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From Philosopedia
OABITAR: See entries for John B. Massen; and for Objectivity, Accuracy, and Balance in Teaching About Religion, Inc.
OAK HILL FREE PRESS Dave E. Matson operates the Oak Hill Free Press (PO Box 61274, Pasadena, California 91116). Two of the company’s publications are “Common Sense and the Bible” and “Common Sense Versus the Bible.”
Oates, Joyce Carol (1938– ) Oates, a writer of realistic novels tinged with surrealism, is known for describing the connection between violence and love as she finds it in American life. She has written A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Childwold (1976), and Solstice (1985). Her interests are catholic, as evidenced by her writing about religious fanaticism in Son of the Morning, about brutality in On Boxing, and college faculties in Unholy Love. Twenty-seven or more of her novels have been published, as well as seventeen or more collections of short stories, seven or more books of poetry, five or more volumes of essays, fifteen plays, and more than two dozen works published by small, independent presses. When her grandfather died of emphysema, Oates described in a Playboy (November 1993) interview, her family became religious. “My parents had been Catholic and they had lapsed. That’s a joke to other people, but to Catholics you are never not a Catholic. You’re born Catholic and you’re baptized, then you become a lapsed Catholic for the next ninety years. It’s like an alcoholic—you’re never not an alcoholic. I’m not a person who feels very friendly toward organized religion. I think people have been brainwashed through the centuries. The churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are patriarchal organizations that have been invested with power for the sake of the people in power, who happen to be men. It breeds corruption. I found going to church every Sunday and on holy days an exercise in extreme boredom. I never felt that the priest had any kind of connection with God. I’ve never felt that anyone who stands up and says ‘Look, I have the answers’ has the answers. I would look around in church and see people praying and sometimes crying and genuflecting, saying the rosary, and I never felt any identification. I never felt that I was experiencing what they were experiencing. I couldn’t figure out whether or not they were pretending. . . . Organized religions such as the Catholic Church are the antithesis of religious experience.…The persistence of crackpots, pseudoscientists like astrologers, suggests the failure of science and education. How can people still be superstitious, still believe in nonsense and astrology and grotesque demonic religions of every kind, every fundamentalist religion crowding us on all sides? How can we have these phenomena and say that science and education have not failed? That’s embarrassing.” In a similar vein, during a conversation reported in The New York Times Magazine (25 December 1994) with fellow novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, Oates stated, “I was never very religious, so I look upon the phenomenon of religion as interesting. But religion has been used by people in power for their own ends, which are pretty transparent, and they are men. So there are different ways of experiencing religion. I mean, obviously, the inner and the spiritual are very different from what I’m talking about.” Oates has written so many articles, essays, and books that her friends wonder where she finds all the time. With Shuddering Fall tells a story that is analogous to the biblical myth of Abraham and Isaac. But “merely having faith” in a supernatural reality,” she has written, “leaves one really nowhere.” Her own favorite short story, she has stated, is her “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” That work has been made into a movie, “Smooth Talk.” Greg Johnson’s Invisible Writer, a Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (1998), similarly confirms Oates’s distaste for religion. At any early age she was furious that a group of cardinals had proclaimed that abortion was unacceptable under any circumstance, reasoning that the fetus might be male.
Oates, Thomas (19th Century) Oates in the 1860s was a leading secularist in the central northern English community of Middleton. He was active in the Lancashire Secular Union. {RSR}
Oberoi, Harjot (20th Century) A Punjabi-born academic, Oberoi gave up his appointment to the chair of Sikh studies at the University of British Columbia after his book on Sikh history, The Construction of Religious Boundaries, was criticized by fundamentalist Sikh leaders. He had suggested that their religion had its roots in Hinduism and Islam rather than being a completely separate divine revelation. As a result, he joined the university’s faculty of arts.
OBERLIN COLLEGE FREETHINKERS In Ohio the Oberlin College Freethought Alliance is on the Web at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
OBITUARIES • There’s no bad publicity, except an obituary notice. –Brendan Behan
OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE “Objective correlative” became a fashionable term after neo-humanist T. S. Eliot in an essay, “Hamlet and his Problems” (1920), used it. Hamlet was an “artistic failure,” he alleged, because Hamlet himself is “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. . . . The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” The view was not widely accepted, particularly by naturalistic humanists in the humanities. (See entry for Hamlet.) {OEL}
OBJECTIVISM In philosophy objectivism holds that all reality is objective and external to the mind, that knowledge is reliably based on observed objects and events. An emphasis is placed on objects, not feelings or thoughts, in literature or art. Rand is a key individual in the objectivist movement. On the Web: <www.geocities.com/Athena/6234>. {See entry for Ayn Rand.}
OBJECTIVITY, ACCURACY, AND BALANCE IN TEACHING ABOUT RELIGION Objective, Accuracy, and Balance in Teaching About Religion (1525-A Day Avenue, San Mateo, California 94403) is led by John B. Massen. His coalition called OABITAR seeks addition to public school history textbooks, when they “teach about religion” by text on major religions, of text about the vital contributions to the advancement of civilization by “non-religion” (skepticism, unbelief, rationalism, humanism, freethought, and atheism). The group hopes to prevent educational censorship by the deliberate exclusion of “non-religion.” Members of the group are the American Humanist Association (AHA), the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Atheist Alliance (AA). {FD}
Obregón, Álvaro [President] (1880–1928) General Obregón, who was President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924, has been described as having been “one of the most enlightened generals in the revolution” of 1913. At a time when peonage was rampant, he advanced agrarian and labor reforms. Obregón was involved in a long, bitter quarrel with the church and in 1928, when again chosen president, he was assassinated by a fanatical Roman Catholic who did so “in order that religion may prevail.”. Obregón wrote Ocho mil kilómetros en campaña (1917). {TRI}
O’Brien, Conor Cruise (1917– ) In 1972, O’Brien was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association and, in 1996, a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. A writer and a diplomat, O’Brien has been vice chancellor of the University of Ghana, a member of the Dail Eireann in Dublin, a senator of Dublin University (1977–1979), editor in chief of the London Observer (1978–1981), and pro-chancellor of the University of Dublin. Among his books are To Katanga and Back (1962, which contains his version of why he was forced to resign as special UN representative of Secretary-General Däg Hammerskjöld), Camus (1969), Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1969), God Land: Reflections In Religion and Nationalism (1988), The Great Melody (1992, a study of Edmund Burke), and Ancestral Voices (1994), the latter book being an analysis of the progressively Catholic nature of modern Irish nationalism. In 1988 he was recipient of the Valiant for Truth Media award. Donald Harman Akenson, in Conor: A Biography of Conor Cruise O’Brien (1995), states that, contrary to the analysis of the British Left, Conor regarded the Irish Republic’s irredentist claim on Northern Ireland, not the British presence in Ulster, as the real form of imperialism in modern Ireland. O’Brien is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. O’Brien’s “Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist” (Atlantic Monthly, October 1996) called the American president a prophet of a “civil religion,” which is in error and apparently was written without a knowledge of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and other of his writings, according to Merrill D. Petersen, author of The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. O’Brien denied this and has retorted that Jefferson’s racism was purposely overlooked by using the inscription on his monument in Washington, an inscription which quotes Jefferson’s contention that the slaves “are to be free” while omitting the immediately following statement: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” This, he holds, shows that the slaves, if freed, are to be deported. In an interview with Timothy J. Madigan (Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}, O’Brien elaborated upon his having judged Jefferson by current concepts of liberty and freedom. He cited one of Jefferson’s slaves, Jame Hubburd, who repeatedly attempted to escape and was severely flogged in the presence of his companions. “I don’t think a man who flogged a slave for seeking his liberty is likely to long remain a hero in [America’s increasingly] multi-racial society.” O’Brien is one of the few debunkers of Jefferson, calling him a wild-eyed anarchist who was a died-in-the-wool racist. (See entry for Thomas Jefferson.) {Atlantic Monthly, January 1997; CE}
O’Brien, James (1805–1864) O’Brien was an Irish orator, famous as a barrister and Chartist agitator. In 1840 he was punished by being sent to prison for eighteen months. Although sometimes described as a Catholic, O’Brien wrote to Robert Owen after his famous rejection of all religion in the London Tavern, “If I mistake not, your ideas and mine are the same, or nearly so, on these subjects.” {RAT; RE}
O’Brien, Paul (20th Century)
O’Brien, who calls himself a reverend, heads the Humanist Ethical Church (6033 Hopkins Road, Flint, Michigan 48506). E-mail: <paul@tir.com>.
OBSCENITY • Damn all expurgated books; the dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. –Walt Whitman
• Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. –Bertrand Russell
• Nothing risqué, nothing gained. –Alexander Woollcott
In the United States, courts have ruled that material which appeals to prurient interest in sex and which does not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value can be banned as obscene. The legal determination that material falls within a definition of obscenity is usually made by a jury. In some communities, pornography is vigorously attacked as being obscene. In others, nudity of any kind is deemed obscene. Americans are said to be more conscious of obscenity than are Europeans. A Greenwich Village humanist in New York City has defined obscenity as “whatever gives a male judge an erection.” (All the Obscenities in the Bible, by Gene Kasmar, is available from 6066 Shingle Creek Parkway #182, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota 55430. The work includes references to human sacrifice, child cruelty, human cannibalism, incest, scatology, harlotry, suicide, slavery, violence, etc.) {CE}
O’Casey, Sean (John) (Casey) (1880–1964) O’Casey was an outright freethinker, according to David Tribe. In six volumes, O’Casey was autobiographical, beginning with I Knock at the Door (1939) and ending with Sunset and Evening Star (1954). He was a Dublin-born Protestant who first wrote under the name of Sean O Cathasaigh. Juno and the Paycock (1924) brought him much recognition, as did The Plough and the Stars (1926), which, however, provoked nationalist riots at the Abbey Theatre in 1926. He moved to England in 1926, settling there permanently and remaining alienated from Ireland. His various works have been grim, satirical, and not always kind to the Irish people. According to George Orwell, O’Casey the playwright was “very stupid” and possibly a member of the Communist Party. (See entry for George Orwell.) {CE; OEL; TRI; TYD}
OCCAM’S RAZOR William of Occam, an English philosopher of the fourteenth century, spoke of a principle that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitate), meaning that explanations in philosophy should be kept as simple as possible. The principle is known as Occam’s (also, Ockham’s) Razor. Albert Einstein warned that one should not shave too much, that “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” William (c. 1285-c. 1349), a Franciscan logician, was known as “doctor invincibilies” by fellow friars. His writing as a monk on the character of knowledge—making a distinction between the name of a thing and the thing itself—was an epistemological study, one that angered Pope John XXII, then in Avignon. (See entry for William of Occam [Ockham].) {CE; DCL; William Safire, The New York Times Magazine, 31 January 1999}
OCCULTISM Occultism is the study of the supernatural and involves a belief in the possibility of bringing occult “powers” under human control. Believers have invested much time and money into such non-scientific ventures.
Ocellus Lucanus (7th Century B. C. E.) An early Greek philosopher, Ocellus Lucanus maintained the eternity of the cosmos. An edition of his work was published with a translation by the Marquis d’Argens. Thomas Taylor published an English version. {BDF}
Ochino, Bernardino Tommasini (1487–1564)
An Italian reformer and a popular preacher, Ochino was chosen general of the Capuchins. He then was converted to the Reformation by Jean Valdez, being forced to flee to Geneva in 1542. Invited to England by Cranmer, Ochino became prebend of Canterbury, preaching in London until the accession of Mary, at which time he was expelled and went to Zürich. Here he became an anti-trinitarian and was banished about 1562 for Thirty Dialogues, in one of which he shows that neither in the Bible nor the Fathers is there any express prohibition of polygamy. Ochino then went to Poland and joined the Socinians. Banished from Poland also, Ochino died in Moravia. Beza, the French Calvinist theologian, ascribed the misfortunes of Ochino, and particularly the accidental death of his wife, to the special interposition of God on account of his erroneous opinions. {BDF}
Ochs, Philip (20th Century) Ochs, a non-believer, illustrates his outlook in the lyrics he has written and the songs he has sung. He is a popular entertainer.
OCKHAM’S RAZOR: See entry for Occam’s Razor.
O’Connor, Arthur (afterwards Condorcet) (1768–1852) O’Connor, who was born in Cork, joined the United Irishmen and went to negotiate for military aid. In 1798 he was tried for treason, but acquitted. He entered the French service and rose to distinction. In 1807, he married Elisa, the only daughter of Condorcet, whose name he took and whose works he edited. O’Connor also defiantly edited the freethinking Journal of Religious Freedom during the restoration. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
O’Connor, (Mary) Flannery (1925–1964) O’Connor is an American author who portrayed contemporary Southern life as a grotesque and gothic combination of brutal comedy and violent tragedy. In Wise Blood (1949), a character declares, “I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from, and no Redemption because there was no Fall, and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.” In Everything That Rises Must Converge, published posthumously in 1965, is a story, “Greenleaf.” It contains the description, “She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.” {TYD}
O’Connor, Richard (20th Century) O’Connor wrote Sinclair Lewis (1971). {GS}
O’Connor, Sinead (20th Century) O’Connor, a singer known for having a shaved head, enraged Catholics when she tore up a picture of Pope John Paul on a “Saturday Night Live” television program in the 1990s. In 1994, when a priest helped her kick her marijuana habit, she told The Irish Times that he had restored her faith in the Church. But, she added without further explanation, she still did not think the Church is good for young people. In 1999 the Irish rocker claimed she had become a priest, a member of a Catholic splinter group known as the Latin Tridentine Church, that she intended to administer “sacraments” including last rites, would wear a clerical shirt (and a dog collar), and would now be known as Mother Bernadette Mary.
O’Connor, Tom (20th Century) In the 1950s, O’Connor was a member of the board of directors of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Fellowship of Boston.
Od: See entry for Zyp.
Odden, Glenn (20th Century) A Presbyterian, an occupational therapist, and playwright, Odden has written in Free Inquiry (Fall 1996), “Religion was a favorite target of (Ambrose) Bierce. He saw the hypocrisy of many religious institutions and clergy with a clarity that he maliciously exploited.”
O’Dell, George E. (1874–1970?) O’Dell, a British empiricist and humanist, was trustee and then president of National Union of Clerks and Administrative Workers (1906–1913), assistant to Stanton Coit in the British Ethical Union (1903–1913), then executive secretary of the American Ethical Union and editor of The Standard (1913–1947). In the 1950s he was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. James F. Hornback has written that O’Dell was “a Humanist never really accepted by Felix Adler as a leader.” O’Dell wrote Aspects of Ethical Religion (1926). (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {HNS}
O’Dell, Robin (20th Century) O’Dell and Tom Barfield wrote “A Humanist Glossary” (1967). {GS}
Odenkirk, Bob (20th Century) Odenkirk, a comedian, said on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” (27 October 1998), “I was raised Catholic, so of course I’m now an atheist.” Along with his comedy partner David Cross, Odenkirk is behind “Mr Show,” an HBO production.
Odenkirk, Bob (12 Dec 1964 - ) Odenkirk, a comedian, grew up in Naperville, Illinois, born second into a family of seven. At Southern Illinois University he produced his own comedy program for student radio, then spent several years in Chicago as a stand-up comic. Hired as a writer on Saturday Night Live, he went on to win an Emmy, then wrote for Get A Life and The Ben Stiller Show, where he wrote, performed, and won another Emmy. Odenkirk has David Cross as his partner in the HBO comedy, “Mr. Show.” Apparently in a serious vein on Comedy Central (27 Oct 1998), he said, “I was raised Catholic, so of course I’m now an atheist.” {CA}
Odger, George (1813–1877)
Odger was an agitator, the son of a Cornish miner and a shoemaker in his youth. He was secretary of the London Trade Council from 1862 to 1872. He organized the English welcome to Garibaldi in 1864 and was one of the most anti-clerical of the Labour leaders, although he never wrote on religion. {RAT}
Odgers, W(illiam) Blake (1849–1924) Odgers was a freethinker who wrote “Should the Existing Laws as to Blasphemy Be Amended And, If So, In What Direction?” (1883). {GS}
ODIN: See entry for Zyp.
O’Donaghue, Alfred H. (Born 1840) O’Donaghue was an Irish-American counselor at law. Although educated for the Episcopal ministry at Trinity College, Dublin, he became a skeptic and published Theology and Mythology (1880), an inquiry into the claims of Biblical inspiration and the supernatural element in religion (1880). {BDF}
O’Donnell, Thomas F. (20th Century) With Hoyt Franchere, O’Donnell wrote Harold Frederic (1961). {FUS}
O’Dowd, Bernard (Patrick) (1866–1953) O’Dowd, an Australian secularist, poet, librarian, and parliamentary draftsman, was head teacher of a Catholic boys’ school when seventeen, but his open advocacy of freethought doctrines made that position untenable. He was editor of the Australian Secular Lyceum Tutor (1888) and wrote a book of verse, Poetry Militant (1909). When eighty-three, O’Dowd gave an address at the Unitarian Church: “I am one who has perhaps, under the influence of what Goethe or someone has called the World Spirit, drifted often over perilous seas, from Roman Catholicism through Spiritualism, Secularism (now called Rationalism), Mysticism, Theosophy, New Thought, and so on . . . but at one stage or another on my pilgrimage I had made contact with the Unitarian movement and, at long last, what I hope is permanent contact.” Upon his death, some in his family tried to arrange Catholic rites for him, but his wishes prevailed and the Unitarian service was conducted by Victor James. {FUK; SWW}
OEDIPUS In Greek mythology, Oedipus was son of King Laius of Thebes and Queen Jocasta. But as dramatized in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, he unknowingly kills his father during an incident in which on a narrow road the two become enraged when neither will give the right-of-way. As the result, and after solving the “riddle of the Sphinx,” Oedipus, who had grown up thinking he was the adopted son of the King of Korinth, became Queen Jocasta’s husband. Upon learning the truth, that he had married his own mother, who then committed suicide, Oedipus in horror made the tragic and inspiring decision to blind, not kill, himself. The drama has a universal interest, involving as it does human accidents, rage, adoption, and love. Many contemporary philosophers and psychologists are critical of the Freudian concept of the “Oedipus complex,” holding that, like the term God, the concept has some use as a symbol but not as a verifiable fact. For Freud, the play shows us the fulfillment of our childhood wishes and the resultant guilt feelings. Boys have an ambivalence toward their father, erotic wishes toward their mother, and “the bisexuality originally present in children” with a “corresponding jealousy and hostility” toward their mother. For Melanie Klein and other critics, however, Freud needs to be amended by showing that hostility begins at birth and is directed not solely at the father but also at the mother. Jacques Lacan suggests further that if the child fails to obtain satisfaction from his mother, he blames a symbolic father, then wields language to get what he wants. Philosopher Jonathan Lear has pointed out that “We cannot begin to appreciate the meaning of Oedipus if we continue to think that Oedipus was oedipal,” this because the central point Sophocles made is not that Oedipus discovered that in killing his father and sleeping with his mother he surrendered to his unconscious wishes. Rather, the work illustrated how fathers can be violent, how nature can be perverse, and how society suffers when the state is authoritarian and patriarchal. Woody Allen, in the movie entitled “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995), includes a Greek chorus along with Jocasta, to whom he gives the wittily bitchy line, “I hate to tell you what they call my son in Harlem.” {Sarah Boxer, The New York Times, 6 Dec 1997; CE}
Oelberg, Sarah (20th Century) Oelberg is minister in Hanska, Minnesota, of the Nora Church Unitarian Universalist. She has written,
I am a humanist because I cannot be otherwise. It is the only way that makes sense to me; I am compelled to be a humanist by the dictates of my mind. It’s what my search for truth and meaning tells me is real. My humanism allows me to be the chief agent of spiritual force and intellectual freedom in my life. It affirms my power to carve out my own destiny and to derive standards and values form my own experience, in light of others’ experience. It guides my lifelong commitment to the disciplined and responsible search for meaning. It requires me to ask, with respect to beliefs, “Is it reasonable to believe this? Does it make sense in terms of what I know about the world and the universe?” . . . [H]umanism is the core of my religion. It is grounded in the three Rs—reason, rationality, and responsibility. It is my rock, upon which I stand proudly and joyously. {World, November-December 1997}
Oersted, Hans Christian (1777–1851) Oersted, a Danish physicist whose name became a classic in the literature of science, was, like Goethe, a pantheist. This he shows in his Aanden i Naturen (1849, 2 volumes). In 1819 he discovered that a magnetic needle is deflected at right angles to a conductor carrying an electric current. This established a relationship between magnetism and electricity and initiated the study of electromagnetics. Oersted also was the first to isolate aluminum, and a unit of magnetic field strength is named for him. {JM; RAT; RE}
Oest, Johann Heinrich (18th Century) Oest was a German poet. Because of the poems he published at Hamburg in 1751, he was accused of materialism. {BDF}
Offen, Benjamin (1772–1848) Offen was an American freethinker who had been born in England. In New York Offen became lecturer to the Society of Moral Philanthropists at Tammany Hall and was associated with the Free Discussion Society. He wrote Biblical Criticism and a critical review of the Bible, A Legacy to the Friends of Free Discussion (1846). Offen supported the Correspondent, Free Inquirer, and Boston Investigator. {BDF; FUS}
Ofili, Chris (20th Century) “The Holy Virgin Mary, which artist Ofili painted, includes a large image collaged with lumps of elephant dung and close-up photographs of female genitalia. The work was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1997. When it was scheduled to appear in a show, “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York City’s Catholic mayor, Rudy Giuliani, threatened to cut off the museum’s city subsidity and remove its board if the show with Ofili’s “sick stuff” was not canceled. The resultant furore over First Amendment rights had the city’s Catholic archbishop siding with the mayor but had artists and others rebuking those who try to censor artists. “I was brought up a Catholic and was an altar boy,” the British-born African artist told reporters from his London home. “I believe in God, but I’m not dominated by it. We all studied math, but we don’t go around spewing numbers. Religion should be used in the appropriate way. The church is not made up of one person but a whole congregation, and they should be able to interact with art without being told what to think. This is all about control. We’ve seen it before in history. Sadly, I thought we’d moved on.” Ofili obtained the elephant dung from the London Zoo. “There’s something incredibly simple but incredibly basic about it,” he said. “It attracts a multiple of meanings and interpretations.” He places clumps of the dung carefully on each canvas. On one a clump of dung is a jeweled brooch encrusted with gold sparkles on a goddess. In another it is an abstract element floating in a densely painted background. In yet another, five balls of dung descend in a line, each with a letter formed from colored pins spelling out the name Rodin. Many of the works rest on two large clumps of dung, which act almost as feet. “It’s a way of raising the paintings up from the ground and giving them a feeling that they’ve come from the earth rather than simply being hung on a wall,” explained the winner of a 1998 Turner Prize for young British artists. {Carol Vogel, “Holding Fast to His Inspiration,” The New York Times, 28 September 1999}
Ogbonna, Dominic I. (20th Century) Ogbonna, a graduate student of philosophy at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, is actively involved with the Nigerian Humanist Movement. Works which he has cited as convincing him not to become a priest are Morton Prince’s Dissociation of Personality, Bertrand Russell’s Skeptical Essays, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and works by Carl Sagan on astronomy.
Ogwurike, Chijioke (20th Century) Dr. Ogwurike, from Nigeria, addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966). He is author of Concept of Law in English-Speaking Africa (1979).
O’Hair, Madalyn Murray (1919–1996?) O’Hair is the activist atheist who triggered the 1963 Supreme Court decision that eliminated prayer in the public schools. Her efforts later blocked Buzz Aldrin from taking communion during the Apollo 11 flight to the moon, and she was instrumental in the striking down of a part of the Texas constitution requiring officeholders to believe in a supreme being. When she refused to take an oath upon being called for jury duty in Austin, Texas, she was jailed. But the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans in a two-to-one ruling found she had been jailed illegally, that jurors who are atheists are not required to swear an oath or any other religion-based premise that might violate their beliefs. “I want to be able to walk down any street in America and not see a cross or a sign of religion,” she has said. “I won’t stop ’til the Pope—or whoever the highest religious authority is—says that atheists have a right to breathe in this world.” Details of her life vary. In her 1970 autobiography, An Atheist Epic, O’Hair revealed that, when twenty-two, she married John Roths. During World War II, he joined the Marines, and she joined the Women’s Army Corps (claiming, in fact, to have been on Eisenhower’s staff). She had a son by an Eighth Army officer, William J. Murray Jr., a wealthy Roman Catholic who denied paternity of the son. She called the son Bill and raised him. Divorcing Roths, she attended South Texas College of Law, dabbled in Communism and socialism, then had another son, Jon Garth. She married an ex-FBI informer, a hard drinker by the name of Richard O’Hair. They lived in Texas with Bill and Bill’s daughter Robin, who had been born in Hawaii in 1965. “Basically,” her son Bill told Mimi Swartz in a 1997 interview, “this family was so dysfunctional anything could have happened. . . . She was a Marxist, I was a laissez-faireist.” In his 1982 My Life Without God, he detailed his differences with his mother and told of her hatred for her father. Madalyn, he revealed, once asked him to murder the old man. Murray, now a “born-again” Christian, runs a Texas ministry called the William Murray Faith Foundation, one which favors “pro-life, pro-family, anti-violence, anti-pornography, and creation science.” With Bill gone from her family, the trinity of atheism became Madalyn, Jon, and Robin. They set up as many as twelve organizations, including the American Atheists and the Society of Separationists. Also, there were the American Atheist General Headquarters, the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library and Archives, Inc., and United World Atheists. Her organizations received funds from around the nation, and numerous atheist chapters formed. In the late 1970s she claimed 70,000 families were on the mailing list of American Atheists. In her childhood, O’Hair said she picked up the Bible “and read it from cover to cover one weekend—just as if it were a novel—very rapidly and I’ve never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism. . . . I looked in the kitchen at my mother and father and I thought, Can they really believe in all that?” Of her many critics, Jane Kathryn Conrad was one of the most outspoken. She published a highly critical pamphlet, “Mad Madalyn,” divulging that Madalyn’s father had keeled over the night after the morning she told him to drop dead. Conrad provided other details, alleging that Madalyn received her Ph. D. from a mail order school called the Minnesota Institute of Philosophy, one that was operated by an atheist. Conrad described how Madalyn allegedly mistreated her second husband, O’Hair. And Madalyn’s atheism, Conrad claimed, actually was entirely a business-oriented entity, adding that Madalyn skimmed cash from contributions, fought with absolutely everyone and trusted no one, liked homosexuals only if they contributed money (and accused one of trying “to make a gay Atheist a day”), arranged for about fifty or sixty wills with a value of about $3 million to develop a Center, did not comply with the terms of gifts made to the Center enjoyed expensive travels, and enjoyed telling tasteless stories about Jews, Christians, and humanists. (Angry that James Hervey Johnson was not going to bequeath over $15 million to her, she wrote him, “You are a dying, defunct, discredited old man who will grow moldy in an unmarked grave.” He never gave in to her.) To one of her homosexual associates who complained to her, she said, “I would expect this kind of literature to issue from a misogomist [sic]. I am a female head of an American atheist group. You are a sock-sucker.” Certainly she achieved journalists’ attention. In a 1965 Playboy interview she said, concerning sex, “I need somebody who can . . . slug it out, toe to toe, and I don’t mean a physical battle. I mean a man who would lay me, and when he was done I’d say ‘Oh brother, I’ve been laid.’ . . . . You think I’ve got wild ideas about sex? Think of those poor old dried up women lying there on their solitary pallets yearning for Christ to come to them in a vision.” When a believer challenged her to explain how she could possibly have been born without God’s help, Madalyn retorted, “My mother and father were fucking in bed one night.” In her Why I Am An Atheist, O’Hair wrote, “Is mankind advanced or retarded by faith in god? Well, if history, with the crimes of the Inquisition, with the crusades, with all the religious wars, if this does not answer the question, we could demolish it by asking if a belief in Santa Claus would not do just as well. . . . Religion has caused more misery to all men in every stage of human history than any other single idea.” In a 1990 speech, she declared, “Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason, and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education, and science to take over.” Barbara Bernstein, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Nassau Chapter, has pointed out that O’Hair had no role in the school prayer decision of 1962, despite journalistic accounts to the contrary. “That 8-to-1 ruling in Engel v. Vitale,” Bernstein declared, “was a result of a suit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of five families in New Hyde Park, N.Y., who objected to a prayer composed by state officials for daily recitation. The Court ruled that even a nondenominational prayer was religious and that ‘it is no part of the business of government to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite.” Another critic, Lawrence Wright, wrote in Saints and Sinners (1993) that O’Hair is a liar and a highly frightened person. She resembles, he said, “a bowling ball looking for new pins to scatter.” Her critics as well as her supporters, in short, are numerous and include many whom she “excommunicated.” From 1962 to 1964, O’Hair edited Free Humanist and was briefly on the board of the American Humanist Association. In 1976, she wrote the present author concerning humanism,
The [Naturalistic] Humanists deserve one another. I know that group and know them well. I don’t want any part of the warped thinking that goes on with them.
Phil Donahue invited her to be on the first episode of his pioneering talk show, and she was on many other talk-shows, saying such things as
I love a good fight. I guess fighting God and God’s spokesmen is sort of the ultimate, isn’t it?
and
We have to live now. No one gets a second chance. There is no heaven and no hell. . . . You either make the best or the worst of what you have now, or there is nothing. Laugh at it. Hug it to you. Drain it. Build it. Have it.
Orin “Spike” Tyson said of her, “She went out in public and made it acceptable to at least say the A word. She put it on the map. One of O’Hair’s provocative works was All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists, With All the Answers (1986). Long the editor of American Atheist, she was succeeded by Robin Murray-O’Hair, but the financial problems continued, the Internal Revenue Service investigated the various associations, and Madalyn eventually cut all ties with the atheist chapters she had worked to form. At a 1993 Atheist Convention in Sacramento, O’Hair was televised on C-Span for national coverage. She spoke on behalf of atheism’s being taught in schools and lamented the hold on education which organized religion has had over the years. Mysteriously, O’Hair simply disappeared from public view in 1996. Left unanswered was whether she was kidnapped, killed, or had hidden because of her health, fiscal, or legal problems. An ex-employee, David Travis, has claimed that he accidentally opened an envelope from New Zealand Guardian Trust that contained a bank statement showing more than $900,000 had been deposited. Meanwhile, the San Antonio Express-News in December 1996 revealed that the United Secularists of America and American Atheists Inc. listed $627,500 in missing assets, “assets believed to be in the possession of Jon Murray, former secretary.” Mimi Swartz in Vanity Fair (March 1997) wrote that Madalyn and Robin were spotted near the end of 1996 in Auckland, close to the New Zealand Guardian Trust, and that a receptionist identified Madalyn as a client. Schwartz concluded, “If the Murray O’Hairs are not in Auckland, they are most likely close by, or certainly have been in the past.” However, The New Zealand Herald claimed the O’Hairs were not in New Zealand as of January 1997, and Ellen Johnson claimed their passports were still in the United States on her desk. In 1998, however, son Jon believed his mother and Robin had been forcibly taken from their home—they had left an unfinished meal and pets. For some reason $500,000 was spent on gold coins at the time of their disappearance. Police were said to be looking into a possible link that Danny Fry may have had in their disappearance, for he disappeared at about the same time. Fry’s nude, headless, and handless body was found in 1995 east of Dallas, Texas. In a 1999 breakthrough, two of the office managers—Gary P. Karr, a former convict who previously had been an accessory to four homicides in Texas including one in which a corpse was mutilated; and David Waters—were arrested. They were suspected of being part of a plot to rob and murder Ms. O’Hair. A lawyer representing Waters, however, said that although Waters had served several years in an Illinois penitentiary on a murder conviction and later had pleaded guilty in 1994 to having stolen $54,000 from American Atheists Inc., he did not have the $500,000 in gold coins that belonged to the O’Hair family, that in fact Waters was about to be evicted from his apartment because of lack of funds. Karr admitted to helping to dispose of four homicide victims in Texas, including one with its head and hands hacked off. Karr and Waters were indicted, but the case remains unsolved. Until the three bodies can be located—those of O’Hair, her son Jon Murray, and her granddaughter Robin Murray—the case as of the end of 1999 had not been closed. “I have told Jon and Robin,” Madalyn O’Hair was quoted in a 1986 atheist newspaper, “that when I die they should gather me up in a sheet, unwashed . . . and put me on a pyre in the back yard. . . . I don’t want any damn Christer praying over the body. . . . I don’t want some religious nut to shove a rosary up the ass of my body.” (Assuming Madalyn did die, some jokers in her American Atheists group, whose membership dipped to 2,400 from 50,000 or more, began making bets as to the date of her “Second Coming.” See entries for John Vinson, the lawyer O’Hair allegedly bankrupted, for David Travis, and for Ellen Johnson. Also, see entries for Jon Garth Murray; and for Arnold Via, the last to see Madalyn before her disappearance.) {CA; E; EU, Gordon Stein; FUS; PA; The New York Times, 26 March 1999; Time, 10 February 1997; TYD; Vanity Fair, March 1997; WAS, 21 January 1976}
O’Hair, Richard (20th Century): For the second husband of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, see entry for her.
O’Hair, Robin (1965–1996?): See entry for Robin Murray-O’Hair.
O’Hara, Daniel (20th Century) O’Hara, a former Anglican curate (1968–1970), is a past president of the National Secular Society (1996–1997) and of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. He is a member of the South Place Ethical Society and the British Humanist Association. In addition, he has been on the Board of the Rationalist Press Association, resigning as director in 1998. He writes for England’s New Humanist and The Freethinker. O’Hara has estimated that, worldwide, in 1996, “Humanists in the modern sense would probably be far short of one million, whereas those who identify as Christians well exceed one billion.” He holds that non-believers have an excellent record despite their small size for contributing to the relief of ignorance, poverty, and disease. {The Freethinker, May and December 1996}
O’Hara, Frank (1926–1966) An American poet of note, O’Hara founded the Poet’s Theatre and later the center of the New York School of Poets. Collected Poems (1971) is his best-known work, but also he was a major art critic during the late 1950s and early 1960s. His poetry contains subjects and images frequently drawn from the world of urban gay male culture. “Biotherm (For Bill Berkson)” is a collage which combines scenes of Fire Island, restaurant menus, and classic Hollywood cinema. The cognoscenti recognized the title as a reference to a sunscreen brand name. O’Hara’s influence upon gay poetry was great, as was his taste for liver-damaging liquor. O’Hara was killed when his Fire Island dune buggy was struck by a twenty-three-year-old summer worker taking a joyride with a young woman. He died intestate, whereupon Kenneth Koch arrived at his apartment with two suitcases “to get the poems to make sure nothing happens to them,” which he managed to do. Those who attended the funeral were concerned that the sixty-year-old Scottish pastor from a Presbyterian church in East Hampton, who did not know O’Hara, would turn the event into a religious ceremony, but he did not. O’Hara’s lovers included Larry Rivers; Joe Le Sueur; Lawrence Osgood; and John Ashberry. O’Hara, a renegade Catholic of an extreme sort, once wrote, “It’s well-known that God and I don’t get along together.” (O’Hara was reportedly concerned about his impotence, a fact the present author confirmed following a drinking bout at New York’s Golden Pheasant on 48th Street in the 1950s.) {CE; GL}
O’Higgins, Bernardo [General] (1778–1842) A Chilean soldier and statesman, O’Higgins was the illegitimate son of Marquis O’Higgins, an Irish Catholic who settled in South America and was Governor of Chile for the Spaniards. A revolutionary leader chosen to replace José Miguel Carrera, O’Higgins lost a battle at Rancagua and fled with the remnant of his army to Argentina, where he joined forces with San Martín. The combined forces defeated the Spaniards at Chacabuco, and O’Higgins was named supreme director of Chile, whose independence he proclaimed in 1818. In 1823, after his financial reforms aroused much opposition, he was deposed and exiled to Peru, where he died. Like his friend General Miranda, General O’Higgins was an atheist. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
O’Higgins, James (20th Century) O’Higgins wrote Anthony Collins: The Man and His Works (1970). {FUK; GS}
OHIO HUMANISTS, ATHEISTS • American Atheist TV Forum, Columbus, Ohio. Contact is Frank Zindler, who hosts a program on Channel 21. • Ann B. Pratt founded Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry. • Dial An Atheist, Columbus, Ohio, has the telephone (614) 294-0300. • Free Inquirers of Northestern Ohio (ASHS), PO Box 2379, Akron, Ohio 44309; (330) 869-2025. Brent Bowen is President. Web: <http://home.neo.lrun.com/fino/home.html>. E-mail: <mvye@uakron.edu>. • Free Inquiry Group (ASHS), POB 8128, Cincinnati, Ohio 45208. (513) 557-3836. George Maurer and Joe Levee are contacts: <joelevee@aol.com>. Web: <http://gofigger.org/>. • Freethought Perspective, 833 Orchard St., Toledo, Ohio 43609 • Humanist Association of Ohio (ASHS), 2637 Home Acre Dr., Columbus, OH 43231; (614) 890-0653. Earl Wurdlow is the contact. • Humanist Chapter of Miami Valley (AHA), A-4, 809 McCleary, Dayton, Ohio 45406. Karen A. Price is the contact. • Humanist Community of Central Ohio (AHA), POB 141383, Columbus, Ohio 43214. Derrick Strobl is President. Phone: (614) 470-0811. Larry Reyka is the coordinator of the north central region of the AHA. E-mail: <info@hcco.org>. Web: <http://www.hcco.org/>. • Humanists of Northwest Ohio (AHA), 4126 Nantucket Drive, Toledo, Ohio 43623. Phyllis C. Cauffiel is the contact. • Oberlin College Freethought Alliance Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Ohio State University’s Students for Freethought are on the Web at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY FREETHINKERS Students for Freethought at Ohio State University are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Ohlinger, F. W. (20th Century) Ohlinger wrote “Natural Religion or Revealed Religion” (1924). {GS}
Öhrwall, Hjalmar (1851–1929) Öhrwall, a professor of physiology at Uppsala in Sweden, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
O’Keefe, J. A. (19th Century) O’Keefe was educated in Germany and was the author of an essay, “On the Progress of the Human Understanding” (1795), in which he speaks disparagingly of Christianity. O’Keefe was a follower of Kant and in 1816 was listed in Living Authors of Great Britain. {BDF}
O’Kelly, Edmund de Pentheny (19th Century) O’Kelly wrote Consciousness, or the Age of Reason (1853); Theological Papers, which Holyoake published; and Theology for the People (1855), a series of short papers suggestive of religious theism. {BDF}
Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851) Oken was a German morphologist and philosopher. In his Sketch of Natural Philosophy (1802), he advanced a scheme of evolution. He developed his system in Generation (1805) and in A Manual of Natural Philosophy (1809). Oken was a professor at Jena but was dismissed because of his liberal views. From 1817 to 1848 he edited Isis, a scientific journal. In 1832 he became a professor at Zürich, where he died. Oken shared the philosophical pantheism of Schelling. {BDF; RAT; RE}
OKLAHOMA HUMANISTS • Humanist Association of Tulsa (AHA), POB 904182, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74105; Dan Nerren is President. (918) 742-8826. On the Web: <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8666/>. E-mail: <gphil@ix.netcom.co>. • Humanist Society of Payne County (AHA), Route 1, Box 656-2, 617 North Washington Street, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74075. Phone (405) 372-2381. Dr. Harry K. Brobst is the contact. E-mail: <102651.3373@compuserve.com>. • Humanists of Central Oklahoma (AHA), POB 94043, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73143. Frank Titus is the contact. • Oklahoma Atheists, PO Box 23022, Oklahoma City, OK73123.
OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY The student group at Oklahoma State University is on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
OLD AGE • Strength of body, and that character of countenance which the French term physionomie, women do not acquire before thirty, any more than men. –Mary Wollstonecraft
• I have everything now I had twenty years ago . . . except now it’s all lower. –Gypsy Rose Lee
• The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.
–H. L. Mencken
• A man is as old as the woman he feels. –Groucho Marx
• Did you ever see a hearse with a luggage rack on top? –Fernando Vargas, asked why he was not saving up for his old age
OLD TESTAMENT Strict Jews are said to say “Hebrew Bible” rather than Old Testament. However, parts of that collection are written in Aramaic, not Hebrew. Meanwhile, others use “Tanakh,” an acronym for the three divisions: Torah (the five books of Moses); Nebiim (the books of the prophets); and Ketubim (other sacred writings).
Oldfield, Josiah (20th Century) A physician and reformer, Oldfield founded the Humanitarian Hospital of St. Francis at London. He also founded the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (1901) and raised and commanded a casualty Clearing Station and a Field Ambulance during World War I. In the compilation Do We Believe? (1905), he wrote, “We all need a wider conception [than the Christian] of God as the basis of our creed.” Oldfield was a theist and had mystic ideas about the soul. {RAT}
Oldham, J. H. (20th Century) Oldham, a theist, wrote Christian Humanism (1944).
Oldiges, Elizabeth (20th Century) Oldiges is a former president of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Free Inquiry Group. She is an active participant in the humanistic Camp Quest.
Olmstead, Clifton F. (20th Century) Olmstead wrote History of Religion in the United States (1960). {GS}
Olds, Mason (20th Century) Olds, of the Department of Humanities at Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts, is editor of the journal, Religious Humanism. Olds wrote American Religious Humanism (1996), in which he explained that religious humanists are not theists. He avers that religious humanists constitute the largest percentage of organizationally active humanists in the United States, a fact that many secular humanists say is unsupported.
Olds, Nettie (19th Century) Olds succeeded Katie Smith as director of the First Secular Church in Portland. She wrote The Truth Seeker (26 January 1895), “Secularism must be built upon the social plain . . . . Enlist the young in our ranks and the Christian churches will be compelled to go out of business for want of converts.” {WWS}
Olincy, Dan (20th Century) Olincy is a tax and estate planning attorney in Los Angeles. He is a former chairman of the California State Bar Tax Committee. He has written for Free Inquiry.
Olincy, George (20th Century) A lawyer, Olincy is a Humanist Laureate and a member of the Academy of Humanism. {SHD}
Olincy, Virginia (20th Century) The wife of George Olincy, Virginia Olincy is active in secular humanist causes. {SHD}
Oliphant, Marcus Laurance Elwin [Sir] (1901– ) Oliphant is an Australian physicist and humanist. He worked with the Manhattan Nuclear Weapons Project in the United States during 1943 to 1945 but has since campaigned for the peaceful use of atomic energy and against the secrecy surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. Oliphant is an outspoken advocate of voluntary euthanasia and other social issues. {SWW}
Oliver, Henry (1820?–1900?)
Oliver was an Australian secularist, freethinker, and furniture maker. He helped found the Adelaide Secular and Free Discussion Society in 1876. Oliver edited their Review (1878–1879), and during the 1880s distributed Liberator for the Australian Secular Association. {FUK; SWW}
Oliver, Phillip B. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Oliver was an editorial associate for Humanist World Digest, a Quarterly of Liberal Religion.
Oliver, Robert (20th Century) Oliver reviewed Michael Martin’s The Domino in the Sky and Other Atheistic Tales in New Humanist (November 1997).
Oliver, William (Died 1764) Oliver, a physician who lived in Bath, was accused of atheism and may likely have been a non-theist. {BDF}
Oljelund, Ivan (20th Century) In Sweden, Oljelund wrote Humanismen: Nagra Synpunkter (Humanism: Some Views, 1919), in which he included a Humanist Manifesto.
Olson, Culbert L. [Governor] (1876–1962) Once a Governor of California, Olson was a spokesperson for atheists. He wrote My Views on Religion (1950?), which included the following: • The thousands of gods that man has worshiped are myths born of his fears and his imagination.
• I wouldn’t say that religion has promoted the social progress of mankind. I say that it has been a detriment to the progress of civilization, and I would also say this: that the emancipation of the mind from religious superstition is as essential to the progress of civilization as is emancipation from physical slavery.
• I don’t see how anybody can read the Bible and believe it’s the word of God, or believe that it is anything but a barbarous story of a barbaric people. {GS; TYD}
Olson, Floyd (20th Century) Olson, a retired landscaper, was one of the plaintiffs in Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Ozaukee County, Wisconsin. The suit ended in that county’s abandoning their official Good Friday holy day, and he received the 1998 Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethinker of the Year Award.” {Freethought Today, April 1997}
OLYMPIAN, OLYMPIUS • Olympian, adj. Relating to a mountain in Thessaly, once inhabited by gods, now a repository of yellowing newspapers, beer bottles, and mutilated sardine cans, attesting the presence of the tourist and his appetite. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Mount Olympus, in Greek mythology, had a peak shielded from human view by clouds and which was home of the Olympian gods. Olympus was the name given to the remote heavenly palace of the various gods. The site is located in northern Greece between the regions of Thessaly and Macedonia. Olympia, not to be confused with Olympus, is a city in the southern Greek region of the Peloponnesus. It is a center of the worship of Zeus and was the scene of the Olympic Games. The great temple of Zeus was celebrated for the ivory, gold-adorned statue of Zeus by Phidias, one of the seven wonders of the world. {CE}
Omar Khayyám (Born 18 May 1048) The most famous of Eastern freethinkers, Omar Khayyám came from Khorassan, a province (now in northeast Iran) which had long been known for its rationalism. One of the ablest mathematicians of his age, he designed a calendar which Gibbon has noted surpasses the Julian and approaches the accuracy of the Gregorian calendar. According to Robertson, Omar was anything but devout. One of Omar’s contemporaries wrote, “I did not observe that he had any great belief in astrological predictions; nor have I seen or heard of any of the great (scientists) who had such belief.” He is said to have gone on pilgrimages not from piety but from fear, for he dreaded the hostility that he would receive if his agnosticism was found out. He placed ethic above creed and was given to the praise of wine, which helps explain why he was never very popular in the Moslem world. Many scholars hold that some of the quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyám were actually written by others, individuals who were venting their freethinking without danger of being accused. Edward FitzGerald’s translations include the following:
• The cycle which includes our coming and going Has no discernible beginning nor end; Nobody has got this matter straight, Where we come from and where we go to.
• Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise! One thing at least is certain—this life flies; One thing is certain, and the rest is lies; The flower that once has blown forever dies.
• The moving finger writes, and having writ Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line Nor all the tears wash out a word of it And that inverted bowl we call the sky Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die Lift not your hands to it for help—for it Rolls impotently on as thou and I.
• Ah, Love, could thou and I with fate conspire To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire Would we not shatter it to bits, and then Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire! (See entries for Edward FitzGerald and Pat Duffy Hutcheon) {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Omboni, Giovanni (Born 1829) Omboni was a Lombard naturalist. A professor of geology at Padua, he wrote many scientific works. In 1848 he interrupted his studies to take part in the war against Austria and the Papacy. {BDF; RAT}
OMBUDSMAN FOR HUMANISTS: See the entry for I. Samkelden.
OMNIPOTENCY • I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast. . . . Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.
–Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), “Trees”
• “Trees” [by Kilmer] maddens me, because it contains the most insincere line ever written by mortal man. Surely the Kilmer tongue must have been not far from the Kilmer cheek when he wrote, “Poems are made by fools like me.” –Heywood Broun (1888–1939), It Seems To Me (1935)
• God can create three creatures such that A is taller than B; B is taller than C; and C is, uh, taller than A. –Anonymous
• “In English,” said the professor, “a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, not even God can cite an example in which a double positive can form a negative.” From the back of the classroom someone piped up, “Yeah, right!” –Internet
OMNIPRESENCE In Terrence McNally’s “Corpus Christi,” a drama performed in New York City in 1998, God after conversing with His son announces that He is leaving, at which the character representing Jesus remonstrates,” You are supposed to be everywhere all the time!” Responds God: “That is a very big misunderstanding.”
ONANISM Onan, the son of Judah in Genesis 38:9, “spilled it,” the seed, on the ground. This was the King James translators’ euphemism for “masturbating.” Because “the Lord” was displeased and killed Onan, Jews, Muslims, and Christians cite the chapter and verse to teach that exciting one’s genital organ is enough to send Jill or Jack off to Hell.
The comic, Woody Allen, has countered such irrational nonsense by saying, “Don’t knock masturbation—it’s sex with someone I love.”
ONE NATION UNDER GOD New York Times religion editor Peter Steinfels, writing about what “under God” means, speculated that some kind of alternative might be suitable. Alcoholics Anonymous could say “under a Higher Power.” Mystics could say “inside God” or “suffused with God.” Seekers could say “exploring God.” Christians smitten with prophecies could say “awaiting God.” Some Jews would say “wrestling with God.” Muslims might prefer “surrendering to God.” Steinfels, a theist, prefers “under Judgment.” Freethinkers would omit the meaningless expression entirely.
O’Neill, Eugene Gladstone (1888–1953) O’Neill, a foremost creative playwright of his century, was the son of actor James O’Neill and was born in a New York City hotel room. (A plaque in his honor was mistakenly installed by Mayor Abe Beame and other dignitaries on the same block but at the northeast, rather than the southeast, corner of Manhattan’s 44th and Broadway. Tennessee Williams had arrived at the correct corner before discovering the officials’ mistake.) O’Neill attended a Catholic boarding school and Princeton, hunted for gold and contracted malaria in Honduras (1909), worked for a time in Argentina and South Africa, reported for a Connecticut newspaper, and was confined to a sanatorium for six months because of a physical breakdown. His first play, The Web (1913–1914), was followed by managing with Robert Edmond Jones the Greenwich Village Theatre (1923–1927) and being director of the Provincetown Players. At that 133 MacDougal Street playhouse where his one-act plays were produced, troupes took turns being star, usher, and ticket-taker. O’Neill won Pulitzer prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1921); Strange Interlude (1928); and Long Day’s Journey Into Night (produced 1956). In The Dynamo, O’Neill clearly shows that he had rejected the Catholic faith in which he was reared. He also is known to have been influenced strongly by Schopenhauer. In 1936, O’Neill received the Nobel Prize in literature. O’Neill’s work described the plight of oppressed people in many places; it used stream-of-consciousness, literary realism, naturalism, and (chiefly Freudian) expressionism; The Great God Brown (1926) affirmed a pagan idealism combined with a tragic view of contemporary materialism; Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) adapted a Greek theme and used fate in its theme. The religion-rationalism conflict was taken up in two works: Dynamo (1929) depicts an electrical dynamo which replaces the old God but which destroys its worshippers; and the hero of Days Without End (1934) is irresistibly attracted to Catholicism. The Iceman Cometh (1946) is deliberately pessimistic, presenting man as possessor merely of hopeless illusions and the certainty of death. Of his various works, Long Day’s Journey into Night is the most autobiographical, describing as it does his addictive mother who was an ex-matinée idol, his drunk brother, and himself Freudianly depicted as trapped in such a brooding family. In 1953, suffering from a disease that affected the coordination between the nerves and the muscles, which was leading to a steady deterioration of his bodily functions, O’Neill on several occasions informed his wife Carlotta that he was going to jump from his hotel window into the Charles River, which flowed below. According to biographer Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill about two months before his death told his wife, “When I’m dying, don’t let a priest or Protestant minister or Salvation Army captain near me. Let me die in dignity. Keep it as simple and brief as possible. No fuss, no man of God there. If there is a God, I’ll see him and we’ll talk things over.” At the end of November, an infection set in and close to the end O’Neill cried out, “I knew it! I knew it! Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it, dying in a hotel room!” {CE; JM; TYD}
Onimus, Ernest Nicolas Joseph (Born 1840) Onimus was a French positivist. He studied medicine at Strasburg and Paris, and he wrote a treatise on The Dynamical Theory of Heat in Biological Science (1866). In 1873 he was one of the jury of the Vienna Exhibition and obtained the Cross of the Legion of Honor. Onimus wrote Psychology in the Plays of Shakespeare (1878) and has written in periodicals including Revue Positive. {BDF}
ONION • Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep. –Carl Sandburg
ONION Onion is an American Midwest publication. It is one of the few that regularly deals satirically with religion. In one issue is what appears to be a heartwarming story about a little paralyzed boy who prays for recovery. However, the sub-heading of the story is “NO,” SAYS GOD. Another story:
VANIMO, PAPUA NEW GUINEA—In His first official statement since the July 17 tsunami that claimed the lives of an estimated 3,000 Papua New Guineans, the Lord announced Monday that He killed the island villagers as part of His longtime “moving in ysterious ways” policy, calling the natural disaster “part of My unknowable, divine plan for mankind.”
Similar stories in the Wisconsin publication concern the unmerited suffering in a world supposedly ruled by a beneficent Providence. Other satirical accounts are illustrated by such as the following headlines: DRUGS WIN DRUG WAR, about public-policy shortfalls; FROG WITH HUMAN HEAD WARNS AGAINST DANGERS OF GENETIC ENGINEERING, about the era of scientific wonders; ANIMAL-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS RELEASE 71,000 COWS INTO WILD, about activists. In addition to publishing on paper, Onion is found on the Web: <http://www.theonion.com>. {Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, 10 May 1999}
ONTOLOGY Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that is concerned with the nature and relations of being. The ontological argument is an argument for the existence of God based upon the meaning of the term God. Logical positivists, however, use the verifiability principle to show the meaningless of ontological arguments. A thing cannot be proved by its definition, they hold. A centaur can be defined and even depicted as being a creature which is half man and half horse; however, centaurs do not “exist.” To define God as “the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness whom men worship as creator and ruler of the universe” does not prove that God “exists,” for according to the verifiability principle there is nothing to test. A carrot, a triangle, and a dog all “exist,” for they are subjects, not predicates. But “God exists and is all-powerful” is not grammatically similar to “Carrots exist and are red.” As illustrated by Paul Edwards in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy (1973), “Since existence is not a characteristic or quality it follows that it cannot be part of any concept. It cannot be part of the concept of God any more than of the concept of cat or gangle (a coinage). It may well be true that God exists, but this conclusion cannot be derived from the concept of the all-perfect Being any more than the existence of centaurs or hippogriffs (a coinage) or leprechauns could be deduced from an analysis of the corresponding concepts. It has also been pointed out that if the ontological argument were sound we could, with equal justice, prove the existence of a perfect scientist, a perfect singer, and any other number of perfect beings. This alone is sufficient to indicate that there is something drastically wrong with the ontological argument.” (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) {CE; ER}
“ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS” Words for the popular hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1865), by the Anglican Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), were revised in 1908 by the Unitarian minister Frederick Lucian Hosmer (1840–1929) to “Forward through the ages/in unbroken line/move the faithful spirits/at the call divine.” Freethinkers with a pacifist leaning lean to changing the words still further . . . to “Backward, Christian Soldiers.”
Oort, Henricus (Born 1836) Oort was a Dutch rationalist who studied theology at Leyden. Among his many works are The Worship of Baalim in Israel (1865) and The Bible for Young People, written with Drs. Hooykaas and Kuenen (1873–1879). {BDF}
OPEN COURT Open Court was a liberal periodical published in Chicago as a monthly (1887–1933) and a quarterly (1934–1936). After its first editor, B. F. Underwood, Paul Carus was its editor for most of his life. Open Court remains a noted publishing house. {FUS}
Oppenheim, Josie (19th Century) A freethinker, Oppenheim wrote Personal Immortality and Other Papers (1877). {GS}
Oppenheimer, David (1914–1991) In 1986, Oppenheimer was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. A distinguished neuropathologist, a gifted musician, and a rationalist, he has written music for productions of Oedipus and Alcestis, and he co-writer with Margaret Esiri the Diagnostic Neuropathology (1989). {CE}
Oppert, Julius (1825–1905) Oppert, a French-Jewish Orientalist, felt there was no career for a Jew in Germany, then settled in France. He shared with Rawlinson (another rationalist) the honor of having found the key to the cuneiform characters in Mesopatamia. He was appointed professor of Sanskrit, later of Assyrian philology and archaeology, at Paris University. In his youth, he abandoned the Jewish faith and never adopted any other. {RAT; RE}
Oppy, Graham (20th Century) Oppy, an Australian, is a contributing editor on Philo and a supporter of Internet Infidels.
OPTIMISM • Optimism is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong. –Voltaire
• Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly. –Ambrose Bierce
• The basis of optimism is sheer terror. –Oscar Wilde
• The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist knows it.
–J. Robert Oppenheimer
Orage, Alfred Richard (1873–1934) Orage was editor of the New Age. He wrote several sympathetic works on Nietzsche. {RAT}
ORATORY: See the entry for Edward Everett concerning epitaphios, epainesis, and parainesis.
Orbok, Ilona St. Ivanyi (20th Century) Orbok is Deputy Bishop of the Unitarian Church in Budapest. (See entry for Hungarian Unitarians.)
OREGON HUMANISTS, RATIONALISTS • Center For Rational Thought, 415 SW 13th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 05826. Lanny Swerdlow is the president; telephone (503) 241-9268 • Corvallis Secular Society (ASHS), 126 N.W. 21st Street, Corvallis, Oregon 97330; telephone (503) 754-2557. E-mail addresses: <byersr@peak.org>and <dearing@peak.org>. Web: <http://css.peak.org/>. • Family of Humanists (AHA, IHEU), POB 4153, Salem, Oregon 97302. Devin Carroll is president and Lloyd Kumley is editor of the chapter newsletter. (503) 391-6810. On the Web: <http://www.teleport.com/~lloydk/ humanist.htm> and <lloydk@teleport.com>. • Humanist Association of Salem (ASHS), PO Box 4153, Salem, OR 97302; (503) 371-1255. Lloyd Kumley is President. E-mail: <lloydk@teleport.com>. On the Web: <www.teleport.com/~lloydk/humanist.htm>.
•Humanists of Portland-Vancouver Metro Area (AHA), POB 3936, Portland, Oregon 97208. Pat Burnet is the contact. Ellis Dunn has succeeded Don Baham as president. E-mail: <kerflouie@aol.com>. On the Web: <www.teleport.com/~brownd/humanist.html>.
• Humanists of Rogue Valley (AHA), POB 648, Talent, Oregon 97540. Phone: (503) 535-2723. Roy Kindell is President. . • Oregon State University at Corvallis has a Society for Logic and Reason. On the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html> and <http://osu.orst.edu/groups/slr>. President is Daisy Peel. • University of Oregon’s Students for Freedom From Religion is on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Orelli, Johann Kaspar von (1789–1849) Orelli was a learned Swiss critic. He edited many classics and wrote letters in favor of Strauss at a time when there was an outcry at his being appointed professor of Zürich. {BDF; RAT}
Orendorff, Charles (19th Century) Orendorff wrote The Pantheist (1865). {GS}
Orense, José Maria [Marquis d’Albaida] (1800–1880) A soldier of a noble family, Orense took part in the struggle against the Church and despotism, for which he was expelled from Spain several times. After the Revolution of 1868, he became President of the Cortes. For many years he was the leader of the anti-clericals and was heavily denounced by the Church. {RAT; RE}
Origen (Origines Adamantius) (185?–254?) Origen, the Christian who cut off his own penis, declared that he did so out of his Christian zeal for purity. He was not allowed to be ordained as a priest, but the famed ascetic, philosopher, and Egyptian-born scholar was allowed to preach. His lectures won him wide acclaim, and around 230 the bishops of Jerusalem and Caesarea ordained him. However, his own bishop, Demetrius, banished him and ordered him deposed. In 231 Origen founded in Alexandria the Catechetical School, one of his pupils being St. Gregory Thaumaturgus. Around 250, during the persecution of Decius, Origen was put in prison, tortured, and pilloried. He died soon after being released. Origen knew Greek philosophy and wrote, according to St. Jerome, eight hundred works, in some of which he attempted to synthesize the fundamental principles of Greek philosophy, particularly those of neoplatonism and stoicism, with the Christianity of creed and Scripture. This, he held, proved the Christian view of the universe to be compatible with Greek thought. Because he blended pagan philosophy with Christian theology, he was condemned by Justinian in the Monophysite controversy. Origen has been called the “grandfather” of Arianism (the castrated grandfather, some hasten to add), and his thinking led to the idea of an eternal and immanent Trinity. {CE; ER}
ORIGIN OF LIFE: See entries for Genesis and for RNA.
“Origin of the World” Most freethinkers, rather than finding the work of French painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) repulsive or offensive—the Louvre has his controversial “Wounded Man”—particularly have appreciated his “Origin of the World.” A provocative study of a woman with her legs spread, the work was owned by the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan.
ORIGINAL SIN Original sin is a quaint theological device to explain what is called “the graceless nature of man requiring redemption to save himself.” Christian theology generally has sought to derive sin from man’s abuse of the freedom with which he was created. But how to explain man’s ability to misuse his freedom so that as a sinner he will set himself against God? The answer is given in the doctrine of peccatum originis, original sin, or the sin which caused Adam’s fall from God’s grace and his expulsion from paradise, which meant that the sin was transmitted from generation to generation and all of Adam’s descendants must be regarded as being of a “perverted” or “depraved” nature. Such an interpretation, given by the apostle Paul, worked its way into Christian thinking, and to rid oneself of sin it was necessary to be baptized. Baptism washed away the original sin and restored man to his innocent state, except that after baptism original sin still leaves a tendency to sin. The German term, Erbsunde, is more explanatory than the English one, for it means “inherited sin.” For challenging the basic Roman Catholic belief about original sin, the Rev. Tissa Balasuriya in Sri Lanka was excommunicated in 1997 for his “relativism.” One Manhattanite reports that Original Sin is his favorite drink—it is a hard cider which contains 6% alcohol and is distributed by New York Beverages (Telephone: (212) 874-3381). (See entry for Robert Gorham Davis, who has a negative criticism of Original Sin. Also see entries for Catholic Relativism and Bernard Vonnegut.) {CE; DCL; ER}
ORIGINAL VIRTUE: See entry for Bernard Vonnegut.
Orme, Richard McAllister (1797–1869) With the Rev. David Devine, Orme wrote David Devine and the Devil; or the Devil in His Own Defence (1894). {GS}
Ormsby, R.K.M. (19th Century) Ormsby edited from Kentucky in 1838 the Louisville Skeptic.
Orozco, José Clemente (1883–1949) A Mexican muralist who “concentrated on Humanist themes,” according to Corliss Lamont, Orozco was a genre painter. At New York’s New School for Social Research, he completed true fresco painting, executed directly on the wet plaster. In 1923 he completed a controversial mural entitled “Christ Destroying His Cross.” His other work includes Prometheus (1930), at Frary Hall, Pomona College, California, and mural paintings in the university at Guadalajara. Much of his work illustrates the theme of man versus machine. In Mexico, Orozco was one of the leaders of the Mexican resistance and, with Rivera, one of the leaders of Mexican renaissance. {CE; CL}
Orr: See entry for Boyd Orr, John.
Orr, Hugh Robert (20th Century) Orr edited Progressive World, a bi-monthly of the United Secularists of America from 1947 to 1981. Upon his death, his wife, Frances Orr, became editor. {FUS}
Orr, M. A. (19th Century) A freethinker, Orr wrote “Two Letters Addressed to the Bishop of Repos” (1876). {GS}
Orr, Robert (20th Century) Orr has been an activist member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
ORTHODOX CHURCH IN AMERICA
The Orthodox Church in America, an Eastern Orthodox church organized in 1794, is at PO Box 675, Syoset, New York 11791.
ORTHODOX JEWISH CONGREGATIONS IN AMERICA The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations in America is at 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001.
ORTHODOXY • Orthodox, n. An ox wearing the popular religious yoke. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Orthodoxy refers to “correctness” of religious belief according to some arbitrary, authoritative standard. Unlike heterodoxy, in which an individual chooses to be at odds with the accepted or authoritative view, orthodoxy conforms to the official formulation of truth. To choose otherwise would be heretical. Orthodox Judaism, according to Rabbi D. de Sola Pool of Shearith Israel in New York City, involves “the total Jewish tradition of living as determined by the basic Pentateuchal code of Moses, amplified by three thousand years of Jewish life in Biblical and post-Biblical ages.” Orthodox Jews, for example, do not “violate the Sabbath.” They cannot use hotel keys but can use electronic card-keys to enter their rooms. Not at all interested in assimilating, the men sport tzitzis, the fringes to remind him of his 613 religious obligations. Women even on college campuses are seen with skirts worn to the ankle and sleeves to the wrist. Roman Catholicism, with its dogma as defined by the Church in its creeds and by the deliverances of the Pope, is such that all its members—whether liberal, conservative, radical, reactionary, saints or sinners—are orthodox. Otherwise, they would be charged with heresy or excommunicated. Trinitarian Protestants look upon themselves as orthodox with respect to Unitarians. The Christ was heterodox, according to Boston University School of Theology’s Francis Gerald Ensley, “with respect to the Judaism of his day and yet was to become the founder of a new orthodoxy.” Orthodoxy varies depending upon the time—what is heterodox at one period may be orthodox in a later one. (See entries for Jews and for Judaism.) {ER}
Ortmann, Arnold Edward (Born 1863) Ortmann was an American zoologist born in Magdeburg. After serving in the German army (1882–1883), he made a zoological and paleontological scientific expedition to Zanzibar. In 1894 he migrated to the United States, becoming curator of invertebrate paleontology at Princeton. In 1899 he was a member of the Princeton Arctic Exhibition, and he was associate editor of The American Naturalist. In Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken, Ortmann told that he had never departed from the teaching of his old master at Jena. {RAT}
Orwell, George (pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair) (1903–1950) A British novelist born in India, Orwell is remembered for his satirical novels, Animal Farm (1946), about the failure of communism, and Nineteen Eighty- Four (1949), a prophetic work which describes the dehumanization of man in a time when sociopolitical conditions are making human freedom difficult to achieve. Orwell’s fiction deals with the problems of human freedom. He was seriously wounded in 1936, fighting with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In Sweden, his Essays were published by the Verdandi Students’ Association and Hjalmar Öhrwall, included along with Claes-Adam Wachtmeister’s The Atheist Manual. Arthur C. Danto has commented on Animal Farm’s symbolism:
“A Fairy Story” is Orwell’s subtitle for the book, and it is made to order for a certain kind of illustration in which pigs can be shown as ridiculous, taking on more and more human attributes; and as evil, since they can, with a few wicked touches, serve as caricatures of various easily represented figures in Soviet history, which Orwell in part meant as the target of his allegory. The proportion that Orwell quite clearly had in mind—Soviet dictators are to human beings as human beings are to animals—makes Animal Farm a pessimistic book only if dictatorship is the inevitable result of political revolution, and if, again, revolutions are inevitably, as the word implies, circular. Orwell’s message was not to beware of revolution but to watch out for the pigs, who may try to take it over. Even then, had the animals’ revolution fallen into the hands of Snowball [the Trotsky figure] rather than the Stalin character in the book [Napoleon]—life might have been as rosy as its promise in the speech of old Major [the utopian idealist], which ignited the misanthropy and the discontent of the proletarian beasts who made the revolution and endured its bitter consequences.
One character in Animal Farm is Moses, the tame raven who represents Orwell’s satirical view of organized religion in dictatorships:
Moses, who was Mr. Jones’s especial pet, was a spy and a tale-bearer, but he was also a clever talker. He claimed to know of the existence of a mysterious country called Sugarcandy Mountain, to which all animals went when they died. It was situated somewhere up in the sky, a little distance beyond the clouds, Moses said. In Sugarcandy Mountain it was Sunday seven days a week, clover was in season all the year round and lump sugar and linseed cake grew on the hedgerows. The animals hated Moses because he told tales and did no work, but some of them believed in Sugarcandy Mountain, and the pigs had to argue very hard to persuade them that there was no such place.
Orwell has been criticized for having provided names of suspected Communists to M16, the Secret Intelligence Service. He also was on record for his suspicions of Jews: Deutscher (Polish Jew); Driberg, Tom (English Jew); Chaplin, Charles (Jewish?); homosexuals (“pansies”); blacks (Paul Robeson, “very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter”); vegetarians, peaceniks, women in tweed skirts and, in Alexander Cockburn’s words, “others athwart the British Way.”). Although he was not a member of the British Humanist Association, he is generally revered by rationalists, freethinkers, and secular humanists. He reviewed some Rationalist Press Association books, but Anatole France’s and Mark Twain’s books he found to have been written by “bigoted atheists.” Nietzsche was right, he wrote in 1940, about Christianity: “You can smell it—it stinks.” In one of his notebooks, not published until after his death, Orwell wrote, “Recently I was reading somewhere or other [about] an Italian curio-dealer who attempted to sell a 17th-century crucifix to J. P. Morgan. Inside it was concealed a stiletto. What a perfect symbol of the Christian religion.” Timothy Garton Ash, reviewing The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 volumes, edited by Peter Davison, 1998), commented upon Orwell’s Englishness, his love of what the English poet Craig Raine “memorably calls ‘the beauty of facts.’ If he had a God, it was Kipling’s ‘the God of Things as They are.’ ” Koestler called Orwell a “reverent atheist.” Bernard Crick called him “a clear Humanist, even a Rationalist with a pronounced anti-Catholicism, even though one with an ironic attachment to the liturgy, the humane political compromises and the traditions of the Church of England.” Flew wrote that “anyone seeking a paradigm of Humanist values can scarcely do better than to look to Orwell.” “I direct that my body shall be buried (not cremated) according to the rites of the Church of England in the nearest convenient cemetery,” he wrote in a will made three days before his death. “Here,” wrote Nicolas Walter, “Orwell follows the familiar pattern of so many freethinkers who were brought up in the Church of England, may have lost all belief in its doctrines and all respect for its practices, but still keep a nostalgic affection for the Authorised Version of the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, and Humans Ancient and Modern.” {Timothy Garton Ash, “Orwell in 1988,” New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; CE; Arthur C. Danto, “ ‘Animal Farm’ at 50,” New York Times Book Review, 14 April 1996; TRI; TYD; Walter, New Humanist, December 1998}
Ory, Georges (20th Century) Ory wrote An Analysis of Christian Origins (1961) and A La Recherche des Esseniens (1975). {GS}
Osborn, Reuben (20th Century) Osborn wrote Humanism and Moral Theory (1970), a humanistic work.
Osborne, Francis (1589–1659) An English writer, Osborne was an adherent of Cromwell in the Civil War. His Advice to A Son (1656) was popular though much censured by the Puritans, who complained and proposed that the works be burned. They passed an order 27 July 1658 forbidding the works to be sold. {BDF}
Osborne, John (1929–1994) Osborne, the English dramatist known as one of the “angry young men,” first received attention not as an actor but as author of Look Back in Anger (1956). His plays generally describe the frustration of living without hope in a world filled with false values and include The Entertainer (1957), Luther (1961) and A Subject of Scandal and Concern (1961), which has freethought overtones, according to Gordon Stein and David Tribe. Osborne also wrote the screenplay for Tom Jones (1963). Osborne died on Christmas Eve, 1944, “an unexpected Christian,” according to critic John Mortimer. {CE; GS; TRI; TYD}
Osborne, William Alexander (1873–1967) Osborne, an Australian rationalist, physiologist, and educationalist, taught physiology and histology at the University of Melbourne from 1903 to 1939. He described himself as an evolutionist and referred to Christmas as the season of “Mithraic festivities.” {SWW}
Oscapella, Eugene (20th Century) Oscapella in an Ottawa, Ontario, lawyer and former chairman of the Drug Policy Group of the Law Reform Commission of Canada. He wrote “Witch Hunts and Chemical McCarthyism,” for Humanist in Canada (Autumn 1996).
Oscar, L. (19th Century) Oscar was a Swiss writer, author of Religion Traced Back to Its Source (1874). He considered religion “a belief in conflict with experience and resting on exaggerated fancies” of animism and mythology. One of the chapters was entitled, “The Crucifixion of the Son of God as Christian Mythology.” {BDF}
Oser, Scott (20th Century) Oser, while a student at the University of Chicago, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Osgood, William Fogg (1864–1943) An accomplished mathematician, Osgood was a Unitarian. Among his works are Advanced Calculus (1925) and Functions of Complex Variables (1936). {U; UU}
OSIRIS: See entry for Christmas.
Osler, William [Sir] (1849–1919) A Canadian physician, Osler was renowned as a medical historian and as one of the most brilliant and influential teachers of medicine in his day. He was professor at McGill (1875–1884), the University of Pennsylvania (1884–1889), Johns Hopkins (1889–1904), and Oxford (from 1905). In 1911 he was knighted. In several of his works, he was clearly an agnostic with tenderness to religion, reports McCabe. In his Ingersoll Lecture, “Science and Immortality,” he shows how science demolishes the myth and then professes a sentimental attachment to it. He also says, “It may be questioned whether more comfort or sorrow has come to the race since man peopled the unseen world with spirits to bless and demons to damn him.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Ossietzky, Carl von (1889–1938) Ossietzky, a German pacifist, was the Nobel Prize winner in 1935. Following World War I, Ossietzky edited the antimilitarist weekly Weltbühne from 1927. In 1932, he was imprisoned for articles in that publication. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, he was removed (1936) to a prison hospital shortly before the announcement that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. The German government protested and barred all Germans from future acceptance of a Nobel Prize. Ossietzky died two years later. Originally a Catholic, Ossietzky had quit the church. {RE}
Ostlind, Robert (1920–1997) Ostlind, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, did regular clerical work with the Freedom From Religion Foundation. His memorial was held at Freethought Hall in Sauk City, Wisconsin. {Freethought Today, January-February 1998}
Ostwald, Wilhelm (1853–1932) Ostwald, who was born in Riga, for a time was a professor of physical chemistry at Leipzig University, earning international fame as a chemist. In 1906 he retired as a Privy Councillor and joined Haeckel in promoting the Monist League, the most power Rationalist body of that time. In Individuality and Immortality (1906), Ostwald said that death is not an evil but, rather, is a necessary factor in the existence of the race. He had, he said, no desire whatever for a future life. He published three volumes of Monistic Sunday Sermons (1911) and paid a glowing tribute to Haeckel in Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken. Long before the “new physics” was developed, Ostwald insisted that energy is the fundamental reality. When he died, a pastor in clerical gown appeared at the funeral and in an address declared that “as a scientist Ostwald had not trodden the pathway of theology.” Friends of the deceased were amazed and, after several others had spoken, a representative of the Monists’ Union was allowed to speak for a few minutes after promising the relatives not to say anything against the Church or religion. {FO; RAT; RE}
O’Sullivan, Gerry (20th Century) O’Sullivan, who became editor of The Humanist in 1994, is author with Edward S. Herman of The “Terrorism” Industry. During a flare-up in 1994 with American Humanist Association president Michael Werner, O’Sullivan was dismissed as The Humanist’s editor. Werner had asked O’Sullivan to intervene in an argument over Rick Szykowny’s final editorial, and O’Sullivan had refused, citing editorial autonomy. He then was dismissed in a scene reminiscent of previous editors’ (e.g., Paul Kurtz and Priscilla Robertson’s) dismissals. O’Sullivan is a book review editor of Z, a journal.
Oswald, Eugene (Died 1912) Oswald fled the Grand Duchy of Baden, compelled to leave on account of his share in the revolutionary movement of 1848. For a time he was a journalist in Paris, contributing to the rationalistic Liberté de Penser. In England he became President of the Carlyle Society, Secretary of the Goethe Society, and author of a positivist study, Der Positivissmus in England (1884). {RAT}
Oswald, Felix Leopold (Born 1845) Oswald was a Belgian-born American author. Educated as a physician, Oswald devoted his attention to natural history. He contributed to the Popular Science Monthly, The Truthseeker, and other journals. Oswald published a work describing his travels in Mexico and Central America, Summerland Sketches (1881). Other of his books are The Secrets of the East (1883), in which he argues that Christianity is derived from Buddhism, and The Bible of Nature (1888), or principles of secularism. Dr. Oswald became Curator of Natural History in Brazil. {BDF; GS; PUT; RAT}
Oswald, John (Died 1793) Oswald’s early life is obscure. He came of poor Scottish parents, bought a commission in the 42nd Highlanders, served in America and India, taught himself Greek, Latin, and Arabic, and after abandoning Christianity mixed with the Brahmins in India. A republican by conviction, he entered the French revolutionary Army and was killed in the Vendean War. He left some poetry and wrote an anti-religious pamphlet, “Ranae Comica Evangelizantes, or the Comic Frogs Turned Methodists.” {RAT}
Otakpor, Nkeonye (20th Century)
A senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Benin, Nigeria, Otakpor is a member of the Executive Board of the Nigerian Philosophical Association. In any diagnosis of the politics of the Western God, Otakpor states, one notes that what is meant by “God” is culturally determined. Thus, there is Allah of Islam; Brahman of Hinduism; Tao of Taoism; Yahweh of the Jews; Chiukwu of the Igo; Olorun of the Yoruba; Leve of the Mende; Juok of the Shilluk; Nzambe of the Bakongo; and God of the Western man. For the Igbo, as an example, Chiukwu was never born, never died, never had human parents or siblings. To them, the Western God is a selfish, colonial God. To them, also, historians and the world press have been Eurocentric, relegating much of the world including theirs to the “primitive” or “Third World.” “While the Western God is supposed to have died for all men,” he writes, “the Western man is metaphorically dying mainly because of his sins of exploitation, domination, and destruction of non-Western peoples. In being humanized, the Western God died. In being divinized, in playing God to other peoples and cultures, dissolving them, ceaselessly unmaking them, making it impossible for such people to create and recreate their positivity, the death of Western man is chronicled.” At the same time, he claims, Western man overlooks Egypt’s ancient past (implying Egyptians were black, which is a point of controversy), although its pyramids are excellent reminders, as are the Ife, Benin, Nok, and Igbo-Ukwu cultures in Nigeria which are as old as the Roman culture. Similarly, the Indian and Chinese cultures and civilizations are overlooked. In short, the West has categorized the world into three parts: the first is theirs; the second belongs to their siblings; the third is reserved mainly for marginalized Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans. Instead of one human race, there are three worlds inhabited by different human races “and this segmenting has obviously been intended as a convenient vehicle for racial segregation.” He continues: “Parallel to the acceptance of one Western God is also the acceptance of one religious system, one marriage system, one philosophical system, one system of governance and political economy, and one model of reality as constructed from Western European prisms.” It follows that non-Europeans will distrust such an outlook, which has resulted in the depopulation of the African continent by slave traders “in order to create the wealth of modern Europe.” In short, the Western God has no appeal whatsoever to many Africans, who consider it blasphemous for the West annually to celebrate a humanized dead God. “An African God, whether of the Mende, Shilluk, Bakongo, Igbo, Yoruba, or Kasai, is neither one-dimensional nor selfish. No African God is worshiped alone nor is there any injunction that Africans should worship only that which is recognized as God. Indeed, while recognizing African Gods in their individual cultures as the ultimate ONE, Africans worship a plurality of spirits that are not on the same pedestal with whatever is taken as a God in the different traditions.” What lesson does he feel is to be learned by Western humanists? That “the inherent pluralism in African lifestyles, the emphasis on the community rather than the atomized self, etc., are indices of the African abiding faith in the worthwhile coexistence of the ONE and the MANY.” And that “to the extent that no African God is a predatory being, none of them permitted or sanctioned (overtly or covertly) colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid. Chiukwu (God) of the Igbo, for example, never encouraged the destruction, pillaging, and despoliation of other peoples and their cultures.” Otakpor makes a strong case for the importance of a complacent and prosperous Western minority to take seriously the ethos of the peasantry in Nigeria, Brazil, Angola, Burma, India, and other parts of the non-European world. {AAH}
Otárola Pacheco, Ricardo (20th Century)
Otárola is a Costa Rican lawyer who is active in the Costa Rican as well as the Iberoamerican humanist associations. He was instrumental in starting Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU) and in developing its World Wide Web home page. In 1996 he was a moderator of a panel on organizing humanism in a cybernetic era at the Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City. Otárola has been instrumental in developing and hosting webpages, his own being at <www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/5553>. His e-mail: <bettedavis@geocities.com>. Otárola has hosted the homepage of ASIBEHU: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>.
Otis, Harrison Gray (1765–1848) Otis, nephew of the American colonial political leader James Otis, was a staunch Federalist. A leader of the Hartford Convention, he was a U.S. senator (1817–1822) and mayor of Boston (1829–1831). In a biography, Samuel Eliot Morison describes how Otis and his wife joined Dr. Peter Thacher’s Brattle Street Church, which became Unitarian: “Most, under the guidance of liberal Congregational clergymen, became Unitarians. The Otises belonged to the Brattle Street Church, which John Adams described as the ‘politest’ in Boston, under four successive liberal ministers: J. S. Buckminister, Edward Everett, John G. Palfrey, and Samuel K. Lothrop.” In 1860, Otis’s relative and namesake—Harrison Gray Otis—nominated Abraham Lincoln for President. {EG; CE}
O’Toole, Adam Duff (14th Century) O’Toole was an Irish freethought martyr, burned to death in 1327 at Hogging (now College) Green in Dublin. Holinshead wrote that O’Toole “denied obstinatelie the incarnation of our savior, the trinitie of persons in the vnitie of the Godhead and the resurrection of the flesh; as for the Holie Scripture, he said it was but a fable; the Virgin Marie he affirmed to be a woman of dissolute life, and the Apostolike see erronious.” {BDF}
O’Toole, Fintan (20th Century) O’Toole’s biography of the fellow Irish-born Richard Sheridan led to his conclusion that the extent of political tolerance relates to the level of social order in a society. O’Toole currently is a theatre reviewer in New York. {New Humanist, March 1998}
Otto, Max (1876–1968) A distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Otto co-wrote with Henry Nelson Wieman Is There A God? A Conversation (1932). He also wrote Things and Ideals (1924), Natural Laws and Human Hopes (1926), and Science and the Moral Life (1949). In the 1950s, Otto wrote book reviews for The Humanist. Otto argued that unless we insist on limiting in some manner the acceptable meaning of God, it is easy to prove the existence of God by “dilution into vagueness”; through reducing the definition of the term “until it means no more than everyone, even the confessed atheist, will have to admit to exist. Thus the definition of God virtually proves his existence. . . . The word God is made to stand for so much that it loses all distinctive meaning. . . . Belief bought at this price costs too much. It not only impoverishes the religious life…but it tends to dissipate the mental discipline so laboriously and slowly achieved by men.” At John Dewey’s memorial service, held at the Community Church (Unitarian) in Manhattan, Dr. Otto told how he once had asked Dewey a question as they were walking on the campus. Dewey stopped. Dewey cogitated quietly. Time passed. More time passed. Much more time passed. Otto wondered after a few minutes if Dewey might be experiencing some physical problem. A stroke? Worse? Finally, and just as Otto started to interrupt Dewey’s seemingly comatose state, Dewey came to life and gave a thorough and profound answer to the question he had just been asked. The response took a long, long time, and it was painstakingly complete, logical, replete with examples, spoken without a pause. Otto observed, as everyone present chuckled, that he was very, very careful, from then on, what he asked Dewey. “Ask a question, and you deserve an answer, not just a response!” (See entries for John Dewey and for the American Humanist Association.) {CL; HNS; U}
Otway, Thomas (1652–1685) Otway wrote The Atheist (1683), a comedy. At one point, Otway stated, “These are rogues that pretend to be of a religion now! Well, all I say is, honest atheism for my money.” {E}
Otwell, Anne (20th Century) Otwell, called by some the Prophet Serpentfoot, has had many problems with Floyd County, Georgia, officials. She has been charged with public indecency for disrobing and of disrupting a lawful meeting because of her objections to prayers being said at the Floyd County Commission meetings. When she asked to be allowed to pray on the grounds of “equal time,” she prayed to “my God (who is) here tonight in person,” at which the audience of more than fifty filed into the hallway in order to avoid what she had to say. An eccentric who has lived in a teepee alongside a highway, she has been described by Fred Whitehead as the kind of activist freethinkers and humanists should support inasmuch as she is on the firing line in small communities which term her a “village atheist” although, he adds, she is closer to being a pantheist. Her voicemail starts, “This is Serpentfoot for the NNNWM, the Church of Nudists, Natives, and Naturalists with a Mission.” {Freethought History #16, 1995}
OUDEREN WEKKRANT A Dutch humanist journal, Ouderen Wekkrant is no longer published.
Ouida: See entry for Ramée, Marie Louise de la.
Ouvry, Henry Aimé (19th Century) Ouvry was translator of Dietetics of the Soul by Feuchterslebens and Unsectarian Catechism by Rau. Ouvry wrote several works on the land question. {BDF}
Överland, Arnulf (20th Century) Överland was a Norwegian non-theist, a member of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) in England. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.) Overmann, Roy (20th Century) At the Fourth Annual Atheist Alliance Convention, held in St. Louis and hosted in 1998 by the Rationalist Society, Overmann addressed the group on “Humanism: The Logical Conclusion to Atheism.”
Overstreet, Harry Allen (1875–1970) Chairman of the philosophy department at the City College of New York (1911–1939), Overstreet was author of a very popular book in its day, The Mature Mind. On the subject of religion, he stated, “I have long since learned that a man can believe in a perfectly cockeyed theology and still be a royally fine person.” On the subject of humanism, he wrote the present author in 1951, “I list myself as a naturalistic humanist for the following reasons:
• The new naturalism assumes that nature includes for more than any
of our systems of knowledge has ever included or now includes. This means that to a naturalistic humanist there are no limits that can now be set to the possibilities inherent in the nature that includes human nature. This removes all dogmatic certainties whether of the ‘materialistic’ or the ‘spiritual’ sort. The destiny of man is apparently as limitless as the nature of which he is part.
• The new naturalism further assumes that the only way of knowing is through the natural processes of the mind. All supernatural deliverances and guarantees, therefore, are out.
• Humanism assumes that the goal of human development lies in the greatest possible fulfillment of human powers. Man does not live to serve some supernatural being. He lives to bring to fruition the powers with which nature has endowed him. As of today, this fruition would seem to lie in a life of widely shared friendliness, understanding, and cooperation.
In the Hibbert Journal (1913–1914), Overstreet rejected the idea of God as a father, creator, person, or “ideally perfect being,” and accepted only “a god that is ourselves and grows with the world.” He also declared, “Christianity as an institutionalized religion has laid no stress on the pursuit of truth. Indeed, for the most part it has been suspicious of the truthseeking process. The truthseeker might overturn accepted beliefs.” {RAT; TYD; WAS, 28 August 1951}
Overton, Richard (17th Century) Overton was an English Republican who wrote a satire on relics (1642) and a treatise on Man’s Mortality (1643), which was anti-Christian enough to say that “the present [belief in the] going of the soul into heaven and hell is a mere fiction,” though Overton did believe in a general resurrection at the end of the world. The book was much attacked, and Parliament was moved to institute an inquiry as to the authorship. After satirizing the Episcopal Church, Overton in 1646 turned upon the Presbyterian clergy, warmly denouncing all religious persecution. He was arrested (on a political charge) and imprisoned, but the army obtained his release. He continued his campaign, and in 1649 he was lodged in the Tower, from which he maintained his output of fiery and critical pamphlets. Upon being released, he was again imprisoned from 1659 to 1663. {BDF; RAT}
Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (43 B.C.E.–18 C.E.) The Latin poet Ovid (Naso, his last name, is apparently a familial inheritance, a reference to a big nose) was admired by Shakespeare, was distrusted in the nineteenth century as an immoralist, and was dismissed for most of the present century as being but a lightweight. But, adds the critic Bernard Knox, Ovid is now back in favor. In his own time he was all the fashion. Ovid’s was, as Knox notes (The New York Review of Books, 15 Jan 1998), “an age of peace that succeeded generations of war and also one that saw the obsolescence of the stern moral code that had made the early Roman republic a nation of dedicated farmer-soldiers and faithful fertile wives.” Ovid’s work falls into three categories: erotic poems, mythological poems, and poems of exile. Amores contains forty-nine short love poems. Metamorphosis, one of Chaucer’s favorite books, concerned myths and is his greatest work. The poems of exile include Tristia, because for some reason in the year 8 of the Christian Era he was abruptly exiled to Tomis, a Black Sea outpost, where he later died. His work was written not to teach morals or lofty edification but, rather, to give pleasure. He shows his expertise, particularly when discussing women and how to appreciate their charms. As for religion, “It is expedient that gods should exist,” he observed in Ars amatoria. “Since it is expedient, let us believe they do.” However, Ovid “had no faith in personal survival after death,” Lamont reports. According to Robertson, Ovid “could satirize the dishonest merchant who prayed to the Gods to absolve his frauds; but he hailed Augustus as the sacred founder and restorer of temples, prayed for him as such, busied himself with the archaeology of the cults, and made it, not quite without irony, a maxim to ‘spare an accepted belief.’ ” (See entry for Poets.) {CE; CL; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Owen, John (19th Century) Owen wrote The Religious Aspects of Scepticism (1891). {GS}
Owen, Robert (1771–1858) Owen, a Scot who had owned a cotton-spinning mill, moved to Indiana, where he started a socialist experiment in New Harmony. His “Declaration of Mental Independence,” delivered on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier. Two of his works were Debate on the Evidence of Christianity (1829) and Threading My Way: Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography (1874). Phyllis Palmer in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief notes that “he was not a caricature philanthropist devoted more to an idea than to actual people” and “he could not accept religious tenets that rationalized poor planning and justified the poverty that accompanied early industrialization.” McCabe wrote that Owen believed that “man’s character is made for him and not by him” and that “all the religions of the world are false.” For a time he had the Royal family among his public supporters, but religious opponents forced him into a public declaration of atheism. He then founded a movement known as Socialism (not State Socialism) and later an ethical movement which he called Rational Religion. The latter had 100,000 members, who may or may not have been agnostics, and in the trade unions he is said to have had influence over more than a million. In his Autobiography, Owen found that “one and all had emanated from the same source, and their varieties from the same false imaginations of our early ancestors.” Robertson admired him because “from an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion. . . . He had come to his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism—of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct—with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable.” Owen during a debate on religion once said, “When we use the term Lord, God, or Deity we use a term without annexing to it any definite idea.” Further, he said, “All the religions of the world are false.” Somehow, when he was eighty-four and his mind was failing, Owen was duped by a spiritualist medium, who convinced him that spirit communication represented “a great moral evolution . . . about to be effected for the human race,” and spiritualist socialism, a kind of “socialism of eternity.” Wheeler says of Owen that he “profoundly influenced the thought of his time in the direction of social amelioration, and he is justly respected for his energy, integrity, and disinterested philanthropy.” At the age of eighty-eight, Owen died. His son, Robert Dale Owen, was quoted as follows in the newspapers, which noted that Owen’s name had at one time been a terror to the clergy and to the privileged classes: “My dear father passed away this morning, at a quarter before seven, and passed away as gently and quietly as if he had fallen asleep. There was not the least struggle, not a contraction of a limb, of a muscle, not an expression of pain on his face. His breathing gradually became slower and slower, until at last it ceased so unperceptibly, that, even as I held his hand, I could scarcely tell the moment when he no longer breathed. His last words distinctly pronounced about twenty minutes before his death, were ‘Relief has come.’ About half an hour before he said , ‘Very easy and comfortable.’” Owen’s remains were interred in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Newtown. Inasmuch as the law allowed the minister had a right to read the Church of England burial service over the heretic’s coffin, according to Foote, the Freethinkers who stood round the grave had to bear the mockery as quietly as possible. (See entry for Robert Dale Owen, his son.) {BDF; CE; EU, Phyllis Palmer; FUK; FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}
Owen, Robert Dale (1800–1877) The son of Robert Owen, one without his father’s charisma but with his interest in the New Harmony experiment, Robert Dale Owen was a writer, a communitarian, and a Democratic member of the Indiana legislature. Owen’s early freethought principles changed in his later life. In Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1859), inspired perhaps by the death of his wife, he turned to spiritualism. He once was an editor of the New Harmony, Indiana, Free Enquirer. {EU, Phyllis Palmer; FUK; FUS; RAT; VI; TRI}
Owen, T. E. (19th Century) Owen, in what was considered a rare event in the 1880s, wrote in Welsh in Secular Review about a freethought group at Rhybydd. {RSR}
Owen-Towle, Tom (20th Century) Owen-Towle is author of The Gospel of Universalism (1993), reflections on the people and history of American Universalism. He also wrote O. Eugene Pickett (1996).
Owens, Karen (20th Century) Owens is a regional director in California of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Owens, Jesse (1913–1980) An African American who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, Owens was a Universalist who had been a Baptist. He is remembered partly because at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, he astounded the world and upset Hitler’s “Aryan” theories by equaling the world mark (10.3 seconds) in the 100-meter race, by breaking world records in the 200-meter race (20.7 seconds) and in the broad jump (26 feet 5 3/8 inches / 8.07 meters), and by winning also (along with Ralph Metcalfe) the 400-meter relay race. Owens wrote Blackthink: My Life as Black Man and White Man. {CE}
Oxlee, John (1779–1864) A freethinker, Oxlee wrote A Confutation of the Diabolarchy (c. 1875), consisting of letters to the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. As early as 1843, Oxlee went on record as believing in “the inexpediency and futility of any attempt to convert the Jews to Christianity.” {GS}
OXYGEN Oxygen, which is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas, is the most abundant element on earth. Evolutionists point out that for early forms of life, however, oxygen was a poison. (See entry for nitric acid.)
OXYMORON Rhetorical figures in which incongruous or contradictory terms—oxymorons—are combined include the following:
deafening silence childproof Christian Science legally drunk clearly misunderstood same difference Now, then . . . (hesitating) found missing religious tolerance pretty ugly
Oyama, Y. (20th Century) In Yokahama, Japan, Oyama edited Iunri in the 1910s.
Ozawa, Seiji (1935- ) A noted conductor of orchestras, Ozawa was born in Hoten, China. After being trained in Japan, Paris, and the United States, he conducted the Toronto and San Francisco symphonies. In 1973 he began a long tenure as conductor of the Boston Symphony. During a televised interview, Ozawa explained that although he directed religious music he was not at all religious. {Dennis Middlebrooks, July 1999}
Ozawa, Seiji (1 Sep 1935 - )
A noted conductor of orchestras, Ozawa was born in Fenytien (now Shenyang, Liaoning China), studied at the Toho School in Tokyo, and before leaving for Europe conducted the NHK Orchestra and the Japan Philharmonic. In Europe, he won the Besançon International Conductors’ Competition. In the United States, after studying at the Berkshire Music Center, he won the Koussevitzky He became assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein (1965-1965), music director of the Ravinia Festival (1964-1968), and of the Toronto Symphony (1965-1969). After becoming musical adviser to the Japan Philharmonic, he directed the San Francisco Symphony (1970-1976). In addition, he has conducted opera companies of Salzburg, Covent Garden, La Scala, Vienna, and the Paris Opéra, at the latter of which he conducted the premiere Messiaen's Saint François d'Assise in 1983.
During a televised interview, Ozawa explained that although he sometimes directed religious music he was not at all religious. {Dennis Middlebrooks, July 1999}
Ozon, François (1968- )
A French filmmaker, the homosexual Ozon has been said to be heir to the satirical surrealist Luis Buñuel. “I’m happy to have had a Catholic education,” he told an Advocate (1 September 1998) reporter, “because I know what’s wrong and what’s good—and I prefer what’s wrong.”
“A Summer Dress” depicts a young gay man on vacation whose clothes are stolen while he is having a mid-day dalliance with a woman, after which he bicycles home in the woman’s dress. The film, he said, says you can have sex but have to protect yourself. “It’s a film about not being guilty about your own sexuality.”
