R

From Philosopedia

RA, or RE Ra, the Egyptian sun god and chief deity, was considered creator and father of all things. By day, he sailed across the sky in a celestial barge, and by night he attacked the forces of evil and darkness. Early kings of Egypt claimed to have been Ra’s descendants. The pyramid is a symbol of Ra, and the hawk and the lion are manifestations of his existence. Amon and Aton frequently are identified with Ra. The chief deity of Egypt in the second millennium B.C.E., Ra was the center of the cult being Heliopolis (the City of the Sun), a cult not native to Egypt and which may have been introduced from the East. Ra’s followers, represented today by Rastafarians, for example, use a variety of fetishes. In Jamaica, they venerate Haile Selassie as a god, teaching the eventual redemption of blacks and their return to Africa. Marijuana is used in their rituals. Haile Selassie, born Tafari Makonnen and the grandnephew of Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia, became emperor when the empress mysteriously died. He then claimed to be the 111th descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to rule Ethiopia. {CE}

RABBI A rabbi in Judaism is a teacher and leader of worship. Jesus is referred to as a rabbi. The title of ordination for authoritative teachers of Judaism began in the period after the destruction of the Temple in 70. Rabbinism is the religious discipline by which the teachers of post-Biblical (Old Testament) Judaism implemented Biblical religion to the needs of their day. {ER}

Rabelais, François (c. 1490–1533) Rabelais, the French writer and physician, is one of the great comic geniuses in world literature. “The grand jester of France,” Bacon called him. As a Franciscan novice, he studied Greek, Latin, science, law, philosophy, and letters, becoming respected by the humanists of his time, including Budé and the Franciscan humanist, Pierre Amy. Pope Clement VII at one time granted him permission to enter the Benedictine monastery of Maillezais. His heretical humor brought him into trouble, and he was once rescued by a military friend from the “in Pace,” a form of burying alive. But this did not dampen his spirits, though it made him cautious; for he dreaded the idea of being burnt alive “like a herring,” saying he was “dry enough already by nature.” The attacks he made on astrology disturbed many, for he even scoffed at the astrological leanings of the new Pope, Paul III. Calvin, who once had been his friend, attacked Rabelais in De Scandalis, accusing him of libertinage, profanity, and atheism. It is not clear whether Rabelais purposely, and three times, substituted an “n” for an “m” in âme, making “ass” [âne] out of the word for “soul” . . . or whether it truly was a printer’s error. Fortunately for Rabelais, the king laughed along with other readers. But not the scholars at the Sorbonne, about whom he had made jibes in his work. Wheeler mentions that Rabelais was denounced as heretical by the clergy for his satires, not only on their order but on their creed. Coleridge said of him, “Beyond a doubt he was among the deepest as well as boldest thinkers of his age.” McCabe notes that when Rabelais was “at last condemned, the Pope was induced to overlook his terrible crime on the ground of what are now said to be the most obscene books in European literature, and on condition that he promised to return to the monastery (which he never did).” McCabe continues that it “is now generally said that his works should not be regarded as obscene because he merely wished to laugh the world out of its murderous religious passion. As if he could not get men to laugh at less gross jokes! He did not care a pin about religion and its moral code.” Robertson suggests that a reasonable inference as to his general creed is that Rabelais was a deist or a unitarian. However, and to save him from being persecuted as a heretic, Cardinal Jean du Bellay arranged for Rabelais to spend his last years as curate at Meudon (1550–1552). “All attempts have been made,” Walter Besant has written, “to prove that Rabelais was a Christian,” which Besant denied. Rather, he stated, “the old man, now that life was drawing to its close, now that his friends were dead, dispersed, and in exile, discerned at last the wickedness of continuing to say masses, which were to him empty forms, in the cause of a Church which was full of absurdities and corruptions.” Many of his friends had perished in prison or at the stake. Rabelais, however, died a natural death in his bed, Foote has described. His end came at a house in the Rue des Jardins, Paris. Many stories were told of his death-bed, and may be found in the bibliophile Jacob’s (Paul Lacroix) introduction to the Charpentier edition of Rabelais’ works. When he had received the extreme unction, he said aloud that they had greased his boots for the great journey. When the priest in attendance asked if he believed in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the holy wafer, he replied meekly “I believe in it, and I rejoice therein; for I think I see my God as he was when he entered Jerusalem triumphant and seated on an ass.” Toward the end they put on his Benedictine robe, whereupon he punned upon a Psalm: Beati qui moriuntur in Domino [Blessed are they who die in the Lord). When a messenger from Cardinal du Bellay arrived, Rabelais said in a feeble voice, “Tell monsignor I am going to seek the great Perhaps.” Gathering his strength for a last effort, he cried out in a burst of laughter, “Draw the curtain, the farce is over.” Although the story may be apocryphal, Jacob remarks, they are “in keeping with the character of Rabelais and the spirit of his writings.” {BDF; CE; FO; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE}

Rabl, Carl (1853–1917) Rabl taught anatomy, in succession, at Vienna, Prague, and Leipzig universities. He was director of the Anatomical Institute at Leipzig, a member of the Privy Council, and recipient of many national and international honors. He was one of the first to defend Haeckel against the charge of “forgery,” and in Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken Rabl tells how Haeckel had converted him to rationalism in his youth. {RAT; RE}

RACE, RACISM

• It’s good that there are yellow Frenchmen, black Frenchmen, brown Frenchmen. They show that France is open to all races—but so long as they remain a small minority. Otherwise France would no longer be France. –Charles deGaulle, First President of France’s Fifth Republic, in 1959

• [Aviation is] a gift from heaven . . . a tool specially shaped for Western hands . . . one of those priceless possessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black and Brown.” –Charles Lindbergh in a Readers Digest (1939) article

Genesis explains how Noah, after the deluge, divided the world among his three sons. Japheth received Europe, Shem got Asia, and Ham was given Africa. Ham got the worst of the property for two reasons: first, he had accidentally seen his father’s nakedness when he walked into a tent; and second, he had disobeyed Noah’s order that on the ark everyone was supposed to be sexually continent—Ham, however, with the aid of a magic demon had slept with his wife, and the punishment was that Ham and all his offspring were given a black skin. The black race, in short, is a symbol of Ham’s having broken a taboo, according to the author or authors of Genesis. The ancient Greeks, however, had no word for race. A slave could be of any color, depending on who had been captured. Herodotus described Thracians as having blue eyes and Egyptians as being dark-skinner and woolly haired. Egyptian men were described as liking cats and as urinating while sitting down rather than standing up. It is only recently that the growing biological evidence indicates that race has virtually no scientific meaning at all. The idea of race, according to David R. Roediger’s Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to be White (1998), came about because social meaning became attached to physical differences. White Europeans gave such meaning an inherent, God-given origin, and Americans kept up the tradition. Roediger’s and other scholars’ work holds that the label of race evolved recently as a tool of the vanquished as well as the victors. Race formerly was thought to be inborn, journalist Ethan Bronner has suggested (The New York Times, 10 January 1998), with some arguing that skin color or facial structure was a window on internal characteristics like wile or listlessness or intelligence. Now, scholars tend to argue the opposite, that race is a tool invented by white Europeans to justify their conquests. The losers, meanwhile, thought of their conquerors in racial terms. In the 17th century, for example, the Chinese often depicted Europeans as having tails. Nancy Shoemaker in an American Historical Review article showed that the Cherokee Indians, especially those of the Southeast, called themselves red out of pride, eager to differentiate themselves from black slaves. In the past, some Americans have erroneously used the word “race” to refer to “religion or nationality,” speaking, for example, about the Catholic race, the Jewish race, the French race, the German race. Today, however, the word is almost exclusively used to refer to the purported major biological divisions of humanity—the Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. Inasmuch as a number of groups—the Australian aborigines, the Dravidian people of South India, the Polynesians, and the Ainu of Northern Japan, to name four—do not fit into the three arbitrary groups, some anthropologists reject the concept of race outright. They stress, instead, the heterogeneity of the world’s population. The Columbia Encyclopedia, surveying the subject, states that it is inappropriate to apply race to national, religious, geographic, linguistic, or cultural groups, nor can the biological criteria of race be equated with any mental characteristics such as intelligence, personality, or character. In the 17th century, after scholars first began to separate types of flora and fauna, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach was the first to divide mankind according to skin color. In the 19th and early 20th century, Joseph Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain held that some groups are superior to others and attributed cultural and psychological values to race. Such an approach, called racism, culminated in the vicious racial doctrines of Nazi Germany, and especially in anti-Semitism. The same approach complicated the integration movement in the United States and was the foundation of South Africa’s segregation policies. Numbers of individuals continue to refer to the “Jewish race,” as if the black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and Rabbi Herman Wouk are of the same race. Commentators are heard to refer to “fighting between Latinos and Jews.” Racism in Canada has been described in Cecil Foster’s A Place Called Heaven: The Meaning of Being Black in Canada (1996) and in Frances Henry’s The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism (1994). The international as well as the national humanist organizations are united in their total abhorrence of racism. In 1993 the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) board went on record:

Humanists disagree with and reject any kind of racism and Nazism. . . . As humanists we hold the opinion that an active fight for values is the best way of counteracting the indifference among people, which enables racists and neo-nazis to get approval of their outlook towards people with a different colour or a different ethnic or cultural background. We do not believe that this problem can be solved by keeping it in the dark. . . .

Race comes in colors, according to Henry Louis Gates’s Colored People (1995), who calls himself colored rather than African American: dark chocolate, coffee, café au lait, cherrywood, light-yellow, almost orange, tan, beige, blue-black, slate, and octoroon (“light and bright and damn near white”). Yale geneticist Kenneth K. Kidd, however, says,

In lectures, I now say that human races do not exist if by race you mean a discrete category, a qualitatively different subgroup of humanity. When I look at DNA, I see no racial differences. There tend to be more DNA variations within each population group than between groups, and such variation is present broadly around the world within every population. This contradicts conventional wisdom of earlier this century when there was a tendency to think of population as monomorphic with rare variants.

“All in the Family,” an American television program, spoofed two WASPs [White Anglo-SaxonProtestants] who might be called the pigment-hewed as contrasted with the melanin-impaired:

Archie Bunker: And that’s why they aren’t white, meat-head! That’s why you never see a white gorilla or a white chimpanzee! Mike: Oh yeah? I think I’m looking at one right now. (See entries for Jewish Nose; Man; Khalid Muhhamad; Noah; and Alexander Pashinski.) {CE; Humanist in Canada, Winter 1998-1999}

Rachel, Julia (20th Century) Rachel is Vice President in Georgia for Internal Communications of the Atlanta Freethought Society.

Rachmaninoff, Sergei Vasilyevich (1873-1943) A pianist, composer, and conductor, Rachmaninoff was one of the greatest pianists of his generation. He conducted the Imperial Opera (1905-1906). In 1917 he left Russia, never to return, moving to Switzerland and immigrating to the United States, living in Manhattan on West End Avenue, and becoming a citizen shortly before his death. His compositions’ massive chords and dramatic chord progressions make his work popular. The second (1901) of his four piano concertos and the “Prelude in C Sharp Minor” (1892) are his best-known works. He also wrote “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” (1934) and many other works. Neither he nor his friend Tchaikovsky, according to the program notes when the Kirov Opera Chorus performed in 1998 in New York City, “expressed anything approaching religious fervor.” {CE}

Radcliffe, Elizabeth (20th Century) Radcliffe, of Santa Clara University, is on the Executive Committee of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Radenhausen, Christian (Born 1813) Radenhausen was a German philosopher, at first a merchant, then a lithographer who lived in Hamburg. He published his Isis, Mankind and the World (4 volumes, 1870–1872); Osiris (1874); Christianity is Heathenism (1881); and The True Bible and the False (1887). {BDF}

Radest, Howard (1928– ) Radest, a graduate of New York City public schools and Columbia College, became Leader of the Bergen, New Jersey, Ethical Society in 1956. He signed Humanist Manifesto II and from 1971 to 1973 was a professor of philosophy at Ramapo College in New Jersey. He became a director of Ethical Culture Schools in 1979. He also is Dean of the Leadership-Training Institute of the Northern American Committee for Humanism (NACH) and is one of the “Troika” of co-chairmen of the IHEU, which includes Bert Schwarz of Holland and Mihaelo Markovic of Yugoslavia. Radest’s Toward Common Ground: The Story of the Ethical Societies in the United States (1969) is the definitive work to date on the topic. Radest is the founding dean of the Humanist Institute and also founded Columbia University’s Seminar on Moral Education. He is on the editorial board of The Humanist and is a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. He once was secretary general of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), and from 1964 to 1970 was executive director of the American Ethical Union. The proceedings of the 1970 International Humanist Congress he edited as To Seek a Humane World. The Devil and Secular Humanism: The Children of the Enlightenment (1990) is somewhat pessimistic, lamenting that humanists are committed to anti-clericalism, reason, progress, science, and democracy but fail to supply individuals with their heartfelt needs. Heir to the legacy of Felix Adler, Radest holds that somewhere around 1973, with the issuance of Humanist Manifesto II, the humanist movement toned down the religious humanism which had been an early influence going back to the 1941 founding of the American Humanist Association. He laments secular humanists’ being “raucous” and “strident” in their protests, believing that anti-clericalism is in “bad taste” and is apt to “alienate liberal allies.” Radest believes that “It is the radical claim of humanism that we can live rich and full lives while denying eternity. It is the even more radical claim that such lives are more satisfying precisely because they come closer to truthfulness and do not rely on illusions.” However, he differs with the Council for Secular Humanism and Free Inquiry that what is now needed is a thoroughly secular, atheist, or agnostic humanism, one that cuts the umbilical cord of religion and religiosity. Radest is on the editorial advisory board of Religious Humanism, the quarterly published by the Fellowship of Religious Humanists.

	At the Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in London (1978) and at the Tenth held in Buffalo (1988), Prof. Radest addressed the groups. Two of his books are Understanding Ethical Religion (1958) and On Life and Meaning (1963). He has retired as Director of the Ethical Culture Schools in New York. In 1993, he received the American Humanist Association’s Distinguished Service Award. Radest signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for Ethical Culture. {CL; EU; Free Inquiry, Fall, 1991; FUS, HSN2}

RADFORD UNIVERSITY HUMANISTS Radford University (Virginia) humanists and freethinkers are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli [Sir] (1888–1975) An Indian statesman and philosopher, Radhakrishnan declared, “It is not God that is worshiped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority, not violation of integrity.” {TYD}

RADICAL Radical, a word the Latin root of which (radix) means root, is used by many conservatives to depict some kind of scary revolutionary whose nihilism might include blowing up buildings—if an idea is different from the usual, to them it is radical. Radical, however, is used by rationalists to describe going to the root of a problem; e.g., “Choose the radical solution of starting all over again.” Radix is the root of radish, a plant the roots of which are preferred by diners over the upper portions. Rationalists, those known for going to the roots of problems, can rightfully be called radicals, individuals who prefer going to primary sources rather than simply accepting what appears on the surface.

RADICAL HUMANIST Radical Humanist, a journal in English of the Indian Radical Humanist Association, is in Mumbai [formerly Bombay] at Sassoon Building, 1st Floor, 143 Mahatma Gandhi Road near Kalaghoda, Fort, Mumbai 400 001, India. R. A. Jahagirdar is editor and V. M. Tarkunde is Editor Emeritus. <mrcssc@bom2.vsnl.net.in>. (See entry for M. N. Roy.)

RADICALISM • Radicalism, n. The conservation of to-morrow injected into the affairs of today. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Radicati, Albert (18th Century) Radicati, Count of Passeron, was an Italian who lived for a time in England. His Twelve discourses concerning Religion and Government (1734) states, “. . . to say that Deists are Atheists is false; for they that are so called by the Vulgar, and by those whose interest it is to decry them, admit a first cause under the names of God, Nature, Eternal Being, Matter, universal Motion, or Soul. Such were Democritus, Epicurus, Diagoras, Lucian, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Seneca, Hobbes, Blount, Spinoza, Vanini, St. Évremond, Bayle, Collins, and in general all that go under the name of Speculative Atheists; and none but fools or madmen can ever deny it.” Radicati’s philosophical dissertation reveals his pantheistic materialism. He shocked his contemporaries by openly advocating suicide and free love. He also held that men “are not blamable for the crimes they commit, since they are always forced either by education or habit to commit them.” Deists and moderate freethinkers alike attacked much of his thought. {BDF; HAB}

RADOGAST In an early Slavic religion, Radogast was the god of the sun. {LEE}

Rafferty, James A. (1921– ) Rafferty, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a lecturer at the USIU School of Human Behavior. {HM2}

Rafton, Harold R. (20th Century) A scientist, Rafton in 1954 was President of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, as well as a member of its board of directors. He was vice president of the American Humanist Association at the time Priscilla Robertson was fired as editor of The Humanist. In fact, he and John Kirk were the ones who moved that she be terminated. It was a time during which the board was concerned that the magazine was moving in a more topical or issues-oriented direction rather than being philosophically oriented and featuring articles which explained the principles of humanism. Whenever asked if he believed in a Supreme Being, Rafton was known to answer, “Yes, Mankind.” {HNS; HNS2}

Rafton, Helen (20th Century) Mrs. Helen Rafton, wife of Harold Rafton, was a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Raglan (John Somerset FitzRoy) [5th Baron] (20th Century) Lord Raglan is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. He was president of the United Kingdom Housing Trust from 1983 to 1989 and is Chairman of the Bugatti Owners Club. Those who look him up in Who’s Who are amused that he lists his avocation as being that of a mechanic for his Bugatti.

Ragon, Jean Marie de (1781–1862) Ragon was a French Freemason, by profession a civil engineer at Nancy. He became Chief of Bureau to the Minister of the Interior. Author of many books on Freemasonry, he wrote The Mass and Its Mysteries Compared with the Ancient Mysteries (1844). {BDF}

Ragsdale, J. Arthur (20th Century) Ragsdale edited The Story of a Humanist Church (c. 1970). {GS}

Raines, Barbara (20th Century) Raines, a teacher of science long active in Ethical Society groups, became in 1960 the Leader of the West Coast Council for Ethical Culture, where she specialized in humanistic psychology. She returned briefly to leadership in Northern Westchester in 1970. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)

RAISON PRÉSENTE A French quarterly, Raison Présente is at 14 rue de l’Ecole-Polytechnique, 75005 Paris, France.

Rajala, Eric (20th Century) Rajala is a case manager at Transitional Living Services, which helps people with a diagnosed mental illness. The editor of Chile Verde, the newsletter of New Mexico’s Green Party, he has written about freethought in a variety of journals. In 1997 he became a senior writer for The American Rationalist.

Raj-Gauthier, Rupert (20th Century) Raj-Gauthier has been Secretary of the Humanist Association of Canada. Also, he was a contributing editor of Qwer Quarterly, newsletter of North America’s lesbian and gay secular humanist group. At the 1994 Toronto Conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Raj-Gauthier spoke on “Humanism and Spirituality.”

Raleigh or Ralegh, Walter [Sir] (1554?–1618) A courtier, poet, and adventurer, Raleigh was a leading soldier and explorer of his time. He served (1569) as a volunteer in the Huguenot army in France. His 1592 expedition returned to England with a richly loaded Portuguese sailing ship known as a carrack. In 1592, he searched for El Dorado on an expedition up the Orinoco River in Guiana. Later, he sat in Parliament. Because of his connection with the poetic group known as the “school of night,” led by Thomas Harriot and including Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, he was accused by many, including the Jesuits, of being an atheist. In The Lie Raleigh had written self-defensively, “Go tell the Church it shows what’s good, and doth no good.” Robertson, after researching Raleigh’s writings, considers Raleigh “a deist, given to free discussion.” But in Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), written in the Tower, if it is authentic, Raleigh makes clear his belief in deity and repudiates atheism and pantheism: “I do also account it an impiety monstrous, to confound God and Nature, be it but in terms.” Queen Elizabeth, however, reportedly called Raleigh an atheist. In 1899 papers by Thomas Kyd were found in which Kyd, who had been arrested for atheism, said he got the papers from Marlowe and denied all sympathy with the views expressed. However, F. S. Boas in Fortnightly Review (1899) concluded that the material was a vehement Unitarian argument on Scriptural grounds and was much more likely to have been written by Francis Kett than by Marlowe. Whatever the facts, it was a time when rationalism was becoming more and more popular and a time when persecution of non-believers increased the zeal of those who objected to such persecutions. Accused of treason, Raleigh in a relaxed manner approached the scaffold, spoke to the crowd of the charges against him and explained why they were flimsy, then asked the executioner to show the ax. “Dost thou think I am afraid of it?” he said, running his hand along the blade. Biographers H. D. Selincourt and E. Thompson then report that he said of the ax, “This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases. When I stretch forth my hands, dispatch me.” Lying down, he stretched out his arms, and when the executioner hesitated Raleigh cried, “Strike, man, strike!” It took two blows, and all was finished. {CE; JMR; JMRH; TRI; TYD}

Rall, Ted (20th Century) A columnist and a cartoonist, Rall wrote Revenge of the Lathchkey Kids (1998), which contains a chapter on his non-religious views. On the Web: <http://www.rall.com>. {CA}

Ram, Joachim Gerhard (17th Century) Ram was a Holstein philosopher who was accused of being an atheist. {BDF}

RAMADAN: See entry for Islam.

Ramaer, Anton Gerard Willem (1812–1867) Ramaer was a Dutch writer, an officer in the Dutch army in 1829. He wrote on Schopenhauer and others, contributed to De Dageraad, and often used the pseudonym of “Laçhmé.” {BDF}

Ramamurthi, M. V. (Died 1998) In Hyderabad, Ramamurthi was editor of the monthly Vikasam in Telugu from 1975 until his death. Also, he published widely in English and Telugu on humanism, rationalism, and secularism. He was a lawyer, one of India’s early radical humanists who worked along with M. N. Roy, and one of his country’s leading radical humanists. Ramamurthy was a president of the Indian Radical Humanist Association, and he was chairperson of the Indian Rationalist Association. (See entry for his wife, Malladi Subbamma.) {FUK}

Ramanthan, S. (20th Century) Ramanthan, who was minister for information in Rajaji’s Congress Cabinet of Madras Presidency in 1937, strengthened the rationalists’ Self-Respect Movement, which formed part and parcel of the Non-Brahmin Movement of South India. Famed as a rationalist in the Madras State Government in the 1950s, Ramanthan was a founding member of the Indian Rationalist Association and acted as its president until 1958.

Ramaswamy, E. V. (20th Century): See entry for G. Vijayam.

Rambaud, Alfred Nicolas (1842–1905) Rambaud was an authority on Russian, entrusted by France with Government missions. He was a key person in bringing about the Franco-Russian entente. Rambaud during the period of secularization taught contemporary history at Paris University, and he wrote Histoire de la civilization générale français (1887, 2 volumes). A rationalist, Rambaud worked cordially against the Church. {RAM; RE}

Ramée, Marie Louise de la (Ouida) (1839–1908) Although the family name was Ramé, Ramée changed her name to de la Ramée. She moved from France to London in 1859, where she adopted the pen name of “Ouida,” a reference to a child’s lisping pronunciation of Louisa. She was an ardent humanitarian, an anti-vivisectionist, and a disdainful opponent of Christianity. “Of all powerless things on earth,” she wrote, “Christianity is the most useless. . . . Christianity has made of death a terror which was unknown to the gay calmness of the pagan.” She spared neither Catholic nor Protestant and was caustic about the “cant” to which they give birth. Her Views and Opinions (1895) has a chapter entitled “The Failure of Christianity.” She moved to Italy from 1860 and in 1874 settled in Florence, where she wrote Under Two Flags (1867). Her Folle-Farine (1871), according to Bulwer-Lytton was “a triumph of modern English fiction.” All told, de la Ramée wrote forty-five novels, often set in a world far removed from reality and showing a spirit of rebellion against the moral ideals reflected in much of the fiction of the time. When her literary profits declined and she fell into debt, de la Ramée in 1894 moved to Lucca, then until her death lived in destitution in Viareggio. David Tribe has classified her as an outright freethinker. {BDF; OEL, RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Ramée, Pierre de la (1515–1572) Called Ramus, Ramée was a French humanist. He attacked the doctrines of Aristotle, was accused of impiety, and his work was suppressed in 1543. Ramée lost his life in the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 26 August 1572. {BDF; WWS}

Ramendra (20th Century) Dr. Ramendra, a reader in the department of philosophy at Patna College, Patna University, founded the Bihar Buddhiwadi [Rationalist] Samaj [Society] with his wife Dr. Kawaljeet in 1985. In 1996 he founded the Buddhiwadi Foundation, a non-profit, tax-exempt educational trust that promotes rationalist-humanism and works to eradicate blind faith and superstition. Dr. Kawaljeet is the managing trustee of the organization. The two are writing Rationalist, Humanist, and Atheistic Trends in Twentieth Century Indian Thought, a work which will contain life-sketches and philosophies of eight thinkers: Periyar, M. N. Roy, Ambedkar, Gora, Kovoor, A. B. Shaw, Narsingh Narain, and Ramswaroop Verma. He is author of Why I Am Not a Hindu and Why I Do Not Want Ramrajya (1995) and Is God Dead? (Kya Ishwar Mar Chuka Hai? 1998). The latter work defends atheism by showing that the idea of “god” obstructs the growth of knowledge and morality. Ramendra can be found on the Web at <www.myfreeoffice.com/buddhiwadi>.

Ramírez, Ignacio (1818–1879) Ramirez, who was influenced by José Luis Maria Mora, was a liberal who led attacks on the power and influence of the church in Mexico. He passed the reform laws that suppressed monasteries in Mexico, which earned him the name El nigromante (the necromancer) for his alleged atheism. {EU}

Ramon y Cajal, Santiago (1852–1934) A Spanish histologist, Ramon y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in 1906. He taught anatomy at Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid universities. In spite of his position, Ramon y Cajal was an outspoken materialist and wrote a manual of science for Ferrer’s atheistic schools. Inasmuch as his research chiefly concerned brain and nerve tissue, he played a part in expelling mysticism from physiology and psychology. {RAT; RE}

Rampal, Jean-Pierre Louis (1922– ) Rampal, the distinguished French flutist, has appeared throughout the world. In 1956 he received the Oscar du Premier Virtuose Français; in 1969, Prix Edison; and in 1978, Prix Leonie Sonning. Rampal wrote a children’s book, La flûte (1978), and in autobiographical materials he cited his atheism. {CA; E} Rampal, Jean-Pierre (7 Jan 1922 - 20 May 2000)

	Rampal, the distinguished French flutist, was born in Marseilles, the son of a father who was first flutist with the local symphony and professor of flute at the conservatory. Although his father did not encourage him to be a professional musician, he did teach him at an early age. It was not until after Rampal began studies in medicine that he decided to return to the flute. In his third year of medical school, he was drafted by Nazi occupation forces for compulsory labor in Germany but, instead of reporting for service, he went underground, headed for Paris, and attended classes at the National Conservatory. Five months later he graduated with first prize and embarked upon a career of performing, at first as principal flutist with the Paris Opera and as soloist and chamber musician.

During the course of his career, Rampal received numerous honors, including the following: the Leonie Sonning Prize, the Prix du Président de la République, and the Académie Charles Cros. He was made a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur, an officer of Arts et des Lettres, and a Commandeur de l'Ordre National de Mérite. Rampal wrote a children’s book, La Flûte, and in his autobiographical Music, My Love (1989) he cited his non-theism. {CA: E}

Ramsay, William [Sir] (1852–1916) The discoverer of helium, Ramsay was a Scottish chemist whose early experiments showed that the alkaloids are related to pyridine, which he synthesized (1876) from acetylene and prussic acid. With Rayleigh, he discovered argon, and, with M. W. Travers, krypton, neon, and xenon. Ramsay also carried on research concerning radium emanation. In 1902 he was knighted and in 1904 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His Christian biographer, Filden, admitted that Sir William was an agnostic with a tinge of mysticism and no belief in a future life. However, he used theistic phrases and in 1908 wrote to a friend, “Life has been pretty good to us—perhaps I should say ‘God.’ I feel inclined to.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Ramsey, William James (1844–1916) Ramsey became a freethinker early in life, for he was the son of a freethinking, Chartist shoemaker. But when his family moved to Norwich, he sang in the cathedral choir. Upon hearing Bradlaugh in Norwich in 1859, Ramsey returned to being a freethinker and joined the Reform League in London, being present at the “storming” of Hyde Park in 1866. He was a founding member at the Old Street Hall of Science, where he was a regular chairman at Sunday lectures. In 1877 after having been a shoemaker, he became manager of the Freethought Publishing Company for Bradlaugh and Besant. Charged with blasphemy in 1883, he was sentenced along with Foote to nine months in the jail at Holloway. In the 1890s he founded the Freethought Federation, then edited the Jerusalem Star (1895–1896) under the pseudonym “Le Vitty Cuss.” In 1906 he worked to secure the return of his old Reform League colleague, W. R. Cremer, as M.P. for Hackney. {BDF; FUK; RAT; RSR; TRI; WSS}

Ranc, Arthur (1831–1908) Ranc was a French writer and deputy who had been brought up by his parents as a freethinker and Republican. He took the prize for philosophy at the College of Poitiers and studied law at Paris. Upon conspiring with C. Delescluze against the Second Empire, he was imprisoned but escaped to Geneva. Ranc collaborated on La Marseillaise, was elected on the Municipal Council of Paris in 1871, and became a Deputy in 1873. Ranc wrote Under the Empire and other political works. {BDF; RAT}

Rancie, Norman (1888–1968) Rancie was an Australian freethinker, atheist, and anarcho-syndicalist. Like his father, J. R. Rancie, he was a member of the Australasian Secular Association. In the early Free Speech battles, Rancie was one of the first to be arrested. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1915 and edited their journal, Direct Action, for two years. Rancie was critical of all politicians, maintained a militant atheism, and upheld his individual brand of idealism throughout his life. {SWW}

Rand, Anthony F. (20th Century) Rand, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was president of the Humanist Society of Greater Detroit. {HM2}

Rand, Ayn (1905–1982) Alice Rosenbaum was born in St. Petersburg to a nonobservant Jewish family. Upon arriving in the United States, she renamed herself Ayn (rhymes with “nine”) after a Finnish woman whose work she had read. Later, living in Chicago, she decided to change her last name but keep the initials. Looking at her Remington-Rand typewriter, she decided upon Ayn Remington, later choosing Rand. An atheist at the age of thirteen, Rand became the philosopher of objectivism—she appropriated the term “objective” from the Marxist regime she had fled. Many defined it as a dog-eat-dog outlook, Gore Vidal describing her philosophy as “nearly perfect in its immorality.” Rand was best known for her novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). For college students in the 1950s and 1960s Rand became something of a cult figure. By 1965 courses on her books and ideas were offered in eighty cities, and many started subscribing to her newsletter, The Objectivist. She opposed the altruism of welfare states and espoused a rational self-interest that included a woman’s right to have an abortion. As for underdogs, she once told an audience at West Point,

Today’s mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy.

Basically, she believed that selfishness is a virtue, that altruism is a vice, that laissez-faire capitalism is our best possible choice:

Since politics is a branch of philosophy, objectivism advocates certain political principles—specifically those of laissez-faire capitalism.

According to Corliss Lamont, in this outlook she suffers from “the reductive fallacy,” in which philosophers or others oversimplify by illegitimately classifying certain multiple phenomena under one category. Rand’s self-interest fallacy, he says, makes this popular novelist an individual “with philosophic pretensions and semantic naiveté.” Others have noted that the “Me Generation” of the 1970s found appealing her “rational selfishness,” and she has a large following among many atheists. One who definitely disliked her was the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she allegedly depicted in The Fountainhead. (Some insist, however, that it was another architect that she had in mind). John Galt, the heroic fictional architect in Atlas Shrugged complained that

We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one’s happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt.

Of religion, she wrote much, including the following:

Religion . . . is the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one-tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worse curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.

For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket—by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.

Martin Seymour-Smith, a critic, is quite explicit: “Unfortunately her crypto-totalitarian and ultra-simplistic ideas have had some influence on the conservatively bred young, since they allow people to be ruthless without a bad conscience. Her ‘philosophy’ is capitalistic-Superman (as in the figure in the comics): the ‘great’ men are those who use others, in the name of ‘reason,’ with an enlightened ruthlessness.” As icing on the cake, he adds, The Fountainhead—like her other books—is offensively ill written (‘pedestrian, pockmarked with short, clipped staccato sentences’).” While working on a Cecil B. DeMille set, she encountered an extra, Frank O’Connor, with whom she reportedly had a sexy relationship. Their eventual marriage included her calling him “Cubbyhole” and his calling her “Kitten Fluff,” details brought out in “Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,” a movie produced and directed in 1998 by Michael Paxton. The movie shows her as being a histrionically proud figure who loved attention, “tiddlywink music,” and movie star Gary Cooper. Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to Nathaniel Branden, who she told both her husband and Branden’s wife that they were going to sleep together. Branden, who became her principal heir, reportedly lost interest in Rand sexually—she was 61 and he was 36—and began a relationship with a younger woman. According to Stephen M. Silverman (Where There’s a Will, 1991), Rand found out about it in 1967 and not only cut him and his wife out of her life but also cut him out of the will. The final estate was valued at $877,000., all of which went to a close associate, Leonard Peikoff, a disciple who had kept in touch with her daily for the last four years of her life. Rand’s New York Times obituary was written by Edwin McDowell, who described her belief that “selfishness was good and altruism evil,” and that the welfare of society must always be subordinate to individual self-interest. Objectivism was described as a belief in “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of life.” Rand’s final services were held in Manhattan’s Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home, where she was laid out next to a six-foot-high dollar sign, her favorite symbol. The services were followed by a private burial at which mourners dropped flowers into the grave. Kipling’s “If” was read, as it had also been read at her husband Frank’s memorial. (See entries for Libertarian, Leonard Peikoff, and Jeff Walker.) {CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; Objectivist Newsletter, Issue #1, 1962; Stephen M. Silverman, Where There’s a Will, 1991; TYD; WWS}

Randall, James A. (20th Century) Randall wrote “A Paper on the Life and Character of Mr. Thomas Paine” (1909). {GS}

Randall, James G. (20th Century) Randall is a contributing editor to Freethought Today. At the 14th annual HUMCON conference sponsored in 1994 by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County, California, he told of his lawsuits against the Boy Scouts, charging the organization with religious discrimination. A lawyer, he has defended cases for individuals who have been forced to pray in schools or otherwise been forced into religious conformity.

Randall Jr., John Herman (1899–1980) A professor of philosophy at Columbia University and a former editor of the Journal of Philosophy, Randall signed both Humanist Manifesto I and II. In the 1950s, he was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York and of the Ethical Culture Society. Among his books are The Problem of Group Responsibility (1922), Making of the Modern Mind (1926), The Philosophy of Paul Tillich (1952), The Role of Knowledge in Western Religion (1958), and The Meaning of Religion for Man (1968). Randall was President from 1966 to 1967 of the Metaphysics Society of America, editor of the Journal of History of Ideas, and joint editor of the Journal of Philosophy. Edwin H. Wilson in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995) has described Randall’s significant contributions and tells of his correspondence with both Bragg and Wilson. {CL; HM1; HM2; HNS; HNS2; PK}

Randall, Tony [Arthur Leonard Rosenberg] (26 Feb 1920 - ) Randall has gone on record that his own mortality weighs heavily on him. “Every day, I read the obits. And there isn’t a day I don’t know someone in there,” he told Libby Copeland of The Washington Post. An atheist who doesn’t believe in an afterlife, he added, “I wish I believed I’d see my parents again, see my wife again. But I know it’s not going to happen.” (The Week, 10 Oct 2003)

Randello, Cosimo (19th Century) Author of The Simple Story of a Great Fraud, Randello was an Italian critic of the origin of Christianity. His book was directed against Pauline theology and was published in Milan in 1882. {BDF}

Rane, M. A. (20th Century) Rane was secretary of the Indian Rationalist Association from 1957 to 1958.

Randi, James (1928–	) 

Randi is a Canadian-born writer, educator, and magician whose given name is Randall James Hamilton Zwinge. With Bert Sugar, he wrote Houdini, His Life and Art (1976). An internationally known conjurer and a skeptic, Randi lectures on paranormal subjects. Flim-Flam (1981) and The Truth About Uri Geller (1975) are two of his books. His work in exposing fraudulent faith healers has won him awards from the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, and he is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In 1989, he wrote The Faith Healers, an exposé, in which he offered to give $1,000. to anyone providing evidence of healing through prayer. His criteria for a cure by faith:

• The disease must not be normally self-terminating.

• The recovery must be complete.

• The recovery must take place in the absence of any medical treatment that might normally be expected to affect the disease.

• There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease was present before the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.

• There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease is not present after the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.

No one yet has claimed this money despite its having been successively augmented by others. When he informs believers that he is not a believer, he finds they usually are “infuriated by such a response.…{They] usually turn away and leave ringing in the air a declaration that there is just no point in trying to reason with me and that I will be ‘prayed for.’ I have no need of this patronization, nor of such a condescending attutide, and I resent it. I consider such an action to be a feeble defense for a baseless superstition and a retreat from reality.” In The Mask of Nostradamus (1990), Randi unmasks the 16th-century astrologer, including among other points that in the prophecy game it is important to make lots of predictions and hope that at least some of them come true. In addition to being on the editorial board of The Humanist, the “Amazing Randi” is principal investigator of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project. Arthur C. Clarke wrote an introduction to Randi’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), a volume that alphabetically presents hundreds of entries, with cross-references, on topics such as the paranormal, supernatural, occult and mysticism, and fringes of science. On the Web: <http://www.randi.org>. {CA; E}

Randi, James (7 Aug 1928 - )

		Randi is a Canadian-born writer, educator, and magician whose given name is Randall James Hamilton Zwinge. With Bert Sugar, he wrote Houdini, His Life and Art (1976). An internationally known conjurer and a skeptic, Randi lectures on paranormal subjects. Flim-Flam (1981) and The Truth About Uri Geller (1975) are two of his books. His work in exposing fraudulent faith healers has won him awards from the Council for Secular Humanism, and he is a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. 

He has become known as being “the most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.” He has haunted the “psychic” spoonbenders, exposed the dirty tricks of faith healers, investigated homeopathic water “with a memory,” and “generally been a thorn in the sides of those who try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.” In 1989, he wrote The Faith Healers, an exposé in which he offered to give $1,000.—it has since been upped to $1,000,000.—to anyone providing evidence of healing through prayer. His criteria for a cure by faith:

• The disease must not be normally self-terminating.

• The recovery must be complete.

• The recovery must take place in the absence of any medical treatment that might normally be expected to affect the disease.

• There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease was present before the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.

• There must be adequate medical opinion that the disease is not present after the application of whatever means were used to bring about the miracle.

No one yet has claimed this money despite its having been successively augmented by others. When he informs believers that he is not a believer, he finds they usually are “infuriated by such a response. . . . [They] usually turn away and leave ringing in the air a declaration that there is just no point in trying to reason with me and that I will be ‘prayed for.’ I have no need of this patronization, nor of such a condescending attitude, and I resent it. I consider such an action to be a feeble defense for a baseless superstition and a retreat from reality.” In The Mask of Nostradamus (1990), Randi unmasks the 16th-century astrologer, including among other points that in the prophecy game it is important to make lots of predictions and hope that at least some of them come true. In addition to his having been on the editorial board of The Humanist, the “Amazing Randi” is principal investigator of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project. Sir Arthur C. Clarke wrote an introduction to Randi’s An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (1995), a volume that alphabetically presents hundreds of entries, with cross-references, on topics such as the paranormal, supernatural, occult and mysticism, and fringes of science. “We may disagree with Randi on certain points,” wrote Carl Sagan, “but we ignore him at our peril.” In 1986 Randi received a fellowship (often called the genius award) from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. On the Web: <http://www.randi.org>. {CA; E}

Randolph, A(sa) Philip (1889–1979) Son of a Methodist minister, Randolph was influenced by Karl Marx and the Socialist Party’s vision of the nobility of the masses. In 1917 as editor of The Messenger, he called upon black men to refuse military service, leading President Woodrow Wilson to call him the most dangerous Negro in America. Although never a porter himself, Randolph became the formidable chief of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, won wage increases, won shorter hours, and in 1935 obtained the group’s admission to the American Federation of Labor. In 1941 when Randolph announced that he would lead tens of thousands of his constituents in a protest march on the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told him, “Questions like this have sociological implications. They can’t be gotten at with hammer and tongs. They can’t be settled with marches.” Randolph remained unswayed. “You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington. We can’t have that,” said Roosevelt. Randolph remained unswayed. So Roosevelt sighed, picked up a pen and signed an order establishing the Fair Employment Practices Commission, arguably the single most important decree since the 13th Amendment. According to Norm Allen Jr., Randolph may have listed himself in Who’s Who as a Methodist, but he did so to avoid public criticism of his outlook of secularism and humanism. He also listed himself as a Mason. “We consider prayer as nothing but a fervent wish,” he declared while being the civil rights leader and founder of the railway porters union. Malcolm X, who once alleged that all leaders of black communities are muddled, added that he found Randolph “the least confused.” Randolph’s photo was once on the cover of the Black Muslim’s Muhammad Speaks (1963). Randolph signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1970, the American Humanist Association named Randolph Humanist of the Year. {HM2; HNS2; Jae Maeder, New York Daily News, 15 March 1999; TYD}

Randolph, Vance (1892–1980) A Midwesterner and an authority on Ozark culture and folklore, Randolph worked in Girard, Kansas, at the newspaper, Appeal to Reason. Some of his off-color Ozark folk stories are found in Pissing in the Snow (1976). Whitehead and Muhrer, in their Freethought on the American Frontier, include “The Infidel’s Grave,” a story from Randolph’s The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and Other Ozark Folk Tales (1955).

Ranke-Heinemann, Uta (1927– ) In Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (1990), Ranke-Heinemann, a German, claims that “the whole of church history adds up to one long arbitrary, narrow-minded masculine despotism over the female sex.” She describes the cultural domination of women that a celibate governing elite of the Catholic Church has perpetuated. John Cardinal O’Connor attacked the book upon its publication, objecting to its statement that homosexuality is so pronounced that many religious orders and diocesan seminaries require men to pass an HIV test. The author also attacks St. Thomas Aquinas’s view that women are an inferior form of man and declares that “celibate hatred of sex is hatred of women.” Celibacy, it is noted, was not a Catholic rule until Pope Gregory VII in the 11th Century fought clerical marriages. He feared, because of the German emperor’s edicts, that priests’ progeny would inherit ecclesiastical property. “I am tired,” writes Ranke-Heinemann, “of the hair-splitting nonsense of the white bachelors of the Church who are defining sexual intercourse.” In 1994 she has written Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fair Tales You Don’t Have to Believe to Have a Living Faith. Ranke-Heinemann is qualified to write on such a subject, for she is one of the few women ever to qualify as a university professor in Catholic theology. However, she lost her academic chair when the Pope withdraw her permission to teach. Ironically, Ranke-Heinemann professes a faith in God and religion. She interprets Jesus speaking for God’s love, for mercy and for compassion, not for the dead, but to the living.

Rankel, Jeff (20th Century) Rankel published Independent Atheist (1127 North College, Decatur, Illinois 62522). {FD}

Rankin, David O. (20th Century) Rankin, a senior minister at the Fountain Street Church in Cedar Rapids, Michigan, has more than two thousand parishioners. He has also served Unitarian Universalist churches in Watertown and New Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as in San Francisco and Atlanta. In “We All Burn Out” (World , Sep-Oct 1995), Rankin describes some of the hazards as well as the glories of being a minister.

Ransleben, Guido E. (20th Century) Ransleben wrote 100 Years of Comfort in Texas (1954). {Freethought History #15, 1995}

Ranson, Allan O. (20th Century) In 1935 for his M. A. thesis at the University of Wisconsin, Ranson wrote on the “Persuasive Methods used by Robert G. Ingersoll.” {FUS}

Ransom, George F. (19th Century) Ransom, a freethinker, wrote Shall We Live Again? (1895). {GS}

Rao, Avula Sambasiva [Chief Justice] (20th Century) Mr. Justice (retired) Rao has been chief justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court in India, the vice chancellor of Andhra University, and a former chairperson of the Indian Radical Humanist Association. He has been a vocal critic of India’s religious organizations and their influence in detracting from the democratic goals of secularism and rationalism.

Rao, Badrinath Krushna (20th Century) Rao, a student of sociology at the University of Alberta in Canada, has written about South Asia and the Kashmir imbroglio for Humanist in Canada (Spring 1999). The current problem has to do with the internal contradictions of Hindu society, he wrote.

Rao, Kotapati Murahari (20th Century) Rao, a rationalist, is President of the Academy of Rural Development and Research in Hyderabad, India.

Rao, P. V. S. (20th Century) Rao, the recipient in 1987 of the Padma Shri in India, is a rationalist. Dr. Rao is senior professor and head of the computer systems and communications group at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay.

Rao, K. Ranganatha (20th Century) Rao, a retired additional director of medical science, Government of Andhra Pradesh in India, teaches biochemistry. Dr. Rao is a rationalist.

Raphael, Sally Jessy (1943– ) Raphael, a noted U.S. talk-show host, has stated, “I don’t believe in God. Although it isn’t what most people think, I believe this is all there is. No heaven. No reincarnation. Once it’s over, it’s over. Once you believe that, it causes you to live every day of your life to the fullest. Every morning I wake up and say, ‘If this is the only day I have left, what can I do to make it mean the most?’ . . . If you believe in an afterlife, I think it makes living a lot easier. Unfortunately, I’ve had to find another way to define my existence. Immortality for me comes from trying to do the most you can for your fellow man. I do extensive charity work to make an impact with my life. My form of prayer is meditation. It’s been a part of my life for thirty years. I meditate for ten minutes to half an hour every day, morning and night. Meditation focuses you so you can come out relaxed and with an enormous amount of energy.” In 1988, Raphael received the television industry’s Emmy Award for being the outstanding daytime talk-show host. {Celebrity Atheists on the Web}

Raphael, Sally Jessy (25 Feb 1942 - ) Raphael, a noted U.S. talk-show host, has two step-daughters, one adopted son, and foster children. She received her B.F.A. from Columbia in New York City and as early as 1955 anchored a radio program for the Junior High School News Station, WFAS-AM, in White Plains, NY. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, she hosted a cooking program over WAPA-TV; has broadcast from Miami and Ft. Lauderdale; was a part-time owner of a perfume factory (1964-1968); owned The Wine Press (1979-1983); wrote (with M. J. Boyer) Finding Love (1984) and (with Pam Proctor) Sally: Unconventional Success (1980). In addition she has appeared in such films as She-Devil (1989); Resident Alien (1990); The Addams Family (1991); The Associate (1996); and Meet Wally Sparks (1996). Also, she has appeared on TV programs such as Murphy Brown, Nightline, Touched By An Angel, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and the John LaRoquette Show. In 1985 Raphael was recipient of the Bronze Medal of the International Film & Television Festival of New York; in 1998 won an Emmy Award as the outstanding daytime talk-show host; and in 1989 won an Emmy Award for her outstanding talk show. She has gone on record as to her philosophic outlook:

I don’t believe in God. Although it isn’t what most people think, I believe this is all there is. No heaven. No reincarnation. Once it’s over, it’s over. Once you believe that, it causes you to live every day of your life to the fullest. Every morning I wake up and say, "If this is the only day I have left, what can I do to make it mean the most?" . . . If you believe in an afterlife, I think it makes living a lot easier. Unfortunately, I’ve had to find another way to define my existence. Immortality for me comes from trying to do the most you can for your fellow man. I do extensive charity work to make an impact with my life. My form of prayer is meditation. It’s been a part of my life for thirty years. I meditate for ten minutes to half an hour every day, morning and night. Meditation focuses you so you can come out relaxed and with an enormous amount of energy.

{CA}

Rapisardi, Mario (1844–1912) Rapisardi was an Italian poet, born in Sicily. He translated Lucretius in 1880 and published poems on Lucifer, which chants the victory of the devil over the Christian God, and The Last Prayer of Pius IX (1871). {BDF}

Rapoport, Anatol (1911– ) Rapoport, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Michigan and author of Science and the Goals of Man (1950) and Operational Philosophy (1953), wrote to the present author about humanism:

“Humanism” to me is an orientation which places man’s aspirations at the center of a system of values. The possibility of doing so derives from two assumptions: (1) that no outside agency need be considered which prescribes values for man regardless of what man’s aspirations may be; (2) that it is possible to distill from the variety of special forms in which human aspirations are expressed (as exemplified in diverse cultures, religions, value systems) a number of basic aspirations characteristic of man as a biological organism. The first of these assumptions can be made by default, as it were, there being no objective evidence to the contrary. The second can be disputed, for it is quite possible that no common human aspirations are discernible, i.e., that conflicting value systems are irreconcilable. Therefore adherence to this second assumption is an act of faith, perhaps the only article of faith to which a humanist subscribes. There is a methodological advantage (from the point of view of ethical theory) to making the two assumptions of humanism. If one can be objective, empirical methods arrive at conclusions as to what the common denominator of human aspirations is and if one takes this common denominator as the ultimate measure of value, one is spared the necessity of grappling with unanswerable questions, such as “What does God want of Man?” The ultimate human values, if they can be found, become not imperatives (signifying what must be) but discoveries (signifying what is) and cannot be altered, or escaped from, any more than the other laws of nature. The humanist, therefore, wishes to know what man as man must do, because he cannot do otherwise, and seeks to define human aspirations in those terms. All other problems of value seeking then become practical ones, that is, one seeks means to enable man to achieve these (human) ends. This, to my way of thinking, is the extension of scientific orientation to ethics. The scientist too discovers what (are the laws of nature). To the extent that he tries to apply science to pre-conceived ends, he works within the framework of the necessary and has abandoned questions beginning with ‘Why?’ where they have no meaning. The scientist also tries to work with the fewest possible arbitrary assumptions. For the same reason the humanist avoids assumptions concerning extra-human prime movers, coercers, frustrators, or evaluators of human aspirations. Further comments on these matters can be found in my articles, “Religion and Salvation” in The Humanist, and “How Relative Are Values?” in ETC., A Review of General Semantics.

In the 1950s, Rapoport reviewed books for The Humanist. In 1989, he was professor of peace studies at the University of Toronto. His field of research is mathematical biography. {WAS, 29 March 1956}

Rapp, Sandy (20th Century) Rapp is author of God’s Country: A Case Against Theocracy (1991).

Rapp, William Jourdan (1895–1942) Rapp was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. A playwright and an editor of True Story, he was a nominal Episcopalian.

Rappleyea, George W. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Rappleyea was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.

Rappoport, John (20th Century) Rappoport, in The Most Hated Woman in America (1998), tells of the disappearance and possible murder of the O’Hair family.

Raso, Jack (20th Century) Raso is editor and managing editor of the Nutrition and Health Forum newsletter and a consultant to Prometheus Books. He wrote The Dictionary of Metaphysical Healthcare: Alternative Medicine, Paranormal Healing, and Related Methods (1996), warning about “alternativism,” an ill-defined, ragtag, quasi-religious movement which is displacing, and in some cases supplementing, organized religion. An atheist, he believes that belief in God facilitates belief in alternative healthcare, which he opposes. {Freethought Today, March 1997}

Raspail, François Vincent (1794–1878) Raspail was a French chemist and politician who had been brought up by ecclesiastics and intended for the Church. While quite young, he became professor of philosophy at the theological seminary of Avignon but, being examined on theological dogmas, was rejected. He went to Paris, became a scientific lecturer, took part in the Revolution of 1830, and refused an offer from Louis Philippe of the Legion of Honor. Frequently imprisoned, Raspail nevertheless was finally elected to the chamber in 1869, where he sat on the extreme left. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Rasputin, Grigori Yefimovich (1872–1916) A Russian “holy man with peculiar eyes,” Rasputin (the name given him by fellow villagers meant “the debauched one”) was a semi-literate peasant who preached and practiced a doctrine of salvation that mixed religious fervor with sexual indulgence. As a young man, he had joined a heretical sect called The Flagellants, whose all-night orgies of incantations, wild dances, provocative switchings, and indiscriminate copulations were practiced as sinful prerequisites of redemption. In public baths he displayed his body to admiring young women. (His penis when erect measured 13” according to his daughter Maria. His wife, Praskovia Fedorovna Dubrovina, a blond, blue-eyed village girl whom he married about 1891 and the mother of his three legitimate children, said, “He has enough for all.”) Rasputin would urge women to debase themselves and “try the flesh,” would fondle their breasts until they confused sexual excitation with religious fervor, and would then convince husbands that intercourse with their wives was an act of redemption willed by God. Hordes of peasants were said to have thrown themselves at his feet, kissing the hemline of his black caftan, crying “Father Grigori, our Savior!” His bedroom was called “the holy of holies,” and the number of his illegitimate children is unknown. In Czar Nicholas II’s court, Rasputin gained a powerful hold over Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna and, through her, over the czar. He became a member of the royal family, convincing them that he was able to heal the emperor’s only son, Alexis. His influence over the Russian state was enormous. He was known to obtain huge “fees” from the rich for political favors, then empty his pockets during the same day to the poor and needy. Although he preferred sex with aristocratic beauties because “they smelled better,” he never improved his own peasant odors and scooped up his food with his hands. His disciples, however, saw in him the reincarnation of Christ. Prince Felix Youssupov, using his beautiful wife as bait, arranged a midnight party at which Rasputin drank several glasses of poisoned wine and ate enough cakes filled with potassium cyanide to kill a cow. When these did not kill him, the Prince shot him with a pistol. Rasputin staggered out into the courtyard where another conspirator shot him again. Rasputin was then stabbed many times. Two days later, the official account stated, his trussed-up body was found under the ice of the Neva River, one arm half-free and his lungs filled with water. Rasputin had still been alive when submerged and he had died by drowning. “If I die,” Rasputin once correctly prophesied, “the Emperor will soon lose his crown.” Alexander Cockburn’s grandmother entertained Prince Felix Youssupov in the years following the Russian revolution of 1917. She told relatives a slightly different story of how Youssupov had compulsively described to her again and again the scene as it took place in his palace in St. Petersburg:

Determined to finish off this charismatic monk who held such sway over the Romanovs, particularly the Czarina, Youssupov had invited Rasputin to dinner. They’d served him a poisonous brew that he had tossed down with relish. Then they’d shot him. Finally they’d dragged him down to the edge of the canal that flowed past the bottom of the garden, and stuffed him under the ice. The next morning they found he’d crawled back up the bank before finally expiring. And all through the killing, Youssupov told Joan, the phonograph had been playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

By the 1990s, Rasputin was no longer the media figure he once had been. But in the 1970s, a rock group called Boney M had a hit song entitled, “Rasputin, Rasputin, Russia’s Greatest Love Machine.” {CE; Alexander Cockburn, NY Press, 26 Mar 1997–1 Apr 1997; PA}

Rastern, Richard (20th Century) An American living in Costa Rica, Rastern is the person who helped found Triangulo Rosa. That group successfully defied the nation’s public health system by insisting that all, not just pregnant women, be given the latest medications for the treatment of those who are HIV-positive. The Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that, indeed, the country could not afford not to spend the needed funds. Rastern currently is director of Agua Buena Human Rights Association, Apartado 366-2200, Coronado, Costa Rica. That group supports the formation of strong advocacy groups run for and by People Living with HIV/AIDS throughout the Latin American region. Panama followed the Costa Rican model in 1999, agreeing to supply the cocktail of medications to HIV-plus individuals and those with AIDS. E-mail: <rastern@sol.racsa.co.cr>.

Ratcliffe, C. E. (20th Century) A Scot, Ratcliffe wrote “Reflections” (1920) and Fact and Fiction—Secular Poems (1956). {GS}

Ratcliffe, Samuel Kerkham (Born 1868) Ratcliffe, a journalist and lecturer, was one of the regular lecturers for the Ethical Societies at London. He edited the Echo in 1900 and from 1903 to 1906 was acting editor of the Calcutta Statesman. He was a secretary of the Sociological Society and the London representative of the New York New Republic. In 1915, he was appointed a lecturer at the South Place Ethical Society. In A Generation of Religious Progress (1916), Ratcliffe contributed a chapter. He concluded that “the very revival of superstition and the manufacture of new creeds are evidence of profound dissatisfaction with the established orthodoxies, and of the determination of the human spirit to find a satisfying means of expression for the craving after reality.” Writing about Charles A. Watts, Ratcliffe stated, “I have always associated the name of Charles A. Watts with causes the advocacy of which demanded courage and tenacity and unremitting watchfulness, and we could always be sure of finding him at his post. The Rationalist Press Association stands as a most unusual monument to his memory.” Ratcliffe’s grandson is Nicolas Walter, of the Rationalist Press Association. {FUK; RAT}

RATIOCINATION To ratiocinate (ra-tee-OS-uh-nate) is to reason logically and methodically. The process of reasoning is such that one re-traces thoughts, understanding the steps used in order to arrive at some conclusion. For example, the direction to find the white house had been to go north past the second stoplight, then turn right. But upon arriving, we find no white house. Using ratiocination, we re-think the steps we took (much like slowly reversing movie frames on a film, one by one, returning to the particular frame at which we were given the original direction) and see the mistake: we went south, not north. Cartoonists often illustrate this by drawing an electric light bulb above the person’s head, symbolizing “the moment of understanding.” A Connecticut teacher has given the following to test the ratiocinative processes of students:

1. The Hundred Years War lasted how long? 2. In which month do the Russians celebrate the October revolution? 3. In which country are Panama hats made? 4. From what animal do we get catgut? 5. Where do Chinese gooseberries come from? 6. Louis XVIII was the last one, but how many previous kings of France were called Louis? 7. What was King George VI’s first name? 8. What color is a purple finch? 9. What kind of creatures were the Canary Islands named after? 10. How long did the Thirty Years’ War last?

Answers given by Dennis Berson in People’s Almanac:

1. From 1337 to 1453 is 116 years. 2. November (7th). The Russian calendar was 13 days behind. 3. Ecuador. 4. The sheep. 5. New Zealand. 6. Sixteen, for Louis XVII died in prison during the Revolution and never reached the throne. 7. Albert. 8. The distinctively colored parts are crimson. 9. A breed of large dogs. The Latin name was Canariae insulae, Island of the Dogs. 10. 30 years, of course, from 1618 to 1648.

Some additional questions to test one’s ratiocination:

1. When was Jesus born? 2. If there is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet, what will happen to non-believers when they die? 3. If a baby dies before it is baptized, will its soul go to limbo or to purgatory? 4. In order to insure peace in outer space, the individuals chosen to inhabit the place should all be members of what organized religion? 5. Is common sense uncommon?

RATIONAL

• Rational, adj., Devoid of all delusions save those of observation, experience, and reflection. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

RATIONAL CENTRE In Ghana, the Rational Centre, led by Hope N. Tawiah, is at POB 01132, Osu-Accra, Ghana. (See entries for Ghanian Humanists and Tawiah, Hope N.) {FD}

RATIONAL RECOVERY RESIDENTIAL FACILITIES The Rational Recovery Residential Facilities, at Placerville, California, can be reached by telephoning (916) 621-4374. {FD}

RATIONAL RECOVERY SELF-HELP NETWORK An alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous, Rational Recovery Self-Help Network is at Box 800, Lotus, California 95651. For chapters in various cities and states, a listing can be obtained from the headquarters or found in “Freethinkers Directory.” (See entry for Secular Organizations for Sobriet and for James Taylor) {FD}

RATIONAL RELIGION In 1839, Robert Owen united the various bodies of his followers in “The Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists.” In 1817 he had declared that “all the religions of the world are false,” and the 100,000 members of the new group were fellow agnostics who, by religion, meant devotion to moral and social ideals. The movement broke into fragments, Secularism taking over the criticism of religion, and later attempts to organize non-theists on the basis of “rational religion” had had no large or permanent success. {RE}

RATIONAL THINKER JOURNAL Rational Thinker Journal, an Illinois internet organization for freethinkers, is found at <www.geocities.com/athens/forum/1906>.

RATIONALISM In philosophy, rationalism is a theory that holds that reason alone, unaided by experience, can arrive at basic truth regarding the world. It is opposed to empiricism on the question of the source of knowledge and the techniques for verification of knowledge. René Descartes, G. W. von Leibniz, and Baruch Spinoza all represent the rationalist position whereas John Locke represents the empirical. Specifically, according to Edgar Sheffield Brightman, who once taught at Boston University in Massachusetts, rationalism is as follows: (a) the deductive [Cartesian, mathematical] method of drawing logical inferences from elementary concepts [intuitions, axioms, innate, or a priori truths], as opposed to the empirical method; (b) the doctrine (opposed to sensationalism) that reason is a higher source of knowledge, independent of sense [when Locke said that “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in sense,” Leibniz added “except the intellect itself”]; or (c) the appeal to coherent thought [as opposed to irrationalism] as a criterion of truth. McCabe states that the word rationalism came into use in the seventeenth century. Bacon spoke of “Rationals who in the manner of spiders, spin webs from their own substance,” but he was referring to the Aristotelian philosophers who disdained empirical science and claimed that reason was the source of truth. In Germany, at the time, they were sometimes called Rationalists. McCabe continues, “About the middle of the century the Clarendon State Papers recorded the appearance of ‘a new sect calling themselves Rationalists,’ who follow ‘what their reason dictates to them in Church or State.’ In 1661 Comenius applied the name to the Socinians (unitarians) and Deists. The word was rarely used, and was not adopted by any body of sceptics. It was usually applied to Christians who tried to prove that their faith is in harmony with reason, or to philosophers who slighted the empirical method of investigations. What are now called ‘Rationalists’ were sceptics, infidels, Atheists, Freethinkers, or Naturalists. Kant, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, used the word in both senses, but in Great Britain it was Owen’s foundation of Rational Religion which led the public to call his followers ‘Rationals,’ or ‘Rationalists,’ that made the name popular. In 1845 George Holyoake published a booklet with the title Rationalism: A Treatise for the Times, but later preferred the word ‘Secularism.’ Others called themselves Freethinkers, Agnostics, or Atheists. The group of Agnostics, with a few liberal Theists, who were associated with C. A. Watts in 1887, adopted the word, and in 1893 founded the Rationalist Press Committee in order to ‘circulate Rationalist publications,’ and the name was later changed to Rationalist Press Association. It defined Rationalism as ‘the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority.’ ” McCabe then notes that rationalists became, “in the common usage of the term, men and women who by this use of reasoning have become convinced that religious beliefs are false. Since it would obviously be absurd to refuse the title of ‘Rationalist’ to men like Voltaire and Paine, the name is in historical retrospect extended to Deists and Theists who rejected all Christian doctrines or who today declare their rejection of the teaching of every branch of the Christian Church.” Organized Rationalists, he added, include members of the Rationalist Press Association (which has no doctrinal or philosophical tests) and similar bodies, and they “usually reject also the belief in God and Immortality and subscribe for the propagation of their opinions.” For Bertrand Russell in his 1928 Sceptical Essays, rationality in opinion is “the habit of taking account of all relevant evidence in arriving at a belief. Where certainty is unattainable, a rational man will give most weight to the most probable opinion, while retaining others which have an appreciable probability, in his mind, as hypotheses which subsequent evidence may show to be preferable. This, of course, assumes that it is possible in many cases to ascertain facts and probabilities by an objective method—i.e., a method which will lead any two careful people to the same result.” (For one view of how rationalism differs from humanism, see the entry for Humanism, Per Curtis Reese. See a detailed discussion by Bernard Williams in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; ER; RE}

Rationalist Annual The Rationalist Press Association’s Rationalist Annual ceased in 1968 and was replaced by Question, which ceased in 1980.

RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION The Rationalist Association, POB 994, St. Louis, Missouri 63188, publishes The American Rationalist. Dr. Gordon Stein was its long-time editor, and Barbara Stocker its managing editor. Upon Stein’s death in 1996, Dr. Kaz Dziamka of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was named the editor.

RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION (RPA) The Rationalist Press Association (RPA) began in 1890 as the Propagandist Press Committee. On 26 May 1899, an association of rationalists that grew out of a Rationalist Press Committee established by C. A. Watts, who had already founded the Agnostic Annual (1884) and the Literary Guide (1885). The original directors were R. B. Anderson, J. S. Dryden, C. T. Gorham, Clair Grece, G. J. Holyoake, Joseph McCabe, C. A. Watts, and A. G. Whyte. Watts’s printing and publishing business belonged to a line going back to Richard Carlile in 1817. In 1902 the RPA began to publish the R.P.A. Reprints and sold four million copies in twenty-five years. In 1940, the honorary associates listed by McCabe were as follows: Arnold Bennett, Prof. Berthelot, B. Björnson, Sir John Boyd Orr, G. Brandes, Prof. Breasted, Prof. Buisson, Prof. Bury, G. Clemenceau, the Hon. J. Collier, C. Darrow, Prof. J. Dewey, Dr. Einstein, Dr. Sigmund Freud, Sir P. Geddes, Sir R. Gregory, J.B.S. Haldane, Prof. Haddon, E. Haeckel, Sir J. Hammerton, Lord Horder, Sir T. A. Hunter, Julian Huxley, L. Huxley, Sir A. Keith, Sir E. Ray Lankester, J. Loeb, C. Lombroso, Somerset Maugham, Sir P. C. Mitchell, Lord Morley, Prof. Pavlov, Eden Phillpotts, T. Reinach, Earl Russell, Bertrand Russell, Sir E. S. Schafer, Sir C. Sherrington, Sir G. Elliot Smith, Sir L. Stephen, H. G. Wells, and Sir H. Wood. Mc Cabe added, caustically, “All the Churches in Great Britain put together could not, from their 8,000,000 members, compile a list which would be half as impressive.” Other honorary associates have included the following: Edward Brabuck, James Bridie, Jacob Bronowski, Basil Chamberlain, Robert Chorley, George Cole, William W. Collins, Joseph Fletcher, Alfred Foster, Frederick Furnivali, Charles Guignebert, Jane Harrison, Edwin Hartland, Édouard Herriot, Leopold Infeld, Ernest Jones, Harold Laski, Carl Lofmark, Willem Manen, Kingsley Martin, David Oppenheimer, Raghunath Paranjpye, P. H. Pardon, Karl Popper, Albert Rivett, Margaret Schlauch, B. F. Skinner, Grafton Smith, Robert Stout, Alan Taylor, George Trevelyan, Edward Westermarck, Edward Willis, Barbara Wootton, and Emile Zola. In 1998, the honorary associates were as follows: Dr. Peter Atkins; H. J. Blackham; Professor Colin Blakemore; Professor Marcel Boll; Professor Sir Hermann Bondi; Alan Brownjohn; Dr. Colin Campbell; Noam Chomsky; Professor Bernard Crick; Professor Francis Crick; Dr. Richard Dawkins; Lord Dormand; Professor Paul Edwards; Professor Lionel Elvin; Professor Sir Raymond Firth; Professor Antony Flew; Lord Foot; Right Honorable Michael Foot; Tony Harrison; Dr. James Hemming; Dr. Christopher Hill; Prof. Eric Hobsbawm; Richard Hoggart; Professor Ted Honderich; Professor Sir Fred Hoyle; Prof. Leopold Infeld; Lord Jenkins of Putney (Hugh Jenkins); Ludovic Kennedy; Professor Paul Kurtz; Richard Leakey; Sir Michael Levey; John Maddox; Professor Haydn Mason; Professor John Maynard Smith; George Melly; Naomi Mitchison; Brian Moore; Edwin Mullins; Professor Patrick Nowell-Smith; Dr. Conor Cruise O’Brien; Jack Parsons; Prof. John Postgate; Claire Rayner; Professor the Earl Russell; Lord Sefton of Garston; Mrs. Renée Short; Dr. David Starkey; Dr. D. J. Stewart; Dr. V. M. Tarkunde; David Tribe; Baroness Turner of Camden; Professor G. A. Wells; Arnold Wesker; Professor Lewis Wolpert; Baron Young of Darlington; and Professor J. Z. Young. The Rationalist Press Association is at Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP. In 1998 its directors were Ivor Russell (Chairman); Antony Chapman; Nigel Collins (appointed March 1998); Jim Herrick; Ralph Ison (retired March 1998); John Metcalf; Daniel O’Hara (retired March 1998); David Pollock; Jonathan Stopes-Roe; Nicolas Walter; and Jane Wynne Willson (Vice-chairman). Metcalf and Willson retired in 1998 and with Russell offered themselves for re-election at the Annual General Meeting to be held 12 July 1999. The number of members was about 900. (See entry for Frederick James Gould, author of a history of the Rationalist Press Association from 1899 on. {RE; Nicolas Walter, “A Century of Reason,” New Humanist #2 and #4, 1999, summarizes the RPA’s century of existence. Explained is the connection between the RPA and the British Humanist Association.}

RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, CENTENARY OF The centenary of the Rationalist Press Association, which formerly was Watts’ Literary Guide, was celebrated by its quarterly journal, New Humanist, in June 1999. Officers and honorary associates sending their greetings included the following:

Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University Alan Brownjohn, poet and novelist Bernard Crick, professor emeritus of politics London University Sir Hermann Bondi, Chairman, RPA Lord Dormand, the Labour MP for Easington from 1970-1987 Lionel Elvin, former director of the London Institute of Education James Hemming, educational psychologist Paul Kurtz, Vice-President, RPA Ludovic Kennedy, TV presenter and author Richard Leakey, paleo-anthropologist Michael Levey, art historian Haydn Mason, chairman of the board of the Voltaire Foundation George Melly, jazz singer, entertainer Patrick Nowell-Smith, professor emeritus of Philosophy David Pollock, RPA director John Postgate, professor of microbiology, the University of Sussex Claire Rayner, writer and chair of the Patients’ Association Conrad Russell, historian; active in the House of Lords as a Liberal Democrat Ivor Russell, Chairman, RPA D. J. Stewart, former chairman of the British Humanist Association and also the Rationalist Press Association David Tribe, former president of the National Secular Society Lewis Wolpert, professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College, London

RATIONALIST RECOVERY ORGANIZATION: See entry for SOS.

Rationalist Reporter The Rationalist Reporter was a monthly bulletin of the New York Chapter of the Rationalist Press Association in 1958. (See entries for E. L. Gruber and Louis Hayden.)

RATIONALISTS NEW YORK Rationalists New York (Box 10-A, 31 Jane Street, New York, NY 10014) publishes and/or distributes material about freethought, rationalism, and secular humanism. E-mail: <wasm@idt.net>.

RATIONALISTS UNITED FOR SECULAR HUMANISM (RUSH) Deidre C. Conn is President of Rationalists United for Secular Humanism. The group’s founder was Chad Docterman, and its other officers include David Fellinton, Vice President; David Anderson, Secretary; and Rachel Seabolt Miller, Treasurer. E-mail: <Conn3@marshall.edu>. On the Web: <www.marshall.edu/rush/>.

Ratner, Joseph (1901?–1979) Ratner was a scientific humanist. With John Dewey, he edited Education Today (1940). Ratner edited Dewey’s Characters and Events. His most noted books were The Philosophy of Spinoza and Spinoza on God. Ratner died of a heart attack. {HNS}

Ratner, Sidney (1908–1996) Ratner was an editor who wrote for The Humanist in the 1950s. With Arthur F. Bentley, he edited Inquiry Into Inquiries: Essays in Social History (1954). He also wrote Taxation and Democracy in America, The Tariff in American History, and The Evolution of the American Economy. Ratner taught at Rutgers University and specialized in economic history. His wide range of interests led him to write a history of the Supreme Court and one of John Dewey, and he published a series of essays about Dewey. In 1989, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy awarded him its Herbert Schneider Award. During World War II, Ratner served as an economist for the Government’s Board of Economic Warfare and the Foreign Economic Administration, following which he became a principal economist in the planning division of the State Department. When the Swedes complained of a lack of ball bearings during the war, items that were necessary for the manufacture of Allied landing craft, Ratner suggested that the bearing industry was controlled by an international cartel. The cartel, which included Germany, had put pressure on the Swedes to limit the supply. When the United States initiated diplomatic efforts with Sweden, the shortage disappeared in two weeks. Ratner was influential in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to expand the size of the Supreme Court, for he found a precedent in President Ulysses S. Grant’s appointments to the Court. Ratner was married to the scholar Louise M. Rosenblatt, also a distinguished humanist. {HNS; Reed Abelson, The New York Times, 17 January 1996}

Rau, Herbert (1813–1876) Rau was a German rationalist who studied theology and became a preacher to free congregations in Stuttgart and Mannheim. Rau wrote Gospel of Nature, A Catechism of the Religion of the Future, and other works. {BDF; RAT}

Rauser, Jerry (20th Century) Rauser, an atheist activist in Minnesota, attended the 1996 fourth World Atheist Conference in Vijayawada, India. His experiences were recorded in The Free Mind, newsletter of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists (February 1996) and in Secular Nation (September-October 1996).

Ravindranath, Alapati (20th Century) Ravindranath, a rationalist, is editor of Misimi in Hyderabad, India.

Rawlinson, Henry Creswick [Sir] (1810–1895) An English Orientalist and administrator, brother of the Orientalist George Rawlinson, Rawlinson served as a consul at Baghdad and became interested in deciphering the cuneiform of the Behistun inscriptions of Darius I. He published his results in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1846). Also, Rawlinson, a Major-General, helped prepare The Cuneiform Inscriptions of Western Asia (1861–1884, 5 volumes) for the British Museum. His brother was a clerical dignitary who stated that Sir Henry was a non-Christian theist who never went to church. The brother remarked, “Not committed to the daily performance of those religious acts and practices which to many are the essentials of an upright life, he held the broad way of doing good because it was good.” McCabe retorted, “One would have thought that in the mind of a priest the ‘broad way’ did not lead to doing good. In plain English, the famous Assyriologist was a liberal Theist who accepted no creed and (unofficially) did not go to church.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Rawson, Albert Leighton (1829–1902) Rawson was an American traveler and author. After studying law, art, and theology, he made four visits to the East. In 1851–1852 he made a pilgrimage from Cairo to Mecca, disguised as a Moslem student of medicine. Rawson illustrated Beecher’s Life of Jesus. In the Freethinkers’ Magazine, Rawson maintained that the Bible account of the twelve tribes of Israel is non-historical. {BDF}

Rawson, Roy Robert (1898–1971) Rawson was an Australian freethinker, Esperantist, parliamentarian, and radical bookseller. A partner of James G. Pyke in Pyke’s bookshop, he was in charge of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books. The shop was the center of the Melbourne Branch of the Left Book Club and the Book Censorship Abolition League. In 1952, Rawson was elected as Australian Labor Party member to the Legislative council for six years. {SWW}

Ray, Sibnarayan (1921– ) Ray, once one of the editors of The Radical Humanist along with Ellen Roy, edited the writings of M. N. Roy, which Oxford University Press has published (3 volumes). In 1949 when at Calcutta University, he described humanism to the present author:

To most Humanists in India the question whether Nehru believes in a soul or not is rather unexciting if not irrelevant. Personally I know that his mind is a queer ensemble of scientific ideas and primitive beliefs; he lives in the Western style, speaks and writes excellent English, talks rationalism and democracy, and he observes all the ancient superannuated rituals of Hindu society. Take for example the custom of Sradh, of offering sacrifices to the dead. Nehru observed it when his father died some years back. He comes of a Kashmir Brahmin family and is quite openly fanatical about preserving the blood-purity of his caste. Most journalists and admirers from the West do not seem to have any guess about this facet of his personality. But what is more surprising is that they refuse to recognise by common consent what is patent and obvious—his insufferable arrogance, his messy thinking and wooliness, his fondness for self-exhibition, and his dictatorial temper. Quite recently an American journalist, Mr. Martin Ebon of McGraw Hill Co., interviewed him and had some taste of his “greatness”—if you chance to meet him, ask him for his impression. . . . There has not been much of a humanist movement in India during the present century. Apart from the publications of Renaissance Publishing, Tagore’s latter-day writings are the only considerable literature on the subject. Humanism in India has been mostly of a religious orientation. Its chief content was social reform with God’s fatherhood and man’s inherent divinity as the chief moral mainsprings. Nanak, Dadu, Chaitanya, Kabir, and all our medieval social reformers preached varieties of religious humanism comparable to the work and ideas of St. Francis. In the 19th century, due largely to the impact of Western ideas, a secular social reform movement started in Bengal, Maharashtra, and certain parts of South India. But the rise of Nationalism and Gandhi’s influence in the present century completely swamped that process. The two most outstanding secular humanists of the 19th century are Jyotirao Phule and Isvar Chandra Vidyasager. Unfortunately, no English translations of their works have so far been made; they wrote exclusively in their mother languages, the former in Maharashtrian, the latter in Bengali. . . . Our own movement is expressly secular. It started as a political movement with the Radical Democratic Party as its central organisation. In our 1948 Conference, however, we decided to dissolve the Party organisation and transform our activities into a more flexible and comprehensive socio-cultural movement. The chief research centre of our movement is the Indian Renaissance Institute (13 Mohini Road, Dehradun). The Renaissance Publishers (15 Bankim Chatterji Street, Calcutta) publish our The Humanist Way (quarterly; previously, it was called The Marxian Way) and The Radical Humanist (weekly, 8 Parekh St., Ratilal Mansions, Bombay). For a comprehensive idea of our philosophy, read M. N. Roy’s New Humanism, his Beyond Communism, his New Orientation, and his Science and Philosophy. Also my own Radicalism. And with Ellen Roy I wrote In Man’s Own Image.

At the Third International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Oslo (1962), Ray addressed the group and was acclaimed as one of India’s leading intellectuals, In A New Renaissance (1998), he describes his concerns as to how the social group known as the intelligentsia has developed or failed to develop in different periods and different Asian societies. A global renaissance is needed, he argues, to address the problems of global pollution, global cretinization, global inequality, and the amassing of destructive weapons. Ray signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {Jim Herrick, International Humanist News, October 1998; WAS, 2 July 1949}

Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François (1713–1796) Raynal, a French historian and philosopher, was brought up as a priest but renounced that profession soon after moving in 1747 to Paris. There, he befriended Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Mechmeja, and others, compiling a philosophical history of European establishments in the two Indies, a work full of reflections on the religions and political institutions of France. The work was censured by the Sorbonne and burned by the hangman by order of Parliament in 1781. Raynal escaped and spent six years in exile, part of the time to the court of Catherine the Great. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Raymo, Chet (20th Century) Raymo is author of Skeptics and True Believers, the Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Faith. A professor of physics and astronomy at Stonehill College in Northaston, Massachusetts, he writes a science column in the Boston Globe. He has spoken to the Humanist Association of Massachusetts about why so many see the face of Jesus in a nebula, sea monsters in Loch Ness, flying saucers in the sky. It is because we yearn to be part of something greater than ourselves, he holds. We learn by hard experience that miracles do not happen: “Yearning and learning are integral parts of being human (the first may be genetic; the second we must work at). We cannot be fully human without both. Finding the proper balance between yearning and learning can keep us occupied for a lifetime.”

Rayner, Claire Berenice (20th Century) Rayner, a writer and broadcaster, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. Similarly, she is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. Also, she is a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA). Rayner has written numerous BBC programs, and among her eighty or so books are Mothers and Midwives (1962), Everything Your Doctor Would Tell You if He Had Time (1980), Safe Sex (1987), and Dangerous Things (1993). “Children should be made to realise,” she has said concerning the superstitions youngsters are forced to grow up with, “that only five of the biblical ten commandments have any relevance today.” {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998)

Razi, Ar (865–925) Razi was the greatest physician of the Middle Ages. He upheld the values of rationalist, religious skepticism, belief in science, the application of human reason to the problems besetting mankind, empiricism, a lack of dogmatism, and a mistrust of blind tradition. As such, he is highly regarded by contemporary rationalists. (See entry for Al Razi Circle) {International Humanist News, December 1997}

Razin, Alexander V. (20th Century) Razin, a professor of ethics at Moscow State University, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Razis, Dennis V. (20th Century) Razis, a Greek physician specializing in oncology, headed the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. The conference was co-sponsored by the International Humanist and Ethical Union and was held June 1995 in Delphi, Greece. Convinced of the need for humans to pull together to work for solutions to the predicament of humanity in today’s world, Razis set out to organize scientists and scholars. He had been encouraged by the late Melini Mercouri, then the Minister of Culture in Greece. After her death, he was able to find funding from a variety of Greek governmental and private organizations. Present at the conference were Mercouri’s husband, Jules Dassin; the Greek Minister of Defence, G. Arsenis; the Metropolite of Amphissa (a church official over the Delphi area), and numerous academics, scientists, and representatives of the IHEU. In 1996, Razis was a participant in the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. In 1998 he edited The Human Predicament, a collection of articles about the survival and fulfillment of our planetary and ethical species. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {International Humanist News, October 1995}

RAZONAMIENTOS Razonamientos is a Mexican quarterly published by the Asociacion Mexicana Ética Racionalista, Apdo. Postal 19-546, Mexico, DF 03900, Mexico. It was first published in 1995, and its editorial board consists of humanists from Argentina, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Spain, and the United States of America. E-mail: <mendezm@spin.com.mx>.

Read, Allen Walker (1906– ) A distinguished lexicographer and professor emeritus of English at Columbia University, Read has written, “The word ‘god’ is not needed in an explanation of human or nonhuman affairs. All sentences in which the word ‘god’ is used in first-order usage are either invalid or obfuscatory in the same way that all calculations in which zero is multiplied result in zero.” The ex-Iowan scholar is known for being an expert on British and United States slang as well as having pinpointed the first usage of “O.K.,” for which William Safire and other linguists often cite his scholarship. He is cited by the Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) for also having traced the origin of “Dixie,” “Podunk,” and ”Rebel Yell.” He has traced “You know,” the ubiquitous interjection used when an individual is searching for what to say next, to 1835, citing evidence that it was “a phrase an Englishman throws in at the turn of every sentence, when he is hunting for a new idea, or the words to fill the coming one.” His research has shown that the word gay did not exist in its contemporary meaning of homosexual before the 1950s. Classic American Graffiti, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America (1935) was Read’s first work, published in Paris and issued privately in seventy-five copies. A glossarial study of the low element in the English vocabulary, it is a masterpiece of latrinalia. For example, in a Banff, Alberta, latrine in 1928 he recorded the following:

Oh! I wish I had the balls of a stallion and a prick of a fellow I know. I would flee to the highest church steeple and I would piss on the people below.

Read’s study includes the shocking-for-some four-letter Anglo-Saxon words, along with such others as balls, clap, puss, bone, dose, hose. It included a quote from a Pompeii wall (around 79 C.E.): Hic ego puellas multas futui. The author’s unembarrassed reporting as to how folks folksily communicate on a vulgar, not just a formal and informal level, caught the appreciative eye of lexicographers as well as the disapproving eye of bluenoses. Read has been president of the Dictionary Society of North America and the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Married to the Alfred Korzybski expert Charlotte Read, he is a longtime advocate of secular humanism and is a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. {HNS; HNS2}

Read, Carveth (1848–1931) Read was Grote professor of philosophy and lecturer on comparative psychology at London University College. He wrote Natural and Social Morals (1909), in which he argues for a humanist ethic and rejects “all shades of religion.” Read added, “With the spread of civilization, the religious spirit declined because so much strength of character exists as to make civilization possible.” {RAT; RE}

Read, Herbert [Sir] (1893–1968) An adviser to the publishing firm Routledge and Kegan Paul, Read once described himself as “an anarchist, romanticist and agnostic.” He was an eminent critic of both art and literature. Charlotte Franklin, writing in New Humanist (December, 1990), disagrees with The Economist’s view that he was “prescient, acute, intelligent and honourable; but also cold, egotistical and unforgivably self-righteous.” She holds that his exploring of utopian themes in The Green Child and his philosophic views in The Contrary Experience (1974) deserve a wider audience, saying he is a humanist in her eyes. Read is also author of Naked Warriors (1919), about war’s horrors, Alienation: The Role of the Artist in Society (1967), and a collection of essays called The Cult of Sincerity (1969). {CE; TRI}

Reade, William Winwood (1824–1875) Reade, a nephew of the novelist Charles Reade, was an English traveler and writer. Born in Scotland, he studied at Oxford, then journeyed to Africa, writing Savage Africa (1863), The African Sketch Book (1873), and The Story of Ashantee Campaign, which event he accompanied as Times correspondent. In the Martyrdom of Man (1872), Reade rejects the doctrine of a personal creator—the work enjoyed eighteen editions. It surveyed ancient and medieval history, telling of the growth of religion from savage beginnings and leading up to a definitely anti-theistic presentation of the future of human life with the claim to have shown “that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of civilization.” His last work, The Outcast, was a freethought novel that describes the harsh experiences of a skeptic who had rejected Christianity and any belief in a future life. McCabe states that although in the Dictionary of National Biography Reade is described as an atheist, actually he was an agnostic of the Spencerian school, one who recognized God as “the First Cause and Inscrutable Mystery.” His obituary, written by Charles Reade in the London Daily Telegraph, included, “He wrote his last work, The Outcast, with the hand of death upon him. Two zealous friends carried him out to Wimbledon, and there, for a day or two, the air seemed to revive him; but on Friday night he began to sink, and on Saturday afternoon died in the arms of his beloved uncle, Mr. Charles Reade.” Winwood Reade not only rejected belief in immortality, but he regarded it as making many men and women, and even nations, “spiritual prisoners of the Shadow of Death, even while living.” Moncure D. Conway, at the gravesite, said that Read “warned these life-long victims that the only victory over death is to concentrate themselves on life.” {BDF; FUK; FUS; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TRI}

Reagan, Ronald Jr. (1958– ) Reagan is son of the 40th United States President, a Presbyterian. While interviewing the self-proclaimed messiah Charles Manson for a media program, Reagan was preached to by the man who allegedly had a “spell” over a “family” of followers who were found guilty of murdering actress Sharon Tate and her four guests. When Manson, explaining his “message” on the recorded program, asked the President’s son if he believed in God, Reagan responded, “No, I do not.” {CA; E}

Reagan, Ronald Jr. (20 May 1958 - ) Reagan, the son of the 40th United States President, who was a Presbyterian, is an actor, writer, ballet dancer, journalist, and television talk show host. While interviewing the self-proclaimed messiah Charles Manson for a media program, Reagan was preached to by the man who allegedly had a “spell” over a “family” of followers who were found guilty of murdering actress Sharon Tate and her four guests. When Manson explained his “message” on the recorded program and asked the President’s son if he believed in God, Reagan responded, “No, I do not.” {CA; E}

Réage, Pauline (20th Century) 

Réage was a pen name for the author of The Story of O (1954). (See the entry for Dominique Aury.)

REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA The Royal Academy of Spain, which as Real Academia Espaõla was founded in 1713 to advance the study of the Castilian language, is located at Felipe IV 4, 28014 Madrid, Spain. Its most recent dictionary in 1992 accepted about 600 new words from Mexico, but the academy’s motto states that it “cleanses, fixes, and adds splendor” to Spanish, protecting it from debasing infiltrators. In 1868 when Feliz Ramos i Duarte printed a first dictionary of “Mexicanism,” he termed it as a compendium of “tainted” terminology, in keeping with the academy’s purposes. In 1997 at the First International Congress on the Spanish Language, held in Mexico, Mexicans made it clear that their country is the largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world, and they presented a 561-page list of 69,566 words and phrases which originated in Mexico. La Real Academia Espanõla, however, complained that it was not invited to the conference and did not intend to allow its branches overseas to become equal partners with headquarters in Madrid. García Márquez scandalized the Iberian conservatives with his proposal “to simplify grammar before grammar simplifies us,” and he suggested dropping the accent marks and either the letter “b” or “v” from written Spanish, since they sound the same. But Camilo José Cela, the Nobel Prize winner from Spain, issued a call to arms to defend the language from being extinguished by other more aggressive competitors, like English. {Julia Preston, The New York Times, 16 April 1997}

REALISM In medieval philosophy, realism was a position that universals or general concepts have existence independent of both the human mind and individual objects. As such, it was directly opposite to nominalism (which holds that universal words or concepts have no objective reality outside the mind, that events exist objectively). In epistemology, realism holds that individual things exist independently of the mind’s perception of them. As such, it is opposed to idealism (which holds that reality exists only in the mind). In literature, it is a movement in contradistinction to naturalism, expressionism, or surrealism that attempts to portray life as it is. Balzac and Stendhal were precursors of realism. Somerset Maugham’s Liza of Lambet is exemplary, and the author uses proletarian or lower-middle-class settings. David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality (1997) makes a current case for realism. In his view of the philosophy of science, he disagrees with instrumentalism, for which science is a tool for anticipating what can be done and then using technology to control it. Instead, Deutsch portrays science as the means for giving and understanding an accurate description of an objective and fixed reality. Current theories, he holds, give real insights into the nature of reality. What is already known about evolution, computation, and human knowledge—combined with the deepest physical theory, namely quantum physics—shows what the universe is like. The Economist (31 May 1997) suggests several flaws in his arguments. First, he fails to persuade people that realism is right, that instrumentalism is wrong. Second, the various strands of his arguments illustrate “Popperian epistemology [which] is in poor odour among philosophers.” And third, he assumes without showing that quantum physics and theories of life and knowledge belong to the same explanatory realm. Meanwhile, many realists insist Deutsch is on the right track. (See Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy (1912) and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7. Also, see entry for Magic Realism.) {AF; CE; DCL; OCP}

REALITY • Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. –Phillip K. Dick {The Eupraxopher November-December 1997}

Reams, Ruth Dickinson (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Reams was President of the National Capital Area’s Humanist Association. {HM2}

REASON 

• Reason is the greatest enemy faith has. Whoever wants to be Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason. –Martin Luther

• Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of “touching” a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. –G. K. Chesterton

Freethinkers and rationalists have a differing viewpoint: “No sensible man, however agnostic, has ‘faith in reason alone.’ Reason is concerned with matters of fact, some observed, some inferred,” wrote Bertrand Russell (Bertrand Russell on God and Religion). “The question whether there is a future life and the question whether there is a God concern matters of fact, and the agnostic will hold that they should be investigated in the same ways as the question, ‘Will there be an eclipse of the moon tomorrow?’ But matters of fact alone are not sufficient to determine action, since they do not tell us what ends we ought to pursue. In the realm of ends, we need something other than reason. The agnostic will find his ends in his own heart and not in an external command.” As an example, he says that a railroad timetable will dispense reasonable information about when trains run from one city to another; but no timetable tells a person that it is wise to travel to that city. In The Rationalist Annual, Russell stated that “the question is how to arrive at your opinions and not what your opinions are. The thing in which we believe is the supremacy of reason. If reason should lead you to orthodox conclusions, well and good; you are still a Rationalist. . . . Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.”

REASON STREET Reason Street in New York City honored Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason” (1795) and its uncompromising attack on the Bible. The name became corrupted to Raisin Street, “raisin” being a colloquial term for a slave. When the street became city property in 1809, it was rechristened Barrow Street in honor of an artist and Trinity Church vestryman, Thomas Barrow. Barrow Street runs parallel and a block south of Grove Street, where Paine died. {Daniel B. Schneider, The New York Times, 2 May 1999}

REASONINGS Reasonings is a monthly of Atheists & Agnostics of Wisconsin, 278 Orchard Drive, Oregon, Wisconsin 53575. E-mail: <mbr@execpc.com>.

Reber, George (19th Century) Reber was the American author of The Christ of Paul, or the Enigmas of Christianity (1876), a work which exposes the frauds and follies of the early fathers. {BDF}

RECANTATION To recant is to repudiate a previous belief, formally and publicly. Interestingly, some theistic individuals or families are so fearful that a person will not go to Heaven, to be joined at some later time, they fraudulently arrange last-minute recantations, baptisms, and the like. Meanwhile, some non-believers have been known to recant on their deathbeds, or so clericals have reported. (See entries for Kay Boyle, Sinclair Lewis, Maximilian Littré, Emma Martin, Thomas Paine, and Voltaire, among many others.)

Reccord, Augustus Phineas (1870–1946) Reccord, a Unitarian minister, was author of Who Are the Unitarians? (1920). During World War II, and after his retirement, he served as a minister of the Louisville (Kentucky) Unitarian Society. An early publicist for Unitarianism, he once wrote: “Much of the prevalent indifference to the church is because of the impression that it demands that we make a choice between an unintelligent faith and an irreligious culture.” Soldiers who heard his lectures could have heard his “Good Men in Hell,” a lecture in which he explained why all good Unitarians should aim not for Heaven but for Hell; he then cited Mark Twain, Emerson, Diderot, and all the other good company who would be found there. In short, Reccord made it clear that he believed not in Heaven or Hell but in heaven and hell: in purely intellectual entities. Some soldiers were nonplussed upon seeing the septuagenarian Bostonian, during his Kentucky church’s fair, plunk down a quarter at a “kissing booth” in order to raise money for the war effort. One, a Bible Belt Methodist who had been avoiding his church’s services because he complained they “missionaried” him, asked Reccord how and if he might join the Unitarians quickly before leaving for battle. Reccord’s response, quite shocking to the Methodist whose church continually campaigns for new members, was, “Goodness, I have no idea!” With a little research, however, he located a membership book, and, with no further proselytizing, the soldier was allowed the following Sunday to join the non-Christian Unitarian church, after which he had his Army identification tag changed to list his religion as “None.” In a short time, Reccord received a postcard from that soldier in France who had led his company up the hill at Omaha Beach: “Greetings and love, from an atheist in his foxhole!” {WAS, conversations}

Reclus, Élie Michel (1827–1904) A brother of Jean Reclus and the son of a Protestant minister, Reclus fought in the Revolution of 1848 and was driven to Brussels, where he taught comparative mythology. He wrote many works on ethnology, including Primitive Folk (1891). Reclus was an atheist. {RAT; RE}

Reclus, Jean Jacques Elisée (1830–1905) Reclus, a French geographer and socialist, was the son of a Protestant minister. The Moravian brethren educated him. Reclus left France after the 1851 coup, traveling in England, Ireland, and North and South America. Reclus upheld the cause of the North during the American civil war and in 1871 supported the Commune, being taken prisoner and sentenced to transportation for life. Receiving amnesty in 1879, he returned to Paris and published a standard Universal Geography in thirteen volumes. Reclus, who gave his two daughters in marriage without either religious or civil ceremony, wrote a preface to Bakounin’s God and the State. {BDF;RAT; RE}

Reclus, Paul (1847–1914) Reclus, a Protestant minister, had three noted sons who became atheists: Élie, Jean, and Paul Reclus. Paul was a professor of clinical surgery at Paris University and, unlike his brothers, took no part in advanced politics nor was he so aggressive as they were. {RAT; RE}

RECONSTRUCTIONISM Reconstructionism in Judaism is a 20th century American movement that advocates a creative adjustment to contemporary conditions for Jews. It differs from Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative Judaism. Reconstructionist Judaism accepts all forms of Jewish practice, regarding Judaism as a culture rather than a theological system. In its redefinition of Judaism, reconstructionism refers not only to religion but also to Judaism as a civilization that includes language, customs, and culture. The movement was founded in 1922. In a 1934 book, Judaism as a Civilization, Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan wrote that the Jewish spirit is nourished through art, literature, and music. To him, God was not the personal deity portrayed by tradition. Rather, God is a symbol of the source of meaning, or the creative force found in the universe. An estimated 15,000 Reconstructionist households existed in 1996. Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, executive director of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation in Philadelphia, has described the typical Reconstructionist synagogue as having 300 families. Most synagogues are found in the Northeast, but a 350-family congregation exists in Eugene, Oregon. (See entries for Mordecai M. Kaplan and A. Walter Socolow.) {CE; The New York Times, 20 January 1997}

RECTOR • Rector, n. In the Church of England, the Third Person of the parochial Trinity, the Curate and the Vicar being the other two.

–Ambrose Bierce

The Devil’s Dictionary

RED HACKLE Bertrand Russell preferred Lapsang Suchong tea and Red Hackle whisky. Discussing his preferences with Robert C. Marsh, Russell remarked about “red” that “there is nothing rarer than a red-headed woman who is not a bitch.” He explained that dark pubic hair did not excite him erotically, that blonde pubic hair was almost invisible, but red pubic hair was highly arousing sexually. Just not in his tea or whisky, one might infer. {Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Summer 1995}

Red Hot Chili Peppers (20th Century) The Red Hot Chili Peppers, a musical group, had in its album “One Hot Minute” the lyrics, “I was not created / In the likeness of a fraud.” This clear rejection of biblical fundamentalism was accompanied by the group’s admitted paganism and hedonism. Other of their works called for honesty, equality, and peace while praising the joys of sex. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996}

Red Jacket (c. 1758–1830) A chief and a famed orator of the Seneca tribe in upstate New York, Red Jacket was so called because he wore red jackets first given him by the British. However, his original name was Otetiani, and he was also called Sagoyewatha. He is included by Whitehead and Muhrer in their Freethought on the American Frontier (1992) because of his vehemence in opposing missionaries who lived on reservations and his speech to one of those Christian missionaries. The speech explained the Indians’ view, and when at the end Red Jacket said he hoped the Great Spirit would protect him on his journey home, the missionary replied, “There [is] no fellowship between the religion of God and the works of the Devil, and, therefore, [I cannot] join hands. . . .” When this was interpreted to Red Jacket, he and his fellow Senecans smiled at the Christian’s negativism and hate, then retired in a peaceable manner. {CE}

Reddals, George Holland (1846–1875) An English secularist, Reddals was a compositor on the Birmingham Daily Post, then started the Secular Chronicle (1873), which was continued by Francis Neale, H. V. Mayer, and G. Standring. {BDF; FUK}

Rediess, Paul (20th Century) In “The Power of Prayer,” Rediess describes a Christian neighbor whose car slams into another’s. “God damn, holy ghost, jesus christ, great god almighty, god damn,” the neighbor was overheard to say. Then a juvenile, Rediess reasoned, “If he had used intuition to pre-time the request, he would not have needed to express the request and could have saved money on a new bumper and parking light.” His father, however, responded, “Sonofabitch!” To which Rediess observed, “I don’t know what a male puppy had to do with it.” {Secular Nation, July-September 1998}

REDEMPTION • Redemption, n. Deliverance of sinners from the penalty of their sin, through their murder of the deity against whom they sinned. The doctrine of Redemption is the fundamental mystery of our holy religion, and whose believeth in it shall not perish, but have everlasting life in which to try to understand it. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Freethinkers who make a mistake which harms others either deny they have erred or, inspiringly, redeem themselves by apologizing or otherwise making up for having erred.

Redman, Edward (20th Century) A minister of the First Unitarian Church of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Redman in 1957 addressed the Ann Arbor Regional Humanist Conference.

REDUNDANCY • Redundant true sentences are true. Redundant false sentences are false . . . except this one. –Ted Nelson

Redwood, John (20th Century) Redwood is author of Reason, Ridicule, and Religion—The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660–1750 (1976). He holds that the mockeries of a few witty skeptics interacted with reason and faith to produce a wide range of opinions, books, and controversies. The period, he adds, was more an age of ridicule than of reason.

Reeb, James (1927–1965) Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, was murdered in 1965 in Selma, Alabama, while working in a civil rights protest organized by Martin Luther King Jr. An account of his life is found in Duncan Howlett’s No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story (1966). {U}

Reece, Gordon (20th Century) Reece, a senior lecturer in engineering mathematics at the University of Bristol, has described himself as “a Jewish atheist” in New Humanist. By this he explains, “It means that the God I don’t believe in is the Jewish God. The others don’t even rate the honour of incredibility.”

Reed, Clarence (20th Century) Reed was a Unitarian who wrote “The Greatest Modern Discovery” (19–?). {GS}

Reed, Clifford (20th Century) The Rev. Reed, of the United Kingdom, is Secretary of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists.

Reed, David (Born 1790) Reed founded the Unitarian Universalist journal, then called The Christian Register. {U; UU}

Reed, Esau (20th Century) Reed edits a World Wide Web homepage that lists notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities. The list is a collaborative effort, for which he provides documentation. On the Web: <http://www.infidels.org:80/infidels>.

Reed, John (1887–1920) Reed, a radical leader and journalist, wrote Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an eyewitness account of the revolution that put the Bolsheviks in power. In 1919, expelled from the Socialist convention, he helped form a Socialist splinter party, the Communist Labor Party. Although he had made a name in journalism, writing from Mexico about Pancho Villa, Reed went to the USSR and worked for the Soviet Bureau of Propaganda. Reed died of typhus and was buried at the Kremlin. Reed was against all organized religions. {CE}

Reed, Lewis (19th Century) Reed was a freethinker who wrote Jingles or Humor, Sarcasm and Fact to Tingle the Present (1894). {GS}

Rees, Lloyd Frederick (1895–1988) Rees was an Australian humanist and artist. In Sydney, he lectured and taught art history, drawing, and painting. Traditionalists as well as modernists critically accepted him. Rees was a member of the Humanist Society of New South Wales. {SWW}

Rees, Malcolm (20th Century) Rees has reviewed books for The Freethinker, including “H. J. Blackham and the Upshot of History.” {The Freethinker, May 1996}

Rees, Martin [Sir] (1943- ) Sir Martin, holder in England of an honorary post that allows him to be called the Astronomer Royal of England, wrote Before the Beginning: Our Universe and Others (1997). As an astrophysicist, he says that to understand where atoms come from we first must understand the stars. “Did the creator magically turn ninety-two different knobs to make the different elements?” he told Claudia Dreifus (The New York Times, 28 April 1998):

Or is there a reason why the earth contains a lot of carbon, oxygen, and iron, but not much gold and uranium? The explanation is that all the atoms were once inside a star. When our Milky Way galaxy was first formed about ten billion years ago, it contained the simplest atoms: hydrogen and helium. Then, the first stars were formed and the nuclear fuel that kept those stars shining converted hydrogen into helium through nuclear fusion and then converted helium into other atoms: carbon, oxygen, and the rest of the periodic table. Later, the stars ran out of fuel, they exploded, threw back all that debris into interstellar space and it all eventually condensed into new stars. One of which was our sun.

People, Rees has concluded, are but “the dust of long, dead stars.” He doubts that intelligent life exists elsewhere but has little doubt that our species one day will propagate out through the galaxy.

Reese, Curtis W. (1887–1956) A Southern Baptist turned Unitarian minister, Reese served in Alton, Illinois, and Des Moines, Iowa. In his post as executive director of the Western Conference Office (Unitarian) located in Chicago, Reese encouraged the organization of Unitarian churches and the acceptance of Humanism. He was a key figure in relocating Meadville Theological School to Chicago. An editor of Unity, he was an early leader of the Humanist movement within Unitarianism and was the successor to Western radical leader Jenkin Lloyd Jones as dean from 1930 to 1957 of Chicago’s Abraham Lincoln Center. In 1944, when Frederick M. Eliot, a humanist by not a doctrinaire one, according to Edwin H. Wilson, rejected the candidacy of Curtis Reese for the presidency of Meadville Theological School, Eliot explained that his decision had not been a personal one but, rather, he did not want Meadville to be perceived as having fallen into humanist hands. From 1949 to 1950, he was President of the American Humanist Association. Concerning the present author’s categorization of seven humanisms, Reese wrote:

Category No. 7, naturalistic humanism, would come nearer indicating my position in the classification of humanist types. I have, however, at times in the past styled my position Organic Humanism, since I have made an effort to weave into my position strands from the various classifications of Humanism. I arrived at my original humanist position without any traceable influence from any other person, but I was very soon thereafter greatly influenced by the writings of F. S. C. Schiller, Roy Wood Sellars, William James, and John Dewey. I think that Classical Humanism properly belongs in the tradition of Modern Humanism, although it does not move out vigorously into the main stream of Humanism. Theistic Humanism, while better than Humanistic Theism, does not seem to me to be a very fruitful concept. Atheistic Humanism is more dogmatic about the nature of the universe than I care to be. Communistic Humanism I do not regard as a satisfactory designation because to me Humanism with its emphasis on freedom and the possibility of the intelligent control of natural processes is contradicted by the Communist ideology.

Reese, who signed Humanist Manifesto I, wrote Humanist Sermons (1927) and The Meaning of Humanism (1945). Describing Midwestern humanism, Warren R. Ross wrote in World (November-December 1997) of Reese’s importance:

What was later to be called religious humanism first gained strength in the late 19th century in the Western Unitarian Conference. The Rev. Mary Safford preached what she called a “religion of morality on fire with love for humanity” from the pulpit of the Des Moines Unitarian Church, where she was followed by the Rev. Curtis Reese and his “religion of democracy.” It was the Rev. John Dietrich in Minneapolis who gave this reason- and ethics-based science-loving faith the name of humanism.”

Reese’s family, all devout Southern Baptists, declared they would rather see Reese burn in hell, as he surely would, if he left the Baptist Church at Tiffin, Ohio, and became minister of the Unitarian Church at Alton, Illinois, which he did. Edwin H. Wilson, learning this at a much later date, said even Reese’s sister, who previously had named her son for Curtis, legally changed the child’s name to that of a Baptist evangelist. Wilson observed, “I understood for the first time the painful pressure that had produced the terrific productivity and dynamic leadership of Curtis Reese.” (See entry for Humanism, per Curtis Reese) {CL; HM1; EU, Paul H. Beattie; EW; FUS; HNS; HNS2; U; U&U; WAS, 28 April 1956}

Reeve, Christopher (1952– ) Reeve is the actor known for playing the title role in “Superman” (1978). He has performed in over one hundred plays, telecasts, and movies. An accident while riding a horse has confined him to a wheelchair, but he inspiringly, valiantly, and successfully continued to continue acting and directing. In Minneapolis, speaking at the Courage Center to the disabled on 27 October 1996, he was asked, “Do you believe in the Lord?” Reeve responded, “Even though I don’t personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though he was watching.” The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that the audience responded with “huge applause for a moment that was typical for its simplicity and candor.” Cinemania (24 April 1997) had a column by Roger Friedman about where Reeve gets his undaunted courage, and Reeve’s brother Ben Reeve, a nonpracticing Massachusetts lawyer, replied that it wasn’t from God: “We’re devout atheists, so that wasn’t it.” On a Larry King telecast in 1998, Reeve was asked about his religious views, and Reeve responded,

Well, believe it or not, I think that, y’know, God is not an entity that you find when you go to church and pray to God Almighty, you know, and I always remembered that going to church as a kid, you know, and they talk about the vengeance of His terrible swift sword and His army, I said, ‘Well, that’s kind of a scary guy.’ But I think that—while I don’t believe in God per se, I believe in spirituality. And I believe that spirituality actually is automatically within ourselves, but we have to learn how to access it, and what that is, is realizing there is a higher power; there is {King suggested “So it’s not atheism?”] more than just us, there is an inner strength, there is something, y’know, that comes from—I don’t know where exactly it comes from, but it’s—it really is the best that humans can be and perhaps what it is—perhaps really what it is is love.

Asked online (7 May 1998) what he meant when at one point in his book he said it seemed that his spirit and left his body and looked down on it from the corner of the hospital room, Reeve explained,

I feel strongly that we are not our bodies. In fact, if a person says “my body,” who is the “me” that is being referred to? Clearly, the spirit and body are two different things. And beyond that, I’m still searching for the meaning of it all. {CA; E}

Reeve, Christopher (25 Sep 1952 - 	)

Reeve is the New York City-born actor known for playing the title role in the 1978 film, Superman. At the age of four with his mother and brother Benjamin he moved to Princeton, New Jersey, because of the divorce of his parents (journalist Barbara Johnson and writer/professor Franklin Reeve, whose novels were written under the name F. D. Reeve). He and his brother spent many vacations with their father, whose Sunday dinners included intellectual stimulation by the likes of Robert Frost, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Robert Penn Warren. The boys’ expensive tuition at Princeton Day School was paid for by Reeve’s stepfather, Tristam Johnson. Christopher headed the schools drama club and was student director of its glee club. When fifteen, he got a summer apprenticeship at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts, and a year later he had an agent. After high school and before college, Reeve toured the country as Celeste Holm's leading man in The Irregular Verb to Love. At Cornell University, majoring in Music Theory and English, he found time to act in France and in England, where at the Old Vic he worked as a “dogsbody.” “I was a glorified errand boy,” he said, “but it was a very exciting time there. I helped by teaching the British actors to speak with an American accent. Then I went to Paris to work with the Comedie Française.” By the time he has finished college, he had performed at the Boothbay (Maine) Playhouse, the Williamstown Theatre (Massachusetts), the San Diego Shakespeare Festival, and the Loeb Drama Center. His roles included Victor in Private Lives, Aeneas in Troilus and Cressida, Beliaev in A Month In The Country, and Macheath in Threepenny Opera. One of two accepted for advanced standing at Julliard School of Performing Arts in New York City (Robin Williams was the other), he studied under John Houseman. When Reeve’s stepfather found it difficult to pay for his education, Christopher took the role of Ben Harper in a television dramatic serial, Love of Life, then won a 1976 role playing in A Matter of Gravity with Katharine Hepburn, whom he called “one of the masters of the craft.” He became too busy, however, to finish his final year at Julliard, moving to Los Angeles to be in Gray Lady Down, then returning to off-Broadway to be in My Life. When he took a screen test for Superman, he portrayed Superman as a hero with brains and a heart, “somebody that, you know, you can invite home for dinner . . . someone you could introduce your parents to. . . . What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that's how I approached the part.” During the eighteen months of shooting the movie, mostly in England, he met and began a relationship with modeling executive Gae Exton, and they had Matthew and Alexandra, keeping joint custody of the two children after parting, unmarried. Reeve then met Dana Morosini, a cabaret performer, whom he married in 1992, and they had a son, Will. He then was in Somewhere in Time, Superman II, the Broadway production of Fifth Of July, seventeen feature films, a dozen television movies, and as many as 150 plays, in some of which roles he played characters that were gay, sociopathic, or villainous

	A born crusader, he has assisted numbers of charities and causes relating to the arts, environment, children, and human rights. In 1987, he faced tear gas and real personal danger when Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman asked him to travel to Chile and lead a demonstration in support of seventy-seven artists targeted with death warrants by the Pinochet government. For his successful efforts to free the artists, Reeve received a special Obie Award in 1988 and another award from the Walter Briehl Human Rights Foundation. He addressed the United Nations to encourage the banning of drift net tuna fishing, and he played a crucial role in securing a landmark agreement to protect the Hudson River and New York City's reservoir system.

In his early twenties Reeve earned his pilot's license and twice flew solo across the Atlantic in a small plane. He also flew gliders and is an expert sailor, scuba diver, and skier. By the 1990's, horses had become his passion. He loved the sport called “eventing,” which combined the precision of dressage with the excitement of cross-country and show jumping. In May of 1995, during the cross-country portion of such an event in Culpeper, Virginia, Reeve's thoroughbred, Eastern Express, balked at a rail jump, pitching his rider forward. Reeve's hands were tangled in the horse's bridle and he landed head first, fracturing the uppermost vertebrae in his spine. Reeve was instantly paralyzed from the neck down and unable to breathe. Delicate surgery stabilized the shattered C1-C2 vertebrae and literally reattached Reeve's head to his spine. He spent six months at Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey, then returned to his home in Bedford, New York, where Dana had begun major renovations to accommodate his needs and those of his electric wheelchair which he operates by sipping or puffing on a straw. “Ironically, this most self-reliant and active of men was now facing life almost completely immobilized and dependent on others for his most basic needs. In addition, his condition put him at constant risk for related illnesses—pneumonia, infections, blood clots, wounds that do not heal, and a dangerous condition involving blood pressure known as autonomic disreflexia—all of which Reeve would experience in the coming years,” according to Steven Younis, who maintain an unofficial but authoritative Reeve homepage on the Web: < http://www.supermanhomepage.com/>

	According to Younis, 

Reeve's advocacy work has understandably begun to take on a very personal focus. His experiences with his own insurance company and, particularly, the experiences of other patients he had met at Kessler led him to push for legislation that would raise the limit on catastrophic injury health coverage from $1 million to $10 million. Reeve accepted the positions of Chairman of the American Paralysis Association and Vice Chairman of the National Organization on Disability. In partnership with philanthropist Joan Irvine Smith, he founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center in California and he created the Christopher Reeve Foundation in 1996 to raise research money and provide grants to local agencies that focus on quality of life for the disabled. Reeve has used the contacts he had made in Washington during his years of advocacy work to lead the fight to increase funding for spinal cord injury research which, despite recent breakthroughs by scientists, had previously received inadequate financial support. He won a pledge for an additional $10 million for research from President Clinton in 1996. His efforts in both the private and public sectors have met with considerable success both in raising money and awareness of the needs and desires of disabled people. . . .

In the years after his accident, Christopher Reeve has gradually regained sensation in parts of his body--notably down the spine, in his left leg, and areas of the left arm. But he remains dependent on a ventilator to breathe and unable to move any part of his body below the shoulders. His condition has stabilized and in early 1998, after the taping of a television special to benefit his foundation, Reeve's wife, Dana, described him as "very healthy and very busy". His compelling autobiography, Still Me, was released in April 1998 and quickly hit the bestseller lists. "Writing the book," Reeve says, "was one of the highlights of my life, before and after the accident." Seven months later, critics praised his talent and courage when Reeve reclaimed his leading-man status by starring in an updated version of Rear Window for ABC. He continues to schedule many speaking engagements and is considering several projects to direct in the spring while tirelessly raising money for spinal cord injury research. He looks to the future with characteristic enthusiasm saying: “My spinal cord is ready below the injury. I'm realistically optimistic. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life like this.”

In Minneapolis, speaking at the Courage Center to the disabled on 27 October 1996, he was asked, “Do you believe in the Lord?” Reeve responded, “Even though I don’t personally believe in the Lord, I try to behave as though he was watching.” The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that the audience responded with “huge applause for a moment that was typical for its simplicity and candor.” Cinemania (24 April 1997) had a column by Roger Friedman about where Reeve gets his undaunted courage, and Reeve’s brother Benjamin, a nonpracticing Massachusetts lawyer, replied that it wasn’t from God: “We’re devout atheists, so that wasn’t it.” On a Larry King telecast in 1998, Reeve was asked about his religious views, and Reeve responded,

Well, believe it or not, I think that, y’know, God is not an entity that you find when you go to church and pray to God Almighty, you know, and I always remembered that going to church as a kid, you know, and they talk about the vengeance of His terrible swift sword and His army, I said, "Well, that’s kind of a scary guy." But I think that—while I don’t believe in God per se, I believe in spirituality. And I believe that spirituality actually is automatically within ourselves, but we have to learn how to access it, and what that is, is realizing there is a higher power; there is [King suggested “So it’s not atheism?”] more than just us, there is an inner strength, there is something, y’know, that comes from—I don’t know where exactly it comes from, but it’s—it really is the best that humans can be and perhaps what it is—perhaps really what it is is love.

Asked online (7 May 1998) what he meant when he had once said that it seemed that his spirit and left his body and looked down on it from the corner of the hospital room, Reeve explained,

I feel strongly that we are not our bodies. In fact, if a person says “my body,” who is the “me” that is being referred to? Clearly, the spirit and body are two different things. And beyond that, I’m still searching for the meaning of it all. {CA}

Reeve, F. D. (20th Century) Reeve, in American Poetry Review (Spring, 1994), uses the poet’s approach in describing his religious non-belief. He writes, “In most of the forty wars on the surface of the earth today, the antagonistic nationalisms are underwritten by religious allegiance—Jew against Arab, Christian against Jew, Catholic against Muslim, Suni against Shiite. Some of the finest art and poetry of the Greeks was characterized by religious unity; much was not. In a secularized, overpopulated world, our cultural goal cannot be Arnold’s ‘to make reason and the will of God prevail.’ From an individual’s point of view, earthly life is very chancy; one’s free will is restricted by luck, by the nature of the society one is born into, and by one’s own nature. The ancient ideals of heroism and of transcendent immortality are incredible. The competitive haste to line one’s pockets by exploiting the natural world threatens to expunge human life long before the earth itself goes out in fire and ice. History proves some men to have been reasonable; mankind, to have been irrational. Or, we might put it simply, clearly no one is in charge. Both god and the devil exist only in the mind of man.”

Reeves, Joseph (1881–1969) Reeves, who once was a chairman of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), was a freethinker who supported innumerable causes, such as the Federal Union (1938) and the Parliamentary Group for World Government (1945). {TRI}

Reeves, William Pember (19th Century) Reeves, an unbeliever and Fabian, married Maud Reeves, a prominent activist for the vote and for women’s rights at the turn of the century. Their daughter, Amber, shocked the Fabian set by having an affair with historian H. G. Wells, with whom she had a daughter. Ruth Fry in Maud and Amber (1992) describes the family, relating how Amber wrote a short work, Ethics for Unbelievers.

REFORM • Reform, n. A thing that mostly satisfies reformers opposed to reformation. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

REFORM JUDAISM As explained by Samuel Cohon, once a professor of Jewish theology at Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, Reform Judaism “stems from the endeavor on the part of Jews in Western Europe to adjust themselves spiritually to the changed order introduced by the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and by the political and social upheaval at the turn of the eighteenth century, on the other. The doctrine of the rights of man,” he added, “culminating in the French Revolution, broke down the barriers wherewith both Church and State kept the Jews apart from their neighbors. In 1791 the National Assembly enfranchised all the Jews of France. Four years earlier the U.S.A. adopted its Constitution based on the principles of equality and of liberty of conscience. For the first time since their dispersion the Jews found themselves the equals of their fellowmen.” However, when a humanist congregation, Congregation Beth Adam, tried in 1994 to join the national Reform Jewish organization, the 220-member “temple without God” led by Rabbi Robert Barr had difficulty. Congregation Beth Adam does not explicitly acknowledge something bigger than them all: God. As a result, local synagogues and the Reform movement’s regional board voted against including the humanistic group, and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations voted 115 to 13 to reject them. Rabbi Alexander M. Schindler, speaking for the Reform group reasoned that “Reform allows for a wide spectrum of belief. Yet some common understanding is necessary.” Meanwhile, Dr. Eugene Mihaly of Hebrew Union College warned that “Exclusion, ostracism, mindless stringency to appease the traditionalists, institutional coercion are alien to Reform Judaism. They chill and kill. They are the death knell of liberal religion.” Commented Rabbi Barr concerning the rejection, “Clearly, the contemporary liturgy isn’t speaking to most people at this point. The unaffiliated rate is high, and the attendance of the affiliated is quite low.” The founder of Reform Judaism in the United States was Isaac Mayer Wise. He oversaw its spread across the country. In the United States, Reform Jewish congregations have more members than other branches of Judaism. In 1995, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, who had pushed for greater rights for the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements in Israel, was elected president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the main body of North American Reform Judaism. {DCL}

Rege, Meghasyama Pundalika (20th Century) Rege is vice president of the Indian Secular Society. He wrote Concepts of Justice and Equality in the Indian Tradition (1985). {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1986}

Regenbrecht, Michael Eduard (1792–1849) Regenbrecht, a German rationalist, left the Church with Johannes Ronge, becoming a leader of the free religious movement at Breslau. {BDF}

Reghillini de Schio, Mario (1760–1853) Born of Venetian parents, Reghillini de Schio was professor of chemistry and mathematics. He wrote Masonry (1833) in French, tracing the lodge to Egypt. He also wrote An Examination of Mosaism and Christianity (1834). Also, he published a number of books on Freemasonry. Mixed in the troubles of Venice in 1848, he fled to Belgium, dying there in poverty. {BDF}

Regnard, Albert Adrien (Born 1836) Regnard, a French physician and publicist, wrote Essais d’Histoire et de Critique Scientifique (1856), which he published himself after finding no suitable publisher that would print the work on scientific materialism. He started, with Naquet and Clemenceau, the Revue Encyclopédique. When its first issue was suppressed, he started La Libre Pensée with Asseline and Condereau. His articles in this publication netted him four months in prison. He wrote New Researches on Cerebral Congestion (1868), Atheism (1878), and A History of England Since 1815. Regnard translated Büchner’s Force and Matter in 1884 and was delegate to the Freethinkers’ International Congress at Antwerp in 1885. {BDF; PUT; RAT}

Regnard, Jean François (1655–1709) A French comic poet, Regnard went to Italy about 1676 and, on returning home, was captured by an Algerian corsair and sold as a slave. Caught in an intrigue with one of the women, Regnard turned Moslem. The French consul paid his ransom, and he returned to France about 1681. Regnard wrote a number of successful comedies and poems. He was made a treasurer of France and, according to Wheeler, died an Epicurean. {BDF}

Regnaud de Saint-Jean D’Angély, Michel Louis Étienne [Count] (Born 1761) Regnaud de Saint-Jean D’Angély was prominent in the National Convention, and it was at his demand that Voltaire’s remains were removed to the Pantheon and a statue was erected to him at Paris. He edited the Journal de Versailles. Napoléon admitted him to the Council of State, making him Secretary of State in 1810 for the Imperial Family. In 1816 he was proscribed and sailed for America. In 1819, he was allowed to return. {RAT}

Regnier, Mathurin (1573–1613) Regnier was a French satirical poet, brought up in Chartres for the Church but showing little inclination for its austerities. A devoted pagan, Regnier did obtain a canonry in the cathedral of his native place. {BDF}

Rehák, Alexander (20th Century) Rehák, an emeritus professor in Slovakia, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Rehan, Khursid Rehan (20th Century) In “Jama’t-e-Tableegh—A New Sect in the Making” (The Radical Humanist, June 1999), Rehan names the four major sects within the Sunni denomination of Islam: Hanafi, Shafayi, Hambali, and Maliki, all named after four Imans. A new sect, he finds, is in the making: Jama’t-e-Tableegh [group of campaigners], which discards the existence of orders and their interpretations as well as the interpretations given by the other four Imans. The movement was launched in 1930 by Maulana Mohammed Ilyas of Delhi with a view to purifying Islam, which was felt to be infected with the Hinduistic and Western cultures.

Reich, David (20th Century) Reich is editor of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He is author of “Fighting the Right on Civil Rights for Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals.” {The World, July-August 1994}

Reich, Eduard (Born 1839) A German physician and anthropologist, Reich studied at Jena, traveled much, and published over thirty volumes besides editing the Athenaeum of Jena (1875) and Universities of Grossenbain (1883). Dr. Reich, a freethinker, wrote Man and the Soul (1872), The Church of Humanity (1874), History of the Soul (1884); and The Emancipation of Women (1884). {BDF}

Reich, Wilhelm (1897–1957) Reich, who was born into an Austrian Jewish family, became a noted as well as controversial psychoanalyst. His life was one long series of problems. A student of Freud, he eventually broke with his master, as had Jung and Adler—he developed his own theories of neurosis, including a concept about “character armoring” and another about the centrality of “genital” potency. Because of his radical politics, he was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. The German Communist Party also expelled him, complaining about his bourgeois views concerning psychiatry. Moving to the United States he was jailed for several weeks, suspected of being a possible German spy. However, he was one of the first leftists to see the weaknesses of Soviet Marxism, and he developed a following in the 1920s that considered him a prophetic genius. His first wife, Annie, was a former patient. Although he said he was a devoted husband, he accused Annie of driving away their two daughters by poisoning them against him. Ilse Ollendorff Reich, his wife and the mother of Reich’s son, Peter, wrote Wilhelm Reich, A Personal Biography (1969). Of the famed Austrian psychiatrist who was hostile to religion, she has written the present author concerning her ex-husband:

Reich never belonged to any organized religious community and, until the time he went to prison, he never went to any kind of religious services. I don’t know what he would have called himself, probably an agnostic or a humanist. His funeral was secular. He identified with Christ / Jesus the human, and I think he accepted not the Christianity of the Church but the teachings of Jesus. Dr. Elsworth Baker, who in my book was named as the person who gave a brief eulogy at the memorial service and ended with Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer from his Murder of Christ, was a psychiatrist who practiced Reich’s orgone therapy. He was a devoted “disciple” of Reich, and he organized after Reich’s death a group of orgone therapists into the “College of Orgonomy,” feuding with all those who in their own way believed they were the only true followers. Baker died a few years ago. Reich’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is only different from the original in the start: “Our Love / Life, who art from Heaven,” and he substituted “guilt” for debts and in the last two lines “and lead us not into distortion of love, but deliver us from our perversions.” He mentions “God-Father is the basic cosmic energy from which all being stems, and which streams through (the) body as through anything else in existence.” Murder of Christ was written in 1952.

“I don’t know,” continued Ilse, herself a Quaker,

whether he distinguished between Christ the supernatural and Jesus the natural. I do think that the concept of Christ was for him a universal concept, continuing through the ages, but that Jesus was for him the natural, exceptional human being who, because of his message of love and his understanding of human nature, had to be murdered. I do know that during his imprisonment and until shortly before his death he attended the Protestant services in prison. He sent our son Peter some prayers that he must have found in those services. This “conversion” seemed to me utterly strange, almost unbelievable in view of his past anti-church attitude. I had, of course, no way to find out why and how this change came about.

Paul Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief described Reich as a “psychiatrist with enormous influence on current therapeutic techniques, second perhaps only to that of Sigmund Freud, and one of the most outspoken opponents of religion, especially its harmful effects on character and mental health. As a psychological rather than a philosophical critic of religion, Reich continued the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Freud, developing this critique more systematically and in greater detail than his predecessors.” Unfortunately, in his later years Reich began to believe all kinds of absurd things, saw Communist conspiracies everywhere, asserted the existence of UFOs, toyed with the idea that he himself was the son of a spaceman, and was jailed by the government because of his orgone box, a contraption in which one was supposed to sit naked in order to boost one’s energy, especially one’s erotic vigor. The Food and Drug Administration in 1956 declared the orgone box a fraud. Reich wrote in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), “What religion calls freedom from the outside world really means fantasized substitute gratification for actual gratification. . . . Every form of mysticism is reactionary, and the reactionary man is mystical.” Convicted of contempt of court, Reich died in prison. Gaskin, pointing out that one defect of Marx’s and Lenin’s analyses of religion is that they give no account of why religious belief persists in situations in which it is not of assistance to the ruling classes in upholding the status quo. But Reich, stated Gaskin, “takes the analysis in a different and more radical direction. In the Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), Reich suggests that the energy that underlies religious emotions can be seen as displaced or redirected sexual energy.” Reich, who once joined the Communist Party, was expelled by the party for writing that book. However, he remained a Marxist. In 1994, Mary Boyd Higgins edited Reich’s Beyond Psychology: Letters and Journals, 1934–1939. She includes private writings from Reich’s pivotal period, a time when he used such jargon as “vegetative,” “vasovegative,” and “Sexpol.” Henry H. Bauer, professor of chemistry and science studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, wrote that the book reveals Reich’s ignorance of much of the science in which he regarded himself as competent. He adds, “This book provides copious support for those who would debunk Reich’s scientific pretensions, and Reich’s attitude—especially perhaps toward women–as he comes across as notably self-centered and altogether not very nice. Yet the book was put together for publication by an admirer, as the introduction plainly shows. So we get insight not only into Reich but also into his followers, and into how skeptical perspective is lost once allegiance has been lent.” “There’s a therapist Jerry travels to New York to see every two weeks, a practitioner of Wilhelm Reich’s theories of orgonomy,” wrote Joyce Maynard when describing her nine-month affair with novelist J. D. Salinger. “Jerry never goes into it much with me, except to say that this therapy involves working with a person’s muscles, and using one’s voice in a certain way that releases blocked energy. This is not the kind of therapist with whom you talk about your childhood, or the kind with whom you might discuss the fact that the young woman you are living with is unable to have intercourse.” An eloquent supporter of Reichian therapy is philosopher Paul Edwards. In 1995, he spoke to overflowing crowds three successive weekends at the New School for Social Research, where Reich had once taught a course that served as the basis for his Function of the Orgone. Overbearing, jealous, crafty (he stole his friend Myron Sharaf’s wife), and a martinet whose rages terrified his friends, Reich nevertheless was an excellent psychiatrist. Unlike Freud, who stood out of sight of his patients, Reich met his nude patients and as a physician probed their bodies for tenseness and other problems. For him, the mind anchors itself in the body and, for example, we might keep our fear down by arching our shoulder. Certain parts of the body were pressed in order to treat the patient, and exercising was recommended. Instead of treating symptoms, which will only reoccur, Reich tried to get at the underlying character traits and worked on them. Whereas Freudian therapists used words rather than physical contact and kept patients for years (Diana and Lionel Trilling had analysis for decades), Reich aimed to keep his patients for a short time. If Karen Horney could not help a patient, it was alleged, she sent him to a Reichian, not a Freudian. Edwards holds that Freud’s therapy does not help much but that Reich’s does. Edwards noted that Reich when young had found his mother in a tutor’s arms, had revealed this to his father, and when his mother later committed suicide the experience greatly affected him. Edwards approved much about Reich’s views, including his opposition to lifelong marriages and his acceptance of masturbation as being entirely natural. Religion goes hand-in-hand with sexual repression, Reich held. That energy might well have gone into sex, and the inference could be made that if one has a good sex life he will not need religion badly. (See the entries by Paul Edwards in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7, The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, and Oxford Companion to Philosophy.) {Henry H. Bauer, Skeptical Inquirer, September-October 1995; CE; EU, Paul Edwards; Richard Gilman, “Orgonization Man,” The New York Times Book review, 5 September 1999; Joyce Maynard, “Salinger in Love,” Vanity Fair, September 1998; Ilse Ollendorff Reich to WAS, 21 November 1991}

Reichenbach, Hans (1897–1953) Reichenbach, whose name is associated with the Logical Positivist movement but who was critical of the narrow scope of its verificationism, termed himself a “logical empiricist.” His Selected Writings, 1909–1953 was about space and time. {HNS; HNS2; OCP}

Reichwald, E. C. (19th Century) Reichwald was secretary starting in 1883 of Chicago’s American Secular Union. Chicago’s Half Century of Progress featured “an old and established representative house engaged in the Chicago fruit and vegetable trade” of ”Messrs. Reichwald & Bro., which was established in 1865 by Jones & Reichwald, who were succeeded in 1868 by E. C. Reichwald & Co.” Both E. C. and his brother W. G. Reichwald were radical freethinkers. {PUT}

Reid, Alastair (1926– ) Although born in Scotland, Reid has chosen to live mainly in Hispanic countries. The son of a minister, he is a poet, translator, essayist, and author of books for children. Ounce, Dice, Trice (1958) is a collection of puns and odd-sounding “nonsense” words. Weathering (1978) is a collection of his poems. Reid translated Neruda’s Isla Negra Notebook (1982) and Borges’s Gold of the Tigers (1977). In “Remembering Robert Graves,” Reid tells of his long friendship with Graves, “a first-rate classicist” who, in the course of writing the two Claudius novels, “had immersed himself in Roman history” and who taught him much about writing. Graves, he wrote, “was a deicide [one who kills or destroys a god]; he had made from the great tangle of his existence a religion that he could feel true to, and which could resolve the contradictions and oppositions in his thinking. As a devotee, he was privy to the Goddess’s will. He always bowed solemnly nine times at the first sight of the new moon. To the supplanting of the Goddess by a Father God he attributed all the ills of the modern world.” Since the Bronze Age, Reid explained, an all-embracing female deity—Moon Goddess, an Earth Mother, controlling seasons, fertility, and the cycle of birth and death—had been worshipped throughout Europe until challenged by the male gods of the Greco-Roman world. With Christianity, goddess worship disappeared, preserved, according to Graves, by poets alone as a divine secret—or through the worship of a muse. From his vast reading, Graves created a monomyth that gave order to his deepest convictions and restored to poetry some of the sanctity he felt it had lost by neglecting myth for reason.” Commented Reid, “I never believed in the Goddess, any more than I believed in a Christian God. I realized, however, that Robert did believe, insistently so, and that the belief sustained and justified him.” {The New Yorker, 4 September 1995}

Reid, George Archdall O’Brien [Sir] (Born 1860)

Reid once summed up his early career, saying he had been in succession a schoolmaster, a Kauri-gum digger, a stockman, a hunter, and joint-editor of Bedrock. As a scientific writer, particularly on questions of heredity, he first won attention by his Present Evolution of Man (1896). He also wrote Alcoholism (1901) and The Principles of Heredity (1905, in which he expressed his rationalism: “Almost without exception, religions have restrained the instinct of curiosity—hence the prolonged intellectual and social stagnation in which so many races have sunk.” He added, “Probably in all history there is no instance of a society in which ecclesiastical power was dominant which was not at once stagnant, corrupt, and brutal.” {RAT}

Reid, W. Nichol (20th Century) Reid wrote The Supremacy of Reason (1924). {GS}

Reil, Johann Christian (1758–1813) Reil was a German physician who, although intended for the Church, turned instead to medicine. He wrote many medical works, displacing some old ideas in a way which brought on him the accusation of pantheism. While attending a case of typhus fever at Halle, he was attacked by the malady and succumbed. {BDF; RAT}

Reilly, Patricia Lynn (20th Century) Reilly, a Unitarian, is co-director of a women’s theology center in Berkeley, California, and author of A God Who Looks Like Me (1995). “In the very beginning was the Mother,” she corrects Genesis, taking issue with what she considers the sexist, patriarchal, and out-of-touch theology of mainstream churches. “Our search for God who looks like us,” she holds, “begins in our own lives. She will be found there.”

Reimarus, Hermann Samuel (1694–1768) Reimarus’s Apology or Defence of the Reasonable Worshipers of God and his Fragments (1774–1778) revealed Reimarus’s views that religion can be based on common sense. One does not need revelation, dogmas, and church doctrines, reasoned one of the most radical of the German rationalists. He thought the Old Testament was a weak religious achievement, that biblical stories are full of humbug and deceit. Jesus, he noted, did not teach the idea of the Trinity nor claim that he was God’s chosen son. Reimarus wrote The Principle Truths of Natural Religion (1754) and left behind the Wolfenbültel Fragments, which were published by Lessing in 1777. Reimarus professed “natural religion,” or deism. {EU, 286, Karl Becker; BDF; RAT; RE}

Reinach, Joseph (1856–1921) Reinach was of a German-Jewish family that settled in France. He practiced law until his friend Gambetta made him chef de cabinet, and he entered the Chambre as an anti-clerical. On the Dreyfus case, Reinach powerfully opposed the Church. He gave his own Rationalist views in a life of Diderot (1894), and he wrote the life and edited the speeches of Gambetta. Reinach was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). {RAT; RE}

Reinach, Salomon (1858–1932) Reinach, the younger brother of Joseph, was a professor of archaeology at the Louvre. His Apollo (1904), Cultes, mythes, et religions (1905–1908, 3 volumes), and Orpheus (1909), are standard works on the evolution of religion. {RAT; RE}

Reinach, Théodore (1860–1928) Reinach, an agnostic, wrote Religions et sociétés (1905), in which he stated that “all the hypotheses which have become beliefs, all the hopes of a beyond and the moral laws which piety has raised, have been shattered,” but “the Unknowable remains.” {RE}

REINCARNATION 

For those not content just with living on Earth in their present existence, the dream of reincarnation, or a rebirth or embodiment in some other form, is an alternative. Several religions, including Hinduism, believe that the human spirit returns to earth in different forms again and again as it strives for perfection. If reincarnation usually means rebirth in another body of the same species, especially the human, transmigration has the broader meaning of passage back and forth across the boundaries of all forms—plant, animal, human, demonic, and divine. Thus, an individual born with a physical defect might dream of becoming a beautiful butterfly one day. Presumably, porcine creatures aspire also, although it is not clear to what ends nor exactly who or what executes the changes. Jesus has been identified by some as having been reincarnated as the wife of Julius Caesar. Paul Edwards in Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996) thoroughly and incisively refutes karma, reincarnation, and related topics. With wit and humor, he attacks J. M. E. McTaggart, C. J. Ducasse, Ian Stevenson, Shirley MacLaine, and others who have fallen for what secular humanists and freethinkers term as nonsense. The Law of Karma, for example, offers only post hoc explanations. Reincarnationists cannot explain credibly how the mind could make its transition from a dead body into the womb of the mother of its next incarnation. Edwards is the first philosopher to have critically examined reincarnation, then shown in depth the theory’s inconsistencies. Mercilessly attacked are Elisabeth Kübler-Ross; Raymond Moody, author of the best-selling Life After Life; Karlis Osis and Erlandur Haraldsson, specialists in deathbed visions; and Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, who have attempted to support reincarnation and other supernaturalistic theories by citing certain experiences during LSD sessions. Edwards exposes their illogic. Although Mory Bernstein in The Search for Bridey Murphy claims that Julius Caesar, Spinoza, and T. H. Huxley believed in reincarnation, Edwards disproves the allegation. Neither, Edwards wrote, were David Hume or many others cited by various authors proponents of reincarnation. Christopher Hitchens has summarized Edwards’s arguments:

• No reincarnationist has ever attempted to answer the question first proposed by Tertullian: “How happens it that a man who dies in old age returns to life as an infant?”

• Reincarnation beliefs predate the findings of evolution. They can give no account of the act that human bodies descended from nonhuman species. And those extremists who postulate human souls in animal or insect bodies obviously cannot describe the experience in any known language.

• Unless a reincarnationist is willing to say there was a “first generation” of souls created with the first humans, he is exposed to absurdity by the recency of human life on the planet.

• Since all births are defined by reincarnationists as “rebirths,” there has either not been a vast explosion in the human population, or souls from “astral bodies” are being mobilized to make up the spiraling deficit. An ingenious solution put forward in some reincarnationist circles—the idea of a single soul inhabiting many bodies at once—destroys the essential claim that any form of individual identity can survive death.

Martin Gardner (Free Inquiry, Summer 1997) reviewed Edwards’s Reincarnation favorably, adding, “One reason Edwards’s book is such a pleasant read is that he has a sense of humor and sarcasm worthy of Voltaire or H. L. Mencken.” {DCL; ER; Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, 12 May 1997; PE; RE}

Reinders, Clarence (20th Century) Reinders, who was raised in the Roman Catholic religion and entered a seminary when he was sixteen, became disillusioned with religion by the time he was twenty-one, rejecting church rituals such as communion—which he regards as cannibalism—and rejecting belief in the Bible—which he considers fiction. In 1998 Reinders, joined by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, filed a lawsuit against the City of Marshfield, Wisconsin, seeking to remove a sixteen-foot religious shrine from a public park. The city, in order to skirt the issue, reportedly planned to sell 7,500 square feet of the park to a religious group in order to maintain the shrine in its location. Reinders received the Foundations “Emperor Has No Clothes” award.

Reiner, Albert L. (20th Century) Reiner is author of Shabbat Commentaries, Torah Commentaries. Instead of viewing belief in God, practice of ritual, or observance of halakha as the sine qua non of Jewishness, he views the Torah as a source of the ideals, humanity, and idiom that are the heritage of Judaistic Humanists.

Reinfeldt, Sebastian (20th Century) At the Eighth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Hannover (1982), Reinfeldt of Germany addressed the group.

Reinhardt, Aurelia (1877–1947) Reinhardt was a Unitarian educator, the president of Mills College. She was the first woman to serve as moderator of the American Unitarian Association. {U}

Reinhold, Ernst Christian Gottlieb (1793–1855) Reinhold was a German philosopher who taught at Kiel University and Jena University. In the main, he followed the ideas of his father, Karl Reinhold, but in some respects he was nearer to Kant. Reinhold called himself a “Speculative Theist.”

Reinhold, Karl Leonhard (1758–1825) Reinhold, father of Ernst Reinhold, was a German philosopher. In 1772 he became a Jesuit, but the Society was suppressed in the following year, so he taught philosophy at a Barnabite College. Adopting the rationalist ideas which were current in Vienna under Joseph II, Reinhold abandoned Catholicism. He joined the Freemasons and a Rationalist Society called Zur Wahren Eintracht. Reinhold collaborated on Wieland’s Deutsche Mercur and married Wieland’s daughter. In his last work, Die alte Frage, Was ist Wahreit? (1820), he returned to a rationalistic theism. {RAT}

Reiser, Armin (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Reiser from Germany addressed the group.

Reiser, Oliver L. (1895–1974) Reiser taught philosophy at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pittsburgh. He is well-known in humanist circles because of his Promise of Scientific Humanism (1940). In addition, he founded the International Committee on Scientific Humanism in the 1950s. In describing his own humanism, Reiser has written,

The one great hope for democracy lies in the development of a non-supernaturalistic religion which, unlike other intellectual movements, will be non-academic in its appeal to all civilized individuals. This new foundation for a coming world-order must be the emergent outcome of the thought-content of a universalized culture. In providing this unification of man’s intellectual-emotional make-up, through a synthesis of the world of facts with the world of values, scientific humanism rediscovers democracy in man’s creative cooperation for a better world. The major contribution of a coming philosophy will be the answer to the cry of people everywhere groping toward a view which will give them at once a confidence in the future, a motive for work, and a goal. The god of this coming world-religion, that is the object of reverence of scientific humanism, is the spirit of humanity in its upward striving—the fearful and wonderful quest to explore the depths and shoals of the cosmic environment and tame the universe for social weal and further human adventure.

Included among Reiser’s books are Humanistic Logic for the Mind in Action (1930), and an introduction to scientific humanism entitled Planetary Democracy (1933). In the 1950s, Reiser was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. {FUS; HM1; HM2; HNS; HNS2}

Reisman, David (20th Century) Reisman wrote The Lonely Crowd (1950). {EW}

Reiss, Harriet M. (20th Century) and Ira L. Reiss (1925– ) In their book, An End to Shame: Shaping Our Next Sexual Revolution (1993), the Reisses denounce America’s present sexual climate. They also outline what steps they believe should be taken to change that climate. He lists his religion in Who’s Who as Jewish.

Reiss, Ira (20th Century) In 1996, at the 2nd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention, held in Minneapolis, Reiss spoke on the subject, “Sexuality in America: Walking Backwards into the 21st Century.”

Reiss, Mike (20th Century) Reiss, a producer for the telecast, “The Simpsons,” has described himself as being both a humanist and a humorist. “The humanists,” he has written, “have never produced an artist like that religious ceiling-painter Michelangelo. We’ve never spawned a musician like that hymn-scribbler Bach. But we have produced the brightest, most biting wits: Twain and Voltaire, Swift and Bierce. Let’s keep the humanist movement funny. It’s what we do best.” (See examples of his wit in the entry for Humanist Humor.) {Secular Humanist Bulletin, Summer 1996}

Reitmeister, Louis Aaron (Born 1903) 

Reitmeister wrote “A Brief Essay About the Gods and My Friends” (1948). {GS}

Reitzel, Robert (1849–1898) Reitzel was a German-American revolutionary. Born in Baden, he studied theology, went to America, walked from New York to Baltimore, and became minister to an independent Protestant church. Resigning that job, he became a speaker of a freethought congregation at Washington for seven years. In Detroit he edited Der Arme Teufel, informing his readers that he “shall be a poor man and a Revolutionaire all my life.” {BDF}

REKENSCHAP A Dutch cultural-scientific quarterly in Dutch and English, Rekenschap is at Postbus 75490, 1070 AL Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: <hv@euronet.nl>.

RELATIVISM In philosophy, relativism is the doctrine that no ideas or beliefs are universally true but that all are, instead, “relative.” That is, their validity depends on the circumstances in which they are applied. Conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are, instead, relative to the persons or groups holding them. Thus, the moon is not “up,” unless one clearly maps what is “down.” Abortion to some is absolutely bad in all cases, but to others it is permissible in some, many, or even in all cases. John Dewey and his school are credited by their critics of being ethical relativists. {DCL; ER}

RELIGION “There is not enough religion in the world,” Nietzsche once lamented, “to destroy the world’s religions.” As to what religion is, Bertrand Russell explained, “By religion, I mean a set of beliefs held as dogmas, dominating the conduct of life, going beyond or contrary to evidence, and inculcated by methods which are emotional or authoritarian, not intellectual.” “Religion is based,” Lord Russell also believed, “primarily and mainly on fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion go hand in hand.” But religion has attracted many, he added, because “belief in God serves to humanize the world of nature, and to make men feel that physical forces [of nature] are their allies. In like manner immortality removes the terror from death. People who believe that when they die they will inherit eternal bliss may be expected to view death without horror. It does soothe men’s fears somewhat even when it cannot allay them wholly.” Writing in 1969, Russell lamented that religion, “as embodied in the Churches, discourages honest thinking, in the main, and gives importance to things that are not very important. Its sense of importance seems to be quite wrong. [In ancient times] when the Roman Empire was falling, the Fathers of the Church didn’t bother much with the fall of the Roman Empire. What they bothered about was how to preserve virginity. That was what they thought important. In the present day, when the human race is falling, I find that eminent divines think it’s much more important to prevent artificial insemination than it is to prevent the kind of world war that will exterminate the whole lot of us. That seems to me to show a lack of sense of proportion.” {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell} • Religion? Superstitious crap! –Carl Pinel of Stockport, England • The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need religion if you are terrified of death. –-Gore Vidal

• People who are no longer religious are more able to be honest with themselves and with others, about how they feel, whatever that feeling is. –-W. W. Watters

{See “The Secular Sphinx: The Riddle of Ethics Without Religion,” by Michael 

Shermer in Skeptic, Vol. 4, No. 2, 1996; The Freethinker, January 1997)

RELIGION AND SCIENCE In the 1990s, many freethinkers and secular humanists accused religious liberals—such as the theistic Unitarians—of reducing theology to vacuousness in their attempt to reconcile a theistic religion with science. That attempt at reconciliation, however, has been a strong one. In the 1970s attempts were made to link Eastern religion with science. “Theology is not some airy-fairy form of metaphysical speculation,” Cambridge University particle physicist turned Anglican priest John C. Polkinghorne has written. His Belief in God in an Age of Science (1998) claims that science and religion both are rooted in encounters with reality. But, countered Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, author of Consilience (1998), “If history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology.”

RELIGION AND SCIENCE, CONFLICT OF (AND NOMA) Stephen Jay Gould, writing of the supposed “conflict” or “warfare” between science and religion, has a scientific humanist’s—he cagily calls it a Jewish agnostic’s—viewpoint:

No such conflict should exist because each subject has a legitimate magisterium, or domain of teaching authority—and these magisteria do not overlap (the principle that I would like to designate as NOMA, or “nonoverlapping magisteria”). The net of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for starters, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty). To cite the usual clichés, we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.

Richard Dawkins, also a secular humanist—but an outright atheist—disagrees with Gould. In “You Can’t Have It Both Ways: Irreconcilable Differences?” he denies Gould’s views:

[I]t is completely unrealistic to claim, as Gould and many others do, that religion keeps itself away from science’s turf, restricting itself to morals and values. A universe with a supernatural presence would be a fundamentally and qualitatively different kind of unvierse from one without. The difference is, inescapably, a scientific difference. Religions make existence claims, and this means scientific claims. {Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1999}

RELIGION-FREE Religion-Free (R-F, or Ruff!) is a designation suggested by James L. Sanders to be placed on correspondence, envelopes, lapel pins, etc., as a way of identifying fellow non-believers. Religion-Free’s address is 413 West Navajo Road, Flagstaff, Arizona 86001. {FD}

RELIGION, ADHERENTS OF Of the 5,929,839,000 humans in mid-1999, an estimated 66% are not Christians and a total of 34% are Christians, according to the 1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica Book of the Year. According to Pres. Bill Clinton, who proudly cited figures supplied by Prof. Robert Putnam of Harvard University, America has more houses of worship per head than any other country. Freethinkers cite similar figures, but lament the way the houses are utilized. (See documentation in the entry for Hell.)

RELIGION, GOOD AND BAD “Those who take pride in their religious observance, whether at Easter services or celebrating the haj, may this week wish to ponder the company they keep,” wrote The Economist at the time of Easter (11 April 1998). Agreeing with those Germans who are skeptical about Scientology, “which tries to turn its followers’ minds and part them from their money, the journal defines religion as “any system of belief in a higher unseen controlling power.”

All right, you may say, Scientology may be a religion, but if so what about all the cults that meet the same dictionary definition? Are the Branch Davidian, of Waco-massacre fame, and suicide-promoting Heaven’s Gate, and metro-gassing Aum Shinrikyo, also to qualify as religions? Well, yes. They may direct their message at the weak and susceptible, but so do other religions. They may hold views that are offensive, but so do other religions (many are founded on a heresy). They may even promote violence, but violence is often the handmaiden of strong religious belief. If you doubt it, go to Bosnia, or Northern Ireland, or the Middle East or countless other places where, even today, men fight their neighbours apparently irrationally. That is ethnic strife, you will be told, but in truth it is religious: Bosnians, whether Muslim or Orthodox, are ethnically identical; so are Ulster’s Catholics and Protestants; Arabs and Jews alike are Semites. It is religion, not race, that fires them up.

RELIGION, WARS OF The Wars of Religion, from 1562–1598, spread following the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. (See entry for Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.) {CE}

RELIGIONS Non-Christians totaled 66% and Christians only 34% in a recent study. (See entry for Hell.)

RELIGIONS, ORIGIN OF: See entry for Walter Burkert.

RELIGIOUS In part because of criticism that ”religion” (from the Latin religare, to restrain) is only a set of beliefs whereas “faith” (from fidere, to trust) is an unquestioning trust in those beliefs, many with a vested interest in organized religion have substituted “faith-based” for “religious.” {William Safire, The New York Times Magazine, 27 June 1999}

RELIGIOUS HUMANISM: See entry for Humanism, Religious

RELIGIOUS HUMANISM

Religious Humanism is a quarterly at 7 Harwood Drive, PO Box Box 1188, Amherst, NY 14226-7188.

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY Collective religious identity is a given in many parts of the world. If you are in Bangladesh, it is expected that you are a Muslim. In Bosnia, if you are a Catholic you are a Croat. In fact, adds Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography, “. . . and vice versa, to the point that if you change your religion from Catholicism to Orthodoxy or Islam, you will feel as if you have also changed your nationality to Serb or ‘Turk.’ ” In America, however, one may be any religion or none and still be fully an American. Collective religious identity is weakened and individual religious autonomy is strengthened by the separation of religion and nationality in American culture.

RELIGIOUS RIGHT: See entry for Christian Right.

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS: See entry for Quakers.

Relly, James (Died 1778) Relly was an associate of the evangelist George Whitefield who, with John and Charles Wesley, co-founded the Evangelical Revival. But Relly withdrew from this connection, becoming an independent preacher of Universalism. In 1759, he published Union, a theological treatise on universal salvation. {U}

Remsburg, John E. (1848–1919) Remsburg, who wrote Six Great Americans, was a rationalist and critic of morality as found in the Holy Bible. Although he lived in Atchison, Kansas, that town’s library has no copies of his work, according to Fred Whitehead in Freethought History (#2, 1992). In Bible Morals (1885), he cited twenty crimes and vices sanctioned by scripture. In his The Bible (1905), he condemns as pernicious and false such Biblical views as the following: Blessed are the poor in spirit; Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth; If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out; If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off; Whosoever shall marry her that is divorced committeth adultery; Resist not evil; Whosoever shall smite thee on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; Love your enemies; Lay not up for yourselves treasurers upon earth; Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what he shall drink, nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on; Take therefore no thought for the morrow. Such views, combined with the name of Christ, Remsburg held, have caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. In 1994, The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His existence was reprinted. It is a classic in American freethought although, as Gordon Stein has pointed out, Remsburg in speaking for a mythological Christ makes the error of interchanging “Christ” when “Jesus” is meant. “Remsberg says that the two terms are interchangeable,” writes Stein (The American Rationalist, November-December 1994), “but that is only true if you are a convinced Christian who believes that Jesus was the Christ. Since Remsburg does not believe this, he should distinguish the possibly historical Jesus from the concept of Christ (Messiah).” {BDF; FUS; PUT}

Rémusat, Charles François [Count] (1831–1897) Rémusat taught Chinese at Paris University and was one of the first to win recognition for Lao-tse and the Buddha. In his works, Rémusat severely criticized the Christian missionaries. {RAT; RE}

Rémusat, Jean Pierre Abel (1788–1832) Rémusat was a French Orientalist, appointed in 1814 professor of Chinese at the Collège de France. Rémusat was one of the first to vindicate the high morality of Lao Tzu and Buddha, and he severely criticized the missionaries for their Chinese translation of the Bible. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. {RAT} RENAISSANCE HUMANISM: See entries for Classical Humanism, Marsilio Ficino, Paul Kristeller, and Charles Trinkaus. During the 1940s and 1950s Trinkaus criticized past academic views of Renaissance humanism.

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM AND ITS UNITARIAN OFFSHOOT Pat Duffy Hutcheon, in “Renaissance Humanism and Its Unitarian Offshoot” (Humanist in Canada, Summer 1998), describes how the naturalism of the ancient Greeks surged again in Renaissance times, then evolved further into both the humanism and Unitarianism of today. “The defining feature of modern humanism—what distinguishes it from all other world views—is its underlying philosophy of evolutionary naturalism,” she writes. “Naturalistic humanists are committed to the evidence of communicable, joint, publicly testable observation—combined with our precious human reason as the means of making connections among experienced regularities.”

RENAISSANCE PUBLISHERS In India, Renaissance Publishers is a leading publisher of M. N. Roy and atheist materials.

Renan, Henriette (1811–1861) Renan was the sister of J. Ernest Renan. She abandoned Catholicism while young. She is said to have inspired her brother to write a life of Christ and she accompanied him to Syria, copying out his notes. In the East she contracted a fatal illness, never returning to the Church and helping Renan with his Vie de Jesus until a few days before her death. {RAT}

Renan, Joseph Ernest (1823–1892) Renan’s Life of Jesus (1863) gave a Humanist interpretation of the Christ as “an incomparable man” and created an international sensation. He has the distinction of having nineteen specific works included on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading. In addition, the Pope personally attacked Renan as a “French blasphemer.” Vie de Jésus made the list in 1863, L’antechrist in 1881, and L’église chrétienne in 1881. His faith, Renan claimed, was destroyed neither by metaphysics nor philosophy but by historical criticism. In 1848 he gained the Volney prize for a memoir on the Semitic languages, and in 1852 published his work on Averroës and Averroîsm. In 1856 he was elected member of the Academy of Inscriptions. In his Life of Jesus, Renan wrote, “No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.” Being a professor of Hebrew in the Institute of France, Renan was denounced by the bishops, who deprived him of his chair which, incidentally, was restored in 1870. McCabe accused one work, Barry’s Renan (1905), of being “a Catholic libel.” Renan’s sister Henriette was his invaluable assistant and, like him, never returned to the Church. Canon Barry’s life of Renan states that she received the last sacraments from “a good Maronite priest” when she was dying. Renan, however, said that the man was “a sort of fool” who forced his way to Henriette when brother and sister were unconscious with fever in Syria, and that the priest had daubed her with his holy oil. In Psichari’s Soeur Anselmine, his son-in-law wrote that Renan’s last days were tranquil, that he told him, “I know that when I am dead nothing of me will remain.” {BDF; CE; CL; ER; FUK; ILP; JM; PUT; RE; TYD}

Renand, Paul (19th Century) Renand was a Belgian author who wrote Nouvelle Symbolique (1861), which discussed the identity of Christianity and paganism. {BDF; RAT}

Renard, Georges (19th Century) 

A French professor at the Academie de Lausanne, Renard wrote Man, Is He Free? (1881) and A Life of Voltaire (1883). {BDF}

Renard, Jules (1864–1910) A French writer, Renard wittily observed, “The Heavenly Father feedeth the fowls of the air’—and in winter He letteth them starve to death.” He also remarked, “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn’t.” {TYD}

Renfro, Henry (1831–1885) Renfro was an ordained Baptist minister who lived near Waco, Texas. By the early 1880s, he had read the works of Paine, Ingersoll, and other freethinkers. When his Baptist denomination ordered him stripped of his ministerial credentials, Renfro joined a fellow Waco minister, J. D. Shaw, a freethinker who announced his own infidel views and started publishing the Independent Pulpit. The story of the two freethinkers was written by Renfro’s great-great-grandson, William Clark Griggs: Parson Henry Renfro: Free Thinking on the Texas Frontier (1994). {American Rationalist, September-October 1995; Freethought History #15, 1995}

Rengart, Karl (19th Century) Rengart was a German democrat and freethought friend of C. Deubler. {BDF}

Renner, Gerald (20th Century) Renner is a contributor to Family Matters, the newsletter of the Secular Family Network.

Renouvier, Charles Bernard (1815–1903) A French philosopher, Renouvier was an ardent Radical and follower of the critical philosophy. Among his works are Manual of Ancient Philosophy (2 volumes, 1844); Republican Manual (1848); Science of Morals (1869); and A Sketch of a Systematic Classification of Philosophical Doctrines (1885). With F. Pillon, he translated Hume’s Psychology (1878). {BDF}

RENSSALAER INDIVIDUALS FOR FREETHOUGHT (RIFT) In Troy, New York, Will Bobrowski and Marshall Vandegrift founded Renssalaer Individuals for Freethought (RIFT) in 1999. The student group is a member of the Campus Freethought Alliance.

Renton, Nicholas Edwin (1931– ) Renton, who was born in England, is an Australian humanist and business consultant. Since 1962 he has been a member of the Humanist Society of Victoria, and in 1987 he became national president of the Council of Australian Humanists. During his term of office he persuaded the American Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to treat humanism as a “religion” in their religious broadcasting departments, and he participated in television debates on subjects such as “Does Man Need God?” and “Is Marriage Really Necessary?” “Nick” Renton is the author of some twenty books, and his Guide For Meetings and Organisations (1961) has been widely used as a reference work. {SWW}

Renton, William (Born 1852) Renton was an English writer who was educated in Germany. At Keswick he published Jesus (1876), a psychological estimate. He has also written a romance of the last generation, Bishopspool (1883). {BDF}

REORGANIZED CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS A break-off, separatist group of Mormons, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, was organized in the 1800s and has its headquarters at Box 1059, Independence, Missouri 64051. (See entry for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.)

REPRESSION

Repression is a Freudian concept that describes the unconscious exclusion from the conscious mind of painful impulses or fears or desire. A person who sexually molests a child, whether a priest or a non-theist, might be suspected of attempting to repress the memory.

REPUBLIC, THE The Republic is the best-known dialogue of Plato. In it, Socrates is shown outlining an ideal state ruled by philosopher-kings. (See entries for Poets and for Utopia.) {DCL}

REQUIEM • Requiem, n. A mass for the dead which the minor poets assure us the winds sing o’er the graves of their favorites. Sometimes, by way of providing a varied entertainment, they sing a dirge. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

RES HUMANA A Polish quarterly, Res Humana is at 00-553 Warszawa, ul. Koszykowa 24, Poland.

Residents, The (20th Century) The Residents are a 26-year-old San Francisco-based band whose members’ identities have never been divulged. In photographs and performances, they appear with giant, veiny eyeballs on their heads, crowned with top hats. Their CD-ROM album, “Wormwood” (1999), turns the most violent and cruel Bible stories into songs. Singing a bit of “Jesus Loves Me,” a figure in a skull mask comes out in a puff of smoke and says, “The idea here is not to insult Jesus but maybe to shine a little light into some dark corners and show that the Good Book is also the bad book.” A song follows about Jeremiah (“They call me Mr. Misery/they laugh and dump decay on me”) and John the Baptist, which offers a good excuse for a severed-head prop. Circumcision is a major theme. The marriage of Dinah, the woman in Genesis, causes her brothers-in-law to kill all the men and enslave all the women of her town. And God’s brutality is sung about: Abraham kills his son, rejects Cain’s offering of grain, and transforms Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. The group’s female singer, as the daughter of Jephthah, who is sacrificed by her father to win a war, intones, “I’m gonna die with no tears in my eyes, ‘cause God digs my daddy!” “Judas Saves” offers an alternative theory: “Just as Dorothy needed the Wicked Witch to get over the rainbow,’ the skull head sings by way of introduction, “where would Jesus be without his Judas?” “Give Me That Old Time Religion” has new lyrics that include, “It was good for making millions/selling platitudes to pilgrims,” and ending, “Even if it’s just a token/it was good for giving home to/human spirits that were broken/so it’s good enough for me.” That The Residents has been so successful with younger people is a sign of freethinkers’ inroads via popular music. {Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 7 April 1999}

Restrepo, Antonio José (Ñito) {Ambassador] (1855–1933) In spite of his atheism, Restrepo became the Ambassador to the League of Nations from Colombia. In this capacity he negotiated the treaty that ended the war between Finland and Russia, for which a street in Helsinki is named after him. {WAS, letter from Dr. Joe Vikin, 13 September 1997}

RESURRECTION In keeping with the Logical Positivists’ Principle of Verification, resurrection is a meaningless concept unless interpreted psychoanalytically as wishful thinking. To a naturalist, any form of life that dies is dead and by definition never returns to life. Brain death, which involves the final cessation of activity only in the central nervous system, is not the total death of an individual—such a condition involves a flat electroencephalogram for some length of time, and it shows only that one function of a body has died. Death of an individual occurs when there is cessation of all life (metabolic processes), and no living creature has ever “risen” from the dead. Once dead, a body becomes rigid (rigor mortis), discolors because of settling of blood (livor mortis), it cools (algor mortis), there is a breakdown of tissue by enzymes liberated by that tissue after death (autolysis), and there is an invasion of the body by organisms from the gastrointestinal tract (putrefaction). Wishful thinking, however, about loved ones leads to hoping that the deceased will somehow return, or continue in some future existence. For example, in Egyptian religion when the state cult grew and pharaohs became powerful, huge and splendid temples were constructed to the gods, leading to powerful priesthoods. The populace found expression of religious feeling in the funerary cults. The Egyptian Book of the Dead describes how the deceased were provided with food and drink, weapons, and articles of toilet. Tombs were visited by the family, who brought new offerings. Although the ancient Egyptian strongly believed in life after death, his idea of passing from his life on earth to life in the hereafter is somewhat obscure, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, and the concepts concerning the afterlife were complex. Individuals hoped not only to extend their life beyond the grave, but to become part of the perennial life of nature. The ka was a kind of double or other self, not an element of the personality, but a detached part of the self which was sometimes said to guide the fortunes of the individual in life. When a man died he was said to join with his ka. The ba, on the other hand, was the manifestation of an individual after his death, usually thought to be represented in the form of a bird. Also, there was akh, the transformation of some of the noble dead into eternal objects, such as stars or other objects in the changeless rhythm of the universe. For the Hebrews, the body was essential to full life. The soul in itself had no force or substance, and must be reunited with the body if the actual man was to exist after death. Daniel 12:2, 13 suggests that those who have remained faithful through persecution will be raised up hereafter. Job 19:25 states that Job is convinced that after he dies and is buried he will appear in his flesh before God, who will vindicate him. Ernest Findlay Scott, who once taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, explained that “for the most part, however, the Old Testament accepts the primitive view that after death the soul survives only as a ghost in Sheol, the world of shadows underneath the earth. The idea of immortality is by no means absent form the Old Testament, but it expresses itself in the purely religious faith that fellowship with God must needs be for ever. . . . The doctrine of resurrection first becomes prominent in the apocalyptic books, which take their departure from the Old Testament idea of the ‘day of Jahveh,’ when the new age will be ushered in by a general Judgment. On this day, according to the apocalyptists, the dead of past ages will be raised up to receive sentence of acquittal or of condemnation. Much of the detail in this conception can be traced to Persian sources.” Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus involves seven, or perhaps eight, different accounts in the New Testament: Matthew 28; Mark 16; John 20; John 21; I Corinthians 15: 3-8; Acts 1: 2,3; Luke 24: 13-32. The accounts often are in conflict with one another. In Paul’s narrative, eye-witnesses are cited who were fully convinced that they had seen “the risen Lord,” and they were in a mood of ecstasy, in which they were conscious only of the momentary impression. In Kings II 4:32-35, the child was dead . . . and Elisha . . . lay upon the child . . . and the child sneezed seven times, and . . . opened his eyes. Later, in Chapter 13, they were burying a man . . . . They cast the man into the sepulchre of Elisha; and when the man was let down, and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived, and stood upon his feet. In Mark 5, Jesus took the damsel by the hand, and said unto her . . . Damsel, I say unto thee, arise. And straightway the damsel arose, and walked. Jesus arranged some other resurrections in John and Luke, and in Acts 9:40 St. Peter also achieves a resurrection. In all such cases of resurrections, believers are blissfully ignorant about the realities of rigor mortis, livor mortis, algor mortis, and autolysis. Or, for that matter, putrefaction. (See the entries for Adonis and for Jesus. For the most thorough discussion of the subject by a secular humanist, see Immortality, edited by Paul Edwards. Or consult Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia, which states that “although all Catholics, and the great majority of Protestants, still believe it, argument about it is a waste of time, especially as immortality of any sort is now so easily refuted.”) {CE; ER}

Rethore, François (Born 1822) A French professor of philosophy at the Lyceum of Marseilles, Rethore wrote Condillac, or Empiricism and Rationalism (1864). He translated Spencer’s Classification of Sciences. {BDF}

Reuschle, Karl Gustav (1812–1875) Reuschle, a German geographer, wrote Kepler and Astronomy in 1871. He dedicated to D. F. Strauss his Philosophy and Natural Science (1874). {BDF; RAT}

Revel, Jean-François (20th Century) Revel, a French journalist, signed Humanist Manifesto II. He is author of Descartes, inutile et incertain (1976) and How Democracies Perish (1983). {HM2}

REVELATION • It looks as though modern science has been holding back a revelation quite as momentous as Copernicus’s: it is Earth, not sky, that is heavenly. –Vincent Cronin, The View From Planet Earth

In theology, revelation is a manifestation of divine will or truth. Revelation, one of the books of the Judeo-Christian Bible, ironically reveals nothing from God in the way of any factual information, previously unknown, nor does it reveal any scientific information at all. “Revealed religions” are founded primarily on the revelations of God to man. As to how freethinkers trick the gullible, magicians such as Randi sometimes purposely provide revelations, explaining that nothing supernatural is involved.

Revere, Paul (1735–1818) A silversmith and American patriot, Revere participated in the Boston Tea Party, making a famous ride to warn everyone about an approaching British attack. He was christened and remained active throughout his life in the New Brick Church in Boston, one which merged with the Old North and Second Church in 1776 and in 1802 became Unitarian under the Rev. John Lathrop. {CE; U; UU}

REVERENCE • Reverence, n. The spiritual attitude of a man to a god and a dog to a man. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Revillon, Antoine (Born 1832) A French journalist, “Tony” Revillon was a lawyer, a writer for many journals, an author of romances, and in 1881 an elected deputy. {BDF}

REVISTA PERUANA DE FILOSOFIA APLICADO Revista Peruana de Filosofia Aplicada, a Peruvian quarterly for the Journal of Applied Philosophy, is at El Corregidor 318, Rimac, Lima 25, Peru. E-mail: <rpfa@geocities.com>.

REVOLUTION A revolution consists of the overthrow of a government by one group and its replacement with another. America’s deist-inspired Founding Fathers favored revolution and in the Constitution devised a way for future Americans to have a peaceful revolution, constitutionally. Other forms of government, even anarchism, do not welcome revolution.

Rey, Marc Michel (19th Century) Rey, an Amsterdam printer and bookseller, printed all the works of d’Holbach and Rousseau and some of Voltaire’s. Rey conducted the Journal des Savans. {BDF}

Reybaud, Marie Roch Louis (1799–1879) Reybaud was an economist and politician. He worked on the Tribune, Corsaire, National, and other papers. He wrote a history of the French Expedition to Egypt (10 volumes, 1830–1836). In 1846 he was elected to the Chambre and in 1848 to the Legislative Assembly. Reybaud was politically more conservative in his later decades, but he retained his rationalism. {RAT}

Reyka, Larry (20th Century) Reyka heads a Mensa special interest group (SIG) called HUMSIG that promotes humanist values, democracy, and reason. His e-mail: <lreyka@beol.net>.

Reynaud, Antoine Andre Louis (1777–1844) Baron Reynaud, a French mathematician, became one of the National Guard of Paris in 1790. A friend of Lalande, Reynaud was a teacher and examiner for about thirty years in the Polytechnic School. {BDF}

Reynaud, Jean Ernest (1806–1863) Reynaud was a French philosopher. For a time he was a Saint Simonian. In 1836 with P. Leroux he edited the Encyclopédie Nouvelle. A moderate Democrat in the Assembly of 1848, Reynaud had great success with an 1854 work, Earth and Heaven. But a clerical council held at Périgueux formally condemned it. {BDF; RAT}

Reynolds, Charles B. (Born 1832) Reynolds was an American lecturer. Brought up religiously and becoming a Seventh Day Baptist preacher, he then converted to freethought. In Boonton, New Jersey, he convened a “free thought” conference in a tent but came into conflict with the neighbors, who pelted him “with ancient eggs and vegetables.” The New York Times reported, “They chopped away the guy ropes of the tent and slashed the canvas with their knives. When the tent collapsed, the crowd rushed for the speaker to inflict further punishment by plunging him in the duck pond.” Whereupon Reynolds moved on to Morristown, New Jersey, where residents began “clamoring for his indictment for blasphemy.” In the only blasphemy trial ever held in the United States, Reynolds in 1886 was defended by Colonel Robert Ingersoll. “No jury has yet, in the state of New Jersey,” Ingersoll intoned in a speech which covered forty-four pages, “decided that honest men are not free, that there is a manacle on the brain. . . . Say to the world that New Jersey shares in the spirit of this age, that New Jersey is not a survival of the Dark Ages, that New Jersey does not still regard the thumbscrew as an instrument of progress, that New Jersey needs no dungeon to answer the arguments of a free man, and does not send to the penitentiary men who think and men who speak.” However, Reynolds was found guilty and fined seventy-five dollars. Reynolds wrote articles in the Boston Investigator, Truthseeker, and Ironclad Age. The New Jersey statute forbidding “cursing, scoffing at or denying the existence of God or Jesus” remained on the books until 1979, at which time the code was changed. {BDF; FUS; The New York Times, 26 January 1997; PUT; RAT}

Reynolds, George William MacArthur (19th Century) An English writer of many novels, Reynolds wrote Errors of the Christian Religion (1832). {BDF}

Reynolds, Malvina (Born 1900) Reynolds was a writer of songs and a Unitarian. She sang her own songs in appearances throughout the United States, Japan, and England. Many of her works were recorded on Folkway albums. Included among her compositions are “Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth” (1967; “What Have They Done to the Rain?” (1962); “From Way Up Here” (1962); “Bury Me in My Overalls” (1956); “Willow Tree” (1956); and “Tweedles and Foodles for Young Noodles” (1970). {U}

Reynolds, Rick (20th Century) A monologist and comedian, Reynolds was in a hit show, “Only the Truth is Funny,” from 1990 to 1992. “I don’t believe in God,” he said on the show, adding, “I hope he doesn’t hold that against me.” In his show, “All Grown Up and No Place to Go,” Reynolds includes, “I don’t use the term ‘miracle’ lightly. I don’t believe in God, or reincarnation, or destiny, or the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.” {CA; E}

Reynolds, Rick (1958 - ) Reynolds, a comedian, had a one-man show, “Only the Truth is Funny,” that in 1990 brought him much favorable publicity. He also has a show, “All Grown Up – And No Place to Go,” which in San Francisco described parenthood, his brush with success, and the difficulties of being an adult. Rhino Records has a two-CD version of his comedy act, called “Life, Kids, Marriage, and Stuff.” “We live,” he has said, “with this emotional pain that we never talk about. In my case it comes from the pressures of a relationship and kids, and the irony not only of the huge love and satisfaction that brings you, but also the amount of work and frustration. I'm unhappy a lot. And I talk to my friends, and they're unhappy. And I go, 'Is my circle of friends so different from the world?' ” He is author of Only the Truth Is Funny: My Family and How I Survived It. NBC-TV signed him to a $750,000 development deal, which resulted in an unaired sitcom pilot and an offer to stick around to create other new shows. In his standup act, which still plays as a 90-minute special on the Showtime Network, Reynolds has discussed his atheism. Refusing to say grace at Thanksgiving dinner, for example, he remarks, “I don’t believe in God. . . . I hope he doesn’t hold that against me.” Similarly, in his “All Grown Up” show, he says, “I don’t use the term ‘miracle’ lightly. I don’t believe in God, or reincarnation, or destiny, or the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.” {CA}

Rezmerski, Nick (20th Century) In 1995, Rezmerski became secretary of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists (UMAH). He was a founder of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Rhodes, Cecil John [Prime Minister] (1853–1902) Rhodes was a British imperialist, business magnate, and the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, South Africa. He developed the country which bore his name, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). McCabe wrote of Rhodes, “Apart from his imperial policy in Africa, which at least had no taint of greed, he was a man of high ideals and left nearly the whole of his fortune of about $30,000,000 for educational and philanthropic purposes. Marcus Aurelius and Gibbon were his favorite authors, and he had an immense admiration of Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. His biographer, Sir T. F. Fuller, shows that he was an agnostic.” {CE; JM; RE; TRI}

Rhoades, Don (20th Century) Rhodes is co-chair of the Atheist Community of Austin, Texas. He has written for Secular Nation (October-December 1998). E-mail: <donrodz@swbell.net>.

Rhoads, Cornelius P. (20th Century) When he reviewed George D. Stoddard’s Krebiozen, The Great Cancer Mystery for The Humanist in 1956, Dr. Rhoads, whose nickname was “Dusty,” was scientific director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. In 1956 he was given the Walker Prize for Cancer Research, which is awarded every five years by the Royal College of Surgeons of Britain for the “best work in advancing the knowledge of the pathology and therapeutics of cancer.” He was specifically cited for having found the presence of a “cancer-immune mechanism” in human cells which, in turn, led to chemotherapeutic studies.

RHODE ISLAND ATHEISTS, FREETHINKERS • Rhode Island Atheists, POB 22, Coventry, Rhode Island 02816. Ludlow Mahan is the contact for the group, which helped start Gil Lawrence’s show on WALE radio. • WALE Radio, Providence, Rhode Island. Gil Lawrence’s radio talk show features the atheist/agnostic point of view.

Rhys, Jocelyn (20th Century) Rhys wrote Shaken Creeds: The Resurrection Doctrines (1922). {GS}

Rhys, John [Sir] (1840–1915) Rhys was a professor of Celtic at Oxford and, in 1895, Principal of Jesus College, Hibbert Lecturer, and Fellow of the British Academy. When Mrs. Humphrey Ward tried to force the Church of England to admit ministers who denied the Virgin Birth, Rhys wrote to Edward Clodd, “If they were only called by the same name of Christians it matters not that they are ritualists or agnostics; the name is the great thing that would enable them to enjoy the Church together.” {RAT; RE}

Rhys-Jones, Griff (6 Nov 1953 - ) Rhys-Jones was born in Cardiff, Wales, and attended England’s Cambridge University, where he became Vice-President of the prestigious Footlights Club. A comedian, he has radio credits that include “A Swift Laugh,” “Ukridge,” “George’s Marvelous Medicine,” “Degrees of Humour,” “Injury Time,” and “Tales of the Crypt.” He was featured in “Not the Nine O’Clock News,” “Alias Smith and Jones,” “The Young Ones,” “Staggered,” “Wilt,” and “The Bookworm.” His stage credits include An Absolute Turkey at The Globe Theatre; The Revengers Comedies at the Strand Theatre; Wind In The Willows at The Royal National Theatre; Thark, The Alchemist and Charlie O’s Aunt at The Lyric, Hammersmith; The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui at the Queens Theatre; Trumpets And Raspberries at The Phoenix Theatre; and Not In Front Of The Audience at the Theatre Royal. Griff has also performed in the opera Die Fledermaus at the Royal Opera House. As a director for the theatre Rhys-Jones has worked on Twelfth Night for the Royal Shakespeare Company; The Alchemist at The Lyric, Hammersmith; and Le School Trip at the Old Vic Youth Theatre. Rhys-Jones has worked as an actor, a director, a writer, and a producer. As part of a response to a reader’s question, he told the United Kingdom’s Independent, “I have no belief in God.” {CA}

Rialle, J. Girard de (Born 1841) Rialle was a French anthropologist. He wrote in La Pensée Nouvelle, conducted the Revue de Linguistique et de Philologie comparée, and has written on how fetishism is dealt with in Comparative Mythology (1878). Rialle also wrote works on ethnology. {BDF}

Riback, Bernard L. (20th Century) Riback, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a humanist counselor. {HM2}

Ribelt, Léonce (19th Century) Ribelt was a French publicist, author of several political works and collaborator on La Morale Indépendante. {BDF}

Ribeyrolles, Charles de (1812–1861) Ribeyrolles was a French politician. Intended for the Church, he chose instead to become a social democrat and edited the Emancipation of Toulouse and La Réforme in 1848. A friend of Victor Hugo, he shared in his exile at Jersey but died at Rio Janeiro. {BDF; RAT}

Ribonucleic acid (RNA): See entries for RNA and Genesis.

Ribot, Alexandre Felix Joseph (1842–1923) During his three times as Premier of France, Ribot struggled with the Church. An agnostic, Ribot was a member of the French Academy. {RAT; RE}

Ribot, Théodule A. (1839–1917) Ribot was a French philosopher, the author of Contemporary English Psychology (1870) and resumés of the views of Mill, Bain, and Spencer, whose Principles of Psychology he has translated. Ribot also wrote On Heredity (1873); The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1874); and Contemporary German Psychology. Ribot conducted the Revue Philosophique. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Ricardo, David (1772–1823) Ricardo, a British economist of Dutch-Jewish parentage, entered business as a stockbroker at the age of twenty and within five years had amassed a large fortune. After reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, he began to study political economy. His major work, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) contained his important theories on the determination of wages and value. He held that wages tend to stabilize around the subsistence level and that the value of almost any good is a function of the labor needed to produce it. His thinking greatly influenced the development of classical economics. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, Ricardo abjured Judaism in his youth and never returned to it or adopted any other creed. {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Ricci, Paul (20th Century) Ricci, who is professor emeritus of philosophy at Cypress College in California, addressed in 1994 the 14th annual HUMCON conference sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County. His lecture, “Does the Complexity of the Universe Imply the Christian God as Creator?”, made the point that new ideas in the fields of cosmology and physics are of no help in bolstering the discredited Design Argument for the existence of God. He is highly critical of The Fingerprint of God by astronomer and evangelist Hugh Ross. Ricci is author of Fundamentals of Critical Thinking.

Ricciardi, Gerry (20th Century) Ricciardi, while at student at Boston University in 1998, signed the Campus Freethought Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.”

Ricciardi, Guiseppe Napoléone [Count] (1808–1885) Count Ricciardi, an Italian patriot, was son of Francesco Ricciardi, Count of Camaldoli (1758–1842). After the age of nineteen, he said, he never kneeled to a priest. In 1832 he founded at Naples Il Progresso, a review of science, literature, and art. Arrested in 1834 as a Republican conspirator, Ricciardi was imprisoned for eight months, then lived in exile in France until 1848. There he wrote in the Revue Indépendante, pointing out that the Papacy from its very essence was incompatible with liberty. He was elected deputy to the Neapolitan Parliament, sitting on the extreme left. In 1849, A History of the Revolution of Italy in 1848 was printed. Condemned to death in 1853, he was seized and his fortune was taken. At the time of the Ecumenical Council, he called an Anti-Council of Freethinkers at Naples in 1869. The Italian government dissolved this, however, but the organization led to the formation of an International Federation of Freethinkers. Count Ricciardi’s final work was a life of his friend, Mauro Macchi (1882). {BDF; RAT; RE}

Rice, Ann (1941– ) Rice is author of Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Feast of All Saints (1980), Cry to Heaven (1982), and Exit to Eden (1985). She also writes as A. N. Roquelaure and Anne Rampling. According to Atheist Celebrities on the Internet, Rice is a non-believer.

Rice, Madeleine Hook (20th Century) Rice wrote Federal Street Pastor: The Life of William Ellery Channing (1961). {GS}

Rice, Robert M. (1902–1993) Rice was a Universalist who had pastorates in Maine, Massachusetts, and the Oak Park, Illinois, Unitarian church which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. When he ended his ministry there, the church made Rice minister emeritus.

Rice, Stuart (20th Century) Rice is a past president of The Jewish Humanist.

Rice, Thomas Jefferson (19th Century) Rice wrote Departure, or Selections from the Jottings of Twenty Years (1875). {GS}

Rice, William Brooks (1905–1970) As chairman of the Joint Merger Commission, the body through which the groundwork was laid for the merger of the American Unitarian Association (AUA) and the Universalist Church of America (UCA) in 1961, Rice played an important role in modern religious liberalism. He was a Unitarian minister in Dover and Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts. {U&U}

Rice, William G. (20th Century) Rice was a member of the American Humanist Association. In 1967 he wrote A Tale of Two Courts: Judicial Settlement of Controversies Between the States of the Swiss and American Federations. {HNS}

Rich, Caleb (1750–1821) Although John Murray’s Gloucester Church is considered the first officially recognized Universalist Church, Caleb Rich’s church founded in Warwick, Massachusetts, in 1773 predates Murray’s church, although it had no official legal recognition. When twenty-one, Rich became a Baptist but began to believe that a fear of hell is a selfish (and therefore tainted) motive for religious experience and moral action. His rebellion against the use of hell as a motive for conversion grew and was supplemented by visionary religious experiences confirming in him the doctrines of universal salvation. The Baptists then excluded him, which led to his forming the Warwick church. One of Rich’s converts to Universalism was Hosea Ballou. {U; U&U}

Richards, William (18th Century) Richards wrote Reflection on French Atheism and On English Christianity (1796). {GS}

Richardson, Benjamin Ward [Sir] (1828–1896) The son of an eminent British physician, Richardson introduced fourteen new anesthetics into medical and surgical practice and took a deep interest in popular education, often on freethought lines. In his autobiography, Vita Medica (1897), Richardson stated that “man is no more immortal than the thing on which he writes his learning” and admits only an impersonal vital spirit in the universe. {JM; RAT; RE}

Richardson, Eliot Lee (1920– ) Richardson, an eminent lawyer who has served in more cabinet positions than any other person in American history, comes from a family whose forebears were Unitarians since the early 19th century. He attended Milton Academy and at Harvard received his B.A. in Philosophy magna cum laude. After being in the Normandy invasion, where he won a bronze star and two purple hearts, he got his law degree from Harvard (again magna cum laude). Moving into government, he served as a Senate aide, then as acting secretary of health, education, and welfare; became US attorney for Massachusetts; was Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and Attorney General; was secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (under President Eisenhower); was Attorney General under President Nixon; was Ambassador to Great Britain and Commerce Secretary (under President Ford); and headed the US delegation to the Third International Law of the Sea Conference (under President Carter). During the Watergate scandal, after President Richard Nixon demanded that he fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, Richardson received plaudits from around the world for resigning as Attorney General in protest. {World, January-February 1997}

Richardson, J. P. (Born 1821) Richardson, the son of Puritan parents, was taught to believe that the world was coming to an end in 1843. When it did not, he began to read freethought literature and met Horace Seaver and J. P. Mendum, becoming a subscriber to the Boston Investigator. Richardson became an ardent opponent of slavery, and when the Civil War broke out he enlisted, raising the first company (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1861) “in all the loyal North” for the war. After the war, he became a judge in Texas and was a president of the Liberal Association of Texas. {PUT}

Richardson, Nancy (20th Century) Richardson, while a student at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, was one of the founders of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Richardson, Peter Tufts (20th Century) Richardson, a Unitarian, wrote Four Spiritualities (1996). The minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Andover, Massachusetts, he divides the world’s spiritual traditions into the Journey of Unity, of Devotion, of Works, and Harmony.

Richardson, Robert Dale Jr. (1934– ) Richardson, a Unitarian, is author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) and The Mind on Fire (1995). His father, Robert Dale Richardson Sr., who wrote the introduction to the Beacon Press edition of Abraham Lincoln’s autobiography, had served Unitarian parishes around New England, later becoming a chaplain at a Boston mental hospital. {World, January-February 1997}

Richberg, Donald Randall (20th Century) Richberg, a freethinker, wrote “G. Hovah Explains” (1940). {GS}

Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, [Duc de] [Cardinal] (1585–1642) McCabe cites Richelieu as one of two statesmen—the other was Colbert—who made France great in spite of its corrupt Church and tainted monarchy. Rarely noticed is that Richelieu was highly independent in religious matters. He angered Rome by his alliance with the Protestants instead of the Catholics in the Thirty Years War. He drove the Papal troops out of Switzerland, induced the King to break off relations with the Vatican, and, as Bayle reports in his dictionary, threatened to sever the connection with Rome and unite with the Protestants in a French National Church. Although there is no evidence that Richelieu was a skeptic, he had little depth in his religious views, McCabe insists. {RE}

Richepin, Jean (1849–1926) Richepin was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist born in Algeria. He began his life as a physician, and during the Franco-German war he took to journalism. In 1876 he published the Son of the Beggars, which was suppressed. His Les Blasphèmes (1884) appeared in several editions. He also wrote The Atheist’s Prayer and Other Poems, which was published posthumously in 1934. {BDF; RAT}

Richer, Leon (Born 1824) Richer was a French deist and journalist. With A. Guéroult, he edited l’Opinion Nationale, and in 1869 he founded and edited L’Avenir des Femmes. In 1868 he published Letters of a Freethinker to a Village Priest and has written volumes in favor of the emancipation of women, collaborating with Mlle. Desraismes in the Women’s Rights congresses held in Paris. {BDF}

Richert, Robert (20th Century) Richert, who is president and co-founder of Freethinkers Toastmasters Club, led a freethought workshop in 1994 at the 14th annual HUMCON conference sponsored by the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County, California.

Richet, Charles (1850–1935) Richet was a 1913 Nobel Prize winner in physiology. His special study was anaphylaxis, a term he used to describe a phenomenon noted earlier by Theobald Smith and which referred to a hypersensitive reaction (akin to allergy) to injections of foreign proteins such as serums. Richet also discovered that hydrochloric acid is the base of gastric juice. Conan Doyle and others erroneously label him a Catholic or a spiritualist, but as president of the French Society for Psychical Research Richet repeatedly explained that he did not believe that the phenomena were due to spirits. Richet also said he was not hostile to religion, that he had never written about the subject. The Catholic Revue des Deux Mondes, after his death, described him as “the greatest physiologist that France has had since Pasteur,” overlooking the fact that Richet was a non-theist, not a Catholic. He had contributed to the organ of Haeckel’s Monist League because, Richet explained, he “has the misfortune to believe more in science than theology” and was convinced that man’s future is not in belief in “childish dogmas.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Richler, Mordecai (20th Century) A comic writer, Richler tells of his non-religious views in Douglas Todd’s Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death, and the Things That Matter (1996). {CA}

Richler, Mordecai (27 Jan 1931) Richler, a writer and comic writer, was born in Montréal and is one of Canada’s best-known novelists, a controversial and prolific journalist, and an occasional scriptwriter. He spent two years in Paris and Spain (1951-1952), lived in England in 1954, and returned to Montréal in 1972. His The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) is a novel about a Montréal-Jewish entrepreneur. His earlier novels are The Acrobats (1954), Son of a Smaller Hero (1955), and A Choice of Enemies (1957). Victor Ramal has described Richler, who has published over 300 journalistic pieces:

Richler's considerable talent for the comic is displayed in The Incomparable Atuk (1963), a zany piece on Canadian nationalism, and in Cocksure (1968), a comical-satirical account of the difficulty of adhering to traditional values in a world gone mad. St. Urbain's Horseman (1971) and Joshua Then and Now (1980) are ambitiously conceived novels that incorporate and go beyond the settings, characters and concerns of the preceding novels. St. Urbain's Horseman examines the personal, professional and ethnic experiences of a 37-year-old man subjected to intense, contradictory feelings, who, Richler has stated, is "closer to me than anybody else." Joshua Then and Now employs a complex pattern of flashbacks to explore the possessive nature of the past, the ironical inversions caused by the passage of time, and the sad aspects of mutability. Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975) and Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987), two racy, hilarious children's novels, tell of the difficulties experienced by the young child in an adult world.

His scripts include Life at the Top (1965), The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), Fun with Dick and Jane (1977), and Joshua Then and Now (1985). His many awards include two Governor General’s Awards (1968, 1971), a Screenwriters Guild of America Award (1974), and a Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award (1976). Richler is profiled in Douglas Todd’s Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death and the Things that Matter(1996. After recounting how he became an “unbeliever” in his youth, Richler is asked if he's still an atheist. He replies: “There's just one trip around the block and you better have as good a time as possible without hurting anybody else. But beyond that, that's it. Only Shirley MacLaine is guaranteed return trips again and again.” {CA}

Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich (1763–1825) Jean Paul, as he was known, was the most widely read novelist in Goethe’s time. As to whether Richter was a believer, an answer can be found in the title he chose for a chapter in his Siebenkäs (1796–1797): “The Dead Christ Proclaims from the Top of the World Edifice That There Is No God.” Although rejecting Christianity, he accepted the idea of immortality. In his lifetime, he was a popular writer who was admired for the idealism and warm portrayals of simple life as shown in his novels. Two other of his works are Titan (1800–1803) and Levana (1807), the latter a treatise on education. Richter’s biographer described his position as “a sentimental Deism” like that of Rousseau. {CE; EU, Volker Dürr; JM; RE}

Rickard, Alan (1929– ) Rickard is an Australian rationalist, atheist, travel agent, writer, and philosophical anarchist. With Frederick W. Swann and Laurence F. Bullock he co-founded the Atheist Society of Australia. He was editor of The Atheist Journal until 1981. {FUK}

Rickards, D. A. (20th Century) During the 1960s, Rickards was a director of the American Humanist Association. He is a veterinarian and song writer, noted for his satires of religious belief.

Ricker, Marilla Marks (1840–1920) Ricker, an American freethinker and attorney, was a frequent contributor to Truth Seeker. Her major work was I’m Not Afraid, Are You? (1912). In 1910 she ran unsuccessfully for governor of New Hampshire, for the Attorney General ruled her ineligible to run. She also wrote Four Gospels (1911), favorably comparing Paine and Ingersoll with John Calvin and Puritan Jonathan Edwards. When Christians pray, she quipped, they spell it with an e. {EU, Gordon Stein; WWS}

Rickman, Thomas (Clio) (1761–1834) 

Rickman was an English radical who published several volumes of poems and in 1819 a life of his friend Thomas Paine. He also published a portrait of Paine by Romney that was engraved by Sharpe. A Quaker who wrote poetry under the name of “Clio,” Rickman was prosecuted several times for selling Paine’s works and his house was a center for the leading London heretics. Rickman was an aggressive deist. {BDF; FUK; RAT; RE}

Riddle, Oscar (1877–1968) Riddle was a biologist and author of a major work on the conflict of science and religion, The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought (1954). Asked about humanism, Riddle replied to the present author:

After fifty years spent in biological research I can have no doubt that this research, above all else, led to the naturalistic humanism described below. Naturalistic humanism sees the truly admirable in the already attained form and functioning of the human being; and finds the truly hopeful in the near certainty that the same or like impulses to growth or change will persist indefinitely. It seeks perfection and absolutes neither in humankind nor elsewhere in a universe of flow and flux. It rejects the view that all ages are alike in fortune or other respects, though it grants that crucial problems of personal and mental freedom have faced man in every age. Man’s severest tests probably lie ahead. The changing framework and essence of society—above all else that exists—are surely, solely, and securely in human hands. In this newest and most involved sphere of reality neither the inevitable nor the Providential can intrude. Here—in emerging majesty well mixed with latent cruelty and bulging desire—man is both builder and creator. This form of humanism can come only as a halting, step-wise growth to each person that acquires it. Its roots seem to rest in inquiry, atheism, and experience; its purely personal fruits clearly range from the calms of comprehension to the revels of the mind. Eventually it puts leadership above instinct, logic and test above too-free emotion, and fellowship above faith. It channels the prized distillates of human brains toward undivided service to human beings.

From 1959 to 1960, he was President of the American Rationalist Federation. In 1958, Riddle was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. {FUS; HNS2; WAS, 8 May 1956}

Ridgeway, Nathaniel (19th Century) In the 1870s, Ridgeway was an active leader in Manchester, England, of the Lancashire Secular Union. {RSR}

Ridings, Elijah Francis Ambrose (19th Century) Ridings wrote “A Reply to Atheism Weighed in the Ballance and Found Wanting”(1823). {GS}

Ridley, Francis Ambrose (1897–1994) Ridley, who was born in Wales, was “a great Victorian freethinker” who in the 1920s after receiving a Licentiate of Theology at Durham University became one of Hyde Park’s colorful left-wing orators and confessed atheist. Once a Trotskyite, Ridley was expelled by Trotsky himself. He wrote for New Leader (later the Socialist Leader) in 1941 and was a member of its National Council in 1943. From 1947 he was co-editor (with George Stone) of the Socialist Leader for two years and editor of Left for five. He wrote Mussolini Over Africa (1935), Next Year’s War (1936), The Papacy and Fascism (1937), Julian the Apostate and the Rise of Christianity (1937), and The United Socialist States of Europe (1944). Many secularists were not radical, he noted, let alone revolutionary, and many socialists were not secularists, either because they were Christian Socialist or because they regarded the “religious issue” as needlessly divisive. But when Chapman Cohen retired as editor of The Freethinker in 1951, Ridley directed the journal toward a secular humanist outlook. At one time Ridley debated with Marcus Garvey, the American pioneer of “black power,” and an unfounded story depicted him in the British Museum Reading Room occupying the chair of Marx or Lenin. Ridley was a colorful individual, “almost a revolutionary saint,” according to Ellis Hillman. His funeral was officiated by Terry Mullins and assisted by Barbara Smoker. At the ceremony, Martin Page declared, “Let the world know that there was no deathbed conversion, no recantation, no renunciation of the freethought and socialist ideals that had sustained him through seven decades.” {The Freethinker, May 1994; FUK; TRI}

Ridley, Matt (20th Century) Ridley, a journalist on scientific subjects, wrote The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue. He states in the latter book that he is a non-believer. {CA}

Ridout, Ronald (Died 1994) Ridout, cited in the Guiness Book of Records for producing more English textbooks than anyone else, was a member of the Rationalist Press Association.

Riehl, Aloys (Born 1844) Riehl was an Austrian philosopher who taught at Gratz University, Kiel, Halle, and Berlin. He described himself as a philosophical Monist and advocated psycho-physical parallelism, rejecting the idea of a separable spiritual principle. His chief work is Der philosophische Criticismus und seine Bedeutung für die positive Wissenschaft (2 volumes, 1876–1887). His rationalism is plainer in his Giordano Bruno (1900) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1905). {RAT}

Riehemann, Robert (20th Century) Riehemann is an adjunct faculty member in the mathematics department at Thomas More College. Also, he is a systems specialist at Cincinnati Bell Information Systems, and he has taught astronomy to humanist children at Camp Quest. For Free Inquiry (Spring 1997), he wrote, “Family Friendly Libraries,” wondering why some libraries continue to forbid children to see certain harmless material. Riehemann in 1998 became a board member of Cincinnati’s Free Inquiry Group, also serving as its program director. He wrote “Science at Home” for Family Matters (Fall 1998).

Riem, Andreas (1749–1807) Riem was a German rationalist who, at first a Christian preacher, was appointed by Frederick the Great as chaplain of a hospital at Berlin. He quit, however, in order to become secretary of the Academy of Painting. Riem wrote anonymously on the Aufklaring. {BDF}

Riepe, Dale (20th Century) Riepe, professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, wrote The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought (1961). The work discusses the early Ajivikas and Carvakas views of the naturalistic elements of Jainism, Hinayana Buddhism, Samkhya, and Vaisesika. (See entry for Indian Naturalism.)

Rignano, Eugenio (20th Century) Rignano, an Italian writer, edited an international scientific review, Scientia. In his Essays in Scientific Synthesis (1918), he predicted the gradual disappearance of religion and wrote that “we may regard it with tranquil security” as it “no longer responds to our needs.” {RAT}

Riley, Isaac Woodbridge (20th Century) Riley wrote “Early Freethinking Societies in America” in the Harvard Theological Review (1918). {FUS}

Rilke, Rainer Maria (1875–1926) The acknowledged greatest lyric poet of modern Germany, Rilke had an unhappy childhood. Born to German-speaking parents in Prague, he had a father who after a failed military career turned to the railroad. His socially frustrated mother had difficulty recovering from the death of her first child, a girl who died in infancy a year before he was born. She called Rilke Sophie and dressed him like a girl. Until he was five, he had braided long hair. Fearing that his son would become feminine, his father sent him to a military school, which Rilke soon disliked. With the help of an uncle, he attended the University of Prague. Married but briefly, he preferred an unsettled, wandering life among literary people and aristocrats who gave him shelter. Greatly influenced by his extensive travels, he met sculptor Rodin, who hired him briefly as his secretary and taught him much about creativity. World War I drove Rilke back to Germany, after his having been to Italy, North Africa, France, and elsewhere. War service and chronic ill health constantly frustrated his work. Rilke’s verse was often mystical and prophetic. His use of symbolism led to poetry which resembled that of medieval verse. He was antipathetic to large modern cities, and he probed into emotional and spiritual issues, frequently being absorbed with death as a poetic theme. In Stories of God (1904), he expressed a mysticism that was continued in Das Stundenbuch (1905, tr. Poems from the Book of Hours), a work in which he treated God as an evolutionary concept. Since his death, Rilke’s reputation has grown greatly, despite his favorable views of political strongmen like Mussolini. Critics such as William H. Gass of Washington University in St. Louis have noted his “belief” in animism (that all things, as well as the parts of all things, are filled with life) and “the notion that we grow our death inside us like a talent or a tumor; that we are here to realize the world, to raise it, like Lazarus, from its sullen numbness into consciousness; that differences are never absolute, but that everything lies on a continuum as colors do (life and death, for instance); that simple people have an understanding of life and an insight into the secret rhythms of nature. These themes are like tides that rise and fall inside him, as if he were just their bay and receptive shoreline.” Commenting about Ralph Freedman’s Life of a Poet (1996) and Edward Snow’s selection and translation of Uncollected Poems: Rainer Marie Rilke (1996), Gass wrote, “Rilke proclaimed the poet’s saintly need to accept reality in all its aspects, meanwhile welcoming only those parts of the world for which he could compose an ennobling description. He was venomous about organized religion, yet there are more Virgin Marys, Saints and Angels in his work than in many cathedrals.” Gass calls Rilke a priest of the poet’s art who “takes the European lyric to new levels of achievement, forming, with Valéry and Yeats perhaps, a true triune god, and the texts of a worthy religion at last—one that we may wholeheartedly admire, in part because we are not required to believe.” Rilke, following a reluctantly diagnosed case of leukemia, died in the arms of his doctor of blood poisoning. The myth concerning his illness is that he had been gathering some roses from his garden in order to honor the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui, had pricked his hand on a thorn, and the wound not only failed to heal but both his arms became swollen. Ulcerous sores developed in his mouth and the pain in his stomach and intestines contributed to his gloomy and depressed state. {CE}

Rimbaud, Arthur (1854–1891) A French poet, Rimbaud wrote hallucinatory and dreamlike verse which anticipated the symbolists. Les illuminations, written over an undetermined time period and possibly finished before he was nineteen, consisted of prose poems which transcended all traditional syntax and narrative elements. His interests were anything but religion in this period of his life. A. L. Rowse’s Homosexuals in History cites a work Rimbaud wrote at the age of sixteen, after having been picked up by some soldiers and brutally initiated into sex:

Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe . . . Mon coeur couvert de caporal . . . Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques . . . Leurs insultes l’on dépravé. . .

From 1872 to 1873, he and Paul Verlaine lived the bohemian dansons-la-gigue life together, much to Madame Verlaine’s disgust. During a drunken brawl, Verlaine fired a pistol, wounding Rimbaud in the wrist, and the resultant scandal led to the end of their relationship, whereupon Verlaine fell in love with nineteen-year-old Lucien Letinois. (Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, 1873 to 1875.) In his confessional autobiography, Saison en enfer (Season in Hell, 1873), Rimbaud renounced his former hellish life and his work, saying he had reached God and that his illuminations had been hallucinations after all. He then set off for Cyprus and beyond, dying at the age of thirty-seven after having become a trader in Abyssinia and, according to Martin Greif, “with the name of his faithful native boy Djani on his lips.” He died with only his sister Isabelle at his side, and she returned to Ardennes “with the mortal remains of the brother whose soul she had entrusted to God.” Rimbaud, according to Rowse, had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, one arranged by Rimbaud’s mother. {CE; GL}

Rimmer, Robert (1917– ) The author of The Harrad Experiment and other novels, Rimmer has stated he believes that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is an enlightened humanist. However, this led Ronald O. Clarke, professor of religious studies at Oregon State University, to label the Bhagwan as “the product of a delusional system associated with a narcissistic personality disorder.” The Bhagwan replied that, yes, like Jesus he is a narcissist. In response, Robert Basil, editor of Not Necessarily the New Age: Critical Essays, ridicules both Rimmer and the Bhagwan. In 1995, Rimmer published Let’s Really Make Love, in which he advocated a change of views about how our “lust for life” should be an integral part of a family’s education for the 21st century. Rimmer for a time was on the editorial board of Free Inquiry, which is evidence of how varied are that journal’s viewpoints. On the Web: <http: www.harrad2000.com>. {SHD; Free Inquiry, Summer, 1989}

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai Andreyevich (1844–1908) “The Five,” a group of late 19th-century Russian composers, were Balakirev, the leader; Cui; Moussorgsky; Borodin; and Rimsky-Korsakov. Although Rimsky originally had intended to have a naval career, he turned seriously to composing after meeting Balakirev in 1861. In 1871 he became professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, retiring from the navy in 1873. In 1861 he became assistant to Balakirev, the director of the imperial Chapel, and conducted the St. Petersburg Symphony Concerts (1886–1900). His symphonic poem Sadko (1867) and his first symphony (1865) were the first works in these forms by a Russian, but it was Rimsky’s operas which brought him fame. His best-known orchestral work is Scheherezade (1888), which was used by the Diaghilev ballet. Among his pupils were Glazunov, Gretchanin, and Stravinsky. He once spent an evening at Lev Tolstoy’s estate near Moscow at a time when the novelist had given up art for religion and who vainly as well as unsuccessfully exhorted Rimsky-Korsakov to do likewise. When the composer apologized for having exasperated his host, Tolstoy reassured him, “Not at all. For me it’s been very interesting to come face to face with gloom.” Stravinsky referred to his teacher’s “bourgeois atheism,” recalling in one of his conversation books how Rimsky at a dinner table pooh-poohed the idea of “resurrection . . . drawing a zero on the tablecloth as he said, ‘There is nothing after death; death is the end.’ ” Meanwhile, Rimsky was not above churning out church choruses for performance by the Imperial Court Chapel Choir, at whose school he taught part time exactly until he qualified for a pension. Ironically, the atheist Rimsky’s “The Invisible City of Kitezh” overflows with heart-rending religious lyricism and portrays the title character Fevronia’s bodily resurrection. Critic Richard Taruskin observed that the religion in the opera, while nominally Christian, “is really a pantheistic pagan folk religion. And that enabled Rimsky to draw inspiration from musical folklore, his eternal well, and also from that other great 19th-century pagan, Richard Wagner, whose nominally Christian ‘Parsifal,’ together with the avowedly pagan ‘Ring’ cycle, served as Rimsky’s chief model in ways both overt and well hidden.” {Richard Taruskin, “ ‘Kitezh’: Religious Art of an Atheist” The New York Times, 25 February 1995}

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nicolai Andreyevich (6 Mar 1844 - 21 Jun 1908)

		“The Five,” a group of late 19th-century Russian composers, were Balakirev, the leader; Cui; Moussorgsky; Borodin; and Rimsky-Korsakov. Although Rimsky originally had intended to have a naval career, he turned seriously to composing after meeting Balakirev in 1861. In 1871 he became professor of composition at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, retiring from the navy in 1873. In 1861 he became assistant to Balakirev, the director of the imperial Chapel, and conducted the St. Petersburg Symphony Concerts (1886–1900). His symphonic poem Sadko (1867) and his first symphony (1865) were the first works in these forms by a Russian, but it was Rimsky’s operas that brought him fame. His best-known orchestral work is Scheherezade (1888), which was used by the Diaghilev ballet. Among his pupils were Glazunov, Gretchanin, and Stravinsky. He once spent an evening at Lev Tolstoy’s estate near Moscow at a time when the novelist had given up art for religion and who vainly as well as unsuccessfully exhorted Rimsky-Korsakov to do likewise. When the composer apologized for having exasperated his host, Tolstoy reassured him, “Not at all. For me it’s been very interesting to come face to face with gloom.” 

Stravinsky referred to his teacher’s “bourgeois atheism,” recalling in one of his conversation books how Rimsky at a dinner table pooh-poohed the idea of “resurrection . . . drawing a zero on the tablecloth as he said, ‘There is nothing after death; death is the end.’ ” Meanwhile, Rimsky was not above churning out church choruses for performance by the Imperial Court Chapel Choir, at whose school he taught part time exactly until he qualified for a pension. Ironically, the atheist Rimsky’s The Invisible City of Kitezh overflows with heart-rending religious lyricism and portrays the title character Fevronia’s bodily resurrection. Critic Richard Taruskin observed that the religion in the opera, while nominally Christian, “is really a pantheistic pagan folk religion. And that enabled Rimsky to draw inspiration from musical folklore, his eternal well, and also from that other great 19th-century pagan, Richard Wagner, whose nominally Christian Parsifal, together with the avowedly pagan ‘Ring’ cycle, served as Rimsky’s chief model in ways both overt and well hidden.” {Richard Taruskin, “ ‘Kitezh’: Religious Art of an Atheist” The New York Times, 25 February 1995}

Ring, Ken (20th Century) Ring is author of a humorous “Interview With God” (New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (April 1994), in which He claimed no knowledge whatsoever of the Pope or even what a pope is. As for Mary’s being a virgin, “Course not! She worked the bar in the old Stable and Manger. She did this bit where she came in on the donkey. . . .” As for his views of contemporary problems on Earth, God seemed to be somewhat disappointed. “Just look,” He lamented, “at what the competition is doing, you know; Gambling never did deliver; neither did Rampant Sex; now we’re getting people who are even turning away from Rugby!”

Rios, Etienne (20th Century) Rios is a Spanish-speaking member of Free Inquiry’s staff. At the 1996 Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City, he was moderator of the Humanism in Latin America panel. Rios was one of the founders of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

R. I. P. R.I.P. A careless abbreviation of requiescat in pace, attesting an indolent goodwill to the dead. According to the learnèd Dr. Drigge, however, the letters originally meant nothing more than reductus in pulvis. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Ripley, George (1802–1880) 

A Unitarian minister, Ripley first became well-known as the writer of essays in the Christian Examiner, in which he rejected the necessity of the biblical miracles as an underpinning for Christianity and in which he defended Emerson’s Transcendentalism against the attacks of Andrew Norton. Wanting to translate Transcendental ideals into social reality, he founded the Brook Farm Community (1841–1847) and became perhaps the leading controversialist for the Transcendentalists. He was attracted to the utopian views of Charles Fourier. But a disastrous fire at the farm in 1846 resulted in the commune’s no longer being able to continue, and Ripley moved to New York, dispirited and debt-ridden. An intellectual interested in the German views of Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as the English theologian James Martineau, Ripley was among the most learnèd of the Transcendentalists. An 1870 letter from William Henry Channing to J. H. Noyes includes the following: “It was George Ripley, and Ripley alone, who truly originated Brook Farm, and his should be the honor through all time. And a very high honor it will be, sooner or later.” {CE; FUS; U; U&U; UU}

Ripley, Robert L(eroy) (1893–1949) Ripley used mathematics to prove that even if Heaven existed, he would choose not to go there. A popular journalist whose “Believe It Or Not” column, including artwork to illustrate, was found in leading newspapers, Ripley was the subject of a biography, Ripley: The Modern Marco Polo, by Bob Considine. In 1929, Ripley’s own book, Believe It Or Not, was published. Among Ripley’s items: (a) During the Mexican War, a certain Señor Lascurain served for 37 minutes as President of Mexico before being impeached; (b) A postage stamp built the Panama Canal, a reference to a Nicaraguan stamp that featured a volcano; its depiction of one of the nation’s small volcanoes in full eruption was used to encourage Congress to choose Panama over Nicaragua; and (c) When Neils Paulsen, of Uppsala, Sweden, died in 1907 at the age of 160, he left two sons—one nine years old, the other 103. (See entry for Heaven.)

Ripley, Sarah Alden Bradford (1793-1867) The wife of Unitarian minister Samuel Ripley, Sarah Ripley was a friend of Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Hawthorne. Although sympathetic to the Transcendentalist movement, she was more of a religious skeptic, science having displaced theology as her principal authority. (See Joan W. Goodwin’s The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley [1999].)

Ris, Hania W. (1914– ) A physician, Ris wrote “Agnostics Do Not Need To Apologize For Their Lack Of Belief” in Freethought Today (June-July 1996). Whenever she told individuals she was an agnostic, she reports, they almost invariably try to change her mind, unsuccessfully.

Risk, Robert G. (20th Century) Risk, president of the Leadville Corporation, was a vice president of the A.H.A. and was chairman of its Committee on Publications. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. When Priscilla Robertson resigned over differences with the American Humanist Association (AHA) board, he resigned, also. {HM2; HNS}

Ritchie, Brian (20th Century) Ritchie, a recording artist, is a bassist with Violent Femmes. “We don’t really think it’s our job to provide a consistent viewpoint,” Ritchie said of the group’s 1994 album, “New Times.” “People are not consistent. Why should we be? We’re not interested in selling people a message. We think it’s better to just be ourselves, and if people are confused, that’s fine. We’re confused.” But not about religion. Ritchie is a devout atheist. {CA; E}

Ritchie, Brian (21 Nov 1960 - ) Ritchie is an alternative rock performer and recording artist who is a bassist in a 1980s group called Violent Femmes. “Now you turn on the radio and hear nothing but crap,” he told interviewer Hannah Guy. “Maybe ten per cent of the music is worth listening to. I consider that a bad era.” What’s wrong, he claims, is that the music industry goes down the same road as fashion and turns to retro influences. “It's not a healthy way to approach music, you know? Someone who just listens to rap is like someone who eats nothing but French fries. Someone who just listens to death metal is like someone who eats nothing but corn flakes, you know?”

	“It's best when new healthy styles of music are being developed all the time. Like if you look at the ’60s, you know, every couple months they came out with something new and different, but that was also good. Now the biggest thing is a combination of rap and metal, which are two of the worst genres available. So it's like, is this good? Is this progress? Or is this, like, a marriage made in hell?” For the Violent Femmes, who describe their music as rock and roll with jazz, country and blues thrown in, it is tantamount to the death of their genre.

“I think rock 'n' roll is kinda going away. I mean, rock 'n' roll as I define it," he continued on his soapbox. “People understand that we have quality and basically I'm not particularly worried about our survival, but the style of music we play is definitely on its way out.” He adds that some of the problems are due to technology's greater role in the music industry. But, he argues, for every ninth person who heads to the drum and sampling machines, there is one person who returns to the musical mother ship of acoustic instruments. “Music can't die off just because of technology taking over," he insists. Ritchie refuses to let the Violent Femmes accommodate popular musical trends. And he thinks that the audiences appreciate it, but one of his concerns is the language barrier between the band and fans. “Some of the language we use—maybe they don't know anymore, but I don't know,” he laughed. “Like, for example we have a song that uses the word 'cunt.' And I don't think they know what that word means anymore, do they? Do you? O.K., well, they don't respond to it the way they used to. So maybe they think that we're being vulgar. In the past they thought it was funny.” Freak Magnet, their album which he described to Hanna Gujy as being “hard-driving, aggressive, neurotic,” is deliberately meant to be different from that of any other band, their way of saying “Here's a unique way of looking at music. It's our way. Enjoy." On the first album, Ritchie did not want to include anything religious, primarily because he is an atheist, “a devout atheist.” Eventually, he gave in. {CA}

Ritchie, David George (1853–1903) Ritchie taught logic and metaphysics at St. Andrews University and was president of the Aristotelian Society (1898–1899). In his posthumously published Philosophical Studies (1905), Ritchie complained that his academic position closed his lips about religion. He did not believe in a personal God—his God was “the highest or ideal good”—or immortality. {RAT; RE}

Ritchie-Calder, Peter Ritchie [Lord] (20th Century) Lord Ritchie-Calder, formerly of the University of Edinburgh when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, has been President of the British Rationalist Association. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2; FUK; SHD}

RITES • Rite, n. A religious or semi-religious ceremony fixed by law, precept, or custom, with the essential oil of sincerity carefully squeezed out of it. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

A criticism of the rationalist and secular humanist groups is that they have no rites, no solemn ceremonies to celebrate a person’s birth, coming of age, marriage (as well as divorce), and death. To counter this, Corliss Lamont and Jane Wynne Willson are among those who have developed suitable wedding and funeral services that can be adapted for individual non-believers. Their approach is entirely unlike that of the Catholics, whose holy rites include the Eucharist, Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, Ordination, Marriage, and Extreme Unction. (See entries for Humanist Ceremonies, Corliss Lamont, and Jane Wynne Willson .)

Ritter, Charles (Born 1838) A Swiss writer, Ritter translated into French Strauss’s Essay of Religious History; George Eliot’s Fragments and Thoughts, and Zeller’s Christian Baur and the Tübingen School. {BDF}

Rivas, Aida (1919– ) Rivas is author of “Memoirs of a Godless Sinner” in Freethought Today (May 1995). She had been raised in Uruguay, was an atheist whose parents were tolerant, and came to the United States as an immigrant. Rivas is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Rivera, Diego (1886–1957) Rivera was a controversial Mexican muralist. A declared atheist, he was a Communist who mixed with rich capitalists. Patrick Marnham’s Dreaming with his Eyes Open (1998) depicts Rivera as a person who for a time and for effect wore a gun and holster. He was an overweight person who reached three hundred pounds, a Marxist who chummed in Mexico with Trotsky and André Breton, and a pal in 1914 with Picasso in Montparnasse and in the 1930s with the Rockefellers in Manhattan.

	At a time when his first wife was pregnant, Marnham wrote, Rivera was sleeping with the photographer and Soviet agent Tina Modotti. When the mother of his first child was delivering their baby, he was sleeping with her friend, never acknowledging the daughter they had together. When married to the noted artist Frida Kahlo, he allegedly slept with her younger sister Cristina as well as with Paulette Goddard, Louise Nevelson, and others. 

Rivera is said by Marnham to have exaggerated many personal stories, concluding that he was a dreamer “with his eyes open”: for example, averring that he was so sickly at birth he was discarded into a bucket of dung but miraculously somehow recovered; that he lived for two years with the Tarascan Indian wet nurse who had carried him off into a forest; that as a boy he lectured to Christians in their church about the falsity of their religion; that he once recommended eating “women’s brains in vinaigrette”; and that he was related on his mother’s side to the Emperor Maximilian’s wife, Carlotta. Rivera “concentrated on Humanist themes,” according to Corliss Lamont. His “Man at the Crossroads” mural for Rockefeller Center in New York City (1933) depicted Lenin along with working class individuals—when Rivera refused to remove the likeness of Lenin, in the resultant furor the work was destroyed. Murals of his in the Detroit Institute of Arts as well as in numerous buildings in Mexico City typify his interpretation of industrial America and the importance of revolution. Marnham noted in 1932 at the time Edsel Ford was paying Rivera for the Detroit work, over 300,000 workers were being laid off and the remaining workers were receiving pay cuts from $33 to $22 per week: “At City Hall there was talk of closing the museum and selling its collection, and there on the platform of the central railway station stood a ‘foreign artist’ being greeted by the Mexican vice consul and the German-born museum director, an artist who was due to be paid $10,000 to cover a perfectly decent wall with Communist paintings.” Rivera’s impact was wide, particularly upon artists such as Jackson Pollock. He was “emblematic,” The New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman wrote (20 December 1998), “in the debates about national or indigenous art versus art in the International style. And, Picasso aside, he was perhaps the only artist of the century whose popularity made him a global diplomat. Rivera became the cherubic public face of revolutionary, postcolonial Mexico.” (See entry for Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo.) {CE; CL}

Rivera, Geraldo (1943- ) A television personality and journalist, Rivera lists himself as Jewish in Who’s Who in America. Previously, he allegedly said on one of his television programs that he did not “believe in faith.” {Celebrity Atheists}

Rivero, Jesús (20th Century) Rivero was a participant in 1996 at the Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. He spoke on the subject, “Los Idolos y los medios masivos de comunición.”

Rivers, Fred M. (20th Century) In 1970 for his Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Maryland, Rivers wrote “Francis Ellingwood Abbott: Free Religionist and Cosmic Philosopher.” {FUS}

Riverso, Emanuele (1928– ) At the Eighth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress at Hannover (1982), Prof. Riverso addressed the group.

Rivet, Gustave (Born 1848) Rivet was a French writer and politician. He taught rhetoric at Dieppe and was deposed for writing, under the influence of Victor Hugo, poetry of an advanced character. In 1877 he turned to journalism, writing in the Homme Libre, the Voltaire, and other rationalist papers. In 1879 he became chef de cabinet in the Ministry of Fine Arts. He was elected to the Chambre in 1883 and was its Questeur from 1898 to 1903. It was Rivet who proposed the abolition of the oath in France. In the Senate in 1903, Rivet supported the legislation against the Church. {RAT}

Rivett, Albert Cherbury David [Sir] (1885–1961) Rivett was an Australian rationalist, secularist, administrator, scientist, and chemist. After obtaining a Rhodes scholarship (1907), he was appointed a Melbourne University lecturer in chemistry (1911), then a professor (1924). In 1948, he was made an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association of Australia, Ltd. {SWW}

Rivadavia, Bernardino [President] (1780-1845) An Argentine statesman and diplomat, the first president of the United Provinces of La Plata (1826-1827), Rivadavia was a liberal largely responsible for Argentina’s independence and for progressive measures that led to its centralistic government. When a unitarian constitution, adopted in 1826, was rejected, Rivadavia resigned and went into exile. Hugo Estrella, head of the Argentine humanist group, claims that Rivadavia’s life is in the tradition of secular humanism. {See entry for Argentine Freethinkers, Humanists.}

Rizal, José (1861–1896)

Born in Calamba, Rizal became a major Philippine nationalist, author, physician, and poet. He described his Laguna Province father, Francisco Mercardo Rizal as "a model of fathers" and his mother, Teodora Alonza y Quinto as "loving and prudent."

His mother taught him the alphabet when he was 3, by 5 he showed talent as an artist, and when 8 he wrote a Tagalog poem, "Sa Aking Mga Kabata," that illustrated his early love of language.

When 16, Rizal obtained his B.A. from the Ateneo Municipal de Manila, then enrolled at the University of Santo Tomas, studying philosophy and letters. Claiming his Catholic tutors were discriminating against Filipino students, he no longer pursued a degree in medicine, moving to Spain, where when 23 he received the degree of Licentiate in Medicine at from the University of Madrid. In 1885 he received his Ph. D. there.

Noli me tangere (1886, tr. The Lost Eden, 1961) was a novel castigating the Spanish officials and what he alleged were the arrogant and despotic Philippine religious orders, resulting in his being expelled when he returned in 1887. He then lived in China, Japan, the United States, England, and France, eventually establishing himself as a physician in Hong Kong.

In 1890 he annotated Antonio Morgas's Sucesos de las isles Filipinas, showing that the islands had a civilization long before the Spaniards arrived. His second novel, El Filibusterismo (1890, tr. The Subversive (1962), was published in Ghent. Upon returning to Manila in 1892, he was arrested, termed a revolutionary agitator, and banished to Dapitan on Mindanao. Going to Cuba in 1896, he was arrested, returned, and after a trumped up trial was found guilty as an instigator of insurrection and founder of secret revolutionary societies. Executed, he became a martyr who incited a rebellion against Spanish rule.

Rizal has been called "the first Filipino Humanist" by Ramon "Poch" Suzara:

• What else do you call a man who was committed to the application of reason and science and to solving human problems of the here and now?
• What else do you call a man who deplored efforts to denigrate human intelligence, who did not seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and who did not look outside nature for salvation? A man who wanted to leave this world one day a better place than he found it.
• What else do you call a man who valued scientific discoveries that have contributed to the betterment of human existence? Who was concerned with securing justice and fairness by eliminating discrimination and intolerance in society?
• What else do you call a man who attempted to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity and who worked for the spread of common human decency?
• What else do you call a man who believed that developing his creative talents to the fullest constituted the greatest happiness in life for the here and the now?
• What else do you call a man who believed in the cultivation of moral excellence, respected the rights of others, believe in human integrity, and was open to critical and rational way of thinking?
• What else do you call man who was concerned with the moral education of children? Who wanted to nourish them with the passion for reason, love, and compassion?
• What else do you call a man who rejected the theologies of despair, the ideologies of violence, and the sacraments of mediocrity?
• And finally, what do you call a man who believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in place of dogma, truth instead of sacred lies, joy rather than guilt and sin, tolerance in place of fear, love instead of hate? {CE; JM; RAT; RE; Ramon "Poch" Suzara, Manila journalist who wrote Bertrand Russell to the Rescue: Can the Wit and Wisdom of Bertrand Russell Save the Philippines?}

RNA (Ribonucleic Acid) The origin of life is closely connected with RNA, or ribonucleic acid, the polymeric constituent of all living cells and many viruses. Toward the end of the 20th Century, the origin of life remained shrouded in mystery. RNA, however, was the popular candidate mentioned by biologists searching for a single molecule that could replicate itself. Douglas Philp, at the University of Birmingham in Britain, worked with molecules simpler than RNA. According to The Economist (4 May 1996), Philp and his colleagues “found four families of dimer (and about a dozen different chemical combinations) that look promising as autocatalysts—an impressive advance considering that a few years ago none, other than the nucleic acids, were known. Whether any of them could form the basis of an alternative genetic system is a moot point. Their shortness is partly a deliberate constraint imposed by the experimenters. Nevertheless, a genetic molecule would almost certainly have to be a polymer if it were going to carry a significant amount of information.” It also would have to be more chemically variable than anything Dr. Philip’s team had come up with. Their work suggests first, stated The Economist, “that RNA may not have had such an easy time of it at the beginning, and second that living systems based on radically different biochemistries from that which emerged on earth some 4 billion years ago are conceivable. It also suggests that it might be possible to achieve a profound change in the way that chemical engineering is done. If recognition sites can be engineered into useful molecules, such as drugs, without altering their function, the external catalysts needed to make them could be scrapped. That would be radical.” (See entries for DNA, Genesis, and Purpose of Life.)

Roa Bastos, Augusto: See entry for Paraguayan Freethought.

Roalfe, Matilda (1813–1880) An English freethinking bookseller, Roalfe served two months in jail for purposely defying the English blasphemy laws by selling Paine’s The Age of Reason and Southwell’s The Oracle of Reason. Upon her release, she again deliberately sold the proscribed works but, for some reason, was not again prosecuted. Roalfe wrote Law Breaking Justified in 1844, the same year that she edited in Edinburgh The Plebian. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; RAT; TRI; WWS}

Roan, Michael (20th Century) Roan is director of the Tandem Project, a non-sectarian, nonprofit international human rights organization founded in 1985 to promote, implement, and monitor the 1981 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. In Free Inquiry (Winter 1995-1996), Roan described the involvement by secular humanists in a 1995 London conference sponsored by the Tandem Project and the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex.

Robbins, Richard (20th Century) Robbins, when he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, was in the department of sociology and anthropology at Wellesley College.

Robbins, Tom (1936– ) Robbins is an author who has written a biography, Guy Anderson (1965); and fiction such as Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), and Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994). In Skinny Legs and All, he wrote that “Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it’s the cyanide.” {CA; E}

Robert, Pierre François Joseph (1763–1826) Robert was a French conventionnel and friend of Brissot and Danton. A professor of public law, he was nominated deputy for Paris. After writing Republicanism Adapted to France (1790), Robert became secretary to Danton and voted for the death of the king. He wrote in Prudhomme’s Révolutions de Paris. {BDF}

Robert, Roberto (1817–1870) Robert was a Spanish anti-clerical satirist. His mordant style is illustrated in such of his works as The Rogues of Antonio, The Times of Mari Casania, and The Skimmer of the Centuries. {BDF}

Roberts, Brad (20th Century) Roberts, who as a singer fronts the rock group, Crash Test Dummies, holds a degree in philosophy. He is known for a song, “God Shuffled His Feet,” which is an evocation of the inscrutability of the Almighty, with its refrain, “God shuffled his feet and glanced around at them. / The people cleared their throats and stared right back at him.”

Roberts, Brad(ley) Kenneth (10 Jan 1964 - ) Roberts, the deep-voiced lead singer of a group called Crash Test Dummies, at one time planned to study and eventually teach law. Instead, he impulsively formed the band when he was young, a decision he has not regretted and which led to the “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” hit song on the group’s compact disk, God Shuffled His Feet (1993). It also led to his 1999 response when asked what was the coolest and most surreal moment on any tour: “Coolest moment—dirty dancing onstage last week with a lovely girl from Hamburg. Most surreal—playing for 40,000 insane hooligans in Finland, all of them drunk as hell, and listening to them humming along to Mmm.” During an interview, he was once asked how he felt about receiving three Grammy nominations. Tongue-in-cheek, he responded that all those pacts with Satan were finally paying off. This, unfortunately, led to the charge that Crash Test Dummies are Satanists. He, however, has called himself an “icy rationalist,” a description that has little to do with any deific higher power, divine or diabolic. (On the Web: http://www.crashtestdummies.com/dummyfaq.html) (CA}

Roberts, F. A. (20th Century) Roberts is an active supporter of New Zealand’s Rationalist and Humanist.

Roberts, George W. (20th Century) Roberts was editor of the Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume (1979). {GS}

Roberts, Isaac (1829–1908) A businessman and astronomer, Roberts took photographs with his twenty-inch reflector and won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society as being the best available at that time. In a letter to Holyoake, Roberts stated, “We seem to be now as ever the playthings of some being that permits us to blunder into the maximum discomfort of life and at the end has arranged that we must return to the state of unconscious atoms.” Roberts was an agnostic. {RAT; RE}

Roberts, John Emerson (Born 1853) After serving a number of Baptist churches, Roberts became a Unitarian in 1884. In 1887 he served the All Souls Unitarian Church in Kansas City. Finding the Unitarians were too “spiritual” for him, he withdrew two-thirds of the Unitarian congregation to form “The Church of This World.” The Grand Rapids Herald in Michigan described him (9 June 1899) as follows:

Mr. Roberts (he objects strongly to be called reverend) is a talented speaker and a man of the most advanced character, holding extremely radical views. He is filling the pulpit of a church which is unique in many of its characteristics. Its pastors receive the splendid salary of $12,000 per year, and what is more strange still, the church is not compelled to resort to any of the usual methods to raise the sum necessary for the running expenses of the church, the rent for the pews proving to be ample for all purposes. It is peculiar also in the character of its services. The pastor delivers a weekly address, or lecture; he scorns the name of sermon. The music of the service is rendered by a full orchestra of 18 pieces, and as he expresses it, “they don’t have any fooling with phantoms or with things they don’t know anything about.” Such a thing as a public prayer is unknown to its members, and the minister of this odd flock says that he can conceive of nothing more vulgar than a public prayer.

Roberts wrote The Inevitable Surrender of Orthodoxy (1895). {Freethought History #7, 1993; GS}

Roberts, Morley (Born 1857) Morley, a novelist, moved from England to Australia, working on railways and farms. Migrating to America, he again took to railroad and farming work. About fifty novels, a volume of verse, a volume of plays, and a collection of essays followed his first novel, The Western Avernus (1887). In one essay, he expressed his agnosticism and his disdain of theology: “God must be very young, and that is his only excuse. . . . When I say God I mean the common conception of Him. It certainly is not mine, if I have any.” {RAT}

Roberts, Paul William (20th Century) Roberts is the Canadian author of In Search of the Birth of Jesus, the Real Journey of the Magi (1995). Intrigued by references to the Magi in the Bible, he set out on his own travels. The book discusses his view that the Dead Sea Scrolls do not confirm the Vatican’s version of Christianity but, actually, reveal a “bitter conflict between rival factions and the warning of a coming schism that would rend the religion in two.” Critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt relates more of Roberts’s findings: “Jesus was born the prophet of a religion involving the individual’s inner knowledge, not faith in an earthly institution. This religion was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, the system founded in Persia by Zoroaster teaching the worship of Ormaz in the context of a universal struggle between the forces of light and darkness. As Mr. Roberts says he learned, the wise men from the East were Zoroastrian Magi. . . . The purpose of their journey . . . was essentially to avert a situation in which ‘good works or spiritual improvement’ would become irrelevant and in which faith alone would get you to Heaven.” In short, without Zoroaster there would be no Christ. He was the bridge, and the Romans burned it. {“Books of the Times,” The New York Times, 14 December 1995}

Roberts, R. (Born 1843) After studying for the ministry at the Bala Welsh Calvinistic Methodist College, Roberts was expelled for heresy and became a Congregationalist minister. Serving for some years at Guisbrough and Leeds, he then joined the Unitarians, serving as minister at Hunslet and Bradford. Then he abandoned every shade of Christianity and established an Ethical Society at Bradford. An agnostic, Roberts contributed to the Literary Guide. {RAT}

Roberts, Robert Rewalt (20th Century) In 1957 for his M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago, Roberts wrote “The Freethought Movement of Chicago.” {FUS}

Robertson, A. D. (19th Century) Robertson is New York edited the Free Enquirer in 1835. {BDF}

Robertson, Alexander (19th Century) In 1865, Robertson wrote Theistic and Atheistic Philosophy. {GS}

Robertson, Archibald (Robert Arch) (20th Century) Robertson, a humanist, wrote Anglican Shipwreck (1945), Jesus: Myth or History (1946); and Man His Own Master, An Essay in Humanism (1948). {FUK; TRI}

Robertson, D. P. (20th Century) Robertson wrote Should Churches Be Taxed? (1968). {FUS}

Robertson, George Croom (1842–1892) Robertson, the son of an Aberdeen tradesman, was appointed assistant to Professor Geddes and in 1866 professor of mental philosophy and logic at London University College. In 1876 Bain, a friend and admirer, got him appointed editor of Mind (a title suggested by Robertson for the new philosophical review). Robertson was a member of the Metaphysical Society and took an interest in women suffrage, the education of women, and other reforms. He wrote on Hobbes (1886) and, although never writing about religion, agreed with his friends Sir L. Stephen and Bain. {RAT}

Robertson, James (20th Century) At the Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in London (1978), Robertson from the United Kingdom addressed the group.

Robertson, John B. (20th Century) Robertson edited Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon (1905). {EW}

Robertson, John M(acKinnon) (1856–1933) Robertson, who was born on the Isle of Arran, has been called “the most successful of all the [freethought] leaders at making his way in the world.” At first a railroad telegraph clerk, then a clerk in an insurance office, he became active in the 1880s in the Edinburgh Secular Society. In 1884, he moved to London to work on the National Reformer, of which he became editor on Bradlaugh’s death. Robertson is credited with having led Annie Besant to socialism, although he himself became a “New Liberal.” In 1906 he was elected Liberal M.P. for Tynemouth, having previously failed to win Northampton. In 1911 he was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary to the Board of Trade, a position he held until the fall of Asquith’s government in 1915. Losing his seat as an Asquithian Liberal in 1918, he devoted himself to freethought literature until his death. The breadth of his writings on both freethought and political topics was enormous, and he became one of the most important of latter-day Liberals and Secularists. Robertson believed that Jesus never existed, and he wrote a five-volume series on the subject. The Gospels, he reasoned, were actually derived from morality plays. Although few historians and scholars now agree, his concepts stirred much discussion. He used “freethought” almost as a synonym for progress in the liberalization of the philosophy of religion, states Gordon Stein. His editorship of Reformer was from 1893 to 1904, prior to which he had been an editor of The National Reformer, upon which Charles Bradlaugh and Joseph Barker had also been editors. During his time with Bradlaugh, Robertson professed atheism but later, according to McCabe, preferred to be called an agnostic. Following Moncure Conway’s departure from the South Place Ethical Society in 1899, he along with Herbert Burrows and J. A. Hobson served as a panel of lecturers there. In 1895, Robertson wrote Modern Humanists. He then wrote Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (1915), which is a major and authoritative book on the subject. His two-volume History of Freethought and his History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century (1929) are major reference works. Robertson’s wide interests included Walt Whitman, about whom he published a study in the “Round Table Series,” Mithraism, socialism, Toryism, and barbarism. He also wrote a pamphlet, “Thomas Paine: An Investigation,” a scathing exposure in 1900 of Christian calumnies regarding Paine’s alleged deathbed recantation. For some months before his death, Robertson’s health had been failing. He attended a meeting of the Bradlaugh Centenary Committee in December. On Thursday January 5, 1933, he was at work on two books which he was writing, and in the evening was listening to a wireless talk on “Saving,” a subject in which he had long been keenly interested. Shortly afterward he had a “stroke” and died. His remains were cremated on January 7, and in accordance with his own often-expressed wish there was no ceremony of any kind at the funeral. (See the entry for D. H. Lawrence.) {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FO; FUK; JM; RAT; RE}

Robertson, Marion Gordon (20th Century) The Rev. “Pat” Robertson founded and leads a powerful grass-roots movement, the Christian Coalition. In his The New World Order (1995), he writes that “What Christians have got to do is take back this country, one precinct at a time, one neighborhood at a time, and one state at a time.” Robertson is anti-evolution, anti-abortion, anti-gay rights, and anti-liberal religion. Because war profits the “monopoly bankers,” he implies that the Rothchilds and their agents (including “the Rothschild publication, The Economist) have incited World War I, the cold war, and the Gulf War in order that military spending by various governments would increase the need for compound-interest loans, the “eighth wonder of the world.” Robertson does not argue that international Jewish high finance was behind Hitler’s war against the Jews, and he treats the Holocaust as Satan’s work, a sign of the coming holocaust of American Christians at the hands of diabolical liberals.

Robertson, Priscilla Smith (1910–1989) A scientific humanist, historian, civil libertarian, and author, Priscilla Robertson was editor of The Humanist in the 1950s, that magazine’s “Golden Age” according to the present author and numbers of intellectuals who wrote about, subscribed to, and contributed to the quarterly and its causes. When she and Corliss Lamont had a tiff over her rights as an editor to, or not to, publish one of his articles, the board of directors of the American Humanist Association dismissed her. As described by philosopher Harold A. Larrabee at the time (2 March 1959), “In a ruthless and even brutal exercise of majority power by the AHA Board of Directors . . . Priscilla Robertson was dismissed as Editor and Gerald Wendt was appointed to replace her on a caretaker basis.” Prof. Larrabee added, “It became quite apparent that a narrow majority of the Directors were strongly opposed to the way in which the magazine has attempted to challenge its readers with new ideas for the Humanism of the future, and prefer to flog the dead horses of past controversial issues in a sectarian spirit.” As a consequence, the magazine’s staff (including Vassar’s English Department Chairman Helen Lockwood, Ethical Culture leader Jerome Nathanson, book review editor Warren Allen Smith) resigned en masse to show their support for her. She never again was active as a humanist, despite encouragement from a group of intellectuals in Taminent, Sidney Hook, numbers of writers who vowed never again to submit articles to the magazine, and others. She did, however, chair the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union during a particularly active time for civil-rights cases. Robertson was the only child of historian Preservèd Smith, the Cornell historian of note who amused scholars by writing a work about theophagy (the eating of God, or communion). A heretic like her father, she wrote Revolutions of 1848 (1952) which was described by Crane Brinton in The New York Times as “in the best tradition of what, in a word perhaps significantly beginning to be overworked, we must call humanism.” An Experience of Women (1982), about the “new woman” on the eve of the twentieth century, she stressed the cross-cultural relationships of female life in nineteenth-century Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Lewis Farm, which describes growing up on her father’s Massachusetts farm won an award in 1968 from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Humanist carried no obituary following its former editor’s stroke in 1989, although the then editor Lloyd Morain knew of her death. Meanwhile, Free Inquiry described her extensive contributions to the humanist movement, and eminent humanists went on record as to her massive efforts upon behalf of humanism. {HNS; HNS2}

Roberty de la Cerda, Eugène de (Born 1843) Roberty was a French positivist writer of Russian birth. He wrote works on sociology, and he completed an essay, “The Old and the New Philosophy” (1887) as well as The Unknowable (1889). {BDF; RAT}

Robeson, Paul (1898–1976) Robeson, the American actor, bass, and controversial humanitarian, was an All-American football player at Rutgers (1919; he was a valedictorian in what then was a Jim Crow-era white college), after which he went to Columbia University law school (1923) and began an acting career with the Provincetown Players in 1924. In 1925 he made his debut as a concert singer. With a resonant voice and the ability to project a humane spirit, he won acclaim by creating the title role in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones (1925; film, 1933). Known popularly for his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in Jerome Kern’s Show Boat (1928; film, 1936) and for his interpretations of Negro spirituals, Robeson was assumed to have continued the Protestantism of his youth. However, after his association with Communist causes and his winning of the International Stalin Peace Prize (1952), he was suspected of being a non-theist and became a pariah in his native country. To avoid trouble after being blacklisted by Hollywood because of his political leanings, he moved to England in 1958 and continued appearing in concerts in Europe and the Soviet Union. George Orwell, alleging that Robeson was “very anti-white” and a Henry Wallace supporter, questioned whether or not Robeson actually was a member of the Communist Party. A polyglot (ten languages, from Chinese to Swahili), he spoke out against man’s inhumanity to man and utilized naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic terms in arguing his outlook. His outspokenness, however, left him not only defiant but also frustrated and disillusioned. Like the Emperor in O’Neill’s play, he became a take-no-shit Negro who was lucky enough to obtain the empty title of King of Jamaica but also who, as critic Gary Dauphin has noted, “hit a ceiling” and “settled uncomfortably in a throne that did not quite fit, his crown slightly askew and his eyes gone a little desperate from the need for constant vigilance.” In 1961 when found in a Moscow hotel bathroom after having slashed his wrists, he was said to have made a “suicide attempt,” a charge Paul Robeson Jr. has always denied. Called by some “the Black Colossus,” Robeson has received more favorable attention now that the Soviet Union has fallen. At a private party, searching for someone to sing like her husband some years after his death, Mrs. Robeson chose Gilbert Price, Langston Hughes’s protégé. Price, a Catholic and winner of four Tony Award nominations, idolized Robeson as well as knew of his non-theism. In 1998, Robeson was granted a lifetime achievement award as part of the Grammy Awards ceremony, being honored along with musicians Roy Orbison, Bo Diddley, and the Mills Brothers. A homepage is on the Web: <www.motownmagic.com/robeson.html>. (See entry for George Orwell.) {CE; Gary Dauphin, The Village Voice, 20 January 1998; Gilbert Price to WAS, numerous conversations, 1980s}

Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore de (1758–1794) Robespierre was one of the leading figures of the French Revolution. A lawyer, he became attached to the democratic and deistic theories of J. J. Rousseau. Elected to the States-General (1789) and the National Convention (1792), he became leader of the Jacobins in their struggle with the Girondists. In 1793 he was elected to the Committee of Public Safety, which he dominated throughout the Reign of Terror. Called “the incorruptible,” he overthrew both the extreme left and the moderates in the Convention and instituted a new civic religion. In 1793 when rightists joined the Plain in a rising in the Convention, Robespierre was arrested, tried, and guillotined. McCabe writes of Robespierre’s role as President of the Convention: “As such he was mainly responsible for the second and most bloody part of the Terror. Against the stupid but common idea that at the French revolution atheism led to horrible outrages, it is important to point out that Robespierre, who was responsible for the worst excesses, was a dogmatic believer in God and simultaneously imposed the worship of God—at its inauguration he publicly burned an ugly effigy of atheism—and the regime which led to thousands of executions (mostly atheists) without proper trial.” In short, McCabe insists that Robespierre was a “fanatical believer in God—practically a Unitarian—who hated Atheism and persuaded the French Government, at the height of the Terror, to recognize the existence of the Supreme Being and declare it the established religion.” Meanwhile, many claim Robespierre was a deist who liked the theories of Rousseau. McCabe observes that following the revolution, “as soon as Robespierre was killed and his religion abolished,” the subsequent period of atheism, the Directorate, found Paris orderly and well behaved. {JM; RAT; RE}

Robin, Charles Philippe (Born 1821) 

Robin was a French physician, a senator, and a member of the Institute and of the Academy of Medicine. In company with Littré he refounded Nysten’s Dictionary of Medicine. In 1872 his name was struck out of the list of jurors on the ground of his unbelief in God, and despite many protests it remained until 1876, the year he was elected Senator. One of the Republic left, he received the Legion of Honor. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Robin, Édouard Charles Albert (Born 1847) Robin was a French chemist and physician. He was a professor of therapeutic clinics at the Paris University and scientific editor of the Bulletin Général de Thérapeutique and the New York Herald. In a symposium on spiritualism, Robin declared, “Communicate with the spirits of the dead! To do that it is necessary that they exist, and we have no reason whatever to suppose that our life is prolonged under another form beyond the grave. Let us put aside these dreams.” {RAT}

Robinet, Jean Baptiste René (Born 1825) Robinet was a French physician who became Comte’s doctor and one of his executors. During the war of 1870 Robinet was made Mayor of the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris. He wrote Notice of the Work and Life of A. Comte (1860), a memoir of the private life of Danton (1865), and contributed an account of the Positive Philosophy of A. Comte and P. Lafitte to the “Biblioteque Utile” (1881). Robinet opened a shop for the sale of deistic literature. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Robinson, Alson (20th Century) Robinson, a liberal minister, was asked to sign Humanist Manifesto I and did so, but too late to be included in the original publishing. {EW}

Robinson, Charles E. (20th Century) Robinson wrote “The ‘Dear Bill’ Letter” (1951). {GS}

Robinson, Chris (20th Century) Robinson is the lead singer and lyricist for the Black Crowes. From a profile by Kim Neely in Rolling Stone (24 January 1991):

Chris . . . contends that the Crowes’ interest in voodoo paraphernalia springs from nothing more than a love of the exotic. . . . Some, however, didn’t find it so comical. The piece spawned a panicky rash of LP-and-concert-ticket bonfires organized by alarmed Christian parents in Texas and Virginia. Naturally, Robinson is eager to share his views on that sector of society. “Jesus Christ loved everyone,” he says bluntly. “Jesus Christ probably loved Satan. I mean, I don’t believe that God and Satan are real, but if you’re a Christian, then you love everyone. And if you’re a Christian and you think I’m fucked up, then fuck you! {CA}

Robinson, Chris (20 December 1966 - 	)

Robinson is a songwriter and a rock-and-roll singer in the group called Black Crowes, which includes his guitarist brother Rich. Their Shake Your Money Maker album sold over three million copies. “Hard to Handle” and “She Talks to Angels” (1991) reached the Top 40 list. A profile by Kim Neely in Rolling Stone (24 Jan 1991) described the Crowes’s interest in voodoo paraphernalia as being nothing more than a love of the exotic. But what Robinson found funny did not amuse some alarmed Christian parents in Texas and Virginia, who organized LP-and-concert-ticket bonfires. His reaction was to respond, “Jesus Christ loved everyone. Jesus Christ probably loved Satan. I mean, I don’t believe that God and Satan are real, but if you’re a Christian then you love everyone. And if you’re a Christian and you think I’m fucked up then fuck you!” {CA}

Robinson, David (1947– ) Robinson wrote The Unitarians and the Universalists (1985). In 1982, he was author of The Apostle of Culture: Emerson As Preacher and Lecturer.

Robinson, Frank Bruce (20th Century) Robinson wrote Crucified Gods Galore (1933) and Your God-Power (1943. {GS}

Robinson, H. D. (H. M. Duhesquet) (19th Century) With S. J. W. Taber from 1832 to 1833, Robinson edited a New York freethought publication called Comet.

Robinson, Harriet Hanson (1825–1911) Robinson, the first woman to testify before the United States Committee on Woman Suffrage, as a girl had been excommunicated by a Congregational Church. A teenager, she had joined after asking permission from her mother, a Universalist. “If you think it will make you any happier, do so,” her mother had told her, “but I do not believe you will be satisfied.” That prediction came true because the new church said that her mother was an unbeliever, that her mother would not go to Heaven. Forced to choose, the daughter wrote later, “I mustered up courage to say, with shaking voice, ‘I do not believe; I cannot go to your church, even if you do excommunicate me.’ ” She was to become active in fighting for women’s rights, and with money she earned she helped send her brother John to study to become a Universalist minister. Harriet married William Hanson, a Unitarian and a journalist, and the two bought a plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. The plot, she wrote in her diary, was next to the famous Hawthornes except for one. The one she did not name, because she felt the famous writer did not live up to his abilities, was that of Thoreau. {EG}

Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775–1867) Robinson was a writer who met Goethe and Schiller at Weimar and who in London was a friend of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Lamb. His posthumous papers (1869, 3 volumes) show him to have been a rationalist. {RAT; RE}

Robinson, James (20th Century) Director of the Institute for Christianity and Antiquity at Claremont College, Robinson is on Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion.

Robinson, James Hervey (20th Century) Robinson wrote The Mind in the Making (1921), The Humanizing of Knowledge (1924, 1926), and The Human Comedy: As Devised and Directed by Mankind Itself (1937). {EW; GS}

Robinson, Richard (1902–1996) Robinson, who taught philosophy at Cornell University for nearly twenty years and taught another twenty at Oriel College, wrote The Province of Logic (1931) and Definition (1950). His moral critique of religion, An Atheist’s Values (1964), was written in a popular style and does not contain technical language or abstract speculation. {New Humanist, June 1996}

Robinson, Svend [Member of Parliament] (20th Century) Robinson, a member of the Canadian Parliament, has publicly announced that he is gay and that he is a non-theist.

Robinson, Thomas C. (20th Century) Robinson is a freethinker who was refused a position at a Dade County high school because of his atheism. Although he sued the University of Miami, he lost in the 1950s. {Freethought Today, September 1997}

Robinson, Wade (20th Century) Robinson, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, is President of the Hume Society.

Robinson, William J. (20th Century) Robinson wrote IfI Were God—A Freethinker’s Faith (1930). {GS}

Robson, Robbi (20th Century) Robson represented the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) in 1995 at the UN’s Fourth World Conference held in Beijing, China. Although somewhat disappointed at the objections advanced by members from some of the “religiously oriented” states, she found that the conference did help the cause of attacking women’s inequality. Robson cited these achievements:

affirmation that women’s rights are human rights; recognition that “culture” is not a reason to deny women their fundamental rights; agreement of the importance of eliminating discrimination against the girl child; commitments to review punitive measures against women who undergo an abortion; recognition of the need for action against the feminization of poverty; declaration against violence against women; rape acknowledged as a war crime; agreement to recognize the economic contributions of women’s unpaid work; agreement of the need to address women’s unequal share of education and power; recognition of women’s contribution toward sustainable development; holding the United Nations accountable for women’s equality within its own structures.

In 1996, Robson spoke about a proposed new agenda for feminism at the Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City. She is chairman of the British Humanist Association and treasurer of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). {International Humanist News, October 1995}

Roca, Deodoro (1890-1942) In Argentina Roca was author of the University Reform Manifesto (1918). A polemicist, writer, libertarian, and iconoclast, he was admired by Waldo Frank, José Ortega y Gasset, Stefan Zweig, and Rafael Alberti. His courageous writings and activities made him unpopular among the upper class in which he was born, but youth admired him, calling him a beloved teacher. The Argentine Humanist Society is named after Roca.

Rocca Jr., Bernard T. (20th Century) Rocca, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a consultant to International Trade and Commodities. He wrote Fitting in the Pieces (1964) and Faith, Fact, and Reason (1973). {FUS; HM2} Rocca Sr., Bernard T. (Born 1892) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Rocca was president of the United Secularists of America. He is author of Fitting In the Pieces (1961), a collection of essays on humanism, evolution and religion, miracles, dogma, and immortality. {HM2}

Roche, Marcel (1920) Roche, a permanent delegate to UNESCO from Venezuela, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. A bacteriologist, he wrote La investigacion cientifica en Venezuela (1967). Roche is editor of Interciencia.

Rochelle, Paula (20th Century) Rochelle is on the Executive Committee of the American Humanist Association’s Board of Directors. A resident of Saratoga, California, she attended the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <prochelle1@aol.com>.

Rockefeller, Steven C. (1936– ) Rockefeller is author of John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (1991). A humanist and Buddhist, Rockefeller details Dewey’s move from a Congregationalist rearing to his interest in a neo-Hegelian realism to his eventual naturalistic humanism.

Rocker, Rudolf (1873–1958) A German anarchist and historian, Rocker in his Nationalism and Culture wrote, “The sense of dependence on a higher power, that source of all brighter future, will yield place to an enlightenment which makes man himself the master of his fate. . . . Only when man shall have overcome the belief in his dependence on a higher power will the chains fall away that up to now have bowed the people beneath the yoke of spiritual and social slavery.”

Rockler, Michael (20th Century) Rockler, a professor of education at National-Louis University, became Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bertrand Russell Society in 1995. In addition, he edited the group’s newsletter, The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly. Rockler is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. In Toronto at the 1994 conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought, Rockler spoke on “John Dewey vs. Bertrand Russell on Religious Belief.” He is author of Innovative Teaching Strategies (1988).

Rockoff, Mark (20th Century) Rockoff is secretary of Atheists United, which publishes a monthly newsletter in Sherman Oaks, California.

Rockwell, W. Teed (20th Century) Rockwell sometimes writes for Truth Seeker. To Nietzsche’s and Ayn Rand’s denial of the value of altruism and pity he suggests there is a closely related third virtue: compassion. It is compassion, he states, which is a necessary part of what it means to be a good person.

Rod, Louis Édouard (1857–1910) Rod was a Swiss novelist who edited La Revue Contemporaine in 1884. From 1886 to 1893 he was a professor at Geneva University. In France he wore the Cross of the Legion of Honour and the decoration of the Crown of Italy. Until about 1889, when he wrote a pamphlet in defense Zola’s Assommoir, he belonged to the naturalist and more boldly rationalistic school. He then fell under the influence of Tolstoy, joining what he called the intuitionist school. In one work, entitled “Religion,” he closes with a drastic piece of prose poetry which he called an “Atheistic Hymn to the Lord.” Although Lanson called him a neo-Christian, the Catholic Delfour quoted Rod as saying, “In reality I have the soul of a believer who has fallen into scepticism.” {RAT}

Roddenberry, Eugene Wesley (Gene) (1921–1991) One of the best-known science fiction writers, Roddenberry wrote Star Trek (1980) and, with Susan Sackett, Star Trek: The First 25 Years (1991), in both of which he shows that humans through critical thinking and cooperative effort will progress. A March-April 1991 interview in The Humanist, on which he was a member of the editorial board, details his humanistic philosophy. On the subject of religion, he has written,

My family was from the South. My mother was very religious. Every Sunday we went to church—Baptist church. . . . I guess I was around fourteen and emerging as a personality. . . . I listened to the sermon, and I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy. It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, “This is a bunch of cannibals. . . .” I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense—largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn’t see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious.

My brother and sister are nonreligious. In fact, the whole family is. You don’t see religious stuff in my family when you are around them. This, in a family that fifteen years before had Tuesday prayer meetings in the house. Mom began that in her early twenties and just drifted out of it in later years.

His Who’s Who entry:

To be different is not necessarily to be ugly; to have a different idea is not necessarily to be wrong. The worst possible thing that can happen to humanity is for all of us to begin to look and talk and act and think alike. The best measure of maturity and wisdom in a human is the recognition of value received on hearing another say: “I disagree with you, for the following reasons. . . .”

In 1997, 0.2 ounces of his cremains, along with the ashes of Timothy Leary and twenty-two others whose families paid $4,800., were placed on a Pegasus rocket, launched from a Lockheed L1011 jet, and shot three hundred miles into orbit. It was the first such burial in space. The “ashtronauts” were expected to orbit the Earth between eighteen months to ten years before gravity would yank them back into the atmosphere and vaporize them. (See entry for Arthur Chappell.) {HNS2; The New York Times, 22 April 1997; TYD}

Roddenberry, Majel (Leigh Hudec) (20th Century)

Mrs. Eugene Roddenberry, known as the “First Lady of Star Trek,” starred as Nurse Christine Chapel in the original “Star Trek” series and two of the films. In 1995, she accepted the Humanist Arts Award of the American Humanist Association upon behalf of her late husband. “Gene,” she said, “was a man who loved humanity unconditionally, fearlessly—from rabbis to agnostics, from university professors to the functionally illiterate . . . and, if he had had a chance, from earth person to alien. Humanity—and beyond humanity, people.” She is author of Human Adjustment to Kainji Servoir in Nigeria (1994).

Roder, Wolf (20th Century) Roder teaches at the McMicke College of Arts and Sciences in Cincinnati, Ohio. For the spring, 1993, Free Inquiry, he challenged an earlier article by Jan Narveson about the growing human population problem. Roder, an active member of the Cincinnati Free Inquiry Group, reviews books succinctly for various freethought journals.

Rodes, Jean and Richard Rodes (20th Century) Jean and Richard Rodes head a Unitarian group, Friends of Russia and the Ukraine (5250 Patriot Lane, Columbia, Maryland 21045).

Rodger, George (20th Century) In Scotland, George Rodger is secretary of the Humanist Society of Scotland, which publishes the Scottish Humanist. He has headed the training of funeral officiants, a group that uses Funerals Without God in their training.

Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917) Rodin “created some of the most stirring of modern statuary, giving impassioned, if somewhat theatrical, expression to the radiant actualities of life on earth,” Corliss Lamont has written of the well-known sculptor. A huge bronze door for the Musée des Arts décoratifs was never finished, but he said it was inspired by Dante’s Inferno and was to have been called “Gate of Hell.” “The Thinker” (1879–1900), “The Kiss” (1886), and “The Bather” are among his better-known works. He also completed “The Hand of God” (1897–1898), which is in the Parisian Rodin Museum. Rodin’s biographer, Mauclair, said that, as his work suggests, Rodin was “independent of all religious doctrine” and that his favorite authors were Rousseau and Baudelaire. {CE; CL; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}

Rodriguez Cobo, Mario: See entry for Humanist Movement.

Rodriguez, Hernan (20th Century) Rodriguez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came in 1976 to the United States, where he works as a translator, and is a member of Minnesota Atheists. In their newsletter (July-August 1995), Rodriguez discusses his surprise in high school upon learning that Columbus, whom he previously had thought was sent to enslave the Indians, had not been allowed to enslave them. That, in fact, when Bobadilla, the special envoy of the Crown inspected Columbus’s governorship in Santo Domingo, he had sent Columbus back to Spain in chains from his third voyage for having done so. Rodriguez cites a work by a Spanish priest, History of the Indies by Bartolom de las Casas, which argues that, wanting to save the Indians from slavery by the Spaniards, he had recommended the introduction of black African slaves in order to spare the indigenous people from the hard labor. Because Queen Isabella did not want her own subjects to be enslaved, and these included the Indians, it was considered permissible to use blacks inasmuch as they came from other dominions. Rodriguez then cites James Michener’s postulates in Iberia, which complement de las Casas: 1. Catholicism captured Spain and adopted a policy of keeping the country in darkness. 2. Using Spain as a base, Catholicism intended to enslave the world. 3. In order to police its conquests, Spanish Catholicism invented the Inquisition, which it proposed to install in subdued territories. 4. The archpriest of these designs was King Felipe II. He was personally evil and committed many crimes in furtherance of his aims.

De las Casas, at the end of his life, recognized his mistake and condemned the importation of African slaves, Rodriguez notes. The British abolished slavery in 1833, and Spain and Portugal ended it in 1840. Today, Rodriguez states, Latin-America has formed societies based more on the interrelation of human beings as the fundamental organization of life rather than on the production and distribution of goods.

Rodriguez, Sue (20th Century) Rodriguez in 1993 was given the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award. The citation included the following: “Sue Rodriguez, with the support of the Right to Die Society of Canada, is currently engaged in a court battle to win the right to a doctor-assisted suicide when she determines that her deteriorating condition, as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, no longer makes her life worth living. Whatever the outcome of this legal action, Sue Rodriguez is to be thanked for her public example of bringing a new degree of honesty to the dying process on behalf of all Canadians.”

Roelker, Edith (20th Century) Roelker wrote A Season in Utopia, the Story of Brook Farm (1961). {GS}

Roell, Hermann Alexander (1653–1718) Roell was a German theologian, author of a deistic dissertation on natural religion that was published at Frankfort in 1700. {BDF}

Roes, David (20th Century) Roes is New Zealand editor of the New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist.

Roesch, Michael (20th Century) Roesch is active with the Siskiyou Secular Humanists. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Rogeard, Louis Auguste (1820–1896) A French publicist, Rogeard became a teacher but was dismissed for refusing to attend mass. In 1849 upon moving from Chartres to Paris, he took part in the revolutionary movement. Under the Empire, he was sentenced to five years for writing Les Propos de Labienus (1865). Rogeard fled to Belgium, where he wrote a criticism on the Bible in the Rive Gauche. In 1871 he assisted Pyat on Le Vengeur and was elected to the Commune but declined to sit. An incisive writer, he signed himself “Atheist.” {BDF; RAT}

Rogers, Carl Ransom (1902–1987) Rogers is one of the founders of humanistic psychology, a movement fundamentalists dislike because of its emphasis on autonomy, not on self-surrender and obedience as is the Judeo-Christian emphasis. He wrote Becoming Partners: Marriage and Its Alternatives (1977). In 1964, the American Humanist Association named Rogers Humanist of the Year. {HNS2; TRI}

Rogers, Gerald F. (20th Century) Rogers, a poet, writer, and philosopher, is author of “Confucius, The First ‘Teacher’ of Humanism?” (Free Inquiry, Spring, 1993). He holds that many people are misled by the later works of Confucian revisionists who have infused mysticism and abstract speculations into Confucian thought, contrary to its original naturalism.

Rogers, Gordon (20th Century) 

If there is no god, does life have a purpose? Asking the question, Rogers concludes that if there is any purpose in the universe, it is what we humans (and any other conscious life forms, if any) put there (New Humanist, October, 1990). Dr. Rogers has held the Chair in Engineering Thermodynamics at the University of Bristol and also been a Pro-Vice Chancellor.

Rogers, James Edwin Thorold (1823–1890) Until 1859, Rogers was an enthusiastic High Church priest. Later he became professor of statistics and economics at King’s College and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, as well as a member of Parliament. Rogers, a rationalist, wrote The History of Agriculture and Prices (1866–1887, 8 volumes). {RAT; RE}

Rogers, Joel Augustus (1883–1966) Rogers was an African American historian, a scholar, a thinker, a motivator. According to McBryde, his research “did much to combat the feelings of white superiority.” His revolt against Christianity “was based largely on his observation that racism and Christianity go hand in hand. A case in point is the segregation of black and white churches. He found the Mormon religion to be especially racist. There are Mormons who still harbor the notion that blacks cannot go to heaven because of their race.” The miracles of the Bible, his father also believed, were “rubbish.” In Nature Knows No Color Line, he gave evidence “of the origin of color prejudice which began when Nordic or fair-skinned whites imposed their standards of beauty on the darker Spaniards, Portuguese, Greeks, and Italians. The color white had become equated with purity, cleanliness, and Godliness. Conversely, blacks were forced to believe that everything associated with the color black was trivial or inferior.” Although Rogers allegedly was an atheist, he was well-versed in many of the world’s religions. {AAH, Mike McBryde}

Rogers, John (1500–1555?) An English Protestant, Rogers started out as a Roman Catholic priest. But William Tyndale converted him to Protestantism, after which Rogers worked on an English translation of the Bible, using the name of Thomas Matthew and eventually being burned as a heretic. Catherine D. Bowen tells the story that when Oliver Wendell Holmes’s brother John was dying, those present asked the nurse if Holmes was still alive. She reached under the sheets, felt some warm feet, and whispered, ’Nobody ever died with their feet warm.” John Holmes looked up suddenly and, in the last words he was ever to speak, said, “John Rogers did.” {CE}

Rogers, Neil (20th Century) Rogers, a radio talk show host in the Miami, Florida, area, has broadcast that he is a non-theist despite his Jewish heritage. {E}

Rogers, W. S. (20th Century) Rogers wrote “The Search for Truth Outlined in Letters from a Rationalist” (c. 1923). {GS}

Rogers, Walter Lacy (19th Century) Rogers wrote “A Review of a Paper Called ‘The Fallacies of Unbelief’ ” (1875). {GS}

Rojas, Fernando de (1465?–1541?) La Celestina (1499) by Rojas has been termed the greatest work of world literature between Dante’s Divine Comedy and the rise of Tudor drama. Devlin calls it a profound study of unbelief, saying Rojas saved himself from the Spanish Inquisition by his mendacious, medieval moralizing. {CE; EU, John Devlin}

Rokitansky, Karl (1804–1878) Rokitansky was a German physician and scientist who had been born in Bohemia. He founded the Viennese school in medicine. His principal work is A Manual of Practical Anatomy (1842–1846). {BDF; RAT}

Roland de la Platière, Jeanne Manon Philipon (1754–1793) A French patriot, the daughter of a drunken engraver, Mme. Roland (Marie Jeanne Philipon, also spelled Phlipon) was fond even at the age of nine of reading Plutarch’s Lives. When twelve and taken to visit the palace at Versailles, she surprised her parents by disliking the place because the royalist splendor “made me feel injustice and look upon absurdity.” For the remainder of her life, she continued her distaste for fashionable society. While at a convent she noted the names of skeptics and, after reading their works, she became in turn a Jansenist, a stoic, a skeptic, an atheist, and a deist. Philip and Grace Wharton, in their Queens of Society, while confessing that “from Cartesian, Madame Roland became Stoic, from Stoic Deist, and from that she never returned,” are candid enough to add that “her life was morally faultless.” Another Christian writer says of her, “the only God she invoked was the future. After her marriage in 1779 with Jean Marie Roland de la Platiêre (1734–1793), she became interested in the Revolution “of another France, a new American Republic, a republic void of aristocratic distinctions, where merit and not rank should demand and receive homage.” She sensed the danger of such a stand, once writing that “we must be ready for everything, even to die without regret! . . . The insolence of the rich and the misery of the people excite my hatred against injustice and oppression, and I no longer ask for anything but the triumph of truth and the success of the Revolution. I am glad there is danger. I see nothing else capable of goading you on. It is impossible to rise to freedom from the midst of corruption without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease.” However, her husband, however, was appointed minister of the interior and they became part of the establishment. King Louis XVI dismissed him in 1792, but he was restored to office after the overthrow of the monarchy. When he became filled with horror at the shocking massacres of September, Roland wrote an address of remonstrance to the Assembly, one that offended the Robespierrean party that had come into power. Danton, Robespierre, and Marat at this time became bitter enemies of the Rolands. Accused of royalism in 1793, Jean resigned and fled Paris. When friends begged Mme. Roland to escape, she replied, “I am ashamed of the part you would have me play. I will neither disguise myself nor leave the house. If they wish to assassinate me, it shall be in my own home.” To her own home, indeed, the mob came, hooting and shouting derisively around the carriage into which she had been placed. Asked if she wanted the blinds pulled, she replied, “No, gentlemen. I do not fear the eyes of the populace. Innocence should never assume the guise of crime.” To which the officer in charge remarked that she had more strength of mind than many men, that “you wait patiently for justice.” “Justice!” she exclaimed. “Were justice done I should not be here. But if I am destined for the scaffold, I shall walk to it with the same firmness and tranquility with which I now go to prison. I never feared anything but guilt.” Imprisoned for five months, she spent much of her time writing memoirs, but the friend to whom she had entrusted the work, fearful it would be discovered, destroyed it. On the day of her execution, her carriage moved slowly amid a jeering crowd. The historian Carlyle described her: “A noble white vision, with its high queenly face, its soft proud eyes, long black hair flowing down to her girdle, and as brave a heart as ever beat in woman’s bosom. Like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete she shines in that black wreck of things. Graceful to the eye, more so to the mind; genuine, the creature of sincerity and nature in an age of artificiality, pollution, and cant; there, in her still completeness, she, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all French women.” Underwood describes what followed:

There was a pause—a stir, at the foot of the guillotine. Would she faint, this brave woman, at the horrors prepared for her—at the headsman’s basket and sharp hungry machine of death? She bent reverently to the statue of Liberty which with strange mockery was set up near the guillotine; uttered her world-famed apostrophe to it, “O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!”; spoke a few cheering words to the old man, La Marche, who shared her fate; begged the executioner to spare those aged eyes the horror of witnessing her death; asked, as her face grew eloquent with the sublime thoughts which this supreme hour of her life evoked, for pen and paper to which to commit them: asked only to be brutally refused. With unfaltering step, unblanched face, and serene eyes, she stepped upon the scaffold, and stepped a moment later into the unknowable, and, through that cruel death, into at least an earthly immortality. So perished, at the age of thirty-nine, one of the purest, if not the purest character evoked by the French Revolution.

Foote supplies a similar description, saying that feeling she was doomed, she determined to go before the Revolutionary Tribunal alone. M. Chaveau-Lagarde, a lawyer, wished to defend her, but she declined his services. “You should lose your life,” she said, “without saving mine. I know my doom. Tomorrow I shall cease to exist.” On October 9 she was driven in the tumbril to the guillotine, clad in white, with her long black hair hanging down to her girdle. With her was a prisoner named Lamarche, whom she endeavored to cheer. She renounced her right to be executed first, so that her dejected companion might be spared the pain of seeing her blood. Samson would not consent to this. “Will you,” she gaily asked, “refuse a lady her last request?” and he yielded. “O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!” (O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”), she exclaimed, but she bowed before the statue nevertheless, knowing that Liberty was holy though worshipped mistakenly with cruel rites. Her husband, then in hiding in Rouen and hearing of her death, deliberately stabbed himself to death. His body was found at the foot of a tree on the road to Paris. He had thrust a cane-sword into his own heart. Beside him was a letter, in which he said that he died, as he lived, “virtuous and honest,” refusing to “remain longer on an earth polluted with crimes.” As a result of his death, and anticipating the Tribunal, he secured his property to his daughter. Margaret Fuller wrote of her, “Madame Roland is the fairest specimen we yet have of her class; as clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser’s Britomarte; austerely set apart from all that did not belong to her, whether as woman or as mind. She is an antetype of a class to which the coming time will afford a field—the Spartan matron, brought by the culture of the age of books to intellectual consciousness and expansion. Self-sufficingness, strength, and clear-sightedness were in her combined with a power of deep and calm affection.” {CE; BDF; FO; RAT; RE; SAU; WWS}

Roles, John (20th Century) Roles served in the Royal Signals Corps in the Far East during the final stages of World War II. He was depicted in James Gardiner’s Who’s A Pretty Boy Then? Roles, a gay humanist, had been in the antiquarian book business. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Autumn 1999}

Rolland, Romain (1866–1944) Rolland, a French novelist, biographer, playwright, and musicologist, spent two crucial years in Rome, where he was influenced by German intellectuals. He wrote biographies of Beethoven (1903), Michelangelo (1905), Tolstoy (1911), and Mahatma Gandhi (1924). His ten-volume novel, Jean-Christophe (1904–1912), established his reputation in the literary world. In 1915 Rolland received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His genuine pacifistic philosophy and the courage of his convictions led to his self-exile in Switzerland, where he remained until 1938. According to McCabe, Rolland used the word God occasionally “but he explains that what he means by God is ‘vague and indefinite.’ ” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Rollason, Atheist Evolution (1994– ) Babies by the thousands are named Jesus, Mohammed, Mary, and Christian or Christine, but George and Tina Rollason of Pennsylvania claim to be the first ever to name a baby girl “Atheist Evolution Rollason,” born 20 July 1994. (A Manhattan wag has speculated about the slim odds that one day she will marry a chap named Jesús or Gautama.)

Rolleston, Thomas William (Born 1857) Rolleston edited the Dublin University Review (1885–1886) and was an assistant editor of the New Irish Library. He wrote The Encheiridion of Epictetus (1881) and The Teaching of Epictetus (1888). His rationalism is developed in Parallel Paths), in which he adopted impersonal theism and left the question of immortality open. {RAT}

ROLLINS COLLEGE FREETHINKERS Rollins College, Florida, humanists are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

Rollins, Henry (20th Century) Rollins, a vocalist and actor, in a spoken word video, “Talking from the Box,” says he is not a spiritual person and does not believe in an afterlife. {E}

Rollins, Jim (20th Century) Rollins is a St. Louis, Missouri, rationalist activist. E-mail: <smiling@infidels.org>.

Rolls, Montgomery (20th Century) Rolls, a freethinker, wrote Come Out of the Madhouse (1932). {GS}

Rolph, C. H.: See entry for Cecil Rolph Hewitt.

Rolph, William Henry (1847–1883) Rolph was a German philosopher, the son of an English father. He wrote On Biological Problems (1884), in which he accepted evolution, discarded theology, and placed ethics on a natural basis. {BDF}

ROMA (GYPSIES) • Bury me standing. I’ve been on my knees all my life. –Manush Romanov

Uncapitalized, a gypsy is one who prefers an unconventional life. A temporary member on a college faculty is called a gypsy, and in the theatre a gypsy is a member of a chorus line. The Gypsies, inaccurately called such because they were thought to have come from a so-called Little Egypt, prefer the name Roma. Originally they came from a low caste tribe in central India, the Dom, one noted for its singing and dancing. To escape Muslim invaders, they fled and Dom became corrupted into Rom. They speak Romany, a unique language sometimes traced to northwest India, and an estimated six to ten million are found on every continent and in forty countries. Often, they travel in small caravans and make their living as fortune tellers, singers, metalworkers, dancers, musicians, horse dealers, and auto mechanics. Sometimes, they do settle down with non-gypsies but have continued to cling to their identity and customs. Their spiritual life consists of a mixture of animism, deism, fear of ghostly ancestors, and the adoption of the religion of their country of residence. Many Roma are Roman Catholic, Orthodox Eastern Christian, or Islamic. They are said by Fonseca to have no heroes or myths of origin, “of a great liberation, of the founding of the ‘nation,’ of a promised land. They have no Romulus and Remus, no wandering, battling Aeneas. They have no monuments, no anthem, no ruins, and no Book. Instead of a sense of a great historical past, they have a collective unease, and an instinctive cleaving to the tribe.” And, unlike the other great diaspora, the Jews, the Gypsies have never desired their own nation state. In 1997, Ion Cioaba, the self-styled king of all Roma, died in Bucharest of a heart attack. He had agitated for Gypsy rights during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, being jailed in 1986. When the Ceausescu regime toppled in 1989, Cioaba had a solid gold, thirteen-pound crown placed on his head at a coronation that attracted 5,000 followers. Meanwhile, in Prague President Vaclav Havel, a champion of human rights, lectured Czechs about their unfair discrimination against Roma. Numbers of Czech Roma had left for Canada and other countries, and Havel lamented their being forced out by public pressure. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 members of the Roma underclass live in the country, and Czech authorities estimated that from seven to twelve million Gypsies lived in Europe. Roma are known as the Sinti in Germany and the Roma in Eastern Europe. During World War II, they were treated as racially inferior and were rounded up, deported to camps, and subjected to the Nazis’ “extermination through labor” program under which slaves survived ninety days on average. Romani Rose, the current chief of the Central Council of German Sinti and Roma, believes that 500,000 European Gypsies were robbed, exploited as slaves, and murdered in the Nazi Porraimos (the Devouring, or Holocaust. Auschwitz had its own Gypsy section. Of the estimated one million living in the United States, only 5,406 were found by the 1990 Census—those who responded probably said they were Romanian, Mexican, or Greek. They usually get along without birth certificates, Social Security numbers, bank accounts, Medicare, and public assistance of any kind. “We’ve grown up fearing documents. Hiding one’s identity is a tragedy, but it’s necessary,” said Ian Hancock, who revealed his Roma ethnicity after receiving tenure as professor of linguistics at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas. “Discrimination against Roma,” he added about the group he called “the most discriminated against ethnic population” in America. “It is widespread in this country. It’s not just police, it’s landlords, funeral parlors, sometimes restaurants.” Like the Jewish Hasidim, Roma maintain strong boundaries to ward off the outside world. Associating with the non-Roma, or Gadje, is strictly avoided by following rules and rituals. According to Hancock, “You must remember Gypsy culture rests solidly on the idea of pollution and purity. Gadje are not clean in a ritual way. Socializing too intimately with Gadje contaminates you. Being in their world, you start to suffer and have to go back with Roma to get your balance back. We don’t have a physical country, so this movable border is our national frontier.” Andrew Blythe, who was related to the last “king” of the Gypsies in Great Britain, emigrated from Scotland to America to escape harassment during the 1800s. According to The Economist (30 May 1998), a man said to be Blythe’s great-grandson, William Blythe, died in a car crash, but not before fathering a son. When his mother remarried that lad changed his name . . . to Bill Clinton. {CE; The Economist, 8 March 1997; The New York Times, 27 February 1997 and 24 February 1999; Isabel Fonseca, “Among the Gypsies,” The New Yorker; Christine Popp, New York Daily News, 7 March 1999}

Romagnosi, Giovanni Domenico (1761–1835) Romagnosi was an Italian philosopher and jurist. In 1791 he published Genesis of Penal Law, many pages of which are borrowed from d’Holbach’s System of Nature. Romagnosi became professor of law in Parma, Milan, and Pavia. A member of the Italian Academy, he wrote Elements of Philosophy (1821), What Is a Sound Mind? (1827), and Ancient Moral Philosophy (1832). Wheeler described him as “a somewhat obscure writer” who, nevertheless, “contributed to the positive study of sociology.” {BDF; RAT; RE}

Romains, Jules (1885–1972) Romains was a French playwright and author, a chief exponent of “unanimism,” a literary theory positing the collective spirit or personality. For example, the spirit of a city might be described. He is author of Men of Good Will (27 volumes, 1932–1946), an attempt to give a panoramic view of French life. Also, he wrote poems, La Vie unanime (1908); a masterful play, Cromedeyre-le-Vieil (1920); and a satirical farce, Doctor Knock (1923). (See letter from Charles Mayer, who describes Romains as being a naturalistic humanist.) {CE; HNS}

ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH

	The National Conference of Catholic Bishops is at 3211 Fourth St., Washington, DC 20017. The church has around 22,700 groups numbering over 61,000,000.
ROMAN CIVILIZATION

Latins claim an association with Latinus, whom they identify as a son of Odysseus by the goddess Circe. With Circe, Latinus had a celebrated amour in the Odyssey. Jasper Griffin, professor of Classical Literature and Public Orator at Oxford University, is a fellow of Balliol College and makes the point that the Latins wanted to attach themselves to the Greek genealogical legends, which explains their invention of Latinus. {“Anxieties of Influence,” The New York Review of Books, 20 June 1996}

ROMAN GODS: See the entry for Greek and Roman Gods.

Romanell, Patrick (1912–2002) Romanell, an educator and philosopher, was born in Bari, Italy, and when a teenager became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He has taught philosophy in Panama, Ecuador, and Italy. He was chairman of the philosophy department at Wells College, taught medical philosophy at the University of Texas, and also taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas, and the University of Arizona. Romanell wrote The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (1938), La Polémica entre Croce y Gentile (1946); Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration (1950); Making of the Mexican Mind (1952); El Neo-Naturalismo Norteamericano (1956); Para um Naturalismo Dialéctico (1967); Humanistic Perspectives in Medical Ethics (1972); John Locke and Medicine: A New Key to Locke (1984); and, with C. D. Leake, Can We Agree? (1950). He was book editor of The Journal of Philosophy (1939–1951) and wrote book reviews for The Humanist in the 1950s. A noted naturalist, he is particularly known for his Toward A Critical Naturalism (1958). For Giovanni Be Crescenzo’s Patrick Romanell and Present-Day American Naturalism (1966), the leading Italian existentialist, Nicola Abbagnano, wrote the preface. An annual Romanell–Phi Beta Kappa Professorship in Philosophy is awarded, and the American Philosophical Association sponsors an annual Patrick Romanell Lecture on Philosophical Naturalism, the first lecture of which was given in 1986 by Abraham Edel. In “The Significance of American Philosophic Naturalism,” Romanell makes a strong case for naturalism: “Everything so far lends weight to our overall assessment of American naturalism as a tenable philosophy, except for one important matter, namely, its incomplete analysis of life’s conflicts, the very stuff that human life is made of, basically and ultimately.” Dewey, he points out, was aware that “the problem of evil is a well-recognized problem, while we rarely or never hear of a problem of good.” This points up the philosophic need to distinguish between tragedy and pathos, to pay “serious attention to the tragic dimension of life and to the Problem of Good that goes with it.” For Romanell, “historically viewed, philosophical naturalism from its pre-Socratic to its American varieties in the twentieth century belongs to the oldest tradition in Western philosophy. Inasmuch as this venerable tradition would have much more relevance and strength if it were to develop an adequate analysis of the tragic side of life, the most significant contribution that a thorough-going critical naturalism can make, at present, may well consist precisely in teaching the success-oriented people of America in particular that the disconcerting clash of life’s equally good things brings unavoidable failure in its train from time to time, as a consequence of which there is no real solution to the tragic choices at stake, let alone a quick or happy one.” Further, “since problems of evil and problems of better are resolvable in theory at least, it is indeed fortunate that the tragic problems of good are the only type in human existence that have no solution in principle. The sooner American philosophical naturalism recognizes them candidly as insoluble by nature, the sooner it can address them appropriate for the benefit of humanity’s endless pursuit of wisdom.” Asked by the present author in 1995 if in his eighties he was still a naturalist, Romanell confirmed the point, adding, “I’m still a damn naturalist on earth, not a damned one in Dante’s inferno!” Romanell has donated his extensive collection of philosophy books to the Council for Secular Humanism’s Library of American Philosophical Naturalism. {Patrick Romanell, “The Significance of American Philosophical Naturalism,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996; WAS, 17 February 1995}

Romanes, George John (1848–1894) A zoologist, a friend of Darwin, and a stout champion of Darwinism, Romanes has been called “a great scientist who deserted Rationalism for religion.” McCabe, however, states that the “conversion” has been misrepresented, that “his last years were saddened by a grave illness which admittedly lowered the vigour of his mind, and his very zealous wife induced him to die in the Anglican communion. She then, with the co-operation of Bishop Gore, published, with the title Thoughts on Religion, what purported to be his new ideas. The book, even as it left their devout hands, does not show a belief in the leading Christian dogmas, or even in the orthodox conception of God. What it does painfully show is the wreck of a scientific mind. It makes the friend of Darwin and Huxley declare that ‘the nature of man without God is thoroughly miserable,’ and ‘unbelief is usually due to indolence, often to prejudice, and never a thing to be proud of.’ If these are the actual words of a man who for twenty years had known all the great Victorian Rationalists, it was tragic to publish them.” {RE}

ROMANIAN HUMANISTS, UNITARIANS Unitarianism began in Romania within the liberal wing of the Protestant Reformation in the second half of the 16th century, at the Diet of Torda (1568). At that time King John Sigismund, inspired by the preaching of Francis David, declared liberty of conscience and religion for the first time. At the end of the 16th century there were 400 congregations. Because of 400 years of subsequent persecutions, there were in 1998 around 125 congregations with settled ministers and about fifty small fellowship, with a total membership of approximately 80,000. The headquarters is in Cluj (Kolosvar), the capital of Transylvania, and Transylvanian Unitarians are ethnic Hungarians whose services are conducted in Hungarian. Bishop Janos Erdo has headed the Unitarian Church in Romania (Bd. 21 Decembrie Nr. 9, 3400 Cluj-Napoca, Romania). World (January-February 1996) contained a photograph of the first new Unitarian church building built in Romania this century, one which stands at Baròt. Its minister is Alpar Kiss. The Rev. Arpad Szabo now heads the Romanian Unitarians, who number around 80,000. As Bishop of the Unitarian Church of Romania, he was elected for a five-year term. Romanian Unitarians, according to Scott Gerard Prinster of the Institutul Teologic Protestant in Club-Napoca, Romania, do not hesitate to call themselves Christians, “although members of other denominations might quibble with that.” Most agree that the Resurrection was spiritual, not physical, but remain unsure how to make that information relevant. Complete religious freedom did not exist as of 1997. Individuals do not leave their denomination and remain of whatever religion their parents are. Religious humanism, as in the United States, is unknown, although most Romanian Unitarians would not object to the idea that the promise and potential of humanity is desirable. “Principiile umanitariste” (1922) included Eugen Relgis’s view that humanism is needed to deify and humanize Man. E-mail: <steve@ldpa.demon.co.uk>. On the Web: <http://www.uua.org/icuu/icuu-europe.html>. (See entries for Mircea Eliade, the Rev. Ferencz Sebe, and Arpad Szabo.) {WAS, 2 June 1997}

Romano, Ray (20th Century)

At the Fourth Annual Convention of Atheists hosted in 1998 by the St. Louis Rationalist Society, Romano spoke on “The Death of Judas.”

ROMANTICISM Romantics are known for breaking the rules laid down by the Classicists. Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century. It emphasized nature, placed an emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, and rebelled against established social rules and conventions. Among the leaders, all non-believers, were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, and Johann Friedrich von Schiller. {DCL}

Romilly, Samuel [Sir] (1757–1818) Romilly was an English law reformer. He was in sympathy with Rousseau’s views, and he was a friend with Diderot and with Jean d’Alembert. Romilly’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution inspired his Letters Containing an Account of the Late Revolution in France (1792). His work in reforming criminal law began with his Thoughts on Executive Justice (1786). Sir Samuel was particularly interested in the reform of law, the abolition of slavery, and opposition to the feudal monarchs of Europe. During Queen Victoria’s reign, many of Romilly’s proposals were adopted. According to the Dictionary of National Biography, “He early lost all faith in Christianity but embraced with ardour the gospel of Rousseau.” The writer of the notice added that Romilly’s “principles were austere to the verge of Puritanism.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Romiti, Guglielmo (19th Century) An Italian positivist, Romiti was professor of anatomy in the University of Siena. His Anatomic Notes was disapproved by many theologians. {BDF}

Romme, Gilbert (1750–1795) Romme was a French mathematician who became deputy to the Legislative Assembly in 1791 and a member of the Convention in 1792. In 1793 he introduced the new Republican Calendar, the plan for which was drawn by Lalande, the names having been assigned by Fabre d’Eglantine. Romme advocated the Fêtes of Reason. Upon being condemned to death, Romme committed suicide. {BDF; RAT}

Ronge, Johannes (1813–1887) Ronge was a German religious reformer. A Catholic priest in 1840, he was suspended because of his views. In 1844 he denounced in a letter the worship of “the holy coat,” which led to his excommunication from the church. He then preached at free congregations but was proscribed after the Revolution of 1849. Taking refuge in England, Ronge issued a revolutionary manifesto in 1851. In 1861 he returned to Frankfort and in 1873 settled at Darmstadt. {BDF; TRI}

Ronsard, Pierre (1524–1585) Ronsard was a French poet. He became page to the Duke of Orleans and, afterwards, to James V of Scotland. Ronsard, a freethinker, was a favorite at the French Court. {BDF}

Rood, Max (20th Century)

	Rood is a professor of law at Rujksuniversiteitte Leiden and former Minister of Justice in Holland. A Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, he wrote Fifty Years of Labour Law and Social Security (1986) and Procesrecht in arbeidszaken (1994). Rood signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Rood-de Boer, Madzy (20th Century) Mrs. Rood-de Boer, a professor of family law and juvenile delinquency, is President of the Socrates Foundation. Founded in 1950, it stimulates humanist influence on science and culture in the Netherlands by founding humanist chairs at the Dutch State Universities; by editing a quarterly on science and culture called Rekenschap (PO Box 114, 3500 AC Utrecht, the Netherlands); and by organizing yearly philosophical Socrates lectures. His book on child welfare is Stroomversnelligen in de kinderbescherming (1973).

Roofe, Paul G. (20th Century) Roofe, when he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, was chairman of the anatomy department at the University of Kansas.

Rooney, Andrew (Andy) Aitken (1919– ) • My wife’s from the Midwest. Very nice people there. Very wholesome. They use words like “Cripes.” For Cripes sake! Who would that be—Jesus Cripes? Son of Gosh? Of the church of the Holy Moly? I’m not making fun of it—you think I want to burn in Heck?

A writer, columnist, and television commentator appearing on the CBS program, “60 Minutes,” Rooney has worked with CBS since 1959. In 1968, and again in 1978, 1981, and 1982, he won an Emmy Award. Rooney is author of The Story of Stars and Stripes (1946), Pieces of My Mind (1984), and Not That You Asked (1989). In Paul Rifkin’s The God Letters (1986), Rifkin tells of posing as a fifth grade student who asked noted individuals if they believed in God. Rooney responded, “No, of course I don’t [believe in God] and anyone who tells you that there is a god who makes his or her presence known to him or her is hallucinating or not telling the truth.” Rooney told Sam Donaldson on ABC’s “Prime Time Live” (May 1995) that he was critical of anyone who even claims to know whether or not a god exists.” And in a 1996 interview with Arthur Unger in TV Quarterly, he was asked if people really knew him. “The only thing I hide from people,” Rooney responded, “that I have never said so far as being blunt and honest goes, is that I am not a religious person. I’m not sure the American public would accept from me that fact. I don’t think that would please them or that it would attract a lot of people to me. And I take the position that it is sort of a personal matter, so I do not ever make an issue of it.” {CA; E}

Rooney, Andrew (Andy) Aitken (14 Jan 1919 - ) A writer, columnist, and television commentator appearing on the CBS program, “60 Minutes,” Rooney has worked with CBS since 1959. In 1968, and again in 1978, 1981, and 1982, he won an Emmy Award. Rooney is author of The Story of Stars and Stripes (1946); A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney (1981); Pieces of My Mind (1984); Not That You Asked (1989); Sweet and Sour (1982); My War (1995); and Sincerely, Andy Rooney (1999), in the last chapter of which, “Faith in Reason,” he publishes a letter to his children and explains that he is an agnostic. In some respects he comes across as everyone’s uncle or grandfather, and in others he comes across as a logical curmudgeon. To almost everyone he comes across as someone who can make anyone laugh:

My wife’s from the Midwest. Very nice people there. Very wholesome. They use words like “Cripes.” For Cripes sake! Who would that be—Jesus Cripes? Son of Gosh? Of the church of the Holy Moly? I’m not making fun of it—you think I want to burn in Heck?

Paul Rifkin’s The God Letters (1986) tells of posing as a fifth grade student who asked noted individuals if they believed in God. Rooney responded,

No, of course I don’t [believe in God] and anyone who tells you that there is a god who makes his or her presence known to him or her is hallucinating or not telling the truth.

Rooney told Sam Donaldson on ABC’s “Prime Time Live” (May 1995) that he was critical of anyone who even claims to know whether or not a god exists.” And in a 1996 interview with Arthur Unger in TV Quarterly, he was asked if people really knew him. “The only thing I hide from people,” Rooney responded, “that I have never said so far as being blunt and honest goes, is that I am not a religious person. I’m not sure the American public would accept from me that fact. I don’t think that would please them or that it would attract a lot of people to me. And I take the position that it is sort of a personal matter, so I do not ever make an issue of it.” With all the problems throughout the world, he finds religion has not really done anything to help. {CA}

Roorda van Eysinga, Sicco Ernst Willem (1825–1887) A Dutch positivist, Roorda van Eysinga served as engineer in Java but was expelled about 1864 for writing on behalf of the Javanese. He contributed to the De Dageraad and Revue Positive, eventually moving to Switzerland, where he died. {BDF; RAT}

Roosevelt, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt: See entry for Adlai Stevenson.

Roosevelt, Sara Delano (19th Century) The mother of Franklin Roosevelt and an important influence on his life, Sara Roosevelt was raised a Unitarian, later becoming an Episcopalian. She once was a member of the New York City Unitarian Church of All Souls.

Roquetaillade, Jean de la (14th Century) Roquetaillade, who was also known as Rupescina and was an early French reformer of Auvergne, entered the Franciscan order. His bold discourses, however, led to his imprisonment in 1356 by order of Innocent VI. Nostradamus said Roquetaillade had been accused of magic and was burned at Avignon in 1362, but Wheeler reports this has been disputed. {BDF}

Rorem, Ned (1923– ) Rorem is sometimes described as music’s elder statesman but also its enfant terrible. “Swords and Plowshares,” which he wrote for the Boston Symphony in 1990, has pacifism as its theme—Rorem is outspoken in his own views concerning pacifism. For twenty-seven years, Rorem has lived monogamously with James Holmes, an organist and choir director in New York, and he believes that gay-rights groups should seek to abolish the military, not to achieve fuller representation in it. A member of the American Academy, Rorem in 1976 won the Pulitzer prize in music. In addition to writing journals, he is best known for his vocal works such as “Air Music” (1975) and 5 Prayers for the Young (1977). His Paris Diary (1966) shocked many with its revelations about his and others’ sexual escapades as, for example, “I can’t sleep with famous people. Or for that matter with rich people, or people in power, used to being the center of attention. I have been in bed with four Time covers—Lenny Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, and John Cheever (included among 3,000 proportionately anonymous souls, including one woman)—and I performed out of a combination of duress and politeness.” In Setting the Score (1988), Rorem went on record as not believing in God nor in an after-life. Asked specifically about his views concerning humanism, Rorem responded to the present author in 1996,

I have gone on record dozens of times in my thirteen books (and specifically in the essay, “Notes on Sacred Music” in the collection Settling the Score) that I do not believe in God, nor in an after-life. I do, however, believe in Belief, which is why I have made so many musical settings of good poetry (and prose) about God. I am a Quaker “by inheritance.” My parents converted before my birth, not for religious but for philosophical purposes, and hoped to ally themselves with a group that believed in pacifism. For better or worse I believe that all war is wrong at all times. But I never go to meeti . . . any more than to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the tenets of which I nonetheless observe.

To New York Times reporter Anthony Tommasini, he responded similarly:

I don’t think life has a purpose. We invent purposes to get through life. I feel basically good, but I am surrounded by death, the deaths of friends, and friends’ mates, and every time it is unbearable. I don’t believe in God, and I know there is no afterlife. Yet I do believe in belief. I’m not moved by the belief of the Moonies, but I am by the belief of Michelangelo, King David, Paul Goodman. {GL; The New York Times, 20 January 1998; WAS, 2 November 1996}

Rorem, Ned (23 Oct 1923 - )

		Rorem is sometimes described as music’s elder statesman but also its enfant terrible. “Swords and Plowshares,” which he wrote for the Boston Symphony in 1990, has pacifism as its theme—Rorem is outspoken in his own views concerning pacifism. For twenty-seven years, Rorem has lived monogamously with James Holmes, an organist and choir director in New York, and he believes that gay-rights groups should seek to abolish the military, not to achieve fuller representation in it. A member of the American Academy, Rorem in 1976 won the Pulitzer prize in music. In addition to writing journals, he is best known for his vocal works such as “Air Music” (1975) and 5 Prayers for the Young (1977). His Paris Diary (1966) shocked many with its revelations about his and others’ sexual escapades as, for example, “I can’t sleep with famous people. Or for that matter with rich people, or people in power, used to being the center of attention. I have been in bed with four Time covers—Lenny Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, and John Cheever (included among 3,000 proportionately anonymous souls, including one woman)—and I performed out of a combination of duress and politeness.” 

In Setting the Score (1988), Rorem went on record as not believing in God nor in an after-life. Asked specifically about his views concerning humanism, Rorem responded to the present author in 1996,

I have gone on record dozens of times in my thirteen books (and specifically in the essay, “Notes on Sacred Music” in the collection Settling the Score) that I do not believe in God, nor in an after-life. I do, however, believe in Belief, which is why I have made so many musical settings of good poetry (and prose) about God. I am a Quaker “by inheritance.” My parents converted before my birth, not for religious but for philosophical purposes, and hoped to ally themselves with a group that believed in pacifism. For better or worse I believe that all war is wrong at all times. But I never go to meetings . . . any more than to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the tenets of which I nonetheless observe.

To New York Times reporter Anthony Tommasini, he responded similarly:

I don’t think life has a purpose. We invent purposes to get through life. I feel basically good, but I am surrounded by death, the deaths of friends, and friends’ mates, and every time it is unbearable. I don’t believe in God, and I know there is no afterlife. Yet I do believe in belief. I’m not moved by the belief of the Moonies, but I am by the belief of Michelangelo, King David, Paul Goodman. {GL; The New York Times, 20 January 1998; WAS, 2 November 1996}

Roretz, Karl (1881–1967) Roretz, an Austrian, was on the first Board of Directors in 1952 of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). At their initial meeting, Roretz addressed the group.

Rorty, Richard (1931– ) Rorty, a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanisms’ International Academy of Humanism, left the University of Virginia in 1998 to become professor of comparative literature at Stanford University. A leading gadfly of contemporary philosophy, he was the son of parents who were atheists and Trotskyites. His maternal grandfather was Walter Rauschenbusch, the theological genius of the Social Gospel. Reviewing his Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998), philosopher Alan Ryan wrote

Richard Rorty is a scandal to his profession. He is a philosopher who thinks that philosophy is a distraction from more important matters. He has for years argued that the pursuit of Truth—as distinct from the humbler search for usable truths—is fueled by self-deception. He has insisted that even if humanity all too often behaves cruelly and sadistically, we would be better off without a sense of sin. Nevertheless, Rorty has a substantial streak of filial piety. It was his hero, John Dewey, who first scandalized his philosophical readers almost a century ago by urging them to turn away from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.” Achieving Our Country is an appeal to American intellectuals to abandon the intransigent cynicism of the academic, cultural left and to return to the political ambitions of Emerson, Dewey, Herbert Croly and their allies.

Ryan praises Rorty’s favoring of the kind of “participatory” grasp of the world celebrated by Whitman and Dewey, and finds few thinkers other than American pragmatists “have had the courage to insist that it is life itself that justifies our ideas about what is true, good, or beautiful.” In Achieving Our Country, Rorty credits the New Left for helping end American involvement in Vietnam but blames it for retreating from pragmatism into theory. As a result, members of the left “give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice. . . . It leads them to prefer knowledge to hope.” Although not ruling out a place for religious forces in any reformist coalition, Rorty simply makes no reference to them. The most influential philosophers of the 20th century, Rorty wrote, were John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Rorty’s other works include Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Pragmatism from Pierce to Davidson (1990), and Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991). In 1994 he wrote “After Philosophy, Democracy” in The American Philosopher, a collection of conversations with Quine, Danto, and others edited by Giovanna Borradori. Also, he was a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994). His 1994 “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” is found in Challenge to the Enlightenment, In Defense of Reason and Science. Included is his complaint about right-wing conservatives who assume that he is a moral relativist because of his atheism:

The orthodox tend to think that people who, like the postmodernists and me, believe neither in God nor in some suitable substitute, must feel that everything is permitted, that everybody can do what they like.

At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Paul Kurtz described Rorty as perhaps the leading United States philosopher. Richard Shusterman of Temple University calls Rorty “probably the most influential contemporary American philosopher on literary theory,” citing the two volumes of his Philosophical Papers written between 1980 and 1989. These, adds Shusterman in an article in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994), “include articles defending pragmatist views of interpretation and scientific inquiry against varieties of representationalism, as well as articles connecting pragmatism with Heidegger and others in the Continental tradition of philosophy and literary theory.” In 1994, David L. Hall wrote Richard Rorty, Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism, in which he contrasts Rorty’s thought with that of Donald Davidson, W. V. O. Quine, Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and others. The State University of New York in 1994 also published a work, Recovering Pragmatism’s Voice: The Classical Tradition, Rorty, and the Philosophy of Communication, in which various authors show that pragmatism fosters inquiry and pluralism by rejecting strategies for closure, questioning prevailing metanarratives, and encouraging the development of new habits of conduct through a critical practice that is fundamentally self-reflective. “During the quarter century in which various forms of imported eliminitivist analytic philosophy had much institutional power in American academe,” Peter H. Hare has written, “many naturalists were unfairly treated. This unjust treatment caused understandable bitterness and resentment. Although these feelings are understandable, hypersensitivity to any philosophy deeply critical of American naturalism has unfortunate consequences. Year after year of intense preoccupation with Richard Rorty, for example, is—at the very least—distracting. Shortly after Rorty’s book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was published in 1979, it was quite adequately shown that Rorty’s so-called pragmatism was radically inconsistent with the pragmatism of American naturalism and not a genuine threat. But today hypersensitive naturalists continue refuting Rorty. Rorty, who enjoys cleverly baiting his critics, encourages this pointless activity. Neglect is what Rorty’s philosophy now calls for, in my view,” Hare states. He then adds that fifty years from now “when historians look back at this period in American philosophy they will consider that Rorty played a significant role only because the discussion of his charming prose stimulated useful clarification of the character of American naturalism. The American naturalist tradition is too resilient and resourceful to be seriously threatened by Rorty. In the long run, Rorty is enriching the tradition he is laboring to discredit.” That 1979 work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argued against the idea that it is possible to pass judgment on what we believe based upon some objective, transcendental standpoint. What Rorty has tried to show is that no belief is more fundamental than any other and that philosophy, which cannot establish anything, should be understood as a conversation with, in the words of Trinity College’s (Oxford) Right Honorable Lord Quinton, “the same sort of claim to finality as the conversations of cultural and literary critics. Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey are invoked as a kind of pantheon for this undermining of the conception philosophers have ordinarily held of their philosophical activity.” “Suppose,” Rorty wrote in a witty book review (The New York Times (22 September 1996), “some newly discovered scrolls provided good reason to think that Christianity was a fraud perpetrated by a con man named Paul (formerly Saul). Seeing a commercial opportunity in the resentment of the poor and downtrodden, Paul invented a religion teaching that God’s only wish is that we should love one another, and commissioned hacks to write the Gospels and the Epistles. After putting this discovery together with what we already know about the forged Donation of Constantine, the Spanish Inquisition and the televangelists, and with the absence of scientific evidence for the claim that Jesus was both God and man, should we conclude that we ought to cleanse our minds and our culture of Christianity?” No, he continues, “we might reflect that bad men occasionally come up with good ideas, and that the egalitarian and altruistic strains in Christianity have done a lot for liberal democracy and human rights. So we might decide to throw away only the rotten parts of Christianity (the creeds and the clergy, perhaps), while keeping the good bits.” Analogously, he added, although Freud may have been in error about many things, we “can continue to explain our quirks, fantasies and neurotic miseries by reference to unconscious beliefs and desires—especially beliefs about our parents and desires for offbeat sex.” (See Richard Rorty, “Remembering John Dewey and Sidney Hook,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996) {CA; E; OCP; The New York Times, 16 May 1998; Peter Steinfels, The New York Times, 11 July 1998}

Rosa, Peter (de) (1932– ) Rosa, a Jesuit theologian who left the priesthood, wrote the following in Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy (1988):

[Catholicism’s] disastrous theology had prepared the way for Hitler and his “final solution.” [The Church published] over a hundred anti-Semitic documents. Not one conciliar decree, not one papal encyclical, bull, or pastoral directive suggests that Jesus’s command, “love your neighbor as yourself,” applied to Jews. Jews were hounded from one land to another. One pope gave them a month to quit their homes in Italy, leaving them only two places of refuge. During the Crusades, they were slaughtered in the thousands, out of devotion to Christ. A Jew who showed his nose on Good Friday was virtually committing suicide, even though the man on the cross had a Jewish nose. . . . There is, tragically, an undeniable link between . . . the papal legislation, the pogroms—and the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi death camps.

(“A Jewish nose” was not explained. 

See entry for Jewish Nose.) {TYD}

Rose, Charles H. (19th Century) Rose, an Australian, wrote A Light To Lighten the Gentiles (1881). {BDF}

Rose, Edward B. (19th Century) An emigrant to Port Elizabeth in 1887, Rose founded a small independent freethought movement in South Africa. His audiences were small, and Royle wrote that Rose’s lectures “resulted in no lasting success.” {FUK; RSR}

Rose, Ernestine Louise Susmond (Polowsky) (1810–1892) Rose, the Polish-born daughter of a Jewish rabbi, wrote A Defense of Atheism (1851) and lectured widely on behalf of freethought. She founded Agnostic Journal, which replaced the Secular Review. She spoke out in favor of the abolition of slavery, of civil rights, and of equal opportunities for education. Rose, one of the inaugurators of the Woman’s Rights Movement, was a constant champion of freethought. In 1838 she had given the first petition to permit married women the right to hold real estate. In 1869, Rose joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony to form the National Woman Suffrage Association. An Owenite, she was called by Owen his “daughter.” In 1853 Rose was elected president of the National Women’s Rights Convention. Moncure Conway tells this of her, that “she went down South, and after being there a little time, her soul was stirred at what she saw going on in the fair city of Charleston. So she advertised that she would publicly lecture the Charlestonians. The novelty of a woman appearing in public attracted a large audience, who were amazed and overwhelmed to hear her rate them about slavery in a way that could hardly have been surpassed by that Mr. Garrison on whose head they had set a price. It was due partly to her sex, and partly to the paralysis caused by her audacity, that she was not torn to pieces; as it was, it required considerable influence to get her safely out of the city.” In her last hours, she asked her friend Hypatia Bonner to insure that no one would try to get her to recant her past atheism, and Bonner reported that Rose died “quite untroubled by any thoughts of religion.” At her funeral, Jacob Holyoake said

More than comely in features, which had dignity of contour, Mrs. Rose had a voice which at once arrested attention by its strength and melody. She spoke with easy accuracy, and with eloquence and reason. . . . Like her great co-worker in the anti-slavery movement, Lucretia Mott, Mrs. Rose took truth for authority, not authority for truth. . . . The slave she helped to free from the bondage of ownership, and the minds she had set free from the bondage of authority were the glad and proud remembrance of her last days. {BDF; EU, Victor E. Neuburg; FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; SAU; TRI; WWS}

Rose, John (19th Century) In 1894, Rose led the Progressive Lyceum in Sydney, Australia.

Rose, Olin (20th Century) Rose wrote Anti-Christian Addresses (1919–1921). {GS}

Rosenblatt, Louise Michelle (20th Century) Rosenblatt, who was a professor of education at New York University, taught a course entitled “Literature and the Crisis in Values.” A naturalist in philosophy, she married a fellow humanist, Sidney Ratner. Rosenblatt wrote Transactions with Literature (1990) and Literature as Exploration (1995).

Rosenfeld, Herbert T. (20th Century) With Harry Elmer Barnes, Rosenfeld wrote Is Humanism A New Religion? (1962). {TRI}

Rosenkranz, Johann Karl Friedrich (1805–1879) Rosenkranz was a German philosophy who taught at Königsberg University. During the Revolution of 1848, he was Councillor to the Minister of Cults, and at the failure of the Revolution he resumed his chair, holding it until he became totally blind. A follower of Hegel, he organized an encyclopedia of learning on a Hegelian basis, edited the works of Kant, and wrote many volumes of philosophy. His rationalism is found in Naturreligion (1831) and a work on Diderot (1866). {RAT}

Rosenow, Albert (Born 1855) Rosenow was born in Germany of Jewish parents but, upon reading the work of Ludwig Büchner, became a freethinker. In Walla Walla, Washington, he helped organize the Liberal Society and the Washington Secular Union. {PUT}

Rosenthal, M. L. (1917– ) Rosenthal, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, taught at New York University. {HM2}

ROSICRUCIANS A secret society, the Rosicrucians have successfully remained so because its members are not allowed to disclose the movement’s secrets, and exceptions over the years have been difficult to find. Allegedly, it was founded by Christian Rosenkreus about 1420, although some consider him but a legendary figure. He is supposed to have received his wisdom and philosophy from ancient sources in various places he visited, Palestine, Damascus, Egypt, and Spain. Those with kabbalistic, mystical, astrological, alchemical, and esoteric interests were attracted and are found in Europe, England, Scotland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, South America, India, and elsewhere. Fama fraternitatis (1614) and Confessio rosae crucis (1615), both probably written by Johan Valentin Andreä (1586–1654), described Rosenkreus’s travels and the development of the Rosicrucian society, which has variously been called Brothers of the Rosy Cross, Rosy-Cross Knights, and Rosy-Cross Philosophers. William Butler Yeats’s collection of poems, The Rose (1895), illustrates his Rosicrucianism. William York Tindall, in a Columbia University literature class, described how Yeats placed a rose in a glass container, somehow pumped all the air out, sealed the top, and held the rose upwards toward a full moon, expecting to see its “soul” waft away. When nothing transpired, Yeats retried, this time being more diligent about getting the rose into a vacuum. This and succeeding attempts failed, however. Yeats continued to focus on using cipher methods learned from the Rosicrucians; that, for example, 9 is a symbol of fertility; ergo “nine bean rows” connoted more to those in the Rosicrucian cognoscenti than to hoi polloi. The Rosicrucian Fellowship in America has described its outlook as

a mystical philosophy, founded upon Christian principles and based upon the reality of Christ and the work he came to earth to do.

It holds that a sixth sense is latent in man which, when developed, enables one to investigate the realm of the super-physical where dwell the dead. Spiritualistic methods of making contact with the dead, however, are not approved. Rosicrucians make much use of astrology and believe in the principle of re-birth, according to Charles S. Braden, who was chairman of the Department of History and Literature of Religion at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. {CE; ER}

Roskoff, George Gustav (Born 1814) Roskoff was a German rationalist. He studied theology and philosophy at Halle and wrote Hebrew Antiquity (1857), The Samson Legend and Herakles Myth (1860), and a standard History of the Devil (2 volumes, 1869). {BDF; RAT}

Rosny, Joseph Henri (Born 1856) Rosny was a French novelist who rejected all theistic belief. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. Somewhat influenced by Tolstoi and repelled by Zola’s conception of naturalist art, he turned to social idealism and with his brother, Justin Rosny, also an agnostic, developed a style said to have been hampered “by their introduction of so much erudition and moral philosophy.” {RAT}

Rosny, Louis Léon Lucien Prunol de (1837–1916) 

Rosny taught Japanese at Paris University. His research on Buddhism and Confucianism was profound. He founded the Orientalist Congress, the Ethnographical Society, the Oriental Athenaeum, and the Society for Japanese Studies. Rosny was a theist, but his research on Orientology was of great value to rationalists. {RE}

Ross, Charles (20th Century) Ross is treasurer of Atheists of Florida. E-mail: <athalflc@aol.com>.

Ross, David (1972– ) Ross has been Vice President of the Auckland University Atheists and is Secretary of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. He edits The New Zealand Rationalist & Humanist Newsletter.

Ross, Edward Alsworth (1866–1951) An American sociologist, Ross taught economics at Stanford University, from which he was ousted in a controversy over academic freedom. He had opposed the use of migrant Chinese labor in the building of the railroads—the Stanfords, who were involved in the building of the Union Pacific Railroad, were disturbed by his stand. He then taught at the University of Wisconsin. Ross wrote Social Control (1901), Principles of Sociology (1921), and his autobiography, Seventy Years of It (1937). In Changing America (1912), Ross states that “the religion a hierarchy ladles out to its dupes is chloroform” and that “the end of clericalism is in sight.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Ross, Harold Wallace (1892–1951) In France during World War I, Ross edited the servicemen’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes. In 1925, he founded The New Yorker and remained its managing editor until his death. Ross, a freethinker, was successful in featuring such sophisticated authors as Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Wolcott Gibbs and in obtaining cartoons showing Peter Arno’s urban characterizations, Charles Addams’s macabre scenes, and Helen Hokinson’s satirized clubwomen. Upon his death, a private service was held at Manhattan’s Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. His ashes were strewn over the emerald mountains of his native Aspen, Colorado.

Ross, James M. (20th Century) Ross is an active member of the Humanist Society of Scotland. He is author of a proposal that Scotland should have a Senate.

Ross, John (19th Century) Ross in 1867 was one of the leaders in Australia of the Eclectic Association of Victoria.

Ross, Robert Samuel (1873–1931) Ross was an Australian rationalist, publisher, editor, and Socialist. His interest in the writings of the American rationalist, Robert Green Ingersoll, led him to the Free Thought Society where he met Wallace Nelson. In 1903 he was appointed editor of the Broken Hill Barrier Truth, but within a year his anti-religious stance and public advocacy of birth control and the violation of the holy Sabbath Day developed an opposition that resulted in his dismissal. In 1908 he became secretary of the Victorian Socialist Party and editor of its paper, the Socialist. {SWW}

Ross, Ronald [Sir] (1857–1932) Ross was a physician who won the Nobel Prize in 1902 for his work on malaria. He was knighted in 1911. He had been a member (1881–1899) of the Indian Medical Service, and he was a professor of tropical medicine at University College, Liverpool. In a volume of poems and a book of literary plays, Ross expounded his Theistic Rationalism. In one poem, “Dogma,” he rejected all Churches and creeds and wanted “no priest but conscience, and no lord but law.” {RAT; RE}

Ross, Warren R. (20th Century) Ross is a contributing editor of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston. He is author of “The Marginalized Majority: UU Humanism in the 1990s” (World, November-December 1997}, in which he looks into humanist history from the mid-1800s to the 1990s.

Ross, William Stewart (“Saladin”) (1844–1906) A Scottish freethinker, the son of orthodox Presbyterians, Ross at the age of twenty went to Glasgow University to study for the Church. Finding his university interests were more literary than theological, he set out to make his name as a poet, entered a publishing house, then managed the Thomas Laurie branch store in London. At the university he had come to doubt the orthodox creeds, and his freethinking grew after reading the poetry of Burns and the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle. His first involvement with the Secularists came in 1880 when, as president of the Lambeth Radical Association, he chaired a lecture from Bradlaugh which had been organized by the South West London branch of the National Secular Society. Caring neither for Bradlaugh nor Mrs. Besant, he had the support of C. A. Watts. However, the elder Watts must have had some trouble controlling his writing articles under the “Saladin” pseudonym, according to Royle. Ross hated the hypocrisy of his age: “Ours is the Era of Dissimulation,” he told F. J. Gould in a 1900 interview. His outlook showed him to be a man of public hates. Ross wrote many essays on secularism, his most famous book being Roses and Rue (1891). He edited the Agnostic Journal (1888) which joined with Secular Review to form a joint title, Agnostic Journal (& Secular Review) that was published from 1889 until his death in 1906. The end of his life was tragic, for he concealed that he was suffering from an illness that impaired his walking. Because of sclerosis, which he admitted in 1904, he had edited the Agnostic Journal from his bed, scarcely able to write except with two hands. After his death, wrote Royle, Ross’s influence continued as an inspiration to those rebels whom freethought inevitable attracted. He had built up an alternative school of thought to the official one of Bradlaugh, Besant, and Foote, and this had resulted in attracting old hands such as W. H. Johnson and young enthusiasts like C. R. Mackay, Ernest Pack, and Guy Aldred. “Even freethought, apparently, needed its guru,” Royle observed. {BDF; EU, Victor E. Neuburg; RAT; RE; RSR}

Rosseau, Leon (Died 1870) Rosseau was a French writer for The Rationalist of Geneva, writing under the name of L. Russelli. He wrote Female Followers of Jesus, founded The Horizon, contributed to La Libre Pensée, and was editor of l’Athée. {BDF}

Rossellini, Roberto (1906–1977) An Italian film director and producer, Rossellini made the key film of the neo-realist movement, “Open City,” in 1946. His “Miracle” (1948, in which Anna Magnani plays a peasant made pregnant by a shepherd she believes is St. Joseph, is said to illustrate that sacrilege was a stimulant for many Italian film makers, including Pier Paolo Pasolini. An affair Rossellini had with actress Ingrid Bergman caused an international scandal; later, he married her.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828–1882) An English poet and painter, son of Gabriele Rossetti and brother of Christina Rossetti (1830–1894, who worshiped at Christ Church, having been swept up into the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England), was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. John Ruskin championed the Pre-Raphaelites, buying many of Rossetti’s works. Rossetti was a master of the sonnet form, and his poetry is considered superior to his painting, which is sensuous and somewhat two-dimensional. In 1860 Rossetti married his model Elizabeth Siddal, whom he loved and had been more or less engaged to for nearly ten years. She, however, was melancholic and tubercular and died from an overdose of laudanum in 1862. In a fit of guilt, Rossetti buried with her a manuscript containing many of his poems. Some years later he permitted her body to be exhumed and the poems recovered. Wheeler cites Rossetti as a freethinker. Jan Marsh, in Christina Rossetti (1995), terms him “an irreligious libertine” and Christina “an Anglo-Catholic, and, among Anglo-Catholics, a Puritan” but “decidedly hostile to Roman Catholicism.” In a memoir prefixed to his Works, Rossetti wrote that he was “a decided skeptic . . . professed no religious faith, and practiced no regular religious observances.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Rossetti, William Michael (1829–1818) Rossetti was a critic, man of letters, and brother of Dante Rossetti. He edited Shelley’s work in 1870, with a memoir and numerous notes. Rossetti, a rationalist, became chairman of the Committee of the Shelley Society. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Rossmässler, Emil Adolf (1806–1867) Rossmässler was a German naturalist who had studied theology but abandoned it for science. Among his writings are Man in the Mirror of Nature (1849–1855) and The History of the Earth (1868). {BDF; RAT}

Rost, Jacob Leo (1921–1997) Rost, who was born in Canada, served in the United States Army during World War II. In Key West, he once won a first-prize contest for resembling Hemingway in his physical appearance. A producer of plays and movies in Hollywood, New York, and London, Rost arranged with humanist friends to scatter his ashes around a tree in Boca Raton that he had gazed at while working and thinking. {Humanists of the Palm Beaches Newsletter, October 1997)

Rostand, Edmond (1868–1918) Rostand was a French poet and dramatist who is known particularly for his Cyrano de Bergerac (1897). La Princesse lointaine (1895, The Princess Faraway) was written for Sarah Bernhardt. In 1900 Rostand wrote L’Aiglon, whose central figure is the pathetic duke of Reichstadt (Napoléon II), a role long played by Sarah Bernhardt. Maude Adams played his barnyard fable Chantecler (1910) in the United States. Jules Harasazti, a Catholic, wrote his biography in which, states McCabe, he “blushes to tell that he believed that the time for churches is over and ‘It is now only in the theater that souls can feel their wings.’ ” Rostand had adopted rationalism in his youth, and in mature life he held that it was the destiny of the theatre to supersede the Churches. “It is now only in the theatre that souls can feel their wings,” he believed. (See entry for Gerald Wendt, who cites Rostand as a humanist.) {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}

Rostand, Jean (Born 1894) Rostand, a French biologist, presided over the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966). In 1978 he wrote Pensées d’un biologiste. A biography, Jean Rostand, un homme du future (1988), was written by Andrée Tetry.

ROSWELL INCIDENT The first United States Air Force (USAF) Roswell Report in 1995 and a second one in 1997 exploded any myth that a UFO from outer space landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, according to Skeptical Inquirer (May-June 1998). That town’s residents are said generally to regard the hoopla as harmless fun, a sign of tourist gullibility, and source of welcome dollars. {See the 1997 work by Philip J. Klass, The Real Roswell Crashed Saucer Coverup)

Roth, Julius (19th Century) Roth was the German author of Religion and Priestcraft (1869) and Jesuitism (1871). {BDF}

Rothenbuecher, Adolph (19th Century) Rothenbuecher was the author of Handbook of Morals (1884), which was written from the secular standpoint. {BDF}

Rothman, Milton A. (1919– ) Rothman in A Physicist’s Guide to Skepticism (1988) prescribes intellectual ammunition as a way to cure, or at least diminish, prejudice and superstition. He also is author of The Science Gap: Dispelling the Myths and Understanding the Reality of Science (1984). In light of data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which has prompted a reassessment of metaphysics, Rothman holds that “Theories saying that the big bang was caused by God answer no realistic questions. They simply push the questions back to an earlier period and make the questions impossible to answer. A realistic theory such as the big bang theory is the only kind that permits questions to be answered in an empirical manner so that we may understand the answers if we are prepared.” Rothman, who notes a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the term secular humanism has suggested substituting the term realistic humanism. We live, he states, in a time when the magnet of illusion is stronger than the pull of realism. The USSR tried to indoctrinate several generations into the worldview of atheism, but Russian visitors to other countries are found rushing to see the nearest Russian Orthodox church. “The magnet,” he writes, “is the feeling of comfort experienced in any group setting. Whether it is a therapy group, an Alcoholics Anonymous-type group, or a church, the feeling is powerful. If secular or realistic humanism is going to extend its influence beyond a tiny minority of the population, it will have to provide a similar setting.” {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1993}

Roths, John (20th Century): For the first husband of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, see her entry.

Rothstein, Arnold M. (1923– ) Rothstein, an adjunct professor in the Division of Humanities at New College, Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, is author of The Jesus Idea (1993). His study examines Jesus as an idea (of salvation) which gradually was constructed and modified over a considerable span of time in the absence of historical evidence.

Rotteck, Karl Wenceslaus (1775–1840) Rotteck was a German historian and statesman. In 1819 he represented the Freiburg university in the States of Baden, where he was known for his liberal views. The government, however, disapproved of those views and forbade him to edit any paper and he was then deprived of his chair. His General History of the World (9 volumes, 1827) gave one of the broadest views of history which had then appeared, but Wheeler reports Rotteck’s death was hastened by constant governmental persecution. {BDF; RAT}

Rotten, Johnny: See entry for John Lydon.

Rouchard, Robert (20th Century) Rouchard is a North Hollywood, California, freethinker who has written for Freethought Perspective (June 1999). Roumain, Jacques (20th Century) A Haitian socialist who wrote about Négritude, Roumain referred to his outlook as being that of humanism.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques (1712–1778) An author, political theorist, and philosopher, Rousseau was a controversial figure in his time. One of his books, Emile (1762), was burned in Paris, and later Rousseau himself was burned in effigy in his native Switzerland by Geneva by ecclesiastics. Although Voltaire said he resembled a philosopher “as a monkey resembles a man,” the anti-intellectual Rousseau did advocate a better life for humanity and a more democratic organization of society: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in irons!” Humanists, he held, need to include human emotion in their outlooks. Meanwhile, he lamented that “The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.” His Social Contract (1762) is a notable document concerning human rights in a society which contains unjustifiable inequalities. Émile made the Vatican’s index of prohibited books in 1762, Du contract social, ou principes du droit politique in 1766, and three other of his works from 1766 to 1806: Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont Archevêque de Paris; Lettres écrites de la montagne; and Julie ou la nouvelle Héloise, lettres de deux amans, habitans d’une petite ville au pied des Alpes. Pope Clement XVIII fulminated against Emile. That work contained his “Confession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” in which the supernatural element in Christianity are discarded. In his Confessions (1781), the great romantic described how he enjoyed being spanked by Mlle. Goton, as well as masturbating while fantasizing over the spankings meted out by his foster mother; told of having des ménages à trois; wrote of flashing his buttocks in dark alleys to the horrified delight of a number of spankingly innocent maidens; and philosophized about a malformed nipple on Mlle. Zulietta, one of the prostitutes he employed and whom, up to this conclusive point, he had considered absolutely perfect. Rationalists everywhere welcomed Rousseau’s statement, “As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.” And he was a favorite of revolutionaries. According to Mallet du Pan, Rousseau was the great fomenter of the Revolution: “He had a hundred times more readers than Voltaire in the middle and lower classes. . . . No one has more openly attacked the right of property in declaring it a usurpation. . . . It is he alone who has inoculated the French with the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, and with its most extreme consequences.” The critic also gives credit to freethinkers Diderot and Condorcet. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Rousseau as one who seems to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. Rousseau believed in life after death and immortality. Of this, Bertrand Russell has remarked that Rousseau’s hope for an afterlife was based upon “the heart” rather than upon reason: “In Rousseau’s environment, reason, as represented by Voltaire, was opposed to religion, therefore away with reason! There is no law of nature guaranteeing that mankind should be happy. Everybody can see that this is true of our life here on earth, but by a curious twist, our very sufferings in this life are made into an argument for a better life hereafter. We should not employ such an argument in any other connection. If you had bought ten dozen eggs from a man, and the first dozen were all rotten, you would not infer that the remaining nine dozen must be of surpassing excellence; yet this is the kind of reasoning that ‘the heart’ encourages as a consolation for our sufferings here below.” Russell also observed Pythagoras and Orphic religion had tainted the views of Plato and later the Christian theologians and, “from them, in a new form, to Rousseau and the romantics and the myriad purveyors of nonsense who flourish wherever men and women are tired of the truth.” Russell countered that a powerful antidote to such nonsense, which hardly existed in earlier times, is science. In 1778, learning that Rousseau was living in poverty in Paris and trying to finish his last book, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, René-Louis de Giradin invited him as well as his companion, Thérèse Le Vasseur, to live on his 2,500-acre estate at Ermenonville, north of Paris. They were given a cottage in exchange for music lessons (Rameau snubbed Rousseau’s musicianship, saying Rousseau was a musician of little talent but great influence), and Rousseau was often seen sitting on a rustic bench, dispensing his wisdom to the children of the unworldly Marquis de Giradin. He also entertained intellectuals who came to pay him honor. Upon Rousseau’s death, a midnight burial was arranged and a white marble tomb was constructed. Later, the body was transferred to the Panthéon in Paris. {BDF; CE; CL; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; ER; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}

Rousseau, Rita (20th Century) Rousseau, who belongs to the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois, wrote “Bicultural Marriage” in World (March-April 1999) about her and others’ marriages with people of other backgrounds.

Rousseau, Wyman (20th Century) At the time of his graduation from New Canaan High School in Connecticut, Rousseau refused to attend the Baccalaureate service, leading his English teacher to predict accurately that his thoughtful student would likely succeed as a liberal minister. In 1994, the Rev. Wyman Rousseau was honored by the Piedmont, North Carolina, Unitarian Universalist Church in celebration of his twenty-five years of service to the denomination.

Rout, Ettie Annie: See entry for Ettie Annie Rout Hornibrook.

Rouvier, Pierre Maurice (1842–1911) Rouvier, a French statesman, was elected to the National Assembly in 1871 and strongly supported Gambetta. He held a number of offices. From 1902 to 1905, when he was Minister of Finance in the Combes Cabinet, the disestablishment of the Church was effected. Rouvier was Premier from 1905 to 1906. He passed to the Senate in 1903. An able financier, Rouvier took a prominent part in the anti-clerical opposition and in the various stages of the secularization of France. {RAT}

Roux, Edward (1903–1966) An ex-Communist who was one of the founders of the Liberal Party, Roux was forced by the government to stop lecturing, writing, editing, and attending meetings. He formed the Humanist Association of Johannesburg, South Africa, editing its Rationalist. {FUK; TRI}

Rouzade, Leonie (19th Century) Rouzade was a French lecturer on freethought. She wrote several brochures and novels, notably Le Monde Renversé (1872) and Ci et Ca, Ca et La, ideas upon moral philosophy and social progress. She also wrote for Malon’s Revue Socialiste and was one of the editors of Les Droits des Femmes. {BDF}

Rowen, Margaret W. (Died in the 1940s): See Martin Gardner’s “The Incredible Flimflams of Margaret Rowen: Seventh-day Adventists and the Second Coming,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1996.

Rowland, Anne (20th Century) Rowland, a West Redding, Connecticut, artist, in a 1991 “Dictu Santificare” show at the Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington, used her talent as an artist “to sanctify by saying.” Central to her work are issues surrounding religious faith in representation, the relationship between representation and claims made about it, and the conflict between the contemporary understanding of the physical world and elements of Christian doctrine. Building on Voltaire’s quip, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” she painted the God people have invented: a wise, old, masculine, bearded being. But she reasoned that if we assign a gender to God, we must accept the deity as a sexual being, with all the ramifications that entails. Thus, she painted what other artists have omitted: “God’s Penis,” “God’s Skin,” “God’s Brain,” “God’s Skeleton, “Jesus When He Was Just An Embryo,” “Mary Magdalene’s Hair,” “Jesus’s Penis,” and a number of other works. Non-believers are both amused and inspired by Rowland’s verve, irony, and humor as shown in her postmodern art. (See entry for Christ’s Penis.)

Rowland, Peter (20th Century) Rowland, a retired chemist, made a discovery in the field of crystallography which became known as the “Rowland Transformation.” At one stage in his career, he worked for an International Project on Nuclear Safety. As to why people believe in God, Rowland has written they do so for several reasons: (a) the God-Parent effect—an “imprinting” occurs in the young and then continues in various species; e.g., wolves as well as dogs learn at an early age about a pecking order, and the pack and its leader are their gods; similarly, children who learn how they were fathered and how their fathers were fathered assume irrationally that all humans have been fathered by some original father; (b) tribal cohesion—humanity evolved as a tribal animal, and there is a pecking order and hierarchy; e.g., the British monarch is still—symbolically at least—the “anointed of God”; and the instinct to worship a line of command and carry that right up to a god-head clearly has survival value, giving the tribe cohesion; (c) survival instinct—children do not believe they will ever die, and a belief in immortality helps reinforce this self-image as the stuff of which dreams are made; (d) and dreams—in past ages, dreams appeared to support the idea of the human spirit with its tribal God-Parent imagery; e.g., we dream of the dead so they must still be alive somewhere; however, this is contrary to the evidence from Electro-encephalography, Rapid Eye Movement sleep studies and brain scanning techniques such as Magnetic Resonance and Positron Emission Tomography that dreams have a physico-chemical basis. “Religion,” Rowland concludes, “is a genetic disease.” {Peter Rowland, New Humanist, August 1995}

Rowlandson, Mary (White) (c. 1635–c. 1678) Rowlandson, wife of a Congregational minister, was abducted along with her two children by the Indians during King Philip’s War. She wrote The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed; Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. A popular example of 17th-century American prose, it became America’s first international best seller and described the dangers endured by settlers, their contempt for the non-Christian Indians, and the importance of a devout dependence upon the Bible during enforced captivities. In the work she wrote of her having been guilty of pride, which is why God apparently put her through such misery and took her baby’s life and separated her from her elder child. “I have seen the extreme vanity of the world,” she confessed in a style still considered typical of how a Christian should respond to adversity.

Rowley, Henry (Born 1855) Rowley spoke on behalf of freethought in various English communities, and as a young man became friends of G. J. Holyoake, Lloyd Jones, E. O. Greening, E. V. Neale, and Benjamin Jones. When he arrived in Brooklyn in 1888, Rowley joined the Brooklyn Philosophical Society and was its secretary and president. Rowley was a materialist whose favorite philosopher was Spinoza, his favorite poet Shelley. {PUT}

Rowland, Raymond (20th Century) A freethinker, Rowland was chairman of the League Against Cruel Sports, which he formed in England in 1924. {TRI}

Rowse, A(lfred) L(eslie) (1903–1997) Rowse was a poet, biographer, and Tudor historian who wrote some ninety books. In his several works about Shakespeare (1963, 1973, and 1977), he argued that Emilia Bassano Lanier, daughter of an Italian court musician, was the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. He also argued that Shakespeare was “a strongly sexed heterosexual” and a man “more than a little interested in women—for an Englishman,” denying that any of the sonnets were written for a male lover. Rowse himself was homosexual. His 1942 memoir, A Cornish Childhood, was a best seller and made him a bona fide scholar celebrity. Rowse is not known to have been a theist nor an active member of any organized religion. His not having been accorded any honors by the Crown until he was ninety, at which time he was made a Companion of Honor, has been ascribed to Isaiah Berlin, who was the Crown’s chief but unofficial adviser on academic honors and who had negative views about him. {OEL, Paul Johnson, The New York Times, 12 November 1997}

Roy, Arundhati (20th Century) Roy wrote The God of Small Things (1998), leading London Observer Service reporter Kate Kellaway to ask if she thought that there is a god overseeing his life. “No,” he responded. I am just like an animal. I have no religion.” So when you die, that’s it? “Yes . . . something even before you die, that’s it.” {CA; E; Raleigh News and Observer 29 July 1998}

Roy, Ellen Gottschalk (1904–1961) The second wife of M. N. Roy, Ellen Roy—a German by birth—was one of the leaders in India of a radical or secular humanism. She wrote Radical Democracy and, with Sib Narayan Ray, In Man’s Own Image. On a 1955 visit to New York City, she was entertained by New York University Professor George Axtelle, spoke of her editorship of the weekly The Radical Humanist, and confided that she regretted having been unable to have voted for Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party nominee for President, whom she admired for his philosophic outlook. Roy was the one who broke a story about the Communist (Chinese) invasion and was murdered soon afterwards. At one time the Communists were an important radical force in the country, and some suspected she had been murdered by them. However, a police investigation ruled that she was murdered by a common thief attracted by her artificial jewelry.

Roy, Evelyn Trent (1892-1970) The first wife of M. N. Roy, Evelyn Roy was a Stanford Uniersity graduate who worked in the international Communist movement and in 1922 was a founding member of the Indian Communist Party in exile (in Tashkent). With M. N. Roy, she wrote One Year of Non-Cooperation and The Communist Manifesto. She was divorced from him in 1927.

Roy, Joseph (19th Century) Roy was the French translator of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1864) and Religion, Death, Immortality (1866). He also has translated Marx’s Capital. {BDF}

Roy, M(anabendra) N(ath) (1887–1954) Norwegian philosopher Finngeir Hiorth calls Roy one of India’s best-known atheists, along with Gora, Periyar, and A. B. Shaw. Roy founded the Communist Party of India and was its principal theorist and inspirer during the 1920s. Later, he broke with the communists and in 1937 started the journal, Independent India. In 1940 he founded the Radical Democratic Party, which was intended as an alternative, among others, to the Communists. In the 1950s, he was a correspondent (India) for The Humanist, and he edited in India the Radical Humanist. Also, he was on the first Board of Directors in 1952 of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, addressing the group at their initial Congress in Amsterdam. Among his many books, all published by the Renaissance Press, are Radical Democracy, New Humanism, Science and Philosophy, Beyond Communism (1987), and Reason, Romanticism and Revolution (1989). Dr. Innaiah Narisetti, the author of “Unbelief in India” in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief, has translated into Telugu several of Roy’s works. In 1992, Innaiah, who was teaching at the Dr. Ambedkar Open University, wrote to the present author about Roy, whose original name was Narendranath Bhattacharya: India missed the Renaissance movement during British rule. When the nationalist spirit was at its peak, the fundamentalist revivalism swept the minds of intellectuals. At that juncture M. N. Roy raised the Renaissance slogan in 1938, but it went unheard. Later, after independence, he launched the Renaissance movement for the attainment of a rational and humanist society. His attempt was against the religious flow, and he had hard times swimming against the current. Roy trained few intellectuals to further the cause of rationalism in India, dying in 1955, but seeds of his thought are slowly but firmly growing in India. The Indian constitution has incorporated the need for scientific temper as a fundamental duty of the citizens. M. N. Roy started his youth as a national-terrorist against Britishers, and in his attempt to acquire German arms he landed in the United States of America in 1916. There, he met Evelyn Trent at Stanford University, who helped transform him from a nationalist to an internationalist. The two married in New York in 1917, lived in New York’s Greenwich Village for a time, but eventually were forced to flee to Mexico. There, they played a historical role and were invited to Moscow for the Second International Communist Congress. While working with Lenin, both Roys trained young communists for Asian revolution and also established an emigré Indian Communist Party. In 1926 and 1927, Stalin sent him to China to help advise the movement there. Later, Roy differed with the Russian leaders, resenting their bossism. While working with Brandleir, he was expelled from the party. Returning to India, he was arrested by the British rulers and jailed for six years. During that time, he studied and developed his ideas and wrote volumes about rationalism. Thereafter, he never looked back and pleaded with others to adopt the scientific study of history. History, philosophy, and theology in India had been full of myths and stories, and Roy believed such subjects should use the historical method of reasoning as their method. Indian society at that time was absorbed with religion, from birth to death. The very idea of secularism was alien to Hindus. Roy discussed the problem thoroughly, defining secularism as being based upon the separation of state and church. Roy’s stand ultimately led to non-religious society in public life. The Indian constitution incorporated secular ideas, which were never implemented inasmuch as the rulers continued to be afraid of the nation’s fundamentalists. Religious codes have yet to be replaced with uniform civil codes. Ambedkar, the depressed class leader who once studied at Columbia University and who was an ardent admirer of Roy’s ideas, fought in vain for a uniform civil code. Roy went through the irrational politics of parties and decided that politics are possible without such parties. He therefore abolished his own Radical Democratic Party and in 1948 commenced India’s humanist movement. Erich Fromm’s The Sane Society (1955) recommended Roy’s Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution in order to understand the European renaissance. In that book, Roy developed a philosophy which was scientific and which was the first of its kind in India inasmuch as he used the scientific method as his tool. Roy’s rationalism, scientific to the core, inspired certain intellectuals to study philosophy, theology, history, and sociology using rationalism and the scientific method. Laxman Sastri Joshi, for example, studied Indian philosophy and produced volumes using such a rationalist approach. Similarly, Shib Narayan Ray wrote on Indian literature. V. M. Tarkunde developed thoughts on secularism, civil liberties, and human rights. Gora, the atheist, conducted a movement against irrational theology, acknowledging his indebtedness to Roy’s thoughts but facing many hardships. In addition to writing several books, Roy also edited journals such as The Humanist Way, The Radical Humanist, and Independent India. His articles found enthusiastic readers among the young. Placing man in the center of his New Humanism, he developed a value system without religion, giving the utmost importance to freedom and saying that other values flow from freedom. A person need not be afraid of supernatural forces, he taught, because they are creations of man. Humans can be rational and cooperative as well as moral in a natural way, without benefit of the divine. He derived his premises on the basis of the physical and the biological sciences. In addition, he tried to connect law with man’s rationality. Although the late A. B. Shah did not agree with Roy’s logic, he accepted the essential nature of man as being rationally based. In India, Roy’s attempts to build a philosophical system along scientific lines represented a first, and his general outlook is gaining a gradual acceptance in academic circles. He evolved twenty-two theses as the basic principles of his Integral Humanism, saying that as the scientific progress takes place philosophy must remain subject to scientific scrutiny and that principles which cannot stand the test should be discarded rather than retained. He disapproved of ‘ultimate truths’ and tried to reconcile determinism with the new quantum theory. The laws of probability, he felt, yield results which are proof for causality in the broad sense. But his writing, between 1931 and 1936, has not been updated and in light of new findings deserves to be edited.

“In his last days,” continued Narisetti, Roy “was associated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, being its vice president from the IHEU’s inception. He laid firm foundations in his lifetime for humanist, rationalist, secularist, and atheist movements in India, training hundreds of persons in study camps. Although these movements are still weak, they have been built on solid philosophic grounds and most surely will one day have a bright future.” (See entry for Ramendra.) {FUK; HNS; HNS2; WAS, 1992}

Royall, Anne Newport (1769–1854) Royall was a contentious freethinker, according to a biography, Anne Royall’s U.S.A., by Bessie Rowland James. She wrote Sketches of History (1826), followed by The Black Book, which was about “the black deeds of evil doers,” resulting in one newspaper calling her “a poor, crazy vagrant.” She piqued quite a few different individuals, as pointed out by Kansas freethought editor Fred Whitehead. In Saratoga Springs, New York, where she stayed in the same Saratoga Springs boarding house as Theodore Dwight, a newspaper editor, James noted, “At every meal while Dwight said grace Anne muttered complaints, such as ‘Our meals grow cold under these prayers of hypocrisy.’ The diners tittered. . . . She called attention to the ‘venom in his eye’ and to his ‘austere countenance heavily charged with puritanical frigidness.’ ”

• She opposed missionaries: “Under the name of foreign missions, home missions, Bible societies, children’s societies, rag-bag societies, and Sunday School societies, the missionaries have laid the whole country under tribute. This is done under the pretense of spreading the Gospel. The gospel has nothing to do with it. . . . Either the country must put down these men, or they will put down the country. Their object and their interest is to plunge mankind into ignorance, to make him a bigot, a fanatic, a hypocrite, a heathen, to hate every sect but his own, to shut his eyes against the truth, harden his heart against the distress of his fellowman, and purchase heaven with money.”

• She opposed the campaign to stop the Sunday mails: “The Third Presbyterian Church [in Philadelphia] even went an annoying step farther. On the Sabbath a chain was stretched across the street in front to prevent traffic from passing.” [This subsequently was forbidden by law.]

• In Burlington, Vermont, a storekeeper named Samuel Hickok threw her down the front steps into snow, resulting in “a contusion, a dislocated ankle, a fracture of the larger bone of the leg, a smaller bone broken above the ankle, knee badly sprained, and the flesh much bruised.”

• She once declared that she wanted to “drill an army of women and shoot every Presbyterian I can find!” Meanwhile, Freemasons were generally said to have welcomed and supported her.

• When the Pennsylvania Senate and House honored her with a banquet, she noted the “Hon. Logan who is keen for uniting Church and State; he openly avows it and is a warm friend of Dr. Ezra Stiles Ely. May both their heads be severed before we see the day.” She then gave a toast: “Blue-skins: May all their throats be cut!”

• In Washington, children of Christian fanatics broke her windows, and the parents carried “loads of tracts to my door, crying out, ‘Who wants to go to heaven? Here is your passport.’ ” The “commander-in-chief” who had led the nocturnal vigil, John Coyle Sr., reported Mrs. Royall called him a “d—d [damned] old bald headed son of a b—h [bitch].” Not once, but three times! Meanwhile, “Holy mobs of boys (black and white)” arrived “to shower the house with stones, yell, and blow horns.” Charged with disturbing the peace, she was convicted and fined $50., which was paid by two newspaper reporters, who wanted to defend the principle of freedom of the press.

• To a mob of students at the “celebrated University of Vagabonds,” her description of the University of Virginia, she decided, “The Presbyterians have the whole of Virginia under their thumbs.”

• In Washington, D.C., she started a newspaper called Paul Pry. When finally closing it she claimed her editorials had been the first to proclaim the abandonment of reform by General Jackson, the first to challenge the Post Office loans and the Post Office frauds, the first to challenge the Indian land frauds of the great land companies, and the first to put a stop to the enormous swindling of a knot of “God’s people, as they impiously call themselves.” She then started The Huntress, which favored states rights in opposition to the encroachments of the general government. She attacked celebrations of the landing at Plymouth Rock, pointing out the slaughter of the Pequot Indians and the torture of their people during witch-hunts.

In 1854, she died and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in a grave that remained unmarked until 1914, when a small monument was erected. Except for the James biography and publicizing of Mrs. Royall by Fred Whitehead, few are aware of her place in freethought history. {Alice S. Maxwell and Marion B. Dunlevy, Virago—The Story of Anne Newport Royall (1769–1854) [1985]; WWS}

Royce, Josiah (1855–1916) A professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Royce has been described as a theist, a pantheist, and a Christian. Some hold that he believed in immortality, but in the Hibbert Journal (1907) he wrote, “I pretend to no knowledge about my future fortunes.” McCabe thinks it incorrect to class Royce as a Christian thinker, but Royce is regarded as a leading metaphysician, an idealist, a believer that reality is the life of an absolute mind. We know truth beyond ourselves, he held, because we are a part of the logos, or world-mind. {CE; RAT; RE}

Royer, Cleménce Auguste (1830–1902) Royer, born of a Catholic royalist family, was a French author. In Switzerland she opened at Lausanne a course of logic and philosophy for women. In 1860 she shared with Proudhon in a prize competition on the subject of taxation. In 1862 she translated Darwin’s Origin of Species, including a bold preface and notes. Her philosophical romance The Twins of Hells was inderdicted in France. In The Origin of Man and of Societies (1869) she states a scientific view of human evolution and challenges the Christian creed. Her many other books and articles in liberal journals evidenced her freethought. {BDF; RAT}

Royle, Edward (20th Century) Royle wrote The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh (1976). Called by Nicolas Walter “the best-known historian of the freethought movement,” Royle has a chapter on Secularism, Rationalism, Positivism, and Ethicism in A History of Religion in Britain, edited by Sheridan Gilley. He also wrote Radical Politics 1790–1900; Religion and Unbelief (1971); Victorian Infidels (1974); and Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans (1980). {Freethought History #18, 1996, contains Fred Whitehead’s evaluation of Royle’s work.}

Rubáiyát (11th Century) Edward FitzGerald in 1859 translated the Persian poet Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát, which contains a particularly humanistic sentiment:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness – Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! (See entry for Omar Khayyam.)

RUBBISH Rubbish, n. Worthless matter, such as the religions, philosophies, literatures, arts, and sciences of the tribes infesting the regions lying due south from Boreaplas. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Rubenstein, Jack C. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Rubenstein was on the executive committee of the American Ethical Union. {HM2}

Ruble, Leland W. (20th Century) Ruble edits Freethought Perspective (833 Orchard St., Toledo, Ohio 43609), a monthly bulletin “dedicated to a discussion of freethought and other related subjects of interests to skeptics, atheists, deists, agnostics, humanists, and freethinkers.

Rudis-Jicinsky, J. (20th Century) Rudis-Jicinsky wrote Historical Sketch of the Bohemian Freethought in the United States (191–?). {GS}

Rudnick, Paul (20th Century) Rudnick is a dramatist who has helped topple several taboos. “Jeffrey” was a comedy about AIDS. His movie script for “In & Out” had actor Tom Selleck kissing actor Kevin Kline, both heterosexuals. “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” in 1998 was described as “a queering of the Bible—a sort of Queen James version—beginning with Adam and Steve in the Garden of Eden, replacing Cain and Abel with lesbians Jane and Mabel. A gay man himself, Rudnick is not put off by ministers who preach against homosexuality, adding, “I don’t think gay people should ever allow themselves to be suckered into those kinds of bogus debates with a minister who has a flock of three and a half people.” They have, however, helped inspire him by some of their prudish arguments:

I thought, What if God did make Adam and Steve? But beyond just the idea of a gay take on the Bible, I wanted to explore everyone’s attitude toward God nowadays. In an odd way, that has become the final taboo. Everyone’s talking about anal sex and their lubricant of choice, but if you ask someone if they believe in God, it actually will make them uncomfortable.

Asked if he was ever bar mitzvahed, Rudnick told Out (December 1998) reporter Steven Drukman,

You bet I was. I learned Hebrew phonetically, from a record that was, like, The Greatest Hits of Rabbi Shlomo, and I had no idea what I was saying. I could have been chanting “Kill the Jews!” and would not have known. I was the first child at my temple to be bar mitzvahed in sportswear—a rust-colored double-breasted blazer and coordinated brown slacks. When I walked down the aisle, I heard statues crumble and Rabbi Schneerson weep.

When asked if he believed in God, Rudnick replied,

I think of myself as an atheist who reads his horoscope—a superstitious atheist. But then on some level, God is the largest superstition of all time.

Asked the same by another interviewer, Stephen Holt (LGNY, 6 May 1999), Rudnick replied,

I believe in Comedy. I believe in Theater. I believe in transcendent experiences. I think that working on a play and watching a comedy on a hot night, that is what strikes me as deeply spiritual and as possessing a higher level of pleasure than just ice cream . . . though I don’t mean to ice-cream bash in any way.

Ruedt, P. A. (Born 1844) Ruedt was a German lecturer known as the “apostle of unbelief.” With Lassalle he started Die Waffe and was imprisoned in 1870 for participation in social democratic agitation. Ruedt wrote widely on the subject of freethought. {BDF}

Ruelle, Charles Claude (19th Century) Ruelle was a French writer, the author of The History of Christianity (1866) and La Schmita (1869). {BDF}

Ruether, Rosemary Radford (20th Century) Ruether edited Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (1974). She wrote Womanguides (1996).

Ruge, Arnold (1802–1880) A German reformer and member of the Tugenbund, Ruge was imprisoned for six years. After his liberation, he became professor at Halle and, with Echtermeyer, founded the Hallische Jahrbücher (1838), which opposed church and state. Elected to the Frankfort Assembly, he sat on the extreme left. Compelled to flee because of his viewpoints, he went to England, where he wrote New Germany and translated Buckle’s History of Civilisation. Ruge’s expectation was that “theoretical Humanism” would lead to “practical Humanism,” that as soon as [the] meaning of Christianism is discovered, the whole Christian heaven falls to the earth, and a new religion is originated, the religion of Humanism.” He advocated “the transcendence of Patriotism in Humanism.” {BDF; RAT}

Ruggieri, Cosmo (Died 1615) Ruggieri was a Florentine philosopher and astrologer who was patronized by Catherine de Medicis. He published Almanachs in 1604, then issued it annually. At the time of his death in Paris, Ruggieri declared himself an atheist and, in consequence, his corpse was denied a Christian burial, and the people dragged his body through the mud. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Ruiz, Angel (20th Century) Ruiz, who is a professor of mathematics at the Universidad de Costa Rica, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.

Ruja, Harry (1912– ) Ruja, a past chairman of the Bertrand Russell Society, is on the board of directors of that group. He is generally considered to be one of the leading Russell scholars. In 1933, Ruja was graduated with honors from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he majored in philosophy. In 1934, he received his M.A. from the University of Chicago and in 1936 his Ph. D. from Princeton University. Ruja’s encounter with Russell began in 1930 when assigned to read The Free Man’s Worship, and in 1939, after sitting in on a session of Russell’s graduate seminar at the University of Chicago, he interviewed Russell. In addition to writing Psychology for Life (1955), Ruja edited Mortals and Others, Bertrand Russell’s American Essays (1975); and co-authored, with Kenneth Blackwell, two volumes entitled A Bibliography of Bertrand Russell. In 1984 Ruja received the Bertrand Russell Society’s Lifetime Service Award. In 1993, he received its award for his “distinguished contributions to Russell scholarship, devotion to the ideal of rationality, and his inspirational fortitude.” (See Ruja’s “Bertrand Russell’s Life in Pictures” in Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Winter 1995-1996.)

Rule, Jane (20th Century) Rule is a writer, a lesbian, and an atheist, according to Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death, and the Things that Matter (1996). {CA}

RUMOR • Rumor, n. A favorite weapon of the assassins of character. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Rumpf, Johann Wilhelm (19th Century) Rumpf was the Swiss author of Church, Faith, and Progress and a critical The Bible and Christ (1858). In Geneva, Rumpf edited Das Freire Wort (1856). {BDF}

Rumi, Jalaluddin: See entry for Dervish.

Runyon, G. Vincent (20th Century) Runyon, along with D. M. Bennett and James Hervey Johnson, is a subject of Freethought By Three Men. Formerly a Methodist minister, Runyon became an atheist, which he described in Why I Left the Ministry and Became An Atheist (1961). His seminary, he wrote, had educated him to be a quack, which he defined:

A quack in short is one who pretends to have an inside wire or track. No priest, rabbi, minister, or bishop or cardinal or pope has inside knowledge about heaven, hell, and god, but to hear me exhort you would have thought that I had influence with God. This is how all ministers sound when they pray (bray) with that old paranoia voice of divine authority, which so many clergymen quickly develop, while thundering and reechoing their god’s fiendish and diabolical warnings of future punishment. Pause and listen some Sunday to these circus freaks peddling their wares over the radio, and please notice at the same time how subtly yet how brazenly they beg for gold to carry on their quackery. {FUS}

Rupp, Julius (Born 1809) A German reformer, Rupp studied philosophy and theology, becoming a minister in 1842. Upon protesting the creeds, he became leader of the free religious movement in East Prussia. {BDF}

Rusden, Henry Keylock (19th Century) Rusden was an Australian atheist, rationalist, accountant, and author. Son of a clergyman, he became a freethinker and founded in 1867 the Eclectic Association. From 1866 onwards, he issued a series of pamphlets assailing Christianity as an affront to reason and an obstacle to progress. His books—Paul in 1871 and The Person, Character, and Teaching of Jesus in 1872—were notable for their unremitting dogmatism, Darwinian social evolution, and Spencerian individualism. Rusden was a member of the Rationalist Society of Victoria, the Yorick Club, and the Cremation Society. {SWW}

Ruse, Michael (20th Century) Ruse, professor of philosophy and zoology at the University of Guelph in Canada, is author of Homosexuality: A Philosophical Inquiry (1990) and believes that “the war against prejudice can be won” but regrets that many who say they are believers in democracy do not believe that “a free society means letting people do what they want because they want to, and not because society approves.”

Rush, Benjamin (1745–1813) Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was involved in a scheme to remove George Washington as commander-in-chief. One of the leading physicians in America during his lifetime, Rush was an extreme advocate of bleeding as a cure for almost all diseases. But his controversial cure was shown during the 1793 yellow-fever epidemic in Philadelphia to have had a deleterious effect on the victims. He developed advanced theories for the treatment of mental disorder later in his career. A product of the Enlightenment, part of the intellectual milieu associated with Benjamin Franklin and others, Rush was one of the earliest American opponents of slavery. Formerly a Presbyterian and an Episcopalian, in 1790, much influenced by Elhanan Winchester, who advocated the doctrine of universal salvation, Rush helped establish the Universalist Church. (See entry for E. C. Vanderlaan.) {U; U&U; UU}

Rush, Reuben (Born 1868) When ten years old, Rush heard Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant, and he became a lifelong freethinker as a result. At the International Congress of Freethinkers, he spoke in the 1890s concerning the imperative need for making this world a better world than he had found it to be. {PUT}

Rushdie, (Ahmed) Salman (1947– ) From a strict Muslim viewpoint, Rushdie is a non-believer, which he does not deny. His Satanic Verses (1988) satirizes Muhammad and all his works (as well as satirizes British police, American Christians, Margaret Thatcher, and others). Rushdie, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, has not been overly successful arguing that fiction is not fact, and his religious outlook is questioned by many commentators. However, he did write the following in The Independent on Sunday (4 February 1990):

And I would like to say this: Life without God seems to believers to be an idiocy, pointless, beneath contempt. It does not seem so to non-believers. To accept that the world, here, is all there is; to go through it, towards and into death, without the consolations of religion seems, well, at least as courageous and rigorous to us as the espousal of faith seems to you. Secularism and its works deserve your respect, not your contempt. . . . To be an Indian of my generation was also to be convinced of the vital importance of Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a secular India. If what Indians call ‘communalism,’ sectarian religious politics, were to be allowed to take control of the policy, the results would be too horrifying to imagine. . . .

Some of his severest critics, non-Muslims, have been disappointed by the alleged retraction of some of his earlier views, which predictably failed to move the Muslim authorities. They hold that he should fight all forms of fundamentalism, difficult as his existence has become. In 1994, to mark the fifth anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie, an Iranian foundation increased its £1.4 million reward an unspecified amount for anyone who will kill him. In addition, the 15 Khordad [5 June] Foundation offered to foot the bill for any expenses incurred in executing Ayatollah Khomeini’s decree, who ruled that because of Rushdie’s blasphemy he must die. Undaunted, Rushdie in 1995 came out with The Moor’s Last Sigh, his first novel in seven years and one which tells of a tragic riff in 1492 when the Arab sultan Boabdil gives up his beloved Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella, which leads to a humiliation that puts an end to centuries of Moorish rule in Europe. Beneath the surface, the work protests the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) broke new ground, its postmodern theme being that the “ground” beneath humankind’s feet is constantly shifting, meanings are constantly changing, reality exists on several levels, and “the principle of uncertainty” rules. The work is surreal, telling as it does an Orpheus-like tale about Ormus Cama and a Eurydice-like Vina Apsara, a singer who is both a sex goddess and an icon of the celebrity age. In a Public Broadcasting System interview with David Frost, Rushdie replied, when asked if he believed in God, “I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.” In 1985 he had said similarly,

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith . . . and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. . . . From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. (For a freethinker’s view about Islam, see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim.) {CA; E; TYD} Rushdie, (Ahmed) Salman (19 Jun 1947 - )

		From a strict Muslim viewpoint, Rushdie is a non-believer, which the author does not deny. His Satanic Verses (1988) satirizes Muhammad and all his works (as well as satirizes British police, American Christians, Margaret Thatcher, and others). Rushdie, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, has not been overly successful arguing that fiction is not fact, and his religious outlook is questioned by many commentators. However, he did write the following in The Independent on Sunday (4 February 1990): 

And I would like to say this: Life without God seems to believers to be an idiocy, pointless, beneath contempt. It does not seem so to non-believers. To accept that the world, here, is all there is; to go through it, towards and into death, without the consolations of religion seems, well, at least as courageous and rigorous to us as the espousal of faith seems to you. Secularism and its works deserve your respect, not your contempt. . . . To be an Indian of my generation was also to be convinced of the vital importance of Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a secular India. If what Indians call ‘communalism,’ sectarian religious politics, were to be allowed to take control of the policy, the results would be too horrifying to imagine. . . .

Some of his severest critics, non-Muslims, have been disappointed by the alleged retraction of some of his earlier views, which predictably failed to move the Muslim authorities. They hold that he should fight all forms of fundamentalism, difficult as his existence has become. In 1994, to mark the fifth anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie, an Iranian foundation increased its £1.4 million reward an unspecified amount for anyone who will kill him. In addition, the 15 Khordad [5 June] Foundation offered to foot the bill for any expenses incurred in executing Ayatollah Khomeini’s decree, who ruled that because of Rushdie’s blasphemy he must die. Undaunted, Rushdie in 1995 came out with The Moor’s Last Sigh, his first novel in seven years and one which tells of a tragic riff in 1492 when the Arab sultan Boabdil gives up his beloved Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella, which leads to a humiliation that puts an end to centuries of Moorish rule in Europe. Beneath the surface, the work protests the rise of Hindu fundamentalism. The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) broke new ground, its postmodern theme being that the “ground” beneath humankind’s feet is constantly shifting, meanings are constantly changing, reality exists on several levels, and “the principle of uncertainty” rules. The work is surreal, telling as it does an Orpheus-like tale about Ormus Cama and a Eurydice-like Vina Apsara, a singer who is both a sex goddess and an icon of the celebrity age. In a Public Broadcasting System interview with David Frost, Rushdie replied, when asked if he believed in God, “I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.” In 1985 he had said similarly,

God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith . . . and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. . . . From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person. (For a freethinker’s view about Islam, see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not a Muslim.) {CA; E; TYD}

Rushton, Cecilie (20th Century) Rushton, a senior female district court judge in New Zealand, is author of “Realising Women’s Rights—The Constraints,” in The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (December 1993). She questions whether, inasmuch as New Zealand is a signatory to the 1979 United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, religionists may continue to impose their discriminatory practices in the name of religious freedom. She also opposes respecting practices of indigenous peoples when they are discriminatory against women. In the article she finds that “religion has not been kind to women. Ironically in Christian countries the most devout adherents of the faith are women. Women, ‘liberated’ from religion by Marxism, now flock back to the church.” The Talmud, she notes, “launches an all-out attack on women. The Testament of Reuben 5:1-2 sees women as intrinsically evil:

For women are evil. . . and since they have no power or strength over men, they use wiles by outward attractions, that they may drawn him to themselves. And whom they cannot bewitch by outward attractions, him they overcome by craft.

Jubilee 25:1 states:

Let the words of torah rather be destroyed by fire than imparted to women.

Other writings of Judaism similarly depict masculinity as normal and femininity as a deviation. Christianity similarly has an anti-female bias, particularly because of St. Paul’s teachings, and she cites numerous examples. Islam, which she estimates as having close to half a billion women adherents, is the most detrimental of the major religions to women. Although Mohammed was not misogynistic, the interpretation of Islamic writings have disadvantaged women not only in Saudi Arabia but in other countries, she claims. Separateness and veiling are practices which discourage feminism, and Surah 2 of the Qur’an states that “Your wives are as a tilth unto you, so approach your tilth when and how you will,” equating women with cultivated land and leading to masculine views that they have the right to impregnate their wives at will. “Custom, often inextricably mixed with religion,” she writes, “is again used to exclude women from decision-making roles and positions of influence. This is exemplified in many of the Pacific Island countries, although much of the genuine custom has been destroyed by missionaries and replaced by rules and mores imported from the narrower aspects of other cultures.” She describes how the Maori women in New Zealand are forbidden to speak at tribal meeting grounds, and even the television game shows exclude women as moderators for to do otherwise, the director of production at Television New Zealand has stated, “would mean a great break with tradition.”

Rusk, Ralph (Leslie) (1888–1962) Rusk, who taught literature at Columbia University, wrote Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925), The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (6 volumes, 1939), and The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1950). His own outlook in class lectures was that of a modified Emersonianism, except that Rusk was a naturalist, not a transcendentalist, in philosophy.

Ruskin, John (1819–1900) Ruskin, a distinguished English critic and social theorist, was the virtual dictator of artistic opinion in England during the mid-19th century. His first work, Modern Painters (1843–1860, 5 volumes) began as a defense of J. M. W. Turner and held that art is a “universal language” based on national and individual integrity and morality. He applied the idea to architecture in The Stones of Venice (1851–1853). He also attacked the ugliness and waste of modern industrial England, proposing social reforms, some of which—old-age pensions, nationalization of education, organization of labor—are now widely accepted. In 1870 Ruskin was appointed Slade Professor at Oxford, the first professor of art in England. “I know few Christians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms in their Father’s house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those mansions,” Ruskin declared. “Nor has the Church’s ardent ‘desire to depart, and be with Christ,’ ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on mourning for every person summoned to such departure.” In 1860 Ruskin told Augustus Hare that he “believed nothing.” In later years he called himself “a Christian Catholic” (as distinct from the pagan Roman Catholics, but he included Huxley). Although he never went to church, he said he took “the Lord’s Supper.” According to his biographer, Sir E. Z. Cook, what Ruskin meant was that he dined at his own table. According to McCabe, Ruskin was never a Christian and, in fact, lost his mental balance occasionally in later years. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Russel, Lucy Channing (19th Century) In 1819 Russel, Catherine Sedgwick, and other transplanted New Englanders, founded the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City. In 1994, that church celebrated its 175th year. Russel’s brother was William Ellery Channing.

RUSSELL: THE JOURNAL OF THE BERTRAND RUSSELL ARCHIVES

	Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives is published by McMaster University Press twice a year, in the summer and the winter. The editor is Kenneth Blackwell, whose e-mail is <blackwk@mcmaster.ca>. The journal has an extensive homepage on the Web: <bookstore.services.mcmaster.ca/mupress/journals/russell/journal.htm>.

Russell, Bertrand (Arthur) (William) [3rd Earl] (1872–1970) Lord Russell was a mathematician, philosopher, and social critic. In 1950 he won the Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1950), inasmuch as there is no prize for philosophy, leading some critics to joke that the judges must never have read his Collected Stories. Principia Mathematica (1903), which he co-wrote with Alfred North Whitehead, is generally considered the major work on the subject of mathematical logic. “I personally cannot see,” Paul Edwards has wittily remarked, “how Principia Mathematica could ever have been completed if Russell and Whitehead had not started on it long before they were born.” In 1905, Russell became a president of the prestigious Rationalist Press Association. His election to the Royal Society particularly pleased him, as did his becoming one of the dozen distinguished British personalities who received the Order of Merit. In his later years, he invariably added FRS and OM to his letterheads. Russell came from a distinguished family. One of his ancestors had died on the scaffold, accused of having plotted the assassination of Charles II and his brother, the future James II. His grandfather, Lord John Russell, was twice prime minister (1846–1852; 1865–1866) and author of the Reform Bill of 1832. His father (John, Viscount Amberley) was a Liberal, but both his grandfather and father had died by the time he was six, so it is his grandmother who was the major adult influence in his life. His life was a model of liberalism, one in which he fought for such causes as those of women’s suffrage, birth control information for the poor, free trade, defense of the civil rights of conscientious objectors, eliminating the scourge of imperialistic war, and combating governmental tyranny. In his three-volume Autobiography (1967–1969), Russell wrote that as a boy he rejected personal immortality, that after reading John Stuart Mill he abandoned the first-cause argument and with it all belief in God. “I see no reason whatsoever to believe in immortality,” he wrote to Lord Milford (19 May 1952). “I think that a person is an organization like a cricket club and that one might just as well expect a cricket club to go to heaven when it is dissolved as expect the same thing about oneself.” In the same letter, he commented about his use of his title: “Like Lord Trent I avoid it for trade purposes as my old name has a certain monetary value. Except for trade purposes, I use my title.” In the Hibbert Journal (October, 1912), Russell used the word “God” as his concept of a sort of world-soul, but thereafter he regretted using the term and discarded all religious language from then on. Russell wrote A History of Western Philosophy (1945), one of his best-known works. His dissident moral and religious views, besides being found in Why I Am Not A Christian (1927), are contained in The Analysis of Mind (1921), The Analysis of Matter (1927), Skeptical Essays (1928), Marriage and Morals (1928), and “Greek Exercises” in The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1. Not accepting that Jesus was the most perfect of men, he wrote, “I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put the Buddha and Socrates above him in those respects.” In “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?”, he stated in 1930, “My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.” For him, “The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free man. . . . A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.” In a 1947 broadcast, “The Faith of a Rationalist,” he decried “hatred of Jews, oppression of Negroes, contempt for all who are not white,” concluding that it is important that “no supernatural reasons are needed to make men kind and to prove that only through kindness can the human race achieve happiness.” In his essay, “The Free Man’s Worship,” he wrote: “Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.” For Russell, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” Russell’s first marriage in 1894 to an American Quaker friend of Walt Whitman, Alys Pearsall Smith, was a simple London Quaker meeting, “without being congratulated by a host of silly fools who don’t think in their hearts that we are to be congratulated.” None of the Russells attended, and Lady Russell in a cool letter announced she had disinherited him. Although divorced in 1921, and despite his three other marriages, Alys arranged his 78th birthday party in 1950 and wrote him, “I am utterly devoted to thee, and have been for over 50 years.” Russell’s marriage to Ottoline Morrell had been expected to bring him some degree of sexual happiness, for he told friends of his having been disappointed sexually with Alys Pearsall Smith. Russell later wrote that his pyorrhea and bad breath were in part responsible for their breakup. With Ottoline, he tore up “dusty old growths in my mind” and lovingly refused to let her “hide under shady sentimental willow trees,” their little problem being that she believed in God and he did not. At one time, according to Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993) by Miranda Seymour, she tried convincing Russell that God existed, and in his determination to explain their differences on the subject he started to write a book, The Religion of Contemplation. It was about reverential atheism, but when Wittgenstein told him the book was rubbish and its first chapters on the theory of knowledge were untenable, Russell tried to suppress the book. Ottoline, who found much she liked in both Wittgenstein and in Siegfried Sassoon, also discovered they were not interested in her sexuality, both being homosexual. She then became lovers with “Tiger” Gomme, who had been working on plinths in the garden at a time when she and Russell were not on speaking terms. (Seymour speculates that D. H. Lawrence may have had her in mind when he wrote Lady Chatterley.) His belief in open marriage led him to Lady Constance Malleson, whose stage name was Colette O’Niel. Although they scarcely knew each other, he wrote, “The first time that I was ever in bed with her (we did not go to bed the first time we were lovers, as there was too much to say), we heard suddenly a shout of bestial triumph in the street. I leapt out of bed and saw a Zeppelin falling in flames.” The war, he found, had further distracted him, and in 1915 he recalled the moment: “The thought of brave men dying in agony was what caused the triumph in the street. Colette’s love was in that moment a refuge to me, not from cruelty itself, which was unescapable, but from the agonising pain of realising that that is what men are.” Russell later married Dora Black (1920) and became a father, following which he married Edith Finch, who had taught at Bryn Mawr (where his first wife, Alys, had been a cousin of one of its presidents). With Dora, he founded the Beacon Hill School, which was progressive in avoiding authoritarianism along with democratic in encouraging students’ individuality. Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Bertrand Russell, A Life (1933), states that his most enduring lovers were Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lady Constance Malleson but that he had slept with Miriam Brudno, Helen Dudley, Celeste Holden, Katherine Mansfield, and (probably) Barry Fox and T. S. Eliot’s wife, Vivienne. His multiple marriages and controversial views led to his being denied a teaching position at the City College of New York (CCNY), for he was challenged by a parent, the Episcopal bishop, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy as one who likely would undermine the “health and morals” of his students. In his later years, he was active for nuclear disarmament, using civil disobedience to draw attention to his campaigns. In 1967 he organized an international tribunal, with Jean-Paul Sartre as chairman, which tried the U.S. government on charges of participating in war crimes in Vietnam. The tribunal found the United States government guilty, and Russell regarded American foreign policy as a detriment to world peace. As his biographer, Alan Wood, has said, the world was never again the same once Russell had set the minds of men on the march. Moorehead, however, tells how Russell in 1960 was “Svengalied” by Ralph Schoenman, an American graduate student at the London school of Economics, who she describes made Russell into something of a puppet for his own causes. Schoenman was a left-wing graduate student at the London School of Economics, managed Russell’s affairs for eight years, wasted large amounts of money, destroyed a number of old friendships, and led to a decline in Russell’s reputation among many scholars. As for Russell’s ever being a Communist, he was not. In China he described himself as a “Marxist,” never a Communist, Royden Harrison has pointed out in Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives (Summer 1995). Nicholas Griffin, of McMaster University in Canada, has edited Russell’s letters, volume I (1992) of which contains tales of his “ferocious” longing for Lady Ottoline, thoughts to Santayana, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s devastating criticism of Russell’s theory of knowledge. T. S. Eliot, reviewing Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, remarked, “Mr. Russell supposes that he is not a Christian, because he is an Atheist. . . . As we become used to Atheism, we recognize that Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity. In fact, several varieties. There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism of our friend Mr. J. M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. Russell,” concluding that Russell’s book “is a curious, and a pathetic, document.” James Thrower, however, expresses the popular view in his Short History of Western Atheism (1971): “Russell’s atheism is classic, not to say monumental.” In 1951, when asked specifically about humanism, he wrote the present author:

You ask me whether I call myself a Scientific Humanist or a Naturalistic Humanist. I am not in the habit of giving myself labels, which I leave to others. I should not have any inclination to call myself humanist, as I think, on the whole, that the non-human part of the cosmos is much more interesting and satisfactory than the human part. But if anybody feels inclined to call me a Humanist, I shall not bring an action for libel.

In 1956, he added:

I do not object to your classifying me as a “naturalistic humanist,” though it is not a description I should ever think of calling myself. When I have to describe my own philosophy I call myself a “logical atomist.” I have read the material that you sent with your letter, but I have nothing to add except that my reason for not liking the word “humanist” is that I regard human beings as a trivial accident which would be regrettable if it were not so unimportant. 

(Antony Flew in A Dictionary of Philosophy,

noted that both Wittgenstein and Russell later 

abandoned the logical atomist label.)

As for belief, Russell wrote, “I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.” Critics have lamented certain of Russell’s views. In 1918, for example, he wrote to Ottoline Morrell, “I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where no one reads. Prison is horribly like that. Imagine if you knew you were a delicious book and some Jew millionaire bought you and bound you uniform with a lot of others.” Caroline Moorehead has pointed out that his opinions on Blacks were equally disagreeable. As for another minority, he had “little but contempt for homosexuals. . . . Like [D. H.] Lawrence, Russell came to dislike and disapprove of homosexuality: ‘Lawrence has the same feeling against sodomy as I have,’ he wrote to Ottoline in 1915. ‘You had nearly made me believe there is no great harm in it, but I have reverted; and all the examples I know confirm me in thinking it sterilizing.’ The examples were Strachey and Keynes; and they knew it.” Richard Rorty has written that Russell “is arguably the most influential philosopher to have written in English in this century,” adding that John Dewey and Thomas Kuhn are his only plausible rivals for that position. However, in light of Wittgenstein’s, Quine’s, and Sellars’s undermining of Russell’s logical atomism, Rorty has written that “historians are more likely to describe [Russell] not as the Galileo of his discipline, but as the founder of a relatively short-lived and provincial school of thought.” An indication that future critics will continue to find fault with Russell is found in a 1996 work by Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell, The Spirit of Solitude, 1872–1921, in which the author presents the sage as a sage but one who was disturbed, not merely egoistical and cold, was blind to others’ sufferings, and wore out his lovers with his obsessions. Monk’s second volume will take up Russell’s later life. In keeping with one of his statements, “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite,” a group of devotees publishes the Bertrand Russell Society Newsletter (3802 North Kenneth Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60641). They also meet annually, toasting “Bertie” with his favorite scotch, Red Hackles. In addition, Russell: The Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives is published twice a year by the McMaster University Library Press. The Russell Archives are at MacMaster in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The Bertrand Russell Society homepage is at <http://daniel.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs.html>. (See entry regarding T. S. Eliot’s criticism of Russell under D. H. Lawrence. Also, see entries for Logical Atomism, Marriage, and Alan Ryan. For articles by Paul Edwards, William P. Alston, and A. N. Prior, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7. See the Conrad Russell entry for information about Marjorie “Peter” Spence, Sir Bertrand’s third wife.) {CE; CL; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; EU, John L. McKenney; FUK; HAB; HNS2; JM; PA; RAT; RE; Richard Rorty, The New Republic, 2 December 1996;TRI; TSV; TYD; WAS, 24 February 1951 and 9 May 1956}

Russell, Bertrand—Humor of The late Trevor Banks opined that Russell was “by far the wittiest of the major philosophers,” admitting with a smile that this “is a bit like saying Margaret Thatcher was the prettiest of the British Prime Ministers.” Examples he gave of Lord Russell’s humor during some of his stage monologues entitled “Bertie” are as follows:

• Solemnity is a condition precedent to believing anything without evidence.

• When you take from a man all sense of humor there will only be enough left to make a bigot.

• It is not surprising then that Whitehead once observed: “The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.”

• What a queer work the Bible is. Abraham (who is a pattern of all the virtues) twice over, when he is going abroad, says to his wife, “Sarah my dear, you are a very good-looking person, and the King is very likely to fall in love with you. If he thinks I am your husband, he will put me to death, so as to be able to marry you, so you shall travel as my sister, which you are, by the way.”

• So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.

• Children should be sent to boarding schools to get them away from mother love.

• The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who deny themselves ordinary pleasures and seek compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

• There was supposed to be some mystic virtue about gold that made it worthwhile to dig it up in the Transvaal and put it underground again in bank vaults in America.

• Some of the Gnostics held that the world was made by the devil while God wasn’t looking. There is a good deal to be said for that theory, and I am not concerned to refute it.

• Truly high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s.

• An honest politician will not be tolerated by a democracy unless he is very stupid . . . because only a very stupid man can honestly share the prejudices of more than half the nation.

• I was told that the Chinese said they would bury me by the Western Lake and build a shrine to my memory. I have some slight regret that this did not happen, as I might have become a god, which would have been very chic for an atheist.

• I heard Lytton Strachey read his Eminent Victorians, which he considered a very serious historical work . . . and I read it again to myself in prison. It caused me to laugh so loud that the officer came round to my cell, saying I must remember that prison is a place of punishment.

• [G. E.] Moore was the most honest person I have ever met. I only once succeeded in making him tell a lie, and that was by a subterfuge. “Moore,” I said, “do you always speak the truth?” “No,” he replied. I believe this was the only lie he had ever told.

• There are nuns who never take a bath without wearing a bathrobe. When asked why, since no man can see them, they reply: “Oh, but you forget the good God.” Apparently they conceive of the deity as a Peeping Tom whose omnipotence enables him to see through bathroom walls, but who is foiled by bathrobes.”

• Many Chinese have that refinement of humor which consists in enjoying a joke more when the other person cannot see it.

• Leibniz wished to be thought well of, so he published only his second-rate work. All his best work remained in manuscript.

• It is sometimes said that a very large part of my writing has been about sexual relations. Actually only about 1% of my writings are concerned with sex, but the conventional public is so obsessed with sex that they haven’t noticed the other 99%.

• Protestants tell us . . . that it is contrary to the will of God to work on Sundays. But Jews say that it is on Saturdays that God objects to work. Disagreement on this point has persisted for 19 centuries, and I know no method of putting an end to the disagreement except Hitler’s lethal chambers, which would not generally be regarded as a legitimate method in scientific controversy. 

• If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others happy.

Russell, Conrad Sebastian Robert [Earl] (1937– ) Earl Russell, Bertrand Russell’s younger son, was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association in 1988. Previously, his uncle Frank Russell and his father were honorary associates. In the House of Lords during a discussion of the Education Reform Bill, he was one of the few who opposed strengthening of religious education in schools. The Fifth Earl Russell, whose mother was Marjorie (“Peter”) Spence, remarked, “Let me say first that I am in profound agreement with the remarks made by the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury about the importance of Christianity for an understanding of history. . . . But it is one thing to tell people what Christianity says, another thing to teach them by the authority of the state that it is right. . . . I know the right to withdraw is there. That right is vital, but it does not altogether confer what I should like, with the voice of an honest atheist, to ask for—that is equality before the law.” In 1993, his Academic Freedom was published, in which he points out that, although the ideal of academic freedom is the cornerstone of higher education, state control often encroaches upon the traditional freedoms of universities. Professor the Earl Russell, a member of the House of Lords, teaches at King’s College, University of London, England. “My early memories,” he wrote in New Humanist about not having been brought up a Christian, “include such things as listening to my father’s debate with Father Coplestone, when I was eight. I remember, too, my father’s amusement at a fan letter which claimed that ‘the Jesuit’s morbid pronunciation of “God” robbed me of all belief in said being.” I was familiar, from an early age, with such awkward questions as where Cain’s wife came from. Yet, at the same time, I grew up aware of religion as a language in which people have described experience which is not confined to the religious, and with a good working knowledge of the Bible as a document to be read in the same spirit as Herodotus or Homer. I have known for as long as I can remember that the Devil can quote scripture.” Earl Russell was tempted around the age of fifteen by religion, he added, but did not succumb. In Academic Freedom (1993), Russell makes a lucid case for an academic world exempt from government interference. Although professors swear to no Hippocratic oath, they do have professional values not only to maintain but also to defend, he reasons, adding that “the taking of money for teaching and research also imposes a duty to engage in those activities.” In 1994, The (London) Sunday Times (24 July 1994) carried a news article, “Missing Wife of Bertrand Russell Found 25 Years On.” Caroline Moorehead, a Russell biographer, had tracked down the pipe-smoking third wife of Bertrand Russell, whom friends called “Peter” and whom at age sixty-three he had married when she was twenty-five. Peter had changed her name to Patricia, was living alone with a pet sheepdog, had little to do with her neighbors, had left her husband in the early 1950s after fifteen years of marriage because she could no longer tolerate his womanizing, and had done so after an unhappy holiday in Sicily when during a picnic he declared, “I am as drunk as a lord, but then I am one.” The couple divorced within two years and Conrad, then fifteen, initially went to live with his mother in a remote Cornish mill. For more than twenty years, however, Conrad had lost track of his mother. {New Humanist, November 1993}

Russell, Dora (Winfred) (Black) (1894–1986) With her husband, Bertrand Russell, Dora Russell ran the Beacon Hill School from 1927 on. They had approximately twenty boys and girls, ages four to eleven. The students were given no religious instruction, could read whatever they wished, bathed together freely, and had their questions answered openly and freely. “In humanism,” she has written, “I have always felt the warmth of association with all organic life, with our roots in the productive soil of our earth. My dissent from god and religion arose from its denial of this very life which animates plants, birds, animals, and humans. If god created all this, then why are his worshippers commanded to reject it all as savage, bestial, lust and sin. . . . Without falling into a mystical vitalism that reverences organic nature as sacred, we can at least try to serve rather than subdue the prancing seas of life.” A feminist who has been described as being perhaps fifty years ahead of her time, she comes alive in Dale Spender’s The Dora Russell Reader: 57 Years of Writing and Journalism, 1925–1982 (1985). Her own outlook is found in The Tamarisk Tree: My Quest for Liberty and Love. In addition to working on behalf of birth control and nuclear disarmament, she was a founding member of the League of Progressive Societies and Individuals, the National Council for Civil Liberties, and the Abortion Law Association. In 1958, she organized a women’s peace caravan which toured Europe in an early attempt to break down Cold War barriers. Ronald Clark, among others, has suggested that her husband Bertrand’s militantly irreligious phase, which began somewhat abruptly in 1925, was partly the result of his (second) wife Dora’s influence. {EU, John L. McKenney; HNS2; SHD; WWS}

Russell, I. R. (20th Century) Russell is Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Rationalist Press Association.

Russell, Ivor (20th Century) Russell is chairman of the Rationalist Press Association.

Russell, John [Viscount Amberly] (1842–1876) Russell, son of the first Earl Russell, was described by J. S. Mill in a letter to Carlyle as “one of the best of our rising politicians.” He was a Spencerian agnostic and gave his eldest son a Rationalist tutor, but the Court of Chancery canceled the appointment. His son, John Francis Stanley Russell, second Earl Russell (1865–1931), nevertheless grew up an agnostic and a supporter of the Rationalist Press Association. Russell died when his son, Bertrand, was four and was remembered by him only as being “philosophical, studious, unworldly, morose, and priggish.” {RAT; RE}

Russell, John (Born 1855) Russell wrote The Task of Rationalism in Retrospect and Prospect (1910). He has been the foreign editor of the Journal of Education. {GS}

Russell, John Francis [Second Earl] (Born 1865) Russell, son of Viscount Amberley, was a lawyer and writer. His Lay Sermons (1902) and Divorce (1912) departed from the views in which his father educated him. A Fabian Socialist, he was one of the first to list his religion in Who’s Who as being “Agnostic.” {RAT} Russell, Phillips (20th Century) Russell wrote Jefferson, Champion of the Free Mind (1956). {GS}

Russell, Richard S. (20th Century) Russell, secretary of Atheist Alliance, Inc., writes for The Freethought Observer and Secular Nation. He is the Hotline contact for Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin. E-mail: <rsrmadison@aol.com>.

Russell, Thomas (19th Century) Russell wrote Testimony of Atheists (1857). {GS}

RUSSIA “The Russian Sphinx” by Aileen Kelly (The New York Review of Books, 20 May 1999) contains the following: Western visions of Russia as an alien civilization, by turns threatening and alluring, are rooted in its anomalous history. The schism of 1054 between the Byzantine and Roman Churches detached it from the culture of Western Christendom, and the Mongol invasion two centuries later completed its isolation. It knew nothing of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the first flowering of secular thought in the West; the Muscovite state that emerged in the fifteenth century under the despot Ivan IV resembled the civilization of medieval Europe rather than the contemporary West. In the early eighteenth century Peter the Great’s reforms brought into the community of European nations a vast and backward country (even as late as 1917, 80 percent of the Russian Empire’s population were classified as peasants). Yet this lumbering land established itself as a great power when, in 1814, the Russian Tsar rode into Paris at the head of his army after the victorious campaign against Napoleon.

England’s Winston Churchill was later to say that the Soviet regime’s unparalleled, terror-driven feats made it appear to the West as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Martin Malia’s Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum (1999) is an end-of-the-century evaluation of what historically has transpired in Russia over the centuries.

RUSSIAN HUMANISTS AND FREETHINKERS • The Russian Center for Inquiry was inaugurated in 1997 in a ceremony attended by Paul Kurtz, its prime mover; Timothy J. Madigan of the Free Inquiry staff; Jan Eisler of the St. Petersburg (Florida) Humanist Society; and Jim Herrick of the Rationalist Press Association. Fifty distinguished scientists and philosophers spoke, many deploring the rising level of irrationality in Russia and the world. The center aims to transcend the intolerance of ancient religious, nationalistic, and ethnic differences by encouraging each individual to become a citizen of the world community. “Above all,” Kurtz challenged those who are working upon behalf of secular humanism in Russia, the group needs to attempt “to give meaning to life by answering the basic existential questions that had largely been ignored by Marxist ideology.” The Center cooperates with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (PSICOP), developing scientific critiques of psychic phenomena, UFOlogy, astrology, and other pseudo-sciences. It continues some of the goals of the Institute for the Scientific Study of Atheism, which closed down in 1991. However, as pointed out by Herrick, “Dogmatic, ideological atheism is obviously no help to humanism (though humanists may often be atheists).” Key figures in the Russian Center for Inquiry’s initial conference were Dr. A. Panin, Acad N. Moiseev, Dr. Tazhurizina, Dr. Chang, Valerii Kuvakin, and professors Abelev, Frolov, Gretsky, Mezhuev, Razin, and Volchenko. Russians who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 included Garry I. Abelev; Yuri Nikolaevich Efremov; Vitalii Ginzburg; Valerii Kuvakin; and Alexander V. Razin. • Ethical Dialogues has become an associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). • Zdravyi Smysl (Common Sense) is the Russian Humanist Society’s quarterly and is published at 119899 Moscow Vorobjovi Gory, Moscow University, Philosophy Department, Moscow B-234. In 1996, a Russian Humanist Society (RHS) held its third general meeting at the Moscow State University. Its chairman is Professor Kuvakin. In 1998 the society became an Associate Member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). In 1997 it was estimated at a humanist conference in Moscow that 60% of Russians are religious believers, 15 to 20% are unbelievers, and 20 to 25 % are undecided. Of these only about 7% would identify as atheists. Observed Jim Herrick, “So much for seventy years of atheist indoctrination! Humanists must emphasise that humanism should be presented in the context of individual freedom and open dialogue.” (See entries for Mikhail Gorbachev and Valery Kuvakin.) {“Ethical Dialogues in Moscow,” New Humanist, December 1995; Jim Herrick, “Humanism in Russia,” New Humanist, November 1997; Jim Herrick, International Humanist News, December 1997}

RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY Vladimir Fedorvich Titov was chairman of the department of Marxist-Leninist philosophy at Moscow State University until, in 1991, his faculty voted, as he put it, to “liquidate completely” his department. He regrets the decision, saying that for seventy years Marxism-Leninism was Russian philosophy, that “Marx was a great thinker. Without him you can’t do philosophy.” (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7. Also see Z. V. Kalinicheva’s “The Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism” (1967), a guide to the museum. Also, see entries for Valerii Kuvakin and Alexey Sokolow.) {Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, 13 March 1999, writes of current professors’ complaints.}

RUSSIAN UNITARIANS In 1993 a Unitarian group was founded following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Congregations in 1998 included one in Moscow and one in St. Petersburgh. Paul Sawyer and his family have been active in helping the two congregations, spending time in 1994 working with people who showed interest. Contact in Moscow is Vitaly Verigan, A/J 667, OTD/Sv 5, Zhukovske, Moskow, OBL Russia 140160. Contact in St. Petersburgh is Yevgeni Schlacter (Eugene Schlacter), 197341, St. Petersbourg Serebristy Blvd., 37, ap 8. Jean and Dick Rodes head a Unitarian group, Friends of Russia a and the Ukraine (5250 Patriot Lane, Columbia, MD 21045).

Rusterholtz, Wallace P. (20th Century) Rusterholtz wrote American Heretics and Saints (1938). {GS}

Rustin, Bayard (1910–1987) Rustin, a nominal member of the Society of Friends, was not technically a theist and is not known to have believed in an afterlife although he could sing Gospel music and knew the Bible because of his early background in religious circles. An African American, he is best remembered for his role in organizing the giant 1963 civil rights march on Washington and for his continuing involvement in that cause. His advocacy of gay rights, although often overlooked, was another of his basic interests. To The Washington Blade in 1986, he said he had informed his civil rights colleagues that he was gay and had never concealed his homosexuality. In fact, he encouraged young people to come out, saying, “Although it’s going to make problems, those problems are not so dangerous as the problems of lying to yourself, to your friends, and missing many opportunities.” While in an Ashland, Kentucky, prison for having organized protest demonstrations, he attempted to integrate it nonviolently. He was, however, beaten by a racist white prisoner, and when he was observed performing oral sex on an inmate “behind a curtain on the stage of the prison auditorium,” he denied his accuser and later suffered a nervous breakdown. John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (1904) describes Rustin’s adventurous life. {AA}

Ruth, J. (20th Century) 

Ruth wrote What Is the Bible? (1904). {GS} Ryall, Maltus Questall (1809–1846) Ryall was secretary of the Anti-Persecution Union in 1842 and assisted his friend, Holyoake, on The Oracle of Reason and The Movement. He died in poverty. {BDF; FUK; VI}

Ryan, Alan (1940– ) Ryan is a philosopher who wrote John Stuart Mill (1970), Bertrand Russell: A Political Life (1993), and John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995). He has been a lecturer in philosophy at New College, Oxford University, in his native England, was a visiting professor of political science at the City University of New York, and since 1988 has taught at Princeton. Ryan lists his religion as “none.” In John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (1995), Ryan argued that the thought of John Dewey is more relevant today than ever before, that a revival of his ideas is needed. He was not, Ryan found, as far left politically as some had claimed, and his philosophic style was to “reconstruct” the institutions and linguistic habits we had grown accustomed to. His Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (1998) is concerned with evaluating contemporary higher education in the United States. The work shows the influence of Dewey, Mill, and Russell, three about whom he has written extensively. Ryan has been described as a self-acknowledged, aggressive atheist of the Bertrand Russell vein, a Mill, Dewey, and T. H. Green scholar. {The Nation, 25 September 1995}

Ryan, William F. (1925– ) Ryan wrote Haldeman-Julius and the Blue Academy (1978). {GS}

Ryberg, Y. E. (Born 1828) A Swedish merchant captain, Ryberg translated several of Bradlaugh’s pamphlets and other secular literature. {BDF}

Rydberg, Abraham Viktor (1828–1895) Rydberg taught the history of civilization at Stockholm University, and he was instrumental in influencing the spread of Rationalism in Sweden. Two of his works are Bilbeln’s Lära om Kristus (1862) and Romeska sägner om Paulus och Kristus (1874). {RAT; RE}

Ryder, John (20th Century) Ryder, an associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland, is editor of American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1995). Naturalism, he explains, holds that nature is objective and can be studied to gain knowledge that is not determined by methodology, perspective, belief, or theory. Contributors on the subject of naturalism included Justus Buchler, Morris Cohen, John Dewey, Abraham Edel, Marvin Farber, Sidney Hook, Paul Kurtz, John Lachs, Corliss Lamont, Thelma Lavine, John McDermott, Ernest Nagel, W.V.O. Quine, John Herman Randall Jr., Richard Rorty, George Santayana, Meyer Schapiro, Roy Wood Sellars, Evelyn Shirk, and F.J.E. Woodbridge.

Rylande, C. G. (20th Century) A freethinker, Rylande wrote Did Jesus Ever Live? (1935). {GS}

Ryle, Gilbert (1900–1976) Ryle wrote about the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and was a friend of Wittgenstein. In his “Systematically Misleading Expressions” (1932), he focused on linguistics and held that a main part of philosophy must be “the detection of the sources in linguistic idioms of recurrent misconstructions and absurd theories.” The editor of Mind (1948–1971), Ryle was an influential figure among British philosophers. (See entry for Richard C. Vitzthum.) {AF; OCP}