H
From Philosopedia
Haag, Herbert Priest who challenged Vatican died in August 2001 at the age of 86. He sought reform and liberalization of the church and had a noted dispute with church authorities over matters including whether ordained priests were needed to celebrate the Eucharist.
Haas, Harry Forest (20th Century) Haas was a freethinker who wrote How to Psychoanalyze the Bible (1939). {GS}
Haase, Hella S. (20th Century) Haase is a novelist whose Threshold of Fire (1997) tells about 5th century Rome. Emperor Honorius is the ruler in 414, the religion of the Christ is the official religion, and paganism is supposed to be done away and its temples torn down. Enter Prefect Hadrian, a fanatical convert who is chosen to judge the trials of non-Christians, and the plot develops. {Reviewed by V. S. Petheram, The Freethinker, September 1997}
HABEAS CORPUS • Habeas corpus, n. A writ by which a man may be taken out of jail when confined for the wrong crime. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Habermas, Jürgen (1929— ) A German philosopher, Habermas is known for being a proponent of critical theory, a social theory with Marxist roots which in the 1930s was developed by the Frankfurt School. He criticized industrial societies for doing whatever is necessary to attain given ends, an emphasis which he argued prevented them from appreciating the importance of communication action and coming to agreement with others. At the University of Frankfurt, he constructed a theory of “discourse ethics” according to which moral judgments would have validity if agreed to by agents in an ideal speech situation. His works include Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1983), and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996). Habermas is a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. {CE}
HAC HAC is an abbreviation of the Humanist Association of Canada. On the Web: <http://infoweb.magi.com/~godfree>.
Hachette, Jean Nicolas Pierre (1769—1834) Hachette, a French mathematician, was prevented from taking a seat in the Academy of Sciences until 1831. However, he was one of the most noted of European mathematicians. {RAT}
Hachtroudi, Fariba (20th Century) Hachtroudi, an Iranian who was forced to live in France because of his nontheistic outlook, spoke about intolerance at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. Since the “savior” Khomeini took power in 1979, he noted, there had been a systematic dehumanization in Iran, where the law is founded in Providence and has been waiting 1,400 years to be put into practice. He lamented that the “sacred terror” has led to a vast flight to foreign countries, that prostitutes are burned alive, addicts are hanged, thieves have their limbs removed, and systematic torture is found in prisons. Half a million have died and another half a million are disabled. Suicide has increased fivefold. The greatest danger, he added, is that the world may come to accept the Islamic state of Iran and end the international fight for human identity. Khomeini died in 1989. {International Humanist News, December 1996; New Humanist, December 1996}
Hachtroudi, Mohsen (1906—1976)
Hachtroudi was an Iranian scientist, poet, and philosopher who had taught at Princeton and Teheran. “Ignorance is the source of all evil. Knowledge is a path to emancipation, but tolerance remains the essential tool for ultimate freedom,” he wrote. “Dogmatism, even allegedly scientific, can lead to the worst catastrophes, as has already been the case. The Association for the Mohsen Machtroudi Foundation (17 rue Henry Monnier, 75009 Paris, France) is a not-for-profit, non-political association created to perpetuate his work.
Hacker, Jeremiah (19th Century) In Portland, Maine, Hacker edited the monthly Pleasure Boat (1844—1860). He persuaded the state to “give every landless man in Maine, who would settle on it, one hundred and sixty acres of land for fifty cents an acre, and this to be paid in labor—making roads, etc.” He also lectured “against priestcraft” and never charged for such. According to Putnam, Hacker was, in 1894, “probably the oldest Freethought lecturer in the world.” {PUT}
Haddad, Ibrahim (20th Century) From 1931 to 1933, Haddad edited the Arabic unbelievers’ publication, al-Duhur, in Beirut, Lebanon. {EU}
Haddon, Alfred Cort (1855—1940) Haddon was an ethnologist who taught at the Dublin Royal College of Science and later at Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute and of the Ethnological Section of the British Association (1902—1903). Until his death, he was a member and supporter of the Rational Press Association, of which he was an honorary associate. {RAT; RE}
HADES • Hades, n. The lower world; the residence of departed spirits; the place where the dead live. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Hadith Males who are non-theists, but who are interested in comparison shopping, are likely unaware that according to the Hadith, which is the Islamic tradition of the sayings and the practices of the Prophet,
Every man who enters Paradise shall be given seventy-two houris [and] no matter at what age he had died, when he enters Paradise, he will not age any further.
A houri is a voluptuous and alluring virgin in the Koranic paradise. As for not aging any further, others interpret Muhamad’s promising that in Paradise all will remain in their twenties. Hadith, as a discipline, consists of two branches. One is concerned with the validation of the individual traditions going back to the Prophet. The other contains the content (matn) as a source of religious authority. The Hadith is considered second in importance only to the Qur’an. Depending upon whether one is a Sunni or a Shiite, differing interpretations prevail. For an explanation see W. A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (1977) and G. H. A. Juynboll, Muslim Tradition (1981).
Hadleigh, Boze (20th Century) Hadleigh, an author who is a freethinker, wrote Sing Out! Gays and Lesbians in the Music World; Hollywood Gays; and Hollywood Lesbians.
Hadley, J. Harold (1912—1994) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hadley was minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Point Washington, New York. He was a consulting editor of Religious Humanism. Hadley spoke often of his Quaker origins. During his ministry from 1959 to 1977, he was an advocate of housing for the elderly and led his congregation to build a complex, which was named Hadley House in his honor. {HM2}
Hadrian (76—138) Hadrian, the Roman Emperor whose full name was Publius Aelius Hadrianus, was learned in Greek and accomplished in poetry and music. He patronized artists and is known as one of Rome’s better emperors. He instituted welfare payments for poor children, reduced taxes, codified the laws, and enacted legislation against the mistreatment of slaves. For six years he and Antinous, a Greek youth of great beauty, were inseparable. When Antinous drowned himself in 130 on a trip to Egypt, Hadrian was grief-stricken. (Their love has been written about by a member of the French Academy, the lesbian M. Yourcenar, and also by Anthony R. Birley in Hadrian (1998). McCabe calls Hadrian an Epicurean atheist. Meanwhile, McCabe is one of the few who denies the legend of Hadrian’s sodomy with Antinous. {JM; RE}
Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August (1834—1919) An early exponent of Darwinism in Germany, some of whose ideas have been proven erroneous, Haeckel wrote The Riddle of the Universe (1899), a comprehensive view of the soul, world, and God. A pantheist, not an atheist, he had a monistic view that there is no personal creator, no moral system in the world, and no Providence, writes Becker, who adds,
The idea of God was sustainable to Haeckel only if one sees God as representing the ultimate cause. The theory of the origin of species and of spontaneous generation explain the origin and development of life and man. The soul is a summary of the functions of the brain, which will be extinguished by death. It is absurd to believe in personal immortality. Power and substance, energy and material are the attributes of substance.
Haeckel urged his fellow Germans to accept their evolutionary destiny, based upon his interpretation of Darwin, as a “master race” and urged them to “out compete” what he felt were “inferior” peoples. In the “Great Chain of Being” view, Africans were at the bottom whereas Europeans were the highest products of evolution. That view became a part of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, to the dismay of many liberals who at first had liked the concept. In 1906, Haeckel formed the Deutscher Monistendbund which, aided by the fact that if one opted out of religion in Germany, allowed one to escape taxes. It and Freigeistige Aktion gained more than one million members. Haeckel was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). His name appeared as an Honorary Associate in the RPA’s initial appeal for £1,000., and the RPA published his Riddle of the Universe. (See entry for Ivan Bloch.) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Karl Becker; FUK; HNS2; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}
Hagen, Benjamin Olive (1791— 1877) Hagen, a Quaker, embraced the views of Robert Owen and was a chief upholder, along with Mrs. Hagen, of Owen’s views in the town of Derby, England. {BDF; VI}
Hagen, Dale (20th Century) Hagen, an American ethical humanist, participated in the 1996 conference of humanists in Mexico City. His e-mail: <dhagen2801@aol.com>.
Hagtvet, Bernt (20th Century) Hagtvet, of the University of Oslo’s Department of Political Science, is a Norwegian signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Hägerstiön, Axel (20th Century) Hägerstiön is author of a general critique of religion, Philosophy and Religion (1964).
Hahn, Emily (1905—1997) A mining engineer, a research physicist, a worker with the Red Cross in the Belgian Congo, Hahn was an early feminist, the author of more than 200 articles for The New Yorker. as well as fifty-four books, including Hongkong Holiday (1946), England to Me (1949), Love Conquers Nothing (1952), (1946), and Once Upon a Pedestal (1974). In 1924 she traveled across the country in a Model T Ford, and The New Yorker published some of her experiences. In 1930, she wrote Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction—A Beginner’s Handbook, a work containing her radical ideas about romance. In 1930, inspired by Charles A. Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, she went alone to Africa where she worked in a hospital and lived with a tribe of Pygmies. In 1935, as The New Yorker’s correspondent in China, she met Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, becoming a confidante of the Soong sisters (one of whom married Sun Yat-sen and the other Chiang Kai-shek), writing The Soong Sisters in 1941. While in China, Hahn had an affair with Sinmay Zau, spent time in opium dens, and became addicted to the drug. “I was young and I thought it was romantic to smoke opium. I was quite determined. It took me a year or so to become addicted, but I kept at it.” Later, a hypnotist cured her of the habit. In Hong Kong, she met the married Major Charles R. Boxer, a British intelligence officer, with whom she had a daughter [Carola Boxer Vecchi], proudly proclaiming the event at a time when illegitimacy was quite frowned upon. When the major was imprisoned by the Japanese, she brought food to him in the prison and avoided repatriation by saying she was Eurasian. Eventually interned, she was sent back to the United States on the Gripsholm in 1943. In 1945, she and the major married and had a second child, Amanda. In 1992, of humanism she wrote to the present author:
I am no philosopher, but I seem to be on the side of most writers in opting for secular humanism, despite an uneasy feeling that I am not quite sure about humanism in general. Humans are not my favorite species, but I’m stuck with them.
As a follow-up, in an interview, Hahn told the present author that her father had been an atheist and an admirer of Robert G. Ingersoll.
Daddy took Ingersoll’s agnosticism hard. He really took it hard. He read to us out of the Bible to show us how silly the book was. In our village church in England, for I live there much of the time, my husband and I took our older daughter who was very religious and wanted to go to some Christmas or holiday service. And the vicar said, “Hello, Major Boxer, we don’t see much of you.” And my husband said, “No, you don’t. My wife is an agnostic, and I am an atheist. We came for the child.”
Laughing, she noted that only a small percentage of the English attend church any more. “Might this be an argument for disestablishmentarianism?” she was asked. “Yes,” she retorted, “they should ‘dis’ a lot of stuff!” Hahn, who became a member of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, is best known for her collection of stories, Times and Places (1970) In it was a story, “I Say This,” about the plight of a Congolese woman she once met. Told she might be able to improve her lot, the woman had replied with the Kingwana word denoting skepticism, “Wapi,” or “Sez you!” Some day in the future, Hahn had tried to convince the woman, females in Africa will be much better off and they should work toward that goal. “Someday, you will have power to decide for yourself about everything,” Hahn had advised. The woman had listened intently, her eyes looking downward. She then looked up. “Lady,” she ejaculated, “Wapi!” {WAS, 12 June 1992; WAS, 1996; Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996}
Haile Selassie: See entry for Ra.
Hailstork, Adolphus (1941— ) An African American who was raised an Episcopalian, Hailstork became a Unitarian and is a composer who teaches at Norfolk (Virginia) State University. David Lockington, associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony, has said of a recent Hailsork composition he was preparing to perform that it is a “drawing together of African traditions with his very strong Eurocentric musical training. There’s a wonderful blend going on.” Hailstork agreed, saying, “From the European thing I get harmony, orchestration, structure; from the African American side of me, some harmony—the split thirds, blues scales, melody, and rhythm! If multiculturalism is the thing, a lot of it meets in me.” {David Reich, “Crossover Composer,” World, November-December 1994}
Hainisch, Marianne (1839—1936) In 1894, Hainisch founded the ethical community in Austria with Friedrich Jodl. {TRI}
HAIR Hair has been given a special significance in many religions. As described in Frazer’s Golden Bough, for example, primitive peoples had certain hair styles for festivals, mournings, weddings, leaders, or medicine men. There were special styles for those in disgrace. According to Maynard L. Cassady, who was chairman of the Department of Religion at the University of Rochester in New York, Greek youths offered hair at initiation rites. Vedic students were instructed as how to wear their hair. Hindu ascetics and hermits set high store by hair arrangement (or disarrangement). In biblical times, long hair meant strength and integrity: The Biblical Samson’s hair was said to be a source of his power. Israelites extolled long hair in contrast to the clipped heads of their enemies. A shaved head meant humiliation, punishment, or penance. Semites generally forbade shaving. In later times, Hebrew men cut their hair but regarded a woman’s long hair as her glory. Christian monastic orders practiced use of the tonsure in a ceremony that involved cutting the subject’s hair. In 1486, the Malleus Maleficarum identified the hair of witches which was so laden with mystical powers that it was imperative witches should be shorn of their locks, as well as hanged by the thumbs, splashed on the head with alcohol, and set on fire. Deuteronomy allows warriors who become infatuated with their captives to marry, but first they must shave the women’s heads and abstain from sexual relations for a month, a practice followed in succeeding centuries by soldiers who were “true” believers. When Joan of Arc cut her locks short, she shocked 15th century leaders, and many artists dared not paint the nineteen-year-old rebel with anything but a flowing mane of hair. As noted by Wake Forest University scholar Utrike Wiethaus, “Men felt very comfortable when they cut off women’s hair,” for this illustrated the male power to desexualize, ostracize, punish, or strip women of their identity. “But,” added Ms. Withaus, “when women did it themselves—like Joan of Arc—the men just freaked out.” Some major as well as many minor rationalists, according to one Greenwich Village wag, are known to have been longhairs and/or hairsplitters. {ER}
Haire, Norman (1892—1952) Haire, whose pseudonym was Wykeham Terriss, was an Australian sex reformer, gynecologist, rationalist, and freethinker. Son of Polish parents and the last of eleven children, he became a captain in 1919 and went to London, where he met Havelock Ellis and an associate of Magnus Hirschfeld, head of the Institute for Sexual Reform in Berlin. When Haire’s Hymen, or the Future of Marriage, was published, the Sunday Chronicle in Australia asked that it be suppressed, whereupon the first printing sold out in three following days and Haire, although fined one hundred guineas, became famous. He then wrote under a pseudonym, publishing sex education articles in a mass circulation magazine, Woman, as a part of a war effort campaign to reduce venereal disease. His writing about frigidity brought the largest correspondence the magazine had ever received, but when an article on male masturbation was submitted the magazine’s new editor balked. Still, the magazine’s weekly circulation doubled, so in spite of loud complaints from Roman Catholic deputations, Haire’s salary was trebled. In England, Haire participated in the founding of the World League for Sexual Reforms. {SWW; TRI}
HAITIAN HUMANISTS Although no organized Haitian humanist groups have been formed, two contemporary authors—both socialists—have referred to their humanism: René Depestre and Jacques Roumain.
Hakeem, Helen (20th Century) Hakeem is assistant secretary of the Executive Council of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Hakeem, Michael (20th Century) Hakeem is a contributing editor of Freethought Today, which is published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He is chairman of that group’s Executive Council.
Haldane, J(ohn) B(urdon) S(anderson) (1892—1964) Son of John Scott Haldane, a British scientist who founded the Journal of Hygiene and made important contributions to mine safety, Haldane is known for his work as a geneticist. With John S. Huxley, he wrote Animal Biology (1927). His philosophic outlook is found in Science and Life: Essays of a Rationalist (1968). One of his more provocative books was Fact and Faith (1934), which shows his rationalistic outlook concerning religion. A Marxist who had disagreements with the Communist Party toward the end of his career, Haldane spent the last few years of his life in India, where he became a citizen. Haldane held that science was a source of social good through its application by the social administration, and to the end, which was a decade after Stalin’s death, he took pride in being termed “a respectable Communist.” “Capitalism,” he had written in 1938, “did not arise because capitalists stole the land or the workmen’s tools, but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive.” Haldane was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” he has written. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world. And I should be a coward if I did not state my theoretical views in public.” One of his ancestors, Robert Haldane (1764—1843), once said he would “rather have devils than missionaries,” and others in his family had believed in the Haldane tradition that the foundation of the state is seen as education, not administrators. Asked once what traits of God were evidenced by life on earth, Haldane thought of the 300,000-odd beetle species and facetiously remarked, “He must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles.” {CE; FUK; RE; TYD}
Haldane, John Scott (1864—1936) A physiologist sometimes mistakenly confused with John Burdon Haldane, Haldane was anti-materialistic and in a broad sense an advocate of vitalism but, according to McCabe, was “otherwise a Rationalist.” {RE; TRI}
Haldar, Sukumas (20th Century) A freethinker in India, Haldar wrote The Lure of the Cross, An Inquiry into the Claims of Christianity (1924). {GS}
Haldeman, Joe William (1943— )
Haldeman, a non-theist, wrote Planet of Judgment (1977); All My Sins Remembered (1977); The Hemingway Hoax (1990); and Worlds Enough and Time (1993). He was editor of Cosmic Laughter (1974). The treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1970 to 1973, Haldeman became its president from 1992 to 1994. During the Vietnam war era, he was turned down as a conscientious objector by his draft board because he was an atheist and had no minister to give him a letter. “All I did was point out that I was willing to spend six years in the Peace Corps, digging ditches in Africa, rather than go kill people,” he said, concluding with a smile, “I wound up carrying a gun in Vietnam.” {CA; E} Joe Haldeman, Novelist art
Haldeman, a Hugo and Nebula award winner, writes "I applied to be a conscientious objector during the [Vietnam war era] and was turned down by my draft board because I was an atheist -- not that they had anything against freedom of religious expression, you understand, but you couldn't get a C.O. deferment unless you had a letter from your minister. And atheists don't have ministers. A year later someone smarter challenged the policy in court, and won. All I did was point out that I was willing to spend six years in the Peace Corps, digging ditches in Africa, rather than go kill people." He concludes "I wound up carrying a gun in Vietnam."
Visit his home page at http://www.teleport.com/~cos/jhald/.
Haldeman-Julius, Alice (20th Century) Haldeman-Julius in 1940 edited the International Freethought Annual.
Haldeman-Julius, Emanuel (1889—1951) Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books were inexpensive, had a light-blue cover stock, and were eclectic in subject matter: sex, religion, anarchy, liberalism, Unitarianism, freethought—you name the subject matter hard to find in libraries of that time, and E. Haldeman-Julius printed it. In effect, he served as educator for the masses. Characterizing the average Christian minister, to the delight of his American Freeman readers, he might include the latest purported news from the Bible Belt: “Bishop Beerbelch pronounced today that he believes a religion without a Hell isn’t worth a damn!” With his down-to-earth prose, he invited closet socialists or village atheists to mail in their orders, which his Girard, Kansas, company was quick to supply. In the Encyclopedia of Unbelief Ryan has a thorough description of the man and his activities, mentioning how he employed the talents of such diverse individuals as Bertrand Russell, Joseph McCabe, Leo Markun, Vance Randolph, T. Swann Harding, and C. Harley Grattan. In his “Meaning of Atheism,” he wrote, “After all, the principal objection which a thinking man has to religion is that religion is not true—and is not even sane. . . . Throughout the greater part of its history, religion has been a form of ‘holy’ terrorism. . . . Wherever there is devout belief—there is also the inseparable feeling of fear. . . . Religion interferes with life and, being false, it necessarily interferes very much to the detriment of the sound human interests of life.” During World War II, Haldeman-Julius published McCabe’s allegation that the Vatican was linked with the Axis powers, this being just one of over twenty books and pamphlets which he authored. A 1948 exposé of the FBI allegedly stoked the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover. Haldeman-Julius in 1951 was found guilty of federal income-tax evasion and, while awaiting an appeal, mysteriously drowned in his Girard, Kansas, swimming pool. {EU, William F. Ryan; FUK}
Hale, Alan (20th Century) Hale was the co-discoverer in 1995 of Comet Hale-Bopp, which should become an internationally spectacular celestial object during the spring of 1997. He is director of the Southwest Institute for Space Research, an independent research and educational organization based in Cloudcroft, New Mexico. He has written, “The idea that we on the Earth hold some type of privileged position within the universe, or that one particular group of individuals on this planet holds a supernaturally ordained privileged position over its other inhabitants, is recognized for the absurdity that it must be. In the long run, he holds,
if we can convince our fellow human beings that the sights we see in the heavens—even something as wondrous as Comet Hale-Bopp will hopefully turn out to be—are purely natural phenomena, and that there is no need to invoke any supernatural or mystical elements as an explanation, then we will have taken a significant step toward preparing our society to deal responsibly with the technological and ethical issues with which it will be confronted during the twenty-first century.
What is particularly desirable at this time is a more enlightened and scientifically literate public. “The time is ripe for such an effort,” he has written, “and I urge all freethinkers and rationalists who are reading this to work together with me toward bringing this to pass.” Hale is a supporter of Internet Infidels. {CA; “The Unlimited Cosmos—A Personal Odyssey” by Alan Hale, Free Inquiry, Summer 1996}
Hale, Constance R. (20th Century) Hale is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker.
Hale, Edward Everett (1822—1909) A Unitarian minister, once chaplain of the U.S. Senate, Hale published anonymously in Atlantic Monthly “The Man Without a Country,” a short novel which brought him much publicity and is still being read. He originated the Lend-a-Hand clubs, was related to the patriot Nathan Hale, and once taught at Boston Latin School. Van Wyck Brooks said that, when a chaplain, Hale was asked, “Do you pray for the Senators, Dr. Hale?” “No,” Hale responded, “I look at the Senators and pray for the country.” He was minister of Boston’s South Congregational Church (Unitarian). {CE; U; U&U; UU}
Hale, M. (20th Century) Hale, a freethinker, wrote “Atheism and Anarchy” (1924). {GS}
Hale, Nathan Unitarian minister and writer who wrote “The Man Without a Country” during the Civil War.
Halévy, Jacques François Fromentel Elie (1799—1862)
Halévy, a French composer, was a professor at the Paris Conservatoire, Commander of the Legion of Honor, and member of the French Academy. A friend of Renan, he shared his liberal theism. Leon (1802—1883), his brother, was a Hellenist who had several works crowned by the Academy. Both deserted the Jewish faith for freethought.
Léon’s two sons, novelist Ludovic (1834—1908) and Orientalist Joseph (Born 1827), were both rationalists, also. {JM; RAT; RE}
Haley, Alex (1921—1992) Haley was an African American who made millions of dollars on a1976 work, Roots, which allegedly traced his family back to its African origins. The work, however, was plagiarized from Harold Courlander’s The African and, according to Margaret Walker, from her own Jubilee. After becoming a literary star, Haley was sued by Courlander and settled after a five-week trial for $650,000. The presiding judge, Robert Ward, ruled that “Alex Haley perpetrated a hoax on the public,” but he has added, “I encouraged a settlement because I believed that Alex Haley was a significant figure in the black community. I believe that Haley was a symbol. I believe that it would not serve any purpose to smash the symbol.” In other words, commented black columnist Stanley Crouch about the judge’s “prototypical Caucasian paternalism,” “If those darkies are happy with their African heritage hoax, let them have it. They’re children anyway. The truth would overwhelm them, poor things.” Proof of the statement is evident in a 1998 statue unveiled by Haley in Morningside Park, Knoxville, Tennessee. Large crowds come by to honor the Tennessean. {Daily News, New York, 12 April 1998}
Halifax, Charles Montagu, (George Savile) [1st Earl Of] (1661—1715) An English statesman, once lord of the treasury, Halifax co-authored with Prior a parody of John Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther, calling it The Town and the Country Mouse (1687). Britain’s national debt can be traced to Halifax’s proposing a system of government borrowing which established such a debt. In 1694, the Bank of England was founded using his and William Paterson’s plan, and Halifax was appointed chancellor of the exchequer. In 1695 he designated Isaac Newton as warden of the mint. Although his contemporaries often called him a deist, even an atheist, Robertson states that his writings show Halifax was either an atheist or a Unitarian. {BDF; CE; JMR}
Hall, Benjamin [Baron] (1802—1867) A member of the House of Lords in England, Hall is known to have stood up and attacked the Church of England for “great abuses in the management of ecclesiastical property.” He insisted on the right of the Welsh to have church services in their own language and, a Unitarian, he was an early proponent of the separation of church and state. But it was during his position of Commissioner of Works that he achieved the most fame: By settling a dispute between the clockmaker and the architect at the time the clock was being constructed at the Houses of Parliament, Hall was memorialized because the clock then became known as Big Ben.
Hall, Covington (1871—1951) Hall’s work, Dreams and Dynamite: Selected Poems, was published in 1985. He has been called by Fred Whitehead “in the heritage of hard-core radical and working class Freethinkers and deserves to be better known today.” A “son of the South,” he was born of a Bourbon family in Louisiana. In 1904 he was chosen Adjutant General of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. {Freethought History, #16, 1995}
Hall, David (20th Century) Hall, a scholar, in “Is the Universe a Duck or a Rabbit?”, examined the thought of two theologians—John Hick and Fritjof Schuon—who, from different perspectives, both look at the possibility of transcendence. Their ideas in the humanist debate with religion of naturalism vs. transcendentalism, he found, ultimately beg the question of whether any concept of God is tenable. {New Humanist, September 1996}
Hall, Edward T(witchell) (1914— ) Hall, an anthropologist who did field work in Micronesia, is author of Handbook for Proxemic Research (1975), The Fourth Dimension in Architecture (1975) and Beyond Culture (1976). His Who’s Who entry states, “The most difficult task in the world is to know one’s self. But knowing others can aid in the performance of that task.” Asked by the present author about humanism, he responded,
I am a non-theist. I look at life with continuing and deep wonder, am a spiritual person, but I reject all organized or gnostic religions. Zen is as close as I can get. There is no way my insignificant mentality can pretend to understand how it all came about or how it works. I know my own life has been a succession of small and large miracles. How and why? No one person or persons are responsible if anything is. It is the reality that unfolds daily before my very eyes. It’s all there for anyone who will take the trouble to look.
{WAS, 20 November 1994}
Hall, Elizabeth (20th Century) According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Hall is the author of Possible Impossibilities, a work which allegedly “would lead children to believe ideas contrary to the teachings of the Bible.” (See entry for Banned Books.)
Hall, Frank A. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hall was minister of the Murray Universalist Church in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He later became minister of the Unitarian Church in Westport, Connecticut. In 1974, Hall wrote An Evaluation of the Massachusetts Furlough Experience, concerning prisons and prisoners. Religious Humanism contains a play/pulpit drama in which “Man” talks to “God” and “Satan.” The essence of the play suggested that God and Satan are aspects of our human psyche, that “truth” seems so “basic” it needs no explanation. An anthropomorphic god is, to paraphrase Paul’s famous comment, “thinking like a child,” Hall has observed, adding, “I choose not to use the G-word, but neither do I dismiss it as merely childish. When asked if I am a theist I respond with the appropriate question, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Humanist’ often (if not usually) means ‘humanistic’ or ‘humanitarian’ to most folks, so we’re all ‘humanists.’ ” {HM2; WAS, 7 March 1995; World, May-June 1995}
Hall, Frank Oliver (1860—1941) A leading spokesman for Universalism in the early part of the twentieth century, Hall was a pacifist who was active in the Church Peace Union, an organization funded by Andrew Carnegie, whose purpose was to explore avenues toward international peace through the leadership of the churches. He forcefully articulated the key tenet of Universalism, attacking the “hideous and sickening conception of God which makes him the creator of a little heaven for a select few and a big hell for the vast majority of the human race.” He defined God as “the name we give to the creative energy,” which is in line with modern speculative naturalism. The object of life, he affirmed in his Common People (1901), is development, and the purpose of the universe “is the production of the highest possible type of manhood and womanhood.” {U&U}
Hall, G(ranville) Stanley (1844—1924) Hall, an American psychologist and educator, wrote Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology (1923). “No priestcraft can longer make man content with misery here in the hope of compensation hereafter,” he wrote in Senescence (1922). {GS; TYD}
Hall, Henry (19th Century) In 1892, Hall wrote Ethan Allen . {FUS}
Hall, John Carey (Born 1844) Hall was a positivist. Entering the consular service in Japan in 1868, he became Acting Vice-Consul at Yedo (1869) and was Consul-General at Yokohama (1902—1914). Hall has written on China and Japan and was one of the founders of the China Society. A member of the Positivist Church and the Rationalist Press Association, he contributed occasionally to the Positivist Review. {RAT}
Hall, Lucia K. B. (20th Century) Hall is a biochemist, artist, and editor of the San Diego Humanist, published by the Humanist Association of San Diego. Her e-mail: <nhall@godless.org>.
Hall, Martin (20th Century) In the 1960s, Hall was a director of the American Humanist Association.
Hall, Norman (20th Century) Hall is the southwest liaison officer for the National Ocean Data Center in La Jolla, California. He is past president of the Humanist Association of San Diego (ASHS). His e-mail: <nhall@godless.org>. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Hall, Robert (20th Century) Hall, a freethinker, is professor of philosophy and sociology at the College of Steubenville in Ohio.
Hall, Sharlot (1870—1943) Hall, who was born in frontier Kansas, was given her first name, an Indian name, by her uncle. Her family attended lectures by freethinker Samuel Putnam in 1895 and, although only twenty-four and he was fifty-six, she fell in love and wrote freethought poetry. His death in 1896 made headlines because the fully dressed bodies of Putnam and a young woman lecturer, Mary L. Collins, were found on the floor of a hotel room, asphyxiated by a gas leakage. Seeing the lot of her mother and most women, Hall vowed never to marry, once remarking, “The egotism of the average man is so great that he thinks he is a glorious sight—even with a wad of tobacco in his cheek and the spit drooling off his chin.” {WWS}
Hall, Stuart (20th Century) Hall in the 1950s edited with Edward Thompson New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, both journals of socialistic humanism.
Hall, T. L. (20th Century) Hall is active with the Humanists of South East Michigan. (See entry for Michigan Humanists.) {FD}
Halley, Edmund (1656—1742) Halley, the eminent English astronomer, was the first to predict the return of a comet and the first to point out the use of a transit of Venus in determining the parallax of the sun. In 1667 he went to St. Helena to observe the southern skies, cataloguing 341 stars of the Southern Hemisphere. He financed the publication of his friend Isaac Newton’s Principia and in 1720 was made the royal astronomer. Halley also discovered the proper motions of the stars and the acceleration of the moon’s mean motion. Known in his lifetime as “the Infidel Mathematician,” Halley was further memorialized in Chalmers’s Biographical Dictionary as follows: “It must be deeply regretted that he cannot be numbered with those illustrious characters who thought it not beneath them to be Christians. . . . That he was an infidel in religious matters seems as generally allowed as it appears unaccountable.” {BDF; JM; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Hallidie, Andrew Smith (1836—1900) Hallidie, a Unitarian, invented the cable car. Also he founded the San Francisco Public Library and Art Society. {UU}
HALLOWEEN Halloween, or Hallowe’en, is related to the Druid Feast of Samhain, at which time priests offered animal sacrifices and built bonfires (bone fires) on hilltops. Samhain—the word in Irish Gaelic for November is pronounced SOW-in—came to earth that night to collect the spirits of all who had died during the year. It is celebrated on November Eve and marks both the beginning of winter and Celtic New Year, one of the two holiest days in the pagan calendar (the other being May 1, or Beltane), when the veil between the worlds is thinnest, and the beloved dead can (and allegedly do) return to be with us. By celebrating the season of darkness, demons and witches were let loose upon the earth to play tricks upon mortals. There were two ways to escape: fool them by dressing as one of them and escape their notice, or pacify them with sweet foods. “So much for the origin of trick or treat,” a New York Times editorialist has observed. But Patricia Kennealy Morris, a self-proclaimed witch, holds that Samhain (pronounced sah-win) is a joyful and solemn festival which has nothing whatever to do with the Devil or the demonic. “As Pagans,” she has written, “we acknowledge neither the Christian God nor the Christian Adversary; our deities predate both. The Horned Lord who for us rules the winter half of the year is no devil but the male principle of the universe personified, represented (not surprisingly for a totemic hunting people like the Celts) as a man with the antlers of a stag. No Devil, no evil witches, no sacrifices: All those things were later Christian inventions, intended to turn the folk away from the ancient benign practices—and unfortunately succeeding all too well, as we see.” As for the jack-o’-lanterns, in Ireland lived a notoriously stingy drunkard named Jack who was said to have tricked the Devil into climbing an apple tree, where he was trapped. Jack made the price of freedom a promise from the Devil never to take his soul. Eventually Jack died and was rejected from heaven because of the meanness and his fondness for drink. When he tried Hell, he was rejected because of the Devil’s old promise. But the Devil did give Jack a coal from the fire to light his journey from the netherworld. Jack placed the coal in a turnip he had been eating and began wandering the earth, homeless, waving his “jack-o’-lantern.” In times past, Irish children carved faces in Halloween lanterns made from potatoes and turnips. Upon reaching America, they discovered the natural superiority of the pumpkin as a receptacle for satanic fire. When the pumpkin, Curcurbita pepo, was first cultivated, it was for its seeds, which were a prized snack among the 6th-millennium B.C.E. cave dwellers of the Tamaulipas Mountains in Mexico. Then it was mixed with cornmeal for bread, filled with milk and made into custard, and baked in hot ashes. In the 1840s, it began to be used to create the grinning orange faces. “Now on Halloween,” concluded a New York Times editorialist, “the last great pagan holiday, the New World pumpkin grins through a night still redolent of Old World magic. It is impossible to imagine such effective ghoulish grimaces coming from a turnip.” (See entries for vampire, witches, and zombies.) {“Consider the Pumpkin,” The New York Times, 31 October 1994}
Halstead, Beverly (1933—1991) A prominent paleontologist, Halstead wrote occasionally for the British New Humanist. He received considerable notoriety in 1987 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. With a partner, Dr. Helen Haste, he physically demonstrated the difficulty that dinosaurs would have had in managing sexual intercourse. At the time of his death, he was President of the Geologists’ Association and of the geology section of the British Association. In a June 1988 article in New Humanist, he described the evening he “went for a final pee and to my incredulity and shock I emptied a full bladder of good thick deep red blood. No pain, just a vivid crimson stream.” Cancer! To become empathetic to the feelings of those who learn for the first time they have cancer, his “On the Biology and Philosophy of Cancer” is a practical reference. His outlook utilized the humanistic tradition, of understanding through metaphor and rhetoric, which is in diametric opposition to the Cartesian tradition.
HAM Ham, who was the Biblical Noah’s son after whom the Hamitic languages were named, was black. Medieval Christianity as well as Islam forbade the enslavement of their own adherents, but some Christians saw blacks as descendants of Ham and, therefore, eternally cursed. Slavery of non-believers was not frowned upon and, in fact, the practice was thought a possible way to scare them into becoming believers. {The Economist, 31 December 1999}
Hamad, Alaa (20th Century) Hamad, an Egyptian writer, was dismissed in 1994 from his job as an employee for thirty-five years of Egypt’s tax authority following an allegation that he had written an immoral book. The novel was Al-Firash (The Bed), and it followed a previous work, A Distance in a Man’s Mind (1991), which was critical of religion and resulted in his being sentenced to eight years in prison.
Haman Haman, according to the Jewish Talmud, was a notorious anti-Semite. The Persian king Ahasuerus reportedly granted power to Haman, who became known for his anti-Semitism.
Hamerling, Robert (1830—1889) A German poet, Hamerling translated Leopardis’s poems. A freethinker, he wrote poems such as “Ahasuerus in Rome” (1866) and “The King of Sion.” Hamerling also wrote a tragedy, Danton and Robespierre. {BDF; RAT}
Hamerstrom, Frances (1908-1998) An internationally known field biologist, Hamerstrom was a conservationist and wildlife biologist. For fifty years she and her husband, Frederick Hamerstrom, lived in a Wisconsin house that had no running water, had not been painted since the Civil War, and had no heat aside from a few cast-iron wood-burning stoves. The two studied prairie chickens, helping to save the endangered species. He was a nephew by marriage to Clarence Darrow. She wrote several books, including An Eagle to the Sky (1970) about nursing an eagle back to health, and My Double Life (1994), her autobiography. In 1986 she addressed the national convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation on the subject of religion and animals. “No chewing gum, and no church,” she said were the only two rules when their children were growing up. A crack wing-shot with a Parker 20-gauge shotgun, she allocated her time applying the humanistic “Hamerstrom Rule of Thirds:
• spend a third of your time for the worthless red tape that your boss requires; • spend a third of your time doing what is wanted of you; and • spend a third of your time doing exactly what you please. (The New York Times, 7 September 1998)
Hamerton, Philip Gilbert (1834—1894) Hamerton, an artist and writer, refused to go to Oxford because he would not sign their Thirty-nine Articles. An etcher, novelist, and writer on art, Hamerton was joint founder of the Portfolio (1869). In his posthumously published autobiography (1897), Hamerton avows his rationalism, though he thought that “true liberation” from theology would come by acquiring knowledge rather than by controversy. {RAT}
Hamilton, Ernest William [Lord] (1888—1939) Hamilton, the son of the Duke of Abercorn, had a career in the Army followed by seven years in Parliament. He then wrote several novels and books on religion. Although a theist, Hamilton rejected all Church doctrines and the idea of a future life. “Church dogmas are doomed,” he wrote in Involution (1912). {RAT; RE}
Hamilton, Alexander (1755-1804) Hamilton, whose imprint on the United States is overlooked by those, some say, who overly emphasize George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams as the major Founding Fathers, was a theist, not a deist. Also, he was one of the most colorful people of his time: having been born on the West Indian island of Nevis it is possible he had some African ancestors in his past; his published letters to John Laurens to “put on the toga” and come with him to Washington imply a possible love for the American Revolutionary soldier—”Adieu: I embrace you tenderly. . . . My friendship for you will burn with that pure flame which has kindled you your virtues. . . . I love you,” perhaps flowery language popular at the time rather than statements to be taken literally; having an adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, which was the first great sex scandal in American politics; a person whose influence made Jefferson the President and Aaron Burr the Vice President, later being the one who thwarted Burr in becoming Governor of New York State; and after calling Burr a “dangerous man” and being challenged to a duel, lost his life in a Weehawken Heights, New Jersey, fight, dying at a physician’s house on Jane Street (after crossing the Hudson River to Manhattan. Hamiltonians complain that Jefferson owned slaves and thought they were naturally inferior whereas Hamilton thought they deserved citizenship and should serve in the Revolutionary War. Hamilton supporters add that Jefferson’s ideal America was based on states’ rights, agrarian capitalism, and isolationism whereas Hamilton envisioned the nation we have become, a centralized industrial superpower with civil rights enforced by the Federal Government. Detractors claim he seriously considered proposing an American monarchy not unlike that of England’s. Hamilton, whose image appears on the U.S. $10 bill is, appropriately, buried at the western end of New York City’s Wall Street. {CE; Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History; Michael Lind, The New York Times, 3 and 8 July 1998}
HAMLET • Are the commentators on Hamlet really made, or only pretending to be? —Oscar Wilde
• Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors—no wonder he is crazy. —H. L. Mencken
• “Who,” asked the priest after a Connecticut service, “comes anywhere near being as inspirational a figure as Jesus?” “Hamlet,” quickly replied a New Canaanite. “Because he was credibly human, fell in love, was witty with a sense of humor, accepted who his real father was and was a faithful son, didn’t spout Christianity, was intellectual, loved the dramatic, was a Montaigne-like skeptic, was devoted to justice, exemplified. . . .” “Enough!” replied the priest, whose favorite literary character was Hamlet also and who thought it better not to develop the case against the Prince of Denmark, a child of the Renaissance, a noble human being struggling against a corrupt world, a disillusioned idealist, the mouthpiece of his creator’s thought, a person who had the consistency, or inconsistency, of life itself.
In a millennium issue of The New York Times Magazine (18 April 1999), editors asked numbers of individuals their answer to the question of what was the best—ideas, stories, inventions, etc.—responses which have been put into a “Times Capsule” that will not be opened until the year 3000. “What was the greatest poem of the millennium?” they asked. “Hamlet,” responded Helen Hennessy Vendler, poetry critic and a professor in Harvard University’s English Department. A member of the American Philosophical Society, she called the work “as lyric as it is dramatic” and “a celebration of skepticism.” Her evaluation made it clear she considers Hamlet a philosophic work and, although she did not use the specific words, it is one entirely in keeping with the philosophy of naturalistic humanism:
Hamlet believes only in death—not in the Christian afterlife that was part of the ideology of his century. For him, the single question is, To be or not to be. Mortality is one uneasiness in him, murder the other, and it scarcely matters in the end whether mortality comes by murder, since what vexes Hamlet is mortality itself. Even the flesh of a king “may go to a progress through the guts of a beggar”; ultimately everything human comes to death, to the sun-kissing carrion and the omnivorous worm. . . . Hamlet—even after seeing the ghost—speaks merely of bad dreams that may come in the sleep of death. The remnants of belief have been scotched by his mordant university learning. In its repudiation of Christian consolation, “Hamlet” marks the philosophical turning point of our Western millennium: the moment in which that reflective skepticism so repellant to [Czeslaw] Milosz (who nonetheless shares it) becomes intellectually dominant. In the wake of the collapse of religious authority comes social revolution: “The toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier he galls his kibe. . . .” “Hamlet” is, then, our pre-eminent post-Christian poem, refusing both the redemptive linear plot of Christianity—by which God brings good out of evil—and the stable political hierarchy implicit in the Christian belief that regal authority is derived from God. Like most lyric poems, “Hamlet” exhibits a recursive structure: the deathblow repeats itself in the fortune of each main character; the morbid dumb show and the “mousetrap” play replicate the main murder plot; and the open graves of the innocent Yorick and Ophelia serve as gaping symbols of the tragedy’s continual undersong of grief. Emily Dickinson once wrote, “He has found his Future who has found Shakespeare.” It is our own future predicament that we find in this great dramatic poem, as we hear Hamlet’s lyric obbligato musing over the gravediggers’ stage.
HAMLET’S GHOST: See entry for Ghosts.
Hamlin, Hannibal [Vice President] (1809—1891) Hamlin, the statesman who was Vice President under President Lincoln, was a Unitarian. {CE; U; UU}
Hammer, Armand (1898—1990) Hammer, who expanded the Occidental Petroleum Corporation into a multibillion-dollar business, was known as an atheist as well as one of the world’s richest men. A promoter of peace and economic ties with the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, he was treated throughout the world as if a diplomat dedicated to ending the Cold War between the USSR and the United States. Nearly one hundred million dollars of Occidental’s funds went to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Danielle Mitterand, wife of the President of France, was present at the center’s opening ceremony and was pledged three hundred thousand dollars to the Mitterands’ private foundation. Hammer also pledged well over one million dollars to the Salk Institute, and to the National Symphony Orchestra he pledged two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for playing “Happy Birthday” to him at his ninetieth birthday party. Others scheduled to benefit from his generosity were his art consultant, Martha Kaufman, and his physician, Rosamaria Durazo. When he died, however, a different picture of Hammer came into view. It had been his Frances’s, his wife’s, money that had been used to start him in his successful business ventures. When Frances had become suspicious of the relationship between her husband and his art consultant, Kaufman had changed her identity to Hilary Gibson and had continued to be his mistress. So had the physician been his mistress. In addition, Hammer had had a number of illegitimate children with other ladies. Meanwhile, he was serving as a conduit for dubious Russian artworks and was trafficking in fake Imperial Fabergé eggs that he authenticated as genuine with an official Fabergé stamp. Also, he allegedly was involved in bribery schemes said to have helped him land lucrative oil drilling and mineral concessions in Venezuela and Libya. To the Communist International in New York, he is said to have secretly distributed the equivalent of $600,000 in 1996 currency. Jacob Jay Epstein, in a thorough investigation, has found that Hammer when he went to Russia in the 1920s had said he was an atheist. When later he went to Saudi Arabia and Libya in search of oil in the 1960s, he listed himself as Unitarian. But in his final days, he met with Rabbi Daniel Lapin of the Pacific Jewish Center and arranged a bar-mitzvah ceremony for December 11th, the first night of Hanukkah. The day before, however, he succumbed of cerebral arteriosclerosis, and the various groups and individuals who had expected to inherit fortunes were to learn that he had left only around forty million dollars, much of which would be used to pay personal debts, legal bills, estate taxes, and the claims made in the suit by his wife Frances’s estate. It then became evident that when the final hammer pounded home, the sound was that of an entire life of deception. Had he lived but one more day, he would have officially become a Jew. {Edward Jay Epstein, The New Yorker, (23 Sep 1996)}
Hammerton, John Alexander [Sir] (1871—1949) Hammerton, after a long experience in journalism including writing for Punch, the Harmsworth serial publications (History of the World, 1907—1909; The World’s Great Books, 1909—1910, etc.), and other large-scale works of reference. Although he was knighted and received much fame, described in his autobiographical Books and Myself, he achieved a special feat. Attributed to him is the most popular of all twentieth century gestures: the “V” sign. He had sighted a “V” for victory sign apparently blazed by a Hawker Hurricane in the sky over the village of Firle in Sussex in the late 1940s. When he wrote about it in War Illustrated, the sign replaced the customary “thumbs up” and was adopted throughout beleaguered Europe as a symbol of defiance to Nazism. Sir John was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {RE}
Hammon, William (18th Century) Hammon reportedly wrote the first atheistic work in England, Answer to Dr. Priestley’s letters to a philosophical unbeliever (1782). However, his name might be a pseudonym used by Dr. Matthew Turner. (See entry for Matthew Turner.) {FUK}
Hammond, William (20th Century) A liberal minister, Hammond was once a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Hamond (Hamont), Matthew (Died 1579) Hamond was an English heretic, by trade a ploughwright. He was burned at Norwich in 1579 for holding “that the New Testament and the Gospel of Christ were pure folly, a human invention, a mere fable.” Previously, Hamond had been set in a pillory and both his ears had been cut off. {BDF}
Hamount, Matthew (16th Century) Hamount was a doubter who was burned at the stake in Norwich, England, in 1529. Priests had accused him of saying that the Bible “is but foolishness, a mere fable; that Christ is not God or the savior of the world, but a mere man.” {TYD}
HAMPSTEAD (England) HUMANIST SOCIETY For information about the Hampstead Humanist Society, write N. I. Barnes, 10 Stevenson House, Boundary Road, London NW8 0HP.
Hampton, Henry (1940-1998) Hampton was a producer whose television documentary, “Eyes on the Prize,” according to the Boston Globe, “set the standard for nonfiction accounts of the civil rights movement.” He was the founder of Blackside, Inc., served as a member of the Advisory Board of Beacon Press, and worked for the Unitarian Universalist Association from 1963 to 1968. During that time he called for clerical leaders to participate in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march of 1965. At the time of his death, Hampton was working on several projects, including I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts, Artists and Communities, to be released in 1999, and The African-American Religious Experience.
Hamsun, Knut (1859—1952) Knut Petersen, Norway’s novelist best known by his chosen name of Hamsun, was an admirer of the Scandinavian rationalists Ibsen, Björnson, and Brandes. He worked in America as a tram-driver and barber before returning to Norway to become its leading writer. Although broadly classed as a pantheist, he held “no particular philosophy,” stated biographer C. D. Marcus.
Hamsun wrote Hunger (1890). In a style now called literary naturalism, the work was greeted as one of the first “modern” novels, one that used a reflective, inner voice long before Proust or Joyce. The work was so influential that Isaac B. Singer in Knut Hamsun, Artist of Skepticism stated that “the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun.”
He also wrote Mysteries (1892), Pan (1894), and The Growth of the Soil (1917). The latter work set simple agrarian values against those of the new industrial society and was awarded the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although Norwegians are somewhat and deservedly proud of him, they have written widely about being ill at ease concerning his flagrant Nazi sympathies. During World War II Hamsun supported the collaborationist government of Norway’s pro-German and fascist leader Vidkund Quisling. In 1920 Hamsun sent his Nobel medal to German propagandist Herman Goering, and upon Hitler’s death he openly mourned. In 1946 Hamsun was declared by psychiatrists to be permanently mentally disabled and was fined $80,000 for economic collaboration with the enemy. In recent years Hamsun’s reputation has improved. Admittedly a cynic who despised suffragettes and shared August Strindberg’s misogynist views, Hamsun had an intense love of nature, an interest in the unconscious, and a humanistic concern for the material condition of the individual and its effect on one’s spirit. Biographer Robert Ferguson in Enigma: the Life of Knut Hamsun (1988) describes him as having been a man of generosity and integrity. He was, say his defenders, very old and perhaps senile when he fell in with Norway’s Nazis. One of his literary admirers is America’s writer in Yiddish Bashevis Singer. Levi Fragell, however, thinks Hamsun “did not criticize religion and, at the end of his life, expressed pro-Christian views.” {CE; The Economist, 17 January 1998; OEL; RE}
Hanaford, Phebe Ann (Coffin) (1829—1921) One of the first Universalist woman to be ordained (1868) to the ministry in New England, Hanaford had previously been a writer of fiction, poetry, children’s books, and a life of Lincoln. Her religious background had been Quaker, she had adopted the Baptist faith of her husband, but encouraged by Olympia Brown she converted to Universalism. One of her last projects was a compilation of biographies of American women, Women of the Century (1877). {CE; U&U}
Hancock, John (1737—1793) Hancock, whose name appears first (and largest) on the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Masonic Lodge, the rituals of which have heavy overtones of deism and which are antithetical to theism. He was governor of Massachusetts (1780—1785 and 1787—1793). {CE}
Handy, Rollo (20th Century) Handy, a former professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is an authority on 19th German materialism.
Hankins, Frank H. (1877—1970) Hankins signed Humanist Manifesto I. A social scientist who taught at Smith College, he was editor of American Sociological Review from 1936 to 1937. He wrote Studies in the Social Sciences (1908), The Racial Basis of Civilization (1926), and was an editor for Webster’s New International Dictionary. In 1960, he was named a Humanist Pioneer by the American Humanist Association. Hankins, writing about his outlook, said
Sociological and historical researchers have shown that the essential core of religion is devotion to those social values which bind men together in cooperative effort for group preservation and mutual welfare; and that these values are discovered through human experiences. Among those discovered in recent times are devotion to truth as exemplified in the scientific mentality, the dignity of individual man, and the ideals of democracy. Humanism thus becomes the next logical step in religious evolution; it is the heir and creative fulfillment of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the democratic revolutions. {EW; HM1; HNS; HNS2}
Hanlon, James O. (20th Century) Hanlon was a New Zealand freethinker who wrote Searchlight of the Bible, A Discussion Between a Christian and an Atheist (1943). {FUK; GS}
Hanna, Emily (20th Century) Hanna, while a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, signed the Campus Freethought Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.”
Hanna, Kathleen (20th Century) Hanna is a recording artist who was a member of the 1990s punk band Bikini Kill but now is a soloist. She and the band were allied with the Riot Grrrl feminist movement and at one time said, “I don’t believe in God, but I believe God invented four-tracks,” a jocular reference to recording studio terminology. {CA} Kathleen Hanna, Recording Artist music Hanna, Kathleen ( ) A recording artist who was a member of the 1990s punk band Bikini Kill and now has embarked on a solo career, Hanna and Bikini Kill are closely tied to the Riot Grrrl feminist movement. According to an interview in The San Francisco Bay Guardian (9 Sep 1998), her new album includes her view, “I don’t believe in God, but I believe God invented four-tracks.”
[CA}
In the September 9, 1998 edition of The San Francisco Bay Guardian is an interview with Kathleen Hanna. She was a member of the 1990s punk band Bikini Kill and is now embarking on a solo career. She and the band were closely tied to the Riot Grrrl feminist movement. The story is about this new move and her new album. In the piece Hanna says, "I don't believe in God, but I believe God invented four-tracks".
The story is available online at http://www.sfbg.com/AandE/32/49/julie.html.
Hanna, Peter (20th Century) Hanna heads the New South Wales Rationalist Association in Australia. E-mail: <rational@mail.mpx.com.au>.
Hannay, Alistair (20th Century) A freethinker, Hannay is professor of philosophy at the University of Trondheim, Norway. {SHD}
Hannay, James B. (20th Century) Hannay wrote the two-volume Sex Symbolism in Religion (1922).
Hanneman, Jeff: See entry for Slayer.
Hannotin, Émile (1812—1886)
Hannotin was a French deist, the editor of the Journal de la Meuse. He wrote Philosophical Theology (1846) and an “Essay on Man,” in which he seeks to explain life by sensibility. {BDF; RAT}
Hanotaux, Gabriel Albert Auguste (1853—1944)
A French historian and statesman, Hanotaux was Minister of Foreign Affairs (1894—1896 and 1896—1898). An officer of the Legion of Honor, he wrote of his agnosticism in the introduction to Despagnet’s La République et le Vatican (1906). Hanotaux was a member of the Academy. {RE)
Hansberry, Lorraine (1930—1965) A prominent African-American playwright, Hansberry wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the first play on Broadway by a black woman. She also wrote To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969). Her antipathy toward religious nonsense, shown in Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity (1991), is similar to that of other secular humanists. A lesbian, she connected homophobia and antifeminism, according to the University of Michigan’s Dorothy H. Lee, “calling for analyses of ethical questions implicit in the social and moral inequities produced by patriarchal culture.” In “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964), she boldly addressed the artistic and sexual issues of a white homosexual artist. Immune to orthodoxy, whether it came from whites or blacks, Hansberry confronted then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy about racism as easily as she addressed issues of sexism and homophobia in the black community. {The Advocate, 19 August 1997; CE; GL}
Hansen, Harold (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hansen was President of the Space Coast Chapter, American Humanist Association. {HM2}
Hansen, Peter (1936— ) Hansen is Vice President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. From 1992 to 1995, he was secretary of the Humanist Society. Hansen has had over five hundred letters and articles printed in newspapers and journals in New Zealand and Australia.
Hanson, Richard Davies [Sir] (1805—1876) Sir Richard was Chief Justice of South Australia. He wrote On Law in Nature (1865), The Jews of History (1869), and St. Paul (1875). Hanson was a freethinker. (BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Hanson, Robert J. (20th Century) A freethinker, Hanson wrote Errors of the Bible (1978). {GS}
Hansson, Sven O. (20th Century) Hanssen is the secretary of Vetenskap och Folkbildning (Swedish Skeptics), Box 185, 101 23 Stockholm, Sweden.
HANUKKAH Hanukkah is an eight-day Jewish Feast of Lights which commemorates the victory of the Jewish warrior Judah the Maccabee over the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes twenty-two centuries ago. The Talmud relates that there was enough oil to light the menorah, the candelabrum, for only one day. Yet it burned for eight, until fresh oil could be found. There being no organized skeptics’ society at the time, disinterested individuals to determine factually the quantity of oil, believers had faith that a miracle had occurred.
HAPPINESS Happiness for some may be sadness, or “not one’s cup of tea,” for others. Lord Russell, in Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1969), listed four important features of happiness: “The first is health; the second, sufficient means to keep you from want; third, happy personal relations; and fourth, successful work. . . . Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.” As to what does not bring happiness, he added, “One thing is worry; and that’s one respect in which I’ve become much happier as I’ve grown older. I worry much less and I found a very useful plan in regard to worry, which is to think, ‘Now what is the very worst thing that could happen?’ . . . And then think, ‘Well, after all, it wouldn’t be so very bad a hundred years hence; it probably wouldn’t matter.” Schopenhauer thought of happiness as a negative factor, the brief cessation of pain and misery, which are the constant. Others have had these ideas:
• Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. —Ambrose Bierce
• Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness. —Bertrand Russell
• The only really happy folk are married women and single men. —H. L. Mencken
• Happiness is not something you experience. It’s something you remember. —Oscar Levant
• Every man is thoroughly happy twice in his life: just after he has met his first love . . . and just after he has left his last one. —H. L. Mencken (The relative merits of happiness are discussed by Richard B. Brandt in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3. See entry for Stephen King concerning Albert Camus’s view that happiness is inevitable.)
HAPPY HUMAN A humanistic symbol called the Happy Human was created by Denis Barrington and used by the British Humanist Association and other groups. (See entry for Denis Barrington.)
HARASS To harass was, originally, to set a dog onto a person, a most inhumane act. The connotation came to mean persistent irritating or tormenting, illustrated by threats from the landlord to pay the rent, from demands by delinquents that merchants give them merchandise, and in the 1990s by females complaining about inhumanistic treatment they received while in the military forces. In the latter example, one pundit suggests that at issue is not one word but two.
Harburg, E. Y. (1896—1981) Lyricist, librettist, and author, Harburg wrote “Earl Carroll’s Sketchbook” (1929), “Ziegfield Follies” (1934), and “Bloomer Girl” (1944). He was co-librettist of “Finian‘s Rainbow” (1947), and he wrote lyrics for such films as “Wizard of Oz” (1937) and “Kismet” (1944). For “Over the Rainbow,” he received an Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Although Jewish, Harburg once wrote:
Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree, And only God who makes the tree Also makes the fools like me. But only fools like me, you see, Can make a god, who makes a tree. {PA}
Hardaker, William (19th Century) Hardaker, a freethinker, edited Old Thoughts for New Thinkers (c. 1883). {GS}
Hardebeck, John W. (20th Century) In the 1960s, Hardebeck was a vice president of the American Humanist Association.
Hardee, R. A. (19th Century) Hardee, a Floridian industrial pioneer, was a captain in the Confederate Army. He helped organize the Liberals of Florida, and he was outspoken concerning his own freethought. {PUT}
Hardie, Glenn M. (20th Century) Hardie is author of “Charles Bradlaugh—Freethinker” in Humanist in Canada (Summer, 1991). He is past president and long-time secretary of the British Columbia Humanist Association. In 1999, he and his wife, Lorraine Hardie, were presented with the first ever Distinguished Service Awards by the British Columbia Humanist Association.
Hardin, Garrett James (1915— )
The author of The Tragedy of the Commons, an eminent ecologist, Hardin received the 1989 Humanist Distinguished Service Award from the American Humanist Association. In 1988, he wrote Promethean Ethics, Living With Death, Competition, and Triage. {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1982; HNS2}
Hardin, Louis [Moondog] (1916-1999) “He was the most famous street person of his time, a hero to a generation,” according to The New York Times obituary. “The gaunt, blind musician known as Moondog, who was celebrated among New Yorkers for two decades as a mysterious and extravagantly garbed street performer,” wrote Glenn Collins, “went on to win acclaim in Europe as an avant-garde composer, conducting orchestras before royalty.” No matter the weather, Moondog could often be seen from the late 1940s to the early 1970s standing in mid-Manhattan around 54th Street and the Avenue of the Americas. He dressed in a homemade robe, sandals, a flowing cape, and a horned Viking helmet, the tangible expression of what he referred to as his “Nordic philosophy.” At his side he clutched a long spear of his own manufacture. Hardin had recorded jazz-accented compositions, usually for small wind and percussion ensembles. One, “All Is Loneliness,” became a hit when recorded by Janis Joplin. He also wrote soundtrack music for “Drive, He Said,” a 1972 movie with Jack Nicholson. Hardin was celebrated by Beat Generation poets and late-1960s flower children. According to Collins, he wrote Bohemian broadsides against government regimentation, against the world monetary system, and against organized religion. {Glenn Collins, The New York Times, 12 September 1999; WAS, conversations}
Harding, T(homas) Swann (20th Century) Harding was a freethinker who wrote “Why I Am a Skeptic” (1929) and The Popular Practice of Fraud (1935). {GS}
Harding, (President) Warren G. (1865—1923) In a 1922 address, President Harding stated, “In the experiences of a year of the presidency, there has come to me no other such unwelcome impression as the manifest religious intolerance which exists among many of our citizens. I hold it to be a menace to the very liberties we boast and cherish.” (TYD)
Hardman, Martha J. (20th Century) At a 1994 conference of the American Humanist Association’s Board, of which she is a member, Hardman spoke on “A Stroll Through the Sexist Structure of English.” The meeting was held at Stanford University in California. Her E-mail address: <afn11122@freenet.ufl.edu>.
Hardwicke, Edward (19th Century) For twelve years Hardwicke was Surgeon Superintendent of the Government Emigration Service. He was an agnostic of the school of Herbert Spencer, and he contributed to freethought and scientific periodicals. {BDF}
Hardwicke, Herbert Junius (Born 1850) Hardwicke, brother of Edward, was the principal agent in establishing the Sheffield Public Hospital for Skin Diseases. He published The Popular Faith (1884) and Evolution and Creation (1887). He has contributed to the Agnostic Annual. {BDF}
Hardwicke, William W. (19th Century) Under the pseudonym of M. D. Alatheia, Hardwicke wrote the Rationalist Manual (1897). {GS; RAT}
Hardy, Alister Clavering [Sir] (Born 1896)
Hardy, a Unitarian, was a marine biologist and researcher in religious experience. He wrote The Open Sea (195—). {U}
Hardy, Thomas (1752—1832) Hardy was unsuccessfully tried for high treason for having organized the London Corresponding Society. That group, inspired by the French Revolution and Thomas Paine, demanded mankind suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments, and payment of Members of Parliament. {TRI}
Hardy, Thomas (1840—1928) A pessimistic humanist deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, a non-theist (according to Robert Graves), and a determinist, Hardy looked upon man as a puppet of fate and the cosmos as “a viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel.” Without Christian supernaturalism, in short, some still retain an outlook of defeatism regarding man’s hopes and man’s progress on earth. Hardy’s novels show how indifferent nature joins with the narrow views of 19th-century humanity to bring human lives to disaster in a godless universe. His “Oxen” is a poetic statement of the loss which one realizes when he gives up the psychological comfort and social cohesiveness that had been possible in the Christian era, but the small hope Hardy offers is that in a rural setting man might possibly be able to live meaningfully, that if the native returns to his roots he will be shaped positively by the seasons and the local traditions; but Hardy’s pessimism persists, realizing that those traditions are vanishing. Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896) are set against a forbidding Dorset landscape (called Wessex in the novels) whose physical harshness echoes that of an indifferent, if not malevolent, universe. In the former, he has a reference to the kinds of hell-fire preachers who left messages of doom and damnation painted on walls and gateposts in rural Britain. Some considered the latter book immoral, because it dealt with sexual relations at a time when novelists avoided such. The Return of the Native (1878) describes the inability of people to adapt to other parts of the world, and it introduces the element of chance—if an important note is slipped under the door, but slides under the rug and is not seen, an entire plot can turn on the accident. For Hardy, people’s lives are ruled not only by nature and fate but also by Victorian social convention, which is in keeping with his reference to “a being who had rejected with indifference the attitude of sex for the loftier quality of abstract humanism.” According to Jim Herrick, editor of New Humanist, Hardy, “was an impassioned if bleak novelist who had a slight connection with the Rationalist Press Association.” Martin Seymour-Smith’s Hardy (1994) suggests that Hardy was attracted “to a form of gnosticism, associated with the Manichaean belief in the power of the principle of evil in the world. His reply to the well-meaning Rev. A. B. Grosart in February 1888 asking his view on the possibility of reconciling awareness of ‘the horrors of human and animal life’ emphasised by Darwinism with the belief in ‘the absoluteness and non-limitation of God’ is deadly” and is as follows:
Mr Hardy regrets that he is unable to suggest any hypothesis which would reconcile the existence of such evils as Dr. Grosart describes with the idea of omnipotent goodness. Perhaps Dr. Grosart might be helped to a provisional view of the universe by the recently published Life of Darwin and the works of Herbert Spencer and other agnostics.
To the critic Peter Faulkner, that letter suggests a Hardy well on the way to humanism. Already, Hardy was the friend of rationalists Leslie Stephen and Edward Clodd. However, in 1899 Hardy turned down the invitation of the Rationalist Press Association that he should become an Honorary Associate, arguing that he preferred to remain detached, that belonging to a philosophic association could be mis-read as propagandizing whereas his intent was “to be simply artistic & delineative. While thanking you for the proposal I will therefore decline associationship for the present.” Faulkner notes that in 1920 Hardy was invited to have himself included in Joseph McCabe’s A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists. Again, Hardy declined, on the grounds that he was “an irrationalist rather than a rationalist, on account of his inconsistencies . . . he thinks he could show that no man is a rationalist, and that human actions are not ruled by reason in the last resort.” In short, Hardy wanted to avoid categorization. He regularly went to church but was not a Christian. “I dream of an alliance between religions freed from dogmas,” he said. In the “Apology” to Late Lyrics and Earlier, he flirted with categorizations, stating that he believed in an “evolutionary meliorism,” a kind of Stoicism. In Christmas (1924), he wrote
“Peace on earth!” was said. We sing it And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison gas.
Faulkner differs from others by declaring that “Hardy, then, despite his antipathy to aspects of Christian dogma and his sceptical view of the Nature of God, was no humanist. Seymour-Smith’s summing up is justified by all the evidence that he gives: ‘He was an uneasy man whose emotionally religious heart was divided from his agnostic head. . . . Tom’s intellect stood bravely aloof from inventing, yet could not help yearning for, a “proof” of the existence of a universe that was ultimately benign.’ ” Critic Karl E. Meyer has pointed out a reason Hardy was known as such a brooding figure:
He not only destroyed the “diabolical diaries” of his first wife, Emma, but also dictated his memoirs to his second wife, Florence. She published them as her own life of the novelist after his death in 1928, enabling Hardy to design his own posthumous pedestal. (Three years after Florence’s demise, the bibliographer Richard Purdy finally revealed the truth in a 1940 lecture.)
Philip Norman, Awful Moments: "When Thomas Hardy died in 1928, his will directed that he be buried unostentatiously in the churchyard at Stinsford, deep in his beloved Wessex. However, just before the funeral, a suggestion came from Stanley Baldwin's government that so great a novelist and poet - whatever his own wishes - deserved no less a burial-place than Westminster Abbey. "Between Hardy's widow and the government, a compromise was reached. The great man's body would be interred at Westminster - but first his heart would be removed and, in a private ceremony following the public one, be buried at its symbolic home, Stinsford.
"There then arose the question of who should remove the heart. Hardy's family doctor refused, but a young assistant volunteered in his stead. The heart was cut out at the surgery, and the body honours.
"Since the heart was not to be buried until the next day, some method of storing it had to be found. Finally, the doctor's maid came up with the answer - a biscuit-tin.
"The biscuit-tin was sealed and placed in a garden-shed to await the morrow's poignant and poetipoetic interrment of Thomas Hardy's heart. Unluckily, during the night it was got at [eaten] by the doctor's cat."
Hardy was the first novelist buried at London’s Westminster Abbey since Charles Dickens. His heart, however, which a surgeon had removed and stored in a cookie can, was buried in Dorset at a Stinsford churchyard. {CB; CE; CL; EU, Victor N. Paananen; Peter Faulkner, New Humanist, May 1994; Robert Graves, speaking at John Masefield’s memorial, is in Corliss Lamont, Remembering John Masefield.; Karl E. Meyer, The New York Times, 7 February 1998;TRI; TYD}
Hare, Peter H. (20th Century) Hare is professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, an authority on atheism and the problem of evil, and a contributing editor on Philo. At the opening of the Jo Ann and Don Boydston Library of Philosophical Naturalism in 1995, Hare read a paper describing the illustrious American naturalist tradition in philosophy. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Hare edited Naturalism and Rationality (1986) and Doing Philosophy Historically (1988). (See entries for naturalism and Richard Rorty.)
Hargreaves, W.J.R. (19th Century) In Toronto in the 1870s, Hargreaves started the Freethought Journal. The first freethought in Toronto was formed in 1873, and a Freethought Association formed in 1877 to campaign for the taxation of ecclesiastical property, secular education, the abolition of the judicial oath, and “a free Sunday.” {RSR}
Häring, Bernard (1913-1998) A Roman Catholic scholar, Häring influenced the sweeping modernization of Vatican II by emphasizing a moral theology of Christian love rather than the cataloguing of sins. For centuries, moral theology—the study of the morality of human actions—had concentrated on sin: the causes, characteristics, degrees, and consequences of the gamut of wrongdoing. Beginning with The Law of Christ (1954), he pioneered a much broader approach that became the standard in Catholic seminaries and universities. When Pope Paul VI issued “Humanae Vitae,” the declaration forbidding Catholics to use birth control, Father Häring was one of the most prominent dissenters. Although investigated by church officials, he was not charged with any offenses. {The New York Times, 11 July 1998}
Harkins, Albert (20th Century) Harkins was a liberal minister who supported the American Humanist Association.
Harkness, Gustavus (20th Century) Harkness was freethinker who wrote, “The Hebrew Pentateuch Analyzed” (1935). {GS}
Harkness, Robert (20th Century) With H. S. Bennett, the Australian freethinker Harkness wrote “Christianity Versus Rationalism, a Debate.” (1922). {GS}
Harlow, Ralph Volney (1884—1956)
Harlow wrote Samuel Adams (1923) and Gerrit Smith: Philanthropist and Reformer (1939). {FUS}
Harlowe, Marie (20th Century) Harlow was a freethinker who wrote Pagan Holidays in Christianity (1903). {GS}
Harman, Moses (1830—1910) A Midwesterner who was born in Virginia, Harman changed from being a Methodist minister to becoming a Universalist. His beliefs in freethought, populism, and socialism are included in his journal, Lucifer, a free love journal edited with his wife Lillian in Valley Falls, Kansas. A selection from the work, along with his photo, is included in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992). Harman also wrote The Persecution and the Appreciation (c. 1910). {EU, William F. Ryan; FUS; GS; PUT}
Harman, Lillian (Born 1870) In Lucifer, the Light-Bearer (28 June 1899), Harman laments the race prejudice and antagonism which she found “so cruelly manifested in the South. And it South. And it must be admitted that only in a lesser degree is the feeling cherished by many in the North. A man or woman in whose veins flows even an infinitesimal proportion of negro blood is ‘only a nigger’; and as such is cursed for being ‘low’ and ‘ignorant,’ or, if in spite of disadvantages, he or she has acquired education and refinement this fact is resented. The negro is thought to be fit only to be the slave, the servant, of the white man. He is an upstart, an interloper, he ‘doesn’t know his place,’ if he aspires to equality of opportunity with his white brother. ‘Knock him down, and kick him for falling,’ is a slang expression sometimes heard. And this seems to be the settled policy of the white man (as a race) in dealing with his dark-hued half brethren.” On the contrary, Harman insists, no race is a superior race. “For I agree with a dear Methodist aunt who used to say to me in explanation of the fact that her affection for me was unchanged by our difference of opinion religiously and socially, ‘There’s room in the world for all of us, if we don’t stick our elbows out!’ ” Gaylor described Harman as being a freethinker. {WWS}
Harmensen, Jacob: See entry for Jacobus Arminius, the name by which he is better known.
Harnack, Adolf (1851—1931 Harnack wrote a critical work, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries (1904).
Harnack, Bill (20th Century) Harnack is cited by the Morains as being one helpful in maintaining the quality and accuracy of humanist publications. {HNS2}
Harnett, James Richard (20th Century) Harnett wrote his 1958 Ph. D. dissertation on the Ethical Culture movement. {FUS}
Harney, George Julian (1817—1897) Harney was a staunch rationalist and an ultra-radical Chartist, the editor of several liberal publication. {RAT; VI}
Harnsberger, Caroline Thomas (20th Century) Harnsberger wrote Mark Twain’s Views of Religion (1961) and Mark Twain’s Clara (1982). {FUS}
Haro, Julio (1955—1992) “Julio Haro died at the age of 37. He was a gay man in a macho country, an atheist in a land of Catholics, a rebel raised in a family of conformists, a reggae-roller in mariachi territory,” wrote Rubén Martínez concerning the star of El Personal, a major Mexican musical group in Guadalajara. Before becoming the darling of many Mexican intellectuals and a performer admired by many Mexican youths, Haro designed furniture, did graphic designing (for a restaurant called Bananas, the owners of which were horrified by his phallic fruits), taught history classes at a Catholic high school, and was eventually fired for trying to organize a teacher’s union. When El Personal played in Mexico City, Haro became famous for his performances, although at the time he was seriously sick with an AIDS-connected disease. While thousand of his fans raved about the song, “La Tapatía,” right-wing Catholic groups were spray-painting “Homosexuales = SIDA.” Gay rights activists responded by rewriting it, “Homosexuales = VIDA.” Despite his family’s Catholicism, they nursed him in his final days and were disappointed that he “made no final deed with God” when the end came. He died in his brother’s arms, there was no funeral, just a quick cremation. {Rubén Martínez, “To Live and Die in Guadalajara,” The Village Voice, 27 June 1995}
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins (1825—1911) An African American Unitarian spokeswoman, Harper wrote an epic poem, Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869), using biblical imagery to demonstrate contemporary issues of slavery and reconstruction. Her purpose was to show why it is important for Americans to put their faith into practice. Iola Leroy is considered the first published novel by an African American. Harper taught in college, helped the Underground Railroad shelter freed slaves, and spoke out on abolition and women’s suffrage. In a 1992 commemoration of her efforts by Unitarians in Philadelphia, it was pointed out that in her time some succumbed to the period’s extreme stereotypes and refused to believe Harper was African American and female, claiming she was actually a man or a white woman in disguise. The 1992 event included erecting a headstone at what had been her unmarked grave.
Harper, Robert A. (20th Century) A contributing editor to The Humanist in the 1950s, Harper was from Michigan.
Harriot, Thomas (1560—1621) Harriot was an English mathematician who accompanied Raleigh to Virginia and published an account of the expedition. Harriot was a deist. {BDF}
Harrington, Donald Szantho (1914— ) Harrington has been a Unitarian minister in Hobart, Indiana, Chicago, and Beverly Hills, California. He then became minister of Community (Unitarian) Church in New York City. A conservative in religion, he headed New York’s Liberal Party beginning in 1966. He is married to Vilma Szantho, who had been a minister in Hungary and who once was told by Albert Schweitzer that he was a Unitarian. A past president of United World Federalists, Harrington is author of Religion in an Age of Science (1965). Asked by the present author about humanism, Harrington “hit all bases”:
My humanism is both naturalistic and theistic. I think of myself as a humanist because I recognize the subjective limitations under which all men live. I cannot say, ‘In the beginning, God.’ I can only say, ‘In the beginning, a man thinking comes to believe that God was at the beginning.’ My thought concerning life’s origin, purpose, and meaning will always be colored by my human powers and limitations. I am a humanist because I rejoice in the power and the glory of human existence. I enjoy the human enterprise in all its mystery, its struggle with inner and outer darknesses., its emerging understanding of itself and its universe, its ongoing efforts for self and social improvement. I am a humanist because my patriotism reaches beyond my own home or country to embrace mankind. I am a naturalist because I believe the universe is one, not two. It is a uni-verse—one unified order of being, structured according to a harmony of laws and principles which the human mind, if dimly, can begin to perceive and describe. This is one, natural universe we inhabit, and we come to understanding of it through the natural powers we have evolved of observation, reasoning, and intuition. We men are an integral part of its ongoing, natural processes, not separate and apart. We are not strangers here, but at home, both in time and eternity. I am a theist because I believe that this natural, universal process, of which our human lives are an integral part, has some ultimate meaning and purpose. This I cannot now discern clearly, though I may find clues which seem to indicate a growing integration, an evolving cooperative relationship of all life processes, an increasing harmony of part with part. Yet, though I cannot prove that life has meaning, I believe it has. I have only two alternatives when I cannot prove a thing. I can say, Life has meaning. Or I can say, Life has no meaning. To say and believe that life has no meaning seems to be destructive of human and other values. To say and believe that life has meaning seems to enhance and encourage human and other values. Furthermore, such order as the universe displays, when seen in human experience, implies an integral intelligence. I choose to believe that there is intelligence, meaning, and purpose in this Larger Universal Life of which we are a part. Thus, I believe in God.
(See entry for John Dewey, at whose memorial service Harrington officiated.)
{WAS, 26 July 1956)
Harrington, George (20th Century) With others, Harrington wrote “The Truth About American Preachers” (1928). {GS}
Harrington, Edward Michael (1928—1989) Harrington, an author, edited Catholic Worker (1951—1952) and New Age (19061—1962). He was a member of the national executive committee of the Socialist Party from 1960 to 1972 and was its national chairman from 1968 to 1972. In 1973 he became chairman of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. He wrote The Other America (1963), Toward a Democratic Left (1968), and Fragments of the Century (1974). In The Politics at God’s Funeral (1983), he declared, “I left the Catholic Church almost thirty years ago. It is relevant to my present attitudes that even though I rejected the Church . . . I clearly remain a ‘cultural Catholic,’ much as an atheist Jew is culturally Jewish. . . . To complicate matters further, I consider myself to be—in Max Weber’s phrase—’religiously musical’ even though I do not believe in God. . . . I am, then, what Georg Simmel called a ‘religious nature without religion,’ a pious man of deep faith, but not in the supernatural.” {TYD}
Harriot, Thomas (1560—1621) Harriot was a mathematician, a tutor to Sir Walter Raleigh. He accompanied Sir R. Grenville’s expedition to Virginia in 1581. Harriot made many discoveries, and, according to McCabe, “was little behind Galileo in the use of the telescope.” A deist, Harriot “cast off the Old Testament.” {RAT}
Harris, Ben (20th Century) Harris wrote Human Gods (1938). {FUS}
Harris, Beverly (20th Century) Harris, who was a plaintiff in an Idaho lawsuit challenging commencement prayers in schools, received the 1995 Freethinker of the Year award at the annual Freedom From Religion Foundation convention. As a high school student who with her mother filed a lawsuit challenging commencement prayers, she and her family were publicly ostracized, their lives threatened, their cats were killed, her younger brothers were beat up, and their car tires were slashed. “Even knowing everything that I know now,” she later observed, “I would do it all over again.”
Harris, Frank (1856—1931) Harris, a freethinker, was editor of Contemporary Review. {GS}
Harris, John (17th Century) Harris, an early freethinker, wrote “A Refutation of the Objections Against and the Attributes of God in General” (1698). {GS}
Harris, Larry Wayne (20th Century) Harris, author of a self-published work titled Bacteriological Warfare: A Major Threat to North America, is a follower of Christian Identity, the religious view that holds that Jews are the “children of Satan” and minorities are “mud people” who are not really human. In 1995 he pleaded guilty to mail fraud when Federal authorities charged he falsely stated that a laboratory had authorized him to purchase freeze-dried bubonic plague bacteria, which had been sent to his home. In 1997 he urged followers of the Third Continental Congress in Grandview, Kansas, to prepare for biological warfare and obtain antidotes to anthrax. In 1998 he was arrested and charged with the actual making of anthrax.
Harris, Leonard (20th Century) Harris, a professor of philosophy at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
Harris, Michael (20th Century) Harris, author of Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel (1990), is a leading Canadian journalist. His book describes the pattern of physical and sexual abuse at a religious orphanage, and he covers the decades through the administrations of several priests, brothers, and bishops in which adults both in and out of the church took sexual advantage of children. When several brothers were exposed for having committed sexual and physical abuse at Mount Cashel Orphanage, the police investigation was aborted and the social service inquiry was stifled. For years the church remained a law unto itself. Harris’s book was the basis for a movie, “The Boys of St. Vincent” (1990), which received wide notoriety.
Harris, Richard (20th Century) With Sidney Brichto, Harris edited a symposium, Two Cheers for Secularism (1998). The thirteen essays are by “believers, half-believers and non-believers” of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds. According to Nicolas Walter, the religious contributions “are the most misleading (secularism inevitably seen as insufficient, and Nazism and Communism predictably seen as examples of secularism), and the Muslim ones are particularly disappointing, but some of the semi-religious ones are interesting and all the non-religious ones (by Frederic Raphael, Karen Armstrong, and John Mortimer) are stimulating.” {New Humanist, October 1998}
Harris, Wendell J. (20th Century) Harris in 1996 became President of the Humanist Quest of Milwaukee in Wisconsin. {Freethought Observer, November-December 1996}
Harrison, Alex (19th Century) Harrison, a freethinker, wrote Problems of Christianity and Skepticism (1892). {FUK; GS}
Harrison, Austin (1873—1928) Harrison, son of Frederic Harrison, was an editor of the English Review. A rationalist, he preferred Nietzsche to Comte. {RAT; RE}
Harrison, Frederic (1831—1928) Harrison was an English positivist and member of the Metaphysical Society. He wrote The Meaning of History and The Choice of Books, and he translated the second volume of Comte’s Positive Polity. A stylist and a man of letters, Harrison was one of the founders of the positivist school. His views on religion, from the positivist standpoint, are found in his Creed of a Layman (1905) and The Positive Evolution of Religion (1912). {BDF; FUK; RAT; RE}
Harrison, G. T. (20th Century) Harrison wrote Mormonism: Now and Then (1961).
Harrison, Harry (20th Century) Harrison, a writer of science fiction, has gone on record as being a non-theist. In his short story, “The Streets of Ashkelon,” in Two Tales and Eight Tomorrows, he relates how the only human living on a planet—one inhabited by curious, evolving, quite intelligent amphibians—teaches them science and logic. Then a ship lands and a spoiler missionary arrives to convert them all to Christianity. Harrison has complained that it is difficult to get atheistic stories published. {E}
Harry Harrison, SF Writer art
See his short story "The Streets of Ashkelon" in the book Two Tales and Eight Tomorrows published by Sphere Books. It's a story of a man living alone (as the only human) on a planet inhabited by curious, evolving, quite intelligent amphibians. He teaches them science and reason/logic. Then a ship lands and a missionary comes to save the souls of these creatures through Christanity.
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In a collection entitled Stainless Steel Visions (1993) containing the above mentioned story, Harrison wrote a preface which includes some very strong statements about his atheism, and the ease (or lack thereof) of getting that particular story published in the anti-atheist environment of America at the time when he wrote it.
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Contributor "Wylee" posted some more details on the Message board.
From the "About the Author" section at Harry Harrison's official website there's a "Bluffer's Guide" to the man written by Paul Tomlinson. Here's the section talking about HH's atheism:
Harry Harrison's short story The Streets of Ashkelon has appeared in more than 30 anthologies and in a dozen or so languages: it is probably the author's most widely published story. It is a story which was almost never written, and even after it was written, it seemed it might never be published.
Harrison had had the idea for the story for some time, but never wrote it because he knew there was no market for such a tale. But then he learned that Judith Merrill was putting together an anthology of original stories, all of which would break one of the taboos which had constrained authors writing for the genre magazines of the time (this being the late 1950s, early 60s). The anthology was never published, so Harrison tried to place the story elsewhere, but without success: it remained unpublished for over a year, until Brian Aldiss accepted it for his anthology More Penguin Science Fiction.
What was so terrible that no one wanted to publish the story? The hero was an atheist who tried to protect the inhabitants of an alien world from the influence of a Christian missionary. The story was regarded as being too offensive for a Christian readership.
Harry Harrison is a self-confessed atheist with no sympathy for such attitudes: The Streets of Ashkelon is an angry, and disturbing, story intended to make the reader question assumptions about religious belief.
The official website is located at http://www.harryharrison.com/:
Harrison, Hubert A. (1882—1927) A noted African American intellect in his time, Harrison wrote for The Call, The Truth Seeker, The Modern Quarterly, The Nation, The New Republic, and other publications. An adjunct professor of comparative religion at the Modern School (later located at Stelton, New Jersey), he found much in Marx, Buckle, Spencer, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Lenin, Bertrand Russell, Dewey, and others to support his own ideas. As founder of the Liberty League and its newspaper, The Voice, Harrison soon learned that his views on religion and birth control were opposed by Catholics and Protestants alike. He greatly influenced Marcus Garvey as well as the Messenger Group headed by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. J. A. Rogers reports that once H. L. Mencken asked to meet Harrison, after which Harrison “was the center of the most serious discussion of the evening; for Theodore Dreiser, Heywood Broun, Ludwig Lewisohn, Charles Hansen Towne came over for the pleasure of talking with the distinguished Negro.” Harrison, one of the intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance, was editor of The Masses for four years and a member of the controversial International Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”). If he had to go to a Heaven that operated under the Jim Crow system, Harrison reasoned, he would prefer to go to the place ruled over by the only spiritual creature ever depicted as non-white: Satan. {J. A. Rogers, AAH}
Harrison, Jane Ellen (1850—1928) Harrison was a lecturer on archaeology at Cambridge University and wrote important works on Greek religion, especially Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1912). Her rationalist attitude is expressed in her 1919 Conway Memorial Lecture: “The old orthodoxy is dead and may well be buried.” She admitted an Immanent God who is “nothing but the mystery of the whole of things.” Harrison was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {RE}
Harrison, John F. C. (20th Century) Harrison wrote Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (1969). {GS}
Harrison, Charles Yale (1898—1954) Harrison wrote Clarence Darrow (1931) and Generals Die in Bed (1954), the latter work about World War I. {FUS}
Harrison, Lilian (20th Century) Harrison, an Australian humanist interested in Esperanto, is involved in Australian humanist activities.
Harrison, Lou (1917— ) A composer and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harrison was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. Also, he was music critic of the New York Herald Tribune. Harrison has taught at San Jose State University in California and at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii. On the subject of humanism he wrote to the present author:
I have been called a “card carrying humanist” for a number of years and in ways possible to me have tried to aid the movement. As to my position in the sequence which is presented, the seven categories, I am unsure. However, I am personally certain, like my father before me, that “when you’re dead you’re dead,” and simply turned off—all systems down. I have studied at some length and intensity what remains of Epicurus (and even given a short lecture on his ideas to a local humanist group) as well as Lucretius. I have also seriously studied congenial forms of Buddhism, and especially the presentation of basic material in A. J. Bahm’s remarkable book, The Philosophy of the Buddha. Both Epicurus’ Ataraxia and the Buddhist Nirvana seem to me to be conditions of equanimity in which one is fully “with it” all the time and can no longer be “shook up.” Such a personal condition would be enormously difficult to achieve and I’m not sure that I’d want to, or could. Socially I am continually shocked by our human cruelty—it seems to have no limits and indeed seems a fundamental part of our kind, alas. I am enormously opposed to organized religion and feel that the Christians and Muslims are responsible for uncountable human and other beings’ miseries. I continuously read in such science journals as I am able as a layman to understand. With the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am for the dismantling of the Industrial Revolution, which I believe to be humankind’s worst and probably last mistake. As humans we have lots of dirty habits, but I think that the filthiest of all is politics. I grew up in the “liberal thirties’ and have lived in dismay during these last two administrations. Surely goodwill and overt love could be enlisted to temper the human suicidal drift. Anyway, I keep contributing as I’m able, and with the determination to do so as honestly and sharply as possible.
In 1992, Harrison’s openly gay Joys and Perplexities, Selected Poems of Lou Harrison was published. In 1997, Harrison was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Arts Awardee. He and William Colvig, a contractor and member of an electricians’ union, have lived together in Aptos, California, since 1967. In a biography, Lou Harrison: Composing a World (1998) by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Liebermann, Harrison’s visits to composer Henry Cowell are described. Cowell, who went to jail for four years on a morals charge of homosexuality, was visited regularly by Harrison, who ferried musical scores back and forth. {HNS2; WAS, 11 Sep 1992}
Harrison, Lou (14 May 1917 - ) A composer and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Harrison was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg. Also, he was music critic of the New York Herald Tribune. Harrison has taught at San Jose State University in California and at the East-West Center of the University of Hawaii. On the subject of humanism he wrote to the present author:
I have been called a “card carrying humanist” for a number of years and in ways possible to me have tried to aid the movement. As to my position in the sequence which is presented, the seven categories [your editor suggested humanism, ancient humanism, classical humanism, theistic humanism, atheistic humanism, communistic humanism, and naturalistic (or scientific) humanism], I am unsure. However, I am personally certain, like my father before me, that “when you’re dead you’re dead,” and simply turned off—all systems down. I have studied at some length and intensity what remains of Epicurus (and even given a short lecture on his ideas to a local humanist group) as well as Lucretius. I have also seriously studied congenial forms of Buddhism, and especially the presentation of basic material in A. J. Bahm’s remarkable book, The Philosophy of the Buddha. Both Epicurus’ Ataraxia and the Buddhist Nirvana seem to me to be conditions of equanimity in which one is fully “with it” all the time and can no longer be “shook up.” Such a personal condition would be enormously difficult to achieve and I’m not sure that I’d want to, or could. Socially I am continually shocked by our human cruelty—it seems to have no limits and indeed seems a fundamental part of our kind, alas. I am enormously opposed to organized religion and feel that the Christians and Muslims are responsible for uncountable human and other beings’ miseries. I continuously read in such science journals as I am able as a layman to understand. With the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am for the dismantling of the Industrial Revolution, which I believe to be humankind’s worst and probably last mistake. As humans we have lots of dirty habits, but I think that the filthiest of all is politics. I grew up in the “liberal thirties’ and have lived in dismay during these last two administrations. Surely goodwill and overt love could be enlisted to temper the human suicidal drift. Anyway, I keep contributing as I’m able, and with the determination to do so as honestly and sharply as possible.
In 1992, Harrison’s openly gay Joys and Perplexities, Selected Poems of Lou Harrison was published. He and William Colvig, a contractor and member of an electricians’ union, have lived together in Aptos, California, since 1967. In 1997, Harrison was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Arts Awardee. In a biography, Lou Harrison: Composing a World (1998) by Leta E. Miller and Fredric Liebermann, Harrison’s visits to composer Henry Cowell are described. Cowell, who went to jail for four years on a morals charge of homosexuality, was visited regularly by Harrison, who ferried musical scores back and forth. {HNS2; WAS, 11 Sep 1992}
Harrison, Paul W. (20th Century) An activist Unitarian, Harrison lives in Finland. His e-mail: <inter.orfex@pp.weppi.fi>.
Harrison, Stanley R. (20th Century) Harrison wrote a biography of Edgar Fawcett (1972). {FUS}
Harrison, Tony (20th Century) Harrison, an English poet and dramatist, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. He is author of The Shadow of Hiroshima and Other Film/Poems (1995), which includes the television poem he produced for the fiftieth anniversary of the Hiroshima atom bomb.
Debbie Harry, Recording Artist music
Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, was interviewed for the February 15, 1999 issue of Esquire magazine:
Esquire: And you always get asked about Madonna. Do you feel you can claim an influence on her?
Harry: Absolutely. But she's an incredibly resourceful refinery--she knows how to refine elements and make them completely understandable and salable to the public. She does a fucking magnificent job, and God bless her, too. I can't say that I even believe in God, but certainly like the slogan, so God bless her.
Harry, Debbie (1 July 1945 - ) Harry, a songwriter, a rock-and-roll singer, and the lead singer of Blondie, was born in Miami Florida. At Wigstock 2001, Michael Musto wrote that she “played herself, singing ‘Atomic’ with gender-bending backups and (we were assured y MC Lady Bunny) a gigantic schlong.” An interviewer for Esquire (15 Feb 1999) asked her questions about her belief:
Esquire: And you always get asked about Madonna. Do you feel you can claim an influence on her? Harry: Absolutely. But she’s an incredibly resourceful refiner—she knows how to refine elements and make them completely understandable and salable to the public. She does a fucking magnificent jog, and God bless her too. I can’t say that I even believe in God, but I certainly like the slogan, so God bless her.”
{Michael Musto, Village Voice, 18 Sep 2001}
Hart, James H. (20th Century)
James in 1933 wrote “A Religious Mood” in The New Humanist.
Hart, William (19th Century) A freethinker, Hart wrote The Candle From Under the Bushel, or 1306 Questions to the Clergy and for the Consideration of Others (1889). {GS}
Harte, (Frances) Bret (1836—1902) The son of a Catholic professor and an adventurer at the age of nineteen, Harte went to California where he taught, clerked, and prospected for gold. His “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” published in The Overland Monthly, which he had helped establish, brought him much success because of its stories of Western local color. His humorous dialect poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (also called “The Heathen Chinee”), helped establish him as a well-known author. He wrote “Outcasts of Poker Flat” and other stories, returning to the East in 1871, becoming the U.S. consul in Germany and Scotland from 1878 to 1885. A Unitarian, he once was a correspondent for their Register, reporting about a traveling evangelist’s visit in California, “We have been spared the cholera, but we have had Mr. Earle badly.” He attended the church where his friend Starr King preached, and he also attended in New York where O. B. Frothingham preached. According to his biographer, Pemberton, Harte “was content to worship God through his works. . . . [He] never voiced a creed.” As to any god, Harte once declared, “The creator who could put a cancer in a believer’s stomach is above being interfered with by prayers.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TYD; U; UU}
Hartikainen, Errikki (20th Century) Hartikainen was secretary general of the Union of Freethinkers’ Associations of Finland. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Hartin, Deborah (20th Century) Hartin in 1972 was on the advisory board of the Humanist Society of Greater New York. A transsexual who in 1970 had undergone male-to-female surgery, she fought for the rights of those who had sex change operations.
Hartland, Edwin Sidney (1848—1927) Hartland, an anthropologist, wrote about comparative religion in Legend of Perseus (1894—1896, 3 vols.). The President in 1899 of the Folk-Lore Society, Hartland was an agnostic and an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT}
Hartley, Nina (20th Century) An actress in adult films, Hartley according to a profile written by Luke Ford entitled “Porn Jews,” said
I believe strongly in the heritage of Jews as educators. I feel very proud of the fact that if it weren’t for the Jews, half the world would still be illiterate. I would like to know about Jewish religion as history, but as an atheist I see no reason to practice any religion . . . because it is organized superstiation . . . the opiate of the masses. . . . No, I don’t believe in God. I was raised with no religion but a lot of morals. I definitely think that sex is natural and healthy, and that people have the absolute right to pursue their sexual preferences with other consenting adults without government or church intervention. Nina Hartley, Adult Film Actress ent Internet Movie Database
"I believe strongly in the heritage of Jews as educators. I feel very proud of the fact that if it weren't for the Jews, half the world would still be illiterate. I would like to know about Jewish religion as history, but as an atheist, I see no reason to practice any religion... because it is organized superstition...the opiate of the masses. "
--From a profile written by Luke Ford titled 'Porn Jews'
---
From an interview found at her website:
Do you believe in god? Do you have a religion?
No, I don't believe in God. I was raised with no religion, but a lot of morals. I definitely think that sex is natural and healthy, and that people have the absolute right to pursue their sexual preferences with other consenting adults without government or church intervention. I can do what I do to share my enjoyment of sex with all my viewers out there. If I can help any person or persons have a great sex session, then I've done a good job! I believe that society changes and that we can take what is good from the world's religions and leave behind what isn't so good, and forge a new say. I'm one of the forgers, I like to think!
{CA}
Hartley, Nina ( )
Hartley is an adult film actress who, in a profile by Luke Ford entitled “Porn Jews,” said,
I believe strongly in the heritage of Jews as educators. I feel very proud of the fact that if it weren't for the Jews, half the world would still be illiterate. I would like to know about Jewish religion as history, but as an atheist I see no reason to practice any religion . . . because it is organized superstition . . . the opiate of the masses.
Asked on her website if she believed in God and if she had a religion, she was equally lucid:
No, I don't believe in God. I was raised with no religion, but a lot of morals. I definitely think that sex is natural and healthy, and that people have the absolute right to pursue their sexual preferences with other consenting adults without government or church intervention. I can do what I do to share my enjoyment of sex with all my viewers out there. If I can help any person or persons have a great sex session, then I've done a good job! I believe that society changes and that we can take what is good from the world's religions and leave behind what isn't so good, and forge a new say. I'm one of the forgers, I like to think!
Hartman, Franz (19th Century)
A freethinker, Hartman wrote The Life of Jehoshua, the Prophet of Nazareth (1889). {GS}
Hartman, Gunde (20th Century) Hartman heads a Unitarian conference center at Klingberg near Hamburg. (See entry for German Unitarians.)
Hartmann, Jacob (19th Century) Hartman was a freethinker who wrote The Creation of God (1893). {GS}
Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard von (1842—1906) Hartmann was a German pantheist, a pessimist in philosophy. He published Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869), Self-Dissolution of Christianity and the Religion of the Future (1875), and The Crisis of Christianity in Modern Theology (1870). Hartmann emphatically rejected belief in a personal God and immortality. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Hartmann, Klaus (1925— )
Hartmann is German Vice-President of the World Union of Freethinkers.
Hartogh Heys Van Zouteveen, Herman (Born 1841) Hartogh, who in 1866 received a gold medal from the king of Holland for a treatise on the synthesis of organic bodies, was for some time professor of chemistry and natural history at The Hague. He lived at Delft, where he was made city councilor. He translated into Dutch Darwin’s Descent of Man and Expressions of the Emotions, adding his own annotations. Although named a member of the Assen city council, he could not take his seat in 1873 because he refused the oath. Dr. Hartogh was director of the Provincial Archaeological Museum at Assen and a member of the Dutch Literary Society. For a long time, he was a member of the Dutch Freethinkers’ Society. {BDF; RAT}
Hartshorn, Nathan (20th Century) Hartshorn, while a member of the Doubters’ Club at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Hartshorne, Charles (1897 ) An instructor in philosophy and then research fellow at Harvard, Hartshorne later taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and the University of Texas. Those who knew him well knew of his intense interest in birdsong, for he was an ornithologist. Said to be one of the most influential students in our day of Alfred North Whitehead and a leader of the school of process philosophy, he also was a force in the rising philosophical stature of Charles Sanders Peirce. Hartshorne’s idea of “God” flows from two basic premises of process philosophy as most systematically elaborated by Whitehead: a conception of the universe in terms of becoming rather than being, and an insistence on the social nature of every aspect of reality. In process philosophy, God is a participant in cosmic evolution. As Hartshorne rendered his idea of God, it is one of religious value as well as philosophical consistency, one summarized by philosopher Peter H. Hare as “a temporal society of experiential occasions.” His Beyond Humanism: Essays in the New Philosophy of Nature (1937) envisioned a new philosophic movement, one that would progress and be a “genuine integration (for the first time) of all the modern motifs” of humanism, one for which a specific name, not humanism, would eventually arise. He also wrote The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God (1948) and Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984). Asked by the present author in 1946 to comment on the word “panentheism,” Hartshorne wrote:
It’s too bad that I can’t recall where it was that I learned the word panentheism. I didn’t coin it, and for a good while after I first heard it I was accustomed to think it a rather foolish thing. But the more I thought about the problem of theism and pantheism the more I came to think a third term was needed, and “all in God” does seem to suggest that God is more than a mere totality of ordinary things, which would be compatible with “all is God.” So I began using it. Since then I read somewhere about a use of the word going back a good while and wondered if that wasn’t the earliest, but now I forget the reference. V. Ferm has a definition in the Dictionary of Philosophy, but it is less definite than I think one needs to be. And he doesn’t go into the history of the thing at all.
(In Hartshorne’s 1946 metaphysics class at the University of Chicago, the present author was nonplused by the elaborateness of Professor Hartshorne’s professing. At the nearby Unitarian society that he attended, Hartshorne was invited to speak to students interested in humanism, naturalism, or John Dewey, which he declined to do. Meanwhile, it was difficult to bring up anything but metaphysics in class. On the final day, when he asked the class to extrapolate as to the possible benefit metaphysics would be in our future, several students were exuberant and particularly praised his explanation of the difference between pantheism and panentheism. When it came the present writer’s turn, I simply replied, “None.” He laughed in the friendliest fashion, along with the class, knowing previously of my interest in naturalism. What I had not revealed to him, however, was my ignorance in being unable to follow his line of reasoning. Somehow I felt this was a personal deficiency upon my part and concluded that philosophy was not to be a part of my future, whereupon I switched my major from philosophy to literature, not even knowing at that time that there was a school of logical positivists who, like me, denied the validity of metaphysical assertions. Pantheism, however, has remained an interest, for which Hartshorne gets all the credit, although it still remains something of a mystery how any person as superior in intelligence as Dr. Hartshorne could possibly have chosen to spend his entire lifetime developing such metaphysical minutiae, i.e., panentheism, with such apparent relish. He likely viewed those with a converse view in similar fashion.) (Marcus Borg of Oregon State University claims he is a panentheist, one who believes that everything is in God, that he is not a pantheist who believes that everything is God. Borg is an Episcopalian. As for Hartshorne’s inability to recall where he learned the word
“pantheism,” see the entry for Karl Krause, who used the word in the 1830s.)
{ER; OCP; U&U; WAS, 29 December 1946}
Hartt, Julian (20th Century) With J. A. C. F. Auer, Hartt published Humanism versus Theism (1941). The two preferred a term other than “humanism” but held that some descriptive word for their forward-looking Unitarian views would eventually be found.
Hartung, John (20th Century) Hartung, in “Love Thy Neighbor” (Skeptic, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1995), describes how the world’s major religions espouse a moral code which includes injunctions against murder, theft, and lying. However, he holds that the rules codified by the Ten Commandments were intended to apply only within a cooperating group for the purpose of enabling that group to compete successfully against other groups. Also, this in-group morality has functioned, both historically and by express intent, to create adverse circumstances between groups by actively promoting murder, theft, and lying as tools of competition. A non-believer, Hartung has riled many by stating that contemporary efforts to present Judeo-Christian in-group morality as universal morality defy the plain meaning of the texts upon which Judaism and Christianity are based. Accordingly, he holds, this effort is ultimately hopeless. (See entry for Women, Genital Maiming Of.)
HARVARD CHAPLAINCY Harvard University was one of the first universities to install a humanist chaplain. The chaplaincy was created to celebrate “humanity in its earthly and evolutionary context. Its main appeal is to the skeptical inquirer and to the idealistic student of an agnostic or atheist inclination. It is for those who prize the scientific, aesthetic, ethical, and democratic achievements of human beings, past and present. A Humanist rejoices in differences and variety, is comfortable with ambiguity, and values deed before creed.” Thomas Ferrick, a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, is the current humanist chaplain. The chaplaincy also supports the Free Thought Society, which was founded by Harvard-Radcliffe undergraduates. (See entry for John Loeb.)
HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL The Harvard Divinity School, which has a long-standing history with the Unitarian movement, is at 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. On the Web: <http://divweb.harvard.edu>.
HARVARD SECULAR SOCIETY The Harvard Secular Society is on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. HARVARD UNIVERSITY Harvard College, the oldest in the United States, was founded for men in 1636 and in 1638 was named for John Harvard, its first benefactor. Intended as a training ground for Puritan ministers, it expanded greatly and became much more generalized. In 1819 the Harvard Corporation specifically recognized a “Faculty of Theology,” and by 1826 fund-raising efforts were underway to build Divinity Hall. Congregationalists were much concerned that Unitarians would become influential in the school, and their fears were justified. During the ensuing controversy between the two groups, conservatives vs. liberals, William Ellery Channing was instrumental in leading the latter group. Congregationalists were soon to feel more at home at Yale. A Unitarian, Charles W. Eliot, was President of Harvard from 1869 to 1908, during which time the elective system was introduced and graduate education was developed. Innumerable freethinkers, rationalists, and secular humanists have been faculty members not only of the university but also of the Divinity School. In 1996, however, Ronald F. Thiemann, the Divinity School’s dean, wrote Religion in Public Life, in which he starts with the writings of John Rawls, then builds on thinkers such as Michael Sandel, Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, and Jean Bethke Eishtain to propose what Commonweal editor has called “a revised liberalism that will allow religious views and voices equal legitimacy in public debate. . . . Strict separation of church and state, he points out, was a notion that came into common constitutional usage only in a 1947 Supreme Court opinion. Today it is used by many, on the bench and off, to say not only that state support for religion is unconstitutional but that religion itself has no legitimate place in public institutions.” That a dean of the Divinity School would express such a stand is a sign of the immense change that has occurred at Harvard. {CE; The New York Times Book Review, 14 July 1996}
Harvey, John (19th Century) A freethinker, Harvey wrote “One Shaft More” (1885). {GS}
Harvey, Van (1926— ) A professor emeritus of religion at Stanford, Harvey is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He is author of “The Re-Discovery of Ludwig Feuerbach.” Harvey is an authority on Ludwig Feuerbach. (Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997).
Harwood, Philip (1809—1887) Harwood, a journalist, decided against Presbyterianism and chose Unitarianism, but his rejection of the miraculous stirred the Unitarians, so he became assistant to Fox at South Place Chapel in 1841. Harwood was an editor of various English journals, including Saturday Review (1868—1883). {RAT}
Harwood, William R. (20th Century) Harwood has researched Yahweh and Jesus, tracing the beginning of the “god” concept through the Judaism of the first century to the monotheistic beginnings of Christianity and its emergence as a three-god creed in 325 of the Christian Era. In Mythology’s Last Gods, Harwood contends that every teaching attributed to Jesus can be traced to a pre-Christian source. The chapter concerning St. Paul’s fanciful misinterpretation of Jesus for his own ends, is entitled, “The Making of a God.” Some critics, who hold that Jesus never existed, disagree with Harwood’s view that Abraham is the first historical personality in the Bible. “If other scholars are doubtful about the historicity of later figures such as Moses, Joseph, David, and Solomon, not to mention Jesus,” writes New Zealander rationalist Bill Cooke, “it is highly unlikely that Abraham is any more historically based. Harwood reviews books for The American Rationalist. {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1997}
Hasanat, Abul (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hasanat was secretary of the Bangladesh Humanist Society. An East Pakistani (now called Bangladesh), Hasanot addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress held in Paris (1966). {HM2}
Haseler, Stephen (1942— ) Haseler is professor of government at the London Guildhall University. He is chairman of Republic, a pressure group campaigning for the abolition of the hereditary principle in the selection of a Head of State and the Second Chamber. A believer in disestablishmentarianism, Haseler is author of The End of the House of Windsor (1993), and he believes the humanist movement needs to take a leading part in the highlighting of the age-old connections and the need for their reform. {The Freethinker, May 1994}
HASIDIC JEWS: See entry for Cabala.
Haskins, Casey (20th Century) With David I. Seiple, Haskins edited Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism (1999). He is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York.
Haskins, Ethelbert (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Haskins was a director of the American Humanist Association. He currently is its treasurer. The Morains credit him as having “opened new understanding of how the crises in Afro-American leadership could be constructively resolved.” {HM2; HNS2}
Haslam, Charles Junius (1811—1902) Henry Hetherington in 1840 was tried for blasphemous libel for having published Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of All Denominations Showing the Errors, Absurdities, and Irregularities of Their Doctrines (c. 1850). This was an anti-Christian penny weekly that exposed scriptural contradictions and called for a Christianity devoid of common prayer, ritual, immortality, and superstition. {EU, John W. Wiener; FUK; RAT; VI}
Haslam, Fred (1833—1898) Haslam from 1851 until his death worked on behalf of the goals of London’s National Secular Society. In 1866 he helped break down Hyde Park railings, and he was a member of the International as well as a freethinker. A mattress-maker by trade, Haslam was badly paid as a result of female labor in his trade, and he took to lecturing to supplement his income. {RSR}
Hasquin, Hervé (1942— ) A Belgian, Hasquin addressed the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985). He edited Études sur le XVIII siecle (1974).
Hassell, Richard (Died 1826) Hassell was one of Carlile’s shipmen. He was sentenced to two years of imprisonment in Newgate for selling Paine’s Age of Reason. {BDF}
Hasson, Isaac (1915— ) In 1976, Hasson founded the Israel Secular Humanist Association, which produces a Hebrew periodical, Breira Humanistit and an English version, Israel Humanist Alternative. An atheist, Hasson in 1985 was a founding member of Israel’s Secular Service Association.
Haste, Helen (20th Century) Haste is professor of psychology at the University of Bath. She has stated, “The assumption of a Christian culture, nowadays being ratified, it seems, by Government thinking, is that the foundation of morality is religion: if you are not religious you cannot be moral. That is a very dangerous logic.” In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, she entitled her lecture, “Are We Irrationally Frightened of the Irrational?” (New Humanist, May 1989).
Hastie, Jack (20th Century) Hastie has written that nearly all prayer “contains metaphysical statements referring to phenomena which can never be confronted by observable facts and therefore either verified or falsified.” As a result, freethinkers question the use of such words as “bless,” “sin,” “Satan,” “merciful,” “holy,” or expressions such as “Lord Jesus, may my roots go down deep in you” or “God is the world’s horizon.” {The Freethinker, November-December 1998}
Hastings, George Tracy (Born 1875) Hastings, a freethinker, wrote Love, Evolution, and Religion (1924). {GS}
HATE: For an example of one who unapologectically preaches hate, see entry for Khallid Abdul Muhammad.
HATRED • Hatred, n. A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another’s superiority. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail. —Rabbi Yaacov Perrin in a funeral eulogy for Dr. Baruch Goldstein
Hattem, Pontiaam van (1641—1706) A Dutch writer, Hattem was a follower of Spinoza, was inclined to pantheistic mysticism, and had several followers.
Roy Hattersley, UK Politician society
A reader reports:
Veteran British Labour politician Roy Hattersley (former Deputy Leader of the Labour Party) writes in The Guardian on 20th December 1999. Describing an evening spent as a volunteer on a Salvation Army soup-run he writes:
"Unrepentant atheist that I am, I found the idea strangely moving. And for once - although there were no paper hats and crackers - I felt the spirit of Christmas. God bless us everyone."
(I assume the last sentence is a rhetorical reference to Dickens rather than a denial of the first.)
Haubelt, Josef (20th Century)
Haubelt in 1995 spoke at a Berlin conference arranged by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He stated that 56% of the population of the Czech Republic is non-denominational, and he reported that Czech humanists are diligent in their campaign for human rights. He wrote Mikulas Kopernik (1974). (See entry for Czechoslovakian Humanists.)
Haught, James A. (20th Century) An associate editor of the Charleston Gazette and a senior editor of Free Inquiry, Haught in 1989 won the Hugh L. Hefner First Amendment Award for his articles in defense of the separation of church and state. In Holy Horrors, an Illustrated History of Religious Murder and Madness (1990), he gives examples of religious persecution during the Crusades; the Spanish Inquisition; witch hunts; human sacrifice of the Aztec civilization; the Holocaust; the mass suicide of Jonestown, etc. He believes his book is the first to survey “the phenomenon of religious homicide in its entirety.” Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the ’90s (1995) demonstrates how religion often divides people and breeds hostility. Haught writes that religion—supposedly a source of kindness and brotherhood—has become one of the chief causes of hatred and war. As a result, he holds that “more voices [are] beginning to assert that religion can be a detriment to humanity. He also wrote The Art of Lovemaking (1992) and Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the ‘90s (1997). Haught’s 1996 work, 2000 Years of Disbelief, is a collection of individuals’ statements concerning their disbelief. Haught signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {CA; E; Freethought Today, June-July 1996}
Hauptli, Bruce W. (20th Century) Hauptli is chairperson and associate professor of philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Florida International University. His The Reasonableness of Reason: Explaining Rationality Naturalistically (1998) makes the point that naturalized epistemology can explain the reasonableness of a rationalist commitment.
Hauptman, Herbert Aaron (1917— ) Hauptman was co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1985). He is a professor of biophysical science at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Upon receiving the Humanist Laureate award, according to presenter Paul Kurtz, Hauptman gave “a very gloomy analysis of the critical issues confronting us in the next century, such as the abuse of power by strong nation states, racism and religious bigotry, the arms race, inequalities between the rich and the poor, and the violation of human rights.” A member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, he is author with Jerome Karle of Solution of the Phase Problem (1953), and he wrote Crystal Structure Determination (1972). Hauptman addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), he spoke at the 1995 dedication of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, and he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Hauptman’s hobbies include hiking, swimming, and stained glass art.
Hauptmann, Gerhart (1862—1946) A German dramatist, novelist, and poet, Hauptmann in his play “Before Dawn,” showed the influence of the theories of Zola and Ibsen, inaugurating the naturalistic movement in German theater. In 1912 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. McCabe finds he was somewhat mystic in his later years “but remained at the most a pantheist.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Hauréau, Jean Barthelemy (1812—1896) Hauréau was a French historian. At the age of twenty he wrote The Mountain, which showed his sympathy with the Revolution. In turn a journalist and a librarian, he wrote Manual of the Clergy (1844), which resulted in attacks by the clericals, and an erudite work, Critical Examination of the Scholastic Philosophy (1850). {BDF}
Hauser, Richard (1911— ) Hauser founded the Institute for Group and Social Development, which became the English Centre for Group Studies. {TRI}
Haüy, Valentine (1745—1822) Haüy was a French philanthropist, one of the founders of theophilantropy. He helped enable the blind to read and founded the institute for the young blind in 1784. In 1807 Haüy went to Russia, staying until 1817 and devoting himself to the blind and to telegraphy. {BDF; RAT}
Havel, Václav (1936— ) Havel is a dramatist who has been President of the former country of Czechoslovakia, then President of the Czech Republic. He has stated that he is not “a proper Christian or Catholic” and he sees no point in worshipping God. But he is “conscious of a ‘horizon,’ an ’intimate-universal’ partner of mine—who is sometimes my conscience, sometimes my hope, sometimes my freedom and sometimes the mystery of the world.” He adds, “the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human responsibility.” In his Letters to Olga, he mentions “my general faith in the meaning of things, in my hope.” Inspired by Heidegger and overlooking his having been a Nazi, Havel speaks of the universe as a living being. He laments that mankind sees the universe differently, sees it as something subservient. He talks about a Being, something spiritual which encompasses all of existence. Man unfortunately has lost sight of Being, relying on technology and rationalist ways of thinking. Therefore, man needs to return to an authentic sense of self, freed from false identities that are imposed by rationalism and technology. Havel has also talked about Gaia and about the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which allegedly offers a proof of God’s existence. In one of his Presidential addresses, he stated,
Soul, individual spirituality, firsthand personal insight into things, the courage to be oneself and go the way one’s conscience points, humility in the face of the mysterious order of Being, confidence in its natural direction and, above all, trust in one’s own subjectivity as the principal link with the subjectivity of the world—these, in my view are the qualities that politicians of the future should cultivate.
Journalist Paul Berman, quoting the above, added that “conventional political people roll their eyes when Havel goes on in this particular vein. Yet to dismiss Havel’s trippier ideas as ‘fluff’ (that is the word one of Havel’s advisers used in a private conversation with me) would be a big mistake, I think.” Berman quoted Czech philosopher Jan Patocka as noting that Havel has been the “main force” that keeps Czech democracy going, the “glue” that holds it together. In 1993, speaking at a George Washington University graduation exercise in Washington, D.C., Havel sounded very much like a secular humanist:
It seems to me that the challenge offered by the post-Communist world is merely the current form of a broader and more profound challenge to discover a new type of self-understanding for man, and a new type of politics that should flow from that understanding. As we all know, today’s planetary civilization is in serious danger. We are rationally capable of describing, in vivid detail, all the dangers that threaten the world: the deepening gulf between the rich and the poor parts of the world, the population explosion, the potential for dramatic confrontations between different racial and cultural groups, the arming of whom no one seems able to stop, the nuclear threat, the plundering of natural resources, the destruction of the natural variety of species, the creation of holes in the ozone layer, and the unstoppable global warming. What is unsettling is that the more we know about such dangers, the less able we seem to deal with them.
He then stated, without explaining what metaphysics is,
I see only one way out of this crisis: man must come to a new understanding of himself, of his limitations and his place in the world. He should grasp his responsibility in a new way, and reestablish a relationship with the things that transcend him. We must rehabilitate our sense of ourselves as active human subjects, and liberate ourselves from the captivity of a purely national perception of the world. Through this ‘subjecthood’ and the individual conscience that goes with it, we must discover a new relationship to our neighbors, and to the universe and its metaphysical order, which is the source of the moral order.
In 1994 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Havel said, “The modern age has ended.” He added that not just the collapse of Communism or of Moscow’s colonial empire has happened but also the era of rationalism that began with the Enlightenment. He explained that the end of the era of rationalism has been catastrophic, that although rationalism had welded together a global civilization, now people, “behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe.” Therefore, “cultural conflicts are increasing and are understandably more dangerous today than at any other time in history. . . . By day, we work with statistics; in the evening, we consult astrologers.” Havel cited two examples of post-modern science, the anthropic cosmological principle (first stated by the English physicist Brandon Carter in 1974) and the Gaia hypothesis (which was proposed in 1972 by the Englishman, James Lovelock)—each, he said, implies that life on earth is part of a larger purpose . . . that we are an integral part of higher, mysterious entities against whom it is not advisable to blaspheme.” Self-transcendence is “the only real alternative to extinction”; man can realize liberty only if he “does not forget the One who endowed him with it.” Of this, journalist Nicholas Wade has commented,
A view of the world built on the anthropic principle and the Gaia hypothesis would not be “post-modern” science but rather a throwback to the numerology and astrology from which the era of rationalism has still not fully rescued us. Havel’s diagnosis of our end-of-century discontents may be right. But transcendence is not the only solution. And to subvert rationalism into mysticism would be a cure more pernicious than the disease.
Although once mistakenly thought to have an outlook quite similar to that of American and European secular humanists—Nicolas Walter has called him an unbeliever—Havel has specifically mentioned that just as Heidegger once talked about the need for a god, “I really think that this civilization is in crisis and only a god can save it.” In a 15 May 1996 address given in Aachen concerning the future of Europe concluded, “Europe will only be able to bear the cross of this world, and thus follow the example of Him in whom it has believed for two thousand years, and in whose name it has committed so much evil, if it first pauses and reflects upon itself, when—in the best sense of the word—it lives up to the potential inherent in the twilight to which it owes its name,” a reference to the fact that the Akkadian word for Europe, erebu, means sunset or twilight whereas the word for Asia, asu, means sunrise. Among those who are negative about Havel are Mario Bunge, who has termed Havel’s thinking “obscurantism.” Timothy J. Madigan, in analyzing Havel’s philosophy, has concluded that it “is appropriate that the literary school that most influenced Havel was the Theater of the Absurd.” (See entry for Michael Novak.) {Paul Berman, The New York Times Magazine, 11 May 1997; Mario Bunge, Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999; Václav Havel, “The Hope for Europe,” The New York Review of Books, 20 June 1996; Timothy J. Madigan, Free Inquiry, Fall 1998; Nicholas Wade, The New York Times Magazine, 14 August 1994}
HAVERING & DISTRICT (England) HUMANIST SOCIETY For information, write HOPWA House, Inskip Drive, Hornchurch; or telephone J. Condon at 01708 473597 or J. Baker at 01708 458925.
Havet, Ernest August Eugène (1813—1889) Havet was a French scholar and critic, a professor of Greek literature at the Normal School. In 1855 he was made professor of Latin eloquence at the Collège de France. Havet’s 1863 article on Renan’s Vie de Jesus in the Revue des Deux Mondes drew much attention, and his four-volume work, Christianity and Its Origins (1872—1884) was a collection of rational criticism. Havet was a member of the Legion of Honour and of the Academy of Political and Social Science. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Haviland, E. Cyril (20th Century) In Sydney, Australia, Haviland edited the monthly Freethought (1880—1881). {FUK}
Havlicek, Karel (1821—1855) Havlicek wrote under the literary name of Havel Borovsky. In his National News and the Slovan, he waged a bitter journalistic war upon despotism and hierarchy. Twice he was tried for alleged high treason, and twice he was acquitted. One winter evening, however, Havlicek was kidnapped by the police, dragged away from his family, and imprisoned at Brixen, Tyrol. While in prison he wrote a satire in verse, “The Baptism of St. Vladimir,” in which he ridiculed the belief in a personal god, efficacy of prayer, and the rights of despots. Havlicek was allowed to die in prison. {PUT; RAT}
HAWAII HUMANISTS, ATHEISTS, AND FREETHINKERS Hawaii has the following groups:
• American Atheists, Inc., 733 Bishop St. (Suite 170-729), Honolulu, Hawaii 96813; E-mail:. <mkahle@atheists.org>. • Hawaii Rationalists (ASHS), 508 Pepekeo Pl., Honolulu, Hawaii 96825; telephone (808) 395-5581 • Humanists of Hawaii, 1515 Nuuanu Queen Tower #48, Honolulu, HI 96717. (808) 524-3872 E-mail: <langton@pixie.net>.
Hawke, David Freeman (20th Century) Hawke is author of an extensive Thomas Paine bibliography (1974). However, John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995) has been negatively critical of the work’s “sniping . . . to the point where readers are left wondering why Hawke ever bothered to write a biography of Paine.” (See entry for John Keane.) {FUK; FUS}
Hawke, Robert (Bob) James Lee (1929— ) Hawke, who was Australia’s Prime Minister from March 1983 to December 1991, was asked by a seven-year-old boy on a television show, “The Day Tonight,” if he believed in God, Hawke replied, “Until I get some evidence one way or the other which is compelling to me, I’m going to have to remain an agnostic.” {CA; E; Robert Pullan, Bob Hawke: A Portrait (1980)}
Hawkes, Jacquetta: See entry for Theism.
Hawkesworth, John (c. 1715—1773) Hawkesworth was an English essayist and novelist. In 1761 he edited Swift’s works with a life of that author. He then compiled an account of the voyages of Byron, Wallis, Carteret, and Cook for the government, for which he received £6,000; however, the work was censured as incidentally attacking the doctrine of Providence. Hawkesworth also wrote a popular novel, Almoran and Hamet. {BDF}
Hawking, Stephen (1942— ) Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988) led many to exaggerate that he represented “the second coming of Einstein.” His work in cosmology and physics places him as one of the most brilliant minds of his time, and his work on the physics of black holes is particularly original, although it is experimentally unverifiable. Suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), the noted theoretical physicist is confined to a wheelchair. (At one point, however, Hawking had a difficult divorce, after which he married his nurse, with whom he had been having an affair.) Unable to speak except by means of a special computer that synthesizes his voice when he presses buttons, he is a consummate example of a human who has succeeded despite egregious physical problems. When Shirley MacLaine accidentally met him in a restaurant, the actress (who claims she remembers past existences before her present life) recognized him and, during a chat, asked whether or not he believed in God. Hawking reportedly smiled, touched the right buttons, and the machine oracularly ejaculated, “No!” Similarly, when his A Brief History of Time was published and a reporter asked if he believed in God, given the “mind of God” reference near the end of the book, Hawking responded, “I do not believe in a personal God.” Specifically, his not being religious is traceable to what matters most to him: “Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” This, according to Michael White and John Gribbin in their biography, makes him less an atheist but simply a person who “finds the idea of faith something he cannot absorb into his view of the Universe.” Married and the father of two sons and one daughter, Hawking co-authored with G. F. B. Ellis The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973). His collection of essays, published in 1993, is Black Holes and Baby Universes. Hawking is a member of the American Philosophical Society. It is ironic, film critic Stanley Kauffmann has pointed out, that Hawking is something of a science-fiction creature, a person with a nearly disembodied brain. He is in the forefront of science at the same time that he is alive only because other scientists have laid the groundwork. Sophisticated devices with computer technology have made his existence possible, for without them he would be a mute prisoner within a useless body. {CA; E}
Hawkings, Gordon Joseph (1919— ) Hawkings is a humanist, a criminologist, and an author. Raised in England by his grandparents as an Anglican, he read Bertrand Russell and became a freethinker. He was Governor of the United Kingdom Prison Services but migrated to Australia in 1961, taking an appointment as senior lecturer in criminal law at Sydney University. With Norval Morris, Hawkings wrote The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control (1970) and “Humanism and the Crime Problem” in A Humanist View (1969). {SWW}
Hawkins, Dexter Arnold (1825—1886) Hawkins was an American educationist who lectured on educational reform and was chiefly instrumental in securing a National Bureau of Education. His rationalism is found in Roman Catholic Church in New York City (1880). {RAT}
Hawkins, Ronnie (20th Century) Hawkins, a professor of philosophy at the University of Central Florida, spoke on the subject, “Today’s Ethics and Morality: How I Came By Them,” at the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida.
Hawley, Henry (Died 1765) Hawley was a Scottish major-general who, by the terms of his will, prohibited Christian burial. {BDF}
Hawley, John S. (20th Century) A freethinker, Hawley wrote Tradition Versus Truth (1903). {GS}
Hawthorne, Julian (1846—1934) An American novelist, the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hawthorne wrote about thirty novels, A History of the United States (1899), and several literary works. His father, he said, had a pew in the Unitarian Church at Liverpool, where the father was for a time stationed, and sent him to occupy it on Sundays (but never attended himself). However, Julian said he “never learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance.” According to McCabe in 1920, Hawthorne was a theist. In 1938 the memoirs of Julian Hawthorne were published. {RAT}
Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804—1864)
One of the greatest of American authors, Hawthorne (whose sea captain father spelled his name Hathorne) came from a prominent Puritan family, his mother being a widow with solitary ways and a gloomy outlook. His Twice-Told Tales (1837) won him some recognition, but he found it necessary to work in a Boston customhouse in order to make a living. For a time he lived at Brook Farm, the transcendentalists’ experiment in utopianism, but found the communal life not to his taste. Blithedale Romance (1852) is based on his experience at the farm. He married Sophia Peabody, a friend and follower of Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, taking a job as surveyor of the port of Salem (1846—1849), where he began writing his masterpiece: The Scarlet Letter (1850), the first U.S. psychological novel. Salem has never quite recovered from its record of having hanged nineteen in the 1690s, also crushing one to death. Although not one of the alleged witches was burned, some writers mistakenly have stated that they were. The Salem that Hawthorne exposed had a fictional villain, the Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale, and a heroine, Hester Prynne, the adulteress required to wear a scarlet “A” but who triumphed over her “sin” because she confessed it openly whereas the minister had not. What Hawthorne excelled in was showing that era’s sex hatred, its repression, its prurience, its relentless pressure to deny reality, its using a child as a pawn in adult power struggles. It has been said that The Scarlet Letter dates the decline of Puritan importance in the U.S., that it speeded the time when a Playboy or a Playgirl could be published, inasmuch as it depicted the effects adultery had on a girl in colonial America. While living at Lennox, Massachusetts, Hawthorne befriended his neighbor, Herman Melville, becoming his closest emotional attraction, to Mrs. Hawthorne’s dismay. Melville’s elegy, “Monody,” after Hawthorne’s death included the following:
To have known him, to have loved him After loneness long; And then to be estranged in life; And neither in the wrong; And now for death to set his seal— Ease me, a little ease, my song!
Mrs. Hawthorne was reportedly pleased when Franklin Pierce, her husband’s college friend and now President, appointed him consul at Liverpool (1853—1857), rejoicing that they now would be living a convenient distance from Melville. (In letters discovered in 1983 in a barn in Gansevoort, New York, Ms. Robertson-Lorant noted Mrs. Hawthorne’s description of her husband, “He hates to be touched more than anyone I ever knew.”) In 1864, while on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce, Hawthorne suddenly died in Pierce’s arms (which some wags have said was the inspiration for Melville’s “Monody”; Gore Vidal implies it may not have been the first time Hawthorne had been in that proximity). Recent biographers continue to mention Melville’s opinion, confirmed by Hawthorne’s son Julian, that he was convinced “Hawthorne had all his life concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries of his career.” Biographer Philip Young claims that the secret was incest between Hawthorne and his sister Elizabeth. Another theory, mentioned by John Updike (The New Yorker, 28 Sep 1992), is that Hawthorne, a young man whose “androgynous beauty” often excited admiration, “was sexually molested by his uncle Robert Manning, with whom he shared, for a time, a bed in the overflowing Manning household.” Eighteen years later, Hawthorne declined to attend Manning’s funeral, and the villainous Judge Pyncheon in his House of the Seven Gables was a horticulturist, Manning’s occupation. Whatever the secret, if indeed he had one, Hawthorne’s tales of human loneliness, frustration, hypocrisy, eccentricity, and frailty made him a celebrated writer who remains a model for contemporaries. A work such as The Scarlet Letter, Updike notes, is of the quality of a classic and can be expected “to hold its secrets in living solution and to be, like life itself, ultimately indecipherable.” Robertson admired Hawthorne’s lack of faith, “whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past, wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual hold.” His son Julian in Hawthorne and His Circle tells that when his father was in Liverpool he had a pew at the Unitarian Chapel there, that he used to send Julian to fill it, never going himself. Julian says he “never learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance,” to which some Unitarians showed amazement, saying Unitarianism is creedless. Hawthorne had been married in a Unitarian church, and his funeral was held in a Unitarian church. (See entries for Alfred Kazin and Herman Melville.) {CE; CL; FUS; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; U; UU}
Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody (1809-1871) The sister of Elizabeth Parker Peabody and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Hawthorne was an author, writer, and Unitarian.
Hawton, Hector (Born 1901) The editor of Question in Great Britain, Hawton is a well-known humanist. He works include Why Be Moral? (1947), Men Without Gods (1948), The Humanist Revolution (1963), and Controversy: The Humanist / Christian Encounter (1971). He signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1957, Hawton was editor of The Humanist, in which British journal he once wrote that Gilbert Murray preferred “freethinker” to either “humanist” or “rationalist.” In 1968 in Hannover, Hawton addressed the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). {FUK; HM2}
Hayden, William George [Governor-General] (1933- ) Hayden was Governor-General of Australia (1989-1996). In 1996 he was named Australian Humanist of the Year. The Australian Humanist (February 1996) stated that the award “is made because he has shown that an avowed atheist who describes himself as a secular humanist can occupy the position of Governor-General with mounting approval.” Hayden, in accepting, said, “To be a humanist, one has to exercise free will, to reason, to be rational, to avoid being the slave of some defunct ideology or the disciple of received wisdom. . . . [However], [b]eing an atheist—as I am—is not a necessary pre-condition for being a humanist.” {CA}
Hayden, Charles Trumbull (19th Century) Hayden was one of the foremost Arizonan merchants and businessmen of his time. He built mills, cultivated lands, established trade, irrigated the land, and was a defender of the rights of the people. He believed in the schoolhouse, not the church; the spade and pick-ax, not the cross. He believed in a paradise in this world now, not in some dream later. Hayden was an early American freethinker. {RE}
Hayden, Louis (20th Century) In 1958, Hayden was chairman of a newly formed New York Chapter of the Rationalist Press Association. The group met at the Henry George School.
Hayden, William (20th Century)
In 1996 in Brisbane, the Honourable Bill Hayden A.C. was presented with the Australian Humanist of the Year Award. It was made in recognition of his caring for human values and rights as Minister of Social Security, his understanding of development issues as Minister of Foreign Affairs, his humanist attitude to euthanasia and to the rights of adoption of same-sex partners, and to his being an outspoken Governor-General. {E}
Haydn, Franz Joseph (1732—1809) Haydn, a great master of classical music, was an Austrian freethinker who joined the Masonic Lodge. That organization was reviled for its being non-theistic, for being deistic. Its deistic rituals held that the Grand Architect of the Universe created the universe but did not interfere by causing miracles or special revelations. Beethoven studied under Haydn, and Mozart was one of his close friends. Two of his great oratorios, written in his old age, were “The Creation” (1798) and “The Seasons” (1801). Austria was at war with France at the time, but Haydn’s burial in the Hundsthrum churchyard was a quiet event. The local prison chief, Johann Peter, was an amateur phrenologist and chose, under cover of war, to study the head of such an illustrious man as Haydn. So two days after the interment, a small group of bribed officials assisted four workmen in exhuming the body, cutting off the head, then reburying the remains. After stripping the head of all flesh, Peter cheerfully pronounced that Haydn had “the bumps of music fully developed.” Inasmuch as it was dangerous to return the skull, Peter kept it in a silk-lined box, eventually giving it to Joseph Rosenbaum, secretary to Haydn’s patron, Prince Esterhazy. Frau Rosenbaum had a glass and ebony display case made for the relic. When the Prince, unaware of what had happened, decided to rebury Haydn in his private church at Eisenstadt eight years later, the robbery was discovered. Meanwhile, Rosenbaum’s wife refused to give up the relic but, in a ruse, another skull was produced. Upon its being examined, however, the skull was found to be that of a man in his twenties, and Haydn had died in his seventies. Eventually, Peter’s wife gave it to her doctor who gave it to the Austrian Institute of Pathology and Anatomy in 1832. Haydn’s actual skull was not reunited with his body until the summer of 1954 when, amid church music and flashbulbs and after Prince Paul Esterhazy promised to build a magnificent tomb if the head were returned, Haydn’s head was finally joined to the rest of his body. {CE; PA}
Haydon, A. Eustace (1880—1975) A Canadian-born ex-Baptist professor of religion who wrote frequently for The Humanist, Dr. Haydon signed Humanist Manifesto I as well as II. He was a Canadian Baptist turned Unitarian and humanist, and he succeeded his teacher, the liberal Professor George Burman Foster, in history of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School (1929—1945). He had also followed Foster in the pulpit of the Unitarian Church in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1945 and following an anti-humanistic, anti-socialistic Leader Horace Bridges, Haydon became Leader of the Chicago Ethical Culture Society (1955—1965) and the Los Angeles Ethical Culture Society (1965—1975). In addition, he served as an officer of the American Humanist Association. He has written, “More important than faith in God is devotion to the human ideals of which he has become the symbol. Too long the strong gods have been made to bear the burden. Wistfully man has watched for the day of divine action to dawn and ever heal the hurt of disappointment by more passionate faith. Hopes hung in the heavens are of no avail. What the gods have been expected to do, and have failed to do through the ages, man must find the courage and intelligence to do for himself. More needful than faith in God is faith that man can give love, justice, peace, and all his beloved moral values embodiment in human relations. Denial of this faith is the only real atheism. Without it, belief in all the galaxies of gods is mere futility. With it, and the practice that flows from it, man need not mourn the passing of the gods.” Edwin H. Wilson, in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995), describes the considerable efforts that Haydon made in helping edit the first manifesto. (See entries for Ethical Culture and for burial practices, a subject upon which Haydon was an expert.) {CL; EU, Howard B. Radest; EW; FUS; HM1; HM2; HNS; HNS2}
Hayes, Judith (20th Century) Hayes is the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of Lutheran ministers. But after spending two years reading the Bible, she says, she “realized that the Bible was little more than a convoluted collection of primitive, barbaric, and bewildering myths, a lousy read.” In Freethought Today (May 1994), she wrote:
If you thank God for the food on your table, you are saying that he put it there. A necessary component of this premise, the other side of the coin, is that if there is no food on your table, God is responsible for that, too. The power to give necessarily includes the power to withhold. When you thank someone for a gift it is because you understand that he or she had the choice of not giving it to you, but chose to do so anyway. Thanking God for your food, then, is the same as saying thank you for not withholding food. You are offering thanks for not being allowed to starve.
In 1996, she wrote In God We Trust: But Which One? Although she had written for Freethought Today, the journal of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, she severed her relationship in 1996, complaining she was unhappy with the production quality of the book. In 1997, calling herself “a happy heretic,” she became a senior writer for The American Rationalist. Her homepage is at <http://www.thehappyheretic.com>. (Freethought Observer, November-December 1996} Judith Hayes, Author art
From an auto-bio provided by the contributor:
Judith Hayes, The Happy Heretic Author
For the first 20 years of my life, the most important part of my life was my faith. As a Missouri Synod German Lutheran, I knew I was destined for Heaven. But when I was around twelve and I formed a close friendship with a Japanese girl, I discovered to my horror that she was Buddhist! Can you imagine? And I could not figure out how she was ever going to get into Heaven, where I, of course, was going. Since I could not bear the thought of my best friend, Susan, spending eternity in Hell, I asked my religious leaders about this, and never received any satisfactory answer. I worried about it a great deal. Poor Susan.
So I decided to read the entire Bible, and thereby shore up my faith and answer all of my nagging questions. I couldn't have been more wrong. The further my studies took me, the less certain I became of ANY of my beliefs, and I finally arrived at some inescapable conclusions. My own logical mind proved to be my undoing. I literally reasoned my faith out of existence.
Such a metamorphosis is not to be taken lightly and does not happen easily when your faith is very strong to begin with. I understand now why the Catholic Church fought so hard to keep the Bible in Latin. If no one knows what it says, no one can question what it says. And almost anything sounds pretty in Latin. But if you read the entire Bible, not just prized snippets, you realize that it is a primitive, brutally violent, bigoted book. It stinks.
After my eye-opening reading of the Bible I naturally went on to read other books about religion, and these other books finished the process that the Bible had started. These other books, written by nonbelievers, simply rang out with logic and clarity. My faith tottered and then collapsed. The battle was over.
Although I was confused for quite a while after my faith left, I finally realized that there was a big, beautiful world out there, filled with promise, without a vengeful god or a pitchforked devil in sight. I saw that the possibilities for happiness were far-ranging and exhilarating. I seldom look back now; instead, I celebrate the fact that I am no longer hamstrung by the oppressive ties of religion. It was a long and arduous journey, but I can finally say, with a joyous certainty, that I am well and truly free. I feel, finally, at home in this world.
My second book, The Happy Heretic, to be published by Prometheus Books, will be out in the spring/summer 2000 season. It reflects my new outlook on the Bible, God(s), faith, and why Moses was such a klutz. My new opinion is simply that all God's children are orphans. But one of my all-time favorites, Mark Twain, said it succinctly and said it best: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Judith Hayes California, USA
Her website (and monthly column) can be found at http://www.thehappyheretic.com.
Hayes, Kay (20th Century) Hayes is Secretary-Treasurer of the Spokane, Washington, Freedom from Religion Foundation chapter of PAINE (People Actively Into Nontheisic Ethics). She has written for Freethought Today.
Hayes, Lester H. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hayes was public relations director of the American Income Life Insurance Company. {HM2}
Hayflick, Leonard (20th Century) The author of How and Why We Age (1994), Hayflick is pleased that humans live so long. The perfect solution to a “successful” old age, he writes, is a “successful death, [one] where you have lived to what we think is a maximum life span—let’s say about one hundred—with full retention of your cognitive and physical abilities, and then drop dead at the stroke of midnight.” Hayflick disapproves of those who indulge in what he calls “grannyology” and advises, instead, acquainting ourselves with “the fundamental biology of aging.” Most, he regrets, prefer books on grannyology. “You know,” he writes, “if there was a God, my book would be on the best-seller list, too. But it ain’t going to be. There’s no God.” {New York, 16 January 1995}
Hayhurst, Christine (20th Century) In England, Hayhurst heads the International Association of Liberal Religious Women. The group, which is associated with the Unitarian and Universalists, encourages the sharing of ideas and the search for spiritual identity in an international, interfaith community.
Hayman, Ronald (1932— ) Hayman is author of a highly rated biography, Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965). In addition to writing about Sartre, Proust, and Tennessee Williams, he wrote Thomas Mann (1995).
Haynes, Edmund Sidney Pollock (Born 1877) Haynes, a lawyer and writer, married one of Huxley’s granddaughters. He wrote in defense of liberty and for the reform of the divorce law. Haynes’s rationalism is found particularly in his Belief in Personal Immortality (1913). An agnostic, Haynes was a life member of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT; RE}
Hays, Mary Rose (20th Century) Hayes is the business director of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer.
Hayward, Abraham (1801—1884) Hayward was a lawyer, an editor of Law Magazine (1828—1844). He offended English rationalists in 1873 by an unpleasant letter on J. S. Mill in the Times. However, Hayward remained an agnostic. “No clergyman invaded his peace” at the time of his death, and his last words were, “We know nothing. There is something great.” {RAT}
Hayward, F. H. (Born 1872) Hayward in 1915 wrote Paganism. With E. M. White, he wrote a work about the English Ethical Culture leader Frederick J. Gould, The Last Years of a Great Educationist (1942). He also wrote Educational Ideas of Pestalozzi and Frobel (1979). {FUK; GS}
Hayward, Henry John (20th Century) Hayward, a freethinker, wrote The Gods Are Going (194—?) {GS}
Hayward, J. K. (20th Century) A freethinker, Hawyard wrote A Rebuttal of Spiritism et al. (1903). {GS}
Haywood, William Dudley (1869—1928) An outspoken atheist, Haywood was a labor leader who in Colorado led the Cripple Creek strike in 1904. He once was defended by Clarence Darrow and found not guilty of assassinating a former governor of Idaho. The socialists forced him out of their party because of his militancy. As a founder of the International Workers of the World (IWW), he preached mass action and class struggle. Arrested at the start of World War I on charges of sedition, he jumped bail and fled to Russia, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Hazlitt, Henry (1894—1993) Hazlitt was an economist whom H. L. Mencken in 1933 asked to succeed him as editor of the American Mercury, an iconoclastic journal founded by Mencken and George Nathan. From 1934 to 1956 Hazlitt wrote about economics for The New York Times, later writing for Newsweek. In 1949 he was asked his views about humanism and responded to the present author:
I don’t know exactly where I would fit into the categories unless I knew very clearly the criteria on which they were based. My guess is that my views would fall somewhere between classical humanism and naturalistic humanism. What I can say definitely is that they would not fall into the categories of theistic or atheistic humanism. If you must stick me in somewhere for the sake of schematic neatness, I suggest that I would probably fit with the least discomfort into the category of naturalistic humanism. Hazlitt wrote Anatomy of Criticism (1933) and Economics in One Lesson (1946, 1988). He did not believe wage levels could be raised by union bargaining or legislating minimum wage laws. He also rejected Karl Marx’s and John Maynard Keynes’s interventionist strategies, emphasizing his basic and consistent belief in the free market system. {WAS, 28 March 1949}
Hazlitt, William (1737-1820) A contemporary of Adam Smith, Hazlitt first joined the Presbyterian ministry but ultimately became unitarian in his outlook. He served several Unitarian churches: Wisbeach in 1764; Marshfield, Gloucestershire, in 1766; Maidstone 1770-1, during which time he met Dr. Benjamin Franklin; and Bandon, Cork, in 1780. For fifteen months, during which time his son William Jr. was born, Hazlitt preached in the Philadelphia area. In 1784 he went to Boston upon hearing that the Brattle Street Church was open. Here he convinced lay members of the congregation that they could ordain him to the ministry without the authority of either a bishop or a council of ministers. His son, writing some years later, noted, “It was while we resided at Weymouth that my father assisted in preparing a liturgy for [James Freeman’s] church which had been Episcopal and furnished him with a form of prayer used by Mr. [Theophilus] Lindsey in Essex Street Chapel, which they adapted to suit the Translantic Church.” Freeman wrote, “Before Mr. Hazlitt came to Boston, the Trinitarian doxology was almost universally used. That honest good man prevailed upon several respectable ministers to omit it. Since his departure, the number of those who repeat only scriptural doxologies has greatly increased.” Freeman, who became the first minister of King’s Chapel, was not joined by others. Jeremy Belknap found Hazlittle’s company “disgusting,” and John Eliot called him “the most conceited man I ever met with.” Two years later William Bentley wrote of Hazlitt, “While at Boston he attached himself to the ingenuous Mr. freeman now Reader at King’s Chapel and led that worthy man to some hasty measures in revising the Liturgy which may prove fatal to his establishment in that Society.” Had Hazlitt not done so, Carl Scovel and Charles C. Forman speculate in Journey Toward Independence: King’s Chapel’s Transition to Unitarianism (1993), “King’s Chapel might never have found models for liturgical reform and independent ordination.”
Upon his retirement Hazlitt moved in England to Crediton, where he died.
Hazlitt, William (1778—1830) Hazlitt, the essayist and English critic, aimed originally to be a minister. Instead, he became a master of the miscellaneous essay, writing on a variety of topics with his profound understanding. He befriended Coleridge, Lamb, Godwin, and Holcroft. In 1812 he gave a course of lectures on philosophy at the Russell Institution. Among his writings are Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817) and Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1820), both of which inspired many to have a renewed interest in Shakespeare. His Political Essays (1819) declared, “The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.” Thackeray described him as “one of the keenest and brightest critics that ever lived.” As a child and son of a dissenting minister, Hazlitt listened to his father, a Unitarian, but objected to the rationalistic philosophy in his sermons and of the bible that used to kindle his father’s “lack-lustre eyes.” From 1793 to 1795 he attended the Unitarian New College. Hazlitt died impoverished, an unbeliever in any future life. {CE; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TDY; U; UU} Headingly, Adolphe S. (19th Century) Headingly wrote a Biography of Charles Bradlaugh (1880). {GS}
Headlam, Stewart D. (20th Century) Headlam, a freethinker, wrote Charles Bradlaugh, An Appreciation (1907). {GS}
Heaford, William (Born 1855) In London during the early 1900s, Heaford was a lecturer for the British Secular League. {FUK; RAT; RSR}
Heald, Mark M. (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Heald was on the faculty of Rutgers University.
Heales, Peter (20th Century) Heales, who writes in England for New Humanist, is a tutor with Birbeck College Centre for Extramural Studies and the Workers Education Association. Also, he is secretary of the Sutton Humanist Group.
Healey, Denis Winston (20th Century) Healey, a former Member of Parliament for Leeds East in England, was described by reporter Frances Welch of the Sunday Telegraph: “Avowedly atheist, Healey is not prepared to concede that human conscience points to the existence of God. Nor does he feel that God has anything to do with the spiritual uplift he gains from art. ‘I think that the only worthwhile politician has a vocation, as a nun has a vocation. But I don’t see that vocation coming from God because I don’t believe in a personal God. I can cry over a Beethoven quartet and I’m deeply moved spiritually when I look at a painting by Mantegna or read poetry by Thomas Traherne. But you can’t be convinced that it is God’s influence if you don’t believe in God,’ Healey said. Asked if had ever felt the need to believe, Healey replied, ‘People turn to God in the same way they turn to chauvinism if they’re unhappy.’ So he was too happy for religion? ‘I dare say I am,’ he grinned, escorting me to the door.”
Healey, Robert M. (20th Century) Healey wrote the acclaimed Jefferson on Religion in Public Education (1962). {FUS}
HEALING People with limited education are highly impressed by individuals who claim they can heal others. Finding a healer who can “cure” their ailment is a goal made all the more important if extreme pain is involved. Healers appear to “cure” with some kind of supernatural intervention. Any reports from sufferers who are “terminal” cases but who have been “healed” receive wide publicity, and healers try to outdo other healers with their claims. The shaman or obeah woman who can concoct a liniment, the religionist who uses “the laying on of hands” or other theological device, the peddler who sells snake oil: all have wide support from individuals who verify they “were healed,” sometimes of cancer or many other ailments . . . almost anything excepting loss of limb. “Laying on of hands” is what a “qualified” person does to “bless” by placing hands on another’s head. The rite has been used as an exorcism before baptism, “to impart the Holy Spirit” to the newly baptised or “to transmit a special grace at ordination.” The Prince of the Sanhedrin, named in the Gospels as one of the judges in the Jewish state until its destruction in 70 C.E., conferred authority upon a new member in this way. “In Egypt and Babylonia, the king and princes received authority for their offices by contact with the hands of the images of the gods,” explained A. Eustace Haydon, who added, “A variant appears in the ancient Hebrew ceremony in which the priest annually transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat. Underlying all such rites is the primitive idea of a mysterious potency which may be communicated by contagion.” Contemporary physicians and scientists are aware of the brain’s triumph over reality. The “placebo effect” has been shown to lead to mechanisms that can turn belief into an agent of biological change. Patients, for example, are given a placebo (Latin for “I shall please”), a sham treatment. They think they are receiving some drug but actually are not. Sugar pills in various shapes, when administered, often resulted in surprising results. “If you expect to get better, you will,” Dr. Irving Kirsch, a psychiatrist at the Univeresity of Connecticut has observed as have numerous others. For example, a 1998 study of a baldness remedy found that 86% of men taking it either maintained or showed an increase in the amount of hair on their heads. But so did 42% of the men taking a placebo. Similarly, Venezuelan children who were asthmatic were given a sniff of vanilla along with a squirt of medicine from a bronchodilator twice a day. The vanilla odor alone increased their lung function 33% as much as did the bronchodilator alone. A Tulane University study by Dr. Eileen Palanace used a placebo to restore sexual arousal in women who said they were nonorgasmic. Hooked up to a biofeedback machine which they are told measures their vaginal blood flow, an index of arousal, they are shown sexual stimuli that would arouse most women. But experimenters who sent false feedback signals that their vaginal blood flow had increased, almost immediately became genuinely aroused. “I was healed!” claim believers at religious meetings. “Of course you were,” freethinkers observe. Or, as Dr. Howard Fields, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Francisco has said, “We are misled by dualism or the idea that mind and body are separate.” He recognizes that a thought is a set of neurons firing which, through complex brain wiring, can activate emotional centers, pain pathways, memories, the autonomic nervous system and other parts of the nervous system involved in producing physical sensations. {See Sandra Blakeslee, “Pladebos Prove So Powerful Even Experts Are Surprised,” The New York Times, 13 October 1998; ER}
HEALING BY PRAYER: See entry for James Randi.
Heaney, Seamus Justin (1939— ) Heaney, the author of Death of a Naturalist and other poetry, is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has been called “the best-known Irish poet since Yeats.” Asked by The Independent on Sunday if he believed in life after death, he replied, “No. I believe in the atheist position, or Wordsworthian one—it’s not in the Elysian fields but on this earth that we find our happiness, in the inner theatre or the theatre of relationships, in society or the home.” In 1993, when he was asked in person if he is an atheist, Heaney replied testily to the present author that he is a “rock Catholic” and did not remember having made any such statement to any British journal.
Heape, Walter (Born 1855) Heape, a zoologist, was Superintendent of the Marine Biological Association (1886—1888). In Sex Antagonism (1913), Heape compared the Christian belief in the miraculous conception of Christ to a belief of the Queensland blacks in spirit-conception—both “know the truth; it is only superstition which compels them to deny it.” {RAT}
Heard, Gerald (20th Century) Heard was a scientific humanist who wrote for The Realist (1929-1920) and was on its board of directors. {HNS2}
Hearn, Lafcadio (Yakumo Koizumi) (1850—1904) Born in the Ionian Islands of Irish-Greek parentage, Hearn was educated first as a Roman Catholic. He studied in Ireland, England, and France before moving to the United States in 1869. Hearn’s first work to gain notice was “Fantastics,” a series of unusual sketches that appeared in a New Orleans newspaper. One of Cleopatra’s Nights (1882) was his translation of some of Gautier’s stories. In 1890, Hearn went to Japan as a journalist, adopted Buddhism, wrote what are considered his best works, married a Japanese woman, and taught in Japanese universities. In 1895, as Yakumo Koizumi, he became a Japanese citizen. Included among his best works are Japanese Fairy Tales (1902) and Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation (1904). Handicapped by partial blindness, Hearn was accused by the editor of the Kobe Times, as having been a priceless asset to the ruling caste and a myopic observer who was exploited by officials. In his outlook, Hearn was a Unitarian, but he adopted Buddhism and wrote that it was superior to Christianity. As his friend, Robert Young, mentioned, however, Hearn was short-sighted and not a good observer. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; U; UU}
HEARSE
• Hearse, n. Death’s baby-carriage. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Hearst, James (1900—1983) Hearst, an Iowa farmer-poet, was a religious or democratic humanist who was uncomfortable with all organized religions. Following are samples of the work of a man who, following a diving accident into shallow water, was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life. First, from “Belief”:
. . . We should stand often against the sun— And what of the work if it isn’t done? For we are two neighbors who like to share A friendly word in the open air.
And we should talk swiftly against the time When crops and men and women and rhyme Shall be as quiet as to us as stone— The time of forever we spend alone.
In “The Grail,” he is naturalistic:
What greater praise canst thou have Than that we seek the grail, Not in the heavens, Lord, among the stars’ cold radiance, But in the furrow, the plowed field, the meadow, The places where it blooms for man in his short life.
In “The Reason for Stars,” Hearst continues,
I never wonder a lot about stars. I’m much too busy with things of this earth That show when a season of labor is done Just what the labor’s been worth.
Stars are all right to admire like flowers, I like to see pretty things when I’m done Working in the fields, but what do I care Whether a star is stone?
There’s plenty to learn in the ways of a seed. What do you get if you study the sky? It’s greater for holding one fruit in my hand Than a heaven of stars in my eye.
Similarly, he philosophizes in “Cows Bawl on Sunday”:
The image of God in a warm mackinaw and rubber boots daily fights his way into the steaming barnyard into a multitude of hungry, angry, playful and determined animals through a cloud of raging sound to bring order out of chaos. Six times a week and rests not on the seventh— and there fails his divinity.
Critiquing Hearst’s Country Men (1943), Dr. H. Willard Reninger of the University of Northern Iowa (UNI) wrote concerning the “Robert Frost of the Midwest,”
He is suspicious of metaphysical systems and expects no final answers in this world. One would never catch Jim Hearst trying to crack the nut of the universe—he would work harder trying to understand a friend. Consequently he thinks and writes from no thesis. Fine meshes are suspect; he shakes no self-righteous sieve. His mind is eminently receptive, a listening mind with ‘schools and creeds in abeyance.’ Not argumentative, he is a man of peace, practicing a quiet self-reliance, but compromising at times because of his reluctance to offend a guest. Unlike his father, he is no swinging fighter for his ideals, winning, instead, through a personal appeal to one’s humanity. . . . Jim Hearst believes that there may be no order in nature except the order imposed upon it by man. From nature man can learn isolated facts and lessons, but the totality he must forge for himself. Man is therefore obliged to impose an order on nature, on his own life, and on everything he makes. This order is necessary to give his life meaning, and above all man is in search of the meaning of existence: he must somehow wrench point and direction from his environment—a reason for being.
Asked about humanism, Robert Frost’s respected friend responded to the present author:
I don’t know where I fit. I can go along with “democratic humanism” because it is vaguely reassuring. If it will help, I’m a backslid Congregationalist with firm leanings away from denominationalism. As my friend August Bang said, “Denominations are God’s little kindergartens.” Mostly I start with the individual as the hitching post for meanings and beliefs. There must be a point of reference somewhere and I like to start with a person. Then he can choose the ground he wants to stand on. There is nothing on this earth more important than people. People think the abstractions, make up the legends and myths, form and reform societies, contain the unconscious, the id, the super-ego—in spite of what some poets, scientists, and other generalizers would have you think. Maybe I’ll change my mind later on, but it will be only a slight shift. Can you make anything out of this? I am more at home in the hayfield right now than in the various aspects of humanism.
{WAS, 12 June 1949}
Heath, A. E. (20th Century) Heath, when president of the Rationalist Press Association, wrote in 1956 of his dislike of the term “humanism” to describe a philosophic outlook. He made the case for rationalism.
Heath, Karl (20th Century) Heath, in the British Freethinker (July 1993), wrote an essay, “Christianity is Evil.” He penned an unfavorable review of Lee Eisler’s Quotable Bertrand Russell in the same journal (January 1994), saying the book is too expensive at £14.50, that one would be better off to buy the 800-page History of Western Philosophy for only 50 pence.
HEATHEN • Heathen, n. A benighted creature who has the folly to worship something that he can see and feel. According to Professor Howison, of the California State University, Hebrews are heathens. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Heathen, which originally denoted someone who was not Jewish and hence was not entitled to share in the promises of salvation and blessings in which the Jews believed, has come to mean anyone who does not acknowledge the God of the Bible, particularly those who are “irreligious” and “uncivilized.” For example, secular humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, and philosophic naturalists are termed heathens by the Christians. {ER}
Heatherly, Marian (20th Century) Heatherly is copy editor and permissions editor for The Humanist. Her column is “Worth Noting.”
HEAVEN Revelation XXI states that Heaven measures 12,000 furlongs in length, breadth, and also height. Robert L. “Believe It Or Not” Ripley in 1925 figured that that comes to
496,793,088,000,000,000,000 cubic feet.
Or about 1500 miles long in each dimension, give or take a few cubes. If 10 cubic feet for each human is allowed (it being assumed that non-humans are to be excluded), Heaven can hold
49,679,308,800,000,000,000 beings.
However, Ripley then figured that, assuming 25 years as a generation, and that roughly 77 generations of humans have existed simply since the time of Jesus, the number in the human family will have reached
302,231,454,657,293,676,543 humans
which is more than all humans who have ever lived.
(Mathematicians note that Ripley’s calculations may not have taken into account that one’s relatives increase in number but never overlap those being counted by others. And he assumes humanity’s pool increases exponentially as one goes back in time, although the reverse is the case.)
At any rate, believe it or not, the good news in 1925 was that if almost all somehow made it to Heaven, they would be able to meet their father and mother and other family members (but not those relatives, of course, that were sinners or forgot us in their will). However, as for those bad folks, the sinners, who are not allowed into Heaven, Hosea Ballou (1771—1852) taught that Hell could not—logically or ethically—exist, that all men at death will be saved by the love of God. If God is the ultimate of good, how could He reasonably reject any human being! Ripley had no comment on this, except that like Ballou he also included the entire human family. Ripley’s bad news, believe it or not, was that your parents would have met theirs, and theirs would have met theirs, theirs theirs, and so forth. It also would mean that because of the space limitations everyone would of necessity be stacked on each other’s heads to a height of 113,236 miles, according to Ripley’s figures. That’s if they stand, not lie down. So to say hello to your dear oldest grandfather, who may be down toward the 113,000 miles bottom of the heap, assuming new arrivals are at the top of the heap, you will need to take about 39 years to descend, even if you are careful not to step on someone’s ear as you do. Extrapolating further, Ripley figured that if we met one relative a minute, and took off no time for sleeping, it would take 575,000,000,000,000,000 years to meet the entire human family, not counting any human beings who would be born after 1925. In 1925, then, did Ripley believe in Heaven? Apparently not, and his 1929 book was popularly received, to the distress of the religious establishment. But philosophic naturalists and non-believers are distressed that religionists preach such an idea. Who is to blame, they ask, when a six-year-old Miami girl, having been told by her mother who was dying of AIDS that she was going to a wonderful place called heaven, sees her mother die, then calmly steps in front of a freight train in order to see her mother. Experts, instead of blaming the heaven-preachers, argue as to whether or not a very young child can commit suicide. Can such a youngster possibly grasp the finality of death? Remarked a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Miami when the deliberate act took place in June, 1993, “I don’t think we can ever know for sure what was on her mind.” Meanwhile, the girl’s adult cousin said the girl knew exactly what she was doing: “She said she’d seen an angel, and she was going to Heaven to be with the angel. So she just stood there with her eyes closed, and the train hit her.” Believe it or not! Others who have commented upon Heaven include the following:
• In heaven all the interesting people are missing. —Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons. —James Thurber
• Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside. —George Bernard Shaw
• Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. —George Santayana
• Only that person is wise who finds everything in life but also finds nothing in death but death. To the intelligent person, life is its own end; for that very reason, it is preparation for nothing. —Ludwig Feuerbach
• Heaven, n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• He: What do you suppose comes after life?
She: Just sort of a great merging with everything. He: Oh, I hope not! I’m a very bad merger!
—Noel Coward, Private Lives (See entry for Edwin Powell Hubble.) {CE; ER}
Barbara Walters, an ABC television reporter, on a 20 December 2005 program discussed Heaven with various individuals.
- Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf said he believes "We will be in comfortable homes, reclining on silk couches. We will have people coming - servants, lovely servants, young youths to regale you, Barbara. Residing in gardens beyond which rivers flow." He added there will be sex and virgins, even for women. But he quarelled with the widespread misconception that Islamic martyrs get 72 virgins. Seventy-two, he said, is just an Arabic expression for "countless."
- A convicted murderer from Islamic Jihad said he joined the group not for its promises of Heaven but because "I wanted to kill Jews."
- For Jackie Mason, a comedian and rabbi, "There's nothing really more that I want," saying life before death is completely satisfactory. But in any hereafter he expects to eat pastrami without gaining weight.
- Hollywood star Elizabeth Taylor reportedly does not fear death because during a near-death experience she felt she had been reunited temporarly with her third husband, Mike Todd.
- Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, admitted that he hopes he'll get his hair back in Heaven."
- Ted Haggard, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, said that if a person does not accept Jesus Christ as his or her savior, he or she will go to Hell. Walters, who is Jewish, asked, "What if the God is not Jesus Christ? What if it's a different God? Do they go to Hell? "I think so, unfortunately," he responded.
- Sports columnist and author Mitch Aboum, author of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, said he finds the idea of Heaven makes life better by making us feel there is something more than the meaningless of daily life.
- Walters, who is Jewish, said nearly 90 percent of Americans believe Heaven exists. Interestingly, she did not interview eminent non-believers.
HEAVEN OR PARADISE? Males doing comparison shopping might note the differences between the Christians’ Heaven and the Muslims’ Paradise. According to the Hadith, which is the Islamic tradition of the sayings and the practices of the Prophet:
Every man who enters Paradise shall be given seventy-two houris, [and] no matter at what age he had died, when he enters Paradise, he will not age any further.
Some have interpreted Muhamad’s views differently, saying in Paradise all will be in their twenties, that a frail centenarian would surely not have to spend eternity at that age. Antony Flew has suggested that “any man who fears that even as an everlasting thirty-year-old he would not be able to do justice to the attractions of this eschatological brothel may be encouraged to learn that ‘A man in Paradise shall be given virility equal to that of one hundred men.’ ” (See entries for Agung and for Heaven, Muslim.) {New Humanist, October 1998}
HEAVEN, A DEAD CERTAINTY A 1997 poll by U.S. News & World Reports found that 67% of Americans are certain that Heaven exists. Further, 87% think they are likely to go there. Just 18%, however, thought all their friends would join them in Paradise. {Reuters, 23 March 1997}
HEAVEN, MUSLIM
In Muhammad the Prophet’s day, belief in an afterlife was virtually nonexistent. To him, however, the Qur’an was “revealed,” and the book contained eloquent descriptions of the dread day when resurrected bodies are joined with their souls and brought before the throne of God’s judgment. First, a trumpet is blown; resurrection occurs; there is an ingathering of all persons for the judgment; an actual reckoning (hisab) is made; then comes a crossing of the Sirat bridge, the possibility of intercession (shafaah), and preparation is made for the final consignment either to the fires of hell (al-nar) or the garden of bliss (al-jannat). Hell is a place where the tortures of the fire are fearful, the flames crackle and roar, fierce boiling waters are all around, the wind is scorching, and black smoke is everywhere. People sigh, they wail, their scorched skin is exchanged for new skin so they can experience the pain again and again, they drink foul liquids, boiling water is poured over their heads, and if they try to escape they are dragged back by iron hooks. Heaven, however, is a Paradise. Here is found peace, contentment, gentle speech, pleasant shade from dark green foliage, fruits, cool drink, and the meat and wine one desires. In Heaven, one can recline on couches and be waited upon by manservants. Males have huris, young virgins said to have eyes like guarded pearls. Some contemporary Muslims are in disagreement as to whether the descriptions are meant to be literal or figurative. “Literal” is the view of the majority, particularly those with little education. (See entry for Heaven or Paradise.) {Also see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim [1995] and the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World [1995]).
HEAVENLY PLAIN: See entry for Shinto.
Hebbel, Friedrich (1813—1863) Hebbel was a German tragedian and poet. His masterpiece, Die Nibelungen (1862), depicts the conflict of the pagan and Christian view of life. Hebbel was a pantheist. {RAT}
Hébert, Jacques René (1757—1794) Hébert was a French revolutionist. He published the notorious Père Duchêsne and with Chaumette instituted the Feasts of Reason. He was denounced by Saint Just and guillotined. His widow, who had been a nun, was executed a few days later. {BDF}
Hébert, Marcel (20th Century) Hébert, a French philosopher, wrote Évolution de la foi catholique (1905), in which he studied the Church from the outside, without hostility. He concluded that it will last, “but without any effective authority on all that thinks, acts, and advances in Humanity.” Hébert believed that man has a sense of “the Divine,” but he remained agnostic as regards personal immortality. {RAT}
HEBREWS: For history, see entry for Jews. For religion, see entry for Judaism. Not all Hebrews became Jews. Not all Jews are Hebrews. Many throughout history have chosen pagan Greek over religious Hebrew.
Hecataeus (c. 500 B.C.E.) Hecataeus of Miletus, a predecessor of Herodotus, was among the earliest of un-believers, according to Angelo Juffras. Like Herodotus, Hecataeus traveled far, was called historikos (widely traveled), a teller of stories, an active inquirer. This led him to observe that “the beliefs of the Greeks are laughable,” although it is not certain just what beliefs he had in mind. Bertrand Russell notes that Heraclitus had negative views of Hecataeus. Heraclitus, however, liked Teutamus, who believed that “most men are bad.” Hecataeus, as one of the first individuals devoted to “inquiry”—histoire originally meant not “history,” in the contemporary sense, but telling stories about one’s inquiries—laid the foundation for sophistés, inquirers who had become wise men because of their traveling and story-telling, or sophists. {EU, Angelo Juffras}
Hecht, Anthony (1923— ) Hecht, an American poet who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, responded in 1989 to the present author concerning humanism:
I feel much as Lionel Trilling did [in the quote you mailed], ill-at-ease with the term “humanism” though perhaps our reasons for discomfort are not the same. I’d be curious to find out if any of your respondents claim to enlist under the heading of “ancient humanist.” As for me, I’m afraid that as currently used (without your fine distinctions) the term seems to mean little more than that the person to whom it applies is “a nice guy,” and more particularly one who is nice by instinct and not by policy or doctrine. This essentially antinomian meaning is one of the things that makes me as hesitant and suspicious as I am. The word carries about as much weight these days as the word “socialism” in the phrase “National Socialism.” In terms of plain usefulness, I still like to employ it as you did in your third definition, the one of “Classical Humanism,” applied, as you indicate, to the likes of More, Erasmus, Montaigne, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bacon, Colet, Vives, and so on. I wish I could claim to be able to enroll myself under such a heading, but apart from my ignorance, I would also have to be a great deal older than I am.
In 1992, he had further observations:
Your categories intrigue me, not least of all because they are by no means exhaustive. None of them, for example, would embrace what Terence and Cicero meant in saying, “I am a man: nothing human is alien to me.” I think this is clearly distinct from the second category of “collective philosophies” such as you enumerate. It furthermore occurs to me to wonder just how useful a term “humanism” can be if, as I shrewdly suspect, there are hardly any people who would categorically deny an affiliation to one or another of its varieties. If not too impatient to consider the question, even Hitler, I imagine, would declare himself a “humanist” (just as he regarded himself as a Socialist) on the grounds that he was generously concerned with the welfare of at least some fellow humans. I may say that I have no faith whatever in the “self-improvability of human personality” which you offer as a description of “secular humanism.” This does not mean that I don’t believe that individuals can improve themselves in important ways; they obviously do so simply by maturing, and most adults are more thoughtful and considerate of others than small children are. But in the main, I do not for a minute believe that the human race has become more humane or less given to barbarous inhumanity than obtained in any former period however “barbarous” or refined in its brutality. From my point of view, the most useful definition is the one you characterize as “classical humanism.” It describes a particular era, and a latitudinous kind of culture that belonged to a certain period, and that is now past. There is nothing wrong nor especially pedantic about seeing humanism as something in the past. Up until recently the word “modern” was defined as “bearing upon the present,” and concerned with whatever is “current.” But now, it appears, we live in a “post-modern” world, and no one will ever be modern again.
{WAS, 30 January 1989 and 5 June 1992}
Hecht, Ben (1893—1964) Hecht was a New York-born journalist, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter of over sixty films, including Academy Award-winning “Underworld” (1927) and “The Scoundrel” (1935). His parents, who had come from Southern Russia, moved to Chicago, where at the age of ten he gave a violin concert. Later, he was an acrobat with a small circus in Wisconsin. In Chicago he became associated with that city’s “literary renaissance” following World War I, working with Sherwood Anderson, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Pascal Covici. He liked the French symbolists (Gautier, Verlaine, Baudelaire), disliked Rousseau (a great big thumping fool”) and Picasso (“an imposter of the arts”), and thought J. K. Huysmans was “the rajah of writing, his brain the splendid macaw of all literature.” Gargoyles (1922) was one of many of his works which received negative reviews. The Greensboro (North Carolina) Daily News called the book “a rambling, incoherent, formless string of incidents, unworthy of the name of story, bristling with innumerable pewter imitations of the steely satire of Masters, Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Maxwell Anderson.” But Burton Rascoe in the New York Tribune described his A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922, illustrated by George Grosz) glowingly:
There is no newspaper writer in America who can touch him in imagination and literary treatment of police court happenings, hospital cases, street curb incidents—all the multitudinous events of city life. He is a poet; he is a wit; he is clever; he has feeling; and he has a sense of drama.
Similarly, James T. Farrell, although noting Hecht’s love of the grotesque and mordant, liked his journalistic collection of stories about the city’s back streets. Stanley Walker called his stories “something of a Bible, the perfect example of how ‘human interest’ stories should be handled.” A Jew in Love (1931) left readers wondering where art leaves off and obscenity begins. Fantazius Mallare, A Mysterious Oath (1922) left no doubt, for the book was sequestered by the government as “obscene literature,” leaving Hecht a more unrelenting foe of censors than ever. A $6,000 per week writer in Hollywood by 1937, Hecht was called “the Ishmael of the inquisitors.” He was said to have been the only director who could chew gum and smoke a cigar at the same time and, also, the only one who could finish a picture ahead of schedule. Hecht was an outspoken Anglophobe, because of England’s stand on Israel. However, he gave Noel Coward his first starring movie role, in “The Scoundrel.” Although listed in Who’s Who of American Jewry 1938—1939, Hecht had rather strong non-theistic sentiments in Fantazius Mallare’s dedication:
This dark and wayward book is affectionately dedicated to my enemies…to the moral ones who have relentlessly chased God out of their bedrooms; to the moral ones who cringe before Nature, who flatten themselves upon prayer rugs, who shut their eyes, stuff their ears, bind, gag, and truss themselves and offer their mutilations to the idiot God they have invented (the Devil take them, I grow bored with laughing at them)…to the religious ones who wage bloody and tireless wars upon all who do not share their fear of life (Ah, what is God but a despairing refutation of Man?)…to the social ones who regard belching as the sin against the Holy Ghost, who enamel themselves with banalities, who repudiate contemptuously the existence of their bowels (Ah, these theologians of etiquette, these unctuous circumlocutors, a pock upon them)…to those and to many other abominations whom I apologize to for omitting, this inhospitable book, celebrating the dark mirth of Fantazius Mallare, is dedicated in the hope that their righteous eyes may never kindle with secret lusts nor their pious lips water erotically from its readings—in short in the hope that they may never encounter the ornamental phrases I have written and the ritualistic lines Wallace Smith has drawn in the pages that follow.
Of Fantazius Mallare, the novel of decadence in the tradition of Against Nature by Huysmans, Arthur C. Clarke remembers, “The awesome picture on page 75 was once the basis of a Time cover, about Toynbee. But it’s the dungeon scene on page 106 that turned me on when first I saw it forty years ago.” {TYD; WAS, 25 April 1997}
Hedberg, Erika (1976- ) Hedberg, while still a philosophy undergraduate, lectured at the Center for Inquiry Mid-West and became a volunteer in the Kansas City Eupraxophy Center and the Campus Freethought Alliance. In 1999 she became the Council for Secular Humanism’s Coordinator for the Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies (ASHS).
Hedenius, Ingemar (1908— ) Hedenius, a Swedish professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, is a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Hedge, Frederic Henry (1805—1890) The editor of Christian Examiner (1857—1861) and a Harvard professor of ecclesiastical history and German literature, Hedge was one of the principal supporters of the “new views” that came to be known in the 1830s as Transcendentalism. The Transcendental Club which met in the middle 1830s in the Boston area, in fact, was referred to as “Hedge’s Club.” He differed with Emerson and others, however, on the issue of the importance of the church in religious life. Emerson thought most institutions, including the church, were at best a necessary evil. Hedge argued that such institutions provide a necessary historical continuity that does not supersede religious intuition but supplements it in importance. With Henry W. Bellows, James Freeman Clarke, and the “Broad Church” group, he opposed the radicals of the Free Religious Association. {CE; FUS; U; U&U}
Hedin, Sven Adolph (Born 1834) Hedin was a Swedish member of the “Andra Kammaren,” or House of Commons. He edited the Aftonbladet (1874—1876) and wrote many radical works. {BDF}
HEDONISM Hedonism is a outlook in which pleasure is the highest good. Aristippus and the early Cyrenaics believed pleasure is achieved by the complete gratification of all one’s sensual desires. Epicurus, however, equated pleasure with the absence of pain. Utilitarianism, a form of 19th-century British hedonism, has been described as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” As pointed out by Prof. Gilbert Murray, the Greek word hedone means “sweetness” rather than sensual pleasure. In that sense hedonism might be applied to the system of Epicurus or of Aristippus. {CE; DCL; ER; RE}
Heffron, Paul (20th Century) Formerly a minister in the United Church of Christ, Heffron is an atheist-humanist who lives in Shoreview, Minnesota. {Secular Nation, October-December 1998}
Hefner, Hugh M. (1926— ) Hefner is the American publisher and businessman who launched Playboy in 1953, infuriating orthodox religionists because of the magazine’s photographs of nude females and advice concerning hedonism. A strong defender of the First Amendment, Hefner takes some credit for advancing the sexual revolution that started in the 1950s and continued widely at least until the onset of the Age of AIDS. When Billy Graham preached to 44,300 people that AIDS may be “a judgment of God” for sin, Hefner commented, “I’m old enough to remember the Monkey Trial in the ’20s and then reading about it as a schoolboy in the ’30s. I was fascinated with the controversy surrounding evolution. To me, from a very early age, it was like superstition and bigotry on one hand and truth and beauty on the other. To be revisiting that crazy notion and others—like AIDS as some sort of retribution—is so preposterous! Society as it stands today certainly isn’t worthy of entry into a new millennium. We may be technologically and scientifically advanced, but socially we are no more than superstitious savages.” Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy (1962—1965) contains twenty-two sections. Asked by journalist Jeff Yarbrough if he believed in the concept of God, Hefner replied, “I don’t. Whatever this awe-inspiring existence is all about, the answer does not lie in a book. The closest that I’m able to come to the concept of God is nature. The greatest religious experiences I’ve had are walking this property and walking through the redwood forest and feeling a sense of awe, of smallness.” {The Advocate, 8 March 1994}
Hefner, Hugh M. (9 Apr 1926 - ) Hefner is the American publisher and businessman who launched Playboy in 1953, infuriating orthodox religionists because of the magazine’s photographs of nude females and advice concerning hedonism. A strong defender of the First Amendment, Hefner takes some credit for advancing the sexual revolution that started in the 1950s and continued widely at least until the onset of the Age of AIDS. When Billy Graham preached to 44,300 people that AIDS may be “a judgment of God” for sin, Hefner commented, “I’m old enough to remember the Monkey Trial in the ’20s and then reading about it as a schoolboy in the ’30s. I was fascinated with the controversy surrounding evolution. To me, from a very early age, it was like superstition and bigotry on one hand and truth and beauty on the other. To be revisiting that crazy notion and others—like AIDS as some sort of retribution—is so preposterous! Society as it stands today certainly isn’t worthy of entry into a new millennium. We may be technologically and scientifically advanced, but socially we are no more than superstitious savages.” Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy (1962—1965) contains twenty-two sections. Asked by journalist Jeff Yarbrough if he believed in the concept of God, Hefner replied, “I don’t. Whatever this awe-inspiring existence is all about, the answer does not lie in a book. The closest that I’m able to come to the concept of God is nature. The greatest religious experiences I’ve had are walking this property and walking through the redwood forest and feeling a sense of awe, of smallness.” {The Advocate, 8 March 1994}
Hegel, G(eorg) W(ilhelm) F(riedrich) (1770—1831) Although an untypical non-believer, Hegel in his Phenomenology of the Mind (1807) presented “one of the most influential sources of contemporary atheism.” His universe centered around “absolute idealism,” or world-soul, and he influenced Kierkegaard and Sartre. His idealism influenced Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hocking, Emerson, and Christian Scientists. John Dewey, however, broke away from Hegelian idealism early on. If there is any individual for Protestantism analogous to what Thomas Aquinas is for Roman Catholicism, a case could be made for Hegel. In Invitation to Learning (1941), Bertrand Russell is negatively critical of Hegel’s Philosophy of History: “[It] is a very important book indeed, judged by the effects it has had, and a totally unimportant book judged by any truth it may contain. [One effect is that it influenced Marx, who, of course, had an enormous effect.] [It is] important, partly because it presented a pattern in history—a scheme, a system—according to which historical events were supposed to have developed, which of course people like. It is a simple formula and they think ‘now we understand it all’; if it is false, they do not notice it. I do not object to a man writing universal history, if he has the time; but I do object to the notion that there is a simple scheme or thread running through it all. . . . I think the course of history is subject to laws and is probably for a sufficiently wise person deterministic; but nobody is wise enough. It is far too complicated and nobody can work it out; and the person who says he has done so is a charlatan.” McCabe has half-hearted praise for Hegel: “His stress on spirit did much harm in European thought for a century and he was stuffily reactionary in politics. But though he professed (morally) to be a Christian, he scorned theology and did not believe in a personal God or immortality. When Heine mentioned the argument for God from the starry heavens, he [Hegel] retorted that the stars are leprosy on the sky, and when he was reminded of Kant’s moral argument for a future life he said, ‘So you expect a tip for nursing your sick mother and for not poisoning your brother.’ ” Hegel had students of philosophy begin with Spinozism. He also is said to have remarked that of all his many disciples only one understood him, and he understood him falsely. Hegel was professor at Jena, Heidelberg, and Berlin, in which last city he died and was buried beside Johann Fichte. (For Mao’s comments about Hegel, see the entry for Marxism. See Andrew Ferguson’s “Popper, Englefield and Philosophy, New Humanist, November 1994, in which Ferguson states that “Popper is as effective as Englefield in showing that most of what Hegel wrote is meaningless rubbish [except in so far as it serves as a rationale for the state exercising absolute power].”) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Volker Dürr; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Heidegger, Martin (1889—1976) “Many people who learn that Heidegger lied over and over again about his Nazism, and that he did his best to ignore the murder of the European Jews, conclude that his writings can be neglected,” wrote Richard Rorty. Despite his being a resentful, ungenerous, disloyal, and deceitful man, Heidegger deserves our attention, adds Rorty, because “he somehow managed to write books that are as powerful and as original as Spinoza’s or Hegel’s. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jürgen Habermas all cut their teeth on those books. You cannot read most of the important philosophers of recent times without taking Heidegger’s thought into account.” Heidegger, one of the founders of 20th-century existentialism (although he rejected the title), was a student of Husserl, succeeding him as a professor of philosophy at Freiburg, Germany. In his Being and Time (1927), Heidegger dealt with the concepts of “care,” “mood,” and the individual’s relationship to death. He related the authenticity of being as well as the anguish of modern society to the individual’s confrontation with his own temporality. In his confrontation with the world, Heidegger taught that man finds ties binding him to objects, companions, and life as well as finds his essential possibilities and his relationship to death. Strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, he in turn influenced the work of Sartre. Although Heidegger joined the Nazi party in Germany, he later said he had not been active in the party nor a believer in its philosophy or cultural policy. He did not, however, leave the party and once orated that “the Führer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law.” Somehow, he felt that the National Socialist revolution of the early 1930s, by using pre-Socratic philosophers’ thoughts and the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, could be given a proper direction. Even after the Nazis showed no interest in his view of the direction Germany should take, he continued to support them, despite his denial. Further, he helped in the banning of prominent Jews—including his own teacher and patron, Edmund Husserl—from Germany University faculties. Also, he blocked the promotion of a former student by writing a confidential memo which accused him of having become “closely tied to the Jew Fränkel, formerly employed at Göttingen, and now dismissed from this university.” Scholars have become intrigued, as shown by Elzbieta Ettinger’s Hannah Arendt—Martin Heidegger (1995), at how the Jewish Arendt had a four-year sexual relationship with Heidegger in 1924 when she was a student, and how he was able to sustain her emotional involvement until her death over five decades after they had met. If it was passion which led the married Catholic thirty-five-year-old Professor Heidegger to initiate the affair with a student, the fact that it was he, not she, who broke off the relationship is interesting inasmuch as he followed up with a self-centered and manipulative desire to keep in touch. Arendt believed his problem was his wife, Elfride. By the early 1930s, Arendt was aware that Heidegger was a Nazi. In 1933, as rector of the University of Freiburg, he was known to have blocked the promotions of Karl Jaspers, Eduard Baumgarten, and Max Mueller, all suspected of being anti-Nazi. When Jaspers’s wife, a Jew, had cried at newspaper reports of anti-Semitism, Heidegger told Jaspers that “it makes one feel better to cry sometimes.” Although some describe Heidegger as being an atheist, Heidegger studied Catholic theology thoroughly, and his search for Being is close to a kind of belief in God. Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest and Professor of Christian Philosophy of Religion at the University of Freiburg, delivered Heidegger’s funeral speech. Heidegger’s thought, he remarked, “has shaken the world and the century.” He added that Heidegger’s path was that of “perhaps the greatest seeker of this century.” Richard Rorty, in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, cites Heidegger—along with Hegel, Marx, Frege, Freud, and Wittgenstein—in a list of “individual men of genius who think of something new” and called him “one of the three most important philosophers of our century” (the others being Dewey and Wittgenstein). Disagreeing, Paul Edwards in “Heidegger’s Quest for Being” (Journal of Philosophy 64:437—470) states that what is more likely is “that Heidegger will continue to fascinate those hungry for mysticism of the anaemic and purely verbal variety, the ‘glossogonous metaphysics’ of which his philosophy is such an outstanding example. The odds are that people afflicted in this way will exist for a long time; and if this is so, Heidegger will indeed be read and admired in future centuries. More sober and rational persons will continue to regard the whole Heidegger phenomenon as a grotesque aberration of the human mind.” Edwards was amused that in a programmatic essay Sartre counted Heidegger as an atheist. “He did indeed reject Christian and Jewish theism,” Edwards wrote in God and the Philosophers, “but he believed in an ultimate reality called ‘Being,’ which has striking similarities to the traditional deity. Being is in everything and is the source of everything. It is always referred to as ‘the Holy’ and as something ‘transcendent’ that cannot be adequately described in language taken from ordinary experience. It can be reached by various mystical techniques, especially one that Heidegger calls Gelassenheit and that has been facetiously described as a form of ‘creative waiting.’ It should be noted that Heidegger felt an affinity with medieval mystics, whom he frequently quoted with approval, and that he was unequivocally opposed to any form of naturalism.” (See entry for Joseph Warren Beach.) {CE; ER; HNS2; Richard Rorty, The New York Times Book Review, 3 May 1998; TYD}
Heidelberger, Michael (1888—1992) Heidelberger, a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, was a distinguished chemist who wrote textbooks and in 1950 was on the faculty of philosophy at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. The Belgian government once honored him for his immunochemical work in helping to cure African sleeping sickness. Heidelberger was one of the first students of the Ethical Culture schools in New York, having been enrolled from 1900 to 1905.
Heideman, Robert (20th Century) Heideman, founder the president of Aquatic System International, was the vice-president of Freethinkers, Inc., and class honorman in the U. S. Navy’s Aviation Ordinance School. The Center for Inquiry’s librarian’s office is named for Heideman.
Heidenstam, Verner von (1859—1923) Known as “Sweden’s Laureate,” for he won a Nobel Prize, Heidenstam as a youth turned from the study of art to poetry. His first volume (Pilgrimage) was inspired by his extensive travels and contained heavy criticism of the clergy and their doctrines and professed agnosticism. “Superstition and faith are the same,” he wrote. “Man’s God is the priesthood’s money chest.” {RE}
Heikel, Viktor (19th Century) With Mathilda Asp, Heikel founded in 1887 the first nonbelievers’ organization in Finland. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.
Heilbroner, Robert Louis (1919— ) An author and economist, Heilbroner has gone on record as being a non-theist. His works include Future as History (1960), Between Capitalism and Socialism (1970), Inquiry into the Human Prospect (1974), The Essential Adam Smith (1986), and Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy (1996). A Guggenheim fellow, Heilbroner taught in New York at the New School for Social Research. {CA; E}
Heine, Heinrich (1797—1856) One of the greatest of German lyric poets, Heine was born of Jewish parents. Deutschland (1844) is a work in which Heine, being a German of Jewish parents, satirizes German anti-Semitism. Of some 3,000 lyrics Schumann, Schubert, and others have put to music, his best-known song is “Die Lorelei.” Although claimed by some as being a religious man, having converted to Christianity as a youth, the conversion was a matter of convenience, meant to qualify him for a university appointment (in law) that he never received anyway. Nevertheless, he is known for his naturalism and, some say, his deism. In the 1850s he had written, “Christianity is useless for the healthy. . . . For the sick it is a very good religion.” Also: “Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there what I wanted—namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor those of philosophy will ever understand the poet.” “[A] slimy and greasy Jew—fit only to eat sausages made of toads,” Carlyle called him. Neither was he liked by the Nazis, who burned his books and banished his works from the anthologies, preserving “Die Lorelei” under “author unknown.” As for the separation of church and state, he declared, “I consider it a degradation and a stain on my honor to submit to baptism in order to qualify myself for state employment in Prussia.” Writers about Heine have argued both that Heine was either too Jewish, or not Jewish enough. They cite his “Gedächtnisfeier” (“Commemoration Service”):
Not a mass will be sung for me, Not a Kaddish will be said, None will say or sing a service On the day that I lie dead. . . .
He continues that when his wife visits his grave, she should not be too sad and that his chubby child “must not walk home all the way;/ You’ll see coaches standing ready/ At the barrier gate that day.” In 1995, Ernst Pawel’s The Poet Dying: Heinrich Heine’s Last Years in Paris states that Heine “never hid the fact that he was born a Jew; he was unashamedly attached to Jewish history and tradition, and he wrote a number of poems and an unfinished novel, The Rabbi of Bacherach, which incorporated and sometimes celebrated that history and that tradition. For most of his life, however, he was a passionate Deist, and he tended to make little of his Jewishness, as well as of his youthful conversion to Christianity. That conversion was clearly a matter of convenience, meant to qualify him for a university appointment (in law) that he never received anyway. He scorned Felix Mendelssohn for his more sincere Christian conviction: ‘if I had the luck of being a grandson of Moses Mendelssohn,’ he explained, ‘I would surely not use my talent to set the pissing of the Lamb to music.’ ” Heine died at the age of fifty-eight, having suffered since youth from syphilis. Some contemporary physicians, however, have diagnosed his case differently. They hold that his progressive paralysis of the spine could have been caused by either a congenital neuropathy or by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease). His last few years were lived as an invalid, morphine being administered to him through sores deliberately kept open on his back in order that the drug could be administered. He found it difficult to speak, and he often held one of his eyelids propped open in order to read or write. About 1848 he became paralyzed and lost his eyesight, but he employed himself in literary composition with the aid of an amanuensis, writing poetry during his sleepless nights and prose during the day. His final illness, spent as a skeleton on his “mattress grave,” was painful. He weighed but seventy pounds and, according to Pawel, was “nearly sightless, heavily sedated, often unable to speak beyond a whisper.” Heine’s biographers Lewis Browne and Eliza Butler say he maintained his sense of humor until the end. Asked if he was really incurable, he would reply, “Oh no, I’ll die some day.” And when someone suggested discreetly that his illness had been caused by excessive work, he would answer, “Well, it was excess at any rate.” At the end of Heine’s life, he was treated by “leeches, enemas, and cauterization of the spine . . . opium rubbed into sores deliberately kept open,” according to Pawel. As for his alleged deathbed conversion, Robertson has written, “[Heine’s] characteristic profession of reconciling himself on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as ‘the Aristophanes of heaven’ serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient clue to his serious convictions; and that ‘God is all that there is’ is the sufficient expression of his pantheism.” Of the alleged conversion, McCabe states that Heine “was in fact an atheist and so remained until he was bed-ridden with spine-disease, when he rediscovered God. ‘Put it down to morphia and poultice,’ he told his friends. He scorned both Judaism and Christianity and never believed in a future life.” Others have claimed that basically Heine was a pantheist. In his last moments, always in pain, he jested that he would report God to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. When his wife sat beside him, praying for his soul, Heine replied in an unpantheistic way, and possibly for his wife’s benefit, “Dieu me pardonnera; c’est son metier” (God will forgive me—that’s His job). Nicolas Walter described Heine as being “a perpetual outsider—a poor man among the rich, an intellectual among philistines, an internationalist among nationalists, a liberal among conservatives, an individualist among liberals, a German among the French, a Jew among Germans, a Christian among Jews, an infidel among Christians, a theist among infidels, always a free thinker in the widest sense.” When Heine’s will was opened, it was found that he had left his entire estate to his wife, provided she would marry again. His reason for the condition was stated with Teutonic bluntness: “Because then there will be at least one man to regret my death.” {BDF; CE; The Freethinker, December 1997; JM; JMR; JMRH; PA; PUT; RAT; RE; TYD}
Heine, Johan (20th Century) Heine spoke in 1997 at a seminar of the European Humanist Professionals in London. He talked about military experiences after UN peace-keeping tasks and described having given psychological support for relief soldiers in Zaire.
Heinerman, John (20th Century) With Anson Shupe, freethinker Heinerman wrote The Mormon Corporate Empire (1985).
Heinlein, Robert A. (1907—1988) Heinlein was a noted science fiction author of the film “Destination Moon” and the novel, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). In Time Enough for Love, he wrote, “History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people. . . .” Of his youth he wrote,
The faith in which I was brought up assured me that I was better than other people; I was saved, they were damned. . . . Our hymns were loaded with arrogance—self-congratulation on how cozy we were with the Almighty and what a high opinion he had of us, what hell everybody else would catch come Judgment Day.”
In 1952, he wrote to his publisher:
The idea that we could lose our freedom by succumbing to a wave of religious hysteria: I am sorry to say that I consider it possible. I hope that it is not probable. There’s a deep latent strain of religious fanaticism in this, our culture. It is rooted in history and has broken out many times in the past—it is with us now. There has been a sharp rise in strongly evangelical sects in this country in recent years, several of which hold beliefs theocratic in the extreme. It is a truism that almost any religion, sect, or cult will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so and will follow it by suppressing opposition and subverting education to seize early the minds of the young.
As for the supernatural, Heinlein wrote, “Men rarely (if ever) managed to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.” A character in Time Enough for Love says,
History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it to derive considerable pleasure fiddling with it.
In 1956, he was asked about humanism and responded to the present author:
I have made little formal study of philosophy and that little was mostly a long time ago. I am not expert in this field; I am engineer-turned-novelist. Humanism to me that which you defined in your letter as “Naturalistic Humanism.” I am aware of the other meanings to this multi-valued word, but the other meanings strike me as having either historical interest only, or special or even mistaken connotations. This opinion probably reflects the fact that “Naturalistic Humanism” as defined in your letter most nearly reflects my own personal philosophy, of the seven categories you list. I seek no quarrel with any religionist; certainly I cannot assert that any creed is mistaken. Yet, if we stipulate without proof the existence of Deity, it seems to me inherently unlikely that one of His attributes would be that He would demand “worship” from his creatures and still less likely that He would expect of them faith or dogmatic belief without evidence. I think it still less likely that He would send messengers with Divine revelations armed with no better credentials than loud voices, legerdemain, and a conviction of righteousness. Moreover, I have not even any certainty about the beliefs, values, and hopes listed in the cited definition of naturalistic humanism. It may be that the human race, through its own efforts, can go on to greater heights, fuller understanding, and a more satisfactory life for all of us and our descendants. It would be pleasant to think so. But I do not find such a belief necessary to continue optimistic striving. We have our hands, we have our brains, we have the challenge all around us, and we have within (from whatever source) the will to strive. That is enough; there is no need to assert “belief” in that which we do not, as yet, know. The goals defined for naturalistic humanism are things which you and I and a large percentage of humans want and are willing to try hard to achieve—hands and brains and the materials at hand. Even if, in the long run, the goals should prove impossible, unreal, or beyond our human capacity, I see no alternative other than suicide in some form or other, personal or racial—and I have no taste for that. I think I have been most influenced in my views by T. H. Huxley, Eric T. Bell, Alfred Korzybski, parts of H. G. Wells’s writings, and Socrates (The Apologia).
Upon his death, Heinlein’s body was cremated. {TYD; WAS, 31 August 1956}
Heinrich, Rolf (1946— ) Heinrich is editor of Miz, a publication for an international league of churchless individuals and atheists. He wrote Verheissung des Kreuzes (1982). (See entry for Internationaler Bund Der Konfessionslosen Und Atheisten.) {FD}
Heinzen, Karl Peter (1809—1880) Heinzen was a German-American poet, an orator, and a politician. In 1845 he published at Darmstadt a work on the Prussian Bureaucracy, for which he was prosecuted and had to seek shelter in Switzerland. At Zurich he edited the German Tribune and the Democrat. In 1848 he participated in the attempted German Revolution, again fleeing, this time to New York. He established the Pioneer (then called Freidenker), first in Louisville, then in Cincinnati, New York, and Boston. Among his many works are Letters on Atheism (1856), The Heroes of German Communism, The True Character of Humboldt (1869), The Rights of Women, and What is Humanity? (1877). {BDF; RAT}
Heldberg, Jim (20th Century) Heldberg works with American Atheists Inc. to encourage groups to affiliate. On the Web: <http://www.atheists.org/>.
HELL • Hell is a place where the police are German . . . the motorists, French . . . the cooks, English.
—Bertrand Russell
The ancient Jews referred to the Sheol or Tophet, where departed souls exist ina gloomy surroundings in which, though not tormented, they wander around without joy. The New Testament mentions Gehenna or Gehinom, which is named after the Valley of Hinnom, a place of punishment (a burial area outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem, as well as a site condemned by Biblical prophets as one where vile and wicked rites were practiced in ancient times. For Christians, Hell is an eternal abode, a place where souls are damned by the judgment of God and are never for eternity allowed to see God. Many believe the Christians borrowed the concept from Persia’s Mithraism. Hell is a fiery place, one described in detail not in the Holy Bible but in Dante Alighieri’s imaginative 14th-century work, The Divine Comedy. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), includes the following diabolical dialogue:
I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”
If the television and other evangelists are correct, and everyone will go to Hell unless he or she believes in the Lord Jesus Christ, has been “washed in the Blood of the Lamb,” been baptized, and is either free of, or has been pardoned for, sins, the following would not have been eligible as of mid-1994. It is not clear whether Jews and Muslims are eligible. However, they are listed below.
ADHERENTS OF NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
AS OF MID-1998 Source: 1999 Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year (Based on the UN’s World Population Prospects)
Religion Adherents in World Muslims 1,164,622,000 83% Sunnites; 16% Shiites; 1% other Non-Religious and Atheists * 909,658,000 The category includes “persons professing no religion, non-believers, agnostics, freethinkers, dereligionized secularists indifferent to all religion.” Also, “persons professing atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion, including antireligious (opposed to all religion)” Hindus 761,689,000 70% Vaishnavites; 25% Shaivites; 2% Neo-Hindus and reform Hindus Chinese Folk Religionists 379,162,000 Followers of traditional Chinese religion (local deities, ancestor veneration, Confucian ethics, Taoism; universism; divination; some Buddhist elements) Buddhist 353,794,000 56% Mayayana; 38% Theravada; (Hinayana), 6% Tantrayana Ethnic Religionists 248,565,000 New Religionists 100,144,000 Followers of Asian 20th Century New Religions, New Religious movements, radical new crisis religions, and non- Christian syncretistic mass religions, all founded since 1800 and most since 1945. Sikhs 22,322,000 Jews 14,111,000 Estimates vary widely. The American Jewish Year Book has different estimates Spiritists 11,785,000 Bahai’s 7,666,000 Confucians 6,241,000 Non-Chinese followers of Confucius, mostly Koreans in Korea Jains 3,922,000 Shintoists 2,789,000 Other Religionists 1,313,000 Including 70 minor world religions, spiritist religions, Mandeans (38,000), New Age religions, quasi religions, pseudoreligions, parareligions, religious or mystic systems, religious and semireligious brotherhoods of numerous varieties, 274,000 Zoroastrians
Total Non-Christians ( 67 %) 3,986,801,000 Total Christians ( 33 %) 1,943,038,000
Total Humans (100%) 5,929,839,000**
* Unitarians-Universalists and Ethical Culture Society and secular humanists are presumably included in the "Non-" category.
- A figure of 2 billion is the optimal or desired number of humans that Earth can comfortably support as its total population, or 3 billion at the very top, according to Zero Population Growth and similar population research groups. In September 1999, the world’s population was estimated to have reached 6,000,000,000.
The Universal Almanac (1996) estimated somewhat different figures:
Region Nonreligious Atheist %
East Asia 618,900,000 123,400,000 73.0 Former USSR 83,100,000 60,600,000 14.1 Europe 49,400,000 17,400,000 6.6 South Asia 18,400,000 5,100,000 2.3 North America 19,000,000 1,000,000 2.0 Latin America 12,900,000 2,400,000 1.5 Oceania 2,900,000 500,000 .3 Africa 1,300,000 100,000 .1 805,900,000 210,500,000
Up-to-date numbers from the above sources can be obtained at the ends of years, but skeptics doubt the accuracy of any such studies. When, for example, do churches subtract all those who die, move, or ask that their membership be discontinued?
Meanwhile, Christians bent on “saving” the world have at least two-thirds of the human population as conversion prospects. The painter Paul Cadmus, a secular humanist, believes that although there is no Hell there should be . . . “for individuals who tell other individuals that they should go to Hell.” (See entries for Edwin Powell Hubble and for Dante, whose nine circles of Hell are found in his The Inferno.)
HELL ACCORDING TO LA CIVILTA CATTOLICA God does not inflict pain “through angels or demons as is illustrated in many paintings or is read in the Divine Comedy,” according to a Jesuit magazine in Rome, La Civilta Cattolica (July 1999). It “is not a ‘place’ but a ‘state,’ a person’s ‘state of being,’ in which a person suffers from the deprivation of God.” Hell’s new makeover was supported by Pope John Paul II, who soon thereafter told visiting pilgrims that “more than a physical place, hell is the state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.” In other words, the Pope said, it is not a loving God who sends people to hell, but individuals who consign themselves to hell through unrepentant sin. That hell is real is true, the Pope appeared to be saying, but his interpretation differs greatly from that of philosophic naturalists. For the Pope, both hell and Hell are still real. Meanwhile, the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, disagreed with the Pope’s stand, insisting that Hell is “a very real place of very real torment.” In the Middle Ages, Jewish descriptions of hell included all sorts of terrible torments like boiling rivers. For naturalists, “Hell” is one helluva theological invention. {Gustav Niebuhr, The New York Times, 18 September 1999}
HELL, BAPTIST Hell, for most Southern Baptists, is the place of punishment described in the Bible: outer darkness, fire, torment, isolation.
HELL, BUDDHIST The Buddhist Hell, according to some of the varied Buddhist leaders, consists of eight hot and cold places, each hell associated with a particular type of suffering. The tortures that are described develop compassion for the beings there and also create an incentive not to engage in the nonvirtuous behavior described.
HELL, ENDOTHERMIC OR EXOTHERMIC? A Yale professor, according to America Online chatterers, gave his graduate students a take-home exam with but one question: “Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?” Most students cited Boyle’s law: gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed. One, however, wrote the following four-pointer:
First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell as well as the rate they are leaving. One can extrapolate that, inasmuch as a soul cannot leave, no souls are leaving.
Second, as to how many are entering Hell, religions that preach about Hell all state that if you’re not one of theirs you will go to Hell. Inasmuch as there are more than one of these religions and inasmuch as most humans do not belong to more than one religion, it can be projected that all people will end up in Hell.
Third, birth and death rates being what they are, the number of souls in Hell will increase exponentially. Further, inasmuch as Boyle’s Law states that, in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added, therefore two possibilities are evident: one, if Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose; and two, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
Now, therefore, if we accept the postulate given me by Miss Theresa Banyan during my freshman year that “It will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you,” and in light of the fact that I still have not succeeded with her, then the second possibility cannot be true; ergo, Hell is exothermic.
HELL, JEWISH The nature of hell is a mystery that Jews leave alone. The assumption, many Jewish theologians hold, is that God is caring and would not be a part of any sadistic punishment.
HELL, MUSLIM
The Muslim Hell is described as a fire having seven levels, the lowest of which crackles and roars with fierce boiling water, scorching wind, and wailing, wretched souls. (See entry for Heaven, Muslim.)
HELL, NON-THEISTIC Hell is due north from the Norwegian city of Trondheim. It is a green and pleasant land where the only hot coals are those used for the traditional saunas. In 1997 there were six members of the Norwegian Humanist League. In short, Hell contains only six humanists.
HELL, ROAD TO • The road to Hell is paved with good assumptions. —Anonymous
HELL, ROMAN CATHOLIC Hell, according to Roman Catholic theology, is a condition of self-chosen, permanent alienation from God, who bestows all “blessings.”
HELLEN The early Greeks supposed they were descended from a man called Hellen. (See entry for Greek Civilization.)
Heller, Adelle (20th Century) and Heller, Reuben (Died 1995) Mr. and Mrs. Heller addressed the 14th annual HUMCON conference in 1994 which was sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles, California. He was vice-president of Humanists of Los Angeles, co-founder of the sponsoring Alliance of Freethought Organizations, a past-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society for Humanistic Judaism., and a director of the American Humanist Association. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.)
Heller, Joseph (1923—1999) A novelist who served as a bombardier in the air force during the Second World War, Heller wrote Catch-22 (1961). Although it had taken him eight years to write, the work brought him instant fame. Good as Gold (1970) is a comic satire about Jewish New York and Washington politics. “Good God,” states a character in Catch-22, “how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?” {TYD}
Hellman, Lillian (1905—1984) A New York dramatist, Hellman is author of Little Foxes (1939) and An Unfinished Woman (1969). She stirred the theatre in 1934 with The Children’s Hour, in which a child maliciously accuses two of her teachers of lesbianism. It was based on a British case in 1810 in which the mother of a schoolgirl accuses Marianne Woods and Jane Pirie of “improper and criminal conduct” with each other. One negative criticism was that Hellman might lead some to commit suicide, but she insisted that the play was sound as written. Toys in the Attic (1960) treated the theme of miscegenation. With Richard Wilbur, she collaborated on an adaptation of Candide (1957) for the Bernstein musical, based upon Voltaire’s work, and she considered herself a freethinker like Voltaire. As for evil, Hellman in Watch on the Rhine (1941) wrote, “Fashions in sin change.” “She rightly saw that Zionism was the antithesis of communism, to whose cruelties,” Martin Peretz has written, “she was loyal till the end, and she couldn’t forgive Zionists their heresy.” She fought actively with Peretz, who had been chairman of The Jerusalem Foundation, screaming during a telephone conversation, “Fascism . . . Dashiell Hammett . . . Un-American Activities . . . immoral . . . disgusting” etc. “Yes,” Peretz offered, “I did socialize with Roy Cohn. But at least I never socialized with Stalin.” At this, she hung up and the two never again talked. She was, off and on, companion to Dashiell Hammett (1894—1961), the crime novelist and author of The Maltese Falcon (1930), who died in 1960. Her will made a $2,500. bequest to Temple Israel of New York City to cover the perpetual care of her parents’ cemetery plot in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Hellman, however, directed the executors of her more than $4,000,000 estate to purchase a cemetery plot and “suitable tombstone” in the Chilmark section of Martha’s Vineyard. Among the famous who attended the funeral were John Hersey, Carl Bernstein, Jules Feiffer, William Styron, Mike Wallace, Ruth Gordon, and Norman Mailer. (In Ex-Friends [1999], Norman Podhoretz calls Hellman a Jewish anti-Semite.) {CE; Martin Peretz, The New Republic, 29 July 1996; TYD}
HELLO Hello is used both to answer someone on the telephone as well as to express surprise. Hola is also found as a greeting both in Old French and in contemporary Spanish. However, the commissioners of Kleberg County (Texas) voted unanimously in 1997 that residents should not use the word because a local man, Leonoso Canales, 56, a flea market operator, saw “Hell” in “Hello” and insisted, instead, that people greet each other with “heaven-o.” (A wag observed that it may not be mere coincidence that there is an “anal” in “Canales.”)
Hellwald, Friedrich von (1842—1892) Hellwald was a German geographer and freethinker who, in addition to many works on various countries, wrote Culture History (1875). {BDF}
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von (1821—1894) For his discoveries in acoustics, optics, and electricity, Helmholtz became distinguished. He was of the foremost rank among natural philosophers of his day in Europe. Among his many works were The Conservation of Force (1847) and Popular Scientific Lectures (1865—1876). Helmholtz rejected the design hypothesis and was an outspoken German agnostic. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Helms, Randel (20th Century) A professor of English at Arizona State University, Helms is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Biblical Criticism Research Project. One of his works, Gospel Fictions (1988), develops the idea that the four Gospels of the New Testament are fictional narratives, composed as the culmination of an extensive literary and oral tradition—idealistic writings produced to serve a theological vision. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Helms addressed the group. He is author of Tolkien’s World (1974) and Gospel Fictions (1988).
Helvétius, Claude Adrien (1715—1771) The French philosopher Helvétius, one of the Encyclopedists, utilized the materialist philosophy “as a powerful weapon against religious superstition and the reactionary Catholic Church,” according to Corliss Lamont. Like Locke, Helvétius believed all are born with minds like blank tablets, and he maintained that we also are born with equal ability and that distinctions develop from the totality of educational influences. Jeremy Bentham as well as James Mill acknowledged being influenced by him, and he once was an honored guest of Frederick the Great. Helvétius had come from a line of celebrated physicians, and his large fortune was dispensed liberally in works of benevolence. “A man who believes that he eats his God we do not call mad,” Helvétius commented about communion; “a man who says he is Jesus Christ, we call mad.” His De L’Esprit (1758, On the Mind) at first passed censorship but, upon finding its true character, the work was condemned by Pope Clement XIII and was burned by the order of Parliament in 1759 for the hardihood of his materialistic opinions. The indictment was that it was a collection “into one cover of everything that impiety could imagine, calculated to engender hatred against Christianity and Catholicism.” Further, the censor was cashiered and Helvétius was dismissed from an honorary post in the Queen’s household. Mme. De Deffand said, “He told everyone’s secret.” Condorcet explained in an essay why the book was so controversial:
It is fanaticism that puts arms into the hands of Christian princes; it orders Catholics to massacre heretics; it brings out upon the earth again those tortures that were invented by such monsters as Phalaris, as Busiris, as Nero; in Spain it piles and lights up the fires of the Inquisition, while the pious Spaniards leave their ports and sail across distant seas, to plant the Cross and spread desolation in America. Turn your eyes to north or south, to east or west; on every side you see the consecrated knife of Religion raised against the breasts of women, of children, of old men, and the earth all smoking with the blood of victims immolated to false gods or the Supreme Being, and [presenting] one vast, sickening horrible charnel-house of intolerance.
On Man, published posthumously, was both atheistic and materialistic. As for Helvétius’s last days, Condorcet wrote, “He felt his strength failing. An attack of gout, which flew to the head and chest, deprived him at first of consciousness and soon of life.” Following his death his wife, Anne Catherine DeLingville Helvétius, retired to Auteuil, where her house was the rendezvous of Condillac, Turgot, d’Holbach, Morellet, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and others. This re-union of freethinkers became known as the Société de Auteuil. Mme. Helvétius died in 1800. {BDF; CE; CL; FUS; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}
Helvie, Clara Cook (1876—1969) A Unitarian minister for over twenty years, Helvie compiled two historical manuscripts on women in the ministries of both the Unitarian and Universalist denominations: “Unitarian Women Minister” (1928) and “Necrology of Women Serving in the Universalist Ministry” (1950), both of which were never published but are a part of the Unitarian Universalist Association Archives and Harvard Divinity School historical documents. {World, May-June 1995; U; U&U}
Hemingway, Ernest (1898—1961) Hemingway wrote in an essentially Humanist fashion without reliance on God or the supernatural, Corliss Lamont noted. Certainly his For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) argues for human brotherhood. Readers empathized with his writing about courage, the fear of death, and the need to cultivate a stoicism which could help one handle ever-present despair. He is not known, however, ever to have gone on record concerning theism or non-theism. When his particularly weak Across the River and Into the Trees (1950) resulted in a front-page New York Times Book Review article by John O’Hara, author of “Guys and Dolls,” with a hyperbole to the effect that Hemingway is the greatest author in the English language since Shakespeare, intellectuals smiled, knowing perhaps secondarily that “Papa” was a poor speller. When his Old Man and the Sea (1952) followed and Papa Hemingway was asked by restaurateur Toots Shor how on earth he got a Nobel Prize (1954) for a simple fish story like that, Hemingway skipped any explanations of symbolism or levels of meaning. He simply explained that the old Cuban was really himself, the “fish” was really Across the River and Into the Trees, the sharks were the critics who had turned his work into shreds, and the faithful little boy was John O’Hara. Although treated at the Mayo Clinic for mental illness, Hemingway apparently decided during a state of acute depression to kill himself, for which there were precedents in his family, rather than to seek help from physicians. His brother, sister, and father had taken their own lives, and in 1996 his granddaughter actress Margaux Hemingway died from taking an overdose of a sedative. During the 1940s, he was incontestably one of the best-regarded novelists in the nation, but following his death he has been criticized negatively for his glorifying the killing of animals, his difficulty in relating to women as well as his condescending depiction of them, and his use of toughness to conceal his own limitations. A 1954 unfinished work, edited by his 70-year-old middle son, Patrick, was published in 1998. Entitled True at First Light, it implies Papa Hemingway may have had a mysterious tribal bride or two. One, a Kenyan called Debba from the Wakamba tribe, was “very beautiful and quite young and more than perfectly developed.” Whether she was actual or fictional is debatable, for Hemingway’s mischievous streak and love of practical jokes included a boast that he had made love to the spy Mata Hari. She, however, was executed by the French the year before he arrived in Italy in 1918. Hemingway’s estate was worth over $5.8 million in 1990 dollars. He died owing the government about $50,000. His remains were buried at Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho. The gravestone is a large flat slab with name and vital dates only. (For allusions to his sexual proclivities, see entry for F. Scott Fitzgerald. John Lahr, in “My Mother the Ziegfeld Girl” (The New Yorker, 13 May 1996), describes how Hemingway once made a pass at his mother. Ann Douglas, in Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995) called Hemingway’s mother “smothering,” saying when he refused to apologize for leaving the house after midnight for a picnic, Grace Hemingway banished him from the household, promising that “when you have changed your ideas and aims in life, you will find your mother waiting to welcome you, whether it be in this world or the next.” Also, see Hemingway’s Genders (1994) by Nancy R. Comley and Robert Scholes, who go deeply into the subject of homosexuality.) {CE; CL; GL; PA}
Hemingway, Russell (20th Century) A freethinker, Hemingway wrote, “Bible Numerology Proves Its Falsity” (1978). {GS}
HEMLOCK SOCIETY, USA The Hemlock Society, USA, POB 11830, Eugene, Oregon 97440, published a quarterly journal and advised about patients’ rights, living wills, and aid in dying. The non-sectarian group took no stand on theological matters. It has since become End-of-Life Choices, PO Box 101810, Denver, Colorado 80250. www.endoflifechoices.org. (See entry for Faye Girsh.)
Hemming, James (1909— ) A British psychologist, Hemming was elected in 1979 as an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is a signer of Humanist Manifesto II. He wrote Individual Morality (1969) and Instead of God (1986). He has been a President of the British Humanist Association and a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA). A member of the Labour Party, Dr. Hemming was disenchanted with the educational system, having firsthand knowledge inasmuch as he has taught in it. He addressed the 1978 Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in London. Writing in New Humanist (November 1993), Hemming asserted that “it is no longer just a possibility that life is widespread in the Cosmos; it is now a high probability. When probability becomes certainty, as it may at any time now, it will profoundly affect human thinking.” As early as the 4th century B.C.E., he added, “the Epicurean philosopher, Metrodorus, neatly summed up the situation: ‘to consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that, in an entire field sown with millet, only one grain will grow.’ ” For Hemming, when such news does arrive, “It will offer the sort of stimulating new vision for which the young are desperate. Sex and drugs are not the answer to their quandary. Working together to raise the quality of life on Earth within the context of a living Cosmos could well be.” In an interview in New Humanist (September 1999), Hemming said he was uncertain when he became a humanist.
I was the son of a clergyman and I gradually realised that I just could not follow what was expected of me. I didn’t fall out with my father; we were very good friends; we reached an agreement to differ. At first I thought I was quite alone in my humanism, but eventually I discovered the British Humanist Association and joined them. This was a great release to me, because I now realised that I was a member of a community and not just staggering along on my own.
Hemming then discussed his having written The Betrayal of Youth, created educational material for Africa, been a witness for the Lady Chatterley trial, and become an activist in the Commonwealth Party during the Second World War. {HM2}
Hempel, Carl G. (1905—1997) Hempel, known for his rigorous empirical approach to scientific logic, taught at City College of New York, Queens College in Flushing, Yale University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He taught at Princeton University from 1955 to 1973. The last surviving member of the Vienna Circle, he loathed the irrational and mystical thinking of late-19th-century Europe. With other similarly-minded philosophers, he advocated what was called “logical positivism,” which argued that whatever could not be verified by experience was meaningless. Born in Oranienburg, Germany, he studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the Universities of Göttingen, Heidelberg, Vienna, and Berlin, working under Hans Reichenbach and receiving a doctorate from the latter in 1934 for work on probability. After fleeing Nazism to Belgium, he moved on to the United States in 1938. According to his former student, Adolf Grünbaum, Hempel’s writings were so influential that for decades almost any rival theory of scientific explanation took his work as a point of departure. In 1948 he produced his deductive-nomological theory, which holds that scientific conclusions are best deduced using logic and a larger law, or nomos in Greek. He built a precise mathematical foundation for explaining statistical, or probabilistic, answers. If a patient asks doctor about the chance of a cure, the doctor’s explanation might, for example, be given as a probability—that in a given percentage of cases there is a cure. “That is an informal statement,” he added. “It needed a systematic form.” He then developed a model that served many philosophers as a master model. He also dealt with how scientists gain confidence in a hypothesis in the first place. He developed models of the philosophy of confirmation in which a hypothesis is confirmed not only by findings but also by being in accord with larger principles, like historical or functional explanations. These models shaped all subsequent work on scientific explanation, observed Ford Burkhart in a New York Times obituary (23 November 1997). Hempel wrote Studies in the Logic of Confirmation (1945); Studies in the Logic of Explanation (1948), and Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (1965).
Hempel, Max (20th Century) Hempel wrote a history of German freethought in the United States, Was Sind die Freie Gemeinden? (1902). {FUS}
Hemstreet, William (20th Century) A freethinker, Hemstreet wrote The Wayfarer’s Plaint (191—?). {GS}
Henault (Hesnault) Jean (Died 1682) Henault was a French Epicurean poet, son of a Paris baker and a pupil of Gassendi. Bayle says Henault professed atheism and had composed three different systems of the mortality of the soul. His most famous sonnet is on “The Abortion.” {BDF}
Henderson, Dillard W. (20th Century) Henderson wrote “Studies Show the Inefficacy of Prayer” in Freethought Today (March 1996). He is a board member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation and lives in Michigan.
Henderson, Laurence Joseph (Born 1878)
Henderson, an American biochemist, wrote The Fitness of the Environment (1913), The Order of Nature (1917), and other scientific papers. In these works he rejects emphatically the idea of design in nature and all natural theology based on it, though he contends for a certain kind of teleology. He thinks Darwin’s advance from theology to theism, and from theism to agnosticism, the normal growth, adding, “We shall never find the explanation of the riddle, for it concerns the origin of things.” {RAT}
Henin de Cuvillers, Etienne Felix (1755—1841) Baron Henin de Cuvillers was a French general and writer who served as a diplomat in England, Venice, and Constantinople. Wounded at Arcola in 1796, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1811. His principle work was on the subject of magnetism, and he suggested that the miracles of Jesus were not supernatural but were wrought by means of magnetism learned in Egypt. In other writings, particularly in reflections on the crimes committed in the name of religion, he showed himself the enemy of fanaticism and intolerance. {BDF; RAT}
Henley, William Ernest (1849—1903) Crippled by tuberculosis of the bone, Henley nevertheless led an active and vigorous life as an editor. He introduced to readers such young writers as Kipling, Wells, and Yeats. Often quoted by secularists is his poem, “Invictus”:
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced nor cried aloud: Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. . . .
It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
McCabe states that Henley wavered between atheism and theism. Philosophy, Henley held, was like chalk in one’s mouth. {JM; RAT; RE}
Henne Am Rhyn, Otto (Born 1828) A Swiss historian, Henne Am Rhyn was an editor at Leipzig and the State Archivist. A leading Swiss Freemason, he wrote various volumes on social and ethics, all rationalistic. In his autobiography he stated that he “cast off all the fetters of the creeds” at the university, although in his later work he is theistic. {RAT}
Hennell, Charles Christian (1809—1850) A Unitarian, Hennell wrote an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838) which Strauss thought was so important that he translated it into German. In a preface to his second edition (1841), Hennell spoke very plainly of “the large and probably increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us,” and made the then remarkably courageous declarations that in his experience “neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence,” and that “the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind.” Hennell’s writing is said to have influenced George Sand into becoming a freethinker. (See entry for Mary Hennell.) {BDF; JMR; RAT}
Hennell, Mary (1802—1843) Hennell, the sister of C. C. Hennell, abandoned Unitarianism. Her “Outline of the Various Social Systems and Communities Which Have Been Founded on the Principle of Co-operation,” which was published as an appendix to Bray’s Philosophy of Necessity (1841). {RAT}
Hennell, Sara S. (19th Century)
Hennell wrote Christianity and Infidelity (1857) and Thoughts in Aid of Faith (1860). {GS}
Hennequin, Émile (1858—1888) A French critic, Hennequin was on the staff of Le Temps. His Critique Scientifique, published a few weeks before his death, gave promise of great distinction. Hennequin was a thorough rationalist. {RAT}
Henning, Max (20th Century) In Frankfurt, Germany, Henning edited Freie Wort in 1914.
HENOTHEISM Henotheism is the worship of one god without denying the existence of other gods. The word dates to 1860.
Henricksen, Bruce (1941— ) A professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, Henricksen commented as follows to the present author’s query about the various humanisms:
Your inquiry seems to invite respondents to find the category of humanism each finds most congenial and then to explain why. If I were forced to a self-definition only employing your seven types of humanism, I would opt for a kind of bricolage made up of types 5 through 7—atheistic, marxist (but certainly not Stalinist), and naturalistic. The problem, however, is that the word “humanism” regardless of any attendant adjective, has become a code word for the repressive aspects of a Euro-centric and gender biased tradition that is now called into question. It is this questioning that Michel Foucault announces at the conclusion of The Order of Things, when he declares the end of the age of “man.” Since I am persuaded by Foucault of the necessity for a radical critique of traditional forms of knowledge, I would decline to label myself as a “humanist.” There is something in a name.
(See entry for Postmodernism.) {WAS, 24 April 1989}
Henriot, Emile (1889—1961) Henriot is a distinguished French writer, author of In Quest of a New Ethics. Charles Mayer has termed Henriot a naturalistic humanist. (See entry for Mayer.)
HENRY VIII: See entry for Anglican Communion.
Henry, George (1827—1892) A famous traveler, Henry was an agnostic. (See entry for his daughter, Mary Henrietta Kingsley.)
Henry, Josephine K. (1846—1928) A freethinker, Henry wrote “Musings in Life’s Evening” (c. 1920). A Kentucky women’s rights advocate, she sent thousands of documents to Congress at her own expense and had over two hundred articles published in various newspapers. At the time when the last person to go to prison for blasphemy in the United States, Charles C. Moore, was released, Henry delivered the address of welcome. Before the Kentucky Constitutional Convention, Henry attempted to convince the writers to include women’s rights in the new Constitution. In her correspondence with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Henry was told that Stanton agreed with her in her atheism. {Free Inquiry, Spring 1995; GS; WWS}
Henry, William (20th Century) Henry was co-author of “A Bible Guide for Truth Seekers” (19—?). {GS}
Henshaw, Donald E. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Henshaw was a humanist counselor. {HM2}
Henschell, Darrel (20th Century) Although raised a Jehovah’s Witness and taught that his family was fortunate to be members of a religion of only .03% of the world’s several billions that possessed “the Truth,” Henschell soon found that many of the church’s claims were conveniently unfalsifiable. It could not be demonstrated, for example, that Jesus returned invisibly in the year 1914. Also, Henschell found in Matthew 1:16 And Jacob begat Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.
but in Luke 3:23
And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli.
Henschell’s further doubts concerning the Bible’s contradictions led to his writing The Perfect Mirror? The Question of Bible Perfection (1996, PO Box 61274, Pasadena, CA 91116). Included are chapters on Christian doctrine, the Old and New Testaments, prophecy, and the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.
Hentoff, Nathan Irving (1925— ) Hentoff, a writer and columnist since 1957 for The Village Voice, wrote The Collected Essays of A. J. Muste (1966), Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (1970), Blues for Charles Darwin (1982), and numerous articles in various journals. He has written that he is “a Jewish atheist,” apparently suggesting that his interest is cultural Judaism but that his outlook is non-supernaturalistic. He also describes himself as a “civil libertarian, left-wing, pro-lifer.” {CA; E} Nat Hentoff, Columnist/Editor/Author media
In an article titled "Pro Choice Bigots", Hentoff describes himself as "a Jewish, atheist, civil libertarian, left-wing pro-lifer."
Hentz, Robert R. (20th Century) Hentz is a retired scientist, formerly on the faculties of North Carolina State and Notre Dame. Among his several freethought poems, Hentz wrote “A Failure of Faith?”:
The preacher believed the Bible In its dictum on snakes Absolutely reliable. He held firm to his faith In refusing to take The serum for a bite By a rattlesnake. On the preacher’s demise, The faithful concluded That he was deluded Not in his scriptural notion But in his strength of devotion.
{Freethought History #9, 1994}
Henwood, Doug (20th Century) Henwood, an editor and economics journalist, is a contributing editor for The Nation, publisher of the Left Business Observer, and author of Wall Street. Not wanting to say he is an atheist, he explained, “I have no idea whether there’s a god or not, and I don’t think humans could ever know. I know that the people who think God has revealed itself to them are full of shit, though. On second thought, ‘full of shit’ is pointlessly hostile. Let me change that to ‘I know that the people think that a god has revealed itself to them are hallucinating, tough.’ ” {CA}
Hepburn, Katharine (1907— ) “I’m an atheist, and that’s it,” Hepburn told a reporter for Ladies’ Home Journal. The Academy Award actress, whose name was often mentioned with Spencer Tracy’s, added, “I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.” A biography by Barbara Leaming, Katharine Hepburn (1995), reports that when thirteen Hepburn discovered the body of her fifteen-year-old brother, Tom, who had slowly strangled himself with a noose. “The Hepburns—candid about sex and all things controversial—tended resolutely to avoid speaking of their most troubling thoughts and emotions,” Leaming explains in her thorough research of the platonic connection which Hepburn had with the married, abusive, and alcoholic Spencer Tracy, who was said to have had a penchant for prostitutes and a history of venereal infection. Although Ms. Selden West, who in 1995 was writing “the authorized biography of Spencer Tracy” and who denied ever finding any evidence or medical records to indicate any such infection, Leaming defended her research, writing that “Orson Welles and others told me about Tracy’s obsession that his visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there had caused his son’s deafness. Letters of those who knew Tracy testify to his often frantic state of mind. Katharine Hepburn, in a Sept. 7, 1944, letter to Philip Barry’s wife, describes him as a wreck who fears he is about to go mad.” Meanwhile, Leaming insists that Hepburn and John Ford “fell in love” and that his grandfather “was obsessed by Kate and found with her a degree of happiness and a peace of mind that he had never known before.” Ford’s grandson, Dan, claims that Leaming “greatly exaggerated the degree and the intensity of the Ford-Hepburn relationship.” In her eighty-eighth year, Hepburn had experienced having twenty biographers delve into her life and had continued to be a presence since her starring role in “Morning Glory” in 1933. {CA; CE; E; TYD}
Hepburn, Katharine (12 May 1907 - ) Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Hepburn was the tomboy daughter of a urologist and a suffragette. She studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, made her acting debut in Baltimore in 1928, then played John Barrymore’s daughter in The Warrior’s Husband on Broadway in 1932. From 1932 on, she received international acclaim for her roles as a character actress with a distinctive New England manner of speaking. Her outstanding films have been Morning Glory (1933, received an Oscar); Woman of the Year (1942, the start of a 25-year professional and personal relationship with co-star Spencer Tracy); The African Queen (1952); Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); The Lion in Winter (1968); and On Golden Pond (1981). On Broadway in the 1950s she played Shakespearean roles and was in Coco (1969). On television she is remembered for her roles in The Glass Menagerie (1973); Love Among the Ruins (1975); and Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986 “I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.” Hepburn told a reporter for Ladies’ Home Journal. The Academy Award actress, whose name was often coupled with Spencer Tracy’s, added, “I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.” A biography by Barbara Leaming, Katharine Hepburn (1995), reports that when thirteen Hepburn discovered the body of her fifteen-year-old brother, Tom, who had slowly strangled himself with a noose. Leaming wrote further:
The Hepburns—candid about sex and all things controversial—tended resolutely to avoid speaking of their most troubling thoughts and emotions,” Leaming explains in her thorough research of the platonic connection which Hepburn had with the married, abusive, and alcoholic Spencer Tracy, who was said to have had a penchant for prostitutes and a history of venereal infection. Although Ms. Selden West, who in 1995 was writing “the authorized biography of Spencer Tracy” and who denied ever finding any evidence or medical records to indicate any such infection, Leaming defended her research, writing that “Orson Welles and others told me about Tracy’s obsession that his visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there had caused his son’s deafness. Letters of those who knew Tracy testify to his often-frantic state of mind. Katharine Hepburn, in a Sept. 7, 1944, letter to Philip Barry’s wife, describes him as a wreck who fears he is about to go mad.
Meanwhile, Leaming insists that Hepburn and John Ford “fell in love” and that his grandfather “was obsessed by Kate and found with her a degree of happiness and a peace of mind that he had never known before.” Ford’s grandson, Dan, claims that Leaming “greatly exaggerated the degree and the intensity of the Ford-Hepburn relationship.” In her eighty-eighth year, Hepburn experienced having twenty biographers delve into her life, finding that she had continued to be a presence since her starring role in Morning Glory in 1933. In 2001 following an operation, she still was hounded by reporters seeking new information about her Hollywood relationships. {CA; CE; E; TYD}
Hepburn, Ronald W. (20th Century)
A freethinker, Hepburn wrote Christianity and Paradox (1958). His Objections to Humanism (1963) mentioned his unease at hearing theological language that was being used by Dewey as well as Huxley. For the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he wrote “Agnosticism.”
Heraclitus (c. 535—c. 475 B.C.E.) A Greek philosopher of Ephesus, Heraclitus held that permanence is an illusion of the senses, that there is no permanent reality except that of change. He resented immoral religion, saying Homer and Archilochos deserved flogging. He also was critical about the absurdity of prayer, pietism, and the phallic worship of Dionysos. He taught that everything carries its opposite, heat and cold, day and night, evil and good, and all this exists only in the relation of contrast. For him, fire was something in which opposites are solved. No one, he held, has a personal soul, but all men share a soul in a universal soul—fire. If, then, being and non-being are part of every whole, what is real is the transitional state of becoming. Many of his followers were attracted to this kind of mysticism, Robertson writes, but his negative wisdom is said to have been substantially ignored. Bertrand Russell finds Heraclitus largely hostile to the Bacchic religion of that time, “but not with the hostility of a scientific rationalist. He has his own religion, and in part interprets current theology to fit his doctrine, in part rejects it with considerable scorn.” Russell cites these extant sayings of Heraclitus concerning the theology of his day:
• The Lord who is the oracle at Delphi neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows
it by a sign.
• And the Sibyl, with raving lips uttering things mirthless, unbedizened, and unper fumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god in her. • To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. • God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each. • Religion is a disease, but it is a noble disease. • Souls smell in Hades. • Greater deaths win greater portions. (Those who die then become gods.) • The way of man has no wisdom, but that of God has. . . . Man is called a baby
by God, even as a child by a man. . . . The wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man.
Benn, an anti-materialist historian of philosophy, quotes Heraclitus as saying, “This universe, the same for all, was not made by any God or any man but was and is and ever shall be an ever-living fire.” Known as “the Weeping Philosopher,” Heraclitus as an idealist deplored and lamented the imperfections of men. {CE; ER; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE}
Hérault de Sechelles, Marie Jean (1760—1794) Hérault was a French revolutionist, born of a noble family. Brought up as a friend of Buffon and Mirabeau, he gained distinction as a lawyer and orator before the Revolution. In 1792 he was made President of the Convention. Hérault edited the document known as the Constitution of 1793 and was president and chief speaker at the national festival. Drawing the enmity of Robespierre, Hérault was executed with Danton and Camille Desmoulins in 1794). {BDF; RAT}
Herbert, Auberon Edward William Molyneux (1838—1906)
A reformer and the son of the Earl of Carnarvon, Herbert left military service to study law, then lectured on history and jurisprudence at St. John’s College (Oxford). Later, he entered politics. Herbert was a Spencerian agnostic as shown in Nineteenth Century (Aug-Sep 1901), and he was a supporter of Bradlaugh. {RAT; RE}
Herbert, Edward [1st Baron] (1583—1648) Herbert, a First Baron of Cherbury, was interested in comparative religion. The Lord of Cherbury in Shropshire, Herbert during the civil wars espoused the side of Parliament. Although called “the father of English deism,” Herbert despite his De Veritate (1624) was not widely read by 18th-century deists. Descartes read and criticized the work, which asserted the sufficiency of natural religion apart from revelation, and Locke differed with its rationalism. Robertson describes Herbert as being “in the full stream of the current freethought of England and France in the first quarter of the seventeenth century.” McCabe termed him, because of his articles in Nineteenth Century (1901), “a Spencerian Agnostic and a supporter of Bradlaugh.” {BDF; EU, E. Graham Waring; FUK; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Herbert, Frank (20th Century) According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Herbert is author of Soul Catcher, a work which allegedly “is a mockery of Christianity, and very much anti-God.” (See entry for Banned Books.)
Herder, Dale (20th Century) At Michigan State University, Herder wrote his 1975 Ph. D. dissertation on Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books. {FUS}
Heredia, José Maria de (1842—1905) Heredia, a Cuban-born French poet, wrote Parnasse Contemporain and Les Trophées (1893). A member of the French Academy, he was an admirer of fellow rationalist poets Chénier, Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle. {RAT}
HEREDITY “Death,” according to one Manhattan wag, “is genetically hereditary.”
HERESY • Heresy is a cradle, orthodoxy a coffin. —Robert G. Ingersoll
Heresy is a belief or a teaching which is considered unacceptable by a religious group. Non-theists who use Christian swear words—e.g., Christ Almighty!—jocularly call such irrational utterances heretical. George H. Shriver, editor of Dictionary of Heresy Trials in American Christianity (1997), includes the witchcraft trials in Salem, the many trials of Episcopalian James A. Pike, and the trial of Anne Hutchinson. In various case studies, the work indicates that heresy is a necessary part of all theology. (See entry for Tissa Balasuriya.) {DCL}
HERETIC, THE The Heretic, a newsletter of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists, commenced in 1994. Its editor, and the president of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists (UMAH), was formerly Eric Snyder.
HERETICS Heretics, nonconformists who either are baptized members of the Roman Catholic Church who have disavowed a revealed truth or are dissenters from any other established church, are described in detail by Charles S. Clifton’s Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (1992). His extensive listing starts with Cerdo and Simon Magus in the 1st century and continues to Michael Servetus and Giordano Bruno in the 16th century. The last in England to be burned for heresy was Edward Wightman, in 1612. (See entry for Catharism.) {BDF}
Herford, Robert Travers (20th Century) Herford was president of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association from 1883 to 1914. At the turn of the century, and after writing about Judaism at the time of Jesus, he had a positive perspective about Pharisaism and often called himself a “Jewnitarian.”
HERMAPHRODITES • Hermaphrodite: A person possessing the organs of both sexes, as a man with both a penis and a brain. —Carol Falkenberry Atlanta Freethought Society
To believers, hermaphrodites are not God’s mistakes; they simply prove how He works in mysterious ways. Some early biblical scholars believed that Adam—a hermaphrodite like his father—later divided into two people after falling from grace. In recognition, the Talmud lists regulations for individuals of mixed sex. Just the same, to religious fundamentalists the subject is not one to be discussed on Easter Sunday when dining with Grandmother. The opposite was true. In ancient Greece, where Plato taught that originally there were three sexes—male, female, and hermaphrodite—but that over a period of time the third sex was lost. Meanwhile, in Greek mythology the tale was told of how Hermes and Aphrodite parented Hermaphroditus, who, at the age of fifteen, became half male and half female when, after falling in love with a nymph, their two bodies fused. In Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (1993) by Anne Fausto-Sterling, a geneticist and professor of medical science, in some actual cases, “the testis and the ovary grow separately but bilaterally; in others, they grow together within the same organ, forming an ovo-testis. Not infrequently, at least one of the gonads functions well, producing either sperm cells or eggs, as well as functional levels of the sex hormones: androgens or estrogens.” Also, there are pseudo-hermaphrodites who possess two gonads of the same kind along with the usual male (XY) or female (XX) chromosomal makeup. But, explains Fausto-Sterling, “their external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics do not match their chromosomes.” Some developed a phallus between 1.5 and 2.8 inches long, but they urinated through a urethra that opened into or near the vagina. Although historically hermaphrodites have been forced to choose some established gender role and stick with it, some have refused to do so. Fausto-Sterling cites a Scottish hermaphrodite living as a woman in the 1600s and who was buried alive after impregnating his/her master’s daughter. Fausto-Sterling is of the opinion that the medical world should not intervene, that intersexuals should be allowed to develop naturally, unimpeded. She cites cases to allay parents’ worries about rearing children who are intersexuals, showing that they adjusted to their status depending upon whether or not those around them accepted that intersexuality is not a disease to be corrected, as is taught by some. Limpets, The Economist (16 March 1996) has pointed out, “start as males and then, when they have grown sufficiently large to produce eggs, become female. Some fish do it the other way round: if a female wrasse becomes big and tough enough to take over her group, she also becomes one of the boys. And snails have the best of both worlds. They are able to make both sperm and eggs in a single body, and thus inseminate others at the same time as they are, themselves, being inseminated.” (See entry for Adam.)
HERMENEUTICS Hermeneutics, in theology, is applied to the study of the general principles whereby the meaning of the Scriptures is to be ascertained. It requires a knowledge of the original languages of the Bible, and interpreters’ qualifications are critiqued. In literature, hermeneutics refers to the art of interpretation of literature. (See entry for Adolf Grünbaum, who is a leading anti-hermeneuticist.)
Herndon, William H. (1818—1891) Herndon was a friend, law partner, and biographer of Abraham Lincoln. His Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (1889) focused on Lincoln’s personal life and led to distortions, particularly in the case of the Ann Rutledge romance, according to D. H. Donald’s Lincoln’s Herndon (1948). Of Lincoln, Herndon wrote,
• Mr. Lincoln was an infidel, sometimes bordering on atheism.
• He never mentioned the name of Jesus, except to scorn and detest the idea of a miraculous conception.
• He did write a little work on infidelity in 1835—6, and never recanted. He was an out-and-out- infidel and about that there is no mistake.
• In 1834, while still living in New Salem and before he became a lawyer, he was surrounded by a class of people exceedingly liberal in matters of religion. Volney’s Ruins and Paine’s Age of Reason passed from hand to hand, and furnished food for the evening’s discussion in the tavern and village store. Lincoln read both these books and thus assimilated them into his own being. He prepared an extended essay—called by many a book—in which he made an argument against Christianity, striving to prove that the Bible was not inspired, and therefore not God’s revelation, and that Jesus Christ was not the Son of God. The manuscript containing these audacious and comprehensive propositions he intended to have published or given a wide circulation in some other way. He carried it to the store, where it was read and freely discussed. His friend and employer, Samuel Hill, was among the listeners and, seriously questioning the propriety of a promising young man like Lincoln fathering such unpopular notions, he snatched the manuscript from his hands and thrust it into the stove. The book went up in flames, and Lincoln’s political future was secure. But his infidelity and his skeptical views were not diminished. {CE; TYD}
HERO In Greek mythology, Hero was a priestess of Aphrodite in Sestos. Leander, her lover, swam the Helleslpoint nightly from Abydos to see her. When a storm blew out the candle that was guiding him, and he drowned, Hero in despair threw herself into the sea. Linguists, who “heroically” point to the fact that Hero was female, argue that it is not logical for those demanding “political correctness” of a word to underline gender, as in human or mankind or history. {CE}
Herodotus (484?—425? B.C.E.) “The father of history,” Herodotus is the Greek who first completed a secular narrative of history, “history” being a word derived from the Greek word for “inquiry.” Henry Cary, in The History (1992), has translated the ancient writer’s encyclopedic interests and curiosity about the customs and workings of early humankind. Bertrand Russell, in Understanding History (1957), believed Herodotus is deserving of reading by contemporaries: “In the first place, he is full of amusing stories. Almost at the beginning of the book, there is the story of the vain king, Candaules, who regretted that no one but himself knew fully the beauty of his Queen, for which he wished to be envied. So he hid his Prime Minister Gyges behind a curtain, where he could see the Queen going naked to the bath. But she saw his feet sticking out and complained that he had offered her a mortal indignity. Then and there she made him a speech, ‘Only two courses are open to you to expiate your offense,’ she said, ‘either you must die or you must kill the King and marry me.’ Gyges had no difficulty in making his choice, and became the founder of the dynasty that ended with Croesus. . . . To anyone who enjoys anthropology Herodotus is interesting from his description of various barbarian customs as they existed in his day. Sometimes he is merely repeating travelers’ tales, but very often he is confirmed by modern research. His survey of the nations and races known to him is leisurely and ample, and affords an admirable introduction to the ancient world for a previously ignorant reader. . . . The main theme of his history is the conflict of Europe and Asia, culminating, for his time, in the defeats of the Persians at Marathon and Salamis.” Herodotus, says Lord Russell, implies that eventually Japan will be defeated and China and India will succeed to it as champions of Asia. “All these vast secular movements come within the framework suggested by Herodotus,” said Russell in 1943. {CE; ER; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Heroma-Meilink, D. (20th Century) At the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Hannover (1968), Heroma-Meilink addressed the group.
Herpyllis: See entry for Aristotle, for whom Herpyllis was mistress.
Herreid, Clyde (20th Century) Herreid, professor of biology at the State University of New York, is a skeptic and also a magician. Visiting the New Zealand rationalists, he spoke of the evolution-creation controversy in the United States, saying “the creationists tried to get equal time in schools for their misnamed ‘creation science’ nonsense that was tried first in Louisiana, then in Arkansas, both attempts of which failed. According to the New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (April 1994), Herreid spurred his listeners to insure that no such controversy erupt within their school systems. A noted Darwin impersonator, Herreid appeared as Darwin at the Center for Inquiry’s facetious 6,000th Birthday of the Earth party, 22 October 1996. {RAT}
Herrick, C. Judson (1868—1960) Herrick, an editor of Journal of Comparative Neurology, wrote his views about humanism to the present author:
Humanism means to me, as a biologist, the search for those vital values that make for more efficient, productive, and satisfying living for all people. This statement is intentionally very general, because every domain of human experience and endeavor is significant for the enrichment of life. The artificial barriers which traditionally separate these domains must be broken down. This calls for a type of cooperation which is rare and a tolerance for ideologies which we may not share that is still more difficult to achieve. We look to science, philosophy, economics, art, religion, and every other field of human experience for reinforcement and guidance, and we aim to bring them together in a united effort for human betterment with all available resources. My personal conception of modern Humanism does not exactly fit any of the seven categories of your list. I am a scientific humanist, but life embraces more than science as conventionally defined. I cannot accept some of the restrictions insisted upon by most of the naturalistic humanists. A naturalist may (or may not) be a theist, if these terms are properly defined. I object to the dogmatic rejection, expressed by many humanists, of the legitimacy of any hypotheses regarding the supernatural. I grant that there is no scientific evidence for the supernatural. Obviously there cannot be, for natural science by definition deals only with the natural. Now, what is nature? We cannot talk rationally about the supernatural without first defining the natural. All science is a human construction, based on human experience. It cannot go further than the range of possible experience. This sets a logical and an operational limit to nature and to natural science as envisaged scientifically and practically. We may, accordingly, accept the definition given by Santayana in 1905, “Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically.” We cannot now say what are the limits of the observable, but assuredly there are such limits for any finite mind. It is, then, arrogant for any naturalist to dogmatize about what may, or may not, exist beyond those limits. The implications of this doctrine are far-reaching. Some of them are mentioned in the Epilogue of my book entitled The Evolution of Human Nature (University of Texas Press, Autumn 1956) and more fully elaborated in a short article which may at some later time see the light. This conception of a liberalized naturalistic humanism I got from my older brother, the late C. L. Herrick, as I have explained in his biography (Trans. Am. Philosophical Soc., 45 (1): 1-85, 1955). Later influence came from many sources, notably William James, George Santayana, John Dewey, Roy Wood Sellars, and G. E. Coghill.
In 1956, Herrick was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. His New York Times obituary described him as an internationally prominent neurologist, a leader in his field. He was quoted as writing, “A thought is a manufactured process as truly as a pair of shoes or a magnetic field. The conclusion that thinking is a mechanistic process, a natural function of physical organs, breaks down the last barrier which formerly blocked the path to scientific study of human nature—all of it, not merely the parts that we share with beasts.” {HNS; HNS2; WAS, 29 July 1956}
Herrick, Jim (20th Century) Herrick, an atheist and the author of works on the history of humanism, has written Vision and Realism, a Hundred Years of the Freethinker (1982); Against The Faith (1985), essays on deists, skeptics, and atheists; and A Humanist Anthology (1995). Herrick was on the editorial board of International Humanist and from 1993 to 1998 was editor of its successor, International Humanist News, which is the journal of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). In addition, he is a former editor of The Free Thinker (1977—1981) and vice president of the National Secular Society. Herrick also is editor of New Humanist, the journal of the Rationalist Press Association, of which he is a member of the Board of Directors. “Bible-smashing is tedious to people who have smashed their Bibles,” Herrick quotes George Bernard Shaw in a lucid article, “The Freethinker Yesterday and Today” (Freethinker, June 1994). But ever since George William Foote’s first issue of the journal in 1881, Herrick notes that it has remained imperative to continue attacking the evangelicals’ “spread of pernicious myths and unnecessary hardship for children and parents.” Unfortunately, he adds, early freethinkers if they were to look at the current situation “would be surprised that religion has proved so persistent in the face of so many intellectual arguments against it. This shows that it is not rational thought that keeps the churches alive but emotion, habit, and the desire for power.” In 1996, speaking at the fourth World Atheist Conference held in Vijayawada, India, Herrick noted that no one has ever been injured by the truth. Self-deception is what actually injures humankind. “We must nurture the positive side of our atheistic existence,” he said, adding that
Extremist religion and fundamentalism, whether from the Christian Moral Right or from Islam, is growing in the world. We must on no account demonise the Muslims. I have met tolerant and civilised Muslims, the Sufi tradition of art and mysticism is fine, and many artistic endeavours are superb. We must keep in dialogue and encourage the liberals.
In India, Herrick attended the Rationalist Conference held in 1996, at which fire-walking demonstrations were held to debunk the godmen who claim they have supernatural powers. He spoke on “Freedom of Speech as a Universal Human Right.” Also in 1996, he participated in the Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. Here, he received a distinguished service award for his four years’ editorship of International Humanist News. In 1998 he spoke at the IHEU’s congress in Mumbai. Herrick, one of the most recognized humanists around the world, resigned as the IHEU’s newsletter editor but remains active in international rationalist and humanist affairs. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 but lamented that “it has a far too rosy view of human nature,” “too much is left to the market economy,” and “the potential for human conflict is underestimated. . . . Nevertheless, perhaps irrationally, humanists of goodwill cannot allow these reservations to dampen the power of human effort and human hope.” E-mail: <jim.rpa@humanism.org.uk>. {The Free Mind, February 1996; FUK; New Humanist, February 1996; SHD}
Herriot, Édouard [President] (1872—1957)
A French statesman, Herriot was president of the French National Assembly. Known as a moderate leftist, anticlerical, and antimilitarist, he was leader of the Radical Socialist (Radical) Party, the dominant party in France from 1899 to 1940. In the avant-garde, he was an ardent advocate of a European confederation, as outlined in his The United States of Europe (translated 1930). When Bertrand Russell was its president, Herriot was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. At his national funeral in 1957, a throng estimated at 300,000 persons assembled in the huge Place Bellecourt where Premier Guy Mollet described Herriot as “a great humanist, a fighter for social reform and educational opportunities, and a man who demonstrated perfectly that ‘the good and useful life is that in which action and thought are mutually sustaining.’ ” (See letter in entry for Charles Mayer, who describes Herriot as being a naturalistic humanist.) {CE; CL; HNS; RE}
Hershaft, Alex (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hershaft was a principal scientist at Booz Allen Applied Research. {HM2}
Hershey, John H. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Hershey was a correspondent (Latin America) for The Humanist. {HNS}
Hertell, Thomas (19th Century) Hertell was a judge of the Marine Court of New York and for some years was a legislator in New York. He wrote several small works criticizing Christian theology and exerted his influence in favor of state secularization. In 1895 he became president of the Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty, a group which attempted to form a national freethought society. {BDF; FUS}
Hertwig, Oscar (1849—1922) A German anatomist, Hertwig was director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy and Biology and was a professor of general anatomy and embryology at the University. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Privy Councillor, and joint editor of the Archiv für mikroskopische Anatomie und Entwickelungsgeschichte. Hertwig was an admirer of and student of Haeckel. {RAT}
Hertwig, Richard (1850—1937) Hertwig, the brother of Oscar Hertwig, was a zoologist who taught at Königsberg, Bonn, and Munich. He was a Privy Councillor and the author of many works on zoology. He was an admirer of and student of Haeckel. {RAT}
Hertz, Gevene (20th Century) Hertz is president of the European Unitarian Universalists (EUU, Frydenlundsvej 49, 2950 Vedbaek, Denmark). Also, she is Vice-President of the International Council of Unitarian Universalists (ICUU). “I consider myself more or less an atheist,” Hertz has written, “in that I do not really believe in any sort of God who has or had any real effect on the world. On the other hand, I find myself thanking God each day when I go out and see the beauty around me, or think about the ways in which I am ‘blessed’ (fortunate?). I like to do it because I feel a need to express gratitude, but I don’t ‘really’ believe anyone is listening.” Her e-mail: <ghertz@nordita.dk>.
Hertzler, Arthur Emanuel (1870—1946) Dr. Hertzler, called the legendary “Horse and Buggy” doctor by Fred Whitehead in Freethought History, was a freethinker. His work, The Grounds of an Old Surgeon’s Faith, a Scientific Inquiry into the Causes of War, was republished in 1944.
Hertzogenberg, Heinrich von (1843—1900) An Austrian composer and professor of composition at the Berlin Royal High School of Music, Hertzogenberg was an intimate friend of Brahms. Their correspondence shows that both were atheists. Although brought up as a Catholic, he became, according to McCabe, “as Rationalistic as Brahms,” saying, “I believe nothing” and “He who has no faith must have emotions.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Hervey, John [Baron] (1696—1743) Hervey, a deist and intimate friend of Queen Caroline, wrote Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second, in which he says he “adopted all the anti-Christian opinions of the time” and had “a peculiar antipathy to the Church and churchmen.” The work by the Baron of Ickworth describes the intrigue and politics of the court of George II. (See entry for Alexander Pope.) {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Hervieu, Paul Ernest (1857—1915) Hervieu was a French dramatist and novelist. His literary career opened in 1882 with Diogène le chien, and he became known also for his dramatic works and other writing. Hervieu was a Commander of the Legion of Honour and Honorary President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. {RAT}
Herwegh, Georg (1817—1875) Herwegh was a German radical and a poet. Intended for the Church, he left that business for literature and found his Gedichte eines Lebendigen (Poems of a Living Man) aroused attention by their boldness. In 1848, he raised troops for the purpose of invading Baden. Failing, he took refuge in Switzerland and Paris. Herwegh died at Baden-Baden. {BDF}
Herzberg, Emanuel (19th Century) A freethinker, Herzberg wrote Gorilla Catechism (1869). {GS}
Herzen, Alexandr Ivanovich (1812—1870) Herzen was an eminent Russian writer and revolutionary leader. Although said to have been the son of Prince Jakoslav, Alexei Gostev has pointed out that Herzen was the illegitimate son of Ivan Alexandrovitch Yakovlev. Herzen’s mother, a German, lived in his father’s house but the two were not married, possibly because she was a strong Lutheran believer who did not want to join the Orthodox Church. Cross-confessional alliances were forbidden in pre-revolutionary Russia. In 1834 Herzen (from the German das herz, or heart) was sent as a civil servant to the provinces because he had belonged to a socialist political circle. Upon returning in 1840 to Moscow he met and influenced Byelinsky with his revolutionary ideas, then was banished in 1847, never to return to Russia. In Paris he supported the Revolution of 1848, and in Switzerland he issued a periodical, Kolokol (The Bell). In 1857, he set up in London the first free Russian press abroad, one which published works that were prohibited in Russia and which passed into that country in large numbers. Who Is to Blame? (1847) was a popular novel about a liberal hero who becomes disillusioned with Russian society. In 1848 after having been a leading Westernizer, Herzen modified his views toward the Slavophile faith in Russia’s communal institutions, although he agreed that peasant communes would be the forerunners of a socialist society rather than as strongholds of tradition. From the Other Shore (1855) contained a critique of the European revolutions of the period. My Past and Thoughts (1855—1868) is a masterpiece of Russian literature. He was at odds with Karl Marx because of his belief that freedom must be for all, including those who do not agree with the author. When he read Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, he wrote, “After reading the first few pages I jumped for joy. Down with the masquerade attire, away with double-talk and allegory. . . . We do not need to clothe reality in myths.” He concluded there is no God, that man is alone in the universe, and that man’s purpose is to develop values and meanings of his own. “All religions,” he declared, “have based morality on obedience, that is to say, on voluntary slavery. That is why they have always been more pernicious than any political organization. For the latter makes use of violence, the former—of the corruption of the will.” In 1875 his works which often expressed his atheism were published as a ten-volume set. Selected Philosophical Works (translated 1956) confirms his outlook as a freethinker, one who, in the words of Aileen M. Kelly, had an overriding “faith in the self-sufficing value of contingent existence.” (WAS, interview with Alexei Gostev, 1998) {BDF; CE; Eileen M. Kelley, Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance [1998]; EU, Hugh McLean; RAT; RE; TYD}
Herzog, Arthur III (1927— ) Herzog, once an editor for Fawcett Publications, wrote The War-Peace Establishment (1965), The Church Trap (1968), and The Rise, Fall, and Exile of the King of White Collar-Crime (1987). In 1968 he was national public relations director of the Eugene McCarthy Presidential Campaign. Herzog in his Who’s Who entry states,
I do not believe that money and success should figure as strongly as it does in our estimate of what is a good life. Since it often does, though, I would point to perseverance as a major element of success. Another, mostly overlooked, is a lack of dogmatism and a belief in skepticism and personal happiness as ends in themselves.
{FUS}
Hestand, Alex (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hestand was an author and a columnist. {HM2}
Hester, Paul (20th Century) A recording artist, once a member of the now disbanded New Zealand-Australian band Crowded House, was asked on MTV Europe (30 September 1993) if he believed in God. “No!” he responded. “My father used to try to get me to go to Sunday school, but I wouldn’t. {CA} Paul Hester, Recording Artist music
Hester was a member of the disbanded New Zealand/Australian band Crowded House. In a September 30, 1993 interview on MTV Europe the following Q&A took place:
Q: Do you believe in God?
Paul: No! My father used try to get me to go to Sunday school but I wouldn't.
Nick [Seymour]: No, not anymore. I am a bit of a lapsed Catholic.
Hester, Paul (8 Jan 1969 - ) Hester, a rock-and-roll drummer who formerly was a member of the disbanded New Zealand-Australian band known as Crowded House, is a drummer with Split Enz & Crowded House. In an interview on MTV Europe (30 Sep 1993) with Hester and bandmember Nick Seymour, the following questioning took place:
Q: Do you believe in God? Paul: No! My father used to try to get me to go to Sunday school but I wouldn't. Nick: No, not anymore. I am a bit of a lapsed Catholic.
Heston, Watson (19th Century) In 1890 The Truth Seeker printed Heston’s The Freethinkers’ Pictorial Text-Book, Showing the Absurdity and Untruthfulness of the Church’s Claim to be a Divine and Beneficent Institution and Revealing the Abuses of a Union of Church and State. He included a series on Uncle Sam and the Priest, the Church Robbing the People, Sabbath Laws, the Church and Thomas Paine, Woman and the Church, Missionaries, Bible Doctrines and Their Results, Heaven, Hell, Persecutions of the Church, etc. The work, which is filled with cartoons of atheistic and freethought material, was reprinted in 1993 by H. H. Waldo (Box 350, Rockton, Illinois 61072).
HET HUMANISTISCH ARCHIEF The Dutch Humanist Archives and Documentation Centre is at Van Asch van Wijckskade 28, 3512 VS Utrecht, The Netherlands; tel: +31-30-2390164; fax: +31-30-2390170; <humarc@uvh.nl>.
HET VRIJE WOORD
Het Vrije Woord is published monthly at Lange Leemstr 57, 2018 Antwerp, Belgium. E-mail: <human@glo.be>.
HETAIRAI The women who came to ancient Athens and were known as Hetairai were not, as is often said, courtesans. They were “pals” or companions. Among the most famous was Aspasia, the unwedded wife of Pericles. (See entry for Aspasia.)
HETEROSEXUALITY “Happiness? It’s whenever I think about or am near my wife.” Directing one’s sexual desire toward a person of the opposite sex is a universal characteristic, the subject of poetry, fiction, films, paintings, sculpture, music, and universal conversation. However, in Ancient Greece, heterosexuality as it is now understood was unknown, or so argues Jonathan Ned Katz. They knew about procreation, of course. They knew about sex between women and men. They knew about sex between men and men as well as about sex between women and women. But they did not consider these things “opposites.” Further, one form of sex was not considered to be a lesser type than another, Katz states in The Invention of Heterosexuality (1995). It was not considered unusual for a person to have same—as well as different—sex desires. He cites the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote, “The Greeks did not see love for one’s own sex and for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior. The dividing lines did not follow that kind of boundary.” In New England from 1607 to 1740, in order to insure enough people to harvest the crops, an entirely different reasoning was used to encourage procreation. Same-sex experiences were penalized, as was masturbation. Churches preached against “sodomites” and “sapphists,” and the death penalty for sodomy was established in all the colonies. Katz develops the argument that, like the Scottish tartan, heterosexuality (a word which Webster documents as first being used in 1892) is a recent concept. Karl Maria Kertbeny is credited with formulating the hetero/homo split, a usage which Krafft-Ebbing in Psychopathia Sexualis (1899) cited. Katz argues that attraction to or relationships with people of the other sex do not make one “heterosexual.” Rather, sexuality is conceived as being on a continuum, that sexual desire and activity are better served without such strictly defining and limiting labels. Contemporary heterosexuals, particularly religious fundamentalists, are entirely in disagreement with Katz’s historical study. Their complaint is that he is not discussing the Judeo-Christian aspects of sex practices nor even that he approves of such. One of the most memorable descriptions of the life a flagrant heterosexual enjoyed is found in Giacomo Casanova’s (1725—1798) 12-volume Mémoires. He not only describes an extraordinary succession of sexual encounters but also provides a portrait of the manners of his time. The Kinsey and other reports, as well as most people’s understanding by conversing with friends, indicate that most people did not “choose” to be heterosexual, that they have been so since birth, and that they are content with such a status. There is little agreement, however, as to whether one’s heterosexuality must involve, in a lifetime, one partner only. “You marry a girl not because you want to live with her,” observed a Manhattan wag concerning heterosexuality. “You marry a girl because you cannot live without her!” (See entry for Marriage.)
Hetherington, Henry (1792—1849) An English radical reformer and one of the heroes of “the free press,” Hetherington in the 1820s was attracted to freethought. A working-class organizer, he founded the Metropolitan Political Union in 1830, which was the germ both of trade unionism and of the Chartist movement. In 1830 the Government obtained three convictions against him for publishing the Poor Man’s Guardian, and he was lodged for six months in Clerkenwell gaol. At the end of 1832 he was again imprisoned there for six months, his treatment being most cruel. An opening, called a window, but without a pane of glass, let in the rain and snow by day and night. In 1840 he was tried for blasphemous libel for publishing Charles Haslam’s Letters to the Clergy of All Denominations. Hetherington, refusing to pay the fine which was levied, spent four months in Queen’s Bench Prison. According to Hetherington, good deeds alone are what counts. He fought against the “taxes upon knowledge” by issuing unstamped The Poor Man’s Guardian (1831—1835), a weekly newspaper for the people, established, contrary to “law,” to try the power of “might” against “right.” His persistency, however, had much to do in removing the taxes. From 1842 to 1843 in Glasgow he edited Free-Thinkers’ Information for the People. His will affirmed his atheism and condemned Christian theology as the “greatest obstacle to human improvement and happiness”:
As life is uncertain, it behooves every one to make preparations for death; I deem it therefore a duty incumbent on me, ere I quit this life, to express in writing, for the satisfaction and guidance of esteemed friends, my feelings and opinions in reference to our common principles. I adopt this course that no mistake or misapprehension may arise through the false reports of those who officiously and obtrusively obtain access to the death-beds of avowed infidels to priestcraft and superstition; and who, by their annoying importunities, labour to extort from an opponent, whose intellect is already worn out and subdued by protracted physical suffering, some trifling admission, that they may blazon it forth to the world as a Death-bed Confession, and a triumph of Christianity over infidelity. In the first place, then, I calmly and deliberately declare that I do not believe in the popular notion of the existence of an Almighty, All-Wise and Benevolent God—possessing intelligence, and conscious of his own operations; because these attributes involve such a mass of absurdities and contradictions, so much cruelty and injustice on his part to the poor and destitute portion of his creatures—that, in my opinion, no rational reflecting mind can, after disinterested investigation, give credence to the existence of such a Being. 2nd. I believe death to be an eternal sleep—that I shall never live again in this world, or another, with a consciousness that I am the same identical person that once lived, performed the duties, and exercised the functions of a human being. 3rd. I consider priestcraft and superstition the greatest obstacle to human improvement and happiness. During my life I have, to the best of my ability, sincerely and strenuously exposed and opposed them, and die with a firm conviction that Truth, Justice, and Liberty will never be permanently established on earth till every vestige of priestcraft and superstition shall be utterly destroyed. 4th. I have ever considered that the only religion useful to man consists exclusively of the practice of morality, and in the mutual interchange of kind actions. In such a religion there is no room for priests—and when I see them interfering at our births, marriages and deaths, pretending to conduct us safely through this state of being to another and happier world, any disinterested person of the least shrewdness and discernment must perceive that their sole aim is to stultify the minds of the people by their incomprehensible doctrines, that they may the more effectually fleece the poor deluded sheep who listen to their empty babblings and mystifications. 5th. As I have lived so I die, a determined opponent to their nefarious and plundering system. I wish my friends, therefore, to deposit my remains in unconsecrated ground, and trust they will allow no priest, or clergyman of any denomination, to interfere in any way whatever at my funeral. My earnest desire is, that no relation or friend shall wear black or any kind of mourning, as I consider it contrary to our rational principles to indicate respect for a departed friend by complying with a hypocritical custom. 6th. I wish those who respect me, and who have laboured in our common cause, to attend my remains to their last resting place, not so much in consideration of the individual, as to do honour to our just, benevolent and rational principles. I hope all true Rationalists will leave pompous displays to the tools of priestcraft and superstition.
Hetherington wrote this Testament nearly two years before his death, but he signed it with a firm hand three days before he breathed his last, in the presence of Thomas Cooper, who left it at the Reasoner office for “the inspection of the curious or sceptical.” Thomas Cooper became a Christian, but he could not repudiate what he printed at the time, or destroy his “personal testimony,” as he called it, to the consistency with which Hetherington died in the principles of Freethought. (See Gordon Stein , “Henry Hetherington,” in American Rationalist (July-August, 1990.) {BDF; EU, Joel H. Wiener; FUK; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}
Hetherly, Marian (20th Century) Hetherly writes “Worth Noting” for and is an editor of The Humanist.
HETUVADI A rationalist, Oriya monthly, Hetuvadi is at 779, Pocket-5, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi 110 091, India.
HETUVADI A rationalist, Telugu monthly, Hetuvadi is at 4-13-6, Ithanagar, Tenali, Andhra Pradesh, 522201, India.
Hetzer, Ludwig (16th Century) Hetzer was an anti-trinitarian martyr. While an Anabaptist minister at Zurich, he openly denied the doctrine of the Trinity. As a result, he was condemned to death by the magistrates of Constance on a charge of blasphemy. The sentence was carried out 4 February 1529. {BDF}
Heusden, C. J. van (19th Century) Van Heusden was a Dutch writer in De Dageraad. He wrote several works, one being Thoughts on a Coming More Universal Doctrine. {BDF}
Hewetson, Richard (20th Century) A Californian, Hewetson is an honorary member of the Minnesota Atheists and a member of Atheists of San Francisco Region. In a Secular Nation (Fall 1994) article, he described how the San Francisco atheists built a secular book section in the San Francisco Public Library. Hewetson is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Hewett, Pauline (20th Century) Hewett in Britain is active with the Muswell Hill Humanist Group.
Hewitt, Cecil Rolph (1901—1994) Hewitt, who wrote under the pen-name of C. H. Rolph, was a chief inspector of the City of London Police. Upon the death of his second wife, Jenifer Wayne, a BBC radio writer and producer, Hewitt “firmly continued to refuse to say the Creed,” observed his friend, Peter Cotes. In one of his last books, Further Particulars, Hewitt wrote that although he might like to be a Christian, “I can’t bring myself to make the leap from a vague sense of the numinous to Christian belief.”
Hewlett, Philip (20th Century) Hewlett’s history of Canada’s liberal religious movement is found in Unitarianism in Canada (1967) and Unitarians in Canada (1978).
Hewson, Arthur B. (20th Century) After the American Rationalist Federation formed in 1955, Hewson in 1956 started The American Rationalist, a publication independent of the Federation. He is author of Affirmative Rationalism (1964). {EU, Eldon Scholl; FUS}
Heyse, Paul Johann Ludwig von (1830—1914)
The first German to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1910), Heyse wrote The Fury (1855) and Andrea Delfin (1859). Robertson lists him as being a rationalist. In Kinder der Welt (1873), Heyse truculently criticized the churches. {BDF; JMR; RAT; RE}
Heywood, Abel (19th Century) Heywood, a radical freethinker and an alderman, was active in the 1860s with the English Manchester Secular Union. {FUK; RSR}
Heywood, Ezra H. (1829—1893) Heywood was something of an eccentric reformer, and many Liberals did not agree with him. Although he had a college education and was intended for the ministry, he devoted his life to the antislavery crusade, opposition to the Civil War, and other causes. He published The Word, which opposed rent, interest, taxes, tariffs, profits, war, marriage, and all monopolies. After being imprisoned for two years in a Charleston jail for his controversial stands, Heywood was released, then contracted a cold during his conduct of a labor reform convention in New York, Heywood died three days later in Massachusetts. {PUT; TRI}
Hibbard, W. D. (19th Century) A freethinker, Hibbard wrote Rays of Reason, or Religion Refuted (1887). {GS}
Hibbert. Robert (1770-1849) Hibbert, a philanthropist whose family made money from sugar plantations in Jamaica, was a Unitarian. He wished the trust to be known as “The Anti-Trinitarian Fund,” but on the advice of lawyer Edwin Field eventually settled for a non-dogmatic title in deference to the political and religious climate of the day. The Trust’s foundation document, while not using the word Unitarian, was Unitarian in ethos. Although today’s Trust includes a liberal Anglican on its Board, membership has been solidly Unitarian. The History of the Trust, by Alan Ruston, is obtainable from the Trust office at 14 Gordon Square, London WC1HOAG, according to Trust Secretary Jim McClelland. It aided the Hibbert Journal 1920-1970). {WAS, e-mail from Jim McClelland, 5 September 1998}
Hibbert, Julian (1800—1834) A British freethinker, Hibbert belonged to many “radical” organizations, was a generous benefactor to freethought causes, and worked with Richard Carlile and Robert Taylor to popularize anti-Christian works. Learning that a distinguished political prisoner had received a gift of £1,000, Hibbert remarked that a freethinking prisoner should not want equal friends, so he gave Carlile a check for the same amount. Hibbert spent nearly £1,000 in fitting up Carlile’s shop in Fleet Street. He also commenced a Dictionary of Anti-Superstitionists and Chronological Tables of British Freethinkers. Carlile described him as “the most actively virtuous human being that I have ever known.” Upon his death, Hibbert left £500 each to James Watson and to Henry Hetherington. {BDF; EU, Joel H. Wiener; FUK; RAT; RE}
Hibschman, Harry (20th Century) Hibschman was a freethinker who wrote “Religion’s Blight of American Divorce Laws” (1929) and “Should Church Property Be Taxed?” (1930). {GS}
Hickey, Thomas (1869—1926) Hickey was a fiery radical who led a New York Knights of Labor strike for the nine-hour day. In 1904, he started a newspaper called The Rebel in Halletsville, Texas, and some of its special issues reached 100,000. He attacked the Texas prison system for its use of the bullwhip to discipline inmates, he published letters which blacklisted militant labor organizers from railroad employment, and he spoke eloquently against religion. The International Socialist Review said in 1910 that he was “a baby blizzard behind a shaggy beard and ponderous moustache. He seldom uses cuss words, but in debate he looks like he is filled with Irish wit and Irish fight.” Not only did he attack the Catholic hierarchy for its damnation of socialism, but also he exposed various anti-Jesuit forgeries. {Freethought History #15, 1995}
Hickman, Larry A. (20th Century) Hickman is professor of philosophy at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. He is general editor of The Correspondence of John Dewey and director of the Center for Dewey Studies. Hickman points out that Dewey “realized that dogmatic religious and metaphysical views tend to break communication and isolate human beings from one another. In [Dewey’s] view, technology offers the best hope for common action because it is the most basic and therefore the most common human project.” Hickman, a humanist, is author of John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology (1990).
Hicks, Elias (1748—1830) Leader of the “Hicksite” Quakers who were non-trinitarian, Hicks was a friend of Walt Whitman’s father, who introduced his son to Mr. Hicks’s humanistic outlook. Because of his unitarianism, he was held responsible for the split in the American Society into Orthodox and “Hicksite” Friends in 1827. According to Corliss Lamont, the liberal or Hicksite wing of Friends (Quakers) “has made the closest approach to Humanism” of the various Protestant groups. Hicks is credited with ridding the Friends of slavery and encouraging them to boycott products of slave labor. {CE; CL; ER}
Hicks, Granville (1901—1982) Hicks was author of The Great Tradition (1933) and became a leading Communist critic and editor of The New Masses. He wrote a biography of John Reed (1936) and in his I Like America (1938) he explained the contemporary scene from the rationale of his political, communistic viewpoint. The First to Awaken (1940) was written with Richard M. Bennett and describes a New Hampshire man who wakes a century after being anesthetized in 1940 to find a revolutionary, humanistic, social, and industrial utopia. Where We Came Out (1954) describes the appeal of, and his disillusionment with, communism. In 1958, he became a frequent contributor to Saturday Review. Hicks wrote to the present author concerning his view of humanism:
I do consider myself a naturalistic humanist. In spite of all the talk there has been about orthodoxy, I feel that naturalistic humanism is constantly gaining ground. I also feel that it has gained a great deal in flexibility and richness.
{CE; WAS, 9 February 1951}
Hicks, L. E. (19th Century) An American geologist, Hicks wrote A Critique of Design Arguments (1883). {BDF}
Hicks, Robert (20th Century) Hicks is Vice-President of the Humanist Association of Toronto (HAT).
HICKSITE QUAKERS: See entry for Elias Hicks.
Hidalgo Tuñon, Alberto: See entry for Alberto Hidalgo Tuñon.
Higgins, Godfrey (1771—1833) Higgins was an English archaeologist whose first work was entitled Horae Sabbaticae (1813), a manual on the Sunday Question. In 1829 he published An Apology for the Life and Character of Mohammed and Celtic Druids, which occasioned some stir on account of the exposure of priestcraft. Upon his death a two-volume work, Anacalypsis, was published, an attempt to draw aside the veil of the Saitic Isis, which he felt was an inquiry into the origin of languages, nations, and religions. Higgins was a deist. {BDF; FUK; RAT; RE}
Higgins, Richard (Dick) (1938-1998) Higgins was an innovator in the 1960’s avant-garde movement. A writer, poet, artist, composer, and publisher, he was a seminal figure in Happenings and the concrete poetry movement. He co-founded the anti-authoritarian Fluxus movement. Higgins invented the term “intermedia” and listed forty-seven pages on his curriculum vitae—headings included visual art, movies and videotapes, music and sound art. Foew&ombwhnw was a 1969 book of essays, an acronym for “freaked out electronic wizard and other marvelous bartenders who have no wings.” It combined the traditional and the iconoclastic and, like a prayer book, was bound in leather with a ribbon bookmark. The founder of Something Else Press, he published (1964-1975) books and pamphlets by avant-garde writers such as Gertrude Stein, Richard Hulsenbeck, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Emmett Williams, Claes Oldenburg, Luigi Russolo, and the 17th-century poet George Herbert. With Allan Kaprow and others he planned and performed in the first Happenings. With George Macunius he established the loosely knit group known as Fluxus, which accepted any activity as art and played fast and loose with definitions. One of his compositions, “Dangerous Music No. 17” (1963), consisted of his wife—the poet Alison Knowles—shaving his head. “Dangerous Music No. 2” involved screaming as loudly as possible for as long as possible. Higgins was a freethinker, entirely uninvolved with any organized religion. His interest was in anything new. {Roberta Smith, The New York Times, 31 October 1998}
Higginson, Edward Jr. (19th Century) A freethinker, Higginson wrote, “Blasphemy, What It Is and On Whom Chargeable.” (1830). {GS}
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (1823—1911) Higginson, known today as Emily Dickinson’s friend and poetry critic, was a commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers (freedmen), a regiment of Negro troops. He championed the rights of Negroes at a time when the cause was unpopular. Previously, he had been the Unitarian minister of the First Religious Society (Unitarian) in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and of the First Church in Worcester, Massachusetts. An abolitionist political activist, he wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), hailed by some as an overlooked masterpiece. In Boston, he led a raid on the Court House to try to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns and was wounded in his attempt. He aided the Free Soil fight in Kansas and was a supporter of John Brown. He contributed to Atlantic Monthly, Nation, and Harper’s Bazaar. He also became a spokesman for the rights of women, feeling that this was “the next great question” facing the country after the liberation of the slaves. Meanwhile, he was a prodigious writer and critic. His books include Malbone (1869), a novel; sketches, including Oldport Days (1873) and Old Cambridge (1899); the lives of Whittier (1902) and Longfellow (1902) for the “Men of Letters” series; biographies of Margaret Fuller (1884) and of his ancestor, Francis Higginson (1891); and an autobiographical account, Cheerful Yesterday (1898). Emily Dickinson is said to have been entranced by Higginson, who was the first to encourage her, although he tended to “correct” her poems. Later, he edited two volumes with Mabel L. Todd of Dickinson’s verse (1890—1891). In Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s The Secret Six (1995), Higginson is described as the toughest-minded of a group of men who conspired with John Brown. The others included Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe, and Gerrit Smith. {CE; FUS; JMR; RAT; U; U&U}
HIGH SCHOOL HUMANISTS, FREETHINKERS Numbers of secondary schools have humanist clubs or discussion groups. Those which are affiliated with the Campus Freethought Association are found on the Web at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
HIGHER POWER A power is the rate at which work is done, expressed as the amount of work per unit time and commony measured in units such as the watt and horsepower. In physics, therefore, with more wattage or horsepower one obtains higher power. Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, founder of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, has observed that “One of the signs of personal strength is that we take blame for what we do wrong. The other sign is that we take credit for what we do right. We do not alienate our power by assigning it to someone else. . . . Strong people are comfortable in recognizing their own power . . . nor do they call their power ‘a higher power.’ ” (See entries for Jim Christopher, Rational Recovery Self-Help Network, Secular Organization for Sobriety, and James Taylor.)
Highsmith, Patricia (1921—1995) Once called “the most important crime novelist at present in practice,” Highsmith was a successful writer. Critic Kathleen Gregory Klein has noted that Highsmith created a new fictional form, introducing the cult-figure serial killer Tom Ripley as a new type of criminal superhero. Of this, Sally R. Munt of Nottinghman Trent University in England wrote, “Lesbian and gay readers, themselves positioned in an uneasy relation to the law and its regulation of permissible behavior, find in Ripley the antithesis to state-sanctioned Christian virtue. He pushes transgression to the limit.” {GL}
Higinbotham, George (1826—1892) Higinbotham was an unorthodox Anglican, editor, independent legislator, lawyer, and judge. As Chairman of the Education Commission, he proposed in 1866 the withdrawal of public funds from church schools and establishment of state-controlled non-sectarian schools. On becoming Chief Judge in 1886, he continued support of responsible government, later refusing public honors because they originated in Britain. Higinbotham deplored the church’s refusal to accept the findings of science, which led to its inability to nourish an educated laity’s spiritual needs. {SWW}
Hikmet, Nazim (1902—1963) Hikmet was a Turkish poet who started writing when he was eleven. While trekking across Anatolia in his late teens, he met several Turkish Communists and, impressed by their idealism, joined the party, which in 1922 was banned in Turkey. In 1938, an atheist and Communist, he was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on charges of inciting a military revolt, although the major evidence against him was that cadets were reading his books. When his health worsened, leftists including Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Neruda, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Pablo Picasso organized campaigns for his release. Set free in 1950, he fled to the Soviet Union where he lived for the rest of his life and where he wrote poems in homage to Lenin, Stalin, and the Chinese revolution. The poet Denise Levertov has described his 17,000-line masterpiece Human Landscapes as
a flashing-past of pictures, a cinematographic semi-autobiographical fiction that will capture the attention of the least scholarly, least specialist of readers. At the same time, it is a work to engage and hold the attention of poets and sophisticated habitual readers of modern poetry, for thigh it is long it is terse, condensed, charged: the work of a supremely confident, energetic, passionate, and powerfully imaginative poet.
Although in 1997 some of his friends wanted to return Hikmet’s body from Moscow to Turkey, including Turkey’s PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) President, Sukran Kurdakul, himself a dedicated secularist, the Islamic-based Welfare Party which controlled both the Culture Ministry and Istanbul’s City Hall, would not allow it. {Stephen Kinzer, The New York Times, 27 February 1997}
Hileman, Tony (19 - ) A writer and speaker, Tony Hileman was the Executive Director of the American Humanist Association (AHA) from 1999? to 2005? . He coordinated the AHA's move to Washington, D.C. and worked to stimulate the AHA's growth by promoting the Humanist outlook at conferences, forums, and chapter events across the country.
Tony began his first career in business renovating large homes into multiple-unit residences in his native Indianapolis, and then developed a chain of small retail shops in central Indiana. He and his wife, Betty, spent a number of years living in Europe where Tony began his second career in wire service journalism working in Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa for United Press International. His thriving journalism career led Tony and Betty back to the United States and eventually to Washington, DC, where he continued to travel extensively around the globe as an executive for Agence France Presse (AFP). Disenchanted with corporate life, Tony left AFP and began his next career as an independent consultant, first in the field of journalism and then more broadly. He eventually specialized as an executive coach helping individuals achieve personal as well as professional success while simultaneously discovering the vast numbers of people who support a Humanist lifestance similar to his own.
In 2005 upon becoming senior leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, he said,
- The path that brought me to Ethical Culture is a familiar one. While the timing may differ for each of us, we likely share a common experience. Most of us were born into one religious or ideological life stance or another, separated from it, and then spent a period actively or passively searching for something that resonated with us. For me, the quest began early. I was questioning the tradition of my birth and its basic beliefs by the time I was eight, rejected them by age ten, fell inactive by 12, and was disassociated by 15. After openly separating from any practice at all, I drifted for the better part of three decades while shaping my own humanistic outlook before happening on Humanism and Ethical Culture. The unexpected and almost accidental discovery that there was a developed body of thought and action that fit my own thinking perfectly was a validating relief. It not only affirmed my sense of self but it encouraged me to bring that same sense to others.
Hill, Christopher (1912— ) In 1986, Hill was elected as an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is author of many books, including God’s Englishman (1970), Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (1971), and John Bunyan and His Church (1988).
Hill, Earl P. (20th Century) A freethinker, Hill wrote “Godmanity” (1908). {GS}
Hill, George Birkbeck Norman (1835—1903) A writer, Hill was a friend of Swinburne, Morris, and Rossetti, sharing their views. He edited Boswell (6 volumes, 1887), some of Johnson’s works, and the letters of Hume and Rossetti. In one of his letters, he wrote, “Priestcraft in every form I hate, and dogma I laugh at.” He thought Christianity “a very noble poem, but of such stuff as dreams are made of.” {RAT}
Hill, George N. (19th Century) Hill, a Bostonian, was one of the founders of the Ingersoll Secular Society. He originated the freethought calendar with T. B. Wakeman, and he was the first American to subscribe to the Bruno monument erected in Rome. {PUT}
Hill, Joe (1879—1915) A freethinker and Swedish-American union organizer, Hill is the legendary hero of radical labor whose “Casey Jones” and “The Union Scab” songs are still popular, as is his “Preacher and the Slave,” which is sung to the Christian tune “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”:
Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked ’bout something to eat, They will tell you with voices so sweet:
You will eat, by and bye, In the glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die—that’s a lie.
Hill, on an allegedly trumped-up murder charge, was executed by firing-squad in 1915. (CE; TYD)
Hill, Joe (7 Oct 1879 – 21 Nov 1915) A freethinker and Swedish-American union organizer, Hill was christened Joel Emmanuel Haggland by his father, Olof, a railroad worker, and his mother, Margareta. When his father died shortly after Joel’s eighth birthday, he and his five siblings were put to work to support the family, Joel taking a job shoveling coal on a steam engine for a construction company. When around twelve, he contracted a form of tuberculosis that resulted in leaving his neck and nose scarred. When his mother died, Joel and his brother Paul used their share of the proceeds from selling the family home and left for America. After reaching Ellis Island, the two found New York City was not paved with gold, and Joel’s first job was for pennies per day to clean bar spittoons. When the brothers split, Joel appears to have gone to Cleveland, San Francisco, and places in the West. He may have had legal problems, and for some reason he became known as Joseph Hillstrom. Because of low-paying, thankless jobs that he and fellow immigrants were forced to take, he became cynical toward his adopted country and developed an interest in unionizing the workers against the handful of wealthy individuals who were the bosses. The labor activists he joined were called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known popularly as the Wobblies, and their aim was for everyone to join “One Big Union” to extract profits from the wealthy and put that money into the hands of the workers. Details of his life are contradictory, but in a 1910 IWW paper he identified himself as Joe Hill, a member of the Portland, Oregon, local and denounced the local police for attacking Wobblies and other workers there. In 1911 he reportedly was ready to join a brigade of Wobblies who were aiding forces fighting for the overthrow of the Mexican government. Reports, in fact, had him fighting for the Wobblies in a dozen different locations on the same date. What is clear is that he wrote many songs, decrying “bosses” and “scabs,” that were included in the IWW’s Little Red Songbook. Reportedly, he was beaten by Fresno police, was accused by San Pedro police of armed robbery of a streetcar, and was a traveler to Utah, where he found Mormon leaders voicing strong anti-union sentiments—in 1913 he reportedly tried to convince them otherwise. On the night of 10 Jan 1914, two men entered a small grocery store operated by John Morrison and his two sons near downtown Salt Lake City. The men wore hats and handkerchiefs pulled up to cover their faces, a Morrison son sensing a robbery grabbed the family’s revolver and fired, one of the masked gunmen fired back, shouting, “We’ve got you now,” and the invading gunmen fled. When a second son came, he found his brother almost dead and his father moaning and near death. Police found drops of blood in the snow approximately one block away, and newspapers speculated about whether John Morrison’s having once been a policeman was connected with the crime. The same night of the murders, Dr. Frank McHugh was awakened by someone at the door, and he found Joe Hill clutching his chest and complaining he had been shot by a man in an argument over a woman. The wound was cleaned and bandaged, and the doctor told Hill to rest in bed and arranged for a friend to drive him home. During the examination, however, he noticed some kind of gun had dropped from Hill’s clothing, and the driver who transported him later reported that on the way Hill had stopped near a vacant field and thrown a gun into a field but out of the range of the headlights. The police tracked Hill down the next morning, found him in bed, ordered him not to move, then shot him in the hand when what Hill said he was doing was reaching for his pants. Eventually, despite their not knowing of his Wobbly connection, Hill was charged with murder, held without bail, and informed that Utah would seek the death penalty. For his trial, Hill accepted an offer of two young Salt Lake City attorneys to represent him free of charge, for they became aware that it would be a high-profile case that could advance their careers. It turned out that the defendant and his attorneys became courtroom combatants, he fired them with the accusation that they were partners with the District Attorney and were trying to railroad him for a crime he did not commit. When the judge refused to excuse the lawyers, Hill took little or no part in the rest of the trial, did not testify on his own behalf, and refused to name the married woman caught in an embarrassing tryst that he said led to the shooting, saying he was a man of honor. Meanwhile, at least two witnesses identified the scars on Hill’s face. A jury deliberated only a few hours, then returned a guilty verdict. Hill was given the option under Utah law of either being shot to death or hanged. “I'll take the shooting,” Hill told the judge. “I've been shot a couple times before, and I think I can take it.” He was transferred to the Utah State Penitentiary to await execution. The Wobblies, however, turned the case into a cause célèbre. IWW leaders “Big Bill” Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn spoke at rallies everywhere, claiming Hill had been convicted by Big Business, and letters, telegrams, and petitions were sent to Utah Governor William Spry and President Woodrow Wilson. The Swedish ambassador complained that Hill had not received a fair trial; the President asked Spry to delay the execution pending a full review of the case. Helen Keller pleaded upon Hill’s behalf. Wilson was reluctant to do more than he already had, and Spry (a Republican) refused to listen further to Wilson (a Democrat). Meanwhile, Hill maintained that it was not his duty to prove his own innocence. He told the Wobblies, “Don't waste time mourning. Organize!” While in prison, he downplayed the significance of his individual case, emphasizing the greater good of the “One Big Union” and the need to carry the struggle forward. To many he was a martyr. To others, he was a murderer with no options. On the morning of 19 Nov 1915, Hill was shot to death by a firing squad. Newspapers carried photographs of a funeral procession through the streets of Chicago. The songs he had crafted for the IWW became hymns that were sung with reverence. He had become a good man fallen at the hands of Big Business and its government partners, and his cause would stay alive:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, Alive as you and me. Says I, "But Joe you're ten years dead," "I never died," says he.
Hill is still the legendary hero of radical labor whose “Casey Jones” and “The Union Scab” songs are still popular, as is his “Preacher and the Slave,” which is sung to the Christian tune “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”:
Long-haired preachers come out every night, Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right; But when asked ’bout something to eat, They will tell you with voices so sweet:
You will eat, by and bye, In the glorious land above the sky; Work and pray, live on hay, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die—that’s a lie. (CE; E; TYD)
Hill, John (20th Century) A member of Freedom From Religion Foundation, Hill is a program manager for a Community Action Agency and a freethought activist with the Inland Northwest Freethought Society in Washington State.
Hill, Norman (20th Century) A human rights activist in New York City, Hill has been influential in furthering the legacy of A. Philip Randolph. He wrote The Railway Traveling Post Office of Great Britain and Ireland (1838—1975) (1977). Hill is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism. {AAH}
Hill, Sam (1940— )
Hill is a rationalist who wrote Poems, Original and Collected (1953).
Hillar, Marian (20th Century) A physician who teaches biology at Texas Southern University in Houston, Hillar was a participant in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City.
Hillary, Edmund Percival [Sir] (1919- ) Hillary, the famed mountaineer and explorer who was born in Auckland, New Zealand, was a member of John Hunt’s Everest expedition. With Tenzing Norgay, he reached the summit of Mt. Everest in 1953, for which he was knighted. In 1958 he and a New Zealand expeditionary party reached the South Pole. His autobiography is Nothing Venture, Nothing Win (1975). In a 1991 interview, he said, “I have no particular religious beliefs at all, but I am interested in all religions. In Tibetan Buddhism, one of the strongest features is that they believe that everyone must choose their own path in life. They don’t try to convert you to their particular form of religion, but it’s up to you to choose your own path. I like that very much indeed. I think that’s a great approach to philosophy.” {CA}
Hillebrand, Karl (1829—1884) Hillebrand’s father, Joseph, succeeded Hegel as professor at Heidelberg. Karl was involved in the revolutionary movement in Germany, being imprisoned in the fortress of Rastadt, from which he escaped to France. He taught at Strasbourg and Paris, where he became secretary to Heine. On the poet’s death he removed to Bordeaux, becoming a naturalized Frenchman, then a professor of letters at Douay. During the Franco-Prussian war he was correspondent to the Times and was taken for a Prussian spy. In 1871 he settled at Florence, where he translated the poems of Carducci. Hillebrand was a contributor to the Fortnightly Review, Revue des deux Mondes, and North American Review. His best known work is on France and the French in the second half of the nineteenth century. {BDF; RAT}
Hiller, Aaron (1920— ) A freethinker, Hiller wrote Diamonds in a Dunghill (1982). He has acted on television, given sermons to Unitarian congregations, and written about religious liberty for a variety of journals. {Freethought Today, May 1996; GS}
Hillman, Harold (20th Century) Hillman is the director of the Unity Laboratory of Applied Neurobiology, and the reader in physiology at the University of Surrey. He also is medical adviser to the Institute of Biological Psychiatry in Bangor, Wales. In New Humanist (July 1993), he argues that new scientific views may be suppressed by a scientific orthodoxy, and he considers ways in which dissident views might be more fairly dealt with. In The Freethinker (August 1994), he examines each word of the Lord’s Prayer, suggesting the following as a text for our time:
God, who resides in Heaven, you are worthy of great respect. Your rule will be accepted on Earth, as it is Heaven. Give us food today, and forgive our sins, as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us [or, cancel our debts, as we have canceled debts owed to us]. Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil, because you have the power, the honour, and the glory for ever. This is true.
However, he continues, note what the prayer states:
(a) “Our father” can be read neither literally nor symbolically, because both meanings are incompatible with the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the son of God; (b) Outside Earth, God’s rule prevails, and sentient and conscious beings there obey it. (c) God is not omnipotent yet, because his will is not being done on earth at present; or he is combating his own will; (d) He creates sin, temptation, the human tendency to indebtedness and evil (or the evil one), as well as the human choice to do evil, so he is not all good. He also determines how far human beings succumb to these evils, while knowing beforehand how much they will. He also decides what punishments he inflicts on them for doing what he has permitted them to do or made them do, and he knows beforehand what they intend.
Hillman concludes that the Lord’s Prayer, the most important affirmation of Christianity, contains affirmations contradictory to the basic tenets of Christianity. Others prefer a total rejection of Judeo-Christian concepts rather than a piece-meal reworking of the humanistic ideas within Judeo-Christianity.
Hilton, Randall (20th Century) A liberal minister, Hilton was once a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Hilty, Palmer A. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Hilty was an administrative secretary, Fellowship of Religious Humanists. {HM2}
Himmelfarb, Gertrude (20th Century) The Enlightenment bequeathed many splendid achievements to mankind, wrote Himmelfarb (The Wall Street Journal, 5 May 1999), a professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. But science and technology can be morally equivocal, she noted. The Enlightenment, in light of this century’s Holocaust, also bequeathed us some dangerous illusions:
In our post-Enlightenment world, we have had to relearn what ancient philosophy and religion had taught us and what recent history has brought home to us: that material progress can have an inverse relationship to moral progress, that the most benign social policies can have unintended and unfortunate effects, that national passions can be exacerbated in an ostensibly global world and religious passions in a supposedly secular one, and that our most cherished principles (liberty, equality, fraternity, even peace) can be perverted and degraded—that, in short, progress in all spheres, not only in science and technology, is unpredictable and undependable. This may be the lesson of the millennium. Progress, yes, but a modest, cautious, amelioratory progress, chastened by the experiences of history and guided by a sense of human limits as well as possibilities.
Hinchman, Aaron (19th Century) In 1843, Hinchman from Goshen, Ohio, edited Self-Examiner. {FUS}
Hinckle, William A. (20th Century) Hinckle was a freethinker who wrote The Evolution of Religion (1910). {GS}
Hinds, Samuel (19th Century) A freethinker, Hinds wrote, “A Reply to the Question ‘Shall I Seek Ordination in the Church of England?’ ” (1871). {GS}
HINDU SKEPTIC Aditya Mishra is a computer scientist who calls himself “the Hindu $kepti¢.” “Aditya,” a Vedic deity, is from Sanskrit and is a synonym for the Sun. He was the son of Adita, who was one of the two Vedic sister goddesses or matriarchs. The other is Diti, the progenitor of several children collectively known as Daityas. In this sense Aditya may have been the first born Aryan. Mishra, who has postgraduate degrees from Lucknow University in India and the University of Pennsylvania, had parents who arranged his marriage “to my wife Sushma when we were in teens and we are happy for that. We have made our home in south Florida and have a daughter who is a librarian.” On the Web: <http://www.smart1.net/aditya/>. E-mail: <a018967t@bc.seflin.org>.
HINDUISM Hindus who believe in the transmigration of souls hold that karma (a force generated by a person’s actions, held also in Buddhism) perpetuates transmigration and its ethical consequences in order to determine one’s destiny in one’s next existence. Through their karma individuals reap the rewards of good as well as bad actions in a series of lifetimes. Their Shiva, also called Mahadeva, is a “horned god” celebrated by the Indus Valley civilization, which combined Shiva worship with phallic worship. Shiva, like the fierce Vedic god Rudra, was a god of destruction as well as cosmic dissolution. Shiva’s consort was Kali, which in Hindi means “the black one,” and she is a goddess associated with disease, death, and destruction. Worshiped by some as the Divine Mother, particularly among the lower castes in Bengal, she is described as having skulls on her head, a bloody sword in one of her arms. Some of her devotees are Thugs, or Phansigars (stranglers), formerly a religious sect of murderers and robbers in India. Presumably, Kali was the contented spouse of Shiva, god of phallic worship. Putting a wealthy, unsuspecting traveler to death was a virtue, not a crime to be punished in the hereafter. The British, when they took over India, thought it expedient to put the Thugs and Phansigars out of business altogether, reportedly succeeding. In 1994, the Hindu government reported that a total of 20,537 brides were killed between 1990—1993. “Dowry deaths” rose to 5,582 in 1993 from 4,836 in 1990. If the families of young Hindu brides cannot meet the illegal post-marriage dowry demands, they are doused in cooking kerosene and burned to death “accidentally,” critics complain. (See entries for Agung and Gandhi. Also see a detailed discussion in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4. For an estimate of the number of Hindus worldwide, see the entry for Hell.) {CE; ER; RE}
Hines, John (20th Century) Hines in Britain is active with the Hastings and Rother Humanist Group.
Hines, Terence (20th Century) Hines is author of Pseudo-Science and the Paranormal: A Critical Examination of the Evidence (1988).
Hins, Eugène (Born 1839) Hins was a Belgian writer. As general secretary of the International, he edited L’Internationale, in which he laid stress on anti-religious teaching. Hins wrote La Russie de devoilée au moyen de sa littérature populaire (1883). “You waste your time and trouble in attacking clericalism,” he wrote; “attack its root—religion.” {BDF; RAT}
Hinton, James (1822—1875) Hinton, a philosopher, was a surgeon by profession and a specialist in ear diseases. The Mystery of Pain (1866) developed a broad and rather mystic pantheism, but Hinton rejected the idea of a personal God. {RAT; RE}
Hinton, Richard W. (20th Century) Hinton wrote Arsenal for Skeptics (1934). The author Rupert Hughes described it as providing “a great number of reasons for the enormous doubt which the churches bewail.”
Hiorth, Finngeir (1928— ) Hiorth, born in Indonesia of Norwegian parents who served as missionaries for the Salvation Army, had a religious upbringing but ceased to believe in any god at the age of nineteen. He studied linguistics and philosophy in Norway, France, Germany, and The Netherlands, obtaining in 1962 his Ph. D. in Germany in theoretical linguistics. He is author of Zur formalen Charakterisierung des Satzes (1962); Timor: Past and Present (1985); Philosophers in Indonesia (1983); Verdslige livssyn (Secular Views of Life, 1993); Innføring i humanisme (Introduction to Humanism, 1994); Innføring i marxisme (Introduction to Marxism, 1994); Secularism in Sweden (1995); Opplysningstidens filosofi (The Philosophy of Enlightenment, 1995); Introduction to Atheism (1995); Introduction to Humanism (1996); Metafysikk og materialisme (Metaphysics and Materialism, 1997); and Atheism in India (1998). Hiorth also has published books on the German philosopher Leibniz (1966), on the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1973), on the American linguist Noam Chomsky (1974), and on the concept of power (1975). From 1963 until his retirement in 1993 he was a lecturer, later a senior lecturer, in philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the World Union of Freethinkers (WUF) and of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). In addition, he is a member of freethought organizations in Great Britain, India, Norway, and Sweden. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Hiorth spoke at the Congress of the World Union of Freethinkers in Belgium, 1989. The word “freethinker,” he found, has been adopted in French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, the Scandinavian languages, and other languages. Most early freethinkers were deists. By the 18th century, a few advocated atheism, a tendency which became more pronounced in the 19th century. Only since the 1960s has “secular humanism” been in current use. His survey of freethought, atheism, and naturalistic humanism is published in New Humanist (October, 1990). Hiorth, who describes himself as “a convinced atheist and materialist,” has noted that many atheists call themselves freethinkers, humanists, rationalists, or agnostics because “these names have their advantages, but also their weaknesses.” New Humanist (October, 1990) published his “Freethought and Secular Humanism.” In 1992 at the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) congress in Amsterdam, he addressed the group on the subject of the Indian philosopher, M. N. Roy, and his radical humanism.
Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von (1741—1796) Hippel was a German who wrote humorous poetry. He studied theology but resigned it for law, then became in 1780 burgomaster of Königsberg. His works, states Wheeler, “betray his advanced opinions.” {BDF; RAT}
Hippo (5th Century B.C.E.) Hippo, according to Robertson, is “the first specifically named atheist of Greek antiquity,” so named by Plutarch. The dubious tradition runs that his tomb bore the epitaph: “This is the grave of Hippo, whom destiny, in destroying him, has made the equal of the immortal Gods.” Hippo had speculated as to physical origins in the manner of Thales, making water generate fire, and that in turn produced the world, but this is uncertain. What is known is that Kratinos wrote a comedy, The Panoptai (the “all-seer,” or “all eyes”), in which the chorus is made to represent the disciples of Hippo and to wear a mask covered with eyes. {CE; JMR}
Hippocrates (c. 460—c. 370 B.C.E.) Hippocrates, the Greek physician recognized as the father of medicine, was an early empiricist. He wrote no books, but according to Plato he taught that to treat any one physical problem the entire body needed to be taken into account. Materials called the Hippocratic Writings described the treatment and cure of physical problems. The Hippocratic Oath is probably of Pythagorean origin, but it has no supernatural overtones and prescribes that the physician is here “not to harm but to help.” {CE}
Hippolyte, Lazare (1801—1888) Hippolyte, the grandson of Count Lazare Carnot, was a distinguished anti-clerical French statesman. (See entry for Lazare Carnot.)
Hird, Dennis (1850—1920) Hird took orders in the Church of England, but they decided against accepting him because of his novel, A Christian with Two Wives (1896) and for his Socialist views. From 1899 to 1909 he was principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, and he helped to found the Central Labour College at London, of which he was its first principal. An agnostic, Hird was a member of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT; RE}
Hires, Harrison (1876—1955) Hires has been a member of the American Humanist Association. In 1943, he wrote For My Children, essays of a freethinker. {HNS}
Hirn, Yrgö (Born 1870) Hirn was a Finnish aesthetic writer. Works translated into English include The Origins of Art and The Sacred Shrine. The latter work is a study from the outside of Catholic art and poetry. Hirn has described himself as an agnostic who regarded Catholic doctrines merely as “strayings of the human mind.” {RAT}
Hirsch, William (20th Century) Hirsch wrote Religion and Civilization, the Conclusions of a Psychiatrist (1912). {FUS}
Hirschfeld, Magnus (20th Century) Hirschfeld was the founder of the German Scientific Humanitarian Committee (1897—1933) in Berlin. A sexologist, he was a humanist, a secular Jew, and a socialist. “Through Science to Justice” (Per Scientiam Ad Justitiam) was his motto, and he was convinced that scientific progress would diminish prejudices against, among other things, homosexuality. His Committee was the first homosexual rights organization worldwide. (See entry for Norman Haire.) {Rob A. Tielman, Free Inquiry, Fall 1997}
Hirshman, John Hans (1921— ) Hirshman is an Australian humanist and health services consultant. He has been City Medical Officer in Sydney, an executive member of the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties, and a founder-member of the Humanist Society of New South Wales. In 1992, Hirshman was named Humanist of the Year. In Humanist Viewpoints, he was described as having “translated his humanist beliefs into practical action for humanity. We must take inspiration from his example and never overlook the connection between the words ‘humanist,’ ‘humane,’ and ‘humanity.’ In line with his life of practical action, John Hirshman has said, ‘There are no theoretical humanists.’ ” {SWW}
Hirth, Georg (1841—1916) Hirth, a German journalist and writer about art, edited the Leipzig Deutsche Turnzeitung (1863—1866). In 1868 he founded the Annalen des deutsches Reichs. Hirth was one of the founders of the Monist League. {RAT}
HISTORY • History is the record of the many dead that are still alive; and of the reasons why so many who expected to live on are dead.
The above definition of history is by Prof. James Henry Leuba, a psychologist who once was a professor at Bryn Mawr. Voltaire, however, defined history as a trick played by the living upon the dead. (See entries for Heraclitus, Herodotus, and for James Henry Leuba. For a study of how religious history has been falsified, see Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia.)
HISTORY, REVISIONIST Americans, invoking the country’s 18th century founders’ writings to support modern views, can easily become guilty of painting the past in rosy pink. Or so Michael Schudson argues in The Good Citizen: A History of American Civil Life (1998). For example, he points out that the much touted New England town meetings were, in fact, open only to property-owning men and, often, only to church members. Instead of being exemplary of pure democracy, the town meetings were controlled by the chosen few, often the richest and the church leaders. Little wonder, then, that attendance by the citizenry ranged from only 20% to 60% of eligible voters. Furthermore, and although “We the people” was at that time a remarkable outlook, “the people” eligible to vote did not include slaves, women, and the poor. In his study of how history has been revised by some, Schudson concluded, “We can gain inspiration from the past, but we cannot import it.” Similarly, the columnist Christopher Hitchens has alleged that some revisionists of history have been anything but historians: Communists once airbrushed people out of history.
HISTORY, UNIVERSAL Some historians write for a nonprofessional audience. Sir Walter Raleigh whiled away prison time writing “an universall Historie” but finished only one volume. Hegel’s entire philosophy is something of a universal history, as is the fifty-page reply to it, Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Toynbee’s twelve-volume Study of History (1934-1961), William H. McNeill’s Rise of the West, and Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) are further examples. René Sédillot wrote History of the World in 300 Pages in the 1940s. David Fromkin, author of A Peace to End All Peace (1989) is about the diplomatic origins of the modern Middle East. Similarly, The Way of the World (1998) is a brief history of what has happened since the Big Bang. Fromkin has cited H. G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920) as his main model. {William R. Everdell, The New York Times Book Review, 17 January 1999}
Hitchcock, Robyn (2 Mar 1953 - ) Hitchcock is a singer and recording artist, well known in the United Kingdom, and a performer in the United States and elsewhere. Luca Ferrari’s Robyn Hitchcock: A Middle Class Hero (Italy, 2000, text in English and Italian) includes an interview, a full discography, and a three-song compact disk that includes “Ring Them Bones,” “Take This in Remembrance,” and “Eerie Green Storm Lantern.” His other works include Storefront Hitchcock; The Soft Boys: A Can of Bees; The Soft Boys: Invisible Hits; Groovy Decoy; Eye; Invisible Hitchcock; Fegmania!; Element of Light; Gotta Let This Hen Out!; Respect; and If You Were A Priest. In an e-mailed interview with Martina Hemming, Hitchcock was asked about religion and responded:
I would describe myself as a person. I am religious but worship no deity. I believe that life passes through us, rather than the reverse. We spend our lives becoming what is disposed of in an instant: a match struck over the Atlantic on a dark night. Life is eternal, we aren't. But that bit of us that is of Life will never perish. It animates whatever comes next. I suspect that when we die, we each receive a print-out of the life we have just finished; and that this in some way determines where our Energies go next. I wonder how Hitler felt when he opened his envelope. It is fairly unlikely that the personality, the memory or the consciousness, survive death; given how much time we spend building and inhabiting them; this is pretty tragic. Although, given the length of eternity, maybe not. The universe (as a fabric of space and time) is probably onion-shaped. There is no more an end or a beginning to it than there is to the horizon, which plays its own part in the myth of the straight line. But we are, as yet, finite creatures, and infinity is as remote from us as Richard Gere is from Cleopatra.
{WAS, 5 Sep 2001}
Hitchens, Christopher (20th Century) A non-theist and author of “Minority Report” in The Nation (1 August 1994), the controversial journalist Hitchen wrote,
Bertrand Russell was right, in my far-from-humble opinion, to conclude that all religions are rubbish in the same way. At any given period it might be true that Shi’a Islam, for example, or Roman Catholicism or Calvinism acted in a fashion more repulsive and intolerant than the ‘mainstream’ faiths. But these peaks of atrocity and stupidity have a way of flattening out over time, as if to give every confession its own chance at bat.
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (1995) finds Agnes Gouxha Bojaxhiu an evil and selfish old woman who has consorted with white-collar criminals and despots. She is, Hitchens avers, less interested in aiding the poor of Calcutta and elsewhere than in using them, wretched people with insufficient care and forced to confront their mortality, as a way to enhance and missionary her Roman Catholic beliefs. She once said to Malcolm Muggeridge that “the poorest of the poor are the means of expressing our love for God.” In 1985, visiting Guatemala and walking where fresh-killed Indians were all about, she said when asked about those deaths, “Everything was peaceful in the parts of the country I visited. I do not get involved in that sort of politics.” In 1988 she told Navin Chawla, “Leprosy is not a punishment, it can be a very beautiful gift of God if we make good use of it. Through it we can learn to love the unloved.” One apostate, Susan Shields, told Hitchens, “In the homes for the dying, Mother taught the sisters how to secretly baptize those who were dying. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if he wanted a ‘ticket to haven.’ An affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient’s head with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him, saying quietly the necessary words. Secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa’s sisters were baptizing Hindus and Moslems.” When she left Haiti, having been presented with the Légion d’Honneur, she told Baby Doc’s First Lady, Michèle Duvalier, “Madame President, the country vibrates with your life’s work.” Hitchens pulled out all the stops, and Murray Kempton, reviewing the work, extrapolated tongue-in-cheek that when Hitchens gets to Heaven and the Recording Angel opens his book, he will cry out with holy glee, “Christopher Hitchens? Bully for you.” When Hitchens signed a 1999 affidavit claiming that his friend Sidney Blumenthal once told him that Monica Lewinsky was “a stalker,” he became the scourge of the literary left. Lewinsky was the White House intern who was brought to her knees by President Bill Clinton, who himself was almost brought to his knees for having lied about their sexual escapades. Blumenthal had sworn he never said she was “a stalker,” leading Alexander Cockburn to call Hitchens “a Judas” by Alexander Cockburn, Victor Navasky to term him “an informer” by Victor Navasky, and many others to refer to him as Chris the Snitch. In No One Left To Lie To (1999), Hitchens lashes out at his opponents and, in a political tirade, claimed that “Clintonism poisons everything it touches.” (CA; Matt Cherry interviewed Hitchens further about Mother Teresa in Free Inquiry, Fall 1996) {E; he New York Review of Books, 11 July 1996; TYD} Christopher Hitchens, Columnist/Commentator media
From a profile of Hitchens in the Washington Post on February 12, 1999:
She gives him his ticket and he scurries toward the plane, wheezing under the weight of two pieces of luggage. "In addition to being a socialist and an atheist, I'm a libertarian," he says. It was these absurd airline security procedures that made him a libertarian, he explains: Why should you have to show a photo ID to get on a plane? A terrorist can get a photo ID. It's a topic he aired at some comic length in his column in Vanity Fair. "The penalty for getting mugged in an American city and losing your ID," he grumbles, "is that you can't fly home."
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Besides writing the Minority Report column in The Nation, Hitchens is "Critic at Large" for Vanity Fair. In addition to this he has written a book The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice (Verso, 1995) which debunks the uncritical sanctification of Mother Theresa. He has produced a TV documentary based on the book which was broadcast in Britain on Channel Four.
In the Fall 1996 issue of Free Inquiry Hitchens is interviewed by Matt Cherry and says: "I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself."
--JF
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The Christopher Hitchens Web may be found at http://www.enteract.com/~peterk/.
Hitchings, Catherine (20th Century)
Hitchings is author of Universalist and Unitarian Women Ministers, which details the biographies of more than 150 deceased Universalist and Unitarian ministers.
Hitchman, William (1819—1888) Hitchman was an English physician who established Freelight and wrote a pamphlet, “Fifty Years of Freethought” (1882). {BDF}
Hitler, Adolf (1889—1945) As pointed out in Michiko Kakutani’s review of Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler (1998),
[B]y the time Hitler came to power in 1933, racial anti-Semitism had already made Germany “pregnant with murder”; the scholar Hyam Maccoby contends that Christianity (with its pernicious anti-Semitic stereotypes) had by World War II created a craving for vengeance against Jews; and Richard Breitman, editor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, argues that the traumas sustained by Germany in the early years of the century (a humiliating defeat in World War I, then starvation, inflation and a crushing depression) forged a desperation and rage that Hitler was able to channel against the Jews. At the same time, hard-core Freudians and psycho-historians intent on trying to map Hitler’s psyche have come up with an assortment of explanations that effectively let Hitler off the hook, using what Mr. Rosenbaum calls “the Menendez defense” to depict him, astonishingly enough, as a victim. The famous psychoanalyst Alice Miller portrays Hitler as a victim of an abusive father; Erich Fromm, as the victim of an overbearing mother. Other thinkers have attributed Hitler’s pathology to a “primal-scene trauma,” to a missing testicle, to a sexual secret that “isolated him from the normal love of human beings,” to a physical illness and to a self-hatred (stemming from his suspicion that his grandmother had a Jewish lover and that he himself was “tainted” by Jewish blood).
In Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (1998), Ian Kershaw wrote that—although Hitler had an abusive father and a doting mother—there is no serious foundation to the rumors of hidden Jewish ancestry, deformity of the genitals, the incompetence or greed of a Jewish doctor at his mother’s deathbed, or many of the other whispers about his background. But, as pointed out by Christopher Hitchens, “Mein Kampf was published as an initially unsuccessful vote-getter in 1925, and at that time social democracy was very strong and popular, and the German Jews were still quite secure. To describe either as the work of Satan was to show what you really thought. [‘There is no making pacts with Jews,’ he tells us he decided back in 1918 when he had recovered from his nervous collapse. ‘There can only be the hard either-or. I. However, resolved to become a politician.’].” Although some mistakenly assume that the consummate symbol of evil in the 20th century was a non-believer, Hitler is an embarrassment to fellow Catholics for such of his statements in Mein Kampf (1940) as, “Therefore, I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s Work.” At a Nazi Christmas celebration in 1926, he had said, “Christ was the greatest early fighter in the battle against the world enemy, the Jews. . . . The work that Christ started but could not finish, I—Adolf Hitler—will conclude.” When he narrowly escaped assassination in Munich in November 1939, Hitler exclaimed, “Now I am completely content. The fact that I left the Burgerbraukeller earlier than usual is a corroboration of Providence’s intention to let me reach my goal.” To celebrate, Cardinal Michael Faulhaber sent a telegram instructing that a Te Deum be sung in the Munich cathedral “to thank Divine Providence in the name of the archdiocese for the Fuhrer’s fortunate escape.” This was followed by the Pope’s personal congratulations. John Toland, a biographer, has written of Hitler’s religion, “Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy, he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of god—so long as it was done impersonally, without cruelty, Himmler was pleased to murder with mercy. He ordered technical experts to devise gas chambers which would eliminate masses of Jews efficiently and ‘humanely,’ then sent them east to stay in ghettos until the killing centers in Poland were completed. As late as 1941, Hitler told Gerhard Engel, one of his generals, “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.” In fact, he mandated that schoolchildren recite a prayer at the beginning of each school day. In Albert Speer, Gitta Sereny prints a letter Speer wrote to his daughter, Hilde, from Spandau prison on 9 January 1953, one in which he made it clear that Hitler “forbade his chosen circle, Hess, Goebbels, Göring etc. to leave their churches.” Meanwhile, the princes of his church never requested his excommunication. McCabe labels Hitler a theist, for Hitler repeatedly cited God in public speeches and said he was a Christian. A survey of Mein Kampf will surprise Jews who may not have noticed some of Hitler’s choices of words and phrases, such as the following: thirty pieces of silver; God’s grace; Lucifer; God’s will; God’s creation; “I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven”; God’s image; devil shuns holy water; [and] sin against the will of eternal providence. Meanwhile, some secular humanists might be surprised to learn that some of Hitler’s supporters called the Nazi philosophy a “New Humanism.” In La Fiction du politique (1987), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe referred to Nazism as “a humanism.” Hitler apparently did not receive any last rites of the Church. On 30 April 1945, he was told by his private pilot, Hans Baur, that a plane was available and was capable of flying as far as Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria (or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara. Hitler declined the offer. Instead, he dictated his final testament to Traudl Junge: “During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people. This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before.” At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler youth leader, entered and found Hitler as well as Eva Braun, whom he had married two days prior. “I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa,” Axmann declared in 1995. “His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down. I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself and appeared to be sleeping.” According to Axmann, two aides took the bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about fifty gallons. A Soviet general, Leonid Siomonchuk, confirmed to German interviewers that he was present when Hitler’s dentist examined the corpse and declared that it was Hitler’s. Hitler’s remains were secretly stored in the East German town of Magdeburg, according to journalist Stephen Kinzer (The New York Times, 4 May 1995). A part of what may be Hitler’s skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow, where Alzha Borkovich, a Russian archivist, displayed it in 1995 before German television cameras. {CE; Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, February 1999; Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, 30 June 1998; RE; TRI}
HITLER’S POPE “Pope Pius XII helped Adolf Hitler destroy German Catholic political opposition, betrayed the Jews of Europe, and sealed a deeply cynical pact with a 20ty-century devil," wrote John Cornwell in Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII (1999). Allowed to see Vatican materials that had been gathered years ago to support the process for Eugenio Pacelli’s canonization, Cornwell was nonplussed upon finding that Pacelli was anti-Jewish, that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, and that after the way “he had retrospectively taken undue credit for speaking out boldly against the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews.” His contempt of Judaism was based on his belief that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik plot to destroy Christendom, referred to “their Jewish cult,” once campaigned to remove black French troops from the Rhineland because he was convinced they were raping women and abusing children, and helped lead German Catholics in the millions to join the Nazi Party, believing that it had the support of the Pope.
Hitschmanova, Lotta (20th Century—deceased) Dr. Hitschmanova for thirty-five years directed the Unitarian Service Committee, which was founded in 1945 to do something tangible in the field of service to less fortunate parts of the world.
Hittell, John S. (19th Century) Hittell was an American freethinker, the author of the Evidences Against Christianity (1857), A Plea for Pantheism, A Brief History of Culture (1875), and St. Peter’s Catechism (1883). {BDF}
HIV: See entry for Human Immunodeficiency Virus.
HIVOS A Dutch quarterly of Humanist Development Institute for Development Cooperation, Hivos is at Raamweg 16, 2596 HL Den Haag, The Netherlands. On the Web: <http://www.dds.NL/~hivos/>. E-mail: <hivos@hivos.NL>.) (See entry for Dutch Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation.}
Hoad, John (20th Century) Hoad, for twenty-five years a Methodist minister and seminary president in Barbados, came to Ethical Leadership from the West Indies and the Cambridge Divinity School. He completed his Ph. D. at the Princeton Seminary and succeeded James F. Hornback as Leader of the St. Louis Ethical Culture Society.
Hoadley, George (1836—1902) An American jurist, Hoadley was elected judge of the superior court of Cincinnati. He afterwards resigned his place and established a law firm. Hoadley was one of the counsel that successfully opposed compulsory Bible reading in the public schools. {BDF; RAT}.
Hoagland, Edward (Morley) (1932— )
A teacher of literature at Bennington College in Vermont and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Hoagland responded to a query by the present author concerning humanism:
I’m a pantheist but of course include humankind in the family of nature, for better or worse. Am particularly relieved at the ending of the Cold War because in foreseeable wars we will only be killing ourselves, not that whole wider world.
Hoagland has studied with Thornton Wilder, John Ciardi, Alfred Kazin, John Berryman, and Archibald MacLeish. He is author of Cat Man (1954), Red Wolves and Black Bears (1976), and City Tales (1986). In a New York Times Magazine article (27 November 1994), Hoagland wrote,
Reincarnation or a heavenly life is the ultimate comfort offered by every religion I am familiar with, and I don’t want to be me for more than another 20 years anyway. Neither eternal oblivion nor me, but something else. Maybe moss. One could do worse. Moss, if left alone, seems to live about as long as people do; then it goes back to mulligatawny soup again.
{WAS, 30 June 1992}
Hoagland, Hudson (1899—1982) The president emeritus of Worcester Federation for Experimental Biology, Hoagland signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1965, he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. A physiologist, he was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1961 to 1964. {HM2; HNS2}
Hoagland, Robert S. (1906—1993) Hoagland, who had once studied with Paul Tillich and Martin Buber, began his Unitarian ministry in Jamestown, New York, later serving in Exeter, New Hampshire; Ft. Wayne, Indiana; Chicago; Schenectady, New York; Tacoma, Washington; and Park Forest, Illinois. From 1972 to 1977, he edited the Religious Humanist. Hoagland was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
HOAXES Examples of hoaxes include the pseudo-fossils of Piltdown man which were planted by Charles Dawson; the pseudo-Celtic epic Ossian written by James Macpherson; and the pseudo-scientific article, “Transgressing the Boundaries–Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” in Social Text (Spring-Summer 1996) by Alan D. Sokal. The latter article consisted of a prank played by a New York University mathematical physicist which, tongue in cheek, drew various philosophical and cultural morals that the author said the editors accepted because “(a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” Sokal’s targets were the “postmoderns” in the humanities who, according to the University of Texas’s Steven Weinberg, “like to surf through avant-garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experiences.” Sokal, after admitting to the hoax, explained that his goal was not so much to defend science as to defend the left from postmodernists, social constructivists, and other trendy leftists. (For information about Alan Sokal, see entry for Physics. Also, see entry for Hoaxes, Religious.) {The New York Review of Books, 8 August 1996}
HOAXES, PARANORMAL The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has cited the following top ten paranormal hoaxes:
• Roswell incident—a “flying disc” that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 was claimed to have been covered up by a Presidential order and that the craft’s aliens, including details of an “alien autopsy” featuring a rubbery humanoid, were stored at secret installations. The disc was a government spy balloon, however. {Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1990 and Nov-Dec 1995}
• spiritualism—modern spiritualism began in 1848 when two girls said they had received messages from a ghost who responded to their questions by knocking a certain number of times. Four decades later, however, the sisters revealed to a theater audience how they had secretly produced the rapping sounds. {Skeptical Inquirer, Winter 1983-1984 and Fall 1985}
• psychic phone networks—psychic ability has never been validated by scientific means, yet phone psychics have appeared to be clairvoyant and have produced a billion-dollar industry’s pioneer network. Psychic Friends, one such company, filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s, an event that two thousand psychics employed by the network failed to foresee. {Skeptical Inquirer, Sep-Oct 1995}
• Shroud of Turin—the purported Holy Shroud of Jesus, bearing the imprints of an apparently crucified man, was shown by forensic tests to have been painted in tempera and a radio carbon testing yielded a date between 1260 and 1390. {Skeptical Inquirer, Spring 1982 and Spring 1989}
• Cottingley fairies—Two English schoolgirls in 1917 fooled many by taking close-up photos of winged fairies dancing in Cottingley Glen. Their hoax fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. {Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1982}
• crop circles—since the late 1970s mysterious swirled patterns appeared in southern English grain fields, which some said were caused by extraterrestrials. In 1991, however, two men demonstrated how they had made the first circles, which others copied and elaborated. {Skeptical Inquirer, Winter, 1992}
• Amityville horror—a couple in Amityville, New York, claimed they were driven out by spooky events in a house where in 1974 a man murdered his parents and siblings. The murderer’s lawyer, however, confessed how, for money, he and the couple had “created this horror story over many bottles of wine.” {Skeptical Inquirer, Winter, 1979-1980)
• Piltdown “missing link”—In December 1912 the long-sought-after “missing link” between man and his prehistoric ancestors was reportedly recovered near Piltdown Common in England. The bones were enshrined in the British Museum. But in 1953 the find was revealed to be a combination of ordinary human cranial pieces and the jawbone of an orangutan. {Skeptical Inquirer, Spring, 1980)
• psychic surgery—a phony healing procedure in which a practitioner appears to reach into a patient’s body, without benefit of scalpel or anesthesia, to remove “tumors” and other diseased tissue was reported in brazil and the Philippines. However, psychic surgery is produced by sleight of hand with animal tissue and blood being used to give a realistic appearance. {Skeptical Inquirer, Spring, 1980)
• King Tut’s curse—the tomb of the “boy king” Tutankhamen, discovered in 1922, had a curse written over the entrance. In 1980, however, the tomb’s former security officer admitted the story of the curse had been circulated to frighten away thieves. {Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1982). {Joe Nickell, Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1998}.
HOAXES, RELIGIOUS Nostradamus’s “predictions” have fooled many, as revealed by James Randi in The Mask of Nostradamus (1990). Religious hoaxes, such as the Shroud of Turin, the Secret Instructions of the Jesuits, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Donation of Constantine, Maria Monk, and Pope Joan, are detailed in Gordon Stein’s Encyclopedia of Hoaxes (1993). Others would add the Mormon Bible and the “healings” of Father Divine and the Jehovah’s Witness belief in the Millennium. Some anti-religionists claim that Judaism pulled the greatest-ever hoax on mankind, by so successfully “selling” the idea of “faith,” “moral fervor,” “sin,” and “eternal life with God in Heaven.” Then, marketing it. (See Walter McCrone’s Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin, 1999)
Hobbes, Thomas (1588—1679) In the spring of 1588, all England was alarmed at the news that the mighty Spanish Armada had set sail for the purpose of deposing Queen Elizabeth, bringing the country under a foreign yoke, and re-establishing the power of the papacy. In sheer fright, the wife of the vicar of Westport, now part of Malmesbury, gave premature birth to her second son on Good Friday, the 5th of April. This seven months’ child used to say, in later life, that his mother brought forth himself and a twin brother Fear. Thomas Hobbes was delicate and nervous all his days, according to Foote. Yet, he was to reach the age of ninety-one. This parson’s son was destined to be hated by the clergy for his heresy. The Great Fire of 1666, following the Great Plague of the previous year, excited popular superstition, and to appease the wrath of God, a new Bill was introduced in Parliament against atheism and profaneness. The Committee to which the Bill was entrusted were empowered to “receive information touching” heretical books, and Hobbes’s Leviathan was mentioned “in particular.” The old philosopher, then verging on eighty, was naturally alarmed. Bold as he was in thought, his inherited physical timidity shrank from the prospect of the prison, the scaffold, or the stake. He made a show of conformity, and, according to Bishop Kennet, who according to Foote is not an irreproachable witness, Hobbes partook of the sacrament. It was said by some, however, that he acted thus in compliance with the wishes of the Devonshire family, who were his protectors, and whose private chapel he attended. A noticeable fact was that he always went out before the sermon, and when asked his reason, he answered that “they could teach him nothing but what he knew.” He spoke of the chaplain, Dr. Jasper Mayne, as “a very silly fellow.” Disliked by the clergy, and especially by the bishops; owing his liberty and perhaps his life to powerful patrons; fearing that some fanatic might take the parsons’ hints and play the part of an assassin; Hobbes is said to have kept a lighted candle in his bedroom. However, Foote notes, that is not mentioned in Professor Croom Robertson’s exhaustive 1886 biography, and if true it was not for superstitious reasons but for his safety in the event he became sick at night. Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, complained that in 1668 he paid three times the original price for Leviathan, simply because it is “a book the Bishops will not let be printed again.” (In various scriptural accounts, Yahweh defeated a sea monster which was called liwyathan.) The work was well received in France and Germany, bringing Hobbes many admirers who continued to correspond with him for the remainder of his life. In his own country, the book’s reputation received notoriety because of its author’s alleged atheism. Hobbes is described by Rudolph in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief: “The philosopher of Malmesbury was hated and feared by contemporaries for his heterodox views. His philosophical system is thoroughly materialistic and determinist, but the scandal he created was the carrying over of these same principles into theology. . . . Religion, according to Hobbes, is a distinctively human phenomenon, a habitual disposition to fear invisible powers. Hobbes attributes the disposition to fear of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion toward what men fear, and taking casual events to be significant prophecies.” Certainly, his materialism upset churchmen in France, where he visited. He thought the life of each person “nasty, brutish, and short” and built a philosophy around his mechanistic view that life is simply the motions of the organism, that man is a selfishly individualistic animal, that fear of violent death causes men to create government. Leviathan (1651) develops Hobbes’s political philosophy. His works, prohibited from being read by the Vatican in 1649 and again in 1701 and 1703, are masterpieces of atheistic materialism and Epicureanism. Hobbes is known for his witty aphorism, that superstition is religion out of fashion, and religion superstition in fashion. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Hobbes as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. Robertson describes him as “the most important thinker of his age, after Descartes, and hardly less influential. . . . Hobbes is in fact the anti-Presbyterian or anti-Puritan philosopher; and to discredit anarchic religion in the eyes of the majority he is obliged to speak as a judicial Churchman. Yet nothing is more certain than that he was no orthodox Christian. . . . Reviving as he did the ancient rationalistic doctrine of the eternity of the world, he gave a clear footing for atheism as against the Judaeo-Christian view.” Berman, however, points out that in Hobbes’s time atheism and irreligion were viewed with the greatest fear and horror, that no rational person could actually be an atheist. As a result, Berman believes Hobbes chose to remain “a covert atheist.” At one point, a committee of Parliament in 1666 decided to investigate Hobbes, citing his “atheism” as a possible provocation of divine wrath leading to the outbreak of the plague in London. When Hobbes submitted to King Charles his Behemoth (1668), a history of the period between 1640 and 1660, the king advised against its publication and the book was not published until three years after Hobbes’s death. Gaskin cites Hobbes’s friend John Aubrey as saying, “There was a report that some of the bishops made a motion to have the good old gentleman burned for a heretic.” But, adds Gaskin, “Hobbes lived on, befriended by the rich and powerful, to die of natural causes in his ninety-second year.” (He had played tennis until he was seventy-five.) Foote wrote that Hobbes did not appear to have troubled himself about death. Bishop Kennel related that “the winter before he died he made a warm great-coat, which he said must last him three years, and then he would have such another.” Even so late as August, 1676, four months before his decease, he was “writing somewhat” for his publisher to “print in English.” About the middle of October he had an attack of stranguary, and “Wood and Kennet both have it that, on hearing the trouble was past cure, he exclaimed, ‘I shall be glad then to find a hole to creep out of the world at.’ . . . This story was picked up thirty years after Hobbes’s death, and is probably apocryphal. If the philosopher said anything of the kind, he doubtless meant that, being very old, and without wife, child, or relative to care for him, he would be glad to find a shelter for his last moments, and to expire in comfort and peace.” At the end of November his right side was paralyzed, and he lost his speech. He “lingered in a somnolent state” for several days, said Robertson, and “then his life quietly went out.” McCabe says of Hobbes, “It is clear that he was at the most a Deist, and his psychology must have made him skeptical about a future life.” Tim Madigan, however, considers Hobbes an atheist. (See an inclusive article by R. S. Peters in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Ross Rudolph and Aram Vartanian; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; Noel Malcolm, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes; RAT; RE; TYD}
Hobhouse, Arthur [Baron] (1819—1904) Hobhouse was a British judge widely respected for his character and idealism. He believed only in “a great ruling power of the universe” and, according to McCabe, “shortly before he died wrote a clergyman that the more he reflected ‘the more my mind is led away from your objects and fixed upon others.’ ” {JM; RAT; RE}
Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawne (1864—1929) Hobhouse, the son of Archdeacon Hobhouse, was a leading British sociologist. His Mind in Evolution (1901) and Morals in Evolution (1906, 2 volumes) received critical acclaim, but his rationalist views are found in Development and Purpose (1913). Hobhouse defined God as “that of which the highest known embodiment is the distinctive spirit of humanity.” {RE}
Hobsbawm, Eric John Ernest (1917— ) Hobsbawm, a historian, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. An emeritus professor of economics and social history at the University of London, he wrote Labour’s Turning Point (1948), The Jazz Scene (1958), The Age of Empire (1987), and Echoes of the Marseillaise (1990).
Hobson, Fred C. (1943— ) Hobson, a freethinker, wrote Serpent in Eden: H. L. Mencken and the South (1974). {Freethought History #14, 1995}
Hobson, John A. (20th Century) Hobson, in Rationalism and Humanism (1933), called upon British Rationalists to move on to Humanism as “the next step.” A leading social scientist and ethicist, he, along with Herbert Burrows and J. M. Robertson, constituted a panel of lecturers following Moncure Conway’s departure from the South Place Ethical Society. In 1957, the British Rationalists did change the name of their monthly journal to The Humanist. {CL; FUK; HNS; RAT; RE; TRI}
Hobson, Joshua (1810—1876) Hobson, who was imprisoned as an infidel, published Voice of the West Riding (1833). {VI}
Hochart, Polydore (19th Century) Hochart was a French historian who studied the alleged evidence in Roman writers in favor of Christ and early Christianity. In 1885 he published Études au sujet de la persécution des chrétiens sous Néron and Études sur la vie de Sénèque. {RAT}
Hochhuth, Rolf (1931— ) A German dramatist, Hochhuth wrote a provocative first drama, The Deputy (1963), which accuses Pope Pius XII and the Roman Catholic clergy of tolerating Nazi crimes against the Jews. He was a member of the German Evangelical Church. {CE}
HOCUS POCUS Hoc est enim corpus meum (This is my body) is the essential formula used in the sacrament of the eucharist. States the Rev. John P. Mahoney of Providence College in Rhode Island, “The term hocus-pocus has an origin arising from English Protestantism as an attack on Catholic doctrine.” Implied, states Mahoney, is that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, abominated by Low-Church Anglicans, was absurd nonsense.
Hodges, John (20th Century) Hodges wrote “Ethics: An Evolutionary Imperative” for Secular Nation (October-December 1998). One is good not because of promises of some afterlife but, “Considering that all of us are uncertain as to our time of death, if you want your personal story to end in victory, you will choose your actions at all times to be compatible with your desired legacy.”
Hodgin, E. S. (20th Century) Hodgin wrote Confessions of an Agnostic Clergyman (1948). {GS; HNS}
Hodgson, Brian Houghton (1800—1894) An Orientalist, Hodgson spent years in the Indian Civil Service, serving at one time as Assistant Resident of Nepal. Burnouf called him “the founder of our Buddhistic studies.” When he was asked about his religious views, Hodgson, an agnostic, said that “I do not care to talk about the unknowable.” {RAT; RE}
Hodgson, Shadworth Hollway (1832—1912) Hodgson was a philosopher who was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1880 to 1894. He wrote Time and Space (1865) and The Metaphysic of Experience (1898). He is seen to be an advanced rationalist in his Philosophy of Reflection (1878, 2 volumes), saying that “the notion of a soul as an immaterial substance is exploded” and that God is only “the spirit of the Whole.” {RAT; RE}
Hodgson, William (1745—1851)
Hodgson was an English Jacobin, the translator of d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1795). In 1794 Hodgson was confined in Newgate for two years for having drunk to the success of the French Republic. A physician, he spent his time in prison writing The Commonwealth of Reason. {BDF; RAT}
Hoekzema, Hans F. (20th Century) Hoekzema is a member in The Netherlands of the board of Hivos.
Hoelderlin, J. C. F: See entry for Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich.
Hoertdoerfer, Pat (20th Century) Hoertdoerfer, a member of the Board of Governors of The Humanist Institute, is an Ethical Culture leader and a Unitarian Universalist minister in Massachusetts.
Höffding, Harold (1843—1921) A professor of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Höffding wrote about Mill and Spencer. German editions have been published of his works Grandlage der humanen Ethik (Basis of Human Ethics), Psychologie im Umries (Outlines of Psychology, 1887), and Ethik (1888). In his numerous works, Höffding expounded a spiritual monism. He excluded a personal God and was agnostic as to personal immortality. The essential religious principle, he held, is “the conservation of values,” moral and aesthetic, and “our greatest model is the Greek way of life.” {BDF; RAT; RE}
Hoffer, Eric (1902—1983) Hoffer, an author, was a longshoreman who called himself “a tourist in life” and who wrote The Ordeal of Change (1963), Temper of Our Time (1967), and Reflections on the Human Condition (1972). In The True Believer (1951), Hoffer wrote, “Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.” A freethinker, he also declared, “It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.” {CE; TYD}
Hoffman, Amy (20th Century) Hoffman is a Unitarian who is executive editor of the denomination’s journal, World. She wrote Hospital Time (1997), a work selected for the “Books for the Teen Age 1998” exhibit at the New York Public Library. The book is a memoir about taking care of friends with AIDS. “My book contains very edgy material—sex, death, and religious skepticism,” she has written. “I’m serious when I say that I only wish my public library had handed me such books when I was an adolescent. I think it’s a measure of the achievement of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement that libraries are now showcasing and even rewarding books like mine, which used to be hidden in obscure collections. It also reminds us of how vigilant we must be in resisting censorious hate groups that would ban our books, which often hold life affirming information for teenagers and the rest of us.” {World, May-June 1998}
Hoffman, Irwin D. (Born 1901) Hoffman, an artist, was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. He wrote An Artist’s Life (1981).
Hoffmann, R. Joseph (20th Century) An Oxford don, once in the humanities department at California State University in Sacramento, Hoffman chairs the Council for Secular Humanism’s Biblical Criticism Research Project. With Gerald A. Larue, he edited Biblical v. Secular Ethics, The Conflict. They also edited Jesus in History and Myth (1986). Hoffman, a Unitarian and senior research fellow and tutor in church history at Westminster College, Oxford, is a senior editor on Free Inquiry. In 1987 he translated Celsus’s On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians. Celsus was an early critic of Christian scriptures and the Christians destroyed most of his works. His The Origins of Christianity has been cited by Gordon Stein as one of the best recent works on the subject. He edited The Secret Gospels: A Harmony of Apocryphal Jesus Traditions (1996). In a foreword to the first issue of The Journal for Critical Study of Religion, Ethics, and Society (1996), according to Jim Herrick, “Hoffmann suggests that there have been many humanisms with nothing in common. There is the Old Guard Humanism of existentialism or pragmatism, of rationalists and empiricists, of ethicists and secularists. American humanism grew out of ethical culture, Unitarianism, frontier skepticism, and Boston Brahmanism. But humanism has become quaint and between 1950 and 1980 in decline, partly due to its persistence in fighting battles with religion which have already been won, although there had been a boost with the revival of fundamentalism as a clear-cut opponent. ‘Liberal theology has effectively supplanted humanism as the church’s most effective critic.’ ” His e-mail is <hoffmann@patrol.i-way.co.uk>. (See the entry for Centre for Critical Studies.) {New Humanist, June 1996 and December 1996}
Hofstadter, Douglas (20th Century) A professor at Indiana University, Hofstadter wrote Godel, Escher, Bach and Le Ton Beau De Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. He has described himself as aa “non-religious person.” {CA}
Hogarth, William (1697—1764) Hogarth, an English painter, engraver, and art theorist, received his initial acclaim as a painter with a series of six morality pictures, including The Harlot’s Progress, which he first painted, then engraved. Other of his works were The Rake’s Progress (1735), Marriage à la Mode (1745), and Analysis of Beauty (1753). The Shrimp Girl and Captain Coram (1740) are considered masterpieces of British painting. Quite the satirist, Hogarth in Gin Lane and Four Stages of Cruelty depicted the cruelty, stupidity, and bombast he observed around him and on all levels of society. Hogarth was a Freemason as well as a deist.
Hogben, Lancelot (1895-1975) Hogben, a physiologist, was professor of zoology at Capetown (1927—1930), professor of social biology at London University, and professor of zoology at Birmingham University. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In What I Believe (1938) he mentioned his own outlook as being that of humanism. Also, in 1938, he took part in the International Freethought Congress. Dangerous Thoughts (1939) included Hogben’s essay, “The Creed of a Scientific Humanist.” {RE; TRI}
Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1782—1862) Shelley’s biographer and friend, Hogg was dismissed in 1811 from Oxford for defending Shelley’s atheism. The biography was considered more about Hogg than Shelley, leading Mary Shelley to withdraw certain materials from Hogg’s use. A successful lawyer, Hogg wrote Shelley at Oxford (published in 1904). Shelley may have written his The Necessity of Atheism in collaboration with Hogg, according to C. E. Pulos’s The Deep Truth. However, Berman holds that Hogg was, as explained by Shelley, not the “original corruptor of my principles,” that he was only an aide in helping him develop his viewpoints. {CE; HAB; RAT}
Hoggart, Richard (1918— ) Hoggart is a scholar and writer. From 1976-1984 he was warden of Goldsmith’s College in London. The Uses of Literacy (1957) demonstrated his interest in literature, education, and the means of communication. A cultural critic, Hoggart became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. {OEL}
Hoggart, Simon (1946— ) With Mike Hutchinson, Hoggart wrote Bizarre Beliefs (1995). A journalist, he writes with a skeptical eye about pseudo-science and the paranormal.
Hoijer, Benjamin Carl Henrik (1787—1812) Hoijer was a Swedish philosopher, a student at Upsala University in 1783 and a teacher of philosophy there in 1798. His promotion was hindered by his liberal opinions. By his personal influence and published treatises, according to Wheeler, he contributed much to Swedish emancipation. In 1808 he became professor of philosophy at Uppsala. {BDF}
d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry (1723—1789) “If we go back to the beginning of things,” said the 18th century encyclopedist, “we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture, and deception embellished or distorted them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.” The Vatican prohibited all of Baron d’Holbach’s works to be read, which is not surprising inasmuch as d’Holbach imitated the tactic of Voltaire and produced a small library of anti-Christian treatises under a variety of pseudonyms. His principal work, System of Nature (1770), came out under the name of Mirabaud, an actual person who was then dead. Described as a “thundering engine of revolt and destruction,” it was the first published atheistic treatise of a systematic kind, according to Robertson, if Robinet is excepted. Berman quotes d’Holbach’s letter to Diderot in 1765 that, although “the Christian religion is nearly extinct in England [and] the deists are innumerable; there are almost no atheists; those who are conceal it. An atheist and a scoundrel are almost synonymous terms for them.” He also wrote,
• The atheist is a man who destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
• Ignorance of natural causes created the gods, and priestly impostures made them terrible.
• All religions are ancient monuments to superstitions, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies rejuvenated.
• If the ignorance of nature gave birth to the gods, knowledge of nature is destined to destroy them.
• The Christian burns the Jew at what is called an auto-da-fe because he clings to the faith of his fathers; the Roman Catholic condemns the Protestant to the flames, and makes a conscience of massacring him in cold blood.
• Sometimes the various sects of Christians league together against the incredulous Turk, and for a moment suspend their own bloody disputes that they may chastise the enemies of the True Faith.
Gordon Stein, in Freethought History (#3, 1992), points out that Anna Knoop’s translation Superstition in all Ages by Jean Meslier . . . Translated from the French actually is not by Meslier but by Baron d’Holbach. The baron, publishing his highly anti-religious works in French, from Amsterdam, but with a false London imprint, published his works either anonymously or under the name of a recently-dead man. What Knoop mistook in an 1802 edition as a work by Meslier actually was Le Bon Sens (Good Sense) by d’Holbach. {CE; CL; ER; EU, Jeroom Vercrysse, translated by Gordon Stein; FUK; HAB; ILP; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Holberg, Ludwig von [Baron] (1684—1754) Holberg, “the Molière of Denmark,” taught metaphysics and rhetoric at Copenhagen University. His comedies won a comparison with Molière’s, while his satirical poems led many to compare him to Voltaire. His anti-clerical deism is particularly seen in his satire, Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741). {RAT; RE}
Holbrook, Stewart Hall (1893—1964) Holbrook wrote Ethan Allen (1944). {FUS}
Holcroft, Thomas (1745—1809) Holcroft was, successively, a groom, shoemaker, schoolmaster, actor, and author. His successful comedies were “Duplicity” (1781) and “The Road to Ruin” (1792). He translated the Posthumous Works of Frederick the Great (1789). For his active sympathy with the French Republicans, he was indicted for high treason, along with Hardy and Thomas Tooke, but was discharged without a trial. {BDF; RAT; RE}
HOLDEEN INDIA PROGRAM The Holdeen India Program, 2562 36th Street NW, Washington, DC 20007, distributes trust income designated for use in India for social justice, maternity, child welfare, education, and migration expenses. Katharine Streedhar is its director.
Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich (1770—1843) Hölderlin was a German poet who withdrew from clerical training and devoted himself to letters and philosophy, adopting pantheistic views. He published Hyperion (1797—1799), a romance, and Empedokles (1800), a pantheistic drama. His mind failed soon afterwards, and for nearly forty years he remained childlike and powerless. Hölderlin is said to have played a large role in shaping Heidegger’s philosophy. {BDF; RAT}
Holdridge, Herbert C. [General] (20th Century) A retired Brigadier General of the United States Army, Holdridge widely circulated a 1955 letter to “defenders of the Constitution” concerning the Vatican’s hostility “toward the freedoms expressed in the Constitution, specifically citing the Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX and the Encyclicals of Leo XIII. He called upon citizens to write all their elected officials to insure that “Catholic Action” groups not succeed in subverting U.S. laws, mentioning that within our borders “30 million potential traitors to our Constitution” live. “Philosophically,” he wrote, “I rejected orthodox Christianity as a child. Although I have not made a thorough study of the Humanist philosophy, I do respect its willingness to work here and now for human decency in every-day life. After all, Jesus of Nazareth is said to have stated, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’ It is obvious that our entire outlook on religions is undergoing a significant change, Billy Graham [a televangelist] notwithstanding.” {WAS, 8 August 1955}
Holland, Clifford (1926— ) Holland, who was born in England but who moved to Canada and has taught philosophy, wrote William Dawson Le Sueur (1840-1917) in 1993 about a Canadian man of letters. In 1995, he spoke in Costa Rica at the founding of the inter-American association of philosophers, Asociación Iberomericana Ético Humanista. Holland is a lecturer emeritus with George Brown College in Toronto. (See entry for LeSueur.)
Holland, Frederic May (1836—1908) Holland, an American author, was ordained in 1863 as a Unitarian minister in Rockford, Illinois. Upon becoming broader in his views, he resigned, then wrote for the Truthseeker and Freethinkers’ Magazine. His principal work is The Rise of Intellectual Liberty (1885) and Atheists and Agnostics (1885). {BDF; PUT; RAT}
Holland, J. G. (1819—1881) An American editor and writer, Holland in Everyday Topics (1876) wrote, “It is a matter of surprise that men whose Christian honesty, purity, and self-devotedness are conceded on every hand, are often men with whom we do not like to associate.” {TYD}
Hollander, Bernard (Born 1864) Hollander, a physician, devoted his attention particularly to abnormal mental phenomena. He became an exponent of psychotherapy, founded the Ethnological Society, and edited the Ethnological Journal. His rationalist views are found in Positive Philosophy of the Mind (1891). {RAT}
Hollerorth, Hugo (20th Century) Hollerorth wrote Relating to Our World (1974) and edited Stone House Conversations (1979), concerning Unitarian Universalist religious education.
Hollick, Frederick (1813—1900) A socialist, Hollick became one of the socialist lecturers under Robert Owen. He held a public discussion with J. Brindley at Liverpool in 1840 on “What is Christianity?” On the failure of Owenism, he went to America, where as a physician he wrote works popularizing medical science. {BDF; RAT; VI}
Holley, Sallie (1818—1893) Holley, a Unitarian, was an abolitionist and an educator.
Hollis, John (1757—1824) An English skeptic, Hollis wrote Sober and Serious Reasons for Skepticism (1796), An Apology for Disbelief in Revealed Religion (1799), and Free Thoughts (1812). According to Wheeler, Hollis “came from an opulent dissenting family and was distinguished by his love of truth, his zeal in the cause of freedom, and by his beneficence.” {BDF; RAT}
Hollis, Thomas (1720—1774) Hollis, a wealthy and liberal man who refused to enter Parliament on account of its corrupt procedure, edited various works of Sidney, Locke, and Neville. Hollis did not attend church and “gave his name to no religious society that could be discovered.” He was a deist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. {RAT}
Holloway, W. E. (20th Century) Holloway, a freethinker, wrote “The Mystical Mood” in The New Humanist, May-June 1933) and Rubaiyat of Today (1938). {GS}
Hollows, Frederick Cossom (1929—1993) “Fred” Hollows was a humanist, an anarcho-syndicalist, and an ophthalmologist. Born in New Zealand, he intended entering the church but found that “sex, alcohol, and secular goodness are pretty keen instruments and they surgically removed my Christianity, leaving no scars.” Hollows, an ophthalmologist, pioneered identification and treatment of blinding eye diseases among Australian Aboriginal people. He also developed a three-year model prevention program to train local technicians to perform eye surgery in Eritrea, Nepal, and Vietnam. In 1990, he won the Australian of the Year Award and, in 1991, was named the Humanist of the Year. “I am a humanist,” he once wrote. “I don’t believe in any higher power than the best expressions of the human spirit, and those are to be found in personal and social relationships. Evaluating my life in those terms, I’ve had some mixed results. I’ve hurt some people and disappointed others, but I hope that on balance I’ve given more than I’ve taken.” {SWW}
Holly, William H. (20th Century) A naturalistic humanist, Judge Holly served with the United States District Court in Chicago. A law partner of Clarence Darrow, Holly when a judge joined the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Holmdahl, John (20th Century) Holmdahl is on the editorial board of The Truth Seeker.
Holmes, Edmund Gore Alexander (Born 1850) Holmes, a poet and educationist, wrote A Confession of Faith (“by an Unorthodox Believer,” 1895). He rejects Christian doctrines but retains theism and the belief in immortality, saying, “I do not believe in the supernatural.” {RAT}
Holmes, Frank (20th Century) Holmes is in the Edinburgh, Scotland, Humanist Group and writes for The Scottish Humanist as well as The Freethinker.
Holmes, Harry (20th Century) Holmes, a former diplomat and lifelong humanist, questions in "Humanism in the Next Century (New Humanist, September 1999), the nature of the path we are taking into the future. His concern is that the high early promise of humankind may now be wasting tragically away.
Holmes, James (19th Century) Holmes was a lecturer for the National Secular Society in the Midlands of England during the 1880s. {RSR}
Holmes, Jesse (1864—1942) A philosopher at Swarthmore College until 1941, Holmes defined “God” as “the unifying element within that moves men to unity in a brotherly world.” He was a chairman of history for Friends’ Sunday schools. {CL}
Holmes, John (19th Century): See entry for John Rogers.
Holmes, John (8 Aug 1944 - 13 Mar 1988) He may never have heard about Adamastor, whose penis was so monstrously huge that he and the nymph Thetis were unable to have sex. But Holmes was always known in showbiz as the actor who told a Screw reporter that he had a 12 5/8” endowment, and he made no secret of the fact, receiving excellent exposure in numbers of pornographic movies. Born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944, in Ashville, Pickaway County, Ohio, Holmes was a bible student and went through a stint in the army before gravitating to porno films. A female neighbor, according to the Internet Movie Database, was making porno loops and advised John he could make good money. Unfortunately his first check bounced. After that he always insisted on payment in cash. Once it was clear he measured up, he seldom lacked for work, bringing not only his family jewels but also a professional attitude that directors appreciated. “The ultimate cocksman” appeared under a variety of names: John Duval; Big John Fallus; Big John Holmes; John C. Holmes; John Curtis Holmes; John Rey; Johnny Wadd; and Long John Wadd. Sexually explicit films were not shown in American theaters until the end of the 1960s, and according to critic Amy Taubin even when X-rated films gained a foothold in the theatrical market, in many states including California it was a felony to engage in their production. In later years Holmes fell victim to drug abuse, his low point coming when he was implicated in the drug-related "Laurel Canyon" murders. Allegedly, he was present at the drug-related torture and murder of his drug-dealing friend, Bill Deverell, as well as the murders of another man and two women. Holmes refused to tell what he knew and was finally acquitted in 1981. He tried to clean up and continue his career but, later diagnosed with AIDS, died in Sepulveda, California, in March 1988 of AIDS-related complications. His third wife, former porn star Misty Rains who was aware that her husband had once estimated he had had sex with over 10,000 women, was at his side. A film about his life is Wadd The Life and Times of John C. Holmes (1998). Critics, however, generally found it weak, some complaining that the title character’s main prop is not shown. Others found the movie was weak despite filmed interviews with porn historian William Margold, female co-stars like Gloria Leonard and Cicciolina (an Italian actor who knew he was sick but thought he had the flu), and Los Angeles Police Department detectives to whom Holmes was said routinely to have snitched on porn directors and producers. Often their stories are contradictory. At the time of his death, Laurie, his wife, insisted that he was a loving husband; others, including Holmes’s goddaughter, claimed that he hated her and married her primarily to have a steady source of drug money. The film does show Sharon Gebenini, to whom he was married from 1965 to 1980 without telling anyone in the industry. She detested what her husband did for a living, wanted no part of it, insisted that he not tell about their marriage, and finally divorced him because he “adopted” a teenaged runaway whom he allegedly pimped, again for drug money. Holmes’s life was partly the inspiration for director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights. His life, however, helps illustrate the idea that the truth, as always, is stranger than fiction. At no time after his Bible-reading youth is there a record that Holmes showed any interest in theological matters and, in fact, he was the ultimate epicurean and sybarite who was capable of embarrassing not only theists but also some prudish non-theists. However, he never officially went on record despite appearing to be a freethinker. On the Web: <http://us.imdb.com/Bio?Holmes,+John>. {Amy Taubin, The Village Voice, 16 January 2001}
Holmes, John (Albert) (1904—1962) When Priscilla Robertson asked John Ciardi for a recommendation of someone to be poetry editor of The Humanist, Ciardi named his teacher, Holmes, who accepted the position (1957). A distinguished poet, Holmes was also Anne Sexton’s teacher. Among the first poems Holmes published was one the present writer located in German by Albert Einstein, a work which praised one of Einstein’s teachers and contained a passing use of the word “God,” which was not used in any theological sense. Holmes remarked that if anyone else had written such doggerel he would not have included it, but “it is always comforting to hear a student who states that a teacher has helped change his life.” Holmes’s Selected Poems was published posthumously in 1965. {U}
Holmes, John Haynes (1879–1964) A leader of liberals in the social application of liberal theology, Holmes believed with Francis Greenwood Peabody as to the necessity of religions facing the “social question.” During World War I, he was a staunch pacifist. Holmes preached a form of economic socialism from his pulpit at New York’s Church of the Messiah, and socialist leader Norman Thomas often attended. He worked with liberal reformist institutions such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In 1919, he led the Church of the Messiah to become the Community Church (Unitarian), hoping to use the church as a proving ground for nonsectarian religion. Holmes was one of the first Americans to recognize the significance of Mohandas Gandhi and his nonviolent movement, becoming Gandhi’s chief American disciple and publicist. He wrote “Ten Reasons for Believing in Immortality” (1929), arguing that nothing in the universe is ever lost, all energy is conserved, therefore “spiritual energy” is immortal; but in dualism spiritual energy does not exist, and Holmes separated himself in his thinking from that of many of the other liberal Unitarians. Many hold that Holmes was so unorthodox a minister that even the Unitarians were too conservative for him. Charles Francis Potter, for example, was not surprised that Holmes had refused to sign Humanist Manifesto I: “He has reverted to theism since he was over and saw Gandhi, whose simple faith in God made a great impression on Holmes. The latter has a very theistic order of service. He is also very pessimistic about the future of liberal religion, but that is partly due to his physical condition and partly to his sad experience with his apartment-hotel proposition.” The latter was a reference to his having to live next door to his mid-Manhattan church in a commercial hotel. When Holmes was accused by the House Un-American Activities Committee of being “under the control of the Communist Party,” humanists Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and Warren Allen Smith wrote the committee, demanding that it apologize to Dr. Holmes. In his Community Church (Unitarian), John Dewey’s memorial service was held at a time when Donald Harrington was minister. In addition to his several books about religion, Holmes wrote an autobiography, I Speak for Myself (1959). He championed birth control, was a pacifist, and was a leader in the movement to abolish capital punishment. {CE; EW; U; U&U}
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. (1841—1935) Holmes was a lawyer, novelist, and member of the U.S. Supreme Court known as the “great dissenter” because of his frequent minority opinions, Holmes thought law could be understood only as a response to the needs of the society it regulated, that it is useless to consider law merely a body of rules developed logically by legal theorists. The son of one of the most famous American authors, and a person raised in the Boston Brahmin culture defined by men like his father but a person who had none of the sometimes expressed Brahmin anti-Semitism, he grew up reading Emerson’s essays right off the press and late in life commented on T. S. Eliot, Proust, and Hemingway. Holmes’s masterpiece, The Common Law (1881), was the result of his having been armed with skeptical and secular inclinations, critic Thomas C. Grey has written. “Holmes set about mastering the technical details of the law, with the ultimate goal of reformulating its theoretical underpinnings. His project was to replace the prevailing theologically tinged or formalistic legal theories with a modern jurisprudence that draws its inspiration from Darwin and its methods from German historical scholarship and English utilitarianism. He labored for fifteen years, practicing law by day and studying and writing at night, first to master the law’s substance, and then to reimagine it as at once a social instrument and a product of society’s habits, desires, and ideals.” The work, generally thought the most important work of American legal scholarship, commenced
The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. . . . In order to know what [the law] is, we must know what it has been, and what it tends to become.
Holmes was presiding officer of the Unitarian Festival (24 May 1859) and was active in publicizing Unitarianism. {CE; TYD; U; UU}
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Sr. (1809—1894) A physician and author, Holmes was dean of the Harvard medical school (1847—1853) and Parkman professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard. One of his important medical lectures opposed the practices of homeopathy. He is known for “Old Ironsides” (1830), a protest against the scrapping of the fighting ship Constitution, and for The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), witty glimpses of life in a boardinghouse. His novel, Elsie Venner (1861), had as its intention to “test the doctrine of ‘original sin’ and human responsibility.” Elsie, a New England girl whose snakelike nature is traced to a prenatal snakebite her mother received, is a heroine said by some scholars to be inspired by Margaret Fuller. Holmes’s freethought is found in his Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871). Dr. Holmes was a Unitarian who, according to McCabe, had no belief in a future life. {CE; JM; JMR; RAT; TYD; U; UU}
Holmes, Olivia (20th Century) After being an interim minister of the Central Unitarian Church of Paramus, New Jersey, in 1999 Holmes became the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Director of International Relations.
Holmes Robert L. (20th Century) Holmes, a professor of philosophy at the University of Rochester, addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). He wrote On War and Morality (1989) and edited Nonviolence in Theory and Practice (1990).
Holmes, Samuel Allen (18th Century) Holmes, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, held a profession hated by faculty members who were Puritanical Protestants: his profession was that of a strolling actor. Holmes held that honesty and integrity were “deceptions and injurious pretenses” and his nihilistic outlook helped incite a riot on campus in 1799. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)
Holmes, Thomas: See entry for Jessica Mitford.
Holmes, Thomas Rice Edward (Born 1885) Holmes, the brother of E. G. A. Holmes, was an educationist and a member of the Rationalist Press Association.
Holmes, William T. (20th Century) Holmes, a freethinker and libertarian, has written “That is Law and What is Its Purpose? for Truth Seeker #123:1.
Holmes, William Vamplew (19th Century) Holmes was one of Carlile’s shopmen, who came from Leeds to uphold the right of free publication. He was sentenced to two years in prison for selling blasphemous and seditious libels in An Address to the Reformers of Great Britain. While in prison he was told that “if hard labor was not expressed in [your] sentence, it was implied.” On his release, Holmes went to Sheffield and commenced the open sale of all the prohibited publications. {BDF}
HOLOCAUST “The Holocaust” is the name given to the period of persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany. Ordinarily, the Nazi persecution of gypsies and homosexuals as well as members of other religious minorities is treated secondarily by all but a few historians. An estimated 20,000 Romas (Gypsies) were killed at the Auschwitz death camp in Poland because of a 1 August 1944 order issued by Heinrich Miller, the chief of the SS as well as the Gestapo. In 1994 at a German Bishops’ Conference with the Polish Bishops’ Conference, a German lay theologian suggested that Roman Catholics should acknowledge that they share historical responsibility and guilt for the Holocaust. Hans Herman Henrix of the Catholic Theological Institute in Aachen spoke of “manifold guilt” of Catholics for a failure to resist the rise of the Nazis in Germany and the annihilation of Jews during World War II. The Vatican immediately issued a statement emphasizing that Henrix’s draft was “in no way a projected document of the Holy See.” The Holocaust has both religious and secular implications, explains the Columbia Encyclopedia. The secular materials [on the subject] attempt to explain how it happened and what the reactions of the victims were. The religious materials focus on the problem of whether one can still speak in traditional Jewish terms of a God, active in history, who rewards the righteous and who maintains a unique relationship with the Jewish people. (The present author has no doubts about the explicit crimes toward humanity which occurred during the Holocaust—when Chief Clerk to the Adjutant General, Hq. Oise, in Reims, France, I viewed secret movies shot at several of the Holocaust sites even before the prisoners were liberated. Later in New York City, I taught two survivors of the concentration camp at Belsen, both with the identification numbers tattooed on their arms.)
Holst, Nils Olaf (Born 1846) Holst, a Swedish geologist, was chairman of the Swedish Society for Religious Liberty. {BDF}
Holt, Bonnie (20th Century) Holt, a Unitarian, wrote Trouping America (1992), about her parents, Floy Mann and Fred Byers, who toured the Midwest as vaudeville performers around the turn of the century.
Holub, Miroslav (1923—1998) Holub, a leading Czech poet, was a distinguished scientist. In “They Asked the Gods,” he questioned the need for religion. But interviewed in 1994 by Ra Page, Holub explained: “I didn’t leave religion, but that was for political reasons. As medical students we were advised to leave the church, and as a protest I never left the Protestant church. For me, the question is not a general one, but an individual one. Deep in the dark gardens inside we can’t escape religion. The question is what kind of religion: is Buddhism any more appropriate for a European soul?” (See entry for Poets.) {Ra Page, New Humanist, October 1998}
Holwell, John Zephaniah (1711—1798) Holwell is noted for being one of the survivors of the Black Hole of Calcutta. A surgeon, he went to India, defended a fort at Calcutta against Surajah Dowlah, and was imprisoned with 145 others in the “Black Hole,” about which he published A Narrative. Holwell succeeded Clive as governor of Bengal. When he returned to England, Holwell published a dissertation directed against belief in a special providence, and he advocated the application of church endowments to the exigencies of the state. {BDF; RAT}
HOLY GHOST, HOLY SPIRIT The doctrine of the Trinity was the theological invention of Cappadocian Fathers (or Holy Spirit), whose work in the 4th century held that God is to be believed in and worshipped as both one and three. God is the Father. God is the Son. And God is the Holy Ghost (or Spirit). At a council held in Constantinople in 381, the doctrine was approved, adhering to Hebraic monotheism but also emphasizing the importance of Christ Jesus, “the Lord” and ”only begotten Son” of God. In 381, the Council of Constantinople elaborated upon an earlier Nicene Creed. To that creed’s statement of belief in the Father, the Son, “and in the Holy Ghost” was added “the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceedeth from the Father; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spake by the prophets.” The New Testament, which was written over a somewhat earlier period, makes no mention of a doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, Jesus appears ignorant of it. The Old Testament, however, mentions ruah (breath), a reference to the mysterious power noticed also in primitive religion that men sometimes become different from themselves. They become mad or have high enthusiasm, allegedly because ruah has been “breathed in” (in + spirare) to a person, who then becomes its instrument. Ruah was offered as an explanation for Samson’s strength, for Saul’s insanity, for Bezaleel’s genius. Later, as explained by Ernest Findlay Scott of New York City’s Union Theological Seminary, it became evident “with the frenzy in which a prophet uttered divine oracles; from the physical state of the prophet, it was transferred to his exalted mood, and hence to all divine impulse and knowledge and action.” One day, it was anticipated, God would “pour out his Spirit on all flesh” (Joel, 2:28) and not just to his chosen prophets, leading to the day of Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit. Scott adds, “In the Synoptic teaching of Jesus himself the conception of the Spirit has little or no place.” In the 6th and 7th centuries, various councils in Constantinople fine-tuned the concept of the doctrine. The complexities have been described by Matthew Spinka of the Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut: “The Council of 680 convened by Emperor Constantine IV Poganatus (668—685), dealt with the mooted question of Monotheletism (one-will theory) which, by asserting that the two natures in Jesus Christ possessed only one common will of energy, practically conceded the substance of the Monophysite doctrine that He possessed only one nature—the divine. Even Pope Honorius of Rome had adopted this heresy. The Council of 680 condemned the one-will theory, and specifically anathematized Pope Honorius. Thus it completed the doctrinal formula regarding the two natures in Jesus Christ which had been centuries in evolving: It asserted that there were two natures, two wills, in one person in Jesus Christ.” Voltaire was amused by the subject and described the Holy Ghost’s origin: “How unfortunately ambiguous is this Holy Ghost, this agion pneuma of which the christicoles have made a third god! The word meant only breath. You shall find in the gospel attributed to John (20:22): ‘When he said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.’ Take note that this was an ancient ceremony of magicians, to breathe into the mouth of those whom they desired to bewitch. There, then, is the origin of the third god of these maniacs.” Non-believers find the doctrine ludicrous, often citing it as one of the reasons they rejected organized religion. As expressed in doggerel:
There once was a God known as Ghost. All manner of shapes he could boast. But when it was time for Madonna, He came as a fowl straight upon her, But stained not her Virginal Honor.
Or, in the vulgate, the Trinity: Daddy-O, J.C., and Spook. (See entry for Bullshitus Episcopalis.) {CE; ER}
HOLY QUARTET Several million Catholics around the world had by 1997 signed petitions asking the Vatican to give Mary a bigger role in Catholicism. Although any papal elevation of Mary would anger other Christians who do not worship Mary, such a move would result in a Holy Quartet: God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, and Mary (playing the multiple roles of daughter of the Father, mother of the Son, and spouse of the Holy Spirit). {“Cardinal O’Connor Backs ‘Holy Quartet,’ ” New York Daily News, 20 August 1997}
HOLY SEE In the Roman Catholic Church, the official name for the jurisdiction of the Pope is the Holy See. See means “seat” in Latin. {DCL}
HOLY WATER The holy water into which Catholics dip is water from which the priest has driven out devils by conjuration and the addition of a little salt. It is a ceremony that goes back to at least the fifth century. Freethinkers who “lace” their water with whiskey call the drink “holy water” but consider it heretical to add salt. {RE}
HOLY WRIT Figuratively, a “holy writ” is any text that is presumed to speak with unquestioned authority. The term, however, ordinarily is used as a synonym of the Bible.
Holyoake, Austin (1827—1874) An English secularist publisher, the younger brother of George Jacob Holyoake, Holyoake printed and published Bradlaugh’s National Reformer. Secular societies, he believed, should be established as meeting places in various respectable communities. His mental emancipation came, he wrote, from hearing the lectures of Robert Owen and his disciples. He took part in the agitation for the abolition of the newspaper stamp—assisting when risk and danger had to be met—and he helped his brother in the production of Reasoner and other publications. Holyoake started Austin & Co. in 1864 and founded Fleet House in 1855. Wheeler notes that Holyoake “took pride in the character of Freethought, and was ever zealous in promoting its welfare. His amiable spirit endeared him to all who knew him.” Holyoake died of consumption and, according to Foote, he was conscious almost to the last, his major regret being that he could no longer fight the battle of freedom nor protect the youth of his little son and daughter. Two days before his death, Holyoake dictated his last thoughts on religion, which were written down by his devoted wife and printed in the National Reformer (19 April 1874). Following is a sample:
Christians constantly tell Freethinkers that their principles of “negation,” as they term them, may do very well for health; but when the hour of sickness and approaching death arrives they utterly break down, and the hope of a “blessed immortality” can alone give consolation. In my own case I have been anxious to test the truth of this assertion, and have therefore deferred till the latest moment I think it prudent to dictate these few lines. To desire eternal bliss is no proof that we shall ever attain it; and it has long seemed to me absurd to believe in that which we wish for, however ardently. I regard all forms of Christianity as founded in silliness. It is the expectation held out of bliss through all eternity, in return for the profession of faith in Christ and him crucified, that induces the erection of temples of worship in all Christian lands. Remove the extravagant promise, and you will hear very little of the Christian religion. As I have stated before, my mind being free from any doubts on these bewildering matters of speculation, I have experienced for twenty years the most perfect mental repose; and now I find that the near approach of death, the “grim King of Terrors,” gives me not the slightest alarm. I have suffered, and am suffering, most intensely both by night and day; but this has not produced the least symptom of change of opinion. No amount of bodily torture can alter a mental conviction. Those who, under pain, say they see the error of their previous belief, had never thought out the subject for themselves.
Holyoake composed a “Secular Burial Service,” which for a time continued to be in use by some freethinkers. {BDF; EU, Lee E. Grugel; FUK; RAT; RSR; VI, TRI; WSS}
Holyoake, George Joseph (1817—1906) The oldest English leader of freethought and the founder of Secularism, Holyoake was an active social reformer. In 1842, he was charged with blasphemy and was sentenced to six months of imprisonment in Gloucester, after which he was a hero to radicals who opposed the laws that disallowed public statements against Christianity. According to Grugel, Holyoake defined secularism “as being a series of rational postulates about the world upon which all social and ethical action could rest.” When Charles Southwell was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, Holyoake took on in the 1840s the editorship of The Oracle of Reason. At that time, he explained, “I had not become [an atheist till after the imprisonment of Mr. Southwell, which led me to inquire into the grounds of religious opinion more closely than I had before done, and it ended in my entire disbelief.” In one of his speeches, Holyoake said, in answer to a question, that he would put the Deity on half-pay, after which he was tried and sentenced by Mr. Justice Erskine to six months in jail. After being jailed, he wrote The History of the Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England (1851), in which he stated, “In early youth I was religious, and as I grew up I attended missionary meetings, and my few pence were given to that cause,” a reference to his having been a Sunday School teacher while a teenager. Berman makes the point that Southwell and Holyoake “claimed only to disbelieve in God, because there was no sufficient reason for belief. They did not, as they put it, directly deny there is a God.” He edited Movement (1843 to 1845), Reasoner (1846 to 1872), Counselor (1861), Secularist (1876 to 1877), and Present Day (1883 to 1886). With Charles Watts, G. W. Foote, and W. S. Ross, he edited Secular Review. Holyoake first used the word “secularist” in 1851, and he presided over the first Secular Conference at Manchester in 1852. Wheeler notes that Holyoake “did much to remove the taxes upon knowledge and has devoted much attention to Co-operation, having written a history of the movement and contributed to most of its journals.” Although he was supplanted by Bradlaugh as the major secularist leader, Holyoake remained a favorite of the young. Harry Snell remarked that the young loved him “for the dangers he had passed, while seasoned reformers regarded him with the affection due to a revered colleague and teacher. . . . I remember the genial and gentle old man with great respect and some gratitude.” He died peacefully at Brighton in the presence of his wife and daughter. They reported that during his last few weeks of life he had taken a keen interest in the general election then pending. {BDF; EU, Lee E. Grugel; FO; FUK; HAB; JM; RAT; RSR; VI; TRI; TYD; WSS}
Holyoake, W. H. (Born 1818) A Leicester bookseller, Holyoake was a leader of the English secularists in Leicester. {VI}
HOM A Dutch quarterly of Humanist Human Rights, Hom-Nieuwsbrief is at PO Box 114, 3500 AC Utrecht, The Netherlands.
HOMARIANISMO In Esperanto, the word for “humanism” is homarianismo.
Home, Henry [Lord Kames] (1696—1782) Home was a Scottish judge who published Remarkable Decisions of the Court of Session (1728). He published Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751) and Sketches of the History of Man, the latter a deistic book. McCabe calls him one of the early freethinkers who did not suffer their brilliant success in life to reduce them to silence about religion. The Scottish Church had seriously denounced his work. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
HOMEOPATHY • Homeopathy, n. A school of medicine midway between Allopathy and Christian Science. To the last both the others are distinctly inferior, for Christian Science will cure imaginary diseases, and they can not. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Homer (Flourished 850 B.C.E.?) The traditional Greek epic poet, Homer is often referred to as the Poet of Paganism. The shade of Achilles, as told in his Odyssey, informed Ulysses. “Better to be the hireling of a stranger, and serve a man of mean estate whose living is but small, than to be ruler over all these dead and gone.” In short, the hereafter was not something they looked forward to. Robertson does not designate him as a freethinker, however, pointing out that his special genius was giving permanent artistic definiteness of form to the Greek gods. “The ancient world,” translator Peter Green has written, “turned to Homer for instruction in everything from social decorum to moral excellence, from religious duties to the proper conduct of a battle. (This last, as Jonathan Shay demonstrated in Achilles in Vietnam, was not quite so foolish a trust as some have supposed.) Homeric epic was described by a later, more doctrinal age, somewhat patronizingly, as ‘the Bible of the Greeks,’ the best they could come up with, presumably, in the absence of the Nicene Creed and the Thirty-Nine Articles.” But not even Homer’s name is certain. Homeros, which means “hostage,” implies he might have been a prisoner of war. Half a dozen cities have competed as Homer’s birthplace. Pindar opted for Smyrna, Semonides for Chios, others assumed he came from Ionia. Of the various translations of The Odyssey, Green prefers Robert Fagles’s Homer: The Odyssey. {CE; CL; Peter Green, The New Republic, 24 February 1997; HNS2; JMR; JMRH}
HOMICIDE • Homicide, n. The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
HOMINISM
Wilhelm Windelband, a German philosopher, suggested in Introduction to Philosophy (1914) that to avoid confusion between the meaning of pragmatism and humanism hominism might well be used for the latter word.
HOMO ATHEISTUS, HOMO IGNORAMUS, HOMO HALLUCINATUS, HOMO RELIGIONUS: See entry for Auckland University Atheists.
HOMO MUTILANS
• I think it would be greatly to our advantage if, instead of calling ourselves Homo sapiens, we called ourselves Homo mutilans, the mutilating species, the species that mutilates both mind and body, often in the name of reason, religion, tradition, custom, morality, and law. Were we to adopt such a name for our species, it might focus our attention upon what is wrong with us and where we might begin setting ourselves right.
—Ashley Montagu The Humanist, July-August 1995
HOMO SAPIENS Homo sapiens shared the planet with Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus—a species which originated in Africa an estimated 1.2-million years ago. For a time, students of prehistory thought Homo neanderthalis (the original caveman, a skeleton of which was found in the Neander valley in Germany in 1856, three years before Darwin’s studies) might have had a place in the evolution of modern humanity, that interbreeding had been possible. In 1997, however, a study of Neanderthal DNA suggested that interbreeding had not taken place. The study, by Dr. Svante Paabo of the University of Munich in Germany, further indicated that the Neanderthals split off much earlier from the hominid line than modern humans did. Mankind’s closest living relatives, studies have shown, are the chimpanzees, not the Neanderthals. Homo sapiens, the modern species of human beings, is the only extant species of the primate family Hominidae. As to how hominids formed, one view is that the young species evolved in one place, Africa, and that it then expanded elsewhere around the world, replacing related species. Another theory is that there were multiple origins for the human species at different places. The Chinese, for example, believe the Han are a “pure” race not descended from Africans. Any populations which may have originated in Africa and moved elsewhere then evolved into modern humans separately but not in total genetic isolation. “In this theory,” science writer John Noble Wilford has written, “lies an explanation for human biological diversity as reflected in what are known as the different races.” Wilford added that scientists of equal accomplishment take opposite sides, “while others hope some new discovery will resolve the issue.” [See entry for Population, Human.) {The Economist, 12 July 1997; The New York Times Book Review, 2 February 1997}
HOMOEROTICISM • [Michelangelo] thought the height of beauty was the young male body. . . . [Caravaggio’s] Greek gods have the look of rent boys. We know for certain that [Da Vinci] never had a woman. Boys, yes. —Robert Hilferty an interview with Sister Wendy Beckett in Out (March 1998)
• Eroticism is in the eye of the beholder. I see no reason to take on a judgment when you’re simply describing a fact. Everybody knows about Leonardo da Vinci. That was the way God made him. —Sister Wendy Beckett, 67-year-old Catholic nun who has a televised series, “Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting”
• But these are facts the Church normally denies or condemns. Even your analysis of the Mona Lisa is insightfully outrageous. You’re the only critic in the history of art who has dared to explain that inscrutable smile in terms of the artist’s homosexuality. You say that Mona smiles because she knows that in spite of his brilliant portrait making he can never really know her intimately—meaning sexually. —Robert Hilferty, continuing the interview
• He’s just painting away, unaware of what he is telling us about himself as well as about her. No one has ever said it, and I do think that it explains the smile. Isn’t that just my good luck to have seen it as opposed to something extraordinary. . . . I [hesitate to] publicly deny what is at the moment the Church’s teaching. I would not spell it out. But it is clear to those who can read between the lines.
—Sister Wendy Beckett, continuing the interview
HOMOSEXUAL Merriam-Webster Inc., the oldest and largest dictionary publisher in the United States, made plans in 1998 to remove offensive slurs and synonyms for “homosexual” in its on-line as well as printed thesauruses. Offending words: faggot; fruit; invert; limp-wristed; nancy; pederast; swish; uranist. The company previously had not included entries for ethnic or racial minorities like Jews, blacks, or people of Hispanic descent because many of the synonyms were negative. On the other hand, some academics hold, it is important to date usages and include such words as “offensive slang” in dictionaries. Phrases change meanings, for example, a “gay deceiver” actually a reference to “falsies” or foam-plastic bust-forms used by heterosexual women. Similarly, “gay” and “queer,” which formerly were considered to have negative overtones, were commonly used by same-sexers toward the end of the 20th century. [See entry for Uranians.]
HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE Denmark, Norway, and Sweden grant legal recognition to gay marriages. In 1996, Iceland became the fourth European country to allow such marriages. Although some United States critics have objected, particularly on religious grounds, complaining that “the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit,” others such as Michael Kavey of Chappaqua, NY, have declared that “the real threats to the family unit are the high rates of illegitimacy, domestic violence, and divorce. Allowing consenting, committed couples to formalize their relationships under the law serves to strengthen the American family, not tear it apart.” In 1998 at a Canterbury, England conference of the world’s Anglican bishops, those present voted overwhelmingly to endorse a resolution declaring homosexual activity to be “incompatible with Scripture” and advising against the ordination of homosexuals. The once-a-decade gathering at the Lambeth Conference voted 526 to 70, representing a victory for an international group of conservative bishops, particularly those from Africa and Asia. The resolution was nonbinding upon leaders who represent a reported 73 million Anglicans in 160 nations. (See entries for Marriage and Gay Marriage.) {The New York Times, 18 July 1996}
HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA South Africa, which has the most recent written constitution of major nations, includes the following:
• (3) The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, and birth.
• (4) No person may unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds in terms of subsection (3). National legislation must be enacted to prevent or prohibit unfair discrimination.
• (5). Discrimination on one or more of the grounds listed in subsection (3) is unfair unless it is established that the discrimination is fair.
HOMOSEXUALITY The United States consists of a combination of diverse communities which, on the one hand, prize their freedom to believe and do what they choose and, on the other hand, have historically been more affected by religious observance and curbed by religious restraints than have most other Western countries. To display one’s sexual orientation may be a Constitutional and democratic right, but to do so often results in puritans’ objections and feelings of guilt. For left-handed individuals to complain that they are discriminated against by tool makers or for women or members of ethnic minorities to object that they are discriminated against is allowable. For male or female prostitutes to ply their trade may be frowned upon by American religionists more so than by Latin American or European religionists, resulting in a double standard whereby some regularly use the prostitutes but decry what the prostitutes do. And for homosexuals even to admit that they are not celibate, let alone to hold hands on the street, can bring down the wrath of the religiously orthodox, who among others hold that homosexuality is a “preference” which is “treatable,” not, as still others claim, a biological phenomenon related to one’s genetic background and, like eye color, a profound and unchangeable part of themselves. “The fear that 16-year-olds will be corrupted by older homosexuals is not necessarily valid,” remarked The Economist’s reviewer of Sexual Behavior in Britain. “Most psychiatrists believe a boy’s sexual preference is fixed before 16.” Gays note that in 1994 some psychiatrists may have erroneously felt that one “chooses” to be gay. In 1999, however, it would be difficult to find a psychiatrist—even in Britain—who would not have used the word “orientation” instead of “preference.” “Queen Victoria, legend has it, refused to accept that women did that sort of thing,” the reviewer added (The Economist, 29 Jan 1994). In the search for sexual identity, with biologists and geneticists still attempting to find what determines a person’s gender, other animals which are homosexual appear not to be affected by their status. In some non-Eurocentric societies, homosexuals are considered “special gifts of nature.” Elsewhere, as observed by journalist Chandler Burr, conservatives disapprove of the search for gay genes and the origins of sexual orientation, fearing homosexuality is not chosen and therefore needs to be tolerated. Liberals, on the other hand, worry that the search will lead “to eugenics and other medical misuses, and they distrust attempts to establish civil rights based on biology rather than on principle.” Burr adds, “Conservatives misunderstand what this research does. Liberals’ fears are misplaced.” At the root of much of the problem is the Judeo-Christian Bible. Early Christian leaders condemned homosexuality, and by the Middle Ages homosexuals were often tried and executed as heretics. Bishop Epiphanius linked homosexuality with the form of Christianity called Gnosticism and accused many of the Gnostics of heresy, warning against any sexual practices such as homosexuality that did not produce children. During the Middle Ages, in his attempt to break the power of soldier-monks known as Knights Templar, the French King Philip IV accused the monks of having secret homosexual rituals, tortured them to extract confessions of sacrilegious practices, and confiscated their considerable wealth. Such a religious interpretation of the Bible has been more successful in giving Americans “guilt feelings” about their sexual practices than it has Europeans, Africans, or Asians (a generalization which is widely felt but difficult to prove). In the Mediterranean regions where Christianity arose, homosexuality was a fact of life. An extensive listing of readings about homosexuality in literature is found in The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day (1998). The earliest text, the Epic of Gilgamesh (3rd millennium B.C.E.), describes the friendship of Gilgamesh for Enkidu. The friendship of David and Jonathan, in the first and second books of Samuel (c. 1012-872 B.C.E.) came much later, as did the friendship tales in the Iliad (8th century B.C.E.) about Zeus and Ganymede, Achilles and Patroclus, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Orestes and Pylades, and many others. According to Chapter 19 of Genesis, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with fire and brimstone around 1900 B.C.E. Centuries later, Philo of Alexandria and some religious writers interpreted this to have been an angry God’s punishment for the inhabitants of the two cities. Such an interpretation hinges on an unlikely translation of the ambiguous Hebrew word meaning “to know,” in only a few cases of which does its biblical use connote sexual activity, states Reay Tannahil in Sex in History (1982). Christians who cite the call in Leviticus for the death penalty for homosexuals do not, however, demand capital punishment for the sin of cursing one’s parents (Leviticus 20:9) or for adultery (Leviticus 20:10). Plato in his Symposium wrote that humanity first consisted of three sexes—its members were joined in pairs: two men, two women, or a man and a woman. To diminish their power and to teach them to fear the gods, Zeus cut each pair apart. As a result, he wrote, humans are said to spend their lives searching for their other half in order to enjoy the fullness of love. In 594 B.C.E., Solon declared the death penalty for any adult who mingled in school yards with boys below the age of puberty, although poets of the time wrote homoerotically that “boys in the flower of their youth are loved,” and there was no legal problem at that time for adults to have relationships with post-pubescent youths. Around 580 B.C.E., Sappho in Lesbos wrote to her own students the earliest known lesbian writings, and around 393 to 387 B.C.E. Plato wrote The Symposium, Phaedrus, and other works celebrating homosexual love. In 371 B.C.E., a Sacred Band of Thebes formed in Greece, a military unit consisting of some 150 male couples and believed to be effective inasmuch as lovers would die together, not shame one another. Alexander the Great (356—323 B.C.E.), whose love for Bagoas is the basis for Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy, is but one of numerous homosexuals whose personal life is discreetly overlooked by most. Hadrian (76—138 C.E.), who had a Greek lover, is another, his same-sex love described by Marguerite Yourcenar’s masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). Sixty or so years after the birth of Jesus, Saint Paul wrote in Romans 1:26-27 and 1 Corinthians 6-9 statements that appear to support homophobia, although scholar John Boswell infers that the real intent of the writer was otherwise. In 533, Byzantine Emperor Justinian I decreed that homosexuality and blasphemy are equally to blame for famines, earthquakes, and pestilences, and he ordered castration for offenders. About 650, a manual used by priests, the Cummean Penitential, provided guidelines for homosexual sin. “Simple kissing” by two males under the age of twenty called for six special fasts. Kissing “with emission or embrace” called for ten special fasts. Mutual masturbation by men over twenty made the offenders liable to twenty days penance; for anal intercourse, the period jumped to seven years. In 1073, all known copies of Sappho’s lesbian poems were burned by ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople and Rome. In 1210—15, the Council of Paris declared sodomy to be a capital offense. In 1252, St. Thomas Aquinas declared that God created the sex organs specifically and exclusively for reproduction, calling homosexual acts “unnatural” and heretical and inspiring intolerance of homosexuality throughout the Catholic world. About 1260, the legal school of Orleans ordered that women found guilty of lesbian acts must have their clitoris removed for the first offense, mutilated for a second offense, and that they be burned at the stake for a third. In 1450—1453, Pope Nicholas empowered the Spanish Inquisition to investigate and punish homosexuality. In 1513, Balboa while exploring present-day Panama reported that “the most abominable and unnatural lechery is practiced by the King’s brother and many other younger men in women’s apparel,” and Balboa threw forty of the offenders to his dogs. Other explorers reported that the Mayan people of Mexico were “great sodomites,” and one wrote back that everyone in the New World seemed to practice sodomy. In 1918, Earl Lind’s Autobiography of an Androgyne was published, although he had begun writing it in 1899 at the age of 25. He considered himself to be an androgyne, an invert, and a fairie, by which words he meant he was psychologically a female with male genitalia. Urnings, he said, “love an adolescent as a normal man loves a woman, and desires active paedicatio [anal penetration] or else mutual onanism [masturbation].” Fairies are distinct from urnings, he wrote, for they “love the adolescent as a woman loves a man, and desire fellatio [oral sucking of the penis] or occasionally play the part of the pathic [bottom] in paedicatio.” (In contemporary usage, fairies would be “bottoms,” urnings “tops,” and sodomites “trade.”) In 1967, Ronald Reagan, who was later to become the President of the United States, called homosexuality “a tragic illness.” In 1995, Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe, said that homosexuals have “no rights at all” and are “worse than dogs and pigs.” The Allyson Almanac (1989) cites numerous historical events involving homosexuality, ending with accounts of the 1980s in which hundreds of thousands of marchers in Washington, DC, demanded civil rights for homosexuals. The book lists where some religious organizations stood on the subject in the 1980s:
• The Roman Catholic Church consistently has condemned all homosexual activity as inherently sinful. In 1986 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a letter in which homosexuality was referred to as “behavior to which no one has any conceivable right.” In 1994, Pope John Paul II preached that the notion of gay or lesbian marriage is “a serious threat to the future of the family and society” and said such unions could not be “recognized and ratified as a marriage in society.” He made the statement two weeks after the European Parliament in Strasbourg offered support for the idea of homosexuals’ marrying and adopting children. Specifically, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) notes that “tradition has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” However, the catechism continues, “The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.” Finally, “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.” In short, past tradition appears to have been one thing, but now that it is 1994 homosexuals are told they did not “choose” their “condition,” they can expect to encounter difficulties from non-homosexuals, and they are advised to be chaste. (See entry for Andrew Sullivan, the gay editor of The New Republic, who is a Catholic.)
• The Protestant Episcopal Church was the first denomination to ordain a woman who was openly lesbian. • The Presbyterian Church in 1976 voted that it would be “injudicious if not improper” to ordain homosexuals to the ministry. At the same time, the Assembly reaffirmed a previous resolution which stated that the “practice of homosexuality is a sin.”
• The United Methodist Church in 1975 unanimously approved a statement that declared that the bishops did not “advocate or support ordination for practicing homosexuals.”
• The United Church of Christ in 1972 was the first to ordain an openly gay person to the ministry. In 1975, it affirmed the civil liberties of gay and bisexual persons, stating that the church “must bear a measure of responsibility for the suffering visited upon same-gender-oriented persons.”
• The Southern Baptist Church in 1987 condemned homosexuality as “a manifestation of a depraved nature” and “a perversion of divine standards,” being one of the most conservative among the mainline denominations.
• Judaism’s Orthodox and Conservative synagogues generally take a dim view of the practice of homosexuality. In 1979, a Reform group, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, upheld the human rights of homosexuals.
• The Unitarian Universalist Association has gone further than most other denominations to defend the rights of gay men and lesbians. A series of resolutions from 1970 on has upheld the rights of gay men and lesbians, and the group has an Office of Gay Concerns. Homosexuals as well as lesbians are often found as Unitarian ministers across the United States, as was the case in other denominations at the end of the century.
In the 1990s, gay groups among almost every denomination—Methodists, Mormons, Baptists, Catholics, Friends, United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalists, etc.—have formed and have worked both outside and inside the national church organizations. A Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (5300 Santa Monica Boulevard #304, Los Angeles, California 90029), an ecumenical religious denomination which is predominantly gay and lesbian, is found throughout the United States. Wainwright Churchill’s Homosexual Behaviour Among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (1967) found that homosexual conduct has been observed by scientists among monkeys, dogs, bulls, rats, porcupines, guinea pigs, goats, horses, donkeys, elephants, hyenas, bats, mice, lions, rabbits, cats, raccoons, baboons, porpoises, and apes. Churchill added that “homosexuality among the apes is highly significant since man is in the same order of animal life.” Gay American History (1976), a documentary by Jonathan Katz, contains an extensive bibliography of books on the subject. Included is the fact that in 1776 Jefferson and other leading citizens began a thorough-going revision of Virginia law, stripping it of all former monarchical and aristocratic aspects and bringing it into conformity with republican principles. In 1777, Katz reports, “Thomas Jefferson was among those liberals who suggested that ‘Rape, Sodomy, Bestiality . . . be punished by Castration,’ rather than, as earlier, by death. As finally written, bill number 64, authored by Jefferson himself and ‘Reported by the Committee of Advisors, 18 June 1779’ adds polygamy to the list.” A. L. Rowse’s Homosexuals in History (1977) describes how sexual ambivalence since ancient times has been one of man’s major concerns and pleasures, and his research is echoed in many other volumes which describe homosexuality throughout the human as well as the animal world. Rowse names dozens and dozens for whom same-sex love was predominant. Writing about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, playwright Terrence McNally observed, “The greatest gay character ever written is Hamlet. . . . Reconsider his misogynic treatment of both his mother and his alleged girlfriend, reexamine his relationship with his best friend, Horatio, and check out his over-the-top enthusiasm for the theater and actors. If it takes one to know one, Hamlet is one. Trust me on this.” Both sadism and masochism occur in homosexuality. For example, Proust illustrated his own “peculiarity” in confiding to André Gide that he sometimes needed intense sensations to achieve orgasm, such as watching warring rats. Biographer Ronald Hayman further describes Proust’s compulsion, “the lifelong habit of trying to buy good will. Even when making love or when having love made to him, he couldn’t believe he was lovable.” Ackerman writes that although Marcel Proust claimed Remembrance was not autobiographical, “most scholars believe it is, and that the narrator’s entanglements with Albertine echo Proust’s doings with his lover, Alfred Agostinelli.” Instead of buying Alfred a Rolls-Royce, Proust bought him one of the first airplanes “and Alfred died in it, spinning into the Mediterranean where he drowned, which gave him the dubious honor of being one of the first people to die in an airplane crash.” As Ackerman observes, Proust would probably have agreed with Baudelaire’s definition of love as “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Meanwhile, Proust played love voluptuously in his mind, caressing the memories with his pen. A Gay American Indian Anthology (1988) by Maurice Kenny describe the American Indians’ Berdache tradition, which placed effeminate men on a high social level among the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Ponca, and other tribes. For example, “To the Cheyenne we were no curiosity. We were friends or wives of brave warriors who hunted for our cooking pots and who protected our tipis [teepees] from Pawnee. We went to the mountain for our puberty vision. No horse or lance or thunderbird crossed the dreaming eye which would have sent us into war or the hunter’s lonely woods. To some song floated on mountain air. To others, colors and design appeared on clouds. To a few, words fell from eagle wings. And they took to the medicine tent, and in their holiness made power for the people of the Cheyenne Nation. There was space for us in the village. The Crow and Ponca offered deerskin when the decision to avoid the warpath was made. And we were accepted into the fur robes of a young warrior, and lay by his flesh and knew his mouth and warm groin, or we married (a second wife) to the chief. And if we fulfilled our duties, he smiled and gave us his grandchildren to care for.” (See entry for Berdache, which is an Arabic, not an Indian, word.) The Greek goddess Aphrodite was said by Hesiod to have risen from the foam of the sea where Uranus’s genitals fell after Kronus mutilated the Greek god of the sky, the mythological father of the Titans. The story in 1867 inspired Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825—1895), a lawyer and early gay rights advocate, to call himself an Urning to the surprise of a convention of German jurists. Homosexuals have offensively been called homos, pansies, fruits, fairies, fag[got]s, swishes, lesbos, and dykes. Some have been called intersexes, androgynes, epicenes, perverts, and gays. Gore Vidal, who prefers same-sex sex to homosexuality, thinks gay is “a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn, and Eleanor Roosevelt.” (At Franklin Roosevelt’s inaugural, Mrs. Roosevelt wore a ring given her by her close friend, Lorena Hickock.) Many contemporary homosexuals call themselves queer rather than or in addition to what they consider the passé word gay. Queer once was used to designate pickpockets and con men, for “queer as Dick’s hatband” commonly was understood to mean “out of order.” Later, as noted in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811), the word meant “wrong, improper.” Many gays and queers in the 1990s show little or no interest in organized religions, which they document as being a major cause for their centuries of being considered immoral. They are apt to express, particularly in their numerous books and magazines, more interest in the Ancient Greeks, pointing to Athena’s proud bisexuality and to Zeus’s escapades with the male Ganymede. (See entry for a gay secular humanist publication, Qwer.) Those, however, who are attracted to Christianity sometimes speculate that Jesus and at least some of his all-male “disciples” bonded not only religiously but also sexually. Monotheism, they note, originally meant the “oneness” of God, implying God’s bisexuality. (See entry for Kallimachos.) In 1986, when Canada Customs discovered that The Joy of Gay Sex discussed as well as depicted anal sex, a bookstore challenged the refusal and won the case. Judge Bruce Hawkins, of the trial-level court for civil cases in Ontario, observed, “To write about homosexual practices without dealing with anal intercourse would be equivalent to writing a history of music and omitting Mozart.” Canada Customs then amended the guidelines, although many United States books continue to be refused entry. The late John Boswell, called “a devout Catholic” by The New Yorker, contended in Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (1994) that the Catholic Church blessed homosexual marriages as recently as the 1700s and even used a kind of liturgy, complete with prayers, to perform them:
Send down, most kind Lord, the grace of Thy Holy Spirit upon these Thy servants, whom Thou hast found worthy to be united not by nature but by faith and a holy spirit. Grant unto them Thy grace to love each other in joy without injury or hatred all the days of their lives.
Doug Stumpf, once Boswell’s editor at Villard, mentions that most of the ceremonies were in Greek, language of the early Catholic Church, but that the following is from an elaborate fourteenth-century version originally in Serbian-Slavonic. It is one of eighty versions of the same-sex marriage ceremony in manuscripts dating from the eighth through the sixteenth centuries:
Lord God almighty, who didst fashion humankind after thine image and likeness and give unto them eternal and everlasting life, who didst choose thy holy disciples and glorious apostles Peter and Paul, and Philip and Bartholomew, to be united not in the bond of birth, but in faithfulness and love, let these love each other without envy and without temptation all the days of their lives. It hath pleased Thee that thy holy martyrs Serge and Bacchus were united not in the bond of birth, but in spiritual faith and love. Grant also that these two servants of thine, N. and N., love teach other without jealousy or temptation. Let them abide all the days of their lives under the Holy Spirit and the prayers of our most pure Queen, the Mother of God, and all thy saints who have pleased Thee through the ages. For thine is the power and thine the kingdom, thine the strength and the glory, Father and Son.
Boswell implied that Jesus and John had some kind of same-sex relationship, that same-sex marriages occurred in sanctified churches, and that, as shown in the above excerpts, the unions invoked the names of God, disciples, and apostles. Apologists countered that perhaps the ritual was a form of “fraternal adoption” or something like a commemoration of “an undying spiritual bonding.” In the fourteenth century, the same-sex ceremony began to be banned for the Church and society were “gripped by a rabid and obsessive negative preoccupation with homosexuality as the most horrible of sins,” stated Boswell, who claimed same-sex unions are still being performed quietly in some parts of Eastern Europe. Cartoonist Gary Trudeau publicized the finding, having one of his comic strip’s characters report that some Yale professor had written a book saying that “for 1000 years the church sanctioned rituals for homosexual marriages.” Boswell is accustomed to controversy. In 1980, he wrote Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, maintaining that Christianity was not originally or inherently hostile to homosexuality. His work, he insists, can help people “incorporate [same-sex love] into a Christian life-style.” A male couple in Washington, D.C., did choose one of his ceremonies for their wedding, wrote Bruce Holsinger in The Nation, but a priest in Hartford who used the rituals to perform a number of gay and lesbian marriages was immediately excommunicated. Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong in his Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991) wrote that St. Paul was a “self-loathing and repressed gay male.” Spong also championed the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church and, in the 1980s, called on priests in his diocese to “bless” homosexual unions. Bonnie and Vern Bullough have written “The Causes of Homosexuality: A Scientific Update” (Free Inquiry, Fall, 1993), in which after extensive and up-to-date research they conclude as follows: “Although the research on homosexuality is in a rapidly changing state, there is evidence accumulating to suggest that sexual preference [changed to “orientation”] is the product of a complex interaction between three factors: (1) a genetic predisposition; (2) physiological factors; and (3) the socialization process. It is no longer possible to argue that either nature or nurture alone is in the answer; it is clear that both are involved in producing sexual preference. Given the power of these influences and the small amount of control exercised by the individual, punitive political policies seem out of place. It seems just as silly to discriminate against someone for his sexual preference as it does for his race or age.” Linguistically, homo is the Greek for same, not Latin for man, and the word homophobia is Greek, not a mixture of Latin and Greek. Homophobia therefore means “hatred of homosexuals” although it appears to mean “hatred of one’s own kind.” Or so some linguists point out. Simon LeVay of the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education and Dean H. Hammer of the National Institutes of Health present evidence for a biological influence in male homosexuality in Scientific American (May 1994). However, in the same issue William Byne of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine argues that current data lack substance, that even if genetic and neuroanatomical traits turn out to be correlated with sexual orientation, causation is far from proved. In its “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles and Values,” the Council for Secular Humanism specifies the stand of secular humanists:
• We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationalist, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.
Meanwhile, the majority’s opinion in the United States against homosexuality—which usually is based on Biblical doctrine—stood fast at the end of the 20th century. Political leaders joined with religious leaders and millions of their supporters in justifying their widely held view that the social fabric demands no “giving in” to homosexual demands for the same equality accorded to women and ethnic groups such as African Americans. Protection under the law is already available for homosexuals, insist the majority. As for a possible ruling by the court in Hawaii that would recognize marriages between two people of the same sex, Congress was quick in 1996 to pass legislation barring such and allowing individual states to ignore same-sex unions which might be made legal in Hawaii or elsewhere. During the debate, Representative Barr, a Republican from Georgia, insisted that “America will not be the first country in the world that throws the concept of marriage out the window and for the very first time in the history of civilization says that homosexual marriages are as important as, and rise to the level of the legal and moral equivalency of, heterosexual marriage.” Instead, he spoke for the majority by saying that “the flames of hedonism, the flames of narcissism, the flames of self-centered morality are licking at the very foundation of our society, the family unit.” (See entries for Heterosexuality, Hostility, Immorality, N. L. Stones [a transsexual], and for the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. Hawaii in 1999 voted against adopting such legislation.) {AA; ACK; Terrence McNally, Los Angeles Times, 9 December 1996}
HOMOSEXUALITY IN LITERATURE: See The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, Readings from Western Antiquity to the Present Day (1998). The earliest examples are of the friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu (3rd Millennium B.C.E.) and 1 and 2 Samuel (c. 1012-872 B.C.E.)
HOMOSEXUALITY IN ZIMBABWE AND ELSEWHERE Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in 1995, at an international book fair group, said that the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (GALZ) group was excluded. When Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer of South Africa and others objected, Mugabe responded that homosexuals have “no rights at all,” that they are “worse than dogs and pigs,” and that they should be hounded out of the country. “Let the Americans keep their sodomy, bestiality, stupid and foolish ways to themselves!” he ejaculated. Not long afterwards, in 1998, the Rev. Canaan Banana, Zimbabwe’s president from 1980 to 1987, was found guilty of sodomy with young bodyguards, gardeners, and cooks. The charges grew out of a 1995 murder trial of a police inspector, Jefta Dube, who killed a colleague who had called him “Banana’s wife.” Homosexuality is not given special moral or psychological significance in many cultures. In 1951, a survey of 190 different societies around the world reported that in 70% of those studied homosexual practices are considered acceptable behavior. The practices are found throughout the animal kingdom. {CE}
HOMOSEXUALITY, WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS What the Bible “really” says about homosexuality, a study by Daniel Helminiak, is on the Web: <www.ezin.net/personal/steven/homo.htm>.
HOMOSEXUALS AND GOD The Web site of the Rev. Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, is <http://www.godhatesfags.com>.
HOMOSEXUALS, MUSLIM Male and female homosexuals who are Muslim experience the same fears and doubts as those who are raised Christians. Al-Fatiha Foundation (405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500, New York, NY 10022) is an international organization dedicated to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) Muslims. In 1999 it arranged a first North American conference, “Creating a Community,” in the hope that it would become the beginning of a movement to create a community and an identity. “My mother would commit suicide if she found out I was gay,” a male said at the conference. “My father knows I’m gay but insists that I marry,” another male said. “Please help me find a gay male in the States who will marry me and get me out of this country,” a lesbian pleaded in an e-mail message. Following is a typical non-academic discussion of the problems homosexual Muslim face, an attempt to assess the Qur’an and those who interpret its sacred text:
Re: Homosexuality and same-sex acts in Islam:
• There is a general consensus amongst the scholars of Islam (both past and present) that homosexuality is a deviation of man’s true (heterosexual) nature. Thus the act of homosexuality is sinful and perverted and is viewed with contempt in most Muslim societies and Islamic countries.
• There are approximately seven verses in the Qur’an (the holy text of the Muslims) that supposedly refer to homosexuality and same-sex acts. The majority of these verses refer to the nation of Lot (the biblical nation of Sodom and Gomorrah). The following are examples of a few verses:
We also sent Lut (Lot): he said to his people: “Do ye commit lewdness such as no people in creation ever committed before you? For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.” Surah VII (Araf), Verses 80-81
Of all creatures in the world, will ye approach males. And leave those whom Allah (God) has created for you to be your mates? Nay, ye are people transgressing all limits? Surah XXVI (Shu’araa), Verses 165-166)
If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both. If they repent and amend, leave them alone: for Allah (God) is Oft-Returning, Most Merciful. Surah IV (Nisaa), Verse 16
• There are approximately four hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) in reference to homosexuality, same-sex acts, and cross-dressing. A few include the following:
When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes – Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
Kill the one that is doing it and also the one that it is being done to. (in reference to intercourse) – Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
Cursed are those men who wear women’s clothing and those women who wear men’s clothing. – Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)
• During the time of the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632 AD) there was not one single case of a reported punishment or execution for homosexuality or same-sex acts. The first execution to ever have been carried out was during the time of the third Caliph, Omar, who ordered a homosexual man to be burned alive. Scholars at the time differed in opinion on this form of punishment, arguing that no human should be burned (according to the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), thus it was decided that homosexuals should be thrown off of the highest building and then stoned to death.
• Islamic schools of thought and jurisprudence differ on the issue of homosexuality. Sex between males was treated differently by the various legal schools, on the basis of differing interpretation of the traditional literature. All the legal schools regard sex between males as unlawful, but they differ over the severity of the punishment. The Hanafite school (predominant in South Asia and East Asia today) maintains that it (same-gender sex) does not merit any physical punishment. The Hanbalites, on the other hand (predominant in the Arab world) believe that sex between males must be punished severely. The Sha’fi school of thought (also predominant in the Arab world) argues that punishment for sodomy can only be carried out if there are four adult male witnesses who actually see the penetration, “as though the key is going into the key whole.”
• According to the Ahmadi Muslim Jama’at (a small sect within Islam), homosexual behavior is a symptom of the decadence of society. In an essay entitled “Homosexuality & Islam,” the Ahmadi sect states (regarding the decadence of society), “As this process continues, people find and invent even more bizarre and perverted means to satisfy natural urges, and trends like child and adult pornography, bisexuality, homosexuality and bestiality appear.” They go on to say that homosexuality “is utterly contrary to every natural law of human and animal life, and counter to the morals, purposes and institutions of a procreative society.”
• The Ismaili sect of Islam (also known as the Agha Khani movement), with a population of approximately 2 million people, believes Islam to be a continuously evolving faith that must be reinterpreted to adapt to modern-day society and culture. Their spiritual leader, the Prince Agha Khan, who is thought to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, has been open to dialogue and communication with progressive movements within Islam. Although he has not officially made any gay-affirming statements, it is believed that he will soon make a declaration regarding this issue.
• In 1988, scholars from Al-Azhar University, the oldest and most prominent Islamic school in the world, located in Cairo, Egypt, passed a fatwa (decree) that sex reassignment surgeries were permissible in Islam. The Grand Mufti of the University stated, “It is permissible to perform the operation in order to reveal what was hidden of male or female organs. Indeed, it is obligatory to do so on the grounds that it must be considered a treatment. . . . It is, however, not permissible to do it at the mere wish to change sex from woman to man, or vice versa.” This fatwa has set a precedent for the Muslim transgender movement for acceptance within the bounds of the Islamic faith.
• There have been many executions and arrests of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Muslims. These stories range from executions in Afghanistan, deportations of transvestites and cross-dressers in Saudi Arabia, to the present-day corruption and sodomy trial of ex-Prime Minister Anwar in Malaysia. It is also estimated that since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, the government has executed more than 4,000 homosexuals.
• Although Islam has been declared as the official religion in most Arab countries (except for Lebanon), European law heavily influences their constitutions. For example, in Algeria, a country heavily influenced by French law(s), sodomy may be punished with imprisonment from two months to two years and a fine (500-2,000 Algerian dinars). Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, where shariah (Islamic law) was always enforced, liwat (sodomy) is to be treated like fornication, and must be punished in the same way. If muhsan (sane) and free, one must be stoned to death, while a free bachelor must be whipped 100 lashes and banished for one year. However a non-Muslim who sodomizes a Muslim must always be stoned to death. Sodomy is proved either by the culprit confessing four times or by the testimony of four trustworthy Muslim men.
• Since the occupation of Afghanistan, in 1992, by the extreme conservative army of the Taliban, there have been approximately 10 public executions in the country. The men, all accused of committing sodomy had a wall toppled on top of them. According to Taliban law, if the accused survive the execution after 30 minutes, they are innocent and are then taken to a hospital to be treated for their injuries.
• Islamic extremists tried to beat up a gay man and threatened to kill him at a London conference on “Islamaphobia,” designed to promote understanding and tolerance of Muslim values, and attended by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian leaders. The conference, held in London, England, claimed that “Islam is wrongly and unjustly portrayed as barbaric, irrational, primitive, sexist, violent and aggressive.” During the question and answer session, an OutRage! Activist and a former Muslim of Pakistani descent, asked the panel of speakers how negative attitudes towards Muslims among gay people could be overcome, given that Islam advocates the burning alive of homosexuals. Most of the conference (then) turned on him. He was surrounded by over a hundred Muslims who screamed abuse and threatened to kill him. None of the Muslim, Christian or Jewish leaders on the platform (panel) intervened to calm the situation or condemn the violence. One Muslim cleric shouted that he had no need to ask what Muslims thought of homosexuals: all he had to do was look at the audience’s reaction. The man was quoted as saying, “Muslims want tolerance for themselves but not for lesbians and gays. They condemn Islamaphobia, while zealously promoting hatred and violence against homosexuals.”
• Imam Siraj Wahaj, an African-American convert to Islam, and a prominent cleric and scholar of Islam in the United States was quoted as saying the following in 1992, in reference to the supposed opening of a gay mosque in Toronto: “I would burn down the masjid (mosque) myself, if I cou