M
From Philosopedia
MAAT In Egyptian mythology, Maat was a goddess who personified truth and justice. Her laws were notably benevolent, not harsh as in the later patriarchal view described in Deuteronomy 28:15-68.
Mabu, Charles R. (20th Century) Mabu in 1917 wrote Nature Sufferage, regarding the unfairness of not taxing church property.
MAC: Names starting with MAC or MC are listed as if they are spelled Mac.
McAndrews, Ed (20th Century) McAndrews is on the Board in Ohio of Cincinnati’s Free Inquiry Group.
MacArdle, Meredith (20th Century) MacArdle was formerly the director of public relations for the British Humanist Association. She is now director of public relations for the Voluntary Euthanasia Society.
McBrien, Richard P. (20th Century) The Rev. McBrien is author of Catholicism (1996), a survey of church teachings. Formerly the chairman of the theology department at the University of Notre Dame, he is one of the most outspoken liberal Roman Catholic theologians. The National Conference of Catholic Bishops attacked his book, complaining that it “raises no questions about the author’s standing as a theologian and priest” but does not approve his inclusion of “inaccurate or at least misleading” statements about some doctrines. More important, the committee proclaimed, the book minimizes established church teachings by overemphasizing the plurality of viewpoints in the church and the importance of modern rather than traditional thinking. As such, it offers “a broad range of opinions on every topic with the apparent intention of allowing, or stimulating, the reader to make a choice. This places a heavy burden on the reader” who may not know which opinions are “part of the mainstream Catholic conversation” and which “are closer to the margins.” {The New York Times, 11 April 1996}
McBride, Ellen (20th Century) McBride is president of the American Ethical Union, the thirteen-member board of which is elected nationally.
McBryde, Mike (20th Century) A freelance artist and writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, McBryde is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
McCabe, Joseph (Martin) (1867–1955) An English atheist, anticlericalist, and critic of the Catholic Church, McCabe described himself as a “pedlar of culture.” E. Haldeman-Julius, his chief American publisher, called him the world’s greatest scholar—his 121 Little Blue Books and 122 larger books totaling 7,600,000 words earned him $100,000. Ordained a Roman Catholic priest (Franciscan) at twenty-three and called Father Antony, he totaled the debits and credits of religion and concluded on one Christmas Eve that Christianity was bankrupt. Religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, he wrote, appealed to nonempirical, spiritual causes and thus was the chief opponent of materialism and, therefore, of science. His 1918 work, The Popes and Their Church: A Candid Account, resulted in much criticism. As John R. Burr has noted, McCabe’s aggressive frankness and skepticism seem to have offended nearly everyone, including the British Rationalist Association, which expelled him in 1928. McCabe was an editor of the Joseph McCabe Magazine (1930–1931) and Militant Atheist (1933). Of amusement to humanists is McCabe’s novel, The Pope’s Favorite, in which Lucrezia Borgia and Giulia, Pope Alexander VI’s mistress, are featured. He wrote about two hundred books and thirty translations, delivered about two thousand lectures (including seven lecture tours in Australasia, the United States, and Canada), and held a score of public debates. McCabe, who described himself as an atheist and a materialist, wished his epitaph to be: “He was a rebel to his last breath.” {EU, John R. Burr; FUK; FUS; RAT; RE; SWW; TRI}
McCabe, Steve (20th Century) McCabe is cited by the Morains as having been “pivotal in maintaining the quality and accuracy of humanist publications.” {HNS2}
McCall, Colin (20th Century) McCall, in reviewing Antony Flew’s Atheistic Humanism for the English Freethinker (June 1994), was in agreement with Flew’s criticism of religion. However, he disagreed with Flew’s using the term race in connection with Homo sapiens and his holding that “intelligence” can be “measurable” by humanly designed tests, a claim which even Alfred Binet did not make in 1905. “So,” writes McCall, “I suppose it may be said that I go along with Antony Flew as an atheist but not as a geneticist.” McCall, the son of parents who were officers of the Manchester branch of the National Secular Society during the presidency of Chapman Cohen, has been general secretary of the National Secular Society and a freethinker all his life. {FUK}
McCall, Fiona (1963–1995) McCall, daughter of Colin and June McCall, was arts page secretary of The Guardian. Her obituary in that journal read,
There are few pure people in the world. Fiona McCall was one of them. She was gentle and kind, funny and generous, a Marxist with a brilliant, non-dogmatic mind and a huge, quiet heart that caused her too much pain. She could have been a great critic—in film, theatre, art, opera, anything. . . .
Maccall, William (1812–1878) A Scot, Maccall found his way to Unitarianism, then left it as being insufficiently broad. He wrote Elements of Individualism (1847), translated Spinoza’s Treatise on Politics (1854), and contributed to Secular Review and other journals. Maccall was an idealistic pantheist. {BDF; RAT; VI; TRI}
McCallister, Mildred L. (1929–1994) McCallister was president of the Humanist Association of the Greater Sacramento Area. She also was coordinator for the American Humanist Association’s Northern California region. A published poet and author, she was active in the Sacramento Skeptics Society. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
McCann, Eamonn (1943– ) McCann, a freethinker living in Derry, holds that although the Vatican a decade ago would discuss certain controversial subjects, in 1996 it bristles with arrogant certainty. “The aspiration of Irish liberals has never been to extirpate the Catholic Church and end its influences,” McCann noted. “What they’ve always wanted is a new accommodation with the Church. But all the indications are that this is no go. The furtive cabal that descended on Dundrum (17 February 1996) is not talking terms. Sooner or later we’ll have to have it out with them.” He would start by encouraging a campaign to have the Vatican lose its United Nations status. McCann wrote War in an Irish Town (1993). {The Freethinker, June 1996 and August 1999}
McCarroll, Tolbert H. [Brother Toby] (20th Century) McCarroll was an attorney who helped prevent civil rights legislation from excluding atheists. He also was executive director of the American Humanist Association in the 1960s. He then became primarily interested in Humanistic Psychology, then in Catholicism, and finally became Brother Toby, head of a Catholic monastery. Although a large number of ex-Catholics become non-theistic freethinkers (e.g., Mary McCarthy), McCarroll is one of a handful of freethinkers who have made the reverse trip. (See entry for American Humanist Association.)
McCarthy, Mary (Therese) (1912–1989) An acerbic and witty novelist, McCarthy described the Dickensian nightmare of her youth in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1935). She was a drama critic for Partisan Review, and her works include The Groves of Academe (1952), in which she satirized faculty life at a women’s liberal arts college. She also wrote The Group (1963), about eight Vassar alumnae of 1933 for the thirty years following their graduation. Her posthumous Intellectual Memoirs, New York 1936–1938 (1992) emphasized, according to Jean Strouse in The Times (24 May 1992), her lifelong crusades “against inaccuracy, cant, evasion, cliché, self-deception, bad writing, weak principles, and fraud—most famously when she said of Lillian Hellman, on Dick Cavett’s television show, that ‘every word she says is a lie, including and and the.’ ” (Hellman sued her but died before the case came to trial.) Although as a youth McCarthy was convent-bred, she no longer considered herself a Catholic once she left her paternal grandparents’ home. In her memoirs she reflects upon having had a maternal grandmother who was Jewish, but McCarthy the Trotskyite was a self-declared freethinker. McCarthy wrote of her sexual exploits with Harold Johnsrud, John Porter, Philip Rahv, Max Eastman, even of three different men in the course of twenty-four hours. As for the males’ sexual equipment, “there were amazing differences, in both length and massiveness. . . . [One married man had] a penis about the size and shape of a lead pencil,” and tall men she found usually to be the most generously endowed. After she slept with the critic Edmund Wilson, in very short order the two married and she endured seven tempestuous years with him, bearing one child. An outspoken atheist, McCarthy in The Company She Keeps (1942) has a character speak lovingly about a person to whom she is drawn sexually, “ ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘. . . do not let them take this away from me. If the flesh must be blind, let the spirit see. Preserve me in disunity. ‘A di,’ she said aloud, ‘reddite me hoc pro pietate mea.’ (Oh gods, render me this in return for my devotion.). It was certainly a very small favor she was asking, but, like Catullus, she could not be too demanding, for, unfortunately, she did not believe in God.” {CE}
McCarthy, Ngaire (20th Century) McCarthy is President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. She took office in 1998, the third female president in the Association’s seventy-year history.
McCarthy, Timothy G. (20th Century) McCarthy is author of Christianity and Humanism (1997), described by the publisher Loyola as being “an exploration of the hope of ecumenism, the promise of liberation theology, and the challenge and mission of Christian humanism as we approach the third millennium.”
McCarthy, William (20th Century) McCarthy, an atheist, wrote Bible, Church, and God (1946). {FUS}
McCartin, Brian (20th Century) McCartin is administrator of the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum in New Rochelle, New York. The museum’s website is at <www.midiapro.net/cdadesign/paine/>.
Macartney, James (1770–1843) Macartney was an Irish anatomist who practiced as a surgeon in London and was professor of comparative anatomy and physiology at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He also taught anatomy and surgery at Dublin University. Although the priests bitterly attacked him for his avowed Rationalism, he “did not formally commit himself to any creed” and held that “every revelation, no matter whether it be real or supposed, must produce hatred and persecution among mankind.” Macartney was a deist. {RAT; RE}
Macaulay, Thomas Babington (1st Baron) (1800–1859) Macaulay, an English historian and author, was elected to Parliament in 1830, where he distinguished himself as a Whig orator. He served in India as a member of the supreme council of the East India Company, helping to reform the Indian educational system. His greatest work was The History of England from the Accession of James the Second (5 volumes, 1849–1861). Criticized for being objective because of his Whig and Protestant bias, the work nevertheless was an unprecedented success. “The Church,” he wrote, “is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.” He also wrote, “With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.” {CE; TYD}
Macchi, Mauro (1818–1880) An Italian writer, Macchi became professor of rhetoric at the age of twenty-four when, becoming obnoxious to the Austrians by the liberty of his opinions, he was soon deprived of his position. He then founded l’Italia, a Republican journal for which he was exiled. With Ausonio Franchi and Luigi Stefani, he worked on the Libero Pensiero and founded an Italian Association of Freethinkers. In 1861 he was elected deputy to Parliament for Cremona and, in 1879, was elevated to the Senate. One of his principal works is on the Council of Ten. {BDF; RAT}
McClain, Virgil (20th Century) In South Bend, Indiana, McClain edited the monthly Rip Saw from 1955 to 1963. In 1963 it merged with The Free Humanist. {FUS}
McClelland, James Robert (1915– ) McClelland is an Australian atheist, a minister in the Whitlam government, a judge, and a journalist. Son of a Catholic mother and an agnostic father, he had a Catholic education but abandoned that faith at the age of seventeen. Active in civil libertarian causes, he practiced as a solicitor until elected in 1972 to the Senate. McClelland always insisted on affirming rather than swearing an oath, and after he resigned from the Senate in 1978 he became first Chief Judge of the New South Wales Land and Environment Court. He was President in the 1950s of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Weapons Tests in Australia, and since 1986 has written weekly columns for Sydney Morning Herald. McClelland’s autobiography is Stirring the Possum. {SWW}
McClinton, Brian (20th Century) McClinton in Ulster is secretary of the Ulster Humanist Association. That group’s publication, The Humanist, has stated that a new core syllabus for religious education in Ulster schools will do nothing to alleviate the tension between Catholics and Protestants. The Minister of Education, McClinton holds, needs to work toward a more humane and humanist attitude in the educating of Irish students. However, in 1998 when an agreement was reached for peace in Northern Island, McClinton said, “The agreement is the best chance for peace that Northern Ireland has had.” He added, “Compromise is, in fact, a humanist virtue.” According to him, the “peace process” has been dominated by the two absolutist belief systems of Orange and Green, which have so far steadfastly refused a compromise. McClinton is author of Ulster’s Third Way: The Humanist Alternative Beyond Orange and Green (1998). {International Humanist News, June 1995 and December 1998; New Humanist, December 1997}
Maccoby, Hyam (20th Century) Maccoby’s A Pariah People: The Anthropology of Antisemitism (1996) found evidence of anti-Semitism in the Greek and Greco-Roman Empires for the 3rd Century B.C.E., and also in Gnosticism and Islam. But it was the Christians who first treated the Jews as pariahs. This was because, as St. Augustine had preached, the Jews had to be punished for their having rejected Jesus and caused a deicide. Although the Albigenses had to be exterminated, the Jews “were spared this fate because they were considered to have an important contribution to make to Christian society.” Maccoby notes that Protestants such as Luther had diatribes against the Jews as bitter as did the Nazis. His view of the Holocaust: “If a people has been subjected to constant vilification and demonisation over a period of centuries, so that a popular loathing has been instilled so deeply as to operate like an instinct, it is no surprise that eventually a movement will arise that has as its aim the extermination of this alleged pest and enemy of humanity.” As his research shows, Maccoby clearly laments anti-Semitism. {Colin McCall, The Freethinker, December 1996}
McCollister, Betty (1920– ) An Iowan newspaper columnist, McCollister has written for Free Inquiry, Skeptic, and The Humanist. She is a former member of the board of directors of the American Humanist Association, has six children and fifteen grandchildren, and is particularly interested in evolution, church-state separation, and women’s issues. McCollister, who has been President of Humanists of Iowa, became that group’s treasurer. She wrote Voices for Evolution (1989). {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1986-1987}
McCollum, James T. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, McCollum was a humanist counselor. The son of Vashti McCollum, he performed as a humanist counselor the first humanist wedding service ever conducted at West Point Military Academy. {HM2; HNS2}
McCollum, Scot (20th Century) McCollum, from Wisconsin, is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
McCollum, Vashti (Cromwell) (1912– ) President of American Humanist Association from 1962 to 1965, McCollum took a case to the Supreme Court which insured that students do not have to receive religious education in public schools. Justice Felix Frankfurter, in his written opinion, said, “Designed to serve as perhaps the most powerful agency for promoting cohesion among a heterogeneous democratic people, the public school must keep scrupulously free from entanglement in the strife of sects.” In that 1948 case, Justice Hugo Black wrote, “[T]he First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other within its respective sphere.” He added, “[E]very State admitted into the Union since 1876 was compelled by Congress to write into its constitution a requirement that it maintain a school system ‘free from sectarian control.’ ” McCollum signed Humanist Manifesto II. Her autobiographical story is One Woman’s Fight (1950). In it she tells how McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 212 (1948) struck down religious instruction in public schools. In 1993, McCollum spoke at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual convention in Huntsville, Alabama. She is in the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. {FUS; HM2; HNS; HNS2; WAS, conversations; WWS}
McConnell, Francis J. (1871–1953) McConnell has a chapter on Thomas Paine in his Evangelicals, Revolutionists, and Idealists. {FUS}
McConnell, Joy (20th Century) McConnell, who had been the American Ethical Union’s Director of Growth and Development and Religious Education, resigned at the end of 1998.
McCord, Barney (20th Century) McCord, from Alabama, is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
McCord, Melody (20th Century) McCord, from Alabama, is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
McCorkel, James (20th Century)
McCorkel is the vice president for academic affairs at Jersey Shore Medical Center of Meridian Health System in Neptune, New Jersey. He is on the board of directors of the UU Service Committee.
MacCorquodale, Kenneth (20th Century) A professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, MacCorquodale was one of the writers of Modern Learning Theory and was editor of the Century Psychology Series. {PK}
Malachy is probably best known as the brother of Frank McCourt, who wrote the bestselling Angela's Ashes about their dirt-poor Irish Catholic upbringing. They (and their other brothers) have gotten a fair amount of media attention and a couple of documentaries about them have been broadcast recently.
The contributor notes: "Malachy came out with a book of his own called A Monk Swimming, and although I haven't finished it, he has so far referred twice to the fact that he is an atheist."
McCoy, Guy and Victoria (20th Century)
The McCoys are co-founders of Atheists of Northern Colorado. Guy is the gorup’s treasurer and his wife Victoria edits their newsletter. E-mail: <vgmccoy@juno.com>.
McCoy, Robert (20th Century) McCoy was President of the American Humanist Association from 1966 to 1968. He is president of Minnesota Skeptics.
MacCready, Paul Beattie (1925– ) A Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, MacCready is president of AeroVironment, Inc. He wrote Investigation of Atmospheric Turbulence (1952). In 1979, he was leader of the team that developed Gossamer Albatross for human-powered flight across the English Channel. In 1981, he was on the team that developed the Solar Challenger, an ultralight aircraft powered by solar cells; in 1987, the General Motors Sunraycer; and in 1990 the General Motors Impact. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1980 named him “Engineer of the Century.” MacCready signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 and is described in the biographical work by Richard L. Taylor, The First Human-Powered Flight (1995).
McCrimmon, Ian (20th Century) McCrimmon is an Illinois freethinker. He has written for Freethought Perspective (June 1999).
McCrone (20th Century) McCrone, of the McCrone Research Institute, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
McCurdie, Jim (20th Century) McCurdie has written about how Robert G. Ingersoll discovered Robert Burns while still a teenager. McCurdie, who discovered Ingersoll’s work when secretary of the Rationalist Press Association in Glasgow (now the Glasgow Humanist Society), has noted that Ingersoll in 1878 made a pilgrimage to Burns’s birthplace. He is active with the Scottish humanist groups. {Freethought History, #23, 1997}
McDermott, John Joseph (1932– ) McDermott, an educator who has taught at Queens College in Flushing, New York, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Union Theological Seminary, edited Writings of William James (1967), Basic Writings of Josiah Royce (2 vols., 1969), and The Philosophy of John Dewey (2 vols., 1973). He is a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994).
Macdonald, E. Stewart (20th Century) Macdonald was a director in the 1950s of the American Humanist Association.
Macdonald, Eugene Montague (1855–1909) Macdonald was an editor of the atheistic Truthseeker from 1883 to 1909, succeeding D. M. Bennett. Macdonald’s brother, George, succeeded him. He wrote Col. Robert G. Ingersoll as He Is, A Defense of Ingersoll, and Design Argument Fallacies (1896). {BDF; FUS; PUT; RAT; RE}
Macdonald, George E. (1857–1943) Macdonald was an editor of the atheistic Truthseeker from 1909 to 1926. With S. P. Putnam, he had edited the San Francisco journal, Freethought (1888–1891). His “Thumbscrew and Rack: Torture Instruments Employed in the 15th and 16th Centuries” (1904) has been reprinted and contains descriptions of how the church used not only racks and thumbscrews but also the wheel and the cruel spider, which was devised to rip off a woman’s breast. Such devices, he claims, were powerful tools to get individuals to conform to religious dogma. {BDF; FUS; PUT; RAT}
MacDonald, John Francis (c. 1897–1970) “Jack” MacDonald was a public servant and long-time president of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales. {SWW}
MacDonald, Norman (20th Century) MacDonald, a Scottish poet who wrote Vox Humana, which opens with “A Humanist Anthem.” He writes on such other subjects as apartheid, animal rights, and ecology. MacDonald has been an active member of the Glasgow Humanist Society.
McDonald, Ramsay (1866–1937) McDonald was associated with a labour church-ethical society affiliated with the English Ethical Union. {TRI}
McDonnell, William (19th Century) McDonnell’s Heathens of the Heath (1874) and Exeter Hall (1873) are little-known freethought novels. The author was born in Cork, Ireland, but moved to Canada. {BDF; PUT}
Mc Dowell, Jean Thelma (20th Century) In 1930 for her M.A. thesis at Northwestern University, McDowell wrote on the oratory of Robert G. Ingersoll. {FUS}
MacDowell, Mary (20th Century) MacDowell, a contemporary of Jane Addams and one who was involved in Chicago social work, was invited to sign Humanist Manifesto I, the only female so asked. She failed to sign. {EW}
McEldowney, David (20th Century) In the 1950s, McEldowney was managing editor of The Humanist.
McElroy, Wendy (20th Century) McElroy, a contributing editor for Free Inquiry, is author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (1996) and Sexual Correctness (1996). Active in libertarian circles, she holds that pornography does not deserve simply to be tolerated but, rather, it deserves celebration. “Pornography is the explicit artistic description of men and/or women as sexual beings,” she states, and she laments that religious fundamentalists define the explicit depiction of sex as evil. Also, she laments that leftists define it as violence against women, which she holds is equally illogical. “Pornography benefits women, both personally and politically,” she states in her campaign to make pornography legitimate. True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (1999) contains witty social comments particularly about feminism.
MacEnulty Jr., John F. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, MacEnulty was president of the Humanist Society of Jacksonville, Florida {HM2}
McEvoy, John G. (1942– ) With A. Truman Schwartz, McEvoy edited Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley (1989).
McEvoy, Mary (20th Century) McEvoy, A popular Irish soap opera star of “Glenroe,” has been described by James F. Clarity as a religious skeptic. A Dublin telecast, it has tackled the subject of religious disaffection, an issue that in the 1980s would have been “too touchy.” {The New York Times, 1 April 1997}
MacEwan, Douglas M. C. (1917– )
At the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union held in Hannover (1968), MacEwanof the UK Conservation Society addressed the group.
McFadyen, Ted (20th Century) A retired journalist and broadcaster, McFadyen was secretary from 1993 to 1996 of the Brighton Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. A secular humanist, he represented the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association at a 1997 conference in Brighton, England, regarding the policing of lesbian and gay communities. He has written for Gay & Lesbian Humanist.
McFarlane, Todd (20th Century) McFarlane is a writer and comic book artist. When criticized by his heavily satire-laden portrayal of religion and God, he explained in the letters page of his comic book, Spawn, that “I go on record by stating that I do not believe in God.” {CA; E}
McGaha, James E. (20th Century) McGaha is a regional director in Arizona of the Council for Secular Humanism.
McGary, Keith (20th Century) In the 1950s when he was a member of the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin, McGary was an associate editor of The Humanist. {HNS}
McGaw, Howard F. (1911–1997) McGaw directed the library at Ohio Wesleyan (1946–1949), at the University of Houston (1950–1961), and Western Washington State College (1963–1967). He was professor of library science at Western Washington University from 1963 until his retirement in 1977. A Unitarian and life member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he once reported, “If I had had any reservations about a life in the hereafter, such reservations would have been dispelled years ago when I read Corliss Lamont’s The Illusion of Immortality. {Freethought Today, January-February 1998}
McGee, John (20th Century) McGee wrote A History of the British Secular Movement (1948).
McGee, Lewis A. (20th Century) A liberal minister, McGee once was a director of the American Humanist Association.
MC GILL UNIVERSITY FREETHINKERS In Montreal, Quebec, Canada, the McGill University Atheist, Agnostic, and Secular Humanist Society is on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
McGill, Charles (20th Century) McGill is Treasurer of the Scottish Humanists.
McGinley, Phyllis (1905–1978) She may or may not have gone on record concerning her religious or philosophical preference, but the Oregon-born 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner wrote the following freethought poem:
Lament For A Wavering Viewpoint
Ah, snug lie those that slumber Beneath conviction’s roof.
Their floors are sturdy lumber, Their windows weather-proof.
But I sleep cold forever And cold sleep all my kind.
For I was born to shiver In the draft from an open mind! {TYD}
McGlynn, Montana (20th Century)
A student of archeology at Hunter College in New York City, McGlynn said on MTV’s “Real World Boston,” “Christianity is the single worst thing that has happened to women. I believe in Darwin, not God. Science is my religion.” {CA}
McGovern, Edythe M. (20th Century) A professor of English at Los Angeles Valley College, Mc Govern specializes in children’s literature. She is author of They’re Never Too Young for Books (1993). A Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, McGovern was a founder of Secular Humanists of Los Angeles (SHOLA). (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD; Free Inquiry, Winter, 1989-1990}
McGowan, Christopher (20th Century) McGowan is author of In the Beginning: A Scientist Shows Why the Creationists Are Wrong (1984).
McGrath, Thomas (1916–1990) A Midwesterner born on a South Dakota farm, McGrath is said by Whitehead and Muhrer, in their Freethought on the American Frontier (1992), to have been a freethinker. His Letter to an Imaginary Friend is a take-off of Christmas in the remote farms and villages of North Dakota, and McGrath is said to have been one of the most eminent of American atheist poets. A video about the atheist poet, called “The Movie at the End of the World, is available from Mike Hazard (344 Ramsey St., St. Paul, Minnesota 55102). {Freethought History #26, 1998}
McGrory, Jim (20th Century) McGrory, a member of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Free Inquiry Group, writes for its newsletter, Fig Leaves.
Mach, Ernst von (1838–1916) Mach was Rector of Prague University (1879–1880) and professor at Vienna University (1895–1901). He was ennobled and admitted to the Austrian House of Peers on his retirement in the latter year. Mach studied the relation of physics to psychology, and the development of his views brought him to an advanced rationalist position. He maintained that there was no essential difference between the physical and the psychic—that both consisted of elements—thus cutting the root of the Christian doctrines. All knowledge comes from the senses, he taught, and he was relentless in campaigning against anything metaphysical in science. Mach, whose name is used to describe the scale by which supersonic speeds are measured, wrote The Analysis of Sensations (1886) and The Science of Mechanics (1893). {RAT}
Machado, Bernadino [President] (1851–1922) Machado, the third president of the Republic of Portugal (1915–1917), was an agnostic as were his two predecessors. He took an open part in International Freethought Congresses. Because of the demoralization in Portugal following World War II, Machada was deposed. But during his guidance, the old power of the Roman Church was broken and so remained until a few years after his death. {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Machan, Tibor (20th Century) Machan, a professor of philosophy at Auburn University in Alabama, is a contributing editor for Free Inquiry. He wrote Introduction to Philosophic Inquiries (1985). Machan is active in libertarian circles.
Machiavelli, Niccolò (1469–1527) Machiavelli was “the standing proof of the divorce of the higher intelligence of Italy from the faith as well as from the cause of the Church before the Reformation,” according to Robertson. To him the Church “was the supreme evil in Italian politics,” and in his time he was considered no religionist although he never avowed atheism. He did not believe in a prayer-answering deity, but like the superstitious of his time he believed that “all great political changes are heralded by prodigies, celestial signs, prophecies, or revelations.” He did not hold that wickedness is to be preferred over goodness; rather than being interested in evil and good, he was concerned with political efficiency. Because Christianity preached meekness and selflessness and could weaken a political society, he frowned upon such. The political man, he felt, needed not virtues but vitality (virtù). Machiavelli’s belief in the method of science, at a time when Aristotle was always invoked to maintain the status quo rather than to experiment with completely free inquiry, helped influence future freethinkers in Italy, including Vico the sociologist. However, in contemporary usage, a “Machiavellian” leader is one who cunningly subordinates moral principle to political goals. (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.) {CE; DCL; ER; FUK; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
McHugh, Linda Beyer (20th Century) McHugh is Editor-in-Chief of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
McIlroy, William (1928– ) McIlroy, who once was general secretary of the National Secular Society, has a column, “Down to Earth,” in the British secular humanist monthly, The Freethinker, of which he was once editor. He is author of a pamphlet published by the Sheffield Humanist Society, “Foundations of Modern Humanism” (1995). As for the claim that building temples builds bridges, McIlroy wrote to The Star (31 January 1996) in Sheffield, “Temples, churches, synagogues, and mosques are centres of religious superstition. Historically and contemporaneously, religion has been a divisive, not a bridge-building, influence.” His Foundations of Modern Humanism (1995), is the text of a lecture delivered to the Sheffield Humanist Society. {Freethought History #18, 1996; FUK; TRI}
Macin Andrade, Raúl (20th Century) Macin was a participant on a panel discussing religious fundamentalism in Mexico at the 1996 Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City.
McInnis, Grace (20th Century) McKinnis, a member of the Canadian Parliament, was awarded the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award in 1974.
MacIntire, Roger W. (20th Century) MacIntire, a Unitarian, is author of Enjoy Successful Parenting (1996) and Teenagers and Parents: 10 Steps for a Better Relationship (1996). [[McIntosh, Janet (20th Century) McIntosh, a graduate student in ethnology at the University of Michigan” is a critic of creationism, writing that “[t]he secular creationist standpoint not only commits biological errors but defies common sense.” {Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}
Mac Intyre, Alasdair (20th Century) Mac Intyre in 1957 wrote Difficulties in Christian Belief. With Paul Ricocur, Mac Intyre wrote The Religious Significance of Atheism (1969). A Catholic and professor of philosophy at Duke University, Mac Intyre is a critic of humanism. His most noted work is After Virtue. {GS}
McIntyre, Jane (20th Century) McIntyre, of Cleveland State University, is on the Executive Committee of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Maciocha, Teresa (20th Century)
Maciocha edited Edwin H. Wilson’s The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1996). She has worked for social change agencies including Community Jobs and Greenpeace. Also, she worked for the Buffalo Coalition for Common Ground and the Western New York Peace Center in an alternatives-to-violence program. {EW}
Mack, Burton (20th Century) Mack is a biblical scholar. In Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth (1993) and The Book of Q and Christian Origins (1995), he indicates that most Christians have a completely mistaken idea as to how the books of the Bible came to be written.
Mack, Frank (20th Century) Frank is author of Yuletide Sunshine Carols (1978). {GS}
Mackay, Charles (1814–1889) Mackay was sub-editor of the Morning Chronicle from 1835 to 1844, editor of the Glasgow Argus from 1844 to 1847, and editor of the Illustrated London News from 1852 to 1858. Known as the writer of songs, such as “There’s a Good Time Coming, Boys,” Mackay was sympathetic to rationalist causes. {RAT}
McKay, Claude (1890–1948) A leading African-American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay wrote revolutionary rhetoric. According to Norm Allen Jr., McKay was a progressive freethinker. Following is typical of his outlook:
The white man is a tiger at my throat, Drinking my blood as my life ebbs away, And muttering that his terrible striped coat Is Freedom’s and portends the Light of Day. Oh white man, you may suck up all my blood
And throw my carcass into potter’s field, But never will I say with you that mud Is bread for Negroes! Never will I yield. . . . {AAH}
McKay, Fred (1914–1997) McKay was one of the longest-serving members of the National Secular Society, having joined in 1941 and remained until his death in 1997.
Mackay, Robert William (19th Century) Mackay wrote The Progress of the Intellect (1850), Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity (1853), and The Tubingen School (1863). {BDF; RAT}
McKellen, Ian [Sir] (1939– ) The English-born actor, McKellen, has been decorated as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Knight Bachelor. He has appeared in numbers of classical plays from “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” to “Six Degrees of Separation” and “The Band Played On.” On Broadway, he received a Tony Award. In Los Angeles and New York City in 1984, he appeared in a one-man show, “A Knight Out at the Lyceum,” which was devised especially for a Gay Games IV tour in the United Kingdom and South Africa. “I was brought up a Christian, low church, and I like the community of churchgoing. That’s rather been replaced for me by the community of people I work with. I like a sense of family, of people working together. But I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.” Check out his official site at http://www.mckellen.com/ {Tim Appelo, Mr. Showbiz, 19 January 1996; CA; E}
McKellen, Ian [Sir] (25 May 1939 - ) McKellen, the English-born actor, has been decorated as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Knight Bachelor. He has appeared in numbers of classical plays from Hamlet and Macbeth to Six Degrees of Separation and The Band Played On. On Broadway, he received a Tony Award. In Los Angeles and New York City in 1984, he appeared in a one-man show, A Knight Out at the Lyceum, which was devised especially for a Gay Games IV tour in the United Kingdom and South Africa. “I was brought up a Christian, low church," he told a reporter, "and I like the community of churchgoing. That’s rather been replaced for me by the community of people I work with. I like a sense of family, of people working together. But I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.” {Tim Appelo, Mr. Showbiz, 19 January 1996; CA; E}
McKelvic, C. (20th Century)
McKelvic, a freethinker, wrote Fear and Religion (1935). {GS}
McKenna, Peter (20th Century)
McKenna, writing in the English Freethinker (February 1994), complains in “The Dreadful Secret of Little Bible Stories” that children are being given Bible stories which contain brutality such as a crucifixion; Elisha cursing children for saying to him “go up, thou bald head,” whereupon a gang of bears tears forty-two of them to pieces; Ahab’s seventy sons are killed at God’s command; “the angel of the Lord” slaughters 185,000 Assyrians; and on and on. He suggests that his son’s state school should not be distributing these “horrible little books” published by Collins, which ironically also publishes the Bible.
McKenzie, Elizabeth (1973– ) McKenzie has served as President of the Auckland University Atheists. She is a Councillor of New Zealand’s Rationalist Council.
Mackenzie, G. L. (19th Century) Mackenzie was a freethinker who wrote Brimstone Ballads and Other Verse (1899). {GS}
McKenzie, John Grant (Born 1882) McKenzie, a freethinker, wrote Nervous Orders and Religion (1951). {GS}
Mackenzie, John Stuart (1860–1937) A professor of logic and philosophy at the University College of South Wales (1895–1915), Mackenzie was active with the Ethical Movement and the Moral Education League. In 1907, he wrote Lectures on Humanism (1907), in which he discussed pragmatism, naturalism, and ethical religion. An intuitionist in ethics, but entirely outside Christianity, he wrote in his Manual of Ethics (1893) that we must reject Christian doctrines, that “what remains essential to religion is the reality of the moral life.” In A Generation of Religious Progress (1916), Mackenzie observes that religious creeds “have the disadvantage of having to be accepted without definite proof.” {RAT; RE}
Mackenzie, William Lyon (1795–1861) Mackenzie was an early 19th century Canadian journalist, freethinker, and insurgent leader who had been born in Scotland. His Colonial Advocate had attacked the government, resulting in his printing office’s being partly demolished. After being elected (1820) to the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, Mackenzie was five times expelled for “libel” and five times reelected by his constituency. In 1834 he became the first mayor of Toronto, and in 1837 when his Reform party was defeated, Mackenzie and a group of insurgents unsuccessfully attempted to seize Toronto. Fleeing to the United States, he set up a provisional government but was imprisoned for eighteen months by the U.S. authorities for having violated the neutrality laws. In 1849, after a proclamation of general amnesty, he became a member (1851–1859) of the Legislative Assembly of United Canada (Upper and Lower Canada). “His aspiration to a cosmic moral order owed something to Christian humanism, though his clerical critics were far too myopic to perceive this,” observed Clifford Holland in a biography of William Dawson Le Sueur. (See entry for William Dawson Le Sueur.)
Mackey, Sampson Arnold (Died 1846) Mackey was an astronomer and shoemaker who is said to have constructed an orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system, out of leather. He wrote The Mythological Astronomy of the Ancients (1822–1824), Pious Frauds (1826), and a rare book, Sphinxiad. {BDF}
Mackie, John Leslie (1917–1981) Mackie was an Australian atheist and philosopher. His published works included The Cement of the Universe (1974) and Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). His last, The Miracle of Theism (1982), discussed the main arguments for and against the existence of God. He concluded that those against theism outweigh those in its favor. {SWW}
Mackie, Ross (Died 1994) Mackie was a key figure in New Zealand rationalism. In 1978 with Dave Miller he managed the New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist, advocating the myth theory of Jesus and following rationalist authorities such as J. R. Robertson and G. A. Wells. {SWW}
McKinney, Arthur L. (20th Century) McKinney, a freethinker, wrote An Endless Day Awaits Us? (1959). {GS}
McKinney, John L. (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, McKinney was in the department of philosophy at the University of Arkansas.
MacKinnon, Ian (20th Century) MacKinnon is author of “The History of Freethought in Australia” (American Rationalist, January-February, 1990).
MacKinnon, John (20th Century) MacKinnon has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
McKinsey, C. Dennis (20th Century) McKinsey edits the monthly Biblical Errancy (1983 to the present). In his Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy (1995), he challenges the common view that the Bible is a good book filled with good material. Voltaire had said that the gospels contain almost as many errors as words. McKinsey shows this also applies to other parts of the Bible. He maintains that the Bible’s negative teachings must be corrected and its inadequacies exposed. Readers of the Bible seem unaware, he holds, of its deceptively inaccurate conglomeration of mythology and folklore masquerading as a valid picture of historical reality, and this leads to their detached stupor. He offers twenty-four reasons why it is bad not to challenge “the Bible-pounders.”
Mackintosh, James [Sir] (1765–1832) A Scottish philosopher, Mackintosh in his youth settled amongst London radicals and rose to the important offices for which he was knighted. He wrote about moral philosophy, and his Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) was a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Sir James’s work was the leading Whig statement in favor of the French Revolution, but from 1796 on he grew hostile to French radicalism. As a member of Parliament, Mackintosh supported penal and parliamentary reform. According to Greville Mackintosh “had never believed at all during life.” However, McCabe calls Mackintosh a liberal theist who, when his son tried to induce him on his deathbed to make a profession of Christianity, refused. {JM; RAT; RE}
Mackintosh, John R. (1833–1907) A freethinker, Mackintosh wrote The Basis of Faith (1894). {GS}
Mackintosh, Thomas Simmons (Died 1850) Mackintosh wrote The Electrical Theory of the Universe (1848) and An Inquiry into the Nature of Responsibility. {BDF}
MacKnight, James W. (20th Century) A minister, MacKnight has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
McKnight, Russell L. (20th Century)
When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Mc Knight was president of the Humanist Association of Los Angeles. {HM2}
McKown, Delos B(anning) (20th Century) McKown, head of the philosophy department at Auburn University in Alabama, is the secularist author of The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion: Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Kautsky (1975). He also wrote With Faith and Fury (1985), a tragicomic novel concerning American religion. In The Mythmaker’s Magic, Behind the Illusion of Creation Science (1993), McKown satirizes the “Creation Scientists.” He holds that although our Constitution is utterly secular, the practice of religion enjoys stronger legal guarantees than does the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Americans are often led to believe that science and religion do not conflict, he writes, but this is false whenever a religion based on scriptural inerrancy arises. McKown is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. In addition, he is a contributing editor for Free Inquiry and a supporter of Internet Infidels. In 1993, he spoke at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual convention held in Huntsville, Alabama. His subject: “Why the Religiously Liberated Languish and Fundagelicals Flourish and What To Do About It!” {HNS2}
McLachlan, Sarah (20th Century) McLachlan, who reportedly has said she is an agnostic, once performed for the Pope. Her atheistic “Dear God,” is in a 1996 XTC tribute CD, A Testimonial Dinner, but she was not the author. “I don’t follow any organized religion,” she told a reporter (Spring Chat, 28 May 1996), “but I do believe in the idea of god as a verb—being love and light and that we are part of everything as everything is part of us. {CA; A}
McLachlan, Sarah (28 Jan 1968 - ) A Canadian-born folk singer and recording artist, McLachlan has performed for the Pope but has said she is an agnostic. Her XTC song, “Dear God,” on a 1996 XTC tribute compact disk, Testimonial Dinner, is non-theistic. Interviewed by Sprint Chat (28 May 1996), she was asked about her religion, and she responded, “I don't follow any organized religion, but I do believe in the idea of god as a verb—being love and light—and that we are part of everything as everything is part of us.” Asked if “Dear God” represents her personal view, she responded in the negative, adding it “is not a song that I wrote and it has an intensity that perhaps I don’t possess on my own.” When the interviewer continued, “Did you have any reservations from an ideological standpoint about covering the song ‘Dear God,’ ” McLachlan responded, “None whatsoever.” In August 2001 McLachlan was publicized for her animal rights stand. Objecting to seven polar bears working in Puerto Rico’s sweltering heat with a Mexican-based Suarez Brothers Circus, she appealed to the U. S. government to return the bears to their natural habitat. “There is no sharper contrast to their natural homes than the small, barren cages they are imprisoned in while the circus hauls them from one intensely hot and humid town to the next,” she wrote on behalf of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. She also claimed to have seen a videotape in which trainers are “repeatedly and abusively jabbing, whacking and whipping the polar bears on the face, head, back, sides and hindquarters to make them perform confusing tricks. The bears are clearly frightened and bewildered by the trainer’s constant yelling and harassment.” {CA; Mitchell Fink, New York Daily News, 31 Aug 2001}
MacLaine, Shirley (1934– ) A bodacious movie actress, MacLaine believes in reincarnation as well as remembers some of her past embodiments (and, as such, is a subject for many jokes by comedians).
McLaren, Alexander Duncan (1868–1947) McLaren, a writer, secularist, and freethinker, was born in Tasmania. He was secretary of the Australian Secular Association in 1890 and spoke at the 1892 opening of the Sydney Lyceum (Freethought Hall). Between 1906 and 1933, McLaren had sixty-six articles published in the Freethinker. Also, he revised G. W. Foote’s Infidel Death Beds (1933). From 1916 to 1947 he lived in England. {FUK; SWW}
MacLean, Angus (1909– ) MacLean is author of The Wind in Both Ears (1987), which concerns Unitarian Universalist religious education.
MacLean, Kenneth Torquil (20th Century) MacLean was the Unitarian Universalist Association’s special assistant to the President for International and Interfaith Relations. He wrote Problems of the Planet (1975) and World Environmental Problems (1981). In 1999 he became minister of the Unitarian Fellowship of the Desert in Palm Desert, California. (See World, July-August 1995.)
MacLeish, Archibald (1892–1982) An American poet and public official, Mac Leish wrote Conquistador (1932), which describes in poetic form the conquest of Mexico, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. A New Deal advocate, he was Librarian of Congress (1939–1944) and Undersecretary of State (1944–1945) during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration. From 1949 to the 1960s, he taught at Harvard. Son of a prosperous businessman whose convictions were fixed, and who was not outwardly affectionate, Mac Leish once described his father’s lack of pity thusly: “God was father’s father.” In 1958, he retold the story of Job in a modern setting, entitling it J. B. and winning a second Pulitzer Prize. Some critics resented his retelling of the Biblical story, objecting to its humanistic overtones; others claimed it improved upon the original. In 1944, MacLeish had an article in Atlantic Monthly (November) entitled, “Humanism and the Belief in Man.” First, he found classical humanism impractical. The trouble with it, he wrote, was that it was formulated at a time when “the sickness of the soul was dogma and superstition,” when “humanism considered as an intellectual discipline-for-discipline’s sake, or as a regimen to free the mind of prejudice and infatuation, or as an aristocratic training of the taste, or as a cult of the classic past, or as the appreciation of fine arts and beautiful letters, [was] a prime specific for such ills as bigotry and puritanism and jesuitry and vulgarity and Victorianism and the complacency of the bourgeois mind.” But the problem in 1944, he added, is not excess of belief. It is lack of belief. He then blasts the neo-humanists such as Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, who are crying out for a “great conversion of the world, a vast revival, a wind from beyond the planet and the stars, to fill us in spite of ourselves, and without our effort, by some miracle of faith, like the miracle they imagine to have happened when Christianity first took the world, or when the religion of the Prophet took it.” He continued:
There is a definition of humanism by which humanism becomes a belief in the one thing in which man has greatest need now to believe—himself, and the dignity and importance of the place he fills in the world he lives in. There is a definition of humanism by which humanism becomes precisely the belief of man in his own dignity, in his essential worth as a man, in what Ralph Barton Perry calls “his characteristic perfection”: a belief not in the potentiality of man, but in the actuality of man; a belief not in the classic perfection of the beautiful letters men have written in the distant past, but in the human perfection of the men who wrote those letters and of others like them, whether writers or other writers, and whether living in the past or in the present or not yet born; a belief not in the thing a man may become if he reads the right books and develops the right tastes and undergoes the right discipline, but a belief in the thing he is.
Then, characteristic of other naturalistic humanists whose total philosophy of life must necessarily include political and economic views, MacLeish added:
If the fundamental proposition upon which the government of the world was based were the proposition that man, because he is man, and in his essential quality as man, has worth and value which governments exist to serve and to protect, regardless of race and regardless of color or religion, there would be little room for the play of international politics which, under color of realism or under color of necessity, puts power first or oil first or gold first, and men second or nowhere, preparing thus for the wars of power or of oil or gold.
Concluding with advice to the generation which has “lost its sense of the place of man in the universe” and which should learn to teach men to believe in themselves and thereby assure their freedom, MacLeish summed up his case: “It is man whom the humanist values, and man is in all men—is all men.” Asked in 1951 to elaborate further, he replied to the present author:
My difficulty is that although I know what I believe, I do not know what word you put to it. I have never called myself a humanist, though if that is the word which applies to my beliefs, then I suppose I am one. However, I do not like labels—even good ones.
His lines from “Geography of This Time” are part of the liturgy of the Unitarian Universalist churches:
What is required of us, Companions, is the recognition of the frontiers across this history, and to take heart and cross over.
To persist and cross over and survive. But to survive To cross over. {CE; CL; TYD; WAS, 30 May 1951}
McLeod, John (19th Century) McLeod is author of Religion: Its Place in Human Culture (1873). {GS}
McLoughlin, Emmett (20th Century) McLaughlin is author of American Culture and Catholic Schools (1960), Crime and Immorality in the Catholic Church (1962), and People’s Padre (1952). The latter book was an autobiography in which he described leaving the priesthood and becoming a freethinker. McLoughlin maintained that the doctrine of probabilism justifies the birth control pill. {FUS}
McMahan, Marjorie and Richard (20th Century) The McMahans are activists with the Capital District Humanist Society, PO Box 2148, Scotia, New York 12302. Richard is editor of the group’s Humanist Monthly.
McMahan, R. H. Jr. (20th Century) When he heard a radio advice-giver say that you cannot be moral without God and said one could logically be frightened if approached by a group of men in jeans and leather jackets but would not be “if these young men were carrying Bibles,” McMahan jocularly devised these scenarios:
• You’re a Palestinian in Jerusalem. • You’re a Protestant in Dublin and their Bibles are wrapped in rosary beads. • You’re black, and those lads are white. • You’re white, and those lads are black. • You’re leaving a gay bar, and those Bible-toting lads are wearing jackets with the BornAgain University logo. • You’re wearing a yarmulke in Redneckville, Arkasippi, or in the “wrong” neighborhood in Anytown; those Bibles are New Testaments. • You’re a Muslim girl being approach by a mullah carrying the Qur’an and the knife he’s about to use to assure that you will never enjoy the sex that will be the right of the man whose property you will be. {The Humanist Monthly, newsletter of the Capital District Humanist Society}
McMillan, Robert (c. 1880–1940?) McMillan, a journalist, was a long-time president of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales, Australia. He wrote The Great Secret and The Origin of the World.
McMurran, Stella (Died 1998) A Canadian who was the central fitgure in Ottawa’s movement for the rights of dying people, McMurran and her husband Don founded the Ottawa branch of Dying with Dignity in 1986 and, subsequently, Choice in Dying—Ottawa. “70 per cent of Canadians,” she declared, agree with television personalities like David Suzuki and Robert Buckman in their belief in individual freedom of choice, up to and including the end of life.
McNally, Terrence (1939- )
A controversial playwright who is Catholic, McNally won an Obie in 1971 for “Bad Habits”; an Obie in 1974 for best play, “The Ritz”; a Tony in 1990 for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” best book of a musical; an Emmy in 1990 for “Andre’s Mother”; a Pulitzer prize for drama nomination in 1994 for “A Perfect Ganesh”; and a 1995 Outer Critics’ Circle award for best Broadway play, “Love! Valour! Compassion!” Raised a Catholic, McNally infuriated the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in 1998 with his play, “Corpus Christi,” described as his unique view of “the greatest story every told.” The plot is about a Jesus-like figure born in a Texas flea-bag hotel in which the noise of violent sex next door greets little Joshua. The chap grows into a charismatic person who has gay lovers including a long-running affair with Judas and other of his apostle-like friends. One scene is nonexplicit but is of a sexual encounter with an HIV-positive street hustler. The Manhattan Theater Club, which planned to stage the play, received a telephoned bomb threat that promised the “extermination of every member of the theater.” The caller of the threat, identifying himself as being from an unknown group called the National Security Movement of America, said, “Again, message is for Jew guilty homosexual Terrence McNally. Because of you we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground. Death to the Jews worldwide.” Deciding first to cancel the play because of the possibility of violence, the club’s administrators reversed themselves and opted for free expression combined with tight security. Praising the decision to allow the play to be seen were thirty of the nation’s leading playwrights, including Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, Christopher Durang, A. R. Gurney, Stephen Sondheim, and Wendy Wasserstein.
McNamara, Matilda Emilie Bertha (1853–1931) McNamara, formerly Bredt, was a bookseller, feminist, and socialist who had been born in Poland. Her book shop was a meeting place for freethinkers, feminists, and other radicals. Her daughter Bertha married poet Henry Lawson, and her daughter Hilda married politician J. T. Lang. A plaque at the entrance of the Sydney Trades Hall commemorates her rationalism:
Kindly and gracious in her splendid way She knew no nationhood And her religion each and every day Was that of doing good. {SWW}
McNamara, William Henry Thomas (1852–1906) McNamara married the widow Bertha Bredt, and together they operated a book shop which sold socialist, freethought, and radical literature. Some described it as a “democratic rendezvous” with an international reading room of imported newspapers, which could be consulted for one penny. The McNamaras felt that socialism could be achieved by workers voluntarily forming cooperatives and gradually assuming social control from privately owned industries. {SWW}
McNeese, S. J. (20th Century) McNeese was a freethinker who wrote An Appeal to Reason, or Sanity Versus Faith (1924). {GS}
Macon, Nathaniel (1757–1837) Macon, a statesman and a deist, said that if a Hindu were to come to North Carolina and aspire to an office to which merit would entitle him, his religion should not be a bar. He helped during the Constitutional Convention of 1835 to open public office to North Carolina Catholics and set the precedent for further opening of citizenship privileges to persons of all faiths and none. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)
McQueen, Albert J. (20th Century) McQueen has been an assistant professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
McQueen, Alexander (20th Century) Dubbed “British Designer of the Year” in 1996, McQueen was asked by David Bowie in Dazed and Confused (November 1996) who he would like to dress more than anyone else in the world. “I can’t think of anyone who deserves such a privilege,” McQueen joked. Then “the sub-headline there!” said Bowie. McQueen answered, “Oh my God no, ’cause I’m an atheist and an anti-royalist, so why would I put anyone on a pedestal?” {CA}
Alexander McQueen, Fashion Designer art
McQueen, recently 'British Designer of the Year', was interviewed in the November 1996 issue of Dazed & Confused (No. 26) by David Bowie. An excerpt:
DB: Here's a fan question. Who would you like to dress more than anyone else in the world and why?
AM: There's no-one I'd like to dress more than anyone else in the world, I'm afraid. I can't think of anyone who deserves such a privilege! (laughs)
DB: The sub-headline there! (laughs)
AM: Oh my God no, 'cos I'm an atheist and an anti-royalist, so why would I put anyone on a pedestal?
McQueen, Thelma (Butterfly) (1911–1995) McQueen, the personable African American actress who played Prissy in “Gone With The Wind” (which Margaret Mitchell originally had intended to entitle Pansy), is remembered for her distinctively high voice (and the confession to her mistress that “Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthing babies”). In that movie, she performed the part of a dim-witted maid prone to outbursts of hysteria, being bitterly criticized for playing such a racial stereotype. She, however, retorted that she had refused to eat watermelon in the movie and had particularly objected to being slapped by Scarlett. It became increasingly difficult for McQueen to find work in film or the theater following “Gone With The Wind,” partly because the audience associated her voice with that of Prissy. At the age of sixty-four, McQueen, who had never completed college, graduated with a degree in political science from the City College of New York. She worked with antipoverty groups, taking a job as a waitress in a soul food restaurant, and she gave tap dance and ballet lessons at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park Recreation Center in order, in her words, to help her “black family.” “I’m an atheist,” she once declared, “and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I’m puzzled that so many people can’t see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry.” In 1989, the Freedom from Religion Foundation honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award. She told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (8 October 1989), “As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.” She also lamented that humans had not put the energy on earth and on people that had been put on mythology and on Jesus Christ, for if we had there would be less hunger and homelessness. “They say the streets are going to be beautiful in Heaven. Well, I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. . . . When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.” Burned over 70% of her body in a 1995 accident at her home, she died after telling firefighters how her clothes had caught fire from a faulty kerosene heater. When a Christian neighbor observed the incident, however, she told the Atlanta Constitution, “I believe she [Thelma] made it into Heaven. She threw up both her hands as she was coming out of that burning house, and made it in with Jesus.” On the contrary, the atheistic McQueen had been a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation since 1981 and had included the foundation in her will. {Freethought Today, January-February 1996; TYD; WAS, conversation; WWS}
McQueen, Thelma (Butterfly) (7 Jan 1911 - 22 Dec 1995) McQueen, the personable African American actress who played Prissy in “Gone With The Wind” (which Margaret Mitchell originally had intended to entitle "Pansy"), is remembered for her distinctively high voice (and the confession to her mistress that “Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthing babies”). In that movie, she performed the part of a dim-witted maid prone to outbursts of hysteria, being bitterly criticized for playing such a racial stereotype. She, however, retorted that she had refused to eat watermelon in the movie and had particularly objected to being slapped by Scarlett. It became increasingly difficult for McQueen to find work in film or the theater following “Gone With The Wind,” partly because the audience associated her voice with that of Prissy. At the age of sixty-four, McQueen, who had never completed college, graduated with a degree in political science from the City College of New York. She worked with antipoverty groups, taking a job as a waitress in a soul food restaurant, and she gave tap dance and ballet lessons at Harlem’s Mount Morris Park Recreation Center in order, in her words, to help her “black family.” “I’m an atheist,” she once declared, “and Christianity appears to me to be the most absurd imposture of all the religions, and I’m puzzled that so many people can’t see through a religion that encourages irresponsibility and bigotry.” In 1989, the Freedom from Religion Foundation honored her with its Freethought Heroine Award. She told a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution (8 October 1989), “As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion.” She also lamented that humans had not put the energy on earth and on people that had been put on mythology and on Jesus Christ, for if we had there would be less hunger and homelessness. “They say the streets are going to be beautiful in Heaven. Well, I’m trying to make the streets beautiful here. . . . When it’s clean and beautiful, I think America is heaven. And some people are hell.” Burned over 70% of her body in a 1995 accident at her home, she died after telling firefighters how her clothes had caught fire from a faulty kerosene heater. When a Christian neighbor observed the incident, however, she told the Atlanta Constitution, “I believe she [Thelma] made it into Heaven. She threw up both her hands as she was coming out of that burning house, and made it in with Jesus.” On the contrary, the atheistic McQueen had been a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation since 1981 and had included the foundation in her will. {Freethought Today, January-February 1996; TYD; WAS, conversation; WWS}
Macrae, Gordon (20th Century)
Writing “Abusive Priests” in The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (Winter, 1998), Macrae cites a study which indicates that “up to 15% of the clergy were abusers.” His response: “What’s really frightening is that they seriously believe that it is only ‘up to 15%.’ Anyone ready to wager on it being significantly higher?”
Macrobius, Ambrosius Theodosius (c. 400–423) Macrobius, a Roman pagan official believed to have been Proconsul in Africa, resisted Christianity to the end. His Saturnalia describes patricians he knew, and it illustrates the high character of the last generation of Roman gentlemen. Macrobius made one of the earliest attempts to resolve religion into solar myths. {RE}
MACROCOSM The macrocosm, as distinguished from the microcosm, is the entire world, the universe. During the Renaissance, microcosm (from the Greek mikros, small, and kosmos, order) was applied specifically to human beings, who were considered to be small-scale models of the macrocosm, with all its variety and contradiction. {DCL}
MacSweeney, Myles (1814–1881) A mythologist, MacSweeney upon coming to London from Enniskillen heard Robert Taylor at the Rotunda in 1830 and adopted his views. He held that Jesus never existed, wrote in the National Reformer as well as Secular Chronicle, and published “Moses and Bacchus” (1874). {BDF}
McTaggart, John (20th Century) McTaggart is assistant professor of sociology at the Kings University College, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has written on “Organised Humanism in Canada and The Netherlands” in New Humanist (March 1997).
M’Taggart, John M’Taggart Ellis (1866–1925) “G. E. Moore, John Ellis McTaggart, and Bertrand Russell are the first three academic atheists of note,” writes Berman. A student of Hegel, M’Taggart (Mc Taggart) believed that the ultimate reality is spiritual, and he denied the real existence of the material, of space, and of time. A determinist, he held that determinism is not incompatible with moral obligation. With Moore and Russell, McTaggart was a member of the Apostles, a Cambridge Society with a distinctively irreverent attitude toward God and religion. His own atheism is found in Some Dogmas of Religion (1906), Studies in Hegelian Cosmology (1918), and The Nature of Existence (1921 and 1927). As for Hegel’s cosmology, McTaggart claimed that “the Absolute is not God and in consequence there is no God.” In Some Dogmas of Religion, he saw “no reason to think that positive belief in immortality is true” or “to suppose that God exists.” As for Christianity, McTaggart wrote, “If one was a Christian one would have to worship Christ, and I don’t like him much. If you take what he said in the first three gospels (for St. John’s has no historical value I believe) it is a horribly one-sided and imperfect ideal. Would you like a man or a girl who really imitated Christ? I think most of the people I know are living far finer lives than anything you could get out of the gospels. The best thing about him was his pluck at the Crucifixion, and other people have shown as much.” Although Ducasse and McTaggart did not believe in God, both believed in reincarnation, according to Paul Edwards, whose Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996) humorously critiques such nonsense. {CE; HAB; JM; PE; RAT; RE}
McWilliams, Peter (20th Century) McWilliams, in Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society (1993), accuses organized religion of making consensual acts a crime. He holds that any activity, which does not harm the person or property of another, should not be illegal.
Macy, Christopher (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Macy was director of the Rationalist Press Association, Great Britain. He wrote Marriage and Divorce (1969) and The Arts in a Permissive Society (1971). In 1977, he edited “Rationalism and Humanism in the New Europe.” {FUK; HM2}
Madach, Imré (1823–1880) Madach was a Hungarian patriot and poet. In 1852 he was incarcerated for one year for having given asylum at his castle to a political refugee. In 1862 he became a delegate at Pesth, the same year he wrote a poem, “Az Ember Tragédiaja” (The Human Tragedy), a freethinking work in which mankind is personified as Adam, with Lucifer in his company. {BDF; RAT}
Maddoux, Martin (20th Century) Maddoux wrote Humanism Exposed (1983) and America Betrayed (1984).
Maddox, John Royden [Sir] (1925– ) In 1986, Maddox was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, and in 1994 Queen Elizabeth II knighted him. Kennedy has been editor of Nature since 1980 and held that post also between 1966 and 1973. In spite of (or perhaps because of) having been sent to Sunday school as a child, he has said, he has always been offended by the hypocrisy of the religious. An even greater offense, the chemist and physicist and naturalist believes, is confusing important issues by the telling of fairy stories. Maddox has written Revolutions in Biology (1964), The Doomsday Syndrome (1972), and Beyond the Energy Crisis (1975).
Madigan, Timothy Joseph (1962– ) Madigan was the Executive Editor (1987–1997) and Editor (1997-1999) of Free Inquiry. Also, he was co-editor of The Secular Humanist Bulletin until 1997. He has taught philosophy at several Western New York institutions, including Monroe Community College, Medaille College, Erie Community College, Houghton College, Daemen College, Canisius College, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He graduated summa cum laude in 1985 from the latter university, receiving his Ph. D. in 1999. Since 1999 he has been the editorial director for the University of Rochester Press. Madigan is one of the youngest as well as one of the best-recognized faces in the secular humanist movement, for he has traveled widely and speaks extensively. He has given presentations at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Louisiana State University, California State University-Northridge, Southeastern Louisiana University, University of South Alabama, Drew University, University of Richmond, Hofstra University, Youngstown State University, Brock University, University of Minnesota, and Hiram College. He has also spoken at conferences in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia; Madrid, Spain; Delphi, Greece; Warsaw, Poland; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; London, England; San Jose, Costa Rica; Toronto, Canada; Edinburgh, Scotland; and Cairo, Egypt. A writer on extensive subjects, including the singer Al Jolson, Madigan co-wrote (with Glenn Odden) such plays as The Knife Before Christmas, Unnecessary Roughness, Forever Hold Your Piece, and Primary Suspect. He was co-editor of On the Barricades: The Best of Free Inquiry (1989); The Question of Humanism (1991), and Toward a New Enlightenment: The Philosophy of Paul Kurtz (1993) and edited “The Ethics of Belief” and other Essays by W. K. Clifford (1999). Also, he has been associate editor of Moody Street Irregulars: The Jack Kerouac Newsletter; and editor of The Brontë Newsletter. Also, he is a United States editor of Philosophy Now (London). A Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, Madigan was active as an assistant to Paul Kurtz in the establishment of secular humanist societies throughout the nation. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Also, he is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the Society for Advancement of American Philosophy, the Bertrand Russell Society (on the board of directors, 1993–present), the John Dewey Society, the David Hume Society, the International Brontë Society, and the International Primate Protection League. He is Executive Director of the Society of Humanist Philosophers. In “Legor et Legar: Schopenhauer’s Atheistic Morality” (Philo, Fall-Winter 1998), Madigan states that Nietzsche referred to Arthur Schopenhauer as the first inexorable atheist among German philosophers. “Yet Schopenhauer’s philosophy—in particular his discussion of ‘compassion’ as the basis of morality—can serve as a starting point for dialogue among Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and atheistic humanists, all of whom need to address what Raimundo Panikkar calls ‘The Silence of God.’ ” Schopenhauer, “this friendless and bad-tempered philosopher,” has much to teach about the nature of morality, he writes. “Like many people,” Madigan has written, “I was named after a relative. But in my case, the relative in question was a Roman Catholic nun—my mother’s cousin, Sister Timothy.” Nuns, until fairly recently, assumed a male name when taking up the wimple. As a young Catholic, Madigan read in The Acts of the Apostles that the biblical Paul “wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews that were in those places, for they knew all that his father was a Greek.” But then the Church Fathers changed their minds, thanks to a revelation from God, and Christians did not have to have their foreskins removed. Observed Madigan after becoming an atheist, “And after this cruel joke, the guy still honored God? What a schmuck.” In his introduction to W. K. Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief, Madigan notes that Clifford chose for his epitaph a statement from Epictetus: “I was not, and was conceived; I loved, and did a little work; I am not, and grieve not.” Dr. Madigan signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. His e-mail: <timothymad@aol.com>. (See entry for New York Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD; HNS2; Secular Humanist Bulletin, Summer 1994}
Madison, James [President] (1751–1826) The “master builder of the Constitution,” our 4th United States President had a wife, Dolley, who has the distinction of having been an official White House hostess for two presidents: She served also for Thomas Jefferson, then a widower. Madison learned Hebrew and made a thorough study of theology after being graduated by Princeton, at which time he gave up his beliefs. He helped draft the constitution of Virginia, insisting that it include protections for religious freedom. He effectively protested against a proposal to make contributions compulsory in Virginia to religion, and he got church and state completely separated there. In his letters, he shows that all his life he opposed the churches. In one (19 May 1823), he insists that the university shall not become “an Arena of Theological Gladiators.” The 5’ 4” one-hundred-pound Madison was reserved, dressed conservatively, enjoyed a risqué story, but according to his letters to Jefferson was a chronic worrier, always afraid that the worst was soon to happen. Richard K. Matthews, in If Men Were Angels: James Madison and the Heartless Empire of Reason (1995), argues that Madison deserves more credit for being an accurate symbol of America. “Think of who he was and what he achieved,” Gordon S. Wood of Princeton has written in critiquing the Matthews thesis:
The major architect of the Constitution; the father of the Bill of Rights and one of the strongest proponents of the rights of conscience and religious liberty in American history; co-author of The Federalist, surely the most significant work of political theory in American history; the leader and most important members of the first House of Representative since 1789; co-founder of the Democratic-Republican party in the 1790s; secretary of state in Jefferson’s administration; and the fourth president of the United States—all this, and still he does not have the popular standing of the other founding fathers, especially that of his closest friend, Thomas Jefferson.
Madison, whose wife Dolley was a lapsed Quaker, in 1785 wrote to William Bradford Jr., “During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been Christianity’s fruits? Superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” He added, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind, and unfits it for every noble purpose.” Madison was one of the few statesmen who did not sprinkle speeches with references to God. McCabe calls Madison a “freethinker like his three predecessors.” Washington, Lincoln, and Madison never spoke about God in their letters. {CE; FUK; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Mädler, Johann Heinrich (1794–1874) Mädler, a German astronomer, was appointed in 1836 Observer at the Berlin Royal Observatory, and in 1840 he became professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at Dorpat. His Populäre Astronomie (1841) and Die Fixternhimmel (1858) were highly regarded. A pantheist, Mädler once wrote a poem in which he emphatically rejected Christianity and confined his belief to a pantheist conception of God. {RAT}
MADONNA Madonna is a picture, statue, or other image of Jesus’s mother. She generally is pictured with the baby Jesus in her arms. If Joseph had spoken Latin, he would have referred to his wife, Mary, as mea domina, “my lady,” although she allegedly did not give birth to his baby but, rather, was supernaturally inseminated. (A Manhattan wag suggests she was inseminated not by the Holy Ghost but by theologians.) In the 1990s people spoke of Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone (1958– ) as the lady who was naturally inseminated. A pop icon, singer, and actress, Madonna became known for her albums Madonna (1983) and Like A Virgin (1984). A Roman Catholic, she wrote Sex (1992) and embarrassed many church officials of various faiths by her views as well as by her actions. Called the “Material Girl,” she appeared in movies, such as “Desperately Seeking Susan, Truth or Dare,” a revealing backstage performance that brought her much publicity. Her “Papa Don’t Preach” took a strict Catholic position, that if you are going to have a baby you should not abort it. Madonna infuriated many by making obscene gestures with a crucifix during performances. She wore huge crosses and turned them from religious ornaments into fashion statements as well as sex accessories. Once, she called Catholicism “disgusting” and “hypocritical,” leading the Vatican to denounce her for not being a model Catholic woman. Her very first words upon meeting basketball star Dennis Rodman, for example, were, “Are you going to eat my pussy first? I like someone to eat me out and get me loose.” In 1996, after several public figures described their sexual experiences with her, Madonna although not married to Carlos Leon had a baby, Lourdes Maria Ciccone Leon, by him, and the child was sent to the Catholic Church for schooling. In 1996, Madonna starred as Evita Peron in the movie “Evita.” One of the quick-change artists of her generation, Madonna upon releasing a 1998 album, “Ray of Light,” told of her interest in sivasana—a yoga-like totally prone corpse pose—in Sanskrit, and the Jewish mystical art of the cabala. Andrew M. Greeley has observed that Madonna has an obvious “God hunger.” As to having become a Buddhist, Madonna told journalist Andrew Smith (Daily News, 3 May 998), “No, I’ve studied Buddhism and I suppose in some ways I’m practicing it. But I wouldn’t say I’m anything specific. These are just things and ideas that I find useful. I feel like I’m just now figuring out who I am and what I want. And the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. I feel like I’m on this journey and I’m searching for answers, but I couldn’t say what I am or what I’m not in terms of some religious dogma, or affiliating myself with a group of thought. I really shy away from that.” {Dennis Rodman, Bad As I Want to Be (1996); The New York Times, 1 March 1998; Vanity Fair, June 1996}
Maeterlinck, Maurice (1862–1949) The Belgian author of Pelléas and Mélisande (1892) liked the mysticism of Emerson and Novalis, and the sixty works he wrote can be considered a symbolist manifesto. In 1911, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his work about impending doom, life’s mystery, and ennui was popular with the reading public. Although not a naturalistic humanist, he was enough of a non-believer to rate having all his works prohibited by the Vatican’s Index in 1914. “There is a vein of mysticism in his ethical conceptions,” noted McCabe, “but he was outside all churches and apparently not even a theist. In a work on the question of a future life (La Morte), he leaves it open and is not, as is sometimes said, a Spiritualist.” {CE; ILP; JM; RAT; RE}
Magee, Bryan (20th Century) Confessions of a Philosopher: A Journey Through Western Philosophy (1999) reveals that Magee is not religious but is fascinated by studying philosophers’ works, particularly those by Schopenhauer, Hume, Bertrand Russell, and Kant. Colin McCall objected to Magee’s statement that atheists know there is not a God, saying atheists simply find no evidence for a God, that in Laplace’s famous phrase, we have “no need of that hypothesis.” But he liked the 600-page book which, he said, was written by a liberal socialist and Labour MP who became a “liberal non-socialist.” {The Freethinker, April 1999)
Magee, William Connor (1822–1891) Magee, a freethinker, wrote Christianity in Relation to Freethought, Scepticism, and Faith (1892). {GS}
Magellan, Ferdinand (Fernão de Magalhães) (c. 1480–1521) “The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church,” Magellan declared. A Portuguese navigator with unusual determination, he began the first voyage around the world in 1519. Prior to that, he had served in Portuguese India, in Morocco, in Spain, in South America, and after putting down a mutiny of some of his officers in Patagonia he discovered and entered the strait that bears his name, later reaching the Pacific Ocean. Traveling onward, his fleet of three vessels sighted no land for nearly two months, but eventually it reached the Philippines where he was killed supporting one group of natives against another. His crew, however, was able to complete the trip in 1522, proving the roundness of the earth and revolutionizing ideas of the relative proportions of land and water. Equally important, it revealed the Americas as a new world, separate from Asia. Had it not been for Magellan’s faith, in astronomy rather than theology, the New World would not have been understood as quickly by Europeans. {CE; TYD}
Magellan, Jean Hyacinthe de (1723–1790) João Jacinte de Magalhaes, as he was originally named, was Portuguese, a descendant of explorer Ferdinand Magellan. He entered the monastic order of St. Augustine, then left the Order and the Church of Rome without entering any other branch of Christianity. Magellan made astronomical and other scientific instruments and was admitted to the Royal Society (1774) and was a corresponding member of the Academies of Science of Paris and Madrid. {RAT}
MAGI: See the entry for Christmas.
MAGIC: See entry for Fertility Rites.
MAGIC REALISM Magic realism (magischer Realismus) is a term coined by Franz Roy to describe tendencies in the work of certain German artists of the new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit), characterized, according to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, “by clear, cool, static, thinly-painted, sharp-focus images, frequently portraying the imaginary, the improbable, or the fantastic in a realistic or rational manner.” The term was used in the United States with the 1943 exhibition of artworks by Charles Sheeler and Edward Hopper. It subsequently has been used to describe the works of such Latin American authors as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alejo Carpentier. Magic realist works typically have a strong narrative drive in which the recognizably realistic mingles with the unexpected and the inexplicable. Dreams, fairy-stories, or mythology combine with the everyday and, sometimes, the irrational. (See entry for Jorge Luis Borges.) {OCE}
Maginnis, Patricia (20th Century) Maginnis was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Pioneer in 1978 for her fighting on behalf of birth control. {HNS2}
Magistro, Charles (20th Century) Magistro has been a liberal Unitarian Universalist minister in Brooklyn, New York; Stamford, Connecticut; and Garden City, New York.
Maglia, Adolfo de (Born 1859) A Spanish journalist, Maglia founded the freethinking group El Independiente and edited El Clamor Setabense and El Pueblo Soberano. {BDF}
Magnani-Torelli, E.]] (20th Century)
At the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union held in Hannover (1968), Magnani-Torelli of Italy addressed the group.
Mahan Jr., Ludlow P. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Mahan was president of the Humanist Chapter of Rhode Island. He is associated with the Rhode Island Atheists. (See entry for Rhode Island Atheists, Freethinkers.) {FD; HM2}
MAHASKTI In India, Mahaskti was considered the Divine Mother, supreme creator of the universe. {LEE}
Mahavira (c. 560–483 B.C.E.) In Jainism, practiced by perhaps two million people in India, it is believed that a succession of twenty-four tirthankaras (saints) originated the religion. The last was Vardhamana, called Mahavira (the great hero) and Jina (the victor). Mahavira, who, like Gautama, was not a theist, taught a rigid asceticism and solicitude, holding that life is a means of escaping the cycle of rebirth, or the transmigration of souls. Released from the rule of Karma, the total consequences of past acts, the soul can then attain Nirvana, and hence salvation. The brotherhood of monks he organized took vows of celibacy, nudity, self-mortification, and fasting. Jainism has appealed to many of India’s most prominent industrialists, bankers, and politicians, who are known for their charity. They have, for example, established asylums for diseased and decrepit animals. {RE}
Mahfouz, Naguib (Nagib Mahfuz) (1911– ) Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, wrote The Children of Gebelawi (1959), which was banned in Egypt because it allegedly scoffed at religion and insulted the Prophet Mohammed. In 1994, a group of young Egyptian fundamentalists ambushed and stabbed the Egyptian novelist outside his home. Many linked the attack to a newspaper’s plan to publish the novel, which theologians at Al Azhar University had condemned in a fatwa. Mahfouz wrote The World of God 1962), God’s World: An Anthology of Short Stories (1973), Satan Preaches (1979), One Act Plays (1989), and Children of the Alley (1996). (See entry for Fatwa.)
Mahler, Gustav (1860–1911) A major composer and conductor who was born in Austrian Bohemia of Jewish parentage, Mahler had a distinguished career. As described in Columbia Encyclopedia, Mahler
followed Bruckner in the Viennese symphonic tradition. He added folk elements to the symphony and expanded it in terms of length, emotional contrast, and orchestral size. He used choral or solo voices in four symphonies; the Second, Third, Fourth, and Eighth; the Eighth is known as the Symphony of a Thousand because of the enormous performing forces required. The thinner texture, wide-ranging melodies, and taut, intense emotionalism of Mahler’s late works strongly influenced the next generation of Austrian composers, especially Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg.
Terry Sanderson in Gay & Lesbian Humanist (Spring, 1998) praised the 1997 Albert Hall performance of the gigantic “Symphony of a Thousand,” adding that although it is set to a religious text, Mahler “refused steadfastly to attach himself to any organized religion. He was born a Jew but has been described as a life-long agnostic. At one point he converted to Catholicism, purely for the purpose of obtaining a job that he coveted—director of the Court Opera of Vienna. It was unthinkable for a Jew to hold such a prestigious position, hence the utilitarian conversion to the state religion. After the confirmation service was over, he came out of the church and remarked to a friend: ‘I’ve just changed my coat.’ The Austrians’ famous anti-Semitism, however, was not to be quenched by such a token gesture, and he was eventually driven out of the country an anti-Semitic press campaign.” Mahler, a morbid person by nature, one who brooded upon the inevitability of death, saw Dr. Sigmund Freud briefly. But he never overcame his fears, not even after comforting his daughter with his music. “Madness seizes me, annihilates me,” he told friends who said he appealed to the Devil to take possession of his soul. He was never, however, adjudged clinically insane. Mahler died of a heart attack brought on by a bacterial infection. (CE; Current Biography}
Mahler, Gustav (7 Jul 1860 - 18 May 1911)
A major composer of nine symphonies and the famous Das Lied von der Erde, Mahler was a conductor who was born in Kalischt. That Bohemian city was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire that became a major component of Czechoslovakia and, later, the Czech Republic. He grew up in a region that was associated with the Czech independence movement. His parents were Jewish, and Jews in the region were associated by ethnic Czechs with Germans. Mahler lamented, “I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed."
Gabriel Engel’s Gustav Mahler: Song Symphonist points out that Mahler loved nature and life but because of childhood experiences (family deaths, a suicide, and a brutal rape he witnessed) feared death. Kindertotenlieder (“Songs on the Deaths of Children”) concerns the loss of an innocent view of life. Although one of the most important and influential conductors of his time, he was not a virtuoso pianist and his youthful compositions were too forward-looking to win the conservative-judged contests that he entered. As a result, Mahler was forced into a conducting career. He conducted at regional opera houses ((Hall in 1880, Laibach in 1881, Olmutz in 1882, Kassel in 1883, Prague in 1885, Leipzig in 1886-8, Budapest from 1886-8, and Hamburg from 1891-7), then became head of the Vienna Opera in 1897. Alma, his wife, told of an incident during his leadership of the Vienna Opera when he attempted to present Richard Strauss’s Salome. A censorship board banned the work because of its references to Christ and “the representation of events which belong to the realm of sexual pathology.” Rather than agree with the censor, Mahler instead argued that “. . . in matters of art only the form and never the content is relevant, or at least should be relevant, from a serious viewpoint. How the subject matter is treated and carried out, not what the subject matter consists of to begin with-that is the only thing that matters. A work of art is to be considered as serious if the artist's dominant objective is to master the subject matter exclusively by artists means and resolve it perfectly to the ‘form.’ ” In 1907 he left Vienna for New York’s Philharmonic Society. But, as Engel points out, Mahler's time in New York was not positive—he had a low opinion of American concertgoers and musicians, did not get along with the New York critics, and fought with the management of both the Met and the Society. Mahler’s work drew heavily on Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner, although Bruckner is often cited as his main influence. He added folk elements to the symphony, and he strongly influenced later Austrian composers, particularly Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Mahler died in 1911, in poor health and exhausted from his New York battles. Terry Sanderson in Gay & Lesbian Humanist (Spring, 1998) praised the 1997 Albert Hall performance of the gigantic Symphony of a Thousand, adding that although it is set to a religious text, Mahler “refused steadfastly to attach himself to any organized religion. He was born a Jew but has been described as a life-long agnostic. At one point he converted to Catholicism, purely for the purpose of obtaining a job that he coveted—director of the Court Opera of Vienna. It was unthinkable for a Jew to hold such a prestigious position, hence the utilitarian conversion to the state religion. After the confirmation service was over, he came out of the church and remarked to a friend: ‘I’ve just changed my coat.’ The Austrians’ famous anti-Semitism, however, was not to be quenched by such a token gesture, and he was eventually driven out of the country by an anti-Semitic press campaign.” Mahler, a morbid person by nature, one who brooded upon the inevitability of death, saw Dr. Sigmund Freud briefly. But he never overcame his fears, not even after comforting his daughter with his music. “Madness seizes me, annihilates me,” he told friends who said he appealed to the Devil to take possession of his soul. He was never, however, adjudged clinically insane. Mahler died of a heart attack brought on by a bacterial infection. Allegedly, the last word he uttered was “Mozart.” (CE; Current Biography}
MAHOMET: See entry for Muhammad.
Mailer, Norman (1923– ) Playwright, short-story writer, versifier, literary critic, journalist, and self-publicist, Mailer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of The Naked and the Dead (1948). His work is known for its neurotic sexuality, and some believe it reveals its author’s complex feelings toward women and his own tendencies toward violence. In 1941 he wrote the present author concerning humanism,
I find it rather astonishing that your categories fail to include Marxism, which is the only philosophical system whose end is truly man himself. I suppose that I would have to list myself under atheistic humanism with a demurrer at being bedded down with Sartre.
Because Mailer is known for changing his viewpoints, he may or may not still hold what he then wrote. In Christians and Cannibals, Mailer wrote,
What characterizes the Cannibals is that most of them are born Christians, think of Jesus as Love, and get an erection from the thought of whippings, blood, burning crosses, burning bodies, and screams in mass graves. Whereas their counterpart, the Christians—the ones who are not Christian but whom we choose to call Christians—are utterly opposed to the destruction of human life and succeed within themselves in starting all the wars of our own time.
Mailer’s two Pulitzer Prizes were for An American Dream (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979). Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), utilizing KGB files in Belarus and concerning the person who assassinated President John F. Kennedy, was described as “a masterpiece” by The Economist. The second of his six wives, Adele Mailer, wrote The Last Party: Scenes From My Life With Norman Mailer (1997). It describes how their marriage started as a “trip into the light fantastic with a nice Jewish boy genius, newly famous and rich, my fatal attraction.” In detail she then describes their sex life together, as well as with others (one four-way of which resulted in a stockbroker’s smashing his cigarette “on Norman’s mechanically gyrating rear”). She related how on 20 November 1962 he stabbed her two times but, lying to the grand jury, she claimed that she did not know who stabbed her. Her husband later pleaded guilty to third-degree assault, was given probation, and never went to jail. The Gospel According to the Son tells the story of Jesus Christ, but not the Christ of Christian orthodoxy. “I’m one of the fifty or one hundred novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament,” Mailer told people. In doing so, he wrote the life of Christ as if the Christ is telling the story. And, like the Christ, he is half man and half something else, leading critic James Wood to observe that Mailer comes off as “a kind of celebrity-centaur. The work has the Second of the Trinity receiving messages from the First of the Trinity which come at quite low frequency. By fusing the four gospels, Mailer tries to resolve C. S. Lewis’s observation that either Christ was who he was or else he was a total madman.” Remarked critic Michiko Kakutani, “Indeed Mr. Mailer’s Father and Son have a lot in common: both are full of themselves, both are fond of self-dramatization, and both tend to feel put upon by their public responsibilities.”
For those who would ask how my words have come to this page, I would tell them to look upon it as a small miracle. (My gospel, after all, will speak of miracles.)
Mailer’s odd change of viewpoints is apparent, also, in his interview in Time (30 September 1991):
I happen to believe in it [reincarnation]. . . . It just seems to me that if we lead our lives with all that goes wrong with them, and then we die and that’s the end of us, that doesn’t make much sense.
Sometimes referred to “as one of the heftiest egos ever to hit the printed page,” Mailer is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (See entry for Michael Novak, who claims that Mailer in 1998, by writing “Religion to me is now the last frontier,” recognizes the importance of religion and has changed his former views. One of Mailer’s former friends, Norman Podhoretz, writes in Ex-Friends [1999] that Mailer is a coward.) {CE; WAS, 20 February 1951}
Maillet, Benôit de (1656–1738) Maillet was a French author who was successively consul in Egypt and at Leghorn. After his death was published “Telliamed,” the anagram of his name, in which he maintained that all land was originally covered with water and that every species of animal, man included, owes its origin to the sea. {BDF}
Maillot, Arthur François Ève (1747–1814) First a soldier, then an actor, eventually a French dramatist, Maillot embraced the Revolution with enthusiasm and was nominated a Commissary of the Convention. Although several times imprisoned under Napoleon I, he was a known rationalist and writer of comedies. {RAT}
Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) (1135-1204) A Jewish scholar, physician, and philosopher, Maimonides wrote Moreh Nevukhim (tr., Guide for the Perplexed) in Arabic and explained his proof of the existence of God, expounded the principles of creation, and elucidated metaphysical and religious problems. His thinking exerted a profound influence upon Christian thinkers. However, Israel Shahak wrote in Jewish History, Jewish Religion,
[Maimonides] was a racist and his attitude toward blacks and Mongols was worse than the attitude of Aquinas toward the Jews. The latter attitude was acknowledged by Catholics only after a long and severe struggle against a previous cover-up. . . . Maimonides’ attitude toward non-Jews, whatever their race, is hardly better than his views about blacks and Mongols. One example: According to Maimonides (and all his commentators) in his monumental compendium of Talmudic law, Mishneh Torah: “If a Jew has a coitus with a Gentile woman, whether she be a child or three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if he is a minor aged only nine years and one day—because he had willful coitus with her, she must be killed, as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble” (“Prohibitions on Sexual Intercourse”). It is obvious a person who could promulgate such a horrible law, and many similar ones, could also compare human beings to half-apes.
{The Nation, 6 July 1998}
Main, Margaret Huntley (20th Century) Main is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker. She is author of A Rose Queen is Forever (1989) and articles in various journals.
Maindonald, John (20th Century) Maindonald is the President of the Australia and New Zealand Unitarian Association. E-mail: <john@maths.newcastle.edu.au>.
Maine, Colin (20th Century) An Australian freethinker, Maine wrote The Unpleasant Personality of Jesus Christ (c. 1977). {GS}
Mainlaender, Philipp (Philipp Batz) (19th Century) A pseudonym of Philipp Batz, Mainlaender wrote Philosophy of Redemption, the first part of which was published in 1876. A German pessimist, he held that polytheism gives place to monotheism and pantheism, and these again to atheism. “God is dead,” he wrote, “and his death was the life of the world.” {BDF}
Maitland, Edward (1824–1897) A freethinker, Maitland wrote How to Complete the Reformation (c. 1872). He also wrote By and By: An Historical Romance of the Future (1977). {GS}
Maitland, Frederick William(1850–1906) Maitland was an English legal historian, a professor at Cambridge University and a leading authority of his time on English law. He wrote Domesday Book and Beyond (1897), a model for the use of a source; and, with Sir Frederick Pollock, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward (1895). Maitland was secretary of a group of freethinking scholars who gathered round Sir Leslie Stephen and shared his agnosticism. “Then, as always, he was a dissenter from all the churches, ” wrote his biographer, H. A. L. Fisher. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Maizels, Albert (20th Century)
Maizels is president of Humanists of the Gold Coast. (See entry for Florida Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Major, Charles Edwin (1859–1954) Major was the first president of the New Zealand Rationalist Association, from 1927 to 1930. He reportedly was against “creeping socialism” but was for the kind of rationalism represented by the evolutionist and laissez-faire liberal, Herbert Spencer. His other accomplishments have been listed in David Harner’s The New Zealand Liberals (1988). {SWW}
MAKE HAPPY The desire to make someone happy is a humanistic one. A humanist, in a basic sense, is one devoted to positive human interests. Best-selling American author Stephen King told a gathering at the University of Maine, his alma mater, “The desire to please—or try to—seems hard-wired into my system. When I was a kid, my mother sometimes used to say, ‘Stevie, if you were a girl, you’d always be pregnant.’ ” (See entry for Stephen King.) {Mark Singer, The New Yorker, 7 September 1998}
Malachi, Martin (20th Century) Malachi, a Catholic and Jesuit, is author of The Final Conclave (1978), a work concerning the Vatican.
Malathi, A. (20th Century) Ms. Malathi is assistant director of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada, India.
Malebranche, Nicolas (1628–1715) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Malebranche as one who seems to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. His philosophy, a synthesis of Cartesian and Augustinian thought, tried to reconcile the new science with Christian theology. Some of his ideas influenced Leibniz, Berkeley, and John Norris, but his theism was always paramount. He thought eternal truths are contained in a divine intellect, that the soul is part of that intellect. {Aram Vartanian, EU; CE; ER}
MALE • Male, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible, sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Malherbe, François de (1555–1628) Malherbe was a French poet who served in the civil wars of the League and enjoyed the patronage of Henry IV. He was called the prince of poets and the poet of princes. He enjoyed skeptical raillery. When told upon his deathbed of paradise and hell, he said he had lived like others and would go where others went. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Malik, Gauri Bazaz (20th Century) Malik is President of the Indian Renaissance Institute. At a 1995 conference of humanists in India, Dr. Malik spoke of women’s issues in South Asia. She thought that the world was awakening to the position of the poor and illiterate, of which women with their children are the major part. This region has been a male-dominated part of the world. “Crushing poverty,” she explained, “overlaid with longstanding patterns of discrimination create conditions for women which threaten their well-being, curtail their social, political, economic rights, and limit their opportunities.” As a result, she reported that agriculture constitutes the livelihood of eighty to ninety percent of South Asia and women undertake the greater part of this work. Because of a tradition of women’s playing a full part in the Vedic tradition and in the early part of the nationalist movement, there has been a continuing loss of women’s status. The dowry system means that mothers abort or kill girl children to avoid a large payment on marriage. Population control is necessary but should be brought about in an enlightened way. She said, “A mass campaign for literacy, land reform, health education, which would have ensured an overall development and education, would check the population in a natural way.” Quoting Gandhi, she continued, “ ‘Prejudices cannot be removed by legislation. They yield only to patient toil and education.’ The Beijing U.N. Conference for women in September 1995 identified and highlighted education as the field for NGOs who work at the grassroots level. It is only through them,” she concluded, “that integrated human development can have a future.” {New Humanist, February 1996}
Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942) Malinowski was a Polish-born English anthropologist who founded “functionalism,” a movement with the theory that cultures should be studied in terms of their particular internal dynamics. He studied the Trobriand Islanders (1914–1918), and he did research in Africa and the Americas. At the time Malinowski wrote Magic, Science, and Religion (published 1948), he dropped the comment that he did not love science because of his agnosticism. “I, personally,” he declared, “am unable to accept any revealed religion, Christian or not.” {TRI; TYD}
Malkin, Yaakov (20th Century) Malkin is a dean of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews.
John Malkovich, Actor ent Internet Movie Database
John Malkovich, with 2 Oscar nominations and dozens of films to his credit, was in Chicago directing a play in January of 2000 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, which he helped found several years ago. The play was a fictionalized story about Sigmund Freud entitled "Hysteria." He was interviewed by Martha Lavey for a WTTW Chicago Public television program entitled "Artbeat Chicago" which aired on January 6. Here, Malkovich explains his thoughts on Sigmund Freud:
"I think he was fantastic, a fantastic man. I mean, flawed, sure, but I don't even know what that means. I think his basic premise is people are strong enough to bear and to comprehend, and if they could remember and name the source of various griefs and sorrows, that they would, by that act, be able to live with them, and I think that's quite a fantastic notion.
I also particularly like him because he was an atheist, and I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny -- people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH..."
Malkovich, John (9 Dec 1953 - ) Malkovich, who was born in Christopher, Illinois, is a movie and stage actor as well as a movie producer and director. A temperamental child, he called his first grade teacher “a motherfucker and cocksucker,” then walked out of school after losing an Easter egg hunt. His father allegedly beat him for six hours for that indiscretion, and at other times his family allegedly locked him out of the house when he was moody, calling out, “Mad dog, mad dog, mad dog.” As a teenager Malkovich weighed over 230 pounds, then lost 70 by going on an all-cherry and lemon jello diet for two to three months. On the football team, however, he was known as the doughnut-eater. In college when he accompanied a girl to an audition, he got the part, she did not. From this background, he not surprisingly continued in drama. In 1981 at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre he had his first directing gig, The Rear Column. Movies he has been in are numerous and include Killing Fields, Places in the Heart (Oscar nomination), Dangerous Liaisons, Sheltering Sky, In the Line of Fire (Oscar nomination), The Portrait of a Lady, Con Air, and Shadow of the Vampire. Malkovich has modeled, likes clothes, owns The Big Sleep Hotel in Wales, and restaurants in France, Portugal, and Spain. He has said, “I don’t go to the movies. I can barely look at them. I find them generally absurd, so horrifyingly flat . . . behemothly stupid.” He also has said that “Film is essentially about whether you want to go to bed with that person.” As a result, he says he prefers poetry and literature to seeing a movie. Interviewed by Martha Lavey for a WTTW Chicago Public TV program entitled “Artbeat,” he talked about Sigmund Freud:
I think he was fantastic, a fantastic man. I mean, flawed, sure, but I don't even know what that means. I think his basic premise is people are strong enough to bear and to comprehend, and if they could remember and name the source of various griefs and sorrows, that they would, by that act, be able to live with them, and I think that's quite a fantastic notion.
I also particularly like him because he was an atheist, and I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny—people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and they go to church. {CA}
Malladi, Ramamurthy (20th Century)
Malladi is an active member of the Indian Rationalist Humanist Association.
Malleson, Andrew (1931– ) A signer of Humanist Manifesto, Dr. Malleson is a psychiatrist. He wrote Need Your Doctor Be So Useless? (1973). {HM2}
Malleson, Miles (Born 1888) Malleson, an author, was a freethinker, according to David Tribe. {TRI}
Mallet, David (1705–1765) Mallet was a Scottish poet who became under-secretary to the Prince of Wales. He edited Bolingbroke’s works and was a close friend of Hume and Gibbon. Those who knew him described him as being “a great declaimer in all the London coffee-houses against Christianity.” {FUK; RAT; RE}
Mallett, Josephine (19th Century) A French author, Mme. Mallet wrote a work on The Bible (1882), taking on its origin, errors, and contradictions. {BDF}
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM A far-reaching document of the papal Inquisition was Malleus Maleficarum, written in the 1480s by two Dominican inquisitors, Heinrich Krämer and Jakob Sprenger. In 1484 Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summus desiderantes affectibus, which gave the Inquisition, not the secular courts, jurisdiction over witchcraft as heresy. Sprenger, the dean of Cologne University, and Krämer had served as inquisitors in parts of Germany. The document allowed inquisitors to handle almost any probability. It even suggested judgments which could be used: “We have exerted our utmost endeavor by various fitting methods to convert you to salvation, but you have been given up to your sin and led away and seduced by an evil spirit and have chosen to be tortured with fearful and eternal torment in hell, and that your body should here be consumed in flames.” {EH}
Mallock, William Hurrell (19th Century) Mallock was a freethinker who wrote Atheism and the Value of Life (1884) and The Individualist (1899). In his Is Life Worth Living (1879), he wrote, “Whatever may be God’s future, we cannot forget His past.” {GS; TYD}
Malon, Benoît (1841–1893) Malon was a French socialist, one of the founders of the International. He was editor of L’Intransigeant and wrote on the religion and morality of the Socialists. {BDF; RAT}
Malone, Dumas (Born 1892)
Malone wrote The Public Life of Thomas Cooper, 1783–1839 (1926). {FUS}
Malone, Tom (20th Century) Malone has been a contributing editor to Freethought Today. As President of Humanists of Georgia, he stated that the American Humanist Association “has become irrelevant” and its leaders “simply want AHA to become a warned-over Unitarian-type society. The world doesn’t need another Unitarian church.” An activist, Malone teaches history and coaches boys’ varsity soccer in a public high school. However, in an about-face and feeling that Madalyn O’Hair’s virulent attacks on religion have strengthened the opposition to the freethought cause, Malone became no longer associated with the Atlanta Freethought Society and was elected in 1994 to the board of the American Humanist Association. He is chairman of their Commission for the Defense of Humanism. In 1996, citing marital problems which required him to “reexamine my priorities,” Malone resigned as President of Humanists of Georgia. (See entry for Georgia Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Malot, Hector Henri (1830–1907) Malot was the French author of a trilogy (Les amants, 1859; Les epoux, 1865); Les enfants, 1866), works which brought him dramatic fame. He was known for the delicate moral tone and purely humanitarian character of his novels. The French Academy crowned his Sans Famille (1878). {RAT}
Malraux, André (1901–1976) A major French man of letters, author of La Condition humaine (1933, Man’s Fate), which won the 1933 Goncourt literary prize. Malraux once wrote, “To the absurd myths of God and an immortal soul, the modern world in its radical impotence has only succeeded in opposing the ridiculous myths of science and progress.” “The individuality of Malraux’s hero,” Thweatt writes, “is integrated into the ‘virile fraternity’ of the Communist cause; and La Condition humaine effects a syncretism of communism and existentialism that is similar in many respects to Montaigne’s syncretism of Christianity and classical philosophy. At the same time, Malraux’s work presents a study of the degrees and variety of authentic action, set against the panorama of the 1927 repression of Communist insurgency by the Kuomintang.” Under Charles DeGaulle, Malraux served (1945, 1958) as minister of information, and in 1959 he became DeGaulle’s minister of cultural affairs. His arbitrariness irritated his former left-wing allies, despite his decision to persuade Marc Chagall to paint the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier. Similarly, his independence irritated the Gaullists, as when he resisted pressure to have an iconoclastic play by Jean Genet banned. “One must always choose freedom, even when it has dirty hands,” he said.” In Signé Malraux (1996), French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard described how Malraux was self-taught but falsely said he had studied at the École du Louvre. Or how, although brought up in a grocery shop, he had falsely told his rich first wife, Clara, that his mother had belonged to the haute bourgeoisie. In 1923 when he and Clara went to Indochina to steal Khmer statues, he was arrested, then expelled, then returned to found an anti-colonialist newspaper. Asia provided the setting of his early novels, in which, as described by The Economist (30 November 1996), “characters are transcended by the cause they choose to kill and die for.” In Spain’s civil war, Malraux commanded a squadron in the Republican air force. In 1945 he changed from his former pro-Marxism to embrace Charles de Gaulle but was fascinated by revolutionary leaders who placed themselves beyond the pale of social convention, such as T. E. Lawrence or Mao Zedong. His companion was the novelist Louise de Vilmorin. In 1996, Malraux’ remains were transferred to the Pantheon, France’s final resting place for illustrious men (and one woman, Marie Curie). President Jacques Chirac, on that occasion, described Malraux as “neither of the right, nor of the left, but of France.” {CE; EU, Vivien Thweatt; PA}
Malte-Bruun, Konrad (1775–1826) Malte-Bruun was one of the first geographers of his time. In 1800 he was banished from Denmark on account of his advanced opinions. Settling in Paris, he collaborated with Mentelle in publishing a large geographical work (16 volumes, 1804–1807), and in 1808 he founded the Annales des Voyages. Malte-Bruun’s chief work was his Précis de géographie et de l’histoire (8 volumes, 1810–1829). {RAT}
MALTHUSIAN THEORY The British economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population (1978). He argued that human population tends to increase faster than food supply and can be checked only by moral restraints or by war, famine, and disease. The 1998 Nobel Award in Economics was given to Amartya Sen, who believes the Malthusian Theory is wrong. {See entry for Amartya Sen.}
Malvezin, Pierre (Born 1841) Malvezin was a French journalist. La Bible Farce (1879) was condemned and suppressed in 1880 and he was sentenced to three months in prison. Malvezin conducted the review, La Fraternité. {BDF}
Mamiani Della Rovere (Count Terenzio) (1865–1867) Mamiani Della Rovere was Pius IX’s Minister of the Interior and in 1857 was appointed professor of the philosophy of history at Turin University. He entered the Italian Camera, was Minister of Education in 1861, ambassador at Berne, and Vice-President of the Senate (1867). Mamiani was disliked by most of the Italian rationalists and was a non-Christian theist. His philosophy was largely built upon the ideas of Hegel, and he talked of a reconciliation of the Catholic Church with modern culture. In La Religione dell’ Avvenire (1880), however, he showed that he meant a religion without revelation or miracles or dogmas. {RAT}
MAN • Man, n. An animal so lost in rapturous contemplation of what he thinks he is as to overlook what he indubitably ought to be. His chief occupation is extermination of other animals and his own species, which, however, multiplies with such insistent rapidity as to infest the whole habitable earth and Canada. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Man, the result of evolutionary processes, came about utterly by chance. No "unseen hand" created the species. Mankind is a lucky accident that lives in a universe which is 13 or so billion years old. Our insignificant little planet did not even exist for two-thirds of that universal history. Magnum miraculum est homo: Man is a great miracle—these were the words said to have been the inspiration for Renaissance philosophers. But is "man the measure of all things"? And what about "The proper study of mankind is man"? Such a statement sounds somewhat arrogant. Just the same, mankind exists, and we humans are a part. It is important for us to determine what we are without over-valuing our species, which goes back only about 200,000 years. Mankind is the measurer, if not the measure. The proper study of mankind must include the scientific outlook if we are to understand our species as well as our universe. Evolutionary concepts appeared in some early Greek writings, such as those of Thales, Empedocles, Anaximander, and Aristotle. For the fifteen centuries that the Catholic Church enjoyed a restraining influence, evolutionary theories did not develop whatsoever and Genesis was taught as fact. In the middle 1990s, bipeds were thought to have existed 5.5 million years ago, and Homo erectus existed between 1.6 million and 250,000 years ago. Paleontologists, however, will undoubtedly make new findings, some of which may even challenge the commonly held view that Homo erectus originated in Africa. In 1995, for example, bones and stone tools were found in the Longgupo cave in central (Sichuan) China which indicate that perhaps 1.9 million years ago hominids existed. Although this may or may not alter the view that Homo sapiens probably emerged in Africa no more than 200,000 years ago, the Chinese discoveries may well indicate an earlier date for migrations out of Africa. The earliest recognizable member of the Homo genus, currently known as Homo rudolfensis, is generally dated as having lived 2.5 million years ago in the Rift Valley of East Africa. A 1999 study indicated that the modern Homo sapiens likely interbred with Neanderthals. (See entries for Neanderthal Man and for Woman.) {CE}
MAN AND HIS CREATIONS Humans are bipedal mammals of the Primate order. Anatomically, they are related to the great apes, but they differ in the notable development of the brain and the capacity to speak, to reason, and to form and freely interbreed races. At one time, it was believed that the first three mythical kings of Sumer—A-lulum, Alagar, and En Men Lu Anna—had reigned for 28,000 years, 36,000 years, and 43,200 years respectively. Biblical figures, despite the illogical dating, did not live so long: Adam, 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Jared, 962; Methusaleh, 969; Noah, 950. Noah’s son lived a mere 600 years; Abraham, 175; Isaac, 180; Jacob, 147; Joseph, 110. Thomas Parr of England is said to have lived 152 years. Eagles and swans live the longest lives among birds, and some carp and pike may live as long as 150 years. Japanese women have been estimated to have an expected longevity of over 81 years. Whales live an average of only 60. Antipater of Sidon in the second century B.C.E. drew up a list of the seven wonders of the world which humans had created:
• the Great Pyramid of Khufu or all the pyramids with or without the Sphinx • the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with or without the walls • the statue of Zeus by Phidias at Olympia • the temple of Artemis at Ephesus • the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus • the Pharos at Alexandria • the Colossus of Rhodes
Of these, only the pyramids remain, although damaged by nature and by man. In 1994, the editors of The Economist produced a rival list:
• the microprocessor, invented by Ted Hoff and which brought together the transistor (1947) and the integrated circuit (1959 • the pill, which in 1963 turned a Mexican yam into an oral contraceptive that “tells the brain not to ask the ovaries to release more eggs” • the telephone network, started by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and presently allowing any of over 580,000,000 subscribers anywhere on the planet to converse “usually within ten seconds of dialing” • the jumbo jet whose Boeing 747 planes are manufactured in “the largest building, by volume, in the world, encompassing 13.4 million cubic meters (472 million cubic feet) of space—enough room to accommodate about 550 Westminster Abbeys”—and which can carry up to 570 passengers with a range of over 8,000 miles. Boeing 747s have carried over 1.4 billion passengers a total of over 18 billion miles, “almost 200 times the distance from the earth to the sun” • the offshore oil platform, which since 1947 has allowed drilling under the world’s seas. In 1989, a platform weighing 1,500,000 tons and named Gullfaks C became the largest object ever to have been moved by mankind. Eleven tugboats moved the 860-feet high platform which contained 245,000 cubic meters of concrete and 80,000 tons of reinforcing steel—enough to build ten Eiffel Towers. The platform accommodates 330 individuals and cost $2 billion to build. • the hydrogen bomb, which was first exploded in 1952 at Eniwetok by the United States and the second in 1953 by the USSR, has changed the nature of international conflict, for nuclear weapons now exist which can destroy all of Earth’s 286 cities of more than a million people, many times over and in a matter of moments. Hydrogen bombs on intercontinental missiles launched from hidden submarines have made possible “a completely different kind of war, one in which anything on the earth could be destroyed in a matter of minutes.” The most modern are accurate to within about 100 metres. • Tranquility Base, a patch of the moon upon which landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in their spacecraft, the Eagle, at 22:18 (Greenwich mean time), 20 July 1969. It was the first time in the moon’s four billion years of existence that human footprints had touched its dust. Now, plans are afoot for basing a permanently crewed moon-base in order to obtain raw materials for export to Earth.
Some, however, are curmudgeons on the subject:
• The earth has a skin and that skin has diseases; one of its diseases is called man. –Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• I believe the best definition of man is “the ungrateful biped.” –Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky
• Man is a dog’s ideal of what God should be. –Holbrook Jackson
• Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. –George Santayana
• What is man, when you come to think upon him but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? –Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)
“Man” in Old English or Anglo-Saxon was universal and referred to all humans equally. Waepman was the word for a male human, wifman for the female human. Although some contemporary feminists object to the use of “man” to include women as well as men, the objection is not to its historical origins, which were gender-free. The newly coined pronoun “(s)he” is considered by many to be redundant. With some chariness, women who lead a group choose to be called a “chair,” but it is believed more prefer “chairwoman,” ”chairperson,” or the original “chairman.” (See entry for Mankind. For the oldest ancestor of man, see entry for Catopithecus.)
MAN IN EARLY AMERICA In 1996 two college students watching a hydroplane race on the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington, found a skeleton that was more than 9,000 years old. If the first findings by forensic anthropologist James Chatters prove true, the skeleton was a “Male, Caucasian,” not racially or culturally associated with any existing American Indian group. In that case, and a radiocarbon test showed one bone to be between 9,300 and 9,600 years old, the remains indicate that the earliest Americans may have reached Washington because 16,000 years ago the North Atlantic was frozen from Norway to Newfoundland. The “Native Americans,” in short, might not have originated in Asia. {Douglas Preston, “The Lost Man,” The New Yorker, 16 June 1997}
MANCHESTER (England) HUMANISTS For information about the Manchester, England, humanists, telephone 0161 681 7607.
Manchester, William (20th Century) Manchester wrote Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H. L. Mencken (1950). He also described in A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance the wild parties held by Pope Alexander VI. (See entry for Alexander VI.) {FUS}
MANDEAN, also MANDAEAN Mandeans are members of a Gnostic sect that originated in Jordan and presently exists in Iraq. Mandean is a form of Aramaic used by the Mandeans. (For an estimate of the number of Mandeans worldwide, see entry for Hell.)
Mandell, Terri (20th Century) Mandell is on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association. She is author of Power Schmoozing (1996).
Mander, Alfred Ernest (1894–c. 1960) Mander was an Australian rationalist, writer, and lecturer. His free-thinking books included Common Cause: The Christian God, and Life After Death. He also wrote Psychology for Everyman (and Woman) (1935) and Clearer Thinking (Logic for Everyman) (1936). During the 1920s he lectured widely in New Zealand. {SWW}
Mandeville, Bernard de (1670–1733) A Dutch-born English author and physician, Mandeville wrote on ethical subjects, his most famous being The Fable of the Bees (1714), a work which Adam Smith praised. He said the self-seeking effort of individuals is the mainspring of an industrial society that religious or legal restraints are mere fictions invented by rulers and clergymen to put men under domination. “Private vices,” he wrote in his satire on the principles of morality, “are public virtues.” Another of his works was Usefulness of Christianity in War (1731). Mandeville was one of the main deists in eighteenth-century England and, according to McCabe, “one of the freest of the many freethinking Englishmen of the 18th century.” {BDF; CE; FUK; JM; JMR; JMRH; New Humanist, August 1997; RAT}
Manekin, Ted (20th Century) For a brief time in 1999, Manekin was Executive Director of the Center for Inquiry Institute in Amherst, New York.
Manen, Willem Christian van (1842–1905) Manen, who for twenty years was a pastor of the Reformed Church, taught theology at Groningen University and ancient Christian literature and New Testament exegesis at Leydon. His chief work, Paulus (1890–1896, 3 volumes), made a sensation because he rejected all the Pauline Epistles as spurious, a view which was little adopted. In 1904 Manen became an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT; RE}
Manfred [King of Sicily] (1232–1266) The natural (illegitimate) son of Frederic II, Manfred was the King of Sicily who took over the Kingdom as Regent when Frederic died and refused to yield it to Pope Innocent IV and his successors, Alexander IV and Urban IV. In 1254, papal forces invaded Sicily, and Manfred was forced to restore the kingdom to the papacy, retaining only the duchy of Taranto in fief from the pope. In a battle in which Charles I defeated him at Benevento (1266), Manfred was killed. According to the Florentine historian Villani, Manfred was a notorious skeptic as well as a gifted prince of high ideals. {CE; JM; RE}
Mangasarian, M(angasar) M(ugurdital) (1859–1943) In Chicago, Mangasarian edited Liberal Review and Rationalist. He is the author of A New Catechism (1902) and Humanism, A Religion for Americans (1925). He founded the Chicago Society of Ethical Culture, later the (Rationalist) Independent Religious Society. Mangasarian wrote at least two dozen pamphlets. In The Rationalist (15 May 1915), he wrote, “Christianity . . . made, for nearly 1,500 years, persecution, religious wars, massacres, theological feuds and bloodshed, heresy huntings and heretic burnings, prisons, dungeons, anathemas, curses, opposition to science, hatred of liberty, spiritual bondage, the life without love or laughter. “ {FUS; RAT; RE; TYD}
Mangialetti, Nada (20th Century) Mangialetti is a clinical psychologist who has been a member of Humanists of Hawaii and Educational Vice President of the New York Area Skeptics. She has written for Free Inquiry and The Secular Humanist Bulletin.
Mangione, Jerre (1909– ) Mangione has been on the editorial board of The Humanist and was a staff writer for Time (1931), an acting director of Yaddo (1977–1978), and an acting director of the Italian Studies Center (1978–1980). He wrote An Ethic at Large, a Memoir of America in the Thirties and Forties (1978).
Manhattan, Avro (1914–1990)
Manhattan’s The Vatican in World Politics was a bestseller in 1949. He was a friend to Picasso, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. Said to be a deist, he promoted the “still, small voice inside people, believing all children are born with great creative potential which is crushed by vulgar entertainment, modern educational shortcomings, and the lack of time to create something out of nothing.” He also wrote Catholic Imperialism and World Freedom (1952) and The Dollar and the Vatican. In 1953 the King of Italy conferred on him the title of Baron. In 1971, he wrote Religious Terror in Ireland. In The Vatican’s Holocaust, he describes how 700,000 perished when Croatia was an independent Catholic state. In 1976 he received the Pioneer Award from the American Atheists, for world-wide education in the matter of theo-politics. In 1981 he was named, to some people’s amusement, Knight Commander of the Knights of Malta. Dawn of Man: An Epic of Our Ancestors Before Man’s Discovery of Fire (1986) took forty years to complete, and Manhattan’s satire of USSR and USA politics, entitled The Presidential Web, took twenty years. His other works include The Catholic Church Against the Twentieth Century (1946), Catholic Imperialism and World Freedom (1972), The Dollar and the Vatican (1956), The Vatican Billions: 2000 Years of Wealth Accumulation (1972), and The Vatican Holocaust: The Sensational Account of the Most Horrifying Massacre of the Twentieth Century (1986). (See Freethought Today [Winter, 1990] for a discussion of Manhattan’s philosophic outlook.) {TRI}
MANIBOZHO Manibozho, in an Algonquin Indian religion, was the god who created earth and mortals out of clay. {LEE}
MANICHAEISM • Manicheism, n. The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Manichaeism (or Manicheism, Manichaeanism, Manicheanism, Manicheeism) is an invented theological term referring to a syncretistic religious dualism which originated in Persia and was widely held in the Roman Empire during the 3rd and 4th centuries. Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines it as having also been found “in central and eastern Asia for a longer period, and teaching as a saving wisdom given through the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and Mani that a cosmic conflict exists between a good realm of light and an evil realm of darkness, that matter and flesh are in the realm of darkness, and that man’s duty is to aid the forces of good by practicing asceticism, especially by avoiding procreation and animal food.” In short, Manichaeism is di-theistic, not mono-theistic. It divides the world between good and evil powers or regards matter as inherently evil.
Manickham, Poopathi (20th Century) Manickham, who lives now in Seattle, Washington, was once a Saivite but is now a Dalit, which he says by default makes him a rationalist and humanist. Saivam and Dalit, he claims, are not at all similar. Some temples in South India still discourage Dalits from entering, he has written, “and if you manage to sneak in they smell your caste by chance and you know how they speed up their pooja—I received the same kind of treatment from a white-only Episcopalian church in Seattle.” He is interested “in a collective effort in the pursuit of total liberation of the oppressed people in the name of caste, religion, and race worldwide.” {E-mail to WAS, 7 April 1998}
Manikin, Lewis (20th Century) Manikin’s Scientific Humanism, or The Religion of Humanity (1940) continued using the term “God” in his attempt to merge his views of humanism and the sciences.
Mankiewicz, Herman (1897–1953) Mankiewicz was one of the famed Algonquin Round Table wits—the Algonquin was a Manhattan hotel where a group of noted intellectuals dined and drank Mankiewicz wrote such major screenplays as “Citizen Kane” (except that how much was his and how much was Orson Welles’s is the subject of endless dispute), “Girl Crazy,” and “Dinner at Eight.” At the end of his life he suffered from edema, his physicians had given up hope, and the family had gathered. To his brother Frank who had on a brand-new, dark blue suit, Mankiewicz complained, “Your suit is much too black and absolutely appropriate for a funeral.” To another brother, Don, he discussed details of his funeral: “Assuming the ceremony will be held indoors, hats will not be worn. You won’t have any trouble, except that Dore Schary will wear his hat. You are to go up to him and tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘Dore, I have a message for you from the deceased: Take off your hat, you’re in the house.’ ” His biographer, Richard Meryman, describes how a rabbi entered the room to provide solace during the final moments. “Get the hell out of here,” exclaimed the screenwriter. “I never had any use for you when I was living, and I’ve got no use for you now.” His last words were with his brother Joe, with whom he had been co-makers on loans for films. “Well that finishes everything I’ve got to take care of before I go to meet my maker. Or . . .” and he chose his last words, “. . . should I say ‘co-maker’?”
Manilow, Barry (1946 ) Manilow is a singer, composer, and arranger. Starting in the mailroom at CBS, he has worked his way up to receiving numbers of musical awards. In 1979, he earned a Grammy Award for “At the Copa” and, in 1977, a special Tony Award. Other of his hits include “I Write the Songs,” “Mandy,” “Looks Like We Made It.” A UK correspondent for The Independent (18 November 1998), asked Manilow if he believed in God and was told, “Yes. His name is Clive Davis, and he’s the head of my record company.” Asked then how important his Judaism is, he responded, “It isn’t. My humanism is.” {CA}
Manilow, Barry]] (17 Jun 1946 - ) Manilow is a singer, composer, and arranger. Starting in the mailroom at CBS, he has worked his way up to receiving numbers of musical awards. In 1972 he became Bette Midler’s music director, and together they received many honors. In 1979, he earned a Grammy Award for “At the Copa” and, in 1977, a special Tony Award. Other of his hits include “I Write the Songs,” “Mandy,” “Looks Like We Made It.” The author of over one hundred songs also has earned an Emmy and an Oscar. In the 1990s he performed in Mexico, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. He continues to perform throughout the nation and the world. “I am a musician,” he has written. “My passion for music has obliterated everything in its path for my entire life. Whenever there was a choice between music and anything else, music won hands down every time. No one person or material thing could ever come close to the feeling I get when the music is right. I am totally committed to my music and my fans.” A UK correspondent for The Independent (18 November 1998), asked Manilow if he believed in God and was told, “Yes. His name is Clive Davis, and he’s the head of my record company.” Asked then how important his Judaism is, he responded, “It isn’t. My humanism is.” {CA} I am totally committed to my music and my fans." - Barry w
MANKIND (HUMANKIND) People are only one of an estimated 1,394,000 identified animal species. Since the 17th century, when scholars began to separate types of flora and fauna, classifications of the mutations of people into races have been made. Scholars generally hold that a common evolution of races occurred, that the differentiation of races occurred relatively late in history. Although some dislike categorizing, most anthropologists agree that three distinct races exist: the Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Each of these broad groups can be divided into subgroups—for example, the Negroid group includes the peoples of Africa south of the Sahara, the Pygmy groups of Indonesia, and the inhabitants of New Guinea and Melanesia. Lacking, however, is general agreement as to the classification of such people as the aborigines of Australia, the Dravidian people of South India, the Polynesians, and the Ainu of North Japan. When a supposed superiority of their own kind of culture or nationality occurs, in which cultural and psychological values to race are attributed, such an approach is called racism. The racial doctrines of Nazi Germany, for example, resulted in a vicious anti-Semitism that proclaimed that “the Jews are a race.” Racism has complicated the integration movement in the United States and was the basis of segregation polices known as apartheid in the Republic of South Africa. (Bishop Desmond Tutu has explained how correctly to pronounce the Dutch word apartheid: uh-PART-hate, and he calls attention to the last syllable.) At what has been called the present “century of the common man,” women have insisted “man” be replaced by “people.” Many writers have chosen to unsex “mankind” and use “humankind.” Wole Soyinka, noting suggestions to replace “history” with “herstory,” has mused about any need for such a political correctness “hersterectomy.” {CE}
Mann, Bryon and Diana (20th Century) The Manns are Scots who moved to New Zealand in 1968. Bryon was a humanist activist at Glasgow University in the second half of the 1960s. {Glasgow Group Newsletter, September 1997)
Mann, Heinrich Landes (Born 1821) Mann was a German pessimistic poet who wrote under the penname of “Lorm (Hieronymus).” In addition to many philosophical poems, he wrote a volume of essays entitled Nature and Spirit (1884). {BDF}
Mann, Horace (1796–1859) An American educator who helped found the first public school at Lexington, Massachusetts, Mann was president of Antioch College. He was active in many Unitarian churches and founded, with others, the First Unitarian Society in West Newton, Massachusetts. The Dictionary of American Biography described him as “a Puritan without a theology.” Mann was attacked by many, who felt state schools should not teach religion, and he eventually won the fight to keep sectarian religion out of the schools. School libraries which he commenced had no books based upon strict religious beliefs, which represented a large change inasmuch as in the early days of Massachusetts there was a state supported church. As a result, the church views had been taught. Mann believed only in an impersonal God, and he rejected immortality. Just before his death, he told some students, “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” {CE; EG; JM; RE; U; UU}
Mann, Mary Tyler Peabody (1806–1887) Mann, the sister of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and the wife of Horace Mann, was a Unitarian. She and her sister established a school for girls in what is now Brookline, Massachusetts. {CE}
Mann, Thomas (1875–1955) Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, author of Buddenbrooks (1901), Dr. Faustus (1947), and The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924, translated 1927), discussed the subject of humanism as early as 1938, when he wrote:
For me and my kind the religious is lodged in the human. Not that my humanism springs from a deification of humanity—verily, there is small occasion for that! Who could find the heart, contemplating this crack-daily given the lie by the bitter and harsh facts? Daily we see it commit all the crimes in the Decalogue; daily we despair of its future; all too well we understand why the angels in heaven from the day of its creation have turned up their noses at sight of the Creator’s incomprehensible partiality for this so doubtful handiwork of his. And yet—today more than ever—I feel we must not, however well-founded our doubts, be betrayed into mere cynicism and contempt for the human race. We must not—despite all the evidence of its fantastic vileness—forget its great and honorable traits, revealed in the shape of art, science, the quest for truth, the creation of beauty, the conception of justice. Yes, it is true, we succumb to spiritual death when we show ourselves callous to that great mystery on which we are touching whenever we utter the words “man” and “humanity.” . . . What Christians call “original sin” is more than just a piece of priestly trickery devised to keep men under the Church’s thumb. It is a profound awareness in man as a spiritual being of his own natural infirmity and proneness to err, and of his rising in spirit above it. Is that disloyalty to nature? Not at all. It is a response to her own deepest desire. For it was to the end of her own spiritualization that she brought man forth. . . . I believe in the coming of a new, a third humanism, distinct, in complexion and fundamental temper, from its predecessors. It will not flatter mankind, looking at it through rose-colored glasses, for it will have had experiences of which the others knew not. It will have stouthearted knowledge of man’s dark, daemonic, radically ‘natural’ side; united with reverence for his superbiological, spiritual worth. The new humanity will be universal—and it will have the artist’s attitude: that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being lie precisely in that he belongs to the two kingdoms, of nature and spirit. It will realize that no romantic conflict or tragic dualism is inherent in the fact; but rather a fruitful and engaging combination of destiny and free choice. Upon that it will base a love for humanity in which its pessimism and its optimism will cancel each other out.
In Dr. Faustus, the character of Serenus Zeitblom is pictured as the extreme academic type of humanist. Zeitblom describes his humanism on page one of the novel, and presumably this also is Mann’s view of a classical humanist:
I am by nature wholly moderate, of a temper, I may say, both healthy and humane, addressed to reason and harmony; a scholar and conjuratus of the “Latin host,” not lacking all contact with the arts (I play the viola d’amore) but a son of the Muses in that academic sense which by preference regards itself as descended from the German humanists of the time of the “Poets.”
He continued,
As for my Catholic origin, it did of course mould and influence my inner man. Yet that lifelong impress never resulted in any conflict with my humanistic attitude in general, my love of the “liberal arts” as one used to call them.
Zeitblom, like the neo-humanists Paul Elmer More, L. J. A. Mercier, and Jacques Maritain, deplores “liberal theology,” which he considers a contradictio in adjecto:
The scientific superiority of liberal theology, it is now said, is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the daemonic character of human existence. Cultured indeed it is, but shallow; of the true understanding of human nature and the tragic nature of life the conservative tradition has at bottom preserved far more; for that very reason it has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.
Are we to conclude, inasmuch as the character of Adrian Leverkuhn is obviously not in accord with Mann’s personal beliefs, that Thomas Mann is speaking his thoughts through the person of Zeitblom? That Mann, who used the German equivalent of the word “humanist” over a score of times in the book, is a classical humanist in sympathy with Zeitblom? That in using the first person throughout the book to describe Zeitblom’s humanism, Mann was in fact seeing through the “faustian” character of Germany’s many Leverkuhns and was suggesting that Germany’s only salvation was that of rejecting the materialism of science which had brought about her downfall and accepting the spiritual approach of classical humanism? The answers are not found in Dr. Faustus, a scene of which is based upon his own sister’s suicide. When the reader finishes the book, he not only sees the defects of Leverkuhn’s thinking but also finds Zeitblom’s philosophy distasteful. The two appear to be extremes, and the reader is forced at times to agree with both, though eventually disagreeing with both. In Chapter XXV, the reader finds himself agreeing with the Devil in his reference to theology:
I hope you do not marvel that “the Great Adversary” speaks to you of religion. God’s nails! Who else, I should like to know, is to speak of it today? Surely not the liberal theologian! After all I am by now its sole custodian! In whom will you recognize theological existence if not in me? And who can lead a theological existence without me? The religious is certainly my line: as certainly as it is not the line of bourgeois culture. Since culture fell away from the cult and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else than a falling away; and all the world after a mere five hundred years is as sick and tired of it as though, salva venia, they had ladled it in with cooking-spoons.
Here, Mann has given an indication of his own personal view. Like his great grandfather, a freethinker and rationalist, Mann is no supernaturalist but, rather, is a naturalist who, amused, looks at the various theological devices such as heavens, hells, angels, devils, original sins, and other-worldly speculations. Or, as he explained in a speech of Dr. Breisacher:
In the genuine religion of a genuine folk such colourless theological conceptions as sin and punishment never occurred, in their merely ethical causal connection. What we had here was the causality of error, a working accident. Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was “a purely intellectual” mis-understanding of the ritual. Was there anything more god-forsaken than the “purely intellectual?” It had remained for the characterless world-religion, out of “prayer”—sit venis verbo—to make a begging appeal for mercy, an “O Lord,” “God have mercy,” a “Help” and “Give” and “Be so good.” Our so-called prayer . . . is the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong: the magic invocation, the coercion of God.
It is between the lines of Dr. Faustus that one finds Mann’s personal beliefs. After he finished the novel in 1947, he wrote the present author in 1948:
In my opinion I do not belong to any philosophical school, and I gladly leave it to you to classify me. It has been said of the “Faustus”-novel that I had split myself therein, and that both, the narrator as well as the hero, bore a resemblance to myself. There is some truth in that, and I especially have to admit that Zeitblom displays many traits of my own intellectual form and existence. This is not altered by the fact that he is treated with some irony at the beginning of the book and that, in general, he to a certain extent plays the role of Famulus Wagner in Goethe’s “Faust.” I don’t believe that I may call myself a classical humanist. This intellectual form seems hardly possible any longer today. You are familiar with my comments on the subject and know that my hopes are aimed at the development of a new humanism which is no longer purely optimistic, but religiously tinted and deeply experienced in all dark aspects of life, a humanism which derives its pride from the unique and mysterious position of man between nature and mind. As I said before, I leave it to you to put a name to this my proud sympathy for the secret of man.
As pointed out by Alex Ross, Doctor Faustus, born of a close study of earlier composers, went on to influence later ones. Theodor Adorno, a philosopher, was Mann’s “musical adviser,” giving advice on technical details and lending his own manuscripts for perusal. Mann cut and pasted Adorno’s and others’ writings into the text. At the time he wrote the work, he was socially friendly with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Arthur Schnabel, Arthur Rubinstein, Ernst Krenek, and Hanna Eisler. The work, Ross has written, “is not simply a parable of the artistic life; it is a grand realist novel of music, a monument to the culture in which Mann came of age.” Life’s dark sides were depicted in Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954), a work said to have been influenced by his guilt feelings about having been a poor husband and a father. Several of Mann’s works, including The Holy Sinner (1951), show people who need to be creative but who, in practice, experience the concept of evil, leading to a form of artist-guilt. Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) concerns a fanatical Freemason and a fanatical Jesuit, the implication being that neither extreme is preferable to a humanistic naturalism. Although Mann undoubtedly is one of the giants of the century, he received much negative criticism for Doctor Faustus, which to many elevated Germany’s Nazi era to a kind of demonic myth, not attacking it analytically from a social or political point of view. He also was faulted for exploring sibling incest (Katia and her twin brother, Klaus Pringsheim) in The Blood of the Walsungs; caricaturing his parents and friends in Buddenbrooks; and including platonic homosexuality and the culture of decline in Death in Venice (1925). Many criticized the support he gave to the German cause in the First World War. However, his supporters point out that he fled Germany, became a US citizen in 1944, and has been recognized as an outstanding German literary figure of the 20th century. In 1941, according to W. H. Auden, he and his lover Chester Kallman visited Mann’s California home. “At the Manns, we took turns screwing a friend on Thomas’s big bed when the family was away,” he wrote. Mann was generally known in artistic circles as being bisexual, and his son, Klaus (1906-1949), was openly homosexual. Critic Gordon A. Craig, in fact, has listed the names of Mann’s young men who, like Horace’s Ligurinus, he “yearned for.” (Of Ligurinus, Horace wrote, “. . . In dreams at night/I hold you in my arms, or toil/behind your flight/Across the Martian Field,/Or chase through yielding waves/the boy who will not yield.”) Mann’s loves were Lübeck schoolmates Armin Martens and Willri Timpe; the art student Paul Ehrenberg, “with whom he became a close friend in 1899, during his first years in Munich”; then, later in life, the seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser, “whom he met while vacationing on the island of Sylt in 1927, when he was fifty-two”; and Franzl Westermeier, “a waiter in the Grand Hotel Dolder near Zürich, with whom he became infatuated while staying there in 1950.” The latter was immortalized in Felix Krull. In each case, according to Craig, “the passion with which he was affected was powerful, brought him moments of exaltation and despair, and, in the case of Ehrenberg at least, to open declarations of love.” However, Craig notes that so far as we can tell there is no proof that the Mann’s love was reciprocated, let alone consummated. Mann left the United States in 1954, hounded by McCarthyites and disenchanted with American politics. He spent his last years in Switzerland. In his Diary, Mann had directed that he wanted his gravestone to stand in a land where German-language poets reposed. The cemetery is next to a church at Kilchberg near Zurich, Switzerland. On his marker are his name and dates as well as the name and dates of his wife Katia (died 1980), who was the daughter of a wealthy mathematics professor who came from a Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism. Adjacent is Erika (died 1969), their eldest daughter, who had given up a career as a journalist and cabaret performer to manage his affairs. Nearby is an obelisk that marks the grave of Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, as well as the snow-capped Alps and a fragment of Lake Zurich. (One of Mann’s critics has been James T. Farrell—see the entry for Farrell. Also, see entry for Van Meter Ames. Ronald Hayman, in Thomas Mann, A Biography (1995) states that Mann was deeply influenced as a young man by the writings of Nietzsche. Hayman alleges that Mann had a fiercely competitive relationship with his older brother, had a secret attraction to young boys as well as to his son Klaus, and scolded his son Klaus for disturbing his tranquillity by once attempting suicide. When Klaus did successfully commit suicide, Mann chose to continue a lecture tour and did not attend the funeral. Mann’s son Michael also committed suicide. Mann’s diaries detail not only his attacks of hypochondria but also, while in his seventies, his flirting with hotel waiters and observing muscular young men on beaches. Although an admittedly heartless egocentric, Mann continues to rate more positive than negative literary criticisms.) {CB; CE; CL; GL; HNS; HNS2; Alex Ross, The New York Times, 6 April 1997; WAS, 23 December 1948}
Mann, Walter (20th Century) A freethinker, Mann wrote Pagan and Christian Morality (1917) and Christianity in China: An Exposure of Foreign Missions (1927). In The Religion of Famous Men (1926), he wrote, “Science has gone on from strength to strength; position after position, once occupied by religion, has been captured until the whole of science has been emancipated from the bondage of the supernatural.” {FUK; GS; TYD}
Mansholt, Sicco Leendert (Born 1908) In 1974, Mansholt, who was Vice-President and later President of the European Community (ECC), said, “We as Humanists have to make clear that any durable society must be developed on the basis of justice and in a democratic way.” The Council of Europe had been formed in 1949 as a consultative body to stand for democracy in Europe after World War II, and in 1950 it became the parent of NATO. In 1968 at the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Dr. Mansholt addressed the group. In 1974 at the Sixth IHEU World Congress, he presided. Mansholt’s study of Albert Schweitzer is entitled Eerbied voor het leven (1975).
Manson, Julius (1903-1998) Manson was President and NGO Representative in New York City of the Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Manson, Marilyn (1969- ) Manson [a/k/a Brian Warner], a recording artist, has publicly bragged about being an in-your-face atheist. A rock star who onstage has hoisted a flaming cross made of television sets and ripped pages from a Bible as he performed, Manson upsets many with his “foul mouth” but turns just as many viewers on with his zany antics. On MTV he once said he wanted to be known as the person who brought an end to Christianity, at another time saying, “Do you really want to go to a place filled with a bunch of assholes.” Numerous freethinkers have found his performances violent, intemperate, sophomoric, and inhumanistic. {E}
John Malkovich, Actor ent Internet
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John Malkovich, with 2 Oscar nominations and dozens of films to his credit, was in Chicago directing a play in January of 2000 at the Steppenwolf Theatre, which he helped found several years ago. The play was a fictionalized story about Sigmund Freud entitled "Hysteria." He was interviewed by Martha Lavey for a WTTW Chicago Public television program entitled "Artbeat Chicago" which aired on January 6. Here, Malkovich explains his thoughts on Sigmund Freud:
"I think he was fantastic, a fantastic man. I mean, flawed, sure, but I don't even know what that means. I think his basic premise is people are strong enough to bear and to comprehend, and if they could remember and name the source of various griefs and sorrows, that they would, by that act, be able to live with them, and I think that's quite a fantastic notion.
I also particularly like him because he was an atheist, and I grew tired of religion some time not long after birth. I believe in people, I believe in humans, I believe in a car, but I don't believe something I can't have absolutely no evidence of for millenniums. And it's funny -- people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH..."
Mantegazza, Paolo (1831–1910) An Italian anthropologist, Mantegazza wrote The Physiology of Pleasure (1854). He also wrote on the physiology of pain, spontaneous generation, ecstasy, and love. In 1876, he wrote a romance, Il Dio Ignoto (The Unknown God). {BDF; RAT}
Manton, Rita (20th Century) Manton in Britain is active with the Havering and District Humanist Society.
Manuel, Frank Edward (20th Century) Manuel was editor of The Enlightenment (1965). He wrote Religion of Isaac Newton (1974), Age of Reason (1982), and Requiem for Karl Marx (1995).
Manvell, (Arnold) Roger (1909–1987) Manvell, who was born in Leicester and has a doctorate in literature from the University of London, has written widely about film, theater, and the history of the Third Reich. At Boston University, he was visiting professor of films (1975–1981). His book about freethinkers is The Trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh (1976).
Manzoni, Romeo (Born 1847) An Italian physician, Manzoni wrote on the doctrine of love of Bruno and Schopenhauer. He also wrote A Life of Jesus. {BDF}
Mao Zedong [President of the Republic; Chairman of the Communist Party] (1893–1976) Mao Zedong (Tse-tung), founder of the People’s Republic of China, was one of the original members of the Chinese Communist Party. An ardent atheist, he differed greatly with leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but the Third World was highly influenced by his revolutionary theories. According to Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times (2 June 1992), it is ironic that an atheist such as Mao has been turned into a something of a god by great numbers of Chinese people. They dangle his portrait like an amulet from taxi rear-view mirrors, much as the Catholic St. Christopher dangles from Western taxi rear-view mirrors as good-luck charms. “I heard there was a convoy of 15 cars,” said one Beijing driver, “and every one got in a bad accident except the two that had Chairman Mao’s picture.” Mao, like Stalin, represents a communistic humanism in which life was undemocratic but at least seemed infused with order and purpose. Kristof adds, “Sociologists have written of how some people, disoriented by the new chaos of pluralism, seek to ‘escape from freedom’ to the womb of authoritarianism, and that perspective may help explain the Mao portraits in China and the Stalin portraits displayed in some Russian vehicles.” Mao organized Kuomintang-sponsored peasant and industrial unions in the 1920s and, after the Kuomintang-Communist split in 1927 led the disastrous “Autumn Harvest Uprisings” in Hunan. In 1958 his “Great Leap Forward” was such a failure that an estimated twenty million people starved, and Mao withdrew temporarily from public view. In 1969 he reasserted his leadership, violently purging his opponents. Mao’s ideas on revolutionary struggle and guerrilla warfare have been influential, particularly among Third World revolutionaries, and in death as in life Mao has continued as one of China’s most powerful figures. In 1994, Dr. Li Zhisui (1920–1995) wrote The Private Life of Chairman Mao, detailing from his viewpoint as Mao’s personal physician what China’s “Great Helmsman” was really like. According to Dr. Li, Mao was an irritable, manipulative egotist incapable of human feeling. He surrounded himself with sycophants and pretty young women (and was not above groping his male bodyguards). He refused to be treated for a sexually transmitted disease, genital herpes, although he knew he was spreading it to the women who shared his bed. “If it’s not hurting me, then it doesn’t matter. Why are you getting so excited about it?” Mao asked his physician, who had suggested he was a carrier of a disease giving trichomonas vaginalis to his sexual partners. Meanwhile, added Dr. Li, “The young women were proud to be infected. The illness, transmitted by Mao, was a badge of honor, testimony to their close relations with the Chairman.” The doctor further reported that Mao had an undescended testicle, suffered from bouts of impotency, became infertile for undetermined reasons in midlife, and did not bathe his face and hands, which were washed by his bodyguards. Further evidence that he was one atheist others would not care to imitate, Mao did not brush his teeth, washing his mouth in the morning with tea and then eating the tea leaves, which left his teeth coated with a green patina. When it was suggested he should use a toothbrush, Mao replied, “A tiger never brushes his teeth.” In Dr. Li’s voluminous description, wrote journalist Richard Bernstein, “Mao emerges as a kind of Chinese Caligula, whose bohemian and decadent life contrasted utterly with the images of it so carefully fashioned by Chinese propaganda.” (See Mao’s views about Hegel and Feurebach in the entry for Marxism.) {CE; The New York Times, 2 October 1994}
Mapanje, Jack: See entry for Poets.
Maple, Eric (1915– ) Maple, an author, is a freethinker, according to David Tribe. {TRI}
Maple, William H. (20th Century) In Chicago, Maple edited the monthly Ingersoll Memorial Beacon from 1904 to 1913. He wrote No “Beginning,” or the Fundamental Fallacy (1899). {GS}
Mapplethorpe, Robert (1946–1989) Mapplethorpe, one of the more controversial of 20th-century U.S. artists, encountered strong flak from the religious right because of his homoerotic photographs. Although denied grants and funds by the National Endowment for the Arts, he expressed unfavorable remarks concerning organized religion and successfully pursued his endeavors with little concern about any detractors before dying from AIDS in his early forties. “Everything in life to him, from Catholicism to militarism, seemed like a lie. He was court photographer to the liars,” his friend Joel-Peter Witkin said. Even the crucifixion obsessed him, Witkin added, saying that if ever he received the last rites of the Church he would do it “as an insurance policy.” Mapplethorpe’s philosophy was fundamentally to forgive and be unjudgmental, to be peaceful and encourage coexistence, in short to be humanistic. Among his works are Certain People: A Book of Portraits (1985) and Black Book (1986), a collection of erotic photos featuring African Americans. Patricia Morrisroe, in Mapplethorpe: A Biography (1995), points out that Sam Wagstaff, a man of aristocratic good looks, found Mapplethorpe the “someone to spoil” for whom he had searched both sexually and intellectually. Rocker Patti Smith was the artist’s significant other before he vainly and sado-masochistically searched for the ideal black man—a “God.” Morrisroe relates how Mapplethorpe then found Milton Moore, a Tennessee bumpkin who had been AWOL from the Navy. Moore’s black penis, which aesthetically was an artistic gem, jutted from his unzippered Sunday suit, looking like a baby elephant’s trunk, and was featured in “Man in Polyester Suit.” One of Mapplethorpe’s commercial assignments was a high-heeled shoe, sleek in purple satin, propped on the cushioning mounds of a black man’s buttocks. During foreplay with his several black lovers, he would diabolically address them as “nigger” and would punish them for their crime in having caused him to desire them by requesting they become coprophagous. “Is there any difference in approaching a black man who doesn’t have clothes on,” Mapplethorpe once asked, “and a white man who doesn’t have clothes on? Not really. It’s form.” When the wife of arch conservative Senator Jesse Helms reportedly saw his photograph of a man fisting another’s anus (“Helmut and Brooks, N.Y.C., 1978”), she is said to have ejaculated, “Lord have mercy, Jesse!” But the critic Janet Kardon praised the same photo’s composition, particularly “the centrality of the forearm.” It was not reported whether the Senator’s wife ever observed the photo of Mapplethorpe’s Jim urinating into the mouth of Tom (“Jim and Tom, Sausalito, 1977”) as he knelt before him in an abandoned bunker in Sausalito. To many, the photo symbolized a holy communion, with the donor standing over a kneeling supplicant, his eyes reverently closed. “What is finally Catholic,” wrote Arthur C. Danto of Mapplethorpe’s work, “is the abiding mystery of spirit and flesh,” to which the secularist could agree, particularly if Catholic were not capitalized. The photographer’s devout Catholic mother once sent her son to worship in a Quonset hut consecrated to Our Lady of the Sorrows. This led to his first drawings, of Madonnas with cubistically rearranged faces. Later he transferred what he called the “magic and mystery” of the Church into the exquisite agonies and hieratic rituals of sadomasochism. Visiting London when he was in his twenties, Mapplethorpe met the English filmmaker Derek Jarman, with whom he spent several days in bed. Jarman later likened Mapplethorpe to Faust, saying he had been corrupted by the offer from the Prince of Darkness to fulfill his fantasies. True, the monkey Mapplethorpe had kept in his student days was called Scratch, borrowing one of the Fallen Angel’s nicknames. True, when it starved to death, Mapplethorpe lopped off its head and sculpted its skull into a musical instrument, eating part of its flesh in a voodoo ritual. And true, he told his bedmates that every sexual act had a third participant: over their two sweating bodies, the Devil spectrally presided. “True to Georges Bataille’s theory about erotic behavior, Mapplethorpe mocked the missionary piety of heterosexual coupling and praised libertinism as a seizure of forbidden knowledge, a career of research conducted along the border between good and evil, life and death,” added Peter Conrad. Conrad, in The New Yorker (5 June 1995), called him “the Devil’s disciple.” Mapplethorpe was accused of taking on an upper-class anti-Semitism and an unseemly snobbism. “I’ve always been honest with people. I’ve never lied. I think I’ve lived a moral life,” he told a priest at a time he knew he would die of AIDS. This might have been said as an objection to false rumors that he had purposely had sex with blacks in order to transmit his illness to them, revengeful and with the belief a black had infected him with the virus. Three months before his mother died and at a time when he had lost considerable weight and looked much older than he actually was, Mapplethorpe succumbed to AIDS, paralysis having set in on the left side of his face. His black model, Milton Moore, whose physical attributes approximated his ideal, did not attend a memorial held at the Whitney Museum, nor did any of the gay crowd that had been his major support. Those who attended, ironically, were art dealers, dressed in suits much as if they were attending an auction at Christies. Mapplethorpe’s ashes were later buried in his mother’s coffin. Mapplethorpe’s father did not allow his son’s name to be engraved on the tombstone. Meanwhile, books have proliferated about him, one of the best being Arthur C. Danto’s Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (1995).
Maradani, Subba Rao (20th Century) Maradani heads the twin cities chapter (Hyderabad and Secunderabad) of the Andhra Pradesh Rationalist Association.
Marat, Jean Paul (1743–1793) Marat was a French revolutionist. Although usually depicted in odious colors, McCabe states, Marat actually was a cultivated man trained in medicine and the author of several scientific works of an atheistic and materialistic character. Voltaire complained that Marat’s Philosophical Essay on Man (1773) was too materialistic. Twice he fled to England because he had been outlawed in France for his incendiary diatribes and calls for violence. In 1792 he was elected to the Convention, where he led the attack against the Girondists. “His truculence,” McCabe writes, “had a purely patriotic root. It is interesting to note that Charlotte Corday, the young woman who assassinated him, also was a freethinker but of a rival political school.” Corday, a royalist sympathizer, stabbed Marat to death in his bath. {CE; JM; RAT}
Marchena, José (1768–1821) A Spanish writer, Marchena read the writings of French philosophers and then fled Spain when threatened by the Inquisition. Becoming a friend of Brissot and the Girondins, Marchena wrote Essai de Théologie (1797) and translated into Spanish Molière’s Tartuffe and some works of Voltaire. In addition, he translated Dupuis’ Origine de tous les Cultes. Marchena became secretary to Murat. {BDF; RAT}
Marchesini, Giovanni (Born 1868) Marchesini was an enthusiastic positivist of the school of Ardigó. He taught philosophy and pedagogy at the University of Padua. His various works are as rigorously opposed to theology or theism as those of Ardigó. Among his works are Morale Positiva (1892), Crisi del Positivismo (1898) and Simbolismo nella Conoscenza e nella Morale (1901). {RAT}
Marcó del Pont, Luis (1938– ) An attorney and human rights advocate, Marcó del Pont spent ten years in exile for defending political prisoners in Argentina. He is a member of the Argentine Humanist Society and has published books concerning university reform and leading freethinking Argentineans.
Marcus Aurelius (121–180) Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus, the Roman emperor, was originally named Marcus Annius Versus. A zealous Stoic, he tried to decrease the brutality at gladiatorial shows. However, he regarded Christians as natural enemies of the empire and persecuted them for their obstinancy and their crimes. “I learned from Diognetus,” he declared, “not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers, and about the driving away of demons and such things.” His Meditations expresses a humanistic philosophy and, according to Wheeler, the ideas “breathe a lofty morality and are a standing refutation of the view that pure ethics depend upon Christian belief.” {BDF; CE; JM; TYD}
Marcus, Cyril (1904–1994) Marcus, a Scot who became a market gardener in the South of France, was the son of Jewish parents. In his early thirties, he developed multiple sclerosis and returned to England, forced to use a wheelchair for the remainder of his life. A member of the Brighton and Hove Humanist Group, Marcus was memorialized by a tribute in The Freethinker (November 1994).
MARDUK Marduk, in an early Babylonian religion, was the sun god, the supreme god. {LEE}
Maréchal, Pierre Sylvain (1750–1803) Maréchal was an articulate and militant atheist at the time of the French Revolution. Known as “l’homme sans Dieu,” he listed three main categories of atheism:
• true atheists– Bruno, Diderot, d’Holbach, Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume, La Mettrie, Lucretius, Meslier, Vanini,
• possible atheists– Averroës, Bayle, Campanella, Cicero, Descartes, Molière, Montaigne, Spinoza
• those who seem atheists only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy– Aristotle, Bacon, Gassendi, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Newton, Plato, Rousseau
As opposites of atheists, he lists these: St. Augustine, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Jansenius, Jesus, François de la Mothe-Fénelon, Pascal
Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des athées (1798) was the first biographical dictionary of skeptics. According to J. M. Robertson, it is one of the best examples of a general historic treatment of the subject, along with Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers (1889). Robertson prefers Wheeler’s work, for Maréchal’s work “exhibits much learning, but is made partly fantastic by its sardonic plan of including a number of typical religionists (including Job, John, and Jesus Christ!), some of whose utterances are held to lead logically to atheism.” McCabe, however, found Maréchal both a scholar and a man of great learning, adding that the book was the result of strong persuasion by the mathematician Lalande. Maréchal’s Almanach des honnêtes gens (1788), which was not an attack upon religion but which on a calendar substituted the names of renowned laymen for saints, was instantly denounced by the Parlement de Paris. Its printer was prosecuted, Maréchal was imprisoned for four months, and the censor who had passed the book was exiled thirty leagues from Paris. Although a major figure in his time, Maréchal is seldom included today in standard reference books. However, Gordon Stein wrote “Pierre Sylvain Maréchal” in American Rationalist (July-August 1991), praising him. {BDF; EU, Aram Vartanian; JMR; JMRH; RAT}
Maresse-Smith, Edgar (19th Century) In Trinidad in the 1890s, Maresse-Smith was president of the National Secular Society branch. {FUK; GS}
Maret, Henry (Born 1838) Maret was a French journalist and deputy. He combated against the Empire, edited Le Radical, and was elected deputy in 1881. {BDF}
Marett, Robert Randolph (Born 1866) Marett, a Jersey lawyer who became lecturer in philosophy at Exeter College (Oxford), became Dean of Exeter College. He is one of the chief authors of the pre-animistic theory of the origin of religion, and he believed in an impersonal God and rejected Christian doctrines. His books include Personal Idealism (1902) and The Threshold of Religion (1909). {RAT; RE}
Margarot, Maurice (1745–1815) Margarot was a republican and a freethinker. He also was a convict, having been so outspoken in debate that he was tried for sedition and sentenced as one of a group of “Scottish Martyrs” in 1794. Upon being transported to New South Wales, he demanded his freedom, which was refused. At his home, a meeting place for radicals, he condemned colonial voracity, resulting in his servitude at the Norfolk Island and Newcastle penal settlements. Upon being pardoned, he returned in 1810 to England, where he continued to harass the Colonial Office and never wavered in his zeal for social freedom. {SWW}
Margolis, Clorinda G. (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Margolis was associated with the Jefferson Community Mental Health Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She wrote Manual of Stress Management (1982). {HM2}
Margolis, Joseph (1924– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Margolis was professor of philosophy of Temple University. He is author of The Truth About Relativism (1991). {HM2; SHD}
Marguerite (Queen) (1553–1615) Marguerite of Valois, Queen of Navarre and sister to Francis I, was included as a freethinker by Wheeler because she protected too many religious reformers. She was the daughter of King Henry II and of Catherine de Medici, and her marriage to Henry, the Protestant king of Navarre (later Henry IV of France), was intended to mark the peace between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Instead, the marriage was a prelude to the massacre of Protestants on St. Bartholomew’s Day. {BDF}
Marguerite, Victor (Born 1866) Marguerite, a member of the French Academy, was a novelist. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honour, President of the Société des Gens de Lettres and of the Ligue Républicaine d’Action Nationale, and Vice-President of the Commission of the National Fund for Literary Travel. A rationalist, he wrote Disaster (1898), The Commune (1904), Vanity (1907), and Frontiers of the Heart (1913). {RAT}
Marietta, Don (20th Century)
“The Goodness of the Godless” was the subject of Marietta’s lecture at the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida.
Marietta, O. (20th Century) Marietta wrote the Paine Memorial (1908). {GS}
Mariette, François Auguste Ferdinand (1821–1881) A French Egyptologist, Mariette spent thirty years in Egypt in the archeological service of the French government, during which time he reportedly acquired more foreign decorations and honors than any other archeologist that had lived up to that time. In Egypt, he received the titles of bey and later of pasha. In 1863 he founded at Bulak (now part of Cairo) the Egyptian national museum. Some today know Mariette as having suggested the story for the libretto of the opera, “Aîda.” Mariette’s brother in a biography described him as a decided atheist, saying he never entered a church and “found no charm in the pastorals and fictions of which we have a prodigious heap in Christianity.” {JM; RAT; RE}
MARIJUANA: See entries for drugs and for International Naturist Church.
Marillier, Léon (1842–1901 Marillier lectured on the religions of non-civilized peoples at the École des Hautes Études and was professor of psychology and ethics at the Sèvres École Normale Supérieure des Jeunes Filles. An authority on the psychology of religion, he translated into French Andrew Lang’s Myths, Cults, and Religions (1896). Marillier was also joint editor of the Revue de l’histoire des religions. {RAT}
Mario, Alberto (Born 1825) Mario was an Italian patriot, the editor of the Tribune and Free Italy. He became aide-de-camp to Garibaldi and married an English lady, Jessie White. In 1860 he wrote Slavery and Thought, a polemic against the papacy. {BDF; RAT}
Mario, Jessie White (1832–1906) A daughter of the ship-builder Thomas White, Mario wrote Alice Lane, a novel published in 1853. In Paris she adopted the views of Lamennais, and in Italy she became a follower of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Mario translated Garibaldi’s memoirs. Her Birth of Modern Italy (1909) was well received. By her command, her funeral was designed to be purely secular. {RAT}
Marischal [Lord]: See entry for David Hume, who called Lord Marischal an atheist.
Maritain, Jacques (1882–1973) Maritain, a French neo-Thomist philosopher, urged Christian involvement in secular affairs and was the French ambassador to the Vatican (1945–1948). In True Humanism (1936), he described l’Humanisme intégral: “Such a humanism, considering man in the integrality of his natural and his supernatural being and setting no limits a priori or the descent of divinity into man, can also be called Humanism of the Incarnation.” (See entry for Theism.) {CE}
Mark, Charles (20th Century) Mark, of Wolsingham in England, was a Chartist. His obituary describes him as “the father and founder of Freethought principles in this locality.” He had been active in freethought and secular circles. {RSR}
Mark, Edward Laurens (Born 1847) Mark became the Hersey professor of anatomy at Harvard and Director of the Bermuda Biological Staff of Research. His Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken showed his high regard for Haeckel. Mark believed that Haeckel’s monistic philosophy “will in time deeply influence all thoughtful and impartial people.” {RAT}
Marke, Ronald (1936– ) An Australian atheist, rationalist, and editor, Marke emigrated to Australia from England in 1962. In Chippendale, Australia, he has edited the bi-monthly Rationalist News (1967 to date). {FUK}
MARKETING . . . OF ORGANIZED RELIGION God’s Total Quality Management Questionnaire has appeared on the World Wide Web. Stating, tongue-in-cheek, that God asks that you take a few moments to answer a few questions and adding that He thanks you in advance for your time and effort, the test includes the following:
1. How did you find out about God? (Circle as many as are applicable.) divine inspiration; friend or relative; near-death experience; newspaper; personal visit; television; word of mouth; Torah; Holy Bible; Qur’an; Playboy; Why I Am Not A Christian; other book (please specify title): ______other: 2. What other sources of inspiration in addition to God are you currently using? (Circle) Alcohol or drugs; Ann Landers advice column; biorhythms; fortune cookies; horoscope; insurance policies; Jimmy Swaggert; lottery; mantras; selfhelp books; sex; tarot; television; none; other (specify): 3. God employs a limited degree of Divine Intervention to preserve the balanced level of felt presence and blind faith. Which do you prefer (circle one): more Divine Intervention; less Divine Intervention; current level of Divine intervention is just right; don’t know 4. God also attempts to maintain a balanced level of disasters and miracles. Rate on a scale of 1 (unsatisfactory) to 5 (excellent) His handling of the following: a. disasters (flood, famine, earthquake, war) b. miracles (rescues, spontaneous remission of disease; sports upsets
THANK YOU, AND GOD BLESS!
Markham, Edwin (1852–1940) Markham, once the superintendent of a California school, wrote humanistic poems such as “Brotherhood” and “Earth Is Enough.” His Universalism shows in “Outwitted”:
He drew a circle that shut me out— Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in.
Markham’s popularity grew when, inspired by Millet’s famous painting, he wrote a poem, “The Man with the Hoe” (1899), in which he protested against the degradation and exploitation of labor, including child labor. {CE; U}
Markovic, Mihailo (1923– ) Markovic, a professor of philosophy at the University of Belgrade and the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, has been a co-president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Some remember his felt criticism of Stalinism in the name of a Humanist Marxism. In 1978 at the Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress in London, Prof. Markovic addressed the group, as he did also at the Eighth held in Hannover (1982). Markovic wrote The Contemporary Marx: Essays on Humanist Communism (1974) and Democratic Socialism (1982). For the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Markovic wrote the section on Yugoslav philosophy. Although he once was named a Humanist Laureate in the Council of Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, the honor was revoked at the recommendation of Paul Kurtz because of Markovic’s political views concerning genocide in Yugoslavia, views about Serbian nationalism which were considered anti-humanistic. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {SHD}
Markovic, Svetozar (1846–1875) A Serbian socialist, Markovic was a philosopher who wrote on aesthetics in “Reality in Poetry,” which was published in Matica (1870), and on his atheism in “The Realistic Trend in Science and Life,” in Letopis Matice Srpske (1871–1872).
Marks, Erich (Born 1861) Marks, a German historian, taught at Berlin University, Freiburg, and Leipzig. He wrote a study of Queen Elizabeth and other historical works. He occasionally lectured for the German Ethical societies {RAT}
Marks, Murray (1840–1918) Marks, a dealer in art treasures, advised Rossetti and Whistler concerning their purchases. His obituary in the Times stressed his “probity” as well as his high artistic skill. Marks gave generously to museums and public collections. He followed the creed of Spinoza, of whom he was a close student. {RAT}
Marks, Raube (20th Century) A board member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Marks of Illinois operated H. H. Waldo Booksellers, a leading mail-order supplier of vintage humanist and freethought books. In 1997, the company’s title became Robb Marks (Box 350, Rockton, Illinois 61072; telephone (815) 624-4593).
Marley, Harold P. (20th Century) Marley, a Unitarian minister, signed both Humanist Manifesto I and II. {FUS; HM1; HM2}
Marlowe, Christopher (1564–1593) Often described as being the greatest English playwright before Shakespeare, Marlowe belongs to the genre known in French literature as poète maudit, one of the “accursed poets” who like Rimbaud, Verlaine, Poe, or Dylan Thomas, went to the “bad.” Marlowe is known for The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (c. 1588). In it, and in exchange for twenty-four years of power and pleasure, Faust forfeits his soul to Mephistopheles, a theme also used by Goethe, Charles François Gounod, Thomas Mann, Steven Vincent Benét, and others. On the subject of religion, Marlowe wrote,
• I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance. • Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion. • Both law and physic are for petty wits.
Divinity is basest of the three, Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile.
Marlowe was a member of “the School of Night,” a group of freethinking intellectuals. As for his atheism, in Doctor Faustus Marlowe makes Mephistopheles affirm that “Hell hath no limits . . . but where we are is hell,” which is a common view today but was original in his time. In private talk, Robertson writes, Marlowe is said to have gone into much more detail as to his unbelief. For example, he claimed that Jesus had sex with his disciple John: “Christ did love him with an extraordinary love,” he wrote. In “Edward II,” Marlowe wrote about the 14th-century British king who was killed in part because he lavished so many royal favors on his male lover. His death before he reached the age of thirty was caused by accidental manslaughter, for which Marlowe himself was to blame. In a tavern brawl, Marlowe when only twenty-nine was stabbed in the eye and killed, allegedly in a quarrel over a boy. Characteristically, he died swearing. Marlowe once had written, “All they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.” Charles Nicholl, in The Reckoning, The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1994), contends that Marlowe’s death was not an accidental killing that involved a youth, that it was an act of murder which resulted from Marlowe’s political and intelligence affiliations. Nicoll suggests that when efforts to slander Marlowe as a dangerous atheist failed, it was Nicholas Skeres, not the man who claimed he had killed Marlowe in self defense—Ingram Frizer—who was the villain responsible for Marlowe’s death. Skeres allegedly worked for a faction which supported the Earl of Essex and wished to discredit Marlowe as a way of discrediting Marlowe’s friend Sir Walter Raleigh. Marlowe lived at a time when personal fighting and duels were common. The longevity of writers and poets who were his contemporaries was short—as A. L. Rowse has pointed out, George Peele died of syphilis, Robert Greene was horribly diseased, and both Thomas Kyd and Thomas Nashe died in their thirties. Within a few years of Marlowe’s death, Ben Jonson would duel and kill the well-known actor Gabriel Spencer. Although further specific evidence is lacking for his reputed atheism, Marlowe admittedly had an eventful death. {CE; GL; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; PUT; RE; TYD}
Marmontel, Jean François (1723–1799) A priest who was educated by the Jesuits and who taught in a Toulouse seminary, Marmontel adopted deism and settled as a writer in Paris. His novel, Bélisaire, was condemned for heresy. He wrote many articles for Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. Marmontel, whose complete works fill nineteen volumes, was appointed Historiographer of France and became a member of the French Academy. {RAT; RE}
Marquand, John (Phillips) (1893–1960) Marquand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose great aunt, on his mother’s side, was the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. She would not, he joked to friends, have liked his work. The Late George Apley (1937) is an amusing tale told by Mr. Willing, a friend of the late Mr. Apley, who is asked by Apley’s son John to describe his father. Willing uses family letters to describe how Apley marries Catherine Bosworth out of a somewhat Puritan sense of duty and tells of his Brahmin life and his idealism as it conflicts with social prudence, showing how compromises are a big part of life. Marquand also wrote detective stories about Mr. Moto, a Japanese sleuth, and H. J. Pulham, Esq. (1941) told the life of a New Englander twenty-five years out of college. Point of No Return (1949) concerned a banker who in middle age found he was no longer able to turn from the path of materialism. Life at Happy Knoll (1958) has sketches in epistolary form which describe a country club’s problems. Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author,
I should honestly try to oblige you if I were not completely involved at present in trying to finish a novel. In this unhappy situation, I feel that tilting with philosophical windmills would throw me completely off the track, if I am not off the trolley already.
That novel was Melville Goodwin, U. S. A., about how stultifying is the life of an Army officer. Tim Marquand, his grandson who is a record company executive, was raised a Unitarian, as was his grandfather. Tim’s father, John Phillips Marquand Jr., was cited in Edward Klein’s All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy (1996), as being the one to whom the future wife of President John F. Kennedy was once madly in love. According to Klein, she “chain-smoked aromatic French cigarettes, drank grasshoppers, and listened to Jack talk about the novel he was writing. They made love in the fashion of the day, groping and fumbling and going almost all the way. It left Marquand, as the American saying went, ‘with blue balls.’ It left Jackie, as the French put it with more delicacy, une demi-vierge, a half-virgin.” Then the shocker: One night as the two went up to Marquand’s apartment on the slow, creaky French elevator, “Jackie let herself get carried away. She was in Marquand’s arms, her skirt bunched above her hips, the backs of her thighs pressed against the decorative open grillwork. And by the time the elevator jolted to a stop, she was no longer a demi-vierge.” Gore Vidal, in Palimpsest (1995), had previously related the story, writing only that the good Catholic Jackie had lost her virginity to an unnamed friend of his “in a lift that he had installed in a pension on Paris’s Left Bank. They had discussed marriage. He came from a better family than hers, as we used, quaintly, to say, but he had no money. He was also Protestant.” Then, in Vidal’s words, “suddenly a fellow Roman Catholic, also on the make for glory if not money, came her way.” It was Kennedy. When Jackie told the un-named “lift-lover,” he was appalled and said, “You can’t marry that . . . that Mick!” Whereupon Jackie told him, “He has money and you don’t.” Although they argued, Marquand lost. An inveterate reader, he died of a heart attack while reading In Her Sister’s Shadow, Diana DuBois’s story about Lee Radziwill, a work in which he is mentioned several places. The elder Marquand, known particularly for detective stories about Mr. Moto, a Japanese sleuth, was said to have been something of an Apley himself, one with a “kindly harassed face.” He enjoyed satire, particularly that by Sinclair Lewis, and he wrote satirically about the affluent middle class. {Dictionary of American Biography; WAS, 27 February 1951}
Marquis, Don (1878–1937) Marquis, an American journalist and humorist, wrote in a poetic work, “Transient,”
Give up the dream that Love may trick the fates To live again somewhere beyond the gleam Of dying stars, or shatter the strong gates Some god has builded high; give up the dream. {TYD}
Marr, Wilhelm (1818–1904) Marr was a German socialist. He wrote Religious Excursions (1876) and several anti-Semitic tracts. {BDF}
MARRIAGE • Were Adam and Eve married? If so, by whom?
• What if rabbis required that Christians marrying Jewish women had to get circumcised?
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights places no restriction on the gender or sexuality of any persons marrying.
In Israel, the Orthodox rabbinate has a government monopoly on the performing of marriage ceremonies. Non-Orthodox ceremonies constitute a small fraction of the number of marriages conducted by the Orthodox rabbinate. In 1993, only 200 of 26,000 marriages were performed for the non-Orthodox. As a result, hundreds of Israeli couples get around the rabbinate each year by going to Cyrpus to obtain their marriages, according to journalist Joel Greenberg in The New York Times (27 April 1994). Others are married by proxy in Paraguay, receiving their certificates by mail. Secular civil-rights advocates object to such a situation, and Rabbi Ehud Bandel of the Conservative movement in Israel has observed, “The absurdity is that the only place in the free world where Jews are denied religious freedom is the Jewish state. The state does not claim to set religious standards for Muslims and Christians, but it does determine that for Jews the only way is Orthodox Judaism, which is a minority in the Jewish world.” Many in Western society assume that romantic love has always been the outcome of romantic love. Not so, writes Bertrand Russell in Marriage and Morals (1959), who says it is only since about the period of the French Revolution that a “proper” marriage was arranged by parents. “The novels and plays of a hundred years ago deal largely with the struggle of the younger generation to establish this new basis for marriage as opposed to the traditional marriage of parental choice,“ he writes. Russell continues, “Whether the effect has been as good as the innovators hoped may be doubted. There is something to be said for Mrs. Malaprop’s principle, that love and aversion both wear off in matrimony so that it is better to begin with a little aversion.” In America, Lord Russell says, the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, “and where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters, the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and an extreme rarity of happy marriages.” Children, of course, are what make a marriage important “but for children there would be no need for any institution concerned with sex, but as soon as children enter in, the husband and wife, if they have any sense of responsibility or any affection for their offspring, are compelled to realize that their feelings towards each other are no longer what is of most importance.” “The triumph of Christian teaching,” Russell notes, “is when a man and a woman marry without either having had previous sexual experience. In nine cases out of ten where this occurs, the results are unfortunate. Sexual behavior among human beings is not instinctive, so that the inexperienced bridge and bridegroom, who are probably not aware of this fact, find themselves overwhelmed with shame and discomfort. It is little better when the woman alone is innocent but the man has acquired his knowledge from prostitutes. . . . All this could be put right by better sexual education, and is in fact very much better with the generation now young than it was with their parents and grandparents.” Lord Russell’s ideas sound commonplace in the 1990s, but in the 1940s his views on sex and marriage led to his being refused a teaching position at City College of New York. That city, he complained in a book edited by John Dewey and Horace M. Kallen, The Bertrand Russell Case, “was virtually a satellite of the Vatican. . . . An Anglican bishop was incited to protest against me, and priests lectured the police, who were practically all Irish Catholics, on my responsibility for the local criminals. A lady, whose daughter attended some section of the City College with which I should never be brought in contact, was induced to bring a suit, saying that my presence in that institution would be dangerous to her daughter’s virtue . . . [and my works were pronounced] lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber. . . . I was thought wicked for saying that very young infants should not be punished for masturbation.” In fact, the Registrar of New York County said publicly that Russell should be “tarred and feathered and driven out of the country.” The “row” ended, Russell explained, when Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the inventor of Argyrol, gave him a five-year appointment to lecture on philosophy at his Barnes Foundation, “where I lectured in a gallery of modern French paintings, mostly of nudes, which seemed somewhat incongruous for academic philosophy.” Although Russell had been warned that Barnes quickly tired of people and demanded constant flattery, and although Russell had exacted a five-year contract from him, Barnes terminated the appointment at the end of 1942. To Lucy Donnelly, Russell wrote concerning the Barnes episode, “I used, when excited, to calm myself by reciting the three factors of a3 + b3 + c3 - 3 abc; I must revert to this practice. I find it more effective than thoughts of the Ice Age or the goodness of God.” “The most extraordinary” invitation to marriage, so described by Sotheby’s when auctioned in 1942 according to The Oxford Book of Letters, was sent in 1861 by a prolific Victorian novelist:
My dearest Miss Dorothea Sankey
My affectionate & most excellent wife is as you are aware still living—and I am proud to say her health is good. Nevertheless it is always well to take time by the forelock and be prepared for all events. Should anything happen to her, will you supply her place—as soon as the proper period for decent mourning is over.
Till then I am your devoted Servant
Anthony Trollope
John Boswell, in Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994), identified seven ceremonies marking same-sex unions before the 12th century, seventeen in the 12th century, and more than a score from the 13th to the 16th centuries. As to whether the unions constituted marriage, Boswell concluded that some of them did so long as marriage is defined as “a permanent emotional union acknowledged in some way by the community.” Whether or not an erotic element existed, evidence is incomplete and it is not clear if the two were supposed to live together forever or could subsequently marry somebody of the opposite sex. Toward the end of the century, many intellectuals questioned whether marriage is, in fact, a “failing institution.” If half or more, depending upon the country, end in divorce, is marriage a failure? And is marriage really a marathon in which the whole point is to arrive at a predetermined finish line: namely, the death of one partner? If a marriage lasts for thirty years and both partners were perfectly happy for the first twenty-eight, is the entire marriage a loss if the couple chooses to separate before dying? Analogously, if a person is a professional accountant for twenty-eight years, then chooses to be a journalist, is this evidence of a career failure? In short, some argue, dogmatic fundamentalists and Judeo-Christians and moral conservatives can be expected to disapprove of divorce but secularists need not attach a stigma to divorce. On the contrary, the fluidity of a marriage which results in divorce and re-marriage can be progressive and positive for all concerned. The Catholic Church grants an estimated 60,000 annulments each year in the United States and, according to Robert H. Vasoli’s What God Has Joined Together (1998), more than eighty percent of those seeking annulments obtain them. Inasmuch as it does not recognize divorce, the only way for Catholics to be free to marry again in the church is to have the marriage declared invalid in the first place. Sheila Rauch Kennedy, in Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church From Annulling Her Marriage (1997), calls that “hypocrisy” and “nonsense.”
In the 20th century, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have been the first to grant legal recognition of gay marriages. Canada, however, became the first country whose Supreme Court ruled that “spouse” includes homosexuals. In an 8-to-1 decision in 1999, it struck down the heterosexual definition, ruling that “The exclusion of same-sex partners from the benefits of” the Ontario Family Law Act “promotes the view that M [a letter standing for one of the two lesbians who had brought the case] and individuals in same-sex relationships generally, [is] less worthy of recognition and protection.” The court stressed that its decision might well affect “many other statutes that rely on a similar definition of the word ‘spouse.’ ”
Meanwhile, freethinkers are those for whom marriages are not made in Heaven—they’re made here on Earth. (See entries for Christian Marriage, Divorce, [St.] Peter, and Bertrand Russell,.) {Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (1967); The Economist, 23 March 1996}
MARRIAGE, A DEFINITION • Marriage, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
MARRIAGE, FORMS OF • Bigamy refers to unlawful polygamy, or the entering into another marriage when already legally married to another. A bigamist, according to strict church teaching, is one who marries someone who already is carnally known by another. For anyone in the Catholic holy orders, a person who is under a vow of continence who marries anyone, even for the first time, is guilty of bigamy—the person has, it is reasoned, already married the church. • Common law marriages are those that are entered into between a man and a women without ecclesiastical or civil ceremony. They are not recognized as legal in many jurisdictions and often must be followed by cohabitation to be legally valid in other jurisdictions. Further, the common law arrangement likely will need to be provable by the writings, declarations, or conduct of the parties. • Digamy (also called deuterogamy) refers to a legal second marriage after a first marriage ends—for example, by death or divorce of the spouse. • Monogamy, in the past, referred to the custom of marrying one person for a lifetime. It has come to mean marriage with but one person at a time, as contrasted with bigamy. • Polygamy is a marriage form in which a person of either sex possesses a plurality of mates at the same time. • Monandry is a woman’s having one husband at a time. • Polyandry is a marriage form in which one woman has two or more husbands at the same time, as contrasted with polygamy. Fraternal polyandry is a marriage in which several brothers share one wife. Sororal polyandry is the sharing by sisters of one husband. • The dissolution of any valid marriage by a court or other body having competent authority is called a divorce, or divorce a vinculo matrimonii, as distinguished from annulment (a judicial pronouncement declaring the invalidity of a marriage—some poor people complain that the church charges too much for such), and distinguished from judicial separation (the cessation of cohabitation by mutual agreement). • Among some non-Christians, divorce is defined as being a formal separation of man and wife by the act of one party or by consent according to established custom—for example, as in a talak (the Muslim divorce that is effected by the simple act of the husband’s rejecting the wife). • None of the above terms apply to the sexual gettings-together of non-humans. (See entry for Divorce.)
Marris, Robin (1924– )
Marris, who is from the United Kingdom, addressed the Second International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in London (1957). In 1974 Morris wrote The Corporate Society.
Marryatt, Thomas (1730–1792) Marryatt, who could read any Greek or Latin author before he was nine, abandoned his Presbyterianism for deism. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and from 1766 practiced in various Irish and English towns. Besides medical works, he wrote a rationalistic Philosophy of Masons. Although commonly regarded as an atheist, Marryatt was a deist. {RAT}
MARS Toward the end of the 20th century, evidence appeared to suggest past life on Mars. By testing twelve or so meteorites from Mars that were found in Antarctica, British as well as American scientists have speculated that Mars could have been inhabited for quite a long period and could even have some life today. One meteorite, called 79001, was considered the “Rosetta stone” of the British studies inasmuch as an analysis of trapped gases within the rock were almost identical in composition to atmospheric samples gathered by the Viking spacecraft in 1976. Scientists predict that in the 21st century samples will be collected by robotic landers on Mars, returned to Earth, and analyzed by international bodies of scientists to come up with definitive conclusions.
Marsalek, Kenneth (1951– ) Marsalek is a founding member and president of Washington Area Secular Humanists. He is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, a regional director of the Council, a member of the Council’s board of directors, and a contributing editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin. In “‘Star Trek’: Humanism of the Future” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1992), he points out that religion has always prompted belief in gods, devils, angels, and the afterlife. In “Star Trek,” however, when Captain Kirk tells a space alien to “Go to the Devil,” the alien replies, “We have no Devil, Kirk.” Exposure to the idea that religious beliefs are not universal enables us to recognize our own beliefs as a product of our culture, rather than as sacred truths. “Mr. Spock shows us,” explains Marsalek, “that there is some alien in all of us. He makes the alien more familiar, more acceptable, and even likable. This helps to overcome what Carl Sagan has called ‘human chauvinism.’ Through science fiction such as ‘Star Trek,’ we gain perspective not only from different cultures, but from different planets, different species, and different times. . . . It plants small seeds of doubt that may germinate, grow, and ultimately blossom into humanism.” (See entry for Washington [DC] Humanists.) {FD}
Marsden, E. C. (20th Century) Marsden, a freethinker, wrote Some Religious Terms Simply Defined (1914). {GS}
Marsden, George M. (1939– ) Marsden, in The Soul of the American University, From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994), laments that freedom of religion has become freedom from religion on the campus. Religion, he holds was driven from campuses as being utterly scientific. Now, he adds, science has lost its own credentials, a conclusion which many find questionable. He wrote The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1996).
Marselli, Niccola (Born 1832) Marselli was an Italian writer, the author of advanced works on the science of history: Nature and Civilisation, The Origin of Humanity, and Great Races of Humanity. (BDF)
Marshak, David (20th Century) Marshak, with M. Elizabeth Anastos, wrote Philosophy-Making for Unitarian Universalist Religious Growth and Learning: A Process Guide.
MARSHALL UNIVERSITY FREETHINKERS Rationalists United for Secular Humanism is a group at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. : www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html On the Web.
Marshall, Alan John (1911–1967) “Jock” Marshall was an Australian rationalist, zoologist, and author. Although one-armed because of a shooting accident when he was sixteen, he had a distinguished career at Oxford and London Universities, which led to appointment as the Foundation Chair of Zoology and Comparative Physiology at Monash University. He wrote The Great Extermination (1968) and Darwin and Huxley in Australia (1970). In a posthumous accolade, Russell Drysdale said Marshall “challenged ideas, apathy, entrenched attitudes, and lack of imaginative thinking. He disposed of sacred cows without requiem and tore to shreds the cloak of our improper conceits.” {SWW}
Marshall, Franklin (20th Century) In 1995, Marshall was elected co-president of the Northeast Atheist Association.
Marshall, George N. (1916–1993) From 1960 to 1985, Marshall led the Unitarian church’s most unconventional body, the Church of the Larger Fellowship. From its office in Boston, Marshall reached Unitarians around the world who did not live near a church, an estimated 4,000 members. He communicated with them by mail, computer network, fax, audio and videotaped sermons, publications, and toll-free telephone numbers for counseling. A friend of Albert Schweitzer, Marshall was a founding member of the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer. In addition to two books about Schweitzer, he wrote eight volumes on religious and social themes, including Facing Death and Grief (1981) and Challenge of a Liberal Faith (1970). Marshall took part in civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama, was an outspoken advocate of the separation of church and state, and opposed prayer in public schools as well as tax aid to religious schools. He once had been minister of the historic First Church in Plymouth, Massachusetts, founded by the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock.
Marshall, Henry Rutgers (1852–1927) Marshall, an architect and writer, was a lecturer on aesthetics at Columbia and Yale. He was president of the American Psychological Association, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the author of Pain, Pleasure, and Aesthetics. In Consciousness, Marshall professed pantheism and rejected the idea of personal immortality as “a crude and inadequate expression of the whole truth. . . . . As much of myself as is of the Eternal will join with it in death,” he stated. {JM; RAT}
Marshall, John [Supreme Court Judge] (1755–1835) Marshall, a statesman and jurist, is known for expanding Federal power while serving as the 4th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. A Unitarian, born in a log cabin and the eldest of fifteen children, he spent his youth in primitive surroundings, but through his mother he was related to the Lees and the Randolphs and to Thomas Jefferson, who later was to become his great antagonist. A University of Toronto teacher of political science, Jean Edward Smith, described in John Marshall, Definer of a Nation (1996) how Marshall was the first Chief Justice to locate and define the real powers of the office. Marshall had led a company of backwoods riflemen through many of the major battles of the Revolutionary War and had spent the winter at Valley Forge with George Washington, his lifelong hero. Like Washington, Marshall distrusted local and state governments which often failed to support the federal government once battles moved beyond their borders. He became convinced that state governments’ provincialism needed the discipline of Federal law, Professor Joseph J. Ellis of Mount Holyoke College has pointed out, if the American republic was to endure. Marshall resented Jefferson’s avoidance of military service, and the two did not get along although they respected each other, with qualifications. “I never admit anything,” said Jefferson of Marshall. “So sure as you admit any position to be good, no matter how remote from the conclusion he seeks to establish, you are gone. So great is his sophistry you must never give him an affirmative answer or you will be forced to grant his conclusion. Why, if he were to ask me if it were daylight or not, I’d replay, ‘Sir, I don’t know. I can’t tell.’ ” Marshall had a semi-invalid wife, Polly, and eleven children. Although his parents, wife, children, and other relatives were Episcopalians, Marshall was an independent Unitarian. {CE; U; UU; The New York Times Book Review, 1 December 1996}
Marston, John (1576–1634) Whether or not he was a Calvinist, or whether he was serious, Marston the satirist and dramatist once wrote, “Man is the slime of the dung-pit.” {CE}
Marston, Philip Bourke (1850–1887) Marston was an English poet who, blind in childhood, became devoted to poetry. A friend of Rossetti, Swinburne, and Thomson, he wrote poems which were sad and sincere. In accordance with his wishes, Marston was buried in unconsecrated ground at Highgate, and without religious service. {BDF; RAT}
Marsy, François Marie de (1714–1763) Marsy was a freethinker who had been educated as a Jesuit. When he brought out an analysis of Bayle in 1755, he was confined to the Bastille. {BDF; RAT}
Marten, Henry (1619–1680) Marten, who was elected to Parliament in 1640, was expelled for his republican sentiments in 1643. Resuming his seat in 1646, he took part in the civil war, sat the civil war, sat as one of King Charles’s judges, and became one of the Council of State. He proposed the repeal of the statute of banishment against the Jews, and when it was sought to expel all profane persons, proposed to add the words “and all fools.” Tried for regicide in 1660, he was kept in Chepstow Castle until his death. Carlyle called him “sworn foe of Cant in all its figures; an indomitable little Pagan if no better.” Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses states that Marten “never entered upon religion but with design to laugh both at it and morality.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Marthaler, John Andrew (1918–1995) Marthaler, a boat captain and radar technician who was a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association, was an outspoken and unintimidated freethinker. His automobile carried a large atheistic slogan, “Just Say No To Religion.” In 1994 he was interviewed by Fred Whitehead, in which he told of years of writing letters to local newspapers and attending conventions of the American Atheists. “I actually see people run when they see me coming,” he said. “The get to where they can’t be near me. There is something about an atheist. See, a Christian believes in devils and they believe that if they interfere with this devil he will do something to them. This is Christianity at its best. They believe in devils; you have to believe in devils to be a Christian. There would never be any Christianity without that Christian devil.” On Easter Sunday in 1995, he died. The Mississippi Press reported that John had converted to Christianity on his deathbed, through the efforts of his sister, Mrs. Anna Presley. A letter to the editor from Hank Shiver soon afterwards, however, said, “From my personal observations, John was in a diminished mental capacity shortly before his death. John had low oxygen levels to the brain, suffered a stroke, difficulty breathing, heart attacks, and was on life support.” {Freethought History #14, 1995}
Martin, Alfred Wilhelm (1862–1933) Martin was a Jewish-Christian-Unitarian theist who left his Free Church in Seattle to write and teach comparative religions in New York, 1907 to 1931. In 1907 he was assistant leader of New York’s Ethical Culture Society and lecturer for the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. He had been ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1888. In his A Generation of Religious Progress (1946), Martin remarked that astronomers have “banished from the firmament the divinities with which a superstitious reverence had endowed the planets and stars.” (See Ethical Culture.) {RAT}
Martin, Bon Louis Henri (1810–1883) Martin was a French historian, whose nineteen-volume History of France (1838–1853) was a monumental work of erudition. A confirmed Republican, he opposed the Second Empire and, after its fall, became a member of the National Assembly in 1871 and a senator in 1876. Martin became an elected member of the Academy in 1878. In addition to his historical works he contribute to Le Siecle, la Liberté de Penser, and l’Encyclopédie Nouvelle. {BDF; RAT}
Martin, Clem (20th Century) Martin, a physician, signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Martin, Dexter (20th Century) Martin, a retired professor of literature, is a freethinker who has written widely and with a distinctive sense of humor. To close friends, Martin confesses that he is head of Outcast College for the “unaccredited and contented.” Among his pamphlets are “ ‘Dirty Words’ In The Bible”; “Why Blacks Should Burn the Bible,” for its God sanctions slavery, as does Jesus; “Craziness of the Catholic Mass,” about eating the body and drinking the blood of God; and “Masturbation in the Bible”; and “Asking God to Cheat in Sports,” suggesting that God would be breaking rules if He favored one team over the other. “Would a decent father like to see some of his children defeat his other ones and make them feel miserable? If you beg God to give your team a victory, aren’t you unconsciously hoping He’ll be unlawful, unjust, and unpaternal? If you thank Him afterwards, shouldn’t you also say, ‘I’m grateful to you, God, for granting us an unfair advantage by Your invisible presence and influence. I’m happy You didn’t believe as a father should’?” In 1993, he wrote, “Skeptical Essays About Religious Question,” five works showing his continued irreverence.
Martin, Emma (1812–1851) Martin wrote a freethought tract in 1844, “Baptism a Pagan Rite,” followed in 1848 by “The Bible: No Revelation” and “Reasons for Renouncing Christianity.” She is known mainly as a lecturer, “a handsome woman, of brilliant talent and courage.” An ex-Baptist, she was fined but not jailed for her activism upon behalf of freethought. It had been the trials of Holyoake and Southwell for blasphemy that had led her to inquire about and embrace the freethought cause. While Holyoake and Paterson were in jail, Mrs. Martin went about committing the “crime” for which they were imprisoned. Underwood states that Martin did not live to reach her fortieth birthday, dying of consumption “just as she was beginning to develop the full strength of her intellect and to realize the full value of life.” She passed away “calmly, undismayed by any superstitious fears, conscious of that integrity of soul and clearness of conscience, which proves ever an armor of defense in every supreme hour of life.” Funeral services were conducted “on strictly rationalistic principles, in accordance with her own express desire, her personal friend and admirer, George Jacob Holyoake, making the address, and speaking to the friends present in behalf of the deceased.” Holyoake in the address said, “In courage of advocacy and thoroughness of view, no woman, except Frances Wright, is to be compared with her, and only one, Harriet Martineau (greater, indeed, in order of power), resembles Mrs. Martin in largeness and sameness of speculation, and her capacity to treat purely social questions, and those relating to woman. She had an affectionate nature, which astonished those who knew her in private, as much as her resolution astonished those who knew her in public. Indeed, she was the most womanly woman of all the public advocates of Woman’s Rights.” In 1848 a circumstantial account of her death-bed recantation was circulated in Scotland at a time when, actually, she was lecturing in London. Three years later she did die after severe suffering. Eight days prior to her death, G. J. Holyoake visited and found her reading Strauss’s Life of Jesus. She requested that he speak at her graveside, which he did. His address was published as “The Last Days of Mrs. Emma Martin.” Although she had endured her suffering with great fortitude, the Rev. Brewin Grant, in the spirit of evangelical Christianity, described her death as a “dreadful tragedy” and agony as “the eloquent and fitting requiem” for it. {BDF; EU, Victor E. Neuburg; FO; FUK; PUT; SAU; VI; WWS}
Martin, Herbert (20th Century) Martin, once head of the philosophy department at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, wrote “The Religion of Humanity”:
To serve the present age as best I may Is my imperative, moral and religious. My country is Humanity, its service my Religion. To see my fellows strive for what will Satisfy their need, struggling, unavailing oft, Rising anew, girded by hope and will to win, Defying fate’s frustrations to the end— All this fills me with reverence, awe, and worship.
Martin, James R. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Martin was a humanist counselor. {HM2}
Martin, Jay (20th Century) Martin is active in the Humanist Community of San Francisco. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Martin, Joanne (20th Century) In 1995 Martin was elected Vice President of the Northeast Atheist Association.
Martin, Kingsley (1897–1969) Martin, a writer and editor, in 1958 became an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. His autobiography, published posthumously, is Editor: New Statesman Years, 1931–1945 (1970). {TRI}
Martin, Louis (19th Century) Martin, who described himself as an atheist socialist, wrote Les Evangiles Sans Dieu (1887). Victor Hugo praised it. {BDF}
Martin, Louis Auguste (1811–1875)
In Paris, Martin edited Morale Independente in 1855. One of his works is Histoire de la femme (1862). For having written True and False Catholics (1858), he was fined three thousand francs and imprisoned for six months. {BDF}
Martin, Michael (20th Century) Martin is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, Boston University. In New York, Martin edited Exit from 1969 to 1972 and Repartée from 1968 to 1972. He is author of The Case Against Christianity (1991), in which he critiques the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and other theological concepts. Also, he wrote Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (1990), in which he distinguishes
Michael Martin, Philosopher/Author art
Martin is author of Atheism: A Philosophical Justification and The Case Against Christianity (Temple Univ. Press), two books that are considered the classic defense of atheism and classic attack on Christianity, respectively.
--JLo
---
Martin published a collection of short stories which present the case for atheism through fiction. The book is The Big Domino in the Sky and Other Atheistic Tales (Amherst, N.Y.:Prometheus Books, 1996). It is reviewed by Finngeir Hiorth in the Summer 1997 issue of Free Inquiry.
negative atheism
(that there are no good reasons for belief in God, or that the term “God exists” is not factually meaningful)
from
positive atheism
(the position that “God exists” is a false although meaningful statement).
He cites Voltaire, a deist, as being a nonbeliever. He also cites Upton Sinclair as a being a nonbeliever, although Sinclair was basically a spiritualist. (Note Sinclair’s letter herein.) Martin attempted to revive Joseph Lewis’s freethought ventures after Lewis’s death in 1968, to limited success. Antony Flew, reviewing Atheism, finds it “not a book to put into the hands of someone deliberating whether to become or remain an atheist or a theist.” It is, however, satisfactory for someone who has worked “in some other area of philosophy and now wanted to learn what had been happening in the philosophy of religion during the last forty or so years.” He adds, “Such a reader would not be put off by the amount of formalism in which Martin indulges, and would not require an explanation—which Martin neglects to provide—of the symbol “IFF.” [IFF = if and only if] On the other hand even the reader would presumably need some indication—which is again not provided—of the contents of Antony Flew’s well known “Theology and Falsification.” A contributing editor for Free Inquiry, Martin also wrote The Big Domino in the Sky, and Other Atheistic Tales (1996), stories which reveal the fallacies of traditional arguments for the existence of God and the improbability of God’s existence given the evil in the universe. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Martin, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, is a supporter of Internet Infidels and a contributing editor of Philo. On the Web: <http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/martin-bio.html> {E; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990 and Fall 1997; GS; Antony Flew, New Humanist, February 1995}
Martin, Oscar (20th Century) A New Zealand student of commerce and computer science, Martin is vice-president of Auckland University Atheists. After graduating, he sophomorically taunted opponents of atheism, “I intend to go on a church-burning psychotic rampage.” E-Mail: <peacenet@ihug.co.nz>.
Martin-Diaz, James Robert (20th Century) Martin-Diaz is an editorial associate for Free Inquiry. In 1982, he edited Engineers for the Public Good.
[[Martinaud, M. (19th Century)
Martinaud was an ex-abbé who refused ordination and wrote to his bishop Letters of a Young Priest, who is an Atheist and Materialist (1868). In it, he stated, “Religion is the infancy of peoples, atheism their maturity.” {BDF}
Martineau, Harriet (1802–1876) “From the moment a man desires to find the truth on one side rather than another, it is all over with him as a philosopher,” wrote Martineau in her “Letters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development.” The youngest of eight children of a Norwich (England) silk manufacturer, she was a sister of the Rev. James Martineau, who attained a celebrity nearly equal to her own and was nearest to her in age. Her family had once been driven with thousands of their fellow Huguenots from France to England, a story she heard often from her parents. In spite of her increasing deafness as a child, she was sent to singing schools and became an accomplished performer upon the piano until her infirmity caused her to lose interest. As for her health, “I have never,” she once wrote, “had the sense of smell, nor, therefore, much sense of taste; and before I was twenty I had lost the greater part of my hearing. When my companions give me notice of distant objects by means of any of these senses—when they tell me what is growing in an invisible field or garden, or where there is music, or what people are saying on the farther side of a reach of the lake on a calm summer evening, I feel a sort of start, as if I were in company with sorcerers.” Lacking the exercise of her senses, however, she developed an interest in writing, according to Underwood. “When the great comet of 1811 appeared, I was nine years old,” Martineau wrote. “Night after night that autumn the whole family went up to the long range of windows in my father’s warehouse to see the comet. I was obliged to go with them, but I never once saw it! My heart used to swell with disappointment and mortification. No effort was wanting on my part; and parents, brothers, and sisters used to point and say, ‘Why, there! Why, it is as large as a saucer! You might as well say you cannot see the moon!’ I could not help it; I never saw it, and I have not got over it yet.” Martineau’s religious education had been in the Unitarian faith, and her first work, published in 1823, was “Devotions for Young People.” Her next was a religious novel, Christmas Day. In 1930 when the British and Foreign Unitarian Association offered prizes for the three best tracts—“On the Introduction and Promotion of Christian Unitarianism among the Roman Catholics, the Jews, and Mohammedans”—Martineau competed for all three. Although there were three separate sets of judges, Martineau won all three prizes. From 1839 to 1844, Martineau was a confirmed invalid. But she continued to write, even when prostrate in bed with illness. Somehow, with the aid of mesmerism, her health improved to the point that in 1840, ear trumpet in hand, she toured Egypt, Palestine, and Arabia, writing an account of her the friends she made and finishing an essay on the life and purposes of Moses and his dealings with the Israelites of old. “It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature,” wrote Martineau, whose collections of stories interpreted economics to the laymen of her time. In her youth, Martineau had attended services at the Octagon Chapel, and she had an article published in Monthly Repository, which she described as “a poor little Unitarian periodical.” She wrote Illustrations of Political Economy (9 volumes) and Illustrations of Taxation (1834). Her unflattering description of the United States in Society in America (1837) was accompanied by her becoming an advocate for the abolition of slavery. When she openly avowed her unbelief concerning religion, even her brother, James, censured her publicly for her atheism. One Christian reviewer remarked that her work “is exceedingly interesting, but it is marred by the mocking spirit of Infidelity which she allows for the first time to darken her pages and testify to the world her disbelieve in the Divine revelation.” Even her friend, Charlotte Brontë, “grieved sadly over this declension on the part of one whom she admired as combining the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties. The book (Eastern Life), Brontë said, was the first exposition of avowed atheism and materialism she had ever read—the first unequivocal declaration of a disbelief of God or a future life. Hundreds, she said, had deserted Miss Martineau on account of this book.” Martineau, however, denied losing any friends whatever by her book and, in fact, said she had gained a new world of sympathy. And she persisted: “There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irreverent as to make me blush; so misleading as to make me mourn. I can now hardly believe that it was I who once read Milton with scarcely any recoil from the theology; or Paley’s Natural Theology with pleasure at the ingenuity of the mechanic-god he thought he was recommending to the admiration of his readers. . . . What an emancipation it is—to have escaped from the little enclosure of dogma, and to stand—far indeed from being wise—but free to learn!” Nathaniel Hawthorne described her as follows: “She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but, withal, she has so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties. . . . All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness. And this woman is an atheist, and thinks that the principle of life will become extinct when her body is laid in the grave! I will not think so, were it only for her sake.” Martineau’s Autobiography, published after her death, shows the full extent of her unbelief, for she had also repudiated her Unitarianism. In it she described herself as “an atheist in the regular sense—that of rejecting the popular theology—but not in the philosophic sense of denying a First Cause.” However, adds McCabe, “her First Cause was impersonal and she rejected immortality.” Martin Greif has praised her for her feminism and alleged lesbianism, although no specific names of her loves were cited. Fewer than six weeks before her death, Martineau wrote her last letter, to H. G. Atkinson, which included the following:
I cannot think of any future as at all probable, except the “annihilation” from which some people recoil with so much horror. I find myself here in the universe—I know not how, whence or why. I see everything in the universe go out and disappear, and I see no reason for supposing that it is not an actual and entire death. And for my part, I have no objection to such an extinction. I well remember the passion with which W. E. Forster said to me, “I had rather be damned than annihilated.” If he once felt five minutes’ damnation, he would be thankful for extinction in preference. The truth is, I care little about it any way. Now that the event draws near, and that I see how fully my household expect my death pretty soon, the universe opens so widely before my view, and I see the old notions of death, and scenes to follow so merely human—so impossible to be true, when once glanced through the range of science—that I see nothing to be done but to wait, without fear or hope for future experience, nor have I any fear of it. Under the weariness of illness I long to be asleep.
Martineau’s funeral was entirely private and free from religious ceremonial. {BDF; CE; EG; Freethought History #9, 1994; Pat Duffy Hutcheon, “Harriet Martineau, The Woman Who Thought Like a Man,” Humanist in Canada, Summer 1996; JM; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (1877); JMR; RAT; RE; SAU; TRI; WWS}
[[Martineau, James (1804–1900)
Martineau, a Unitarian and the brother of Harriet Martineau, was an English theologian who upheld the theist position against the negations of physical science. He wrote A Study of Spinoza (1881) and Types of Ethical Theory (1885). Robertson terms him a philosopher who was rather a coadjutor than a champion of the Unitarian sect. {CE; JMR; JMRH; U}
Martins, Charles Frédéric (1806–1889) In 1863 Martins became corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. A botanist, he wrote an introduction to Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique (2 vols., 1873), in which he professed agnosticism, rejected materialism and spiritualism, and was negative in his views of myths and churches. {RAT}
Marty, Martin E. (1928– ) Marty wrote The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion (1961), an anti-freethought book according to Gordon Stein. Affiliated with the University of Chicago, Marty headed up the Fundamentalist Project. In 1998 at a symposium, “The Role of Religion in Public Life” sponsored by Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), however, he said, “It is the role of unbelievers to force religions to be benign,” a comment which Marie Castle found was analogous to Steve Allen’s suggestion that the task of atheists is to civilize the Christians. Castle found Marty “a long way from being religious in the sense of believing biblical mythology. He may be closer to being a deist than anything.” Nominally, he is a Lutheran. {GS; Secular Nation, July-September 1998}
MARTYR • To die for an idea is to set a rather high price upon guesswork. –Anatole France
• A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. –Oscar Wilde
Religious martyrs are willing to suffer persecution for their faith, including undergoing torture or death. In the days of the Romans, martyrs who became victims were revered to the point that even any object associated with them was venerated. Relics came in three classes: (a) the body of a saint, or any part thereof; (b) any part of his clothing; and (c) a prayerbook. Chaucer has described how animal bones were sold as saints’ bones to gullible country parsons, pointing up the fact that the Papacy long has had a problem authenticating relics. In the 1990s, “living martyrs” have videotaped goodbye messages before committing suicide. Saleh Abdel Rahim al-Souwi, for example, carried an estimated forty pounds of explosives onto an Israeli bus, killing himself and over twenty Jews as well as injuring dozens more. In the videotape he had made beforehand, he said, “It is good to die as a martyr for Allah.” Holding a rifle and using quotations from the Qur’an, he added, “Sages end up in paradise.” A young Palestinian, he left behind his family and parents. His father, although giving his condolences to the victims’ families, said his son “is lucky to be a martyr.”
Marvin, Burdette K. (20th Century) Marvin wrote Christian Teaching: An Inquiry (1949). {GS}
Marvin, F. S. (20th Century) Marvin has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Marvin Francis Sydney (1863–1943) Marvin, a positivist writer, wrote The Living Past (1913). He was an inspector of schools and was a divisional inspector and inspector of training colleges. He wrote The Unity of Western Civilization (1970). {RAT}
Marx, Karl (1818–1883) “The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion,” wrote Marx, a philosopher and revolutionary theorist who was descended from a line of rabbis and brought up as a Lutheran. He came to believe that “The proofs of the existence of God are nothing but proofs for the existence of the essentially human self-consciousness. . . . Man is the supreme being for man. . . . Atheism and communism . . . are but the first real coming-to-be, the realization become real for man, of man’s essence.” According to Stack, Marx began and ended his productive life with a few basic assumptions: “(1) that religious beliefs channel human energy and hope into another, ethereal world and thereby divert man’s efforts from the improvement of his earthly estate; (2) that the capitalist economy, especially in the form of political economy, is unjust and encourages egoism and selfishness, breeding ‘social atoms’ that are only interested in their own welfare; (3) that there are ‘laws’ governing human history, principles of economic evolution, and dialectical opposition that derive from the historical pattern of ‘class conflict’; (4) that a truly human society of communal cooperation toward a common end is possible; (5) that man must overcome both religious and economic alienation if he would attain genuine emancipation; and (6) that the capitalist system of economy entails basic ‘contradictions’ (especially that engendered by the collective production of goods and the unequal benefits of the distribution of these goods) that will eventually lead to its negation.” Leon Trotsky’s former secretary, Raya Dunayevskaya, described Marx’s philosophy in The Humanist Alternative (1973) as “a new Humanism.” Dunayevskaya adds that Karl Marx was a thoroughgoing naturalist who at first had called his outlook “a new humanism,” by which he meant a Marxist rather than a communistic humanism. McCabe, saying that Marx is often credited with having said that religion is “the opium of the people,” wrote that that description might initially have been written by the Rev. Charles Kingsley, a Christian Socialist. In his Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right (1844), Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions.” He then added, “It is the opium of the people.” Marx declared that “the workers have nothing to lose in this [revolution] but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!” He claimed that the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” was coined by Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), and at one point he said, according to Engels in a letter to C. Schmidt, “All I know is that I am not a Marxist.” Nevertheless, in an 1852 letter he summarized his achievements: “What I did that was new was to prove…that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In his Theses on Feuerbach (published 1888), Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Corliss Lamont considered Marx a dialectical materialist who differed from naturalistic humanists by his ambiguous attitude toward democracy and his acceptance of determinism. Bertrand Russell objected to Marx for two reasons: “one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.” Russell added, in his Portraits From Memory (1956), “The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage earners under capitalism, is arrived at, (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus’s doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo’s theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. . . . His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.” One of his works, On Religion (translated into English by the USSR, 1975) greatly disturbed leaders of the various organized religions. Socialism was greatly affected by political Marxism, but many Socialists following the 1917 Russian Revolution disassociated themselves from Soviet Communism. Although some ensuing Communist regimes claimed to be orthodox Marxists, they often interpreted the views of Marx in greatly different ways. With the dramatic fall of the USSR and other communist nations in the 1990s, Marx’s influence has dwindled but not disappeared. Marx died in his sixties while writing at his worktable. Allegedly, among his last words were these: “Get out of here and leave me alone. Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough already.” At Marx’s funeral, Stephen Jay Gould noted, “Only nine people were there.” Marx is buried in London’s Highgate cemetery. A bronze bust perches atop a stone block with the words,
Workers of all lands unite. The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it
His wife Jenny (died 1881) and daughter Eleanor (died 1898) lie adjacent. Just across the way lies social reformer Herbert Spencer. (See entry for Louis Blanc, author of the phrase “Let each produce according to his aptitudes . . . let each consume according to his need.” Also see entries for Communistic Humanism and Communistic Christian Settlements.) {CE; CB; EU; FUK; JM; PA; RAT; RE; The New York Times, 26 June 1999; TRI}
MARXISM À LA MAO AND KISSINGER [TOP SECRET] Chairman Mao [of China]: Do you pay attention or not to one of the subjects of Hegel’s philosophy, that is the unity of opposites? Henry Kissinger[United States Secretary of State]: Very much. I was much influenced by Hegel in my philosophic thinking. Mao: Both Hegel and Feuerbach who came a little later after him. They were both great thinkers. And Marxism came partially from them. They were predecessors of Marx. If it were not for Hegel and Feuerbach there would not be Marxism. Kissinger: Yes, Marx reversed the tendency of Hegel, but he adopted the basic theory. Mao: What kind of doctor are you? Are you a doctor of philosophy? Kissinger: Yes. (laughter) . . . . I can’t read German in its original form. I must translate into English, because it is too complicated in its original form. This is quite true. Some of the points of Hegel—quite seriously—I understand better in English than in German, even though German is my mother language. –from The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (1998) MARY • There is no God, and Mary is his mother. –Gore Vidal in Palimpsest, quoting a statement George Santayana is said to have made (See entry for Virgin Mary.)
Mary Magdalen The Cathari held that Jesus did not die on the cross, that he married Mary Magdalen, that they settled in the Languedoc, and that their heirs founded the Merovingian dynasty that united Christian Europe under Charlemagne. (See entry for Catharism.)
MARY, THE VIRGIN: See entry for Great Mother Goddess.
MARYLAND HUMANISTS Maryland has the following humanist groups:
• Atheist Students’ Association (ASA), University of Maryland at College Park. It was founded by Ali Aliabadi and Brie Waters in 1995. Keith Augustine, a philosophy major, is its secretary. • Baltimore Secular Humanists (ASHS; a chapter of WASH), PO Box 24115, Baltimore, Maryland 21227; telephone Ken Marsalek (410) 467-3225. Contact: Don Evans at <don.evans@cwix.com>. • District of Columbia Chapter (WASH), PO Box 15319, Washington, DC 20003; (202) 546.7430. E-mail: <lgporter@erols.com>. • Frederick Secular Humanists (ASHS; a chapter of WASH), 123 West 2nd St., Frederick MD 21701; (301) 631-5982). E-mail: <frank_greene@compuserve.com> and <jewell_kross@ftdetrck-ccmail.army.mil>. 18 South Jefferson St., Frederick, Maryland 21901; (301) 619-3680. E-mail: <jewell_kross@ftdetrck:ccmail.army.mil>. • Humanist Association of the National Capital Area (AHA), POB 2465, Wheaton, Maryland 20902. Roy Toracaso is its contact. • Johns Hopkins University Atheists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Maryland-District of Columbia Secular Humanist Chapter of WASH (ASHS), PO Box 15319, Washington, DC 20003; (202) 298-0921. • Mid Atlantic Region (AHA), 3708 Brightview Street, Wheaton, Maryland 20902. Roy Torcaso is coordinator for the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. • University of Maryland Atheist Students Association is on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Masaryk, Jan (1886–1948) Jan, the son of Tomás Masaryk, followed in his father’s political footsteps. During World War II, he became foreign minister of the Czech government-in-exile, continuing until 1945, at which time and shortly after the Communist coup in 1948 he committed suicide. His death, for he leaped from a window and the news media publicized the event, was alleged to have been his final act of defying the Communists. Others allege he was killed. Masaryk was a Unitarian. {CE; JM; UU}
Masaryk, Tomás Garrigue [President] (1850–1937) Masaryk, a Czech patriot, statesman, sociologist, and philosopher, believed that philosophy should not only contemplate the world but also should try to change it. He cared little for epistemology, but he accepted Hume’s empiricism and Comte’s positivism. After being professor of philosophy at the University of Prague, he led the independence movement from 1907 on, becoming Czechoslovakia’s first president (1918–1935) following World War I. In 1923, the Liberal Fellowship was formed, and that led to the establishment of the Religious Society of Czechoslovakian Unitarians. More a positivist than a freethinker, he believed in “the supreme moral and religious command to love men.” Although not a Unitarian himself, he was said to have found his wife’s Unitarianism congenial. In his Ideale der Humanitat (1902), Masaryk professed agnosticism, according to McCabe, and he took part openly in the international freethought movement. In 1938, Masaryk wrote Modern Man and Religion (1938). {RAT; RE; TRI}
Mascagni, Pietro (1863–1945) Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” (1890) gave him a worldwide reputation as an excellent Italian composer. Although he wrote church music, Mascagni according to his biographer, G. Bastianelli was a pagan even in his religious compositions and had “no religion.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Mascagni, Pietro (7 Dec 1863 - 2 Aug 1945)
The son of a baker, Mascagni was born in Livorno where he studied composition but, unhappy with the school’s strict rules, left to study orchestra conducting at a Milan, Italy, conservatory. He settled in Cerignola as the local theatre director and the conductor of the local band.
The success of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) gave him a worldwide reputation as an excellent Italian composer but prevented his finishing his work at Cerignola. Although he wrote church music, according to his biographer, G. Bastianelli, Mascagni was a pagan even in his religious compositions and had “no religion.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Masci, Filippo (1844–1901)
Masci, an Italian philosopher, was a Commander of the Crown of Italy, Rector of Naples University, Secretary of the Royal Society of Naples, and member of the Council of Higher Education. In his writings such as Psicologia religiosa and Elementi filosofici, he held that matter and spirit are two aspects of one evolving reality. {RAT}
Maslow, Abraham H. (1908–1970) Maslow is regarded as the founder of humanistic psychology. In 1927 at City College of New York, when introduced to William Graham Summer’s Folkways, Maslow found that the book freed him from his “simple, unquestioning ethnocentrism” and changed the way he saw the world. As described by Richard J. Lowery in A. H. Maslow: An Intellectual Portrait, Maslow came to believe the following:
Man has a higher nature and . . . this is part of his essence. . . . We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.
Maslow, who taught at Brandeis University and New York University, was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 1967. With B. Mittelmann, he wrote Principles of Abnormal Psychology (1941). Also, he wrote Motivation and Personality (1954) and Religion, Values, and Peak Experiences (1964). Maslow was a key influence in Betty Friedan’s turn toward secular humanism, she wrote as well as told friends.
Mason, Gabriel Richard (20th Century) “What I Believe” by Mason appeared in Joseph Lewis’s freethought publication, Age of Reason (March, 1964). For that magazine he also wrote “Existentialism for Freethinkers” (March, 1965). In 1956 he wrote Great American Liberals and, in 1965, Existentialism for Freethinkers. With Arthur Burton in 1969, Mason wrote William James and Religion.
Mason, Haydn Trevor (1929– ) Prof. Mason in 1988 was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In 1994, he was the subject of a festschrift, The Secular City, edited by T. D. Hemming, E. Freeman, and D. Meakin. The work was subtitled “Studies in the Enlightenment Presented to Haydn Mason” and contained essays in honor of the leading authority in England on Voltaire and eighteenth-century France.
Mason, Josiah [Sir] (1795–1881) Mason, a British philanthropist, was a Birmingham manufacturer who began life by hawking on the streets at the age of eight. He gave a considerable amount of money to charities, including an orphanage and a college of science. Although his biographer reported that Mason was “not a religious man according to the views of any sect or party” and forbade Christian teaching in his foundations, Mason’s wishes were not carried out. The college of science, now incorporated as part of Birmingham University, began with what McCabe calls “the usual clerical influence.” Mason was a theist but “the dogmatic ecclesiastical aspects of religion were repugnant to him.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Mason, Leonard (20th Century) Mason is a contributing editor of Religious Humanism, a quarterly published by the Fellowship of Religious Humanists.
Mason, Marylin (20th Century) Mason is the education officer for the British Humanist Association.
Nick Mason, Recording Artist music
Here's a quote from Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd, in an interview with Q magazine:
Q: Do you believe in God?
NM: No I don't, though I quite often wish that I did. I believe in God Dylan.
The quote can be found at http://www.pinkfloyd-co.com/band/interviews/nbm/nbm_frame.html
Mason, Nick (27 Jan 1945 - ) An English rock-and-roll performer, drummer, singer, songwriter, and recording artist, Mason was the drummer of the Pink Floyd. He formed a music production company with Rick Fenn, former guitarist with British art rock group, 10cc, and with instrumentalist Mike Oldfield, known as the person whose “Tubular Bells” was used as the chilling theme to The Exorcist. Mason and Fenn collaborated on the film soundtrack for White of the Eye, a thriller directed by Donald Cammell. Mason is also found on Fictitious Sports (1981) and Heard It On the Radio, Vol 3 (1999). Following is from a magazine interview with Q found online:
Q: Do you believe in God? Mason: No, I don’t, though I quite often wish that I did. I believe in God Dylan.
(On the Web: http://www.pinkfloyd-co.com/band/interviews/nbm/nbm_frame.html) {CA}
MASONIC LODGE, MASONRY: See entry for Freemasons.
MASORETIC Of the number of ancient versions of the Holy Bible, the Masoretic translation was by the Masoretes, people who tried to preserve unchanged the text of the Hebrew Bible and in so doing provided it with vowel points and copious annotations. The Masorah notes, enumerations of the occurrences of words or concern with their orthography, accumulated from c. 500 to c. 1100. (See entry for Bible.)
Masquerier, Lewis(1802–1888) An American land reformer of Huguenot descent, Masquerier wrote The Sataniad, established Greenpoint Gazette, and contributed to the Boston Investigator. {BDF}
MASS For freethinkers and humanists, mass refers to a unified body of matter with no specific shape, as in “a mass of bull dung.” But for Christians, Mass (or mass) is a public celebration of the Eucharist, a theological invention having to do with “the Last Supper” and “communion.” In England during the Middle Ages, a mass was in honor of a specific person—Michaelmas was the feast day of Michael the angel; Christmas was the feast day of Christ; and so on. (See entries for Universe and Neutrino.) {DCL}
MASSACHUSETTS ATHEISTS, HUMANISTS Massachusetts has the following groups:
• Amherst College Atheists, Agnostics, Rationalists, and Godless Humanists. On the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>
• Coalition of Humanists, Atheists, and Ethical Organizations of New England. Joseph Gerstein is its contact. • Harvard Secular Society is on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Humanist Association of Massachusetts (AHA), POB 38-1125, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Joseph Gerstein is President. Executive Director and editor of the newsletter is Tom Ferrick. E-mail: <thomas_ferrick@harvard.edu>. (See entry for Alexander Lincoln Jr.) • Massachusetts Institute of Technology Atheists, Agnostics, and Humanists on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Williams College’s Doubting Club is at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Massen, John B. (1915– ) Massen, the founder, first President, and assistant treasurer of the Atheist Alliance, spoke in 1994 at the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT). He actively publicizes OABITAR (Objectivity, Accuracy and Balance In Teaching About Religion, Inc., 1525-A Day Avenue, San Mateo, California 94403). In Secular Nation’s first issue (Fall 1994), Massen tells that the new alliance formed “as an alternative to atheist organizations that are totally controlled by a single family,” an obvious reference to Madalyn Murray O’Hair. His e-mail: <athalsfj@aol.com>.
Massenet, Jules Emile Frédric (1842–1912) Massenet, an important French composer, composed more than twenty operas, one of the best known being “Manon” (1884), which exemplifies his sensual style and contains accompanied spoken dialogue rather than the traditional recitative. A freethinker, Massenet also wrote a daring and popular oratorio on “Mary Magdeleine” and an opera, “Herodiade.” {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Massenet, Jules Emile Frédric (12 May 1842 - 13 Aug 1912)
Massenet, an important French composer, composed more than twenty operas, one of the best known being Manon (1884), which exemplifies his sensual style and contains accompanied spoken dialogue rather than the traditional recitative. A freethinker, Massenet also wrote a daring and popular oratorio on “Mary Magdeleine” and an opera, “Herodiade.”
His father, a superior officer under the First Empire who had resigned when the Bourbons were restored, was a distinguished pupil of the Polytechnic School. He became an iron-master and was the inventor of huge hammers which, crushing steel with a single blow, changed bars of metal into sickles and scythes. “So it was that, to the sound of heavy hammers of brass, as [in the case of] ancient poets, I was born,” Massanet wrote. In 1848, while his mother was giving him his first music lesson, he recalls “the strangely chosen moment, for our lesson was interrupted by the noise of street-firing that lasted for several hours. The revolution had burst forth, and the people were killing one another in the streets.” By his twenties, Massanet had become a lauréat of the Imperial Conservatory of Music and won a scholarship from the Académie de France. In an autobiographical work compiled by Robert Frome, he wrote of the humanist’s love of the humanities:
To be an artist is to be a poet, to be touched by all the revelations of art and nature, to love, to suffer—in a word, to live! To produce a work of art does not make an artist. First of all, an artist must be touched by all the manifestations of beauty, must be interpenetrated by them. How many great painters, how many illustrious musicians, never were artists in the deepest meaning of the word! Did the progress made in these years of work really prove my vocation? Certainly I had won the “prix de Rome” and had also taken prizes for piano, counterpoint, fugues, and so on. No doubt I was what is called a good pupil, but I was not an artist in the true sense. Oh, those two lovely years in Rome at the dear Villa Medici, the official abiding-place of holder of Institute scholarships—unmatched years, the recollection of which still vibrates in my memory and even now helps me to stem the flood of discouraging influences!
Not all the rest of his life was inspiring, however:
In 1870—a dismal date for my poor dear country—the Prussian cannons, answering those of Mont Valérin, often lugubriously punctuated the fragments that I tried to write during the short moments of rest that guard duty, marching around Paris, and military exercises on the ramparts, left us. . . .
His friend, painter Henri Regnault, died. Cold, hunger, and despair was all around until an armistice, “which in our wearied but far from resigned hearts rang the knell of our last and righteous anger! Yes, truly, during those dark days of the siege of Paris, it was indeed the image of my dying country that lay bleeding in me, feeble instrument that I was, when shivering with cold, my eyes blinded with tears, I composed the bars of the Poëme du Souvenir for the inspired stanzas written by my friend the great poet Armand Silvestre, “Arise, beloved, now entombed!” In his Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers, Wheeler in 1889, before Massenet’s death, termed him a freethinker, which was generally known in Massenet’s circles. {BDF; CE; Robert Frone, RFrone@aol.com; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Massey, Gerald (1829–1907)
Massey was an Egyptologist who published A Book of Beginnings, Natural Genesis, and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907). George Eliot, impressed by what she had read about him, cast Massey as the character of Felix Holt in her novel of the same name. In Natural Genesis he had a chapter on “The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ,” which has appealed to contemporary freethinkers. Massey was born of poor parents and was sent to a factory at the age of eight to earn a miserable pittance. At fifteen, he left Tring for London, was an errand boy, and after reading widely became a freethinker and political reformer. The Spirit of Freedom that he started in 1849 cost him five situations in eleven months. Massey lectured widely on such subjects as “Why Don’t God Kill the Devil?” and “The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ.” {BDF; RAT}
Massol, Marie Alexandre (1805–1875) Massol was a French writer who studied under Raspail, then went to Paris and became a Saint Simonian. In 1848 he wrote on Lamennais’s La Réforme and worked on the Voix du Peuple (Voice of the People) with his friend Proudhon, to whom he became executor. In 1865 he established La Morale Independante with the object of showing that morality has nothing to do with theology. {BDF; RAT}
Masterman, Patrick (20th Century) A theist who is anti-atheistic, Masterman is author of Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism (1971). {Freethought History #9, 1994}
Masters, Edgar Lee (1869–1950) Author of the best-selling Spoon River Anthology (1915), Masters amused a large audience by his collection of free-verse epitaphs in which the sins and scandals of small-town folks were bared. But his was an anti-democratic outlook filled with a bleak view about man. If there is a God, and he didn’t believe there is, then God gets the blame for the catastrophes which both the good and evil people must endure. His cynicism is anti-humanistic, and his view élitist to many; to others he was a cynic but also a secularist and a humanist. Lincoln, the Man (1931) expresses the viewpoint that Lincoln was no friend of liberty. His Serpent in the Wilderness (1933) contained his poetry. Masters, a friend of Vachel Lindsay, was a law partner of Clarence Darrow. Jefferson Howard, one of the individuals depicted in Spoon River Anthology, is likely a picture of Masters himself, according to May Swenson. Thomas Jefferson was an idol of Masters, and Howard’s epitaph read
Foe of the church with its charnel dankness, Friend of the human touch of the tavern. . . .
In a 1942 interview by Robert van Gelder of The New York Times, Masters said,
I am a Hellenist. . . . The great marvel of the world is Greek civilization. They thought in universals, as did the Elizabethans. We are provincial in our thoughts.
He previously had declared,
Many books have been written to show that Christianity has emasculated the world, that it shoved aside the enlightenment and wisdom of Hellas for a doctrine of superstition and ignorance.... Hebraic and Christian anthropomorphism . . . has done so much to curse the world.
Masters had a sense of humor, as shown in the following poem entitled “The Convert”:
Friend in China write me letter of great missionary Who convert many Chinese people. And say if they believe they can eat poison, And handle serpents, as written in Holy Scripture. Chan Chou accept Jesus, and is baptized. Then handle cobra to prove he believe. Cobra bite Chan Chou, and he die. Missionary say Chan Chou die because he did not believe. I say he believe or would not handle cobra.
According to Swenson, “In Spoon River, Masters borrowed the mouths of the dead to give outlet to all his grudges, beliefs, indignations, insights, prophesies, discoveries of glaring injustice, revelations of life’s mysteries and paradoxes—and his own eccentric philosophy. Miraculously he also created and bequeathed to us a world in microcosm, new in form, timeless in essence.” {CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; May Swenson, Introduction to Spoon River Anthology, 1962; TYD}
Mastroianni, Marcello (1923–1996) Mastroianni, an Italian movie actor noted for his good looks and introspective air, was directed by Federico Fellini in “La Dolce Vita” (1959), “8 1/2” (1963), and “City of Women” (1978). “I loved life, and I was loved back,” the son of a cabinetmaker was once quoted as saying. Upon his death, his former lover, Catherine Deneuve; their daughter Chiara Mastroianni; and Anna-Maria Tato, his companion of the last twenty-two years, attended a funeral at the St.-Sulpice Church in Rome. The church benediction—no Mass was offered—was a compromise between Ms. Deneuve, a practicing Roman Catholic, and Ms. Tato, who opposed it because the actor was not religious. The coffin with his body was then brought from Paris to Rome, where it was received by Flora Carabella, whom he had married in 1948, and their daughter, Barbara. Both had arranged for the secular service, stating that the actor had made it clear he did not want a religious burial. Thousands, including fellow actor Sophia Loren, attended the outdoor funeral.
Mastroianni, Marcello (28 Sep 1924 - 19 Dec 1996) Mastroianni, an Italian movie actor noted for his good looks and introspective air, was directed by Federico Fellini in La Dolce Vita (1959), 8 1/2 (1963), and City of Women (1978). “I loved life, and I was loved back,” the son of a cabinetmaker was once quoted as saying. Upon his death, his former lover, Catherine Deneuve; their daughter Chiara Mastroianni; and Anna-Maria Tato, his companion of the last twenty-two years, attended a funeral at the St.-Sulpice Church in Rome. The church benediction—no Mass was offered—was a compromise between Ms. Deneuve, a practicing Roman Catholic, and Ms. Tato, who opposed it because the actor was not religious. The coffin with his body was then brought from Paris to Rome, where it was received by Flora Carabella, whom he had married in 1948, and their daughter, Barbara. Both had arranged for the secular service, stating that Mastroianni had made it clear he did not want a religious burial. Thousands, including fellow actor Sophia Loren, attended the outdoor funeral. {Associated Press, Dec 1996}
MASTURBATION • Masturbate: to read X-rated material with one hand. –Anonymous
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) states that the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure “is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action. . . . The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” A 1741 pamphlet by a Swiss physician, S. A. D. Tissot, “Onanism, or a Treatise on the Disorders of Masturbation,” sounded a general alarm that masturbation was not only immoral but also it was dangerous, that it drained the body of vital fluids and caused neuroses which could damage the nervous system. A few years later, Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a physician who bled and purged patients, wrote that masturbation caused poor eyesight, epilepsy, memory loss, and tuberculosis, that masturbators were easy to spot because they looked sickly and repugnant. Charles Dickens in 1850 continued the idea, describing Uriah Heep as a pale creature who lacked eyebrows and had red eyes and clammy hands which he chafed together constantly, and “everyone knew he was a masturbator.” (As further evidence of non-scientific declarations at that time, Dr. William Finley Semple of Mount Vernon, Ohio, in 1869 warned that using “the rubbery abomination” of chewing gum, “would exhaust the salivary glands and cause the intestines to stick together.”) J. H. Kellogg, who invented corn flakes, informed parents in Plain Facts for Young and Old Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life (1888), that among the thirty-nine signs of masturbation were acne, bashfulness, boldness, nail biting, use of tobacco, and bed wetting. He recommended bandaging children’s genitals, or enclosing them in a cage, or simply tying the children’s hands. Kellogg recommended circumcising boys without an anesthetic, and he recommended applying carbolic acid on the girls’ clitorises . . . adding without documentation that eating corn flakes daily would prevent the vile practice. Mark Twain had a comment about masturbation which is believed to be similar to that of other non-believers who prefer the Ancient Greek over the Ancient Hebrew viewpoint: “The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories—and mainly a yearning to paint pictures.” Journalist Gina Kolata has written, “Some 19th-century inventors patented devices to stop masturbation, including a genital cage that held a boy’s penis and scrotum with springs, an alarm sounding when an erection occurred. Though later reformers like Sigmund Freud later denounced these remedies, they believed that the act could cause impotence, premature ejaculation, and a dislike of intercourse.” The dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, at the time that he was found by the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler to be “a confused schizophrenic with mild manic excitement,” not only believed he had become God; he also believed that he would now convert the world back to feeling rather than thinking, that his servants were having sex with animals, and that his four-year-old daughter Kyra’s masturbating would cause her mental and physical breakdown. According to Peter Ostwald’s Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (1991), Nijinsky was repeating a common assumption of the 1910s. Meanwhile, surveys show that 60% of adult men and 40% of adult women masturbated in the past year and that 90% of teen-age boys and 65% to 70% of teen-age girls masturbated, leading Kolata to add, “Today, Americans presumably know better.” In short, smart children learn from each other that the cause of it all is their parents’ ignorance in believing the Old Testament “sin of Onan,” the spilling of seed on barren ground. The not-so-smart parrot the perverse view that masturbation (and, for some, all sex) is bad for your health. The great majority are aware that masturbation is but one small facet of healthy sex. Sometimes called “the last taboo,” masturbation in 1994 was mentioned favorably by the African American Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders. Her clumsily improvised answer to a question at a United Nations conference was misconstrued to mean she favored instructing students how to masturbate, whereas she had merely said the subject was one about which schools should inform and not necessarily be excluded from sex education discussion in schools. Commented journalist Frank Rich when the Surgeon General was forced to leave office, “Surely the President knows that anyone who needs masturbation lessons is unlikely to meet the minimal intellectual requirements for school attendance anyway.” Rich added, after comedians brought the subject further out of the closet, “The more people talk about masturbation, the more fears can be dispelled among those young people who still worry that the act turns one into “a confirmed and degraded idiot” —which was the serious concern of Sylvester Graham, inventor of the graham cracker, from his popular 1834 book, A Lecture to a Young Man.” (Rich and Elders could not have known that the President in 1998 would himself be described by Monica Lewinsky as having engaged in oral sex with him in the White House but that he had finished himself off in the bathroom, a tale that titillated individuals around the world.) Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas W. Laqueur (2004) describes the subject thoroughly, quoting from Shakespeare to contemporary authors. Enlightenment leaders including Diderot were against it, but novelists like James Joyce and Marcel Proust and contemporary minds were not. Meanwhile in the 1990s, the comic Woody Allen cautioned individuals, “Don’t knock masturbation—it’s sex with someone I love.”
Mata, Pedro (1875–1946) Mato was a Spanish physician, a professor at the University of Madrid. He wrote Glory and Martyrdom (1851), poetry, as well as A Treatise on Human Reason (1858-1864) and On Moral Liberty and Free Will (1868). {BDF}
MATERIALISM Materialism is a widely held system of thought that explains the nature of the world as entirely dependent on matter, the final reality. Early materialists such as Democritus, Epicurus, and the proponents of Stoicism, conceived of reality as material in nature. In the 17th century the theory continued, and in the 18th century Locke’s investigations were adapted to the materialist position. In the 19th century, it developed in the form of dialectical materialism and in the formulations of logical positivism. In Humanist Sermons (1927), John Dietrich and Curtis Reese wrote
Humanism is not Materialism. Humanism holds the organic, not the mechanistic or materialistic, view of life. . . . Humanism encourages research in the realm of the spirit.
Thus countering the link of materialism to a deterministic, mechanistic view of the universe and reality, the two early Unitarian religious humanists used “spirit” in the old sense, much as we talk of “team spirit” or a “spirited person” or even “keeping one’s spirits up” when ill or suffering, Jone Johnson has noted. Organic views, such as the naturalism of Dewey, were not meant to isolate the so-called spiritual issues. As a term, materialism often implies a narrow reductionist view that is not a necessary prerequisite for either a naturalist or a humanistic approach, Alan Levin has observed. “The term has received a black eye because of Marx’s ‘dialectic materialism.’ When Marx used the phrase, he implied a hidden unmeasurable mechanism, thus violating the principle of materialism.” Extreme materialism, according to Keith Campbell in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “is the view that the real world consists of material things, varying in their states and relations, and nothing else.” One 20th century religious leader, Harlem’s Reverend Ike in New York City, used to illustrate his faith in “materialism”: “I wear $500 suits because the Lord wants me to wear $500 suits.” Materialists deny the existence of spirit and look for physical explanations for all phenomena. A materialist traces mental states to the brain or nervous system, not to the spirit or the soul. (See entry for Frederick Albert Lange, whose philosophic position was the opposite of the Kantian view of the world. Also, see the entry for Richard C. Vitzthum, whose work on materialism was more favorable than that of Lange. For one view as to how materialism differs from humanism, see the entry for Humanism Per Curtis Reese.) {CE; DCL; RE; WAS, e-mail from Jone Johnson, 23 May 1999 and Alan Levin 23 May 1999}
MATHEMATICS Science’s top unanswered questions: • How did life begin? • What is consciousness? • Why does the universe appear to follow mathematical laws?
Pythagoras dealt with the last question by declaring that numbers are the basic elements of the universe. Some have since assumed that God is the great mathematician, the one who declared, “Let there be numbers” before declaring “Let there be light.” Such a view, mathematician George Johnson explains, uses the notion of God metaphorically but embraces the philosophy of Plato “who proposed, rather unscientifically, that numbers and mathematical laws are ethereal ideals, existing outside of space and time in a realm beyond the reach of humankind.”
The point of science, however, is to describe the universe without invoking the supernatural. Reuben Hersh in What is Mathematics Really? (1997) wrote that “Ideal entities independent of human consciousness violate the empiricism of modern science,” insisting that mathematics is more of a human creation, like literature, religion, or banking. Rather than being some ethereal essence, it comes from people who invented, not discovered it. At the end of the twentieth century, such a human-centered mathematics has gained force and respect. Stanislas Dehaene, in The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (1997), [provides experimental evidence to show that the brains of humans—and even of chimpanzees and rats—may come equipped at birth with an innate, wired-in aptitude for mathematics. Gregory J. Chaitin’s The Limits of Mathematics (1997) takes an anti-Platonist stance. Other contemporary mathematicians no longer take for granted the Platonic creed. Rather than being a Universal Truth, mathematics is a useful invention. If humans ever were to encounter an alien civilization, would they understand concepts like pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter? Platonists assume yes, according to John D. Barrow in Pi in the Sky (1992). The anti-Platonists such as Jean-Pierre Changeux, the French neurobiologist, argue against such. “The Platonist claim that every intelligence must produce prime numbers, pi, and the continuum hypothesis,” insists Hersh, “is an example of simple anthropomorphism.” When does mathematics start for a human being? Some say it starts with one’s heartbeat in the womb, that it is the basis for all music, that its lack of importance in academic circles is lamentable. Anyone who can explain why the following is the correct answer deserves to be called a mathematician:
.111,111,111 111,111,111 [multiplied by]
12,345,678,987,654,321
(See entries for Population, Human; Population Explosion; and Six Degrees of Separation.) {George Johnson, The New York Times, 10 February 1998}
Mather, Cotton (1663–1728) One of the most celebrated of all New England Puritan ministers, he wrote Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), which vaguely shows how the history of Massachusetts demonstrated the working of God’s will. He is often depicted as the archetype of the narrow, intolerant, and severe Puritan. He played an important part in the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. (CE; OCAL; OEL)
Mather, David (19th Century) In Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992), Robert M. Wright relates a story about Dodge City, Kansas, which was told by Wright. Mather, or Mathews as Wright called him, was city marshal of Dodge at a time when an itinerant preacher was drawing large crowds to hear his sermons. Hearing that Mather was a wicked man, a killer of killers, so bad that he had killed seven one night in one house and all at one sitting, the preacher was ecstatic one Sunday upon finding Mather in a seat of honor in front of the evangelist. How the preacher rejoiced, how happy he was that in front of the large assemblage he could say he had converted the wickedest man in the county! He was so happy, in fact, he was now willing to die, certain that he would be rewarded by a place in heaven. Whereupon, large numbers agreed, declaring they wanted to die so they too could go to heaven rejoicing together. Then Mather rose. He said at last religion had been poured into him. He could feel it in his fingertips. He was sure that he, too, would go to heaven now that he had experienced the spirit. Then, he pulled out his two six-shooters, saying he would shoot the preacher and them and then himself to insure they all departed together. “I will send you first,” he said, firing a shot over the preacher’s head. Then he fired several shots in the direction of the faithful. Everyone fell to the floor, afraid. It was at this point that Mather declared, “You are all a set of liars and frauds. You don’t want to go to heaven with me at all,” whereupon he shot the place up and left. The now powerless preacher left town, too, departing for new fields. Wright ended the story much as fellow Midwesterner Mark Twain would have: “And I am sorry to relate, the people went back to their backsliding and wickedness.”
Mather, Increase (1639–1723) Cotton Mather’s father, in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation, set the stage for America’s apparent need for strong religious leaders as well as for its bibliolatrous future:
Consider . . . that some of us are under special advantage to understand these mysterious truths of God: that is to say, such of us as are in an exiled condition in this wilderness.…God hath led us into a wilderness, and surely it was not because the Lord hated us but because he loved us that he brought us into this Jeshimon.
Mather was the president of Harvard College (1685–1701) but spent little time in Cambridge. He and his son were outstanding upholders of the old Puritan theocracy and of the established order in church and state. (CE; OCAL; OEL)
Mathewson, Debra (20th Century) Mathewson is Secretary of Atheists of Northern Colorado. E-mail: <mark_m@sprynet.com>.
Mathiesen, Marius (20th Century) Mathiesen is an active member of the Norwegian Humanist Association and maintains their web page. E-mail: <mathiesen@human.no>.
Mathews, Harold Victor (1903– ) Mathews is an Australian humanist and educational innovator. He arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1912. In 1946 he became head of Australia’s first and only major experimental school. He holds that “speed reading” claims are questionable. Active in Rotary, View, Probus, and Skeptics, he co-authored Sex for Modern Teenagers (1968). {SWW}
Matisse, Henri (1869–1954) Matisse, the French painter, sculptor, and lithographer who along with Picasso is considered one of the two foremost artists of the modern era, was of Flemish descent—the name sometimes was spelled Mathis or Mathisse. When twenty-nine, he married Amélie Parayre, but it was with his first mistress, Camille Joblaud, that Matisse had his first child. The story of his difficulties in first becoming an artist, and of a “Humbert scandal” involving the Parayre family’s finances, has been detailed by Hilary Spurling in The Unknown Matisse: A Life of Henry Matisse, The Early Years, 1869-1908 (1998). The scandal made Parayre one of the most vilified names of that time, but once the Humberts were found guilty and sentenced to five years’ solitary confinement with hard labor both the Parayre and Matisse families felt exonerated. This allowed Matisse to continue his painting, which had been cut short by the “dark period” in his life. Matisse once wrote, “Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our original sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance.” Henry Spurling’s The Unknown Matisse (1998), confirmed not only that Matisse was “a staunch atheist” but also an anarchist. {TRI; TYD}
Matoub, Lounes (1956-1998) Matoub, an activist in the Berber cultural movement, was co-founder in 1976 of the Algerian Human Rights League. In 1994 Islamists kidnapped him and repeatedly threatened his life. In 1998 he was murdered in Algeria “for his freethinking and his defiant mountain music. “They’ll never kill him,” the singer’s sister was quoted as having said. “He has left his songs, which will speak for him.” {The Freethinker, August 1998}
MATRIARCHY: See entry for Patriarchy.
Matrix-Holt, Cherie (20th Century) Matrix-Holt, a member of the Central London Humanist Group and a former employee of the British Humanist Association, has written in New Humanist (May 1994) about a case in which a number of gay men were imprisoned for consensual sado-masochistic activities. Sado-masochism is not illegal in England and a person cannot consent to assault. But, according to Matrix-Holt, “there are exceptions: casual fighting, ritual circumcision, and beatings for religious purposes (no matter how severe) are allowed. A person can consent to being injured by a medical practitioner. Tattooing and piercing are allowed, yet only for decoration.”
Matson, David E. (20th Century) Matson, a Biblical scholar, has written for The Skeptical Review, pointing out many of the theologians’ inconsistencies in their attempt to “harmonize” the Bible. Matson, a computer programmer, is editor of the Oak Hill Free Press (PO Box 61274, Pasadena, CA 91116). He has written for Freethought Perspective. On the Web: <www.rthoughtsrfree.org/sfw/books.htm>.
Matson, Floyd William (1921– ) A professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii and a former president of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology, Matson is author of The Broken Image and Becoming and Behaviour. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2; PK; SHD}
Matson, Rosemary (20th Century) Matson is a California representative of the National Women’s Political Caucus. An activist on behalf of eco-feminist, civil liberties, women’s rights, and world peace causes, she was named 1995 Humanist Heroine by the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Caucus. {HNS2; The Humanist, Nov-Dec 1995}
Matson, Wallace I. (20th Century) Matson, a freethinker, wrote The Existence of God (1965). He wrote Sentience (1987). {GS}
Matsumura, Ken (20th Century) Matsumura is chairman of the Northern California Council of Humanist Organizations (NOCCHO), and he is a director of Secular Humanists of the East Bay (SHEB) in Berkeley, California.
Matsumura, Molleen (20th Century) Matsumura is a local humanist group leader in East Bay, Berkeley, California, the Network Project Director of the National Center for Science Education, an associate editor of Free Inquiry, a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, and a contributing editor of the Secular Humanist Bulletin. In 1991, she collaborated with Fang Fu Ruan, writing Sex in China. She also wrote Voices for Evolution (1995), a collection of the official position of many groups with regard to the teaching of evolution and creationism. Matsumura is associate director of the National Center for Science Education. In her position, she has blamed America’s decentralized education system, which allows countless small decisions on what is taught in schools to be made at the local level. Matsumura signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {The Economist, 17 August 1996; FD; Molleen Matsumura, “Pornography: A Business Like Any Other,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1997}
Matthews, Dave (20th Century) On the death of Matthews’s sister, the recording artist said he no longer was a believer. “I’m glad some people have that faith. I don’t have that faith. If there is a God, a caring God, then we have to figure he’s done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.” {CA}
Matthews, Dave (9 Jan 1967 - )
Matthews is a rock singer and recording artist who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, but moved two years later to Westchester County, NY, where his dad, a physicist, worked for IBM. In the early 1970s he moved to Cambridge, England, then returned to New York, where his father died in 1977. The family then returned in 1980 to South Africa where he attended different schools and, in his words, "got more wise about the evils of government, there and in general."
In 1986 he relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia, where his parents had lived before he was born, took piano lessons, learned to play the guitar, and got the idea of having his own band. "I didn't really have a vision, or a plan," Matthews has said. "I'm sure [traveling] gave me a little bit of an openness. The most diverse music in the world is in America, 'cause there's so many different cultures here, but what tends to be pushed to the top is often a narrow view of what there really is. So maybe [travel] just gave me a wider pool of listening." His goal in starting the Dave Matthews Band was to surround himself with the best players possible, and the main four—whom he refers to as his superiors—ended up fitting together. “The band wasn’t something that I was looking for; it was very much I loved the people I asked to play with me. There was a connection at the beginning, and I think what we've been about is not some grand scheme but more the spirit of everyone, which is why we ended up with this band and why it sounds like it does.” In the magazine Us (June 1998), he told an interviewer when asked about religion, “I’m glad some people have that faith. I don’t have that faith. If there is a God, a caring god, then we have to figure he’s done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.” And in the Boston Globe (4 Mar 2001), Steve Morse says of Matthews that he “crystallizes his thoughts on God in the rocking 'What You Are' with the verse, 'Hoping to God on high is like clinging to straws while drowning. . . . Oh, realize what you are!’ ” Matthews is quoted: “It would be safe to say that I'm agnostic. However, I do feel as though we owe a faith to the world and to ourselves. We owe a grace and gratitude to things that have brought us here. But I think it's very ignorant to say, `Well, for everything, God has a plan.' That's like an excuse. . . . Maybe the real faithful act is to commit to something, to take action, as opposed to saying, `Well, everything is in the hand of God.’ ” {CA}
Mattill, A. J. Jr. (1924– )
In a pamphlet, “Ingersoll Attacks the Bible,” Mattill synthesizes a number of Ingersoll’s comments about the Bible. Other of his works include The Seven Mighty Blows to Traditional Beliefs and Jesus and the Last Things: The Story of Jesus the Suffering Servant. He also has written a critique of freethought, The Art of Reading the Bible, and a study of Universalism, The Evolution of American Universalism. Originally ordained to the ministry of the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1952, he transferred to Churches of God in North America in 1966, then dropped his ordination and membership to be ordained a Unitarian in 1979. He translated Albert Schweitzer’s The Problem of the Lord’s Last Supper (1982) and wrote Ingersoll Attacks the Bible (1987) and A New Universalism for a New Century (1989).
Mattill has described his works as “free-thought studies that seek to show the inadequacy of traditional religions and set forth the basic elements of a rational religion.” He has written for Free Inquiry and is a contributing editor of The American Rationalist. {Free Inquiry, Spring, 1981; GS}
Mattson, Esther (20th Century) Mattson was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, which led that county to abandon its official Good Friday holy day. She received the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s 1998 Freethinker of the Year Award. {Freethought Today, April 1997}
Matulis, Sherry (1931– ) “I was born an atheist (aren’t we all?) in the small town of Nevada, Iowa,” Matulis has written. She is a contributor of poetry and articles to Freethought Today, which is published by Freedom From Religion Foundation. In 1991 at the 50th annual convention of the American Humanist Association, Matulis was named “Humanist Heroine.” In 1954, she experienced a life-threatening illegal abortion sought after she was raped. Often called “the village atheist,” Matulis has written,
Rumor has it that I’m the love child of a clandestine affair between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Jules Verne, but don’t you believe it for a moment. Actually, I’m a libertarian feminist who has devoted the first fifty years of her life primarily to the children of her body, five in number, and who is intent on devoting at least the next fifty to the children of her mind, which at last count number somewhere in the gazillions. {WWS}
Maubert de Gouvest, Jean Henri (1721–1767) Brought up as a monk, Maubert de Gouvest fled and took service in the Saxon army. He was thrown into prison by the King of Poland, but the Papal nuncio procured his release on condition of his retaking his habit. This he did and went to Rome to be relieved of his vows. Failing this, he went to Switzerland and England, where he was well received by Lord Bolingbroke. Maubert de Gouvest published Lettres Iroquoises (1752) and other anonymous works, but in 1764 he was arrested as a fugitive monk and vagabond in Frankfort, where he was imprisoned for eleven months. {BDF} Maude, Aylmer (1858–1908) While on business in Moscow from 1880 to 1897, Maude met Tolstoi, whose mysticism he did not share. He collaborated in translating Tolstoi’s works and wrote Tolstoi and his Friends (1901) and Life of Tolstoi (1908–1910). {RAT}
Maudsley, Henry (1835–1916) Maudsley, who was born in Yorkshire, was educated in London, took mental pathology as his specialty, and reached eminence in his profession. He wrote many works, among them The Physiology and Pathology of the Mind (1867) and Body and Mind (1870). His Natural Laws and Supernatural Seemings (1880) was a powerful exposure of the essence of all superstition. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Maugham, John (Died 1875) Maugham was a freethought leader in London. He was an opponent of Holyoake and of Bradlaugh’s neo-Malthusian policies. {VI}
Maugham, William Somerset (1874–1965) Maugham, an expert storyteller and a master of fictional technique, was orphaned at ten and sent to live with his uncle, a stern vicar. Although he qualified as a physician, he never practiced medicine but his training convinced him there is no God. He wrote seventy-eight books and many plays. Of Human Bondage (1915) describes some of the bondages in life that a person with a clubfoot has—Maugham was a stammerer who empathized with such problems. Another bondage which he described was that of being born into some organized religion, as if the geographical accident must remain permanent. “A Unitarian,” he wrote in the novel, “very earnestly disbelieves in almost everything that anybody else believes, and he has a very lively sustaining faith in he doesn’t quite know what.” (Any rationalist looking for a novel to recommend might well start with this book.) The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is based on the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin—asked what the title meant, Maugham has been quoted as saying, “People tell me it’s a good title but they don’t know what it means. It means reaching for the moon and missing the sixpence at one’s feet.” One of his better known works is a short story, “Miss Thompson,” which reached a wide audience when made into a movie. Maugham wrote with wit and irony, frequently showing a resigned agnosticism combined with a cynical attitude toward life. Summing Up (1939) includes the following: “The arguments for immortality, weak when you take them one by one, are no more cogent when you take them together. . . . For my part, I cannot see how consciousness can persist when its physical basis has been destroyed, and I am too sure of the interconnection of my body and my mind to think that any survival of my consciousness apart from my body would be in any sense a survival of myself. . . . It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct.” After discussing religion, he declared “I remain an Agnostic.” The Razor’s Edge (1943) is a humanistic account, one that deals with Laurence Darrell, a young American, and his search for “spiritual” fulfillment. Darrell, it could be argued, is the leading fictional proponent of humanistic naturalism. In his search for truths, not Truth, he found,
I wanted to believe, but I couldn’t believe in a God who wasn’t better than the ordinary decent man.
He further comes to doubt all the basic tenets of Christian theology; is not satisfied with theologians’ answers to his question that, if an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil; and finds interesting the Katha-Upanishad’s statement, “The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.” Any rationalist will understand the feeling that Darrell experiences when in India he at last senses why he needs neither a nirvana nor a heaven:the sharp edge of reason had shown him that the ecstasy of life is not dependent upon retiring to a cloister and accepting the various theological explanations but, rather, is connected with understanding the joys of living in this world, in loving the objects of this world, “not indeed for themselves, but for the Infinite that is in them.” Maugham in 1914 had met Gerald Haxton, a young American who remained his companion until dying in 1944. Maugham is said to have believed that early nights would keep him young, and he used this as an excuse to decline certain invitations. But there is the story that at one party, when a friend encouraged him to stay a little longer, Maugham declined, saying, “I want to keep my youth.” Whereupon his bitchy friends, knowing of his bisexuality, chimed in, “Then why didn’t you bring him with you so we could meet him?” Maugham was not amused. His son’s later accounts of his own and his father’s homosexual escapades have dazzled gossips for decades. One story, told by Martin Greif, is that Maugham was injected with cells from sheep fetuses (as allegedly Merle Oberon and also Pope Pius XII had been), and “he delighted in demonstrating to uncomfortable guests his ability to achieve a rampant erection.” Another story is that on his deathbed when he was 91, the elder Maugham grabbed Alan Searle’s hand and, whispering to his lover Searle, said, “I want to shake your hand and thank you for all that you’ve done for me.” In another version, his last words were, “Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.” In 1949, in A Writer’s Notebook, Maugham wrote, “What mean and cruel things men do for the love of god.” Two years later he wrote the present author concerning humanism:
The fact is that I know nothing about the philosophy of naturalistic humanism, and so there is nothing I can say about it.
However, soon afterwards he apparently completed some research, for he became associated with the New Humanist, a publication of the British Rationalist Press Association (RPA), of which Bertrand Russell was president. Maugham also accepted an honorary associateship from the Rationalist Press Association. {CE; CL; GL; JM; RE; TYD; WAS, 24 March 1951}
MAUI In Polynesia, the Maui gods were sons of the sun. {LEE}
Maupassant, Guy de (1850–1893) Maupassant was described by Corliss Lamont as a humanist, an author who is an exemplar of French psychological realism. Before going mad in 1891, Maupassant—whose full name was Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant—wrote prodigiously about characters that were unhappy victims of their greed, their desire, their vanity. But he describes the sordidness without sermonizing. Although his short stories are masterpieces and include “The Necklace,” “The Piece of String,” and “Mlle. Fifi,” he is also known for A Life (1883), Bel-Ami (1885), and Pierre And Jean (1880), the latter a study of two brothers and their hatred. The influence of Maupassant upon other writers has been significant. {CE; CL; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de (1698–1759) Maupertuis was a French mathematician, geometrician to the Paris Academy of Sciences and one of the chief experts engaged to measure a degree of the meridian. Maupertuis was a friend of Frederic the Great and Voltaire. Besides his many works on mathematics and astronomy, Maupertuis published a rationalist work on religion (in Latin, 1750). He was a member of the French Academy. {RE}
Maurer, George (20th Century) Maurer, who has been the Treasurer of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Free Inquiry Group, became President in 1998.
Maurois, André: See entry for Charles Mayer.
MAUSOLEUM • Mausoleum, n. The final and funniest folly of the rich. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Mauvillon, Jakob Von (1743–1794) Secretary to the King of Poland, Mauvillon wrote several histories. Besides translating and writing intelligently on matters of economic and military science, he became a pronounced heretic, carefully hiding his unbeliefs. A friend and admirer of Mirabeau, he defended the French Revolution in Germany. One of Mauvillon’s anonymous works was The Only True System of the Christian Religion (1767), which first had the title of False Reasonings of the Christian Religion. {BDF; JMR; JMRH; RAT}
Maverick, Maury Jr. (20th Century) Maverick, a journalist for the San Antonio Express-News and a former Texas legislator, wrote Texas Iconoclast. He is an activist member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Mawer, W. (19th Century) Mawer was a freethinker who wrote “Plain Reasons Why Prosecution for Blasphemy Should be Abolished” (1884). {GS}
Maxim, Hiram Stevens [Sir] (1840–1916) Maxim, the inventor of the Maxim machine gun, was an American who moved to England. Among his inventions were a smokeless powder, a delayed-action fuse, and an airplane. In 1900 he became a British subject and in 1901 he was knighted. His brother Hudson and his son Hiram Percy Maxim were all scientists. McCabe, who knew him well, said that in private Maxim was a virulent atheist. Maxim gave expression to it by making a large collection of criticisms of religion which were arranged in a volume he called Li Hung-chang’s Scrap-Book (1913). The Chinese statesman, whom he had known, was dead, but Maxim had said he would have agreed for he, also, was a disdainful atheist. He also wrote My Life (1915). {JM; RAT; RE}
Max Müller, Friedrich (1823–1900) Max Müller, a philologist, became the highest authority in Europe on Sanskrit. However, the clergy kept him out because of his advanced rationalism. Max Müller’s pantheist views are seen in his Origin and Growth of Religion (1878). {RAT; RE}
Maxse, Frederick Augustus (1833–1900) Maxse’s distinguished career in the navy won him the appointment of Rear Admiral. After he retired, he worked for progressive movements, especially rationalism. Maxse was an atheist and, according to George Meredith, a fiery one. {RAT; RE}
Maxwell, Jordan (20th Century) Maxwell is a freethinker who lectures on astromythology and astrotheology. He has written, “Christians today do not orient themselves to new knowledge or existing factual evidence. They stubbornly cling to these stories and myths that are over 6,000 years old which they have been led to believe, and thus lead others to believe.” Jordan appeared on over two hundred radio and television programs across the country, speaking about ancient mysteries of the Bible and similar topics.
Maxwell, Stephen (1953– )
Maxwell is an Australian rationalist, atheist, and plumber. By the age of twelve, he claims to have become an unbeliever despite his and his family’s being nominally Catholic. In the 1980s Maxwell joined the Rationalist Association of New South Wales, became treasurer in 1992, and is a regular contributor to The Rationalist News. He is author of The History of Soapbox Oratory, Part One: Prominent Speakers of the Sydney Domain. {Freethought History, #23, 1997; SWW}
May, Samuel (1810–1899) A Unitarian minister, May was an Abolitionist who wrote The Fugitive Slave Law and Its Victims (1856). {U}
May, Samuel Joseph (1797–1871 May, a Unitarian minister, was a prominent Abolitionist. He wrote On Redemption By Jesus Christ (1847) and What Do Unitarians Believe? (1869). Though both were married, May and educational leader George Barrell Emerson (1797-1881) maintained an intimate sexual friendship for their entire years. {Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland (1998); U}
May, Walter Victor (Born 1868) May, a German zoologist, edited the Socialist Beobachter. He was imprisoned for twenty-two months for blasphemy. He wrote, besides zoological works, Goethe, Humboldt, Darwin, Haeckel (1904), E. Haeckel (1909), and other volumes on evolution. In Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken, May explains that he does not strictly follow Haeckel but is “as far removed as ever from any ecclesiastical creed.” {RAT}
Mayabb, Stanley E. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Mayabb was co-founder of the Humanist Group of Vacaville and Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, California. {HM2}
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Vladimirovich) (1893–1930) Stalin admired Mayakovsky’s fiction, but the poet-dramatist-activist revealed in The Bathhouse his contempt for political developments in Stalin’s time. Called “the leading poet of the Revolution,” Mayakovsky became a leading Russian futurist, attacking all of his country’s literary past, and calling for a radical linguistic experiment. He loved to bait the bourgeoisie, and two of his satirical plays are Klop (1928, translated as The Bedbug) and Banya (1930, The Bathhouse). Although known for his propaganda (agitka), he was admired by William Carlos Williams for his “stepped lines.” Once, he wrote an impassioned poem criticizing Esenin for having committed suicide, but after an unhappy love affair with Lili, the wife of Osip Brik, Mayakovsky shot himself to death. According to Martin Seymour-Smith, Mayakovsky “at heart was a religious (non-Christian) modernist but with his roots more firmly in tradition than many of his contemporaries.” {CE; TRI}
Maybeck, Bernard (1862–1973?) Maybeck, a Unitarian, is the architect who designed in 1939 the Palace of Arts in San Francisco for the Golden Gate Exposition Frank Lloyd Wright, when invited to deliver the first Maybeck lecture at the University of California in Berkeley during the 1950s, was asked if he had ever met Maybeck. To his hearers’ surprise, he answered no, adding he did not think much of Maybeck’s architecture, according to Alan Parcells in World (Sep-Oct 1992). {UU}
Mayer, A. W. F. (20th Century) Writing in Freethinker (August 1999), Mayer laments the fact that “there are whole cultures in other countries and cultural groups in this country today in which a woman is considered better dead than defiled. Fathers and brothers will pursue and kill daughters or sisters for disobeying or being forced to disobey their cultural rules. Marital or sexual ‘crimes’ can lead to women being beaten, imprisoned, maimed, or outcast from their families.”
Mayer, Charles (Born 1881) A French scientist, Mayer is author of In Quest of A New Ethics (translation by Harold Larrabee). In 1951, he wrote the present author:
Je suis en possession de votre lettre me demandant si je connais actuellement des personnages importants en France dont la philosophie est l’équivalent de ce qu’aux États-Unis vous appelez ‘humanisme naturaliste.’ Il est très difficile de vous preciser des noms parce qu’en France l’appellation d’humaniste n’a pas le sens relativement précis qu’elle possède aux États-Unis. C’est ainsi que Maritain, écrivain catholique, se réclame tout autant de l’humanisme que Sartre, écrivain athée.
Je suis donc bien embarrasé pour vous citer quelques noms. George Duhamel, André Siegfried, Jules Romains, Emile Henriot, et aussi bien entendu Édouard Herriot son des Humanistes mais comme l’a remarque très justement le Professeur Harold Larrabee pour André Maurois je serais surpris qu’ils acceptent de se placer sous une denomination philosophique quelconque. Espérant que ces quelques renseignements répondent à peu près à l’objet de votre lettre, je vous prie de croire, Cher Monsieur, à mes bien sympathiques sentiments.
The letter states that although “naturalistic humanist” is not a commonly used term in France, Mayer considers that the phrase generally describes the outlooks of Duhamel, Siegfried, Romains, Henriot, and Herriot. However, Maurois likely would not have listed himself as such. In the 1950s, Mayer was a correspondent (France) for The Humanist. {HNS; WAS, 25 July 1951}
Mayer, Jean (1920–1993) Mayer, who was president of Tufts University from 1976 to 1992, was a visionary, nutritionist, and recipient of three Croix de Guerre and nearly a dozen other French military honors. While a French second lieutenant in the field artillery, he was captured by German forces during World War II but shot a guard and then served with the French underground. In 1950 he joined the faculty of Harvard University, where he taught nutrition and public health. He became an adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, as well as to Congress, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Children’s Fund. In 1966, he was one of the first scientists to speak out against the use of herbicides in the Vietnam War. Mayer was a member of Boston’s King’s Chapel and was proud of Tufts’ Universalist past.
Mayer, Philip (20th Century) A liberal minister, Mayer wrote The Nature Spirit: Religion Without Supernatural Hopes (1987). {GS; HNS}
Mayer, William V. (20th Century) Director of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study at the University of Colorado, Mayer is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. In 1980, he wrote Perspective on the Educational Uses of Animals.
Mayfield, William H. (20th Century) Mayfield was a freethinker who wrote “A Brief Summary of Fundamentals Relating to Life, Death, Religion, and Philosophy” (1951). {GS}
Mayhew, Jonathan (1720–1766) An important 18th century liberal, Mayhew was called by Conrad Wright one of “the two great leaders (with Charles Chauncy) of the first generation of New England Arminians.” Minister of West Church in Boston, he was a strong opponent of creeds in any form, and he led in the attack on the doctrines of “original sin,” laying the groundwork for the affirmation of human nature that would eventually develop in the thought of William Ellery Channing and others. In the funeral sermon for Mayhew, Chauncy said, “He nobly claimed that which he esteemed equally the right of others—the liberty of thinking for himself.” {TYD; U; U&U}
MAYLASIAN FREETHOUGHT
• Nakkeeran Parry, in Kuala Lumpur, belongs to an atheist organization called Periyar Pagutharivu Pasarai. Phone (603) 4456781. • A Dravidar Association at Kuala Lumpur is modeled upon the Dravidian groups of India. (See Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth by Gordon Stein.)
Maylone, W. Edgar (20th Century) A freethinker, Maylone wrote Thrown At the Atheist’s Head (1973). {FUS; GS}
Maynard Smith, John (1920– ) In 1986, Prof. Maynard Smith, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. His works include On Evolution, (1972), The Evolution of Sex (1978), Evolution and the Theory of Games (1982), Evolutionary Genetics (1989), and, with Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995). Smith shares Daniel C. Dennett’s strong supporter of Darwinism. (See his critique of Darwinism in the entry for Dennett.)
Mayo, E. L.: See entry for Theism.
MAYONNAISE • Mayonnaise, n. One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Mayor, Osborne Henry: See the entry for James Bridie.
Mayr, Ernst (1904– ) Mayr is a retired zoology educator who is associated with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He was a member of the Rothschild expedition to Dutch New Guinea in 1928, to New Guinea 1928–1929, and various other places. He has written about New Guinea birds, systematic zoology, animal species, and evolution. He was president of the XIII International Ornithology Congress in 1962, recipient of the Wallace Darwin medal in 1958, and editor of Evolution (1947–1949). Mayr has received honors from Australian, British, New Zealand, German, and Russian organizations. Because of his 1997 article in which the words “by God” appeared, he was asked if he was a theist and responded,
I am definitely a non-theist. When I used the expression “by God,” it was merely an expletive. When I got my first employment contract in 1926 at the University of Berlin, I had to make a formal declaration to be exempted from paying the 10% church tax. My views are obvious to anyone reading my recent book, This is Biology (Harvard University Press, 1997). {WAS 12 May 1997}
Mayr, Jack (20th Century) Mayr is an atheist-humanist activist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Mayur, Rshmi (20th Century) Mahur, director of the International Institute for a Sustainable Future and President of Global Futures Network, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
MAZDA See entry for Zoroastrianism. Mazdaism is an Iranian religion that evolved about the fifth century B.C.E., succeeding the prophetism (Zoroastrianism) of an earlier period. {ER}
Mazlish, Bruce (1923- ) A historian and educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mazlish (with Jacob Bronowski) wrote The Western Intellectual Tradition (1960). His other works include James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the 19 Century (1975; The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (1993); and The Uncertain Sciences (1998). He edited Psychoanalysis and History (1963, revised 1971). In The Uncertain Sciences Mazlish urges science and the humanities to work on understanding their relationship. So long as religion slows the process, humanity will continue to have difficulty discarding religion unless scientists and humanists combine their efforts. Unfortunately, people will continue to “espouse and act in accordance with religious beliefs, rather than the laws and methods of the human sciences,” he laments. He is alarmed that one poll reports that 70% of Americans “belong to a church of some sort.”
Mazhar, Isma’il (20th Century) In Cairo, Egypt, Mazhar edited in Arabic al-’Usur from 1927 to 1931. One of his works published in the 1960s on the subject of Arab philosophy is Tarikh al-fikr al Arabi.
Mazlish, Bruce (1923– ) “A human is that animal who breaks out of the animal kingdom by creating machines,” Mazlish has written in The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution of Humans and Machines (1993). A professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mazlish warns humanists that they must not let machines dominate them, that machines “can pose a real threat if we don’t understand that they are an extension of ourselves that can be used to better or worse purposes.” Machines can be good, of course, such as telescopes and microscopes and eyeglasses that are extensions of our sensory apparatus. We increasingly acquire artificial hips, knees, and pacemakers. We merge our mental faculties with a computer. But, Mazlish states, in the human quest for perfection we have developed the computer robot that will take on a life of its own. This, he warns, is scary. Mazlish is author (with J. Bronowsky) The Western Intellectual Tradition (1960). He also wrote The Riddle of History (1966), Meaning of Karl Marx (1984), and The Leader, the Led, and the Psyche (1990). Mazlish is associate editor of Journal of Interdisciplinary History. (See an interview with Mazlish by Timothy J. Madigan in Free Inquiry, Fall 1994.)
Mazzini, Giuseppe (1805–1872) Mazzini was a revolutionist and Italian patriot, whose secret society Giovine Italia (Young Italy) campaigned for Italian unity under a republican government. A supporter of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, Mazzini like Garibaldi was a member of the Masonic Lodge, an organization disapproved of by the Vatican because of its being a secret lodge that was non-theistic and pro-deistic. Carlyle called Mazzini, the deist, “a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind.” McCabe, rather than emphasizing Mazzini’s deism, said Mazzini praised Christ, criticized Christian doctrines, and had an emphatic belief in a deistic God. {BDF; CE; JM; RE; Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, 1995}
[[Mc: Names starting with Mac or Mc are listed as if they are spelled Mac.
Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931) An American philosopher and psychologist, Mead studied the development of the mind and the self, and he regarded mind as the natural emergent from the interaction of the human organism and its social environment. Within this biosocial structure the gap between impulse and reason is bridged by the use of language. Man, to master language, sets up assumptions as to his role in life, and self and consciousness-of-self emerge, giving intelligence a historical development that is both natural and moral. Mead called his position social behaviorism, using conduct—both social and biological—as an approach to all experience. The Columbia Encyclopedia states that the work of John Dewey and of Mead may be regarded as complementary. Mead wrote The Philosophy of the Present, Mind, Self, and Society; and The Philosophy of the Act, all published posthumously. Not a member of an organized religion, Mead was a freethinker and non-supernaturalist. {CE; HNS2}
Mead, Margaret (1901–1978) Mead, the American anthropologist who was affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History from 1926 until her death, won world fame through studies of child rearing, personality, and culture. Among her books are Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), Growing Up in New Guinea (1930), Male and Female (1949), and the autobiographical Blackberry Winter (1972). Asked about humanism, she responded to the present author:
I can’t classify myself under any of the headings in any known fashion. I suspect that we are on the verge of a new religious integration. This is going to owe a great deal to technical advances on the one hand, i.e., developments like “Cybernetics,” Gray Walter’s The Living Brain, and things of that sort, and a rapprochement between Eastern and Western historical religions on the other—the sort of thing that is foreshadowed in Neville Shute’s Round the Bend, or Edmund Taylor’s chapter, “Journey Into Morning,” in Richer By Asia. I also suspect that in what is at present called the “neo-orthodoxy,” young people are handling traditional religious symbols of all sorts including traditional atheism on a deutero level, which most religious leaders are unwilling or unable to deal with. So I’m afraid I don’t fit in any way.
Mead did not fit in with Hannah Arendt, either. In Between Friends (1995), her letter to Mary McCarthy illustrates this: “I was away from New York, an idiotic affair at Baltimore, honorary degree together with Margaret Mead, a monster, and Marianne Moore, an angel. . . . Mead (one better call her only by her second name, not because she is a man, but because she certainly is not a woman).” Although Mead had been married three times, she was described by one of her friends as one who “fell in love with women’s souls and men’s bodies. She was spiritually homosexual, psychologically bisexual, and physically heterosexual.” When she was asked what she thought of homosexuals, Mead—who when she gave birth at the age of forty to her child had insisted on having the delivery filmed in order to study the film—once replied, “They make the best companions in the world.” And in 1976, speaking before the Washington Press Club, Mead told the reporters, “I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.” Mary Catherine Bateson, her daughter, was once chastised by Mead for having had a romance with another woman. Then, six years after her mother’s death, Bateson disclosed in her memoirs that Mead and anthropologist Ruth Benedict had had a long affair, commencing in the summer of 1925 when the two took a trip together to the Grand Canyon. Fearing an openly lesbian relationship would damage her career, Mead remained closeted. In fact, both she and the married Benedict were once romantically interested in linguist Edward Sapir. {AA; Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work [1959]; WAS, 16 August 1954}
Mead, Sidney Earl (1904– ) A distinguished American church historian, Mead wrote, “When the overwhelming bulk of American Protestantism turned ‘right’ in a flight from Reason (during the early 1800s), Unitarianism turned ‘left’ in defense of Reason.” He described a “typical Unitarian” as “one for whom the standard religious formulas have failed, who lives therefore on the verge of a belief vacuum.” He was president of Meadville Theological School from 1956 to 1960, after which he taught at Southern California School of Theology and at the University of Iowa. Among his works are The Old Religion in the Brave New World (1977) and History and Identity (1979). {U&U}
Meade, Robert D. (20th Century) Meade, in “The Gods and Medical Practice” (The American Rationalist, January-February 1996), describes some scenes of cross-cultural psychology in which he observed the following:
• In Nepal, he was prevented from helping a holy man who was clearly having an epileptic fit. Next day near a bodi tree, his followers rejoiced that the holy man had been taken into death by God.
• In Northern India, he observed a village where smallpox was rampant and the natives had erected statues to Sheetala, the goddess of smallpox. Residents prayed that they would receive the blessings of Sheetala and have as evidence the disease’s scars, which in the rest of the world are met with great dread.
• In Central Africa, he found a young woman lying on the ground, bewitched, receiving sacrifices of scarce and precious foodstuffs that were burned to obtain the gods’ help in her recovery. She died a short time later.
• In another place, chanting noises were made by women dressed in dark colors while in the front of the room a man in a long, white robe was leading the chants. In his hand he had a long stick, on which was perched a carving of a nearly naked figure, his grimacing face contorted and twisted as if in great pain. Candles cast an eerie glow, and the room was filled with the fetid stench of rancid burning wax. The place was a small town in the State of Washington, and the Catholic parishioners “were engaging in a primitive, superstitious ritual and praying to yet another god that their leader, the Pope, would recover from surgery, which had removed a tumor from his colon.”
Meades, Jonathan (20th Century) Meades, a British novelist, was named an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society in 1997. On his television program, “Modern Times,” he has attacked some of the directions of recent leaders of organized religion, saying, “The churches got it wrong. The punters wanted more mumbo-jumbo, not less.” {CA}
Jonathan Meades, UK Television Presenter media
Meades set out his strongly atheistic position in the Sunday Telegraph March 2, 1997.
He followed this up in his television program Modern Times which the contributor writes was as much an attack on the Church of England as God: "The churches got it wrong. The punters wanted more mumbo-jumbo, not less."
Meador, Andrew J. (20th Century) Meador was a freethinker who wrote The Christ of Prophecy (1953). {GS}
MEANING • The meaning of life is that it stops. –Franz Kafka
• There is an old bon mot, sometimes ascribed to Sir Hamilton A. R. Gibb of Oxford . . . that every Arab word has its primary meaning, then its opposite meaning, then something to do with a camel, and lastly something obscene. Similarly, it was said at Harvard, when I was there in the ‘60s, that every Sanskrit word means itself, its opposite, a name of God, and a position in sexual intercourse. –Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider
MEANINGLESSNESS: See entry for Walter Burkert.
MECCA: See entry for Islam.
MEDICINE • Like a celestial chaperon, the placebo leads us through the uncharted passageways of mind and gives us a greater sense of infinity than if we were to spend all our days with our eyes hypnotically glued to the giant telescope at Mt. Palomar. –Norman Cousins
Gerald W. Friedland and Meyer Friedman in Medicine’s 10 Greatest Discoveries (1998) list the following:
• 1543: Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Structure of the Human Body) illustrated why without bones our bodies would be mushy blobs. • 1628: William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart) introduced the discovery of circulation, saying that his findings were “of so novel and unheard-of character, that I not only fear injury to myself from the envy of a few, but I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies.” • 1675: Anton Leeuwenhoek, looking under a microscope at a drop of rainwater, found “little animals,” bacteria that cause all kinds of diseases. • 1796: Edward Jenner, using cowpox to cause a mild disease to protect from the deadlier smallpox, led to injecting dead bacteria to help eradicate smallpox and protect against bubonic plague, chickenpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, measles, mumps, rabies, typhoid fever, tetanus, and other diseases. • 1842: Crawford Long used ether to prevent the feeling of pain, developing surgical anesthesia. • 1895: Wilhelm Roentgen discovered the X-ray beam, leading to the development of the most important diagnostic tools. • 1907: Ross Harrison grew living cells outside the body, making it possible to search for the causes of diseases including cancer. • 1912: Nikolai Anichkov discovered that cholesterol is responsible for coronary artery disease. • 1928: Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, leading the way for the development of other antibiotics to treat infections. • 1950-1953: Maurice Wilkins did pioneer work to isolate a single fiber of DNA, leading James Watson and Francis Crick to develop their own double helix model of DNA, the heredity-bearing molecule. All three shared the Nobel Prize.
MEDICINE AND RELIGION: See entry for Robert D. Meade.
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY: See entry for classical humanism. Also, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.
MEDITATION: See entry for Bliss.
Medow, Louis E. (20th Century) Medow was one of fifty-three charter members in 1991 of Atheists of Florida. He is a member of the South Florida Chapter of American Atheists.
Medvedev, Zhores A. (1925– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Medvedev, a Soviet dissident, was associated with the Medical Research Council. In 1986 he wrote Gorbachev and in 1990 The Legacy of Chernobyl. {HM2; SHD}
Medwin, Thomas (1788–1869) In 1810, Medwin collaborated with Shelley, his cousin, in writing Ahasuerus the Wanderer, which publishers rejected as “atheistic.” It was finally published in 1823. Medwin in 1824 published a Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron and, after Shelley’s death, wrote A Memoir of P. B. Shelley (1833), which he later expanded into The Life of P. B. Shelley (2 volumes, 1847). {RAT}
Meercx, Joep (20th Century) A Dutch conscientious objector, Meercx is full-time secretary of the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s Human Rights Commissioner’s ombudsteam. An anthropologist with experience in Argentina, he has worked as a volunteer for Amnesty International. Jim Herrick wrote about Meercx’s work in the New Humanist (June 1988).
Meehl, Joanne H. (20th Century) Meehl, an employment counselor with the South Coastal Worker Assistance Center, is author of The Recovering Catholic: Personal Journeys of Women Who Left the Church (1995). The book tells of the reasons women begin to question their faith, the heavy burden of religious guilt, the attitudes of the hierarchy toward women, and the escalating amount of sexual abuse cases involving priests. Meehl is, herself, a recovering Catholic.
Meeker, Kevin (20th Century) Meeker in 1996 won the Graduate Student Award for submitted papers at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association. His subject was “Hume’s Scepticism about Reason and Naturalized Epistemology.” Meeker, Mindy (20th Century) Meeker is Vice President for Programs of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio, Texas.
Megahey, Leslie (20th Century) Megahey in 1994 wrote and directed “The Advocate,” a movie that commences showing a man fitted with a noose, about to be executed for having had “carnal knowledge of the she-ass here present.” At his side is the complicit donkey, also about to be hanged. According to Megahey, in 15th Century France animals and inanimate objects could be tried under civil law. Rats could be summoned as courtroom witnesses, but because of the church’s influence a Jewish doctor could not. The story, which begins in 1452, is said to take place just thirty years after cohabiting with a Jew ceased to be a capital crime. In the script, the advocate of the title serves as a public defender, and his first client is a woman accused of witchcraft. He loses. His second is a pig, the property of some roving Gypsies. The pig has been accused of killing and partially devouring a Jewish boy from the village—thus, a double crime, because the Catholic Church has an injunction against eating meat on Fridays. He loses again. Janet Maslin, reviewing the medieval shenanigans in The New York Times (24 August 1994), notes that a last-minute pardon arrives, not for the man and his ass but for his impassive-looking consort. “She is released without stain to her character,” intones a solemn magistrate, who then presides over the man’s execution. Whereupon the local peasants watch eagerly as justice is done. Megahey’s wit in detailing theological niceties is clearly in the tradition of freethought.
Megata, E. M. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Megata was a correspondent (Japan) for The Humanist.
Mehring, Darryl (20th Century) Mehring is active with the Humanists of Boulder, Colorado. (See entry for Colorado Humanists.) {FD}
Mehta, Ved (Parkash): See entry for Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Meier, Jürg (20th Century) At the Eighth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Hannover, Meier of Switzerland addressed the group. Meier is a historian of goldsmithing.
Meier, Richard Louis (20th Century) Meier is a planner, a futurist, and a behavioral scientist. He has written Science and Economic Development (1956), Modern Science and the Human Fertility Problem (1959), Resource-Conserving Urbanism for South Asia (1968), and Ecological Planning and Design (1991). Meier has taught at the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Michigan and is professor emeritus at the University of California.
Meighan, Roland (20th Century) Meighan is author of The Freethinker’s Guide to the Educational Universe (1994). It is a selection of quotations on education. Among other noted individuals, Paul and Goodman and Bertrand Russell included, Meighan quotes Carl Rogers: “I deeply believe that traditional teaching is an almost completely futile, wasteful, overrated function in today’s changing world. It is successful mostly in giving children, who can’t grasp the material, a sense of failure.”
Meijer, Theo (20th Century) Meijer is President of the British Columbia Humanist Association.
Meissner, Alfred (1822–1885) Meissner was a German poet and freethinker, the author of Recollections of Heine, among other works. Heine called Meissner “the heir apparent of Schiller.” {BDF; RAT}
Meister, Jacques Henri (1744–1826) Meister was a Swiss writer who, although intended for a religious career, met D’Holbach and Diderot, of whom he wrote a short life. He was secretary to Grimm. Meister wrote Origin of Religious Principles (1762) and Natural Morality (1787). {BDF; RAT}
Melcher, Frederic G. (Born 1879) Melcher, a noted publisher and editor, was a Unitarian. {U}
Meldrum, Max (Duncan) (1875–1955) A Scot who arrived in Australia in 1889, Meldrum was a rationalist and freethinker. In art, he was a controversial figure who used “tonal realism” and who claimed that anyone who believed in religion would never be a great painter.
Meleagros (Ancient Greece)
Meleagros, whose work is quoted by Dudley Fitts in the Greek anthology, sings his humanism poetically:
• I swear it, by Love I swear it! More sweet to me is Hêliodôra’s voice Than the holy harp of Lêto’s golden Son.
• O Night, O sleepless tossing, longing for Hêliodôra!
Poor eyes hot with tears in the lingering white dawn! Is she lonely too? Is she dreaming of how I kissed her, And dreaming so, does she turn to kiss the dream of me?—or a new love? a newer toy? Forbid it, lamp! See it never! Did I not set you to guard her?
• Squealshrilling Mosquitoes, fraternity lost to shame,
Obscene vampires, chittering riders of the night: Let her sleep, I beg you!, and come (If you must come) feed on this flesh of mine. (Oh useless prayer! Must not her body charm The wildest, most heartless, most insensate beasts?) Yet hear me, devils, I have warned you:
No more of your daring, Or you shall smart from the strength of my jealous hands
• O Fingernail of Hêliodôra,
Surely Love sharpened you,
surely Love made you grow:
Does not your lightest touch transfix my heart?
• Fair are the boys of Tyre, by Love I swear it!
But Myiskos Sweeps the bright stars from the sky, that bursting sun.
Méline, Félix Jules (Born 1838) Méline was a French statesman who worked with the anti-clerical Gambettists. He was President of the Chambre (1888–1889) and Premier and Minister of Agriculture (1896–1898). Upon quitting the Chambre, Méline supported all measures against the Church, and became a Senator in 1903. Méline was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. {RAT}
Melissos (fl. 444 B.C.E.) A man of action, Melissos led a successful sally to capture the Athenian fleet, according to Plutarch. Melissos was a freethinker who said of the gods that “there was no need to define them, since there is no knowledge of them.” But, as in the case of Parmenides and Zeno and others of the Eleatic school, writes Robertson, Melissos of Samos turned first “to deep metaphysic and then to verbal dialectic, to discussion on being and not being, the impossibility of motion, and the trick-problem of Achilles and the tortoise.” {JMR; JMRH}
Mellen, Ida M. (Born 1877) Mellen wrote to the present author her views about humanism:
I list myself in Who’s Who as a rationalist and feel that liberals who commonly avoid mentioning their convictions in such a record do serious wrong to liberalism. Incidentally, I believe it is more fashionable now to say non-theism rather than atheism. Dr. Potter’s definition of Humanism for Webster’s permanently prevents me from becoming a Humanist. Self-perfectibility has been superseded by self-improvement, which is more reasonable, since perfection, at least in the Occident, is out of the question. Also, I consider character more important than personality and draw a sharp line of demarcation between the two. This bars me as well from embracing Humanism. Dr. [Carleton] Coon’s definition of humanism is wholly wrong in saying that “Every scientist has to be a humanist as well, if he wants anyone to read and understand his stuff.” Apparently he forgets there are other sciences in the world than anthropology. I have been writing books in the field of popular science for thirty years, and it would be ridiculous to suggest that I would need to become a Humanist in order to be understood.
{WAS, 4 June 1957}
Mellen, Richard (20th Century) Mellen, who heads the American Society of Freethinkers, is known for distributing freethought materials, including REASON IS THE ANSWER bumperstickers. (See entry for American Society of Freethinkers.) {FD}
Melly, George (1926– ) For New Humanist (July 1993), Melly wrote about his outlook:
I came from a middle-class Liverpool family and was born in 1926. My mother was Jewish by birth, but had converted to the Church of England at the age of fourteen shortly after her Orthodox father had died. My father was of Unitarian stock. I was sent to what was called The Children’s Service at the local Church; a middle-class affair—working-class children attended Sunday School in the afternoon—and then when I reached a suitable age, attended normal services and was eventually confirmed at the age of fourteen or so. My mother believed vaguely in an after-life. My father, as I discovered later, just paid the minimum lip-service to religion and went to church only on Christmas Day. When I was about sixteen I discovered Surrealism and with its adamant atheism and my “conversion” followed. I have never seen any reason to deviate and it is now fifty years later. It seems to me that religion of whatever complexion has been responsible for more misery and violence in the course of history than any other factor, and among religions I include a faith in extreme nationalism or any rigid system. I view my death with no qualms. I shall not hesitate to take Pascal’s wager. Our only contribution, or so I believe, to the world is through our genes. I find it a mixture of panic, self-importance, and superstition to insist on personal survival. I’ve had a very full and interesting life, adore both nature and art, have been blessed with many friends, have laughed a great deal and wept mercifully little. At no time have I felt even the least temptation to lift my hat to any form of unseen power.
In 1970 he wrote Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain. He also wrote an autobiography, Scouse Mouse, Or, I Never Got Over It, as well as Paris and the Surrealists (1991). In 1986, Melly was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. He also is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society and a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA).
Melly, Sarah (20th Century) In Nottingham, Melly is active with the Nottingham Humanist Group.
Mellow, Edie (20th Century) Mellow in secretary in Michigan of The Jewish Humanist.
Melton, Nancy (20th Century) Melton is on the staff of the freethinker magazine, Truth Seeker.
Melville, Arthur (20th Century) Melville, who has a B.A. in philosophy, an M.A. in religious education, and a Ph. D. in clinical psychology, is author of With Eyes To See: A Journey From Religion to Spirituality (1942). Ordained as a Maryknoll priest in 1961, he ministered in Guatemala from 1961 to 1968 in an area without roads, electricity, or running water. After establishing clinics, a birth control program, cooperatives, credit unions, and literacy programs, he converted the parochial school into a public school and turned church property into a cooperative vegetable garden for the poorest families. Finding that the oppressed Mayan people were permitted no legal means for advancing, he joined the revolutionary movement and was expelled. Going underground in Mexico, he was arrested, jailed, almost beaten to death, and put back into the United States. Melville the priest then married, did counseling in California prisons, and has written critiques of the established systems that guide the lives of most people. For Truth Seeker (#123: 1), he wrote, “Pope on the Carpet in Guatemala.”
Melville, Herman (1819–1891) An internationally respected, major U.S. author, Melville was the son of Alan Melvill (as the family name was spelled when Herman was born). His father imported French dry goods as well as spent the family inheritance, having borrowed $20,000 from his father and from his parents-in-law. His mother, Maria, was a stern Calvinist of the Reformed Dutch Church variety. She believed that all children are born in Original Sin, that they must be “sanctified in Christ,” and they must be baptized. We are predestined, she would relay to her family, by God’s free grace to be chosen, or not be chosen, into the elect. Even a life of “good works” could not persuade God to choose an individual . . . which might explain a line in Pierre (1852), according to biographer Hershel Parker, that if our actions are “foreordained…we are Russian serfs to Fate.” Upon his father’s death, when Herman was twelve, the family was in deep debt and Herman was sent to work in a bank for over a year at $150 per year. He then worked in his brother’s store as a clerk, taught school, and at the age of twenty joined a whaling ship, signing on as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Liverpool, which he wrote about in Redburn (1849). Spending eighteen months on a whaler in 1841-1842, he found such intolerable hardships on board that he and a companion escaped from the ship at the Marquesas Islands. Here, the two were captured by a tribe of cannibals, then rescued by an Australian whaler, about which he wrote Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847). Robertson points out that in Chapter 24 of Typee, Melville recounts how some of the natives he met were unafraid of their gods, not only abusing them but also challenging them to fight. Melville’s unsympathetic view of Christian missionaries in Polynesia was met with a hostile reaction from church journals. And from this point on, his skepticism about religion was shown in his various works. Laurie Robertson-Lorant in a biographical work, Melville (1996), tells of his first time crossing the ocean as a passenger, for he was journeying to England to sell the rights to White-Jacket. Walking out onto the ship’s deck one evening, he was shocked to see a man in the water, and he shouted for crew members. The drowning man, however, refused any help and disappeared below the waves. In his journal, Melville recalled the man’s expression: “it was merry,” he wrote. The experience was an upsetting one, but the captain later explained that passengers jumping overboard was not all unusual, that often their loved ones were often on hand to see them leap. After marrying Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of the Chief Justice of Massachusetts, Melville bought a farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, befriending his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne and being one of the first to appreciate his genius. In fact, it is said that Mrs. Hawthorne found the emotional attachment between Melville and her husband a bit much, and she was pleased when her husband was appointed by his friend, President Franklin Pierce, to the post of consul at Liverpool, England, requiring that they move from the Tanglewood area. (Melville had written, after meeting Hawthorne and reviewing in 1850 his Mosses from an Old Manse for The Literary World, “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New England roots into the hot soil in my Southern soul.” Although he tried to disguise his identity by signing the review, “By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” Melville and his extended metaphor of insemination were easily detectable. Meanwhile, Mrs. Hawthorne has been quoted as saying of her husband, “He hates to be touched more than anyone I know.”) Melville’s masterpiece is Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), a symbolic account of a deranged whaling captain’s obsessive voyage to find and destroy the great white whale that had ripped off his leg. On one level, it can be read as a sociological critique of various American class and racial prejudices, on another a repository of information about whales and whaling, and on another a philosophical inquiry into the nature of good and evil, of man and his fate. On yet another, the work is an exposé of the sordidness of the business of butchering whales. Why, Melville speculated, do we follow certain of our desires even when we logically deduce that these desires hurt us? Why is what we call “evil” actually evil? Why if we know something is dangerous do we persist in pursuing it? Billy Budd, Foretopman (written during the last five years of his life but published in 1924) features Billy, a handsome sailor who, because of his innocence and beauty, is hated by Claggart, a dark, demon-haunted petty officer. Billy, in his simplicity, cannot understand why Claggart should hate him, why, in short, evil should desire to destroy good. When Claggart concocts a story that Billy wants to start a mutiny, Billy in his only act of rebellion strikes Claggart, who after the blow dies as he falls and his head hits a hard surface. Although the ship’s captain sympathizes with Billy and recognizes his essential innocence, he is forced to condemn him to death. Following Billy’s hanging, he lives on as a legend among sailors. The book was dedicated to Hawthorne. Its homosexual overtones inspired Benjamin Britten to write an opera, “Billy Budd,” an idea developed by George Steiner in New Yorker (5 July 1993). Pierre, or the Ambiguities, was a critical and financial disaster. A Gothic romance with Shelleyan overtones and a satire on the literary profession, it touches upon a variety of controversial subjects. The title character is doted upon by a mother whose “playfulness of . . . unclouded love” implies a perverse sexuality. He then falls in love with Isabel, who it turns out is his illegitimate sister; yet, “he imprinted repeated burning kisses upon her . . . . They coiled together, and entangledly stood mute.” Mr. Falsgrave, the family clergyman, is as hypocritical and deceitful as everyone else in the community. His cousin Glen, with whom he had felt “an ardent sentiment” when the two were lads and had explored “the preliminary love-friendship of boys,” steals Lucy, the person to whom he is engaged, Pierre murders him in a rage and is imprisoned. Lucy and Pierre’s mother die of grief. Pierre and Isabel, who now are incestuously in love, commit suicide in his prison cell. In short, Pierre, who had hoped to find a way to set the universe aright, is undone by his ideals and becomes “the fool of Truth, the fool of Virtue, the fool of Fate.” The New York Day Book commented upon Pierre with the headline, HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY. Crazy was not Hawthorne’s analysis of Melville. As Parker points out, Hawthorne wrote that Melville was into metaphysics. In his November 1856 journal Hawthorne had written: Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists—and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before—in wandering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting (during his visit with Hawthorne in Liverpool). He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.
James Wood, noting Hawthorne’s analysis, wrote that Melville “was tormented by God’s ‘inscrutable’ silence—this is clear from the work. Moby-Dick, who is both God and Devil, flaunts his unhelpful silence as God does to Job: ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?’ In the chapter ‘The Tail,’ Ishmael admits that if he cannot really comprehend the whale’s rear, then he can hardly see his face: ‘Thou shalt see my back parts, my tail, he seems to say, but my face shall not be seen,’ an appropriate of the verse in Exodus in which God tells Moses that ‘thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen.’ ” “Most people, Melville tells Hawthorne, “fear God, and at bottom dislike Him . . . because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch. . . . You perceive I employ a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity; don’t you think there is a slight dash of flunkeyism in that usage?” The lines exemplify, wrote Wood, that Melville “could not help playing the infidel: he was one of the most delvingly sacrilegious writers who ever existed. . . . He slapped at God; but, in some way, he could not do without the idea of being slapped by God in return. . . .Ahab’s monomaniacal hunt of the whale is not so far from Ishmael’s multiple tolerance of it.” In 1866, when forty-seven, Melville became an outdoor customs inspector in New York City (at the Hudson River on Gansevoort Street, named after his mother’s maternal family), a position he held for nineteen years. During this time he was relatively unknown. It was not until 1920 that literary scholars recognized his genius; in fact, his New York Times obituary referred to him as Henry, not Herman. Now one of America’s most written about authors, Melville has a large number of supporters as well as detractors. He has been described by Ohio State University professor Elizabeth Renker as a drunken wife-beater who once pushed his wife down a flight of stairs. Donald Kring, when he wrote a biography of Henry Whitney Bellows, came across an 1867 letter from Samuel Shaw, the half brother of Melville’s wife, Lizzie, that proposed they fake a kidnapping to rescue her from Melville’s sporadic violence. The University of Delaware’s Hershel Parker, however, in a 1996 biography, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume 1, 1819–1883, disbelieves the allegation. But although many scholars may have overlooked Melville’s weaknesses, three of four Melville children had plainly led unhappy lives. His oldest son committed suicide. And the five women in his family who survived him looked on him at times as a “beast,” in the words of Eleanor Metcalf’s son Paul. Stan Goldman’s Melville’s Protest Theism, The Hidden and Silent God in “Clarel” (1994), challenges past views that Melville was an agnostic. However, he was a member in New York City of the Church of All Souls (Unitarian), whose minister Walter Donald Kring in Herman Melville’s Religious Journey (1997) has described Melville’s turning from Calvinism to Unitarianism. Melville is buried at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, where also buried are composer Irving Berlin, musician Miles Davis, and former New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. (See entries for Moby-Dick, Ethan Allen, and for James Wood, who holds that Melville was not a Christian theist and did not believe in a supernatural God. Also see entry for Alfred Kazin, who wrote that Melville retained his faith despite knowing in what and where and whom to believe.) {CE; CL; GL; JM; JMR; JMRH; OCAL; OEL; RAT; TRI; TYD; Philip Weiss, The New York Times Magazine, 15 December 1996; U; UU}
MEME In 1976 the biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” to describe an element of culture: a word, a song, an attitude, a religious belief, a mealtime ritual, a technology. Much of what people do depends upon memes which have changed their human nature, such as being served cranberry juice by a friend, then serving it to other friends later on because of one’s memory of how pleasant the occasion was. Reviewing Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999), Robert Wright remarked that, “Like genes, memes pass from person to person, and over time some memes prove more prolific than others. So vast bodies of memes evolve—ideologies or religions or industries or musical genres. ‘Memeplexes,’ that is.” Dawkins holds that culture evolves in Darwinian fashion. Whereas memes formerly traveled largely from parent to child, today through television, radio, and the Internet they travel almost instantaneously. In a foreword to the Blackmore book, Dawkins proudly reported that “memetic” had appeared at least 5,042 times on the World Wide Web at the time he last checked.
Memmi, Albert (20th Century) Memmi is an honorary president of the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews.
MEMORIAL SOCIETIES “Why Bury $5,000 In A Hole?” asked Heather Anderson in an article in World (July-August 1996). Instead of incurring huge burial costs, many prefer joining memorial societies and giving the savings to the remaining family members rather than to professional morticians. Traditional burials include the purchase of a casket, embalming, several days’ use of the funeral home for visitation and service, and a hodge-podge of additional services from the funeral director (salmon-color caps behind the eyelids, dentures, wires to shut the jaw, clipping of the frenula so the mouth will close, haircuts, shaves, etc.). Addresses of memorial societies and crematoriums are available from most Unitarian, freethought, or humanist societies.
Mena, Abelardo (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Dr. Mena was senior psychiatrist of the Veterans Administration Hospital, Miami, Florida {HM2}
Ménard, Louis (1822–1901) Ménard, a French painter and author, wrote Prologue of a Revolution, for which he was obliged to leave France. He also wrote Morality Before the Philosophers (1860), Studies on the Origin of Christianity (1867), and Freethinkers’ Religious Catechism (1875). {BDF}
Mencius: See entry for Meng-zi.
Mencken, Henry (Louis) (1880–1956) “As for religion, I am quite devoid of it,” Mencken declared in Minority Report (1956). “The act of worship, as carried on by Christians, seems to me to be debasing rather than ennobling. It involves groveling before a Being who, if He really exists, deserves to be denounced instead of respected.” He also wrote,
The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
Mencken, one of the best-known journalists of his day, wrote, “The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother’s milk.” In Smart Set (1920), he explained, “To sum up: (1) The cosmos is a gigantic flywheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute; (2) Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it; (3) Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.” His skepticism about religion is scattered through nearly all of his writings, and his most important works are The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908), Treatise on the Gods (1930), and Treatise on Right and Wrong (1934). The second of the three discussed Huxley, who was one of his heroes, and agnosticism. Mencken—the curmudgeon, anti-Semite, and Prussophile—is not the household name he once was, but in 1992 Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, who had edited Mencken and Sara: A Life in Letters (1988), published The Impossible H. L. Mencken: A Selection of His Best Newspaper Stories (Doubleday, 1992). John Updike, known to some as the stereotypical Anglo-Saxon Protestant, reviewed it in The New Yorker, much as in earlier times it would have been covered by an ASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant is now considered redundant). Updike, for example, negatively criticized the following Mencken observation: “The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable. . . . The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or to the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci.” What this all amounts to, he continued, “is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes . . . a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them. . . . The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only.” Two posthumous works, Thirty-five Years of Newspaper Work and My Life as Author and Editor (1993), were not published at his specific request until thirty-five years after his death. The latter contained not only his impressions of Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Eugene O’Neill, Frank Harris, George Jean Nathan, Anita Loos, and Scott Fitzgerald but also included ethnic slurs, usually about Jews, for which he had long been known. Of Alfred Knopf, he wrote that the publisher “showed a certain amount of the obnoxious tactlessness of his race.” He described Stelle Golde, who was Smart Set’s editorial secretary, as “a grotesque Brooklyn Jewess.” Of Dorothy Thompson, Sinclair Lewis’s second wife, Mencken wrote, “She was the true daughter of her Methodist pa—a tinpot messiah with an inflamed egoism that was wholly unameliorated by humor.” Yet, Mencken was the one who exposed a Baltimore hotel’s refusal to permit the African American poet Countee Cullen to speak. He fought against injustice wherever he found it, as in the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti or the deportation of Emma Goldman and other Jewish radicals following World War I when the Great Red Scare occurred. Mencken coined many neologisms, including Bible Belt, booboisie, smuthound, and Boobus americanus. He so delighted in skewering Baptists and Methodists that he was dubbed “the Anti-Christ of Baltimore,” although he was more “the Anti-Christian of Baltimore” and held that what Christians needed to do was practice the teachings of their Christ. He also targeted American society, with which he maintained a love-hate relationship: “There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public” and “Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.” Asked why he stayed in the country if he found so much that was unworthy of reverence here, he quipped, “Why do men go to zoos?” As for God, Mencken the caustic rationalist wrote, “It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just, and omnipotent God.” As for his early religious experiences, he stated, “What I got in Sunday School . . . was simply a firm conviction that the Christian faith was full of palpable absurdities and the Christian God preposterous.” And as for his faith, he said, “Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” (See entry for Neo-Humanism, which Mencken attacked.) {CE; CL; EU, John R. Burr; FUS; PA; RE; TRI; TYD}
Mendel, (Abbot) Gregor Johann (1822–1884) An Austrian monk known for his work on heredity, Mendel had been forgotten until other botanists repeated his experiments and gave his name to the new theory of heredity. N. Iltis, a relative who wrote Life of Mendel (1932), states that Mendel was violently anti-Christian right up to the time when he entered the monastery. In fact, he wrote a poem in which he speaks of “the gloomy powers of superstition, which now oppress the world.” A poor man, Mendel had entered the monastery because it offered a chance of study. As a priest, said McCabe, “he shirked his functions as far as possible, and even as abbot he bought Darwin’s Origin of Species and accepted evolution, which was then anathema to all Catholics.” Mendel’s experiments became the basic tenets of genetics and were a notable influence in plant and animal breeding. {JM; RE}
Mendelsohn, Jack (1918– ) A Unitarian minister, Mendelsohn is author of God, Allah, and Ju Ju: Religions in Africa Today (1962) and Being Liberal in an Illiberal Age: Why I Am A Unitarian Universalist. In 1971 he wrote Channing: The Reluctant Radical, concerning the major nineteenth century Unitarian leader. In 1997 the Unitarian Universalist Association presented Mendelsohn with its Award for Distinguished Service to the cause of Unitarian Universalism.
Mendelsohn, Oscar Adolf (1896–1978) Mendelsohn was a humanist, public analyst, musician, and writer. He wrote The Earnest Drinker; Liars and Letters Anonymous; Drinking With Pepys, and Outrageous Liars. In 1964 he was appointed honorary vice president of the Humanist Society of Victoria. Upon his death, he bequeathed to Monash University funds for presenting in perpetuity a free public lecture to promote the study of humanism, materialism, positivism, and other effects of the application of the scientific attitude to human affairs and thought. As a result, some of Australia’s leading freethinkers have given lectures; e.g, Professor Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Professor John A. Passmore, and Sir Mark Oliphant. {SWW}
Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–1786) Mendelssohn, a Jewish philosopher who was a leader in the movement for cultural assimilation, had a high repute in Germany for his philosophical works, and some were crowned by the Berlin Academy. In later years he had a more definite belief in God and immortality but not Judaism or Christianity. “He lived entirely in the sphere of deism and natural religion,” McCabe quotes Baur as having written. He translated The Psalms and The Pentateuch into German. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Mendenhall, J. H. (19th Century) Mendenhall, a freethinker, wrote Christianity, A Fiction (1892). {GS}
Mendes, Catulle (1841–1909) A French-Jewish novelist, Mendes at the age of nineteen founded the Revue fantaisiste at Paris and was prosecuted for articles he wrote for it. In his volume of verse, Pour dire devant le monde (1891), Mendes gives free expression to his caustic atheism. {RAT; RE)
Mendez -Acosta, Mario (20th Century) A television news commentator in Mexico City, Mendez-Acosta has written for Free Inquiry. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Mendez-Acosta addressed the gathering. He is a member of the Ibero-American Commission, a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries. In 1995, he spoke at the dedication of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, and in 1996 he was a key organizer with his wife, Patricia López Zaragoza, of the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1986}
Mendizabal, Juan Alvarez (1790–1853) Mendizabal, the son of a Jew named Mendez, was a Liberal Spanish statesman, a minister during the reign of Cristina. During the brief spell of power of the Voltairean liberals, Mendizabal contributed to the subjugation of Spain’s clerical party and abolished the religious orders, proclaiming their goods as national property. According to McCabe, he “checked the monastic bodies of Spain, and enriched the national treasury from their swollen coffers.” {BDF; RAT}
Mendoça, Pedro (20th Century) A Brazilian, Mendoça spoke on the unification and the need for expansion of humanism at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City in 1996. Mendoça is a philosophic positivist.
Mendoza, Antonio (20th Century)
“I grew up as a Catholic,” Mendoz said when asked about the religious images in his artwork, “but early on I gave up any sort of belief and stopped going to church. I don’t particularly have any problem with the church since it has no effect on my life whatsoever. It upsets my mother that I am an atheist, but that’s an issue she has to resolve herself.” {CA}
Antonio Mendoza, Artist art
In an interview published at a display of his work on the Web, Mendoza is asked "There are a lot of religious images flying through your work. How do you feel about the Catholic Church?"
He replies "I grew up as a Catholic but early on I gave up any sort of belief and stopped going to church. I don't particularly have any problem with the church since it has no effect on my life whatsoever. It upsets my mother that I am an atheist, but that's an issue she has to resolve herself."
Mendoza, Diego Hurtado de (1503–1575)
Mendoza was a famous and learnèd Spanish author. After studying Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew at the university, he joined the army. While at school he wrote the comic novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, which was condemned by the Inquisition. When sent on an embassy to Pope Paul III, the latter was greatly shocked at Mendoza’s audacity and vehemence of speech. Because of the intolerant policy of Philip II, Mendoza’s chief work, History of the Moorish Wars, remained unprinted for thirty years. The Inquisition also prohibited Mendoza’s satires and burlesques. He commented on Aristotle, translating his Mechanics. {BDF}
Mendum, Ernest (Born 1853) The son of Josiah P. Mendum, Mendum worked with his father at the Boston Investigator. He assisted in the organizing of the Paine Memorial Corporation and was an organizer of the Ingersoll Secular Society. {RAT; RE}
Mendum, Josiah P. (1811–1891) Mendum, a publisher and the proprietor of the Boston Investigator, had become acquainted with Abner Kneeland in 1833. When Kneeland left Boston for the West for reasons of health, Mendum continued the paper together with Horace Seaver. Mendum was one of the founders of the Paine Memorial Hall in Boston and was a chief support of freethought there. Among the titles he sold: Theological Works of Thomas Paine ($1); Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason ($3 per dozen); Hume’s Essays ($1); Speech of Abner Kneeland (12¢); Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature ($1.25); Abner Kneeland, “A review of the Evidence of Christianity” (50¢); Ethan Allen, Oracle of Reason (37¢). {BDF; PUT; RAT}
Menendez, Albert J. (20th Century) A contributing editor to Americans for Religious Liberty, Menendez is author or co-writer of more than twenty books including Religion at the Polls (1977), Church Schools and Public Money (1991), and Church and State in Canada (1997). His concerns are that states have generous give-aways to sectarian schools, which leads to a serious problem: keeping church and state separate. He edited The Best of Church and State: 1948–1975 (1975). In 1978, he wrote John F. Kennedy, Catholic and Humanist. In 1993, his Visions of Reality, What Fundamentalist Schools Teach, examines the various textbooks used in fundamentalist schools, documenting that the schools promote prejudice against people of other faiths, distort history, derogate our literary heritage, cast science in a bad light, and otherwise indoctrinate children with “visions of reality” that are incompatible with public tax support. In The December Wars (1993), Menendez discusses religious symbols and ceremonies in the public square, tracing the celebration of Christmas as far back as the fourth century, when Catholic orthodoxy used Christmas as a major propaganda tool and a political issue as well as a religious observance. With Edd Doerr, Menendez has compiled Religious Liberty and State Constitutions (1993), in which are listed the religious liberty and church-state provisions of the fifty state constitutions. {FUS}
Meng-zi (Mencius; Meng Tzu) (371?–288? B.C.E.) A great teacher, Meng-zi is memorable for his insistence on advancing Kongfu-zi’s (Confucius’s) view that man is by nature good and that humans are the main part of the state, so it follows that it is the ruler’s fault if they go astray. Some rulers apparently were exemplary, for one rationalistic duke who lived earlier than 250 B.C.E. refused to permit the sacrifice of a man as a scapegoat on his behalf. In 166 B.C.E., also, the Han Emperor Wen permanently abolished such sacrifices. Meng-zi, a better sociologist than Lao-zi (Lao-tzu) or Kongfu-zi (K’ung Fu-tzu), taught that “it is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart.” Alas, laments Robertson, despite such a clear outlook, “the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food, at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. . . . Centuries before our era, the Chinese had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane than that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period.” But supernaturalism and superstition flourished just the same, for, as Robertson concludes, “there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought.” McCabe wrote that although Meng-zi “is much less frequently quoted than K’ung Fu-tzu, of whom he professed to be merely a disciple, he was in some respects greater and much more interesting. Like K’ung Fu-tzu he was an atheist, but he had not the conservatism of the older sage. There was a great ferment of thought in China at the time, and almost every fundamental theory of life had its apostle. Meng-tsu advocated the full social application of the ethic of K’ung Fu-tzu, especially his Golden Rule (Reciprocity). He denounced war and social injustice and was the first Chinese democrat. The modern Chinese writer Yuan Cho-ying well shows both his atheism and his very modern sentiments in Le philosophie morale et politique de Mencius (1927).” {CE; JM; JMR; RE}
Menninger, Karl A. (1893–1990) Menninger was an eminent psychiatrist who had been a subscriber to The Humanist. A nominal Presbyterian, he wrote Whatever Became of Sin? (1988) and The Human Mind Revisited (1978). He is one of three sons of Dr. Charles Frederick Menninger, who founded the Menninger Foundation, which has had a major influence on treatment of the mentally ill. {HNS}
MENNONITES
Non-believers who tour in Israel or even in New York City are sometimes startled upon seeing Jews dressed in black and appearing to be at a rehearsal for some movie about life in the distant past. In Pennsylvania and elsewhere—for example, in Belize on large farms—they are similarly startled upon seeing Christians who appear as if they also are on a movie set, individuals who do not drive cars, use electricity from public utilities, accept Social Security or Medicare, or go to war. Examples of the latter group are the American Mennonites, who are directly descended from three sects that originated in the European Reformation: the Swiss Brethren, Obenites, and Hutterites. The larger groups in America are the Old Mennonites, General Conference Mennonites, Mennonite Brethren in Christ, Mennoniten Brüder Gemeinde, Reformed Mennonites, and Old Order Amish. The Old Mennonites are found in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and stress strict discipline, baptism by immersion of believers only, and widespread home missions. The movement is led by an unsalaried lay-clergy. They practice foot-washing, the anointing of the sick, and the kiss of charity (a salutation known as the holy kiss—Romans 16:16; I Corinthians 16:20; and I Thessalonians 5:26—which Professor William M. Beahm of the Bethany Biblical Seminary in Chicago, thinks was practiced “promiscuously among early Christians, but [is] now limited to the same sex and found only among certain religious groups like the Dunkers and others.” The Mennoniten Brüder Gemeinde is divided into two parts, the larger branch that immerses the applicant for baptism forward, the smaller that insists on backward immersion. The Old Order Amish oppose all ritualism, do not allow church buildings, meet in houses or barns, conduct several-hour services in German, forbid pictures and insurance, and dress very plainly. Menno Simons (1492-1559) was a Dutch Anabaptist (a re-baptizer) who had been a Roman Catholic priest. He rejected any state church and preached against religious persecution, oaths, the taking of life, and infant baptism. {ER}
Menocchio, Giacamo (1532–1607) “Creation: All was chaos . . . and out of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels . . . and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time.” For penning this statement, Menocchio, a 16th century miller, was regarded as a heretic, a threat to the Church, and, as a result, he was burned at the stake, according to Florence Grippe in The New York Times (15 December 1991).
Mensah, Emmanuel Kofi (20th Century) The chairman of Action for Humanism in Ikeja, Lagos State, Nigeria, Mensah has been studying for his doctorate in philosophy at the Adventist Seminary of West Africa in Nigeria. “Religion is the brainchild of fear, and fear is the parent of cruelty,” he writes in an essay found in Norm Allen Jr.’s book. Although conversant with the ways of witch doctors, he also cites Thomas Paine and Bertrand Russell. Accused of being an Antichrist by an office worker, Mensah responds, “I am not an Antichrist. I am a humanist who is committed to the utilization of the fundamental faculties of reason and objectivity.” To which the accuser cries, “Go, go, go away! You devil!” As for the future, he hopes extensive education will be possible. But humanism must not remain Eurocentric. On the second largest continent of the world, Mensah says it will be difficult to reach a population where only 20 percent can read. But songs, poetry, dramas, plays, and the media can logically be utilized to what he hopes to see, “the bright morning when Africa’s problems will be solved through education and self-reliance rather than spirituality, astrology, numerology, magic, and other paranormal beliefs.” In 1997 he had returned to his native Ghana, where he planned to resume the editorship of Sunways, a humanist newsletter he edited in 1991. (See entry for Action for Humanism.) {AAH}
Mentelle, Edme (1730–1815) Mentelle was a French geographer and historian. He wrote Précis de l’Histoire des Hébreux (1798) and Précisde l’Histoire Universelle, both of which are thoroughly anti-Christian. In fact, Mentelle doubted if Jesus ever existed. He was a member of the Institute and Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. {BDF; RAT}
Menuhin, Yehudi (1916– ) Menuhin, the renowned New York-born violinist, has won ten Grammy Awards and appeared throughout the world in concerts featuring both classical and modern composers. He wrote an autobiography, Unfinished Business (1977, and was co-writer of The Music of Man (1979, which is autobiographical. Menuhin is a member of the British Humanist Association. In 1993, Queen Elizabeth honored him by making him a Life Peer.
Menuhin, Yehudi [Sir] (22 Apr 1916 - 12 Mar 1999) Menuhin, the renowned Rochester, New York-born violinist-conductor-teacher-humanitarian, won ten Grammy Awards and appeared throughout the world in concerts featuring both classical and modern composers. At the age of seven, he made his concert debut with the San Francisco Symphony. His career included being President and Associate Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London, Conductor of the English String Orchestra, Principal Guest Conductor of the Warsaw Sinfonia, and President and Principal Conductor of the Philharmonia Hungarica. For many years he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a special series of concerts. A humanitarian, he once addressed Israel’s Knesset about the Palestinian peace process, and he wrote extensively about world peace and international cooperation. Invited to India by Prime Minister Nehru, he met Ravi Shankar and made several recordings with him, proceeds of which went to Indian charities. In 1960 Menuhin was awarded the Nehru Peace Prize for International Understanding. In 1992, he was honored as the Ambassador of Goodwill to UNESCO. He also received the Legion d’Honneur from France, the Order of Merit from Germany, the Ordre Leopold from Belgium, the Gran Cruz de la Orden del Merito Civil from Spain, and was made Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine in Italy. In 1993 Queen Elizabeth II bestowed a knighthood on him, giving him the Order of Merit and a Life Peerage in Her Majesty’s Government. He was also the first Westerner to be made an Honorary Professor of the Beijing Conservatoire in recognition of his concerts in China and of his endeavors in helping many young Chinese violinists to continue their studies in the West. Menuhin wrote an autobiography, Unfinished Business (1977, and was co-writer of The Music of Man (1979), which is autobiographical. He was a member of the British Humanist Association.
Mepham, George (1916–1995)
Mepham in Britain was secretary of the Sutton Humanist Group. With his wife, he co-founded the group in 1955 and was active for many years on the Executive Committee of the British Humanist Association. Barbara Smoker, president of the National Secular Society, presided over Mepham’s funeral ceremony at the North East Surrey Crematorium.
MEPHISTOPHELES In Faust, Goethe depicts a devil, Mephistopheles, who tempts Faust into selling his soul to the “powers of darkness.” Marlowe, in his Doctor Faustus, spelled it Mephistophilis. {DCL}
Mercado Domenech, Serafin J. (20th Century) A Mexican, Mercado spoke on education for the cyber-age at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Mercer, Beryl (20th Century) In Cornwall, Mercer is active with the Cornwall Humanists.
Mercier, Charles Arthur (1852–1919) Although he began life as a cabin boy, Mercier ended as a distinguished authority on mental diseases, the author of Conduct and Its Disorders (1911). When Spiritualism became popular during the war of 1914–1918, he wrote a caustic criticism, Spiritualism and Sir O. Lodge (1917). Mercier was an agnostic. {RAT; RE} Mercier, L. A. (19th Century) Mercier wrote La Libre Pensée, which was published in Brussels in 1879. {BDF}
Meredith, Evan Powell (1811–1880) Meredith was a Welsh writer, once a Baptist minister and an eloquent preacher in the Welsh tongue. He translated the Bible into Welsh. However, his investigation into the claims of Christianity made him resign his ministry. In The Prophet of Nazareth (1864), Meredith mentions a purpose of writing a work on the gospels but failed to include it. He did, however, expose the prophecies of Jesus. His Amphilogia (1867) was a reply to the Bishop of Landaff and the Rev. J. F. Francklin. {BDF; RAT}
Meredith, George (1829–1909) One of England’s greatest novelists, Meredith wrote cerebral works that contained psychological character studies. Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) is one of the Hampshire-born writer’s best-known works. Even in his “late boyhood,” he “detested religion,” but not, according to his biographer R. E. Sencourt, Christianity as he interpreted it for himself. In his novels as well as in his poetry, he includes his belief in evolution—in life as a process of becoming. Of Meredith, Wheeler in 1889 said, “Deep thought and fine grace characterise his writings. As a poet Mr. Meredith is not popular, but his volumes of verse are marked by the highest qualities and give him a place apart from the throng of contemporary singers.” Meredith made numerous references to Darwin, Swinburne, and Renan as well as emphasized “the creative activity of nature” as the sole source of life and energy. He was one of the earliest members of the General Council of the Secular Education League, according to Nineteenth Century (April 1911), and he corresponded with freethinker G. W. Foote as well as “gave his name as well as his cheque” to the support of the Freethinker. In 1883, he protested against Foote’s imprisonment for blasphemy, and in one of his letters spoke of the fight against the priests as the best of causes. Contemporary critics praise Meredith for his joyful belief in life as a process of evolution. Edward Clodd, who knew Meredith well, wrote in his Memories that Meredith wrote to him, “When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion that lasted six weeks, but I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.” On 13 April 1909, Meredith wrote a letter to Theodore Watts-Dunton on the death of Swinburne, which had taken place three days previously. “He was the greatest of our lyric poets—of the world, I could say, considering what a language he had to wield.” On April 23, he wrote to Foote, enclosing a contribution to the Freethinker fund, and this was almost certainly the last letter he ever wrote. On May 4, he said: “Nature is my God and I trust in her.” His remains were cremated at Woking. There was no religious service, but when the ashes were buried at Darking Cemetery, Foote reported, “a clergyman muttered some Anglican prayers.” That same day, in Westminster Abbey, “the Dean conducted with great ceremony a requiem service.” Freethinkers, however, have been most inspired by Meredith’s own thought about finality:
Into the Earth that gives the rose Shall I with shuddering fall? {BDF; CE; CL; FO; Freethinker (20 October 1912); Freethinker, January 1998; JM; RE; TRI; TYD}
Mérimée, Prosper (1803–1870) Mérimée was a cultivated gentleman, a painstaking student of archaeology, a linguist who translated Russian authors into French, a senator under the Empire, and a member of the Academy. The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX (1829) has an objectivity and psychological penetration called rare among the romanticists. According to Robertson, he—like Flaubert, Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, and the De Goncourts—was a rationalist. In his anonymous brochure on H(enri) B(eyle), “Eleutheropolis,” there is an open profession of atheism. {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (20th Century) Merleau-Ponty, in Humanism and Terror (1947), discussed humanism in terms of his distaste for Communism.
Mero, Ralph (20th Century) Mero is a Unitarian minister who is executive director of Compassion in Dying. The group has assisted a number of people who wanted to commit suicide, offering guidance and suggestions on how to end a life. Members say, however, they do not administer lethal drugs, but refer patients to doctors for prescriptions that taken in sufficient doses can be fatal. His group praised a 1994 decision by Federal Judge Barbara Rothstein that struck down a 140-year-old Washington State ban on assisted suicide. (See entry for suicide. Also see “On Their Own Timetable,” The World, January/February 1995.)
Merrell, Lloyd Frank (20th Century) The Humanist (Spring, 1941) contained Merrell’s “Look Within,” which one scientific humanist says is commendably humanistic but, notes a wag, shows a questionable command of anatomy:
We seek for God through age on age Outside of man with futile quest. The God of every pilgrimage Is deep within the pregnant breast.
Merrill, Walter (20th Century) Merrill wrote From Statesman to Philosopher: A Study of Bolingbroke’s Deism (1949). {FUK; FUS}
Merritt, Henry (1822–1877)
An English painter and writer from Oxford, Merritt on coming to London lived with Holyoake and contributed to the Reasoner, using the signature “Christopher.” Merritt wrote on Dirt and Pictures and Robert Dalby and His World of Troubles, among other works. {BDF; RAT}
Merton, Thomas (1915–1968) An American religious writer and poet, Merton was a Roman Catholic convert who became a Trappist monk in 1941 and was later ordained a priest. In 1965 when a refrigerator was delivered to his hermitage, he was bothered with the idea that he had chosen to live the life of a hermit but should a hermit have a refrigerator? He decided that the solitary life could be judged only by the interior, not by the external surroundings. Or, as The Economist (20 July 1996) observed, “Trappings have little to do with Trappists.” Merton died in an accident in Thailand. {CE}
Merwin, W(illiam) S(tanley) (1927– ) Merwin, a poet and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is known for his translation of The Cid (1959) and for such poetry such as A Mask for Janus (1952), Drunk in the Furnace (1960), The Carrier of Ladders (1970, for which he received a Pulitzer award), and The Compass Flower (1977). Responding about humanism, Merwin wrote the present author:
“Humanism” tout court, as in your first category, is a term that I would not have made a point of quarrelling with, at one time, if it had been applied to me, though I would never have laid claim to it on my own and have always been uncomfortable with “isms” and that one is no exception. But I have come to have and to recognize further misgivings about the word and what strike me as the assumptions around it, which seem serious enough for me to avoid the use of it insofar as possible, and to feel that I do not at all fit the ascriptions that it implies. What I hear in the word “humanist” now is the suggestion of a “devotion to humanity and human interests” exclusively of, or in preference to, or as against any and all other forms of life. At its least it connotes to me a rather smug and stuffy club, content with its membership policy, and at its worst a comfortable platform from which to justify the current proliferation of human fabrication, convenience, and self-importance, at the expense of every non-human living being. What I value most about my own species, what I take to be singular about it, is the craving to see, beyond immediate comfort, advantage, and condition, the nature of life as a whole in each of its forms and in its full mystery, and the ability to recognize itself as a gifted part of that undefinable and unqualifiable totality. I think of that as our true and only place, and I believe that any values we may arrogate to ourselves that do not arise from such a recognition and its sobering demands for proportion and responsibility, are simply egotism writ large—and the great classical “humanists” themselves, as well as the events of our age, have made plain enough the consequences of that.
{WAS, 19 May 1989}
Meslier, Jean (1664–1729) Meslier was a French atheist, a critic of popular superstition. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Meslier as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. To him, all religions are nothing but “erreurs, abus, illusions, et impostures.” However, he had been a curé of Etrépigny, in Champagne, and was known as a charitable priest, a champion of animal rights, and a religious man. Surprisingly, at his death he left two autographed copies of Testament, in which he wrote his personal views about life. These have been called “one of the most notorious examples of apostasy.” A third copy was to have been deposited in the archives of the jurisdiction of Sainte-Menehould. But by some strange chance one of the books circulated, and then one hundred copies appeared on the market in Paris, selling at ten louis apiece. On the copy he left for his parishioners, he wrote, “I have not dared to say it during my life, but I will say it at least in dying or after my death.” He said that although some men before him had impugned miracles, some gospels, some dogma, some the conception of deity, some the tyranny of kings, he impugned them all. And whereas most deists had eulogized the character of the Gospel Jesus, Meslier envelops it in his harshest invective. His writing style was slow and heavy—the style of a carthorse, Voltaire called it. Robertson has commented that although Voltaire, d’Holbach, and Diderot were slow in publicizing Meslier’s work, “the entire group of fighting freethinkers of the age was in some sense inspired by the old priest’s legacy.” Writing in Freethought History (#3, 1992), Gordon Stein explains a commonly held misconception that Anna Knoop’s translation—Superstition in All Ages by Jean Meslier . . .Translated from the French—is by Meslier. However, Stein explains, the book is a translation of Baron d’Holbach’s Le Bon Sens (The Good Sense). Except for the excerpts from his will, in which he requested to be buried in his own garden, Meslier’s work have never been translated into English. In his will, Meslier left his property to his parishioners. {BDF; EU, Aram Vartanian; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TRI}
Messadié, Gerald (20th Century) Messadié, an atheist, grew up in Egypt and is the author of fifteen books. A History of the Devil (1997) carries the message that belief in the Devil actually leads one to evil. {George Rowell, Pique, March 1999}
Messenger, Dally (1938– ) Messenger is an Australian civil celebrant, humanist, and educationalist. In 1970, he was the first ever to apply to become an independent, authorized, civil celebrant in Australia. One reason the clergy accepted the concept is that they objected to having been “forced” previously to officiate at inappropriate ceremonies. For Messenger, all humans are deserving of such ceremonies, even those whom the clergy do not like. {SWW}
Messer, William (20th Century) Messer, an activist member of the Free Inquiry Group in Cincinatti, Ohio, is on the board of that city’s American Civil Liberties Union.
MESSIAH Although the word is not found in the Old Testament as a proper name or as a technical term, “messiah” appears in Apocalyptic literature such as Enoch 48:10 and refers to men, principally kings and high priests whose consecration to their high office was symbolized by the ceremony of pouring oil on their heads. Such a rite gave what was considered a divine afflatus. Saul was designated “the Meshiach Yahweh,” or anointed of the Lord. Others were David, Solomon, John, Jehoahaz and, when there were no longer kings over Israel, reference is made in Ezekiel and Leviticus to the anointing of high priests. Because of their role in history as “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” the Jewish people are frequently spoken of as “God’s anointed.” Following the destruction of Judea in 586 B.C.E., the Jews entertained the hope of an early restoration of their independence and the re-establishment of the monarchy under a scion of the Davidic dynasty whose throne would endure forever. Zerubbabel was seen as a possible fulfillment of this hope. The prophets of Israel projected the vision of the coming of the Great Day of the Lord, when God’s kingdom would be universally established. The longing for the coming of a personal Messiah assumed greater and greater prominence whenever the Jewish religion was threatened, and in the year 5000 of the Creation Calendar it was believed a Messiah would appear and inaugurate the millennium. Jesus, according to Frederick Clifton Grant who once taught at Union Theological Seminary, “did not proclaim himself as Messiah nor did he undertake to gather a group of followers whom he could lead in a revolt against the Roman authority.” Grant adds that the Christian story of the last days of Jesus “was never looked upon as a documentary account of the proceedings. . . . It is difficult to maintain the traditional view that Jesus claimed, in the presence of the high priest and his satellites, to be either the Messiah or the Son of Man who was expected to come upon the clouds of heaven.” In the 20th century, the Grand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson was believed to be the Messiah by many Lubavitchers. A pluralist, he steadfastly believed that traditional Judaism was the only Judaism, but he welcomed the non-Orthodox even if they only visited in order to sample what he had to offer. Over 1,500 Chabad houses, or Lubavitch centers, were opened from Morocco and Hong Kong to Kiev and Seattle, and the organization allegedly took in one hundred million dollars a year in contributions. In 1991 when Schneerson prophesied to Hasidic groups that they were living in the messianic era, other rabbis rejoiced and proclaimed that “Schneerson is the Messiah,” some even stepping up campaigns to do good deeds in order that the arrival of the Messianic era might be hastened. Despite his having two strokes and being on his deathbed, he was aware that his followers fervently believed he would not die. When he succumbed, however, his followers were so sure he would not die that they had made no preparations whatsoever for his burial. “Once he is out of the body,” a rabbi rationalized, “it is the soul and you have no more limitations. Hopefully, he can accomplish everything he wanted to now.” Many believe Menachem Schneerson will rise from the grave and declare himself the Messiah, but others showed concern that he had left no directions as to who would control the movements five hundred million dollar budget in the event he was unable to do so. Psychologists note that when events challenge beliefs, the response can be reinterpretations that allow believers to weather periods of doubt. “Indeed,” observed New York Times reporter David Gonzalez (14 June 1994), “the thousands of mourners that have descended upon the city can help to strengthen the ties of faith that bind the Lubavitcher movement’s estimated 200,000 members worldwide.” In short, the Messiah “cannot” die . . . but, if he does, there is a reason. (See entry for Sabbatai, who was married to a Christian prostitute and proclaimed himself the Messiah. For the view that Isaiah’s “sign” had nothing to do with a messiah, see entry for Kenneth E. Nahigian.) {ER}
METAPHYSICAL SOCIETY The Metaphysical Society was a debating group that met in London nine times a year to discuss issues pertaining to philosophical ideas and religious beliefs. The members, some of the most notable figures of Victorian Society, included theists as well as non-theists. Included in the 1870s were William Kingdon Clifford, William Gladstone, Thomas Henry Huxley, Archbishop Henry Manning, John Ruskin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. {Tim Madigan, numerous conversations.}
METAPHYSICS Metaphysics is a division of philosophy which is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being. It includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology. Metaphysics, therefore, goes beyond or transcends the natural science of physics. The source of the word is Metaphysica, the title of Aristotle’s treatise on the subject. Since the middle of the 19th century, however, the dominant philosophical trend has been in the direction of positivism, which denies metaphysical assertions. The logical positivists, for example, by using the verification principle find that metaphysical questions are meaningless, unable to be tested. Philosophic naturalists such as A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell were anti-metaphysics in their writing, but some contemporary supernaturalists are known to continue speculating that if God is all-powerful He is capable of arranging for a number of angels to dance upon the point of a pin. Writers of fiction enjoy questioning whether things are genuinely real, as in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. A literalist would assume Gregor actually did so; figuratively, Kafka was writing a tale of psychological terror. Schopenhauer said that humans are doomed by nature to be metaphysical creatures. However, according to Michael J. Dee’s Conclusions (1917),“There are no more metaphysicians among the educated Japanese. Why should there be among us?” (See the entry for verification principle. Also see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.) {CE; DCL; ER; TYD}
Metcalf, John (20th Century) Metcalf in 1995 was appointed company secretary of the Rationalist Press Association. In 1996 he was named Administrative Director of the RPA.
Metcalf, Paul (1918-1999) Metcalf’s mother was Eleanor Thomas Metcalf, a granddaughter of Herman Melville and his literary executor. His father, Henry Knight Metcalf, was a descendant of Roger Williams. Although Metcalf said he had thought little about his famous ancestors, in his 1965 book, Genoa, he acknowledged his relationship to Melville and told his hometown newspaper, The Berkshire Eagle, that the book “was a way of getting the Melville monkey off my back.” Metcalf was instrumental in furthering Melville studies. In 1921 the manuscript of Melville’s Billy Budd was discovered in a tin box in his family’s home. Just before his death, two more boxes of family papers were discovered.
Metchnikov, Élie (1845–1916) Metchnikov was a Russian writer in French, the author of many works including one on Japan. After working with Pasteur, Metchnikoff became deputy director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He introduced the theory of phagocytosis, that certain white blood cells are able to engulf and destroy harmful substances such as bacteria. In 1908, he shared with Paul Ehrlich the Nobel Prize in Physiology. Metchnikov also developed a theory that lactic-acid bacteria in the digestive tract could, by preventing putrefaction, prolong life. And with P. P. É. Roux, he experimented with calomel ointment as a treatment for syphilis. In The Nature of Man (1904) Metchnikov expressed his atheism, according to McCabe. He also wrote a critical article on Christian communion in Revue Internationale des Sciences Biologiques. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Metrodoros (4th or 5th Century B.C.E. ?) According to Robertson, there were three freethinking Metrodoroses: Metrodoros of Lampsakos, a friend of Epicurus; Metrodoros of Chios; and another Metrodoros of Lampsakos. The latter was a disciple of Anaxagoras and zealously carried out his master’s teaching as to the deities and heroes of Homer, “resolving them into mere elemental combinations and physical agencies, and making Zeus stand for mind, and Athenê for art.” James Hemming has written of the 4th Century Metrodoros, an Epicurean philosopher, who wrote: “to consider the Earth the only populated world in infinite space is as absurd as to assert that, in an entire field sown with millet, only one grain will grow.” {JMR; JMRH; New Humanist, November 1993}
METROPOLITAN COMMUNITY CHURCH: See entry for Gay.
Mettrie, Julien de la: See La Mettrie, Julien de.
Metzger, Bruce M. (20th Century) Metzger with Michael D. Coggan edited The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993). The work is written in a scholarly, not necessarily skeptical, point of view.
Metzger, Tom (20th Century) Metzger is a white racist leaders who is an atheist. He founded WAR (White Aryan Resistance) and is active on the radical and racial right. According to Soldiers of God: White Supremacists and Their Holy War for America by Howard L. Bushart, John R. Craig, and Myra Barnes, Metzger originally was a part of Christian Identity. His rejection of religion is thought not to be based upon science but, rather, on aesthetics—he feels that Christianity is not suited for the white man. “Break out of your death cell, White man!” he has editorialized on the Web. “Your race and only your race must be your religion.” {CA}
Meunier, Amédée Victor (Born 1817) Meunier was a French writer who popularized science. He wrote Scientific Essays (1851–1858) and the Ancestors of Adam (1875). {BDF}
MEXICAN FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS The Mexican Ethical Rationalist Association (Asociacion Mexicana Ética Racionalista, Apdo 19-546, Mexico City DF 0-3900, Mexico) is a leading ethical rationalist group in Central America and publishes a quarterly, Razonamientos. It is an associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. (See entry for its quarterly, Razonamientos. Also see entries for José Luis María Mora and Ignacio Ramirez.)
MEXICAN POSITIVISTS Gabino Barreda (1818–1881) introduced a Comtean variety of positivism in Mexico. Upon being put in charge of educational reform in 1867, he introduced changes that reflected his antischolastic views. Later, during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, Justo Sierra led the intellectual life and was more inspired by Mill and Spencer than by Comte. Upon being named minister of education, Sierra reestablished the National University, which had been abolished earlier as a result of a church-state controversy. Like most positivists, Sierra based his anticlericalism on what he regarded as the religious superstition. In 1974, Leopoldo Zea wrote Positivism in Mexico. {EU}
Meyer, George J. (20th Century) A physician, Meyer is a member of the freedom From Religion Foundation who lives in Florida. For Freethought Today (August 1998), he wrote, “Science and Religion Never Friendly.”
Meyer, Hans (Born 1858) Meyer, a writer who traveled around the world, climbed some of the highest ranges of Asia, Africa, and America, and wrote various travel works. In 1884 he joined his father in a publishing firm and edited the Konversations-Lexikon, an important German encyclopedia. In 1891 he married Haeckel’s daughter Lisbeth, and he shared the views of his father-in-law. {RAT}
Meyer, John J. (20th Century)
Meyer, a freethinker, wrote 20,000 Trails Under the Universe With a Cerebroscope (1917). {GS}
Meyer, Lodewijk (17th Century) A Dutch physician, Meyer was a friend and follower of Spinoza. He published Exercitatio Paradoxa (1666) on the philosophical interpretation of scripture, a work Wheeler avers has wrongly been ascribed to Spinoza. {BDF}
Meyer, Sophie (20th Century) Meyer, president of the Residents Association at Pennswood Village in Newtown, Pennsylvania, participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <smyr@aol.com>.
Meyers, Carol (20th Century) A professor of religion at Duke University, Meyers is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Biblical Criticism Research Project.
Meyerson, Barbara (20th Century) Meyerson is an Adjunct Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City.
Mezentius [King] (Ancient Rome) In The Aeneid, Vergil’s writing of the Roman national epic in the 1st Century B.C.E., Mezentius, King of the Etruscans, is depicted as a classic type of freethinker, doubtless drawn from barbaric life. A divum contemptor, he calls his right arm his god and in dying declares that he appeals to no deity. He does not, however, deny that gods exist. {JMR; JMRH}
Mialhe, Hippolyte (Born 1834) Mialhe was a French writer who, from 1860 to 1862, was with the French army of occupation at Rome. He organized federations of freethinkers in France, edited L’Union des Libres-Penseurs, and wrote Mémoires d’un libre Penseur (1888). {BDF}
Miall, Louis Compton (Born 1842) A biologist who had taught at Leeds University, Miall was Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal Institution (1904–1905) and President of the Zoological Section of the British Association in 1897. His History of Biology was published by the Rationalist Press Association in 1911. {RAT}
Michaels, Barbara (20th Century) Michaels is on the Board of Governors of The Humanist Institute.
Michaud, Yves (20th Century) Michaud, in France, is a corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) As did Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo typified the ideal in art of “a new type—the universal man—the many-sided personality, delighting in every kind of this-earthly achievement” rather than the old type, the ascetic monk as ideal human. The Sistine Chapel ceiling and the homoerotic sculpture of David are his best-known works. The latter scandalized Australian authorities, who even in the present century have sent police to seize coffee-table books containing photos of the nude statue. His poems and sonnets were not published until 1960, having been altered for centuries to show that the love poems were addressed to women, not men (as was his original intent). Although his “Pieta” and “Moses” earned high praise from church officials, he was aware that Deuteronomy IV: 16-18, specifically prohibits “the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth.” Both the Old Testament and the Qur’an are scathing about idolatry, and Michelangelo (along with other artists of his time) was aware that religious Jews could not even make or own statues or busts. Michelangelo never married, but according to The Advocate (19 August 1997) he likely was “intimate” with a Roman nobleman named Tommaso Cavalieri and, perhaps, with Pope Julius III. {CE; CL; GL}
Michelet, Jules (1798–1874)
Michelet was a French historian, author of History of France and The French Revolution, and the greatest historian of the romantic school. With his friend Quinet, he wrote The Jesuits (1843). In 1851, refusing the oath of allegiance to Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III), Michelet lost his position as professor of history at the Collège de France. In 1867, upon publication of his major work, the Histoire de France (1833–1867), he traced the biography of the nation as a whole, rather than concentrating on persons or groups of people. His work was allegedly marred by emotional bias against the clergy, the nobility, and the monarchic institutions, but his critics were complaining against his atheism. Sorceress (1862) dealt with witchcraft in the Middle Ages, a work which like his other works provoked Christian critics. “Man,” Michelet once wrote, “is his own Prometheus,” to which he added that he had “no faith but humanity.” {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Michener, James (1907–1997) Michener, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tales of the South Pacific (1984), was one of the few major American authors to publicly acknowledge his secular humanism. In 1989, while a guest lecturer on a Star Princess Cruise shop plowing Alaskan waters, the writer of numerous novels gave a talk to the ship’s auditorium-packed crowd during which he recounted his being a foundling who had never had skates, a wagon, or a sled. His clothes, he said, were always somebody else’s. And he added, “I never felt in a position to reject anyone. I could be Jewish, part Negro, almost everything else. I am a Humanist, a knee-jerk liberal. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with moral guidance, create a decent society.” In a popular essay he refuted critics who attacked his humanistic credo, one that supported secular and liberal values. In Parade (24 November 1991):
I was raised as an orphan by a farm couple and took their name. I know nothing of my parents so I never felt in a position to reject anybody. I could be Jewish, part Negro, probably not an Oriental, but almost anything else. This has loomed large in my thoughts. . . . . I decided (after listening to a “talk radio” commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life that) I was both a Humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a Humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, crate a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perceptual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a Humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation. But I do not want to be accused of atheism. No man who loves the book of Deuteronomy and the first chapter of the Epistle of James, as I do, can be totally non-religious. . . .
In The World is My Home: A Memoir (1992), Michener again described his philosophy as being a kind of “liberal humanism” in the vein of Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson, and John Dewey. Although unsure of his parentage and his birthdate, Michener thought he had been born in New York and had arrived in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, when he was about two weeks old. Mabel Haddock Michener, a poor young widow, he wrote in his autobiography, “made her living by taking in orphaned children and doing other families’ laundry.” When ninety and suffering from poor health, he chose to discontinue his life-saving kidney dialysis treatment and died of complications following renal failure. John Kings, a longtime friend and assistant, explained Michener’s personally choosing to end his life. “He felt he had accomplished what he wanted to accomplish in terms of his life’s work. He did not want to suffer a long series of complications.” (See entry for Hernan Rodriguez, who quotes from Michener’s Iberia.) {CE; HNS2; Thaila Daley Kleinoeder, The Pen Woman, March-April 1998; TYD}
MICHIGAN HUMANISTS AND FREETHINKERS Michigan has the following groups:
• American Atheists, Inc., PO Box 96, Wayne, Michigan 48184-0096. Henry Schmuck is a contact; E-mail: <hmorgan@oeonline.com>. • Freethought Association of West Michigan (ASHS), PO Box 9873, Wyoming, Michigan 49509 • Great Lakes Humanist Society, PO Box 1183, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48804. E-mail: <humanist@netscape.net>. • Humanist Community of Central Michigan (AHA), 2401 Wellington Road, Lansing, Michigan 48910. Ron Clement is its contact. Larry Reyka is the coordinator of the north central region of the AHA. • Humanist Ethical Church, 6033 Hopkins Road, Flint, Michigan 48506. The Rev. Paul O’Brien is the leader. E-mail: <paul@tir.com> • Humanist Fellowship of West Michigan (AHA), 6647 Noffke Drive, Caledonia, Michigan 49316. Dirk Nebbeling is a contact. The group’s homepage on the Web: <http://members.aol.com/faowm>. • Humanists of South East Michigan (AHA), POB 432191, Pontiac, Michigan 48343. T. L. Hall is its contact. • Kalamazoo College Freethinkers are at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Michigan Technological University’s Freethinker, Atheists, and Rationalists Organization are on the Web at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Monroe County Community College Humanists are found on the Web at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Secular Humanists of Detroit (ASHS), POB 432191, Pontiac, Michigan 48343; 220 Bagley, Room 908, Detroit, Michigan 48226 (313) 962-1777. Contact: Steve Walker. E-mail: <avhogan@dhol.com>. • Society for Humanistic Judaism, 28611 West 12 Mile Road, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334. • University of Michigan at Flint Humanists: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Western Michigan University’s Atheists, Heathens, and Agnostics group is on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY In Houghton, Michigan, the Michigan Technological University’s Freethinker, Atheists, and Rationalists Organization is on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Michnik, Adam (20th Century) Michnik is editor of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s leading newspaper. In 1993 he was named a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is a political writer and co-founder of KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee), the organization of dissident intellectuals that helped to end communist rule in Poland. His essay, “The Church and the Marty’s Stake in Poland,” is included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994).
Micklewright, F.M. Amphlett (1908– ) A freethinker, Micklewright wrote Rationalism and Culture (19–?) and The New Orthodoxy (1943). {FUK; GS}
MICROBES • We live in evolutionary competition with microbes. There is no guarantee that we will win. —Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Nobel Prize Winner, 1958
Before birth, the human fetus is germ-free. But as the newborn passes through the birth canal or is delivered by Cesarean operation, bacteria inhabit the body. Few places in nature, in fact, harbor populations as diverse and numerous as those found in the human body. Microbiologist Dr. Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis estimates that at least four hundred species set up housekeeping in the baby’s gut, and many more reside on the skin, the mouth, and elsewhere. For the most part, however, they work on their hosts’ behalf and in subtle and intriguing ways. In a Darwinian struggle for survival they not only feed their hosts but also help synthesize vitamins. “The colon almost looks like it evolved for the purpose of harboring bacteria,” Dr. Abigail Salyers, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois, has noted. The microbes, which have been evolving for billions of years and are always seeking new niches such as the plaque on human teeth, “want a free lunch,” Dr. Salyers has stated. “We want to survive in their world and take advantage of it. Thus our bodies have evolved to accommodate microbes. We should love them. They’re like our mother. They clean up our messes.” In fact, Dr. Carl R. Woese, an evolutionary microbiologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, has observed, “If you wiped all multicellular life forms off the face of the earth, microbial life might shift a tiny bit [but] if microbial life were to disappear, that would be it—instant death for the planet!” {The New York Times, 15 October 1996}
MICROCOSM: See entry for macrocosm.
Middlebrooks, Dennis (20th Century) Middlebrooks, who works in New York City for Bank Leumi, jokingly describes himself as one of the Jewish-owned bank’s “Saturday men,” explaining that by being a freethinker he can work on others’ sabbath. Formerly president of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, he joined in 1998 with Warren Allen Smith, another former president, to found FANNY (Freethinking Activist Nonbelieving New Yorkers). Middlebrooks is one of the Civil War and Robert G. Ingersoll cognoscenti. He has been published widely in letters-to-the-editor columns. A courageously independent thinker, he is an active rather than a passive nonbeliever. (See entry for Freethinking Activist Nonbelieving New Yorkers.)
Middleton, Conyers (1683–1750) Middleton, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote Letter from Rome, Showing an Exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism (1729), in which, according to Robertson, “the part of paganism in Christianity is so set forth as to carry inference further than the argument ostensibly goes.” His proclamation did nothing to check the spread of open deism among students at Oxford University, the university officials publicly lamented. Middleton is considered to be one of the earliest English rationalistic theologians. He as a latitudinarian advocated opening the church to a broad spectrum of beliefs. Middleton wrote a classic Life of Cicero. {BDF; CE; FUK; JMR; JMRH}
Middleton, Hannah Elina (1942– ) Middleton is an Australian atheist and Marxist anthropologist. Asked to describe her life’s stance, she replied with a quotation from the Russian dramatist Aleksandr Nikolayevitch Ostrovsky (1823–1886): “Man’s dearest possession is life and since it is given to him to live but once he must so live as to suffer no torturing regrets for years without purpose, so live as not to be seared with the shame of a cowardly and trivial past, so live that dying he can say all my life and my strength has been given to the finest cause in the world: the liberation of mankind.” {SWW}
Miescher, Friedrich (19th Century) Miescher isolated a substance which he called nuclein (now known as DNA, or deoxyribo nucleic acid) in 1869. Not until the last half of the 20th Century did research reveal its significance as the material of which the gene is composed. Philosophers have generally overlooked the importance of Miescher’s discovery. {CE}
Mignacca, Marge (20th Century) Mignacca is a contributing editor of The American Rationalist.
Mignardi, G. (19th Century) Mignardi was an Italian writer, a freethinker who published Memorie di un Nuovo Credente (Memoirs of a New Believer, 1884). {BDF}
MIHRAB Muslims who must face Mecca, but who cannot tell in which direction Mecca is, look for a mihrab, a niche in the wall of a mosque or a room that indicates the direction. Analogously, freethinkers who cannot tell in which direction Amherst, New York, is consult an atlas, use a compass, or inquire at a petrol station.
Milbrath, Lester W. (20th Century) Milbrath is professor emeritus of environmental studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988) and is author of Learning to Think Environmentally (1996).
Milelli, Domenico (Born 1841) Milelli was an Italian poet whose family intended to make him a priest. However, turned out to be a rank pagan, as shown by his Odi Pagane (1879), Canzonieri (1884), and other works. {BDF; RAT}
Miles, Austin (1933– ) Miles’s Don’t Call Me Brother (1989) describes how he went from circus ringmaster to Pentecostal televangelist and back again. His experiences with the born-again are detailed. In Setting the Captives Free (1990), he has members of the Assemblies of God and other Pentecostal churches tell how they were victimized.
Miles, Jack (1942– ) Miles is author of the controversial God: A Biography (1995). An Episcopalian who once was a member of the Jesuit order and studied at both the Gregorian College in Rome and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Miles treats God as a character in a literary work, the Bible. Just as Hamlet and Don Quixote are “real,” so is God. “No character . . . on stage, page, or screen,” Miles says, “has ever had the reception that God has had.” God, he writes, is a male with multiple personalities. First, he created the world in order to make a self-image, which, explained Phyllis Trible in a New York Times review (14 May 1995), indicates that “He does not fully understand who He is but discovers Himself through interaction with humanity. Immediately the focus narrows to the man and the woman in the garden. When they disobey their creator, He responds vindictively and so reveals His own inner conflict. Called God in Genesis I, he is lofty, powerful, and bountiful; called Lord God in Genesis II and III, he is intimate and volatile. Ambivalent about His image, the creator becomes the destroyer: the floor descends. A radical fault runs through the character of God.” The work infuriated religious fundamentalists but was found refreshing by religious liberals. (See review of God by Robert Gorham Davis in Free Inquiry, Summer 1996.)
Miles, William John (1871–1942) Miles in 1912 was secretary of the Rationalist Press Association of New South Wales, Australia. He was a rationalist, public accountant, businessman, and eccentric. In 1914 he published the Sydney Rationalist Annual. When his Australia First and right-wing Independent Sydney Secularist ceased in 1940 after forty-nine issues, Miles wrote that censorship had caused him to suspend publication. However, a new group continued the journal, saying that it now was being put out “by a few atheists who do not favour the Communistic Propaganda which has become a feature with the Rationalist Association of New South Wales (although many of the members are certainly not Communists).”
Milk, Harvey (1930–1978) Milk, a political conservative who became an ardent liberal, was elected in 1977 to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A gay activist, he along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were shot and killed by former city supervisor Dan White, a rabid opponent of gay rights. When White was sentenced to only seven years and eight months, although the murder of public officials was subject to the death penalty in California, a riot followed and over one hundred individuals were injured. White later committed suicide. Milk once wrote, according to the gay journal, The Advocate, “I want nothing even smacking, or smelling, or hinting of religion.”
MILKY WAY Although many in organized religion still speak of a three-tiered universe (Heaven, above; Earth, in the middle; Hell, below), any rationalist is aware that we are in the large aggregation of gas, dust, and stars held together by the gravitational attraction between its parts and which is known as the Milky Way. Our galaxy, which is one of innumerable others, contains a sun and perhaps one hundred billion stars. Cosmologist David N. Schramm, reviewing Robert Osserman’s Poetry of the Universe (1995), exclaims how well the book helps us “stretch our minds so that we can see expanding space curved somewhat like the surface of Earth, but in three dimensions rather than Earth’s two, and with the added fourth dimension, time. What we know from modern astronomy is this: Other galaxies are moving away from our Milky way galaxy and, no matter which direction they are moving in, the farther away they are the faster they move. Our view when we look out at the galaxies is what a raisin might see in a rising loaf of raisin bread; the more distant raisins have more rising dough between them and thus move faster while nearby raisins have less dough separating them and thus move apart more slowly.” Schramm continues, “In the universe, it is space itself that is expanding (rising) and the galaxies, like the raisins, remain the same size. The elegant simplicity of the expansion of the universe is pointed up by Mr. Osserman’s observation that a person anywhere, in any galaxy at any time, could make an egocentric map of the universe, with himself or herself at the center of the map, and come to exactly the same conclusion about the shape and evolution of the universe (his section on egocentric maps is revealing and quite amusing).” Osserman, a mathematician, is one of many who attempt to make the cosmos meaningful. (See entry for Extraterrestrial Life.)
Mill, James (1773–1836) Mill was a philosopher and historian who, the son of a poor Scottish shoemaker, was educated by patrons for the church. He took up the study of Greek philosophy and became licensed as a preacher in the Scottish Church, but he moved instead to London and became editor of the Literary Review. He would have entered the pulpit as a Presbyterian preacher had he not, according to his son, by his “own studies and reflections been led to reject not only the belief in Revelation, but the foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion.” Further, “He came to the conviction that ‘concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known.’ ” Mill looked upon religion as “the greatest enemy of morality,” and he regarded the God of Christianity as an embodiment of the “ne plus ultra of wickedness.” In 1819, he published his History of British India (3 volumes). For the fifth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Mill wrote many articles. A friend of Bentham, he also wrote in the Westminster Review, forwarding the views of philosophic radicalism. In religion he became a skeptic and, after reading Bishop Butler’s Analogy, became interested in atheism. Mrs. Grote, commenting upon Mill’s death, said, “He died without any pain or struggle, of long-standing pulmonary phthisis.” A few days earlier, Francis Place wrote to Mrs. Grote, “Stayed too long with poor Mill, who showed much more sympathy and affection than ever before in all our long friendship. But he was all the time as much of a bright reasoning man as ever he was—reconciled to his fate, brave, and calm to an extent which I never before witnessed, except in another old friend, Thomas Holeroft, the day before the day of his death.” {BDF; FO; JM; RAT; RE}
Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) The son of James Mill, John was so severely educated by his father that he read Greek at the age of seven. At the age of twelve, he was well acquainted with the classics and had begun to study logic. Becoming one of the most learned writers of his generation, he was respected throughout the country. A founder of utilitarianism along with Jeremy Bentham, Mill stressed the method of empiricism as the source of all knowledge. He was a strong advocate of proportional representation, labor unions, and farm cooperation. He favored women’s rights and was not averse to Comte’s religion of humanity. In 1856, his Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications (1848) was included on the index of prohibited reading. According to Delos B. McKown, Mill wished to win over to his skeptical position on religion only those of superior intelligence and character. He did not wish to deprive lesser mortals of their religion, hoping instead to improve their religious outlook through education. Neither did he suggest Nature as an alternative to supernatural religion, according to the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Vol. 5). Mill wrote that “Christian morality (so-called) has all the characters of a reaction; . . . Its ideal is negative rather than positive; passive rather than active; Innocence rather than Nobleness; Abstinence from Evil, rather than energetic Pursuit of Good. . . . It holds out the hope of heaven and the threat of hell, as the appointed and appropriate motives to a virtuous life; in this falling far below the best of the ancients, and doing what lies in it to give to human morality an essentially selfish character. . . . It is essentially the doctrine of passive obedience; it inculcates submission to all authorities found established.” He also wrote, “It is conceivable that religion may be morally useful without being intellectually sustainable.” Also, “God is a word to express, not our ideas, but the want of them.” Mill, who was in his forties and after having loved her for twenty years, married Harriet Taylor in 1851 when her husband died. But she died in 1858 and, profoundly affected, he dedicated to her the famous On Liberty (1859), which they had worked on together. It is a major work revered by rationalists because of its pro-democratic, liberal stand. According to Robertson, Mill’s Three Essays on Religion—“Nature,” “The Utility of Religion,” and “Theism” (1859, 1875, in Dissertations and Discussions)—exhibit not only that Mill was not a Christian but that he had never been one. Equally important, Mill “cleared the air of the hell-fire and the God who prospered on fear. More than any other event,” Berman maintains, Mill “shifted the onus of proof from the atheist to the believer.” With Viscount Morley, he agrees that “probably no English writer has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the root of the theological spirit.” What he believed in was a finite God, one who exists but is not as the traditionalists claim necessarily all-powerful, perfectly good, and entirely omniscient. Prof. Bain, his intimate friend and biographer, once said of Mill that “in everything characteristic of the creed of Christendom he was a thorough-going negationist. He admitted neither its truth nor its utility.” Bain also wrote that Mill “absented himself during his whole life from religious services.” Mill’s important philosophical work is the System of Logic (1843), in which he treats philosophy comprehensively and from the viewpoint of an empiricist. In his Three Essays on Religion, Mill admittedly mellowed his agnosticism with a view of a finite and impersonal God. But, wrote Paul Edwards in Immortality, Mill remained agnostic concerning the subject of life after death, or immortality. In 1871, accepting under great pressure the office of pall-bearer at Grote’s funeral, Mill on walking out of Westminster Abbey remarked to Bain, “In no very long time, I shall be laid in the ground with a very different ceremonial from that.” Bain then noted, “It so happened, however, that a prayer was delivered at his own interment by the Protestant pastor at Avignon, who thereby got himself into trouble, from Mill’s known scepticism, and had to write an exculpation in the local newspaper. The pastor, Bain found, was “a very intelligent and liberal-minded man.” However, when the Democratie du Midi announced that Mill had received “the last consolations of religion” on his death-bed, “M. Rey honourably denied the statement and said, “Il n’y avait point de pasteur pres du lit de M. Mill” (There was no clergyman at Mr. Mill’s bedside.) After a fall, Mill died of erysipelas. Three days before his death in 1873, he had walked fifteen miles. Dr. Gurney described his last hours:
Mr. Mill suffered but little, except in swallowing, and from the heat and weight of the enormous swelling, which, by the time I arrived from Nice, had already spread over his face and neck; and yet he learned from me on my arrival the fatal nature of the attack with calmness and resignation. His express desire that he might not lose his mental faculties was gratified, for his great intellect remained clear to the last moment. His wish that his funeral might be quiet and simple, as indeed, his every wish, was attended to by his loving stepdaughter with devoted solicitude. (New York Daily News, 12 May 1873)
One English Christian journal, which itself went out of business soon afterwards, declared its opinion that Mill’s soul was burning in hell and expressed a hearty wish that his disciples would soon follow him. (See entry for Helen Taylor.) {BDF; CE; ER; EU, Delos B. McKown; FO; FUK; HAB; ILP; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; TRI; TSV; TYD}
Millar, John (1735–1801) Millar was a jurist who was intended for the Church, but discussion on religion with inventor James Watt and economist Adam Smith undermined his religious beliefs. He became tutor to the son of Lord Kames, at whose house he met Hume and adopted his philosophy. In 1760 Millar became an advocate and the following year he became a professor of law at Glasgow University. His Origin of the Distinctions of Ranks (1806) is discreetly rationalistic. {RAT}
Millard, Killick (1870–1952) In 1936, Millard founded the Euthanasia Society in England.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent (1892–1950) Millay is sometimes remembered as the American poet who was known for the bohemian freedom of her life style, the one who wrote
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light. To which Dorothy Parker respectfully remarked, “We all wandered in after Miss Millay. We were all being dashing and gallant, declaring that we weren’t virgins, whether we were or not. Beautiful as she was, Miss Millay did a great deal of harm with her double-burning candles . . . made poetry seem so easy that we could all do it. But, of course, we couldn’t.”
Millay was born in Maine and was given her middle name to honor a New York City site, Greenwich Village’s St. Vincent Hospital, in which one of her relatives had once been taken and had recovered. She graduated from Vassar College (and had tried to commit suicide there by jumping from her dormitory window). Millay moved to Greenwich Village in the 1920s (to “the smallest house in New York City,” 9 1/2’ wide, at 75 1/2 Bedford Street, which at various times was inhabited also by matinee idol John Barrymore, film actor Cary Grant, and composer-critic Deems Taylor). In the Village she became associated with the Provincetown Players, writing one-act satirical fantasies for them such as Two Slatterns and a King (1921). A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) established her as a reckless, romantic, cynical, “naughty” New Woman, and her impact became great upon writers of her time. In 1923, Millay married Eugene Jan Boissevain, a Dutch coffee importer, and moved to “Steepletop,” a farm near Austerlitz, New York. That same year, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Harp-Weaver and Other Poems. Critics found her work contained a disillusioned bitterness and remarked about her technical ability, particularly in her sonnets. Millay wrote the libretto for Deems Taylor’s opera, The King’s Henchman (1927) and, with George Dillon, she translated Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (1936). Jennifer S. Wilson of the University of Minnesota relates that at a cocktail party Millay once discussed her recurrent headaches with a psychologist who asked her about her attraction to women. “Oh, you mean I’m homosexual!” Millay responded. “Of course I am, and heterosexual too, but what’s that got to do with my headache?” Although, like many poets, she used the word “God,” she did not appear to mean it in an orthodox sense. In her “Conversation at Midnight,” Millay wrote,
There is no God. But it does not matter. Man is enough.
In 1949, her husband died, and Millay died less than a year later of heart failure. {CE; GL; OEL; OCAL}
Millé, Constantin (19th Century) A Romanian writer, Millé lectured at Jassy and Bucharest on the history of philosophy, from a materialistic point of view. He was also active with Codreano and, after the latter’s death, in spreading socialism. Millé, who contributed to the Revista Sociala and the Vütoral edited by C. Pilitis, has been active in the International Freethought Federation. {BDF; PUT; RAT}
MILLENNIUM Revelation:20 refers to the thousand years during which holiness is to prevail and Christ is to reign on earth, which will be a period of great happiness because the devil will be cast into a bottomless pit. The idea possibly derives from the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, who conceived of the history of the world in thousand-year periods, culminating in the final defeat of evil and triumph of good. According to many biblical passages, one day for God equals 1,000 earthly years. Using this analogy, if God created in six and rested for one, the Earth can endure for 6,000 years and must then rest for the final 1000 years. Inasmuch as Anglican Archbishop James Ussher stated in 1650 that the world began on 23 October 4004 B. C., something apparently has not worked out: The world did not end 6000 years later, or on 23 October 1996. Ergo, even Dionysius Exiguus’s miscalculation of the date of Jesus’ birth by at least four years is wrong. Millennialists persist in believing that Jesus Christ will return to rule the Earth with his saints and cast the devil into a bottomless pit. At midnight on 31 December 1999, millennialists again despaired. Naturalists and humanists, on the contrary, looked to the new millennium as an arbitrary period of time during which people will be united by their humanity, not by their faith. Also, they do not consider “millennium” to be a Christian occurrence, pointing out that on 31 December 1999 in Jerusalem the calendar year there will read 5758. (See Nicolas Walter on Pre-Millennial Tension in The Freethinker, October 1996. A cogent discussion of “the millenial itch” is in The Economist, 4 January 1997) {Stephen Jay Gould, USA Weekend, 19-21 September 1997}
Miller, Arnold (20th Century) Miller, associate professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati, is editor of Paleobiology, a quarterly journal of the Paleontological Society. His expertise is in evaluating trends in global diversity through geologic time. Miller has spoken to the Cincinnati secular humanists about ways to combat the unscientific views known as creationism.
Miller, Arthur (1915– ) Arthur Miller, Playwright art
Miller, quoted in the program for the Sydney Theatre Company's production of his play "Broken Glass", from an interview by Caroline Scott and Alexandra Lautenbacher in Sunday Times Magazine, 1995, says: "I have no formal religion but there's a space in my head for it. Maybe I would believe in God if he believed in me. But we're living in a reality that's so hard to understand. In the last 75 years the human race has been humiliated in a way we've never known before..."
Miller, who was married to Marilyn Monroe after her marriage to baseball player Joe DiMaggio, is a major American playwright. For many, he is as well known for being Monroe’s husband as for having invented the character of Willy Loman, the “ordinary” person in Death of a Salesman (1949) who is destroyed by hollow materialistic values. Miller’s work, which deals with moral and political issues, includes All My Sons (1947), and A View from the Bridge (1955), the latter of which gained the censors’ wrath because one of the male characters “contemptuously” kisses another man. The Crucible (1953), which was a powerful depiction of religious paranoia and its resulting mayhem, was made into a 1997 movie. Its director, Nicholas Hytner, said, “The sad truth about this story is that it will always be topical. It speaks directly about the bigotry of religious fundamentalists across the globe, about communities torn apart by accusations of child abuse, about the rigid intellectual orthodoxies of college campuses. There is no shortage of contemporary Salems ready to cry witchcraft.” After the Fall (1964) is a thinly disguised story of his marriage to Monroe (whom he married in Connecticut in a ceremony presided over by a Unitarian minister). The work appears to say that we are all, indeed, fumbling around in a godless world, so what responsibility do we have to others! In 1989, he wrote the present author:
Humanism? I don’t know, I guess it has to be the opposite of inhumanism, and we all know what that is.
In 1992, still unwilling to be labeled, he wrote concerning which kind of humanist he might be:
Depends on the day. I’d call myself a secular humanist, excepting when the mystery of life is overwhelming and some semi-insane directing force seems undeniable.
When the Sydney Theatre Company produced his “Broken Glass,” Miller was quoted in 1995:
I have no formal religion but there’s a space in my head for it. Maybe I would believe in God if he believed in me. But we’re living in a reality that’s so hard to understand. In the last seventy-five years the human race has been humiliated in a way we’ve never known before. (See entry for David Diamond, who disagrees with Miller’s 1992 statement.) {CA; CE; E; RI; TYD; WAS, 1 May 1989 and 15 June 1992}
Miller, Cecil H. (20th Century) Miller was on the executive committee of the Southwestern Philosophical Conference when in the 1950s he wrote book reviews for The Humanist.
Miller, D. M. (20th Century) Miller wrote The Evolution of God: The Origins of Moral Behavior (1998). Our goals, he holds, are set by our emotions, not by our intellect. The existence of God is a lie told by our genes to compel us to act in ways that promote our welfare and their survival. The reason we are imperfect is that while a certain amount of goodness is good for us, too much is bad for us. Miller’s book includes his observations on society’s evolution. {Jim Cox, Midwest Book Review}
Miller, David (20th Century) Miller was a key figure in 1978 of the Manawatu branch that took over the management of The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist.
Miller, Dusty (20th Century) In Britain, Miller is active with the York Humanist Group and is author of Women Who Hurt Themselves (1994).
Miller, Emma (1839–1917) Miller was an Australian freethinker and women’s activist. Born in England to a Unitarian and Chartist family, she emigrated to Queensland in 1878 and became an advocate of women’s right to suffrage, to form trade unions, and to freedom from exploitation in houses of work. An admirer of Thomas Paine, she was foundation president of the Women’s Equal Franchise Association. Miller also was a founding member of the Australian Labor Party. {SWW}
Miller, Florence Fenwick (Born 1854) A writer, Miss Miller retained her maiden name with her husband’s consent. She published The House of Life (1878), and from 1876 to 1882 sat on the London School Board. In 1877, speaking of Harriet Martineau, Miller repudiated “superstition and priestcraft” and declared herself an agnostic like Miss Martineau. {RAT}
Miller, Irene L. (20th Century) Miller is an actor who portrays Margaret Sanger in one-woman shows.
Miller, James (Died 1989) Miller, a folk-singer better known as Ewan MacColl, was the joint founder of the Theatre Workshop. A Communist, he also was a humanist, according to Nicolas Walter. In 1985, when he realized he was approaching the end of his life, Miller wrote a song for his companion Peggy Seeger called “The Joy of Living,” which he contributed to a BBC Radio 4 program about humanism in 1987:
Take me to some high place Of heather, rock and ling; And the sundew hung with diamonds. Feed me to the wind: So that I will be Part of all you see, The air you are breathing.
I’ll be part of the curlew’s cry And the soaring hawk, the blue milkwort Scatter my dust and ashes, I’ll be riding the gentle wind That blows through your hair, Reminding you of how we shared In the joy of living.
Miller, James Alexander (1915– ) A professor emeritus of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Miller, a naturalist, reviewed in the 1950s Julian Huxley’s book on cancer in The Humanist. Miller has won a large number of awards for his cancer research, including in 1980 the Mott award of the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation.
Miller, Jeanne (20th Century) Miller, whose son was preyed upon by a Chicago-area priest in 1982, founded VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup, Inc.), a national advocacy group which since its formation in 1991 has received much attention by the media. At the 1993 Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual convention in Huntsville, Alabama, Miller spoke on “Clergy Sexual Abuse and the Moral Bankruptcy of Institutional Religion.”
Miller, Jonathan Wolfe (1934– ) Miller is the London-born physician, actor, theater and film director known to Americans particularly for his co-authoring and acting in “Beyond the Fringe” (1961–1964) and for his 1986 directing on Broadway of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” He was associate director of the National Theatre (1973–1975) and artistic director of Old Vic (1988–1990). He has directed many dramas and operas, including works by Shakespeare, Marston, Wilde, Henry James, Beethoven, Mozart, and Verdi. Miller, a physician who was a research fellow in the history of medicine at University College, London University (1970–1973), is author of Freud: The Man, His World, His Influence (1972) and The Don Giovanni Book (1990). Miller has been decorated with the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and in 1996 was admitted into the Council for Secular Humanism’s Humanist Academy. Also, he is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.
Miller, Montague David (1839–1920) Miller, called “Monty,” was an atheist, carpenter, socialist veteran, and a “Eureka Stockader.” To the grief of his mother and the disgust of his Wesleyan father, he became an atheist at the age of 15. Arguing that Christianity was scientifically unsound and that atheism provided a superior moral code for society, Miller became a leading lecturer for the Australian Secular Association. Ross’s Magazine described him as “The Tolstoi of Australia,” and he was elected the first chairman of the Melbourne branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. On his deathbed, Miller said he would die with “atheistic fortitude.” Thomas Walker spoke at the graveside while mourners sang “The Red Flag.” {SWW}
Miller, O. W. (20th Century) Miller, who was an associate professor of psychology and assistant in philosophy at Nebraska Wesleyan University, wrote The Kantian Thing-in-itself (1956). Asked his views on humanism, he responded to the present author:
Relative to Religious Humanism, as I think of it, it is inclined to be too superficial. It fails to recognize man as being profoundly related to the rest of Reality. It may not over-emphasize the humanistic element in Christianity, but it under-estimates the divinity of man. The 25th chapter of Matthew, the Book of James, and many other sections of the Scriptures stress the humanistic aspects of religion. But the 17th Chapter of John and numerous other scriptures stress the fact that man is more than a social being. Furthermore, Humanism is a religion without a theology. I would prefer a theology without a religion. That is, if I had a choice. But when we come to Renaissance Humanism, that is a horse of another color. I am in hearty accord with Petrarch, Erasmus, Rabelais, Sir Thomas More, and Cervantes, for the reason that they stress man, learning, knowledge, reason, and scholarship. So far as Naturalistic Humanism is concerned, I have given it considerable attention. And I am inclined to believe that this Philosophy of Reality is moving in the right direction. As I teach it, this Philosophy correlates with Naturalistic Theism or Theistic Naturalism as set out by five or six outstanding thinkers, and as found in E. S. Brightman’s book on the philosophy of religion, and elsewhere. When it comes to Supernaturalism, in the accepted sense of the term, we are on dangerous ground, unless we understand how to differentiate between Metaphysics and Logic. As for myself, Leibnitz, Immanuel Kant, and others help me over the bumps, or out of the mud, of this system of thought. If this world in which we live is not real, then nothing is real. Relative to this point, The Realm of Ends by James Ward gives me my direction. Kant, Ward, and other philosophers of like mind bring us back from our Transcendental Tangent. Ward, especially, points out, in other words, of course, that man, ignoring the whole of his nature, tends to yield himself to the Centrifugal forces of life and thought, when a much more reasonable and satisfactory view might be arrived at if man would attempt to see himself in terms of both the Centrifugal and the Centripetal. If man would only check on himself in terms of Metaphysics and Logic, he might then realize that his natural Logical Tendencies have carried him entirely too far from the center of Theological Gravity. {WAS, 25 April 1956}
Miller, Olin (20th Century) Miller, a freethinker, wrote “400 Bible Errors” (c. 1970). {GS}
Miller, Perry (1905–1963) Miller edited The Transcendentalists (1950). A towering figure in the field of American intellectual history, he held in The New England Mind (1939) that religion rather than economics was the prime motive behind the settling of New England. He wrote The American Puritans (1956) and edited The Works of Jonathan Edwards (1957). {CE}
Miller, Rachel Seabolt (20th Century) Miller is treasurer of Rationalists United for Secular Humanism.
Miller, Russell E. (1917–1993) Miller wrote The Larger Hope: History of the Universalist Church in America (2 volumes, 1979–1985), the definitive history of Universalism’s origins in 1770 and its history until its merger with the American Unitarian Association in 1961. He also wrote a comprehensive history of Tufts University, Light on the Hill, describing its history including its having been chartered by a group of Universalist clergy in 1852. Miller, who joined the Tufts faculty in 1948, served as chairman of the history department from 1975 to 1980.
Millerand, Alexandre (Premier) (1859–1943) Millerand in 1883 joined the staff of Clemenceau’s paper, La Justice. Later, he edited La Petite République. In 1885 he entered the Chambre as a Radical-Socialist, breaking with the extreme Socialists in 1899. In 1920 he was elected Premier of France. {RAT}
MILLERSVILLE UNIVERSITY HUMANISTS Humanists in Pennsylvania at Millersville University are found on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Millholland, Jean (20th Century) Millholland is the Executive Director Emeritus of the Council for Secular Humanism. She has been an active director of humanist activities since the formation of the group, and she signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Millière, Jean Baptiste (1817–1871) Millière was born of poor French parents, became an advocate, and founded the Proletaire at Clermont Ferrand. For writing Revolutionary Studies, he was, after the coup d’état, banished to Algeria until the amnesty of 1859. In 1869 Millière started, with Rochefort, the Marseillaise, of which he became one of the principal directors. At the election for the National Assembly, he was elected for Paris. Although he took no part in the Commune, but sought to act as an intermediary, he was arrested and summarily shot near the Pantheon. Millière died exclaiming, “Vive l’humanité!” {BDF; RAT}
Millikan, Robert Andrew (1868–1953) Millikan, an American physicist and educator, won the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physics, which was awarded for his measurement of the electron’s charge. He also made important studies of cosmic rays (which he named), X rays, and physical and electric constants. Millikan also lectured on the reconciliation of science and religion. At a time when Leuba showed that more than 80% of the greater scientific men of America did not believe in God, Millikan said he had “never known a thinking man who did not believe in God.” {CE; RE}
Mills, C. Wright (1916–1962) An eminent American sociologist, Mills was controversial because he advocated comparative world sociology. He criticized intellectuals for not using their freedom responsibly by working for social change. The Power Elite (1956) referred to the power structure of post-war American society in terms of an oligarchy. The Nation (8 March 1958) wrote,
As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life. {CE; TYD}
Mills, David (20th Century) Mills, a freethinker, wrote Overcoming Religion (1981). The work originally was entitled Holy Hypnosis. {GS}
Mills, Jeanne (20th Century) Mills is author of Six Years With God: Life Inside Rev. Jim Jones’s People’s Temple (1979).
Mills, Mike (20th Century) Mills, the bassist for the group R. E. M., was asked by Q Magazine if he believed in God. Mills responded, “No.” {CA} Mike Mills, Recording Artist music
Mills is the bassist for the group R.E.M. When Q Magazine, a British music publication, gave Mills a questionnaire that asked him if he believed in God, Mills replied, "No."
Mills, Mike (17 Dec 1958 - ) A rock-and-roll bassist with the group R. E. M., Mills was born in Orange County, California but the family soon moved to Macon, Georgia. His father was a church singer, his mother played guitar, and Mills played sousaphone in the high school band, later switching to bass guitar. According to Denise Sullivan's, Talk About the Passion, Mills was asked by Bill Berry to become a bassist for his band and after high school, and the two kept in touch, playing with Hindu Love Gods in 1984 and with Waxing Poetics in 1986. In 1991 he sang lead vocals such as “New Wild Heaven” and “Texarkana” in a Warner Brothers film, Out of Time. When an interview for the British magazine Q asked him if he believe in God, Mills replied, “No.” {CA}
Mills, William (Deceased 1999) Mills was a Unitarian humanist in Montreal, a staunch supporter of non-believers.
Milne, A. A. (1882–1956) Milne, a freethinker according to David Tribe, is known for his verse collections for children, particularly Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). From 1906 to 1914 he had been an assistant editor of Punch, and after the First World War he had begun a career as playwright with Mr. Pim Passes By (1919). “The Old Testament,” he declared, “is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter attractions of cinema, motor bicycle, and golf course.” {OEL; TRI; TYD}
Milnes, Richard Monckton (Baron Houghton) (1809–1885) Milnes was a poet and a politician. A Liberal M.P., he was conspicuous in the support of reform. He was President of the Social Science Congress, the Foreign Secretary of the Academy, and Trustee of the British Museum. Milnes described himself as “a Puseyite sceptic,” explaining that “Christianity is the consummation, the perfection, of idolatry.” {RAT; RE}
Milos, Marilyn Fayre (20th Century) Milos, a nurse, is founder and executive director of the National Organization of Circumcision Information Resource Centers. She is co-founder of the International Symposia on Circumcision. An atheist, she is outspoken in her opposition to genital mutilation of males and females. Circumcision, she holds, was originally practiced for religious reasons, as a punitive measure, as a puberty or premarital rite, as an absolution against the feared toxic influences of vaginal (hymeneal) blood, and as a mark of slavery.
Milton, John (1608–1674) Milton, whom Corliss Lamont referred to as “the Protestant poet,” wrote Areopagitica (1644), a classic statement on human rights and freedom of thought which non-believers revere, along with Mill’s On Liberty. His is the superlative argument for freedom of the press. Paradise Lost (1667) with its story of Satan’s rebellion against God is an amusing literary addition to the Bible, taken literally by many, along with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A listing in the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading is as follows:
Miltonus, Ioannes. Literae pseudo-senatus anglicani, Cromwellii reliquorumque perduellium nomine ac iussu conscriptae. Decr. 23 nov. 1694.
As a young man, Milton visited the aging Galileo and left Italy with a lasting hatred for all forms of tyranny. His Areopagitica became the first defense of freedom of speech and press in the English language, and although not a nominal Unitarian he was a vocal anti-trinitarian. It can be assumed that the Pope did not appreciate Milton’s referring to him as “the triple tyrant.” Paradise Regained incorporates a homosexual temptation into the famous banquet scene, the University of Michigan’s Claude J. Summers has pointed out. The scene includes “allusions to Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Ganymede, and Hylas.” After citing Alexander and Scipio as examples of individuals unsusceptible to heterosexual temptations, Satan tempts Christ with a seductive tableau vivant that includes “Tall stripling youths rich clad, of fairer hew / Then Ganymede or Hylas.” Those who have only read his Paradise Lost label Milton an orthodox Christian, McCabe objects, adding that the same is true for Chaucer. “In other works,” McCabe states, “he clearly shows himself a freethinker. The historian Macaulay drew attention to the ‘heterodox views on the nature of the deity and the eternity of matter’ in Milton’s Latin treatise, Christiana Doctrine, and said that he was obviously ‘emancipated from the influence of authority.’ Even Paradise Lost is rather a rationalization of a Christian legend than an acceptance of it in the church sense.” “The finest thing about this Paradise,” said Taine, “is its hell.” A philosopher who liked Milton was Bertrand Russell who, in Fact and Fiction (1961), wrote: “Above all, I admired Areopagitica. I treasured such sentences as, ‘As good almost kill a man as kill a good book, who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself.’ This was an inspiring sentiment for an intending writer who devoutly hoped that his books would be ‘good books.’ And more especially, encouraging to a budding philosopher was the statement, ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.’ This might almost be taken as the sacred text for free speech and free discussion. ‘Opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making’ says in a few words what is essential for the condemnation of censorship. Alas, I did not know in those days that to cure Milton of opposing censorship, they made him a censor. This is the almost invariable logic of revolutions, while in the making, they praise liberty; but when successful, they establish tyranny.” Contemporaries cite Milton’s having had three wives and of being no champion of women’s rights. His blindness, according to biographer John Philipps, came from a gutta serena or amaurosis, a condition of loss of sight from disease of the optic nerve, retina, or brain without any perceptible external change in the eye. Phillips added that Milton died in “a fit of the Gout, but with so little pain or emotion that the time of his expiring was not perceived by those in the room.” {CE; CL; ER: EU, Paul H. Beattie; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; GL; ILP; JM; RE; TYD}
Milyukov, Pavel Nikolaevitch (Born 1859) Milyukov was a Russian historian who was banished for his liberal views at Moscow University and who then accepted the chair of history at Sofia University (1897–1898). From 1901 to 1905, he was on the staff of Chicago University. In 1905 he was elected to the Duma. Milyukov edited the Free Nation and Popular Rights and was one of the Liberal leaders who effected the Revolution of 1917. When the Bolshevists seized power, he moved to England. Milyukov was a rationalist. {RAT}
MIND • The human mind is like a parachute: it works best when it’s open. –Jun Sczesnoczkawasm
Miner, Alonzo Ames (1814–1895) A temperance crusader and an opponent of slavery, Miner reached public prominence as president of Tufts College (1862–1874). He was one of Boston’s most prominent representatives of Universalism in the late 19th century. {U&U}
MINERVA The Roman goddess identified with the Olympian Athena, Minerva was worshiped in various places. Her Aventine Hill temple was a meeting place for skilled craftsmen, actors, and writers. {CE}
MINISTER • Minister, n. An agent of a higher power with a lower responsibility. In diplomacy an officer sent into a foreign country as the visible embodiment of his sovereign’s hostility. His principal qualification is a degree of plausible inveracity next below that of an ambassador. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
MINNESOTA ATHEISTS, HUMANISTS • Friends Free of Theism, 7227 Park Avenue, Richfield, Minnesota 55423. Rob Nienkerk and Charles French are contacts. • Humanist Association of Minneapolis and St. Paul (AHA), 4418 Josephine Lane, Robbinsdale, Minnesota 55422-1328; (612) 321-9050. E-mail: <hieror@aol.com>. On the Web: <http://humanist-msp.org>.
• Minnesota Atheists (Atheist Alliance) (ASHS), POB 6261, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. (612) 588-1597. Steve Petesen and Marie Castle are its co-chairpersons. E-mail: <mac@min.org>. On the Web: <http://www.mnatheists.org>.
• University of Minnesota Atheists and Unbelievers (ASHS), 300 Washington Avenue SE, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455; telephone (612) 731-1543. Officers in 1996 were Stephanie Erickson and Jason Erickson, [unrelated] co-presidents; Jodi Gustafson, activities and discussion group leader; Mike Fritsche, activities coordinator; and Nick Rezmerski, publicist. <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Minsås, Unni (20th Century) Minsås, who is vice-president of the Norwegian Human Etisk Forgund, is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Minsberg, David (1920– ) Born in Poland, Minsberg came to the United States at the age of four, was raised in an orthodox Jewish family, moved to the Philippines where he married a Filipina, taught, and sold as well as published books. In The Agnostic Mystique, A Guide for the Unperplexed (1996), he states that humans are metaphors for god, that this helps make possible the development of a humanistic outlook, one that involves having no canon, no council, and no infallible or fallible authority. Theists and atheists are two sides of a coin, he holds. Agnostics, however, are a coin standing on edge. The agnostic is his own authority, Minsberg maintains after delving into subjects such as education, morality, paradox, humor, government, religions, and how we bumble and stumble in order to accomplish our humanistic dreams.
Minsky, Marvin (20th Century)
Minsky is Toshiba professor of media arts and sciences and professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is one of the world’s leading theorists of artificial intelligence. Life, he has stated, is as much about knowing how to avoid mistakes as knowing about what is right. Past myths may have made people feel good, but in the world of cyberspace some individuals unfortunately are clinging to the old instead of growing with the new. “People,” he appeals on behalf of activism, “need to grumble that the world does not make sense . . . but could.” Minsky is best known for research on knowledge representation, machine vision, robotics, computational complexity, and confocal microscopy. He has written The Society of Mind (1987) and in 1992, with Harry Harrison, The Turing Option, a novel about the future of artificial intelligence. As to whether machines can ever deal with the intangibles of humanness, Minsky told New York Times reporter Claudia Dreifus (28 July 1998),
It’s very tangible, what I’m talking about. For example, you can push something with a stick, but you can’t pull it. You can pull something with a string, but you can’t push it. That’s common sense. And no computer knows it. Right now, I’m writing a book, a sequel to The Society of Mind, and I am looking at some of this. What is pain? What is common sense? What is falling in love? What are emotions? Emotions are big switches, and there are hundreds of these. . . . If you look at a book about the brain, the brain just looks like switches. . . . You can think of the brain as a big supermarket of goodies that you can use for different purposes. Falling in love is turning on some 20 or 30 of these and turning a lot of the others off. It’s some particular arrangement. To understand it, one has to get some theory of what are the resources in the brain, what kind of arrangements are compatible, and what happens when you turn several on and they get into conflict. Being angry is another collection of switches. In this book, I’m trying to give examples of how these things work.
He then praised Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark, whose “2001: A Space Odyssey” predictions were just about right in everything except for the date. His favorite sci-fi authors are Robert Heinlein, the late Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, David Brin, and Larry Niven. Also, Mary Shelley, who he said “was right in predicting how people would not understand the poor thing [Dr. Frankenstein’s creation]. “That’s such a sad story! By the way, I’ve gone through that book very carefully to see if she left any hints explaining how the robot worked. But alas, no clues and the funny part is when you read it, you don’t mind.” A thoroughgoing philosophic naturalist, Minsky—unlike too many secular humanists—has a rollicking sense of humor. On the Web: <www.ai.mit.edu/people/minsky/minsky.html>. {CA; E; WAS 17 January 1997}
Miosa, Frank T. (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Miosa addressed the group. A Canadian who directs the Toronto Learning Centre, he spoke on “Humanism and Ethics” at the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought.
Mirabaud, Jean Baptiste de (1675–1760) Mirabaud was a French writer who translated Tasso and Ariosto and became perpetual secretary to the French Academy. He wrote Opinions of the Ancients on the Jews, a Critical Examination of the New Testament (under the name of Fréret); The World: Its Origin and Antiquity (1751); and Sentiments of a Philosopher on the Nature of the Soul (1743). The System of Nature, which was attributed to Mirabaud, was written by d’Holbach. {BDF; RAT}
Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel Riquetti [Comte de] (1749–1791) Mirabeau was a famed French statesman and orator. He inherited from his family a passionate nature, a frank strong will, generous temper, and a mind of prodigious activity. He entered the army in 1767 but, by an amorous intrigue that provoked the ire of his father, was imprisoned. In fact, he was jailed several times on the request of his father, Victor de Mirabeau, with whom he carried on a public quarrel. In 1783 his Erotika Biblion anonymously appeared and dealt with the Bible’s obscenity. In 1785 he fled to England in exile, where he moved in Whig circles. When sent in 1786 on a secret mission to Prussia, he betrayed his government’s trust by publishing his unedited reports to Paris, containing accounts of scandal and intrigue in the Prussian court and leading many to regard him as having an unsavory reputation. When the king ordered the States-General to leave the hall after the day’s session was declared closed, Mirabeau replied (with words which have been variously reported): “We shall not leave our places save by the force of bayonets.” The assembly remained in session and adopted Mirabeau’s motion that its members were inviolable. In 1791 Mirabeau was chosen President of the National Assembly and became leader of the Revolution. He actually had sought to create a strong constitutional monarchy on the British model, which would permit him to play a decisive role as prime minister. However, members of the Assembly were barred for cabinet posts by a 1789 decree specifically directed against him. Mirabeau then began secret dealings with the court, entered the pay of the king and queen, and his political position became untenable. He advocated the abolition of the double aristocracy of lords and bishops as well as the spoliation of the church and the national guard. Carlyle called him “far the strongest, best practical intellect of that time.” In January, 1791, he sat as President of the Assembly, with his neck bandaged after the application of leeches. Foote reports that at parting Mirabeau said to Dumont, “I am dying, my friend; dying as by slow fire.” On the 27th of March he stood in the tribune for the last time. Four days later he was on his death-bed. Crowds beset the street, anxious but silent, and stopping all traffic so that their hero might not be disturbed. A bulletin was issued every three hours. “On Saturday, the second day of April,” says Carlyle, “Mirabeau feels that the last of the Days has risen for him; that on this day he has to depart and be no more. His death is Titanic, as his life has been. Lit up, for the last time, in the glare of the coming dissolution, the mind of the man is all glowing and burning; utters itself in sayings, such as men long remember. He longs to live, yet acquiesces in death, argues not with the inexorable.” Although Mirabeau is sometimes classed as a deist, McCabe wrote, “Carlyle tells in his French Revolution that when he was dying he said, pointing to the sun, ‘If that isn’t God it is at least his Cousin.’ He rejected the idea of immortality and seems rather to have been an atheist.” Power of speech gone, Mirabeau made signs for paper and pen, and wrote the word dormir, “to sleep.” Cabanis, the great physician, who stood beside him, pretended not to understand this passionate request for opium. Thereupon, writes the doctor, “He made a sign for the pen and paper to be brought to him again, and wrote, ‘Do you think that Death is dangerous?’ Seeing that I did not comply with his demand, he wrote again, ‘How can you leave your friend on the wheel, perhaps for days?’ ” Cabanis and Dr. Petit decided to give him a sedative. While it was sent for “the pains became atrocious.” Recovering speech a little under the torture, he turned to M. de la Marek, saying, “You deceive me.” “No,” replied his friend, “we are not deceiving you, the remedy is coming, we all saw it ordered.” “Ah, the doctors, the doctors!” he muttered. Then, turning to Cabanis, with a look of mingled anger and tenderness, he said, “Were you not my doctor and my friend? Did you not promise to spare me the agonies of such a death? Do you wish me to expire with a regret that I trusted you?” “Those words,” says Cabinis, “the last that he uttered, ring incessantly in my ears. He turned over on the right side with a convulsive movement, and at half-past eight in the morning he expired in our arms.” Dr. Petit, standing at the foot of the bed, said, “His sufferings are ended.” “So dies,” wrote Carlyle, “a gigantic Heathen and Titan; stumbling blindly, undismayed, down to his rest.” Upon his death in 1791, impressive manifestations of public sorrow and respect were shown, for he had gained wide popularity with the masses. A procession a league in length wended its way. The Church of Sainte-Geneviève was turned into a Pantheon, and he was buried in the Panthéon. But when his dealings with the court were discovered, the body was later removed. {BDF; CE; FO; JM; RAT}
MIRACLES • Miracle, n. An act or event out of the order of nature and unaccountable, as beating a normal hand of four kings and an ace with four aces and a king. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Anthony Flew in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, states that the term, like the word “nice,” is often used to refer primarily to the responses of the user. Believers think of a miracle as a preternatural occurrence that is viewed as the expression of a divine will, for its cause is hidden. Non-believers, who are naturalists in philosophy, hold that if the sun stood still, or Lazarus rose from the dead, or Jesus walked on the top of water, or the crippled suddenly became no longer crippled, these cases would not be what they appeared to be on the surface. As a result, investigations would be commenced to determine the actual cause. If someone appears to walk atop water, at what distance and at what angle did observers see this, and could the water level have been so low it only appeared the individual was walking on water? If a blind person suddenly sees, what degree of blindness had he had and under what conditions did the situation seem to change? The Catholic Church requires rigid attestation of supposed miracles before canonizing a person (making the individual an officially recognized saint), but the church does not require belief in other than biblical miracles. At the end of the millennium, the “faithful” have been seeking miracles and finding them—they believe—in unlikely forms and places. These include, wrote Joe Nickell in “Miracles or Deception?”(Skeptical Inquirer, September-October 1999), apparitions of the Virgin Mary (for example in the Bosnian village of Medjugorje, beginning in 1981), bleeding statues and crucifixes (e.g., in Quebec in 1985), and miraculously appearing images, such as the portrait of Mary seen in a splotch on a tree in Los Angeles in 1992. “People seem to hunger,” Nickell added, “for some tangible religious experience, and wherever there is such profound want there is the opportunity for what may be called ‘pious fraud.’ Money is rarely the primary motive, the usual impetus being to seemingly triumph over adversity, renew the faith of believers, and confound the doubters. An end-justifies-the-means attitude may prevail, but the genuinely religious and the devoutly skeptical may agree on one thing, that the truth must serve as both the means and the end. Ultimately, neither science nor religion can be served by dishonesty.” (For a possible explanation of why some think a miracle has occurred, see entry for Healing Effect. Also see entry for David Hume.) {CE}
Miralta, Constancio (Born c. 1849) Miralta was the pen name of a popular Spanish writer who had been a priest and doctor of theology. He wrote for Las Dominicales. His most notable works are Memoirs of a Poor Clerical; The Secrets of Confession; and The Sacrament Exposed. Miralta’s work, The Doctrine of Catholicism upon Matrimony, greatly encouraged civil marriages. {BDF}
Miranda, Don Francisco (1750–1816) Miranda was a South American patriot and general, a Venezuelan who aided the Americans in the War of Independence. Reportedly, Miranda was a skeptic and follower of James Mill. Mill himself described Miranda as an atheist. A hero of the struggle for independence from Spain, Miranda is sometimes called the Precursor to distinguish him from Simón de Bolívar, who completed the task of liberation. In France Miranda fought in the French Revolutionary Wars but, running afoul of the Jacobins, fled to England, where he was helped by William Pitt. Miranda sought foreign aid and led in 1806 an unsuccessful expedition to the Venezuelan coast. He was dictator of the country for a short time but in 1812 surrendered to the Spanish. Bolívar and others, angered by his capitulation, seized him and turned him over to the Spanish, who deported him to Cádiz and kept him in a dungeon of the Inquisition for the rest of his life. (BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Mirbeau, Octave (1850–1917) Mirbeau, a French novelist, was an atheist who defined religions as “the monstrous flowers and the hideous instruments of the eternal suffering of man.” {JM; RAT; RE}
MISCEGENATION Cohabitation, sexual relations, or marriage between members of different races is called miscegenation. Although unofficially miscegenation may be frowned upon, one author—Dorothy West, a patrician black writer, daughter of a slave, and the longest surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s—wrote in The Wedding (1995) that class, good manners, and a good education are important, not color: “Color was a false distinction; love was not.” A classic case of miscegenation is the pairing of President Thomas Jefferson—or his close relative—and his young black slave, Sally Hemings. DNA tests in 1998 indicated that fifty-two-year-old John Jefferson of Norrisville, Pennsylvania, is a direct descendant of Hemings through Eston Hemings Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson’s Y chromosome matched blood samples taken from the descendants of Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. {The New York Times, 1 November 1998}
Mishima, Yukio (1925–1970) Mishima, the first Japanese novelist to win a Nobel prize, was called by Life “the Japanese Hemingway.” He had been born Kimitake Hiraoka of a samurai family, worked in an aircraft factory during World War II, and practiced physical fitness and the ancient arts of the samurai as a member of his Tatenokai (Shield Society). Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) depicted a psychopathic monk who destroys the temple he loves. Other of his works are the semiautobiographical Confessions of a Mask (1949) The Sound of Waves (1954), and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (1963). A homosexual, he and one of his student acolytes committed ritual suicide (seppuku), cutting open their bellies, after an unsuccessful demonstration against the army for its alleged lack of power under the Japanese constitution. On the eve of his death, Mishima wrote two Columbia University professors, hoping they would judge his work sympathetically. Mishima, with his militia of students, was a theist devoted to the restoration of the Japanese emperor’s divinity. {The Economist, 11 November 1995}.
MISCREANT • Miscreant, n. A person of the highest degree of unworth. Etymologically, the word means unbeliever, and its present signification may be regarded as theology’s noblest contribution to the development of our language. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Mishra, Aditya: See entry for Hindu Skeptic.
Mishra, Nirmal K. (20th Century) Mishra, a California humanist, participated in 1996 in the international congress of humanists in Mexico City. E-mail: <nmishra@ecs.csun.edu>.
MISIMI A Telugu humanistic monthly, Misimi is at Plot No. 337A, Road No. 10, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad 500 034, India. MISSIONARIES, RELIGIOUS • Missionaries are going to reform the world whether it wants to be reformed or not. –Oscar Wilde
• Missionaries, my dear! Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food for destitute and underfed cannibals? Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, Heaven in its infinite mercy sends them a nice plump missionary. ––Oscar Wilde (See entry for Electronic Ministries, which in 1996 took in an estimated $3.5 billion)
MISSISSIPPI HUMANISTS The Humanist Association of Mississippi (AHA) is at Route 1 Box 170, Enterprise, Mississippi 39330. Charles L. Graham is its contact. Phone: (601) 693-1244. {FD}
MISSOURI HUMANISTS AND FREETHINKERS Missouri has the following groups:
• Ethical Society of St. Louis (IHEU), 9001 Clayton Road, St. Louis, Missouri 63117. • Family Freethought Alliance (ASHS), PO Box 260067, St. Louis, MO 63126; (314) 825-6422. The group is on the Web at: <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/ffc/index.html>. E-mail: <nonbelief1@aol.com>. • Humanists Mid-Continent (AHA), 5828 Cherry St., Kansas City, Missouri 64110. Contacts are Audra and Delta Gier. • Kansas City Eupraxophy Center (ASHS), 6301 Rockhill Road (Suite 412), Kansas City, Missouri 64131; (816) 822-9840. Verle Muhrer, its head, has arranged for a special euphraxophy building to provide a variety of programs for area humanists and freethinkers (816) 822-9840. E-mail: <uprax@sound.net>. • Rationalist Society of St. Louis (ASHS), PO Box 2931, St. Louis, Missouri 63130; telephone (314) 664-4424. Their site on the Web is at: <http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Temple/9917/rss/.html>. E-mail: <rsslbarb@aol.com> and <smiling@infidels.org>. • The Voice of Reason in Kansas City, Missouri, sponsors a radio talk show on KKFI-FM which is geared toward the interests of skeptics and humanists. • University of Missouri at Kansas City Humanists: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Washington University in St. Louis’s League of Freethinkers is on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Mitchell, J. Barr (19th Century) Mitchell was the anonymous author of Dates and Data (1876) and Chrestos, A Religious Epithet (1880). Dr. Mitchell also wrote in the National Reformer, using only his initials. {BDF}
Mitchell, Katrina (1972– ) Mitchell is a photographer known for her attempts to plumb the depths of female identity. “I spent my whole childhood and adolescence thinking about religious ideas. I don’t think I can express all of my beliefs in words just yet, but I feel, as a Unitarian Universalist, that whatever I end up believing, it’s okay. Besides, I feel like everything I do is spiritual. When I make the time and the place to create, that’s a very spiritual exercise.” Among her works are black and white nude photos she took of herself, in motion and splattered with mud. “There is a mirror on the floor and I’m standing over it. Everything is blurry, except my genitals, and there’s dark mud everywhere. Afterward, everyone who saw the photos said, ‘This is about menstruation,’ and I saw then what they saw: The photos feel very ritualistic, very secret, very private. It’s about something mysterious that men can’t ever understand, a time women can use to reflect on what is happening to our bodies and in our lives.” {World, November-December 1994}
Mitchell, Logan (Died 1841)
Mitchell was author of lectures published as The Christian Mythology Unveiled (1881), also called Superstition Besieged. Reportedly a suicide, he left by his will a sum of £500 to any bookseller who had the courage to publish his book, an offer taken up by B. Cousens. {BDF}
Mitchell, Maria (1818–1889) Mitchell was an astronomer and educator. Raised a Friend, she was critical of that group’s strictness and began to go to Unitarian services. Here, she found that she could be more independent, but she did not abandon the use of “thee” and ”thou” in her speech. Her interest in astronomy led to her finding what she claimed was a comet, a discovery confirmed by other astronomers. As a result, she was awarded a gold medal by the King of Denmark and became known as America’s first woman astronomer. Later, she taught at Vassar and became the first woman member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. {U}
Mitchell, Peter Chalmers [Sir] (1864–1945) Mitchell, who became one of Britain’s leading zoologists, was uncompromising in his freethought, according to McCabe. An atheist and a materialist, he described himself in Evolution and the War (1915) as “one who dislikes all forms of supernaturalism and who does not shrink from the implications even of the phrase that thought is a secretion of the brain, as bile is a secretion of the liver.” Mitchell was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). {JM; RAT; RE}
Mitchell, Steven (20th Century) Mitchell has been a vice president and editorial director of Prometheus Books as well as an editorial associate of Free Inquiry.
Mitchell, Violet (1900–1994) Mitchell, an English lady from Hertfordshire, was passionately committed to the causes of radical freethought and animal rights. A friend of President Chapman Cohen of the National Secular Society, she was anti-Christian because “it propagates the idea that animals are lower than humans; they are ‘different’ but not lower. Like the Government, Christians assure me they are against inflicting ‘unnecessary’ pain; like some trade unionists, they uphold justice but do not demand justice for all sentient creatures. For me, Justice is indivisible—it is not logical to confine it to homo sapiens. Upon her death, her friend George Mepham noted that “Violet was an atheist—she insisted that ‘Humanist’ did not adequately define her non-belief.” {The Freethinker, February 1994}
Mitchell, Warren (20th Century) The actor who played the role of the irascible Alf Garnett in “Till Death Do Us Par,” Mitchell is an atheist. {Freethinker, January 2000}
Mitchell, Warren (1926 - ) Mitchell, an atheist born in London, won great acclaim for his interpretation of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of Salesman at the National Theatre in 1979. He also is known for playing the role of the irascible, foul-mouthed, right-wing Cockney Alf Garnett in Till Death Do Us Part. He continued as Garnett in a television series, In Sickness and In Health (1985-1986), which was repeated in 1993. Other BBC television appearances by Mitchell include All of Silence (1995) and Death of a Salesman (1996). {Freethinker, January 2000}
Mitchison, Naomi (Mary Margaret) [Lady] (1897–1999) In 1984, Lady Mitchison was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. At the time of her death, she not only was the oldest member of the organization but also had been involved with it longer than anyone else. Among her dozens of books are Cloud Cuckoo Land (1925), Comments on Birth Control (1930), and an autobiography entitled All Change Here (1975). Mitchison’s father was the physiologist and philosopher J. S. Haldane. Her mother was the hostess Kathleen Trotter. Her brother was the pioneering geneticist J. B. S. Haldane. Her uncle was R. B. Haldane (Lord Haldane of Cloan), the Liberal and then Labour Lord Chancellor. When her husband, Gilbert Richard Mitchison, was wounded in action while serving in the army in France, she nursed him back to health, he became a barrister, and the two formed the nucleus of a largely left-wing intellectual circle. Mitchison was an active supporter of birth control, but she had seven children over twenty-two years. Her first son’s death from meningitis was cruelly described in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. Her other three sons became distinguished scientists and Fellows of the Royal Society. Her daughters became writers. A radical in religion as well as politics, she supported the freethought movement, joined the Rationalist Press Association, and served as a director of the short-lived paper of “scientific humanism,” The Realist (1929). She visited the Soviet Union in 1934 but was never a fellow traveler. She supported the Scottish Nationalists and became involved in 1963 with the Bakgatla tribe in Bechuanaland (later Botswana). During a career of seventy years, she contributed thousands of articles and letters to scores of papers as well as produced books at a rate of more than one a year. In 1997, a birthday party was held in Carradale, near Campbeltown in southwest Scotland, for the 100-year-old socialist, feminist, anti-militarist, anti-racists, Scottish nationalist, internationalist, writer, lover, parent, and grandparent. {Nicolas Walter, New Humanist, November 1997; New Humanist, March 1999; TRI}
Mitford, Jessica (1917–1996) Mitford, an incisive critic of her British upbringing and of American ways, made her reputation with The American Way of Death (1963; The American Way of Death Revisited, 1998), a scathing indictment of the funeral industry in which undertakers had “successfully turned the tables in recent years to perpetrate a huge, macabre, and expensive practical joke on the American public.” Undertakers, who now called themselves “funeral directors” and “morticians,” sold coffins which had become “caskets,” supplied hearses which had become “professional cars,” flowers which had become “floral tributes,” for corpses which had become “loved ones.” They did not, however, like cremation’s being referred to as “bake and shake” nor to her description of what went on backstage, where the body . . .
is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, roughed, and neatly dressed—transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture.
She also revealed information about neighborhood undertakers, to the dismay of the trade, and included a list of anatomy departments and medical schools that have better uses for dead bodies than being embalmed. When she questioned the prices on some of the items being charged, she was told by an undertaker, “How much would it cost you to stay in a good motel for three days?” As to the Dr. Thomas Holmes who, she wrote, is often affectionately referred to as “the father of American embalming” and who followed early Judaeo-Christian belierfs as to the nature of God, man, and the hereafter, Mitford denied the idea. Instead, she said, embalming “originated with the pagan Egyptians and reached its high point in the second millennium B.C. Thereafter, [it] suffered a decline from which it did not recover until it was made part of the standard funeral service in twentieth-century America.” Journalist Richard Severo reported that Mitford’s work led to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission but that California Congressman James B. Utt, whose state is known “for its Pharaonic funerals and ornate cemeteries,” denounced Miss Mitford as “pro-Communist, anti-American” and speculated that she would donate profits from the book to “the coffers of the Communist Party, U.S.A.” Mitford had been a Communist in the 1940s. The youngest daughter born to Lord Redesdale (David Mitford) and Lady Redesdale, the former Sydney Bowles, she came from an eccentric family. Her sister Pamela aspired as a child to be a horse. Her sister Diana wanted to be a Fascist and, eventually, became the wife of England’s ranking Fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley. Her sister Unity became a disciple of Hitler, shot herself, then died nine years later in a nursing home. (In the sitting room they shared as children, Unity had adorned her side with swastikas while Jessica responded by carving small hammers and sickles into the windowpanes on her side of the room.) Her sister Nancy became a novelist, best known for her Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. When nineteen, she ran away from home with a second cousin, Esmond Romilly, a nephew of Winston Churchill, getting cut out of her father’s will. Romilly, who joined the Canadian Air Force, was killed in action in 1941. She then married a Brooklyn lawyer in 1943, moving to Oakland, California. In addition to writing The Trial of Dr. Spock, William Sloan Coffin Jr., Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman, and Marcus Raskin (1969), five who were accused of aiding and abetting those who sought to violate the Selective Service Act, she wrote Kind and Unusual Punishment: The Prison Business (1973), finding prisons are wanting in almost everything except brutality; A Fine Old Conflict (1977), about her Communist days; Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (1979); and The American Way of Birth (1992), in which she accused doctors of doing too many Caesareans and of not paying attention to the possibilities offered by midwifery. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh (1997) include her tweaking Waugh about religion. She compared the resurrection of the body to “finding your motor car after a party,” and expressions such as “she must be in Heaven by now” were equated with “she’d caught the 4:45.” Waugh’s displeasure resulted: “Would it not be best always to avoid any reference to the Church or to your Creator? Your intrusions into this strange world are always fatuous.” Not swayed by such reasoning, she continued her mirthful ways, describing, for example, a mix-up at a florist’s and a French lesbian artist’s saying, “My wreath was the kind of thing a trades union sends to the Pres. of the Republic. It took two men to carry it. All the old lesbians looked absolutely astounded & I was treated like the widow by the undertakers.” Although Mitford was nominally an Anglican, she was actually an agnostic, as shown in her letters to Waugh. Late in life, asked what sort of funeral she wanted, she replied an elaborate one that had “six black horses with plumes and one of those marvelous jobs of embalming that take 20 years off.” She added that she wanted “streets to be blocked off, dignitaries to declaim sobbingly over the flower-smothered bier, proclamations to be issued—that sort of thing.” Shortly before her death, Ms. Mitford said to her friend and fellow non-theist Molly Ivins, “Well, I had a good run, didn’t I?” {Richard Severo, The New York Times, 24 July 1996; Molly Ivins, The New York Times, 25 August 1996; Vanity Fair, March 1997}
MITHRA or MITRA • The Mithraists were the first to teach that strength is gentleness. All of this is rather better than the Christian hysteria which vacillates between the murder of heretics on one hand and the cringing rejection of this world on the other. –Gore Vidal, Julian (See entries for Christmas and for Zoroastrianism.)
Mitrokhin, Lev W. (20th Century) Editor of Social Science, a leading publication in the former USSR, Mitrokhin also is deputy editor in Moscow of Problems of Philosophy. At the Eleventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Brussels (1990), Mitrokhin addressed the group. {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1990-1991}.
Mitterrand, François Maurice Marie [President] (1916–1996) Mitterrand, a president of France, became a prisoner of war during the Second World War, escaped, then became active in the French Resistance. In the 1950s, he held several cabinet posts, joined the weak Socialist party, then became its secretary in 1971. In 1981, Mitterrand became the first Socialist president of the French Fifth Republic. Jean Lacouture’s Mitterand (1998) not only describes his eloquence, his brilliance at stragegy, his being a master of timing, a leader of men, a charmer of women, but also tells how in his later life he could be arrogant, cynical, cruel, vindictive, a schemer who liked to divide and rule. The courageous leader of the French Resistance, after his dubious beginning as a Vichyite, was author of a number of books, including Le coup d’état permanent (1964), Un socialisme du possible (1970), and Politique II (1981). It was not until 1995 that he divulged some secrets about his past: that he had worked for the collaborationist Vichy regime before joining the Resistance during World War II; in 1940, while serving in the Vichy army of Marshall Philippe Pétain, he wrote First Agreement, a novel about Elsa and Philippe, a couple madly in love and living together, which was a shocking notion at that time; and that until 1986 he had remained friends with René Bousquet, the Vichy official charged in 1989 with crimes against humanity for his role in deporting Jews from France to Nazi death camps. Later, he joined the Resistance. Alan Riding, of The New York Times, has suggested that because Mitterrand had stunned his wide circle of Jewish friends with such disclosures, he chose to collaborate on a work with Elie Wiesel, Memoir in Two Voices (1996). To Wiesel he explained that he had been unaware of Vichy’s anti-Semitic policies and that he had thought Bousquet was only a respectable businessman. Wiesel does not state in the book whether he found these explanations valid ones. Progressive freethinkers were shocked when, in 1994, Mitterrand as the President of France said of Rwanda, “In such countries, genocide is not too important.” In 1994, when the world press announced his prostate cancer (he kept it a secret for fifteen years!), Mitterrand, a declared atheist, met with a devoutly Catholic French philosopher to discuss death. The philosopher, Jean Guillot, 93, told reporters that Mitterrand confided that the doctors had given him no more than six months to live, that his major goal was to live until at least 7 May 1995 in order to complete his second seven-year term. In a television interview, asked what he would say when he arrived “who knows where,” Mitterrand replied drily, “Eternity is a long time.” (In fact, he did live out his term of office.) Mitterrand ended his own life by halting the drug treatment against the cancer that killed him. Roland Dumas, a close friend and a former Foreign Minister, said over television, “A few days before his death, he told me, ‘Now I have my philosophy.’ ” He had asked his physician, Jean-Pierre Tarot, what would happen if he stopped taking all drugs except painkillers, and the physician told him he would be dead in three days. The day Mitterrand stopped the treatments, he died. In flowing African robes, Arab Headdresses, and sober mourning clothes, numbers of notables assembled for a requiem Mass in Notre Dame Cathedral while his family 250 miles away in Jarnac conducted a small funeral. In Paris, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger said that Mitterrand was “more agnostic than anything else,” adding, “May François Mitterrand find in the company of saints the help, forgiveness, and courage finally to open his eyes to the invisible,” a comment that angered many and surprised some of the sixty world leaders and thirteen hundred other dignitaries who had gathered. Maurice Duruflé’s “Requiem” was played. Meanwhile, in Jarnac, in a small Romanesque Church of St. Peter, the entering procession started with the former President’s widow, Danielle, their two sons, and his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot, and their daughter, Mazarine Pingeot. Mrs. Mitterrand had invited both women to the interment next to his parents’ graves in the church graveyard. “A sceptical free-thinker, he had a religious feel for nature,” reported The Economist in an obituary. “His stature rests . . . on a grasp of the limitations of politics, on being a catalyst, on knowing when to do nothing. He was an exceptional leader in a time when France was ceasing to be an exception.” Among others, journalist Adam Gopnik has commented upon how Mitterrand orchestrated his own afterlife. For example, Paris-Match published a photo of Mitterrand on his deathbed, one that looked as if he himself might have photographed his final minute. He had chosen to die not on a hospital or state bed but a medium-sized married couple’s bed with white bedspread, looking as if it had just been smoothed out by the femme de ménage. Dressed for a Sunday promenade, in a dark-gray suit and shoes, “he looked the way the French like their leaders to look—dignified and serene without trying too hard for that effect.” Gopnik, after saying that by American standards Mitterrand was a relatively weak leader, observed that “the French love authoritarian leaders and pine for them when they’re gone.” They were amused upon finding that their President had kept an entire separate second family, “like a character in the fifties French comedy. Anne Pingeot, Mazarine’s (their “illegitimate” daughter) mother, who is a scholar of nineteenth-century sculpture, was not really his mistress; she was a second wife. He spent the weeks with Danielle at the Élysée, and the weekends with Anne and Mazarine at the château of Souzy-la-Briche, another propriété de la nation that the French President had at his disposal.” Gopnik continues: “One day, he would be found with Danielle on the Rue de Bièvre, in the Fifth Arrondissement, and the next, chez Anne on the Rue Jacob, in the Sixth. He had two country residences, too: one at Latche, in the Landes, for Danielle, their two sons, and the Labradors; one in Gordes, in Provence, for Anne, Mazarine, and the cats. He spent Christmas with Anne and Mazarine and New Year’s Day with Danielle and his sons. These arrangements were widely known yet never made public. (He had other liaisons. He loved women, particularly their feet. He asked his conquests to take their shoes off in front of him, so that he could caress their insteps.)” After Mitterrand’s death, Dr. Claude Gubler wrote The Great Secret (1996), in which he revealed that Mitterrand had sworn his doctors to silence when they had found prostate cancer that had spread to most of the rest of his body by November 1981. Many condemned Dr. Gubler for betraying a confidence, although others were surprised that Mitterrand had been able to dupe them about such a basic issue as his health for more than a decade. However, according to Gopnik, “In Mitterrand, the French got what they want: not so much an authoritarian figure as a romantic one, and romantic in both the strict and the popular senses. . . . For most of the past two hundred years, it has been the passionate unspoken conviction of the French people that History, in Mitterrand’s sense—the high, romantic, sometimes even tragic sense—was happening here. Not happening here in just the modest, decent sense in which history always happens everywhere but in the grand, Hegelian sense: the spirit of the time kept its court in Paris.” {CE}
Mittermaier, Karl Joseph Anton von (1787–1867) Mittermaier was a German jurisconsult whose works on law gained him a high reputation. He obtained a chair at the Heidelberg University, and in 1831 he represented Baden in Parliament. A freethinker, he wrote about the need for freedom in all areas. {BDF; RAT}
Mittie, Stanilas (19th Century) Mittie in 1789 proposed the taking of church bells to make money and cannon. During the revolution he distinguished himself by other anti-clerical suggestions. {BDF}
MIZ A German humanistic journal, Miz is at Wurzberger Strasse 18a, 63739 Aschaffenburg, Germany.
MIZUAGE Geisha girls in Japan are unavailable for brief sexual encounters. However, in the past young girls were sold to a highest bidder for the purpose of deflowering. The rite was known as mizuage. Meanwhile, a geisha can be supported by a wealthy man interested in a long-term sexual relationship.
MOBY-DICK Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851), is a symbolic account of the conflict between man and his fate. Or of Man’s love for, but conflicts with, Nature. Critics disagree concerning the symbolism of Moby-Dick, a white whale that attacks the whaling ship Pequod and tears away Captain Ahab’s leg. Ahab then becomes monomaniacal, his one purpose in life being that of capturing the fierce and cunning whale. His crew—Americans that include Asians, American Indians, Africans, and whites—endures storms, lightning, loss of the compass, the drowning of a man, and the insanity of Ahab’s favorite, a lad named Pip. When the white whale again attacks and the captain’s ivory leg is snapped off, Ahab eventually is able to harpoon the whale but gets fouled in the line and is pinioned to the whale. The ship is sunk and, as the final spars settle in the water, one of the crew nails to the mast a sky-hawk that pecks at the flag he is placing as a signal. The ship,
like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
The sole survivor is Ishmael, narrator of the tale (and named after the Biblical Ishmael, Abraham’s son who was cast out after the birth of Isaac and is sometimes considered to be the forebear of the Arabs). In the opening scenes Ishmael needs to spend a night in New Bedford, the inn is crowded, and he has to share the inn’s wedding bed with a harpooner and cannibal, Queequeg. Reluctantly going to bed under such circumstances (the pagan had no objection, freethinkers note, to sharing a bed with another human being), Ishmael awakens in the morning to find his bedmate’s arm “thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. You had almost thought I had been his wife.” The two maintain a close friendship up to the end of the work. Robert K. Martin, professor of English at the Université de Montréal, wrote in Social Critique and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville about the “imagery of marriage as well as with a sense of sexual and racial transgression” in the early scenes. Ishmael’s religious outlook is that it is “unbecoming” to be “hugging a fellow male in that matrimonial sort of way.” Ishmael, however, comes across as not at all being another Christian homophobe. When Father Mapple, in a sermon, reinforces Ishmael’s fear of otherness and particularly of male friendship as preached in Christianity, Ishmael concludes humanistically, “I’ll try a pagan friend . . . since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy.” At the plot’s end, Ishmael is saved from drowning by using Queequeg’s coffin (saved not by “the blood of the lamb” but by a pagan, no less!). Martin states that “One of Melville’s most daring insights in Moby-Dick is the recognition of homophobia as a force linked to racism and required by patriarchal society just as much as the suppression of women.” For critic Alfred Kazin, Ahab is a self-conscious Prometheus dedicated to “[striking] the sun if it wronged me.” But of those who held that the whale is God and Fate, mindless and cruel, few noted that Melville’s hero set out to kill God. Also, few at the time recognized the work’s humanistic brilliance and Melville’s statement about how puny are man’s attempts to fight against, not just live with, nature. Today, Moby-Dick is as close a work as any other to being America’s prose epic. {CE; OCAL; OEL}
Mocenicus, Philippus (16th Century) Mocenicus, although the Archbishop of Nicosia in Cyprus, wrote as a Venetian philosopher such heretical works as Contemplations (1588), Peripatetic Question of Coesalpinus, and the books of Telesio on The Nature of Things in a volume entitled Tractationum Philosophicarum. {BDF}
Mockus, Michael (20th Century) In 1916, attorney Theodore Schroeder, a freethinker, defended Mockus on a blasphemy charge. {FUS}
MODERN FREETHINKER An Indian publication in English, Modern Freethinker is at 779 Pocket 5 Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi 110 091, India. <mahesh@del1.vsnl.net.in>.
MODERN RATIONALIST A monthly in English, Modern Rationalist is at 50, E. V. K. Salai, Chennai (Madras) 600 007, India. E-mail: <periyar@giasmod01.vsnl.net.in>.
MODESTY • Modesty died when clothes were born. –Mark Twain
Modisett, Mitchell (20th Century) Modisett is the Past President of Humanists of Florida. He was a participant at the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention and at the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida.
Moehlman, Arthur B. (1889–1952) Moehlman was a member of the American Humanist Association. In 1970, he wrote School Administration. {HNS}
Moehlman, Conrad Henry (Born 1879) Moehlman, an educator, wrote The Wall of Separation Between Church and State (1951). {FUS; HNS}
MOHAMMEDAN Muslims object to the word Mohammedan, which implies that the man called Muhammed, like the Christ called Jesus, was a supernatural being. (See entries for Islam, Muhammed, and Muslim.
Moia, Nelly (20th Century) Moia is a head teacher in Luxembourg. In 1988 she resigned in disgust from the National Working Party on Lay Moral Education, after much constructive work in assembling course materials. She did so to protest against a bill to abolish the right to abstain from religious and lay moral instruction in schools. Three of her works with theses of humanist morality are For Animals (1992), For Women (1993), and Geint d’Pafen (Against the Holy Joes) (1994).
Moiseev, Nikita (20th Century) Moiseev, a Russian professor of mathematics, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Moleschott, Jacob (1822–1893) Moleschott, a Dutch born scientific materialist, became a popularizer of science. He was a professor of physiology at Zurich and afterwards at Turin. Moleschott wrote Circulation of Life, Light and Life, Physiological Sketches, and other medical and scientific works. Lange called him “the father of the modern materialistic movement,” a view also affirmed by Finngeir Hiorth (New Humanist, February 1994). Moleschott’s best known work, Force and Matter (1855), had in its day much the same success as Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, McCabe wrote, adding, “It was translated into every European language and sold by the hundred thousand. Moleschott did not refuse the label Materialist—and he was, of course, an atheist—though like Haeckel (and modern physics) he held that matter and energy are two aspects of the ultimate reality. In youth he had studied philosophy and had more inclination for poetry than science. He was a man of warm sentiments and high ideals. He was virtually driven out of Germany for his heresies and rose to high honors in Italy, where freethought was general in the academic world fifty years ago.” {BDF; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}
Molesworth, Robert (1656–1725) The Right Honourable Robert Molesworth supported the Prince of Orange in the Revolution of 1688, after which he was called to the Privy Council and employed at London. He sat in the Irish Parliament from 1695 to 1699 and in the English Parliament from 1705–1708 and 1714–1725. The Royal Society admitted him in 1698, and he was created Baron and Viscount in 1719. An intimate friend of Toland and Shaftesbury, he shared their deistic views openly, as illustrated in his Account of Denmark as it was in the year 1692 (1694). {RAT}
Molesworth, William [Sir] (1810–1855) Molesworth was a statesman and man of letters, the eighth baronet of his family. In 1855 he was Secretary for the Colonies. For some time, he was proprietor and conductor of the Westminster Review, in which he wrote many articles. Molesworth produced an edition of Hobbes at his own expense, and he contributed to the support of Auguste Comte. He was a deist. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin (1622–1673) Molière was a French playwright and actor, the creator of high French comedy, the forerunner of the Comédie Français. An upholsterer, he joined the Béjan troupe of actors when young, toured the provinces for thirteen years, and received the patronage of Louis XIV. His farces, comedies, masques, and ballets ridiculed a vice or a type of excess by caricaturing a person who incarnates it: Tartuffe (1664), the religious hypocrite; Le Misanthrope (1666), the antisocial man; The Would-be Gentleman (1670), the parvenu; The Learned Women (1672), affected intellectuals; The Imaginary Invalid (1673), the hypochondriac. When he produced Don Juan, a religious writer described it as “a school of atheism in which, after making a clever atheist say the most horrible impieties he entrusts the cause of God to a valet who says ridiculous things.” Similarly, Tartuffe, a satire on religious fanatics and hypocrites, resulted in the clergy’s demands that Molière be burned as a heretic and led to his excommunication. Molière’s father had been valet to the King, and this as well as his skill in writing comedies got him royal protection. His farces, contemporaries also find, remain uproariously amusing. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Molière as being only a “possible” atheist. McCabe labeled Molière a freethinker. Martin Greif relates that when Molière was in his own late forties, he fell in love with fifteen-year-old Michel Baron, “the talented young actor whom he had taken into his own home after removing him from a company of child actors of which he was the star.” Molière’s wife, twenty-one years his junior, screamed bloody murder. The boy, not exactly dumb, moved out. Molière ordered him back. The wife said, “Choose! It’s either him or me.” According to Greif, Molière chose and “three years later, when the playwright died, Michel Baron was at his side.” Curtain . . . except that there was a Catholic funeral despite any last confession and without his ever repudiating his profession of being a comedian. Molière was buried at night, for no priest in Paris would escort the body to the cemetery and no cemetery would accept him. Louis XIV, however, intervened, pointing out that Church law defined burial to be four feet and asking that Molière, then, be buried five feet but without pomp or scandal. As a result, a non-religious ceremony resulted. The casket was covered with the upholsterers’ embroidered banner, not something related to comedy. When 150 gathered and became noisy, Madame Molière dispensed coins and requested that those present escort the body to the cemetery. Here, the playwright was buried in a section reserved for suicides and unbaptized children. Later, the body was moved, and today Molière’s tomb is in the huge Père-Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris, near the tombs of Chopin, Bizet, Proust, and Oscar Wilde. The Catholic Encyclopedia blandly describes Molière as a Catholic, yet he died as McCabe points out, excommunicated, and the priests whom his wife summoned refused to come, giving in only when the King said that some sort of burial service should be arranged. {CB; CE; EU, Aram Vartarian; JM; RAT}
Molina, Mario José (1943– ) Molina came to the United States from Mexico in 1968. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, his achievements including the discovery that fluorocarbons deplete the ozone layer of stratosphere. Molina signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. “We have to understand our environment,” he wrote in his Who’s Who in America entry, “to find out if we are tampering with it. One of our accomplishments has been to call attention to society’s potential altering of the atmosphere.”
Moll, Shirley R. (20th Century) A Minnesota atheist, Moll is treasurer of the Atheist Alliance. E-mail: <smoll175@aol.com>.
Molnar, Alex (20th Century) Molnar, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is an activist who supports public schools and opposes vouchers for religious and private schools. He is consulting editor of Educational Leadership, the journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. In 1996, he spoke in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Freedom From Religion Foundation conference.
Molnar, Thomas Steven (20th Century) Molnar wrote Theists and Atheists (c. 1980) and Giving Kids the Business (1996). {GS}
Molony, Daniel D. (20th Century) Molony was instrumental in helping form the 1958 New York Chapter of the Rationalist Press Association. Molony lived in Staten Island, New York.
Molteno, John Charles [Sir] [Premier] (1814–1886) Molteno, the Premier of Cape Colony, was a poor boy of Italian extraction who had been born in England. In South Africa, he made a fortune and rose in politics to become Premier. His son and biographer stated that his father had shed at an early age the Catholic belief in which he had been reared, that although his life was “in the highest sense religious” he was “above the narrow formularies of any sect.” {JM; RAT}
Momerie, Alfred Williams (1848–1900) A theologian, Momerie taught logic and mental philosophy at King’s College and in 1883 was preacher to the Foundling Hospital. He wrote The Defects of Modern Christianity (1882) and Agnosticism (1884), which led to accusations of his heresy and his eventually being deprived of his positions. In The Fate of Religion (1893), Momerie wrote that “the orthodoxy common to all the Churches is a monstrous outgrowth of ecclesiasticism.” Momerie retained his clerical title and remained a theist. {RAT}
Mommsen, Theodor (1817–1903) A historian, Mommsen studied at Kiel, then became professor of law in Leipzig, Zürich, and Berlin. He wrote History of Rome (1853–1885), in which he expressed the opinion that it is doubtful if the world was improved by Christianity. His chief biographer, L. M. Hartmann, says in Theodor Mommsen (1908) that he “left Christianity for Deism and Deism for Atheism.” He disliked Kaplanokratie (the rule of priests), and Hartmann says that one of the reasons Mommsen left his History of Rome unfinished was that “he found no pleasure in describing the substitution of the Nazarene for the ancient spirit.” Mommsen was Perpetual Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. In 1902 Mommsen won the Nobel Prize in literature. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Momus, Recording Artist / Writer music
In the September 6, 2000 edition of The Onion A.V. Club titled "Is There A God?", celebrities were asked the question. Momus was among those asked.
Momus is a musician, essayist, and wit whose newest album is titled Stars Forever.
The Onion: Is there a God?
Momus: Umm... Uh, I'm an atheist.
See the feature at http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html.
Momus: See entry for Nicholas Currie.
Mon, Stormy (1945- ) Although raised a Methodist, Mon is an Oregonian freethinker, a “free spirit” and not a joiner. Imagine Freedom from Governments and Churches is an entire work that is uncopyrighted and free on the Web: <http://www.stormy.org>. Included are topics such as libertarianism; Mormons (“history of a fraud”); the Bible (a book review); the Koran (about Mohammed’s insecurity); and religious dogmas (which are responsible for the second-class treatment of women throughout history). E-mail: <stormy@stormy.org>.
“Mona Lisa”: See entry for Homoeroticism.
Mondale, R. Lester (28 May 1904-19 Aug 2003) The half-brother of former Vice President Walter Mondale, Lester Mondale was the youngest signer of Humanist Manifesto I and a spokesman for humanism in Unitarianism and Ethical Culture for many years. In 1933 he led the Philadelphia Ethical Culture Society. He wrote Three Unitarian Philosophies of Religion (1946, 1952) and The New Man of Religious Humanism (1973). Mondale once was president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists, and he signed both Humanist Manifesto I and II. He is on the editorial board of The Humanist. In 1998 Mondale was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Fourth Annual Atheist Alliance Convention, and it was noted that he was the sole surviving signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto. In 1999 he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (Walter Mondale, when a Senator, addressed the Fifth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Boston (1970). See entry for Ethical Culture.) {HM1; HM2; HSN2; EU, Howard B. Radest; EW; FUS; HNS}
Moneta, Ernesto Teodoro (1838–1918) Moneta was a Nobel Prize winner (1907), a journalist who fought “the Papal troops” in the war for the liberation of Italy and afterwards edited the anti-Papal Secolo for thirty years. Moneta was one of the leading workers in Italy for peace and reform. He founded La Vita Internazionale and the Lombard Union for Peace and Arbitration. Moneta was a rationalist. {RE}
MONEY • What’s the answer to 99 questions out of 100, son? Money.
–Malcolm Forbes Sr., a billionaire, to Malcolm Forbes Jr
. The first paper money was issued by China in 1024. In 1661 a Swedish bank printed paper money. All organized religions, including philosophic associations, are quite agreeable to accepting money . . . and credit cards. {The Economist, 31 December 1999}
Money, John (1921– ) A sexologist at Johns Hopkins University, and one of the pioneers in the field, Money has written for Free Inquiry. He addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988). That year, he wrote Gay, Straight, and “In Between”: The Sexology of Erotic Orientation. Rolling Stone in an article described Money: “Having lost his faith in his early 20s, Money increasingly reacted against what he saw as the repressive religious strictures of his upbringing and, in particular, the anti-masturbatory, anti-sexual fervor that went with them. The academic study of sexuality, which removed even the most outlandish practices from moral considerations and placed them in the ‘pure’ realm of scientific inquiry, was for Money an emancipation.” {CA; Free Inquiry, Summer, 1988}
Monette, Paul (1945–1995) Monette is the author of Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988), which describes the death of a lover, attorney Paul Horwitz, “46 now and dying by inches.” A complementary work, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988), is a book of poetry. His National Book Award-winning Becoming A Man, Half a Life Story (1992) describes his life as a homosexual. In December 1991, Monette himself was diagnosed with AIDS, and in his remaining life he stated as a goal that he would continue his pleas for humanistic justice. Halfway Home is narrated by a performer who has AIDS and who transforms himself into a deity named Miss Jesus, one who fights with his athletic brother. It is about the dying performance artist who retreats to a friend’s California estate to confront his mortality. “One hundred percent tolerance is possible,” he has written. “Everyone is capable of healing the hate in their heart.” Reminiscing, he describes his having been a closeted homosexual teacher, sometimes raging against a “straight” world that had made his life so dangerous. “We laugh together then and dance in the giddy circle of freedom. . . . And every time we dance, our enemies writhe like the Witch in Oz, melting, melting—the Nazi Popes and all their brocaded minions, the rat-brain politicians, the wacko fundamentalists and their Book of Lies.” Monette added that he did not believe in any afterlife. In 1994, Monette issued Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise. In it, he discusses the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church as well as the 1993 march by homosexuals on Washington. He also tells of the difficulties and occasional ironies of gay writers trying to “get covered” by the mainstream press. One of Monette’s strengths is that of explaining what it is like to live with AIDS. His radiation treatments for a form of cancer, KS, or Kaposi’s sarcoma, are “Arcadian compared to the exigencies of chemo,” he writes in vivid prose. In 1983 he and Horwitz visited Keats’s grave in Rome, and later he tells how he shopped for his own as well as his lovers’ burial plots. In the 1994 work, which was an essay, “My Priests,” contains his atheistic ruminations on “the Vatican Nazis,” “bloodsucker convents,” and “The Vatican’s Minister of Hate (Cardinal Ratzinger).” Whether writing about the “Nazi popes” or the “shit-eating Republicans,” Monette is nothing if not opinionated. Another of his lovers, casting agent Stephen Kolzak, died of AIDS. Monette’s obituary in The New York Times (12 February 1995) mentioned his winning the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction, which he reportedly said had “literally kept me alive” after contracting AIDS. Monette said the award had appropriately sent a message that gay and lesbian literature “is significant.” Ned Rorem set to music Monette’s “Live Alone” for a male chorus. {GL}
Monge, Gaspard [Conte de Paluse] (1746–1818) Monge, the French physicist, was so precocious that the priests who educated him set him to teach physics and mathematics at the age of sixteen. Later he became so distinguished in both sciences that Napoleon made him not only a senator but created him Count of Pelusium. He became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1780 and, through the influence of Condorcet, was made Minister of the Marine in 1792. Napoleon gave him an estate for his many services to the French nation. Maréchal and Lalande include Monge’s name in their list of atheists. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Mongez, Antoine (1747–1835) Mongez was a French archaeologist, a member of the Academy of inscriptions and of the Institute, before which he said he “had the honor to be an atheist.” Mongez, one of the most ardent members of the Convention, wrote many memoirs. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Mongold, Harry E. (20th Century) Mongold contributes material to The American Rationalist, one article of which (July 1992) states there were two Christianities in the time of Paul. There was the Judaistic one taught by James, John, and Peter, in which a Messiah had arrived to bring glory to Israel. Also, there was Paul’s Hellenistic one, in which all mankind was freed from the rule of the elemental spirits. Paul derives his from Greek ideas, whereas the former “is mainly the Jewish religion except for the belief that the Messiah had come and been executed.” Mongold finds that the book of Acts, which evidently was written to reconcile the two, is filled with inconsistencies and fails to convince that there was only one religion of Jesus. More and more, he finds, “science is making it harder and harder to distinguish between the Hebrew religion and that of other peoples. In other words, early history in the Bible seems less and less reliable.”
MONGOLIAN ATHEISM Atheists abound in former republics of the USSR. B. Batbayar, a member of the Mongolian Parliament, was quoted in the press as explaining why a late 1990s Christian-oriented television program was tolerable: “I’m very happy in Mongolia to introduce news without commentary. Personally, I’m an atheist.” {The New York Times, 26 January 1997}
MONISM Monism, in metaphysics, is a term applied from the 18th century to any theory that explains phenomena by one unifying principle or as the manifestation of a single substance. Monists stress the oneness of reality. Hegel identified this oneness as spirit, or mind. Spinoza identified it as an all-pervasive deity. On the question of whether people’s minds are distinct from their bodies, for example, a monist would hold either that mental conditions are essentially physical conditions (materialism) or that bodies depend on minds for their existence (idealism). A form of rationalism introduced by Haeckel, monism was meant to replace the usual German “freethought” as a positive philosophy of reality. Haeckel disliked the term “agnostic,” which had little support in Germany, and thought atheism too negative and materialism too weak in recognizing the importance of energy. The British jibed at his philosophy as “out of date,” said McCabe, who added that the complaint looks foolish in the light of modern developments in physics. Alternatives to monism are dualism (for example, matter and spirit, or good and evil) and pluralism (the explanation of the universe in terms of many principles). Bertrand Russell, for example, was a pluralist. (See a discussion of monism by Roland Hall in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.) {CE; DCL; RE.}
MONK Men under religious vows who live in community and whose work is usually centered on their community, often called a monastery, are monks. Buddhism and Christianity have notable groups of monks. Freethinkers and humanists, stated a Manhattan wag, “are not in the business of monkery.” (For Maria Monk, see entry for Hoaxes, Religious.) {DCL}
Monk, Maria (Born 1850) Monk wrote The Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), which is an anti-Catholic classic.
Monk, Ray (20th Century) Monk wrote Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1996), in which he details Russell’s weaknesses as well as his greatness.
MONKEY • Monkey, n. An arboreal animal which makes itself at home in genealogical trees. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
MONKEY’S UNCLE
Monkey’s Uncle is published by Ed Babinski at 109 Burwood Drive, Simpsonville, South Carolina 29681. {FD}
Monod, Jacques (1910–1976) In 1965, Monod shared with Andrew Lwoff the Nobel Prize in physiology. The author of Chance and Necessity (1971), he was associated with the French Institut Pasteur. Monod signed Humanist Manifesto II. In his Le Hasard et la necessité, Monod wrote, “The scientific attitude implies . . . the postulate of objectivity—that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan; that there is no intention in the universe.” {HM2}
MONOGAMY • I am a strict monogamist: it is 20 years since I last went to bed with two women at once, and then I was in my cups and not myself. –H. L. Mencken
• In this society, we view monogamy like we view virginity—one incident and it’s over, the relationship is destroyed—but we should view monogamy like we view sobriety. You’re sober. You might get completely drunk one night, but you can get sober again. You can get monogamous again. –Dan Savage gay syndicated columnist
• All sex is a power play. We like to deny it. We like to pretend that sex is birds and bunnies and bubbling brooks, that sex can’t be evil, nasty power dynamics, but that’s what makes it hot for people, whether they cop to it or not. Even the most vanilla sexual scenario has a subtle interplay of power back and forth. In the leather S&M scene, they take those seeds and exaggerate it until it’s laughable. You watch people having S&M sex and it’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen. It’s like cops and robbers or Indians and cowboys with your pants down. –Dan Savage
• Sexual boredom is the most pandemic dysfunction in this country. Think of sex as an appetite. Now think about having to eat the exact same meal every day for the rest of your life—of course you’d get bored. –Judith Seifer, Past President, American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists
• I don’t know if monogamy is a natural way to live,. It’s a product of social organization, but it’s essential for the way our society is organized, both emotionally and for the passage of property. In my practice I rarely find people who have had affairs say they would do it again. –Judith Seifer
• I’m not made for a monogamous world. Monogamy is an Anglo concept. To most Latin European men, or Iberian men, the whole notion is hopelessly archaic. It’s not that I disagree with it philosophically. It’s just that under the rules I choose to live by—because they are the rules of the game I’m playing, the game of life in Anglo Saxon America—you are not allowed to cheat. And my wife wouldn’t permit it. She wouldn’t be married to me if I did. So you make choices and you sacrifice. –Geraldo Rivera {Playboy, October 1998}
• It’s a medical fact that monogamy and intimacy are what make people happy. –Drew Pinsky, M. D. a/k/a Dr. Drew, co-host of MTV’s “Love Line”
In all societies, the family is one in which the choice of partners is generally guided by the rules of exogamy (one must marry outside a group) and, in more complex societies, by rules of endogamy (one must marry within a group). Incest is a taboo and is proscriptive. Rules concerning marriage are usually prescriptive, and marriage is usually heterosexual and entails exclusive rights and duties of sexual performance. However, the Nayar women of India ritually marry men of a superior caste and are allowed to enjoy sexual relations with any number of other men and bear legitimate children. Among the Dahomey of West Africa, a woman can marry another—the first woman becomes legal father of the children (by other men) of the second. Polyandry (having several husbands) is found where the value of a woman’s labor is high and can result in limited births. A levirate (in Latin, levir = husband’s brother) marriage is one between a widow and her late husband’s brother, as described in the Book of Ruth. Other variations of marriages are found in past as well as in present societies. Monogamy, particularly in Judeo-Christian societies, is considered the normal practice in marriage. Others find it “unnatural” although one of the oldest expressions of the egalitarian spirit: even if you are rich and powerful, you still get only one wife. As a result, some upper-class men claim multiple wives by philandering or, possibly, by having serial, not parallel, marriages. Although monogamy works for many, freethinkers recognize, it does not work for others. Sea horses are monogamous. They have no teeth, stomach, or ribs. Their eyes move independently of each other. The male endures pregnancy, holding the eggs the female deposits in his brood pouch until they develop into babies. Just before sunrise, seahorses “dance” together, linking their tails in an elaborate tango. The male emits musical sounds as the female deposits the eggs into his pouch, possibly because among males throughout the world he is the only one certain he is the babies’ father. The author of Monogamy, Dr. Adam Phillips, has written that many Americans mistakenly believe there is a predictor of personality—that some key fact about a person, an essential microdot of information, makes everything else intelligible; for example, the person’s being gay, a transvestite, or a “normal” heterosexual. Beware, Phillips as a psychoanalyst adds, of judging a complex being by a simple standard. “If you discover that your employee is gay, your partner is a transvestite, your best friend is a “normal” heterosexual, what have you actually discovered about them?” he asks. “What can you predict about their parenting skills, their eating habits or indeed their ability to be President of the United States? These seemingly intimate details about people’s lives make us jump to unlikely conclusions because so few reliable conclusions are available. It is one thing to believe that sexuality is intimately revealing, quite another to believe we know what it reveals. Even the oracle always needs interpretation.” Part of the complex of moral life, Phillips avers, is that people can do good things for bad reasons, and vice versa. Many are shocked to learn that someone in a monogamous relationship is found to have been unfaithful. Phillips added:
Perhaps it is not fidelity that we really believe in. What we really believe in, what we are committed to, is how disappointing we are to ourselves, and how we can use our ideals to humiliate ourselves and others. It seems as though our preferred state of mind is righteous indignation, and so our preferred political act is scapegoating. And in a democracy, scapegoating is always a failure of the political imagination. (See anthropologist Laura Betzig’s Despotism and Differential Reproduction [1986]; and entry for Polygamy.) {Adam Phillips, “How Much Does Monogamy Tell Us? The New York Times, 2 October 1998; Barbara Johnson, “Sex Advice for the Clinton Age,” The New York Times Magazine, 4 October 1998}
MONOPHYSITISM: For an explanation of monophysitism, a form of heresy, see the entries for Eutyches and for Christianity.
MONOTHEISM The concept of monotheism, non-theists hold, has been a major stumbling block to freethinking about philosophic ideas. It is a doctrine or belief that there is one God. James Henry Breasted, an American Egyptologist, held that Pharaoh Ikhnaton (1375–1358 B.C.E.) was a monotheist. Diop and Freud similarly claimed that monotheism was not original with the Jews. Zoroastrianism in its early stages was monotheistic, and in its later stages Greek religion became monotheistic. The belief was introduced in Israel first by II Isaiah in the exile about 440 B.C.E., and it became increasingly popular until it was fully established in the course of post-exilic days. For Gore Vidal and some other freethinkers, monotheism is a curse, the enemy of pleasure and the foe of rational inquiry. (See entry for Egyptian Religion.) {CE; ER}
MONROE COUNTY (MICHIGAN) COMMUNITY COLLEGE Monroe County Community College has a humanist group. On the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. Monroe, Jasper R. (1825–1891) Monroe edited the weekly Iron-Clad Age (1881–1898) in Indianapolis, Indiana. According to Fred Whitehead’s Freethought History (#2, 1992), Monroe was a novelist, playwright, and poet noted for his freethinking. Monroe had started the Rockford Herald (1855) and the Seymour Times (1857). He wrote Origin of Man, or The Early Reformers (1885). During the Civil War he was appointed surgeon to the 150th regiment. Following his death, his daughter, Lulie Monroe Powers (1850–1895), continued publishing of Iron-Clad Age. P. H. and Pearl A. Powers edited it until 1898, after which it eventually was absorbed by The Truth Seeker. {BDF; FUS; JM; PUT; TRI}
Monsey, Messenger (1693–1788) Messenger was an English physician, an intimate friend of Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield, and other leading skeptics. The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians states that Monsey “shook off the manacles of superstition and fell into the comfortless bigotry of scepticism.” {RE}
MONSIGNOR Monsignor, n. A high ecclesiastical title, of which the Founder of our religion overlooked the advantages. –Ambrose Bierce,The Devil’s Dictionary
Montagna, Donald (20th Century) Montagna, a business trainee and a member of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, worked briefly with Arthur Dobrin on Long Island, then took his skills in organizational development and psychology into leadership of the Washington Society in 1972. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Montagu, Ashley (1905–1999) An anthropologist and social biologist, Montagu wrote On Being Human (1950), The Natural Superiority of Women (1953), The Cultured Man (1958), The Humanization of Man (1962), Immortality, Religion, and Morals (1971), and The Elephant Man (1971). A consultant for UNESCO on matters pertaining to race, he edited the National Historical Society Series. He produced, financed, wrote, and directed the film, “One World or None” (1946). Montagu, a Unitarian, once declared, “The Good Book—one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.” To The New York Times (9 Dec 1993), Montagu wrote:
Why cannot we abolish all guns? In Japan it is a crime to own a gun, and the murder rate is spectacularly low. There is no reason for owning a gun, not even by the police. Guns are made to kill. The freedom to own a gun constitutes the freedom and the license to use it. Can we not begin the control and prevention of violence by the control and prevention of gun ownership? This would be a first significant step toward a healthier America and the recognition that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.
Montagu was named the American Humanist Association’s 1995 Humanist of the Year. {CE; HNS2; TYD}
Montagu, Basil (1770–1851) The natural (“illegitimate”) son of the Earl of Sandwich, Montague became Commissioner in Bankruptcy and later Accountant-General in Bankruptcy. He secured many reforms of the law, edited the works of Bacon (1825–1857, 16 volumes), and wrote a number of works on law and philosophy. According to Harriet Martineau, Montagu before his death “distinctly declared in a message to me his approbation of the avowal his friend W. Atkinson and I made of opinions like his own,” opinions which were atheistic. {RAT; RE} Montagu, Edward [Earl of Sandwich] (1625–1672) A British admiral, Montagu was a friend and supporter of Cromwell. He accepted the restoration of Charles II and became Admiral of the Fleet, Knight of the Garter, and Master of Trinity House. Pepys, the famed diarist and son of one of the earl’s cousins, was his secretary and often mentions his master’s heresies: “I found him to be a perfect skeptic,” Pepys wrote on 7 October 1660. On another page he describes the earl composing an anthem during service in the royal chapel, all the while muttering heavy curses over the work. The Earl of Sandwich negotiated (1661) the marriage between Charles and Catherine of Braganza, secured English possession of Tangier as part of her dowry, and brought Catherine to England. At the battle of Lowestoft (1665) in the second Dutch War, he fought with distinction and was killed in the battle of Southwold Bay in the third war. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Montagu, Mary Wortley [Lady] (1689–1762) Born Lady Mary Pierrepont, daughter of Evelyn Pierrepont, later Duke of Kingston, Montagu became the wife of Britain’s ambassador to Turkey. She is remembered for her quarrel with Pope, who then attacked her viciously in his poems: with “gendered hatred,” according to Isobel Grundy’s biography, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (1999). Horace Walpole also disliked her, depicting her as a greedy, heartless eccentric. Her letters, however, show her to have been a brilliant woman struggling for emancipation. While in Turkey, she learned about the practice of inoculation. On her return home she grafted a small amount of the smallpox germ into her young daughter, the practice caught on among her friends, and by 1718 she was working to educate the general public in the use of inoculation against smallpox. Wal Sichel, however, disliked her because of “her aversion to the Church and to everything that transcended her own faculties.” He objected to her freethinking and such of her remarks as “Either the papists are guilty of idolatry or the pagans never were so.” She had, in fact, been a freethinker all her life. Others found her difficult, prone to quarreling, somewhat lacking in care about her clothes, and having in Horace Walpole’s words an “old, foul, tawdry, painted, plastered visage.” At the age of nineteen she not only translated Epictetus but also married the skeptical grandson of the skeptical Edward Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich. Pope, Lord Hervey, and other Deists met in her salon. Her five volumes of letters were free about her opinions. For example, she wrote that “Priests can lie, and the mob believe, all over the world.” For that reason she scorned “the quackery of all the Churches . . . and all creeds and theological shimsies.” {JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; The Economist, 5 June 1999}
Montaigne, Michel Euqie (Seigneur de) (1533–1592) A stoic, skeptic, and Epicurean, Montaigne once wrote, “O senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm and yet will make gods by the dozens!” Of the witty essayist, Saint-Beuve reportedly observed that Montaigne was a good Catholic, only he was not a Christian. Lamont and others have pointed out that Montaigne never rejected Christian supernaturalism. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited him as being only a “possible” atheist. Thweatt notes that Montaigne’s skepticism in his own time was viewed “not as a covert attack on faith but as a legitimate defense of Christian doctrine.” McCabe labels him “clearly a deist with a great disdain of the churches and their quarrels, but his expressions are necessarily so guarded that his Essays have only a literary interest today.” Freethinkers respect Montaigne because he expressed natural thoughts in common language, recognizing that all religious opinions are the result of custom. Also, his Essays opened the era of freethinking in France. At the end, no one was sure whether Montaigne was a secret atheist or whether he was a Christian. Emerson had said, “Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers,” admiring his motto, “Que sais je?” (What know I?). {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Aram Vartarian and Vivien Thweatt; HNS2; JM; PA; RAT; RE; TYD}
Montalvo, Juan (1832–1889) Montalvo was sharply critical in Ecuador of the regime of Gabriel Garcia Moreno (1860–1875) and his alliance with the church. Montalvo’s Siete trados and Mercurial eclesiástica were both called heretical, and he was accused of being anticlerical. {EU}
MONTANA FREETHINKERS The E Club, 600 Chestnut, Anaconda, Montana 59711 is run by Frank and Marie Skiles. The group publishes Slant Press and appeals to secular humanists, freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists. The title’s E stands for empiricist. {FD}
Monteil, Charles François Louis Edgar (Born 1845) Monteil was a French journalist who fought against the Empire, writing in Le Rappel. For his Histoire d’un Frère Ignorantin (1874), he was prosecuted by the Christian Brothers and condemned to a year in prison, fined two thousand francs plus an additional fine of ten thousand francs in damages. In 1877, Monteil wrote a Freethinker’s Catechism. In 1883, he was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. {BDF; RAT}
Monteiro, J. P. (20th Century) Monteiro is the Brazilian and Portuguese corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Montelfeltro, Federico da (1422-1482) A member of the Italian noble family, upon the death in 1444 of Oddantonio Montelfeltro he became the second duke of Urbino. Known for being active in politics, he had an art collection that included his portrait painted by Piero della Francesca. According to The Secret Renaissance: The World of the Secretary From Petrarch to Machiavelli (2004) by Marcello Simonetta, Federico was the mercenary who orchestrated the coup in 1478 that killed Giuliano Medici during an invasion of the Duomo cathedral in Florence during a high mass. The plot had been thought to have been engineered by Francesco de Pazzi with an assist from Pope Sixtus IV, but Simonetta claims it was the humanist who planned the assassination. Simonetta made his conclusions after decoding a three-page letter sent by the duke to his ambassadors in Rome two months before the coup attempt. {Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times.}
Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat [Baron de Bréde et de] (1689–1755) A French jurist and political philosopher, Montesquieu gained a seat in the French Academy in 1728, although there was dissent by many because of his alleged irreligion, which most called deism. His Persian Letters (1721), supposedly written by Persian tourists in Europe, satirized and criticized French institutions. The work had to be printed in Rouen and published at Amsterdam. In his posthumous Pensées Diverses: De la religion, his anti-clericalism is emphatic. “Churchmen,” he wrote, “are interested in keeping the people ignorant.” He expressed himself both as a convinced deist and, with no great air of conviction, as a believer in immortality. But he said, “I call piety a malady of the heart, which plants in the soul a malady of the most ineradicable kind. . . . The false notion of miracles comes of our vanity, which makes us believe we are important enough for the Supreme Being to upset Nature on our behalf. . . . Three incredibilities among incredibilities: the pure mechanism of animals [the doctrine of Descartes]; passive obedience; and the infallibility of the Pope.” As for immortality, he declared, “The religion of Confucius denies the immortality of the soul, and the sect of Zeno did not believe in it.” The clergy denounced him and his work was placed on the Roman Index. Others called him a deist in his heart and an Erastian in his politics, or one who approved of state supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. L’Esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) studies comparatively three types of government—republican, monarchic, and despotic. His conclusion that the powers of government should be separated and balanced in order to guarantee the freedom of the individual greatly influenced the formation of the American Constitution. Montesquieu hailed the Encyclopédie’s writers at a time when the clergy was calling them atheists. His own work, particularly his Thoughts, was deistic. Under pressure, according to McCabe, Montesquieu admitted a priest to his deathbed, “so Catholics now claim him.” {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}
Montgolfier, Joseph Michel (1740–1810) The inventor of the passenger-carrying balloon, Montgolfier was a French chemist and paper-manufacturer. In 1783, he and his brother Jacques Étienne Montgolfier sent up at Annonay, near Lyons, a large linen bag inflated with hot air. Its flight covered more than a mile and lasted ten minutes. Also that year, a Montgolfier balloon sailed over Paris in the first manned free balloon flight. Montgolfier served the Revolution with zeal and was much honored. Lalande, who knew him well, wrote that Montgolfier was an atheist. {BDF; CE; JM; RE}
Montgomery, Edmund (Born 1835) Montgomery, a philosopher whose parents were Scottish, lived as a youth in Frankfort, where he saw Schopenhauer and became a friend of Feuerbach. Dr. Montgomery holds not only that there is no evidence of a God but that there is evidence to the contrary. {BDF; RAT}
Montherlant, Henri de (1896–1972) Montherlant, a French novelist and dramatist of decadent and egotistical novels that glorify force and masculinity, fought in World War I. Later, he was an athlete and a bullfighter. Among his works are Les Bestiaires (1926, tr. The Bullfighters, 1927), Le Cardinal d’Espagne (1960), and La Guerre civile (1965, tr. 1967 in Theatre of War). “Religion,” Montherlant wrote, “is the venereal disease of mankind.” {CE}
Moodie, Sara E. (20th Century) Moodie, while at student at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Moody, Joel (19th Century) In Science of Evil (1871), Moody observed, “Men of generous culture or of great learning, and women of eminent piety and virtue, from the humble cottage to the throne, have been led out for matters of conscience and butchered before a mad rabble lusting after God. The limbs of men and women have been torn from their bodies, their eyes gouged out, their flesh mangled and slowly roasted, their children barbarously tortured before their eyes, because of religious opinion.” {TYD}
Mook, Friedrich (1844–1880) Mook, a German freethinker, became lecturer to a free congregation at Nürenberg and wrote a popular Life of Jesus (1872–1873). While traveling abroad, Mook drowned in the River Jordan. {BDF; RAT}
MOON Earth’s single natural satellite is called the Moon. It rotates elliptically about the earth each 27.322 days and is about 240,000 miles (385,000 kilometers) away. The accepted wisdom in planetary science, according to John Noble Wilford of The New York Times (29 July 1997), is “that a massive object sideswiped Earth 4.5 billion years ago, in the heavy bombardment of planets and planetary fragments during the solar system’s formative period. The collision scattered crustal debris that later coalesced in orbit to form the Moon.” Wilford added, “Scientists at Harvard University even calculated that the object that collided with Earth must have been as massive as Mars.” Believing that the Moon is the home of the gods, some American Indians objected strongly in 1969 when astronaut Neil Armstrong landed there and, irreligiously to them, exclaimed, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (He had meant to say, “. . . one small step for a man. . . .”) According to Armstrong, the Moon “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert areas of the United States. It’s different, but it’s very pretty.” However, despite man’s having stepped on the moon and despite the various scientific tests which have made, astronomers generally agree that our closest celestial neighbor remains a mystery. {PA}
Moon, Sun Myung (20th Century)
The Korean-born Moon, who in 1954 established the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, heads what today are the 10,000+ members of the Unification Church. His followers, called “Moonies” by most, are not supposed to tape-record or take photographs during his sermons, one of which lasted sixteen hours and forty minutes. Journalists are generally prohibited from attending services. He has not granted an interview in two decades. Peter Maass (The New Yorker, 14 September 1998) has described the group’s views:
The core of Moon’s beliefs, expressed in “Divine Principle,” a four-hundred-and-eleven-page book, is that Eve was seduced by Satan in the Garden of Eden and had illicit sexual relations with Adam. This violated God’s desire that Adam and Eve await His blessing of their union before becoming intimate and having children. Their offspring were thus tainted by Satan’s influence; evil invaded the human spirit. God later sent Jesus to establish a pure family on earth, free of evil, but Jesus was crucified before He could marry and have children. Moon sees the essence of his own mission as completing the one given to Jesus—establishing a “true family” untouched by Satan while teaching all people to lead a God-centered life under his spiritual leadership.
Some parents have hired professional “deprogrammers” to return their children from what they allege is Moonie brain-washing, fearful that their son or daughter would be married in one of the group mass wedding ceremonies Moon arranges for couples who are not acquainted with each other before the occasion. At least two of the thirteen children Moon had with his current wife (his first marriage ended in divorce) have reportedly rebelled against him. According to Maass, the wife of Moon’s eldest son by his current wife and his onetime heir apparent fled from their family compound in Irvington, New York, taking her five children. She obtained a restraining order against Moon and accused Moon’s son, Hyo Jin, of “secreting himself in the master bedroom, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, drinking alcohol, using cocaine and watching pornographic films.” Her account of the marriage and divorce are found in a tell-all memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons (1998). Included are allegations of money laundering, cocaine abuse, infidelity, incest, and sexual abuse. The Washington Post (10 March 1999) reported that Moon’s enterprise—Kahr Arms—specializes in manufacturing lethal, concealable six-inch guns, adding that it has purchased the company that manufactures the gangsters’ favorite weapons: tommy guns.
Moondog: See entry for Louis Hardin.
Mooney, Jo Ann (1959- ) Mooney from 1998 to 1999 was the Council for Secular Humanism’s Director of Humanist Community Development.
Moor, Edmund (1771–1848) Moor was a major in the East Indian Company. He wrote of The Hindu Pantheon (1810) and Oriental Fragments (1834). {BDF}
Moore, Basil (20th Century) In Wales, Moore is active with the Mid-Wales Humanists.
Moore, Brian (1921–1999) The Belfast-born Moore, whose parents were Catholic with republican sympathies, emigrated in 1948 to Canada and subsequently moved to the United States. The first of his nineteen novels were published pseudonymously under the name of Michael Bryan. His works include Judith Hearne (1955; published in the US as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1956), about a lonely Belfast spinster who becomes alcoholic; The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), about the misfortunes of an Irish immigrant in Canada; I Am Mary Dunne (1968), a first-person female narration; Catholics (1972), in which a papal representative visiting an Irish religious community some time in the future; and The Mangan Inheritance (1979), about an American journalist in search of his Irish heritage. Although he had left Ireland, he remained a distinctly Irish novelist. His father had been a distinguished physician and member of the Senate of Queen’s University. Moore, in later life, was pleased to have received an honorary degree from the university with which his father had been associated. Graham Greene was an admirer and had some of the same skill at creating a location and the struggle between atheism and Catholicism. In 1995, Moore became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {New Humanist, March 1999}
Moore, Charles C(hilton) (Born 1872) From Lexington, Kentucky, Moore edited the weekly Blue Grass Blade from 1884 to 1905. He was imprisoned for sending atheistic material through the mail, then received a hero’s welcome in 1899 upon returning home—he described his experiences in Behind the Bars (1899). Michael Adcock, in an article in American Rationalist (October 1992), claims that Kentucky may have had many notable freethinkers, but none was quite like Moore. For one thing, he was an imprisoned freethinker who was able to convert his warden, E. G. Coffin, to freethought. The Rational View (1890) exposed many of the Bible’s contradictions, and his final book, Dog Fennel in the Orient, debunked all the “holy places” he visited on a tour to Palestine. Moore is the last known person to go to prison for blasphemy in the United States. {Cincinnati, Ohio, Fig Leaves, May 1995; FUS}
Moore, George Augustus (1852–1933) A novelist, Moore was educated in a Catholic college but abandoned the Church while studying art in Paris, as shown in his first work, Flowers of Passion (1877). A Modern Lover (1883), set in artistic Bohemian society, was banned by the circulating libraries, a fact that confirmed Moore in his outspoken battle against prudery and censorship. In his Confessions of a Young Man (1888), he observed, “Women have never invented a religion; they are untainted with that madness, and they are not moralists.” Moore told McCabe he called himself a Protestant for political reasons but that he actually was an agnostic. In his literary drama, The Apostle (1911), Moore made Paul strike Jesus dead on finding him alive years after his supposed resurrection, and Catholics tried to get him prosecuted for Brook Kerith (1916), which presented Jesus as an Essenian monk. Moore was instrumental in the planning of the Irish National Theatre, which Yeats acknowledged “could not have been done at all without Moore’s knowledge of the stage.” {RAT; RE; TYD}
Moore, Benjamin (20th Century) Moore, a physiologist, taught at University College, London, and at Yale and Liverpool universities. A theist, he was a dissenter from creeds. In his Origin and Nature of Life, he spoke of the God of theology as “a perfect superman,” although the beauty of the world suggested to him “an infinite intelligence.” He may have been agnostic as to immortality and was not displeased that what he called the dogmas of a century ago are “now buried in a merciful oblivion.” {RAT}
Moore, G(eorge) E(dward) (1873–1958) “G. E. Moore, John Ellis McTaggart, and Bertrand Russell are the first three academic atheists of note,” writes Berman. Moore edited Mind (1921–1947), which showed his change from an early influence by the idealism of F. H. Bradley and the transcendental epistemology of Immanuel Kant to a new and critical epistemology. “The Refutation of Idealism” and Principia Ethica distinguish between acts of consciousness and their possible objects, and between the ways in which we can be said to know and the things we can know. Although he did not consider linguistic analysis the main interest of philosophy, notes Columbia Encyclopedia, he was concerned along with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein in philosophical problems that are caused by the imprecisions of ordinary language. Moore, McTaggart, and Russell were prominent members of the Apostles, a Cambridge Society with a distinctively irreverent attitude toward God and religion. In one of his essays, Moore wrote, “I am an infidel, and do not believe that God exists; and I think the evidence will justify my disbelief. But just as I think there is no evidence for his existence, I think there is also no evidence that he does not exist. I am not an atheist in one sense: I do not deny that God exists. My arguments will only urge that there is no reason for thinking that he does: they will not urge that there is reason for thinking he does not. I do not believe that he does exist, but also I do not believe that he does not exist.” Elsewhere, he admitted that he had not been “a good answerer of philosophical questions” but he did endeavor to place truth before consistency or the desire for an answer. Moore was a Fellow of the British Academy. McCabe, who was his friend, told him that Jesus was probably an Essenian monk to about the age of thirty. Moore wrote a play, The Apostle, and a novel, The Brooke Kerith, in which he rejected the Christian view of Jesus. He was an agnostic, McCabe wrote, but said he preferred to be regarded as a Protestant for reasons of Irish politics and to express his abhorrence of the Roman Church. Meanwhile, McCabe added, Protestants shuddered at his blasphemies about Jesus. In 1954, asked his views of humanism rather than of atheism, Moore responded,
None of the titles you mention seems to me suitable to cover my philosophical position. I should say that my position cannot properly be called a “Humanism” at all, since I regard philosophy as not dealing specially with mankind at all, but with the whole universe.
{CE; HAB; JM; RAT; RE;
TRI; WAS, 5 August 1954}
Moore, Howard W. (1889–1993) When interviewed by The New York Times on the occasion of his 102nd birthday, he said he was asked what, inasmuch as he did not believe in God, sustained him, and he answered, “My own sense of moral responsibility. To accept an authority outside oneself is to deny oneself the right to make an ultimate decision. Understanding that and the consequences likely to follow is to know freedom in the deepest sense.” During World War I, Moore had been a pacifist and was sentenced to five years at hard labor for refusing to serve in the Army. “War was futile and its use as an instrument of national policy a confession of moral bankruptcy,” he stated in Plowing My Own Furrow (1985), a book written at the age of ninety-five from his stone house north of Cherry Valley, New York. He and other conscientious objectors had been sent to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, where he said they were beaten, taunted, and tortured for two years. The World War I resister and atheist died at the age of 104.
Moore, James (20th Century) An American scholar who lectures in the history of science and technology at the Open University in England, Moore with Adrian Desmond wrote Darwin (1991). He also produced The Darwin Legend (1994), in which he tells of the legend of Darwin’s alleged conversion to Christianity at the end of his life, repeatedly told by religious propagandists but denied by the Darwin family. Moore tells of Darwin’s evasive views of religion and irreligion as well as his family’s disingenuous treatment of them. {Nicolas Walter, “Rationally Speaking,” New Humanist, May 1995}
Moore, James Proctor (20th Century) Moore wrote This Strange Town, Liberal, Missouri (1963). {GS}
Moore, John Howard (Born 1862) Moore was an American writer. In his Better-World Philosophy (1899), he wrote with a humanitarian idealism. In Savage Survivals (1916) he is more directly rationalistic. {RAT}
Moore, Marianne (1877–1972) Moore, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet for Collected Poems (1951) and author of Predilections (1955), wrote wittily, intellectually, and satirically. Asked her view of humanism, Moore, a Presbyterian, responded to the present author:
I have not thought of myself as a humanist—was asked recently if I might not be called a moralist and perhaps I could be. I am much concerned about the irresponsibility of man for man. Casuists who are despots violate the rights of man, confused by the apparent triumph of other despots, unintentionally testifying to the fact that there is a moral law and that it is not transgressed with impunity—unconsciously emphasizing verities of the Apostle Paul in which they take no interest—that the servant of righteousness is made free and the wages of sin is death.
{WAS, 17 June 1956}
Moore, Michael (20th Century) In 1996, at the 2nd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention, held in Minneapolis, Moore spoke on the subject, “Truly Free: Civil Rights and Civil Duties.”
Moore, R. Laurence (20th Century)
Moore, a professor of history and government at Cornell University, co-wrote with Isaac Kramnick The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (1996). 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.”
Moore, Samuel D. (19th Century) Moore, a freethinker in Adrian, Michigan, was a supporter of The Truth Seeker during the time Bennett was arrested and imprisoned. He regularly attended freethought conventions. {PUT}
Moorehead, Caroline (20th Century) Moorehead is author of Bertrand Russell: A Life (1993). Although she covers much of the material already contained in Russell’s autobiography, Moorehead tells how Lady Ottoline Morrell, who became Russell’s mistress in 1910 and fueled his passion for sexual enlightenment, did not much care to have sex with him. It was his mind she fell in love with. The work does not emphasize Russell’s non-belief, slightly mentioning his work for Haldeman-Julius and his writing Religion and Science and Why I Am Not a Christian.
Mooren, Jan Hein (20th Century) Mooren, at a 1997 seminar of the European Humanist Professionals in London, spoke of research done on the victims of violence. A psychologist at the Humanist University in Utrecht, he described how trauma is experienced on an emotional, cognitive, and behavioral level. Because those who have experienced post-trauma stress lose control of their live, humanist counselors are needed to insure that they receive treatment.
Mor, Barbara (20th Century) With Monica Sjöö, Mor wrote The Great Cosmic Mother (1991).
Mora Poltronieri, Hugo (20th Century) Mora, who is president of the Costa Rican Association of Esperanto, participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. Mora is an ethical humanist activist. E-mail: <miaumiau@sol.racsa.co.cr>.
Mora, José Luis Maria (1794–1850) Mora was a liberal reformer in Mexico, one critical of church power. He held that the Mexican Republic was being held back by the corporate interests of the church. For example, its many franchises and fueros prevented any serious attempt at creating national unity, and he suggested that both the church and the army weakened public morality. Mora wrote México y sus revoluciones (1836). His efforts influenced later liberals, including Ignacio Ramîrez, who passed the reform laws that suppressed monasteries in Mexico. (See entry for Ignacio Ramírez.) {EU}
Morain, Lloyd (1917– ) Morain was president of the Illinois Gas Company when he signed Humanist Manifesto II. From 1951 to 1955, he was President of the American Humanist Association, a position he again had from 1969 to 1972. With his wife Mary in 1954, Morain co-wrote Humanism as the Next Step. He served as editor of The Humanist for more than ten years, during which time he was criticized for not having included an obituary for Priscilla Robertson, a previous editor. Upon his retirement, he remained on the editorial board. The Morains were on the Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and Lloyd was one of four directors responsible for incorporating that group. In 1994, the American Humanist Association named the two Morains Humanists of the Year. Lloyd Morain signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for Priscilla Robertson. For a negative criticism of his updating of Humanism as the Next Step, see the bibliography herein.) {FUS; HM2; PK}
Morain, Mary (1911–1999)
Mary Morain, co-writer of Humanism as the Next Step (1954), was on the editorial board of The Humanist and of the International Society for General Semantics. In 1952, she was on the first Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). “Humanism is practical,” she has written. “It helps us to understand complex situations, to solve problems, and to make decisions. . . . It teaches that there is an intrinsic, inalienable value in all human beings. . . . It teaches us to look for courage, for comfort, to one another, our fellow humans. . . . A sense of belonging comes to those who realize that we are in every respect a part of nature—a nature far larger, far older, than ourselves.” While president of the International Society for General Semantics, she edited two books of tested classroom exercises in general semantics, Teaching General Semantics and Classroom Exercises in General Semantics. She also edited two anthologies of articles from ETC., Bridging Worlds Through General Semantics and Enriching Professional Skills Through General Semantics. In 1994, the American Humanist Association named her and her husband, Lloyd, Humanists of the Year. {HM2; PK}
Morais, Herbert M. (1905–1970) Morais wrote Deism in Eighteenth Century America (1934). {GS}
Moraita, Miguel (Born 1845) A Spanish historian, Moraita taught at Madrid and was an ardent enemy of clericalism. He wrote the voluminous History of Spain. When in 1884 he made a discourse at the university against the pretended antiquity of the Mosaic legends, several bishops excommunicated him. The students, against whom the military were employed, supported Moraita. Moraita was Grand Master of the Spanish Freemasons. {BDF; RAT}
MORAL MAJORITY
Moral Majority is an organization of conservative Christians. Paul W. Weyrich, a longtime moral crusader, suggested to its leader, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the name of the far right group. Weyrich heads the Free Congress Foundation. Both groups support The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. Conservatives have pressured the Republican Party to work toward raising the general public’s “moral standards.” Annoyed that President Bill Clinton’s standing in the polls did not suffer during his impeachment trial, Weyrich said that while he was “not suggesting that we all become Amish or move to Idaho, he believed that “we have to look at what we can do to separate ourselves from this hostile culture. What steps can we take to make sure that we and our children are not infected? We need some sort of quarantine.” (Richard L. Berke, The New York Times, 21 February 1999}
MORAL THEOLOGY: For the change from the Catholic Church’s concentrating on sin, its causes, its characteristics, its degrees, and consequences to emphasizing love, see the entry for Bernard Häring.
MORALITY • Act only on that maximum through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law. –Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
• Do unto the other feller the way he’d like to do unto you an’ do it fust. –Edward Noyes Westcott (1846-1898), David Harum
• That indeed were a world fit to perish, wherein the moralist had set up the ignoble maxim: Safety first. –Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) • Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices. –George Bernard Shaw
• Don’t look down on any human being . . . unless it’s to help him up. —Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878-1937)
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
–Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
• Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99% of them are wrong. –H. L. Mencken
• A dog licks his balls . . . because he can. –A Teton Valley, Wyoming, B-K cowboy’s observation
“Morality does not depend on religion,” John Ruskin declared, one of the many who came to the same conclusion. “The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists—that is why they invented hell,” wrote Bertrand Russell. Lord Russell wrote that there is something better than traditional morality, and it involves learning how to lead a happy life. But he added that a way of life “cannot be successful as long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams. I do not think that the best kind of life is possible in our day for those who, below the level of consciousness, are still obsessed by the load of sin. It is obvious that there are things that had better not be done, but I do not think the best way to avoid the doing of such things is to label them sin and represent them as almost irresistibly attractive.” He also wrote, “We need a morality based upon love of life, upon pleasure in growth and positive achievement, not upon repression and prohibition.” For John Dewey, morality lies within the individual and is relative to his experience. G. E. Moore’s intuitionalism postulated that individuals receive an immediate awareness of the morally good. Kant found moral law in the categorical imperative. Relatively speaking, morality or what ideally is right human conduct differs from community to community, depending upon what value judgments have been accepted by its inhabitants. Sir Ron Dearing, the chief curriculum adviser in England, is known for his view that a renaissance of moral education is needed to deal with the violence of modern society. “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” is a statement signed by more than 1,600 leading scientists, including more than 100 Nobel laureates in science. Signatories included Carl Sagan, James Watson, Stephen Jay Gould, Paul Ehrlich, Murray Gell-Mann, Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and E. O. Wilson. In preparation for the millennium, they called for a moral manifesto: “We the undersigned, senior members of the world’s scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead,” the document read. “No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished.” As a result, “A new ethic is required. . . . This ethic must motivate a great movement, convincing reluctant leaders and reluctant governments and reluctant peoples themselves to effect the needed changes.” (See Lee Eisler’s The Quotable Bertrand Russell for more of Lord Russell’s many views on the subject. In his New Hopes for a Changing World (1951), Russell explains what he believes is better than traditional. Also see Paul Kurtz’s view in the entry for Common Moral Decency.) {Roger Bingham, “Toward a Science of Morality”; and John Hartung, “Prospects for Existence: Morality and Genetic Engineering” in Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1996; CE}
MORALITY, GENITAL-BASED Genital-based morality, according to Edwin Kagin in a tongue-in-cheek article (FIG Leaves, February 1999),
is an infantile system of primitive simplistic thinking involving magical make-believe, and is thus quite easy to understand. Abortion, homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, unmarried sex, oral sex, sodomy (maybe gomorra, too), non-monogamous sex, ‘adult’ videos, nudist clubs, nude beaches, nude dancing—anything that touches upon, views, uses, or has anything whatsoever to do with, genitals, is immoral and bad.
However, if the preacher meets the deacon in a whorehouse, lawyer Kagin observes, both are expected to lie about sex, even under oath.
Morandini, D. Michael (20th Century)
Morandini has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Moravec, Hans (20th Century) Moravec, who has gone on record as being a non-theist, is a researcher into artificial intelligence and robotics. Hans Moravec, AI and Robotics Researcher science
From an article in Mondo 2000, "...he's rife with contradictions. He's married to an evangelist though he is himself an atheist."
Moravia, Alberto (Alberto Pincherle) (1907– )
Son of an architect, Moravia was a Roman-born Jew who became an eminent critic, playwright, film critic, journalist, and writer of fiction. Spiritual ennui is the theme of his Time of Indifference (1929), which depicted his own humanistic outlook and his concern about a middle-class society that favored the rise of Fascism. His early criticism of bourgeois “bad faith” and moral decadence led some to accuse him of “Jansenism” for his stand on moral determinism.
Moravia spent much of World War II on the run, having depicted Mussolini comically in The Fancy Dress Party (La mascherata, 1941). Some critics objected to Woman of Rome (1947), calling it immoral, lewd, and sexually over-obsessed; the prostitute he describes is a strong symbol of the power of femininity. The novel’s Adriana observes that “everything was love and everything depended on love . . . and if you did not have it you could not love anyone or anything.”
The freethinking Moravia also wrote Two Women (1957), The Empathy Canvas (1960), Time of Desecration (1980), and The Conformist (1951), the latter of which explored the psycho-sexual basis of politics.
In 1952, all his writing was placed on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading.
Sartre is said to have been influenced by Moravia’s early work. In Germany, one publisher refused to publish any of “the Jew’s books,” but Time (15 December 1961) called him one of the century’s best writers. {CE; ILP, Additus; OCE}
MORAVIAN CHURCH The Moravian Church’s origin can be traced to the evangelical movement in Bohemia led by John Hus, who suffered martyrdom in 1415 after being burned at the stake. In a conflict with Archbishop Zbynek over a papal schism, he had sided with Pope Alexander V rather than with Pope Gregory. In 1457 followers of Hus formed an organization called Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Brethren). The union of followers included four principles as the basis for their church: (1) the Bible as the only source of Christian doctrine; (b) public worship to be conducted on the model of the Apostolic Church, (c) the Lord’s Supper to be received in faith and defined in the language of Scripture, and (d) true Christian life as essential evidence of saving faith. A contemporary affected by Moravian mysticism was the poet Hilda Doolittle. {See entries for Hilda Doolittle and John Hus.) {ER}
Moravec, Hans (20th Century) An artificial intelligence and robotics researcher, Moravec was described in Mondo 2000: “He’s rife with contradictions. He’s married to an evangelist, though he is himself an atheist.” {CA}
Morazán, Francisco [President, Central American Federation; President, Costa Rica] (1799–1842) Morazán, a Central American statesman, led the Honduran revolutionary army that overthrew (1829) the regime of Manuel José Arce and was proclaimed president of the Central American Federation in 1830. Because of opponents who complained that Guatemala dominated the group, Morazán moved the capital to San Salvador. A liberal, he promoted education, abolished most monastic orders, and established freedom of worship. Opposed by an increasing number of conservatives, he eventually went into voluntary exile until recalled in 1842 by Costa Rica and was proclaimed president there. In 1842, his own partisans shot him. {CE; EU}
More, Byron (20th Century) More, a freethinker, wrote Is the Bible Authentic? (c. 1901). {GS}
More, Max (20th Century)
More is a Californian who is president of the Extropy Institute. Also, he is editor of Extropy: The Journal of Transhumanist Thought. More holds that humanists need not fear “their own Promethean urge to challenge the gods,” and he thinks humanists should be activists: “No more gods, no more faith, no more timid holding back. Let us blast out of our old forms, our ignorance, our weakness, and our mortality. The future belongs to posthumanity.” (See Max More, “On Becoming Posthuman,” Free Inquiry, Fall 1994.) {CA}
More, Paul Elmer (1864–1937) More, who with Irving Babbitt is associated with the movement of New Humanism or neohumanism, wrote On Being Human (1936).
More, Thomas (Sir) (1480–1535) McCabe is skeptical about More’s being a “saint” of the Roman Church. “One of his chief biographers,” McCabe notes, “says that he was ‘a bundle of contradictions,’ but the evidence suggests that he was sceptical in his youth and prime, and very sincere in his later sacrifice for his faith. The Catholic argument that he was not serious in writing the sceptical second part–as published: it was written first–of the Utopia is frivolous.” That part is plainly skeptical and anti-clerical, however, and McCabe continues that “no Catholic could have written as he did about religion.” A highly intelligent person, More was a ruthless interrogator. He hunted heretics, burned books, and contested those who believed they could find God directly and without utilizing priests and popes. As for the canonization, “Like that of Joan of Arc, and others in modern times, it was a political and financial move. British priests–the fact was concealed from the laity–were outraged to find at the close that they had to pay Rome £15,000, besides £4,000 for a present to the Pope.” {RE; TYD}
Moreau, Hégésippe (1810–1838) Moreau was a French poet, a radical and a freethinker who fought in the barricades in 1830. He wrote The Mistletoe and the Oak, and his entire works were collected with an introduction by Sainte-Beuve. {BDF; RAT}
Moreau, Jacques Joseph (1804–1884) Moreau, a physician, became a distinguished alienist of the materialist school. He wrote on moral faculties from a medical point of view. {BDF; RAT}
Morehead, Robert (19th Century) A freethinker, Morehead wrote Philosophical Dialogues (1845). {GS}
Morellet, André (1727–1819) The Jesuits educated Morellet, a French encyclopedist, and all his life he kept the title of the Abbé Morellet. Yet, according to the Grande Encyclopédie, he “did more than any in spreading the views of the philosophers.” Morellet was friends with Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, and Franklin. {RAT; RE}
Morelli, Giovanni (1816–1891) Morelli was an Italian writer, politician, and rationalist. The rebellion against the Papacy and Austria drew him into active life in 1848, and at the collapse of the Republic he returned to his interests in art, writing several volumes on the Italian and foreign galleries. In 1859 he was commander of the National Guard at Magenta. From 1860 to 1870 he sat in Parliament for Bergamo, and in 1873 he passed to the Senate. {RAT}
Morelly, N. (18 Century) Morelly was a French socialist, author of Code de la Nature, a work sometimes attributed to Diderot. It was published in 1755 and urged that man should find circumstances in which depravity is minimized. Little is known of him, but it is believe he was a priest who turned rationalist and drew upon himself the zeal of the orthodox by his writings. {BDF}
Morem, Sally (20th Century) Morem, a science writer, is secretary of the Humanist Association of Minneapolis and St. Paul. For Secular Nation she has written “Peering at Faces in the Clouds” (September-October 1996) and “Does God Exist?” (October-December 1998). E-mail: <sjmorem@juno.com>.
MORES
Mores is a bi-monthly in Dutch of Humanistisch Verbond Belgie at Lange Leemstraat 57, 2018 Antwerpen, Belgium.
Moreton, Stephen (20th Century) Moreton has reviewed books for the Gay and Lesbian Humanist.
Morfill, William Richard (1834–1909) A philologist, Morfill in 1900 was a professor of Russian and Slavonic languages. He composed grammars of the Russian, Polish, Serb, Tchek, and Bulgar languages, and he was familiar with Turkish, Irish, and Welsh. His rationalist sentiments appear in his article on Slav religion in Religious Systems of the World. {RAT}
Morgan, Angela (20th Century) Morgan, a poet who wrote Gold On Your Pillow (1952), wrote the present author concerning humanism:
I have read a brochure of the American Humanist Association, “Ten Points” or divisions of the Humanist idea, and it rejoices me to find the propositions so convincingly stated. . . . It is a great step forward in human history to throw away the old superstitions as to the nature of man. Someone had to explode that stupid doctrine of Original Sin before humanity could stand on its feet and draw a wholesome breath. . . . There must be, somewhere, a cosmic or celestial reality which is drawing the human being up toward a nobler destiny. . . . How could man grow, how could he evolve, how could he become better and greater without this unseen but plausible power or force for good, drawing him forward and up? . . . The gods of primitive man are to be discredited; the God of vengeance who throws his disobedient children into hell fire is too preposterous to consider; the God of theology is not too popular with modern thinkers. But First Cause, or Source, or Creator–how can we get away from that logical need? Do I fall into the general classification of naturalistic humanism?
Morgan, a Unitarian, did most of her research on such subjects as deism and transcendentalism. {WAS, 17 February 1951}
Morgan, Anna (20th Century) In Britain, Morgan is active with the Lichfield Humanist Group.
Morgan, Arthur E. (1878–1975) Morgan was president of Antioch College (1920–1936) and chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (1933–1938). Among his works are My World (1927), The Philosophy of Edward Bellamy (1945), The Search for Purpose (1955), The Community of the Future (1956), Dams and Disasters (1970), and The Making of the TVA (1974). In the 1950s, he reviewed books for The Humanist and was active in promoting Friends’ and humanist causes. {EW; HNS, U}
Morgan, Conway Lloyd (1852–1936) Morgan taught zoology and geology at Bristol University College. When that school became a university, he was Vice-Chancellor but resigned to take the chair of psychology. McCabe calls Morgan “a more advanced Rationalist than Voltaire and Paine,” adding that Morgan rejected the belief in immortality, admitted only an impersonal “First Cause,” and said that “the general trend of Haeckel’s constructive scheme of scientific interpretation is on lines which are winning or have won acceptance.” {RAT; RE}
Morgan, Dermot (1953-1998) Morgan, who was known as Father Ted in England’s Channel 4 sit-com, was an atheist who, as Rory Carroll reported in The Guardian (7 March 1998), “savaged the Church throughout his career.” Upon his death and at the request of his family, communion was held at St. Theresa’s church, Mount Merrion, Dublin, after which the body was cremated. Father Michael Paul Gallagher, who had tutored Morgan at University College, Dublin, told a congregation, which included the Irish President and government ministers, that it was part of Morgan’s vocation “to be hard to take at times.” He did not mention that in Morgan’s last interview, a few days before his death, he called the clergy “ju-ju men.” {The Freethinker, May 1998)
Morgan, Ernest (20th Century) During the 1960s, Morgan was a director of the American Humanist Association. He was co-founder of the Arthur Morgan School and published A Manual of Simple Burial which helped lead to the development of memorial and cooperative burial societies across the nation. {HNS2}
Morgan, James (20th Century) Morgan’s “The Measure of a Man” was printed in Humanist in Canada (Summer 1997). He is an Ontarian psychotherapist who specializes in men’s issues.
Morgan, Martin (20th Century) Morgan is associated with the Humanist Fellowship of Brooklyn (AHA). (See entry for New York Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Morgan, Richard (20th Century) Morgan is an Episcopalian who has written The Supreme Court and Religion (1972). {GS}
Morgan, Thomas (Died 1743) Morgan was a Welsh deist, known for his The Moral Philosopher (1737). A Presbyterian, he was deposed for his Arianism about 1723, at which time he was a physician in Bristol. Morgan, who edited Radicati’s “Dissertation on Death” (1731), called Moses “a more fabulous romantic writer than Homer or Ovid,” and he attacked the evidence of miracles and prophecy. Lechler called Morgan “the modern Marcion.” {BDF; FUK; RAT}
Morgan, Thomas Charles [Sir] (1783–1843) Morgan was made a baronet in 1811. A warm friend of civil and religious liberty, he was a skeptic who wrote Sketches of the Philosophy of Life (1818) and Philosophy of Morals (1819). The Examiner wrote of him, “He was never at a loss for a witty or wise passage from Rabelais or Bayle.” He did lose clients, however, for through clerical persecution many refused to use him as their physician. {BDF; RAT}
Morgenbesser, Sidney (1921– ) Dr. Morgenbesser was John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He has edited Philosophy, Science, and Method: Essays in Honor of Ernest Nagel (1969) and Philosophy, Morality, and International Affairs (1974). {CL}
Morgenroth, Florence (20th Century) Morgenroth is president of Humanists of the Suncoast in Florida.
Morgentaler, Henry (1923– ) On November 24 1999, Dr. Morgentaler declared himself atheist on the program Les francs Tireurs on the French-speaking TV station Tele Quebec.
He has been the president of La Libre Pensée for the past few years, a French-speaking association of freethinkers. He has been named 'Humanist of the Year' a few years ago from The Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies at their congress at Montréal, Québec, Canada.
Morgentaler was one of the founders in 1968 of the Humanist Association of Canada, and he served as its first president. He spent the last nine months of World War II in German concentration camps, moving to Montreal in 1950. He is a leading campaigner in Canada for the legalization of abortion, and he has expressed pride in having performed 65,000 abortions. Eight clinics in major cities across Canada bear his name. In 1992 his first clinic, in Toronto, exploded in a fiery blast. Members of the Campaign Life Coalition, he said, pray for him daily: “They think I’m the embodiment of the devil.” Inasmuch as surgeons have been threatened and even killed, he wears a bulletproof vest to work. At the 1990 Humanist World Congress, Morgentaler said, “Humanism is not just an intellectual philosophy, but also has practical implications in its aim to create the full realisation of all human potential. . . . Humankind is facing unresolved Humanist problems: population, environment, nuclear risks, ethnic and tribal conflicts. Humanism is devoted to human welfare, to the acceptance of democracy and the peaceful resolution of conflict by a constructive rational solution to problems.” In 1973, he was named the first Humanist of the Year by the Canadian Humanist Association. In 1975 he was so named by the American Humanist Association. In 1999 he received the annual award of the Bertrand Russell Society, saying, “I have been a great admirer of Bertrand Russell and consider him one of my mentors, the man who deeply influenced my philosophy of life. As founder of the Humanist Association of Canada, I have often quoted Bertrand Russell, especially his saying that ‘the good life is based on love guided by reason.’ ” A physician who was born in Poland, Dr. Morgentaler spent six years in Nazi concentration camps before going to Canada. He has written Abortion and Contraception (1982). In an article, “Secular Humanism Versus Christianity” in Humanist in Canada (Spring 1990), Morgentaler states, “I believe people should be made aware that it is possible to develop a life-style and a commitment to human values without the necessity of believing in God or the illusions of immortality. . . . It is this commitment to the values of secular humanism, embodying the desire for justice and a better society, that is the origin of my twenty-year-old struggle for women’s right to safe medical abortions. . . . It is time we all change our attitudes and learn to live in peace and harmony in spite of religious or ideological differences.” Morgentaler, who is on the Board of Governors of The Humanist Institute, signed Humanist Manifesto II and Humanist Manifesto 2000. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Morgentaler addressed the group. In 1990, he presided over the Eleventh World Congress held in Brussels. Also in 1990, at Carleton University, he debated Michael Horner on the subject, “Secular Humanism vs. Christian Humanism: Which is the Superior World View?” A biography by Catherine Dunphy, Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero (1996) details his extraordinary life. An honorary president of the Humanist Association of Canada, Morgentaler in 1992 addressed the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT). A biography by journalist Catherine Dunphy, Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero (1997), showed Morgentaler as being at times impatient and stubborn, a difficult person to work with. However, he has many Canadians, particularly women, who support his efforts, and he is an important personage in Canadian humanism. {Anthony DePalma, The New York Times, 10 November 1998; E; HM2; HNS2; Henry Morgentaler, “The Moral Case for Abortion,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1996; Humanist in Canada, Winter 1997-1998; SHD}
Mories, A. S. (20th Century) Mories wrote Haeckel’s Contribution to Religion (1904). {GS}
Morin, André Saturnin (1807–1888) A French advocate and writer, Morin in 1830 wrote defending the revolution against the restoration. In 1848, he was made sous-prefet of Nogent. During the Empire he combated vigorously for Republicanism and freethought, writing under the signature “Miron” in the Rationaliste of Geneva, the Libre Pensée of Paris, and Libero-Pensiero of Milan. Morin was associated with Ausonio Franchi, Trezza, Stefanoni, and the Italian freethinkers. His principal work is An Examination of Christianity (1862, 3 volumes). His Jesus Reduced to His True Value went through several editions. Morin was one of the founders of the Bibliothèque Démocratique, to which he contributed several anti-clerical volumes. In 1876 he was elected to the Municipal Council of Paris, where he brought forward the question of establishing a crematorium. {BDF; RAT}
Morison, James Augustus Cotter (1831–1888) Morison was an English positivist and man of letters. In 1863 he published The Life and Times of Saint Bernard. He was one of the founders of Fortnightly Review, in which he wrote, as well as in the Athenaeum. In 1886 he published “The Service of Man,” an essay toward the religion of the future, which shows that the benefits of Christianity have been much exaggerated and its evils palpable. George Meredith once dedicated to Morison a volume of poems. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Morley, John [Viscount Morley of Blackburn] (1838–1923) A statesman, man of letters, and editor of the liberal Fortnightly Review, Viscount Morley wrote lives of Voltaire (1872), Rousseau (1873), and Diderot and the Encyclopedists (1878). “All religions die of one disease,” he reportedly said, “that of being found out.” He also observed in Critical Miscellanies (1872) that “Where it is the duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.” In 1886, Morley was appointed by Mr. Gladstone Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was a friend of McCabe, who said he was an admirer of the freethought opinions of Voltaire, Diderot, and other heretics, as shown in his Diderot and the Encyclopedists (1878). McCabe added, “His political associations and high social position restrained him, and he once begged me, almost tearfully, not to publish a letter of his in which he said that Gladstone was far inferior, both morally and intellectually, to J. S. Mill. But he was a man of fine and universally respected character–‘Honest John’ he was often called–and in his autobiography (Recollections, 1917) he again avowed himself an agnostic.” In 1919 Morley became an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {BDF; FUK; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
MORMON, BOOK OF The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims that its founder, Joseph Smith, was visited by God and Jesus Christ, who told him not to join any established church. Later in a revelation he was instructed to form the church and was directed to a hill in Palmyra, New York, where golden tablets contained a revealed book. Smith translated The Book of Mormon from these tablets that allegedly gave God’s historical account of the Western Hemisphere from about 600 B.C.E. to 421 C.E. After the Christ was crucified, according to the revelations Smith received, he appeared in North America and ministered to its inhabitants, who were believed to be descendants of immigrants from Jerusalem. Mormons using the book hold that theirs is the only true Christian faith. Through proxy they baptize the dead, whom they believe were denied an opportunity to join the church. They believe that God dwells near the planet Kolob, with his many wives and countless spirit children, whom He sends to Earth as humans to be tested. Marriage and family relationships last for eternity, according to the revealed “truths.” {Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, 31 May 1998}
MORMON CHURCH The Mormons originated in the United States in the nineteenth century, with teachings based on the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The latter was allegedly revealed by angels to Joseph Smith, a poor, half-literate seventeen-year-old, who was told to look for some golden plates bearing a history of ancient America which God had hidden on Hill Cumorah, near his father’s farm in upstate Manchester, New York. He went, he saw, but the angel he talked to would not let him possess the plates. Finally in 1827 the angel allowed him to take the gold book, and in time he decoded the book’s “Reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphics and dictated his translations to a scribe. At one time Joseph gave 116 pages of the translation to a follower who lost them. Angry angels punished him by repossessing the plates. After months of prayer and meditation, he got the text back and in 1830 published the Book of Mormon, but he was left empty-handed and could not keep the plates. Under the leadership of Brigham Young, the Mormons moved to Utah and laid stress on hard work, loyal family life, and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. Mormonism was once controversial because of polygamy, but the church repudiated the practice in 1890 and no longer sanctions it. It also closed the priesthood to blacks, who, according to Mormon doctrine, carried the mark of Cain. That policy, however was reversed in 1978 because the church’s President said he had “a revelation.” John L. Brooke in The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844 (1995) tells how on his father’s side Smith was descended from a line of village magicians. In the wake of Salem witchcraft trials in the 1690s, the Smiths had practiced white witchcraft. On his mother’s side, Smith inherited a mix of sectarianism and hermeticism (an interest in alchemy, magic, and the occult). Brooke’s goal was to explore “the particular affinities, latent and manifest, running between the religious culture of prophesy and restoration and the occult cultures of popular conjuring and esoteric hermeticism.” How it was possible for an ignorant farm boy to have come up with a religion that now claims nine million members or more remains the most astonishing of Joseph Smith’s alchemical achievements. (See entry for Steve Benson, grandchild of Mormon President Ezra Taft Benson. Also, see entries for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Gentile, and Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. As to how Virgil Thomson was turned onto marijuana by the Mormons’ President, see entry for Thomson.) {CE; DCL}
MORMON HOMOSEXUALS D. Michael Quinn in Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) wrote of being a closeted gay Mormon who was excommunicated by his church but still considers himself a true Mormon. Vern L. Bullough, reviewing the work, wrote, “I long ago ceased to regard myself as a Mormon and believe religion is a matter of choice, not of biology. I regard Quinn’s interpretation of Mormonism as a major flaw in his work.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}
MORMON MISSIONARIES “Where did you serve your mission?” Mormon girls are said to ask men asking for a date. Depending upon the men’s answer, Andrew Jacobs has written, “they won’t even date you.” The pressure to serve a mission is intense, young Mormons find, “and those who don’t can find themselves on the fringes of Mormon life.” A two-year mission is considered a rite of passage for Mormon men who reach the age of nineteen. Women, who make up only 17% of the missionary force, must wait until they are twenty-one and are not pressured to become missionaries the way men are. Their focus is more upon marriage and having families, and they are not allowed to hold the priesthood, perform baptisms, or supervise confirmations. Upon their nineteenth birthday, however, men must interrupt whatever else they are doing and go out into the world to proselytize. Although church officials claim there is no pressure to win converts, many missionaries say that those with a prodigious tally, not just five to seven people a year, can expect a hero’s welcome upon their return home and promotions in the church hierarchy. Citing examples of Mormons who quit the church, Jacobs noted that in Mormonism “You either believe everything or nothing: there is no gray area.” As a result some quitters who have “lost the fire” confess that they worried about becoming an apostate. But they sometimes question the church’s doctrines or become disillusioned upon discovering that potential converts are offered access to the church’s generous welfare program. Disapproving of such, they become lapsed Mormons despite the pressure they feel from their Mormon neighbors against anyone “who wants out.” Although the Salt Lake City “Temple Square” brand of Mormonism does not practice polygamy, pious Mormons are advised, according to K. L. Johnson (New York Times Magazine, 21 March 1999), “that they will have the opportunity to take on more than one wife after death so that they may become head of their own expansive patriarchies.” In New York City, the number of members has more than doubled from 1990 to 1997, almost entirely because of people who have converted to the faith. An estimated two hundred forty Mormon missionaries operate in the city, and 20,123 individuals were converted in 1997 because of their efforts. Worldwide, the church’s membership has grown from four million in 1978 to ten million in 1998. Whereas the Roman Catholic Church has 6,000 missionaries around the world, Mormons have 60,000 working in 160 countries. {Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, 31 May 1998)
MOROCCAN HUMANISM: See entry for Mohammed Choukri.
Moroz, Andrew (20th Century) Moroz wrote “The Inconsistency of Theism” (Secular Nation, July-September 1998), pointing out that philosophy is a human endeavor that entails no assumptions. “And if through logical argument and rational debate the impossibility of a god is revealed, however much our sentiment of nostalgia calls for a divine caretaker to walk our world, the falsehood must be cast off so we may enjoy the ultimate freedom that only truth can bring.
Morrell, R. M. (19th Century) Morrell was a secularist who founded the National Sunday League in 1856. It pioneered Sunday lectures at St. Marin’s Hall and other London centers, and it campaigned against the restrictions on Sunday entertainments imposed by the Act of 1781. Annie Besant was its vice-president.
Morrell, Robert W. (20th Century) In Nottingham, England, Morrell has edited the Thomas Paine Society Bulletin. He wrote The God of the Twilight (1980). {FUK; GS}
Morris, Charles (19th Century) Morris wrote Aryan Sun-Myths: The Origin of Religions (1899), in which he showed that all Indo-Germanic nations have worshiped crucified saviors. He held that the sun-myths of the ancient Aryans were the origin of the religions in all of the countries peopled by the Aryans. {CE}
Morris, Charles W. (1901– )
When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Morris was professor emeritus of the University of Florida. He also taught in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago and the University of Denver. {HM2; HNS; HNS2}
Morris, Desmond (20th Century) An zoologist, Morris wrote Biology of Art (1961), Apes and Monkeys (1965), The Naked Ape (1967), The Art of Ancient Cyprus (1985), The Illustrated Naked Ape (1986), and with Ramona Morris Men and Apes (1965). In The Naked Ape he included the following:
[Religion] has led to a number of bizarre by-products, such as belief in “another life” where we will at last meet up with god figures. . . . In a sense, we still believe in an after-life, because part of the reward obtained from our creative works is the feeling that, through them, we will “live on” after we are dead.
In 1994, Morris wrote The Human Animal, which contains the following:
There have been many arguments about the location of the immortal human soul. Could it be in the heart, in the head, or perhaps diffused throughout the whole body–an all-pervading spiritual quality unique to the human being? The answer, it seems to me as a zoologist, is obvious enough: a man’s soul is located in his testicles; a woman’s in her ovaries. For it is here that we find the truly immortal elements in our constitution–our genes.
{CA; E}
Morris, Edward (20th Century) Morris is associated with the Humanist Association of Middle Tennessee. (See entry for Tennessee Humanists.) {FD}
Morris, Ethel (20th Century) A Unitarian minister in Auckland from 1948–1957, Morris moved to England where, although eschewing little of the traditional Christian language, was a religious humanist, according to John Maindonald.
Morris, Frank (20th Century) A choreographer, Morris in a New York interview (25 April 2005) said he is not religious. "I'm not anti-religion, I'm atheist. If religion works for you, go for it. Really, please do. Pray for me if you need to."
Morris, Gordon (20th Century) Morris is a regional director in Minnesota of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Morris, Gouverneur (1752–1816) Morris, who helped draft the Constitution of New York State, was Minister to France from 1792 to 1794. He retired in disgust at the excesses. Morris detested Paine, according to McCabe, and “is responsible for much of the libel of him, but he was himself a Deist. Jefferson, a close friend, wrote, ‘Morris often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than he himself did.’ ” {RAT; RE}
Morris, Steven (20th Century) Morris, a professor of physics at Los Angeles Harbor College in Wilmington, California, wrote “The Founding Fathers Were Not Christians” in Free Inquiry (Fall 1995). He cites the non-Christians Thomas Paine, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Ethan Allen, and Benjamin Franklin. Morris spent one year at the South Pole, running a seismometer. He has written widely about astronomy and has been an active member of the Los Angeles-based Atheists United.
Morris, William (1834–1896) An English poet, artist, architect, interior decorator, book illuminator, furniture maker, lecturer, businessman, translator, essayist, printer, craftsman, Socialist campaigner, publisher, and painter, Morris is considered one of the great Victorians. An early interest in the ritual and architecture of the Middle Ages led, after he read Ruskin, to the ideas on aestheticism and social progress in his work. His News from Nowhere (1891), according to Corliss Lamont, “sketched a Humanist Utopia in terms of a simple and secularized village economy in which crowded cities and grimy factories are both eliminated and where regular work merges with applied art and the creation of beauty.” Art is the expression of joy in labor rather than an exclusive luxury. He made no distinction between art and craft and saw fine design and workmanship as the salvation of the industrial society. Life and Death of Jason (1867 was a poem in heroic couplets based on the story of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts. It and Earthly Paradise (1868–1870) established Morris as one of the most popular poets of his day. From 1876 onward, Morris took a fervent interest in social questions, and in 1883 he joined the Socialists. W. Allingham, his friend, wrote that by this time he had quite ceased to take an interest in theology. “It’s so unimportant, it seems to me,” he told Allingham. From this nonchalant attitude, Morris passed to atheism, and his friends tell how he used to declaim with great zest a certain scornfully anti-Christian couplet of Swinburne’s. The personal and family troubles Morris experienced are detailed in Norman Kelvin’s edition of The Collected Letters of William Morris (1995) and in Fiona MacCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for Our Time (1995). Jane, the daughter of an Oxford stable hand who became his wife, openly had an affair with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who once described Morris as an exhausted wombat. His wife, it is documented, never really loved Morris and married him only to rise from the working class. She witnessed his many temper tantrums and reacted coldly toward him. Max Beerbohm recalled Morris as “a wonderful all-round man, but the act of walking round him has always tired me.” Even fellow socialist George Bernard Shaw, noting Morris’s extreme fits of rage, speculated that Morris suffered from some form of epilepsy. Jenny, their daughter, was diagnosed at the age of sixteen as epileptic, and her grand mal seizures frightened both of her parents, who tied her to her bed in order to protect themselves as well as her. William Butler Yeats, however, said of Morris, “If some angel offered me the choice, I would choose to live his life, poetry and all, rather than my own or any other man’s.” Morris believed in the “abolition of private property” and “the struggle against Capitalism.” His acquaintances included Eleanor Marx, the youngest daughter of Karl, and Friedrich Engels. A friend of the leading anarchists of his day, Morris was arrested for public disorder and he founded the Hammersmith Socialist Society. According to R. Page Arnot’s William Morris: The Man and the Myth, Morris, despite having his views distorted by his Christian Socialist friend Bruce Glasier, who claimed Morris was a religionist, stated, “I am what is called bluntly an atheist.” Peter Faulkner, an editor of the Journal of the William Morris Society, has written extensively about Morris’s “socialist humanism.” On his death, Morris was widely mourned as “our best man” by his fellow socialists, by whom he was deeply revered. His view that “the true incentive to useful and happy labour is, and must be, pleasure in the work itself” links his political and artistic aspirations, both of which have remained profoundly influential. (See entry for Frank Lloyd Wright.) {CE; CL; OEL; Peter Faulkner, New Humanist, September 1996; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI}
Morrissey (20th Century)
Morrissey, a recording artist, has gone on record as being a non-theist. {E}
Morrissey [Stephen Patrick Morrissey] (22 May 1959 - ) Morrissey, a recording artist with The Smiths, is a vegetarian, a pacifist, a thinker, and a freethinker. Shy and straightforward, he makes no secret of the fact that, musically, he dislikes Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and Diana Ross. In his own words:
• Childhood: I had quite a happy childhood until I was six or seven; after that it was horrendous. At the age of eight I became very isolated – we had a lot of family problems at the time – and that tends to orchestrate your life. I had a foul adolescence and a foul teenage existence. Except you couldn’t really call it an existence. I just sort of scraped through, escaping into films and books until The Smiths happened and allowed me to live again. (Nov 1983) • Adolescence: I never had an adolescence. I went straight from six to forty-six. Quite depressing, really. I missed out on all those things like discos at Christmas. I suppose I’ve now regressed, but I wouldn’t call it a second childhood, because it’s my first. (May 1984) • Influences: Oscar Wilde and James Dean were the only two companions I had as a distraught teenager. Every line that Wilde ever wrote affected me so enormously. (Jun 1984) He [Oscar Wilde] was a hideously fat person so I’m sure he indulged in meat quite often; but he is forgiven (Jan 1985). • Vegetarianism: We get violently upset when animals eat human beings. So why shouldn’t we feel horror when human beings eat animals? (Jan 1983) • Animal Rights: I feel animal rights groups aren’t making any dramatic headway because most of the methods are quite peaceable. The only way we can get rid of the meat industry, and other things like nuclear weapons, is by really giving people a taste of their own medicine. (Mar 1985) • The Smiths: Before I joined the group I was in a serious medical condition (May 1983) We’re (The Smiths) out to prove that you don’t need dazzling technology to produce music. There’s a horrendous myth in modern music that you need the most complex equipment and the most far-reaching ideas, otherwise you don’t rate. We’ve got back to a very traditionalist structure with the four-piece setup which has been severely underrated in the past couple of years. (May 1983). • The message of The Smiths: That people should discard any notions of in-ness or hip-ness or cool-ness, and simply relax and be themselves, whatever that may be. Ninety per cent of immediate daily anxieties are futile. (1984)
• Suicide: Although it’s hard for many people to accept, I do actually respect suicide because it is having control over one’s life. It’s the strongest statement anyone can make, and people really aren’t strong. Most people as we know lead desperate and hollow lives. (June 1986)
• Heaven: As a child I went to this Catholic school; they fed us this idea of Heaven and living forever and ever and ever. It used to petrify me. Can you imagine living this life without end? It’s horrific. (1984) • [Have you ever had a religious impulse?] No, I haven't in all honesty. I would like to but I haven't. There must be consolations and comforts because millions of people can't be wrong but I think I'm just a doomed realist. {E; Stuart Maconie, Q, Sep 1995}
Morrison, Dan (20th Century)
Morrison is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.
Morrison, George Ernest (1862–1920) Morrison was an Australian writer who had crossed Australia on foot from the Gulf of Carpentaria to Melbourne and the following year he traveled from Shanghai to Rangoon. For the Times, he became the Pekin correspondent. The Chinese decorated him with their Order of the Excellent Crop. In his Australian in China (1895), Morrison showed personal regard for the missionaries but revealed the utter futility and hypocrisy of their work. He estimated that they converted “nine-tenths of a Chinaman per worker per annum,” and was disdainful of the Christian effort. {RAT}
Morrison, Jim (1943–1971) The noted musician Morrison, as well as his wife, Patricia Kennealy-Morrison, were non-theists. Both, she has written, were attracted to
the most ancient faith in which he and I were married and which we both ardently espoused. I refer to paganism, also known as witchcraft or wicca. Today, the Craft (the pre-Christian religion of Celtic Europe) is enjoying a resurgence. {The New York Times Magazine, 28 December 1997}
Morrison, Jim (8 Dec 1943 - 3 Jul 1971) The early death of the noted American rock singer, Morrison, led to his becoming something of a cult figure among music-lovers. Son of a U.S. Navy admiral, Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida. He studied theatre arts at the University of California and in 1965 with Ray Manzarek, John Densmore, and Robbie Kriger formed The Doors, a name taken from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book about mescaline, The Doors of Perception, which in turn had cited William Blake’s “If the doors of perception were cleansed / All things would appear infinite.”
The lyrics Morrison wrote in 1965 dominated the first two Doors albums. The first single chart success came in July 1967 with “Light My Fire.” His albums included The Doors (1967); Strange Days (1967); Waiting for the Sun (1968); The Soft Parade (1970, with a hit single, “Touch Me”); Absolutely Live (1970); 13 (1971); Morrison Hotel (1971); Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine (1972; The Best of Doors (1973); An American Prayer (1980); Alive She Cried (1983); The Doors Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1987); and Greatest Hits (1996). During a 1969 Miami performance, the audience of 10,000 thought it saw Morrison’s “snake.” He was not arrested on the spot, for the police feared a riot would ensue. He was charged with exposing himself and later was sentenced to eight months’ hard labor and a $500 fine for “profanity” and “indecent exposure.” He remained free while the sentence was appealed, then said “See me change,” grew a beard, and became more reclusive. The Doors played their last concert with Morrison in New Orleans. It was a disaster, and Morrison smashed the microphone into the stage, threw the stand into the crowd, and slumped down.
Moving to Paris, he wrote The Lords and the New Creatures, which was published in 1971. He had consulted a physician concerning a respiratory problem that year, and on July 2nd he regurgitated a small amount of blood. The following day he was found dead in his bathtub, and he was buried in Paris at Pére Lachaise Cemetery. Morrison, as well as his wife—Patricia Kennealy-Morrison—was a non-theist. Both, she has written, were attracted to
the most ancient faith in which he and I were married and which we both ardently espoused. I refer to paganism, also known as witchcraft or wicca. Today, the Craft (the pre-Christian religion of Celtic Europe) is enjoying a resurgence.
In 1979 Francis Ford Coppola used The Doors' performance of “The End” in his Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, and in 1991 director Oliver Stone made the film biography The Doors, starring Val Kilmer. In 1989 Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison was published. In 1990 Morrison’s graffiti-covered headstone was stolen from the Paris cemetery. {The New York Times Magazine, 28 December 1997}
Morrison-Reed, Mark D. (1949– )
Morrison-Reed is author of Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, a study of Unitarian Universalists.
Morrow, David (20th Century) Morrow contributes material to The American Rationalist, one article of which (July 1992) laments the fact that astrology is more popular than psychology in the United States.
Morrow, James (20th Century) According to Celebrity Atheists, Morrow, an author, is a non-theist. {E} James Morrow is a science fiction author best known for his GodHead Trilogy. In an article in the February 26, 2000 edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, he is described as "...an atheist who writes science fiction with biting religious satire." See entire article at: http://www.post-gazette.com/magazine/20000226scifi8.asp Update (28-May-01): In "A Conversation With James Morrow, Part 2 of an interview with Nick Gevers" Morrow is asked "how does an author of religious fantasies conclusively dispel the clouds of religious belief?" Morrow answers "[...] I worry about it. I should begin by saying that -- as my readers might imagine by now -- I'm an atheist. I don't like that word, though, because the concept it identifies is keyed to a negative, a void, whereas atheists of my stripe experience their attitude as something quite positive, quite nourishing. As the British philosopher Galen Strawson recently observed, 'God loves the atheists best, because they're the ones who take him the most seriously.' "Some readers say that, given all the woolly speculation in my fiction, I must be an agnostic. But I don't like that word either. I find it evasive. It lacks sinew. An agnostic is an atheist who has lost his nerve. "Am I any sort of believer? Well, I believe in the universe, and all the mind-boggling mysteries the word 'universe' entails. Science has given us some authentic insights into that universe, but much of reality is still pretty cryptic. The philosopher Thomas Nagel says that, when we speak of God, we're using the word as a placeholder for the insights we don't yet have. So maybe I'm a placeholderist. But I'm not happy with that stance either, because 'God' is so easily confused with the answers whose place he's holding." See http://www.sfsite.com/02a/jm97.htm for the full interview. --- Update (28-May-01): Morrow heard of his provisional status from an earlier edition of the celebatheist list and weighed in (May 2001): "I wanted you to know [that 'atheist' is] a perfectly accurate label." He added "If you care to drop by my website (see url below) you'll see an ad for the James Morrow issue of Paradoxa. In that magazine, I refer to myself as 'a vulnerable atheist.'" --- Morrow's homepage can be found http://www.sff.net/people/Jim.Morrow/.
Morrow, Lance (1939– )
Morrow, of Time, wrote in that magazine, “If you scratch any aggressive tribalism, or nationalism, you usually find beneath its surface a religious core, some older binding energy of belief or superstition . . . that is capable of transforming itself into a death-force, with the peculiar annihilating energies of belief. Faith, the sweetest refuge and consolation, may harden, by perverse miracle, into a sword–or anyway into a club or a torch or an assault rifle. Religious hatreds tend to be merciless and absolute.” {TYD}
Morrow, Marguerite (20th Century) Morrow in Scotland is active with the Glasgow Humanist Society.
Morse, Edward Sylvester (1838–1925) Morse, an American zoologist and art expert, was director of the Peabody Museum at Salem, Massachusetts. In an article in Knowledge (1898), he was reported as saying, “I have not yet seen anything in the discoveries of science which would in the slightest degree support or strengthen a belief in immortality.” {RAT}
Morse, Philip M. (20th Century) Brought up as a Methodist, Morse was an airline pilot, then worked in computer publications, printing, inventory control, and distribution for a computer company. He has written, “I have always been a skeptic but not an atheist until my 50s in a gradual process of self-awareness.” On the subject of Earth’s overpopulation, he has published an article in Freethought Today.
Morse, Sidney H. (19th Century)
Morse in Boston, Massachusetts, edited The Radical in the 1860s. In 1892, he wrote Ethics of the Homestead Strike.
Morselli, Enrico Agostino (Born 1852) Morselli was an Italian physician and scientist. He wrote many works on anthropology, including one on “Suicide” in the International Scientific Series. Morselli edited Revista di Filosofia Scientifica, and he translated Herbert Spencer on the past and future of religion. {BDF; RAT}
MORTAL SIN In Roman Catholic theology, a sin is mortal when it is serious enough to subject the sinner to damnation. For example, willful murder is a mortal sin. Less serious sins are called venial. Secular humanists consider “sin” a device particularly for psychiatrists who are trying to address a cure for clients who have been misled by their religious shepherds. But they prefer the secular terminology used—for example on the subject of murder, vice, or crime, etc.—in the various international legal codes. (See entry for venial sin.) {DCL}
Mortier, Roland (20th Century) Mortier, a cultural historian from Belgium, has been cited by Michel Delon in the Parisian Les Cahiers Rationalistes as being a rationalist. Mortier is author of Diderot on Allemagne 1750–1870 (1986).
Mortillet, Adrien de (Born 1853) Mortillet, the son of Louis Mortillet, sustained his father’s views and became professor at the School of Anthropology founded by him (largely, according to McCabe, for the correction of theology) at Paris. He edited the review, L’Homme Préhistorique. {RAT}
Mortillet, Louis Laurent Gabriel de (1821–1890) Mortillet was a French scientist who had been educated by the Jesuits but was condemned in 1849 for his political writings, forcing him to take refuge in Switzerland. Mortillet wrote A Contribution to the History of Superstition and other works that showed his freethought. He was curator of the Museum of St. Germain and was elected Deputy in 1885. An atheist, Mortillet fought the Church while a member of the Chambre. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Mortimer, James (20th Century) In Murders and Other Friends: Another Part of Life (1994), Mortimer describes himself as an “atheist for Christ.” In the book’s last chapter he presents himself as an unbeliever who is sympathetic to the ethical and cultural aspects of Christianity. {CA; E}
Mortimer, John Clifford (1923– ) A novelist, barrister, and playwright, Mortimer at one time was married to Penelope Mortimer (1918– ), the novelist who wrote The Pumpkin Eater (1962), The House (1971), Long Distance (1974), and an autobiography, About Time (1970). He married his second wife, also a Penelope, on his forty-ninth birthday. The son of Kathleen, an artist, and Clifford Mortimer, a lawyer known for his expertise concerning divorce law, he wrote A Voyage Round My Father (1971), which is an autobiographical portrait of his blind and histrionic father. Mortimer’s plays include The Dock Brief (1958, which was produced for both radio and television in 1957). In 1982, Mortimer wrote an autobiographical work, Clinging to the Wreckage. His films include “The Innocents” (1961); “The Dock Brief” (1962, and called “Trial and Error” in the United States); “The Running Man” (1963), a translation of Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear” (1968); and “John and Mary” (1969). The latter starred Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow. In 1971 Mortimer became famous for explaining to an Old Bailey jury why Rupert Bear, a children’s comic-strip character, had an extraordinarily large erection. Ian Parker, in The New Yorker (20 March 1995), states that Mortimer has been captive to the success of “Rumpole of the Bailey,” a reference to Horace Rumpole, a Dickensian-like character. A captive to the memory of his father, Mortimer says of him, “He and Rumpole are both objects of my invention,” admitting that much of his work can be traced directly to his own life experiences. Mortimer is a conservative as well as a socialist. Some have said that, if Britain were ever to become a Republic, they could envision Mortimer as its ideal first President. Parker adds that Mortimer “took theatre into court, as judges sometimes observed, and he took the court into the world of letters–into theatre, films, television, and journalism.” Parker also reported that upon interviewing Mick Jagger for a newspaper profile, Mortimer asked him, “Do you believe in immortality?” Jagger’s response: “What a question to throw me in the middle of the World Cup!” Mortimer’s response, an indication of his interest in the gods of celebrities, was, “But do you?” Mortimer is an atheist who, according to Parker, “is nonetheless indebted to the Christian tradition.”
Morton, A. L. (Born 1903) Morton, a freethinker, wrote The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (1967). {FUS}
Morton, Francis Torrey (20th Century) A freethinker, Morton wrote The Proven Continuity of Life, Its Relation to Jesuitism and the Christian Religion (1913). {GS}
Morton, James Ferdinand Jr. (20th Century) Morton wrote “The American Secular Union” (1910) and “Exempting the Churches” (1916). {GS}
Mortyn, Frank (20th Century) Since 1980 Mortyn in San Diego, California, has edited Humanist Century. A physicist, Mortyn lectures widely on humanism and freethought. Mortyn is a senior writer for The American Rationalist.
Moscheles, Felix (1883–1917) Moscheles, a painter and the son of pianist Ignaz Moscheles, was a friend of Whistler and DuMaurier. An agnostic, he at one time was President of the International Arbitration and Peace Association. {RAT; RE}
Moser, Elwood (20th Century) Moser was a freethinker who wrote Evolution and Man, Natural Morality, the Church of the Future, and Other Essays (1919). {GS}
Moser, Gerald (20th Century) Moser is author of Seven Essays on Joseph Priestley (1994). A founding member of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Centre County, Pennsylvania.
Moses There is general agreement, according to McCabe, that “the Hebrews got the story of the baby in the bulrushes from an ancient Sumerian record about the birth of Sargon, whose mother put him in a basket of reeds by the river, where he was found and adopted. . . . Persistent search in the abundant remains has discovered no evidence that the Hebrews ever were in Egypt, and it is now the more common opinion that they were not a united people before the tribes straggled into Syria. This and the wholly fabulous character of the Moses story do not dispose us to look for even ‘a kernel of truth’ in it,” McCabe concluded. Arthur M. Davis, among others, has wondered if Moses could read. He allegedly walked down from Mt. Sinai with two stone tablets, on one of which “Thou shalt not Kill” was allegedly inscribed. Yet later on Moses ordered his army to butcher thousands of men, women, and male children (Numbers 31: 14, 17-18). {RE}
Moses, George (19th Century) A Canadian, Moses in 1871 became the first Native North American to be ordained as a Universalist minister.
Mosier, Scott in CA
MOSLEM Moslem is a dated form of Muslim. See entry for Islam.
MOSQUE A mosque is an Islamic meeting house.
Moss, Arthur B. (1855–1937) Moss, a lecturer and writer, wrote numerous pamphlets, a number of which are collected in Waves of Freethought (1885). He was a contributor to the Secular Chronicle, Secular Review, Freethinker, Truthseeker, and other journals. Moss, a devout Christian until the age of sixteen, became a freethinker after reading Paine’s Age of Reason. A school board officer, he was for a time prohibited from lecturing on Sundays. Moss was a pillar of the Camberwell Secular Society until his death. {BDF; FUK; PUT; RAT; RSR; TRI}
Moss, Harry Walter Sr. (20th Century–deceased) Moss wrote The Book of the Few–Genesis: A Secular Interpretation of Biblical Creation (1997?). We were meant, he concludes to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. We were not, however, meant to eat from the Tree of Life, which means that we will not live forever. But knowledge is immortal, Moss illustrated, so long as we pass it to the next generation.
Moss, J. (19th Century) In 1869, Moss of Bristol started a West of England and South Wales Secular Union. This led to the formation of a society at Cardiff. {RSR}
Moss, James (20th Century) Moss, a New York City psychiatrist, is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
Mossner, Ernest Campbell (1907– ) When he reviewed books in the 1950s for The Humanist, Mossner taught English at the University of Texas in Austin. He wrote David Hume (1962) and was on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy from 1963 to 1967. {FUS}
Mosso, Angelo (1846–1910) Mosso, an Italian physiologist, was an agnostic. He was appointed assistant to Moleschott at Turin University. Mosso was a Commander of the Order of S. S. Maurice and Lazarus and of the Crown of Italy. His funeral, at which learned societies were represented, was purely secular. {RAT}.
Most, Johann Joseph (1846–1906) A German anarchist, Most was a bookbinder by trade and edited German as well as Austrian newspapers. His work was frequently suppressed, and he was imprisoned for his public denunciation of religion, patriotism, and accepted moral standards. When elected to the Reichstag (1874–1878), he became disillusioned with government and was deported. In England, he was deported after serving a sixteen-month sentence for glorifying the assassination of Russia’s Alexander II. In 1882 he emigrated to the United States, where he was jailed many times for his writings. In New York, his circle frequented Justus Schwab’s 51st Street saloon, an establishment so shocking that men and women entered by the same door. Emma Goldman came under his influence, and he received the dubious honor one day of being publicly whipped by her because of a disagreement they had about anarchy. Most once wrote, “God is merely a specter, fabricated by designing scoundrels, through which mankind is tyrannized and kept in constant dread. But the phantom instantly dissolves when examined under the glass of sober reflection.” The God Pestilence (1902) states,
Among all mental diseases that have been systematically inoculated into the human cranium, the religious pest is the most abominable. . . . The more man clings to religion, the more he believes. The more he believes, the less he knows. The less he knows, the more stupid he is; the more stupid, the easier he is governed. The easier to govern, the better he may be exploited; the more exploited, the poorer he gets. {CE; FUS; PA}
Mostel, Zero (Samuel Joel) (1915-1977) An actor known for his expressive face, large body, but graceful movement, Mostel made his Broadway debut in Keep ‘Em Laughing (1941). He also was featured in Ulysses in Nighttown (1958 and 1974), Rhinoceros (1961; film, 1973), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962; film, 1966), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). His 1965 autobiography was titled Zero by Mostel. Mostel’s last wish, told to his wife, was that he wanted to be cremated “like Einstein” with no funeral or memorial service. {CE}
Mostel, Zero (Samuel Joel) (28 Feb 1915 - 8 Sep 1977) One of eight children, Mostel was Brooklyn-born and raised in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side. As a child interested in drawing, he took his pad and colored pencils to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy the paintings, then attended art classes at the Educational Alliance, a Jewish organization that worked with Jewish immigrant families—Louise Nevelson, Ben Shahn, and Adolph Gottlieb also were students there. After graduating in 1935 from the City College of New York, he studied art at New York University, then took on odd jobs, including in 1937 working with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to support himself. In 1939, he married a classmate at City College, Clara Sverd. But the marriage was plagued by irreconcilable personality conflicts, especially over Mostel's artistic ambitions. They separated in 1941 and divorced three years later. He made his Broadway debut in Keep ‘em Laughing (1941). At Café Society Downtown, he secured a job in 1942 as a comedian, where the club’s press agent, Ivan Black, dubbed him Zero for, “After all, here’s a guy who’s starting from nothing.” Although he was in the Army briefly, he was discharged perhaps because of his left-wing politics. However, he entertained American troops overseas and, in 1944, married a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, Kathryn Harkin. The marriage to a Gentile upset his rigidly Orthodox Jewish parents and, although at times it was tumultuous, they had two sons: Josh in 1946, Tobias in 1949. After World War II, Zero did stand-up in nightclubs, then acted in plays like Beggars Holiday and films like Panic in the Streets. In one irreverent satire, he played a pompous reactionary, Senator Polltax T. Pellagra, which made him a target for rightwing anti-Communists. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he denied he was a Communist and refused to name names, resulting in his being blacklisted for much of the 1950s. In 1958, his friend Burgess Meredith cast Mostel as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nightgown, and he won an Obie, the Off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony. Two yeas later he was run over by a bus, remained hospitalized for five months, and underwent four operations to avoid prevent amputation of his leg. Gaining use of his leg, he starred in Rhinoceros in 1960, winning a Tony. He then reestablished himself as a star in Tony-winning performances in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof. By 1975 he was not working steadily, and although he was offered the title role of Shylock in Arnold Wesker’s pro-Jewish version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Mostel died from an aortic aneurysm. Theatergoers remembered him for his expressive face, large body, but graceful movement. His 1965 autobiography was titled Zero by Mostel. According to his wife, his last wish was that he wanted to be cremated “like Einstein” with no funeral or memorial service. {CA; CE}
Mosterin, Jesús (20th Century)
Mosterin, who teaches logic at the University of Barcelona in Spain, is a member of the Ibero-American Commission, a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries.
MOTHERS • All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. –Oscar Wilde
• The only regret I have is giving you birth. –The mother of composer Stephen Sondheim, in a note to the son she abandoned and just before she underwent life-threatening heart surgery.
Mothersill, Mary (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Mothersill was chairman of the philosophy department of Barnard College, which was affiliated with Columbia University. In 1984, she wrote Beauty Restored. Prof. Mothersill spoke at Corliss Lamont’s memorial service in 1995. {CL; HM2}
Motley, John Lothrop (1814–1877) A Unitarian who was highly negative about Catholicism, Motley wrote The Rise of the Dutch. He was a minister to Great Britain and Austria. Oliver Wendell Holmes reported in his John Lothrop Motley (1889) that William Lewis, one of Motley’s critics, wrote, “It is understood, and he makes no mystery of it that he inclines towards the vague and undecided doctrine of the Unitarians.” {CE; RAT; RE; U; UU}
Mott, Lucretia (1793–1800) Mott was a Quaker who from 1818 on became well-known as a lecturer for temperance, peace, the rights of labor, and the abolition of slavery. Delegated to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, she was excluded on account of her gender. In 1848, she organized the first woman’s rights convention in the United States, at Seneca Falls, New York. Although a Quaker, she was said by Wheeler to have preferred conscience to revelation. Mott was a friend of Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Stanton. Her husband, James, attended the 1840 London conference on slavery, presided over the 1848 conference, and aided in the founding (1864) of Swarthmore College. A renegade Quaker who was thrown out of her church for her radical views, Mott was socially ostracized for her humanistic outlook concerning slavery, and a rioting mob once almost burned her in her home. She was associated with the Free Religious Association. {CE; PUT; BDF; TYD}
Mouat, Kit (20th Century) Mouat founded the Humanist Letter Network (International) in 1962. He wrote What Humanism is About (1963) and An Introduction to Secular Humanism (c. 1973). {FUK; TRI}
Mounier, Emmanuel (1903–1950) Mounier founded Esprit, a journal of Personalism.
MOUNTAINS Early Christians believed mountains were ugly excrescences, that human depravity had brought them about, and that they were the land’s punishment for having accepted Abel’s murdered blood. English writers, living with hills but not mountains, ordinarily described them negatively. Hamlet, bragging of his love for the dead and about-to-be buried Ophelia, declares, “[L]et them throw/millions of acres on us, till our ground,/singeing his pate against the burning zone,/make Ossa [a Greek 6,489 ft. high peak] like a wart!” The English “divine” and metaphysical poet, John Donne, called mountains “warts, and pock-holes in the face of th’ earth.” Geologists vividly describe how some mountains are remains of plateaus dissected by erosion, while others are cones of volcanoes or intrusions of igneous rock that form domes. The concept of plate tectonics is the first reasonable unifying theory, hypothesizing that the earth’s crust is broken into several plates that sideswipe each other or collide. Not until recent times has it been understood that Africa was joined with what now are the Americas. In 1953 when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norkay of Nepal reached the summit of Earth’s highest elevation, Mount Everest on the border of Tibet and Nepal, a new and romantic view of mountains occurred. As to why mankind had the desire to climb such dangerous objects, humanistic mountaineers reply, “Because they’re there.” {CE}
MOVEMENTS In the political realm, the four major movements of the latter part of the 20th Century have been, according to editorials in newsletters of several freethought organizations,
• the civil rights movement; • the anti-war movement; • the women’s movement; and • the gay and lesbian movement.
Mowat, Robin (1925-1998) Mowat was a New Zealand rationalist known to many as an itinerant, or man with no address. From time to time he would call into Rationalist House and pick up his mail. Upon his death it was learned that he had served in the British Merchant Service and the Royal Navy during World War II.
Moya, Francisco Xavier (Born c. 1825) Moya was a Spanish statistician who became deputy to the Cortes of 1869. He wrote several works on the infallibility of the Pope and on the temporal power. {BDF}
Moynihan, Patrick Berkeley [Lord] (1906–1965) Moynihan, the 2nd Baron of Leeds, was the second president of the English Euthanasia Society. He was chairman of the Liberal Party Executives from 1949–1950.
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus (1756–1791) Mozart, the Austrian composer, represents one of the great peaks in the history of music. His works, written in almost every conceivable genre, combine beauty of sound with classical grace and technical perfection. A prodigy, he was taught to play the harpsichord, violin, and organ by his father, Leopold, and began composing before he was five. When Mozart was six, he and his older sister performed a concert for the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna. By the age of thirteen, he had written concertos, sonatas, symphonies, a German operetta, and an Italian opera. The Pope made him a Knight of the Golden Spur, and for ten years he was concertmaster to the archbishop of Salzburg, a position in which he was restless because of his doubts about Catholicism. Two leading biographers are in agreement that Mozart was a non-Christian theist, but the Catholic Encyclopedia claims him as being a Catholic. Mozart became a Freemason in 1784 and took his Freemasonry seriously. His Kleine Freimaurer Kantate (K.623), “A Small Freemason Cantata,” for chorus, two tenors, bass, and chamber orchestra has the following recitative:
For the first time, noble brothers, We are met in this great seat of virtue, wisdom, and truth, We consecrate ourselves to the sanctity of our labor, Which is to discover for ourselves the great mysterious truth. Joyful are all brethren on this day, This happy day of holy dedication By which the brotherhood is bound in unity. Let us be thankful that human kindness Reigns among men once again upon earth.
“The Magic Flute” is permeated by Masonic imagery, themes, and motifs. Also, Mozart wrote Maurerische Trauermusik (K. 477), the “Masonic Funeral Music,” about which Paul Nettl has written: “The low, threatening notes of the winds anticipate the serious mood. Several chords serve as an introduction, then a plaintive, rhapsodic melody is played by the solo violin. This juxtaposition of winds and strings corresponds to the dialectic of life and inexorable death. . . . The dotted rhythms in the bass accompany the sobbing of the strings which, toward the middle of the piece, rear up in sudden anguish and then return to a gentle but serious lament. His famous ‘Requiem Mass’ was composed for Count Walsegg, who paid Mozart but put his own name on the composition. Ulibichov, the second leading biographer, gives further evidence that he abandoned the Church.” Mozart had worked feverishly on the requiem, with the foreboding that it would commemorate his own death. Meanwhile, he died at the age of thirty-five without finishing it. One of his pupils, Franz Süssmayr, did finish the requiem. Freemasonry was sternly condemned by the Catholic Church. To his father Mozart in 1778 explained that Masonry was his only creed. “The orthodoxy of my youth is all over,” he explained, “and will never come back.” McCabe quotes the biographer Wilder as saying that “on his death bed [Mozart] refused to ask for a priest and when his wife nevertheless sent for one, it was refused, and he was buried without service in the common grave of the poor.” Common myth has it that at Mozart’s funeral snow fell. However, Nicolas Slonimsky, author of Music Since 1909 and My First Hundred Years–he lived to be 102–checked with the Austrian weather bureau and learned that it was a clear day there on 7 December 1791. {CE; Freethought History #9 1994; JM; RAT; RE}
Mthembu, Ayida S. (20th Century) The Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mthembu is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
Muavia (510–585) McCabe has written of Muavia, the first caliph of Syria, “His name will hardly be found in any encyclopedia of general history because religious influence has always restrained historians from doing justice to the brilliance of the Arab civilization of the Middle Ages while Christendom was semi-barbarous. Muavia, in particular, is ignored because, while theologians plead that it necessarily took the Church many centuries to raise the Teutonic barbarians to civilization, Muavia thus raised the equally barbaric Arabs in a single generation.” McCabe labels Muavia, the son of opponents of Muhammad who were convinced that he was an imposter, “a skeptic with the formal title of Caliph.” McCabe included him in his Hundred Men Who Moved the World. (See entry for Muawiya,) {JM; RE}
Muawiya (Died 680) Muawiya (also spelled Moawiyah) was the first Ummayad caliph (661–680) and one of the greatest Muslim statesmen. Under Umar he became the able governor of Syria. As caliph he made Islam an autocracy. His administration was tolerant, and he displayed an enlightened point of view in his dealings. McCabe might have mistaken Muavia for Muawiya, for Muavia’s parents were allegedly opponents of Muhammad, who was born around 570 and died in 632. {CE}
Mudaliar, Murugesa (19th Century) In Madras, India, Mudaliar edited Philosophical Inquirer from 1878 to 1888. {FUK}
Muehl, Siegmar (20th Century) Muehl is author of “Hermann’s ‘Free Men’: 1850s German-American Religious Rationalism,” in Missouri Historical Review (July 1991). A descendent of Eduard Mühl, publisher of Herman, Missouri’s first newspaper, Lichtfreund, Muehl has taught in the College of Education at the University of Iowa. He has written for Freethought History and has translated freethought authors such as the German-American Friedrich Muench.
Muench, Friedrich (1799–1881) Muench was a significant figure in German-American and Missouri history. Formerly a Lutheran pastor in his native Germany, Muench exchanged his orthodox views about miracles and revelation for a faith in “natural” religion based on reason. During the Civil War years, he served a term in the Missouri legislature, during which time his anti-slavery views resulted in threats against his life, property, and family. An account of his views can be found in Freethought History (#6, 1993), edited by Fred Whitehead. Muench’s brother, Georg, established the Mount Pleasant Vineyards in Augusta, Missouri, where his winery continues.
Muhammad (Mohammad, Mahomet) (570?–632) Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, was born in Mecca of the tribe of Kuraish. Scholars are unsure whether he was born in the early 7th century or, as Lawrence Conrad has suggested, “well into the second century A.H.,“ which is 570 of the Christian Era, a difference of eighty-five years. One of the most famous humans in history, he at the age of forty felt that Allah had selected him to be the Arab prophet of true religion, the “revelations” and teachings of which are recorded in the Qur’an and which are the basis of Islam. Although his early successes were few and in 622–the date is confirmed by dated coinage which marked the beginning of a new era–he was almost murdered by enemies, Muhammad escaped to Yathrib in a flight, or Hegira, upon which Islam counts its dates. The city, henceforth called Medina, or City of the Prophet, became a model theocratic state, and by 630 Muhammad had won all Arabia. Although he had assumed Jews and Christians would welcome him for having converted so many and for being the last of the prophets, a successor of Jesus the Christ, he became disappointed in their refusal to do so and enmity commenced despite the common use by the three religious groups of the Old Testament. In a short time, he began persecuting the Jews who refused to accept his religion, and he reduced Christians to dependency in areas that his zealous armies had conquered on three continents. “The Koran accuses the Jews of corrupting the Scriptures and the Christians of worshipping Christ as the son of God, although He had expressly commanded them to worship none but Him,” writes N. J. Dawood in his translation of The Koran (Penguin, 1956). “Having thus gone astray, they must be brought back to the right path, to the true religion preached by Abraham. This was absolute submission or resignation to the will of Allah.” Unlike Jesus, whom Christian followers believed was the supernatural Christ and Son of God, Muhammad was a human being born to Abdallah ibn Abd-al-Muttalib and his wife Armina. Muhammad was raised by a grandfather, then by an uncle, for both his parents had died by the time he was six years of age. At the age of twenty-five, he was the chief merchant and camel driver of a rich widow, Khadija, whom he married three years later. Upon her death, he provided himself with a harem, which brought a variety of problems, and he had several wives. One of his daughters, Fatima, had offspring to whom contemporaries boast of being related. And in 632, after several decades of successful preaching, Muhammad died in the arms of his last favorite wife, Aisha. Muhammad, which in Arabic means “the praised one,” disliked having his followers called Muhammadans. This, he reasoned, made it sound as if he was a supernatural being, like the Christ after whom the Christians had named themselves. Instead, he was but a prophet, like the man Jesus, except that Muhammad preached that he was the last and the greatest of the prophets. Other prophets he recognized were Adam, Abraham, and Moses. The Qur’an, he declared came to him during a vision when a voice said “Iqra” (recite), “Recite in the name of your Lord, the Creator, who created man from clots of blood. Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bounteous One, who by the pen has taught mankind things they did not know.” When Muhammad awoke, he found the words “inscribed upon his heart” and he recited a series of messages from Allah, the Qur’an, in revelations which came to him over a period of twenty-three years. The popular belief in idols he disliked intensely, and he made his followers discard them, preaching, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.” He disclaimed power to perform miracles but emphasized that he was the messenger of Allah who was sent forth to confirm previous scriptures. Muhammad specified the exact size of the stick with which a man may beat his wife: It should be no thicker than one man’s thumb—contemporary feminists are infuriate by such an idea, however. For his millions of followers, Muhammad is a prophet who saw a vision of one god and one brotherhood of the faith. He courageously attacked evil. He proclaimed his message vigorously. He organized followers into a compact moral force. And they proudly continue the force of his personality. Non-Muslim scholars, however, hold that the Muslims were not much interested in Muhammad at the beginning, that the concept of sunna (the right or established way of doings things) began as a general idea. For example, Ibn Al Rawandi has written (New Humanist, February 1995) that there “was the sunna of a region, the sunna of a group of persons, or the sunna of some particular distinguished person such as David or Solomon or the Caliph, even the sunna of Allah. It was not until the manufacture of hadiths (prophetic traditions) got under way in the second Islamic century that all these vague notions were absorbed and particularised in the detailed sunnat-an-nabi (the sunna of the Prophet). . . . In fact, rather than seeking to extract a biography of Muhammad from the Quran on the assumption that it is a record of what he said, it could just as well be argued that there is no necessary connection between Muhammad and the Quran at all. Why could not Muhammad have been simply a military leader of monotheist persuasion, as indicated in the ‘Constitution of Medina,’ who stirred up the Arab tribes to conquest? Once they had acquired an empire they needed a religion to hold it together and justify their rule. In accordance with the Jewish and Christian models available this meant they needed a ‘revelation’ and a ‘revealer.’ Hence the Qur’an and ‘the Prophet’ were contrived and conjoined,” Ibn Al Rawandi argues, “over a period of a couple of centuries.” (See entries for Islam, Qur’an, and Dostoyevsky’s Epilepsy. Three rationalistic studies of Muhammad are by W. M. Watt, Muhammad at Mecca [1953]; W. M. Watt, Muhammad at Medina [1956]; and Muhammad and the Origins of Islam [1994]. A particularly devastating critique of the Muslim religion can be found in a review by Ibn Al-Rawandi of Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim in New Humanist, December [1995]. For other critics of Muhammad, see the entries for Taslima Nasrin and Anwar Shaikh.) {CE; ER}
Muhammad, Khallid Abdul (20th Century) In 1993 at Kean College in New Jersey, Muhammad as National Spokesman of the Nation of Islam said (Nat Hentoff, Village Voice, 26 November 1996) the following:
• Everybody always talk about what Hitler did to the Jews. But don’t nobody ever ask, “What did the Jews do to Hitler?” The Jews had undermined the very fabric of society of that society. The way they do wherever they go.
• Go to the Vatican in Rome where the old, no-good Pope, you know that cracker. Somebody need to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.
• In South Africa, if they don’t get out of town by sundown, we kill the white women. We kill the children. We kill the babies. We kill the blind. We kill the cripples. We kill the faggot. We kill the lesbian. We kill ‘em all.
“If you say you’re white, goddammit I’m against you. If you’re a Jew, I’m against you. Whatever the hell you want to call yourself, I’m against you,” Muhaddad said in September 1997. During a 1998 “Million Youth March” at which fewer than ten thousand showed up, Muhammad reiterated his outlook: “Stop asking me about the Jews being the bloodsuckers of the black nation. . . . They are the bloodsuckers of the black community.” A subsequent 1999 “Million Youth March” was attended by even fewer individuals.
Muhammad ibn al Hudail al Basri (Died c. 849) Muhammad was a philosopher of Asia Minor, founder of the Muhammadan Freethinking sect of Mutazilah around 757. {BDF}
Muhrer, John (20th Century) Muhrer, while a Webster University student, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Muhrer, Verle (20th Century) Muhrer is a professor of philosophy at Penn Valley Community College (Kansas City, Missouri). A humanist activist, he is co-editor with Fred Whitehead of Freethought on the American Frontier (1992). Muhrer is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism and heads the Center for Inquiry–Midwest. (See entry for Missouri Humanists.) {FD}
Muir, John (1838–1914) An American naturalist born in Scotland, Muir was a conservationist and crusader for national parks and reservations. He traveled, often by foot, throughout the country. The glacier he discovered in Alaska is called Muir glacier. The Muir Woods National Monument is also named for him. John of the Mountains (1938) describes his scientific naturalism, although he did not use that terminology.
Muirden, Bruce (1928–1991) In Adelaide, Australia, Muirden edited the quarterly Australian Humanist from 1968 to 1975. His Diggers Who Signed On For More (1990) is about Australia’s part in the wars of intervention. Muirden was a humanist, journalist, author, and political press secretary. He served as Labor press secretary under eight ministers in the Dunstan, Corcoran, and Bannon governments. The Puzzled Patriots, which told the story of the Australian First Movement, painted a disquieting picture of what can happen to civil liberties when legal processes are suspended on grounds of “security.” {FUK; SWW}
Muirhead, John Henry (1855–1940) Muirhead was a member of the London Ethical Society and wrote of its founding. However, he belonged rather (like Bosanquet) to the school of Absolute Idealists. His views are chiefly given in his Philosophy and Life (1902), Elements of Ethics (1910, and Social Purpose (1918). At an Ethical symposium, Muirhead stated, “The claims of priests and Churches to be the depositories and administrators of a system of divinely-given commands are groundless.” (TRI; RAT}
Mújica, Armando (20th Century) Mújica, a Mexican economist, spoke on the subject of a need for a humanistic economics program in Latin America at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City in 1996.
Mulder, Liesbeth (20th Century) Mulder, a music teacher who is professionally active in Dutch Public Education policy initiatives, is acting President of the Dutch Humanist League. In 1998 she was elected a Vice President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Mullen, Frank (20th Century) A recording artist who plays with the band Suffocation, Mullen, when asked where he got ideas for his lyrics, responded, “Basically, a lot of it comes from my own thoughts. A lot of it has to do with government, the way we see it. It deals with a lot of stuff that’s just the way we see the world and we see what’s happening, is where a lot of our lyrics come from. I’m not really satanic, I don’t really believe in that. I have my own religious views and stuff, I don’t believe in [the various organized religions]. So my religious views are on, I guess, an atheist point.” {CA}
Mullen, Frank ( ) A recording artist and a member of the band called Suffocation, Mullen in an interview conducted by Doug Folden was asked about his lyrics, where they come from. “Basically,” he responded, “a lot of it comes from my own thoughts. A lot of it has to do with government, the way I see it. It deals with a lot of stuff—that’s just the way we see the world and we see what’s happening—is where a lot of our lyrics come from. I’m not really satanic. I don’t really believe in that. I have my own religious views and stuff. I don’t believe in [one or the other religion]. So my religious views are on, I guess, an atheist point.” {CA}
Mullen, Shirley Annette (20th Century)
Mullen organized Freethought (1987) and was an active freethinker.
Müller, F. Max: See entry for Max Müller, F.
Muller, H. C. (Born 1855) A Dutch writer, Muller contributed articles to De Dageraad (the Daybreak) and taught modern Greek at the University of Amsterdam. {BDF}
Muller, Helen D. (20th Century) Muller, with Edythe M. McGovern, wrote They’re Never Too Young for Books (1993).
Muller, Herbert J. (1905– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Muller was a professor of literature at the University of Indiana. He is author of Uses of the Past (1952) and is brother of Hermann Muller. “The First Crusade,” he once observed, “set off on its two-thousand-mile jaunt by massacring Jews, plundering and slaughtering all the way from the Rhine to the Jordan. ‘In the temple of Solomon,’ wrote the ecstatic cleric Raimundus de Agiles, ‘one rode in blood up to the knees and even to the horses’ bridles, by the just and marvelous judgment of God.’ ” Asked specifically for his views concerning humanism, Muller wrote to the present author: I am working on a couple of books, one on the subject of Tragedy which may be of some interest in connection with your inquiry about the humanistic implications of literature. But your definition No. 7, naturalistic humanism, fits my position closely enough.
Some of Dr. Muller’s other books are The Spirit of Tragedy (1956), Freedom in the Ancient World (1961), and Adlai Stevenson: A Study in Values (1968). {HM2; HNS; TYD; WAS, 23 March 1956}
Muller, Hermann Joseph (1890–1967) Muller was a Nobel Prize-winning (1946) geneticist at the University of Indiana. He was developer of the theory that genes are life’s basis inasmuch as they can replicate as well as any alterations which may arise in them. He wrote the present author concerning humanism,
The statement of about 1000 words that I gave as President-elect of the American Humanist Association at their annual meeting, on March 10, 1956, in Chicago, represents my viewpoints.
Muller, who wrote more than 350 articles and four books, was president of the American Humanist Association from 1956 to 1958 and was named their Humanist of the Year in 1963. {CE; HNS2; WAS, 25 March 1956}
Muller, Robert (20th Century) Muller joined the United Nations in 1948 as an intern. He rose through the ranks to become Assistant Secretary General to three Secretaries General. He was one of the main architects of the U. N. institutional system in economics and social fields. Awarded the UNESCO Peace Education Prize in 1989, he currently is Chancellor Emeritus of The University for Peace in Costa Rica, which was created in 1980 by the U.N. In an interview, Muller stated that “Many world conflicts, even the Middle East conflict, are basically religious conflicts. They are the most difficult to resolve, because all involve fundamentalist believers. They have found the total and absolute truth, and you cannot even discuss any alternatives with them.” But his is a positive humanistic outlook: “The whole biology on this planet—as I see when walking in the woods of Costa Rica—is creation, reproduction, and an incredible diversity that is part of the totality. Unity in diversity is the role of evolution, which we understand as humans, but we must not kill each other in the name of diverse religions, diverse customs, and diverse languages. We must see the planet as our home, and this is another great change in our worldview that is now taking place.” {“1995: The United Nations’ Year for Tolerance,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996}
Mulliam, Tom (20th Century) Mulliam is co-editor with Ben Price of Groundswell, a monthly that supports individual freedoms.
Mullin, Ross (20th Century) Mullin is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker.
Mullins, Edwin (1933– ) Mullins, an art critic, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. A journalist and filmmaker, he wrote Songs (1962), The Royal Collection (1993), and a novel, Angels on the Point of a Pin (1979).
Mullins, Terry (20th Century) Mullins was secretary of England’s National Secular Society from 1979 until 1996, at which time the position went to Keith Porteous Wood.
MULTICULTURALISM Individuals who emphasize the importance of multiculturalism do so to call attention to the differing intellectual and artistic activities which otherwise would be overlooked. As Michael Lind of Harper’s has pointed out, however, “One may debate the definition of Western civilization, but no one can dispute that postclassical Euro-American societies share traditions that they do not share with Middle Eastern, South Asian, African, or East Asian nations. ‘Unmasking’ and ‘deconstructing’ all concepts leads to paranoia and solipsism. Societies cannot function without grand narratives any more than individuals can function without memory and foresight.” {Michael Lind, “Western Civ Fights Back,” The New York Times, 6 September 1998}
MUMBAI Mumbai is the contemporary name of Bombay, the city in India. It was the site of the 1999 International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress.
Mumcu, Ugur (20th Century) One of Turkey’s most respected secular journalists, Mumcu was gunned down in the street because “secularism is now the fanatics’ most important target,” according to Salman Rushdie in an op-ed article, “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam” in The New York Times (11 July 1993). Turkey’s Interior Minister reportedly said that at least three other previous killings had been carried out by a group called Islamic Movement whose members have been trained in assassination techniques “at an official Iranian facility between Teheran and Qom.” Rushdie added that in July 1993 when thirty-six secularist writers and artists gathered for a conference in the town of Sivas, all were burned to death in their hotel by a mob of Islamic fundamentalists that accused them of being atheists and therefore were deserving of being burned alive.
Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990) Mumford, a social philosopher and educator at the University of Pennsylvania (1951–1959), wrote Conditions of Man (1944) and Conduct of Life (1951). Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author:
The question put to me about humanism is one that I attempted to answer a year or two ago in response to a UNESCO inquiry; but it is a difficult subject to define in a brief manner. Perhaps the negative approach is the most accurate one. Certainly I am not a classical humanist in the original historic sense, for I do not believe that Greece and Rome were the sole repositories of human culture, nor do I believe that the valid insights of Christianity can be left out of a humanist synthesis. Neither am I a humanist in the sense that Paul Elmer More was, because, though he included the insights of oriental philosophy and even religion in his concept of humanism, he treated science with the same contempt that his brethren in the sixteenth century did; whereas science itself, for me, is a human instrument, important for man’s further development: In this regard I would depart from Socrates’s believe that stars and trees could teach him nothing, and would ally myself with Aristotle’s fuller humanism. Again, my humanism is not theistic in the sense of accepting the sanctions of the church for the goods of humanism: But my humanism does not exclude a concern for a more cosmic order, in which man’s existence is a transitory, not a final term; nor does it exclude a concern for those ultimate problems with which religion has dealt. Certain, I would reject Sartre’s atheistic humanism, as I reject his existentialism: For me existentialism is a form of philosophic illiteracy, just as, existentially speaking, it is a final step in the devaluation and degradation of man. To call it humanism is like calling absolutism democracy. These negatives would seem to put me, by exclusion, among the naturalistic humanists: Yet I do not find that classification altogether satisfactory; for thinkers like Dewey give the scientific and objective view of life exclusive validity; and disparage other modes of apprehension and intuition, overlooking or misinterpreting the subjective roles of language, art, and dream. For this reason, I have sometimes used the adjective “organic” to describe my effort to embrace every kind of existence, cosmic, mechanical, biological, social, personal, and divine. What this means concretely is demonstrated partly in The Condition of Man; but the volume that will follow it, The Conduct of Life (Autumn 1951), will bring out my conception of humanism even more fully. Perhaps holistic humanism would be a better description of my brand: Yet there is such an accretion of meanings around the very word humanism, it is so encrusted with barnacles, that I would gladly drop it altogether if one could find a more adequate term. . . . I have a philosophic reason for keeping aloof. You will find it, should you be curious, in The Conduct of Life, in the section of “The Fallacy of Systems.”
(See entry for James T. Farrell.)
{WAS, 27 March 1949, 15 February 1951, and 28 April 1956}
Mumford, Stephen D. (20th Century) Mumford, president of the Center for Research on Population and Security, wrote The Pope and the New Apocalypse: The Holy War Against Family Planning (1986). He has been a frequent speaker at humanist meetings, at which he describes the relationship between world population growth and national and global security. Mumford was a participant at the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention. {HNS2}
Münch, Friedrich (1799–1881) A rationalist, writer of the first book on American grape varieties, an abolitionist, and an elected state senator, Münch was known as a liberal in religion. Theodore Parker published his Treatise on Religion and Christianity (1847), which shows his having been influenced by German “higher criticism.” Excerpts from his work, including a photograph, can be found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier. The authors conclude that basically Münch was a theist. A part of “Wer ist ein Freidenker? (Who is a Freethinker?),” taken from his Gesammelte Schriften, is quoted in Freethought History (#7, 1993).
Munday, Diane (20th Century) For thirty years, Munday has been a leading campaigner in Britain for a woman’s right to choose an abortion. During that time, she writes, “the rationalist and humanist movement has been steadfast in its support for legal abortion, whilst individual humanists and rationalists have played predominant roles. I believe that while there is a Roman Catholic Church there will be an aggressive anti-abortion movement. I hope that humanists will continue to oppose it with vigour and rational argument for as long as is necessary.” (New Humanist, October, 1990).
Munsch, Robert (20th Century) Munsch, a Unitarian, has written children’s books including Alligator Baby, Stepheanie’s Pony Tail, Paper Bag Princess, and Love You Forever. Web: <http://bookzone.scholastic.ca/fauthor_musch.html>. {CA}
Münsterberg, Hugo (1863–1916) Münsterberg was an American psychologist who was director of the psychological laboratories at Harvard University. He resigned in 1914, when a wealthy American offered $10,000,000 to the university if it would dismiss him (for defending German’s action in the War). Münsterberg disdainfully rejected the idea of personal immortality and thought it could be desirable “only to a cheap curiosity,” but contended for “eternal life” in a vague, impersonal sense. {RAT}
Munullog (19th Century) Munullog in Manchester, England, wrote Hymns and Songs for the Church of Man (1890). {GS}
Murad, Ferid (1936– ) A physician, Murad co-edited The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics (1985). He is a teacher in the University of Texas Medical School’s Department of Integrative biology, Pharmacology, and Physiology. In 1998, with Robert F. Furchgott and Louis J. Ignarro, Murad won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They shared the prize for discovering the role of nitric oxide as a signaling molecule in the cardiovascular system—their work paved the way for several medical breakthroughs, including the anti-impotence drug Viagra. Murad signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Murchison, Roderick Impey [Sir] (1792–1871) A famed British geologist, Murchison served in the Napoléonic wars but after the peace turned his attention to science. He established the Silurian as a new geologic system and, with Adam Sedgwick, collaborated on the establishment of the Devonian system. Murchison also defined and named the Permian Period. In 1855 he was appointed director general of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. When Murchison was near the end of his life, a fellow geologist said he hoped that God would give him back his Christian faith and hope. Sir Roderick had long been known for his heresies, and he did nothing to satisfy his friend’s hopes. {JM; RAT; RE}
Murdoch, (Jean) Iris [Dame] (1919–1999) Murdoch, a member of the Irish Academy, was a novelist and a philosopher. Her novels have been described as “subtle, witty, convoluted, puzzling, and often wildly comic,” in which she views man “as an ‘accidental’ creature thinking of himself as free but actually constricted by the boundaries of self, society, and the natural world.” Her works often show an individual’s finding that he lacks freedom as well as the lack of capacity for self-knowledge. Among her writings are The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), An Accidental Man (1972), The Sacred and the Love Machine (1974), and Nuns and Soldiers (1980). In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), she develops her version of Platonism, stating that mankind has imperfect apprehensions concerning morality, apprehensions which we can never fully understand. In her view, Christianity needed to be demythologized, that its claims concerning incarnation and divine existence are philosophically incredible. We may need the idea of the Good for the moral life, but do we need any ontological proof of the existence of God? The figure of Christ may be religiously significant, but can Jesus, like Gautama, be both real and mystical without the old god-man mythology? Murdoch was influenced by the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl as well as Husserl’s Zen Buddhist critic Katsuki Sekida. She found fault with much in Wittgenstein’s thought, preferring the dualism she has modified from the thinking of Plato and Schopenhauer. One of her concerns, reported New Economist (25 Sep 1993), “has been religion and its role in the modern world. She herself does not believe in God and, in the specific case of Christianity of the more orthodox sort, has a problem with the picture of God as a person up in Heaven, and Christ as his son, a magical, spiritual being. But she thinks that the maintenance of religion is essential; that it must be preserved. She notes that many are comforted by the belief that they will meet their loved ones after death but, in her opinion, such beliefs are, literally considered untrue.” Buddhists and Hindus do not have this problem, she noted, for what matters to Gautama is a “mystical” matter, mystical not as something magic but what Meister Eckhart taught, that what matters is the soul, the spirit, and what is meant by these. An Anglican who became a Marxist then a non-Marxist, Murdoch has written that although philosophy is not itself religion it can teach people much about religion: “To lose Christianity would be a most terrible thing. The figure of Christ is so compelling. That is what we’re so lucky to have, as it were. . . . I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.” In a review of her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Peter Heales in New Humanist concluded that “we shall delude ourselves if we look here for the philosopher’s stone. Perhaps the most rational response would be a ‘flight from the enchantress.’ ” Colin McCall, in Freethinker, June 1996), noted Murdoch had been included in Women Philosophers (1996) but, added, “I certainly cannot go along with Iris Murdoch in her belief in transcendent ‘beauty.’ The statue is broken, the flower fades, the experience ceases,’ she says, ‘but something has not suffered from decay and mortality.’ ” According to Jim Herrick, Murdoch once declined being a vice-president of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association because she did not share what she felt was the “anti-religion” in some humanistic outlooks. She had, in fact, once described herself as being a Christian Buddhist. In 1987 she was made a Dame of the Order of the British Empire. In 1997, her husband, Prof. John Bayley, reported that his wife was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. As her death approached, Bayley wrote Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998), in which he describes his attempt to understand his wife’s physical condition. She had told a friend that she was “sailing into the darkness,” but of their last years together, he wrote that “we are physically closer. . . . She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer’s, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.” {CE; TRI; TYD}
Murdoch, Marion (1850–1943) The first woman to receive a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Meadville Theological School, Murdoch was a key member of the Iowa Sisterhood. With her life partner, Florence Buck, she served as a co-pastor of Unitarian churches. In 1893, she was a featured speaker at the World’s Parliament of Religions, where she recommended the ministry as an appropriate profession for women.
Murger, Henri (1822–1861) A French author, Murger contributed poems and dramas to the Revue des Deux Mondes. In the poem “Le Testament,” he states in answer to an inquiring priest, “Reponds lui que j’ai lu Voltaire” (Tell him I have read Voltaire). Murger’s most popular work was Scenes of Bohemian Life. {BDF; RAT}
Murillo, Bartolomé (1617?–1682) Murillo, a famous Spanish religious and portrait painter, once incurred the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition. He had followed the generally accepted rules for Christian art: The Virgin Mary must be on the right of the cross, St. John on the left; God, Jesus, angels, and the apostles could be shown with bare feet; but the feet of the saints and of the Virgin Mary could not be shown bare. Murillo was condemned by the Inquisition for having painted one scene “suggesting that the Madonna had toes.” He escaped serious punishment, but in Cádiz while working on “The Marriage of St. Catherine” for the Capuchin church, he fell from a scaffold and died as a result of his injuries. {CE}
Murphy, Audie (1924-1971) Murphy, the most celebrated, most decorated soldier of World War II, was not known to believe in the supernatural nor in an afterlife. He killed some 240 German and Italian soldiers and was awarded numerous medals including the Medal of Honor. His will provided that there be “no funeral service and only my sons in attendance at my burial at the graveside of my family plot at Forest Lawn Cemetery. If Pamela is then my wife, she shall also be present.” He wanted only a medium-priced funeral and a “simple, plain and ordinary burial ceremony.” The memorial in Los Angeles was attended by six other Medal of Honor winners and over six hundred people, after which the body was flown to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. There, he was buried with full military honors, with then U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations George Bush in attendance. So much for wills!
Murphy, Howard A.: See entry for Theism.
Murphy, John Patrick Michael (20th Century) A Colorado activist and freethinker, Murphy is an attorney and member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc. He has appeared on various news programs to argue his tax-the-church initiative and was a participant at the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention. “Hitler Was Not an Atheist,” Murphy’s article in Free Inquiry (Spring 1999), confirms that Hitler was a member in good standing of the Church of Rome, his troops were often sprinkled with holy water by the priests, he liked corporeal punishment in home and school, he openly despised homosexuality and criminalized it and, “if past is prologue, we know what to expect if liberty becomes license” and political and ecclesiastical authority figures take over.
Murphy, Lionel Keith (1922–1986) The Honorable Mr. Justice Lionel Murphy was Justice of the Australian High Court. He was a delegate in 1968 to the UN Conference on Human Rights in Teheran. As Attorney-General in the Whitlam government, he was responsible for reform of divorce law, trade practices, legal aid, and racial discrimination. He had been a Senator until his resignation in 1975 to become High Court Judge. In 1983 he received the Humanist of the Year Award. {SWW}
Murphy, Robin (20th Century) Murphy has been on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.
Murray, (George) Gilbert (Aimé) (1866–1957) Murray, the Australian-born British classical scholar, is best known as a Greek scholar, a translator of Greek drama. He wrote The Rise of the Greek Epic (1907) and Hellenism and the Modern World (1953). McCabe describ ed Murray as being one of the chief “appeasers” in British public life and, as such, not only never attacked the churches but at times appeared to be against freethinkers. But in an address to the Classical Association, he once confessed that he was an agnostic. To the present writer, Murray wrote concerning humanism,
My secretary, who misdirected my other letter to you, has now left, so I cannot repeat it. What I must have said, in general, is not to make any such elaborate distinctions between the different kinds of humanism, but one great distinction between that which man can know and what he cannot know; let him act according to his knowledge, but I would say not quite neglect certain things to which he is sensible but cannot at present have certain knowledge. Practically, this puts me on much the same level as Julian Huxley, but with more emphasis on the higher nature of man in regions where the mere animal does not reach.
According to Hector Hawton, Murray preferred the term “Freethinker” to either “Humanist” or “Rationalist.” {CE; CL; HNS; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; WAS, 19 August 1956}
Murray, John (1741–1815) The Universalist movement in America began when John Murray’s boat from England ran aground in 1770 at Cranberry Inlet, New Jersey. He had been brought up as a strict Calvinist, but the influence of John Wesley relieved that fear in some respects. It was his reading of James Reilly’s Union (1759) which greatly influenced him, for Reilly argued that all humanity actually achieved union with Christ in his death and therefore had already paid the price for sin. Espousing such an outlook, he was ostracized and had other tragedies in his life. He lost his child as well as his wife; was beset by economic difficulties; served time in debtor’s prison; and resolved the problems by moving to America. While preaching, he endured persecution: rotten eggs and stones were hurled at him. In Boston, he picked up one such stone and remarked, “This argument is solid and weighty, but it is neither rational nor convincing.” In 1775, he was chaplain in the American Revolutionary army. In 1788 he married Judith Sargent Stevens (Murray), the widowed daughter of Winthrop Sargent, whose literary career complemented Murray’s religious work. In 1779 he formed the Gloucester Universalist Church with Sargent’s help. Objecting to the payment of taxes to support the Congregational church in their area, his group won in a landmark case their right to support the church of their choice. As such, the Universalists helped to move American society away from enforced religious obligations. In 1793, he moved to the Boston Universalist Society. (See entry for Caleb Rich.) {CE; EU, Paul H. Beattie; FUS; U; U&U; UU}
Murray, Jon Garth (1954–1996?) Murray was managing editor of American Atheist, the magazine once edited by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. He became President of American Atheists. However, according to David Travis, an editorial, financial, and clerical worker who ended his association with the O’Hair group in 1995, Jon did not “even know when to be polite.” Travis called him a “screaming madman running around the office, shouting obscenities about everyone and everything.” Scott Kerns, another member, lamented that Jon “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.” Allegedly, Murray alienated many atheist chapters so badly that they seceded, and those which did not were dissolved by 1991. Murray disappeared, along with his mother and sister Robin, in 1996. Although his body had not been found as of the end of 1999, the FBI was investigating whether David Waters and Gary Karr had anything to do with the disappearances. (See entries for Robin Murray-O’Hair and Madalyn O’Hair.) {Time, 20 February 1997}
Murray, Judith Sargent Stevens (1751–1820) Wife of John Murray, the founder of American Universalism, Judith Murray was the first native-born woman dramatist to have her plays professionally performed. Also, she was among the first to have published statements on women’s rights in the United States, for she wrote “On the Equality of the Sexes (1790). Daughter of the prominent Gloucester sea captain Winthrop Sargent, she wrote The Gleaner (3 volumes, 1798), a series of her essays, plays, and poems. That publication was subscribed to by George and Martha Washington. Murray’s pseudonym was Constantia. {U; U&U}
Murray, Norman (20th Century) In Montreal, Murray wrote a freethought work, Eye-Opener (19–?). {GS}
Murray, Orson S. (19th Century) In Fruit Hills, Ohio, Murray from 1844 to 1848 edited Regenerator.
Murray-O’Hair, Robin (1965–1996?) The adopted granddaughter of Madalyn O’Hair, Robin Murray-O’Hair succeeded her mother as editor of American Atheist. In 1995, she along with her Uncle Jon and Madalyn mysteriously disappeared. Although assumed to have been killed, Robin had not been found as of the end of 1999. (See entries for Robin Murray-O’Hair and Madalyn O’Hair.)
Murray, William J. Jr. (20th Century) A wealthy Roman Catholic and an Eighth Army officer, Murray met Madalyn Murray O’Hair during World War II. He refused to admit paternity of her son, William J. III., and refused to divorce his wife. {Vanity Fair, March 1997}
Murray, William J. III (1946– ) Murray, with his mother Madalyn Murray O’Hair, joined Lewis Schempp in the lawsuit against the School District of Abington, Pennsylvania. They took the case all the way to the Supreme Court and won a 1963 ruling that the Bible could not be read aloud nor could the Lord’s Prayer be allowed in a public school inasmuch as this constituted a religious exercise and was unconstitutional under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. He later became a born-again Christian, runs a Texas ministry called the William Murray Faith Foundation, and wrote My Life Without God (1982)
Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957) Murry, husband of Katherine Mansfield and friend of the D. H. Lawrences, edited the Athenaeum (1919–1921). He published Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valléry, and other important writers. Murry wrote critical works of Dostoevsky, Keats, Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, establishing himself as a well-known critic. He and Lawrence were interested in pacifism and in planning a Utopian community called “Rananim.” (See entry for G. K. Chesterton, who wrote humorously about Murry’s atheism.)
MUSIC The first heartbeats when we are in the womb introduce us to musical rhythm. Later, we distinguish sounds, melody, harmony, and timbre, utilizing mathematics to help notate our feelings and moods, not our thoughts. Those not in the cognoscenti, however, think music can connote thoughts.
MUSIC, FREETHOUGHT AND HUMANIST: See entries for Andrew Charles and The Residents.
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES The ancient Greeks believed that the music of the spheres—a beautiful sound, inaudible to the human ear—was made by the stars and planets as they moved through the heavens. The “spheres” were not the planets themselves, but invisible globes to which the planets were believed to be attached. (See entry for Ptolemaic Universe.)
Musil, Robert Elder von (1880–1942) Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1953–1960) has been described as satirical, expressionistic, and the last work of the classical tradition. Critic George Steiner places the German Musil and the French Proust on the same profound level, adding that Musil was a highly trained and qualified mechanical engineer with a keen grasp of mathematics and mathematical logic. Musil, whose wife was Jewish, was particularly interested in philosophy. He did not, however, argue by precept or example for the radical unison of the philosophical and the poetic. Steiner suggests that “qualities” is not the best translation of Musil’s best work. A more exact title, he explains, would be The Man Whose “I” Is in Search of His “Me.”
MUSLIM: See entry for Islam. Note that Muslim is not interchangeable with Arab or Arabian: not all Muslims are Arab, and not all Arabs are Muslim. For critics of the Muslim religion, see entries for Taslima Nasrin, Anwar Shaikh, and Ibn Warraq. For an estimate of the number of Muslims worldwide, see entry for Hell.
MUSLIM GAYS Following is a 1999 Reuters report from Istanbul, Turkey:
Turkish men: macho, Muslim, and mustachioed. But behind the oh-so-masculine facade thrives a tradition of cross-dressing and homosexuality that harks back to Ottoman times. Switch on a Turkish television set and videos of girlish male pop singers in full makeup and flamboyant clothes top the local charts. A popular talk show is hosted by the Irritable Virgin, a loud-mouthed man with a penchant for blonde wigs and sequined dresses. And the country’s best-loved classical music diva, Bulent Ersoy, is a voluptuous transsexual whose recent marriage to a man caused a stir more because the groom was half her age than for other lurid details. To even the most casual observer, gender-bending and gayness are an open secret in this predominantly Muslim society. But talking about it is strictly taboo, so even though everyone knows otherwise closeted male pop stars appear in the tabloids with female models on their arms. ``There is this silent consensus: you can be gay as long as you don’t come out and give it a name,’’ columnist and cultural commentator Perihan Magden said. It was not always so. The Ottoman Empire was renowned for liberal sexual practices including transvestite dancers and infamous harems often housed young boys as well as women. “In the Ottoman Empire everything was completely in the open. It was the Tanzimat (Westernization process) in the 19th century that changed all that,’’ historian Murat Bardakci said.
The first international conference of gay Muslims was held in New York City, May 1999, by Al-Fatiha Foundation (405 Park Avenue, Suite 1500, New York, NY 10022). That foundation was formed in 1997 by Faisal Alam, who admitted that he had not fully reconciled his sexuality and his faith. “But when you face God and the Prophet on the day of judgment, the first question he’ll ask is not whether you are gay or how many sex partners you had, but did you believe in me?” Alam rationalized. The sixty or so attendees included blond-haired and blue-eyed European Americans as well as olive-skinned Americans and Europeans of Arab and South Asian descent. In addition to the references in the Qur’an about Lut (Lot), hadith (sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) such as the following are problems for gay Muslims who are literalistic:
• When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.
• Kill the one that is doing it [having intercourse] and also kill the one that it is being done to. • Cursed are those men who wear women’s clothing and those women who wear men’s clothing.
However, no record appears to exist that in the Prophet’s time anyone was executed for same-sex acts. The third Caliph, Omar, ordered a homosexual man to be burned alive. According to Alam, the Hanafite school (predominant in South Asia and Eastern Asia today) maintains that same-gender sex does not merit any physical punishment. The Hanabalities (predominant in the Arab world) believe, however, that sex between males must be punished severely. The Sha’fi school (also predominant in the Arab world) argues that punishment for sodomy can only be carried out if there are four adult male witnesses who actually see the penetration “as though the key is going into the key hole.” The Ismaili sect (also known as the Agha Khani movement, with a population of approximately two million) believes Islam is a continuously evolving faith that must be reinterpreted to adapt to modern-day society and culture. The Prince Agha Khan, thought to be a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, was thought to have been open to dialogue and communication with progressive movements within Islam. Nevertheless, it is widely held that Muslims who are Western-style homosexuals will never be allowed to enter Paradise. {WAS, conversations with Faisal Alam, a Pakastini Muslim, and Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not A Muslim.}
MUSLIM RELIGION, CRITICISM OF Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim (1995) discusses the totalitarian nature of Islam and its law, Islamic colonialism, how Islam treats heretics and freethinkers, the status of women, the undemocratic pressures applied by Islamic immigrants in the West, and its taboos (wine, pork, and homosexuality). G. A. Wells, professor of German at the University of London, has praised the book not only for being “courageous” but also for scrutinizing the fundamental tenets of Islam so uncompromisingly. Religion, Warraq found, "is largely a reshuffling of ideas of a yesterday, and to this Islam is no exception. It has taken a great deal from both Jewish and Christian traditions, but I doubt whether many Christians are aware of in what strange guise Christianity figures in the Qur’an. According to Sura 4, Jesus was not crucified: the Jews ‘[k]illed him not, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear that way to them.’ This strikes at the heart of what is now established as Christian doctrine. If there was no atoning death, there is no redemption, through such a death." What is in the Qur’an about Christianity, Warraq claims, “derives from heretical sects.” The Qur’an looks more authentic than the Gospels, Wells noted, “in that its author works no miracles and makes no claim to divinity. . . . Also, there are so many variant readings that it is misleading to speak of the Koran: ‘The definitive text still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.” Islam never really encouraged science, if by science is meant “disinterested inquiry,” according to Warraq. What Islam means by “knowledge” is religious knowledge, for all other knowledge is dangerous to the faith. Whatever real science occurred under Islam occurred despite, not because of, the religion. Further, he holds, the Muslim world has been indebted from the beginning to the Greeks and is indebted now to science for understanding its own intellectual and cultural history. Warraq concludes that he is “convinced that despite all the shortcomings of Western liberal democracy, it is far preferable to the authoritarian, mind-numbing certitudes of Islamic theocracy.” Few other works have dared touch such subjects, and like Salmon Rushdie he is afraid to reveal his exact whereabouts for fear of being assassinated. Various intellectuals are concerned that within a few decades Muslim authoritarianism will have become so widespread that opposition will form and that “crusades” against Islam will result in the loss of enormous amounts of human lives. (See entries for Anwar Shaikh and Ibn Warraq.)
MUSLIM WOMEN, PLIGHT OF Muslim heterosexual men read in the Qur’an (II.223), “Your wives are a tilth for you, so go into your tilth when you like.” A man’s wife’s vagina, in short, is solely his to cultivate, and it is her duty to satisfy his sexual needs. (See entries for Homosexuals, Muslim, and Homa Darabi.) MUSLIMS IN AMERICA The first Muslims in America who were black were brought in slave ships. Approximately a fifth of the slaves brought to America from West Africa were Muslims. Some black Muslims say that “Islam is part of the genetic memory of blacks.” Diana Eck, a teacher of comparaative religion at Harvard University, points out that in 1998 there are more Muslims than Episcopalians in the United States and more Buddhist temples in suburban backyards than is generally realized. It is estimated that by the year 2016 Muslims will overtake Jews as America’s largest religious minority. {The Economist, 24 August 1996}
MUSLIMS, BLACK Wali Farad, whom his followers believed was “Allah in person,” founded the Black Muslim group in Detroit in 1930. When he mysteriously disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad assumed leadership and preached, in addition to the Qur’an’s teachings, that white men are devils and that blacks are God’s chosen people. Upon his death his son, Wallace D. Muhammad became the leader. In 1976 a group led by Louis Farrakhan split off from Wallace D. Muhammad’s group. One of the better-known ministers was Malcolm X. Moderates stress the Islamic principles of universal brotherhood and social justice. {CE}
MUSLIMS, NON—IN MUSLIM COUNTRIES: See entry for Bat Yóer.
Musset, Charles Alfred de (1810–1857) A French romantic poet, whose infatuation with George Sand also resulted in disillusionment, Musset was published first in Revue des Deux Mondes. Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836) is an account of his affair with Sand and reflects the disillusioned mood of many of his contemporaries. According to Robertson, Musset like Béranger was a rationalist. In 1853, Musset was admitted into the Academy. McCabe says of Musset, “His early poems are full of skepticism, but after his rupture with George Sand he fell into a morbid state and wrote a religious book. In his later work he returned to his first position—a non-Christian theist with no belief in immortality. His art was exquisite but his character weak, and he vacillated as poets so often do.” {BDF; CE; JM; JMR}
Musset, Louis Charles Alfred de (1810–1857) A French poet and dramatist, Musset completed a free translation of De Quincey’s Opium Eater (1828). His career as a littérateur was interrupted by his painful liaison with George Sand, with whom he was infatuated but who did not return his affection. Musset’s work is known for its melancholy and anxiety, which was known as the mal du siècle. His Espoir en Dieu shows what Lanson has termed its “banal religiosity.” McCabe states that Musset was plainly agnostic as to a future life and was far removed from Christian doctrines, though always a theist. {RAT}
Mussolini, Benito [Il Duce] (1883–1945) Mussolini, who was a freethinker and a socialist before becoming Italy’s fascist dictator during the Second World War, had the following observations concerning religion:
• Religion is a species of mental disease. It has always had a pathological reaction on mankind.
• The God of the theologians is the creation of their empty heads.
• The history of the saints is mainly the history of insane people.
• When we claim that “God does not exist,” we mean to deny by this declaration the personal God of theology, the God worshiped in various ways and diverse modes by believers the world over . . . that God of absurd attributes who is an affront to human reason.
• Science is now in the process of destroying religious dogma. The dogma of the divine creation is recognized as absurd.
• Religious morality shows the original stigmata of authoritarianism precisely because it pretends to be the revelation of divine authority. In order to translate this authoritarianism into action and impose it upon humanity, the priestly caste of revealers has sprung up and with it the most atrocious intolerance.
The king dismissed Mussolini when the Allies invaded the mainland, leading to a rebellion within Mussolini’s Fascist Party. Both Mussolini and Hitler had at one time used “new humanism” as descriptions of their views, to the embarrassment of many humanists. The Germans made him a puppet ruler in Northern Italy, but upon the German collapse Mussolini was captured by Italian partisans, summarily tried, and executed. The remains were finally buried in 1957, at the San Cassiano Cemetery, Predappio, Italy. He first had been buried in a Capuchin monastery cemetery in Cerro Maggiore. {PCE; TYD}
Musto, Michael (3 Dec 1955 - )
Musto’s column in New York’s Village Voice is the first many readers consult when they pick up the weekly, for he dishes the dirt and minces no words. His use of circle endings, double entendres, catty sense of humor, and witty in-jokes brings laughter out of the young, most of the middle-aged, and many of the older. His outlook is refreshingly logical, his syntax is a marvel, and his influence particularly in gay circles is monumental. Asked about his religious views, he responded:
I was born and raised a Roman Catholic and went to catechism every Wednesday, though the only church I've been to in ages is the Limelight. Deep down I don't think we're important enough to have an afterlife, though every time I'm faced with my own mortality I suddenly feel otherwise. (The Limelight is a gay Manhattan disco, housed in a church.) {WAS, 4 Sep 2001}
Muzzey, David Saville (1870–1965) Muzzey was a Yankee seminarian turned American historian, who taught part time at Columbia University and Barnard. His textbooks have been widely used throughout the nation. Muzzey joined the Ethical Culture Society Leadership in 1898, serving for the long period to 1965. His works include Life of Thomas Jefferson (1918) and Ethics as a Religion (1951). Muzzey’s Political Idol of Other Days (1939) received an honorable mention by the Pulitzer Prize committee. {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Myers, Francis (20th Century) A member of the department of philosophy at the University of Denver, Myers in the 1950s was an associate editor of The Humanist. He wrote “Comments on George Axtelle’s ‘John Dewey’s Concept of the Religious’ ” in Religious Humanism (Summer 1967). {HNS}
Myers, Lonny (20th Century) In 1999 the American Humanist Association made Myers its Humanist Distinguished Service Awardee. An activist in the fields of human sexuality and sexually transmitted disease, she is a staunch defender of abortion rights. Also, she works to educate people about the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases (particularly in regards to women and infants), teaches medical assistants, and actively tries to eradicate the practice of female genital mutilation in the United States and elsewhere. {The Humanist, March-April 1999}
Myers, William (20th Century) Dr. Myers, a Florida anesthesiologist, is a member of the board of Freethinkers, Inc.
Myler, Harley (1953– ) Myler, who is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Central Florida, is secretary in Winter Park, Florida, of Freethinkers, Inc. He has also taught at Florida Institute of Technology and New Mexico State University in addition to having had industrial experience with General Instrument Corporation and with the US Army Air Defense Artillery as missile systems officer. In addition to writing over thirty technical articles, he is author (with A. R. Weeks) of Computing Imaging Recipes in C (1993) and The Pocket Handbook of Image Processing Algorithms in C (1993).
Myler, Robert J. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Myler was title officer of Title Insurance & Trust Company. {HM2}
Myrdal, Gunnar (1898–1987) An eminent Swedish economist, Myrdal was a public official and a sociologist. His Crisis in the Population Question (1934), written with his wife, Alva, stimulated general welfare measures, and he headed Carnegie Corporation of America from 1938–1942, writing an exhaustively detailed study of African Americans in a book entitled An American Dilemma (1944). When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was a professor at the University of Stockholm, Sweden. Myrdal was considered the foremost expert on the Swedish economy. {HM2; CE}
MYSTERY AND MYSTERIES • Three great mysteries there are in the lives of mortal beings: the mystery of birth at the beginning; the mystery of death at the end; and, greater than either, the mystery of love. Everything that is most precious in life is a form of love. Art is a form of love, if it be noble; labor is a form of love, if it be worthy, thought is a form of love, if it be inspired. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, at a 1931 wedding at which he officiated
As explained in The Columbia Encyclopedia, secret cults existed in Greek and Roman religion: “The conventional religions of both Greeks and Romans were alike in consisting principally of propitiation and prayers for the good of the city-state, the tribe, or the family, and only secondarily of the person. Individuals sought a more emotional religion that would fulfill their desires for personal salvation and immortality. Secret societies were formed, usually headed by a priest or a hierophant. By the 5th cent. B.C. mysteries were an important part of the fabric of Hellenic life. Although the mystic rites were kept secret, it was known that they required elaborate initiations, including purification rites, beholding sacred objects, accepting occult knowledge, and acting out a sacred drama. . . . The most important mystery cults in Greece were the Eluesinian, the Orphic, and the Andanian. Since the mystery deities were associated primarily with fertility, many scholars believe that these cults were based on unrecorded primitive fertility rites. The popularity of mystery cults spread in the Hellenistic age and still more widely in Roman times.” The mystery—also called miracle—play was a form of medieval drama, one that started in the 10th century by dramatizing the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. It reached its height in the 15th century. One problem, the church found, was that too much of the play was devoted to dramatizing the tantalizing sinning, too little at the very end to resolving the sin. Mystery—detective—stories involve solutions to crimes based upon the logical interpretation of the evidence presented. Although Aesop’s fables, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the Apocrypha contain elements of mystery stories, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and his other “tales of ratiocination” involving the chevalier C. Auguste Dupin started the present genre. Other writers have been Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Conan Doyle. When Doyle was sent to a Roman Catholic public school, he became revulsed by Christianity, according to Christopher Hitchens (The New York Review of Books, 4 November 1999). But later in life Doyle turned to spiritualism.
MYSTICISM • Mysticism is not religion, but a religious disease. –George Santayana
Mysticism is the practice of putting oneself into, and remaining in, direct relation with God, the Absolute, or any unifying principle of life. Christian mystics are numerous: Clement of Alexandria; Origen; St. Augustine; Cassian; St. Gregory I; Erigena; St. Peter Damian; St. Anselm; St. Bernard of Clairvaux . . . and the Columbia Encyclopedia lists many others, including Swedenborg. Books on the topic include William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); Friedrich von Hügel’s The Mystical Element of Religion (1923); and Henri Bergson’s The Two Sources of Religion and Morality (1935). There are no known freethinker-mystics. Bertrand Russell has noted that mystics have conceived of numbers as “God’s thoughts,” that mathematics is “the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a supersensible intelligible world.” But Lord Russell has no interest in mysticism nor in “intuition,” which he said Bergson had raised
to the position of sole arbiter of metaphysical truth. But in fact, the opposite of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
(See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, for the history, nature, and assessment of mysticism.) {CE; ER) MYTHOLOGY • Mythology, n. The body of a primitive people’s beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities, and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• Mythology is what grown-ups believe; folk-lore is what they tell their children; and religion is both. –Cedric Whitman
• History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end. –Jean Cocteau
MYTHS
• Why do we continue to find myths so fascinating? The ascendancy of science and the triumphs of modern Western thought leave a large gap, an unsatisfied need, which we attempt to meet with beliefs of very different kinds and very different origins. The Hubble telescope has not killed astrology; antibiotics have to contend with herbal remedies and acupuncture; men and women are still carried off by mysterious creatures from other worlds (though nowadays in interplanetary flying machines rather than in fiery chariots) and return after undergoing experiences which ordinary language is powerless to convey. And the study of myth flourishes as never before. The word “Western,” of course, gives a clue. We enjoy the practical benefits of those triumphs, but we flinch from the triumphalism—rational, patriarchal, colonialist—that often accompanies them, and we hope that comfort and meaning can be found in the very different wisdom of other times and other places.
—Jasper Griffin, “The Myth of Myths,” The New York Review of Books, 4 November 1999
MYTHS, SCIENTIFIC: See entry for Science, Myths of.
