K
From Philosopedia
K. EXECUTIVE CLUB In Uganda, the humanists are led by M. J. Collins’s K. Executive Club, POB 3092, Kampala, Uganda. (See entry for Uganda, Humanists In.) {FD}
KA: See entry for Resurrection.
KADER KRINGLOOP KRANT A Dutch publication, Kader Kringloop Krant is at Postbus 71, 1000 AB, The Netherlands.
Kadison, Alexander (20th Century) A freethinker, Kadison wrote Through Agnostic Spectacles (1919). {GS; RAT}
Kaech, Jean (20th Century) In Switzerland, Kaech coordinates a number of groups known as the World Union of Freethinkers (Postfach 6207, 3001 Bern, Switzerland). {FD}
Kafka, Dusan J. (20th Century) The Rev. Dr. Dusan J. Kafka heads Unitaria, which, under Norbert Capek’s leadership was a center of anti-Nazi resistance in Czechoslovakia. The small congregation of Unitarians had overpowering problems during rule by the Communists but is currently active. In 1923, the Liberal Fellowship became the Religious Society of Czechoslovakian Unitarians. Norbert Capek, at President Jan Masaryk’s bidding, was instrumental in founding the church. The present group will change its name inasmuch as the Czechs and Slovaks have split Czechoslovakia into two parts.
Kafka, Franz (1883—1924) Kafka, the Prague-born novelist who wrote in German, is one of the most influential of 20th century writers. Although he came from a middle-class Jewish family from Bohemia, he had a quadruple alienation, according to Martin Seymour-Smith:
(a) from his Jewishness; (b) his Czech identity, as a German speaker); (c) his family; and (d) from his own potentiality to lead a full life.
As Seymour-Smith explains, Kafka and his near contemporary Rainer Maria Rilke were “torn between art (which reveals life) and life (which rejects the solitariness, selfishness, lovelessness of the dedicated artistic condition).” Unlike Rilke, however, Kafka could not find full faith in his writing and his life, except for a few moments, was even more wretched and guilt-ridden. Kafka’s characters are functional but he is
tragically uninterested in character: all are mysteriously in the right, trying him for the crime of human insufficiency, for dedication to inadequate words. Joseph K in Der Prozess (1925), The Trial, is being tried for nothing he can specify but he feels guilty and is executed. Karl Rossmann in Amerika (1927), America, is punished for allowing himself to be seduced; and despite the relatively comic surface of the book, it remained tragically unfinished because Kafka wanted to end it on a note of reconciliation and could not do it. As for the castle in the again unfinished novel of that name, Kafka’s greatest: ultimately this, too, is reconciliation: the possibility of being a writer and being a full human being, who has a family and a human function.
The opening sentence of The Trial is exemplary of Kafka’s portrayal of enigmatic reality:
Someone must have slandered Joseph K., because one morning, without his having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Das Schloss (1926, The Castle) was unfinished but contains the curious plot in which it is believed someone might be listening at the other end of a telephone line (God?) but no one responds (no God?). “Kafkaesque,” as a result, has come to describe surreal distortion and a sense of impending danger. Kafka’s world is both dreamlike and real, as shown in The Metamorphosis, in which the character of Gregor Samsa, when the story is cross-read, lends himself to a kind of floating meaning. “I was Gregor Samsa,” Paul Monette once confessed, adding, “It was not the last time I would take my life out of a book.” Other gay writers have agreed, pointing out that the work is like a parable of closeted denial and coming out. Numbers of others have commented similarly about how they have felt the alienation from family that Kafka described so uniquely. Critics speak of Kafka’s spinelessness against a strong-willed, self-made father, a man who would not comprehend his son although Kafka desperately desired his approval. Despite the “father = Father = God” equation and despite his bug-like dependence, Kafka never is able to find happiness, as shown in Die Verwandlung. Not with whores or girlfriends. He broke off an engagement with one girlfriend, then became engaged to her again, then became engaged in 1919 to another, then broke that off. In 1923 he met Dora Dymant, who was twenty years younger, and she stayed with him until his death in a sanatorium near Vienna, tragically unable ever to find what he had been searching for: personal salvation. His literary legacy was Kafka’s sole concern. In his desk upon his death was a note to Max Brod, a friend:
Here is my last will concerning everything I have written . . . the only books that can stand are . . . The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor . . . I do not mean that I wish them to be . . . handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best. . . . But everything else of mine . . . without exception is to be burned, and I beg you to do this as soon as possible.
Brod, however, not only failed to comply but edited The Trial, The Castle, and America for posthumous publication. J. M. Coetzee, professor of General Literature at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, prefers the 1998 translation of The Castle by Mark Harman, explaining that Edwin Muir’s translation is not nearly so good and suggesting that Muir because of his limited knowledge of German guessed at Kafka’s meaning, often missing the point. Most critics do not find Kafka “a Jew,” although his mother was a Jew and he learned from his parents about guilt, salvation, and the very concepts that made his life so miserable. Rather, he was not actively into any organized religion . . . none except art. {CE; GL; OCE; PA; J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books, 14 May 1998; WWTCL}
Kagin, Edwin (20th Century) A Kentucky attorney and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Kagin is Vice President of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Free Inquiry Group. For its newsletter, Fig Leaves, he cited the following as proof there is no life after death: “For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.” Ecclesiastes 9:4-5, by God! Not forgotten, he added, is the person with an inscription on his tombstone, “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” His wife, Helen Kagin, is secretary of the Cincinnati Free Inquiry Group.
Kahl, Joachim (1941— ) At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) International Peace Conference in Zutphen (1983), Kahl of Marbury in Germany addressed the group. He wrote a moral critique of religion entitled The Misery of Christianity (1971). In 1981, he wrote, with Erich Warnig of Köln, Freidenker, Gesohichte und Gegenuart. {CA; E}
Joachim Kahl, Author art
Like Karlheinz Deschner, Kahl is best known for his critiques of Christianity. See his The Misery Of Christianity (Das Elend des Christentums)
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Some German posters to the [message board] can now confirm Kahl's atheism:
...on the site http://www.mazeway.de/~ibka/Artikel/ag98/atheismus.html is an article of Kahl which begins "Atheist wurde ich durch mein Theologiestudium." (I became atheist by my study of theology). I have also a book by Friedrich Heer/Joachim Kahl/Karlheinz Deschner "Warum ich Christ/Atheist/Agnostiker bin; Kiepenheuer & Witsch Köln, 1977" (Why I am a christian/atheist/agnostic) in which Kahl wrote the essay "Warum ich Atheist bin" which begins "Ich bin Atheist, und zwar kein versteckter, sondern ein offener und konsequenter, ein streitbarer Atheist" (I am atheist, not a hidden, but an open and consequent, a pugnacious atheist).
Kahle, Mitchell (20th Century) Kahle is the Hawaii contact for American Atheists, Inc. E-mail: <mkahle@atheists.org>.
Kahlo, Frida (1907—1954) A celebrated Mexican artist, often called a national treasure, Kahlo is known by many as the one who married Diego Rivera, divorced him, then remarried him. Her 1942 “Self-Portrait With Monkey and Parrot” was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $3,200,000., and her other works continue to have a wide following of admirers. Kahlo was the daughter of a lower-middle-class German-Jewish photographer, an epileptic, and a mother whom writer Amy Fine Collins has termed a “hysterically Catholic Spanish-Indian.” In her youth, Kahlo sometimes dressed as a man, and she is said throughout life to have lovingly combed her noticeable mustache with a special brush. When Olga Campos leaned over, upon Kahlo’s death, to kiss the corpse’s cheek, Frida’s mustache hairs bristled and for a moment the psychologist thought her friend was still alive. In Mexico Kahlo is known as la heroina del dolor, a heroine of pain. This commenced when she was eighteen years old and was “technologically raped,” the result of a hideous streetcar and bus accident in which her body was skewered by a thick metal bar which punctured her abdomen and ripped through her vagina. However, Collins has written, she was adored by such marginalized groups as “lesbians, gays, feminists, the handicapped, Chicanos, Communists (she professed Trotskyism and, later, Stalinism), hypochondriacs, substance abusers, and even Jews (despite her indigenous Mexican identify, she was in fact half Jewish and only one-quarter Indian).” Over eighty-seven publications have described her life and work, and her recently discovered diary had an initial print run of more than 150,000 and an introduction by Carlos Fuentes. When Rivera wanted a divorce to marry the Mexican film star, María Felíx, Kahlo overdosed on drugs. When they married, she had found him as irresistible as he was ugly, like “a boy frog standing on his hind legs,” but even actress Paulette Goddard had gone to bed with him, and it was rumored sculptor Louise Nevelson also had. Meanwhile, Kahlo reportedly had affairs with Georgia O’Keeffe, Leon Trotsky, Trotsky’s secretary Jean van Heijenoort, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, and others. Collins implies that Kahlo, who had at least thirty surgical operations, also had as many doctors as she had lovers. In 1953, after her right leg was amputated because of gangrene, Kahlo became particularly despondent. Rivera took a room next to hers, which improved her spirits greatly, and she entertained guests royally while in bed, also showing them her oozing sores. Toward the end of her life, when her atheism and Stalinism were strongest, her features coarsened and she took on somewhat the appearance of an effeminate boy.
Although her death certificate listed the cause of death as “pulmonary embolism,” art historian Sarah Lowe and others felt Kahlo had decided that “enough was enough” and had committed suicide by overdose.
“Her paintings demand—fiercely—that you look at her,” wrote biographer Hayden Herrera in Frida, a 1983 biography. Agreeing, Kirk Varnedoe, a chief curator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote, “She clicks with today’s sensibilities—her psycho-obsessive concern with herself, her creation of a personal alternative world carry a voltage.” In her vivid diary, Kahlo’s last entry was “I hope for a happy exit and I hope never to come back.” (See entry for Diego Rivera.) {Amy Fine Collins, “Diary of a Mad Artist,” Vanity Fair, September 1995}
Kahn, Carol (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Kahn was a featured speaker. She is author of Beyond the Helix (1995).
Kahn, Marion (20th Century) A signer of Humanist Manifesto II, Kahn has been president of the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York. A retired art teacher, she is a member of Humanists of North Jersey and founder of Alliance Against Homelessness for the Mentally Ill of Bergen County, New Jersey. {HM 2}
Kaiser, Hilary (20th Century) Kaiser, a Unitarian, wrote Veteran Recall: Americans in France Remember the War (1994). The book collects war stories, oral recollections, poems, and photographs of American World War II veterans living in Paris.
Kaiser, Michael (20th Century) Kaiser is a student of philosophy and sociology at the University of Constance, Germany. In 1997 he was an intern at the International Humanist and Ethical Union headquarters in London. E-mail: <h0444hua@student.hu-berlin.de>.
KALAMAZOO COLLEGE FREETHINKERS In Michigan the Kalamazoo College Freethinkers are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
KALEVALA The Kalevala, epic of the Finnish people, is a collection of poetic narratives that are at the root of a historicity of Finland. It was a shaper of the nation’s language, much as Luther’s Bible in Germany or the King James translation of the Bible in England. (See entry for Eino Friberg, a translator.)
Kalinicheva, Zoia Vasil’evna (20th Century) A Moscow freethinker, Kalinicheva wrote The Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism, A Short Guide (1967). {GS}
Kalisch, Moritz Marcus (1825—1885) Kalisch, born in Pomerania of Jewish parents, was educated at the University of Berlin, the came to England as a political refugee and tutor to the Rothschild family. His Commentary on the Pentateuch’s rational criticism anticipated the school of Wellhausen. Kalisch contributed to Scott’s series of freethought tracts. {BDF; RAT}
Kallen, Horace (1892—1974) A professor of aesthetics and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, Kallen wrote Why Religion? (1927); Individualism—An American Way of Life (1933); Freedom and Experience (1947); Ideals and Experience (1948); Democracy’s True Religion (1951); Freedom in the Modern World (1952); and A Study of Liberty (1959). As early as 1915 in The Nation, Kallen remarked that the “melting pot” concept is both a theoretical misconception and a practical failure. He suggested replacing it with “cultural pluralism.” A noted philosopher and writer, Kallen teamed with John Dewey in 1941 to edit The Bertrand Russell Case, detailing Lord Russell’s inability to be hired to teach philosophy at City College of New York because of objections made by religious groups to his writings. Asked in 1956 about humanism, Dr. Kallen wrote the present author:
My Humanism may be called secular or human Humanism. Its specification is to be found in my Secularism is the Will of God (1954). It is the faith that human beings are all different from each other and are, as different, equally entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This applies to supernaturalists as well as naturalists, atheists as well as theists, etc. The maxim Homo sum nihil humanuum a me alienum puto expresses it. So does the Protagorean aphorism, “Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, of things that are not, that they are not.” These two expressions imply one another and are systematically elaborated in the idea of Secularism as embracing all the attitudes and valuations of mankind without prejudice.
Dr. Kallen and the present writer once were invited to serve on the board of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (POAU), one aim of which was the attempt, for it was not successful, to keep Fordham University from acquiring New York City public land next to Lincoln Center in Manhattan. All the other board members were Protestant ministers, leading Dr. Kallen to remark, “You and I apparently are the ‘other’ Americans.” To the Euthanasia Society of America, he once declared that “voluntary death is an inalienable human right.” His last work was What I Believe and Why—Maybe (1971). Kallen was a model humanist: kindly, secular, active, profound, a doer as well as a thinker. {CL; HNS; WAS, 11 May 1956}
Kallimachos (Ancient Greece) Unlike the Hebrews, the Greeks such as Kallimachos thought of their major god, Zeus, as a lover, one who adored both sexes:
Hate him O Zeus if he hates me—. Theokritos, my Theokritos, deliciously bronzed— Hate the boy four times as much as he hates me! Heavenly Zeus, by Ganymede I swear, The goldenhaired, you in your time have loved. I say no more. {Translations by Dudley Fitts}
Ganymede was the most beautiful of mortals. The father of the gods, Zeus, was attracted by this rosy-faced, bright-eyed boy, so he disguised himself as an eagle, seduced him, and carried him to Mount Olympus where Ganymede was the object of love—discreetly termed a cupbearer—among the other divinities. Zeus, as compensation to Ganymede’s father for the loss of his son, gave him a team of beautiful, light-footed horses. The Hebrew Bible contains no such analogies.
Kallman, Chester (1921—1975) Kallman, a poet, librettist, translator, and editor, has been depicted sensitively by Thekla Clark in her Wystan and Chester: A Personal Memoir of W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman (1996). The stepson of Dorothy Farnan, Kallman was a good-looking male described by Wystan Auden as “a Roumanian-Latvian-American Jew.” Clark, however, termed Kallman an atheist. At a time when he was a lover of Harold Norse, Kallman met Auden and the two became lovers “mad with happiness.” However, Kallman was not the monogamous kind, and he enraged the jealous Auden, once being choked by the poet. Although the two remained friends, they found that their relationship turned sexless. One of Kallman’s many lovers, twenty-one-year-old Yannis Boras, was a Greek with whom he stayed for five years, until he was killed in an automobile accident. According to Clark, Kallman’s libretto for the opera “Elegy for Young Lovers,” was inspired by their relationship, after which he looked for other young Greeks as companions. Concerned as he grew older that he was losing his “Lana Turner looks,” Kallman moved about, seldom informing Auden where he was. Clark depicts Kallman with affection, for she allowed him to stay at her home in Florence and he wrote to her extensively. Of the fights Kallman had with Auden, Clark observed, “As a devout Christian, [Wystan] was satisfied . . . to let ‘Miss God’ pardon him. Chester, as a romantic atheist, couldn’t.” The two, she noted, got along best when they collaborated on librettos. Wystan, she noted, thought homosexuality was wrong whereas Kallman regarded it as both a moral lifestyle and beautiful. Wystan “wanted a certain blond beauty in his lovers.” Kallman preferred “beetle brows.” Although Kallman wrote the libretto for “The Tuscan Women,” which was set to music by Carlos Chávez, he has become mainly remembered as a one-time lover of W. H. Auden.
Kalthoff, Albert (1850—1906) Kalthoff, a freethinker, wrote The Rise of Christianity (1907). He joined Haeckel’s Monist League and was its first President. {GS; RAT}
KAMA In the Sanskrit language, Kama means sex as well as love indivisible. Swami Nostradamus Virato of the Church of Tantra (<tantra.org>) has introduced the subject of tantra—prolonged, ritualistic sexual pleasure as a path to the divine:
Almost everyone is familiar with the Kama Sutra, a tantric treatise on lovemaking. Kama is also the name of the Hindu goddess of love. And love is what tantra encourages—total unconditional love, including the mind, the spirit, and the body. In tantra, the orgasm is with the universe.
As observed by one theist, “Kama is the non-theoretical Hindu concept of the Big Bang.” {Playboy, July 1999}
Kamal, Alimul (1982— ) A teenager, Kamal was asked in a Flushing, New York, junior high school history class to write about “the religious holidays.” To the teacher’s surprise, he wrote that he was “not religious,” then completed an essay about the winter solstice and secular humanism. Kamal, nephew of Taslima Nasrin, is one of a growing number of younger people who have become acquainted with, and do not fear to speak about, secular humanism. Upon having to return to his native Bangladesh, however, he found many even in his own family were concerned about his “lack of religion.” {WAS, numerous conversations}
Kamehameha, Maloka (20th Century) Kamehameha wrote An Atheist Goes to Church (c. 1955). {GS}
Kamen, Henry Arthur (1936- ) Kamen, a Catholic, is author of The Spanish Inquisition (1965), adjudged by many critics to be a balanced view of the time. Kamen was born in Burma.
Kamenka, Eugene (1928—1994) Kamenka, whose parents were Russian and Jewish, was born in Germany but educated in Australia. A professor and head of the History of Ideas Unit at the Australian National University, he wrote The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (1962), Marxism and Ethics (1969), Intellectuals and Revolution (1979), and The Portable Karl Marx (1982). Kamenka was an atheist who once wrote, “I fight, above all, the unnecessary waste of lives—not only by genocide, pointless wars, and blinkered terrorism, but by state, religious, or political oppression and brutality. I rail also against the elevation or deliberate preservation of ignorance and superstition to ward off fear of criticism, loss of privilege, and change.” {SWW}
KAMI: See entry for Shinto.
Kaminer, Wendy (20th Century) Kaminer, a Public Policy Fellow at Radcliffe College, wrote I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (1992), in which she described herself as a “liberal feminist Jewish atheist.” She also wrote True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism and “The Last Taboo, Why America Needs Atheism.” The latter New Republic (14 October 1996) article noted that today, with belief in guardian angels and creationism “becoming commonplace,” it is as risky to make fun as “burning a flag in an American Legion hall.” Almost all Americans, 95% she noted, profess a belief in God or some universal spirit, and 76% imagine Him as a heavenly father who actually pays attention to their prayers. Kaminer, herself an atheist, lamented that we have no Mark Twains and H. L. Menckens to counter today’s Jimmy Swaggarts and born-again Christians. Readers complained that she had suggested religious belief is childish, that “worshiping a supernatural deity . . . is like worrying about monsters in the closet that find you tasty enough to eat.” The New York Times called “offensive” her remark that the sacraments are “silly.” Others, however, supported her wholeheartedly. Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety (1999) continues her deconstruction of pop culture and piety. She finds New Age spiritual practices “painful stupidities that people embrace to ease their fears of death,” and she also laments our age’s “blind antipathy to reason.” {E; Free Inquiry, Fall 1999}
Kane, George (20th Century) Kane wrote “The Atkins-Craig Debate on God’s Existence: Points Not Made Are Points Lost,” a critical review of religion for Secular Nation (July-September 1998).
Kane, Hal (20th Century) Kane, a research associate at the Worldwatch Institute, has written for The Humanist concerning the world’s desperate conditions concerning food production. Kane is author of The Hour of Departure (1995).
Kane, James Alexander (1912—1980) Kane was a humanist, teacher, scholar, social reformer, linguist, and civil marriage celebrant. Raised a Roman Catholic, he renounced religion at maturity and was active in the Humanist Society of West Australia, of which he was prime founder. In addition he was involved with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, the United Nations Association, the Australia-China Society (he visited China in 1978), and the Council for Civil Liberties. {SWW}
Kane, Sarah (1971-1999) A provocative playwright, Kane committed suicide in a hospital room where she was being treated for depression. The daughter of a journalist, she grew up with a Christian-redemption outlook in a London suburb but rejected religion when seventeen, saying it involved “a spirit-filled, born-again lunacy.” The Bible, she found, was full of rape, mutilation, war, and pestilence. “Blasted,” her first play, appeared to promote depravity. A rampaging soldier rapes another man, then gouges out his eyes, eats his tongue, and forces him to cannibalize a dead baby. The Daily Mail called the work “a disgusting feast of filth.” “Cleansed” included a scene in which heroin is injected into an eyeball, amputation occurs, and a person is raped with a broom handle. Benedict Nightingale of The Times of London wrote in a review, “She is not the gloating opportunist that some reviewers of ‘Blasted’ thought. She has no less integrity than Pinter or Bond, but, God knows, I would hate to live in her head.” Her last play, “Crave,” ended with a suicide. “Some people seem to find released at the end of it,” the “enfante terrible of the British theater” said, “but I think it’s only the release of death. In my other plays it was the release of deciding to go on living despite the fact that it’s terrible.” {Warren Hoge, The New York Times, 25 February 1999}
KANSAS HUMANISTS • South Central Kansas Chapter of the Council for Secular Humanism, PO Box 3089, Wichita, Kansas 67201.
Kant, Immanuel (1724—1804) Kant’s critique of the proofs of God later contributed to forms of atheism. Although hardly a non-believer, Kant did disturb believers with his view that man and God are on the same level, and that our desire to please God is “a servile and pathological urge.” As for God, who will always remain unknown, “We can no more extend our stock of theoretical insight by mere ideas, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account.” Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft was added to the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1827. Zuckerstätter mentions that although Kant’s “critical philosophy” is a complex synthesis of rationalist dogmatism and empiricist skepticism, Kant remained a believer. Also, he held with Plato that the mind will continue to exist after death, without any body. Ironically, his Religion Within the Bounds of Pure (i.e. Mere) Reason (1792—1794) indicates disbelief in every one of the standing Christian dogmas—Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles, and the supernatural basis of morals. Singing in the churches, he pronounced, was mere bawling. Prayer, whether public or private, was a form of superstition in that it addressed an unseen world: “To kneel or prostrate himself on the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man.” In ethics, he was an extreme rationalist, holding that moral principles are objectively valid commands of the a priori reason. Like Plato, observes Robertson, Kant is finally occupied in discussing the “right fictions” for didactic purposes and ends “by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security.” McCabe called Kant “the ablest of the German philosophers,” adding that he “did good service in showing that the scholastic philosophy which still dominated Europe was purely subjective (in other words, word-spinning), but his own theory soon died, and his ethical philosophy almost gave back to mysticism what he had taken away. He mistook the analysis of the puritanical mind of an old bachelor (himself) for a study of the moral sense generally and concluded that its ‘categorical imperative’ implied a God as law-given and a future life as a reward. He thus became a non-Christian theist and in his third chief work disowned all supernatural religion.” “Kant is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate,” Bertrand Russell wrote in his History of Western Philosophy (1945). “His philosophy allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason. In Kant . . . the subjectivist tendency that begins with Descartes was carried to new extremes. There is an emphasis upon mind as opposed to matter, which leads in the end to the assertion that only mind exists.” {CE; CL; ER; EU, Rudolf Zuckerstätter; ILP; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Kapila (6th Century B.C.E.) Kapila was one of the earliest Hindu thinkers. His system is known as the Atheistic Philosophy. It is expounded in the Sankhya Karika, an important relic of bold rationalistic Indian thought. J. R. Ballantyne has translated his aphorisms. {BDF; CE}
Kapitza, Sergei (20th Century)
In 1993 Kapitza, a physicist at the Institute for Physical Problems, Moscow, and Chair of Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, was named a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism by the Council for Secular Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Kaplan, Justin (1925— )
Kaplan, an author who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, won a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1967. He has written Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (1966), Lincoln Steffens, A Biography (1974), and Mark Twain and His World (1974). He has edited Dialogues of Plato and The Pocket Aristotle (1956). Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author:
I’m uncomfortable with broad, over-used terms such as “humanism” (except in a purely historical sense) and even more uncomfortable with sub-species such as “theistic” and “secular.” But if, on pain of death, I had to assign specific values to “humanism” in general I’d list free inquiry, tolerance, and concern and then pray for relief.
{WAS, 10 April 1989}
Kaplan, Mordecai M. (1881—1983) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Rabbi Kaplan was founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist Movement. This fourth branch of Judaism (the others being Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform) is closest to the philosophic movement of secular humanism. Kaplan wrote Future of the American Jew (1981). {ER; HM2; HNS}
Kara, Maniben (Died in the 1970s) Kara, an associate of M. N. Roy, was a radical humanist and a leading trade union leader in Bombay. He was known for fighting for the rights of women at a time when that cause was not a popular one in India.
Karayan, Vagan (20th Century) Karayan, while a student at University College in Los Angeles, California, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Karim, Nehal (20th Century) Karim, a sociologist at the University of Dhaka, is Secretary General of the Assembly of Freethinkers in Bangladesh. Although secularism was once a fundamental of the constitution there, he told a 1995 meeting of major Indian humanist organizations, a freethought movement has been weak although one was formed in the late 1920s. There are few human rights organizations in Bangladesh, he lamented, and the freethought movement there is in its infancy. Karim is author of The Emergence of Nationalism in Bangladesh (1992). He participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. {New Humanist, February 1996}
Karlekar, Hiranmay (20th Century) Karlekar is managing editor of the daily Indian Express. At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s 1998 congress in Mumbai, he reviewed the century’s humanistic developments, suggesting that it started as a philosophy and was now moving into action. Karlekar called for global disarmament and stated that freedom as discussed by Erich Fromm and Habermas is crucial to humanism. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Karlfeldt, Erik Axel (1864—1931) A Swedish poet and Nobel Prize winner, Karlfeldt was the rare Laureate who protested that he had no right to the prize because he was little known outside his own country. His Arcadia Borealis (1938) showed he was somewhat mystical but was an agnostic. In “A Vagrant,” Karlfeldt wrote a couplet:
What’s your religion? What is your creed? I know only this: I know naught. {RE}
Karlin, Elizabeth (1944-1998) A prominent physician who directed an abortion clinic in Madison, Wisconsin, Karlin was dogged for years by religionists who were anti-abortionists. She was followed and stalked, but upon her death she was eulogized by Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, who said, “For years, day and night, she and her nurses endured harassment from demonstrators outside their clinic and their homes. She never wavered in her commitment to protect a woman’s right to choose.” Dr. Karlin was a donor to the Freedom From Religion Foundation. {Freethought Today, September 1998).
Karlsson, Mikael (20th Century) Karlsson, of the University of Iceland, is on the Executive Committee of The Hume Society, a group that is engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
KARMA A concept common to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, karma is a doctrine involving past and future reincarnations. For philosophic naturalists, it can neither be proved nor disproved and is a meaningless metaphysical concept, one incapable of being tested. However, in an apparently serious letter published in an April 1993 issue of Sri Lanka’s The Island, Dr. C. Godamunne of Kandy wrote as follows:
BEWARE Buddhists believe in rebirth. That is, a person can be born over and over again in this world (Samsara). It is due to your Karma. One can be born in the Animal World, Spirit World, Deva World, and Brahma Worlds. Lord Buddha was also born as a cobra, an elephant, a monkey, etc. So he was born in the Animal World, according to Jataka Katha (stories). So there is a chance that your parents may be born in the Animal World, due to their previous Karma. Say your father is born a bull and is slaughtered and its meat sold. If this meat is bought by your household and you eat it as a tasty dish then in short you are eating your own father’s flesh. So beware, you Buddhists, lest you devour your own dear parents, your relatives, your friends.
Karmin, Otto (1881—1920) Karmin was a Swiss freethinker and sociologist who was responsible for raising a monument to the Spanish freethought “martyr,” Michael Servetus. {RAT; TRI}
Karnik, V. B. (Deceased in the 1970s) Karnik, a humanist activist, edited the weekly Radical Humanist in India. He wrote M. N. Roy, A Political Biography; Strikes in India; and Trade Unions in India.
Karr, Barry (20th Century) Karr is executive director of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer. E-mail: <skeptinq@aol.com>. On the Web: <http://www.csicop.org/>.
Karr, Steve (20th Century) Karr, Barry Karr’s brother, has been a director of public relations for Free Inquiry.
Karsten, Rafael (1879—1956) Karsten, a Finnish non-theist, taught practical philosophy at the University of Helsinki. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Karve, R. V. (20th Century) In Bombay, India, Karve was an editor from 1931 to 1946 of Reason. A veteran rationalist and pioneer of family planning in India, he was prosecuted several times for his writings. {FUK}
Kasden, Lawrence Edward (20th Century) Kasden is a film director and screenwriter. He co-wrote “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) and “Return of the Jedi” (1982), and he wrote “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981). A videotape, “Larry Kasden, a Humanist in Hollywood,” is available from the Society for Humanistic Judaism, 28611 West Twelve Mile Road, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334.
Kasmar, Gene (1937— ) Kasmar is author of All the Obscenities in the Bible (1995), in which he focuses only on the King James version of the Bible. He includes such topics as prostitution, suicide, incest, homosexuality, and abortion (finding that the Bible is not against abortion). On the Web: <kerry@mtn.org>. {Gene Kasmar, Humanist in Canada, Autumn 1997; Gordon Stein, The American Rationalist, March-April 1996}
Kaspary, Joachim (19th Century) Kaspary, a humanitarian deist, was assisted by the aptly named Epenetus Earwaker at the National Secular Society’s outdoor meetings in London during the 1880s. {RSR}
Kato, Soichi (20th Century) Kato was a member of the New York Humanist Society. As executive director of the International Committee for Breaking the Language Barrier, he worked with government and corporations to improve international communications through the use of uniform signs and symbols.
Kathan, Melvin L. (20th Century) Kathan, a freethinker, wrote Key to Creeds (c. 1950). {GS}
Katz, Bernard (20th Century) Katz is a senior writer for The American Rationalist, has written for Truth Seeker, and is the author of freethought pamphlets. He is associated with Humanists of South Jersey (AHA). Katz taught in the Philadelphia secondary schools and also was a stock and commodities broker. His interest in religion, he has related, started when he tried to find the key to the irrationality of the stock market. As he examined religious beliefs, an area perhaps more irrational than the stock market, he drew parallels. The commonality he found was that they both work on high emotions, and neither is predictable. He found that there are few rationalities in either area. Ibn Warraq has complained that Katz in The Ways of an Atheist (1999) has utilized some of his ideas, almost word for word, without citing his own Why I Am Not A Muslim (1995). (See entry for New Jersey Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Jonathan Katz, Actor/Producer/Comedian ent Internet Movie Database
Katz is probably best known for his lead role in Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist on Comedy Central. He is also a co-creator of the series.
He appeared on the July 19th, 1999 installment of Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect on ABC where the producers were trying to build a religiously diverse panel to discuss the meaning of life. Actor Patrick Duffy represented the devout Buddhist. There was a renegade Bishop and a born-again Christian as well. Ironically, Maher introduced Katz incorrectly as a "practicing Jew".
The planned discussion of the meaning of life was overtaken by the untimely death of JFK Jr., his wife and her sister. Here's an excerpt:
Bill Maher: What would the Jews say about this?
Jonathan Katz: I think the Jewish perspective on this would be "Oi --
[ Laughter ]
-- not again."
[ Applause ]
Just to clarify what you said earlier, Bill, I am Jewish, but I was raised superstitious.
[ Laughter ]
I actually don't believe in God. I do believe, though, that you shouldn't step on the cracks on the sidewalk.
[ Laughter ]
Bill: I see.
Jonathan: And science will bear me out, that it actually is dangerous.
Bill: But you do actu -- you don't believe in God at all?
Jonathan: I do not believe in God.
Bill: Really? So you are atheistic?
Jonathan: Yes.
Bill: Okay.
Jonathan: And my parents were atheists.
---
The official Dr. Katz website may be found at http://www.comcentral.com/katz/. Katz, Jonathan (1 Jan 1947 - ) Katz, who is known for playing the lead role in “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” on television’s Comedy Central, is co-creator of the series. On Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect program on ABC, one installment showed producers trying to build a religiously diverse panel for the purpose of discussing the meaning of life. Actor Patrick Duffy represented the devout Buddhist. Maher introduced Katz as a “practicing Jew.” The following is an excerpt about the untimely death of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and her sister, followed:
Maher: What would the Jews say about this? Katz: I think the Jewish perspective on this would be "Oi. . . not again.” [ Laughter ] [ Applause ] Just to clarify what you said earlier, Bill, I am Jewish, but I was raised superstitious. [ Laughter ] I actually don't believe in God. I do believe, though, that you shouldn't step on the cracks on the sidewalk. [ Laughter ] Maher: I see. Katz: And science will bear me out, that it actually is dangerous. Maher: But you do actu. . . you don't believe in God at all? Katz: I do not believe in God. Maher: Really? So you are atheistic? Katz: Yes. Maher: OK. Katz: And my parents were atheists. (The official Dr. Katz website is at http://www.comcentral.com/katz/) {CA}
Katz, Zev (20th Century) With Renee Kogel, Katz edited Judaism in a Secular Age—An Anthology of Secular Humanistic Jewish Thought.
Kaufmann, Paul (1922— ) Kaufmann is an Australian humanist, rationalist, civil libertarian, and public servant. The descendant of four Jewish grandparents, he had left Austria for England, then served in the non-combatant part of the Australian Army. In the late 1960s he joined the Humanist Society of Canberra, eventually becoming President. With Geraldine Spencer, he campaigned to have the Australian census question on religion changed to read: “No religion, write none.” Kaufmann contributed to humanist journals and newsletters and was active in civil liberties, human rights, and voluntary euthanasia organizations. {FUS}
Kaufmann, Walter (1918—1991) One of the professors of philosophy at Princeton University whose popularity was proved by the immense number of students who chose his classes, Walter Kaufmann was raised a Lutheran. Faith of a Heretic (1963) described his inability to believe that Jesus was God, resulting in his becoming an orthodox Jew. He then left religion, toying with such terms as freethinker, atheist, and agnostic but preferring to be a heretic, one whose opinion “is contrary to the fundamental doctrine or creed of any particular church.” He wrote Nietzsche (1950), a work which fails adequately to describe Nietzsche’s bad side, according to Paul Edwards. Kaufmann also wrote From Shakespeare to Existentialism (1959) and Critique of Religion and Philosophy (1961). Although he did not sign Humanist Manifesto II, he was one of fifty-eight who in 1980 signed its sequel, A Secular Humanist Declaration. Kaufmann once wrote, “Faith in immortality, like belief in Satan, leaves unanswered the ancient question: Is God unable to prevent suffering and thus not omnipotent? Or is he able but not willing to prevent it and thus not merciful? And is he just?” {SHD}
Kaula, William Mason (1926— ) Kaula, born in Australia of United States citizens, is an educator, geophysicist, and secular humanist. From 1963 to 1992, he taught geophysics and space physics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Kaula is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has written Theory of Satellite Geodesy (1966) and Introduction to Planetary Physics (1968).
Kaunda, Kenneth David [President] (1924— ) Kaunda, a former schoolteacher and Zambian politician, was president of Zambia from 1964—1991. In 1953 he opposed the formation of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyassaland. His party was banned in 1959, he was imprisoned, but upon being released he formed a new independence party, the United National Independence Party. In 1962 he rejected a British proposal for Northern Rhodesia that he said would perpetuate white supremacy. In 1963 he pressed for dissolution of the federation which had formed, and the following year he became president of the new nation and was re-elected five times. In the 1991 election, however, he lost. Kaunda has received the Nehru Award for International Understanding and the Knight of Collar Order of Pius XII. Among his books are Black Government (with C. M. Morris, 1960) and Humanism in Africa and a Guide to Its Implementation (1967). A patriarch and an autocrat, Kauanda talks about “God’s people” and his “philosophy of humanism” and “consciencism.” Kaunda, who led his country for twenty-seven years, is said to have the cultural distinction of being an atheistic humanist and of preaching humanism, “a philosophy that synthesised Christian socialism and traditional African values.” Although Zambian Humanism was ideal in theory, it did not hide being a cover-up for Kaunda’s one-man rule. His dictatorship was overthrown in 1992. {CE; DGC}
Kaur: See entry for Kaur Kawaljeet.
Kautsky, Karl (1854—1938) Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity (1925) was highly negative and resulted in criticism by Christian leaders. {RAT}
Kavanaugh, James J. (20th Century) Kavanaugh wrote The Struggle of the Unbeliever (1967) and God Lives (1993). {GS}
Kawaljeet, Kaur (1956- )
Kawaljeet is one of the editors and a regular contributor to Buddhiwadi (Rationalist), a Hindi quarterly published by Buddhiwadi Foundation. She lectures regularly on computer literacy and the scientific outlook at Priya Academy. Also, she manages Buddhiwadi Study and Research Center, organizations established by the Buddhiwadi Foundation. Kawaljeet participated in the 1999 Humanist World Congress at Mumbai, India, where she delivered a talk on Cultural Prerequisites of Freedom. She also attended the IHEU General Assembly at Mumbai as a representative of the Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj. Her “How I Became a Rationalist” and her brief biography are available on the Internet.
E- mail: <bobsoft@vsnl.com> and <brs_patna@yahoo.com>. On the Web:http://www.myfreeoffice.com/buddhiwadi>. (See entry for Nath Ramendra, her husband.)
Kawaljeet Kaur, Atheist Activist society
Dr. Kawaljeet Kaur is the Managing Trustee of the Buddhiwadi Foundation, a registered, non-profit, educational trust for promoting rationalism, humanism and atheism. She is one of the founder members of Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj (Bihar Rationalist Society), which is a membership organization affiliated to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Dr. Kawaljeet is presently the General Secretary and Treasurer of Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj. She has represented the organization at the 14th IHEU World Congress held at Mumbai, India, from 10 to 14 January 1999. She delivered a talk at the Congress on "Cultural prerequisites of Freedom". Among other things she has clearly declared in her talk:
"Traditional religious ideas like god and fate, which deny freedom and responsibility, are not compatible with the culture of freedom... We must adopt logical and scientific thinking, and get rid of erroneous ideas like god and fate if we are to develop a culture of freedom."
Several letters, reports, articles and interviews of Dr. Kawaljeet have been published in different popular magazines and newspapers, including leading newspapers published from Patna. She is a regular contributor to Buddhiwadi, the Hindi quarterly published by Buddhiwadi Foundation. In one of her articles titled "How I became a Rationalist" she says:
"Many a times in past, when I declared that I was an atheist, people used to ask whether I believed in good human conduct or not! I was very much amused by such questions. I believe that blind belief in god obstructs the growth of knowledge and morality. Ethics ought to be independent of religion. A person can become good only if she or he is free from the fear of god."
Dr. Kawaljeet's brief biography and her articles "Cultural prerequisites of Freedom" and "How I became a Rationalist" are available on the web site of the Buddhiwadi Foundation. It is also possible to search for her through Yahoo.
Kawamura, Matasuke (20th Century)
A member of the Japan Academy, Kawamura is Justice of the Supreme Court in Japan. He is a Unitarian.
Kawanzaa
Kawanzaa, a Kiswahill word that means “first,” is a holiday based upon the African tradition of celebrating the harvesting of the first fruits. It was introduced for use by African Americans in 1966 by Dr. Ron Karenga. In a seven-day celebration (December 26th-January 1st), Nguzo Saba (Seven Principles) are taken up, one per day: Umoja (unity); kujichagulia (self-determination); ujima (collective work and responsibility); ujamaa (cooperative economics); nia (purpose); kuumba (creativity); and imani (faith). Symbols that are included are the straw mat (jkeka); the candle holder (kinara); the seven candles (mishumaa saba); corn (vibunzi or muhinki); a unity cup (kikombe); crops (mazao); and gifts (zawadi).
Kay, Robert E. (20th Century) A psychiatrist, Kay is a Pennsylvania Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has written “Ten Basic Ideas for Raising Children” (Freethought Today, April 1999).
Kazantzakis, Nikos (1883—1957) Kazantzakis, the Greek author of Zorba the Greek (1946), also wrote an ambitious work, The Odyssey, a Modern Sequel (1938), which includes the outlooks of Gautama, Jesus, Nietzsche, Lenin, and others. His Die letzte Veruchung was included on the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1953. {CE; ILP, Additus, 5 December 1961}
Kazi, Abdul Dadir (20th Century) A freethinker in Karachi, Pakistan, Kazi wrote Sartre and God (1975), a study of Sartre’s atheistic existentialism. {GS}
Kazin, Alfred (1915-1998) Kazin’s God and the American Writer (1997) states that he is not interested in a particular artist’s profession of belief but, rather, “in the imagination he brings to his tale of religion in human affairs.” The concept of God, he concludes, figures importantly in the American literary imagination, God and man “eternally watchful of the other.” He found Clemens and T. S. Eliot anti-Semitic. Hawthorne, he found, would not believe in God but could not escape the “power of blackness” that tormented his Calvinist ancestors: “In the depths of the heart,” Hawthorne wrote, “is a tomb and a dungeon.” Emerson, who was preceded by eight generations of clergymen, refused such a dungeon and overthrew organized religion altogether, proclaiming that divinity lies within: the “infinitude of the private mind.” Whitman, although “drenched in religion,” dared to come up with his own creed, a self-celebration and ecstatic, world-embracing sexuality in which God is one’s bedfellow and “sleeps at my side all night.” Emily Dickinson thought Whitman was being “disgraceful” with such an idea. Kazin found that she “explained the religious quest better than anyone, and with justice to all, when she tossed off in a letter, ‘It is true that the unknown is the largest need of intellect, although for this no one thinks to thank God.’ ” Although Kazin admired Dickinson as having “the most penetrating intellect,” his favorites being Melville and Lincoln, two tortured souls who wanted to believe in God in the face of annihilation. Melville, Kazin held, retained a faith “even if he did not always know what and where and whom to believe.” Lincoln, however, remained the rationalist who joined no church. Kazin, who was not an observant Jew, arranged for his cremains to be given to Judith Dunford, who asked that his ashes be consigned to the East River in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. (See entry for Jewish Authors.) {The New York Times, 23 July 1999}
Keane, Augustus Henry (1833—1912) Keane, an anthropologist, was educated for the Catholic priesthood but discarded his orders and his creed, taking to travel and the study of ethnology. In 1883 he was appointed professor of Hindustani at University College. His works include Man: Past and Present (1899), Ethnology (1901), and The World’s Peoples (1908). {RAT}
Keane, John (20th Century) Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995) was written by the Australian-born John Keane, a professor of politics at the University of Westminster in England and director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy. In the biography, Keane found seventy new Paine selections that previously were not listed in other bibliographies. His new bibliography, The Writings of Thomas Paine, 1737—1809, contains over six hundred individual contributions by Paine. Keane is critical of David Freeman Hawke, finding that he was guilty of “sniping.” He wondered “why Hawke ever bothered to write a biography of Paine.” Moncure Conway, although he wrote a valuable and fully documented sourcebook, is accused of “sermonising.” Although Jack Fruchtman Jr. found Paine “something of a country bumpkin,” Keane disagrees, noting that “the world’s chief public defender of republican democracy” mixed with individuals who may have had unorthodox religious views and were religious Dissenters. But, wrote Paine in the 18th century in what many find is a decidedly contemporary viewpoint, “I have always considered monarchy to be a silly contemptible thing. . . . I compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there is a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company see what it is, they burst into laughter.” (See entry for Thomas Paine.) {Colin McCall, “Modern Messages—From the 18th Century,” The Freethinker, June 1995; David Powell, “Books,” New Humanist, May 1995}
Kearney, Sean (20th Century) Kearney holds that “no one has made a greater and more lasting contribution to the development of Free Thought in Ireland than John Toland.” {New Humanist, November 1997}
Keary, Charles Francis (1848—1917) Keary was on the staff of the British Museum, and his rationalist views are set forth in Pursuit of Reason (1910). He put Christian doctrines disdainfully aside and believed only in the existence of the Absolute. {RAT}
Keats, John (1795—1821) In his twenties, Keats decided against becoming a surgeon and became one of England’s leading poets. The critics attacked his Endymion (1818), but his poems and sonnets are now considered consummate examples of romanticism. These include “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and the unfinished “Hyperion.” Keats emphatically rejected Christianity, which in an 1816 work he said is “dying like an outburnt lamp.”
Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition
The church bells toll a melancholy round, Calling the people to some other prayers, Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares, More Hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound. Surely the mind of man is closely bound In some black spell; seeing that each one tears Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs, And converse high of those with glory crown’d. Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp— A chill as from a tomb, did I not know That they are going like an outburnt lamp; That ‘tis their sighing, wailing ere’ they go Into oblivion;—that fresh flowers will grow, And many glories of immortal stamp.
The details of his death at such a young age are not widely known. In February 1820, he had entered his lodgings in Wentworth Place, staggering like a drunk. His friend, Charles Brown, heard Keats cough and say, “Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see the blood.” With his background in medicine, he looked at the blood for a moment, then said, “I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood. I cannot be deceived in that color. That drop of blood is my death warrant. I must die.” His diagnosis of tuberculosis was correct, and “he was to die the same slow and painful death he had witnessed his brother endure only a year before,” Scott Slater and Alec Solomita have noted. He recovered somewhat but had relapses, suffering intermittently, they added, “from delusions of persecution—on the one hand, blaming his illness on literary critics and on the other, blaming Fanny Brawne, for not sleeping with him.” Agreeing to go to Italy with a friend, painter Joseph Severn, Keats threatened suicide several times but became better by the time they reached Rome. Several weeks before he died at the age of twenty-six, Keats told Severn he wanted no name engraved on his gravestone. He simply wanted the words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” On December 10th, upon suffering a hemorrhage, Keats staggered about his room crying, “This day shall be my last!” Severn previously had hidden all vehicles of self-destruction (knives, forks, drugs), and Keats was unable to kill himself. But every time the physician came Keats would ask, “How long is this posthumous life of mine to last?” On February 24th, Severn heard Keats calling out, “Lift me up for I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—thank God it has come.” Severn then held Keats in his arms, their hands clasped for the next seven hours. After breaking out into a sweat, Keats whispered, “Don’t breathe on me—it comes like ice.” He then died very quietly. W. Sharp, who knew him well, said Keats, who did not believe in God and used the word only in a figurative sense, also had no belief in a future life. Like Shelley and Byron, Keats was not buried in England but near the pyramid of Cestius in Rome’s old Protestant cemetery. Severn failed to follow the Keats request for a simple gravestone, choosing instead, “This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who, on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraved on his tomb stone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.’ ” The Keats name is not on the gravestone, but it is found on the adjacent Severn gravestone: “devoted friend and death-bed companion of John Keats whom he lived to see numbered among the immortal poets of England.” {CB; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Keenan, Maynard James ( ) Keenan is a recording artist, the frontman for groups called Tool and A Perfect Circle. The five musicians who form his circle have collaborated with such bands as Nine Inch Nails, Orgy, Rage Against the Machines, Guns ‘N Roses, the Vandals, the Deftones, and Tori Amos. The perfect circle, he has explained, is the reflection of eternity: “It has no beginning and it has no end—and if you put several circles over each other, then you get a spiral.” Commenting about the names of real and mythological people on Mer des Noms, Keenan who once said the Bible contains fairy tales explained
A lot of the names of the songs are actually people I do know in real life and some elements of their lives seem to be the same as elements in the lives or stories of mythological figures. A lot of names in America and Europe have their roots in Latin and Greek words. A lot of them go back to archetypes and their stories. It's amazing, isn't it? If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes. There are hundreds of myths that are talking about virgin births or murder. It's really hard to find out what happened first: Was it something that happened to people in their lives and it got turned into a myth, or was there a myth and people tried to copy it somehow? This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on T.V. everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing. -{CA}
Keene, Charles Samuel (1823—1891)
Keene, one of the best-known Punch artists of his time, was a Gold Medalist of the 1890 Paris Exhibition. During his last illness, according to his biographer G. S. Layard, Holman Hunt tried to convince him of a future life. Keene, a thorough rationalist, replied, “Do you really believe this? I can’t think so.” {RAT; RE; TRI}
Keim, Karl Theodor (1825—1878) Keim was a German rationalist and a professor of theology at Zürich. His rationalism hindered his promotion, and he was an invalid most of his days. He is chiefly known for the History of Jesus of Nazara (1867—1872) and Primitive Christianity (1878). {BDF}
Keiser, C. J. (20th Century) Keiser, on the basis of his published views, was originally asked to sign Humanist Manifesto I. He never did. {EW}
Keith, Arthur [Sir] (1866—1955) Sir Arthur Keith was a director of the Rationalist Press Association when Bertrand Russell was its president. He also became an honorary associate. Keith has critiqued Clifton Fadiman’s editing of I Believe (1939). In that volume, twenty-two eminent thinkers had been asked in 1931 to summarize briefly their philosophic outlooks. Then, in 1939, they were asked to revise their comments: “Of the 22 men and women who contributed originally to these pages, only two [Hilaire Belloc, Dean Inge] regard the Creator—God, the One, omnipotent and personal—as having the form and properties set forth in the Book of Genesis. . . . Yet, I am far from claiming that the anthropomorphic God is dead; the most we can say is that he is dying. We humans are weak-kneed beings. Most of us still demand a God, cast in our own mold—one who can give succor when approached in prayer. An emotion has called Him into being.” Keith wrote The Place of Prejudice in Modern Civilization (1931). (See entry for Spirit.) {CE; HNS; JM; RE; TRI}.
Keith, Brian (20th Century)
Keith is Vice President of the Humanist Association of Ottawa, Canada.
Keith, George [Earl Marischal] (1685—1778) Keith, a Scottish soldier, 10th earl marischal (Lord Marshall), friend of David Hume, and Jacobite, was appointed captain of the Guard by Queen Anne. When his property was confiscated for aiding the Pretender, he fled to the Continent and was in high favor, as was his brother James, with Frederick the Great. Keith was appointed ambassador to Paris in 1751, governor of Neuchâtel (1752), and ambassador to Spain (1758). According to McCabe, Keith was “a very cultivated man, a friend of Voltaire, and a drastic deist. His biographer Mrs. Caithell says that ‘in almost every letter he writes there is a jibe against some part or other of ecclesiastical lamas, as he called them.’ ” D’Alembert said in a funeral oration that Keith was “a man of pure and classic morals.” Although eventually pardoned by George II of Britain, Keith remained for the rest of his life in Prussia. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Keith, James Francis Edward (1696—1758) Keith was an eminent military commander. He joined the army of the Pretender and was wounded in 1715 at Sheriffmuir. Afterwards, he served with distinction in Spain and in Russia, rising to high favor under the Empress Elizabeth. In 1647 he took service with Frederick the Great as field-marshal and became Governor of Berlin. Carlyle calls him “a very clear-eyed, sound observer of men and things. Frederick, the more he knows him, likes him the better.” From their correspondence it is evident Keith shared the skeptical opinions of Frederick. Marshal Keith fell in the battle of Hochkirch, 1758. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Keleman, Lawrence (20th Century) Keleman is author of Permission to Believe: Four Rational Approaches to God’s Existence (1990). It is anti-atheist.
Kellam, Paul (20th Century) Kellam, a founding editor of Inc. and a managing editor of Consumer Reports, is an active member of the Free Inquiry Society of Central Florida. His wife, Eloise Roberts Kellam (1928-1998), was also a secular humanist.
Keller, Harvey (20th Century) Keller, Secretary of the Secular Humanist Society of San Antonio, Texas, is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Keller, Helen Adams (1880—1968) Blind and deaf since the age of two, Keller according to her mother had “not been ill a day since ‘the illness,’ ” or so she told the governess, Annie Sullivan, when she took on the job of educating the six-year-old. Although the illness was called “brainfever,” it might have been meningitis. Annie had the major problem of communicating with her charge and, as brought out by biographer Van Wyck Brooks in 1956, somehow was able to understand the connection between w-a-t-e-r and the water that was poured over her hand. “I understood,” she explained later, “that it was possible for me to communicate with other people by these signs. Thoughts that ran forward and backward came to me quickly—thoughts that seemed to start in my brain and spread all over me.” Nevertheless, she eventually graduated with honors in 1904 from Radcliffe and earned the world’s attention for her accomplishments. Keller’s knowledge of religion depended heavily upon those who transmitted their own views on the subject, a condition similarly experienced by children reared to accept their parents’ authoritative views. In The Story of My Life (1903), she wrote,
There is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much so that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read through it from beginning to end. I do not think that the knowledge I have gained of its history and sources compensates me for the unpleasant details it has forced upon my attention.
In The World I Live In” (1908) Keller commented about smells:
But, when advised by Alexander Graham Bell that “a day must come when love, which is more than friendship, will knock at the door of your heart and demand to be let in,” Keller responded, “I can’t imagine a man wanting to marry me. I should think it would seem like marrying a statue.” To a 1922 proposal of marriage by mail, she responded,
In 1940 Keller wrote Let Us Have Faith, describing her faith in the future. That future included knowing about the 1957 William Gibson television play, “The Miracle Worker,” describing her early life. The play enjoyed 700 performances beginning in 1959, following which a movie was made in 1962. In 1965, although she was incapacitated, she was one of twenty women elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s Fair. She and Eleanor Roosevelt received the most votes. In his review of Dorothy Herrmann’s Helen Keller: A Life (1998), John Updike in The New Yorker (10 August 1998) relates the Alabama family’s background: Helen’s mother was related to the Massachusetts Adamses and to the orator Edward Everett. Her father was “a moody Confederate veteran and small-town newspaper editor of Swiss descent, a person who died deeply in debt in 1896. Whereas Annie was “a decidedly disaffected Catholic,” Helen was “a rapt Swedenborgian,” “a devotee of both Christ and Marx,” “an ardent socialist, pacifist, and suffragist.” The two, Annie told Herrmann, “had such fundamentally different conceptions of life that they would have loathed one another had they met under ordinary circumstances.” Although Updike is convinced that Keller was a Swedenborgian, Keller was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. Potter, who knew her and conversed with her, considered her a freethinker. {CE}
Keller, Paul (20th Century) Gnostic atheism, writes Keller in The American Rationalist (January-February, 1994), goes one step further than atheism. Whereas atheism claims there is no defensible evidence for the claim that there is a God, gnostic atheism is the position that it is known that there is no God or other supernatural beings.
Keller, Robert (20th Century) Keller is Treasurer of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio, Texas. The world’s population, at 5.7 billion in 1995, has exponentially increased more than two times since World War II. Kellert, in The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society (1996), lamented that it is ironically difficult to convince 5.7 billion people that we need to stop rather than increase our numbers. He added that we must stop converting our plains and forests to grazing and croplands and must stop our despoiling the world’s oceanic systems. He suggested several approaches to tackle the problem:
• naturalistic (we must again take pleasure in nature) • ecologistic-scientific (we must make a systematic study of nature) • esthetic (we must learn to appreciate the beauty of nature) • symbolic (we must use nature in communication and thought) • humanistic (we must combine the humanistic with the scientific when dealing with nature)) • moralistic (we must include the moralistic in our outlook toward nature) • dominionistic (we must see the need to control nature) • negativistic (we must show that even such creatures as snakes and spiders are good)
The more education people have, Keller states, the more they stress the importance of humanistic, moralistic, and scientific values. With E. O. Wilson, he is understandably alarmed that an estimated three species per hour are disappearing from Earth, the result being an ecological Armageddon.
Kelleher, Anne (20th Century) Kelleher, a philosopher and broadcaster, took a leading part in defending humanism in England’s Channel Four television program “Beyond Belief: Religion on Trial.” She also has been an interviewer on “Choices, Choices” and a program for children, “Bright Sparks.”
Kellerman, Lois (20th Century) Kellerman was a young mother when she received intensive training in Ethical Leadership in the 1980s. She became a Leader in Queens, New York, in 1983. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)
Kelley, Alec E. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Kelley was a professor at the University of Arizona. {HM2}
Kelley, George (20th Century) Kelley is Co-Director with Margaret Downey of the Thomas Paine Pennsylvania Memorial Committee (Box 342, Pocopson, PA 19366).
Kelley, Pat (20th Century) Kelley, a computer analyst, is the person who is webmaster of the Sacramento Freethought Web site: <http://www.rthoughtsrfree.org>.
Kellgren, Johan Henric (1751—1795) Kellgren was the first Scandinavian author to take an explicit anti-Christian stance. He was a poet, critic, and editor. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.) {RAT}
Kelly, John (20th Century) Kelley is active in the American Humanist Association chapter in Phoenix, Arizona. (See entry for Arizona Atheists, Humanists.)
Kelly, John E. (19th Century) In Sydney, Australia, J. E. Kelly edited Stockwhip (1875—1877), which became Satirist. {FUK}
Kelly, Tim (20th Century) Kelly in 1999 became a Board Member of Cincinnati’s Free Inquiry Group. “I was originally reared in the Christian belief system (conservative),” he wrote for their newsletter, “but over time (over a course of some ten years), as a result of personal study and inquiry, left the Christian faith.” He found the secular humanist group on the Internet. A researcher and writer, he owns and operates a corporate health facility center and teaches classes in the martial arts.
Kelso, John (19th Century) A freethinker, Kelso wrote Deity Analyzed in Six Lectures (c. 1891). {GS}
Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny) (1809—1893) Kemble, an actress and playwright, was a Unitarian. She was an ardent writer against slavery. Kemble was the elder daughter of the famed English actor and manager, Charles Kemble, who in 1822 was manager of Covent Garden. Her aunt, Sarah Kemble Siddons, was the most distinguished actress of the Roger Kemble (1721—1802) family. In 1829 Fanny made her debut as Juliet under her father’s management at Covent Garden, and she enjoyed such success that she went on to be the original Julia in Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback, written expressly for her. In 1834 she married Pierce Butler, a Unitarian who owned plantations in Georgia with seven or eight hundred slaves to run them. But her feelings about slavery, particularly when she broke the law by teaching one to read, led her to write “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.” In her diary she wrote, “The estate returned a full income under his [the overseer’s] management, and such men have nothing to do with sick slaves; they are tools, to be mended only if they can be made available again; if not, to be flung by as useless, without further expense of money, time, or trouble.” After several years of arguing about such issues, the Butlers separated. Fanny returned to England, wrote against slavery for the London Times, and finished her first novel at the age of 80. {CE; EG; U; UU} Kemble, Frances (Fanny) in CA
Kemble, Frances Anne (Fanny) (27 Nov 1809-15 Jan 1893)
Kemble, an actress and playwright, was a Unitarian. An ardent writer against slavery, Kemble was the elder daughter of the famed English actor and manager, Charles Kemble, who in 1822 was manager of Covent Garden. Her aunt, Sarah Kemble Siddons, was the most distinguished actress of the Roger Kemble (1721—1802) family. In 1829 Fanny made her debut as Juliet under her father’s management at Covent Garden, and she enjoyed such success that she went on to be the original Julia in Sheridan Knowles’s The Hunchback, written expressly for her.
In 1834 she married Pierce Butler, a Unitarian who owned plantations in Georgia with seven or eight hundred slaves to run them. But her feelings about slavery, particularly when she broke the law by teaching one to read, led her to write the “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839.” In her diary she wrote, “The estate returned a full income under his [the overseer’s] management, and such men have nothing to do with sick slaves; they are tools, to be mended only if they can be made available again; if not, to be flung by as useless, without further expense of money, time, or trouble.” After several years of arguing about such issues, the Butlers separated. Fanny returned to England, wrote against slavery for the London Times, and finished her first novel at the age of eighty. {CE; EG; U; UU}
Kemerling, Donald (20th Century) Kemerling is vice president in Kansas City, Missouri, of the Eupraxophy Center.
Kemler, Edgar (20th Century) Kemler wrote The Irreverent Mr. Mencken (1950). {GS}
Kempers, Anne Grimshaw (20th Century) Kempers, a Unitarian, is author of Heart of Lightness: Experiences of a Peace Corps Volunteer in Africa (1993). She spent two years in Zaire.
Kennaway, Ernest Laurence [Sir] (1881—1958) A pathologist, Kennaway wrote Some Religious Illusions in Art, Literature, and Experience (1953). {GS}
Kennedy, C. F. (20th Century) Kennedy edits The Bibliofantasiac. E-mail: <tangle@interlog.com>.
Kennedy, Dan (20th Century) A Unitarian, Kennedy covers media and politics for the Boston Phoenix. “From the Inside Out: Helping Ex-Prisoners Make the Transition” (World, June-August 1998) describes how volunteers helping prisoners “quickly found they were learning as much as they were teaching. They couldn’t provide ex-convicts with the counseling and assistance they needed without stumbling into issues of class and of how the culture conspires against the despised and downtrodden.”
Kennedy, Florynce (1916— ) Kennedy is an African American freethinker whose television programs frequently support liberal causes, including women’s rights to have abortions. A lesbian and lawyer, she who co-wrote Abortion Rap: Avortement Droit Des Femmes. {Martin Duberman, Stonewall}
Kennedy, John F. (20th Century) Kennedy, while a student at New Mexico State University, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald [President] (1917—1963) The 35th United States President was his nation’s first Catholic President, which was considered a milestone by many inasmuch as certain citizens had mistakenly believed that ours is “one nation under a Protestant God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” To his credit, at forty-three the youngest President to hold office, John F. Kennedy announced,
Whatever one’s religion in his private life may be, for the officeholder, nothing takes precedence over his oath to uphold the Constitution and all its parts—including the First Amendment and the strict separation of church and state.
As pointed out by Gore Vidal and others, President Kennedy did not separate the state from his love life, enjoying numerous eighteenth-century-like amoral sexual escapades within the White House. (See entry for Robert Frost.) {CE; Gore Vidal, The New Yorker, 1 December 1997}
Kennedy, Joseph Patrick II (1952— ) Kennedy, the son of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy, is a Massachusetts congressman. Sheila Rauch Kennedy, whom he divorced, wrote in Shattered Faith (1997) that she had vomited when her ostensibly religious husband had asked for an annulment so he could marry a longtime aide, Beth Kelly, in a Catholic ceremony. She refused to accept an annulment, which would have meant their marriage had been invalid, because of the moral implications for their twin sons. Inasmuch as the Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, the only way to remarry is to declare the marriage invalid in the first place. “I don’t actually believe this stuff,” her book reports he told her. “It’s just Catholic gobbledygook. . . . You can’t be stupid enough to believe this.” {The New York Times 24 April 1997}
Kennedy, Ludovic [Sir] (1919— ) A writer and broadcaster married to the Scottish ballerina Moira Shearer, Kennedy wrote an autobiography, On My Way to the Club (1989). He contributed to the BBC’s “Panorama” (1960—1963) and produced a number of television series. “We’re in an age where it’s not possible to accept supernatural beliefs,” he told a Sunday Telegraph interviewer in 1994. “In five hundred years God will simply be seen as myth and allegory. . . . There have been millions of gods in human history. This is just another one. We do not believe today in the gods the Greeks and Romans worshiped, but they did. I mean, why do people believe now there’s just one? There could be hundreds up there watching us.” Kennedy told the interviewer that he had discarded religion because he had wasted 1,300 hours on religious observances at school. His preoccupation with euthanasia and “dying well,” he explained, are not solely connected with atheism, for he knows many believers who are also interested in advancing the idea. “It’s only the Catholics who are implacable enemies of euthanasia,” he added. “That wicked old man the Pope,” whereupon he quoted the Pope’s words with feeling: “Suffering, especially during the last moments of life, has a special place in God’s saving plan.” To which Kennedy responded, “Unmitigated tosh!” In 1986, Kennedy was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In 1994, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him. In 1996 Sir Ludovic was named President of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and in 1997 he became an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. All in the Mind: a Farewell to God (1999) discusses how Margaret Knight’s radio talks in the 1950s played a large part in secularizing Britain, swinging large numbers of people away from belief in God. Terry Sanderson found the book of interest but felt that it is no longer important to attack Christianity in the old ways, that Kennedy was, “regrettably, tilting at windmills that are already derelict—at least in Britain.” His Testament: Reflections of a Born Again Heretic confirmed what in 1996 he told the Daily Telegraph:
I haven’t believed in God since I first went to school. He exists only in the mind and is otherwise completely redundant. I had to undergo at least 1,300 hours of heavy Christian indoctrination—what a terrible waste of time. {The Freethinker, July 1994 and February 1997; The Freethinker, July 1997}
Kenney, Anthony (20th Century) See the entry for Richard Dawkins, who describes Kenney—the President of the British Academy—and his ability to renounce the Catholic orders and become an independent thinker.
Kenny, Courney (1847—1930) Kenny was a university professor of law and a Member of Parliament who made an attempt to get his Religious Prosecution Abolition Bill (1887) passed in order to fight the blasphemy law. The attempt was unsuccessful. {GS}
Kenny, L. B. (20th Century) Commencing in 1992, Dr. Kenny became chairperson of the Indian Rationalist Association.
Kenrick, John (19th Century)
Both Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe, historians of Egypt, were Unitarians. {JMR}
Kenrick, William (c. 1720—1779) Under the name of Ontologos, Kenrick published a 1751 essay to prove that the soul is not immortal. His first poetic production was a volume of Epistles, Philosophical and Moral (1759), an avowed defense of skepticism and addressed to Lorenzo. In 1775 he commenced the London Review, and the following year he attacked Soame Jenyns’s work on Christianity. Kenrick translated some of the works of Buffon, Rousseau, and Voltaire. {BDF; RAT}
Kent, Gordon (20th Century) Kent, leader of a Humanist Society in Moline, Illinois, wrote Humanism (1944) and Humanism for the Millions (1951). {EW; GS; HNS}
Kent, Jack (20th Century) A retired Unitarian minister, Kent is author of The Psychological Origins of the Resurrection Myth (1999). Antony Flew described the work: “Of all the accounts I know of the origin of the belief in the physical resurrection from the dead of Jesus, the son of Joseph, and hence of the rise of the Christian Church, the account here presented seems to me the most plausible.” {New Humanist, September 1999}
Kent, Theodore C. (1923— ) Kent, a Unitarian minister, started a Humanist society in Moline, Illinois, in 1933. Edwin H. Wilson said Kent had a reputation “for certain sensational and erratic tendencies, such as dimming the lights with a rheostat during his meditational services and easing the lights back on when he got to the ‘Amen.” However, Wilson added that Kent was an excellent orator who was successful in reaching the hypothetical “man on the street.” His paperback “Humanist for the Millions” was issued in several editions. The author in 1995 of Mapping the Human Genome: Reality, Morality, and Deity, Kent wrote of the moral implications of the scientific effort to identify all the genes that make up DNA.
Kent, William (20th Century) Kent wrote Lift Up Your Heads, An Anthology for Freethinkers (1948). {GS}
KENT (England) HUMANISTS For information, write M. Rogers, 2 Lyndhurst Road, Broadstairs CT 10 1DD; telephone 01843 864506.
KENTUCKY HUMANISTS Kentucky has the following groups:
• Louisville Association of Secular Humanists (ASHS), PO Box 91453, Louisville, Kentucky 40291; phone (502) 491-6693. • Larry Reyka, POB 3208, Columbus, Ohio 43210, is the AHA coordinator of the north central region. • University of Louisville humanists on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Kepler, Johannes (1571—1630) Kepler, the German astronomer whose “Kepler’s laws” describe the revolutions of the planets around the sun, once professed Protestantism. However, he was excommunicated by the Tübingen Protestant authorities in 1612 because he had condemned the Lutheran doctrine that the body of Christ could be in several places at once. Kepler’s mother, found guilty of witchcraft, was saved from harm because of her son’s influence. Kepler eventually returned to Catholicism. {CE; ER; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Keyser, Cassius Jackson (Born 1862) Keyser was an American mathematician who was a member of the American Board of the Hibbert Journal. Keyser was a theist, but he rejected personal immortality. In Humanism and Science (1931) he discussed scientific humanism, arguing that “the spirit of Science” is “the soul of Humanism.” {RAT} Keracher, John (20th Century) A materialist, Keracher wrote How the Gods Were Made (c. 1920). {GS}
Kerby, J. J. (19th Century) Kerby’s Atheism and Socialism (1905) was a provocative book in its time and showed the author’s dedicated atheism.
Kerler, Dietrich Heinrich (1837—1907) Writing to the German philosopher and phenomenologist Max Scheler, who believed that love is the great principle of human association and God is the source of all love, Kerler retorted, “Even if it could be proved by mathematics that God exists, I do not want him to exist, because he would set limits to my greatness.”
Kern, Marc (20th Century) Kern is the founding director and chief executive of Officer of Life Management Skills, which houses the Addiction Alternatives and Rational Life skills organizations. At the 14th annual HUMCON conference in 1994, which was sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County, California, Kern discussed rational coping skills, the Rational-Emotive behavior therapy of Dr. Albert Ellis, Rational Recovery, and other non-religious help for those with substance-dependence and related problems.
Kerns, Scott (20th Century) Kerns once led the Texas chapter of American Atheists. At his wedding, Madalyn Murray O’Hair played the preacher and “took the ceremony very seriously,” making sure that, unlike Texas justices of the peace, she would not slip a “God” or even a “Jesus” into the service. Jon Murray, Kerns later found, was not up to heading the organization. “He had no special training, nor a great number of social skills, as well as a speech impediment. He was at an extreme disadvantage, and he was aware that he’d been put in a position beyond his abilities to handle.” {Time, 10 February 1997}
Kerouac, Jack (1922—1969) • You have to believe in life before you can accomplish anything. That is why dour, regular-houred, rational-souled State Department diplomats have done nothing for mankind. Why live if not for excellence? —From Jack Kerouac’s journals
Kerouac, an American novelist who became spokesman for the Beat generation, wrote On the Road (1957), which relates the wanderings of Sal Paradise and his friend, Dean Moriarty, across America. The two think they are getting somewhere and that they’re looking for someone. Then it dawns upon them that they’re already there, on the road, which is the sensible place to have a pad and for Dharma bums to be. He also wrote Dharma Bums (1958) and The Subterraneans (1958). Of his confessional style of writing, Truman Capote once quipped, “That’s not writing. That’s typewriting.” Kerouac’s chronic alcoholism led to his death from a stomach hemorrhage. During one of his breakdowns, he had hallucinated, thinking of himself as a prize in a war between angels and devils. He did not label his outlook, but although he was raised a Roman Catholic he developed views that were non-theistic with Zen and humanist overtones. (The New Yorker, 22-29 June 1998) {OEL}
Kerr, David (18th Century) Kerr, a Fayetteville Presbyterian minister, became a passionate republican and skeptic upon accepting a professorship at Chapel Hill. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)
Kerr, Michael Crawford (1827—1876) Kerr was an American statesman, a confirmed freethinker and materialist. He was a member of the Indiana legislature in 1856 and was elected to Congress in 1874. Kerr was known for trying to revise the tariff in the direction of free trade. {BDF}
Kesey, Ken (1935- ) Kesey, a hero of the countercultural revolution and the hippie movement of the 1960s, once was a paid volunteer at a Veterans Administration hospital in Menlo Park, California, where he took mind-altering drugs and reported on their effects. The job served as background One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962; film, 1975), which is set in a mental hospital. He also wrote Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), in which he examines values in conflict; Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear (1988), a children’s book; and Caverns (1990), a mystery novel written with thirteen of his graduate students in creative writing at the University of Oregon and using the pseudonym of O. U. Levon, which read backwards is “novel U. O.” [University of Oregon]. According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is often banned because it is alleged to promote “secular humanism.”
Kespohl, Julius (20th Century) Kespohl has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Kessler, John J. (20th Century) Kessler, who worked on The Humanist, was a semanticist who wrote The Three Hills of Semantika (1955) and Giordano Bruno, the Forgotten Philosopher (c. 1960). {GS; HNS2}
Kessler, Julius (20th Century) Kessler was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Ket (Kett, or Knight), Francis (16th Century) Ket of Norfolk, a relative of the rebellious tanner, was prosecuted for heresy and was burned in a castle ditch. Stowe says he was burned in 1588 for “divers detestable opinions against Christ our Saviour.” {BDF}
Ketkar, Kumar (20th Century) Ketkar is editor in India of the Maharashtra Times, the only paper in the state of Maharashtra to oppose the Indian atomic explosions. At the 1998 congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Mumbai, Ketkar discussed India’s political problems as they related to humanism. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Kevorkian, Murad (Jack) (1928— ) Michael Betzold, author of Appointment With Doctor Death (1993), once asked Dr. Kevorkian what he thought happened after one dies. “You rot,” replied the retired pathologist who has achieved notoriety in the 1990s for having assisted more than 130 seriously ill individuals to kill themselves. Although castigated by his opponents as “Dr. Death,” Dr. Kevorkian believes euthanasia must be made legal through carefully designed physician-assisted suicide for individuals who have no hope of recovering from their illness. He has merited the wrath of various Christian officials but counters with the argument that religion and medicine should be completely divorced. Or, as his lawyer described it, “If the church is in charge, man, we might as well go back to the fucking Inquisition.” In short, as a physician Kevorkian was trained to focus on and address the underlying problem, rather than be distracted by symptoms, and he had seen pointless suffering which could have and should have been ended to everyone’s benefit. Meanwhile, Michigan law outlaws physician-assisted suicide, and the state suspended Dr. Kevorkian’s medical license because of his invention of “Mercitron,” a machine that allows individuals to kill themselves painlessly at the flick of a switch. “The world knows I’m not a criminal,” he has argued. “You’ve lost common sense in this society because of religious fanaticism and dogma. You’re basing your laws, and your whole outlook of natural life, on mythology! It won’t work!” His book on the subject, in which he argues for the goodness of planned death, is Prescription: Medicine (1993). In a Playboy profile (August 1994), Kevorkian was asked if he was ever religious. “Not really,” he replied. “I went to Sunday school until I got tired of the myths. Walk on water! You can’t fool a kid.” An agnostic, Dr. Kevorkian addressed the annual convention in 1991 of the Freedom From Religion Foundation meeting in Ann Arbor. In 1994, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist Hero of the Year. In 1995, he assisted the Unitarian minister John Evans, who was suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, a terminal lung disease, to commit suicide. Evans was the twenty-second person of over forty Kevorkian, whom some began to call “Dr. Life,” had assisted as of the end of 1996. Asked if he would be present when the U.S. Supreme Court took up the issue of doctor-assisted suicide, Kevorkian responded, “Nothing good can come of this. Did anything good come out of [the abortion case of] Roe v. Wade? You got some doctors killed. What the Supreme Court does is irrelevant. . . . You want me to go down there and face nine religious kooks?” Meanwhile, Kevorkian is considered by many to be a medical kook. Betzold in “The Selling of Doctor Death” (The New Republic, 26 May 1997) details the many criticisms of Kevorkian’s endeavors to pioneer the radical change in the way human beings die. In what legal scholars considered a major mistake, Kevorkian chose to represent himself in a 1999 case brought against him for having helped end the life of Thomas Youk, a 52-year-old from a Detroit suburb who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. The incident was televised, Mr. Youk’s family was present, Mr. Youk pleaded for medical help in ending his suffering, and Kevorkian was seen on film injecting the lethal chemicals. A jury, however, convicted him of murder. The Youk family, which was not allowed to speak at the trial, was disturbed by the jury’s verdict, as was the Hemlock Society. However, a group of disabled people, called Not Dead Yet, was heartened, viewing the euthanasia movement as threatening to disabled people. Kevorkian responded by threatening to starve himself in jail, and his friends prepared to appeal the jury’s decision. Found guilty by a Michigan judge, Kevorkian was sentenced in 1999 to ten to twenty-five years in prison despite pleas on his behalf from the widow and brother of the terminally ill man he was convicted of killing. He planned to appeal the conviction but was not allowed bail. Meanwhile, his supporters held that the Michigan lawmakers, not Kevorkian, should be jailed for having written such inhumanistic legislation. The doctor, they claimed, had now become a 20th century freethought martyr. Kevorkian is an honorary member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His hobbies include playing flute with a jazz quintet, composing (“A Very Still Life: the Kevorkian Suite” for flute and jazz quintet), and oil painting. A 1997 showing of thirteen paintings were said by critics to be those of an amateur, but they disturbed many viewers because they depicted severed heads, moldering skulls, rotting corpses, and a frame which was stained with his own blood. The doctor’s fascination with the subject of death—even as a young physician, he photographed the eyes of dying patients, finding this “interesting”—has led to the speculation by his opponents that he would assist suicides not only for the terminally ill but also for people with “severe trauma” or “intense anxiety.” (See entry for Derek Humphry.) {Associated Press, 6 January 1997; E; HNS2}
Key, Ellen Karolina Sofia (1849—1926) The daughter of a Swedish countess, Key nevertheless came from an impoverished family. Through teaching and writing, she became a leading European female to write on social questions. Key joined Haeckel in his Monist (atheist) League, often writing for his monthly. Seven of her thirty works were translated into English. {JM; RAT; RE; WWS}
Khamarov, Eli (20th Century) Khamarov, an author and social theorist, has gone on record as being a non-theist. He wrote Surviving on Planet Reebok and Lives of the Cognoscenti. {CA; E}
Khan, Akhtar Hameed (1915— ) Khan, according to Salman Rushdie, is a Pakistani poet who “is quoted as having said that while he admires Mohammed his real inspiration has been the Buddha. He denies saying this but nevertheless is accused of blasphemy by mullahs. In 1992, he was arrested for allegedly insulting the Prophet’s descendants by writing a poem about animals that, the fundamentalists asserted, contained hidden allegorical meanings.” In The New York Times op-ed article entitled “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam” (11 July 1993), Rushdie concludes, “He managed to beat that charge but now again his life is in danger. . . . We should understand that secularism is now the fanatics’ most important target.”
Khan, Seemin G. (20th Century) An eye physician and surgeon in Chicago, Khan participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City.
Khare, Nina (20th Century) Khare was Secretary to the South Place Ethical Society from 1991 to 1996, at which time she left to join REFUGE, an organization that supports women seeking sanctuary from domestic violence. A fourth-generation freethinker, she comes from the Essex families of Warner and High. {Freethinker, August 1996}
Khayyám: See entry for Omar.
Khosla, Vinod (20th Century) In the next one hundred years, Khosla tells friends, “traditional religion will be as relevant as witch doctors are today.” The partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, who was born in India and who co-founded Sun Microsystems in California’s Silicon Valley, also holds that the pope, who “chooses to talk about gays, abortion and priests not being women . . . could use his power in better ways.
Kichanova, Inga (20th Century) Kichanova, from the USSR, addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966).
Margot Kidder, Actor ent Internet Movie Database
In a February 2000 TV Guide article written by Rich Brown, Kidder is quoted as saying:
"I went through millions of dollars -- I have no idea how much. I'd buy things for friends, take people to Paris. Once I stayed up for three weeks in a row because I felt like I was called upon to write a new religion for women. I was reading all these books, including the Bible -- and I'm an atheist." Kidder, Margot [Margaret] Ruth (17 Oct 1948 - ) Born in Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Kidder is a television and movie actress. Previously married to John Heard, Thomas McGuane, and Philippe de Broca, she now is single and unattached. Kidder is associated with having been Superman’s Lois Lane in Superman: The Movie (1978), as well as in the sequels: Superman II (1980), Superman III (1983), and Superman IV (1987). Also, she has appeared in numerous other films: Never Met Picasso (1996); Bloodknot (1995); Windrunner (1995); Beanstock (1994); Henry and Verlin (1994); Maverick (1994); One Woman’s Courage (1994); The Pornographer (1994); La Florida (1993); Aaron Sent Me (1992); Mob Story (1990); White Room (1990); and others including Miss Right (1988); The Amityville Horror (1979); and Gaily, Gaily (1969). She has been the voice of the narrator of The Emerald City of Oz (1988), The Marvelous Land of Oz (1987) and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1987). She is the bartender in a CD-ROM, Under the Killing Moon and has had notable guest appearances such as being Joy Adams in Burke’s Law (1994) and as Dr. Ellen Holden in Murder, She Wrote (1984). In an article by Rich Brown in TV Guide (February 2000), Kidder is quoted as saying,
I went through millions of dollars—I have no idea how much. I'd buy things for friends, take people to Paris. Once I stayed up for three weeks in a row because I felt like I was called upon to write a new religion for women. I was reading all these books, including the Bible . . . and I'm an atheist. (On the Web: http://www.graphicpizazz.com/margotkidder/) {CA}
Kidneigh, John C. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Kidneigh was professor of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. He wrote Access to Medical Care (1981). {HM2; HNS}
Kielland, Alexander Lange (1849—1906) A Norwegian writer of novels, short stories, and plays, Kielland is a major writer of realism. With the purpose of encouraging social reform, he used wit and irony in such works as Skipper Worse (1882), Tales of Two Countries (1879), and Norse Tales and Sketches (1897). His St. Hans Fest (1887) attacked the hypocrisy of Christian morals. His humanistic novels succeeded in a country with a strong Lutheran church, forming an opposition counter-culture which has become more and more secular, according to Levi Fragell, a former executive director of Norway’s humanist organization, Human-Etisk Forbund. {BDF; Free Inquiry, Winter, 1990-1991; RAT}
Kierkegaard, Søren (1813—1855) According to Barnes, Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist who believed that “the ultimate challenge for religious existentialism is to make the leap in faith, believing in God against reason and despite the absurd (or because of it).” During his lifetime, he was scarcely known outside Denmark and was not taken seriously by his compatriots. Born when his mother was forty-five and his father was fifty-six years of age, Kierkegaard had uneven legs, a hunched back, and frail health. In his journals, he remarked that “I was already an old man when I was born, delicate, slender and weak, deprived of almost every condition for holding my own with other boys, or even for passing as a complete human being in comparison with others.” It was Karl Barth’s interpreting him in his Epistle to the Romans that brought Kierkegaard’s name to the larger audiences. Kierkegaard considered the Danish church “godless,” which made him unhappy. Wanting to be an orthodox Lutheran, he hoped to commit himself to the claims of the Absolute without regard for the cost involved, according to Princeton’s Otto A. Piper. Such an attitude is opposed to the “spectator attitude” of science and speculative philosophy. With emphasis, Kierkegaard pointed out that the hardships of such existential life were made tolerable only through the certainty of divine grace and forgiveness of sins. Such self-scrutiny was similar, he held, to that shown by Pascal and St. Augustine. He has greatly influenced contemporary Protestantism with his view that belief involves a leap of faith. At Kierkegaard’s religious funeral at a Viking church near Uppsala, Sweden, his nephew spoke up to complain that the Lutheran Church was appropriating the memorial of its most outspoken opponent, for his uncle had once written, “Pastors are royal officials, and royal officials have nothing to do with Christianity.” Kierkegaard, however, was serene after suffering a fatal stroke, believing he soon would sit astride a cloud and sing Alleluia. {CE; ER; EU, Hazel E. Barnes; RAT; TRI}
KILLING • Kill one man, and you are a murderer.
Kill millions, and you are a conqueror. Kill all, and you are a God.
—Jean Rostand
Killip, A. E. (20th Century) In Yorkshire in the early 1900s, Killip was a lecturer in Birkenhead for the British Secular League. {RSR}
Kilpatrick, William Heard (1871—1965) Kilpatrick, the son of a Baptist minister, as a youth became a non-conformist who did not believe in report cards or pupil punishment. At the University of Chicago in 1898, after taking a course with John Dewey, Kilpatrick became determined to teach and to make schools different. At Mercer University, where he taught mathematics and became a vice president, he was found to be a non-believer in the Virgin birth. After a three-day theological trial, he was asked to resign. He then moved to Columbia University, where he became known as “the father of progressive education” and “the million dollar professor” for an estimated 34,000 students from 1909 to 1938. Although he praised Dewey, he differed educationally in some respects. At the present writer’s request, he once spoke of his philosophic naturalism and humanism to New York City humanists, at which time he explained why he rejected organized class subjects that strictly followed a syllabus. He also visited the present writer’s class of private school students at the progressive Bentley School in Manhattan, commenting that the teacher appeared to be following his own child-centered emphasis. “No,” came a quick response, “I am just teaching the way I wish I’d been taught.” Kilpatrick roared with laughter, for he confirmed that this echoed his own educational philosophy. In 1953, as a subscriber to The Humanist Newsletter, Kilpatrick wrote his views about what a humanist’s political views can be:
A humanist may belong to any reputable party, provided that in his acceptance of this party affiliation he consistently maintains his respect for human personality and its full development, his acceptance of democratic freedom and equality joined with commitment to the common good, and his determination to find out by the free play of intelligence what to think and do as he faces the successive situations of life.
Adjacent was a copy of a New Yorker cartoon showing two men discussing politics, one saying, “As good Americans we should oppose McCarthyism, but if we do somebody’ll say we’re not very good Americans—see, that’s McCarthyism!” {CE; HNS; HNS2}
Kim, Sang J. (20th Century) Kim is an astronomer at the National Space Science Data Center at Goddard Space Flight Center / National Aeronautic and Space Administration in Greenbelt, Maryland. He laments the Korean Unification Church, which numbers less than 1% of Korean Christians but which has more Americans as members than it has Koreans. He also laments the Korean phenomenon of Jesus-worship. “Koreans have been bombarded only by Christian material for a long time,” he writes. “We should educate and communicate with the religious. We should also show believers and unbelievers in Korea clear humanist visions and values that can be alternatives to religion, so that we and our descendants can live happily and prosperously without being abused by dogmatic religions.” {Free Inquiry, Spring, 1992}
Kimberly, James (20th Century) Kimberly is the chief development officer for the Council for Secular Humanism and for the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
Kimbrell, Lois (20th Century) Kimbrell is associated with the Humanist Society of New Mexico (AHA). (See entry for New Mexico Humanists.) {FD}
Kincaid, Gerald (20th Century) Kincaid in 1941 wrote his M.A. thesis at the University of Illinois on “The ‘Lines of Argument’ Used by Robert G. Ingersoll in His Lectures on Religion.” {FUS}
Kindell, Roy (20th Century) Kindell, a science and mathematics teacher, is associated with Humanists of Rogue Valley (AHA) in Oregon. (See entry for Oregon Rationalists, Humanists.) {FD}
KINDNESS • One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. —Oscar Wilde
• Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. —Tennessee Williams
KING JAMES BIBLE The year after James I (1566—1625) was born, he became titular king of Scotland. Although he married at the age of twenty-three and had several children, gossip of that time was that he had many liaisons with male lovers, beginning when thirteen with his cousin, Esmé Stuart. Upon succeeding Queen Elizabeth in 1603, the quip circulated that “Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” Among his lovers was the handsome Robert Carr, who was made a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. When Carr married, James wrote to him complaining of Carr’s “withdrawing yourself from lying in my chamber, notwithstanding my many hundred times earnestly soliciting you to the contrary.” A later favorite was George Villiers, the Earl of Buckingham, of whom James said, “You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than anyone else. Christ had his John, and I have my George.” James knew the Bible well, for during his twenty-two years as king (during which he had constant feuds with Parliament and ended by dissolving that body) the King James Version of the Bible was begun. Known as the Authorized Version, it had no rival among Protestants until the late nineteenth century, when the Revised Version was published in England. {AA; DCL; GL}
King, Baird (20th Century) Lt. Colonel (Retired) King leads Humanists of Iowa (AHA). King, Charles (1922— ) “Charlie” King is a freethinker and “soapbox orator.” He left school when fourteen years of age. In 1961 he began speaking at the Sydney Domain forum, and in 1973 he formed and became president of the loosely structured Freethinkers Association of New South Wales. {SWW}
King, Florence (20th Century) King, whose column “The Misanthropes Corner” is in National Review, wrote (Mid-March 1997) of her supporting a cause “. . . with every atheistic bone in my body.” {CA} Florence King, Columnist media
In her regular column "The Misanthropes Corner" in the National Review she said "...with every atheistic bone in my body..." in the mid-March 1997 issue.
King, Kerry: See entry for Slayer.
King, Larry (Larry Zeiger) (1933— )
King is a noted American radio and television personality. In 1992 he was named to the Emerson Hall of Fame of the Broadcasters Hall of Fame. On the air, he has stated that he is a non-theist, that when he had a heart attack there was no bright light at the end of the tunnel “or anything like that.” In Powerful Prayers, he ironically makes reference to his agnosticism toward the idea of God and the efficacy of prayer. Larry King, Interviewer/Talk Host/Author media
King can be seen weeknights on CNN hosting Larry King Live.
He is a self-described agnostic. Listeners to his old late night radio show may remember his often said statement "I don't know. I just don't know." -CF
In an interview (broadcast January 31, 1996) on ABC's PrimeTime Live, King was asked why he was so afraid of death. He responded that when he had his heart attack, there was no bright light at the end of the tunnel or anything like that, and closed with "I KNOW this is it."
--AD, CR
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Ed. King's name has been withdrawn from the list. A reader reports that King had Rosemary Altea (author of the book The Eagle and the Rose) on his show who claimed to be talking to Larry's dead relatives, Larry said he was convinced it was genuine.
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Ed. Perhaps King should be considered agnostic again...
In his new book "Powerful Prayers," King, ironically makes reference to his agnosticism towards the idea of God and the efficacy of prayer.
From the November 12, 1998 Christian Science Monitor:The year and a half spent on this book didn't make him "a believer," King says in an interview, but it has affected him. "I've certainly seen the power of it for people. I appreciate that very intelligent people believe in it.... I haven't made that leap that says, 'Someone is watching over me,' but I am much more open to it than I was."
--RAF
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In a (June 2000?) interview with the German TV-magazine "Hörzu" (Nr. 24/2000), Larry King mentioned his agnosticism: Hörzu: "After 35,000 Interwiews, do you learn something new in them?"
King: "Nearly every time. With one exception - if it comes to religious topics everything is already said. I am an agnostic, so I don't learn anything from them. But most of the time it's {CA; E}
King, Larry (Larry Zeiger) (19 Nov 1933 - ) King is one of the best known of American radio and television personalities. He is the Brooklyn-born son of a bar owner who died when Larry was nine, forcing his mother to go on welfare. He barely passed high school, earning one point more than was required to avoid flunking. After working as a United Parcel Service man, he got his first break as a disc jockey on a Miami station, debuting his first program on Miami television in 1960. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he wrote a newspaper column. In 1971, using funds entrusted to him to investigate the Kennedy assassination, King got into deep trouble, was arrested for theft, and journalists reported that he had squandered the money on gambling debts, cars, and expensive restaurant tabs. He worked to overcome the bad reputation, and by 1978 his Larry King Show succeeded in becoming the first national call-in show. Billionaire Ross Perot chose in 1992 to announce his candidacy for President of the United States on King’s show. In 1993 Vice President Al Gore debated Perot concerning a controversial North American Free Trade Agreement, and in 1996 the national candidates chose King’s program to air their views. In 2001, his 44th year, he had interviewed more than 30,000 people and was one of the highest paid individuals on television. In 1992 he was named to the Emerson Hall of Fame of the Broadcasters Hall of Fame. He has suffered a number of life-threatening heart attacks and chairs the Larry King Cardiac Foundation, which gives grants to individuals with heart disease. On the air, King has stated that he is a non-theist, that during one of his heart attacks there was no bright light at the end of the tunnel “or anything like that.” In Powerful Prayers, he ironically makes reference to his agnosticism toward the idea of God and the efficacy of prayer. {CA; E}
King, Margaret J. (20th Century) King is arts editor of Religious Humanism, the quarterly of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists.
King, Patricia (20th Century) King is a contributing editor to Freethought Today.
King, Peter (1776—1833) A financier and a Whig member of the House of Lords, King voted for Catholic Emancipation and opposed the suggestion of a grant to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. “Of late years,” reported Gentleman’s Magazine in its obituary notice (1833), “Lord King has chiefly signalized himself as the bitter enemy of the Church, and particularly of the Episcopal Bench.” King, the seventh Baron King, was a deist. {RE}
King, Thomas Starr (1824—1864) King, a Universalist-Unitarian minister who spoke in California against slavery during the Civil War period, encouraged California to join the Union side. The Thomas Starr King School for Religious Leadership in Berkeley is named after him, for he is generally regarded as the most notable missionary of Unitarianism to the West Coast. King wrote Christianity and Humanity. Once asked the difference between the Unitarians and the Universalists, King, who had served both as a minister, quipped, “The one thinks God is too good to damn them forever, and the other thinks they are too good to be damned forever.” {U; UU; U&U}
King, Victor (20th Century) King is President of the Atheist Network’s Board of Directors and edits its Atheist Network Journal (PO Box 130898, Houston, Texas 77219). He heads the Atheist Alliance that resulted when Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s atheist chapters disbanded in 1991.
Kingdon, F. R. S. (1845—1879) Kingdon, a British mathematician, was one of several scientists (Huxley, Darwin, Tyndall, etc.) who wrote about their freethought. His Lectures and Essays (published 1918) advised, “Keep your children away from the priest, or he will make them the enemies of mankind.” {JM}
Kinglake, Alexander William (1809—1891) Kinglake, a lawyer, made a reputation by his novel Eothen (1844) and was commissioned to write the official history of the Crimean War (1863—1887, 8 volumes). In his novel, Kinglake had freely expressed his agnosticism, as he had in his personal letters, especially one published by Grant Duff in the Spectator (10 May 1919). {RAT; RE}
Kingsley, George Henry (1827—1892) Kingsley, a traveler and writer, was brother of Canon Kingsley, who gave up the creed at an early date and took a part on the anti-clerical side in the French Revolution of 1848. In a memoir prefixed to his Notes on Sport and Travel (1900), his daughter Mary reproduced a letter of his expressing strong Rationalist sentiments and telling that he was an agnostic. In the book he severely criticized the churches, particularly resenting “the foul brutality and baseness” of the Roman Church. {RAT; RE}
Kingsley, Mary Henrietta (1862—1900) Well-known as an African traveler, Kingsley startled many by her daring journeys and her trading in Africa. The daughter of George Henry Kingsley, also a traveler and an agnostic, she is quoted in Clodd’s Memories as being an agnostic. Upon returning in 1900 to nurse wounded Boers, Kingsley died of enteric fever. {JM; RAT; RE}
Kinney, Paul (20th Century) Kinney, with others, wrote “Should Public Schools Do Church Work?” (1947). {GS; HNS}
Kinnock, Neil [Rt. Honorable] (1942— ) Kinnock, a member of the House of Commons, has been on the National Executive Committee of England’s Labour Party since 1978. From 1979 to 1983, he was chief Opposition Spokesman on Education. From 1980 to 1982 he was President of the Association of Liberal Education. In 1986, he wrote Making Our Way. He has stated publicly that he is an atheist. {CA; E; New Humanist, September 1996}
Kinsella, William Patrick (1935- ) Kinsella is the Canadian author of Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa (1980) and numbers of other novels and works of poetry. In 1987 he was named Author of the Year by the Canadian Library Association. In 1994 he was decorated with the Order of Canada. Kinsella is a member of American Atheists and the British Columbia Humanist Association. {CA}
Kinsey, Alfred (1854—1956) An American biologist and noted sexologist, Kinsey was associated with the University of Indiana from 1920 until the time of his death. His early work dealt with the gall wasp. After receiving financial support from the university, the National Research Council, and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey began a project of interviewing many thousands of individuals in a study which led to his publishing Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953). The research immediately helped free American society of Victorian repression. His crusade to promote more enlightened sexual attitudes, according to James H. Jones’s Albert C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life (1997), led to the following:
[I]n 1957, a year after his death, the Supreme Court’s Roth decision narrowed the legal definition of obscenity, expanding the umbrella of constitutional protection to cover a broader range of works portraying sex in art, literature, and film. In 1960, the birth-control pill was introduced, offering a highly effective method of contraception. In 1961, Illinois became the first state to repeal its sodomy statutes. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled that a magazine featuring photographs of male nudes was not obscene and was therefore not subject to censorship. And in 1973, in a dramatic reversal, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of psychopathologies.
Jones described Kinsey’s finesse is developing and interviewing individuals, told of his interest in homosexuality (in fact, calls Kinsey—the father of four—a homosexual rather than a bisexual) and sado-masochism (who struggled as a youth with homoerotic feelings and punished himself by inserting a toothbrush up his urethra during masturbation); photographed his wife Clara masturbating; filmed writer Glenway Wescott and his companion Monroe Wheeler in order to document the former’s “jackknifing” at the time of his orgasm; decreed that men could have sex with each other and that the wives, too, could be free to embrace whatever sexual partners they liked; even had himself photographed while engaged in masochistic masturbation. One of Kinsey’s most provocative discoveries was that males of different social backgrounds and educational levels presented strongly dissimilar sexual histories. Many of his statistics were challenged, and he received considerable criticism from academic as well as religious sources for the scope of his research. Martin Duberman, critiquing the Jones work, pointed out that he had ignored Kinsey’s famous 0 to 6 scale (0 = exclusive heterosexuality; 6 = exclusive homosexuality). Insiders, he claimed, placed Kinsey at between a “1” and a “2”—more “straight” than “gay”—when younger, then shifting increasingly to the “homosexual” side of the scale as he aged, but never becoming an exclusive “6.” In the final analysis, Duberman found the Jones book “never manages a coherent portrait—and personality contradictions can intelligible cohere.” Kinsey was the son of evangelical Methodists. His father had forbade dancing, tobacco, drink, and popular music in their household. Kinsey in his later years went public, according to Jones, declaring himself an atheist. He did not, however, become a member of any of the freethought associations. (James H. Jones, “Dr. Yes,” The New Yorker, 25 August-1 September 1997)
Kinsley, Michael (9 Mar 1951— ) Kinsley was managing editor of The New Republic from 1976 to 1979 and its editor from 1979 to 1981. From 1981 to 1983 he edited Harper’s Magazine. Now an internet editor of Slate with a World Wide Web following, Kinsley has gone on record as being a non-theist. {CA; E}
Kirby, Joe (20th Century) Kirby wrote The First Book of Atheist Humor (1983). {GS}
Kirchoff, Chris (20th Century) Kirchoff, who will graduate from Harvard in 2001, has been described by the Humanist Association of Massachusetts Newsletter “as the leading Humanist student at Harvard,” succeeding Darek Araujo.
Kirk, John R. (20th Century) When he wrote book reviews for The Humanist in the 1950s, Kirk was on the Michigan State University faculty and worked for WJIM-AM and WJIM-TV.
Kirkendall, Lester A. (1903—1991) Kirkendall, who taught at Oregon State University, was the author of Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships (1984). A co-editor of The New Sexual Revolution, he taught the first course on human sexuality on any campus in the United States. Kirkendall signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1983, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. {HM1; HNS2; PK}
Kirkhart, Roberta (20th Century) Kirkhart is a teacher, writer, atheist activist, and defender of church and state separation. She addressed the 14th annual HUMCON conference in 1994 that was sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County.
Kirkman, T. P. (19th Century) Kirkman, a freethinker, wrote On the Infidelity of Orthodoxy (1870). {GS}
Kirsch, Jonathan (20th Century) Kirsch has found some stories in the Hebrew Bible that appear to have been played down by preachers. In The Harlot by the Side of the Road (1997), Kirsch recommends seven:
• Lot impregnates his daughters (Genesis 19:1-38) • Hamor rapes Dinah with consequences (Genesis 34:1-31) • Tamar, the harlot by the side of the road (Genesis 38:1-26) • The bridegroom of blood: Zipporah circumcises (Exodus 4:24-26) • Jephthah sacrifices his daughter (Judges 19:1-20) • The traveler hacks up his concubine (Judges 19:1-30) • Tamar is raped by her brother (2 Samuel 11:2-15; 12:9-25; 13:1-22) {Wolf Roder, FIG Leaves, February 1999}
KISMET Kismet is a Moslem expression of belief in a fate that rules the affairs of men. Not only a man’s fortunes, but also his deeds with their future consequences are considered to be pre-ordained and inevitable. (See entry for Fate.) {ER}
KISSES • A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. —Mistinguett
Kisubi, Alfred (20th Century) Kisubi, a professor of human services at the University of Wisconsin, is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
Kitcher, Philip (20th Century) Kitcher is a contributing editor of Philo.
Kittle, Rudolph (1853—1929): See entry for Harris Lenowitz.
Kittredge, Herman (20th Century) Kittredge wrote Ingersoll: A Biographical Appreciation (1911). {GS}
Klacel, Francis Matthew (1808—1882) Klacel was the first outright atheist among Bohemian authors. His Ethics (1847) was the first freethought work in Bohemia. Persecution drove him to America. {PUT}
Klaatsch, Hermann (1863—1916) Klaatsch, a German anthropologist, was a leading German authority on primitive man and a distinguished anthropologist generally. A monist, Klaatsch contributed occasionally to the organ of the monist league, Das Monistische Jahrhundert. {RAT}
Klass, Philip Julian (1919— ) Klass, a technical journalist, an electrical engineer, and a former avionics editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology, is on the executive council and was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer. He is author of UFOs—Identified (1968), Secret Sentries in Space (1971); UFOs—Explained (1975), UFOs: The Public Deceived (1983); and UFO—Abductions: A Dangerous Game (1988).
Klawans, Stuart (20th Century)
Klawans, a film critic for The Nation, found “Dogma,” by the Catholic filmmaker Kevin Smith
a movie that should not have offended so many Catholics. After all, it affirmed the divinity and unique salvific mission of Jesus, the efficacy of the sacraments in and of themselves and the Magisterium. The movie is therefore far more acceptable to Catholics than it is to Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, animists of all nations and secular humanists.
Klawans then added that he was “a member of the latter group.” {The Nation, 29 November 1999}
Kleber, John E. (1941— ) Kleber wrote his 1969 Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Kentucky on “The Magic of His Power: Robert G. Ingersoll and His Day.” He wrote Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992). {FUS}
Kleberg, Carl-Johan (20th Century) Kleberg, at the 1998 Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Mumbai, spoke about church-state separation in Sweden. Humanists, he explained, have argued for neutrality for religion in schools, but the church has constantly opposed such reform. In 1999 he is President of the Swedish Humanist Association. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Klein, Dorothy (20th Century) Klein, a freethinking activist, is on the Executive Board of the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York.
Klein, Georg (20th Century) Klein [the first name is pronounced yay-org], a Hungarian-Swedish secular humanist, is a researcher at the Department of Tumor Biology at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. A cell biologist and oncologist whose parents were Jewish, Klein in The Atheist and the Holy City: Encounters and Reflections (1990) is troubled by the perils inherent in religion. His book does not simply criticize religious systems, but he is concerned that religious bureaucracies built around the Jehovah-Jesus myths have resulted in many massacres of the innocent. “It is not enough merely to be ‘anti-religious,’” he wrote. “One must build a positive force, humanism, that counteracts the religious influence in the schools, the army, and the government.” Protesting that he is not an agnostic but an atheist, Klein added, “I am, indeed, an atheist. My attitude is based on faith. . . . The absence of a creator, the nonexistence of God is my childhood faith, my adult belief, unshakable and holy.” The book describes what it was like to be a nonreligious doctor working in a Jerusalem clinic at a time when the world’s major monotheistic religions were jockeying for position among the sacred sites. The book also relates his friendship with Leo Szilard, devoting two chapters to the “father of the atomic bomb.” In Pieta (1993), Klein addresses the age-old question, “Why is there suffering?” The book’s hero is Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ethics of compassion is one that Klein embraces, and whose “unflinching pursuit of the truth” is one that Klein attempts to emulate. However, he also understands the dilemmas that arise when the two paths do not converge. Klein’s interest in the Holocaust is not merely academic, for many of his Hungarian relatives perished in the death camps. In 1993, Klein was named a Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism for Secular Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for Christian de Duve.) {Fabiola Aguirre, “Science and Culture,” Free Inquiry (Summer 1994); Timothy J. Madigan, “Searching for an Answer to Suffering,” Free Inquiry (Summer 1994)} Klein, Marty (20th Century) Klein is on the editorial board of The Humanist.
Klein, Nettie (20th Century) Klein, who had been the Secretary General of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, resigned at the 1996 conference of humanists in Mexico City, where she was given an award for more than thirty years’ work as General Secretary. She first came into contact with the IHEU in Oslo in 1962, then attended conferences in Europe, India, and the United States. Klein spoke at the 1992 IHEU Congress in Amsterdam, receiving an award. A former humanist counselor, Klein wrote a regular column in International Humanist News up to the time of her retirement in 1996, at which time she announced she would be happily concentrating upon her grandchildren. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Kleist, Heinrich von (1777—1811) A German poet, Kleist was orphaned at eleven, enlisted in the army as a teenager, quit the army after four years in order to study, and from reading Kant he became a skeptic and freethinker. In 1800 he taught Kantian philosophy in Paris. His first gay relationships, according to Toronto critic Anna Sonser, were in the military and led to “lifelong associates with Ernst von Pfuel and Rühle von Lilenstern.” He was plagued by moral and emotional upheavals, including a “Kant Crisis,” which according to Sonser “undermined his faith in truth and knowledge and inaugurated a period of despondency and personal anguish.” Upon becoming engaged to Wilhelmine von Zenge, he shortly thereafter went to Würzburg in search of treatment for what may have been a sexual disorder. Friends were aware that he fought against despair and desired death. Known chiefly for his dramas and a collection of tales, Kleist is also known for the suicide pact he arranged with Henriette Vogel. In Potsdam he shot her, then himself, when only thirty-four. {BDF; GL; RAT}
Klem, Tom (20th Century) Klem chairs the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists in California. He spoke in 1994 at the 14th annual HUMCON conference sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County, California.
Klemm, Edward G. Jr. (1910— ) Klemm, a poet and a freethinker, wrote I Wonder Why (1977). {GS}
Kleveland, Åse (20th Century) Kleveland, the Norwegian minister of culture, is a member of Norway’s humanist organization, Human-Etisk Forbund.
Klinger, Friedrich Maxmilian von (1753—1831) Klinger, a German writer, went to Russia in 1780 and became reader to the Grand Duke Paul. He published poems, dramas, and romances, exhibiting the revolt of nature against conventionality. Goethe called him “a true apostle of the Gospel of nature.” {BDF}
Kluckhohn, Clyde K(ay) M(aben) (1905—1960) A noted anthropologist on the Harvard faculty, Kluckhohn was a naturalist who wrote for The Humanist. His cousin was the Iowa novelist and Friend, Ruth Suckow. A particular interest of his was the culture of the Navaho Indians, as shown in Navaho Withcraft (1944). A humanistic 1949 work, Mirror for Man, popularized Kluckhohn’s views. {HNS}
Klugman, Richard E. (1924— ) Klugman, who in 1938 arrived in Australia from Italy, is an atheist, humanist, politician, and medical practitioner. Upon becoming Labor Member of the House of Representatives in 1969, was one of three only who affirmed allegiance rather than to take the oath. By 1990, most of the Australian Labor Party members were affirming. Strongly anti-authoritarian, he has been active with the Council for Civil Liberties and the Humanist Society of New South Wales. Klugman has a special interest in Abortion Law Reform and education with particular emphasis on changing the syllabus on religious education in schools. {SWW}
Klugman, Werner (20th Century) Klugman has been a president of the American Ethical Union. He is the Vice President and Treasurer in New York City of The Humanist Institute. {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Knapp, Wilfrid (20th Century) Once a Korda Scholar in Paris, Knapp has taught government at Oberlin. She is a secular humanist. In 1977, she wrote North West Africa, A Political and Economic Survey.
Kneeland, Abner (1774—1844) Kneeland was a Universalist minister who did not believe in God. The God-concept, he believed, was “. . . as much a fable and fiction as that of the god Prometheus.” After serving a sixty-day sentence for blasphemy in Massachusetts, where adversaries were concerned by his freethinking successes, the former carpenter, journalist, and Baptist emerged as a national celebrity and a hero to freethinkers. Under the influence of radicals Robert D. Owen and Frances Wright, Kneeland publicly rejected the evidences of Christianity and left the Universalist denomination, saying he “did not believe in the God which the Universalists did.” He then made a trek to the Iowa Territory, where he established for intellectuals a liberal community called Salubria, which did not prosper. He is buried in Farmington, Iowa. For many, Kneeland, who had journeyed from the Baptists to Universalists to presumed atheism, confirmed the warnings of many opponents of liberal religion that liberalism led to atheism and pantheism. He wrote the autobiographical A Review of the Trial, Conviction, and Final Imprisonment . . . of Abner Kneeland for the Alleged Crime of Blasphemy (1838). He also edited Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. In 1831, he was a founder of the weekly Boston Investigator, an early if not the oldest freethought journal. He eventually settled on a farm in Salubria, Iowa, dying there at an advanced age. {BDF; FUS; JM; Stephen Papa, The Last Man Jailed for Blasphemy; PUT; RAT; RE; TYD; U; U&U; UU}
Knezevic, Bozidar (1862—1905) H. James Birx has described Knezevic, born in Ub, a small town in rural northwestern Serbia, as a lonely genius who wrote in Serbo-Croatian and who is little known. However, Knezevic “not only accepted the principles of both Darwinian and, with reservations, Spencerian evolutions but also combined and extended these frameworks along with his own penetrating insights into a cosmic vision that focused upon planetary history from a pananthropic perspective.” In Theories of Evolution (1984), Birx describes Knezevic as a naturalist philosopher of cosmic evolution, a rationalist and an empiricist,” one who, reminiscent of Spinoza and Bruno, was a freethinker, a humanist, and a pantheist who held God to be Nature. “Knezevic was neither encumbered nor shackled by a myopic and superannuated natural theology or archaic and obscure mysticism; he viewed science and reason as the instruments of a natural faith. . . . As a humanist, he firmly believed in the moral responsibility and value of individual as well as collective efforts,” Birx added. Knezevic wrote History, the Anatomy of Time: the Final Phase of Sunlight (1980. Translation by George V. Tomashevich in collaboration with Sherwood A. Wakeman); The Principles of History; and Thoughts, the latter consisting of 876 aphorisms.
Knight, Frank (20th Century) Knight wrote “Absolutism or Absolutism!” in The New Humanist (May 1929).
Knight, Harry (20th Century) Knight has been a general secretary in London of the South Place Ethical Society.
Knight, Margaret (1903—1983) “I had been uneasy about religion throughout my adolescence, but I had not had the moral courage to throw off my beliefs until my third year at Cambridge,” Knight wrote in the preface to Morals Without Religion and Other Essays (1955). After reading philosophers such as Russell, she added, “A fresh, cleansing wind swept through the stuffy room that contained the relics of my religious beliefs. I let them go with a profound sense of relief, and ever since I have lived happily without them.” A teacher at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Knight signed Humanist Manifesto II. She edited Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to Bertrand Russell (1961), and Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to Attenborough (1995). In the latter work, which is a revision by James Herrick, writers who have been added are Mark Twain, E. M. Forster, J. Bronowski, Richard Dawkins, David Attenbourgh, A. J. Ayer, Antony Flew, Sidney Hook, and Paul Kurtz. She became a celebrity in Great Britain when she scored a first, giving a series of freethought lectures on the BBC radio in 1955, leading the Sunday Graphic to run a snapshot of her next to a headline with two-inch letters, THE UNHOLY MRS. KNIGHT. The story began, “Don’t let this woman fool you. She looks—doesn’t she—just like the typical housewife; cool, comfortable, harmless. But Mrs. Margaret Knight is a menace. A dangerous woman. Make no mistake about that.” {HM2; WWS}
Knight, Richard Payne (1750—1820) Knight, a patron of the arts and learning, wrote Inquiry into the Principles of Taste as well as works about the symbolic language of ancient art. What shocked his puritan contemporaries was A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients (1786), in which he wrote that “Men are superstitious in proportion as they are ignorant, and . . . those who know least of the principles of religion are the most earnest and fervent.” In a 1957 preface to Sexual Symbolism, Ashley Montagu noted that Knight showed how phallic worship and phallic religions existed in Europe, not just among certain sects of the Chinese Tantrists and Taoists. Montagu added that it was not unexpected in the Age of Victoria that “the violence of the reaction to the publication of Knight’s volume was such that the work had to be withdrawn upon publication.” When Knight, a member of the Radical party in Parliament, died he bequeathed to the British Museum his collection of antiquities valued at £50,000. {CE; TYD}
Knight, Roger (20th Century) Knight is an activist supporter of the Pink Triangle Trust in England. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter, 1998}
Knight, Van (20th Century) Knight, a minister in Canada of the Victoria Church, has written,
Never before have Unitarians been asked to tolerate, with good will, such radical diversity. If we are to continue to be a unifying religious presence, we have hard work to do. . . . Humanism remained the exclusive philosophy of most Unitarian congregations until the emergence of paganism around 1980. Paganism with its tradition of polytheism opened a Pandora’s box.
KNIGHTS OF MALTA Founded nine centuries ago, Knights of Malta began when a monk opened a hospital in Jerusalem for pilgrims who were attacked while making their way to the Holy Land. During the Crusades, it became a military organization celebrated for its defense of the islands of Rhodes and Malta. After the Crusades, it returned to its mainly medical work but kept the name. Now a charitable organization that is expensive to join, Knights of Malta includes in its goals to help the sick and the poor and to defend the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. More than 12,000 are members of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the American Association of which includes 1,800 in its New York-based chapter. Other chapters are based in Washington and San Francisco. Members put K.M. (Knight of Malta) or D.M. (Dame of Malta) after their written names, make pilgrimages to Lourdes if they pay their own way, and may serve (without pay) on the boards of some Catholic charities. The Vatican newspaper has warned that dozens of groups use variations of the name but are simply profit-making organizations or scams. {Charles W. Bell, New York Daily News, 12 January 1999).
Knoblauch, Karl von (1757—1794) A German author, Knoblauch was a friend of Mauvillon and published several works directed against supernaturalism and superstition. {BDF}
Knopf, Otto Heinrich Julius (Born 1856) Knopf, a German astronomer, was director of the Jena University Observatory. He wrote many works on astronomy and was an active worker in the Monist League. In the tribute to Haeckel (Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken), Knopf expressed his thorough rationalism. He saw no “plan” in nature, and he thought that the old psychology, which taught a soul capable of living apart from the body is “struck out of the list of sciences.” {RAT}
Knopfler, Mark (1949— ) Knopfler is a Scottish-born rock guitarist, singer, and composer. He founded and was lead guitarist, vocalist, and composer for the rock group Dire Straits. His albums include “Brothers in Arms” (1986, with Bob Dylan), and he received a Grammy Award in 1986 for best performance by a group. In 1983 he co-produced “Infidels.” Knopfler has stated that he is not a theist. {CA; E}
Knower, Eve Tenney (20th Century) Knower is a poet whose work included the following:
A TOAST
A toast to sceptics everywhere! They breathe the clean and salty air Of doubt; The spirit’s smoth’ring feather beds, Stitched carefully by wishful heads, They flout; The sour wine of life they sip And from the empty skins they rip The Truth; If our poor, weakling hopes they blast, They give to their own follies, past, No truth. To them, whose flame can Nickie roast! To their fine fire, we drink our toast: To doubt! Drink deeply—all you sons of guile— To man’s good gift, the sceptic’s smile!— To doubt!
KNOWLEDGE: See entry for Gravity.
• There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment’s notice to reveal the will of God on every possible subject.
—George Bernard Shaw
• Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.
—E. E. Cummings
Knowles, Cameo (1932— ) A sculptor and art therapist in Elkhart, Indiana, Knowles is a grandmother who is active in the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Her master’s thesis at Indiana University develops the theory that through rigorous artistic training, people with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) can improve their fine motor control, develop their perceptual skills, increase their ability to concentrate, and thus “normalize” their behavior. Her works, in porcelain, bronze, cast hydrocal, and terra cotta, include depictions of Persephone, Aphrodite, Demeter, Bast, Athena, and Minerva. {World, November-December 1994}
Knowles, James (1831—1908) Knowles founded The Nineteenth Century. He then edited The Contemporary Review. His letters to T. H. Huxley show that he shared Huxley’s agnosticism. {RAT; RE}
Knowlton, Charles (1800—1850) Believing that Christianity was the major obstacle to improvement in the quality of individual and social life, Knowlton was devoted to de-christianizing American culture. One of his books was Elements of Modern Materialism (1829). He was a pioneer of contraceptive medicine in America, and he believed that the then popular Robert Dale Owen’s recommended method of coitus interruptus was inadequate. Writing Fruits of Philosophy: The Private Companion of Young Married People, by a Physician, he used a tone that was unpolemical. However, the book cost him fines and a three-month jail sentence at hard labor in Massachusetts. Upon his release, he urged freethinkers not to relax simply because superstition had begun to “grow pale and totter away in the form of unitarianism, universalism, etc.,” and he thought materialism to be the best way to root out religion. His influence was international, in that his marriage manual came to be imitated. {BDF; EU, Roderick S. French; FUK; FUS; TRI}
Knox, Robert (1791—1862) Knox, an anatomist, was an outspoken deist and at times in his letters is closer to agnosticism. He was recognized as one of the ablest anatomical teachers in Britain. {RAT}
Knutsson, Hope (20th Century) An American psychiatric occupational therapist from New York City who married an Icelander, Knutsson is president of the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association (Sidmennt). In 1989, she introduced civil confirmation to Iceland, becoming one of the founders in 1990 of an organization that assists people with secular ceremonies, publishes and distributes a newsletter and booklets about such ceremonies, and has initiated a movement for the separation of church and state. E-mail: <hopeful@islandia.is>. On the Web: <www.islandia.is/sidmennt>. {International Humanist News, September 1997}
Knutzen, Matthias (Born 1645) Knutzen was born in Holstein, lost his parents, and was brought to an uncle at Königsberg, where he studied philosophy. In 1674 he preached atheism publicly at Jena in Germany, and his followers were called Gewissener from their acknowledging no other authority but conscience. An estimated seven hundred were followers in Jena alone. Knutzen denied the existence of either God or Devil, deemed churches and priests useless, and held that there is no life beyond the present. For him, conscience is a sufficient guide, taking the place of the Bible, which contains great contradictions. {BDF; RAT}
Koch, Adrienne (1912—1971) Koch wrote Religion of the American Enlightenment (1933), originally entitling it Republican Religion. She also wrote The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (1943). {GS}
Koch, Charlotte and Raymond (20th Century) The Kochs wrote Educational Commune: The Story of Commonwealth College (1972). Freethinkers, they give a first-hand account of an independent school for workers that was established in the 1920s near Mena, Arkansas. {Freethought History #14, 1995}
Koch, G. Adolph (20th Century) Koch’s work about deism is Republican Religion, the American Revolution, and the Cult of Reason (1973). {FUS} Koch, Heinrich (1800—1879) A watchmaker who emigrated from Germany to the Midwest, Koch worked on Der Antipfaff (The Anti-Priestling), one of the first rationalist papers in the West. One of his poems, which is pantheistic, is found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992).
Koch, Leo Francis (20th Century) A biologist on the faculty at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Koch called himself a scientific humanist and reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s. While a member of the American Humanist Association board, he voted for the termination of Priscilla Robertson as editor.
Kocol, Cleo (20th Century) Kocol is the representative to the Atheist Alliance of the Sacramento-based Atheists and Other Freethinkers. She is on the board of the Atheist Alliance.
Kodish, Bruce I. (1952— ) A physical therapist and Alexander Technique teacher in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland, Kodish serves on the teaching staff of the Institute of General Semantics. He has a doctorate in applied epistemology from Union Institute Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio, having written on “The Adulthood of Humanity: General-Semantics and Secular Humanism.”
Kodish, Susan Presby (20th Century) Kodish is co-author with her husband, Bruce I. Kodish, of Taking a Scientific Approach in Everyday Life. A psychologist in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland, and education director of the Institute of General Semantics, she serves on the board of directors of the Washington Area Secular Humanists.
Koerbagh, Adriaan (1632 or 1633—1669) Doerbagh was a Dutch martyr. After becoming a doctor of law and medicine, Koerbagh published A Flower Garden of all Loveliness (1668), a dictionary of definitions in which he gave bold explanations. The work was rigidly suppressed, and he fled to Culenborg. There he translated De Trinate and began a work entitled A Light Shining in Dark Places to illuminate the chief things of theology and religion by Vrederijk Waarmond, inquisitor of truth. When he was betrayed for a sum of money, Koerbagh was tried for blasphemy, heavily fined, sentenced to be imprisoned for ten years to be followed by ten years of banishment. Koerbagh died in prison. {BDF}
Koestler, Arthur (1905—1983) A Hungarian-born English writer and a Communist in the 1930s, Koestler left the party over the Stalin purge trials, becoming a spokesman of the non-Communist left. His best-known novel, Darkness at Noon (1941), describes the purge of a Bolshevik “deviationist.” In “The Lotus and the Robot” (1960), Koestler wrote of his conversation with a professor of comparative religion, an expert on Buddhism. Is it possible, he inquired, “to have a system of ethics divorced from any transcendental belief?” The question showed his sincere questioning as to how human life can be thought to be absolute or sacred, for we live in a world of evolutionary accidents? According to Paul Edwards in Immortality, Koestler was favorably impressed by Emerson’s view that after death we “lie in the lap of immense intelligence,” or Absolute Mind, a “great reservoir of consciences.” Bernard Crick has written, “Like Koestler, I am ‘a pious atheist,’ ” presumably with first-hand knowledge of the Hungarian-born writer’s philosophic outlook. In 1951, Koestler wrote about humanism to the present author:
The term “supernaturalistic” begs the definition of nature. I believe this is not a problem of philosophy, but of semantics. If, however, your question refers to nineteenth-century materialism, that, of course, is dead as mutton. What will come after, I do not know. We live in an earthquake, and the new pattern of things has not crystallised.
His unusual personal affairs have been described in David Cesarani’s Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (1998). In 1951, for example, when he wrote the above about the meaning of humanism, Koestler was married to Mamaine Paget. But he thought the wife of Michael Foot, a well-known socialist, “had a bit of a yen for me” and when she was alone with him, according to Mme. Paget, he “suddenly grasped my hair, he pulled me down and banged my head on the floor. A lot.” She managed to get away but was afraid to report the problem for fear it would lead to bad publicity. Daring to return after a time, she was again attacked and “I was overborne. I was terribly tired and weakened. There’s a limit to how much strength one has and he was a very strong man. And that was it.” Cesarani wrote that “Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next few years it would be almost a hallmark of his conduct.” At another time he refused to wear a condom, and when Elizabeth Jane Howard became pregnant and considered an abortion, she was told that “the idea of having children was anathema to him.” After the abortion—in his The Lotus and the Robot, Koestler deplored “the slaughter of the unborn with its concomitant ill-effects on women”—and although she was having severe financial difficulties, he gave her little sympathy, adding “You’ll get over it.” In their sitting room on Montpelier Square in London, Koestler and wife number three, Cynthia, swallowed honey laced with lethal quantities of barbiturates, dying during the night and were not found for two days. Koestler, who suffered with Parkinson’s disease and terminal leukemia, was found in an armchair, a glass of brandy in his hand. Cynthia, who had been in good health, typed a note added to his “farewell message” composed nine months prior. She wrote, apparently for Koestler’s editor, Harold Harris, “I should have liked to finish my account of working for Arthur—a story which began when our paths happened to cross in 1949. However, I cannot live without Arthur, despite certain inner resources.” The family dog lay dead nearby. {Bernard Avishai, The New Yorker, 6 January 1997; Alexander Cockburn, “The Rapist and the Snitch,” The Nation, 23 November 1998; CE; TYD; WAS, 27 March 1951}
Kogel, Renee (20th Century) With Zev Katz, Kogel edited Judaism in a Secular Age—An Anthology of Secular Humanistic Jewish Thought.
Kohl, Gim (20th Century) At the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida, Kohl co-led a think tank called “Who and Why Humanists of Florida Should Lead the Banner of Humanism.”
Kohl, Marvin (1932— ) A professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Fredonia, Kohl is visiting research scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He was chairman of the board of directors of the Bertrand Russell Society for six years, 1989 to 1995. Kohl signed Humanist Manifesto II, is on the editorial board of The Humanist, and is a contributing editor for Free Inquiry. {HM2; SHD}
Kohlberg, Lawrence (1927—1987)
A professor of educational and social psychology at Harvard, Kohlberg was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He wrote Moral Development and Moral Education (1973) and Moral Stages (1983). {Free Inquiry, Winter 1981}
Kohn, Alfie (20th Century) Kohn is an author who signed a 1994 statement, “In Defense of Secularism,” which was issued by the Council for Secular Humanism. He wrote The Brighter Side of Human Nature (1990) and Beyond Discipline (1996).
Kohn, Robert D. (20th Century) An architect, Kohn became a leader in 1942 of the New York Ethical Culture Society. {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Kolb, Georg Friedrich (1805—1884) Kolb was a German statistician and author of History of Culture (1869—1870). {BDF}
Kolbe, Hermann (1818—1884) Kolbe was a leading organic chemist in Europe. Sir E. Frankland, who studied under him, wrote in Sketches from the Life of E. Frankland that Kolbe was an agnostic. {RAT; RE}
Kolenda, Konstantin (1923—1992) The McManis Professor of Philosophy at Rice University, Kolenda had a regular “Philosopher’s Column” in The Humanist. He wrote Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism: Philosophy Democratized and Religion Without God (1976). {Free Inquiry, Winter 1981; HNS2}
Kollwitz, Käthe Schmidt (1867—1945) A German graphic artist and sculptor, Kollwitz was an early artistic voice for feminism and an ardent pacifist and socialist. Her humanism included portraying the anguish being experienced by people suffering from hunger or other forms of misery. Her own suffering included losing one of two sons in World War I and a grandson in World War II. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s entourage did not approve of the grim social conditions which she chronicled in her art, and during the Nazi period Kollwitz lost her teaching position and was prohibited from exhibiting her work. Kollwitz had an innate social conscience that was abetted by her husband, a physician who opened a clinic in 1891 in the Berlin slums—this is reflected both in her depiction of the urban poor as well as the depiction of peasants but also in her choice of medium: prints, because of the austerity of their tones. A 1905 etching, “Plowman With Standing Woman in Foreground,” was critiqued by art critic Roberta Smith: “Kollwitz gives the tilled earth the soft, grainy darkness of a lithograph, while the sky is filled with light, airy scratches that resemble the faintest of brush strokes. Mediating between the two areas is the straining, nearly horizontal figure of a man harnessed to a plow. Reduced to a nearly unrecognizable beast of burden, his humanness is signaled more by an old woman watching him than by his actual form.” No expressionist and one who distanced herself from the avant-garde movements of her time, Kollwitz used a simplified, representational style in her lithographs and other works. {CE}
Kong, Dave (20th Century) Kong is an activist with the San Francisco chapter of American Atheists, Inc. E-mail: <dksf@atheists.org>.
Kongfu-zi [Confucius; Kong Fuzi] (c. 571—479 B.C.E.) K’ung Fu-tzu was a true humanist, said Lin Yutang. (His name was Latinized by missionaries and has since been spelled Kongfu-zi, using the simpler Pinyin system of transliteration): Lin had these observations:
For the Chinese the end of life lies not in life after death—for the idea that we live in order to die, as taught by Christianity, is incomprehensible; nor in Nirvana, for that is too metaphysical; nor yet in the satisfaction of accomplishment, for that is too vainglorious; nor yet in progress for progress’s sake, for that is meaningless. The true end, the Chinese have decided in a singularly clear manner, lies in the enjoyment of a simple life, especially the family life, and in harmonious social relationships. . . . There is no doubt that the Chinese are in love with life, in love with this earth, and will not forsake it for an invisible heaven. They are in love with life, which is so sad and yet so beautiful, and in which moments of happiness are so precious because they are so transient.
Kongfu-zi married at the age of nineteen, had one son, but after an unhappy marriage divorced his wife. A private school he commenced became so popular it is said to have had three thousand pupils. Teaching history, poetry, literature, the proprieties, music, natural science, and government, he avoided all references to the supernatural as well as deprecated feats of physical strength, according to Robert A. Ballou. At the age of fifty-five, after having had a successful government position, he wandered from state to state with a group of pupils, spreading the principles which have given him worldwide immortality. Basically, he viewed the sociocultural context, rather than the supernatural, as the source and shaper of cultural change. He is remembered for having rescued ancient Chinese classics from threatened oblivion, collecting and editing works such as the following: the Wu Ching, or Canon of History; the Shu Ching, or Canon of Poetry; the I Ching, or Canon of Changes—a mystical system of divination; the Li Chi, or Book of Rites; the Ch’un Ch’iu, or Spring and Autumn Annals—a local history which he himself wrote; and the Shih Ching, a book of odes. These constitute the six canonical classics of Confucianism. The Shi Shu of four books embody his major teachings, and his analects are found in Lun Yü (Collected Sayings: Analects). A 1997 translation, Analects of Confucius, is by Simon Leys. Unlike the Christ and the Buddha, Kongfu-zi did not attempt to originate nor reform a religion. Instead, he organized the one that had existed in the land of his birth from time immemorial, giving form to its books, dignity to its formalities, and emphasis to its moral precepts. His way of life was one of formalism, of the proprieties, of a lack of extremes in all things. Human behavior, not theology, was his chief interest. Asked about God, he would reply, “I prefer not speaking.” (Shang-Ti, which means God, is a term Ballou documents that K’ung Fu-tzu used but once, preferring a more general and impersonal word Tien, meaning Heaven or the intangible order of goodness which rules the universe.) Many of the sayings of Kongfu-zi are humanistic; for example:
• It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great.
• While you cannot serve men, how can you serve spirits? While you do not know life, what can you know about death?
• To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, that may be called wisdom.
• If I do not associate with mankind, with whom shall I associate?
• By nature men are nearly alike.
• If we cannot serve man, how can we serve spirits?
Recently, American reference materials are becoming less Eurocentric and are incorporating international outlooks for balance; however, one goal of secular humanists has been to provide an objective humanities approach which includes all continents of mankind and which relegates national chauvinism to the past. Margaret Knight’s Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to Bertrand Russell is an initial example. Russell, however, in The Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell (1927) wrote, “I must confess that I am unable to appreciate the merits of Confucius. His writings are largely occupied with trivial points of etiquette, and his main concern is to teach people how to behave correctly on various occasions. . . . His system, as developed by his followers, is one of pure ethics, without religious dogma; it has not given rise to a powerful priesthood, and has not led to persecution.” Confucianism, in short, is unique in the history of the survival of an ethic without religion. {CE; CL; ER; Pat Duffy Hutcheon, Humanist in Canada, Autumn 1997; JMR; JMRH; New Humanist, October 1998}
Konigsberg, Allen Stewart: See entry for Woody Allen.
Konner, Melvin (20th Century) Konner, a physician, anthropologist, and author, has stated that he is a non-theist. On the faculty at Emory University, he also is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine. He wrote The Tangled Wing, Medicine at the Crossroads and Becoming a Doctor, in the latter of which he explained,
In general I was interested in the role of the chaplaincy in hospitals, and I came to believe it could be greatly expanded. This was ironic for an atheist, but logical for a professional anthropologist. . . . Although I had been religious as a teenager and could sympathize with all sorts of beliefs, I was now so skeptical that my sympathy seemed hollow. I thought that some patients could profit from talking with someone who at least took seriously the existence of an incorporeal realm, and who could discuss it in terms that would transcend my level of psychologizing. {CA; E} Melvin Konner, Anthropologist/Author/Doctor science
Dr. Konner is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of Anthropology at Emory University, he is also affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine. He has written a number of books ( The Tangled Wing, Medicine at the Crossroads: The Crisis in Health Care, among others). He is contributing editor of The Sciences and writes a column on health and behavior for the New York Times Magazine.In his book, Becoming a Doctor, he writes, "In general I was interested in the role of the chaplaincy in hospitals, and I came to believe it could be greatly expanded. This was ironic for an atheist, but logical for a professional anthropologist." He goes on to describe some of the religious beliefs of the patients and comments, "Although I had been religious as a teenager and could sympathize with all sorts of beliefs, I was now so skeptical that my sympathy seemed hollow. I thought that some patients could profit from talking with someone who at least took seriously the existence of an incorporeal realm, and who could discuss it in terms that would transcend my level of psychologizing." (p. 175)
Konrád, György (1933— )
Author of The Case Worker, Konrád in 1990 was elected president of International P.E.N., the first Central European to hold this position in the organization for poets, essayists, and novelists. He is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Konrád’s father, the son of Ignac Kohn, changed the family name to that of an uncle, Konrád, who was a Talmudic scholar and owner of a bookstore.
In a 1992 novel, A Feast in the Garden, Konrád tells about David Kobra, an eleven-year-old who is clearly derived from the author’s own experiences. Depicted are his siblings, parents, grandparents (the Kohns), friends, and neighbors as they perish or survive two World Wars, a Holocaust, a cold Hungarian police state, and all the confusion faced upon entering America. The plot cloys somewhat with all its details of simple domestic Hungarian pleasures, but the best anecdotes are those about the earlier generation, “whose mild skepticism and humanism Konrád/Kobra inherits,” stated critic Suzanne Ruta. In 1995 he wrote Varakozac and The Melancholy of Rebirth. Konrád is a member of the Hungarian Humanist Federation, an organization that arose following the fall of the “iron curtain.” {WAS, conversation}
Koonz, John (20th Century) Koonz, an Austin, Texas, middle school teacher, despite objections from parents who wanted him to teach creationism, has insisted on teaching evolution. “There is no compromise on this issue. Either we provide quality science education or we give in to religious fanatics,” he declared. Koonz is author of A Guide Book to Parts of Our Universe from Planck Time to the Hominids. {Freethought Today, September 1996}
Kopérnik, Nicholas (Copernicus) (1473—1543) Although helping to open the era of modern science by his use of the scientific method, Kopérnik was held back greatly by his religious views. He doubted the Egyptian Ptolemy’s complex calculations (2nd century of the Common Era) believing that Ptolemy’s seventy-nine separate assumptions were “inconsistent with the perfection of God, who, he believed, operated through simple and harmonious laws. Here Copernicus was adumbrating, in religious terms, the scientific law of parsimony,” stated Corliss Lamont. Later, Kepler (who believed in sun worship and astrology) and Galileo were to utilize empirical evidence to develop Copernicus’s heliocentric theories of planetary motion. The Church, which Latinized his name, likely believes Copernicus is in Heaven, but scientists can make the case that Kopérnik found the heavens here on earth. Many assume that the reason Copernicus refused to publish his book about the heliocentric system until he was dying was that he feared the Church would not like it, writes Ralph Estling (Skeptical Inquirer, November-December 1997). But he adds, “Very nearly everyone is wrong. Copernicus held back because he knew that his scientific colleagues wouldn’t like it, and would have good reason not to. The calculations Copernicus made on where the planets should be in their paths around the sun were no better, and in many cases were worse than, what had been determined with the old, creaking geocentric system of Ptolemy. This because, while Ptolemy’s preconceptions harked back to Aristotle, Copernicus’s preconceptions went back a generation further, to Plato.” De Revolutionibus Orbius Coelestium [On the Movement of Heavenly Bodies, c. 1530] was denounced by the Vatican in 1616 and only removed from the Vatican’s Index Prohibitorum two centuries later, in 1822. Modern astronomy was built upon the book’s findings. In 1999 Pope John Paul II, in Torun, Poland, Kopérnik’s birthplace, indulged in apologetics, stating, “Although Copernicus himself saw his discovery as giving rise to even greater amazement at the Creator of the world and the power of human reason, many people took it as a means of setting reason against faith.” Meanwhile, it was Aristarchus 1800 or so years earlier than Kopérnik who had discovered the movements of the planets around the sun, not the Latinized Copernicus, who erred in thinking the sun was the majestic symbol of God. (See entry for Aristarchus of Samos.) {CE; CL; ER; The New York Times, 8 June 1999; TYD}
KORAN (QUR’AN) • Then I studied the Koran instead of reading it without knowing the meaning. I found it total bullshit. —Taslima Nasrin (See entries for Islam, Qur’an, and the Committee for the Study of Koranic Literature.
Korbol, Michael (20th Century) “I self-discovered Catholic hypocrisy in 7th grade, but still was voted the parish’s Catholic Youth Award in 8th grade. I then attended public high school and found the atmosphere refreshing,” Korbol has written. He is a freethinker who is a doctor of podiatric medicine in Illinois. {The Freethinker, June-July 1997}
Korn, Bertram (20th Century) Rabbi Korn has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. He wrote American Jewry and the Civil War (1951). {HNS}
Korn, Robert (20th Century) Korn is author of “Were the Ten Commandments Written by God?” published in the May 1997 “Humanist News & Views” of the Humanist Association of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Finding the commandments woefully deficient, Korn wrote, “I expect the average modern high school student could write a better set of commandments than these from the Bible. It is not reasonable to assume that the Ten Commandments were written by a being with godlike intelligence.”
Korn, Selig (1804—1850) Korn was a learned German Orientalist of Jewish birth. A convert to freethought, he wrote many works on mythology under the name of F. Nork, works listed in Fuerst’s Bibliotheca Judaica and highly recommended for research by Wheeler. {BDF; RAT}
Kornbluth, C. M.: See entry for Science Fiction Writers on Philosophy.
Kors, Alan Charles (20th Century) Kors is author of Atheism in France 1650—1729 (1990), a definitive book about the orthodox sources of disbelief.
Korsch, Karl (20th Century) Korsch, an unorthodox Marxist, called himself a humanist.
Korzybski, Alfred Habdank (1879—1950) The eminent Polish linguist, a Count before his American naturalization and the creator of “General Semantics,” Korzybski expanded semantics from its ordinary concern with only the meaning of words into a new system of understanding human behavior. “In the old construction of language,” he held, “you cannot talk sense.” Because of Aristotelian thinking habits, which he thought outmoded, men do not properly evaluate the world they talk about. As a consequence, words lose their accuracy as expressions of ideas, if ever they had such accuracy. Life, he explained, is composed of nonverbal facts, each differing from another and each forever changing. Too often, he contended, people get their thought-speech processes confused, so that they speak before observing and then react to their own remarks as if they were fact itself. General semantics, he explained, has to do with living, thinking, speaking, and the whole realm of human experiences. To say a rose “is” read,” for example, is a delusion because the red color is only the vibration of light waves. In 1921 his Manhood of Humanity—The Science and Art of Human Engineer caused a stir in the intellectual world. For one thing, his “time-binding theory” was explicitly non-theological in its premises. Science and Sanity, An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics in 1933 is a landmark book.
When I was five years old, my father, an engineer, gave me the feel of the world’s most important scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century, which prepared the groundwork for the scientific achievements of the twentieth century and remain fundamentally valid today. The feel of the differential calculus, as well as non-euclidean and four-dimensional geometries, which he conveyed to me at that time shaped the future interests and orientations of my life, and became the foundation of my whole work.
. . . A functional analysis, free from the old mythological and zoological assumptions, showed that humans, with the most highly developed nervous systems, are uniquely characterized by the capacity of an individual or a generation to begin where the former left off. I called this essential capacity “time-binding.” This can be accomplished only by a class of life which uses symbols as means for time-binding. Such a capacity depends on and necessitates “intelligence,” means of communication, etc. On this inherently human level of interdependence time-binding leads inevitably to feelings of responsibility, duty toward others and the future, and therefore to some type of ethics, morals, and similar social and/or socio-cultural reactions. . . . The mechanisms of time-binding are exhibited in most humans except those with severe psycho-biological illnesses. However, some inaccessible dogmatists in power, particularly dictators of every kind, have blocked this capacity considerably. Clearly police states of secrecy, withholding from the people knowledge of, and from, the world, or twisting that knowledge to suit their purposes, “iron curtains,” etc., must be classified as saboteurs among time-binders, and certainly not a socio-cultural asset to the evolution of humanity. . . . .
Metaphysicians of many kinds or many creeds since time immemorial tried to solve the . . . perplexities by postulating different “prime movers” or “final causes,” beyond which the further “why” is ruled out as leading to the logically “verboten” “infinite regress.” Originally religions were polytheistic. Later, in the attempt for unification, perhaps to strengthen the power of the priesthood, and also because of the increasing ability of humans to make generalizations, monotheisms were invented, which have led to the most cruel religious wars. Different rulers, dictators, “fuehrers,” etc., have followed similar psycho-logical patterns with historically known destructive or constructive results. . . .
Religions and sciences are both expressions of our human search for security, and so predictability, for solace, guidance, feelings of “belonging,” etc., culminating in self-realization through a general “consciousness of abstracting,” the main aim of my work.
Although Korzybski joined no freethought or naturalistic humanist groups, he illustrated by his outlook that he was a non-theist, in many ways an anti-theist. {HNS2}
KOSHER • My soul is not my stomach, so it doesn’t make a difference what I put there, so long as it is digestible.” —Rabbi Stephen Wise, Founder of Reform Judaism
Kosher is the descriptive term in Judaism for food and other objects that are “clean” according to laws contained in the Torah. Pork and shellfish, for example, are forbidden. Dairy products and meat may not be mixed. In the slaughtering of animals, certain methods are prescribed. As an idiom, kosher means right, proper, or according to law as defined in the Torah. Jewish comics tell the following:
“Tell me, rabbi, have you ever tasted ham? Be truthful now,” said the Catholic priest during a chess match. “Once,” blushed the rabbi. “I was in college. Curiosity got the best of me. And, father, did you ever have sex with a girl? Be truthful now.” “Once,” blushed the priest. “I was in college before being ordained, and I did have sex with a girl.” It was the move before checkmate, and a freethinking onlooker inquired of the priest, “It’s better than ham, right?” {DCL}
Kosik, Karel (20th Century) Kosik in Czechoslovakia called his philosophic outlook “humanism.”
Kosko, Bart (20th Century) “Biology is not destiny,” stated Kosko, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. “It was never more than tendency. It was just nature’s first quick and dirty way to compute with meat. Chips are destiny,” he added, extrapolating how big a chip would be needed to replace the human brain. And he asked rhetorically, if such a chip were constructed, and an individual had the choice of “plugging” his brain into a chip that contained global thought or collective consciousness, what would this mean for humanity? In Fuzzy Thinking (1993), Kosko explained new and further ideas for programming computers. If the Aristotelian approach of “A or no-A” can be expanded to allow computers to work with vague, or fuzzy, concepts, for example, then the computer need not be limited to simple yes or no responses, Kosko pointed out.
Kostelanetz, Richard (1940— ) A writer and editor of many books about contemporary art, Kostelanetz wrote John Cage (1978), edited Esthetics Contemporary (1988), and wrote Gertrude Stein Advanced (1990). Kostelanetz signed Humanist Manifesto II and Humanist Manifesto 2000. {HM2; SHD} Kotakowski, Leszek (20th Century) Kotakowski in Poland once termed himself a Marxist humanist. Later, he turned against Marxism as well as naturalistic humanism.
Kotkin, Jean Somerville (20th Century) Kotkin is executive secretary of the American Ethical Union. She is on the editorial board of The Humanist and is a contributing editor on Free Inquiry. After succeeding Howard Radest in the American Ethical Union office, she became a Leader for National Development. Said by James F. Hornback to be a “religious” humanist” with strong sympathies toward psychological humanism, Kotkin signed Humanist Manifesto II, is on the board of the American Humanist Association, and is Executive Director in New York City of the Humanist Institute. In addition, she is the IHEU’s main representative to the United Nations. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {CL; HM2; HNS2}
Kottinger, Herman Marcus (19th Century) Kottinger wrote The Youth’s Liberal Guide for Their Moral Culture and Religious Enlightenment (1877). {GS}
Kotula, Charline Kirkpatrick (Died 1995) With her husband, Jo, Kotula was since its incorporation as a national group in 1978 the eastern vice-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF). The two were senior members of the Foundation’s board of directors and its executive council. Also, they co-directed the New Jersey Freedom From Religion Foundation, the oldest and largest chapter.
Kotula, Jo (1910-1998) Kotula was an aviation artist who during one month in 1931 had covers gracing four national magazines: Popular Science, Air Trails, Model Airplane News, and the Saturday Evening Post. Born in Poland, he came with his family when six months of age and lived in Pennsylvania, his father being a coal miner. Over a thirty-eight year span, he painted four hundred or so covers for Model Airplane, and during World War II he illustrated Air Force manuals. One of five founders of the American Society of Aviation Artists, he along with his wife Charline was a co-founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. {Freethought Today, September 1998}
Kotaiah, Narra (20th Century) Kotaiah, proprietor of Acme Tiles in Hyderabad, India, is an active member of the Andhra Pradesh Rationalists Association. He has been vice president of the Andhra Pradesh Chapter of the Indian Radical Humanist Association.
Kovács, Lajos (1909—1994) Kovács was the twenty-eighth bishop of the Transylvanian Unitarian Church, the son of a Unitarian minister and the great-grandson of Janos Kriza, a 19th-century bishop. Kovács led the Unitarian church in Romania during dangerous times under a totalitarian regime. His wife of forty-five years, Klára Vaska Kovács, was also instrumental in helping train Romanian Unitarians and biblical scholars.
Kovoor, Abraham T. (1898—1978) In Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Kovoor was President of the Ceylon Rationalist Association and edited the annual Ceylon Rationalist Ambassador (1966 to 1972). His writings helped expose god-men, and his influence was felt by B. Premanand and Dr. Narendra Dabholkar. Called “an atheist to the core,” Dr. Kovoor was a rationalist who fought against unscientific beliefs. He rejected supernaturalism and asserted the essential dignity and worth of man and his capacity to achieve self-realization through the use of reason and scientific method. In 1998 a centenary memorial seminar was held in Delhi, according to Modern Freethinker (June 1998). (See entries for Premanand, Dabholkar, Ramendra, and G. Vijayam.) {FUK}
Kowalik, Pietr (20th Century) Kowalik heads a Unitarian group, the Union of the Polish Brethren (Jednota Braci Polskich, SKR.POC2T.655, 50-950 Wroclaw, Poland).
Frank Kozik, Graphic Artist art
In the September 6, 2000 edition of The Onion A.V. Club titled "Is There A God?", celebrities were asked the question. Kozik was among those asked.
Frank Kozik is the graphic artist behind countless rock posters and album covers; he also runs Man's Ruin Records.
The Onion: Is there a God?
Frank Kozik: Yeah, it's called science. It's called physical reality.
See the feature at http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html.
Kraft, Michael (20th Century) Kraft, while a member of the Humanists’ Society at the University of British Columbia in Canada, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. E-mail: <mkraft@telusplanet.net>. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Kraft-Lorenz, James (20th Century) Kraft-Lorenz is a freethinker who actively supports the separation of church and state. He has written for Truth Seeker.
Kramer, Producer / Recording Artist music
Named Rolling Stone's Producer of the Year in 1994, Kramer founded Shimmy-Disc, a notorious record company that discovered and released music by GWAR, WEEN, KING MISSILE, BONGWATER (his band), HALF JAPANESE and others. He has also produced the first recordings by WHITE ZOMBIE, ROYAL TRUX, JON SPENSER, GWAR, DANIEL JOHNSTON, GALAXIE 500, LOW, and many others.
As a musician, he founded BONGWATER and played bass for bands as varied as THE BUTTHOLE SURFERS, THE FUGS (or rather, the 1984 FUGS reunion tour), GG ALLIN, JOHN ZORN, WEEN, and too many others to mention.
At the Editor's insistence, Kramer offers some background on his godlessness...
When I was 12 years old, I was told by my mother, as my father sat by, that although we never went to temple, I would have to be bar-mitzvah'd.
She told me that not a single member of her family would ever speak to her again unless her only son was bar-matvah'd. My father grunted. It wasn't until years later that I discovered the true depth of his contempt for not only judaism and religion in general, but in particular his contempt for everyone in his family "in utter thrall to ancient superstition", as he later put it.
My first real encounter with my father's lack of belief came not long after I began Hebrew lessons in preparation for my bar-mitvah. Having never had ANY kind of religious training before, I was VERY skeptical at first as to how I would react to my first encounters with zealotry, but soon found that the "Hebrew" I was to learn would never be anything more than phonetic. As with most so-called "reform" Judaism, boys are taught to speak or sing in Hebrew but are rarely taught the meaning of the words they were singing. No one EVER offered ANY form of translation. I did well with the phonetics right from the start, and one Saturday afternoon, I came home with a look of accomplishment on my face, proud to show my father what I had "learnt". I sang what I had learned that day - a short section of the Torah. I sang it well.
"That sounds lovely, son", he said sarcastically.
"What do you mean?"...I knew his tone and what it meant. After all, he was my father and I was his son.
"Well, son, let me ask you something. Do you know the meaning of any of those words you just sang?"
"NO, Dad. They didn't even mention it. They just want me to sing it correctly and not mispronounce any of the words."
"Well then, you should be very proud of yourself. They've turned you into an excellent parrot."
I stood there stunned as he turned his back on me and left the room muttering..."You should be VERY proud. My son. The parrot."
If there was one cell in my body that COULD have been jewish, it was wiped out like syphillis that very day, courtesy of the words of a father who loved me enough to say what he knew I needed to hear.
The only bad thing about my life today is that my ex-wife and daughter live in an apartment directly below devout Christians, sorely testing my humanism. I want them outta there. The atheist within me is chipping away at even my most dire character traits - that of being a humanist. I fear that soon my sense of humanism itself will be entirely devoured, and that I will become like some of my friends who won't even TALK to a Christian. And if that is where my lack of belief leads me, I will obediently follow it off a cliff, if need be.
My daughter, Tess, now nearly 8, came home from school about a week before xmas vacation with a look of great joy on her face..."Dad! Guess what?
I have something really great to tell you! I just found out the another girl in my class doesn't believe in god, either! Isn't that GREAT? Now there are TWO of us!"
In 1984 my father died. Two weeks before the end, he wrote a poem. He'd never written one before. I read it at his bedside in the hospital. It spoke of a river through which all life flowed before emptying into the sea and becoming one with the universe. Interpreted benignly, this could be seen as bioligical prose. Interpreted more acutely, it could easily seem the pains of a mind forced to face his own mortality, and even question it.
"Dad, this is beautiful."
"Is it? It's got some bullshit in it, son."
"So does most poetry, Dad."
"Son? Will I ever see you again, after I'm dead? Do you think I'll be watching you, at least, as you have kids, as you raise them, as you get old? What do you really think, son?"
"I think what YOU really think, Dad."
"I don't know what I think. I'm going to die. I'm not sure anymore. Are you sure?"
"I'm sure, Dad. You're dying, but you will live on in my memory and in my life and in my children, and in Mom. We won't meet again, but we are together forever."
"Good son. That's my boy. Now go into my wallet in my coat pocket hanging in the closet, and take out the $10 bill that's there. I want you to go and buy your mother flowers for me. I can't recall the last time I bought her flowers. Do that for me, son."
My atheism is rocklike. Nothing touches it.
Life is random. One wrong turn, one more or one less microbe, and we humans might never have appeared at all.
There is no creator.
There is only the love of a father and a daughter, the lifelong quest to escape the strangling inner loneliness we all suffer, and the march of nature.
KRAMER (1-2-2000, NYC)
---
Kramer's production company website is http://www.shimmydisc.com.
Kramer ( ) Kramer is a producer and a recording artist who in 1994 was named Rolling Stone’s Producer of the Year. He founded Shimmy-Disc, which released music by various groups including his own band, Bongwater. He has played bass for bands such as The Buttonhole Surfers, GG Allin, John Zorn, and Ween, and he played on the 1984 Fugs reunion tour. Bongwater, formed in 1985 as a studio project between Kramer and Ann Magnuson, recorded songs such as “Ride My Seesaw,” “Too Much Sleep,” “Power of Pussy,” and “The Big Sell-Out.” On the Web he has discussed (2 Jan 2000) his religious background:
When I was 12 years old, I was told by my mother, as my father sat by, that although we never went to temple, I would have to be bar-mitzvah'd. She told me that not a single member of her family would ever speak to her again unless her only son was bar-matvah'd. My father grunted. It wasn't until years later that I discovered the true depth of his contempt for not only Judaism and religion in general, but in particular his contempt for everyone in his family "in utter thrall to ancient superstition,” as he later put it. My first real encounter with my father's lack of belief came not long after I began Hebrew lessons in preparation for my bar-mitvah. Having never had ANY kind of religious training before, I was VERY skeptical at first as to how I would react to my first encounters with zealotry, but soon found that the "Hebrew" I was to learn would never be anything more than phonetic. As with most so-called "reform" Judaism, boys are taught to speak or sing in Hebrew but are rarely taught the meaning of the words they were singing. No one EVER offered ANY form of translation. I did well with the phonetics right from the start, and one Saturday afternoon I came home with a look of accomplishment on my face, proud to show my father what I had "learnt." I sang what I had learned that day—a short section of the Torah. I sang it well. "That sounds lovely, son", he said sarcastically. "What do you mean?".I knew his tone and what it meant. After all, he was my father and I was his son. "Well, son, let me ask you something. Do you know the meaning of any of those words you just sang?" "NO, Dad. They didn't even mention it. They just want me to sing it correctly and not mispronounce any of the words." "Well then, you should be very proud of yourself. They've turned you into an excellent parrot." I stood there stunned as he turned his back on me and left the room muttering..."You should be VERY proud. My son. The parrot." If there was one cell in my body that COULD have been Jewish, it was wiped out like syphilis that very day, courtesy of the words of a father who loved me enough to say what he knew I needed to hear. The only bad thing about my life today is that my ex-wife and daughter live in an apartment directly below devout Christians, sorely testing my humanism. I want them outta there. The atheist within me is chipping away at even my most dire character traits —that of being a humanist. I fear that soon my sense of humanism itself will be entirely devoured, and that I will become like some of my friends who won't even TALK to a Christian. And if that is where my lack of belief leads me, I will obediently follow it off a cliff, if need be. My daughter, Tess, now nearly 8, came home from school about a week before xmas vacation with a look of great joy on her face. "Dad! Guess what? I have something really great to tell you! I just found out that another girl in my class doesn't believe in god, either! Isn't that GREAT? Now there are TWO of us!" In 1984 my father died. Two weeks before the end, he wrote a poem. He'd never written one before. I read it at his bedside in the hospital. It spoke of a river through which all life flowed before emptying into the sea and becoming one with the universe. Interpreted benignly, this could be seen as biological prose. Interpreted more acutely, it could easily seem the pains of a mind forced to face his own mortality, and even question it. "Dad, this is beautiful." "Is it? It's got some bullshit in it, son." "So does most poetry, Dad." "Son? Will I ever see you again, after I'm dead? Do you think I'll be watching you, at least, as you have kids, as you raise them, as you get old? What do you really think, son?" "I think what YOU really think, Dad." "I don't know what I think. I'm going to die. I'm not sure anymore. Are you sure?" "I'm sure, Dad. You're dying, but you will live on in my memory and in my life and in my children, and in Mom. We won't meet again, but we are together forever." "Good son. That's my boy. Now go into my wallet in my coat pocket hanging in the closet, and take out the $10 bill that's there. I want you to go and buy your mother flowers for me. I can't recall the last time I bought her flowers. Do that for me, son." My atheism is rocklike. Nothing touches it. Life is random. One wrong turn, one more or one less microbe, and we humans might never have appeared at all. There is no creator. There is only the love of a father and a daughter, the lifelong quest to escape the strangling inner loneliness we all suffer, and the march of nature.
(Kramer’s production company website is http://www.shimmydisc.com) {CA}
Kramer, Frederick (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Kramer was a humanist counselor. {HM2}
Kramer, Larry (1935- ) With Vitto Russo, author of Celluloid Closet, a work which exposed Hollywood hypocrisy about homosexuality, screenwriter-novelist Kramer in 1987 founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Kramer in 1969 had written the screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and. In 1985 he had written The Normal Heart, a play which first starred Richard Dreyfuss as a gay journalist seeking to publicize what was not yet realized to be a major international plague. The work was hailed by some as a successful work of political theater. Others complained that Kramer was too brash, that he had gone to such extreme limits that even many in the gay community, not just many in the heterosexual community, considered him an enemy. On the one hand, actress Elizabeth Taylor was saying that “Larry had shaken people up to AIDS awareness, whether they like it or not. He says it as it is.” And on the other hand, Senator Jesse Helms was saying that “I’m not going to comment on Kramer. Remember he and that ACT UP put a giant condom on my house.” Jeff Getty of ACT UP/Golden Gate was saying, “I’m fed up with him—PWAs [people with AIDS] need more hope and positive thinking. Larry Kramer’s an old man who doesn’t know when to shut up.” And actress Barbra Streisand was saying, “His play, The Norman Heart, is a universal story about everyone’s right to love. I’m proud that he has entrusted it to us to bring to the screen.” Kramer, author in 1987 of Faggots, was a founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) but later he disagreed with its leaders and departed. He told writer Andrew Sullivan in 1995, “Evil has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to research. I can’t find anybody who writes about evil that makes any sense to me. I talk about evil as evil, not as evil in relationship to God, not evil as the opposite of good. Everybody brackets the two. I want to talk about evil. I want to talk about evil, per se. Nobody writes about it that way.” He then allowed that Hanna Arendt had come closest to it. Kramer added, “I don’t believe in God, so we have to leave him out of it. But I didn’t think that the world was evil until the last few years. I’ve been unwilling to even think of that notion of evil. But I now think that the fact that this plague has been allowed to go on, that so many people have been allowed to die is just evil.” Saying to Sullivan that he lives in Washington, DC, and knows how slow everything is, Kramer continued, “You know how fast everything can be made to go when you have someone who can make it go that fast and we’re now on the third asshole in a row in the White House who simply doesn’t want to do anything about it.” The award in literature given to him in 1996 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters was as follows: “Since his screenplay for D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in 1969, Larry Kramer has been a prophet of psychic health and catastrophe among us—a prophet unmatched for the accuracy of his omens and the reliability of his anathemas and remedies. His uncannily foresighted novel Faggots appeared in 1978 just as the AIDS virus flooded whole wings of the American bloodstream; now its Swiftean portrait of all but vanished subculture stands as that culture’s visible memorial. His later plays have been clear as firebells, memorable as tracer bullets.” Kramer has made no secret of the fact that he has AIDS and is aware that his life will be cut short before any cure is found. In a discussion of an NBC drama about AIDS, “An Early Frost,” Kramer had said in 1985, “I’m so tired of us not being allowed to touch each other, kiss each other, as straight people are allowed to do, as black people are allowed to do, as anybody else is allowed to do on TV. Every other minority has been exposed and dramatized to the hilt. Why are we kept in such straitjackets?” {GL; Poz, April-May 1995}
Kramnick, Isaac (20th Century) With R. Laurence Moore, Kramnick wrote The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (1996). Kramnick is a Cornell University professor of history and government. In his writing he gives the ritually necessary nod to propriety: “One of the authors grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home. The other is descended from Irish and German Catholics on his mother’s side and Calvinist Protestants on his father’s.”
Krassner, Paul (1932- ) At the age of twenty and upon learning about the New York Rationalist Society, Krassner came to believe that life is curiously askew inasmuch as it is next to impossible to find rationality anywhere in the world. From 1954 to 1958, he was managing editor of a controversial but humorous journal, The Independent, becoming known as an absurdist and an activist both in the New Left and the psychedelic subcultures. In 1958, he wrote a guide for adolescents, Guilt Without Sex, and began publishing The Realist, “the hippest magazine in America.” One of its outlandish covers depicted an Easter bunny nailed to a cross, which appealed to such of his friends as Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary (1920—1996), and others he described as being “yippies,” many of whom shared his use of Owsley White Lightning and other brands of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Claiming to be an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, with whatever tax advantages that provided, he preached in the radical 1960s that it is entirely rational to doubt God’s inexistence: “I stand before you as an atheist, doing what men of the cloth should be doing.” Krassner, who edited Lenny Bruce’s How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, was given his first big publishing break by the publisher Lyle Stuart. Although comparatively unknown, Krassner is remembered as having been accused in 1969 of being one of the Chicago Seven who had disrupted the Democratic National Convention the previous year. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, he was routinely asked. His response, which many fondly remember, was, “No.” In 1993, Krassner wrote about his unusual and irrational life in Confessions of A Raving Unconfined Nut, Misadventures in the Counter-Culture. “I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen,” he stated, “when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.” Later, he added, “I stand before you as an atheist, doing what men of the cloth should be doing. . . . Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn’t believe in.” He also wrote The Lighter Side of Unbelief. “Atheism,” Krassner declared in one of his albums, “We Have Ways of Making You Laugh” (1996), “is an extension of the reproductive urge.” As proof, he includes noisy climaxes of his atheist girlfriends saying, “Ooh. Oh. No God! No God! No God!” Krassner signed a 1994 statement, “In Defense of Secularism,” issued by the Council for Secular Humanism. {CA; E}
He states in his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut "I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan." (pg 31)
"I stand before you as an atheist, doing what men of the cloth should be doing." (pg 115)
"Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn't believe in." (Picture Page)
Krassner, Paul (9 Apr 1932 - ) At the age of twenty and upon learning about the New York Rationalist Society, Krassner came to believe that life is curiously askew inasmuch as it is next to impossible to find rationality anywhere in the world. From 1954 to 1958, he was managing editor of a controversial but humorous journal, The Independent, becoming known as an absurdist and an activist both in the New Left and the psychedelic subcultures. In 1958, he wrote a guide for adolescents, Guilt Without Sex, and began publishing The Realist, “the hippest magazine in America.” One of its anti-religious covers depicted an Easter bunny nailed to a cross, which appealed to such of his friends as Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg, Dick Gregory, Abbie Hoffman, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and others he described as being “yippies,” many of whom shared his use of Owsley White Lightning and other brands of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Although comparatively unknown, Krassner is remembered as having been accused in 1969 of being one of the Chicago Seven who had disrupted the Democratic National Convention the previous year. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” he was routinely asked. His response, which many fondly remember: “No.” Claiming to be an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, with whatever tax advantages that provided, he preached in the radical 1960s that it is entirely rational to doubt God’s inexistence. “I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen,” he stated, “when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.” Later, he added, “I stand before you as an atheist, doing what men of the cloth should be doing. . . . Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I had decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the God I didn’t believe in.” Krassner, who edited Lenny Bruce’s How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, was given his first big publishing break by the publisher Lyle Stuart. In 1993, Krassner wrote about his unusual and irrational life in Confessions of A Raving Unconfined Nut, Misadventures in the Counter-Culture, stating, “I had become an atheist at the age of thirteen, when atomic bombs were dropped on Japan.” He also wrote The Lighter Side of Unbelief. In a 1996 album, We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, Krassner declared, “Atheism is an extension of the reproductive urge.” As proof, he includes noisy climaxes of his atheist girlfriends saying, “Ooh. Oh. No God! No God! No God!” Krassner signed a 1994 statement, “In Defense of Secularism,” issued by the Council for Secular Humanism. {CA; E}
Kraus, Howard (20th Century) Edwin H. Wilson has written of Kraus that he “appeared in Minneapolis and wanted to promote humanism on a commission basis—much the same as the Ku Klux Klan had been promoted. Harold Buschman responded to Kraus’ proposal by remarking, ‘That stinks!’ Raymond Bragg also remembered being visited by Kraus at his Chicago office. ‘He talked about promoting humanism by endorsing various commodities, including contraceptives,’ Bragg recalled.” {EW}
Kraus, Karl (1874—1936) An Austrian satirist, Kraus declared, “When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest. {TYD}
Krause: See entry for Ernst H. Ludwig.
Krause, Karl Christian Friedrich (1781-1832) Krause was a philosopher who, under the influence of Schelling and Fichte, became a pantheist. He taught at Jena, Göttingen, and Munich. Krause attempted to reconcile the absolutism of Hegel with the subjectivism of Fichte in a system that he called panentheism. (See entry for Charles Hartshorne.) {RAT}
Kreisner, Howard (20th Century) Kreisner is editor of Secular Nation, a quarterly of the international Atheist Alliance which commenced in 1994 and of which he is vice-president. Also, he is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. He started the first atheist radio show at a public access station if Houston, Texas, and has been involved in several lawsuits involving religious displays on public property. In 1996, he was reported to have moved to Dallas, Texas, and to be in the process of an amicable divorce with Anna Voss. Both had moved from San Diego, where they were active in the Atheist Coalition. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.)
Krejei, Franz (1858—1909) Krejei was a Bohemian psychologist, a professor of philosophy and psychology at the Czech University of Prague. An outspoken rationalist, he presided at the 14th Annual Congress of Freethinkers at Prague in 1907. He told those who attended, “Reaction is the real subversive element, and it shuts down the energy of motive forces until they accumulate and explode.” {RAT; RE}
Krekel, Arnold (1815—1888) Krekel was an American judge who had been born in Prussia but went with his parents in 1832 to America, settling in Missouri. He was elected in 1852 to the Missouri State Legislature, served as a colonel during the Civil War, was president of the Constitutional Convention of 1865, and signed the ordinance of emancipation by which the slaves of Missouri were set free. A pronounced agnostic, he was described in Putnam’s Four Hundred Years of Freethought. Krekel when he realized he was about to die requested his wife not to wear mourning, saying that death was as natural as birth. His wife, Mattie Parry Krekel (Born 1840), was also a freethinker. In a Truth Seeker (15 February 1890) article, she wrote, “Freethought means, first of all, mental self-assertion.” {BDF; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; WWS} Kreves, Eugene (20th Century) When Kreves signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was minister of the DuPage Unitarian Church in Naperville, Illinois. {HM2}
Kreyche, Robert J. (20th Century) A freethinker, Kreyche wrote God and Reality (1965). {GS}
Krikorian, Y(ervant) H(ovhannes) (Born 1892) A respected naturalist in the philosophy department at the City College in New York, Krikorian reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s.
Krim, Mathilde (20th Century) Krim addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). She is widely known for her work in studying human immunodeficiency viruses and their effects upon society. Dr. Krim co-founded the American Foundation for AIDS Research.
Kring, Walter Donald (1916-1999) Kring was a Presbyterian-turned-Unitarian clergyman, author, ceramic artist, and sleuth into the secrets of Herman Melville’s private life. He was minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan for twenty-three years (1955-1978) before leading the Eliot Church in Natick, Massachusetts, until 1997. He wrote Religion is the Search for Meaning (1955); Across the Abyss to God (1966); Liberals Among the Orthodox: Unitarian Beginnings in New York City, 1819-1839 (1974); Henry Whitney Bellows (1979); History of the Unitarian Church of All Souls, New York City, 1882-1978 (1991); and Herman Melville’s Religious Journey (1997). Kring is noted for having discovered that Melville may have been a wife beater and child abuser. During his writing about Henry Bellows, he came across a letter from Samuel Shaw, the half brother of Melville’s wife, Lizzie, proposing that they fake a kidnapping to rescue her from Melville’s sporadic violence. The Melville Society elected Kring in 1979 as its first nonacademic president. He also was a past president of the Beacon Press of Boston, secretary of the American Unitarian Association, and president of the Harvard Divinity School Alumni Association and the Unitarian-Universalist Historical Society. {Wolfgang Saxon, The New York Times, 24 January 1999}
KRISHNA Krishna, a popular deity in Hinduism, is the eighth incarnation (avatar) of Vishnu. Hindus, unlike those in the Judeo-Christian world, tolerate spectacular infidelity in their gods. For example, Krishna committed adultery with 16,000 married women. (See entry for Christmas. A Manhattan wag says Krishna’s record with married women certainly beats Moses’s or Jesus’s.)
KRISTALL Kristall, a quarterly associated with Freigeistige Aktion, is at Schillerstrasse 50, D-63263 Neu-Isenburg, Germany. E-mail: <ortrun.e.lenz@t-online.de>.
Kristeller, Paul (1905-1999) Kristeller, a Columbia University professor, wrote more than eight hundred books and articles about the Renaissance, distinguishing humanism as a historical phenomenon. “Many people would say he was the greatest Renaissance scholar of the century,” Professor James Hankins of Harvard has stated. A German Jewish refugee who came to the United States in the 1930s after having studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Freiberg, Kristeller was a founding member of the Renaissance Society of America and its president from 1957 to 1959. His chief scholarly project was a seven-volume catalogue, Iter Italicum [Italian Journey], which was published between 1963 and 1996. An expert on Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), an Italian philosopher who revived Platonism during the Renaissance, Kristeller was best known for his efforts on behalf of Renaissance humanism, as distinct from later forms. {Eric Pace, The New York Times, 10 June 1999} Kristensen, Bjorn T. (20th Century) In 1997 when 100,000 Norwegians were added to the state Evangelical Lutheran Church overnight because of a church-sponsored campaign to update its membership lists, Kristen noted, “What is happening here is terribly wrong. It is a federal abuse of the individual. The state church should do the same thing everybody else has to do—ask people to become members in a positive fashion.” Kristensen is leader of the Human Ethical Association.
KRISTALL ZEITSCHRIFT FUR GEISTENSFREIHEIT UND HUMANISMUS A German quarterly, Kristall Zeintschrift fur Geistesfreiheit und Humanismus is at Schillerstrasse 50, D-63263 Neu-Isenburg, Germany.
Kristol, Irving (1920— ) Kristol, a noted editor and social sciences educator, has stated in a telecast that he is “a non-believing Jew.” He was co-founder and co-editor of Encounter and an editor of Commentary and The Reporter. With Nathan Glazer he wrote The American Commonwealth (1976) and with Stephen Spender and Melvin Lasky edited Encounters. Kristol is a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. {William F. Buckley Jr., New York Post, 24 January 1998}
Krog, Helge (1889—1962) Krog, a Norwegian critic and playwright, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Kroll, Leon (1884—1974) Kroll, an eminent United States lithographer and painter, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One of his murals is in the Justice Department, Washington, DC, and his paintings are found in major galleries throughout the United States. Asked about humanism in 1956, Kroll responded to the present author:
I am neither a writer nor a philosopher, and I doubt whether my idea of humanism is of general interest. However, since my life is concerned with the search for truth and beauty as an artist-painter sees it, I will comment briefly. The artist is inevitably a lover of humanity. His work is based on that emotional quality. He gives it expression in terms of form and color. This is true even from the earliest records of painting and sculpture. The artist tries to express what he feels about what he sees and create a beautiful order through this visual perception. Technical experiments, while valuable and fascinating, are not enough, since they concentrate on too limited objectives and more often than not depart from aspects of life and nature to such an extent that they become academic. From my point of view, I can see no advantage in the elimination of the recognizable object. It serves, when sufficiently plausible, as a better universal language than arbitrary abstractions. The abstract element is inevitably present in a work of art whether the work is representational or not. It requires more mastery of design, more imagination, and a broad vision of humanity and nature to include man, his aspirations, and character in a work of art than to be satisfied with the comparative aridity of the abstract as a final expression. Some cultures, such as ancient Hebraic and Moslem, forbade the use of man as subject matter in art. The result, when compared to other art of the same period, resulted in mere decoration, some of it fabulously skillful but devoid of full expression of the human spirit. To me, man is more important than the atomic age or any other scientific contribution. Ever recurrent, yet always new and wonderful.
{WAS, 25 August 1956}
Kropotkin, Peter A. [Prince] (1842—1921) Pyotor Alekseyevich Kropotkin, the foremost theorist of the anarchist movement, which he hoped to put on a scientific basis, was a philosopher of revolution. A geographer, and a naturalist in philosophy, he wrote Paroles d’un révolt (Words of a Rebel, 1885); La Conquéte du pain (The Conquest of Bread, 1892); and Etika (1922, posthumously published, Ethics), in which he tried to present ethics as a science, except that he died before completing his work. One of his most controversial books was Mutual Aid (1902), in which he attacked T. H. Huxley and other Social Darwinists for their picture of nature and human society as essentially competitive. Kropotkin was consistently nonviolent in his anarchist beliefs, leading many non-anarchists to admire his outlook. McCabe describes him as “a pacifist anarchist of the Tolstoi type and an agnostic.” A brother who translated Spencer’s Biology into Russian died in Siberia in 1886. {CE; BDF; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Kropp, Arthur (1957—1995) A freethinker, Kropp was president of the 300,000-member civil liberties organization People for the American Way. He led the group through battles against the nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court and a proposed Constitutional amendment to prohibit flag burning and in favor of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 and the Civil Rights Act of 1991. He was instrumental in leading People for the American Way in its efforts on behalf of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, and legislation allowing people to register to vote when they get their driver’s licenses. According to his companion, Chris Bobowski, Kropp died of AIDS.
Kroto, Harold W. [Sir] (1939– ) Kroto, a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000, was recipient in 1996 of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He teaches at the School of Chemical, Physical, and Environmental Science at Brighton in Sussex. Newly added to Academy of Humanism
Krueger, Douglas E. (20th Century) Krueger is author of What Is Atheism? A Short Introduction (1998). Christianity, he finds, “is just another religion with a host of grand promises, scary threats, and no evidence.” Citing major sources, he makes a rational case for non-belief. A professor of philosophy at Northwest Arkansas Community College, Krueger has had much experience engaging in public debates.
Krumbein, Aaron (20th Century) Krumbein wrote his 1943 M.A. thesis at Columbia University on “The Social Philosophy of Robert G. Ingersoll.” {FUS}
Krutch, Joseph Wood (1893—1970) Editor, teacher, naturalist, drama critic of Nation, Krutch in The Modern Temper (1929) wrote, “[P]oetry, mythology, and religion represent the world as a man would like to have it, while science represents the world as he gradually comes to discover it.” Asked his views concerning humanism, Krutch wrote the present author:
I suppose I would call myself some kind of a humanist, and if I have to fit into one of your categories, I suppose it would be into “naturalistic humanism,” aware that the specifically human ought always to be seen against the background of all life. I am afraid I cannot be more specific than that without writing a book.
Krutch’s books include Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (1924), Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), The American Drama since 1918 (1939), Samuel Johnson (1944), Henry David Thoreau (1948, The Measure of Man (1954), and The Human Nature and the Human Condition (1959). Retiring to Arizona, he became not only the philosophic naturalist but also the scientific naturalist, focusing on The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist’s Interpretation (1955), in which he vividly describes the desert’s insects and animals. {CE; HNS; TYD; WAS, 23 March 1949}
Krzyzanowski, Sigismund Julien Adolph (Born 1845) Under the pen name of Sigismund Lacroix, Krzyzanowski with Yves Guyot wrote The Social Doctrines of Christianity. In 1877 he was sentenced to three months in prison for calling Jesus “enfant adulterin” in Le Radical. In 1881 he was elected president of the municipal council and in 1883 became deputy to the French Parliament. {BDF}
Ksarjian, Lena (20th Century) Ksarjian is a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER). In “Religion as a Human Science” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1994), she stated, “I cannot consider myself an educated person without a formal understanding of how religion shapes culture and functions within it. As a humanist, I can participate in the human dramas shaped by Judaism and Christianity, with the understanding that religion is nothing more and nothing greater than the invention of the human imagination.” In “Trying to Prove that the Bible is Pro-Woman” (Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999), Ksarjian writes that a Bible-based feminism actually promotes the patriarchy it tries to eliminate.”
KU KLUX KLAN The Ku Klux Klan is a designation mainly given to two distinct secret societies that played a part in American history, although the name has been used by other groups. A. W. Tourgées Fool’s Errand (1880) and Thomas Dixon’s Clansman (1905) were two works on which D. W. Griffith based his film, “The Birth of a Nation,” which dealt with the organization. David M. Chalmer’s Hooded Americanism (1968) is one of several works listed by The Columbia Encyclopedia as a source about the group. In the 1990s David Duke in Louisiana surprised many by representing a resurgence of a large public support for the KKK. He proposed dividing the country into racial “homelands,” suggested that Manhattan and Long Island be declared “West Israel,” and that the rest of the metropolitan area become “Minoria,” an area set aside for Puerto Ricans, southern Italians, Greeks, and “other unassimilable minorities.” Some of the Klan’s terminology is as follows:
Grand Dragon—head of State Klan Kamelias—female members King Kleagle—chief organizer Klabee—treasurer Klaliff—vice president Klantoken—$10 initiation fee Klanton—county organization Klavern—local Klan lodge Kleagle—organizer Kligrapp—secretary Kludd—chaplain {AAH Examiner, Summer 1998; CE; James Ridgeway, Village Voice, 3 March 1998}
Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth (1926— ) A psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross is cited by Paul Edwards as being a believer in reincarnation and “the most credulous person who ever lived.”
Kubrick, Stanley (1928–1999) Kubrick was a noted producer, director, and writer. His thirteen feature-length films are “Fear and Desire” (1953), “Killer’s Kiss” (1955), “The Killing” (1956); “Paths of Glory” (1957); “Spartacus” (1960); “Lolita” (1962); “Dr. Strangelove” (1964); “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968); “A Clockwork Orange” (1971); “Barry Lyndon” (1975); “The Shining” (1980); “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), and “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999). To Playboy, he responded as to whether he thought “2001” is a religious film:
I will say that the God concept is at the heart of “2001” but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun, and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or other will eventually emerge.
Interviewed by American Cinematographer (1969) and asked if there is an unseen cosmic intelligence, or god, in the movie, something responsible for the events depicted on the screen, Kubrick responded,
The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, “2001” shows that what some people call “god” is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don’t understand, they call “god” . . . . Everything we know about the universe reveals that there is no god. I chose to do Dr. Clarke’s story as a film because it highlights a critical factor necessary for human evolution; that is, beyond our present condition. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn’t that obvious?
So what did he say to people who find the movie spiritual and call it a “religious experience”?
It’s simply not there, religion and spirituality. Sufficiently advanced beings could be capable of things we might not even be able to understand—though these things would all make perfect sense to an advanced civilization, I suspect that these people to whom you refer are simply calling what they don’t understand in my film “god.”
Although the son of a physician, Kubrick was said by friends not to have consulted doctors, to have given himself medication if he did not feel well, and to have gotten insufficient sleep. Film was his life, but he loved to play chess, prepare meals, and be at home, from which he rarely traveled far. Although called secretive, reclusive, strange, mysterious, and cold, those who knew him well and worked with him found him the top man in his field. Of him Sydney Pollack the director said,
I always think of Stanley literally on the edge of a smile. His eyes always had mischief in them. He always had this sense of the devil in him while he was very calmly asking questions. He read everything and knew absolutely all aspects of the business, including literally what the box-office receipts of every theater in the world were over the past few years.
Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack. Permission to bury him in his garden was arranged by the local authorities in Herefordshire—it was only the second time, the first having been for George Bernard Shaw. He is buried among his animals: dogs, cats, squirrels. {CA; E; Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Magazine, 4 July 1999}
Kubrick, Stanley (26 Jul 1928 - 7 Mar 1999) Kubrick was a noted producer, director, and writer. His thirteen feature-length films are Fear and Desire (1953); Killer’s Kiss (1955); The Killing (1956); Paths of Glory (1957); Spartacus (1960); Lolita (1962); Dr. Strangelove (1964); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); A Clockwork Orange (1971); Barry Lyndon (1975); The Shining (1980); Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). He had intended to make AI, a film about artificial intelligence, but upon his death Steven Spielberg made it—the film could be seen to imply, tongue-in-cheek, that if God created Adam because He needed to be personally loved, why shouldn’t humans be able to use their scientific powers to create robots as their own personal super-toys? To Playboy, Kubrick responded as to whether he thought 2001 is a religious film:
I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun, and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or other will eventually emerge.
Interviewed by American Cinematographer (1969) and asked if there is an unseen cosmic intelligence, or god, in the movie, something responsible for the events depicted on the screen, Kubrick responded,
The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, 2001 shows that what some people call “god” is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don’t understand, they call “god” . . . . Everything we know about the universe reveals that there is no god. I chose to do Dr. [Arthur C.] Clarke’s story as a film because it highlights a critical factor necessary for human evolution; that is, beyond our present condition. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn’t that obvious?
So what did he say to people who find the movie spiritual and call it a “religious experience”?
It’s simply not there, religion and spirituality. Sufficiently advanced beings could be capable of things we might not even be able to understand—though these things would all make perfect sense to an advanced civilization, I suspect that these people to whom you refer are simply calling what they don’t understand in my film “god.”
AI ironically shows that humans are far nastier than the robots that are depicted. Even the human children are bullies who selfishly compete for their adults’ love. In one scene at a mass robot grave, something like Auschwitz, scientists are heartless corporate executives who steal body parts. The son of a physician, Kubrick was said by friends not to have consulted doctors, to have given himself medication if he did not feel well, and to have gotten insufficient sleep. Film was his life, but he loved to play chess, prepare meals, and be at home, from which he rarely traveled far. Although called secretive, reclusive, strange, mysterious, and cold, those who knew him well and worked with him found him the top man in his field. Of him Sydney Pollack the director said,
I always think of Stanley literally on the edge of a smile. His eyes always had mischief in them. He always had this sense of the devil in him while he was very calmly asking questions. He read everything and knew absolutely all aspects of the business, including literally what the box-office receipts of every theater in the world were over the past few years.
Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack. Permission to bury him in his garden was arranged by the local authorities in Herefordshire—it was only the second time, the first having been for George Bernard Shaw. He is buried among his animals: dogs, cats, squirrels. {CA; E; Peter Bogdanovich, The New York Times Magazine, 4 July 1999}
Kuçuradi, Ioanna (20th Century) Kuçuradi is head of the Department of Philosophy at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey. She also is secretary general of the International Federation of Philosophic Societies. A secularist, she has described secularization in Turkey (Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996), including an analysis of Atatürk’s contribution. “Compared with, for example, the French revolution,” Kuçuradi states, “Atatürk’s revolution shows the following striking specificity: the French revolution was an attempt to introduce into European social reality a historically new worldview—a concept of man and of what is valuable, which was created by the Enlightenment. . . . Atatürk’s revolution was also an attempt to modernize Turkish society” with the aim to “introduce ideas and concepts, that were developed not in Turkey, but elsewhere and that proved to be more conducive to developing certain human potentialities. . . . Thus considered, Atatürk’s was a cultural revolution, aimed at introducing the Enlightenment in Turkey and carried out through the modernization of the legal system.” In 1996, she was moderator of a panel on secularism in the Middle East at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Kuebler, Ernest William (1929— )
Working with Frederick May Eliot and Sophia L. Fahs, Kuebler became one of the most important forces in religious education in 20th century liberal religion. His approach was to move Unitarian religious education “from a Bible-centered to a child-centered approach.” From 1937 to 1962, he was general editor of Beacon Books in Religious Education. {U&U}
Kuenen, A. (1829—1891) Kuenen wrote Christianity: Three Notices of the ‘Speaker’s Commentary.’ ” (c. 1875) and National Religion and Universal Religion (republished 1979). {GS}
Kuenzli, Alfred E. (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Kuenzli was on the faculty of the State University of New York, New York State College for Teachers in Albany.
Kuh, Edwin J. (20th Century) Kuh, a freethinker, wrote The Right to Disbelieve (1910). {GS}
Kuhmerker, Lisa (Died 1998) A founder of the Association for Moral Education and editor of Moral Education Forum, Kuhmerker addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). {Free Inquiry, Summer 1988}
Kuhn, Margaret (1905— ) In 1978, the American Humanist Association named Kuhn Humanist of the Year. Upon being forced to retire in 1970, she almost single-handedly created the Gray Panthers, a national organization dedicated to eradicating ageism and bringing about peace and social justice. In Maggie Kuhn on Aging (1977), she wrote, “We need to counter the old dehumanizing images of old age . . . . We are not ‘senior citizens’ or ‘golden agers.’ We are the elders, the experienced ones; we are maturing, growing adults responsible for the survival of our society. We are not wrinkled babies, succumbing to trivial, purposeless waste of our years and our time. We are a new breed of old people. There are more of us alive today than at any other time in history. We are better educated, healthier, with more at stake in this society. We are redefining goals, taking stock of our skills and experience, looking to the future.” From 1978 to 1980, Kuhn served on President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on Mental Health. {HNS2}
Kuhn, Thomas (Born 1922) Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a major work on the contemporary philosophy of science. Scientists, he argues, work within and against the background of beliefs that he characterizes as a “paradigm.” No strictly logical reason for the change of a paradigm exists, although such changes occur, a view counter to that of Karl Popper, for whom science is the apotheosis of sound and logical defensible thought. Both Kuhn and Popper, however, are evolutionary epistemologists who see analogies between their views of scientific change and the evolution of organisms. Richard Rorty, who holds that Bertrand Russell is “arguably the most influential philosopher to have written in English in this century,” adds that John Dewey and Thomas Kuhn are “the only plausible rivals for that position.” (See entry for Consilience.) {OCP}
Kuhr, Rudolf (20th Century) Kuhr, an activist supporter of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, is associated with Humaniste Aktion in Germany. E-mail: <humanist.aktion@t-online.de>. On the Web: <http://home.t-online.de/home/humanist.aktion/>.
Kularatnam, K. (20th Century)
Prof. Kularatnam from Sri Lanka addressed the Sixth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Amsterdam (1974).
KUMANI Kumani, in an early Indian religion, was the virgin goddess. {LEE}
Kumar, Prem (20th Century) Kumar, for Humanist in Canada (Autumn 1996), wrote “Canadian Multiculturalism.”
Kumley, Lloyd (20th Century) Kumley is Secretary of American Humanist Association. A lawyer, he is co-chairman of the AHA’s Humanist Youth Club and edits several children’s publications: Sunrise Journal, Stargazer, and Star Walker. His e-mail: <lloydk@teleport.com>. (See entry for Oregon Rationalists, Humanists.) {FD}
Kunchithapadam, Krishna (20th Century) Kunchithapadam is the program chairperson and webmaster for Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin. E-mail: <krishna@cs.wisc.edu>.
Kundera, Milan (1929—) A Czech novelist, Kundera studied at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies but left for Paris in 1968 when the Russians invaded. His first novel, Zert (The Joke, 1967), was followed by The Farewell Party (1976) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979). The latter, a semi-autobiographical view of post-war Europe, evoked cultural, political, and sexual lives of the “two or three new fictional characters baptized on earth every second.” In Testaments Betrayed, Kundera has gone on record as being a non-theist. {CA; E; OCE}
Milan Kundera, Novelist art
Author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera says he is an atheist in his book on the novel and art, Testaments Betrayed.
K’ung Fu-Tzu: See entry for Kongfu-zi, which follows the simpler Pinyin system of transliterating Chinese.
Kunneman, Harry (20th Century) Kunneman is a professor at the University of Humanist Studies in Utrecht. He is a member of the Dutch Humanist League.
Kunz, F. L. (20th Century) Kunz, vice president of the Foundation for Integrated Education, is a naturalist. On the subject of the term, “humanism,” he wrote the present author about his being a naturalist:
However, I would like to say that I use the term in the sense as would a modern physicist, familiar with deductive-exact scientific method. Einstein would be my model here, and not Bertrand Russell. As you know, for such people—Einstein, Schrödinger, etc.—empiricism has a vital role in testing, winnowing, and proving out certain structures of thought which start with postulates, but end up as the finest kind of pragmatic science. One of the results of this development—which took strong hold at the time of James C. Maxwell—has been the physical and theoretical demonstration of the reality of the non-material. Thus we have established for us a view that inverts the 19th century mechanism, to which many 19th century people added a weak, inconsistent idealism. One of the important ingredients now, in 20th century thought, is a powerful realistic idealism. It is easy to show this, experimentally, in physics. Further, one can produce evidence which shows that the same kind of methodology and the same authoritative content of knowledge can be derived for biology, without submitting to reductionism. After that similar gains can be made (and are prima facie acceptable now) in human psychology and sociology. But what I have said above is only a small beginning and must not be taken to represent the whole of my own view. {WAS, 7 August 1956}
Kuralt, Charles Bishop (1934—1997)
Kuralt, a popular news correspondent and CBS television star, in one of his travels met an individual from the New York Secular Humanists who informed him that secular humanists are followers of Democritus and Protagoras, not Moses and St. Augustine. Also, that they hold nature as being paramount over humanity, not the other way around, for which reason they appreciate the way Kuralt closes his Sunday newscasts: with shots of birds, dew-wet flowers, quiet mountains, and assorted views of nature in the raw. Replied Kuralt, without admitting to being a philosophic naturalist, “I am a visceral, lower-case, secular humanist myself, and I wish you and the Secular Humanist Society equivalent of ‘God-speed’!” Kuralt wrote On the Road With Charles Kuralt (1985).
Kuran, Timur (20th Century): See entry for Preference Falsification.
Kurdakul, Sukran (20th Century) Kurdakul is president of Turkey’s PEN, the organization of poets, essayists, and novelists. A dedicated secularist, he has actively tried to return from Moscow the body of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, an atheist and Communist. Kurdakul is a writer of poetry and literary history. {Stephen Kinzer, The New York Times, 27 February 1997}
Kurtz, Jonathan Jr. (1995— ) When ten weeks old, Kurtz, the grandson of philosopher Paul Kurtz and son of Jonathan Kurtz, Marketing Director of Prometheus Books, was the first to have a secular humanist Welcoming Celebration in the Center for Inquiry library in Amherst, New York. American humanists, following the lead of Jane Wynne Willson in Britain, have developed ceremonies for important moments in life—rites of passage such as birth, graduation, marriage, and death. With his grandparents (Claudine Kurtz, Paul Kurtz, Maria Curley, Robert Curley), aunt (Annie), and parents (Gretchen Kurtz and Jonathan Kurtz) participating, the Welcoming Celebration occurred 23 September 1995. Jonathan Jr. slept throughout the entire ceremony.
Kurtz, Paul (1925— ) A leading exponent of secular humanism, Kurtz is professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. An accomplished and versatile scholar, who is often called “unquestionably the most important atheist thinker and publicist in America today,” Kurtz is all the following:
• editor-in-chief of the highly influential Free Inquiry, an international secular humanist magazine which is published quarterly (Box 664, Buffalo, NY 14226);
• an educator who has taught at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut; Vassar College in New York; the New School for Social Richard in New York City; Union College in New York; the University of Besacon in France;
• the President of the Secretariat of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, which he had helped to organize in 1983. Among those who have been elected are such political figures as Sakharov and Djilas, who were recognized for their defense of human rights and democracy;
• a member of the editorial board of International Humanist, a quarterly of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), of which he was a co-president for eight years; in 1982 he addressed the Eighth IHEU World Congress in Hannover, as he did also at the Tenth in Buffalo in 1988;
• author of Eupraxophy: Living Without Religion (1989). He has introduced the term eupraxophy, or “good practice and wisdom,” describing the movement of secular humanism as being an ethical, philosophical, and scientific one. Secular humanism, he emphasizes, is a nonreligious way of life and cosmic outlook;
• drafter in 1983 of Humanist Manifesto II and the individual who is at the center of criticism that it toned down the religious humanism of Humanist Manifesto I. After many attempts to contact Andrei Sakharov, who had been expelled from Moscow, Kurtz was able to contact him directly and got him to endorse the Manifesto, which became front-page news in The New York Times. Maintaining that secular humanism is a philosophic movement, not a religion, he argues that it is time for humanists to accomplish what most Enlightenment figures never did: abandon Deism and a belief in the supernatural, however that is defined. Humanism, he holds, should “break away from its ethnic foundations (the Society of Secular Humanistic Judaism) or its religious foundations (Unitarian Universalist Association, Ethical Culture, Fellowship of Religious Humanists, and the American Humanist Association). It should not be held hostage to Unitarian, Judaistic, or Adlerian institutional forms, but needs to develop its own identity and integrity.” Now that the idea of God is dead, and only of minor literary interest, our major concern today is “to assert that humans are alive. This does not mean that we should exalt Reason, forget Passion, and not appeal to the whole person.” In short, he favors a “thoroughly secular, atheist, or agnostic humanism . . . [that is] honest and truthful about who we are and what we stand for.” “Isn’t it time,” he declares, “that we finally cut the umbilical cord of religion?”
• presenter to Andrei Sakharov of the International Humanist of the Year Prize in 1988, an honor which had been awarded in absentia earlier that year;
• Vice-President of the British Rationalist Press Association, to which in 1979 he was elected an honorary associate;
• a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion;
• an editor for Prometheus Books of A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology (1985); The Humanist Alternative (1973); Sidney Hook, Philosopher of Democracy and Humanism (1982);
• the author of The Fullness of Life (1974); Exuberance: A Philosophy of Happiness(1977); Forbidden Fruit, the Ethics of Humanism (1988); Philosophical Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism (1990); The Transcendental Temptation, a Critique of Religion and the Paranormal (1991); and The New Skepticism (1992);
• a facilitator in setting up dozens of secular humanist chapters across the country and in establishing the movement’s headquarters and building (at 3965 Rensch Road in Buffalo, New York 14228);
• the principal founder of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP);
• a speaker on “The Future Course of Humanism” at the 3 November 1995 opening of the Centre for Critical Enquiry, Westminster College, Oxford.
• the publisher of Philo, a journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers which commenced in 1998.
• recipient in 1998 of the International Humanist of the Year Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union at a congress held in Mumbai.
• the individual mainly responsible for drafting and arranging signers for the important Humanist Manifesto 2000, of which he was a signer.
In 1988, the International Humanist and Ethical Union gave Kurtz a special Academy World Humanist Award for his far-reaching successes in expanding the influence of the philosophy of secular humanism. At the 9 June 1995 dedication of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, he was awarded a “Certificate of Condemnation” signed by “the Horribly Reverend Pat Robertson” and “the Most Holy Johnnie Paul II,” facetiously presented by the Committee of the Far Righteous for his being an igtheist, a denier of revealed truth, a discounter of creationism, and a skeptic. In 1993, he spoke in Berlin at the European Humanist Federation, lamenting the rise of fundamentalism, which he found is associated with the weakening of the classical humanist tradition. Fundamentalism, he stated, is basically an authoritarian personality either in issuing commands (if a leader) or obeying them (if a disciple). Most often the fundamentalist doctrine is supported by nationalistic, racial, and ethnic chauvinism. It is intolerant of dissent and the greatest sin is heresy and blasphemy. Kurtz added, “The battle for rationality and freedom is never fully won, for waiting in the wings are new virtues and thus the courage to criticize nonsense and to defend rational humanism as an alternative.” He suggested the following counter measures for humanists:
• Ally ourselves with forces which believe in democracy and tolerance, including liberal Christians;
• Produce serious criticism of the Qur’an and Bible and develop critical thinking in education;
• Develop visible humanist alternatives with a moral component.
In Toronto in 1994, he spoke at the conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT) on “The Positive Reach of Humanism: An Agenda for the 21st Century.” In 1995 in Madrid, he spoke to the Spanish Association of Rational Humanism concerning “Neo-Spirituality and the Paranormal.” In Delphi, Greece, he spoke at the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. Also, Kurtz has appeared in telecasts and on Public National Radio interviews. Kurtz’s critics have been many. Board members of the American Humanist Association were aghast when he accepted for The Humanist an advertisement from a sex-oriented magazine. Others have complained that “the Kurtz group” claims “secular humanism” is a philosophic movement worthy of being named as such in philosophy texts, but it is not. Herbert Tonne once objected to Kurtz’ one-man rule, his “ownership of CODESH” combined with his financial interest in Prometheus Books. Although Prometheus Books supplies titles unavailable elsewhere, Tonne questioned its being owned by Kurtz’s son and alleged that it was becoming a vanity press that preyed upon authors by charging them to accept their work or by paying scanty royalties. When Kurtz says, “Is it not time others work with us in establishing a new coalition?” what he really means, Tonne complained, is “It is time for the American Humanist Association, Freedom From Religion Foundation, and others, to do his bidding.” However, CODESH, now the Council for Secular Humanism, is currently run by a board of directors. Kurtz serves without salary or compensation as its chair. Kurtz claims he has personally committed some $600,000 toward the future of the organizations he founded.
Other critics have suggested that Kurtz is not up on a philosophic rung with Sidney Hook in the academic world although he pretends to be. Many have complained that his coinage, “eupraxophy,” is ludicrous and unpronounceable, that it under-emphasizes the humanities. Nicolas Walter found his outlook as one filled with neologistic nostrums. Kurtz’s retort is that the length and breadth of his leadership of the Council for Secular Humanism speaks for itself.
A compilation of his work, Toward A New Enlightenment, The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz (1994), focuses on central issues such as ethics, politics, education, religion, science, and pseudoscience which have concerned him throughout his career. The Courage to Become: The Virtues of Humanism (1997) is an affirmative perspective on Promethean humanism. Kurtz’s Who’s Who entry:
Two passions have dominated my intellectual and professional life: (1) a commitment to critical intelligence—I am skeptical of the false beliefs and mythologies that have motivated other men and women—and (2) a belief in the importance of human courage, particularly in defending reason in society and in attempting to reconstruct ethical values so that they are more democratic and humane.
In 1996 at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, Kurtz was moderator of a panel discussion of science and superstition. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Kurtz’s e-mail: <pksksh@aol.com>. The homepage on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/>. (His thorough agenda for 21st century humanism is found in New Humanist, February 1995; see entry for Humanists, Naturalistic.) {CA; E; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1991; FUK; FUS; HM2; HNS2; PK; SHD; TYD}
Kushner, Tony (20th Century) Kushner, an agnostic with an interest in Marxism, was recipient in 1990 of the Whiting Foundation Writers Award. In 1992, for his epic “Angels in America,” he received the London Evening Standard Award for Best Play, followed in 1993 by the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play of 1993. “Angels in America” was the first part of the seven-hour production “Millennium Approaches,” followed by the second part, “Perestroika” the Russian word for “rebuilding.” In both, an angel appears as a genuine 20th century deus ex machina with a Message From on High. The work, a gay fantasia on national themes, has been praised by many of Kushner’s contemporaries in the theater as being a universal metaphor from the facts of the historical moment. John Lahr, drama critic of The New Yorker, called it “a masterpiece. You’d be very hard-pressed to find a serious play of this dimension on Broadway in the last thirty years. It’s talking about something [homosexuality] that American culture has had to adjust to.” Thomas M. Disch has written, “ ‘Angels in America’ certainly has its quota of shock value—full frontal male nudity, simulated sex between men (who remain in their underwear), and any amount of inspired X-rated wisecracking. . . . Perhaps the most innovatively shocking element of ‘Angels’ is its complex portrait of right-wing power broker, and closet homosexual, Roy Cohn, who is dying of AIDS, delirious with rage and fear, haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and a villain to his last strangled breath. . . . When Cohn is dead at last, Kushner rises to a different kind of glory in one of Perestroika’s greatest scenes, when Louis, a paragon of frazzled neoliberalism, says Kaddish over his archenemy’s corpse, his rusty Hebrew cued by Ethel Rosenberg’s ghost.” Although Kushner depicts an America of lies and cowardice, he also envisions an America of truth and beauty. “For me,” Kushner has explained, “the bulk of it—the epic nature of it—becomes part of what it’s about: this incredible struggle I feel people have to wage in order to be able to change themselves.” Kussman, Carmel (Died 1994) Kussman, who had been on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association, was its treasurer at the time of her death. She was active in founding an American Humanist Association group in Brooklyn, New York, and she was a member of the Secular Humanist Society in Manhattan.
Kuvakin, Valerii (1939- ) Kuvakin, a professor of philosophy at Moscow State University, is Chairman of the Russian Humanist Association. He is associated with The Humanist Alternative, a quarterly, and Zdravyi Smysl l (Common Sense, Novatorov 18-2-2, Moscow 117421, Russia). In 1997 he became head of the newly formed Center for Inquiry at Moscow State University. He is a contributing editor of Philo and signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1997-1998; International Humanist Bulletin, June 1995 and December 1997}
Kupyers, Janet (1970— ) Kuypers edits Children, Churches and Daddies, ”the unreligious, non-family oriented literary and art magazine.” She is author of The Window (1994). {Freethought History, #17, 1996}
Kwame, Nii Otto II [Chief] (20th Century) Kwame, chief of the village of Pokuasi in Ghana, has given land for a Rational Centre of Ghana, the motto of which is “Down with Superstition.” Working with Hope Tawiah, Kwame is a combination social worker, counselor, priest, and medicine man for the village’s six thousand residents. He has described how one of the villagers came to him with a child suffering from intestinal worms. Besides offering the traditional remedies, Kwame also went to the pharmacy and bought a vermifuge that he administered to the patient. After the patient recovered, Chief Kwame explained to the mother that the illness had been caused by worms and it was cured by medicine, an approach she accepted. “Such,” observed his visitors Bonnie and Vern Bullough, “is the work of a rationalist in Ghana.”
Kwasniewska, Aleksander [President] (1954- ) A Polish politician, Kwasniewska was a leader of the Polish youth movement including being chairman of the Polish Socialist Students’ Union at Gdansk. He now is chairman of the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland and leader of the Democratic Left Alliance Caucus. In 1995 he defeated Lech Walsea to become President of Poland. Kwasniewska, an atheist, and his Catholic wife, Jolanta Kwasniewska, welcomed Pope John Paul on his 1999 visit to his native country.
Kwee, Swan Liat (20th Century) A Dutch pamphleteer, Kwee wrote a “Bibliography of Humanism” (1957). {GS}
Kyd (or Kid), Thomas (1558—1594) Kyd, the eminent dramatist, was suspected by many of being an atheist. He was closely associated with Marlowe, with whom he shared lodgings in 1591. Kyd’s “atheistical” writings led to his being tortured and imprisoned. His Spanish Tragedy (1592) was published anonymously and was so popular that it passed through ten printed editions by 1633. The only work published under his name was a translation from Robert Garnier, Cornelia (1594), re-issued in 1595 as Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie. {OEL; TRI}
Kykhuizen, George (20th Century) Kykhuizen is author of The Life and Mind of John Dewey (1973). (See entry for John Dewey.)
