P
From Philosopedia
Paalzow, Christian Ludwig (1753–1824) Paalzow was a German jurist who translated Voltaire’s commentaries on The Spirit of the Laws and Burigny’s Examination of the Apologists of Christianity (1793). He also wrote A History of Religious Cruelty (1800). {BDF; RAT}
Pace, William (1 Jun 1958 - ) Pace received his Master of Fine Arts in Film Production from New York University's Graduate Film and TV program. His thesis film, Echo Canyon, won the Cinemax National Short Film Search and was televised nationally on the USA Cable Network. He has co-written three produced screenplays: Blades, which has been called a "dead-on parody of Jaws”; All’s Fair, a comedy starring George Segal, Sally Kellerman, and Robert Carradine; and A Girl’s Guide to Sex, called by Variety a “relentlessly perky” romantic comedy. Pace also wrote and directed an award-winning independent feature film, Charming Billy, which depicts the dramatic story of what might make an “ordinary” man snap and become a mass murderer. Its star, Michael Hayden, won the Best Actor Award at the Los Angeles AFI International Film Festival. Variety commented that “Pace displays notable cinematic and storytelling craft." In his forthcoming Echo Canyon, the main character has lines about “faith”: “There is no God, no Heaven! But Hell, yeah, that I believe in—it’s the memories of all you’ve done in life, everything you did, everything you didn’t.” The senior screenwriting instructor at New York City’s New School for Social Research, Pace lives on Manhattan's Upper East Side with artist Hillary Bradley, both members of the Fourth Universalist-Unitarian Society. {WAS, Aug 2001)
PACHACAMUC
The Yuncas called Pachacamac the supreme god, the creator of all. {LEE}
PACIFISM Man is kept from being his best, according to Bertrand Russell, by his pugnaciousness. Free Man’s Worship tells of his pacifism during World War II. “If I could give to others what has come to me in this way,” Lord Russell writes, “I could make them too feel the futility of fighting. But I do not know how to communicate it; when I speak, they stare, applaud, or smile, but do not understand.” In former times, he explained, “when two wished to live on the produce of a piece of land which only yielded enough for one, they must either both starve or fight till one was killed. In practice, it was not single men who fought, but groups of men, called successively tribes, nations, coalitions, or United Nations. In spite of Christianity, when enjoined peace before the necessary industrial technique had been invented, sheer necessity drove men into conflict.” In his various works, Russell discusses the consequences of war over various historical periods, and he laments that war between men and nations will continue in the future, remarking that “In England, Germany, and the United States (in 1917), no government could have withstood the popular demand for war. A popular demand of this sort must have an instinctive basis, and for my part, I believe that the modern increased in warlike instinct is attributable to the dissatisfaction (mostly unconscious) caused by the regularity, monotony, and tameness of modern life.” Devoted pacifists as well as many former soldiers devoted to the cause of war admit the utter inhumanness of killing. They were outraged in 1937 when German planes bombed Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, an incident during which women and children who were killed were memorialized by Pablo Picasso’s painting, “Guernica.” They also lamented the bombing of Dresden, Germany, in which at least 35,000 Germans died—the humanist Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote Slaughterhouse-Five; or The Children’s Crusade (1969), a novel inspired by his experience of the bombing while an American prisoner-of-war in that city. Others have lamented the bombing by Americans of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II. John Hersey wrote Hiroshima (1946) to detail the conflagration, in which 90% of Hiroshima was leveled and as many as 140,000 casualties occurred. An estimated 100,000 were killed when Tokyo was firebombed in 1945, an event described hyperbolically by American General Curtis LeMay: “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” Katsumoto Saotome, a Japanese antiwar campaigner observed that “[t]he firebombing probably led to an earlier end of the war. But I think killing noncombatants was an unforgivable violation of human morality. But in fact it was Japan that was the first to kill noncombatants, when it bombed cities like Chongquing [Chungking] in China.” In many respects, observed journalist Nicholas D. Kristof on the firebombing’s fiftieth anniversary, “the firebombing of Tokyo was the top step in a spiral staircase in the capacity of conventional arms and the willingness to use them.” (See entry for War.) {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Pack, Ernest (20th Century) In London during the early 1900s, Pack was a lecturer for the British Secular League. He wrote The Parson’s Doom (1900?) and The Trial and Imprisonment of J. W. Gott for Blasphemy (c. 1920). {FUK; RSR}
Padia, Chandrakala (20th Century) Padia is on the board of directors of the Bertrand Russell Society.
PAEDICATIO
Paedicatio is a prudish way to refer, using Latin, to anal penetration, whether male/female, female/male, female/female, or male/male.
PAGAN If you are “irreligious” or a hedonist, according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, you are a pagan:
pagan n [ME. fr LL paganus, fr. L, country dweller, fr pagus country district; akin to L pangere to fix] (14th Century) 1 : HEATHEN 1; esp : a follower of a polytheistic religion (as in ancient Rome) 2 : one who has little or no religion and who delights in sensual pleasures and material goods : an irreligious or hedonistic person or a heathen
heathen n pl [ME hethen fr. OE haethen; akin to OHG heidan heathen, and prob. to OE haeth heath] 1 : an unconverted member of a people or nation that does not acknowledge the God of the Bible 2 : an uncivilized or irreligious person
To a Christian, Moslem, or Jew, a pagan is not one of the fellow believers. Although semantically a “snarl word” with negative overtones, pagan to non-believers has positive overtones. Tacitus and Juvenal indicated that in their time the pagans, or rustics, were those who were not called up for military service and did not take the military oath. Inasmuch as the Christians deemed themselves the soldiers of Christ, they called those who did not take their oath “pagans.” Augustine, in his City of God thought of the pagans as the best-educated men of the African cities. Leaders of an American pagan organization that includes the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS) have urged dictionary publishers to adopt the following definition:
neo-paganism n A collection of diverse contemporary religions rooted in indigenous traditions or deriving inspirqation therefrom, characterized by a belief in the interconnection of all life, personal autonomy, and immanent divinities. Often nature-centered and supportive of gender equality.
Kafiristan, in northeast Afghanistan on the southern sz of the Hindu Kush, was a region named after the Arabic word kafir, which mean “the country of unbelievers, the pagans.” Its 60,000 or so residents practiced animism until about 1895–1896, at which time they were forced to convert to Islam. The area is now called Nuristan, which in Persian means “land of light or the enlightened.” The Kafiri language belongs to the Indo-European family and, some have suggested, Greek settlers were the founders. During the 1979–1989 occupation by Soviet forces, some of the heaviest guerrilla fighting occurred here. Contemporary secular humanists, agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers—none soldiers of Christ—are, gratefully, pagans and heathens. Also, they likely are pacifists who do wholly disapprove of the religious wars found throughout Earth. They likely are not, however, members of the pagan-worshiping Wiccan religionists. Those Wiccans consider themselves witches whose ethics are “to harm no one, do what you will.” Wiccans do not, however, recognize the concept of Satan and base their beliefs on pre-Christian religion, when people celebrated the waxing and the waning of the moon, the solstices, the equinoxes. On the Web: <http://www.bloomington.in.us/~pen>. (See entries for Halloween, Wicca, and Witchcraft.) {CE; RE}
PAGAN PRACTICES Since Neolithic times, pagans have enjoyed various “religious” practices. For example, trees have been considered symbols of birth, fertility, and good fortune. To alert the tree gods inside that we need their help, we “knock wood.” Druids hung gilded apples and candles onto oak trees to please the god of the sun, Balder. Celts celebrated the solstice with bunches of mistletoe, the berries of which supposedly held the seeds of the sun’s fire. Scandinavians added the myth that promised a kiss underneath would bring good luck, or at least heat things up. Saturnalia was the ancient Roman wildly licentious holiday for Saturn, god of agriculture who was said to be returning from his exile. Not a few orgies were held under trees from which candles were displayed. Pope Gregory I wrote to St. Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, that the best way to convert the Anglo-Saxons could be to adapt some of their customs. Ergo, Jesus’s alleged birth date was moved to December 25th to coincide with the solstice. And many of the pagan practices, including the use of fir trees, were incorporated. Germans, who had displayed fir trees for the solstice, began displaying them to celebrate the Christ’s birth. In 1605 a Strasbourg scribe observed the first such tree,
At Christmas they set up fir trees in the parlors and hang upon them roses cut from many colored paper, apples, wafers, spangle-gold, sweets, etc.
Puritans in America, however, considered Christmas Day one of penance and fined anyone caught feasting 5 shillings. By 1856, however, President Franklin Pierce inaugurated the custom of the White House Christmas tree. By 1997, according to the National Christmas Tree Association, an estimated 30,000,000 trees (and untold needles) were dragged into America’s living rooms. Scotch pine has been the most popular breed, followed by the Douglas and balsam firs. (See entry for Thomas W. Flynn.) {Lenore Skenazy, New York Daily News, 29 November 1997}
Paganini, Niccolo (1782–1840) Paganini was an Italian violinist whose virtuosity became a legend. He perfected the use of double and triple stops and revived the practice of scordatura, the diverse tunings of the strings. As a child prodigy in 1793, Paganini made his debut at Genoa. When he retired in 1835, he lost his voice and, later, died from cancer of the larynx. According to his biographer, Count Conestabili, Paganini was orthodox but admitted “religious indifferentism.” He received neither the last sacrament nor had any religious service at his funeral, and McCabe says Paganini’s friends knew he was an atheist. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Pagano, Francisco Mario Saverio Antonio Carlo Pasquale (1748–1800) Pagano was an Italian jurist, philosopher, and patriot. A friend of Filangieri, he became a professor of criminal law in 1787. For his Political Essays in three volumes (1783–1792) he was accused of atheism and impiety. He wrote on Criminal Process and On God and Nature. Taking part in the Provisional Government of the Neapolitan Republic in 1791, he was taken prisoner by the royalists and executed 6 October 1800. {BDF; RAT}
Page, David (1814–1879) Page was a Scottish geologist, author of introductory and advanced textbooks on geology. His Man: Where, Whence, and Whither? (1867) advocated Darwinian views and received mixed reviews in Scotland. A friend of Robert Chambers, Page was for some time credited with his Vestiges of Creation because of the scientific details he had supplied. {BDF; RAT}
Page, Don (20th Century) In 1968, Page was among the founders of the Humanist Association of Canada, editing Humanist in Canada from 1982 to 1987. He then edited the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s International Humanist. In October of 1992 he was appointed editor of The Humanist, the bi-monthly publication of the American Humanist Association with headquarters in Amherst, New York. But the following June he resigned, stating that he was “unwilling to assume responsibility for certain editorial arrangements that predate the beginning of my mandate last October.“ In a farewell editorial, he remarked that the European Humanist Federation gives a strong voice for humanist values within the political and social councils of an increasingly unified Europe, representing “a pluralistic but unified humanism.” “Surely,” Page writes, “we should aim at no less on this continent.” Except for the long period during which Edwin Wilson edited The Humanist, the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association has had little luck in holding on to its editors. (See entry for Priscilla Robertson.)
Page, Martin Richard (1938– ) Page is the author of Britain’s Unknown Genius: The Life-Work of J. M. Robertson (1984). {FUK}
Page, Preston (20th Century) Page is president of Humanists of the Jefferson Tradition (AHA). (See entry for Virginia Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Page, Ra (20th Century) Page, the literary editor of City Life in Manchester, England, is a freelance writer for the Guardian. In “Cyberphobia: the Ethics of Computer Evolution,” Page related his concern with the central dilemma between the utilitarian worth of the computer, its service to mankind, and its threat to the integrity of human thought. {New Humanist, September 1996}
Pagels, Elaine Heisy (1941– ) Pagels, a historian of religion, is an Episcopalian. She wrote The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exogesis (1973), The Gnostic Paul (1975), The Gnostic Gospels (1979), and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988). Her Origin of Satan (1995) takes up the dichotomy of how Christianity (within the basic gospel message of love and good works) demonizes its enemies. Originally, Satan had been a servant of God, one who obstructed human mischief; for instance, he stood in the path of Balaam’s ass, not allowing Balaam to proceed because God did not want him to proceed. Around the 7th century B.C.E., however, some Jewish scribes pictured Satan in a sinister way, using him as a device to explain division in the house of Israel. Christians have continued the concept, down to the present. By calling its opposition “the devil’s work,” Christianity attacked whatever it wished, from abortion to prayer in the schools to gays to family values. In The Origin of Satan, Pagels wrote,
Such visions (of Satan) have been incorporated into Christian tradition and have served, among other things, to confirm for Christians their own identification with God and to demonize their opponents—first other Jews, then pagans, and later dissident Christians called heretics.
The early Christians, she states, had a unique view of life and faith as a cosmic battle of good vs. evil, and from this they introduced an evil being (Satan) who opposed the great good (God). She shows how the gospels put the Jews in the devil’s camp. Romans fare better, for they were the political power of the time and were prime converts. Pagels gets across the idea that it is not wrong that Christians aim for a victory over evil. But so long as they treat others as evil incarnate, she sees little hope for any Christian peace. Meanwhile, other scholarship more and more confirms that Satan originated as a Judaized version of the Zoroastrian spirit of evil, Ahriman. (See entries for Gnosticism and Devil.) {TYD}
Paget, James (Sir) (1814–1899) Paget was a surgeon, pathologist, and friend of Darwin, Huxley, Pasteur, Prime Minister Gladstone, and writers Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot. He declared, “I know of no book which has been a source of brutality and sadistic conduct, both public and private, that can compare with the Bible.” {TYD}
Paget, Violet (19th Century) An English author using the pen name of “Vernon Lee,” Paget wrote such works as Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy and Baldwin, which were dialogues on her 1886 views and aspirations. In 1883 she had written “Responsibilities of Unbelief” in Contemporary and was outspokenly aggressive concerning her agnosticism, as she also was in her Vital Lies: Studies of Some Varieties of Recent Obscurantism (1912, two volumes). {BDF; RAT; RE}
Pageze, L. (19th Century) Pageze was a French socialist who wrote on the Concordat and the Budget des Cultes. In 1887 he wrote Separation of Church and State. {BDF}
Paglia, Camille (1947– ) Camille Paglia, Writer/Author art UPDATED
In a speech given at Georgetown University and airing on C-SPAN in November of 1994, she stated "I speak as an atheist" and "I do not believe in god".
She also confirms this in her book Vamps and Tramps and in an August/September 1995 interview in Reason magazine.
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Paglia is a columnist for Salon magazine.
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From a 1995 interview in The Guide:
"I am a sixties social activist. Where there is social injustice I think we have to take strong action to remedy it. But politics should not become a god to us. To me, art transcends all politics. I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist but matters of spirit and of the mind transcend all political affiliations. I would like a balance between art and politics. Everyone who knows anything about me knows that the minute there is a problem, I am out there and I am in people's faces, and I have kicked and punched people, and I was fired from a college my first job for getting in a fist fight."
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"We are hierarchical animals," I declared in my first book. Rousseauist liberals and armchair leftists (like Michel Foucault) think hierarchy is imposed on free-flowing human innocence by unjust external forces, like the government and the police. But hierarchy is self-generated on every occasion by any group, especially in a philosophical vacuum. As an atheist, I acknowledge that religion may be socially necessary as an ethical counterweight to natural human ferocity. The primitive marauding impulse can emerge very swiftly in the alienated young. --from http://www.salonmagazine.com/people/col/pagl/1999/04/28/camille/index.html. --- with contributions from CDA, ER and others --- Update (28-May-01): In a February 28, 2000 column entitled "The Bush Look" Paglia takes on the postmodern artists who sneer at religion: "Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole." Found at http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index1.html --La
Paglia, an intellectual, democrat, and libertarian who is thoroughly conversant with the humanities, sizzles, whether on the printed page or during appearances on television. A professor of humanities at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, she does not hesitate in her rebelliousness to object to the Establishment’s wrong goals or society’s weaknesses, and when she takes aim she levels her cannons with precision. For example, she is known for her view that a prostitute is “the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one.” A lesbian and an atheist, she minces no words. “I do not believe in God,” she writes in Vamps and Tramps (1994), “but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hardcore gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. Flicking the radio dial in America, one hears bursts of beautiful, spellbinding poetry. But it is neither academics nor contemporary writers who are filling the air with dazzling imagery and profound spiritual truths. Alas for progressive politics, these are the voices of white and black Christian ministers, reading form the Bible. Why have intellectuals abandoned the people? This is the shame of modernism. High Romanticism at least gave poetry as the prize of rebellion and, turning from God, put nature in his place.” Paglia added, “Everyone in the world should know all the great religions of the world: Hinduism; Buddhism; Greco-Roman and Near Eastern paganism; Judeo-Christianity; Islam, African, North American, and Oceanic tribal cults, pre-Columbia imperial myth. Art, history, and philosophy are intertwined with the evolution of religion. This is the true multiculturalism. The secularism of the Enlightenment was meant to free the mind, not kill the soul. In the spirit of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists and revolutionaries, we must keep church and state separate, even while we preserve the eternal insights and metaphors of religion. Authority belongs to the classroom, not the pulpit.” Her Sexual Personae, Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1991), explains that art is a pagan background between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature. She followed this with Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), in which she denounced the women’s movement’s descent into Puritanism. The artist Mapplethorpe, she holds, was the contemporary pagan priest of art. Of her, Gloria Steinem has said, “Twenty years ago, feminism was blamed for the beef boycott. Now divorce. Feminism isn’t responsible for divorce; marriage is responsible for divorce. What’s important is that we have progressed enough that being a feminist is no longer seen as some fringe activity. It is mainstream enough for anti-feminists like Camille Paglia to need to say they are feminists.” Paglia is particularly eloquent on the subject of feminism: “To rescue feminism, we must give religion its due but require it to stay in its place. Again, Judeo-Christianity is only half our tradition. Paganism has other paradigms to offer. The militant virgin goddesses, Athena and Artemis, with their cold autonomy, are heroines of mine. Plato speaks of two Aphrodites, a common one of physical childbirth and the other, the Uranian, patron of spiritual and intellectual influence, specially associated with homoerotic relations. Evasions of nature’s biological imperative are distinctly human. I take the extreme view of that Enlightenment neopagan, the Marquis de Sade, who lauds abortion and sodomy for their bold frustration of mother nature’s relentless fertility. My code of modern Amazonism says that nature’s fascist scheme of menstruation and procreation should be defied, as a gross infringement of woman’s free will.” In many respects, Paglia is the most eloquent speaker on behalf of contemporary secular humanism, although she does not align herself with any particular philosophic movement. A 1960s free speech militant, she alarms prudes and fundamentalists with her enlightened logic, aesthetics, and ethics. In an uplifting 1995 interview with Tim Madigan, Paglia went on record concerning many subjects:
I hate dogma in any form. I hate it in the Roman Catholic church, which is why I left it twenty-five years ago. I hate it in gay activism and feminism now. Dogma has also taken over the humanities departments in elite schools–poststructuralism and so forth. . . . There’s nothing more dangerous to a liberal democracy than fixed dogma. . . . I’m an atheist but we people of the sixties were very spiritual in our own ways. That is, we abandoned organized religions, but we sought out Hinduism and Buddhism. We were very interested in cross-cultural spiritual experiences. A passage to India, as it were. . . . The Enlightenment turned away from organized religion, but put reason and science in its place. Romanticism rebelled against organized religion, but put nature and art in its place. What has modernism done? It turned against organized religion, and given nothing in its place. . . . There’s two thousand years of developed thought behind Christianity. There’s three thousand years behind Judaism. So, better Jehovah than Foucault. Jehovah at least brings along this incredible work, the Bible. What a great collection of poetry, magnificent, filled with things of spiritual use, whether you believe in God or not. The grandeur and intellectual development of Catholic theology is staggering. Foucault is a fraud; and that’s the diet our best kinds in the elite schools are being fed. It is appalling. The man knew nothing. . . . The overall theme of my work is this: Judeo-Christianity never defeated paganism. Instead, paganism, after the fall of Rome, was driven underground. . . . Postmodernism is a big fancy word for nothing. It is so passé. Let’s get past Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. . . . Most of the women in academe who pretend to be feminists are not. They do not know the history of feminism. . . . My feminism predates the feminism of Gloria Steinem. I go way back. . . . It’s not male hatred of women, but male fear of woman that is the great universal. . . . I have a peculiar way of looking at things, through male eyes. It’s probably because of my bisexual experience. Many of the things I’m saying are obvious, but feminism is so stuck behind its own blinders. One of the worst of these is to constantly see misogyny everywhere. I’m called a misogynist! Does that make any sense? Someone who’s an open lesbian, who’s written on Madonna and Diana and Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy Onassis? I’m constantly writing evocatively of women. . . . {E; Free Inquiry, Spring 1995}
Paglia, Camille (2 Apr 1947 - ) Paglia, an intellectual, democrat, and libertarian who is thoroughly conversant with the humanities, sizzles, whether on the printed page or during appearances on television. A professor of humanities at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, she does not hesitate in her rebelliousness to object to the Establishment’s wrong goals or society’s weaknesses, and when she takes aim she levels her cannons with precision. For example, she is known for her view that a prostitute is “the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one.” A lesbian and an atheist, she minces no words and in Vamps and Tramps (1994) wrote
I do not believe in God, but I believe God is man’s greatest idea. Those incapable of religious feeling or those (like hardcore gay activists) who profane sacred ground do not have the imagination to educate the young. Flicking the radio dial in America, one hears bursts of beautiful, spellbinding poetry. But it is neither academics nor contemporary writers who are filling the air with dazzling imagery and profound spiritual truths. Alas for progressive politics, these are the voices of white and black Christian ministers, reading form the Bible. Why have intellectuals abandoned the people? This is the shame of modernism. High Romanticism at least gave poetry as the prize of rebellion and, turning from God, put nature in his place.
She added,
Everyone in the world should know all the great religions of the world: Hinduism; Buddhism; Greco-Roman and Near Eastern paganism; Judeo-Christianity; Islam, African, North American, and Oceanic tribal cults, pre-Columbia imperial myth. Art, history, and philosophy are intertwined with the evolution of religion. This is the true multiculturalism. The secularism of the Enlightenment was meant to free the mind, not kill the soul. In the spirit of the eighteenth-century encyclopedists and revolutionaries, we must keep church and state separate, even while we preserve the eternal insights and metaphors of religion. Authority belongs to the classroom, not the pulpit.
In “The Bush Look” (28 Feb 2000), Paglia’s column took on the postmodern artists who sneer at religion:
Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.
Her Sexual Personae, Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1991), explains that art is a pagan background between male and female, form and chaos, civilization and demonic nature. She followed this with Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992), in which she denounced the women’s movement’s descent into Puritanism. The artist Mapplethorpe, she holds, was the contemporary pagan priest of art. Her fourth book, a study of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, has been published by the British Film Institute in its Film Classics Series Of her, Gloria Steinem has said, “Twenty years ago, feminism was blamed for the beef boycott. Now divorce. Feminism isn’t responsible for divorce; marriage is responsible for divorce. What’s important is that we have progressed enough that being a feminist is no longer seen as some fringe activity. It is mainstream enough for anti-feminists like Camille Paglia to need to say they are feminists.” Paglia is particularly eloquent on the subject of feminism:
To rescue feminism, we must give religion its due but require it to stay in its place. Again, Judeo-Christianity is only half our tradition. Paganism has other paradigms to offer. The militant virgin goddesses, Athena and Artemis, with their cold autonomy, are heroines of mine. Plato speaks of two Aphrodites, a common one of physical childbirth and the other, the Uranian, patron of spiritual and intellectual influence, specially associated with homoerotic relations. Evasions of nature’s biological imperative are distinctly human. I take the extreme view of that Enlightenment neopagan, the Marquis de Sade, who lauds abortion and sodomy for their bold frustration of mother nature’s relentless fertility. My code of modern Amazonism says that nature’s fascist scheme of menstruation and procreation should be defied, as a gross infringement of woman’s free will.
In many respects, Paglia is the most eloquent speaker on behalf of contemporary secular humanism, although she does not align herself with any particular philosophic movement. A 1960s free speech militant, she alarms prudes and fundamentalists with her enlightened logic, aesthetics, and ethics. In a 1995 interview with Tim Madigan, Paglia went on record concerning many subjects:
I hate dogma in any form. I hate it in the Roman Catholic church, which is why I left it twenty-five years ago. I hate it in gay activism and feminism now. Dogma has also taken over the humanities departments in elite schools–poststructuralism and so forth. . . . There’s nothing more dangerous to a liberal democracy than fixed dogma. . . . I’m an atheist but we people of the sixties were very spiritual in our own ways. That is, we abandoned organized religions, but we sought out Hinduism and Buddhism. We were very interested in cross-cultural spiritual experiences. A passage to India, as it were. . . . The Enlightenment turned away from organized religion, but put reason and science in its place. Romanticism rebelled against organized religion, but put nature and art in its place. What has modernism done? It turned against organized religion, and given nothing in its place. . . . There’s two thousand years of developed thought behind Christianity. There’s three thousand years behind Judaism. So, better Jehovah than Foucault. Jehovah at least brings along this incredible work, the Bible. What a great collection of poetry, magnificent, filled with things of spiritual use, whether you believe in God or not. The grandeur and intellectual development of Catholic theology is staggering. Foucault is a fraud; and that’s the diet our best kinds in the elite schools are being fed. It is appalling. The man knew nothing. . . . The overall theme of my work is this: Judeo-Christianity never defeated paganism. Instead, paganism, after the fall of Rome, was driven underground. . . . Postmodernism is a big fancy word for nothing. It is so passé. Let’s get past Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. . . . Most of the women in academe who pretend to be feminists are not. They do not know the history of feminism. . . . My feminism predates the feminism of Gloria Steinem. I go way back. . . . It’s not male hatred of women, but male fear of woman that is the great universal. . . . I have a peculiar way of looking at things, through male eyes. It’s probably because of my bisexual experience. Many of the things I’m saying are obvious, but feminism is so stuck behind its own blinders. One of the worst of these is to constantly see misogyny everywhere. I’m called a misogynist! Does that make any sense? Someone who’s an open lesbian, who’s written on Madonna and Diana and Elizabeth Taylor and Jackie Kennedy Onassis? I’m constantly writing evocatively of women. . . . (http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index1.html )
Pahl, Stewart V. (20th Century)
During the 1960s, Pahl was a director of the American Humanist Association. He wrote Humanism is Now! (1972).
PAIN • Pain: the essential ingredient of art. –Allen Windsor (See entries for Evil and Iago.)
Paine, Robert Treat (1731–1814) Paine, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was a member of the Continental Congress (1774–1778), eventually becoming attorney general of Massachusetts and then (1790–1804) the state’s supreme court justice. Paine was active in his later years as a Unitarian. {EG}
Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) Paine was a major American revolutionary and one of the country’s inspiring founders. Paine’s father was a Quaker and a staymaker (who manufactured women’s undergarments). He attended the local grammar school in Thetford, England, where, Paine recalled, “it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of learning.” Just before arriving in America, he was felled by typhus and had to be carried off the ship on a stretcher, but he lived to fight against despotism and become one of the country’s best-known defenders. He infuriated Thetford citizens with his advocacy during the French Revolution of an invasion of Britain by France. However, Thetford today sports a statue by Sir Charles Wheeler of its famous citizen. Wheeler, approving of Paine’s views, wrote that Common Sense (1776) advocated absolute independence for America and “did more than anything else to precipitate the great events of that year. Each number of the Crisis, which appeared during the war, was read by Washington’s order to each regiment in the service. Paine subscribed largely to the army and served for a short time himself.” Paine in 1787 went to London to sell his invention of an iron bridge. His Rights of Man (1791–1792), written as a reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, brought him a sentence of outlawry because it was a defense of the French Revolution. Paine then fled to Paris where, although he could not speak French, he was elected a member of the Convention. When he protested against the execution of King Louis XVI and the Terror, however, he was imprisoned for nearly a year and narrowly escaped the guillotine. While in jail, he wrote his deistic Age of Reason (1793–1794), a powerful attack on Christianity and the Bible. In Age of Reason, he wrote, “The idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause of all things,” a concept basic to his belief in deism. Son of Quaker parents, he was called “a man steeped in sin” and a “hater of Christ” by his enemies, but his “Common Sense” still appeals to contemporary rationalists interested in deism. Morrell in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief details Paine’s religious views: Paine held Jesus in high regard. He disbelieved in revealed religion, believing instead in that which makes common sense and is in accord with science. Revealed religion, he reasoned, was harmful and needed to be rejected. His deism postulated a God that had created everything but then had left mankind to get on with things themselves. Not only refuting the divinity of Christ, he said of the four gospels, “It is, I believe, impossible to find so many and such glaring absurdities, contradictions, and falsehoods as are in these books.” In England, notes Robertson, Paine’s views were much discussed. Paine was instrumental in “laying deep and wide the English foundations of a new democratic freethought; and the upper-class reaction in the nature of the case was doomed to impermanency, though it was to arrest English intellectual progress for over a generation. The French Revolution had re-introduced freethought as a vital issue, even in causing it to be banned as a danger.” “I do not believe,” he wrote in The Age of Reason, “in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. . . . Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.” He further elaborated: “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit.” In 1797, Paine founded in Paris the little “Church of Theo-philanthropy,” beginning his inaugural discourse with these words: “Religion has two principal enemies, Fanaticism and Infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combated by reason and morality; the other by natural philosophy.” Paine was no scholar. As a result, and because champions of the “religion of Galilee” enjoy disparaging any unlearned person who meddles with religion, Paine was considered an antagonist. However, his astute Biblical criticism jarred them, and his approach became a forerunner of later scholastic research. Robertson laments the fact that Paine “lived to find himself shunned and vilified, in the name of religion, in the country whose freedom he had so puissantly wrought to win.” He received sympathy and fair play, ironically, “only from the atheists whom he distrusted and opposed, or from thinkers who no longer hold by deism.” Robertson adds, “There is reason to think that in his last years the deistic optimism which survived the deep disappointments of the French Revolution began to give way before deeper reflection on the cosmic problem [citing Conway’s Life of Paine], if not before the treatment he had undergone at the hands of Unitarians and Trinitarians alike.” Paine’s Discourse to the Society of Theo-philanthropists (1798), Berman found, discredits atheism and is clearly deistic. However, President Theodore Roosevelt in an illogical outburst mistakenly called Paine a “filthy little atheist.” Paine was clearly not an atheist; he was a deist, believing in a God of moral truth, a Supreme Architect of the universe who had no further control over his creation and to whom petitionary prayers are redundant. “I believe,” he wrote, “that God is too good to kill his son when he couldn’t revenge himself in any other way, and also too mighty to be under any necessity of doing it. Any system of religion that has anything in it which shakes the mind of a child cannot be a true religion or system. . . . I do not believe in the creeds of any other church; my own mind is my own church.” He also wrote, “I believe in one God and no more: and I hope for happiness beyond this life.” In England, his effigy was burned, as were his books, and he was attacked in print by Bishop Richard Watson of Llandaff, among others. In 1802 he returned to America, where his views on religion and his opposition to Washington made him unpopular. His last years were saddened by ill health and neglect. In 1806, William Carver found him in such a bad state that he scrubbed Paine from head to toe: three times. Carver also cut his nails, some of which had grown around his toes “nearly as far under they extended on top,” and shaved him and cut his hair. Carver for five months took him to his own home but, after five months, found Paine was “not house-trained” and sometimes drank as much as a quart of brandy at a sitting. Meanwhile, Paine never earned money from his publications, requesting, for example, that the money be given to buy mittens for American soldiers. When Paine demanded something for his “selfless” services, the State of New York gave him a 300-acre farm at New Rochelle and the Pennsylvania Assembly and the Continental Congress gave him some cash grants. But Paine was not a good manager, was always in need, and was attacked by Americans who believed his Age of Reason was anti-Christian, although in fact the tract affirmed Paine’s deism and his belief in an afterlife. Paine, unlike the other Founding Fathers, was regarded as one with “no connections” but one who made the others uneasy because he wrote for ordinary people and his fiery language was easily able to stir them up. Two early works about him, better than most which have followed, are Crane Brinton’s bibliographical essay in The Dictionary of American Biography (1934) and Eric Foner’s Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (1976). They point out that Paine, who had participated in the major American and French revolutions, favored revolutions elsewhere. Although other revolutionaries had worked in their own countries, Paine favored Toussaint L’Ourverture’s black republic of revolutionary Haiti. Jack Fruchtman Jr., in Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, tells of Paine’s view on miracles: “The story of the whale swallowing Jonah, though a whale is large enough to do it, borders greatly on the marvelous but it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale.” And which is more probable, Paine asked, “that a man should have swallowed a whale or told a lie?” Fruchtman repeats the story that “no one could stand to be in the same room with Paine for very long,” because he was unclean and had “the brimstone odour.” John Keane, however, takes exception to Fruchtman’s describing Paine as “something of a country bumpkin,” saying that Paine “found himself in familiar company. The men and women who attended the lectures of Ferguson and Martin were mainly self-educated shopkeepers and artisans, many of whom leaned towards unorthodox religious views, and religious Dissenters, with strong leanings towards political radicalism. . . . These audiences were decidedly modern in outlook.” In 1995, John Keane in Tom Paine, estimated to be the fiftieth biography of the pamphleteer, wrote how—when forty-four and part of an American mission to France—Paine was described by an interpreter as of “dirty appearance and brimstone odor,” so smelly that he needed very hot water (bien bouiilli) to be bathed of his stench. Others have commented that Franklin was frequently unwashed and unshaven. Although said to have been the first to call his country the United States of America, he was only one of the first, having written the phrase on 13 January 1777. On 21 June 1776 Thomas Jefferson asked Benjamin Franklin to review his draft of “A Declaration by the Representiaves on the United States of America.” John Dickinson on 17 June 1776 in a draft of some articles of confederation used “the United States of America.” Linguist William Safire concludes that eighteen on three committees, including Roger Sherman, were aware of the phrase but that Jefferson usually is credited. Paine was a popularizer of the phrase, not the coiner. Biographer David Freeman Hawke compiled an extensive bibliography of Paine’s works, one which, however, has been criticized by Keane. Hawke described Paine’s final days. Although in great pain, he had a sense of humor and his mind was clear. His doctor referred one day to his distended abdomen saying, “Your belly diminishes.” “And yours augments,” replied Paine. Paine’s last years were full of pain, caused by an abscess in the side, which was brought on by his imprisonment in Paris. He expired, after intense suffering, on June 8, 1809, placidly and without a struggle. Pious visitors hoping to “save his immortal soul from the wrath of God,” however, disturbed even his last hours. Foote supplies some examples:
• One afternoon a very old lady, dressed in a large scarlet-hooded cloak, knocked at the door and inquired for Thomas Paine. Mr. Jarvis, with whom Mr. Paine resided, told her he was asleep. “I am very sorry,” she said, “for that, for I want to see him particularly.” Thinking it a pity to make an old woman call twice, Mr. Jarvis took her into Mr. Paine’s bedroom and awoke him. He rose upon one elbow; then, with an expression of eye that made the old woman stagger back a step or two, he asked, “What do you want?” “Is your name Paine?” “Yes.” “Well, then, I come from Almighty God to tell you, that if you do not repent of your sins, and believe in our blessed Savior Jesus Christ, you will be damned and . . . .” “Poh, poh, it is not true; you were not sent with any such impertinent message: Jarvis make her go away. Pshaw! he would not send such a foolish old woman about his messages; go away, go back, shut the door.”
• Two weeks before his death, his conversion was attempted by two Christian ministers, the Rev. Mr. Milledollar and the Rev. Mr. Cunningham. The latter said, “Mr. Paine, we visit you as friends and neighbors; you have now a full view of death, you cannot live long, and whoever does not believe in Jesus Christ will assuredly be damned.” “Let me,” said Mr. Paine, “have none of your popish stuff; get away with you, good morning, good morning.” The Rev. Mr. Milledollar attempted to address him, but he was interrupted in the same language. When they were gone he said to Mrs. Heddon, his housekeeper, “Do not let them come here again; they intrude upon me.” They soon renewed their visit, but Mrs. Heddon told them they could not be admitted, and that she thought the attempt useless, for if God did not change his mind, she was sure no human power could.
• Another of these busybodies was the Rev. Mr. Hargrove, a Swedenborgian or New Jerusalemite minister. This gentleman told Paine that his sect had found the key for interpreting the Scriptures, which had been lost for four thousand years. “Then,” said Paine, “it must have been very rusty.”
• Even his medical attendant did not scruple to assist in this pious enterprise. Dr. Manley’s letter to Cheetham, one of Paine’s biographers, says that he visited the dying skeptic at midnight, June 5–6, two days before he expired. After tormenting him with many questions, to which he made no answer, Dr. Manley proceeded as follows: “Mr. Paine, you have not answered my questions; will you answer them? Allow me to ask again, do you believe, or—let me qualify the question—do you wish to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?” After a pause of some minutes he answered, “I have no wish to believe on that subject.” I then left him, and know not whether he afterwards spoke to any person on the subject. Sherwin confirms this statement. He prints a letter from Mr. Clark, who spoke to Dr. Manley on the subject. “I asked him plainly,” said Mr. Clark. “Did Mr. Paine recant his religious sentiments? I would thank you for an explicit answer, sir.” He said, “No, he did not.”
• Mr. Willet Hicks, a Quaker gentleman who frequently called on Paine in his last illness, as a friend and not as a soul-snatcher, bears similar testimony. “In some serious conversation I had with him a short time before his death,” declared Mr. Hicks, “he said his sentiments respecting the Christian religion were precisely the same as they were when he wrote The Age of Reason.”
• Cheetham, who was compelled to apologize for libeling Paine during his life, confirmed that Paine “died as he had lived, an enemy to the Christian religion.”
Meanwhile, children in Sunday schools were told what was published by the Religious Tract Society, that Paine had recanted. According to William Cobbett, the source of the mischief was Mary Hinsdale, who had formerly been a servant to Mr. Willet Hicks. This gentleman sent Paine many little delicacies in his last illness, and Mary Hinsdale had conveyed them. According to her story, Paine made a recantation in her presence and assured her that if ever the Devil had an agent on earth, he who wrote The Age of Reason was undoubtedly that person. When Hinsdale was hunted out by Cobbett, however, “she shuffled, she evaded, she affected not to understand,” and finally said she had “no recollection of any person or thing she saw at Thomas Paine’s house.” One of Paine’s intimate friends, Colonel Fellows, was met by Walt Whitman, the American poet, soon after 1840 in New York. Whitman became well acquainted with the Colonel, who was then about seventy-eight years of age, and described him as “a remarkably fine old man.” From conversations with him, Whitman became convinced that Paine had been greatly calumniated in respect to his views. Thirty-five years later, addressing a meeting at Lincoln Hall, Philadelphia, on Sunday, 28 January 1887, the democratic poet said, “Thomas Paine had a noble personality, as exhibited in presence, face, voice, dress, manner, and what may be called his atmosphere and magnetism, especially the later years of his life. I am sure of it. Of the foul and foolish fictions yet told about the circumstances of his decease, the absolute fact is that as he lived a good life, after its kind, he died calmly and philosophically, as became him.” Upon his death, Paine was refused interment in a Quaker cemetery and was buried in a plot on a New Rochelle, New York, farm given him by New York State to reward him for his Revolutionary writings. Few people attended the funeral of the person who was the first to use the expression, “the religion of humanity,” Morrell reports. And of these “none represented the U.S. government. Ten years later William Cobbett removed Paine’s remains and took them to England, but their whereabouts are unknown.” His death mask, however, is on display at the public library in Thetford, England. (See entries for John Keane, author; Brian McCartin, administrator of the Thomas Paine Memorial Museum; and Reason Street. Also, see entry for Extraterrestrial Life, for Paine was one of the first in Colonial America to extrapolate about the subject.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Robert W. Morrell; FUK; FUS; HAB; HNS2; JM; OEL; PA; RAT; RE; William Safire, The New York Times Magazine, 5 July 1998; TSV; TYD; UU; VI; TRI}
Painlevé, Paul (1863–1933) Painlevé was professor of general mathematics at Paris University. Few Frenchmen of his time had so many national and international honors. He was an outspoken rationalist who supported the erection of a statue to Servetus. {RAT; RE}
Painter, Nell Irvin (20th Century) Painter, a freethinker, wrote The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979). Hudson, although a Communist, sang in his church choir and served as a deacon, but the work contains an account of theological conflicts in the black community in 1930s Birmingham. Many of the black “Reds” were Christians, but others were orthodox Marxist atheists. In 1996, Painter wrote Sojourner Truth 1996). {Freethought History #14, 1995}
PAKISTAN HUMANISTS The founding father of Pakistan, M. A. Jinnah, according to Ian Buruma,
a lawyer with fastidious Anglophile habits, was a secular man who ate ham—in private. He had no desire to found a religious state, let alone a theocratic state. He just didn’t want to be dominated by Hindus. To him, the Congress Party of Gandhi and Nehru was inevitably a Hindu party, and a rather vulgar one at that, and since Congress would rule India, the only alternative was to create a separate, secular state for Muslims.
The other founding father, Sir Mohammed Iqbal, a convert of Kashmiri Brahmin stock, was a poet and an intellectual who, Buruma relates,
. . . . made a speech in 1930 in which he promoted the ideal of an Islamic state in India. Naipul describes Iqbal’s dream as a tribal one, a longing for a world that is “neatly parceled out, every tribe in his corner.” It is indeed a dangerous dream, as we know from recent Balkan events where Muslims are the victims of orthodox Christian zealots. But Iqbal was a more complicated character than Naipaul makes him out to be. Nehru saw him as an exponent not of religious zealotry but of modern nationalism. His Urdu poetry was full of nationalist sentiments. Part of his vision of a Muslim state in India was a desire for Islam to “rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it. . . . “ Nehru observed [in The Discovery of India] that since “Indian nationalism was dominated by Hindus and had a Hinduised look . . . a conflict arose in the Moslem mind.” In fact, Iqbal later seems to have changed his mind about the Muslim state, and came to believe that it would be harmful to India and Muslims too. According to Nehru, Iqbal turned to socialism in his last years, inspired by the splendid achievements of the Soviet Union.
In Pakistan, Dr. Yunis Shaikh has founded a group that holds public meetings about religion and women’s rights. Called the Enlightenment, the group has lobbied the Government and Senators and MPs, criticizing the use of the Sharia law. The group has challenged Muslims to a debate, saying that they will change their minds if convinced and if the Muslims agree to do the same. Shaikh has not been attacked directly, but threats have been made against his parents and he has had to give up two jobs. E-mail: <pakhumanist@hotmail.com>. Meanwhile, V. S. Naipaul, in Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (1998), is “enraged” by the fundamentalist Islam he has found in Pakistan and other predominantly Islamic countries. A Pakistani journalist, Asawal D. Sardar, has written a detailed criticism of the country’s blesphemy law, finding it a pretext for persecution. (See Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim.) {International Humanist News, December 1998; M. A. Jinnah, In the Empire of Islam, The New York Review of Books, 16 July 1998; Asawal D. Sardar, The International Association for Religious Freedom: <iarfna@nywork2.undp.org>.}
PAKISTAN UNITARIANS In 1991 Indirius Dominic Bhatti discovered Unitarianism in a dictionary of religions. The definition described his own religious ideas, and he told others as well as organized the Unitarian Universalist Christians of Pakistan (UUP). In 1994 UUP became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association. UUP’s aims and objectives are • to promote justice, peace, human dignity, and social development; • to mobilize communities against cruelty/ies and slavery/ies of all sorts; • to prepare people to get social, administering therapy to the socio-religiously confused and disturbed; • to work for social, economic, educational, environmen tal, cultural, and religious uplifting; • to offer a form of religious liberalism and social justice to demoralized people.
The Unitarian Universalist Christians of Pakistan have sold land in Lahore to build a church for its 100 members. The group can be reached by contacting Indirius Dominic Bhatti, PO Box 6127, Lahore Cantt, Pakistan. On the Web: <http://www.uua.org/icuu/icuu-asia.html>.
Pal, R. M. (20th Century) Pal spoke at the 1998 congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union that was held in Mumbai. He stated that the religious division of the partition of India had as a goal to end communal problems, but India today is faced with majority communalism, not minority communalism. Pal holds that it is a myth that India has a tradition of tolerance. There has been flexibility and pluralism, but not real tolerance. He wrote “Fascism and Its Continuing Appeal” for Radical Humanist (June 1999). {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Palamedes
In Greek mythology, Palamedes was a hero of the Trojan War. A number of inventions were attributed to him, including the alphabet, numbers, weights and measures, coinage, and eating at regular intervals. As such he is like a personification of Phoenician culture, which was responsible for many of these developments.
In the Athens of Demosthenes, a Group of Sixty met in Heracles’s temple where they traded wisecacks and humor. Palamedes, then, is also credited with having invented jokes.
One epic version has him drowned by Odysseus and Diomedes, who envied him.
Paleario, Aonio (c. 1500–1570) Paleario was an Italian humanist and martyr. In 1520 he went to Rome and took his place among the brilliant men of letters of the court of Leo X. After the taking of Rome by Charles V, he retired to Sienna. In 1536 he published at Lyons an elegant poem on the mortality of the soul, one modeled on Lucretius. While a professor of eloquence at Milan, he was accused of heresy. He had called the Inquisition a poignard directed against all men of letters. On 3 July 1570, he was hanged by religious authorities, who then threw his body into flames. {BDF}
PALEONTOLOGY Paleontology, the study of early beings, is of the utmost importance to freethinkers who develop their philosophical outlook. Basically a science of the life of past geologic periods based on fossil remains, it is closer to geology than to biology. This is so because the environment of animals and plants cannot be understood and reconstructed without knowledge of the age, structure, and composition of the rocks in which their remains are found. Paleontology can be subdivided into paleobotany (the study of ancient plants, also called paleophytology); palynology (the study of ancient spores, pollen, and microorganisms); and paleozoology (the study of ancient animals, which includes the invertebrate such as clams and the vertebrate such as dinosaurs. Richard Fortey’s Life (1998) is a paleontological study of what else besides dinosaurs has occupied the earth in the last four billion years. Less than one percent of all the species that ever lived are known to us through fossils, he explains. As to why dinosaurs disappeared, Fortey discusses Stephen Jay Gould’s conclusions about the creatures of the Burgess Shale, which Gould felt died without issue and illustrated the blind and random pruning of an earlier and vastly more diverse world. Fortey, however, notes that the Burgess Shale animals are now believed to be forerunners of existing species which, as pointed out by ecologist Jerry A. Coyne, undermines “Gould’s claim that if evolution were replayed, the vagaries of chance would populate the modern world with creatures substantially different from those we know.” In 1999 paleontologists reported in Science (23 April 1999) that a team, headed by Dr. Berhane Asfaw in Ethiopia, had named a newly found species Australopithecus garhi (the latter word meaning “surprise” in the language spoken by the Afar people). “This species is descended from Australopithecus afarensis and is a candidate ancestor for early Homo,” the scientists stated. Characteristics of the skull, teeth, and limb bones seemed to mark the species as a descendant of A. afarensis, which lived from 3.7 million to 3 million years ago and are represented by the “Lucy” skeleton from Ethiopia. Even earlier species of australopithecines, found in Kenya, have been dated back to 4.2 million years. The hominids are thought to have split from the ape lineages more than 5 million years ago. (See entries for Stephen Jay Gould and Lucy.) {CE; The New York Times Book Review, 12 April 1998; John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, 23 April 1999}
Palevitz, Barry A. (20th Century) A professor in the botany department at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, Palevitz in “Science and the Versus of Religion” (Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1999) warns that science and religion are different spheres, that “religion and science are equally valid at what they do individually, but not in each other’s sphere.” He resents the implication “that scientists have no spiritual dimension,” citing how awed he becomes when snorkeling on a coral reef, “humbled by a crisp December night full of stars, forever amazed by a dividing cell, and inspired by human creativity.”
Palfrey, John Gorham (Born 1796) Palfrey, a Unitarian minister, was a politician, writer, and 18th century theologian.
Palfrey, Sarah Hammond (1823-1914) The daughter of John Palfrey, Sarah was a Unitarian and an author.
Palladas (Ancient Greece) Palladas wrote humanistically . . . but not for feminists:
• To the man who has married an ugly wife
Lamp-light’s an even deeper darkness.
• Only twice is womankind
Anything but an affliction:
[1] in bride-bed & [2] in the grave.
• Praise, of course, is best:
plain speech breeds hate. But ah the Attic honey Of telling a man exactly what you think of him! • In silence walk your wretched span; in silence Be like Time, that passes silently. And live unheeded: You shall be so, once dead.
(Translation by Dudley Fitts found in Poems from the Greek Anthology)
Paley, William (1743–1805) Paley, an English theologian, wrote Horae Paulinae (1790) to prove that the New Testament is not “a cunningly devised fable.” He believed that all living things were created by “a divine watchmaker,” a viewpoint which Darwin later showed was erroneous. {CE}
Pallas, Peter Simon (1741–1811) Pallas was a German naturalist and traveler. Invited by Catherine II to become professor of natural history at St. Petersburg, he traveled through Siberia and settled in the Crimea. In 1769 he was a member of an expedition to observe the transit of Venus, and until 1774 he explored the upper Amur, the Caspian Sea, and the Ural and Atlas mountains, collecting valuable specimens in natural history. In 1810 he returned to Berlin, where he died. Lalande spoke highly of him, and Cuvier considered him the founder of modern geology. A rationalist, he was equally distinguished in geology, zoology, and anthropology. {BDF; CE; RAT}
Pallavicino, Ferrante (1616–1644) Pallavicino was an Italian poet and wit. He was a canon of the Lateran congregation, but for composing some satirical pieces against Pope Urban VIII he had a price set on his head. Fleeing to Venice, he was betrayed by a false friend, and the Inquisition had Pallavicino beheaded at Avignon on 5 March 1644. {BDF}
Palmaer, Bernhard Henrik (1801–1854) Palmaer was a Swedish satirist, the author of The Last Judgment in the Crow Corner. {BDF}
Palmen, Ernst [Baron] (1849–1919) Palmen was a Finnish historian, a professor of history at Helsingfors University. A monist and atheist, he strongly supported Haeckel, whom he hailed as “a second Prometheus” who was “like every bringer of truth and light.” {RAT; RE}
Palmer, Charles (20th Century) Palmer is associated with the Atheist League of the State of Washington. (See entry for Washington Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Palmer, Courtlandt (1843–1888) An American reformer, Palmer had been brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church but became a freethinker while young. In 1880 he established and became president of the Nineteenth Century Club, dedicated to the utmost liberty of public discussion. Among its members was Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll. He contributed to the Freethinker’s Magazine, Truthseeker, and other journals. After bidding the members of his family an affectionate farewell, Palmer, aware that he was dying, said: “The general impression is that Freethinkers are afraid of death. I want you one and all to tell the whole world that you have seen a Freethinker die without the least fear of what the hereafter may be.” Upon his death, Colonel Ingersoll delivered the eulogium. Mrs. Palmer did not share her husband’s agnosticism. She felt some liberal Christian minister should say a few words over her husband’s corpse and, out of tenderness to her feelings, Ingersoll consented to the proposal. The Rev. R. H. Newton then spoke, refraining from any pious allusions to the dead agnostic and confining his words entirely to Palmer’s character. {BDF; FUS; RAT; RE}
Palmer, Edwina (1904-1999) Palmer joined the South Place Ethical Society in 1927 and was one of its most active workers. At the time of her death, she had been a member of the Rationalist Press Association for thirty years. {New Humanist, March 1999}
Palmer, Elihu (1764–1806) During the time of Paine and Jefferson, Palmer was the most notorious of the militant American freethinkers. According to Roderick S. French, Palmer was of a philosophic mind and carried his scientific rationalism beyond deism, becoming, “one of the first tentative voices of philosophic naturalism in America. His views were unified by the anthropology of his confident humanism. His thought and work were inspired by the conviction that the powers of man are competent to all the great purposes of human existence.’ ” Palmer was blind from an attack of yellow fever, yet he initiated organized unbelief in the U.S. by founding a deistic society in New York in 1796, leading it until his death in 1806. He dictated to a secretary his Principles of Nature (1802) and “The Immoral Teachings of Jesus,” the latter of which is found in Gaskin’s Varieties of Unbelief: From Epicurus to Sartre (1989). “The crimes of ecclesiastical despots,” he cried, “are still corroding upon the very vitals of human society.” {BDF; EU, Roderick S. French and Gordon Stein; Freethought History #9, 1994; FUK; FUS; JM; RAT; TYD}
Palmer, Harold (20th Century) Palmer in 1995 was elected co-president of the Northeast Atheist Association.
Palmer, John (20th Century) In 1995, Palmer was elected treasurer of the Northeast Atheist Association.
Palmer, William Scott (20th Century) Palmer, a freethinker, wrote An Agnostic’s Progress (1905). {GS}
Palmerston, Henry John [Viscount] (1784–1865) Palmerston was a British statesman. His viscountcy, to which he succeeded in 1802, was in the Irish peerage and therefore did not prevent him from entering the House of Commons in 1807. Initially a Tory, he served (1809–1818) as secretary of war but then joined the Whig government as foreign minister. A firm believer in liberal constitutionalism, Palmerston was instrumental in securing the independence of Belgium (1830–1831), and in 1834 he formed a quadruple alliance with France, Spain, and Portugal to help the Iberian countries put down rebellions aimed at restoring absolutist rule. Viscount Palmerston vigorously prosecuted the Crimean War, facilitated the unification of Italy, and suppressed the Indian Mutiny. Although his diplomacy has been described as having been reckless, it did advance British prestige. McCabe says Palmerston was either a skeptic or an atheist and that Morley in his Life of Gladstone wrote of Palmerston, “The Church in all its denominations was on terms of cool and reciprocated indifference with one who was above all else the man of the world.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Panaetius (Died 111 B.C.E.) Panaetius was a Stoic philosopher, a pupil of Diogenes and perhaps of Carneades. About 150 B.C.E. he visited Rome and taught a moderate stoicism, denying the doctrine of the conflagration of the world, and placing physics before dialectics. Panaetius wrote On Duties, to which Cicero expressed his indebtedness in his De Officiis. {BDF}
Pancholi, N. D. (20th Century) At the 1998 congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Mumbai, Pancholi talked about religious separatism and terrorism in Kashmir. The movement for separation in Kashmir, he reported, is not primarily a religious movement but is one for democratic rights that many feel have been denied. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Pancoucke, Charles Joseph (1736–1798) An eminent French publisher, Pancoucke was acquainted with d’Alembert, Garat, and others, and was a correspondent of Rousseau, Buffon, and Voltaire, whose works he brought out. Pancoucke translated Lucretius in 1768, brought out the Mercure de France, projected in 1781 the Encyclopédie Méthodique (of which there are 106 volumes), and founded the Moniteur (1789). {BDF; RAT}
PANENTHEISM: See entry for Charles Hartshorne.
Panizza, Mario (19th Century) Panizza was an Italian physiologist and philosopher. He wrote a materialist work, The Philosophy of the Nervous System (1887). Panizza rejected the idea of a spiritual soul. His Anniversario del supplizio di Giordano Bruno (1890) was a eulogy of Bruno, whom he admired. {BDF; RAT}
Pankhurst, Richard (1839–1898) Pankhurst was a radical skeptic and feminist. He drafted the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, which gave the wife the right to her own property which, previously, had passed into the absolute control of the husband. {TRI}
Pankhurst, Sylvia P. (20th Century) In 1920 Pankhurst called her Worker’s Socialist Federation the Communist Party. It was the first Marxist use of “communism” in England. {TRI}
Pannill, H. Burrell (20th Century) Pannill wrote The Religion of John Fiske (1957). {FUS}
Panosch, Martin (20th Century) Panosch, of the Austrian Freidenkerbund Oesterreichs, was a participant in 1996 of the humanist conference in Mexico City. His e-mail: <mpan@fc.alpin.or.at>.
Pantano, Eduardo (19th Century) An Italian author, Pantano wrote a book on the Sicilian Vespers and the Commune (1882). {BDF}
PANTHEISM • Pantheism, n. The doctrine that everything is God, in contradistinction to the doctrine that God is everything. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Pantheism identifies the universe with God or God with the Universe. John Toland in the 18th century used it, although ancient thinkers also had ideas of “God is all, and all is God.” Xenophan, the ancient Hindus, the Stoics, Erigena, Eckhart, Boehme, Bruno, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, W. P. Montague, Alfred North Whitehead—all were interested in the concept and devised different interpretations of its meaning. McCabe defined pantheism as “any theory that admits the existence of a God but denies that he is distinct from nature. The word (literally meaning ‘the All is God’) was introduced in the eighteenth century but covers a great variety of philosophies, from ancient Brahmanism or the theories of the Eleatic School in Greece to those of Spinoza, Goethe, Schelling, etc.” He adds that “It was a natural reaction against the old idea of a God or gods creating the world and then working miracles and giving relations to improve the work they had performed; but the nature of the union of God and the world, the spiritual and material, the infinite and the finite, etc., could not be contemplated in exact thought, and the system was more apt to appeal to poets.” A contemporary who thinks of the totality of all the galaxies and all within that known and unknown space as being the Ultimate, a kind of super-Mother Nature, might label herself or himself as a pantheist. Particularly, adds a Manhattan wag, when viewing a beautiful sunrise or sunset. A United Kingdom web page about pantheism is at <http://members.aol.com/Heraklit1/index.htm>. A compact disk, “Song of the Pantheist” with words by Judson M. Savage and music by freethinker Warren Allen Smith, was once available from Box 10-D, 31 Jane Street, New York, NY 10014. (See entries for Charles Hartshorne, Minot Savage, and John Toland. Also, see Alasdair Mac Intyre’s article on pantheism in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6.) {CE, ER}
PANTHEON Originally, the pantheon was a temple to all gods. The Pantheon in Rome (built in 27 B.C.E., destroyed, and rebuilt in the 2nd Century by Hadrian) was made of brick with a large hemispherical dome. In 609 it became a Christian church. In Paris the Panthéon, which was designed by J. G. Soufflot, was built between 1764 and 1781. Several times secularized and reconsecrated, it became a national mausoleum. Among the early honorees were François Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Also honored are authors Victor Hugo and Emile Zola; resistance hero Jean Moulin; and Louis Braille, who invented the reading system for the blind. The 70th and 71st people whose remains were enshrined in the Panthéon, in 1995, were Marie and Pierre Curie. {CE}
Papa, Stephan (20th Century) Papa, a Unitarian, wrote The Last Man Jailed for Blasphemy (1998). He tells the story of Universalist minister Abner Kneeland, who became infamous by the 1830s for his outspoken and, for the times, unorthodox public writings and views on religion. (World, July-August 1999)
PAPACY: For a caustic critique, see Joseph McCabe’s A Rationalist Encyclopedia.
PAPAL BULL A papal bull is the Vatican’s mascot, or so freethinkers assume.
Papillon, J. Henry Fernand (1847–1873) Papillon was a French philosophic writer who wrote An Introduction to Chemical Philosophy (1865). He contributed to the Revue de Philosophie Positive and the Revue des Deux Mondes. His principle work was Nature and Life (1873). Although he leaned to a rationalism of the spiritual kind in his later years, he never embraced Christianity. {BDF; RAT}
Papp, Gabor (20th Century) Papp is leader of the Hungarian humanist organization, Magyar Humanista Egyesulet. The association has held seminars about philosophical and theoretical problems of abortion and euthanasia. Papp edits a 440-year-old ethical monthly magazine that regularly represents humanist values and reprints articles from international and national magazines.
Paps, George (20th Century) In the 1950s, Paps was a director of the American Humanist Association.
Paquet, Henri Remi René (Born 1845) Paquet was a French writer who, after studying under the Jesuits, went to Paris, became an advocate, but devoted his attention to literature. Under the anagram of “Nérée Quépat,” he published La Lorgnette Philosophique (1872), a dictionary of the great and little philosophers of the time. He also wrote a study of La Mettrie entitled Materialist Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century. {BDF; RAT}
PARADISE For Christians, paradise is a state of pure happiness, which is associated with the Garden of Eden and with Heaven. The word has a pagan (Zoroastrian) rather than Judeo-Christian source: pairi-daëza is a garden, an enclosed park, a paradise in the Avestan view. For non-theists, paradise is more apt to be associated with a pleasant place or state of ideal beauty, like one’s bed on a sleepy Sunday morning and afternoon.
PARADOX: See entry for Logical Paradoxes.
PARAGUAYAN FREETHOUGHT Augusto Roa Bastos, who was born in 1917, a prominent author in Paraguay. He is one of the few there to express himself in non-supernaturalistic terms. Forced because of his democratic views to live in exile in France for forty years, he was able at last to return in 1997. Twice during his long exile he had reentered the country secretly, and both times he was expelled for being a dangerous agitator who preached subversion. This was because Roa Bastos had written a surreal portrait of a paranoid dictator, I, The Supreme. Asked for his views by a reporter, he lamented that Paraguay is not yet a democracy, that it “is still a 19th-century country, not having advanced much in its culture. It continues to be an island surrounded by land.” The less educated peasants “know me as a myth,” he found, “created by circumstances [of exile] rather than by my own action.” Asked about his early influences, he replied, “When I came from the countryside to Asunción, I lived in the house of a bishop, who was my uncle, where there were only church books, which of course I did not read, and the classics. I did read the classics. My uncle had a complete set of Flaubert, for example. The cultured priests, in those days, were censors and were charged with confiscating prohibited books. The first book I read in my life was Don Quixote, just because it was there.” “It is a fact,” he observed when asked if writers are creative in order to be remembered even after they die, “that there is a progressive invasion of the shadow of death on the work of people who had very strong drives in their youth. They enter old age and become reactionary—this is the case with Octavio Paz. Now we can speak of him as a terminated case, a closed proceeding. All in all, I believe he was a really great poet.” And does he believe in God? Roa Bastos’s response:
The important thing is faith–and you have to have faith in someone or something–independent of the question of the existence of God. I condemn those who try to strip others of their faith: it is like extracting their inner force. There is a need to believe. I always resist the idea of a crusade to do away with the believers. I have always taken great care not to dispossess others of their faith. It may be the only wealth that they have.
By inference, then, Roa Bastos is a typical freethinker. A Country Behind the Rain, which he is working on, will attempt “to look at societies from all parts of the world. When I sit down to write, I am surrounded by an unstoppable stream of memories of my wanderings through the world: a small village in India, in Venezuela, in Paraguay, or in Sicily. There are always two or three central themes, emerging from dreams and central obsessions.” {Silvia Soler in Búsqueda, Montevideo, 7 May 1998; World Press Review, August 1998}
Paranjpye, Raghunath P. [Sir] (1876–1966) The Indian Rationalist Association (IRA) was formed in Madras in December at a conference inaugurated by the late Sir Raghunath P. Paranjpye, who had been a founding member of the Rationalist Association of India and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association of London. He wrote Religion on the Indian Problem (1943). {FUK}
PARANORMAL The paranormal, or supernatural, is that which is not scientifically explainable. Asked about the subject, philosopher Paul Kurtz, chairman of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Box 703, Buffalo, New York 14226), remarked, “Far more exciting and constructive than the paranormal is astrophysics.”
PARANORMAL HOAXES: See entry for Hoaxes, Paranormal.
PARAPRAXIS Parapraxis is a Freudian term to describe a slip of the tongue that reveals a subconscious motive. Paul Edwards gives the example of having attended a dull party and, leaving early, was told by the hostess, “Oh, it’s so good of you to leave.” She had meant to say “to have come.”
Pardee, Caroline J. (1911– ) With Robert H. Jones, Pardee wrote My Dear Carrie: The Civil War Letters of George K. Pardee and Family (1994). An Ohio Unitarian, Pardee discovered in her attic the letters written by her grandfather to her grandmother while he served in the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War.
Pardon, P. H. (20th Century) Mlle. Pardon, in 1947, was elected as an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association.
Pare, William (1805–1873) Pare was an Owenite social reformer. He wrote an abridgment of Thompson’s Distribution of Wealth. Also, he wrote Capital and Labor (1854), Cooperative Agriculture (1870), and Vol 1 of the Biography of Robert Owen. {BDF; RAT}
Parfait, Noel (Born 1814) Parfait was a French writer and politician. He took part in the revolution of 1830 and wrote many radical brochures. After the coup d’état he took refuge in Belgium. In 1871 Parfait was elected deputy and sat on the extreme left. {BDF}
PARICA In Peru, Parica was considered to have been a god who flooded the earth. {LEE}
Parikh, G. D. (Deceased) Parikh, who was the rector of Bombay University, produced the People’s Economic Plan for the Indian Rationalist Humanist Association.
Parikh, Indumati (20th Century)
The president of the Radical Humanist Association of India and a physician Dr. Parikh signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1988, the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism elected her a Humanist Laureate. She is internationally noted for the work she has done in a Bombay slum area by organizing clinics for family planning, maternal and child-care services, educational programs for women, and day nurseries. Her main goal, she says, is helping women to help themselves.
A signer of Humanist Manifesto II, she was married to Prof. Parikh who, before his death, wrote “People’s Plan 1,” a Radical Humanist contribution to the Economic Reconstruction of post-independent India. He had taught at Ruia College and was Rector of Bombay University. At the Second International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in London (1952) and also at the Tenth held in Buffalo, she addressed the gathering. In 1992 at the 40th Anniversary IHEU Congress in Amsterdam, she was presented with a Distinguished Humanist Service Award for “her unparalleled charitable services to the needy and ill in India, and her inspiring exemplification of the ideals of humanism.” In a revealing interview by Levi Fragell, the Norwegian editor of Human-Etisk, Parikh was asked her views of Mother Teresa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. She remained discreetly quiet, but Abe Solomon, president of the Indian Secular Society, said, “Mother Teresa has been a disaster for India.” It was then that Dr. Parikh said, “Yes,” that she agreed with Solomon’s wisdom. This is because, in her words, “Contraception, information about sexual matters, abortion—the keys to some of the greatest social problems of our world–are regarded by mainstream religions as precipitating a shameful decline and lack of morality. They include not only Hindu and Muslim traditions but also the Christian churches who are supplying medical assistance to India. The Roman Catholic church is influential in this connection and has a very negative influence, perhaps fatal.” In 1994 her essay, “The Need for the Third World of Humanism,” was included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science. In 1996, she welcomed humanists to the M. N. Roy Memorial Development Campus and told about the launching of the South Asian Humanist Centre. “We need interdisciplinary research,” she explained, “to discover our rational heritage; we have to launch a massive drive for non-formal education for our masses. . . . To my mind South Asian people are moving in a vicious circle of ignorance, poverty, primitive and ritual-ridden religious fundamentalism, fatalistic attitudes and population explosion. The result is the erosion of democratic and human values, which is leading us to authoritarian, bureaucratic power politics.” Parikh signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. On the Web: <mrcssc@bom2.vsnl.net.in>. (See entry for G. Vijayam.) {HM2}
Paris, Bruno Paulin Gaston (1839–1903) Paris was a director of the École des Hautes Études and then professor of the French language and literature at the Collège de France (Paris University). In its obituary notice the Athenaeum described Paris as being “one of the most distinguished and most learned Frenchmen of modern times,” a reference to his writing works on medieval literature. Paris shared Renan’s views, as shown in his discourse on that writer and in his Penseurs et poètes (1896). {RAT; RE}
Paris, Erna (20th Century) An award-winning journalist in Toronto, Paris has won six awards for feature writing and is the author of a variety of books: Stepfamilies (1984); Unhealed Wounds: France and The Klaus Barbie Affair (1985); and The Garden and the Gun: A Journey Inside Israel (1988). Her The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny, and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1995) not only describes Spain during the Inquisition but also relates social upheavals in nineteenth and twentieth century France and Germany.
Paris, Matthew (of) (Died 1259) Paris recorded that in 1249 a total of 443 heretics were burned in Saxony and Pomerania. Previously, multitudes had been burned by the Inquisitor Conrad, who was himself finally murdered in revenge. He was the confessor of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, and he taught her among other things, “Be merciful to your neighbor” and “Do to others whatsoever you would they should do to you.” His praises as recorded by Montalembert are cited by Robertson. Matthew of Paris was an English historian, a monk of St. Albans. {CE; JMRH}
Parisot, Jean Patrocle (17th Century) Parisot was a Frenchman who wrote La Foy devoilée par la raison (1681, Faith Unveiled By Reason), a work whose title led it to be suppressed. {BDF}
Park, Charles Edwards (1873–1962) Called by Time “the Grand Old Man of U.S. liberal pulpits,” Park was minister of Boston’s First Unitarian Church for forty years. In contrast to many of the currents of modernism and Humanism among Unitarians, Park preached a Christian message based on the religion of Jesus, preaching that the central quest of Christianity is to “know Christ in his human character, as a man among men.” This was not a supernatural view, because Park attributed to Paul, not Jesus, many of the supernatural elements of the Christian tradition. But for him Jesus was a teacher whose mysticism was “the key to the whole personality.” As expected, others found his approach anything but liberal. {U&U}
Park, James (20th Century) Park is the Humanist Campus Minister at the University of Minnesota. He participated in the 1996 discussion, “Is There Life After Death?”, at the University of Minnesota campus.
Parke, David (20th Century) Parke is author of The Historical and Religious Antecedents of the New Beacon Series in Religious Education (1978). He edited The Epic of Unitarianism (1957). {GS}
Parke, W. H. (19th Century) Parke was a freethinker who wrote “Salvation Without Saviours—the Route of the Divinities” (1800?). {GS}
Parker, Dorothy (Rothchild) (1893–1967) The witty Parker once wrote, “I went to a convent in New York and was fired finally for my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was a spontaneous combustion.” She was drama critic for Vanity Fair (1916–1917) and book critic for The New Yorker (1927). Her bons mots were legendary:
• Men seldom make passes
At girls that wear glasses.
• The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.
• Look at him, a rhinestone in the rough.
• His body has gone to his head.
• If all the girls in attendance (at the Yale prom) were laid end to end—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
• I was the toast of two continents: Greenland and Australia.
• (Asked to use the word horticulture) You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.
• (Told that Clare Boothe Luce was kind to her inferiors): And where does she find them?
• (Informed that President Calvin Coolidge was dead): How could they tell?
• (A 1933 review of “The Lake,” starring Katharine Hepburn): Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of motions from A to B.
• (At a party): One more drink and I’ll be under the host.
• All I want is a little room where I can lay my hat and a few friends.
• Brevity is the soul of lingerie.
• This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
• “The House Beautiful” is the play lousy.
• Tonstant Weader fwowed up. (in a review of “The House at Pooh Corner”)
• Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart.
Critic Brendan Gill calls her “a blatant homophobe.” However, Parker is often cited for her humanistic sentiment:
The man she had was kind and clean And well enough for every day, But, oh, dear friends, you should have seen The one that got away!
Parker, one of the better-known wits who were members of the Algonquin Round Table (Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Harpo Marx, Irving Berlin, George S. Kaufman were others), once described her bisexual husband and screenwriting partner, Alan Campbell, as “the wickedest woman in Paris.” An alcoholic who was unhappy in several love affairs and who had three marriages, she made at least four attempts at suicide, once by swallowing a bottle of shoe polish. Not unsurprisingly, she suggested EXCUSE MY DUST as the epitaph for her gravestone. Her final death “was anti-climactic and painfully lonely,” Stephen M. Silverman wrote (Where’s There’s a Will, 1991). “She became a drunk in later years, and increasingly reclusive. She had settled into the Volney Hotel on Manhattan’s East 74th Street, inhabited principally by widows and divorcees. . . . [One night] she got drunk with an old friend, returned home to the Volney, and telephoned the friend to say goodnight once more in a slurred and sentimental speech. They found her the next morning in a pile on the floor, C’est Tout [her dog] whimpering in a corner.” She left an estate worth about $90,000 in 1990 dollars. After expenses, the remaining $20,000 was given to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which she had directed although they had never met. The money went to his organization, the NAACP, and within a year King was murdered. Parker’s will had stated that no service of any kind should be held, but Lillian Hellman took charge and 150 attended. Parker was cremated in a yellow satin gown that had been given to her by Gloria Vanderbilt. At Manhattan’s Frank E. Campbell Chapel, where the body lay, Kate Mostel stayed overnight, saying she felt a body should not be left alone. Her husband, actor Zero Mostel, gave a eulogy, suggesting that the last thing Parker would have wanted was this formal ceremony. “If she had her way,” he added to everyone’s amusement, “I suspect she would not be here at all.” Hellman’s eulogy included “She was part of nothing and nobody except herself.” Afterwards it was found that Parker owed the Volney $385., a drug store $24., a newspaper delivery service $95., and the Internal Revenue Service $65. In her apartment was $350. worth of uncashed royalty checks, some of them seven years old. Also lying around was a $10,000 check from Hellman, which represented the sum obtained from selling a Picasso gouache Parker once had given Hellman and which she had sold upon hearing in 1965 that Parker was destitute. Parker, according to Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair, October 1999), “had never been very affirmatively Jewish—she disliked her father’s piety and always insisted that her hatred of Hitler and fascism was, so to say, secular.” {CE}
Parker, Edward Harker (1849–1926) When Parker returned from trade in China to study law in London, he was called to the bar but, instead, joined the Consular Service in China and Burma. In 1896 he was appointed reader in Chinese literature at Liverpool University College, and in 1901 professor at Manchester. His works on China do not conceal his rationalism. “The Chinese intellect,” he wrote in Studies in Chinese Religion (1910), “is quite robust enough to take care of itself, and it is not likely that it will ever surrender itself to the dogmatic teaching of any Christian sect.” {RAT; RE}
Parker, Eva: See the entry for her husband, Robert G. Ingersoll.
Parker, John C. (19th Century) Parker is author of an essay in Prolegomena to the History of the Religion of Israel (1878) in which he demonstrated the various human patterns of authorship in the Old Testament. {FD}
Parker, John C. (1926– ) When a teenager, Parker became convinced that he was the only Democrat and atheist in Vermont, then moved to Connecticut where he worked as a nurse’s aide in a state mental hospital. In the late 1940s, he remembers, “I went to a dinner celebration sponsored by Charles Smith of The Truth Seeker, honoring Vashti McCollum—who was a real beauty. Woolsey Teller also spoke.” Parker edits The Northeast Atheist (PO Box 63, Simsburg, Connecticut 06070. (WAS, 20 July 1997)
Parker, Theodore (1810–1860) A Unitarian minister of note, Parker was brought up in poverty and who acquired a university education while laboring on the farm. A famed orator he was opposed to slavery (to the point of sheltering slaves in his own house), contributed to The Dial, and was a transcendentalist. His Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion was considered a “radical” viewpoint in 1842, and he agreed: radix is a word-root that describes getting down to the roots of matters. Not only did Parker deny miracles but also he introduced Unitarians to the new German scientific criticism of the Bible. He was an early example of the preacher who used his pulpit as a platform for constantly urging social reform. For him, most of the traditional supports of Christian belief such as the biblical miracles, the inspiration of the scriptures, and the divinity of Jesus were transient rather than permanent and necessary parts of religion. Such an outlook made him a rebel, an iconoclast, among fellow Unitarians, and “Parkerism” became a shorthand phrase for modernist and reformist stances within Unitarianism. Parker, who bequeathed his library of 13,000 volumes to the Boston Public Library, is described in Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s The Secret Six (1995) as one of the men who conspired with John Brown. (See entry for Frances Power Cobbe.) {BDF; CE; ER; EU, Paul H. Beattie; FUS; JMR; JMRH; U; U&U; UU}
Parkman, Francis Sr. (Born 1788) Parkman, a Unitarian minister, was a teacher and writer. He was pastor of the New North Church in Boston. {U}
Parkman, Francis (1823–1893) Parkman, a historian and a horticulturist, wrote The Oregon Trail (1849), describing how the West was opened up in 1846. The son of the Rev. Francis Parkman Sr., Parkman remained a Unitarian all his life. {U; UU; CE}
Parmelee, Maurice (1882–1969) Parmelee, whose expertise was economics and sociology, taught at Syracuse, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, and New York universities. A materialist, he described his Science and Human Behaviour (1913) as “an attempt to explain human behaviour on a purely mechanistic and materialistic basis.” {RAT; RE}
Parmenides (500 B.C.E.) A pupil of Xenophanes and a leading figure of the Eleatic school, Parmenides contributed to philosophy the method of reasoned proof for assertions. First, being is the material substance of which the universe is composed. Being, then, is the sole and eternal reality. Using dialectic, he destroyed the possibility of generation, destruction, change, and motion. Change and motion, he held, are illusions of the senses. There is no empty space, logically, because being is spatially extended. Therefore, motion is impossible. He was reverenced but feared by Plato, according to Theaetetus. But Plato derived from Parmenides, according to Bertrand Russell, “the belief that reality is eternal and timeless and that, on logical grounds, all change must be illusory.” Parmenides “made short work of the counter-sense of not being” but, states Robertson, “does not seem to have dealt at close quarters with popular creeds.” (CE; BDF; JMR; JMRH; Bertrand Russell, History of Philosophy)
Parny, Evariste Désire de Forges de (1753–1814) Parny was a French poet. A disappointed passion for a Creole inspired his “Amatory Poems,” after which he wrote the audacious War of the Gods, Paradise Lost and The Gallantries of the Bible. His poems were erotic and full of charm, leading to his being addressed by Voltaire as “mon cher Tibullus.” Although the Revolution swept away his fortune, he accepted it, even wrote fiery poems to support it. His long poem, La guerre des dieux (1799) is a scathing parody of the Bible. In 1803, Parny was admitted into the French Academy. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Parris, Thomas Collins Touzeau (1839–1907) Although educated at the Bristol Baptist College, Parris became a Unitarian minister, patronized by Samuel Courtauld. Parris helped his father sell books in Bristol, then moved to London where he joined Bradlaugh during the 1877 crisis. In his later years he joined the anti-Foote Freethought Federation, and he was a friend of William Morris at Kelmscott House. More a teacher than a lecturer, he spoke for the National Secular Society in the 1870s but did not enter into debates, working mainly in the South West of England. Parris was active as a secularist until infirmity compelled his retirement shortly before his death. {RSR; TRI}
PARROT The common name for the order Psittaciformes, which is comprised of 315 species of colorful birds, is parrot. Some species can be taught to imitate the human voice. Supernaturalists are known to have taught pet parrots to say “Amen”; naturalists, “God is dead, haha.” In 1998 a parrot’s fossil found in Wyoming was thought to be between sixty-five million and seventh million years old, thereby living at the same time as dinosaurs.
Parry, Brian (1949–1996) Parry, with his partner Barry Duke, served on the Council of Management of the National Secular Society. He helped found the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. Denis Cobell conducted a secular humanist funeral ceremony for Parry. {The Freethinker, February 1997}
Parry, Charles Humbert Hastings [Sir] (1848–1918) A British composer, Parry wrote many oratorios, concertos, choral odes, and works of a religious character. But, according to McCabe, Parry was a freethinker. In the obituary notice, The Times reported, “From his earliest years Parry had had no sympathy with dogmatic theology, but as his mind concentrated more and more upon the problem of human struggle and aspiration of life and death, failure and conquest, he found his thoughts most perfectly expressed in the language of the Bible.” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Parry, Nakkeeran (20th Century) Parry is an atheist who in Kuala Lumpur, Maylasia, belongs to Periyar Pagutharivu Pasarai. Phone: (603) 4456781.
Parsons, Jack (1920– ) Parsons, a population expert, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1994. He wrote Population vs. Liberty (1971), Changing Directions (1974), Population Fallacies (1977), and Human Population Competition: A Study of the Pursuit of Power Through Numbers (1999). Parsons is a member of the Fabian Society and of the British Humanist Association.
Parsons, Keith (20th Century) Parsons, a supporter of Internet Infidels, is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. He wrote God and the Burden of Proof. Parsons is the head of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Society of Humanist Philosophers and editor of its journal, Philo, which commenced in 1998. Philo, in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, was the character who braved the religious temperament of the times in order to provide rational grounds for being skeptical of religious assertions concerning god, reality, and ethics. The journal named Philo, in his words, offers “high-quality, critical examinations of theistic and religious claims, conducts useful explorations of issues in humanistic and naturalistic ethics, and facilitates meaningful discussions in these areas.” Its first contributors included Paul Kurtz, Adolf Grünbaum, Richard Gale, Kai Nielsen, Michael Martin, Quentin Smith, Theodore Schick Jr., Theodore M. Drange, Keith M. Parsons, and H. James Birx.
Parsons, Lucy E. (1853–1942) Parsons was the widow of Albert Parsons, a Haymarket martyr who, although innocent was one of four to hang in 1887, singing “Annie Laurie” shortly before his execution. When twenty, she fled Ku Klux Klan-riddled Texas with her husband, describing herself as Indian and Spanish, although she appeared to be African American and a former slave. She gave birth to a son, Albert, in 1879 and to a daughter, Lulu Eda, in 1881. Some official designated the daughter “nigger” on her birth certificate. Once arrested for leading a Hunger Demonstration in 1915, Parsons was bailed out by Jane Addams. In her late eighties, nearly blind, she died in a house fire. According to Carole Gray, “Lucy survived many disabilities, including being a black woman married to a white man at the turn of the century, having two children to raise alone after her husband’s murder, being an atheist, and supporting the unpopular cause of labor rights.” {Free Inquiry, Spring 1995}
Partington, Anna (20th Century) Partington, who was educated at the University of Manchester in England, has written for The American Rationalist.
Parton, James (1822–1890) Parton, who was born in England but educated in New York, was an author. He wrote many biographies, including those of Jefferson (1874) and of Voltaire (1881). He also has written Topics of the Time (1871), On Church Taxation, and “The Immortality of Religious Capitals” (1883). William Dean Howells said of Parton, “In the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries that he did not know.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Partridge, Andy (20th Century) Partridge, a songwriter and recording artist, is lead singer of XTC. “Basically, I don’t believe in God,” Partridge told an interviewer. “I don’t think there’s a stately British actor in a white sheet looking down on us all and deciding that you’re going to get run over, and you’re going to win the pool.” Heaven and Hell are states of mind, he holds but adds, “If you can create heaven for yourself without creating hell for somebody else, fine. That’s a good enough code. Try and create heaven for somebody else as well, but don’t create hell for anyone ’cos that’s less than animal.” {CA}
Partridge, Andy (11 Nov 1953 - ) Partridge is a songwriter and recording artist, the lead singer of XTC. He has been called “the disobedient child of the music industry” by Rifff (June 1997), a publication which added, “He smiled during the punk movement. He won't tour. He rarely grants interviews. He cries over chord progressions. He hates stardom and the limelight, and spits them out like warm beer. Though he finds his hometown of Swindon, England, a continual affront to his sensibilities—he swears he's a prisoner there—it's where he leads his fairly normal life. From this steady post, he's been cranking out 20 years' worth of sparkling pop.”
“Basically, I don’t believe in God,” Partridge told an interviewer. “I don’t think there’s a stately British actor in a white sheet looking down on us all and deciding that you’re going to get run over, and you’re going to win the pool.” Heaven and Hell are states of mind, he holds but adds, “If you can create heaven for yourself without creating hell for somebody else, fine. That’s a good enough code. Try and create heaven for somebody else as well, but don’t create hell for anyone ’cos that’s less than animal.” {CA; E}
Partzsch, Kurt (20th Century)
At the Eighth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress in Hannover (1982), Partzsch from Germany was given a Humanist Award for his contribution to social welfare in Germany.
Parvish, Samuel (18th Century) A deist, Parvish wrote An Inquiry Into the Jewish and Christian Revelation (1739), of which a second edition was issued in 1746. {BDF; FUK}
Pascal, Blaise (1623–1662) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Pascal as being the opposite of an atheist, pointing out that he thought reason was impotent in resolving man’s problems and satisfying his hopes. Instead, Pascal believed in the necessity of a mystic faith, holding that man needed faith in order to understand the universe. With Plato, he believed that the mind, after the body dies, continues to exist without any body. He did write, however, that “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” At the age of thirty-two he retired to a monastery, gave up his life of pleasure, fasted, wore a girdle of sharp nails, and in seven years he died. {CE; ER; EU, Aram Vartanian; RE; TYD}
PASCAL’S WAGER Pascal had the idea that it is prudent to believe in God’s existence, for if there is no God little will be lost, and if there is a God then eternal happiness can be gained. The flaw in his thinking, however, is that he assumed there is only one god. If there is more than one, then selecting one would annoy the others. If the one god were the kind to penalize someone who had no evidence of its existence, then how to explain that “God is a God of love.” The rationalists’ approach is to remain neutral—if there is one or more gods, let them recruit you. Meanwhile, Pascal instead of asking “Is there a god?” might better have asked, “Is there exactly one god, or are there many?” (See entry for Blaise Pascal.)
Pascoli, Giovanni (1855–1912) An Italian poet, Pascoli translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which resulted in his being termed in the Athanaeum as “the first rank of living Italian poets.” Some Italian authorities regarded him as “the greatest Latin poet since the Augustan Age.” Pascoli was anti-Papal, and in much of his verse he rejoices at the triumph of Garibaldi and the liberators of Italy. However, he was a theist with a certain moral tenderness for Christianity. He called upon the clergy to “get rid of the ashes and scum [of dogma and ritual’ upon their souls and present Christianity as a torrent of love.” {RAT}
Pasek, Michael (20th Century) Pasek is membership secretary of the Humanist Association of Canada. {HAC}
Pashinski, Alexander (20th Century) Pashinski, a lecturer at Moscow State University in Russia, spoke at the 1993 Congress in Berlin of the European Humanist Federation (EHF). Racism, he lamented, is an alternative ideology to humanism: “Racism is a way of life, the way without love of people for their own selves, without love of other people as humans. Racism does not want people to represent themselves as humans, enjoy the freedom of sharing their relationships, and develop their interaction with other humans in an harmonious way. They cannot accept democracy as an institution to govern racial and national relations, because it is human-based.”
Pasolini, Pier Paolo (1922–1975) Pasolini, a former Roman Catholic and a Marxist, was an Italian writer and film director. His “Decameron” (1971) depicted nuns reveling in copulation. Crotch shots and close-ups of penises abound, and his “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” (1964), “The Canterbury Tales” (1972), and other films show that as an atheist he had no reverence for the Church. Some, however, consider “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” to be the best film every made of the life of Jesus. In 1975, a male street hustler mysteriously murdered Pasolini. {Tim Madigan, Free Inquiry, Spring 1991}
Pasquarello, Tony (20th Century) An emeritus philosopher at Ohio State University at Mansfield, Pasquarello successfully pursued a second career as a pop-jazz-classical musician and performer. He has investigated, in “Humanism’s Thorn: The Case of the Bright Believers,” why it is that intelligent people can be believers. Certainly, he notes, bright people do not believe in nonsense. Yet, traditional theism is nonsense. Ergo, how to explain Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, and Erigina! Either God exists or he doesn’t. Either there is or there isn’t an elephant in my bedroom. Perhaps, Pasquarello infers, if humanists could learn why so many intelligent people are turned on to religion humanism itself will profit. In the final analysis, he writes wittily, “It’s comforting to know that Smith, the neighbor to my left, thinks the Earth is round. But it’s positively demoralizing to know that Jones, my other neighbor, thinks it is flat. Particularly if Jones holds a doctorate in geodetic sciences.” In The Altar Boy Chronicles (1999), he describes what it was like to grow up in a Catholic Little Italy during World War II. (Free Inquiry, Winter, 1992-1993)
Pasquier, Étienne (1529–1615) Pasquier was a French journalist. He defended the universities against the Jesuits, whom he also attacked in a bitter satire, Catéchisme des Jesuits. {BDF}
Passerani, Alberto Radicati di (Died 1737) Passerani, an Italian philosopher and a count attached to the court of Victor Amedée II, wrote some pamphlets against the Papal power. The Inquisition pursued him and seized his goods. He fled to England, making the acquaintance of Collins, and to France and Holland. In the year of his death he published Recueil de Pièces curieuses sur les matieres les plus intéressantes and containing A Parallel Between Mahomet and Sosem (an anagram of Moses), an Abridged History of the Sacerdotal Profession. He also wrote A Faithful and Comic Recital of the Religion of Modern Cannibals, reportedly by Zelin Moslem. Passerani had one work that pretended to be a translation from an Arabic work on Mohammedanism, satirizing the Bible, and with a pretended sermon by Elwall the Quaker. Passerani died in Holland, believing in no afterlife and leaving his goods to the poor. {BDF; RE}
Passmore, John (1914– )
Passmore, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is a researcher in the History of Ideas Programme at Canberra’s Australian National University and a corresponding member of The Hume Society. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Passmore, who is president of the Australian Academy of Science, is an atheist and author of various philosophical works including A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957), Philosophical Reasoning (1961), Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974), and Recent Philosophers (1985). In 1994 Passmore wrote “Hostility to Science” in Challenges to the Enlightenment, In Defense of Reason and Science. {CA; SWW}
Pasteur, Louis (1822–1895) The famed French scientist Pasteur, father of modern hygiene and public health, made research on fermentation, at one time claiming to disprove the theory of spontaneous generation in his experiments with bacteria. In a lecture in the Sorbonne’s grand amphitheatre, Pasteur linked spontaneous generation to the kind of materialism that needed no divine creator. Said Pasteur, “neither religion, nor philosophy, nor atheism, nor materialism, nor spiritualism has any place here. . . . It is a question of fact. I have approached it without preconceived idea.” This led to his germ theory of infection, and in his work on wine, vinegar, and beer he developed the process of pasteurization. He also found a solution for the control of silkworm disease, and his technique of vaccination against anthrax led to a successful treatment against rabies in 1885. Pasteur was elected to the Academy as a successor of Littré, and he gave his name as Vice-President of the British Secular Union. Wheeler in his Dictionary of Freethinkers confirms that in his prime Pasteur was vice-president of the British Secular (Atheist) Union, and Wheeler was the chief secularist writer of the time. In The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (1995), Gerald L. Geison claims that Pasteur did not claim that nonliving matter can spontaneously organize itself into living matter, that he did not even believe in spontaneous generation, and that when his experiments gave wrong results Pasteur simply lied by giving an alternative explanation. He was, Geison hastens to add, a truly great scientist. But when Pasteur treated several victims who had been bitten by a rabid dog and announced he had discovered a treatment for rabies in humans, based on experiments on dogs, Pasteur as a matter of fact had only studied some thirty dogs, a third of which had succumbed to rabies. However, Nobel Prize winner M. F. Perutz, in The New York Review of Books (21 Dec 1995), declares that Geison is entirely wrong about Pasteur’s alleged unsavory and unethical conduct, then deconstructs Geison’s deconstruction in order to restore Pasteur’s “rightly dominant image.” In an edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, an article about Pasteur describes him as “this simple and devout Catholic,” changing the content to the contrary in earlier editions. The anonymous Catholic author quotes as his authority the standard biography by Vallery-Radot. However, states McCabe, that biography describes Pasteur as a freethinker “and this is confirmed in the preface to the English translation by Sir W. Osler, who knew Pasteur personally. Vallery-Radot was himself a Catholic, yet admits that Pasteur believed only in ‘an Infinite’ and ‘hoped’ for a future life.” In his Academy speech in 1822, Pasteur said, “The idea of God is a form of the idea of the Infinite whether it is called Brahma, Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus.” Pasteur did not receive the sacraments at death. Relatives put rosary beads in his hands, and the Catholic Encyclopedia claims him. {BDF; RE; TRI}
Pastor, Joseph (19th Century) Pastor was the first editor of Pokrok in Chicago and Racine, Wisconsin. The Czech journal lasted from 1867 to 1878. {FUS}
Pastoret, Claude Emmanuel Joseph Pierre de (1756–1840) Pastoret was a marquis, French statesman, and writer. His Zoroaster, Confucius, and Mahomet (1787) and Moses Considered as Legislator and Moralist (1788) were written at a time when comparative religion was a study in its infancy. His principal work is a learned History of Legislation (11 volumes, 1817–1837), in which he passes in review all the ancient codes. Pastoret embraced the Revolution and became President of the Legislative Assembly. He proposed the erection of the Column of July on the Place of the Bastille and the conversion of the church of Ste. Geneviève into the Pantheon. In 1792 he presented a motion for the complete separation of the state from religion. During the Terror, he fled but returned as deputy in 1795. In 1820 Pastoret succeeded his friend Volney as a member of the French Academy. In 1823 he received the cross the Legion of Honor, and in 1829 Pastoret became Chancellor of France. {BDF; RAT; RE}
PATAPHYSICS Pataphysics has as its purpose the parodying of the methods and theories of modern science. A French absurdist concept of a philosophy or science dedicated to studying what lies beyond the realm of metaphysics, it often expresses ideas in nonsensical language. For example, Alfred Jarry wrote, “If souls are independent, man is God.” Absurdists neither confirm nor deny that pataphysics is the science of shit, a Manhattan wag has noted, choosing to remain silent about that which they have thoroughly tested in laboratories.
Pater, Walter (Horatio) (1839–1894) The Dictionary of National Biography, citing his agnosticism, states that Pater had “lost all belief in the Christian religion.” “By the time he arrived at Oxford as an undergraduate,” Peter Ackroyd has observed, Pater “had no more faith in Christianity than in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Ackroyd, calling Pater the meek mentor of Oscar Wilde, described him as being ugly but intriguing, the “Caliban of letters.” Pater is said to have searched for academic preferment, not for a wife. Although he said, “I would give ten years of my life to be handsome,” the mustache he grew made matters worse. His peers are said by Ackroyd to have considered him a somewhat overrefined Oxford tutor who lived with his cat and was cared for by his two sisters. Henry James, remarking about Pater’s reserve and his diffidence, wrote that Pater was “the mask without the face.” At Braenose College, Oxford, where he taught philosophy, Pater was known for its “hearties”–athletic young men with more profile than prose style–and the poet A. C. Benson, who shared Pater’s tastes, said, “That a man should be ardently disposed to athletic pursuits was no obstacle to Pater’s friendship, though he was himself entirely averse to games; it rather constituted an additional reason for admiring one with whom he felt otherwise in sympathy.” Pater is said to have lectured on philosophy, usually without mentioning any particular philosopher, and in his private quarters he had a bust of Hercules (which he termed a “coquetry”), becoming one of the first of Oxford dons “to bring a carefully studied taste to the arrangement and decoration of his rooms.” In his thirty years there, he never received any other lectureship or professorship. Denis Donaghue, in Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995), wrote that Pater had a high receding forehead and eyes bright but perhaps a little too close together. He wore a frock coat very correctly, but he sported an apple-green tie, which in some eyes, at least, was equivalent to wearing a dress. Among his friends were Swinburne, Rossetti, the Humphry Wards, and the Mark Pattisons. His Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) included essays on Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the eighteenth century German scholar who pursued Hellenism in more than a scholarly sense, causing Pater to remark about Winckelmann’s “romantic, fervid friendships with young men” which “perfected his reconciliation with the spirit of Greek sculpture.” The work established Pater’s reputation. He also wrote about Botticelli. In an essay on Leonardo da Vinci (1869) he described Mona Lisa as one “who had learned the secrets of the grave.” In an essay (1868) on the poetry of William Morris, Pater, searching for a conclusion, concluded with a memorable statement, “To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.” (Ackroyd has written, “How does one burn with a hard, gem-like flame?”) In a fictional biography, Marius the Epicurean (1885), which described a young intellectual in the time of Marcus Aurelius, Pater described his responses to paganism, Christianity, and Rome, leading Mrs. Humphry Ward to comment that “No one can fail to catch the autobiographical note.” Pater, an unbeliever, directly faced the question of what one may lie for in a world devoid of God. He believed that one must devote oneself to the improvement of the quality of one’s individual consciousness during the brief moments of existence that mortality allows. In his posthumous and unfinished Gaston de Latour (1896), Pater reveals a preoccupation with the cruelty, beauty, and religious sensibility of a largely imaginary “impassioned past.” From time to time, Pater gave public lectures. “Did you hear me?” he asked Oscar Wilde after one such event. “We overheard you,” Wilde replied. Remarked Ackroyd, “Reading Pater is like listening to Wilde through a conch shell.” When he heard that Pater had died in his fifty-fifth year, Wilde asked, “Was he ever alive?” Death, however, Pater thought of as “the last curiosity,” and wags have said that it is somehow appropriate that Pater should have been buried at Oxford during the summer vacation. Many attacked him as being unscholarly and morbid, but Pater had a profound influence on the undergraduates of the day and was acclaimed by Oscar Wilde as “the holy writ of beauty.” Because of Pater’s influence, Paananen states, “Victorian earnestness—reflected in the efforts of writers like Eliot, Carlyle, and Arnold to hold to morality and hard work even in a godless universe—went out of fashion.” Oscar Wilde named Pater as the key influence on his life. {Peter Ackroyd, “Pomp and Circumstances,” The New Yorker, 15 May 1995; BDF; CE; EU, Victor N. Paananen; GL; JM; OEL; RAT; RE}
Paterson, Katherine (20th Century) According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins is often banned because allegedly “Christians are portrayed as being dumb and stupid.” (See entry for Banned Books).
Paterson, Thomas (19th Century) Paterson, after the imprisonment of Southwell and Holyoake, edited the Oracle of Reason. For exhibiting profane placards he was arrested and sentenced 27 January 1843 to three months in prison. His trial was docketed as God v. Paterson (1843). Paterson then insisted on considering God as the plaintiff and, by quoting from “the Jew book,” testified concerning the plaintiff’s bad character. When released, he went to Scotland to uphold the right of free publication. There, he was sentenced to fifteen months in prison for selling “blasphemous” publications. On his release he was presented with a testimonial 6 April 1845, with H. Hetherington presiding. Paterson, who had been the only Scottish atheistical publisher, then moved to America. (See Forgotten Freethinkers #10, The American Rationalist, January-February 1995.) {BDF; FUK; RAT; VI}
Paterson, William Romaine (Born 1871) A novelist who wrote under the name of Benjamin Swift, Paterson wrote Nancy Noon (1896) as his first novel. His rationalism is found in a pamphlet, “The Credentials of Faith,” which he published in his own name in 1918. It is a searching criticism of Christianity in the form of a dialogue. {RAT}
PATHOS: See entry for Tragedy, for the two terms are commonly mis-used.
Patin, Gui (1601–1671) Patin, the admiring friend of French philosopher and scientist Pierre Gassendi, was never explicitly heretical. He may have written of Socinianism as a pestilent doctrine, but he was constantly anti-clerical. The Society of Jesus, he felt, was “that black Loyolitic scum from Spain.” He was not a wholehearted freethinker, however, ending one of his 836 letters with Credo in Deum, Christum crucifixum, etc. The other 835, however, did not so end. Larousse said of him, “C’était un libre penseur de la famille de Rabelais,” that he was a freethinker of the Rabelaisian family. {BDF; JMR; JMRH}
Patri, Umesh (20th Century) Patri appeared with Lavanam, the Indian atheist, at the San Joaquin Valley, California, Center for Nonviolence in 1994. Dr. Patri, who wrote Hindu Scriptures and American Transcendentalists, is an authority concerning the influence of Renaissance philosophy on contemporary Indian humanism.
PATRIARCHY • God is for men, and religion for women. –Joseph Conrad
• This is where the family honor lies! —a high school biology teacher in Egypt, sketching the female reproductive system and pointing out the entrance to the vagina, according to Egyptian journalist Abeer Allam
Anthropologists speak of patriarchy as being a familial and political social system in which a father is the head and descent is traced through his side of the family. In the latter part of the present century, feminists around the world have objected to the acceptance of such a concept.
A matriarchy, in which a woman has dominated the family clan or tribe, allegedly existed in ancient times but usually failed. Iroquois women could nominate and depose members of their ruling council, but male members enjoyed a veto over women. Crow women took ritual offices, but their power was limited by menstrual taboos. Myths regarding matriarchies and matriarchates are thought by many to be the result of males’ rationalization to continue their dominance. Taslima Nasrin is an example of a contemporary who opposes patriarchy and, in fact, laments that it enjoys a success because it was males, not God or gods, who wrote the allegedly “sacred” books that decreed male dominance over females. She, and many others, refuse to take their father’s last name. Therefore, inasmuch as she represents a major danger to the continued dominance of patriarchy in Islamic societies, a fatwa was placed on her head and Muslim fundamentalists in Bangladesh demanded that her writings be burned and that she be hanged. As a result, she was forced to flee not once but twice to safety in Sweden. Reports of the negative effects of patriarchy on females fill many newspaper columns. In Afghanistan, the Taliban not only require that all women be covered from head to feet but also can be flogged or killed for the slightest infractions of male-written laws. In Morocco, a woman who has been raped and is now an unmarried mother becomes an outcast in her conservative Islamic society. Treated as being inferior under Morocco’s Koranic laws, such women are legal minors, inherit only half a share, need permission from a male relative to marry, and can simply be repudiated without recourse by their husbands. A woman who has a child out of wedlock is treated with even more disdain. Asked who fathered her baby, a middle-aged lady by the name of Zara told a reporter matter-of-factly, “Hariba is the daughter of a policeman who took me by force at the cemetery.” Although rich or educated women might successfully obtain an abortion, which is illegal, poor young women cannot. “In many Islamic countries people deal with unwanted pregnancy by pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s a taboo subject,” Wassyla Tamzali, a specialist in women’s rights at Unesco said in 1999. The killing of “unchaste” girls and women by their relatives is condoned in Arab parts of Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Israel. Douglas Jehl, writing in Jordan (The New York Times, 20 June 1999), described how female chastity is seen in the Arab world “as an indelible line, the boundary between respect and shame. An unchaste woman, it is sometimes said, is worse than a murderer, affecting not just one victim, but her family and her tribe.” He relates how a teenage brother by killing his “unchaste” sister thereby earned his family’s respect as well as that of the community’s. Patriarchy exists, similarly, in Jewish and Christian countries, leaders often citing the Holy Bible as God’s wishes on the subject. A woman has no chance, in short, of ever becoming a Pope or a Jewish leader. Freethinkers, on the other hand, cite many instances of their leaders’ co-equality. (See entry for and books by Taslima Nasrin.) {CE; Marlise Simons, “After the Rape, a Lifetime of Shame. It’s Morocco,” The New York Times, 1 February 1999}
Robert Patrick, Playwright art
This Robert Patrick should not be confused with the actor of the same name. According to Samuel French inc. (publisher of plays) "New York's most-produced playwright of the 1960's." He has over fifty plays in print and won many prizes. He wrote in his play JUDAS, "There are no gods, Judas, no ghosts. The only consciousness in the universe is the men and women who are alive right now. When all gods are one, men must see that they never needed gods." In a lighter tone, in his play T-SHIRTS, one character says, "God! Why do I never get what I want?" and another answers him, "Possibly because you keep asking God for it and he doesn't exist." In HELLO, BOB, a woman tells a friend, "Why I went to Ireland God knows, and there is no God."
Bio follows:
ROBERT PATRICK (Born Kilgore, Texas, September 27, 1937), a pioneer in Off-Off Broadway and gay theatre, has published over 60 plays. His first, The Haunted Host, premiered at the legendary Caffe Cino in 1964 and has opened gay theatres from Toronto to Sydney. Samuel French called Patrick "New York's most-produced playwright of the 1960's," climaxing in the 1969 "Show Business" Award for Joyce Dynel, Salvation Army, and Fog, as well as Rockefeller and N.Y.S.C.A.P. grants.
His directors include Marshall Mason, Lanford Wilson, Clive Donner, and Norman Rene. Marge Champion starred on PBS in his Camera Obscura. The Haunted Host introduced Harvey Fierstein, who recorded Patrick's Pouf Positive and toured Europe with it. The international success of Kennedy's Children won the Glasgow Citizens World Playwrighting Award and productions with Shelley Winters, Sally Kirkland, Kelsey Grammer, Julie Kavner, Julie Hagerty, and Anne Wedgewood. Shirley Knight won a "Tony" in it on Broadway and starred in it on CBS Cable with Jane Alexander, Lindsay Crouse, and Brad Dourif.
In 1974 he contributed three plays in the U.K.'s first season of gay theatre, "Homosexual Acts." From 1975 he promoted high-school theatre for the International Thespians Society, receiving their 1980 Founders Award "for services to theatre and to youth." He wrote their playwrighting textbook, Tools, Not Rules. From 1979 to 1982 he wrote the only column about Off-Off Broadway, "State of the Art," for the paper, "Other Stages." In 1983 and 1986, two consecutive Manhattan Borough Presidents declared Blue Is For Boys weekends in Manhattan (an unprecedented honor) in recognition of the first play about gay teenagers.
In 1988 he published Untold Decades, a comic history of American gay male life. The Trial Of Socrates was the first gay play produced by the city of New York. Judas, with Kelly McGillis and Mark Harelik, was the first original play mounted by the Pacific Conservatory Of The Performing Arts. The Last Stroke won the "Pick of the Fringe" Award at the Edinburgh Festival.
In 1994 he published Temple Slave, a novel about the origins of Off-Off Broadway, which has gone into a second printing and been optioned for film. In 1996, he published Michelangelo's Models, Bread Alone, The Trial Of Socrates, and Evan On Earth. In 1997, he received the Robert Chesley Award for Lifetime Achievement In Gay Theatre.
The Denver Center Theatre Company commissioned Patrick to write book and score for a full-length musical, All At Sea He has written for TV's "Ghost Story," "High Tide," and "Robin's Hoods," and ghosted many TV- and screen-plays. Marlo Thomas commissioned My Cup Ranneth Over for herself and Lily Tomlin. Five anthologies feature his short stories. He published many comic poems about theatre in "Playbill" Magazine, and erotic ones in "FirstHand" Magazine. Mister Patrick appears in the films "Resident Alien," with Quentin Crisp, "O Is For Orgy: The Sequel," and "The O-Boys: Porn, Parties, and Politics." He has just completed a book of autobiographical film criticism, "Narcissus in the Dark."
His website is http://hometown.aol.com/rbrtptrck
Patterson, Dorothy Smith (20th Century) Patterson is president of the board of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
Patton, Dennis (1943– ) Patton, a sculptor, is an active member of the People’s Unitarian Universalist Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His works include “In Transit,” consisting of sixteen-foot-high figures, striding, baggage in hand, perhaps toward a commuter flight at the Cedar Rapids Airport, where it was installed in 1993. Many of his works are constructed of stainless steel and painted in vibrant colors. {World, November-December 1994|
Patton, George Smith Jr. [General] (1885–1945) An American major general who received much publicity for his spectacular sweep of U.S. forces from Normandy through Brittany and Northern France, Patton is one of those cited by Paul Edwards as having believed in reincarnation.
Patton, Kenneth L(ee) (1911–1994) Patton, the author of Hello Man (1945) has been a Unitarian Universalist minister in his emphasis upon the importance of the symbolic resources of world religion. In his Madison, Wisconsin, church, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Patton started to develop his view that “religion cannot operate without symbols.” At the Charles Street Meeting House (Universalist) in Boston, he combined art, symbols, and words, writing Man’s Hidden Search: An Inquiry in Naturalistic Mysticism (1954), A Religion for One World (1964), and Services and Songs for the Celebration of Life (1967). Patton once was a director of the American Humanist Association. He wrote to the present author that he is a Naturalistic Humanist,
. . . although I would prefer to call it Humanistic Naturalism, for I believe naturalism is the larger and more definitive term for the position I hold, and humanism only modifies it. I would not quarrel with the basic concern of Humanism with human values and development, but I believe we have been, not too much concerned with man, but too little concerned about the other-than-human creatures and elements of the natural world. It is here that the mystical naturalism of the more radical schools of Zen Buddhism has much to teach us. Humanists still tend to consider themselves as somewhat set over against nature, whereas the Chinese and Japanese naturalists have for many centuries placed man completely within the realm of nature, as one creature among many others. They have a delightful sense of “at home-ness” in the natural world. Through Zen Buddhism they have developed a profoundly mystical (in a completely this-worldly sense) and aesthetic appreciation of the human and natural condition, which I believe will go far to correct the overly utilitarian and positivistic trends in the pragmatic and scientific humanist of the west. Not that these latter issues should be slighted, but rather that they should be supplemented by the artistic and poetical dimensions of humanism and naturalism which the Orient has demonstrated are potential within a naturalistic philosophy. The men who have most influenced my thinking have been John Dewey, Max C. Otto, and A. Eustace Haydon. In addition to Zen Buddhism, I should also refer to Existentialism, with whose metaphysics I would quarrel, but with whose emphasis upon the emotional and aesthetic aspects of the human situation I believe are a corrective to the overly bland estimates of the Scientific Humanism of America. I believe that Humanism is now emerging into something approaching maturity, through the interaction of various strands of world naturalism such as those referred to above.
In A Religion for One World, he underlined the meaning of the word universalism as being a religion which draws from all the religions. His Charles Street Meeting House in Boston features a variety of symbols, for the poet Patton insisted that “religion cannot operate without symbols.” Included is a bookcase of world scriptures, a mural of the Great Nebula in Andromeda, and a sculpture symbolizing the atom. Patton’s humanistic poems are found in Hello Man (1945) and Strange Seed (1946). {CL; EU, Paul H. Beattie; HNS; WAS, 28 May 1956; U&U}
Patwari, A.B.M. Mafizul Islam (20th Century) Patwari is president of the Humanist and Ethical Society of Bangladesh. He wrote Fundamental Rights and Personal Liberty (1988) and Humanism and Human Rights in the Third World (1992).
PAUL (Saint) • The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all: it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death into a religion that delivered millions of men so completely into their dominion that their own common nature became a horror to them, and the religious life became a denial of life. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Some scholars hold that anti-Semitism arose because St. Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles and the earliest Christian writer, encouraged it. He may or may not have been born of orthodox Jewish parentage. Hyman Maccoby, for example, states that Paul claimed to be a Jew and even a Pharisee but possibly was a non-Jew who converted and became disaffected. Similarly, Betty McCollister in The Humanist (July-Aug 1993) finds that anti-Semitism “infects the first three gospels, especially the passage in Matthew in which Jews accept blood guilt in perpetuity, and permeates the fourth gospel, attributed to John, whose author (whoever he was) was obviously not a Jew.” Meanwhile, Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong in Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991) describes St. Paul as a “self-loathing and repressed gay male.” S. Levin, in “The Primal Dream: St. Paul’s Vision” (New Humanist, February 1996), postulates that if Paul participated in an Eleusis experience or in another of similar type, he hallucinated a Jesus figure (Galatians 1:12, 16), adding that “the use of the word hallucination does not necessarily brand him as psychiatrically disturbed. Hallucinations can be no more than misperceptions, visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile. But they can also be pathological.” (See reference to his alleged “Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy” under Dostoyevsky, Fëodor.)
Paul, Alice (1885–1977) Paul wrote the Equal Rights Amendment and in 1928 founded the World Party for Equal Rights for Women. The daughter of Quakers, Paul was a freethinker.
Paul, Charles (20th Century) Paul is a past president of The Jewish Humanist. He is the journal’s editor, along with Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, and is a member of the humanistic Birmingham Temple.
Paul, M. Eden (20th Century) Paul wrote Rationalism (19–?). {GS}
Paul, Susanne J. (20th Century) Paul is on the editorial board of The Humanist and was President of the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association.
Paulett, Robert C. (Died 1998) Paulett, a Freedom From Religion Foundation member from Virginia, was a freethinking activist.
Paulhan, Jean: See entry for Dominique Aury. Paulhan was a member of the French Academy.
Pauli, Gregorius (16th Century) An Italian who was a minister in Cracow, Pauli declared Jesus to be “a mere man.” Further, he preached community of goods, promised a speedy millennium, and condemned the bearing of arms. Inspired, a group of Unitarian ministers and nobles in 1562 formally renounced the doctrine of the Trinity. With forty-two subscribing ministers, they formed a Unitarian Church in Poland, opposing infant baptism. Remarks Robertson about the church, “Ethically, its doctrine was humane and pacificatory, its members being forbidden to go to law or to take oaths; and for a time the community made great progress, the national Diet being, by one account, ‘filled with Arians’ for a time.” {JMR; JMRH}
Pauli, Karl E. (20th Century) In Erie, Michigan, Pauli edited Granpappy’s Almanac from 1962 to 1963. It was an unbelievers’ journal. Among his works were “Philosophy of Atheism” (1915) and “State of Ohio vs. Karl E. Pauli, et al.” (1923). {GS}
Pauline, Mark (20th Century) Pauline, a performance artist, is the leading force behind Survival Research Laboratories. His group of machinists has performed internationally and been featured in Wired, The Mondo 2000 Users’ Guide to the New Edge, and on a CBS show concerning cyberculture. In an interview in Re/Search (#5/6), Pauline describes the conflicts that as a child he had about religion. “Then,” he states, “I quit believing in god.” {CA; E}
Pauling, Linus Paul (1901–1994) A chemist, Pauling is the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes, the chemistry prize in 1954 and the peace prize in 1962. He was active in promoting peace, world disarmament, and the cessation of nuclear weapon testing. Many know of him because of his advocacy of taking large quantities of Vitamin C in order to fortify the body against colds, for his announcement resulted in pharmacies being immediately unable to maintain adequate supplies. During World War II, ignoring the widespread resentment against Japanese-Americans, he hired as his gardener a young man whose parent had been born in Japan–in retaliation, vandals defaced Pauling’s house to show contempt for his brand of social conscience. In 1952, Pauling was denied a passport, partly because he had incurred the suspicion of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who had accused him of having a “well nigh incredible” record of membership in Communist front organizations. Pauling denied under oath that he had ever been a Communist, and it turned out that he had applied for a passport in order to go with his wife, Ava, to participate in a London conference on the structure of proteins. Meanwhile, Pauling’s The Nature of the Chemical Bond was regarded as hostile to the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and when the Soviets criticized his work Pauling countered by calling Stalinist science distorted. A Unitarian and son of an Oregon druggist, Pauling dropped out of his Portland high school as a form of protest against taking courses that he regarded as pointless. Gaining entrance to Oregon Agricultural College without a high school diploma, he majored in chemical engineering, was quickly recognized as a prodigy, and eventually became a fellow of the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. When a professor at the California Institute of Technology, he had said there were “many aspects” of religion that offered no conflict with science. But he said there was some question as to the extent to which a “good scientist” could accept religious dogma. Challenged about this on the NBC TV program, “Youth Wants to Know,” he was told that Dr. Robert A. Millikan of the same school had declared that “the more he read and the more he studied, the more he was sure about the existence of God.” Pauling commented: “My experience has been different, in a sense almost opposite, of Professor Millikan.” In 1961 the American Humanist Association named Pauling Humanist of the Year. For him, “Humanism is a rational philosophy…a philosophy of service for the good of all humanity, of application of new ideas of scientific progress, for the benefit of all humankind.” In 1972 he won the Lenin Peace Prize, and in 1974 he won the U.S. National Medal of Science. For three decades or more, Pauling was a member of the First Unitarian Church in Los Angeles. He wrote No More War! (1962) and How To Live Longer and Feel Better (1987). Often photographed with his beret atop his head, Pauling remained to the end irreverent, iconoclastic, and outspoken. {CE; CL; HNS2; U; UU}
Paulson, Philip K. (20th Century) Paulson is head of the Humanist Association of San Diego (AHA). In “I Was an Atheist in a Foxhole” (Secular Nation, Fall 1995), he tells of his experiences in Vietnam when other soldiers in a panic screamed out for God to help them. “To hell with God!” he insisted. “You help us! You radio back for mortar and artillery fire support!” Ironically, when his group pulled through, he was told, “See, Paulson, God answers prayers.” In 1973 Paulson joined the American Humanist Association: “I needed to belong to a group of nontheists who shared my visions of hope and who inculcated rational methods of reasoning, social sympathy, and cooperative skills.” (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Pauw, Cornelius (1730–1799) Pauw was a learned Dutch writer who wrote philosophical researches on the Americans, Egyptians, Chinese, and Greeks. Frederick the Great esteemed him for his ingenuity and penetration. Pauw was the uncle of Anacharsis Clootz. {BDF}
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich (1849–1936)
A Nobel Prize winning physiologist, Pavlov is internationally known for his experiments with dogs. According to Joseph McCabe, Pavlov was a materialist and an atheist. The first son of the village priest and the grandson of the village sexton, Pavlov was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). He has said, however, that he envied his wife’s belief in religion. {CE; JM; TRI}
Pawelek, John (1942– ) A senior research scientist in dermatology and a lecturer in pharmacology at Yale University, Pawelek was raised a Lutheran but is an active member of the Unitarian Society of New Haven, Connecticut. One of his inventions is a sunblock that doubles as a medication for vitiligo, a blotchy-skin condition that results from the failure of some melanin cells to produce pigment. Pawelek has called himself “an optimistic agnostic.” {World, July-August 1999}
Payne, George (19th Century) Payne, a leading Manchester, England, secularist in the 1880s, was instrumental in forming an Electoral Rights Defence Association, which had ninety branches in fifty-eight towns, mainly in Lancashire. {RSR}
Payne, John (1842–1916) Between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, Payne translated the whole of Dante, much of Goethe, Lessing, and Calderon, and parts of other French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Persian, Arabian, Greek, and Latin writers. Payne became a poet in his leisure, never went to church, and thought Christianity “of no practical value as a moral agent.” He added that “the best Church is that without a priest, a faith that is pure of the poisonous parasite.” His work consists of two volumes of collected works and includes his Songs of Life and Death (1902). {RAT; RE}
Paz, Octavio (1914–1998)
An educator and winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, Paz was the Mexican Ambassador to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and Ceylon (from which post he resigned because of his Government’s 1968 massacre of student demonstrators). In the early 1950s he was an attaché in the Mexican embassy in Delhi, later returning as ambassador. In a 1952 poem, “Mutra,” he wrote about Mathura, a Hindu holy city said to have been the birthplace of the god Krishna. Paz, a one-time Catholic, became an atheist.
Among his works are Raiz del Hombre (1937), A la Orilla del Mundo (1943), and Piedra de Sol (1957). He also has written The Monkey Grammarian (1981). In 1988, he wrote Sor Juana (The Traps of Faith). Paz’s work is distinguished for its insight, elegance, and erudition. Of his Sunstone (Piedra de Sol), the Swedish Academy of Letters said, “This suggestive work, with its many layers of meaning, seems to incorporate, interpret, and reconstrue major existential questions, death, time, love, and reality.” The Academy quoted one of his poems as his literary credo:
Between what I see and what I say Between what I say and what I keep silent Between what I keep silent and what I dream Between what I dream and what I forget: Poetry.
In 1979 in The New Yorker, he commented upon the chasm separating Americans and Mexicans: “In general, Americans have not looked for Mexico in Mexico; they have looked for their obsessions, enthusiasms, phobias, hopes, interests—and these are what they have found. In short, the history of our relationship is the history of a mutual and stubborn deceit.” In 1983 he told Alan Riding of The New Yorik Times, “Intellectuals have a semireligious attitude, so it’s difficult for them to criticize their own religion. Therefore, they hate me as they would a heretic. If they could, they’d send me to the stake.” In 1992, Paz became a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. His work shows that he has been influenced by surrealism, existentialism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and most recently by erotic love and artistic creativity. In a 1992 New York Times article, he spoke of capitalism: “The market, blind and deaf, is not fond of literature or of risk, and it does not know how to choose. Its censorship is not ideological: it has no ideas. It knows all about prices, but nothing about values.” In 1994 in an interview in New Perspectives Quarterly, he asserted that Mexico was “condemned to modernize” its economy and society: “I say condemned because seeing the United States, Europe, and Japan, I think modernization is not a benediction. It is a kind of air-conditioned hell.” Two of his works on India were published in 1997: In Light of India and A Tale of Two Gardens, Poems from India 1952–1995. Like Gandhi, Paz was anti-materialism. He found distasteful the demon of money, the doctrines of envy, and the vulgarity in popular entertainment. Fundamentalism, he held, should be called by its true name: fanaticism. Returning to India in 1968 and viewing Shiva and Parvati, the divine couple depicted as the ultimate in happiness, Paz wrote, “It was as though we were leaving ourselves. Shiva and Parvati: we worship you not as gods but as images of the divinity of man.” The work about India surveys its society, its politics, and its art and literature. He had been sick for years with what he called a “long and wretched” illness, cancer. When a European news agency prematurely reported his death, Paz telephoned to the station, “It pains me that those who insist on killing me are in such a hurry.” When Paz died, observers commented upon his appeal to young intellectuals, but they also called attention to his cerebral jousting with Carlos Fuentes, who opposed Paz’s political conservatism. Paz’s critics accused him of tepid, bourgeois reformism for his views against Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, to which he retorted, “The ‘progressive’ intellectuals, almost all of whom wanted to establish a totalitarian socialist regime, attacked me vehemently.” Carlos Fuentes was conspicuously absent from the funeral rites, held at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City where the body had lain in state. The rites were entirely secular, and Paz’s body was cremated. Citing the loss of such a Promethean figure whose poetry, literary criticism, cultural essays, and political polemics had won a Nobel Prize, literary critic Christopher Dominguez Michael said, “The death of Paz closes a chapter in our history. It is the end of the age of the intellectual as the master of his era.” {The New York Times, 21 and 25 April 1998}
Paz y Miño, Manuel Abraham (20th Century) Paz, a Peruvian who teaches applied philosophy, is a member of the Ibero-American Commission, a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries. He was a participant in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. Paz wrote No existe Dios? (Does God Not Exist?, 1995) and publishes Revista Peruana de Filosofia Aplicada (RFPA; Peruvian Journal of Applied Philosophy, El Corregidor 318, Lima 25, Peru). E-mail: <rpfa@yahoo.com>. On the Web: <RPFA@www.computextos.com.pe>.
Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer (1804–1894)
Peabody’s West Street Book Shop in Boston became the gathering place for transcendentalists and other reformers. Margaret Fuller’s conversations for women were held there in the early 1840s, and Peabody became one of the most prominent women among the transcendentalists. She organized in 1860 the first kindergarten in Boston. In close connection with William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Bronson Alcott, she emphasized in her thoughts and works the possibility of the nurture and full development of a child’s, or any individual’s, inherent capacity for good, based on what her mentor Channing called a “likeness to God.” Peabody published Fuller’s transcendental magazine, the Dial, as well as pamphlets of the Anti-Slavery Society and several of Hawthorne’s early works. She was greatly respected by religious and philosophic liberals of her day. (See Enrique Krause’s “In Memory of Octavio Paz,” The New York Review of Books, 28 May 1998.) {CE; FUS; U; U&U; UU}
Peabody, Francis Greenwood (1847–1936) The son of Ephraim Peabody, minister of King’s Chapel in Boston, Peabody as a Harvard teacher emphasized ethics. He taught that the modern economic conditions were threatening the foundations of the old social order, including family, property, and the state. This made political and economic questions into ethical ones and demanded a new spirit of service and self-sacrifice in the marketplace. A liberal rather than a radical, Peabody did not advocate a change in existing structures of society, except insofar as changed personal behavior might alter them. His Jesus Christ and the Social Question (1900) was “a pioneer statement of Christian social principles” and helped move liberal thinking away from a concentration on individualism and personal development toward a sense of the ethical imperative in social life. As for his schooling at Harvard College and Divinity School, Peabody wryly remarked, “I cannot remember attaining in seven years of Harvard classrooms anything that could be fairly described as an idea.” {U&U}
Peacock, E. P. (19th Century) Peacock was a president of the American Secular Union. {FUS}
Peacock, John Macleay (1817–1877) Peacock was a Scottish poet who wrote in the National Reformer and other publications. In 1867 he published Hours of Reverie. {BDF; RAT}
Peacock (or Pecock), Reginald (c. 1390–1460) Peacock may have been “the father of English rationalism.” He was successively Bishop of St. Asaph (1444) and Chichester (1450), by the favor of Humphrey, the Duke of Gloster. Peacock declared that Scripture must in all cases be “the doom of reason,” and he questioned the genuineness of the Apostles’ Creed. In 1457 he was accused of heresy, recanted from fear of martyrdom, was deprived of his bishopric, and imprisoned in a monastery at Canterbury. Here, when visited, he would repeat
Wit hath wonder, that reason cannot skan, How a Moder is Mayd, and God is Man.
Peacock’s books were publicly burned at Oxford. Wheeler declares that Peacock’s influence contributed to the Reformation. {BDF}
Peacock, Samuel (1839–1933?) Peacock, a physician, was a land investor and secularist. He was an adviser and supporter of Joseph Symes. In 1911, he was legally involved in an “Anti-Abortion” termination of pregnancy homicide action, but the jury failed to agree at the second trial. At the third, Peacock was acquitted. (See entry for Ghosts.) {SWW}
Peale, Norman Vincent (1898–1993) Peale, a Methodist, wrote The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which contained such help-yourself advice as (1) read and memorize verses from the Bible and say them before bedtime, when you get up, and at odd moments during the day; (2) put yourself in the hands of God and think of Him as your unseen partner; (3) draw on Higher Power by yielding to it, saturating your mind with the Bible; etc. However, in a 1995 issue of Lutheran Quarterly, two ministers argued that Peale clearly based his self-help prescriptions not on the Bible but on a book by an obscure 1920s mystic, Florence Scovel Shinn. John Allen, Peale’s son-in-law who is president of the board of the Peale Center for Christian Living, has denied any plagiarism had taken place. {World, November-December 1995}
Pearce, George (c. 1850–c. 1925) Pearce was the first secretary of the Rationalist Press Association in Brisbane, and he was an active reporter of Queensland rationalist news to Ross’s, an Australian magazine. {SWW}
Pearce, Harold Herbert (1926–1993) Pearce was an Australian atheist, rationalist, humanist, and electrical fitter. At Sydney University, he was a Rationalist Atheist speaker, and he was a regular Sydney Domain lecturer. A foundation member of the Australian Party and Defense of Government Schools, Pearce also was president of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales from 1970 to 1978. {SWW}
Pearce, Harry Hastings (1897–1984) Pearce is one of Australia’s best-known rationalists, freethinkers, and secularists. Over a period of sixty years, he set up or revived rationalist groups, engaged in press controversies, and presented papers to cultural societies on literary, scientific, philosophical, and religious matters. Pearce collected an estimated 15,000 titles of freethought and radical publications, which he willed to libraries in Canberra and Melbourne. Upon his death he was given a secular funeral, and his body was carried out for cremation to the strains of Australia’s “Waltzing Matilda” and New Zealand’s “Po Atarau” (Now Is the Hour). He is author of articles on non-believers in Australia and New Zealand in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief. He wrote Failure of Christian Morality (1943) and Back to the Bible and What (1945). {FUK; GS; SWW}
Pearce, John (20th Century) Pearce was once chair of the British Humanist Association’s Ceremonies Sub-Committee. In “A Future for British Humanism” (New Humanist, June 1999), he suggested that as the largest body of non-believers the British Humanist Association needs to lead the way to help an amalgamation of the various groups.
PEARL: See entry for National Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty.
Pearson, Charles Henry (1830–1894) Pearson was an Australian secularist, academic, journalist, politician, and education reformer. He was the first headmaster of a school for girls afterwards called the Presbyterian Ladies College, but because of his controversial speeches on free trade and land tax he was asked for his resignation. Supported by David Syme, Pearson wrote regularly for The Age. Using the language and values of enlightened Protestantism, he emphasized ways to move a society previously unified by faith to one joined in citizenship. If teachers could not speak what they believed, he argued, it was impractical to teach Christianity. Pearson propounded the reforming power of education based on the principles of such education being secular, compulsory, and free. {SWW}
Pearson, Hesketh (1887–1964) Pearson, a freethinker, wrote Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind (1937). {GS}
Pearson, Karl (1857–1936)
Pearson wrote Matter and Soul (1886), The Positive Creed of Freethought (c. 1888), and a volume of essays entitled The Ethic of Freethought (1888), in which he advocates “a concrete religion which places entirely on one side [that is, excludes] the existence of God and the hope of immortality.” A mathematician, he took up the eugenics movement, wrote a life of Sir F. Galton, and was appointed Galton Professor of Eugenics and Director of the Laboratory for National Eugenics at London University. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Peart, Neil (20th Century) Peart, a lyricist and drummer, is quoted online at a Rush fan site as saying he is a “linear-thinking agnostic, but not an atheist, folks.” In a 1980 interview, he mentioned his views by referring to the Rush songs “High Water,” “Roll the Bones,” “Presto,” “Ghost of a Chance,” and “The Big Wheel.” {CA; E}
Peart, Neil (12 Sep 1952 - ) Peart is a Canadian heavy metal drummer, songwriter, and author. When eighteen he traveled to England to get into the music business, came upon and enjoyed Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, found it difficult to get a job, and returned to Canada, disillusioned about the music business. In a band called Rush, he has produced twenty studio and live albums. A 1988 work by Bill Banasiewicz, Rush Visions: The Official Biography (1988), gives details of early life. The Masked Rider is a work in which Peart describes having cycled through West Africa. It tells of his physical and spiritual journey. His trek with two sidekicks—Aristotle and Vincent Van Gogh—is funny but also startling. At one point Dante is suffering from dysentery and finds he is staring down the muzzle of a drunken soldier’s machine gun. What inspires him are the smiles of people as he passes, the children’s joy at seeing him, the wonders of the countryside. In the book Peart goes on record as being a “linear-thinking agnostic, but not an atheist, folks.” {CA}
Pebody, James (19th Century)
Pebody, with his brother Edward, were leading Northampton secularists in the 1860s. They met at the Admiral Nelson public house on The Green. {RSR}
Pechmeja, Jean de (Died 1785) A French writer, Pechmeja was a friend of Raynal and wrote a socialistic romance in twelve books. He used the style of Telemachus. {BDF}
Peck, John (Born 1819) Peck was raised in a log cabin in the Canandaigua Lake region of New York State. He said, “I have stood for hours watching the eagles as they soared over the waters, or swooped down to bring up a big fish. I used to start up the wild deer to see them bound through the forest and thought them the most beautiful and graceful in the world. But my chief delight was on the waves. As soon as the fury of a storm had subsided I was out in a boat and spent hours on the bounding waves.” A smithy interested in astronomy, Peck found that “the more I studied the laws of nature, the less use I found for a God. I have studied the systems of religion a good deal, and there is so much absurdity in all of them that, in spite of myself, the ridiculous side is constantly turning up.” Peck lectured widely but was considered a blasphemer, particularly because he had become convinced “that the Christian scheme was the most stupendous fraud; and against this superstition I have spent the best energies of my life.” Peck wrote Miracles and Miracle Workers (1896). {FUS; PUT}
Peck, Robert: The American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998) cites Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die as often banned because the book “is bigoted against Baptists.” (See entry for Banned Books.)
Pecker, Jean-Claude (20th Century) Pecker, a member of the Secretariat of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, is a professor of astrophysics at the Collège de France, Académie des Sciences, holding the chair of theoretical astrophysics for twenty-five years. He is an active member of Union Rationaliste and is the permanent representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) at UNESCO. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Prof. Pecker addressed the group. In 1970, he wrote Space Observatories and in 1992 The Future of the Sun (Le promeneur du ciel). His essay, “From Aristotle to the New Age,” is in Challenges to the New Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994). In 1995 in Delphi, Greece, Pecker spoke at the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. In 1996 he was a participant at the Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City. Jim Herrick described Pecker’s asking if laicity in France, 1789–1996, was an obsolete model. “The basic religiosity of the French exists beside an essential scepticism,” he stated. “Laicity was the fight to separate church and state. There has been a pressure from the political Right for money to be contributed toward Catholic schools (outside the state system). Muslims were largely found in the state schools and there had been the “Islamic scarf” debate where the question of the right of Muslim girls to wear the Islamic scarf at school became an issue.” Pecker then described the 1905 laws that established separation of church and state. “The attitude of the French government at that time made France more radically free from Church influence than any other European country, even in the symbols of power.” French humanists, he concluded, have the job of making sure that the State remains neutral about religion. Pecker’s father, incidentally, was a rabbi. In 1998 at the congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union held in Mumbai, Pecker spoke on “Science and the Paranormal,” lamenting that so many are not aware that St. Teresa levitating and the image of Christ on the Shroud of Turiun have no basis whatsoever in science. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for Tolerance.) {SHD; International Humanist News, December 1996 and December 1998}
Peden, W. Creighton (1935– ) Peden is a contributing editor for Religious Humanism, the quarterly of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists.
Pedersen, Tove Beate (20th Century) Pedersen is the General Secretary for the Human-Etisk-Forbundel I Norge, which is the largest membership humanist organization (60,000 members in a country of four million). A psychologist and feminist, she left the church when at high school she was provoked by seeing a bishop blessing weapons in Vietnam. She signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {International Humanist News, October 1998}
PEDOPHILIA In the mid-1980s stories commenced about lascivious Catholics priests who preferred children as their sex object, thus reanimating age-old stereotypes of the priesthood. Apologists complained about such anti-Catholic prejudice, but Philip Jenkins’s Pedophiles and Priests, Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis (1996) makes the case that the “social construction” of the crisis arose from within Roman Catholicism itself. He also holds that the incidence of pedophilia among Catholic clergymen is similar to that found in other denominations. A John Jay College of Criminal Justice study found that from 1950 to 2000 almost 11,000 claims of abuse were brought against nearly 4,400 priests, although many claim the figure should have been much higher. The Conference of Catholic Bishops claims that over 700 priests have been removed since 1998. No known study compares the incidence of pedophilia between non-theists and theists. (See entries for Horatio Alger and Priests.)
Peebles, J. M. (1822–1922) Peebles wrote The Christ Question Settled, of Jesus, Mary, Medium, Martyr (1909) and To Dance With Angels (1990). {GS}
Peel, Daisy (20th Century) Peel is president of Oregon State University’s Society for Logic and Reason in Corvallis.
Peikoff, Leonard (20th Century) Peikoff is a writer of objectivist philosophy. In Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1993), he wrote, “Every argument commonly offered for the notion of God leads to a contradiction of the axiomatic concepts of philosophy. At every point, the notion clashes with the facts of reality and with the preconditions of thought.” He also is author of Introduction to Objectivist Philosophy (1990). {CA; E}
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1839–1914)
Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Peirce greatly influenced William James and John Dewey with his view that logic is the beginning of all philosophic study, and what an idea means is to be found in examining its consequences. He coined the term “pragmatism,” which James used with acknowledgment, although it is reported that originally James had chosen to use the word “humanism.” Peirce was a scientist. But, according to Charles Hartshorne, Peirce held matter to be “ ‘mind hide-bound by habit,’ the portion of nature in which creative spontaneity is slight, hence largely without consciousness, though not without feeling. There is a continuum of all possible (thought not of all actual) forms and qualities, so that differences commonly regarded as of kind (such as that between a color sensation and a sound sensation) are really differences of degree (theory of Synechism). The whole of evolution is a ‘divine poem.’ In a few passages of Peirce’s writings it seems to be suggested that God is in some manner enriched by the world process, himself a temporal being, but in others God is referred to in traditional fashion as wholly independent of time and the world.” For those who find such a view metaphysical, Hartshorne the metaphysician continued: “Primarily a logician, Peirce thoroughly revised many portions of logic and was one of the chief creators of symbolic logic. Among the matters best worked out in his fragmentary and often difficult writings are his frequency theory of probable reasoning, his theory of the categories (also called Phenomenology), and his studies of the kinds and uses of signs. Peirce lost his position at Johns Hopkins because of allegations that he had seduced his colleagues’ wives. As a result, he spent his last days in poverty and obscurity. After Peirce’s death, Morris R. Cohen edited Peirce’s major essays, entitling them Chance, Love, and Logic (1923). For further evidence that Peirce was theistic, see Hartshorne’s 1941 article, “A Critique of Peirce’s Idea of God.” Peirce’s collected papers total eight volumes and were published from 1931 to 1958. A 1993 biography by Joseph Brent points out that it was William James, in a lecture at Berkeley, who named Peirce as the founder of pragmatism, although Peirce himself never used the term in print until afterwards, then favoring the term “pragmaticism.” (Those in the cognoscenti pronounce his name PURSE, which rhymes with nurse. See an article about Peirce by Murray G. Murphey in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6. Also see the entry by Leroy F. Searle of the University of Washington in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism which discusses Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim that “the entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct that, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.” Peirce held that it is by inquiry and experiment that we seek the “fixation of belief,” while the ethics of the process is profoundly summarized in the slogan that Peirce would have on “every wall of the city of philosophy: Do not block the way of inquiry.” Writes Searle, this means that “no belief is ever ultimate, and no one ever gets the last word.”) {CE; CL; ER; TRI}
Pekar, Harvey (20th Century) Pekar, writer of American Splendor (1986) comics, has written, “There are plenty of people who, based on the evidence they perceive, are agnostics, not believing they have answers as to what the purpose of life is and if and when it ends. You can’t force them, including me, to be spiritual.”
PEKING MAN In 1995, Prof. Huang Peihua of the Chinese University of Science and Technology reported that, after using electronic spin resonance, it had been determined that the remains of the pre-historic “Peking Man,” which had thought to have existed from 700,000 to 200,000 years ago, was not as old as previously thought. He placed the Peking Man as having been active about 585,000 to 250,000 years ago. In 1996, however, Richard Ku, a researcher at the University of Southern California, announced that the bones, from a cavern at Zhoukoudian near Beijing were at least 400,000 years old and perhaps considerably older. If this is the case, the research contradicts the contentions that the Peking Man deposits were so recent that they suggest that primitive hominids coexisted with the direct ancestors of anatomically modern humans. “The Zhoukoudian deposits have really stood as evidence of late survival of the species in the Far East,” said Philip Rightmire, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “If you push even the latest levels back to 400,000 years ago, then a claim for overlap begins to fall away. It begins to look more like a gradual evolution from one form to the next, rather than an overlap.” The remains of the Peking Man were discovered in 1921, and at least forty hominids that were unearthed reveal that they used stone axes and fire. {The New York Times, 2 May 1996}
Pelagius (5th Century C.E.) A British monk, Pelagius believed in the freedom of the human will, denying that “Original Sin” made man incapable of self-reform. He emphasized human effort in spiritual salvation. For him, human nature was not, in other words, incorrigibly corrupt. Such a view led Pelagius into a controversy with St. Augustine, who won. As a result, and ever since, Christianity has taught that human nature is corrupt and dependent upon God for salvation. The Pelagian heresy foreshadowed the Unitarian belief in human freedom and the positive qualities of human nature. {CE; ER; EU, Paul H. Beattie; JMR; JMRH}
Pelin, Gabriel (19th Century) Pelin was the French author of works on Spiritism Explained and Destroyed (1864) and God or Science (1867). {BDF}
Pell, John (20th Century) Pell, a freethinker, wrote Ethan Allen (1929). {FUS}
Pelletan, Pierre Clement Eugène (1813–1884) A French writer, Pelletan as a journalist wrote in La Presse under the name of “Un Inconnu,” articles distinguished by their love of liberty and progress. In 1852 he published his Profession of Faith of the Nineteenth Century and in 1857 The Law of Progress and The Philosophical Kings. From 1853 to 1855 he opposed Napoléon in the Siècle and, afterwards, established La Tribune Française. Although elected deputy in 1863, the election was annulled. He was re-elected in 1864. In 1883 he wrote Is God Dead? {BDF; RAT; RE}
Pellett, Thomas (Born 1671) A Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Pellett was a Censor in 1717, 1720, and 1727. He edited Newton’s Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms (1728) and was said to have been one of the most studious and learned physicians of the day. Viscount Percival said in his Diary: “Dr. Holmes told me that now Dr. Tyndal [Tindal] is dead and the head of the unbelievers is Dr. Pellett, the physician, who, though he never published anything, is a man of the best learning and the coolest speculative infidel of the whole pack.” {RAT}
Pelli, Cesar (1926– ) Pelli, the architect born in Argentina but who became an American citizen, has an international reputation and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of the top ten of living American architects, he was dean of Yale’s School of Architecture (1977–1984. His works include the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles; the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo; the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Expansion and Residential Tower of New York City’s World Financial Center; New York’s Carnegie Hall Tower; Plaza Tower in Costa Mesa, California; Docklands Light Railway Station in London; and the New Main Terminal at Washington National Airport. He had the Kuala Lumpur commission to build the tallest two towers in the world, the Petronas Towers 1 and 2, which were are 1,483 feet or 88 stories each. His first sacred building, a Catholic church at St. John’s University in New York, was designed as “a distillation of visiting thousands of churches. It was, however, in line with directives of the Second Vatican Council, he told reporter David W. Dunlap (The New York Times, 31 October 1999). “From a philosophical point of view, I’m very much in sympathy with those views,” he explained, saying they include “democratic views of what a church should be.” Worshipers facing the altar see a slice of sky, framed by the cross. “We want people to see the sky and sense that nature is where we are; that this is God’s world.” Whether Pelli is as much a freethinker as Frank Lloyd Wright, who also designed churches, is unclear. In 1992, asked about the present author’s description of seven humanisms, Pelli wrote,
Secular Humanism defines our moment, but all its other forms continue to affect us.
{WAS, 15 June 1992)
Pelrine, Eleanor Wright (20th Century) A Canadian author, Pelrine signed Humanist Manifesto II. He wrote Abortion in Canada (1971). {HM2}
Pelton, William (20th Century) Pelton is active with the Humanists of Denver. (See entry for Colorado Humanists.) {FD}
Pemberton, Charles Reece (1790–1840) Pemberton was an English actor, author, and freethinker. He traveled throughout the world and, in 1843, wrote The Autobiography of Pel Verjuice. {BDF; RAT}
PEMBERTON PUBLISHING COMPANY LTD. Pemberton Books in England, a publisher of many freethought works, was a precursor to America’s Prometheus Books. Trading as Human Horizons and wholly owned by the Rationalist Press Association, it has a special interest in the production of radio and television programs.
Penelhum, Terence (1929– ) Penelhum is a corresponding member in Canada of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume. He wrote David Hume (1992) and Reason and Religious Faith (1995).
Pengelley, Eric T. (20th Century) Pengelley, a retired professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, is a naturalist who holds that religion warps one’s mind. The Bible “has been used throughout the ages,” he has noted, “to justify everything from slavery to genocide, misogyny to child abuse, and other delectable absolute Christian ethics.” Born to an “areligious” family in Canada, he moved as a toddler with his family to Jamaica, then spent his formative years at a boarding school in England. He spent five years in the Canadian Air Force during World War II. Pengelley is author of Sex and Human Life (1978). {Free Inquiry, Summer 1996}
PENIS • I’ve seen an awful lot of them, and if you put all the Kennedys together, you wouldn’t have a good one. –Truman Capote,
musing about the size of the Kennedy brothers’ penises
{RFK, A Candid Biographyof Robert F. Kennedy (1998}
Religionists have been known to express shock when “intimate” body parts are discussed. Although female breast sizes are more readily observable, males historically have hidden their “wedding kit” or “family jewels”—Americans in general find the subject of penis sizes “taboo.” Women about to be married, those who have been inculcated by the patriarchal system with the idea that pre-marital sex is bad and hearing “until death do us part,” fear “the honeymoon night” for a variety of reasons. From before 1400 to the mid-sixteenth century, European religious art emphasized the genitals of the infant Jesus and the dead Christ. As pointed out by Leo Steinberg in The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1996), such an ostentatio genitalium enforced the doctrine of the divine incarnation. God, in short, was all man. Only later were the fig leaves and gravity-defying loincloths added. In 1995, a secular discussion about penises by Jack McAninch, M.D., chief of urology at San Francisco General Hospital, revealed findings of his study involving eighty men. He found that when erect, the average penis is 5.1 inches in length and 4.9 inches in circumference. When flaccid, the average penis is 3.5 inches in length and 3.9 inches in circumference. His research indicated that an erect penis should be considered “subnormal” only when it is 2.8 inches or less in length and/or 3.5 inches or less in girth. His study shows that only 2% of men fell into that category. Earlier, the Alfred C. Kinsey Institute for Sex Research had found that the erect penises of college males in its study measured as follows: .2% had 3.75 inches; .3 % had 4 inches; .2 percent had 4.25 inches; 1.7% had 4.5 inches; .8% had 4.75 inches; 4.2% had 5 inches; 4.4% had 5.25 inches; 10.7% had 5.5 inches; 8% had 5.75 inches; 23.9% had 6 inches; 8.8% had 6.25 inches; 14.3% had 6.5 inches; 5.7% had 6.75 inches; 9.5% had 7 inches; 1.8% had 7.25 inches; 2.9% had 7.5 inches; 1% had 7.75 inches; 1% had 8 inches; .3% had 8.25 inches; .3% had 8.5 inches; .1 percent had 8.75 inches; and .1% had 9 inches. According to this, the median erect male penis is 6 inches, not 5.1 inches as in Dr. McAninch’s study. In 1990, the Mariposa Foundation (3123 Schweitzer Drive, Topanga, California 90290) measured circumference as well as length of erect penises in its study on condoms. The median length of erect penises—both white college as well as non-college students—was 6 inches; the median of black college students was 6.25 inches. The circumference of erect penises for whites as well as blacks in its study was between 4.75 and 5 inches. More black college and white non-college students had larger circumference figures than did white college students. The study also indicated that non-college whites have, of those who exceed the average, longer erect penises than college whites. It also indicated that black college students have, of those who exceed the average, longer erect penises than white college students do. As to whether penis size comes from the father’s or the mother’s side, Charles Panati in Sexy Origins & Intimate Things suggests that “Penile size, as with many male characteristics, is largely a matter of heredity. If Dad is hung, there’s a good probability his sons will be too.” Playboy (June 1998) playfully added to Panati’s opinion, “The length of a man’s penis has nothing to do with his height or the size of his nose, feet, or hands. There is an inverse correlation, however, to the price of his automobile.” Herman Melville is only one of many writers intrigued by the subject. In Moby-Dick, Melville wrote of the whale’s penis as being “grandissimus.” Northern Italian boatmen along the Po River speak of their remo ghignante (tricky oar), according to Alberto Bevilacqua’s Eros (1996). The carters of Arginotto call it Alberobello (beautiful tree), and Mirasole smugglers call their penis Fratello Branca (sharp shooter). Men as well as women of other nations often ascribe a pet name to the male’s penis. Until the 1960s, little was discussed in the media about the male genitalia. Groucho Marx brought down the wrath of ABC Radio censors in the late 1940s when he asked a Mrs. Story, the mother of nineteen kids, why she had so many. “Because I love my husband,” she reponded. “I love my cigar too,” said the comic, “but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.” In 1961 the Barbie doll was given a male partner, Ken, whose penis was a discreet but unbiological bump. In 1971 Cosmopolitan pictured a naked man (actor Burt Reynolds). The penis became a part of “The Crying Game,” and John Bobbit’s was cut off by his angry girlfriend (an act allegedly common in South America), after which Bobbit appeared in pornographic movies with his sewed-on body part. On television, a widely seen “Seinfeld” episode had a worried male concerned that his date had seen his naked penis in a shrunken state and would no longer be interested in him. In 1993 The New York Times accepted the word, according to Gay Talese, author of Thy Neighbor’s Wife. “There’s Something About Mary,” a movie, teems with references to masturbation, castration, oral sex, and a five-minute sequence in which Ben Stiller gets his penis snagged in his zipper. Female rappers Salt ‘N’ Pepa can be heard on “Shoop” singing about “What’s up with that thang / I wanna know how does it hang / Straight up, wait up . . . .” Billboard’s 1997 modern-rock hit was Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” about “snorting speed and getting blow jobs.” In the space of a generation, in short, the male organ moved from being a taboo to becoming a public piece of conversation. When a woman claimed that Bill Clinton, the newly elected President of the United States, had as the Governor of Oklahoma dropped his trousers and demanded oral sex, she cited in a lawsuit brought against Clinton that she had been forced to witness his “distinguishing characteristic” known as Peyronie’s disease. Journalists had trouble in choosing the wording for their Puritanical readers to show that the allegation referred to a sharp curvature when the penis is erect. A 1999 movie, “American Pie,” depicts a teenager boy defiling a just-baked pie, the ads showing the pastry with a hole in the crust where he had masturbated. A 1999 comedy telecast, “Action,” has a prostitute putting her hand down the trousers of a movie star and, later, a father discussing the size of his sex organ with his pre-treen daughter. Also in 1999, one of the Presidential candidates—Elizabeth Dole—and 272 million other Americans saw advertisements for Viagra (a sex-enhancing pill for the estimated 30 million men who suffer from impotence). The ads featured her husband, former Senate majority leader and himself once a Presidential candidate from the State of Kansas, Robert Dole. There is no known study that compares the penis sizes of theists with non-theists or, for that matter, that correlates penis sizes (length, width) with breast and/or feet sizes. Some individuals, in fact, are embarrassed to discuss such, except with strangers. Others, who erroneously believe you can tell a person’s religion by the length of his nose, have been known to continue making assumptions about male penis sizes or female breast sizes by referring to their race. (Concerning phallocentrism, see entries for Adamastor, Origen, and John Allegro) {The Economist, 10 July 1999; Scott Turow, “Something’s Up,” Vanity Fair, September 1999}
PENIS MODIFICATIONS For adherents of Judaism and Islam, circumcision is a religious ceremony in which the prepuce of the male child is amputated (milah), the glans is bared (periah), and the flow of blood is stanched (metuitzah). Benedictions (invocations of “divine” blessings) are recited before and after the circumcision, and the child is given a name at this time. Afterwards a festive meal is arranged. Similar ceremonies are found among some Egyptians, Polynesians, Indian tribes of the New World, and primitive tribes of Africa and Australia. Circumcision, although termed “genital mutilation” by some, came about according to Louis Finkelstein, then the President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City, for a variety of possible reasons: (a) for hygienic purposes; (b) as a mark of tribal affiliation; (c) as a preparation for sexual life; (d) as an initiation test of courage before acceptance into the tribe; (e) as a means of sanctifying the generative faculties; and (f) as a sacrifice redeeming the male from the god who gave him life. For Jews circumcision is one of the most important of the 613 commandments. Raven Rowanchilde of the University of Toronto’s sociology department has speculated that men of many cultures alter their penises despite the pain involved in order to augment their appeal as mates. Natalie Angier in The New York Times has described some of Rowanchilde’s views:
In Australia and New Guinea, a number of traditional peoples practice subincision, in which a cut is made to the underside of the penis that makes the organ look wider without, apparently, affecting its capacity to perform. According to anthropologists who study these groups, the women consider intercourse with a subincised man to be superior to sex with a non-incised partner. In twenty cultures of Southeast Asia, men ritually insert objects like bells, balls, pins, rings, or marbles made of ground shells under the skin of the genitals. The To Saloe-maoge women of Sulawesi may even demand to know the number of penile marbles a man possesses before they will consider a proposal of marriage. The Dyak men of Borneo use a palang, a smooth bar with rounded ends made of bone or metal, to transect the head of the phallus; Dyak women, according to anthropologists, say that sex without a palang is like rice, “but with it, it tastes like rice spiced with salt.” {ER; Natalie Angier, The New York Times, 7 July 1998}
Penn, Sean (1960- ) An actor, Penn married Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1985, but the two are now divorced. He has been in a variety of Broadway plays and films, receiving an Academy Award in 1996 for “Dead Man Walking.” In an interview in George (December 1998), he told writer Nick Toches that he is an agnostic. {CA}
Penn, Sean (17 Aug 1960 - ) An actor, Penn married Madonna Louise Ciccone in 1985, but the two divorced. He has been in a variety of Broadway plays and films and was an Academy Award nominee in 1996 for Dead Man Walking. He made his Broadway debut in Heartland and has been in numerous films, including: Taps (1981); Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); Bad Boys (1983); Crackers (1984); Racing with the Moon (1984); The Falcon and the Snowman (1985); At Close Range (1986); Shanghai Surprise (1986); Colors (1988); Judgment in Berlin (1988); Casualties of War (1989); We're No Angels (1989); State of Grace (1990); Carlito's Way (1993); Dead Man Walking (1995, for which he received the Golden Globe Award); She's So Lovely (1997); Loved (1997); The Game (1997); U Turn (1997); Hugo Pool (1997); The Thin Red Line (1998); Hurly Burly (1998); As I Lay Dying (1998); and Up at the Villa (2000). Penn was the director-writer of The Indian Runner (1991); The Crossing Guard (1995 (a TV movie); and The Killing of Randy Webster (1981). In an interview in George (December 1998), he told writer Nick Toches that he is an agnostic. {CA}
Pennetier, Georges (Born 1836)
Pennetier was director of the Museum of Natural History at Rome. He wrote Origin of Life (1868), in which he argued the concept of spontaneous generation. {BDF}
PENNSYLVANIA HUMANISTS AND JOURNALS Pennsylvania has the following groups:
• American Humanist Association, Northeast Region (AHA), POB 1256, Fair Lawn, NJ 07410. Theodora Dolores Trent is coordinator for New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. • Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia (FSGP, A chapter of FFRF Inc)., PO Box 242, Pocopson, PA 19366. Margaret Downey and Joe Zemel are the contacts at <downey1@cris.com> • Greater Philadelphia Story, bi-monthly of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Chapter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, PO Box 242, Pocopson, Pennsylvania 19366-0242 • Humanist Association of Greater Philadelphia (AHA), 1702 Sheffield Drive, Blue Bell, Pennsylvania 19422. William Proctor and Gabriel Elias are contact members. Phone: (215) 635-0305.
• Humanist Community of Pittsburgh (AHA), 735 Summeriea Avenue, Washington, Pennsylvania 15301. Stephen Yelanich is the contact.
• Millersville University Humanists on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Pennsylvania State University humanists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Secular Humanists, PO Box 2141, Philadelphia, PA 19103 (215) 602-2245. E-mail: <pglsh@hotmail.com>. On the Web: <members.aol.com/pglsh>. • Pittsburgh Secular Humanists (ASHS), 5003 Impala Drive, Murrysville, PA 15239; (412) 476-5694. E-mail: <jimsioux@sgi.net>. On the Web: <http://www.geocities.com/~shiwpa/PSHMain.html> • Temple University humanists and freethinkers: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY Pennsylvania State University humanists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
PENTATEUCH The five books Moses allegedly wrote at God’s command—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are known as the Pentateuch. Some contemporary scholars have proposed that the books actually are a compilation of four separate narratives, woven together by ancient editors, or redactors, to create a single text. The four narratives have been identified by the letters J, E, P, and D–J (the first letter of the German spelling of the name Yahweh), E, for Elohim, the Hebrew word for God; P, for the priestly source, referring to passages concerned with religious law; and D, signifying Deuteronomy. Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, has argued that the D-J narrative is far longer than the three others and comprises a “hidden book,” one which runs from Genesis to the First Book of Kings and is nearly three thousand years old. Thus, he claims, it is the world’s first book-length prose work. Harold Bloom’s The Book of J argued that J’s author was a woman. Religious fundamentalists, however, believe that the Pentateuch was “revealed” by God, who dotted each “i” and crossed each “t.” Secular humanists, after analyzing the various books, find God’s creation lacking in literary quality when compared to works by such authors as Sophocles, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Victor Hugo. {Gustav Niebuhr, The New York Times, 23 January 1999}
PENTECOST: See entry for Holy Ghost.
Pentecost, Hugh (19th Century) Pentecost, who was a freethinker, wrote What I Believe (189-?). {GS}
PENTECOSTAL CHURCHES In the United States, the Assemblies of God organization numbers over 2,400,000. Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, which represents an estimated 1,000,000, is at 3939 Meadows Drive, Indianapolis, Indiana 46205. The United Pentecostal Rhuch Internation, which numbers an estimated 700,000, is at 8855 Dunn Road, Hazelwood, Missouri.
PENTECOSTALISM A contemporary movement in religion, Pentecostalism is based on direct personal appeal and power rather than dependence upon polity and doctrines. The Pentecostalism which is found in the United States began with such ministers as Charles Fox Parham, who preached to his Topeka congregation in 1901 that speaking in tongues was objective evidence of baptism in the Spirit, and William Joseph Seymour, a self-educated African American who in 1906 said that if people prayed with sufficient fervor God would send “a new Pentecost,” one like the miracle described in Acts. Pentecost, a word which derives from the Greek, is a name for the Jewish Feast of Weeks, which falls on the fiftieth day after Passover. Worldwide, it is growing rapidly, gaining an estimated twenty million members a year. The Yoido Full Gospel (Pentecostal) Church in Seoul, South Korea, has 800,000 members. The various Pentecostal groups in 1994 were estimated to total as many as 410 million. Harvey Cox, in Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (1994), distinguishes between Pentecostalism and fundamentalism: “[They are not the same. Fundamentalists attach such unique authority to the letter of the verbally inspired Scripture that they are suspicious of the Pentecostals’ stress on the immediate experience of the Spirit of God. . . . [W]hile the beliefs of the fundamentalists, and of many other religious groups, are enshrined in formal theological systems, those of Pentecostalism are embedded in testimonies, ecstatic speech, and bodily movement. But it is a theology, a full-blown religious cosmos, an intricate system of symbols that respond to the perennial questions of human meaning and values.” “Speaking in tongues” (glossolalia) is observed at meetings. In 1906 after Seymour and his followers began speaking in tongues, which they held is a sign of the coming of the end of the world as predicted in the Book of Revelation, San Francisco was shaken a few days later by the great earthquake. Seymour, who had been shunned by most up until this time, now found himself surrounded by flocks of blacks and whites who uncharacteristically joined together despite that era’s racial separation. “God was now assembling a new and racially inclusive people to glorify his name and to save a Jim Crow nation lost in sin,” Cox wrote. Although whites soon split off into their own congregations, Cox found that Pentecostalism is “one of the least segregated forms of Christianity” in a religion which allegedly preaches brotherhood. Oral Roberts in the 1960s encouraged a Pentecostal revival organized by faith-healing. The formal origin of the new Pentecostalism or charismatic movement is traced to Dennis Bennett, an Episcopal minister whose methods influenced many Protestant denominations, the Roman Catholic church, and, to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodox communions. Another type of Pentecostalism consists of sects which adopt or tolerate beliefs and practices such as ancestor worship and polygamy. These are found mostly among non-whites in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Pentecostalism is just one more form of a supernaturalistic religion to rationalists or freethinkers, who nevertheless are impressed by the growth of the movement among the poor, the dispossessed, the less education, and minorities. (See entry for Tongues.) {S. M. Burgess and G. B. McGee, eds., Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (1988); CE; Dan Wakefield, “Speaking in Tongues,” The Nation, 23 January 1995}
Penter, John (20th Century) Penter is author of Circumstantial Evidence (1981). {GS}
Penzig, Rudolph (Born 1855) Penzig, a German educationist, wrote Arthur Schopenhauer und menschliche Willensfreiheit (1879) and edited Ethische Kultur. Active in the Monist League, Penzig showed his rationalism in Laienpredigten (1905, a collection of ethical addresses). {RAT}
PEOPLE • It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. –Oscar Wilde
• When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst. –H. Allen Smith
• The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner. –Karl Kraus
• People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them. –Anatole France
PEOPLE FOR THE AMERICAN WAY People for the American Way (2000 M St NW, Washington, DC 20036) is an organization dedicated to separation of church and state. It specifically is not anti-religion.
PEOPLE FOR THE ETHICAL TREATMENT OF ANIMALS People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is at PO Box 42516, Washington, DC 20015. (See entry for Ingrid Newkirk.)
Perelman, Chaim (Born 1912; Deceased) Perelman, a Polish-born professor of philosophy at the University of Brussels, Belgium, and dean of the faculty of philosophy of letters at the Free University of Brussels, was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. Perelman wrote New Rhetoric and the Humanities (1979) and Justice, Law and Argument: Essays on Moral and Legal Reasoning (1980). Perelman had been a member of the board of directors of Hebrew University. {HM2}
Pérez, Allen (20th Century) Pérez, formerly a Costa Rican lawyer, is the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee’s Latin America-Caribbean associate. He and his wife, Debbie Duquay Pérez, have been active in the Asociación Ético Humanista Costarricense (ASEHUCO). In the State of Washington and in Costa Rica, the two have fought for human rights. He currently works on behalf of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee in Cuba, Haiti, and Central America.
Pérez-Escalarin, Antonio (20th Century) Perez-Escalarin is the author of Atheism and Liberation (1978). {GS}
Pérez Galdós, Benito (1843–1920) Pérez Galdós has been called the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. He wrote a cycle of forty-six historical novels, Episodios nacionales, which recount episodes in Spanish history from 1805 to the end of the century. He also wrote Doña Perfecta (1876); an attack on clericalism and religious intolerance, La familia de León Roch (1878), and a four-volume work contrasting the lives of two women of widely different classes, Fortunata and Jacinta (1886–1887). Elected to the Royal Academy in 1897, Pérez Galdós became deputy of the republican party in Madrid. Upon becoming blind in 1912, he continued to dictate his books until his death. In the words of McCabe, “No other man did as much as this distinguished atheist for the emancipation of Spain.” He added that the British Royal Society of Literature presented its gold medal to him as “the most distinguished living representative of Spanish literature.” {BDF; CE; JM; RAT}
PERFECTIBILITY OF MAN • Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be built. –Immanuel Kant
Rousseau and others advanced the doctrine of the perfectibility of man, saying that people are capable of achieving perfection on earth through natural means, without the grace of God. Inasmuch as “perfectibility” is logically impossible to attain, it has been recommended that the concept might better be termed “the improvability of man.” (See entry for Charles Francis Potter who regretted using “perfectibility” rather than “improvability” of man.)
Perfitt, Philip William (Born 1820) Perfitt was a liberal minister at South Place and elsewhere. He founded the Free Church on London’s Newman Street and edited the Path-finder (1859–1861). {VI}
Pericles (c. 495–429 B.C.E.) Under the tutelage of Pericles, Athens reached its zenith. The famed “Funeral Oration of Pericles,” as told by Thucydides, includes the following: “Our constitution is named a democracy, because it is in the hands not of a few but of the many. Our laws secure equal justice for all in their private disputes, and our public opinion welcomes and honors talent in every branch of achievement, not for any sectional reason, but on grounds of excellence alone. . . . We are lovers of beauty without extravagance, and lovers of wisdom without unmanliness.” Nowhere is he cited as having mentioned the name of a single god, nor does he mention some future existence for the fallen Athenian soldiers who have died. The Encyclopedia Britannica states that Pericles was “unpopular on account of his rationalism in religious matters,” to which McCabe responds that it is clear Pericles shared the atheism that had then become common in Greece. Humanists find it difficult to locate an analogous contemporary in a high government position.
When Pericles was married, around forty, and with two adolescent sons, he met twenty-five-year-old Aspasia, a golden-haired lass from Megara who managed a brothel and conducted a school for elocution and philosophy, intended principally for young ladies. She then withdrew from teaching and resumed the role of courtesan, became his new mistress, and was already pregnant by him. Inasmuch as she was from Megara and not an Athenian citizen, he could not marry her. But he arranged another marriage for his former wife, brought Aspasia into his house, and willed his fortune to their son, Pericles II.
Pericles himself is believed to have died of a combination of flu and toxic shock syndrome, during an Athenian plague that lasted from 430 to 427 B.C.E. The condition was one in which a maddening fever was followed by bloodshot eyes, inexplicable vomiting and bleeding, followed by skin lesions and diarrhea. Medical historians have been unable to cite the exact cause, inasmuch as Thucydides’s accounts lacked even rudimentary medical vocabulary. He wrote that the disease was African, from somewhere south of Ethiopia. His phlyktainai could, however, be translated as blisters, which have fluid, or as calluses, which do not. Blisters might suggest smallpox, but bubonic plague is a possibility. (See entry for Plague.) {CE; CL; JM; Anthony Ramirez, The New York Times, 18 August 1996; PA; RE; TYD}
Perier, Casimir (1777–1832) Although he had a clerical education, Perier became a wealthy banker who entered politics as a moderate anti-clerical. He was Minister of Finance and Commerce under the restored monarchy, but he resigned and supported the Revolution of 1830. Later he was President of the Chambre, President of the Council, and Minister of the Interior. Perier, whose deism is found in his Opinions et discours (1838), was the grandfather of President Casimir-Perier. {RAT; RE}
Peris, Daniel (20th Century) In Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless (1998), Peris details the history of atheism in the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks, he mentions that Lenin once said, were the “Jacobins, plus the proletariat.” Their League of the Godless turned out posters by the thousands that proclaimed “Religion is poison. Protect your children.” To counter a widespread folk belief that the corpses of particularly holy persons did not decay, the Bolsheviks opened the tombs to demonstrate that they rotted like the rest of mankind. The Godless, Peris found in his research, was a weekly with a circulation ranging from two to five hundred thousand. [Fred Whitehead, Freethought History #26, 1998}
Periyar (Erode V. Ramaswami) (1879–1973) Periyar (which means “great leader”) was a controversial leader of social reform and of atheism in modern India. He used the pseudonym Erode V. Ramaswami. Periyar was greatly influenced by Robert G. Ingersoll and had much of his writing translated into Tamil. Deodhekar notes the complex political struggles he endured, and at his death he was buried in a simple wooden coffin, not cremated as is the Hindu custom. Vast crowds gathered in Madras to pay homage. His grave is now a monument to atheism and to Tamil aspiration. Periyar was an editor of Kudi Arasu and Pakutharivu, both in Telugu. Delegates to the fourth World Atheist Conference in Vijayawada also attended a one-day State Rationalist Conference held by the Periyar organization. In the center of their multi-building compound is a statue of Periyar with one of his sayings on the base. On seeing it, several Americans read it, shouting at the top of their lungs, “There is no God. There is no God. There is no God at all. He who invented God is a fool. He who propagates God is a scoundrel. He who worships God is a barbarian.” (See entries for Ramendra, K. Veeramanim, and G. Vijayam.) {EU, Govind N. Deodhekar; FUK; HNS2; Jerry Rauser, The Free Mind, February 1996}
PERIYAR PAGUTHARIVU PASARAI Periyar Pagutharivu Pasarai is an atheist organization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Phone (603) 4456781. (See entry for Nakkeeran Parry).
Perkins, A(lice) J. G. (20th Century Perkins, with Theresa Wolfson, wrote Frances Wright: Free Enquirer (1939). {GS}
Perkins, Erasmus (19th Century) Perkins, the publisher of a periodical, The Theological Inquirer (1815), reprinted Shelley’s Refutation of Deism as well as other essays and letters sympathetic to letters sympathetic to atheism. Berman finds that Perkins lacked Richard Carlile’s dynamism and publicizing genius and that his periodical had little circulation or impact. Further, Perkins neither avowed nor defended atheism. {HAB}
Perkins, Frederick W. (20th Century) A Universalist minister, Perkins once wrote, “The traditional idea has been, and in the minds of many Christians it still persists, that religious truth must be certified by some external authority. The Catholic or High Church Anglican says, ‘I believe because the church or the bishop or long-established tradition says so.’ The orthodox Protestant, who yet craves some substitute for the ancient authorities to determine what to believe, says, ‘I believe because Jesus says so.’ The true liberal says, ‘I believe because reason and conscience say so.’ This does not mean that the liberal must discard all external helps. Only a consummate intellectual egotist would be so lacking in spiritual humility.”
Perkins, Palfrey (1883–1976) Perkins, a Unitarian activist and minister, was a supporter of the Harvard Divinity School, was chairman of the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College, encouraged the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and helped form the Unitarian Service Committee. {U&U}
Perkins, Thomas Handasyd (1764–1854) A prominent member of the Federalist Party, Perkins was elected eight times to the Senate and three times to the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature. His philanthropy included the Boston Athenaeum and the New England Asylum for the Blind. A Unitarian, Perkins worshipped at the Church of the Rev. Dr. Ezra Stiles Gannett, and that is where his funeral was held, according to Thomas G. Cary’s Memoir of Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1856). {EG}
Perón, Eva Duarte de (1919–1952) The wife of Argentine’s President Juan Domingo Perón, Eva, a devout Catholic, became something of a worldly saint to her countrymen. Santa Evita by Tomás Dujovne Ortiz tells what happens to Eva, three years after her death at a time when plans to overthrow Perón were underway and a new junta decided to insure that she remain dead, both physically and symbolically. An Army colonel who as a spy lectured about secrecy and rumor and who was an admirer of Kant and Edmund Burke, hijacked Eva’s mummified body. The corpse was first hidden behind a movie theater’s screen, a place that often played Abbott and Costello movies. (The theater’s owner had called the body “Sweetie.”) Moved various other places, it was then detected by an Army officer’s wife in her husband’s attic, leading to his shooting his pregnant wife in a panic and ending up as a destitute drunk who came to believe Evita, as Eva was affectionately known, had been stolen from him and buried on the moon. (See Sarah Kerr, “Working Girl,” The New York Review of Books, 20 February 1997.)
Perot, Jean Marie Albert (19th Century) A French banker, Perot wrote Man and God (1881) and Moral and Philosophical Allegories (1883). {BDF}
Perrier, Jean Octave Edmond (Born 1844) Perrier, a French zoologist, was curator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris. He wrote numerous works on natural history and one on Transformisme (1888). An agnostic, Perrier stated in a symposium on spiritualism, “I believe that when one is dead, one is dead for a very long time.” {BDF; RAT}
Perrin, Raymond S. (19th Century) Perrin wrote The Religion of Philosophy, an attempt to unify knowledge and compare the chief philosophical and religious systems of the world. {BDF}
Perrons, François Tommy (1822–1901) Perrons was a French historian, a professor of rhetoric at the Polytechnic and inspector for the Paris Academy. He wrote Jérome Savanarole (2 volumes, 1853), L’église et l’état sous le règne de Henri IV (2 volumes, 1872), and La démocratie en France au moyen age (2 volumes, 1873). These were crowned by the Academy. His chief work is Histoire de Florence (6 volumes, 1877–1884), but the work of particular interest to rationalists is his Les Libertins en France au XVII siècle (1896). {RAT; RE}
Perry, Charles M. (20th Century) Perry wrote The Ironic Humanist (1924). {GS}
Perry, David (20th Century) A public school teacher, Perry asked his class one day if they knew where snakes came from. Amidst the cries of “God made them,” he heard a lone voice utter, “They evolved from fish.” His goal, he has said, is not to create juvenile humanists but, rather, to teach individuals to think rationally. {Secular Nation, July-September 1998}
Perry, Ralph Barton (1876–1957) Perry was a philosopher at Harvard University (1876–1957) and the Pulitzer Prize-winner in 1936 for The Thought and Character of William James (1935). Asked for his views on humanism, Perry wrote that at the age of eighty he was confined to a hospital bed but recommended that his new work, The Humanity of Man (1956) be consulted. In a review of that book in The Journal of Philosophy (16 August 1956), Harold A. Larrabee wrote, “A weakness for which the author is not responsible, but which the book does little to remedy, lies in the multiple and confusing meanings of ‘humanism.’ The ancient classicists, the Renaissance scholars, the followers of More and Babbitt, and the scientific anti-supernaturalists each have firm holds on separate corners of the label, and have torn it to shreds. How can any small group of men make good an exclusive claim to so broad a classification? Professor Perry’s own ‘humanism,’ which includes and excludes something of each of them, only complicates further an already intolerable imbroglio in semantics. The humanity of man, as freedom of choice, is bountifully manifested in the diverse and conflicting ways in which men lay claim to the title of human.” [WAS, 1 May 1956}
Perry, Thomas Ryley (19th Century) Perry, one of Carlile’s shopmen, was sentenced in 1824 to three years in Newgate Prison for having sold Palmer’s Principles of Nature. He became a chemist at Leicester and in 1844 petitioned Parliament for two prisoners Paterson and Roalfe, who were imprisoned for blasphemy. Perry stated to the judge that his own imprisonment had not fulfilled the judge’s hope of his recantation. {BDF}
Perry, William Graves Jr. (1913– ) Director of the Bureau of Study Counsel at Harvard University and author with C. P. Whitlock of the Harvard Reading Course (1948), Perry contributed humanistic works to Priscilla Robertson when she was editor of The Humanist. One of his books was Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (1968). Students remember Dr. Perry as the scholarly gentleman, the superlative professor with a prominent hearing aid in each ear.
Perry, William J. [Admiral] (1927– ) Perry, the son of a grocer who became a teacher at Stanford University, was appointed in 1977 to be President Jimmy Carter’s Under-Secretary of Defense for research and engineering. A person who emphasized technological solutions to military problems, he was appointed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton to head the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense. In 1995 he was Vice President of Hambrecht & Quist, a San Francisco-based investment banking firm that specializes in high-tech companies. Admiral Perry is a Unitarian. {Current Biography 1995}
Perrycoate, Frank Hill (20th Century) A freethinker, Perrycoate wrote On the Influence of Religion Upon Truthfulness (1913) and Religion and Moral Civilisation (1915). {GS}
Persons, Stow (1913– )
Persons is author of Free Religion: An American Faith (1947), which studied the free religious movement that emerged from Unitarianism following the Civil War. {FUS}
PERUVIAN HUMANISTS Manuel Abraham Paz y Miño is president in Peru of Asociación Ediciones, Revista Peruana de Filosofía Aplicada. His Peruvian Journal of Applied Philosophy (El Corregidor 318, Lima 25, Peru) is on the Web: <RPFA@www.computextos.com.pe>. His e-mail: <rpfa@geocities.com>.
PERVERSION • A pervert is one who denies the pleasure of sex. –Anonymous
• Nicht Der Homosexuelle Ist Pervers, Sondern Die Situation In Der Er Lebt” (“It’s Not the Homosexual Who is Perverse but the Situation in Which He Lives” –A 1970 German movie directed by Rosa von Praunheim.)
Peshkov, Alexei Maximovitch: See entry for Maxim Gorky.
PESSIMISM • Pessimism, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarcrow hope and his unsightly smile. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• Pessimist: one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. –Oscar Wilde
• A pessimist thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it. –George Bernard Shaw
Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich (1746–1827) Pestalozzi was a Swiss educational reformer. His theories laid the foundation of modern elementary education. After studying theology at the University of Zurich, he conducted a school for poor children, then directed the experimental institute at Yverdon, which was established on Pestalozzian principles. His theory was based on the importance of a pedagogical method that corresponded to the natural order of individual development and of concrete experiences. He held that the individuality of each child is paramount and something that has to be cultivated actively through education. He opposed the prevailing system of memorization learning and strict discipline, replacing it with a system based on love and an understanding of the child’s world. Running through much of Pestalozzi’s writing is the idea that education should be moral as well as intellectual. “No other Italian, and few Frenchmen, wrote French as well as he,” said Larousse. In 1871, at the triumph of the moderates, Pestalozzi was expelled from France and ceased to be a friend of that country. A deist like Rousseau, Pestalozzi kept theological instruction out of his schools, despite the heavy pressure of the clergy. “We seek the foundations of dogma and of all religious opinions in human nature,” he wrote in a “Report to Parents.” E. Langner, in a detailed study of his views, concludes that Pestalozzi “rejects all sectarian claims.” {CE; JM; RAT; TRI}
PETER Peter is a name conferred by Jesus on Simon, his closest disciple. Matthew contains a passage in which Jesus acclaims Peter as the rock on which he will build his church. Robert Gorham Davis points out, in connection with the Roman Catholic view that ordaining married men would be a drastic departure from the tradition of the Roman church, “It depends on how early a tradition begins. All three synoptic Gospels agree that Peter, the rock on which Jesus founded his church, was married, with a mother-in-law that Jesus cured of a fever. Paul exclaims in his anguished first letter to the Corinthians, ‘Have I no right to take a Christian wife about with me, like the rest of the apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas?’ ‘Cephas,’ meaning ‘rock,’ is the Aramaic equivalent of Peter, whose inheritors the popes profess to be. If he was married, why not they?”
Peter I (Peter the Great) (1672–1725) Peter, czar of Russia (1682–1725), was a major figure in the development of imperial Russia. After visiting Europe, he returned to Russia and started ruthless reforms in order to change what he considered were the country’s backward ways. Before actually outlawing beards, he imposed a tax on them, later personally cutting some of the beards himself. Also, he ordered Russians to wear Western dress henceforth. He introduced territorial conscription, enlarged and modernized the army, founded a navy, and set up military-technical schools. He increased the number of nobles owing service to the state, forced nobles’ sons to attend military-technical schools, and created a bureaucratic hierarchy in which promotion depended on merit rather than birth. The Academy of Sciences was founded, the calendar reformed, and the alphabet simplified. Although the discontented looked to Peter’s son, Alexis, the son was tried for treason and tortured to death in 1718, followed by Peter’s proclaiming himself “emperor of all Russia” in 1721. Peter’s second wife, crowned as Catherine I in 1724, succeeded him. Those who regard Russia as essentially European praise him for his policy of Westernization, and others who consider Russia a unique civilization attack him for turning Russia from its special path of development. Peter was known for having convulsive fits. He had, states the Columbia Encyclopedia, “a bearlike constitution, was of gigantic stature, and possessed herculean physical prowess. He drank himself into stupors and indulged in all conceivable vices but could rouse himself at a moment’s notice, and he was willing to undergo all the physical exertions and privations that he exacted from his subjects.” “That Peter rejected and mercilessly mocked the Orthodox Catholic religion is well known,” McCabe wrote, adding, “As French Deism had not at that time reached Russia it is clear that he and his leading companions at court were atheists. His favorite type of orgy was to travesty and insult the only religion he knew. In considering these orgies and the intemperance of his character we have to remember that Peter did not introduce them into Russian life. It had in moral respects remained barbaric during centuries of church domination, and Peter’s breaches in its isolation, on which the clergy insisted, led to the beginning of an improvement of life and character.” Alexei Gostev, however, labels Peter as one who “inclined to Protestantism.” For example, he tried to close all monasteries. The mockery of church rituals, Gostev adds, is not the result of his and his companions’ atheism but more a desire to challenge the value system of the period. (WAS, interview with Alexei Gosteve, 1998) {CE; JM}
Péters, Laurent (20th Century) A French journalist, Péters is with the Association for the Mohsen Hachtroudi Foundation. In 1996 he was a participant at the Humanist World Congress in Mexico City.
Petersen, Bill (20th Century) At the Fourth Annual Atheist Convention hosted in 1998 by the St. Louis Rationalist Society, Petersen spoke about “Activism Against the Boy Scouts.”
Petersen, Steve (20th Century) Petersen is co-chairman of the Minnesota Atheists. He wrote “The Death of Each of Us Is in the Order of Things” for Secular Nation (Summer 1995}.
Peterson, David (20th Century) Peterson is editor of The Separationist, the newsletter of the Secular Humanists of the Low Country in South Carolina. He is on the Web: <http://www.serve.com/sechumlo>. Peterson’s E-mail: <sechumlo@mail.serve.com>.
Peterson, James (20th Century) Peterson is active with the Humanists of Tallahassee. (See entry for Florida Atheists, Humanists.) {FD} Peterson, R. (19th Century) Dublin-born, Peterson at the age of twelve was sent by his father to New York to learn the mercantile business. Not liking this, he began life on his own as a newsboy sleeping under stoops and in crockery crates on the docks. Emigrating to Ohio, he learned the printer’s business, became a lawyer in Texas, and published that state’s second Republican newspaper. His editorials attracted the attention of the Ku Klux Klan which, one midnight, surrounded his house, bullied and threatened, then rode away. Peterson published Common Sense, a freethought journal “devoted to the rise of reason and the downfall of faith.” {PUT}
Petrarch, Francesco (Petrarca) (1304–1374) One of the great figures of Italian literature, the poet Petrarch was among the first to realize that Platonic thought and Greek studies provided a new cultural framework. A friend of Boccaccio, he can be termed a freethinker, according to Robertson, in that “with less aggressiveness but also without recoil, stood for independent culture and a rational habit of mind as against the dogmatics and tyrannies of the Church.” Petrarch was in the main a practical humanist, “not in accord with the verbalizing scholastic philosophy of his time, and disposed to find his intellectual guide in the skeptical yet conservative Cicero.” Called “the first modern man” and “the founder of modern criticism, Petrarch earned a name for resisting all dogmatisms. . . . For himself, having little speculative power, he was disposed to fall back on a simple and tolerant Christianity. Thus he is quite unsympathetic in his references to those scholars of his day who privately indicated their unbelief.” Although he knew nothing of the teaching of Averroës, for example, he spoke of him as “that mad dog who, moved by an execrable rage, barks against his Lord Christ and the Catholic faith.” Such a statement is ironic inasmuch as Averroës was a Muslim scholar. (See entry for Classical Humanism.) {CE; ER; HNS2; JMR; JMRH; RE}
Petit, Claude (17th Century) Petit was a French poet who, being accused of having written some impious pieces, was burned on the Place de Grève in 1665. {BDF}
Petrini, Henrik (1863–1957) Petrini, a professor of physics in Sweden, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Petronius Arbiter, Gaius (c. 27–66) A Roman satirist (whose original name was Titus Petronius Niger according to Plutarch and Pliny but Gaius according to Tacitus), Petronius was one of the first authors to utilize humor extensively. He used a literary device, petroni arbitri satyricon, which satirized manners of a place at a particular time and which used colloquial language. Known as the arbiter elegantiae in Nero’s court, he had the reputation of being a luxurious profligate. When caught in an intrigue and arrested with no hope of being freed, he called his friends. In their presence, he slit his veins and bled to death in leisurely fashion while they observed the tragic scene. “It is fear,” he declared in Satyricon, his satire of excesses in Nero’s Rome, “that first brought gods into the world.” A generation ago, John Sullivan and William Arrowsmith provided the standard translation of Satyricon. Today, according to Peter Green of the University of Texas at Austin, R. Bracht Branham and Daniel Kinney have supplied the standard translation. Scholars still discuss whether The Satyricon is a genitive plural with libri—books—understood, in which case the work is “a recital of lecherous happenings.” Or is it a neuter plural, Satyrica, which Branham and Kinney state is “a heuristic metaphor for the moral ambiance of the fictional world Petronius has created”? What is apparent is that Petronius has pleased centuries of audiences with his descriptions of homosexual rape; dildoes spruced up with oil, pepper, and crushed nettle seeds; incestuous voyeurism; heterosexual cornholing; and energetic pederasty. In The Satyricon is a character, Encolpius (a well-endowed stud whose name means “crotch”), and scenes such as the following:
After serving up these verses he befouled me [the narrator is male] with a slobbery kiss. Then he got up on my bed and in spite of my resistance forced the covers off me. He labored long and hard over my groin—in vain! The make-up caked on his face melted and streamed off in rivulets; there was so much rouge in his wrinkles you’d have thought of an old wall battered by a rainstorm.
There are just two things that keep him from being one in a million: he’s circumcised and he snores. Now I don’t mind that he’s cross-eyed. So’s Venus. That’s why he’s never quiet: one eye is always on the move. I only paid three hundred for him.
He persuaded the girl to sit down on top of his [penis], and ordered Corax to get under the bed he was lying on and keep his master in motion by putting his hands on the ground and thrusting his own loins against the bottom of the bed. He obeyed the command reluctantly and the girl was skillful enough to match him, thrust for thrust. When the business was nearing a climax, Eumolpus ordered Corax in a loud voice to redouble his efforts. So old Eumolpus, sandwiched between his valet and his mistress, was riding a kind of seesaw.
For Green, the Branham and Kinney translation makes clear that as a philosophical Sceptic, Petronius pens verses on the deceptiveness of dreams and the senses. And, like Epicurus, he thinks that fear created gods. The controversial 1968 film version of The Satyricon was by Federico Fellini. {BDF; GL; JMR; JMRH; Peter Green, “Bigus Dickus,” The New Republic (28 October 1996; TYD}
Petrosyan, Maria (20th Century) Petrosyan’s Humanism (1972) is a Marxist discussion of what is needed as an alternative to religious education.
Petrowski, Marc (20th Century) After receiving his doctorate in gerontology and the sociology of knowledge, Petrowski taught at East Central University in Oklahoma. A non-theist, he wrote “Prayer and Healing” for Freethought Today (March 1996).
Petruccelli della Gattina, Ferdinando (1813–1890) Petruccelli was an Italian writer and historian. A deputy to the Naples Parliament in 1848, he took part in the anti-Papal Revolution and was driven to France and his property confiscated at its failure. His history of the Papal elections, Histoire diplomatique des Conclaves (1864–1865, 4 volumes) was put on the Vatican’s Index. {BDF; RE}
Petrus de Abano: See entry for Abano.
Petty, William [Marquis] (1737–1807) Petty, a British statesman who became Premier, had the titles of the Marquis of Lansdowne, Viscount Colne, Earl Wycombe, and Earl of Shelburne. He opposed the American war and, as Premier, was happy to bring it to a close. Later, he opposed the French War and, in cooperation with Bentham, supported reform at home. Sir John Bowring, in his Memoir of Bentham, wrote that “Lord Shelburne avoided talking on religious subjects for fear, he hinted, of getting into a scrape, but he avowed to Bentham that his opinions were what is called skeptical.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Petzoldt, Joseph (1862–1929) Petzoldt was President of the German Society of Positive Philosophers. Like Mach, and more or less following Avenarius, Petzoldt pleaded for a psychophysical parallelism, holding that the psychic and the physical, or what are commonly called spirit and matter, are two aspects of a monistic reality. He described himself as an Empirio-critical Positivist. {RAT}
Pevey, Richard (20th Century) Pevey is active with the Shreveport Secular Humanists. (See entry for Louisiana Humanists.) {FD}
Peypers, H.F.A. (Born 1856) Peypers, a Dutch writer, was an Amsterdam physician. He contributed to De Dageraad and was one of the five editors of that freethought monthly. {BDF}
Peyrard, François (1760–1822) Peyrard, a French mathematician, was a warm partisan of the revolution and was one of those who in 1793 incited Bishop Gobel to abjure his religion. An intimate friend of Sylvian Maréchal, Peyrard furnished him with notes for his Dictionnaire des Athées. Peyrard wrote a work on Nature and Its Laws (1793–1794) and translated the works of Euclid and Archimedes. Peyrard proposed the piercing of the Isthmus of Suez. {BDF; RAT}
Peyrat, Alphonse (Born 1812) Peyrat was a French writer who fought against the Second Empire. He founded l’Avenir National, which was condemned several times because of its controversial content. In 1871 he was elected deputy of the Seine and proposed the proclamation of the Republic. Among other works, he wrote a History of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception (1855), History and Religion (1858), and Elementary and Critical History of Jesus (1864). {BDF; RAT}
Peyrefitte, Roger (1907– ) An openly gay French novelist, Peyrefitte is no favorite among Catholic officials. The Red Cassock is a parody about the murders of Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul I. The Keys of St. Peter is about corruption in the Vatican. This Special Friendship (1945) takes place in a Jesuit school for boys, where the youths are counseled daily to guard themselves against impure friendship, yet where sex abounds. When a French film based on the book was released in 1963, the film was considered scandalous by showing sixteen-year-old George failing head-over-heels for Alexandre, a twelve-year-old, exchanging poems, swearing eternal friendship in a blood ceremony, and meeting in secret. In one of his tales, Peyrefitte told about a marquis who discovered when he was forty-five, and “with fright,” that he was gay. “Then,” he continued, “he realized he had lost forty years of his life. One should never lose hope. Homosexuality can strike any straight man at any age.” The Exile of Capri (1961) is a fictional account of Baron Jacques d’Adelswärd Fersen (1880-1923), a pederast. Peyrefitte won the 1991-1992 Prize of the Balzac Academy for his work as a whole.
Peyrère, Isaac de la (1594–1676) A French writer, Peyrère was brought up as a Protestant. In Praeadamitae, because he had maintained that men lived before Adam, the bishop of Namur censured it, the hangman in Paris burned the book, and la Peyrère was arrested at Brussels by order of the Archbishop of Malines. He escaped, however, by favor of the Prince of Condé on the condition he would retract his book at Rome. According to his epitaph, he never did. {BDF}
Pfalzner, Paul M. (20th Century) Pfalzner, a Canadian medical physicist and freethinker in Ottawa, has written for the English Freethinker, including a tragi-comic satire, “The Perils of Perfection, or a Plague on Pleroma.” The article spoofs God’s alleged perfection. He is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada. In “Why I Am Immune to Mystics” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1995), Pfalzner traces his antipathy to mysticism and irrationalism to his youthful experiences in his native Austria during the time of its Anschluss with Nazi Germany.” Pfalzner has served as President of the Humanist Association of Canada. (CA; HAC).
Pfalzner, Paul (20th Century) Pfalzner, a medical physicist, is a non-theist who is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada. {E}
Pfannstiel, Harvey (20th Century) Pfannstiel is Vice President of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio, Texas.
Pfeffer, Leo (1910–1993) Author of Church, State, and Freedom (1953), The Liberties of an American: The Supreme Court Speaks (1956), and God, Caesar, and the Constitution (1975), Pfeffer had a legal career that included defending many church-state separation cases. He was with the American Jewish Congress from 1945 to 1964, becoming director of its Commission on Law and Social Action in 1957. Pfeffer represented Roy R. Torcaso, a notary public from Wheaton, Maryland, whose commission was withheld because he refused to take an oath declaring belief in God. He was elated when the Supreme Court in 1961 ruled that states could not compel officeholders to declare a belief in God. The Court in a unanimous ruling struck down a provision of the Maryland Constitution on the ground that it was a “religious test for public office,” a provision which stated, “No religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this state, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.” Pfeffer was the founder of Public Education and Religious Liberty (PEARL). In 1972, Pfeffer in PEARL v. Levitt, argued before a U.S. District Court, which invalidated a law which allocated state funds to pay for a portion of the salaries of parochial school teachers and other so-called secular services in parochial schools. In 1973, in the U.S. Supreme Court, he argued the Pearl v. Nyquist case, and the court ruled that direct grants to religious schools for building maintenance and repair, tuition reimbursement to parents, and tax credits for tuition at religious schools are unconstitutional. Alan, his son and a professor of law at Skidmore College, has reported that his father had started out to become a high school English teacher. Under New York law at the time, however, he could not be certified unless he passed a course in public speaking. He took the course, but failed it. Twice. Law school was his second choice. Later, while professor of Constitutional Law and chair of the political science department at Long Island University professor, Pfeffer was remembered as a punster—whenever anyone referred to tanks, tongs, or tents, Pfeffer would reply, “You’re welcome.” Although the university had no award to give outstanding teachers, they devised one, and Prof. Pfeffer became the first recipient. In 1988, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. Pfeffer’s funeral was secular in content but was held in a synagogue. {FUS; HNS2}
Pfeiff, Johan Gustaf Viktor (Born 1829) Pfeiff was a Swedish baron, the editor in 1822 of The Truthseeker. He translated some of the writings of Herbert Spencer into Swedish. {BDF}
PHALLICISM The emphasis upon sex is found in a wide range of religions. In the Yucatan are gigantic phalli in the ruins of temples. In Egypt are ithyphallic (showing an erect penis) carvings on the walls of temples, and Herodotus described phallic statues of Osiris in the country’s fifth century B.C.E. villages. In India, combined representations (lingam and yoni) were found by Christian missionaries, who tried to rid the country of them although the objects had long ago spread to the East Indies and Japan. In Japan, phallic worship was incorporated into Shinto. The phallos, the male organ or a model of it, was prominent in the religious life of Arabia before Muhammed. Frazer’s The Golden Bough described how it was the main feature of religions which spread from the Aegean Sea to Mesopotamia and from the Black Sea to Egypt. In the Middle Ages, an exaggerated and exposed pudenda formed the key-stone of the arch over many church doors, acting as a charm against devils or the evil eye. One such, which was over the door of Cloyne cathedral, is preserved in the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin, for priests had such “obscenities” removed and began to boast of the exceptional chastity of Irish women. In a Norman church in Hertfordshire, England, such a specimen was found. The custom—in France, where the phalli of saintly men were in some places preserved and kissed; and Italy, where traces were preserved all through the Middle Ages—was noted by Voltaire, who ridiculed how priests blessed phallic models on the feast of Saints Cosmas and Damian, then sold them to the women. In the Hebrew religion, a phallic element lasted until the Captivity, although it is disguised in English translations by using such euphemisms as “loins” or “rock.” In Syria, priests and people adopted a phallic religion and had phallic images and sacred prostitutes (of both sexes) in the temple and on the “high places.” Clifford Howard’s Sex Worship (1902) and H. Cutner’s A Short History of Sex Worship (1940) were earlier works this century on the subject, and in the contemporary literature are dozens of volumes, including Reay Tannahill’s Sex in History (1982). In her book, Tannahill holds that the old primate mating position had man with only a back view of his sexual partner, enjoying an esthetic satisfaction in opulent, rounded buttocks. Women had no view at all. She not only tells of the phallic symbols but also includes a photograph of a Greek urn, upon which is depicted an individual carrying in a Dionysiac procession a phallic object in the form of a fish. Non-believers also “worship” a penis, often describing it as a treasure (a part of “the family jewels”). They are apt to speculate occasionally about historical figures and how small, for example, Napoléon really was or how many penises a drunken Alcibiades may have knocked off statues. Women on television talk-shows gain their fifteen minutes of fame discussing penises they have felt and compared, sometimes adding blow-by-blow descriptions of their encounters. The New Yorker once referred to rugged actor John Wayne’s “p.i.,” later explaining that the tough symbol of masculinity suffered from “penis insufficiency.” In San Francisco and other cities touted for their sexual excesses, artists find that “the bigger the sculpture’s dong, the more the work’s worth.” Some Haitians and Africans carve erotic, “big-dick” statues, sometimes with a shield that, upon being removed, exposes a well-proportioned penis, which appeals to a portion of the general public. Many urbanites are entranced by underwear ads, at the same time swallowing the Victorian view that sexual display is bad . . . and therefore sinful. One non-believer, asked about phallicism in New York City’s Greenwich Village, observed, “Sorry, I’m a breast man.” Few seem aware that in ancient Greece phallic worship was entirely normal and centered around Priapus (the son of Aphrodite). Or that in Rome the cult of Cybele and Attis with its festive excess and annual “Day of Blood” took place in order that admittance into the priest caste could take place upon showing self-inflicted castration. One penis of which there is no further record is that of a well-known Christian with a zeal for purity: Origen. He cut his off. (See entries for Napoléon and Origen.) {CE; RE}
Phanu, Y. (20th Century) Phanu has since 1979 edited Nasthika Yugam in Vijayawada, India, a publication in Telugu. {FUK}
Pharmacopulo, A.P. (19th Century) Pharmacopulo was the Greek translator of Büchner’s Force and Matter. He was a corresponding member of the International Federation of Freethinkers. {BDF}
Phatak, N. R. (20th Century) In India, Phatak wrote Rationalists of Maharashtra (1962). {FUK; GS}
Pheidias: See entry for Phidias.
Phelips, Vivian (1860–1939) After a full term in the Indian Civil Service (engineering), Phelips retired to England and wrote Churches and Modern Thought (1906). The Bishop of London called it “that most dangerous of books.” {FUK; RAT; RE}
Phelps, Christopher (20th Century) Phelps’s Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (1997) includes an attack on the post-revolutionary Hook, particularly from 1938 onwards. Hook is excoriated for accepting the Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in 1985 and condemned for helping to lead an “anticommunist crusade.” The work is patently biased, according to Paul Kurtz (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998).
Phelps, J. A. P. (20th Century) In Durban, Phelps has written for The Freethinker (August 1996) about how, indirectly, the odd urge to “worship” cropped up. His reference is to the word glory, in which members of a community share—without verbal expression—the glory and wonder of the return of spring, or of sunshine after storm, or the discovery of new edible roots or nuts, or the birth of a precious child. Those memorable moments, such as looking into the sky and unexpectedly seeing two hundred wild geese in formation, fill one with glory, a word he prefers to “wonder” or “awe.” {The Freethinker, August 1996}
Phenix, Philip Henry (1915– ) Phenix, a philosopher, worked on and wrote for The Humanist. He wrote Realms of Meaning (1975) and Education and the Common Good (1977). {HNS}
PHENOMENOLOGY Edmund Husserl founded a philosophical method that was known as phenomenology, one that was supposedly devoid of presuppositions and which focused purely on phenomena. The aim was to elucidate meaning through intuition. The school of thought influenced existentialism. (For a discussion by Richard Salmite, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6, which mentions Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.) {CE}
Phidias (c. 500– c. 432 B.C.E.) Phidias, the Greek sculptor, was one of the greatest sculptors of ancient Greece. No original in existence can be attributed to him with certainty, but numerous Roman copies of supposed fidelity exist. His greatest achievements were the “Athena Parthenos” at Athens and the “Zeus” (one of the Seven Wonders of the World) in the temple of Olympia, both colossal figures of chryselephantine workmanship (draperies of beaten gold, flesh parts encrusted with ivory). The “Athena,” which was dedicated in the Parthenon (c. 447–429 B.C.E.), was the chief treasure of Athens. It was destroyed in antiquity, but several copies are preserved. McCabe wrote of Phidias that “he was in the end prosecuted for impiety by the Athenian democracy and died in prison. Much is obscure in the matter, but it is agreed that it was the priests who pressed the prosecution of the great artist.” {CE; JM}
Phifer, Kenneth (20th Century) An author, Phifer wrote The Faith of a Humanist and A Book of Uncommon. Faith (1991).
PHILANTHROPINISTS: See entry for Johann Bernhard Basedow.
PHILANTHROPY • Take egotism out, and you would castrate the benefactors. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Philip, Ambrose: See entry for Infidel.
Philp, H. L. (20th Century)
Philp wrote Freud and Religious Belief (1974). {GS}
Philipon, Marie Jeanne (18th Century): See entry for Roland de la Platière. At the time of her execution, she exclaimed, “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”
Phillip, Arthur (1738–1814) Phillip was an early Australian secularist. {SWW}
PHILIPPINE UNITARIANS The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines (UUCP), which has five churches and ten fellowships, has between four hundred and one thousand members. The Rev. Toribio Quimada, who preached the Universalist concept concerning “salvation for all,” started the Universalist Church of the Philippines in 1954. He held that God is love and it would be illogical that a place such as Hell would be reserved for sinners. He held that the Bible’s contradictions prove that the Bible is not the word of God. For him, Jesus was the son of Mary and Joseph, not God, that Jesus was a person who preached love, peace, equality, and justice for the oppressed. In 1988 Quimada was murdered, the same year UUCP was admitted as a member congregation of the Unitarian Universalist Association. The Unitarian Universalist Church of the Philippines held its 41st annual convention in 1996. Rebecca Sienes was elected President, and Josephine Espartero was elected president of their Women’s Association. Their treasurer, the Rev. Eddie Espartero, was drowned in a 1996 flood while visiting one of his churches. According to Marlin Lavanhar, the UUCP has succeeded through faith healing to cure chronic and supposedly terminal illnesses. They accept no money for their services. Contact: Roberto Cagadas Sr., 065 Rovira Road, Bantayan, Dumaguete City 6200, Negros, The Philippines.
Phillippo, William Skinner (19th Century) Phillippo was an English farmer, a deist who wrote an Essay on Political and Religious Meditations (1868). {BDF}
Phillips, Bernard (20th Century) A professor of religion at Temple, Phillips in The Humanist Alternative (1973) explains the relationship of Zen and Buddhism with humanism. He is author of The Essentials of Zen Buddhism, an Anthology of the Writings of Daisetz T. Suzuki (1963). {PK}
Phillips, Julia Miller (1944– ) Phillips has produced such films as “Steelyard Blues” (1972); “The Sting” (which received an Academy Award for best picture of the year in 1973); “Taxi Driver” (1976); “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977); and “The Beat” (1988). She received the Katherine McFarland Short Story award in 1964. In You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, she states, “I’m a third generation atheistic Jew.” {CA; E}
Phillips, Julia (7 Apr 1944 - ) Phillips, whose birth name was Julian Miller, is an author and one of the producers behind the films Taxi Driver, The Sting, and Close Encounters. As a story editor at Paramount Pictures, she formed Bill/Phillips Productions with her then-husband Michael Phillips and actor Tony Bill, and at the age of twenty-six she won an Academy Award as co-producer of The Sting. Her career suffered because of a period of drug abuse, which she describes in Driving Under the Influence (1995) and her tell-all bestseller You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (1999). In the latter book she writes, “I’m a third generation atheistic Jew.” {CA}
Phillips, Richard [Sir] (1767–1840)
An industrious English writer, Phillips was a hosier, bookseller, printer, publisher, republican, Sheriff of London (1807–1808), and knight. He compiled many schoolbooks, chiefly under pseudonyms such as the Rev. J. Goldsmith and the Rev. D. Blair. His own opinions are found in his Millions of Facts. In Golden Rules and Social Philosophy (1826), Phillips expressed his rationalism and dedicated the book to Simon Bolívar. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Phillips, Sam (20th Century) Once a big star in Christian music, Phillips has now rejected what she considers to be its narrow and often-bigoted worldview. On her album, Martinis and Bikinis, Phillips sings a rousing version of Lennon’s scathing song, “Just Gimme Some Truth”:
I’m sick and tired of hearing things From uptight, shortsighted, narrow-minded hypocrites; All I want is the truth; Just gimme some truth.
Phillips, Stephen (1868–1915) In 1897, Phillips’s Poems was awarded the Academy Prize as best book of the year. Christ in Hades and Other Poems (1896) and Paolo and Francesca (1899) show Phillips’s advanced Rationalism. The latter book was received enthusiastically, and Phillips was compared by serious critics to Sophocles and Shakespeare. Phillips was both a poet and an actor. {RAT; RE}
Phillips, Thomas Trewin (c. 1840–1920?) Phillips was an Australian secularist, boarding house proprietor, and temperance worker. An itinerant lecturer for the Australian Secular Association, he was involved in the 1891 take-over of the Melbourne Hall of Science. {SWW}
Phillips, Wendell (1811–1884) Phillips, the American reformer often ranked with Edward Everett and Daniel Webster as an orator, was a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (1840). He opposed the Mexican War, the annexation of Texas, and slaveholding everywhere. The black slave, he argued, was owed not only freedom but also land, education, and full civil rights. When the 15th amendment to the United States Constitution did enfranchise blacks, Phillips agitated for social reforms, prohibition of liquor, woman suffrage, abolition of capital punishment, currency reform, and labor rights. Phillips was a freethinker. {TRI}
Phillpotts, Eden (1862–1960) Phillpotts, a prolific and popular British novelist, playwright, and poet, did not discuss his personal views on religion in his work. Joseph McCabe, however, was his personal friend and states that he found “no man nearer to me in his opinions on religion, but though he remains an agnostic, in recent years he has become milder and more conservative.” Phillpotts was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
PHILO Philo is a biannual publication of the Society of Humanist Philosophers. It commenced in 1998. Paul Kurtz is publisher and Keith Parsons is Editor. The character Philo, in David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, braves the religious temperament of the times to provide rational grounds for being skeptical of religious assertions concerning God, reality, and ethics. Contributing editors are Kurt Baier; H. James Birx; Mario Bunge; Daniel C. Dennett; Theodore M. Drange; Paul Edwards; Antony Flew; Richard Gale; Adolf Grünbaum; Peter H. Hare; Ted Honderich; Philip Kitcher; Valerii Kuvakin; Robin LePoidevin; Sherrie Lyons; Michael Martin; Kai Nielsen; Graham Oppy; W. V. Quine; John Searle, J. J. C. Smart; Theodore Schick Jr.; Quentin Smith; and Svetozar Stojanovic. Executive Editor Lewis Vaughan is at PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. E-mail: <fivaughn@aol.com>.
Philodemus (1st Century B.C.E.) A prominent Epicurean philosopher in Greece, Philodemus wrote on central philosophical questions such as the fear of death and the nature of happiness. Some of his treatises were found at Herculaneum in 1997, along with portions of Epicurus’s On Nature. {Tim O’Keefe, The New York Times, 28 July 1997}
PHILOSOPHER-KING In Plato’s Republic, the ideal ruler was one who had the virtue and wisdom of the philosopher.
PHILOSOPHER’S STONE Practitioners of alchemy thought they could change other metals into gold. Figuratively, the “philosopher’s stone” is a substance thought to be capable of regenerating man “spiritually.” It appears in the alchemical literature under hundreds of different and fanciful names. {AF}
PHILOSOPHERS, FEMALE “Most philosophers these days are attached to university teaching or research departments,” Colin has noted. “Not so in the past; and before the end of the nineteenth century there were no women academic philosophers, because there were no women academics.” Mary Warnock in Women Philosophers (1996) includes women of merit who were “concerned with matters of a high degree of generality, and . . . at home among abstract ideas.” Her work presented the “generalising, explanatory, and argumentative aspects of their works. Included among the seventeen she describes are the following:
Anne Conway (1631–1679); Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797); Harriet Martineau (1802–1876); Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912); Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930); Susan Stebbing (1885–1943); Hannah Arendt (1906–1975); Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986); and Iris Murdoch (1919–1999).
PHILOSOPHERS, PLAGIARISM BY Philosophers, all of whom are trained in ethics, have never plagiarized others’ material or ideas. One or two, perchance, have been known, however, to wander into others’ texts.
PHILOSOPHERS, TENDENCIES OF Philosophers as an entire group, frequently hesitate to go on record with direct statements which contradict other philosophers. They do, however, feel free to “tend” toward the view that . . . .
PHILOSOPHES In France during the eighteenth century, a group of radical thinkers and writers, including Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were called Philosophes, a word taken from Old French rather than from the Latin philosophus or the Greek philosophos. The philosophes stressed the use of human reason and were critical of established religious and political practices in France. {DCL}
PHILOSOPHIES, SOCIOLOGY OF The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1999), by Randall Collins, makes the point that the development of philosophy is determined by the social structure of the philosophical profession. At any one time and in any one community, philosophers are almost universally members of a comparatively small number of competing groups. These last for some time, until absorbed or extinguished by other groups. Self-sufficient philosophers—“isolates”—are exceptional. The macrohistorical work by Collins, according to Anthony Quinton in The New York Review of Books (8 April 1999), is in a league with the works of Spengler and Toynbee. Collins divided the philosophical universe into seven: Greek (with its Roman attachment); medieval European (and Jewish); Islamic; modern Western; Chinese; Indian; and Japanese. According to Quinton, Collins “rightly observes that religion is not the enemy of philosophy but commonly its stimulant. Religious authorities often seek to suppress independent thinking. But dogmas have to be defined, clarified, and defended, and that generates creative philosophy, as the intellectual efflorescence of the European Middle Ages makes evident.” However, Quinton finds weaknesses in the approach, which although it is enormously detailed, learned, and comprehensive does not take up the relative importance of the ideas over which the various philosophers conflict.
PHILOSOPHY Philosophy attempts to discover the fundamental principles of the sciences, the arts, and the world that the sciences and arts deal with. The word philosophy is from the Greek for “love of wisdom.” Philosophy has subdisciplines that explore principles of specific areas, such as knowledge (epistemology), reasoning (logic), being in general (metaphysics), beauty (aesthetics) and human conduct (ethics). The shortest definition of philosophy, that it is thinking about thinking, is a basic one. However, as noted in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, most definitions of philosophy are controversial, and the subject has changed in the course of history.` Bertrand Russell in his 1927 Selected Papers found three principal types of philosophy:
• The first of these, which I shall call the classical tradition, descends in the main from Kant and Hegel; it represents the attempt to adapt to present needs the methods and results of the great constructive philosophers from Plato downwards.
• The second type, which may be called called evolutionism, derived its prominence from Darwin, and must be reckoned as having had Herbert Spencer for its first philosophical representative, but in recent times it has become, chiefly through William James and M. Bergson, far bolder and more searching in its innovations than it was in the hands of Herbert Spencer.
• The third type, which may be called “logical atomism” for want of a better name, has gradually crept into philosophers through the critical scrutiny of mathematics. This type of philosophy, which is the one that I wish to advocate, has not as yet many wholehearted adherents, but the “new realism” which owes its inception to Harvard is very largely impregnated with its spirit. It represents, I believe, the same kind of advance as was introduced into physics by Galileo: the substitution of piecemeal, detailed, and verifiable results for large untested generalities recommended only by a certain appeal to imagination.
Others have expressed varying views of philosophy and philosophers:
• Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• If you wish to understand a philosopher, do not ask what he says, but find out what he wants. –Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• Philosophy, n. A route of many roads leading from nowhere to nothing. –Ambrose Bierce
• All are lunatics, but he who can analyze his delusions is called a philosopher. –Ambrose Bierce
• I think I think; therefore, I think I am. –Ambrose Bierce
• Philosophy teaches us to bear with equanimity the misfortunes of others. –Oscar Wilde
• The business of philosophy is to show that we are not fools for doing what we do. –Oliver Wendel Holmes
• Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses.
–H. L. Mencken
• Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it. –Albert Camus
John Casti (Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 3, 1996) lists “Big Questions” that philosophers currently ask:
1. How did life originate on Earth? 2. Are human social behavioral patterns determined by our genes? 3. How do humans acquire language? 4. Is it possible to build a computing machine that will think, just like you and me? 5. Do there exist intelligent, extraterrestrial life forms in the Milky Way galaxy? 6. Does there exist an objective reality independent of human observers? (See entry for Purpose of Life. Also, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6, has informative entries concerning the anthropology of philosophy, bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, journals, educational philosophy, the philosophy of history, law, religion, and science.) {DCL}
PHILOSOPHY, DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS OF In mid-1998 the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig and containing ten volumes, was published. Prior to that, the leading such reference works were as follows:
Audi, Robert, General Editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995) Edwards, Paul, ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), four volumes Flew, Antony, A Dictionary of Philosophy (1979) Honderich, Ted, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995)
Phips, William [Sir] (1651–1695) Governor Phips, the first royal governor of the Colony of Massachusetts, declared that as of 12 October 1692 “spectral evidence” would no longer be admissible in court. As a result, the infamous Salem Witch Trials came to an end. Prior to the declaration, an estimated nineteen were hanged and one was pressed to death. Phips stated that he stopped the proceedings “because I saw many innocent people might otherwise perish,” including fifty-two people with pending cases of witchcraft—all of whom were released within three months of his ruling. Whether or not Governor Phips was a believer is unclear, although he likely made the ruling for humanitarian as well as for political reasons. Sir William was knighted because, backed by the Duke of Albermarle, he found a considerable treasure in a sunken vessel off Hispaniola (Haiti). His decisions irked many in the religious community, and he died while being investigated on charges of maladministration. {CE}
PHOBIAS Phobias are intense fears that a person develops concerning a specific thing or situation. They sometimes are classified as severe neuroses that represent or are symbolic of repressed anxiety or fear. Achluophobia, fear of the dark, is sometimes traced to an individual’s upbringing by supernaturalists who believe in ghosts and demons. Triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13, is similarly triggered by superstition. Xenophobia or zenophobia, fear of strangers, has a connection as shown in Judges 12: 4-6 with how Hebrews pronounced the word “shibboleth” differently from others. {CE}
Photius (c 820–892?) A Greek churchman and theologian, Photius was one of the most learned men of his time. As a leader of the orthodox faction, he wished to treat the repentant iconoclasts indulgently. Although he was chosen to be a patriarch, the pope refused to recognize him. In 867, Photius retaliated by calling a synod that challenged the pope in Bulgaria. Later, he became a patriarch when Pope John VIII recognized him, but in 886 he was forced to resign under imperial pressure, and he died in exile. According to Robertson, Photius was something of a freethinker, declaring from the pulpit that earthquakes were produced by earthly causes and not by divine wrath. But he was an image worshipper, as were large numbers at that time. Many reckon the deep cleavage between East and West from the schism of Photius, although the final schism did not occur until the 11th century. Photius is venerated as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. {CE; ER; JMR; JMRH}
PHRENOLOGY
• Phrenology, n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists in locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Although phrenology (cranioscopy), a study of the shape of the human skull, was of interest to followers of the 18th century founder, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), today’s neurologists and anthropologists have refuted the theory and call it a form of quackery. In ancient times, the heart was believed to be the center of human intellect and emotion. The brain was thought of more as the body’s cooling system. Gall taught that certain parts of the brain had specific tasks, for example to handle the physical or emotional or intellectual. Henry Clark informed the New York Area Skeptics (27 February 1996) that Gall mapped each of the areas upon discovering them. A slight forehead bulge, for example, represented people who show up on time for appointments and who remember to pay their bills. However, a corresponding depression in the skull represented people who were characteristically forgetful. Not only is the memory located in the front of the brain, Gall believed, but also a swelling over the corresponding area of the brain indicated an enhanced characteristic whereas a depression indicated a reduced characteristic. Church leaders, complaining that his assertions were at odds with religious teachings and did not allow room for the human “soul” asked him to leave Austria. By 1804 he and Johann Spurzheim had identified ten more areas of the brain, and many of Europe’s élite hailed this new “science.” In France, he became famous as well as wealthy. Soon after going to the United States to lecture at Harvard, Gall died. In 1835 Orson, Lorenzo, Charlotte, and other members of a Fowler family “picked up the torch of Phrenology,” treating it like a real business. They founded a publishing house and issued various books. Also, they supported causes like women’s suffrage and even published a book written by Susan B. Anthony. In the 1850s, a Fowler phrenological reading cost between $1 and $3. When in the 1930s the last of the Fowler family died, phrenology also died. {CE}
Phule, Jyotirao (1827–1890) According to Sibnarayan Ray of City College, Calcutta University, Phule was one of the outstanding secular humanists of the 19th century in India. His name stands out among the non-Brahmin reformers of Maharashira, and he led a revolt against Brahmin domination and subjugation of the non-Brahmins. He criticized all the social evils and the inimical acts of the Brahmins in particular, starting the Satyashodhak movement after the Sepoy Mutiny in order to carry on further agitation against Brahminism. He was a clear-thinking rationalist and did not accept any organized religion or models of worship. His work, however, has not been translated from Maharashtrian into English. (See further comments in the entries for Nehru and Sibnarayan Ray.)
Phunkel, Oscar (20th Century) Phunkel was a freethinker who wrote Where Is God? (1979). {GS}
PHYSICS The two pillars of 20th Century physics—quantum mechanics and general relativity—have both been confirmed by experiment. But, according to New York University physicist Alan Sokal, “they are based on incompatible conceptual structures: they cannot both be exactly correct.” Sokal, who became noted for pulling a hoax in Social Context about “postmodernism in the humanities,” was serious when he continued, “the central unsolved problem of theoretical physics is to find a logically consistent theory that would reduce to quantum mechanics and general relativity in their respective domains while superseding them conceptually. Superstring theory is one candidate for such a unified theory of quantum gravity.” However, superstring theory may or may not turn out to be the correct theory of quantum gravity. “Unfortunately,” Sokal continues, “the clash between quantum mechanics and general relativity occurs only at energies a million billion times higher than those achievable in present-day accelerators. A direct experimental test of superstring theory—or of any theory of quantum gravity—is thus out of the question. Nevertheless, these theories may well have experimentally testable consequences at lower energies. They may predict, for example, the masses and interactions of the various fundamental particles (quarks, leptons, and so forth). We won’t know whether this is the case until these theories are better understood, and it is in this direction that superstring theorists are working.” His conclusion is that we should not reject superstring theory prematurely, using spurious philosophical grounds. “The total energy of the universe appears to be zero,” physicist Victor J. Stenger has written. Therefore, and counter to religionists’ views, “no miracle of energy created ‘from nothing’ was required to produce it. Similar, no miracle was needed for the appearance of order. Order can and does occur spontaneously in physical systems.” The 20th century was the century of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics revolutionized the view of the material universe. The computer revolution was made possible by developments in solid-state physics. (See entries for Genesis, Hoaxes, String Theory, and Steven Weinberg.) {CE; Vixtor Stenger, Free Inquiry Winter 1998-1999; The New York Times, 22 July 1996}
Pi y Margall, Francisco (1824–1901) A Spanish philosopher and republican statesman, Pi y Margall said that the first book he learned to read was Volney’s Ruins. A translator of Proudhon, he also introduced to Spain the writings and philosophy of Comte. Pi y Margall was associated with Castelar and Figueras in the attempt to establish a Spanish Republic, and he became Minister of the Interior as well as, in 1873, the President. {BDF; PUT; RAT}
Piatt, Donald A. (20th Century) Piatt, an editor, has been a staff member of The Humanist. {HNS}
Picasso, Pablo Ruiz y (1881–1973) Picasso, the world-famous Spanish painter, settled in Paris in 1901. He and Braque developed cubism, in which three-dimensional subjects were fragmented and redefined from different points of view, simultaneously. In 1917 he designed ballets for Diaghilev, after which came a period of monumental nudes which developed in the 1930s into terrifyingly distorted forms. William Rubin, in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1995), claimed that Picasso created personal fetishistic symbols in order to resolve his conflicts with the world. He expressed his atheism, his willingness to risk anarchy for freedom, his fear of disease and illness, and “his deep-seated fear and loathing of the female body, which existed side by side with his craving for and ecstatic idealization of it.” David Tribe, similarly, terms Picasso a non-believer, an outright freethinker. “Guernica” (1936), often called the most powerful outcry of the age, was a painting symbolizing a fleet of Adolf Hitler’s bombers which General Francisco Franco of Spain requested and which destroyed the Spanish town. In 1974, as stunned visitors looked on helplessly, a vandal drew a can of spray paint from his pocket and scrawled the words “Kill Lies All” on the masterpiece. Fortunately, a heavy coat of varnish acted as a transparent shield and the lettering was removed without damage. Picasso’s secret, “a childhood vow to God,” was explained by John Richardson, in “At the Court of Picasso” (Vanity Fair, November 1999): “When his younger sister Conchita had been dying of diphtheria in Corunna in 1895, young Pablo vowed that he would never paint again if his sister’s life was spared. He did paint again, and her life was not spared. Hence Picasso’s identification with the Minotaur, to whom woman after woman would have to be sacrificed.” Picasso had two wives, a succession of mistresses (when he separated from Fernande Olivier, Picasso is said by Rubin to have had a sexual fascination with the thirteen-year-old girl he and Fernande had adopted, at which time Fernande retrieved the child), a number of whores (Rubin claimed Picasso got a venereal disease during his visits to a brothel), and his children—legitimate and otherwise [with model Marie-Théresèe Waltger, he had a daughter, Maïa]—were subjects of sensational reports by the world’s popular press.
His ability to work even when a nonagenarian, according to Richardson, was due in great part to his wife Jacqueline’s “solicitude, patience, and sacrificial ardor that sustained the artist in the face of declining health and his greatest enemy, death, [for this] enabled him to be more productive than ever before and go on working into his 92nd year.” She was distraught from the day he died but lived thirteen more years to the age of fifty-nine, at which time she shot herself. “A young priest presided over the minimal rites that were compatible with a ceremony in an unconsecrated place,” Richardson described. “Although spacious, the guardroom, where the ceremony took place, was unseasonably hot and airless, and crammed with flowers. Four gravediggers carried Jacqueline’s coffin—a very fancy one in the Empire style, which Picasso would have appreciated for its inappropriateness.” {CE; OEL; PA; TYD}
Picchioni, Anthony (20th Century) Picchioni is clinical director of an adult psychiatric unit at Charter Hospital of Grapevine, Texas. He is author of A Comprehensive History of Guidance in the United States. {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1992}
Pichard, Prosper (19th Century) A French positivist, Pichard wrote Doctrine of Reality (1873), “a catechism for the use of people who do not pay themselves with words.” Littré wrote a preface. {BDF}
Pickett, O. Eugene (1925– ) Pickett, the fourth president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, led 1000 churches and fellowships with a membership of 170,000. He presided from 1979 to 1983. {CL; U}
PICKPOCKETS, DIDDLERS, AND GRIFTERS • A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. “Man was made to mourn,” says the poet. But not so:—he was made to diddle. This is his aim—his object—his end. And for this reason when a man’s diddled we say he’s “done” —Edgar Allen Poe.
• When Egypt’s King Farouk was wedded in 1938, Cairo’s pickpockets dutifully declared a moratorium for the day in honor of the person who appeared to be a latterday Tutankhamun. –Max Rodenbeck, Cairo, 1998
If evil is a theological term, diddling is a freethinker’s. A rational person is well aware that a coin has three sides, that confronted with a decision one has more than one choice and it could be the edge. Choices are not so much between good and evil but among several. A choice many people have made over the centuries is to diddle. As David L. Maurer pointed out in The Big Con (1955), diddling goes back to Egyptian and Mesopotamian times, and to Reynard the Fox by way of the Elizabethan coney-catachers and the Spanish picaresque. It has intrigued not only Edgar Allan Poe (“Diddling”) but also H. L. Mencken (who described the lingo of pickpockets in The American Language); S. J. Perelman; Pruence Crowther; Stuart Berg Flexner; George Roy Hill (The Sting, 1973); Preston Sturges (“The Lady Eve” (1941); Herman Melville (The Confidence Man: His Masquerade (1857); Samuel Clemens (the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn); and others. The parson may choose between righteousness and lust, but the freethinker chooses among being an honest banker, or a banker who “fudges” in the way he accounts financial sums, or perhaps being a banker who is a grifter, a moonshiner, a shell-game hustler, a forger, a pot smoker, a safe-cracker, an internet scamster. As pointed out by Luc Sante (The Big Con, 1999), diddlers who are big cons sometimes work in pairs: the roper and the inside man—the archetypal Punch and Judy, or Mr. Tambo and Mr. Bones in minstrelsy. Losers to big cons hesitate to admit they have been “taken” by the likes of such grifters as Limehouse Chappie, Yellow Kid Weil, the Square-Faced Kid, Slobbering Bob, the Hashouse Kid, the High Ass Kid, the Indiana Wonder, Wildfire John, or the Christ Kid. One Manhattan recording studio owner who had known all along that a client—an African American Christian bishop—was a grifter, nevertheless got taken. Not only did the bishop “stiff” him with a worthless check at the last of numerous sessions but also he stiffed an entire church that had advanced him several thousand dollars to record their choir, then failed to show up or pay the studio. That same bishop recorded Sunday radio services in which a statement “Be sure to read John 3:5 and don’t forget the old bishop” actually was a demand for money after following his advice to bet on the fifth horse in the third race. The “service” included “canned” music, “canned” applause, and “canned” audience participation. No one who heard the weekly services, broadcast in Philadelphia and New York City, could have guessed that the bishop arrived in a blue Cadillac with two fellow homosexual helpers, who supplied him and themselves with beer and cocaine as the service was “patched” together by studio engineers. (See entry for Stanley Walker.) {Fernando Vargas, numerous conversations}
Picton, J. Allanson (1832–1910) Picton wrote The Bible in School: A Question of Ethics (1907). He originally had been a minister for the Cheetham Hill Congregational Church (1856–1862), but upon being accused of heresy, moved to a more liberal congregation at Leicester. He then entered public life and was M.P. for Leicester from 1884-1894. Picton was an advocate of secular education and ended his own religious development as a pantheist, writing The Religion of the Universe (1904) and Pantheism (1905). {GS; RAT}
Pieart, Richard (20th Century) Pieart is Vice President of Humanists of Iowa. E-mail: <iowa@humanists.net>.
Piech, Ferdinand (1937– ) Piech, an automotive executive, is a recipient of the Austrian Badge of Honor for Achievements in Science and the Arts. He has worked for Porsche and Audi and in 1993 became chief executive officer of the Volkswagen management board. In a German atheist magazine, Miz (April 1996), the Volkswagen CEO is asked what it is he believes:
My persuasion is that one must have such a lifestyle, that the end can come every day, and then one’s conscience is clear. That is connected with the fact that I’m an atheist. One should always have a clear conscience concerning one’s environment and the people. This is my attitude.
{CA; E}
Pierce, Benjamin (Born 1809) A Unitarian, Pierce was a prominent mathematician and an astronomer in the 19th Century. {U}
Pierce, Richard D. (1915–1973) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Pierce was chairman of the social studies department at Emerson College in Boston.
Pierce, Ulysses G. B. (20th Century) Pierce, who was chaplain of the United States Senate from 1909 to 1913, once stated, “It is a colossal conceit to suppose that man is the acme of all creation, and that in its boundless ranges no higher type of life is reached. I think few of us have ever read an argument for immortality that did not fail to satisfy us.” Contemporary secularists understandably wonder how he ever got approved for the job. {CE}
Piercy, Blodwen (20th Century) A former president of the Humanist Association of Canada, Blodwen Piercy is married to Joe Piercy. The two have been co-editors of Humanist in Canada. E-mail: <jepiercy@cyberus.ca>
Piercy, Joe (20th Century)
Piercy, a Canadian, is on the editorial board of International Humanist. He is President of Canadian Humanist Publications (CHP) and, with his wife Blodwen Piercy, is co-editor of Humanist in Canada. E-mail: <jepiercy@cyberus.ca>
Pierpont, James Lord (1822–1893) “Jingle Bells,” the winter song, was composed by Pierpont, an organist at the Unitarian Church in Savannah, George. His brother, John Jr., was the pastor, and his father, John Sr., was a poet, a prominent Abolitionist, and a founder of the American Unitarian Association. Pierpont was uncle of the financier John Pierpont Morgan. On the Web: <http://www3.pair.com/montrsmu/carolshist/jingleb.html>.
Pierson, Allard (1831–1896) Pierson was a Dutch rationalist critic. At first, he was minister to the Evangelical congregation at Leuven, afterwards at Rotterdam, and finally became a professor at Heidelberg. He resigned his connection with the Church in 1864. Pierson wrote many works, including Poems (1882), New Studies on Calvin (1883), and Verisimilia (1886), written in conjunction with S. A. Naber. {BDF; RAT}
Pietrantonio, Ann Marie (20th Century) In 1996, Pietrantonio won a Freedom From Religion Foundation contest for an essay describing her experiences of being forced to pray in a public school. {Freethought Today, October 1996}
Pigault-Lebrun, Guillaume Charles Antoine (1753–1835) Pigault-Lebrun was a witty French author of comedies and romances. His Le Citateur (1803) was a collection of objections to Christianity, borrowed in part from Voltaire, whose spirit he largely shared. In 1811 Napoléon threatened the priests he would issue this work wholesale. Under the Restoration, the book was suppressed but has been frequently reprinted. Pigault-Lebrun became secretary to King Jerome Napoléon. {BDF; RAT}
Pike, E. Royston (Born 1896) Pike wrote Slayers of Superstition: A Popular Account of the Leading Personalities of the Deist Movement (1931). He disliked “humanism” as a term describing various degrees of unbelief. {FUK; FUS}
Pike, J. W. (Born 1826) Pike was an American lecturer who wrote My Religious Experience and What I Found in the Bible (1867). {BDF}
Pikkusaari, Jussi (1939– ) In the 1980s, Pikkusaari was chairman of the Humanist Union of Finland. He had helped enable regional centers to form humanist associations, following which he arranged for the nine separate associations in 1987 to form the Union. (See entry for Finnish Freethinkers, Humanists.)
Pilcher, Edward John (Born 1862) Pilcher grew up among the Wesleyan Methodists, but the study of Biblical prophecy, especially in Daniel and Revelation, convinced him of “the baselessness of Christianity.” He published a translation of the Babylonian code of law, The Hammurabi Code (1904). A well-known Assyriologist, Pilcher contributed to the Reformer, Freethinker, and Literary Guide. {RAT}
PILEGASH: See entry for concubines.
PILGRIM • Pilgrim, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Pillai, Omchery N. N. (20th Century)
Pillai spoke at the 1995 conference of major Indian humanist organizations, telling about the model of society in Kerala (South India). He told of his personal encounter with an “untouchable” which led him to campaign against the caste system. Kerala, which has a high level of education, is experiencing humanistic changes. {New Humanist, February 1996}
Pillsbury, Parker (1809–1898) Pillsbury was an American reformer who, after being a Congregational minister for one year, perceived that the churches were the bulwark of slavery and abandoned the ministry. He became an abolitionist lecturer, edited the Herald of Freedom, National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Revolution. He also preached for free religious societies. His principal work is Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (1883). The Church as It Is (1885) contains his non-Christian views on theism, as does his autobiography. {BDF; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}
PILTDOWN MAN In 1908, an amazing discovery was made at Piltdown in Sussex: human remains in the form of a fossil. In 1911–1913 the parts of a broken cranium and jaw of a primitive man were found. In 1915 another skull of the same type was found. “Sir Arthur Keith thinks that the race may have been ancestral to Modern Man,” Joseph McCabe reported in his 1940 work. He added, “The race to which the specimens belonged is intermediate between Pekin Man and Neanderthal or Mousterian Man and is generally regarded as having lived in southern England (which was an extension of Europe) at least 250,000 years ago.” In the 1950s, however, fluorine tests were made which showed that the fossil was no more than 50,000 years old, and an X-ray analysis proved that the jaw was from a chimpanzee. Further tests showed the jaw and tooth were of modern origin. What had been hailed as the “missing link” in the evolutionary chain was, in fact, a ruse. Who had been responsible, however, was not known. The novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived nearby and visited the site, unsure who the hoaxer could have been. Scientist Stephen Jay Gould speculated that scholar Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a prime suspect. But what became clear to everyone was that even rationalists can be “taken” and for a period of several decades. In 1953, when Kenneth P. Oakley made chemical tests, the bones were found to have been those of a recently dead human and the jaw of a recently dead orangutan, both cleverly treated to appear old. According to Gardiner, a trunk found in the mid-1970s in the southwest tower of the Natural History Museum contained irrefutable physical evidence that Hinton was the hoaxer. In the trunk were many vials of rodent remains along with hippopotamus fossils, elephant teeth, and assorted bones that were stained with the same mix of chemicals used on the Piltdown bones. “These two stupid men, Dawson and Smith Woodward, really believed that the elephant bone went with the man that was two feet above in the gravel bed,” Gardiner concluded. “In a way, the last piece of evidence was to show what fools they were.” Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum, has said that although Gardiner’s hypothesis is “very convincing,” he is still unwilling to rule out the possibility that Dawson, who had found the bones, might have been involved in the hoax as well. Dr. Ian Langham in Australia and Frank Spencer of Queens College, New York City, studied the hoax independently and Spencer’s Piltdown, a Scientific Forgery (1990) named the two culprits as being Sir Arthur Keith, who provided the technical expertise and possibly the bones, which were stained to look prehistoric, and Charles Dawson, who planted them in the gravel pit where he then led others, including Teilhard, on fossil hunts. In 1996, Prof. Brian Gardiner, a paleontologist at King’s College in London, reported (Nature, 23 May 1996) he had found the hoaxer: Martin A. C. Hinton, a paleontological prodigy whose specialty was rodent bones and who was an expert in Sussex geology. Gardiner held that Hinton had planted some specially stained human and orangutan remains in a gravel pit in Piltdown in order to discredit his boss, Arthur Smith Woodward, the paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Angry that Smith Woodward had refused to pay his wages weekly instead of in a lump sum upon completion of his work, Hinton devised the scheme of placing the bones where Charles Dawson would find them. Dawson, a lawyer and amateur scientist, discovered the Piltdown bones per Hinton’s plan, took them to Smith Woodward, and Smith Woodward was appropriately fooled. When he died in 1948, Smith Woodward apparently still believed in the authenticity of the bones. (See entries for Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had been fooled into believing in the authenticity of a 2,900-pound Cardiff, New York, giant, and Frank Spencer. Also, see entry for Peking Man. In a 1996 work, Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution, John Evangelist Walsh details why and how Charles Dawson is believed to have been the definite perpetrator.) {RE}
Pincherle, Alberto: See entry for Alberto Moravia.
Pinel, Carl (20th Century) Pinel, a nurse, wrote “Whatever Happened to Lazarus,” in which he discusses “near-death experiences.” But death, he points out, is like virginity: Both are absolute conditions. Either Lazarus died, or he did not. Pinel also asks why no one inquired of Lazarus what his alleged death was like, and he speculates as to why Jesus would so cruelly want to return Lazarus to this harsh world of suffering. “The most likely explanation,” Pinel wrote, “is that the story was made up when the Gospels were written about a century after the deaths of their alleged authors. St. John may not have heard of Lazarus, who may not even have existed anyway.” Although James Hemming argued in New Humanist (June 1998) that Jesus was a humanist, Pinel countered that Jesus, so far as we can tell “was a fanatic.” As an example, he cites the parable of the unmerciful servant, who is forgiven a debt by his master but, in turn, fails to cancel a debt owed to him and is handed over to be tortured. Jesus warns his listeners: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother from your heart.” “Those,” Pinel points out, “are not the words of a gentle person, but of a megalomaniac obsessed with sadistic power fantasies.” {The Freethinker, July 1995; New Humanist, October 1998}
Pinel, Philippe (1745–1826) Pinel was director of the Bicêtre Hospital and then of La Salpetrière. Under Napoléon he was professor of physics and hygiene, then of pathology, at the Paris School of Medicine. At a time when gross medieval theories, based upon the Gospels, held that insanity was due to diabolical possession, Pinel anticipated a medical theory and became a leader in the treatment of insanity. Pinel was a materialist and a humanitarian. {RAT; RE}
Steven Pinker
, Cognitive Scientist science
Newly elected to Academy of Humanism
Pinker is the MIT cognitive scientist who has written the popular science bestsellers The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works. In the latter book, much of the final chapter, The Meaning of Life, explores the origin of religious belief (as an empirical problem for evolutionary psychology). The possibility that God actually exists is dismissed in a short paragraph (p. 560):
"The problem with the religious solution [for mysteries such as consciousness and moral judgments] was stated by Mencken when he wrote, 'Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.' For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the world unfolds according to a wise and merciful plan, why does it contain so much suffering? As the Yiddish expression says, If God lived on earth, people would break his window."
Pinkham, Daniel (20th Century) Pinkham, the music director of Boston’s King’s Chapel, is a Unitarian who teaches at the New England Conservatory of Music.
Pinkham, Lydia (1819–1883) Pinkham was the tenth of twelve children born to a strong-minded Quaker woman. As a girl in Lynn, Massachusetts, she and her sister Gulielma helped escort the ex-slave Frederick Douglass who was scheduled to speak in their town. Although the crowd jeered as they and some other drably dressed Quaker girls accompanied Douglass, no harm came to anyone. As a young lady, the fiercely independent Pinkham developed an interest in pharmacology, once copying a formula that was supposed to improve one’s health. Eventually, she developed the product into Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, which she advertised as “the greatest medical discovery since the dawn of history.” The product was a success, and women who had been too shy to go to male doctors began writing her for advice about their medical problems. Pinkham then wrote a small book for women, distributed it free, and helped many with good advice about puberty, conception, birth, and other subjects considered delicate at the time. Surprisingly, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which fought against the use of liquor, endorsed her “vegetable compound,” unaware that one of its ingredients was alcohol. Lydia and some of her children attended Unitarian and Universalist churches. {EG}
Pinn, Anthony B. (20th Century) Pinn, who teaches religious studies at Macalester College in Minnesota, is author of Why, Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology. The work explores failed efforts by Christian apologists to reconcile the existence of Black suffering with the belief in an omnipotent, just, and loving God. Pinn, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, offers “strong” humanism as an alternative to theistic religions. {International Humanist News, December 1997}
Pinsker, Michael (20th Century) Pinsker is a director of the National Secular Society.
Pinter, Harold (1930– ) Pinter, according to David Tribe, is an outright freethinker. The English dramatist, in his “comedies of menace,” invests the commonplace with tension and mystery, often through the use of silence. Among his best-known plays are The Dumbwaiter (1957), The Birthday Party (1958), The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming (1965), and No Man’s Land (1975). Pinter’s inspiration for Betrayal (1978) was autobiographical, describing how, while he was married to the actress Vivien Merchant, he had an affair from 1963 to 1969 with Joan Bakewell, a British television news broadcaster and journalist who was married to television producer Michael Bakewell. {TRI; TYD}
PIQUE Pique, the newsletter of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, was named in 1990 by its editor, Warren Allen Smith. In 1993, in a fit of pique over differences with the chapter’s board, he resigned. From a circulation of over 800, Pique then dropped dramatically in quality and in loss of the chapter’s members. In 1998 John Arents revived the newsletter.
Pirandello, Luigi (1867–1936) Pirandello, one of the great figures in 20th century European theater, was grotesquely humorous but intellectually pessimistic. He was blacklisted for sympathetically portraying homosexuals in “Six Characters in Search of An Author” (1921), but he received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. Using a central theme, man’s attempts to distinguish between reality and illusion, Pirandello saw reality as an intangible, and what is thought to be reality he saw only as a series of illusions. Basically a rationalist, he wrote such works as Right You Are If You Think You Are (1917), Henry IV (1922), and Tonight We Improvise (1930). Dr. W. S. Starkie, an orthodox biographer, laments that “God is too absent from his work, and there is no trace of the wonderful balm of mysticism.” The Italian philosopher, Croce, has a book on Pirandello’s poetry and remarks that “his conception of reality is the exact opposite to the religious.” Some have suggested that at the root of Pirandello’s pessimism was a marriage in which his wife for fourteen years was insane. {CE; JM; RE}
PIRATES
Piracy is considered a crime against mankind and, except during times of war, pirates can be executed without trial. In the 1st Century B.C.E. pirates preyed upon Phoenician and Greek commerce, intercepting grain convoys and almost starving Rome itself. Unlike privateering, piracy involves no commission and receives the protection of no national flag. H. A. Ormerod’s Piracy in the Ancient World (1924) and Philip Gosse’s The History of Piracy (1968) are classic studies of piracy. Sir William Gilbert, however, ridiculed romantic pirate stories in his Pirates of Penzance (1879).
Baldasarre Cossa (c. 1370–1419), before entering the service of the Church and becoming the antipope John XXIII, was a pirate. He also was a homosexual, as were such other pirates as Bartholomew Sharp (fl. 1680); Edward Teach (died 1718 and was known as Blackbeard); and Anne Bonney (fl. 1718) and Mary Read (born 1690). {CE; Lavender Lists, 1990}
Pirie, George (20th Century) Pirie in 1998 retired as President of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. He is author of “An Essay on Humanism,” a work that can be found on the Web: <crash.ihug.co.nz/~remk/fnz/nzhum/essayhum.html>.
Piron, Alexis (1689–1773) “His pieces were full of wit and gaiety, and many anecdotes are told of his profanity,” wrote Wheeler. “Among his sallies was his reply to a reproof for being drunk on Good Friday, that failing must be excused on a day when even deity succumbed.” Piron was a French comic poet. In his old age, he became blind. Worried about a Bible in the margin of which he had written parodies and epigrams, Piron jocularly threw the whole book in the fire. Asked on his death-bed if he believed in God, he responded, “Parbleu, I believe even in the Virgin.” {BDF}
Pisacane, Carlo (1818–1857) Pisacane, the Italian son of the Duke of San Giovanni, served in the army in Algeria and joined the revolutionary forces against Austria and the Papacy. He was the chief organizer of Mazzini’s army. When the Roman Republic fell, he fled to Switzerland and then to England. In 1857 he led a small venture against the reactionary Neapolitan power, but it failed and Pisacane fell in the fight. Pisacane dissented strongly from Mazzini’s theism and was an agnostic who was scornful of all religion. {RAT}
Pisarev, Dmitri Ivanovich (1840–1868) Pisarev was a Russian critic, journalist, and materialist. His successes included a criticism on the scholastics of the nineteenth century, and his works were published in ten volumes. {BDF; RAT}
Pitcher, Edwin Hoffman (20th Century) Pitcher wrote “A Definition of Truth” (1945). {GS}
Pitkin, Royce S. (20th Century): Pitkin, when he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, was President of Goddard College. An estimated one-third of the Goddard students then were Unitarian Universalists. For ten years Pitkin was president of the Vermont-Quebec Unitarian Universalist Convention.
Pitt, Marie Elizabeth Josephine (1869–1948) An Australian journalist, poet, and freethinker, Pitt published controversial verse in the Socialist which “criticised the press, the Church, and the State.” In 1911, she was one of the editors of the Socialist. Pitt was a Unitarian.
Pitt, William [1st Earl of Chatham] (1708–1778) Pitt, a British statesman, was called “the Great Commoner” because of his services to his country. He criticized the War of the Austrian Succession which, in 1742, led to the downfall of Robert Walpole. He denounced government policy in the Seven Years War, then became head of a coalition government in 1757. His shrewd policy led to the defeat of the French in India and Canada. Although he formed another ministry in 1766, he was forced to retire in 1768 because of mental illness. Pitt ardently opposed the American War and particularly the use of Indians against the colonists. It is disputed whether he wrote a certain “Letter on Superstition,” a letter first published in the London Journal (1733), and which contained the deistic views that “the more superstitious people are, always the more vicious; and the more they believe, the less they practice. Atheism furnishes no man with arguments to be vicious; but superstition, or what the world made by religion, is the greatest possible encouragement to vice, by setting up something as religion, which shall atone and commute for the want of virtue.” The letter ends with the words, “We need a religion of humanity. The only true divinity is humanity.” In 1819, Pitt wrote “A Letter on Superstition.” His biographer, Basil Williams, denies it but gives other evidence that Pitt was a deist having only “a simple faith in God” but no belief in the Christian God. Wilberforce, the pious abolitionist who was intimate with the younger Pitt, said, “Lord C. died, I fear, without the smallest thought of God.” Instead of a parson at his deathbed, Chatham had Pitt’s son read Homer to him. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Pitt, William (1759–1806) Pitt “the Younger,” a British statesman who was made prime minister by George III, instituted lower customs duties in accordance with Adam Smith’s theories, and his liberal policies continued until Great Britain became involved in the French Revolutionary Wars, followed by the Napoléonic Wars. Pitt resigned in 1801 when the king refused to approve Catholic Emancipation. Although Horatio Nelson’s great naval victory at Trafalgar pleased him, he was upset by the defeat of Britain’s allies at Austerlitz (1805) and died soon afterwards. William Pitt the younger, according to Robertson, was “an agnostic deist. Whether or not the elder Pitt was a deist, the younger gave very plain signs of being at least no more.” He adds that Pitt’s illustrious rival, Charles James Fox, also was an unbeliever, “though equally careful to make no profession of unbelief.” Macaulay, Rosebery, and others apparently accepted a story by the Bishop of Lincoln that Pitt had had a deathbed conversion. But the best-informed witness, Lady Hester Stanhope, Pitt’s niece and intimate friend, who kept house for him until he died (Pitt possibly was gay), bluntly pronounced the clerical story “a lie,” saying that Pitt “never went to church in his life.” {BDF; CE; JMR; JMRH; RAT}
Pittman, Jason (20th Century) Pittman, while a student at Kalamazoo College, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Pitzer, Donald E. (20th Century) Pitzer wrote Robert Owen’s Legacy (1972). {FUS}
Place, Francis (1771–1854) Place, an English radical reformer, was active in the trade-union movement. Because of his efforts, the anti-union Combination Acts of 1799–1800 were repealed in 1824. An early leader of the Chartists, he helped draft the “People’s Charter.” Place wrote Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822), one of the earliest tracts on birth control. Jeremy Bentham told John Quincy Adams in 1817 that Place was an atheist, a fact documented in the Reasoner (26 March 1854). His biographer, Graham Wallis, called him an agnostic, but the word was unknown in Place’s time. Meanwhile, Lord Morley in his Recollections states that Place was “regarded as an atheist by his friends.” {BDF; CE; FUK; HAB; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
PLACEBO EFFECT: See entry for Healing.
PLAGUE Religionists often ascribe an individual’s illness to her or his having “sinned” or somehow gone against God’s will. God, the omnipotent one, then punishes the person or an entire group by sending a contagious, malignant, epidemic disease or other form of illness. Giovanni Villani, who died of the pestilence in 1348, had argued that the plague was divine punishment for the current sins of the Florentines: “avarice, greed, and usurious oppression of the poor.” The Judeo-Christian Bible tells of the ten plagues of Egypt, during which the waters were turned to blood, frogs and lice and flies and boils and hail and locusts and darkness affected the earth and its living creatures. In Athens in 429–430 B.C.E. a plague occurred, killing Pericles among others. In Rome in the 3rd Century a disastrous epidemic occurred, during which 5,000 persons reportedly succumbed daily. In Constantinople in 1334, a widespread epidemic spread throughout Europe, aided by returning Crusaders who carried the disease back home and causing an estimated three-quarters of the population of Europe and Asia to die. According to David Herlihy’s The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1998), the infectious agent of the Black Death that struck Europe might not have been bubonic plague. Had it been, then outbreaks in the human population should have been preceded by extensive deaths among local rodents. No such lethal outbreak of mortal disease (or epizootic) among rodents has been recorded, however. Herlihy describes how the Church had to conduct trials when petitioners described having been miraculously cured and petitioned to be canonized. A seventy-volume hagiographic collection (Acta Sanctorum published in Antwerp starting in 1643) shows that the “sign of the plague” was frequently described as petechiae, or spots, characteristic of anthrax and some other diseases (but rare with bubonic plague). Herlihy estimated that the population of Europe was reduced by two thirds between 1320 and 1420. In England, some cities and villages fell by seventy or eighty percent in the late decades of the 14th Century. In London in 1665 a great plague occurred. In 1918-1919 an influenza pandemic became a global horror the scope of which rivaled that of the Black Death of the Middle Ages. At the end of the 20th century a plague, called AIDS and caused by HIV (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus), had killed over fourteen million throughout the world and infected another forty-seven million. In 1959 the first known AIDS-like case was believed to be that of a Bantu man who lived in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo). As of 1998 an estimated one in four adults in Botswana Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe had become infected by the virus, as well as almost one in five adults in several other African countries. Although prevention programs stressing health education and condom use helped some nations slow transmission of the virus, no effective vaccine had been found to prevent infection. The causes of such diseases may eventually be determined, but large numbers of “believers” hold that an all-loving God is behind the illnesses. Many leaders of organized religious groups and individuals, such as Catholicism’s Mother Teresa, preached out against the use of condoms. People who were entirely ignorant of HIV were told the bromide, “Sex is sinful. Just don’t do it.” Meanwhile, scientists continued working to halt the spread of the frightening epidemic. J. Claiborne Stephens and thirty-eight others wrote “Dating the Origin of the CCR5-∆32 AIDS-Resistance Allele by the Coalescence of Haplotypes,” The American Journal of Human Genetics, Vol. 62, No. 6 (June 1998). The group studied a mutant gene, one that obliterates the receptor site where the HIV-1 virus attaches to lymphoid cells of the immune system. They estimated, using mathematical models to analyze the data, that this mutant gene in 4,166 individuals from thirty-eight ethnic groups in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America first appeared in European populations about 700 years ago (with a plausible range of uncertainty of 275 to 1,875 years in the past). The data, they suggested, provided “considerable, albeit indirect, support for the scenario that the . . . [mutant gene] has rapidly increased in its frequency by a strong selective pressure, possibly an ancient plague, the nature of which is currently undetermined.” (See entries for AIDS and HIV.) {CE; Joel E. Cohen, The New York Review of Books, 4 March 1999; The New York Times, 4 February 1998}
Planck, Max (1858–1947) Planck, a German physicist, sought to explain the experimental spectrum of black body radiation, and he introduced the hypothesis (1900) that oscillating atoms absorb and emit energy only in discrete bundles (called quanta) instead of continuously, as assumed in classical physics. The success of his work and subsequent developments by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and others established the revolutionary Quantum Theory of modern physics, of which Planck is justly regarded as the father. In 1918, he received the Nobel Prize in physics. His biographer, H. Hartmann, said that Planck was “far removed from all dogmatic, mystery-mongering beings” and recognized God only as “the ideal Spirit,” adding that Planck believed in no future life. “Religion,” he wrote in Where Is Science Going? (1932), “belongs to that realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore is closed to science.” {CE; JM; RE; TRI; TYD}
PLANETS Although he did not explicitly predict the existence of planets around stars other than the Sun, Epicurus “believed in an infinity of worlds, meaning other ordered systems beyond the visible universe as it was then conceived,” according to science writer John Noble Wilford. “This contrasted to the Earth-centered cosmos of the contemporary Aristotle, whose cosmology prevailed in Western thought for more than two millennia.” In 1999 the discovery of planets around other stars has made Epicureans of astronomers, Wilford has written. “Only in the last three years have astronomers established the reality of latter-day Epicurean speculations about a plurality of worlds, which in recent centuries came to mean planets beyond the solar system, some possibly inhabited. But while astornomers tip their hats to Epicurus, they just wish he had advised them how to make sense of the distant planets being detected by their telescopes.” {The New York Times, 2 March 1999}
Plate, Ludwig (Born 1862) Plate was a German zoologist, a teacher of zoology at Marburg, a curator of the Institute of Marine Science at Berlin University, and a director of the Phyletic Museum at Jena University. One of the founders of the Monist League, he publicly debated in defense of Monism against Christianity (Ultramontane Weltanschauung und Modern Lebenskunde (1907).
PLATFORM Platform is published by the Ethical Culture Society at 4450 Fieldston Road, Bronx, NY 10471.
Plato (427?–347 B.C.E.) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Plato as one who seems to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. But, like Aristotle, he is no freethinker and, instead, is one who inspires theists. “Not one of them,” Plato wrote, “who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.” In Christian history, he is the typical philosopher of dualism. As such, according to Robertson, “he came to be par excellence the philosopher of theism, as against Aristotle and those of the Pythagoreans who affirmed the eternity of the universe.” What freethinkers admire about Plato, however, was his early love of ratiocination, of “the rendering and receiving of reasons.” “Platonic love” has come to mean a kind of sexless friendship. Although Phaedrus praised pederasty, not homosexual intercourse in general, Plato condemned homosexual intercourse in both the Laws (Book VIII) and the Republic. In the former, he wrote that it should be punished by a deprivation of civil rights, which was a severe penalty. He also stated that adultery, fornication, and the use of prostitutes should not be engaged in; but, if engaged in, it should be kept private or closeted. The Symposium (384 B.C.E.?) speaks of the philosophical life as being an ongoing quest for ennobling beauty. Such a quest can result in a type of immortality in which one can leave beautiful memorials of words and deeds. The work describes male love:
. . . if any device could be found whereby a state or an army were made up only of lovers and beloved, there would be no better way of living, since lovers would abstain from all ugly things and would be ambitious in pursuing honor and truth toward each other; and in battle side by side, such troops, although few, would conquer most of the world, since a man would be less willing to be seen by his beloved than by all the rest of the world, fleeing the ranks during a fight or throwing away his arms; he would choose to die many times rather than that.
In fact, when the Sacred Battalion of Thebes, entirely composed of pairs of lovers, fought the battle of Chaeronea, according to Reay Tannahill, “all 300 of its members fell dead or mortally wounded.” Elsewhere, Plato wrote, “Through the nightly loving of boys, a man, on arising, begins to see the true nature of beauty.” So although in his Laws he writes one thing, in his private life he practices another. Apologists explain he was merely relating the attitudes of his time, attitudes which were not his own. Bertrand Russell, in History of Philosophy, has called Plato one of philosophy’s misfortunes: “Plato possessed the art to dress up illiberal suggestions in such a way that they deceived future ages, which admired the Republic without ever becoming aware of what was involved in its proposals. It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.” {CE; ER; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; EU, Aram Vartanian; GL; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; Reay Tannahill, Sex in History; RE; TYD}
PLATONISM: See the entry for Platonism by Gilbert Ryle in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6. Bertrand Russell, in History of Philosophy, details the weaknesses of Platonism.
Platt, James (19th Century) Platt was a woolen merchant, the deistic author of Business (1875), Morality (1878), Progress (1880), Life (1881); and God and Mammon. {BDF}
Platt, Robert [Lord] (1900–1978) Platt, a physician, wrote Private and Controversial (1972). The Dictionary of National Biography praised the book “with its frank and penetrating views of medicine and music (his two great loves), his interesting family background, his experiences in wartime, medical ethics, religion—which he approached negatively—statistics, and enthusiasm.” Platt was president in England of the Eugenics Society. {TRI}
PLEASURE: See entry for Schadenfreude.
PLEDGES Freethinkers are not into pledging, except to pledge allegiance to their government, family, or friends, as well as to pledge a liquid toast when honoring someone. A major part of church, synagogue, and temple financing, once members have been securely indoctrinated about guilt (or the need for self-reproaching in the event of any inadequacy in following doctrine), is the pledge. Although in the United States religious groups have arranged to be tax exempt, and in some countries they even receive money from the national government, money is needed to build, to pay salaries, to pay for various religious projects. Members are encouraged to make weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual pledges of money. The pledges are solemn binding promises to support the religious organization by helping to finance their programs. (An unlikely church T-shirt, described in Ken Alley’s Once Upon a Pew, proclaims, “I UPPED MY PLEDGE. UP YOURS.)
PLEONISM • Pleonism, n. An army of words escorting a corporal of thought. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Plimer, Ian (20th Century) Plimer is professor of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne and author of Telling Lies for God (1994). He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.
Pliny the Elder (c. 23–79 CE) A Roman naturalist whose extensive work lacks scientific authority, Gaius Plinius Secundus “had no faith in personal survival after death,” Lamont has written. “From the moment of death onward, the body and soul feel as little as they did before birth,” Pliny wrote. In his Natural History, he wrote, “It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it may be, pays any regard to human affairs.” Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism (1814) cites Pliny as being an atheist. By the end of the seventeenth century, Pliny’s Natural History (77 CE) had been universally rejected because of his pseudoscientific methods. According to James Wynbrandt’s Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces (1998), Pindar advised eating a mouse twice a month in order to prevent toothache. When Mr. Vesuvius erupted, Pliny went to the site in order to calm the people. Volcanic fumes overcame him there. {BDF; CE; CL; TYD}
Pliss, Pat (20th Century) Pliss has been business manager of The Humanist.
Plotina (c. 70–121) Plotina, a Roman Empress, was the wife of Trojan and, in conjunction with Hadrian, did much of the work that is credited to the so-called “Stoic Emperors.” Pliny described her as “the embodiment of all the virtues,” and the historian Dio said she was of the highest character. Like Hadrian, but more seriously, she was a follower of Epicurus, according to one of her letters reproduced in Henderson’s Life of Hadrian. McCabe laments that “our literary traditions about ancient Rome completely ignore the existence of such fine Empresses as Livia, Plotina, Sabina, Julia, etc.” {JM; RE}
Plotinus (250–270) A native of Egypt who was perhaps of Roman descent, Plotinus studied the philosophies of India and Persia and became known as a neoplatonist. Although he opposed Christianity, his theories had a considerable influence on Christian theologians. His idea of emanation, a view of origination as being a series of hierarchically descending radiations from the Godhead through intermediate stages to matter, was more developed than that of the Stoics and of Philo. Reaching God through thought is not possible, he reasoned, but it is attainable when the soul, in an ecstatic state and in a mystical fashion, loses the restraint of the body and allows a person “to know God.” Plotinus allowed no one to paint his portrait, although one Roman artist did so from memory), and he refused to celebrate his own birthday, but only the birthdays of Plato and Socrates. Plotinus’s pupil Porphyry collected his teacher’s writings under the title The Enneads. Reportedly, his last words were, “Try to bring back the god in you to the divine in the All,” which has also been translated as, “I am trying to bring back the divine in us to the divine in the All.” {CE; EH; ER}
Plumacher, Olga (19th Century) Plumacher was a German pessimist, a follower of Hartmann. She wrote Pessimism in the Past and Future (1884) and has defended her views in Mind. {BDF}
Plumer, William [Governor] (1759–1850) An American senator, Plumer in 1780 became a Baptist preacher, then resigned because of his skepticism. A deist, he served in the New Hampshire legislature for eight terms, during two of which he was Speaker. From 1812 to 1818, Plumer was Governor of New Hampshire. {BDF; RAT}
Plumptre, Constance (20th Century) Plumptre wrote Studies in Little-Known Subjects and Other Essays (1903). {GS}
PLURALISM Pluralism is a conviction that various religious, ethical, racial, and political groups should be allowed to thrive in a single society. In metaphysics, pluralism can also mean an alternative to dualism and monism. A pluralist asserts that there are more than two kinds of principles, whereas the dualist maintains there are only two and a monist only one. Philosophers generally considered as pluralistic are Empedocles, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, William James, and Bertrand Russell. {CE; DCL}
Plutarch (46?–120) A Greek essayist and biographer, Plutarch after traveling widely became a priest in his native Boeotia, a region of ancient Greece. In The Parallel Lives (translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579), he paired biographies of Greeks and Romans and influenced many, supplying Shakespeare with material for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra but also supplying Rousseau with doctrines and Alexander Hamilton with his heroes and ambitions. “The superstitious man,” he wrote, “wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.” Bertrand Russell found Plutarch interestingly gossipy. Plutarch told how Mark Antony, before he pursued Queens, traveled with a third-rate actress, inflicting her talent upon respectable provincials. He also tells how Caesar as a young man got into trouble “for reading a love letter from Brutus’s mother during a meeting of the Senate, where no one was allowed to read anything.” For Plutarch, who condemned the vulgar notions of deity, he would rather men said there was no Plutarch than traduce his character—in other words, superstition is more impious than atheism. Comments Lord Russell, “His heroes are not statuesque figures of perfection; they are concrete men, who could have existed even if they never in fact did.” {BDF; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; GL; HNS2; Bertrand Russell, Understanding History; TYD}
PLUTO: See entry for its discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh.
Pobo, Kenneth (1954- ) A professor of English at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, Pobo has taught at the University of Wisconsin and was poetry editor of Cream City Review (1980-1981). He wrote Musings from the Porchlit Sea (1979), Postcards from America (1980), Billions of Lit Cigarettes (1980), and Yes, Irises (1992). Pobo feels his poetry is in the tradition of Eliot, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Auden. What he dislikes is “the boring ‘I’ poems of contemporary writing,” and he is committed to the gay rights and feminist movements. Is there any hope for the human race? “No,” he responds. But is there any hope for individuals? “Yes.” Asked about humanism, Pobo responded:
I consider myself a humanist in the tradition of E. M. Forster who opens his great novel Howards End with the phrase “Only connect.” I do not think of the word “humanist” as soft and gushy but a word which is as exact as the point of a diamond. A humanist must care about social justice issues. For me, Forster’s only connect starts in our homes but extends beyond the borders of concepts like the nation-state. Humanists can be believers in a Supreme Being or Beings or not. As of now, I see little evidence which supports a belief in a Supreme Being who “cares” about us. We must care for each other—as much as we can—as it is a bleak world. And such caring is an active verb. It means trying to wake up. As a writer who is gay, I feel particularly driven to use my time, and my writing life, to advance a greater awareness of a simple fact: gay people are people and not just “things” to be controlled and/or eliminated by a vicious society. Likewise, I see little evidence that there is a life after death. I certainly hope that heaven, were there to be such a place, would have nothing to do with all-day sunlight and gold streets and glitzy mansions. I’d like to go to a heaven with my lover. It’s called a bedroom. It’s here on earth. Another easy-to-get-to heaven is my garden. Why strive for a heaven with too much sun and not enough darkness? Plans need darkness to thrive. As for Hell, oh brother, don’t I wish there were a big nasty one waiting for Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan. But those dull boys needn’t worry too much. Worms will eat them and finally they’ll make the world more beautiful when they fertilize flowers. Hell is usually conceived of as hot. If it exists, it probably would be hot. I so prefer Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—free of humankind, they’re already much warmer than Earth. Since I write poems, stories, and essays, sure, I’d love them “to live on” but even if they don’t (and they probably won’t) I had a blast writing them and think it’s a pretty cool way to spend a lifetime. {WAS, 5 Mar 1999)
Podmore, Frank (1855–1910) While at Oxford, Podmore became a Spiritualist, but in 1880 he disturbed the National Association of Spiritualists by informing them that he had become a skeptic. He was a member of the Council of the Society for Psychical Research from 1882 to 1909. Podmore collaborated with Gurney and Myers in compiling Phantasms of the Living (1886) and believed strongly in telepathy. McCabe holds that the two finest exposures of Spiritualism are Podmore’s Modern Spiritualism (1902) and The Newer Spiritualism (1910). Podmore also worked in the Fabian Society and was an agnostic. {RAT}
Poe, Charlotte (1953- ) Poe, married and the mother of three children, is founder and president of FTVC, a freethinkers group in Ventura, California. She also edits that organization’s monthly newsletter. Formerly a chemical engineer, she owns and operates a promotional products company that includes a line of freethought merchandise produced and distributed by freethinkers. E-mail: <FrThVC@aol.com>. Poe Specialties is on the Web at <http://members.aol.com/PoeSpecs/>.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849) Although one of America’s major writers, the grandfather of the detective novel, Poe is often dismissed as being an alcoholic and a failure. He was the son of actor parents: an alcoholic father who deserted his family shortly after Edgar was born and a mother who died of consumption soon after that. Raised and adopted by a wealthy Virginia merchant John Allan and his wife, Poe at the age of seventeen entered the University of Virginia, withdrawing after a term because of his excessive drinking and gambling. The Army dismissed him for having disobeyed an order. When twenty-seven, Poe married his tubercular cousin, Virginia Clemm, a plump girl who was only thirteen. The two lived in poverty, with Virginia sleeping on a straw mattress wrapped in Poe’s old army coat and using Poe’s cat as a bed-warmer. When Virginia died during the winter, Poe removed the coat from the body and wore it to the cemetery. The cat, incidentally, died of starvation when deserted by Maria Clemm, Poe’s aunt/mother-in-law, after Poe’s death. His biographer R. W. Griswold is accused of overemphasizing Poe’s personal faults and distorting his letters, a jealous man who was envious. Others, however, emphasize Poe’s greatness as a writer and say he was a complex person, tormented and alcoholic, yet also considerate, humorous, a good friend, and an affectionate husband. In France, Poe is particularly liked, partly because he was introduced through superior translations by Baudelaire, who, many feel, improved upon Poe. Poe, who wrote “The Premature Burial” and the stream-of-consciousness “The Tell-Tale Heart,” was known always to have been fearful of being prematurely buried. He wrote the compelling “Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher, as well as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Raven.” Wheeler cites Poe’s “Eureka, A Prose Poem” (1848) as indicating his pantheistic views of the universe. The work is generally overlooked but is an attempt to establish an all-embracing theory of cosmogony. He jeered at Aristotle, calling him Aries Tottle, and Bacon, whom he called Hog. Both he called “intellectual grovellers.” Further, he claimed that his own description of the operation of gravity was better than Newton’s. Biographer Kenneth Silverman in Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (1991) further explained:
What Poe revealed, to capsulize his treatise, was that in the beginning, Divine Volition willed into being a “primordial Particle” and diffused it as atoms into a limited part of Space, the Universe of Stars. Owing to a tendency to regain their original oneness (gravity), the atoms began to agglomerate, forming clusters of nebulous matter. The condensation and rotation of one such cluster gave rise to the solar system, whose planets represent the coalescings of ring after ring of matter whirled off by the shrinking sun at the center. The planets have continued the same revolutionary movements (orbits) around the sun that characterized them as rings. Innumerable similar systems exist. In a necessary reaction to the originating divine diffusion of atoms, they will one day draw together into an almost infinitely less number of vast spheres, the “ingathering of the orbs” proceeding until the spheres themselves collapse into “the final globe of globes.” Being rather nonmatter than matter, this ultimate globe will instantaneously disappear, leaving God to remain “all in all.” The entire process if likely repeated forever and forever, “a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine.
“No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul,” Poe added. But for him, Silverman continued, such a feeling of personal infinitude . . .
is but the residue of an original identity between ourselves and God, for the universe consists simply of fragments of diffused godhead, “infinite individualizations of Himself.” The “Heart Divine” that gives birth to the universe is “our own”; each soul is “in part, its own God—its own Creator.” God presently exists as the Universe of Stars, whose reunion is but his reconstitution as Individual. As the clusters ingather, we will become more conscious of our identity with Him and at least blend into the one God. Then our awareness of individual identity will gradually be merged in the “general consciousness.” Our distress in considering that we shall lose our person-ality dissolves in the realization that at the epoch of final condensation our consciousness will be identical with Divinity. Then the self knows: “he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah.” After dying, we eventually become God.
For him, God was a term representing a sense of the Ideal, not some anthropomorphic being. In “Al Aaraaf” Poe has God commanding the angel Nesace, “ruler” of Al Aaraaf, to convey a message to other worlds. The angel Ligeia is roused by Nesace and asked to awaken a thousand seraphs to perform God’s embassy. Two souls, Ianthe and Angelo, fail to respond. Silverman comments that the incomplete and unusual work shows Poe trying to combine Tycho Brahe’s nova with a repository for souls in the Koran, explaining that Al Aaraaf is the heaven for art and artists, the “birth-place of young Beauty.” Such an outlook about God did not please a young theological student named John Henry Hopkins, son of Vermont’s Episcopal bishop. He objected to Poe’s cynicism toward formal Christianity. He also recalled hearing Poe praise the “highly cultivated” Jesuit fathers at nearby St. John’s College, because they “smoked, drank, and played cards like gentlemen, and never said a word about religion.” When Hopkins saw the manuscript copy of Eureka at the publisher’s office, he was appalled that Poe included the vision of a never-dying self, coextensive and identical with God, “a system of complete and pure pantheism.” This Hopkins called unscientific and predicted that Christians would consider such a pantheism a damnable heresy which would place Poe’s “great discovery” in with “the empty chimaeras of infidelity.” Soon after the book was published a review appeared in the Literary World which lumped Poe with the Transcendentalists, rated Poe’s account of planet formation a rehash of Laplace, and generally described the work as being “arrant fudge.” Poe, the reviewer lamented, thinks nothing exists greater than his own soul, which is “extraordinary nonsense, if not blasphemy; and it may very possibly be both.” Poe responded with a long retort, claiming that what Laplace covered “compares with that covered by my theory as a bubble compares with the ocean on which it floats.” He said the “Student of Theology,” which he assumed to be Hopkins, used mis-quotations, faulty grammar, and a tone of “turn-down-shirt-collar-ness.” As for being accused of pantheism, or polytheism, or paganism, or “God knows what,” he offered that he cared only that he not be accused of being a “Student of Theology.” McCabe said Eureka was written the year before Poe died and is a combination pantheistic-agnostic profession of faith. The idea of God, Poe said, “stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception,” adding that we know nothing about the nature of God, that Nature and God are one and the same, and there is no such thing as personal immortality. The main mention of organized religion in Poe’s entire life, his biographer Woodberry wrote, was that the Bible was read to him while he was dying. However, Poe had written the following, in addition to referring to a “great celestial Oneness” and to explaining in detail his oneness with the Oneness in Eureka:
• The idea of God, infinity, or spirit stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception.
• The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind.
• No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter . . . than you and I; and all religion . . . is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.
One story has it that Poe attempted suicide by an overdose of opium and it was on a drinking spree that he died. Joseph Walker, a Baltimore printer, found him delirious in a Baltimore tavern. Talking to specters “that withered and loomed on the walls,” he stopped breathing, or so the story went. However, Dr. R. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center, holds that Poe was not drunk at the end of his life, that by the time he died at the age of forty Poe almost always avoided alcohol, that even a glass of wine made him violently ill for days. What happened, Dr. Benitez holds, is that Poe entered Washington College Hospital comatose. By the next day he was perspiring heavily, hallucinating and shouting at imaginary companions. The next day, he improved but could not remember having fallen ill. On his fourth day at the hospital, he again grew confused and belligerent, then became quiet and died. This, the doctor concluded in The Maryland Medical Journal (September 1996), is a classic case of rabies. Rabies victims frequently exhibit hydrophobia because it is painful to swallow, and when Poe was calm and awake he refused alcohol and could drink water only with great difficulty. Agreeing, Dr. Henry Wilde of Chulalongkorn University Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, stated that Poe “had all the features of encephalitic rabies.” No, most authorities counter, there was never any evidence of a bite or scratch, which would have been the case had he developed rabies. When taken to a hospital because he was delirious, Poe was unable to communicate rationally with the physician there, Dr. John J. Moran, who had heard of the author but did not know him. Poe’s funeral was arranged by the physician, who located a relative, the Rev. W. T. D. Clemm, one of Virginia’s cousins, to conduct the service. The body was buried the next day, long before news of the death reached New York and other places. Only eight persons attended the burial on a forbidding October day in Baltimore’s Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery, and the ceremony lasted no more than three minutes, according to one who attended. Dr. Moran had purchased the wooden coffin, and Poe was buried next to his grandfather, Major David Poe, the only marker being “No. 80.” The grave went unmarked for twenty-six years. It took ten years to raise the necessary one thousand dollars to erect a tombstone, at the unveiling of which the only literary notable present was Walt Whitman. Before the reburial, Poe was exhumed and Dr. Henry Shepherd reported that the “skull was in excellent condition—the shape of the forehead, one of Poe’s striking features, was easily discerned. The teeth were perfect and white as pearl.” The body was transferred to a sturdy casket and buried by George Spence, a gravedigger who had known Poe and had buried him the first time, also. The epitaph on the Baltimore monument:
QUOTH THE RAVEN NEVERMORE
At the time of the reburial, his deceased aunt, Mrs. William Clemm, was laid nearby. Her daughter, Poe’s teenage wife, Virginia, joined them in 1885. She had been exhumed years earlier when her graveyard had been disturbed by developers. William Fearing Gill, an early admirer of Poe, had placed Virginia’s bones in a box and kept them under his bed. {BDF; CE; JM; The New York Times, 15 September 1996; PA; PUT; RAT; RE; TYD}
POEM, THE BEST IN 1000 YEARS: See entry for Hamlet.
POETS • In Plato’s republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use as a soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsessions. –Lawrence Ferlinghetti Upon being named San Francisco’s first poet laureate in 1998
Poets have been banned since time immemorial. Publius Ovidius Naso was exiled in 8 CE by Augustus Caesar to Tomi, a bleak fishing village on the Black Sea coast, where he died nine years later. Ovid was banned because he showed a lack of reverence for authority. He brought out “The Art of Love” just at a time when Augustus’s daughter was shipped off to Pandataria for her adulterous liaisons. In Hungary today, according to Donald Harrington, people are more apt to cite poets rather than statesmen or historical figures. Recent poets cited by the 25th anniversary issue of Index on Censorship (1997) include the following:
• Jack Mapanje, punished by Dr. Hastings Banda, the dictator of Malawi, for “Of Chameleons and Gods”
• Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in Nigeria for founding the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People
• Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry was banned on national public radio in the United States on the grounds that it contained “indecent language”
• Miroslav Holub, a Czech poet whose work did not celebrate the glories of Stalinism
• Liu Hong Bin and Yang Lian of China, who have lived in exile since the Tiananmen massacre
• Samih Al-Qasim and Mahmoud Darwish of Palestine, who are persecuted by Israeli authorities
• Shams Langaroudi of Iran, whose four-volume history of modern poetry has been banned from publication in Iran
In the words of Mark Doty, an American poet, poets are “true guarantors of individuality,” which makes them the antithesis of the repressive authoritarian spirit. (The Economist, 11 October 1997)
Poey, Andrés (Born 1826) Poey was a Cuban meteorologist and positivist of French and Spanish descent. He wrote in the Modern Thinker and is author of many scientific memoirs as well as a popular exposition of positivism (1876), in which he has a chapter on Darwinism and Comtism. {BDF}
Pohl, David C. (20th Century) Pohl, a Unitarian minister, has been the Unitarian director of the Department of Ministry. He retired in 1993, having been a minister of liberal religion for almost four decades.
Poincaré, Jules Henry (1854–1912) Poincaré was a French mathematician, a forerunner of Einstein, who won eight gold medals, nine honorary degrees, and forty diplomas from foreign academies. In his last words, Last Thoughts (published 1913), Poincaré entirely rejected Christianity and believed in God only in the sense that he is the moral ideal. He wrote,
We know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. {Humanism Scotland, Autumn 1997}
Poincaré, Lucien (Born 1862) Poincaré was a French physicist who taught at Paris University and Sèvres and was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. A rationalist, he wrote The New Physics and its Evolution (1907) and Electricity, Present and Future (1909). {RAT}
Poincaré, Raymond [President] (1860–1934) The cousin of Jules Poincaré, Raymond Poincaré became President of the French Republic (1913–1920). He was an atheist who reportedly had developed a strong moral sense. {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Pojman, Louis (20th Century) Pojman’s Ethics: Discovering Right and Wrong (1995), discusses many ethical theories, most of which do not require a god or God. The work is often used in college-level introductory courses in ethics.
Polak-Schwartz, H. A. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Madame Polak-Schwartz of the Netherlands was a correspondent for The Humanist. In 1952, she was Organizing Secretary of the newly founded International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).
Polanski, Roman (1933– ) Polanski is a noted film director, writer, and actor. Accused of sexual improprieties, he has been barred from coming to the United States from his native France. His 1962 “Knife in the Water” won a Venice Film Festival award, and his “Cul-de-Sac” in 1966 won a Berlin Film Festival award. “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968) won him much fame, and he intentionally included ambiguities so that it can be interpreted as having no genuine supernatural events; i.e., those are all in Mia Farrow’s head, not real events. His opera, “Lulu,” won him a 1974 award at the Spoletta Festival. Polanski’s autobiography, written in 1984, is Roman and reveals his atheism. {CA; E}
Polanski, Roman (18 Aug 1933 - ) Polanski is an internationally known film director, writer, and actor. As noted by Peter S. Green,
Roman Polanski’s life has been shaped by the maxim that art often has its roots in great suffering. After fleeing the oppressive rule of Communism in his native Poland in 1961, Mr. Polanski made two of his most powerful films, Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac. Later, after Charles Manson killed Mr. Polanski’s wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and their unborn child in 1969, he went on to make his bloody adaptation of Macbeth.”
Green then recounts how Polanski spent time in the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, from which he escaped at the age of six; how his The Ninth Gate (1999, starring Johnny Depp) failed critically of surviving the Warsaw ghetto, The Pianist, contained such brutality that Polanski was visibly and emotionally upset. Accused of sexual improprieties with young females, he has been barred from coming to the United States from his native France. His 1962 Knife in the Water won a Venice Film Festival award, and his Cul-de-Sac in 1966 won a Berlin Film Festival award. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) won him much fame, and he intentionally included ambiguities so that it can be interpreted either as holding that supernatural creatures exist or that there are no genuine supernatural events; i.e., what happened is all in Mia Farrow’s head, not real events. His opera, Lulu, won him a 1974 award at the Spoletta Festival. Polanski’s autobiography, written in 1984, is Roman and reveals his atheism. {CA; E; Peter S. Green, The New York Times, 6 Sep 2001}
Polansky, Joseph A. Jr. (20th Century)
Once a seminarian and a Trappist monk, Polansky joined the Benedictine order for five years. In Prick the Bubble (1999), he tells how, at the age of twenty-nine, he lost his sight because of diabetes. Earning an M. A. in Systematic Theology at Duquesne University, he continued post-graduate work at the University of Notre Dame.
Hired as a religious education coordinator at a parish in Coldwater, Michigan, he began to realize, in his words,
that I was not making sense. I thought I spoke the English language, but I was talking the artificial language of theology and might have been babbling in tongues. I became violently religious—the beginning of my last-ditch stand for my faith. Actually I was clinging to an empty shell and was so much happier when I let it go. I proceeded to analyze myth, symbol, ritual, sacrament, idols, miracles, and other facts of religion, and realized that religion was an illusion.
Married for over two decades and a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Polansky is active in Altoona, Pennsylvania, community concerns and addresses local organizations on the importance of the Leader Dog program. {Freethought Today, September 1998}
Polansky, Lorie (20th Century) The wife of Joseph A. Polansky Jr., Lorie has written for Freethought Perspective (April 1999).
POLEMICS Polemics (with its linguistic roots in Greek of polemikos, hostile, and polemos, war) involves arguments among professing Christians in an effort to determine the “true” Christian view with regard to specific questions. In everyday usage, to polemicize is to write or deliver an argument, or to engage in disputation or controversy. (See entry for Apologetics.)
Polet, Theo (20th Century) Polet has been a representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) at UNESCO. In 1958, the United Nations allowed the group non-governmental organization (NGO) status.
POLISH HUMANISM A “Law of the Infinite Cornucopia” has been described by a Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, who explained that there never is a shortage of arguments to support whatever doctrine you want to believe in. Causes, in short, can invariably be found for any event, however extraordinary or unexpected, and whatever happens will be explained. When 1995 elections resulted in a loss for the candidates of the Catholic Church, the Primate of Poland, Jozef Glemp, credited the “neo-pagans.” However, critics have suggested that the Church’s choices lost basically because the majority of Polish voters did not approve of the Church’s trying to influence the voting. Primate Glemp had called on the faithful to pray for “the elections, President Walesa, and the fatherland.” Walesa lost. The winner was Aleksander Kwasniewska, an atheist whose wife is Catholic and whose platform included economic reform and a pragmatic approach to solving governmental problems. More than one dozen small Polish humanist groups reportedly existed in Poland in 1994. Professor Barbara Stanosz—who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000—has worked with the German Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands to obtain funds for their magazine, Bez Dogmati. Two other active leaders are Jan Wolenski and Bohdan Chwedenczuk. There are these groups and publications:
• Association for Humanism, c/o Prof. Dolowy, is at UL. Rackowiecka 39A M 10, 02-521 Warsaw • Bez Dogmatu (Without Dogma) is a quarterly at Instytut Wydawniczy “Ksiazka I Prasa,” ul. Twarda 60, 00-818 Warszawa • Culture Secular Society, an associate member of the IHEU, is at Rada Krajowa, UL. Koszykowa 24, 00-553 Warsaw • Neutrum AL Jerozolimskie Marszalsowska 13, 13-PL 0026 Warsaw • Neutrum, UL. Zlota 72 M I, 00-821 Warsaw • Polish Freethinkers Society, U1, Jaroslawa Dabrowskiego 17A M 1, 02-561 Warsaw • Res Humana, a quarterly, 00-553 Warszawa, ul. Koszykowa 24 (See entries for Andrzej Dominicrat, Leszek Kotakowski, and for Society for Humanism and Independent Ethics.)
POLISH PHILOSOPHY: See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6.
POLISH UNITARIANS
The Unitarian Universalist Community in Poland (UUCP) has 150 members and friends. Congregations are found in Chorzow, Katowice, Myslowice, Zabrze, Bytom, and Warczawa. In the 16th and 17th centuries the Polish Brethren were condemned to banishment and in 1658 were involved in the Counter-Reformation. In the first thirty years of the present century in Krakow, Pastor Grycz-Smilowski achieved a restoration of the Unitarian movement, but his death in 1959 resulted in a lack of interest in Unitarianism. Today Unitarian groups are acknowledged by the Polish Government and collaborate with religious and humanistic groups to protect religious freedom and human rights. Contacts include Rada Naczelna of Wspolnota Unitarian Universalistow w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej; and Dr. Helmut Iwa, ul. Wolskiego 10/5 41-500 Chorzow, Poland. Pietr Kowalik heads the Union of the Polish Brethren (Jednota Braci Polskich, SKR.POC2T.655, 50-950 Wroclaw, Poland). The presiding council of a Unitarian group in Chorzow consists of Helmut Iwa, President of the Community; treasurer Marek Ziolkowski; and secretary Zbigniew Strombirski. Contact is the Rev. Michael Gozdzik, ul Weilka Skotnica 38/44 41-400 Myslowice, Poland.
POLISH-AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT Freethought in the United States, by Gordon Stein, discusses various American freethought groups.
POLITICS • Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: See Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6.
POLITICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATES A group that monitors the political far right and the fundamentalist-religious right is Political Research Associates, 120 Beacon Street (Suite 202), Somerville, Massachusetts.
Polk, Charles (18th Century) Polk, son of Colonel Thomas Polk, was a freethinker. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)
Polk, Ezekiel (18th Century) Polk, the grandfather of President James K. Polk, was a freethinker. (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)
Pollard, Robert (1907– ) Pollard wrote “Abolish the Blasphemy Laws” (1957). {TRI}
Pollitt, Katha (1949– ) “For me, religion is serious business,” Pollitt wrote in The Nation, “a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.” Her column, “Subject To Debate,” is in The Nation (26 December 1994), for which she is an associate editor. In her columns she has written that for some reasons “my left-wing, cosmopolitan parents—he the agnostic Episcopalian, she the atheistic Jew—sent me to a private non-denominational Protestant school for girls. Prayer in the schools? For nine years I had chapel every day: three hymns, the doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, a Bible reading (or was it two Bible readings?) and, on Fridays, a sacred-music solo from Mr. Crandall, the organist. Never mind that one-third of the student body was Jewish and another third Roman or Eastern-rite Catholic. You don’t have to say the prayers, our teachers used to tell us, but you should bow your head as a mark of respect. Not praying was easy, not bowing somewhat less so. It was not singing that was the real challenge. I loved choral singing, which is surely one of life’s great pleasures, but since I didn’t believe in God, to take part was to participate in falsehood. Truth or beauty? Principled isolation or join the fun? Reign in Hell observe in Heaven? These questions obsessed me for years and, indeed, still do.” Pollitt wryly recommends that students be forced to endure school prayer, at least until “it will become clear that prayer in schools does nothing to lower crime or teen pregnancy, much less raise S.A.T. [educational] scores. The religious kids will still be devout, but the others—the ones from nonobservant homes, who supposedly need to be forced into piety—will have been moved from apathy to disgust” and the message to the youth will have become clear, that “we have nothing for you here, start thinking about the hereafter.” After mentioning on a television program, “Crossfire,” that she, as a representative of the secular humanist viewpoint, did not believe in God, Pollitt was awarded the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) Freethought Heroine of 1995 award. See also http://www.aclu.org/about/transcripts/katha118.html
(Her acceptance speech was published in Freethought Today [April 1996].) {CA; E; WWS}
Pollitt, Katha (14 Nov 1949 - ) A New York City-born columnist whom other journalists have said “tells it like it is,” Pollitt is a stylist with words and a good place to go, as The Washington Post has written, “for original thinking on the left.” She is lucid in her comments about “family values,” surrogate mothers, “difference feminism,” teenage mothers, welfare “dependency,” abortion’s place in health care reform, the French strikes in the fall of 1995, even Shakespeare. Pollitt was educated at Harvard and the Columbia School of the Arts and has taught poetry at Barnard College and the 92nd Street Y. Since 1980 she has contributed to The Nation. Her 1992 essay on the culture wars, “Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me,” won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism. Also in 1992, she won the Whiting Foundation Writing Award, and in 1993 her essay, “Why Do We Romanticize the Fetus?”, won the Maggie Award from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. A 1982 book, Antarctic Traveller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her poetry—which has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Grand Street, Yale Review, Poetry and Antaeus—she has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In The Nation, she wrote, “For me, religion is serious business, a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.” She also has explained that for some reason
. . . my left-wing, cosmopolitan parents—he the agnostic Episcopalian, she the atheistic Jew—sent me to a private non-denominational Protestant school for girls. Prayer in the schools? For nine years I had chapel every day: three hymns, the doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, a Bible reading (or was it two Bible readings?) and, on Fridays, a sacred-music solo from Mr. Crandall, the organist. Never mind that one-third of the student body was Jewish and another third Roman or Eastern-rite Catholic. You don’t have to say the prayers, our teachers used to tell us, but you should bow your head as a mark of respect. Not praying was easy, not bowing somewhat less so. It was not singing that was the real challenge. I loved choral singing, which is surely one of life’s great pleasures, but since I didn’t believe in God, to take part was to participate in falsehood. Truth or beauty? Principled isolation or join the fun? Reign in Hell observe in Heaven? These questions obsessed me for years and, indeed, still do.
Pollitt wryly recommends that students be forced to endure school prayer, at least until “it will become clear that prayer in schools does nothing to lower crime or teen pregnancy, much less raise S.A.T. [educational] scores. The religious kids will still be devout, but the others—the ones from nonobservant homes, who supposedly need to be forced into piety—will have been moved from apathy to disgust” and the message to the youth will have become clear, that “we have nothing for you here, start thinking about the hereafter.” After mentioning on a television program, “Crossfire,” that she, as a representative of the secular humanist viewpoint, did not believe in God, Pollitt was awarded the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) Freethought Heroine of 1995 award. (On the Web: <http://www.ffrf.org/fttoday/april96/pollitt.html>). (Her acceptance speech was published in Freethought Today [April 1996].) {CA; E; WWS}
Pollock, David (20th Century)
Pollock is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Rationalist Press Association. E-mail: <david.pollock@virgin.net>.
Pollock, Frederick [Sir] (1845–1937) Pollock, an English jurist, succeeded to his baronetcy in 1888. He was a professor of jurisprudence at Oxford and, after 1914, was judge of the admiralty court of the Cinque Ports. In addition to numerous works on law, Pollock wrote monographs on Spinoza (1880). His correspondence with Oliver Wendell Holmes was published as The Holmes-Pollock Letters (1941). Sir Frederick was a Fellow of the British Academy, Correspondent of the French Institute, and Associate of the Royal Academy of Belgium. He considered that “man’s life and thought will not be fixed,” that “our ideals themselves are shifting and changing shape,” and that superstition is “a great and deadly serpent.” {JM; RAT; RE}
POLTERGEISTS: See entry for Ghosts.
Polybius (c. 203–120 B.C.E.) A leader of the Achaean League, Polybius the historian was influential in Greek politics. Of his forty books, only the first five survive. Following is a sample from Histories:
Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequence, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death. {CE; Humanism Scotland, Autumn 1997; TYD}
POLYGAMY • Polygamy, n. A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• Brigham Young originated mass production, but Henry Ford was the one who improved on it. –Will Rogers
Of 1,154 societies studied by anthropologists, 980 have been openly polygamous. For example, the four Incan offices from petty chief to full chief were given ceilings of seven, eight, fifteen, and thirty women, respectively. Although Catholic teaching specifically holds that polygamy is sinful, the practice forms a central part of the traditional social structure of millions of Africans in every region. One Catholic president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who built in the Ivory Coast the world’s second largest basilica after St. Peter’s in the Vatican, is known to have several wives. Africa has more than ninety million Catholics and is one of the most fertile recruiting grounds for new believers. Although Cardinal Poupard of the Ivory Coast states the church will never endorse polygamy, he acknowledges that it exists but vows to attempt to replace it gradually with monogamy. Joseph Smith continues to inspire some polygamists, who believe in original divine revelations including plural, or celestial, marriage. The official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when Wilford Woodruff was its president, renounced polygamy in 1890, particularly in order to gain political acceptance for Utah’s becoming a state. It now excommunicates polygamists. However, Ogden Kraut, a fundamentalist publisher and historian in Salt Lake City, estimates that there are 30,000 to 35,000 practicing polygamists, counting all family members, in the United States, a number estimated to be four or five times greater than in the 1880s. Timothy Egan in 1999 put the figure at anywhere from 20,000 to 60,000 people living in families where one man is married to two, three, five, as many as thirty women. “No one has been prosecuted for polygamy in Utah for nearly fifty years,” he claims. At a 1999 trial of David Ortell Kingston, the polygamist who was convicted of incest with his sixteen-year-old niece, the Kingston clan was said to have about one thousand members and $150 million in assets. The number of polygmaists was estimated at between 20,000 and 30,000. Brigham Young is believed to have had twenty-seven to fifty-five wives, sixteen of whom bore him fifty-seven children. Journalist Florence Williams (The New York Times, 11 December 1997) interviewed one polygamist’s household, which belonged to a financier in his forties. It was a 35,000-square-foot motel-like structure “with 37 bathrooms and 31 bedrooms, this for 10 wives and 28 children.” All the wives shared a central kitchen. By schedule, they rotated child-care duties, cooking, cleaning, yard work, and gardening. The house was shaped like an airplane propeller with three radiating blades. Two of the blades housed bedrooms for wives and children (the latter grouped by age and sharing bedrooms with half-siblings). Some wives were said to get along better than others, one wife saying, “We have to want to get along.” “We’re a 24-hour restaurant,” said another, noting the four refrigerators, two dishwashers, and fourteen counter stools. Rooms just off the hub contained a home theater, a computer room, and several bathrooms with specially designed child-height counters. “There are cheaper ways to have sex,” the polygamist explained but added, “We feel it’s the best deal on earth to live together and work together, and the architecture absolutely shows that.” On the subject of polygamy, Bertrand Russell in Political Ideals (1961), wrote: “It is generally assumed without question that the state has a right to punish certain kinds of sexual irregularity. No one doubts that the Mormons sincerely believed polygamy to be a desirable practice, yet the United States required them to abandon its legal recognition, and probably any other Christian country would have done likewise.” However, he notes that the prohibition might not have been wise. After all, polygamy is legally permitted elsewhere in the world and, had it been allowed in Europe or in Utah, “the world would have acquired a piece of knowledge it is now unable to possess. I think in all such cases, the law should only intervene when there is some injury inflicted without the consent of the injured person.” (See entries for Ochino, Mormon Church, and Pentecostalism.) {CE; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; The New York Times, 4 June 1999}
POLYGYNY Women, it is claimed, need men to protect them. But because a man’s sexual needs often exceed a woman’s, the solution is to allow polygny: the practice of having more than one wife at a time. Many refute this, claiming that it is not possible for a man with multiple spouses to give each the equal treatment that is required, for example, by the Qur’an.
POLYTHEISM Polytheism is the belief in more than one god. The ancient Greeks were polytheists whose gods included Apollo, Athena, Dionysus, and Zeus. {DCL}
Pombal, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo [Marquis de] (1699–1782) Pombal was a Portuguese statesman who, after serving as ambassador to England and Austria, became secretary for foreign affairs and war for King Joseph. In 1736, he became chief minister. A dynamic Portuguese political figure, he was a zealous organizer and was notoriously anti-clerical. Pombal curbed the Inquisition by subordinating it to the king’s authority, then expelled the Jesuits from Portugal and its colonies as well as redrafted the property laws to prevent the accumulation of great wealth by the church. Prior to this, an estimated ten percent of the population had been priests and the Inquisition was still burning heretics at the stake. Inasmuch as there were few or no Protestants, those who suffered were either Jews or so-called “New Christians,” formerly Jewish families that had converted but were thought to still have Jewish affiliations. An enlightened despot, Pombal ended slavery in Portugal, reorganized the educational and military systems, and encouraged agriculture and industry. He was instrumental in building up Brazil with increased production of minerals, tobacco, and sugar, but in his actions he was admittedly ruthless in suppressing all opposition. (See review by Derek Beales of Kenneth Maxwell’s Pombal: Paradox of the Enlightenment in The New York Review of Books, 18 April 1996.) {CE; Tim Egan, The New York Times Magazine, 28 February 1999}
Pomerantz, Alfred (20th Century) “The Messiah” by Pomerantz was published in an April 1959 Age of Reason, Joseph Lewis’s freethought magazine. Pomerantz also wrote “Trinity,” in the February 1960 issue.
Pomeroy, Ernest Arthur George (Born 1867) Pomeroy, the seventh Viscount Haberton, served in the army and succeeded to the title in 1912. He wrote a number of advanced rationalist works and, in Idol of Fear (1905), he drastically criticized Christianity, defended Judas, and included discourses about Jesus which were along Voltairean lines. {RAT; RE}
Pomeroy, Wardell Baxter (1913– 2001) A psychologist, the Michigan-born Pomeroy helped Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey in a research of the sexual landscape of America. A clinical psychologist at an Indiana reformatory in 1941, he met Kinsey, saying, “I found myself telling him things I had never dreamed of telling anyone else. Occasionally, as he deftly and persistently questioned me, I hesitated a moment, but then I said to myself, ‘Of course, I must.’ ” The two had a twenty-year relationship, the young Pomeroy becoming one of Kinsey’s closest associates. Over the years Pomeroy quizzed some 8,000 about their sex lives in much the same way Kinsey had questioning him, posing point-blank queries that conveyed no hint of judging. He was co-author of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), works that helped revolutionize attitudes in the United States toward sexuality (and drawing the immediate wrath of many religious and conservative groups). As pointed out by Eric Nagourney, the books “took an unvarnished look at taboo subjects like masturbation, homosexuality, extramarital affairs, premarital sex, and sex offenses. The second reported that women were far more sexually active than had previously been assumed. And the researchers presented hard numbers, based on the surveys, to make their case.” Although in later years, some Kinsey reports were attacked for their methodology—critics questioned Kinsey’s assertions about the prevalence of homosexuality—but the research did convey the central theme that the sex lives of Americans were far more varied than had previously been acknowledged. Pomeroy’s books drew both praise and criticism for two books intended for adolescents and their parents: Boys and Sex (1968) and Girls and Sex (1970). Both, according to the American Library Association, were among the one hundred books most often singled out by people seeking to ban books in the 1990s. In 1972, Pomeroy wrote, “In retrospect, the controversy over the two reports seems slightly incredible. Harmful to youth? The present generation would consider their conclusions old-fashioned in the climate of freedom that now prevails.” Pomeroy was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. (Eric Nagourney, The New York Times, 12 Sep 2001)
Pompery, Edouard (1812–1895) Pompery was a French publicist. A follower of Fourier, he wrote on Blanquism, on opportunism (1879), and on Voltaire (1880). {BDF}
Pomponazzi, Pietro (1462–1525) One of the Renaissance thinkers, Pomponazzi did not believe in immortality or a future existence. He questioned St. Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle. Church officials disliked his view that the soul is mortal, that to believe it is immortal requires acceptance simply on faith. Not only did he deny immortality but also he held that ethics could do very well without the belief (adding, however, that mankind is “brutish and materialized” and needs the belief in heaven and hell to make them moral). In Venice, the Inquisition burned Pomponazzi’s book on immortality, highlighting how devastating his critique really was. In spite of his philosophical views, he insisted on his readiness to submit all his tenets to the judgment of the Church. {BDF; CE; CL; ER; JMR; JMRH}
De Ponnat [Baron] (1810–1884) De Ponnat was a French writer, educated by the Jesuits but later a thorough freethinker and democrat. A baron, he collaborated with A. S. Morin on the Rationaliste of Geneva. He was imprisoned for a year because of articles in Le Candide and other publications, and he wrote The Cross of Death, a discourse to the bishops who assisted at the Ecumenical Council of Rome (1862). His principal work is a history of the variations and contradictions of the Roman Church. {BDF}
Ponsonby, Arthur Augustus William Harry (1871–1946) Ponsonby was the first Baron of Shulbrede, the son of General Sir Henry Ponsonby. He became Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in 1924 and for the Dominions in 1929. In his Conflict of Opinion (1919, Ponsonby rejected Christianity and admitted God only as “the spirit of perfection outside of us. . . . We may conceivably in time succeed in creating God more definitely.” {RE}
Pontiac [Chief] (Flourished 1760–1766) Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa Indian tribe reportedly said, of Robert Rogers who was on his way to taking possession of the Western forts for the English, “They came with a Bible and their religion—stole our land, crushed our spirit . . . and now tell us we should be thankful to the ‘Lord’ for being saved.”
Pontoppidan, Henrik (1857-1929) A Danish novelist and Nobel Prize winner, Pontoppidan early in life was a journalist. In 1880 he was prosecuted for blasphemy. He later became a minister but reverted to Rationalism, writing a series of satirical novels. Tennyson was inspired by his description of a mythical sea-monster, the kraken, which slept in the depths of the sea, an “ancient dreamless, uninvaded sleep” which Tennyson described as a “pained fascination with the thought of a life which somehow is not life at all.” Pontoppidan had described the kraken in his Gesta et vestigia Danorum extra Daniam (1740) and a Natural History of Norway (1755). {RE}
Pontius, James (20th Century) Pontius, a freethinker, wrote The Holy Bible in a Nutshell (c. 1910). {GS}
Pool, Gary (20th Century) Pool, an editor in Indiana, has written about Amnesty International for The Humanist (USA).
Pool, Elijah: See entry for Nation of Islam.
POPE The head of the Roman Catholic Church is the pope, who is believed by his church to be the successor of the apostle Peter. He is Bishop of Rome, president of the College of Cardinals, and monarch of the 108.7-acre Vatican city state, which is a small nation within Rome. The corporate finances have never been made public. Fewer than 500 residents live there, but the Vatican has diplomatic relations with 130 nations. In Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes (1997), Eamon Duffy points out that one-third of the popes elected between 872 and 1012 died under unusual circumstances; for example:
• John VIII (872–882) was bludgeoned to death by his own entourage; • Stephen VI (896–897) was strangled; • Leo V (903) was murdered by his successor, Sergius III (904–911); • John X (914–928) suffocated; • Stephen VIII (934–942) was horribly mutilated.
Meanwhile, the Greek antipope John XVI (997–998) had his eyes, nose, lips, tongue, and hands removed but failed to die. Pius II (1458-1464), according to William Manchester, as bishop “fathered several children by various mistresses.” Quentin Crisp theorizes that Pope John Paul I “died so suspiciously soon after his enthronement [that he was] rumored to have been poisoned with lethal cups of tea.” (See entry for the notoriously immoral John XII, pope from 955 to 964. For a description of his wild parties, see the entry for Alexander VI. For Pope Joan, see entry for Hoaxes, Religious. Also see Papal Bull. A recent book on the politics of the Vatican and how the church’s leaders wish their followers would follow, not complain, see Thomas Reese’s Inside the Vatican, 1997. See entry for Quentin Crisp.) {DCL}
Pope, Alexander (1688–1744) Pope’s Essay on Man (1734) contains the celebrated couplet:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.
He is generally conceded to be the leading 18th century English poet. According to Voltaire, Pope’s “The Universal Prayer,” attached to “An Essay on Man,” was mainly influenced by the philosophy of Lord Shaftesbury, and that prayer has often been called the deists’ prayer. As a child born of Roman Catholic parents, whose father was a prosperous Roman Catholic linen draper, Pope was debarred from a Protestant education. As a result, he was almost entirely self-taught. Only 4’ 6” tall (1.4 meters), he was afflicted by a tubercular condition, Pott’s disease, which left him with a pronounced spinal curvature starting in his later childhood. In addition, as can be discerned in his Eloisa to Abelard (1717), Pope’s genital apparatus was dysfunctional and his romantic life was thus thwarted. Joseph Addison attacked Pope for his Tory leanings, but Pope called Addison and his Tatler friend Richard Steele “hermaphrodites” (homosexuals). William Wycherly and the poet-critic William Walsh, among others, liked Pope. Pope prospered by publishing his translations of Homer, which have been said to be magnificent but somewhat inaccurate. With the money earned, he bought a lease on a house in Twickenham, where he and his mother lived for the rest of their lives. The Popes, appropriate family name that it was, were Catholic. Or were they? McCabe states that Pope was one of a large and brilliant circle of Deists in London, that although many quote the words about the proper study of mankind they often forget to quote the preceding “presume not God to scan.” Lord Chesterfield described Pope in one of his letters as “a Deist believing in a future life.” The Catholic Encyclopedia claims him on the ground that he “willingly yielded” to a friend’s suggestion that he should receive the sacrament when he was dying. It is another of the constructive untruths of that flower of Catholic culture,” McCabe complains. “What Pope said was, ‘I do not suppose that it is essential, but it will look right,’ ” which McCabe finds strange language for a man who had been an “apostate” for a quarter of a century. McCabe cites Pope’s “Universal Prayer” as an indication that Pope actually had entirely deserted Catholicism and was a deist. Alexander Pope, according to Martin Greif, had something else in common with some of the Vatican Popes: He had strong homoerotic desires. A member of the “Scriblerians,” an all-male club that included homosexuals such as John Arbuthnot, John Gay, Robert Harley, Jonathan Swift. In the 1730s Pope engaged in one of the most famous and venomous literary feuds in history, according to Martin Greif in The Gay Book of Days: “Pope, supposedly jealous that his friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had taken up with John Hervey, Baron Hervey of Ickworth, began satirizing Hervey’s effeminacy in his poetry, most notably as “Lord Fanny” in Imitations of Horace (1733–1738) and as “Sporus” in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1734). If Pope’s picture of the mincing Lord Fanny had not set London laughing, the reference to Sporus had literate London holding its sides, since Sporus was the boy ‘bride’ of Nero who would bare his rear for the emperor to attack in public.” Greif continues, “At the same time, Nero’s ‘husband’ was Doryphorus, who would return the favor in kind—also in public. Hervey, understandably upset by these jibes, responded with verses of his own that ridiculed the crippled poet’s hideous hump and his less than noble birth. London wags found this hilarious, too. Eventually, the feud died down and was forgotten.” {CE; A. Owen Aldridge, EU, G. S. Rousseau, “Scriblerians,” GL; RAT; RE; TYD}
POPE JOHN PAUL I John Paul I (1912-1978) died or was murdered one month after he took office in 1978, being succeeded by John Paul II. Reviewing “The Godfather” in Christopher Street (Issue #153), Crisp advised moviegoers about the movie: “This picture stops just short of being blasphemous, but viewers should be warned that it denounces Catholicism at least as vigorously as it attacks the Mafia. In one early scene, we are shown a Vatican official offering Mr. Pacino the control of a vast conglomerate enterprise in exchange for sufficient money to cover its own ill-advised investments. The narrative also manages to drag in Pope John Paul I who, in real life, died so suspiciously soon after his enthronement and who was rumored to have been poisoned with lethal cups of tea.” A 1984 book, In God’s Name by David Yallop alleged that the Italian mob killed the pope, a charge which the Vatican denounced as “shocking and deplorable.” The Church explained that the strain of office had proved too much for the 65-year-old pope and that he had suffered a heart attack. However, no autopsy was performed, according to Vatican tradition. Cardinal Aloisio Lorschelder, the late pontiff’s choice to succeed him, also questioned the death, saying in August 1998, “I have to say that a suspicion remains in our hearts.” In 1999 singer Elton John purchased rights to Yallop’s best-selling novel, saying he intended to make a movie about the mysterious death. {CE; New York Daily News, 16 February 1999}
POPE JOHN PAUL II: See entry for Stanislaw Lem.
POPÉ (died c. 1690) Popé was a Pueblo medicine man who practiced his traditional religion. He was anti-Spanish rule and in 1680 organized a revolt during which attacks on Sante Fe, the capital city, killed some 400 colonists and missionaries and forced survivors to retreat down the Rio Grande to El Paso. Assuming a despotic role, Popé attempted to wipe out all traces of the Spanish conquerors, their language, their culture, their churches—he even washed clean anyone whom the Spaniards had baptized. In 1692 shortly after Popés death, the Spaniards reconquered the area and rebuilt the Catholicism he had wiped out. {CE}
Pope, John (20th Century) Pope wrote The Hellions (1987). {GS}
Pope, Liston (20th Century) A Southern freethinker, Pope wrote Millhands and Preachers (1942), which tells about the role of the church in social affairs and its frequent vassalage to economic leaders. {Freethought History #14 1995}
Popper, Karl Raimund [Sir] (1902–1994) Popper, a philosopher and a defender of democratic systems of government, was born in Vienna. His father, Simon Popper, a doctor of law at the University of Vienna, was a prominent liberal lawyer, and his mother, Jenny Schiff Popper, was a pianist. Although his parents were Jews, Popper was christened in a Protestant church. For a few months, Popper considered himself a Communist, but upon witnessing a confrontation between Vienna police and young unarmed socialists trying to rescue some Communists from the police station, he saw the police fatally shoot several of the young people. Although a Marxist would have accepted that such deaths might be necessary on the road to revolution, Popper decided he could not. As World War II approached, he and his wife, Josefine, left for New Zealand. There, he was a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury College in Christchurch. In 1945, Popper went to London to teach at the London School of Economics. At the time of his death, Popper was professor emeritus of logic and scientific method at the University of London, where he had taught from 1949 to 1969. In a 1934 work, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, he argued that science does not proceed through verification. Rather, it makes bold, competing conjectures, exposing them to rigorous tests and eliminating those which have been refuted. “Next to music and art,” Popper has stated, “science is the greatest, most beautiful, and most enlightening achievement of the human spirit.” Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) has been called one of the most influential books of the century. It was the inspiration for the widespread use of the phrase “open society.” He argued that communism and fascism are philosophically linked, and in The Poverty of Historicism (1957), another attack on Marxism, he questioned the idea that there are inexorable laws of human history. Rather, he believed, history is influenced by the growth of knowledge, which is unpredictable. “Erroneous beliefs may have an astonishing power to survive,” he wrote, “for thousands of years, in defiance of experience and without the aid of any conspiracy. . . . One example is the general conspiracy theory itself . . . the erroneous view that whenever something evil happens it must be the evil will of an evil power.” His simple idea that anyone could understand was that man makes progress by making mistakes. In science, he held, the mark of a good theory is that it should be easily falsifiable and open to correction. The origin of “falsification” was, according to I. Grattan-Guinness (Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Summer 1998),
In Vienna at that time, at least in the bourgeoisie to which Popper’s family belonged, there operated the Dienstmädchen system of “slave labour,” as he described it to me. A woman worked as servant to a family for thirteen days per fortnight, from a Sunday to the following Saturday week; then her employment would continue unless the head of the household decided that it be terminated at the end of the next fortnight. When Popper was about nine years old (around 1911, therefore) his father accused their servant of stealing an amount equivalent to £15, and dismissed her under this rule. Upon asking his father about the woman’s prospects, “I did not receive a satisfactory reply.” Thus the influence of his father was negative—in his own later terms, a falsification. In response to my query, he confirmed that The Open Society had been written to oppose that sort of system as well as the ones which the Nazis and the Communists were trying to impose in the 1940s. . . . “Communism will always revive,” Popper said to me on another occasion.
Freudianism, Popper complained, was not genuinely scientific, unable to be refuted because it is so all-encompassing. In politics, he held that the mark of a good system of government was that it should be open to criticism, something lacking in the political utopianism of Plato, Hegel, and Marx. His difference with Wittgenstein was that he thought scientific theories can be proved false but cannot be proved true, that genuine philosophical problems exist; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argued that puzzles caused by language’s imprecision exist, not genuine philosophical problems, that the puzzles could be “dissolved” through a better understanding of language.
Rejecting the certainty of knowledge, Popper held that knowing is an individual, unpredictable act of genius. Unlike the logical positivists, he believed that knowing is not limited to verifiable statements. For him, psychology, astrology, metaphysics, Marxist history, and Freudian psychoanalysis are all pseudo-sciences, and he rejected them as “myths.”
In Search of a Better World (1992) contains a selection of thirty years of Popper’s lectures and essays. Challenges To The Enlightenment, In Defense of Reason and Science (1994) contains a translation of “Emancipation Through Knowledge,” which he had delivered in German on the Bavarian Broadcasting Network in a 1961 series of broadcasts on the meaning of history.
Critics have pointed out that Popper claimed to have solved one of the great philosophical puzzles, David Hume’s “problems of induction.” But he did not and, according to his own theories, should have welcomed the fact when his error was pointed out. He did not, however, ever admit he was wrong, leading some to accuse him of being un-Popperian. In 1979, Prof. Popper was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. Also, he was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He refused, however, to sign their Secular Humanist Declaration (1980) if B. F. Skinner signed it. In a 1992 interview with The Sunday Times in London, when Popper was asked to comment on the collapse of the Marxist states of Eastern Europe: “I will not except to say, ‘I told you so.’ I just knew that these were beastly regimes and I kept saying so. That is all.” Sir Karl’s wife, Josefine, died in 1985. They had no children. (See New Humanist, November 1994, in which Andrew Ferguson states that Popper is as effective as F. R. H. (Ronald) Englefield “in showing that most of what Hegel wrote is meaningless rubbish (except in so far as it serves as a rationale for the state exercising absolute power).” Also, see the entry for Richard Bailey, who found that Popper was active in Austrian politics and social reform; and see Anthony Quinton’s article on Popper in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6) {CE; Sarah Lyall, The New York Times, 21 March 1998}
POPULATION, HUMAN Demographer Nathan Keyfitz in a 1991 letter to the historian Justin Kaplan wrote that
The dead outnumber the living, in a ratio that could be as high as 20 to 1. Credible estimates of the number of people who have ever lived on the earth run from 70 billion to over 100 billion.
If in 1997 an estimated 5.8 billion humans were alive, and averaging the above figures to put the total persons ever born at about 85 billion, we can extrapolate that the dead outnumber us about fourteen to one. The dead will always outnumber us. Two thousand years ago, the Earth had an estimated one-quarter of a billion people (the population of the United States in 1990). That figure doubled to a half- billion people by 1650. By 1830 the human population passed one billion, by 1930 two billion, and by 1973 four billion. Around 1965-1970 the global population growth rate reached an all-time peak, according to Joel E. Cohen, author of How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1995). “In Africa,” Cohen added, “contrary to the world trend, the absolute number of chronically undernourished increased by two-thirds between 1970 and 1990. Africa also had the highest population growth rates during that period—and still does.” Writer Annie Dillard (Harper’s Magazine, January 1998), after presenting the above figures, continues:
One tenth of the land on earth is tundra. At any time, it is raining on only 5 percent of the planet’s surface. Lightning strikes the planet about a hundred times every second. The insects outweigh us. Our chickens outnumber us four to one. One fifth of us are Muslims. One fifth of us live in China. And every seventh person is a Chinese peasant. Almost one tenth of us live within range of an active volcano. More than 2 percent of us are mentally retarded. We humans drink tea—over a billion cups a day. Among us we speak 10,000 languages. We are civilized generation number 500 or so, counting from 10,000 years ago, when we settled down. We are Homo sapiens generation number 7,500, counting from 150,000 years ago, when our species presumably arose; and we are human generation number 125,000, counting from the earliest forms of Homo. Every 110 hours a million more humans arrive on the planet than die into the planet. A hundred million of us are children who live on the streets. Over a hundred million of us live in countries where we hold no citizenship. Twenty-three million of us are refugees. Sixteen million of us live in Cairo. Twelve million fish for a living from small boats. Seven and a half million of us are Uygurs. One million of us crew on freezer trawlers. Nearly a thousand of us a day commit suicide.
Dillard then notes Joseph Stalin’s observation, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Included among the statistics: Mao in China starved 30 million. Eleven million children under five die each year now. In Bangladesh in 1991, waves drowned 138,000. As to how important, relatively, all this is, Dillard noted
Ten years ago we thought there were two galaxies for each of us alive. Lately, since we loosed the Hubble Space Telescope, we have revised our figures. There are nine galaxies for each of us. Each galaxy harbors an average of 100 billion suns. In our galaxy, the Milky Way, there are sixty-nine suns for each person alive. The Hubble shows, says a report, that the universe “is at least 15 billion years old.” Two galaxies, nine galaxies . . . sixty-nine suns, 100 billion suns. . . . These astronomers are nickel-and-diming us to death.
POPULATION EXPLOSION Priscilla Robertson in the 1950s was only one of many humanists who issued an alarm in the pages of The Humanist concerning the troubling increase in the human population. In the 19th century, Lord Richie Calder was one of many who had sounded a similar alarm. Meanwhile, some major church organizations have, contrarily, fought birth control measures and planned parenthood programs. Thomas Robert Malthus had predicted that the population would eventually outstrip the food supply. Karl Marx rejected that view, arguing that the problem was not one of overpopulation but of unequal distribution of goods, a problem that even a declining population would not solve. Family planning has succeeded in some countries—Japan, the republics of the former Soviet Union, and most of Europe—and in some developing countries, such as India, China, Kenya, Pakistan, Taiwan, Turkey, Egypt, and Chile. In the United States, however, birth control and abortion are bitterly debated. Zero Population Growth, an educational group founded in 1970, has aimed to stop population growth, first in the United States and then in other countries. On the international level, besides the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the United Nations Economic and Social Council provides birth control aid to underdeveloped nations. During the Roman Empire, an estimated quarter to a half billion humans existed. By the mid-19th Century, the number had increased to one billion. By 1930 the number had increased to 2 billion. In 1992, the world’s population was about 5.4 billion. In 1995, the population had increased to 5.7 billion. The U. S. Department of Commerce has estimated that by 2010 the number will increase to 7 billion and by 2020 to 7.9 billion. The United Nations has estimated that the population in 1990 will have doubled by 2050. By the year 2150, one estimate has the human population as high as an incredible 694 billion. Theists may ignominiously welcome the latter number as a bullish sign for church finances. But non-theist organizations such as the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and the Council for Secular Humanism have reacted with horror when they extrapolate as to what such a future will bring. Of particular interests to freethinkers and rationalists is “punctuated equilibrium,” an idea developed by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould, one which recognizes that although the theory of evolution satisfactorily describes the past it cannot predict the future. The negative conclusion which they have developed, for example, states first that only at times of speciation, when one evolutionary lineage splits into two, does evolutionary change occur. Speciation, however, requires the geographical isolation of subpopulations of a species. With 5.7 billion humans interbreeding and possessing easy mobility to all parts of the Earth, isolation has now become next to impossible. Thus, evolutionary changes will come to a stop, and the species we now have will not increase as they were able to do in the distant past. By over-populating the Earth, in short, humans are tragically leading to their own demise as well as that of other species. Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001 extrapolates that long before 3001 Earth will not be habitable. (See entry for Paul Ehrlich, who predicts that with the globe’s population heading toward ten billion by the middle of the 21st century, Western countries will gobble up the resources needed by the impoverished throngs of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Also see entries for Hugh Iltis and Priscilla Robertson.) {CE; Free Inquiry, Spring, 1999, has an entire issue containing alarming population growth figures—articles are by Philip Appleman, Diana Brown, Lester R. Brown, Roy W. Brown, Frances Kissling, Craig Lesher, and Carl Wahren.}
Porath, Alan (20th Century) A Wisconsin freethinker, Porath is a retired chemical engineer. He was one of the plaintiffs in a successful environment lawsuit and also in a successful suit for Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, to abandon their official Good Friday holy day. He received the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s 1998 Freethinker of the Year Award. {Freethought Today, April 1997}
Porath, Mary (20th Century) A retired Wisconsin teacher and children’s librarian, Porath and her husband, Alan, were plaintiffs in a successful lawsuit, Freedom From Religion Foundation v. Ozaukee County, Wisconsin, that ended in the county’s abandoning their official Good Friday holy day. She received the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s 1998 Freethinker of the Year Award. {Freethought Today, April 1997}
PORNOGRAPHY In his Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996), Roger Shattuck discussed what kinds of knowledge that are not now strenuously forbidden which really ought to be forbidden. Milton’s Paradise Lost warned against undue curiosity, repeating the view that to eat of the forbidden fruit resulted in having knowledge that one would be better not to know. “Know to know no more,” Milton advised Adam and Eve. Augustine and other church leaders were in agreement. Shattuck advised “a wise agnosticism” in dealing with the subject of pornography. It is not the forbidding of knowledge which is the solution; the important thing is for people to learn how to handle what formerly was forbidden but which can no longer be beyond the scope of our studying. Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) was an American censor who banned as pornographic Fanny Hill (1750), The Lustful Turk, Peep Behind the Curtains of a Female Seminary, A Night in a Moorish Harem, Love on the Sly, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and an estimated 500,000 reproductions of drawings or paintings. “Anything which tends to destroy the dignity of womanhood or to display the female form in an irreverent manner is immoral,” he stated. Although he expressed a reverence for the female form, “the place for a woman’s body to be—denuded—is in the privacy of her own apartments with the blinds down.” In 1934 when Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer was printed in Paris, the poet Ezra Pound rejoiced, “an unprintable book that is fit to read.” In 1963 the New York publishing firm of G. P. Putnam’s Sons was taken to trial for printing John Cleland’s Fanny Hill. The firm won, lost an intermediate appeal, and in 1964 won gain in New York’s Court of Appeals, 4 votes to 3. {PA}
Porphyry (c. 242–c. 305) Porphyry, a Greek scholar and Neoplatonic philosopher, was a follower of and editor of The Enneads of Plotinus. He made sharper attacks on Christianity than had his teacher in a work titled Against the Christians. Church leaders who could find any copies destroyed them, for they objected to his criticism that the Book of Daniel was written during the Maccabean period, centuries later than the time it describes. He also listed other discrepancies, such as the various accounts of Jesus’s resurrection, and he questioned how Paul could tell fellow Christians to “Bless and curse not” but so bitterly denounce his opponents in the early church. Porphyry avoided gambling, the theater, horse racing, and public games. He was a vegetarian, believing that the less-developed souls of animals entered those who ate their flesh. Porphyry’s Isagoge, an introduction to Aristotle’s logic, became a standard medieval text. In Porphyry’s Against the Christians: The Literary Remains (1994), R. Joseph Hoffmann has edited and newly translated the pagan critic’s work. {BDF; CE; EH; HNS2}
Porteous, Skipp (1944– )
A Fundamentalist preacher turned humanist, Porteous is editor of The Freedom Writer, a First Amendment newsletter. He also edits Walk Away, a newsletter for people leaving fundamentalism. In Jesus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1991), Porteous describes how he was “saved” at the age of eleven and how he was able to walk away. Since 1984, he has served as President and National Director of the Institute for First Amendment Studies. Porteous, who had been a Unitarian Universalist, converted to Judaism in 1996. On Chanukah Sunday, before some eighty friends and family at the Hevreh of Southern Berkshire in Massachusetts, he observed, after being with his wife of fourteen years, Barbara Simon, “The formal conversion does make a difference, because you feel like you have the whole Jewish community behind you. “Barbara never tried to convert me,” he stated to the Jewish Forward, but “in July I decided I was really Jewish at heart. Right away I started observing Shabbat” and chose as his Hebrew name Avi ben Avraham. {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990; World, March/April, 1994}
Porter, Bernard (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Porter was president of the Toronto Humanist Association. {HM2}
Porter, Burton F(rederick) (20th Century) Porter wrote Deity and Morality With Regard to the Naturalistic Fallacy (1968). {GS}
Porter, George (20th Century) Porter, who is newsletter editor of the Washington (District of Columbia) Area Secular Humanist WASHline, is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Porter, Lois (20th Century) Porter, a founding member and first president of the Washington Area Secular Humanists in Washington, D. C., is author of “Fanny Wright: Free Enquirer” and “Matilda Joslyn Gage, Feminist and Secular Humanist.” She is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism and an Associate Editor of Free Inquiry. In 1994 in Rochester, New York, Porter spoke on “Female Freethinkers” at a Robert G. Ingersoll memorial in commemoration of Ingersoll’s work on behalf of women’s equality. He is Vice-President of the Washington Area Secular Humanists. {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990 and winter 1996-1997}
Porter, Samuel P. (19th Century) From 1892 to 1894, Porter was secretary in New York of the Freethought Federation of America.
PORTUGUESE FREETHINKERS: See entry for Pombal.
Porzio, Simone (1496–1554) Porzio was a disciple of Pomponazzi. When lecturing at Pisa and asked about the soul, he echoed what he had written in De Mente Humana, that the human soul differed in no essential point from the soul of a lion or plant, that those who thought otherwise were prompted by pity for man’s mean estate. {BDF}
Poser, Ernest G. (20th Century) Poser, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, wrote “Reflections of a ‘Born Again’ Humanist” in Humanist in Canada (Summer 1997). He is a founder of organized humanism in Canada.
Posidonius (c. 125–51 B.C.E.) A Greek Stoic philosopher, Posidonius of Apameia wrote copiously, but all his works have been lost. Those on ethics and physics contributed greatly to the Stoic outlook. Posidonius held that a vital force emanates from the sun and permeates the world, which was his doctrine of cosmic sympathy showing that man and all else in the universe are united. He calculated the circumference of the earth, drew a map of the earth, and showed it to be a sphere. Similarly, many ancient Greeks thought that the earth’s land mass is ocean-circled. His suggestion that India could be reached by sailing westward across the Atlantic, rather than eastward, erred only by stating that India was 70,000 stadia away. {CE}
POSITIVISM • Positivism, n. A philosophy that denies our knowledge of the Real and affirms our ignorance of the Apparent. Its longest exponent is Comte, its broadest Mill, and its thickest Spencer. –Ambroce Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Positivism is an approach to philosophy frequently found in the twentieth century. Positivists usually hold that all meaningful statements must be either logical inferences or sense descriptions, and usually argue that the statements found in metaphysics, such as “Human beings are free” or “Human beings are not free,” are meaningless because they cannot possibly be verified by the senses. The works of Francis Bacon, George Berkeley, and David Hume contain in an implicit form the basic tenets of positivism. The term is specifically applied to the system of Auguste Comte, who developed its coherent doctrine and who then influenced various trends of contemporary thought, including the movement of logical positivism. (See entries for Comte; Latin American Positivism; Humanism, per Curtis Reese; and Leopoldo Zea, author of Positivism in Mexico. Nicola Abbagnano wrote about positivism in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6; also see “The London Positivists” in The London Heretics by Warren Sylvester Smith; and the entry for Pedro Mendoça, a Brazilian positivist.) {CE; DCL; RE}
Posner, Gary P. (20th Century) Posner, a Florida physician and critic of faith healing, is on Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project. He founded Tampa Bay Skeptics in 1988. {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1986-1987}
“Posos, Juan de” (18th Century) An undiscovered author using the name Posos expressed atheistic opinions in a book of imaginary travels, published in Dutch at Amsterdam in 1708 and translated into German at Leipzig in 1721. {BDF}
Post, Albert (20th Century) Post wrote Popular Freethought in America, 1825–1850 (1943). {FUS}
Post, Amy (1803–1889) Post was an American reformer, a leading advocate of slavery abolition, temperance, woman’s suffrage, and religious reform from as early as 1828. {BDF}
POST-CHRISTIAN Post-Christian is a term that began to be used in the latter part of the 20th Century. Freethinkers admit that the term is an overly optimistic expression that denotes a hoped-for wish-fulfillment. (See entry for Post-Human.)
POSTERITY • Do you have a desire to be remembered? “I don’t think so.” I mean, do you think about posterity? “What did posterity ever do for me?” –Alfred Hitchcock, answering questions by Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Devil Made It
Postgate, John Raymond (1922– ) Postgate, a microbiologist, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1994. He wrote Microbes and Man (1969), The Sulfate-Reducing Bacteria (1979), and A Plain Man’s Guide to Jazz (1973). He has written,
I was born in Pimlico in 1922 and grew up in Hendon and Finchley, North London. My parents were political animals. Raymond Postgate, my father, was a socialist historian, writer, and propagandist (the fame he derived from founding the Good Food Guide came late in life), and my mother was Daisy, daughter and later private secretary of George Lansbury, sometime leader of the Labour Party. Although politically active in my undergraduate days at Oxford—I led a group of Labour sympathisers in the University’s Communist-dominated Labour Club during the Second World War—I was distracted by girls, jazz music, and science, in that order, and politics became a minor though still abiding interest. I remain a jazz enthusiast, writer, and musician, and am married with three grown-up daughters, but my career was in science: I took First Class Honours in Chemistry from Balliol, followed by a D. Phil. for research in Chemical Microbiology, and became a professional research scientist. Happily I was successful. I had become fascinated by microbes, especially bacteria, because they can live in extraordinarily harsh environments (air-free, boiling hot, sub-zero, hyper-saline), can feed on poisonous or seemingly intractable substances, can conduct remarkable chemical processes. My research gained me Fellowship of the Royal Society, a D. Sc. from Oxford, a couple of Visiting Professorships in the USA; in due course I became Director of a personal research unit at the University of Sussex, where I was also Professor (now Emeritus) of Microbiology: I was President of the Institute of Biology and of the Society for General Microbiology. As well as numerous research papers and some technical books I have also published a couple of reasonably successful popular science books, Microbes and Man and The Outer Reaches of Life, and articles on popular science. I became atheistic as a ten-year-old, to the discomposure of my Cub-master, whom I stopped in the street to announce brightly that, there being no God, I could no longer be a Cub. (Pages 146-8 of my wife’s and my biography of my father, A Stomach for Dissent, describe how he aided my liberation from religion). Being a scientist, becoming aware of the astonishing scope of microbial existence, has re-enforced my disbelief. In addition, the strong social conscience (inherited) has made me acutely aware of the appalling cruelties and injustices inflicted in the name of God, today as much as in the past. Not that there have not been comparable atrocities inflicted in the name of Karl Marx, even of Darwin. I know and regret that a large part of humanity seems to require a system of prescriptive beliefs, usually a religion. It is a requirement that mankind must grow out of. I try when I can to show that enlightenment and reason can provide awe, wonder, delight, escape, even social and moral imperatives, without calling for mysticism, hatred, revenge, or retribution. {New Humanist, September 1996}
POST-HUMAN N. Katherine Hayles, mindful of Donna Maraway’s 1985 “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” has been concerned about the trend of humans to depend upon machines. In How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), she as a leader in cybertheoryland discussed cybernetics, the interdisciplinary postwar science devoted to analyzing both the animal and mechanical kingdoms as self-organizing systems based around information flows and feedback loops. A new subjectivity exists, she has found, one that undercuts the centrality of consciousness and erodes the distinction between humans and machines. According to her, today’s “third wavers” largely spurn such philosophical reflections, being more interested in programming Darwinian computer simulations that, following the archetype of Artificial Life, attempt to reproduce the logic of organic life by allowing codes to “evolve” inside the petri dish of a personal computer. Future generations, she extrapolates, will be stupefied by “the postmodern orghodoxy that the body is primarily, if not entirely, a linguistic and discursive construction.” If already we have become posthuman, she asks, what kind of posthumans will we be? (See entry for Cybernetics and Cyberspace.) {Erik Davis, “The Posthuman Touch, Village Voice, 23 March 1999}
Postma, Paul (20th Century) Postma served as treasurer of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) for twenty years. In 1998 at their congress in Mumbai, Postma was given a distinguished service award. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
POST-MODERNISM AND THE POST-MODERNIST CRITICISM OF HUMANISM Commencing as early as 1949, a postmodernist movement began which reacted against the theory and practice of modern art or literature. Paul Kurtz finds that postmodernists are critical of “modernity,” which in part is equated with the Enlightenment—thinkers like Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, d’Holbach, the Encyclopedists, Kant, Goethe, Bentham, Mill, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Paine. These were individuals who had confidence in mankind’s ability to control its destiny, who declared that humans are free and rational agents, and who believed mankind is responsible in some measure for its future. But in the 1960s a group of anti-humanists spoke about “the death of man,” with Theodor Adorno critical of humanism’s optimism, stating that after Auschwitz we can no longer write hymns “to the grandeur of man” (quoted in French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism, 1990). The French postmodernists included Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Drawing upon Heidegger’s philosophy, they deplore the growth of technology, maintain that language is a veil masking Being, state that every text should be deconstructed, and hold that objective scientific knowledge is a myth. They hold the anti-humanist views that human beings are not capable of free and autonomous choice; that they are not rational and responsible; that universal ethical norms can not be discovered; and that the ideals of liberal democracy and of human rights do not have genuine authenticity. The postmodernists pushed the Sartre generation aside, concentrating upon their own new rebellions—against humanism, against literature, against the shape of a printed page, against the idea of progress, sometimes even against clarity of expression itself. Victor Farias in Heidegger and Nazism (1989) points out that Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and in 1935 reaffirmed the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism,” believing the Party was Germany’s only hope for grasping “the problem of technology.” Incredibly, states Kurtz, Philippe Lacoue Labarthe, a disciple of Derrida, has defended Heidegger by maintaining that “Nazism is a humanism” because “it rests on a determination of Humanitas which is, in its eyes, more powerful, i.e., more effective, than any other.” Although Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut have negatively criticized the postmodernist Heideggerians, their influence persists but only in a minor way. Paul Kurtz declared in opposition to the anti-humanists that “we need a re-enchantment with the ideals of humanism, a re-enlightenment. We need a new Enlightenment. For those who say it is not possible, I say it is, and indeed, the humanist stream of culture is making headway in spite of its critics.” Postmodernism, its critics state, is over-reliant on technology-assisted instruction. It resists the misapplication of technology to teaching, which depends upon human contact and teachers and the interaction of students as well as of other teachers. Belgian philosopher Paul Cliteur is in agreement, stating that postmodernism rejects the Enlightenment, that although many postmodernists may be atheists it behooves the secular humanists to refute their methodology. Richard Rorty of the University of Virginia has the view that post-modernism is
one of these terms that has been used so much that nobody has the foggiest idea what it means. It means one thing in philosophy, another thing in architecture, and nothing in literature. It would be nice to get rid of it. It isn’t exactly an idea; it’s a word that pretends to stand for an idea. Or maybe the idea that one ought to get rid of is that there is any need to get beyond modernity.
Jean Bricmont, Vern L. Bullough, Xiaorong Li, Theodore Schick Jr., John Searle, Harvey Siegel, and E. O. Wilson have discussed postmodernism in a series of articles edited by Matt Cherry (Free Inquiry, Fall 1998). Cherry pointed out that postmodernism questions accepted standards and emphasizes how social context affects beliefs and theories, therefore trying to “deconstruct” the assumptions underlying truth claims. It encourages openness to the points of view of those outside the mainstream. Although it is to be welcomed that postmodernism provides an antidote to complacent claims of certainty, Cherry points out that, in their finding it difficult to get at the truth, postmodernists reject the very notion of “truth” itself. This leads to a view that there is no “objective knowledge” and no “facts,” only personal interpretation. Therefore, “reason” and “science” are no better than any other “myth,” “narrative,” or “magical explanation.” Were such theories taken seriously, they would, for example, destroy support for science, social reform, and universal human rights.
For most, postmodernism is already passé. What will be the intellectual fashion of the near future is always unclear. (See entry for Deconstruction. A first-rate discussion of the topic is found in Tony Judt’s Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (1993). Also, see the article by John McGowan of the University of North Carolina in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism, who points out that the term postmodernism was first used in reference to architecture as early as 1947 and is best understood as “marking the site of several related, but not identical, debates among intellectuals in the last four decades of the twentieth century. These debates revolve around the relation of artworks to social context, the relation of art and of theory to political action and to the dominant social order, the relation of cultural practices to the transformation or maintenance of society in all its aspects, the relation of the collapse of traditional philosophical foundations to the possibility of critical distance from and effective critique of the status quo, the relation of an image-dominated consumer society to artistic practice, and the future of a Western tradition that now appears more heterogeneous than previously thought even while it appears insufficiently tolerant of [open to] multiplicity.” Finally, see “Why Postmodernism is Not Progressive: If You Seek Understanding or Social Change, Don’t Go There,” by Barbara Epstein, Free Inquiry, Spring 1999.) {Paul Cliteur, “The Challenge of Postmodernism to Humanism,” New Humanist, August 1995; Paul Kurtz, Free Inquiry, Winter, 1992-1993}
POSTULATE A postulate is a statement accepted as true for the purposes of argument or scientific investigation; e.g., “No human has survived death.” {DCL}
Pott, Joseph Holder (18th Century) A freethinker, Pott wrote, “A Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Archdeaconry of St. Alban’s at the Visitation” (1796). {GS}
Potter, Charles Francis (1885–1962) Potter, author of The Story of Religion (1929), founded in 1929 the First Humanist Society of New York City, which met Sundays in Manhattan’s Steinway Hall on 57th Street. Included on its advisory board were Harry Elmer Barnes, L. M. Birkhead, E. A. Burtt, John Dewey, John H. Dietrich, Will Durant, William Floyd, Edwin Franko Goldman, Helen Keller, James H. Leuba, Robert Morss Lovett, George E. O’Dell, John Herman Randall Jr., Oliver L. Reiser, Roy Wood Sellars, Herbert Bayard Swope, and Oswald Garrison Villard. Dr. Potter wrote extensively concerning his philosophy, about which he wrote the following: “Humanism is not only belief in the possibility of the slow and steady self-improvement of the would-be-human race, individually and socially, without any assistance from alleged celestial super-persons, but it is also the intelligent implementation of that belief by co-operation with groups and agencies working toward that end.” A tireless popularizer of the Humanist movement and publicist for the liberal cause generally, he started as a Baptist but, when church leaders questioned his theological views, found it necessary to convert to Unitarianism. In 1923–1924, he came into national prominence by engaging in a series of debates with the Baptist fundamentalist leader John R. Straton over the issues of biblical fundamentalism. Soon thereafter he served as a defense team expert in the famous Scopes trial on evolution, for the theological war between liberalism and fundamentalism expanded in the 1920s. Potter rejected the doctrine that “the chief end of man is to glorify God” and declared instead that man should strive “to improve himself, both as an individual and as a race.” His ethically centered religion of growth rejected supernaturalism in religion. The weddings he performed were unique at that time in that the bride and groom, rather than repeating others’ vows, had to devise their own. When Potter mentioned the cross, he referred to Benjamin Franklin’s kite: “One symbol typifies salvation by sacrifice; the other, service by science.” Individuals attending his lectures for the first time were warned, “What I will say will be devoid of fairy-tales about angels, demons, devils, or gods, for mine is a faith in man and a belief in man’s capabilities for improving individuals and society as a whole by the slow, steady improvement of human personality.” In 1938, he was a founder of the Euthanasia Society of America. Potter’s works included Was Christ Both God and Man? (1924), Humanist Sermons (1927), Humanism, A New Religion (1930), Humanist Religion (1931), Humanizing Religion (1933), The Meaning of Humanism (1945, 1972),The Lost Years of Jesus Revealed (1948), Creative Personality: The Next Step in Evolution (1950), and The Preacher and I: An Autobiography (1951). As a contributing editor to The Humanist Newsletter (September-October 1953), Potter wrote:
Humanism is an adult American religion for mature minds. The humanist has outgrown belief in fairy-tales about angels, demons, devils, or gods. In place of faith in miracles and the supernatural, his interest is in the slow steady improvement of human personality, both his own and that of other people. He recognizes that theology has been superseded by psychology, sociology, creative art, and scientific education. He has long since abandoned the idea of the creation of the world and man by a primitive tribal deity 4000 years ago, and believes instead in evolution, not as a mere scientific theory, but as a life process of which he is a part and which he and his fellow men are learning to direct intelligently in order to produce a better world. Humanism is a new positive constructive emphasis in religion. Whether a man believes or disbelieves n God is not so important today as to believe in man.
Edwin H. Wilson credited Potter with realizing the worldwide potential of humanism and of the value of obtaining prestigious names. “I had a talk about humanism with Sec’y [Cordell] Hull in February,” Potter might say casually in a letter, “an appointment arranged by F.D.R. himself after he read my sermon in the N.Y. Times. Dr. Borchard of Yale, exert on International Law often consulted by Hull and Roosevelt, who went to Lima and back with Hull, is a member of our society here, and has been talking humanism to them. Several other administration men are humanists,” Potter added. In the same letter to Wilson he said, “Dr. Har Dayal of India and London, a splendid scholar who could lecture fluently in eight languages, spoke for me here on ‘Why I Am A Humanist,’ and joined our society, but, alas, he just died of a heart attack. Auer was down last week and we had a long session, discussing the manifesto. Burtt is speaking for me next Sunday, and I will talk with him about it. Aronson speaks for me the 30th. . . .” Potter was well acquainted with many, and his zeal for humanism was apparent to all. However, Wilson includes caustic references to Potter by some of the “meticulous academic men” involved with the writing of Humanist Manifesto I. Raymond Bragg, for example, were concerned that because of Potter’s “flare for publicity” humanism might become too exclusively identified with him rather than with the American Humanist Association. For the Merriam-Webster company, Potter wrote several definitions, including one for “humanism” which the dictionary used. Unfortunately, he reported later, he had used the words “perfectibility of mankind” rather than “improvability of mankind” as a humanistic goal. (See the entry for Ida M. Mellen. To the present writer’s surprise, the charismatic and jovial Dr. Potter and his wife enjoyed putting on ESP demonstrations at their Hotel Ansonia apartment in Manhattan, she in an adjacent room and unable to see certain cards drawn from a deck. Whether or not she bettered the mathematical odds for such, their interest in the subject was unexpected. It was a time when even the dedicated skeptics were intrigued by parapsychologist Joseph Banks Rhine’s experiments.) {CL; FUS; HM 1; HNS; HNS2; U; U&U; WAS, 16 October 1956}
Potter, Dennis (Christopher) (George) (1935–1994) Potter, a playwright, an author, and a freelance journalist on the Daily Herald, The Sun, and the Sunday Times. He wrote plays and novels but devoted his professional life to television. Some of his controversial BBC works were “Pennies From Heaven” (1978, remade as a Hollywood film), “The Singing Detective” (1986), and “Lipstick on Your Collar” (1993). When asked by Melvin Bragg of Channel 4 in England about his once having said he’d “never quite thrown off the idea of believing in God,” Potter responded, “Well, I don’t know. God’s a rumor, if you like. Christianity or indeed any other religion that is a religion because of fear of death or hope that there is something beyond death does not interest me. What kind of cruel old bugger is God if it’s terror that is the ruling edifice, the structure of religion? And too often, for too many people, it is, Now that to me isn’t religion. Religion has always been . . . the wound, not the bandage. I don’t see the point of not acknowledging the pain and the misery and the grief of the world, and if you say, ‘Ah, but God understands’ or through that you come to a greater appreciation, I then think, ‘That’s not God, that’s not my God, that’s not how I see God.’ I see God in us or with us, if I see God at all, as shreds and particles and rumors, some knowledge that we have, some feeling why we sing and dance and act, why we paint, why we love, why make art. All the things that separate us from the purely animal in us are palpably there, and you can call them what you like, and you can theologize about them, and you can build great structures of belief about them. The fact is they are there and I have no means of knowing whether that thereness in some sense doesn’t cling to what I call me.” Upon learning in 1994 that he had cancer that had spread to his liver, Potter christened the cancer Rupert, after the publisher Rupert Murdoch, whom he detested for allegedly polluting the body politic. “I would shoot the bugger if I could,” he exclaimed. Instead of wasting the bullet, however, and when his wife herself died of cancer, Potter rushed to write a final work. “My only regret,” he said, “would be to die four pages too soon. If I can finish, then I’m quite happy to go. I don’t mind. I am quite serene. I haven’t had a single moment of terror since they told me. I know I’m going to die, whether it’s in four weeks’ time, five, six. It might be longer—I might make eight, nine, ten, who knows?” Potter died fourteen weeks later, a week after Margaret, who had been his nurse, ally, and comrade for thirty-five years.
Potter, (Helen) Beatrix (1866–1943) A British Unitarian, Potter was born in Kensington, was never sent to school, and grew up a lonely child. She became self-taught and invented a cipher so elaborate that the half-million words she wrote in it were not deciphered until Leslie Linder broke the code and published The Journal of Beatrix Potter (1966). The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1893) began as a letter to the son of a former governess and was published at her own expense in 1901. In 1913 she married a Lakeland solicitor, William Heelis, and for the remainder of her life devoted herself amost entirely to her farms and the new National Trust. Potter identified with Unitarianism more because of family loyalties than acceptance of the Unitarian outlook. She has written, “I shall always call myself a Unitarian because of my father and grandmother, but for the Unitarians as a Dissenting body, as I have known them in London, I have no respect. Their creed is apt to be a timid, illogical compromise, and their forms of Service, a badly performed imitation of the Church.” The relatives she named were friends of James Martineau, whose writings emphasized the primary role of the conscience of the individual. Her father, Rupert, had studied under Martineau at New College (Unitarian) in Manchester, England. As pointed out by Stephenie Pierson, Peter Rabbit, now a century old, has been “analyzed by child psychiatrists, scrutinized by scientists and botanists, lionized by authors and poets (Graham Greene, W. H. Auden, Maurice Sendak), parsed by philologists and linguists. He’s been held and chewed and read and loved by generations of small children on large laps. And he’s come out with his charm, his dignity, and his little blue waistcoat intact.” {CE; EG; OEL; U; UU}
Potter, Van Renssalaer II (20th Century) Potter, an emeritus professor of oncology at the University of Wisconsin, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Potter, Wendall (20th Century) Potter, an African American who lives in the Detroit area, wrote “After Years of Searching I Remain A Staunch Atheist” for Secular Nation (Fall 1995). His parents had told him about the god who they said lived in the sky, and they also lied about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. As a child, he wrote,
I watched with amazement and sometimes fear, my parents go to church and “get happy.” But how could this be? My mother nearly always cried and there was nothing happy about it—not only did the whole event distress me for 14 years, it was totally unbelievable. It seemed discrediting to any god who would sanction that kind of “emotional overdosing.” That kind of emotionality was no different than what I saw at sports events or red hot parties. I was a teen before I figured out that no god could have such an effect on a person at 11:30 a.m. and by 7 p.m. hostility and sometimes violence dominated the same person. Rather than believe that god allowed this, I knew at 16 years old that he couldn’t exist. And everything I’ve seen in the last 10 years has validated my belief.
Potter, Thomas (1718–1759) In 1770, when John Murray landed at Good Luck on Barnegat Bay, New Jersey, he was given hospitality by a Universalist, Thomas Potter. It was Potter who urged Murray to preach once again, and nine years later Murray organized the First Universalist Church in America at Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Potter, William James (1829–1893) The idea of the Free Religious Association can be traced to Potter’s desire to form a “spiritual anti-slavery society” in the wake of the dispute over the formation and principles of the National Conference in 1866. Potter thought “the New Protestantism” should be a radical movement, in essence the latest expression of the core of the Protestant tradition, the resistance to theological authority. He refused to label himself “Christian,” and he persuaded his New Bedford, Massachusetts, First Congregational (Unitarian) Society to allow him not to administer the Lord’s Supper. During the tensions between radicals and Unitarian moderates in the 1870s and 1880s, Potter was dropped from the American Unitarian Association yearbook in 1873. His last book was Lectures and Sermons, with a Biographical Sketch (1895). {FUS; U&U}
Potts, Richard (20th Century)
In Dallas, Texas, Potts edited Common Herd, a non-believers’ journal, from 1909 to 1940. {FUS}
Potvin, Charles (1818–1902) A Belgian author, Potvin was a member of the Royal Academy of Letters and a professor of the history of literature at Brussels. He wrote anonymously Poesie et Amour (1858) and Rome and the Family. Under the name of “Dom Jacobus,” Potvin wrote The Church and Morality and Tablets of a Freethinker. He was president of La Libre Pensée of Brussels and was director of the Revue de Belgique. {BDF}
Pouchet, Felix Archimède (1800–1872) Pouchet was a French naturalist who studied medicine under Dr. Flaubert, father of the author of Madame Bovary and became a physician in 1827. While a professor of natural history at the Museum of Rouen, Pouchet by his experiments enriched science with many discoveries. He wrote The Universe (1865). {BDF}
Pouchet, Henri Charles George (1833–1894) Pouchet, a French naturalist, was the son of Felix Pouchet. Also a physician, he became a professor of comparative anatomy in the museum of Natural History at Paris. In 1880 he received the Legion of Honor. He wrote The Plurality of the Human Race (1858). {BDF}
Pougens, Marie Charles Joseph de (1755–1833) Pougens was a French author, a natural son of the Prince of Conti. When twenty-four, he was blinded by smallpox. Pougens was an intimate friend of philosophers, and he embraced the revolution with ardor although it ruined his fortunes. He wrote Philosophical Researches (1786), edited the posthumous works of d’Alembert (1799), and worked at a dictionary of the French language. His Jocko was the tale of a monkey and showed his sympathy with animal intelligence. In his Philosophical Letters (1826), he gives anecdotes of Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Pechmeja, and Franklin. {BDF}
Poulin, Paul (19th Century) Poulin was a Belgian follower of Baron Colins and was the author of What Is God? What Is Man? (1865), a scientific solution of the religious problem. He maintained that man and God exclude each other, that the only divinity is moral harmony. {BDF}
Poulsen, Kenneth (20th Century) Poulsen is active with the Humanists of the Sun Coast in Tarpon Springs, Florida, of which he once was President. In 1995, he was honored as Humanist of the Year at the All-Florida Humanist Conference held in Clearwater. An atheist who is a member of Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin, he has written
I am an atheist because I value the preciousness of life and believe in the earth sciences and nature. Neither gods, supernaturals, nor spirits are necessary for a crutch in the atheist dedication to a moral and ethical life. (See entry for Florida Atheists, Humanists.) {FD; Freethought History #13, 1995; Humanists of the Palm BeachesNewsletter, October 1997}
Poultier d’Elmolte, François Martin (1753–1821) At the Revolution, Poultier d’Elmolte cast aside his Benedictine frock, married, and became chief of a battalion of volunteers. Elected to the Convention, he voted for the death of the King. Exiled in 1816, he died at Tournay in Belgium. He wrote Morceau Philosophiques in the Journal Encyclopédique; Victoire [Confessions of a Benedictine]; Discours Décadaires, for the use of Theophilantropists; and Conjectures on the Nature and Origin of Things (1821). {BDF; RAT}
Pound, Louise (1872–1958)
When she reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Pound was a member of the English department at the University of Nebraska. A sister of Dr. Roscoe Pound, the noted former Dean of the Harvard Law School, she was state tennis champion of Nebraska in 1891–1892 and state golf champion in 1916. Her specialty was regional American slang and folklore, she contributed articles to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and she was on the advisory board of American Literature, College English, and the Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors. Pound edited American Speech.
Asked about humanism, Pound responded to the present author:
Human, humane, humanism, humanist, humanitarian, humanitarianism—here is a cluster of related words for lexicographers to watch, to define, and to modify their definitions when and as necessary. To follow the history of significant words, their rise and expansions of meaning, is always of interest, and preferably it is from the basic historical meaning that start should be made. It was in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the period of the English renaissance, with its rediscovery of the cultural and philosophical legacies of Greece and Rome, that the term humanism entered our language. It had about the same meaning as the Latin humanitas as used by Cicero and his contemporaries, that is, culture of the mind. Lists of the early English and European humanists are rarely identical, although to all humanism meant, no doubt, a break with the past. Some historians viewed early humanism as a revolt against the theological preconceptions of the mediaeval mind, a turn, as it were, to the earth and those dwelling on it. But surely on the whole it maintained for its users the tradition of religious orthodoxy while taking on the meaning it has retained into our own time, that of liberal cultural acquirement befitting human beings. To the humanist such acquirement was to be gained through knowledge of poetry, drama, history, rhetoric, logic, with especial emphasis on the ancient literatures. The latter seemed a storehouse of wisdom having permanent values for the conduct of life; and, further, Latin, the language of the church, gave unity to Christian Renaissance civilization. Hence the educated youth should be trained in the ‘humanities’ (French les humanites). Emerson writes in this tradition when he speaks in English Traits, 1856, of “an Eton youth learned in all the humanities,” that is, learned in the traditions of humanism, though by his time the word might also imply devotion to human interests and to systems of thought or action concerned with them. Today with the lessening of emphasis on the culture of ancient civilizations and with the rise of science to dimensions incredible in older days, the meaning of humanism is enlarging. As it turns still more to the physical world and those dwelling in it, it seems to be taking to itself some of the qualities of humanitarianism. The latter word is an extension from humane, which means gentle, kindly, sympathetic. The humanist who was concerned with the ideal world of thought and valued cultural education derived from the study of the humanities may now be a person interested in the actual world of human life, sympathetic with the human race and conscious of man’s obligations to society. The new devotion to the study of the natural world makes the old limitations seem impractical. As I hear the word humanism used today it seems to have connotations of human welfare, helpfulness, and progress. The humanist may be a cultivated man who practices humanity and humanitarianism. And he believes that to attain their best possibilities human beings must rely on themselves, not on the natural or on the supernatural. I have no new classifications to offer or proposals to try to further. On the whole, for me too the meaning of the term humanism is changing or has changed. It is enlarging from that of concern for the enhancement of mental culture, ability, and outlook into a wider naturalistic concern for general human welfare. It now implies devotion not only to the mind of man but to humanity and human interests in general. It is this meaning that as time passes will no doubt enlist most supporters.
One of Willa Cather’s biographers, Sharon O’Brien, writes that while at Duke University she came across Cather’s letters to Pound, her friend at the University of Nebraska, “romantic letters in which Cather agreed that relationships like theirs were ‘unnatural,’ ” which one secular humanist has interpreted as being a reference to the two’s specific rather than general humanistic interests. {WAS, 4 January 1952}
Poundstone, Paula (20th Century) Poundstone, a comedian, is a non-theist, according to Celebrity Atheists. She has said, “Although raised a conservative Methodist, I am, in fact, a liberal atheist. Many people mistake me for Irish.” The nice thing about being an atheist, she tells audiences is that
you don’t feel compelled to try to convert everybody. Can you just see a couple of atheists going door to door on Sunday morning and saying to people who come to the door in their bathrobes, “We have no word. Here’s a book of blank pages we’d like you to take a look at.”
{CA; E}
Paula Poundstone, Comedian ent Internet Movie Database
In an interview, Poundstone commented that she, although an atheist, really liked this blind gospel singing group from Alabama.
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In her HBO special "Paula Poundstone goes to Harvard" she says that she "didn't believe in anything" about religion, and makes a few religious jokes.
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From her page at the Mother Jones site.
[Q]: I assume you are a Jewish liberal, like myself. Do you have any opinions about why Jews tend to be more liberal as a whole?
A: I am quite flattered that you view me as a liberal Jew like yourself. Although raised a conservative Methodist, I am, in fact, a liberal atheist. Many people mistake me for Irish.
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In an August 1999 appearance on the Hollywood Squares Paula was asked how long the flood lasted in the biblical story Noah's ark. She responded with a few funny answers and then proclaimed I don't know I am an atheist!
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Another new quote: a reader reports that (in June? 1999) "E! had a show about religion in Hollywood. Most of the actors and actresses interviewed were decidedly spriritual (in mostly non-conventional ways). There was one four-second clip, sandwiched between all the others without editorial comment, in which Paula Poundstone said, "I'm an atheist, so I don't really know where spirituality fits in for me . . . a devout atheist."
Poundstone, Paula (29 Dec 1959 - )) Poundstone, a native of Boston who lives in Los Angeles, is a television hostess, and comedienne. She first picked up a microphone as a comedian in 1979 but won a Cable ACE Award in 1992 for her first hour-long stand-up special for HBO, “Cats, Cops and Stuff.” From 1993 to 1998, she wrote a column for Mother Jones and is a frequent performer at social events such as the annual televised “Comic Relief” show for the homeless. Interviewed by Jerry Fink (3 Feb 2001) for Las Vegas Sun, she told of having provided a home for eight children, three of whom she adopted and five of whom she has cared for until they can be placed in a permanent home. On 28 June 2001, Santa Monica police arrested her on a felony warrant that charged her with lewd acts upon a child and child abuse. She immediately denied the charges, that could have resulted in a maximum prison term of more than thirteen years. In September, she accepted a plea agreement that ended the child-abuse case and cleared her of lewd-conduct charges but required her to have five years of supervised probation with the condition that she spend 180 days in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center instead of in a county jail. Poundstone has nine cats and three rabbits, which she tends in addition to being a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth. Of that program she has said,
It's a blast to do. The format of the show is that three people all come out onstage and all of them claim to be the same person. They read this affidavit and, like, a short biography about the person and each panelist gets 30 seconds to ask questions. It's fun and it works great for me for a variety of reasons. Not only am I lazy, and would hate to have to memorize something, plus there is something exciting about flying by the seat of your pants. It's a syndicated show, on five (days) a week. We tape every other weekend, five shows on Saturday and five shows on Sunday. Those two days, it's a tiring schedule, but I must say the rest of the (gig) is pretty easy. I've never watched it, actually, because I get real embarrassed to see myself, but people tell me it looks like a lot of fun. I actually think it's a good show. It's not rocket science, but it's largely clever. Of the game show formats, it's one of the more clever ones.
An interview by Mother Jones included the following:
Mother Jones: I assume you are a Jewish liberal, like myself. Do you have any opinions about why Jews tend to be more liberal as a whole?
Poundstone: I am quite flattered that you view me as a liberal Jew like yourself. Although raised a conservative Methodist, I am, in fact, a liberal atheist. Many people mistake me for Irish.
On Hollywood Squares (August 1999) she was asked how long the flood lasted in the biblical story about Noah’s ark. She responded with some funny remarks, then said she didn’t know, that she’s an atheist. She responded similarly during an E! show about religion: “I’m an atheist, so I don’t really know where spirituality fits in for me . . . a devout atheist.” {CA}
Powell, B. F. (19th Century) Powell was a compiler of the Bible of Reason (1837), or scriptures of ancient moralists. {BDF}
Powell, David (20th Century) Powell has reviewed books for New Humanist.
Powell, Frederick York (1850–1904) The historical works Powell wrote allowed him to succeed Froude as Regius Professor of Modern History at Christ’s Church (Oxford). He knew Irish, Maori, Gypsy, and Persian and was an agnostic when he went to Oxford, calling himself “a decent heathen Aryan.” Of Gladstone, Powell said to Edward Clodd, “What an extraordinary thing it is that a man with such brains for finance shouldn’t be able to throw off the superstitious absurdities of the past.” {RAT; RE}
Powell, Thomas (Died 1862) Powell was a Chartist leader who was secretary of the London Atheistical Society. He emigrated to Trinidad. {VI}
POWER • The strong do what they can; the weak do what they must. –Thucydides
• [T]he only purpose for which poweer can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. . . . He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. –John Stuart Mill “On Liberty”
• I didn’t understand that there were two things vastly more important than orgasm to most people, and that’s power and its handmaiden, money. –Norman Mailer commenting about his having proposed the hipster, in Advertisements for Myself, as contemporary hero, a psychopath, utterly selfish, who exorcises the dread of the atomic age by existing for the intensity and immediacy of his pleasure—an immediacy embodied in the Negro, who had always lived with violence and had developed a proud indifference to respectability. {David Denby, The New Yorker, 20 April 1998}
Powers, J(ames) F. (1917– ) An author, Powers wrote the present author concerning humanism:
I’m not educated enough to classify myself as allied with any of the kinds of humanism you list unless it would be No. 4 (theistic humanism), but I have an instinct against definitions, which may be attributed to my lack of education, and against abstractions. I am not bragging, nor am I confessing, but just telling it as it is, to the extent that I can truthfully tell. This won’t be any help, probably, but may be better than no reply at all.
In 1963, his Morte d’Urban won the National Book Award. His 1975 book of short stories is How The Fish Live. Powers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. {WAS, 15 June 1992}
Powers, LeGrand (20th Century) Powers, a Universalist minister, was the first state labor conciliator in the United States, having been appointed by the Governor of Minnesota.
Powers, Lulie Monroe: See entry for J. R. Monroe.
Powers, Richard W. (20th Century) Powers is a contributor to Freethought Today, which is published by Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Powys, Llewelyn (1884–1940) Powys was a prolific essayist and journalist, and his Skin for Skin (1925) described somberly the course of his own tuberculosis and the idyllic Dorset interludes when it seemed he was being cured. Impassioned Clay (1931) was a personal account of the human predicament, the Epicurean ethic, and his confrontation with death. Damnable Opinions (1935) presented radical and iconoclastic views he shared with his brothers, John Cowper Powys and Theodore Powys. {FUK; RE}
Poynter, J. W. (20th Century) Poynter wrote The Popes and Social Problems (1949). {GS}
Pozner, Vladimir (20th Century) A Russian journalist and former spokesman for the Soviet Union, Pozner on a CNBC talk show with Phil Donahue stated that he is an atheist. He wrote Remembering War (1990) and Eyewitness (1992). {CA; E}
Prades, Jean Martin de (1720–1782) A French theologian, de Prades was an intimate with Diderot and contributed the article on “Certitude” to the Encyclopédie. In 1751 in the first open attack on Christianity by a French theologian, de Prades presented to the Sorbonne his thesis for the doctorate. He maintained many propositions on the soul, the origin of society, the laws of Moses, miracles, all views contrary to the dogmas of the Church. His thesis made a great scandal, and Pope Benedict XIV condemned it. As a result, de Prades fled to Holland for safety. Recommended to Frederick the Great by d’Alembert de Prades was received with favor and became reader to that monarch. Frederick wrote an anti-Christian preface to de Prades’s work on ecclesiastical history, published as Abrége de l’Histoire ecclesiastique de Fleury (1766). {BDF; RAT}
PRAGMATISM In philosophy, pragmatism is a method in which the truth of a proposition is measured by its correspondence with experimental results and by its practical outcome. “What difference will it make to practice if this philosophical claim is true?” asked the pragmatists. Truth, then, is tested by the practical consequences of belief. Originators of the system were C. S. Peirce and William James. John Dewey was influenced by the pragmatic outlook. Dewey held that as new discoveries are made, truth is modified, that truth is relative to time and place and purpose of inquiry. The Revival of Pragmatism (1999), edited by Morris Dickstein, includes essays by Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Judge Richard Posner, Stanley Fish, Richard Poirier, and Ross Posnock. Alan Ryan, in a The New York Times Book Review (4 April 1999), noted that the contributors divided along familiar lines:
Rorty says that we should see pragmatism as a form of “romantic polytheism.” Rorty’s longstanding distaste for philosophers who unproductively go on and on about whether what we believe is really true has a predictable result here. The romantic polytheist does not believe that there really are innumerable gods to be worshiped and obeyed. Rather the polytheist has bought Dewey’s thought that “God” is a plausible name for whatever we most mind about. Posner offers a different perspective; his conception of pragmatism owes as much to the everyday understanding of the word as to anything more philosophically strenuous. But his essay is a very readable, and indeed a rather elegant, discussion of the ways an appellate judge goes about deciding what the law requires. Just as Richard Rorty provides us with John Dewey rather dramatically loosened up, so Judge Posner provides us with something like Benjamin Cardozo in his shirtsleeves. . . . Ray Carney’s account of the paintings of Thomas Eakins is perhaps the farthest removed from the work of the philosophers and lawyers, and it is certainly the most self-conscious about going back into the 19th century rather than promoting pragmatism as a branch of late-20th-century avant-gardism. But Carney takes off from one of Dewey’s pregnant remarks in Art as Experience—that “mind is primarily a verb”—and Eakins’s paintings of the surgeon at work in “The Surgical Clinic of Professor Gross” and “The Clinic of Professor Agnew” provide him with just the platform he needs. (See H. S. Thayer in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 6, for discussions of Peirce, James, Dewey, and others. Also see the entry for Richard Rorty and a 1994 work, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication.) {CE; RE}
Prahl, Frank (20th Century) Prahl at the 1993 Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual convention in Huntsville, Alabama, spoke on “Library Censorship: What You Can Do.” He is a member of the American Humanist Association and is secretary of Humanists of Houston, Texas. Prahl was one of the organizers of a January 1999 Humanist and Freethought Conference in Arlington, Texas.
Prairie, Alexander (20th Century) Prairie was a President of Atheists United in Sherman Oaks, California. He resigned in 1993.
PRAKTISCHE HUMANISTIEK A Dutch quarterly for humanist counselors, Praktische Humanistiek is at Postbus 470, 3500 AL Utrecht, The Netherlands; <mg@uvh.nl>.
Pratchett, Terry (1948 - ) Pratchett is a science fiction and writer of humorous materials. His Discworld series contains an article entitled “A Life in the Day of Terry Pratchett,” in which he remarks, “I think I’m probably an atheist, but rather angry with God for not existing.” {CA; E}
Prater, Horatio (Died 1885) Prater wrote Physiology of the Blood (1832), Letters to the American People, and Literary Essays (published 1856). A gentleman of fortune, he left the bulk of his money to benevolent objects. Because of his knowledge of physiology and to insure that he was really dead, Prater ordered that a deep wound be made in his arm. {BDF}
Pratt, Ann B. (20th Century) Pratt founded the Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry group.
Pratt, Enoch (Born 1810) Pratt, a Unitarian, was a 19th century financier and philanthropist. {U}
Praxiteles (c. 370–330 B.C.E.): See entry for Beauty.
PRAYER • Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them seriously. –Sir Francis Galton
• It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. –Mark Twain
• Pray, n. To ask the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.
–Ambrose Bierce
• The English . . . obviously regarded praying much as they did a necessary physical function, something best done in private. –Baroness James of Holland Park
• Hands that help are better than lips that pray. –Robert Ingersoll
• Some freethinker solutions as to Whom to pray to –the great French goddess, Mais Oui –the vegetation god, Lettuce –Who Knows (as in, why oh why did it rain?) –Anonymous
• E-mail #1 to God If I pray to You, will You listen? <wasm@idt.net>
You can waste your time, if you wish. However, I’d appreciate it if you’d get off my back and let me finesse programming 9001-beta for HAL. <God@eden.com>
• E-mail #2 to God Why, dear God, did the Age of Miracles end? <secularhum@aol.com>
That was the development phase of the project. Now we’re in the maintenance phrase. <God@eden.com>
• E-mail #3 to God O, Heavenly Lord of Us All, why did You allow Satan and evil? <RevDoodoo@aol.com>
Believe me, Satan is simply an MIS director who takes credit for more powers than he actually possesses. Nonprogrammers become scared of him. He’s irritating, but irrelevant. I had thought I eliminated evil in one of the earlier revs, so you’ll just have to put up with the problem until I devise an update of the program. <God@eden.com>
PRAYER FOR FORGIVENESS In Louisiana, Shreveport humanists tell the story about the boy who prayed for a bicycle. When it did not come in time for his birthday, he prayed for one at Christmas. When none arrived at Christmas, he realized that is not how things worked. Next day he stole one . . . and prayed for forgiveness.
PRAYER IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS: See entry for Katha Pollitt.
PRAYER WHEEL In Buddhism, a prayer wheel is a cylinder with prayers written on it. The wheel is turned by some worshipers during prayer, or the turning may be used as a substitute for spoken prayers. {DCL}
Preda, Pietro (19th Century) Preda was an Italian who wrote Revelation and Reason (1865) under the pseudonym of “Padre Pietro.” {BDF}
PREDESTINATION In theology, predestination is a doctrine asserting that God has pre-planned from eternity the salvation of certain souls. Calvinism even developed double predestination, asserting that God has foreordained some people to damnation. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that predestination is consistent with free will inasmuch as God moves the soul according to its nature. Calvinism, however, rejects the role of free will. Naturalists find such a doctrine impossible to test and meaningless. (See entries for determinism and for Jacobus Arminius.) {CE}
PREFERENCE FALSIFICATION Timur Kuran, in Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995), holds that social pressures can make people say that they want and believe something that they really do not want or believe. As an illustration, individuals in a dictatorship may speak highly of their leaders but privately call them scoundrels and fools. People in small American towns may attend church regularly and pray with everyone else, even though they are unsure whether they actually believe in God or understand their church’s doctrines. “Falsified preferences,” of course, could simply be labeled as lies, but he notes that they are lies with certain social implications. Usually, they are the result of perceiving what the opinions of others presently are or will be. Unwilling to disagree with the majority, individuals protect their reputation by declining to say anything that people might deem bizarre or offensive. As people’s thoughts about other people’s thoughts change, Kuran notes, people’s public preferences are affected. When the shifts are rapid, there can be a bandwagon effect. He gives as examples the changing norms involving smoking, discrimination, sneaker wear, the use of “Ms.,” surprise best-sellers, the use of “African American,” and recycling. Public pressures, it follows, affect private preferences as well as public pressures. He gives the example that “Hindu ideology has contributed to the untouchables’ acceptance of their deprivations as fair, that it has made many treat their wretched existence as natural, and that it has facilitated their complicity in an order that degrades them.” Thoughts that are generally considered “unthinkable” eventually become “unthought,” illustrating that social pressures can make certain ideas disappear from public discussion. Kuran discusses how the possibilities of law involve an inherent mystery. Laws often are rarely enforced—those requiring people to clean up after their dogs, those banning littering, those directing where people can smoke, for example—but have an effect on people’s perceptions of other people’s attitudes. Kuran’s thesis bears on why “the village atheist” is disliked, why the moral majority makes cogent attacks upon homosexuals, hippies, and unwed mothers, as well as why social pressures can be serious obstacles to liberty but why, in the face of such obstacles, governmental efforts might actually promote freedom.
PREJUDICE “Children,” said Sir Peter Ustinov, the Goodwill Ambassador-at-Large for Unicef, “are the one strata of life which have absolutely no prejudice. None of us, and this is a message of hope, are born with prejudice. You often see children playing with someone who is hideously deformed by some caprice of nature, and the only people appalled are the adults who are wondering whether the children should be allowed to play together. Unfortunately, prejudice comes from education and with family life and all the things that are praised by religious orthodoxy. Every good bottle of wine has to have some residue. Similarly, life comes with prejudice, and there’s little one can do. I am still learning things that I learned in my first school, for example. Why do I think that? I ask myself and then trace it back to some idiotic history book or patriotic idea.” {WAS, Conversation 22 April 1995}
PRELATE
• Prelate, n. A church officer having a superior degree of holiness and a fat preferment. One of Heaven’s aristocracy. A gentleman of God.
–Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary • . . .an ecclesiastical oxymoron. Johnny Hart in “B.C.,” a cartoon strip
Preller, Ludwig (1809–1861) Preller began to study for the Church but became a rationalist and turned to philology, which he taught at Jena. Preller wrote about Greek and Roman religion (Griechische Mythologie and Romische Mythologie, 1854–1858) and was an agnostic. {RE}
Premanand, B. (20th Century) Premanand is an Indian famous for his debunking of the miracle men in India. As a devout Hindu twelve-year-old, he believed those men and longed to possess their powers. In a New Humanist interview with Jim Herrick (June 1992), he smiled upon hearing that in the West European psychics and spiritualists are thought of as fraudulent whereas Indian gurus are believed to be basically honest. “They want something new and they think that new powers come from these gurus,” he explained. “In India,” he added, “you can take action against people who make false advertisements.” Premanand has toured the State of Maharashtra to expose god-men by repeating their tricks, James Randi-style, in front of large audiences. “I would be really happy to see a true miracle,” he said when interviewed. “It is one of my ambitions before I die.” But, reported Herrick, “there is a twinkle in his eye at this point.” In addition to being convenor of India’s Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), he edits Indian Skeptic, a monthly in English. In his Science Versus Miracles (1994), Premanand explains 150 or so tricks of the godmen, and he proposes bringing out nine more volumes in order to explain an additional 1500 of the godmen’s tricks. For his popularizing of science, he was given an award in 1998 of 100,000 rupees by the National Council for Science and Technology Communication of the Indian Government’s Department of Science and Technology. (See entries for Narendra Dabholkar and Govind N. Deodhekar.)
Premontval, André Pierre Le Guay de (1716–1767) When nineteen, Premontval in the college of Plessis Sorbonne composed a work against the dogma of the Eucharist. He was a member of the Academy of Sciences at Berlin. He wrote Le Diogene de d’Alembert (1754, Freethoughts on Man), Panangiana Panurgica (1757, The False Evangelist), and Vues Philosophiques (1757). In De la Théologie de L’Etre, Premontval denied many of the ordinary proofs of the existence of a God. {BDF}
Prentice, Ruth (20th Century) Prentice is historian of Internet Infidels. On the Web: <rprentice@infidels.org>.
PRESBYTERIAN
• Presbyterian, n. One who holds the conviction that the governing authorities of the Church should be called presbyters.
–Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH The Presbyterian Church (USA), organized in 1983, is at 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky. It reports having 3,600,000 or so adherents. Andrew W. Rule, once professor of church history and apologetics in the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky, gave the following description in the 1940s:
A Church is presbyterian when it acknowledges in its polity no higher office than that of “presbyter” or elder, and when its highest courts, therefore, are composed of presbyters. It is Protestant in the sense that it claims historical continuity with the Protestant Reformation, and adheres to the basic Reformation principles. It is catholic in the sense that it recognizes, and is proud to claim membership along with other non-Presbyterian bodies in one, universal Church, the body of Christ is that Head, constituted by Him “from above.” {ER}
Prescott, James W. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Prescott was with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Prescott edited San Diego’s Truth Seeker from 1989 to 1990. He is founder and director of the Institute of Humanistic Science. His e-mail: <dpresco1@san.rr.com>. {FD; HM2}
Prescott, William Hickling (1796–1859) Prescott, a historian, wrote histories of Mexico, Peru, and Spain. In 1904, W. H. Munro edited twenty-two volumes of his works. When he visited London in 1850, at the house of the Bishop of Oxford, he met the daughter of a Bishop who said she had never before heard the name of Dr. William Ellery Channing. According to his friend George Ticknor, Prescott replied, “I gave her a great shock by telling her I was a Unitarian. The term is absolutely synonymous, in a large party here, with infidel, Jew, Mohammedan; worse even, because [a Unitarian was] regarded as a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Like many leading families of Boston, according to his biographer C. Harvey Gardiner, the Prescotts shifted to Unitarianism. “Like Susan [his wife], William could not turn his back on his church, so they compromised. A compact between them provided for their alternating between the Unitarian and Episcopal churches.” {CE; EG; U; UU}
PRESIDENTS, RELIGIOUS AFFILIATIONS OF THE U.S.: See entry for Franklin Steiner.
Presley, Sharon (20th Century) Presley, the director of the Institute for Critical Thinking, is author of Belief Style Traps—Tyranny of the Mind. She spoke at the 1995 Atheist Alliance Convention in North Hollywood, California.
Press, Jacques (20th Century) A noted Hollywood composer, Press was an associate of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. In 1972 to the New York Humanist Chapter (AHA), Press discussed “Humanism and Creative Imagination in Music.”
Preston, S. Tolver (Born 1844) A freethinker, Preston wrote Science and Sectarian Religion (1883). {GS}
PRESTON (England) HUMANISTS For information, telephone Peter Howells at 01257 265276.
Prévost, Eugène Marcel (Born 1862) Prévost, a novelist, wrote a successful novel, Le scorpion (1887), which was based on his negative experiences of the Jesuits as teachers. Prévost was admitted to the French Academy in 1909, was an Officer of the Legion of Honour, and the Honorary President of the Société des Gens de Lettres. He wrote De la prostitution des enfants (1909). {RAT}
Prévost, Louis Constant (1787–1856) Prévost taught geology at Paris University. McCabe says of Prévost that “his work in ridding the science of Biblical adulterations and establishing the principle of uniformity raised him to the position in France which Lyell occupied in England.” {RAT; RE}
Prévost-Paradol, Lucien Anatole (1829–1870) Once a professor of French literature at Aix in 1855, Prévost-Paradol resigned in 1856 and joined the staff of the Journal des Débats and the Courrier du Dimanche. He was a spirited opponent of the clerical-imperialists, was sent to prison in 1866, and the Courrier was suppressed. In 1870 he became French Ambassador at Washington, for which his advanced colleagues blamed him. The Franco-Prussian War, which at once broke out, so depressed him that he shot himself in America, which, according to McCabe, at least proved that in accepting the Empire he had not embraced its theology. Prévost-Paradol was a member of the French Academy. {RAT}
Preyer, Wilhelm Thierry (1841–1897) Preyer’s The Soul of the Child (1889) was the German physiologist’s well-known work. Preyer was one of the first German professors to welcome evolution and apply it to physiology and psychology. He wrote a Rationalist appreciation of Darwin, Darwin: Sein Leben und Wirken (1896). {RAT; RE}
Price, Ben (20th Century) Price is co-editor with Tom Mulliam of Groundswell, a freethought monthly devoted to individual freedoms.
Price, Karen A. (20th Century) Price is associated with the Humanist Chapter of Miami Valley (AHA) in Ohio. (See entry for Ohio Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Price, Lawrence M. (Born 1881) Price wrote The Reception of English Literature in Germany (1968). Asked for his views of humanism, he responded to the present author:
Your inclusion of me probably indicates that you wish to know what the non-philosopher pictures to himself under the term “humanism.” I am under the impression that philosophy is concerned in great part with the relation of the human mind to the outside material world. I find the hypothesis of the existence of the mind of man no bolder than the hypothesis of the existence of matter. The humanist, I would say, considers the impact of the material world upon the mind as the most important thing about matter. His view of the universe is therefore homocentric. This illusion I regard as highly healthful. Man thus feels he is an actor of a bit part in a universe drama. Most humanists prefer to think that the drama will have a happy end of some sort. Most humans are humanists, although some of them are not aware of it. A motor mechanic thinks that the machine is what is important to him. He is not aware of the fact that the importance of the machine consists in the fact that it stimulates his curiosity. If I am a humanist I do not know to which group I belong. I do not disagree with any paragraphs of the [Harry] Overstreet letter. The Webster definition is somewhat random. The terms ancient humanism, classical humanism, and neo-humanism seem useful for the library or the historian. Theistic humanism seems to me a contradiction of terms. I have no opinion, for lack of a clear conception, of atheistic humanism and communistic humanism.
(See entry for Harry Overstreet) {WAS, 15 October 1951}
Price, Robert M. (1954- ) Price, who has taught New Testament, theology, and mythology at Drew University, Montclair State University, and Unification Theological Seminary, edits The Journal of Higher Criticism and writes fiction. He commenced as a fundamentalist Baptist, then became interested in the theology of Paul Tillich, briefly flirted with Unitarian Universalism, and is now a freethinker. He hosts Heretics Anonymous at his New Jersey home and is a supporter of Internet Infidels. Price signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. In 1999 he was named Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism. “I take quite seriously the likelihood that there was no historical Jesus in the first place,” he wrote in World (Winter 1998-1999), a thesis he will develop in Deconstructing Jesus (2000). E-mail: <criticus@aol.com>.
“PRICK AND HOLE” BIBLE: See entry for Harris Lenowitz.
PRIDE On the subject of pride, Bertrand Russell observed:
The men who think out administrative reforms and schemes of social amelioration are for the most part earnest men who are no longer young. Too often they have forgotten that to most people, not only spontaneity but some kind of personal pride is necessary to happiness. The pride of a great conqueror is not one that a well-regulated world can allow, but the pride of the artist, of the discoverer, of the man who has turned a wilderness into a garden or has brought happiness where, but for him, there would be misery—such pride is good, and our social system should make it possible, not only for the few, but for the many.
But as for those who are proud of their having accepted some organized religious group’s views, Russell wrote,
There is something feeble, and a little contemptible, about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
(See entry for Richard Taylor, who has written a defense of Pride.)
{Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Priest, John F. (20th Century) A professor of religion at Florida State University, Priest is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Priest addressed the group. {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1982}
Priestley, J. B.: See entry for Theism. Also see the entry for George Orwell, who suspected Priestley of Communist ties because he made so much money in the USSR.
Priestley, Joseph (1733–1804) Priestley, a chemist who was in the Royal Society, was co-discoverer of oxygen with Swedish pharmacist Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742–1786). In his History of Electricity (1767), Priestley explained the rings (now known as Priestley’s rings) formed by a discharge upon a metallic surface. The importance of his discovery of “dephlogisticated air,” the gas Lavoisier later named oxygen, Priestley did not fully appreciate. In 1774, Priestley published his Examination of Scottish Philosophy, followed in 1782 by History of the Corruptions of Christianity. The latter book was considered blasphemous and was burned in public, for it rejected predestination and the Trinity, and it refused to accept the view that the Bible is divinely revealed. In 1786, he published History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ. In 1790 he wrote two volumes of A General History of the Christian Church to the Fall of the Western Empire and in 1803 finished another four volumes. At one time he wrote of his regret that Benjamin Franklin was not only an “unbeliever in Christianity” but also refused to read books and pamphlets purporting to “prove” the truth of Christianity. Priestley, according to Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley (1990), read Jefferson but did not share his theology, . He opposed the slave trade and favored the French Revolution, which led in 1791 to people storming his house, wrecking his library, and destroying his scientific apparatus. As a result, Priestley—once a Presbyterian and now a convert to Unitarianism—fled in 1794 to the United States, residing the rest of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania, where his sons lived. Here, he received a warm welcome, continuing his scientific experiments and becoming the last defender of the phlogiston theory, one which postulates that in all flammable materials a substance (phlogiston) without color, odor, taste, or weight is given off in burning. He also was critical of Benjamin Franklin, writing, “It is much to be lamented that a man of Dr. Franklin’s general good character and great influence, should have been an unbeliever in Christianity, and also have done so much as he did to make others unbelievers.” Priestley, who despite a problem with stammering had been a Unitarian preacher in England at Needham Market, Leeds, Birmingham, and Hackney, also preached from 1794 to 1804 in Northumberland. A lecture he gave in Philadelphia led to the establishment of that city’s first Unitarian Church and, in 1796, the first church so named in the Americas. Berman relates the reaction by Matthew Turner to Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever—the two discussed deism, atheism, and Unitarianism. Priestley hoped that his History of the Corruptions of Christianity, which concluded that much accepted Christian dogma was in fact a “corruption” of the original Christian truth, would clear away theological error to exhibit the version of Unitarianism that he thought would eventually predominate as the Christian faith. Although his definition of “God” was unorthodox, Priestley believed in human survival after death; in fact, he reasoned that inasmuch as animals live in such misery here, “a merciful God will make them some recompense for it hereafter.” In England, Priestley is revered as a founder of the Unitarian movement. In the United States, his version of Enlightenment Unitarianism became a significant part of the American liberal heritage. However, as can be seen from his criticism of Franklin, he was anything but a liberal in the current meaning of that word. (See entry for John Clifford.) {BDF; CE; EG; FUS; HAB; HNS2; JMR; JMRH; TYD; U; U&U; UU}
PRIESTS • . . . the priest in his surplice, who resembles a dangerous rhinoceros. –Vincent Van Gogh, upon his arrival in Arles after recovering from a bout of religious fervor {The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 1996}
The Kansas City Star, at the end of 1999, sent questionnaires to 3,000 of the 46,000 priests in the United States, asking about their sexuality. Of 801 responses received, 75% of the priests said they were heterosexual, 15% were homosexual, and 5% were bisexual. The paper found that Catholic priests are dying from AIDS-related illnesses at a rate four times higher than the general population and that the cause is often concealed on their death certificates.
Prillaman, Lexro Bernard (20th Century) In 1931 for his M.A. thesis at Northwestern University in Illinois, Prillaman wrote on the subject of the figures of speech which Robert G. Ingersoll used. {FUS}
PRIMATE
• Primate, n. The head of a church, especially a State church supported by involuntary contributions. The Primate of England is the Archbishop of Canterbury, an amiable old gentleman, who occupies Lambeth Palace when living and Westminister Abbey when dead. He is commonly dead. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Primm, Sarah (20th Century) Primm is active in the Humanist Association of Pikes Peak. (See entry for Colorado Humanists.) {FD}
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY FREETHINKERS Princeton University in New Jersey has a freethinkers’ group which can be found on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
PRINCIPLE OF EMERGENCE: See the entry for Determinism.
PRINCIPLE OF VERIFIABILITY The Logical Positivists held that the Principle of Verifiability is a claim about what meaningfulness is: “at its simplest, a sentence is meaningful provided there is a method for verifying it. Therefore, if a sentence has no such method, i.e., if it does not have associated with it a way of telling whether it is conclusively true or conclusively false, then it is meaningless.” In the 1920s it was hoped this would strip “metaphysical discourse” of its pretensions of factuality. Thus, “Dominica has 365 rivers” is verifiable, therefore meaningful. “St. Peter used to flap his wings in my apple tree” is unverifiable and meaningless. “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe” is both meaningless and nonsensical. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” is unverfiable and therefore meaningless. (For discussions of the principle, see entry by R. W. Ashby in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8; and by Ernest LePore of Rutgers University in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.)
Pringle, Allen (19th Century) Pringle was a Canadian freethinker, author of Ingersoll in Canada (1880). {BDF; FUK}
Pringle-Pattison, Andrew Seth (20th Century) Pringle-Pattison, in Australia, wrote Awake! Theological Addresses and the Clergy (1922). {GS}
Prins, Marie P. (20th Century) Prins, a Dutch secular humanist, has written, “Why is it necessary to have such a heavy philosophical discussion about whether people need God to be moral? Let us look at the practice. After all there have been quite a few atheists all through a large part of recorded history—for instance the Confucians and the Buddhists. I may be missing something,” she added, “but I am not aware that their morals are any worse nor any better than those of mono- or poly-theists of whatever kind.” {Free Inquiry, Summer 1996}
PRINTING “Printing,” according to Pulitzer-Prize winner Dared Diamond, is “the best single ‘invention’ of this millennium.” Without its invention, people would not have read quickly the Bible, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, the Declaration of Independence, the Communist Manifesto, or other world-changing texts. But Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) is only partly responsible:
Gutenberg played a major practical and symbolic role in independently reinventing, in a greatly improved form and within a more receptive society, a printing technique previously developed in Minoan Crete around 1700 B.C., if not long before that.
Chinese printing is known to go back to around the 2nd Century C.E., Diamond continues, “when Buddhist texts on marble pillars began to be transferred to the new Chinese invention of paper via smeared ink. By the year 868, China was printing books. But most Chinese printers carved or otherwise wrote out a text on a wooden block instead of assembling it letter by letter as Gutenberg did (and as almost all subsequent printers using alphabetic scripts have also done). Hence the credit for what Gutenberg invented is also corrected from ‘printing’ to ‘printing with movable type’: that is, printing with individual letters that can be composed into texts, printed, disassembled, and reused.” The Minoans had created a disk covered on both sides with spiraling arrays of 241 symbols constituting 45 different “letters” (actually, syllabic signs), which were not deciphered until recently. The disk was discovered in the ruins of a 1700 B.C.E. palace at Phaistos on Crete. {Jared Diamond, The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999}
Priscillian (Died 385?) A Spanish churchman, the bishop of Avila, Priscillian was suspected of Manichaean and Gnostic leanings because he stressed puristic ideals, sought perfection in asceticism, and dabbled in astrology. The Roman Emperor Maximum ordered that Priscillian be put to death for practicing magic, and he was executed despite protests from such of his former opponents in the church as St. Ambrose, St. Martin, and the pope. In a council held at Brago (563?), Priscillianism was finally condemned and disappeared from Spain. {CE; TYD}
PRISON INMATES A study in England’s The Guardian (2 Feb 1998) reported that inmates in British prisons numbered as follows:
34,506 were Christians of various denominations 4,758 were members of others faiths; 85 were agnostics 76 were atheists. Pritt, D. N. (Born 1887) Pritt was a barrister and freethinker. He was vice president of the National Council for Civil Liberties in England. {TRI}
PRIVACY The right to privacy is a fundamental right, according to Levi Fragell, President, and Babu R. R. Gogineni, Executive Director of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. La vie privée is, for freethinkers, to be cherished above every other right. In 1998 when the United States President William Jefferson Clinton was threatened with impeachment, the IHEU went on record in a letter to President Clinton:
We write as President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (which has 100 member organisations in over 35 countries including the USA) to express our deep concern at the invasion of your life, and Ms. Lewinsky’s [a White House employee who admitted to having had oral sex with him], privacy. We consider quite unacceptable the gross interference of both State and judiciary in what are essentially matters of personal morality. Whether the person involved is a private citizen or the President of the United States is immaterial. The public persecution and humiliation to which you are being subjected reminds us humanists of the terrible practices carried out by the Church in the Dark Ages—and of the cruelties perpetrated by some theocratic regimes in today’s world. Protection of privacy, when matters do not attract the provisions of the criminal law is a fundamental human right. If privacy were violated by society’s official institutions, we can none of us feel safe in our private lives, and therefore commiserate with you at the public violation of your rights. As human beings we all rely on a reciprocal sense of solidarity and common humanity from our fellow citizens, and we deeply regret that this has not been available to you, as Congress prepares to initiate impeachment proceedings against you. {International Humanist, October 1998}
PROCESS PHILOSOPHY: See entry for Charles Hartshorne.
Proctor, Richard Anthony (1837–1888) Proctor, an English astronomer, spoke out against religion as being irreconcilable with the facts of science. The honorable secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society, he maintained in 1869 the since-established theory of the solar corona. Attracted by Newman, Proctor for a time was a Catholic, but when he thought out the question of Catholicism and science he formally renounced religion in a letter to the New York Tribune (November 1875), calling the two irreconcilable. Further heretical views were shown in his remarks on the so-called Star of Bethlehem in The Universe of Suns, and Other Science Gleanings. Proctor entirely rejected the miraculous elements of the gospels, which he considered largely a rechauffé of solar myths. He pointed out the coincidence between the Christian stories and solar myths, and also with stories found in Josephus. According to his friend Edward Clodd, Proctor was an agnostic to the end of his life. The very last article that Proctor published was a vindication of Colonel Ingersoll in his controversy with Gladstone in the North American Review. Proctor contracted yellow fever and died in New York. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Proctor Jr., William Earl (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Proctor was president of the Philadelphia Area American Humanist Association. {FD; HM2}
PROFESSORIAL ACADEMESE Roy Bhaskar’s Plato etc: The Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution (1994) includes the following sentence:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal of the unholy trinity of Parmenedian/Platonic/ Aristotelian provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humea-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monavalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean/Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard. {Skeptic Vol. 4, No. 2, 1996}
PROGRESS • Signs of one who is making progress are: He censures no one, praises no one, blames no one, finds fault with no one, says nothing about himself as though he were somebody or knew something. When he is hampered or prevented, he blames himself. And if anyone compliments him, he smiles to himself at the person complimenting; while if anyone censures him, he makes no defense. He has put away from himself his every desire, and has transferred his aversion to those things only, of what is under our control, which are contrary to nature. In a word, he keeps guard against himself as though he were his own enemy lying in wait. –Epictetus
PROGRESSIVE LEAGUE The Progressive League in England was formed in 1932 to bring together various progressive societies and individuals. It specializes in social activities, organizes conferences, produces the monthly Plan, and is headed by Dorothy Forsyth, 39 Belsize Court, Lyndhurst Gardens, London NW 3 5QP.
PROMETHEUS In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the Titan who was man’s benefactor. He stole fire from the gods, gave it to man, and taught man many arts and sciences. Zeus, in retaliation, plagued man with Pandora and her box of evils, then chained Prometheus to a mountain, where an eagle preyed on his ravaged liver, which was daily reconstituted so it could be daily re-ravaged. Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, Goethe’s “Prometheus,” Byron’s “Prometheus,” and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound relate the myth, pointing out that the gods were less angry at Prometheus for giving man fire than they were about his having given man hope. Paul Kurtz, in his Toward a New Enlightenment (1994), emphasizes the Promethean myth as being Hellenistic in origin, a myth which “has inspired countless generations of protesters, atheists, secularists, and humanists who herald Prometheus’s heroic virtues. Pitted against this myth are the Mosaic, Christian, and Islamic revelatory myths, Hebraic in origin and inspiration. One difference is that the Greeks, at least by the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers, knew that the Homeric legends were only mythological” whereas “Judeo-Christian theologians and philosophers, still today, have not accepted the fact that their Gospels are likewise only confused mythical fictions spun out of the human imagination.” Kurtz submits that Prometheus is particularly relevant today, that “Promethean men and women have audacity and the stubbornness and determination to create and realize their own ideals. They are self-generating free spirits, thinkers, and doers. Prometheus thus emphasizes the heroic virtues. . . . The human being by definition is a Promethean animal and human history began when men and women set out on their own without Zeus to create a better, more interesting, morally meaningful, and exciting life.” (See entry for Greek and Roman gods.) {CL}
PROMETHEUS-SPRAVODAI SPOLOCNOSTI PROMETHEUS A quarterly Slovak publication with English summaries, Prometheus-Spravodai Spolocnosti Prometheus is at Palovicova 14, 82 1 08 Bratislava, Slovakia.
PROMETHEUS BOOKS Prometheus Books, a publisher (59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, New York 14228), is the largest publishing company in upstate New York. It has more than one thousand titles and has specialized in books on secular humanism, atheism, skepticism and the paranormal, science, philosophy, the social sciences, sexology, education, and history. Run by Paul Kurtz’s son, Jonathan, the company has published works by Peter Ustinov, Martin Gardner, Sidney Hook, Thomas Szasz, Isaac Asimov, Steve Alan Kennedy Taylor, James T. Farrell, Bertrand Russell, Susan Blackmore, and Stefan Heym. It also publishes classical authors, including Descartes, Kant, Paine, Darwin, Dewey, Huxley, Adam Smith, and others. Some of its published authors have complained that the company is partly a vanity press, others that it is nepotistically allied with the Council for Secular Humanism. However, Prometheus remains one of the largest printers of freethought books., titles which other companies often are fearful of publishing. On the Web: <pbooks6205@aol.com>.
PROMETHEUS SOCIETY The Prometheus Society (IHEU) is at Osadna 3, 831 03 Bratislava, Slovac Republic. (See entry for Jaroslav Celko.)
PROMISCUITY • What I have seen of the love affairs of other people has not led me to regret that deficiency in my experience. –George Bernard Shaw
• Save a boyfriend for a rainy day, and another in case it doesn’t rain. –Mae West
PROOF The love of truth is admirable. But veracity, as defined by John Locke, is “not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.” Bertrand Russell adds, “What sort of thing is it reasonable to believe without proof? I should reply: The facts of sense experience and the principles of mathematics and logic–including the inductive logic employed in science. These are things which we can hardly bring ourselves to doubt, and as to which there is a large measure of agreement among mankind. But in matters as to which men disagree, or as to which our own convictions are wavering, we should look for proofs, or, if proofs cannot be found, we should be content to confess ignorance.” {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Proper, Matt (20th Century) Proper, who is from Niskayuna and goes to Yale, is president of the Yale University Humanists and Secularists.
PROPHET A prophet is one who utters “divinely” inspired revelations. The word is not a useful term in philosophy. According to R. B. Y. Scott, professor of Old Testament Literature and Exegesis in the United Theological College of Montreal in Canada, “The first prophets so-called were dervish ecstatics, like the prophets of Baal (I Kings 18:25-29) and other contemporary groups whose psychopathic acts and cries were attributed to divine possession (I Samuel 10: 5, 6).” The prophets were not forecasters or philosophers “but mystics, preachers, moralists, poets, and men of action who felt themselves to be mouthpieces of Yahweh.” Major Prophets are said to have been Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. Minor Prophets were Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obodiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habbakuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Emanuel Swedenborg and Joseph Smith are self-proclaimed prophets who came out of Protestant backgrounds. Muhammad declared he was the last and greatest of the prophets. In Greece, the prophets were called poets.
PROSTITUTION • Prostitutes are a necessity: without them, men would assault respectable women in the streets. –Napoleon
Joseph McCabe points out that prostitution was no less frequent in Christian than in pagan times. He cites a French priest who had a most extensive knowledge of classical and medieval literature and who found “that while the wicked Greeks had about fifty words for the sex act, and the Romans (including Dr. Sanger’s Martial) about the same number, the French of the Middle Ages had 300. Compare Rabelais. And the evil had a brazenness that would never have been tolerated in Athens, Alexandria, or Rome. In 1189, ships took 300 prostitutes to the Crusaders in Palestine, and St. Louis complained bitterly of the same traffic in the Sixth Crusade. Thousands of them—the Swiss, in 1476, found 2,000 left behind in one camp after the defeat of the Emperor—accompanied armies, and hundreds flocked to important Church Councils.” McCabe’s Story of the World’s Oldest Profession (1932) analyzes the subject, including sacred prostitution. Humanists Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough have written Women and Prostitution, A Social History, in which they discuss the historical, sociological, and anthropological background of the “world’s oldest profession.” Novelist Emily Hahn told the present author that prostitution, both male and female, entirely “natural.” Pierre Bayle has pointed out that prostitutes are seldom atheists. Agreeing, a recent editor of Free Inquiry found when he attended a 1997 prostitutes’ conference in California, “I did meet some sacred whores when I was at the conference,” jocularly adding, “but my atheism repelled them. I can’t even get laid at a prostitution convention!” (See entry for Australian and New Zealand Humanists.) {RE}
Protagoras (c 481–411 B.C.E.) “As to the gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life,” wrote Protagoras. He is “the first notable Humanist of whom there is reliable record,” according to Corliss Lamont, and formulated the famous dictum, ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.’ ” Protagoras’s agnosticism was archetypal . McCabe called it an obvious screen for his atheism, led to the Sophistic tradition of agnosticism. It incited Athenians to banish him and burn his books in the market place. {CE; CL; HNS2; JM; RE; TYD}
PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC The Protestant work ethic is a view of life that promotes hard work and self-discipline as a means to material prosperity. It is called Protestant because some Protestant groups believe that such prosperity is a sign of God’s “grace.” {DCL}
PROTESTANTISM • Definition of Protestantism: hemiplegic paralysis of Christianity—and of reason. ––Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore. ––H. L. Mencken
PROTESTANTS AND OTHERS UNITED FOR THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE Horace Kallen and Warren Allen Smith once served on the Board of Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church State (POAU). One aim of the group, composed mainly of clerics except for the two naturalistic humanists, was to keep Fordham University from acquiring New York City public land next to Lincoln Center in Manhattan. The goal was unsuccessful. Commenting upon the group’s title, Kallen, a professor of aesthetic at the New School for Social Research, remarked to Smith, “You and I apparently are the ‘other’ Americans.” (See entry for Church and State.)
PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION: See entry for Hoaxes, Religious.
Proudhon, Pierre Joseph (1809–1865)
Proudhon was a French social theorist and anarchist. In 1840 in a memoir, “What Is Property?”, he gave the celebrated answer, “C’est le vol!” (It’s theft!”). Asked about God, he replied with the aphorism, “Dieu, c’est le mal” (God, God is evil). As for humanism, he wrote, “I can be neither spiritualist, nor materialist, nor atheist, nor humanist. . . . Humanism is a false religion.” After the Revolution of 1848 he was elected a member of the constituent assembly and tried unsuccessfully to establish a national bank for reorganization of credit in the interest of the workers. He attacked Louis Bonaparte when President, resulting in a sentence of three years in jail and a fine of 10,000 francs. For his \ work \ on \Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, he was condemned to three years in prison and 4,000 francs fine in 1858. Proudhon escaped to Belgium. Among his posthumous works was The Gospels Annotated (1866). His complete works totaled twenty-six volumes and often express his anarchistic views. {BDF; HNS2; RAT; RE}
Proust, Marcel (1871–1922) Called by some one of the three major authors of the century (along with Thomas Mann and James Joyce, who also were freethinkers), Proust was a novelist, essayist, and critic, the author of A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1937; English translation, Remembrance of Things Past, 1922–1931; however, In Search of Lost Time is a less careless translation). His parents were wealthy, and one of his cousins married Henry Bergson. His father, Dr. Adrien Proust, was a writer of thirty-four books. His younger brother, Dr. Robert Proust, wrote The Surgery of the Female Genitalia, a work about prostatectomies so well-known that some physicians referred to them as “proustatectomies.” Proust was actively involved on the side of Dreyfus, in the Dreyfus case of 1897–1899. In Proust’s view, time mocks man’s intelligence and his endeavors. Memory synthesizes yet distorts past experience. Most experience causes inner pain, and the objects of man’s desires are the chief causes of his suffering. In Proust’s scheme, man is isolated, society is false and ruled by snobbery, and artistic endeavor is raised to a religion and is superior to nature. His ability to interpret man’s innermost experience in terms of such eternal forces as time and death created a profound and protean world view, inspiring wide discussion. A sickly child, Proust endured a lifelong bout with asthma. He was allergic to flowers, pollen, dust, perfume, smoke, dampness, and cold, and his attacks could also be triggered by emotional upsets. Some of his attacks were largely psychosomatic, and in the winter he slept fully clothed. Even in summer he wore sweaters, mufflers, stockings, gloves, and a nightcap to bed. He became so obsessed with his asthmatic condition that he often used more than twenty towels after bathing to avoid having a damp towel touch his body. His skin, he felt, was so sensitive that instead of using soap, described writer Alain de Botton, he would wash with “finely woven, moistened towels, then pat himself dry with fresh linen (an average wash requires twenty towels, which Proust specifics must be taken to the only laundry that uses the right non-irritant powder, the blanchisserie Lavigne, which also does Jean Cocteau’s laundry.” Truman Capote, ever the gossip, wrote that Colette had told him that she wore the same perfume that Empress Eugénie had worn, adding that Cocteau had told her Proust wore that same perfume, too. Proust never married. He had such an attachment to his mother that although over thirty years old he would tell her about his “peeing” and bowel movements and how he had slept the night before. Many assumed that Proust had sexual relationships with a number of men. However, the Baron de Charlus, the principal homosexual character in his A Race Accursed, is one of the most grotesque of the many characters he depicted. Meanwhile, according to Edward White’s Marcel Proust (1998), Proust did have a major lover, a young waiter from the Ritz, a person who lived with him for two years. By 1912 Proust was living in bed. In 1922 he suffered uremia, vertigo, speech difficulty, and an attack of bronchitis. While struggling for breath on 18 November 1922, he hallucinated that a large black woman was chasing him and, shortly afterwards, succumbed to the illness that had plagued him all of his life. As for any afterlife, Proust once wrote to the editor of L’Intransigeant,
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. . . . But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Proust, according to David Tribe, was an outright freethinker. {AA; CE; GL; OEL; TYD}
Provenza, Paul (20th Century) Provenza is an actor and a comedian. Online, he has written,
I did about ten minutes of anti-religion material on a special on Comedy Central called “Pulp Comics,” in which I have a priest hitting on a 13-year-old boy in a confessional, and the Last Supper done as a Friar’s Roast. . . . In my [standup] act, I do a half hour or so of the ridiculousness of religion and lambaste the Catholic Church in particular. I point to how irrational it is to have any reverence for religion at all. We look at the ancient Greeks with their gods on a mountain top, throwing lightning bolts, and say, “Those ancient Greeks. They were so silly. So primitive and naïve. Not like our religions. We have burning bushes talking to people and guys walking on water. We’re . . . sophisticated. {CA}
PROVIDENCE • Mussolini: a gift from providence. –Pope Pius XI (However, see entry for Mussolini.)
Provine, William (20th Century) In 1995, Professor William Provine of Cornell University, a historian of science and a firm adherent of Darwinian evolution, stated, “To my mind, evolutionary biology leads straight to a vision which is equivalent to atheism,” which leaves at most a distant God “of no comfort whatsoever.” He added that when biological organisms die, “they are really and truly dead. There simply is no such thing as immortality or life after death.” Continuing during a symposium at Vanderbilt University, Provine said, “Mammals don’t have virgin birth, and none has ever happened. Resurrection doesn’t exist in the natural world.” Life is produced, he added, “by a process that gives not one damn about us. It simply plops us here as humans on the earth the same way it does chimpanzees or gorillas or the AIDS virus or anything else.”
PRUDE • Prude, n. A bawd hiding behind the back of her demeanor. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Prusak, Peter (20th Century) Writing in Prometheus, a humanistic journal published in Bratislava, Prusak advised the nation of Slovakia, new in 1993, that the most democratic system is to separate state and religion. “In the current post-totalitarian society,” he notes, “the churches, especially the Roman Catholic Church, enjoy support, subsidies, and biased preference from several politicians and parties, despite the fact that in the recent census 27 per cent of the population claimed to be non-denominational or atheists.” Prusak is concerned that the Slovak Republic’s new constitution does not separate church and state and that this “leaves room for unhealthy efforts for domination instead of mutual understanding, tolerance, respect, and cooperation for the benefit of the whole community.”
PSEUDONYMS A pseudonym is a fictitious name which authors sometimes assume as their pen name. Freethinkers and atheists, for example, have often used pseudonyms in order to avoid conflicts and public disapproval, even hangings or guillotinings, because of their individualistic views. (For a key to such, see Gordon Stein’s listing in God Pro and Con [1990]. Also, see entry for Jun Sczesnoczkawasm.)
Psichari, Jean (Born 1854) Psichari (Joannes Psuchares) was a French Hellenist and novelist of Greek extraction. In 1903 he taught modern Greek at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes. His Essai de grammaire historique néo-grecque (1887) won the Volney Prize of the Institut, and his Autour de la Grèce (1895) was crowned by the Academy. Psichari married Renan’s daughter. In his novel, Soeur Anselme (1919), he gave an account of Renan’s last days. {RAT}
PSYCHE: See entry for Eros.
PSYCHICS Psychics claim to be capable of extraordinary mental processes, such as extra-sensory perception and mental telepathy. In 1997 singer Dionne Warwick’s “Psychic Friends Network” reportedly logged about 4,000,000 minutes monthly at $4 per minute but apparently could not foresee its forthcoming bankruptcy. {American Rationalist, May-June 1997}
PSYCHOANALYSIS • Psychoanalysis? It’s that science which probes the history of one’s infancy to see how it affects one’s adultery. —Bruce Wright
Sigmund Freud gave the name, psychoanalysis, to a system of interpretation and therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders. It began after he studied (1885-1886) with the French neurologist J. M. Charcot and became convinced that hysteria was caused not by organic symptoms in the nervous system but by emotional disturbance. It involved free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference in order to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts. (In Encyclopedia of Unbelief, see Paul Edwards’s section on Wilhelm Reich. He and other non-theists have been negatively critical about some of the claims of psychoanalysis. Note that some psychiatrists are also psychoanalysts: for example, Mrs. Isaac [Janet] Asimov, a non-theist.) {CE]
PSYCHOKINESIS Psychokinesis, according to psychics, is the production or control of motion by the exercise of psychic powers. A Manhattan secular humanist, when asked for money from several psychics, decided to test psychokinesis: “All those who believe in psychokinesis, please raise my hand.”
Ptah-Hotep (2nd or 3rd Century B.C.E.?) McCabe described Ptah-Hotep as being an ancient Egyptian moralist whose Maxims survived but whose date is variously assigned to the second or the third millennium. Breasted speculates that the work may date to 2,000 B.C.E. The work shows a cultivated middle-class in ancient Egypt, one with moral sentiments remarkably like those of our contemporary times and openly ignoring the Egyptian religion. It never mentions an Egyptian deity but speaks throughout of “God” in the monotheistic sense. Other literature of the second millennium (or earlier), such as The Song of the Harper, shows a widespread and flippant skepticism about a future life and some, according to McCabe, is atheistic. If so, the alleged “oldest book in the world” is atheistic. {JM; RE}
PTOLEMAIC UNIVERSE Ptolemy, the Greek astronomer, put forth a model of the universe in which the Earth was the center, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars revolving around it. The Ptolemaic system prevailed in astronomy for nearly fifteen hundred years, until the model of the solar system proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus (with the sun, not the earth, at the center) was accepted. Church authorities forced Galileo to declare belief in the earth-centered universe. {DCL}
Ptolemy II (c. 308–246 B.C.E.) Ptolemy II, son of Ptolemy I and Berenice of the Macedonian dynasty, was king of ancient Egypt from 285 to 246 B.C.E. He continued his father’s efforts to make Alexandria the cultural center of the Greek world, completed the Pharos, and encouraged the translation of the Pentateuch into the Greek Septuagint. During his reign, a canal was built from the Nile to the Red Sea. Ptolemy warred against Syria until he married his daughter Berenice to the Syrian Antiochus II. He repudiated his wife Arsinoë in order to marry his sister, who was also named Arsinoë. According to McCabe, most around Ptolemy were skeptics who had no pressure of either Greek or Egyptian priests, and Alexandria did become the world’s greatest center of freethought as well as of art, science, and all culture. Ptolemy’s learned tutor is known in Greek literature as “Theodorus the Atheist.” {JM}
PUBIC HAIR: SEE ENTRY FOR RED HACKLE.
Puccinelli, Blanche Lee (20th Century) In the 1950s, freethinkers were smiling about such of Puccinelli’s provocative booklets as “My Convent Daze” and “Deaf, Dumb and Blind.”
Pueckler Muskau, Hermann Ludwig Heinrich (1785–1871) A prince and freethinker, Pueckler Muskau was a German who traveled widely and wrote his observations in a work entitled Letters of a Defunct (1830). He also wrote Tutti Frutti (1832) and Semilasso in Africa (1836). {BDF}
Puertas Fuertes, Jesús Antonio (20th Century) Puertas Fuertes, a teacher of ethics in a Zaragoza, Spain, collegio, attended the 1994 CSHAFT meeting in Toronto. On Costa Rican television in 1995, Puertas Fuertes was interviewed about secular humanism and spoke at the founding of Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU), an association to encourage ethical humanism in South and Central America. In 1996, Puertas was moderator of a panel discussion on intolerance at the Humanist World Congress in Mexico City.
PUGWASH CONFERENCE: See entry for Cyrus Eaton.
PULITZER PRIZES Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) left funds to found what now is the Columbia University graduate school of journalism and endowed the Pulitzer Prizes, awards given annually for achievements in American journalism. Of the $375 million in 1990 dollars which he was worth at the time of his death, no money was left to churches. {CE}
Pullar, Nick (20th Century) Pullar is Treasurer of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.
Pulley, Marie Harlowe (20th Century) Pulley wrote Christianity, the Greatest Misfortune (1948). {GS} Pullman, George (1831–1897) A Universalist, Pullman invented the railroad sleeping car that revolutionized dull nighttime travel, an improvement often lamented by Puritans, who imagined dire happenings within such cramped and open sleeping quarters. In 1868, he introduced dining cars. His first parlor car, the Pioneer, was used in President Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train. {CE; U}
Pullman, Tracy (20th Century) Pullman was a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
PULSARS Pulsars, which are remnants of stellar explosions known as supernovae, rotate rapidly and emit beams of radio waves that can be detected by radio telescopes. Since 1968 more than five hundred have been observed. Four types of pulsars have been located. A millisecond pulsar is the most extreme type. If a neutron star spins fast enough—once every 100 seconds or so—and also has a strong magnetic field, it emits pulses of radio waves intense enough to reach the earth. Such a bleeper is a radio pulsar, first discovered in 1967. A second type is the x-ray pulsar that spins at the same rate as a radio pulsar but emits x-rays instead. A third is the millisecond pulsar, of which more than fifty have been spotted. In 1998 a fourth type was found, an x-ray millisecond pulsar called SAX J1808.43658 after its coordinates in the sky. Astronomers have long wondered why the fastest-spinning stars in the universe, “millisecond pulsars,” came to rotate so fast. The 1998 discovery is satisfying astronomers that by using an orbiting x-ray detector, the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer, they have finally caught one in the act of being spun and have analyzed its motion. {CE; The Economist, 25 July 1998}
Pulszky, Franz Aurel (1814–1897) Pulszky was a Hungarian writer and politician. His account of England (Aus dem Tagebuch eines in Grossbritannien reisenden Ungarn, 1837) opened the doors of the Hungarian Academy to him. He was elected to the Diet in 1839 and in 1848 was appointed Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of Finance. For his involvement in the revolutionary movement of 1849, he was compelled to fly to England, where he became a friend of G. J. Holyoake. The Austrian Government condemned him to death. After 1860 he lived in Italy, taking part in the work of liberation, until 1866, when he was allowed to return to his country to serve in the Diet. {RAT}
PUNISHMENT To punish is to inflict some kind of a penalty for an offense, a sin, or a fault. The religionists’ ultimate punishment is to consign a sinner to Hell. Secular societies often imprison individuals for their offenses. In the United States, the number of people locked up since 1980 has tripled. One in every 163 Americans is in jail or prison, a rate six times the average in Europe. {The Economist, 13 February 1999}
PURGATORY Roman Catholics believe that souls who have died “in grace” must expiate their “sins.” They do this in “purgatory,” a place or condition of suffering. Purgatory is not mentioned in the Bible. It is, therefore, a quaint concept devised by its theologians, who have been known to spend time arguing whether it is possible to commit a “venial sin,” for example, in Purgatory.
PURITAN • A Puritan is a man, in a black frock, sitting on a rock, reading Scripture, sucking a lemon—and contemplating adultery. –Anonymous
• The puritan is one who uses the cross as a hammer to knock in the heads of sinners. –H. L. Mencken
• People blame our Puritan [background for our attitudes about sex], but a scholarly study some years back showed that most children in the early New England colonies were born out of wedlock. It seems that available land was extremely limited, the hostile Indians being so close by, and a landless suitor could not support a wife. So girls will be girls and boys likewise, and so on. The Puritan tradition, in brief, is sex. –Arthur Miller
PURITAN ETHICS Puritan ethics, according to Mrs. Ethyn W. Kirby, formerly a history professor in Wells College, Providence, Rhode Island, “stressed the virtues of sobriety, honesty, and thrift. An outstanding element was moral fervor, which is shown in Edward Dering’s rebuking Queen Elizabeth and in William Prynne’s attacks on bishops and theatres, and which gave to Puritanism a dogged strength and vigor.” When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and exposed the weakness of Puritan ethics in practice, he used Prynne as the last name of the bastard daughter of the Puritan minister who had sired her. Jonathan Edwards is one of the better known United States Puritans, celebrated for his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (1741). Researching her family history, Dorothy Greninger found much that she had not expected:
The Puritans arrived in Massachusetts in 1630 with a Royal Charter. Instead of setting up a branch of the Church of England, as expected, they set up First Church, a sort of combination church-state. To join the church, you had to agree with the official theology. Otherwise you could be banished, even in midwinter. This could be a death sentence. Not only errant Puritans were banished. Anabaptists were banished. Quakers were banished; they were also abused physically (ears cut off, whippings). When supply ships were delayed, Fast Days were decreed to save food. Minister John Wheelwright preached that fasting was not necessary; he and his supporters were banished. Anne Hutchinson was tried for holding a discussion in her home on [a question of theology]. Her crime seems to have been that, as a woman, she had no right to be making such judgments. When Indians later killed Anne and other members of her family, Governor John Winthrop Sr. was said to have regarded this as punishment for her incorrect theology. [To anyone suggesting that Puritans were] “almost exactly like all other human beings at all times,” which people could be meant: Adolf Hitler? Torquemada? {ER; Mensa Bulletin December 1998}
PUROGAMI (Vanguard) A Bengali monthly, Purogami is at 15 Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 073, India
PURPOSE OF LIFE Who am I? What am I? Where am I? Why am I? When in time am I? Philosophy, a study which investigates causes of reality and synthesizes learning, has developed answers utilizing logic, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology in order to address such questions. Humanists, rationalists, and freethinkers in general reject the ancient answers. Astronomy and the various other sciences are consulted for contemporary and empirical answers. Richard Dawkins, for example, in 1995 published River Out of Eden, a radically different picture than that depicted in the biblical Garden of Eden. From his viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins posits that the central purpose of evolution is the survival of DNA, not of the beings that are the DNA’s temporary expression. Life perhaps began when the first molecule of RNA, DNA’s elder cousin, got itself more or less accurately replicated in some natural stew of chemicals on the primitive earth. The first living cells, the first plants and animals, emerged merely because they were better mechanisms for repeating that first ancient accident of replication.” In short, the purpose of life is for DNA to endure, not for humans to bow to one of the various supernatural divinities. According to Dawkins, DNA is not just a human’s way of making another human: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Nobel Prize winner Christian de Duve, differing from others who hold that the universe is meaningless, wrote in Vital Dust, Life as a Cosmic Imperative (1995): “For me, this meaning is to be found in the structure of the universe, which happens to be such as to produce thought by way of life and mind. Thought, in turn, is a faculty whereby the universe can reflect upon itself, discover its own structure, and apprehend such immanent entities as truth, beauty, goodness, and love. Such is the meaning of the universe as I see it.” (See entries for Christian de Duve, Bertrand Russell, and the various other secular humanists and rationalists listed herein.)
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergyevich (1799–1837) Hailed even in his own time as Russia’s greatest poet, Pushkin was known for his fairy romance Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) and his novels, Eugene Onegin (1828) and Boris Godunov (1831). Although he entered government service, he was exiled to the south of Russia because of his liberalism, during which time he read Voltaire and Byron, authors whose outlooks he liked. After the accession of Nicholas I (1826), he was allowed to return to Moscow. Hugh McLean alleges that Pushkin was an atheist when young. An energetic and self-consciously Byronic type of person, according to Serena Vitale’s Pushkin’s Button (1999), “When, as a youth, he pirouetted in a waltz or mazurka, provincial ladies took him for a foreigner, a demon, or a Freemason.” In Odessa he once wrote that he was taking lessons in atheism from a deaf English philosopher. However, most Russian authors of his time were nominally Orthodox, attending services only when they had to and remaining generally unconcerned about religious matters. Although he denied writing the blasphemous Gavriiliada (The Gabrieliad), in which God and Zeus are depicted as sexual creatures, intellectuals at the time were certain he was the author. Pushkin’s mother’s grandfather was Abram Hannibal, who was Peter the Great’s Africa-born and black general, “the blackamoor of Peter the Great” in Pushkin’s words. Pushkin’s African heritage is rarely mentioned. According to Vitale, Pushkin’s marriage in 1831 to Nikolayevna Goncharova proved to be an unhappy one. Georges d’Anthès—a Frenchman who was formally adopted by a wealthy and homosexual Dutch Ambassador to the court of Czar Nicholas I, Jacob van Heeckeren—publicly showed affection for the poet’s wife, possibly to hurt van Heeckeren, and Pushkin began receiving anonymous letters concerning their intimate dance-floor conversations. But whether or not anything more than some stolen kisses was concerned, Pushkin and d’Anthès scheduled a duel on a snow-covered field outside St. Petersburg. A skilled duelist, Pushkin had the strategy of allowing d’Anthès to fire first in order that he would have to stand without moving when it was Pushkin’s turn to fire. But it was Pushkin who received the mortal shot and, carried home, he died two days later in what The New Leader’s assistant editor Richard Lamb has called “the most tragically unnecessary death of any great writer.” Tsar Nicholas wrote Pushkin on his deathbed, expressing his “forgiveness.” However, Lermontov, among others, accused government officials of complicity in the affair. Pushkin’s large debts were paid by the government, his children’s education was paid for, and his widow was given a pension. She, in fact a brief favorite of the Tsar, later married a general. D’Anthès was expelled from Russia but had a successful political career in France and died in 1895, at eighty-three, surrounded by children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. {BDF; CE; EU, Hugh McLean; JM; d Lamb, The New York Times Book Review, 7 March 1999; RAT; RE}
Putnam, George Haven (1844–1930) Putnam, an author and the son of G. P. Putnam, founded a well-known publishing house. In 1864 during the Civil War, he was captured by the Confederates, then retired with the rank of major. Active in many civic and social causes, Putnam organized the American Publishers’ Copyright League in 1887 and led the successful battle for passage of an international copyright law in 1891. McCabe, who knew him well, says he “often scolded him for his appeasement policy as regards the churches, but he did not conceal his skepticism and was a member of the British Rationalist Press Association.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Putnam, Hilary (1926– ) Putnam. a Harvard philosopher, has been described as being one of the most important of contemporary secular philosophers. Trained in the tradition of Rudolph Carnap’s Logical Positivism, he later came under the influence of such philosophers as W. V. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Nelson Goodman. In the process, states Nicholas G. Fotion of Emory University, Putnam became a critic of positivism, arguing that “there is no privileged foundation to our knowledge, no fixed principle of verifiability, no fact-value distinction as the positivists characterized it, and that sentences (our beliefs) cannot be assessed as true or false individually (i.e., holism rather than atomism is correct).” Putnam is also critical of another foundationalist position, which he calls metaphysical realism. Of late, adds Fotion, Putnam “has rejected functionalism, the theory that mental states are computational states—a theory he himself founded earlier in his career. Of late he has also written about matters of ethics and politics. Like his views in metaphysics and epistemology, he tends to want to hold a middle, yet somewhat liberal, position between two extremes—although he confesses there were times (e.g. during the Vietnam War) when he flirted with Marxism, a position he now finds extreme.” His major works are Representation and Reality (1988), Realism with a Human Face (1990), and Renewing Philosophy (1992). Some freethinkers question why, as an atheist, Putnam observes the Jewish holidays and feels that such traditions are important. {CA; OCP}
Putnam, Samuel Porter (1839–1896) An American freethought lecturer and author, Putnam was a Congregational, then a Unitarian minister for a time but left the ministry and became in 1892 the president of the Freethought Federation of America. One of its accomplishments was keeping the World’s Fair in Chicago (1893) open on Sunday, for at that time all public “amusements” had to be closed on Sundays. His major work was 400 Years of Freethought (1894), which included over 140 portraits. In San Francisco from 1888 to 1891 he edited Freethought with George E. Macdonald, the brother of the editor of the Truth Seeker who later became editor of that publication himself. In My Religious Experience (1891), Putnam declared, “The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing, though it might be free from dogma. I believe, however, that the religious feeling, as feeling, is wrong, and the civilized man will have nothing to do with it. . . . [When the] shadow of religion disappeared forever . . . I felt that I was free from a disease.” He added, “The moment that one loses confidence in God, or immortality in the universe, [one becomes] more self-reliant, more courageous, and the more solicitous of aid where only human aid is possible.” “On the night of December 11-12, 1896,” Gordon Stein has written (The American Rationalist, September-October 1995), “freethought lecturer and author Samuel Porter Putnam and rising freethought star May Collins were found dead in her guest room in Boston. Immediately, rumors began circulating in the religious press that there had been some sort of ‘hanky-panky’ going on between the 58-year-old Putnam and the 20-year-old Miss Collins, who was on her first freethought lecturing tour away from her native Kentucky.” Both, however, were found fully clothed. A coroner found their deaths were due to accidental asphyxiation by illuminating gas. For some unexplained reason, Putnam took pains to conceal from friends that he was a divorced man with two children. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUS; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Putsage, Jules (19th Century) Putsage was a Belgian follower of Baron Colins, the founder of the Colins Philosophical Society at Mons. Putsage wrote Determinism and Rational Science (1885) along with many essays in La Philosophie de L’Avenir of Paris and La Societe Nouvelle of Brussels. {BDF}
Putz, Paul (20th Century) Putz is Treasurer of Arizona Secular Humanists, PO Box 3738, Scottsdale, Arizona 85271.
Pyat, Felix (1810–1889)
Pyat was a French socialist, writer, and orator. His religious father had sent him to a Jesuit college at Bourges, where Pyat secretly read the writings of Beranger and Courier. Pyat wrote popular dramas, such as The Rag-Picker of Paris (1847). In 1871 he founded Le Combat. Elected to the National Assembly, Pyat protested against the treaty of peace, was named member of the Commune, and was condemned to death in 1873. Returning to France after the armistice, he sat as deputy for Marseilles. {BDF; RAT}
Pycroft, S. (18th Century) Pycroft wrote A Brief Inquiry into Free Thinking in Matters of Religion, and Some Pretended Obstructions To It (1713). {GS}
Pyeshkov, Aleksey Maximovich: See entry for Maxim Gorky.
Pyke, James G. (1874–1930) Pyke was an Australian freethinker, Esperantist, and bookseller. A pioneer president of the Melbourne Esperanto Club, he used the pen name “Ezoko,” the Esperanto word for the pike fish and a play on his own name. Owner of Carrolton’s Bookshop in Melbourne, he obtained the franchise for Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books. While returning from an Esperanto conference in Malta, he disappeared from the ship, Balranald. {SWW}
Pyke, William Thomas (1859–c. 1940) Pyke was an Australian freethinker, rationalist, and bookseller. In 1929 he was described as “probably the most knowledgeable bookseller Australia has ever produced.” His freethinking family views were endorsed by his grandson, Frank, who bequeathed a substantial portfolio of stocks and money to advance “the aims and objects of Rationalism.” {SWW}
Pynchon, John (1937– ) Pynchon, an American novelist noted for his wild sense of humor, is often grouped with authors of black humor, such as Vonnegut and Heller. In describing 20th century life, he turns to fantasy, as shown in V (1963), which features mythical albino alligators in New York City sewers; in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a satirization of California life; and in his masterpiece, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), in which he discusses war and death in World War II London. Like a Kerouac character, Pynchon has next to dropped out of the public’s sight. The most recent photograph available is one in the 1953 Oyster Bay High School yearbook, although his back was photographed in 1996 for a magazine story stating he lives in Manhattan with his wife and their son. Shunning personal appearances, he asked the comedian “Professor” Irwin Corey to accept a National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow, and the humorist complied by delivering one of his pseudo-academic doubletalk lectures while dressed in tuxedo and tennis shoes. Mason & Dixon (1997) reveals Pynchon’s early skills in engineering physics as he tells the tale of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, British astronomers in the 1760s who established the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, the Mason-Dixon line which eventually became the border between the slave states and the free states. Louis Menand, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, notes that the novel really is about modernity and entropy, the latter a thermodynamic term referring to systems which run down because of a loss of available energy as all molecules reach the same temperature. Entropy, Menand explains, leads to the standardization and universalization of time and space, to an attempt to get everyone on the planet on the same wavelength. But “Once it is established that the density of the earth makes it impossible for there to be a society of people living under its surface, that possible world will disappear. This example is fantastic. The examples of the American Indians and the native South Africans are not.” Pynchon, like Kerouac, never labeled his outlook, but it is non-theistic. {CE; Louis Menand, The New York Review of Books, 12 June 1997; OEL}
Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360 –c. 170 B.C.E.) The father of skepticism, Pyrrho found that the contradictory of any statement can be entirely plausible, also. Therefore, the best philosophic attitude is to be imperturbable and to suspend judgment, to be a skeptic and doubter about everything. The concept arrived after his trip to India with Alexander’s army, during which he accompanied the philosopher Anaxarchus and became acquainted with the philosophy of the Magi and the Indian Gymnosophists. As they traveled, they noticed that different peoples disagreed on a variety of matters, and Pyrrho realized that this is so because we are confined to our own impressions of what is truth. Rational principles are not what govern life but, rather, conventions and instincts govern life. It is related that in his personal life he kept house with his sister, sharing with her in all domestic duties. Pyrrho, who lived to be ninety, left no written work, but his principles were perpetuated by Timon of Philius, his pupil, and his general outlook was developed by Sextus Empiricus. C. E. Pulos in The Deep Truth, A Study of Shelley’s Scepticism (1962) notes that Pyrrho by not developing the positive side of his scepticism “seemed to deprive men of their motives for action and to inculcate an attitude of indifference.” The positive side of scepticism was emphasized, however, by Sextus Empiricus. For him, the academic sceptic is free to shun the improbable and to pursue the probable with as much intensity as is desired. Bertrand Russell in his History of Philosophy (1945) observes that “Scepticism as a philosophy is not merely doubt, but what may be called dogmatic doubt. The man of science says ‘I think it is so-and-so, but I am not sure.’ The man of intellectual curiosity says ‘I don’t know how it is, but I hope to find out.’ The philosophical Sceptic says ‘nobody knows, and nobody ever can know.’ It is this element of dogmatism that makes the system vulnerable. Sceptics, of course, deny that they assert the impossibility of knowledge dogmatically, but their denials are not very convincing.” {BDF; CE; RE}
PYRRHONISM • Pyrrhonism, n. An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Pythagoras (c. 582–c. 507 B.C.E.) According to Robertson, the elusive Pythagoras “is not so much a rationalistic as a theosophic freethinker; but to freethought his name belongs insofar as the system connected with it did rationalize, and discarded mythology.” Little is known about his life inasmuch as some of his disciples came to worship him as a demigod, and it is impossible to differentiate his teachings from those of his followers. The Pythagoreans taught that numbers constitute the true nature of things, performed purification rites, and believed in the transmigration of souls. Shelley’s A Refutation of Deism cited Pythagoras as a theist, along with Plato and Anaxagoras. {CE; HNS2; JMR; JMRH; RE}
