Hemalata Lavanam

From Philosopedia

Lavanam, Hemalata (20th Century)

In Vijayawada, India, Lavanam edited Insaan (1956–1962) and the monthly Atheist (1969 to the present). She is the wife of

Sometimes described as “the Robert Ingersoll of India,” “a Gandhian atheist,” and “a most visionary and humanitarian human,” Lavanam spoke in 1993 to Massachusetts humanists and, as head of India’s Atheist Center, in 1996 she spoke on “Positive Atheism for a Positive Future” at the fourth World Atheist Conference which was held in India and of which she was a co-convener. She pointed to those pessimistic religious people "who on the approach of the second millennium prophesied Armageddon and Doomsday and said that on the contrary we needed to give hope to humanity that the future would be bright and positive. Today’s atheists, she advised, have a double role to play: they have to save humanity from pessimistic adventurism and to invent and promote tools to build a positive future in every walk of life. Now it is the responsibility of atheists to take positive strides toward promoting universal humanism and universal human identity without which it would become impossible to save even our physical and social environment. Atheists must work with liberal minded non-atheists in common cause, for they have a responsibility of restructuring the unjust and exploitive cultural, moral, social, political institutions and ideas and values, at local, national, and international levels."

Mrs. Lavanam has an international following, is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and has traveled around the world several times.

(See entry for G. Vijayam. For a 1995 interview in La Jolla, California, in which among other things he tells why he thinks Christians hate theists, see Secular Nation, Summer 1995.)

{CA; E; FUK; New Humanist, February 1996}