F
From Philosopedia
Faber, Roger J. (1931- ) Faber, a freethinker, wrote Clockwork Garden: On the Mechanistic Reduction of Living Things (1986). {GS}
Fabre d’Eglantine, Philippe François Nazaire (1755-1794) A French revolutionist and playwright, Fabre d’Eglantine was chosen as a deputy to the National Convention. He voted for the death of Louis XVI and proposed the substitution of the republican for the Christian calendar. With his friend, Danton, Fabre d’Eglantine was executed in 1794. {BDF}
Fabre, Ferdinand (1830-1898) Fabre was a French novelist who abandoned his early studies for the priesthood. His novel, Les Courbezon (1861), was crowned by the Academy. His L’abbé Tigrane (1873) won for him a high position. In 1883 he became librarian of the Bibliothèque Mazarin. In his many stories of clerical life, Fabre is tender to his old Church, but he remained outside it. {RAT}
Fabre, Jean Henri (1823—1915) Fabre, a French entomologist, was the son of a priest. His books on insect life, although in some respects corrected by later scientific work, had a high international reputation. Although religious writers quote him as one of their “great Catholic scientists,” D. G. Legros in a biography expressly says that Fabre was “free from all superstition and quite indifferent to dogmas and miracles.” Although Fabre refused even to read Darwin’s Origin—the Athenaeum wrongly said in its obituary notice that he was an early adherent of Darwinism—he was, states McCabe, “merely a stubborn Vitalist, like Butler. He was a Theist, but, as his chief biographer, D. G. Legros, says, he was ‘free from all superstition and quite indifferent to dogmas and miracles.’ ” {JM; RAT; RE}
Fabricatore, Bruto (1824-1869) Fabricatore was an Italian writer whose father Antonio had the honor of having a political work placed on the Index in 1821. Fabricatore took part in the anti-papal Freethought Council of 1869 and has written works on Dante and others. {BDF; RAT}
Fagan, Brock (20th Century) Fagan, a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa in the 1940s, was an iconoclast, a unitarian, an Emersonian, a pessimist, and a particular favorite of students because of his outspoken views about the weaknesses of human institutions. He fearlessly taught about atheism, deism, transcendentalism, and the literary, philosophic humanism favored by Midwestern Unitarianism. Some Iowans knew him only as the person who wrote iconoclastic as well as acerbic letters to the editor so often on so many topics.
Fagan, John (19th Century) In 1862 Fagan began to work on behalf of London’s National Secular Society, and from 1870 he devoted his evenings and Sundays to walking round freethought and republican meetings selling the National Reformer and freethought publications. {RSR}
Faggi, Adolfo (Born 1868) Faggi was an Italian philosopher. He wrote works on psychology and philosophy, his La Religione e il suo Avvenire (1892) being both rationalistic and positivistic. {RAT}
Faguet, Auguste Émile (1847-1916) Faguet taught literature at the Sorbonne. A leading literary and dramatic critic, he was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and a member of the French Academy. In Voltaire (1895), he deprecates active hostility to Christianity. The work is a type of “non-aggressive agnosticism.” {RAT}
Fahnestock, Leroy W. (20th Century) Fahnestock’s “The Problem of Man” appeared in Joseph Lewis’s freethought publication, Age of Reason (January, 1964). He was a generous contributor to Joseph Lewis and his Freethinkers of America.
Fahringer, Catherine (1922- ) Fahringer founded the Freethought Forum. An atheist, she hesitates when people assume she is like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, saying, “There are other atheists out there. They are beautiful people. Madalyn’s not, unfortunately.” Fahringer, from Texas, is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. {WWS}
Fahs, Sophia Lyon (1876-1978) Fahs, who was born in China where her parents were Presbyterian missionaries, was the principal figure in the remaking of Unitarian religious educational materials during the 1930s. Not until she was eighty-two was she ordained into the Unitarian ministry. She recognized the often overlooked importance of early childhood education, and she worked to provide suitable materials to be used with Unitarian youth. A posthumous work of hers is Old Tales for a New Day (1981). {GS; U; U&U}
Fairfield, Roy P(hilip) (1918- ) Fairfield is a former professor of political science at Antioch University in Ohio. Also, he is a director of the Union for Experimental Colleges. Fairfield edited Humanistic Frontiers in American Education (1971). In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. In addition, he is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism and a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. He was a key person giving editorial guidance in the writing of Humanist Manifesto II and signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {HM2; HNS2; PK; SHD}
FAIRNESS AND ACCURACY IN REPORTING Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is found on the Web: <http://www.org/fair/>.
FAIRY When one religion triumphs over another, states Paul G. Morrison, who was curator of the rare book room at the University of Chicago libraries, “the gods of the vanquished faith may be identified with those of the victorious one, or rejected as demons. The Celtic religion evaded both prongs of this fork, and by shrinkage of the old gods made fairies, brownies, or ‘little people’ of them. Thus they are still here, still helpful, although sometimes mischievous, and always shrink from holy water and the sign of the cross.” No professional philosopher is known to have verified through testing that such exist, except as a meaningless postulation. However, a Greenwich Village wag alleges that a large numbers of fairies have been seen in the rest rooms of churches, libraries . . . and even skirting about in offices of the most prestigious philosophy departments. {ER}
FAITH Faith (fiducia) refers in religion to a trusting and confident belief, without any proof, in God. One can have implicit faith that God exists and that He will reward those who seek to know Him. The clergy during the Middle Ages were required to have explicit faith in what was termed “the intelligent acceptance of the doctrines of the Church, and involving therefore a clear apprehension of the details of those doctrines.” Faith (fides) is a reference to our perceptual awareness of our material environment; for example, when driving we have faith that the approaching car will stay on its side of the road, at least until we see otherwise. Lord Russell in Bertrand Russell on God and Religion has been quoted on the subject:
We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion [feelings] for evidence. The substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions. Christians have faith in the resurrection, Communists have faith in Marx’s theory of value. Neither faith can be defended rationally, and each is therefore defended by propaganda and, if necessary, by war.
Quips on the subject include the following:
• “Faith” is a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see— But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.
—Walt Whitman
• Faith, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• Though I do not believe that a plan will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders. —Henry David Thoreau
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. —H. L. Mencken
• Faith is when you believe something that nobody in his right mind would believe. —Archie Bunker, a character in the 1970 sitcom “All in the Family”
• Faith without reason is madness. —Lloyd Dettering
• It takes a lot more faith to live this life without faith than with it. —Peter De Vries
• Faith is believing what you know isn’t true. Ted Kahn, in 3001 by —Arthur C. Clark {See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, for a detailed discussion; ER}
FAITH ATHEISM (Faitheism) Faith Atheism is a recent Internet coinage. According to its proponents the “faitheists” agree on the following:
• No God or gods exist. • Neither humans nor the universe was created by a “higher” power. • There is no immortal soul nor is there an afterlife.
Calling themselves religious, the faitheists differ from the standard variety of atheists, who do not regard atheism as a religion. Instead, faitheists realize that it is impossible to prove that no god or gods exist, just as theists cannot prove that a god does exist. The faitheists, however, have faith that no god exists.
{The Freethinker, November-December 1998}
FAITH IN GOD A 1916 survey of 1000 randomly selected scientists by James Leuba, an atheist, indicated that of the 600 who responded 50% said they believed in personal immortality but only 40% believed in God. A 1997 study by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia found that the depth of religious faith among scientists had not changed much. The new study found that 40% of the biologists, physicists, and mathematicians who responded to the same questions said they believed in God, the kind who answers prayers. Meanwhile, 93% of the general American public continues to believe in God, according to national polls. (See entry for James Leuba.)
Falck, Hans S. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Falck was distinguished professor of the Menninger Foundation. He wrote Social Work: The Membership Perspective (1988). {HM2}
Falconi, Carlo (20th Century) Falconi wrote The Popes in the Twentieth Century: From Pius X to John XXIII (1967).
FALLACIES Fallacies in philosophy can be categorized as follows:
• formal, involving the calculus of propositions; e.g., using p and q, non-p, non-q; • informal, involving ambiguities and vagueness; e.g., does “Men are unwise” mean all, or some?; • errors in non-deductive reasoning and in observation; e.g., the illusion that the land is rolling when one goes ashore after having become used to the rolling of a ship; • errors in discourse; e.g., inconsistency; petitio principii; a priori fallacies; ignoratio elenchi; is “I haven’t got no money” proof of an educated individual’s having enough to buy a dinner, or proof of an uneducated individual’s inability to buy a dinner?; • errors of interrogation; e.g., “Have you topped reading your horoscope?”, which, if answered yes, means you once did; and, if answered no, that you still read your horoscope; although in fact you have never wasted your time on such; • errors in explanation and definition; e.g., in which the definitions lead to circular arguments; and • philosophic fallacies; e.g., arguing “is” from “ought.” (See a discussion by J. L. Mackie in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3.)
Fallières, Clément Armand [President] (Born 1841) Fallières was the eighth President of the French Republic. In 1876 when he entered the Chambre, he was a supporter of Gambetta’s anti-clerical campaign. In 1890 he was Minister of Justice and Cults, during which time he severely checked the clergy. Fallières was a rationalist. {RAT}
FALSIFIABLE That which is falsifiable can be shown to be false: • The only state capitol building in Iowa is in Des Moines. That which is unfalsifiable cannot be shown to be false: • God told me to do it.
FAME • There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. —Oscar Wilde
FALSIFICATION: See entry for Karl Popper.
FAMILY The family is an “obsolete and exploitative institution,” according to Tom Flynn:
(1) Like priestcraft, matrimony, and monarchy, the family is just the sort of pre-Enlightenment institution that secular humanists and other progressives have historically striven to undermine. At humanism’s core lies enmity toward all things medieval, authoritarian, and obscurantist. As medieval holdovers go, the family may be short on obscurantism, but it’s drenched in authoritarianism. It’s second only to matrimony in transmitting the idea of women as brood animals. In perpetuating the idea of children as property, it has no peer. The family must go.
(2) In our overpopulated world, the family lends luster to the idea that everyone should find a partner of the opposite sex and pump out babies. Recent trends toward fewer births per family (in the industrial world, at least) are laudable. But why not a society where forming a family and reproducing are simply viewed as two options among many–options jointly exercised by, perhaps, only a third of the reproductive-age population? That would really give us a handle on population control! The family must go!
Finally, (3) the family stands in the way of another implicit humanist goal: decoupling sex from reproduction and reproduction from parenting. The birth control explosion of the 60s emancipated much sex from reproduction. Yet even today, few can imagine anyone but themselves raising their kids, as though conception and childbirth imply anything about one’s capacity to prepare a child for today’s complex world. {Tom Flynn, “What’s Wrong With the Family,” Secular Humanist Bulletin, Summer 1997}
FAMILY MATTERS Family Matters, a quarterly of the Council for Secular Humanism, is a newsletter of the Secular Family Network. t is at P. O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. The editor is Jan Loeb Eisler. E-mail: <familynews@secularhumanism.org>.
FAMILY OF HUMANISTS Family of Humanists (PO Box 4153, Salem, Oregon 97302) publishes magazines for youth: Sunrise Journal (to age 8); Stargazer (ages 8 to 11); Starwalker (ages 12 and up). Also, an adult newsletter is available from <LloydK@Teleport.com>.
FAMILY VALUES In the 1990s, many used “family values” as a code word meaning “anti-homosexuality.” Politicians who pointed to any breakdown in the family social structure argued for a return to Biblical standards. The Bible’s message, they stated, is not only one of charity but also one in which individuals have a duty to themselves and to their family to take responsibility where they can. Ferdinand Mount, in his The Subversive Family, found just the opposite. The Christ’s message, he said, was
• I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.
and
• If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. {London Sunday Times, 3 November 1996}
FANATICISM • A fanatic is a man who does what he thinks the Lord would do if only He knew the facts of the case. —Finley Peter Dunne
• A man is a fanatic if he thinks one matter is so overwhelmingly important that it outweighs anything else at all. To take an example, I suppose all decent people dislike cruelty to dogs; but if you thought that cruelty to dogs was so atrocious that no other cruelty should be objected to in comparison, then you would be a fanatic.” And he added that fanaticism is important “because a very great part of the evils that the world is suffering is due to fanaticism. —Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1969) (Also, see Bertrand Russell’s comments in the entry for Islam.)
Fang Fuy Ruan (20th Century) Fang Fuy Ruan from China addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). Fang is author of Sex In China (1991).
Fanon, Frantz Omar (1925—1961) Fanon was born in Martinique, educated in France, and became an Algerian psychiatrist and editor of the Algerian National Front’s newspaper. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), he called for an anticolonial revolution led not by the proletariat but by the peasants of the Third World. Fanon looked forward to a new breed of humanistic man, modern yet proud of his nonwhite heritage, which would emerge from such a struggle. {CE}
Fantus, Bernard (1874—1940) Born in Budapest, Fantus came to the United States in 1889 and became a professor of pharmacology at the University of Illinois and editor for twenty-two years of The Yearbook of Therapeutics. In 1937 Fantus established the world’s first blood bank. He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I and the posthumous recipient in 1976 of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Pioneer Award. Fantus in 1935 wrote,
Rest treatment should merely be a preliminary to the more important portion of therapy: the refitting of the individual for work and life. . . . Vocational rehabilitation, actual training for a trade, is a need of the chronically sick and permanently disabled . . . and [is] the single most important problem of medical statesmanship today. {FUS; HM1}
Farber, Ellen (20th Century) Farber is Executive Director of the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York.
Farber, Marvin (1901—1980) Farber was the long-time chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. A naturalist in philosophy, he developed a theory of evolution that had terrestrial and cosmological aspects. “Concerning evolution,” anthropologist H. James Birx has written,
perhaps no other single theory in the annals of natural science so clearly points out that the human animal with its mental activity and resultant sociocultural environs is but a recently recent (geologically speaking) product of universal history. . . . Like Ludwig Feuerbach, whom he greatly admired, Farber saw all religions as being essentially grounded in the psychosocial wants, needs, and desires of our very vulnerable species within the processes of nature itself.” Birx believes that Farber represents a scientific naturalist and rational humanist viewpoint that is “ontologically grounded in an uncompromising and unapologetic materialism.
Farber was influenced by Ralph Barton Perry’s General Theory of Value (1926), Alfred North Whitehead’s Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927), and Clarence Irving Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order (1929), as well as by his teacher Edmund Husserl. Farber is author of The Foundation of Phenomenology (1943), in which he criticizes Husserl’s subjectivist philosophy; Naturalism and Subjectivism (1959), a major work which clarifies the crucial distinction between ontology and epistemology; and Basic Issues of Philosophy: Experience, Reality, and Human Values (1968). He was a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994).
Farber, Sala (20th Century) Farber is Executive Director in New York City of the Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Fard, Wallace D.: See entry for Nation of Islam.
Fargus, Frederick John (1847—1885) A novelist who wrote under the name of Hugh Conway, Fargus achieved fame with his Called Back (1883), which sold nearly half a million copies. His poem, “The Unknowable,” rejected Christianity and accepted only “the unknown God.” In a letter to Mrs. Lynn Linton he congratulated her on having made “a great step towards the destruction of illogical creeds,” and said of his friends that “with scarcely one exception those intellectually worth their salt are Agnostics.” {RAT}
Farkas, Daniel (20th Century) Farkas, while a student at Yale University in 1998, signed the Campus Freethought Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.”
Farmer, Fannie Merritt (1857—1915) An eminent cooking expert, the director of the Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer is known for having written major books on the art of cooking. Her publisher, Little, Brown, found that they had sold more copies of her cookbook than they did of Little Women. One of her secrets was to insist upon using exact measurements, “a level 1/4 cup of butter,” for example, not “a piece of butter the size of a walnut.” Farmer came from a close family, and she and her three younger sisters are said to have attended the Unitarian church on Sundays. {CE; EG; U; UU}
Farmer, Frances (1914—1970)
John M. Davis has written about Farmer, a 1930’s film star, about whom a movie, “Frances” (1982), was made starring Jessica Lange. The sixteen-year-old Frances wins a $100 first prize in a national student writing contest, but it turns out that her essay was entitled “God Dies,” and parents are horrified at such a youth who is a hellbound atheist.
Farmer, when charged with drunk driving, had a series of mental problems, was confined to an insane asylum, tried to escape, was given a transorbital prefrontal lobotomy, and the result was that her prior sarcasm and resistance to authority disappeared.
In 1958, she appeared on a TV program saying “faith in God” had helped her to be cured, but she began to drink heavily and died of cancer in 1970. Davis holds that Farmer was deprived of due process of law by faulty decisions made by psychiatrists, and he claims her mother was entirely wrong in blaming Communists for having driven her daughter crazy. {Secular Nation, Summer 1995}
Farmer, James (1920—1999) Farmer, Director of the Public Policy Training Institute, was a noted African American who signed Humanist Manifesto II. He was on the editorial board of The Humanist. In 1966, he wrote Freedom When? and, in 1985, Lay Bare the Heart. Founder and first director of the Congress of Racial Equality, Farmer led the first organized civil-rights sit-in in U. S. history at an all-white Chicago restaurant. In 1976, the American Humanist Association named him a Humanist Pioneer. {HM2}
Farn, J. C. (19th Century) Farn wrote Pictures of Controversy (185—?). {GS}
Farner, Henry George (20th Century) Farner, a freethinker, wrote Heresy in Art (1918). {GS}
Farquhar, John (1751—1826) Farquhar, the son of poor parents, settled in India, then returned to England a millionaire. He offered the city of Aberdeen £100,000 to found a college in which no religion should be taught. With pain, the pious city fathers refused. Farquhar openly rejected Christianity and thought Brahmanism superior to it. {RAT; RE}
Farr, Bernard C. (20th Century) Farr is the former head of the School of Theology at Westminster College, Oxford, and also was director of research and academic programmes. He is a member of the planning group for a Humanist Studies Advanced Certificate Diploma to be offered by Westminster College. Farr wrote An Education of Modern Spiritualities (1996).
Diane Farr, co-host of MTV/KROQ's "LoveLine" media
Farr, along with Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew, is a co-host of "LoveLine".
During a May 1999 show featuring Henry Winkler as a guest, Farr said "For Lent, when I was younger, I gave up Happy Days. Now I'm an atheist."
Farrah, Frederick (19th Century) Farrah was a radical publisher and bookseller in London. He continued the work of the Fleet Street House. {FUK; VI}
Farrar, Ed (20th Century) Farrar signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Farrar, Eliza (1791-1870)
A Quaker and a Unitarian, Farrar was an abolitionist and a writer of children’s books.
Farrell, C. P. (19th Century) Farrell, who was Robert G. Ingersoll’s brother-in-law, was Ingersoll’s “authorized” publisher from the beginning. {FUS}
Farrell, James T(homas) (1904—1979) When Farrell, the Chicago author, wrote Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932—1935), Catholics were incensed by his literary naturalism and descriptions of the Church. They would have been even more irritated had they known Farrell married Nora Kaye when she was fourteen or so. This he told Gore Vidal but never listed her as his wife in Who’s Who. The marriage was annulled, and later Kaye became ballet master Antony Tudor’s principal interpreter. Farrell became one of the best and best-known novelists of his decade. When asked by the present author about humanism he wrote,
I am struck by the names you list as among the supporters of naturalistic humanism: John Dewey, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford [Ed. note: Mumford was later removed when in his correspondence he agreed that he was a “holistic,” not a naturalistic or scientific or secular, humanist]. There is much in Mann and Mumford which decidedly runs counter to Dewey’s views. I wonder if you have stated the position of naturalistic humanism too broadly and generally for it to be meaningful? My contribution to the Partisan Review symposium on religion, published last summer (15 March 1951), indicates my views. I was a Catholic until I was twenty-one. I don’t have any violent feelings about it, and if people want to believe, it is their business. As for Mumford, he is just mixed up and obscurantic. I fear you are too concerned with a category here. What is the precise content of public conduct of some of those whom you mention? Mann is a naturalistic humanist or isn’t he? But he accepts honors from the East German puppet government of the Russian slave masters. Corliss Lamont for years has defended the crimes of Stalin. The consequences of action and the conduct of men must be the measure here, in the Deweyean sense. In his History of Materialism, Lange (the nineteenth-century German scholar) remarked that, in his view, the influence and ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates marked a regression in thought. Then, he remarked to the effect that men went on having insight, and they thought that their insights were necessarily derivable from these ‘regressive’ thinkers. He added that when the great progressive thought of an epoch wears thin and goes down, men go on having insights, and then, they believe that their insights, the truths they discover, are necessarily linked with regressive ideas. There is a point here. People think their beliefs and their formal ideas necessarily give them the clue to truth and insight. It isn’t always the case. Insights and conduct are often in contradiction with beliefs and with ideas, formally held.
In 1958, Farrell added,
Camus is a humanist––a fine and honest spirit, more so this than a thinker.
Farrell’s experiences as a baseball enthusiast and a pupil of Catholic schools served as the basis of Young Lonigan (1932), which cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer and many others claim was their first memory of reading a “forbidden book.” In that novel, Farrell describes the young William Lonigan, nicknamed Studs, who plays baseball and basketball, smokes secretly, fights, Jew-baits, shoplifts, and experiments with sex. The various characters include Father Gilhooley, gang members, a middle-aged homosexual, and one gang member who deserts the gang when his girlfriend refuses him simply because he is a Jew. Farrell, a master of literary naturalism, describes with sociological thoroughness what a squalid urban environment does to its inhabitants. Tommy Gallegher’s Crusade (1939) tells of a boy’s joining a priest’s anti-Semitic campaign. Silence of History (1963) describes Eddie Ryan, who loses his faith in Catholicism. The Catholic hierarchy was expectedly “underwhelmed” by Farrell’s fiction. In addition to many novels, Farrell wrote A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), describing his Marxist views, Literature and Morality (1947), and My Baseball Diary (1957). In The Humanist, Farrell reviewed MacLeish’s J.B. He was not nearly so favorable as John Ciardi in his Saturday Review of Literature critique. Farrell complained that Ciardi exaggerated by claiming that the book represents “the birth of a classic.” Farrell found MacLeish’s humanism was posed in terms of despair, and he preferred the humanistic outlook of Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship.” {CE; HNS; WAS, 15 August 1951 and 21 March 1958}
Farrell, Sophia (20th Century) Farrell is an active member of Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine’s Birmingham Temple.
Farrington, Benjamin (20th Century) Farrington was an English rationalist, an author who wrote for Rationalist Annual.
Farrington, Matthew (19th Century) Farrington was active in the antislavery cause, finding himself in danger several times from New York City proslavery mobs. Upon moving to Bremer County, Iowa, where he taught in the public schools, Farrington became president of the Liberal League of Northern Iowa and also of the Iowa State League in the latter part of the 1890’s. {PUT}
Fass, Donald J. (20th Century) In 1972, Fass was named vice-president of the New York Chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Fast, Howard (1914— ) Fast, a novelist who wrote Citizen Tom Paine (1943) and Spartacus (1952), won the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953 but later returned the money he received. A member of the Communist Party, Fast served a prison term (1950) for refusing to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In The Naked God (1957, he describes his political experiences. Asked about humanism in 1951 after his term in prison, Fast responded to the present author:
I find myself somewhat bewildered by the various categories of humanism. It would seem to me that humanism is an expression of action rather than fancy thinking. The only kind of humanism I know is that kind which has a regard for the dignity and the lives of human beings. I don’t know what you would call it nor do I think it is important to give it a label. But I do know that in terms of such humanism, very few people are humanists. By no stretch of the imagination can any humanism I might conceive of fit into the political expression which has turned Korea into a graveyard and turned the Korean cities into piles of ashes and rubble. This may be the expression of what Mr. [Sidney] Hook likes to refer to as democracy as against his hatred for bolshevism. You see, I don’t even consider Mr. Hook a candidate for the school of humanity.
{CE; WAS, 15 February 1951}
FATE Que sera, sera! What will be, will be. Fate is a belief which implies an inevitable and usually an adverse outcome. Epictetus and the Stoics held that the will of God is inescapable whether one wishes it or not. John Stuart Mill wrote, “A Fatalist believes, or half believes (for nobody is a consistent Fatalist), not only that whatever is about to happen will be the infallible result of the causes which produce it (which is the true Necessitarian doctrine), but, moreover, that there is no use in struggling against it; that it will happen however we may strive to prevent it.” Muslims hold that whatever happens—a famine, a drought, an accident—it is the will of Allah. Meanwhile, Louisa May Alcott wrote, “Resolve to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.” Naturalists, who are more interested in mathematical probabilities and human capabilities, are not fatalists.
Father Anthony: See entry for Joseph McCabe.
Father Divine (George Baker): See the entry for Divine.
FATWA As an indication of its importance, the word fatwa was not in the 1992 American Heritage Dictionary or the 1993 Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, but it is frequently used in the media to refer to a Muslim edict. A fatwa is a Hindu and Muslim legal term, meaning a formal legal opinion, hence a judicial sentence, given by a canon lawyer. “The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment”: In 1993, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, a blind theologian, issued that fatwa. Another Muslim fundamentalist theologian, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman of Egypt, issued a fatwa authorizing five Islamic militants to assassinate Egypt’s President Anwar el-Sadat in October 1981. The sheik later was on trial in New York City for plotting to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels and other landmarks. In 1989 the Ayatollah Rudollah Khomeini of Iran called for the death of Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses he regarded as a sacrilegious ridiculing of the Prophet Mohammed. In Bangladesh, Muslim religious fundamentalists issued a fatwa against Taslima Nasrin, forcing her to seek refuge in Sweden. Except in the Muslim world, Rushdie and Nasrin are considered among the most courageous people of their time. Although secularist opponents of Islamic rule have mocked the fatwas, their harsh or contradictory nature has done lasting damage to the image of Islam, according to journalist Youssef M. Ibrahim in Paris. He cited the group of young Egyptian fundamentalists who ambushed and stabbed Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel laureate for literature. They claimed that his Children of Gebelawi (1959) had scoffed at religion and insulted the Prophet Mohammed. Fatwas are often issued on such questions as whether one should fast during an airline flight and on whether charitable donations from belly dancers are accepted as good works by God. (See entries for Taslima Nasrin and Salman Rushdie. Also, see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim.) {ER}
Fauche, Hippolyte (1797—1869) Fauche was a French Orientalist who translated the Mahabbrata, the Ramayana, and the plays of Kalidasa. He was a freethinker who wrote for La Liberté de Penser. {BDF}
Faulkenberry, Alfred (20th Century) Faulkenberry, when ordered along with other jurors to pray in an Alabama courtroom, refused and walked out. The practice received considerable media attention, and a lawsuit by the Alabama Freethought Association was started in 1997 against the presiding judge. He and his wife, Carol Faulkenberry, have written for AAH Examiner, the newsletter of African Americans for Humanism. {Freethought Today, April 1997}
Faulkenberry, Carol (20th Century) Faulkenberry, a freethought activist and wife of Al Faulkenberry, is author of “The Steeple on the Kmart” in Freethought Today (June-July 1998). She also wrote a humorous “An Uppity Old Atheist Woman’s Dictionary” (1999).
Faulkner, Charles W. (20th Century) An African American psychiatrist and a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C., Faulkner has written critically of religion and has called for the need of critical thinking. During the Iran-Contra trial calling Colonel Oliver North, which had a jury of twelve African American men and women, both attorneys began their arguments with an unusual emotional appeal to the jury: They quoted words from the Bible. This, Faulkner states, is because most assume that black jurors are “brainwashed” by religion. Even if North was guilty, could a religiously inspired jurist find a guilty man innocent simply because he or she believed deeply in religion? The tactic, Faulkner wrote in a column on “The Misuse of Religion” (6 November 1989), actually works sometimes. “What goes around, comes around” implies that God will punish evil-doers, but Faulkner retorts that if you want someone punished you had better do it yourself. And to readers who complain that he is “against” religion, he replies that his major problem with religion “is that it has not found a way to confront the realities that we face daily, such as drug sales, drug murders and drug rehabilitation, AIDS, homosexuality, and the right of people to believe or disbelieve in religion and still be respected as ‘right thinking’ individuals.” A minister, by utilizing cadence, including occasional intonation or chants, can provide an atmosphere which “drains the body of stress, relaxes the mind, and heightens one’s suggestibility to such a degree that the individual often becomes much like a human robot that responds almost automatically.” In his Dollars and Sense 7, no. 2 (June-July 1981), Faulkner discusses the psychological effects of religion on the masses and finds “the society in which the black church exists is perhaps more ruthless and inconsiderate than we had reason to expect . . . . The way to treat this age-old addiction is not to tear the victim away from the beloved church but to entice, if at all possible, the heartless society that controls, restricts, and manipulates the influence of the black church and its influence on the masses.” Interviewed by Norm Allen Jr., Faulkner explains the appeal of African American religious leaders such as Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton: “The likelihood of blacks ever getting themselves out of the turmoil that they’re currently in becomes stronger with the use of militancy.” Asked about the resolution passed by the Association of Black Psychologists which states that white religious images such as those representing Jesus, Mary, and the angels have had a very negative effect on the collective self-esteem of black children, Faulkner replies, “Oh, I agree with the resolution totally . . . . I think that blacks are outcasts in religion just as much as they are historically. But I think that the most important point is that millions of blacks are very close to the church, but still pray to a white leader.” And can humanism be made attractive to African Americans? He replies: “I think that humanism has to be in a position to produce a practical program that has practical, easy-to-evaluate results. If you look at astrology, for instance, many black people hold very strongly to astrology because they need a crutch. What kind of inspiration can humanism provide? Humanism has to provide some means whereby blacks can feel that if they accept it, they will become more successful and happier.” Faulkner signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {AAH}
Faulkner, Peter (1933— ) Faulkner, author of Humanism in the English Novel (1976), lists his politics as Socialist and his religion as Humanist. He is the reader in the School of English and American studies at Exeter University in England, he has written for New Humanist, and has been editor of the Journal of the William Morris Society. {“The Socialist Humanism of William Morris,” New Humanist, September 1996}
Faulkner, William (1897—1962) Faulkner, a major American novelist, was an outright freethinker, according to David Tribe. Faulkner in 1949 received the Nobel Prize in literature and is known for The Sound and the Fury (1929), The Hamlet (1940), A Fable (1954, winner of a Pulitzer Prize), and The Reivers (1962, winner of a Pulitzer prize). As I Lay Dying (1930) is cited by the American Library Association as a book that book-banners target. The family name originally had been Falkner, and he was the great-grandson of William C. Falkner, the prototype of the Colonel Sartoris who was described in his novels centered on “Jefferson” in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. In accepting the Nobel Prize, Faulkner made a brief statement about his belief “that man will not merely endure: he will prevail . . . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” and “the writer’s duty is to write about these things.” His use of “soul” and ”spirit” had no theological overtones, and he was disinterested about religious matters. In 1994, Meta Wilde died. Her 1976 best seller, A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner and Meta Carpenter Wilde, details an eighteen-year romantic affair which they had had and which started while she was working as a script supervisor on the 1936 film, “The Road to Glory,” for which Faulkner was a co-writer. {TRI; TYD}
Faupel, A. D. (20th Century) Faupel was a Unitarian minister who withdrew his following from the Oakland, California, group, calling the new schismatic group the Fellowship of Humanists. It became the first and oldest affiliate of the American Humanist Association. {EW}
Faure, François Felix [President] (1841—1899) Faure was the sixth President of the French Republic. The son of a worker who made a fortune in business and rose to high positions in politics as an anti-clerical liberal, Faure while President from 1895 to 1899 was responsible for the drastic laws against the Church that were passed in those years. He died of apoplexy. {JM; RAT; RE}
Faure, Sébastian (1858—1942) In his Twelve Proofs of the Nonexistence of God, Faure wrote,
For centuries kings, rulers, churches, leaders have been treating the people like a vile, miserable herd to be fleeced and butchered. And for centuries the disinherited–thanks to the deceitful marriage of Heaven and the terrible, frightful vision of Hell–have been docile and have stood misery and slavery. It is time that this odious sacrilege, this abominable fraud came to an end! The heaven of which they have incessantly spoken to you, the heaven with which they try to lessen your misery, deaden your pain, and suffocate the protest which, in spite of everything, comes from your heart, is unreal and deserted. Only your hell is populated and exists. . . .
{FUS; RAT}
Faust, Johann or Faustus (16th Century) According to legend, Faust was a learned German doctor who performed magical feats and who died under mysterious circumstances. He had allegedly sold his soul to the devil (personified by Mephistopheles in many literary versions) in exchange for youth, knowledge, and magic power. Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus (c. 1588) was one of many variations on the legend, as were Goethe’s Faust (1808—1833) and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). Klinger, Chamisso, Grabbe, Lenau, Berlioz, Gounod, Schumann, Liszt, Boito, Spohr, and Busoni are just a few of the many creative artists who have been inspired by the legend. {CE}
Faust, M. (20th Century) Faust, a freelance writer who reviews films for books such as Video Movie Guide and The Complete Guide to Videocassette Movies, writes “Film Reviews” for The Humanist.
Fausto, Sebastiano Da Longiano (16th Century) Fausto at the beginning of the sixteenth century is said to have projected a work, The Temple of Truth, with the intention of overturning all religions. He translated the Meditations of Antoninus and wrote observations on Cicero (1566). {BDF}
Fawcett, Edgar (1847—1904) Fawcett was a poet, an admirer of Ingersoll. “He called himself an Agnostic Christian,” states McCabe, “mixing skepticism on fundamentals with an ill-informed moral admiration of Christianity in his Songs of Doubt and Dreams, Agnosticism and Other Essays (1889.” Fawcett had no belief in God, but he had a moral admiration of the Christian ethics. {FUS; JM; RAT; RE}
Fawcett, Henry (1833—1884) A British economist and statesman, Fawcett although he became blind at the age of thirty-five was professor of economics at Cambridge and held high political offices. A monument to him was erected in Westminster Abbey by public subscription. In Leslie Stephen’s biography, Fawcett is said to have regarded theological controversy as “miserable squabbles.” McCabe says the Right Honorable Henry Fawcett, who in 1880 became Postmaster General, shared the agnosticism of J. S. Mill. A monument was raised by public subscription and erected in Westminster Abbey. {JM; RAT; RE}
Fawkener, Everard [Sir] (1684—1758) Fawkener was the London silk-merchant at whose house Voltaire lived when he was in England. He was knighted and appointed ambassador to Constantinople in 1735. Voltaire, in one of his letters, describes Fawkener “smiling with his human philosophy at the superstitious follies of believers.” {RAT; RE}
Faymonville, Philip R. (20th Century) Faymonville has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Fearn, Blanche (1911—1995) An ardent freethinker, Fearn was a member of the Executive Council of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. At the age of fourteen, she protested bible-reading in the public school she attended. Like her French convent-educated mother, she rejected religion when young. Her memorial service was held at Ormond Beach’s Unitarian Society.
Fears, Herbert (20th Century) Fears is Past President of the British Columbia Humanist Association in Canada. In a critique of humanistic Judaism’s leaders unwillingness to join humanist alliances, Fears wrote (Humanist in Canada, Spring 1998), “It would seem that the secular Jews who adopt the humanist nomenclature are, by their isolationism, merely subscribing to the conceit of the ‘chosen ones’ held by their religious counterparts. Not exactly a productive way of achieving common goals considering how few we secularists are, methinks.”
Fechner, Gustav Theodor (1801—1887) Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics (1860) “admitted no difference between body and soul.” In religion he was mystical and is often regarded as a liberal Christian. The orthodox disowned him. {RAT; TRI}
FÉDÉRATION DES AMIS DE LA MORALE LAIQUE In Belgium, Fédération des Amis de la Morale Laique (IHEU), is at Du Meridien 17, 1030 Brussels, Belgium. {FD}
FÉDÉRATION HUMANISTE EUROPÉENE: See entry for European Humanist Federation.
Feeney, Gayle (20th Century) Feeney heads the Australian and New Zealand Unitarian Association (ANZUA, 25 Burneway Street, Sunshine, Victoria 3020, Australia).
Feer, Henry Léon (Born 1830) Feer was a French Orientalist known chiefly for his Buddhistic studies (1871—1875). {BDF}
FEET WASHING
Because Jesus was said to have washed the feet of his disciples before the Last Supper, his example continues to be followed by dignitaries in the Catholic church as well as by members in rituals of such Protestant groups as the Dunkers [Dunkards], the Mennonites, and the River Brethren. Non-believers are impressed negatively by the symbolism, although one New York philosophy department chairman is known to have enjoyed other kinds of foot fetishism. (See entry for Mennonites.) {ER}
Feherty, David (20th Century) A professional golfer, Feherty has gone on record as being a non-theist: “If God wanted people to believe in him,” he reasoned, “why’d he invent logic then?” {E}
David Feherty, Professional Golfer sports
[[Feherty writes (or said?) "If god wanted people to believe in him, why'd he invent logic then?"
Fehr, Howard F. (1901—1981) The mathematician who edited New Thinking in School Mathematics and helped introduce the “New Math.” Fehr while at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote to the present author about humanism:
Fundamentally, I am not a student of philosophy except in so far as it affects my work in education. My whole basic philosophy of life, of course, is conditioned by the training and thinking I have done within the field of mathematical science. As such, I am in very great agreement with [Julian] Huxley’s point of view. I agree with the naturalistic humanism approach to the solution of the problems of man. In fact, the definition [of naturalistic humanism] as found in Ferm’s Encyclopedia of Religion [describes] the most promising way under present knowledge that man can hope to achieve good life.
{WAS, 29 July 1954}
Feiffer, Jules (1929- ) A freethinker whose satirical cartoons in New York’s Village Voice began bringing him fame in 1956, Feiffer is one whose humanism shows in his concern about the breakdown of communication: between the state and the citizen, between black and white, between man and woman. He wrote “Little Murders” (1965), a play that involves black humor; Harry: the Rat With Women (1963), a novel; and the screenplay for “Carnal Knowledge” (1971). “Christ died for our sins,” he has written. “Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?” {CE} Jules Feiffer, Editorial Cartoonist art
Feiffer has apparently described himself as a "judeo-atheist," in a fairly recent book (2000?) about contemporary religious leaders, which included a profile on satanist Anton LaVey.
--EH
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"Christ died for our sins. Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?" -Jules Feiffer
Feiffer, Jules (26 Jan 1929 - ) Feiffer, born in the Bronx, New York City, started to draw at the age of six. His early favorites were Flash Gordon, Popeye, and Terry and the Pirates. He studied at James Monroe High School and entered the Art Students' League. “I was desperate to be a cartoonist,” Feiffer once said. From 1947 to 1951 he studied at the Pratt Institute while working as an assistant on Will Eisner's classical comic, The Spirit, Feiffer later saying he presumed that the spirit was Jewish. Eisner abandoned it in 1952. In 1949 Feiffer created his first own comic feature, Clifford, about a child who is accidentally drafted. During his army time Feiffer made animated cartoons for the Signal Corps. After return to civilian life he worked in several jobs before Village Voice began in 1956 print his political cartoons with their uniquely neurotic characters. The weekly comic strip was simply called Feiffer. A number of protagonists appeared in the strip, but among the best known are Bernard Mergendeiler, a victim-hero and psychological wreck devoured by tics and complexes, whom Feiffer depicted with the undertones of self-hatred and self-pity. Other characters are also more or less portrayed with black humour—the spineless men and neurotic and poisonous women. In 1958 several of the strips were published in book form under the title SICK, SICK, SICK. Since then the strips have been reprinted in both hardbound and paperback forms. Feiffer's comic strip antiheroes also appeared in a play, The Explainers, staged at Chicago's Playwrights Cabaret in 1961. A freethinker whose satirical cartoons in New York’s Village Voice starting in 1956 led to his climb to fame, Feiffer is one whose humanism shows in his concern about the breakdown of communication: between the state and the citizen, between black and white, between man and woman. His cartoons have appeared in numerous journals, including Playboy, New Yorker, the London Observer, and New Statesman and Society. He received an Academy Award for Munro, an animated cartoon; a special George Polk Memorial Award in 1962; an Obie Award in 1969; the Outer Circle Drama Critics Award in 1969, 1970; and a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1986. He wrote Little Murders (1965), a play that involves black humor and was made into a film; Harry: the Rat With Women (1963), a novel; and the screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (1971)—the film, starring Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, was banned in Georgia. Feiffer's books for children include The Man in the Ceiling (1993), A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears (1995), Meanwhile (1997), I Lost My Bear (1998), and Bark, George (1999). A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears was about a prince, Roger, whose sense of humor is too much for the king and his wizard. As political cartoonist Feiffer attacked unyieldingly, especially President Johnson's Vietnam politics and Richard Nixon, who was his most constant target. One strip showed President Johnson looking from his Oval Office while peace demonstrators are dragged away by the White House police. “Freedom of speech is one of out most precious liberties,” says the president. “Yes, Mr. President,” answers Dean Rusk. After Nixon's resignation subsequent satire of the Presidents became half-hearted in The Village Voice. In 1986 Feiffer received the Pulitzer Prize in editorial cartooning. “Christ died for our sins,” he has written. “Dare we make his martyrdom meaningless by not committing them?” {CE}
Feigl, Herbert (1902— )
When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Feigl was professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Minnesota. In 1966 Feigl addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris. In 1980, he signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. Feigl wrote Inquiries and Provocations (1981). {HM2; HNS; SHD}
Feinstein, Michael (1956— ) A sophisticated singer-pianist, Feinstein has more than thirteen recordings on the market. He was a 1992 Grammy nominee and has performed at the White House during the past three administrations, mainly music from the1930s to 1950s and including Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Cole Porter tunes. Asked about religion, Feinstein has said he identifies with none whatsoever. “I was born Jewish,” he told Advocate reporter Jeffrey Newman, “but I haven’t observed Judaism since I was twelve.”
Feldman, Ruth (20th Century) Feldman is an editor of Humanistic Judaism.
Feldmann, Annette B. (20th Century) Feldmann, an atheist, headed the Shelley Society in New York City and is a member of the Percy Bysshe Shelley Society in London.
Fellens, Jean Baptiste (Born 1794) Fellens, a professor of History in France, was author of a work on pantheism (1873). {BDF}
Fellini, Federico (1920—1993)
Fellini, an Italian film director, is described in Columbia Encyclopedia as having written screenplays for such neorealistic films as Rossellini’s “Open City” and “Paisan” and who, in 1950, “quickly abandoned neorealism in favor of professional actors and scripted tales of almost fable-like simplicity expressing a humanistic outlook.” “La Strada” (1956) and “La Dolce Vita” (1960) received international acclaim. His films then “became a celebration of life, with swirls of color, international casts of distinctive faces, and camera gymnastics substituting for traditional drama.” Other of his major films are “8 1/2) (1963) and “Satyricon” (1969). “Like many people,” he has declared, “I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty. . . . I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working. . . . Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?” {CE; TYD}
Fellini, Federico (20 Jan 1920 - 31 Oct 1993) Fellini, an Italian film director, wrote screenplays for such neorealistic films as Rossellini’s Open City and Paisan and, in 1950, “quickly abandoned neorealism in favor of professional actors and scripted tales of almost fable-like simplicity expressing a humanistic outlook.” La Strada (1956) and La Dolce Vita (1960) received international acclaim. His films then “became a celebration of life, with swirls of color, international casts of distinctive faces, and camera gymnastics substituting for traditional drama.” Other of his major films are 8 1/2 (1963), Satyricon (1969), City of Women (1980), Ginger and Fred (1986), and Voices of the Moon (1990). In 1993 he was presented with an Honorary Academy Award. “Like many people,” he has declared, “I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty. . . . I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working. . . . Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?” {CE; TYD}
Fellinton, David (20th Century) Fellinton is Vice President of Rationalists United for Secular Humanism.
Fellowes, Robert (1771—1847) Fellowes gave up his religious views in favor of deism, as evidenced in his The Religion of the Universe (1836). He was proprietor of the Examiner and a great supporter of the London University. {BDF; RAT}
Fellows, John (18th Century) Fellows, a freethinker and a freethought publisher, was a personal friend of Thomas Paine. {FUS}
Fellows, Otis (1908—1993) Fellows taught in the humanities department at Columbia University. A noted scholar, he co-edited with Norman Torrey The Age of Enlightenment (1942, revised 1971), which is a leading anthology of 18th-century French literature. At Columbia, Dr. Fellows taught French and Romance philology, later becoming chairman of the Italian department. An authority on Denis Diderot, he founded Diderot Studies, a periodical published in Geneva which he edited. His best-known work is Diderot (1977), a biography and appreciation. In addition, he wrote From Voltaire to “La Nouvelle Critique”: Problems and Personalities (1970) and a 1953 collection of Georges Simeon’s detective stories.
Fellows, Will (20th Century) Fellows, a Unitarian, wrote Farm Boys: Lives of Gay Men from the Rural Midwest (1996), stories of fifty gay men who grew up on Midwestern farms.
FELLOWSHIP OF RELIGIOUS HUMANISTS The Fellowship of Religious Humanists is at PO Box 597396, Chicago, Illinois 60659.
Felmet, Joe (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Felmet was a humanist counselor. {HM2}
Fels, Joseph (1854—1914) Fels, a philanthropist, began life as a poor boy but made a fortune in the soap business. He used his money and energy to promote reform. According to Mary Fels in a biography, Fels was a non-Christian theist. {JM; RAT; RE}
Felton, Cornelius C. [University President] (19th Century) Felton, a Unitarian, was a classical scholar who was once President of Harvard University. {U}
FEMALE RIGHTS: See entry for Robbi Robson, who represented the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) in 1995 at the UN’s Fourth World Conference in Beijing, China.
FEMALE SEXUALITY • A woman experiences “three delights in intercourse”: one from the motion of her own sperm, a second from the motion of the male sperm, and a third from the motion or rubbing that takes place in coitus. —From Canon of Medical Knowledge, a compendium by Avicenna, the Arab physician and philosopher, c. 1030 (translated into Latin in the 12th century)
• Woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force . . . or influence. —St. Thomas Aquinas, 13th Century)
• Obimeè! The devil knows how to do so much between husband and wife. He makes them touch and kiss not only the honest parts but the dishonest ones as well. Even just to think about it, I am overwhelmed by horror, fright, and bewilderment. . . . You call this holy matrimony? —From Rules of Married Life, Brother Cherubino da Siena, 15th century
• Many women die without having experienced the extreme of pleasure. . . . The motive force which in them calls out for pleasure is so delicate and the source of it so distant, that we need not be surprised if pleasure does not come at all or gets lost upon the way. —From “On Women,” Denis Diderot, 1772
• No human hand is capable of communicating to the tissues such rapid, steady and prolonged vibrations, and certain kneading and percussion movements, as the vibrator. —From “Principles of Electro-medicine, Electro-surgery and Radiology” by Anthony Matijaca, who prescribed vibratory sessions to relieve “female troubles.” 1917
• We have long understood that the development of female sexuality is complicated by the fact that the girl has a task of giving up what was originally her leading genital zone, the clitoris, in favor of a new genital zone, the vagina. —From Female Sexuality, Sigmund Freud, 1931
• Some of the psychoanalysts and some other clinicians insist that only vaginal stimulation and a “vaginal organism” can provide a psychologically satisfactory culmination to the activity of a “sexually mature” female. It is difficult, however, in the light of our present understanding of the anatomy and physiology of sexual response, to understand what can be meant by a “vaginal organism.” —From Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Alfred C. Kinsey et al., 1953
• Men make their own orgasms during sex: women should be able to as well. —From The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, by Shere Hite, 1976
• For the purposes of this deposition, a person engages in “sexual relations” when the person knowingly engages in or causes contact with the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person with an intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person. —From the definition of sexual relations that U. S District Judge Susan Webber Wright allowed in the deposition of President William Jefferson Clinton in the Paul Corbin Jones lawsuit, 1998 (“The Truth About Sex at Any Given Moment,” by Camille Sweeney, The New York Times Magazine, 16 May 1999)
FEMALES
• After a woman gets too old to be attractive to men, she turns to God. —Honoré de Balzac
• A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on. —Oscar Wilde
• Women are like elephants to me—I like to look at ’em, but I
wouldn’t want to own one.
—W. C. Fields
• Nature has given woman so much power that the law cannot afford to give her more. —Samuel Johnson
• Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong, silent type. —Fran Lebowitz
• What passes for woman’s intuition is often nothing more than man’s transparency. —George Jean Nathan
• Women should be obscene and not heard. —Groucho Marx
• A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. —Gloria Steinem
• [I love them] because women are beautiful and they have two ovaries and they have breasts and no prostate. —Bill Cosby
• Women are beautiful and wonderful creatures. I enjoy their company. I am not a dirty old man. I am a very sexy senior citizen. They can drive men proverbially up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the other side, and we love them. —A British seventy-six-year-old Tory peer, in 1998
“Man” in Old English or Anglo-Saxon was universal and referred to all humans equally. Waepman was the word for a male human, wifman for the female human. Although some contemporary feminists object to the use of “man” to include women as well as men, the objection is not to its historical origins, which were gender-free. The newly coined pronoun “(s)he” is considered by many to be redundant. With some chariness, women who lead a group choose to be called a “chair,” but it is believed more prefer “chairwoman,” or ”chairperson,” or to continue using “chairman.” Natalie Angier’s Woman, An Intimate Geography (1999) points out that woman are seldom credited for being stronger, more sexual, more aggressive, and more adaptive. She notes that a woman’s X chromosome is six times larger than the Y and has a “vastly higher gene richness.” The woman’s egg is the largest cell in the body, the only spherical one, “a geometer’s dream,” “the true sun, the light of life.” Freud erred, Angier notes, with his theory that clitoral orgasm is “infantile” and vaginal orgasm “mature,” whereas in fact the clitoris has no greater end than to serve women’s pleasure, and that is end enough. A man’s penis is for urinating and ejaculating, but the clitoris is a special organ that is capable of repeated stimulation and multiple orgasm. How inhumane, she reasons, that clitoridectomy is practiced annually on some two million women, mainly in Africa. “Genital cutting is an extreme abuse of human rights. Like slavery and apartheid, it is unacceptable,” she cries. As for abortion, does the uterus belong to the woman who houses one, or, in the case of pregnant women, does it belong to the fetus, or the fetus’s representatives in the form of church and state? Or to doctors who, Ms. Angier says, overindulge the urge to cut by performing more Caesarean sections and hysterectomies than are warranted? Angier, in no uncertain terms, insists that each woman must be the mistress of her own corporeal house—let the church and state butt out! {Marilyn Yalom, The New York Times, 8 April 1999)
FEMALES AND THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN BIBLE
In 1895, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the following:
The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgement seat of Heaven, tried, condemned, and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man’s bounty for all her material wants. . . . Here is the Bible position of woman briefly summed up.
Helen H. Gardener noted the following references concerning women in the Judeo-Christian Bible:
• The Bible teaches that a father may sell his daughter for a slave (Exodus XXI: 7), that he may murder her and still be a good father and a holy man (Judges, XIX: 24). It teaches that man may have any number of wives; that he may sell them, give them away, or change them around, and still be a righteous man. It teaches almost every infamy under the heavens for woman, and it does not recognize her as a self-directing free being. It classes her as property, just as it does a sheep; and it forbids her to think, talk, act, or exist except under conditions and limits defined by some priest.
• Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord.
• For the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.
• Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.
• But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man.
• Neither was the man created for the woman, but the woman for the man. {John Updike, The New Yorker, 14 September 1998; PUT}
FEMALES AS CATHOLIC PRIESTS In 1998 a recently excommunicated Catholic cleric, the Rev. Pat Buckley, defied the Vatican by ordaining sixty-seven-year-old Frances Meigh as a priest in his ministry. “It is not the body that is being ordained, but the soul. Gender is irrelevant,” Buckley told his congregation. But the Church, the official faith of four of Ireland’s more than five million citizens, retorted that Buckley had no authority to ordain anyone. Meigh, who paints religious icons and lives as a hermit, said she would now be known as the “very Rev. Mother Frances.” Married and the mother of three children before getting her marriage annulled by Church authorities, she was one of many controversial remarried divorcees in Buckley’s former ministry in Northern Ireland. Elsewhere around the world, women are not allowed to become Catholic priests. {Associated Press, 16 September 1998}
FEMALES WHO PASSED AS MEN In Suits Me (1998) Diane Wood Middlebrook lists women who have passed as men: Billy Tipton, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton, a musician whose five wives allegedly were unaware Billy was a female; Charlotte Clarke, an 18th-century cross-dressing actress; Jack Bee Garland, a turn-of-the-century adventurer who feigned muteness, worked as a newspaper correspondent, and wandered the streets of San Francisco giving money to the hungry and homeless; James Miranda Stuart Barry, a 19th-century physician credited with performing the first Caesarean section in Britain; and Catalina de Erauso, a 17th-century conquistador granted a pension by Philip IV of Spain. {Holly Brubach, The New York Times, 28 June 1998}
FEMALES, DEGRADATION OF Christian ethics emphasized sexual virtue, which did much to degrade the position of women, according to Bertrand Russell. (See his critique in the Quotable Bertrand Russell. Also see entries for Christian Ethics, Marriage, and Cecilie Rushton.) (Edward Royle’s Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans has a discussion of “Women, Sex, and Birth Control in Britain, 1866—1915.”)
FEMALES, GENITAL MAIMING OF More than ninety percent of Egyptian girls undergo surgical practices that are erroneously called “female circumcision.” The essentially African practice, which predates Islam in Egypt, is intended either to control or prevent sexual intercourse or rob it of pleasure. Aziza Hussein, the wife of a former Ambassador to the United States, spoke at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo, and she added that the practice must absolutely be discontinued in the name of humanity. Even in educated families, she said, one-third of the girls are mutilated, and the Coptic Christians also are guilty of genital maiming. Using an anatomically correct wooden model of female buttocks and genitals, Mrs. Hussein demonstrated to members of the conference what genital mutilation is and what irreversible damage it inflicts on little girls wherever the practice is allowed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 1996 that more than 150,000 women and girls of African origin or ancestry in the United States may be at risk of having the genital rite performed or have already been cut. The rite is common in twenty-eight countries that span Africa’s midsection, although it varies widely in its prevalence and severity. One twenty-eight-year-old mother, Halima Ali Haqui Sheeky, whose eleven-year-old daughter attends a Texas school, explained to reporters while her seventeen-month old daughter was curled up in her lap, “We were taught that this was a way of insuring a girl’s good behavior. It prevents them from running wild. Women should be meek, simple and quiet, not aggressive and outgoing. This is something we just accept.” The practice is not required by the Qur’an, John Hartung has pointed out. He adds that the vast majority of Muslims do not clitoridectomize or infibulate women: “Millions of Christians, mostly in Ethiopia, perform clitoridectomy as a religious duty, and some, mostly in the Sudan, add infibulation. Even some Jews perform clitoridectomy, notably Ethiopian Jews, most of whom now reside in Israel, where the practice continues. It is practiced in the Mideast, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and Pakistan and was until recently among the Christian Skoptsy in Russia.” (See the entry for Genital Maiming, for in 1997 Egypt’s High Court ruled that genital cutting of girls is no longer allowed.) {The New York Times, 28 December 1996 and 3 January 1997}
FEMALES, INDIAN: See entry for Gauri Bazaz Malik.
FEMALES, MUSLIM The Prophet specified the exact size of the stick with which a man may beat his wife. It should be no thicker than one man’s thumb.
FEMALE PHILOSOPHERS Although males have historically predominated in philosophy, following are some examples of works by or about female philosophers of note:
• Kennedy, Ellen, and Susan Mendus, eds., Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (1987) • Le Doeuff, Michèle, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc. (1991) • Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (1981) • Waithe, Mary Ellen, ed., A History of Women Philosophers, 4 volumes (1984) • Warnock, M., Women Philosophers (1996)
Specific names include the following: Hypatia, recipient of a lynching incited by St. Cyril; Queen Christina, who was implicated in the death of Descartes by asking him to rise in the Swedish winter dawn to give her lessons; Anne Conway; Susan Haack; Harriet Taylor; Catherine Cockburn; Susan Stebbing; Suzanne Langer; Hannah Arendt; Iris Murdoch; Mary Midgely; and Simone de Beauvoir. (See entry for Philosophers, Female.)
FEMINISM • One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone deBeauvoir
• She freed us from then corset. Women don’t pass out today. . . . We can breathe. She put the A-frame dress on us, showed our legs, removed the focus from the waist, bobbed our hair, and we were off and running. —Jane Fonda on an ABC telecast telling how fashion designer Coco Chanel had influenced women
Man has colonized nature, women, and the Third World, complained Vandana Shiva in Staying Alive. She accused Europeans and North Americans of being dependent on the colonies of powerless peoples everywhere, within or beyond their borders (blacks, women, and the jobless) to preserve a high standard of living. Science, she argued, was advanced by men (white men) to reduce nature to usable and rejectable parts. She and Maria Mies in Ecofeminism (1995) develop the thesis that feminism is interconnected with the fact that neither communism nor capitalism has spread the world’s wealth with justice nor have women been fairly treated throughout the world. Feminism, which an increasing number of authors have taken up as a movement around which to rally, is a belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Ms. Gloria Steinem, the sexagenarian who in a 1995 New York Times interview with Molly O’Neill was described as “America’s best-loved feminist,” has described herself as a congenital optimist. Although she discerned an anti-feminist mood in the 1994 election results, resented the number of terrorist acts at abortion clinics, and was disappointed at the dissent among some women who call themselves feminists, she predicted that feminism will not be dampened by temporary setbacks. In Revolution Within: A Book of Self-Esteem (1993), she described her background and told of starting Ms., a magazine that served as a vehicle for the feminist movement. In 1995, she told her interviewer, social change comes in fits and starts. “The first wave was about women gaining a legal identity, and it took 150 years. The second wave of feminism is about social equality. We’ve come a long way, but it’s only been twenty-five years. You don’t change consciousness without backlash.” She described how William F. Buckley Jr., Arianna Huffington, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Helen Alvarez argued on a television program, “Firing Line,” in favor of the resolution “The women’s movement has been disastrous.” But Betty Friedan, Karen Burstein, Camille Paglia, and Kathryn Kolbert refuted such allegations that the women’s movement had precipitated the breakdown of the American family. “Twenty years ago, feminism was blamed for the beef boycott,” Steinem said. “Now divorce. Feminism isn’t responsible for divorce; marriage is responsible for divorce. Women used to say, ‘I am not a feminist, but. . . . Now, they say, ‘I am a femini. . . but. . . .’ Feminism is acceptable. We just have to get that sentiment to the polls. The main task now is getting people out to vote.… What’s important is that we have progressed enough that being a feminist is no longer seen as some fringe activity. It is mainstream enough for anti-feminists like Camille Paglia to need to say that they are feminists.” In some parts of the world, the feminist cause is either unknown or non-existent. The Council for Secular Humanism, in its “Affirmations,” is pro-feminist. Betty Friedan is a member of its Academy of Humanism. (See entries for Margaret Fuller, Devil, Camille Paglia, and Cecilie Rushton.)
FEMINIST CAUCUS OF THE AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION The American Humanist Association’s Feminist Caucus (PO Box 429, Madison, Wisconsin 53701) was founded in 1977 by co-chairpersons Gina Allen, Meg Bowman, and Annie Laurie Gaylor. (See entry for Women.)
FENG SHUI: See entry for Supernaturalism.
Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe (1651-1715) During the French Revolution Maréchal cited Fénelon, the French theologian, as being the opposite of an atheist. He was banished for his mystical instruction in faith, and his quietism brought a long quarrel with his former patron Bossuet, also cited by Maréchal as the opposite of an atheist. Pope Innocent XII condemned the writings of Fénelon. {CE; ER; EU, Aram Vartarian}
Fenichell, Stephen (1956— ) Fenichell has been an American Humanist Association treasurer. {CL}
Fenn, Wallace O. (20th Century) Fenn has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Fenn, William Wallace (1862—1932) Dean of Harvard’s Divinity School, Fenn played a key role in moving the Western Unitarian Conference out of the control of Jenkin Lloyd Jones and, eventually, in securing the healing of the split between the American Unitarian Association and the western radicals. {U&U}
Fenton, Don (20th Century)
Fenton is on the staff of Secular Nation, the international Atheist Alliance magazine that commenced in 1994.
Fenton, James (1949— ) Fenton, who is called the poet Auden’s heir, is professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. Highly respected in Britain, Fenton like Auden was elected Oxford University’s official poet. Highly original both in his work and life, Fenton has, in the words of Ian Parker,
lived with a pet monkey in Phnom Penh, farmed prawns in the Philippines, eaten a bowl of live ants–that sort of thing. Almost by accident, he has made a fortune from a musical, ‘Les Misérables.’ Perhaps most famously, he was the foreign correspondent who rode on the first North Vietnamese tank to reach the Presidential Palace during the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Fenton, who was born in Lincoln, in the north of England, is one of four children of a vicar, now Honorary Canon Emeritus of Christ Church, Oxford. In “God, A Poem” (1983), Fenton described the disappointment inherent in belief:
“. . . . I didn’t exist at Creation, I didn’t exist at the Flood, And I won’t be around for Salvation To sort out the sheep from the cud–
“Or whatever the phrase is. The fact is In soteriological terms I’m a crude existential malpractice And you are a diet of worms.
“You’re a nasty surprise in a sandwich. You’re a drawing-pin caught in my sock. You’re the limpest of shakes from a hand Which I’d have thought would be firm as a rock,
“You’re a serious mistake in a nightie, You’re a grave disappointment all round–– That’s all that you are,” says th’ Almighty, “And that’s all that you’ll be underground.” (Ian Parker, “Auden’s Heir” {The New Yorker, 25 July 1994)
Fenzi, Sebastiano (Born 1822) An Italian writer, Fenzi in 1849 founded the Revista Britannica. He wrote for L’Italiano and also wrote a credo which is a non-credo. {BDF}
Ferencz, József (1908—1994) Ferencz’s grandfather, of the same name, was a bishop of the Transylvanian Unitarian church, and in 1971 Ferencz was elected bishop of the Unitarian Church of Hungary. He led the church for seventeen years and was chief editor from 1971 to 1989 of Unitárius Élet.
Fergus, James (Born 1812) A Scot, Fergus was the son of a Presbyterian but, upon reaching Canada, spent three years in a Quaker settlement and learned the trade of a millwright. He then transacted business throughout the Midwestern United States, moving to and laying out the town of Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1854. Fergus helped build dams and bridges across the Mississippi, drove cattle, acted as the first recorder of Alder Gulch at Virginia City, was for many years a citizen of Lewis and Clark country and moved eventually to Montana. Fergus was a freethinker. {PUT}
Ferguson, Andrew R.B. (20th Century)
Ferguson is a member of the British Rationalist Association. He has written book reviews for New Humanist. In “A Foundation for Critique of Pure Verbiage,” a work by F. R. H. Englefield, Ferguson calls the book an important one for understanding the nature and function of language. Unlike most religious and philosophical writing, which allegedly goes “round in circles,” the Englefield work is a “readable exposition of how and why such verbiage has continued to hold a respected place in academic and popular thought since the time of classical Greece. {New Humanist, February 1996}
Ferguson, Anne (20 Century) Ferguson writes a column, “Adam’s Rib,” in the New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist.
Ferguson, Martha and Philip (20th Century) The Fergusons are editors of Cincinnati’s Free Inquiry Group newsletter, FIG Leaves.
Ferguson, O. Andrews (20th Century) Ferguson is a coordinator for the American Humanist Association in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. (See entry for North Carolina Humanists.) {FD}
Feringa, Frederik (Born 1840) A Dutch writer, Feringa contributed to De Dageraad (The Daybreak) over the signature of Muricatus. He wrote Democratie en Wetenschap (Democracy and Science, 1871) and De Vrye Gedachte (Freethought). {BDF}
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence (1913— ) An American author and publisher, Ferlinghetti helped found the City Lights Bookshop, which was a center for writers of the Beat Generation. He encouraged Allen Ginsberg, among other authors. His A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) contains the sentence, “I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American.” Asked if he has ever been an active or inactive member of some religious group, Ferlinghetti responded in the negative. He added he does not believe in an afterlife and cited his “Big Fat Hairy Vision of Evil” in Starting from San Francisco (1956), part of which is as follows:
Evil evil evil evil World is evil Life is evil All is evil if i ride the horse of hate with its evil hooded eye turning world to evil. . . .
Evil evil evil evil evil evil evil even if three naked monkeys see no hear no speak no evil Ebony Buddha With Three Eyes is evil to evil eyes Bronze Image Dancing Krishna is evil Tibetan Conquerer of Death draped in human skin is evil Singing Bodhisattva is evil in evil eyes. . . .
Horse will catch me in the living end He’ll lie down on top of me in my horsehair grave. . . . Horse will lick my horsy face with his gluepot tongue Horse will puke on me Poop his baked potatoes out on me in death’s insanity and i will eat this naked lunch that turns me into him in the death of that god which is consciousness itself Ah but i will not look out before that date three Horse’s fur windows and vomit landscapes!
{CE; TYD; WAS, 23 Apr 97 and 29 Oct 97}
Fernández Flores, Rafael (20th Century) A Mexican, Fernández spoke about science and superstition at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Fernau, Rudolf (19th Century) A German, Fernau wrote Christianity and Practical Life (1868), Zoologica Humoristica (1882), and Religion as Ghost and God Worship. {BDF}
Feroe, Sandra (20th Century) Feroe is co-chairperson of Atheists of Colorado. She has written for Secular Nation (October-December 1998).
Feron, Emile (Born 1841) A Belgian advocate, Feron was Councillor of the International Freethought Federation. {BDF}
Ferrari, Guiseppe (1811—1876) Ferrari was an Italian philosopher, a disciple of Romagnosi, a study of whose philosophical writings he published in 1835. Upon being attacked by the Catholic party, he was exiled and moved to Paris, where he became a collaborator with Proudhon and a contributor to the Revue de Deux Mondes. In 1842 he became a professor of philosophy at Strasbourg, an appointment soon canceled on account of his opinions. In 1859 he was elected to the Italian Parliament, where he remained one of the most radical members until his death at Rome. {BDF; RAT}
Ferrer, Francisco (1859—1909) Ferrer founded his “Modern School,” a purely secular one, at Barcelona in 1901. “No priest and no religion, no prayers, and no devotions inspired by any creed of supernaturalistic affinities, found shelter under its auspices,” Foote has reported. Such roused the bitter antagonism of the clergy, who stirred up the authorities against him. He was imprisoned and his property confiscated. But new schools were established in many localities. In 1906, a bomb explosion at Madrid furnished the pretext for serious charges against Ferrer. Three years later another pretext was furnished by a civil disturbance in Barcelona. He was falsely charged with complicity in the rising and condemned to be shot, a sentence that was carried out on 12 October 1909. Pope Pius X sent a gold-handled sword engraved with his felicitations to the military prosecutor who had obtained Ferrer’s death. Ferrer’s The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (1913) was posthumously published. (See William Heaford’s article on Ferrer in Freethinker, 14 May and 7 June 1931.) {FO; GS; TYD}
Ferrer y Guardia, Francisco (1859—1909) A famous freethinker and teacher, Ferrer was convicted on false evidence as a revolutionary by the Spanish monarchy and executed in 1909. Ferrer called “belief” an “ancient error” and was an early exponent of progressive education. In his “Modern School” (1902) there were to be no rewards or punishment, and no competition. Music and current affairs were emphasized. The schools were to be free of any religious indoctrination, he wrote in his Origin and Ideals of the Modern School (published in 1913). At one time, there were more than forty branches of the Modern School in Barcelona and more than 120 schools which followed his methods. His belief in science and in the female potential riled Church officials. In 1906 when King Alfonso XIII was almost assassinated Ferrer, held in prison without trial for eleven months, was arrested as a suspect. Acquitted, for an anarchist had thrown the bomb, Ferrer organized the International League of Rational Education. But Bishop Casanas continued fighting “the partisans of the godless school,” and Ferrer’s trial was said to have been a mockery of justice. Pope Pius X inscribed a gift sword to the “Procureur” of the Military Tribunal for his part in ridding Spain of the antichrist. As described by McCabe, Ferrer “incurred the mortal hatred of the clergy. Inasmuch as he was also a philosophic Anarchist of the gentle Tolstoi school, the government willingly obliged the bishops and, after a gross travesty of a trial, had him shot. He was a man of high character and ideals.” Ferrer y Guardia left behind, on the walls of his dungeon, “Let no more gods or exploiters be served; let us learn rather to love each other.” {CE; CL; EU, Kit Mouat; JM; RAT; RE}
Ferrero, Guglielmo (1871—1942) Ferraro, an Italian man of letters and historian, collaborated with his father-in-law, Cesare Lombroso, in writing La donna delinquente (1893), a criminological study of female offenders. He was an outspoken critic of fascism and, exiled by Benito Mussolini, became professor of history at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, in 1930. He wrote The Greatness and Decline of Rome (1902—1907, 5 volumes). In 1908 he was Lowell lecturer in America. When invited to contribute to a symposium on the future life, Ferrero wrote that he did not believe in it. Ferrero was a positivist, not in a religious sense; in fact, McCabe labels Ferrer an agnostic. {JM; RAT; RE}
Ferri, Enrico (Born 1856) Ferri, once a professor of criminal law at the University of Siena, became a member of the Italian Parliament. He wrote a large work on the non-existence of free will. With Professor Lombroso, he was a leader of an Italian school of criminal law reform. Asked by McCabe if all Italian Socialists had given up the Catholic faith, Ferri wrote back, “Yes, and they reject every religion under the sun.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Ferri, Luigi (1826—1895) An Italian philosopher, Ferri wrote History of Philosophy in Italy (1868) and The Psychology of Pomponazzi. He was a corresponding member of the French Institut, member of the Academia dei Lincei and of the Council of Higher Education, and Chevalier of the Order of Merit. {BDF}
Ferrick, Thomas (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Ferrick was a leader of the Ethical Society of Boston. He is Harvard University’s Humanist Chaplain and has stated that the chaplaincy “celebrates humanity in its earthly and evolutionary context. Its main appeal is to the skeptical inquirer and the idealistic student of an agnostic or atheist inclination.” Ferrick is on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association. E-mail: <thomas_ferrick@harvard.edu>. (See entries for Chaplain, John Loeb, and Massachusetts Humanists.) {FD; HM2; HNS2}
Ferrière, Emile (Born 1830)
Ferrière was a French author of Literature and Philosophy (1865), Darwinism (1872), and The Apostles (1879, a work which challenged early Christian morality. Another work that showed his freethinking was Paganism of the Hebrews Until the Babylonian Captivity (1884). {BDF}
Ferris, Timothy (1944— ) A journalist who is emeritus professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Ferris has made his name writing about scientific matters. The Red Limit: The Search for the Edge of the Universe (1983) and Coming of Age in the Milky Way (1988) were followed by The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the Universe(s) Report (1977). In the latter work, Ferris writes that the big-bang theory is not a temporary theoretical fashion, likely to be changed when further astronomical findings are reported. Rather, it is almost certain to endure as part of any future theory of the universe. Such a conclusion, he adds, “may seem curious to readers of the many newspaper and magazine articles that have appeared during the past decade proclaiming that this or that observational finding has put the big-bang theory in jeopardy.” “There is more to the world than this world, and more to this world than we know,” Ferris notes. After a conference of theologians and cosmologists, however, a telecast of the event showed
. . . several religious people sitting around, and they turned to each other with smug smiles and said, “Well it just goes to show that the man of science laboriously climbs the mountain and gets to the top and finds that the man of religion has been there all the time.” Well, that’s crap! . . . What I find repugnant is the easy assumption in some quarters of religion that one or another scientific finding has simply confirmed what they already knew. {Before the Big Bang,” The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1997}
Ferucci, Franco (20th Century) Ferruci, an Italian born professor of literature at Rutgers University, is author of The Life of God. (See entry for God Himself.)
Ferry, Jules François Camille (1832—1892) Ferry, a French statesman, became Minister of Public Instruction and was responsible for secularizing the schools. He also was a Premier and the President of the Senate. A thorough agnostic, as shown in his Discours et Opinions (1903), he was a noted leader of the anti-clericals. {JM; RAT; RE}
Ferry, Luc (20th Century) Ferry, a professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and the University of Caen, was elected a Humanist Laureate in 1993 by the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is described as being in the forefront of the younger French intellectuals and philosophers. Ferry wrote Political Philosophy (1991), the first part of a projected four-volume work on rights. He rejects a simple return to the ancient philosophers, arguing that the ideals of equality and human rights that have been developed in modern times need also to be included. Kant and Fichte, he holds, have much to teach us about rights, which are germane only if we accept the contemporary idea of human rights that they need to be shared by all humans simply by virtue of the fact we all are humans. He also wrote The System of Philosophies of History (1992), From the Rights of Man to the Republican Idea (1992), Homo Aestheticus (1993), The New Ecological Order (1995), and Why We Are Not Nietzscheans (1997). With Alain Renaut, Ferry wrote French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism (1990). The discursive work tells about the 1968 student uprisig in France, then discusses French Nietzscheanism (Foucault), Heideggerianism (Derrida), Marxism (Bourdieu), and Freudianism (Lacan). Ferry and Renaut argue against “anti-humanism” and argue for a faith in our sovereignty over ourselves. In so doing, they are negative about the dominant French philosophical currents since 1968 and align themselves more with Kant, Fichte, the Marburg and Frankfurt schools, Habermas, Raymond Aron, and Karl Popper. Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectual in the 20th Century (1995) is negatively critical of the work. Ferry and Renault also wrote Heidegger et les modernes (1988; Heidegger and Modernity, 1990), in which they claim that Heidegger, when he is a humanist, is a critic of National Socialism. Clearly, Ferry is a “non-metaphysical” humanist.
FERTILITY RITES An important pagan myth was the search of the earth goddess for her lost or dead child or lover—Isis and Osiris; Ishtar and Tammuz; Demeter and Persephone. Such a myth symbolized the birth, the death, and the reappearance of vegetation, when acted out in a sacred drama, and it was the fertility rite par excellence, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia. Other rites involved magic, such as kindling of fires (symbolizing the sun) and scattering the reproductive organs of animals on the fields, displays of phallic symbols, and ritual prostitution. At one time in India, it was believed that a fertile marriage would result if virgins were first deflowered by means of the lingam, a stone phallus symbolizing the god Shiva. Sacrifices of both humans and animals were believed to release the powers embodied within them and so make the fields or forests productive where the sacrifices had taken place. Many ancient fertility rites have persisted in modified forms into modern times. The Maypole dance which young children so love, for example, derives from spring rituals glorifying the phallus. Religious fundamentalists, in a Pat Robertson-approved ceremony termed “See You At the Pole,” gather at flagpoles and pray, apparently unaware that they are duplicating an ancient pagan ritual of phallic worship as performed by druids and other pagans in northern Europe before being stopped by Christian leaders. {CE}
Fessenden, Larry (20 Century) A film director, Fessenden was asked by Peter Graham about his independent film “Habit” (1995), which Graham called “a horror movie that has a romantic and nostalgic tone,” then commented that that sounded religious. Fessenden responded,
Yes and no. I’m a wretched atheist and existentialist. I don’t believe in God at all. I think there’s nothing. On the other hand, I’m probably more religious than the average Joe, because I feel that there’s something to be revered. The wind and the trees, the mystery. Habit is about that other thing, the mystery. Sam wants to believe in this other power, that this woman he’s dating is a vampire, that she’s the undead. He buys into something that is ludicrous and romantic. He has this great yearning and there’s no way for him to show that. {CA}
FETISH A fetish is an inanimate natural or man-made object believed to have magical power, either from a will of its own or from a god that has transformed the object into an instrument of its desires. A fetish with great power is often declared taboo. Stones, feathers, shells, carvings in wood can be fetishes, and fetishism can include using objects as substitutes for male genitalia. Preachers have been known to use a choir robe as a fetish. Women have been known to use the Christian cross. Unless fetishism is coupled with other psychological disturbances, it is not considered a serious disorder. (See entry for Animism.) {CE}
Feuerbach, Friedrich Heinrich (1806—1880) The son of a famous German jurist, Feuerbach at first studied philology, then chose to preach what his brother Ludwig taught. He wrote Theanthropos (1838), a series of aphorisms, and Religion of the Future (1843—1847). Like his brother Ludwig, Friedrich was a freethinker. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; PUT}
Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas (1804—1872)
Author of The Essence of Christianity (1841, translated by George Eliot in 1854), Feuerbach was a leading German atheist, materialist, “sensuousist,” and naturalist. A disbeliever in personal immortality and suspicious of idealism, he was a leading skeptic. In 1828 he became a lecturer in the University of Erlangen, but soon had to retire owing to the offence caused by his “Thoughts on Death and Immortality,” in which he attacked the belief in an immortal “soul.” As early as 1839, Feuerbach held that Christianity had in fact long vanished not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, that it was nothing more than a fixed idea. God, he held, is merely man’s projection of man’s [inner nature. Riepe relates Feuerbach’s intellectual strengths and weaknesses, showing how he influenced the 19th-century Protestant thought as well as the outlooks of Richard Wagner, Marx, Engels, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Barthe, Marbin Buber, Martin Heidegger, Sidney Hook, and Sartre. When Marx read Feuerbach, he concluded that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Buber, the Jewish philosopher credited Feuerbach with having “introduced that discovery of the Thou which has been called ‘the Copernican Revolution’ of modern thought.” Hook described Feuerbach’s psychology of religion as “still the most comprehensive and persuasive hypothesis for the study of comparative religion.” Among his observations:
• God has not created man, but man created God.
• It is as clear as the sun and as evident as the day that there is no God and that there can be none.
• Christianity has in fact long vanished, not only from the reason but also from the life of mankind, and it is nothing more than a fixed idea.
• Whenever morality is based on theology, whenever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.
According to H. James Birx, Feuerbach represents a significant philosophical break from such early German idealists as Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, providing “a starting point for a naturalist humanism. He embraced the scientific-rational attitude, acknowledged the value of both the natural and social sciences, and incorporated the theory of biological evolution into his own conceptual framework of man within nature. In essence, Feuerbach saw humanity within sociocultural development and our species as a product of organic history.” Although a Christian of the evangelical type–Brewin Grant–claimed that he “died in despair,” Feuerbach’s friend Carl Scholl, who delivered an address at his grave, visited him every morning during his last illness. Scholl said that Feuerbach was suffering from bronchitis and endured severe pain with great fortitude. He died 13 September 1872 “in a slumber so peaceful that those present scarcely noticed that he was dead.” (For Mao’s view on Feuerbach, see the entry for Marxism.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Dale Riepe; FO; Van A. Harvey, “The Re-Discovery of Ludwig Feuerbach,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997; FUS; HNS2; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE; Carl Scholl, Dem Andenken Ludwig Feuerbach (1872); TRI; TYD}
Feyerabend, Paul (1924—1994) Reviewing Feyerabend’s autobiography, Killing Time (1995), Richard Rorty wrote, “Paul Feyerabend, who died in 1994 at the age of 70, was the Norman Mailer of philosophy. Like Mailer, he was a soldier in World War II (but on the wrong side). Feyerabend, too, was brilliant, brave, adventurous, original and quirky. Both liked to shock: Mailer used to say that we face a choice between cancer and homosexuality, Feyerabend once tried to put modern medicine and voodoo on an epistemological par. And there are other resemblances. Feyerabend was an exuberant political radical, but nobody could pin down his political views. He was a celebrated womanizer (even though, as this autobiography reveals, he never experienced sexual intercourse, having been rendered impotent at twenty-one by a bullet that pierced his spinal cord and left him on crutches, and in almost constant pain, for the rest of his life). His life was disorganized, and he sometimes treated his wives, lovers and colleagues very badly indeed. Feyerabend remains a hero to a sizable minority of philosophers, but the majority think of him as having had too little self-discipline to fulfill his early promise.” That sizable minority liked the ex-Nazi officer’s views because he sided more with Frege and Husserl who wanted philosophy, in Rorty’s words, “to be an autonomous, ahistorical discipline that discerns ineluctable formal structures of reality, experience or language” rather than with Heidegger and Dewey, who felt that cutting philosophy loose from history would produce “only sterile scholasticism.” “Some philosophers of science, in particular Paul Feyerabend,” wrote Paul Kurtz in Towards a New Enlightenment, “deny that there are any objective methods [of science] at all. There is no method, he says, it all depends on cultural or social conditions of the time. This position, I submit, is absurd. It reduces science to utter subjectivism. My retort is that there is a real world out there, and that some methods are more effective than others. In any case, science is a cooperative, intersubjective venture, testing its hypotheses by evidence, experiment, and consistency, and we cannot say that ‘anything goes’ and that one theory is as good as any other, and/or that the paradigms that are fashionable are those that win out.” (See entry for Consilience.) {Richard Rorty, “Untruth and Consequences,” The New Republic, 31 July 1995}
Feynman, Richard P. (1918—1988) In What Do You Care What Other People Think? (1988), the Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Feynman who once worked on the Manhattan Project wrote,
In those days, in Far Rockaway, there was a youth center for Jewish kids at the temple. . . . Somebody nominated me for president of the youth center. The elders began getting nervous, because I was an avowed atheist by that time. . . . I thought nature itself was so interesting that I didn’t want it distorted (by miracle stories). And so I gradually came to disbelieve the whole religion.
Genius, The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) is the title of a biography by James Gleick. Feynman shared the Nobel Prize with Julian Schwinger and Shinichiro Tomonaga. They developed QED (Quantum Electrodynamics) into a theory that encompassed all electromagnetic properties of electrons. In so doing, it covered all of physics and physical chemistry except gravitation and nuclear structure. In 1943 he worked at Los Alamos, working on the atomic bomb until it was tested two years later. He is credited with identifying the cause of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy. Gleick reports that at the graveside of his father, Feynman read no prayers, that he was a vehement atheist. The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (1998), written by Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman, told of his view that “Science makes an impact on many ideas associated with religion, but I do not believe it affects moral conduct and ethical values.” He also held that “the metaphysical aspects of religion have nothing to do with the ethical values, that the moral values seem somehow to be outside the scientific realm.” The work gives his materialistic, nontheistic view of the cosmos. Freeman Dyson has called Freynman “the most original mind of his generation.” He also was a bongo player with a sense of humor. When he was dying of cancer, for example, The Los Angeles Times offered him an advance copy of the obituary to obtain any suggestions for changes. “No thanks,” the confident atheist replied, because to do so “ahead of time” would take “the element of surprise out of it.” Gleick also quotes what Feynman, in anticipation of death, thought:
You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers, which might be wrong. {Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762—1814) Fichte, the famed German philosopher, held to a dialectical idealism which attempted to unify the theoretical and practical aspects of cognition that had been set apart by Kant. Kant’s noumenal realm was rejected, “making the active indivisible ego the source of the structure of experience. This led to his postulation of a moral will of the universe, a God or absolute ego from which all eventually derives and which therefore unites all knowing,” states the Columbia Encyclopedia. Fichte’s Kritik aller Offenbarung (Critique of all Revelation, 1792) led to charges that he was attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the worship of reason. This led to his wife’s being insulted in the streets of Jena, his house being riotously attacked in the night, and his moving, although the High Consistory of Weimar acquitted him of all charges. His Wissenschaftslehre (“Doctrine of Knowledge” [1794–1795]) brought him into conflict with the Kantians, and when accused of atheism he retorted the charge on the utilitarian theists, then resigned his Jena position. According to Robertson, after attacks from religionists as well as from philosophers, Fichte “remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all around. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist ‘for his own hand,’ who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as ‘freethinking chatter.’ If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza.” McCabe calls Fichte an idealist pantheist, not an atheist. {BDF; CE; ER; EU; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Ficino, Marsilio (1433-1499) An Italian philosopher, Ficino was a notable reviver of Platonism during the Renaissance. (See entry for Paul Kristeller.)
Ficke, Arthur Davison (1883—1945) An Iowa-born poet, Ficke conspired with another humanistic author, Witter Bynner, by writing Spectra, a literary hoax that satirized modernism in poetry. His Mr. Faust has a New Yorker working with Satan to overcome disillusionment, ending with a spiritual peace that is humanistic. His most philosophic work is Tumultuous Shore (1942). In “An Ungodly Man,” Ficke writes ironically about an artist:
His paintings were treasured, But he was disliked because He cursed the church, he drank much gin, He followed wenches by the score; He was a man of utter sin. Our matrons turned him from the door.
He died at last, of too much gin. . . . We are a Christian folk; and we Treasure, forgiving of his sin, His pictures for posterity.
In “Prayer for a Lady,” he ends by addressing “God”:
This prayer I offer unto Thee Aware of its futility. Full well I know Thou canst do naught, Being but a figment of my thought.
Ficke’s “In This Hour,” describes his humanism:
I pray you, in this hour’s confusion go Not back again into the old belief That all man’s life is brutish, harsh, and brief, And that what has been, always will be so. Earth has seen many a great hope’s overthrow And many a noble dream go down in grief; Yet still persists the parable of the leaf That spring unfolds above the endless snow.
Be not too sure that evil in this hour Has strength to make as nothing all our gain And leave us naked to the whirlwind’s wrath. Through earlier, darker days than these, some power Of man, mere man, endured its night of pain, Then strode one footstep higher up the path. {CL; The Humanist Newsletter, September-October, 1953}
FIDEISM Around 1885, the term “fideism” came to mean a reliance on faith, not reason, in the pursuit of religious truth. Thus, according to this view, Christianity, Islam, or any other religion rests on premises that are accepted by faith. John Hick, who taught theology at the University of Birmingham, is an example of a fideist, one who held that belief in God includes believing that God created goodness as well as evil. But belief in God, he held, is not incompatible with the fact that evil is found in the world. Hick argued against the seeming incompatibility of believing that, if God is perfectly loving, He must wish to abolish evil; that if He is all-powerful, He must be able to abolish evil. Even if the arguments for the existence of God were not valid, Hick held, faith in God “stands ultimately upon the ground of religious experience and is not a product of philosophical reasoning.” Fideism, in short, holds that everything that can be known about God or divine things is known only or primarily by faith, never by reason alone. Bertrand Russell noted that, as a new theology, fideism “cannot be refuted since it does not profess to prove its points.” Ernest Nagel similarly found that fideism “is impregnable to rational criticism.” J. C. A. Gaskin, in Varieties of Unbelief from Epicurus to Sartre (1989), defined fideism as “[t]he position that the teachings of Christianity or of Islam or whatever are justified because all knowledge rests on premises accepted by faith.” {ER}
Fieger, Geoffrey (20 Century) Fieger, the lawyer and champion of Dr. Jack Kevorkian—the advocate and practitioner of assisted suicide—ran for Governor of Michigan in 1998. In early 1996 Fieger compared the Orthodox rabbis to Nazis when they issued a statement condemning assisted suicide as a violation of Jewish teaching. “They’re closer to Nazis than they think they are. Orthodox Jews are not different than the right-wing Christian nuts. If you’re a religious nut, you’re a religious nut,” he told The Detroit News. He described Michigan Governor John Engler, a Republican, as “the product of miscegenation between barnyard animals and human beings” and said of the Governor’s children that “unless they have corkscrew tails, those kids are not his.” He has called Adam Cardinal Maida, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Detroit, a “nut” and described the Pope by saying he would prefer taking advice from “Joe the wino.” As for Jesus: “[J]ust some goofball that got nailed to the cross.” A freethinker who is not a member of any religious group but has said he is ready to “keep all my options open,” explains on his Web page that “I have no difficulty with the unfettered practice of religious beliefs” but do not want them incorporated into law. (See entry for Jack Kevorkian.)
Field, Frank (19th Century)
Field, of Oldham, was an active leader of the Lancashire Secular Union in England in the 1870s. {RSR}
Fielding, Henry (1707—1754) Fielding is the English dramatist whose novel, Tom Jones (1749), made him a major name in literature. The title character was presented as Fielding’s concept of the ideal man, one in whom goodness and charity are combined with common sense. “No man has ever sat down calmly unbiased to reason out his religion,” Fielding wrote, “and not ended by rejecting it.” {TYD}
Fielding, William John (1886-1972?) An internationally known author, Fielding was an executive secretary of Tiffany & Co., the New York jewelers. Later he became secretary-treasurer of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, an art institute the purpose of which is to aid young artists. Fielding wrote thirty Little Blue Books, which sold more than six million copies at the height of their popularity in the 1920s and through the 1940s. He also wrote ten books on psychology, sexology, anthropology, and related subjects, the best known of which, Sex and the Love-Life (1927, sold more than one million copies. The Library of Congress requested that the book be translated into braille for the benefit of the blind. As a president of the Thomas Paine Foundation, he helped popularize the ideas and works of Paine. In 1964 he participated in the dedication of a monument to Paine in the latter’s birthplace, Thetford, England. His “Thomas Paine Returns to Thetford” appeared in Joseph Lewis’s Age of Reason (January 1965). Fielding also wrote Shackles of the Supernatural (1938; 1969); Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage (1942); and All the Lives I Have Lived (1972). From Girard, Kansas, Fielding had edited Know Thyself from 1923 to 1924; wrote articles for the New York Socialist daily, Call, from 1911 through 1923; was editor of a Socialist Party weekly, the Newark, New Jersey, Leader from 1915 to 1920; had articles in the atheists’ Truthseeker in 1923 and in the 1940s; wrote for the Freethinkers of America’s Age of Reason in the 1950s and 1960; wrote for the London Freethinker in the 1950s and 1960s; wrote for American Rationalist in the 1960s and 1970s; and wrote for the United Secularists of America’s Progressive World in the 1960s and 1970s. An outspoken advocate of birth control, he worked with Margaret Sanger. Fielding died in Rockville Center, New York. {FUS}
“Fielding-Hall,” (Harold Fielding Patrick Hall) (1859—1917) A writer on Burma, Fielding-Hall in his Soul of a People (1898) rendered considerable service to Rationalism by showing–and it was widely read and discussed–that an Asiatic Buddhist people, the Burmese, was superior in general character to any in Europe or America. His own creed, given in The World-Soul (1913), is Emersonian in that he accepted only an Unknown Power or World-Spirit, rejecting both Christianity and immortality. {RAT; RE}
Fields, Annie Adams (1834-1915) Fields was a Unitarian, an author, a literary hostess, and a charity worker. Upon the death of her husband James Fields, the editor of Atlantic, she lived with Sarah Orne Jewitt.
Fields, Emmett F. (1928— ) Fields is author of Atheism—An Affirmative View (1981) and Is the Bible the Word of God? (1986?). In an interview with Fred Whitehead, Fields described his collection of freethought literature. Raised to believe Christianity, he found it necessary later to [fight] my way this hole that I had been put in by indoctrination. I thought I must be the only person in the world that ever had these ideas. All of the free thought information that was written and not available, I couldn’t find, I knew nothing about it. I had a heck of a struggle and then I started finding people who thought the way I came to think and telling me about these books, and I started looking for them.” Fields currently has three to four thousand freethought works. A CD-ROM entitled “Bank of Wisdom” (PO Box 926, Louisville, Kentucky 40201) includes out-of-print freethought materials. {Freethought History #14, 1995; GS}
Fields, James T. (19th Century) Fields, a Unitarian, was a well-known publisher in the 1800s. He was editor of the Atlantic. {U}
Fields, Joseph (20 Century) Fields, a retired bus driver in New York City, told BBC Radio in a 1998 interview how as an African American he had felt great relief when as a young man he had ridded himself of the Christianity he had been raised to believe in. A member of the American Humanist Association, Fields in 1998 attended the International Humanist and Ethical Union conference in Mumbai, India.
Fields, W. C. (William Claude) (1879—1946) Fields, famed comedian, film star, juggler, and atheist, said, “Prayers never bring anything. . . . They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy–but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas.” Fields had a popular and ongoing feud on radio with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy, who once joked, “Pink elephants take aspirin to get rid of W. C. Fields.” Viewers noticed his big nose, first for its acne, eczema, and, later, its condition caused by drinking too much liquor. Viewers also laughed at his screen persona, which showed him to have a bedeviled wife. He also was pictured as disliking small children, saying, “I like children. If they’re properly cooked.” And “Uncle will give you some nice razor blades to play with,” lines by his Elmer Prettywillie to a baby in “It’s the Old Army Game.” And “Children should neither be seen nor heard from–ever again.” In actuality, Fields doted on his grandchildren and once planned to open an orphanage. Among other of his various quips are the following:
• I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
• What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?
• My illness is due to my doctor’s insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.
• The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.
• Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
• Will Hays [a censor of movies] is my shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in clean postures.
• Anybody who hates dogs and loves whiskey can’t be all bad.
A cantankerous man whom fellow boozer John Barrymore thought would make a great Lady Macbeth, Fields remained to the end the “definite personality” he told an interviewer in 1935 he wanted to be. When he recognized that “the Man in the Bright Nightgown” had come for him in 1946, as his last act Fields put his finger to his lips, looked around the room at those who were there, and winked. Undertakers in Philadelphia practice the world’s most difficult profession, he once quipped, because morticians there cannot always tell if they are burying a live or a deceased person. Although his epitaph is widely believed to state I WOULD RATHER BE LIVING IN PHILADELPHIA, the bronze plaque on a marble niche front at Forest Lawn in California lists only his name and the vital dates. {CB; CE; Simon Louvish, Man in the Flying Trapeze, the Life and Times of W. C. Fields (1997); PA}
Fields, W. C. (William Claude) (29 Jan 1879 - 25 Dec 1946)
Fields, famed comedian, film star, juggler, and atheist, said, “Prayers never bring anything. . . . They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy–but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas.”
Fields had a popular and ongoing feud on radio with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy, Charlie McCarthy, who once joked, “Pink elephants take aspirin to get rid of W. C. Fields.” Viewers noticed his big nose, first for its acne, eczema, and, later, its condition caused by drinking too much liquor. Viewers also laughed at his screen persona, which showed him to have a bedeviled wife. He also was pictured as disliking small children, saying, “I like children. If they’re properly cooked.” And “Uncle will give you some nice razor blades to play with,” lines by his Elmer Prettywillie to a baby in It’s the Old Army Game. And “Children should neither be seen nor heard from–ever again.” In actuality, Fields doted on his grandchildren and once planned to open an orphanage.
Among other of his various quips are the following:
• I always keep a supply of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy.
• What contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch?
• My illness is due to my doctor’s insistence that I drink milk, a whitish fluid they force down helpless babies.
• The cost of living has gone up another dollar a quart.
• Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.
• Will Hays [a censor of movies] is my shepherd, I shall not want; he maketh me to lie down in clean postures.
• Anybody who hates dogs and loves whiskey can’t be all bad.
A cantankerous man who fellow boozer John Barrymore thought would make a great Lady Macbeth, Fields remained to the end the “definite personality” he told an interviewer in 1935 he wanted to be. When he recognized that “the Man in the Bright Nightgown” had come for him in 1946, as his last act Fields put his finger to his lips, looked around the room at those who were there, and winked. Undertakers in Philadelphia practice the world’s most difficult profession, he once quipped, because morticians there cannot always tell if they are burying a live or a deceased person. Although Fields’s epitaph is widely believed to state I WOULD RATHER BE LIVING IN PHILADELPHIA, the bronze plaque on a marble niche front at Forest Lawn in California lists only his name and the vital dates. {CB; CE; Simon Louvish, Man in the Flying Trapeze, the Life and Times of W. C. Fields (1997); PA}
Fierstein, Harvey (1954— )
Fierstein is author of the Broadway play, “Torch Song Trilogy,” which consists of three separate plays (“The International Stud,” “Fugue in a Nursery, and “Widows and Children First!”). It was unusual in that he wrote it to get attention as an actor, not a playwright. Fierstein, whose hoarse voice is related to a childhood accident, won two Tony Awards for his author-star performance as Arnold Beckoff in an off-beat “traditional family values” plot. Playgoers who saw “Torch Song Trilogy” laughed wildly at the bunny shoes designed for him by designer Mardi Philips and in which he campily tramped around, fully aware that a bunny is also the object of sexual desire. Following is a sample of Fierstein’s wit:
• Gay liberation should not be a license to be a perpetual adolescent. If you deny yourself commitment then what can you do with your life?
• . . . when I grew up we had no positive images if we were gay. I was totally lost––I was just this fat faggot living out in Brooklyn. All I knew about gays was that they always got beaten up in some Philip Marlowe movie.
• I wish that homosexuals were born with a little horn in the middle of their forehead so we couldn’t hide so easily. At least if you can’t hide, you have to stand up and fight.
Fierstein was the librettist and Jerry Herman was composer and lyricist of the Broadway production of “La Cage aux Folles” (1983). On “Uncensored,” a Public Broadcasting System program, Fierstein said he was both a cultural Jew and an atheist. {AA; CA; E; GL} Harvey Fierstein, Screenwriter/Actor ent Internet Movie Database
On a 1995(?) appearance on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect, one of the panelists suggested that Fierstein -- who is a Jew -- must think that Menorahs ought to be displayed alongside Christmas trees on public property. Fierstein disputed this and said that neither should be displayed saying that though he is a Jew, he is also an atheist.
--JR
Fierstein, Harvey (6 Jun 1954 - )
Fierstein is author of the Broadway play, Torch Song Trilogy, which consists of three separate plays (The International Stud, Fugue in a Nursery, and Widows and Children First!). It was unusual in that he wrote it to get attention as an actor, not a playwright.
Fierstein, whose hoarse voice is related to a childhood accident, won two Tony Awards for his author-star performance as Arnold Beckoff in an off-beat “traditional family values” plot. Playgoers who saw “Torch Song Trilogy” laughed wildly at the bunny shoes designed for him by designer Mardi Philips and in which he campily tramped around, fully aware that a bunny is also the object of sexual desire. Following is a sample of Fierstein’s wit:
• Gay liberation should not be a license to be a perpetual adolescent. If you deny yourself commitment then what can you do with your life? •When I grew up we had no positive images if we were gay. I was totally lost––I was just this fat faggot living out in Brooklyn. All I knew about gays was that they always got beaten up in some Philip Marlowe movie. • I wish that homosexuals were born with a little horn in the middle of their forehead so we couldn’t hide so easily. At least if you can’t hide, you have to stand up and fight.
Fierstein was the librettist and Jerry Herman was composer and lyricist of the Broadway production of La Cage aux Folles (1983). On “Uncensored,” a Public Broadcasting System program, Fierstein said he was both a cultural Jew and an atheist. {AA; CA; E; GL}
Figueras y Moracas, Estanilas (1810—1879)
A Spanish statesman and orator, Figueras y Moracas was elected in 1851 to the Cortes, was exiled in 1866, then returned in 1868. He fought the candidature of the Duc de Montpensiéer and became President of the Spanish Republic in 1873. Figueras y Moracas died poor and, according to his wish, was buried without religious ceremony. {BDF; RAT}
Figueres Ferrer, José [President] (1906—1990) Figueres was the Costa Rican president who abolished the army, setting an unusual precedent that his successors have left unchanged. “What other nations in history, including the Vatican, have ever taken such profound action?” declared freethinker Fernando Vargas, a fellow Costa Rican. Despite bitter opposition, Figueres instituted a sweeping program of welfare legislation, public works, and educational reform. Although Figueres was a freethinker, his son (who in 1994 became the country’s president) is not. {CE}
Figuiera, Guillem (Born c. 1190) Figuiera was a Provençal troubadour and precursor of the Renaissance. His poems were directed against the priests and the Court of Rome. {BDF}
Filagieri: See entry for Beccaria.
Filangieri, Gaetano (1752—1788) Filangieri was an Italian writer on legislation, his principal work being La Scienza della Legislazione (1780). In the fifth volume he deals with pre-Christian religions, and the work was put on the Catholic Index of prohibited reading. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Filipe, Nuno (20 Century) A Portuguese writer who uses the pseudonym “Atheos,” Filipe is critical of what he calls “the lie that is Christianism”:
No Cristianismo, só o facto de se duvidar de deus é considerado pecado. Não é o cepticismo a atitude a seguir por um homem sensato? E se o cristianismo está correcto, porque tenta afastar o homem do fruto proibído? Porque tenta afastar o conhecimento do homem?
[In Christianism, just the fact of doubt about god is considered a sin. Isn’t scepticism the attitude of a wise man? If Christianism is right, why does it try to put away man from the forbidden fruit? Why does it try to put away knowledge from man?] {CA}
Nuno Filipe, Portuguese Writer art
Filipe, Nuno ?
Filipe, who also uses the pen name "atheos", is very critical of Christianity in his published writings saying that it is a disease that adversely affects society.
"Admito que por vezes o homem precisa de orientação, e a religião poderá em parte ajudar o homem nessa sua carência, mas a verdade acima de tudo! E não devemos colaborar com a mentira que é o cristianismo."
"I admit that sometimes man needs orientation, and religion could help him in that, but the true above everything! And we should not collaborate with the lie that is christianism."
and from another article...
"No cristianismo, só o facto de se duvidar de 'deus' é considerado pecado. Não é o cepticismo a atitude a seguir por um homem sensato? E se o cristianismo está correcto, porque tenta afastar o homem do 'fruto proibído'? Porque tenta afastar o conhecimento do homem?"
"In christianism, just the fact of doubt about 'god' is considered a sin. Isn't scepticism the attitude of a wise man? If Christianism is right, why does it try to put away man from the 'forbidden fruit'? Why does it try to put away knowledge from man?"
One of the journals, O Malho, in which his work is published says that he is considering publishing an upcoming book with an English translation. The publish date is at yet undetermined.
Filler, Louis (1912— ) When he reviewed books for The Humanist, Filler was on the faculty at Antioch College. He wrote Voice of Democracy: David Graham Phillips (1978).
Fillible, Kent (20th Century) Fillible is a local humanist activist in Shreveport, Louisiana. {Free Inquiry, Spring 1991}
Fillmore, Millard [President] (1800—1874) Fillmore, the 13th United States President, was born in a log cabin. Once a lieutenant in the Anti-Masonic party, he joined the Whig Party and was reelected three times to the House of Representatives. Becoming Vice President on the Whig ticket with Zachary Taylor, he succeeded to the Presidency when Taylor in 1850 died of cholera. Upon learning of Taylor’s death, he wrote to the cabinet, “I have no language to express the emotions of my heart. The shock is so sudden and unexpected that I am overwhelmed.” In the 1856 election, Fillmore ran on the Know-Nothing Ticket. Although opposed to slavery, Fillmore felt it best if the nation be held together. In supporting bills that the antislavery people opposed, he said, “I well know that by so doing, I must lose the friendship of many men. The man who can look upon a crisis without being willing to offer himself upon the altar of his country is not fit for public trust.” During his administration a treaty was approved with the help of Commodore Perry which opened trade with Japan. On the lighter side, the Fillmores were responsible for starting the first library in the White House and replacing a fireplace with a cook stove for kitchen use, according to Gillis. (Gillis also credits the Fillmores with installing the first bathtub there, but actually this story was a hoax perpetuated by H. L. Mencken.) Daniel Webster was his Secretary of State, but because of a division of the slavery issue he was not renominated by the Whig convention in 1852. Fillmore opposed Lincoln’s election and supported the Fugitive Slave Law, which required the return of escaped slaves to the South. He was a charter member of the First Unitarian Church of Buffalo, holding pew #70. {CE; EG; U; UU}
Filter (20 Century) Filter is a group of contemporary recording artists who are known for the song, “Hey Man, Nice Shot!” During a February 1996 chat session on Prodigy, the band was asked how God had influenced their mind and responded, “We respect people’s spirituality. Just don’t come up to my fucking face and tell me about God, because for thousands of years organized religion has done nothing more than fuck up science and, in general, any kind of scholastics.” Another band member added, “I don’t believe in some old man with a beard telling me I can’t have sex with my girlfriend because I’m not married and I’m condemned to Hell for the rest of eternity.” {CA} Filter, Recording Artists music
Filter is best known for the song "Hey Man, Nice Shot!". During a February 1996 chat session on Prodigy, a fan asked Filter how God had influenced their music. The band replied "...we respect people's spirituality. Just don't come up to my f---ing face and tell me about God, because for thousands of years organized religion has done nothing more than f--- up science and, in general, any kind of scholastics." A member of the band also said, "I don't believe in some old man with a beard, telling me I can't have sex with my girlfriend because I'm not married and I'm condemned to Hell for the rest of eternity."
Finch, A. Ellen (19th Century) A freethinker, Finch wrote The English Free-Thinkers of the Eighteenth Century (1879). {GS}
Finch, John (19th Century) Finch was chairman of the Rational Society Congress of 1844. {VI}
Finch, Robert (20th Century) Finch is President of Humanists of Houston (HOH), Texas. In 1995, HOH was host of the Southwest Regional Humanist and Freethought Conference.
Findlay, Christopher (20th Century) Findlay, a rationalist, has written for England’s New Humanist. Reviewing Antony Grey’s Speaking of Sex (1994), Findlay finds that Grey “makes no prescription for an ideal sexual vocabulary; he concludes that ‘the language of the market place and of the streets will carry on, as it always has, being the most compelling form of sexual discourse.’” Findlay continues, “In a brief discussion of the language of the tabloids, [Grey] actually welcomes their ‘enthusiastic employment of vulgar language’ as ‘making sexual discussion less solemn’–he welcomes their use of the ‘jolly notion of “bonking,” which is indeed a new word uncorrupted by being used as a term of abuse (like ‘f***ing’ [Ed. note: fucking] or ‘c**t’ [Ed. note: cunt]), which Grey rightly decries.” Findlay notes that a common way to avoid the shock many feel at hearing some words is to use innuendo, as is done in pop songs. “It enables us to share intimate mental images without the embarrassment of explicit terms, and,” Findlay adds, “is perhaps the most widely used of all forms of sexual discourse.”
Findley, George (19th Century) Findley, a second-hand book seller, was a member of the Leicester, England, freethought group. He led a group of positivists. The Leicester group in 1885 played cricket on a Sunday, openly challenging Sabbatarian prejudices. The police took their names and addresses. The following week, the team was attacked by a mob which tore up the wickets and threw the ball in the river. The ball, one of the secularists observed, “was rescued by a sensible dog.” {RSR}
Fine, Stacie (20th Century) Fine is Community Development Director of the Society for Humanistic Judaism.
Finey, S. J. (20th Century) Finey, a freethinker, wrote The Bible, Is It of Divine Origin, and Influence? (1859). {GS}
Finger, Ben Jr. (20th Century) Finger’s poetry was included in The Humanist Newsletter (Summer 1953):
Faith in Man
When strife and rank injustice mar the earth, How can a thinking man ignore their clutch? How can I even trust in my own worth, Knowing that I have fallen short so much? Peace is removed by many a weary mile, And faith is deeply challenged by such greeds As make it seem a sacrilege to smile.
And yet, recall the pageant of great deeds. Think about all the heroes who have grown To heights of character. . . . When thus we scan Man’s arc of life, we certainly have known Enough of good to give us faith in man!
Fingerman, Bob (20 Century) Fingerman, a writer and comic artist, has created a wide variety of atheistic protagonists in his comic books. “I thank both my parents for their atheism,” he has written, “That was a great way to be brought up.” {CA} Bob Fingerman, Comic Artist/Writer art
Fingerman has been writing and drawing comic books for the last decade that feature a wide array of atheistic protagonists who reflect his own views.
He writes: "I thank both my parents for their atheism. That was a great way to be brought up."
---
Fingerman's site, which features samples of his work, can be found at
http://www.neurobellum.com/wage/
FINGERPRINTING: See entry for Francis Galton.
Fink, George A. (20th Century) An Iowan, Fink once was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Fink, Margaret (1933— ) Fink is an Australian atheist, art teacher, and film maker. She produced “The Removalists” (1974) and “My Brilliant Career” (1978), both feature films. In Who’s Who of Australian Women, Fink describes herself as “an art teacher, an anarchist, and an atheist.” {SWW}
Finke, Heinrich (Born 1855) Finke was a German historian, an Archivist of Schleswig (1882—1887), teacher of history at Münster University (1887—1897), and professor of history at Freiburg University in 1898. In 1906 he was made Privy Councillor. Finke was a frequent lecturer for the German monists and was a strong supporter of Haeckel. {RAT}
Finkelstein, Joel (20th Century) Finkelstein, while a student at Columbia University, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Finlay, Thomas (19th Century) Finlay, a freethinker, wrote “Defence, Prepared for Delivery by Thomas Finlay, Charged Before the High Court of Justiciary, City of Edinborough, 24 July, 1843, with Vending Blasphemy” (1843). {FUK; GS}
FINNISH FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS “Since over 90% of Finnish people are initiated at birth/confirmation into either the Lutheran Church or (a very minor percentage) the Eastern Orthodox denominations,” explained humanist Paul Harrison about how the state pays money to churches, “your income is already skimmed for taxes as a matter of course. Employers are also skimmed regardless of whether their employees are members of the church or not (I know, for I managed a language school here a few years ago. The tax office still insisted on the tithe, although the staff was practically all foreigners and didn’t know Luther from a lukather).” In Turku, Harrison’s e-mail is <intereng@netti.fi>. Finnish groups and journals include the following:
• Humanist Union of Finland (IHEU), PO Box 793, 00101 Helsinki 10 • Humanisti, a quarterly, PL 793, 00101 Helsinki; <pekka.elo@oph.fi>.
• Life and Education in Finland is at Museokatu 18 A 2, 00100 Helsinki
• Union of Freethinkers of Finland is at Siltasaarenkatu 15 C 65, 00530 Helsinki • Vapaa Ajattelija (Free Thinker), Siltassarenkatu 15 C-65, 00530 Helsinki; <val@val.pp.fi>.
A concise description of the history of the Finnish Humanist Union has been written by its chairman, Gunn Väyrynen, in International Humanist News (October 1995). Finland was for many centuries the eastern part of the Swedish kingdom. After the war of 1808—1809, Sweden lost this part to the Russian Empire. Finland did not become independent until 1917. Until the end of 1922, every Finnish citizen had to belong to some Christian congregation. One of the first to insist upon and legally obtain a civil, rather than a religious, marriage was Rolf Lagerborg, a friend of sociologist and well-known humanist Edvaard Westermarck (1862—1939). The Finnish Humanist Association formed in 1968 and publishes a quarterly, Humanisti, edited by Pekka Elo. In the 1980s, the chairman was Jussi Pikkusaari. An estimated five hundred are members of the Humanist Union of Finland. The Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, was translated into English by Eino Friberg, a Finnish-born Unitarian Universalist minister who lived primarily in the United States. (See entries for Eino Friberg and Scandinavian Unbelievers; also see Gunn Väyrynen, “The Humanist Movement in Finland,” International Humanist News, October 1995)
FINNISH-AMERICAN FREETHINKERS: Finnish-American freethinkers are discussed by Gordon Stein in his Freethought in the United States.
Fiorentino, Francesco 1834—1884) Fiorentino taught philosophy at Spoletto in 1860, in Bologna in 1862, and in Naples in 1871. He was elected deputy to Parliament in 1870. A disciple of Felice Tocco, Fiorentino paid special attention to the early Italian freethinkers, writing upon The Pantheism of Giordano Bruno (1861). He also wrote on Pompanazzi, Telesio, Strauss, and Spinoza. In the Nuova Antolgia, he wrote on Vanini, Caesalpinus, Campanella, and Bruno. Fiorentino was a friend of Bertrando Spaventa, succeeding to his chair at Naples in 1883. {BDF; RAT}
Firbank, (Arthur Annesley) Ronald (1886—1926) Firbank, the son of Thomas Firbank, a Member of Parliament, and Lady Firbank, converted to Catholicism in 1907. In “Odette d’Antrevernes,” he described a pious girl who prays for a vision of the Virgin Mary but, instead, encounters a destitute prostitute. When he visited Rome in order to take holy orders, Firbank found that the “Church of Rome wouldn’t have me, and so I mock her.” What followed, Corinne E. Blackmer of Southern Connecticut State University has described, were fictional characters “of homosexual choirboys, lesbian nuns, cross-dressing priests, salacious bishops, flagellants, and self-canonized saints.” Santal (1921) describes a young Islamic boy’s religious aspirations. The Flower Beneath the Foot (1924), includes a character, Laura de Nazianzi, who becomes a saint by renouncing heterosexual romance and joining “the lesbian Convent of the Flaming Hood.” Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926) has a cardinal baptizing a police puppy named Crack and ends when the naked cardinal (“elementary now as Adam himself”) drops dead while pursuing a choirboy named Chicklet around his church. Readers, Blackmer noted, found in Vainglory a description of Monsignor Parr as “something between a butterfly and a misanthrope, [who] was temperamental, when not otherwise . . . employed.” Firbank died probably of acute alcoholism, was accidentally buried in a Protestant cemetery, then subsequently was reinterred in a Catholic cemetery. {GL}
Fireman, Peter (20th Century) A freethinker, Fireman wrote Christianity, A Tale and A Moral (1931). {GS}
Firkins, Oscar W. (1864—1932) Firkins, an English professor at the University of Minnesota, wrote “The Two Humanisms: A Discrimination” in The New Humanist (March-April 1931). Saying the “two cults” of literary and philosophic humanists “co-exist quite without coherence; almost without collision,” he concluded, “Each has an intuition as a basis. The faith in reason as savior is, after all, a faith; the future, its chosen witness, holds its tongue. {EW}
FIRST AMENDMENT
The United States Constitution’s First Amendment prohibits government-established religion and guarantees freedom of worship, of speech, of the press, of assembly, and to petition the government. In the 1990s, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, ruling against a science teacher who stated that his school district violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution by forcing him to teach the “religion” of evolution, stated that secular humanism is not a religion. Secular humanists have always claimed the same, that theirs is a philosophic movement. On the Web: <http://www.fac.org>. (See entries for Hugo L. Black and Constitution of the United States.)
FIRST CAUSE The argument for God’s existence, according to St. Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways,” is that of a “First Efficient Cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.” The concept involves a belief that everything has been caused by something other than itself. An infinite series of such causes cannot be, so the argument goes. Whatever it was that was the initial cause is, therefore, God. However, naturalists in philosophy argue that no such cause has been or can be located, that even if there were there is no evidence that it had divine attributes or absolute goodness. (See entries for Genesis and God. Also, see Antony Flew’s A Dictionary of Philosophy,) {AF; OCP}
FIRST HUMANIST SOCIETY OF NEW YORK In 1929, Charles Francis Potter, a Unitarian minister who had served as Clarence Darrow’s biblical expert at the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, founded the First Humanist Society of New York. (See entry for Charles Francis Potter.) {HNS2}
FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON HUMANISM AND ETHICAL CULTURE The First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture, was sponsored in the early 1950s by Dutch, Austrian, British, and American Humanist and Ethical societies. {HNS2}
FIRST NATIONAL CHURCH OF THE EXQUISITE PANIC: See the entry for Robert Delford Brown.
Firth, Raymond William [Sir] (1901— ) A professor emeritus of anthropology, University of London (1944—1968), Firth was elected an honorary associate in 1943 of the Rationalist Press Association. He also is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Among his works are Art and Life in New Guinea (1936), Symbols, Public and Private (1973), and Human Types (1975). He edited Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Malinowski (1957). Firth signed Humanist Manifesto II and Humanist Manifesto 2000. In New Humanist (March, 1993), Sir Professor Raymond Firth wrote:
I was born in New Zealand, in 1901. My liberal-minded parents brought me up as a Christian, undogmatically, in the Methodist Church, in which I remained until I came to England in 1924. But by then my religious faith had slipped away, by an intellectual route of scepticism. Though only some anthropologists are humanists, my own anthropological studies confirmed my review of religion as a human art, not requiring any assumptions of an ultimate reality such as God or Mind, independent of the human world. In its many varieties, religion has been associated with some of the finest aesthetic creations in music, painting, literature. It has also been a cover for some of the most bitter, cruel and violent conduct of people against one another. In both these respects it conforms to an interpretation in terms of essentially human characteristics. For me, two primary assumptions are the value of knowledge and the value of human personality. Neither assumption needs any divine authority to back it. Morality, like religion, is a human social construct, and it is man’s existence in society which gives meaning and value to belief and conduct.
I am well aware that such positions face intellectual challenges of a philosophical order. But I take my stand on probabilities. We can argue about the nature of reality, and the impossibility of proof of negative assertions such as There is no God. But I argue that a central part of any assumptions about reality lies in the existence of human individuals. These are linked in extremely complex, powerful organisations, with elaborate figurative, symbolic justification. Sensitive and intricate to a high degree, they generate immense intellectual invention and fantasy. Hence the probability of any further superhuman forces or entities being responsible for human affairs, including religion, seems extremely low. Assertions about revelation, and relations with transcendental beings or powers can be clearly seen as imaginative invention, often corresponding to vested interest of a social, economic or political order. (See Firth’s “An Anthropological Interpretation of Religion,”
Free Inquiry, Fall 1996.) {CE; HM2; SHD}
Fischart, Johann (c. 1545—1614) Fischart was a German satirist called Mentzer. His satires in prose and verse were written in a Rabelaisian style and are often directed against the church. {BDF}
Fischer, Edmond H(enri) (1920— ) Dr. Fischer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1992, was born in Shanghai, studied in Europe, and is a biochemist at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author:
I don’t know in which category you want to include me, but I am definitely a non-theist. I do not believe in a Supreme Being and I do not believe in the existence of any God.
{WAS, 1 December 1994}
Fischer, Ernest G. (20th Century) Fischer wrote Marxists and Utopias in Texas (1980). {Freethought History #15, 1995}
Fischer, Ernst Kuno (1824—1907) Fischer was a German philosophy whose rationalist sentiments of the first volume of his History of Modern Philosophy (1853) brought about his retirement. He taught at Jena and Heidelberg. Fischer wrote sympathetically on Bruno and Goethe and expounded a modified Hegelian system. {RAT}
Fischer, J. C. (Died 1888) Fischer was a German materialist, the author of a work on the freedom of the will in 1858 and a criticism of Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1872. {BDF}
Fischer, Johann Georg (1816—1897) A German poet, Fischer wrote dramas which celebrate the defeat of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. In 1882 Fischer received the Order of Personal Nobility. {RAT}
Fischer, Kuno (Born 1824) Fischer in 1856 was appointed professor of philosophy at Jena, Germany. His chief works are History of Modern Philosophy (1852—1732); Life and Character of Spinoza; Francis Bacon (1856), and Lessing (1881). {BDF}
FISH SYMBOL: See entry for Ichthus.
Fisher, Carrie Francis (1956— ) Fisher, the daughter of well-known entertainers Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and the former wife of composer-performer Paul Simon, has appeared in numerous movies. The Portable Curmudgeon Redux (1992) quotes her as saying,
I love the idea of God, but it’s not stylistically in keeping with the way I function. I would describe myself as an enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God. I can see that people who believe in God are happier. My brother is. My dad is, too. But I doubt.
{CA; E}
Fisher, Carrie Francis (21 Oct 1956 - ) Fisher, the daughter of well-known entertainers Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and the former wife of composer-performer Paul Simon, has appeared in numerous movies. In the Portable Curmudgeon Redux (1992) she is quoted as saying,
I love the idea of God, but it’s not stylistically in keeping with the way I function. I would describe myself as an enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God. I can see that people who believe in God are happier. My brother is. My dad is, too. But I doubt.
{CA; E}
Fisher, David (20 Century)
Fisher is an activist with the Humanist Society of Queensland in Australia. E-mail: <humanist@petrie.starway.net.au>.
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield (1879—1958) A famed novelist who served on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Fischer was a humanist. She wrote The Montessori Mother (1913) and The Biography of An Outlook On Life (1953). {CE; HNS}
Fisher, Ebenezer (1815—1879) Fisher, who headed the Universalists’ new theological school at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, confronted the school’s poor financial situation and was successful in keeping it from the brink of extinction in its early years. Fisher was an ordained Universalist minister. {U&U}
Fisher, H(erbert) A(lbert) L(aurens) (Born 1865) Fisher wrote a critical work, Our New Religion: An Examination of Christian Science (1930).
Fisher, J. Greevz (19th Century) Fisher was vice-president in 1893 of the Legitimation League, a group which at first had the support of secularists until it openly advocated free love. (See entries for Wordsworth Donisthorpe, the League’s president, and Oswald Dawson, its secretary.) {RSR}
Fisher, Joseph L. (20th Century) Fisher was the second moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association, serving from 1961 to 1977.
Fisher, Julie (20 Century) Fisher, of the Texas Hill Country Freethinkers in Pipe Creek, Texas, wrote “Being Honestly Atheist” in Secular Nation (April-June 1999).
Fisher, Raymond (20th Century) Fisher wrote his 1968 Ph. D. thesis at the University of Illinois on Robert G. Ingersoll’s rhetorical principles. {FUS}
Fisher, Vardis (1895—1968) During the Depression years of the 1930s, Fisher was hailed as one of the most promising authors of the American West. He was author of thirty-six published books, was published in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Danish, and wrote on the evolution of man and religion. Tim Woodward’s biography, Tiger on the Road, cites Fisher’s view that most people would rather meet a tiger on the road than face the truth about themselves. Among his “Testament of Man” books are Darkness and the Deep (1943), about the evolution of the ancestors of man; Intimations of Eve (1946), about prehistorical matriarchy and moon worship; Jesus Came Again (1956), which rejects the divinity of Jesus; A Goat for Azazel (1956), about the pagan origins of Christianity; Peace Like A River (1957), about female subjugation and extreme Christian asceticism; My Holy Satan (1958), about the horrors of the Inquisition); and Orphans of Gethsemane (1960), a semi-autobiographical work about our male-dominated, Judeo-Christian, Western society, its values, and its wars. Upon his death, the Mormons attempted to claim Vardis as one of their own, which so infuriated his widow, Opal Fisher, that she issued press releases confirming her husband’s and her own atheism. She was a member of American Atheists and a regular contributor to its journal until her death in 1995. {Richard M. Andrews, Internet memo, 10 May 1997}
Fiske, John (1842—1901) Fiske was an American author, a lecturer on philosophy at Harvard (1872—1879) and its librarian (1872—1879). He wrote Myths and Mythmakers (1872); Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (2 vols., 1874); Darwinism and Other Essays (1879); Excursions of an Evolutionist (1883); and The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge (1885). An enthusiastic follower of Spencerian evolution, Fiske tried to reconcile orthodox religious beliefs. Religious writers quote him as an orthodox Christian, but J. S. Clark in Life and Letters of J. Fiske (1917, 2 volumes) shows that Fiske accepted only an “unknowable” god and immortality (as an act of faith) and rejected Christianity. According to Patrick Romanell, Fiske was clearly a naturalist in the same tradition as John Dewey and Morris R. Cohen. “Is it honest for me to go and sit there on communion day and drink the wine and eat the bread while feeling it all to be mummery?” Fiske wrote in an 1860 letter to his mother. He also wrote, “[Christianity’s past is] the history of fraud, superstition, misery, and bloodshed, until these last two centuries, when its power has dwindled almost to nothing. . . . One and all, the orthodox creeds are crumbling into ruins everywhere. We now witness the constructive work on a foundation that will endure through the ages. That foundation is the god of science–revealed to us in terms that will harmonize with our intelligence.” {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE; Patrick Romanell, Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996; TYD}
Fitch, John (1743—1798) Fitch, originally a Methodist, founded the Universal Society in Philadelphia. He left his church because his fellow Trenton, New Jersey, Methodists censured him for working on Sundays in order to supply American troops during the Revolutionary War. {FUS}
FitzGerald, Edward (1809—1883) The translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), Fitzgerald actually paraphrased rather than translated the 11th-century poet. Omar Khayyam humanistically counseled living life to the fullest while one can. Fitzgerald also wrote Euphranor (1851), which was a Platonic dialogue, and Polonius (1852), which was a collection of aphorisms. A recluse and a skeptic, Fitzgerald was attracted to Persian skepticism and also translated Calderon. {BDF; CE; CL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}
Fitzgerald, F(rancis) Scott (Key) (1896—1940) The literary spokesman of the “jazz age,” the decade of the 1920s, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a colorful novelist whose marriage to Zelda was known for its madcap life style. As a young man working at an advertising agency, he lived at 200 Claremont Avenue at Tiemann Place in New York City, where for an Iowa laundry he coined the slogan, “We keep you clean in Muscatine.” By his early twenties, he had written This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Beautiful and the Damned (1922). His masterpiece was The Great Gatsby (1925), a devastating portrait of the so-called American Dream, one that measures love and success in materialistic terms only. Fitzgerald originally had entitled the book The High-Bouncing Lover. Tender Is the Night (1934) had as its theme the spiritual malaise of American life, which he had experienced even before writing his final novel, The Last Tycoon (published in 1941), about a Hollywood studio mogul. The work was unfinished, for Fitzgerald died at the age of forty-four of a heart attack while working as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald describes a sign in front of an oculist’s shop: “The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic–their retinas are one yard high.” Some have insisted that he was symbolizing God by using the eyes with the yard-high retinas. Others feel he was illustrating what can trigger a response from a person’s superego. Still others note that retinas cannot be seen, that Fitzgerald meant pupils or irises. Although raised a Midwestern, genteel, Roman Catholic youth in St. Paul, Minnesota, Scott as an adult became known as a spoiled rich boy who lived with reckless and stupid extravagance, one who was unable to hold his liquor. He and his Alabama belle, Zelda, were married in 1920 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York despite her family’s concern about their Episcopalian daughter’s marrying a non-Protestant. Their zany life together has been documented by biographers Jeffrey Meyers, Andrew Turnbull, and Arthur Mizener, among others. Any number of documented drunken scenes revealed his dissipation and flamboyant lifestyle: He once tipsily told airline passengers that his Hollywood mistress, Sheilah Graham, was “a great lay”; while he was a houseguest of Sara and Gerald Murphy, he threw their gold-flecked Venetian wineglasses over the garden wall; when the Murphys objected, he threw a can of garbage onto their patio while they were dining; when he was in France and an old lady tendered a tray of candies and nuts, he kicked the tray from her hands; with lipstick he wrote on the expensive dress of his friend John Peale Bishop’s wife; he got into a number of fistfights, usually losing; etc. Zelda, as a reminder of their friendship, once removed her black panties and tossed them to New York literary and drama critic Alexander Woollcott. The curious enjoyed dishing the dirt about Fitzgerald, and in 1924 when Zelda had an affair with a French aviator she reported that, in comparison, Fitzgerald was “inadequate.” Ernest Hemingway, one of his many drinking buddies, included a passage in A Moveable Feast about the size of Fitzgerald’s penis and gossips whispered that although Fitzgerald had a scorn for “fairies” he himself may have had homosexual experiences. To Zelda he once wrote, “The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you thought I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine,” for she had accused him of having a relationship with Hemingway. Of Hemingway, Fitzgerald had once written, “I really loved him, but of course it wore out like a love affair. The fairies have spoiled all that,” implying that their friendship had stopped because of such gossip. Graham, according to Meyers, knew about the relative sizes of penises, however, and “she found the tubercular, drug-addicted and often alcoholic Fitzgerald a creditable performer–‘very satisfactory . . . in terms of giving physical pleasure.’ After lovemaking, they would lie happily in each other’s arms for a long time.” The homosexual gossip continued, however, despite his describing homosexuals unscientifically as “Nature’s attempt to get rid of soft boys by sterilizing them.” Critic Sally Eckhoff, reviewing two of Matthew J. Bruccoli’s books, Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship (1994) and F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters (1994), notes, “From all the evidence now available, we can safely believe Hemingway’s assertion that Mrs. Fitzgerald had told her husband that his dick was too small. During a drunken lunch at Michaud’s, the distraught Scott spilled the beans to Ernest [Hemingway]—both repaired to the hommes room to size up the problem. “ ‘Forget what Zelda said,’ I told him. ‘Zelda is crazy,’ ” Hemingway wrote in his chapter called “A Matter of Measurements.” (According to Edmund Wilson, Hemingway tried to dilute Scott’s anguish about his penis by claiming ‘it only seemed to him small because he looked at it from above. You have to look at in a mirror.’ Fitzgerald didn’t buy it.) Hemingway complained to Max Perkins that ‘almost every bloody fool thing I have ever seen or known him to do has been directly or indirectly Zelda inspired,’ but added, ‘I would not have Scott imagine I believed this for the world.’ ” Hemingway knew that Zelda sneered about The Sun Also Rises, saying it was about “bullfighting, bullslinging, and bullshit.” In his last letter to his daughter “Scottie” (Frances Scott), written the month he died, Fitzgerald wrote, “But be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas,” a reference to her having become a fanatic Christian. Fitzgerald, however, expressed no interest in organized religion and, as was evident to his friends, was a non-believer and no longer a Catholic. His handwritten will speaks of “the uncertainty of life and the certainty of death” [emphasis added]. The will is surprising in that it mentions Zelda’s insanity, giving her all of his household and kitchen furniture “in the event she shall regain her sanity.” In previous letters to Scottie he had written, “I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her.” Zelda outlived him eight years, dying in 1948 at the age of forty-seven, a hopeless schizophrenic, in a sanitorium fire. Her last years were spent clutching a Bible and writing about the apocalypse. Scott’s estate and literary-property interests passed to their only child, Frances Scott Fitzgerald. {CE}
Fitzhugh, Louise (20 Century) According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Fitzhugh’s “The Long Secret” “pokes fun at religion.”
Fitzhugh, Percy (19th Century) Fitzhugh was a freethinker who wrote The Religion of Bloodshed (c. 1895). {GS}
Fitzjohn, George S. (20th Century) A freethinker, Fitzjohn wrote War in Heaven (19–?). {GS}
Fitzpatrick, Brian Charles (1905—1965) Fitzpatrick was an atheist, rationalist, civil libertarian, journalist, historian, and adviser to governments. Son of a Catholic father and a Presbyterian mother, neither of whom practiced their faiths after marriage, Fitzpatrick was active in founding the Australian Council for Civil Liberties. He opposed state grants to religious schools and was identified with many secular causes. {SWW}
[[[FitzRoy, John Somerset]] [5th Baron]: See entry for Lord Raglan
Flach, Vera (20th Century) Flach wrote A Yankee German in Texas (1973). {Freethought History #15, 1995}
FLAGELLATION Flagellation, which involves self-punishment by means of whipping, was considered a way to do penance for one’s sins, particularly in thirteenth-century Catholic Europe. The flagellants marched in processions through cities, sometimes dressed in black with hoods which covered their heads. But their self-whippings sometimes became extreme and ecclesiastics began to express their disapproval. In 1349, Pope Clement VI forbade the flagellants’ displays of whipping, hymn singing, and praying. In the United States, the Third Order of Franciscans continued the practice in New Mexico, and in Colorado it was continued by La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno. Freudians have described flagellation as being sexually oriented. Secular humanists, unless they are seriously into masochism, ordinarily avoid being flagellated. (See entry for Gherardo Segarelli.) {EH; ER; RE}
FLAMING CHALICE: See entry for Czech Republic Unitarians.
Flammarion, Nicolas Camille (1842—1925) “Spiritualists deceive the public,” states McCabe, “by alleging that Flammarion adopted their creed. He never did. He thought many of the phenomena were genuine while exposing a great deal of fraud, but that they were due to ‘unknown forces’—which is the title of his book on the subject––not to spirits.” McCabe quotes Flammarion, a French astronomer, as writing, “The supernatural does not exist,” and labels him a theist, but anti-Christian. However, Flammarion wrote, “Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.” And his Dreams of an Astronomer includes the following:
Man has conceived a God in his own likeness. It is in the name of this pretended God that monarchs and pontiffs have in all the ages, and under cover of all religions, bound humanity in a slavery from which it has not yet freed itself. . . . It is in the names of the gods of Olympus that the Greeks condemned Socrates to drink the hemlock; it is in the name of Jehovah that the high-priests and Pharisees crucified Jesus. It is in the name of Jesus, himself become God, that fanaticism ignominiously condemned to the stake men like Giordano Bruno, Vanini, Étienne Dolet, John Huss, Savanarola, and numerous other heroic victims; that the Inquisition ordered Galileo to belie his conscience; that thousands and thousands of unfortunates accused of witchcraft were burnt alive in popular ceremonies; it was with the express benediction of Pope Gregory XIII that the butchery of St. Bartholomew drenched Paris in blood. {JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Flanner, Janet (1892-1978): See entry for George Orwell, who considered the New Yorker author, once a “red baiter,” a dishonest careerist.
FLAT EARTH THEORY “The earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment.“ That is the religious edict, or fatwa, which was issued in 1993 by Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz, the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia. The sheik is a blind theologian or, to distinguish him from other theologians, a sightless theologian. On the Web: <http://flatearth.tdolby.com/>. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both believed the earth is spherical. (See entry for Fatwa.)
FLATLAND Flatland (POB 2420, Fort Bragg, California 95437) is a journal of Situationists. Its editor is Jim Martin. {FD}
FLATWOODS FREE PRESS Flatwoods Free Press, which has published A. J. Mattill’s Seven Mighty Blows of Traditional Belief, is at Route 2, Box 49, Gordo, Alabama 35466.
Flaubert, Gustave (1821—1880) Flaubert took five years to write his masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1867), about a romantic young woman married to a dull provincial doctor. The book resulted in his being prosecuted on moral grounds. Prior to this, when in 1846 his friend Alfred Le Poittevin married (but who once had written him, “We are something like one single man, and we live of the same life”), Flaubert was enraged and wrote, “I experienced, when he married, a very deep stab of jealousy.” Also, after having a homosexual experience in Egypt, Flaubert wrote to Bouilhet, “You ask me whether I consummated that piece of work in the baths. Yes, I did. It was with a big young guy covered with smallpox marks who wore an enormous white turban.” In a letter to a friend about visiting the Turkish baths, Flaubert confided, “One admits one’s sodomy, though sometimes you do a bit of denying, and then everybody teases you and you end up confessing.” In her correspondence with Flaubert, George Sand advised him to get married, and he complained to the Princesse Mathile that her “perpetual pious optimism . . . sometimes sets my teeth on edge.” Their unlikely friendship has been described by Barbara Bray in Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), leading critic Julian Barnes to observe, “George Sand continues to trip–how could she not?—like an aesthetic Florence Nightingale. She is his old, devoted friend, still and always; yet in literary matters she is no replacement for his lost ‘left testicle,’ the poet Louis Bouilhet, who had died in 1869. Increasingly she comes across as something between an agony aunt and Little Mary Sunshine.” In Salammbo (1863), he writes about ancient Carthage. L’Éducation sentimentale (1870) was a revision of an earlier novel. The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874) was written three times. Three Tales (1877) contains his short story, “A Simple Heart.” All of his output shows him to have been a slow writer, one intent on finding le mot juste, the exact word. Quite the worldly author, Flaubert was a master of the realistic novel, one who did not spend all his time simply moving his quill. He also did not approve the guilt-clad morals of his time, quipping, “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he’ll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.” In Madame Bovary, the pharmacist is given these lines:
I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all the others with their mummeries and their juggling. . . . I believe in the Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and parents; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the ethereal heavens like the ancients. My God is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and of Beranger! I support the Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard and the immortal principles of ’89. And I can’t admit of an old boy God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again after three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in squalid ignorance, and tried to drag whole nations down after them.
Commenting upon letters with George Sand which are in Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), The Economist (5 June 1993) observed,
They had their differences. Flaubert was a vehemently reactionary anti-Christian, arguing always against the need to assist or promote the weak and meek. Sand (who was seventeen years Flaubert’s senior) was a true daughter of the French revolution; Flaubert, examining it with his head rather than his heart, saw dismal proof of human stupidity, the failing he excoriated in Bouvard et Pécuchet. He was appalled by modern life; Sand, although older, embraced it wholeheartedly.
New Yorker (26 July 1993) added that she had been called “a latrine” by Baudelaire but praised as “France’s Byron” by Chateaubriand for her much publicized liaisons with Frédéric Chopin and Alfred de Musset. Meanwhile, there were Flaubert’s pathological ties to his mother, or his inclination to seek out (for either sexual or platonic bonds) viragoesque older women, such as Eulalie Foucaud, Elisa Schlésinger, Louise Pradier, Louise Colet, and Sand. He and Sand also had views on sexual abstinence, on the nature of the literary vocation, and on the afterlife. Flaubert once wrote, “Artists (who are priests) risk nothing by being chaste, on the contrary!” On reincarnation: “I was boatman on the Nile, procurer in Rome at the time of the Punic wars, then Greek rhetorician in Suburra. . . . I was pirate and monk, mountebank and coachman–perhaps Emperor of the East. . . . Many things would be explained if we could know our real genealogy.” To which Sand starkly replies, “I think I was once a plant or a stone.” Neither J. M. Robertson nor Jacqueline Marchand cite Flaubert as clearly being a freethinker, although his works have appealed to freethinkers. Skeptics like his view that “It is necessary to sleep upon the pillow of doubt.” McCabe particularly liked The Temptation of St. Anthony, which he states “sufficiently shows what he thought of the Church.” (See entries for Adamastor, George Sand, and Felix Pouchet.) {ACK; BDF; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TRI; TYD}
Flaws, Gordon G. (19th Century) Flaws was a freethinker who wrote Sketch of the Life and Character of Saladin (1880s?). {FUK; GS}
Fleck, Gustav Peter (1909—1995) Fleck, a Netherlands-born banker and former securities firm executive, became an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister in 1984. He was founder of the Amsterdam Overseas Corporation, which evolved into the current Rothschild’s, Inc. Outside the Rothschild family, Fleck was the only person to serve as a partner and director in both the French and English Rothschild houses. He wrote The Mask of Religion (1980), The Blessings of Imperfection (1987), and Come As You Are (1993). Fleck was an associate minister of the First Parish, Brewster, Massachusetts, and also served several Unitarian fellowships.
Fleck, Roger L. (1919-1999) Although he was baptized by a Presbyterian minister who was an officer in the local Ku Klux Klan and also was born with cerebal palsy, Fleck became a freethinker in his teens and served during World War II. He worked thirty years for Continental Airlines, helped desegregate a camp for crippled children run by the Lions Club, and was on the board of directors of Big Brothers and Sisters in Houston, Texas. Fleck was a life member of Freedom From Religion Foundation. {Freethought Today, March 1999}
Fleishman, Norman (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Fleishman was Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood World Population in Los Angeles, California. {HM2}
Fleming, Caleb (18th Century) A freethinker, Fleming wrote Three Letters Concerning Systematic Taste (1755). {GS}
Fleming, Donald (20th Century)
Fleming wrote John W. Draper (1950). {FUS}
Fleming, John William (1863—1950) “I will not go on bended knee before any man, nor kiss the ring of any Pope,” exclaimed “Chummy” Fleming, who arrived in Australia from England in 1884. The bootmaker, agitator, and anarchist attended Australian Freethought Association conferences and, while working in Ballarat, was the local secretary. One of those who instituted the first Victorian May Day meetings, he carried a flag inscribed ANARCHY. Upon his death, his cremated ashes were scattered around the Yarra Bank forum, where he had spoken almost every Sunday for more than fifty years. {SWW}
FLEMISH HUMANISTS: See entry for Belgian Humanists.
Flemming, Anna (19th Century) Flemming was minister of the Universalist Church of Avon, Illinois, in the 1880s.
Flemming, Virginia (1904—1992) Flemming addressed the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture held in Amsterdam (1952). Lady Flemming was the daughter of Stanton Coit, the British Ethical Culture leader, and helped transform his Ethical Church into the Ethical Union and then into the British Humanist Association. {HNS}
Fletcher, Joseph Francis III (1905—1992) A theologian who once was an ordained Episcopal priest, Fletcher became a pioneer of medical ethics, teaching at the University of Virginia. He wrote eleven books and more than 350 articles. In 1954, he published Morals and Medicine which, according to his The New York Times obituary, argued “the case for active euthanasia, for telling the truth to dying patients, for artificial insemination and for sterilization of those judged unfit for parenthood.” Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy once dubbed him “the Red Churchman,” for he was twice beaten unconscious while lecturing in the South for the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union. Added The Times, “In the late 1960’s, he renounced belief in God and publicly espoused humanism, although he maintained many of his ties to religious groups and members of the clergy.” In 1974, Fletcher was the American Humanist Association Humanist of the Year. In 1986 he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. He served on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, signed Humanist Manifesto II, and is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. {HM2; HNS2; SHD}
Fletcher, Laadan (1920— ) Fletcher, raised a Christian fundamentalist in England, renounced religion when twenty-five. He migrated to West Australia in 1968, lecturing at the University of West Australia. He has been an officer in the Humanist Society and a long-term member of the West Australia Voluntary Euthanasia Society. {SWW}
Fletcher, Ronald (1921—1992) In 1986, Fletcher, the well-known sociologist, was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is author of the pamphlet, “A Definition of Humanism.” Fletcher was critical of the Catholic teaching on sex which he described as “a tissue of illogicality, an overstrained and unconvincing attempt to make medieval mumbo jumbo fit the knowledge and problems of the modern world . . . an infallible guide to muddle and misery.” {TRI}
[[Flew, Antony (Garradi Newton) (1923— )
Flew, in the New Humanist (July 1993), has written: “My father, like his father before him, was a Methodist minister. So at age thirteen I was sent to the excellent boarding school founded by John Wesley for the education of the sons of his itinerant preachers. But Kingswood’s religion was no longer premised, as was that of its founder, upon the belief that the unredeemed are destined for eternal torture. So what, to the distress of all concerned, I rejected in my middle teens as manifestly incompatible with innumerable familiar facts was belief in the existence of a God both omnipotent and good. It was only later, and with particular reference to Islam, that I came to appreciate the appropriateness of the characteristically Hobbist observation that ‘ . . . in the attributes which we give to God we are not to consider the signification of pious intention, to do him the greatest honour we are able.’ For although every surah (chapter) of the Qur’an begins ‘In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate’ it proceeds to present Allah as a sort of cosmic Saddam Hussein, forever torturing all those who fail to believe, worship, and obey. I joined the RPA in the early fifties, contributing to the old Literary Guide fairly regularly. My first book, entitled with the brash confidence of youth A New Approach to Psychical Research, was published by C. A. Watts in 1953. Most of its successors have been similarly concerned to promote rationality. David Hume, the subject of two, was treated as the first major thinker of the modern period whose philosophy was through and through secular, this-worldly and human-centred. The titles of others indicate the same concern: Thinking about Thinking; A Rational Animal: Philosophical Essays on the Nature of Man; Darwinian Evolution; The Logic of Mortality; and Thinking about Social Thinking (1995). My final fling–the first set of Prometheus Lectures plus other essays in atheist humanism–is due out from Prometheus in the fall.” That volume is entitled Atheistic Humanism (1993), in which he supports the pragmatic implications of scientific naturalism. A professor emeritus of philosophy at Reading University in England, Flew is a member of the Secretariat of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1976, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, and he is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. The Presumption of Atheism (1976) a collection of his philosophical essays, has been reissued as God, Freedom and Immortality. Flew is a contributing editor of Philo. David Berman in New Humanist (October, 1988) has remarked in a review of Logic of Mortality (1984), “Of course, Flew’s style and standpoint will come as no surprise. For (with the exception of A. J. Ayer) he is surely the best-known living philosophical unbeliever in the English-speaking world.” Flew, who also does not believe in any survival after death, is a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. In Immortality, Paul Edwards writes of him:
Flew in many places makes it clear that he is not a radical materialist, admitting that mental processes are irreducible to bodily phenomena. At the same time he insists that human beings are “creatures of flesh and blood” and these creatures of flesh and blood are the subjects of sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
In 1987, with Gary Habermas, Flew wrote Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? The Resurrection Debate. In 1994 his essay, “The Terrors of Islam,” was published in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science. In it, he suggests that Islam and its weaknesses need to be studied much as Christianity has been, and inasmuch as Islam is intolerant of all such critical dissent it will be up to rationalists and humanists to do the job. As for the supernatural, Flew has declared, “Stuff is all there is; while everything which is not stuff is nonsense.” In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, his lecture was entitled “Against the New Irrationalism.” (See entries for Paul Edwards, Colin McCall, and Michael Martin.) {CA; E; HM2; HNS2; TRI; TYD}
Flexner, Abraham (1866—1959) The director of The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Flexner was a naturalistic humanist. On his ninetieth birthday, The New York Times in 1956 interviewed the “intellectual giant who did more than any other man to give this nation a sound system of medical education,” finding he did not want a birthday party because it would interrupt all the work he had to do. His philosophy, he said, is, “You gain happiness by helping others.” {CE}
Flis, Andrej (20th Century) Flis, a professor of sociology at the University of Cracow in Poland, holds that the Roman Catholic Church is increasingly alienating itself from European culture. He is author of “The Polish Church as an Enemy of the Open Society.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997; New Humanist, September 1996}
FLOOD, THE Genesis recounts the story of a massive deluge, a story believed to be a variant of the Babylonian legend but refined and adapted to fit the theological and moral ideas of Israel. In the biblical version, Yahweh both willed the flood and gave advance warning to Noah. (In Iran, the high god instructed Yima to build a walled enclosure to save the good people. In India the flood was not the result of a divine decree but one of the series of cosmic cataclysms which periodically destroy the world. In one version, Vishnu took the form of a great fish to save Manu, who had befriended him.) Such a flood, said to have occurred in 4004 B.C.E., involved forty feet of sea level rise every hour for the 960-hour period in Genesis. A problem for religious fundamentalists who accept such a tale is that Earth contains no sediment deposits in ponds, lakes, oceans, and caves of the same age, 4004 B.C.E. Also, all the glaciers are not of the same age. Then, too, there is a glaring omission of micro-organisms in the Genesis tale, and the ever-increasing fountain of illogic overflows. The appeal of the flood story is also found in tales told by other early religions, including those of the American Indians. (See entry for Genesis.) {Skeptical Inquirer, September-October 1995}
Floquet, Charles Thomas (1828—1896) A French statesman who edited the Temps and the Siécle, Floquet was one of the most ardent supporters in the National Assembly of the anti-clericalists. He was one of the chief opponents of Boulangism and fought a duel with Boulanger himself. Floquet was one of the workers of the Gambetta group who prepared the way for the disestablishment of the Church in France. {RAT}
Flor, Bjorn (20th Century) A Norwegian humanist, Flor in 1996 participated in the international conference of humanists in Mexico City. <bjorn.flor@nrk.no>.
Florence, Lella (1887—1966) Florence was a freethinker who fought in England for reform of abortion laws. {GS}
Florence, Sargant (1890— ) Florence, a sociologist, was a leader of freethinkers. {GS}
FLORIDA ATHEISTS, HUMANISTS Florida has the following atheist and humanist groups:
• Atheists of Florida (ASHS), PO Box 3893, Ft. Pierce, Florida 34948; (305) 936-0210. Web: <www.execpc.com/~aai/florida>. E-mail: <athalflc@aol.com>. • Atheists of Florida, Tampa Bay Chapter (Atheist Alliance), POB 130753, Tampa, Florida 33681. • Atheists of Florida, Palm Beach Chapter, 374 Golfview Road, North Palm Beach, Florida 33408; e-mail: <schisler@earthlink.net>. • Atheists of Florida, St. Augustine Chapter, PO Box 860132, St. Augustine, Florida 32086 (904) 808-1884. • First Coast Freethought Society, PO Box 558, Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida 32004; (904) 285-1205. Earl Coggins is the Contact. E-mail: <bbperry2@worldnet.att.net>. • Florida International University Humanists: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html> • Florida State University humanists are at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Free Inquiry Society of Central Florida (ASHS), PO Box 4365, Winter Park, Florida 32793-4365; (407) 262-1915. Cathy Giordano is the contact, Veritas the newsletter. E-mail: <fisofcf@aol.com>. On theWeb: <reasonworks.com/cff/veritas.htm>. • Freethinker Society of Sarasota Bay, 5230 Lake Village Drive, Sarasota, FL 34235 (941) 379-5137 • Humanist Society of Gainesville, 1708 N.W. 10th Ave., Gainesville, Florida 32605; (352) 336-6343. • Humanist Association: St. Petersburg, PO Box 8099, Madeira Beach, Florida 33738 (727) 391-7571. On the Web: <http://home1.get.net/HASP/>. Jan Eisler’s E-mail: <hasp@gte.net>. • Humanist Association of West Central Florida, PO Box 6675, Lakeland, FL 33807; (941) 701-7407; Ken Schmidt is the contact:. E-mail: <kas007@earthlink.net> and <jayoung@mindspring.com>. On the Web: <http://www.cris.com/~eugenio/hawcf.htm>. • Humanist Society of Gainesville (AHA), 1708 N.W. 10th Avenue, Gainesville, Florida 32605; (352) 336-6343. Hugo Borresen and Abby Goldsmith, contacts. On the Web: <http://www.afn.org/~afn59918>. • Humanist Society of Greater Fort Walton Beach (AHA), 308 Pontevedra Drive, Niceville, Florida 32578. Kenneth Gibbs is a contact. • Humanist Society of South Pinellas (AHA), POB 3641, Saint Petersburg, Florida 33731. Robert D. Collete is its contact. • Humanists of Broward County, Alan MacDonald, President, 9548 NW 38 Court, Fort Lauderdale, FL 3351-5945 (954) 749-3938 • Humanists of Florida, Sol Klotz, President, 3206 Middlesex Road, Orlando, Florida 32803 (407) 896-3955 <http://www.applicom.com/humanist/>. • Humanists of Fort Myers, Bill D’Albora, contact, 11220 Caravel Circle SW 301, Fort Myers, FL 33908; phone: (941) 454-0136 • Humanists of Greater Fort Walton Beach, William H. White, contact, 338 Okaloosa Road NE, Fort Walton Beach, FL 32548; phone: (904) 243-5247. • Humanists of Indian River: The Ed Wilson Memorial Chapter, Joe Allison, President, 255A Ocean View Lane, Indiatlantic, Florida 32903 (407) 777-6933 • Humanists of Northeast Florida, Mimi Cerniglia, PO Box 1143, Ormand Beach, Florida 32175 (904) 676-2954 • Humanists of the Nature Coast, 6134 W. Pinedale Circle, Crystal River, FL 34429. Jackie Evans and Scott Forbes, contacts; phone: (352) 563-2857. E-mail: <sco@citrus.infi.net>. • Humanists of the Palm Beaches (ASHS), Marvin Engle has been its President, 860 Lakeside Drive, North Palm Beach, Florida 33408. • Humanists of Polk County, Kenneth A. Schmidt, president, P.O. Box 6675, Lakeland, FL 33807; phone: (904) 701-7401. E-mail: <pts2000@earthlink.net> • Humanists of Tallahasee (AHA), POB 7038, Tallahassee, Florida 32314. • Humanists of Volusia/Flagler County, 356 Seminole Drive, Ormond Beach, Florida 32174; (904) 676-2954. E-mail: <mimijc@aol.com>. • Humanists of the Gold Coast (AHA), #606, 500 Ocean Boulevard, Boca Raton, Florida 33432. Dr. Albert Maizels is its president. (407) 338-9622 • Humanists of the Sun Coast (AHA), Hal East, Secretary-Treasurer, 317 Highland Ave N, Clearwater, Florida 34615 (813) 446-0312 • Humanists of the Treasure Coast, The Phillip Appleman Chapter is presided over by Bill Green, 835 18th St (#504), Vero Beach, Florida 33960 (561) 569-7314 • Rollins College freethinkers and humanists: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Secular Humanists of South Florida (ASHS), 4341 NW 16th St. (#208), Fort Lauderdale, Florida 33313; (954) 717-0477. E-mail: <humanist@web2000.net>. On the Web: <www.seflin.org/human/human2.htm>. • Thomas Jefferson Societies (USA), Suite 601, 6020 Shore Boulevard South, Gulf Port, Florida 33707. Its contact is Sydney Goetz, and the group was formed to combat the forming of bible clubs in schools. • University of Florida’s Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA) chapter can be e-mailed care of Bill Bishop: <afn55009@afn.org>. • University of Florida Humanistic Atheist Students Association is on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University of South Florida’s Campus Freethought Alliance (CFA) can be telephoned: George Giannakoulias (727) 443-1751.
FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Florida International University humanists are at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY Florida State University humanists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Flourens, Gustave (1821—1880) Flourens was a French writer. His drastic rationalism was shown in articles in La Pensée Nouvelle and in his Science de l’homme (1865), leading the clergy to secure his dismissal and resulting in his going to Crete. There he took part in the insurrection and sat in the National Assembly. Returning to France in 1868, Flourens was imprisoned for his utterances and was shot, fighting for the Commune. {RAT}
Flourens, Marie Jean Pierre (1794—1867) A French scientist, Flourens published a work on the nervous system of vertebrates and was then admitted into the Academy of Sciences. He became perpetual secretary in 1833. One of his popular works was Human Longevity and the Quantity of Life on the Globe. His son, Gustave (1838-1871), succeeded his father as professor of natural history at the Collège de France. Also an atheist and anti-clerical, he was deposed from his chair for writing Science de l’homme (1865). After taking up radical politics, Gustave was shot for fighting for the Commune. {BDF; RAT; RE}
FLOWER COMMUNION: See entry for Maja V. Capek.
Flower, Benjamin (18th Century) For libeling Bishop Watson in 1799, Flower was imprisoned. An independent freethinker, he published Political Register (1807—1811). Eliza Flower was his eldest daughter.
Flower, Benjamin Orange (Born 1858)
An American writer, Flower founded and edited the Arena (Boston), then the Coming Age (1896—1904), finally combining the two as the Arena (1904—1909). He edited the Twentieth-Century Magazine (1909-—1911) and wrote widely, including a life of Whittier. {RAT}
Flower, Eliza (1803—1846) Flower, a musical composer, devoted herself to providing music for South Place Chapel after it seceded from the Unitarian connection under W. J. Fox. She composed sixty-three of the hymns found in their book. Flower shared Fox’s theism and she and her sisters are described in Harriet Martineau’s Five Years of Youth and Deerbrook. Sarah Flower, a sister, also was a freethought activist and was lyricist for her sister’s music. {Freethought History #9, 1994; RE}
Floyd, William (Edward Gregory) (20th Century) An atheist and author of many works on freethought, Floyd during the 1950s was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. An outspoken atheist, Floyd was the openly atheistic signer of Humanist Manifesto I and author of Christianity Cross-Examined (1941). {FUS; HM1}
Flügel, J(ohn) C(arl) (1884—1955) Flügel was a Freudian psychologist who joined the Promethan Society in the 1930s. In 1976 his The Psychology of Clothers was published. {TRI}
Flynn, Thomas William (1955— ) A senior editor of Free Inquiry and founding co-editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Flynn co-founded Catholics Anonymous with Thomas Franczyk. He heads Inquiry Media Productions, and in addition to writing on atheism and humanism is a producer of many solid humanistic works. He is a Secular Humanist Mentor, has been a member of the board of directors of the Council for Secular Humanism, and currently serves as secretary. He also is director of the Center for Inquiry-International. In 1993, he designed the museum at the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace in Dresden, New York, which is open to the public each summer. In The Trouble With Christmas (1993), Flynn takes a positive stand against non-believers’ celebrating Christmas, declaring the pagan solstice should be disregarded altogether. In Toronto in 1994, he spoke at the conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT). In 1996, he spoke about the dangers of anti-scientific thought at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. Flynn is a signer of . In January 2000, Prometheus Books is scheduled to publish Flynn’s first novel, Galactic Rapture, a science-fiction black comedy about a small-time religious con man on a backwater planet, a person who gets mistaken for the next incarnation of Christ.
Flynt, Larry (20th Century) Flynt is the controversial publisher of Hustler, which many term a pornographic journal. In 1978 he was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin, who was upset that the magazine had depicted a white woman and a black man. Milos Forman produced a film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which was about Flynt’s colorful life and how the shooting resulted in his being permanently disabled, confined to a wheelchair. On a “Larry King Live” show (10 January 1996), he was asked if the reason he thought Jerry Falwell is a hypocrite is because he didn’t believe in God, Flynt replied, “I am not saying he don’t believe in God. I am just saying I don’t believe in God. That puts me at odds with him.” In a 1984 “satire” ad in which Flynt had depicted Falwell, he was sued for $1,000,000 but won the case and did not have to pay. Frank Rich, a New York Times critic, wrote that Flynt, unlike so many others who claimed to have been embarrassed that reporters were writing that President Bill Clinton had had sex in the White House, admitted that he personally was a self-proclaimed seller of smut: “Mr. Flynt’s candor is downright refreshing. . . . In the land of the pious hypocrite, the honest pornographer is king.” The First Amendment to the Constitution, Flynt insists, is the cornerstone of American independence: “Rights and civil liberties cannot be taken for granted, and that has become my cause. It’s a perfect cause for an iconoclast because the things you have to fight for are often unpopular.” “If I can leave any kind of legacy,” Flynt has written,
I’d like to have expanded the parameters of free speech. If something isn’t worth going to jail over, it’s not worth very much. I did more than five months in a federal prison because I called a judge a “fucking asshole.” But you know what? That wasn’t a low point in my life. For me, it was a high point. . . .I know I’m rebellious, iconoclastic, and independent. Fundamentally, however, I say what I mean and I mean what I say, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of others. Besides, I don’t think life is fun unless you live it on the edge.
{CA; E; P.O.V., April 1999}
Flynt, Larry (1 Nov 1942 - )
Flynt is the controversial publisher of Hustler, which many term a pornographic journal. In 1978 he was shot by Joseph Paul Franklin, who was upset that the magazine had depicted a white woman and a black man. Milos Forman produced a film, “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” which was about Flynt’s colorful life, one that depicted how the shooting resulted in his being permanently disabled, confined to a wheelchair. On a Larry King Live show (10 January 1996), he was asked if the reason he thought Jerry Falwell is a hypocrite is because he didn’t believe in God, Flynt replied, “I am not saying he don’t believe in God. I am just saying I don’t believe in God. That puts me at odds with him.” In a 1984 “satire” ad in which Flynt had depicted Falwell, he was sued for $1,000,000 but won the case and did not have to pay. Frank Rich, a New York Times critic, wrote that Flynt, unlike so many others who claimed to have been embarrassed that reporters were writing that President Bill Clinton had had sex in the White House, admitted that he personally was a self-proclaimed seller of smut: “Mr. Flynt’s candor is downright refreshing. . . . In the land of the pious hypocrite, the honest pornographer is king.” The First Amendment to the Constitution, Flynt insists, is the cornerstone of American independence: “Rights and civil liberties cannot be taken for granted, and that has become my cause. It’s a perfect cause for an iconoclast because the things you have to fight for are often unpopular.” “If I can leave any kind of legacy,” Flynt has written,
I’d like to have expanded the parameters of free speech. If something isn’t worth going to jail over, it’s not worth very much. I did more than five months in a federal prison because I called a judge a “fucking asshole.” But you know what? That wasn’t a low point in my life. For me, it was a high point. . . .I know I’m rebellious, iconoclastic, and independent. Fundamentally, however, I say what I mean and I mean what I say, and that’s more than I can say for a lot of others. Besides, I don’t think life is fun unless you live it on the edge.
{CA; E; P.O.V., April 1999}
Fo, Dario (1926— )
Fo, the son of a railway stationmaster and part-time actor, is an iconoclastic Italian playwright-performer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997. The Swedish Academy likened him to the “jesters of the Middle Ages” who relied on wit, irreverence, and even slapstick humor to mock authority while “upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.”
The Vatican immediately condemned the award, L’Osservatore Romano writing that “Giving the prize to someone who is also the author of questionable works is beyond all imagination.” The church had been a frequent target of Fo’s satire.
The Wall Street Journal described Po as an anti-American and an ignoble prize winner. “No normal theater fan,” wrote Stephen Schwartz on the editorial page, “would go to see ‘We Can’t Pay, We Won’t Pay’–which glorifies the looting of a supermarket.”
The United States State Department twice granted Fo and his wife, actress Franca Rame, waivers to enter the country, although he was refused in the 1980s under longstanding laws denying visas to people who took part in antigovernment activities or belonged to the Communist Party, which Fo did. His “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” in 1970 was hit play in Italy and Britain. “Mister Buffero,” a television program, was deemed in 1977 by the Vatican to be the “most blasphemous show in the history of television.”
“The Pope and the Witch,” staged in 1992 in San Francisco, features a news conference at which the Pope, who has turned pro-abortion and pro-drug legalization, confuses a children’s gathering in St. Peter’s Square with an abortion rights rally.
Instead of delivering a formal lecture before the Swedish Academy, the seventy-one-year-old satirist distributed twenty-five pages of caricatures and doodles, lampooning critics who had derided the academy for bestowing its illustrious Nobel Prize for Literature on “a trouble-making iconoclast.” He mocked the “sublime poets and thinkers” who he said had been tumbled from their Parnassian heights by his winning. “In reaction to this typhoon, insults are hurled at the Swedish Academy. You’ve overdone it this time: the Nobel Prize to a comedian-playwright-actor! Who’s ever heard of such a thing?” He then thanked the academy for giving him and his wife and collaborator, Franca Rame, inspiration to “continue doing what we set out to do from the start: to attack, with laughter and reason, in song and in mime, every form of oppression and injustice.” {CA; The Wall Street Journal, 13 October 1997}
Fo, Dario (26 Mar 1926 - ) Fo is a playwright, director, composer, stage and costume designer, and in 1997 was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is the son of Felice Fo, a socialist station master and actor in an amateur theatre company, and Pina Rota, author of the autobiographical Il paese delle rane. Born in San Giano, a small town on Lago Maggiore in the Province of Varese, he is said to have learned the rudiments of narrative rhythm by listening on vacations to his maternal grandfather, a farmer who took Fo with him on a horse-drawn wagon to sell his produce and tell his customers satirical and timely stories. His father’s job changed often, necessitating frequent moves, and Fo liked to sit in taverns or the piazze, listening to the fisherman and glass-blowers swap tall tales steeped in pungent political satire in the oral tradition of the fabulatore. In 1940 he moved to Milan, studying at the Brera Art Academy but left before completing the final few exams. Conscripted into the army of the Salo Republic, he managed to escape, hiding in an attic storeroom. His parents were active in the resistance movement, his father helping smuggle Jewish scientists and escaped British prisoners of war into Switzerland by train, his mother caring for wounded partisans. To help her husband put their three children through college, his wife worked as a shirtmaker. It is not an easy task for a humanist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. After the war, Italian theatre developed piccoli teatri (small theatres) that played a key role in developing the idea of a “popular stage.” Fo, unable to afford a seat, stood through many of the performances. His interest in drama continued, but while working as decorator and assistant architect he studied architecture, becoming known as a person who could tell tales as tall as those he had heard in his childhood. In 1950 Franco Parenti heard his comical rendering of the parable of Cain and Abel, a satire in which the Cain, poer nano (poor little Cain), is depicted as a miserable fool but not evil. Every time Cain tries to mimic the blond blue-eyed Abel he gets into trouble. So enduring one disaster after another he goes crazy and, what else, kills the splendid Abel. Parenti enthusiastically invited Fo to join his theatre company. He also developed grotesque renditions of the stories of Samson and Delilah, Abraham and Isaac, Romeo and Juliet, Moses, Othello, Rigoletto, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King David, Nero, and others—when producers finally caught on to his monologues’ social and political satire, they censured them. In 1951, he switched to a revue, Sette giorni a Milano, describing meeting Franca, who became his leading actress, and this resulted in his becoming a celebrity with his own show on Italian national radio. The two married in Milan’s Saint Ambrose Basilica, but signs on church doors of that period exhorted parishioners not to see his Il ditto nel’occhio (1953), the first satirical post-war revue, one that sparked both approval and controversy as well as leading to difficulty in finding theatres for future productions. Controversy followed the two during their forty-five years together in theatre. She became administrator and organizer for the Fo-Rame Company, which in 1959 was known as being a radical theatre company that produced populist plays using farce, slapstick, and surrealism. More accidentale di un anarchico (1970, The Accidental Death of an Anarchist), Non si paga, non si paga (1974, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay), and Female Parts (1981, a one-woman play written with his wife) became widely known. Later works include Il Papa e la strega (1989, The Pope and the Witch) and Johan Padan a la descoverta de la Americhe (1992, Johan Padan and the Discovery of America).
The two presented Canzonissima, a controversial television show built around the national lottery. Italian TV was introduced to portrayals of the lives and difficulties of common people; e.g., the work-related illness of a signal woman; bricklayers that fall to their death from scaffolding; a sketch with a Mafia theme about a murdered journalist (resulting in Fo and his wife’s receiving death threats delivered in miniature, wooden coffins and the entire family’s being placed under police protection. The Fos were ordered to pay several billion liras in damages, and for fifteen years they were banned by RAI from participating in programs or commercials on the state-owned national radio or television. Meanwhile, thousands of letters and telegrams in support of the Fos were received by RAI, which could find no replacements. Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe opened the 1963-1964 Odeon Theatre’s program in Milan. It is about the court of Isabella of Castille, the discovery of America, and the ethnic cleansing of Spain’s Arabs and Jews. Because it exposed schoolbook history and militarist and patriotic rhetoric, the work was attacked by rightwing groups. Fo and his wife were assaulted upon leaving the Valle Theatre in Rome, and only through the presence of groups of militant workers from the Italian Communist Party could the performances continue.
In 1967 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Fo withdrew permission for his plays to be staged in Czech theatres, refused cuts proposed by Soviet censors in a play scheduled to open at a Soviet theatre, and found all his work stopped in the Soviet Union. In 1968-1969, the two disbanded their company and established an independent theatre collective, the Associazione Nuovo Scene, composed of more than thirty young technicians, actors, and actresses that organized in three groups to tour Italy before working class audiences. A 1969 play’s expressed critique of Stalinism and of the social democratic position of the Italian Communist Party led to the tour’s being sabotaged—Franca returned her Party card to its secretary Enrico Berlinguer, but Dario was never a member. Their Mistero buffo enjoyed over five thousand performances, and it had to be staged at sports arenas to hold the large numbers who came to hear blatant allusions to the feminine genitalia. Because of political differences, the two left Nuovo Scene for Collettivo Teatrale La Comune, producing Vorrei morire anche stasera se dovessi sapere che non è servito niente, about the Italian and Palestinian resistance. A 1971 play, Fedayin, was staged with ten authentic Palestinian freedom fighters—Franca herself fetched fedayeen in Lebanese training camps with the help of the Popular Democratic Front. From 1971 to 1985 the La Comune collective staged hundreds of performances during the economic crisis, donating the revenues to the workers, but the owner refused to renew their contract when it expired. Undeterred, they and their colleagues rented the Rossini Cinema on the outskirts of Milan, finding various acts of repression by the police as well as efforts at censorship. When a group of fascists kidnapped, tortured, and raped Franca Rame, as a punishment for the Fos’ political activism (particularly a work about prisons), outcries of indignation and support appeared throughout Italy. Two months after the rape, Franc returned to perform in Basta con i fascisti, a slide presentation with monologues by Fo-Rame and Lanfranco Binni. It was aimed for young people and addressed the cultural and political presence of fascism within the Italian state. Fanfani rap ito, written in four days in support of the campaign for a referendum for the legalization of abortion, had both supporters and detractors. In 1975 La Comune visited the People’s Republic of China for one month. A 1975-1976 play concerned the drug fad that was making headway in Italy. In 1976 Dario and Franca were invited to return to RAI after fifteen years—the political right and the Church complained loudly. In 1980 Franca, Dario, and their son Jacopo founded the Libera Università di Alcatraz, a cultural and agricultural retreat and study centre located in the hills between Gubbio and Perugia. By buying up, little by little, 3 700 000 square metres of forest (that otherwise would have been felled) and olive groves, the Fos prevented the destruction of a beautiful valley. They also restored eleven ancient and abandoned farmhouses and medieval towers. Alcatraz has become a gathering place for various artists and cultural groups—including Sergio Angese, Stefano Benni, Dacia Maraini, Milo Manara, Andrea Pazienza, Elena Cranco—who hold workshops in theatre, cartoon drawing, dance, writing, psychophysical techniques, psychology, and craftsmanship. Alcatraz also arranged educational programs and summer camps for young people, social outcasts, and persons with handicaps. The activities at the center include equine therapy, comic therapy, nature walks, and pool swimming including a swimming school. In addition, it offers natural gardening, an ecological restaurant and a facility to preserve organically grown fruit and produce. The center has had more than 3000 guests and is directed by Jacopo Fo. In Argentina, during a performance of Tutta casa, letto e chiesa and Mistero buffo, a youth threw a military tear-gas grenade into the theatre. It exploded, creating panic among the audience of well over 1000 persons. Every evening throughout the stay in Argentina, young and not-so-young fascists in black leather jackets threw stones at the windows of the theatre while tens of policemen watched complacently. Windows up to the third floor were broken. Meanwhile, groups of Catholics (instigated by fiery press articles by the Bishop of Buenos Aires, written before the arrival of the company), carrying oversized images of Jesus on their chests, prayed in the lobby of the theatre. Others interrupted the performances with shouts every time the word "pope" was mentioned. When the Fos were invited to participate at the Italian Theatre Festival in New York, the Department of State denied them entry visas. As a result, a large group of U.S. artists and intellectuals (including Norman Mailer, Eve Merriam, Arthur Miller, Martin Scorese, Ellen Stewart, and Sol Yurrick) organized a protest against the ruling. When Joseph Papp invited them to stage a production at New York’s Public Theatre, the State Department again denied them entry. However, when American producer Alexander Cohen staged a Broadway production at the Belasco Theatre of Accidental Death of an Anarchist, with adaptations by Richard Nelsan, The State department—after personal intervention by President Reagan, to the surprise of liberals—granted Fo and Rame a limited, six-day entry visa. Finally granted a normal entry visa, they performed Mistero buffo and Tutta casa, letto e chiesa at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, at New Haven University’s Repertory Theatre, at Washington's Kennedy Center, at Baltimore's Theater of Nations, and at New York’s Joyce Theater. They held a five-day theatre seminar at New York University as well at various workshops. The open-ended structure of Mistero buffo allows it to evolve over the years, permitting Fo to address issues he deems noteworthy. Sitti! Stiamo precipitando! is a comic-grotesque farce about AIDS. Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire!—written in 1994-1995 by Franca, Jacopo, and Dario—is based on Jacopo’s book, Lo zen e l'arte di scopare (more than 300 000 copies sold), illustrates how we are kept in the dark about sex when we grow up, thinking that sexuality, particularly women’s sexuality, is something indecent. Initially it was banned but, after several months of press campaigns and litigation, the ban was dropped and the play was described as “brimming with profound maternal love and therefore recommended to minors.” For a time in the 1990s Dario lost 80% of his sight because of cerebral ischaemia, but eventually he recovered and France gave him a computerized typewriter—he refuses to use a computer. The Fos’ work has been played throughout the world, has the distinction of being loved and hated everywhere, has been deconstructed by the academics and the non-academics. But on 9 October 1997, Fo received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Those in the humanistic cognoscenti were elated; others were nonplused at the Swedish Academy’s decision. In September 2001 the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, opened its festival with Fo’s one-man play Johan Padan, recounting the journey of a 15th-century John Doe from Europe to the New World. During the festival, Fo and his wife appeared in his comic Mistero Buffo and Ms. Rame starred in Sex? Thanks, Don’t Mind If I Do!, a work written by her, Mr. Fo, and their son Jacopo Fo. (CA; E; The Wall Street Journal, 13 Oct 1997; WAS}
FOCUS
A humanistic monthly, Focus is published at 687 Larch Avenue, Teaneck, New Jersey 07666-2301; E-mail: <rca001@aol.com>.
Foerster, Norman (1887—1972) Foerster, a “neo-humanist,” edited a well-known textbook, American Poetry and Prose (1970), and he wrote American Criticism (1962) and Humanism and America (1967). In 1949, asked about humanism, Foerster responded to the present author:
Whatever changes there have been in my conception of humanism are stated in my books. I have said nothing about Existentialism and have nothing to say now, because I know far too little about it. “Naturalistic humanism” (Sellars, Haydon, et al.) seems to me a contradiction in terms. One might as well speak of a carnivorous vegetarianism. I assume you have seen Professor Mercier’s recent book.
In 1956, he added,
My conception of humanism is, in essentials, that of Irving Babbitt. Babbitt’s object was not to offer something new and provincially modern, but simply to revive the ‘truths of the inner life’ as they appear in the humanist tradition since Aristotle and Confucius and are sanctioned by the religious tradition since Jesus and Buddha [sic]. Abjuring all forms of authority, he reaffirmed, on the basis of immediate experience, the fundamental doctrines and the way of life that have characterized the “wisdom of the ages.” Humanism, in this approach, is dualistic, sharply opposed to the monistic naturalism upon which modern thought, art, and life so largely rest. What is central in the humanist outlook, so conceived, seems to me perennially sound and fruitful. But in matters of spirit and method, and in application to specific domains of modern civilization–political, economic, social, artistic–there is room for wide differences. One of the goods of humanism is diversity. I have indicated my position more fully in the concluding chapter of American Criticism.
{WAS, 24 March 1949 and 3 August 1956}
Foerster, Wilhelm (Born 1832) Foerster was a German astronomer, a director in 1865 of the Berlin Observatory. He educated his children without religion and headed the German Ethical Movement. A Privy Councillor, Foerster was almost the only German professor to oppose the War. {RAT}
Dave Foley, Actor ent Internet Movie Database
Foley's comedic rise to fame includes "Kids In The Hall", NBC's NewsRadio and a lead voice in many major animated features.
He appeared on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect on October 10th, 2000.
The discussion turned to the subject of a book on Catholicism written by one of the panelists, Therese Borchard.
Therese: I think if you believe in the basic tenets of the Catholic faith, you're Catholic. But abortion -- some of these peoples' teachings are -- they're not part of the core Catholicism.
Dave: But isn't the essential pillar of Catholicism papal infallibility?
Bill: Yeah.
Therese: I wouldn't say that that's the core. No, I think belief in the father, and the son and the holy spirit, the trinity, the communion of saints --
Dave: But is papal infallibility a belief of the Catholic church?
Therese: Yes, it is.
Dave: Do you believe in papal infallibility?
Therese: I believe that the pope speaks with an authority of God. Yeah.
Dave: Well, then how can the church ever change its mind about anything unless God gets confused one day?
[ Cheers and applause ]
Therese: I believe -- I believe he sets -- I believe he sets an ideal that we are supposed to strive to, but I don't think that -- I think that if we fall short of that --
Dave: If the pope is infallible, then God must be like Hank Kimball -- you know, he must be so hard to make out where he's going with anything.
Therese: I would rather have -- I would rather have a pope that had a firm belief --
Bill: What was he on?
Dave: Just, you know, "Green Acres."
Bill: "Green Acres."
[ Laughter ]
The conversation continued with another challenge to Borchard, this time from songwriter/recording artist Mark Wills:
Mark: If you have a set set of rules and you don't follow them, then are you straying from your religion?
Therese: Well, we're Americans, but we don't -- we have disagreements.
Mark: That's like saying a Big Mac's not a Big Mac without the secret sauce.
[ Laughter ]
[ Cheers and applause ]
Therese: I think all religions -- people strive to the majority. People have -- but they don't believe everything.
[ Talking at once ]
Dave: Not all religions claim the direct authority of God speaking to their leader. You know, I'm an atheist, but I'm a Puritan atheist. And --
[ Light laughter ]
Bill: See, I'm not an atheist. I believe in God, I just don't think God would want this enormous silly bureaucracy between him and me.
[ Cheers and applause ]
Foley, Dave in CA
Follen, Charles (1746—1840) A German reformer, Follen was an Abolitionist teacher and a Unitarian minister. He was Harvard’s first professor of German literature. He introduced German to the Harvard curriculum and, also, introduced the Christmas tree to New England. Some of his lectures are found in his Works (1841—1842), edited by his wife, Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787—1860). Also, Follen wrote Hymns for Children (1825) and Poems (1839). {U}
Follen, Eliza Lee Cabot (1787-1860) Follen, a children’s author and abolitionist, introduced the Christmas tree custom to America. She and her husband, Charles, were both Unitarians.
FOLLY
• Human folly goes up and down, but it always exists, and its depths have never been plumbed. —Samuel Cummings (1927-1998), an American-born Englishman called the international king of the arms trade, a person who sold guns to dictators in Central America favored by the United States, to Fidel Castro to fight the Batista regime, to Taiwan, and to various African groups
trying to overthrow their national governments.
Fonblanque, Albany William (1793—1872) Fonblanque was an English journalist, the son of an eminent lawyer. In 1820 he was on the staff of the Times and contributed to the Westminster Review. In 1830 he became editor of the Examiner, retaining his post until 1847. His caustic wit and literary attainments did much to forward advanced liberal views. Some of Fonblanque’s editorials were published under the title of England Under Seven Administrations. {BDF; RAT}
Fonda, Jane (1937- ) Fonda, the daughter of actor Henry Fonda, appeared in Broadway and in films in the early 1960s. While married to director Roger Vadim (1965-1973), she made “La Ronde” (1964) and “Barbarella” (1968). She married Tom Hayden in 1973. Fonda won Academy Awards for “Coming Home” (1978) and “Klute” (1970). She was in “Cat Ballou” (1965), “Barefoot in the Park” (1967), “They Shoot Horses Don’t They?” (1969), “The China Syndrome” (1979), “On Golden Pond” (1981), “Agnes of God” (1965), “The Morning After” (1986), “Old Gringo” (1989), and “Stanley and Iris” (1990). Politically active in anti-nuclear and feminist peace movements, she incurred the wrath of many for visiting North Vietnam in 1971, earning the derisive title of “Hanoi Jane.” Later she received the thanks of many for her strong anti-war stand at a time when her views were decidedly unpopular. A 1985 Roper Poll listed as her the fourth most admired woman in America. Fonda, who married fellow freethinker Ted Turner in 1991, is author of various weight-loss and workout books.
Foner, Philip S(heldon) (1910— ) Foner, a freethinker, wrote Mark Twain, Social Critic (1958). {FUK; GS}
Fontane, Theodor (1819—1898) Fontane was a German poet and novelist. A non-Christian theist, he wrote Gedichte (1851). {RAT; RE}
Fontanier, Jean (17th Century) Fontanier was a French writer accused of blasphemies in a book entitled Le Tresor Inestimable. Wheeler has the opinion that Garasse, with little reason, called Fontanier an atheist. However, Fontanier met the fate of blasphemers and was burned at the Place de Grève in 1621. {BDF}
Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier De (1657—1757) A nephew of Corneille, Fontenelle was called by Voltaire the most universal genius of the reign of Louis XIV. Educated at the Jesuit’s College, he went to Paris in 1674, wrote some plays and Dialogues of the Dead (1683). In 1687, his History of Oracles was attacked by the Jesuit Baltus as impugning the Church Fathers. In 1699, Fontenelle was made secretary to the Academy of Sciences, a post he held forty-two years. L’Abbé Ladvocat, commenting on Fontenelle’s books, said, “as these books contain many things contrary to religion, it is to be hoped they are not his.” He referred to Doubts on the Physical System of Occasional Causes, Resurrection of the Body, The Infinite, and a Treatise on Liberty. Fontenelle nearly reached the age of one hundred and, a short time before he died when asked if he felt any pain, replied, “I only feel a difficulty of existing.” {BDF; RAT}
FOOD One of the best parts about not dying is that one can continue eating. Non-believers are religiously sensuous about carbohydrates, fats, minerals, proteins, and vitamins. Philosophic naturalists and atheists are rumored to eat chocolate religiously. They marvel, however, at Catholics who at one time were ordered not to eat meat on Fridays; Jews who never eat pork chops or bacon; Muslims who never eat ham or drink a vodka martini; Rastafarians who proscribe eating meat, dairy, salt, or white sugar; Mormons who must not drink Coca Cola; or Santerians who, fulfilling revelations by iyaloshas (priestesses), feed the orishas sacrificial animals instead of eating them.
FOOL • Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. —Anonymous but frequently quoted by freethinkers after learning that Santa Claus is not a person and that Jesus could not possibly have risen from the dead.
Foot Washing: See entry for Feet Washing.
Foot, Dingle (Mackintosh) [Sir] (1905— ) Lord Foot, a barrister and politician, became a Liberal Member of Parliament (United Kingdom) for Dundee, 1931—1945. In 1945, he was a member of the British Delegation to the San Francisco Conference. He was Solicitor-General from 1964 to 1967 and chairman of the Society of Labour Lawyers from 1960 to 1964. In 1995, Lord Foot, a non-believer, was named an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {New Humanist, September 1996}
Foot, Michael [Right Honorable] (1913— ) A British journalist, lawyer, and politician, the Right Honorable Michael Foot in 1992 was made an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He also is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. In 1952 he became editor of the Tribune in London. He has been a Labour Member of the United Kingdom Parliament for a division of Monmouthshire and for the Devonport division of Plymouth. The Rt. Hon. Foot’s works include Armistice 1918—1939 (1940); The Trial of Mussolini (1943); Parliament in Danger (1959); The Politics of Paradise (1988); and books on Aneurin Bevan and Harold Wilson. He wrote an introduction to a new edition of Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography (1998). At the opening of Bradlaugh House in 1994, Foot cut a ribbon, which officially opened the premises. Barbara Smoker jovially introduced him as “a man of letters who used to have some connection, I believe, with politics.” {TRI}
FOOTBALL Most forms of football are derived from many ancient games, especially harpaston and harpastrum. In 1998 a consignment of World Cup footballs had to be withdrawn from sale in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Produced in India, they were overprinted with the national flags of participating nations, including that of Saudi Arabia. Inasmuch as the Saudi flags bears the words “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet,” Muslims objected that to kick a ball bearing such “holy” words from the Qur’an would be “a gross insult.” {The Freethinker, June 1998}
Foote, Edward Bliss (1829—1909) Foote was born in Ohio and was taught as a twelve-year-old Presbyterian to regard Paine, Hume, and Voltaire as frightfully vicious men. He became the editor of the first paper published in New Britain, Connecticut, and while visiting in Boston heard the Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker. He also heard the liberal Unitarian minister, O. B. Frothingham, and contributed money to D. M. Bennett’s The Truth Seeker. Foote, a physician, opposed the first Comstock bill in 1872, and in 1876 Foote was fined $3,500 for having sent through the mails an innocent pamphlet treating on physiological subjects and advocating the right of married people to regulate the size of the family through the use of contraceptives. When in 1873 Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for daring to cast a vote in Rochester, Foote sent his check for $25 to assist in paying the unjust fine. Foote was a member of the Federation of Freethought, the Secular Union, the Manhattan Liberal Club, the Institute of Heredity, and the Constitutional Liberty League. {PUT; TRI}
Foote, Edward Bond (1854—1912) Foote, son of Edward Bliss Foote, was sent by his parents, then Unitarians, to a school which taught much orthodox theology. But he became a physician and shed his religion under the instruction of O. B. Frothingham. A member of the Liberal Club in New York City, he gave a lecture on “The Blue Glass Craze” on the same platform with Walt Whitman and others of that radical 8th Street circle. In 1888 he was made president of the club. Of himself, Foote once wrote, “As a hygienist I favor (and almost practice) vegetarianism, avoid tobacco, and apply prohibition of alcoholics to myself. I am one of the neo-malthusian cranks who would limit population, and my pet hobby is eugenics, or the right of every child to be well born, or not at all. So I also advocate woman suffrage, and the sexual emancipation of women, less bondage in marriage, far greater freedom in divorce, and believe that every child born should be as legitimate in law as in nature. . . . As to religion, I am Agnostic, subscribe to the articles of the Secularists, and find myself pretty closely in accord with the Positivism of Mr. T. B. Wakeman. . . . Lastly, I look forward to cremation, and anticipate nothing further.” {PUT}
Foote, George William (1850—1915) An English freethinker and publisher, Foote was a president of the National Secular Society (NSS) in 1890. In Plymouth when Foote was four, his father who was a custom officer died, and Foote was brought up an Anglican. But at the age of fifteen, he became a Unitarian under the liberalizing influence of the Rev. J. K. Applebee. In 1868 he went to London, where he joined the Young Men’s Secular Association and was soon working energetically for Freethought and Republicanism. Both as a speaker and as a writer he early showed a power of thought and expression which, combined with utter fearlessness, was to make him later so great an asset to the Freethought cause. During the decade 1870—1880 Foote contributed to the Secular Chronicle and the National Reformer; founded, in conjunction with G.J. Holyoake, the Secularist; edited the Liberal; and wrote a number of pamphlets, including “Heroes and Martyrs of Freethought” and “God, the Soul and A Future State: a Reply to Thomas Cooper.” In 1881 he established the Freethinker, a journal that was destined to become a powerful factor in spreading Freethought throughout England. From 1883 to 1887 be edited Progress, which contained many articles of literary merit. During his presidency of the NSS, financial problems predominated and in 1902 he personally became bankrupt. A radical and an individualist, he was a social Darwinian. In his Flowers of Freethought (1893), he wrote, “The mental serf is a bodily serf too, and spiritual fetters are the agencies of political thralldom. The man who worships a tyrant in heaven naturally submits his neck to the yoke of tyrants on earth. He who bows his intellect to a priest will yield his manhood to a king.” He also wrote, “We cannot fathom the Infinite–it is enough for us to love and serve humanity.” A.D. McLaren, in an updating of Foote’s Infidel Death-Beds, described some of Foote’s problems: “Though the prosecutions of Foote for ‘blasphemous libels’ published in the Freethinker, constitute an important chapter in the story of his life, it is impossible here to enter into details concerning them. He was served with his first summons in July, 1882, and at the Court of Queen’s Bench was compelled to find securities for £600. The next trial arose out of the illustrations in the Christmas number of the same year and had more serious consequences. For this offence he was, in March, 1883, sentenced by Judge North, a Roman Catholic, to twelve months’ imprisonment “as an ordinary criminal subject to the same discipline as burglars. Replied Foote, ‘I thank you, my lord. Your sentence is worthy of your creed.’ Nearly two months later Foote was tried again on the first indictment, before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, and defended himself in a speech which is now one of the classics in the literature of its kind. For a detailed account of these prosecutions the reader is referred to Foote’s ‘Prisoner for Blasphemy,’ and the ‘Defence of Free Speech.” “Apart from his thirty-five years’ work on the Freethinker,” McLaren continued, “during the whole of this period Foote was in various other ways–writing books and pamphlets, lecturing and debating–serving the cause to which he had early decided to devote his life. In 1882 appeared ‘The God the Christians Swear By,’ during Charles Bradlaugh’s parliamentary struggle, ‘Blasphemy No Crime,’ and ‘Death’s Test,’ afterwards enlarged into Infidel Deathbeds. The last, like ‘A Lie in Five Chapters?’ (1892), in which he ran to earth the story of a ‘converted Atheist,’ which the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes had started, was more than an exposure of “lying for the glory of God.” Foote discerned as clearly as any man ever did the influence of superstitious beliefs on personality, and the fatal ease with which they are made to serve the purposes of the professional soul-saver. ‘The Bible Handbook,’ in which W.P. Ball collaborated, appeared in 1885, and ‘Crimes of Christianity’ in 1887. In producing the latter, which is a veritable store-house of historical facts for the Freethought propagandist, he had the assistance of his life-long friend, J. M. Wheeler. ‘Rome or Atheism’ (1892) shows that power of going straight to the point which characterized all Foote’s work. It also shows exactly where he himself stood. The Newman brothers are made the text for a keen analysis of the Roman Catholic’s “certitude” and the Protestant’s “right to private judgment”; the disintegration of Protestantism is seen to be inevitable; and the field will be left to the two great protagonists who already “march steadily forward to their Armageddon.” His views on death and a future life are concisely expressed in “The Gospel of Secularism,” contributed to Religious Systems of the World. The Secularist, he says, will give no assent to any proposition of whose truth he is not assured, and ‘declines to traffic in supernatural hopes and fears.’ ” Foote’s literary and artistic tastes were catholic. He liked the works of Titian, Angelico, and Turner; Beethoven, Wagner, and Chopin; Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, and Browning. His favorite novelist was his friend George Meredith, but he also liked Richardson, Fielding, Thackeray, and George Eliot. Among the poets he thought highly of were George Herbert, Cowper, Morris, and Swinburne. In theology, he possessed works by St. Basil, St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Erasmus and, his favorite, Hooker. F. J. Gould remembers Foote’s “Victorian regularity in his frock-coat, black tie, and restraint of gesture.” Foote was five feet ten inches, of average build, had a beard, and his hair turned to gray in his early fifties. Henry Salt recalled of Foote that “It was always an intellectual treat to hear him speak.” Aldred in his autobiography wrote of Foote, “I saw him as a would-be priest, even when they styled themselves Freethinkers and Atheists. . . . Foote in particular, and Cohen as his lieutenant, had to be not only the priests but the popes of the Freethought movement,” similar comments of which previously had been alleged about Bradlaugh and Holyoake. Chapman Cohen, upon Foote’s death, wrote as follows: “To me it will always be some consolation that he died as he would have wished–in harness. . . . When I saw him on the Friday (two days) before his death he said, ‘I have had another setback, but I am a curious fellow and may get all right again.’ But he looked the fact of death in the face with the same courage and determination that he faced Judge North many years ago. A few hours before he died he said calmly to those around him, ‘I am And when the end came his head dropped back on the pillow, and with a quiet sigh, as of one falling to sleep, he passed away.” {BDF; EU, Edward Royle; FO; FUK; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE; RSR; TRI; TYD; WSS}
Foote, Henry Wilder (20th Century) Foote wrote The Religion of Thomas Jefferson (1960). {FUS}
Forberg, Friedrich Karl (1770—1848) A German philosopher, Forberg became attached to Fichte’s philosophy. An article he wrote with Fichte, “The Ground of Our Faith in Divine Providence,” brought on them a charge of atheism, and their journal was confiscated by the Electorate of Saxony. Religion, Forberg held, consists in devotion to morality, and he wrote An Apology for Alleged Atheism (1799). {BDF; RAT}
Forbes, Milton L. (20th Century) Forbes is author of The Messiah (1989) and Out of the Mists of Time: Who Wrote the Bible and Why (1992).
FORBIDDEN BOOKS: See a listing of such works in pre-Revolutionary France, which are included in the entry for Robert Darnton. Also see Index Librorum Prohibitorum
Ford, Arthur L. (20th Century) Ford, a humanist, wrote Joel Barlow (1971 and The Poetry of Henry David Thoreau (1970). {GS}
Ford, Gerald N. (20th Century) Ford, a chartered accountant, is Treasurer of the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC).
Forder, Robert (1844—1901) Forder was the son of a Norfolk agricultural laborer who was himself sent out to work in the fields when he was eight. At the age of sixteen he went to London and, after being rejected by the army because he was “too puny,” he worked as a laborer in the boiler-shop of a firm of marine engineers at Deptford. Attending open-air radical and freethought meetings, he became a freethinker and a republican, then a Reform League organizer. In 1877 he became general secretary of the National Secular Society. During the imprisonment of Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp in 1883, Forder undertook charge of the publishing business. {BDF; FUK; RSR}
FORECASTLE A forecastle is the section of the upper deck of a ship located at the bow forward of the foremast. It is also called the fo’c’s’le, the only word in English with three apostrophes: a delight for grammarians who argue with absolutists that such a construction is impossible.
Forel, Auguste (1848—1931)
A Swiss physiologist who taught psychiatry and was director of the asylum at Zurich, Forel wrote on a variety of subjects. His work, Ants (1904), was awarded the Academy Prize. He wrote on the anatomy of the brain, insanity, prison reform, and social morality. His chief rationalist work is Vie et mort (1908). Forel, the leading scientific man of modern Switzerland, described himself as an Agnostic. {RAT; RE}
Ford, Charles Henri (1913— ) Ford, a photographer, is widely known as having been Pavel Tchelitchew’s lover for twenty years. He is the brother of actress Ruth Ford, whom he once memorably photographed in a flimsy, flowery dress with her young arms wrapped around a barber pole. The photo also contains three children dressed for winter and peering unexplicably into a shop window. Ford’s portraits in the 1930s were distinctive, as were his 1950 photos in Italy, including one of the photographer James Van Der Zee and the surrealist poet André Breton. A poet and a novelist (The Young and the Evil was co-authored with Parker Tyler in 1933), Ford was once editor of the now defunct surrealist magazine, View. His friends besides Tyler included Gertrude Stein, George Platt-Lynes, Jean Cocteau, Andy Warhol, and Pier Paolo Passolini, among others. Discussing his view of organized religion, Ford has stated that he is not interested in such matters. He did, however, express an interest in Buddhism. {WAS, conversations, 1997}
Ford, Henry (1863—1947) The famed maker of horseless carriages was allegedly an atheist and, allegedly, a pro-Nazi. As the apostle of mass production, Ford manufactured 15,000,000 Model T Fords starting in 1908. Some anti-Semitic articles in Ford’s Dearborn Independent brought him legal problems, and he was involved in numerous other lawsuits and controversies with bankers, financiers, union leaders, and others. Throughout his life, he never allowed outside investments in any of the Ford holdings. Ford contributed to a monthly paper, The Humanist, which was published at Humanity House by the British Humane Association in the 1920s. It was politically right-wing and, despite its title, was not associated with the rationalist, freethought, or secular humanist organizations. In 1925 Ford publicized his views in favor of reincarnation, leading his friend Luther Burbank to challenge them in a headline-capturing story in the San Francisco Bulletin of 22 January 1926: I’M AN INFIDEL, DECLARES BURBANK, CASTING DOUBT ON SOUL IMMORTALITY THEORY. If Ford were an atheist, as alleged, he apparently is one of the few atheists on record who believed in “reincarnation of the soul.” (See entries for Luther Burbank and Paul Edwards, the latter of whom ridiculed Ford’s ideas about reincarnation.) {CE}
FOREPLAY Born-again freethinkers often object that although they have been relatively successful in discarding most of the religious baggage they were saddled with in youth, they have found it difficult to overcome the feelings of guilt about sex that were instilled by the religion of their parents’ choice. Particularly harmful, many have said and written, is the lack of sex education that they received either from their family or their schools. Foreplay, the intimate sexual stimulation that precedes intercourse, is either entirely overlooked by men or, according to women, is that which involves a half-hour of begging. Few freethinkers appear to agree, at least in printed materials, as to the ages at which sex education should start and by whom it should be taught. Few, however, disagree that sensuousness is humanistically delightful.
Forest, Lester (20th Century) In the 1960s, Forest was a vice president of the American Humanist Association.
Forester, C. S. (1899—1966) Forester, the English writer of the Hornblower novels and The African Queen (1935), wrote the present author concerning humanism:
I’m an ignorant person, and completely incapable of commenting on naturalistic humanism. Maybe I have a blind spot, a kind of tone-deafness with regard to philosophy.
{WAS, 20 February 1951}
Forester, Marilyn (20th Century) Forester is Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Atheist Network, a Houston, Texas, group which formed in 1991.
FORGIVENESS, CHRISTIAN • I sent for the wench to clean my room, and when I came in I kissed her and felt her, for which God forgive me —William Byrd The Secret Diary
Of William Byrd of Westover, 1709-1712
Forkosch, Morris (20th Century) and Selma Forkosch (20th Century) The Forkosches established an endowment for giving annual awards for the best humanist article and the best humanist book. In 1997 Jim Herrick was a recipient for his article, “When Humanists Embrace the Arts.” The 1997 book award was given to New Zealand philosopher Kurt Baier for Problems of Life and Death: A Humanist Perspective.
Forlong, James George Roche (Born 1824) Major General Forlong, who was educated as an engineer, joined the Indian Army in 1842. He fought in the South Mahrata campaign of 1845—1846 and in the second Burmese war. On Burma’s annexation, he became head of the survey, roads, and canal branches. In 1858 and 1859 he traveled extensively through Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Spain, returned to India and Upper Bengal, and from 1872 to 1876 was secretary and chief engineer to the Government of Oudh. In his youth an evangelical preacher, he became a student of Eastern religions, archaeology, and languages, and wrote Rivers of Life, in which he set forth the evolution of all religions from their radical objective basis to their present spiritual developments. Himself a freethinker, Forlong illustrated in a chart with streams of color the movements of thought from 10,000 B.C.E. to the present time. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Forman, James (1928— ) Forman, an African American, wrote The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1985), in which according to Norm Allen Jr. he discusses his atheism and his contempt for “religious crap.” In 1994 Forman received the Council for Secular Humanism’s African American Humanist of the Year award in Orlando, Florida. {CA; E}
FORNICATION The act of copulating, considered by some as one of mankind’s most important pleasures but by others a disgusting and obscene act, is ordinarily referred to as fornication in “proper” company. In ultra-proper company and with a French tonality, “le fucking” is used, apparently to soften the dreaded Anglo-Saxon sound. One of the founders of the Secular Humanist Society of New York has suggested, non-facetiously, that lovers might well be rated on a Kinsey-like one-to-seven scale, that a one be granted to those who egocentrically consider copulation as something only for their own satisfaction or as something that is dirty, but that a seven be given those who make an art of the act for however many parties are pleasurably involved. “Where,” he speculated, “might Alcibiades, Jefferson, Shelley, Florence Nightingale, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and Mae West have ranked?” Technically, fornication is consensual sexual intercourse between two persons not married to each other, at least in Christian countries. Specifically, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), “Fornication is carnal union between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of persons and of human sexuality which is naturally ordered to the good of spouses and the generation and education of children. Moreover, it is a grave scandal when there is corruption of the young.” The negative treatment of the entire subject of sex by Christian theologians has resulted in the sex act’s being taught as something that is “committed,” or bad. Pope John Paul II in a 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, refers to pre-marital sex, masturbation, homosexuality, and artificial insemination as “intrinsically evil. If acts are intrinsically evil, a good intention or particular circumstance can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain ‘irremediably’ evil acts per se and in themselves are not capable of being ordered to God and to the good of the person.” In short, one is not supposed to enjoy sex. Roget’s Thesaurus, under “sexy,” adds: “SEE IMPURITY.” “Fuck you!” is usually expressed as an intensive phrase, as is “Get to fuck out of here,” both vulgarisms not expressed in “polite” society. The wry expletive, “Well, fuck me!”, usually is followed, according to slang expert Eric Partridge, with the equally wry “Later” or ”No thanks.” Similarly negative connotations surround expressions such as “You’re a fuck up, you fucker, so fuck off!” In short, in the Western World most references to copulation and fornication are negative in intent, allegedly a sign of organized religions’ successes in degrading the pleasures of sex. It is rare to hear “fuck” used in a positive sense, certainly not when uttered by a man who talks of a woman as being “a good fuck.” Teachers of grammar have been known to become embarrassed by saying that the sentence, “I smell good,” involves use of the copulative verb smell (as in a reference to one’s cologne). Instead, they call it a linking verb. (“I smell well” refers to a sensitive, unclogged nose.) Bertrand Russell in Marriage and Morals (1959) discusses how an enjoyable act, such as having sex, was turned into a sin and what this led to:
Catholicism has always had a certain degree of toleration for what is held to be sin. The Church has recognized that ordinary human nature could not be expected to live up to its precepts, and has been prepared to give absolution for fornication provided the sinner acknowledge his fault and did penance. This practical toleration was a method of increasing the power of the clergy, since they alone could pronounce absolution, and but for absolution fornication would entail eternal damnation. The outlook of Protestantism has been somewhat different, in theory less severe, but in practice, in some ways more so. Luther was much impressed by the text, “It is better to marry than to burn,” and was also in love with a nun. He inferred that in spite of vows of celibacy, he and the nun had a right to marry, since otherwise, given the strength of his passions, he would have been led into mortal sin. Protestantism accordingly abandoned the praise of celibacy, which had been characteristic of the Catholic Church, and wherever it was vigorous it also abandoned the doctrine that marriage is a sacrament, and tolerated divorce in certain circumstances. But Protestants were more shocked than Catholics by fornication, and altogether more rigid in their moral condemnations. The Catholic Church expected a certain amount of sin, and arranged methods for dealing with it; the Protestants, on the contrary, abandoned the Catholic practice of confession and absolution, and left the sinner in a much more hopeless position than he occupies in the Catholic Church. One sees this attitude in both its aspects in modern America, where divorce is exceedingly easy, but adultery is condemned with far more severity than in most Catholic countries.
Two leading secular humanists, Bonnie and Vern Bullough, wrote widely on the subject. Their general overview is similar to that of the average person on the street, that—like sleep and food—sex provides one of life’s intrinsic joys, that–whether one is bisexual, homosexual, or heterosexual–sex when not under (or over) practiced is a pleasant necessity and helps one maintain mental and physical well-being. The opposite of one who feels that sex is evil, an act for which “guilt feelings” need to follow, is the individual who has a healthy and positive view concerning sex, who regards fornication as an art to be developed. Meanwhile, those who fuck, shit, and piss are admonished by The Puritanical Powers That Be to fornicate, excrete, and urinate. For the healthy person, fornication is one of life’s major pleasures, a major humanistic right. (See entry for Swearing.)
Fornos, Werner (20th Century) President of the Population Institute since 1982, Fornos in 1991 was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. He wrote Gaining People, Losing Ground (1987). {HNS2}
Forrest, W. M. (20th Century) Forrest, a non-theist and freethinker, wrote Do Fundamentalists Play Fair? (1926). {GS}
Forrester, George (20th Century) Forrester wrote The Faith of an Agnostic, or First Essays in Rationalism (1902). {GS}
Forster, E(dward) M(organ) (1879—1970) A leading British novelist of the twentieth century, Forster highlighted the difficulty of forming human relationships in his best-known work, A Passage to India (1924). In 1968, he received the British Order of Merit. Maurice (1914) was published after his death, and it was revolutionary in that he treated homosexuality as an inherent trait rather than simply a manner of behaving. Upon his mother’s death, he wrote, “Surely she will give up being dead now.” He also wrote, “I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him, and even hurt by him.” As for his democratic outlook, “Love and loyalty to an individual can run counter to the claims of the State. When they do–down with the State, say I, which means that the State would down me.” Jim Herrick (New Humanist, May, 1990) spoke of Forster’s humanism upon an occasion when Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. He cited Forster’s description of humanism in his essay on Gide and George: “The humanist has four leading characteristics–curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.” In Two Cheers for Democracy (1951), Forster wrote,
I do not believe in belief. But this is an age of faith, in which one is surrounded by so many militant creeds that, in self defense, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and science, which ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp. Tolerance, good temper, and sympathy–well, they are what matter really, and if the human race is not to collapse, they must come to the front before long. But for the moment they don’t seem enough; their action is no stronger than a flower battered beneath a military jack-boot. They want stiffening, even if the process coarsens them. Faith to my mind is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.
Forster once wrote, “Two cheers for democracy; one because it admits variety, and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough; there is no occasion to give three. Only Love, the Beloved Republic, deserves that.…I cannot believe that Christianity will ever cope with the present world-wide mess, and I think that such influence as it retains in modern society is due to its financial backing rather than to its spiritual appeal.” During World War I, while working in Egypt for the International Red Cross, Forster had a passionate liaison with a young tram conductor, Mohammed el Adl, whose premature death in 1922 greatly affected him. In 1930 he started a long-lasting relationship with a police constable, Bob Buckingham, one that continued even when Buckingham married in 1932 and lasted until Forster’s death in the Buckinghams’ home in 1970. In addition to stating his views in “What I Believe,” Forster wrote “An Alternative in Humanism” and “How I Lost My Faith,” which were included in a Rationalist Press Association booklet. During his retirement in Cambridge, Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanist Society. Although he was not an active member, Forster knew of and worked with the British Humanist Association. ( See entry for Edward Carpenter.) {CE; CL; Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Summer 1999; GL; TYD}
Forsyth, David (20th Century) Forsyth, a freethinker, wrote Psychology and Religion, A Study By A Medical Psychologist (1935). {GS}
Fortlage, Karl (1806—1881) Fortlage was a German psychologist, a professor of psychology at Berlin and then of philosophy at Jena. At first a follower of Hegel, he abandoned his system and attempted to blend the “transcendental Pantheism” of Fichte with empirical psychology. Fortlage rejected theism in his Darstellung und Kritik der Beweise des Dasein Gottes (1840). {RAT; RE}
Foscolo, Nicolo Ugo (1778—1827)
Fosco, an Italian poet, was an enthusiastic follower of Alfieri. In 1797 Fosco published a deistic tragedy, Tieste, for which he was called before the Venetian Inquisition. He greeted the French Revolution and Bonaparte, serving in the French Army. In 1809 he became professor of rhetoric at Pavia University, but the return of the Austrians drove him to Switzerland. In 1816 he settled in London. Foscolo’s works were published in eleven volumes (1850—1859). {RAT}
Fosse, Bob (1927-1987) Fosse, the dancer-choreographer-director, was not known to be a believer in the supernatural or in an afterlife. He won ten Ton awards for his stage work and his movies included “Sweet Charity,” “Cabaret,” and “All That Jazz.” At the opening of a revival of “Sweet Charity,” Fosse was enroute to the theatre when he had a massive heart attack. As he would have wanted, the show went on. In his will he left $25,000 for sixty-six friends to “have dinner on me. They all have at one time or other during my life been very kind to me. I thank them.” The humanist-like dinner was held in Central Park’s Tavern on the Green in New York, and attending were such guests as novelist E. L. Doctorow, Liza Minnelli, Buddy Hackett, Dustin Hoffman, and Roy Scheider.
Foster, Abigail Kelley (1810—1887) Foster was an American abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights. After teaching in several Quaker schools, she began a crusade against slavery, becoming one of the first female lecturers before sexually mixed audiences. Her fellow churchgoers refused to take up the slavery issue, holding that each follower must follow his or her own divinely inspired directives. Foster, however, believed in passive resistance. When she refused to speak out within the church, the men at one point rose and carried her out. When they re-entered, she did also, and the women were so shocked by her actions that she was beaten as she was being carried out again. {CE; Carole Gray, “Nineteenth-Century Women of Freethought,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1995}.
Foster, Alfred William (1886—1962) Foster was an Australian rationalist, socialist, and pacifist who became Mr. Justice Foster, Deputy President of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. The Catholic Advocate, when a witness claimed he had told a boy there is “no hell, sonny,” wanted him deported to Mexico or Russia, where he could “rail at religion without restraint.” After all, they reasoned, the boy’s mind might never recover from such a shock. However, the boy’s mother, a Mrs. Ryan who said the Advocate had wrongly assumed by their name that they were Catholic, sided with Foster, ending the incident. When the Rationalist Association was incorporated as a registered company in 1925, Foster became the first chairman, holding the position until 1935. In 1940 he became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association of England. Sir John Barry spoke at Foster’s secular ceremony, telling of Foster’s courage, wisdom, and compassion through which he had achieved “the only immortality he would have desired.” {SWW}
Foster, (Alicia Christian) Jodie (19 Nov 1962 - ) Foster, after her graduation from Yale University, made her acting debut in the television show, Mayberry, RFD (1969). In addition to numerous other television shows, she has been in such movies as Tom Sawyer (1973); Kansas City Bomber (1972); Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More (1975); Taxi Driver (1976) (for which she was an Academy Award nominee); Foxes (1980); Carny (1980); Stealing Home (1988); and The Accused (1988). In 1991, she won an Oscar, as did Anthony Hopkins, for Silence of the Lambs. In 1997 she starred in Contact, the movie based upon Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name in which she played a radio astronomer dedicated to searching for clues to life beyond Earth. “Like Ellie in the movie,” film critic Betsy Pickle of the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported, “Foster doesn’t believe in a supreme spiritual being.” Although saying she respects religious belief and has studied it, “As far as in my own life, I only have questions. Just as the character says in the movie, as a scientist, I’d have to say that there is no evidence. . . . " In fact, she added, she had never believed in God nor practiced a religion:
It’s only as I got older that I really got interested in it. I didn’t have any religious background. My mother had a lot of religious background; my brothers and sisters did. But for some reason, I was the last in the family, and it was the ’60s, and it just didn’t trickle down. The only church I’d ever been into, I think, the only service that I’ve ever attended, was the cathedral of the Vatican–because you went to Rome, and you want to go in. And I think I’ve been to Notre Dame a few times because it’s really pretty. {CA; The Freethinker, November 1997}
Foster, George Borman (1858—1918) Foster was an ordained Baptist minister who taught philosophy at McMaster University in Canada and then at the University of Chicago starting in 1895. His Finality of the Christian Religion (1906) and The Function of Religion in Man’s Struggle for Existence (1909) gave him the reputation of being a great teacher and a champion of freedom in religious thinking. Because of his concern with the problem of the objective validity of religious faith, and especially with the problem of the ontological reference of the God-idea, he started to move from a theistic supernaturalism to a humanistic naturalism.
However, his critics say, he confused many because he continued emotionally to use the God-idea which intellectually he thought had no ontological validity. As a result, states philosopher Hjalmar Johnson of Augustana Theological Seminary, Foster’s thought has exercised a great influence upon the rise and development of “religious humanism” in America.
Foster, (Alicia Christian) Jodie (1962— ) Foster, after her graduation from Yale University, made her acting debut in the television show, “Mayberry, RFD” (1969). In addition to numerous other television shows, she has been in such movies as “Tom Sawyer” (1973); “Kansas City Bomber” (1972); “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More” (1975); “Taxi Driver” (1976) (for which she was an Academy Award nomination); “Foxes” (1980); “Carny” (1980); “Stealing Home” (1988); and “The Accused” (1988). In 1991, she won an Oscar, as did Anthony Hopkins, for “Silence of the Lambs.” In 1997 she starred in “Contact,” the movie based upon Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name in which she played a radio astronomer dedicated to searching for clues to life beyond Earth. “Like Ellie in the movie,” film critic Betsy Pickle of the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported, “Foster doesn’t believe in a supreme spiritual being.” Although saying she respects religious belief and has studied it, “As far as in my own life, I only have questions. Just as the character says in the movie, as a scientist, I’d have to say that there is no evidence.…” In fact, she added, she had never believed in God nor practiced a religion:
It’s only as I got older that I really got interested in it. I didn’t have any religious background. My mother had a lot of religious background; my brothers and sisters did. But for some reason, I was the last in the family, and it was the ’60s, and it just didn’t trickle down. The only church I’d ever been into, I think, the only service that I’ve ever attended, was the cathedral of the Vatican–because you went to Rome, and you want to go in. And I think I’ve been to Notre Dame a few times because it’s really pretty. {CA; The Freethinker, November 1997}
Foster, Robert G. (20th Century) Director of the Menninger Foundation’s marriage counseling service and training program, Foster was a naturalistic humanist.
Foster, Stephen Symonds (1809—1881) Foster, a freethinker, wrote The Brotherhood of Thieves (1886). He was husband of the American abolitionist, Abigail Kelley Foster. (He is not the gay composer, Stephen Foster (1826-1864), who wrote “O Susannah,” “De Camptown Races,” and “The Old Folks At Home.” {GS}
Foucault, Michel (1926—1984) Called by critic Alan Ryan the most famous intellectual figure in the world when he died, Foucault followed Jean-Paul Sartre in gaining the attention of those who were interested in philosophic-literary ideas. In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault pronounced “the death of Man,” describing the individual as but a “rift in the order of things.” His target was Marxists, and he held that the intellectual “spoke the truth to those who had yet to see it, in the name of those who were forbidden to speak the truth: he was conscience, consciousness, and eloquence.” He also declared that biology did not exist in the eighteenth century because “life itself did not exist.” In The Passion of Michel Foucault, James Miller tells that Foucault’s fellow students thought he was half mad, that he had attempted suicide when young, that he was under psychiatric care more than once. Miller emphasizes the Nietzschean strain in Foucault’s life and work, adding that Foucault became an excellent director of studies at Uppsala’s Maison Française, where he gave a post in the department to his lover, Daniel Defert. Defert was the one who inspired Foucault to look “more intellectual” by shaving his head. Foucault later headed the philosophy section at a new university in Vincennes, leaving after enjoying anarchic battles with the riot police, for a position at the Collège de France. His Discipline and Punish (1975) helped him become a cult figure in the United States. In Madness and Civilization (1965; translated in 1970), Foucault detailed how within social practices are morally disturbing power relations. In History of Sexuality (1984), he discussed the self’s relationship to itself, calling it “ethics.” Foucault died of AIDS, having likely contracted the disease in San Francisco bathhouses. Although called an anti-humanist, Foucault is not generally accused of being pro-theist or pro-supernaturalist. He once referred to himself as being “neither a Hellenist nor a Latinist.” (For references to Foucault’s homosexuality, see Queering the Renaissance (1994), edited by Jonathan Goldberg.) {CE; GL}
Fouda, Farag (Died 1992) Fouda, a distinguished secular thinker in Egypt, was assassinated in 1992 by Moslem extremists, according to Salman Rushdie in “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam” in The New York Times (11 July 1993). According to Rushdie, “We should understand that secularism is now the fanatics’ most important target.”
Fouillée, Alfred Jules Émile (1838—1912) Fouillée was a French philosopher who was crowned by the Academy of Moral Sciences for two works on the philosophy of Plato and Socrates. His Sorbonne thesis, Liberty and Determinism, was attacked by Catholics. He was author of History of Philosophy (1875) and was considered, with Taine, Ribot, and Renan, the principal representative of French philosophy of his time. His system was known as that of idèes-forces. In his attempt to reconcile idealism and naturalism, Fouillée held that ideas are themselves forces. {BDF; CE; RAT; RE}
Foulkes, Paul (1923— ) During a National Secular Society lecture, Foulkes, a philosopher, outlined five criteria he recommended for the organization: no party lines, no absolutes, no censorship, no sacred books, and no sacred names.
FOUNDING FATHERS The “founding fathers” were members in 1787 of the convention that drafted the United States Constitution. Although religious fundamentalists erroneously state they were Christians, in reality they were highly literate individuals whose views on liberal democracy were shaped largely by the works of Montesquieu and other French Enlightenment philosophers, as well as their English counterparts John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. (See entries for Montesquieu, Locke, and Hobbes.)
Fourier, François Marie Charles (1772—1837) A major French social philosopher, Fourier developed what can be described as a socialistic utopia. His Théorie des quatre mouvements (1808) developed the idea that man could create a world in which social harmony could exist. To do this, an economic group composed of 1,630 people and called a “phalanx” would live in a phalanstery, or community building, and work would be divided among people according to their natural inclinations. One of his disciples, Victor Prosper Considérant, according to critic Julie Martin, had a strong impact on Colette’s mother, Sido. Considérant thought “that the free expression of every passion—homosexuality, polygamy, unfettered sexual drives—would create social harmony and bring about a new social order.” He tried to establish Fourierism in Texas, and others interested in his ideas were Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley. The Transcendentalists’ Brook Farm for a time was Fourierist, although the most successful of the communities was the North American Phalanx at Red Bank, New Jersey. Fourier himself was an independent, a non-Christian, one who was not an anti-clerical atheist and one who believed in the transmigration of souls. He further believed in a divine Providence and claimed to have discovered the “plan of God” for man, but like Owen he had an unbounded and heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility. {BDF; CE; JMR; Julie Martin, The New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1999; RAT; RE; TRI}
Fourier, Jean Baptiste Joseph [Baron] (1768—1830) Fourier, an eminent French mathematician and physicist, was known for his researches on heat and on numerical equations. He originated Fourier’s theorem on vibratory motion. Fourier accompanied Napoleon to Egypt. Although hated by the clergy because of his scientific triumphs and persecuted under the restored royalty, he was not prevented from being admitted to the French Academy as well as the British Royal Society and other learnèd bodies. {JM; RAT; RE}
FOURIERISM Fourierism was an early 19th-century system for social reform as advocated by Charles Fourier. He proposed that small self-sustaining communal groups be organized for society’s good. (See entry for François Marie Charles Fourier.)
Fowler, Carrie (20th Century) Fowler, while a student at the State University of New York at Albany, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Fowler, Jeanne (20th Century) Fowler is the Atheist Coalition representative to the Atheist Alliance, having succeeded Howard Kreisner in 1996. {Freethought Observer, November-December 1996}
Fowler, Jeaneanne (20th Century) Fowler, a research fellow at the University of Wales College in Newport, wrote Humanism: Beliefs and Practices (1999), in which she describes the system of belief based without reference to the supernatural. In a review, Nicolas Walter (The Freethinker, November 1999), noted the work’s “fulsome forewords by Hermann Bondi and Paul Kurtz, leading figures in two of the largest humanist organisations in the English-speaking world” and its attention more to “centralist humanism” than to the more militant forms of freethought “as represented by the National Secular Society and the Rationalist Press Association.” Walter found, however, that the work “deserves our gratitude for trying so hard to explain what we are up to.” More favorable views have been expressed by officials of the British and American humanist groups. Fowler has written a book on Hinduism and reportedly is writing one on Taoism.
Fowles, John (1926- ) Fowles is an English novelist whose works combine psychological probings—chiefly of sex and love—with an interest in the social and philosophical context of human behavior. The Collector (1963) was about a shy man who, in a hapless search for love, kidnaps a girl and keeps her captive. The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) parodied early novelistic devices and described the social mores of Victorian England. He also wrote The Magus (1966); The Ebony Tower (1974); Daniel Martin (1977); Mantissa (1982), and A Maggot(1985). Fowles was nominated for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature but lost to Günter Grass. In a review of Wormholes (1998), The New York Times Book Review commented that “Religion is one of several subjects (environmentalism is another) for which Fowles retires elegance in favor of the bludgeon. ‘Being an atheist,’ he tells us, ‘is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation.’ ” {CA} Fowles is best known for his books The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Magus, Daniel Martin and others.
From the May 31, 1998 New York Times Book Review reviewing John Fowles' new book, Wormholes:
... Religion is one of several subjects (environmentalism is another) for which Fowles retires elegance in favor of the bludgeon. "Being an atheist," he tells us, "is a matter not of moral choice, but of human obligation."
In his journals, Fowles acknowledges "three main politicosocial obligations": "First to be an atheist...
Fox, Avril (1917— )
In 1965, the British Humanist Association helped to form TRACK. Fox and some independent secularists formed COSMO, both of which groups advocate radio and television freedom. {GS}
Fox, Charles James (1749—1806) Fox, an orator and British statesman, upon being dismissed by George III as lord of the treasury, attacked the government’s policy in North America. During the War of Independence, he defiantly wore the colors of the Americans in the House of Commons. A bitter opponent of William Pitt, he favored the French Revolution and opposed British intervention in the French Revolutionary Wars, greeting the fall of the Bastille as “one of the greatest and best events in history.” Fox also argued for the political rights of Roman Catholics as well as dissenters, and he is remembered as a great champion of liberty and an enemy of slavery. According to A. Benn, Fox was an atheist at a time when only Godwin and Bentham dared to admit such. Lord Holland, his nephew, confirmed that Fox was “no believer in religion” and, although he allowed his wife to have prayers when he was dying, he took no notice and said that he “did not like to pretend any sentiments he did not entertain.” {CE; HAB; JM; RAT; RE}
Fox, Elizabeth Vassale [Lady Holland] (1770—1845) Fox, the wife of the third Baron Holland, was described by Greville in Memoris as “a social light which illuminated and adorned England, and even Europe, for half a century.” An atheist like her famous uncle, she was known, Greville adds, “to be wholly destitute of religious opinions.” {JM; RE}
Fox, George (1835—1914) Fox, a rationalist and parliamentarian, has been described in Australia as “the father of organized Rationalism in Queensland.” The Queensland Rationalist and Ethical Society had almost one hundred members at the time of his death. {SWW}
Fox, George M. (20th Century) Fox, a freethinker, wrote The Vanishing Gods (1984). {GS}
Fox, George T. (20th Century) A freethinker, Fox wrote Priestly Celibacy Exposed (c. 1910). {GS}
Fox, Henry [First Baron Holland] (1705—1774) Fox, the father of C. J. Fox, was an English statesman, for many years the leader of the House of Commons. Lord Chesterfield said he “had no fixed principles either of religion or morality,” implying he detested Fox. The Chalmers Dictionary states that Fox “was an excellent husband and he possessed in abundance the milk of human kindness.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Fox, Henry Richard Vassale [Third Baron Holland] (1773—1840) A distinguished politician, Fox fought for Liberal reforms and warmly defended the Greek and Spanish rebels against feudalism. Holland House was the chief center in London of heresy as well as of beauty and wit, notes McCabe, who quotes the Rev. Sydney Smith on Fox: “There never existed in any human being a better heart, or one more purified from the bad passions, more abounding in charity and compassion, and which seemed to be so created as a refuge to the helpless and oppressed.” {JM; RE}
Fox, Jane (20th Century) In 1994, Fox was named editor-designate of Scottish Humanist (11A Strathkinness High Road, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9UA, Scotland), succeeding Eric Stockton and commencing in 1995. {Freethought History, #24, 1997}
Fox, Nancy L. (20th Century) An Oregon secular humanist, Fox was daughter of a missionary in China. In “True Religion and the ‘Mishkids’” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998), she told how in order to rid herself of her father’s influence she “flew the coop.” When in his nineties her father, “blind to the void in our relationship” that his religionism had caused, pleaded for her to visit him at his nursing home, she replied, “Not now, Father, too busy. Some other time.” She added, “I’m not proud of that response. And never again did I see that stranger. Soon after, he died. His ensuing epitaphs? Rave reviews nationwide.” Many freethinkers have experienced similar situations in which they have grown out of the religion “into which they were born.”
Fox, Ray (20th Century) Fox in Britain is active with the Wiltshire Humanists.
Fox, Robin Lane (1946— ) Fox is a teacher of ancient history at the University of Oxford. He wrote Pagans and Christians (1987). In The Unauthorized Version, Truth and Fiction in the Bible (1992), he shows that the Bible is replete with falsification and error, can therefore not be the “word of God,” but is an important collection containing human comments about existence. In the book’s preface, Fox explains, “I write as an atheist, but there are Christian and Jewish scholars whose versions [of the bible] would be far more radical than mine. They will find this historian’s view conservative, even old-fashioned, but there are times when atheists are loyal friends of the truth.” {CA} [[Robin Lane Fox, Professor/Author art
He's written a few scholarly tomes as well as a book of Biblical criticism from a historical perspective, The Unauthorized Version. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford.
In the preface to The Unauthorized Version he states,
"I write as an atheist, but there are Christian and Jewish scholars whose versions [of the Bible] would be far more radical than mine. They will find this historians' view conservative, even old-fashioned, but there are times when atheists are loyal friends of the truth."
--RCN
Fox, William Johnson (1786—1864) The South Place Ethical Society originated as a universalist Baptist congregation in the late eighteenth century. It had become a Unitarian chapel by the time of Fox’s ministry (1817—1853). Moncure Conway followed Fox, ministering to the Society from 1864 to 1885 and moving it in the direction of religious humanism. Originally, Fox had been a Congregationalist, then became a Unitarian. One of his first published sermons was on behalf of toleration for deists at the time of the Carlile prosecutions in 1819. He advanced from the acceptance of miracles to their complete rejection. A prominent worker for radicalism, he contributed to the Westminster Review, Weekly Dispatch, and Daily News. His works, which include spirited Letters to the Working Classes, and a philosophical statement of Religious Ideas, were published in twelve volumes (1865—1868). {BDF; Freethought History #18, 1996; FUK; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}
Fragell, Levi (1939- ) A leading Norwegian humanist, Fragell after receiving his M.A. in comparative religion worked in education, journalism, and public relations. When seventeen, however, he had started his professional life as a preacher in a Pentecostal church. Fragell was President of the Norwegian Humanist Association (1976-1981), its Secretary General (1982-1991), and Editor from 1976 to 1997 of its Human-Etikk (later The Humanist). The Association, which was founded in 1956, has since 1976 increased its membership to 60,000 from 1,700 paying members.
After serving as Vice-President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), he became President in 1998. Fragell is contributing editor to Free Inquiry and is on the editorial board of International Humanist. He has taken part in all IHEU congresses since the one in London in 1978.
In 1996, he and sixteen Norwegian humanists attended the fourth World Atheist Conference in Vijayawada, India. He also attended the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, participating on a panel which discussed philosophic humanism in the cyber-age. In 1997, following the meeting of IHEU board of directors meeting, he spoke at the annual humanist lunch in London and also was featured speaker on the occasion of Humanist Days in Finland. Fragell signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. His e-mail addresses: <fragell@human.no> and <lfragell@online.no>. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1990-91; HNS2; International Humanist News, December 1996}
FRANCE Although two-thirds of the French describe themselves as Catholic, an estimated one in ten goes to mass regularly, according to The Economist (30 March 1996). The cinq à sept, when businessmen and businesswomen slip out of the office for a secret visit to their loves, is believed to be common, the magazine’s findings continued. An estimated 89% of French men and 84% of French women claim to be happy with their sex lives. Other polls show that 72% of men and 86% of women claim always to have been faithful to their spouses. Also, that 93% of the French say they “have confidence” in the family and 89% hope it will remain. However, an estimated 2,200,000 couples live together out of wedlock, seven times as many as twenty years ago in a 1960 study. Only a few (7%) of the French regard “living in sin” as morally wrong. More than one in three of all French babies are now born out of wedlock, one of the highest rates in Europe (after Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway). Further, outside traditionalist Catholic circles illegitimacy no longer carries a stigma. Although two out of every five marriages in France end in divorce, cohabiting couples have been found to be more than five times as likely to separate as married ones. (See entries for French Humanists and Intellectuals.)
France, (Jacques) Anatole (1844—1924) Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908) has a nearsighted priest baptizing a large group, regretfully finding they are penguins—the trouble his act causes to the alarmed authorities in an animal-less Heaven makes this allegorical and satirical novel diabolically provocative. Although he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, all his works were prohibited by the Vatican in 1922. An atheist, France never accepted the historicity of Jesus. In fact, he once wrote favorably about Pontius Pilate. Philosophically, according to William F. Ryan, he stood somewhere between Epicurean thinking and contemporary existentialism “and was, in fact, among the first to pronounce the human condition and the state of the universe absurd.” In contrast to St. John Chrysostom, who said, “Virginity stands as far above marriage as the heavens above the earth.” France held that of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest. “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing,” France once observed. In a letter to the International Congress of Freethinkers at Paris in 1905, France wrote, “The thoughts of the gods are not more unchangeable than those of the men who interpret them. They advance–but they always lag behind the thoughts of men. . . . The Christian God was once a Jew. Now he is an anti-Semite.” {CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; ILP; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Franceschini, Mark (Died 1992) Franceschini was the partner-in-life of atheist activist Don Sanders, with whom he popularized the American Gay and Lesbian Atheists association and edited its publication. In 1995, when Sanders also died of AIDS, cremains of both were mixed and interred in an undisclosed place to insure that Franceschini’s Roman Catholic parents would be unable to remove the remains for a religious ceremony by the same church from which he sought excommunication because of his distaste for its doctrines.
Franch, Michael (20th Century) Franch, a student and teacher of history, entered Ethical Culture 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; the publication was co-sponsored with the AHA from 1969 to 1977). He has since completed his doctorate with free-lance employment in 1984. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Franchere, Hoyt G. (20th Century) With T. F. O’Donnell, Franchere wrote Harold Frederic (1961). {FUS}
Franchi, Anne-Marie (20th Century) Franchi, from France, is on the editorial board of International Humanist. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), and Franchi spoke at the Eleventh held in Brussels. She is a Vice-President of the European Humanist Federation.
“Franchi, Ausonio” (Born 1821) Franchi was the pen name of Francesco Cristoforo Bonavino, an Italian ex-priest. Ordained in 1844, he became skeptical because of the practice of the confessional and quit the job for philosophy, having ceased in 1849 to believe in church dogmas. His principle work is The Philosophy of the Italian Schools (1852). From 1854 to 1857, he established La Razione (Raison) and Il Libero Pensiero at Turin as well as became an active organizer of anti-clerical societies. In 1866 he published a criticism of positivism and, in 1868, became professor of philosophy in the Academy of Milan. {BDF}
Francis, Convers (1795—1863) A Unitarian minister in Watertown, Massachusetts, Francis encouraged the young Theodore Parker but disagreed with Parker’s later advocacy of absolute religion. Francis supported Emerson and joined the Transcendental Club, gaining the trust of both the moderate Unitarians and the younger transcendentalists who began to go beyond the Unitarian theological synthesis in the later 1830s. {U&U}
Francis, Samuel (18th Century) A physician, Dr. Francis was an 18th century atheist who argued his atheism eloquently. Berman speculates that Francis might have been a pseudonym, for virtually nothing is known about the man. But if it was not, Samuel Francis, M.D., “must have been a daring man to sign his name to such a radical work as Watson Refuted (1796),” which was a strong attack against a Bishop Watson, “even granting that he never explicitly professes himself an atheist.” {BDF; FUK; HAB}
Francis, William Boyd (20th Century) An Alaskan actor, Boyd enjoys appearing in the person of Robert Ingersoll at occasions such as the 22nd annual National Convention of American Atheists in 1992. He dresses the part and plays the role, citing the actual words of the famed agnostic.
Franck, Adolph (1809—1893) A French philosopher, Franck was a member of the Institut and was professor of law and also classical languages at the Collège de France. A rationalist and a Jew, Franck edited the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques (6 volumes, 1843—1849). {RAT}
Franckenstein, Ian (20th Century): See entry for Kay Boyle.
Francoeur, Robert (20th Century) Francoeur is on the editorial board of San Diego’s freethinker magazine, The Truth Seeker. He is author of Utopian Motherhood (1970).
François de Neufchateau, Nicolas Louis (1750—1828) Count François de Neufchateau was a French statesman, poet, and academician. In his youth he became secretary to Voltaire, who regarded him as his successor. He favored the Revolution and was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, becoming President of the Senate from 1814 to 1816. As a member of the Directory in 1797, he circulated d’Holbach’s Contagion Sacrée. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Franczyk, Thomas (20th Century) A founding co-editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin, Franczyk is also co-founder of Catholics Anonymous. In addition, he is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism and an editorial associate of Free Inquiry.
Frank, Henry (20th Century) Frank, a freethinker, wrote The Doom of Dogma and the Dawn of Truth (1901). {GS; FUS}
Frank, Jerome D(avid) (1909— ) Prof. Frank of the United States presided over the Fifth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Boston (1970). He is author of Sanity and Survival in the Nuclear Age (1982).
Frank, Philipp (1884—1966) Frank has been a member of the American Humanist Association. He was author of Science and the Modern Mind (1958). {HNS}
Frank, Waldo (1889—1967) Frank was a radical critic of United States society, one who was active in left-wing causes from the 1930s to the 1960s. He wrote Our America (1919) and South American Journey (1943). Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author,
I have a somewhat negative attitude toward the contemporary use and usefulness of the term Humanism. It meant something indeed in the Renaissance and after, when men who were Christians, by faith or by culture only, began to modulate their values from the domain of the Supernal to the domain of man. Humanism was a perfect instrument for differentiating the philosophies of such men as Descartes and Spinoza and Leibnitz, the arts of such men as Rabelais and Shakespeare, from the otherworldly tonalities of the Scholastics, the transcendental mystics, and the Byzantine or pre-Raphaelite painters. “But today? The very fact that Catholics, atheists, Platonists, Marxists, Pragmatists, et al., can all claim to be humanists reveals, it seems to me, the vulnerability of the term. There is much in the naturalist humanism of Spinoza, in the theological humanism of Aquinas, in the mathematical humanism of Kepler and Bruno, which appeals to me–and which has nourished me. But there has been a pendulum swing since the modulation from the transcendental to the human. What is needed now is a definition of the human in terms beyond what the word humanism connotes in most of its modern uses. This definition will entail new knowledge of the cosmic and new methods for achieving this knowledge and making it viable. I doubt if the leaders in this search will have much use for the term Humanism. It belongs to history, rather than to contemporary methodology.
{WAS, 14 August 1956}
Franke, Egon (20th Century) Franke is a Member of Parliament and Minister for German Affairs (Germany). He presided over the Eighth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Hannover (1982).
Frankel, Charles (1917—1979) Frankel, who was a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, wrote of history and value theory. Like John Dewey, his emphasis was on practical philosophy, not metaphysical speculation. His works include The Faith of Reason (1948), The Case for Modern Man (1956), and Pleasures of Philosophy (1972). Frankel’s outlook was entirely naturalistic, and he reviewed books for The Humanist. In 1988 the Charles Frankel Prize in the Humanities was established and is given to five Americans “who have made contributions to cultural life by bringing the humanities to a wider audience.” Nominations are solicited by the endowment and narrowed to a list of finalists by the National Council on the Humanities, an advisory board to the agency. The chairman of the endowment was Sheldon Hackney who, in 1996, chose as recipients novelist Rita Dove; historian Doris Kearns; political philosopher Daniel Kemmis; scholar of Hispanic literature Arturo Madrid; and television journalist Bill Moyers. {CL}
Frankel, Jeff (20th Century) Frankel is active with the Decatur, Illinois, Independent Atheist. (See entry for Illinois Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Frankland, Edward [Sir] (1825—1899) “An exceptionally brilliant and accomplished man of science,” according to the Dictionary of National Biography, Frankland received several gold medals for his discoveries in chemistry. He was a member of the French, Berlin, Bavarian, Petrograd, Bohemian, and Swedish Academies of Science. In his autobiography, Sketches from the Life of E. Frankland, Frankland explains that he discarded Christianity and was a complete agnostic. {JM; RAT; RE}
Franklin, Benjamin (1706—1790) Deist Franklin irked the theists with his common sense philosophy devoid of supernaturalism and religiosity. “Lighthouses are more helpful than churches,” Franklin declared. Joyfully pursuing French women while being the United States minister to France, he set a pace that Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson found difficult to match. William Franklin, the last royal governor of New Jersey, was his illegitimate son. To President Ezra Stiles of Yale University, Franklin in a 1790 letter just before his death wrote,
Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshiped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is like to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. . . . I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments, without reflecting on them for those who appeared to me unsupportable and even absurd.
In 1728, he had written his views in Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion. Franklin, who quit the Presbyterian Church and was a deist, according to McCabe, was a member of and financial contributor to the First Unitarian Church in London. Many consider his Autobiography (1771—1778), which covers only his early years, one of the finest examples of the genre in any language. His proposal for a one-chamber Congress was not accepted—the sole example of unicameralism in the United States is Nebraska. Turgot summed up Franklin’s services: Eripuit coelo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis. [He wrested the thunderbolt from heaven and the sceptre from kings.] A different view was held by theologians: Franklin by developing the lightning rod denied to deity an avenue of punishment for the wicked. A different view was also held by his political enemies, who knew of his early devotion to England and the king, his being twenty-six years older than Washington and almost fifty older than Madison and Hamilton, his aristocratic notions (he proposed at the Constitutional Convention that all members of the executive branch in the new federal government serve without pay), and his willingly spending over one-third of his lifetime outside his country. At the age of eighty-four, Franklin was in great pain and left the world willingly and peacefully. His daughter was with him and said she hoped he would get better and live many more years. “I hope not,” he retorted, escaping pain only by the use of opium. Later that day, April 17, 1790, he was advised to move on his bed in order to breathe more easily. His last words were, “A dying man can do nothing easy.” (See entry for Native Americans–Ethnic Cleansing.) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, A. Owen Aldridge; FUK; FUS; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU}
Franklin, Charlotte (20th Century) Franklin, a rationalist, wrote “Religion and the Younger Woman” in New Humanist (November 1989) and a review, “Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millenia,” in New Humanist (November 1997).
Franklin, Robert D. (20th Century) A humanist who was director of the Toledo Public Library, Franklin is a former President of the United World Federalists of Toledo.
Fransham, John (1730—1810) A native of Norwich, Fransham became a teacher of mathematics, renounced the Christian religion, professed paganism, and wrote several treatises in favor of disbelief. {BDF; RAT}
Frantz, Mary and John (20th Century) The Frantzes are Wisconsin physicians and philanthropists whose contributions have funded the Skepticism and Paranormal Library at the Center for Inquiry.” {Mary Frantz, “The Ultimate Gift,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1996}
Fraser, Caroline (20th Century) Fraser, author of God’s Perfect Child (1999), wrote a book exposing Mary Baker Eddy and the Church of Christ, Scientist. Attacked by Eddy followers, Fraser remarked in The New York Times (12 September 1999):
Thousands of people believe all manner of things, testifying to abduction by space aliens and seeing Jesus in oil stains and tortillas; however sincere the believers and however large their numbers, their belief is not evidence of accuracy. Moreover, the preventable deaths of Christian Science children are facts, not “tales,” and they lie at the heart of the moral failure of Christian Science. Dostoyevsky once posed the question: “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?” Mary Baker Eddy and her followers did consent, and the children of Christian Scientists have been paying the price ever since.
Frauenstädt, Christian Martin Julius (1813—1879) A philosopher and disciple of Schopenhauer, Frauenstädt was made his literary executor by Schopenhauer. Also a pessimist, Frauenstädt wrote Letters on Natural Religion (1858) and Letters on the Philosophy of Schopenhauer. {BDF; RAT}
Frazer, Felix J. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Frazer was an editorial associate on Humanist World Digest, A Quarterly of Liberal Religion.
Frazer, James George [Sir] (1854—1941) Frazer’s Golden Bough (1890) and Totemism and Exogamy (1910) supplied so many anthropological examples of religious practices in various parts of the world that what previously had been thought to be peculiarities of the sacred Christian cult now were seen to be variations of world practices. As a result, the problem was no longer whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation–it was to determine if the central narrative was historical in any degree whatsoever. Among other facts he provided were that in China, “if the God does not give rain they will threaten and beat him; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity.” Anthropologists have been quick to point out that many primitive peoples were sometimes unafraid of their gods, that sometimes they beat their fetishes to secure attention or they punched them in the face to illustrate their dissatisfaction. Frazer’s comparative studies of magic, folklore, and religion showed similarities between primitive and Christian cultures. McCabe notes that Frazer once scolded him for describing him as a Rationalist, but that in the second edition of his Golden Bough Frazer acknowledged that his work “strikes at the foundations of beliefs in which the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge.” According to McCabe, the Dean of the Chapel of Trinity College said after Frazer’s death, “He was not an atheist. I would say perhaps that he held his judgment in suspense.” In other words, adds McCabe, he was an agnostic, but the Dean gave him a religious funeral. {CE; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI}
Frazier, Douglas (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Frazier was a leader of the American Ethical Union. A veteran Unitarian-Universalist minister, he was a Leader of the Los Angeles Ethical Culture Society (1958—1964) and that of Bergen County, New Jersey (1964—1968). (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {HM 2}
Frazier, Kendrick (20th Century) Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer, is a leader of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In 1995, he received the Humanist Pioneer Award by the American Humanist Association. He wrote The Hundredth Monkey and Other Paradigms of the Paranormal (1991).
[[Frederic [Empress]]]: See entry for Maud Mary Alice.
Frederic, Harold (1856—1898) Frederic, who at age nineteen was a reporter on the Utica Observer and at age twenty-two became its editor, later became the London correspondent of The New York Times. A novelist, he wrote The Copperhead (1893), describing the intolerant attacks upon Abner Beach, a New York farmer who opposed Abolition at a time when that movement was sweeping the North during the Civil War. His most popular novel was The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896), which described a Methodist minister’s “fall” and which has been praised highly a century later by fellow novelist Joyce Carol Oates. {FUS}
Frederick, J. George (20th Century) Frederick wrote Humanism as a Way of Life (1930). {GS}
Frederick, Scott (20th Century) Frederick, a freethinker, wrote Religious Intolerance and Secularist Opposition in America (1975). {GS}
Frederick II [Holy Roman Emperor] (1194—1250) Called by Wheeler “the greatest man of the thirteenth century and founder of the Renaissance,” Frederick II was elected to the throne in 1210. He promoted learning, science, and art, founded the Universities of Vienna and Naples, had the works of Aristotle and Averroës translated, and was the patron of many of the able men of his time. For his resistance to the tyranny of the Church, he was twice excommunicated (by Pope Innocent III and Innocent IV). In 1228, he expelled Pope Gregory IX from Rome. Wheeler wrote that “for some heretical words in his letter, in which he associates the names of Christ, Moses, and Mohammed, he was reported author of the famous work De Tribus Impostoribus. He addressed a series of philosophical questions to Ibn Sabin, a Moslem doctor. He is said to have called the Eucharist truffaista, and is credited also with the saying, “Ignorance is the mother of devotion.” In 1225 Frederick married Yolande and claimed the crown of Jerusalem. At Jaffa he made a treaty by which Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem were surrendered to the Christians, with the Mosque of Omar being left to the Muslims. In 1229 he crowned himself King of Jerusalem. In 1245, after excommunicating Frederick and declaring him deposed, Innocent IV himself fled to Lyons. Meanwhile, the election in 1246 of an anti-king to Conrad IV, Frederick’s youngest son, plunged Germany into civil war. Although the war in Italy turned in Frederick’s favor in 1250, in December the king died of dysentery. With Frederick II’s rule the great days of the German empire ended and the rise of states in Italy had begun. Frederick II is often described as having been one of the most arresting figures of the Middle Ages. (See entry for Epicurus.) {BDF; CE; FO; JM; RE}
Frederick II [The Great] (1712—1786) The first modern freethinking king, Frederick the Great of Prussia was despised by his tyrannical father, Frederick William I, who also was unhappy with his son’s interest in French art, literature, and a Prussian lieutenant, Hans von Katte. When the somewhat effeminate Frederick and Hans tried to escape to England, the two were arrested and imprisoned. The king then forced his son to watch as the twenty-five-year-old Katte was beheaded. Afterwards, the king arranged his son’s marriage to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, but they separated soon afterwards and Frederick continued to show no interest in women. Moving to Rheinsberg, he wrote Anti-Machiavel, an idealistic refutation of Machiavelli. Also, he struck up a long correspondence with Voltaire. According to A. L. Rowse in Homosexuals in History (1977), Frederick “didn’t care what anybody said or thought about him. He was a cynic on this score about others as about himself; he had told Voltaire: ‘We’ve got here a cardinal and several bishops, some of whom make love before and others behind–good fellows who persecute nobody.’ On observing a soldier he recognized, fettered in irons: ‘Why is that excellent soldier in irons?’ ‘For bestiality with his horse.’ To the officer in charge: ‘Fool–don’t put him in irons: Put him in the infantry.’ ” Upon his father’s death and as soon as he became king, Frederick made Katte’s father a field-marshal. To the disinterested, Frederick became known as an outstanding leader, one who abolished torture and increased religious tolerance, saying “every man must get to heaven his own way.” According to Robertson, Frederick was the great deist king of the deist age, although he disapproved of his morals and states that as a ruler he did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. Called an “enlightened despot,” according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, “he instituted important legal and penal reforms, set up trade monopolies to create new industries, forwarded education, and accomplished internal improvements such as drainage projects, roads, and canals. Though he improved the lot of his own serfs, the nobility had more control over their peasants after his reign than before. He was tolerant in religious matters, personally professing atheism to his intimates. Cold and curt, he relaxed only during his famous midnight suppers at Sans Souci, his residence at Potsdam. There he was surrounded by a group of educated men, mostly French, that included, at times, Voltaire (who broke with him in 1753 but who later resumed his friendship from a safe distance), d’Alembert, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. . . . He failed to appreciate such men as Lessing and Goethe, who were among his most ardent admirers.” Upon Voltaire’s death, Frederick pronounced his eulogium before the Berlin Academy, denouncing “the imbecile priests,” and declaring that “the best destiny they can look for is that they and their vile artifices will remain forever buried in the darkness of oblivion, while the fame of Voltaire will increase from age to age, and transmit his name to immortality.” “That he was a Deist, the protector of Voltaire and other Deists,” wrote McCabe, “even a Jesuit has never questioned.” In Dante’s Inferno, Frederick II and more than a thousand followers of Epicurus are in Hell. To avoid just such a happenstance, one of Frederick’s subjects, solicitous about his immortal soul, sent him a letter full of pious advice. “Let this,” he said, “be answered civilly; the intention of the writer good.” Shortly afterwards, according to Carlyle, “For the most part he was unconscious, never more than half conscious. As the wall clock above his head struck eleven, he asked: “What o’clock?” “Eleven,” answered they. “At four,” murmured he, “I will arise.” One of his dogs sat on its stool near him; about midnight he noticed it shivering for cold: “Throw a quilt over it,” said or beckoned he; that, I think, was his last completely conscious utterance. Afterwards, in a severe choking fit, getting at last rid of the phlegm, he said, “We are on the hill, we shall go better now.” {BDF; CE; EU; FO; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}
Fredin, Nils Edvard (Born 1857) Fredin, a Swedish writer, published translations of modern poets and Col. Ingersoll’s writing. The Swedish Academy in 1880 awarded him first prize for an original poem. {BDF}
Fredkin, Ed (20th Century) Fredkin is a computer scientist, a college dropout who at the age of thirty-four became a full professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Robert Wright’s Three Scientists and Their Gods (1988) mentions Fredkin’s outlook: “I guess what I’m saying is: I don’t have any religious belief. I don’t believe there is a God. I don’t believe in Christianity or Judaism or anything like that, okay? I’m not an atheist. . . . . I’m not an agnostic. . . . I’m just in a simple state. I don’t know what there is or might be.” {CA}
Fredson, Patrick (20th Century) Fredson has debunked the idea of miracles for The American Rationalist (March-April, 1995). He often writes for the journal.
FREE INQUIRY Free Inquiry (Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664) is a journal of secular humanism published quarterly by the Council for Secular Humanism at its headquarters located at 1310 Sweet Home Road in Amherst. Chairman of the editorial board is Timothy J. Madigan, who served as its editor for years. Paul Kurtz is editor-in-chief; Lewis Vaughn is editor; Andrea Szalanski is managing editor; Matt Cherry is deputy editor; senior editors are Vern L. Bullough, Richard Dawkins, Thomas W. Flynn, Martin Gardner, James A. Haught, Gerald A. Larue, and Taslima Nasrin; associate editors are Molleen Matsumura, Wendy McElroy, and Norm R. Allen Jr.; frontlines editor is Chris Mooney; contributing editors are Jo Ann Boydston, Paul Edwards, Albert Ellis, Roy P. Fairfield, Charles Faulkner, Antony Flew, Levi Fragell, Adolf Grünbaum, Marvin Kohl, Thelma Lavine, Joe Nickell, Lee Nisbet, J.J.C. Smart, Svetozar Stojanovic, Thomas Szasz, and Richard Taylor; book review editor is Timothy Binga; editorial associates are Lois Porter and Warren Allen Smith; cartoonist is Don Addis. The journal is the leading publication of secular humanism in the United States. E-mail: freeinquiry@secularhumanism.org>. On the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org>. (See entry for Secular Humanism. For a critique of the magazine, see entry for Literature and Secular Humanism.)
FREE INQUIRY NETWORK The Free Inquiry Network is at Box 2668, Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60138. On the Web.
FREE MIND Free Mind (235 Coffman Union, 300 Washington Ave SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455) is the newsletter and forum of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists. On the Web.
FREE MIND Free Mind (7 Harwood Drive, PO Box 146, Amherst, NY 14226) is the membership newsletter of the American Humanist Association. E-mail: <humanism@juno.com>.
FREE MIND A monthly, Free Mind is at 4116 Candlewood Drive S.E., Lacey, Washington 98503-4422.
FREE RELIGIOUS ASSOCIATION The Free Religious Association (FRA) was formed in 1867 by “splendid gadflies and dissenters within the denomination” of Unitarianism. According to David Robertson, they were “not very influential as church builders or organizers. Their importance was in the intellectual stimulus that they provided to the denomination. Although in an immediate sense they had few followers, they were an advance guard, generally ahead of the religious thinking of mainstream Unitarianism and thus fighting an often frustrating battle. But the direction of their thinking–away from supernaturalism toward science, away from theism toward Humanism, and away from ecclesiasticism toward social reform–charted important directions in denominational development in the twentieth century.” Henry W. Bellows, Cyrus Bartol, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, and Bronson Alcott were among the early leaders. Emerson was vice-president in 1879, succeeding Frothingham. But Emerson declined a second term, declaring that the FRA concentrated too much on what Kant (and Aristotle) had called “the starry heavens above,” and not enough on “the Moral Law within.” An extensive chapter on the subject is found in David Robertson’s The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985). According to Edwin H. Wilson, “The Free Religious Association never went beyond what it called humanistic theism, and, because of the intense individualism of its members and gathering of dissents, its exciting meetings—usually front-page newsworthy—soon ended.” (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EW; HNS2; U&U}
FREE WILL • Free will and determinism are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you is determinism. The way you play your hand is free will. —Norman Cousins
Philosophers hold that free will is the belief that human beings are the authors of their own actions. Individuals holding such a view reject the idea that human actions are determined by external conditions of fate, such as divine will. In short, humans will have little luck in convincing the traffic policeman that they had been ordered by Hermes or Zeus to travel in excess of the speed limit. Such an excuse would likely not result in “Godspeed,” which refers to success, as in “God prosper you.” Free will just might, according to Robert Wright, be an illusion. In The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are (1994), Wright argues that morality was “designed” by evolution and allows us to maximize our genetic legacy by increasing our chances of staying alive and having lots of babies. We fool ourselves about our goodness, he holds, by acting credibly as if our motivations are not what they are, thereby deceiving others into complying with our wishes. (See entry for predestination.)
Freebury, Julia Anne (1923— ) Freebury is an atheist, feminist, and civil libertarian activist. Migrating in 1950 to Australia from England, she became active from 1968 to 1970 with the Abortion Law Repeal Association, working to help women get abortions and celebrating when a court case, “the Judge Levine ruling,” absolved several physicians of abortion charges. As a result, the law in New South Wales was less restrictive than the rewritten laws in Britain or South Australia and enabled abortions to be performed without the threat of the doctor being charged and found guilty by a jury. {SWW}
Freedman, Noel (20th Century) Freedman, a professor of Old Testament at the University of Michigan, is a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Biblical Criticism Research Project.
FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION The Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) publishes Freethought Today (Box 750, Madison, Wisconsin 53701), the only freethought newspaper in the United States. The foundation was founded in 1978. With 3,500 members nationwide, it is the largest organization of unbelievers in the United States. The editor is Annie Laurie Gaylor. Its major spokesperson is Dan Barker, the fundamentalist-minister-turned-freethought-activist who is a nationally known speaker for the Foundation. The newspaper gives wide coverage of national freethought groups and meetings, its numerous photographs illustrating numbers of ordinary, nice-looking individuals, not at all stereotypical of what believers imagine non-believers to look like. <http://www.infidels.org/org/ffrf>.
FREEDOM OF RELIGION William Sierichs Jr. (The American Rationalist, January-February 1996) has explained what “freedom of religion” is:
What is freedom of religion if it is not most specifically freedom from religion?
Freedom of religion means that the Christian is free from having to participate in the religion of the Muslim; the Muslim is free from the religion of the Hindu; the Hindu is free form the religion of the Jew; the Jew is free from the religion of the animist; and so forth.
Even within religions, freedom of religion means freedom from religion. The Episcopalian is free from the particular religious beliefs and practices of the Lutheran, who is free from the religious beliefs and practices of the Baptist, who is free from the Roman Catholic, who is free from the Presbyterian, who is free from the Methodist, who is free from the Church of Christ, and so forth. Similarly, Sunni and Shiite in America are free from each other; and Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Jews can ignore each other.…
FREEDOM WRITER Freedom Writer (PO Box 589, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230) is a First Amendment newsletter edited by Skipp Porteous.
Freeman, Anthony (20th Century) Freeman, “the Bishop’s Adviser for Continuing Ministerial Education in the Diocese of Chichester,” is a Church of England priest who, upon writing God n Us (1993), was “sacked” by his Bishop, the arch-conservative Dr. Eric Kemp. Freeman preached his last sermon in July 1994. In his book, Freeman described his “conversion experience” from a fairly traditional liberal Anglo-Catholicism, according to critic Daniel O’Hara, to a radical rejection of all forms of supernaturalism and an admission that religion is entirely a human invention. O’Hara reasons that if Freeman had waited until he became Bishop before coming out as a crypto-atheist, he might have more likely kept his job as a priest in the Church of England. Freeman’s book is “in the forefront of a radical re-interpretation of Christianity in humanistic, this-worldly terms,” writes O’Hara. “He is quite frank about there being no God, no life after death, no ultimate reference point outside human judgement on ethical questions.” Jim Herrick, however, claims Freeman has made only the first step in liberating himself of his Christian experience, adding he should take the next step, that of leaving the concept of God altogether: “You have crossed most of the water, tread the last stepping-stone, and [should] join us for a completely liberating experience.” {New Humanist, November 1993}
Freeman, Arthur (20th Century) For the English New Humanist, Freeman reviewed John Carroll’s Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture, finding it exceedingly hostile to the Enlightenment and to contemporary humanism. “We are left wondering what sort of person the author is and what readers will get from his book,” Freeman concludes. In New Humanist (December 1995), he reviewed The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy and also The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Neither book, he found, has satisfactory entries on humanism, positivism, atheism, or agnosticism, and neither discusses secularism or ethicism.
Freeman, James (1759—1835) Freeman was the first avowedly Unitarian minister in the United States. The American Revolution had cut Episcopalians off from their ecclesiastical leaders in England, particularly George III, and the minister of Boston’s King’s Chapel, a loyalist, was forced to flee. In the absence of any other qualified clergyman, Freeman was appointed. But he had difficulty with the doctrine of the Trinity and, contemplating resigning, recommended instead that his church modify such a tenet. This they were not about to do, nor could they accept him simply because he said he subscribed to the Scriptures. However, the congregation in 1787 split away, voting him in as their minister. Therefore, the First Episcopal church in New England now became the first Unitarian Church in the New World. Enemies called Freeman a “liberal” or an “Arminian,” but he chose the word “Unitarian” to describe his views, partly because of his friendship with William Hazlitt. Freeman wrote Sermons on Particular Occasions (1812) and Eighteen Sermons and a Charge (1829). {FUS; U; U&U}
Freeman, M. A. (19th Century) Mrs. Freeman was the daughter of a freethinker, her father being known as “a Thomas Paine Infidel.” Her maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Ann Harris, was cousin to John Quincy Adams. Freeman was chairman of the finance committee of the American Secular Union in Chicago. Active with the Chicago Secular Union, she published the Chicago Liberal in 1891. {PUT; WWS}
FREEMASONRY The Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, a fraternal order with almost three million members in the United States and six million worldwide, has been described as the largest secret society in the world. It started among the cathedral-building guilds of 16th-century Europe, and its member masons showed their secularism by decorating the religious with gargoyles, flora and fauna, and some scenes which bordered on the grotesque. In recent times, Its membership has dropped, for example from 350,000 in the 1950s to fewer than 100,000 today in New York State. Anderson’s Constitutions (1723), the bylaws of the oldest extant lodge, the Grand Lodge of England, cite religious toleration, loyalty to local government, and political compromise as being basic to the Masonic ideal. The first Grand Lodge in the Americas was one in Philadelphia (1730), of which Benjamin Franklin was a member. John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Voltaire, Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann von Goethe, William Hogarth, Johann von Schiller, Rudyard Kipling, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, George Pike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Irving Berlin, and a number of world leaders have been members. Some of the British Masons are the current patron, Prince Michael of Kent; the occasional celebrity like Arthur Conan Doyle or Peter Sellers; and various past Princes of Wales. The current Prince, Charles, turned down an invitation to join, and his father, Prince Philip, is a member but never participates. In 1738, Pope Clement XII issued a bull which expressed the Catholic Church’s disapproval of Masonry. Totalitarian states–most recently, Nazis and fascists in Italy, Austria, and Germany as well as right-wing politicians in the former Soviet Union and Communist China–have consistently opposed the lodge’s existence. Fundamentalist Christians are anti-Masonry, declaring that the Masonic symbols–the square and compass–are satanic devices. By 1764, the Empress of Austria, Maria Theresa, suppressed the Masonic order, after Pope Clement XIII issued a bull In Eminenti, threatening Masons with excommunication. According to the late Dr. William B. Ober, “The stated position of the Roman Catholic Church is that it holds that the beliefs and observances of Freemasonry constitute it a deistic or pagan religion and that the Masonic oath and secrecy imposed are canonically unlawful.” Masonry rested on a deistic outlook. Rather than being theists, who hold that God created the universe and continues to interfere in the universe by such methods as miracles and special revelations, Masons were deistic in their elaborate symbolic rites and ceremonies. A Great Architect of the Universe, one of the terms preferred to using “God,” had created the universe, but that architect does not interfere in the universe. Further, petitionary prayers to the Creator, who has moved on to other places, are unnecessary and futile. Although few philosophers in the 20th century are deists, inasmuch as more specialized philosophic choices are available, deism made a profound impact particularly during the 18th century. In 1877, the Grand Orient of France cut out references to the “Grand Architect” and required no belief in God or immortality. Masonry is found in some Catholic countries, for a Mason can be of any or no organized religion so long as he professes belief in the Supreme Architect of the Universe, however the individual defines the term. The Catholic Church, however, objects to Freemasonry because it is a secret fraternity which practices a “natural religion,” one which lumps the Gospel with other religions and other philosophies. The two views, Masons hold, are not incompatible. A 1985 report to the Catholic Bishops Conference quotes the oath taken by Master Masons, or Third Degree Masons as follows: “The swearer binds himself to upholding his duties under no less penalty than that of having my body severed in two, my bowels taken from thence and burned to ashes, the ashes scattered to the four winds of heaven. . . . ” The first of her gender to become a Mason was Maria Deraismes, a freethinker who was invited by the Masonic Lodge of Le Pecq, near Paris, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Order of the Eastern Star, which is limited to Master Masons and their female relatives, is a subsidiary lodge. Two organizations for girls are Job’s Daughters and Rainbow Girls. The organization for boys is DeMolay, named after Jacques DeMolay (who some allege was gay). The civil and philanthropic efforts of the Masons are well-known, and the Shriners–famous for their antics at parades–are noted for their contributions to hospitals. In a 1991 best-selling book, The New World Order, religionist Pat Robertson linked Jews and Freemasons. He suggested they are co-conspirators in a “grand design” to eliminate private property, national governments, and traditional Judeo-Christian theism. Specifically, he wrote about “the world designs of a well-known but secret fraternal order,” reviving the discredited Christian right arguments of the 1920s and 1930s which were made by William Dudley Pelley and Gerald B. Winrod. William L. Fox, archivist of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Southern District, has accused them of believing “that Jewish capitalists and radicals, assisted by remnants of the Bavarian Illuminati, who had in their minds infiltrated European Freemasonry, were cooperating to destroy Christian civilization.” Fox denies all such charges, saying that the purpose of Freemasonry “is to provide opportunity for men of diverse backgrounds to gather in neutral territory for fellowship and charitable undertakings.” Fred Whitehead, in Freethought History (#24, 1997), has a scholarly article, “The Freemasonry Connection,” about Freethought and Freemasonry. He highlights the importance of Dutch publishers in issuing Deist and dissenting books during Freemasonry’s early period, points out that Jefferson was not a Freemason but partook of the general culture of Enlightenment that prevailed in the early Republic, and notes that both the Freemasons and the Freethinkers presently suffer from declining memberships. (See entries for Freethinkers and for Edward Cahill. Also see entry for Maria Desraimes, the first female Freemason.) {CE; ER; RE}
FREEMASONRY—SECRETS OF For more than 350 years, Masons have tried to conceal their secret rituals. Each who becomes a member takes an oath stating that if he (females are not allowed to join) reveals secrets of Freemasonry, he will have his throat cut, his tongue torn from his mouth, and his bowels burned to ashes. However, secrets of Freemasonry have become published. For example, Warren Hoge in The New York Times (29 March 1998) revealed the following: To become a Freemason, for instance, a man must present himself outside the closed door of a lodge in shirtsleeves with the left breast bared, a blindfold across his eyes, a hangman’s noose draped around his neck, a shoe on one foot, a slipper on the other and one trouser leg rolled up. Upon entry, he is confronted with a dagger pointed at his bare nipple and the chanting of men in blue goatskin aprons with wands in their hands and ornamental chains draped across their chests. Even the notorious secret handshake is no longer unknown to outsiders, referred to as “profanes” in Freemason-speak. It is accomplished by pressing a thumb on the space between the knuckles, with the exact position depending upon one’s level—apprentice, fellow of the craft or master Mason—and then gripping.
FREETHINKER The Freethinker is a secular humanist monthly that was founded by G. W. Foote in 1881. It is edited by Peter Brearey (24 Alder Avenue, Silcoates Park, Wakefield, WF2 OTZ) and published by G. W. Foote & Co. (Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP). On the Web, the editor can be reached at <editor@freethinker.co.uk>. On the Web: <http://www.freethinker.co.uk>.
FREETHINKER YOUTH CAMP The Freethinker Youth Camp is a joint effort of the Changeology Learning Centre and the Colorado Springs Freethinkers. It is designed to provide a summer experience for freethinking youth. On the Web: <http://www.evolvefish.com/camp>.
FREETHINKERS, FREETHOUGHT Independently of authority, a freethinker forms opinions on the basis of reason. Freethinkers reject supernatural authority as well as ecclesiastical tradition, for it is felt that bowing to authority leads people to essentially identical conclusions concerning morality and religion. Anthony Collins made the term known in his Discourse of Freethinking Occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect Called Freethinkers (1713), and in England the freethinkers although not breaking completely with Christianity were vitally interested in deism. In France, however, Voltaire entirely renounced Christianity, and the Encyclopedists similarly rejected organized religions. Freethought has influenced the philosophies both of the Freemasons and, in France, the Culte de l’Être. Organizations which have furthered freethinking including the American Rationalist Association, the American Secular Union, the Freethinkers of America, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The present work quotes heavily on the subject from John MacKinnon Robertson’s Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (1914) and Gordon Stein’s editing of The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985). For Lord Russell, “To be worthy of the name, [a freethinker] must be free of two things, the force of tradition and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either. What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. Freedom from the tyranny of passion is as essential as freedom from the influence of tradition. The jealous husband who suspects his wife of infidelity on inadequate grounds, and the complacent optimist, who refuses to suspect her when the evidence is overwhelming, are alike permitting passion to enslave their thought; in neither of them is thought free.” On the Web: <http://freethought.com>. (See entries for Libertinage and John Toland.) {CE; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; RE}
FREE-THINKERS’ DAY Harvard University’s Humanist chaplaincy in 1993 submitted Free-thinkers’ Day, October 12th, as a proposed “holy” day which students could observe. In 1994, “Freethought Week,” from October 8th to 15th, was declared in proclamations by the governors of Missouri and Texas, partly because of pressures from David Schreiber and Catherine Fahringer of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Cities which proclaimed the freethought week included Philadelphia, Madison, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Portland. (See entry for Humanist Holidays.)
FREETHINKER’S DIRECTORY “Freethinker’s Directory” is a directory which lists freethought groups, listed by locality, name, and type of organization. David Briars edits the publication at RD 1, B-45, Craftsbury, Vermont 05826. {FD}
FREETHINKING ACTIVIST NONBELIEVING NEW YORKERS (FANNY) In 1998 Dennis Middlebrooks and Warren Allen Smith founded Freethinking Activist Nonbelieving New Yorkers, a liaison to humanistic groups in the New York City area, one that catered to the interests of fellow agnostics, atheists, secularists, humanists, philosophic naturalists, or freethinkers. Agreeing to be honorary members were painter Paul Cadmus; novelist Sir Arthur C. Clarke; clinical psychologist Albert Ellis; “M*A*S*H” originator Ring Lardner Jr.; Bangladeshi gynecologist-poet Taslima Nasrin; lexicographer Allen Walker Read; novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and sculptor Anita Weschler. Chairpersons in addition to the two founding members were Victor Acevedo, Dana DiTullio, Darren Schmidt, Herbert A. Tonne, Eric Walther, and Irving Yablon. Membership was closed except to those “doers” who had completed an individual activist project and had been approved by the founder-directors. Projects carried out by the group were varied: placing an “In Memoriam” in The New York Times on the centenary of the death of Robert G. Ingersoll, and toasting him at a plaque in his honor at the Hotel Gramercy in New York; introducing Taslima Nasrin to India’s Dr. Innaiah Narisetti, Ecuador’s Pablo Cevallos, and Russia’s Dr. and Mrs. Valerii Kuvakin; arranging contacts with journalists for Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not A Muslim; commencing a Taslima Nasrin homepage and informing four hundred international journalists and human rights officials of her week-by-week struggle to escape from Bangladesh; entertaining Argentine humanist leader Hugo Estrella; showing 23-year-old University of Moscow graduate student Alexei Gostev where John Dewey taught at Columbia University and lived at 1158 Fifth Avenue; publicizing and moderating lectures by Dr. Paul Edwards; covering Dana DiTullio’s research about Siloism for interested groups; toasting Irving Yablon, who joined a Missouri atheist group that picketed the Pope’s visit in 1999; helping arrange the BBC recorded interview of Joseph Fields and Warren Allen Smith regarding African American humanists; working with the BBC to record comments by Smith for their “World Service” radio program in regard to human rights and humanism; celebrating the birth or death dates of eminent freethinkers at Tom Paine’s “Marie’s Crisis” bar; writing humanistic comments for various letters-to-the-editor columns; and compiling a list of alternatives to the 12-step Higher Power AA groups in the area. On the Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/fanny.html>.
FREETHOUGHT On the Internet, an international link is available to archives, criticism, debates, events, lists, literature, magazines, newsgroups, organizations, people, satire, and statistics. Its address: <http://www.infidels.org>. The Freethought Web contains an extensive directory of World Wide Web sites on freethought. Matt Cherry has described being online as “feeling like a kid in a candy shop with no adults anywhere.” Included are links to major philosophers, to creationism, to intellectual history, to the various religions, to skepticism, to Bertrand Russell, etc. On the Web: <www.kaiwan.com/~lucknow/horus/intel.html>.
FREETHOUGHT EXCHANGE The Freethought Exchange (Gnostic Press, PO Box 202447, Arlington, Texas 76006) is a bi-monthly newsletter of news and views about the community of unbelief. Contributions of up to two pages of material are printed free, and longer selections are charged $5 and up per page.
FREETHOUGHT FORUM Freethought Forum, a monthly of the Humanist Fellowship of San Diego, is at PO Box 87662, San Diego, California 92128-7662.
FREETHOUGHT HISTORY Freethought History (Box 5224, Kansas City, Kansas 66119) is a scholarly monthly, generally conceded the most authoritative of its kind, published by Fred Whitehead. Whitehead, a history professor, wrote Freethought on the American Frontier.
FREETHOUGHT MUSIC “Modern rock” and “alternative rock” as well as “rap” music often contain freethought ideas. Sarah McLachlan on the album A Testimonial Dinner–the Songs of XTC sings a song, “Dear God,” which is atheistic. On Gerry Dantone’s Infidels Records label, Dantone’s band called UniversalDice.com has recorded and performed one of his humanistic rock operas entitled, “My Name is Thomas,” which is available on the World Wide Web. Other examples of those who have sung freethought and atheistic works are Tori Amos; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Genesis; Metallica; Ministry; Monty Python; Nine Inch Nails; The Residents; and Rudy Schwartz. (See entries for Andrew Charles, Gerry Dantone, and Residents.) {Fig Leaves, April 1996}
FREETHOUGHT OBSERVER The Freethought Observer (PO Box 202447, Arlington, Texas 76006) became a bi-monthly in 1994 and was edited by Tim Gorski. In 1996 The Freethought Observer became a section within Secular Nation, which in 1997 discontinued including it.
FREETHOUGHT PERSPECTIVE Freethought Perspective is published by Leland W. Ruble, 833 Orchard Street, Toledo, Ohio 43609. The associate editor is Dr. Dorothy B. Thompson.
FREETHOUGHT TODAY Freethought Today (PO Box 750, Madison, Wisconsin 53701) is published ten times a year and is edited by Annie Laurie Gaylor. In addition to top-notch coverage of violations of church-state separation, the publication has included a compilation by Denise McLaughlin of “Black Collar Crimes,” cases from coast to coast in which officials of various religious bodies are cited in news articles for rape, abuse, sexual molestation, pornography, and various types of sexual misconduct. On the Web: <http://www.infidels.org>.
FREEWOMAN Freewoman, which began on 23 November 1911, initially was “A Weekly Feminist Review.” From 12 May 1912 on, however, it was “A Weekly Humanist Review” that conveyed the combination of feminist and masculinist views. Although it ceased in 1912, it was revived as the New Freewoman in 1913, “An Individualist Review,” and on 1 January 1914 it became The Egoist. {New Humanist, December 1998}
Frege, Gottlob (1848—1925) Frege, one of the founders of symbolic logic, wrote a two-volume work, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (1893—1903), demonstrating that mathematics is derived solely from deductive logic, that it is not synthetic as Kant had posited. However, Bertrand Russell and others pointed out some serious contradictions in his work, and Frege wrote few other original works. Michael Dummett, in Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993), holds that Frege was the most important contributor to the science of logic since Aristotle, adding that German-speaking philosophers have contributed more to analytical philosophy than have English- or French-speaking writers. {CE}
FREIDENKER A humanistic German monthly, Freidenker is at Shonalcher Str. 2, 70597 Stuttgart, Germany.
FREIDENKER VEREINIGUNG DER SCHWEIZ A Swiss member of the IHEU is Freidenker Vereinigung Der Schweiz, PO Box CH-3001, Bern, Switzerland. It publishes the monthly Frei Denker. {FD}
FREIDENKERBUND OESTERREICHS: See the entry for the Austrian, Martin Panosch.
FREIE HUMANISTEN NIEDERSACHSEN Freie Humanisten Niedersachsen, a full member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, is at Otto-Brenner-Str. 22, D-30159 Hannover, Germany.
FREIGEISTIGE AKTION In Germany, Freigeistige Aktion(IHEU), Fasanenweg 8, 31535 Neustadt 1, Germany, publishes a quarterly, Kristall. {FD} Freiligrath, Ferdinand (1810—1876) Freiligrath was a German poet who, when he professed his faith in Mein Glaudbenbekenutniss, was forced to flee his country. Returning in 1848, he joined Karl Marx on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Again prosecuted, he fled to London where he was honored as one of the best poets of the time. {BDF; RAT}
FRIENDS GENERAL CONFERENCE The Friends General Conference, organized in 1900, is at 1216 Arch St. (1-B), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107. Over 2,400 houses of worship serve their members, who often are called Quakers.
FRIENDS OF RELIGIOUS HUMANISM (FRH) Friends of Religious Humanism (7 Harwood Drive, PO Box 1188, Amherst, NY 14226-7188) is an organization founded in 1962 by Edwin H. Wilson, Lester Mondale, and others as the “Fellowship of Religious Humanists.” Its purpose is to advance humanism within the Unitarian Universalist denomination and to promote religious humanism in general. Mira Poudrier, the group’s office manager, oversees the publication of a semi-annual journal, Religious Humanism. The organization’s stated purpose is as follows:
To promote and encourage the religious, ethical and philosophical thought and life of our members and society. To this end, (we) shall arrange lectures, encourage writing, publish periodicals and other literature, hold discussion groups, seminars and conferences, endeavoring to provide both inspirational materials and scholarly studies which apply the scientific spirit and methods to the materials of ethics and religion.
Following are statements by some of FRH’s supporters:
Like most persons of this persuasion, I regard myself as a Religious Humanist not because of having been converted to a creed; a faith; not because of my having signed a membership card in a crusading fraternity of believers. The term Religious Humanism is more descriptive of a state of mind, of an attitude with respect to philosophy, religion, ethics, than it is a label for another “ism.” —Lester Mondale Religious Humanism: A Testimonial
I have been enthusiastic about our Religious-Humanist Fellowship because it presages an enlargement of humanism, a creatively different emphasis in humanism . . . life’s dimensions and puzzles, for their happy resolution, demand rationality, but not bellicosity, required is an imaginative psychology as well as an analytical logic, an inward look as well as an extraversion...to hold eternity in an hour and to see the world in a grain of sand are valid human endeavors...it is an honest and valid emotional appeal to still undefined values of tomorrow as they stand in tension with the values which have egregiously failed our today. For motivational insight maybe we need a Prometheus. Or in remembering another mythmaker, maybe we need to see things as a little child. —Robert Hoagland
A New Dimension of Humanism
Humanism is a celebration and a promise; it celebrates the integrity of human reason, responsibility and compassion, and it promises a satisfying lifestyle that can be counted on. No more deprecation of the human condition; rather, an opportunity to remain true to ourselves by having both feet in this world and responding to the challenges of existence with excitement and pragmatic service to others. Humanism is religion come of age; at long last we humans can live dignified lives, finite creatures though we may be. At long last, men, women and children can find ultimate fulfillment through bringing out the best in humanity for the sake of humanity. —Beverley Earles
YES: Humanism can be religious; indeed, the most meaningful and liveable kind of humanism is itself a religious way of understanding and living life. It offers a view of [people] and [their] place in the universe that is a religious philosophy...overarching and undergirding it all, there can be a haunting sense of wonder which never leaves one for whom life itself is a mystery and miracle. Where did we come from, why are we here, where are we going with all the effort, frustration, the grief, the joy? To be caught up in this sense of wider relatedness, to sense our being connected in live ways with all the world and everyone in it, is the heart dimension of religion, whatever its name. —Peter Samson
Can Humanism Be Religious?
Freireligiöse Rundschau Freireligiöse Rundschau, a quarterly in German of Freireligiösen Landesgemeinde Würtemberg, is at Oberer Kirchhaldenweg 59, 70195 Stuttgart, Germany.
Freke, William (17th Century) About 1663, Freke (or Freeke) wrote A Brief But Clear Confutation of the Trinity, which upon being brought to the attention of the House of Lords was ordered to be burned by the common hangman. Freke was prosecuted by the Attorney General and fined £500. {BDF}
Fremlin, John (1913—1995) Fremlin, a member in England of the Birmingham Humanist Group, was Professor of Applied Radioactivity at the University of Birmingham. A nuclear physicist, he wrote Be Fruitful and Multiply and Power Production: What Are the Risks? The former title was ironic, for the work rejected the Biblical injunction and demonstrated the necessity of popular limitation, world-wide. {The Freethinker, June 1995}
FRENCH ACADEMY L’Académie français is France’s learnèd society, one of the five societies of the Institut de France. The Academy received its royal letters patent in 1635, and its membership of forty (“the forty immortals”) were formed to govern French literary effort, grammar, orthography, and rhetoric. Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis XIII, was its founder, and following his death the patronate went (1643) to Pierre Séguier, the chancellor. On his death (1672), King Louis XIV assumed the position of protecteur, which ever after remained a prerogative of the head of the French state. In 1793 the suppression of the academies ended the French Academy, but it reappeared in the second class of Napoleon’s Institut (1803). The French Academy has been conservative in its recording forms (for it does not legislate) concerning orthography and has discouraged the use of “foreign” words and spellings. Although many of France’s greatest writers have been members of the Academy, the most prominent of those who did not attain membership are Molière, Marquis de La Rochefoucauld, Duc de Saint-Simon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Émile Zola, and Marcel Proust. Not coincidentally, most of these writers were anti-clerical. {CE}
FRENCH HUMANISTS In 1995, French tax authorities reported that 50,000 taxpayers, the highest number ever, had declared income from their work as stargazers, healers, mediums, and similar occupations. By comparison, the country had fewer than 30,000 Roman Catholic priests and some 6,000 psychiatrists. The state-run Minitel on-line system which is found with computers in millions of French homes offers clients to choose, under the heading “astrology,” over four hundred listings for tarot card readings, horoscopes, and other astral advice. A 1986 poll found that 25% of the French believed the devil existed. In 1995 that figure had jumped to 34%. To offset such, several humanist groups have existed in France, the nation where teenagers are taught logic and philosophy in school. From 1993 to date, the following groups and publications were active:
• Cahiers Rationalistes (a monthly), 14 rue de l”Ecole-Polytechnique, 75005 Paris • Centre d’Anatole France—an exclusively atheistic group with no religious connections, it is militantly anti-Catholic and anti-clerical. • Centre Laïque de l’Europe—founded over 13 years ago, the group of socialists and radicals is interested in laicite, or influence by lay people, especially in relation to recent developments on the church-state separation. • Cercle Condorcet—the group, now four years old, meets monthly in Paris and reflects on issues similar to the concerns of the Ligue d’enseignement, or League of Educators. • Cercle Diderot—the group is named after the 18th-century philosopher and eminent encyclopedist and is dedicated to keeping his legacy alive. • Cercle Ernest Renan—the group is devoted to Biblical study and studies religious dogma from a skeptical angle. • Europe et Laicité, a quarterly, 11 rue des Huguenots, 94420 Le Plessis-Trevise <eurolaic@club-internet.fr>. • Knights of La Barre—the group, named after an 18th-century Chevalier who was executed for blasphemy, supports anti-clericalism and is critical of Catholicism. • La Libre Pensée—founded before the 1870 commune de Paris by radicals, marxists, anarchists, and anti-clericalists, the group is working to insure that the EEC gives equal rights to non-believers, not just to the believers who are in the majority. Its address is 10-12, Rue Des Fosses St. Jacques, 75005 Paris • La Raison, 10-12 rue des Fosses-Saint Jacques, 75005 Paris • Les Idées en Mouvement, 3 rue Recamier 75341 Paris, Cedex 07 <info-ligue@saturne.cie.fr>. • Raison Présente, a quarterly, 14 rue de l’Ecole-Polytechnique, 75005 Paris • Union Rationaliste—founded in 1930 by academics at the time of the growth of fascism, the group sees itself as part of the struggle against all forms of dogmatism. • Signers of are R. M. Bonnet of the European Space Agency; Jacques Bouveresse, professor of philosophy, Collège de France; Jean-Pierre Changeux, professor of neurobiology, Collège de France; Gérard Fussman, professor at Collége de France; Jacques Le Goff, specialist in French Middle Age Civilization and Literature, ENESS; Jean-Claude Pecker, astronomer, Collège de France; and Evry Schatzman, astronomer, former President of the French Physics Association. (See entries for France and Intellectuals.)
FRENCH PHILOSOPHY: See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3. (A first-rate discussion of post-World War II philosophy is Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944—1956.)
FRENCH PROTESTANTS • Protestants have been in the vanguard of most of the great liberalising ideas and reforms in French history: the declaration of human rights, the abolition of slavery, the market economy, the devolution of power from the centre, the spread of state education, the separation of church and state, advocacy of contraception and divorce. {The Economist, 18 April 1998}
FRENCH UNITARIANS A. Blanchard-Gaillard heads the Association Unitarienne Francophone, which has a Christian theology similar to that of Transylvanian Unitarianism. Three small groups in France (Paris, Nancy, Digne) and one Swiss group in Geneva publish Unitarian Approaches. M. Blanchard-Gaillard is at Les Hautes-Sieyes, Route des Courbons, 04000, Digne, France). Unitarians in Paris can be contacted by telephoning (33) 1-42 77 96 77.
French, Alice (1850—1934) French was the oldest of six children whose family had been founders of the Davenport, Iowa, Unitarian Church. One of the first regionalist authors to write realistically about Iowa and Arkansas, she wrote a number of works including A Slave to Duty and Other Women (1906). According to an editor and critic, Susan Koppelman, French had a lifelong partnership with Jane Allen Crawford. The two divided their year between Davenport and their plantation in Arkansas. “French’s subtle, almost sly portrayals of ties between women who love each other,” stated Koppelman, “are now being appreciated.” {GL}
French, Charles (20th Century) French is active with Friends Free of Theism in Richfield, Minnesota. He is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
French, Marilyn (1929— ) French addressed the Ninth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Oslo (1986). She is author of The Women’s Room (1977), The Bleeding Heart (1980), Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), War Against Women (1992), and A Season in Hell (1998). Asked about humanism, French responded to the present author:
My parents were raised Catholic but had left the church by the time I was born. My mother, an agnostic, suggested I might be interested in religion and sent me to the Catholic Church for religious instruction shortly before my ninth birthday. I was extremely devout for a year but could not get answers to any of my questions, and when a priest scolded me for questioning I left the church. I was thirteen. I called myself a deist for a few years, having read Tom Paine. But I have been an atheist since I was eighteen, and at present am a well-informed but implacable foe of organized religion.
{WAS, 19 December 1994}
French, Roderick (20th Century) French’s 1971 Ph. D. dissertation at George Washington University was on “The Trials of Abner Kneeland—A Study in the Rejection of Democratic Secular Humanism.” {FUS}
Freneau, Philip (1752—1832) The first professional journalist, Freneau was a propagandist as well as a satirist for the American Revolution and for Jeffersonian democracy. He edited papers, including the partisan National Gazette (Philadelphia, 1791—1793) for Jefferson. In addition, he was the earliest important American lyric poet, the author of such works as “The Wild Honeysuckle” and “Belief and Unbelief.” In the latter 1815 poem, he wrote,
Humbly Recommended to the Serious Consideration of Creed Makers
What some believe, and would enforce Without reluctance or remorse, Perhaps another may decry, Or call a fraud, or deem a lie.
Must he for that be doomed to bleed, And fall a martyr to some creed, By hypocrites or tyrants framed, By reason damned, by truth disclaimed? . . .
They who extort belief from man Should, in the out-set of their plan, Exhibit, like the mid-day sun An evidence denied by none.
From this great point, o’erlooked or missed, Still unbelievers will exist; And just their plea; for how absurd For evidence, to take your word!!
Not to believe, I therefore hold The right of man, all uncontrolled By all the powers of human wit, What kings have done, or sages writ;
Not criminal in any view, Nor–man!–to be avenged by you, Till evidence of strongest kind Constrains assent, and clears the mind. {CE; FUS}
Frère-Orban, Hubert Joseph Walther (1812—1896) Frère-Orban was a Belgian statesman who started as a lawyer in Liège and led the Liberals. In the Chambre in 1847, he became Minister of Public Works, then Minister of Finance (1848—1852). In 1857 he brought down the Catholic Ministry and was again Minister of Finance (to 1870). He was Premier 1868—1870 and 1878—1884, during which time he drastically checked the clericals. {RAT}
Fréret, Nicolas (1688—1749) Fréret was a French historical critic, a pupil of Rollin. He became a member of the Academy of Inscriptions in 1714. For a discourse on the “Origin of the Franks,” he was incarcerated for four months in the Bastille, where he read Bayle so often he could repeat much from memory. Fréret was an unbeliever and the alleged author of the atheistic Letters from Thrasybulus to Leucippe, although the author might actually have been the Baron d’Holbach. {BDF; FUK; GS; RAT}
FRÉTTABRÉF SIDMENNTAR An Icelandic quarterly, Fréttabréf Sidmenntar is published by the Icelandic Ethical Association, Aesufell 4 APT 2F, 111 Reykjavik, Iceland. <hopeful@islandia.is>.
Freud, Lucian (1922— ) Freud, the painter, is the son of an architect who was the youngest of Sigmund Freud’s three sons. He is the husband of sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty, and is known to many as having once been a long and close friend of the painter Francis Bacon. In his youth he is said to have set fire to Cedric Morris’s art school. He is also said to share his grandfather’s interest in zoology, one of his early drawings being that of a dead monkey which shocked viewers long before his contemporary paintings of nude fat people appeared. Calling psychoanalysis “unsuited to the life span,” Freud claims to be fairly ignorant of his grandfather, who died when Lucian was sixteen. He told John Richardson that he liked his grandfather’s “humor and generosity and his fondness for conspiracy,” which Richardson explained “is a trait that Lucian seems to have inherited, though not to the extent of convening a secret committee, as Sigmund Freud permitted Ernest Jones to do in 1912, with the sole purpose of shielding him and his controversial work from prying outsiders.” These days, Richardson adds, Lucian Freud might do with such a shield in light of how prurient critics like to pry into his paintings “that depict the women in his life–friends, his daughters, mistresses–without any clothes on.” As for painting his daughters in the buff, Freud has explained, “What could be more natural? I paint only people who are close to me. And who closer than my children. If I had thought it odd to paint them, I would never have done so. For me, painting people naked, regardless of whether they are lovers, children, or friends, is never an erotic situation. The sitter and I are involved in making a painting, not love. These are things that people who are not painters fail to understand. Besides, there is something about a person being naked before me that invokes consideration–you could even call it chivalry–on my part: in the case of my children, a father’s consideration as well as a painter’s.” One of the nudes he has painted is Leigh Bowery (1961—1994), a homosexual (who died of AIDS), a performance artist from Australia. Freud says he is drawn to homosexual models “because I respect their courage,” and his 1993 great back view of Bowery in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art shows that the artist has been influenced by German art such as Dürer’s “Adam and Eve.” Freud’s “And the Bridegroom” depicts both the mountainously huge Bowery and the toothpick-like Nicola as they lie naked on a bed. In an analysis, Richardson comments that the two are turning away from one another, “ambivalently in what could be taken–or more likely mistaken–for postcoital repose.” Viewing the 1993 Freud exhibition, Bowery wore a dress. “I’ve copied Lucian in thousands of ways,” he told reporter Margalit Fox. “Whatever he makes for dinner, I make for dinner. I copy the clothes he wears and the phrases he uses.” In return, Freud copies Bowery, sometimes using New York transvestite slang, the model told a reporter before picking up his skirt and gliding out of the museum. “So it’s slightly a two-way street.” Freud, who is not a believer in the various organized religions, has works at the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Melbourne, the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and elsewhere around the world. (See entry for Leigh Bowery.)
Freud, Sigmund (1856—1939) The eminent founder of psychoanalysis, Freud early on rejected the use of hypnosis, developing a technique called free association that allowed emotionally charged material which the individual had repressed in his unconscious to emerge to conscious recognition. His application of psychoanalytic theory to cultural problems has been wide, in areas such as anthropology, education, art, and literature. One little-known fact is that Freud’s first research was a study of the gonads of an eel. He is author of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900); The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904); The Id and the Ego (1923); and Totem and Tabu (1918). When the American poet Hilda Doolittle, better known simply as H.D., visited Freud in 1933, she found “the death-head swastika chalked on the pavement leading to the professor’s door.” Inside his Viennese office, she found he had a large collection of archaeological artifacts on his desk “like a high altar.” Picking a tiny Athena from the collection, he offered it to her, saying, “This is my favorite. She is perfect…only she has lost her spear.” The significance of handing the bisexual H.D. a figurine of the bisexual Athena was filled with sexual implications, which he may or may not initially have intended, according to her Tribute to Freud (1956). But the story illustrates his intense interest in the Ancient Greeks which, combined with his knowledge of Judaism, led to his controversial work on monotheism and Moses. Moses and Monotheism (1938) implies that Moses was not a foundling Jew. Rather, he was a high-born Egyptian, a member of Akhenaten’s intellectual elite. Moses obtained his monotheistic concepts from the Egyptian religion of Aton, choosing the Hebrews, a poor group of alien people who had settled in a border province, as his people, making Egyptians out of them in order that they could profit by his country’s culture. In addition to monotheism, he gave them two other Egyptian “gifts”: the practice of circumcision, and the Aton cult’s ethical code. In short, Moses obtained his idea of one god from a human, not from a supernatural source, a viewpoint which immediately drew negative criticism from most leaders of the organized religions and others with vested financial interests. “Religion,” Freud wrote, “is an attempt to get control over the sensory world in which we are placed by means of the wish world which we have developed inside.” By the age of forty-two, Freud, the author of Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory (1905) and who had married a cousin and had had six children, said, “Sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” At the age of fifty-six, he said that “at the bottom of his heart” he had found sexual intercourse” degrading,” according to People’s Almanac #2, because he was unable to discuss sex with his children. Freud’s work, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen said in a 1947 sermon, is based on “materialism, hedonism, infantilism, and eroticism.” Sheen’s attack called attention to the religionists’ concern that psychiatry and psychology were providing alternative, nonspiritual explanations for religious experiences. Freud was accused of treating religion as a comforting illusion, something which a mature person or society would outgrow. (Ironically, as pointed out by Peter Steinfels in The New York Times (3 Jan 1993), the president of the American Psychiatric Association, is a Catholic. That group’s president-elect as well as the president and the president-elect, and secretary general of the World Psychiatric Association, are Catholics, also.) “Neither in my private life nor in my writings,” Freud wrote in a letter to Charles Singer, “have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.” However, he also wrote, “When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.” And “Religions originate in the child’s and young mankind’s fears and need for help. It cannot be otherwise.” He also wrote, “The Catholic Church so far has been the implacable enemy of all freedom of thought” and, to colleague Ludwig Binswanger in 1927, “The Nazis? I am not afraid of them. Help me rather to combat my true enemy…Religion, the Roman Catholic Church.” Freud was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), of which Bertrand Russell later was president. On the subject of religion Freud wrote
In my Future of an Illusion I was concerned much less with the deepest sources of the religious feeling than with what the common man understands by his religion—with the system of doctrines and promises which on the one hand explains to him the riddles of this world with enviable completeness, and, on the other, assures him that a careful Providence will watch over his life and will compensate him in a future existence for any frustrations he suffers here. The common man cannot imagine this Providence otherwise than in the figure of an enormously exalted father. Only such a being can understand the needs of the children of men and be softened by their prayers and placated by the signs of their remorse. The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to mix among the ranks of the believers in order to meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!” And if some of the great men of the past acted in the same way, no appeal can be made to their example: we know why they were obliged to.
George J. Stack has written of Freud’s attitude toward religion: “The Future of an Illusion (1927) is a terse, sharp critique of religion. It emphasizes the psychogenic origin of belief in God (who is characterized as a projection of the child’s vision of a powerful, stern father), the obsessive-compulsive nature of ritual and prayer, the illusory nature of religion as based upon ‘omnipotence of thought,’ and infantile feelings of dependence. In sum, Freud argued that religion is a ‘universal neurosis’ that must be outgrown if men would attain independence of mind and maturity.” In that book, Freud had written, “Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.” Gaskin, who states that although Freud had been brought up to observe Jewish religious customs, he “seems never to have had any serious belief in God or in gods. But he has much to say about religion in a number of his published works. His frequently repeated contentions are that ‘the psychical origin of religious ideas . . . are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind’; and that ‘the primal father figure was the original image of God.’” Gaskin adds that Freud “argues in close detail, and with evidence, that human beings, being the sort of creatures they are, need to believe in gods,” that religion is based upon wish fulfillment. Freud’s views were controversial in his own time and continue to be so. Simon LeVay, whose The Sexual Brain (1993) develops the view that the brain’s hypothalamus produces what is called male- and female-typical sex drive and who found the nucleus of the hypothalamus smaller–sometimes absent–in gay as compared to straight men, has said when asked if he views Freud as a savior or a scourge, “A scourge, absolutely. He started the idea that homosexuality was a state of arrested development caused by defective parenting. He himself was not homophobic. He wrote some things that were very gay-friendly, particularly toward the end of his life. Nevertheless there’s an incredible amount of unnecessary guilt and blame that has to be laid at his doorstep. What happened with homosexuality is exactly what happened twenty years ago with schizophrenia, with everyone blaming parents for making their kids schizophrenic. I can’t imagine what it does to a parents.” Freud was not homophobic. In fact, unexpurgated correspondence with the young Wilhelm Fliess, a psychologist, reveal that Freud definitely had a “crush” on him. Fliess was not that interested in returning the love, however, but from him Freud developed ideas concerning bisexuality and from him he adopted terms such as “latency period” and “sublimation.” For a time, also, Freud was attracted to Jung, an attraction that wore off and eventually led to a break when Freud was in his fifties, whereupon Freud exulted that he was finally rid of that Jung and his pious gang. Jung, it transpired, was anti-Semitic, an occultist, and pro-Nazi, until the Nazis were defeated, after which he tempered his views. Freud also disapproved of Jung’s having made a pass at a patient, Ms. Spielrein, who had insufficient money to pay his fee, after which she became his own patient. Although critics of psychoanalysis are many, supporters of Freud point out that no other thinker has made creativity and imagination more democratically available. “Creativity,” Jonathan Lear has written, “is no longer the exclusive preserve of the divinely inspired, or the few great poets. From a psychoanalytic point of view, everyone is poetic; everyone dreams in metaphor and generates symbolic meaning in the process of living. Even in their prose, people have unwittingly been speaking poetry all along.” Paul Edwards has perceptively noted that little evidence exists that any of Freud’s patients, including Gustave Mahler and Bruno Walter, were ever cured. Just the same, and although it is partly true that Freudianism has currently diminished somewhat in importance, Edwards holds that it is imperative to retain such of Freud’s truly great contributions as the concepts of repression (the unconscious exclusion from the conscious mind of painful impulses or fears or desire), transference (the process by which emotions and desires originally associated with a person are unconsciously shifted to another person, often an analyst), and parapraxis (the slip of the tongue which reveals a subconscious motive). Edwards is not at all positive about Freud’s having been attracted to Lamarckism, to parts of Freud’s dream theory, to his view that paranoia is caused by repressed homosexual feelings whereas many homosexuals are not at all repressed or paranoiac, and to his inexcusably having fabricated some data in order to support certain theories. Freud’s final days have been described in Peter Gay’s Freud: A Life For Our Time (1988). Cancer had eaten away much of his jaw, the cancer gave off such a putrid smell that even his dog avoided him, Freud lost weight, and he began to be less alert mentally. Losing such a great quality of life and knowing that his intolerable pain could not be relieved by medicine, he arranged with his physician, Dr. Max Schur, to inject morphine and allow him to lapse into a coma. The father of psychiatry clearly was a believer in euthanasia. The funeral address was delivered by Ernest Jones, the surviving member of Freud’s close associates. Jones praised Freud’s unwavering love of truth and his hatred of deception. “As never man loved life more, so never man feared death less.” The cremains were buried in a Grecian urn, which he had admired and owned, at Golder’s Green Cemetery in London, England. (See entries for Ernest Jones and for Adolf Grünbaum, the latter of whom holds that Freud’s ideas about repression can be accepted only when tested against data obtained from control groups, but “no such data have become available during the past century.” Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend by Frederick C. Crews is meant “to expose [Freud’s] system of psychological propositions to the same kind of scrutiny one would apply to any other aspiring science.” Also see entry for Hilda Doolittle, who helped Freud escape from the Nazis to London.) {CE; CL; ER; EU, George J. Stack; HNS2; JM; News & Views, Humanists of North (New) Jersey, June 1998; PA; RE; TRI; TYD}
Freud, Vera (20th Century) Freud is a permanent representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union at UNESCO and is the official representative in Europe for Child Haven International. She participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. In a 1999 talk to the Unitarian Fellowship of Ottawa, she discussed women, traditions, and progressive action. {Humanist in Canada, Autumn 1999}
Frey, Stephen H. (20th Century) An atheist who wrote many letters to Pennsylvania newspaper editors, Frey was attacked by many Christian readers. His experiences were described in Freethought Today (June-July 1996}. He has written for Freethought Perspective (April 1999 and June 1999).
Frey, William (1839—1888) Frey was the adopted name of a Russian positivist and philanthropist. Disgusted with the oppression and degradation of his country, he went to New York in 1866 and established co-operative communities and also Russian colonies in Kansas and Oregon. In 1881 he went to London in order to influence his countrymen. A year before his death, he revisited Russia. {BDF}
Freycinet, Charles Louis de Sanices de (1828—1923) A French statesman, Freycinet was a President of the Senate, Minister of Public Works, twice Minister of War, twice Foreign Minister, and three times Premier. He was a member of the French Academy and author of a number of economic and mathematical works. {RAT; RE}
Freytag, Gustav (1816—1895) Freytag was a German novelist. From 1848 to 1870 he was joint editor of Die Grenzboten. His chief novels are Soll und Haben (3 volumes, 1855) and Die Verlorene Handschrift (1864). His rationalism is expressed in his letters and essays. {RAT}
FRI TANKE A Norwegian humanist publication, Fri Tanke is at Boks 6744, St. Olavs pl, 0130 Oslo, Norway.
Friberg, Eino (20 Century) The Finnish-born Friberg has lived primarily in the United States and is a retired Unitarian Universalist minister. In the mid-1970s he began translation into English of the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic. The work, published in 1988 with memorable artwork, is said to follow the Hiawatha-type meter of the original poetry. However, the reverse is the case: Longfellow copied the work’s meter for his poem. George C. Schoolfield of Yale, noting the excellence of Friberg’s translation, wrote that whereas W. F. Kirby in 1907 had translated II.143-148 of Runo Two (Väinäimöinen’s scornful reply to the little man of the sea) as Väinäimöinen, old man and steadfast, Answered in the words which follow: “You have hardly been created, Neither made, nor so unproportioned, As to fell this mighty oaktree, Overthrow the tree stupendous.”
Friberg, in comparison, wrote in the 1988 translation with a directness at once simple and effective:
But old Väinäimöinen answered: “Maybe you were never made, Neither made nor intended, To become the Big-Oak breaker, Destroyer of the dreadful tree.
Friedan, Betty Naomi (1921— ) Friedan, founder in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW), is a leading social reformer and feminist. The Feminine Mystique (1963. 1984) attacked the popular notion that women could find fulfillment only through childbearing and housewifery. In 1969, she denounced lesbians as a “lavender menace,” for which comment she apologized in 1977 at their Houston conference. She has also written Women’s Lib (1972), It Changed My Life (1985), Second Stage (1991), The Fountain of Age (1993), and The Second Stage (1998). In 1975, Friedan was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. She signed Humanist Manifesto II, having been influenced greatly by Abraham Maslow. A biography by Judith Hennessee, Betty Friedan, Her Life (1999), suggests that Friedan’s abrasiveness has always been part of her problem. Her marriage was an unhappy one, complete with physical fights in which she was punched or pushed down. She is seen by some as the victim of sexism, anti-Semitism, and taunts about her sterotypically big nose. Others, however, have been inspired by her exhorting women to free themselves of their own crippling ideas of themselves. Judith Shulevitz, a senior editor at Slate in a review of the Hennessee work (The New York Times, 9 May 1999), mentions that today Friedan is “mostly written off as obsolete—too bourgeois for left-wing feminists, too feminists for the family-values right and too kooky for everyone else.” When nominated as one of Council for Secular Humanism’s Laureates in the International Academy of Humanism, she accepted, saying that unfortunately feminism, liberalism, emancipation, and humanism are still dirty words in many parts of the U.S. In 1988, Friedan addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo. Friedan is on the editorial board of The Humanist. {CE; HM2}
Friedkin, William (1939- ) Friedkin directed such films as “The Exorcist” (1973); “The Boys in the Band” (1970); and “The French Connection” (1971, Academy Award winner). In Sight and Sound (July 1998) he was referred to as an “agnostic Jew.” William Friedkin, Film Director ent Internet Movie Database
Friedkin, who directed such films as The Exorcist and The French Connection is profiled in the July 1998 issue of the British film magazine Sight and Sound where he is referred to as an "agnostic Jew". The article is called 'Lucifer Rising: The Exorcist Returns' and concerns the 25th anniversary of one of the most famous horror films.
From the article (Page 8): In the quarter century since its opening, The Exorcist has been remembered less as a complex metaphysical drama than as a terrifying tour de force. Yet for all its shocking power, the film is an unsolved riddle, a masterful amalgam of contradictory themes that maintains a tension between the divine and the depraved, the progressive and the regressive, the hidden and the apparent. Written by a devout Catholic (William Peter Blatty) and directed by an agnostic Jew (William Friedkin), The Exorcist managed simultaneously to enthral and appal Americans who had lived throught Manson, Vietnam and Watergate, and to capture the imagination of thousands of Europeans for whom Pope Paul IV's 1972 address regarding the "question of the Devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons" was recent news. {CA}
Friedkin, William (29 Aug 1939 - ) Born in Chicago, Friedkin is a movie producer, director, and screen/scriptwriter. He directed such films as The Exorcist and The French Connection. The British Sight and Sound called The Exorcist one of the greatest of horror films:
In the quarter century since its opening, The Exorcist has been remembered less as a complex metaphysical drama than as a terrifying tour de force. Yet for all its shocking power, the film is an unsolved riddle, a masterful amalgam of contradictory themes that maintains a tension between the divine and the depraved, the progressive and the regressive, the hidden and the apparent. Written by a devout Catholic (William Peter Blatty) and directed by an agnostic Jew (William Friedkin), The Exorcist managed simultaneously to enthrall and appall Americans who had lived through Manson, Vietnam and Watergate, and to capture the imagination of thousands of Europeans for whom Pope Paul IV's 1972 address regarding the "question of the Devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons" was recent news.
He married Jeanne Moreau, then Kelly Lang, then Lesley-Anne Down, and is currently married to Sherry Lansing. {CA}
Friedman, Kinky (20th Century) Friedman, a musician and author, has gone on record as being a non-theist. {E}
Friedrich, Carl J(achim) (1901—1984) A Harvard University professor, Friedrich wrote reviews for The Humanist in the 1950s. He is author of New Image of the Common Man (1950). Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author:
I wish I could clearly choose one of the seven categories, but are they really on a level? Do we not all use at times the word humanism in the general connotation the lexicographer gives it, do we not carry with it the lessons of ancient humanism, do we not all start from classical humanism? I would exclude from myself atheistic and communistic humanism, but I suspect that I am something of a combination of a theistic and a naturalistic humanist. But in contrast to the description of theistic humanism, I believe in man’s capability of working out a good part of his personal development (salvation seems to me a pre-judicial term, involving a petitio principii) apart from a supernaturalistic philosophy, but I do at the same time believe that he will be greatly aided in this struggle by the possession of a faith in supernatural powers, and more especially a faith in God. You seem to imply that only the naturalistic humanist acknowledges that he might be wrong; I think that this is equally true of others. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas’ famous dictum: Ignoramus, ignorabimus shows that intellectual humility is one of the main virtues of the true Christian. But what I miss most in your categorical scheme is the recognition of humanism outside the tradition of Greece, Rome, and the Judeo-Christian religious faith, except for very recent phenomena. But what of the humanism in China, in India, and so on? It seems to me that our great problem today is the recognition of a pan-humanism which while fully recognizing the support it may receive from various religious faiths would stress the common core of all human beings in their striving for the higher forms of self. May I add one further thought which seems to me crucial for humanism today, and which is inadequately recognized by many, especially those whom you call classical neo-humanists. There has been in the past and there is in some humanist circles at present a strong tendency to think of humanism as an elitist doctrine for the few. It was so with the Stoics, with the Humanists of the sixteenth century, and with the Confucians. It is also true of the followers of Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, and Ortega y Gasset. It is my conviction that humanism today must be non-elitist. To put it affirmatively, humanism must be based upon a belief in the common man. This belief represents very serious difficulties but they must be faced. We do not longer accept the easy-going rationalism of the eighteenth century as expressed in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. And yet, humanism, pan-humanism calls for the recognition that man’s communal capacity is not the possession of an intellectual or cultural elite. The kind of belief I am talking about you can find in Dostoyevsky, more especially in The Brothers Karamazov. But you can also find it in Abraham Lincoln’s political philosophy and in Gandhi’s best thought. You ask which writers most influenced me. This is hard to say. Kant, Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle certainly are very important. But the common man himself, my country neighbors here and abroad, has taught me most.
{WAS, 4 September 1956}
FRIENDS, SOCIETY OF: See the entry for Quakers.
FRIENDSHIP • Friendship goes dancing round the world proclaiming to us all to awake the praises of a happy life. —Epicurus
• Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar;
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.
—William Shakespeare
• Friendship is the finest balm for the pangs of despised love. —Jane Austen
• I have lost friends, some by death . . . others by sheer inability to cross the street. Virginia Woolf
FRIENDSHIP LIBERAL LEAGUE OF PHILADELPHIA: See entry for K. M. Whitten.
Fries, Jacob Friedrich (1773—1843) Fries, brought up as a Moravian, became a deist and a German philosopher of the neo-Kantian rationalistic school. He wrote a System of Metaphysics (1824) and a Manual of the Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Aesthetics (1832). In his History of Philosophy, Fries criticized Kant’s proofs of God and immortality. {BDF; RAT}
Friess, Horace L(eland) (1900—1975) The son-in-law of Felix Adler, Friess was a chairman of the Department of Religion at Columbia; an editor of The Review of Religion; and a board member of the American Ethical Union. He became a leader of the New York Ethical Culture Society in 1942. With H. W. Schneider, he wrote Religion in Various Cultures (1932). In 1952 Friess addressed the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture in Amsterdam. From 1952 until his death, he served as a part time Leader and trainer of Leaders in New York. He was Felix Adler’s literary-biographical executor. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest; HNS; PK}
FRITANKEREN Fritänkeren (Freethinker), a Swedish quarterly, is at Torsgatan 47, 1 tr., 113 37 Stockholm, Sweden. E-mail: <gunnar.staldal@stockholm.mail.telia.com>.
Fritchman, Stephen Hole (1902—1981) A controversial Unitarian minister because of his political engagements, Fritchman edited the Christian Register but lost the job because he moved the magazine from a denominational periodical to a more broadly political one. At odds with Frederick May Eliot, Fritchman left the editorship and became minister of the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles from 1947 to 1969. Heretic: A Partisan Autobiography (1977) contains his views concerning liberal religion and his reactions to being called a “pinko” [a pro-Marxist]. For the Sake of Clarity (1992) is a collection of his addresses. {U&U}
Fritsche, Mike (20th Century) Fritsche is editor of The Free Mind, newsletter of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists. He also is that group’s Vice President.
Froebel, Friedrich (1782—1852) Froebel, the son of a poor Lutheran pastor, ranks with Pestalozzi as one of the major educators. He founded the kindergarten system. Froebel’s theories on education are based on a belief in “the divine unity of nature,” so that spiritual training became a fundamental principle. He stressed the importance of pleasant surroundings, self-activity, and physical training in the development of the child. However, the clergy bitterly opposed his work, and the Prussian government obliged by closing his schools on the ground that Froebel would not have Christian lessons in them. McCabe cites Pastor Schmeidler as stating that Froebel was not a Christian but had vague pantheistic views. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Frohman, Daniel (20th Century) Frohman was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Frolov, Ivan Petrovich (20th Century) Humanism is the most appropriate philosophy for the future, Frolov states in Man, Science, Humanism (1990). A Russian who was editor of Pravda, he writes about Marxism from a philosophical viewpoint. Frolov is editor of The Dictionary of Philosophy (1985).
Fromkin, David (20th Century) In The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century (1998), Fromkin avoids including the moral seriousness most historians traditionally utilize. Instead, he takes the position that the meaning of human history is natural, not divine. Humans are therefore obligated to accept that, as our population increases but our cultures become fewer, history is universal, not otherwise. A professor of international relations, Fromkin lists eight stages in universal history:
• the emergence of the hominid line, apes with brains, in prehistoric Africa; • the discovery of agriculture and the creation of the first cities— settlements whose residents were not all farmers; • the sudden rise of universalizing religious and moral systems all over civilized Eurasia in the sixth century B. C. E.; • the birth of the idea of world civilization with the empires of ancient Eurasia; • the rise of rationalism and empirical science; • the irreversible encounter, after the 15th century, between human societies in Eurasia and Africa and those in the Americas; • the industrial modernization that began in the 18th century; and • the steady movement toward democratic government centered in the 19th century and the unsteady movement toward decolo nization and world law in the 20th. {William R. Everdell, The New York Times
Book Review, 17 January 1998}
Fromm, Erich (1900—1980) An eminent social philosopher and psychoanalyst, author of The Sane Society and Escape From Freedom (1941), Fromm at Eva Ingersoll Wakefield’s and the present author’s invitation addressed a Humanist Society of New York meeting in the 1950s and told those assembled that he basically was a naturalistic humanist. Although Fromm started as a disciple of Freud, he came to believe an individual is the result of his body and his culture, that it is easy for those who are the products of an industrial society to become estranged from themselves. Such views were considered controversial when he taught at Columbia University. In 1966 Fromm was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In his Man for Himself (1947), Fromm wrote, “If faith cannot be reconciled with rational thinking, it has to be eliminated as an anachronistic remnant of earlier stages of culture and replaced by science dealing with facts and theories which are intelligible and can be validated.” {CE; CL; HNS; HNS2; TYD}
Frommer, Arthur (20th Century) Frommer edited The Bible and the Public Schools (1963). {GS}
Frost, Robert (1874—1963) Frost, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner for the excellence of his poetry, has been a biographer’s delight, filled with unique complexities.He had an ancestor who, upon being intimate with an American Indian girl, was banished from Kittery, Maine, and was not allowed to return until he married an English wife. Frost had a father who was an atheist and a mother who was a mystical Swedenborgian mother. His own philosophical outlook ranged between his parents’ extremes:
I turned to speak to God About the world’s despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn’t there.
His parents had met as fellow schoolteachers. His Scottish mother was born Isabelle Moodie in Leith, near Edinburgh. Her father had been a sea captain who drowned soon after she was born. Her mother was “a hussy who ran away from the arduous duties of motherhood,” so the eleven-year-old Isabelle was sent to Ohio. Here, she published poetry with Swedenborgian overtones and attempted to support her family by being a schoolteacher, at which biographers have said she failed. Frost later described her as “a queer woman” with “incipient insanity.” The famous poet’s homelife was anything but pleasant. His only sibling, Jeanie, was eventually sent to a mental institution, where she wrote her brother, “I am very peculiar and did not start right. If I ever was well and natural it was before I can remember.” His wife, Elinor, bore many children: the oldest, Elliott, died of typhoid fever when three—although the mother thought the death was because of “God’s judgment,” Robert blamed himself for not having obtained the best medical care; a daughter, Elinor Bettina, died soon after she was born; son Carol killed himself with a deer rifle when thirty-eight; Marjorie died of a postpartum infection; Irma had an unhappy marriage and was eventually committed to an insane asylum. Frost’s wife, two years before Carol’s suicide, died of a heart attack—after her death Robert wrote to a friend, “God damn me when he gets around to it.” Alone, the poet asked his daughter Lesley to let him live with her, and according to biographer Lawrance Thompson
She said she had seen him cause so much injury to the lives of his own children—particularly to Irma, Carol, and Marjorie—that she would not permit him to move into her home, where he might also injure the lives of her two daughters. Her rage increased as she went on to insist, through her tears, that she could not forgive him for his having ruined her mother’s life. It was his fault, she said, that her mother was dead, for it was his own selfishness which had forced her mother to climb those stairs to the upper quarters, repeatedly. . . . Then she hurt him most by concluding that he was the kind of artist who never should have married, or at least never should have had a family.
Encyclopedist Sherman Wakefield, the husband of Robert Ingersoll’s granddaughter, Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, wrote the present writer, “I note with interest that you had a conversation with Robert Frost recently and don’t quite get the combination of Unitarianism and Swedenborgianism. He must be awfully confused, religiously. I wrote July 18th and got no answer from him” (27 December 1954). The reference was to a dinner at Frost’s publisher’s home in New Canaan, Connecticut. After two pre-dinner cocktails with the salty, grandfatherly poet, the present writer remarked that some say he sounds as if he might be a Unitarian in the following sentiment:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
and
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
His reply to the question was that his mother was a Swedenborgian. “Yes, but you, Mr. Frost?” Again, he replied that his mother’s Swedenborgianism was an important part of her life. It became evident that although Frost deliberately had chosen to be a member of no organized religion, he found his mother’s devotion “beautiful” and he was not about to question her theism. At this point, the publisher’s teenage son interrupted, revealing that the present writer liked E. E. Cummings’s poetry better than his. Frost smiled at such adolescent ingenuousness, then revealed that at Poetry, a major magazine for established as well as new poets, Cummings truly was the only individualistic poet who was writing at that time. Frost was then told about an Iowa professor’s analysis of the symbolism of “Birches.” He listened intently to the academic discussion of what Frost purportedly had used as symbols in the work, then resolutely replied, perhaps fired by the several cocktails,
The next time you see that prof, tell ’im “Up your ass!”
Frost proceeded to mention his friendship with Iowa poet James Hearst, with whom he said he shared a “religious love of nature.” Frost said that he had made a major mistake when first he had bought a 30-acre farm in Derry, New Hampshire–he had purchased it rather quickly, whereas any other farmer, particularly Hearst, knows that you take plenty of time checking land out before you purchase it. As a result, his neighbors never quite accepted him as a farmer. Although a final attempt was made to bring up the subject of his outlook on religion, mentioning terms like theism, agnosticism, atheism, and naturalistic humanism, Frost remained noncommittal. “You feel that if you respond, you will upset the many believers who are your supporters?” I finally said. Like many other authors of his time period, he pleaded that his work contains all such answers. A work which does provide something of an answer is Masque of Mercy. In it, Frost has a character, Brother’s Keeper, who in his attempt to understand Jesus takes the unitarian approach through Palestine rather than the Christian approach through Rome, remarking that Paul has almost theologized Christ out of Christianity. Beneath Frost’s Wordsworthian and Emersonian woodland philosophy, however, was a troubled and combative spirit. Not so well known was that after the death of his wife Elinor in 1938, Frost took Kathleen Morrison not only as his secretary but as his lover, this despite her still being married to novelist and Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. Jeffrey Meyers, in Robert Frost: A Biography (1996), reveals that a previous biographer, Lawrance Thompson, was also a lover of Kathleen Morrison and agreed with her, against Frost’s wishes, that his biography would not mention her affair with the poet. Meyers also relates that Hart Crane wrote a letter telling of his admiration for Frost’s daughter Lesley, to which Frost commented, “Fortunately for Lesley, the homosexual, suicidal Crane was not really interested in women.” Another member of Morrison’s harem, for Frost was not alone, was Bernard De Voto, who writer who became editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. Frost’s influence upon others was monumental. B. F. Skinner credited Frost with advising him to become a writer instead of continuing his college work. Numbers of others credited him with inspiring them in their creative endeavors. His public readings were so numerous Allen Ginsberg called them “relentless” and said, “He created an audience for poetry readings. . . . He was the first voyager, a kind of pioneer, the original entrepreneur of poetry.” At one such reading, John Updike recalled, the author of A Masque of Reason (1945) that had been panned by left-wing critics turned to Archibald MacLeish in the audience and, in an obvious reference to his Broadway success “J.B.,” which spoke of “Our labor . . . is to learn through suffering to love,” retorted, “People think everything is solved by love. Maybe just as many things are solved by hate.” Updike noticed that MacLeish “smiled, slightly, through the assault; he knew his man, and perhaps had heard it all before.” But it illustrated, Updike added, Frost’s admission one time that “There’s a vigorous devil in me.” Although he once had studied philosophy with George Santayana, Frost was not wholly convinced by the Harvard teacher’s considering religion an expression of symbolic, not literal, truth. Doubt, he agreed, is a part of faith. But, as pointed out by Jay Parini in Robert Frost, a Life (1999), Frost’s “many doubts never added up to a denial of basic things of the spirit, since spirit was a vital part of his dualism, along with matter.” On Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, Lionel Trilling described “Fire and Ice” (1923) and “Bereft” (1928) as having been written by a “poet of terror,” noting his gloomy and malicious side. But in 1961, on President John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration Day, Frost made a memorable and happy appearance on the platform to read a poem written especially for the occasion:
Summoning artists to participate In the august occasions of the state Seems something artists ought to celebrate . . . A golden age of poetry and power Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour. . . .
In the blinding winter sunlight, however, Frost was unable to read his text in the glare and the wind. Giving up, he recited a poem that he knew by heart. It was on that day that, stunning the freezing crowd by removing his overcoat, Kennedy at the last minute changed
Ask not what your country will do for you, but what you will do for your country.
to
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
When Frost entered a hospital for the final time, he told a reporter, “I don’t take life very seriously. It’s hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it. And what’s in between doesn’t make much sense. If that sounds pessimistic, let it stand.” Actually, it sounded entirely unlike something his mother would have said. Rather, it was the sentiment of his father, the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa non-theist. Frost died unexpectedly during an operation for appendicitis. Friends recalled that he once spoke about an epitaph, remaking “I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” (See the entry for James Hearst.) [CE; PA; John Updike, “Poet on the Fault Line,” The New Yorker, 15 March 1999; WAS interview 1954}
Frost, William Prescott Jr. (Died 1885) The father of the poet Robert Frost was, as described by John Updike (The New Yorker, 15 March 1999), “the only child of a New Hampshire farm family, a Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, a San Francisco journalist with political ambitions, a drinker, a professing atheist, a gun lover, a sometimes abusive husband and parent.” When he died, he left his wife Belle and family with eight dollars.
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks (1822—1895) A leader of the radical wing of late 19th-century Unitarianism and a founder of the Free Religious Association, Frothingham was the son of a Boston Unitarian minister, Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham. He favored Transcendentalist theology rather than a conservative version of Unitarianism, and befriended Theodore Parker during his ministry in Salem, Massachusetts. His Religion of Humanity (1873) is considered a central statement of modernist thinking in theology, and in his Transcendentalism in New England (1876) he made important contributions to the early historiography of the Transcendentalist movement. Among Frothingham’s parishioners was sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. (See entry for Felix Adler and for Free Religious Association.) {BDF; CE; FUS; RAT; U; U&U; CE}
Froude, James Anthony]] (1818—1894) Froude was son of an Archdeacon of Totnes. He became a rationalist and abandoned his clerical life, explaining the change in Nemesis of Faith (1848). The editor of Fraser’s Magazine for many years, he wrote Life of Carlyle (1882), which provoked much controversy because, states McCabe, of its “giving away the early impotence of Carlyle.” His translation of Lucian’s most characteristic Dialogue of the Gods, Wheeler wrote, “is done with too much verve to allow of the supposition that the translator is not in sympathy with his author.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Fruchtman, Jack Jr. (20th Century) Fruchtman wrote Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom (1994), a biography that updates previous works. However, according to John Keane, Fruchtman mistakenly depicted Paine as “something of a country bumpkin” who was “clearly out of his element in these [intellectual] circles.” (See entry for John Keane.)
Fry, Elizabeth (1780—1845) A noted prison reformer in England, Fry was a Unitarian. {U}
Fry, John (17th Century) Fry was a colonel in the Parliamentary army. In 1648 he was called to the House of Commons, where he voted that Charles I be put on trial and sat in judgment when sentence was passed. His The Accuser Shamed (1649) was ordered to be burned for speaking against “that chaffie and absurd opinion of three persons in the Godhead.” Fry was then charged with blasphemy. {BDF; RAT}
Fryer, Peter (1927— ) Fryer, a freethinker, wrote Mrs. Grundy (1963). {TRI}
FUCK Considered an obscene word, fuck first appeared in “Flen Flyys,” a poem written before 1500. The work satirized Carmelite friars of Cambridge, England, with its title taken from the first words of the poem, “Flen, flyys, and freris” [fleas, flies, and friars]. One of its lines, “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk,” when decoded (according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1992), becomes “fvccant vvivys of heli,” or, fully decoded, “They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely [a town near Cambridge].” Inasmuch as the word has become so common and so over-used, even in print, some freethinkers have recommended futter as a replacement in order to bring back the overtones previously communicated. Carl Muller, in “Giving the middle finger to the Bulgarian” (The Island, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 20 February 1999), wrote:
[W]e have the old English word “futter,” which in the worst sense means to “roger,” which the Scots admit to after they have done to a girl what comes naturally. “Futter” used to be in fashion for a long time and it is a pity that the word fell into disuse. The Roman poet Martial frequently used the word “futuere” (from which “futter” came) and this in turn was derived from “fundo,” meaning to pour out, ejaculate, discharge semen. Funny, we abandoned the seemingly innocuous “futter” for a four-letter word with more resonance. The point is, “futter” belonged to polite conversation while the word in use today is certainly not. We still have to painfully insert asterisks when forced to convey the word although I don’t, but then, that is part of my—shall we say—charm.
Fukuzawa, Yukichi (1834—1901) According to Robertson, “The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to a naturalist way of thought.” He adds that in 1894 there were no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples and 190,803 Shinto temples and shrines in Japan, that it is a difficult task in Japan to rid the average individual of a great amount of commonly held superstitions. Fukuzawa wrote An Outline of a Theory of Civilization (1973). {JMR}
Fulghum, Robert (1937— )
A part time minister, author, and lecturer, Fulghum wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (1958), It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It ((1989), Uh Oh (1991), and Maybe (Maybe Not) (1994). A Unitarian, he made a forty-city book tour for charity in 1994, raising a million dollars for such diverse groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Interlochen Center for the Arts, Amnesty International, and the Children’s National Medical Center. He was a graduate of Starr King School for the Ministry, the Berkeley, California seminary for Unitarian Universalists. He served Unitarian churches in Washington State for more than twenty years. {World, May/June 1995)
Fulks, Clay (20th Century) Fulks, a freethinker, wrote Christianity, A Continuing Calamity (1950). {GS}
Fuller, Margaret: See entry for Sarah Margaret Fuller.
Fuller, (Richard) Buckminister (1895—1983) An architect and engineer, Fuller developed “energetic” geometry (1917), the “4-D” house (1928), a self-contained, dustless unit which could be transported by air; the streamlined Dymaxion auto (1933); and the Dymaxion house (1944—1945). His geodesic domes have been used widely for military and industrial purposes. A controversial thinker, Fuller in 1969 was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. “Sometimes,” Fuller declared, “I think we’re alone. Sometimes I think we’re not. In either case, the thought is quite staggering.” Fuller greatly enjoyed lecturing, but his sense of time was such that upon at least one occasion, in New Canaan, Connecticut, half his audience left after one hour and fifteen minutes. Then, half of those who remained left after another half-hour. Although a master of ceremonies walked on stage and discreetly suggested he had only five more minutes, Fuller continued speaking until the lights were turned off by the one of only three people who remained–the one who had keys to lock the auditorium. {CE; HNS2; TYD}
Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret (Ossoli) (1810—1850) An important personage in literary circles, Fuller was an ardent feminist who in her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) treated the subject in its economic, intellectual, political, and sexual aspects. A leader of transcendentalism, she edited its journal, the Dial, and was a friend of Emerson (who later edited the Dial), Thoreau, Hawthorne, and others in that philosophic movement. She did not favor the movement’s Brook Farm utopian experiment, and she has been described as Emerson’s token woman in the Transcendental Club. Fuller’s father was a Jeffersonian liberal who, elected to Congress for four terms, opposed the extradition of fugitive slaves. He also opposed the Missouri Compromise, which admitted a slave state, and he was against the Seminole War. Margaret was his eldest child, and before she was nine she studied Greek, French, and Italian as well as read Vergil, Cicero, Horace, Livy, and Tacitus. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Unitarian minister who encourage Emily Dickinson and her, once observed that the Massachusetts Fullers were energetic to the point of being “without a particle of tact.” Her Fuller grandfather had been a minister who lost his pulpit because, in the words of critic Millicent Bell, “he was suspected of insufficient zeal for the Revolution” and who later refused to vote for the ratification of the new Federal constitution “because it implicitly sanctioned slavery.” Fuller’s influence on other authors was major. She has been identified as Zenobia in Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. Lowell caricatured her as Miranda in his Fable for Critics. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter echoed Fuller’s argument for women’s progressive liberation. A stimulating talker, she once conducted conversation classes for society women on social and literary topics. Horace Greeley made her the first literary critic of the New York Tribune. For the Tribune she wrote about Italy’s Revolution of 1848—1849, having married the Marchese Ossoli, a follower of Mazzini, and moving with her husband to Rome and taking part in the struggle. (The two may not actually have married, for she was evasive about the subject to her friends.) Millicent Bell states that Fuller tended to see herself as having masculine and feminine traits–“masculinity being a label for her logical powers, her love of knowledge, her assertiveness, her longing for active life. She also had a feminine side, she felt, a side that was poetic and emotional and responsive to nature as well as caretaking–and this she identified with her mother who exemplified the Victorian Angel in the House and loved gardening and babies. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century theorized that all men have some measure of the womanly and that all women have some measure of the manly. Her biographer, Mason Wade, as well Jonathan Katz in Gay American History, states that although Fuller was bisexual in writings which survived her, these were severely bowdlerized after her death by Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clark, allegedly to “protect her reputation.” Contemporaries knew of her being attached to the intelligent wives of several Harvard professors as well as to an older English girl who was the object of a sentimental crush, and to the future abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child. Fuller was a Unitarian who, unlike the deists, thought that God is immanent in man and nature, that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge, and that individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority are keys to humankind’s happiness. Her reputation in the 1960s and 1970s has undergone a major revival, and she is coming to be understood as a pioneering feminist, an important literary critic, and a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement. Her place in literary history is presently being reassessed and her life and writing is being recognized as “a vindication of women’s right to think.” Contemporary critics are agreeing with the landmark History of Woman Suffrage (1881): “Margaret Fuller possessed more influence upon the thought of America than any woman previous to her time.” She is credited with having formulated the issues that were central for the 1848 Seneca Falls convention on women’s rights. Without equality, she insisted, marriage was a union between parent and adopted child or master and slave. Bell adds, “She repudiated the idea that women’s freedom of occupation would break up the home, and pointed out that the hard labor of working-class women proved that women were not too delicate to assume the burdens of men while an upper-class woman was likely to have already escaped into the frivolous pursuit of ‘animation for her existence.’” Women could do anything: “Let them be sea-captains if you will.” Often quoted is her general statement, “I accept the Universe!” At Brook Farm, she experienced communitarian ideals, but she came to see the Utopian commune as embodying an economic and social critique of the larger society. Bell notes that Fuller “moved from the belief in private solutions to the acceptance of the need for political change. Channing, a follower of Fourier, had become a more important influence on her than Emerson. . . . In the year of The Communist Manifesto, which she may not have read, she saw some form of socialism as ‘the inevitable sequence to the tendencies of the era.’ Unlike many of America’s intellectuals–Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville included–who had recoiled from the English Chartists and the Paris revolutionaries of 1848, she was drawn to the radical ideas of the European rebellions. The Jeffersonian democracy in which she had always believed no longer seemed an ultimate human aim.” She began to disparage America for maintaining slavery and for the war with Mexico, saying America had become “stupid with the lust for gain . . . shamed by an unjust war.” Many hold that Emerson, fearful of the commotion she would cause upon returning, urged Fuller to delay her return home. It was her political views, as well as the gossip of Rome that had preceded her, which would surely have embarrassed her writer friends. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, describing Fuller’s last months in Italy, said Fuller had become “one of the out & out Reds.” Fuller and the marquis had to flee from Italy because of their strong rebellion against the Papacy. Unfortunately, she was drowned with her husband and infant son when their ship wrecked an estimated four hundred yards off the Fire Island, New York, shoreline. Only the baby’s body was recovered. Thoreau traveled to the scene the next day, found Ossoli’s coat, and wrote in his journal: “I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,–an actual button,–and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives; all else is but a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.” Never recovered was her manuscript of the history of the Italian revolution. {BDF; CE; EG; FUS; JM; TSV; RAT; RE; TYD; U; WWS}
Fulpius, M. (19th Century) In Switzerland, Fulpius edited Rationaliste in the 1860s.
FUNDAGELICALS: See entry for Delos B. McKown.
FUNDAMENTALISM • Fundamentalism is an ideology that diverts people from the path of natural development of consciousness and undermines their personal rights. —Taslima Nasrin
“Fundamentalist” has its root in the “fundament,” “foundation,” “of the buttocks,” “backside,” etc. In Christian theology, fundamentalism is a conservative 19th- and 20th-century movement. Fundamentalists believe that the statements in the Bible are literally true, which puts them at odds with the theory of evolution. In the 1920s and to date, the Evangelical movement has opposed liberalism and secularism. Fundamentalists throughout the Christian or Muslim world are noted for their rigid adherence to fundamental or basic principles, principles for which they are willing to die if necessary. Marlene Winell wrote Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion (1993), and Edward T. Babinski wrote Leaving the Fold: Testimonies of Former Fundamentalists (1995). Herb Caen, in San Francisco Chronicle (20 July 1981), wrote a secular critique of fundamentalism: “The trouble with born-again Christians is that they are an even bigger pain the second time around.” (See entry for Walk Away, a newsletter for ex-fundamentalists. See entry for fatwa, a device used by Muslim fundamentalists.) {DCL; TYD}
FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN: PAT ROBERTSON • Charismatic TV preacher, international businessman, presidential candidate in 1988, founder of Regent university, would-be Third World evangelist and entrepreneur, self-styled political boss, [Pat] Robertson is on a mission from God. He wants a godly nation, which sounds to his enemies like a fundamentalist Christian state, one that might apply the Word to all facets of American life (much as the Afghan Taliban and Iranian mullahs are applying their Word). Robertson denies working toward a theocracy. He isn’t likely to start flogging women for showing their faces, or lopping off the hands of thieves, and he most certainly wouldn’t ban television (as the Taliban did). He wants a country where abortion is outlawed, where the Bible is back in schools, where “children are cared for by two married, heterosexual parents.” He wants a popular culture that is strictly PG, that, he says, “glorifies not what is seamy and sordid and violent but what is good, beautiful and noble.” He wants to combat the “white witchcraft, black magic and satanic worship” he sees behind astrology, UFOs, Zen and New Age religions, and he wants to encourage a strictly patriarchal view of marriage: “Christ is the head of the household, and the husband is the head of the wife.” He wants to save the world, but first and mostly he wants to save America. —Mark Bowden, “The Holy Terror,” Playboy, February 1999
FUNDAMENTALISTS ANONYMOUS Fundamentalists Anonymous, Box 20324 Greeley Square Station, New York, NY 10001, publishes a newsletter. {FD} FUNERALS • Funeral, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
“Funerals,” Quentin Crisp holds, “are rather horrid. All that standing in the pouring rain in the churchyard while people say how wonderful you were. They can just put me in a plastic bag and shovel me into a Dumpster. I don’t care.” Jessica Mitford would have died laughing. Her The American Way of Death (1963) made fun of the funeral industry with its “morticians” and “caskets” and “floral tributes” instead of funeral directors and coffins and flowers. Not long after her death, the following advertisement appeared in New York’s Daily News (8 August 1996):
. . . Our basic goals have been to improve the service of our chapels. Since the 1980’s, we have invested half a million dollars in renovations (almost always using African-American contractors) which has resulted in state-of-the-art chapels. In fact, our chapels are such a class act because of the exquisite outer and inner quality of our edifices. Unity Funeral Chapels have wall-to-wall carpeting, modern air conditioned, cushioned chairs, private family and reposing rooms, sensitive-to-your-needs courteous, efficient, highly skilled funeral directors, price quotes by phone, a unique pre-arrangement program, the latest model customized powder-blue Cadillac hearses owned by Unity Funeral Chapels, and the latest model Cadillac limousines rented from Black-owned agencies. Overall, Unity employs twenty-two individuals from the African-American community. Unity also contributes to community educational and recreational programs. Let’s bury the rumors now: Unity Funeral Chapels Inc. is a totally African-American-owned and operated enterprise, and God willing, we intend to remain so. . . .
Mitford, late in life, had been asked what sort of funeral she wanted. An elaborate one, she responded gravely, that had “six black horses with plumes and one of those marvelous jobs of embalming that take 20 years off.” She added that she wanted “streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued–that sort of thing.” Unity Funeral Chapels, Inc., had she known, could expertly have served her final needs. (See entry for Burial Practices.)
Fürbringer, Max (Born 1846) Fürbringer was a German anatomist who taught at Heidelberg, Amsterdam, and Jena. A Privy Councillor, he was a leading anatomist in Germany. Fürbringer acknowledged himself a monist and eulogized Haeckel as “a hero of science” and “prophet” of truth. {RAT}
Furnemont, Léon (Born 1861) A Belgian advocate, Furnemont founded the Circle of Progressive Students. He represented Young Belgium at the funeral of Victor Hugo. A Councillor of the International Federation of Freethinkers, he was director of a monthly journal, La Raison, in 1889. {BDF}
Furness, Frank (Born 1839) Furness, a skilled 19th century architect, was a Unitarian. {U}
Furness, Kenneth (20th Century) When Furness signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was executive secretary of the British Humanist Association. {CL; HM2}
Furness, William Henry (1802—1896) After the Philadelphia Unitarian Church was founded in 1796 by Joseph Priestley, it continued without a minister until Furness became the minister, and he served for fifty years. Furness rejected, in his Remarks on the Four Gospels (1836), the use of the biblical miracles as a basis for Christian faith, which allied him with the Transcendentalists on the miracles question. Furness thought the miracles occurred but were natural events, that religious faith does not require confirmation of supernatural events. His Hegelian-influenced Christianity a Spirit (1859) shows his interest in German philosophy. Furness preached the funeral sermon of his lifelong friend Emerson in 1882. {U&U}
Furniss, James J. (19th Century) Furniss, a freethinker, wrote The Anonymous Hypothesis of Creation (1877). {GS}
Furnivall, Frederick James (1825—1910) Furnivall was a writer who, although not a Christian, devoted himself to educational work with the Christian Socialists. He helped to found the Working Man’s College (1854) and was active in the Sunday League and other progressive organizations. Furnivall founded the Early English Text Society and the Chaucer, Wyclif, Shelley, and Browning Societies. He was an agnostic and an honorary associate of the Rational Press Association. {RAT; RE}
Fussman, Gérard (20th Century) Fussman, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Futrell, Mynga (20th Century) With Paul Geisert, Futrell wrote Different Drummers, Nonconforming Thinkers in History (1999).
FUTURE Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true, and our happiness is assured. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Mankind enjoys speculating about what the future will bring. Utopias and dystopias are described in detail by writers of fiction and science fiction. Although it is impossible to foresee what is by definition obscure, John Maddox has made an attempt in his What Remains to be Discovered: Mapping the Secrets of the Universe, the Origins of Life and the Future of the Human Race (1998). He offers the big questions: How did the universe begin? How does the universe work? Did galaxies or stars come first? When and how did life commence? When and how did sexual reproduction commence? What are consciousness, memory, imagination? Einstein’s “general relativity (gravitational) theory” and the theory of quantum mechanics are, he holds, “perhaps the two outstanding intellectual achievements of this century.” He adds, “As a direct consequence of the structure of D. N. A., both the internal working of the cell and the mechanism of inheritance in plants and animals (including the development of embryos from fertilized eggs), has become susceptible to laboratory investigation.” But the more we know, the more contradictions are apparent. Out of these contradictions must come future discoveries. Maddox’s book contains summaries of our present knowledge, but in 3001 his look into the future will likely amuse whoever is able to locate his, as well as Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s fictional 3001, extrapolations. {Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “The Century Ahead for Science,” The New York Times, 16 November 1998}
Fuykschot, Cornelia (20th Century) Fuykschot is a humanist living in Gananoque, Ontario. Writing in Humanist in Canada (Spring 1999), she told of successfully complaining to the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) about daytime religious programs that were getting on her nerves.
