly unscientific account in the revealed-from-God Genesis story, it follows that God had a different concept of “day” from that of us mere mortals.

APOLOGY • Apologize, v.i. To lay the foundation for a future offence. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

An apology is a literary work that defends, justifies, or clarifies an author’s ideas or point of view. The literary use neither implies that wrong has been done nor expresses regret, although in everyday usage a person who gives an apology says he is sorry about something. Plato’s Apology (3rd Century B.C.E.) presents Socrates’s defense of himself at his trial before the Athenian government. Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie and Defense of Poesie, both written in 1850, examined the art of poetry and its condition in England. The two works were written to justify the poet’s craft after it had been attacked by critics. In 1864, Cardinal Newman wrote a spiritual autobiography, Apologia pro Vita sua, which attempted to clarify his views after they had been misrepresented in an essay by Charles Kingsley. In popular usage, true love means you never have to say you are sorry, the implication being that apologies involve specific wrongs and that, ideally, “true” lovers would never do wrong.

A POSTERIORI A posteriori reasoning is derived inductively, by reasoning from observed facts. For example, one cannot prove the existence of gods by using a posteriori reasoning. One can deduce—contrary to what had been assumed up to the 1980s— that insects evolved 120 million years before plants, as revealed by 1993 studies made by Dr. Conrad C. Labandeira of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and Dr. J. John Sepkoski Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. (See entry for a priori.)

A PRIORI A priori reasoning is derived from what are believed to be self-evident propositions; for example, theists and deists use a priori arguments to prove the existence of God, or the Supreme Architect of the universe. “Only the sort of knowledge that is called a priori—especially logic and mathematics—can be possibly supposed to exist in every one independently of experience,” Bertrand Russell wrote, adding, “In fact, this is the only sort of knowledge (apart from mystic insight) that Plato admits to be really knowledge.” However, as objected to by Russell and detailed in basic source books, including A Modern Introduction to Philosophy (1973) by Paul Edwards and Arthur Pap, philosophers question whether we have any a priori knowledge of matters of fact at all. For example, to those who claim that the principles of mathematics and logic are a priori, is this the case or is our knowledge of these principles not really based on experience? For Russell,

Mathematical knowledge, it is true, is not obtained by induction from experience; our reason for believing that 2 and 2 are 4 is not that we have so often found, by observation, that one couple and another couple together make a quartet. In this sense mathematical knowledge is still not empirical. But it is also not a priori knowledge about the world. It is, in fact, merely verbal knowledge. “3” means “2 + 1,” and “4” means the same as “2 + 2.” Thus mathematical knowledge ceases to be mysterious. It is all of the same nature as the “great truth” that there are three feet in a yard.

(See entries for A Posteriori, Plato, and Aristotle.)

Apelt, Ernst Friedrich (1812—1859) Apelt, a German philosopher, criticized the philosophy of religion from the viewpoint of reason and wrote works on metaphysics. He became known as the leader of the aesthetic rationalist school, which on the religious side connotes a liberal theism. {BDF; RAT}

APOCALYPTICISM Apocalypticism is a belief in the imminent destruction of the world. It also involves, once goodness triumphs over evil, the foundation of a new world order. Paul Edwards, in Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996), devastatingly attacks such nonsense concerning forecasts about the destruction of Japan as well as various American states. {PE}

APOCRYPHA, OLD TESTAMENT The Apocrypha of the Old Testament contains fourteen books commonly found in the Greek Bible (the Septuagint) and the Latin Vulgate in excess over the Hebrew Bible. Catholics refer to the books as “deuterocanonical,” reserving the name Apocrypha for other quasi-scriptural books in excess over those of the Vulgate to which Protestants give the name Pseudepigraphs. Generally speaking, the books in the Apocrypha have not been included by Protestants, who doubt their authenticity. For a table of those books of the Old Testament which are in the Roman Catholic Canon, the Protestant Canon, the Jewish Scripture, or the Protestant Apocypha, see the entry for Bible in most standard dictionaries. {CE; ER; RE}

APOLOGETICS Apologetics, once called “a science of the defence of Christian truth,” is a branch of theology which defends (the Greek root, apologetikos, means defend) the doctrine of the divine origin and authority, particularly within Christianity. Unlike polemics, the practice of theological controversy to refute errors of doctrine, apologetics is felt to be so fundamental to the Christian faith that argument with professing Christians is not anticipated. But attacks by non-Christians—Jews and pagans, particularly—were anticipated, so the apologists’ efforts were made to defend Christianity by using evidence and sound reasoning. According to Edgar J. Goodspeed, who had been a professor of Biblical and Patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, The Preaching of Peter, which was written early in the second century, attacked both Greek and Jewish ways of worship and described the Christians as “a third race.” Quadratus in 125 or 129 CE wrote a second apology which was to be presented to Hadrian in order to obtain more lenient treatment for the Christians. Aristides in 138 or 147 CE addressed a defense of the new faith to the emperor Antoninus, one which attacks Chaldean, Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish forms of worship, in contrast with Christian worship and morals. {ER}

APOSTROPHE Humanists are aware that only one word in English contains three apostrophes, the manuscript sign (’). (See entry for Forecastle.)

APOTHEOSIS Apotheosis is the ascribing of divine power to a human being. Alexander the Great, for example, obtained his first apotheosis at the oracle of Amon in Egypt. Originally, such ascriptions were only for deceased emperors but then became observed for living ones. Ancestor worship is related. (See entries for Shaman and Emperor Worship.) {CE; ER}

APPLE “Some religious fundamentalists,” stated the editor of Pique, newsletter of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, “still will not eat an apple, believing that Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden because they ate such. But the Biblical words are that the two were evicted from Paradise for having eaten ‘the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden.’ Anyone who thinks a specific fruit is mentioned,” stated the editor, “is full of applesauce.”

Appleby, J. K. [Category:19th Century|Appleby, J.K.]

Appleby, a Unitarian minister, influenced George William Foote to give up Anglicanism and adopt a Unitarian position early on in his youth. {RSR}

Appleman, Philip (1926— ) A poet and professor emeritus of English at Indiana University, Appleman is editor of the Norton Critical Edition Darwin (1979) and author of Darwin’s Ark (1984), Apes and Angels (1989), and New and Selected Poems 1956—1996. He lectures on humanistic subjects and is a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. In 1994, Appleman was named the Humanist Arts Awardee by the American Humanist Association. In 1996, he was a featured speaker at the national convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin.

Aquila (2nd Century) Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, became a proselyte to Christianity, then left that religion. He published a Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures to show that the prophecies did not apply to Jesus. Justinian forbade the Jews to read Aquila’s version of the Scriptures. {BDF}

AR RAZI CIRCLE Ar Razi Circle (ARC), an institute for the promotion of secularism in the Islamic world, endorses the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenants on Human Rights. It is committed to the ideas of democratic society and to a total separation between the state and religion. (See entries for Ar Razi and for Islamic Women, Rights Of.) {International Humanist News, December 1997}

ARABIC "Arabic" refers to language. There are Arabic-speaking Jews, Arabic-speaking Christians, and Arabic-speaking Arabs. Arabic is spoken throughout the Arabian peninsula and also in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Mauritania, and Chad. It is the mother tongue of more than 150 million in Africa and Asia. The Qur’an (still called the Koran by some in the West) was written in Arabic and for religious reasons is said not to be translatable inasmuch as it is verbatim the Word of God. Neither must it be modified. In it, God speaks in the first person. Within Arab nations, disbelief is severely punished, with the tacit implication that Allah approves of the meting out of pain, tears, and suffering. {CE}

ARABS Although originally "Arabs" referred to the Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, it now refers to those persons whose primary language is Arabic; i.e., most of the population of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, Suday, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, and Yemen. The term does not usually include Arabic-speaking Jews (such as those in North Africa and formerly also in Yemen and Iraq), Kurds, Berbers, Copts, and Druses, but it does include Arabic-speaking Christians (such as those found in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan). Arab and Arabian are terms that are not interchangeable with Muslim. Not all Muslims are Arab, and not all Arabs are Muslim.

	Freethinkers point out that it was the Arabs who introduced Europe to the Greek philosophers, whose writings they had already translated into Arabic. (See entry for Fons Elders, who has written that Arab humanism from the eighth to the twelfth century was essential to the development of the Renaissance.) (CE)

Arago, Dominique François Jean (1786—1853) Arago’s early work in mathematics and astronomy was so brilliant that the French Academy, against its own rules, admitted him at the age of twenty-three. Other European academies also honored him. He was equally distinguished in physics, in manuals of which his name still occurs.

	An outspoken atheist and republican even under Napoleon (who esteemed him) and Louis Napoleon, Arago at the age of sixty-two fought at the barricades in the Revolution of 1848. In his published correspondence with Baron von Humboldt, who called him a “zealous defender of the interests of Reason,” Arago often attacked religion. The French Grande Encyclopédie termed Arago “one of the most illustrious savants of the nineteenth century.” 

His son, François Victor Emmanuel (1812—1896), was a distinguished lawyer who took part in the Revolution of 1848, afterwards joining the advanced anti-clerical group which attacked the clerical policy of the Government in the Chambre. He sat in the National Assembly from 1871 to 1876, then was in the Senate from 1880 to 1894. From 1880 to 1894 he was French ambassador to Switzerland.

	His brother Étienne Vincent Aragao (1802—1892), a distinguished dramatist, also attacked religion. During the fourth Revolution, Arago was Mayor of Paris during the siege. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Aragon, Augustin (20th Century) From 1901 to 1914, Aragon edited Revista Positiva in Mexico City.

Aragon, Louis (1897—1982) Aragon, a French poet, wrote in Treatise on Style (1928), “Of all the possible sexual perversions, religion is the only one to have ever been scientifically systematized.” {TYD}

Aramalla, Purnachandra (20th Century) Originally from Andhra Pradesh State in India, Aramalla has long been active in Indian rationalist and humanist circles. He is author of Nature, Life, and Man (Prakruti, Jeevamu, Manavudu,1984); What the Modern Science Tells Us? (Aadhunika Vijnanam Emi Cheputondi?, 1993); and numerous articles. Before coming to New York in 1984, he taught at Andhra University in India for several years and currently is owner of two pharmacies in New York City. Aramalla is the son of a popular teacher, history lecturer, and rationalist: Koti Reddi Aramalla (1923- ). {WAS, interview}

[[Aranda, Pedro Pablo Abarca de Bolea [Count] (1718—1799) A Spanish statesman, Count Aranda was a soldier and ambassador to Poland. He was inspired by the ideas of the Encyclopedists and contributed to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain in 1767. The clergy and monks conspired against him, drove him from office, and dragged Spain back to its medieval condition, states McCabe. The Inquisition threatened him but, because of his reputation and because he neared the age of eighty, did not venture to take action. In 1792 he was elected Spanish minister to France but, then recalled, was later exiled to Aragon, where he died. Like his friend Voltaire, Aranda was a deist. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Araujo, Derek Carl (20th Century) Araujo, the founding president of the Campus Freethought Alliance, organized a humanist group at Harvard University in 1996 and served until 1999, leaving to teach physics in New York City. In 1998 he was a signer of the Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.” Araujo is author of “Student Freethought Group Embarks on Productive Path” in Free Inquiry (Winter 1996—1997). He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <derek@jackbruce.com> and <JBruceFan@aol.com>. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Arbués, Pedro (1441—1485)

Arbués is also known as Saint Peter Arbués. According to Charles Lee in History of the Inquisition, Arbués said, “Innocent or not, let the Jew be fried.” Ferdinand V had made him the chief Spanish Inquisitor in 1484. The following year while he was at prayer, Arbués was stabbed, allegedly at the instigation of nobles whom he was threatening. In 1664, he was beatified, and in 1867 he was canonized.

Arbuthnot, Forster (1883—1901) On his return to England after being in the Indian Civil Service (1853—1878), Arbuthnot joined Burton in the Kama Shastra Society for the issue of unexpurgated translations of Eastern works. He initiated the Oriental Translation Fund (1891). Arbuthnot was an agnostic. {RAT}

Arcesilaus (c. 315—241 B.C.E.) Arcesilaus and Carneades, teachers in Plato’s Academy, started with the Delphic oracle’s telling Socrates that he was the wisest of the Athenians. He realized he was, because he alone was aware that he knew nothing. If nothing can be known by our senses or our reason, there is no way to distinguish true or real perceptions from illusory ones, Arcesilaus taught. No certain criterion was known. Therefore, one has to suspend judgment on all that knowledge claims about any reality beyond our immediate experience. What we possess is reasonable or probable information that may, or may not, actually be true. This idea—that probabilities are sufficient to guide us through life—gave birth to the academic skepticism that later would be discussed by Cicero and Diogenes Laertius. St. Augustine attempted to refute such an idea. However, Bertrand Russell in History of Philosophy lauds Arcesilaus for his advocacy of skepticism though still professing to follow Plato. Arcesilaus “maintained no thesis,” Russell explains,

. . . but would refute any thesis set up by a pupil. Sometimes he would himself advance two contradictory propositions on successive occasions, showing how to argue convincingly in favour of either. A pupil sufficiently vigorous to rebel might have learnt dexterity and the avoidance of fallacies; in fact, none seem to have learnt anything except cleverness and indifference to truth. So great was the influence of Arcesilaus that the Academy remained skeptical for about two hundred years.

{CE; EU, Richard H. Popkin}

ARCHAEOLOGY • An archeologist is the best husband any woman can have because the older she gets the more he is interested in her. —Agatha Christie

• Let the believers be tricked by the Adam and Eve of “sacred” scriptures. Meanwhile, the humanists’ “sacred” facts are dug up by freethinking archaeologists. —Anonymous

Archaeology [Greek arkhaio + log-ia, study of beginnings] is a branch of anthropology that documents past human life and culture by studying such evidence as graves, buildings, tools, pottery, and human remains. Italians in the 15th century excavated ancient Greek sculpture. Later, Johann Winckelmann and Ennio Visconti advanced the study of the Greek and Roman past, and Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Arthur Evans at Crete, Michael Ventris in his deciphering of the Minoan script—all helped advance the study. Today, archaeologists study New World as well as Old World sites, making such exciting findings as those of Louis Leakey, who located the skeletel remains of humans in East Africa dating back 1.7 million years. As just one tantalizing illustration of the findings of archaeologists, the 1984 discovery of the body of a young man in a bog in Cheshire, England, led to the determination that he had been violently struck on the head, his throat had been cut, and this had happened during the 1st or 2nd century according to radiocarbon dating. The manner in which he had been killed was similar to that of the way others had been killed in Grauballe and Tollund in Denmark, indicating all had been ritually sacrificed. {CE}

ARCHBISHOP

  • Archbishop: a Christian ecclesiastic of a rank superior to that attained by Christ. 

—H. L. Mencken

Archelaos (5th Century B.C.E.) The most important disciple of Anaxagoras, Archelaos of Miletos was the first systematic teacher of Ionic physical science in Athens. He taught about the universe’s infinity, and he grasped the nature of sound. Archelaos is said to have been the master of Socrates. {JMR; JMRH}

Archer, Jeff (20th Century) Archer wrote “Runs, Hits, and Prayers” (Secular Nation, Fall 1995), in which he tells some experiences he has had as a referee. One was calling a technical foul on a team that was praying too long, for which he received catcalls from fans and players alike. He laments the fact that in the “good old days” religion did not mix with sports but that Americans, unlike Europeans, have been increasingly mixing sports and religion. Archer, who is editor of The Alternative, wrote Strike Four: Adventures in European Baseball (1995). In 1996, he became leader of San Diego’s Atheist Coalition.

Archer, William (1856—1924) Archer was a Scottish-born freethinker, author, critic, and translator of Ibsen’s plays. To him, the god-idea was a noxious fallacy. For The World, Archer was a theatre critic in 1884, continuing for twenty-one years. He was opposed to any censorship and, when Shelley’s “The Cenci” was banned in 1886, Archer insisted that “the English nation should be allowed to judge for itself as to whether the works of its great poets are fit or unfit for the stage.” “ ‘Theocracy,’ ” Archer wrote, “has always been the synonym for a bleak and narrow, if not a fierce and blood-stained, tyranny.” A translator of “A Doll’s House” and ”Hedda Gabler,” in which as co-director he starred his mistress, Elizabeth Robins, Archer was a friend of Henrik Ibsen as well as of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw, when Archer died, wrote that he felt that “he took a piece of me with him.” Peter Whitebrook, in a biography, points out that Archer wrote for Progress and was an atheist and combative speaker. He also contributed to the Literary Guide, the monthly organ of the Rationalist Press Association and to the Rationalist Annual. Archer wrote The Life, Trial, and Death of Francisco Ferrer, who was executed for advocating freethought at the Esaula Moderna in Barcelona; and God and Mr. Wells, which was a reply to Wells’s God the Invisible King. Joseph McCabe remarked that Archer “seems to have been lenient to Spiritualist claims,” a reference to his having lost a son in World War I and had consulted a number of mediums in the hope of learning something definite. Whatever the reason, he “abruptly ceased” visits to mediums in 1920. Archer will be remembered, not for recommending that blacks in the American South have their own separate state, but for his having introduced Ibsen to Britain, guided the early career of Shaw, and encouraged Pinero, Wilde, Galsworthy, and Granville Barker. {RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Archibald, Charles (20th Century) Archibald is a board member of the American Humanist Association. [[Archilochus (c. 700 or 650 B.C.E.) Fragments of Archilochus’s poetry survive. Isaiah Berlin liked the Greek poet’s lines, “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” turning the idea into his own observation that thinkers include those who contribute a number of unrelated but valuable insights and those who develop a unified vision or universal principle. {CE; Paul Johnson, The New York Times, 12 November 1997}

Ardell, Donald B. (20th Century) Ardell publishes the Ardell Wellness Reports and hosts an internet wellness show at <www.yourhealth.com>. The author of The Book of Wellness: A Secular Approach to Spirituality, Meaning, and Purpose, he holds “that a satisfactory sense of meaningful work and a purposeful life are certain prerequisites for a continuing sense of happiness in life.” E-mail: <donardell@earthlink.net>. {Free Inquiry, Summer 1998}

Ardigó, Roberto (1828—1920) At the age of forty-three, Ardigó gave up being a Catholic priest. He then became a major figure in the movement of Italian positivism, teaching against idealism at the University of Padua and taking the position that human knowledge originates in sensation. He wrote the twelve-volume Opere filosofiche (1882—1918) and La scienza della educacazione (1909, 3rd edition). {BDF}

Ardila, Ruben (1942— ) A professor of psychology at the Universidad de Colombia, Ardila is one of the Humanist Laureates in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and is a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. Ardila is author of La Psicologia en America Latina: Pasado, Presente, y Futur (1993) and, with Mario Bunge, The Philosophy of Psychology (1987).

Arendt, Hannah (1906—1975) Arendt, a German-American political theorist, was not a believer in God. In her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), she traced Nazism and Communism to nineteenth-century imperialism and anti-Semitism. Her other works include The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and The Life of the Mind (1977). The 1968 work was controversial in its exploration of the complicity of the European nations in the destruction of the Jews and of what she termed the “eerie banality of the Nazi evil.” (For a description of her intellectual as well as physical attraction to Heidegger, see the entry for Martin Heidegger. The two had a sexual relationship despite his never expressing regret about the Holocaust and his not helping his Jewish students, although he did not actively harass or persecute them.) {Paul Edwards, “Heidegger’s Quest for Being,” Journal of Philosophy 64:437-470, 1989; DGC}

Arents, John (Stephen) (1926— ) Although his parents were religiously conservative and he was a child gospel singer, he retired at age six because of ill health, never resuming that career. A Brooklyn-born chemist whose research has been in quantum chemistry, Arents taught and did graduate work at Columbia University from 1950 to 1956, then was a lecturer and professor at The City College of the City University of New York (CCNY) from 1956 until his retirement in 1991. With Chester B. Kremer he co-authored Theory and Problems of Modern General Chemistry (1965) and, with Leonard C. Labowitz, Physical Chemistry: Problems and Solutions (1969). With F. Brescia, H. Meislich, and A. Turk, he was co-author of General Chemistry (5 editions with various titles, 1966—1988). Arents is a fiercely independent thinker, as critical of liberal and humanist irrationality as of any other kind. E-mail: <jarents@bestweb.net>.

Aretino, Pietro (1492—1556) The “scourge of princes,” Aretino was an Italian satirist whose derisive wit helped him become wealthy, wealthy because those who feared he would write about them paid him not to. A writer of comedies and letters filled with satire, Aretino was a subject for one of Titian’s portraits. In I Raggionamenti (The Conversations), Aretino writes of an abbot who, according to Charles Rosen, “dallies with a girl in one hand and a boy with the other while simultaneously screwing a nun and being sodomized by a novice priest (all their simultaneous cries of delight skillfully orchestrated by the author).” {CE}

Arey, Lisa T. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Arey was a director of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association.

Argens, Jean Baptiste de Boyer [Marquis] (1704—1771) The Marquis d’Argens was a military man who became one of Frederick the Great’s chamberlains. He translated Julian’s discourse against Christianity and Ocellus Lucanus on the Eternity of the World. Wheeler says Argens took Bayle as his model but was inferior to that philosopher. Although clerical writers stated that he was “converted” before death, Argens’s widow refuted the charge. {BDF; RAT}

Argenson, Marc Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy d’ [Count] (1696—1764) A French statesman who at one time was Governor of Paris and Minister of War, Argenson was a friend of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists. Largely owing to Voltaire’s protection, the two were able to work in Paris during an age of despotic bigotry, and the dictionary was dedicated to him. Count Argenson shared their deistic views, as did his brother, René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy (1694—1757), the Marquis d’Argenson, Councillor of State and Minister of Foreign Affairs (1744—1747). {JM; RAT; RAT; RE}

Argental, Charles Augustin de Ferriol (1700—1788) Count d’Argental was a French diplomat, a nephew of Mme. de Tencin, the mother of D’Alembert. A close friend of Voltaire, Argental wrote Memoirs du Comte de Comminge and Anecdotes de la cour d’Edouard. {BDF; RAT}

ARGENTINE FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS Hugo Estrella has completed a thorough study of the struggle of freethinkers in Argentina. In the first two of three parts, published in International Humanist News (Dec 1997 and Oct 1998), he claimed that the contributions of Juan José Castelli, Bernardo Monteagudo, Mariano Moreno, Domingo Sarmiento, Bartolomé Mitre, Esteban Echeverria, and Bernardino Rivadavia “were whispered with respect by every free thinking person in the country.” The group’s journal is El Desorden (Caseros 636 C.P. 5000, Córdoba). On the Web: <www.humanistarg.org>. (See entries for Juan Alberdi, Hugo Estrella, and Domingo Sarmiento.)

ARGENTINE UNITARIANS Lilian Burlando, a retired clinical psychologist, leads a Unitarian group at Sanchez de Caballero 2030, (9410) Ushuaia, Tierre del Fuego, Argentina.

Argilleres, Antoine (16th Century) 

Argilleres at first was a Jacobin monk and afterwards a Protestant preacher. For having eight years previously taken the part of Servetus against Calvin at Pont-de-Veyle in Bresse, Argilleres was tortured several times, was then decapitated, and his head was nailed to a gibbet at Geneva (1562). {BDF}

Argow, Waldemar (1916—1996) A minister of the People’s Church (Unitarian) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Argow was a naturalistic humanist who wrote reviews for The Humanist in the 1950s. He is author of What Do Religious Liberals Believe? (1950). He also served as minister in Toledo, Ohio, and Palm Beach, Florida.

ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN Theologians who argue from design do so by appealing for the existence of God based on the hypothesis of an ultimate design, intention, or purpose in the universe. “Why do people believe in God?” Richard Dawkins has asked. He answered, “For most people the answer is still some version of the ancient Argument from Design.” In “The Improbability of God” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1998), he tackled that subject using a scientist’s reasoning, concluding after detailing the improbabilities of the design argument that “There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have.” (See entry for Goldwin J. Emerson.) (For other types of arguments, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Antony Flew’s Dictionary of Philosophy or the Oxford Companion to Philosophy.)

ARGUMENTATION: See entry for Elenchus, the method Socrates used to refute the thinking of others.

ARGUMENTUM AD POPULUM In logic, an argumentum ad populum is a fallacious argument, which holds that a hypothesis or belief is true if it is held by many people. If, for example, most people believe that they will go to Heaven when they die, then—using such an argument—Heaven exists. Similarly, if most individuals in the State of Utah believe a half-literate seventeen-year-old named Joseph Smith was told by angels that golden plates bearing a history of ancient America were buried near his father’s farm, then it is true that angels exist and that they supplied Smith with the information. American advertisers utilize the concept to good commercial advantage.

ARIANISM: See the entries for Arius, Christianity, Origen, and William Whiston.

Arion, Frank Martinus (1936— ) Arion, a writer and poet who lives part-time in Curaçao and part-time in the Netherlands, founded the first humanist primary school of Curaçao, which allows teaching in the native language of Papiamento.

Arisian, Khoren (20th Century) Arisian has been on the board of Leaders of Ethical Culture Societies in Boston (1966—1968) and New York (1968—1979; 1999—). He then became minister of the Minneapolis Unitarian society, a traditionally humanistic group. He has been an associate editor of The Humanist (USA) and in 1973 wrote The New Wedding: Creating Your Own Marriage Ceremony. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration, and he was a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. The American Humanist Association in 1995 presented him with their Humanist Pioneer of the Year Award, citing his “devotion to the advancement of ethical humanism and service to the liberal religious community.” He is editor of Religious Humanism. Institute. {HM2; HNS2; EU, Howard B. Radest; PK; SHD}

Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310—230 B.C.E.) 

Aristarchus is the Greek astronomer credited with being the first to propose a heliocentric theory of the universe. Archimedes and Copernicus cited Aristarchus as believing that the earth moves around the sun and that the sun is at rest, also concluding that the sun is larger than the earth and that seasons are caused by the earth’s axis being inclined to the plane of the ecliptic. Only his treatise, “The Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon,” remains. According to Julian Kane, professor of geology at Hofstra University, “the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria in the year 391 was considered an unsuccessful attempt by Christian zealots to destroy all records of Aristarchus, discoveries that the Church considered contrary to its dogma.” It was not Copernicus who first proposed the movements of the planets around the Sun; it was Aristarchus, 1800 years earlier. (See entry for Galileo.) {CE}

Aristarchus of Samothrace (c. 217—145 B.C.E.) Aristarchus is the innovator of scientific scholarship. A Greek scholar, he succeeded his teacher, Aristophanes of Byzantium, as librarian at Alexandria. Without his expert revising of Homer’s writings, those works would not have been passed down. Although it is said that Aristarchus wrote over 800 volumes, few of his critiques of Alcaeus, Anacreon, Hesiod, Pindar, and the tragedians remain. {CE}

Aristippus (c. 435 B.C.E.—360 B.C.E.) Aristippus was founder of the Cyrenaic School of Greek philosophy. A pupil of Socrates, he turned to the Skeptics and held that no knowledge beyond common human experience is possible. In contemporary terminology, McCabe states, Aristippus was an agnostic. Aristippus came from Cyrene, in a part of Africa now known as Libya and which then was a populous region, the Florida of the Greek world. He did not advocate surrender to sensual pleasure, often abstaining for a long period to show that he was master of himself and his pleasures. But his doctrines comprised the first coherent exposition of hedonism and opposed those of the Cynics, although the two groups drew upon Socratic philosophy. “It is better to be impoverished than uneducated,” he stated. “The one lacks wealth, the other lacks humanity.” {CE; MC; RE}

Aristophanes (c. 448—388 B.C.E.) The greatest of the ancient authors of comedy, Aristophanes wrote more than fifty plays, only eleven of which have survived Little, however, is known of his life. A satirist, he exposed not only the political and social evils of the age but also the philosophers, the gods, and the theology of the people. The Clouds (423) satirized the Sophists and Socrates. Lysistrata (411) amusingly suggested a way to stop war—women should simply withhold sex from their husband-soldiers. The Women at Demeter’s Festival (411) conspire to ruin Euripides because of his misogyny. Thesmophoriazusae, a hilarious work, involves cross-dressing. Women, in The Ecclesiazusae, take over the government. In Plutus (388), the blind god of wealth recovers his eyesight and distributes the gifts of fortune more equitably. Plato is said to have died with Aristophanes’s works under his pillow. In the Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes defend male love, stating that male love was superior to that of love for females because it was “more masculine” and was more suitable for political leadership. Aristophanes introduced the longest word ever penned in the history of literature, 172 letters long in Greek and 182 letters in its English transliteration. The word—which means a fricassee of sweet and sour ingredients including mullet, honey, brains, pickles, vegetable marrow, vinegar, and the Greek drink ouzo—is

Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhypotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechynokichlepikossyphophattperisteralektryonoptekephalliokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon. 			

{BDF; CE; GL; JMRH; PA; TYD}

Aristotle (384—322 B.C.E.) Called by Corliss Lamont “the first great naturalist in the history of philosophy,” Aristotle codified the laws of logic. However, he thought man had a soul and body, spoke of “God” as the Prime Mover, or Unmoved Magnet, and, Lamont added, “marred the purity of his Naturalism by indulging in a confusing redefinition of supernaturalist concept [which] made it easier for the Catholic Church many centuries later to incorporate his thought with seeming logic into its theology.” Aristotle also believed in slavery and in the natural inferiority of women but apparently did not believe in an after-existence. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Aristotle as seeming to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. According to Robertson, Aristotle was an unbeliever in the popular and Platonic religion. He was a monotheist, but a monotheist with no practical religion. What was worst in his thinking, states Robertson, “was its tendency to a priorism, which made it in a later age so adaptable to the purposes of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus his doctrines of the absolute levity of fire and of nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum set up a hypnotizing verbalism, and his dictum that the earth is the center of the universe was fatally helpful to Christian obscurantism.” “The common idea that [Aristotle] and Plato are the two typical thinkers of ancient Greece,” wrote McCabe, “is very far astray.” Plato’s spiritualism had few followers; Aristotle’s rejection of the idea of spirit and his inventing the idea of the immaterial, got a few more followers. They were attracted to his idea that man’s mind is not material but could exist only in an intimate union with matter. This did great harm to the evolutionary materialistic science of the Ionic School and introduced the metaphysical method. Another difference, says McCabe, is that he had red blood in his veins, that he “was very fond of his pretty mistress Herpyllis.” Aristotle’s influence upon succeeding generations is not to be overlooked, for he was an albatross around the neck of science for fifteen hundred years. His dogmas, observed Harry Elmer Barnes in An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, “held back the development of both physics and chemistry and were not finally obliterated until the time of Boyle and Stahl in the seventeenth century.” Asimov observed that Aristotle’s views about the geography of Earth prevailed until the time of Columbus, and, as Ackerman points out, many still judge someone’s character by their looks: “Aristotle claimed that if a person looked at all like an animal he shared that animal’s essential nature. Someone with a beaky nose and angular face would be eaglelike—bold, brave, and egotistical. Someone with a horsey face would be loyal and proud. A broad face indicated stupidity, a small face trustworthiness, and so on.” Bertrand Russell found Aristotle to have been the first to write like a professor, not as an inspired prophet. A professional teacher, Aristotle was “not passionate, or in any sense religious.” Saying Aristotle practically invented logic, Russell warns that traditional formal logic is analogous to Ptolemaic astronomy: Both are antiquated, a waste of time except to understand those historical periods. It has taken almost 2000 years, unfortunately, to break the hold that Aristotle has had on logic, and Russell blamed the Catholic Church’s insistence upon teaching an antiquated logic instead of pursuing the discoveries of modern logic. (See entry for a priori.) {CE; CL; EU, Aram Vartanian; HNS2; Bernard Katz, The American Rationalist, July-August 1998; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}

Arius (c. 250 — 336) When Arius, a presbyter, asserted that Jesus was not part of the Trinity but of a different substance from God, the Council of Nicaea outlawed his views and affirmed the Nicene Creed: “God is a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” For Arius, God the Father was “uncreated” and was the first principle from which all else, including the Son and the Holy Ghost, was derived. As such, he taught that although the Father is eternal, the Son was created at some point and therefore is not eternal. Lamont states Arianism “never died out in Christian circles and for centuries had its secret adherents.” Charles W. Lowry Jr. of the Virginia Theological Seminary has written that the Arian Controversy began in 318 when Arius openly opposed his Bishop Alexander on the eternity of the Son: “Against this Arius insisted that the Father must be older than the Son and that ‘there was when the Son was not.’ After his excommunication by Alexander, Arius found many allies, and ‘in a short time the whole Eastern Church became a metaphysical battlefield.’ The climax of the controversy was the Council of Nicaea (Nice) called in 325 by the Emperor Constantine.” Here Arius’s views were condemned, and the famous anti-Arian Creed of Nicaea was promulgated. Its most important phrase, “of one being (or substance) with the Father,” survives in the Creed commonly called the Nicene and used in many of the Liturgies of Christendom. (See entry for Origen.) {CE; CL; EH; ER; JMR; JMRH}

ARIZONA ATHEISTS, FREETHINKERS, AND HUMANISTS • American Atheists, Inc., PO Box 64702, Phoenix, AZ 85082-4702. Pat Wilkinson, the state director, is at <pwikinson@atheists.org>. • Arizona Secular Humanists are at PO Box 3738, Scottsdale, Arizona 85271 (602) 230-5328. E-mail: <103217.260@compuserve.com>. Contact is Tom Vincent. • Dial-An-Atheist has been available at (602) 623-3861. • Humanist Community of Tucson, contact: Hedy Simpson, P.O. Box 86014, Tucson, AZ 85754-6014; (520) 743-7804. Email: <75247.223@compuserve.com>. • Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix (ASHS), 10540 East Firewheel Drive, Scottsdale, AZ 85249 <aztec.asu.edu/hsgp>.

	• Humanists of Prescott, Jim Powers, chair, P.O. Box 10642, Prescott, AZ 86304-0642; Phone: (502) 776-1552. 

ARKANSAS FREETHINKERS AND HUMANISTS • Arkansas Society of Freethinkers, 13912 Willow Pond Road, Little Rock, Arkansas 77206. (501) 888-9333. • Humanists of the Mid-South (AHA), address of which is Route 2 B-376A, Benton, Arkansas 72015, are led by Charles Dixon and J. J. Dixon.

ARMAGEDDON Judeo-Christians make much of the Biblical Armageddon, an entirely unscientific concept which involves a belief about “the end of the world,” at which time the forces of good and evil will indulge in a catastrophic battle. The idea is particularly popular at the end of any century, with some claiming that Armageddon will arrive, for example, precisely at midnight on 31 December 1999. Many were disappointed on 31 December 1899, 31 December 1799, et cetera.

Armellini, Carlo (1777—1863) Armellini was an Italian statesman. Pope Pius VII made him a Consistorial Advocate at the Papal Court, but in 1848 Armellini joined the Anti-Papals. After the flight of Pius IX, Armellini became Minister of the Interior. Mazzini made him a member of the Executive Committee of the Roman Republic, and he formed the Triumvirate with Saliceti and Montecchi, and afterwards with Saffi and Mazzini. At the restoration of the Pope by the French, Armellini retired to Belgium. {RAT}

ARMINIANISM: See entry for Jacobus Arminius.

Arminius, Jacobus (James) (1560—1609) Arminius, a mild-mannered University of Leyden professor, was a Dutch Reformed theologian (whose name originally was Jacob Harmensen). He tried to defend the Calvinist doctrine of predestination but upon reflection concluded such a doctrine was wrong. He then tried to convince the Dutch Reformed Church that Calvin was wrong about the doctrine of irresistible grace, ending with a view similar to that of the Roman Catholic Council of Trent. His opponents held that God elects certain persons for salvation, denying the privilege to others. Furthermore, because God wills it so, therefore it is just. Disagreeing, Arminius held that “He cannot will to do . . . that which He cannot do of right. For His will is restricted by justice.” God has foreknowledge, and He can see foresee the purely contingent—in other words, God knows in advance that a man will sin by free choice, but he does not will nor predestine the man to do so. Further, he held, man’s freedom stands in contrast to compulsion, to necessity, and to spontaneity. As explained by Walter Edwin Roush, a professor of Old Testament Language and Interpretation at the Bonebrake Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, “Even in the desire for happiness, which is spontaneous, man is not free. Freedom exists only where there is the power of alternate choice. Man faces alternate choice and is actually free. . . . The Arminians [as his followers were called] held that grace is not irresistible, but that those who are ready for the conflict, and desire Christ’s help, and are not inactive, will be kept from falling.”

	Arminius’s influence spread widely and included such ministers as Ebenezer Gay (1696—1787), Charles Chainey (1705—1787), Jonathan Mayhew (1720—1766), William Bentley (1759—1819), and James Freeman (1759—1835). It was adopted by the Methodist and related movements in the 18th century, and its viewpoint promoted a spirit of tolerance. Rather than speculative theology, Arminianism led to an emphasis upon human duties. (CE; ER)

Armitage, Andrew (20th Century) Armitage, of Hebron, has reviewed books for England’s Gay and Lesbian Humanist.

Armstrong, David Malet (1926— ) Armstrong is an Australian philosopher and atheist. He has been the Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney since 1964. His publications include A Materialist Theory of the Mind (1968) and Belief, Truth, and Knowledge (1973). (See entry for Richard C. Vitzthum.) {SWW}

Armstrong, Henry Edward (1848—1937) Armstrong, recognized as one of the most distinguished organic chemists in Europe, was a humanitarian and an outspoken Agnostic. He closed an article in the Humanist (1918) with Swinburne’s defiant line, “Glory to Man in the Highest.” In the Rationalist Press Association Annual (1919), he professed his materialism. {RAT; RE}

Armstrong, Jesse L. (20th Century) Armstrong has been active in the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Armstrong, Rebecca (20th Century) Armstrong is on the Board of Governors of The Humanist Institute.

Arnason, Wayne (20th Century) Arnason is American president of the Unitarian Universalist Ministers’ Association.

Arnesen, Liv (20th Century) In 1994 Arnesen became the first woman to ski solo to the South Pole. A Norwegian newspaper, Aftenposten (23 August 1998), reported her [in translation] as saying

I know many people who believe in God, and I expected to find Him on my way to the South Pole if He exists. My religious experiences were very different, however, [only] involving myself, nature, and the universe. {CA}

Arnheim, Michael (20th Century) Arnheim, professor of ancient history at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He is author of Is Christianity True? (1984) and South Africa After Vorster (1979).

Arnink, Dale E. (20th Century) Arnink is minister to the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos in New Mexico. He is on the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

Arnold of Brescia (c. 1090—1155) Said to have been a student of Peter Abelard, Arnold was an Italian monk, the prototype of an intellectual who questions and becomes a charismatic spiritual leader. Only secular powers should own property, he held, because he accused the church of being too temporal and its clergy unwilling to imitate Jesus, owning nothing. Ordered to come to Rome, he complied but expressed disgust at the clerical opulence and corruption which he found. Pope Adrian IV, the one English Pope, had Arnold, who throughout remained a strictly religious and ascetic monk, hanged, strangled with a garrote, and his body burned and thrown into the river. {BDF; EH; RE}

[[Arnold, Edwin [Sir] (1832—1904) 

Arnold was a British poet who, during years of service in India, conceived an immense admiration of Buddhism, which he thought superior to Christianity. His Light of Asia, on the life of the Buddha, did much to broaden the public mind. McCabe writes that Arnold’s view about God is obscure, but Sir Edwin rejected the belief in personal immortality in Death and Afterwards. Sir Edwin rejected the idea of a future life and the Christian creed or “any extant religion.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Arnold, Gipson (20th Century) Arnold has been Treasurer and President of the Atheist Network and is a writer for its newsletter, the Atheist Network Journal. In American Atheist (May 1990), he wrote about the first atheist radio show, “Radio’s Finest Hour.” Arnold, a practical person, has observed the following concerning toilet etiquette of the gods:

• You shall have a place outside the camp and you shall go out to it; and you shall have a stick with your weapons; and when you sit down outside, you shall dig a hole with it, and turn your back and cover up your excrement. —Deuteronomy 23:12

• Then he (God) said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow’s dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith. —Ezekiel 4:15

• Therefore, behold, I (God) will bring evil upon the house of Jeroboam, and will cut off from Jeroboam him that pisseth against the wall. —I Kings 14:10

• Behold, I (God) will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your solemn feasts. —Malachi 2:3

• “The ear, the skin, the two eyes, the tongue, the nose, the two feet, the two hands, the speech, the genital organ and the anus: these verily are the ten sacrificial priests. Sound, touch, color, taste, smell, words, actions, motion, and the discharge of seed, urine, and excretions are the ten oblations (sacrifices). —The Mahabbharata

• When defecating or urinating, one must squat in such a way as neither to face Mecca nor to turn one’s back upon it. . . . It is not necessary to wipe one’s anus with three stones or three pieces of fabric: a single stone or piece of fabric is enough. But if one wipes it with a bone, or any sacred object, such as, for example, a paper with the name of God on it, one may not say his prayers while in this state. . . . It is preferable, for urinating and defecating, to squat down in an isolated place; it is also preferable to go into this place with the left foot first; it is recommended that one keep his head covered while evacuating, and have the weight of his body carried by the left foot. —Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeni, Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeni (1980) {FD; Freethought History #9, 1994}

Arnold, Madison (20th Century) Arnold, an actor, in Freethought Today (March 1989), wrote that

I never accepted religion, so I had nothing to reject as such. The history of “Christiansanity” (my own coinage of which I am proud!) is so brutal of mind, emotions, freedom, progress, science, and all that I hold precious, that by an standards of justice its leaders in almost any given period would be incarcerated for life, or worse! {CA}

Arnold, Madison An actor, Arnold is a regular contributor to Freethought Today. In a March 1989 issue, he was quoted:

As a kid I looked up and saw no god and I wondered where “he” got such a large notebook to write down X's when I am bad as I was told he did. One of the first unanswerable questions I asked was when I was eight years old. Some cousins of mine always said a prayer before eating:

 God is kind,
 God is good,
 And we thank him [sic]
 For our food.

At that time we always heard the children in Europe were starving, therefore we should not waste any food. Two questions arose in my mind. First, what I knew about poetry was that it had to rhyme, and “food” and “good” didn't rhyme, so I always said “Fud” with a silent sneer, and made it rhyme. Second: I once asked my aunt if god is good and we thank him for our Fud, why are the kids in Europe starving? I asked her if the kids in Europe were all bad. I remember her saying, “Be thankful that you have food,” but, of course, she couldn't deal with the rest of it. I never accepted religion so I had nothing to reject as such. The history of “Christiansanity” (my own coinage of which I am proud!) is so brutal of mind, emotions, freedom, progress, science, and all that I hold precious, that by any standards of justice its leaders in almost any given period would be incarcerated for life, or worse!

Arnold, Matthew (1822—1888) 

Arnold’s father, Thomas, was immortalized in Tom Brown’s Schooldays and in Lytton Strachey’s portrait in Eminent Victorians. An earnest administrator, he stood for a profound Christian ethic. Matthew, his second child, became an inspector of schools for thirty-five years, continuing even after his poetry and criticism made him famous. His antipathy for what he considered the new middle classes’ unthinking materialism is illustrated by his view of the Atlantic telegraph, “that great rope with a Philistine at each end of it talking inutilities.” A deeply immersed classicist, he became professor of poetry at Oxford, where he claimed that the role of the critic was “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world.” The Economist dubbed him a “staunch Liberal,” a “reactionary in some of his views,” and an “almost socialist in others. Any pomposity was tempered with a vivacity and sense of humour, and behind his superior airs was a modest and playful man, if somewhat egotistical.” Corliss Lamont has stated that “the agnostically inclined Matthew Arnold vigorously attacked religious superstition and upheld the idea that Jesus was not God but a great teacher and oracle of ‘sweet reasonableness.’ ” Although he liked Cardinal Newman’s sermons at Oxford, they did not persuade him. Lamont lauds Arnold’s minimal definition of God: “a Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” However, most humanists are averse to using the word “God,” relegating it to what believers generally mean by the term. Often amusing in the way he expressed his views, Arnold wrote about the settling of New England:

Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when we figure to ourselves Shakespeare or Virgil–souls in whom sweetness and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were eminent–accompanying them on their voyage, and think what intolerable company Shakespeare and Virgil would have found them!

Known for his romantic pessimism, at a time torn between religion and science, Arnold described his feelings of spiritual isolation in “Dover Beach” and “Isolation: To Marguerite.” Concerning religion, he penned St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), and Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877). “All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science,” he wrote. What Arnold looked forward to was a culture that would incorporate all the best that ever has been thought and said in the world, a goal much like that of contemporary teachers of the humanities. Arnold disbelieved in a future life and Christianity, but he remained a churchgoer. Religion he defined as “morality tinged with emotion.” God, he once defined, is “the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfill the law of their being.” (See entries for Arthur Hugh Clough and D. H. Lawrence.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; The Economist, 20 July 1996; TSV; TYD}

Arnoldson, Klas Pontus (1844—1916) A Swedish reformer and author of Hope for the Centuries, A Book on World Peace (1900), Arnoldson was not a wealthy person but spent much of his money in the cause of peace. He opposed the war with Norway in 1906. In 1908, with Fredrik Bajer, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Arnoldson worked energetically for freethought causes in Sweden. {JM; RAT; RE}

Arnould, Arthur (1833—1895) A French novelist, Arnould wrote Bérenger (2 volumes, 1864). His Histoire de l’Inquisition (1869) was a fiery criticism of the clergy under Napoleon III. For this, Arnould was prosecuted several times. His work is aggressively rationalist, and he wrote many dramas as well as plays. {RAT}

Arnould, Victor (1838—1894) A Belgian, Arnould organized the freethought movement at Anvers and inaugurated a system of popular conferences. In Brussels, he was president of Brussels and also the president of the National Freethought Federation from 1875 to 1878 and from 1887 to 1888.

	In 1869 he was elected delegate to the Freethought Congress at Naples. Arnauld wrote History of the Church (1878) and Philosophy of Liberalism (1877). From 1868 to 1873 he edited La Liberté, a freethought publication. {BDF; PUT; RAT}

Arnow, Harriette Simpson (1908—1986) Arnow, author of a novel, Dollmaker, when asked about humanism, responded to the present author:

It should be so simple to sit down and write a sentence or so saying what I do or do not believe. However, it isn’t. It seems sometimes that for most of my life I have been on a long pondering. I grew up in the Christian Church; that was in the South where the Christian Church was the name of a Protestant faith promulgated by Alexander Campbell and known by various names in various places. We were a very religious people, but early doubt troubled me; one of my mother’s cousins was a missionary to China, and I wondered if it were wise to destroy the belief of the Chinese in order to put another in its place; and then I was troubled being certain the devil would get me for such thoughts; and then I was comforted for God had given me a mind and it was up to me to use it; and so I began to go round and round and have been going ever since. I don’t think I am a humanist. I sometimes think I am closer akin to some of the early settlers in Tennessee, Watauga for example; they said little of religion, didn’t apparently have much, but believed that man was bigger than anything made by man, including his religion and political system, but now it would seem that we live in an age where all forces combine to belittle the individual; he exists less as an entity than as a part of something held as of much more importance than himself—his religion, politics, firm, etc. Time and again I go back to the Jesuit Relations; on one side all educated Frenchmen of one faith, on the other all ignorant savages, but so often the great hardships they endured together makes suffering men, individuals of them all.

{WAS, 22 November 1954}

Arnstein, Walter (20th Century) Arnstein’s The Bradlaugh Case: Atheism, Sex, and Politics Among the Late Victorians (1965) focused on government policy and Westminster debates. For six years in the 1880s, a major issue in British politics was whether Bradlaugh, an atheist, political radical, and advocate of birth control, should be allowed to take his seat in Parliament. {Freethought History #18, 1996}

Aron, Raymond (1905—1983) Aron was the editor in London of Le France Libre (1940—1944), a columnist for Figuro (1947—1983), and a professor in the faculty of letters at Paris University (1955—1983). In 1965 he was a Cornell University professor at large. He wrote Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1938), Century of Total War (1951), and Opium of the Intellectuals (1955). Aron addressed both the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture held in Amsterdam (1952) and the 1962 Congress held in Oslo.

Aronson, M. J. (20th Century) In the 1940s, Aronson was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.

Arouet, François: See entry for Voltaire.

[[Arpe, Peter Friedrich (1682—1740) Arpe, a philosopher born in Kiel, Holstein, wrote an apology for Vanini in 1712. A reply to La Monnoye’s treatise on De Tribus Impostoribus is attributed to him. {BDF}

Arreola, J. A. (20th Century) Arreola is editor of The Alternate Approach, the newsletter of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio, Texas.

Arrhenius, Svante August (1859—1927) A Swedish chemist and Nobel Prize winner, Arrhenius was a prominent member of the Monist League–the German equivalent of England’s Rationalist Press Association–and an agnostic. He discovered the process of electrolytic dissociation. Arrhenius held that “conceptions of an all-embracing Nature and of freedom and manhood advance and recede together.” {RAT; RE}

[[Arriaga, Manoel José d’ [President] (1839—1917)  

Arriaga, who became President of the Portuguese Republic, was disinherited by his father, who claimed to be of royal blood, for becoming a freethinker and a republican at the university. Turning to law and politics, he had such a brilliant success that after the Revolution of 1911 he was appointed President. An atheist, Arriaga was both humanitarian and anti-clerical in the legislation he passed. {JM; RAT}

ART • Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth. —Pablo Picasso

A branch of learning, art is one of the humanities. It is a form of creativity that goes back at least to works found in France’s Chauvet Cave which has been dated as approximately 32,410 B.P. (plus or minus 720) for Chauvet and 27,100 B.P. (before the present) for the tracing of a hand at Cosquer near Marseilles. Basically, artists are those creative individuals who transmute the personal into the supra-personal. (For a description of how one artist used elephant dung to create “The Holy Virgin Mary,” see the entry for Chris Ofili.) {See “The Miracle at Chauvet” by E. H. Gombrich in The New York Review of Books, 14 November 1996}

Arthur, John (Died 1792) Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des Athies lists Arthur as a mechanic, as repairers of tools were called then, from near Birmingham, one who took a prize in Paris. Julian Hibbert also included him in his Chronological Tables of Anti-Superstitionists. {BDF}

Arthur, William (19th Century) Arthur, an atheist, wrote God Without Religion (1887) and Religion Without God (1888). {GS}

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE In the world of computer science, artificial intelligence refers to a machine’s ability to perform activities normally thought to require human intelligence. Dr. Robert J. White, a professor of neuro-surgery at Case Western Reserve, has observed that

While artificial-intelligence scientists are being forced to design miniaturized circuitry for their “think machines” that replicate the brain’s cellular format, all of this research has a fundamental flaw. Artificial-intelligence investigation is based on advanced solid-state physics, whereas the humble human brain is a viable, semiliquid system! Have no fear. The artificial human mind is not here, nor will it be. (See entry for Marvin Minsky) {The New York Times, 26 March 1998}

Aruoba, Oruc (20th Century) In Turkey, Aruoba is a corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Arvin, Newton (1900—1963) Arvin, who in 1952 became a member of the Institute of Arts and Letters of the American Academy, when asked about humanism replied to the present author,

I more and more dislike labels and shibboleths, and shy away even from “naturalistic humanism” if that phrase is to take on or be given a cultic or sectarian connotation like Ethical Culture, New Thought, Unity, or what not; nevertheless, some such phrase comes as near as any to the philosophical position which seems to me the only tenable one for the contemporary mind to take.

Arvin, whose critical biography of Herman Melville won the National Book Award in 1951, also wrote scholarly biographies of Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Whitman. When a senior at Harvard, he sent unsolicited reviews to Van Wyck Brooks, who encouraged him by writing “You are a critic by nature.” However, he added that to succeed he needed to experience life more, not just remain in an ivory tower. In 1922 Arvin became a freshman-composition instructor at Smith. The economic depression during his youth led him to speak out against social injustice—in 1932 he pledged to vote Communist, as did Lincoln Steffens, John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderosn, and Theodore Dreiser. That same year he married Mary Garrison, said to have been a great Valkyrian figure. Their eight-year marriage was an unhappy one. Barry Werth is one of many who has written about Arvin’s homosexuality. Arvin kept a journal most of his life, describing an early recognition that he was “certainly a girlish small boy, not a virile one, even in promise, and the world of boys being what it is, I was not long in being made aware of this,” particularly when taunted for his lack of skill in sports. He had a love affair for three years with Truman Capote in the late 1940s, but friends said Arvin’s sexual outlet consisted of masturbating and collecting gay pornography. In a notable invation of privacy, three state troopers, a federal postal inspector, and a local policeman raided his home in 1960 after he hesitantly let them enter. They confiscated large quantities of homosexual erotica as well as journals that documented his sexual activities. Arvin was charged with possessing “obscene pictures” and of “lewdness,” offenses that could have landed him in jail for five years and a fine of twenty-five thousand dollars. Taken to the local police station, he regretably gave up the names of fifteen other men who collected similar erotica. Upon pleading guilty to the charges, he received a one-year suspended sentence. Arvin was admitted several times to Northampton State Hospital for psychiatric treatment. Although not fired by Smith College, Arvin was forcibly retired and never returned to the classroom after his arrest made national headlines. Sylvia Plath had earned extra money in 1958 grading exams for him. Arvin suffered, after prostate surgery, from painful incontinence. In early 1962 after finishing the Longfellow work, he was found to have pancreatic cancer. But he lived to read Edmund Wilson’s glowing The New Yorker review that included, “Among the writers who have really devoted their lives to the study of our literature . . . I can think of only two who can themselves be called first-rate writers: Van Wyck Brooks and Newton Arvin.” In the weeks before his death Arvin excised with a razor many of his journals’ embarrassing passages, evidence to the end that he had been successfully taunted because of his sexual orientation. In 1996 the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, worth $100,000 and given by the author’s estate, was awarded to Alfred Kazin. But, following Capote’s instructions, the awards are made in honor of Arvin. At the inaugural award ceremony, Kazin said that he had taught at Smith when Arvin was there and, ironically, Arvin had not thought very highly of him. {WAS, 8 February 1951; Barry Werth, “The Scarlet Professor,” The New Yorker, 5 October 1998}

ARYAN Archaeological evidence corroborates the text of the Veda by placing the invasion of India by the Aryans at around 1500 B.C.E. Aryans are members of the people who spoke the parent language of the Indo-European languages. In Adolph Hitler’s Nazi regime, however, an Aryan was a Caucasian Gentile especially of the Nordic type. (As to whether Aditya was the first known Aryan, see the entry for Hindu Skeptic.) {CE}

Asbury, Herbert (20th Century) A freethinker, Asbury wrote Up From Methodism (1926). {FUS)

Ascarate, Gumezindo de (19th Century) 

Ascarate, a Spanish professor of law at the University of Madrid, was a Republican deputy. An able Radical parliamentary orator, he wrote Social Studies, Self- Government and Monarchy and other political works. In philosophy, he was a follower of Krause. {BDF}

ASCESIS Ascesis (from the Greek askesis, exercise) is the philosophic concept that by rigorous training in the activity of thought one can–through self-discipline–modify one’s way of being. Foucault illustrated this by studying ancient dietary and sexual regimens. As described by Parisian philosopher Richard Shusterman, Foucault’s “experiments with drugs and S/M were somatic analogues of philosophy’s textual disciplines of exploratory self-fashioning for better self-care,” not just a way of discovering who one is. {The Nation, 30 June 1997}

ASCETICISM Some ascetics, believing that a simple way of life allows one to concentrate upon the task at hand, believe that by self-denial and austerity they will release the soul from bondage to the body, permitting “union with the divine.” Asceticism and contemplation often go hand-in-hand or, as used in context by Stringfellow Barr, “For the Catholic asceticism of poverty, the Protestant substituted the asceticism of work.” Humanists, such as admirers of Thoreau at Walden Pond, find the ascetic lifestyle one that downplays telephones, television programs, public programs, and extreme socializing.

ASEHUCO The Costa Rican Ethical Humanist Association is Asociación Ético Humanista Costarricense (ASEHUCO). Commenced in 1989, its president is Marco Castillo Rojas. The group can be contacted on the Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>.

Asgill, John (18th Century) Asgill wrote Mr. Asgill’s Defense Upon His Expulsion from the House of Commons of Great Britain in 1707 (published 1881). He was a rationalist whose religious doubts made him unpopular with the Establishment. {GS}

ASHES: At certain times of the year, people are seen coming from churches, their foreheads dabbed with ashes, a practice started in the Middle Ages. Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, and the ashes are considered a symbol of repentance, humility, or mourning to mark the start of the liturgical season of Lent. Not only Catholics but also some Anglicans, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Methodists practice the medieval custom.

Ashby, Robert (20th Century) In 1995, Ashby was appointed Executive Director of the British Humanist Association. In a speech at the South Place Ethical Society annual reunion, he mentioned that humanism has reached maturity through Corliss Lamont, Paul Kurtz, and others. “The BHA,” he said, “is moving away from the reinforcement of one popular image of secular people–that generally incorrect picture of a band of aggressive god-haters with a desire for vengeance. Instead we aim to present humanism as the positive outlook that it is, in today’s terms. We should ensure that humanism today provides the basis for future civilisation.” E-mail: <robert@humanism.org.uk> {International Humanist News, October 1995}

Ashurst, William H. (1792—1855) Ashurst, a secularist like his son William H. Ashurst Jr. (1818—1879), was a friend of Garibaldi and Mazzini. As a youth, he joined the “freethinking Christians,” but in later life he “ceased to be a member of any sect.” {RAT; VI}

Ashman, Charles R. (20th Century) Ashman wrote The Gospel According to Billy (1977), an exposé of William (Billy) Franklin Graham, the fiery and persuasive evangelist who has been the friend of several United States Presidents and who has been an international figure in Protestantism.

ASHS The Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies is a network created for mutual support among local and regional societies of secular humanists. A Director of Humanist Community Development arranges the addition of many national chapters. Joan Mooney, however, in 1998 did not accept New York’s FANNY (Freethinking Activist Nonbelieving New Yorkers). Snail-mail: PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664; (716) 636-7571.

ASIA Asia, the largest continent in the world, to the Assyrians was asu, a word meaning “where the sun sets.” (See entry for Europe.)

ASIAN RATIONALIST FEDERATION In 1996 at the World Atheist Conference held in India, the Asian Rationalist Federation was formed.

ASIBEHU In 1994, the Ibero-American Ethical Humanist Association (ASIBEHU) commenced as an organization for Spanish-speaking humanists and freethinkers (los librepensadors) from South, Central, and North America as well as the Caribbean. On the World Wide Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>. (See entry for Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista [ASIBEHU].)

Asimov, Isaac (1920—1992) An internationally known science fiction author, Asimov was President of the American Humanist Association at the time of his death. He was on the editorial board of The Humanist, was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, and was a Humanist Laureate of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Academy of Humanism. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. In 1984, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. His first 100 books took him 237 months. His second took 113 months. His third 100 took only 69 months. Asimov wrote at least 467 books, typing away on an Underwood 5 and researching a wide range of subjects: pre-school material as well as college textbooks. He also wrote mysteries as well as books about the Bible, astronomy, limericks, humor, sociology, mathematics, science, Shakespeare, ancient and modern history, and philosophy. Asimov has been quoted as saying he usually awoke at 6 a.m., sat down at the typewriter by 7:30 a.m., and worked until 10 p.m. Asked by Barbara Walters what he would do if advised by a physician that he had only six months to live, he replied, “I’d type faster.” To the Secular Humanist Society of New York, of which he was an honorary member, he said that he disliked traveling far from his 33rd floor apartment on Central Park West in New York City. At one Manhattan lecture, he sang all the verses of a Tom Lehrer ditty. In 1938 the teenaged Asimov left his father’s Brooklyn candy store to take a story to John W. Campbell Jr., publisher of Astounding Science Fiction. Within a few days he received a rejection letter with several pages of positive criticism. A few weeks later he returned to deliver a new story, inspired by Campbell’s advice if not his cigarette smoke. Again, a rejection letter arrived shortly afterwards. Asimov was later to note that acceptance letters usually just contained money but that reject letters contained something more valuable: advice. It was on one such trip to Campbell’s office, Oliver Morton wrote in The New Yorker (17 May 1999), that Asimov came up with the idea of a galactic empire. The “Foundation” stories that resulted always involved faster-than-light travel, “for an Empire that takes thousands of years to traverse will not remain an empire for long.” The best ships have to be those of the Imperial Navy “or of the smugglers and/or traders who outflank them.” Planets must play the role of the smallest administrative units “and are often oddly one-dimensional in their climate—one finds whole worlds of glacier, of desert, of swamp. There is a metropolitan world of tall towers, vast domes, and unbridled splendor amid the close-packed suns of the core—Asimov called his Trantor. There is a government loosely based on a historical model. The Roman is most common, but the Chinese dynasties have had their influence, as has Victorian England.” Of his 467 titles, the “Foundation” series detailed a complex future of humankind and robots, in which were detailed the three-part “law of robotics”:

• A robot may not injure a human, or through inaction allow a human to come to harm. 

• A robot must obey the orders given it by humans, except when such orders would conflict with the first law.

• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

Asimov took the somewhat scientifically inaccurate script of the movie “Fantastic Voyage” and wrote a novelization. He noted, however, that the microscopic characters that were injected into the bloodstream of a dying man in the script were so small that even a molecule of oxygen would have been too big for them to breathe. Asimov, said fellow scientist-author Carl Sagan, was “one of the master explainers of the age. I think millions of people owe their knowledge of science, their familiarity with some scientific fact, to reading either the fact or fiction of Isaac Asimov.” “I’ve never been particularly careful about what label I placed on my beliefs,” Asimov has written.

I believe in the scientific method and the rule of reason as a way of understanding the natural universe. I don’t believe in the existence of entities that can not be reached by such a method and that are therefore “supernatural.” I certainly don’t believe in the mythologies, in heaven and hell, in God and angels, in Satan and demons. I’ve thought of myself as an “atheist,” but that simply described what I didn’t believe, not in what I did. Gradually, though, I became aware that there was a movement called “humanism,” which used that name because, to put it most simply, humanists believe that human beings produced the progressive advance of human society and also the ills that plague it. They believe that if the ills are not to be alleviated, it is humanity that will have to do the job.

As to why humanists should fight with religionists when so outnumbered, Asimov observed, “Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug superstition to their breasts.” And did he believe in life after death? No, of course not, said the son of Judah and Anna Rachel Berman Asimov. As a matter of fact, two months before his death he told a group of writers and artists that a recent bout with prostate problems made him, yes, wish for the end of conscious thought: This, from one whom the Guiness Book of World Records cites as being the American author with the most titles to his name. He explained, “I don’t have to worry about death, because there isn’t an idea I’ve ever had that I haven’t put down on paper.” Asimov’s memorial was held in the Ethical Culture Society, his wife Janet’s choice, not far from the apartment he did not like to leave. His last book, written partly while he was hospitalized, was I, Asimov (1994). {CE; HM2; HNS2; SHD; TYD; WAS, 1991}

Asimov, Janet (20th Century) Now a retired psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Isaac Asimov’s wife Janet has been a published writer since 1966. She has written stories, articles, and twenty books (eleven for children). Her bi-weekly science column, “Asimov on Science,” for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate results in fan mail from around the world. Of Scandinavian lineage (one-quarter Danish, one-quarter English, one-half Swedish), she received her B.A. from Stanford University, her M. D. from the New York University College of Medicine in 1952, and in 1960 she graduated from the William Alanson White Institute of Psychoanalysis. She is a member of the Ethical Culture Society and of Freethinking Activist Non-believing New Yorkers. The two Asimovs decided at the age of eleven to become writers but, being children of the Great Depression,

Isaac and I were preoccupied with the problems of making a living. Since writers—especially now—have a hard time making ends meet, we both went to graduate school. It was important to have an advanced degree and professional status, while continuing to write on the side. Fortunately both of us liked our respective professions. He enjoyed teaching, and my brother (in the last medical school class that Isaac taught) affirms the fact that he gave great lectures.

Isaac had more confidence and talent, becoming a published writer at the age of eighteen. I stopped writing during the rigors of medical school and residency and started again after I graduated from analytic school.

I was never an official member of any religion until middle age, when I joined the New York Society for Ethical Culture. Isaac and I were married by an Ethical Culture Leader. I belong to the American Humanist Association.

I think both Humanism and Ethical Culture could do more to emphasize human beings as part of Nature. For instance, we are irrevocably affected by what happens to Earth’s atmosphere, ozone layer, oceans, etc. When I applied to become a student at the White Institute, one of the interviewers asked me what I thought my position was in Nature. Off the top of my head came something like “I am an animal living on planet Earth, in a Solar System, in a great big Universe.” Simplistic, but then I didn’t realize that many years later I’d be trying to simplify science for the laymen. {WAS, 20 August 1998}

Asklepiades (Ancient Greece) Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks, as illustrated by Asklepiades (in a Dudley Fitts translation), addressed, among other homely subjects, their mistresses:

You deny me: and to what end? There are no lovers, dear, in the under world, No love but here; only the living know The sweetness of Aphrodite–but below, But in Acheron, careful virgin, dust and ashes Will be our only lying down together.

Asklepiades also offered humanistic advice:

Drink down the strong wine: dawn’s but the span of a finger, And shall we wait for the lamp that brings Good night? Drink, drink to joy, dear friend: for soon we’ll have A lonely night for sleeping, and that’s for ever.

Askenasy, Hans (20th Century) Askenasy was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1930 and emigrated to the United States in 1949. He is a psychologist and the author of Are We All Nazis?, among other works on the Holocaust. He was critical of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners in Free Inquiry (Winter 1996-1997).

Asma, Stephen T. (20th Century) Asma, who holds a doctorate in philosophy, teaches humanities at Columbia College in Chicago, Illinois. In “Abortion and the Embarrassing Saint” (The Humanist, May/June 1994), Asma notes that “the discrepancy between classical and contemporary Catholic theories of fetal development is enough to make the pope cringe. What Christians really want,” he added, “is to have their visceral responses and intuitional moral impressions stamped onto the gavel of state authority.” Asma wrote Following Form And Function (1996).

ASOCIACIÓN IBERO-AMERICANA ÉTICO HUMANISTA (ASIBEHU) An association of Spanish-speaking ethical humanists in South, Central, and North America, Asociación Ibero-Americana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU, Apartado 1057, 2050 San Pedro, Costa Rica) was commenced in 1994 in San José, Costa Rica. It was made possible by a generous grant from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and by the efforts of Rob Tielman, Matt Cherry, Paul Kurtz, Tim Madigan, and Warren Allen Smith. ASIBEHU’s first president was Alexander Cox Alvarado. Its webmaster and executive director is Ricardo Otárola. On the World Wide Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>

ASOCIACION MEXICANA ÉTICA RACIONALISTA (AMER) In 1995, the Asociacion Mexicana Ética Racionalista published the first issue of a quarterly, Razonamientos. On its editorial board are humanists from Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Spain, and the United States of America. E-mail: <mendezm@spin.com.mx>.

Asoka (300 B.C.E.—232 B.C.E.) H. G. Wells says of Asoka, the famous Hindu monarch, that in the world-list of kings, “the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star.” Asoka became a zealous Buddhist in mid-life and did wonders for the vast empire he had inherited. His moral code was severe and dogmatic, but it did not interfere with the ingenuous sexual freedom that then ruled in India. Vincent Smith, an authority on Hindu history, says that Asoka “ignored, without denying, the existence of a Supreme Deity.” As such, Asoka embraced Buddhism in its pure atheistic form, giving the world an example of “the fruits of atheism.” {JM; RE}

Asp, Mathilda (19th Century) Asp founded Sweden’s first nonbelievers’ organization in 1887. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

ASP ASP is short for Angle-Saxon Protestants. The expression often has negative and clique-like connotations, as does WASP (except that the W for white is considered redundant).

Aspasia (Mid-5th Century B.C.E.) Pericles’s unwedded wife, Aspasia, “was likely enough to be a freethinker” who shared her famous husband’s opinions and ideals, according to Robertson. But when a comic playwright, Hermippos, brought a charge of impiety against her, Pericles, who had not taken the risk of letting Anaxagoras come to trial, himself defended Aspasia before the dicastery, or place where the courts sat. The most famous woman of the ancient world, and one of the most beautiful, Aspasia had come from Asia Minor (Ionia) and, being a foreigner and non-Athenian, was not eligible under Athenian law for Pericles to marry. One of the Hetairai, which McCabe says means pals or companions, “not courtesans as is often said,” she was put on trial for irreligion. Pericles therefore defended her, obtaining her acquittal. According to some, she became adviser of Pericles after he divorced his wife in 445 B.C.E. Xenophon wrote favorably about Aspasia. {CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}

Aspland, Lindsey Middleton (19th Century) Aspland, a freethinker, wrote Law of Blasphemy (1884). {GS}

Aspland, Robert (19th Century) Aspland, a freethinker, wrote An Inquiry into the Nature of the Sin of Blasphemy (1817). {GS}

ASS, BURIDAN’S Jean Buridan (c. 1295—1356) was a French nominalist philosopher who, like Aristotle, wrote about a hungry ass. To its right was a haystack, and to its left was a haystack. Both haystacks appeared to be equally good and equidistant, but, unable to decide which to choose, the ass died of starvation. The illustration indicates the dilemma everyone has in choosing something when no evident reason exists for making one choice over another. {AF; OCP}

ASS, FEAST OF THE During the Christmas season in the ninth century and following, an annual religious ceremony was held in parts of Europe. An ass, often ridden by a beautiful girl, was led through the city by the clergy and placed near the altar during Mass (higher as well as lower clerics assisting); and the priests he-hawed instead of making the usual responses, leading the body of people present to join in the braying. People then sang (sometimes coarse popular songs) and danced around the ass. {RE}

Asseline, Louis (1829—1878) A French writer, Asseline established La Libre Pensée, a weekly journal of scientific materialism. He wrote Diderot and the Nineteenth Century. After the revolution of 1870, he was elected mayor of the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris. {BDF; RAT}

ASSEMBLY OF FREETHINKERS The Assembly of Freethinkers (IHEU) is at House No. 258, Road No. 1, Dhanmondi R/A, Dhaka 1205, Bangladesh.

Assezat, Jules (1832—1876) A French writer, Assezat was secretary of the Paris Society of Anthropology. He edited the complete works of Diderot. {BDF; RAT}

ASSIMILATION • We should just keep fucking each other until we’re all the same color. —Warren Beatty, in the movie “Bulworth” (1998)

• It’s good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They show that France is open to all races—but so long as they remain a small minority. Otherwise France would no longer be France. —Charles deGaulle in 1959; a view that is usually branded as a racist statement

The Population Association of America has found that blacks and whites in the United States are not much more likely to intermarry in 1990 than they were thirty years prior. A total of 97.6% of black women were found to have husbands who are black, down from 99.1% in 1960. The odds of a black woman having a black husband are over nine thousand times the odds of a non-black woman having a black husband. Fewer than 40% of American Indian women, however, married another Indian, compared with 786% in 1960. According to The Economist (20 June 1998), sociologists consider intermarriage to be the “litmus test” of assimilation. High rates of intermarriage signal a breakdown in barriers between racial or ethnic groups. Such marriages then speed that breakdown along by building family ties across groups. Intermarriage also produces children who are less clearly identified with a particular race or ethnic group. Golfer Tiger Woods, son of a Thai woman and a black man, was cited as an example. (See entry for Jew, Who Is A?)

ASSOCIATION FOR HUMANISM The Association for Humanism in Poland is c/o Prof. Dolowy, UL. Rackowiecka 39A M 10, 02-521 Warsaw, Poland.

ASSOCIATION “HUMANIST CONSCIENCE” Association “Humanist Conscience,” Vesuviusstraat 2, Willemstad, is a humanist group in Curacao, the Netherlands Antilles. {FD}

ASSOCIATION LAÏQUE HUMANISTISCHE PRÄSENZ The Association Laïque Humanistische Präsenz was formed in 1988 to work in nine German-speaking communes of Belgium.

ASSOCIATION OF CITIZENS WITHOUT RELIGION The Association of Citizens Without Religion is led by Prof. RN Dr. Frantisek Fabian, C Sc., Volsinach 2012, CZ-100 00 Praha 10, Czech Republic

ASSOCIATION OF IRISH HUMANISTS The Association of Irish Humanists is at 25 Wolf Tone Square West, Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland. The newsletter of the Association of Irish Humanists is at 5 Ailesbury Gardens, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, Ireland.

Assollant, Jean Baptiste Alfred (Born 1827) Larousse wrote that Assollant has all the skepticism of Voltaire in his novels. {BDF; RAT}

Ast, Georg Anton Friedrich (1778—1841) A German Platonist, Ast was professor of classical literature at Landshut and Munich. He wrote Elements of Philosophy (1809). {BDF}

ASTROLOGY Freethinkers and Catholics agree on astrology, the belief that star movements can be interpreted to predict human events. Both agree as to its unfortunate appeal to the uneducated. Specifically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) says, “All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to ‘unveil’ the future. Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers. They contradict the honor, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone.” The last sentence, of course, is as meaningless to freethinkers as is astrology. The Dutch Society of Skeptics in 1996 checked the competence of 44 astrologers by using two lists, one containing the place and date of birth of seven people, the other with extensive information about each of the seven. Asked to match the two, one-half did not even get one correct answer. None correctly matched more than three. However, the terms of the challenge had been set by the astrologers.

“What’s your sign?” ask the astrologers. “I don’t carry one,” respond the freethinkers. {American Rationalist, May-June 1997}

ASTRONOMY In the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy’s view, the Earth was at the center of the universe, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars revolving around it. Fifteen hundred years later, Copernicus showed that the sun, not the earth, is at the center. Church authorities, meanwhile, had forced Galileo to declare belief in the Earth-centered universe. Freethinkers and other non-theists build their philosophic outlooks on facts supplied by astronomers, not on beliefs guessed through theological divination. Rather than spending time on the “ontological argument” (an argument for the existence of God based upon the meaning of the term God), they spend their time investigating reality: quarks, black holes, or the “Great Attractor” which in the 1990s was found to be a huge region of matter that is drawing in the Milky Way galaxy with its gravitational pull. “The Hubble constant” is still much discussed. For example, Allan Sandage, a Hubble pupil who holds that the universe is from 14 to 18 billion years old, used the Hubble telescope to check the distance to a galaxy called NGC 4639. “He managed,” reported The Economist (9 March 1996), “to discover 20 cepheids in it and used them to calculate that it is 82 million light years away. With this value he was able to confirm that the luminosity of a supernova that was seen in NGC 4639 in 1990 matched expectations, yielding a Hubble constant of 57. Such supernovae ought, therefore, to be a reliable way of measuring the distances to galaxies too far away for their cepheids to be seen.” Dr. Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Institution in Pasadena, disagreed. Using the Hubble telescope to look at 20 cepheids in a galaxy called M100, she found that the galaxy, part of a nearby group known as the Virgo cluster, “is closer to the earth than previously realised. The result, when combined with M100’s red shift, gave a value for the Hubble constant of 80. This, in turn, suggested that the universe is 12 billion years old at most. As to why she received such different results with her cepheids, The Economist suggested that one possibility “is that the Virgo cluster is simply too near. Though the Big Bang predicts that galaxies are moving apart more or less uniformly, it does allow for a bit of local jiggling. It may be that the Virgo galaxies are receding from the Milky Way that fast, not because of any general expansion but because of such local turbulence. Dr. Sandage reckons that cepheid distances to a dozen or so Virgo galaxies will be needed for a reliable result.” Noting that Sandage is an Iowa-born theist, some freethinkers tend to look upon his findings with suspicion, particularly because he has made some unusual statements about a supernatural force “out there.” Freethinkers are in the forefront of holding that the astronomers’ findings and disagreements are far preferable to metaphysical extrapolations concerning the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead. Astronomers using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope combined efforts in 1997 to discover the most distant object ever seen, a galaxy some 13 billion light years from the Earth. Formally named “Red Arc in CL1358+62,” it contains small but intensely bright knots, each apparently a region where many stars are forming. Astronomers at the very end of the 20th century were ecstatic upon finding that the solar system is not alone as an array of planets orbiting in the gravitational embrace of a shining star. Three large planets were found around Upsilon Andromedae, a solar-type star forty-four light-years away. As to the philosophical significance, they could only guess, according to The New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford (16 April 1999). (See entries for John D. Barrow, Christian deDuve, Edwin Powell Hubble, Sir Martin Reese, and Joseph Silk.) {The New York Times, 31 July 1997}

Astruc, Jean (1684—1766) Astruc was a French physician and founder of Biblical criticism. He taught anatomy at Toulouse (1710), then at Montpellier, and later of medicine at Paris. In 1753, he published Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux dont il parait que Moise s’est servi pour composer le livre de Genèse, which for the first time divided the Mosaic narrative into Jahvist and Elohist documents. Astruc died “without the sacraments.” {RAT}

Aszo y del Rio, Ignacio Jordan de (1742—1814) A Spanish jurist, Aszo was a naturalist who wrote many scientific works. In his political works, he advocated the abolition of ecclesiastical power. {BDF; RAT}

ATARAXIA Ataraxia, Greek for tranquility of mind, was the goal as well as the inspiration of the Greek Sceptics. When contentious issues arose, one achieved ataraxia by remaining calm and suspending one’s judgment until the argument was clearly comprehended. {AF}

Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (1881—1938) Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, in reforming the country made secularism an indispensable pillar of the Republic. In 1923 he abolished the caliphate and established the republic, secularizing education. He dismantled the system of Islamic law which had prevailed during the long centuries of Ottoman rule. Atatürk (the word means father of the Turks) introduced new laws based on Swiss and Italian civil codes. He banned the fez as a symbol of backwardness, outlawed the use of Arabic in the Muezzin’s call to prayer, and gave women the vote. In the 1930s, tribunals tried people for wearing head-dress associated with Islam, the religion of ninety-nine percent of Turkey’s people. All convents run by religious sects were banned, and primary school education was made compulsory. In 1928 the Arabic script was discarded, replaced by the Latin alphabet. “Islam” and “religion” were replaced in the constitution by “secular” and “democratic.” Among political leaders, Atatürk stands as one of the inspiring secularists of the century. As evidence of his opposition, Muslim students who attended a private Qur’an school were shown in a 1997 video lining up to file past, and to spit on, a bust of Atatürk. “I swear by Allah,” the students vowed in unison, “to strive to create a state based on religion and Islamic law in Turkey and to devote myself to the war against Mustafa Kemal atheism.” News reports indicated that militants were using schools to try to impose an Islamic-based political order, one that would supplant the government’s secularism. More than 100,000 Muslims protested against secularism in a May 1997 march within Istanbul. Onlookers were concerned about possible fateful results of the conflict. Critics point out that during his mature years, Atatürk abandoned all religious belief, writing a civics manual that was anti-Islamic. “He described Mohammed,” Andrew Mango has written in Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation (1997), “as a carrier of Arab nationalism and said that as for Turks, their religion had always been ‘a religion of nature.’ In the late 1920’s he told an English journalist: ‘I have no religion. I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea.’ ” McCabe wrote, “They gave him the name Atatürk for his wonderful work. Like so many great theistic rulers he showed that personal asceticism is no more required of the head of a state than belief in the spiritual.” McCabe later describes Atatürk as “a complete sceptic, protesting that his only ideal was the good of his country.” In 1998 when a movie about him was proposed by Tarquin Olivier, son of actor Laurence Olivier, some Greek-Americans complained that Atatürk was unworthy of favorable portrayal. Although small in numbers and allegedly motivated by a negative feeling toward Turkey in general, the group described him as a “savage maniac” who was also “a child molester of both sexes, a mass murderer, a destroyer of Greek civilization, and in general a disgrace to human civilization as we know it.” Andrew Mango’s Atatürk (1999) added, after describing his subject, “He was a man of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was not made by saints.” In 1998 when an eight-pronged tower was constructed, commemorating the life of Turgut Ozal, the country’s leader for most of the 1980s, its architect Yilmaz Sanli commented that the crescent on the top was a reminder that their former leader was a believer in Islam. In Ankara, however, Atatürk’s resting-place is part shrine and part museum, entirely devoid of any religious imagery. {CE; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1991; The Economist, 2 May 1998; JM; RE}

ATEN Aten, in early Egypt, was considered the God of the Sun. {LEE}

ATEO (ITALY) The Italian atheistic publication, Ateo, Trimestrale di cultura laica, is at C.P. 989, I-35100, Padova PD, Italy. E-mail: <uaarpd@tin.it>.

ATHEISM 

• I was a freethinker before I knew how to think. —George Bernard Shaw

• Atheism: Historically a vague and contentious term meaning lack of belief in god(s) or impiety toward the god(s). Abandoned in favor of “unbelief” [in the present book]. —J. C. A. Gaskin Varieties of Unbelief From Epicurus to Sartre (1989)

Atheists point out that all humans are born atheists. Linguistically, atheism (a + theism) is a disbelief in the existence of God, gods, and of any supernatural existence. Few avowed atheists wrote of their disbelief until the nineteenth century, at which time a popular belief in a conflict between religion and science was highlighted by the writings of such individuals as Robert G. Ingersoll and, in the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the latter of whom gave the word a bad name. Atheism differs from agnosticism, which holds that the existence of God, gods, and the supernatural cannot be proved. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), “Since it rejects or denies the existence of God, atheism is a sin against the first commandment.” Further:

• Atheism must be regarded as one of the most serious problems of our time. The name “atheism” covers many very different phenomena. One common form is the practical materialism which restricts its needs and aspirations to space and time. Atheistic humanism falsely considers man to be “an end to himself, and the sole maker, with supreme control, of his own history.” Another form of contemporary atheism looks for the liberation of man through economic and social liberation. It holds that religion, of its very nature, thwarts such emancipation by raising man’s hopes in a future life, thus both deceiving him and discouraging him from working for a better form of life on earth.

• Since it rejects or denies the existence of God, atheism is a sin against the virtue of religion. The imputability of this offense can be significantly diminished in virtue of the intentions and the circumstances. Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism. To the extent that they are careless about their instruction in the faith, or present its teaching falsely, or even fail in their religious, moral, or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than to reveal the true nature of god and of religion.

• Atheism is often based on a false conception of human autonomy, exaggerated to the point of refusing any dependence on God. Yet, to acknowledge God is in no way to oppose the dignity of man, since such dignity is grounded and brought to perfection in God. . . . For the Church knows full well that her message is in harmony with the most secret desires of the human heart.

Gordon Stein, in The American Rationalist (Sep-Oct 1994), listed what he considered are the top ten books that have been “the most powerful in refuting the existence of God and truth of Christianity” (listed alphabetically):

The Bible (both Old and New Testament) Cohen, Chapman, Theism or Atheism Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’, The System of Nature Ingersoll, Robert G., Some Mistakes of Moses Martin, Michael, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification Martin, Michael, The Case Against Christianity Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason Palmer, Elihu, Principles of Nature Scott, Richard, A Game of Chess Smith, George H., Atheism: The Case Against God

	“Unbelief” is generally the preferred term, not “atheism,” by many freethinkers and unbelievers. Meanwhile, to the cognoscenti, “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” (See entry for Humanism, Per Curtis Reese.)

ATHEISM, ANCIENT “In Ancient Greece,” Finngeir Hiorth has written, “there were not many atheists. The word ‘atheist’ comes from Greek, and about 10-15 persons in ancient Greece were called ‘atheists.’ But most of these believed in one or more gods, and about the others not much is known. In ancient China atheism was no real option. In ancient India there were some atheists, but their names are not known.” Atheism, Hiorth found, is a relatively new phenomenon, not more than three hundred years old. Those individuals who were atheistic, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, did not elaborate on their views, developed philosophies which were largely independent of atheism, or dressed their outlook in a profound but also an obscure philosophy of religion. {New Humanist, December 1998}

ATHEISMUSSTRICT Atheismusstrict was a controversy in Germany toward the end of the eighteenth century. It concerned allegedly subversive philosophical views of Johann G. Fichte (1762—1814) and Friedrich C. Forberg (1770—1848). (See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.)

ATHEISM, INTERNATIONAL: See entries for individual countries.

THE ATHEIST Founded by Gora, The Atheist is at Benz Circle, Vijayawada, India 520 006. E-mail: <rajatha@VMM.XEEVGA.XEEMAIL>. ems.vsnl.net.in>.

ATHEIST ALLIANCE The Atheist Alliance, the Democratic Alliance of Autonomous Atheist Societies (PO Box 5296, San Mateo, CA 94402) published their first quarterly, Secular Nation, in 1994. It was edited by Howard Kreisner. The founding president was John B. Massen. The co-presidents were Christos Tzanetakos and Marie Castle. Their stated aims are to help develop a strong, democratic, atheist society; to assist fledgling groups; to make atheism a respected viewpoint in discussions of public policy; and to develop liaison with similar groups. Castle in 1995 declined to be nominated again and was replaced by Lee Baker. The group held its first annual Atheist Alliance Convention, in North Hollywood, California. Member societies include the following:

Arizona Secular Humanists, Phoenix-Scottsdale, Box 3738, Scottsdale, AZ 85271 (602) 230-5328 <103665.3310@com puserve.com> Atheist Alliance, the nationwide coalition of atheist groups: <talkeetna@aol.com> Box 6261, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406 <http://www.atheistalliance.org> President: Marie Alena Castle, 5146 Newton Ave. North, Minneapolis, MN 55430 (612) 588- 1597; <mac@mtn.org> [[Atheist Centre, Benz Circle, Vijayawada, India 520006 (+91) 866-472330 Atheist Coalition (San Diego) (619) 622-1892 <atheistcoalition@hotmail.com> Atheist Community of Austin, Texas, Box 3798, Austin, TX 78764 (512) 478-2116 or (512) 892-3188 <tankgirl@swbell.net> and <donrodz@swbell.net> [[Atheist Network]: <atheism@wally.hti.net> Atheist Outreach (at-large membership), 278 Orchard Dr., Oregon, WI 53575 (608) 835-7937 <zemel@atheistalliance.org> or <slferoe@aol.com> Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin, 278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, WI 53575 (608) 835-7937 <mwbookrevw@aol.com> [[Atheists and Other Freethinkers], Box 15182, Sacramento, CA 95851; (916) 920-7834 <hkocol@hotmail.com> and <frethnkr@inforum.net> <www.rthoughtsrfree.org/aof/aof/htm>. [[Atheists of Colorado, Box 391, Colorado Springs, CO (303) 530-0392 <slferoe@aol.com> Atheists of Florida, Box 3893, Ft. Pierce, FL (305) 936-0210 <athalfle@aol.com> and <schisler@earthlink.net> <http://www.execpc.com/~aai/florida>. Atheists of Northern Colorado, Box 2555, Loveland, CO (970) 577-0015 <vgmccoy@juno.com> Atheists of San Francisco Region, Box 421815, San Francisco, CA 94142 (415) 647-9309 <jackmassen@aol.com> and <ray75511@aol.com> [[Atheists United, Box 57435, Sherman Oaks, CA 94142 (818) 785-1743 <bkirkhart@aol.com> Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Pocopson, PA 19366 (610) 793-2737 <downey1@cris.com> Metroplex Atheists, 6 Ft. Worth Ct., Mansfield, TX 76063 (817) 473-8213 <metroatheists@star-telegram.com> Minnesota Atheists, Box 6261, Minneapolis, MN 55406 (612) 588-7031 <mac@mtn.org> and <august@mtn.org> Rationalist Society of St. Louis, Box 2931, St. Louis, MO 63130 (314) 664-4424 <rsslbarb@aol.com> or <reover@juno.com> Shasta Atheists & Freethinkers, 1544, Shasta Lake, CA 96019 (530) 244-3731 <spresz@snowcrest.net> Society Against Religion (Commack, New York) <nogod1@aol.com> Southeast Michigan Chapter FFRF, 414k91 Bellridge Blvd #12, Belleville, MI 48111 (734) 699-7232 <vipressverity@ameritech.net.org> or <slferoe@aol.com>

In 1998, at the time of their Fourth Annual Atheist Alliance Convention held in St. Louis, Missouri, the officers were Marie Castle, President; Jim Cox, Vice President; Richard Russell, Secretary; Ed Golly, Assistant Secretary; Shirley Moll, Treasurer; and Jack Massen, Assistant Treasurer. The 1999 national convention was held in Austin, Texas. On the Net: <http://www.execpc.com/~aai> and <http://www.mnatheists.org/alliance.html>. (See entry for John B. Massen.)

ATHEIST AMATEUR RADIO NETWORK Ray C. Beckett, A-2, 2003 Logan, Hamilton, Ohio 45015, has a ham radio station W90E that promotes an active network. {FD}

ATHEIST CELEBRITIES According to an Internet homepage, the following are well-known individuals who may not be so well-known as atheists:

Woody Allen, director; Russell Baker, columnist; Ingmar Bergman, film director; Pierre Boulez, composer-conductor; Marlon Brando, actor; Warren Buffett, financier; George Carlin, comedian; Noam Chomsky, linguist; Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author; Alexander Cockburn, columnist; Michael Crichton, author; Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate and biophysicist; Quentin Crisp, author; Richard Dawkins, author; Amanda Donohoe, actress; Paul Edwards, philosopher and editor; Barbara Ehrenreich, columnist; Albert Ellis, psychologist; Harlan Ellison, author; Harvey Fierstein, actor; Antony Flew, philosopher; Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler; Dario Fo, Nobel Laureate and dramatist; James Forman, civil rights activist; Jodie Foster, actress; John Fowles, novelist; Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and CEO; Sir John Gielgud, actor; Jean Luc Godard, Director; Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw; Alan Hale, astronomer; Nat Hentoff, columnist; Katharine Hepburn, actress; Christopher Hitchens, columnist; Derek Humphry, euthanasia campaigner; Penn Jillette, magician; Wendy Kaminer, journalist; Neil Kinnock, European commissioner and former leader of the British Labour Party; W. P. Kinsella, novelist; Michael Kinsley, columnist; Paul Krassner, editor and comedian; Stanley Kubrick, director; Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter; Richard Leakey, paleontologist; Alexander I. Lebed, Russian politician; Tom Lehrer, satirist; Sir Ian McKellen, actor; Arthur Miller, playwright; Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence researcher; Desmond Morris, zoologist; Taslima Nasrin, Bangladeshi author; Ted Nelson, author; Randy Newman, recording artist; Jack Nicholson, actor; Camille Paglia, author; Roman Polanski, director; Katha Pollitt, editor; Vladimir Pozner, commentator; Jean-Pierre Rampal, flautist; James Randi, conjurer; Ron Reagan Jr., talk host; Christopher Reeve, actor; Richard Rorty, philosopher; Salman Rushdie, novelist; Dan Savage, sex advice columnist; George Soros, financier; Mira Sorvino, actress; Teller, magician; Gore Vidal, author; Max von Sydow, actor; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., author.

On the Web: <www.primenet.com/~lippard/atheistcelebs>. [See entries, herein, for individuals.}

ATHEIST CENTRE The oldest existing atheist organization in India is the Atheist Centre (Benz Circle, Vijayawada 520 010, India). It was founded in 1940 by Gora and Saraswathi Gora, and its current president is Gora’s son, Lavanam. In 1996, the center was co-host with the Periyar Rationalist Movement of India of the fourth World Atheist Conference. Delegates were told of the center’s large projects and facilities, including economic development, education, health, disaster relief, and social transformation. One of the programs serves 200,000 people in 150 villages. Describing the conference, Jerry Rauser of Minnesota commented that upon visiting in Madras the one-day State Rationalist Conference that followed, the foreign delegates were impressed by the dynamism of the Indian non-theists. At the statue of Periyar, they read aloud, even screamed, the saying on the base: “There is no God. There is no God. There is no God at all. He who invented God is a fool. He who propagates God is a scoundrel. He who worships God is a barbarian.” The Centre conducts intercaste marriages, criticizes religious taboos, organizes beef and pork suppers at which both Hindu and Muslim supporters can be challenged, acts to help child prostitutes, and opposes child marriages. It also conducts a campaign to promote the scientific outlook and rational thinking. Witchcraft and sorcery, which survive in rural life, are exposed with the cooperation of the Indian Medical Association. An associated organization—the Arthik Aamata Mandal (Association for Economic Equality)—is devoted to comprehensive rural development. (See entries for Gora and Lavanam.) {FD; New Humanist, February 1996; HNS2}

ATHEIST COALITION Atheist Coalition, a monthly of the Atheist Coalition, is at P. O. Box 4786, San Diego, CA 92164-4786. Their E-mail is <latheistcoalition@hotmail.com>.

ATHEIST CONTACTS PAGE On the Web the Atheists Contact Page is found at <http://www.sdmst.edu/caa-bin/contact>. ATHEIST NATION Atheist Nation (PO Box 3217, Chicago, Illinois 60654) is a monthly newsletter found on the Web: <http://www.atheistnation.com>. The e-mail address of its publisher, J. L. Jaxon, is <jaxonpub@aol.com>.

ATHEIST NETWORK Atheist Network is at POB 130898, Houston, Texas 77219 and, on the Web Atheist Network is found at <http://www.keith.com/~rkblack/tna.html>. {FD}

ATHEIST STUDENTS’ ASSOCIATION (ASA) The Atheist Students’ Association (ASA) was founded in 1995 at the University of Maryland in College Park by Ali Aliabadi and Brie Waters. Its secretary, an Internet Infidel, is Keith Augustine.

ATHEIST THOUGHT Eric Stockton’s Atheist Thought is on the Web: <http://www.orknet.co.uk/godiva/at/index.htm>.

ATHEIST TV OUTREACH PROJECT (ATVOP) Co-directors of the Atheist TV Outreach Project are Dwayne Walker and Brett Welch. Their e-mail: <mac@mtn.org>. Their phone: (612) 588-1597.

ATHEIST VIEWPOINT: See entry for Ellen Johnson.

ATHEISTIC HUMANISM Theos and atheos, or some such similar terms, have always stimulated the imaginations of people interested in religion. Of the two, the former term has undoubtedly attracted more numerical adherents because of the affirmation, optimism, and proselytizing that have accompanied it. In contrast, the latter has carried with it a connotation of abnegation, pessimism, iconoclasm, and negativism. As an entity in itself, atheism has enjoyed relatively few wholehearted disciples, not even of most individuals in the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics where it was the “state religion” in the twentieth century. Yet there is that logical position of atheism, and it not only serves as an opposite in one’s mind to theism but also helps round out the logician’s fancy syllogisms. By atheism is meant the denial of any god, regardless of the definition of “god” that may be offered. To define it otherwise, to define it in such a fashion that one can conclude there really are no atheists, is both illogical and non-constructive. There are, however, those who call atheists all persons who deny a personal god or gods, or who deny a personal god or gods that have been particularly defined by some specific creed; e.g., the Trinitarian, the Calvinistic, the Catholic. President Theodore Roosevelt, for example, erroneously called the deist Thomas Paine “a filthy little atheist.” In his attempt to define atheism, Bradlaugh in Plea for Atheism (1864) wrote, “The atheist does not say, ‘There is no God,’ but he says, ‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. I do not deny God, because I cannot deny that of which I have no conception.’” Richard Carlile, however, simply said that not only is there no such being as a God but also there is no such place as Heaven in which God could dwell. Meanwhile, Charles Watts in 1898 offered the following: “I am a pronounced Atheist–that is, I have no belief in the existence of any ‘God’; I am an Agnostic–that is, I know nothing of the alleged supernatural, or a future life. Further, I am a Secularist–that is, I believe in making the best, physically, morally, and intellectually, of what is known, leaving conjectures as to the unknown to those imaginative individuals who prefer to indulge in speculations, rather than in the realities of life.” Those who hold the atheistic position have so frequently been attacked because of their views that many have chosen alternate terms, such as freethinker, to describe their positions, thereby escaping what they fear will be adverse publicity. “The oldest freethought paper in the world,” for example, is The Truth Seeker, the official organ of the National Liberal League and an atheistic journal which was first founded in 1873. Since its formation, the magazine has believed “in the right of everyone to pursue happiness in his own way, so long as he does not injure others.” Although it favors “democracy and individual liberty,” its editorial policy has at times been negativistic. Some have objected to its various editors’ stands on secular as well as theological matters, but in general The Truth Seeker’s outlook has been that of atheistic humanism. Although atheistic humanism has never enjoyed popularity in the United States, Jean-Paul Sartre in France developed a similar set of beliefs in which he not only admitted his atheistic negativism and pessimism but also endorsed this to others. Sartre has appealed to many disappointed god-seekers with his statement,

Man is anguish. . . . He lives forlornly in a world without God. He has nothing to cling to within himself, nor without.

Rather than emphasizing the negation of God, however, Sartre claimed to have developed a religion of man, something more than just a plain rejection of natural or supernatural religion: “The doctrine I am presenting is the very opposite of quietism, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further and adds that Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than his life.” To some, this was not such pessimistic reasoning. After all, if man exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself, he must therefore do something positive to achieve such ends. Sartre continued: “Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. [It] isn’t trying to plunge man into despair. It declares that even if God did exist that would change nothing. Not that we believe God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the point. In this sense Existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action. Man cannot start making excuses for himself. There is no determinism. Man is free. The coward makes himself cowardly. The hero makes himself heroic. What counts is total involvement.” Michael Valle, founder and president of University of Minnesota Atheists and Unbelievers, has offered some current definitions of agnosticism and atheism which, he stated, have been influenced by the writings of Michael Martin and Michael Scriven:

• Negative atheism refers to the literal definition. The negative atheist does not necessarily deny the existence of a god, but simply lacks a belief. Some negative atheists, such as the logical positivists, contend that the concept of god is factually meaningless, and so to affirm or deny its existence is to say nothing. They thus lack a belief in a god.

• Positive atheism refers to an actual denial of the existence of a god, whether that denial be a dogmatic assurance that there is no god or a more moderate assurance that it is more likely than not that there is no god. This definition conflicts with common usage, for the atheism most people refer to is the dogmatic positive variety.

• Negative agnosticism neither affirms nor denies the existence of a god. Negative agnostics have no opinion in the matter because of a lack of knowledge or interest in the subject.

• Positive agnosticism makes the claim that it is actually impossible to know whether there is a god or not. Such an agnostic has a substantial position, unlike the negative agnostic.

Valle continued, “Insofar as an agnostic lacks a belief in a god or gods, that agnostic is at least a negative atheist. The current meaning of agnosticism is perfectly compatible with negative atheism. It appears that agnosticism does not denote any concept that atheism does not cover–other than the positive agnostic’s position that it is impossible to know whether there is a god. Thus, it appears that negative agnostics are generally uninterested negative atheists, and positive agnostics are negative atheists who think positive atheism can never be justified.” He concluded, “Philosophically, it seems that agnostics and atheists are far more related than either might like to admit.” By “atheism,” Theodore M. Drange means positive atheism. He uses “nontheism” to mean “negative atheism.” All atheists, he notes, are nontheists, but not vice versa. Some nontheists are agnostics, withholding judgment one way or another on God’s existence, possibly maintaining that neither judgment can be supported. Some other nontheists make the more forceful claim that both theism and atheism are mistaken or misguided regarding the nature of discourse about God. He calls such discourse “God-talk.” Examples of noncognitivists who regard God-talk to be meaningless (or unintelligible) are A. J. Ayer, Antony Flew, Paul Edwards, and Kai Nielsen. Examples of those who claim that God-talk is noncognitive but not meaningless are philosophers such as R. B. Braithwaite, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and D. Z. Phillips. Although he feels some in the latter category might call themselves “theists,” he regards them as nontheists. Gaskin, preferring “unbelief” to atheism, used the following definition:

Unbelief: At least (a) lack of belief in any supernatural agents and, by implication, (b) lack of belief in miracles, and often, but connected with (a) and (b) only contingently, (c) lack of belief in personal survival after death. (See entry for Hell, and definition for Hell by Edgar Sheffield Brightman. Also, see entry for Hippo, the first atheist in Greek antiquity. McCabe’s A Rationalist Encyclopedia. contains a discussion of atheism.) {CE; ER; JMRH}

ATHEISTIC MUSIC: See entry for Freethought Music.

A-THEISTS AS CLASSIFIED BY A MANHATTAN WAG

• Adolescent atheist: Since I am a teenager, I know everything, and I know there is no God. So, like, the fact that many adults think that there is a God, like, proves my case.

• Campus atheist: I need attention, I need to feel important, and I can get these things by being obnoxious about the non-existence of God.

• Closet atheist: There are no good reasons for believing in God, but what harm can there be?

• Evangelical atheist: It is not sufficient that there is no God. We must do our best to make sure that nobody even thinks about believing that there is one.

• Fundamentalist atheist: There is no God, and anyone who thinks there is a God is a misguided, dangerous fool.

• Lethargic atheist: Religion is such a hassle. Why bother!

• Nihilistic atheist: Life as well as anything else has no point, and the existence of a god would invalidate this, so it is obviously not true.

• Paranoid atheist: Religion—sounds like another conspiracy, along with the aliens, the dolphins, and the CIA—they’re all out to get me!

• Philosophical atheist: I don’t believe, therefore I am.

• Politically correct atheist: God has a consistent history of discrimination on gender, sexual orientation, feminist, racial, and cultural grounds, therefore must be banned from existing.

• Puritanical atheist: We shall smite all evil believers in nonsense and shall continue our purge until not one damned theist is left alive.

• Scientific atheist: There is no God because I cannot create a falsifiable hypothesis concerning His existence.

• Social atheist: Well, everyone I know and respect is an atheist, so there must be something to it.

• Theological atheist: The principles of logic demonstrate the absence of any omnipotent and omniscient being in the universe. {From the Internet}

ATHEISTS AND OTHER FREETHINKERS Atheists and Other Freethinkers (AOF) publishes a monthly newsletter, AOF News & Views (PO Box 15182, Sacramento, California 95851).

ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES A granite memorial, “Atheists in Foxholes,” was dedicated at Lake Hypatia, Alabama, on 4 July 1999. Freedom From Religion Foundation President Anne Gaylor envisioned such a monument, which features the insignia of all United States military branches, is made of Georgia granite, and was built at Fearn Park. Its wording is as follows:

IN MEMORY OF ATHEISTS IN FOXHOLES AND THE COUNTLESS FREETHINKERS WHO HAVE SERVED THIS COUNTRY WITH HONOR AND DISTINCTION. PRESENTED BY THE NATIONAL FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION WITH HOPE THAT IN THE FUTURE HUMANKIND MAY LEARN TO AVOID ALL WAR

ATHEISTS OF FLORIDA Ed Golly is Secretary of Atheists of Florida (PO Box 3893, Ft. Pierce, Florida 33948). The group is “dedicated to freedom of thought and expression and to the mandate of the First Amendment for complete separation of State and Church.” Kyoko Brogdon was the original incorporator along with the late John Diamond. Jan Eisler was the first to become a life member in 1996, followed by Charles Schisler.

ATHEISTS WHO CONVERTED TO CHRISTIANITY Antonio Casao Ibanez, writing from Spain, has cited several examples of famous atheists who later changed to Christianity: Jacques Maritain and his wife, both philosophers; Charles Foucault; André Frossard, son of a former Secretary of the French Communist Party; Vittorio Messori, the interviewer and collaborator of John Paul II’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope; Max Jacob, the Jewish poet and friend of Picasso; Evelyn Waugh; and Sheldon Vanauken, a Virginia professor of history. {The Skeptical Review, January-February 1997}

ATHEISTS: For an estimate of the number of atheists in the world, see entry for Hell.

ATHEISTS, RELIGIOUS: See entry for Faith Atheism (Faitheism).

ATHEISTS’ BELIEFS “Atheists believe there is no God.” “No,” retorts Brian Templeton in Des Moines, Washington, “all atheism says is the simple and obvious fact that there is no evidence for the existence of supernatural beings, whether they be gods or tooth fairies.” {Skeptical Inquirer, March-April 1999}

Athelstan (Aesthelstan) (Died 939) Athelstan, English son and successor of Edward the Elder, was king of Wessex (924—939) and grandson of Alfred. After a victory over his enemies at Brunanburn in 937, Athelstan became overlord of all England. In 960, he ruled that shops must be closed on the Christian Sabbath. That religious stranglehold on Sunday ended in August 1994 when Queen Elizabeth II gave the Royal Assent to the Sunday Trading Bill. The bill allows shops to be open from 10 AM to 6 PM on Sunday, except that large shops and certain others including small shops under 3,000 square feet may open all hours on Sundays if they choose. England’s National Secular Society and The Freethinker played a significant role in the victory.

ATHENS The largest city in Greece, Athens according to tradition was governed until about 1,000 B.C.E by Ionian kings. Afterwards, it was governed by its aristocrats through an archontate. Solon in 594 B.C.E. abolished serfdom, modified the extreme laws attributed to Draco (who had governed Athens c. 621 B.C.E.), and gave power to the propertied classes, thus establishing a limited democracy. The Persian Wars (500-449 B.C.E.) made it the strongest Greek city-state, and during the rule of Pericles (443-429 B.C.E.) the city reached the height of its cultural and imperial achievement. Socrates, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were major figures of the time. The Peloponnesian War resulted in the city’s losing to Sparta, its population humbled and halved. C. M. Bowra, Russell Meiggs, W. S. Ferguson, and Donald Kagan have documented the ancient Athenian humanism. Secular humanists in the West, unlike the various religionists, wish that Europe had followed the philosophers of Athens and Ionia, not the theologians of Constantinople and Rome and Geneva. (See entry for Sparta.) {CE; New Humanist, October 1998}

ATHLETICS: See entry for Sports.

Atkins, Peter Williams (1940— ) Peter William Atkins, Physical Chemist/Author science

Known to all chemistry undergraduates for writing standard texts, he also writes on creation and creationism.

In the preface to The Creation Atkins writes "My aim is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations."

--NJ

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In a commentary published in the January 20, 1997 issue of the journal Chemistry and Industry Atkins argues that the mysticism offered by religion no longer has any place in explaining our existence and how the universe works. He writes

"The challenge of elucidating living processes -- including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit' -- is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions. There are other, perhaps more challenging problems, including the origin of everything.

"In no case, though, is there any indication that science is grinding to a halt and coming up against a barrier to further explanation. There is certainly no justification for asserting that the powers of science are circumscribed and that beyond the boundary the only recourse to comprehension is God."

The article (along with some critical responses) can be found at http://ci.mond.org/9702/970218.html.

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An article in September 11, 1996 Electronic Telegraph titled "Professor says science rules out belief in God":

IT IS not possible to be intellectually honest and believe in gods. And it is not possible to believe in gods and be a true scientist, a professor said yesterday in a debate between science and religion at the annual festival of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

While apologising for being "forthright", Peter Atkins, professor of chemistry at Oxford University, said that religious belief was "outmoded and ridiculous". Belief in gods was a "worn out but once useful crutch in mankind's journey towards truth". "We consider the time has come for that crutch to be abandoned," he said.

Theologians could not even agree about the nature of their gods. These personages ranged from "blue touch-paper gods" who started everything and never interfered again, to "infinitely meddlesome gods who, as well as starting it off, police every elementary particle".

Religion provided empty answers to questions it had itself invented. To assert, for example, that a god was responsible for any action or deed was an abnegation of the power of human understanding. "It is a vacuous answer," said Prof Atkins. "To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance."

Science, on the other hand, gave us the hope of comprehension. It provided clear answers to questions that had stumped religion for centuries. It respected the human spirit and encouraged striving towards comprehension. Prof Atkins said: "Religion utterly failed to provide an explanation of the biosphere other than that 'God made it all'. Then Darwin thundered over the horizon and in a few decades of observation and thought . . . arrived at an answer."

Putting the opposite view, Prof William Gosling, of Bath University, said the strength of religion was its "unknowable mystery". He added: "At the heart of all religion there is nothing but the mysterious cause and author of all. More durable than time, more extensive than space, stronger than death, the very source of life itself . . . God is the last answer to all questions."

Religion was not about searching for truth. "To speak of truth in religious mysteries is beside the point. If you can test a statement's truth it cannot be essentially religious. It is not knowledge but belief that matters most in religious life."

Science even failed to offer us truth. Discoveries such as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and chaos theory showed it was eternally impossible to discover absolute truth. All science could offer was probabilities. Some of the most important questions in life were essentially religious. "Will you love me for ever?" "Can abortion be morally justified?"

"None of these gives rise to verifiable answers, but to think them meaningless is crazy," said Prof Gosling, who later accused Prof Atkins of being "slightly polemical". Prof Atkins responded: "I regard teaching religion as purveying lies. I came here today to de-corrupt you all."

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The following quotes arrive from Wayne Aiken's Atheist Fortune Cookie File.

"Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?" [P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.123]

"Religion closes off the central questions of existence by attempting to dissuade us from further enquiry by asserting that we cannot ever hope to comprehend. We are, religion asserts, simply too puny. Through fear of being shown to be vacuous, religion denies the awesome power of human comprehension. It seeks to thwart, by encouraging awe in things unseen, the disclosure of the emptiness of faith. Religion, in contrast to science, deploys the repugnant view that the world is too big for our understanding. Science, in contrast to religion, opens up the great questions of being to rational discussion, to discussion with the prospect of resolution and elucidation. Science, above all, respects the power of the human intellect. Science is the apotheosis of the intellect and the consummation of the Rennaissance. Science respects more deeply the potential of humanity than religion ever can." [P.W. Atkins, "The Limitless Power of Science" essay in "Nature's Imagination", John Cornwell, ed.; 1995 Oxford University Press, p.125]

"It's a vacuous answer . . . To say that 'God made the world' is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don't understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance." [Peter Atkins, British Association for the Advancement of Science]

Atkins is professor of chemistry at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Lincoln College. A writer for Ethical Record and New Humanist, he is author of Creation Revisited (1992), The Creation (1993), and Concepts of Physical Chemistry (1995). He has written,

The scientific account of cosmogenesis cannot stop when it has accounted for the universe springing from a seed the size of a Sun, nor when it has arrived at a seed the size of a pea. Nor can it stop at any smaller seed. A seed the size of a proton implies that that seed had to be manufactured, placed there by some cosmic pre-existing gardener. Science will be forced to admit defeat if it has to stop at a seed of any size. That is the severity of the criterion that science sets for itself. If we are to be honest, then we have to accept that science will be able to claim complete success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergency of everything from absolutely nothing. Not almost nothing, not a subatomic dustlike speck, but absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not ever empty space.

“My aim,” he wrote in The Creation, is to argue that the universe can come into existence without intervention, and that there is no need to invoke the idea of a Supreme Being in one of its numerous manifestations.” “There is certainly no justification for asserting that the powers of science are circumscribed and that beyond the boundary the only recourse to comprehension is God,” he wrote in Chemistry and Industry (20 January 1997). “To say that ‘God made the world,” he was quoted by Electronic Telegraph (11 September 1996) as saying during a debate held by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “is simply a more or less sophisticated way of saying that we don’t understand how the universe originated. A god, in so far as it is anything, is an admission of ignorance.” In 1993, Atkins was named an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He explained in New Humanist (February 1994) that he had been brought up “in a largely unthinking home and was banished to church on Sunday morning. In slightly later life I even summoned the faithful by ringing the bells. It was not until I entered the benign and encouraging environment of a university (Leicester, in fact) to study chemistry, that I began to think for myself, and soon discarded the remnants of belief in written authority.” In Free Inquiry (Spring, 1998), Atkins wrote that “Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology.” Atkins laments the fact that science respects the power of the human intellect whereas religion belittles it. {CA}

Atkinson, Alice (20th Century) Atkinson, a Glasgwegian, once was an air hostess with what was then OAC, landing on the rivers and lakes of Africa in flying boats and touching down from Egypt to South America. Married to an ex-wartime Spitfire pilot, Atkinson is the film critic for Humanism Scotland .

Atkinson, Arthur (20th Century) Atkinson in England is active with the Ealing Humanist Group. A naturalist, he is author of The Approach to Humanism (1997).

Atkinson, Henry George (1818—1884) Atkinson was a philosophic writer. Interested in mesmerism, he wrote in the Zoist. He was a frequent contributor to the National Reformer and other secular journals. Harriet Martineau served as one of his philosophic guides. {BDF; RAT; RSR}

Atkinson, Sam (20th Century) A freethinker, Atkinson wrote Science and the Priest, the Emancipation of Women and Free Love Explained (1910?). {GS}

ATON: See entry for Ikhnaton.

Attenborough, David Frederick (1926— ) In the James Herrick revision of Margaret Knight’s Humanist Anthology, Attenborough is included as a humanist author. A broadcaster and naturalist, he is the younger brother of Richard Attenborough. “Zoo Quest” (1954—1964) was a program that allowed him to undertake zoological and ethnographic expeditions to remote parts of the world. He wrote Trials of Life (1990), The First Eden (1987), The Living Planet (1984), and Life on Earth (1979).

ATTENUATED DEISM Attenuated deism is, according to J. C. A. Gaskin’s Varieties of Unbelief from Epicurus to Sartre (1989), “[a]cknowledgment of the possibility of some inconceivably remote and unknowable creator-god who is neither concerned with nor of concern to the human race, nor thinkably like a human person.”

Atwood, Isaac Morgan (1838—1917) Atwood converted from his Baptist faith to Universalism and served two decades as the head of the theological school at St. Lawrence in Canton, New York, resigning there to become the first general superintendent of the Universalist church. He wrote Revelation (1889). {U&U}

Atwood, John Murray (1869—1951) A professor of sociology and ethics, Atwood followed in his father’s (Isaac’s) footsteps by becoming Universalist dean of St. Lawrence Theological School. He once wrote, “The fact that in the Bible so-called history (temporary truth) is inaccurate often, does not subtract from its worth as a book of religious culture. Some stories like Jonah or Job or the parables of Jesus are plainly fiction, but of imperishable value, for they declare what is as true today as when first composed. . . . So a story may be historically false but morally and spiritually true. . . . There is no need of a church or a creed to tell a man what is truth. He can apprehend that for himself.” {U; U&U; UU}

Atwood, Margaret (1939— ) In The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), which has been made into a film by Volker Schlondorff, Canadian novelist Atwood “shows a humanist belief in the power of the survival of the deepest human feelings,” according to Jim Herrick (New Humanist, December, 1990). The plot shows an American state of Gilead, following a catastrophe, in which a monotheistic autocracy rules. Fundamentalism takes over, women are not allowed to read or own property, and because of widespread infertility some women are chosen as submissive breeders, handmaids. As “two-legged wombs,” women face the future in this time when “the Eyes of God run over all the earth.” Herrick notes, “A witty addendum 200 years later demonstrates in the proceedings of a group of historians that the state of Gilead was part of the sectarian wars and had not survived.” Saying the was brought up by a doctrinaire agnostic, Atwood explained:

A doctrinaire agnostic is different from someone who doesn’t know what they believe. A doctrinaire agnostic believes quite passionately that there are certain things that you cannot know, and therefore ought not to make pronouncements about. In other words, the only things you can call knowledge are things that can be scientifically tested.

In 1987 Atwood was the Canadian and also the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year. {CA; HNS2}

Aubrey, Edwin E. (20th Century) Aubrey wrote Secularism A Myth (1954). {GS}

AUCKLAND UNIVERSITY ATHEISTS In New Zealand, the Auckland University Atheists (originally the Auckland University Freethinkers) was founded in 1990, formed as a reaction “to a wave of loathsome sectarian fundamentalist Christian interlopers who appeared to be hell-bent on dominating the social atmosphere of the campus.” Its goals:

• to promote alternatives to religion on campus (and beyond, where possible)

• to provide fellowship for unbelievers in religious dogma

• to emphasize the superiority of reason over religious superstition

Its officers have been Bryce Boland, president; Oscar Martin, vice president; Alex Clark, treasurer; and Conrad Inskip, publicity. The group’s humorous Web homepage shows four creatures—homo Ignoramus, homo Hallucinatus, homo Religiosus, and finally homo Atheistus. Slowly, they advance ever upwards, ever onwards. On the Web: <http://crash.ihug.co.nz/~remk/fnz/aua/index.html> and <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Auclair, Walter (20th Century) Auclair is an editor of the newsletter of the Capital District Humanist Society, PO Box 2148, Scotia, New York 12302.

Audebert, Louise (19th Century) Audebert wrote Romance of a Freethinker and Reply of a Mother to the Bishop of Orleans (1868).

Auden, W(ystan) H(ugh) (1907—1973) Auden, the Anglo-American poet who was a major literary figure in his time, wrote about politics and psychology as well as Christianity and homosexuality. He received the Pulitzer for The Age of Anxiety (1947) and completed numerous critical essays and opera librettos. Auden’s father was a highly educated physician, his mother a highly religious Anglo-Catholic. Auden wrote that his youthful Sundays were spent with “music, candles, and incense.” When sent away to a prep school, he met the future novelist Christopher Isherwood, who became one of his closest friends. In 1925 he went to Oxford to study science but switched to English, during which time he read widely and wrote poetry. In 1930 his “Poems” were published by Faber & Faber, one of whose editors was T. S. Eliot, and Auden became a leader of such left-wing poets as Cecil Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. Although never a member of the party, Auden was called by one critic a communist “with a love for England.” Thomas Hardy, however, rated higher in his estimation than any of the political writers. John Maynard Keynes described Auden as being “very dirty but a genius,” for he wore ragged clothing and had sandy-colored hair which often fell over his forehead. Auden’s face was noted for being etched with wrinkles. According to Dr. Douglas Model of Eastbourne, England, the condition had been caused by his excessive smoking. Facial wrinkles were deeply ingrained. He smoked non-stop, bit his fingernails, and in a self-description wrote, “The way he dresses / reveals an angry baby,/ howling to be dressed.” His self-criticism included the admission that he felt embarrassed being near anyone who was not in some respect superior: “It may be a large cock, it may be sanctity,” he explained. During his last years, after having been a United States citizen and resident from 1939 to 1946, he lived and traveled in England, Italy, Austria, China, Spain, Belgium, Iceland, and New York. Other literary expatriates were Conrad, Eliot, James, Joyce, Pound, and Stein, so his exile was not particularly unusual. Upon moving to New York, he completed an elegy for William Butler Yeats, who had just died, in which he mourned also for his missing the England in which he had grown up and leaving the readership he had developed. Some readers never forgave him. For example, upon his death Anthony Powell read the news account to Kingsley Amis “No more Auden.” Amis regretted hearing this, but Powell retorted, “I’m delighted that shit has gone. . . . Scuttling off to America in 1939 with his boyfriend.” Auden’s love for Chester Kallman, a poet and librettist, has been described by Dorothy Farnan in Auden in Love (1984), a book that oozes with gossip. Farnam was about Kallman’s age and through him met his father, Eddie, whom she eventually married. As Kallman’s step-mother she knew intimate details of Auden’s private life. In the biography she ends with Kallman’s lonely death fifteen months after finding Auden’s corpse in a Vienna hotel. She describes Auden’s determination to remain faithful to Kallman, according to Douglas Martin, “even support him financially, as the younger man broke his heart again and again. . . . ‘Chester fell in love for the first time again’ “ is a phrase Farnam repeats often. Of Kallman, the biographer Richard Davenport-Hines, author of Auden (1995), wrote, “Our first impressions of Auden, slovenly in rumpled tweed, were of disbelief,” remembered Harold Norse, Kallman’s boyfriend at the time. “His shirt was unpressed, heavy woolen socks bunched limply around his thick ankles, and untied shoelaces flopped over his shoes.” But Kallman, whom Auden described as being “a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew,” and he became lovers “mad with happiness.” The love had its ups and downs. Kallman wrote to Norse that on a 1939 trip he had “almost precipitated a domestic crisis by groping a boy sitting next to me between Jacksonville and Tallahassee. . . . Wystan was quite rightly exasperated.” Since first meeting, Kallman had been unfaithful to Auden and, in 1941, he informed an enraged Auden that he would never again sleep with him. Auden in a rage squeezed Kallman’s throat, but the two were to remain together on and off in a sexless relationship. When Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika Mann, asked him to marry her for passport purposes so she could escape from Nazi Germany, he complied. “What else are buggers for?” asked Auden, who was asked similarly by others. Isherwood noted that Auden once lamented that “no one would ever love him, that he would never have any sexual success,” a fact related to his usually being attracted to teenagers, the critic Nicholas Jenkins wrote in an authoritative New Yorker (1 April 1996) article. During the Spanish Civil War, Auden was aghast upon seeing how the Republicans treated clergy and destroyed their buildings, coming to believe that religion was a necessary good even if he was not religious. Same-sex relations were sinful, he felt, but not so sinful as dishonesty, greed, and violence. In what has been described as self-chastisement, he held that humanity was thoroughly sinful and in 1940 he started going to church again, in Brooklyn Heights, returning to orthodox Episcopalianism. The poet Alfred Corn has written that Auden’s late poems, like “A Summer Night,” “In Praise of Limestone,” and Ischia” are political poems, “not only because of ironic touches in them about negative attitudes or actions, but also because they present a vision of happiness on earth, which Auden, as a proponent of incarnational theology, regarded as fundamental. To hold out that vision as an alternative to human cruelty and bigotry was the obligation, indeed, one of the chief exhilarations, of the poet.” Auden, however, was not quite that explicit, believing as he did “That love, or truth in any serious sense, / Like orthodoxy, is a reticence.” Auden died of a heart attack and complications of alcoholism. Stephen M. Silverman in Where There’s a Will (1991) said the estate of approximately $857,000 in 1990 dollars was left to Kallman, who squandered much of the money. Kallman’s will would have left everything to Auden, so Kallman’s father became his heir. Auden’s papers ended up at the New York Public Library. (See entry for Chester Kallman, an atheist.) {AA; CE; The New York Times, 19 June 1996}

Audifferent, Georges (Born 1823) A positivist, Audifferent was executor to Auguste Comte. Born in Martinique, he settled in Marseilles and wrote several medical and scientific works. {BDF}

Auer, J. A. C. Fagginer (20th Century) Auer, one of the signers of Humanist Manifesto I, wrote Humanism States Its Case (1933) and, with Julian Hart, Humanism vs. Theism (1951). The important part he played in the writing of the manifesto has been described in detail by Edwin H. Wilson in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995). Dr. Auer was described as being a Harvard professor who was a “meticulous church historian.” {FUS; HM1; HNS}

Auerbach, Berthold (1812—1882) Auerbach was a German novelist, a Jew devoted to Spinoza. In 1841 he published a life of the philosopher along with a translation of his works. {BDF; RAT} Augustine, Keith (20th Century) Augustine, a philosophy major, is secretary of the Atheist Students’ Association (ASA) at the University of Maryland at College Park. Also, he was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Augustine, Saint (Aurelius Augustinus) (354—430) During the French Revolution Maréchal cited St. Augustine as holding the opposite views of an atheist. His Confessions is considered a classic of Christian mysticism. For Augustine, the world is God’s inscrutable riddle, and the Bible is our guide for understanding God’s inscrutability. For evidence of St. Augustine’s lack of humanism, consider the following:

• Intercourse with even a lawful wife is unlawful and wicked if the conception of off spring be prevented; • Nothing is so much to be shunned as sex relations (Soliloquies); • Second marriages are lawful, but holy widowhood is better (On the Good of Widowhood); • Cursed is everyone who places his hope in man (Confessions). • If a man leaves his wife and she marries another, she commits adultery. . . Marriage is not good, but it is good in comparison with fornication (On the Good of Marriage). {CE; ER; EU, Aram Vartarian; RE}

Aulard, François Victor Alphonse (1849—1928) One of the most learned historians of France, Aulard taught at the Sorbonne (Paris University) and wrote Culte de la Raison (1892), in which he exposed the falseness of such legends as that of the Goddess of Reason. Aulard was a militant anti-clerical and an agnostic. {RAT; RE}

AURA: See entry for Spiritism.

Aurelius, Marcus: See entry for Marcus Aurelius.

Aureol, Pierre (Petrus Aureolus) (Died 1321) William of Occam had been influenced by Aureol, whose Realism included the view that what the mind perceives are not realities but formae speculares. {JMR}

Aury, Dominique (1908—1998) “The most ardent love letter any man has ever received”: Jean Paulhan, one of the members of the French Academy, described The Story of O (1954) with those words. A critic on a level in France with Edmund Wilson in the United States or Cyril Connolly in Britain, Paulhan did not reveal the rest. For the work had been written expressly for him by Aury, a woman who feared that he might end their long affair, an affair which spanned three decades, during war and peace, occupation and liberation, and through Paulhan’s long second marriage. In an interview (The New Yorker, 1 Aug 1994) with John de St. Jorre, the eighty-six-year-old explained that the novel had been written under the pen name of Pauline Réage, that it was the first explicitly erotic novel to have been written by a woman and published in the modern era. To the police or anyone who asked if she had been the author, Aury always responded, “That is a question to which I never respond.” But she had written the work, and it was only for an audience of one, M. Paulhan, who was then in his late sixties and she in her mid-forties. The work was, she said, a private document of their passion and une entreprise de séduction by which she hoped to “ensnare” a highly sophisticated man. “What else could I do? I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t write poetry. What could I do to make him sit up?” The work sold millions of copies and in 1955 won the Deux-Magots Prize, then became a movie in 1975. The freethinking Aury read de Sade, and her novel, which was daringly published by the Olympia Press, includes sadism and masochism as well as sexual abuse and enslavement. Readers in 1954 were not accustomed to reading such as the following:

They made her kneel down . . . with her bust on an ottoman, her hands still tied behind her, with her hips higher than her torso. Then one of the men, holding her with both his hands on her hips, plunged into her belly. He yielded to a second. The third wanted to force his way into the narrower passage and, driving hard, made her scream. When he let her go, sobbing and befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to feel someone’s knees against her face, and she realized that her mouth was not to be spared.

And . . .

What O missed was not, properly speaking, Jacqueline, but the use of a girl’s body, with no restrictions attached. If Natalie had not been declared off-limits to her, she would have taken Natalie, and the only reason she had not violated the restriction was her certainty that Natalie would be given to her at Roissy in a few weeks’ time, and that, some time previously, Natalie would be handed over in her presence, by her, and thanks to her.

Clericals reacted with shock. Freethinkers inquired about a sequel.

Austin, Benjamin Fish (20th Century) Austin, a freethinker, wrote Conundrums for the Orthodox Clergy (1924) and The Devil (1924).

Austin, Charles (1790—1874) A lawyer and disciple of Bentham, Austin influenced J. S. Mill. The Hon. L. A. Tollemache wrote that in his heretical opinions Austin “inclined to Darwinism, because as he said, it is so antecedently probable; but, long before this theory broke the back of final causes, he himself had given them up.” {BDF; RAT}

Austin, Dorothy (20th Century) Austin is a chapter contact for the Humanist Quest of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Newsletter.

Austin, John (1790—1850) A jurist and brother of Charles Austin, John Austin was a friend of James Mill, Grote, and Bentham, whose opinions he shared. Austin wrote profound works on jurisprudence, and his lectures on the philosophy of law according to Oxford’s Prof. John Finnis “gave wide and long-lasting currency to Bentham’s legal positivism.” {BDF; OCP}

Austin, Kate Cooper (1864-1902) Austin, a freethinker and a Universalist, was a feminist, writer, and anarchist.

Austin, Sarah (1793—1867) Austin was a writer who lived in the Mill-Bentham circle for many years. She translated French and German authors (including Goethe and Ranke). She disclaimed the title of Unitarian and was an impersonal theist. To Victor Cousin she wrote, “It is vain to try to uphold religion; her own ministers are her assassins.” {RAT}

AUSTRALASIAN UNBELIEVERS In 1925, the Rationalist Association of Australia was founded in Melbourne, the same year of the founding of the Rationalist Society of Australia. In 1927 the Auckland Rationalist Association was founded, the prime mover being A. E. Carrington. This was renamed the New Zealand Rationalist Association and Sunday Freedom League and was supported by Harry H. Pearce. From the 1930s on, a number of secular, atheist, freethinker, skeptic, and atheist organizations were formed. Those which are still active and the year of their founding are: The Humanist Society of Western Australia (1959); the Humanist Society of New South Wales (1964); the Humanist Society of Victoria (1961); the Humanist Society of South Australia (1962); the Humanist Society of Canberra (1964); the Council of Australian Humanists (1965); the Humanist Society of New Zealand (1967); the Humanist Society of Queensland (1968); the Atheist Foundation of Australia (1971); and Australian Skeptics (1981). (See entry for the Council of Australian Humanist Organizations.){FUK}

AUSTRALIA	

• Australia, where everyone is a mate . . . and where, therefore, the leader must be a prime mate. —Anonymous Australian

AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND UNITARIAN ASSOCIATION The Australia and New Zealand Unitarian Association (ANZUA), formerly headed by Ms. Gayle Feeney, now has John Maindonald as its President. ANZUA was formed in 1974 to promote fellowship and communication between Unitarian and other liberal groups. Congregations in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney were founded in the 1850s by Unitarians who emigrated from Britain. The Auckland Congregation was founded in 1898, but services had been held in New Zealand as early as 1863. By 1901 there were 468 recorded as Unitarians. ANZUA’s address is Stat Dept., University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308. E-mail: <john@maths.newcastle.edu.au>. The Rev. Max Landau Moss is at 157 Schnapper Rock Road, Albany 1331, New Zealand. {International Humanist News, June 1995; World, November-December 1995}

AUSTRALIAN AND NEW ZEALAND HUMANISTS In 1991 at an Adelaide Humanist Convention, it was resolved to achieve a number of aims by the year 2000. Among the aims were the legalization of voluntary euthanasia, the decriminalization of prostitution, and the decriminalization of certain drugs including marijuana. In 1995, in the Northern Territory, the first aim was achieved after a fourteen hours debate. Fifteen of the twenty-five members of the Northern Territory parliament voted for the so-called Terminally Ill Bill.

AUSTRALIAN HUMANIST A quarterly, the Australian Humanist is at 138-B Princess Street, Kew, Victoria 3101, Australia.

AUSTRALIAN HUMANISTS, FREETHINKERS The five humanist societies in Australia are situated in the five capital cities but are named after the five states: New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia. The five elect the Council of Australian Humanist Societies (CAHS) who are responsible for the Australian Humanist and for the running of “Australia 2000.” Ray Dahlits is President of the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, 4 Alandale Ave., Balwyn, Victoria 3103, Australia. Rosslyn Ives is Secretary. E-mail: <rayday@vic.bigpond.net.au> and <rosslyn@netspace.net.au>. James Gerrand formerly was the Council’s secretary and the editor of Australian Humanist. His e-mail: “JamesGerrand”<ingroup@vicnet.net.au>.

• The Atheist Foundation of Australia is found on the Web at <http://www.users.bigpond.com/Atheist_Australia/index.htm>. • The Australian Humanist is published quarterly at 138 B Princess Street, Kew, Victoria 3101. One member, Tony Lee, has jocularly questioned how Noah managed to get to Australia to pick up a couple of Koalas, plus sufficient eucalyptus trees of a certain species upon which they feed exclusively. • Humanist Viewpoints, which John Tendy edits, is published monthly at Humanist House, 10 Shepherd Street, Chippendale, NSW 2008. <jtendys@triode.net.au>. • New South Wales’s humanist society is on the web: <http://sydney.dialix.oz.au/~hsnsw/index.html>. • Queensland Humanist is at GPO Box 2041, Brisbane 4001. Contact is David Fisher at <humanist@petrie.starway.net.au>. • Rationalist Society of Australia is headed by Peter Hanna: <rational@mail.mpx.com.au>. • South Australia Humanist Post is a monthly. Its address is GPO Box 177, Adelaide, 5001 <rmc@adelaide.on.net>. Dick Clifford is President of the Humanist Society of South Australia, and in addition he is that group’s webmaster: <http://www.users.on.net/rmc/hsofsa.htm>. • Victorian Humanist, published ten times per year, is at GPO Box 1555 P, Melbourne, Victoria 3001 E-mail: <leeman@connexus.apana.org.au>. The homepage of Victoria’s humanist society is at <http://home.vicnet.net.au/~humanist/>. • Western Australia-Humanist News is at GPO Box T1799, Perth 6001, Western Australia. Contact is Robyn Edwards at <robyned@ozemail.com.au>. {See article by David Tribe about Australasian unbelievers in the Encyclopediaof Unbelief.}

AUSTRALIAN SKEPTICS Although not all skeptics are freethinkers or secular humanists, many are. The Australian skeptics are on the Web: <www.skeptics.com.au/>.

AUSTRIAN FREETHINKERS Franz Sertl’s Die Freidenkerbewegung in Österreich im zwanzigsten jarhundert (Freethought in 20th-Century Austria, 1995) describes the start of the “free religious” movement from 1848 to 1851 until the present. Freethinkers trace their history to 1887 when the Vereinder Konfessionslosen changed its name into Verein der Fredenker. In 1996 the freethinkers are organized under the name of Freidenkerbund Österreichs (Postfach 54, A-1153 Vienna, Austria). The chairman is Wolfgang Soos and the group’s quarterly is called Der Freidenker, Geist and Geselleschaft, which has the e-mail <szanya@via-at>. Although the number of organized Austrian freethinkers hardly exceeded one thousand in 1989, there were 23,000 organized freethinkers in 1910 and a maximum of 100,000 members in 1925. The organization was prohibited from 1933 to 1945. Martin Panosch, of Freidenkerbund Oesterreichs, can be reached at <mpan@fc.alpin.or.at>. {Freethought History #20, 1996}

Autissier, Isabelle (20th Century) Autissier was the first woman to compete in Vendée Globe Challenge, a solo, nonstop, around-the-world sailing race. “I don’t believe in heaven or God,” she has stated, “and I want for this one life to be as rich in experience as possible.” {The New York Times, 10 November 1996}

AUTOPSY Although some religious groups and individuals do not allow autopsies, the Catholic Church has decreed that they can “be morally permitted for legal inquests or scientific research. The free gift of organs after death is legitimate and can be meritorious. The Church permits cremation, provided that it does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body.” Freethinkers and humanists ordinarily have no objections to autopsy or cremation, leaving the decisions entirely up to the individual or the executor of the individual’s estate. Fernando Vargas, asked by his executor if he would object to an autopsy, responded, “Surprise me!”

Avalos, Hector (1958— ) An assistant professor in the department of philosophy and religion at Iowa State University in Ames, Avalos was awarded that university’s title, “1996 Professor of the Year.” He is author of “Mary at Medjugorje” (Free Inquiry, Spring 1994), a critical inquiry into the supposed 1980s appearance of Jesus’s mother in a little town in Bosnia-Herzegovina (formerly Yugoslavia). More Marian devotees showed up than appeared during the Jesus apparition stories of early Christianity, he found. Avalos received his master’s degree from the Harvard Divinity School and his doctoral degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Born in Mexico, he became in 1968 a child preacher who gave the keynote sermon at the age of nine before hundreds at the Territorial Convention of the Church of God in Glendale, Arizona. He railed against the ascendant sexual revolution, rock music, long hair on men, mini-skirts, and other ideas that were anathema to his Pentecostal church. By his early teens, he was a zealous believer, willing to go anywhere, to suffer any sacrifice, to preach the word of salvation to the “pagan” masses. He prayed for the sick, many of whom said that God had healed them through his prayers. In high school he began a program of self-study which encompassed the study of Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Akkadian, Near Eastern history, philosophy, and theology. But, reading about chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, and the Apollo mission, he decided in his first year in college that there might not be a God as defined by traditional Christianity.

	“The logical consequence of this realization,” Avalos has written, “was that miracles went down the drain.” Finding that the God-myth was not necessary for a fulfilling and constructive life, he became a biblical scholar and an agnostic/atheist/secular humanist. The two philosophers he came most to admire were Spinoza and Hume.

In 1979, he developed a life-threatening illness called Wegner’s Granulomatosis, which is a chronic condition in which the immune system attacks its own tissues as though they are foreign implants. A form of vasculitis, it is an extremely rare disorder that attacks the respiratory tract, the nasal sinuses, and the kidney in a progressively destructive process. Avalos has also suffered from a painful, systemic arthritis that is part of the disease.

	His interest in biblical studies and in his physical condition led him to write Illness and Health Care in the Ancient Near East: The Role of the Temple in Greece, Mesopotamia, and Israel (1995). A work in medical anthropology, it compares the temples of Asclepius in Greece, the temples of Gula/Ninisina in Mesopotamia, and the temples of Yahweh to explain the socio-religious features that led Israel to develop its own ideas about the role of the temple in health care. 

In 1996 Avalos was appointed executive director of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Also in 1996 at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, Avalos spoke about the failure of the theology of liberation. {“How Bible Study Made An Unbeliever Out of Me,” Freethought Today, August 1991; WAS, interviews}

AVANT-GARDE In the arts, to be in the avant-garde is to be in the vanguard. C. Carr (Village Voice, 22 September 1998) has listed some early examples:

• 1863: Artists assumed the task of épater le bourgeois when early modernists challenged academic painting at a Salon des Refusés. Harold Rosenberg observed that “Vanguard art must be synonymous with rejected art—not because advanced art desires to fail but for the deeper reason that only art officially cast aside can arouse in the spectator authentic feelings uncoerced by vested authority.” • 1873: Arthur Rimbaud stopped writing poetry at the age of nineteen. • 1896: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi opened with the word merde, introducing obscenity to the stage and prompting a riot at Paris’s Théâtre Nouveau. • 1907: Picasso’s first Cubist painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, created an artistic stir. • 1909: The first Futurist manifesto promised to destroy all museums, moralisms, and cowardice. • 1910: Wassily Kandinsky created the first completely nonrepresentational painting. • 1913: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring provoked such an outcry during its first performance that the dancers onstage could not hear the orchestra. • 1914: Marcel Duchamp bought a bottle rack and signed it as an artwork, thus becoming the first conceptualist. • 1916: Hugo Ball recited phonetic poems (no real words) while dressed in a cardboard costume at his Cabaret Voltaire. • 1916: Dadaists embraced nonsense and negation, attacking all art, past, present, and future; their tracts defined Dada as “soft-boiled happiness” and “nothing, nothing, nothing.”

An innovator in the 1960’s avant-garde was Richard Higgins, a seminal figure in developing what he called Happenings. His 1969 book of essays, foew&ombwhnw (an acronym for “freaked out electronic wizard and other marvelous bartenders who have no wings”) included theoretical essays, plays, poems, word scores, musical scores, graphic music notions, and performance piece instructions. The volume was bound like a prayer book, in leather, with a ribbon bookmark. His creative output has been called a forerunner of multi-media installation art. (See entries for Beat Generation, John Cage, Dada, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Higgins, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. During the victory or V-Day celebration at the conclusion of World War II in Europe, a French girl, a Russian soldier who previously had been a Nazi prisoner-of-war, and the present writer, marched arm-in-arm as the three leaders of a parade that wended through the streets of Reims—they were before (avant) the flag-bearers and drummers (le garde) and the hundreds who then followed to mark the defeat of the Nazis immediately after General Jodl surrendered to General Ike Eisenhower at the city’s Little Red Schoolhouse.)

AVATAR An avatar is an embodiment, as of a concept or a philosophy, or an incarnation in human form. In Hinduism, the Buddha is thought of as an avatur of the god Vishnu. Non-believers seldom use the concept except in the sense of describing someone, for example a hypocritical religious leader, as “the very avatar of cunning.”

Avebury, John Lubbock [Baron the Right Honorable] (1834—1913) Avebury, a British banker who studied and wrote with authority on many branches of science, particularly anthropology, was termed by Nature in his obituary the “President General of his Age.” One of his works, The Pleasures of Life sold a half million copies and was translated into forty languages. A vague deist, according to McCabe, Baron Avebury admitted a “Divine Power” but was impatient “at all the assertions under the name of mystery.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Avedon, Richard (1923— ) A master photographer, Avedon has been voted one of the world’s ten greatest photographers by Popular Photography (1958). In 1989 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. In a 1996 television profile, he stated that although he is Jewish and has had a “religious experience” of some sort, he is a total agnostic. {CA; E}

Avedon, Richard (15 Mar 1923 - ) A master fashion and portrait photographer, Avedon was voted “one of the world’s ten greatest photographers” by Popular Photography in 1958, received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Council of Fashion Designers of American in 1989, the International Photography Prize of the Erma and Victor Hasselblad Foundation New York in 1991, and the Humanitarian Award of the Mental Health Association in 1996. New York City-born, he studied with Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory, New School for Social Research, 1944-1950. He has been a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Theatre Arts, The New Yorker, and Vogue. His entry in Who’s Who in America lists numerous works that contain his photography and places in which his work has been shown. In a 1996 television profile, Avedon stated that although he is Jewish and has had a “religious experience” of some sort, he is a total agnostic. {CA; E}

Aveling, Edward Bibbins (1849—1898) An English freethought teacher, Aveling, according to Stein, “was one of the very few people associated with the freethought movement in the past two hundred years about whom the balance of opinion is negative. Aveling’s weaknesses were women, toward whom he was thoroughly unprincipled, and money, which he had a fine knack of spending, especially when it was borrowed.” George Bernard Shaw once described him: “If it came to giving one’s life for a cause one could rely on Aveling even if he carried all our purses with him to the scaffold.” In 1880 Aveling had delivered over a hundred freethought lectures and was made a National Secular Society vice-president. But Bradlaugh lent him money, which was not repaid, and Aveling although he had taken over Foote’s publications during his imprisonment and Wheeler’s illness lost the respect of his fellow freethinkers. Shaw implied that Aveling not only appropriated a microscope belonging to Mary Reed, one of the most promising pupils in the freethinkers’ Science School, but probably seduced her as well. Aveling was willed money by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx. He had agreed to marry her when his former marriage could be dissolved. Instead, he married Eva Frye, a twenty-two-year old actress. Eleanor, in a duplication of the suicide of Emmy in Madame Bovary, drank prussic acid, which she had obtained by sending her maid to a chemist with “Dr.” Aveling’s card. Assuming Aveling was a medical doctor, the pharmacist gave the poison to the maid. {EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; RAT; RSR; TRI; WSS}

Aveling, Eleanor (1855—1898) Aveling, who was Karl Marx’s daughter, translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1886) and Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1891). She wrote The Working-Class Movement in America (1888) and, in conjunction with Dr. E. B. Aveling, with whom she lived, The Woman Question (1888). {RAT}

Avempace (12th Century) Avempace, the Arabian philosopher and poet who was one of the teachers of Averroës, was called by Al-Fath Ibn Khakan “an infidel and atheist.” He is said to have suffered imprisonment for his heterodoxy. {BDF}

Avenarius, Richard (1843—1896) Avenarius was a German philosopher, the joint editor of the Vierteljahrschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. He was a critical empiricist, relying upon experience purified of all metaphysics and rejecting the dualism of body and mind as well as all creeds based on that belief. {RAT}

Avenel, Georges (1828—1876) A French writer, one of the promoters of the Encyclopédie Générale, Avenel edited some of Voltaire’s work and, by his express wish, was buried without religious ceremony. {BDF; RAT}

Averroës (Ibn Roshd) (1126—1198) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Averroës as being a “possible atheist.” The Spanish-Arabian philosopher was influential in the West because use of his commentaries on Aristotle. He believed that philosophic truth derives not from faith but from reason, which positions him opposite St. Thomas Aquinas. Robertson points out that he was the least mystical and the most rational of the thinkers of his circle. “At nearly all vital points he oppugns [challenges] the religious view of things, denying bodily resurrection, which he treats (here following all his predecessors in heretical Arab philosophy) as a vulgar fable; and making some approach to a scientific treatment of the problem of ‘Freewill’ as against, on the one hand, the ethic-destroying doctrine of the Motecallemin, who made God’s will the sole standard of right, and affirmed predestination (Jabarism); and against, on the other hand, the anti-determinism of the Kadarites.” Of all the tyrannies, Averroës boldly declared, the worst is that of priests. Still, he remained a nominal Muslim. McCabe explains why, saying the Arabs had the quaint custom of choosing the most learned men for high political positions, and Averroës was Governor of Seville for twenty years. When the Moorish fanatics got him imprisoned, Averroës possibly disguised his atheism by referring to a belief in a vague pantheistic “World Soul,” instead of Aristotle’s (impersonal) God, thereby throwing them off the track. Averroës and the Enlightenment, The First Humanist/Muslim Dialogue (1996) was edited by Mourad Wahba and Mona Abousenna. It contained comments by thirty-four scholars from eighteen countries on five continents who had met in Cairo in 1994 and Buffalo in 1995 to discuss the ideals of the Enlightenment and secularism while celebrating the approaching 800th anniversary of the noted Islamic philosopher. (See entry for Avicenna.) {BDF; CE; ER; EU, Aram Vartarian; JM; PUT; JMRH; RE}

AVERROÉS TODAY A semi-annual publication in English and Arabic, Averroés Today is at PO Box 5101, Heliopolis West, Cairo, 11771, Egypt. (See entry for Averroës.)

Avery, Milton Clark (1893—1965)

Avery, an American painter, used bold massing of forms as shown in his “Poetry Reading” (1957). His “Green Sea” (1954) verges on complete abstraction and is said to be in the tradition of Matisse. Avery’s memorial service was at New York’s Society for Ethical Culture. {CE}

AVESTA, THE The Avesta is the oldest part (the Gathas) of the sacred book of the Persians. McCabe points out that Christians obtained many of their ideas from the Persians, including the concept that the souls of all men one day will be summoned to judgment, the wicked punished, the good rewarded. The dogma of judgment was a fundamental part of the Persian view for at least six centuries before the Christ. {RE}

Avey, Albert E. (1886—1963) Avey, a philosopher at Ohio State University, responded to the present author as follows:

My position is theistic “superhumanism,” but not “supernaturalism.” Nature seems to have no limits, hence I do not know where the supernatural begins. This is not a useful distinction. But I believe the idea of God is valid when rightly reinterpreted. A form of pantheism, similar to that of Whitehead and Hartshorne, seems most adequate to present-day thinking. Man is certainly only a part of the scheme of things and not always the most significant. Yet I do not find myself torn by the inner struggles that the existentialists suffer from. I find myself sympathetic with recent neo-Kantianism, and Fichte appeals to me.

{WAS, 3 August 1954}

Avicenna (980—1037) Husain Ibn Abdallah, called Ibn Sina or Sind, was an Arabian physician and philosopher. A sovereign authority in medical science until the days of Harvey, he had a philosophy that was pantheistic in tone, with an attempt at compromise with theology. McCabe calls Avicenna the second of the two greatest scholars of the Arab-Persian civilization, the other being Averroës. Unlike Averroës, who is said to have studied far into every night except his wedding night, Avicenna was boisterously sensual and a frequenter of taverns. He wrote not only on medicine but also on theology, philosophy, philology, mathematics, astronomy, geology, physics, and music. To baffle the fanatics, McCabe states, Avicenna “professed a sort of Pantheism. Tradition ascribed to him the saying that ‘the world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.’ ” {BDF; JM; RE}

Avila Camacho, Manuel [President] (20th Century) While President of Mexico in the 1940s, Avila signed a decree stating that the rites of religious creeds do not conform with the dignity of the military uniform and insignia, nor with the martial personality of military men.” As a result, soldiers in uniform were not permitted to attend religious services. It is likely that he and his Sub-secretary of National Defense, Francisco L. Uraquizo, were non-believers. {CE}

Avoine, C. L. D. (1875—1945) Avoine edited Reason, the official journal of the Rationalist Association of India. In 1934 he was accused of blasphemy, or according to the Indian Penal Code, of hurting the religious susceptibilities of His Majesty’s subjects. At issue was an article he wrote, “Religion and Morality,” but he was acquitted and hailed in the press as one who had triumphed for freedom of expression.

Avula, Gopala Krishnamurthy (20th Century) Avula, a founding member of the Indian Rationalist Association, was its vice-president from 1955 to 1966.

Awbrey, Frank (20th Century) In 1995 Awbrey, a biology professor at San Diego State University, was honored by the American Humanist Association for his valiant defense of biology against biblical creationism. Awbrey wrote Evolutionists Confront Creationists (1984).

Axelrod, Jacob (20th Century) Axelrod wrote Philip Freneau, Champion of Democracy (1967). {FUS}

Axtelle, George Edward (1893—1974) A professor emeritus at Southern Illinois University when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Axtelle was active in New York humanist circles. Following his trip to Northeast Africa, he became interested in the effect of religious orthodoxy upon Egyptian culture and civilization. In 1954, he spoke on “Priesthood in Ancient Egypt” to the New York chapter of the American Humanist Association. In Religious Humanism (Summer 1967), he wrote, “John Dewey’s Concept of ‘The Religious.’ ” Axtelle was President of the American Humanist Association from 1959 to 1961. {HM2; HNS}

Ayer, Alfred J(ules) [Sir] (1910—1989) Ayer, a British philosopher who was a first vice-president of the British Humanist Association and from 1965 to 1970 its president, edited The Humanist Outlook (1968). In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. To the present author, he wrote about humanism:

I do not know how you wish to draw the distinction between atheistic humanism and naturalistic humanism. Is it that the atheistic humanists dramatize the fact that there is no God, whereas the naturalistic humanists assume it without being emotionally impressed by it? Or would you include theists and agnostics among your naturalistic humanists so long as their main interest was in the fortunes and activities of human beings independently of any matters of religious belief or disbelief? If that is the criterion of naturalistic humanism then I should classify myself as a naturalistic humanist, although I am in fact also an atheist.

In 1988, while Ayer was in the United States, his heart stopped. His thoughts on a rationalist’s experience of “death” are written up as an article, “That Undiscovered Country” (New Humanist, May, 1989), in which he states, “My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society.” Ayer was concise in his writing, attacking racism in sport and the harassment of homosexuals. “There was something pathological about his pursuit of women,” The Economist (19 June 1999) noted:

He started soon after his first marriage, encouraged by the attentions of a dance-hall hostess in Vienna, and did not let up until he died approaching 80. When ill and old and about to remarry his second wife, Dee, he was still capable of planning to go off with a woman less than half his age. Women to him were like sweets to a greedy little boy. In general, he was not so much autistic as child-like, artlessly pleased with himself, insistent on being the centre of attention. He never really grew up.

A Fellow of the British Academy, Ayer was knighted in 1970. His works include Foundation of Empirical Knowledge (1940), Philosophical Essays (1954), and Concept of a Person (1963). At the 1996 conference of the Humanist Society of Scotland, Ayer said that humanists think

• that this world is all we have and can provide all we need;

• that we should try to live full and happy lives ourselves and, as part of this, help others to do the same; • that all situations and people deserve to be judged on their merits, by standards of reason and humanity; and

• that individual and social cooperation are equally important.

Observers were quick to notice that Ayer made no mention of religion. (An essay by Paul Edwards, in which Ayer is called the leading exponent of logical positivism in Great Britain, is found in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Edwards’s Immortality includes supporting material which confirms Ayer’s disbelief in any kind of survival after death.) {CE; CL; EU, Paul Edwards; HM2; Humanist in Canada, Summer 1997; SHD; TRI; TYD; WAS, 15 March 1951}

Aymon, Jean (1661—1734) A French writer, Aymon abjured Catholicism at Geneva and married at the Hague. He published Metamorphoses of the Romish Religion. Aymon’s La vie et L’Esprit de M. Benoit Spinoza (1719) was afterwards issued under the title of Treatise of Three Impostors. {BDF; RAT}

Ayres, A. P. (19th Century) Ayres, a secularist, wrote A Secular Funeral and Marriage Handbook (1885?). {GS}

Ayres, C(larence) E(dwin) (1891—1972) Ayres, when he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, taught economics at the University of Texas. {HNS)

Ayrton, William (1847—1908) Ayrton was a physicist and engineer, one of Lord Kelvin’s pupils at Glasgow. He made many discoveries and was one of the first to advocate the transmission of power from generating stations. An agnostic, Ayrton had a secular burial. {RAT}

AYUDH (The Weapon) An Indian freethought quarterly, Ayudh is at 276 Telang Road, Matunga, Bombay 400 019, India.

Azaña Díaz, Manuel [President] (1880—1940) Azana, the son of a Catholic Alcalde, discarded his creed and became a graduate of Madrid University in Spain. He was awarded the 1926 National Prize for Literature. An anti-clerical Republican, he became Minister of War during the Revolution of 1931, was imprisoned in Barcelona by the right-wing government in 1934, and later was named Premier. Azana was behind a series of laws which secularized Spain. In 1936, he became President of Spain and, when the Italians and Germans crushed the Republic, Azana fled to England and never returned to Spain. His political and moral stand on freedom, as illustrated in his commentaries in La velada en Benicarló, illustrated his insistence on the need to liberalize Spain. His biggest battle was against the narrowness, hypocrisy, and dominance of the Catholic Church. This is shown in his first novel, El jardín de los frailes. A lover of art, music, and literature, he was said by Daniel de Bois-Juzan in Celui qui fut Pedro Muñoz to have had, possibly, a male lover in addition to his wife. The Azañas were childless. {GL; RE}

Azm, Sadik al (20th Century) Azm, a professor of philosophy at the University of Damascus in Syria, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

AZTEC HUMAN SACRIFICE: See entry for Human Sacrifice