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From Philosopedia

EALING (England) HUMANISTS: For information telephone Derek Hill at 0181 422 4956 or Charles Rudd at 0181 904 6599.

Earl of Rochester: See entry for John Wilmot.

Earl, Michael Scott (20th Century) Earl, who spent two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, once labored full-time in pursuit of converts to Mormonism. He abstained from music, dating, television, radio, physical contact with family members, even foregoing his favorite soft drinks. Now a freethinker, he is active in the Free Inquiry Society of Central Florida. In a five-part taped series, “Bible Stories Your Parents Never Taught You” (1999), Earl attacks the widely-held presumption that the Holy Bible is a good book.

Earles, Beverley M. (20th Century) A humanist who was an activist in New Zealand, Earles is on the editorial board of The Humanist and is vice-president of the American Humanist Association. In 1989 she received a Ph. D. in religious studies at the University of Wellington in New Zealand for a study, “The Faith Dimension of Humanism,” which was one of the first to research organized humanism. In 1992, she was a teacher of English on the faculty of Kansas State University. Earles is not only an activist in humanism but also in feminism, and she laments the fact that the contributions of humanist women have not been more widely recognized. Her “Outstanding Humanist Women—Dora Russell in Particular” was featured in the Spring 1994 Feminist Caucus Newsletter. In 1999, now a faculty member in New York City of the Humanist Institute, she was named by the American Humanist Association as a Humanist Pioneer. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1987-1988; HNS2}

EARTH • I don’t know if there are men on the moon, but if there are, they must be using this earth as their lunatic asylum. —George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

• Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ball-bearing in the hub of the universe. —Christopher Morley (1890-1957)

Earth is the fifth largest planet of the solar system, the only one known to support life. It has one natural satellite, the moon. Its change of seasons is caused by the tilt (23.5°) of Earth’s equator to the plane of the orbit. It speeds like a top and like a merry-go-round horse on a carousel that is itself riding on a larger carousel, and the entire amusement park is moving through space. It sits in a cosmic shooting gallery, one that includes speeding blocks of ice and rock, one chunk of which sixty-five million years ago collided with it and the resultant tumult killed off the dinosaurs. Earth rotates on its axis at about 1,037.5 miles an hour at the equator. The speed of a trip around the Sun is about 66,700 miles an hour. Meanwhile, the solar system is in a more-or-less circular orbit around the center of the galaxy at an average velocity of about 220 kilometers a second, about 492,126 miles an hour, according to Facts on File Dictionary of Astronomy, and the galaxy is moving at about 19.4 kilometers a second, or about 43,396 miles an hour, toward a point in the constellation Hercules called the solar apex. It is estimated to be at least 4.55 billion years old. Earth’s origin remains a controversial subject. Philosophers speculate that there will come a time, long before the sun dies, when the Earth’s inner fires will die down, and elements vital to life will cease being recycled into the environment by volcanic eruption and tectonic uplift.

	The Anglo-Irish Bishop James Ussher’s 17th century research of the Holy Bible concluded that Earth had been created at 9 a.m. (some say noon and threaten to become schismatics) on October 23rd, 4004 B.C.E.

Therefore, on 23 October 1996 a 6000th birthday party for Earth was held by secular humanists at the Buffalo, New York, Center for Inquiry. The party, complete with cake, was attended by Tim Madigan (dressed as Noah), biology professor Clyde Herreid (dressed as Darwin), and anthropologist H. James Birx (dressed as himself). A jocular press conference followed the appropriate libations, toasts, and thanks to God. (See entries for Eratosthenes, Flat Earth Theory, and Bishop James Ussher.) {CE; ER}

EARTH DAY Earth Day, which is celebrated at the Vernal or Spring Equinox, is an important observance for freethinkers. (See entry for Humanist Holidays.)

Earwaker, Epenetus (19th Century) The appropriately named Earwaker was a lecturing assistant to the humanitarian deist, Joachim Kaspary, at outdoor London meetings of the National Secular Society in the 1880s. {RSR}

EASTER Easter as a strictly religious holiday has no relevance for freethinkers. The day is named after a spring goddess, Eastre. Pagan practices included the exchange of gifts, such as Easter-eggs, and by generous hospitality to friends and the poor. Christians, starting at the end of the second century, celebrate the feast of the resurrection of Christ on an Easter Sunday, a date variously prescribed but set by the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the first Sunday following upon the spring equinox. Today, the event is generally held on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox. Indicative of the confusion of pagans’ and religionists’ observances at that time of the year, Ken Alley in Once Upon a Pew describes a church bulletin’s editing which ended, “This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Johnson to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.” (See entries for John Shelby Spong and for Humanist Holidays.) {ER}

Easterbrook, Gregg (20th Century) Although a believer, Easterbrook in Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt (1998) thinks God is not omniscient and not omnipotent. If it were otherwise, he holds, God would not be the morally imperfect being He is. Easterbrook is yet another contemporary novelist who hopes to be remembered for postulating a bizarre interpretation of theology that might appeal to those who otherwise would remain potential doubters.

Easterman, Daniel (20th Century) Easterman is a novelist and an honorary fellow in the Centre for Middle East and Islamic Studies in the University of Durham. A writer for the English New Humanist, Easterman is author of The Judas Testament (1994) and The Final Judgment (1996).

EASTERN ORTHODOX CHURCHES The Eastern Orthodox churches derive from the church of the Byzantine Empire that adheres to the Byzantine rite and acknowledges the honorary primacy of the patriarch of Constantinople. Includes are the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America and the Orthodox Church in America. As with other churches, all are dependent upon financial contributions if they are to continue their colorful as well as aromatic services.

Eastman, Eleanor (20th Century) Easterman at the Fourth Annual Atheist Alliance convention in St. Louis was given a Lifetime Achievement Award. {Secular Nation, July-September 1998}

Eastman, Max (1833—1969) Eastman, the editor of radical periodicals until 1923, was for many years a Communist and a leader of American liberal thought. He later rejected Communism and wrote several books attacking it. Eastman’s most popular work was Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), and among his autobiographical works was Love and Revolution (1965). In 1949, he wrote the present author concerning humanism,

I never think of myself, and never have, as being any kind of an ‘ist” or subscribing to any “ism.” Even in regard to Socialism, I maintained this attitude to the extent possible in my editorials in the old Masses and The Liberator.

{CE; WAS, 24 April 1949}

Eaton, Cyrus (Stephen) (1883—1979) Eaton, a Nova Scotia-born industrialist and banker who became a naturalized citizen of the United States, wrote several books, among them Third Term Tradition (1940) and The Engineer as Philosopher (1961). A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, and the Royal Norwegian Academy of Sciences. Eaton started in business by holding a business position with John D. Rockefeller Sr. He later organized Canada Gas & Electric Corporation, organized Republic Steel Corporation in 1930, and was a director of Inland Steel, Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Cleveland Trust Co., Sherwin-Williams Co., Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Co., and numerous other corporations. Eaton was famous for having been the initiator of the Pugwash Intellectual Life Conferences starting in 1956, accused by many as being politically “left-wing.” In the 1950s and 1960s he advocated the then unpopular view that there should be increased diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union. He was recipient in 1960 of the Lenin Peace Prize. According to Edwin H. Wilson, Eaton “was an early supporter of humanism. He and [A. Eustace] Haydon were lifelong friends.” {EW; HNS2}

Eaton, Clement (Born 1898) Eaton’s The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (1964) contains much information on freethinkers famous and obscure. He also wrote Jefferson Davis (1977). {Freethought History #14, 1995}

Eaton, Daniel Isaac (1752—1814) A bookseller in England, Eaton in 1792 was prosecuted for publishing Paine’s Rights of Man, but the prosecution fell through. Afterwards, he published Politics for the People and Political Dictionary (1796), for which he again was prosecuted. To escape punishment, he fled to America. Upon returning to England, he was seized along with his property. Books to the value of £2,800 were burned, and he was imprisoned for fifteen months. He called his shop “The Ratiocinatory,” and he translated the rationalist works of Fréret and Helvétius. In 1811, he issued the first and second parts of Paine’s Age of Reason, and in 1812 he was tried before Lord Ellenbourgh on a charge of blasphemy for issuing the third and last part. This time he was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and to stand in the pillory. The sentence evoked Shelley’s spirited Letter to Lord Ellenbourgh. Shortly before his death, Eaton again was prosecuted for publishing George Houston’s Ecce Homo. {BDF; FUK; PUT; RAT}

Eaton, David (Died 1992) Eaton, an African American who became senior minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., favored such social action causes as assistance to local minority youth and alleviating world famine. His church in 1985 welcomed a refugee fleeing from Central America, and his sermons were anti-racist and pro-reconciliation.

Ebacher, Tom (20th Century) Ebacher, an atheist in Kensington, Minnesota, has written about the value of humanitarianism for Secular Nation (April-June 1998) and about “First Cause” (April-June 1999).

Eberhard, Johann August (1739—1809) An influential German deist, Eberhard was driven out of the Church for the heresy of having written his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation of the Heathen (1722). In effect, it placed the Greek philosopher on a level with Jesus, which trinitarians claimed was blasphemy, although Lessing reportedly enjoyed the work. Frederick the Great liked Eberhard’s direction of thought, making him a Professor of Philosophy at Halle, where he later opposed the idealism of both Kant and Fichte. Eberhard wrote a History of Philosophy (1788). {BDF; JMR; JMRH; RAT}

Eberty, Gustav (1806—1887) 

Eberty was a German freethinker, the author of several controversial works. [BDF}

Ebury, Eva (1906—1997) Ebury was a chiropodist who, with her husband Len Ebury, held morning and afternoon outdoor meetings in Hampstead for the North London Branch of the National Secular Society. He was the speaker, she the seller of The Freethinker. Terry Mullins conducted her secular service at St. Marylebone Crematorium. {The Freethinker, February 1997}

Eby, Kermit (20th Century) A sociologist at the University of Chicago, Eby wrote book reviews for The Humanist in the 1950s.

Echegary, José (1833—1916) A Spanish dramatist, mathematician, physicist, economist, and politician, Echegary from 1874 to 1905 wrote sixty-eight plays, becoming the leading playwright of his day. He shared the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature with Frédric Mistral. He was a professor of mathematics who became Minister of Education, then of Finance, in the Liberal Government (1867—1874). With the return to power of the clerical-royalists he took up letters, expressed his rationalism, and was popular for thirty years. {CE; RE}

Echtermeyer, Ernst Theodor (1805—1844) Echtermeyer was a German critic who, with A. Ruge, founded the Hallische Jahrbücher, which contained many free thought articles. He taught at Halle and Dresden, where he died. {BDF; RAT}

Eckermann, Johann Peter (1792—1854) Eckermann, a German scholar and author, was Körner’s secretary and Goethe’s assistant. He taught English and German at the University of Jena and later was librarian at Weimar, where the Grand Duke made him a Councillor. Eckermann’s Conversations With Goethe (1836—1848, 2 volumes) provide excellent biographical evidence. In 1838 Eckermann was appointed Councillor and Librarian to the Grand Duke of Weimar. He shared Goethe’s liberal pantheism. {RAT; RE}

Eckerson, Judith (20th Century) Eckerson is Consulting Leader with the Northern Virginia Ethical Society. Her e-mail: <eckerson@erols.com>.

Eckhoff, Erik (20th Century) Eckhoff and his wife, Dagfinn Eckhoff, founded the Pagan Society in Norway. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

Eckler, Peter (19th Century) In New York, Eckler edited the semi-monthly publication, Age of Reason, from 1848 to 1851. {FUS; PUT}

Eco, Umberto (1929— ) Eco is an Italian novelist, essayist, semiologist, and scholar. From 1954 to 1959, he was employed by Italian television and from 1963 to 1964 was a lecturer in aesthetics at the University of Turin. In his first novel, The Name of the Rose (1980; translated in 1983), he told of the struggle between church and state as mirrored in recent Italian history. The work combines detective fiction, medieval philosophy, and moral reflection, encapsulating his semiotic theory and how signs are produced and interpreted in the world. The subject is also dealt with in Theory of Semiotics (1976). Speaking to critic Herbert Mitgang about his work, Eco stated, “We are always approaching the time of anti-Christ. In the nuclear age, we are never far from the Dark Ages.” Speaking to Time about his Foucault’s Pendulum (1988; translated 1989), Eco remarked, “This was a book conceived to irritate the reader. I knew it would provoke ambiguous, nonhomogeneous responses because it was a book conceived to point up some contestation.” Other of his works are Filosofi in liberta (1958), The Role of the Reader (1979), and The Limits of Interpretation (1991), the latter being a profound interpretative study of interpretation itself. “I think,” Eco has written, “that the duty of a scholar is not only to do scientific research but also to communicate with people through various media about the most important issues of social life from the point of view of his own discipline.” In “The Birth of Ethics” (Index on Censorship, 19 March 1997), Eco wrote,

I am of the firm belief that even those who do not have faith in a personal and providential divinity can still experience forms of religious feeling and hence a sense of the sacred, of limits, questioning and expectation; of a communion with something that surpasses us. What you ask is, what there is that is binding, compelling, and irrevocable in this form of ethics.

He has written How to Travel With a Salmon, and Other Essays (1994), humorous pieces from an Italian newspaper column, “Diario Minimo.” The work includes “How to Be a TV Host” and “How to Go Through Customs,” along with other selections that include the paradoxical. In 1995 he wrote The Island of the Day Before and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. In the latter, which is a study of the interaction of the reader and what he reads, he uses the metaphor of words: the path one finds; exploring; identifying a tree; camping; living in a tree house. “The Model Reader, he holds, “is a sort of ideal type whom the text not only foresees as a collaborator but also tries to create.” In 1995, Eco became a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Humanist Academy. In 1999 he was inducted as an honorary member into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (See entry for Legumes.) {CE; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 77-80, 1979}

ECONOMICS • An economist is someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about—and makes you feel it’s your fault. —Pasi Kuoppamäki of the Bank of Finland at <www.etla.fi/pkm/JokEc>

Economics is a social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. It also is concerned with the theory and management of economics or economic systems. How humans allocate scarce resources in order to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed has been studied from the days of the ancient Greeks. Plato in his Republic described a model society on the basis of a careful division of labor. Aristotle attributed great importance to economic security as the basis for a healthy society and found the middle-sized landowner the ideal citizen. Other leading economists from various nations:

Cicero, Vergil, Varro, Hume, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Malthus, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich List, Henry C. Carey, C. H. Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Louis Blanc, Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand, Karl Knies, Karl Marx, William Stanley Jevons, Leon Walras, Karl Menger, John Bates Clark, Alfred Marshall, Knut Wicksell, John Maynard Keynes, Gunnar Myrdal, Sir Arthur Lewis, Joseph Schumpeter, and Arthur Pigou. {CE}

ECUADOR FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS Two presidents of Ecuador, Vicente Rocafuerte (1783—1847) and Eloy Alfaro (1864—1912), implemented anticlerical reforms, particularly in the field of education.

	A leading contemporary Ecuadorian secular humanist is Pablo Cevallos, a teacher of logic in Guayaquil at the Catholic University. His e-mail: cevallop@ucsg.edu.ec>. (See entries for Pablo Cevallos and Juan Montalvo.)

ECUMENISM Ecumenism, the promoting of worldwide unity or cooperation, is a movement to promote better understanding among different religious groups, for often extreme violence has resulted when adherents have insisted that non-adherents were enemies who were preaching false views. Those involved in the ecumenical movement do not hope to change others’ views. They hope to limit violence which has been caused by religionists in the name of religion. To the surprise of many, La Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal, included the statement,

God may have spoken through books as diverse as the Muslim Koran, the Hindu Vedas and Bhagavad-Gita, and the sacred texts of China’s Taoism and Japan’s Shintoism.

Whether this passed the attention of the Vatican censors is not clear. {Awake, 22 August 996; DCL}

Edamaruku, Joseph (1934— ) At the Indian Rationalist Association’s international conference held in New Delhi in 1995, Edamaruku gave a history of the association. He and his wife, Soley Edamaruku, have been rationalist pioneers in the Indian state of Kerala. {FUK; GS}

Edamaruku, Sanal (1955— ) Edamaruku has written widely expressing his concern about the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in India. He is of the opinion that any solution needs to involve an insistence upon keeping India a secular state as well as liberalizing and modernizing its society. He has written sixteen works, including two novels and several hundreds of articles, on various aspects of rationalism, humanism, secularism, and ethical politics. His magic shows have helped expose the Babas and the Guru-politics nexus of India. With the numerous volunteers he has trained, he undertakes “walks on fire” to disprove Babas claims. Edamaruku appears regularly in the media and is an active symbol of the ongoing fight for scientific temper in India. A second generation rationalist, he is the son of Joseph Edamaruku and Soley Edamaruku, who were pioneers of the rationalist movement in Kerala, the southern state of India. He joined the rationalist movement as a student activist in 1970 and was the convenor of the Rationalist Student Movement. Moving to Delhi in 1977, he became active in the rationalist movement. At his insistence, a 1980 All-India Conference for rationalists was organized at Mumbai (Bombay) for the purpose of rewriting the constitution of the Indian Rationalist Association. In 1983, he was elected as the youngest General Secretary of the Association. In 1981 he started Indian Atheist Publishers, which has published numerous rationalist books including several translations of western freethought classics and contemporary books. The Indian Rationalist Association joined the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) in 1992 upon his initiative. Edamaruku has been a Board member of IHEU since then and has addressed gatherings and conferences in Europe and America. In 1995 at New Delhi, the First International Rationalist Rationalist Conference was hosted by Edamaruku and the Indian Rationalist Association. An International Alliance Against Fundamentalism, of which Edamaruku was Founder President, was inaugurated during this conference. In 1996, his novel, Sanmarganishtante Ikkilikal (The Ticklings of the Moralist), was published. In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, the year he became an Honorary Associate, he spoke on “Rationalism in the Third World in the 21st Century.” Edamaruku signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {WAS, November 1998}

Eddy, Richard (1828—1906) Eddy has been called the leading 19th century historian of Universalism. In 1876 he was elected president of the Universalist Historical Society, and he edited the Universalist Quarterly. {FUS; U&U}

Edel, Abraham (Born 1908) 

Edel has been professor of philosophy at City College of New York, City University of New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are The Theory and Practice of Philosophy (1946), Science and the Structure of Ethics (1961), and Anthropology and Ethics (1959). Edel was one of the contributors to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994). {CL}

Eddington, Arthur Stanley [Sir] (1882—1944) Eddington, an English physicist and astronomy, made major contributions to the study of stars, their evolution, motion, and internal constitution.He was a pioneer in understanding the theory of relativity, which he expounded in Mathematical Theory of Relativity (1923) and The Internal Constitution of the Stars (1926). Eddington did not believe in the God of the theologians, but he was a member of the Society of Friends. He held that he did not believe in the existence of a material universe—an attitude which is as deadly to Christology as to Materialism—and held that electrons and stars are just ideas in the mind of God. Because his work is marred by entirely false statements about the earlier state of science in regard to the nature of atoms, physicists reject and criticize his views on indeterminism or the breakdown of the law of causality. In his Swarthmore Lectures to Quakers in 1929, McCabe reported, Eddington “explains that he regards proof of the existence of God as superfluous: that you know it as you know the existence of a friend.” (See the entry for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who differed with Eddington on some important astronomical matters. Also see entry for Susan Stebbing, whose criticism of Eddington has been called a model of clarity.) {CE; RE}

Eddy, Mary Baker (1821—1910) Eddy in 1866 founded the Christian Science movement, a variant of American Protestantism, and in 1908 founded its daily newspaper, Christian Science Monitor. A three-volume biography by Robert Peel is the one approved by Christian Science authorities, but Samuel Clemens and Willa Cather have written entirely negative views of Eddy. Martin Gardner, in The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy, claims that Eddy “copies shamelessly, often word for word,” from John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, and others, particularly Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, the man from whom Gardner maintains Eddy took the central idea of Christian Science. She is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a circle of eight Corinthian columns on an elevated base marking her tomb. Unlike other denominations, the Church of Christ, Scientist (which claims to have 2,400 different churches), declines to publish membership figures. (See entries for Willa Cather, Christian Science, Samuel Clemens, Martin Gardner.) {Caroline Fraser, “Mrs. Eddy Builds Her Empire,” The New York Review of Books, 11 July 1996}

Edel, Joseph Leon (1907—1997) Edel [pronounced ay-DELL], Pulitzer Prize winner in 1963 for his five-volume biography of Henry James, also wrote Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. Asked about the various categories of humanism, he wrote the present author,

These are all such long definitions and what is needed is brevity, for there lies clarity. I therefore offer:

The feeling for, and study of, all that pertains to the human order as distinct from the Divine.

I think of this as necessary because of the gross distortions of definition that have occurred in recent years especially under the conservative tutelage. I don’t see the need for “secular” if you accept my definition. It defines itself.

	Edel between 1957 and 1959 was president of the American Center of PEN, and in 1969 and 1970 he was president of the Authors Guild. In 1972 he was elected a member of the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters. {CE; WAS, 14 February 1989}

Edelen, William (20th Century) Edelen, a newspaper columnist and editor of The Edelen Letter, is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker. He flew for twelve years as a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, flying both fighter planes and transports in World War II and Korea. After receiving his Master of Theology degree from McCormick Theological Seminary (at the University of Chicago), he served as a Presbyterian minister, then took up anthropology at the University of Colorado. Edelen is a long-time promoter of religious literacy, pointing out such facts that resurrected gods before Jesus included Attis and Mithra. A collection of his articles, Toward the Mystery, examines the chains which bind so many theists’ minds.

Edell, Dean (20th Century) Dean Edell, Radio Medical Talk Show Host media

During his nationally syndicated radio talk show he has said a number of times that he has no belief in religion or an afterlife, usually in response to topics such as near death experiences, anti-abortion protests by the religious right, etc.

--WA

---

Dr. Edell has a website rich with practical and solid medical advice at http://www.healthcentral.com.

Edell, a radio medical talk-show host, has gone on record as being a non-theist. During his nationally syndicated radio talk shows, usually in response to topics such as near death experiences or anti-abortion protests by the religious right, Edell responds that he has no belief in religion or in an afterlife. {CA; E}

Edelman, Gerald M(aurice) (1919— ) A 1972 Nobel Prize winner in medicine-physiology, Edelman heads the Department of Neuroscience at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, where he is researching cell adhesion molecules which control the embryonic development process of cell differentiation. In Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (1992), he looks forward to a second Enlightenment in which the major scientific underpinning will be neuroscience, not physics. “The problem then,” he states, “will be not the existence of souls, for it is clear that each individual person is like no other and is not a machine. The problem will be to accept that individual minds are mortal.” {Secular Nation, Fall 1994}

Edelman, Marian Wright (20th Century) Edelman, the first black woman to be admitted to the Mississippi Bar, served as a staff attorney and activist for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1963 to 1968. She served as director of the Harvard University Center for Law and Education from 1971 to 1973. In 1984, she was named the Humanist Distinguished Service Awardee by the American Humanist Association.

Edelmann, Johann Christian (1698—1767) Called by Robertson one of the most energetic freethinkers of his age, Edelmann wrote Unschuldige Wahrheiten (Innocent Truths), “in which he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position, but without rejecting ‘revelation.’” Later influence by the deists led Edelmann to withdraw from the Pietist camp, “attacking his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought was degenerating.” His Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte (Moses with Unveiled Face) (1740) was “an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch,” containing the argument that no religion is of importance. His works, including Christ and Belial (1741) were burned in various German cities. Robertson wrote that

Edelmann’s teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic, with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration the appanage [the rightful endowment] of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age, he estimated Jesus highly.

Mirabeau praised him, and Guizot called him a “fameux esprit fort.” {BDF; JMR; JMRH; RAT}

EDEN Eden, the Biblical site of the mythical Adam and Eve, is a Judeo-Christian concept which hinders students seeking facts about the origin of life.

Eden, Amnon (20th Century) Eden, while a student at Tel Aviv University in Israel, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

EDINBURGH (Scotland) HUMANISTS: For information, write 2 Saville Terrace, Edinburgh EH9 3AD; or telephone 0131 667 8389.

Edis, Taner (20th Century)

Edis, who is at Iowa State University in Ames, is a supporter of Internet Infidels.

Edison, Thomas Alva (1847—1931) Despite deafness and only three months of formal schooling, Edison was one of the most productive inventors of all time. “Genius,” he held, “is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration.” While still in his teens, he said he “ate his way” steadily through fifteen feet of books on the shelves of the Detroit Public Library, this after having read when ten years of age Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and Hume’s History of England. “What does God mean to me?” Edison once wrote. “Not a damned thing! Religion is all bunk.” He also wrote, “All Bibles are man-made” and “When a man is dead, he is dead,” and “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.” In 1910, he told The New York Times in an interview, “I cannot believe in the immortality of the soul. . . . No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life—our desire to go on living—our dread of coming to an end as individuals. I do not dread it, though. Personally, I cannot see any use of a future life.” Edison invented the carbon microphone (1877), the record player (1878), the incandescent lamp (1879), and the kinetoscope (1889). In 1996, however, the French proposed commemorating the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema by Auguste and Louis Lumière, by which they hoped to dramatize that they, not Edison with George Eastman, invented the cinema. Edison’s kinetoscopic camera, they hold, was no more than the precursor of television; to view it, one had to peep into a box. As to whether “his 1,093 patents are all to be credited to his undisputed genius or to the work of many assistants,” Martin Gardner also has had doubts. In “Thomas Edison, Paranormalist” (Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1996), Gardner chooses not to discuss the world’s most famous, most prolific inventor’s foibles: “his temper tantrums, his lust for money, his efforts to purloin ideas, his boasts about war weapons that never existed, or his disastrous relations with his two wives and his children.” What Gardner does focus on is Edison’s changing religious opinions, his lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, and his gullibility. As a youth he admired Thomas Paine but, Gardner notes, unlike the deist Paine Edison did not believe in God, the soul, or an afterlife. At the time a pantheist, Edison liked to call nature the “Supreme Intelligence,” indifferent and merciless toward humanity. But in 1920, Gardner avers, Edison came to believe in an afterlife and actually worked on an electrical device for communicating with the dead, a change which befriended him to Christian leaders. Edison’s second wife, eighteen years his junior, was a devout Methodist who thought evolution a plot of Satan. In 1926 Edison was quoted as referring to God as both a “Great Power” and a “Creator.” And he praised Christianity as the wisest and most beautiful of world religions. Matthew Josephson in his biography, however, said that when Edison’s wife entertained six Methodist bishops and a theological debate ensued, Edison said, “I’m not going to listen to any more of this nonsense!” and stormed out. Allegedly, the Edisons agreed from that point on not to discuss religion and lived happily until his death at age eighty-four. Also according to Gardner, Edison in his old age was bamboozled by a magician, Berthold Reese (1841—1926). Houdini the magician had been impressed by Reese’s skill but had, during a séance with him, “caught him cold-blooded. He was startled when it was over, as he knew that I had bowled him over. So much so that he claimed I was the only one that had ever detected him.” Of Edison’s faith in Reese, Houdini wrote Conan Doyle, “That he fooled Edison does not surprise me. He would have surprised me if he did not fool Edison. Edison is certainly not a criterion, when it comes to judging a shrewd adept in the art of pellet-reading [a pellet being a billet rolled into a ball].” When an article in the New York Graphic unveiled some of Reese’s techniques, Edison was so furious he wrote the editor that he had watched Reese several times, that on each occasion he had written something on a piece of paper when Reese was not near or when he was in another room, and that in no case was one of the papers handled by Reese. “Yet he recited correctly the contents of each paper.” An account of Reese’s methods by Ted Annemann in The Jinx (1936, Summer Issue) included a photograph of Reese, his hand holding a cigar that he habitually smoked during his performances because it made it easier to palm a folded billet. Gardner reports a number of Edison’s failed predictions, that the talking motion picture would not supplant the regular silent motion picture; that the possibilities of the aeroplane in 1895 had been exhausted “and we must turn elsewhere”; that the radio craze would die out; that more electricity would be sold for electric vehicles; that only direct current should be used; etc. Gardner, however, is one of the few to have viewed Edison in such a light. As for that device to communicate with departed souls, Haught among others holds that Edison “played games with his detractors,” citing Edison’s statement, “It will give them a better opportunity to express themselves than Ouija boards or tilting tables.” As for the minister’s inquiry about the need for installing lightning rods on the church spire, Edison had replied, “By all means, as Providence is apt to be absent-minded.” Two years before he died, Edison had a conversation with the well-known atheist, Joseph Lewis, saying, “The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age, and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them. Incurably religious—that is the best way to describe the mental condition of so many people. Incurably religious.” Similarly, biographers Matthew Josephson and Wyn Wachhorst pointed out that Edison was incurably irreligious, that he rejected three fundamental tenets of Christianity: Christ’s divinity, a personal God, and immortality. In 1948, D. D. Runes edited Edison’s Diary and Sundry Observations. According to his biographer, Ronald W. Clark, Edison on 18 October 1931, at the age of eighty-four, died after having been in a coma for five days. Just before he lapsed into the coma, he looked out the bedroom window and across the valley by his home. “It is very beautiful over there” were his last words. {CE; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TSV; TYD}

Edman, Irwin (1896—1954) Chairman of the philosophy department at Columbia University, Edman was a naturalist in philosophy, along with Ernest Nagel. He was graduated by Columbia University in 1917, began lecturing in philosophy there in 1918, and headed the department in 1945. Edman combined pragmatism with his interest in esthetics, as shown in Philosopher’s Holiday (1938). A foremost American writer on the philosophy of George Santayana, he wrote his political views in Fountainheads of Freedom (1941). Edman is noted for being a spokesman in the liberal tradition of William James and of John Dewey. A strong believer in education and the importance of fighting evil, he remarked, “When we give up the battle, the devil must smile as he watches us relax—under the guidance of theologians,” a wry reference to his contempt for those theologians. In his Candle in the Dark (1939), Edman wrote, “Men in the nineteenth century were sad that they could no longer believe in God; they are more deeply saddened now by the fact that they can no longer believe in man.” In Four Ways of Philosophy (1937), Edman notes that the naturalist admits some religious impulse in man, but “the supernaturalist insists that this impulse which nature generates cannot be satisfied by nature save as seen in a supernatural context. To which the naturalist retorts that nature generates some impulses, possibly, which cannot be satisfied, as a man may be hungry without proving thereby that food is in his neighborhood or his reach.” {CL; HNS; TYD}

Edson, Charles Leroy (1881—1975) In his autobiography, The Great American Ass (1926), Edson tells of his freethinking outlook. His Whale Meat: A Shocking Portrayal of Our Tribal Belief In Free Food from the North Pole (1924) speaks of God as a tribal artifact. His photo and excerpts from some of his writing are in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier.

Edson, Katharine Philips (1870-1933) Edson, a Unitarian, was a suffragist, reformer, and labor arbitrator.

EDUCATION • Education is the transmission of civilization. —Ariel and Will Durant

• There is one kind of co-education that everybody believes in—the co-education of teachers and students. —John Dewey

• You must unlearn what you have learned. —Yoda, the Jedi master in George Lucas’s Star Wars

“We are committed,” the Council for Secular Humanism states in its “Affirmations of Humanism,” “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.” Some critics of secular humanism associate it with John Dewey, complaining about his relativistic outlook. “Religious people,” Jim Herrick has noted, “are now commonly attacking the ‘relativism’ of secular teaching. Secularists believe in relativism in the sense that we must take account of a situation in order to decide on the moral behaviour, but they are not ‘relativists’ in that they believe in the possibility of universally shared principles of behaviour.” (See entry for Morality.}

EDUCATIONAL HERETICS PRESS Educational Heretics Press at 113 Arundel Drive, Bramcote Hills, Nottingham, NG9 3FQ, England, is publisher of works such as The Freethinker’s Guide to the Educational Universe (1994) by Roland Meighan.

Edward, Marshall (20th Century) Marshall, in Columbian Magazine (1911), wrote “Thomas A. Edison on Immortality.” {GS}

Edwards, Brian (20th Century) Edwards is a broadcaster, raconteur, author of The Public Eye (1971), and editor of Right Out: Labour Victory ’72 (1973). He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.

Edwards, Chilperic (20th Century) Edwards, a freethinker, wrote The Oldest Law in the World (1906). {GS}

Edwards, Don (1915—	)

A Unitarian, Edwards served as national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action starting in 1965. A California congressman, in 1996 he was given the American Humanist Association’s distinguished service award.

Edwards, Ian (1929— ) Edwards is an Australian humanist and medical general practitioner. He has been chairman of the Humanist Society of New South Wales, and he co-authored Sex for Modern Teenagers (1969) and A Humanist View (1969). {SWW}

Edwards, James J. (20th Century) Edwards is author of A Skeptic’s Look at the Bible.

Edwards, John (20th Century) Edwards, an American, participated in 1980 at the 2nd World Atheist Conference in India.

Edwards, John Passmore (1823—1911) Edwards was a British philanthropist, a poor boy who had educated himself and made a large fortune in journalism. “His papers set a standard of truth and idealism,” states McCabe, “that is hardly known any longer, and his money was lavishly distributed amongst educational and philanthropic institutions (70 of which bear his name).” Edwards was influenced by Emerson and, in his A Few Footprints (1906), says he is an agnostic. McCabe, who knew him, agreed that Edwards was “a Spencerian Agnostic” and took a helpful interest in the early stages of the Rationalist Press Association. {JM; JMRH; RAT; RE}

Edwards, Paul (1923— ) Edwards is an American philosopher “who is mixed one part analytic philosopher to one part philosophe,” according to Professor Michael Wreen of Marquette University in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995). He is then described as being editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (8 volumes, 1967), “a massive Enlightenment work with a notable analytic sensibility” which “focuses on such traditional philosophical issues as God, free will, immortality, induction, and the nature of value-judgements.” The Right Honorable Lord Quinton of Trinity College, Oxford, has called the encyclopedia “superior in every way to all its predecessors” and “there has been nothing since to compare with it.” A professor of philosophy who has taught at Brooklyn College, New York University, and the New School University, Edwards wrote the introduction to Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian (1957). He also wrote The Logic of Moral Discourse (1955), Buber and Buberism (1970), Heidegger on Death (1979), and Voltaire (1989), Immortality (1992), Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996), and numerous scholarly articles. In Immortality (1992), Edwards writes of “Karmic Tribulations” and “The Dependence of Consciousness on the Brain,” providing thirty-four essays by a variety of thinkers on the subjects of survival and immortality.

• Those believing in human survival he lists as

Aquinas, Descartes, Geach, MacKay, Priestley, and Tertullian.

• Those believing in some form of God without believing in survival, he states, are

Mill and Voltaire.

• Those who believe in survival without believing in God are

Ducasse and McTaggart.

• And of the many who reject both belief in God and in survival are 

Ayer, Flew, and Hume. s Long a leader of and inspiration for humanists, Edwards is an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. In 1983, he was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In addition to writing the foreword to The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985), he signed Manifesto II and is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In addition, Edwards is a contributing editor to Free Inquiry and to Philo. David Berman, reviewing Edwards’s Immortality in the British New Humanist, was generally favorable and mentioned that the book has an “occasional joke. Thus in his discussion of dualism he mentions the (supposed) comment of one behaviourist to another: ‘You are fine—how am I?’” But he denies that Hume was a “frankly irreligious” philosopher. Berman, however, is intrigued by the Edwards view that “there is probably no consensus against dualism among contemporary philosophers.” Students smile upon relating that when Edwards lectures and mentions a name or a work he suspects they have not read, he exhorts them with “Barbarians, you are barbarians, barbarians! You must read everything ever written by [e.g., Hume] before tomorrow’s class!” On the following day, it is likely that someone in a back row will be questioned about yesterday’s assigned author, whether or not the student is auditing the course or taking it for credit. The front rows of his classes are usually filled to capacity. Students soon learn, also, not to inquire about Sidney Hook, who was once his department chairman and in whose room he once shared space. “I was so happy,” Edwards might retort, his face filled with glee, “that when he died his photo and obituary did not make page one of The New York Times!” Although the two shared many philosophic beliefs, Edwards is quick to go on record as to his heartfelt feelings: that a pretty girl should not be overlooked, or that public interest in Ayn Rand and R. D. Laing is fading in the 1990s, or that Nietzsche was not a true misogynist. In his 1995 Prometheus Lecture, a three-part series covering Nietzsche, Freud, and Wilhelm Reich given at New York’s New School for Social Research, Edwards stated that “the elimination of error is almost as important as the discovery of truth.” To everyone’s surprise, over three hundred attended the lectures, including some who had been in his classes thirty years prior. “Yes,” Edwards emphasized, “I have the anti-religious bug. Freud had it, too, but not Reich. Lucretius had it. So did Nietzsche, Hume, and Bertrand Russell.” Edwards stated that he does not object to others having their religious beliefs—the Australian aborigines very likely need such—but he holds that any educated individual today who has heard about logical positivism or read the works of contemporary philosophers and persists in mysticism or supernaturalism is not one of his kind. Further, he does not apologize for pointing out their weaknesses. He cited as a major goal his attempt to separate a philosopher’s bad from his or her good concepts. To avoid weighing the bad and the good is to indulge in shoddy research and will confuse future researchers who, if lazy, will regrettably repeat those falsities and others will then repeat them, also. As examples, he noted the false “facts” that Hume was a deist and that Wittgenstein died a Catholic. Confirming the individualistic as well as honest approach which Edwards brings to philosophy, Wreen has written that “[a] deep respect for science and common sense mark Edwards’s writings, and he is well known for his use of humour as a lethal weapon against philosophers whom he regards as pompous purveyors of platitudes, especially Heidegger and Tillich.” In 1996, Edwards wrote a devastating study entitled Reincarnation, A Critical Examination. As to why a rationalist would write about such a patently absurd topic, Edwards’s response is that there is widespread belief in them. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in fact, has never heard an argument for life after death that she does not endorse, he laments. Whereas some make decisions based on reincarnationist beliefs, he adds, others make money on retailing reports of astral adventures. Edwards is at his most devastating in discussing the “interregnum,” where souls await their next body, and the absurdities of “astral clothing.” “The book,” wrote Kenneth Blackwell, “is salutary in revealing the persistence of nonsense and the persisting need for education, logic, and good sense.” Edwards signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. A commendably concise summary of Edwards’s viewpoint is “God and the Philosophers,” which he wrote as an entry for the Oxford Companion of Philosophy. A forthcoming book with that title is in the works. (See entries for Freud, Hume, Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich, and Bertrand Russell.). {CA; Kenneth Blackwell, Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Winter 1998-1999; E; HM2; HNS2; OCP}

Edwards, Robyn (20th Century) Edwards is a humanist activist in Western Australia. E-mail: <robyned@ozemail.com.au>

Edwards, Samuel (20th Century) Edwards wrote Rebel! A Biography of Thomas Paine (1974). {FUK; GS}

Edwards, Sandy (20th Century) Edwards is an active member of Humanist Society of Scotland. E-mail: <ase1@st-andrews.ac.uk>.

Edwards, Thomas (18th Century) A freethinker, Edwards wrote A Discourse on the Limits and Importance of Free Enquiry in Matters of Religion (1792). {GS}

Edwien, Andreas (1921— ) Edwien, a Norwegian, wrote Is Christianity a Danger to World Peace? (1977) and Jesus in Conflict with Human Rights (1979). (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

Edwords, Frederick E. (1948— ) In addition to being Executive Director of the American Humanist Association since 1980, Edwords in 1994 became managing editor of The Humanist following Rick Szykowny’s resignation. As such, he is one of the major leaders of humanistic thought. As such, however, he also receives blame for the decline of the humanistic journal. Edwords is credited with launching a journal, Creation/Evolution, which was devoted exclusively to answering the religious right’s creationist arguments. He has spoken at international humanist conferences in Costa Rica and Mumbai, emphasizing that humanists must address the new technologies. Because the American Humanist Association held the copyrights to Humanist Manifestos I and II and did not approve of the Council for Secular Humanism’s naming the next manifesto III, Edwords did not sign the newly named Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <edwords@juno.com>. On the Web: <http://www.humanists.net/> and <http://www.infidels.org/org/aha/>. (See entry for New York Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {CL; FD; HNS2}

Edwords, Mary (20th Century) Edwords is an American activist and humanist. Her e-mail: <75332.3305@compuserve.com>. Eenens, Ferdinand (1811—1883) Eenens was a Belgian writer who wrote La Vérité (1859), a work on the Christian faith and Le Paradis Terrestre (1860), an examination of the legend of Eden. He used such pen names as Le Père Nicaise, Nicodème, and Timon III. {BDF}

Eeramani, K. (20th Century) In Madras, India, Eeramani since 1973 has been editing Modern Rationalist. {FUK}

Effen, Justus van (1684—1735) Effen was a Dutch writer. While secretary of the Dutch Embassy at London, he conceived the idea of a weekly like the Spectator and founded Le Misanthrope, later Le Journal Littéraire, and finally (1731—1735) De Hollandsche Spectator. In 1722 he translated into Dutch Mandeville’s deistic Free Thoughts on Religion. {RAT}

Efremov, Yuri Nikolaevich (20th Century) Efremov, who is department head of Sternberg Astronomical Institute at Moscow State University, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

EGALITARIANISM Egalitarianism is a belief in human equality, particularly with respect to social, political, and economic rights. That is not to say that all humans are or could be the same, which is profoundly illogical. The rights inherent in egalitariarianism make diversity not only possible but also desirable. Some Christians may look forward to a Heaven in which all are equal in the eyes of God. Freethinkers enjoy their diversity in the here and now. They can flourish, however, only if they can live where their rights are respected not to believe in the supernatural.

Egan, Greg (20th Century) A science fiction writer from Australia, Egan in an interview in Eidolon 11 (January 1993) said

I was raised as a Christian, and I still retain a lot of the values of Christianity. The trouble with basing values on religions, though, is that the premises of most of them are pure wishful thinking; you either have to refuse to scrutinise those premises—take them on faith, declare that they “transcend logic”—or reject them. As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more “modern” view than the average believer does. But by the time you’ve “modernised” something like Christianity—starting off with “Genesis was all just poetry” and ending up with “Well, of course there’s no such thing as a personal God”—there’s not much point pretending that there’s anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you’re an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God. [Asked what inspires him to write], most of my “inspiration” is very transparent. The Cutie was triggered by reading that childless adults in the United States were buying themselves Cabbage Patch dolls—and that one couple had even had an exorcism performed on theirs. I’m still not sure if that was apocryphal or not. The Moral Virologist was a fairly direct response to religious fundamentalists blathering on about AIDS being God’s instrument. I thought someone should point out that, even on their own terms, this was a blasphemous obscenity. I suppose that story was also guided by the example of “creation science”; believing in doctrine is bad enough, but if you start trying to reason from it, you churn out an ever-growing list of absurdities which you also have to believe. Greg Egan, Australian SF Writer art

From an interview published in Eidolon 11, January 1993, pp.18-30:

"I don't want to write motherhood statements -- feel-good stories that cave in at the end and do nothing but confirm everything you ever wanted to believe; I've done that in the past, and it's insidious. Stories like that should be burned. If I'm certain of anything, it's that understanding how the real world works - how human brains actually function, how morality and emotions and decisions actually arise -- is essential to any kind of ethical stance which will make sense in the long term. If that gets me branded 'mechanistic', so be it.

"I was raised as a Christian, and I still retain a lot of the values of Christianity. The trouble with basing values on religions, though, is that the premises of most of them are pure wishful thinking; you either have to refuse to scrutinise those premises - take them on faith, declare that they 'transcend logic' - or reject them. As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more 'modern' view than the average believer. But by the time you've 'modernised' something like Christianity - starting off with 'Genesis was all just poetry' and ending up with 'Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God' - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God."

When asked what inspires him to write, Egan said

"Most of my 'inspiration' is very transparent. 'The Cutie' was triggered by reading that childless adults in the US were buying themselves Cabbage Patch dolls - and that one couple had even had an exorcism performed on theirs. I'm still not sure if that was apocryphal or not. 'The Moral Virologist' was a fairly direct response to religious fundamentalists blathering on about AIDS being God's instrument; I thought someone should point out that, even on their own terms, this was a blasphemous obscenity. I suppose that story was also guided by the example of 'creation science'; believing in doctrine is bad enough, but if you start trying to reason from it, you churn out an ever-growing list of absurdities which you also have to believe."

---

In a personal correspondence with Mr. Egan, he confirmed that his Hugo winning novella, Oceanic, was, in fact, a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his own journey to atheism. {CA}

Egner, Russell Forrest (20th Century) A freethinker, Egner wrote In Search of Truth (1951). {GS}

EGO

A Dutch humanist monthly for soldiers, Ego is at Oranje Nassaulaan 71, 3708 GC Zeist, The Netherlands.

EGOISM In ethics, egoism is opposed to altruism. Spinoza held that egoism is a necessary corollary of the supreme instinct of self-preservation, for “no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.” Egoists hold that the ends and motives of human conduct are the good of the individual. Altruists, however, hold that the criterion of morality is the welfare of others. For Nietzsche, all altruistic sentiment is cowardice. Herbert Spencer held that the conflict between the two can be traced to the conflict of the individual with his family, his group, his race, and people like him. The two could be reconciled, he thought, through social discipline. {CE}

THE EGOIST: See entry for Freewoman.

EGOTIST • Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me.

—Ambrose Bierce

The Devil’s Dictionary

Egren, Michael (20th Century) Egren is Vice President in Michigan of The Jewish Humanist.

EGYPTIAN CIVILIZATION The peoples of Egypt and the Near East were said to have made their appearance, according to Jasper Griffin of Oxford University, in myths

in connection respectively with the Greek heroine Io (who went to Egypt in the form of a cow) and with the hero Cadmus, sprung from the same family but living in Phoenicia. Cadmus came back to his birthplace, Greece, bringing with him the alphabet, and became the founder of the city of Thebes, the great-granddaughters of Io, the fifty Danaids (daughters of Danaus, another eponym, this time of the Danaans, an old name for the Hellenes), returned to Greece in flight from their hated suitors, their cousins, the fifty sons of Aegyptus.

When forced to marry them, all but one of the Danaids cut their bridegrooms’ throats on their wedding night. Such a myth has led many human males to universal feelings of alarm, Griffin has written,

. . . at the thought of marrying, and being helpless in the presence of, a woman—about whom, when you came down to it, you really knew very little.

{Jasper Griffin, “Anxieties of Influence,” The New 

York Review of Books, 20 June 1996}

EGYPTIAN FREETHINKERS AND HUMANISTS • Averroës Today (published in English and Arabic twice per year), PO Box 5101, Heliopolis West, Cairo, 11711—is of interest to freethinkers. Mourad Wahba, its president, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. • Afro-Asian Philosophy Association (is an Associate Member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in London)—the group has held conferences in Cairo on “Enlightenment and Human Rights” and “Terrorism and Teaching Philosophy.”

EGYPTIAN RELIGION Much confusion surrounds the study of ancient Egyptian religion, and current research finds contradictory myths and beliefs riddled with inconsistencies. What is clear, however, is that five centuries before the introduction of monotheism by the Hebrews, five centuries before the first prophet appeared in Judea, Ikhnaten had imposed monotheism. However, according to McCabe, “the people, instead of perceiving it to be a higher truth, gladly joined with the priests in getting it suppressed and polytheism restored.” (See J. H. Breasted’s Development of Religion in Ancient Egypt (1912) and Siegfried Morenz’s Egyptian Religion [1973].) {CE; RE}

EHF: See entry for European Humanist Federation.

Ehrenfeld, Sylvain (20th Century)

Ehrenfeld is one of the IHEU’s representatives to the United Nations.

Ehrenreich, Barbara (1941— ) Ehrenreich is an atheist, socialist, and feminist who writings have been published in Time, The Nation, Ms., Mother Jones, Esquire, Vogue, New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine. With Deirdre English, she wrote Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1972), which exposed male dominance of female health care. She also wrote The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983); Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989); and The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990). In the latter work, she mentions that her great-grandmother, Mamie O’Laughlin, once called for a Catholic priest to administer last rites for her dying father. When he sent word he would not perform the ceremony unless Mamie gave him $25 in advance, she was so outraged by the priest’s greed that she eventually became an atheist. As for her descendants, Ehrenreich added, “Furthermore, whether out of filial devotion or natural intelligence, most of us have continued to avoid organized religion, secret societies, astrology, and New Age adventures in spiritualism.” In 1998 she was the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year. The Freedom From Religion Foundation named her “Freethought Heroine 1999” at their annual national convention held in San Antonio, Texas. {CA; E; Free Inquiry, Spring 1998; WWS} Barbara Ehrenreich, Columnist media

Ehrenreich is a columnist for TIME magazine. In the introduction to her book, The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed, she mentions that several of her ancestors were atheists. Her great-grand-mother, Mamie O'Laughlin, once called for a Catholic priest to administer last rites for her dying father. When the priest sent word that he would not perform last rites unless Mamie gave him $25 in advance, Mamie was so outraged by the priest's greed that she eventually became an atheist. According to Ehrenreich, "It was on account of its greed that the church lost the souls of Mamie O'Laughlin and all of her descendents, right down to the present time. Furthermore, whether out of filial devotion or natural intelligence, most of us have continued to avoid organized religion, secret societies, astrology, and New Age adventures in spiritualism." Ehrenreich says about her mother, "The worst thing she could find to say about a certain in-law was that he was a Republican and a churchgoer, though when I investigated these charges later in life, I was relieved to find them baseless." Although Ehrenreich does not come out and say point blank that she is an atheist, [the contributor thinks] it's pretty clear she grew up in an atheist family and she is proud to keep up with the family "tradition."

In addition to her discussion of her family history, Ehrenreich also wrote a tounge-in-cheek essay about secular humanism, "Give Me That New-Time Religion," which is also included in Worst Years. She says, "I was raised in a real strong Secular Humanist family--the kind of folks who'd ground you for a week just for thinking of a dating a Unitarian, or worse." Another good quote: "What gets me is all the mean things people say about Secular Humanism, without even taking the time to read some of our basic scriptures, such as the Bill of Rights or Omni magazine." Ehrenreich, Barbara (28 Aug 1941 - ) Ehrenreich is a feminist, socialist, and atheist, whose writings have been published in Time, The Nation, Ms., Mother Jones, Esquire, Vogue, New Republic, and The New York Times Magazine. With Deirdre English, she wrote Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (1972), which exposed male dominance of female health care. She also wrote The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983); Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989); and The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990). In the latter work, she mentions that her great-grandmother, Mamie O’Laughlin, once called for a Catholic priest to administer last rites for her dying father. When he sent word he would not perform the ceremony unless Mamie gave him $25 in advance, she was so outraged by the priest’s greed that she eventually became an atheist. As for her descendants, Ehrenreich added, “Furthermore, whether out of filial devotion or natural intelligence, most of us have continued to avoid organized religion, secret societies, astrology, and New Age adventures in spiritualism.” In 1998 she was the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year. The Freedom From Religion Foundation named her “Freethought Heroine 1999” at their annual national convention held in San Antonio, Texas. {CA; E; Free Inquiry, Spring 1998; WWS}

Ehrenreich, Gerald A. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Ehrenreich was an associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine. {HM2}

Ehrenreich, Barbara (20th Century) In Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (1997), Ehrenreich takes up the theme of war and what is the central rite of so many ancient religions, blood sacrifice. “I was preoccupied with ritual blood sacrifice as a kind of antecedent to war or socially sanctioned violence in which people have traditionally invested very powerful feelings and ideas of religious significance,” she stated in a Free Inquiry interview (Winter 1997-1998). Humanism is in Ehrenreich’s family tradition. The story goes that it began with her great-great-grandmother in the 1800s in Montana. She rejected religion after she could not afford the fee a Catholic priest demanded to attend to her dying father. “I think that, like the Japanese and the Germans in the 1930s and 40s, we are equally wrapped up in nationalism as our unofficial—and un-examined—religion,” she has lamented. {Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}

Ehrlich, Anne (20th Century) A senior research associate in biology at Stanford, Ehrlich served as a consultant to the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Global 2000 Report. In 1985 she received the American Humanist Association’s Distinguished Service Award. “Over 60% of the earth’s land surface is being used in some degree or another by human beings,” she has written. “Most of what remains is desert, mountaintops, or arctic areas. . . . But we are only one of somewhere between five and thirty million species of organisms that exist on this planet. It is obvious that we consume much more than our share of earth’s biological productivity. So . . . whatever your cause, it is a lost cause without population control.”

Ehrlich, Paul (1932— ) Ehrlich, an educator and biologist, wrote How To Know Butterflies (11961), Process of Evolution (1963), Population Bomb (1968), Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man (1971), Race Bomb (1977), The Population Explosion (1990), and a variety of other works which warn about overpopulation in the poorest countries and overconsumption in the richest countries.

	Ehrlich has described creationists as “a group of morons”; he puts down “flacks of the pesticide industry” because “they have no shame”; he shrugs off most scientists who, unlike himself, do “dull ignorant work that is of no significance to humanity”; and he has described any economists who assert that there are no known physical limits to growth as being “totally imbecilic.”

A controversial and outspoken scientist, he does not believe birth control can work, calling it “nonsensical.” He would, in fact, favor the forcible sterilization of Indian men who have more than three children. Like the naturalistic humanists of the 1950s who, Cassandra-like, warned about the danger of the human population explosion, Ehrlich has appeared on television to predict that, with the globe’s population heading toward ten billion by the middle of the 21st century, Western countries can be expected to gobble up the resources needed by the impoverished throngs of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In 1990 Ehrlich became a MacArthur Prize fellow. Paul Ehrlich, Biologist science

Ehrlich is probably best known for his research writings on population growth and resource depletion.

The October 2000 issue of Scientific American's "Profile" section featured biologist Paul Ehrlich (author of the mega-bestseller "The Population Bomb" some years ago), who became an atheist at age six. Although Ehrlich alludes to his own fear of death, the article points out "...he won't be renouncing his long-held atheism. Offered the choice of 'being tortured for eternity [in hell] or bored for eternity' in heaven, the rebel chooses neither. 'No organized religion has ever presented me with anything that is remotely attractive as a reward,' he maintains. To the end, Paul Ehrlich will stick to his convictions."

See the article at http://www.sciam.com/2000/1000issue/1000profile.html.

Eichorn, Johann Gottfried (1752—1827) Eichorn was a German Orientalist and rationalist. He was professor of Oriental Literature and afterwards professor of theology at Gottingen. In A Commentary on the Apocalypse, he tends to uproot belief in the Bible as a divine revelation. Eichorn is said to have lectured every day for fifty-two years. {BDF; RAT}

Eichorn, Nat (20th Century) Eichorn is active with the American Humanist Association chapter in Tucson. (See entry for Arizona Atheists, Humanists.)

Eichtal, Gustav d’ (1804—1886) Eichtal was a French writer, born of a Jewish family. He became a follower of Saint Simon and was one of the founders of the Société d’ Ethnologie. Eichtal published Les Evangiles (1863), a critical analysis of the gospels. After his death, his son published his Mélanges de Critique Biblique (Miscellanies of Biblical Criticism), in which he studied the name and character of “Jahveh.” {BDF}

Einstein, Albert (1879—1955) An internationally eminent theoretical physicist, who formulated the relativity theory, Einstein is a symbol of genius in the 20th century. As a boy, he lived in Munich and Milan, studying at a cantonal school in Switzerland, graduating from Zürich‘s Federal Institute of Technology, and later becoming a Swiss citizen. In 1910 he became full professor at the German University in Prague, then returned to Zürich, resuming his German citizenship. In 1921 he won the Nobel Prize in physics, notably for his work on the photoelectric effect. He taught at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, from 1933 to 1940. His property, however, was confiscated in 1934 by the Nazi government and he was deprived of his German citizenship. In 1940 he became an American citizen, although McCabe reports that the Catholic hierarchy denounced him as an atheist when he was invited to America. In addition to being known for his relativity theory, he is known for his contributions to the development of the quantum theory and for the unified field theory. He alerted Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt to the possible use of atomic energy in bombs, but Einstein remained a pacifist throughout his life. His formulation of a general theory of relativity that included gravitation as a determiner of the curvature of a space-time continuum revolutionized almost all fields of study. Hume and Mach, he once stated, were the philosophers who impressed him the most favorably. The “general” theory suggested that space itself is not just a stage for the material world to act on, but is an active participant in the play. For example, space gets bent out of shape by any matter that is hanging about in it. His “special” theory of relativity showed that an object can be two different sizes for two different people, and that they can perceive the time between two events to have different durations. Norman Cousins told the story that when he took his young daughter to see the distinguished Princeton professor, she had ingenuously informed Einstein that he was the smartest man in the world and she marveled at all the little objects that graced his desk. He described several of them to her. “And why do you have this rock?” he was asked, for it appeared to be a rock like all other rocks anywhere. “To remind myself,” he responded, “that it is something I do not thoroughly understand.” (For something else Einstein did not understand, see the entry for Marie Curie.) In their Private Lives of Albert Einstein, biographers Roger Highfield and Paul Carter cite Einstein’s acquaintance with Marie Curie but state he had little regard for women’s intellectual potential in the sciences. “I’m not much with people,” he stated, “and I’m not a family man. I want my peace. I want to know how God created the world.” So he came up with the relativity principle (a person’s speed in a car can be relative to the ground, the moon, the farthest galaxy) and the absolute value of the speed of light. He also came up with the equation, E = mc2, which changed physics as well as nuclear fission and the history of mankind. Little wonder that when Franz Kafka was in the same room with Einstein in 1911 or 1912, Kafka—although one of the most creative thinkers of the time—sat “tongue-tied in a corner.” Einstein was on the board of advisors of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, of which Bertrand Russell was then president. Einstein once wrote, “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusive human concern with no superhuman authority behind it. . . . Teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.” His final will left his manuscripts and royalties to Hebrew University. Raised as he was by non-religious parents, Einstein was not involved in religious activities, but he did identify with his Jewish heritage and became an outspoken Zionist. In Living Philosophies (1930), Einstein wrote, “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own—a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism. It is enough for me to contemplate the mystery of conscious life perpetuating itself through all eternity, to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the intelligence manifested in nature.” Eight years later, in 1938, he revised those sentiments:

Things [have grown] even worse than a pessimist of the deepest dye would have dared prophesy. In Europe to the east of the Rhine free exercise of the intellect exists no longer, the population is terrorized by gangsters who have seized power, and youth is poisoned by systematic lies. The pseudo-success of political adventurers has dazzled the rest of the world; it becomes apparent everywhere that this generation lacks the strength and force which enabled previous generations to win, in painful struggle and at great sacrifice, the political and individual freedom of man. Awareness of this state of affairs overshadows every hour of my present existence, while ten years ago it did not yet occupy my thoughts. It is this that I feel so strongly in re-reading the words written in the past. And yet I know that, all in all, man changes but little, even though prevailing notions make him appear in a very different light at different times, and even though current trends like the present bring him unimaginable sorrow. Nothing of all that will remain but a few pitiful pages in the history books, briefly picturing to the youth of future generations the follies of its ancestors.

He disagreed with Kant that particular concepts of time and space are necessary premises for thought, concepts that are innate in the human mind. Rather, he held, all concepts including physical ones are “free inventions of the human intellect” which can be modified in the event they do not compare with one’s experiences. Our intuition about the physical world, he held, is based on sensory experiences and can be fundamentally in error. In 1950, Einstein wrote Essays in Humanism. The Helen Dukas (who was his secretary) and Banesh Hoffman editing of Albert Einstein: The Human Side (1979) quotes him as writing in German to a Colorado banker in 1927: “My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. Morality is of the highest importance—but for us, not for God.” Also, he stated in a letter,

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

In 1941, Einstein delivered a paper on “Science and Religion” at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, pointing out, “Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord men solace, help, and guidance; also by virtue of its simplicity the concept is accessible to the most undeveloped mind.” Students of Einstein’s thought have remarked that if Einstein had a God, it was the God of Spinoza, not the God of the organized religions. But they are amused that, as Abraham Pais’s “Subtle Is the Lord” (1982) reports, “Of Bergson’s philosophy he [Einstein] used to say, ‘God forgive him.’” However, Einstein did once write,

It was, of course, a lie which you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly.

McCabe noted that “Catholic prelates in the United States denounced him, with their usual crudeness, to the public as an atheist, and he replied that he believes in a ‘great Power,’ the source of order and beauty.” McCabe adds, “Agnostic is the accurate description of his opinion, but Einstein has never made any serious study of religious issues.” When Einstein declared that “God does not play dice with the universe,” speaking about quantum explanations of what goes on within atoms, many clergymen jumped to the erroneous conclusion that Einstein was a believer. But Einstein’s “cosmic religion” was his way of expressing an awe of our universe, an entity too profound to be adequately understood. Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, disagreeing, quipped, “Who ever wanted to die for the Milky Way!” Haught quoted The Private Albert Einstein (1992) by Peter Bucky, a young confidant of the genius:

Einstein told me many times that he did not believe in a single God. He said he could not imagine how God could manifest himself in a human countenance. Rather, he believed that there was a cosmic force that could develop things that mortal men could not even begin to understand. . . . I recall his telling me that, during his earlier years, when he would apply for various positions and come to a column asking for details about his religion, he would mark down “dissident,” thus demonstrating his disinterest in any one faith. . . . During an interview with Professor William Hermanns, Einstein once said that he could never accept any conceptualization of God that was based on fear, either fear of life or fear of death, or one that required a blind belief, totally removed from logic. Nor did he envision God in any personal sense. In that respect, he said that if he were to talk about a personal God, he would consider himself to be a liar.

In 1994, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed Einstein’s theory about black holes. The Ultimate Einstein, a CD-ROM, attempts to explain the scientist’s various theories and makes possible a study of Einstein’s skepticism. It shows how at one time he considered nationalism as “ugly,” for he lived through the horrors of World War I, but he came to hold that nationalism can help create human dignity. The work shows how he rejected conservatively defined religion, tells of his advocacy of the values of the Enlightenment, and speaks of his love of classical literature. He took pride in knowing about Jewish culture but when asked later in life if he cared to succeed a Jewish scientist (Chaim Weizmann) as president of Israel, he declined. “What really interests me,” Einstein once remarked, “is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” Such a comment, said Dennis Overbye, deputy science editor of The Times, was not a reference to a “white-bearded man sitting up in Heaven toting up sins and dispensing favors to prayerful supplicants.” Rather it was Einstein’s way of asking (a) could the universe be any other way than it appears to be? or (b) if not, how much room remains in that universe for things like chance and miracles? Overbye reasons that “A God with no choice, of course, might seem to be a cold comfort or even no God at all, at least in the traditional sense.” To Einstein, then, God

was a code word for the mystery and grandeur of the universe, the wellspring of awe, a reminder that there was something at the core of existence that all his equations could only graze, as he said once, “something we cannot penetrate.”

He accepted the fact, Overbye added, that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, that humans will never know the answer to some questions, but that science is nothing if not the search for reasons, “for the smoking gene in our coiled cells, the atom of consciousness, the quantum butterfly flapping its wings at the heart of the world.” Einstein had a child shortly before his marriage in 1902 with a Swiss student, Mileva Maric, a marriage that ended in divorce and involved trying to put their illegitimate daughter up for adoption and sending their mentally disturbed son, Eduard, to a Swiss psychiatric home, where he was not visited by his father—Eduard died wretchedly. Michelle Zackheim’s Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl (1999) claims—Jeremy Bernstein thinks Zackheim has no real evidence, calling most of the study “a wild goose chase”—that the daughter was born severely retarded, possibly with Down syndrome, and died at twenty-one months after a bout with scarlet fever. The daughter was never adopted and, instead, was left with her parents in the Vojovodina region of Serbia. The Einsteins had two other sons—Albert Jr. and Eduard. In 1919 Einstein married his second cousin, Elsa Einstein, a widow who had two daughters, and upon her death in 1936 he spent his last two decades unmarried. He died of an abdominal aneurysm. His will reveals that Helena Dukas, his “secretary-housekeeper,” received more than his own relatives, that she was to receive from a special trust “all of my manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties and royalty agreements, and all other literary property and rights, of any and every kind or nature whatsoever.” Upon her death, his stepdaughter Margot Einstein was to receive such moneys, and upon her death the property was to be delivered to the Hebrew University in Israel. His violin was willed to his grandson, Bernhard Caesar Einstein. Although the will contained no provisions for his funeral or burial, Einstein’s vital organs, including his brain, were removed for scientific study. He then was cremated. Einstein’s last book was entitled Essays in Humanism (1950). (Einstein, whose parents were Hebrews, was not a Jew; the present work distinguishes between a Hebrew and a Jew, referring to the former as a descendant from one of a group of northern Semitic peoples including the Israelites, and to the latter as a person regardless of his mother’s religion who—like Sammy Davis, an African American—chooses the Jewish religion and its basic theology. See the John Holmes entry concerning a comment about a poem by Einstein, and see the entry for Edwin Powell Hubble.) {Jeremy Bernstein, in The New York Times Book Review, 19 Dec 99, claims Zackheim’s book is erroneous in claiming Einstein had syphilis—Zackheim countered that he had written, “I merely posed the medically sound possibility that if he had syphilis, as his friend and physician Janos Pleasch posited, it could have had an impact on the health of his first- and third-born children”; CE; CL; HNS2; JM; RE; The Economist, 8 November 1997; TRI; TYD}

Einstein, Morris (19th Century) A freethinker, Einstein wrote Origin and Development of Religious Ideas and Beliefs, as Manifested in History and Seen by Reason (1871). {GS}

Eisenstadt, Barbara Lynn (20th Century) An American secular humanist, Eisenstadt in 1996 attended the international conference of ethical humanists in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <blefilm@aol.com>.

Eisler, Jan Loeb (20th Century) Eisler, who was married to Lee Eisler, has been on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association. A life member of the AHA, she is vice-president of the statewide chapter, Humanists of Florida, and a board member of Humanists of the Suncoast as well as Humanists of St. Petersburg. She is treasurer of both Liberals United and the Tampa Bay chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. In addition, she is acting treasurer of the Bill of Rights Network, vice president of the Bertrand Russell Society, and editor of a humanistic newsletter, Family Matters (Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226). In her professional life, she is a registered nurse. She has taught advanced cardiac and trauma life support. In her early years, as an activist she participated in Freedom Marches and bears the scars inflicted during one of those marches. Eisler was a participant at the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Conference and is a life member of the Hemlock Society, the Bertrand Russell Society, and Atheists of Florida. In addition, she is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. In 1997 she journeyed to Russia to help inaugurate a Center for Inquiry at Moscow State University. Eisler, who in 1999 was elected Vice President of the IHEU, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Eisler’s e-mail: <hasp@gte.net>.

Eisler, Lee (1909—1998) 

A founding member of the Bertrand Russell Society, and a key individual responsible for that group’s international success in continuing to further research concerning Russell as well as publicize Russell’s timeless views, Eisler edited the society’s definitive newsletter for decades. A secular humanist, Eisler was an active member of the New York society. In 1971, he wrote Morals Without Mystery. One of his most useful works is The Quotable Bertrand Russell (1993), which presents the British philosopher’s thinking on a number of topics of continuing interest. Eisler pored over Russell’s books along with numerous articles and countless newspaper and magazine stories, outlining the material around questions. For example, he asks, “What is the basic problem in Africa?” or “How can a child be taught to love its parents?” or “What’s wrong with St. Paul’s views on marriage and sex?” Eisler then lists Russell’s written answers, giving the reader the satisfying experience of feeling that Russell is present and is answering questions that it would take a person ages to find if forced to read all eighty-nine books that Russell wrote during his ninety-eight years. Eisler, a retired New York writer of advertising, lived in Florida at the time of his death. {WAS, numerous conversations}

Eisler, Riane (20th Century) Eisler wrote The Chalice and the Blade, which studies how societies became patriarchal. {HNS2}

Eisler, Rudolph (1873—1926) An Austrian philosopher, Eisler was secretary of the Vienna Sociological Society and editor of the Philosophico-Sociological Library. His dictionaries of philosophers and philosophy are of great value to scholars, and Eisler’s own monistic views are given in his Leib und Seele (1906). {RAT; RE}

EL BOLETIN-ÉTICO-HUMANISTA: See entry for Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU), the Spanish-speaking association of ethical humanists with headquarters in Costa Rica.

Elbert, J. C. (20th Century) Elbert is treasurer of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists.

“Elborch, Conrad von” (Born 1865) Elborch was the pseudonym of a Dutch writer who, when Wheeler published Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers, did not want his name revealed because of his position. The individual also wrote as Fra Diavolo, Denis Bontemps, and J. Van den Ende. Elborch translated a rare Latin treatise, De Tribus Impostoribus, about three Impostors—Jesus, Moses, and Mohammed—with an important bibliographic and historical introduction. {BDF}

Elders, Fons (1936— ) Fons, professor of the University for Humanist Studies in Utrecht, discussed the meaning of humanism and the nature of its cultural context at the 1993 Congress of the European Humanist Federation in Berlin. In a debate with Paul Kurtz, Fons cited the heterogeneous traditions of humanism a pagan Graeco-Roman tradition; an Alexandrian tradition with hermetic gnosis and ramifications in Arab humanism; catharism; kaballah; Renaissance humanism; Chasidism (a mystic movement spread among Polish Jews in the second half of the 18th century); Freemasonry. He also named Christian humanism, an Enlightenment humanism, and a post-modern humanism.

	The humanism he prefers resembles Mondrian’s “Boogie-Woogie” painting: the interplay between vertical and horizontal colors—a dynamic between the visible and invisible dimension of human existence. For him, humanist spirituality is the source of inspiration for the arts and for lifestyles, for the erotic and nature-oriented values, and for an open attitude to non-Western cultures. Elders added, 

I would like to contribute to a revival of the pagan and gnostic humanist traditions, not in opposition to the Enlightenment values, but to liberate the classic and romantic values of the Enlightenment from their mutual stalemate; to liberate Western culture and Western humanism from their superiority complex. Along these lines we have a chance to develop a humanism worthwhile to the new generations on the different continents and in the various cultures, while slowing restoring our disequilibrium with Gaia.

At a 1995 conference in India, Elders said that humanism had been enriched by the culture of India. Alexander the Great had two teachers, the Greek Aristotle and an Indian guru. Arab humanism from the 8th to the 12th century was essential to the development of the Renaissance, he explained. Socrates and the Buddha were comparable in their empirical observation, questioning, and observation on suffering. Humanism, he added, is a multi-cultural phenomenon that should be broad and inclusive so that a liberal Muslim or a Christian in sympathy with a human position should be allowed to participate. He is said to be proud of having been the first actor to appear frontally nude on Dutch television. Elders is one of the members of the IHEU’s Committee on Religious Extremism and Rational Inquiry. He was a participant at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City on the idea of “Tolerance as a Core Value of Secularism.” In 1997 Elders wrote Humanism Toward the Third Millennium. E-mail: <eldersf@xs4all.nl>. {International Humanist News, December 1996; New Humanist, February 1996 and December 1996}

Eldridge, Paul (20th Century) Eldridge, a freethinker, wrote Michel de Montaigne: Skeptic and Atheist (1950). {GS}

ELECTRONIC MINISTRIES Electronic preachers took in roughly $3.5 billion in 1996, according to Ole Anthony, director in Texas of Trinity Foundation, an independent evangelical watchdog group. He is outraged that out of a donor pool of about five million people, 55% are elderly women and roughly one-third belong to society’s poorest and neediest.” According to him, “the church should be ashamed of allowing these businesses to prey on the elderly, the poor, and the desperate and do it in the name of God.” {The Economist, 31 May 1997}

ELEPHANT: See entry for Animal.

ELENCHUS Elenchus is a Greek word that signifies asking questions with a view to determining the cogency or credibility of what a person has said. The procedure was central to Socrates’s method of examining the ideas of others, as shown in Plato’s early dialogues such as the Protagoras. By showing the speaker’s confusions, inconsistencies, or other flaws, Socrates was often able to refute the individual’s views, resulting in his winning no friends. {OCP}

Elesin, Milan (20th Century) An atheist in Yugoslovia, Elesin is webmaster for an atheistic group. On the Web: <http://SOLAIR.EUnet.yu/~milane/msesbook.html>.

Elfenbein, Hiram (20th Century) A freethinker, Elfenbein wrote Organized Religion: The Greatest Game of Make- Believe (1968). {GS}

Elfman, Danny (20th Century) A film score composer and recording artist, Elfman was formerly with the disbanded Oingo Boingo and is best known for his orchestral scores for movies such as “Batman,” “Men in Black” and “Mission Impossible.” He wrote the opening theme for “The Simpsons,” a television series. “I don’t believe in life after death,” he told Joshua A. Fruhlinger, adding,

I kind of hope that there’s a Hell. I hope that there’s a Heaven and that I’m qualified for Hell. ‘Cause that’s where I would definitely want to go. You know, if there is a Heaven and a Hell, I hope that involves the Russian plan. I’ve always loved the Russian version of Hell, where all the writers and the interesting people are gonna spend their time gathering. It’s just like this big house in like the middle of somewhere. If there is a Christian version of Heaven, I know I don’t want to go there. Awful bad. Jews don’t have Heaven and Hell. It’s not really part of that way of thinking. If there is any kind of Hell, I would like to think it’s along the lines as presented in Master Margarita, a Russian novel, and that nails it for me. {CA}

Eliade, Mircea (Died 1986) Eliade was a Romanian Unitarian who, after being on the staff of the Sorbonne, became chairman of the Department of History of Religions at the University of Chicago. He was one of the pioneers in the systematic study of the history of religions, showing that the myths and symbols of many early roots of all religions are similar. He wrote The History of Religious Ideas, The Myth of the Eternal Return, and The Sacred and the Profane. Also, he edited the sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion.

Eliot, Charles William (1834—1926) President of Harvard from 1869 to 1909, Eliot edited the Harvard Classics (1909—1910). Henry James wrote a biography of the Unitarian Eliot, and Eliot wrote a biography of his son Charles (1859—1897), who planned the park system of Greater Boston. “Thoughtful people,” he once wrote, “have dismissed the anthropomorphic idea of God as monarch, king, or Lord of Hosts, with all the imperial and feudal-system ideas of God which have so long prevailed not only among the masses of mankind, but among the intellectual leaders of the race. No ideas about God have changed so much, however, as the ideas about him as creator. . . . No thinking person now accepts as anything but primitive myth or fanciful poetry the story of the Garden of Eden.” According to McCabe, Eliot turned from Unitarianism at an early date to the vague pantheism of Emerson. Eliot’s The Happy Life (1896) states that some religion is necessary but that orthodox religion is impossible. {CE; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; U; UU}

Eliot, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843-1929) A Unitarian, Eliot was the mother of T. S. Eliot, the poet. Her father-in-law was William Greenleaf Eliot, the Unitarian minister and founder of Washington University in St. Louis.

Eliot, Frederick May (1889—1958) While Frederick May Eliot was President of the American Unitarian Association, its membership grew 75%. He is one of the better-known Unitarian ministers of the first part of the twentieth century. Although some thought he was a humanist, he preached on behalf of a nondogmatic theism, based on an understanding of the word God as symbolic of the deepest human needs and strivings. {U; U&U; UU}

Eliot, George (Marian Mary Ann Evans) (1819—1880) Taking a masculine pseudonym in a time when women had problems in succeeding as writers, Evans wrote Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede (1859) and Silas Marner (1861). In the former, Eliot shows in three tales the hopelessness and helplessness of most private lives. In Chapter 17 of Adam Bede she reveals goals for humanity not unlike those of present-day secular humanists. She also demonstrated the demands of a secular morality that for her replaced, and in most respects duplicated, the demands of Christianity’s revealed system of morality. Early on in life, she was favorably impressed by the sympathetic treatment of the atheist in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Devereaux (1829), and her philosophic outlook became that of a rationalist. At the age of twenty-two, she refused to accompany her father to church, which has been interpreted both as a sign of her individuality and also of her refusal to be dominated by a male. Evans was encouraged by the brother-in-law, Charles Hennell, of her friend, Charles Bray. Hennell wrote An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838). “Human affection,” she wrote, “is the only power for salvation on this earth.” For Evans, Christian dogmas were “dishonorable to God” and pernicious to human happiness. She further showed her freethinking outlook by translating Strauss’s famous Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, the latter being the work of a profound atheist. Foote tells that in a conversation Eliot had with a Mr. Myers, they talked of God, immortality, and duty: she gravely remarked, “How inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, and how peremptory and absolute the third.” Germaine Greer, in The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (1992), cites George Eliot as a woman who, without benefit of plastic surgery, found romance in mid-life and beyond. Eliot once wrote, “If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for women.” As for her physical appearance, Moncure Conway said she was “a finely-shaped woman, and quite large, though not in the sense in which Hawthorne describes English female largeness. She is by no means corpulent, nor are there any suggestions of steaks and sirloins about her, but she is of large skeleton. She is not meager, either, but has the look of being made out of fine clay. She is blonde, with very light auburn hair; clear, serene, smiling eyes; beautiful teeth. She has also gracious and easy manners, with an undefinable air of unworldliness—of having been made for large and fine societies, but never entered them. In a word, she is a woman who, though not handsome, would personally satisfy her most ardent admirers.” Underwood, however, mentions that Eliot was “nervously sensitive as to her lack of beauty and will not on that account consent to sit for any kind of picture.” “The pseudonym of George Eliot,” wrote Underwood, “under which she first appeared as a novelist, and the careful assumption of masculinity throughout the pages of Adam Bede, while it puzzled and led astray the public as to her identity, did not long deceive as to her sex. The woman’s tender heart and keen sense of injustice made palpable the true woman’s nature all through her book. Theodore Parker, writing to Frances Power Cobbe in 1859, remarks: ‘I am reading Adam Bede, a quite extraordinary book. But I wonder that any one should have doubted that a woman wrote it. Strange is it that we tell the universal part of our history in all that we write!’” When Eliot met George Henry Lewes, who wrote a biography of Goethe, he was married and unable to obtain a divorce, having given his name to his wife’s child by another man. He encouraged her to write fiction and for twenty-five years was the person she considered her “true” husband–although not legally married to him, she even took his surname, adding Eliot because it “was a good mouth-filling, easily pronounced word.” Not even her publisher was told of the pseudonym, and one of the few who guessed that George Eliot might be a woman was Charles Dickens. The only work she published under her real name was her translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854). When Lewes died of cancer, and only eight months before her own death, Eliot married for the first time. Her husband, John Cross, was twenty years younger. On their honeymoon in Venice, Cross is said to have jumped out of the hotel window, landing in the Grand Canal. He was not injured. Neither ever explained the incident. Gossips, however, spread the rumor that his sixty-year-old wife made too many sexual demands on her husband. As readers of her Middlemarch will remember, however, gossip and rumor may be quite powerful forces but are not always to be trusted. A 1994 television version of Eliot’s Middlemarch, her penultimate novel, received excellent reviews both in Europe and in America. One of the few negative reviews came from Nicolas Walter, who regretted that as a convinced freethinker Eliot never gave freethought a proper place in any of her books. Louis Menand, writes in a lengthy critique in The New York Review of Books (12 May 1944), “Nietzsche thought that what George Eliot wanted was Christian morality without the Christianity. ‘They have got rid of the Christian God,’ he says of the English in Twilight of the Idols, with Eliot in mind, ‘and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality.’ He was being contemptuous, of course (and he probably hadn’t read any of Eliot’s novels); but many other commentators have assumed that Eliot did write her books in order to articulate a post-Christian moral and social philosophy, and they have devoted themselves to the business of deciphering it. It’s this idea of Eliot as, in some systematic sense, a moralist that is responsible for the assumption that modern readers (and modern viewers) will find her preachy and dull.” Nicolas Walter, commenting upon Rosemary Ashton’s George Eliot: A Life (1996), termed Eliot “a thorough rationalist.” Although she treated religion sympathetically and understood when people turned to the “forms and ceremonies” for comfort, Colin McCall observed, “she preferred “to do without opium.” “My childhood,” she wrote, “was full of deep sorrows—colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plum-cake.” In death, she would no longer have sorrow or, as pointed out in her humanistic poem, “Oh, may I join the choir invisible.” She is buried at Highgate in the northern part of London, not far from the grave of Karl Marx and next to the graves of George Jacob Holyoake, Charles Watts, and George Lewes—for a time, Eliot lived with the freethinking Lewes. Eliot’s biography, written by her second husband, states that “her long illness in the autumn had left her no power to rally. She passed away about ten o’clock at night on the 22nd of December, 1880. She died, as she would herself have chosen to die, without protracted pain, and with every faculty brightly vigorous. . . . Her body lies in the next grave to that of George Henry Lewes at Highgate Cemetery; her spirit, the product of her life has, in her own words, joined ‘the choir invisible, whose music is the gladness of the world.’” Eliot’s grave is marked by a simple grey stone obelisk. {CB; CL; CE; EU, Victor N. Paanamen; FO; FUK; JM; JMRH; PUT; RAT; SAU; TRI; TSV; WWS}

Eliot, Maude Howe (1854-1948) Eliot, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, was an author, a social reformer, and a Unitarian.

Eliot, Samuel Atkins (1862—1950) 

Eliot, the son of Harvard President Charles William Eliot, was elected secretary of the American Unitarian Association in 1898. During his presidency, Unitarians, who emphasized liberal values, became a noted national organization. There is an Eliot Chapel in Kirkwood, Missouri. {FUS; U&U}

Eliot, Thomas Lamb (1841—1936) After building a strong Unitarian church in Oregon, one of the principal centers of the Pacific Northwest Unitarians, Eliot was a leader in founding Reed College in 1911. {U&U}

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888—1965) Eliot, an American-English poet and critic, was assistant editor of the Egoist (1917—1919). His Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Wasteland (1922) received critical acclaim, expressing as they did the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love. In 1910 and 1911 in Paris, while he studied at the Sorbonne, Eliot is said to have had a homosexual relationship with Jean Verdenal (1889—1915), who died in battle, after which in 1917 Eliot hurriedly married his first wife, Vivien. In 1927, Eliot espoused Anglo-Catholicism, turning from spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation, accepting religious faith as a solution to the human dilemma. In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. “It’s clear that T. S. Eliot was by nature dour,” a Harvard psychologist, Dr. Jerome Kagan, has said. The observation was also made in the 1940s by H. Willard Reninger who, at a conference meeting where Eliot had just entered, wryly reported that the room temperature dropped ten degrees. Reninger, however, was an Eliot fan up until the time Eliot moved from his earlier naturalism to an Anglican supernaturalism. Ezra Pound, as editor of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), recommended cutting the poem “Saint Narcissus,” which Gregory Woods of the Nottingham Trent University in England has described as “that peculiar fusion of pagan and Christian imagery that now appears at the end of the Complete Poems. Woods noted that Hart Crane, among others, assumed that Eliot was homosexual. Eliot’s love for Verdenal is said to be “one of the central facts” of the work, with the so-called Hyacinth girl of the poem’s opening section being the poet’s sentimental memory of “a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac.” The figure, like Verdenal, dies in a trench, which Eliot describes as, “He who was living is now dead.” Anthony Julius, in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996), depicted Eliot as an anti-Semite whose anti-Semitism is integral to his poetry. “Anti-Semitism,” Julius wrote, “did not disfigure Eliot’s work, it animated it. It was, on occasion, both his refuge and his inspiration, and his exploitation of its literary potential was virtuous.” An example, which manages to insult both Jews (many of whom lived in a North London suburb, Golders Green) and blacks:

Bolo’s big black bastard queen Was so obscene She shocked the folk of Golder’s Green.

In an essay collection, After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot wrote that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” In later editions he withdrew the statement. (See entries for Alfred Kazin and for Neo-Classical Humanism, which Eliot supported. Also see entry for his Unitarian mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot.) {CE; James Wood, “After Strange Gods,” The New Republic, 29 July 1996; GL}

Eliot, William Greenleaf (1811—1887) Eliot, an early exponent of New England Unitarianism in the Midwest, founded and guided Washington University in St. Louis. He was a major spokesman for a conservative and Christologically-oriented Unitarianism in the West, in opposition to the more radical religion that characterized the Western Unitarian Conference later in the century. {U&U}

Elizabeth I (Queen) (1533—1603) McCabe says that although many think it a paradox or a strain of evidence to claim monarchs of Christian lands as freethinkers, he feels the Queen of England from 1558 to 1603 was a freethinker, as was Caroline and a number of others. “She studied seriously in youth,” he wrote of Queen Elizabeth I, “but she had to make her way cautiously in ‘an age that was so brave and beautiful and blackguardly’ (as Lynd calls it) because the rival Christians were religious cut-throats. She was, moreover, vigorous and masculine to a degree of coarseness. I am convinced that she belonged to what is now called ‘the Third Sex.’” Green in his standard Short History of the English People (Ch. viii, 83), says that “no (other) woman who ever lived was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion.” Professor Pollard says in his authoritative Political History of England (VI, p. 180) that “it can hardly be doubted that she was skeptical or indifferent.” “She was a humane ruler,” concludes McCabe, “until Catholic plots forced her to change her policy.” But, he adds, “Her persecution of Catholics was not religious in motive. She held to a policy of toleration until the Catholics began to plot against her. The suggestion of some that her ‘virginity’ implies religious belief is frivolous and is excluded by the boisterous vulgarity of her character. An application to her case of our modern knowledge of the glands might solve that problem.” {JM; JMRH; RE}

Elkin, E. H. (20th Century) Elkin, from the United Kingdom, was on the first Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).

Ellerbe, Helen (20th Century) Ellerbe’s The Dark Side of Christian History (1995) discussed the origins of Christianity, how out of persecution it became the state religion of the Roman Empire, and how it commenced persecuting others. The author, in passing, stated that her book “is in no way intended to diminish the beautiful work that countless Christian men and women have done to truly help others.”

Ellerbee, Linda (1944— ) Ellerbee, a broadcast journalist, has been a newscaster, a disc jockey, a program director, a reporter, a co-anchor, and commentator. For NBC-TV, she was a reporter for the “Today Show” and co-anchor for “Weekend NBC News.” She has written And So It Goes: Adventures in Television (1986) and Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991). According to Atheist Celebrities on the internet, Ellerbee is a non-believer. {E}

Ellero, Pietro (1833—1914) Ellero was an Italian jurisconsult, a counselor of the High Court of Rome and a professor of criminal law in the University of Bologna. His Scritti Minori, Scritti Politici, and La Question Sociale were all placed on the Vatican’s Index. {BDF}

Elliot, Hugh Samuel Roger (Born 1881) A scientific writer, Elliot translated Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (1914), edited the Letters of J. S. Mill (1910), and wrote Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson (1912). Elliot rejected agnosticism as inadequate and urged the adoption of “scientific materialism.” {RAT}

Elliotson, John (1791—1868) A physician at St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1822, Elliotson made many contributions to medical science. By new prescriptions of quinine and creosote, he excited some hostility in the profession. He was the first in England to advocate the use of the stethoscope. He also was one of the first physicians to discard knee-breeches and silk stockings and to wear a beard. In 1831 he was chosen professor at University College but, becoming an advocate of curative mesmerism, resigned his appointments in 1838. He was founder and President of the London Phrenological Society, edited Zoist (13 volumes), translated Blumenbach’s Physiology, and defended materialism. Thackeray dedicated Pendennis to him, and Elliotson also received a tribute of praise from Dickens. {BDF; RAT}

Elliott, Ebenezer (1781—1849) Elliott was a radical poet whose anniversary was often celebrated by English freethinkers. {GS}

Elliott, Elizabeth (20th Century) Elliott has been a major benefactor in the acquisition of Freethought Hall, the Freedom From Foundation’s national office in Madison, Wisconsin. The hall’s library is named in her honor.

Elliott, John Lovejoy (1868—1942) In 1895, Elliott founded New York’s Hudson Guild. He was instrumental in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Elliott served with Norman Thomas, Roger Baldwin, and John Haynes Holmes in the Civil Liberties Union (1917), which later became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). With Eleanor Roosevelt’s help, he started the Good Neighbor Committee, to give economic assistance to refugees coming from Europe. Elliott, in short, was a freethinker and a doer. James F. Hornbach has described Elliott as being “a warm farm boy from the civil-libertarian Illinois Lovejoys and Ingersoll-supporting Elliotts.” (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest}

Elliott, Maud Howe (1854—1948) Elliott, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, attended Unitarian services.

Elliott, Sarah Barnwell (1848—1928) Elliott, a Georgia-born novelist, wrote Felmers, a novel depicting the conflict between rationalism and Christianity, an unusual theme in 1879. Her Jerry (1891) described the Tennessee mountain people with whom she lived most of her life.

Ellis, Albert (1913— ) Ellis, a noted clinical psychologist who founded and is the executive director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Rational-Emotive Therapy, signed Humanist Manifesto II. He is a contributing editor to Free Inquiry. In 1966, he wrote Sex Without Guilt. In 1989 with Raymond J. Yeager, he co-authored Why Some Therapies Don’t Work, the Dangers of Transpersonal Psychology. In addition he has written more than fifty books for professional and popular audiences. “If devout religiosity, therefore, is often masochism,” he has written, “it is even more often dependency. For humans to be true believers and to also be strong and independent is well nigh impossible. Religiosity and self-sufficiency are contradictory terms. . . . According to orthodox religious shalts and shalt nots, you become not only a wrong-doer, but an arrant sinner when you commit ethical and religious misdeeds; and, as a sinner, you become worthless, undeserving of any human happiness, and deserving of being forever damned (excommunicated) on earth and perhaps roasted eternally in hell.” “The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel,” he wrote in his role as a psychotherapist, “the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, law-abiding citizen. . . . He will become a compulsive wrongdoer.” In Case Against Religiosity, Ellis declares that “devout theists often ignore, deny, and hallucinate about reality; and the more devout they are—as the long history of religion shows—the more delusionary and hallucinatory they seem to be.” In 1971, he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. Dr. Ellis, who is on the editorial board of The Humanist, is an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. (See “Why I Am a Secular Humanist, An Interview with Albert Ellis,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1997). {cA; E; HM2; HNS2; SHD; TYD; WAS, conversations}

Ellis, Alfred Burdon (1852—1894) A writer, Ellis entered the army and served in the Ashanti and Zulu wars. In 1878 he became District Commissioner at Quettah, and in 1892 he was made a colonel. His long stay in West Africa allowed him to make a thorough study of native life and languages, and his works on the religions of the Gold and slave coasts are of historical importance. {RAT}

Ellis, Bret Easton]] (20th Century) Ellis wrote Less than Zero (1980) and American Psycho, the latter a controversial novel that led Robert Love of Rolling Stone (4 April 1991) to ask him if he believed in God. Ellis responded, “No, I don’t believe in God. That’s such a strange thing to admit in an interview.” {CA}

Bret Easton Ellis, Writer	art	

Ellis is the author of the trendy 1980s novel Less than Zero and the controversial American Psycho. Shortly after the release of American Psycho, an interviewer asked Ellis if he believed in God. This is what he replied: "Are you asking me if I was raised in a religious family or if I go to church? I was raised an agnostic. I don't know - I hate to fly, I have a fear of flying. That means either that I have no faith in air-traffic controllers or that I've done something really bad, and this is God's way of getting at me. Maybe I'm caught in the middle... But no, I don't believe in God. That's such a strange thing to admit in an interview."

Source: Robert Love, "Psycho Analysis," Rolling Stone, Apr. 4 1991, pp. 50-1. [[Ellis, Brian David (1929— ) Ellis, an Australian rationalist and philosopher, has taught at La Trobe University since 1966. A member of the Rationalist Society of Australia, he wrote Rational Belief Systems (1979) and Truth and Objectivity (1990). {SWW}

Ellis, Charles (20th Century) Ellis wrote “Christian” and “Mormon” Doctrines of God (1902). {GS}

Ellis, Donald Geoffrey de Vere (1926—1990) Ellis was an Australian rationalist, humanist, and public servant. He was a member of the Rationalist Association of Southern Australia before the name changed to Atheist Foundation of Australia in 1970. He was a joint founder in 1962 of the Humanist Society of South Australia. Ellis also was president of Keep Our State Schools Secular (KOSSS), the Skeptics, and co-founder of the South Australia Voluntary Euthanasia Society. {SWW}

Ellis, H(enry) Havelock (1859—1929) Sometimes called “the Darwin of sex,” Ellis was an English freethinker and psychologist who espoused open marriage. In “Impressions and Comments,” he wrote,

Had there been a Lunatic Asylum in the suburbs of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ would infallibly have been shut up in it at the outset of his public career. That interview with Satan on a pinnacle of the Temple would alone have damned him, and everything that happened after could have confirmed the diagnosis. The whole religious complexion of the modern world is due to the absence from Jerusalem of a Lunatic Asylum.

When at the age of thirty-two the bisexual and (then) impotent Ellis married novelist and manic-depressive Edith Lees, both were virgins. They maintained separate living quarters for six months a year, kept their finances separate, and agreed to have sex outside the marriage. In her six-month “vacation,” his wife took up with a lesbian. . . . In 1898, a British bookseller was arrested for selling Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897), inasmuch as sex was considered a forbidden subject in publishing then. In 1928 his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897—1928) was so controversial that in the U.S. only doctors could purchase it. However, many of his views are commonplace today: The male reaches a peak of sexual activity at a lower age than the female; masturbation is common as well as harmless; women have multiple orgasms; older people are sexually responsive; before adolescence, children are sexually aware and act as sexual beings; women become frigid mostly because they are repressed when young and because men don’t know how to make love effectively. When he was sixty, Françoise Cyon brought Havelock out of his impotency, but he could not afford to have her move in with him. Fortunately, Margaret Sanger offered her a salary as Ellis’s secretary, leading to two decades of their relative bliss. Sanger had been a sex partner, as had poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), who was intrigued that Ellis enjoyed watching her urinate. Ellis helped reform the prevalent repressive attitudes toward sex in his day, foreshadowing the women’s liberation movement. He coined the terms “narcissistic” and “autoerotic” and asked the kinds of questions that in the eighteenth century had been asked by Diderot and Voltaire. “There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion,” he wrote in Impressions and Comments (1914). His agnosticism is shown in Affirmations (1897) and My Life (published 1940). {CE; HNS2; JM; PA; RAT; TRI; TYD}

Ellis, J. Spencer (Born 1838) Spencer, whose father was a Congregational minister and whose mother was a pious Christian lady, found freethought through his elder brother, J. Harris Ellis. Harris was a friend of G. J. Holyoake, Robert Cooper, and other freethought leaders. Spencer secured a job on the London Times for thirteen years, then moved in 1876 to Toronto where he became printer of Secular Thought. At an 1891 freethought convention in Canada, Ellis was made its editor. He lectured on freethought in principal Canadian cities. {FUK; PUT}

Ellis, Royston (1941— ) A British-born poet, novelist, and travel author, Ellis left England in 1962, dropped out of school, performed poetry with rock groups such as Cliff Richard and the Shadows (whose first biography he wrote), then with The Beatles before they became famous. He appeared on television and stage with a guitarist called Jimmy Page, who eventually led Led Zeppelin. In the 1960’s he lived first in the Canary Islands (the setting of his first novel, The Flesh Merchants). From 1966 to 1980, he lived in Dominica, Windward Islands (setting of his million-copy bestsellers such as the historical novel, The Bondmaster, which he wrote as Richard Tresillian). Since 1980 he has lived in Sri Lanka and covered the Indian Ocean by writing guide books. India By Rail (1993), an insider’s view, tells how 7,000 trains operate throughout India. He also has written The Story of Tea as well as travel books and articles about Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Steve Turner, in Cliff Richard, The Biography (1993), describes how as a sixteen-year-old Ellis left school and toured with the Beatles—Ellis suggested the spelling (not Beetles, which they had chosen), convincing them they were part of the Beats, the individuals who were unfairly being beaten down because they were unconventional. At performances, the Beatles provided the music and Ellis provided the rocketry (poetry read to rock ‘n’ roll). He showed John Lennon and Paul McCartney how to break down a Benzedrine nose inhaler and sniff the strips inside to produce a mild high. This was, Lennon later recounted, their first experience with drugs. The Beatles immortalized him in the song “Paperback Writer.” Only eighteen years old, Royston wrote Driftin’ With Cliff, in which he described life on the road with Britain’s top pop singer, Cliff Richard. Turner described Royston as

. . . Britain’s first teenage pundit, an Allen Ginsberg of suburban London. The fact that he wore a beard and had worked as an office boy, duster salesman, gardener, milk-bottle washer, building labourer, and farm hand by the age of eighteen helped confirm the image. . . . His first volume of poems, Jiving to Gyp, was dedicated [to Cliff Richard], and he was soon asked by television programmes to explain what teenagers were all about. He ended up with his own series, “Living For Kicks,” in which he explored the controversial issues of the day such as pep pills and sex before marriage.

Ellis. a cogent musical commentator—his 1961 paperback The Big Beat Scene still stands up as an appraisal of early British rock ‘n’ roll—met the fledgling Beatles (in May 1960). “The first time we ever heard about gayness was when a poet named Royston Ellis arrived in Liverpool with his book Jiving With Gyp,” McCartney has recalled. “He was a Beat poet. Well, well! Phew! You didn’t meet them in Liverpool. And it was all ‘Break me in easy, break me in easy . . . .’ It was all shagging sailors, I think. We had a laugh with that line.” “One in every four men is homosexual,” Ellis told McCartney, according to Barry Miles’s Paul McCartney (1998):

So we looked at the group! One in every four! It literally meant one of us is gay. Oh, fucking hell, it’s not me, is it? We had a lot of soul-searching to do over that little one.

The “one” was their manager, Brian Epstein, who in 1962 signed a management contract with them for twenty-five per cent of their gross receipts, after a certain threshold was reached and after he got them a recording contract.

McCartney’s biographer adds the following:

“Polythene Pam” was another of John’s songs written in India and originally destined for the White Album. It was inspired by Stephanie, a girlfriend of the Beat poet Royston Ellis, whom the Beatles backed at Liverpool University in 1960. On 8 August 1963, the Beatles played at the Auditorium in Guernsey, the Channel Islands. Royston Ellis was working as a ferryboat engineer on the island and invited John to come back to his flat. John told Playboy: “I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn’t wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about.” Royston Ellis told Steve Turner: “We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed.” Paul remembered meeting Royston in Guernsey: “John, being Royston’s friend, went out to dinner with him and got pissed and stuff and they ended up back at his apartment with a girl who dressed herself in polythene for John’s amusements, so it was a little kinky scene. She became Polythene Pam. She was a real character.” John: “When I recorded it I used a thick Liverpool accent because it was supposed to be about a mythical Liverpool scrubber dressed up in her jackboots and kilt.”

Under the pseudonym Richad Tressillian, Ellis became a best-selling author of The Bondmaster series—over a million copies were sold of the paperbacks with a historical background and a description of the lives and loves of 19th century West Indian whites and the workers on their estates. Under the same pseudonym he wrote a best-selling series, Fleshtraders, again about 19th century miscegenation and adventures but this time set in Mauritius. In Dominica, in addition to being the real estate developer for the Marquis of Brisol and a Reuters correspondent, he edited The Educator, a journal favorable to the Premier, Edward LeBlanc. In 1983, some of his poetry was included in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, poems from his “Cherry Boy.” He has written extensively about railroads in Sri Lanka and is known for his definitive guide to railroads in Southeast Asia and for his travel guidebook about Mauritius. A Man for All Islands (1998) is a biography of Maumoon Abdul Gayroom, President of the Maldives. With photographer Gemunu Amarasinghe, he wrote A Maldives Celebration. An autobiographical work, Toni the Maldive Lady: My Story (1999), written with Ellis’s help, is by and about a British lady who considers all Maldivians her family and sends books to libraries in the islands. Asked in 1991 about humanism, Ellis wrote,

Since the age of 14, I have not known exactly what I am, nor do I care, having decided at the age of 14 that it was not god who created man but man who created god. My first book, Jiving to Gyp (gyp means hell) published when I was 18, contained raunchy atheistic poems.

Ellis lectures on Queen Elizabeth II trips from Bombay to Singapore, he writes extensively, and he is a Life Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society. A photo and article, “England’s Ginsberg,” was featured in Gay and Lesbian Humanist (Autumn 1999). (Cliff Richard, parenthetically, became a born-again Christian.) {WAS, 11 September 1991 and numerous conversations}

Ellis, Royston (10 Feb 1941 - ) A British-born poet, novelist, and travel author, Ellis dropped out of school in 1957. He bummed around Soho and the jazz club scene, all the time writing poetry; had his first volume of poems about the new generation of freeloving, rock ‘n’ rolling teenagers published in 1959; made his poetry popular by terming it “rocketry”; and performed his poems to rock music on TV and stage shows around England, appearing with rock groups such as Cliff Richard and the Shadows, then read his poetry backed by The Beatles before they became famous. His main musician, with whom he appeared at London’s Mermaid Theatre to great acclaim in July 1961, was the then seventeen-year old Jimmy Page. Ellis gave readings in Moscow at the invitation of Yevgeni Yevtushenko. Ellis left England in 1962, “having somehow become a spokesyouth for Britain’s mods, rockers, and beatniks, a role I felt I had outgrown,” he has said. He lived in the Canary Islands (the setting of his first novel, The Flesh Merchants), then from 1966 to 1980 in Dominica, Windward Islands (setting of his million-copy bestsellers such as the historical novel, The Bondmaster, which he psuedonymously wrote as Richard Tresillian). It described the lives and loves of 19th century West Indian whites and the workers on their estates. In Dominica, in addition to being the real estate developer for the Marquis of Bristol and a Reuters correspondent, he edited The Educator, a journal favorable to the Premier, Edward LeBlanc. Festivals of the World: Trinidad is a children’s book. In the 1980s, again as Richard Tresillian, he wrote a best-selling series, Fleshtraders, again about 19th century miscegenation and adventures, this time set in Mauritius. Steve Turner, in Cliff Richard, The Biography (1993), describes how as a sixteen-year-old Ellis left school and toured with the Beatles—Ellis suggested the spelling (not Beetles, which they had chosen), convincing them they were part of the Beats, the individuals who were unfairly being beaten down because they were unconventional. At performances, the Beatles provided the music and Ellis provided the rocketry (poetry read to rock ‘n’ roll). He showed John Lennon and Paul McCartney how to break down a Benzedrine nose inhaler and sniff the strips inside to produce a mild high. This was, Lennon later recounted, their first experience with drugs. The Beatles immortalized him in the song “Paperback Writer.” Only eighteen years old, Royston wrote Driftin’ With Cliff, in which he described life on the road with Britain’s top pop singer, Cliff Richard. Turner described Royston as

. . . Britain’s first teenage pundit, an Allen Ginsberg of suburban London. The fact that he wore a beard and had worked as an office boy, duster salesman, gardener, milk-bottle washer, building labourer, and farm hand by the age of eighteen helped confirm the image. . . . His first volume of poems, Jiving to Gyp, was dedicated [to Cliff Richard], and he was soon asked by television programmes to explain what teenagers were all about. He ended up with his own series, “Living For Kicks,” in which he explored the controversial issues of the day such as pep pills and sex before marriage.

Cliff Richard, parenthetically, became a born-again Christian. Ellis, a cogent musical commentator—his 1961 paperback The Big Beat Scene still stands up as an appraisal of early British rock ‘n’ roll—met the fledgling Beatles (in May 1960). McCartney has recalled, “The first time we ever heard about gayness was when a poet named Royston Ellis arrived in Liverpool with his book Jiving With Gyp. He was a Beat poet. Well, well! Phew! You didn’t meet them in Liverpool. And it was all ‘Break me in easy, break me in easy.’ It was all shagging sailors, I think. We had a laugh with that line.” “One in every four men is homosexual,” Ellis told McCartney, according to Barry Miles’s Paul McCartney (1998):

So we looked at the group! One in every four! It literally meant one of us is gay. Oh, fucking hell, it’s not me, is it? We had a lot of soul-searching to do over that little one. The “one” was their manager, Brian Epstein, who in 1962 signed a management contract with them for twenty-five per cent of their gross receipts, after a certain threshold was reached and after he got them a recording contract.

McCartney’s biographer adds the following:

“Polythene Pam” was another of John’s songs written in India and originally destined for the White Album. It was inspired by Stephanie, a girlfriend of the Beat poet Royston Ellis, whom the Beatles backed at Liverpool University in 1960. On 8 August 1963, the Beatles played at the Auditorium in Guernsey, the Channel Islands. Royston Ellis was working as a ferryboat engineer on the island and invited John to come back to his flat. John told Playboy: “I had a girl and he had one he wanted me to meet. He said she dressed up in polythene, which she did. She didn’t wear jackboots and kilts, I just sort of elaborated. Perverted sex in a polythene bag. Just looking for something to write about.” Royston Ellis told Steve Turner: “We all dressed up in them and wore them in bed. John stayed the night with us in the same bed.” Paul remembered meeting Royston in Guernsey: “John, being Royston’s friend, went out to dinner with him and got pissed and stuff and they ended up back at his apartment with a girl who dressed herself in polythene for John’s amusements, so it was a little kinky scene. She became Polythene Pam. She was a real character.” John: “When I recorded it I used a thick Liverpool accent because it was supposed to be about a mythical Liverpool scrubber dressed up in her jackboots and kilt.”

In 1983, some of Ellis’s poetry from Cherry Boy was included in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse. Asked in 1991 about humanism, Ellis wrote,

Since the age of 14, I have not known exactly what I am, nor do I care, having decided at the age of 14 that it was not god who created man but man who created god. My first book, Jiving to Gyp (gyp means hell) published when I was 18, contained raunchy atheistic poems.

Since 1980 he has lived in Sri Lanka and covered the Indian Ocean by writing guide books. India By Rail (1993), an insider’s view, tells how 7,000 trains operate throughout India. He also has written The Story of Tea as well as travel books and articles about Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. A Man for All Islands (1998) is a biography of Maumoon Abdul Gayroom, President of the Maldives. With photographer Gemunu Amarasinghe, he wrote A Maldives Celebration. An autobiographical work, Toni the Maldive Lady: My Story (1999), written with Ellis’s help, is by and about a British lady who considers all Maldivians her family and sends books to libraries in the islands. A Hero in Time (2001) details the atrocities of the 16th century Portuguese in their attempts to convert to Christianity and colonize the Islamic Maldives. Ellis appeared in Wonderful Life (1963, a movie with Cliff Richard) and starred in a TV drama in Sinhala (1998). He lectures on Queen Elizabeth II trips from Bombay to Singapore, he writes extensively, and he is a Life Fellow of the Royal Commonwealth Society. A photo and article, “England’s Ginsberg,” was featured in Gay and Lesbian Humanist (Autumn 1999). As the “voice of a generation” he was interviewed by Britain’s Channel 4 for a series, “Sex on Television,” in which he describes “how it used to be done.” “Forty years later,” he told the present interviewer in 2001, “I find myself regarded as ‘a spokesman for a generation’ and am being credited with starting the swing that characterized the 1960s. Thus I am becoming a TV personality in England (again) and am working on a new book about the dawn of the ‘60s.” (On the Web: <http:www.roystonellis.com> and <http://www.timesone.com.sg/te>) {WAS, 11 September 1991, 2 Sep 2001, and numerous conversations}

Ellis, Sallie (Born 1835) Ellis, a Unitarian, began what she called the Post Office Mission. {U}

Ellis, Thomas (19th Century) 

In the 1870s, Ellis was an active leader in England of Manchester’s Lancashire Secular Union. {RSR}

Ellis, Warren (20th Century) A British comics writer, Ellis has credits that range from mainstream works such as Marvel’s Excalibur to more adult-oriented fare such as Transmetropolitan, the latter work featuring a character inspired by Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. As for why Marvel decided to abort a project entitled “Last Gasp,” which he had been writing, Ellis explained, “Something bad was going to happen [in the story]. It grew out of my atheism, my hate, and, curiously, my little-seen optimism.” {CE} Warren Ellis, British Comics Writer art

Ellis's credits range from fairly mainstream works such as Marvel's Excalibur to more adult-oriented fare such as Transmetropolitan, a book printed by DC Comics' Helix imprint of sci-fi books (and featuring a character inspired by Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson). Ellis also maintains his own web site at http://www.warrenellis.com.

In a (Nov 1998?) e-mail to members of his mailing list, Ellis was giving background on Marvel's decision to abort a project entitled Last Gasp which he had been writing. The e-mail included the statement, "Something bad was going to happen [in the story]. It grew out of my atheism, my hate, and, curiously, my little-seen optimism."

Ellis, William (1794—1872) A nonconformist missionary sent to Polynesia in 1816, Ellis in his Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee (1827) includes the following glimpse of a society Robertson suggests Lucretius would have liked: “We asked [the natives] who was their God. They said they had no God; formerly they had had many: but now they had cast them all away. We asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said ‘Yes,’ for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience, and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it was a good thing to have no God. . . . They said perhaps it was; for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind of provisions.” {CE; JMR; JMRH; RAT}

Ellis, William (1800—1881) Ellis was a philanthropist who began work as a clerk at the age of fourteen and rose to the position of chief manager of the Indemnity Marine Insurance Company. Inspired by the works of J. S. Mill, whose “idealist agnosticism” he shared, Ellis founded nine Birkbeck Schools in England at his own expense and wrote textbooks for them. At one time, he gave lessons to the royal children at Buckingham Palace. Ellis was a friend of Holyoake and helped in a wide range of social reforms. {RAT; RE}

Ellis-Hagler, Elizabeth (20th Century) Ellis-Hagler is vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.

Ellison, Harlan Jay (1934) “The two most common elements in the universe,” Ellison wrote in an entry for Who’s Who in America, “are hydrogen and stupidity.” The author’s 5” entry in that work lists books (64 are noted), numbers of scripts for television, films, short stories, mysteries, computer games, and science fiction works. Ellison was scenarist for “I, Robot” (1978), and his various works have been credited as inspiration for The Terminator. Ellison, who is highly regarded by other science fiction authors, has gone on record as being a non-theist. “I am so far beyond atheism,” Ellison the essayist wrote, “there isn’t a word in the English language dictionary to describe me.” {CA; E}

Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO business

A poster to the [message board] reports that Ellison says he's an atheist in his book The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison : Inside Oracle Corporation : God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison.

Editor's Note: if anybody has the exact quote, please send it in and I'll post it here. Thanks!

Ellison, Ralph Waldo (1914-1994) Ellison’s semi-autobiographical account of a young black intellectual’s search for identity was Invisible Man (1952). The work won him the National Book Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a seat in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a position as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University that netted him one of the largest salaries received by any English teacher at the time. On the one hand, Invisible Man has been seen by some as showing a character that is only seen as an incarnation of his race, a person battered about by both blacks and whites who impose their visions of racial identity on him, a person whom people physically but not humanistically see. One critic, Edward Rothstein (The New York Times, 16 May 1999), sees Ellison as portraying and defending American ideals, as seeking some way “to reveal the nature of America’s racial trauma without being either political or prescriptive,” not as an “Uncle Tom” or careerist who produced “obsequious bleatings of white appeasement.” His second novel was to have been the story of a “little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to the reared by [a] Negro minister,” a person who eventually grew up to become a virulently racist United States senator. In 1967, however, a fire at his summer house burned the 360 pages he had finished—he had no duplicate copy. Ellison understandably was devastated. Juneteenth, a 2,000-page manuscript that Ellison left at the time of his death, was edited by his literary executor, John Callahan. A New Yorker excerpt (12 April 1999) tells how the novel’s narrative “alternates between the old minister’s lyrical recounting of the events of the past and the senator’s feverish, dreamlike reminiscences. . . . [T]he senator remembers his life in the late nineteen-twenties, the period between his black childhood and his white adulthood, during which he travelled through the Southwest, posing as a professional filmmaker, and had a brief but intense affair with an Oklahoma girl.” Below, a dreamlike scene in which the former minister is on a picnic date with “a teasing brown,” a light-skinned girl:

A bee danced by as on a thread. I felt a suspension of time. Standing still, my eyes in the tree of blossoms, I let it move through me. Eden, I thought, Eden is a lie that never was. And Adam? His name was Snake. And Eve’s? An aphrodisiac best served with raw fresh oysters on the half shell with a good white wine. The spirit’s there. . . . She arose she rose she rose up from the waves.

Ellison did not go clearly on record as to his belief or non-belief in any organized religion.

Ellsworth, Will (20th Century) Ellsworth wrote “Coping With Hate in America” in HSH News, newsletter of Houstonians for Secular Humanism (December 1998). Less than five percent of those found guilty of hate crimes, according to his research, were members of organized hate groups.

Elo, Pekka (20th Century) Elo edits the quarterly magazine, Humanisti (Vallikatu B.A.I., SF 02600 Espoa, Finland) of the Humanist Union of Finland, where he is Director of Ethical Education. He spoke about ethical education in schools at the 1995 conference of humanists and atheists in India. E-mail: <pekka.elo@oph.fi>. {New Humanist, February 1996}

Elphinstone, Mountstuart [The Honourable] (1779—1859) Elphinstone, a statesman, served in Nagpur, Poona, Bombay, and elsewhere. He was one of England’s more enlightened and conscientious administrators in India or, as described in the Dictionary of National Biography, “It is remarkable that a man so sceptical, retiring, unselfish, and modest should be one of the chief founders of the Anglo-Indian Empire.” Elphinstone, a deist, wrote History of the Hindu and Muhammadan Periods. {RAT}

Éluard, Paul (1895—1952) A poet and leading exponent of surrealism, Éluard was a member of the French resistance in World War II. A humanist, he wrote Mourir de na pas mourir (To die of not dying, 1924) and, with André Bréton, L’Immaculée Conception, 1930). {CE}

Elvin, Diana (20th Century) Elvin has encouraged the formation of small humanist groups throughout England. “You don’t need many people for a house group,” she has written. “Get any two or three Humanists together and they’ll start a discussion.” {The Freethinker, June 1996}

Elvin, Lionel (1905—	) 

Elvin in 1965 became president of the Humanist Teachers Association. In 1986, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. He has directed the University of London’s Institute of Education. “I was brought up in a Bible-Christian home,” Elvin wrote in New Humanist (November 1994), adding the following:

But there was discussion, especially about the Sunday sermons, and discussion leads to questions. (Perhaps that was what Santayana had in mind when he said that Protestantism was half-way between Catholicism and Atheism.) My first serious question came when I was in elementary school during the First World War. A visiting parson had led the school in prayer and had called out, ‘God, damn the Germans!’ The God I had been told about in my pacifist home had said, ‘Love your enemies.’ Both could not be right. Which was? A few years later I decided to read about religion systematically. The result was that by the time I went up to Cambridge I had given up all religious belief. After ten years as a Fellow of my college and five as Principal of Ruskin College, I became Director of the Educational Department of UNESCO. That deepened my feeling that you could find good people (and ones that were not so good) pretty well irrespective of their avowed beliefs or disbeliefs, for my colleagues were of every kind. It also made it clearer than ever to me that to hold that one god (your own) was the one true one and the others false was less reasonable than to see all supposed gods as mythical expressions of man’s subjective hopes and fears. I came back to England to be a Professor and then Director of the London University Institute of Education, and I took a vigorous part in the debate about religion in the publicly maintained schools. Many seriously committed Christians (who are in a minority in this country now) are fighting a desperate rearguard action to keep a hold on the minds of the young through the schools. They will fail. We have too many religions now. And few even nominally religious parents will tell their young that they will go to Mr. Patten’s Hell if they do not behave properly. Neither they nor their children believe there is a Hell now. But many of this large middle group have a feeling that in some vague way religious education may help their children to be morally good. (A study of the history of religions and their wars and oppressions ought to lead them to doubt that.) How believing that one person is three persons and vice-versa, or that an ordinary wafer and a drop of wine can become the actual body of someone long since dead, can help you to lead a better life is not exactly clear. Nevertheless, this is where our fight lies. If we can show people that morality does not depend on holding beliefs that cannot be rationally defended we shall do much to free coming generations from religions that, although they may have tolerant adherents, have in their institutional and popular forms led to terrible fanaticism and cruelty.

Elvin signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {TRI}

ELYSIUM • Elysium, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians—may their souls be happy in Heaven! —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

EMAIL Electronic mailing over the Intertnet, known as Email and available only toward the end of the century, has been widely used by international freethinkers. For example, listed below are some humanist magazines and their e-mail addresses:

AAH Examiner (United States of America) cfiflynn@aol.com American Atheist Newsletter aanews@atheists.org American Atheist fzindler@atheists.org

American Rationalist

rsslbarb@aol.com Ateo (Italy) uaarpd@tin.it Atheist Coalition (USA) lekkerspikkels@msn.com Botulf-bladet (Sweden) christiaan.vos@vasteras.mail.telia.com Canadian Humanist News hac@magi.com De Vrije Gedachte (The Netherlands) DVG@netcetera.netcetera.nl Diesseits (Germany) hvdberlin@aol.com Espace de Libertés (Belgium) espace@cal.ulb.ac.be Europe et Laicité (France) eurolaic@club-internet.fr Family Matters (USA) familynews@secularhumanism.org Family of Humanists (USA) lloydk@teleport.com Focus (USA) rca001@aol.com Free Inquiry (USA) freeinquiry@secularhumanism.org Free Mind (USA) humanism@juno.com Freethinker (United Kingdom) jim.rpa@humanism.org.uk Frettabref Sidmenntar (Iceland) hopeful@islandia.is Fri Tanke (Sweden) gunnar.staldal@stockholm.mail.telia.com Fritänkeren (Norway) fritanke@human.no Gay and Lesbian Humanist (United Kingdom) galha@bigfoot.com Greater Philadelphia Story (USA) downey1@cris.com Het Vrije Woord (Belgium) human@glo.be HIVOS Magazine (The Netherlands) hivos@hivos.nl Humanism Scotland ahenness@aol.com Humanist (USA) thehumanist@juno.com Humanist (The Netherlands) hv@euronet.nl Humanist (Norway) humanist@human.no Humanist Association of Canada Newsletter cb787@freenet.carleton.ca Humanist in Canada jepiercy@cyberus.ca Humanist Outlook (India) pnarain@ignca.ernet.in Humanist Viewpoints (Australia) jtendys@triode.net.au Humanisten (Sweden) mikael.goransson@migor.se Humanisti (Finland) pekka.elo@oph.fi Humanity (United Kingdom) robert@humanism.org.uk Humanus (Norway) skaara@human.no International Humanist News jim.rpa@humanism.org.uk Kristall (Germany) ortrun.e.lenz@t-online.de Les Idées en Mouvement (France) info-lligue@ligue.cie.fr Libero Pensiero (Italy) roberto.laferla@agora.stm.it Modern Rationalist(India) periyar@giasmd01.vsnl.net.in New Humanist (United Kingdom) jim.rpa@humanism.org.uk New Zealand Humanist iain-middleton@clear.net.nz New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist bill@freethought.org.nz Philo (USA) fivaughn@aol.com Praktische Humanistick (The Netherlands) swp@pi.net Radical Humanist (India) mrcssc@bom2.vsnl.net.in Reasonings (USA) mbr@execpc.com Rekenschap (The Netherlands) hv@euronet.nl Revista Peruana de Filosofia Aplicada (Peru) rpfa@geocities.com Secular Humanist Bulletin (USA) shb-editor@secularhumanism.org Secular Nation (USA) mac@mtn.org Secularist (India) freedom@bom3.vsnl.net.in Skeptical Inquirer (USA) skeptinq@aol.com SOS International News Letter (USA) sosla@loop.com South Australian Humanist Post rmc@adelaide.on.net Stargazer, Starwalker, Sunrise Journal (USA) lloydk@teleport.com UCOS Nieuwsbrief (Belgium) lawauter@vub.ac.be Van Menss tot Mens (The Netherlands) info@lb.humanitas.nl Vapaa-ajattelija (Finland) val@val.pp.fi Victorian Humanist (Australia) leeman@connexus.apana.org.au WisselKrant (The Netherlands) hv@euronet.nl

EMANATIONISM Emanationism, as illustrated in the work of Plotinus, is opposed both to evolutionism and creationism. Through emanation, the Godhead was thought to have originated the world by a series of hierarchically descending radiations through intermediate stages to matter. The idea has been obliterated by evolutionism in contemporary times. {See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 2.}

EMBALMING • Embalm, v.t. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor’s lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his glutoeus maximus. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

The American funeral industry, according to Jessica Mitford, justified the necessity of embalming dead bodies to guard public health. However, Dr. Jesse Carr, the chief of pathology at San Francisco General Hospital and professor of pathology at the University of California Medical School explained to her “that in cases of communicable disease, a dead body presents considerably less hazard than a live one. ‘There are several advantages to being dead,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You don’t excrete, inhale, exhale, or perspire.’ ” Mitford also quoted a Canadian health minister who stated unequivocally, “Embalming serves no useful purpose in preventing the transmission of communicable diseases.” There was also no law to enforce it. As a result of her book, the Federal Trade Commission Consumer Protection Bureau attempted to regulate the funeral industry. Lobbyists intervened to thwart their efforts, but one ruling stuck, that it is “a deceptive act or practice for a funeral provider” in any way to imply that embalming is legally required. (See entry for Jessica Mitford) {A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books, 24 September 1998}

Emberland, Terje (20th Century) Emberland is the editor of the Norwegian Humanist.

Emerling, Michael]] (20th Century) Emerling, a freethinker, wrote Theistic Objections: An Autopsy (1972). {GS}

Emerson, Alfred E.]] (Born 1896) An entomologist, zoologist at the University of Chicago, and an editor of Ecology, Emerson wrote the present author concerning humanism:

Of the various aspects of ‘Humanism’ defined in the mimeographed sheets recently sent me, I find myself in essential accord with NATURALISTIC HUMANISM but I have reservations about the others and would be opposed to some such as COMMUNISTIC HUMANISM. I hope the modern Humanist groups are not trying to reconcile everything ever called Humanistic. Not only would I subscribe to a philosophy based upon Naturalism as contrasted to Supernaturalism, but I would also emphasize the creative and self-correcting aspects of scientific knowledge applied to all fields of human enquiry. We certainly do not yet have all the answers and I see no possibility of absolute knowledge through modern science or any other method of gaining knowledge. I thus see a never-ending increase in knowledge and understanding, but I see no end to this pursuit. Although I see no end, I do see trends and progress, as you may detect in the article in The Scientific Monthly (February 1954) entitled, “Dynamic Homeostasis: A Unifying Principle in Organic, Social, and Ethical Evolution.”

{WAS, 12 May 1956}

Emerson, Gloria]] (20th Century) “Father, forgive. They know not what they do.” Emerson reacted this way in the 1960s upon learning in Vietnam as a New York Times reporter that fellow Americans had started bombing Hanoi. Shocked, she ran through the streets in the middle of the night. Then, she recalled, I ran through the streets in the middle of the night and “I wrote on the wall in Magic Marker, ‘Father, forgive. They know not what they do.’ And I don’t even believe in God.” {Hendrik Hertzberg, “The Sixties,” The New Yorker, 9 Aug 1999}

Emerson, Goldwin]] (20th Century) Emerson, a retired professor of education at the University of Western Ontario, wrote “God and the Mosquito,” in which he shows that the religionists’ “argument by design” has the benefit of simplicity but “is overly simplistic and generates more questions than it answers.” {Humanist in Canada, Winter 1998-1999}

Emerson, Mary Moody]] (1774-1863) A Unitarian, Emerson was a writer whose unpublished works foreshadowed the ideas of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo]] (1803—1882) 

Emerson, the third of six sons (two sisters died in early childhood), was greatly influenced in his youth by his father’s sister, Mary Moody Emerson, who was 4’ 3” tall and slept in a coffin-shaped bed. She was, he felt, “the best writer in Massachusetts,” and his manuscript of her letters and his recording of their conversations totaled 870 pages. Although his father was nonreligious, a Unitarian minister, his aunt was a “deistic pietist” whose motto was “Always do what you are afraid to do.” She came to disapprove of her nephew’s ideas, but from her he learned to think for himself. His mother, widowed when Emerson was eight, ran a boardinghouse to keep her five children out of poverty. Waldo, as he was called, did not seem destined for greatness, and at Harvard he graduated thirtieth in a class of fifty-nine. He suffered from eye trouble and had early symptoms of tuberculosis. As pointed out by Carlos Baker, an Episcopalian, in Emerson Among the Eccentrics (1996), the kindly, self-controlled man with unusual friends had a hellish youth. His father died when Emerson was eight. His young wife, Ellen, died after their eighteen months of marriage; his brothers had traces of madness and died young. He proposed by letter to his second wife, Lydia Jackson, later confessing he knew he could never have written the kind of romantic love letter she wanted. Baker’s book, about the thinkers and hangers-on who surrounded Emerson, is consummate in its details. A careful journal-keeper, he included whose work he read (his transcendentalism was inspired by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Carlyle), quotations he liked, and arguments he worked out. He looked into the mystical writings of Pythagoras, Plotinus, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Swedenborg, and Böhme, and he read from Chinese, Indian, and Persian religious literature. By writing his comments into the journal, which amounted to some 263 volumes of observations, anecdotes, epiphanies, and dreams that totaled more than 3,000,000 words, he was aided in remembering ideas and constructing new essays. In his journal are described the personal losses which so affected him—his wife Ellen died in 1831; his brother Charles died in 1836, and two of his other siblings died in childhood, one having been retarded from birth; his son Waldo died in 1842. His second marriage, to Lydia Jackson in 1835, resulted in her calling him Mr. Emerson. Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) implies that Lydia treated him coolly but loved him greatly. The journals also describe his closeness to Margaret Fuller and to Caroline Sturgis, leading Richardson to speculate, without specifics, that “in the early 1840s Emerson was living emotionally, though not physically, in what would now be called an open marriage.” A Unitarian minister (1829 to 1832) and a leading transcendentalist along with Coleridge, Emerson believed in humankind’s need to think independently. At the Second Church of Boston, he left because of some differences with his congregation—he demanded that he not be required to administer “the silly Lord’s Supper.” Following is an excerpt from one of his final sermons, delivered on 9 September 1832:

The Lord's Supper

Having recently given particular attention to this subject, I was led to the conclusion that Jesus did not intend to establish an institution for perpetual observance when he ate the Passover with his disciples; and, further, to the opinion, that it is not expedient to celebrate it as we do. I shall now endeavor to state distinctly my reasons for these two opinions.

I. The authority of the rite

What did [the expression “this do in remembrance of me”] really signify? . . . . I see natural feeling and beauty in the use of such language from Jesus, a friend to his friends; I can readily imagine that he was willing and desirous, when his disciples met, his memory should hallow their intercourse; but I cannot bring myself to believe that in the use of such an expression he looked beyond the living generation, beyond the abolition of the festival he was celebrating, and the scattering of the nation, and meant to impose a memorial feast upon the whole world. . . . But still it may be asked, why did Jesus make expressions so extraordinary and emphatic as these —“This is my body which is broken for you. Take; eat. This is my blood which is shed for you. Drink it.” I reply they are not extraordinary expressions from him. They were familiar in his mouth. He always taught by parables and symbols. It was the national way of teaching and was largely used by him. Remember the readiness which he always showed to spiritualize every occurrence. He stooped and wrote on the sand. He admonished his disciples respecting the leaven of the Pharisees. He instructed the woman of Samaria respecting living water. He permitted himself to be anointed, declaring that it was for his interment. He washed the feet of his disciples. These are admitted to be symbolical actions and expressions. Here, in like manner, he calls the bread his body, and bids the disciples eat. . . . But it is said: “Admit that the rite was not designed to be perpetual. What harm doth it? Here it stands, generally accepted, under some form, by the Christian world, the undoubted occasion of much good; is it not better it should remain?”

II. This is the question of expediency

 1. If the view which I have taken of the history of the institution be correct, then the claim of authority should be dropped in administering it. . . .
 2. It has seemed to me that the use of this ordinance tends to produce confusion in our views of the relation of the soul to God. It is the old objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, -—that the true worship was transferred from God to Christ, or that such confusion was introduced into the soul, that an undivided worship was given nowhere. Is not that the effect of the Lord’s Supper? I appeal now to the convictions of communicants—and ask such persons whether they have not been occasionally conscious of a painful confusion of thought between the worship due to God and the commemoration due to Christ. For, the service does not stand upon the basis of a voluntary act, but is imposed by authority. . . . I am so much a Unitarian as this: that I believe the human mind cannot admit but one God, and that every effort to pay religious homage to more than one being, goes to take away all right ideas. I appeal, brethren, to your individual experience. . . .
 3. Passing other objections, I come to this, that the “use of the elements,” however suitable to the people and the modes of thought in the East, where it originated, is foreign and unsuited to affect us.  Whatever long usage and strong association may have done in some individuals to deaden this repulsion, I apprehend that their use is rather tolerated than loved by any of us. We are not accustomed to express our thoughts or emotions by symbolical actions. Most men find the bread and wine no aid to devotion and to some, it is a painful impediment. To eat bread is one thing; to love the precepts of Christ and resolve to obey them is quite another. . . . The statement of this objection leads me to say that I think this difficulty, wherever it is felt, to be entitled to the greatest weight. It is alone a sufficient objection to the ordinance. It is my own objection. This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it. If I believed that it was enjoined by Jesus on his disciples, and that he even contemplated making permanent this mode of commemoration, every way agreeable to an eastern mind, and yet, on trial, it was disagreeable to my own feelings, I should not adopt it. I should choose other ways which, as more effectual upon me, he would approve more. For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. . . .
 4. Fourthly, the importance ascribed to this particular ordinance is not consistent with the spirit of Christianity. The general object and effect of this ordinance is unexceptionable. It has been, and is, I doubt not, the occasion of indefinite good; but an importance is given by Christians to it which never can belong to any form. My friends, the apostle well assures us that “the kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness and peace and joy, in the Holy Ghost.” I am not so foolish as to declaim against forms. Forms are as essential as bodies; but to exalt particular forms, to adhere to one form a moment after it is outgrown, is unreasonable, and it is alien to the spirit of Christ. . . . What I revere and obey in [Christianity] is its reality, its boundless charity, its deep interior life, the rest it gives to my mind, the echo it returns to my thoughts, the perfect accord it makes with my reason through all its representation of God and His Providence; and the persuasion and courage that come out thence to lead me upward and onward. Freedom is the essence of this faith. It has for its object simply to make men good and wise. Its institutions, then, should be as flexible as the wants of men. That form out of which the life and suitableness have departed, should be as worthless in its eyes as the dead leaves that are falling around us. . . . [T]hat for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul. The whole world was full of idols and ordinances. The Jewish was a religion of forms. The Pagan was a religion of forms; it was all body—it had no life—and the Almighty God was pleased to qualify and send forth a man to teach men that they must serve him with the heart; that only that life was religious which was thoroughly good; that sacrifice was smoke, and forms were shadows. This man lived and died true to this purpose; and now, with his blessed word and life before us, Christians must contend that it is a matter of vital importance—really a duty, to commemorate him by a certain form, whether that form be agreeable to their understandings or not. Is not this to make vain the gift of God? Is not this to turn back the hand on the dial? Is not this to make men—to make ourselves—forget that not forms, but duties; not names, but righteousness and love are enjoined; and that in the eye of God there is no other measure of the value of any one form than the measure of its use? . . . Influenced by these considerations, I have proposed to the brethren of the Church to drop the use of the elements and the claim of authority in the administration of this ordinance, and have suggested a mode in which a meeting for the same purpose might be held free of objection. My brethren have considered my views with patience and candor, and have recommended unanimously an adherence to the present form. I have, therefore, been compelled to consider whether it becomes me to administer it. I am clearly of opinion I ought not. This discourse has already been so far extended, that I can only say that the reason of my determination is shortly this: —It is my desire, in the office of a Christian minister, to do nothing which I cannot do with my whole heart. Having said this, I have said all. I have no hostility to this institution; I am only stating my want of sympathy with it. Neither should I ever have obtruded this opinion upon other people, had I not been called by my office to administer it. . . . As it is the prevailing opinion and feeling in our religious community, that it is an indispensable part of the pastoral office to administer this ordinance, I am about to resign into your hands that office which you have confided to me. It has many duties for which I am feebly qualified. It has some which it will always be my delight to discharge, according to my ability, wherever I exist. And whilst the recollection of its claims oppresses me with a sense of my unworthiness, I am consoled by the hope that no time and no change can deprive me of the satisfaction of pursuing and exercising its highest functions.

McCabe is critical of Emerson but says the fact that Emerson refused to continue as a Unitarian minister “definitely puts him in the class of freethinkers.” He added that Emerson “believed in an Over-Soul or World-Soul (as others put it) and might be described as a Pantheist. He did not like the label Transcendentalist or any other label and did not care to pin himself to any definite religious formulae. Although his dogmatic intuitionist ethic is not suitable for our time and it led to a good deal of ethical narrowness, he was a fine force in American life in the last century.” A leader among liberal Unitarians, Emerson wrote a poem about “The Oversoul,” a term which for him replaced the Judeo-Christian God and was something of a Platonic ultimate, that “Form of the Good” to which all else is connected. His delivering of “The Divinity School Address” in 1838 was a major event in religious liberalism, for he said, “God resides not in formal religion but in Nature, not in rites, but in persons. A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man when his heart and mind open.” Harvard officials interpreted this as meaning he had rejected Christianity, and they were indignant. He was not invited back to Harvard until 1866, when he finally was granted an LL.D. degree. The New England intelligentsia helped him with the Transcendental Club, its publication called The Dial, and the Brook Farm experiment. He became a spokesman for the transcendentalists, as did in varying degrees Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Melville, and Whitman. Among Emerson’s humanistic gems are the following:

• I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings. • I like a church; I like a cowl; I love a prophet of the soul; And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains, or pensive smiles; Yet not for all his faith can see Would I that cowlèd churchman be. • If eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being. • Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. • The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. • Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. • Go put your creed into your deed, nor speak with double tongue. • A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consisten cy a great soul has simply nothing to do. • I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. • When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it. • Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow you think in hard words again, though it con tradict everything you have said today. • Other world? There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact. • We should not forgive the clergy for taking, on every issue, the immoral side. • The cure for theology is mother-wit. • As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect. • I knew a witty physician who . . . used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian. • Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. • The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. • Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. • Things are in the saddle, And ride mankind. • The reward of a thing well done, is to have done it. • Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

	Nietzsche was favorably influenced by Emerson. Erwin Schrödinger as well as Arthur Koestler found favor with Emerson’s view that after death we “lie in the lap of immense intelligence,” that being the Absolute Mind, a “great reservoir of consciousness” according to Paul Edwards in Immortality. Matthew Arnold pronounced Emerson’s essays “the most important work done in prose” in the nineteenth century. Not so praiseworthy were Hawthorne, Melville (“I do not oscillate in Emerson’s rainbow”), T. S. Eliot, and Yvor Winters. But, Harold Bloom wrote, “The mind of Emerson is the mind of America, for worse and for glory, and the central concern of that mind was the American religion, which most memorably was named ‘self-reliance.’ “

When elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (which was built on the Bronx campus of New York University), Emerson received 87 of the 97 possible votes, bettered only by Washington, Lincoln, Webster, Franklin, Grant, John Marshall, and Jefferson. Three decades prior, Emerson had been fooled into believing that a recently found 10’ 4 1/2” 2900-pound Cardiff, New York, giant was a fossil. Emerson is buried on a rising ground called Authors’ Ridge at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. The site is marked by a large granite boulder gravestone. Nearby are the remains of Henry David Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott. Emerson is flanked by Lidian Emerson, his wife, by their son Waldo, who died at age five, and their daughter Ellen. Ellen’s epitaph reads that although “of a fine mind, she cared more for persons than for books.” (See reference to his vice-presidency of the Free Religious Association in the entry for Ethical Culture. Also see entry for William Furness.) {CE; CL; ER; EU, William F. Ryan; FUK; FUS; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD; U}

Emerson, William]] (1701—1782) Carlyle liked the English mathematician Emerson, recalling that he told Mrs. Gilchrist, “Emerson was a Freethinker who looked on his neighbor, the person, as a humbug. He seems to have defended himself in silence the best way he could against the noisy clamor and unreal stuff going on around him.” Emerson compiled a list of Bible contradictions. Although the Encyclopaedia Britannica has stated that there is no foundation for the statement of Carlyle and others that Emerson was a skeptic, the Rev. W. Bowe candidly admits in his Some Account of the Life of W. Emerson (1793) that Emerson rejected Christianity. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Emery, Linda]] (20th Century) Emery, a fundamentalist turned humanist, is an instructor in English at Boise State University in Idaho.

Emlyn, Thomas]] (Died 1741) Emlyn in 1703 was imprisoned at Dublin, Ireland, for his anti-trinitarian beliefs. {U}

Emmett, Robert]] (1778—1803) Emmett was an Irish revolutionist who was expelled from Dublin University for his sympathy with the National Cause in 1798. McCabe, calling him an Irish patriot, remarked that “there was much more freethinking in Ireland much more freedom to think 150 years ago than there is today, and the priests carefully conceal the opinions of patriots like Emmett, O’Brien, O’Connor, etc., whom they hold up to youth today. Emmet went to France and there imbibed republicanism and deism, and on his return he organized a revolution.” In 1802 he was found guilty of insurrection and was sentenced to be executed. Emmett made a memorable speech before receiving sentence, and on the scaffold he refused the services of a priest, saying he was “an infidel by conviction.” The cause of his capture was his having returned to Ireland in order to see once more his sweetheart, the daughter of Curran. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

EMPATHY]] “Don’t . . . touch . . . me!” exclaimed a teacher whose artificial leg had come off and a student had offered to help him up. The still-angry Vietnam veteran, in short, wanted no pity. To show empathy (einfühlung in German) is to identify with and understand another’s feelings—empathetic humanists, for example, would aim to put themselves in others’ shoes before taking certain actions. One humanist made a sincere friendship with a paraplegic by arranging eye-level contact (e.g., sitting on a street curb) on almost all occasions. Being seated at a table with a dwarf allows both to have eye-level contact and to avoid “looking down” on a person. Unsighted individuals often demand not to be led, preferring to follow. At the time of someone’s death, the immediate family often wants total privacy, not unsolicited visits. Although commercial Hallmark sympathy cards are preferred by those who could be accused of valuing sympathy over empathy, those who do not feel in a superior position say they seldom sympathize with “the poor suckers who are not as fortunate as I am.” To be empathetic, one sees things through the eyes of the person who is being addressed. Troubled people often become more troubled when sympathized with. Those who differ retort that sympathy involves a mutual understanding of affection, not a feeling of superiority, that saying “I am sorry” when sincerely felt is simply a harmless expression of their compassion.

Empedocles]] (c. 495— 435 B.C.E.) The first to state a principle that is now central to physics, Empedocles taught that everything is composed of four underived and indestructible roots: fire, water, earth, and air. The atmosphere, not a mere void, actually has a corporeal substance. “In the absence of the void or empty space he explained motion as the interpenetration of particles, under the alternating action of two forces, harmony and discord,” explains the Columbia Encyclopedia. He explicitly denied anthropomorphic deity: “None of the gods has formed the world, nor has any man; it has always been.” Further, states Robertson, he threw out “a certain glimmer of the Darwinian conception—perhaps more clearly attained by Anaximandros—that adaptations prevail in nature just because the adaptations fit organisms to survive, and the non-adapted perish.” {CE; JMR; JMRH; TYD}

EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES AWARD]] “The Emperior Has No Clothes Award” is given by the Freedom From Religion Foundation to prominent Americans who call public attention to the shortcomings of religion. It is a gold-colored statuette of the royal figure of folktale notoriety. Just as the cautious subjects of that tale’s emperor did not wish to call attention to his being naked, not dressed in the most wondrously beautiful cloth that only the very wise could see, “so people echo religious inanities because it is the thing to do,” the Foundation holds. The first award went to comedian George Carlin.

EMPEROR WORSHIP]] The kings of Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia were said to have been semi-divine beings. “The ideal king of the Jews,” wrote Shirley Jackson Case of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, “was to be an individual especially anointed by God and thus a superman.” Among the Greeks, heroes were half-divine and became fully divine after dying on earth. Alexander the Great, for example, was considered an incarnate deity. Julius Caesar was voted divine honors, called apotheosis, by the Roman senate upon his decease. Caligula and Domitian demanded that incense be burned before Caesar’s image. According to Case, Jews, “being recognized as an established social group that refused to take this oath,” were excused, but Christians lacked this social prestige and for two centuries were subject to intermittent persecution for their refusal to say “Caesar is lord.” {ER}

EMPIRICISM Empiricism is a philosophical doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience. Such a position is opposed to rationalism, denying as it does the existence of innate ideas. Empiricists hold that all ideas are derived from experience, that knowledge of the physical world can be nothing more than a generalization from particular instances, that it can never reach more than a high degree of probability. John Stuart Mill was the first to treat the subject, and among its other leading advocates have been John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. James K. Feibleman in Foundations of Empiricism (1965) and Fraser Crowley in A Critique of British Empiricism (1968) write about the epistemological doctrine. Stuart Brown, editor of British Empiricism and the Enlightenment (1996), begins with Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists and with Newton and the early English Enlightenment. Locke is cited as being a key figure. {CE; ER; RE}

Empson, William]] (1906— ) Empson, the English critic and poet, wrote a classic of modern literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). An atheist, he wrote Milton’s God (1961). {Free Inquiry, Fall 1992}

ENCYCLICAL]] Humanists or freethinkers ordinarily issue “memos” or even “manifestos” for general or wide circulation. In the Roman Catholic Church, however, a papal letter addressed to the bishops or to the hierarchy of a particular country is called an encyclical. Encyclicals by religionists ordinarily lay down policy on religious, moral, or political issues. {DCL}

ENCYCLOPEDIA An encyclopedia—a word taken from the Greek, meaning a circle of knowledge—was originally meant to compile knowledge but, equally important, to give it shape. A Roman 6th century encyclopedia was divided into Divine and Human categories. A 9th century Arabic encyclopedia set priorities by beginning with discussions of power and war and ending with entries on food and women. During the 17th century, alphabetical encyclopedias began to thrive, as did cross-referencing and detailed indexing.

ENCYCLOPÉDIE, ENCYCLOPEDISTS The Encyclopédie; ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des les métiers was the work of the French Encyclopedists, or philosophes. Originally, it was to have been a translation of the Chambers Cyclopedia under the editorship of Abbé Gua de Malves, but the project was abandoned because of disagreements. The publisher, Le Breton, then agreed to let Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert edit an entirely new work, and they were aided by Quesnay, Montesquieu, Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Turgot, and others. A first volume was produced in 1751, and its rational, secular emphasis infuriated the Jesuits, who attacked the work as irreligious. In 1759 Alembert resigned as editor, but Diderot with the help of the chevalier de Jaucourt brought the clandestine printing of the work to completion in 1772. Of its twenty-eight volumes, eleven were devoted to plates illustrating the industrial arts. In the shop, a printer deleted some articles which contained overly liberal opinions, but the work represented a successful championing of the skepticism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. In 1780, a five-volume supplement and a two-volume index were added. The encyclopedia stressed scientific determinism, attacked legal, juridical, and clerical abuses, and was a factor in the intellectual preparation for the French Revolution. Upon seeing the collection, and it is available for example in the 42nd Street Public Library in New York City, the viewer is amazed at the quality of workmanship, the scope, and particularly the large size of the books. {CE}

ENDANGERED SPECIES Freethinkers everywhere are concerned about the fact that so many species are being lost for a variety of ecological reasons. In the United States alone, 717 endangered species of animals have been listed in 1999 by private as well as government sources. These range from the Alabama beach mouse and the American alligator to the Wyoming toad and the yellow-shouldered blackbird. “The fewer any species, the less likely we will ever eventually be able to make significant, large-scale, balanced, complete and thorough ecological repair/remedy,” wrote Drew Kovaly and Jeff Walther in Green Light (September 1999), journal of the International Naturist Church.

ENDOWMENTS Males (as well as females) are intrigued by the story of Adamastor, whose penis was so monstrously huge that he and the nymph Thetis were unable to have sex. Gore Vidal’s “Live From Golgotha” (1982) described the Bishop of Ephesus, the heterosexual Timothy who was said to have had “the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor,” and was represented as having been an acolyte and “love toy” of St. Paul. Spy, an irreverent magazine quite interested in all kinds of endowments, pulled a blasphemous prank in which it “measured the power of the Almighty Dollar against America’s most Bible-thumpin’, cross-bearin’ academic institutions” (September-October 1996):

Posing as R. Stephen Atkinson, the financial advisor to a born-again billionaire named Mildred Goldstein, the slick journal contacted Christian colleges, offering cash from the fictional Goldstein, who was described as an ailing octogenarian widow with no living relatives who wanted to leave $20,000,000. to the first school that could accommodate her dying wish: “Incorporate Goldstein into the name of their Christian school.” Schools and their suggested possible solutions:

• Southwest Baptist University 

The Goldstein College of Christian Education • College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA The Goldstein Institute for Jesuit Studies • Catholic University change the sports team’s name from the Cardinals to the Goldsteins • Seton Hall’s Immaculate Conception School Goldstein Seminary and School of Theology • Southern Methodist U’s Perkins Chapel

	Goldstein Chapel

The various schools were only temporarily duped. The endowments were never realized. Seton Hall, in fact, decided that the offered endowment was too small to buy the “kind of connection” that it would take to rename the school.

“It proves,” quipped a Manhattan wag, “that it takes a large endowment to make the right kind of connection.”

Engels, Friedrich (1820—1895) Corliss Lamont listed Engels as a materialist with a humanistic outlook. A German socialist, Engels with Karl Marx founded “scientific socialism,” collaborating with him to write the Communist Manifesto (1848). When Marx died in 1883, Engels edited his writings, including the second and third volumes of Das Kapital (1883—1894), which established the materialist interpretation of history. Belfort Bax, a British atheist and socialist who knew him, called Engels a “devout atheist.” Secular humanists such as Sidney Hook and Paul Kurtz have objected to the Marxist approach, which is not founded upon freedom, the significance of the individual, and political democracy. {CE; CL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Engle, Marvin (20th Century) Engle is president of the North Palm Beach, Florida, chapter of the Council for Secular Humanism. He also is a regional director of that Council.

Engledue, William Collins (1813—1859) 

Engledue was President of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh. He was a contributor to the Zoist and published an exposition of materialism under the title of Cerebral Physiology (1842). {BDF}

Englefield, F. R. H. (Died 1975) Englefield, who wrote The Critique of Pure Verbiage (published 1990), is a philosopher whose work gives more illumination than many traditional works, according to A.R.B. Ferguson in New Humanist (November 1993). Englefield also wrote Language: Its Origin and Its Relation to Thought (1977) and The Mind at Work and Play (published 1985).

English, George Bethune (1787—1828) An American writer and linguist, English wrote Grounds of Christianity Examined (1813), which excited some controversy. English had a gift of language, passing for a Turk with a Turkish ambassador, and surprising a delegation of Cherokees by disputing with them in their own tongue. English wrote a reply to his critics, Five Smooth Stones Out of the Brook, and two letters to Channing on his sermons against infidelity. {BDF; FUS; RAT}

ENGLISH HUMANISM Voltaire admired England for its combining freedom of speech, religious tolerance, the rational thinking of John Locke and Isaac Newton, and political moderation. For him, the essence of British freedom was the stock exchange:

a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohametan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts.

Voltaire’s view that England was tolerant in matters of religion is not true, wrote Neal Ascherson in The New York Review of Books (20 May 1999). What Voltaire had required, he said, was “a mythical neighbor country whose virtues would show up the vices and shortcomings of France,” adding “he also insisted that the English political system of limited monarchy and bourgeois liberties could be exported—even across the Channel. Skeptics objected that coconuts that ripened in India did not ripen in Rome.” Ian Buruma’s Anglomania: A European Love Affair (1999) states that the very qualities that Voltaire rejected were ones embraced by Goethe and the German writers of the late 18th and early 19th century. Shakespeare was adopted as virtually a German poet, a great Saxon bard unshackled by the Aristotelian rules of classical theater, writing with extraordinary power about the human conditions. In Buruma’s words, Shakespeare was “the Nordic genius Germans had been waiting for.” Yes, but Ascherson adds that Shakespeare also was a Volksgenosse in Nazi Germany, where his works were declared to be “German classics” in September 1939. In 1940 as the Nazi armies prepared for the invasion of Shakespeare’s land, Macbeth and Hamlet with their lonely Nordic heroes arming for battle against fate were the plays they liked best. Buruma, whose great-grandparents were Continental European Jews, found that many think of Britain as the land of freedom and tolerance, of Magna Carta, parliamentary democracy and refuge to political dissidents from Voltaire to Salman Rushdie. To others, it is a place of genteel tradition, stable institutions, aristocratic privilege, capitalism, and empire.

	English humanism dates at least to the mid-18th century. The Humanistic Religious Association of London’s 1 September 1853 Constitution included the following:

In forming ourselves into a progressive religious body, we have adopted the name “Humanistic Religious Association” to convey the idea that Religion is a principle inherent in man and is a means of developing his being towards greater perfection. We have emancipated ourselves from the ancient compulsory dogmas, myths, and ceremonies borrowed of old from Asia and still pervading the ruling churches of our age.

In “Humanism in the Eighteenth Century” (The Humanist, 1951), James V. Grasso described the objectives of the Association, which included spreading the knowledge of the time and to foster the cultivation of the sciences, philosophy, and the arts. An up-to-date listing of local humanist groups in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic is found bi-monthly in Humanist News, the newsletter of the British Humanist Association (47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP, England). {EW; Alexander Stille, The New York Times Book Review, 2 May 1999}

ENGLISH HUMANISTS: See a listing in the entry for United Kingdom, Freethought and Humanist Groups.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE It is difficult to explain the following to anyone learning the English language:

• A fire engine has no fire and is not on fire. • Eggplant contains no egg, hamburger no ham, pineapple no pines or apples. • Quicksand does not work quickly, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

• Writers write . . . but fingers do not fing, grocers do not groce, 

and hammers do not ham. • Teachers have taught, but preachers have not praught; vegetarians eat vegetables but humanitarians do not eat humans. • The plural of tooth is teeth, but the plural of booth is not beeth; of goose is geese, but of moose is not meese. • In English one recites at a play and plays at a recital; ships by truck and sends cargo by ship; has a nose that runs and feet that smell; parks on driveways and drives on parkways. • A wise man and a wise guy are opposites. • A house burns up as it burns down; to fill a form out, we fill it in; an alarm clock goes off by going on.

Fortunately, muse freethinkers, such a dynamic language is relative, not absolute, and was invented by humans, not gods.

ENGLISH UNITARIANS Jeffrey J. Teagle heads the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (1-6 Essex Street, Strand, London, WC2R 3HV, England). According to John Clifford,

England has approximately 170 congregations ranging in size from three or four to one hundred fifty. A broad swath from Liverpool through Manchester to Sheffield would take in the majority of our English congregations and members. There is another concentration in the Southeast, centred on London. The majority of these Unitarians would describe themselves as liberal Christians, and the worship patterns tend to be very similar to what one would find in most non-conformist (i.e., non-Anglican/Episcopalian) chapels, although the content would normally be noticeably different. Most of these congregations would have a strong denominational and/or district identity although there are a few that are fiercely independent. Some of the latter are strong congregations in a liberal Christian ould. There are a very few congregations of clear humanist, universalist, or theist practice, but most would be more accurately described as amalgamations. The role of the minister, particularly in worship, would be the strongest single influence in this, but we have democratic structure and our Management Committees also play a role in determining public profile. Many English and Welsh congregations trace their origins to the Act of Uniformity of 1662 (called the “Great Ejection” by dissenters) when liberals were forced out of the State Church and they formed independent local congregations (frequently called Presbyterian, although no consistent system of higher courts was set up). Other of our congregations in England and Wales trace their roots to the General Baptist congregations of the mid-18th Century. They believed in General Salvation, i.e. universalism, and adult baptism. A few of the Universalist congregations founded in mid-18th century became Unitarian in the early 19th century as Priestley and his followers were making that name a focus for various dissenting groups. In the Manchester area there was a group of dissenting Methodist congregations that became Unitarian during the 19th century. Some of our congregations were actually founded as Unitarian congregations either as spin-offs from an existing congregation or as the result of internal missionary work. At one point there were also several “domestic mission,” i.e., community service centres in deprived urban areas, but only one of these remains and it is a congregation more than a domestic mission. We British Unitarians have a denominational name given to us by history that we seem to lack the will to change. It is, The General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, usually abbreviated by us to “GA.” So when we talk about ourselves collectively we frequently do not even use the word Unitarian. Also, inasmuch as North American usage permeates our society, many of us are starting to refer to our Annual Meetings as our GA. Very confusing, but be aware that when a British Unitarian says GA s/he may not be talking about our annual gathering but about the denomination as a whole. Or s/he may be talking about the central secretariat based at Essex Hall in London, which I serve. {WAS, e-mail from John Clifford)

ENLIGHTENMENT “Enlightenment” is a term for the rationalist, liberal, humanitarian, and scientific trend of 18th century Western thought. The period is also known as the Age of Reason. Its achievements include the 17th-century empiricism of Francis Bacon and Locke as well as by Descartes, Spinoza, and others. Other representatives of the Enlightenment are such thinkers as Voltaire, J. J. Rousseau, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Swift, Hume, Kant, G. E. Lessing, Beccaria, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin. The social and political ideals they presented were enforced by “enlightened despots” such as Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, Catherine II of Russia, and Frederick II of Prussia. Diderot’s Encyclopédie and the U. S. Constitution are representative documents of the Age of Reason. Not all individuals consider the Enlightenment mankind’s finest intellectual achievement. On the contrary, they argue that it has become a catastrophic error. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Another Philosophy of History (1774) challenged the universalist, optimistic character of Enlightenment thought. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1972), asked, according to The Economist (16 March 1996), “why mankind, far from advancing to an ever closer harmony, had sunk into an abyss of hitherto unimaginable barbarism; why science, far from serving its Enlightenment purpose of enlarging human understanding, had only served the cause of human cruelty. Their answer was that the Enlightenment had been doomed all along to serve totalitarian goals.” (For some dangerous illusions about the Enlightenment, see the entry for Gertrude Himmelfarb. The most influential works of modern counter-Enlightenment are by writers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Roberto Unger, and Christopher Lasch in America. In England, John Gray. Satori is the Japanese word for the state of enlightenment sought in Zen Buddhism.) {CE}

Ennis, Garth (20th Century)

Ennis, a comic book artist and writer of Preacher and Hellblazer, has gone on record in Wizard: The Guide to Comics #62 (October 1996) as being a non-theist:

I’m an atheist, really. But everyone seems to think I’m some terrible lapsed Catholic who suffered the worst of a Catholic upbringing and had the crap kicked out of him by nuns and monks. In actual fact, I’m not Catholic, and I never had any kind of direct religious upbringing at all, although I was exposed to the inevitable religious influence that growing up in Ireland will give you. Garth Ennis, Comic Artist/Writer art

Ennis is the controversial author of the comic books (DC's "Preacher", "Hitman" and formerly of "Hellblazer" for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint). He said:

"I'm an atheist, really. But everyone seems to think I'm some terrible lapsed Catholic who suffered the worst of a Catholic upbringing and had the crap kicked out of him by nuns and monks. In actual fact, I'm not Catholic, and I never had any kind of direct religious upbringing at all, although I was exposed to the inevitable religious influence that growing up in Ireland will give you. And slightly more directly, my school had what was known as the Scripture Union or Christian Union, which young people were very strongly encouraged to join. They weren't too overt about it, but the kind of insidious propaganda that they employed used to, quite frankly, annoy the piss out of me. But I've always been interested in the history of Christianity and its effect on the world, and more generally speaking, in the idea of faith and of someone giving control over his destiny to what he sees as a higher power. These things have always just fascinated me and they're bound to show up in my work again and again. Negatively." -- Wizard: The Guide to Comics #62, October 1996, p.56

---

In an AOL chat that took place on August 20, 1996 Ennis is asked: "People say you hate God. Is this true or do you just feel better when he's not around?"

Ennis replies "I don't [believe] he exists. I think if he did exist he'd be a villain....and that's where preacher and a lot of my work on Hellblazer comes from."

---

Ennis says he doesn't believe in God in the new (January 2000?) issue of "Wizard." This is from the intro to his interview:

"Stretching out on the chair, Ennis willingly discusses two of his biggest fascinations - faith and violence - and hints at a subtle bond linking the two. Ennis openly admits he doesn't believe in God, and says he tackles religion in his stories for the same reason he includes violence - 'because it entertains and fascinates me, not because it's a part of my life.' And while such an admission may seem controversial to some, it's merely a matter of fact for Ennis."

{CA; E}

Ennius, Quintus (239—169? B.C.E.) A Latin poet regarded by the Romans as the father of Latin poetry, Ennius aspired to being Rome’s Homer. He introduced the Latin qualitative hexameter and the elegiac couplet, smoothed the current roughness of Latin diction, and gave a definitive artistic base to Latin poetry. As a teacher of Greek and belles lettres, for he was of Greek descent, he translated Euhemerus. Cicero says of him that he “followed” as well as translated Euhemerus, and his favorite Greek dramatists were freethinking Euripides and Epicharmus, both of whose works he translated. Ennius attacked the popular superstitions, particularly soothsaying and divination, which appealed to Henry David Thoreau as well as to other of his contemporaries. {CE; JMR; JMRH}

Eno, Brian (1948— ) Eno (his full name is Brian Peter George St. John de la Salle Eno) is a composer, musician, and producer. He co-founded the rock group, Roxy Music, and has been a solo musician since 1973. He produced “Evening Star” with Robert Fripp; “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” with David Byrne; and “The Joshua Tree (U2). As a video artist he was in “Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan” (1981). When his music was described as being “godless,” he responded,

Well, I’m an atheist, and the concept of god for me is all part of what I call the last illusion. The last illusion is someone knows what is going on. That’s the last illusion. =Nearly everyone has that illusion somewhere, and it manifests not only in the terms of the idea that there is a god but that knows what’s going on but that the planets know what’s going on. Astrology is part of the last illusion. The obsession with health is part of the last illusion, the idea that there’s that if only we could spend time on it and sit down and stop being unreasonable with each other we’d all find that there was a structure and a solution underlying plan to it all, for most people the short answer to that is God.

{CA; E}

Garth Ennis, Comic Artist/Writer art

Ennis is the controversial author of the comic books (DC's "Preacher", "Hitman" and formerly of "Hellblazer" for DC Comics' Vertigo imprint). He said:

"I'm an atheist, really. But everyone seems to think I'm some terrible lapsed Catholic who suffered the worst of a Catholic upbringing and had the crap kicked out of him by nuns and monks. In actual fact, I'm not Catholic, and I never had any kind of direct religious upbringing at all, although I was exposed to the inevitable religious influence that growing up in Ireland will give you. And slightly more directly, my school had what was known as the Scripture Union or Christian Union, which young people were very strongly encouraged to join. They weren't too overt about it, but the kind of insidious propaganda that they employed used to, quite frankly, annoy the piss out of me. But I've always been interested in the history of Christianity and its effect on the world, and more generally speaking, in the idea of faith and of someone giving control over his destiny to what he sees as a higher power. These things have always just fascinated me and they're bound to show up in my work again and again. Negatively." -- Wizard: The Guide to Comics #62, October 1996, p.56

---

In an AOL chat that took place on August 20, 1996 Ennis is asked: "People say you hate God. Is this true or do you just feel better when he's not around?"

Ennis replies "I don't [believe] he exists. I think if he did exist he'd be a villain....and that's where preacher and a lot of my work on Hellblazer comes from."

---

Ennis says he doesn't believe in God in the new (January 2000?) issue of "Wizard." This is from the intro to his interview:

"Stretching out on the chair, Ennis willingly discusses two of his biggest fascinations - faith and violence - and hints at a subtle bond linking the two. Ennis openly admits he doesn't believe in God, and says he tackles religion in his stories for the same reason he includes violence - 'because it entertains and fascinates me, not because it's a part of my life.' And while such an admission may seem controversial to some, it's merely a matter of fact for Ennis."

Ensor, George (1769—1843) Ensor was an Irish writer whom Bentham described as clever but impracticable. A deist and freethinker, he wrote severe criticisms of the Bible. Ensor’s works included The Independent Man (1806), A Review of the Miracles, Prophecies and Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments (1816), and Natural Theology Examined (1836). {BDF; FUS; JM; RAT}

Eon de Beaumont, Charles d’ [Chevalier/Chevalière] (1728—1810) A Catholic, a spy in the service of Louis XV, a captain of Dragoons, a female impersonator (as Lia de Beaumont): d’Eon was all of these. He became lady-in-waiting and even read to Czarina Elizabeth as she relaxed in her bath. His mission was to prevent the signing of a military treaty between Russia and England (one promising Russian support if France attacked England’s sovereign state of Hanover). The Empress, according to Carol Orsag, heeded “Lia’s” advice and refused to sign the treaty. Since the age of four, d’Eon had been dressed in feminine attire by his mother, who had preferred having given birth to a girl. Although successful as a female agent, Charles also distinguished himself in the French Army during the Seven Years War, as a captain in the Dragoons, and as an unofficial ambassador to England. When twenty-six, he was made a chevalier in the Order of Saint-Louis.

	Louis XV charged d’Eon to prepare the way for a French invasion of England, a fact unknown in 1763 to France’s full-time ambassador, the Comte de Guerchy. When the ambassador ordered d’Eon to give up the title of minister plenipotentiary, d’Eon did the unheard of: he refused, apparently considering that his rapid advancement made him invulnerable. Threatening blackmail, he published some highly confidential documents. This made him a hero to the English and resulted in Louis XV’s intervention upon his behalf. But some time in 1770 d’Eon dropped a hint that he was a woman. 

Gary Kates, in Monsieur d’Eon Is A Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (1995), researched two dozen biographies and much anecdotal trivia known in France as petite histoire but was unable to determine why. What is known is that d’Eon did not deny it and some—the pamphleteer Charles Théveneau de Morande—even claimed to have fondled d’Eon’s vagina. Kates, a history professor at Trinity University in Texas, suggests that d’Eon was neither a transvestite nor a transsexual, that his decision to live as a woman (whom he considered “spiritually” superior to men) was an intellectual one. For almost a century in England, France, and throughout Europe, debates raged over Charles’s “true” sex, with over $2,000,000 wagered on the “she-man.” Some bribed servants and resorted to window climbing in order to win their bets, but all attempts at carrying him off and displaying his sexual parts publicly were unsuccessful. Princeton’s Robert Darnton has written that d’Eon’s manuscripts, according to Kates, “showed him to have believed in an idiosyncratic variety of Augustinian Catholicism built on the hatred of men (especially Jews, owing to their emphasis on circumcision), a vision of a gender-free Garden of Eden (Adam seems to have been the first hermaphrodite), and moral insights” which Kates considered “exceptionally rich and original,” such as: “God created [woman and man], the one for doing good, the other for doing bad. So long as a man is a man, the earth is his; so long as a woman is a woman, virtue is hers.” Although d’Eon had contact with freethinkers like Voltaire and Paine, he continued his commitment to the Catholic Church, was an arch royalist, was an early enthusiast for the French Revolution, a war hero, a blackmailer, an ascetic, an exhibitionist and athlete, a student of Saint Paul, a student of Horace, a woman, a man—in short, a bundle of contradictions. In 1810, after remaining in London through the French Revolution and most of Napoleon’s rule, still dressed as a woman, d’Eon died, poor and obscure. His housemate, the widow of a British naval officer, dressed the body for burial. She and one physician declared that he was definitely a male with a male sexual apparatus that was inspected, sketched, and cast in plaster by experts. Other medical experts, knowing that the newspapers could not get enough of the story, claimed he was a hermaphrodite. All agreed d’Eon had been a master spy. {PA}

EPAINESS: See entries for Edward Everett and for Oratory.

Ephron, Nora]] (20th Century) A writer and director of such movies as “Michael” and “Steeplechase,” Ephron has declared that she is not a believer in God “in a formal sense.” She directed “Sleepless in Seattle,” which was nominated in 1993 for an Academy Award as being the best original screenplay. {New York Daily News, 19 January 1997}

Epicharmus (Died c. 450 B.C.E.) A Sicilian Greek comic poet, Epicharmus, by writing about other than personal satire and mythological burlesque, was the first to write a coherent artistic comedy. According to Robertson, his treatment of the deities on stage was “in a spirit of such audacious burlesque as must be held to imply unbelief.” Epicharmus was translated by the Roman poet Ennius. {CE}

Epictetus (c. 50—138) Epictetus, a Phrygian Stoic philosopher, wrote nothing, but his disciple Arrian set down his teachings in the Discourses and the Encheiridion. McCabe, saying shorthand was known at that time, theorizes that Arrian quoted Epictetus directly. He adds that Epictetus “belonged to the small religious wing of the Stoic movement and his extravagances of virtue illustrate again the danger of introducing any mysticism into ethics. The absurd suggestion that he borrowed from Christ is refuted by the dates. His chief interest is to remind us that all the moral sentiment attributed to Jesus in the gospels were familiar in the first century.” The brotherhood of man is a key feature in his Stoic outlook, for Epictetus believed mankind on earth is a collection of prisoners in an earthly body. Inasmuch as Epictetus was lame much of his life, and possibly had been a slave, he was somewhat meek, not being negative about government or religion. As described by Bertrand Russell, Marcus Aurelius wrote that Epictetus “used to say, ‘Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse,’ that Zeus could not make the body free, but he gave us a portion of his divinity. God is the father of men, and we are all brothers. We should not say, ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman,’ but ‘I am a citizen of the universe.’ If you were a kinsman of Caesar, you would feel safe; how much more should you feel safe in being a kinsman of God? If we understand that virtue is the only true good, we shall see that no real evil can befall us.” As for any afterlife, “Where are you going? It cannot be to a place of suffering; there is no Hell.” He had also written, “I was not, and was conceived; I loved, and did a little work; I am not, and grieve not,” which W. K. Clifford chose as his epitaph. In 1992, James R. Stockdale, the Vice Presidential candidate who ran with Ross Perot, surprised some potential voters by declaring he was a devotee of Epictetus’s philosophy. {CE; ER; JM; JMRH; RE; TYD}

EPICUREANISM J. C. A. Gaskin, in Varieties of Unbelief from Epicurus to Sartre (1989), defined Epicureanism as a “complete (and the original) humanistic-materialistic philosophy whose particular stance with regard to gods is to acknowledge that inactive, uncreating gods exist as part of the material universe. However, these inactive gods have no care for us nor we any duty to or dependence on them.”

Epicurus (341—270 B.C.E.) Epicurus “taught that there are no deities who intervened in human affairs and that mortal man has no existence after death,” Corliss Lamont wrote. Angelo Juffras points out that Epicurus did not deny there were gods; he denied that any such gods control events, particularly astronomical occurrences. Nor, as found in Aphorisms, could gods affect human affairs:

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. . . . If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. . . . If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?

His emphasis upon denying an afterlife helped remove human anxiety about any fear of divine judgment and eternal punishment, thereby denying the very basis of the popular Greek religion of that day but not offending the prejudices of the Athenians. The Romans Lucretius and Diogenes were among his many followers, and his influence lasted 700 years in the form of a creedal following. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Epicurus as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. Epicurus taught in a community of thinkers which he called the Garden, one which included some women and at least one slave. (A Buffalo wag agrees that no garden should be without these.) Bertrand Russell describes Epicurus’s distaste for Nausiphanes, apparently a follower of Democritus and whom he described derisively as The Mollusc. Also, Epicurus failed to acknowledge the extent of his indebtedness to Democritus, as well as to Leucippus. In fact, “he asserted that there was no such philosopher—meaning, no doubt, not that there was no such man, but that the man [Leucippus] was not a philosopher.” Although 300 of Epicurus’s works were lost, Russell holds that Lucretius hews closest to Epicurus’s viewpoints. Pleasure and tranquillity, Epicurus felt, were good. “The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this. The pleasure of the mind is the contemplation of pleasures of the body. By contemplating pleasure rather than pain, we can achieve virtue through prudence in the pursuit of such pleasure. Rather than active (dynamic) pleasures, we should pursue passive (static) ones. The former consist in the attainment of a desired end accompanied by pain; the latter consist in a state of equilibrium, which results as Bertrand Russell has described it as “the kind of state of affairs that would be desired if it were absent.” Passive pleasure does not depend upon pain as a stimulus to desire. It is as if it is more pleasant to be in the state of just having eaten moderately rather than in the state of having a voracious desire to eat. Therefore, it is the absence of pain, rather than the presence of pleasure, which really is the wise man’s goal. As for social pleasures, the safest is friendship. Or, as Russell describes the Epicurean outlook, “Eat little, for fear of indigestion; drink little, for fear of next morning; eschew politics and love and all violently passionate activities; do not give hostages to fortune by marrying and having children; in your mental life, teach yourself to contemplate pleasures rather than pains. Physical pain is certainly a great evil, but if severe, it is brief, and if prolonged, it can be endured by means of mental discipline and the habit of thinking of happy things in spite of it. Above all, live so as to avoid fear.” Russell’s view is quite different from Epictetus’s summary of Epicurus: “This is the life of which you pronounced yourself worthy: eating, drinking, copulation, evacuation, and snoring.” Epicurus of Samos held that two of the greatest sources of fear were religion and the dread of death, which were connected, since religion encouraged the view that the dead are unhappy. He therefore sought a metaphysic which would prove that the gods do not interfere in human affairs, and that the soul perishes with the body.” In his own words, Epicurus stated, “the supreme purpose of philosophy should be to introduce tranquillity and happiness into human life.” Augustine, however, called his views “a philosophy of swine.” Dante’s Inferno estimates that more than a thousand followers of Epicurus, “who make the soul die with the body,” are in Hell. Among them, he specifies Emperor Frederick II, the Guelph Cavalcante Cavalcanti, Ottavio Cardinal Ubaldini (who died in 1273), the Ghibelline noble Farinita (Manente degli Uberti, chief of the Florentine Ghibellines, who was a wise and valiant leader who died in 1264. In 1283 Salmone da Lucca, an Inquisitor, condemned him, his wife, his sons, and his grandsons as heretics. His bones were then thrown away, his property confiscated, and his goods were sold). When Epicurus died, his school—the Garden—memorialized him with a monthly feast. (See entries for Ancient Humanism; for his mistress, Leontium; and for Philodemus) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Angelo Juffras and Aram Vartanian; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}

EPIDEMICS McCabe has edifying information concerning the epidemics in history and their relation to religion. The Castle of Sant’ Angelo (Holy Angel) at Rome, for example, “is an historic memorial of the tragedy of the substitution of the individualist and other-worldly ethic of Christianity for the social ethic of the Romans. The building is really the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, who had presided over the empire of an estimated 100,000,000 people at the greatest height that civilization had reached in 3,500 years of history. Five centuries later the tomb, now converted into a Christian monument, rose above a city that had sunk from 1,000,000 to 40,000 people and from a brilliant height to squalor, poverty, and dense ignorance. The statue of an angel, commemorating the supposed miraculous arrest of a plague by angels in the days of Gregory I, is a symbol of the appalling social retrogression. The cultivated region around Rome had become a poisonous swamp, and the pious Pope, who was eager to destroy what was left of Roman culture, used the very worst measures (crowded churches, processions, etc.) to combat the infection that crept into the city. The normal death-rate in Europe had become so high that populations which now treble in a century took four centuries to double—England rose from two to four millions between 1066 (Domesday Book) and 1500—and ghastly epidemics swept periodically over the Continent. In tenth-century France (when Arab medical and sanitary science was at its height) there were forty-eight famines and epidemics in seventy-three years. The Black Death (1348—1351), which was probably bubonic plague, is estimated to have had 25,000,000 victims, besides the horrible sufferings of millions who recovered, or about two-thirds of the population of Europe. The “mummy pills” which many took as a preventive were made from the bodies of people who had died of the plague. Epidemic hysteria (the Flagellants, the Dancing Mania, etc.) added, when pestilence ceased, to the horrors.” McCabe cites as the best sources Hecker’s Epidemics of the Middle Ages (1844) and G. G. Coulton’s The Black Death (1929). Since the time AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was identified in 1981, the Roman Catholic Church has specifically insisted that the use of condoms during sexual relations or the distribution of clean needles to addicts is not preferable to abstinence. Human sexuality is for the purpose of conjugal love of man and woman, fecundity is a gift and an end of marriage, every baptized person is called to lead a chaste life with Christ as the model of chastity, believers are instructed by the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, it has been predicted that AIDS, the 20th-Century’s plague, will be worse and more widespread than were all the previous epidemics to date. {RE}

EPIPHENOMENALISM Epiphenomenalism consists of a group of doctrines about mental-physical causal relations. These are defined in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy and, as Paul Edwards has observed, T. H. Huxley was a pioneer proponent of the idea. The theory implies that human beings do not survive the death of their bodies in any form whatsoever. {PE; OCP}

EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF AMERICA The Episcopal Church, organized in 1789, is at 815 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017. It calls itself “in communion with the see of Canterbury: in England. On the Web: <http://www.ecysa.angelican.org..

EPISTEMOLOGY Epistemology is a study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, focusing on the limits and validity of knowledge. In short, “How do we know what we know?” John Dewey is one of many naturalists who have written on the subject. Logical positivists, by positing the verification principle, tried to define the testable scope of epistemology. One can “know,” for example, from the readings on a Fahrenheit thermometer the relative temperature of a room. One cannot “know,” however, “the origin of nothing as compared with something”. . . nor if karma and fate are valid concepts . . . nor if the Christian God has the same seven bodily openings as humans. (See entry for Richard Dawkins.) {For a thorough study of the subject, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.}

E PITAPHOS: See entries for Edward Everett and for Oratory.

E PLURIBUS UNUM: The Latinate e pluribus unum, “one out of many,” is found on the Great Seal of the United States. Religionists often mistakenly translate the phrase as “One nation, under God.”

Epstein, Harriet (20th Century) Epstein writes “First Person” for The Humanist. She is a freelance writer and lecturer in the New York City area.

“EQUAL UNDER GOD” In 1997 President Bill Clinton of the United States of America at a “town hall” meeting in Akron, Ohio, said

We live in a country that is the longest-lasting democracy in human history, founded on the elementary proposition that we are created equal by God. That’s what the Constitution says. And we have never lived that way perfectly, but the whole history of America is in large measure the story of our attempt to give a more perfect meaning to the thing we started with—the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

However, as pointed out by Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the “elementary proposition that we are created equal by God” is not in the Constitution:

“[T]he thing we started with,” and keep trying to “give a more perfect meaning to,” is not the Constitution and the Bill of Rights but the assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence. To be fair, Bill Clinton is not the only American who gets our basic documents all mixed up. Still, a man sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” should have a better idea of just what the document does and does not say. A champion of affirmative action should also have a better grasp on the connection between that effort to achieve racial equality and “the thing we started with.” {The New York Times, 7 December 1997}

EQUALITY: See entry for Egalitarianism.

ERAS A period of time which is reckoned from a specific date that serves as a basis of its chronological system is called an era. Following are examples of chronological eras in 1999:

Era Year Began in 1999 Byzantine 7508 14 Sep Jewish 5760 10 Sep at sunset Roman 2752 14 Jan Babylonian 2748 24 Apr Japanese 2659 1 Jan Grecian 2311 14 Sep or 14 Oct Christian 1998 1 Jan Diocletian 1716 12 Sep Indian (Saka) 1921 22 Mar Islamic/Muslim 1420 16 Apr at sunset {World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1998}

Erasmus (or Desiderius Erasmus) (1469—1536) Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and Renaissance humanist, revolted against the other-worldliness of medieval Christianity but never rejected its supernaturalism. He frequently cited Greek and Roman philosophers and authors, leading Constandse to refer to Erasmus as a pagan rather than a Christian. Erasmus valued the human conscience and felt that good and evil has existed for all nations and all times. His emphasis was upon making peace among all people, and he rarely used ecclesiastical dogmas as his starting point. His influence was widespread, and it was said that Pope Paul had once considered making him a cardinal. But in Spain, his followers, called erasmistas, came to be considered heretics or some kind of crypto-Protestants. McCabe cites Erasmus as a great freethinker of his time, adding that he was probably the bastard son of a Dutch priest and his niece. Although we may not know the full extent of his skepticism, McCabe wrote, “he did use his very wide influence to scourge the Roman Church and at times the whole Christian world.” He despised both Rome and Lutheranism, but had “no inclination to die for the truth,” he said. McCabe adds that Erasmus “loved comfort (usually at the expense of a friend or patron) and had rather a cynical and Rabelaisian outlook upon life; though this and his discretion about the truth will not surprise any who know the age and the state of the Church. The Catholics burned his fine edition of the Greek New Testament, yet tolerated the grossest license, and the Reformers were sour against the Humanist culture which Erasmus loved. While he did much to ensure the success of the Reformation—he has been described as ‘the man who laid the egg that Luther hatched’—Luther detested him.” After joining the monastery in 1488, Erasmus is said to have become enamored of Servatius Rogerus, who may have accepted, then spurned, his attentions. The platonic friendship with William Blount, Fourth Lord Mountjoy, was his most enduring friendship. (For a listing of the classical humanists, see the entry under Classical Humanism. Forest Tyler Stevens of Johns Hopkins University has an entire chapter on Erasmus’s alleged homosexuality in Queering the Renaissance (1994), edited by Jonathan Goldberg. He analyzes the “love” letters between Erasmus and young Servatius Rogerus. See entry for Preservèd Smith.) {CE; CL, ER; EU, Anton L. Constandse; HNS2; JM; JMRH; RE}

Eratosthenes (c. 275—195 B.C.E.) 

A Greek scholar and astronomer who was the head of the library in Alexandria, Eratosthenes was a versatile writer of poetry as well as works on theater, geography, astronomy, mathematics, tilt of the earth, as well as the earth’s size and its distance from the sun and the moon. He calculated the circumference of the round earth to be 24,000 miles (less than 1,000 miles off the true value) and the distance to the sun to be 92,000,000 miles, a stunningly close estimation. In short, this ancient Greek freethinking philosopher knew the world was round. It was not until 1577—1580 that Sir Francis Drake’s sailors became the first Englishmen to circumnavigate the world, proving Eratosthenes’s theory. The scholar’s jest concerning the gods is evident in his poem dedicated to Pan:

His pierced shepherd-pipe, His hairy mantle, his club, Daphnis the lover of women now dedicates to his dear Pan.

O Pan, receive these gifts of Daphnis; For like him you love music, like him you are luckless in love. {CE}

Erdmann, Johann Eduard (1805—1892) A German philosopher, Erdmann in 1829 entered the Lutheran ministry but abandoned it in 1832. He taught philosophy at Halle University, where his work on the history of philosophy showed him to be a Hegelian. Erdmann thought that soul and body are aspects of one reality. {RAT}

Erdmann, Marie (20th Century) When Erdmann signed Humanist Manifesto II, she was an elementary school teacher. {HM2}

Erdmann, Robert L. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Erdmann was associated with the International Business Machines company. {HM2}

Erdo, Janos (20th Century) Bishop Erdo heads the Unitarian Church in Romania. (See entry for Romanian Unitarians.)

Erickson, George A. (20th Century) Erickson, from Minnesota, is on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association. He is Vice President of Humanists of Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Erickson, Gerald M. (1927— ) Erickson, professor of classics and Near Eastern studies at the University of Minnesota, is faculty advisor for a student group named University of Minnesota Atheists and Unbelievers. He holds that religion and morality are not necessarily related, that all too often they are at odds with each other. {Secular Nation, November-December 1996}

Erickson, James G. (1925— ) Erickson, a freethinker, wrote Book of Freeman Cartoons with Harry Fowler in 1940. The cartoons he drew for E. Haldeman-Julius’s newspaper, The American Freeman, were widely known. An atheist, he served in the infantry during World War II and in his first letter-to-the-editor mentioned that he was an atheist and had been in a foxhole. The FBI compiled a total of 358 pages on Erickson, because he “has the power to influence people by his ability to cartoon and he, therefore . . . would be dangerous to the United States if we should become engaged in a war with Russia.” His response, upon finding the file made available under the Freedom of Information Act, was that he wondered in a nuclear war if he would have had time. Erickson has been an admirer of Madalyn Murray’s American Atheists. {Freethought History #17, 1996; GS}

Erickson, Jason (20th Century) In 1996, Erickson, a student of geology, became co-president of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists. Although confirmed in the Christian faith at the age of fourteen, he became an atheist at the age of fifteen. Erickson was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {Freethought Today, April 1997; International Humanist News, December 1996}

Erickson, Kai T. (20th Century) Erickson is author of Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (1960).

Erickson, Stephanie (20th Century) In 1996, Erickson, a geology student, became co-president of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists. {Freethought Today, April 199[7}

Ericson, Edward L. (20th Century) Ericson is a former president of the American Ethical Union and a leader of the Washington, D.C. (1959—1971) and New York Ethical Culture societies. A Unitarian and signer of Humanist Manifesto II, he is on the editorial board of The Humanist, is a contributing editor of Religious Humanism, and was one of the principal founders of Americans for Religious Liberty. He addressed the 1966 Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris. In the 1980s, Ericson became a “free lance” writer and a lecturer. He is author of The Humanist Way (1988) and American Dream Revisited (1993). (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {CL; HM2; HNS2; PK}

Ericsson, John (1803—1889) An American inventor, Ericsson after serving for some years as engineer in the Swedish Army moved to England, where he perfected the invention of the steam-propeller for ships. The conservatism of British shipbuilders drove him to America, where he won an international reputation as an engineer and inventor. He constructed the monitors which played an important part in the Civil War. Ingersoll, who was intimately acquainted with Ericsson, described him as “one of the profoundest Agnostics I ever met.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Erigena, John Scotus (615—677) Erigena was an Irish philosopher in a time when the Irish were known as “Scots” in Europe. He took the name Erigena, which means “born in Erin” and was one of the most brilliant of the Irish scholars who, in the short period when some culture still survived in Ireland—the Anglo-Saxon invasions had ruined it in England—migrated to France. Several times he was condemned by the Church, and the work of his that survives (De Divisione Naturae) is, according to McCabe, vaguely pantheistic. He is said to have held against the boorish bishops that “reason precedes faith.” Disagreeing with McCabe, Dermot Moran in a 1989 study argued that God is the source of all things. {JM; JMRH; RE}

Erion, Gerald J. (20th Century) Erion is Associate Dean of the Center for Inquiry Institute (CFII), which is an educational group that provides a Certificate of Proficiency to students of humanism. The group’s address is PO Box 703, Amherst, NY 14226. E-mail: CFlinstit@aol.com.

Ernst, Max (1891—1976) Ernst, the German painter who was a member of the Dada movement and a founder of surrealism, scandalized believers with a 1926 painting, “The Blessed Virgin Chastising the Child Jesus Before Three Witnesses: A.B. [André Breton], P. E. [Paul Eluard], and the artist.” Depicted is a big-breasted Mary about to slap a young, perhaps five-year-old, blond Jesus. Viewers were sure to question how an all-perfect God in the form of His Son could possibly have done anything wrong that would have demanded his mother’s punishment. At any rate, the tyke’s buttocks are appropriately blushing and his apparently detachable halo has fallen onto the floor. The painting hangs in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany. {CE}

EROS In Greek religion, Eros was symbolic of love in all its manifestations: physical passion at its strongest; tender, romantic love; playful, sportive love. The god of love, Eros was represented as a winged youth armed with bow and arrows. Some legends described Eros as one of the oldest of the gods, born from Chaos and personifying creative power and harmony. Most described him as the son of Aphrodite and Ares. Poets ascribed to Eros that which all in love have experienced: the frenzies and agonies of love. To some, Eros was also the god of fertility. In Roman myth, where he was called Amor or Cupid, he was represented as a naked, winged child, the son and companion of Venus. Legend also has it that he fell in love with Psyche, sweeping her off to an isolated castle but forbidding her to look at him inasmuch as he was a god. As lovers will do, she disobeyed, he abandoned her, and she ceaselessly searched for him until at last the two were reunited and she became immortal. {CE}

Ernesti, Johann August (1707-1781) Ernesti was a German critic, a professor of classical literature at Wittenberg and Leipzig. A philologist, Ernesti insisted that the Bible must be interpreted just as any other book must be. {BDF}

ERRANCY LIST The Skeptical Review has as its e-mail address <errancy@infidels.org>.

Erwin, Greg (1947—1999) Erwin was president of the Humanist Association of Ottawa, a member-at-large of The Humanist in Canada, and a contributing editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin. He published, edited, and distributed Lucifer’s Echo, a monthly electronic magazine of atheism, humanist, and freethought that was distributed over the Internet. Erwin also was a supporter of Internet Infidels. Born in the United States, Erwin moved to Canada in 1968 and became a Canadian citizen. He was behind the campaign for all humanists who were formerly members of churches to have those churches remove their name from their membership records, and he provided information to anyone who asked how to get excommunicated. At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Erwin was elected president. In a memoriam, Trevor Banks wrote

Greg had recently retired very early after twenty-six years in the public service, latterly with the National Parole Board. He had obtained a degree in Modern Languages at Carleton University. Soon after his arrival in Canada, at a retreat in the Laurentians, he met his beloved wife and devoted friend Paddy, with whom he had the good fortune to spend the next twenty-nine years of his life. . . . He served as President of HAO and, later, as 1st Vice President of HAC. Humanism could not have wished for a better ambassador. He was always willing and eager to devote his time and immense talents to spreading the philosophy of humanism to the world through interviews on the radio and TV and on the internet. His online periodical, “The Nullifidian,” was a masterpiece of rational humanistic dialogue and polemic. (UU News, 31 Jan 1999)

Erwin, Milo (19th Century) Fred Whitehead in Freethought History (#3, 1992) quotes a statement by Erwin in The History of Williamson County, Illinois (1976):

I met some old men who told me that in an early day, when they neither had gospel nor meetings, that the people were peaceable, friendly, and happy; and as soon as preachers came into the country they got up “isms,” “sects,” and “systems,” which ended in jars and feuds among the people, and that they have never seen any peace since.

Esau, Reed (1965— ) Esau, a software engineer in Minnesota, founded the Celebrity Atheists, Agnostics, and Other Non-Theists on the internet in 1995 in response to a statement made by a nationally syndicated late-night radio talk-show host. The host had attempted to marginalize those who are skeptical of religious ideas as being members of an ideological class—radical left-wing Marxists. Esau found, however, that

my experience said otherwise, so I launched this clever bit of counter-propaganda on the World Wide Web. The list is a collaboration of sorts, relying on its thousands of readers for submissions and updates. I play the role of editor, collecting and organizing information for publication. The list has but a single purpose in mind: to defuse the misconception that we are of a single mind. In a non-partisan manner, it attempts to show, by quoting those with whom most of us are familiar (celebrities), that you can find non-theists across the political and ideological spectrum.

Esau is amused that the talk-show host is no longer on the air. A motorcyclist, Esau relaxes by racing around the Canadian and American byways. {WAS, 25 March 1997}

Escherny, François Louis d’ (1733—1815) The Swiss author of Lacunes de la Philosophie (1783) and Equality (1795), Escherny became the associate of Helvetius, Diderot, and Rousseau, whom he much admired. His work displays his freethought. Escherny accepted the French Revolution in its sober beginnings but was later repelled by the Terror. {BDF; RAT; RE}

ESKIMO: See entry for Inuit.

Eslinger, Brian (20th Century) Eslinger, minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Ames, Iowa, has a humanistic outlook that emphasizes acting ethically. Discussing a meeting with two daughters as they recounted stories of their ninety-year-old father who was dying, he heard of the father’s active life of service to others, which he described as being one humanist perspective. Religious humanism, he added,

has always had many [viewpoints]. For instance, early in the century, as humanism was forming in Unitarianism, a group represented by Francis Ellingwood Abbott believed, in Abbott’s words, that “science is destined to be the world’s Messiah” and had, in fact, replaced God. On the other hand, the Rev. John Dietrich, while embracing reason, did not sweep all knowledge into science. “I consider [the meaning of our finer emotions] as important as the message of reason,” he said. In the place of a narrow focus on science, Dietrich emphasized all experience. I myself focus on how our experiences affect our actions, how we act ethically. A universal of humanism is the optimistic belief that human beings can perform saving acts, that indeed only we can. Where can we find encouragement to struggle and celebrate in this world? I do not rely on supernatural forces. My inspiration comes to me through my own senses, though I realize the senses are shaped and influenced by heredity, society, and history. In this complicated relationship reason plays a crucial role. As imperfect beings we understand that our views are not the final word on anything, but through reason we can understand how limited our perspectives are and learn from the perspectives of other people. My time with the grieving family [of the ninety-year-old father] deepened my feeling that a quiet life, lived with purpose, can affect many lives around it. Was the women’s father a humanist? I don’t know, but he taught me about being human. {World, November-December 1997}

Esolen, Anthony M. (20th Century) Esolen, who teaches English at Providence College in Rhode Island, translated and edited Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things (1995).

ESOTERIC • Esoteric, adj. Very particularly abstruse and consummately occult. The ancient philosophies were of two kinds: exoteric, those that the philosophers themselves could partly understand, and esoteric, those that nobody could understand. It is the latter that have most profoundly affected modern thought and found greatest acceptance in our time. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

ESP: Extra-sensory perception has had its exponents, like Uri Geller. But as documented by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch in Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience (Johns Hopkins University Press), ESP is in a category with astrology.

ESPACE DE LIBERTÉS A humanistic monthly in French, Espace de Libertés is in Belgium at Campus de la Plaine ULB-CP 236, Avanue Arnaud Fraiteur, 1050 Brussels. <espace@cal.ulb.ac.be>.

Espenschied, Judith (20th Century) The first Ethical Culture Leader up to 1999 to give birth after entering leadership, Espenschied was an active young parent in Washington, a graduate student of philosophy, and one who became president of the National Leaders Council. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)

ESPERANTO In Esperanto, the artificial international language invented by a Polish oculist, Ludwig Lazar Zamenhof, “humanism” is homaranismo.

Espinas, Alfred (Born 1844) A French philosopher who with Ribot translated Spencer’s Principles of Psychology, Espinas wrote studies on Experimental Philosophy in Italy and on Animal Societies (1877). Espinas is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and a member of the Institut. {BDF; RAT}

Espronceda, José de (1810—1842) So obnoxious was Espronceda when he was fifteen years old that he was imprisoned, then banished. In London and Paris, the young radical came under the influence of Byron and Hugo, then fought with the people in the Paris Revolution of 1830. When the Spanish king died, Espronceda returned to Madrid but was again banished for too free expression of his opinions. Among his works are lyrical poems; an unfinished epic, El Pelayo; and a poem about the Devil-World, El Diablo-Mundo, which shows the influence of Faust and Don Juan. His God, he said, was Liberty and

I unheedingly follow my path, At the mercy of winds and of waves. Wrapt thus within the arms of Fate, What care I if lost or saved. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Esquiros, Henri Alphonse (1812—1876) Esquiros was a French poet. In his Évangile du Peuple (1840, for which he suffered eight months’ imprisonment, he rationalizes the life of Jesus. Esquiros was elected anti-clerical member of the Legislative Assembly in 1848 but was compelled to flee in 1851. A devoted rationalist, he became a member of the Provisional Government in 1870, the National Assembly in 1871, and the Senate in 1875. {RAT}

ESSENCE: See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.

ESSENES 

The Essenes were members of a Jewish sect that was born of the ferment of ideas in the few centuries before the time of Jesus, when, according to McCabe, “the imperialist-military movements led to a very wide mingling of cultures.” Josephus mentioned them in his Jewish War, and some have speculated that Josephus might have been an Essene. What Josephus tells of their doctrines and practices “has a singular resemblance to the manner of life which the Jesus of the Gospels recommends,” McCabe notes, implying that many so-called Christian ideas were not original. For example, the Essenes lived in monasteries. They went about Judaea in pairs, healing the sick and exhorting men to virtue. They were vowed to celibacy and poverty, carried no money or change of garments, and had to avoid oaths. Their preaching laid great stress on peace and justice. DeQuincey contended that the early Christians were Essenes, and the fact that, while they must have been a prominent feature of the religious life of Judaea, they are never mentioned in the Gospels raises a suspicion that the Christians of the second generation tried to suppress knowledge of them. Inasmuch as the Essenian sect goes back to at least 100 B.C.E., the implication is that the philosophy of love preached by Jesus was not the Word of God but, rather, the view of the Essenes. Further, there is evidence of Persian and Hellenistic influences in the sect’s thought. In 1997, Stephen J. Pfann, director in Jerusalem of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity, told a conference of several hundred scholars that the bitter contests over the scrolls had been resolved, that the caves in which the scrolls had been found had now passed from Jordanian to Israeli control, and that it was now possible to concentrate upon interpretations of the desert sect and its impact on both Judaism and Christianity. According to Pfann, in about 30 B.C.E. the Maskil, the leader of a strict and ascetic Jewish sect known as the Essenes, wrote some notes to instruct a two-year novitiate before he could be accepted as a full-fledged Sons of Light and allowed to enter the community. Ordinarily, written notes were not made lest they fall into the “profane” hands of the Sons of Darkness. Pfann reported that “The Essenes held sacred sessions every night to study sacred texts and find their meanings. They believed they were called into the wilderness to discern divine revelation in the Torah. So the early stages of their discussion was recorded in code until a final version was prepared by the Maskil. He was the visionary. He floated between heaven and earth. He sought revelation in nature, in the movement of the sun, moon, and stars.” Freethinkers’ interest in the scrolls is focused on the findings by John Allegro. He has charged that the Catholic Church deliberately suppressed parts of the Essene texts. As of 1995, the Dead Sea Scrolls had not been fully made public and, again, the implication was that powerful vested interests are adamant in wishing to keep them secret lest it become obvious that Jesus was simply another Essene, nothing more. A 1998 work, Hershel Shanks’s The Mystery and Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls, disagrees with Edmund Wilson’s earlier assessment, that the most important of the scrolls foreshadowed Christian doctrine. Wilson found that the Qumran sect was “more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.” Shanks disagrees, holding that “Jesus is not in the scrolls,” that the scrolls are Jewish, not Christian, documents, and that their value lies in revealing that “we had not previously known about the situation of Judaism at the dawn of Christianity.” According to Shanks, the Scrolls show there were several Judaisms when Christianity was born. One was Christianity, the other Rabbinic Judaism. Richard Bernstein, writing in The New York Times (1 April 1998), found the Shanks view “arresting, even shocking to some. We can be thankful to Mr. Shanks for illuminating the documents that produced it, even as we wish he had given us fuller explanations of the scholarly and theological debates that the discovery of the scrolls has always entailed.” (See entry for Edmund Wilson, author of The Scrolls from the Dead Sea [1955].) {CE; The New York Times, 27 July 1997; RE}

Essex, R. S. (20th Century) Essex, a freethinker, co-wrote with Sidney Dark The War Against God (1937). {GS}

ESTABLISHED CHURCH 

If a government supports a church as a national institution, that church is the established church. In England, the Church of England is the established church, although efforts have been made to “disestablish” the church, with opponents of the idea known as anti-disestablishmentarians. The Presbyterian Church is the established church in Scotland, the Lutheran in Scandinavian countries.

Esteve, Pierre (c. 1700—1748) A French writer, Esteve wrote a History of Astronomy and an anonymous work on the Origin of the Universe Explained from a Principle of Matter (1748). {BDF}

Estienne, Henri (1528—1598) Estienne was a French printer who, at the age of eighteen, assisted his father in collating the manuscripts of Dionysius and Halicarnassus. In 1557 he established a printing office of his own, issuing many Greek authors. His Apologie pour Herodote is designed as a satire on Christian legends and directed against priests and priestcraft. As a result, he was driven from place to place. Sir Philip Sidney highly esteemed him and “kindly entertained him in his travaile.” Garasse classes him with atheists. {BDF}

Estrella, Hugo (1964— ) For the International Humanist News (December 1997, October 1998, and December 1998), Estrella has described the struggle of freethinkers in Argentina. In addition to being Executive Director of Sociedad Humanista-Ética Argentina, he is Executive Director of Y/S Pugwash Argentina. Estrella signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <humanistarg@usa.net>.

ETERNAL LIFE Alexander Nehamas, a Princeton professor in the humanities and philosophy, has written of “eternal life” that

The idea that there is such a thing as an eternal life and that it is in most ways more important than this life—though it has produced a number of great goods—I think has generally caused immensely greater misery than it has helped the world. First of all, it has completely devalued, for many of those who believe in it, their present life. Second, it has made many of those people who believe in it live in constant fear and guilt for what’s going to happen to them afterward. And it has prevented them from doing anything to get rid of that fear and guilt by acting right because, if anything, they will get their just deserts [six] later on. Faith in the eternal life, which means faith in an absolute justification if you are on the right side, has caused some of the worst treatment of human beings by other human beings. {The New York Times, 31 October 1997}

ETERNITY • If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. —Ludwig Wittgenstein ( See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.)

ETHICAL CULTURE Felix Adler (1851—1933) inaugurated the Ethical Culture movement in New York City in 1876. Although trained to succeed his father as rabbi of Temple Emanuel in New York, Adler revolted against the theology and ceremonialism of the Hebrew religion. With a few sympathizers who left the synagogue with him, he founded a society pledged “to assert the supreme importance of the ethical factor in all relations of life, personal, social, national and international, apart from any theological or metaphysical consideration.” The society holds its own religious services, but members may have other religious affiliations. Societies were formed in Chicago (1882) by William M. Salter; in Philadelphia (1885) by S. Burns Weston; in St. Louis (1866) by Walter L. Sheldon; in Brooklyn (1906) by Leslie Sprague; and in Westchester County (1927) by David S. Muzzey. In New York, the Ethical Culture Schools introduced the systematic teaching of ethics in all the grades. On Adler’s death in 1933, the senior leadership of the New York society passed to his colleague for forty years, Dr. John L. Elliott. Other leaders have included Horace J. Bridges in Chicago; W. Edwin Collier in Philadelphia; J. Hutton Hynd in St. Louis; and Henry Neumann in Brooklyn. Two outstanding books concerning the movement are David S. Muzzey’s Ethics as a Religion (1951) and Howard B. Radest’s Toward Common Ground (1969). James F. Hornback, whose Columbia University doctoral dissertation was about Ethical Society founders, wrote the following in 1986 to the present author about Adler and the Ethical Societies:

The Society for Ethical Culture in the City of New York, as it was soon incorporated, began in May 1876 with a meeting of the largely personal following of twenty-five-year-old Dr. Felix Adler, whose inaugural (or trial) sermon in his father’s Temple Emanu-El (German, Reform) in New York had ended long expectations of his being a rabbi. Why? His “Judaism of the Future” would be open to all people, and he had neglected to mention any “special mission” for “the Jewish people,” or even their God. The gentlemen of the Board were shocked and quickly agreed with him on severance. Adler disclaimed atheism, or even agnosticism, but had a deep Kantian sense of the independence and the supremacy of ethics in human life and in the cosmos—“the Ought,” as he put it for teaching children, “in all its awful majesty.”

The railroad-banking tycoon Joseph Seligman endowed a lectureship for Adler at the new and liberal Cornell University, where President Andrew D. White (later author of the classic History of the Warfare of Science and Theology in Christendom) defended his wide-ranging lectures on “Oriental Language and Literature” from Christian and orthodox critics. When his contract was not renewed in 1876, Adler went back to his friends in New York City, with whom he had met on weekends, to start his Society.

A fringe member of the Emerson circle, Adler also joined the Free Religious Association (FRA) and its annual intellectual conferences in Boston, founded in 1867 and lasting into the twentieth century. He became president in 1879, with Ralph Waldo Emerson as vice-president, succeeding the more aloof intellectual Octavius B. Frothingham, Unitarian, of New York. But he declined a second term, declaring that the Free Religious Association concentrated too much on what Kant (and Aristotle) had called “the starry heavens above,” and not enough on “the Moral Law within.”

Adler’s activism (schools, charities, visiting nurses, child labor, etc.) attracted other young men of the Free Religious Association: William M. Salter from Iowa, Knox College and Harvard Divinity School, who chose to stay with Adler and lead an Ethical Society in Chicago (1882—1883) rather than go to the new “Ethical Basis” Unitarian Society in Minneapolis; S. Burns Weston, victim of a Unitarian “heresy” trial for not preaching the “Unitarian Christianity” specified in the bequest supporting his church in Leicester, Massachusetts; and Walter L. Sheldon, a New Englander whom Weston met in school at Berlin, suffering from scientific and philosophic destruction of his Fundamentalism. Weston went as Adler’s founding Leader in Philadelphia (1885), and Sheldon, after much fuming over Adler’s anti-scientific attitudes, to be first leader in St. Louis (1886). Stanton Coit, a self-recruited Emersonian from Ohio, teaching English at Amherst, understudied with Adler but found a movement of his own with the leading ethical philosophers (Sidgwick, Muirhead, Bosanquet, Caird, Stephen, etc.) in the London (1886) and the conversion in name only of the South Place Religious Society (1793) into Ethical Society (1888). Coit, a self-styled humanist, was always too empirical, liturgical, and willing to translate Christian words and symbols into humanism, for Adler’s taste.

Yet Coit recruited and trained several of the second- and third-generation (quarter-century) Leaders for Adler’s movement: Golding, Chubb (self-trained, a charter member of the London Society and the Fabians), and O’Dell (a humanist never really accepted by Adler as a Leader); and then Hynd (humanist, St. Louis) and Collier (ethical mystic and transcendentalist, Philadelphia). Under Coit’s daughter Virginia (Lady Flemming)) and those previously mentioned, the British Ethical Union has gone much more unambiguously humanistic since his death in 1944.

Adler’s departure from Judaism drew emotional criticism from Jewish loyalists for many years, and still does, although it was without bitterness or denial of valuable heritage on his part. He gave two reasons. First, however noble or ethical at its best, Judaism is “a racial religion.” (The concept of “race” was to yield to “ethnic” or “ethnocentric” with Huxley and Hadden in the 1930s, and to “racist” as a negative attitude with Ashley Montagu and others, later on.) Second, Judaism’s “unitary concept” of God was less true to reality for Adler than an ideal or transcendental “community of spirits” or “Spiritual Universe.” He affirmed a “Host of Gods” rather than “the God of Hosts.” He opposed Zionism until death in 1933.

Disappointed and often taunted over vastly disproportionate numbers of Jews in his societies and schools (“seldom exceeds 100%,” quipped Rabbi Stephen Wise’s son, James W., in his Adler chapter in Jews Are Like That), Adler steadfastly refused to make his movement explicitly Jewish, or to sanction a parallel movement for gentiles. (Even today, one hears from the uninformed or the malicious, who have often said so to me, that Ethical Societies are more appropriate for Jews, and the Unitarians or even the Humanists for “Christians.”) In Starting or in recognizing new societies, Adler was to take great care in finding sponsoring committees of prominence and varied background, and giving them professional Leaders who shared his universalism in this matter.

In St. Louis in 1883, Adler sternly disavowed a distinguished group of German freethinkers, both Jewish and gentile, who were followers of Ex-Senator Carl Schurz and his Westliche Post. They had long called their own activities Ethische Kultur. On hearing of Adler’s movement, they invited him “to give his episcopal benediction.” Instead, he spoke at great length on his own views, monopolizing a large audience, according to a young reporter, Adolphe de Castro, who was later U.S. Consul in Madrid. By 1886, Adler and Weston had found Sheldon as a Leader, and formed a sponsoring committee chaired by attorney Charles Nagel (later President Taft’s Secretary of Commerce and Labor), whose wife was Louis Brandeis’s sister. Freethinkers were conspicuously absent, as were the noted St. Louis Hegelians (W. T. Harris, Louis Soldan, Denton Snyder, etc.). But the society began with a cross-section of religious and ethnic backgrounds, which it has maintained despite an over-representation of Jewish background (15 to 18% according to a 1986 questionnaire) and under-representation of blacks (1 to 2%).

Adler’s second generation of Leaders (roughly 1900—1925) remained loyal to a generally idealist-transcendentalist philosophy: John Lovejoy Elliott, a warm farm boy from the civil-libertarian Illinois Lovejoys and Ingersoll-supporting Elliotts (in New York, 1894—1942); David S. Muzzey, Yankee seminarian turned American historian at Columbia and Barnard (part-time, New York, 1895—1965); Alfred W. Martin, Jewish-Christian-Unitarian theist who left his Free Church in Seattle to write and teach comparative religions (New York, 1907—1931); Anna Garlin Spencer, minister, Free Religious Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 1889—1904 (New York, 1904—1913), then moved on in feminist protest to teaching, with expressed sympathy of Weston and Chubb); Percival Chubb, charter member, London, and first secretary, Fabians, to United States as writer, lecturer, and teacher of English and drama (soon in Ethical Culture High Schools), editor Ethical Record (1898—1904), later Leader (St. Louis, 1911—1933, emeritus till death, 1960); Horace J. Bridges, British laborer (printing) groomed by Coit as liberal empiricist, turned theological and social conservative as Leader under Adler, died Episcopalian in the 1950s (Leader, Chicago, 1913—1945); George O’Dell, British empiricist and humanist, trustee and then president of National Union of Clerks and Administrative Workers (1906—1913), assistant to Coit in the British Ethical Union (1903—1913), then executive secretary of American Ethical Union and editor of The Standard (1913—1947); Henry Golding, British businessman and Ethical layman, career change late, till early death (New York, 1923—1931); and Henry Neumann, college teacher of English and education, youngest of second generation and professed bearer of Adler’s philosophy into third and fourth, when he died a tolerant humanist (Brooklyn, 1911—1966). Many Humanists will remember the kindly octogenarian.

The small but distinguished third generation (1925—1950 and after) veered sharply toward humanism, excepting W. Edwin Collier, a Coit recruit from the Church of England who remains in active retirement (Ethical-Unitarian) a transcendental mystic (Philadelphia, 1934—1952). Algernon D. Black, a graduate of Ethical Culture Schools and Harvard, joined Adler’s staff in 1923, was made a Leader in 1932, headed ethics teaching in the schools for many years, led actively in the larger community for more than fifty years, and is now emeritus. Though a humanist, he declined to sign Manifesto II out of loyalty to the larger inclusiveness of Ethical Culture. (So did Horace L. Friess, Adler’s son-in-law and literary-biographical executor, who taught humanist philosophy and comparative religions for many years at Columbia, and served as a part-time Leader and trainer of Leaders in New York from 1952 until death in 1975). Joseph L. Blau, a renowned student of Judaica and teacher of American philosophy and religion (retired as department head) at Columbia, did sign Humanist Manifesto II and listed himself in Who’s Who as “a long-time humanist,” with an explicit credo. The late Jerome Nathanson, a journalist and student of philosophy, did John Dewey’s authorized interpretation, with few direct quotations or phrases, for Scribner’s (John Dewey: The Reconstruction of the Democratic Life, 1951), worked often in cooperative Ethical-Humanist projects (including church and state and the Conferences on Science and Democracy in 1943, 1944, and 1945), used “religious” terminology with explicit misgivings, and signed Manifesto II shortly before his final illness (Leader, New York 1940—1975). J. Hutton Hynd, the Scottish Congregationalist who became a humanist with Coit, was forthright in his rejection of traditional religions (favorite address, “The Fundamentalists Are Right”), though willing (as I am) to make use of their incidental institutional wisdom, beauty and “trappings.” While in St. Louis (1933—1950), he continued the Sheldon and Chubb heritage of sound institutionalism, though with far less social consciousness. He returned to semi-retirement in the British movement, and died in 1970.

V. T. Thayer, made a member of the AEU Leaders Council—then called the Fraternity of Leaders—as Adler’s trusted though Dewey-ite Director of Ethical Culture Schools, 1928—1947, was one of the signers of the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933. So was Frank Swift, a young British-Canadian Unitarian in training for Ethical leadership in St. Louis, New York, and Boston, who died that December as a good Samaritan on icy roads. The news of their signing was mercifully kept from Dr. Adler in his final illness. Incidentally, I have always shared Dr. Thayer’s reluctance to call Humanism, or even Ethical Culture, “religious” for the alleged advantages in public acceptance or law. He believed, as I do, in complete equality of “rights” for “religious” and “non-religious” institutions and individuals, rather than fudging meanings. And he warned of the Fundamentalist backlash against our double standard.

The fourth generation of Ethical Leaders was forthrightly humanistic. The late Henry B. Herman, an Ethical Culture and Wisconsin graduate and experienced social worker, started Leadership training in New York in 1942 with J. F. Hornback and William D. Hammond (long a Unitarian minister, now retired). Herman led in New York and briefly in Westchester County (1946—1965) before moving to the Wisconsin Student Union, where he died young in 1971. Hornback led in Westchester (1947—1951) and in St. Louis until going emeritus in 1984. Sheldon Ackley, fired from teaching philosophy at Gettysburg College, for atheism, was recruited by Joseph Blau as the highly successful first Leader of the Long Island Society (1950—1959). He returned to university administration and teaching, coming back after early retirement to be an explicitly “Secular Humanist” Leader in New York in 1982. Matthew Ies Spetter, a Dutch humanist, journalist, and Holocaust survivor, taught in the schools, then led in Brooklyn (1953—1955) and in Riverdale-Yonkers since 1955. Walter Lawton, a Baptist minister turned businessman and society president, has led in Northern Westchester, Queens, Chicago, and Westchester (1958— ); Barbara Raines, a teacher of science long active in Philadelphia, moved west and became Leader of the West Coast Council for Ethical Culture in 1960, where she specialized in humanistic psychology, and then returned briefly to leadership in Northern Westchester in 1970; Douglas Frazier, a veteran Unitarian- Universalist minister, led in Los Angeles (1958—1964) and Bergen County, New Jersey (1964—1968); and Harold J. Quigley, a Presbyterian dismissed for heresy, in Cleveland, Los Angeles, and Chicago (1962—1981).

Younger men who joined the fourth generation were the humanistic Unitarians: Edward L. Ericson in Washington (1959—1971) and New York until going “free lance” as a writer and lecturer in 1984; Khoren Arisian in Boston (1966—1968) and New York (1968—1979), and now at the traditionally humanistic Minneapolis Unitarian Society; and Howard Box in Brooklyn (1960—1976) until his return to the Unitarians in Oak Ridge. Their contemporary, Howard Radest, came from a New York high school and Columbia College into Leadership training and military service, after which he became Leader in Bergen in 1956, executive director of the AEU in 1964, and after a few years of teaching philosophy at Ramapo College, New Jersey, director of Ethical Culture Schools in 1979. Radest is also Dean of the Leadership-Training Institute of the North American Committee for Humanism (NACH) and one of the “Troika” of co-chairmen of the IHEU, which includes Bert Schwarz of Holland and Mihaelo Markovic of Yugoslavia.

Older men who joined the fourth generation as Leaders were A. Eustace Haydon in Chicago (1945—1955) and Lester Mondale in Philadelphia (1952—1959), both signers of Humanist Manifestos I and II; and George Beauchamp, a teacher and educational administrator active in formation of the Washington Society during World War II, who was elected to the Fraternity of Leaders in 1947. Haydon, the Canadian Baptist turned Unitarian and Humanist, succeeded the liberal Professor Foster (his teacher) in history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School (1929—1945). To him, religion was “the shared quest for the good life”—a ridiculously broad definition, to my mind, but one which was no doubt broadening and humanizing to several generations of clergy and teachers. His selection by the remnants of the Chicago Society to succeed their contemptuously anti-humanistic, anti-socialist Leader, Horace Bridges, assured the depletion of their once great resources, as the wealthy Dr. Bridges insisted on a pension. Dr. Haydon gave his eloquent basic address many times in the decade following his second retirement (1955—1965), and in Los Angeles his last decade (1965—1975). Mondale, the youngest signer of Manifesto I and spokesman for humanism in Unitarianism and Ethical Culture for many years, is still active as a speaker, conference-goer, and Humanist magazine columnist from his longtime Ozark Mountain retreat. Beauchamp, in semi-retirement since 1957 as developer of a retirement center in Florida, is still active as Dean (counselor to Leaders) of the AEU Leaders Council.

A transitional figure between the fourth and fifth generation (1975 to 1986), M. Michael Grupp belongs more with the fifth in philosophy and style, as he emphatically refused to sign Humanist Manifesto II because hr regarded it as too rationalistic and non-religious for Ethical Culture. He has been a Leader since 1965 in Southern Connecticut, Queens, Westchester, and Brooklyn—a frequent youth worker and ethics teacher. Other veteran fifth-generation Leaders are Joseph Chuman, a classics graduate at City College, now completing a doctorate in religion at Columbia, who started leadership training in 1967, led briefly in Essex County, New Jersey, and then settled as Leader in Bergen; Arthur Dobrin, a history major from City College, who came into Ethical leadership training after Peace Corps service in Kenya (1965—1967), has led in Long Island since 1968 through community service and poetic flair, and is now a doctoral candidate in social work at Adelphi; Donald Montagna, now a business trainee and member in New York who worked briefly with Dobrin, then took his skills in organizational development and psychology into leadership of the Washington Society in 1972; Michael Franch, a student and teacher of history, entered leadership in Baltimore in 1975, edited ethical society initially for the AEU (as a more Ethical movement-centered, religious, and economical publication than The Humanist, co-sponsored with the AHA from 1969 until 1977), and then completed his doctorate with free-lance employment in 1984; and Judith Espenschied, long a leadership prospect as an active young parent in Washington, a graduate student of philosophy, finally entering leadership in Philadelphia in 1982, bearing another child soon after (the only Ethical Leader ever to do so), and now President of the National Leaders Council. Only Chuman of this fifth generation signed Humanist Manifesto II in 1973, although Franch and Espenschied with their more naturalistic philosophies (less psychological or existential) might well have done so.

Also joining Ethical Leadership after intensive training in the 1980s are three young mothers: Lois Kellerman of New York and Susan Bagot of Washington, “certified” in 1983 as Leaders in Queens and a new society in Northern Virginia, respectively; and Judith Toth, for several years executive secretary and an organizational trainer in Washington, for leadership in Baltimore in 1985, part time, in her third training year. David Clarke, an experienced Unitarian minister with a doctorate, is doing his in-service training with West Coast societies.

Also fifth generation through late entry into Ethical Leadership are John Hoad from Barbados and Cambridge Divinity School, twenty-five years a Methodist minister and seminary president in the West Indies, who came from Princeton Seminary studies (and has now completed his Ph. D.) during Jeff Hornback’s doctoral leave (1980—1981) and stayed on, overlapping, to succeed him; Gerald Larue, longtime Humanist and recent AHA Board member, professor emeritus of religion at UCLA and still teaching and counseling there part time, was introduced officially as Leader in Los Angeles at the AEU Assembly of 1982; and Jean Kotkin an Ethical member, school parent, and longtime volunteer in New York, succeeded Howard Radest in the AEU office, at first cut back in policy and finance to “administrative secretary,” then rising rapidly through style and titles again to “executive director,” and now, since her successful application for leadership status several years ago, to the new title of Leader for National Development. An ardent “religious” humanist with strong sympathies toward the psychological humanism of the fifth generation, she did nevertheless sign Humanist Manifesto II and administers the Humanist Institute for NACH. John Hoad, similarly oriented now, might not have signed in 1973. And Jerry Larue, though not on early printed lists of signers, might have signed eventually.

Thus, the AEU, which began as an Adler-dominated federation of the first four American societies in 1886, was largely a voluntary organization for correspondence, platform-exchange, annual or semi-annual conventions, and official approval of Leaders. The International Ethical Union (IEU), started in Eisenach in 1896, included Ethical societies in Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, and Tokyo up to World War I. The IEU sponsored important Moral Educational Congresses, with published proceedings, and one Inter-National Races Congress in London in 1911. Moral Education Congresses resumed after the war, every four years from 1922 in Geneva, Rome, Paris, and Krakow, and plans were aborted for the next one in Berlin. But there was little else in the IEU between the wars, and Ethical societies faded out in all but Great Britain and Vienna. Hence the need for revival, with the strange new Humanists, after World War II.

After Adler, the AEU remained loose and poorly financed. George O’Dell, who succeeded Weston as its secretary and publisher, eked out a living doing pastoral work for New York and pulpits for Unitarians. He was retired (back to England) in 1947, and succeeded by a series of far more highly paid editors, executive secretaries, and staff specialists, supported by a per capita assessment formula for the societies starting at $10 and now with a ceiling about four times that. After Henry Neumann volunteered to edit the failing Standard (then Ethical Outlook), the AEU stabilized under Radest’s capable administration, with an ecumenical co-sponsorship of The Humanist instead. Even as Adler had cut loose his finely conceived International Journal of Ethics (1890—1914) on the mistaken grounds that “it does not count for the movement” (too many naturalists, pragmatists, utilitarians, etc.), so did the younger Leaders and smaller societies, with or without Leaders, vote the AEU out of The Humanist under Paul Kurtz at the St. Louis Assembly of 1977. They did not heed, or did not care, that Kurtz was his own man in editorial policy and management, and not a servant of the AHA, which was soon to break with him, too, and switch to Lloyd Morain. (Although often disagreeing with Paul Kurtz on his conservative politics and radicalism on lifestyles, I consider him a good and challenging editor—as I do Morain. The break for AHA was more personal than philosophic.)

In 1926, The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ethical Movement 1876—1926 was published and contains historical information about the group’s origins. Membership in the twenty Ethical Culture congregations peaked in the 1960s at about 5,800 and, according to the Kansas City Star (7 August 1993), had diminished to 3,050 members in the 1990s, “more than half . . . in New Jersey and New York.” Ethical Culture is found on the Web: <http://www.aeu.org/society.html>. (For a continuation of Dr. Hornback’s historical sketch of the relationship between the Ethical Culture groups and the American Humanist Association, see entry for American Humanist Association. Also see entry for South Place Ethical Society.) {CE; ER; PUT; RE; WAS, 1986}

ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETIES • California Ethical Culture Society of the Bay Area (415) 522-3758; <sanfrancisco@aeu.org> Ethical Culture Society of Los Angeles, PO Box 370425, Reseda, CA 91337 <losangeles@aeu.org>. Ethical Culture Society of San Diego <sandiego@aeu.org> • District of Columbia Washington Ethical Society, 7750 16th St. NW, Washington, DC 20012 (202) 882-6650; <wes@aeu.org> • Illinois Ethical Humanist Society of Greater Chicago, 7574 North Lincoln Ave., Skokie, IL 60077; (847) 677-3354; chicago@aeu.org> • Iowa Iowa Ethical Union <iowa@aeu.org>

• Maryland Baltimore Ethical Society, 1323 North Calvert St., Baltimore, MD 21202 (410) 581-2322; <baltimore@aeu.org> • Massachusetts Ethical Society of Boston, PO Box 38-1934, Cambridge, MA 02238 (617) 739-9050 • Missouri Ethical Society of St. Louis, 9001 Clayton Road, St. Louis, MO 63117 (314) 991-0955 • New Jersey Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, 687 Larch Ave., Teaneck, NJ 07666; (201) 836-5187 Ethical Culture Society of Essex County, 516 Prospect St., Maplewood, NJ 07040 (201) 763-1905 Princeton Ethical Humanist Fellowship, PO Box 3286, Princeton, NJ 08543; (609) 924-6492; <princeton@aeu.org> • New York Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture, 53 Prospect Park W., Brooklyn, NY 11215 (718) 768-2972 Ethical Culture Society of Queens, 207-03 3rd Ave., Bayside, NY 11361 (718) 631-2807 Ethical Culture Society of Suffolk, PO Box 134, Commack, NY 11725 (516) 499-0726 Ethical Culture Society of Westchester, 7 Saxon Wood Road, White Plains, NY 10605 (914) 948-1120 Ethical Humanist Society of Long Island, 38 Old Country Road, Garden City, NY 11530 (516) 741-7304 Ethical Society of Northern Westchester, 108 Pinesbridge Road, Ossining, NY 10562 (914) 941-3544 New York Society of Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th St., New York, NY 10023 (212) 874-5210 Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture, 4450 Fieldston Road, Bronx, NY 10471 (718) 548-4445 • North Carolina North Carolina Society for Ethical Culture, PO Box 3132, Chapel Hill, NC 27515 • Pennsylvania Philadelphia Ethical Society, 1906 S. Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 735-3456 • Texas Ethical Culture Fellowship of Austin, PO Box 160492, Austin, TX 78716 (512) 306-1111 • Virginia Northern Virginia Ethical Society, PO Box 984, Vienna, VA 22183 (703) 437-3161 <noves@aeu.org>

ETHICAL DIALOGS A Russian freethought group is Ethical Dialogs, c/o Ethics Department, Faculty of Philosophy, Moscow State University, 119899 Moscow B-234, Russian Republic.

ETHICAL HUMANISM: See entry for Secular Humanism.

ETHICAL NATURALISM: To determine whether an “ought” can be deduced from an “is,” see Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.

ETHICAL RECORD Ethical Record is published by South Place Ethical Society at Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London, WC1X 8SP, United Kingdom. It reports on lectures, with brief letters, notices, and similar items.

ETHICAL RELATIVISM In ethics, ethical relativism is the belief that nothing is objectively right or wrong. The definition of right or wrong depends on the prevailing view of a particular individual, culture, or hist]]orical period. Although in the Trobriand Islands it was once ethical in the evenings for young women to climb through the open windows of eligible bachelors, such a practice is frowned upon in London and elsewhere. In Morocco and Greenwich Village, New York City, males who are friends can hold hands in public, a practice that could result in violence in America’s Bible Belt or in other parts of the world. {DCL}

ETHICAL UNION The Union of Ethical Societies, which was formed in 1896, became the Ethical Union in 1920. In 1967, the organization became the British Humanist Association. {Nicolas Walter, New Humanist, February 1996}

ETHICS Ethics is a philosophic discipline that deals not only with what is good and bad but also with moral duty and obligations. Naturalists who have written on the subject include William Kingdon Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief” and “The Ethics of Religion” (1880); G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (1903); Bertrand Russell, Marriage and Morals (1929) and The Conquest of Happiness (1930); and P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (1954). Also, humanistic philosophers A. J. Ayer, Albert Schweitzer, and Bernard Williams have written extensively on the subject. The oldest continuing organization to have focused on humanistic ethics is South Place Ethical Society, founded 14 February 1793. The group meets in Conway Hall and serves as the potential focus of the British Humanist movement. Bertrand Russell’s views on ethics (Power, 1938) included the following:

• The fundamental defect of Christian ethics consists in the fact that it labels certain classes of acts “sins” and others “virtue” on grounds that have nothing to do with their social consequences. An ethic not derived from superstition must decide first upon the kind of social effects which it desires to achieve and the kind which it desires to avoid. It must then decide, as far as our knowledge permits, what acts will promote the desired consequences; these acts it will praise, while those having a contrary tendency it will condemn. (Education and the Modern World, 1932)

• It’s very difficult to separate ethics altogether from politics. Ethics, it seems to me, arise in this way: a man is inclined to do something that benefits him and harms his neighbors. If it harms a good many of his neighbors, they will combine together and say, “Look here, we don’t like this sort of thing, and we’ll see to it that it doesn’t benefit the man,” and that leads to the criminal law, which is perfectly rational. {Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind, 1969}

• The power conferred by military conquest often ceases, after a longer or shorter period of time, to be merely military. All the provinces conquered by the Romans, except Judea, soon became loyal subjects of the Empire, and ceased to feel any desire for independence. In Asia and Africa the Christian countries conquered by the Mohammedans submitted with little reluctance to their new rulers. Wales gradually acquiesced in English rule, though Ireland did not. After the Albigensian heretics had been overcome by military force, their descendants submitted inwardly as well as outwardly to the authority of the Church. The Norman Conquest produced, in England, a royal family which, after a time, was thought to possess a Divine Right to the throne. Military conquest is stable only when it is followed by psychological conquest, but the cases in which this has occurred are very numerous. (See the entry for ethics in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.) {CE; ER; JMRH; RE}

ETHNIC CLEANSING Ethnic cleansing “is a euphemism for religious genocide,” wrote Victor Boldt. “Ethnic Albanians,” for example are Kosovo Muslims and should be so described by the media. {Humanist in Canada, Winter 1999-2000}

ETHNOGRAPHY, ETHNOLOGY Anthropololgists who specialize in scientifically describing specific human cultures are ethnographists. Those who compare human cultures—their language, religion, technology—are ethnologists. Ethnology deals with the origin, distribution, and characteristics of the races of mankind.

ETISK-FORBUND: See entry for Norwegian Humanists.

Ettel, Konrad (Born 1847) Ettel was an Austrian freethinker. He wrote many poems and dramas. His freethinker’s catechism, Grundzuge der Naturlichen Weltanschauung (1886) reached a fourth edition. {BDF}

Etu, Samuel (20th Century) Etu, a Nigerian educator, is active in the Lagos humanist group and in his library has a complete set of the published writings of Robert G. Ingersoll. {HNS2}

Etzioni, Amitai: See entry for Communitarianism.

EUCHARIST • Eucharist, n. A sacred feast of the religious sect of Theophagi. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

For believers, the Eucharist is an act of worship which was instituted at the Last Supper and in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed. Freethinkers sometimes confuse the Eucharist with a player of euchre, the thirty-two-card game in which, after being dealt five cards, one is required to take at least three tricks in order to make a trump and win. The player is then said to have euchred his opponent. Euchring someone involves deceiving them. (See entries for Hocus Pocus and for Theophagy.) {DCL}

Eucken, Rudolf Christoph (1846—1926) Eucken was a German philosopher who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Literature. His philosophy, activism, stressed personal ethical effort rather than intellectual idealism and was praised by humanists. Eucken, however, preferred the word activism. He wrote The Truth of Religion (1901) and Knowledge and Life (1913). {CE}

Eudes, Emile François Désiré (1844—1888) Eudes was a French Communist, a chemist who was condemned with Régnard to three months’ imprisonment for writing in La Libre Pensée. Joining the ranks of the Commune, Eudes became a general. When the Versailles troops entered Paris, he escaped to Switzerland. On his return, he wrote with Blanqui. {BDF}

Eudo de Stella (12th Century) 

With a smutty mouth, a hermit from Brittany called Eudo (of the Star) preached that he was a second Christ. One enraged chronicler wrote that “although Eudo was uneducated and scarcely knew the letters of the alphabet, he discoursed and preached from Holy Writ with a filthy mouth. Although not in holy orders, with impious boldness he disgracefully celebrated Mass, to the error and the destruction of the corrupted people.” It was a time of harsh winters and bad harvests, and those with no resources who joined his wandering band allegedly stole whatever the group needed. They also attacked churches and monasteries, rationalizing that they were not preaching the truth anyway. In 1148 the Archbishop of Rouen sent soldiers who captured and imprisoned Eudo. He died while on a diet of bread and water, and his leading disciples were executed by burning. {EH}

EUGENICS: See entry for Francis Galton.

Eugenius IV (1382—1447) Pope Eugenius IV (1431 to 1447) in a 1442 decree (quoted in derision by Joseph McCabe) wrote, “We decree and order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them, nor bathe with them. Christians shall not allow Jews to hold civil honor over Christians, or to exercise public offices in the state.”

Euhemerus (fl c. 300 B.C.E.) A contemporary of Epicurus, Zeno, and Pyrrho, Euhemerus of Tegea, according to W. K. C. Guthrie, was an atheist. {CE; EU; JMR}

EULOGY • Eulogy, n. Praise of a person who has either the advantages of wealth and power, or the consideration to be dead. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

EUNUCHS, FEMALE Shobha Nehru—a eunuch who became a figure in Hissar, India, politics—was born of an upper-class Hindu family, was raised as a girl, but was born a eunuch. Because eunuchs are shut out by Hinduism’s strict caste system, she adopted Islam but took the last name of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharial Nehru. In Jonathan Karp’s front-page account of her story (The Wall Street Journal, 24 September 1998), eunuchs in India are described as being

a subculture of sexual outcasts who rank lower in India than the untouchables. They are notorious for crashing weddings, singing raunchy songs and dancing until paid to leave. . . . .” I used to entertain people by dancing,” says Ms. Nehru, whose husky voice contrasts with her attire, a delicately draped sari in the colors of the Indian flag—saffron, white and green. “Now I entertain them by doing good, humanitarian deeds.”

As a politician in the southern city of Bangalore and then in the State of Haryana, Nehru performs only when invited and bestows blessings rather than curses. In one squatter colony, she has successfully helped lobby for water supply and better roads, winning a 1995 election and working to improve civic amenities and reduce crime as well as police abuse. She would like to run for Parliament. Another eunuch ran unsuccessfully in 1996 under the slogan, “You don’t need genitals for politics. You need brains.” According to Karp, born eunuchs are the élite among India’s hijras, an Urdu word for “impotent ones.” Considering themselves neither men nor women, hijras generally adopt feminine names and dress. They may have been born

with deformed genitalia; a small fraction are hermaphrodites, and others are homosexual cross-dressers. Some males undergo castration to be accepted in the community. Eunuchs deny longstanding allegations that they kidnap and castrate boys to keep their secret society alive, though over the years there have been a number of documented cases of adolescent boys being forcibly mutilated sexually.

Ancient sacred Hindu texts contain references to “the third sex” and descriptions of impotent men who danced and cast spells. The Hindu epic Ramayana tells of the god-king Ram who was banished to the forest where he urged all men and women followers to go home. Being neither, the eunuchs waited fourteen years for his return and were blessed for their devotion. Scholars have said, however, that the episode does not appear in the most widely accepted Ramayana texts. Estimates vary as to how many hijras India has, somewhere between 50,000 and 1.2 million. Karp has stated that they are more commonly ridiculed or reviled than revered today and often are consigned to a life of begging. In Bombay they are known to ask commuters for money or be flashed. “Many Indians believe eunuchs have occult powers,” Karp found, “so they pay.”

EUNUCHS, MALE God in his mercy, according to the Bible, does not allow eunuchs or those who have had their “stones crushed” (i.e., their testicles smashed) to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. A male eunuch is a castrated human male, one who can get an erection but who cannot ejaculate a bodily fluid. Eunuchs were used as harem chamberlains in Asia, and they have been employed as servants in wealthy or royal households, as during the court of Constantinople under the Byzantine emperors, from whom the Ottoman sultans adopted the practice. Narses, a Byzantine general, is one of the most famous early eunuchs; Carlo Broschi Farinelli is one of the better known of recent times. Moslems were not noted for using eunuchs, although the sale of young males to be eunuchs was once an important element in African trade. Shakespeare, who used eunuchs in Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night, knew of the Vatican’s castrati. The Shakespearean acting companies used castrati to play women’s roles and who, as explained by Steven Orgel in Impersonations: a The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (1997), enabled the introduction of overt sexuality, simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual, into the world of ecclesiastical celibacy. The Papal choir used castrati until the beginning of the 19th century. Inasmuch as the Church did not permit females to sing in the churches, it was necessary to “manufacture” male sopranos. Pope Leo XIII finally issued orders to “get rid of them.” Meanwhile, Leo XIII found the scandal in theatre-life (not churches) in various parts of Italy (not Rome) and indignantly suppressed it. According to McCabe, “It was one of the most notorious facts in Roman ecclesiastical life and was found in many other Italian churches, until the Pope’s secular authority over Rome was ended in 1870.” The custom of using eunuchs in choirs spread from Constantinople, and in the 18th century the male heroes’ roles were sung by castrati. Bishop Liutprand of the tenth century tells in his Antapodosis that Christians—he means Christians in monasteries—used to collect Christian boys, castrate and rear them, and sell them as harem-eunuchs to the Moslems. As late as the 17th century, Jews were castrated and the mutilation publicly exhibited in Rome, for intercourse with Christian prostitutes. In 1996, ninety-four-year-old San Yaoting, allegedly the Chinese emperor’s last eunuch, died in Beijing. As a young boy, he was emasculated in a crude operation arranged by his family, who hoped for money. He then became the emperor’s eunuch, a person trusted to enter the inner courtyards of the palace where the women of the imperial family and harem lived. The operation to remove what was called his “three precious” was performed using only hot chili sauce as a local anesthetic. In 1997, a bizarre cult known as The Heaven’s Gate and led by Marshall Herff Applewhite, the sixty-six-year-old son of a Presbyterian minister, believed that the Hale-Bopp Comet was, actually, related to Biblical predictions. Its thirty-nine members committed suicide together, believing the “Higher Source” was about to recycle the Earth and the only hope for survival was to pass through death at the right time and be beamed up by an inter-galactic UFO piloted by the late Ms. Bonnie Nettles for a journey back “home.” One-third of the men had been castrated, in keeping with Matthew 19:12 and St. Paul’s invitation for his detractors to “ . . . I would that they go and castrate themselves” (Galatians 5:12). Like traditional Christian monks and nuns, the cult’s members were supposed to be completely celibate. Freethinkers find the subject of castration by religionists intriguing but inhumanistic. {CE; The Economist, 4 January 1997; The New York Times, 20 December 1996; RE}

EUPRAXOPHY A coinage by Paul Kurtz, eupraxophy means “good practice and wisdom.” It is a description of secular humanism’s being an ethical, philosophical, and scientific outlook, one which emphasizes a nonreligious way of life and cosmic outlook. Nicolas Walter as early as 1989 was negatively critical of the coinage, asking if humanism is a or an eupraxophy and observing that the word sounds peculiar. “I wonder,” he wrote, “whether anyone who seriously proposes the adoption by humanists of such a term as eupraxophy is thinking of them as human; and whether, if we seriously offered it to the wider public, we would be thinking of them as human. . . . I find it hard enough explaining what I mean by humanism and why I work for the humanist movement without wanting to make a complete fool of myself.” In Kansas City, Missouri, Verle Muhrer first defended use of the term, and the secular humanist building there is called The Eupraxophy Center - Muhrer then resigned from the center.

Euripides (c. 480—405 B.C.E.) Euripides—who wrote, “He was a wise man who originated the idea of God—was “closest . . . of the great Greek writers,” wrote Lamont, “to being a complete Humanist.” Illustrating that the gods do not determine your fate, so why waste your time with superstition, Euripides the playwright wrote: “Vain, vain were prayer and incense-swell and bull’s blood on the altars.” Robertson, commenting upon how such a view challenged a current view on the gods, stated that “If Euripides has nowhere ventured on such a terrific paradox, as the Prometheus, he has in a score of passages revealed a strain of skepticism which, inasmuch as he too uses all the forms of Hellenic faith, deepens our doubt as to the beliefs of Aeschylus.” Melanippe by Euripides begins with an audacious first line that evoked a great uproar: “Zeus, whoever Zeus be, for I know not, save by report.” He further depicts the gods as sometimes lawless and his characters impeach them as such or declare there can be no truth in the “miserable tales of poet” which so represent them. As regards his constructive opinions, Robertson wrote, “We have from him many expressions of the pantheism which had by his time permeated the thought of perhaps most of the educated Greeks.” A skeptic of the aggressive type, Euripides has been described as “Euripides the Rationalist” because of his systematic assault on the religion of his day. Of his eighty works, only eighteen are extant, and these include Medea (431 B.C.E.), Electra (413 B.C.E), and Orestes (408 B.C.E). His The Bacchae is a tragedy but one which has both a cross-dresser and two old men who are out cruising for hot dates. In 1995 Greek archeologists reported they had located the island cave on Salamis near Athens where Euripides probably wrote some of his ancient masterpieces. {CE; CL; JM; JMR; JMRH; The New York Times, 13 January 1997; RE; TYD}

EUROPE Europe is the sixth largest continent. As a word, Clive James has pointed out,

Europe goes back a long way: Assyrian inscriptions speak of the difference between asu (where the sun rises; i.e., Asia) and ereb (where it sets). As a place, Europe is old even by the standards of dynastic China and Pharonic Egypt. As an idea, though, Europe is comparatively new: the word European didn’t turn up in the language of diplomacy until the nineteenth century, and to think of Europe as one place had always taken some kind of supervening vision. Whatever unity existed within it came not through a unifying idea but through the exercise of power, and did not last. {The New Yorker, 28 April 1997}

EUROPE ET LAICITÉ A humanistic quarterly in French, Europe et Laicité is at 11 rue des Huguenots, 94420 Le Plessis-Trevise, France. <eurolaic@club-internet.fr>.

EUROPEAN HUMANIST FEDERATION (Fédération Humaniste Européene) The European Humanist Federation (EHF) was formed in 1991 to present the humanist outlook and to defend the rights of unbelievers in Europe before the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. In Berlin in 1993, the EHF had its initial congress. Member organizations at the outstart were Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Scotland, Slovakia, Sweden, and the former Yugoslavia. The Executive Committee in 1995 consisted of Steinar Nilsen (Norway) as President, Ann-Marie Franchi (France) and Rob Tielman (the Netherlands) as Vice-Presidents, Claude Wachtelaer (Belgium) as Secretary, and Klaus Sühl (Germany) as Treasurer General. In 1998 the Secretary General was Claude Wachtelaer and Nilsen remained as President. {International Humanist News, April 1996 and October 1998}

EUROPEAN HUMANIST PROFESSIONALS In 1994, the former International Association of Humanist educators, counselors, ceremony officiants, and staff members of humanist organizations was renamed the European Humanist Professionals. The group in 1995 met in Oslo. Its annual publication is obtained from Postbus 797, 3500 AT Utrecht, The Netherlands. Tel: +31-30-1290189; fax: +31-2390170; <hsn@uvh.nl>.

EUROPEAN UNITARIANS Gevene Hertz is president of the European Unitarian Universalists (EUU, Frydenlundsvej 49, DK-2950 Vedbeck, Denmark). EUU was founded in 1982 and includes seven fellowships of about two hundred adults and one hundred children with many members at large. The fellowships are led by religious education coordinators. Many members are Americans living permanently or temporarily in Europe. On the Web: <http://www.nordita.dk/~hertz/euu.html>.

Eusebius (4th Century?) Gilbert Murray’s Four Stages of Greek Religion contains the following “Pagan’s Prayer”:

May I be no man’s enemy, and may I be the friend of that which is eternal and abides. May I never quarrel with those nearest to me; and if I do, may I be reconciled quickly. May I never devise evil against any man. May I love, seek, and attain only that which is good. May I wish for all men’s happiness and envy none. May I never rejoice in the ill-fortune of one who has wronged me. When I have done or said what is wrong, may I never wait for the rebuke of others, but always rebuke myself until I make amends. May I win no victory that harms either me or my opponent. May I reconcile friends who are wroth with one another. May I, to the extent of my power, give all needful help to my friends and to all who are in want. May I never fail a friend in danger. When visiting those in grief, may I be able by gentle and healing words to soften their pain. May I respect myself. May I always keep tame that which rages within me. May I accustom myself to be gentle, and never be angry with people because of circumstances. May I never discuss who is wicked and what wicked things he has done, but know good men and follow in their footsteps.

Murray cites Eusebius as being possibly a 4th-century Greek. Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263—339?) was a Greek apologist and church historian, bishop of Palestine (314?—339) who played a part in the controversy over Arianism. Similarly Eusebius of Nicomedia (died 342) was a Christian churchman and theologian, leader of the heresy of Arianism and bishop of Nicomedia (330—339) as well as patriarch of Constantinople (339—342). The former objected to parts of the Nicean Creed and later did not support it. The latter signed the Nicene formulary but was exiled by Constantine, later becoming his advisor and an Arian. {CE}

EUTHANASIA

Euthanasia involves permitting a hopelessly sick or injured human, or animal, to be put to death as painlessly as possible. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), however, states that “sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible. Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.” It was not morally unacceptable to Sigmund Freud, who in 1939 ended his pain-filled life with morphine. Nor in the 1950s to the humanist minister Charles Frances Potter, who was president of the New York Euthanasia Society. The legality of euthanasia has been and continues to be tested in diverse places around the world. Derek Humphrey, founder of the Hemlock Society (USA) and author of Final Exit (1992), assisted his own wife, Jean, to die. Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, challenged the State of Michigan to legalize euthanasia by assisting individuals there to die by the use of his home-made “suicide machine,” and successfully completed several dozen euthanasias before being jailed. His confinement, to many, has made him a martyr. Physicians, it is generally agreed, have for centuries eased patients out of their final days of physical misery, but always with the threat of litigation and possible punishment—Freud’s own physician provided him with morphine. The Netherlands reportedly has the most liberal legal system for allowing euthanasia. In 1994, 1424 cases (roughly 2.1% of annual deaths) were reported there. Meanwhile, as they sometimes point out, viewers of horse racing on television have seen horses mercifully shot after breaking their legs in an accident, and they also have seen human beings kept alive for years in a state of vegetation. Bertrand Russell, in Unpopular Essays (1959), wrote as follows:

The whole conception of “Sin” is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. If “Sin” consisted in causing needless suffering, I could understand, but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering. Some years ago, in the English House of Lords, a bill was introduced to legalize euthanasia in cases of painful and incurable disease. The patient’s consent was to be necessary, as well as several medical certificates. To me, in my simplicity, it would seem natural to require the patient’s consent, but the late Archbishop of Canterbury, the English official expert on Sin, explained the erroneousness of such a view. The patient’s consent turned euthanasia into suicide, and suicide is sin. Their Lordships listened to the voice of authority and rejected the bill. (See entries for Australian and New Zealand Humanists, Jean Davies, Sigmund Freud and Karl-Henrik Nygaard.)

EUTHANASIA IN THE NETHERLANDS “Active euthanasia has been practiced in The Netherlands for more than twenty years,” according to Pieter V. Admiraal, considered by many to be the world’s leading spokesperson for the right to physician-assisted suicide. “Today the total number is estimated as 3,500 to 4,000 cases a year.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}

Eutyches (c. 378—452) Eutyches headed a monastery near Constantinople (modern Istanbul). When he originated the Monophysite heresy, holding that Christ had one nature that mingled human and divine elements, that after the incarnation He possessed only the divine nature, Eutyches was declared a heretic. An anti-Nestorian, he was subject of a general council ordered by Flavian, the Patriarch of Constantinople. The council met in Ephesus in 449 and by sheer physical violence annulled the excommunication of Eutyches (leading Pope Leo to call it the Robber Synod). In turn this led to the Council of Chalcedon (451), which ruled that Jesus Christ possessed two natures in one person, thereby condemning both Eutyches as well as Nestorius while approving Cyril of Alexandria. This led the Egyptian church, along with the Ethiopian, to adopt Monophysitism, as did the patriarchates of Jerusalem and Antioch. Eventually, Eutyches was again deposed and exiled. Monophysitism exacerbated the growing division between the eastern and western branches of Christianity, and despite Justinian I’s attempts to unite the groups, an enduring split followed between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. The Arab conquests of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt made the schism permanent. {CE; EH; ER}

EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN AMERICA The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, organized in 1870, is at 8765 West Higgins Road, Chicago, Illinois 60631. It represents over 5,100,000 members.

EVANGELISM • Evangelist, n. A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

	Evangelism refers to zealous preaching, as through missionary work. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were evangelists, as are Protestant preachers or missionaries who travel in order to disseminate what they hold is the gospel truth. An “Evangelical” believes in the sole authority and inerrancy of the Bible, holding that salvation can be obtained only through regeneration and in a spiritually transformed personal life. {DCL}

Evans, David Egan (1974- ) Evans was born and raised in Utah. While being raised as a Mormon, he found that his parallel interests of science and Mormon theology led him to recognize the inherent contradictions. During his two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his skepticism turned to humanism. Upon his return of a completed mission, he joined the American Humanist Association, later becoming a board member of the Humanist of Utah. A computer technical specialist for Packard Bell NEC, he is a student working toward a Bachelor’s Degree in physics, his minors being philosophy and chaos theory. E-mail: <dave@intelligentinquiry.com>. On the Web: <http://intelligentinquiry.com/>.

Evans, Don (20th Century) Evans is Secretary of the Washington Area Secular humanists in the nation’s capital.

Evans, Elizabeth Edson (19th Century) Evans, a freethinker, wrote The Christ Myth (1900). {GS}

Evans, Gareth John (1944— ) Evans is an Australian humanist, atheist, lawyer, and politician. He has been a Senator in Victoria since 1978 and a leader of the government in the Senate since 1993. In 1990 he received Humanist of the Year Award. A commitment to humanism and a generally non-religious view of the world stems from his 1958 experiences of Billy Graham’s first crusade in Australia—at the age of fourteen, Evans became a committed and comprehensive skeptic, then an agnostic, now an atheist. Reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not A Christian, he reports, was a major influence on his thought. {SWW}

Evans, George Henry (1803—1855) Evans emigrated from England to New York while a child. He set up as a printer, publishing the Correspondent, the first American freethought paper. He also published the Working Man’s Advocate, Man, Young America, and the Radical. He editorialized upon behalf of delivery of mail on Sundays, the limitation of the right to hold lands, the abolition of slavery, and other reforms. His brother became one of the chief elders of the Shakers. Evans died in Granville, New Jersey. {BDF; FUS; RAT; RE}

Evans, John (19th Century) A freethinker, Evans wrote History of All Christian Sects (1875). {GS}

Evans, Mary Anne: See entry for George Eliot.

Evans, Richard M. (1933-1998) Evans taught educational psychology at the University of Houston, Morningside College, and the U. S. Naval Academy. A colonel, he was commander of the Marine Corps Communications Electronics School. One of the founders of the Free Inquiry Society of Central Florida, he named its newsletter Veritas. Upon retiring, he had become public relations director for the area’s symphony orchestra before his death from cancer.

Evans, Rod (20th Century) Evans, with Irwin M. Berent, wrote Fundamentalism: Hazards and Heartbreaks (1994), which investigates what has gone wrong with religious fundamentalism and why.

Evans, T. (19th Century)

In the 1880s, Evans in what was considered a rare event wrote for Secular Review in Welsh about a freethought group which had started in Rhybydd. {RSR}

Evans, William (1816—1887) Evans, of Swansea, became a follower of Robert Owen. He established The Potter’s Examiner and Workman’s Advocate (1843) and wrote in the co-operative journals under the anagram of Millway Vanes. {BDF}

Evansgardner, JoAnn (20th Century) Evansgardner, from Pennsylvania, is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Evanson, Edward (1731—1805) Evanson was a theological critic who had been a vicar but entertained so many doubts about the Trinity that he began expressing heretical opinions. In 1771 he was prosecuted, but because of some irregularity in the proceedings escaped any consequences. In 1773 he addressed a letter to the Bishop of Lichfield, trying to show that either Christianity was false or else the orthodox churches were, and in the following year he resigned. His The Dissonance of the Four Generally-Received Evangelists (1792) rejected all the gospels, except Luke, as inauthentic. The work resulted in a controversy with Dr. Priestley and, as described by Wheeler, “a considerable share of obliquy and persecution from the orthodox.” {BDF}

Evatt, Elizabeth Andreas [Justice] (1933— ) The Honourable Justice Evatt is an Australian reformer and barrister. As president of the Law Reform Commission, she said, “Australia should be prepared to examine its dominant cultures, religions, and practices in the light of human rights standards, as well as evaluating the religions and practices of minorities. We should apply the same critical eye to Judaeo-Christian as to Islamic practices. Just as polygamy may be thought to be incompatible with standards of equality, so may be many Christian practices.” Evatt has held a number of prominent appointments including, in 1989, being chairperson of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. She has edited two books: A Guide to Family Law and Do It Yourself Divorce. {SWW}

EVE The Judeo-Christian Eve is unflatteringly depicted as the mother of two sons: one a killer, one the killed. (See a discussion of “The African Eve” under the entry for Martin G. Bernal. For the oldest naturalistic humanist, see entry for Lucy.)

Evêmeros: See entry for Euhemerus.

Everett, Charles Carroll (1829—1900) A librarian and instructor in modern languages, Everett taught at Harvard’s Divinity School about non-Christian religions. He was a Unitarian who believed that Christianity was the “absolute” religion because of the university of its application, its intuitive nature, and its grounding in the person of Jesus. He defined religion in Theism and the Christian Faith (1909) as “the Feeling toward a Spiritual Presence manifesting itself in Truth, Goodness and Beauty, especially as illustrated in the life and teaching of Jesus and as experienced in every soul that is open to its influence.” {U&U}

Everett, Edward (1794—1865) Everett was a Unitarian minister who became Governor of Massachusetts, President of Harvard, a U.S. Senator, and a Secretary of State. But he is remembered as being the one who orated for two hours preceding Lincoln’s delivery of the 272-word “Gettysburg Address.” Garry Wills in Lincoln At Gettysburg, The Words That Remade America (1992), relates how Everett had been Emerson’s teacher at Harvard and was a transcendentalist. Trained in Germany in the classics and a professor of Greek at Harvard, Everett was a practitioner of elaborate classical oratory.

	But it was Lincoln (whom Wills calls “a Transcendentalist without the fuzziness”) who had the classical epitaphios, with its two essential sections: epainesis, or praise for the fallen; and parainesis, or advice for the living. Like Pericles, he and Everett in their “Dedicatory Remarks” and “Oration,” respectively, gave a tribute to fallen warriors which is remembered and which established a model for future American funeral orations. Lincoln was never a student of Everett, but as described by Wills “the two speakers drew on a shared philosophical tradition both men honored.” In Boston, Everett had been pastor of the Brattle Street Church. {CE; EG; U; UU}

Everett, Millard S(penser). (Born 1897) When he wrote reviews for The Humanist, Everett was in the philosophy department at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Everett, Walter Goodnow (20th Century) Everett wrote Moral Values (1918). {GS}

Evershed, Mary (19th Century) A freethinker, Evershed wrote “Two Letters Addressed to the Bishop of Ripon, On Secularism, the Holy Scriptures, and the Geophysical Position of the Garden of Eden” (1876?). {GS}

EVIL Evil, the antithesis of good, is a concept which leads to the philosophical problem, Why does evil exist in the world? Traditional Christian belief ascribes evil to the misdeeds of men, to whom God has granted “free will.” Dualism, an explanation found in Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, holds that two opposing principles exist in the universe. The biblical Job is a literary treatment of the problem, as is Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. Many contemporaries reason that if there were an all-powerful God, He could have prevented evil. If God were truly and perfectly good, He would have prevented evil. The fact that evil exists in incompatible, therefore, with the traditional God. Perhaps we all want to have a touch of evil in us, Jean Cocteau dramatized. In Beauty and the Beast, the movie version of which starred Greta Garbo, the monster metamorpohosizes into a handsome prince and Garbo states, “Give me back my beast!” The British biologist Lyall Watson, writing in Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (1996), defines evil as a violation of the ecological order. The word evil comes from ubiloz, an Old Teutonic word with a root meaning “up” or “over.” Aristotle thought of moderation as a “golden mean,” but Watson refers to the “Goldilocks Effect, nature’s way of getting things ‘just right.’” Although living objects have “an innate predisposition towards equilibrium,” he states, an amoral and persistent competition of genes to stay alive helps upset that equilibrium. He cites such examples as the spotted hyena that bears twins and “within minutes of birth one of the cubs attacks its twin, sometimes savaging a brother or sister that has not yet even emerged from its amniotic sac” in order to fight for a parent’s nurture. (See John Updike’s “Elusive Evil, An Idea Whose Time Keeps Coming,” The New Yorker, 22 July 1996) Numbers of humanists have expressed themselves on the subject—almost all major creative humanists have included evil characters in their operas, paintings, short stories, dramas, novels, plays, etc. However, the average individual finds the entire concept nebulous and concentrates, instead, upon laws that delineate that which is good and punish that which society considers bad. As a result, what is “evil” or bad in one setting might be considered “good” or legal in another, depending upon legislation enacted by individuals in the various communities. Bertrand Russell in Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell (1927) divided evil into three classes:

• evils due to a physical nature: death, pain, and the difficulty of making the soil yield a subsistence; • evils springing from defects in the character or aptitudes of the sufferer: ignorance, lack of will, and violent passions; • evils that depend upon the power of one individual or group over another: these comprise not only obvious tyranny, but all interference with free development, whether by force or by excessive mental influence such as may occur in education. (See entries for Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Iago; and discussion of evil in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3. Also, see entry for pickpocketry, which tells the freethinkers’ view about diddling: that we do not choose between good and evil but, rather, among several options.) {RE}

Evison, Joseph (19th Century) Evison, whose nickname was “Ivo,” edited the weekly Rationalist in Auckland, New Zealand, from 1885 to 1886. {FUK}

EVOLUTION “Under the restraining influence of the Church,” notes the Columbia Encyclopedia, “no evolutionary theories developed during some fifteen centuries of the Christian era to challenge the belief in special creation and the literal interpretation of the first part of Genesis; however, much data was accumulated that was to be utilized by later theorists.” The work cites secular humanist James H. Birx’s Theories of Evolution (1984) as a major explanation of “acquired characteristics,” “natural selection,” and the theories of A. R. Wallace, Charles Robert Darwin, and others. Creationists and Christian fundamentalists do not accept the Darwinian theory of evolution. Pope John Paul in 1996 decreed, however, that the theory of evolution was “more than just a hypothesis,” after which Cardinal John O’Connor of New York suggested it is possible that the first life on Earth was a “lower animal,” that Adam and eve were “some other form” than man and woman. Darwin’s original theory as modified, however, is generally accepted by scientists and has been enhanced with evidence from biochemistry and molecular biology, all the while utilizing his basic study of comparative anatomy, embryology, geographical distribution, and paleontology. The origins of humanity are believed to lie in Africa. Over a million years ago, people of a species known as Homo erectus moved into Asia, then fragmented with one group—Neanderthal man—spreading into Europe. A second migration 100,000 years ago saw a new human species—Homo sapiens—move from Africa, at which time these newcomers replaced their older relatives and modern humanity came into its own. Or so the neat story goes, according to The Economist (26 February 1994). However, such a view is changing. In 1891 Homo erectus fossils were found in Java and have been dated at being between 700,000 and 1,000,000 years old. According to Carl Swisher and Garniss Curtis of the University of California at Berkeley, those Javan fossils are much older, perhaps 1,800,000 or even 1,900,000 years old and making them contemporary with bones from East Africa. If their findings are accepted, the African and Asian populations of Homo erectus may actually be separate species. In such a case, they hold, Homo erectus migrated into Africa, rather than out of it. Few evolutionists doubt, states The Economist, “that the ultimate origins of human beings lie in Africa. Australopithecus, the only begetter of all things hominid, is found nowhere else.” Not yet, yes, reply Chinese scientists who are diligently searching for such a specimen. In 1999 when Kansas legislated that creationism had to be taught in schools in addition to the theory of evolution, William Silverton of Halifax, Nova Scotia, wittily observed that no one can lose: “if the evolutionists win the battle for the minds of young Kansans, then of course we all win; if the creationists come out on top, it proves that . . . evolution can proceed backward as well as forward.” “Lucy,” the skeleton of one of the oldest human forebears which was found in 1974, has been determined by geologists to be 3.2 million years old, plus or minus 10,000 years. Named for the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” she rests in a wooden box in a safe in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (See entries for Evil, Genesis, and Richard Hawkins. Cretinism or Evilution, a newsletter published by E. T. Babinski [109 Burwood Drive, Simpsonville, SC 29681], pokes fun at creationism and critics of evolutionism.) {CE; JMRH; Michael Ruse, editor, Philosophy of Biology; PUT; RE}

EVOLUTION AND FAITH Pope Pius XII cautioned in a 1950 encyclical, “Humani Generis,” that although the faithful might regard evolutionary theory as just that—a “serious hypothesis”—they must not proclaim it as “certain doctrine.” Pope John Paul II in a solemn statement delivered in 1996 to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, declared that “fresh knowledge” produced by scientific research now led to the “recognition of the theory of evolution as more than just a hypothesis.” As in the past all creation stemmed from the hand of God, the Pope noted, even if the human body proved to have its origins in “living material that pre-exists it,” but Roman Catholics must believe that “the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.” Inasmuch as teaching in Catholic schools and universities in most countries was already generally accepted as a standard part of the curriculum, the Pope’s declaration had little effect. A headline in the conservative daily Il Giornale blared out, THE POPE SAYS WE MAY DESCEND FROM MONKEYS.

Ewart, Gavin Buchanan (1916—1995) Ewart in 1994 became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In New Humanist (August 1995), he wrote:

I was born in London in February 1916, of Scottish descent. My father was a surgeon at St. George’s Hospital in the days when it was still at Hyde Park Corner. I was educated at Wellington College and Christ’s College, Cambridge. I did classics at school and university—though I switched to English for my last two years at Cambridge. Reading Lucretius, with his denunciations of conventional religion, may have affected me (also, perhaps, Thomas Hardy). My father, if not an atheist, was certainly an agnostic of an anti-Presbyterian kind. My grandfather James Cossar Ewart was a Darwinian Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh. In order not to offend the Sabbath sensibilities of Penicuik, I remember being forbidden to play with a ball on Sunday. My upbringing, therefore, except outwardly (in Scotland) and for conformist reasons, was not a pious one. From the age of 16 I interested myself in poetry; and in 1933, when I was seventeen, my first ‘adult’ poem was published by Geoffrey Grigson in New Verse, heavily influenced by the poetry of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I came later under the influence of W. H. Auden, whom I still consider the greatest English-language poet of this century. My first book was published in 1939 and since then, apart from the period of the War when I wrote very little, I have continued writing poems very steadily. There are two major collections—The Collected Ewart 1939—1980 and Collected Poems 1980—1990. The latest book is 85 Poems. All are published by Hutchinson. I also edited, in 1978, The Penguin Book of Light Verse. The work of which I am most proud is the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse that I was given in 1991 by the American Academy.

Ewart also wrote Londoners (1964) and Other People’s Clerihews (1983), a clerihew being an epigrammatic verse-form invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley and consisting of two rhymed couplets, usually dealing with the character of a well-known person; e.g.,

Sir James Jeans Always says what he means; He is really perfectly serious About the Universe being Mysterious.

In a foreword to Bet Cherrington’s compilation, Facing the World: An Anthology of Poetry for Humanism (1989), Ewart observed: “The rationalist and the atheist must be stoical. There is no afterlife, and justice may never be done. Bernard Shaw once wrote that all great truths begin as blasphemies. It’s certainly true of this one, as the persecution of unbelievers throughout the centuries adequately proves. If we want justice on the earth, in this life, we must get it ourselves.” {OEL}

Ewerbeck, August Hermann (19th Century) Ewerbeck was born in Dantzic but, after the events of 1848, lived at Paris. He translated into German Cabot’s Voyage en Icarie and several works by Feuerbach. In What Is In the Bible? he translated from Daumer, Ghillany, Luetzelberger, and B. Bauer. {BDF} EXCELLENCE • Be not elated at any excellence that is not your own. If the horse in his elation were to say, “I am beautiful,” it could be endured; but when you say in your elation, “I have a beautiful horse,” rest assured that you are elated at something good that belongs to a horse. —Epictetus

EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE Not all human beings resemble the classic beauty exemplified by Ancient Greek statuary. In the animal (and insect) world, those who differ greatly are the subject of teratology, the study of “exceptional people” or malformations or so-called “monstrosities.” Dwarfs, for example, have a defective cartilage or bone growth that usually is genetically transferred. Midgets’ bodies are proportionately correct miniatures caused by a malfunction of the pituitary gland, which often can be corrected with hormonal treatments. Numbers of midgets (munchkins) were hired to perform in the M-G-M Studios film, “The Wizard of Oz,” which starred Judy Garland. Children often love dwarfs and midgets. Frederick Drimmer’s Very Special People, the Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities (1973) and Leslie Fiedler’s Freaks (1993) describe other “exceptional people,” which is the descriptive phrase used by many empathetic freethinkers. (See entry for Teratology.) {Todd S. Purdum, The New York Times, 3 November 1997}

EXCOMMUNICATION Excommunication is thought by believers to be the gravest of all ecclesiastical censures. It involves formal expulsion from a religious body. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jews. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I, was twice excommunicated, first by Pope Innocent III and then by Innocent IV. The Vatican lists excommunicates as either vitandi (those whom the Holy See has expressly excommunicated by name as persons to be specially shunned in religious matters and so far as possible in secular matters) or tolerati (the other excommunicates). Muslims have been known to be far more severe upon finding any of their adherents accused of grave offenses. Some Protestant groups have placed all responsibility for final disciplinary action in the assembly church body, whereas others delegated the responsibility to a church council or committee—most, however, have abandoned the practice. Anyone who dies excommunicate is not publicly prayed for, and excommunicates are invited to repent and return in order to be readmitted. Greg Erwin, the Canadian who is president of the Coalition of Secular Humanists, Atheists, and Freethinkers (CSHAFT), urges former members of churches to remain excommunicates, not seek repentance and return to the church. If their names have not been removed from the membership records, he urges individuals to insist that they be removed. (See entry for Greg Erwin.) {CE; ER; RE}

EXISTENCE: Do centaurs, dragons, and Pegasus exist? Do qualities, relations, numbers, and abstract objects exist? A cogent explanation is found in “Existence” in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.

EXISTENTIALISM Pascal, St. Augustine, Socrates, Karl Jaspers, Miguel de Unamuno, and even the novelist Norman Mailer have been associated with the philosophical system called existentialism. So have theologians Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Rudolf Bultmann, Søren Kierkegaard, and Paul Tillich. Chiefly a 20th century movement in philosophy, existentialism centers on individual humans, who are trying to live out their lives in an unfathomable universe, one in which they with free will they must try to determine without certainty what is right or wrong or good or bad. The self-declared existentialist among the major thinkers is Jean-Paul Sartre, whose summary description, “existence precedes essence,” means that the essence or idea of God and the gods came fairly recently, that matter existed long before humans invented such deities. Sartre believed that there is no fixed human nature, that mankind is totally free, that mankind with such a dread responsibility is understandably anguished. Naturalistic and secular humanists have been negatively critical about some aspects of existentialism, explaining that, although existence precedes essence, the negativism of Sartre need not necessarily follow. A. J. Ayer in Rationalist Annual (1948) accused Sartre of systematically misusing, in his ontology, the verb “to be.” Ayer and other atheists much preferred a positive humanism, such as that of Camus. On the subject, Delmore Schwartz has quipped, “Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.” The First Existentialist Congregation (Unitarian Universalist) of Atlanta, Georgia, was voted in 1995 the “Most Welcoming Spiritual Organization” by readers of the gay/lesbian/bisexual weekly Southern Voice. The congregation is the only Unitarian Universalist group that cites existentialism in its title. (See a detailed discussion of existentialism in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.)

EXORCISM Exorcism is a novel theological invention by which practitioners, or exorcists, expel an evil spirit, usually using some kind of incantation. In Paris the Notre Dame Cathedral’s exorcist is the Rev. Claude Nicolas, who holds that “there are a lot of things brewing that disturb people. There are all sorts of sects and black cults. Some people believe there is a spell on them. Some openly talk about the Devil. Of course,” he added, “the evil spirit often disguises a serious mental problem.” Taking more of a Medieval approach, the Vatican claims that the demand for exorcism has steadily grown. As a result, it has encouraged bishops to appoint more exorcists. The Devil, the Church teaches, is real and evil spirits exist. The official exorcist for the Archdiocese of New York is the Rev. James LeBar, a “soldier of the Cross” who performed ten exorcisms in 1998. “Maybe only 10% of the people who contact us requires [sic] an exorcism,” he told a Daily News religion reporter (6 Feb 99), “and that’s after the required psychiatric and medical examinations.” Meanwhile, since the 1970s, charismatic Christians have been sweeping through the ranks of mainstream Protestant and Catholic churches, telling their followers they were possessed by the demons of nicotine, alcohol, abortion, homosexuality, and more. {The New York Times, 15 June 1998}

EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE Freethinker Tom Paine, after befriending scientists Benjamin Martin and James Ferguson, became convinced that through science one can find his own way without the aid (or hindrance) of kings and priests. The three were intrigued by globes of the earth and, in Paine’s words, “the natural bent of my mind was to science. As soon as I was able, I purchased a pair of globes.” This led him to argue that “there is room for millions of worlds as large or larger than ours, and each of them millions of miles apart from each other. . . . The inhabitants of each of the worlds of which our system is composed enjoy the same opportunities of knowledge as we do.” In short, Paine was one of the first in Colonial America who held such an advanced view. In the 1950s, Julian Huxley, among others, extrapolated that some forms of life exist in other parts of the universe, adding that it would be presumptuous for those of us on Earth to assume that we are the only forms of life throughout the various galaxies. Paul Davis, in Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life (1995), is one of many others who hold that life exists in extraterrestrial places. He supports a program called SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which beams radio telescopes at thousands of star systems in the hope that signals will be received from “out there.” Were a signal received, he reasoned, the discovery would be even more profound than the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. “If human intelligence is just an evolutionary accident, as orthodox Darwinists claim,” he writes, “then there is no reason to expect that life on other planets will ever develop intelligence as far as we have.” But if we ever do detect some alien intelligence, “it would suggest that there is a progressive evolutionary trend outside the mechanism of natural selection.” It would also suggest that we are not alone in the vastness of space, that “[t]he certain existence of alien beings would give us cause to believe that we, in our humble way, are part of a larger, majestic process of cosmic self-knowledge.” Particularly important, such a discovery would undermine the religionists’ faith in Genesis and organized religion itself, not that theological apologists would soon be put out of business. In 1996 a 13,000-year-old meteorite fragment from Mars , ALH84001, was found in the Allan Hills in Antarctica by a group of American researchers led by David McKay of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It initially appeared to have traces of alien life forms, whereupon several theological apologists were quick to point out that God had sent all the fallen angels to Mars, which explained how life had gotten there. The scientific community recalled that an 1864 meteorite known as the Orgueil impact at first was thought to contain, in the words of Bartholomew Nagy, “organized elements.” Later, and although Dr. Nagy never himself claimed he had found traces of life, the elements turned out to be particles of furnace ash and grains of ragweed. As of mid-1996, scientists generally held that the only way to be sure of life on the Red Planet is to go to Mars and return with some samples of rock. (See entry for Milky Way.) {Timothy Ferris, “A Message From Mars,” The New Yorker, 19 August 1996} EYE Creationists argue that the eye could not have developed through evolution, that only God could have created such an organ. However, according to Richard Dawkins in New Statesman and Society (16 June 1995), Swedish scientists have used a computer program to demonstrate that a single light-sensitive cell could develop into a fish eye in 400,000 years. {Skeptical Inquirer, November-December 1995}

Eyschen, Christian (20th Century) is secretary general of La Libre Pensée.

Eysenck, H(ans) J(urgen) (1916— ) A professor of psychology at the London University Institute of Psychiatry, Eysenck is chief editor of Behaviour Research and Therapy. Among his books are The Biological Basis of Personality (1967), Sense and Nonsense in Psychology (1957), and Description and Measurement of Personality (1968). Eysenck was active in the British humanist movement. {HM2; PK; TRI}

Ezekiel, Moses Jacob (1844-1917) Ezekiel was an American sculptor who served in the Confederate Army (1864-1865), afterwareds studying sculpture in Berlin and Italy. He greeted the Freethought Congress of 1904. {RAT}

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