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From Philosopedia
S. A. HUMANIST POST An Australian monthly, S. A. Humanist Post is at GPO Box 177, Adelaide, 5001, Australia.
Saatkomp, Herbert J. (20th Century) A professor at Texas A & M, Saatkomp is an authority on Santayana.
Sabbatai Zevi (also, Shabbatai Zvi and Shabbatai Sevi) (1626–1676) At the height of the Ottoman rule, Sabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself the Messiah, named the year 1666 as the millennium, and gathered a host of followers. A Jewish mystic and founder of the Sabbatean sect, he attempted to land in Constantinople, was captured, and to escape death embraced Islam. Although he was married to a Christian prostitute, he appealed to a following in the hundreds of thousands for his doctrine of universal sin. In the 18th century, the Sabbatean movement was revived under Jacob Frank. {CE}
SABBATARIANS Sabbatarians insist that the Sabbath be observed in a strict way. In the United States, Sabbatarian laws, known as “blue laws,” barred certain business and sporting activities on Sunday. The term is also used to apply to those who observe the seventh day (Saturday) as the Sabbath, such as certain Adventists and Seventh-Day Baptists. {CE}
SABBATH • Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh. Among the Jews observance of the day was enforced by a Commandment of which this is the Christian version: “Remember the seventh day to make thy neighbor keep it wholly.” To the Creator it seemed fit and expedient that the Sabbath should be the last day of the week, but the Early Fathers of the Church held other views. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
The Babylonians were likely not the first to have a day of rest, usually at fixed periods, and they had a seven-day week, on the seventh day of which they considered it unlucky to work although they did not suspend work on that day. Because their festival at the full moon was called Sabattu, it is quite possible the Jews adopted the name from them during the Exile, according to McCabe. The Muslims followed the Jews, except they are not compelled to abstain from work except during the hours of service. By the fourth century Rome had a day’s holiday, with free entertainments, on more than half the days of the year. In fact, they resisted Constantine’s attempt to introduce Sunday. The claim of some apologists that Christianity, which changed the day of rest to “the Sun’s Day” in honor of Christ, conferred a great boon on the poor workers of Rome by bringing them one day’s rest in seven, reflects their abysmal ignorance of Roman history. In Islam, Friday is the weekly day of public prayer. {CE; RE}
Sabin, Ibn (c. 1218–c. 1271) Sabin, Al Mursi, was a Spanish Arabian philosopher born of a noble family at Murcia. About 1249 he corresponded with Frederick II, replying to his philosophic questions. Sabin committed suicide about 1271. {BDF}
SACERDOTALIST • Sacerdotalist, n. One who holds the belief that a clergyman is a priest. Denial of this momentous doctrine is the hardiest challenge that is now flung into the teeth of the Episcopalian church by the Neo-Dictionarians. –Ambrose Bierce e Devil’s Dictionary
Sachse, Heinrich Ernst (1812–1883) A German atheist, Sachse worked upon behalf of forethought causes in Magdeburg. {BDF}
Sachs, B. (20th Century) Sachs was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Sackett, Susan (20th Century) Sackett is Vice President of the Arizona Secular Humanists, PO Box 3738, Scottsdale, Arizona 85271. She also is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism.
SACRAMENT • Sacrament, n. A solemn religious ceremony to which several degrees of authority and significance are attached. Rome has seven sacraments, but the Protestant churches, being less prosperous, feel that they can afford only two, and these of inferior sanctity. Some of the smaller sects have no sacraments at all–for which mean economy they will indubitably be damned. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
SACRED • Sacred, adj. Dedicated to some religious purpose; having a divine character; inspiring solemn thoughts or emotions; as, the Dalai Lama of Thibet; the Moogum of M’bwango; the temple of Apes in Ceylon; the Cow in India; the Crocodile, the Cat, and the Onion of ancient Egypt; the Mufti of Moosh; the hair of the dog that bit Noah, etc. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
SADDUCEES: See entry for Sadoc.
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François [Comte de] (1740–1814) Sade was author of Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Bedroom (1791), which admittedly is pornographic. However, his work has been considered a part of the pantheon of such French authors as Rousseau, Balzac, Racine, and Proust, and is included as part of the French canon in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade series. Sade described himself as “atheistic to the point of fanaticism.” He also wrote, “Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be made to believe in him, and in the second a fool.” Sade is known mainly as the Marquis de Sade, a title he held before becoming count when his father died in 1767. After fighting in the Seven Years War and marrying, he was imprisoned because of his allegedly scandalous conduct (for example, persuading Rose Keller, an unemployed widow, not a whore, to come to his villa in 1768, where he tied her to the bedposts, gagged her with a fur muff, whipped her until she bled, then poured sealing wax into her wounds, etc.). Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795), in which he declared that “Religions are the cradles of despotism,” has a daughter sodomize her mother with a dildo. Worse, so the mother will further agonize, Sade has the mother raped by a syphilitic servant, her orifices are sewn, and she cannot excrete, causing her body the utmost of pain. Psychologists, as pointed out by Laurence L. Bongie’s Sade: A Biographical Essay (1998), have had wide discussions as to what must have been Sade’s hateful feelings toward his mother as well as his mother-in-law. A French critic, Pierre Klossowski in 1933, suggested that the root of Sade’s malignant condition was a “negative Oedipal complex,” involving an inability to work through a normal rivalry with his father, whom he considered a weakling, and by identifying with his father turned his libido against his mother by punishing her in his fictional mother-torture fantasies. Others, however, claim Sade’s mother did not abandon him nor his father. In 1771, three years after his liberation from Pierre-Encize, the Sades and their three children moved to La Coste in an attempt to avoid his reputation and his creditors. In 1772 dressed in a vest of marigold-yellow satin with matching breeches, a plumed hat on his head and a gold-knobbed cane in his hand, he organized a party in Marseilles that was held in a prostitute’s room. His valet, Latour, assembled four girls for his pleasure, and de Sade not only had active and passive sodomy with Latour but also copulated with the prostitutes, whipped them, and was whipped by them. The Aix-en-Provence parlement, after convicting him of sodomy and an attempt to poison–actually, he had fed the women Spanish fly that looked like candy and they became so sick they called the police–sentenced him in absentia to death to death, then had him beheaded and burned in effigy. Sade understandably fled to Italy. For twenty-seven years he was confined in places such as the Bastille (by some, Sade was credited with causing the Bastille riot), the dungeon at Vincennes, and at Charenton asylum. During this time he wrote ribald romances and, released during the revolution, had some of his plays produced by the Comédie Française. De Sade believed that inasmuch as both sexual deviation and criminal acts exist in nature, they are natural, a premise which the Church fought strenuously. His notion may have come from his reading of d’Holbach and libertine literature, according to Robert Darnton (The New York Review of Books, 14 January 1998). He also believed that sex that involves pain is not necessarily bad and can, in fact, be gratifying. This, however, was considered perversion, and because of such “sadism” (the term was first included in a dictionary in 1834) his work was banned for its obscenity. He also was put in prison and later sent to an insane asylum for having written a pornographic novel, Zoloe and Her Two Acolytes, in which the chief characters were based on Napoleon and Josephine. In addition to his many affairs with women, he preached in his novels the superiority of male attractions and he had homosexual relations, according to his helpful and cooperative valet. Aldous Huxley termed Sade “the one complete and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.” Sade’s depictions of horror, although revolutionary, were not particularly colorful or picturesque. They included matter-of-fact descriptions of acts which both church and state have committed throughout history, allegedly to enforce good behavior in keeping with judicial standards which had been set by the religious and governmental leaders. What other authors had not done so well, however, was to describe the humiliation which humans have experienced. Charles Rosen, author of The Romantic Generation, has observed that Sade knew that all sexual intercourse is basically an act of violence and rape. Further, Rosen suggests, “Sade is impressive because he makes hypocrisy almost impossible to sustain in considering the erotic imagination. There are many reasons for thinking that pornography does not actually stimulate or inspire sadistic acts, and if this is the case, Sade’s work might reasonably be made required reading for high school students (he is perhaps a bit strong for the elementary level).” Maurice Lever, in a biography entitled Sade (1993), wrote that the Marquis richly deserves his terrible reputation. For example, his 120 Days of Sodom, written while Sade was in the Bastille, describes the possibility of multiple incest: a nobleman programs three generations so that he is able to show that, “in fucking [his daughter], he fucked his sister . . . and his daughter-in-law, and . . . also constrained his son to fuck his own sister and mother-in-law.” Imprisoned, he did more than just imagine: He sent his wife, which humiliated her, to arrange for and deliver pastries and some custom-made wooden ebony dildos (“six inches in circumference by eight or nine inches long”), then recorded 6,536 “introductions” (to sodomize himself) in order to obtain prestiges, or orgasms, by stuffing himself at both ends. Lever’s book reads like a surrealist creation, including Sade’s taunt to his enemies: “Kill me or take me as I am, because I will not change.” Francine du Plessix Gray, in At Home With the Marquis de Sade (1998), noted that Sade and his wife, Renée-Pélagie, were married for twenty-seven years, fifteen of which he was running from the police or was in jail. On the evening he was released from the Bastille she obtained a formal separation: “Having survived greater measures of passion and devotion than most women experience in ten lifetimes, she returned to being the placid, conventional creature she had been before she met Donatien de Sade. Reclusion, religious devotion, the petty groveling of a provincial Catholic life, would now be the measure of her days.” Under the Directory he sank into poverty, was returned to Charenton as a criminal and insane madman, and at age seventy-three bought the sexual services of Madeleine Leclerc, daughter of an employee at Charenton. He was with her until a week before his death, 2 December 1814. Ms. Du Plessix Gray, in summing him up, writing,
He never grasped the fundamentals of civilised life: which have to do with accepting, with a measure of serenity, the ultimate necessity of compromise.
That, however, could explain people’s continued fascination with him. Although as a young man Octavio Paz was enthusiastic about de Sade, after examining the ontological impossibilities and philosophic weakanesses of Sade’s views Paz finally found his youthful admiration had vanished. In An Erotic Beyond: Sade (1998) he came to view the infamous libertine as a philosophically tyrannical bore. “Let us renounce,” Sade wrote, “the ridiculous theory of the immortality of the soul, made to be scorned as relentlessly as that of a God as false and as ridiculous as it is. Let us abjure with equal courage both of these absurd fables, the fruits of fear, ignorance, and superstition.” Upon his father’s death, Sade’s son burned at least two volumes of a projected ten-volume novel, The Days of Florabelle, or Nature Revealed. His remains were scattered, for his 1806 will requested that “all traces of my grave disappear from the face of the earth, as I flatter myself that my memory will be effaced from the minds of men.” (Angela Carter wrote a feminist defense, The Sadean Woman; in 1989 Arlette Farge’s Le Goût de l’archive related that in 1766, furious that a horse and carriage would not allow his own carriage to pass through a narrow street, Sade buried his sword in the horse of the carriage blocking his way.) {CE; GL; PA; TYD}
Sadi, Marie François (19th Century) Sadi, the grandson of Count Lazare Carnot, was an atheist. He became President of the French Republic. (See entry for Count Lazare Carnot.)
Sadler, Gilbert T. (20th Century) Sadler wrote Behind the New Testament (1921). {GS}
Sadler, Laetitia (20th Century) Sadler is the lead singer of a band called Stereolab. In an interview in the Minnesota Daily (May 1996), she was asked if she was a Marxist and replied, “I’m not for ideologies and religions. You have to think for yourself. Things have to make sense in your head and have to correspond to a reality or a possibility. It’s good to see what could happen rather than just be fatalistic.” {CA}
Sadoc (3rd Century B.C.E.) Sadoc was a learned Jewish doctor. He denied the resurrection, the existence of angels, and the doctrine of predestination. He opposed the idea of future rewards and punishments. His followers, named after him, were Sadduccees. {BDF}
Saffi, Aurelio (1819–1890) Saffi was one of the triumvirs, or three heads, of the Roman Republic of 1848. He fled to Switzerland, then to England, when it was crushed, then returned to Italy in 1860 when Garibaldi offered him a position. Saffi wrote many historical and legal works in which his anti-Papal sentiments found expression. {RAT; RE}
Safford, Mary Augusta (1851–1927) An important woman in the 19th-century Unitarian ministry, Safford was a leader of what came to be known as the “Iowa Sisterhood’ or the “Iowa Band.” She preached what she called a “religion of morality on fire with love for humanity.” This group of women ministers actively promoted liberal religion in the Midwest. She was minister in Humboldt, Sioux City, and Des Moines, Iowa, as well as secretary of the Iowa Unitarian Association. {U; U&U, World, November-December 1997}
Safford, Victoria (20th Century) Safford is minister in Northampton and Florence, Massachusetts, of the Unitarian Society. She has written of her humanism,
To the extent that I know no personal god and acknowledge no First Cause or Creator; to the extent that I love and struggle in and weep for the human condition and hold it not separate from the other natural drama we are all caught in; to the extent that I expect no afterlife but am busy enough trying to live rightly now; to the extent that human freedom and the defense of this freedom against human evil are somewhat of a mission for me, I suppose I am a humanist Yet what if I say that art is as clarifying, as satisfying, as much a portal to the truth for me as science ever can be? What if I claim that they are two expressions of the same deep human longing to see? What if I say that a story or an image, even a biblical one, can sometimes hold for me more wisdom than a set of proven facts? What if I know that certain rituals, certain rites, certain symbols, even Christian or Jewish or Muslim ones, are as likely to transform me as certain reasoned arguments? What if I get as much or much more out of watching the ocean rush in and out, and hearing it at night, and swimming in its salt, than out of any human discourse? To the extent that metaphor and myth live for me; to the extent that as a minister I’m more curious about how people feel than about what they know; to the extent that human limitations make me daily doubt human grandeur, I suppose my humanism is in question. I’m not an “ist” at all. I’m a human being, trying to discern and describe the beautiful, the good, the true, and to effect these, to the extent that I can, in the world. {World, November-December 1997}
Saga, Francesco De Rovigo (Died 1566) Saga was an Italian heretic, put to death at Venice for his anti-trinitarianism on 25 February 1566. {BDF}
Sagan, Carl (1934–1996) Sagan, who was the director of Cornell’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies, once wrote, “The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by ‘God’ one means the set of physical laws that are found in the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying. It does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.” His publications include The Dragons of Eden (1977), for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. In 1980 he created and was host of the public-television science series “Cosmos.” In 1981, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. Also, he was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Sagan’s essay, “Real American Patriots Ask Questions,” written with his third wife Ann Druyan, is included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994). In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), Sagan protested against superstition and people’s uncritical acceptance of pseudo-scientific claims. Richard Lewontin has pointed out that Sagan regretted the fact that most of us do not have control of the intellectual apparatus needed to explain manifest reality in material terms. In place of scientific (i.e., correct material) explanations, we substitute demons. Religions, Sagan wrote, are the “nurseries of pseudo-science.” “I worry,” he added, “that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us–then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” He was concerned about doomsday asteroids that are rumored to soon hit the Earth, although he admits there is always the possibility. Reports of alien abductions are complete nonsense. He also writes about repressed memories, creationism, belief in miracles, and the claims of tobacco companies that cigarettes have not been shown to be harmful. In a March-April 1996 cover story for Skeptical Inquirer, Sagan recommends science as a source of spirituality. “It has beauty, power, and majesty that can provide spiritual as well as practical fulfillment,” he explains. At the same time, he laments the fact that “superstition and pseudoscience keep getting in the way, providing easy answers, casually pressing our awe buttons, and cheapening the experience.” In The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), he commented on a variety of topics:
If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I’d be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. . . . Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. . . . If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. . . . Try science. . . . Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural. . . . In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. “Witches” are today being burned in South Africa. . . . The worldwide TM [Transcendental Meditation] organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. . . . It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money, so long as you have got it.
Sagan’s memorial service was held in New York’s Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, the structure that features a statue of God (a bearded Caucasian with His arms outstretched) on the front. Church officials referred to “Carl the great atheist” and explained that the site was chosen because of Sagan’s record of having successfully worked with national church leaders on environmental matters. Speakers included MIT physicist Philip Morrison; Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould; the former director of the USSR’s Space Research Institute, Ronald Sagedeev; Vice President Al Gore; and Sagan’s daughter, Sasha; son, Jeremy; and third wife, Ann Druyan, who is secretary of the Federation of American Scientists. Druyan told of his and her exuberance at having included an interstellar message along with Bach, Beethoven, and other composer’s music in two NASA Voyager spacecrafts now beyond the outer solar system. At a speed of 40,000 miles per hour, the objects are traveling in space and have a projected shelf life of a billion years. How, they mused, would some finder in the distant future interpret all this, perhaps even after Earth no longer had humans. The memorial ended with Sagan’s recording of an excerpt of “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.” The powerful and life-like voice resounded eerily throughout the immense Gothic structure. (See “A Battle-Cry for Reason and Rationality,” Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1996; also see entry for Ann Druyan.) {CE; HNS2; Richard Lewontin, The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997; TYD; Warren Allen Smith, Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1997}
Saginian, Armen A. (20th Century)
Saginian, the executive director of New Horizons, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Sahlin, Mona (1957– ) Sahlin is a Swedish government official. She was Minister of Labor (1990–1991), Chairman of the Commission on Labor Market (1991–1992), and deputy prime minister, minority equality issues (1994 to date). Sahlin, a Social Democrat, has been on the executive committee of her party since 1990 and its secretary since 1992. According to Celebrity Atheists, Sahlin is a non-theist who, asked on national radio if she believed in God, responded in the negative. {CA; E}
Sahula-Dycke, Ignatz (20th Century) Sahula-Dycke wrote The God Business: Polemic Essays About Religion and Its Effect on Western Behavior (1973).
Saich, Roy (20th Century) Saich in Britain is active with the Coventry and Warwickshire Humanists. He also is a member of the National Secular Society and of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA).
Saigey, Emile (Died 1875) Saigey was a French inspector of telegraph wires. He wrote Modern Physics (1867) and The Sciences in the Eighteenth Century: Physics of Voltaire (1874). {BDF}
Saillard, F. (19th Century) Saillard was a French author who wrote The Revolution and the Church (1869) and The Organisation of the Republic (1883). {BDF}
SAINT • Saint, n. A dead sinner revised and edited. –Ambrose Bierce
• Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. –George Orwell
• “Ah, my lord, it is only the first yard that really matters.” –Marie Deffand, who had been told that St. Denis carried his head twenty or thirty yards after it had been cut off.
A “saint” is “canonized” by having the Pope proclaim that the individual is deemed worthy of being “venerated,” or respectfully revered. The papal statement is made after “beatification,” a decree that the person can be honored in a limited way and after at least two miracles are “authenticated” that the “blessed one’s intercession” has completed. Pope John Paul II in 1998 canonized Edith Stein (1891-1942), a Jewish intellectual, philosopher, and atheist who became a Carmelite nun. Numbers of Jews, including the World Jewish Congress, immediately objected to the Vatican’s logic and sensitivity, saying Stein had been gassed during the Holocaust because she was Jewish, not because she had become a Carmelite nun. Stein, upon becoming a nun, took the name Teresia Benedicta of the Cross The miracle which elevated her to sainthood occurred because a two-year-old namesake survived an accidental overdose of aspirin-like Tylenol. After Teresia Benedicta McCarthy of Brockton, Massachusetts, suffered from severe liver damage, she is said to have recovered overnight after her family prayed to Teresia Benedicta of the Cross. Saint Vitus, a 3rd century Christian martyr, suffered from what today is called Sydenham’s chorea (named after a physician, Thomas Sydenham [1624-1689]). The affliction, involving jerky and involuntary movements of the body, was called St. Vitus’s Dance. The condition is not hereditary, whereas Huntington’s disease–also a disturbance of the nervous system–is. {ER}
Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre Beginning 24 August 1572, French Protestants, or Huguenots, were systematically murdered by Roman Catholics. Many Huguenots had come to Paris for the wedding of Henri of Navarre (later Henri IV) to Marguerite of Valois–a Catholic, Marguerite had been forced into the marriage in an attempt by Catherine de’ Medici (the regent from 1560 to 1563 and adviser from 1563 to 1574) to reconcile the Protestants and Catholics. With so many Protestants in Paris, Catherine and her son, King Charles IX, successfully carried out a general massacre which spread throughout France and caused the resumption of the Wars of Religion (1562–1598). Alexandre Dumas père wrote a vivid description of the event, which in 1993 was turned into a movie, “Queen Margot,” by Patrice Cherneau. {CE}
St. Gaudens, Augustus (1848–1907) St. Gaudens, an Irish-born US sculptor, is described as being the foremost sculptor of the late nineteenth century. His most famous work, often called “Grief,” depicts a mysterious figure with a face that is shadowed. But he had another title in mind: either “Peace” or “Nirvana.” In 1897 in Boston, he built a monument to Robert Gould Shaw, a colonel in a Negro regiment in the Civil War. St. Gaudens was “firm in his principles and a great admirer of Mr. O. B. Frothingham, with whom he agrees,” his daughter has said, referring to the leader of the radical wing of late 19th-century Unitarianism. Louise Hall Tharp Little has written of his religious views in Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era (1969). {CE; UU}
St. John, Henry [Viscount Bolingbroke] (1678–1751) One of the most provocative British statesmen, admired by Voltaire for his wit, Viscount Bolingbroke was a conservative, pro-Church, English aristocrat. However, his writings show him to have been, in fact, a deist. He believed that God does not intervene in history, has never revealed Himself, and it is man’s reason alone that is paramount in living a meaningful life. Said to be more a debater than a thinker, he had a much greater influence than Samuel Johnson was willing to admit. Voltaire had been his intimate, often acknowledging his debt, and St. John supplied Pope with the material for his Essay on Man. Although his outlook had assimilated part of the Spinozistic and the atheistic case against anthropomorphism, he used anthropomorphic language on the score that “we must speak of God after the manner of men.” McCabe says that St. John was one of the most important of the Deists, “though he concealed his views.” Robertson believes the weak side of Bolingbroke’s polemic was its inconsistency. {BDF; CE; EU, E. Graham Waring; FUK; FUS; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI}
ST. JOHN’S CATHEDRAL, NEW YORK CITY Although in Reims it is declared that their cathedral is the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, the Manhattan Episcopalians claim that theirs, St. John the Divine with a statue of God on the front, is. Virgil Thomson, although not a theist, recognized the panache involved in having one’s memorial in a noted place. He ordered that his memorial be held in New York at “the St. John the Too-Too Divine” Cathedral.
Saint Lambert, (Charles) Jean François de (1717–1803) Saint Lambert was a French writer who, after being educated among the Jesuits, entered the army. He became a devoted adherent of Voltaire and an admirer of Madame du Chatelet. Saint Lambert wrote some articles in the Encyclopédie. His poem, “The Seasons” (1769), gained him admission to the French Academy. His Philosophical Works were published in 1801. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Saint Mary’s Duluth Clinic When a hematologist told Dr. Van Druten he was headed for the St. Mary’s Duluth Clinic, Druten responded, “Oh, the clinic of the unwed mother Mary!” {Secular Nation, July-September 1998}
Saint Nicholas: See entry for Santa Claus.
Saint Paul: See entry for Paul, Saint.
Saint Pierre, Jacques Henri Bernardin de: See entry for Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri.
Saint Priest, Alexis Guignard [Count] (1805–1851) Saint Priest was the son of the Russian Princess Sophia Galitzer. He took part in the Revolution of 1830 and later was French Plenipotentiary Minister in Brazil, Portugal, and Denmark. Among his works was a history of the suppression of the Jesuits (1844), and at the time of Saint Priest’s death he was writing a biography of Voltaire. {RAT; RE}
St. Sebastian: See entry for Sebastian.
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy [Comte de] (1760–1825) Saint-Simon, a French courtier and writer of memoirs, was founder of the semi-Socialist Saint Simonians. A noble who traveled extensively in America, Germany, and Britain, he acquired a humanitarian zeal which he crystallized into what he called a New Christian sect (Nouveau Christianisme) for social service. However, he rejected all Christian doctrines. Saint-Simon made a fortune through land speculation, then lavished his wealth on a salon for scientists and spent his later years in poverty, sustained by the faith that he had a message for humanity. The message was that brotherhood must accompany scientific organization, and his writings contain certain ideas foreshadowing the positivism of Auguste Comte, who for a time was his pupil. After his death, Barthélemy Prosper Enfantin and Saint-Armand Bazard led a group of Saint-Simonians. The group called for abolition of individual inheritance rights, public control of the means of production, and gradual emancipation of women. By 1833, the movement had disintegrated, but it exerted much influence upon later socialist thought. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
St. Teresa of Avila “Visions of Ecstasy,” a film by Nigel Wingrove, depicts St. Teresa of Avila having a sexual fantasy about a nun and an imagined erotic relationship with Jesus. {New Humanist, December 1996}
St. Vitus: See entry for Saint.
Sainte Croix, Geoffrey Ernest Maurice de (1910-2000)
A Marxist historian of ancient Greece and Rome, de Ste. Croix wroteThe Origins of the Peloponnesian War (1972) and The Class Struggle in the Ancient World (1981). “He revived the pro-Athenian, pro-democratic stance of earlier scholars like George Grote,” said Victor Bers of Yale. His loathing of Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church—it was a source of intolerance and cruelty, he thought, particularly to women—led him to denounce God, whom he called Yahweh. In 1972 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy. Although some historians disagreed with him, others found his work outstandingly written and based on exact detail.
Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin (1804–1869) Sainte-Beueve was a French literary historian and critic. The first major professional literary critic, he developed the appreciation of literature through psychological and biographical insight. First a student of medicine, then of literature, he contributed reviews to the Globe in 1824. A favorable review of Hugo’s Odes and Ballades gained him the attention of the Romantic school. He made his mark in 1828 with his Historical and Critical Picture of French Poetry in the Sixteenth Century. He also published some poetry and a semi-autobiographical psychological novel, Volupté (1834), which was inspired by his love for Mme. Victor Hugo. He considered his great work to be Port-Royal (1840–1859), a six-volume history not only of Jansenism but also including a section of 17th-century French society. In 1844 Sainte-Beuve was made a member of the French Academy, and he became a senator. According to McCabe, the more famous “Sainte-Beef” became, the more advanced and outspoken he became in his skepticism. In Pensées d’aout, he abandoned all beliefs. The Grand Encyclopédie states that as Saint-Beueve grew older he became more and more hostile to religion and was “the protector of Freethought in the Senate.” Dan Hofstadter, in The Love Affair as a Work of Art (1996), holds that Proust, as shown in Contre Sainte-Beuve, unpublished writings brought out in 1954, had a long-cherished plan to write an attack on the critic whose famous “method” was allegedly wrong. However, he never finished the project, instead writing A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust disagreed that in studying literary works one essentially was understanding an author, that therefore he would need to know the person’s religion, his background, his friends, his ideas. No, Proust held, a work is the product of another “I” than the one we list “in our habits, in society, and in our vices.” To understand an author, then, one does not need to speak to his friends but, rather, needs to plumb the work by introspection. Diderot scholar P. N. Furbank, citing Robert Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch, says that Proust had more in common with Sainte-Beuve than he liked to pretend. “Where Proust wanted to offer a devastating description of Sainte-Beuve’s ‘method,’ “ writes Calasso, “he revealed its secret, which was in fact very close to his own.” The New Critics, similarly, held that readers and critics should focus not on authors but on works. Sainte-Beueve would not have agreed, of course, with T. S. Eliot and the other New Critics. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI} Saisset, Émile Edmond (1814–1863) Saisset, a French philosopher, belonged to the eclectic and pantheistic school of Victor Cousin. He taught at the Sorbonne in 1862 and was a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales. Saisset’s views on religion are seen in his Le scepticisme (1865). {RAT}
Saint-Évremond, Charles de Marguetel de Saint-Denis de (1613?–1703) Saint-Évremond was a major-general, a writer, an amateur moralist, and a critic. He served under Condé and Nördlingen. For satirizing Cardinal Mazarin he was once confined in the Bastille. He was exiled, however, for his hostility to the 1658 Peace of the Pyrenees, which set the Franco-Spanish border, and he died in England, where he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His writing contributed to the skeptical, freethinking current of his century, and his Comédie des académistes showed him to be the most famous Epicurean and hedonist of his day. He influenced young men like Bolingbroke, according to Robertson, and he was known as a Deist. Asked on his deathbed if he wished to reconcile himself to God, Saint-Évremond replied that, no, he desired to reconcile himself to appetite (or, in another translation, “Certainly, with my stomach.”). {CE; BDF; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Saint-Glain, Dominique de (Born c. 1620) Saint-Glain was a French Spinozist who went to Holland in order to profess the Protestant religion more freely. He assisted on the Rotterdam Gazette. Upon reading Spinoza, he espoused the system and translated into French the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus under the title of La Clef du Sanctuaire (1678). When he was violently attacked for this, Saint-Glain changed the title to Ceremonies Superstitieuses des Juifs (Superstitious Jewish Ceremonies) and also to Reflexions Curieuses d’un Esprit Desintéressé (Curious Reflections of a Disinterested Soul). {BDF}
Saint-Hyacinthe, Themiseul de Cordonnier de (1684–1746) Saint-Hyacinthe was a French writer, the author of Philosophical Researches (1743). Voltaire published his Diner Du Comte de Boulainvilliers under the name of St. Hyacinthe. {BDF}
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine (1767–1794) Saint-Just was a prominent figure during the French Revolution, a student of philosophy and a commissary to the army. McCabe wrote that his enemies had gotten him arrested and guillotined during the Terror. However, Saint-Just was a leading member of the dreaded Committee of Public Safety and, later, president of the Convention. A supporter of Robespierre in the destruction of the Hébertists and Dantonists, Saint-Just believed in the perfect state, one based on rigorous Spartan virtue, and he allowed no opposition. When Robespierre was overthrown and Saint-Just was prevented from delivering a speech in his defense, Saint-Just was arrested and both were guillotined. McCabe listed Saint-Juste as an atheist, one who “died at the age of 27, with great serenity.” {CE; RAT; RE}
Saint-Saëns, (Charles) Camille (1835–1921) Saint-Saëns, an eminent French composer, was an outright freethinker, according to David Tribe. He is best known for the opera “Samson et Dalila” (1877), which Caruso sang. Saint-Saëns also wrote symphonies, concertos, and symphonic poems. Franz Liszt called him “the finest organist in the world.” Indicative of his outlook, Saint-Saëns once wrote, “When Art was born, Religion took possession of it. Religion did not create Art.” {TRI}
Saint-Saëns, (Charles) Camille (9 Oct 1835 - 16 Dec 1921) Saint-Saëns, a precocious French composer and pianist, took lessons as a child from Stamaty and Boëly, then studied with Halévy when he enrolled in the Conservatoire in 1848. Hired to be the organist at the Madeleine (1857-1875), he was hailed as being the world’s greatest organist by Gounod, Rossini, Berlioz, and Liszt. Also, he taught at the Ecole Niedermeyer (1865-1865), at which Fauré was one of his devoted pupils. Known for having revived an interest in the music of Bach, Handel, and Rameau, he co-founded the Société Nationale de Musique (1871). Saint-Saëns was a virtuoso pianist, praised for his interpretations of Mozart, and he composed classical sonatas, chamber music, concertos, and thirteen operas of which Samson et Dalila (1877) was the most successful and was sung by Enrico Caruso. Saint-Saëns was an outright freethinker, according to David Tribe. Indicative of his outlook, Saint-Saëns once wrote, “When Art was born, Religion took possession of it. Religion did not create Art.” {TRI}
Sakala (20th Century)
Dr. Sakala of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada, India, addressed the 1992 IHEU Congress in the Netherlands. On the subject of social action in India, she described how the Centre gives medical assistance as well as socio-psychological counseling for women, some of whom have married at the age of thirteen and are deserted after a period of time. For years, she reports, the Atheist Centre has championed inter-caste and inter-religious marriages in order to break down some of the barriers in Indian society.
Sakamoto, Tatsuya (20th Century) Sakamoto, of Japan’s Keio University, is a 1997 Hume Conference Director of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Sakharov, Andrei D(mietrievich) (1921–1989) Sakharov, the outspoken Soviet advocate of human rights and nuclear physicist who from 1948 to 1956 helped develop the USSR’s hydrogen bomb, was a member of the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. When in the late 1960s he became a critic of Soviet repression and the world arms race, he was imprisoned. Further, he was excluded from participating in Academy of Science matters, and he was banished to Gorky, where he was prohibited from speaking freely and which called the world’s attention to the problem of dissidents in the USSR. Sakharov was the first Soviet citizen to win the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1990. In his acceptance speech, Sakharov said that mankind’s goal is to “make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive.” During his imprisonment and confinement, he worked on Moscow and Beyond: 1986 to 1989 and Memoirs (posthumously published, 1992), the latter a chronicle of his life until 1986 and written despite K.G.B. (secret police) interference during an eleven-year period in which he was exiled to Gorky (which now is called Nizhny Novgorod and to which thousands of visitors annually trek, finding on a window of the door to his study that Sakharov had printed with a blue marker, “Per aspera ad astra [Through perseverance, to the stars].). In 1980, the American Humanist Association named Sakharov Humanist of the Year. In 1988, he was awarded the Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union “for his long-standing contributions to the cause of human rights.” This was presented to him in the United States, when finally Soviet politicians allowed him to travel. Paul Kurtz presented the award “in recognition of his long-standing contributions to the cause of human rights, the scientific outlook, and the ideals of humanism.” In accepting, Dr. Sakharov commented that he had a deep affection for the international humanist movement. In addition, Sakharov was a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. At his memorial, David Remnick, author of Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993), walked in the funeral cortege of, in his estimation, “the most fearless martyr of the regime.” Said one of Sakharov’s old friends in a metaphor reminiscent of religious legend and the story of Saint George, “I’m only glad that before he died Sakharov dealt the system a mortal blow. If God sent Jesus to pay for the sins of humankind, then a Marxist God somewhere sent Andrei Sakharov to pay for the sins of our system.” Upon hearing this, John Bayley remarked that “even then no one could know that the blow was mortal, least of all that courageous populist Boris Yeltsin, whose towering figure was just ahead of Remnick in the funeral procession.” (See entry for Elena Bonner.) {CE; HM2; HNS2}
Salacrou, Armand (Born 1899) Salacron’s “Certitudes et Incertitudes” in Theatre (1943), observed, “The existence of a world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.” {TYD}
Saladin: See entry for William Stewart Ross.
Saladin (Salah ad-Din) (1137?–1195) Christopher Hitchins has called Saladin, the Muslim warrior and Ayyubid sultan of Egypt, “the greatest Kurd in history.” He, the opponent of the Christian Crusaders, conquered Jerusalem among other sites. The Christians never recovered from their loss to his army. {CE}
Saladin, Kenneth (20th Century) Saladin, who once sued to have Christian symbols removed from the city seal of Milledgeville, Georgia, is a professor of biology and an activist on behalf of church-state separation. {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1984}
Salaville, Severien (1755–1832) Salaville, a French journalist during the 18th century, was, according to Robertson, “the one convinced and reasoning atheist among the publicists of the Revolution [who] opposed the Cult of Reason with sound and serious and persuasive argument, and strongly blamed all forcible interference with worship, while at the same time calmly maintaining atheism as against theism.” {JMR; JMRH; RAT}
Saldaña, Jorge (20th Century) Saldaña participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. He spoke on “Telecracia y Dictadura,” noting how Mexican radio and television coverage has been instrumental, unfortunately, in keeping one political party in power for sixty-five years.
Sale, George (1680–1736) Sale was an English Oriental scholar. He was one of a society that undertook to publish a Universal History and was one of the compilers of the General Dictionary. With a preliminary discourse and explanatory notes, he translated the Qur’an. Sale was one of the founders of the Society for the Encouragement of Learning. {BDF}
Sales y Ferre, Manuel (Born c. 1839) A Spanish scientist, Sales y Ferre was a professor at the University of Seville. A freethinker, he published several works on geology.
Salgadão, Sebastiao (20th Century) Salgadão, a noted photographer, when asked by Photographer’s Forum interviewer Ken Lassiter if he believed in God, responded in the negative:
KL: Sometimes the words “compassion, empathy, humanity, dignity, and tenderness” are used to describe your photographs. Is that how you feel about the people?
SS: People sometimes ask if I am a religious person. I am not a religious person. I don’t believe in God, that there is only one superior who directs all things in the universe. No, I believe one kind of that is in man–the human god. {CA; E}
Saliers, A. (19th Century) Saliers was a contributor to l’Athée. He wrote On Patriotism (1881). (BDF}
Salisbury, Harrison E(vans) (1908– )
Salisbury, an author and journalist, responded to the present author concerning humanism:
If I have to be categorized, put me in Class One [“to the lexicographer, a term denoting devotion to human interests as well as one referring to the study of the humanities”]. I have no relationship to humanism as a religion or sect. I simply fit, I think, your definition. I try to have a regard for my fellow human beings, I try to have sympathy for the mixed bag of the human condition, and I try to keep my fellow man in mind when I am acting or writing. If not, I would declare out of the human race, of which I have no intention. It is always surprising to me to find people who seem to regard the human race as a Party of One.
{WAS, 9 July 1992}
Salisbury, Lee (20th Century) Salisbury, of Shakopee, Minnesota, wrote “Leading Scientists Still Reject God” for Secular Nation (January-March 1999).
Saleeby, Caleb Williams (Born 1878) After being assistant to Sir Jonathan Hutchinson at the Polyclinic, Saleeby wrote the Spencerian Evolution, the Master Key (1906), in which he described himself as “a camp follower of those who believe that we cannot know reality.” Although an agnostic, he was chiefly occupied with Eugenist propaganda and was a member of the National Birth-rate Commission. He edited The New Library of Medicine and sat on various national and scientific commissions. {RAT}
Salk, Jonas Edward (1914–1995) Dr. Salk, an American physician and microbiologist who developed a vaccine against poliomyelitis, was one of America’s all-time leading scientists. In the 1960s he developed the first successful vaccine against poliomyelitis, the viral illness that had gripped the nation in fear with images of children doomed to death or paralysis. His 1955 announcement that the new polio vaccine was safe and effective became a turning point in the fight against a disease which, wrote journalist Harold M. Schmeck Jr., “condemned some victims to live the rest of their lives in tanklike breathing machines called iron lungs and placed sunny swimming holes off limits to children because of parents’ fears of contagion.” In the five years before 1955, when mass inoculations with the vaccine began, cases of paralytic polio averaged about 25,000 a year in the United States. A few years after polio vaccination became routine, the annual number of cases dropped to a dozen or so, sometimes fewer. In 1969 not a single death from polio was reported in the nation, the first such year on record, and by the time of his death the disease was on the verge of being eradicated worldwide. Some eminent virologists insisted, right up to the first field trial, that the killed virus vaccine should be withheld in favor of a live virus vaccine concurrently under development. The live virus vaccine, developed by Dr. Albert Sabin, was first licensed in 1961. The live virus is modified in the laboratory so that it stimulates immunity but causes no damage. After the polio vaccine was proved successful in the field trials, Dr. Salk became a hero to the public with opinion polls ranking him, Schmeck added, roughly between Churchill and Gandhi as a revered figure of modern history. In 1976 the American Humanist Association named Dr. Salk Humanist of the Year. In 1977 in Washington, DC, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At the time of his death, from a heart attack, Dr. Salk had a conviction that he lived at the crucial time at which the graph of world population growth changed its slope, a harbinger of future leveling-off and decline. From 1970 on, he also lived with and was married to Françoise Gilot, a French painter and the former mistress of Pablo Picasso. {CE; HSN2} Sallet, Friedrich von (1812–1843) Sallet was a German poet of French descent. An officer in the army, he was imprisoned for writing a satire on the life of a trooper. In 1834 he attended Hegel’s lectures at Berlin, and in 1838 he quit the army. In a poem, “The Layman’s Gospel,” Sallet takes New Testament texts and expounds them pantheistically; the God who is made flesh is replaced by the man who becomes God. {BDF; RAT}
Salmeron y Alonso, Nicolas (1838–1881) Salmeron y Alonso was a Spanish statesman who studied law and became a Democratic journalist. During the Revolution of 1873, he became President to the Cortes. Salmeron y Alonso wrote a prologue to the work of Giner on Philosophy and Arts (1878), and his own works were issued in 1881. Salmeron, an outspoken agnostic who took part in the 1892 International Freethought Congress at Madrid, was a great force in the growth of Spanish rationalism. {BDF; PUT; RAT; RE}
SALON During the Enlightenment, periodic gatherings of persons noted in literature, philosophy, the fine arts, or similar areas were held at one person’s home and were known as salons. {DCL}
Salt, Henry Stephens (1851–1939) Salt was an English writer who had been born in India and was educated at Eton. A contributor to Progress, Salt wrote Literary Sketches (1888) and A Life of James Thomson (1889). He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association. {BDF; FUK; RAT; TRI}
Salt, Lorraine (20th Century) Salt has been on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.
Salter, William Mackintire (1853–1931) An Ethical Culture leader of note in Chicago (1882–1883), Salter along with Judge Henry Booth founded the Bureau of Justice, which grew into the Legal Aid Society. Salter had trained in Iowa at Knox College, and later he studied at Harvard Divinity School. In 1902, he wrote Society and Its Children, With Special Reference to Child Labor. {EU, Howard B. Radest; RAT}
Salters, Edgar Evertson (Born 1858) Salters was an American author who studied at Concord, Paris, Munich, and Heidelberg. In 1884 he published a sketch, Balzac, followed by The Philosophy of Disenchantment, concerning Schopenhauer and Hartmann. In The Anatomy of Negation, Saltus gives an account of some atheists and skeptics from Kapila to Leconte de Lisle (1886). Salters (called Saltus by Wheeler) also wrote novels. His brother Francis was a poet, the author of Honey and Gall. {BDF}
SALVATION In Christianity, salvation is a union or friendship with God and a deliverance from Original Sin and damnation. Jesus promised salvation to his followers. The Salvation Army, a Protestant denomination organized along military lines and headed by a general, is known for its charitable works and streetcorner bands featuring tubas, accordions, and blissfully non-professional singers. “Deliverance of evil” is a theological invention which has nothing to do with freethought, rationalism, and secular humanism.
SALVATION ARMY The Salvation Army, organized in 1865, is at 615 Slaters Lane, Alexandria, Virginia 22313.
Salverte, Anne Joseph Eusèbe Baconniere de (1771–1839) Salverte was a French philosopher who studied among the Oratorians. He contributed to Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des Athées in 1793, published an elegy on Diderot in 1801, and as an elected deputy demanded that Catholicism not be recognized as the state religion. He is remembered for his work on The Occult Sciences (1829). On his deathbed, Salverte refused religious offices. {BDF; RAT}
Salvianus (5th Century) “Apart from a very few who avoid evil, what is nearly the whole body of Christians but a sink of vice?’ Those words, by a Marseilles priest, gave a picture of the moral condition of the Christian world that he saw at the middle of the fifth century. Salvianus’s work, De Gubernatione Dei (On the Providence of God), like other critical documents of the time, was not translated. For Africa he gives an appalling picture, confirmed by Augustine’s sermons that Africa is “the cesspool of the world.” Some observers have noted that, judging by his work, the Christians seem not to have bettered the Romans the way they had claimed. {RE}
Samaram: See entry for G. Vijayam.
SAME-SEX MARRIAGES Is the legalization of same-sex marriage desirable? According to almost all the leaders of organized religions, no. However, Vern L. Bullough, a Free Inquiry senior editor and prominent secular humanist, replies yes, “because the benefits that come from legal marriage are substantial” and he finds no moral or ethical reason that individuals in such relationships should be discriminated against. (See entry for Spouse.) {Free Inquiry, Winter 1997-1998}
Samkalden, I. (20th Century) Samkalden, former professor of the Law of International Organisation and former Minister of Justice for the Netherlands, was the first Commissioner for Human Rights of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. As an ombudsman, her main duty is to act on behalf of persons “who are the victims of discrimination on account of their conviction or personal disposition, with special reference to the humanist philosophy of life.” Also, the Commissioner deals with “infringements on the principle of separation of church and state in concrete cases.” As such, Dr. Samkalden, also the former Lord Mayor of Amsterdam, and Minister of State, served from 1983 to 1986. In the June 1988 New Humanist, Jim Herrick has described the history of this group. Humanists anywhere in the world who might need its services should write the Commissioner for Human Rights, Plompetorengracht 19, 3512 CB, Utrecht, Holland.
Samper, José María (1828–1888) At first a militant anticlericalist in Colombia, Samper as a representative of the “Generation of 1849” helped create the Liberal party and brought José Hilario López to power. The López administration enacted sweeping anticlerical reforms, the first that truly separated church and state in Latin America. “Until 1848,” Samper wrote in Apuntamientos para la historia politica y social de la Nueva Granada desde 1810 (1853), “Bogotá had been held in almost complete subjection by the clergy. The Jesuits and the other friars and clerics dominated most of the families with the power of superstition, and they had been able to fanaticize the masses and make them into blind instruments of absolutistic propaganda.” However, when the liberal reforms did not achieve the support of the masses, Samper became a devout Catholic and held that liberalism and Catholicism were not incompatible. {EU}
Sampson, Wallace I. (20th Century) Dr. Sampson, a physician at Stanford, is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project.
Samson, Leon (20th Century) Samson was a dialectical materialist who wrote The New Humanism (1930).
Samson, Peter H. (1914–1992) Samson, who was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, was an assistant minister at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles from 1938 to 1940, where he was ordained in 1939. As an accredited interim minister from 1983 to 1992, he served nine churches, from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Adelaide, Australia, to Paramus, New Jersey. Samson’s booklets, “The Living Sources of Free Religion” (1949) and “What It Means to Be a Unitarian” (1951), were extensively distributed in Unitarian and Universalist societies.
SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERITY ATHEISTS San Diego State University Atheists on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Sand, George (Amandine Aurore Lucile [Lucie] Dudevant, née Dupin, Baronne Dudevant) (1804–1876) Sand came from an old and aristocratic family. Her father, Maurice Dupin, had been an officer in the Imperial Army. Upon his death at the age of thirty from a fall off his horse, her mother had to raise the family, all boys but Aurore, who was raised by her grandparents. At the age of fifteen, she was sent to a convent in Paris to finish her education, and the following year when her grandmother died she was left heiress of the Dupin estate at Nohant. There were not many eligible men of her own class in the vicinity, but she met and married Baron Dudevant, a young neighbor of twenty-seven and an officer in the Imperial Army. They separated when she was but twenty-four, she retained her estate, and when twenty-seven she and her little children went to Paris (possibly to be with Jules Sandeau, a young journalist she had once met). At first trying to be a painter, then a writer, she chose to appear before the public under a masculine guise for, as explained by Underwood, “already she had learned that the world is more lenient in its criticism and judgment of a man than it is of a woman. The petty, superficial homage paid to youth and beauty in a woman did not deceive her.” She chose George as her first name, and presumably Sand was inspired by her friendship with Sandeau. A romantic by nature, Sand shocked the Parisian literati and became its center. Her iconoclastic opinions and daring mode of life caused many rumors during the period in which she wrote eighty novels, all of which made the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading from 1840 to 1863. Sand was a strong believer in women’s rights. Often wearing male attire, she was said to have had female as well as male lovers. Her notorious liaisons included Jules Sandeau, Alfred de Musset, Prosper Mérimée, and Frédéric Chopin, giving her the reputation of being a nymphomaniac. However, the philosopher she most admired—Pierre Lerous—was not her lover. Nor was the philosopher Rousseau, whose work had led to her dropping Catholicism—he had died in 1778. The Goncourts, “who believed genius to be exclusively a male possession, put it with a gloating coarseness: an autopsy of any famous female writer, Mme. Sand or Mme. de Staël, would reveal a clitoris growing enviously toward the size of a penis,” according to Julian Barnes in a review of Barbara Bray’s Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (The New York Review of Books, 10 June 1993). A restaurateur once told the Goncourts, “It’s a funny thing, but when she’s dressed as a man I call her Madame, and when she’s dressed as a woman I call her monsieur.” Sand once wrote concerning the Prussian invasion of 1870 and the Commune of 1871 that the Communards “have ruined and will continue to ruin the republic, exactly as the priests have ruined Christianity.” After Balzac, Robertson notes, it is difficult to find a great French novelist who is not frankly rationalistic. He claims Sand will not be claimed by the orthodox. However, in her correspondence with Flaubert she has an open mind about the afterlife, writing, “When I’m no longer useful or agreeable to other people, I’d like to depart peacefully without a sigh, or at least with no more than a sign over the poor human race: it doesn’t amount to much, but I’m a part of it, and perhaps I don’t amount to much either.” As for her using the word “God,” she explained that “it is an avatar of which the meaning is often an enigma.” In Flaubert-Sand: The Correspondence (1993), The Economist (5 June 1993) remarks of the letters to her literary friend in France, “They had their differences. Flaubert was a vehemently reactionary anti-Christian, arguing always against the need to assist or promote the weak and meek. Sand was a true daughter of the French revolution; Flaubert, examining it with his head rather than his heart, saw dismal proof of human stupidity, the failing he excoriated in Bouvard et Pécuchet. He was appalled by modern life; Sand, although older, embraced it wholeheartedly. But life was, as Henry James shrewdly observed, her greatest talent; she was “a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself.” The English, who once had thought of her as an assailant of marriage and religion, eventually came to appreciate her work and genius, Wheeler observed. Of religion, she wrote to a friend, “If I make use of the expression ‘God,’ it is only to refer to one of the loveliest of hypotheses which the human mind has ever conceived, and which expresses only the complete good which we all seek. I appreciate and respect your faith (theism) but cannot share it with you. In the future, my friend, make up your mind to respect those who love the truth, even if they seek it in a light that you consider deceptive.” Upon her death and in accordance with her wishes, no religious ceremonies were performed, according to Underwood, “save a short prayer, which was insisted upon by the Catholic priest of the diocese, as essential to his permission to allow the body to be buried in consecrated ground. Victor Hugo delivered the funeral oration over her grave, in the course of which he thus eulogized her: “She is the one great woman in this century whose mission it was to finish the French Revolution and commence the revolution of Humanity. Equality of the sexes being a branch of the equality of men, a great woman was necessary. It was for a woman to prove that her mind might possess all gifts, without losing a particle of her angelic nature—might at once be strong and gentle. George Sand was that woman. She is one of the glories of our age and country. She had a great heart like Barbes, a great mind like Balzac, and a great soul like Lamartine. She was good, and accordingly she had detractors, but the insults to her were of that kind which posterity will count as glories.” Upon her death Turgenev wrote to Flaubert, “What a good man she was, and what a kind woman.” Flaubert had addressed her as “chere maître.” Plauchat, in his Galerie Contemporaine, had said that Sand believed in God, but “certainly not in the vengeful and merciless God of the orthodox.” Her last work was a critical notice of Renan’s “Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques” in Le Temps only a month before her decease. Toward the end of May she took to her bed, suffering from internal paralysis, from which she never rose again. Up until the day of her death she remained lucid, one of the last directions being, “Ne touchez pas à la verdure,” which her children understood to mean that she wished that the tree in the village cemetery where she was soon to be buried should not be disturbed. On 8 June, at nine in the morning, Foote reported, she “expired in calmness and serenity.” (See entry for Flaubert.) {BDF; CE; FO; PUT; RE; SAU; TRI; TYD}
Sandburg, Carl (1878–1967) Winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1940 for his biography of Abraham Lincoln, Sandburg featured Chicago in many of his poems. A Universalist, he voiced the long-range optimism characteristic of humanists, as in his “The People, Yes”: And man the stumbler and finder, goes on, man the dreamer of deep dreams, man the shaper and maker, man the answerer. . . .
Man is a long time coming. Man will yet win.
Sandburg’s recollection of what it was like to attend Lombard, a Universalist-founded college in Galesburg, Illinois, at which he was a member of the 1898–1899 basketball team, is found in his Ever the Winds of Chance (1983). He had been raised a Lutheran but said he subscribed to Unitarian Universalism “a little more definitely than to any other denomination.” In addition to his Pulitzer Prize for the six-volume Lincoln work, Sandburg won Pulitzers for Cornhuskers (1918) and Complete Poems (1950). His autobiography is Always the Young Strangers (1953). In The People, Yes (1936), Sandburg reasoned, “To work hard, to live hard, to die hard, and then to go to Hell after all would be too damned hard.” At the request of Mrs. Sandburg, the Rev. George C. B. Tolleson, minister of the Unitarian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, conducted her husband’s funeral. She and two of the Sandburg daughters conferred with Mr. Tolleson prior to the service and told him about a little red notebook in which Sandburg had copied out a passage from Walt Whitman in memory of Lincoln. Tolleson used that excerpt in the service, the lines beginning, “Come, lovely and soothing Death,” as well as Sandburg’s own “Finish,” which begins, “Death comes once; let it be easy.” {CE; CL; TYD; UU}
Sanders, Donald R. (1951–1995) Sanders has been described by journalist Mimi Swartz as “a pornographer with a penchant for alienating others and a phone-sex business.” He became something of a surrogate son to atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair and a brother to Jon Garth Murray. In the mid-1980s he was placed on the board of American Atheists and worked in a number of capacities, the last as its executive vice president. He also served on the boards of directors of the Society of Separationists and was the National Chapter Coordinator for American Atheists. In 1989 he received the “Atheist of the Year” award. In 1992 in Houston, Sanders helped organize the American Atheist’s picketing of George Bush’s church, and he was an activist upon behalf of gay as well as atheist causes. According to Sanders’s close friend, Leslie Perez, a transsexual and former death-row denizen once known as Leslie Douglas Ashley, it was Sanders who helped the O’Hairs in their alleged escape to New Zealand. “They were transferring money abroad for a time,” Perez told journalist Mimi Swartz. “I know ‘cause Don told me about it.” Upon his death from AIDS, Sanders’s cremains were mixed with those of his deceased partner-in-life, Mark Franceschini, who had died in 1992. Inasmuch as Franceshini’s Roman Catholic family wants to remove his remains for a religious ceremony, the interment of their ashes has remained undisclosed. {Vanity Fair, March 1997}
Sanders, James L. (20th Century) Sanders founded Religion-Free (R-F, or Ruff!), 413 West Navajo Road, Flagstaff, Arizona 86001. He proposes that the designation by placed on correspondence, envelopes, lapel pins, etc., as a way of identifying fellow non-believers. He wrote “Leaving Religion and Anti-Religion” for The American Rationalist (March-April 1997). {FD}
Sanders, Joseph R(oosevelt) (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Sanders was a professor at the University of West Florida. He wrote Aristotle and Kierkegaard (1972). {HM2}
Sanderson, John Scott Burdon [Sir] (1828–1905) Sanderson was a master of epidemic diseases. “His Rationalist views were so well known,” McCabe reported, “that when (1859) he applied for positions at hospitals he was asked for testimonials to his orthodoxy, though the testimonials which were accepted referred only to his high character and ability.” Sanderson taught physiology and histology at London University College and was professor of medicine at Oxford. In 1893 he was President of the British Association. Sir John was Anti-Vitalist, and he joined in the public rebuke of Lord Kelvin, in 1903, for saying that science was returning to a belief in a Vital Principle. {RAT; RE}
Sanderson, Terry (20th Century)
Sanderson is a British rationalist, journalist, and member of the National Secular Society, the author of Making Gay Relationships Work (1990) and How To Be A Happy Homosexual (1989). “Religion,” he has written, is “a potent enemy of the lesbian and gay community,” and he has urged the Humanist movement to take a firmer stand on gay and lesbian rights. The Potts Papers (1996) has been described as being a beguiling satire, a story “packed with perverted sex, gambling, random violence, and a great deal of hoovering.”
Sandhu, Ranjit (20th Century) Sandhu, philosopher Paul Kurtz’s secretary, is on the staff of Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer. Son of a Hindu father and a Greek Orthodox mother, he has been instrumental in organizing Dr. Kurtz’s office at the Council of Secular Humanism’s Buffalo address.
Sands, Maniel (20th Century) Sands wrote Lessons from the Creator, the Image of God (1903). {GS}
Sandvig, Bente (20th Century) Sandvig is head of the Research Department for the Human-Etisk Forbund in Norway. He has fought against a law which Parliament passed, one which removed the right of exemption from religious education and ensuring that religious education is preponderantly Lutheran. Holding that the Norwegian Parliament is thereby ignoring the international obligations of human rights conventions, Sandvig is one of the leaders of the Norwegian humanists who are demanding that the law be changed. His e-mail: <sandvig@human.no>. {International Humanist News, April 1996}
Sandwich, John Montagu [Earl of]: See John Montagu.
Sanger, Margaret (1879–1966) Sanger, the leader in the birth-control movement, was the daughter of a pious Catholic mother who died at age forty-nine after having had eleven babies and seven miscarriages. Her father was a freethinking, socialist Irishman. She was jailed in 1915 because the Comstock Act classified birth control data as obscene and not fit for the US mails and she had mailed such material. Her clinic at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn was closed in 1916 when a policewoman posed as a patient. In 1917, given a choice of a fine or thirty days in the workhouse, she chose the jail time. Refusing to be fingerprinted, proclaiming she was a political prisoner, she also refused a physical examination. During her thirty days in jail, she read aloud to the thirty-seven women in her cellblock, giving them birth-control advice. Upon her release, she was met by society women, working mothers, and militant feminists singing the “Marseillaise,” joined in by female prisoners still inside. A believer in “free love” and sensual, spiritual sex, Sanger had many lovers. (She called sexologist Havelock Ellis “King” but enjoyed sex more with historian H. G. Wells, according to Irving Wallace’s The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People [1981].) To her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, she once advised, “Kissing, petting, and even intercourse are all right as long as they are sincere. I have never given a kiss in my life that wasn’t sincere. As for intercourse, I’d say three times a day was about right.” In 1957, the American Humanist Association named her Humanist of the Year. One reason for her nomination was that the nominating committee (Harold R. Rafton, Edwin H. Wilson, Malcolm H. Bissell, Sherman D. Wakefield, and Warren Allen Smith) recognized that honors to women had woefully been overlooked in past years. According to Wakefield, Sanger’s father was a great admirer of Robert G. Ingersoll, and when Margaret was a young girl in Corning, New York, her father took her to welcome Ingersoll to town for a lecture that her father had arranged. Her admiration for Ingersoll is shown in Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (1938). In 1992, Ellen Chesler’s Woman of Valor sympathetically details her sex-without-fear views. Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, disliked Sanger, saying her “legacy is fifty-seven types of sexually transmitted disease.” Others who disliked her pointed to her 1922 book, Pivot of Civilization, in which she urged the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted” and called for sterilization of “genetically inferior races.” Later and in her autobiography, she singled out “the Asiatic races,” lamenting that “the incessant fertility of [the Chinese] millions spread like a plague.” Alexander Cockburn is one of her few negative critics, writing (New York Press, 23-29 September 1998) that she “was a monster, racist, and not much discomfited by Nazi ‘family planning’ in the Dachau manner.” As for religion, Sanger stated, “No gods, no masters.” {CE; HNS2; TRI; TYD; WWS}
Sanguinetti, Horacio (1935- ) Sanguinetti is the current President of the Argentine Humanist Society. A lawyer, teacher, and writer, he was rector of the National College of Buenos Aires and first Secretary of Education of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (1996-1997). Sanguinetti has written about liberal leaders like Robespierre and books on the University Reform of 1918’s influence in Latin America.
Sankar, Jyothi (20th Century) In 1971, Sankar and A. Suryanarayana founded a monthly, Free Thought, for the Indian Rationalist Association.
Sansom, Peter (20th Century) Sansom is a liberal minister who was a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
SANTA CLAUS Santa Claus is not required to visit all 2,000,000,000 children under the age of eighteen, for he does not (appear to) handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Buddhist children on Earth. This reduces his workload to perhaps 15% of the total, or 378,000,000, which based upon 3.5 children per household averages down to 91,800,000 homes. With thirty-one hours of Christmas to work with, according to John Michael Keller in Skeptic (Vol. 2, No. 3), thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of Earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical), this works out to 822.6 visits per second. Assuming one good child in each household, this leaves Santa 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh, and move on to the next house. This means that Santa’s sleigh moves at 650 miles per second, or 3,000 times the speed of sound. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds, but, assuming each child gets at least two pounds, the sleigh carries 321,300 tons, not counting the overweight Santa. Instead of only eight or nine reindeer, he needs 214,200 for such a payload, which must tote 353,430 tons (or four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth). It follows that 353,430 tons traveling at 650 miles per second will create enormous air resistance. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, and Santa will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. Thus, a 250-pound Santa would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force. This, of course, is entirely credible to Christian children, who also believe God is in Heaven and one day if they are good little boys and girls they will be rewarded by seeing Him. In Russia, Grandfather Frost is called Ded Moroz (pronounced, incredibly, “dead morose”). Freethinkers tell their children the Santa myth but make it clear that the story is truly make-believe, that Santa symbolizes goodness, surprises, and sharing. (See entry for Tom W. Flynn, whom his friends call the anti-Santa Claus.)
Santa Maria, Domingo [President] (1825–1885) In 1846 Santa Maria edited El Orden and from 1847 to 1850 he was Governor of Province of Colchagua, Chile. When the clericals were in power from 1851 to 1853, he had to live in Peru, and from 1858 to 1861 he was in exile, mainly in England. From 1881 to 1885 he became President of the Republic of Chile, during which time laws of divorce and civil marriage were passed and the privileges of the corrupt Church were restricted. An attempt was made to assassinate him, but at the close of his term of office Santa Maria became President of the Senate. {RAT}
SANTA MUERTE (Saint Death) In Mexico, Santa Muerte is considered by some to be the angel of last resort, particularly by those who feel abandoned by their government and disparaged by the church. At a small chapel in Tepito, one of Mexico City’s notorious neighborhoods, adults and children who live on the fringes of a society besieged by renegade cops and corrupt politicians come to pray. The Catholic Church has condemned Santa Muerte services as devil worship and, according to journalist Ginger Thompson in The New York Times (26 Mar 2004) “law enforcement authorities have linked the cult to violence committed by drug traffickers and child prostitution rings. In a spate of killings in the northern state of Sinalos in 2004 that left more than 50 people dead, authorities reported finding tattoos, rings and pendants bearing the image of the Santa Muerte on the bodies of many of the victims. Novelist Homero Aridjis told the reporter, “Some ask for her protection from harm. But others ask for protection from harm even as they do harm to others. She is their accomplice.”
Santana, José M. F. (20th Century) Santana created a non-believer’s calendar, Uskonnottomien Kalenteri (1983) in Swedish, and he was active in freethought affairs in Sweden. A lawyer, he helped establish the Humanist and Ethical Union of Sweden in 1979. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Santayana, George (1863–1952) Santayana, a Spanish-born U.S. philosopher and critic at Harvard University (1889–1912), is author of The Life of Reason (1905–1906), Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and The Last Puritan (1935). According to John Gouinlock, Santayana’s mother was a deist, his father an atheist. Both regarded religion as a form of superstition but believed in conforming to its outward requirements. His early The Life of Reason (1905–1906) used the Aristotelian principle to distinguish what is ideal in human life–in art and science, society and the moral life, and religion. Reason’s aim is harmony. Life teaches the lesson of human finitude, not of existence without end. If there were but one God, He would be responsible for evil as well as good. In polytheism, with its many gods which celebrate different ideal ends, religion is more robust, complete, and poetic. The Jews were the first to deny authenticity to other religions, and Christians and Muslims perpetuated this intolerance, making it a virtue. Calling himself a pessimist and one disillusioned, he meant that one must be free of illusion if he is to have a clear conception of the ideal; and to be pessimistic means to regard the universe as functioning according to laws that are indifferent to human interest and independent of human will, which explains his liking Spinoza, also one who was disillusioned and pessimistic. His naturalism was not consistently elaborated but, as Gouinlock notes, “Few philosophers have done so much to show how religion can become obscure and debased when it pretends to science; and no philosopher has argued so well that religion can be a poetic expression and celebration of temporal life.” Santayana did not fully acknowledge his homosexuality until fairly late in life. According to editor and critic Scott McLemee, Santayana told his secretary Daniel Cory after a 1929 conversation with a gay A. E. Housman that, “I think I must have been that way in my Harvard days, though I was unconscious of it at the time.” McLemee added,
One finds Santayana’s clearest homophile expression in a set of four elegiac sonnets for Warwick Potter, a young man Santayana called his “last real friend,” who died of cholera following a boating accident in 1893. The sequence, “To W. P.” (1894) inevitably recalls Milton’s “Lycidas,” though Santayana’s poem is much less an exercise in literary and mythological allusion than Milton’s. More than “Lycidas,” it seems a genuine outpouring of grief—though the sense of loss is transformed by the poet into resignation and even acceptance: “For time a sadder mask may spread / Over the face that ever should be young.” The sequence ends on a note of transcendence, with his grieving friends vowing to Potter to “Keep you in whatso’ever things are good, and rear / In our weak virtues monuments to you.” Even so, Santayana’s most powerful lines convey the wounding permanence of loss: “And I scarce know which part may greater be— / What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”
(A gay Manhattan wag has speculated as to what intended when he wrote, “My humanism was entirely confined to man.”) Santayana once wrote of his parents’ influence upon his thinking:
I had heard many Unitarian sermons (being taken to hear them lest I should become too Catholic) and had been interested in them so far as they were rationalistic and informative, or even amusingly irreligious, as I often thought them to be; but neither in these discourses nor in Harvard philosophy was it easy for me to understand the Protestant combination of earnestness with waywardness. . . . My mother, like her father before her, was a Deist: she was sure there was a God, for who else could have made the world? But God was too great to take special thought for man: sacrifices, prayers, churches, and tales of immortality were invented by rascally priests in order to dominate the foolish. My father, except for the Deism, was emphatically of the same opinion. Thus, although I learned my prayers and catechism by rote, as was then inevitable in Spain, I knew that my parents regarded all religion as a work of human imaginations, and I agreed, and still agree, with them there. . . . The necessity of naturalism as a foundation for all further serious opinions was clear to me from the beginning.
In The Life of Reason he explained that religion is not something to be taken as being literally true. It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human, it aims at the “life of reason,” but it largely fails in attaining it. As for the gods, fear created them; but this fear and the mythology that it produces only half deceives the thinker. What is needed, he writes, is a paganizing of Christianity. It should take as its standard of value the human in life. Otherwise, it will continue with its mythology, the price of which is superstition, and although mythology and magic have their imaginative values, neither has succeeded: The Life of Reason, insofar as it is life, contains the mystic’s primordial assurances, and his rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a man-colored and natural happiness.” In 1951, while convalescing at the Convent of the Blue Nuns in Italy, he wrote to the present author:
In my old-fashioned terminology, Humanist means a person saturated by the humanities: Humanism is something cultural: an accomplishment, not a doctrine. This might be something like what you call “classical humanism.” But unfortunately there is also a metaphysical or cosmological humanism or moralism which maintains that the world is governed by human interests and an alleged universal moral sense. This cosmic humanism for realists, who believe that knowledge has a prior and independent object which sense or thought signify, might be some religious orthodoxy, for idealists and phenomenalists an oracular destiny or dialectical evolution dominating the dream of life. This “humanism” is what I call egotism or moralism, and reject altogether. Naturalism, on the contrary, is something to which I am so thoroughly wedded that I like to call it materialism, so as to prevent all confusion from romantic naturalism like Goethe’s for instance, or that of Bergson. Mine is the hard, non-humanistic naturalism of the Ionian philosophers, of Democritus, Lucretius, and Spinoza. Those professors at Columbia who tell you that in my Idea of Christ in the Gospels I incline to theism have not read that book sympathetically. They forget that my naturalism is fundamental and includes man, his mind, and all his works, products of the generative order of Nature. Christ in the Gospels is a legendary figure. Spirit in him recognizes its dependence on the Father, and not monarchical government; i.e., the order of nature; and the animal will in man being thus devised, the spirit in man is freed and identified with that of the Father. My early Lucifer, which you mention, has the same doctrine.
Santayana in Soliloquies in England (1922) wrote, “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. . . . My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety toward the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.” He also wrote, in his Reason in Science, “A thorough Materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be, like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher.” Martin Greif has called The Last Puritan the best novel ever written by a philosopher. It also is one of the saddest, for it relates the story, according to A. L. Rowse, of Santayana’s own unrequited love for Bertrand Russell’s heterosexual brother Frank. The attraction began when Santayana was invited to go for a cruise on the Russell yacht and, although Frank had no trouble crossing the narrow plank to the boat, George almost fell into the water and had to be helped over with the aid of Frank’s strong, manly arms. Even when Frank was later imprisoned for bigamy, the two maintained a correspondence. It is possible that the relationship was not totally unrequited, an allegation which came up later when Frank was sued for divorce by his wife. Forty years later, Santayana was writing to his first inspiration, his one and only love, “You now say more than you ever ‘said’ to me, even in our young days, about being ‘attached’ . . . to me; you must have been, in some way which . . . I don’t pretend to understand. In that case, why drop me now, when certainly there has been no change on my side except that involved in passing from twenty to sixty?” Of the defects of the Russell character, for Frank once forgot George’s name and called him Sargeant, Santayana wrote of Bertrand Russell: “There is a strange mixture in him, as in his brother, of great ability and great disability; prodigious capacity and brilliance here—astonishing unconsciousness and want of perception there. They are like creatures of a species somewhat different from man.” Frank appears as the anti-hero Lord Jim Darnley in The Last Puritan, leading Rowse to conclude that “the story may have demanded it, but there is an element of wish-fulfillment here, perfectly understandable in the circumstances.” At his request, and because of his long residence in Italy, Santayana was buried in a plot reserved for Spanish nationals in the Catholic cemetery in Rome. (See the section by Frederick A. Olafson on Santayana in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; CL; EU, John Gouinlock; GL; HNS; PA; RE; TRI; TYD; WAS, 9 February 1951}
Sante, Luc (20th Century) A leading expert on con artists, Sante is author of the introduction to David W. Maurer’s The Big Con (1999). He also wrote Low Life, Evidence, and The Factory of Facts. (See entry for Pickpocketry, which explains how Sante’s introduction helps support the view that diddling is an alternative to black-and-white/either-or choices.)
SANTERIA Santeria has mistakenly been called “the Latin voodoo.” More correctly, it is a religious outlook which originated in West Africa, one tempered in Cuba and other Caribbean countries as well as in some cities of the United States. In casas (houses), autonomous priests administer to their initiates, or godchildren. As babalawos of the Yoruba religion, the leaders—petitioning orishas, divine spirits—advise in matters such as love, work, and health. They feed the orishas sacrificial animals, such as chickens, goats, or lambs, fulfilling revelations by iyaloshas, or priestesses. In 1993, when Hialeah, Florida, banned such ritual animal sacrifice, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that such a ban violated the Santeristas’s freedom of religion. As a result, the secretive Afro-Cuban faith has become more open and has an estimated ten thousand adherents in the country, with three hundred Santeria priests in South Florida alone. Leaders claim many of their adherents are Catholics in addition to being Santeristas. According to Russell Miller, botánicas, the herbal pharmacies which stock Santeria sundries, are patronized by many Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and people from the Dominican Republic who are living in the United States. When lurid news reports appear of animal parts found in parks and on street corners, animal-rights groups including the Humane Society have complained loudly that Santeristas are responsible. Although attempts are being made to form various churches, such as the Lukumi Babalu Aye in Miami, most Santeristas are said to prefer meeting in families’ houses. Lizette Alvarez has quoted Anthony Cabrera Mondesire, a Santeria priest and author, as describing Santeria:
In the Beginning Oloddumare, the supreme being, created the universe and sent the orishas, or deities, to create life out of the elements. Therea re two master orishas: Obatala, who created human life and consciousness out of the substance of the earth, and Orumila, who governs an individual’s destiny. The Meaning of Life The world is a place for the soul to evolve. Santeros strive to be of service to others, to develop good character and to keep a cool head. There are two other types of people: bystanders and those who are destructive. All humans go to heaven—ikole orun—when they die, but destructive people live in hell on earth and suffer in heaven. Good and evil The terms are too subjective, since what can be good for one person can be evil for another. Instead, forces in the universe are either constructive or destructive for humanity. In either case, they are controlled by orishas. Affecting Fate With the help of priests, who can divine the past, present, and future, individuals can appeal to the orishas through prayers, music, proper behavior, and offerings of food, flowers, or other items and, in initiations or dire straits, animal blood. Priesthood Women can become priests, but only men can become high priests. Priests are the only ones who can interpret the laws expressed in the 256 symbols of the Ifa Corpus, a codification of Santeria tradition. Each priest receives an individualized set of taboos, which can include prohibitions on alcohol use, promiscuity, or illegal activities, for example.
Following is a printed set of directions given to a person who told his priestess that he was having personal problems:
Read Psalm 20 THREE TIMES over black and red candle Light black candle at 11 PM Light red candle at 6 AM Put mix into basin of water and read Psalm 20 THREE TIMES over it In the morning put the clothes that you are wearing on the WRONG SIDE and sprinkle mix lightly unto them While sprinkling mix say: IN THE NAME OF GOD THE FATHER, IN THE NAME OF GOD THE SON, AND IN THE NAME OF GOD THE HOLY GHOST Shake clothes 3 TIMES and put them back on RIGHT SIDE Then put clothes on bed and use the remaining water to clean your face. Then put clothes on. Get A GLASS OF RUM AND 3 CIGARETTES, light the cigarettes, and put behind the door When leaving the house open the door and throw the rum outside and say: ST. MICHAEL! ST. MICHAEL! ST. MICHAEL! PLEASE DEFEND ME Take a little Bible with you and read PSALM 4
The individual said that the fivc differently colored candles had cost over $15 each. He did not mention the cost of a variety of liquids in small vials which he was supposed to mix. {Russell Miller, “A Leap of Faith,” The New York Times, 30 January 1994; Lizette Alvarez, The New York Times, 27 January 1997; WAS}
Saphin, Edward C. (20th Century) Saphin, a freethinker, wrote “What Does the Bible Conceal?” (19–?). {GS}
Sapir, Louis (20th Century) Sapir was a President of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City.
Saposnekow, Jacob (20th Century) Saposnekow, whose alma mater was City College of New York, was a naturalistic humanist. {HNS}
Sappho (c. 630 B.C.E.) Sappho, who was the greatest of the early Greek lyric poets and the earliest woman author whose work survives, was an aristocrat, a teacher, and an extensive writer of poetry. Plato called her “the tenth Muse.” Inasmuch as her island home was Lesbos and her circle of friends were mostly but not exclusively women, she has become the archetypal lesbian and symbolic mother of lesbians. Little of her total output of writing still survives. Legend has it that when church father Tatian branded Sappho a whore in 140 C.E., her books were burned by the Christians. One version of the legend claims it was in 380 at the time of Gregory Nazianzen, whereas others set the burning in Constantinople and Rome in 1073. Sappho freely wrote about the gods and called upon Aphrodite not as a fearsome deity but as a mentor and confidante, the translator Anita George has pointed out. George added, “To perhaps overenthusiastic lesbians and feminists, Sappho represents a utopian dream: a socially prominent woman of influence and genius dwelling in a matriarchal society.” However, George holds that Sappho’s very real accomplishment was that “she lived proudly as a lesbian and achieved everlasting fame as a poet in spite of the severe obstacles posed by her society.” {GL}
Saramago, José (1922- ) Saramago in 1998 became the first Portuguese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised Saramago “who with parables sustained by imagination, compassion, and irony continually enable us once again to apprehend an illusory reality.” A 1989 work, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, has an humble publishing house proofreader inserting a “not” into a history of Portugal, leading to the work’s affirming that the Crusaders did not help liberate 12-century Lisbon from Moorish occupation. Critics have praised his use of the supernatural, the allegorical, the paradoxical, and the irrational in his questioning of faith and existence. In a satire, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), God mixes his seed with Joseph’s, resulting in Jesus’s decidedly nonvirgin conception. Further, God shows the innocent human Jesus how to create a religion that will spawn violence and intolerance. Using unusual punctuation and leaps in time, the story not only gives Saramago’s version of Jesus’s life but also refers to what has happened to Christianity in the interim. “It is apparent,” Alan Riding has written, “that he knows his Bible, and he treats the figure of Jesus with compassion, as a victim of a power struggle between God and the Devil. But his underlying message is that religion has turned man against man in wars, massacres, exterminations, autos-da-fé, and the like, ‘all in the name of God.’ ” The country’s center-right Government vetoed the novel’s choice as a 1992 European literary prize and called the work blasphemous. Furious, he left Lisbon and moved to the Canary Islands with his wife, Pilar del Rio, a Spanish journalist. In Blindness (1998), blindness overcomes all the human population but one person, a woman. While anarchy and bestiality abound all around, the streets filling with filth, this one woman becomes a mother and a god to all around her. She helps guide. She illustrates how humanity is achieved through suffering. She uses tenderness to help the blind see again, the novelist implying that it is illogical for mankind to wait until horrors occur, that humans are fully able to see how to overcome their figurative blindness. Saramago, who because of poverty left school to become a car mechanic, has a working man’s outlook. He is a member of Portugal’s outlawed Communist Party and was a journalist until the revolution of 1974. An atheist in a Roman Catholic and conservative land, he was temporarily amused when for the second year running the Nobel had gone to someone the Vatican perceives to be anti-religious. “Why does the Vatican get involved in these things?” he asked. “Why doesn’t it keep itself busy with prayers? Why doesn’t it instead open its cupboards and reveal the skeletons it has inside?” When journalists approached, he told them, “If the Pope were on the jury, they [Nobel Committee] wouldn’t have given me anything. The Vatican is easily scandalized, especially by people from outside. They should just focus on their prayers and leave people in peace. I respect those who believe, but I have no respect for the institution.” Saramago signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {CA; Tim Parks, “Sightgeist,” The New York Review of Books, 18 February 1999; Alan Riding, The New York Times, 9 and 12 October 1998 and 3 December 1998}
Sarandon, Susan (1946- )
Sarandon, an actress seen in the movie “Thelma and Louise,” has been quoted as saying, “I’m really a Humanist,” adding to the Los Angeles Times reporter that her role as Louise was not to present men in a negative light and that she rejects the “feminist” label.
Sarcey, Fracisque (1827–1899) Sarcey was a French critic, the editor of Le XIXe. Siècle. He wrote plays, novels, and many anti-clerical articles. In his Souvenirs de jeunesse (1884) and Souvenirs d’âge mûr, Sarcey tells of his rejection of all religious beliefs. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Sardou, Victorien (1831–1908) Sardou became one of the best dramatists of the nineteenth century, and he wrote more than seventy plays. His farce comedy is Divorçons! (1880). In Fédora (1882), Sarah Bernhardt made her triumphant return to the Paris stage. Two plays were written for Sir Henry Irving, Robespierre (1899) and Dante (1903), but were never given in French. Sardou had abandoned Catholicism early in life, and although Spiritualists quote him as one of their conquests McCabe states that he was not, that he was a rationalist. Sardou was elected to the French Academy. {RAT; RE; TRI}
Sargent, Denny (20th Century) Sargent wrote Global Ritualism: Myth and Magic Around the World, a non-theological discussion by a freethinker about the value and use of ritual.
Sargent, Doris E. (20th Century) Sargent was secretary and a member of the board of directors in 1954 of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston.
Sargent, Mike (20th Century) Sargent in Britain is active with the Worthing Humanist Group.
Sargent, Pamela (1948– ) Sargent, an author, wrote Cloned Lives (1976), The Golden Space (1982), and Ruler of the Sky (1983). She has edited an anthology, Women of Wonder (1975) and received numerous awards for her writing. Asked by interviewer Jill Engle which books had influenced her as a child, she listed some by E. B. White, Grimm, Bulfinch, Walter Farley, Fred Hoyle’s The Nature of the Universe, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. “Oh, and the Bible, believe it or not, even though I was brought up as an atheist,” she added. “The Old Testament’s full of good stories, my personal favorites being those of David and Esther. I never could get into the New Testament.” {CA; E}
Sargent, Porter (1872–1951) A publisher of handbooks concerning private schools, Sargent in 1935 wrote The New Immoralities: Clearing the Way for a New Ethics. {HNS}
Sargon of Akkad (reigned 2340 BCE - 2305 BCE) King Sargon conquered an empire that included all of Mesopatamia and extended over Syria and Elam. He sent expeditions as far as Southeast Arabia and Asia Minor. Sargon's dynasty lasted 160 years and was destroyed by Gutians from the Zagros Mountains. The dynasty is credited with spreading Semitic and Sumerian civilization. He also has been called Sharukkin.
Sarlin, Alfred Bernhard (1860–1919) A Finnish writer, Sarlin was an influential journalist who wrote two controversial books, Rules by the Grace of God (1908) and Russia in the Light of the Facts (1908). He was condemned to four months in prison for translating Kropotkin’s Terror in Russia, and in 1912 he began a large work, Humbug as Lord of the World, which was to consist of twenty parts and deal drastically with religious shams. Only nine parts were published at the time of his death. They were aggressively rationalistic, and Sarlin was condemned to six more months in prison. {RAT}
Sarma, Armadeo (20th Century)
Sarma is the convenor of the Society for the Scientific Examination of Para-Science (GWUP) in Rossdorf, Germany. He also is a representative of Euroskeptics.
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino [President] (1811–1888) Sarmiento was an Argentine leader who opposed Catholic doctrine. A predecessor of positivism, he believed Catholicism could best be opposed by removing its economic foundations—which were based on feudal structures—and by promoting free enterprise and laissez-faire economics. An opponent of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Sarmiento spent years of exile in Chile, becoming known as a journalist and an educational reformer. He helped overthrow Rosas in 1852. Alberdi was the main architect of the constitution in 1853, and Sarmiento was president of Argentina from 1868–1874. During Sarmiento’s term of office, a law was passed establishing civil marriage as the only legal marriage in Argentina. His administration was also marked by the conclusion of the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay, by material progress, and, especially, by the organization of schools and the reform of educational methods. Sarmiento wrote Facundo, o Civilización i barbarie (1845; translated as Life in the Argentine Republic in the Days of the Tyrant, nominally a biography of Juan Facundo Quiroga but actually a criticism of caudillismo, personalism in politics. {CE; EU}
Saro-Wiwa, Ken: See entry for Poets.
Saroyan, William (1908–1981) A prolific writer, Saroyan wrote The Time of Your Life (1939), for which he received a Pulitzer prize. He also is known for The Human Comedy (1942) and short stories such as “My Name is Aram” (1940). Asked for his views of humanism, Saroyan responded to the present author in what some say was his typical fashion:
The fellows from whom you have received comments are the fellows for the job, I’m not. First of all, I don’t understand what any of it’s about. I think living is an animal event, although the animal has become quite sophisticated, artistic, cunning, and/or phoney. I am not, however, as some fools allege anti-intellectual. I can exchange ideas with anybody and have always found doing so a fine animal pleasure, especially when I do most or all of the talking, which is the case very nearly every time. I think man’s soul has been probed so deeply and humorlessly that all of the probing has become boring and virtually meaningless. It appears to be—this probing, that is—a substitute for actual living or an escape from a sense of guilt and failure for having lived poorly or ineffectually. (Refer to the first sentence of this paragraph and let me quickly get the hell out of here.) I am opposed to the latter four kinds of humanism you mention—theistic humanism, atheistic humanism, communistic humanism, naturalistic humanism. I am glad I didn’t write any of the books you mention and glad I wrote the ones I wrote. And I wish you every success because I expect that will make you glad.
{WAS, 3 April 1951)
Sarraga de Ferrero, Belén (20th Century) A Spanish educationist, Sarraga in Malaga edited a rationalist and feminist organ, Conciencia Libre. In Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1910, she edited Liberal. Sarraga attended the International Freethought Congresses at Rome (1904) and Paris (1905). {RAT; WWS}
“Sarrasi” (19th Century) Sarrasi was a pseudonym of A. de C., a French Orientalist who wrote L’Orient Devoilé (1880), in which he shows the mythical elements in Christianity although remaining anonymous. {BDF}
Sars, Georg Ossian (1837–1927) Sars taught zoology at Christiania University and was one of the eminent Norwegian scientists of his time. He supported Haeckel’s Monism. On Haeckel’s eightieth birthday, Sars described the much-derided Riddle of the Universe as “the stately structure of the Monistic philosophy” and declared that “progress can be promoted no longer by metaphysical speculations and antiquated theological dogmas.” {RAT; RE}
Sarton, George (1884–1955) Sarton, a Harvard historian, wrote in his History of Science, “The most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological foundation.” He was author of The Faith of a Humanist (1912) and The History of Science and the New Humanism (1931). {TYD}
Sarton, May (1912–1995) Sarton was born in Belgium but moved to Massachusetts at the age of four when her father became a Harvard professor. By the age of eighteen she had had two poems accepted by Harriet Monroe’s Poetry. Encounter in April (1936), her first book of lyrics, was followed by several volumes of poetry. The Single Hound (1938) was published by Elizabeth Bowen, by that time her lover. When thirty-four, Sarton fell in love with a Simmons College English teacher, Judy Matlack, moving in with her. Margot Peters, in May Sarton: A Biography (1997), details the literary bad girl’s love affairs with numbers of individuals from Muriel Rukeyser to her own shrink. Included are the drunken brawls, her father’s paying for girlfriends’ ship tickets, her mediocre reviews, her teaching at Wellesley, and her winning a Guggenheim. Included are details of her intense relationships, her compelling hunger for affection, and her disappointments at not being known for her work but, rather, for being a spokeswoman for lesbian coming out. Sarton’s novels include Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), which describes a distinguished Harvard professor’s life and suicide; I Knew a Phoenix (1959), which were sketches for an autobiography; Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), an openly lesbian novel in which she revealed her homosexuality; and At Seventy: A Journal (1985), which received the American Book Award. Published posthumously in 1995 was At Eighty-Two, based upon the journal she kept up to her death and containing her annoyance at being old: uncertain balance, clumsy fingers, mislaid names and objects, inadequate strength, frequent pain, and the admission that “words do not obey me anymore.” Although in the 1990s the National Endowment of the Arts frowned upon giving financial grants to anyone who was homosexual or lesbian, Sarton in 1967 had received NEA grant money. She stated she was “proud of the fact that I came out as a lesbian in 1965” but that she had done so only after her parents’ deaths. “I’m not sure I would have done it if they had been alive.” She objected to being labeled a “lesbian writer,” adding, “I think my work is universal, and I think my value is as a maker of bridges between two worlds—homosexuals and heterosexuals, between old and young, between men and women.” A Unitarian, she taught or lectured at Harvard, Wellesley, the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Colorado College, Beloit College, the University of Kansas, and Dennison University. In 1993 at the First Parish Unitarian Church in Brookline, Massachusetts, where funeral services were held for a 100-year-old elm tree, felled to make room for constructing a school, Sarton’s poetry was featured. She had written, “Is there a more unnerving sound than the hideous mechanistic screech of a buzz saw at work? It is an anti-sound; it does not fit with any landscape.” Sarton was a long-time friend of the actress Eva le Gallienne, with whom she studied acting and who also a non-believer. Upon becoming an octogenarian in 1993, Sarton wrote Encore: A Journal of the 80th Year, discreetly making no further mention, as she had in a 1973 journal, that she, like the Mrs. Stevens of the 1965 novel, was a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive . . . a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality. Such a revelation by so stellar a poet made her an immediate heroine to feminists. Although ignored by most critics, Sarton was described by Enid Nemy as “a commanding, no-nonsense figure with clear blue eyes and a shock of white hair,” a woman who lived in “self-imposed loneliness” in a weathered clapboard house on the Maine coast. She had had, she admitted, a difficult life being a seeker after truths, an ardent explorer of life’s important questions. An individualistic and stoical figure, Sarton died of breast cancer. Asked before her death how she would like to be remembered, she replied, “As wholly human.” {CE; GL; U}
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980) A French existentialist, a philosopher greatly influenced by Heidegger, and a 1964 Nobel Prize winner (he declined the honor), Sartre once wrote, “Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.” Sartre’s entire body of works made the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1948. His mother was a Schweitzer from Alsace, and the 5’ 4” Sartre was first cousin to Albert Schweitzer. The two dominant personalities, both of whom had been reared as Lutherans, were almost polar opposites in their philosophic outlooks. Sartre’s 1938 novel, Nausea, describes the hero’s discovery of the meaningless contingency of all existents, human and nonhuman. His Being and Nothingness in 1943 became the central work of humanistic existentialism. It described the plight of the individual in a God-less world without objective meaning, one in which humans had to make their own values. No Exit in 1944 contains the line, “So that’s what Hell is. I’d never have believed it. . . . Do you remember, brimstone, the stake, the gridiron, [when it comes to] hell, it’s other people!” Typical of his atheistic humanism are these statements: “The doctrine I am presenting is the very opposite of quietism, since it declares that there is no reality except in action. It goes further and adds that Man is nothing else than his plan; he exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than his life. . . . Man is anguish. He lives forlornly in a world without God. He has nothing to cling to within himself, nor without. . . . Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn’t trying to plunge man into despair. It declares that even if God did exist that would change nothing. Not that we believe God exists, but we think that the problem of His existence is not the point. In this sense Existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action. Man cannot start making excuses for himself. There is no determinism. Man is free. The coward makes himself cowardly. The hero makes himself heroic. What counts is total involvement.” In his Existentialism as a Humanism (1946), Sartre rejected theism because, according to Paul Edwards in God and the Philosophers,
It is incompatible with free will in the somewhat peculiar sense in which he takes it to be a basic fact about human beings. If there were a God, he would create human beings with a “nature” or “essence,” and this is incompatible with Sartre’s view that in man existence precedes essence. This seems to mean that human beings do not have an essence until they have chosen their initial “fundamental projects,” Sartre’s term for character traits. Sartre maintains that at the age of five or six a child makes his first fundamental choice which gives him his early character. This choice can at any time be undone so that the person acquires a different character or essence. The initial fundamental choice was not even in principle predictable. Even God, if there were a God, could not have known it in advance.
In 1966–1967, although he and Bertrand Russell differed on philosophic questions, Sartre joined the International War Crimes Tribunal which found the United States guilty of genocide during the war with North Vietnam. Upon Sartre’s death, no public ceremonies were planned, but an estimated 25,000 to 50,000 people came spontaneously to pay tribute at his funeral. In Moscow, Izvestia noted the death with only five lines. Sartre is one of the many celebrities buried at Montparnasse (for example, André Citroën, Guy de Maupassant, the Iowan actress Jean Seberg, Pierre Laval, Alfred Dreyfus). The following year, Simone de Beauvoir published Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981), in which she told of his last months, his being incontinent, his young companions, and his stashing of whisky bottles, rather than his interest in evaluating his political legacy. Some of what she failed to include, Bianca Lamblin added in A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Bianca Lamblin (1996). Lamblin, a redheaded Polish-born Jew who had come to France with her parents as a baby in 1922, had become hopelessly infatuated with Beauvoir, her high school teacher with whom she had sex. She then had sex after Beauvoir introduced her to Sartre, then thirty-three, who also became her teacher at the Sorbonne. In 1940, when Lamblin was dropped by Sartre, then by Beauvoir, she was infuriated and the following year married Bernard Lamblin, a fellow student. Mrs. Lamblin wrote in her book that she would never have written her memoirs except that Beauvoir had written pettily and vengefully about her and, “nauseated and disgusted when I discovered the true personality of the woman I had loved all my life,” she published the work, entitled Mémoires d’Une Jeune Fille Dérangée, a play on Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’Une Jeune Fille Rangée. Lamblin holds that Beauvoir had introduced her and others to Sartre in order to satisfy his “need for romantic conquests,” particularly after his own interest in Beauvoir had cooled. Although Lamblin faced danger as a Jew, Sartre and Beauvoir “never worried about my fate or tried to get news of me” from the end of 1940 until the liberation in 1944. In Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944–1956, Tony Judt damns Sartre as being a national embarrassment, not an asset, because he failed to test his political thoughts against political realities. Sartre, Judt declares, argued away the brutalities of Stalinism, was deluded or perverse, and thought too much but saw too little. Judt, however, does not attack other intellectuals, such as political commentator Raymond Aron, Catholic novelist François Mauriac, publisher Jean Paulhan, and the humanist Albert Camus. (See the article by Frederick A. Olafson on Sartre in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CB; CE; CL; EU, Hazel E. Barnes; ILP, Additus, 15 December 1961; PA; TYD; TRI}
Sass, F. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Sass was a Uruguayan correspondent for The Humanist.
SASTRIYA HETUVADAM A Telugu monthly about scientific rationalism, Sastriya Hetuvadam is at 3-15 A.P. Housing Board Colony, Moula Ali 500 040, India
SATAN
To believers within Judaism and Christianity, Satan is God’s adversary and is the lord of evil. In pre-exilic Jewish thought the figure of Satan was not known, and Judaism held that there was but one divine power, one God. The Zoroastrian view held that in life there are two ways of life which are in conflict: the good, and the evil. This ancient Persian belief, which pre-dated Judaism, was that earthly as well as spiritual beings must choose the good or the evil side in the battle. Evidence of the Zoroastrian influence is found in Zechariah 3:1-2, Job, I:1; and I Corinthians 21:1. As explained in the Encyclopedia of Religion by Julian Morgenstern, then the President of Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, “The absolute monotheism of normative Judaism affirmed that there was only one divine power, one God, and, in purposed refutation of the dominant Persian dualism of the day, that He was the creator of both light and darkness, the source of evil as well as good (Isaiah 45: 6-7). But to the popular Jewish mind of that day dualism seemed to solve conveniently one of the baffling problems of existence, the problem of good and evil, and so, contrary to the tenets of official Judaism, evolved the figure of Satan, patterned obviously after the Zoroastrian power of evil, Ahriman. Actually Satan never had any place in the theology of normative Judaism. The name, Satan, in Hebrew means “adversary; accuser”; and just this role Satan plays in the Old Testament and in subsequent Jewish apocalyptic literature. He is the adversary of God and man. He seeks to frustrate God’s purposes of good and to entice men to defy God and do evil. Then he accuses them before God and brings about their punishment and destruction. However in Jewish thought and legend Satan was never more than a figure of secondary rank and power, always subordinate to God and subject to discipline by Him. Only in Christianity, as it emerged from Judaism, did Satan come to be regarded as a divine being; altogether independent of and hostile to God, the malevolent worker of evil in the world, and thus to be identified with the Devil.” The Yazidis, part of Iraq’s Kurdish minority, have been branded by many Christians and Muslims as devil worshipers. Chris Hedges, writing from Sheik Adi, Iraq, for The New York Times (31 May 1993), said the Yazidis believe that Satan, “whose name they are forbidden to pronounced, is actively malevolent, while God is passively benevolent. To ward off evil, as well as use the powers of the Prince of Darkness to their own advantage, they propitiate Satan’s representative, known as the Peacock Angel, in their religious rites.” The sect follows the teachings of Sheik Adi, a holy man who died in 1162, whose crypt lies in the shrine in the Lalish Valley, about 15 miles east of Mosul. Writes Hedges, “Yazidis are not allowed to harm plants or animals in the valley. And pilgrims reverently wash themselves in the streams in purification rites before visiting the shrine. Yazidis have no public places for worship outside of the sacred valley, where believers gather to celebrate the four yearly festivals. Like Zoroastrians they venerate fire, the sun, and the mulberry tree. They believe in the transmigration of souls, often into animals. The sect does not accept converts and banishes anyone who marries outside the faith. Yazidis are forbidden to disclose most of their rituals and beliefs to nonbelievers.” Sheik Adi’s coffin is draped with green and white silk sheets in a sanctuary that contains a stone carving of a six-foot-high snake on the right side of the front door. The snake is blackened each day with shoe polish and venerated by worshipers. “We are not allowed to kill black snakes,” said Baba Shaweesh, who wears dreadlocks and has a scraggly beard. “The snakes have magical powers it is best not to challenge.” Baba Shaweesh became a eunuch, one of the last ceremonial eunuchs in the Middle East, “to resist the temptation of the flesh.” He carried out the operation himself with a knife and the juice from some medicinal plants to heal the wound. To the reporter he stated that he can divine the future but will not relate everything he sees to his followers because, “I receive wisdom in my dreams. I see when men will die and days later preside over their funerals. I am visited by Sheik Adi, who tells me what will take place in the weeks and months ahead. But there is a lot I do not tell to others. How much can people accept? It is often best in this world to be ignorant.” Nonbelievers find ludicrous such imaginative inventions as Satan and the Devil. Many believers, however, speak of both with fear. A 1997 study by the Barna Research Group in Oxnard, California, found that an estimated two-thirds of Americans do not believe in the Devil as a living entity, that Satan is “not a living being, but is a symbol of evil,” this despite Jesus’s declaration to “Get thee hence, Satan” (Matthew 4:10). (See entries for Ahriman, Beelzebub, Devil, and Elaine Pagels. McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia suggests that the concept of Satan was “borrowed” by the Jews in the second century from the Babylonian mythology which was then current. Other scholars, such as Norman Cohn, a Fellow of the British Academy, hold that Satan originated as a Judaized version of the Zoroastrian spirit of evil, Ahriman.) {CE; ER}
SATAN, CHURCH OF The Church of Satan was founded by Anton Szandor La Vey (1930–1997). Called the “Black Pope,” he became noted in the 1960s for using a “Satanic Bible,” a work said to have been based on a Spenserian tract by the pseudonymous Ragnar Redbeard and entitled Might is Right. La Vey held that the cardinal principle of Satanism was indulgence, that there is no need for any God in one’s outlook, and the best way to show contempt for God is to enjoy people. In Los Angeles his daughter Zeena operates an occult-oriented and true-crime book store called Hellhouse, one which had Adolf Hitler PEZ dispensers and (convicted killer) Charles Manson lunchboxes. Estranged from her father, Zeena drives around Los Angeles in a hearse. When La Vey’s wife, Diane, filed for divorce, the settlement forced him to liquidate his assets, which included the Church of Satan. Journalist Alan Cabal (New York Press, 12–18 November 1997) observed, “It was dissolved in bankruptcy court, a fitting end for an organization that never had the slightest meaning beyond shock value. Various tinpot wannabes have attempted to keep the name going, but the cognoscenti of the Satanic tradition abandoned it decades ago when it became apparent that the Church was nothing more than a cash cow.”
SATANISM Satanism is a term invented by religious fundamentalists, one which implies that a living Satan exists and that profoundly wicked people choose to worship Satan instead of God. These Satanists allegedly abduct innocent children, burn houses of worship, are responsible for morally bad events, use 13 and 666 as secret passwords, and are dedicated to anti-religious causes. In 1995, the Proctor & Gamble Company sued a distributor of Amway, a competitor, alleging that it was spreading rumors linking the company to Satanism. For over fifteen years the company had been fighting a rumor that its president had spoken in support of Satanism on a nationally televised talk show and that the company’s moon-and-stars trademark is a Satanic symbol. No one from the company had ever discussed Satanism on a talk show, Proctor & Gamble argued, and its trademark dates from the mid-1800’s, when a man in the moon was a popular design and when its thirteen stars in the logo design was chosen to honor the thirteen original colonies.
SATORI
Satori is the Japanese word for the state of enlightenment sought in Zen Buddhism.
SATYAN VESHAN (Prabodh) A Gujarati monthly, Satyan Veshan (Prabodh) is at 3 Abhinav Park, Ghod dod Road, Surat, Gujarat, 395001, India.
Saul, John Ralston (20th Century) Saul, who in 1995 was designated Canadian Humanist of the Year by the Humanist Association of Canada, wrote Voltaire’s Bastards (1993) and The Doubter’s Companion (1994). In the latter book, subtitled “A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense,” Saul writes in a style reminiscent of Bierce. He has given the prestigious Massey Lectures in Toronto. {CA; E}
Saul, Marjorie Joan (1923– ) Saul, who arrived in Australia in 1924 from England, is a humanist, agnostic, secretary, and journalist. Although reared in the Church of England, she left the church when a student at Sydney University. From 1980 to 1981, she was president of the Humanist Society of New South Wales, and she was convenor of the humanist sub-committee investigating the incidence of female genital mutilation in Australia. She contacted Muslim women’s groups and disseminated information to women’s health organizations in order to eradicate the practice. During the late 1970s and early 1980s she was the sexist advertising contact for the Women’s Electoral Lobby investigating the stereotyped portrayal of women in advertising. {SWW}
Saull, William Devonshire (1783–1855) Saull was an English geologist who established a free geological museum, contributed to the erection of the John Street Institute, and was principally instrumental in opening the old Hall of Science, City Road. Saull wrote about the connection between astronomy and geology. He is buried in Kensal Green, near his friends Allen Davenport and Henry Hetherington. {BDF; RAT; VI}
Saumur, Lucien (20th Century) Saumur wrote The Humanist Evangel (1982). {GS}
Saunders, Thomas Bailey (Born 1860) Saunders, a lawyer and writer, translated into English many works of Schopenhauer. He also translated Harnack and The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe (1893). His own rationalism is shown in Quest of Faith (1899), where he rejected the creeds and accepted only “a co-ordinating Power.” {RAT}
Saunderson, Nicholas (1682–1739) Saunderson, an English mathematician, lost both his eyes and his sight by smallpox when but a year old, yet he became conversant with Euclid, Archimedes, and Diophantus when read to him in Greek. He lectured at Cambridge University, explaining Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, even his works on light and color. It was said, Wheeler reports, “They have turned out Whiston (a Unitarian) for believing in but one God, and put in Saunderson, who believes in no God at all.” The same author was pained that a man who experienced “the kindness of Providence throughout his extraordinary life [should be guilty of] the obtrusion of infidel opinions,” apparently unaware that Saunderson was blind for fifty-five years. Saunderson said that to believe in God he must first touch him. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Sauvestre, Charles (1818–1883) Sauvestre was a French journalist, one of the editors of L’Opinion Nationale. He wrote The Clergy and Education (1861), Secret Instructions of the Jesuits (1865), Religious Congregations Unveiled (1870), and other anti-clerical works. {BDF}
Savage, Dan (20th Century) Savage writes a sex advice column, formerly called “Hey, Faggot,” now called “Savage Love,” in Village Voice and other alternative weeklies. Typical of his hilarious but rational advice is what he responded to a gay man who, when he was with another man, said he felt as if he was “being watched . . . by God or angels in the room.” Advised Savage, “Let me walk you through this: If there were such things as angels—which there are not—and if there were such a thing as God—which there is not—God and his heavenly host would have more important things to do than stand at the foot of your bed and watch you get fucked in the ass.” {CA}
Savage, Dan ( ) Savage writes a sex advice column, formerly called “Hey, Faggot,” now called “Savage Love,” in Village Voice and other alternative weeklies. He graduated with a B. A. in theatre from the University of Illinois. With his companion, Terry Miller, he has one adopted son and is furious that in 2001 a Florida judge upheld a 1977 law that bans adoptions by gay men and lesbians. Writing an op-ed column in The New York Times (5 Sep 2001), he laments the fact that bigotry in Florida keeps orphans from loving homes, for those very orphans are victims who cannot “pick up and move to states that do not exclude perfectly fit single people and loving couples from pools of potential adoptive parents.” Typical of his hilarious but rational advice is what he responded to a gay man who, when he was with another man, said he felt as if he was “being watched . . . by God or angels in the room.” Advised Savage, “Let me walk you through this: If there were such things as angels—which there are not—and if there were such a thing as God—which there is not—God and his heavenly host would have more important things to do than stand at the foot of your bed and watch you get fucked in the ass.” {CA}
Savage, Maxwell (20th Century)
A Unitarian minister, Savage wrote, “Since Christ was human, born within the circle of history, he becomes of true value to us who are human, for now, in the light of the full spiritual and moral stature of his life we can try to live our own lives as truly as he lived his; not imitating him, but inspired by him. The Christ, a God, is outside our circle since we are not superhuman. Need for him has ceased. He should be allowed to join the line of lesser gods who have gone into oblivion.”
Savage, Minot Judson (1841–1918) At first a Congregational minister in Framingham, Massachusetts, Savage after a long process of growth toward liberalism converted to Unitarianism. His Religion of Evolution (1876) was one of the earliest attempts to extract religiously satisfying and optimistic conclusions from evolutionary theory, and his sermons on the subject found an enormously responsive audience in Chicago, Boston, and New York. As an orator, he was considered one of the great preachers of his era. The Beacon Press’s 1937 Hymns of the Spirit contained Savage’s words for a pantheistic hymn (which has been modified as “Why Seek Afar For Beauty?” Although unpublished, the hymn has been taped by Warren Allen Smith with his somewhat modified words and performed with his music):
Why seek afar for beauty? Look, it glows In dew-wet grasses all about your feet; In birds, in sunshine, childish faces sweet, In stars and mountain summits topped with snows.
Go not abroad for happiness. For, see, It is a flower blooming at your door. Bring love and justice home, and then no more Will you wonder in what dwelling joy may be.
In wonder-workings, or some bush aflame, Men look for God and fancy him concealed. But in Earth’s beauty nature stands revealed, While grass and flowers and stars spell out her name. {CE; U; U&U}
Savage, Rick (20th Century) Savage is a director of the National Secular Society.
Savonarola, Girolamo (1452–1498) Savonarola was an Italian religious reformer, a Dominican who was popular in Florence because of his eloquent attacks on moral laxity. Pope Alexander VI excommunicated him (1497) because Savonarola ignored his order to stop preaching. Savonarola was finally executed as a false prophet. (See entry for Pierre van Paassen.)
SAVANT OF VIRGINIA Abraham B. Carter has published Savant of Virginia, a work which includes many writers who were members of the Society of Evangelical Agnostics. {FD}
Savary, Anne Jean Marie René [Duc de Rovigo] (1774–1833) Savary, a French soldier, joined the army in 1790, fought with distinction in the German and Egyptian campaigns, and was made a brigadier-general after Marengo by Napoleon. In 1807 he was created Duc de Rovigo and appointed Governor of East Prussia. He then commanded an army in Spain, and in 1831 was given the supreme command in Algeria by Louis Philippe. Savary’s Memoirs are evidence of his rationalism. {RAT}
Savelle, Max (20th Century) Savelle wrote Seeds of Liberty: The Genesis of the American Mind (1948), a study of how deism developed in the United States prior to the American Revolution. {FUS}
Savile, George: See entry for Charles Halifax.
Sawtelle, C. M. (19th Century) Sawtelle was the American author of Reflections on the Science of Ignorance (1868), or as he explained, how to teach others what you do not know yourself. {BDF}
Sawyer, Caroline (Born 1812) Sawyer, a Unitarian, was a 19th-century poet and writer. {U}
Sawyer, Robert J. (20th Century) A Canadian science fiction writer, Sawyer in 1996 responded to questions some readers had submitted to Science Fiction Weekly. One reader asked about The Terminal Experiment, in which Sawyer introduced the concept of the “Soulwave” and wondered if this idea was born out of hope or personal belief. Sawyer responded,
The idea of the soulwave isn’t really born of either hope or personal belief. I believe that when we die, we’re eaten by worms—end of story. That’s one of the reasons why The Terminal Experiment debunks the so-called near-death experience. But I do think that questions of immortality fascinate writers—they crop up again in my latest novel, Starplex. After all, we write so that something of ourselves will survive our death. {CA}
Sawyer, Thomas Jefferson (1804–1899) One of the greatest of the pioneer educators of 19th century, Sawyer founded The Christian Messenger (1831), helped found the Universalist Historical Society 1834), and was dean of Tufts Divinity School (1882–1890). {U; U&U}
Sax, Karl (Born 1892) Sax, a naturalistic humanist, was a scientist and member of the American Humanist Association. Concerned about the world’s food supply and Earth’s diminishing natural resources, he wrote in Standing Room Only, the World’s Exploding Population (1955). The work had a profound influence upon Priscilla Robertson, then editor of The Humanist, who developed a strategy for encouraging international efforts to publicize one of mankind’s greatest dilemmas, one that became exponentially worse in the 1990s. {HNS; HNS2}
Say, Jean Baptiste Léon (1826–1896) Say was a pioneer of the Cooperative Movement and was France’s Minister of Finance after 1871. He also became President of the Senate. Like his friend President Thiers, Say was an agnostic. {RAT; RE}
Sayers, Dorothy L.: See entry for Theism.
Sayles, John (1950– ) Sayles is a film director, writer, and actor. He wrote Pride of the Bimbos (1975), The Anarchists Convention (1979), and “Los Gusanos” (1991). He is a MacArthur Foundation grantee and works for Paramount Pictures. According to Celebrity Atheists, Sayles’s politics is “survivalist” and his religion is “Roman Catholic Atheist.” {CA; E}
Sayles, John (28 Sep 1950 - ) Sayles, who was born in Schenectady, New York, and received a B.S. at Williams College, is an independent film director, writer, and actor. He wrote Pride of the Bimbos (1975), The Anarchists Convention (1979), and Los Gusanos (1991). He directed the Bruce Springsteen music video, "Born in the U.S.A." Employed by Paramount Pictures, Sayles in talking about his job went on record: “My main interest is making films about people. I'm not interested in cinematic art.” In Lianna (1983) he examines the subtle changes a married woman undergoes when she determines she is a lesbian. A low-budget film (shot for an estimated $300,000), it has been criticized by some for being exploitive, by others for being commendably sensitive. Baby, It's You (1983) tells of high-school romance between a college-bound Jewish girl (Rosanna Arquette) and a working class Italian youth (Vincent Spano).
In 1983, Sayles was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius grant” of $30,000 per year, tax free, for five years. This allowed him to make The Brother From Another Planet (1984), about a black alien (Joe Morton), mute, adrift in Harlem.
Matewan (1987) is about union-making and union-breaking in the West Virginia coalmines of the 1920s. Eight Men Out (1988) relates the 1919 Black Sox scandal in which baseball players are involved in a plot to illegally “throw” the World Series. According to Celebrity Atheists, Sayles’s politics is “survivalist” and his religion is “Roman Catholic Atheist.” Freethinkers interpret such an answer as being analogous to that of others who say they are Jewish atheists or Protestant atheists, that they are unwilling to completely reject ideas instilled when they were young. {CA}
Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (1956– )
Sayre-McCord, of the University of North Carolina, is on the Executive Committee of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Sbarbaro, Pietro (Born 1838) Sbarbaro was an Italian publicist and reformer. He published a work on The Philosophy of Research (1866), dedicated to Mauro Macchi a book on The Task of the Nineteenth Century, and presided at a congress of Freethinkers held at Loreto. {BDF}
‘SBLOOD A slang expression which refers to Jesus’s dripping blood on the cross, ’sblood is found in Hamlet’s retort to Guildenstern, “ ’Sblood, do you think that I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.” A similar slang expression of that time was ” ’Swounds,” a reference to Jesus’s discomfiture caused by nails used to pin him onto the cross. Individuals of that time apparently believed that the body could be held up by nails.
Scales, Peter (20th Century) Scales, a secular humanist, is a social-political scientist who has written for Free Inquiry. {Summer, 1981}
Scambini, Henry (20th Century) Scambini, a freethinker comedian, entertained at the First Annual Atheist Alliance Conference in 1995. “‘Beauty may be only skin-deep, but ugly goes to the bone’: I made that joke up,” he says, adding that he helped train both Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor.
SCANDINAVIAN PHILOSOPHY: See the article by Justus Hartnack in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.
SCANDINAVIAN UNBELIEVERS José M. F. Santana in Encyclopedia of Unbelief has an extensive listing of unbelievers in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. Faith Ingwersen follows with a study of unbelief in Scandinavian literature. From the year 1000 when the Scandinavian countries were Christianized, they mixed the Christian and the pagan. The first openly militant atheist in Sweden was Viktor Lennstrand (1861–1895), who held that no true social reform can come about if people “are blinded, weakened, imprisoned, and stupefied by Christine doctrine.” The first Scandinavian author to take an explicit anti-Christian stance was the Swedish poet, critic and editor Johan Henric Kellgren (1751–1795). Noted Swedish unbelievers include Per de Grytnäs, who in 1619 was hanged as a renegade for denying “pure evangelical doctrine”; Olof Von Dalin (1708–1763), poet; Johan Tobias Sergel (1740–1814), painter and cartoonist; Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795), poet; Johan Henric Kellgren (1751–1795), poet, publicist, and a member of the Swedish Academy; F. W. C. Areschoug (1830–1908), a botanist; G. J. Leufstedt (1830–1901), called “Lennstrand’s predecessor” and “the Antichrist” for his lectures; Anton Nyström (1842–1931, who introduced the ideas of Comte into Sweden; Karl Staaff, a prime minister; Hjalmar Öhrwall (1851–1929), a professor of physiology at Uppsala; Knut Wicksell (1851–1926), who followed Lennstrand as editor of the Freethinker and Think for Yourself!; Svante Arrhenius (1859–1927), recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and a declared atheist; Hinke Bergegren (1861–1936), journalist; Anna B. Wicksell (1862–1928), pacifist and a member of a League of Nations committee; Allen Vannerus (1862–1946), author of Atheism Versus Theism; Henrik Petrini (1863–1957), professor of physics; Bengt Lidforss (1868–1913), botanist; Hjalmar Söderberg (1869–1941), novelist; Ingemar Hedenius (born 1908), a professor of philosophy at Uppsala University; and José M. F. Santana, a Spanish lawyer living in Sweden, who helped establish the Humanist and Ethical Union of Sweden in 1979). Noted Finnish unbelievers include Anders Chydenius and Robert Lagerborg, who wrote on freedom of religion in 1863; Viktor Heikel and Mathilda Asp, who in 1887 founded the first nonbelievers’ organization; Rolf Lagerborg, a philosopher; Edward Westermarck (1862–1939), founder of Finnish sociology; Rafael Karsten, a professor of practical philosophy at the University of Helsinki; and Errikki Hartikainen, secretary general of the Union of Freethinkers’ Associations of Finland. Norwegian unbelievers include poet and playwright Bjornstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910; novelist Alexander Kielland (1849–1906), whose St. Hans Fest (1887) attacks the hypocrisy of Christian morals; critic and playwright Helge Krog (1889–1962); Arnulf Överland, a member of the Rationalist Press Association of London; Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), zoologist who was the Nobel Peace Prize in 1923; botanist Kristian Horn (1903–1981); Erik and Dagfinn Eckhoff, founders of the Pagan Society; and critic of religion and theology Andreas Edwien (born 1921). Edwien wrote Is Christianity a Danger to World Peace? (1977) and Jesus in Conflict with Human Rights (1979). In Denmark, unbelievers include Frederik Dreier (1827–1853), author of Spiritual Belief and Freethinking; Rudolf Varberg; Georg Brandes (1842–1927), literary critic; Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885), poet and novelist; Johannes V. Jensen (1873–1950), writer and journalist; and Jeppe Aakjaer (1866–1930). The Dane Karen Blixen (1885–1962), who wrote under the pen name “Isak Dinesen,” declared in Out of Africa (1937) that God and Satan are equally glorious, equally eternal, necessitating human courage to accept such a fate and live dutifully in pride and with honor. Ingwersen considers Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974) as “an unbeliever preoccupied with the plight of the unbeliever. He often turns a reassuring myth around to show the ludicrousness of its promise. The novel Barabbas (1950) may be, in fact, the ultimate characterization of the unbeliever who cannot transcend his own belief.” {EU, José M. F. Santana; EU, Faith Ingwersen}
Scarbrough, Allan (Died 1998) “It’s Lonely Being An Atheist,” wrote Scarbrough in Freethought Today (June-July 1998). An Arizonan with an accounting degree, he found while studying at Bob Jones University that the dictatorial structure and intolerance of fundamentalism was not for him. By reading Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ayn Rand, he began to have serious doubts about Christianity and became a freethinker.
SCARABAEUS • Scarabaeus, n. The sacred beetle of the ancient Egyptians, allied to our familiar “tumble-bug.” It was supposed to symbolize immortality, the fact that God knew why giving it its peculiar sanctity. Its habit of incubating its eggs in a ball of ordure [shit] may also have commended it to the favor of the priesthood, and may some day assure it an equal reverence among ourselves. True, the American beetle is an inferior beetle, but the American priest is an inferior priest. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Scargill, Daniel (17th Century) Scargill is an example of one who recanted his atheism. In 1669, he wrote Recantation . . . publickly made before the University of Cambridge (of which he was formerly a member). Scargill described how he once had been a Hobbesian atheist: “I do profess . . . that the openly professed atheism of some, and the secret atheism of others, is the accursed root of all the abounding wickedness. . . . in the present age.” His recanting made it difficult for Hobbes, who was trying to protect himself against the accusation that he was an atheist and a spreader of atheism. {HAB}
SCATOLOGY Scatology, a study of fecal excrement, can lead to an obsession with anything involving excretary functions. Coprology (using scatalogical findings) is the science of solid waste products. Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Sociohistorical Coprology (1999) is a work by marine biologist Ralph A. Lewin in which human, sloth, prairie dog, and even Guatemalan jumping viper excrement is studied scientifically. Such studies expand human understanding of the environment.
SCEPTIC Sceptic is a United Kingdom journal at <toby@cs.man.ac.uk>. (See entry for Skeptic and Skepticism.)
Scepticus: See entry for Britannicus, Scepticus.
Schade, Georg (1712–1795) Schade was a German deist who believed in the immortality of brutes. In 1770 he was imprisoned on the Isle of Christiansoe for his opinions. He left, settling at Kiel, Holstein, in 1775, where he died in 1795. {BDF}
SCHADENFREUDE A German word, schadenfreude refers to taking pleasure from the misfortunes of others. Freethinkers, for example, should not take pleasure upon reading that churches lose lawsuits of child molestation by priests and are required to pay out huge sums of money. The real issue is that of the damage done to the children.
Schadewald, Robert (20th Century) Schadewald was formerly head of the National Center for Science Education, a group founded in 1982 to counter the creationist threat to science education in the public schools.
Schafer, David (20th Century) Schafer is President of the Humanist Association of Central Connecticut (HACC), of which he was a co-founder. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <djschaf@compuserve.com>. (See entry for Connecticut Atheists, Humanists.)
Schäfer, Edward Albert Sharpey [Sir] (1850–1936) Schäfer, who taught physiology at University College in London and at Edinburgh University, edited the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Physiology. He was President of the British Association in 1912 and gave an address on the origin of life which was materialistic. Schäfer was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association and was an agnostic. In that group’s Annual for 1914 he rejected all “interventions of the Deity” in biology and said, “The churchgoer still prays but he would be astonished if his prayers were answered.” {RAT; RE}
Schafersman, Steven (20th Century) Schafersman is associated with the American Humanist Association’s Houston, Texas, chapter. At the Fourth Annual Atheist Convention hosted in 1998 by the St. Louis, Missouri, Rationalist Society, he spoke on “Spreading Humanism Through the Web.” (See entry for Texas Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Schaff, Adam (20th Century) Schaff, from Poland, partook in a Marxist—non-Marxist Humanist Dialogue in Vienna in 1968, at which A. J. Ayer from Britain also participated. Unfortunately, Russian tanks entered Prague just before the Dialogue was to convene, but the conference continued just the same. In attendance were about sixty thinkers from both Eastern European and Western countries, and according to Paul Kurtz the Dialogue eventually degenerated into a shouting match because of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1977, he wrote Structuralism and Marxism. In 1995, he wrote The Polish Challenge.
Schaffer, Hal (1931– ) When a professor at Adelphia University in New York, Schaffer as varsity soccer coach took his team to the NCAA Finals. He was Dean of Admissions and Records at State University College at Cortland, New York, and he has been a board member of the American Movement for World Government, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Humanists of the Palm Beaches in Florida. Schaffer, although retired, has served as a USTA Tennis Umpire.
Schantz, B. T. (20th Century) Schantz wrote “Ethan Allen’s Religious Ideas” in the Journal of Religion (1938). {FUS}
Schaper, Bertus W(illem) (20th Century) At the Second International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress, which was held in London (1957), Dr. Schaper of the Netherlands addressed the group. In 1976 he wrote about the Munich four-power agreement in Het trauma van Munchen.
Schapiro, Herbert (20th Century) Schapiro is a local humanist activist in Tuscon, Arizona, and a former board member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. He has a journalistic clipping service, which has proved invaluable to many freethought societies by providing them with news sources. {SHD}
Scharf, Ed (20th Century) Scharf is a Texan freethinker. His accounts of freethought in Comfort, Texas, during the 1800s have been published in Freethought Today. {Freethought History #20, 1996; Freethought Today, April 1998}
Schatz, Bernie (20th Century) Schatz is the American Humanist Association coordinator of the northern part of the United States. (See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Schatzman, Evry (20th Century) Schatzman, an astronomer who is the former president of the French Physics Association and a member of the Academy of Sciences, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Schechter, Lori (20th Century) Schechter is a past president of The Jewish Humanist.
Scheffer, Ary (1795–1858) A French painter of the romanticist movement, Scheffer painted religious pictures and was often assumed to be a Catholic. He was, however, a Deist who in his youth had joined the Carbonari and always opposed the Bourbons and the Church in France. Scheffer was a friend of Renan, who married his niece. {RAT; RE}
Scheiber, Béla (20th Century) Scheiber is president of the Rocky Mountain Skeptics and is on the executive council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
Scheick, William J. (20th Century) Scheick, with Edward H. Davidson, wrote Paine, Scripture and Authority: The Age of Reason as Religious and Political Idea (1994). The book, according to Gordon Stein, claims “that The Age of Reason was not written so much to express Paine’s views on religion as it was to tell his views on the political system that was dependent upon religion for its survival.” {The American Rationalist, July-August 1994}
Schell, A. (1817–1894)
In 1849 Schell sailed from New York via Cape Horn to San Francisco, and he made seven trips across the Isthmus of Panama, and twenty-seven trips by rail across America. Schell was an active freethinker. {PUT}
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854) Schelling taught philosophy at Jena, Wurzburg, and Munich. He is counted third (after Kant and Fichte) in the dynasty of German philosophers, according to McCabe, and was a pantheist who rejected the ideas of a personal God and immortality as well as Christian dogmas. {RAT; RE}
Scheman, Naomi (20th Century) A professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Scheman is author of Engenderings: Constructions of Knowledge, Authority, and Privilege (1993). There are moral reasons not to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing god, she said in a 1996 speech to University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists. Further, many of the attitudes of believers about God’s role in the world are morally troubling, which is why her speech was entitled, “Quarreling With a God I Don’t Believe In: On the Moral Grounds for Atheism.”
Schempp, Ed (1908– ) Schempp was joined by Madalyn Murray O’Hair in the historic lawsuit in which the Supreme Court ruled that Bible readings were illegal in U.S. schools. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania, because of their efforts was ruled a violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. In 1993, Schempp told Church and State that he and his wife Sidney has raised their three children in a church-affiliated with the Unitarian Universalists, that his son Ellory had been sixteen at the time his high school was mandating ten Bible Verses to be announced over the public address system at the start of the day, and that Ellory had rebelled by reading the Qur’an instead of standing for the daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. His infuriated teacher had sent Ellory to the principal, the principal was speechless when young Schempp would not relent, and the result in 1963 was Abington Township School District v. Schempp. The principal, a Methodist minister, wrote letters to universities where Ellory had applied, labeling him a “troublemaker” and appealing to Tufts University in Boston even after it had accepted him. Ellory later earned a doctorate in physics at Brown University and today manages a high technology superconductor firm. Commenting upon the prayer and Bible reading problem in 1993, Ellory Schempp has said,
It’s a sad thing that school prayer continues to be so divisive. There are some groups in the country that feel very strongly that symbolic acts of this kind are very important to them. But what these people don’t understand is that this kind of religion by rote does not foster Christian values. I think it is important that [separationists] continue to take these cases on. . . . We have to realize there is a proper sphere for religion and a proper sphere for public schools. I wish we would focus on providing a proper education in the schools rather than worry about providing a little Bible reading.
Scher, Ted (20th Century) Scher is a chapter contact for the Humanist Quest of Milwaukee , Wisconsin, Newsletter.
Schérer, Edmond (Henri) (Adolphe) (1815–1889) According to Robertson, Schérer, a French poet, “was an unbeliever almost against his will.” Like Béranger and Taine, he was a rationalist at a time when most of the French poets were theists. One of his works is Etudes Critiques sur la littérature contemporaine (1863–1889). He originally had come from a Protestant family, but his views were too free for him to retain his position as a professor of exegesis at Geneva, so he went to Strasbourg. Here, he became chief of the School of Liberal Protestants. When he wrote Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie Chrétienne (1850–1860), his views “drew down a tempest from the orthodox.” When elected deputy in 1871, Schérer sat with the Republicans of the left. {BDF; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Scherer, Paul: See entry for Theism.
Scherr, Johannes (1817–1886) Scherr was a German author who, with his brother Thomas, wrote A Popular History of Religious and Philosophical Ideas (1843) and History of Religion (1857). In 1860 he became professor of history and literature at Zürich. {BDF}
Scheuer, Sidney H. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Scheuer was chairman of the Committee for an Effective Congress. He was on the first National Board of Directors in 1952 of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and at the 1957 Congress addressed the group. In 1978 he received a special award “for 25 years of devoted service to IHEU.” Scheuer is the author of Ethics of International Economics (1980). {HM2}
Schick, Theodore Jr. (20th Century) Schick is a professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He wrote How To Think About Weird Things. A professor of philosophy at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he is author of “Can A Robot Have Moral Rights?” an amusing exercise in Free Inquiry (Winter 1997-1998). Schick was an instructor of “The History and Philosophy of Skepticism” at the January 1998 Center for Inquiry Institute in San Diego, California. “Can You Go to Heaven? he asks in Free Inquiry (Fall, 1999), and he answers in the negative. In fact anyone looking forward to eternal bliss, he explains, should get prepared for the bad news. In Philo, of which he is a contributing editor, he wrote “The ‘Big Bang’ Argument for the Existence of God” (Spring-Summer 1998). He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}
Schievella, Pasqual S. (20th Century) A non-theist, Schievella wrote Hey! It That You, God? (1985). {GS}
Schiff, Johan Moriz (Born 1823) Schiff was a German physiologist, a professor of comparative anatomy at Berne (1854–1863); of physiology at Florence (1863–1876); and at Genoa. He wrote many physiological treatises which were attacked as being materialistic. {BDF}
Schifter, Jacobo (1952– ) Schifter is a Costa Rican who founded the Instituto Latino Americano de Prevencion y Education en Salud (ILPES) (Latin-American Institute for Health Education, Apartado 561, 1002 San Jose, Costa Rica). A freethinker, he set up an association for educating Central Americans concerning sexually transmitted diseases. {WAS, conversations]
Schiller, Ferdinand (Canning Scott) (1864–1937) Schiller, the British philosopher who called his philosophic system “humanism,” wrote Humanism: Philosophical Essays (1903, 1912), Riddles of the Sphinx: A Study in the Philosophy of Humanism (1910), Studies in Humanism 1912), Tantalus (1924), Problems of Belief (1924), and Our Human Truths, published posthumously in 1939. Schiller’s humanism, closely related to the pragmatism of William James, held that “man is the measure of all things.” (See the article by Reuben Abel on Schiller in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; CL; HNS2; TRI; TYD}
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von (1759–1805) Schiller has been called, after Goethe, the greatest of the German poets. He was raised in a religious atmosphere, but he appeared to have little respect for Christianity’s influence as a factor in cultural progress. Although called “the representative of the rationalism of his age,” Schiller in Robbers (c. 1779) makes his worst villains freethinkers and champions religion against all assailants although seldom giving favorable portraits of priests. That play was one of the great plays of the “sturm und drang” period. Schiller often wrote as if a deist but for a time professed to be a Kantian. Like his friend Goethe, according to Robertson, “he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility. . . ; he does not hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed no morality, no Natur-recht, and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it.” He once wrote Goethe, “A healthy poetic nature wants, as you yourself say, no moral law, no rights of man, no political metaphysics. You might have added, as well, it wants no deity, immortality, to stay and support itself withal.” His Gods of Greece, to which Elizabeth Barrett Browning replied in Pan Is Dead, gave offense to many of the orthodox, and Schiller afterwards erased part of it. The Greek gods, he felt, had vanished from the world and had taken with them all that was fairest in color and sound, leaving the husk of the word. In “Resignation,” he poetically makes the unbeliever say that the illusions of superstition are holy only because they are covered by the giant shadow of our own fears. Schiller was a member of the Masonic Lodge, a non-theistic secret organization with deistic rituals. Schiller was ennobled in 1802. As for immortality, he declared, “A healthy nature needs no God or immortality. There must be a morality which suffices without this faith.” Carlyle, writing of Schiller’s final illness, stated, “Feeling that his end was come, be addressed himself to meet it as became him; not with affected carelessness or superstitious fear, but with the quiet unpretending manliness which had marked the tenor of his life. Of his friends and family be took a touching, but a tranquil farewell; he ordered that his funeral should be private, without pomp or parade. To someone inquiring how be felt, he said, “Calmer and calmer”; simple but memorable words, expressive of the mild heroism of the man. About six, he sank into a deep sleep; once for a moment he looked up with a lively air, and said, ‘Many things were growing plain and clear to him!’ Again be closed his eyes; and his sleep deepened and deepened, till it changed into the sleep from which there is no awakening; and all that remained of Schiller was a lifeless form, soon to be mingled with the clods of the valley. (See the article by Julius Elias on Schiller in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {BDF; CE; EU, Volker Dürr; FO; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}
Schilpp, Paul A. (1897–1993) Schilpp, the editor of the twenty-one-volume Library of Living Philosophers and who had been associate editor of Religious Humanism, wrote the present author concerning humanism:
Humanism, to me, connotes an emphasis on man as both the end and goal of all human endeavor as well as upon the essential dependence of man upon himself in the processes of individual growth and of social development and progress. I believe, in other words, that man has to work out his own (individual and social) salvation with fear and trembling, yes, but also with courage, insight, and caring. Such working out need not preclude, however, man’s making use, in this process, of any and all avenues of approach open to him: the use of nature and of natural laws as he comes increasingly to understand these, as well as the use of his intellectual, moral, aesthetic and spiritual powers as he learns to develop and understand these. In terms of method and procedure I suppose I would fit mostly into the category of naturalistic humanism. But, in terms of metaphysical considerations, I would rank as a theistic humanist. So long as man is—in the area of ultimates—still as largely ignorant as he is today, and in view of man’s obviously finite nature and even more finite (and limited) knowledge and comprehension, it seems to me the height of human arrogance for finite man to want to rule out God. Such procedure reminds me of the attempt, on the part of a mosquito, to rule out the possibility of man because the mosquito never has met a man and, if it had met one, could, obviously, neither explain nor understand man. But I cannot grant that theistic humanism of necessity must be held “within the framework of a supernaturalistic philosophy.” If there is a God, He must have some nature, which will be “natural” to Him as human nature is natural to man (or dog-nature is natural to a dog). God, in order to be God, must, I suppose, be thought of as superhuman; but this implies no more that He is supernatural than the fact that man is supervegetative implies that man is supernatural. God is merely beyond finite man’s finite grasp—as, indeed are many natural phenomena events yet in this atomic age. I would insist, therefore, that my theistic humanism is a type of naturalistic humanism. Everything that has ever been achieved in human history has been achieved by man (from the sub-beastly atrocities of war and other forms of head-hunting to the highest achievements of human hands, heart, mind, and spirit). Though man is finite, the latent capacities of his nature are so nearly limitless that no man can actually imagine or even dream what man may yet be able to achieve: If he will marshal and use the best powers of his rational, moral, and spiritual capacities in the building of a better world of human understanding, appreciation, freedom, and love. More detailed statements of the writer’s theistic humanism are found in This Is My Faith (1956) and in his Tully Cleon Knoles Lectures in Philosophy, Human Nature and Progress (1954).
{WAS, 27 August 1956}
Schirmer, Greta B. (20th Century) Schirmer was treasurer and a member of the board of directors in 1954 of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association.
Schisler, Charles (20th Century) Schisler is a life member of Atheists of Florida and is that group’s President. His “Some Principles of Rationalism” appeared in The American Rationalist (January-February 1997). Schisler wrote a booklet, “The Necessity of Atheism” (337 Golfview Road, Box 306, North Palm Beach, Florida 33408), in which he affirms atheism “as an antidote to theologies of perversion and ideologies of hate.” E-mail: <schisler@earthlink.net>.
SCHISM Church groups have long had a record of disunions and discord. When a formal breach of union occurs within a church it is called a schism. Divisions have occurred sometimes because of personality conflicts among the leaders or because of arguments over organization or content. A main schism was the “Great Schism” of 1054, which produced a separation of the four Eastern and the Roman patriarchates which exists to the present time. Pope Leo IX, inspired by the ideals of the Cluniac Reform and under provocation from the aggressive Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius (1043–1058), demanded that the latter acknowledge the supreme jurisdiction of the Holy See in the church universal. The causes of the schism were deep-seated and comprised political, cultural, as well as religious differences. (See McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia, which reports that “The Popes were brought back to Rome from their luxurious and vicious court at Avignon, not by a neurotic nun, as Catholics represent, but by the threat of the Romans to repudiate their allegiance, as they had often done.” He details the Great Schism, including its end in 1414 at the Council of Constance, at which 1,000 prostitutes allegedly attended.) {ER; RE}
Schlacter, Yevgeni (Eugene) (20th Century) Schlacter is associated in Russia with the St. Petersburgh Unitarian group at 197341, St. Petersbourg, Serebristy Blvd., 37, ap 8. E-mail: <eugene@uua.spb.su>.
Schlauch, Margaret (1898–1986) In 1962, Prof. Schlauch was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. She was the author of Gifts and Tongues (1942) and English Medieval Literature and the Social Foundations (1956). Born in New York City’s Greenwich Village, she taught at New York University (1927–1951) and became known as an educator, author, philologist, and specialist in Anglo-Saxon and Viking literature. In 1951 she moved to Poland, where she became a citizen, a member of the Communist Party, and a professor at Warsaw University.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834) A Protestant theologian, Schleiermacher excelled as one who helped secure the liberation of the church from the state. His translations of Plato and his interest in the Romantic movement led him to define religion as an absolute dependence on a monotheistic God, reached through intuition and independent of dogma. His Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1893) and The Christian Faith (1821–1822) strongly influenced liberal Protestant theology. Robertson points out, however, that Schleiermacher’s friend Sach, “who had passed the Discourses in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic, and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality.” Others called him “godless,” pointing to his view that civil marriage should precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory. Robertson calls him “at bottom a pantheist, and the secret of his attraction for so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to explain away.” {CE; ER; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Schlesinger, Annette (20th Century) Schlesinger, from Indiana, is on the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M(eier) (1917– ) Schlesinger, whose The Age of Jackson (1946) and A Thousand Days (1965) won Pulitzer Prizes, wrote the present author about humanism:
I am not sure that I can contribute anything very useful. My own views on the problem are rudimentary. It seems to me that most important for the preservation of civilization is a belief in moral standards. That belief is really most solid when it is founded upon a fervent belief in a supernatural order. For those of us who lack a belief in supernatural religion, we must base the standards as securely as possible on our own conception of man. For my own part, I find the Christian interpretation (as in Reinhold Niebuhr) of the incompleteness of merely human experience and the inadequacy of merely human resources entirely convincing; but I cannot go along with the belief that this incompleteness and this inadequacy are to be perfected by an infusion of the supernatural. I do not know where this puts me in your categories, but I do think that any great literature must be based on an understanding of the weakness and fallibility, the misery as well as the grandeur, of man.
Schlesinger (which he pronounces SCHLAY-sing-er) elsewhere has written, “My general belief is that Augustinian Christianity is fine up to the point where belief in God comes in. In other words, I find the Christian interpretation of experience more illuminating than any humanist interpretation, though I agree with the humanists in being unable to take the supernatural seriously.” Elsewhere, Schlesinger has identified one of the problems in our country to be that we have “too much pluribus, and not enough unum.” In a Wall Street Journal article (22 November 1995), Schlesinger lamented the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, saying it was “only the latest outrage committed by people who think they are executing the will of God.” Noting that pollsters find that “more than a third of American adults claim that God speaks to them directly,” Schlesinger asked, “Am I alone in finding this a scary statistic? What in the world do they mean? How does God talk to them? Do they hear voices, like Joan of Arc? And what does God say to them? He continued, “Fundamentalism in one form or another has been the scourge of the 20th century. Fundamentalists are absolutists—people who believe they are appointed carriers of a sacred gospel and feel so sure they are right that they have no compunction about killing heretics or doing anything else to advance their cause. . . . Unrebuked and unchecked, fundamentalists of all faiths will continue to believe that they are serving God by mayhem and murder.” Schlesinger in the Who’s Who volumes lists himself as a Unitarian. In 1996 he was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He was President of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1981–1984) and has been its Chancellor. (In a 22 June 1992 Op-Ed column of The New York Times, Schlesinger relates how he first heard Niebuhr preach in the winter of 1940-1941. The preacher “cast an intellectual spell on my generation,” he wrote. “He persuaded me and many of my contemporaries that original sin provides a far stronger foundation for freedom and self-government than illusions about human perfectibility.”) {CE; TYD; WAS, 24 February 1951 and 2 May 1956; conversation, 19 April 1995}
Schlesinger, Melvin (1916-1999) Schlesinger was named “Freethinker of the Year” in 1994 by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), of which group he was a member of the board of directors. This was in recognition of his role as successful plaintiff in a significant state-church challenge. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago had ordered a township to remove a huge Catholic crucifix from a public park in 1993, which represented a legal victory that had taken over ten years to obtain. During the Coolidge Administration, the Knights of Columbus had donated a “war memorial” to the park, a work which turned out to be this crucifix. It has since been moved to a Catholic rather than a public property. Owner of a real estate firm, he had been treasurer of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. {Freethought Today, January-February 1999}
Schlick, Moritz (1882–1936) Schlick, founder of the Vienna Circle, was a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. A leading figure in the development of logical positivism, he wrote Space and Time in Modern Physics (1920) and The Problems of Ethics (1931). “How men know what they know,” he believed, could be ascertained by using the methods of the sciences. At the age of fifty-four, Schlick was murdered by a paranoid student. (See entry for logical positivism. Also see the article by Béla Juhos in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; TRI}
Schmidt, Eduard Oskar (1823–1886) Schmidt was a German zoologist who traveled widely and became professor of natural history at Jena. Among the first of Germans to accept Darwinism, he illustrated its application in many directions and published The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism in the “International Scientific Series.” {BDF; RAT}
Schmidt, Fred (20th Century) Schmidt, a retired journalist for the San Antonio Express-News, is a Texas labor leader and an assistant to U. S. Representative Henry B. Gonzalez. He is an activist for Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Schmidt, Kaspar (1806–1856) Schmidt, a German philosopher, wrote a system of individualism in The Only One, and His Possession (1845). He also wrote A History of Reaction (1852) and translated Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Say’s Textbook of Political Economy. {BDF; RAT}
Schmidt, Nathaniel (1862–1939) Schmidt was one of the early leaders of the Ethical Culture Society. A scholar, he wrote The Coming Religion (1930). {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Schmitz, Al (20th Century) Schmitz was coordinator of the 1998 World Congress held in Luxembourg of the World Union of Freethinkers.
Schmuck, Henry (20th Century) Schmuck, the former state director of Michigan’s American Atheists Inc. can be e-mailed at <hmorgan@oeonline.com>.
Schneeberger, F. J. (Born 1827) Schneeberger was an Austrian writer who used the name “Arthur Storch” for some of his popular novels. He was one of the founders of the German Freethinkers’ Union. {BDF}
Schneider, Amy (20th Century) Schneider is manager of Le Salon, a coffeehouse that opened in October 1997 at the Center for Inquiry International in Amherst, New York.
Schneider, Georg Heinrich (19th Century) A German naturalist, Schneider wrote The Human Will From the Standpoint of the New Development Theory (1882) and other works. {BDF}
Schneider, Herbert W(allace) (1892–1984) Schneider, an associate of John Dewey and a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, was author of History of American Philosophy (1946) and Religion in Twentieth Century America (1952, 1964), in the latter of which he characterized humanists as follows:
There are among the humanists left-wing Unitarians who do not reflect the liberalism of Emerson and who do not wish to be confined to Christian limitations. There are materialists who are no longer “doctrinaire” materialists but who are suspicious of the theologians who use terms like “soul,” “immortal,” transcendental,” “God,” and “spirit”; they prefer more secular language for their secular truths. There are naturalists who are disgusted by the use of . . . supernatural symbols and myths . . . who find no use for organized religions, but who have a “religious” concern for the life of reason. There are still a few old-fashioned rationalists, free-thinkers or professional atheists . . . . And there are many individuals who cannot be labeled. . . .
On the subject of humanism Schneider, who was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, wrote the present author:
You state the important types of humanism very well and if I had to choose I would certainly belong in the seventh, naturalistic humanism. But I am interested in giving a humanistic account of theism without supernaturalism. To me it seems pretty close to the position of Feuerbach in his Essence of Christianity. {CL; HM2; PK; SHD; WAS, 5 March 1951}
Schneider, Martin (1921-1999) Schneider, a major in the Marine Corps in the South Pacific during World War II, was a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Schnitzler, Arthur (1862–1931) An Austrian playwright, Schnitzler in Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken (1927), wrote, “Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief. . . . Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness, of a belief.” {TYD}
Schoelcher, Victor (1804–1893) Schoelcher was a French philosopher who devoted himself from about 1826 to advocating the abolition of slavery. In 1848 he was made Under Secretary of the Navy and caused a decree to be issued by the Provisional Government enfranchising all slaves on French territory. Schoelcher was elected Deputy for Martinique in 1848 and 1849. Having opposed the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon (later Napoleon III) in 1851, Schoelcher was forced into exile in England until Napoleon’s fall in 1870. In London, he wrote occasionally in the Reasoner and National Reformer. Returning to Martinique in 1871, Schoelcher was elected a life senator in 1875. {BDF; CE; RAT}
Schoenig, Richard (20th Century) Schoenig, in “The Truth About Faith” (American Rationalist, May-June 1997), concluded that faith (a) contradicts reason; (b) is not a path to knowledge; (c) cannot objectively adjudicate its conflicting claims; (d) cannot be justified on the basis of strength of internal conviction; and (e) is not found in all people.
Schoenman, Ralph (20th Century) Schoenman, who had been a graduate student at the London school of Economics, managed Bertrand Russell’s affairs for eight years. According to Moorehead and others, Schoenman “Svengalied” Russell, wasted large amounts of his money, was responsible for destroying a number of Russell’s old friendships, and tried to make the elderly Russell into a puppet for his own personal causes. (See entry for Bertrand Russell.)
SCHOLASTICISM Christian thinkers in Europe during the Middle Ages encouraged scholasticism, which was marked by careful argumentation. Central to scholastic thought was the idea that reason and faith are compatible. Thomas Aquinas tried to show that ancient philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, supported and illuminated Christian faith. A freethinkers’ scholasticism focuses on free inquiry, the erudite, and a profound search for knowledge. {DCL}
Scholl, Aurélien (Born 1833) Born in Bordeaux, Scholl was a French journalist who wrote for Corsaire, founded Satan, Le Nain Jaune, and wrote onl’Evénement. In addition to writing several novels, Scholl wrote Le Procès de Jésus Christ (1877). {BDF; RAT}
Scholl, Eldon (1918–1990) Scholl was an editor and was one of the founders of the American Rationalist. A lifelong rationalist and freethinker, he worked for environmental and other causes, sometimes under the pseudonym of Arthur Stahl. After the demise in 1956 of the United Secularists of America, Scholl and a group started the American Rationalist, which continues to be published. In 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, he started Secular Subjects. {EU, Eldon Scholl; HNS}
Scholl, Karl (Born 1820) Scholl was a German writer and preacher to the free religious bodies of Mannheim and Heidelberg. Because of his opinions, he was suspended as a minister in 1844. He wrote Messiah Legend of the East (1852) and in 1861 a volume on Free Speech, in which he extracts writings by English, French, and American freethinkers. In 1870 he started a monthly journal of the Religion of Humanity. In 1879, Scholl wrote Judaism and the Religion of Humanity. {BDF}
Scholtz, Jud R. (20th Century) Scholtz has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Schonfield, Hugh J. (20th Century) Schonfield is author of The Passover Plot: Did Jesus Really Die On the Cross (1965).
SCHOOL
• God has no place in public schools, just as facts have no place in organized religion. School Principal in the teleseries “The Simpsons”
Schopenhauer, Adele (1797–1849) An accomplished woman and the sister of Arthur Schopenhauer, Adela Schopenhauer sided with her brother when his rationalism alienated their mother, and she relieved his pessimistic melancholy. In her Diary (1909, 2 volumes) are numerous rationalistic passages. She is said to have been an incredibly ugly woman, miserable for much of her life. She may have committed suicide, as her father was rumored to have done. {RE}
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) Schopenhauer, a German who was the “philosopher of pessimism,” was among the first of avowed atheists. Theism is incompatible with the responsibility of a “moral being,” he wrote, “because in theism responsibility always falls back on the Creator of that being. . . . If our will is free it is also original being, and vice versa.” Touted as the pre-eminent pessimist, he believed that the prime mover of human life is “the will to live,” but it also is the basic cause of human suffering. When he became infected with syphilis, Schopenhauer feared he would lose what he valued most: his mind. One of views, on tetragamy rather than monogamy, was that two men should share a women as a wife until she was past childbearing age and then should marry a second young woman, continuing to care for the first. His Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) highlighted his deep hatred of woman, which was related to his philosophic pessimism. Schopenhauer’s main significance lies in his original conception of reality and in his compellingly argued and terrifying bleak and pessimistic vision of human existence as a meaningless, unceasing, and futile struggle, full of torment and suffering, in a hostile and godless universe. This vision still stands as a disturbing and powerful challenge to anyone of a more optimistic persuasion. In a chapter of Parerga, “Religion, A Dialogue,” he wrote, “Faith and knowledge are related as the two scales of a balance; when the one goes up, the other goes down. . . . The power of religious dogma, when inculcated early, is such as to stifle conscience, compassion, and finally every feeling of humanity. . . . For, as you know, religions are like glow worms; they shine only when it’s dark. A certain amount of ignorance is the condition of all religions, the element in which alone they can exist. . . . To free a man from error is to give, not take away.” As pointed out by Gaskin and others, Schopenhauer thought religion is superfluous to the enforcement of morality, that “it is not true in any but a ‘flowery or allegorical’ sense. But religion is “needed” by ordinary people to give direction and form to their lives. The philosophical person may transcend religion, but he or she should not expect others to do so.” “The fruits of Christianity,” Schopenhauer declared, “were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives in America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.” Lamont, observing that although Schopenhauer may have been an atheist, “In his own way, Schopenhauer was as anthropomorphic as anyone else. For he ascribed to the cosmos the human attributes of mind, will, and evil. Instead of postulating a good Mind or an all-inclusive God at the very heart of things, he postulated an evil Will, in essence an all-inclusive Devil. The excellent lesson that Schopenhauer’s pan-Satanism teaches is that if we indulge in the pathetic fallacy of imputing to the universe qualities that emerge only in living forms, there is at least as much of a case for imputing the bad qualities as the good.” In Frankfort am Main, the Schopenhauer Society founded in 1911 continues to meet and study his views. (See the article by Patrick Gardiner on Schopenhauer in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Rudolf Suckerstätter; PA; RAT; TYD}
Schorer, Mark (20th Century) Schorer wrote Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961). {GS}
Schoumans, Jan (20th Century) Schoumans was awarded the Yad Vashem medal in 1999, the highest civilian award offered by the State of Israel. A member of Humanist Association of Canada, Schoumans had hid people of a Jewish background from the Nazis during the occupation of Holland through the Second World War. {Humanist in Canada, Summer 1999}
Schreiber, H. E. (Ernie) (20th Century) Schreiber, a former President of the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC), is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada. He is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. E-mail: <heesnaps@magi.com>. On the Web, his page for European Union North American Communicators (EUNACOM) expresses secular and atheist views: <http://www.eunacom.net>.
Schreiner, Olive (1855–1920) Schreiner, whose pseudonym was Ralph Iron, was the daughter of a German missionary and was born in Basutoland (now Lesotho). She wrote The Story of an African Farm (1883), which has been likened to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and which relates the story of two children living in the African veldt. It describes how her father had been a missionary to the natives of Basutoland and how the harshly pious home had driven her to atheism. The book was so virile that few suspected the author was a woman. Because of its feminist and anti-Christian sentiments, the work was highly controversial. In 1889, she wrote The Search for Truth. Schreiner, a champion of liberalism, was married to S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, who wrote her biography (1923). Edward Carpenter wrote of her, “I have seen her shake her little fist at the Lord in heaven and curse him down from his throne.” {BDF; CE; GS; RAT; RE; WWS}
Schrödinger, Erwin (1887–1961) A 1933 Nobel Prize winner in physics, with P. A. M. Dirac, Schrödinger was a non-believer. He is noted for developing wave mechanics (1926), which is a form of quantum mechanics. The Schrödinger equation is a widely used mathematical tool of the modern quantum theory. In What Is Life? (1944), Schrödinger speaks of his having turned against religion although it “has never done me any harm.” {CE}
Schroeder, J. Henry (Born 1840) Schroeder worked at mill-wrighting, mining, saw-milling, farming, and dairying, building the first creamery in Coos County, Oregon. A freethinker and a materialist, he was elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1878. He also was elected president of the Oregon State Secular Union. {PUT}
Schroeder, Theodore (1864–1953) Schroeder, a libertarian crusader and publicist, was influenced by the works of Thomas Paine, Robert G. Ingersoll, and Ludwig Feuerbach to become a freethinker. He particularly liked Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity. Schroeder, a lawyer in Salt Lake City, Utah, called polygamy “sanctified lust,” and he perceived the Mormon theocracy as a threat to the separation of church and state. His erotogenetic theory of religion was refuted by William James but was defended by Chapman Cohen and Havelock Ellis. Religion, Schroeder came to believe, “is the most pernicious single influence in human society; without one redeeming feature.” But he distinguished between religion and theology, which he considered a worthy intellectual pursuit; and he consistently defended a person’s right to hold and expound religious views. In 1911, Schroeder founded the Free Speech League, and he wrote for Truth Seeker. {EU, Ralph E. McCoy; FUS; TYD}
Schroeter, Eduard (1810–1888) Schroeter was a German-American writer who studied theology at Jena and entered the freethought religious communion in 1845. In 1850 he moved to America, speaking in Sauk City, Minnesota, and other places concerning the merits of freethought. In 1881 he attended the International Conference of Freethinkers at Brussels. Schroeter was a contributor to the Milwaukee Freidenker. {BDF; RAT}
Schroot, A. (19th Century) A German author, Schroot wrote Visions and Ideas (1865), Natural Law and Human Will, Creation and Man, and Science and Life (1873). {BDF}
Schubert, Franz Peter (1797–1828) Schubert, the Austrian composer who was one of the most gifted musicians of the 19th century, wrote his first symphony in 1813. Except for a circle of admirers who were among the leading artists of the period, Schubert received little recognition before his death. Although he taught music to the children of a Hungarian nobleman, he basically lived in poverty. Although his father and uncle were educated by Jesuits and remained devout, his brother Ignaz Schubert was described as a “freethinker,” and according to Daniel O’Hara the brothers shared an “anti-clericalism and contempt for orthodox piety.” Wrote Franz to Ignaz,
You have no idea what a gang the priesthood is here: bigoted as mucky old cattle, stupid as arch-donkeys, and boorish as bisons.
He further described a ceremony to observe the festival of St. Francis, a part of which involved kissing a relic of the saint: “[S]everal of the adults crept out of the door, having no desire, perhaps, to share in this privilege.” As a youth, Schubert was educated in Catholic schools. By his mid-teens, he led a Bohemian life and had close friendships with wealthy young men who were allegedly bisexual or homosexual. Terry Teachout (Commentary, March 1997) cited one of these friends:
Anyone who knew Schubert knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other, how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation. . . . His body, strong as it was, succumbed to the cleavage of his—I would like to say souls, of which the one pressed heavenwards and the other wallowed in slime; perhaps, too, it succumbed to lack of recognition which some of his larger efforts suffered and to bitterness at the meanness of his publishers.
Elizabeth McKay, a biographer, held that Schubert might have suffered from cyclothymia, a form of manic-depressive disease, citing how his music often ranged between the extremely joyous, then the extremely tragic. Toward the end of 1822 when he was but twenty-five, Schubert was diagnosed with syphilis. He would have to have known that medical treatments at the time usually did not work, and commentators have suggested that the theme of intense but doomed love of life, which appears in his work, must have arisen from such a realization. Although he composed several Masses, Schubert never made a public break with the Church, as pointed out by Daniel O’Hara (Ethical Record of the South Place Ethical Society, February 1997). He always omitted the phrase “I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church,” and according to O’Hara “clearly rejected the exclusivist pretensions of the Roman church, though Protestantism held no attractions for him.” Other Masses omitted “references to the Virgin Birth, the resurrection of the body, and the session of the risen Christ at the right hand of the father.” O’Hara holds that Schubert’s religion was “art, love, and friendship,” that a key concept was also his love of nature. In his final days, Schubert made no call for a priest or for devotional literature, and he received extreme unction only when he was no longer conscious. As his father wished, Schubert was buried with a traditional Catholic funeral and is entombed near Beethoven, whom he never met even though they lived nearby each other for years. {CE; Fred Whitehead, Freethought History #22, 1997}
Schueneman-Pott, Friederich (1826–1892) Although he studied for the Lutheran ministry, Schueneman-Pott renounced the Christian religion and became a lecturer for the Free Religious Society in Germany. In 1848 he fought against the government, was indicted for high treason, was imprisoned, was tried, and was acquitted. He went to the United States in 1854 and edited Blätter für Freies Religiöses, a German freethought publication that was published from 1856 to 1877. He also made lecturing tours throughout the country. Schueneman, who had been adopted by Baron Ernst von Pott, wrote widely on ethical and freethought subjects. {PUT}
Schug, Philip (20th Century) In the 1950s when he was minister of the First Unitarian Church in San Antonio, Schug was an associate editor of The Humanist and a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Schüklenk, Udo (20th Century) An academic, Schüklenk has written on such subjects as “Deathly Doctrine: Christian Churches and AIDS” and Ethics, Research, and the Public Understanding of Science,” in the latter of which he argues that “religious beliefs or good intentions are no viable substitute for a rational ethical analysis.” On the Web: <www.uclan.ac.uk/facs/ethics/udopage.htm>.
Schultes, Richard Evans (1915– ) A leading ethnobotanist, Schultes is an expert on hallucinogens and drugs as well an eminent museum director. A popular Harvard professor and an expert on Richard Spruce, Schultes has spent months in various jungles to complete his botanical studies. In 1992 he received the Linnean Gold Medal from the Linnean Society. A thorough description of the provocative scientist, a Unitarian, has been written by E. J. Kahn Jr. in New Yorker (1 June 1992).
Schultz, Werner (20th Century) Schultz, the editor of Diesseits, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Schultz, William Alan (“Bill”) (1947– ) Schultz is a senior software engineer. He is Vice President of Internet Infidels. E-mail: <pope@agnostic.org> and <bill@infidels.org>. On the Web: <http://www.agnostic.org/>.
Schultz, Werner (20th Century) Schultz, who is active with the Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, is one of many Europeans who has objected to the hanging of a crucifix on the wall of every classroom in all Bavarian schools. “What would happen,” he writes in International Humanist News (October 1995), “if it were decided in a class with 70% Muslim pupils to hang a Koran Sura next to the blackboard? There would be a storm of protest roaring through the Christian West—even though one line written in Arabic would nowhere near have the same effect on little children as does a tortured man on a cross.” Schultz is one of the members of the IHEU’s Committee on Religious Extremism and Rational Inquiry.
Schultz, William (1949– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Schulz was a Ph. D. candidate at Meadville/Lombard, the University of Chicago. For his 1954 doctoral dissertation, he wrote “Making the Manifesto: A History of Early Religious Humanism,” published as a hardcover book in 1975. He interviewed many of those who had written Humanist Manifesto I and observed about the John Dewey philosophy that, coming as it did
. . . on the explosive heels of the technological revolution, it quite readily reinforced the “rumor” already spreading for several decades (since Huxley’s time and before) that science could transform Being. Man was flexing his muscles in Nature’s face; intelligence, judgment, and the scientific input could regulate and direct her. Lacking the obstacles which a deity might provide, and confident that the universe (matter) was just waiting to be exploited for man’s benefit, humanity stood in awe before the possibilities with which its new Weltanschauung presented it. Religious humanism institutionalized that awe.
At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Schulz addressed the group. In 1985, he was elected the fifth President of the American Unitarian Universalist Association, a position he held from 1985 to 1993. He then was named executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A., the human rights organization which received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1977. {EW; HM2; U}
Schultze, Karl August (Born 1846) Schultze was a German writer who studied at Jena, Göttinger, and Münich. He wrote On Fetishism (1871), A History of the Philosophy of the Renaissance (1874), and Kant on Darwin (1875). In 1876 Schultze became professor of philosophy in Jena, and in 1883 wrote Elements of Spiritualism. {BDF}
Schumacher, Mary (20th Century) Schumacher heads the Friendly Lesbian Atheist Group of Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin.
Schumaker, John (20th Century) Schumaker, who is concerned about the origins of religion, has written for Free Inquiry. He is a lecturer in psychology at the University of Newcastle and is author of Wings of Illusion and The Corruption of Reality. In “Can Religion Make You Happy?” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1998), Schumaker wrote that “Modern religion is failing as a vehicle of transcendence” but that without religion “[t]o be very good at what one loves to do is the best prescription for a satisfying life.”
Schumann, Robert Alexander (1810–1856) A noted German musical composer, Schumann had studied law at Leipzig but decided instead on a career in music. Because of a hand injury which resulted in his abandoning any career as a pianist, he served as editor of the Newe Zeitschrift für Musik from its inception in 1834 until 1844, championing younger composers, particularly Chopin and Brahms. In his lieder he set to music lyrics by such poets as Heine, Goethe, Eichendorff, and Kerner. Schumann wrote a “profane” oratorio, Paradise and the Peri (1840), and his Letters reveal his freethought and liking of Goethe’s pantheism and Jean Paul Richter’s rationalism. In 1854 after a nervous breakdown, Schumann entered a sanitarium, where he died two years later. {CE; BDF; RAT; RE}
Schummer, David (20th Century) Schummer is coordinator of Campus Freethought Alliance, which represented at the end of 1997 forty-two freethought campus groups. In 1998 while a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he signed the Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.”
Schurz, Carl (1829–1906) A Missouri Senator, Schurz worked with German freethinkers in a group called Ethische Kultur (Ethical Culture) and having a newsletter, Westliche Post. Ethical Culturist Felix Adler was invited to give them “his episcopal benediction,” but upon visiting he monopolized the large audience and spoke at great length only on his own views. {See entry for Ethical Culture.}
Schütte, Frank L. (20th Century) A Berliner, Schütte is a spokesman of the board of the International League of Non-Believers and Atheists (ILNA), which he had founded in 1976.
Schuyler, Louisa Lee (19th Century) Schuyler, a member of the New York Unitarian Church of All Souls, founded that city’s Bellevue Hospital’s school of nursing.
Schwalb, Isaak (20th Century)
Schwalb wrote “A Fraud Masked by Religion” (1976). {GS}
Schwalbe, Gustav (1844–1916) Schwalbe, a German anthropologist and physician, served as military surgeon in the Franco-German War, after which he taught at Leipzig, Jena, Königsberg, and Strasbourg. His anthropological works include Studien über den Pithecanthropus Erectus (1899) and Die Vorgeschichte des Menschen (1904). Schwalbe was an agnostic. {RAT}
Schwaner, Wilhelm (Born 1863) Schwaner, a German writer, was editor of the Berliner Reform (1896–1897) and edited and published the Volkserzieher and Upland. Some of his rationalist works, which had a large circulation, were Germanenbibel and Gottsuchen der Völker. Schwaner was a pantheist of the Goethe school, with a sentimental regard for Christianity and a disdain of its doctrines and clergy. {RAT}
Schwartz, A. Truman (20th Century) Schwartz, with John G. McEvoy, edited Motion Toward Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley.
Schwartz, Delmore (1913–1966) Schwartz was a poet, editor, and author of In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938). Asked for his views on humanism, he responded, “I’m sorry to have to say that my own views, such as they are, can’t be formulated in terms of the seven kinds of humanism you mention.” {WAS, 11 March 1951}
Schwartz, Mauricio-José (20th Century) Schwartz, at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City, spoke about Mexican cybernetics and democratic participation.
Schwartz, Tony (20th Century) Schwartz, who has been a New York Times and Newsweek correspondent, is author of What Really Matters: Search for Wisdom in America and Trump, The Art of the Deal. A member of Manhattan’s All Souls Unitarian Church, Schwartz is a theist who makes no apologies for using the word God. {He wrote The Media, the Second God (1981). {World, Sep-Oct 1995}
Schwartz, Walter G. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Schwartz was director of the Humanist Committee of San Francisco. {HM2}
Schwarz, Bert (20th Century) A former co-chairman of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, Schwarz has also been a member of the Dutch parliament. A retired businessman, he is a professional masseur in The Hague. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)
Schweichel, Georg Julius Robert (Born 1821) Schweichel was a German writer who, first studying jurisprudence, took up literature. He took part in the events of 1848, then moved to Switzerland where he wrote Life of Auerbach, a novel, and wrote a preface to Dulk’s Irrgang des leben’s Jesu (1884). {BDF}
Schweikher, Paul (20th Century) Schweikher, a scientist, has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Schweitzer, Albert (1875–1965) An Alsatian theologian, physician, and organist, Schweitzer wrote Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906, tr. Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910); The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (1913; 1948); and Civilization and Ethics (1923). His ethical philosophy was developed in Philosophy of Civilization (1923), which contained his concept of “reverence for life.” For that concept, he received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1952. Reared a Lutheran, Schweitzer was an unorthodox Protestant, rejecting as he did the historical infallibility of Jesus although admiring the spiritual Jesus. Sacrificing a comfortable life in Europe, where in 1905 he had written a biography of Bach, co-edited his music (1912–1914), and enjoyed a reputation as being an organist who excelled playing Bach’s compositions, Schweitzer moved in 1913 to Lambaréné in Africa. There, he founded a hospital to which people feared coming until the word went out that Dr. Schweitzer never surgically removed any body parts. Some critics accused him of administering dictatorially, but specialists and notables visited him from all over the world to observe his successful hospital. In the mid-1940s, and after having had trouble with Protestant sources in obtaining hospital funds because of certain fears he was not preaching an infallible Jesus, he joined the Church of the Larger Fellowship (Unitarian). Vilma Szantho Harrington, wife of the New York Unitarian minister Donald Harrington, has written that Schweitzer “. . . told me personally that he was a Unitarian when I visited him with my husband in Lambaréné.” Norman Cousins, writing of his visit, admired the physician’s workmanship, productiveness, and applied humanism, remarking that on Schweitzer’s daughter’s birthday Schweitzer showed his sense of humor by playing a boogie-woogie tune for her on the organ. Schweitzer admired not only Cousins but also wrote friendly letters to Romain Rolland, Gandhi, Hermann Hesse (to whom in 1915 he wrote, “I feel a bond with you in the ideal of humanity. Both of us remained loyal to this ideal in an age when it lost prestige”), Einstein, Thomas Mann, Pablo Casals, and Bertrand Russell. From his African hospital, he wrote the present author in 1951 concerning humanism:
I find the articles [in The Humanist] very interesting and my full sympathy is given to the movement which it represents: Humanism. The world thinks it must raise itself above humanism; that it must look for a more profound spirituality. It has taken a false road. Humanism in all its simplicity is the only genuine spirituality. Only ethics and religion which include in themselves the humanitarian ideal have true value. And humanism is the most precious result of rational meditation upon our existence and that of the world. (Translated from the French by Warren Allen Smith).
In 1956, he wrote again:
I kindly ask you to excuse me for writing after such a long time. But I am so overburdened with work and so tired also, as my eyes are overtired. It also is impossible for me to write something about my Humanism. I must be very concentrated on my work, the medical and the literary work. I think your study, as you term it, very interesting. Please give only your opinion about me as you think it and feel it after the thoughts that I lay down in my works. That will be the best. When you will send me a copy of your work, it will greatly be appreciated. But please do not send it to Lambaréné (where the termites eat my books) but to my address at Gunsbach, Alsace, France.
The above is a translation from the German by A. Silver, nurse, who added:
Dr. Schweitzer asked me to express to you his regret for not having answered your letter dated 26 April 1956. He is very much interested indeed in your study of Humanism and in former years he surely would have contributed more to this study. But now it is no more possible. The hospital grew to a greater importance than he had ever intended, the hospital administration is much more complicated than before, and the correspondence is tremendous. Dr. Schweitzer works in general on the hospital ground from 7 a.m. till sunset and has to write often till midnight. This is his life week after week and year after year, without ever having some time for himself, to finish his manuscripts, which he wants so much to finish before it may be too late. Many letters remain unanswered, as our time for correspondence is rather limited. He asked me to thank you for the honor you showed him in inviting him to contribute his thinking about humanism, and to thank you for your sympathy.
In 1961, Schweitzer wrote to George N. Marshall of the Unitarian Church of the Larger Fellowship,
I thank you cordially for your offer to make me an honored member of the Unitarian Church. I accept with pleasure. Even as a student I worked on the problem and history of the Unitarian Church and developed a sympathy for your affirmation of Christian freedom at a time when it resulted in persecution. Gradually I established a closer contact with Unitarian communities and became familiar with their faith-in-action. Therefore, I think you that through you I have been made an honored member of this church.
Norman Cousins, who like Marshall had visited with and written about Schweitzer in Africa, said that he shared Schweitzer’s humanistic outlook and his interest in the historical Jesus, the man-not-a-god, as well as his profound belief in applied ethics, in applying humanism, not just talking about it. Schweitzer’s critics, however, focused on his dictatorial rule of the African hospital, his helping blacks but allegedly considering them inferior, his failing to pass on any skills to the natives in order that one day they could replace the foreigners who had come, and his insufficiently applying his philosophy to the social realm. Schweitzer had designed a simple stone cross for his gravestone, and he was buried on the hospital grounds in Lambaréné. The inscription, “Here Lies Dr. Albert Schweitzer,” is in French only. {CE; CL; HSN2; U; UU; WAS, 15 April 1951 and 1956}
Schweitzer, Jean Baptista von (1833–1875) A German socialist poet, Schweitzer studied law in Berlin and Heidelberg. After Lassalle’s death, he became president of the German Workmen’s Union and was sent to Parliament in 1867. He wrote the Zeitgeist and Christianity (1862) and The Darwinians (1875). {BDF; RAT}
Schweninger, Ernst (Born 1850) Schweninger was a German pathologist, once the private physician to Prince Bismarck. He later became professor and director of the chief clinic at Berlin. In the Haeckel Memorial Volume (Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken, 1914), Schweninger wrote a cordial appreciation of the great monist, whose rationalism he fully endorsed. Haeckel, he wrote, had raised for himself, in the record of enlightenment, “a monument memoriá et aere perennius.” {RAT}
SCIENCE Naturalists in philosophy use science and the scientific method when they reason. As Bertrand Russell wrote in The Art of Philosophizing (1968), “Whoever wishes to become a philosopher will do well to pay attention to the history of science, and particularly to its warfare with theology.” He then explains his criticism of the Catholic Church: “With the exception of pure mathematics, every science has had to begin by fighting to establish its right to exist. Astronomy was condemned in the person of Galileo, geology in the person of Buffon. Scientific medicine was, for a long time, made almost impossible by the opposition of the Church to the dissection of dead bodies. Darwin came too late to suffer penalties, but Catholics and the Legislature of Tennessee still regard evolution with abhorrence. Each step has been won with difficulty and each new step is still opposed, as if nothing were to be learnt from past defeats. In our day, it is the newest science, psychology, that encounters opposition, particularly when it seems in danger of interfering with the doctrine of ‘sin.’ The conception of ‘sin’ was the Church’s way of preventing anti-social behavior. If the police failed, the sinner could not congratulate himself on his escape, for God would punish him. In ethics, equally, the old obscurantism continues. No one is injured when a man marries his deceased wife’s sister, yet the Church is still shocked by such wicked behavior, since it defines ‘sin’ not as what does harm, but as what the Bible or the Church condemns.” Addressing the historical conflict between religion and science, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) states that basic scientific research, as well as applied research, “is a significant expression of man’s dominion over creation. Science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development for the benefit of all. By themselves, however, they cannot disclose the meaning of existence and of human progress. Science and technology are ordered to man, from whom they take their origin and development; hence they find in the person and in his moral values both evidence of their purpose and awareness of their limits.” Science, the catechism continues, “must be at the service of the human person, of his inalienable rights, of his true and integral good, in conformity with the plan and the will of God.” However, Isaac Asimov in The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, makes it clear that what scientists do not believe “are the tenets of religion, in particular those of the Judeo-Christian belief-system.” He adds that “the scientific view is that fundamentalism is a form of religion that clings to Babylonian science of twenty-five centuries ago and by modern standards is nothing but superstition. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, wish to appropriate the respect given to science, and wish to have their views taught in the public schools as ‘science.’ This cannot constitutionally be done if their views are backed only by biblical evidence and nothing more, since that would violate the principle of separation of church and state. Therefore, they present their fundamentalist views without mention of the Bible, surround it with a potpourri of undigested scientific terminology, and call it ‘scientific creationism.’ However, calling a horse a golden-haired princess doesn’t make it any the less a horse, and ‘scientific creationism’ is merely fundamentalism.” (See McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia for a discussion of Science and Religion and Scientists and Religion.) {EU; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
SCIENCE AND GOD: See entry for “Do Scientists Believe in God?”
SCIENCE AND NON-SCIENCE The scientific method involves observation, induction of laws, formation of hypotheses predicting yet unobserved phenomena, and observations to test these hypotheses. Ted Debiak, President of New York Area Skeptics, adds two more principles:
• A hypothesis must be falsifiable: that is, its proponent must be able to specify what evidence would lead him to abandon it.
• “Double-blind” experiments are preferable, as in medical experiments where neither the patient nor the examining physician knows what treatment has been administered. More generally, an observer should not know the “correct” or “expected answer” answer.
Other requirements of good science are communication with others in the field and reproduction of results in other laboratories. Debiak in an 18 March 1998 speech to the New York Area Skeptics provided some examples of non-science:
• Margaret and Kate in 1848, abetted by their aunt, pretended that sounds they were able to make with their joints were made by the spirits of the dead, with whom they could communicate. Thirty years later they admitted the hoax, but Spiritualism by then had grown into a new religion and mere facts were not going to destroy their claim.
• The “N-rays” of René Blondot in 1903 appeared to emanate from an iron container enclosing a hot platinum filament. Blondot, attempting to find a filter for polarized X-rays, noticed that radiation seemed to pass through an aluminum window and was diffracted by an aluminum prism. The spectrum was observed as a fluorescent thread. However, the experiments could not be reproduced elsewhere. In 1904, Robert Wood, an American physicist, visited the university of Nancy (for which the rays were named) and in the dark room removed the prism without the knowledge of Blondot or his assistant. Blondot still saw the spectrum. When Wood surreptitiously replaced the prism, the assistant, thinking there was no prism, saw no spectrum. Blondot had to admit that it was all an illusion.
• The 1908 Piltdown Man was later shown to have been a hoax after fluorine tests indicated the alleged remains were not over 200,000 years old but, rather, consisted according to X-rays of a chimpanzee jaw and a tooth of modern origin. The usual suspect for the forgery is Charles Dawson.
• R. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, claimed to be the only person who could remember all his past lives, including one as Piltdown Man.
• In 1966 Boris Derjaguin claimed that when water vapor condenses in a fine quartz capillary it takes a new form, with density, viscosity, and boiling point greater, and freezing point less, than for ordinary water. Scientists outside of Russia later determined that polywater is really a colloidal dispersion of silica (quartz) in water.
• In 1989 B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed they had achieved nuclear fusion, not at the usual millions of degrees, but at room temperature. However, scientists now see cold fusion as an illusion despite the fact that conferences continue to debate the subject.
Irving Langmuir has suggested the following laws of bad science: (1) The maximum effect is produced by a barely detectable change in conditions; (2) effects are close to the limit of detectability; (3) there are claims of great accuracy; (4) fantastic theories, contrary to experience, are suggested; (5) ad hoc explanations are always provided for disappointing results; and (6) the percentage of scientists who accept the results rises to about 50%, then falls to zero. {John Arents, “When Science Goes Wrong, The New York Area Skeptic, Summer 1998}
SCIENCE EDUCATION Freethinkers and secular humanists strongly favor science education. However, schools are populated by students whose vocabulary includes such words as creationism, faith, heaven, hell, holy ghost, soul, spirit, virgin birth. And religions, as Carl Sagan pointed out, currently are “nurseries of pseudoscience.” Meanwhile, many science teachers use the scientific method of reasoning most of the time but, because of their religious faith, they believe Jesus once literally rose from the dead; that the Ten Commandments or the Book of Mormon or the Qur’an were personally delivered by God or by angels to Moses or Joseph Smith or Muhammad; that upon their death they will go to Heaven; etc. A 1997 survey by Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia reported that of the 600 of 1000 American scientists who responded to a query, about 40% believed in a God who, by the survey’s strict definition, actively communicated with humankind and to whom one may pray “in expectation of receiving an answer.” Dr. Alan Hale, the co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp while the comet was still visible in 1997, stated that unless drastic changes are made he would not recommend that young people seek careers in science. This was because he deplored the limited career options and the widespread superstitious beliefs spawned by “scientific illiteracy,” two of the main causes he perceived of a malaise in science. He specifically worried about antiscientific attitudes based on belief rather than reason and cited hundreds of “vicious hate letters” he had received after he publicly scoffed at the belief by superstitious sky-watchers that a bright star visible near the Hale-Bopp comet was a “companion” carrying extraterrestrial visitors to the solar system.
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS ON PHILOSOPHY
• To me however, death is merely death, and a person who was alive is gone, and although sorrow and loneliness may devour you as a result, it should not be put on public display, any more than it must. I realize this is not a popular view and will not prevail. –Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov
• It makes, in the upshot, no difference from which direction one approaches the central question of our time: will we, or will we not, survive the consequences of our own ingenuity? Both alternatives remain open. –John Brunner, The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer
• Gods can do anything. They fear nothing: they are gods. But there is one rule, one Seal of Solomon that can confound a god, and to which all gods pay service, to the letter: When belief in a god dies, the god dies. . . .To be replaced by newer, more relevant gods. –Harlan Ellison from the introduction to Deathbird Stories
• History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion—i.e., none to speak of.
–Lazarus Long in Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love
• The most important Manhattan Projects of the future will be vast government-sponsored enquiries into what the politicians and the participating scientists will call “the problem of happiness”—in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude. . . . The love of servitude cannot be established except as the result of a deep, personal revolution in human minds and bodies. –Aldous Huxley from the Foreword to Brave New World
• After 20 generations of shilly-shallying and “we’ll” cross that bridge when we come to it,” genus homo had bred itself into an impasse. . . . Mental subnormals were outbreeding mental normals and supernormals, and the process was occurring on an exponential curve. . . . If you think that had any effect on breeding practices, you do not know genus homo. –C. M. Kornbluth from “The Little Black Bag”
• For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however, satisfying and reassuring. –Carl Sagan The Demon-Haunted World (See the entries for Aliens from Outer Space and for Voltaire, who was the first to use the expression. Also, critics have noted that an inordinate number of science fiction writers, named herein, are non-theists.) {The American Rationalist, September-October 1997}
SCIENCE, MYTHS OF Gina Kolata laments that some scientific myths are too good to die. In The New York Times (6 December 1998), she listed two examples:
• the “Hawthorne Effect” was a much touted 1927-1933 study of factory workers at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Plant in Illinois, one which showed that regardless of the changes made in working conditions productivity increased. However, as Stanford University’s Dr. Lee Ross has shown, only five workers took part in that study, and two of these were replaced partway through for gross insubordination and low output. The University of Michigan’s Dr. Richard Nisbett calls the Hawthorne effect “a glorified anecdote. Once you’ve got the aanecdote, you can throw away the data.”
• A 25 June 1990 study by Dr. Bernard Siegel told of two oncologists who tested a combination of four chemotherapy drugs, which had the initials EPHO. When one doctor’s patients did well, but only a fourth of the others’ patients improved, the first doctor explained that he had simply rearranged the letters of the drugs so they spelled HOPE. The test was challenged by the University of Toronto’s Dr. Robert Buckman, who traced the Siegel story to a book by Norman Cousins, who had referred to an article published in a 1988 Western Journal of Medicine, the writer of which said the story was simply a parable meant to tell doctors that there is more to treating cancer than merely doling out drugs.
SCIENTIFIC HUMANISM: See entry for Secular Humanism.
SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM: See entries for Lucretius, Hobbes, and Materialism.
SCIENTIFIC METHOD Scientists are aware that questions are not settled. Provisional answers are given to such questions; later, other scientists are invited to provide more illuminating answers. Scientists, according to David Baltimore of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “are different from artists in that they give primacy to logic and evidence, but the most fundamental progress in science is achieved through hunch, analogy, insight, and creativity. The culture of science is one that allows for both rigor and fluidity, an amalgam that, though quite different from nonscientific culture, is no less valuable.” In their investigations, scientists observe phenomena and come up with a hypothesis, experiment to demonstrate the truth or falseness of that hypothesis, then make conclusions which validate or modify the hypothesis. {The New Yorker, 27 January 1997}
SCIENTIFIC THEORY • [Do not] put too much confidence in experimental results until they have been confirmed by theory. –Sir Arthur Eddington
SCIENTOLOGY The Church of Scientology is a religious sect which was founded in 1954 by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986). His Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health (1950) formed the basis of a philosophic outlook which allegedly offers an alternative path to overcoming physical and mental stress. The soul, it is claimed, can be cleaned of its negative energy through a ceremony called “processing.” Each person, it is taught, creates his or her own problems. The common man is smarter than the educated elite. We all possess Godlike powers and un-tapped, unlimited potential (which can be accessed through techniques which cost money). Challenged in the 1950s by the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, and investigated in the 1960s by the governments of England, Australia, and the United States, the church had its tax-exempt status temporarily questioned. Hubbard moved to England in 1959 and lived the rest of his life as a recluse. The group’s leadership denies that it is a cult, and they have claimed a membership of eight million, although others put the figure as low as fifty thousand. The church in 1995 had a paid staff of 13,000. Many celebrities have been attracted to Scientology, a feat attributable to its three-decade efforts that are unusual for a religious group. Included are musician Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie; musicians Isaac Hayes and Chick Corea; television legal analyst Greta Van Susteren; and actors John Travolta and Tom Cruise. “Through Scientology,” Travolta said at an award from the public works commission for a renovation project in Los Angeles, “you learn to examine your life and be more productive. You can make sure you avoid any pitfalls and you can face your challenges and handle them.” The church operates a Celebrity Centre near Hollywood Hills, a place which caters to artists and actors and where they can stay while being counseled. In 1995, several dissidents electronically posted on computer bulletin boards a 136-page text that could be copied for free. Some Scientologists are required to pay thousands of dollars to the church for their copy. As a result, the “free” text was copied in Finland, Germany, China, and elsewhere around the world. Charging that the dissidents had infringed on copyrights and had misappropriated “trade secrets,” United States marshals seized their computers and files. Meanwhile, the posting underlined the ease with which individuals on the global computer network could by-pass national laws to oppose religions and, in addition, could also freely criticize governments. “A church that won’t tell you what they teach until you pay them?” That question echoed throughout the cyberspatial network, but church officials countered by saying their membership remained faithful. The church sued a major magazine, Time, because of a 1991 article that described the Scientology movement as a “global racket” and claiming that it had had questionable dealings on the Vancouver Stock Exchange. The $416,000,000 libel suit was dismissed by a Federal judge in 1996, and the writer of the article countersued, accusing the church of harassment and improperly obtaining his credit reports. In 1996, the southern state of Bavaria in Germany required all state employees to fill out a questionnaire detailing any tie to the Church of Scientology. The leaders of Germany’s sixteen regional states also debated whether to place the Scientologists under government surveillance. They charged that the self-help movement is a profit-making scheme and should be denied the tax breaks ordinarily given to churches and charities. French as well as German governments have questioned whether Scientology is a religion, claiming that it is a money-making enterprise because of the high fees it charges members. Although Hubbard died, Scientologists take comfort in the writings he left behind and believe he currently is doing research “in some other place.” Annual birthday parties are held in his honor. (See entries for L. Ron Hubbard as well as for Science and Non-Science.) {CE; New York, 29 July 1996 and 13 February 1998
Scobie, Richard S. (20th Century) For twenty-seven years, Scobie was executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a humanitarian group that engages in social action, education, and service as well as supports the development of local democratic institutions and leadership in Africa, the Caribbean, Central America, India, and the Philippines. Scobie retired in 1998, saying that
[T]he bipolar balance of terror has given way to the chaos of ethnic, religious, and racial warfare in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Globally, the gap between rich and poor, north and south, is growing with savage implications for the ever more vulnerable majorities. The marginalizations of indigenous people in Mexico, Burma, and South Dakota, the marketing of women in Thailand, India, and the streets of Los Angeles, and the disenfranchisement of poor mothers and children by structural adjustment in the Third World and welfare reform in the United States all ensure that UUSC will continue to be needed, and busy.
Scopes, John T(homas) (20th Century) Scopes wrote Center of the Storm: Memoirs of John T. Scopes (1966). He had been a biology teacher who was tried in 1925 for teaching Darwinism in a Dayton, Tennessee, public school. Clarence Darrow was one of his attorneys while William Jennings Bryan aided the state prosecutor. On the first day of the trial when Judge John T. Raulston bowed his head and began to pray, Darrow objected to the prayer but was overruled. Darrow also objected to a sign proclaiming, “Read Your Bible,” and it was removed. During the trial, Bryan admitted that he knew nothing of ancient civilization or other religions. In what became known as the “Monkey Trial,” the jury, one member of which was illiterate, found Scopes guilty, for the defense had never denied that Scopes had taught the doctrine of evolution. Also, the trial was lost partly because of the defense, which refused to plead any of the technical defenses available, fearing an acquittal on a technical rather than a constitutional basis. Scopes was fined $100. Later, however, he was released by the state supreme court on a technicality. Although the case tended to discourage enactment of similar legislation in other states, the law was not repealed until 1967. {CE; GS; PA; TYD}
Scot, Reginald (1584–1599) Scot was an English rationalist, author of The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), the first English work to question the existence of witches. King James I had the book burned, but it was republished in 1886. {BDF}
Scott, Amy (19th Century) Scott was the first recorded African American to join a Universalist church, the one in Philadelphia.
Scott, Bill (20th Century) Scott is Vice President (programming) of Free Inquirers of Northeastern Ohio. {FINO, 1 Jan 1998}
Scott, Clinton Lee (Born 1890) Scott, a Universalist minister at St. Petersburg, Florida, signed Humanist Manifesto I as well as Humanist Manifesto II. He wrote The Universalist Church of America: A Short History (1957). Of the first manifesto, Scott said it probably represents as well as any one statement could a cross section of the thought of the number of persons included,” adding that “One of the primary virtues of a Humanist is his intellectual modesty. Whether the universe is ‘self-existing’ or ‘created,’ and whether or not there is a cosmic end beyond the fulfillment of man’s life here and now are matters about which even a Theist can make but a poor guess. However, I like the positive character of the statement and especially the recognition of the economic factors.” {EW; HM1; HM2; HNS; U}
Scott, Ernest (1967–1939) Scott, who married Mabel Besant, daughter of the militant feminist Annie Besant, changed his name on Mabel’s insistence to Besant-Scott. The two moved to Australia, where he became a reporter for The Herald in Melbourne. During Annie Besant’s 1894 lecture tour of Australia, they assisted in the establishment of the Australasian section of the Theosophical Society. Ernest edited the Australia Theosophist, but his wife converted to Roman Catholicism and the marriage broke up. In 1913 he was invited to the Chair of History at the University of Melbourne, where he maintained his earlier freethought attitudes and where “religious belief was to him simply a delusion.” {SWW}
Scott, Eugenie C. (20th Century) Scott, an anthropologist, is executive director of the National Center for Science Education. She is a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranorma, which publishes The Skeptical Inquirer. In 1994 she addressed the 14th annual HUMCON conference sponsored in Long Beach, California, of the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County. She has gone on record in Skeptical Inquirer (July-August 1999) as being concerned about any “theistic science movement,” the growth of which would be detrimental to pure science. Polls, she further laments, “show that almost half of Americans deny that evolution occurred. About 40 percent think that evolution occurred, and was guided by God, and an additional 10 percent or so agree that evolution occurred, but deny any role for God.”
Scott, George Campbell (1927– ) Scott, an actor and director who in 1971 refused an Oscar for his performance in the film, “Patton,” but accepted a 1971 Emmy Award for “The Price,” was asked by CNN’s Larry King if he believed in life after death. Scott replied in the negative but was not asked if he also was a non-theist.
Scott, Harold (20th Century) A Unitarian minister, Scott was a contributing editor to The Humanist in the 1950s. {HNS}
Scott, Peter (20th Century) Scott in Britain is active with the Berkshire Humanists.
Scott, Richard (20th Century) Scott’s A Game of Chess (1954) refutes the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. {FUS}
Scott, Robert H. (20th Century) Scott is author of “An Atheist Speaks.” He wrote a critical survey in 1949 of the Federal Communications Commission’s decision on atheistic religious programs.
Scott, Thomas (1808–1878) Scott was an English scholar who traveled widely, lived with Indians, and was a page to Charles X of France. Having investigated Christianity, he later devoted himself to freethought propaganda by sending scholarly pamphlets among the clergy and cultured classes. From 1862 to 1877 he issued from Mount Pleasant, Ramsgate, over a hundred different pamphlets and challenged the Christian Evidence Society to debate his freethought viewpoints. With Sir G. W. Cox, he wrote The English Life of Jesus (1871). Scott also wrote A Farewell Address (c. 1875). {BDF; FUK; RAT; RE; TRI}
SCOTTISH HUMANISM In the 1960s, an active Humanist group at Glasgow University included Bryon and Diana Mann, John Milburn, Anna McLaren, Jessie Brooks, Jim McCurdie, and Floris Greenlaw. The United Kingdom Christian Handbook 1992–1993 contains statistics compiled by Fergus Watt concerning the incidence of religious non-belief in Scotland. He estimated a total of 3.2 million adult believers over fifteen years of age, of whom 2,900,000 are Trinitarians and 300,000 are non-Trinitarian or “other.” From 1985 to 1990, Watt found a decline in membership of 15% among Roman Catholics, 8% among Presbyterians, 4% among both Methodists and Baptists, and 3% among Anglicans. However, Pentecostals made a 39% increase and Afro-Caribbeans increased 67% (although they had but 385 members as of 1990). Watt estimates that non-believers in Scotland number around 500,000. Scottish humanist contacts include the following:
Alloa: Charles McGill, 33 Balfour St., Alloa, FK10 1RU Angus: Bob Watson, Fairfield Mains, Arbroath Angus, DD11 3RX Banff/Moray: Geoff Armitage, Norheim, Church St., Dufftown, Banffshire Dumfries and Galloway: Charles Douglas, Midpark, Balmaclellan, Castle Douglas, Galloway DG7 3PX Dundee: John Duncan, 10 Barnes Ave., Dundee East Neuk of Fife: Sandy Edwards, 11A Strathkinness High Road, St. Andrews KY 16 9UA Gourock: J. C. Johnston, 7 McPherson Drive, Gourock, PA19 1LJ Mid-Fife: Campbell Brown, Croft Cottage, Croft Road, Markinch KY 7 6EQ Lochaber: Hector M. Rogers, Tigh Na Car Ruadh, Invergarry, Invernesshire Mid-Borders: Fergus Watt, Plesandis, Main St., Denholm, Roxburghshire TD 9 8NU North Ayshire: Robin Wood, 37 Inchmurrin Drive, Kilmarnock KA 3 2JD Orkney: Eric Stockon, West Cottage, Sanday Orkney KW17 0HB South Ayshire: John Watson, Park Farm, Turnberry, Ayrshire KA26 9ND
Scottish humanist groups include the following:
• Humanist Scotland is at <ahenness@aol.com>. • Humanist Society of Scotland: George Rodger, 17 Howburn Place, Aberdeen AB11 6XT, United Kingdom (01224) 573034. Their newsletter is edited by Alex Scott, 51 Inveroran Drive, Glasgow G61 2PJ. Their secretary is Alan Henness, 138 Lumley Street, Grangemouth FK38BL On the Web: <http://visitweb.com/hss>. • HSS Aberdeen Group: Rosalind Cheyne, 9 Westfield Terrace, Aberdeen (01224) 635675. • HSS Edinburgh Group: Mrs. Jean Llewellyn, 2 Saville Terrace, Edinburgh EH 9 3AD (0131) 667 8389. Steuart Campbell is on the contact. <explicit@cix.co.uk> • HSS Glasgow Group: Alan Henness, 138 Lumley St., Grangemouth FK3 8BL (01324) 485152.
Scotland has four Unitarian congregations. The oldest, in Edinburgh, was started in the 1770s as a “congregation of Universalist dissenters,” and it adopted the Unitarian label around 1815. Its one hundred members include agnostic humanists as well as liberal Christians. Glasgow, Dundee, and Aberdeen each have from fifty to seventy members. According to John Clifford, Dundee is largely chrstocentric in its worship, Glasgow and Aberdeen much less so. The four comprise the Scottish Unitarian Association.
(See entries for Humanism in Scotland,
Humanist Society of Scotland, and Humanist Society of Scotland, Glasgow Group.) {Glasgow Group Newsletter, September 1997}
SCOTTISH HUMANIST PUBLICATIONS Scottish Humanist was published by the Scottish Humanist Council, c/o Robin Wood, at 37 Inchmurrin Drive, Kilmarnock, Scotland. Humanism Scotland, edited by Jane Fox, is the official organ of the Humanist Society of Scotland at 11A Strathkinness High Road, St. Andrews, KY16 9UA, United Kingdom. E-mail: <Ahenness@aol.com>. {FD}
SCOTTISH UNITARIANS
On the Web: <http://www.ednet.co.uk/~hill> and <http://www.unitarian.org.uk/>.
Scotus, John Duns: See entry for Aureol.
Scrase, Leslie (20th Century) Scrase is the editor and publisher of The Humanist Theme and author of Coping with Death, which complements the British Humanist Association’s Funerals Without God. His The Sunlight Glances Through Poems (1996) includes wry humor, reaction to public events, and a humanistic philosophy. In Some Ancestors of Humanism (1997), Scrase found significant aspects of humanism in Jainism, in Buddhism, in the ancient Chinese religions and teachings of Confucius, and the Ancient Greeks. Although none can specifically be termed “humanism,” he notes, “to come anywhere near to modern humanism, all these strands are needed.”
Scribe, Augustin Eugène (1791–1861) Scribe’s first play, Le Prétender sans le savoir (1810) was a failure and was followed by a dozen other failures. But in 1815 his Une Nuit de la Garde Nationale inaugurated a success for the French playwright. He wrote one hundred and fifty plays for one theatre; his works fill seventy-six volumes (1874–1885). Scribe was admitted to the French Academy in 1836. He avoided politics and controversy, and he had no religious membership. His work, however, contained liberal religious ideas. {CE; RAT}
Scriven, Michael: See entry for Atheistic Humanism.
SCRUPULOSITY William Van Ornum, a professor of clinical psychology at the Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, defines scrupulosity as a disorder that shows itself through obsessive-compulsive worship and irrational religious belief. “Even though it’s about faith, scrupulosity is a terrible, terrible disease,” he has written in A Thousand Frightening Fantasies: Understanding and Healing Scrupulosity and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (1998). He cites examples: a woman with scrupulosity sits through three or four Roman Catholic Masses before she believes the priest said the final prayer the right way; an elderly woman fears she has sinned by giving germs to others after she has used a toilet; a computer programmer stays late at work daily as restitution because she feels she has not given 100% to her employer. Van Ornum has stated that “Martin Luther had it awful. He couldn’t say Mass. If he said one word wrong, he had to say the whole Mass over again.” Commenting on the subject, the Rev. Thomas Santa in a Scrupulosity Anonymous Newsletter mailed from Liguori, Mississippi, wrote, “Scrupulosity at its basis is not a religious disorder. It’s an obsessive-compulsive disorder. But therapists have a tendency to jump to the conclusion that someone with religious problems is screwed up because of their religion and not because of a disorder.” The newsletter is mailed to more than 13,000 subscribers. {Associated Press, 22 February 1998}
SCYLLA In Greek mythology Scylla was the female sea monster who devoured sailors. The idiom, “to be between Scylla and Charybdis,“ means that by avoiding one danger it is possible to be exposed to yet another danger. Charybdis was a ship-devouring sea monster who resided just opposite Scylla’s cave. Scylla betrayed her father to his enemy Minos in order to seek Minos’s love, but he then scorned her. {CE}
SCYTHIA An ancient region from the Danube to the borders of China, Scythia was occupied by warlike mounted nomads who came from Russia in the 1st millennium B.C.E. Early Scythians believed they sprang from a union of the Greek hero Heracles with a sexually aggressive snake-woman in a Scythian cave. Before the 9th century B.C.E., they formed a kingdom in the East Crimea, and during the 7th century B.C.E. they invaded Mesopotamia, Syria, and the Balkans. Thereafter, they survived attacks by Darius I of Persia (512 B.C.E.) and Alexander the Great (c. 325 B.C.E.), but after 300 B.C.E. they were driven back to South Russia and were displaced there in the 2nd or 1st century B.C.E. by a related group, the Sarmatians. {CE; Jasper Griffin, “Anxieties of Influence,” The New York Review of Books, 20 June 1996}
Sczesny, Gerhard (20th Century)
A German, Sczesny addressed the Third International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Oslo (1962).
Sczesnoczkawasm, Jun (20th Century) Sczesnoczkawasm is a pseudonym for an ex-English department chairman who taught at Bentley School in New York City and at New Canaan High School in Connecticut. A rationalist of dubious parentage, Sczesnoczkawasm is the life companion of Allen Windsor. Sczesnoczkawasm, once on the staff of the Hvmanist Book Clvb [sic], was designated as the individual “in charge of (unspecified) relations with the public.” “The bad thing about having my name,” Sczesnoczkawasm once wrote, “is that no one can figure out my gender, religion, or nationality. The good thing is that no one can figure out my gender, religion, or nationality.” (See entry for Hvmanist Book Clvb and Allen Windsor.)
SEA OF FAITH Sea of Faith is a network of those who, while remaining within the Christian churches, hold broadly humanist ideas. David Boulton, who edits a magazine of the same name, finds that sea-of-faith humanists have much in common with others in the humanist movement. {David Boulton, New Humanist, November 1997}
Seabolt, Rachel: See entry for Rachel Seabolt Miller.
Seabrook, Gabriel (20th Century) Seabrook, an anthropologist and author, is a secular humanist.
Seaburg, Hugh F. (20th Century) In 1933 for his M.A. thesis at the University of Iowa, Seaburg wrote on the subject of Robert G. Ingersoll’s speeches. {GS}
Séailles, Gabriel (1852–1906) Séailles taught philosophy and was dean of the philosophical faculty at the Sorbonne. Apart from rationalist passages in his Ernest Renan (1895) and Les affirmations de la conscience moderne (1903), he wrote a letter which was read at the International Congress of Freethinkers at Rome in 1904. In it he said, “The human mind can conceive of no ideas more extravagant or ridiculous than it [the Church] has invented to fool and cheat the ignorant multitude and to awe and suppress the intellectual minority.” {RAT; RE}
Searle, John R. (1932– ) Searle has been described as being one of the most important of the contemporary secular philosophers. A professor of mind and language at the University of California at Berkeley, Searle wrote The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) and Mind, Language, and Society (1999). According to Nicholas G. Fotion of Emory University, “The mind, for Searle, is intentional (à la Brentano) in that perceptions, memories, imaginings, desires, and many other mental states take objects (e.g., I see the car and I remember Aunt Fanny).” Fotion adds, “For Searle, although the mind emerges from the body, it possesses an ineliminable subjective character with which materialistic accounts cannot adequately deal. In religion to this claim, he uses his famous Chinese room argument to show that even though a ‘system’ (a computer and a person) inside a room can manipulate Chinese symbols, it does not necessarily operate on the level of meaning. To do that, mental (intentional) concepts need to be introduced into the system.” In “Consciousness and the Philosophers” (The New York Review of Books, 6 March 1997), Searle attacks functionalism and David J. Chalmers’s The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. He is a contributing editor for Philo. (See entry for Richard C. Vitzthum.) {OCP}
Sears, Catherine (20th Century) Sears, from 1971 to 1973, edited Progressive World. {GS}
Sears, John W. (20th Century)
Sears, a clinical psychologist, signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Seaton-Tiedemann, (Mrs.) M. L. (1858–1948) In Freethinker (16 June 1918), Seaton-Tiedemann, the founder of the Divorce Law Reform Union in England, wrote, “Every measure for the true welfare of the community has been opposed by the Churches.” {TRI}
Seaver, Horace Holley (1810–1889) The Investigator was a radical periodical founded by Abner Kneeland, and some of its incisive articles had been written by “Z.” This proved to be Seaver’s signature, and when Seaver became editor he continued the publication for fifty years, until it merged with the Truth Seeker. Seaver was a zealous member of the “producing classes,” and in his magazine he pointed out the connection between skepticism and social reform. He wrote Occasional Thoughts of Horace Seaver From Fifty Years of Freethinking (1888), which illustrated his atheism and materialism. With Josiah P. Mendum, he helped in the erection of the Paine Memorial Hall. Seaver’s funeral oration was delivered by Colonel Robert Ingersoll. {BDF; EU, Roderick S. French; FUS; PUT; RAT}
Sebald, Hans (20th Century) Sebald, professor emeritus of sociology at Arizona State University in Tempe, has documented in Free Inquiry (Winter 1993) that in contemporary Germany “secular humanism has a hard time to oppose a church structure that has extended its tentacles into every nook and niche of society.” Germany, he finds, “is an anomaly among modern nation states insofar as the government functions as the church’s tax collector,” passing the collection plate not only for Catholics and Protestants but also nonbelievers may support humanist or freethinker organizations. Such an agreement was part of the 1933 Concordat, the treaty between the Third Reich and the Vatican, “personally signed by the pope and Hitler (the latter himself a Catholic who was never excommunicated) and in fact the first significant international treaty Hitler signed upon coming into power.” Such an arrangement, Sebald notes, “so convenient and lucrative for the church, contributed to the minimal opposition shown by German Catholicism against the Nazi state—after all, who wants to have a falling out with an agent who so reliably fills one’s treasury?” He is author of Witch-Children From Salem Witch-Hunts to Modern Courtrooms (1995). {Free Inquiry, Spring 1997}
Sebastian, St. (Died 287) A Roman martyr, Sebastian is known as the homosexual’s saint. Shakespeare, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde (who adopted the pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth” on his release from prison), Claude Debussy, Jean Cocteau, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Mishima, Thomas Mann (whose Aschenbach in Death in Venice worships Sebastian as a “new type of hero”), and others have shown an interest in the man. {GL}
Sebe, Ferencz (20th Century) Sebe, who is Unitarian district minister for northwestern Romania, is an expert about the origins of Unitarianism in 16th century Transylvania. (Note that the ancient province of Dacia, now Romania, was Romanized in the 2 and 3rd centuries and was overrun successively by the Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Magyars, and Mongols.)
Sebille, Adolphe (19th Century) Sebille was a French writer who, under the pseudonym of “Dr. Fabricus,” published God, Man, and His Latter End (1868), which was a medico-psychological study. He also wrote Letters from a Materialist to Monsignor Dupanloup (1868–1869). {BDF}
Sechenov, Ivan (19th Century)
Sechenov (or Setchenoff) was a Russian philosopher who, in 1863, published Psychological Studies, explaining the mind by its physiology. {BDF}
Seckel, Al (20th Century) A humanist and member of the Bertrand Russell Society, Seckel is author of Bertrand Russell on Ethics, Sex, and Marriage (1987) and Bertrand Russell on God and Religion (1991).
SECRET INSTRUCTIONS OF THE JESUITS: See entry for Hoaxes, Religious.
SECRETS • When anyone says to me, “Can you keep a secret?” I say, “Why should I, if you can’t? –Gore Vidal Playboy, December 1998
SECRETARIAT FOR GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT The Secretariat for Growth and Development works to support the creation and growth of new humanist groups. It is located at the Center for Inquiry International in Amherst, New York, and is supported by the Council for Secular Humanism and Prometheus Books. Grants have been given to humanist groups in Bangladesh, China, Costa Rica, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru from the Humanist Network Development Program. {International Humanist News, October 1998}
SECRETS • There are two secrets to success: 1. Never tell everything you know.
SECT A sect is a religious group, often one which has separated from a larger denomination. The word often implies disapproval, as exemplified by the observation in the 1830s of the astute French visitor, Alexis de Tocqueville: “From time to time strange sects arise that endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness. Religious insanity is very common in the United States.”
SECT OF ZARATHUSTRA A freethought group, The Sect of Zarathustra is at 30 Stockton Street, Bloomfield, New Jersey 07003.
SECULAR ALTERNATIVE The Atheist League of Washington (POB 1785, Seattle, Washington 98111), published Secular Alternative. {FD}
SECULAR EDUCATION LEAGUE The Secular Education League was formed in 1907 for the purpose of removing all teaching of religion from all state-funded schools in England. “After nearly a century,” laments Nicolas Walter, “its work still needs to be done.” {New Humanist, February 1996}
SECULAR FAMILY NETWORK Family Matters, edited by Jan Loeb Eisler, began with a winter 1997 issue and provided secular humanist resources and viewpoints for parents, children, and families. E-mail: <hasp@gte.net>
SECULAR HUMANISM, A SURVEY OF Variously called scientific, naturalistic, ethical, or even religious, the movement of secular humanism has succeeded in making an impact upon philosophic as well as religious thought. Although secular humanism draws its supporters from a variety of viewpoints, most secular humanists in order to attain the good life discard all dependence upon anything outside man himself. They are content with life’s exciting uncertainties. Some like John Dewey have emphasized instrumentalism; some like Curtis W. Reese have incorporated Unitarianism; some like Corliss Lamont stress philosophic naturalism; some like Nobel Laureates Francis Crick, Murray Gell-Mann, Herbert Hauptman, André Lwoff, and Steven Weinberg emphasize the scientific method; some like Carl Sagan join astronomy with humanism; Paul Kurtz has coined eupraxophy, or “good practice and wisdom,” to describe the movement’s being ethical, philosophical, and scientific. In 1899, Charles Watts founded the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) in Great Britain, a group of agnostics whose goal was to “circulate Rationalist publications.” They 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 assumption of authority.” The RPA has no doctrinal or philosophical tests, but its members usually reject a belief in God and immortality, are both secular and humanistic in their outlooks, and prefer the rationalist label. In 1928 Jai Prithvi Bahadur Singh of Nepal founded a Humanistic Club, and in the following year traveled throughout Europe in order to encourage the setting up of other such club which, following the aftermath of World War I, he felt were needed to inspire intellectuals. Europe at the time had sunk into bankruptcy, and the resultant internal chaos had, he felt, plunged the intellectuals of the world into a state of shock. To resolve this “state of nightmare,” he proposed turning to humanistic principles and values that could improve the governance of the relationship between men and nations. He included among his humanistic tenets the following:
• Instead of entering into unhealthy competition and dogmatic contradictions, humans should direct their behavior toward a path of reconciliation so that security, privileges, and prosperity can be insured through mutual understanding. • The general public needs an organization through which it can interact, exchange ideas, and solve common problems. • If the doctrine of self-security is based on humanitarian grounds, the path leading to a peaceful society will automatically open. • Whatever is done to destroy human civilization is, lamentably, a symbol of animalistic instinct. • Humanism is a philosophic outlook which human beings, creatures who are distinct from other animals, choose to observe as a duty and not as a religion.
Singh’s lecturing led to conferences in Switzerland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland, Russia, France, Iceland, Italy, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and England, following which several humanistic clubs were founded. In the United States, the secular movement of humanism commenced just before the 1920s and greatly expanded in the 1930s when the philosophy of naturalistic humanism was nurtured in Unitarian societies in the Midwest, West, and East. Edwin H. Wilson in 1930 wrote in The New Humanist that adult education in England and the United States was evidence that what is now called secular humanism was beyond authoritarian church control. Most Ethical Culture and some Universalist societies also helped publicize the beliefs. By 1933 the movement had become sufficiently popular and had gained enough adherents that a group of thirty-four philosophers and scholars formulated a “clarion call” for its wholehearted support. The document they agreed upon is known as A Humanist Manifesto, and it was signed, along with others, by Reese and Dewey. Over half the signers were or have been ministers of Unitarian, Universalist, and Ethical Culture societies. The manifesto appeared in the May-June, 1933, issue of New Humanist with a note by Raymond B. Bragg, editor, stating that it was a product of many minds, was designed to represent a developing point of view, and was not in any sense a new creed. Had the signatories written individual statements of belief, he added, they undoubtedly would have stated the propositions differently. He continued, “The importance of the document is that more than thirty men have come to general agreement on matters of final concern and that these men are undoubtedly representative of a larger number who are forging a new philosophy out of the materials of the modern world.” Signers of Humanist Manifesto I included literary people such as Llewellyn Jones and Robert Morss Lovett. There were educators such as W. Frank Swift and V. T. Thayer. Journalists included Harry Elmer Barnes, William Floyd, and Albert C. Dieffenbach. An imposing group of philosophers was represented: John Dewey, Edwin A. Burtt, John Herman Randall Jr., Oliver L. Reiser, and Roy Wood Sellars. There were economists such as F. H. Hankins and scientists such as A. J. Carlson, Maynard Shipley, and Bernard Fantus. There was Rabbi Jacob J. Weinstein and such Unitarian and Universalist ministers as J.A.C. Fagginger Auer, E. Burdette Backus, Ernest Caldecott, A. Eustace Haydon, Harold P. Marley, R. Lester Mondale, Charles Francis Potter, and Edwin H. Wilson. Wilson, who was the guiding force behind the formulation of the manifesto and who became a particularly effective organizer for the American Humanist Association, edited its journal, The Humanist, and as a Unitarian minister was helpful in bringing together the religious as well as the naturalistic humanists. Four years prior to the manifesto, Charles Francis Potter had founded a Humanist Society in New York City, the first “church” of its kind in the nation. It served as a precedent for the formation of other such organizations, which now are found nationwide. Potter replaced sermons by lectures. His society had no paid clergy, no creed, no prayers, and no baptisms. Wedding ceremonies were unique in that the bride and groom, rather than repeating a vow devised by someone else, composed their own. As to God and immortality, Potter and his group were agnostic. The purpose of the society was to provide a place where mature minds could meet and discuss an adult American religion, one “devoid of fairy-tales” about angels, demons, devils, or gods; one based upon a faith in man and a belief in man’s capabilities for improving individuals and society as a whole by the slow, steady improvement of human personality. Potter’s ultimate hope was that his church with its philosophy of humanism and its utilization of common sense and the scientific method would serve as a model for others, and that eventually all or at least the majority of churches would merge into a humanistic, not a supernaturalistic, union which could be imitated in other nations. John Dewey has been considered the unofficial dean of the movement, although he preferred the phrase “humanistic naturalism” to “naturalistic humanism.” His Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920) indicted metaphysics as “the product of an aristocratic and leisure class, the expression of a desire to escape into another world instead of facing the responsibilities of the here and now.” Other early leaders whose books supported and outlined the meaning and purpose of this secular movement of humanism included James H. Leuba, a psychologist; Max C. Otto, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin; Julian S. Huxley; Bertrand Russell; and H. G. Wells. George Santayana’s Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931) served as a powerful attack on the neo-humanism of Babbitt and Moore—his book strongly supported naturalism. He wrote that “the principle of morality is naturalistic. Call it humanism or not, only a morality frankly relative to man’s nature is worthy of man, being at once vital and rational, martial and generous; whereas absolutism smells of fustiness and faggots [burned sticks].” His The Life of Reason (1905–1906) explained that religion is not something to be taken as being literally true; it is merely symbolic and thoroughly human, it aims at the “life of reason,” but it largely fails in attaining it. As for the gods, fear created them; but this fear and the mythology that it produces only half deceives the thinker. What is needed, he insisted, is a paganizing of Christianity. Walter Lippmann provided further support. In his A Preface to Morals (1931), he described how the “acids of modernity” have eaten away traditional theology with its beliefs in a personal God, Original Sin, and the resurrection of Jesus. Stating that there is nothing absolute in the morals as laid down by traditional theology, he asserted that the new naturalism which based its faith on reason considered morals as being common sense observations, that they are arrived at objectively rather than subjectively, and that they naturally conclude that love is good and hate is bad, that beauty is a quality above ugliness, and that pleasure is above pain. Irwin Edman in his Four Ways of Philosophy (1937) wrote that the naturalist admits some religious impulse in man but “the supernaturalist insists that this impulse which nature generates cannot be satisfied by nature save as seen in a supernatural context. To which the naturalist retorts that nature generates some impulses, possibly, which cannot be satisfied, as a man may be hungry without proving thereby that food is in his neighborhood or his reach.” To the growing number who wrote or spoke about naturalistic humanism, or joined the American Humanist Association, more and more new names appeared. Sherman D. Wakefield, husband of Robert Ingersoll’s granddaughter (Eva Ingersoll Wakefield), edited a monthly Progressive World, which was a more “folksy” journal than the American Humanist Association’s The Humanist. Other journals began. Free Inquiry was formed by Paul Kurtz to represent the secular humanism of the Council for Secular Humanism (formerly CODESH, the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism), which now represents the largest number of secular humanists in the United States. At least thirteen humanist journals are published in The Netherlands, where an estimated 25% of the population are secular humanists. There is the Australian Humanist; the French Espace de Libertés; the English Ethical Record; the English Family of Humanists which publishes Sunrise Journal for youth up to 9 years and Starwalker for youth 9 to 15 years of age; the English Freethinker; the English Gay and Lesbian Humanist, a quarterly; the Swedish bi-monthly Human-Etiska Förbundet; the Belgian Het Vrije Woord; the Norwegian Humanist; the German Der Humanist; The Humanist in Canada; the English Humanist News; the Indian Humanist Outlook; the Israeli Humanist Review; the American Journal of Humanism and Ethical Religion; the English New Humanist; the New Zealand Humanist; The Scottish Humanist; the Israeli Secular Humanistic Judaism; the Indian Radical Humanist; the Indian Secularist; the Finnish Vapaa Ajattelija (Free Thinker); Bengali Monthly; the Telugu humanist monthly for Women’s Liberation Stree Swetcha; and Misimi, a Telugu monthly of humanist ideas; to name but a few. In the 1980s, humanist groups were formed not only in Central America but also in South America. The apparent success of secular humanism, however, has not been matched by its membership rolls. Although an estimated 25% in The Netherlands are humanists, fewer than 150,000 Americans subscribe to the various humanist publications. Philosophy professors as a group are not active members, choosing to avoid being “labeled.” But the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and its journal, International Humanist News (47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP, England) continue making valiant efforts to publicize the movement, believing that it represents the world’s “hope” in the 21st century. Entirely in disagreement are religious fundamentalists. In 1993, Merriam-Webster’s Tenth New Collegiate Dictionary finally included the following:
secular humanism n (1933) : HUMANISM 3; esp : humanistic philosophy viewed as a nontheistic religion antagonistic to traditional religion secular humanist n or adj
In 1992, Houghton Mifflin’s American Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, had the following:
secular humanism n. 1. An outlook or a philosophy that advocates human rather than religious values.
2. Secularism.
No major reference book cites humanistic naturalism, the term used by Kenneth L. Patton, John Dewey, James Gutmann, and the present author. In 1996, Presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan was quoted at a rally of supporters in Des Moines, Iowa: “We see a cultural war going on for the soul of America. We see the God of the Bible expelled from our public schools and replaced by all the false gods of secular humanism. Easter is out, but we can celebrate Earth Day. We can now worship dirt.” (The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that secular humanism is not a religion. See the entries for Hugo L. Black and for teratology.) {EW; RE}
SECULAR HUMANIST ASSOCIATION OF ISRAEL An associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union is the Secular Humanist Association of Israel, PO Box 18200, Tel Aviv-Jaffa 61 280, Israel.
SECULAR HUMANIST BULLETIN The Secular Humanist Bulletin (Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226; telephone (716) 636-7571) is an associate members’ quarterly newsletter of the Council for Secular Humanism. It is edited by Tom Flynn and Tim Madigan. Contributing editors are Brent Bailey and Farrell Till. Flynn includes a distinctive column, “Secular Humorist.” His e-mail: <SHB-Editor@secularhumanism.org>.
SECULAR HUMANIST SOCIETY OF NEW YORK The Secular Humanist Society of New York (SHSNY) was founded by Warren Allen Smith, who in 1990 entitled its newsletter Pique. Present at the initial meeting were Tim Madigan and Paul Kurtz of the Council for Secular Humanism. The meeting was held in Variety Recording Studio, 130 West 42nd Street, its first members being the studio’s co-owners Fernando Vargas and Smith. Honorary members secured by Smith were Isaac Asimov, Paul Cadmus, Arthur C. Clarke, Paul Edwards, Albert Ellis, Sidney Hook, Ring Lardner Jr., and Allen Walker Read. Pique he chose as its newsletter’s title in order to signal that as editor he wished to be an activist and stir up interest about the group’s objectives. Dennis Middlebrooks succeeded him as presiding officer. Although Smith left the group, the newsletter continues and the group’s board of directors in 1999 is John Arents, Conrad Claborne (Vice President), Artur Harris, Hugh Rance (President), George Rowell, and Roger Sorrentino.
SECULAR HUMANISTIC JUDAISM Secular Humanistic Judaism, a journal written in English, is at 8 Itamar Ben Avi St, PO Box 4512, Jerusalem 91044, Israel.
SECULAR HUMANISTIC MUSIC: See entry for Andrew Charles.
SECULAR JEWS A number of Jews say they are agnostic or atheistic but are “secular Jews,” by which they identify with the Jewish religion of their ancestors but disbelieve in any supernatural deity. Journalist Nat Henthoff and biologist Sheldon F. Gottlieb both call themselves atheistic Jews. “I define myself,” Henthoff has explained when informed that it appears to be illogical to call oneself an atheistic Jew or an atheistic Catholic, “and it ain’t nobody’s business but my own.” Meanwhile, others call themselves non-Jewish Jews, which appears to many to be analogous to calling oneself a non-Christian Christian, a non-Spanish Spaniard, or a non-African African. However, if one’s mother is Jewish, one is automatically Jewish according to strict Jewish theologians. Meanwhile, if one’s mother is a Congregationalist or an atheist, one is not automatically a Congregationalist. A 1969 reward of $19.69 offered by Jun Sczesnoczkawasm to any baby who, within two weeks of birth, verified that he or she was born a member of any religious group had—as of the end of 1999—gone uncollected.
SECULAR JOURNAL The stated purpose of Secular Journal, an online newsletter, is
to provide a journal in conjunction with a communications network on a bilingual English/German basis (to be expanded into multilingual services as more cooperators offer their support and expertise). American English is being used since most continental European countries use it as a second language. The German language parts are accepted in the styles currently common in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Articles and essays reproduced here originate from various atheist, secular, and secular humanist publications. Original individual submissions are welcome, as long as they concern themselves with those, or closely associated subjects. No hate mail or pornography (including pictures) will be accepted or distributed, but sarcasm is welcome, within the limits of common decency.
SECULAR NATION Secular Nation, the International Atheist Alliance Magazine was edited by Howard Kreisner. Marie A. Castle and Anna Voss had been counselors. In 1996, however, it merged with The Freethought Observer at the same address and in 1997 Castle became its editor. Its address: Box 6261, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. E-mail: <mac@mtn.org>.
SECULAR ORGANIZATIONS FOR SOBRIETY Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), a Council for Secular Humanism support group for recovering substance abusers, has more than one thousand local groups throughout North America and several in Britain. It is located at 5521 Grosvenor Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90066. For details about the Central London Group, write 42A Marler Road, London SE23 2AD or telephone (0181 291 5572); or 28 Newgate Close, St. Albans AL 4 9JE (0172 7851266). (See entries for James Christopher, Rationalist Recovery Organizations for Self Help, and SOS.)
SECULAR WEB The Secular Web is a product of Internet Infidels, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to providing information over the Internet about the existence of a god, church/state separation, the possibility of life after death, mysticism and the paranormal, and the interface between science and religion. Included are thousands of historical and contemporary articles. For example, one can find Joseph Mc Cabe’s Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers, can search for individual names or listings, and then can print the material. It is the largest site on the Web that is dedicated to the promotion of secular viewpoints, including agnosticism, atheism, freethought, humanism, and rationalism. On the Web: <http://www.infidels.org/>.
SECULARISM As formulated in 1841 by G. J. Holyoake (1817–1906), secularism is a variety of utilitarian social ethic which seeks human improvement without reference to religion. It does so without reference to religion and turns exclusively to human reason, science, and social organization to solve problems. It appeals partly as a protest against the dominance and control of human life by ecclesiastical bodies, or by religious faith and dogma which had its new birth at the Renaissance, according to Robert Worth Frank, who taught religion and ethics in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois. According to Frank, the word is used derogatively by religionists because it leads to a “pursuit of specialized interests without any sense of the unity of life and which has initiated a crisis in the religious and cultural life of modern man.” Holyoake, however, felt that “Secularist” had a positive meaning, one which indicated that the rejection of religion was accompanied by humanitarian feeling and endeavor. Thus, it was thought to be preferable to the words in current use: Atheist, Freethinker, Skeptic, Infidel. In 1852, a conference of twenty-two secular societies convened in Manchester, and many of the groups built Halls of Science or schools. In 1858 Charles Bradlaugh succeeded Holyoake as president of the London Secular Society, and in 1866 he and Austin Holyoake founded the National Secular Society. Holyoake described his aims in the Origin and Nature of Secularism (1896). Other writers about the subject include Horace Kallen, author of Secularism is the Will of God (1954); and Edward Royle, author of Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (1980) and Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (1974). One of the most outspoken contemporary critics of “secularism” is Pope John Paul II, who often utters condemnations of secularist stands that differ from his own. “Resist secularism, free love, and the culture of death,” he warns, the last a term he uses instead of abortion. ER; EU, Gordon Stein; RE}
SECULARIST A bi-monthly in English of the Indian Secular Society, Secularist is at 15 Zapurza, Sahitya Sahawas, Bandra East, Bombay 400 051, India; <freedom@bom3.vsnl.net.in>.
Sedgmore, Brian (20th Century) Sedgmore, a Member of the United Kingdom Parliament, has expressed his secularism in radio broadcasts. He is an honorary associate of the National Secular society. {The Freethinker, February 1999}
Sedgwick, Catharine Maria (1789–1867) Sedgwick, a Unitarian, wrote fiction about the simple domestic virtues of the American home, which she considered the safeguard of the Republic. She depicted early 19th century social customs in such of her romantic novels as A New-England Tale (1822) and Redwood (1824). The romantic adventures of Colonial settlers who experienced Indian captivities and massacres were described in Hope Leslie, or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827). Sedgwick was active in the Unitarian Church and as a feminist, but she did not participate in radical reform movements. She and William Ellery Channing’s sister, Lucy Channing Russel, are credited with founding in 1819 All Souls Unitarian Church in New York City. {U} Sedgwick, Ellery (1872–1960) Sedgwick wrote Thomas Paine (1899). {GS}
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (20th Century) Sedgwick was raised in a traditional assimilated Jewish family. Her father was a scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and her mother was a high school English teacher. In 1975, after being graduated by Yale (“a very frigid place [in which] there wasn’t even feminism, let alone gay and lesbian studies”), she was hired by Hamilton College and began what she termed a study in “queer theory,” a new approach in literary analysis. Applying the analysis to Henry James’s short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” she found that ordinarily the work is read as a heterosexual love story about John Marcher, who cannot return the love of a woman and upon her death he realizes the extent of his life. But Sedgwick points out that in the final paragraphs, as Marcher hurls himself on the grave he looks up and sees a stranger, a man: “There was a kind of hunger in his look,” James wrote. Marcher was conscious of “the image of a scarred passion . . . something that profaned the air: and in the second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment looking after it, as it went, with envy.” Her interpretation is that the stranger is looking for a homosexual encounter in the cemetery, that the beast in the jungle is a “man’s desire for man—and the denial of that desire.” The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995 presented her with its Morton Dauwen Zabel Award:
Eve Sedgwick has turned a piercing yet affectionate poet’s eye on a vast body of English and American poetry and fiction that has famously secreted itself in layers of carapace and veiling—the world of high passion and passionate friendship, especially that large but half-mute department called the love of man for man. Her elaborate and quite astonishing discoveries constitute not merely a large addition to our understanding of great and lesser writers, they likewise stand as powerful statements in one of our century’s, our nation’s, last debates—the right, or denial, of adult human mind to choose its willing partner.
Sedgwick is married to Hal Sedgwick, a professor of visual perception at the City University of New York’s College of Optometry. In 1991 Sedgwick found she had breast cancer. To reporter Dinitia Smith in 1998 she said, “I have lived over a year with knowing I will probably die of this disease. And I have been interested in what it’s all going to be like.” A non-theist, she has studied Buddhism. “In Buddhism,” she added, “gender seems very ephemeral.” {Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, 17 January 1998; WAS conversation, 17 May 1995}
Seeger, Daniel Andrew (20th Century) A 1964 Federal Appeals Court in New York City ruled in Seeger’s favor after he objected to the U.S. Selective Service Act’s limitation of draft exemptions to those who have faith in a Supreme Being. In 1965 the Supreme Court upheld the Appeals Court by a slim margin. {CL}
Seeger, Pete (1919– ) Seeger is a noted folksinger and composer, a controversial activist known for using music to struggle against war, racism, poverty, and pollution. In the 1940s he organized the Almanac Singers, touring the nation with the group, then teamed with Woody Guthrie in writing labor and anti-Fascist songs. He once toured with Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, and he organized a group, the Weavers. Seeger takes pride in having been one of the first Yankee college students who fell in love with Southern folk music, performing in hundreds of concerts, completing many recordings and writings, and getting others interested in the idea of making their own music as well as reviving old music of many types. Among his songs are “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (1961); “If I Had a Hammer,” in collaboration with Lee Hayes; “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” in collaboration with the Weavers; and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” For a time, the various broadcasting networks blacklisted him, stating that his work was too controversial. When a member of the Community (Unitarian) Church of New York, Seeger wrote that “It is fine to think of Unitarian-Universalism as a world religion. Now, how about reaching out to sing more songs (in our services) that are not in English, like ‘De Colores’; ‘Nkosi Sikelele Africa’ (the South African national anthem), ‘Ragupati Ragavi’; etc.” His idea of the ideal church: “It would be like a water tower. I would put the congregation on a platform at the very top, where they could see all around, without walls. My church has always been the outdoors.” And of liturgy: “I am no longer leery of using the word ‘God,’ though I have my own definition. I particularly like what a French mystic said: ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.’ ” In 1994 President Clinton presented Seeger with an award for outstanding contributions to American culture. {World, November-December 1995, and July-August 1996}
Seeger, Pete (3 May 1919 - )
Seeger is a noted folksinger and composer, a controversial activist known for using music to struggle against war, racism, poverty, and pollution. In the 1940s he organized the Almanac Singers, touring the nation with the group, then teamed with Woody Guthrie in writing labor and anti-Fascist songs. He once toured with Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, and he organized a group, the Weavers.
Seeger takes pride in having been one of the first Yankee college students who fell in love with Southern folk music, performing in hundreds of concerts, completing many recordings and writings, and getting others interested in the idea of making their own music as well as reviving old music of many types. Among his songs are “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” (1961); “If I Had a Hammer,” in collaboration with Lee Hayes; “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” in collaboration with the Weavers; and “Turn, Turn, Turn.” For a time, the various broadcasting networks blacklisted him, stating that his work was too controversial. When he was a member of the Community (Unitarian) Church of New York, Seeger wrote that “It is fine to think of Unitarian-Universalism as a world religion. Now, how about reaching out to sing more songs (in our services) that are not in English, like ‘De Colores’; ‘Nkosi Sikelele Africa’ (the South African national anthem), ‘Ragupati Ragavi’; etc.” His idea of the ideal church: “It would be like a water tower. I would put the congregation on a platform at the very top, where they could see all around, without walls. My church has always been the outdoors.” And of liturgy: “I am no longer leery of using the word ‘God,’ though I have my own definition. I particularly like what a French mystic said: ‘The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me.’ ” In 1994 President Clinton presented Seeger with an award for outstanding contributions to American culture. {World, November-December 1995, and July-August 1996}
Seeley, John R. (20th Century)
Seeley in 1952 was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Seeley, John Robert (1834–1895) Seeley was an English historian and man of letters. In 1863 he was a professor of Latin in London University. In 1866 appeared his Ecce Homo, a survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ—it was published anonymously, and Lord Shaftesbury denounced it in unmeasured terms as “vomitted from the pit of hell.” In 1869, Seeley became professor of modern history at Cambridge. In 1882 he wrote Natural Religion. Prof. Seeley, a president of the Ethical Society, accepted God and immortality but not Christianity, which he regarded as “the original Ethical Society.” The Bible he regarded as “an ancient text-book.” {BDF; RAT; RE}
Sefton, William Henry [Baron Sefton of Garston] (1915– ) In 1989 Lord Sefton was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. In the House of Lords, he once moved an amendment to ensure that religious education should promote “an understanding of various religious beliefs and living beliefs such as humanist and secular points of view, but does not promote any particular religion or belief.” He defended such a proposal to protect the integrity of teachers, adding that he resented being told that “as a pagan I was responsible for the moral anarchy which is now so rampant and pernicious.” The House of Lords rejected his motion, 120 votes to 31. “To summarise why I have become a rationalist is a difficult task for one not educated in formal writing,” he wrote in New Humanist, “but I think it can be boiled down to a belief that a person should be honest and have the courage to speak out at all times. In all the debates on TV and radio, very rarely does one hear mention of the real villains in the piece.” For Lord Sefton, the main opposition to a peaceful and rewarding life here and now is superstitious religion. He, however, prefers Thomas Paine’s view: “I am a citizen of the world and my religion is to do good.” {New Humanist, November 1993)
Segarelli, Gherardo (13th Century) In the 1260s when there was an outbreak of Flagellants, a religious order of self-scourgers, Segarelli came forward as a new Christ. According to Robertson, he “had himself circumcised, swaddled, cradled, and suckled; and proceeded to found a new order of ‘Apostolicals,’ after the manner of a sect of the previous century, known by the same name, who professed to return to primitive simplicity and to chastity, and reproduced what they supposed to be the morals of the early Church, including the profession of ascetic cohabitation. Some of their missionaries got as far as Germany; but Segarelli was caught, imprisoned, reduced to the status of a bishop’s jester, and at length, after saving his life for a time by abjuration, burned at Parma, in the year 1300.” Two of his followers, Fra Dolcino and Margherita di Trank, set up an armed movement which held out in the southern Alps for two years, until the Apostolicals were reduced to cannibalism. But in 1307 when they were overpowered, Dolcino was forced to watch his beautiful companion Margherita burn to death before his eyes. Refusing to abjure, Segarelli was gradually tortured to death, uttering no cry. {JMR; JMRH}
Segond, Louis Auguste (19th Century) Segond was a French physician and positivist. In 1849, he wrote a plan of a positivist school to regenerate medicine. {BDF}
Seibel, George (20th Century) Seibel wrote The Religion of Shakespeare (1924). {GS}
Seidel, Anton (1850–1898) An eminent Hungarian conductor, Seidel after working in Europe came to the United States where in New York he conducted the American premiere of “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” (1876), “Triston und Isolde (1887), and the Ring cycle (1889). His wife was Austrian soprano Auguste Kraus. He was director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra from 1891 until his death. Seidel, an atheist, died of ptomaine poisoning. {H. Krebbiel, Anton Seidel (1898); H. Finck, Anton Seidel, A Memorial by His Friends (1899)}
Seidel, Martin (16th Century) Seidel was a Silesian deist who held that Jesus was not the predicted Messiah. He tried to propagate his opinion among the Polish Socinians, explaining in The Foundations of the Christian Religion that the Old and New Testaments are inconsistent. {BDF}
Seidel, Peter (20th Century) Seidel, an active member of the Cincinnati, Ohio, Free Inquiry Group, is author of Invisible Walls (1998). “Our failure to react to planet-imperiling circumstances,” he writes regarding the human exploitation of our natural surroundings, “does not lie in our not knowing what is wrong or not knowing what to do about it, but rather in our failure to take this knowledge seriously enough to act on it. We need to understand this failure and to do something about it.” An environmental architect and planner who studied with architect Mies van der Rohe, he has taught architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, University of Michigan, Miami University, and Central China University of Science and Technology.
Seiden, Rita (20th Century) At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985), Seiden of the United States addressed the group.
Seider, Rose (20th Century) In 1972 Seider was financial secretary of the Humanist Society of Greater New York.
Seidl, Anton (20th Century) Seidl followed Theodore Thomas, who died in 1905, as director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Hungarian by birth, he was rumored to be the illegitimate son of Franz Liszt. This, as well as the rumor he was an atheist and a freethinker, was to his advantage in public relations. “For an ordinary American citizen it might have been reprehensible,” wrote Howard Shanet in Philharmonic: A History of New York’s Orchestra (1975), “but for a Hungarian artist it seemed romantically in character. Besides, he had such personal fire that many who disagreed with him nevertheless admitted his fascination. Dvorak, who criticized him as a ‘wild rebel and an atheist,’ became his fast friend during his stay in New York.” Seidl, after leaving the Leipzig Conservatory in 1872, actually had lived in the household of Richard Wagner for a number of years and was his disciple.
Seigneuret, H. J. (19th Century) Seigneuret, a freethinker, wrote Moses Before the Court, or the Forgery of the Old Testament (c. 1880). {GS}
Seignobos, Charles (1854–1942) Seignobos, a French historian who taught at Paris University and the Sorbonne, wrote Histoire de la civilisation (1886) and Cours d’histoire (9 volumes, 1903–1906), in which his rationalist views appear. He was an Officer of the Legion of Honour and of Public Instruction. {RAT}
Seiple, David I. (20th Century) With Casey Haskins, Seiple edited Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism (1999).
Selassie, Haile: See entry for Ra.
Selden, John (1584–1654) An English scholar and jurist, Selden in Table-Talk (1689) wrote, “The clergy would have us believe them against our own reason, as the woman would have had her husband against his own eyes.” He also wrote, “Scrutamini scripturas [Let us examine the scriptures]: These two words have undone the world.” {TYD}
Seldes, George (Henry) (1890–1995) A muckraker and agnostic who wrote for The Nation, Seldes liked to expose official and unofficial censorship of the press. In 1939 he wrote The Catholic Crisis and in 1938 Lords of the Press: The Facts About the Most Powerful Anonymous Group of Men in America. On his 100th birthday he told a Nation reporter: “I’ve never been asked about religion. Father thought that it was totally wrong, the whole world system of inculcating religion in young people 5, 6, 7, and 8 years old, you know. . . . So his idea was to keep you away from anything religious until you were 15 or 16—in the teens—and then you could study all the religions, and you might want to choose to be a Mohammedan. He said the main thing is that we [the Seldes family] are all deists; we believe in God. We are not atheists, none of us. We may be agnostic—that’s a good healthy way to be, my father would say—but we’re certainly not atheists. We’re religious people. That’s the only religion we had in the family for generations.” Seldes, who died at the age of 104, was an honorary member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Seleveld, Elizabeth (20th Century) A Norwegian, Seleveld was a participant in a science and superstition panel at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
SELF-IMPROVEMENT • It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete. –Norman Cousins
SELF-RELIANCE Freethinkers aim to rely upon their own capabilities, judgment, resources, and independence. Few if any would object to the ideas found in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.”
SELF RESPECT MOVEMENT K. Veeramani in India leads a socio-political and atheistic movement in Tamil Nadu in southern India known as Self Respect Movement, Periyar Thidal 50 EVK Sampath R, Madras 600 007, India. {FD}
Self, Will (1961– ) Self, a freethinking British writer with decidedly unorthodox heroes involved in incidences of black humor, has become a countercultural icon. Cock and Bull (1993) features a woman who sprouts a penis and a man who grows a vagina. Self, who as a teenager used marijuana, amphetamines, and cocaine and later used heroin, informed Vanity Fair that the work was written to voice “anger at the way gender-based sexuality is so predetermined, the way we fit into our sex roles as surely as if we had cut them off the back of a cereal packet and pasted them onto ourselves.” My Idea of Fun (1994) features a boy who apprentices himself to the Devil and learns how to commit cold-blooded murder, or at least he says he learns how. A leading satirist, Self constructs a new Mephistophelean bargain, for in order to obtain the magical powers of penetrating the past and having lots of fun and money, the boy must avoid any sexual intercourse with a woman. In fact, his penis will fall off if he achieves penetration, he is warned, so he resorts to masturbation until his mysterious guide, called the Fat Controller and apparently a metaphor for capitalism run amok in the 1980s, disappears. He then meets another would-be mentor, a sinister psychiatrist named Dr. Gyggle who tells him Fat Controller is a manifestation of his “delusionary apparatus” and a lonely boy’s delusion constructed “to compensate for the lack of a father” and to “punish himself for his own Oedipal crime.” Cured of his fantasies by Dr. Gyggle, the boy falls in love and becomes a successful marketing entrepreneur in a world of fun where junkies are businessmen and businessmen are the Devil’s servants, where babies play with razor blades and animals serve as sex partners for humans. Until the Fat Controller resurfaces, that is. My Idea of Fun has been described by The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani as “a genuinely ambitious and accomplished novel, a novel that reads like an original and often willfully perverse Cuisinart mix of William Burroughs, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, and Lewis Carroll. One reads the book with a combination of fascination and nausea, intellectual curiosity and emotional horror, impressed by Mr. Self’s virtuosic skills with language and satire even while being repelled by his images of necrophilia, mutilation and torture.” Great Apes (1997) describes a world of ten-second orgies, parents humping their children, and sign language before the alpha male: “I worship your adamant penis” or “the refulgence of your anal scrag.” Evolution has taken a different turn, with chimpanzees ruling the cities while subhuman humans are roaming the African savanna and are caged in zoos. Simon Dykes, the thirty-nine-year-old in the story, is now a transformed man, an insane chimp in a psycho ward. The “what if?” plot describes how he is psychologically treated to restore his humanity. Of contemporary authors, Self is one of the most irreverent. In a foreword to Book of Revelation (Pocket Canons), he called the work a “sick text” and a “guignol of tedium.” (See entry for Mikhail Bakunin.) {Tad Friend, New York, 1 September 1997}
Seligman, Joseph (20th Century) Seligman, a railroad-banking tycoon, endowed a lectureship for Felix Adler at the new and liberal Cornell University, where President Andrew D. White defended his wide-ranging lectures on “Oriental Language and Literature” from Christian and orthodox critics. Seligman greatly assisted Adler at a time just before Adler founded the Ethical Culture movement.
Sellars, Roy Wood (1880–1973) Sellars, a philosopher who wrote Evolutionary Naturalism (1922), signed Humanist Manifesto I in 1933. His 1918 Next Step in Religion rejected H. G. Wells’s God as well as the Christian: “I challenge any one to develop a really tenable system of theology,” to which he added that he wanted to see a “human faith” with “no tottering creed to sustain.” He also wrote Evolutionary Naturalism (1922), Religion Coming of Age (1928), The Philosophy of Physical Realism (1932), “Religious Humanism” in The New Humanist (May-June 1933), and “In Defense of the Manifesto” in The New Humanist (May-June 1933). Expanding on his ideas concerning humanism, Sellars in 1956 wrote to the present author:
The direction to be taken in the use of the term humanism, according to my way of thinking, is along naturalistic and empirical lines. It concerns itself with the achievement of human values and with the purposes and endeavors which give meaning to human life. Meaning is embedded in activities which give lasting satisfaction and a retrospective justifiability. And these, so far as I can see, are sufficient unto themselves and require no supernatural framework. Such an added framework strikes me as essentially traditional in character and of the stuff of which mythology is made. I prefer to speak of naturalistic humanism rather than of scientific humanism. This is, of course, a minor point. The term scientific calls up, in my mind, the ways of testing knowledge about ourselves and the world. And so far as that goes it is all to the good. But life is more than knowledge. It is an affair of imagination and values as well, of finding out what is good and beautiful and worth while. In naturalistic humanism we have the meeting-point of philosophy and religion in that both concern themselves with the interpreting of human life, though their historical genius has been different. On the whole, religions have taken the path of special revelations and sacred literature. All this immersed in ritual and liturgy. Philosophy has emphasized thought and clarification. This element has not been absent from past religion but it has been used dependently and subordinately. The humanist feels that it is both the most courageous and the wisest thing to face up to the human situation as the sciences have disclosed it and to aim at enriching human life in its various dimensions, social, familial, political, and artistic, to mention but a few of those dimensions. He takes it that the meaning of life can be spelled out in this frame which, after all, has always been with us, though under some condemnation to the mysteries held by faith. The transition will not be easy for many, for the rhetoric and mental pictures involved will be different. As I see it, it will be an affair of gradual shifting of perspective and emphasis. It is my conviction that it will be better for man when he recognizes and admits his actual status and standing as a creature of this planet and determiner of his own destiny. The humanist does not regard himself as romantic when he cherishes the hope that, out of this recognition, there will come an enforcement of the ideals of mutual understanding and fellowship in both their personal and their institutional forms. And, in these days, the debate will be a worldwide affair.
In the 1950s, Sellars was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York, and he has been an official of the American Humanist Association. During the 1950s, he reviewed books for The Humanist. His son, Wilfrid Sellars, is a noted philosopher whose Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) is a study in analytic philosophy. He attacked the “myth of the given” in empiricism and helped turn analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists. The very idea of “epistemology” was, in fact, questioned. A 1997 edition includes an introduction by Richard Rorty. (See entry for American Humanist Association.) {CL; EW; FUS; HNS; HNS2; PK; RAT; U; WAS, 2 September 1956}
Sellevold, Elizabeth (20th Century) A Norwegian humanist, Sellevold attended the 1996 international conference of humanists in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <forlag@human.no>.
Sellon, Edward (19th Century) Sellon was an English archaeologist, the author of The Monolithic Temples of India: Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus (1865), and other scarce works which were privately printed. {BDF}
Selnes, Kjartan (20th Century) A Norwegian, Selnes spoke about the media in a cybernetic era at the 1996 Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City. Noting that the media help considerably to shape events, he cited the three news agencies (in France, Germany, and England) which in 1840 divided the world into spheres. In the 1990s, the major news sources are Reuters, the Associated Press, FPI, and UPI. The media, he noted, does not simply show us the world, it plays a part in changing it. This has been seen in the power of the media to disillusion the Americans in the Vietnam War and the impact of pictures of war in Bosnia. In the third world the mass media are seen as elite agents. Left to itself the market does not necessarily encourage diversity. Selnes holds that the markets should be more regulated by humanist values. His e-mail: <selnes@human.no>. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Selous, Frederick Courteney [Sir] (1851–1917) Selous, a professional elephant-hunter in Africa, wrote A Hunter’s Wanderings (1881), winning the Royal Geographical Society’s Gold Medal. In a symposium on immortality in the Christian Commonwealth (1915), Selous wrote, “I have no confidence that I shall survive bodily death; nor, until I know what my future state would be if I did so, do I hope for survival.” He further said he did not believe in “some power, which is known to civilized man as God.” During World War I, he volunteered for service, although he was in his sixties, and was killed in action. E-mail: <selnes@human.no>. {RAT; RE}
SEMANTICS Semantics is a scientific or philosophical study of the relations of words and their meanings. “To argue whether the medication killed the patient or contributed to her death is to argue over semantics,” it has been said. But the semanticist has shown that certain words used at certain times carry positive, or perhaps negative, overtones. For example, an automobile named Nova would be difficult to market in countries where no-va means “it doesn’t go.” “Navel” is preferred to “belly button” upon formal occasions. “The Gay 90s” connoted something different in the 1870s as contrasted with its meaning in the 1900s. ETC: A Review of General Semantics is published quarterly by the International Society for General Semantics (2465 A & B Salvio St., Concord, California 94520). The organization was formulated by Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) and was founded by S. I. Hayakawa (1906–1992) in 1943.
Sembat, Marcel Étienne (Born 1862) Sembat was an agnostic and a politician. He was elected to the French Chambre in 1893. For a time he edited La Petite République and, later, was one of the editors of L’Humanité. In 1914 he was Minister of Public Works in Viviani’s cabinet. {RAT}
Semerari, Giuseppe (20th Century) Semerari, in Italy, is a corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Sémérie, Eugène (1832–1884)
Sémérie was a French positivist. Becoming a physician, he studied mental maladies and in 1867 published Intellectual Symptoms of Madness, in which he maintained that the disordered mind went back from positivism to metaphysics, theology, and then to fetishism. The work was denounced by the Bishop of Orleans. A friend of Pierre Lafitte, Sémérie edited the Politique Positive and wrote Positivists and Catholics (1873) and The Law of the Three States (1875). {BDF; RAT}
Semier, Doug (20th Century) Semier, while a student at the University of California in Irvine, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Semler, Johann Salome (1725–1791) Semler was a German critic, a professor of theology at Halle and founder of historical Biblical criticism there. He translated Simon’s Critical History of the New Testament, and by asserting the right of free discussion drew down the wrath of the orthodox. {BDF}
Semple, Etta Donaldson (1855–1914) An American freethinker, Semple published in her newspaper, The Free-Thought Vindicator, on the front page: “A Reward of $1,000 will be Given to the Man, Woman or Child, who will Furnish Positive Proof Of A God, the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ (as a savior), the Soul, the Devil, Heaven or Hell, or the Truth of the Bible.” No takers appeared, but her unpopularity led to her attempted assassination (another woman was killed instead). A photograph and excerpts of Semple’s freethinking are found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992). She wrote in 1898,
If I deny the existence of a God—if I deny the idea of a gold-paved city with pearly walls and jasper gates somewhere out of knowledge and space and prefer to die and trust to the unfaltering laws of nature—if, in plain words I don’t want to go to heaven. whose business is it but my own? {EU; E. Graham Waring; WWS}
Sen, Amartya (20th Century) Winner of the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, Sen was honored partly for proving that Thomas Malthus was wrong with his prediction that too many people and too little food will necessarily lead to worldwide starvation. The Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sen has been called “the conscience of the profession” by another Nobel laureate, Robert Solow. He has merged philosophy with economics in such of his works as Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981). His view is that the “poverty index” takes into account not only the proportion of a society living below the poverty line but also the degree of poverty among the most destitute. In 1994 Sen was President of the American Economics Association, and he teaches part-time at Harvard University. {The New York Times, 15 Oct 1998; The Economist, 17 Oct 1998}
Senancour, Étienne Pivery de (1770–1846) Although his parents wanted him to become a priest, Senancour escaped to Geneva, where he adopted the deism of Rousseau and devoted himself to literature. His Overmann (1804) was received favorably by the critics, and it was admired by Sainte-Beueve and Matthew Arnold. The work was a lightly fictionalized series of letters in which the author discusses man, his own melancholy, and intellectual matters. Although Brinton described Senancour as “not at all religious,” McCabe labeled him a theist. {CE; RAT; RE}
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (the younger) (c. 3 B.C.E.–65 C.E.) Seneca, a Roman philosopher, dramatist, and statesman, wrote Dialogi, essays on anger, on divine providence, on Stoic impassivity, and on peace of soul.
Robertson reports that his monotheistic aversion to the popular superstitions of his day represents the elevating power of the higher Greek Stoicism: “On this score he belongs to the freethinking age, while his theistic a priorism belongs to the next.” Of religion, he wrote, “Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” As for immortality, Seneca wrote, “After death, nothing is. . . . Let the ambitious zealot lay aside his hope of heaven, whose faith is but his pride. . . . Naught’s after death, and death itself is naught. . . . Then may the saints lose all their hope of heaven, and sinners quit their racky fears of hell.” {CE; ER; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}
Senghor, Léopold Sédar [President] (1906– ) Senghor, the son of a Senegalese landowner, won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he met other writers and formulated the concept of negritude. That concept asserted the importance of African heritage. Serving with the French army in World War II, Senghor represented Senegal (1945–1958) in the French legislature, then became president of the Senegalese republic, serving from 1960 to 1980. Although a secular humanist, Senghor ruled a nation that is said to be over 59% Moslem. Among Senghor’s works are Chants d’Ombré (1945), Éthiopiques (1956), On African Socialism (1959, 1964), Selected Poems (1964), and Freedom 1, Negritude and Humanism (1974). A distinguished intellectual, he wrote many essays in French. He instructed that his distinctive poetry should be accompanied by musical instruments. In 1984, he became the first black member of the French Academy. Senghor, who lives in France, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. (CE)
Senior, Clarence (1903–1974) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Senior was Chief of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor, Migration Division. A professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, Senior wrote The Puerto Ricans (1965) and The Assault on Poverty (1966). {HNS}
SENSA: See Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy (1912) and the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.
Sensible, Captain (20th Century) Captain Sensible is a guitarist, the founding member of a punk band called The Damned. He e-mailed the following to an onliner:
When Cliff Richard, a celibate born-again Christian, refused to introduce the group, arguing that the band and punk music in general are evil], Bloody cheek! I’ve got three kids, and they think I’m okay. How dare the uptight buffoon bad-mouth people he doesn’t even know. I’ll tell ya what I think is evil, though. It’s not using yer dangly bits for what they’re there for . . . love, procreation, and, dare I say . . . a bit of bloody fun along the way! How many times have religions of the world been damaged by some discovery or other only to move the goalposts and carry on as before as though nothing had happened? They gave Galileo a hard time for saying the world was round. Somehow God seems to have forgotten to tell his “flock” about our planet revolving ‘round the sun and all that. Then there was the theory of evolution, the teaching about which in school was fought against in a courtroom in the USA and is still disbelieved by a majority of Americans, incredibly. There’s also no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible, either. Perhaps it’s not inspired by an all-knowing being after all and is, after all, just a cracking good work of fiction? No, I’m afraid none of that faith things holds any water for me.
On the Web: <www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/4962> {CA}
Captain Sensible (23 Apr 1955 or 24 Apr 1959) Captain Sensible is a British rock-and-roll singer-guitarist-bassist-recording artist. He is soloist for The Damned, a punk band, and is known for the novelty hit “Wot.”
On the Web he has gone on record concerning his views on religion:
I remember a time a few years back when The Damned were standing onstage ready to perform for the TV cameras when we became aware of an argument going on in the production office. The presenter—Cliff Richard (a celibate born-again Christian) was refusing to introduce us, arguing that the band (and punk music in general) was “evil.” Bloody cheek—I've got 3 kids and they think I'm okay. How dare the uptight buffoon bad-mouth people he doesn't even know. I'll tell ya what I think is evil, though. It's not using yer dangly bits for what they're there for . . . love, procreation and—dare I say—a bit of bloody fun along the way! How many times have religions of the world been damaged by some discovery or other only to move the goalposts and carry on as before as though nothing had happened? They gave Galileo a hard time for saying the world was round. . . .Somehow God seems to have forgotten to tell his “flock” about our planet revolving round the sun and all that. Then there was the theory of evolution—the teaching about which in schools was fought against in a courtroom in the USA and is still disbelieved by a majority of Americans, incredibly. There's also no mention of dinosaurs in the bible either. Perhaps it's not inspired by an all-knowing being after all and is, after all, just a cracking good work of fiction? No, I'm afraid none of that faith thing holds any water for me.
(On the Web: http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Towers/4962/>
and <http://www.officialdamned.com>.
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
• I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute. –President John F. Kennedy
An organization devoted to keeping church and state separate is on the World Wide Web: <www.louisville.edu/~tnpeteol/church/index.htm>. (See entries for Church and State and also for Protestants and Other Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.)
Lloyd Burton, professor of law and public policy at the U of Colorado: “[As to the first use of the metaphor of ‘a wall of separation,’ Jefferson was, as it happens, drawing on an earlier tradition. In 1643, Roger Williams, a clergyman and founder of Rhode Island, who had been banished from the Puritan Colonies for challenging theocratic authorities, wrote that there should be “a wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world” – by which he meant the predations of sectarian political leaders. The difference between the two if that, while Williams felt the wall necessary to protect the church from the state, for Jefferson the greater need was to protect the state from the church.” {The New Yorker, 29 Sep 2003}
SEPTUAGINT The Septuagint version of the Holy Bible was made in Alexandria, Egypt, by various translators who worked from about the 3rd to the 1st century before the Christian era. It varies widely in its degree of literalness and in its linguistic level. Kenneth E. Nahagian, for example, calls it a “sloppy” translation. (See entries for Bible and Yoel Wasserman.) {ER; CE}
Serafini, Maria Alimonda (19th Century) Serafini was an Italian who wrote A Catechism for Female Freethinkers 1869). She also wrote Marriage and Divorce (1873). {BDF}
SERBIAN-AMERICAN FREETHINKERS: See Freethought in the United States, by Gordon Stein, for a discussion of Serbian-American freethinkers in the United States.
Sercombe, Parker (20th Century) Sercombe wrote “God’s Principle Jokes” (c. 1900), not a memorably lengthy work. {GS}
SERENITY Serenity, according to Bertrand Russell’s Understanding History (1957), is not, as pedants try to convince us, a quality of the truly great men “who see how, in mysterious ways, good comes out of evil, and that, speaking generally, they help us to bear with fortitude the misfortunes of others. The generous young, exposed in almost every university of the world to this desiccated abomination, are apt to reject with scorn all the conventionally great names.” As examples of those whose supposed “serenity” is the theme of “endless academic nonsense,” Lord Russell cites Shakespeare’s lines:
As flies to us are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.
And
You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse.
“No,” continues Russell, “the greatest men have not been ‘serene.’ They have had, it is true, an ultimate courage, a power of creating beauty where nature has put only horror, which may, to a petty mind, appear like serenity. But their courage has had to surpass that of common men, because they have seen deeper into the indifference of nature and the cruelty of man. To cover up these things with comfortable lies is the business of cowards; the business of great men is to see them with inflexible clarity, and yet to think and feel nobly. And in the degree in which we can all be great, this is the business of each of us.”
Sergi, Giuseppe (1841–1936) Sergi taught anthropology and experimental psychology at Rome University and was director of the Roman Museum of Anthropology. He wrote more than a hundred books and two hundred academic articles, for which he has been dubbed “the Grand Old Man of Italian Rationalism as well as science.” At the International Congress of Freethinkers in Rome (1904), Sergi gave a fiery atheist address, saying that “the conceptions of a soul, a future life, a God, are all superstitious errors which have clouded the human mind and given a false direction to human conduct.” {RAT; RE}
Sergi, Johan Tobias (1740–1814) Sergi, a Swedish painter and cartoonist, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Serling, Rod (1924–1975) Serling, a television writer who produced “The Twilight Zone,” was a winner of eight Emmy Awards. He was a Unitarian Universalist. {EG}
SERMONS
• Homilophobia is what keeps me in bed on Sunday mornings. —Anonymous [Homilophibia denotes “fear of sermons”]
• “Better to see a sermon than hear one. —Anonymous
Serrano, Andres (1950– ) Serrano is the controversial artist whose “Piss Christ” depicts a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine. The work is Serrano’s statement concerning art’s lack of limitations in conveying artistic symbolism. A high school dropout at fifteen, a drug dealer and addict at twenty, this son of an African-Cuban mother and a Honduran father strongly defends his right to depict whatever an artist feels. Other of his works include photographs taken in a morgue and entitled “Rat Poison Suicide,” “Infectious Pneumonia,” “AIDS Related Death,” and so forth. Since right-wing protests against financing of his art catapulted him to martyrdom, Serrano has enjoyed the ensuing publicity. “You can’t have the sacred without the profane,” Serrano has said. I wouldn’t be so obsessed with Christianity if I didn’t have a feeling for it, and I find it strange when people call me an anti-Christian bigot. What is wrong is to make something that isn’t beautiful.” Some critics, however, complain that his work, artistically, is less than compelling. Sister Wendy Beckett, however, likes it. The sixty-two-year-old Catholic nun, who lives in a Carmelite order in England and stars in a British Broadcasting Corporation art show called “Sister Wendy’s Grand Tour,” finds a religious meaning in Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” “You could regard it as a moving meditation on what we do to the figure of Christ,” she has said in 1993 over the radio. “To say it is blasphemous says more about the person looking at it.” Sister Wendy appeared to be directing her thoughts at such as U.S. Senator Jesse A. Helms, the Republican from North Carolina, who has called the work blasphemous. Helms had been instrumental in voting against funds for the United States National Endowment for the Arts whenever it supported such controversial artists as Serrano. Serrano has explained that his photographs of religious tableaux are informed by “unresolved feelings about my own Catholic upbringing, which help me redefine and personalize my relationship with God. For me, art is a moral and spiritual obligation that cuts across all manner of pretense and speaks directly to the Soul.” He belies the fundamentalist view of his work as “anti-Christian bigotry,” arguing that “[as] a former Catholic and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I feel I had every right to use the symbols of the Church, and resented being told not to.” Further, Serrano has written that he is indebted to Renaissance and medieval religious paintings, and that by using blood, piss, semen, and milk in his work he is merely creating abstract images. In 1987 he did abstract photographs entitled Blood, Milk, and Piss. His Ejaculate in Trajectory was completed in 1989. Critic Holland Cotter has observed that a crucifix brought the artist to light, and religion seems to be his métier. Critic Mark Stevens has quoted Serrano as saying his “use of bodily fluids, especially in connection with Christianity, has been a way of trying to personalize and redefine [my] relationship with Christ.” Serrano has also said that his use of urine was “meant to question the whole notion of what is acceptable and unacceptable. There’s a duality here, of good and evil, life and death.” Stevens stated that Serrano, like many artists, enjoyed violating a taboo., “a provocateur working in familiar Western traditions not only of art but of religion, where anticlericalism and an iconoclastic attack upon idols are common.” He added, “In fact, Serrano is provocative less because he violates taboos or criticizes the Catholic Church than because he is at bottom so palpably, so classically, religious. He is a hair-shirt Catholic, one obsessed with putting great pressure on the body in order to feel the spirit. Serrano, in his way, is outrageously old-fashioned.” The artist lives in a downtown Brooklyn apartment which contains a shower of over one hundred crucifixes in his bathroom, dragon sconces he found in a Parisian flea market, a bishop’s bed, crimson stoles, a photo of a prostitute, a skeleton, a pickled human brain in a jar, numerous skulls and religious objects. “I’m not a practicing Catholic, but I like the Catholic aesthetic, Serrano explained to a New York reporter (14 October 1996) in 1996. “What’s going on here (in the decor of the apartment) has nothing to do with spirituality. I like the sense of theater, the sense of drama.” A 1997 show of his large photographs includes one of a priest who has been pleasantly tied up, apparently a ready masochist; an Asian woman also tied and seemingly ready for rough sex; a woman holding a horse’s penis; a white man on his knees, orally sucking a black man; a woman “receiving head” while dressed as a clown; a female midget about to be penetrated by an appendage at least one-fourth her height; and similar other scenes. The show is entitled, enigmatically, “A History of Sex.”
Serre, de la (18th Century) De la Serre wrote Examination of Religion (1745), a work attributed to Saint Évremond and condemned to be burned by the Parliament of Paris. {BDF}
Sertl, Franz (20th Century) Sertl is author of the history of freethought in Austria, Die Freidenkerbewegung in Österreich im zwanzigsten jarhundert. The work recounts the history of organized freethought from 1848 to date. (See entry for Austrian Freethinkers.)
Servetus, Michael (Miguel Serveto) (1511–1553) A Spanish physician and Unitarian theologian, Servetus was the first to publish an account of how the blood circulates in the body. In 1531, his On the Errors of the Trinity was published, and he became the most famous of the sixteenth-century anti-Trinitarians, hated by Catholics and Protestants alike. Luther called the book horribly wicked. Servetus sent a copy of his Christianismi Restitatio to Calvin, who denounced him to the Catholic authorities at Lyons, where Servetus was imprisoned but escaped. Melanchthon in 1539 warned the Venetian Senate against allowing the book to be sold. Servetus himself was said to have been an astrologer (at a time when Martin Luther on Biblical grounds rejected astrology and the Copernican astronomy alike, holding devoutly to a belief in witchcraft). “Your Trinity is the product of subtlety and madness. The Gospel knows nothing of it. God is one and indivisible.” Declared a heretic on charges brought by the Protestant leader John Calvin, Servetus refused to recant and was caught heading for Italy via Geneva. There he was burned alive, in what has been described as “a slow fire,” along with some of his allegedly odious writings, to the delight of Protestants and Catholics alike. (See entry for Otto Karmin.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Paul H. Beattie; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TRI; TYD; U, UU}
Service, Robert (19th Century) In 1870, Service founded in Melbourne, Australia, the Sunday Free Discussion Society.
Service, Robert W. (1874–1958) “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee” were two long works which made Service famous in the 1910s and 1920s. An Englishman raised largely in Scotland but a poet who made the Yukon famous, Service described the wild northwest frontier in all its ruggedness. Poor Sam, for example, in the middle of his cremation alarmed his buddies by coming unfrozen and exclaiming he had not felt so warm in ages. “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill” tells how his buddies, to fulfill his final wish, were able to fit him into his coffin only by sawing up his frozen body. Whitehead and Muhrer contain some of Service’s poems in their Freethought on the American Frontier (1992), adding that in his later years Service wrote religious poetry which was somewhat orthodox. {CE}
SETI SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aims radio telescopes at thousands of target start systems in the hope of receiving signals from “out there.” (See entry for Extraterrestrial Life.)
Settle, John (1842–1915) Settle was a Lancashire miner who late in life became a rationalist and made the Rationalist Press Association the residuary legatee of his estate, on condition that the money should be used for the delivery of lectures in Wigan. {RAT}
Settle, Mary L. (20th Century) Settle wrote The Scopes Trial (1972). {GS}
Seume, Johann Gottfried (1763–1810) Seume was a German poet who, sent to Leipzig to become a theologian, became disgusted by the dogmas and left for Paris. He lived an adventurous life, traveled extensively, and wrote Promenade to Syracuse (1802) A deist, Seume was highly critical of orthodox Christianity, writing that “Grotius and the Bible are the best supports of despotism.” {BDF; RAT}
SEVEN DEADLY SINS In the Middle Ages, the sins that led to “damnation” were pride, covetousness (greed), lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth.
SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD: See entry for Man.
SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISTS: See Martin Gardner’s “The Incredible Flimflams of Margaret Rowen, Seventh-day Adventists and the Second Coming,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1996 and Spring 1997. Gardner also discusses “the comic pratfalls of Robert Reidt.”
Severance, Caroline (19th Century) Severance was vice president of the Free Religious Associates when Octavius Brooks Frothingham was its president. {FUS}
Severance, Channing (20th Century) Severance, a freethinker, wrote The Failure of Christianity (1921). {FUS}
Severn, Joseph (1793–1879)
As a youth, Severn won the Gold Medal of the Royal Academy for his art, at which time he became a friend of Keats and accompanied the doomed poet to Italy and cared for him. After Rome “was taken from the Pope,” to quote McCabe, Severn remained in Italy and became British Consul. Severn shared Keats’s Rationalism and followed the struggle against the Church with enthusiasm. {RAT; RE}
Sewards, Colin (20th Century) Sewards, of Metroplex Atheists in Texas, is a board member of the Atheist Alliance.
SEX • In your sex life preserve purity as far as you can before marriage, and if you indulge, take only those privileges that are lawful. However, do not make yourself offensive or censorious to those who do indulge, and do not make frequent mention of the fact that you do not yourself indulge. –Epictetus
• As far as sex is concerned, I don’t think the American man gives his woman a fair shake. There’s not enough quantity and certainly not enough quality. People talk the game, but they don’t play it very well. –Frank Sinatra, singer
The sexual attitudes of non-believers as compared to those of believers have never been definitively studied. Because of many of the organized churches’ teachings it is likely, however, that the former are more apt to enjoy sex, experimenting with different positions and partners, whereas the latter are more apt to suffer needless anxiety about sex and to feel guilty even when finding their left testicle is larger than their right (which they may not know is a universal characteristic) or when they have a pleasurable orgasm (which many women regrettably never achieve). Sex in America (1994) does state that Christian churchgoers likely have fewer partners than “heathens,” but one of the facets of studying sex is that humans have difficulty talking about it, particularly during it. The sex life of early man is a mystery. Reay Tannahill, in her Sex in History (1980), remarks that “polygamy has been far more widespread than monogamy during most of the five thousand years of recorded history.” Erotic Stone Age drawings exist, and there is much evidence that it was not always known how human births came about, that “it is not altogether easy to accept that homo sapiens, after more than 100,000 years of fully-fledged existence, may still have been unaware of the biological facts of life when the Neolithic revolution began.” Evidence exists that some thought man can become pregnant (for instance, by eating possum) and die in childbirth. Some women denied that men had anything whatsoever to do with their being pregnant. Men, meanwhile, viewed themselves as superior in all ways to women, and they dominated the world’s earliest civilizations in the Near East. In Greece, where dildos were used and where masturbation was considered an emotional safety valve, Demosthenes observed, “We have hetairai for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs, and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping.” Hetairai were successful women in a man’s world, sometimes very successful; they also were experienced in anal intercourse. As for pederasty, “the bloom of a twelve-year old boy,” said Straton, “is desirable, but at thirteen he is much more delightful. Sweeter still is the flower of love that blossoms at fourteen, and its charm increases at fifteen. Sixteen is the divine age.” The Greeks, however, considered intercourse with a boy who had not reached the age of puberty as evil and as illegal as in other civilizations; homosexuality in the modern sense is seldom attested to in ancient Athens. As Tannahill among others points out, “It was the monotheistic strand of Near Eastern culture that won in the end, that of the Hebrews, who had no need to compromise between religious and secular law. The Pentateuch was a mixture of Near Eastern customs and ordinances handed down from Sinai, but both had the authority of Yahweh and were thus mandatory. So the attitudes born of the Neolithic era were preserved, and when the Christian Church, solidly based on Hebrew foundations, took over the Western world as successor to Rome, social and sexual relationships became fossilized in the amber of ancient Hebrew custom. To Near Eastern prejudices, the Church Fathers added their own. Sex was transformed into a sin and homosexuality into a danger to the state.” The Church proscribed adultery, abortion, homosexuality, infanticide, zoophilia, and masturbation. Whereas Solon had suggested “three times a month” for marital intercourse and the Jewish Mishnah prescribed, “Every day for the unemployed, twice a week for laborers, once a week for ass drivers,” the Church said never, unless children were the object. Whereas other societies regarded sex as pleasurable, in any position, to the Church sexual pleasure was a sin “and only the man-superior position was acceptable.” Meanwhile, while the Church encouraged monogamy, others compared the practice to that of a person voluntarily choosing a lifetime diet of one cup of rice per day for sustenance. Tannahill has written that Asia and the Arab world added a new dimension to “pure love” that was to influence not only poets and troubadours of courtly love but also the whole image of woman in the West. “The Victorian resurrection of courtly love was largely responsible for transforming middle-class ladies into sweet, untouchable guardians of morality, whose distaste for sex led to an explosive increase in prostitution, an epidemic spread of venereal disease, and a morbid taste for masochism,” she notes. “The artificial ideal of the Victorian family was sustained until well into the twentieth century, most influentially by Hollywood rather than the Church, but the published researches of Kinsey and others, increasing familiarity with psychoanalytic theory, and simple economic reality ultimately helped to undermine it. Even so, it still survives, despite the revulsion against traditional relationships expressed in women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the free sex movement, and despite the fact that, in legal terms, the sexes have in many countries been brought almost into equilibrium.” If so, and in social terms, much remains to be accomplished, feminists will argue. Georgian England’s most popular sex manual in the 1690s, Aristotle’s Master-Piece, remained in print for several centuries. It avoided anything that was considered to be at all problematic—homosexuality, sadomasochism, masturbation—as well as “any dialectic of sex with neurosis.” In nine states of the United States it was illegal in 1933 for unmarried sex between consenting heterosexuals. Oral sex (giving and receiving) was illegal in twenty states for heterosexuals, twenty-seven states for homosexuals, leading activists to complain that few remember what Jefferson said in his first inaugural address in 1801: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Bertrand Russell, in 1969, wrote, “I should deal with sexual morality exactly as I should with everything else. I should say that if what you’re doing does no harm to anybody, there’s no reason to condemn it. And you shouldn’t condemn it merely because some ancient taboo has said that this is wrong.” Views on sex are almost as varied as sexual positions:
• The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable. –Lord Chesterfield
• Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble. –John Barrymore
• Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right. –Woody Allen
• Men and women, women and men. It will never work. –Erica Jong
• Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t. –George Bernard Shaw
• Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress. –Quentin Crisp
In 1992, a study of the sexual practices of Americans was compiled, one involving 3,432 men and women aged 18 to 59. Their study found that 22.8% of the women had been forced by men to do something sexually that they did not want to do; however, only 2.8% of the men said they had ever forced a woman into a sexual act. While only 2.8% of men and 1.4% of women in the study identified themselves as homosexual or bisexual, 10.1% of men and 8.6% of women reported they had had same-sex desires or experiences—this finding was quite different from the 1-in-10 figure that came from the 1948 Kinsey study. The statistics include how many like to watch a partner undress, receive oral sex, give oral sex, have anal intercourse, have group sex, etc. More than 80% of Americans are said to have had one sexual partner, or no partner at all, in the preceding year, and that number rises to 96% among the married. Half the population is said to have no more than three different partners, the median for men being six and for women was two, in an entire lifetime. A total of 90% of the women and more than 75% of the men claim they have never had extramarital sex. The survey findings were published in two books: Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (1994) and The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994), the latter going far beyond Kinsey and being one of the most comprehensive tour of our bedrooms ever published.
However, critics were fast to note flaws in the study’s methodology. For example, the average man was said to have had six sex partners while the average woman had had two—logically, these numbers should be equal (and imply that men exaggerate or women understate). Also, those interviewed in the presence of a spouse or a sex partner responded differently when interviewed alone. The study, which had wanted to obtain a sample of about 400 homosexuals, had fewer than 100 because the Bush Administration had agreed with conservative pressure and withdrew the project’s financing. The original survey, which was to have been paid for by the Federal Government, was opposed by religious and ultra-conservative leaders, leading to its discontinuance. Because the Government was afraid to ask, someone else found out: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. A government can be quite effective in setting an ideological fashion. For example, and as evidence of the efficacy of the prudery of Chairman Mao’s teachings, the Chinese Legal Daily in 1994 told of two highly educated university lecturers who, after months of trying to conceive a child, sought the advice of a physician. The physician, finding the wife was still a virgin, learned that the couple thought that sleeping together, literally just sleeping in the same bed, was a reproductive act. (See entries for Adamastor, Arthur Danto, fucking, sex education, sexuality, and sodomy. Also, see Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia concerning sex and religion. He points out that of the 600 religious sects that are included in a Dictionary of Religion, only seven were founded by women. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, a leading sexologist and one of the authors of the Kinsey Report, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Academy of Humanism. Vern L. Bullough, among other secular humanists noted herein, has written extensively on the topic.) {CE; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}}
SEX ACT: See entry for Calvinism, with E. L. Doctorow’s comments.
SEX EDUCATION Annie Besant was an advocate of birth control, and she toured and lectured widely. In her time, however, most of the uneducated learned about birth control through advertisements in urinals and drug stores, and on posters. In 1877, when she stood trial for advocating birth control and was acquitted, manufacturers launched a sales drive. Michael Mason, in The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1995), reasons that abstinence did not find favor with wives. One York wife was quoted as saying, “Self-restraint? . . . not much! If my husband started on self-restraint, I should jolly well know there was another woman in the case.” Mason found that rationalist W. R. Greg regarded celibacy as a “social gangrene.” The Reverend Charles Kingsley celebrated the joys of physical lovemaking with his wife; but if it was not so enjoyable, how on earth could frailer creatures be restrained? So although the Anglican clergy deplored celibacy—a Roman practice—they backed restraint and later marriage, and deplored sensuality. On this the high-minded agnostics, such as George Eliot, were their allies. George Drysdale, a precursor of Havelock Ellis, argued in the 1880s that sexual abstinence could cause lesions in the sexual organs. Mason denies that Victorian women were ignorant or joyless, but he admits that many doctors were opposed to birth control, and they were enraged when Bertrand Russell’s father declared in 1868 that they ought to favor it. They were too scared of a charge of impropriety to make a vaginal examination. They also feared their patients would desert them for quacks—and on sexual matters quacks have abounded. {Noel Annan, “Under the Victorian Bed,” The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995}
SEX IN ISLAM Muslims generally understand sexual fulfillment within marriage for both parties to be the ideal state of affairs. One’s sexual needs must be understood and satisfied. Licensed sex is neither sinful nor restricted solely to procreation: it serves as a means of communication and a source of solace. Muslims complain that others misinterpret their teachings, for it would be a corruption of Muslim practice if women within the marriage institution were considered a degradation. On the contrary, Muslim leaders insist, but virginity is highly valued for girls. To control impregnation (aze), the Prophet recommended coitus interruptus. Most Muslims disapprove of abortion, unless the mother’s life is severely medically compromised.
Female circumcision is practiced in many parts of Africa in order to control female sexuality and insure virginity at the time of marriage. As for polygamy, a man’s needs often exceed a woman’s, according to the patriarchal outlook. The man must not take more wives, however, than he can afford.
Homosexuality is either considered unlawful, abnormal, punishable under the shariah, or tolerated in those areas where homosexuals are viewed as a “third sex,” neither men nor women. (See entry for Heaven–Muslim, for sex continues even after one’s death. Also see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim.)
SEX SYMBOLS The Christian cross has been interpreted as a sex symbol. “Just as the sun was the father,” wrote B. Z. Goldberg in The Sacred Fire (1958), “so was man’s lingam [a stylized phallic symbol of the masculine cosmic principle and of the Hindu god Siva] the father; and just as the moon was the mother, so was the yoni [the stylized representation of the female genitalia symbolized in the Hindu cosmology]. . . . The lingam is in the shape of a rod with a round head; so any object of this form, stone or wood, might become such a symbol. The yoni is an oval opening; so any oval figure might represent the female divinity of sex. By further simplification it was enough to draw a vertical line to suggest the lingam and a horizontal one to signify the yoni, while the union of the two was represented by the cross.” Goldberg details many sex symbols found in Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
SEX, ORAL I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning How you settled your head athwart my hips and Gently turn’d over upon me. . . . –Walt Whitman “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass
SEX-CHANGE OPERATIONS In 1952, George Jorgensen became Christine by having a sex-change operation in Denmark. An estimated 25,000 Americans have had sex-changing surgery to date, according to New York Times reporter James Brooke (8 November 1998). Through the 1980s, when few surgeons would perform the operations, about two-thirds of the nation’s sex-change surgeries were done at Mount San Rafael Hospital. In Trinidad, Colorado, of the 3,800 patients Dr. Stanley H. Biber treated, the pioneering surgeon claimed that over the years only three, all men, had been unhappy in their new sex. Because of unfavorable publicity in the 1970s, Dr. Biber and other surgeons drew up guidelines to eliminate the surgery on demand. Most candidates now must go through two psychiatric evaluations, live and dress in their new role for at least a year, and undergo nine months of hormone treatments: testosterone for women and estrogen for men. Toward the end of 1998, Dr. Biber found a major shift in the sex of his patients, from overwhelmingly male to 50-50 now.
Sextus Empiricus (around 200 CE) Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism and his treatises against the dogmatists began with ten tropes attributed to Aenesidemus, “ways of skeptical argumentation leading to suspense of judgment about what is not evident. . . . He showed how our moral beliefs are relative to the customs of our society. The result of all of this was not to deny that knowledge is possible but to lead the seeker after knowledge to suspend judgment on all non-evident questions. By so doing, people will achieve ataxaria, a state of being unperturbed, and they can then live undogmatically following the dictates of nature and custom and acting on how things appear to be.” Robertson points out that Sextus Empiricus was one of the freethinkers of antiquity who passed down the view that “all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to control the people.” (See entry for Pyrrho.) {BDF; CE; EU, Richard H. Popkin; JMR; JMRH}
SEXUAL ACTS OF HETEROSEXUALS A report on the sexual practices of British men (The Economist, 9 May 1998) reveals that 7.8% have twenty-one or more heterosexual partners over a lifetime. The same study showed men in the United States had 12.7%. Women in Britain with that many partners claimed 1.2% whereas American women claimed 2.4%. Slightly less than 5% of men in the two places claimed to have had extra-marital sex within the past year, as compared with slightly less than 3% of the women. Only 8% to 11% of Britishers found pre-marital sex “almost always wrong” whereas 24% to 32.7% of Americans found it sinful. Similarly fewer Britishers (76% to 83%) found extra-marital sex “always or almost always wrong” whereas 93.5% of American women and 88.9% of American men thought so. “Unsurprisingly,” wrote The Economist editors, “Americans are less likely to use a condom despite engaging in riskier sex. They pay a price: the incidence of AIDS is ten times as high as it is in Britain. The authors [of the study published in the American Journal of Public Health] conclude that ‘Our public health may be the high price we pay for our public opinion.’ ”
SEXUAL ACTS OF THE BONOBO The bonobo, animals inaccurately called pygmy chimpanzees, lubricate the gears of social harmony with sex in all possible permutations and combinations: males with females, males with males, females with females, and even infants with adults. The sexual acts include intercourse, genital-to-genital rubbing, oral sex, mutual masturbation, and “French-kissing.” Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and author of Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997), has said that
Sex is there, it’s pervasive, it’s critical, and bonobo society would collapse without it. But it’s not what people think it is. It’s not driven by orgasm or seeking release. Nor is it often reproductively driven. Sex for a bonobo is casual, it’s quick, and once you’re used to watching it, it begins to look like any other social interaction.
In his book, de Waal found that, “The chimpanzee resolves sexual issues with power; the bonobo resolves power issues with sex.” {The New York Times, 22 April 1997}
SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION Pioneering sex therapists William Masters and Virginia Johnson have stated that if children early on are trained that sex is bad or dirty, such training has been identified as one of the primary causes of sexual dysfunction in married couples. Organized religions include no sex education classes in their sabbath schools, and critics claim this leads children to consider sex as something bad rather than as something basic to human happiness.
SEXUAL ORIENTATION “Sexual orientation” is favored over the term “sexual preference” because it indicates an identity that cannot be changed or cast aside lightly, like a preference. One could be a male brunet with a preference for doughtnuts and for being a beautiful blonde female but still be a doughtnut-eating brunet male. One’s sexual identification is commonly defined as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, depending on a person’s sexual relationship.
SEXUALITY, ANIMAL: For a deconstruction of the Noah’s Ark myth, see entry for Animal.
SEXUALITY Jerome Beadle and Bruce Falton, mindful that organized religion’s stand on sex has always stood in the way of people’s enjoyment of sex, have compiled the following instances. For their complete listings, see People’s Almanac #2.
• 14 CE. Emperor Tiberius of Rome forbade the execution of virgins, whereby virgins were deflowered by the executioner before the sentence was carried out.
• c. 875. The Scottish King Ewen III established the rights of “the First Night”: “Wives of common men shall be free to the nobles; and the Lord of the ground shall have the maidenheads of all the virgins dwelling in the same.” The practice may have continued up to the beginning of the Middle Ages.
• 1072. Pietro Damiana, an Italian reformer who was son of a prostitute, preached inside brothels that virginity should be preserved and that girls should abstain from sex.
• 1191. When King Richard the Lion-Hearted arrived at Marseilles in his first holy crusade against the infidels, he was horrified to discover that his advance party of trusty Christian knights had spent all the campaign funds on prostitutes.
• 1274. St. Thomas Aquinas, who called sex “lust,” preached that any sexual activity other than that intended for procreation was a sin against nature. His four other offending categories were, in descending order: (a) bestiality; (b) homosexuality; (c) using any position other than face to face, with the woman on her back; and (d) masturbation, which he considered effeminate in men.
• 1275. Angela de Labarthe of Toulouse was burned at the stake for having sexual intercourse with the Devil. Reportedly, she had given birth to a child with a wolf’s head and a snake’s tail.
• 1300. The Lothardi sect in Russia believed in Christian morality so long as members were twenty-seven inches below ground; hence, their meetings were held in subterranean caves and featured riotous orgies.
• 1382. Sex made its first appearance in a John Wycliffe translation of the Bible: “Of alle thing is havynge sowle of ony flesh, two thow shalt brynge into the ark, that maal sex and femaal lyven with thee.”
• 1415. [The original] Pope John XXIII was deposed for “notorious incest, adultery, defilement, homicide, and atheism.” While still a chamberlain, he had openly kept his brother’s wife as a mistress. While a cardinal in Bologna, “two hundred maids, matrons, and widows, including a few nuns, fell victim to his brutal lust.” (John was the original Pope John XXIII, but of the Pisan Line. At the same time, Pope Gregory XII was pope but of the Roman Line. Meanwhile, a third pope, Pope Benedict XIII, was pope but of the Avignon Line. This was during the Great Schism, 1378-1417.)
• 1484. Pope Innocent VIII was nicknamed “the Honest,” because he was the first pope to acknowledge his illegitimate children publicly.
• 1529. During Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s trial for treason, he was accused of giving Henry VIII syphilis by whispering in the king’s ear.
• 1535. Father Valdelamar, a priest in Toledo, Spain, was found guilty of rape, blasphemy, consorting with prostitutes, and extorting the favors of a young woman in exchange for absolution. He was sentenced to a mere thirty-day house arrest and a fine of two ducats.
• 1542. Andrew Boorde in his Dyetary of Helth warned solemnly that eating lettuce killed sexual desire. Later, and upon becoming Bishop of Chichester, he was publicly defrocked for keeping three prostitutes in his chambers.
• 1555. Pope Paul IV, who organized the Inquisition which had been set up by Paul III, ordered the removal of Michelangelo’s paintings from the Sistine Chapel on the grounds that they were obscene. Michelangelo’s pupil, Daniele da Volterra, was ordered to add clothes to all the naked figures (including all the angels and the Virgin Mary) in The Last Judgment, after which de Volterra was nicknamed “the Breeches Maker.” • 1559. Pope Paul IV began compiling the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books deemed to have blasphemous or profane content. Over 4,000 titles, including the total output of Balzac, Dumas, Stendhal, and Alberto Moravia, were included. In 1966, the Catholic Church stopped publishing the Index.
• 1565. Mass-scale erotic convulsions swept the Convent of Nazareth in Cologne. A German doctor De Weier found that the nuns were throwing themselves on their backs, shutting their eyes, raising their abdomens erotically, and thrusting forward their pudenda.
• 1585. St. Mary Magdalene de Pazzi ran madly about the convent, masochistically rolling around on thorns and burrs, whipping herself, and begging other nuns to hurl globules of hot wax at her. She was canonized in 1671.
• 1611. Two unmarried women found to be pregnant upon arrival in Virginia were returned to England in an attempt to stamp out the risk of promiscuity in the colony.
• 1624. Richard Cornish was hanged for forcing a young man into “unnatural” sexual relations. Two who complained were later pilloried and had their ears sliced off for protesting this first homosexual hanging in America and for alleging that Cornish “was put to death through a scurvie boys meanes & no other came against him.”
• 1634. In France, Jeanne des Anges, a nun, suffered nightmarish erotic hallucinations and convulsions after being spurned by the Curé Grandier. The curé was put to death, providing the basis for Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun (1952) and Ken Russell’s 1970 film, “The Devils.”
• 1634. Mary Mandame was charged in Plymouth, Massachusetts with “dallyance diverse tymes with Tinsin, an Indian” and “committing the act of uncleanse with him.” She was sentenced to be whipped and to wear at all times a badge of shame on her left sleeve. Tinsin was whipped at the pillory for “allurement & enticement.”
• 1653. An eighty-two-year-old man was executed in England for adultery.
• 1656. Captain Kemble of Boston was found guilty of “lewd and unseemly behavior,” having kissed his wife in public on the Sabbath after a three years’ sojourn at sea.
• 1658. Plymouth, Massachusetts, Puritans passed an adultery law which required a female offender not only to be whipped but to bear for the remainder of her life the letter A on her breast. Failure to comply made her liable to having the A branded on her face with a red-hot iron. The law was portrayed by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850).
• 1665. Condom first appeared in a work by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The word may come from the Latin cunnus (the female pudenda) and dum (implying an inability to function), not from the legendary but mythical Dr. Condom; however, its origin is uncertain.
• 1672. Women shipped out of England to Virginia for the express purpose of helping to populate the new colonies were priced not in currency but in tobacco, sometimes being valued at 120 pounds of tobacco per female.
• 1680. Maiden Lane in downtown New York was so named, according to People’s Almanac, because so many maidens lost their maidenheads there.
• 1684. A sex manual published in London under the title Aristotle’s Masterpiece, or the Secrets of Generation Displayed in All Parts Thereof, advised extensive sexual foreplay and emphasized the value of clitoral massage, saying “blowing the coals of these amorous fires” pleased women.
• 1702. Lord Cornbury, a governor of New York and New Jersey, performed most of his official duties in women’s clothes. He was recalled in 1708 after landing in jail for debt.
• 1708. Edmund Curll was indicted for having sold Venus in the Cloister, or the Nun in Her Smock, a blasphemous tale of lesbian nuns first published in France in 1682.
• 1714. The Roman Catholic Church banned the confessional requirement that men name their partners in fornication when it was discovered that priests might be making carnal use of the information.
• 1723. In Montpellier, France, police raided a meeting of the Multiplicants, a sect in which twenty-four-hour-only marriages were consummated publicly on the altar, followed by orgies. Its leaders were hanged, and the women—after having their heads shaved—were placed in nunneries.
• 1729. Sir Francis Dashwood masqueraded as King Charles XII of Sweden, thereby seducing Empress Anne of Russia.
• 1750. John Cleland wrote the erotic novel, Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, called by Anthony Comstock “the most obscene book ever written” but one which never made the Vatican’s Index.
• 1768. The Encyclopedia Britannica was first issued. The entry for “Woman” stated, “The female of man. See Homo.”
• 1770. Pope Clement XIV outlawed the 200-year-old practice of using castrati in papal choirs. Persons performing such operations on young boys were excommunicated, though the boys were made very welcome into the choirs thereafter.
• 1782. Dr. John Hunter, assisting a couple incapable of having children, got the man to masturbate, then took the semen in a warm syringe and injected it into the posterior part of the wife’s vagina. The result was a bouncing success, the first child of artificial insemination. Church officials expressed their outrage at such a perversion.
• 1798. The Bishop of Durham warned Britain’s House of Lords that France was trying to defeat England morally, not militarily, by smuggling in hordes of ballet dancers.
• 1821. The first American obscenity trial found printer Peter Holmes guilty of smut-peddling. He had published Fanny Hill.
• 1822. A statue of Achilles representing the invincibility of the Duke of Wellington, commissioned and paid for by the women of England, was unveiled in Hyde Park. At the unveiling, witnesses realized this was London’s first nude statue . . . and within a few days the statue miraculously grew a fig leaf.
• 1829. The British banned the Hindu practice of suttee in India and elsewhere throughout the Empire, although it continued until at least 1905. Suttee was the enforced immolation of a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.
• 1834. Sylvester Graham (1794–1851), best remembered for inventing the graham cracker, wrote “A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians.” He warned that “high seasoned food, rich dishes, and the free use of flesh” led to insanity. He advised married couples that overdoing it sexually led to, among other problems, “chilliness, headache, melancholy, hypochondria, hysterics, feebleness of all the senses, impaired vision, loss of sight, weakness of the lungs, nervous cough, pulmonary consumption, disorders of the liver and kidneys, urinary difficulties, disorders of the genital organs, spinal diseases, weakness of the brain, loss of memory, epilepsy, insanity, apoplexy, abortions, premature births, and extreme feebleness, morbid predispositions, and an early death of offspring.” Further, he warned that every ejaculation lowered a male’s life expectancy.
• 1843. Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, first exhorted his followers to practice polygamy.
• 1847. A British physician named Simpson angered churchmen when he administered the newly discovered chloroform to a woman in childbirth. The church claimed that the Bible commands that women should bring forth their children in sorrow.
• 1869. The term homosexuality was coined by Dr. Benkert, a Hungarian physician.
• 1873. The U.S. Congress passed the Comstock Act, banning obscene materials—including rubber prophylactics—from the mails. This caused George Bernard Shaw to coin the word comstockery.
• 1881. Henry James, in Washington Square: “He wanted to abuse somebody, and he began, cautiously—for he was always cautious—with himself.”
• 1882. Aletta Jacobs opened the world’s first birth-control clinic, in Holland. She popularized the diaphragm, which was known as the “Dutch cap.”
• 1895. Striptease shows began in Paris with Le Coucher d’Yvette showing a girl gradually removing her clothes as she vainly searched for a flea.
• 1900. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams underscored the importance of repressed sexual desires in human behavior.
• 1913. The world’s first nude calendar was published, and it contained “September Morn,” a painting by French artist Paul Chabas (1869–1937). Antipornography crusader Anthony Comstock complained, “There’s too little morn and too much maid.”
• 1916. Margaret Sanger opened America’s first birth-control clinic (a phrase she coined) at 46 Amboy Street in Brooklyn, New York. After a policewoman posed as a patient to obtain evidence, the establishment was closed.
• 1924. André Gide in his autobiographical novel If It Die became the first important modern public figure to declare publicly that he was a homosexual.
• 1934. Upon reading Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer, poet Ezra Pound remarked, “At last, an unprintable book that is fit to read.”
• 1938. The Roman Catholic-oriented National Organization for Decent Literature was founded. In the years to come it would condemn such works as C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, and Christopher Morley’s Kitty Foyle.
• 1946. Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian leader, publicly confessed that he had been taking naked girls to bed with him for many years—to test his mastery of celibacy.
• 1946. Massachusetts, charging Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber with being obscene, made an attempt to ban its sale because of the following: 70 references to sexual intercourse; 39 illegitimate pregnancies; 7 abortions; 10 descriptions of women dressing, undressing, or bathing in the presence of gentlemen; 5 references to incest; 13 references ridiculing marriage; and another 49 “miscellaneous objectionable passages.” Afterwards, a radio comedian was censured for suggesting that Miss Winsor should have called her book Forever Under.
• 1948. Dr. Alfred Kinsey and associates published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, to be followed five years later by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.
• 1951. A nationwide census in India indicated there were nearly 3 million husbands and more than 6 million wives between 5 and 14 years old.
• 1952. Surgeon Christian Hamburger in Denmark performed successful sex-change surgery on ex-American soldier George Jorgensen. The fame achieved by then Christine Jorgensen led to the Danish surgeon’s being so swamped with applications for the operation that the Danish government had to restrict the operation to Danish patients only.
• 1953. Hugh Hefner published the first Playboy, which was undated because Hefner did not know whether there would be a second issue. The first playmate was Marilyn Monroe. The magazine infuriated leaders of organized religion, for it was aimed at “that select group of urbane fellows who were less concerned with hunting, fishing, and climbing mountains than with good food, drink, proper dress, and the pleasure of female company.”
• 1961. USSR leader Nikita Khruschev expressed his outrage upon visiting Hollywood and finding the “indecencies” of the film “Can Can.”
• 1966. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson published Human Sexual Response, the first detailed description and analysis of the physiological aspects of sexual excitation and orgasm.
• 1967. “I Am Curious (Yellow),” a Swedish film, became one of the first popularly distributed movies in the U.S. to portray sex explicitly.
• 1971. The world’s first commercial sperm bank was opened in New York City.
• 1973. Robert A. Martin, a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker pacifist, was arrested during a peace march on the White House. Refusing to pay a $10 bond, he was moved to a District of Columbia jail where prisoners with records for violence were kept. In two days, he was raped 50 times.
• 1977. The first female-to-male transsexual operation was performed on a female University of Missouri student. Reported The New York Times, “The doctors said the penis contained a tiny hydraulic system that permitted a fluid to be pumped from a reservoir in the abdomen into the penis to cause erection. Investigation shows that the penis-erection device has been used in more than 200 operations in the country to date, most performed by the device’s inventor, Dr. F. Brantley Scott, a urologist affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.” {PA}
Seymour, Edward Adolphus (1804–1885) A British statesman, Seymour was a commoner who rose to be First Lord of the Treasury. He was made Duke of Somerset and Earl St. Maur for his services. In his retirement he wrote Christian Theology and Modern Skepticism, in which he rejected all supernaturalism. Seymour believed in a “Supreme Intelligence” which, if it did exist, he felt throws “a ray of light beyond the mystery of the grave.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Seymour, Nick (20th Century) Seymour, a recording artist, was a member of the disbanded New Zealand/Australian band called Crowded House. When asked in an interview on MTV Europe (30 September 1993) if the band’s members believed in God, Paul Hester responded, “No! My father used to try to get me to go to Sunday school, but I wouldn’t.” Seymour said, “No, not anymore. I am a bit of a lapsed Catholic.” {CA}
Seymour, Nick (9 Dec 1958 - ) Seymour, a rock-and-roll bassist with a group called Crowded House, was asked in an interview on MTV Europe (30 Sep 1993), as was band member Paul Hester, the following:
Q: Do you believe in God? Paul: No! My father used to try to get me to go to Sunday school but I wouldn't. Nick: No, not anymore. I am a bit of a lapsed Catholic. {CA}
Shadwell, Thomas (1640–1692)
Shadwell was an English dramatist. Some of his work illustrates the days of Charles II and were damned by Dryden in his Mac Flecknoe. {BDF}
Shaen, William (1821–1887) A Unitarian, Shaen arbitrated in the National Reformer the dispute between Holyoake and Bradlaugh. {VI}
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper [1st Earl of] (1621–1682) Earl Shaftesbury supported religious toleration during the Oliver Cromwell period, but in 1673 he renounced his earlier position because he was suspicious of the king’s favoring the Roman Catholics. A founder of the Whigs, he pressed for the exclusion bill to keep the Roman Catholic duke of York (later James II) from becoming king. When Charles dissolved the 1681 Parliament, Shaftesbury found it expedient to flee to Holland. He is considered one of the most skillful and influential politicians of his day. According to Voltaire, the dominant influence on Pope came from Shaftesbury, particularly his deists’ prayer, “The Universal Prayer.” The Earl did not parade his unbelief, for to do so would have been dangerous. But he was a champion of the deists because of his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm (1708), his Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), and his treatise The Moralists (1709). The anecdote is told that he was overheard by a scrubwoman as he remarked to a number of friends that “All wise men have the same religion.” When the scrubwoman eagerly inquired what this religion of all wise men was, Lord Shaftesbury is said to have replied: “Wise men, madam, never tell.”
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper [3rd Earl of] (1671–1713) The third Earl of Shaftesbury was educated privately under Locke’s supervision. He entered Parliament but quit because of health problems. In Holland, he met Bayle and in 1711 published Characteristicks. Although he attended church and took the Sacrament, Cooper held a deistic view of the Bible and gave a yearly pension to the deist Toland. In philosophy, he deserted Locke for Platonism, and he held an intuitionist ethic. {BDF; CE; CL; EU, A. Owen Aldridge; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}
Shah, A. B. (1920–1981) At his death, Shah was director of the Institute for the Study of Indian Traditions and honorary professor at the Indian Institute of Education, both at Pune in India’s State of Maharashtra. According to Norwegian philosopher Finngeir Hiorth in The Secularist (India, January-February 1991), Shah along with M. N. Roy, Gora, and Periyar was among India’s most interesting atheists. In 1968, he founded the Indian Secular Society. He was also founder-editor of New Quest, a journal of criticism, creative writing, and ideas. And he was an indefatigable crusader for secular humanism. “Secularism,” he wrote in 1968, “primarily means the separation of religion from man’s secular life,” a definition which shows George Jacob Holyoake as the source for his concept. In 1966, he addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris. When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Shah was president of the Indian Secular Society, which he had founded in 1969, and was director of the Institute for the Study of Indian Traditions. Shah died of a heart attack. (See entry for Ramendra.) {FUK; HM2; SHD}
Shahan, Mark (20th Century) Shahan heads the membership committee of Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin
Shaikh, Anwar (1928- ) Shaikh’s Islam: The Arab Imperialism (1998) starts by pointing out the inherent absurdities in the concept of prophethood. The Prophet started by being politically weak and claiming to be a mortal and humble servant of Allah. Once becoming strong, after his move from Mecca to Medina, “he began changing his tone, until he was able to claim himself to be Allah’s Superior.” Muhammmed’s arrogance is expressed, claims Shaikh, in the arrogance of the religion he invented toward all non-Arabs, especially the Jews. Ibn al Rawandi, in commenting about Shaikh’s work, has written,
The notorious episode of the Jewish tribe of the Banu Quraiza, in which Mohammed is supposed to have overseen the slaughter of 800 Jewish men, is seen by Shaikh as “a pathetic model of ethnic cleansing. The Jews suffered this fate when they refused to become Arabs. We cannot find an example of such extreme nationalism so early in history. Yet the Muslims believe that Islam does not recognise nationalism. They insist that it is a message of international brotherhood.” As regards history this is not quite true, of course. It was routine in the ancient world that when a city was conquered the men were killed and the women and children sold into slavery.
Shaikh is editor of a humanist journal, Liberty. Born a Muslim in the Indian city of Gujarat (now Pakistan), he lives in England. In Pakistan the Muslim clergy have demanded his extradition in order that he may be publicly hanged. In an interview with Ibn Al Warrag in The Radical Humanist (June 1999), Shaikh told how after being born near the city of Gujrat (in present-day Pakistan), he was circumcised and brought up “breathing Islam.” In his twenties, however, he began to be skeptical about Islam. He has detailed his becoming a “liberal humanist” in books which he published at his own expense: Islam: The Arab Imperialism; Eternity; Faith and Deception; and Taxation and Liberty, all available from Principality Publishers (PO Box 9181 Cardiff, Great Britain CF2 4YP). Shaikh signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. The Freethinker, November-December 1998}
Shaikh, Younis (20th Century) Shaikh started a group, the Enlightenment, in Pakistan in the early 1990s. It holds public meetings that raise questions about religion and women’s rights. The group has lobbied the Government and Senators and MPs, criticizing the use of the Sharia law. Although he has not been attacked directly, threats have been made against his parents and he has had to give up two jobs. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
SHAKESPEARE AND BARDOLATRY: For “the worship of Shakespeare” as a substitute for Christianity, see the entry for Bardolatry.
SHAKESPEARE, SHAKE-SPEARE, SHAKSPERE Doubt continues as to the authorship of the greatest dramatic pieces and works in the English language—e.g., “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “As You Like It,” “The Comedy of Errors,” the “Sonnets,” and others:
• Baconian Theory holds that the son of a Warwickshire husbandman would not likely have had the skill to write such magnificent works, whereas Francis Bacon (1561-1626) did. Doubters think such a view sounds like social snobbery. • Oxfordian Theory holds that the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550-1604), wrote some or all of the plays. T. J. Looney identified him in 1920, but doubters call his theory “looney.” At the start of the 21st Century, however, more and more are leaning toward the theory’s credibility. • John Fletcher (1570-1625) is thought to have been the collaborator on “Henry VIII,” “Cardenio,” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” the latter work which may have derived in part from a 1613 masque by Sir Francis Beaumont (1584-1616). • Stratfordian Theory holds that William Shakspere (1564-1616 was the author. Charles Chaplin in My Autobiography (1964) and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in a letter to Arnold Zweig (2 April 1937) are just two of many who do not think so. Henry James (1843-1916) wrote in a letter to Violet Hunt (26 August 1903) that he found it “almost as impossible to conceive that Bacon wrote the plays as to conceive that the man from Stratford, as we know the man from Stratford, did.”
The present work will follow the plan of the editors of Harper’s Magazine (April 1999), which describes the two viewpoints:
The Oxfordian Theory was advanced by Mark K. Anderson, author of Prospero’s Bible: The Secret History and Spiritual Biography of the Man who was “Shake-speare”; Tom Bethell, author of The Noblest Triumph; Joseph Sobran, author of Alias Shakespeare; Richard F. Whalen, author of Shakespeare: Who Was He?” and Daniel Wright, co-patron with Sir Derek Jacobi of the De Vere Society of Great Britain.
The Stratfordian Theory was advanced by Jonathan Bate, author of The Genius of Shakespeare; Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human; Marjorie Garber, author of Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers; Irvin Matus, author of Shakespeare, in Fact; and Gail Kern Paster, editor of The Shakespeare Quarterly
In light of such diverse viewpoints, in the present work,
Shakespeare will refer to whoever really was the author of the greatest dramatic pieces and work in the English language (whether or not we ever determine for sure who wrote them.
Shake-speare will refer to Roger Stritmatter’s research, which indicates that the pen name for Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), was Shakespeare, that he wrote under that name because as an earl he could not risk using his own name, and that he was the actual author of most if not all the works ascribed to William Shakspere. Stritmatter, in an eight-year study of an annotation by de Vere of the Bible, found that more than a quarter of the 1,066 annotations and marked passages in the de Vere work appear in Shake-speare. The parallels range from the thematic—sharing a motif, idea, or trope—to the verbal—using names, phrases, or wordings that suggest a specific biblical passage. Stritmatter found the correlation between Shake-speare’s favorite biblical verses and de Vere’s Bible is high: .439 compared with .054, .068, and .020 for Spenser, Marlowe, and Bacon.
Shakspere will refer to William Shakspere (1564-1616), whom most have come to think, perhaps erroneously, wrote the works.
Shakespeare, Sonnets of “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” was, in the past, said to have been written for a fair-haired, wealthy young woman, Viola de Lesseps. However, as pointed out by Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, the editor of The Norton Shakespeare, it was one of a group of 126 sonnets written to a fair-haired, wealthy young man, whom he once described as “the master mistress of my passion.” The first seventeen of the sonnets clearly address a man, and not until the 127 does “the Dark Lady” appear. Greenblatt in response to the question, “How is it that a miserably undemocratic, unenlightened culture 400 years ago could be more tolerant of expressions of same-sex love, or the appearance of it, than our own?”, responded that
Elizabethan England was not in fact more tolerant; our laws on sexual relations, inadequate though they may be, are models of sweet reasonableness compared with the viciously punitive statutes on the books in the 1590’s. But there is considerable evidence that those statutes were rarely, if ever, enforced: charges were rarely brought, juries were consistently unwilling to convict, and many of the most politically powerful figures in the realm were altogether comfortable with expressions of same-sex desire. We, by contract, have prominent politicians like the Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, who voice the opinion that homosexuality is akin to alcoholism and kleptomania. (See entry for Shakspere—the Oxford Argument, in which the homosexual Richard de Vere is thought to have written the sonnets.)
{The New York Times, 6 February 1999}
Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) The greatest playwright and author in the English language–if indeed he wrote all the works ascribed to him–Shakspere was the person who pointed out that “Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.” Santayana in “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare” indicates that Shakspere was not into supernaturalism. The German critic Gervinus declared that Shakspere “wholly discarded from his works . . . that which religion enjoins as to faith and opinion.” He also wrote that “Just as Bacon banished religion from science, so did Shakespeare from art. . . . From Bacon’s example it seems clear that Shakspere left religious matters unnoticed on the same grounds.” Robertson commented, “While there is no record of his having privately avowed unbelief, and certainly no explicit utterance of it in his plays, in no genuine work of his is there any more than bare dramatic conformity to current habits of religious speech; and there is often significantly less. In Measure for Measure the Duke, counseling as a friar the condemned Claudio, discusses the ultimate issues of life and death without a hint of Christian credence.” Prof. J. R. Green in the 19th century wrote, “Often [Shakspere’s] questionings turned to the riddle of life and death, and he leaves it a riddle to the last without heeding the common theological solutions around him.” But, because of his being the best known of all writers in English, and never unequivocally having gone on record concerning his philosophic outlook, Shakspere has been claimed by believers and non-believers alike. Secular humanists empathize with the man born where a Roman road (strata via) crossed an afon (Welsh for the river Avon) near a ford: Stratford-on-Avon. As pointed out by Princeton’s Thomas Marc Parrott, town records show that John, his father, a glover, had been fined twelve pence for failing to remove a dirt heap in front of his house. But the father’s fortunes rose in 1552 when he married Mary Arden, daughter of his father’s landlord. Now the father became the town’s first ale-taster (who supervised the price and quality of ale as well as bread). He continued advancing, becoming a town councilor, chamberlain (keeper of borough accounts), alderman, and in 1568 the bailiff or presiding officer of the Corporation. In such a capacity he granted licenses starting in 1568 to traveling companies of players, leading one to envision that he might have taken the four-year-old William to his first stage play in some guild hall, possibly utilizing complimentary tickets. By 1578, in a turn of fortune, John’s finances were such that he was unable to pay the weekly sum of four-pence for the relief of the poor, and by 1586 he was deposed from his office as alderman because of continued absences from meetings. In 1592, John was reported a “recusant,” one who failed to attend the parish church for fear of being arrested for debt, and one can imagine the effect this had on his family. Mary, William’s mother, had come from a family whose landed gentry included a Robert Arden, who in 1438 had been sheriff of the county; and his descendant, Edward Arden, also once high sheriff, who was executed in 1583 for alleged complicity in a Roman Catholic plot against the life of Queen Elizabeth. William’s mother, in the opinion of Princeton’s Thomas Marc Parrott, likely adhered in secret to her father’s faith. William was baptized as Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere on Wednesday, April 16th, 1564. The oldest surviving child, he studied in a guild school that taught subjects entirely in Latin, including Aesop’s Fables, Cicero, Vergil, Ovid, Terence, Plautus, Seneca, and the Geneva version of the Bible. In what must have embarrassed the family, the son William at age nineteen informed his parents of his need for a speedy marriage to Anne Hathaway, eight years his elder. On November 28th, 1582, friends filed a bond with the Bishop of Worcester, in whose diocese the town of Stratford lay, in order that the couple could marry without the customary delay of a triple announcing of the banns in church. For any such delay would have carried them into the Advent season and by the old church law marriage was forbidden from Advent Sunday until about the middle of January (apparently so as not to distract from the celebration by Christians of Jesus’s alleged birthday). The Bishop granted the license, and Anne’s child Susanna was baptized May 26th, 1583, only six or so months after the revelation. John took no part in the marriage and possibly did not approve of his son’s marrying a poor girl eight years the boy’s elder, but Susanna arrived soon after the marriage ceremony. Two years later Anne presented William with twins, Hamnet and Judith. Thereupon, and perhaps because his wife had “gotten religion” on account of her “sin” that resulted in daughter Susanna, William left the family to make his name and fortune in the evil theatre world of the evil city of London, which Puritans had preached so much against and which obviously attracted the twenty-something writer. Although his references to religion were many and varied, following are a few:
• In religion, what damned error but some sober brow will bless it, and approve it with a text, hiding the grossness with fair ornament? –The Merchant of Venice
• Thrust your head into the public street, to gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces. –The Merchant of Venice
• Methinks sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian. –Twelfth Night
• His worst fault is, he’s given to prayer; he is something peevish that way. –The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Scurvy jack-dog priest! By gar, me vill cut his ears.
–The Merry Wives of Windsor
• Modest doubt is call’d the beacon of the wise. –Troilus and Cressida
• Thou art a proud traitor, priest . . . gleaning all of the land’s wealth into one, into your own hands, cardinal, by extortion. . . . I’ll startle you worse than the sacring bell, when the brown wench lay kissing in your arms, lord cardinal. –King Henry VIII
• We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep. –The Tempest
• I tell thee, churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be, when thou liest howling. –Hamlet
His 154 sonnets are cryptic in their description of his relations with a rival poet, a dark woman, and a handsome man. No one is certain as to who these three, if they were real, actually were. A. L. Rowse, himself a homosexual, claimed Shakspere had no male lover, that he was “a strongly sexed heterosexual” and a man “more than a little interested in women—for an Englishman.” Rowse claimed the Dark Lady was Emilia Bassano Lanier, the daughter of an Italian court musician. (See entry for Shakespeare, Sonnets of.) Many point to atheistic overtones in “The Tempest”:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which is inherent, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant folded, Leave not a rack behind: We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakspere’s successes are internationally known, but not so well-known is that he stayed away from his family in Stratford until his final years, returning as likely the wealthiest man in town. He must have been disturbed by the slander that was circulated about his daughter Susanna, and still more by the imprudent marriage of Judith who, in 1616, married Thomas Quiney in February, the “closed season,” without a special license, resulting in their excommunication. McCabe notes that Shakspere’s work is entirely objective, “his pagan characters using pagan language, his Christian characters Christian, and we have no expression of personal opinion or evidence of contemporaries” about his personal beliefs. “It is therefore impossible to reach a definite conclusion. We may say with the historian Green that there is no depth in ‘the religious phrases which are thinly scattered over his work’ and that in the serious and more or less didactic plays of his last phase he does not apply to the problems of life ‘the common theological solutions’; in other words he gives us the impression of being a simple humanist in his maturity. We can say only that the skeptical interpretation seems more probable than the Christian.” In 1616 William had called for his lawyer, Francis Collins, to make certain changes in his will. The opening paragraph of his will included the following: “I commend my soul unto the hands of God my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing through the merits of Jesus Christ, my Savior, to be made partaker of life everlasting,” words typical of the time and likely were those of his lawyer. In fact, George Bernard Shaw researched the material and concluded, “Shakespeare had no conscious religion.” Shakspere arranged for a marriage portion for Judith, canceled his gift of plate (silver) to her in favor of his little grandchild, Elizabeth (who had become his darling in his last days); left memorial rings to Burbage, Heminges, and Condell; left little or nothing to the just-excommunicated Judith; and left his “second best bed” to his wife, apparently a recognition that their hasty wedding had not resulted in a congenial and happy marriage. He left nothing to any church. The next month, according to the Vicar of Stratford, “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard for Shakspere died of a fever there contracted.” When Virginia Woolf visited Shakspere’s grave at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1934, she noted in A Writer’s Diary (1934) her feelings about how “down there one foot from me lay the little bones that had spread over the world this vast illumination.” In Shakespeare, the Invention of the Human (1998), Harold Bloom concluded that Shakespeare’s religious sentiments will never be known, because “Shakespeare maintained his usual ambiguity in this dangerous area.” He also noted that Hamlet is neither a Protestant nor a Catholic work: “It seems to me indeed neither Christian nor non-Christian, since Hamlet’s skepticism does not merely exceed its possible origin in Montaigne but passes into something rich and strong in Act V, something for which we have no name.” Inasmuch as his only son had died in childhood, and Susanna’s only child, Elizabeth, died childless in 1670, and the three sons of Judith had died long before, Shakspere’s descendants were soon extinct. He achieved his immortality as have all productive humanists: by living on in his works. (See George Santayana’s “The Absence of Religion in Shakespeare; and Les Reid’s “Shakespeare and the Wars of Religion,” New Humanist, December 1995, in which he considers the possibility that Shakespeare was a Catholic. Also, see entry for A. L. Rowse.) {CB; CE; FUK; GL; JMR; JMRH; TRI; TYD}
SHAKSPERE—THE OXFORD ARGUMENTS Tom Bethell, and others who have argued the Oxford Theory in Harper’s Magazine, April 1999, makes the case that no evidence exists to prove that Shakspere wrote anything at all, “let alone the erudite works of ‘Shakespeare.’ ” Yes, the man found work minding the horses of theatergoers, he became an actor as did his young brother Edmund, but he left London in 1604 at the age of forty and soon thereafter sued a neighbor for a malt debt of 35 shillings. Are we, at the height of his powers, led to suppose that “England’s greatest writer threw down his pen, perhaps in mid-play, and headed back to Warwickshire, preferring the milieu of Stratford’s small-claims court and its conveyance office to literary London [?]. Even his will makes no mention of any literary remains. Daniel Wright agrees, pointing out that in the early 1780s, the Reverend Dr. James Wilmot, a friend of Dr. Johnson, researched Shakspere and found he had lived a fairly nondescript life, had no major connection to the literary world, and after an uneventful life was buried without ceremony in a grave that failed even to identify its occupant by name. It was an age during which writers anonymously published pamphlets, books, plays, essays, tracts, and other texts including unflattering satires under a pseudonym in order to escape being hauled before the Privy Council (as was Samuel Daniel for his Philotas). Some were imprisoned (as were George Chapman and Ben Jonson for Eastward Ho); others were mutilated (as were John Stubbs, Alexander Leighton, and William Prynne). Some may even have been assassinated (as was, perhaps, Christopher Marlowe). Princeton’s Gerald E. Bentley attests that “the large majority of all English plays before the reign of Elizabeth are anonymous, and even from 1558 to 1590 the authors of most plays are unknown.” For seven years after the Shakespeare plays began to be printed, they were published without any name at all affixed to them. Not until the end of the sixteenth century did any plays begin to appear in print under the name of “William Shake-speare,” a name that Wright points out “might have been adopted by almost any writer who desired to conceal his title, office, or baptismal name yet wished to assert his identity as a playwright.” Mark K. Anderson points out that Orson Welles and Roger Stritmatter think Oxford wrote the works. Citing “Hamlet,” he notes that the Prince enacts entire portions of Oxford’s life story: “Oxford’s two military cousins, Horace and Francis Vere, appear as Hamlet’s comrade-at-arms Horatio and the soldier Francisco. Oxford satirizes his guardian and father-in-law, the officious bumbling royal adviser Lord Burghley (nicknamed ‘Polus’), as the officious, bumbling royal adviser Polonius. The parallels between Burghley and Polonius are so vast and detailed that even the staunch Stratfordian A. L. Rowse admitted that ‘there is nothing original’ anymore in asserting this widely recognized connection. Furthermore, like Polonius, Burghley had a daughter.” Anderson thoroughly advances similar “proof” that the details of Oxford’s life, not that of Shakspere, had similarly close connections with “Helena,” “Falstaff,” “King Lear,” and “Prospero.” Joseph Sobran makes a convincing argument: Oxford was homosexual, had been accused of “buggering boys,” and he did not put his name to the love sonnets, for “no common poet would have dared make amorous advances to an earl, but another earl might.” The reference is to the Earth of Southampton. The Sonnets were published in 1609, five years after Oxford’s death, their cryptic dedication supplied by the publisher, the dedicatee described as “the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr. W. H.” —the initials, reversed, of Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. “By praising the poet in such terms while presuming to dedicate his poems for him,” Sobran continues, “the publisher invites the inference that the real author was no longer able to speak for himself: he was already dead. (William of Stratford still had seven years to live.) The poet’s self-revelations match Oxford and nobody else in Elizabethan England. If the Sonnets and the other works of Shakespeare had been ascribed to Oxford from the start, it’s hard to imagine that anyone would doubt his authorship today.” Richard F. Whalen, developing the view that Oxford was an excellent writer and had connections with the theatrical world, mentions that research on Oxford has only recently begun, that although it is unlikely “that much more will be found about the Stratford man,” we are left with a choice as to the real author: “The Stratford merchant and theater investor, a simple man of mundane inconsequence? Or the recognized poet, patron of acting companies, and playwright, known at the time to be writing under a pseudonym,; a complex, mercurial nobleman in Queen Elizabeth’s court whose life is mirrored in Shakespeare’s works; a man with direct personal links to the publishers of the First folio? The choice seems obvious.”
SHAMAN Siberian tribes had shamans (“they who know”) who, because of an alleged ability to achieve a communion with the spirit world, guided people with their mystical wisdom. A shaman was said to have been born to his job, having been chosen by a spirit to be a tribe’s magician, medium, or healer. Similar to the African witch doctor and the American Indian medicine man, the shaman shielded mankind from spirits which might be harmful. Ancestor worship is related in that spirits of the dead are believed to continue dwelling in the natural world and can influence the living. Ancestor worship has been ritualized in West Africa and in ancient China, as well as in the Shinto faith and among Melanesians. Somewhat related is the raising of a person, once alive, to the level of a god—some Roman emperors were so elevated in a deification known as apotheosis. (See entry for Emperor worship.)
SHAME • Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. –Anonymous
Shange, Ntozake (1948– ) Shange (born Paulette Williams in Trenton, New Jersey) is a playwright and poet. Her “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf” (1976) is a feminist drama which describes the psychological, emotional, and physical pain some African American women receive from insensitive black men as well as an often hostile environment. Religious liberals quote her poem,
i was cold i was burning up a child & endlessly weaving garments for the moon with my tears I found god in myself & i loved her i loved her fiercely.
Shank, Michael (20th Century) Shank’s family was raised by his mother “to be straight-and-narrow, Bible-believing Christians.” She saw to it that her children went to the local Baptist church each Sunday. “But it didn’t work! I was under the influence of two opposing forces: the inquisitiveness I learned from my grandfather and the religious conservatism of my mother’s church. Eventually, the rational side won over my mind, but Mother’s life and deeds won over my heart.” Now an activist Unitarian in Des Moines, Iowa, Shanks (E-mail: <seeker@dwx.com>) has written that, to him, humanism
means that it’s up to people to solve the world’s problems. God will not do it for us. It also means that our differences—whether they are about religion, race, gender, affectional orientation, politics, or whatever—are miniscule compared to what we have in common as human beings. If I diminish the humanity of someone else, through racism, sexism, religion, or in any other way, I diminish my own humanity.
Shankar, G. N. Jyoti (20th Century) Shankar wrote God–Bubble Pricked (1973) and How to Secularize India? (1977). The son of a Baptist minister in India, he became the general secretary of the Indian Rationalist Association before moving to the United States. Living by the motto of “Goodness is necessary—God is not,” he is webmaster of “Bubbles,” a freethought page on the Web at <http://www.avana.net/~jshankar/index.htm>. Shankar, to illustrate his approval of cremation, went to the Wisconsin Memorial Park in 1978 and with his wife reserved two boxes on the wall “to avoid going six feet under!” His history of freethought in India is on the Web: <http://www.avana.net/~jshankar/hist0001.htm>. E-mail: <jshankar@avana.net>. {CA; E; GS; e-mail to WAS}
Shannon, Julie (20th Century) Shannon, a Unitarian Universalist, is a composer whose musical, “Stones,” won Phoenix, Arizona, Maxie awards in 1994 for best musical, best direction, best actress, best actor, best supporting actress, best supporting actor, best musical direction, and best scenic designs. The play is about the Chicago African American community of the 1920s.
Shapiro, Carl (20th Century) Shapiro wrote Freethought versus Religion (1977), Freethought Works (1979), and Saner Living Through Atheism (1978). He is associated with Freethought Commentary in Paterson, New Jersey. (See entry for New Jersey Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD; GS}
Shapiro, Karl: See entry for Theism.
Shapley, Harlow (1885–1972) Shapley, the former director of the Harvard Observatory, once offered this observation: “Biochemistry and microbiology, with assistance from geophysics, astronomy and other sciences, have gone so far in bridging the gap between the inanimate and the living that we can no longer doubt but that whenever the physics, chemistry and climates are right on a planet’s surface, life will emerge and persist.” Among his writings are Star Clusters (1930), Galaxies (1943), and Of Stars and Men (1958). {CE; CL}
SHARIA The Islamic sharia law in Mogadishu, when carried out, involved fitting the crime to the punishment. In one six-month period in 1995, there were eight hand and foot amputations, and three executions, one by stoning and two by firing squad. The stated authority for the law is the Qur’an.
Sharif, Ahmed (20th Century) Sharif, a professor of English literature, is a Bangladeshi who is an atheist.
Sharma, Bhogendra (20th Century) Sharma, a Nepalese humanist leader, heads the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Centre for Victims of Torture. E-mail: <cvict@mos.com.np>.
Sharp, S. (19th Century) Sharp was an old-time anti-slavery reformer in Ohio. A successful businessman, he gave generously to aid freethought causes. {PUT}
Sharpe, Lynn (20th Century) Sharpe is the wife of R. A. Sharpe, who has described her as “a militant atheist . . . who has never been willing to acknowledge that there is more to religion than a collection of fairy-tales.”
Sharpe, R. A. (20th Century) Sharpe, who has described himself as a “Post-Christian,” wrote The Moral Case Against Christian Theism (1997). The work, commented Daniel O’Hara, “finds more to admire in the character and teaching of Jesus than [Carl] Lofmark, George Wells, or Margaret Knight would have allowed.” However, O’Hara adds, “It is refreshing to have such a clear and unanswerable case against moral theism so well and briefly presented: it is amazing that it emanates from the SCM Press,” which formerly was the publishing arm of the Student Christian Movement. {The Freethinker, May 1997}
Sharpe, Samuel (1799–1881) Both Sharpe and John Kenrick, major historians of Egypt, were Unitarians. Sharpe in 1863 wrote Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity, and in 1871 he wrote The Rosetta Stone. {JMR; JMRH}
Sharukkin - See entry for Sargon.
Shattuck, Roger (20th Century) Shattuck, author of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996), is a senior professor of French and Literature. His work challenges academics and others to resolve the problem of the cultural divide between the humanities and science. Scientifically informed humanists and humane scientists: these are the desired goals, he states. (See entry for Pornography.)
Shaughnessy, P. (19th Century) A Scot and a freethinker, Shaughnessy wrote Is God Knowable? (c. 1880). {GS}
Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950) In his early London years Shaw boldly proclaimed himself “like Shelley, a socialist, an atheist, and a vegetarian.” He told McCabe that for a time he had to live on twelve cents a day. When Charles Bradlaugh died in 1891, leaving the National Secular Society without a leader, Shaw was asked to take on the leadership. However, he called them the fundamentalists of the secularist movement, and they withdrew their offer to make him Bradlaugh’s successor, accusing Shaw of having an outlook that relied on purely mystical assumptions. Shaw had many careers—playwright, critic, journalist, platform spellbinder, protester against censorship, unpopular critic of Britain’s war policies, producer and director of many of his own plays, champion of the rights of women. He had a twenty-five-year exchange with a nun, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, during which both tried and failed to convert the other. She never forgave him for his blasphemous picture of Jesus as “the conjurer” in his fable, The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932). Although he would never allow himself to be called a Christian, he can be classed as an unbeliever only in the sense that there was, as he said at the end of his life, no church in the world that would receive him, or any in which he could consent to be received. Shaw has written, “The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much out of life as Wesley [John Wesley, the founder of Methodism] is an unanswerable question, but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys.” Not everyone appreciated Shaw’s wit nor his dramatic plots. Frank Harris described him as “the first man to have cut a swathe through the theater and left it strewn with virgins.” Oscar Wilde observed, “Bernard Shaw has no enemies but is intensely disliked by his friends.” H. L. Mencken wrote of Shaw, “It is his life work to announce the obvious in terms of the scandalous.” McCabe wrote, “He virulently criticizes Christianity and suggests that Jesus was of unbalanced mind—and equally criticizes Rationalism (and science), following Samuel Butler in the belief that a Vital Principle animates the living universe and that instinct (or the inspiration of this) is the guide, not reason.” George Orwell thought Shaw was probably not a Communist but was “reliably pro-Russian on all major issues.” Shaw was turned down several times before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925. St. Joan was published in 1924. The prize was not awarded until 1926, leading to the author’s Shavian comment, “I wrote nothing in 1925, and that is probably why they gave it to me.” In Bernard Shaw, The Ascent of the Superman (1996), Sally Peters claims the playwright was a gender bender, a Uranian or Urning, terms made fashionable by the Marquess of Queensberry to derogate “queer” people. Although her proofs are not entirely convincing to other scholars, she told of Shaw’s woolly yellow Jaeger one-piece suits which he thought contained one’s body odors. He was a neurotic washer, and he felt his body excrements would be odorless if he stuck to a vegetarian diet. Vaccinations, he held, killed people and should be avoided. Shaw the socialist author left a capitalist estate of $1,028,252. Reaffirming his belief in creative evolution rather than in any specific church creed, he asked that memorials to him that took “the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice” be omitted. His ashes were to be sprinkled at Ayot St. Lawrence. “Personally,” he wrote in his final instructions, “I prefer the garden to the cloister.” After making numerous small bequests, Shaw left the bulk of his sizable fortune for the development of a British alphabet having forty letters. In court, however, the request was lowered to a £500 prize being offered in a competition to select a letter design. At the age of ninety-four, Shaw was lucid but tired during his final days. Biographer St. John G. Ervine has written that to a few close friends Shaw said he was ready, if not longing, for his final rest. On the last day of his life an hour before he died and when visited by a friend, Ellen O’Casey, he said wryly, “Well, it will be a new experience anyway.” (Shaw’s acquaintance with many leading freethinkers is described in The London Heretics by Warren Sylvester Smith. See entry for George Orwell.) {CE; EU, Warren Sylvester Smith; FUK; HNS2; JM; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; WSS}
Shaw, James Dickson (1841–1926) Shaw, an American writer brought up on a cattle farm in Texas, joined the Southern army during the American Civil War and was wounded. He became a Methodist Episcopal minister, but upon studying biblical criticism in order to answer the skeptics his own faith gave way. He then started the Independent Pulpit at Waco, Texas, the only freethought paper in the South, with subscribers in every state and several other countries. Shaw rejected all supernaturalism and wrote The Bible, What Is It? (1892)) as well as The Bible Against Itself. {BDF; Freethought History #15, 1995; PUT}
Shaw, Naomi (20th Century) When Shaw signed Humanist Manifesto II, she was president of the National Women’s Conference, American Ethical Union. {HM2}
Shaw, Robert (1927-1978) Shaw, an author and actor, appeared in various West End productions and as Rosenkrantz in “Hamlet” (1951). He had parts in such movies as “From Russia with Love,” “The Battle of the Bulge,” “A Man for All Seasons,” and “A Town Called Bastard.” On Broadway he was in “Elmer Gantry.” Shaw was a Unitarian.
Shaw, Robert Gould (1837–1863) Shaw, a Union hero in the American Civil War, was the white colonel of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first body of black troops organized in any of the free states. It was a time when so many opposed black troops that the authorities sent the troops by ship rather than by train. But Colonel Shaw had the satisfaction of marching his troops up Beacon Hill in Boston, where at the State House Governor John Albion Andrew proudly cheered them on. In the attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston, South Carolina, Shaw was killed. The Boston Commons today has a sculptured figure of him by Augustus Saint-Gaudens who, like Shaw, was a Unitarian. {CE; EG}
Shawn, William (1907–1992) The son of Benjamin and Anna Bransky Chon, Shawn changed his name by 1932 because “Chon sounded too Chinese.” After dropping out of the University of Michigan when twenty, he worked for six months at $30 a week for a Las Vegas, New Mexico, newspaper called Daily Optic. In 1929 he got a job in Chicago with International Illustrated News. Cecille, his wife and also a journalist, got freelance work with The New Yorker, and Shawn secured a job as reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section. By 1935 he had become associate editor of the magazine, in 1939 became managing editor, and from 1952 until he was fired in 1987 by S. I. Newhouse was The New Yorker’s editor. One hundred seventy writers, artists, and editors, including J. D. Salinger, petitioned to have Shawn rehired, to no avail, this despite the magazine’s never having had a year in which it lost money. Under Shawn’s leadership the magazine was, in fact, the most successful of any in the nation. Newhouse chose, however, to hire Robert Gottlieb. The five-foot-five Shawn was noted for his phobias: he would not live above the second floor because he was afraid of heights; at the theater he sat toward the back, fearing a fire might erupt; he avoided all tunnels and elevators. Rumor had it that he carried a hatchet in his briefcase in the event he got stuck in an elevator. A private public figure who was married for sixty-three years, Shawn was revealed in 1998 by reporter Lillian Ross’s book to have carried on a surprising decades-long affair, a “shadow marriage” in which he had even raised a child (an adopted Norwegian boy, Eric) with her. Following his death in Manhattan of a heart attack in his Fifth Avenue apartment bed, and in accordance with his wishes, he was cremated with no memorial or religious service. His son Allen read John Donne’s poem “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” at the cremation. Also present were wife Cecille, son Warren, and writer Jamaica Kincaid. (Paul Alexander, New York, 27 April 1998)
Sheen, Martin (Ramos Estevez) (1940– ) Sheen, an actor who has appeared in numerous films, in television shows, and on Broadway, has stated, “I’m one of those cliff-hanging Catholics. I don’t believe in God, but I do believe that Mary was his mother.” According to Atheist Celebrities on the internet, Sheen is a non-believer. {TYD}
SHEFFIELD (England) HUMANISTS For information, write Gordon Sinclair, 9 South View Road, Barnsley S74 9EB; telephone 01226 743070.
Shields, Jill (20th Century) Shields is secretary of the Free Inquirers of Northeastern Ohio.
Shields, Susan (20th Century)
For nearly a decade, Shields was a Missionaries of Charity sister who played a key role in Mother Teresa’s organization. How the nun harmed her helpers as well as those they “helped” is described in “Mother Teresa’s House of Illusions,” a damaging article in Free Inquiry (Winter 1997-1998). According to Shields, while huge donations were being amassed, one summer the sisters were given more crates of tomatoes than they could distribute. As an example of Mother Teresa’s thinking, she scolded the sisters for canning the tomatoes, saying that “storing things showed lack of trust in Divine Providence.” Shields cites other examples in her explanation of how she decided to leave whereas others, who had no education beyond what they brought with them when they joined, did not have the courage to walk away.
Sheldon, Lurana (20th Century) Sheldon, a freethinker, wrote Is That You, God? (1900). {GS}
Sheldon, Walter Lorenzo (1858–1907) Sheldon founded the St. Louis Ethical Culture Society in 1886. He had disagreed heavily over what he considered Felix Adler’s anti-scientific attitudes, for he had adopted the scientific method of reasoning in his own attempt to overcome his earlier Fundamentalism. In the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Jeff Hornback has written, Sheldon had an article on the common fallacy of “Agnostic Realism” (1885), in which he contended that “we may not assume that as unknowable which we use as real and knowable.” Hornback adds, “The journal was published by the famous St. Louis Hegelians, who made the city one of America’s two philosophic capitals—the other was Concord, with Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who were closer to the Ethical founders. The Hegelians brought the leading European philosophers to the United States, in translation, and were much too urbane and convivial for the ploddingly moralistic New Englander, Sheldon.” In his diary jottings, Sheldon wrote on 18 May 1888, “Remark. The three different elements to be met in my Society (1) the radical German (2) the conservative American & (3) the Hebrew—how to blend them. . . .! Baffled, baffled by this Hebrew question! cramped by it and never can get away from it. . . . Now I am a stranger among H’s and G’s [Hegelians and Germans]. . . . Resolution. Stop letting Salter, Adler, and the rest treat me as a youth and an apprentice. . . . I have not the worldly tact of Professor A, nor the personal sweetness of W, nor the objective personality of C. . . . Salter is too much in the air, Adler is too much in himself, Weston too much with ladies, Mangasarian too much in Constantinople, Gizycki [George von Gizycki, a German philosopher] too much in the Utilitarianism, Black is too much and too long at one station, Coit alone is amenable to experience.” (See entry for Ethical Culture.)
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (1797–1851) Shelley, best known for her science-fiction novel, Frankenstein (1818), was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin (who must have marveled at the creature he, who had a doctorate, had created). Like her husband Percy, whom she had married after his first wife Harriet committed suicide by drowning herself, Shelley was a freethinking deist, an early example of a female who had no compunction about admitting she was an unbeliever. She and Shelley had one child, Percy Florence Shelley. Underwood has supplied details about the unusual life the Shelleys led: “In 1814, Shelley, not yet separated from his first wife, meeting Mary at the grave of her mother, whither she often fled to escape the scoldings of her step-mother, declared his love for her. The scene, their peculiar circumstances, their daring faith in each other, their youth, their beauty, made for them a romance which was irresistible. On the 14th of July, Harriet, Shelley’s wife, came to London, and Godwin called on her and endeavored to reconcile Shelley to her, not dreaming of the drama going on under his own roof. On the 28th of July, Mary Godwin, aided, abetted, and accompanied by her step-mother’s daughter, Jane Claremont, ran away with Shelley. Mrs. Godwin pursued the party, but could not make them return. Godwin held little or no communication with them until the death of Shelley’s first wife, and their legal marriage. ‘The three,’ says K. Paul in his biography of Godwin, ‘went to Paris, where they bought a donkey and rode him in turn to Geneva, the others walking. He was bought for Mary, as the weakest of the party, but Shelley’s feet were soon blistered, and he was glad to ride now and then, not without the jeers of the passersby. Sleeping now in a cabaret, and now in a cottage, they at last finished the strange honeymoon, and the strangest sentimental journey ever undertaken since Adam and Eve.” When the first Mrs. Shelley drowned herself in 1817, Shelley had hastened home to England to claim the two children of his first marriage. Mr. Westerbrook, the children’s maternal grandfather, however, refused him the custody, and the claims of the father were set aside on the grounds of his “infidelity,” whereupon the children “were sent to be educated in a clergyman’s family, the more surely to save them from any hereditary taint of skepticism.” Death, however, “stilled the hearts of the two eldest of their little children, who had grown so dear to them: taking first William, and then Clara, only the youngest, named for his father, Percy, remaining to them.” One evening when Lord Byron visited them at their Italian villa, only Byron, Polidori, Shelley, and Mary being present, the subject of ghosts, goblins, and wraiths came up. Underwood adds, “The subject had a weird fascination for those poetic, mystic natures, and it held them with its half-defined sense of the horrible until far into the night. As they at last rose to retire, Byron in one of his sudden impulses, said, ‘Let us each write a ghost story!’ All eagerly agreed, and made a compact there and then to do so. No one was to see any part of the others’ manuscript, will all were completed. Like most sudden compacts of the kind, it was only partly carried out.” Mary, who having been brought up in Scotland, the land of “bogles,” “brownies,” and witchcraft, and despite her father’s philosophic teachings had an interest in the “uncanny.” Although the others never carried out the compact, Shelley was delighted with his wife’s specimen, in which Victor Frankenstein says, “With how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries”; and “For the first time, also, I felt what the duties of a Creator toward his creature were, and that I ought to render him happy before I complained of his wickedness.” Colin McCall has pointed out that the 1935 film, “Bride of Frankenstein,” contained an unfortunate prologue in which Mary Shelley tells her husband and Byron, “My purpose was to write a moral lesson of the punishment that befell a mortal man who dared to emulate God.” Nonsense, McCall rejoinders! “Mary Shelley’s ‘monster’ was ‘fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy’; he becomes violent because he is rejected. ‘I am malicious,’ he says, ‘because I am miserable; am I not shunned and hated by all mankind?’ ” Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out that Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his preface to Frankenstein, “had, in order to justify Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment, alluded to Erasmus Darwin’s atheistical view on the possibility of quickening matter by electricity.” Gould in his Dinosaur in a Haystack says of the monster that his misery arises “from the moral failure of other humans, not from his own inherent and unchangeable constitution.” Shelley wrote six novels, five volumes of biographical essays, two “mythological dramas” in verse, a score of short stories, and two volumes of engaging travelogue, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844). In 1997 the British biographer Claire Tomalin came across a handbound manuscript of a long-lost story that Shelley had written for Lady Mountcashell’s daughter Laurette, a thirty-nine page happy children’s story that had lain forgotten for over 170 years. Upon Mary’s death, what was said to be her husband Percy’s heart was found wrapped in her copy of Adonais—however, some skeptics believe the salvaged organ was more likely Shelley’s liver. Although she had wanted to repose in Rome next to her husband, she was buried in the family vault at St. Peter’s church in Bournemouth, along with her husband’s heart, or liver, and their son (Sir Percy Florence Shelley). Also buried there are her parents (William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who were moved from Old St. Pancras in London). Toward the end of her life, she became somewhat interested in religion. (See entries for Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and for Cloning.) {CB; CE; Stephen Jay Gould, “Why Darwin?” New York Review of Books, 4 April 1996; Richard Holmes, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999; JMR; RAT; SAU; TSV; TYD}
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822) Many are the tales about Shelley. He switched from Eton, where he refused to fag (a Briticism to describe English public school boys who are required to act as servant to an older schoolmate), to Oxford. There in a school essay, Shelley wrote that so long as there is theism there needs logically to be the antithesis. But his essay, “The Necessity of Atheism,” (1811), earned no A+. On the contrary, Oxford expelled him. His father, Sir Timothy Shelley, also forbade him his house. Shelley then went to London, wrote Queen Mab, and met Miss Westbrook, marrying her in 1811 and separating after two children had been born. In 1816 he learned that his wife had drowned herself, so he claimed the custody of his children. Lord Chancellor Eldon, however, decided against him, largely because of Shelley’s heretical opinions, which were considered radical in his day but are mild today. Shelley previously had written A Letter to Lord Ellenborough, indignantly attacking the sentence the judge passed on E. I. Eaton for publishing Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. In 1816 Shelley married Mary, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1818, fearing their son might also be taken from him, Shelley left England never to return . . . and never to live to the age of thirty-one. Lamont described Shelley’s outlook as having “a vague pantheistic belief.” His bisexuality and anti-establishment views shocked Europe more than wife Mary’s Frankenstein. His Queen Mab (1813) tells how he wept when his mother took him “to see an atheist burned. . . . The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs; his resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; his death pang rent my heart! The insensate mob uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. ‘Weep not, child!’ cried my mother, ‘for that man has said, “There is no God!” ’ ” On the contrary, Shelley believed “the being called God bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of the philosophers even from themselves.” For Shelley, classical Greece had seen the highest fulfillment of man as a free being; the introduction of Christianity, however, withered man’s spirit and constrained his estimate of himself. For Shelley, “Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.” Queen Mab contains the following: How ludicrous the priest’s dogmatic roar! The weight of his exterminating curses, How light! and his affected charity, To suit the pressure of the changing times, What palpable deceit!—but for thy aid, Religion! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peopleth earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves!
In 1812 Shelley wrote to Elizabeth Hitchener, “I have lately had some conversation with Southey which has elicited my true opinions of God—he says I ought not to call myself an Atheist, since in reality I believe that the Universe is God.” Remarks Berman: “So for Southey the universe (in Shelley’s thought) is another name for God; whereas for Shelley God is another name for the universe. The distinction is not unimportant.” Berman has written a particularly thorough description of Shelley’s views, finding his philosophical method “is closer to that of Hammon, Turner, and Collins than it is to Scepticus’s. It is epistemological rather than metaphysical. Shelley is more interested in the nature of our knowledge and belief in God than in the nature of God per se.” Shelley’s little known “A Refutation of Deism” (1814) has been reprinted in J. C. A. Gaskin’s Varieties of Unbelief (1989). In it, the young Shelley not only rejects the existence of God but also rejects Judeo-Christian revelation, citing its immoral character and suspect historicity. His arguments against “deism” also apply to traditional “theism.” Shelley cites as atheists Epicurus, Democritus, Pliny, Lucretius, and Euripides. He also lists Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, and Plato as being theists. Shelley accidentally drowned off Leghorn while returning in a small yacht from an 1822 visit to his friend, the bisexual Lord Byron. Sharing his fate were his friend Williams and a sailor lad, all of whom had unsuccessfully faced a squall which submerged them. When Shelley’s body washed ashore near Viareggio, its face was so disfigured that his body had to be identified by the copies of Aeschylus and John Keats’s poems doubled back in his jacket. “The face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” wrote the poet’s friend Edward Trelawny. Because of Italian law and a plague at that time, the body had to be cremated on the spot. Trelawny and poets Byron and Leigh Hunt, called by Tom Weil, “perhaps the most literate team of undertakers in history,” performed the ritual. An iron mattock was used to crack Shelley’s skull, which Byron had requested be saved for him. Trelawny said “more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life,” after which Trelawny tossed salt and frankincense onto the flames and poured wine and oil over the cadaver, leading to dancing flames as Shelley cooked. Hunt recalled the “inconceivable beauty” of the flickering flame-sheet. Presently, continued Trelawny, “the corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time. . . but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt.” Arthur Norman, in a 1955 article in The Journal of the History of Medicine, suggested that Shelley may have suffered from “a progressively calcifying heart . . . which indeed would have resisted cremation as readily as a skull, a jaw, or fragments of bone.” Later, Trelawny—who said Shelley was an atheist to the last—presented Shelley’s heart (some say it was his liver) to the poet’s wife, Mary, for burial in Bournemouth, England. In 1889, sixty-seven years after his death, the heart (or liver) was buried with the body of his son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley. However, Trelawny did not give the skull to Byron, for, “. . . remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking cup, I was determined Shelley’s should be so profaned.” Shelley’s ashes, contained in an oak casket, were delivered to the British consul in Rome who, because the Vatican had closed the old section of the Protestant Cemetery, stored the remains in his wine cellar. At Mary’s request, they tried to rebury their son William, who had been buried in the same cemetery three years before, with his father. However, beneath the child’s stone they found, instead, the skeleton of a grown man. So Shelley was buried alone for a time, then moved by Trelawny to a better plot near the rear wall. Byron, despite having a clubfoot and who once swam the Bosporus, swam to the site where Shelley had died, symbolically leaving a flower. Instead of the marble statue of a nude Shelley spread supine, just washed ashore from the fatal shipwreck, which is found in the first quadrangle at Oxford’s University College (where Shelley was “sent down” in 1811 for his freshman tract in favor of atheism), a simple marker decorates the poet’s grave. A white slab embedded in the ground, it contains only his name, the words cor cordium (heart of hearts), the dates of his birth and death in Latin, and Trelawny’s lines from The Tempest:
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Cor Cordium Natus iv. Aug MDCCXCII Obit. vii. Jul. MDCCCXXII
Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.
Today both Trelawny and Keats now lie nearby. Trelawny once wrote, “The principal fault I have to find is that the Shelleyan writers, being Christians themselves, seem to think that a man of genius cannot be an Atheist, and so they strain their own faculties to disprove what Shelley asserted from the very earliest stage of his career to the last day of his life. He ignored all religions as superstitions. . . . A clergyman wrote in the visitors’ book at the Mer de Glace, Chamourni, something to the following effect: ‘No one can view this sublime scene and deny the existence of God.’ Under which Shelley, using a Greek phrase, wrote, “P. B. Shelley, Atheist,” thereby proclaiming his opinion to all the world. And he never regretted having done so.” (BDF; CB; CE; CL; EU, Terry L. Meyers; FO; HAB; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD)
Shepherd, James (1904– ) A freethinker, Shepherd was on the executive committee of the National Secular Society in England and worked for civil liberty causes. {TRI}
Shepherd, Luke (19th Century) In 1836 Shepherd edited a freethought publication from Rochester, NY, The World As It Is.
Sheppard, Hugh Richard Laurie (20th Century) Sheppard is the author of What Can We Believe? (1939). {GS}
Sherer, Naomi (20th Century) Sherer is on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association.
Sherman, Marian (1892–1975) Sherman was born and educated in England but emigrated with her parents to Canada and worked as a medical missionary in India from 1922 to 1934. A physician, she was a co-founder of the Victoria Humanist Fellowship and told The Star (Victoria, 17 March 1955), “The concepts of personal immortality and a personal deity are irrational. That which cannot be made clear in words (e.g., God) cannot exist.” Commenting upon how people hate the word atheist, she said, “They think there is something evil about it. It only means a person who doesn’t believe in a supernatural being over us.” Sherman, a physician, in 1975 was given the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award. {WWS}
Sherman, Robert I. (20th Century) Sherman, a radio talk host and an atheist activist, is heard on AM Radio WKTA, Chicago. “My notoriety,” he has written, “comes from attacking virtually every state/church separation violation within shouting distance of Chicago. Victories include: Removal of Christian crosses from city seals in numerous nearby municipalities. Enging Buffalo Gorve, Illinois, Police Department exclusion of atheists from their public education program, formerly known as ‘Boy Scouts Explorers Post’ but now known as ‘Police Cadets.’ Ending forced acknowledgement of the Judeo-Christian god in compulsory recitation of pledge of allegiance in Illinois public schools. Removal of Christian crosses that adorned the Kane County, Illinois, government center.” {CA}
Sherman, Robert I. ( ) Sherman, is a Midwestern civic activist and radio talk-show host. He publishes Liberal News and Commentary (at http://www.robsherman.com/liberalnews/home.html) and hosts a talk show on Radio 1530 WJJG in the Chicago area. In addition to founding We Need Seat Belts, a civic organization dedicated to getting the belts on all busses and railroad passenger cars, he is the active founder of National Atheists (http://www.nationalatheists.org/) and makes appearances where church/state separation is discussed by the national media. Of religion he has said, “My notoriety comes from attacking virtually every state/church separation violation within shouting distance of Chicago. Victories include: Removal of Christian crosses from city seals in numerous nearby municipalities; ending Buffalo Grove, Illinois, Police Department exclusion of atheists from their public education program, formerly known as “Boy Scouts Explorers Post,” but now known as “Police Cadets”; ending forced acknowledgement of the Judeo-Christian god in compulsory recitation of pledge of allegiance in Illinois public schools; removal of Christian crosses that adorned the Kane County, IL (50 miles west of Chicago) government center." {CA}
Sherman, William Tecumseh [Union General] (1820–1891)
Sherman was a Union general in the American Civil War. A banker in San Francisco and New York and a lawyer in Leavenworth, Kansas, he became superintendent of what today is Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge. When Louisiana seceded, he resigned the university post, rejoined the U. S. Army as a colonel, and commanded a brigade in the first battle of Bull Run. He distinguished himself in the Vicksburg and Chattanooga campaigns and took Atlanta in 1864, burning the city. After capturing Savannah, he wreaked havoc through South Carolina and received the surrender of General J. E. Johnston in 1865. Sherman’s statement that “war is hell” expressed his belief in the need for ruthlessness in modern warfare.
He “did not believe that God was molding events in response to human petition, conduct, or spiritual state,” stated Charles Royster in The Destructive War W. T. Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (1991). He cites David F. Boyd as recalling that Sherman’s “only peculiarity about religion was that he was such an advocate for individual religious freedom, that he thought it wrong ever to attempt to influence any one’s religious convictions. I have often heard him about this: if I could I would not change the religion of a Hottentot or Feejee Islander, etc. etc.” Sherman was married for almost forty years to a devout Roman Catholic, and although their children were reared as Catholics Sherman joined no church. “He regarded organized religion as a human invention and dismissed the doctrines of the Trinity and of transubstantiation as ‘mathematical impossibilities.’ He prefaced mention of the immortality of the soul with the word ‘if.’ Sherman,” Boyd continued, “did not oppose belief or the practice of Christianity. Chaplains accompanied his army, and revival meetings among soldiers went on during the George and Carolina campaigns.”
When religious ministers sought permission to ride the railroad to the front lines, Sherman responded, “Certainly not; crackers and oats are more necessary to my army than any moral or religious agency.” According to Royster, “To Sherman war was a natural phenomenon, guided by nature’s laws, which God had created but which operated with the consistency of mathematics, not by God’s ‘mere fiat.’ As for an afterlife, Sherman remained an agnostic. Royster added that Sherman “mistrusted metaphysics, philosophy, and religious or ethical systems that tried to change what he took to be human nature.”
Shermer, Michael (20th Century) Shermer, editor of Skeptic, wrote Why People Believe in Weird Things. He is a non-believer. {CA}
Sherrington, Charles Scott [Sir] (1857–1952) Sherrington was an English neurophysiologist who was educated at Cambridge. As a physician, he did important work in the study of cholera and of diphtheria and tetanus antitoxins, resulting in the improvement of health and safety conditions in British factories during World War I. He was knighted in 1922. With E. D. Adrian Sherrington shared the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries regarding the function of the neuron. Although he did not call himself a materialist, he virtually recommends it in his works. In The Brain and Its Mechanism (1933), Sherrington holds that in time science will show “how the brain does its thinking.” Sherrington was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {CE; JM; RE}
Shinn, Quillen Hamilton (1845–1907) Shinn, a West Virginian who fought for the Union and who spent time in a Confederate prisoner of war camp, studied with Ebenezer Fisher at St. Lawrence University and became one of the greatest builders of Universalist churches of his time. He traveled over 25,000 miles a year, preached in every state, and started “about fifty” churches and the same number of Sunday schools. {U; U&U}
SHINTO The ancient Japanese native religion of Shinto had no one god who ruled over the other gods, but the sun goddess was exalted above the others. Kami, meaning above or superior, was a word designating deities, supernatural beings who originated after chaos gave birth to heaven and earth. At first, there were three rulers of the Heavenly Plain (which one should not confuse with the Christian or Jewish “Heaven”). More followed, and eventually a pair—Izanagi and Izanami—ruled the “bridge of heaven,” stood on the rainbow, and created, after piercing with a jeweled spear, the island now known as Japan, to which they descended. The sun goddess Amaterasu-o-mi-kami and her brother Susa-no-wo, the storm god, have been claimed to be the direct ancestors of Jimmu, who in 660 B.C.E. was also claimed to have been the first Emperor of Japan. For Asian children, the myth was a constructive way to explain origins as well as ethics and morality. For example, Susa-no-wo was known for his disorder, roughness, and evil, and parents used his symbolic traits in discussing bad behavior with their sons and daughters. (See entry for Fukuzawa. For an estimate of the number of Shintoists worldwide, see the entry for Hell.) {CE; ER}
Shipley, Maynard (1872–1934) Shipley, husband of writer Miriam Allen deFord, was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I. A lecturer on astronomy and evolution, he wrote thirty-three “Little Blue Books” and was founder and president of the Science League of America. Shipley died thirteen months after signing the manifesto and, following her husband’s request for cremation, de Ford then spread his ashes in the San Francisco Bay he had so deeply loved, an unusual act and one which disturbed some Californians at that time. Shipley, a popular public and radio lecturer wrote The Key to Evolution (1927) and The War on Modern Science (1929). {EW; FUS; HM1}
Shirley, Ralph B. (20th Century) Shirley, a freethinker, wrote God, the Greatest Hoax (1971). {GS}
Shisler, Charles (20th Century) Shisler, a humanist, has written in The American Rationalist that humanism needs to include the following principles:
Whereas the Universe is the sum total of everything existing in infinite space, we know that whatever entities exist, they are part of the Universe and that there can be nothing external to the Universe, causative or otherwise. We recognize we must master our own destiny, using unique powers of reason and methods of science to comprehend the Universe and solve problems, and we vigorously oppose all efforts to denigrate human intelligence.
He also finds that humanism as a philosophy differs from other outlooks, that as humanists, in his opinion,
We value our sense of humor—that antidote to pomposity—whose acid wit can erode foundations of majestic memorials to enshrined error. We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of perversion and ideologies of violence—and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in ennobling service to others. We believe in optimistic hope rather than despair, learning in place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy and beauty rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in place of fear, love instead of hatred, reason over blind faith.
SHIT The uses of human defecation or excrement, vulgarly called shit, are positively described by J. C. Jenkins in The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure (1998).
Shockley, Patricia (20th Century Shockley is Secretary of the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association. She is a co-founder of the Columbus chapter of that association.
Shoemaker, Lene Lund (20th Century) Shoemaker is a leader of the Danish Unitarian Church. (See entry for Danish Unitarian Church.)
Shook, Eric (20th Century) Shook, while a student at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was one of the founding members of the Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Shor, Morton (20th Century) Shor, an atheist, is co-author with Rabbi William E. Kaufman of A Question of Faith: An Atheist and a Rabbi Debate the Existence of God (1993). The letters quoted, in which each develops his points, show that the rabbi refuses to listen to the atheist and Shor is left trying to show how shallow and false are the rabbi’s arguments.
Short, Renée (1917 - 2003) In 1986, Mrs. Short was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. A member of Parliament, she was instrumental in getting the Abortion Law Reform Act placed on the Statute Book in England. She was a Labour MP from 1964 to 1987. In 1978 she presided over the Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress in London. In 1979 she wrote The Case of Long-term Prisoners.
Shosky, John Edwin (1955– ) Shosky, assistant professor of philosophy at American University in Washington, D.C., addressed the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), speaking about “Propositions Without Proof.” A communication consultant and speechwriter, he has been a senior policy analyst at the White House’s Office Publication Affairs (1988). From 1995 to 1997, he was Vice President of the Bertrand Russell Society. Shosky edited Philosophical Essays: Antony Flew (1998), collecting twelve essays by the renowned atheist philosopher.
Shotwell, David A. (20th Century) Shotwell is a freethinker who has written “Knowledge, Truth, and Science” for The American Rationalist (September-October 1995). Shotwell, James Thomson (1874–1965) Shotwell was assistant general editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1904–1905) and from 1907 onward taught history at Columbia University. His rationalism is expressed in Religious Revolution of To-day (1913), in which Shotwell includes a naturalistic theory of the origin of religion as well as an account of the dissolution of Christianity. {RAT}
SHROUD OF TURIN: See entries for Turin Shroud and for Hoaxes, Religious.
SHS SHS is an abbreviation for Secular Humanist Society, and many such groups meet regularly in American cities, usually publishing their own newsletters. They have banded into an Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies (ASHS), a network for mutual support. All are associated with the Council for Secular Humanism, Box 664, Buffalo, NY 14226.
Shuemaker, Harry R. (1938– ) Shuemaker, a 13th generation Unitarian Universalist, traces his ancestry from John and Priscilla Alden and the Mayflower. His great, great, grandfather joined the Universalist church of Avon, Illinois, in the 1880s, the minister being the Rev. Miss Anna Flemming. Shuemaker, a retired high school social studies teacher, is an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Geneva, Illinois, a church that dates to 1842. He claims to be a “humanistic/naturalistic/theistic/ Christian/plus a tiny pinch of pagan UU.” “Non-believers,” he holds, “seems to say that we don’t believe anything when, in fact, we believe so much that it cannot be easily written down. I like such phrases or labels as ‘Believers in the Free Spirit,’ ‘the Free Mind,’ and ‘the Open, Loving Heart,” or something like that. Or just Unitarian Universalist will do.” E-mail: <hs4rocky@interaccess.com>.
Shuford III, R. L. (20th Century) When Shuford signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was an instructor at the Charlotte Country Day School. {HM2}
Shute, J. Ray (20th Century) The Hon. J. Ray Shute from North Carolina in 1952 was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Siano, Brian (20th Century) Siano, a freelance writer in Philadelphia, writes about skepticism, UFOs, and similar subjects for various publications, including The Humanist, of which he has been a senior editor.
Sibbern, Gabriel (19th Century) Sibbern, a Danish philosopher, wrote Om Humanisme (On Humanism, 1858), which was rationalistic and emphasized humanism as “a view of life.”
Siciliano, Pietro (1835–1885) Siciliano, who had been professor in the University of Bologna, wrote Positive Philosophy, Socialism, Darwinism and Modern Sociology (1879). He wrote the rationalistic Modern Psychogeny, with a preface by J. Soury (1882). {BDF; RAT}
SIDDHARTHA: See entry for Gautama.
Sides, Ellen (20th Century) Sides is a member of the Committee of the Association of Irish Humanists, County Wicklow, Ireland. In New Humanist (February 1995), she made the point that “the case of humanism is not best served by speaking of those with religious beliefs.” Sides is editor of the Newsletter of the Association of Irish Humanists.
Sidgwick, Henry (1838–1900) Sidgwick was the son of a clergyman and cousin of Archbishop Benson, but when he took a course at Cambridge he became a Rationalist. In 1869 he was appointed professor of moral philosophy, resigning on account of the religious tests. When these were abolished two years later, he became a lecturer on moral and political philosophy and later Knightsbridge Professor. The basis of Sidgwick’s thought was British utilitarianism, and he held that the doctrine of common sense rests on the principles of utilitarianism. Morley’s Recollections (1917) states that Sidgwick “broke with orthodox Christianity in an early stage of his life and seems to have made no return to it.” Mrs. Sidgwick confirmed this in a biography (1906), saying that “half a dozen bishops tried hard to get him to die as a Christian” and gave him Christian burial, but “his old hope of returning to the Church of his fathers had not been fulfilled.” Sidgwick was a theist, McCabe notes. {RAT; RE}
Sidney, Algernon (1617–1678) Sidney was an English Republican, the second son of Robert, Earl of Leicester. He became a colonel in the Army of Parliament and a member of the House of Commons. Sidney’s liberal ideas were set forth in his Discourses Concerning Government (published 1698), a treatise that had great influence on the 18th-century political thought, particularly in the American colonies. On the Restoration, he remained abroad until 1677 but, being implicated in the Rye House Plot, was condemned by Judge Jeffreys to be executed on Tower Hill 7 December 1678. On the scaffold, Sidney refused the aid of any minister of religion. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Siebold, John (20th Century) “Curricula in universities are decidedly naturalist in character if not outright atheist in content,” Siebold has noted (Free Inquiry, Spring 1999).
Siegal, Sue (20th Century) Siegal is an editor of the newsletter of the Capital District Humanist Society, PO Box 2148, Scotia, NY 12302.
Siegel, Hannah L. (20th Century) Siegel in 1954 was a member of the board of directors of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association.
Siegfried, Andre (1875–1959) A French economist, historian, and academician, Siegfried is said by Charles Mayer to have been a naturalistic humanist. One of Siegfried’s works was America in Mid-Century (1955). (See entry for Charles Mayer.)
Sierichs, William Jr. (20th Century) Sierichs is a Biblical scholar. He has written “The Pagan Origins of Biblical Morality, or Where Did Moses Really Get Those Commandments From?” in The American Rationalist (January/February 1995). His “Daniel in the Historians’ Den” was written for The Skeptical Review (July-August 1996). Sierichs writes of the influence of Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and others. (See entry for Freedom of Religion.)
Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph [Count] (1748–1836) Sieyès was a French revolutionary and statesman. A clergyman before the Revolution, he was known as Abbé Sieyès. He advocated the formation of the national assembly and participated in the writing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the constitution of 1791. As a member of the Convention, he voted for the execution of King Louis XVI. His prudent silence enabled him to live through the Reign of Terror, and in 1794 he became active in the government again. In 1799 he entered the Directory, then conspired with Napoleon Bonaparte in the overthrow of the Directory by a coup d’état. After the Bourbon restoration, he lived in exile in Brussels. Although named as one of the few priests who took a prominent part in the Revolution, Sieyès wrote that he “evaded every occasion of clerical work” before that time and was a freethinker who never returned to the Church after taking part in the Revolution. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Sifakis, Carl (20th Century) Sifakis is author of Hoaxes and Scams (1995), in which he finds “considerable evidence” that, although many find it hard to understand why so many people fall for a hoax or fraud, financial or other gain is an important factor and it is the victims who often are “the dishonest.” The work details alphabetically all kinds of scams. He describes the fake Piltdown Man, various evidences for Bigfoot, hoaxes connected with “spirit rappings,” poltergeists, ghosts, and claims by religious messiahs. Ghosts, Sifarkis states, are embedded in British culture. In the United States, “messiahs” are more common.
Siffle, Alexander François (1801–1872) Siffle was a Dutch writer who studied law at Leyden and became notary at Middleburg. A contributor to De Dageraad, Siffle was a man of wide reading. {BDF}
Sigismund, John [King] (16th Century) The first Unitarian king in history, King John of Transylvania called the Diet of Torda in 1568, at which time his court preacher Francis David spoke in favor of religious toleration for all religious groups. The king then issued the first edict of religious toleration in modern Western history. It read in part, “Preachers shall be allowed to preach the Gospel everywhere, each according to his own good, if not they shall not be compelled. . . . No one shall be made to suffer on account of his religion, since faith is the gift of God.” Upon the king’s death, the new ruling prince confiscated churches and schools, giving them to the Roman Catholic church. He also imprisoned the first Unitarian bishop, David Ferenc, who died in 1579. In 1948, the Communist regime also confiscated schools and church properties. However, a Unitarian church still exists in Romania, although it since has had to withstand the intolerance of Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Communists. {CE; EU, Paul H. Beattie}
Sigward, M. (Born 1817) Sigward was an active French democrat and freethinker, the compiler of a Republican calendar. He took part in the International Congress at Paris in 1889 and was one of the editors of Le Danton. {BDF}
Sik, Toma (20th Century) Sik is secretary of the Israel Secular Humanist Association in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Sikes, Mary Ellen (20th Century) Sikes founded and is coordinator of the Central Virginia Secular Humanists, a chapter of Washington Area Secular Humanists. Also, she is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism and a contributing editor to the Secular Humanist Bulletin.
SIKH A Sikh is an adherent of Sikhism, a monotheistic religion founded by the guru Nanek in northern India in the 16th century, one which combines elements of Islam and Hinduism. Sikhs refuse to recognize the Hindu caste system, forbid idolatry and pilgrimages, and believe that the soul goes through several cycles of death and rebirth before becoming liberated. They are known for five distinctive K’s: the kesh (uncut hair covered, in the case of men, by a turban); the kanga (comb, to keep the hair neat); the kachera (short trousers worn under outer garments); the kirpan (or sword, usually worn in a small version on a key chain or elsewhere); and the kara (an iron bangle worn on the wrist). (For an estimate of the number of Sikhs worldwide, see entry for Hell.)
Silk, Joseph (1942– ) Silk and John D. Barrow wrote The Left Hand of Creation (1994), in which they explain the most recent findings in cosmology.
Siller, Sidney (20th Century) Siller, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was chairman of the Committee for Fair Divorce and Alimony Laws. {HM2}
Sillman, Jerry (20th Century) Sillman is an activist with Rationalists of East Tennessee, 1036 Thompson Bridge Road, Maryville, Tennessee 37801.
SILOISM: See entry for Humanist Movement, which is distinct from and often antithetical to the movement represented by the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Silone, Ignazio (Secondo Tranquilli) (1900–1978) An humanist, novelist, and journalist, Silone founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921. As an anti-Fascist lived in exile in Switzerland from 1930 to 1945. He wrote Fontamara 91933), Bread and Wine (1937), and A Handful of Blackberries (1952). His memoir in The God That Failed (1950) illustrated how a European ex-Communist changed. {CE; OEL}
Silson, Roy (20th Century) Silson, who has written for New Humanist, had an early interest in Mendelian principles, leading to his having specialized in the more complex genetics of those utility and fitness qualities important in evolution and practical breeding.
Silver, Queen (1910–1998) By the age of seven, Silver had read Darwin and Haeckel, and less than two years later she delivered a series of lectures in Los Angeles on such subjects as Darwin, human nature in the animal world, Mexico, and Peru. When eleven, she publicly challenged William Jennings Bryan to a debate on evolution. Bryan declined. In Inglewood, California, from 1923 to 1932, Silver published Queen Silver’s Magazine. She helped to found a Los Angeles group which later became Atheist United, and she has been a member of many freethought and humanist organizations. Her journals and personal papers were left to the Center for Inquiry libraries. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999; Freethought Today, January-February 1998; WWS}
Silverman, Carl (1956- ) An agnostic and freethinker whose parents were Jewish, Silverman of Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, challenged the owner of the Hagerstown, Maryland, Suns, a Class A affiliate baseball team of the Toronto Blue Jays. The owner was giving church-themed discounts to Sunday games if individuals brought a bulletin from their church. Inasmuch as the city of Hagerstown owns the stadium, Silverman took his case to the Maryland Commission on Human Relations, which found “probable cause” that the promotion violated state antidiscrimination laws. Silverman told the press, “It irked me that if you bring a church bulletin, you are treated better, you get a better deal.” Saying he rejects all religion as being a brand of mental illness, he formerly had waged a successful battle with his local school district to keep the Gideons from distributing Bibles throughout the public schools. Also, he forced the State of Pennsylvania to remove crosses from two state parks. {The New York Times, 2 May 1999}
Silverman, David (1966– ) Silverman, a professional inventor who works for American Telephone and Telegraph, has filed more than eighty patents. He has compiled an American Atheist mailing list and can be reached at <hdiweb@gtminet.net>.
Silverman, Herb (20th Century) Silverman, a professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston, is an active secular humanist in the Greenville, South Carolina, area, where he is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. In 1992 when he applied to become a notary public, he struck “God” out of the phase “so help me God” on the application. South Carolina’s Governor Carroll A. Campbell Jr. and its Secretary of State Jim Miles rejected the application. But in 1995, Fifth Circuit Judge Thomas L. Hughston Jr. ruled (Order 94-CP-40-3594, 2 August 1995) that state laws requiring officeholders to sign oaths affirming the existence of a deity are unconstitutional. The Wall Street Journal (9 August 1995) recognized Silverman’s achievement by placing him in their “winners” column. Commented The Economist, “Mr. Silverman, raised in the Jewish faith, says he will enjoy being a notary public if he wins his case. He hopes it will ‘change the hearts and minds of some of my fellow South Carolinians who don’t believe that atheists can be moral and ethical people.’ ” Silverman signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. His homepage can be seen at <http://math.cofc.edu:8080/~kunkle/herb.html>. {“In (blank) we trust,” The Economist, 12 October 1996; Freethought Today, September 1995}
Silverman, Joell (20th Century) When Silverman signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was chairman of the Religious Education Committee, American Ethical Union. {HM2}
Simcox, Edith (1844–1901) Simcox was author of Natural Law, and she wrote on the Design Argument in the Fortnightly Review, using the signature “H. Lawrenny.” Simcox was a rationalist and non-theist. {BDF}
Simcox, George Augustus (1841–1885) Simcox was an English poet who brought out editions of Juvenal, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and others. He wrote History of Latin Literature (1883). Simcox, who was influenced by Swinburne and Morris, wrote about such rationalists as Renan, Shelley, and Harriet Martineau. His own skepticism is seen in Poems and Romances (1869) and in a drama, Prometheus Unbound (1867). {RAT}
Simcox, John V. (20th Century) With Warren Sandel and Raymond Winch, Simcox wrote Is the Roman Catholic Church a Secret Society? (1946). {GS}
Simmermacher, Donald G. (20th Century) A New Mexican social worker, Simmermacher is a secular humanist who has written for Free Inquiry (Spring, 1986).
Simmons, Albert (20th Century) Simmons, who used the pseudonym “Ignotus,” wrote Agnostic First Principles (c. 1900). {GS}
Simmons, Bayard (20th Century) Simmons was the first “suffra-gent” imprisoned for female suffrage (1906). His poems are found in Fanfare for Freethought (1938). {TRI}
Simmons, J. W. (20th Century) A freethinker, Simmons wrote Checking Up on the Bible By Facts of Science (1947). {GS}
Simmons, Philip (20th Century) Simmons, an English professor at Lake Forest College, is author of Deep Surface (1997). A Unitarian Universalist, he has written about nature’s “Wild Things—e.g., grouse, turkey, rabbit, squirrel, fox, ferret, beaver, bobcat—that so many of us overlook. {World, November-December 1998}
Simms, Carolyne (20th Century) Simms wrote Letters from a Roman Catholic (1976). {GS}
Simon de Tournai (13th Century) Simon de Tournai was a professor at Paris University early in the 13th century. He reportedly said that “three seducers”—Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad–“have mystified mankind with their doctrines.” As a result, he was said by unnamed Christian authorities to have been punished by God for his impiety. {BDF}
Simon, Barbara (20th Century) Simon is a lawyer married to Skipp Porteous. The two have made their Institute for First Amendment Studies, which is based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a major organization that studies individuals and groups—including religious—violate the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Both Simon and her husband are Jewish.
Claude Simon, art
Simon is a prominent French writer (born in 1913; won Nobel Prize in 1985). From his interview in The Paris Review (Spring 1992):
(about his early education)
INTERVIEWER: What was the name of the boarding school?
SIMON: Stanislas College, which is actually a grammar school in Paris. My mother was very pious and had wanted me to receive a religious education.
INTERVIEWER: Did this institution have any effect on you emotionally or intellectually?
SIMON: I became an atheist. That, it seems to me, is evident in my books.
(Later....)
SIMON: Shakespeare wrote: Life is "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That is also my way of thinking. Except that for me life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art... (ellipsis in original).
Simon, François Jules (1814–1896)
Simon taught philosophy at the Sorbonne but was deposed for protesting against Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1851. In 1871, Simon became Minister of Public Instruction, Life-Senator, President of the Council, and a member of the French Academy. Although French Rationalists disliked his leniency to the Church, he was an outspoken non-Christian theist in his La religion naturelle (1856) and Dieu, patrie, liberté (1883). {RAT; RE}
Simon, John Ivan (1925– ) Simon is a film and drama critic known for his acerbity, judiciousness, censoriousness, approbation, nit-picking, affirmativeness, and a variety of other disparate qualities which have made him loved as well as feared by individuals throughout the world of theatre. “Since ‘Sacrilege’ is a Catholic play,” he thundered in a typical New York critique (13 November 1995) about a nun who challenges the Vatican to open the priesthood to women, “let me make my confession. I have no use for organized religion of any kind, and don’t give a rap whether Sister Grace, who so fervently desires it, makes it from nun to priest. Consequently, all the thrashing about in Diane Shaffer’s play leaves me out.” Born in Yugoslavia, Simon came to the United States when he was sixteen. A graduate of Harvard, he has been a film and drama critic on the staffs of a variety of magazines. He is author of Acid Test (1963), Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline (1980), and The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays (1989).
Simon, Maud (20th Century) A freethinker, Simon wrote Speaking For Myself, or Some Personal Points of View (1945). {GS}
Simon, Neil (1927- ) In a biography, Neil Simon Rewrites, he reminisced about religion’s indelible mark:
So there I sat at the party drinking anything they put before me. I was completely stunned, not from liquor but from emotion. I knew how it felt to be drunk but I didn’t know how to feel success. Was there something inside of me which allowed me to enjoy my moment but not be elated or overcome with it? I had been taught somewhere in my backgound that Jews did not gather around a campfire talking about the possessions they had with them, for they would surely be gone in the morning. You did not boast about your good fortune because God would certainly punish a boaster. I was not overly religious, in fact hardly religious at all, but your culture, by osmosis, or what you hear around the dinner table as a boy, brands fears and superstitions into your mind forever. {CA}
Simon, Richard (1638–1712)
A devout Catholic who refuted Protestantism, Simon was a champion of the Bible against Spinoza. But then, in his L’histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), he impugned the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. As a result, his French translation of the New Testament, a four-volume work called Bibliothèque Critique, was suppressed and the translation was condemned by Bossuet and the Archbishop of Paris. Simon wrote always as an avowed believer, but his work gave a new breadth of footing to the deistic arguments. {BDF; ER; JMR; JMRH}
Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–468? B.C.E.) Simonides, a Greek lyric poet, wrote much which was lost, but his encomia, epinicia, and dirges were excellent. Two of his finest epitaphs are on the fallen at Marathon and at Thermopylae. “The longer I consider the subject of God,” he declared, “the more obscure it becomes.” {TYD}
Simonis (16th Century) Simonis was a Polish physician who was persecuted for his opinions given in an atheistic work entitled Simonis Religio, published at Cracow in 1588. {BDF}
Simons, John (20th Century) While a student at Western Washington University, Simons was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Simons, Minot (20th Century) A Unitarian minister, Simons once stated, “The theory of evolution has removed the entire foundation of the doctrine of the fall of man and of the inherent depravity of human nature.”
Simpson, George (Died c. 1844) Simpson, of the Glasgow Zetetic Society, put forward a Refutation of the Argument a priori for the Being and Attributes of God (1838). It was a reply to two Scots, Clarke and Gillespie, in which he used the signature “Antitheos.” {BDF}
Simpson, George Gaylord (1902–1984) Simpson, a paleontologist, anthropologist, and a chairman of the Department of Geology and Paleontology, The American Museum of Natural History, New York City, wrote This World of Life: The View of an Evolutionist (1964), The Meaning of Evolution (1967), and Biology and Man (1969). Asked to comment on humanism, Simpson wrote to the present author:
Naturalistic Humanism, as I understand and accept it, is the view that all that we can possibly know or verify exists or occurs in nature, that is, in the physical universe. The supernatural is not philosophically excluded; it is simply unknowable. Supposed knowledge of the supernatural, when not merely bogus, is an error as to the significance of certain natural activities of the human mind and emotions. These activities, generally labeled as religious, are real and may be profoundly valuable, but they are a part of human nature, not a contact with the supernatural. There is no proved limit to what we may know within the framework of naturalism. It follows that what we now believe is always provisional and relative to the progress of knowledge in general. A believer in naturalism cannot be dogmatic even on this point, but the whole history of mankind testifies that acceptance on faith of supernatural, or of non-natural, postulates or hypotheses is stultifying at best. My concept of naturalism further includes these beliefs: that men and mankind are worthy both individually and as a whole; that they are responsible to and for themselves and to and for each other; that they have legitimate natural (not supernatural) values and morals; and that they are perfectible through their own resources. I take it that these views make my naturalism also humanistic in some sense of that abused word. Of course all this must here be said too briefly to be unambiguous. For instance, it is imperative to add that perfectibility, as I mean it, does not imply a single, static, and definable state of perfection or beatitude. It implies, rather, a relative goal, always receding, constantly to be redefined, and not necessarily or even desirably the same for all of us.
After his death, his daughter, Joan Simpson Burns, while rummaging through some of his papers came across a novella, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, which she published in 1996. It is about a mid-22nd-century scientist who experiments with the quantum theory of time and accidentally gets caught between two particles of time, disappearing but reappearing eighty million years in the past. That made Magruder the only Homo sapiens on earth, and the novella goes into how he made tools, survived on dinosaur meat, eggs, and figs, and carved onto stone slabs a record of his experiences. Eighty million years later, in the Rocky Mountains, the slabs are located. Finding a tyrannosaur, Magruder writes that “it was a reptile, a dinosaur 15 feet high as it poised on its ponderous hind legs, 30 feet long from its obscene snout to the end of its great, tapered tail. . . . Its small, two-toed hands were held up beneath its tremendous jaw in a way that might have seemed ludicrously ladylike if the intention had not been so obviously grim. Its teeth were six-inch daggers and gleamed white as it swung its ponderous head to face me.” Despite such pedagogical language, Prof. Alan Lightman and Stephen Jay Gould see another level of meaning to the story, for Simpson appears to have felt that he was a lonely person whose work would be dismissed or ignored by future generations. “I wanted to shake him,” Gould wrote in an afterword, “and tell him how much we all loved him. . . . But no one could . . . please him.” {CE; HNS; WAS, 10 April 1956}
Simpson, James (20th Century) Simpson is on the editorial board of The Humanist.
Simpson, James Young (1873–1934) Simpson wrote Landmarks in the Struggle Between Science and Religion (1926). {GS}
Simpson, Lyle L. (20th Century) An Iowa attorney, once President of the American Humanist Association, Simpson is a naturalistic humanist. He is President of the American Humanist Association’s Endowment Fund. {CL; HNS2}
Simson, John (1668–1740) Simson, a theologian, was librarian at Glasgow University, then decided to preach, but his lectures drew upon him the suspicion of heresy. In 1715 the General Assembly of the Scottish Church referred his case to a committee of thirty ministers and six elders, and he was warned to be more careful. In 1726 he was again impeached, on the ground that he denied the divinity of Christ. Simson never wrote his views, and it is not clear what he really believed., but he appears to have been ahead of his time with his view that reason is “the foundation of theology.” {RAT}
SIN Although “sin,” as distinguished from crime and vice, is not a meaningful concept to secular humanists—the Greeks and Romans had no word for the concept—it is of major importance to Judeo-Christians. Secular humanists find that belief in such a concept can lead to unhealthy and harmful guilt complexes, feelings of “having sinned,” with the resultant fears concerning how best to “acquire forgiveness” lest the sinner “be punished by the wrath of God.” Although humanists may study the religionists’ interest in this injurious concept, they often do so in order to provide therapy to those who suffer from the repercussions of believing in such a concept. “There would be no point to sin if it were not the corridor to pleasure,” novelist Mary Gordon has written. Whereas pleasure may be avoided by orthodox believers in sin, non-believers feel no guilt whatsoever in seeking sensual gratification nor frivolous amusement and are amused that anyone should believe that “what does not come from faith is sin,” as explained by the Christian apostle Paul, who greatly influenced Augustine, Luther, Kierkegaard, and others in their own affirmation of the concept. Sin is ever-present and is ever-tempting. Five decades ago in the 1940s, Wilhelm Pauck of the University of Chicago wrote about the never-changing transgression of the “law of God”: “The most adequate definitions of sin as developed by Christian theology (in harmony with its identification with unfaith) were those in which it is interpreted as superbia (pride) and concupiscentia (selfish desire and, in the narrower sense, sensuous lust). Sin as pride is in the last resort the refusal on man’s part to acknowledge God as God. It is imbued with the attitude of hybris by which man tries to deify, absolutize himself as if he could be self-sufficient. Sin as concupiscence is every expression of egotism and selfishness in which an utter disregard of both God’s sovereignty and love is shown.” In short, believers if they are conscientious believers must not yield to sin. To do so is to be egotistic, non-theistic, and anthropocentric. Contemporary Protestants introduced a definition of sin that was determined by the insights of the natural and social sciences in the moral development of mankind and of human groups and individuals. Some liberal Protestants, however, have come to regard the term sin as practically meaningless. Others are rediscovering the Biblical, particularly Pauline, teaching concerning sin. Roman Catholicism makes the distinction between mortal and venial sins. Mortal sin, according to Dr. Pauck, “is regarded as that transgression of God’s law which causes the sinner to lose the effect of grace, thus rendering him subject to eternal punishment in hell. A venial sin is a violation of God’s law which does not alienate the sinner from God, entailing no loss of grace, but requiring submission to penitential discipline. A mortal sinner can acquire forgiveness only by fulfilling the requirements of the sacrament of penance through which grace is restored in him.” Non-believers, although considered sinners by believers, do not condone crime (violation of the civil law) or vice (immorality resulting from the disregard of the social and ethical standards of society). Non-believers do, however, take an active interest in defining crime and vice. As a result, they take great interest in such questions as, Is euthanasia a crime? Is the exclusion of religious institutions from taxes a crime? Is allowing animal sacrifice, or the handling of poisonous snakes, in a religious service a crime? Is nudism a crime? Is teaching the need for the illusion of divinity or immortality a crime? What vices, such as the presently illegal pleasures which are provided by organized crime groups, are not crimes? In 1993, according to Peter McWilliams in Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do, more than 350,000 people are in jail for something they did—something that did not physically harm another’s person or property. In Michigan, he states, “More than 135 people are currently serving life sentences without possibility of parole for the mere possession of illegal drugs. . . . In addition, more than 1.5 million people are on parole or probation for consensual crimes. And more than four million people are arrested each year for doing something that hurts no one except, potentially, themselves.” McWilliams estimates that, because of this, “every man, woman, and child in this country is paying $800 per year to destroy the lives of six million fellow citizens involved in the tangled web of consensual acts, crime, and punishment. And moving the underground economy that is associated with consensual crimes above ground would create six million tax paying jobs.” Sin, according to Bertrand Russell, is called that as an excuse for cruelty. “It’s to enable you to inflict suffering without a bad conscience, and therefore it is a bad thing.” On the other hand, he added, “I think sin is something that it is positively good to punish, such as murder, not only because you want to prevent murder, but because the murderer deserves to suffer.” Other observations concerning sin:
• Question: What kind of sins are the greatest?
Answer: Adultery, fornication, murder, theft, swearing,
witchcraft, sedition, heresies, or any the like. –John Bunyan, “Instructions for the Ignorant” (1675)
• Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful. –Benjamin Franklin
• The different religions have never overlooked the part played by the sense of guilt in civilization. What is more, they come forward with a claim . . . to save mankind [sic] from this sense of guilt, which they call sin. –Sigmund Freud
• That which others call sin is experiment for us. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
• He said he was against it.
–Attributed to President Calvin Coolidge, when asked what was said by a minister who preached about sin.
• The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to have them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. –George Bernard Shaw
• Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. –Oscar Wilde
• All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal, or fattening. –Alexander Woollcott
• All sins are attempts to fill voids. –Simone Weil
• Sin has always been an ugly word, but it has been made so over the last half-century. It has been made not only ugly, but passé. People are no longer sinful: they are only immature or underprivileged or frightened, or, more particularly, sick. –Phyllis McGinley
• The biggest sin is sitting on your ass. –Florynce Kennedy
In the 1990s, Satan continued to bedevil. Islamic fundamentalists referred to America as “the great Satan.” Religionist Pat Robertson asserted that feminism “encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft” and, worse, become lesbians. Hindus saw the devil in Muslims. Muslims saw the devil in Jews. African nationalists saw Satan in Nordic blondes. And some secular humanists, nonplused that the political as well as religious center was seemingly moving more to the right and conservatism, extrapolated that “the Devil must’ve made ‘em do it.” (See the entry for S. Levin concerning sinosis and the entry for fornication, in which Bertrand Russell explains how Christians differ in the way they deal with the “sin” of fornication. Also see entries for mortal sin and for venial sin.) {CE; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; ER}
SIN, EXAMPLES OF
• The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) voted not to change its constitution in order to allow practicing homosexuals to be ordained as clergy members.
• A small group of Orthodox rabbis declared that the Reform and Conservative movements were “not Judaism,” urging Jews to stay away from those synagogues because their rabbis were allowing people to drive on the Sabbath.
• A Baptist church in Berryville, Arkansas, closed its sole day care center because it encouraged women to work when God wanted them at home.
• An Orthodox rabbinic board in New York City ruled that women’s prayer groups violated Jewish tradition inasmuch as they allowed women to read the Torah publicly.
• Orthodox fundamentalist mullahs in Bangladesh called for the death of the gynecologist and poet Taslima Nasrin because she allegedly blasphemed the Qur’an.
• The State of Michigan warned Dr. Jack Kevorkian who since 1990 had attended forty-five suicides who or whose families had requested his assistance, to stop helping people hopelessly ill to commit suicide.
• Marshall Herff Applewhite convinced thirty-eight Heavens Gate followers in California that a sleek spaceship was trailing in the wake of the Hale-Bopp comet and that if they swallowed barbituates and vodka or smothered themselves with plastic bags the 39 of them (of the 18 men, one-third had been castrated to enforce adherence to a celibate lifestyle) would be taken by God into Heaven. In their pockets were rolls of quarters and United States $5. bills.
SINA, IBN (AVICENNA): See entry for Avicenna.
Sinclair, Upton (1879–1968) Sinclair is presently known as a novelist, but future generations may consider him more as a Utopian whose hundred or so books included well-known historical figures as fictional characters. His eleven-volume Lanny Budd series, World’s End (1940–1953), is more a political commentary than a literary achievement, and how future critics will accept his work is debatable. Highly critical of Christianity, he has held that correcting organized religion is preferable to abolishing it. In Profits of Religion (1918), he rankled many with his view that religion is a capitalist tool, that it teaches the poor to accept the fact that God has allotted them their positions in life. In one work, They Call Me Carpenter (1922), he describes the dream a rich man has upon meeting the Christ. Theodore Dreiser was unhappy with the speculation that Sinclair had used him as his model for the fictional infidel being portrayed. Although Sinclair rejected his youthful Episcopalianism, he never rejected his faith in socialism, with the novel serving as a device to express his liberal views. The work which received the most critical acclaim was The Jungle (1906), in which through the character of Jurgis Rudkus he indicts the inhumanistic and immoral conduct of meat-packing officials toward their own workers, and his memorably vivid descriptions of what was wrong with the industry (“There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.”) led to governmental reform in the food inspection laws. Sinclair’s liberal stands included opposing prostitution, alcohol, and erotic materials. Although he lost the California race as Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, he went on to write the Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Dragon’s Teeth (1942). Critical of the Church, he wrote, “Various Catholic societies . . . in every city and town in America, are pushing and plotting to get Catholics upon library boards, so that the public may not have a chance to read scientific books; to get Catholics into the public schools and on school boards, so that children may not hear about Galileo, Bruno, and Ferrer; to have Catholics in control of police and on magistrates’ benches, so that priests who are caught in brothels may not be exposed or punished.” Asked if he was a theist or a humanist, he wrote the present author concerning humanism,
Answering your statement that my views on theism are difficult to find, I refer you to my book called What God Means To Me (1935). No doubt you will find the material you desire there, and you have my permission to quote from the book anything which may be of use to you in compiling your article.
In short, Sinclair was against Christianity’s anti-scientific thrusts, its fostering notions of class, and its outlook on women, but basically he was a spiritualist. The book tells of his meeting, when seventeen, a Unitarian clergyman “who informed me that he had several times met and talked with ghosts.” The book which “came nearest to swaying my mind toward the spiritist idea is Sir Oliver Lodge’s Raymond,” and Sinclair declares he had “communications” with Jack London, who told him things no medium could have known. His wife, said Sinclair, once attended a séance and heard Oliver Wendell Holmes “speaking with a very decided New York accent.” Concluded Sinclair, “We have a choice of two courses. We can say that life is a chaos, and that we are the sport of blind forces, and take ourselves out of it forthwith. Or we can listen to the inner voice which tells us that there must be a plan, even though we cannot understand it. I have chosen the latter course.” As noted by McCabe, in Sinclair’s later years “he took up Spiritualism and wrote What God Means to Me.” {CE; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; WAS, 20 February 1951}
Sinclaire, Frederick (1881–1954) Sinclaire was an Australian Unitarian, socialist, and theistic humanist. An admirer of the works of George Bernard Shaw, he saw religion not as a supernatural force but as an inherent part of mankind’s nature. In 1907 he was appointed minister of the Melbourne Unitarian Church, resigning four years later to become co-editor with Marie Pitt of the Socialist. In 1916 he formed the Free Religious Fellowship, editing their Fellowship. “Rationalism,” he said in 1920, “is like nitrogen, a necessary ingredient of the air we breathe, in itself not poisonous but simply innutritious. The cure for rationalism is not anti-rationalism . . . but post-rationalism.” In New Zealand, he became professor of English at Canterbury College, returned to the Church of England, but still retained his liberal beliefs. {SWW}
Sindona, Michele (20th Century) Sindona is author of St. Peter’s Banker (1983), which relates the scandal at the Pope’s own bank in the Vatican and includes his own involvement.
Sinfield, Peter (20th Century) Sinfield, who writes lyrics for King Crimson’s first albums, is a non-theist. Two of his titles which contain inflammatory lyrics for theists are “In the Court of the Crimson King” and “In the Wake of Poseidon.” {Fredrik Bendz on the Internet}
Singer, Charles (20th Century) A freethinker, Singer wrote The Christian Failure (1943). {GS}
Singer, Irving (1925– ) Singer is a philosophy educator, a Santayana scholar, and a naturalistic humanist. He has taught at Cornell University, the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University, and M.I.T. (since 1969). He wrote Santayana’s Aesthetics (1957); The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther (1966); The Goals of Human Sexuality (1973); Mozart and Beethoven (1977); Meaning in Life: The Creation of Value (1992); and The Pursuit of Love (1994). The Harmony of Nature and Spirit (1998) details Singer’s aesthetic naturalism and his search for a happiness that involves feeling good in our life and about our life. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999}
Singer, Peter (1946- ) In Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (1995), Singer finds the Judeo-Christian teaching—that life is “sacred”—has lost its validity, that decisions concerning euthanasia are better decided on the basis of the patients’ “ethically relevant characteristics.” For example, is life of any value to those who are handicapped with Downs disease, or are permanently comatose, or are enduring intense pain because of cancer? If judged case by case, it is possible that abortion, choosing not to treat handicapped children, and voluntary euthanasia are morally acceptable. Adults not constrained by past conventions have every right, he holds, to hasten a painful death. As for children, he suggests an arbitrary twenty-eight days of life before decisions are made by parents as to whether or not to allow hopeless cases to have their life mercifully terminated. This skirts the problem others have as to when a fetus can be aborted, and Singer recommends the same for fellow animals, such as a farmer’s cattle or others’ pets. Specifically, he would not feed Downs syndrome infants, arguing that they do not have “genuine” consciousness. He includes examples of “commandments,” the Old Commandments (OC) and what he terms the New Commandments (NC); e.g.,
OC 1: Treat all human life as of equal worth. NC 1: Recognise that the worth of human life varies.
OC 2: Never intentionally take innocent human life. NC 2: Take responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
OC 3: Never take your own life and always try to prevent others taking theirs. NC 3: Respect a person’s desire to live or die.
OC 4: Be fruitful and multiply. NC 4: Bring children into the world only if they are wanted.
OC 5: Treat all human life as always more precious than any non-human life. NC 5: Do not discriminate on the basis of species.
As might be expected, his views have been hotly challenged. When he was announced as joining the Princeton University faculty’s bioethics department, The New York Times (10 April 1999) headlined the story, “Princeton’s Choice of a Euthanasia Backer Causes a Stir.” Interviewed in Sweden by Staffan Gunnarson, Singer when asked if he considers himself a humanist, responded, “Well, not in any limited and traditional ‘Jewish’ or ‘Christian’ sense of the word, that’s for sure. From that point of view I am not a humanist. I would rather consider myself to be a utilitarian, so far.” He said he is an atheist, a person who thinks parents have the right to end the life of newborn children who are really and ill and will only endure a life of pain and despair, and favors self-determined euthanasia. He has supported the proposed new laws on euthanasia in Northern Australia. {The Freethinker, August 1997; International Humanist News, December 1997}
Singh, Buta (20th Century) Singh spoke at the Atheist Centre’s 50th Anniversary International Conference in 1980.
Singh, Hajom Kissor (19th Century)
Singh in 1887 founded the Indian Council of Unitarian Churches. A tribal Khasi, he objected to the mass converstion to Christianity of so many of his tribal sisters and brothers midway through the 19th century. By forming his own church, he emphasized the teachings of Jesus but also those of the Buddha, the Sikh prophets, and the Hindu and Islamic scriptures. His church also borrowed elements of the indigenous tribal faith, that of Seng Khasi. (See entries for Indian Council of Unitarian Churches and for Unitarians in India.)
Singh, Jai Prithvi Bahadur (1877–1940) Singh was the Nepalese founder and president of the Humanist Club in Banglore, South India. He was the eldest son of Bikram Bahadur Singh and Rudra Kumari Devi (daughter of the first Rana Prime Minister Jung Bahadur Rana). In 1889 when then Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher forced his father to abdicate his power of Bajhangi Raja, he was coronated as the Raja of Bajhang. In 1894 he married fourteen-year-old Khageshori Devi, daughter of Rana Prime Minister Chandra Shumshere Rana. From 1902 to 1905 he became Counselor General at Calcutta, after which he returned to Kathmandu with a hand press in order to print badly needed textbooks in the Nepali language. In 1907 he published A History of Japan, which described how the sovereign emperor (Mikado) was kept in virtual imprisonment and rendered powerless by the autocratic rule of Shoguns. When Chandra Shumshere Rana, his father-in-law, read the book, he felt threatened that the book was an indication of some kind of conspiracy against the autocratic Rana family rule. They and he differed openly, and the resultant rift widened considerably. In 1911 he published Prakrit vyakaran (Nepali Grammar), a useful educational work. In 1913 he published Tatto Prashansha, a book on humans and humanity. From 1907 to 1913 he was chief of Court (Bharadari Shabha) and, because of the major differences of opinion with the Rana rules, he opted to return to Bahjang. In 1916 he handed his crown to his father and journeyed to Nainital, India, during which time he wrote the three-volume Philosophy of Humanism to propagate his idea of world peace and world brotherhood. In 1927, traveling in disguise as a Burmese, he reached England with a passport from the French rule of Pandechhori. He stayed six months, then returned to Banglore, where at Chetty Road Banglore he constructed the Humanist Club and published three books on humanism, initiated the publication of Humanist Magazine, and wrote Shanti ko Jhanda (Flag of Peace). The first phase of his life was devoted to his struggle against Rana oligarchy. As early as 1905 he hurled a bombshell against the Rana regime by writing Sichya Darpan, a three-volume work in which he became noted as a political cartoonist of the period following World War I. Using stories, fables, and parables, he talked about freedom in diverse forms: freedom from arbitrary power, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and the freedom to realize one’s own talent. Following World War I, Singh went into voluntary exile in Banglore, devoting the rest of his life to the cause of humanism. Following are the tenets of Jai Pritnvi’s philosophy:
• Instead of entering into unhealthy competition and dogmatic contradictions, humans should direct their behavior toward a path of reconciliation so that security, privileges, and prosperity can be insured through mutual understanding. • The general public needs an organization through which it can interact, exchange ideas, and solve common problems. • If the doctrine of self-security is based on humanitarian grounds, the path leading to a peaceful society will automatically open. • Whatever is done to destroy human civilization is, lamentably, a symbol of animalistic instinct. • Humanism is a philosophic outlook which human beings, creatures who are distinct from other animals, choose to observe as a duty and not as a religion.
Jai Prithvi died in Jaya Bhawan, India, but his influence upon Nepalese philosophers continues to be a major one. (See entry for Nepal Humanists.) {HNS2}
Singh, Min Bahadur (20th Century) Singh is President of Research Academica for Humanism & Jaya Prithvi Bdr. Singh in Nepal. (See entry for Nepal Humanists.)
Singletary, Mary Jo (20th Century) Singletary is president of the Alliance of Humanist, Atheist, and Ethical Culture Organizations of Los Angeles County, California. She also heads the Humanist Association of Los Angeles. In 1994 she spoke at the Alliance’s 14th annual conference, which was held aboard the Queen Mary.
Sinha, V. K. (20th Century) Sinha, of the Indian Secular Society, has written in the Indian Secularist, which he edits, that he favors euthanasia. The Right to Life, he holds, recognizes the individual’s total possession of his own life—a life to make or mar; a life to achieve his highest potential or a life merely to eke out animal existence. A person is free to be a poet or an humble artisan. The rights belong to him simply because he is human. Speaking at a 1995 conference of humanists in India, Sinha predicted that “The BJP, which is a communal party, with its saffron brigade comprising the RSS, the Hindu Vishwas Parishad, the Bajrang Dal, and a host of other Hindu fundamentalist groups might capture, if not political power at the center, at least the power to determine the social and political agenda in the coming decade. . . . It is the fundamentalism and nationalism which the saffron brigade presents that contemporary India faces its greatest threat and challenge. . . . This poses the gravest challenge to the humanists and secularists in India.” Sinha is author of Secularism in India (1966). {New Humanist, February 1996}
Sinnott, Nigel Hugh (1944– ) Sinnott, who was born in England of an Anglican father and a right-wing, agnostic mother, is an Australian atheist, freethinker, research historian, editor, and writer. At the age of ten, he has written, he “decided that Christianity was not only false, but nasty to boot.” Two of Lord Macaulay’s poems—“Naseby” and “Horatius”—led him to become a convinced republican and militant atheist. In 1963 he joined Oxford University’s Humanist Group, the Ethical Union, and the Rationalist Press Association. In 1972–1973 he became full-time editor of the Freethinker. Migrating to Australia in 1976, he was the founder member and secretary of the Secular Society of Victoria. His publications include Charles Bradlaugh and Ireland (1971); Joseph Symes, “The Flower of Atheism” (1977); Matilda, Agnes, and Stella Symes (1978). Sinnott also edited Joseph Skurrie’s Freethought Reminiscences (1977). He has contributed to The Rationalist News (Sydney); New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (Auckland); and the Victorian Humanist (Melbourne). In 1999, in a legal battle against the Alexandra Primary School, Victoria, he won a battle to scrap the Loyal Declaration that was worded, “I love God and my country. I will honour the flag. I will serve the Qeen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the laws.” The new wording, which his ten-year-old daughter Miriam will now use: “As a young Australian, I promise to obey the laws of my country, and respect the rights of people through my words and actions. I will try to make my home, school and community a better place for all.” {The Freethinker, May 1999; FUK; SWW}
Siqueiros, David Alfaro (1896–1974) Siqueiros is a Mexican muralist who, according to Lamont, “concentrated on Humanist themes.” One of the principal figures in 20th-century Mexican mural painting, Siqueiros was expelled from the United States for his revolutionary activities. One of his major works, at the Hotel de México, is “March of Humanity.” Siqueiros was both a communist and a humanist. {CL}
SIREN • Siren, n. One of several musical prodigies famous for a vain attempt to dissuade Odysseus from a life on the ocean wave. Figuratively, any lady of splendid promise, dissembled purpose, and disappointing performance. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
SISYPHUS In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the son of Aeolus and founder and king of Corinth. Renowned for his cunning, he was said even to have outwitted Death. However, for his disrespect to Zeus he was condemned to eternal punishment in Tartarus. There he eternally pushed a heavy rock to the top of a steep hill, where it would roll down again. “The Myth of Sisyphus,” by Camus, is an essay based on the legend. (See entry for Tartarus.) {CE}
Sitting Bull (c. 1831–1890) Sitting Bull, the Sioux leader in the battle of the Little Bighorn, was a pagan who was feared by the whites who had forced Indians under his command to be settled on a reservation. His actual name was Tatanka Iyotake. During the battle with George Armstrong Custer and his men, Sitting Bull’s forces in 1876 defeated and killed his enemies. This became a Pyrrhic victory, for the shock of Custer’s defeat spurred Washington to wage “total war” on the Sioux. Sitting Bull then escaped to Canada but returned in 1881 on a promise of a pardon. In 1885 he appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, selling his autograph to gentlemen for $1 to $5 and to ladies, free. But when he encouraged the Sioux not to sell their lands and advocated a ghost dance religion, he was arrested by an Indian policeman who, during a struggle, accidentally killed him. The Indian policeman, who was immediately killed by outraged spectators, was given a Christian burial with military honors. Sitting Bull was interred in a pauper’s grave. “I wish it to be remembered,” Sitting Bull had said when giving himself up to a representative of the U.S. Army, “that I was the last man of my tribe to surrender my rifle.” A symbolic victim of American brutality and exploitation, Sitting Bull had been a holy man to his people. For the tribal goddess, White Buffalo Woman, he performed the sun dance. With skewers, he had pierced his chest and back, dancing suspended in the air until the flesh tore loose, all the while staring into the sun and praying. “The life of white men is slavery,” he observed. “They are prisoners in towns or farms. Look at me. See if I am poor, or my people either. . . . The whites may get me at last, as you say, but I will have good times till then.” Another Indian chief, reports Robert M. Utley in The Lance and the Shield: The Life and Times of Sitting Bull (1993), said, “They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one: they promised to take our land, and they took it.” A relative in 1953 stole Sitting Bull’s bones from the North Dakota pauper’s grave, retrieving them for burial in South Dakota.
SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION The popular belief is that anyone on earth can be linked to anyone else by a chain of only six other people, the link being called “six degrees of separation.” Playwright John Guare dramatized the view in a 1993 play of the same name. Mathematicians have shown that any large set of linked, dynamic components—people, electric power stations, brain cells, etc.—can be transformed into a small world by introducing short cuts between a few components. Relatively few short cuts can make big changes in a network, linking clusters of people, power stations, or brain cells together in unexpected ways. For example, a person who knows Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright will be connected to everyone she knows, including kings and queens. However, if a person knows that his neighbor’s daughter-in-law was Ms. Albright’s college roommate, the person would be connected to the Queen of England by three degrees of separation. Practical applications of the concept include the idea that—using regular networks, small-world networks, and random networks—it takes few short cuts between nodes and clusters to turn a big world into a small world. However, adding more short cuts does not necessarily improve network efficiency. Short cuts can make networks more efficient, as in the case of improving the efficiency of cell phone networks by deliberately introducing a few random connections between nodes, or phones. Short cuts can also have negative effects, as when human populations that are isolated experience disease epidemics that are localized but jet travel makes it possible for diseases to spread rapidly and exponentially. Poet Allen Ginsberg, illustrating the concept, claimed five degrees of separation with poet Walt Whitman. Ginsberg said he had had sex with Neal Cassady, who had had sex with Arthur Gavin, who had had sex with Edward Carpenter, who had had sex with Whitman. {Sandra Blakeslee, “Mathematicians Prove That It’s A Small World,” The New York Times, 16 June 1998; Lavender Lists (1990)}
Sjoberg, Walter (19th Century) Sjoberg, a Finn, took part in founding the Utilistiska Samfundet. During the imprisonment of Mr. Lennstrand, Sjoberg gave bold lectures on his behalf at Stockholm. {BDF}
Sjöö, Monica (20th Century) With Barbara Mor, Sjöö wrote The Great Cosmic Mother (1991).
SKEPTIC A monthly, Skeptic is at PO Box 475, Manchester M60 1TH, United Kingdom.
SKEPTIC Skeptic (2761 North Marengo Avenue, PO Box 338, Altadena, California 91001) is a quarterly published by the Skeptics Society. Michael Shermer, assistant professor of the history of science at Occidental College and author of Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (1997), is publisher and editor-in-chief. E-mail: <skepticmag@aol.com>. On the Internet: <http://www.skeptic.com/>.
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SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Skeptical Inquirer is a bi-monthly published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (3965 Rensch Road, Amherst, New York 14228). Paul Kurtz heads the committee and Kendrick Frazier, the editor, is at 944 Deer Drive NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87122. Noted members of the editorial board include Martin Gardner, Philip J. Klass, and Joe Nickel. E-mail: <skeptinq@aol.com>. On the Web: <http://www.csicop.org>.
SKEPTICAL REVIEW Skeptical Review (PO Box 617, Canton, Illinois 61520) is a quarterly edited by Farrell Till, a highly respected Biblical scholar who as a non-believer patiently demolishes the positions of any believers who dare to take him on. E-mail: <errancy@infidels.org>.
SKEPTICISM Democritus, the first skeptic, held that sense perception is not a certain guide to objective reality. The Sophists were early skeptics, as was Protagoras, who taught the relativity of knowledge, and Gorgias, whose extreme skepticism held that either nothing can be known or, if anything were known, it could not be communicated. Pyrrho held a similar extreme view of skepticism. Arcesilaus, however, taught that probable knowledge, not certitude, which is impossible, is attainable. Other skeptics have been Michel de Montaigne, Pierre Charron, Blaise Pascal, René Descartes, Pierre Bayle, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. F. H. Bradley held that skepticism means “to become aware of and to doubt all preconceptions.” Of these, Montaigne and Bayle, along with Joseph Glanvil in England, combined skepticism with a devout theism. Both the supporters and some of the opponents of religion have held that skepticism rests on faith rather than reason. Non-believers are attracted to skepticism as well as to Kantian agnosticism, for the scientific method demands that all things assumed as facts must be questioned. Since the time of Descartes, critics in religion and morals have tended to depict skepticism as a form of negative dogmatism, as seeking actually to deny the existence of anything whose nature is in doubt. Academic skepticism, which is associated with the Academy of Carneades, held that although the same evidence is always compatible with two contrary conclusions, some beliefs are more reasonable than others and we can act upon the balance of probabilities. Some believers point to “holy” people’s ability to walk on fire. However, skeptics, quick to point out the physics behind firewalking, explain the conductivity and capacity of heat. A hand placed into a 450o oven to remove a cake, for example, does not get burned, but a hand placed onto a metal pan will sizzle inasmuch as metal has a high heat capacity and conducts heat rapidly. Coals in a fire are more like cake than the metal pan. A show-off intent upon being a faker, however, needs to move as quickly as a fakir if he does not want to be burned. A major journal which has an international audience is Skeptical Inquirer, published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (Box 703, Buffalo, NY 14226). The committee has subcommittees to investigate astrology, paranormal health claims, unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and parapsychology. Another is Skeptic, which is devoted to the investigation and promotion of science and rational skepticism and is published by the Skeptics Society, 2761 North Marengo Avenue, Altadena, California 91001. (See entries for Edgar Sheffield Brightman and for Ghosts. For a history and the values of skepticism to philosophy, see Richard H. Popkin’s article in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; DCL; ER; OEL}
SKEPTICS CORNER Louis W. Cable has a web site, Skeptics Corner, devoted to refuting biblical claims: <http://www.inu.net/skeptics>.
SKEPTICS SOCIETY
The Skeptics Society is on the Web: <http://www.skeptic.com/>.
SKEPTICS, OUTSTANDING Skeptical Inquirer (January-February 2000) listed the following as the outstanding skeptics of the 20th century: James Alcock; Isaac Asimov; Robert A. Baker; Stephen Barrett; Bart Bok; Samuel Clemens; Richard Dawkins; Albert Einstein; Richard Feynman; Kendrick Frazier; Martin Gardner; Stephen Jay Gould; Harry Houdini; Ray Hyman; Philip J. Klass; Paul Kurtz; H. L. Mencken; Joe Nickell; Oscar Pfungst; Karl Popper; James Randi; Bertrand Russell; Carl Sagan; and Michael Shermer. Also: Milburne Christopher (1914-1984); Joseph Jastrow (1863-1944); and D. H. Rawcliffe.
Skerry, James Humphrey (c. 1899–1971) Skerry in 1925 was the first treasurer of the Rationalist Association of Australia LTD., a post he kept until his death. {SWW}
Skiles, Frank and Marie Skiles (20th Century) The Skileses published Slant Press, a newsletter for empiricists, secular humanists, freethinkers, agnostics, and atheists. (See entry for Montana Freethinkers.) {FD}
SKIN Without it, our sweat glands could not excrete waste products and our body could not cool when it over-heats. Skin is the flexible tissue that encloses the body of vertebrate animals and, in humans and other mammals, serves vital protective and metabolic functions. Of the many unscientific tales about skin, Genesis is one of the worst and most misleading. Literalists believe that 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 blackness of some people’s skin, in short, is a symbol of Ham’s having broken a taboo about seeing naked skin, according to the author or authors of Genesis. In 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps of northern Italy, a mummified body was found in a melting glacier. Called the Iceman’s body, it is the oldest known human-flesh remains. The New York Times science reporter John Noble Wilford (17 February 1999) has described the autopsies which showed that the Iceman was probably herding sheep or was on a solitary journey, that he was no more than forty years old and in poor health, that his teeth were worn to nubs from chewing dried meat, working leather, or both. Possibly as the result of living in a shelter with an open hearth, his lungs were as black as a smoker’s. His body was tattooed close to or on the classic acupuncture points for treatment of pain from arthritis of the spine, hips, knees, and ankles. The two walnut-size lumps of a tree fungus that he possessed could, if ingested, have killed certain parasitic bacteria, thus acting as a natural laxative and antibiotic. Inasmuch as the Iceman suffered from a parasitic worm, the fungus may have been his remedy for the acute stomach and intestinal pain he must have suffered on the last day of a hard life. Stuffed derma (the Greek word for skin)—a beef casing that includes seasoned mixture of matzo meal or flour, onion, and suet, prepared by boiling, then roasting—is a delicacy both to dermatologists (medical physicians concerned with the physiology and pathology of the skin) as well as to sausage-eating non-dermatologists. (See entry for Skin.) {CE}
Skinner, B(urrhus) F(rederic) (1904–1990) A famed behaviorist and professor of psychology at Harvard University, Skinner wrote The Behavior of Organisms (1938), Walden Two (1961), and About Behaviorism (1974). Known for his “Skinner box,” an experimental chamber with doors, switches, and a dispenser of food pellets, he observed the behavior of rats and, using reward techniques, applied his findings to human learning. His imagined utopian community, Walden Two, infuriated counterculturists of the 1960s, and his Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) rankled many with its conclusion that freedom and dignity are illusions. However, two small communities based upon Walden II—Twin Oaks in Virginia and Los Horcones in Mexico–still survive. Further, his concept of programmed instruction continues to affect educational theories and methods, particularly in the United States. Critics of a form of psychotherapy which developed from Skinner’s views complain that behavior modification treats symptoms rather than causes. In 1972, Skinner was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Association. Also, he received the Humanist of the Year award from the American Humanist Association. Skinner signed Humanist Manifesto II. {CE; HM2; HNS2; PK; SHD}
Skinner, Clarence Russell (1881–1949) Skinner, a professor at Tufts College and a Universalist minister, opposed both world wars. He was dean of Crane Theological School (1933–1945) and is generally considered as being the most important 20th-century Universalist leader. He moved the denomination toward a more political and “this-worldly” understanding of the term Universalist. For him it is not enough simply to be in the world—it is also necessary to judge the world, ethically and religiously. With Alfred S. Cole, Skinner wrote Hell’s Ramparts Fell (1941), a biography of John Murray. Charles A. Howe has edited Clarence R. Skinner, Prophet of a New Universalism (1999). {U; U&U; UU}
Skinner, Ebenezer (1830–1892) Skinner was a freethinker, bookseller, secularist, and spiritualist. In the early 1880s, he was president of the Liberal Association of New South Wales, an organization initiated by a spiritualist group aiming to attract both religious and skeptical members. An enthusiast in building the Sydney Lyceum, he was compiler of The Secularists’ Guide. Skinner’s daughter married secularist William Whitehouse Collins. {FUK; SWW}
Skinner, William (19th Century) Skinner, of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, was a deist, the author of Thoughts on Superstition, or An Attempt to Discover Truth (1822). He also is credited with Jehovah Unveiled, or the God of the Jews (1819), which Carlile published. {BDF}
Skolimowski, Henryk (20th Century) Skolimowski wrote Ecological Humanism (1976).
Skou, Jens Christian (1918– ) Skou, a biophysics educator in Denmark, was co-recipient in 1997 of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. A member of the Danish Royal Academy of Scientists, Skou signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <des@mil.aau.dle>. Newly elected to Academy of Humanism
Skoyles, John R. (20th Century) Skoyles wrote “A Mind Virus Writes to Richard Dawkins” for The Freethinker (January 1997). Skurrie, Joseph (1858–1949) Skurrie was a secularist, freethinker, rationalist, advocate of Esperanto, a teetotaller, and vegetarian. After joining the Australian Secular Association in Bendigo in 1880, he became its corresponding secretary to Joseph Symes’s Liberator. Skurrie was caretaker of the Hall of Science, then joined the re-formed Rationalist Society of Australia. {SWW}
Slack, Samuel Benjamin (Born 1859) Slack, a philologist, taught classics and comparative philology at McGill University in Montreal. For the Rationalist Press Association, he translated Dr. van den Bergh van Eysinga’s Radical Views About the New Testament (1912), with an introduction in which he expressed his own rationalism. {RAT}
Slaten, A. Wakefield (20th Century) Slaten is a Unitarian who wrote The Appeal of Fundamentalism (1925) and What If the World Went Atheist? (1928). In 1929 after editing “The Humanist Pulpit” for The New Humanist, he was succeeded by Edwin H. Wilson. {EW; GS}
Slater, Humphrey (20th Century) Slater wrote a little-known novel, Heretics, in which he shows a resemblance between the 12th- century Children’s Crusade and the 20th-century Spanish Civil War. Of particular interest is his view that, because so many parents were killed during the Crusades, society had trouble dealing with all the homeless orphans who became delinquent. How best to resolve the problem? Ship them out to kill the Moslems, for the sake of Christianity!
Slater, John G. (20th Century) Slater, in Bertrand Russell (1994), quotes Russell’s definitive answer about immortality: “I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” Slater found that Russell saw much that was good in Christianity, particularly the central place of “love” in Christian teaching. He considered “worship” and “acquiescence” of value but not if interpreted as involving supernaturalism.
Slater, Thomas (1820–1900) Slater was an English lecturer, for many years an advocate of secularism and cooperation. He was on the town council of Bury and lived at Leicester. The circuit he was given by the National Secular Society was Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands, and Tyneside, and he became one of the popular speakers in the north of England. Slater had charge of the Secularist Bookstore at Leicester at the time of his death. {BDF; RAT; RSR}
Slattery, J. R. (20th Century) Slattery wrote State Grants and Church Graft (c. 1915). {GS}
SLAVERY • Some slaves told me a sure way to keep the dogs from ketching you. They said if you put red pepper and turpentine in your shoes, they can’t run you, ‘cause they can’t scent you. –Jean-Claude Baker in Josephine, quoting John Crawford in Bullwhip Days that Southern whites hunted runaway slaves with dogs
“Slavery” to most Americans is a reference to the South, the Civil War, and the fact that John Rolfe in 1619 had written that “a dutchman of war…sold us twenty Negars.” But Herodotus had described how Aesop, a legendary Greek fabulist, was a slave who lived in Samos and was eventually set free by his master. Yale University’s David Brian Davis among others has pointed out that Portugal was importing slaves from sub-Saharan Africa in the 1440s. African kings and merchants from the Senegambia region had sold large numbers of slaves to Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, English, French, Swedish, Danish, German, American, Cuban, and Brazilian traders, and representatives of the various religions—Muslims, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, New Christians, even Moravians and for a time Quakers—did not object. From the mid-16th until the 19th century, Europeans shipped as many as 12,000,000 African slaves, purchased from their African captors, across the Atlantic. Arab slavers took millions more to the Middle East. Serfdom was abolished by the tsar of Russia in 1861. As to why slavery succeeded, Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (1998) and Robin Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (1998) document that a major reason was greed. The late African American scholar Nathan Huggins illustrated this when he wrote The racial wrong was lost on African merchants, who saw themselves as selling people other than their own. The distinctions of tribe were more real to them than race, a concept that was yet to be refined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western rationalists. The most famous of the former slave-trading houses in Senegal was on Gorée Island. Visitors can see where millions passed through after being branded like cattle, with each European company having its distinctive mark. “The value of a woman,” according to the seventy-four year-old guide Joseph Ndiaye, “was fixed according to the fullness of her breasts. Men were weighed to insure that they met the minimum requirement of 120 pounds. After being weighed, the men were appraised by their age and origin, with certain ethnic groups prized for their hardiness or as supposedly prolific breeders. The Yoruba, for example, were prized as ‘stallions.’ ” Although in 1996 Le Monde in Paris cited a French Jesuit’s asserting that “only 200 to 500 slaves a year” were sold in Gorée, the Senegalese Government and scholars countered with archives from the French port of Nantes that showed more than 103,000 slaves had been traded in that one port alone between 1763 and 1775. The first slaves were taken from Gorée in 1536, and the trade continued at least until 1848.
Except for the brotherhood-of-man-under-the-fatherhood-of-God idea, slavery as a practice was not denounced by Jesus nor Paul nor any Father of the Church, although slavery was common in the Roman world (and in one frontier-war the Romans took 100,000 captives). The Church did not condemn slavery until the abolitionist sentiment of recent times, and St. Augustine expressly defended slavery, states McCabe, “as a divinely ordered social arrangement, and there is nothing in the writings of the other Fathers to suggest that he differed from them.” Augustine even wrote that there is “no crime in the eyes of God,” although he was not writing specifically about slavery. In the last centuries of the Republic, slaves probably were twice as numerous as free workers. One estimate had it that the ratio was thirty to one. Zeno included slaves in his principle that all men were born equal, and Epicurus was “conspicuous among Greek philosophers for his kindness to slaves, according to Lecky. Epicurus, in fact, welcomed slaves to his table. Slavery was justified by the Bible and was good for blacks, said a first-term Republican from Jasper, Alabama, in a 1996 speech prepared for a Senate debate over his proposal to fly the Confederate battle flag atop the state’s Capitol. Leviticus 25:44, he quoted, says, “You may acquire male and female slaves from the pagan nations that are around you.” Furthermore, I Timothy 61 states that slaves should “regard their own masters as worthy of all honor.” Continuing, Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson said, “The incidence of abuse, rape, broken homes, and murder are one hundred times greater, today, in the housing projects than they ever were on the slave plantations in the Old South. . . . The truth is that nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated or better loved than they were in the Old South by white, black, Hispanic, and Indian slave owners.” McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia contains a thorough discussion of slavery, one that is extraordinarily caustic about the Church’s role. “The Slave Trade and the Jews,” by David Brion Davis in The New York Review of Books (22 December 1994), is a thoroughly documented study of the subject. Davis writes that black slavery was taken for granted by Catholics, Muslims, Lutherans, Huguenots, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Jews alike. He adds, “The participants in the Atlantic slave system included Arabs, Berbers, scores of African ethnic groups, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch, Jews, Germans, Swedes, French, English, Danes, white Americans, Native Americans, and even thousands of New World blacks who had been emancipated or were descended from freed slaves but who then became slaveholding farmers or planters themselves.” Historian Ira Berlin, in Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998), details four distinct regional types of slavery—the type in the North (the mid-Atlantic and New England colonies or states); the Chesapeake (Virginia and Maryland); the Carolina low country; and the lower Mississippi valley (principally Louisiana). The earliest people of African origin arrived before the 17th century in English North America and were not from traditional African societies. In the 17th century those who arrived often had Spanish or Portuguese surnames and had been exposed to Christianity. In the 18th century the “plantation generations” usually came from societies in the African interior. Between 1803 and 1808 some 35,000 arrived. It was north of the Carolinas, Berlin wrote, that Americans’ tradition of classifying people with any known African ancestray as “black” first began. (David Brion Davis, “A Big Business,” The New York Review of Books, 11 June 1998; The Economist, 31 December 1999; Howard French, The New York Times, 6 March 1998; George M. Fredrickson, “Of Human Bondage,” The New York Times Book Review, 4 October 1998) {RE} Slayer Slayer is a recording group that makes no excuses for being anti-religious. The thrash/metal/punk music group’s album, God Hates Us All (American Recordings), was called by Kerrang! in the United Kingdom “the ugliest, most visceral and consistently grim Slayer album in many years. And as any true Slayer fan will know, this is a supreme compliment.” Writer Chirazi continued that in listening you “instantly feel the legendary Slayer G-force crushing mid-paced riffs, hernia-inducting drums, and a vocal that’s part hell and part desperation, all captured in the sort of sound that’s so sharp and stark you could use it to slice through concrete.” Another reviewer, Ian Christie, wrote, “Within these simpler songs are nerve-twitching variations and muscular micro-pauses that dance with predatory grace. The only dark lords [Slayer] worship are themselves.” Guitar World (July 1998) cited the group’s guitarists, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman, as being atheists. {CA}
Sleeper, John F. (19th Century) Sleeper, a freethinker, wrote The Mythologic Christ (1881). {GS}
Slenker, Elizabeth “Elmina” Drake (1827–1908) Slenker was daughter of a Quaker whose congregation in La Grange, New York, frowned upon freethinking. She wrote essays critical of the Bible in the Boston Intelligencer and wrote four novels with freethinking overtones. With Lillian and Moses Harman, she worked on a free-love journal, Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, which advocated using contraceptive devices, for which she developed a sex survey, anticipating the Kinsey Reports. Agents of Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice arrested her, and in a trial Slenker refused to swear on the Bible. Exonerated, she continued her efforts to disperse information concerning sexual education. From 1892 to 1893, she edited from Snowville, Virginia, Little Freethinker. {BDF; EU, William F. Ryan; PUT; WWS}
Sloan, John (1871–1951) Sloan, who was in the forefront of the American realist tradition in painting, was a naturalistic humanist. Among his works are “McSorley’s “Bar” and “Wake of the Ferry.” He is also known for his nudes. Sloan’s painting owes its distinction to a natural interest in human beings, whose life he portrayed with a directness often verging on satire. He was equally gifted as an etcher. {CL}
Sloan, Richard P. (20th Century) Sloan wrote a lead article in Lancet, “Religion, Spirituality, and Medicine,” in which he cautioned physicians not to prescribe religion as medicine. He is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. He is also chief of the Department of Behavioral Medicine at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Director of the Behavioral Medicine Program at Columbia Presbyteran Medical Center in New York. Sloan was a featured speaker in San Antonio at the 1999 national Convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
SLOVAK HUMANISTS The Prometheus Society, which is an associated member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), publishes Prometheus–Spravodai Spolocnosti Prometheus in Slovak, with English summaries quarterly, at Pavovicova 14, 82 1 08 Bratislava, Slovakia. In a 1995 Berlin conference arranged by the IHEU, Alexander Rehak told of the 1990 founding of the Prometheus Society, which cooperates with the World Union of Freethinkers. He detailed the problems of unemployment, heavy taxation, decline in living standards, growth of crime, drug use, and development of a mafia, all of which contribute to the difficulty of developing humanism in Slovakia. The influence of Catholicism is increasing, he stated, but Slovak humanists continue to campaign for separation of church and state and for an open and tolerant society. J. Celko and A. Rehak are activists in the Slovakian humanist movement. {Ladislav Hubenák, “Secular Humanism in Slovakia,” New Humanist, December 1995}
Smart, John Jamieson Carswell (1920– ) Smart, son of the Astronomer Royal in England, came to Australia in 1950 as a practicing Christian. Upon studying philosophy, however, he came to reject religion. An atheist and a philosopher, he is known for his espousal of the identity theory of mind: that mental processes are identical to physical processes in the brain. He developed the thesis, in Philosophy of Scientific Realism (1963) that the theories of science are the best account that we can have of the nature of reality and the entities that constitute it. A number of other Australian philosophers, including David Armstrong, support the view. After his professorship of philosophy at the University of Adelaide he was professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. A defender of materialism, Smart also wrote Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (1961), Between Science and Philosophy (1968), Ethics, Persuasion, and Truth (1984), Metaphysics and Morality (1987), Our Place in the Universe (1989), and Atheism and Theism (1996). In 1996, he was elected a Humanist Laureate by the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is a contributing editor on Philo and a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. {CA; SWW}
Smeal, Eleanor (20th Century) Smeal, a past president of the National Organization for Women and co-founder and president of the Feminist Majority, was awarded the 1994 Freethought Heroine Award and gave the keynote speech at the 17th annual Freedom From Religious Foundation convention in Madison, Wisconsin. In 1993 she was chosen as “the fourth most influential woman in the United States.” Smeal wrote Why and How Women Will Elect the Next President (1984).
Smetana, Augustin (1814–1851) Smetana taught philosophy at the University of Prague but was deposed because of his liberal views. He then severed his connection with the Catholic Church in 1850 and became one of the leading Bohemian freethinkers. {PUT; RAT}
Smiles, Samuel (1812–1904) Smiles, a freethinker and an individualist, wrote Self-Help (1859). {TRI}
Smith, Adam (1723–1790) Smith, the eminent Scottish economist who became known as the prophet of modern capitalism, while at Oxford was reprimanded for reading David Hume’s allegedly atheistic “Treatise of Human Nature.” His own “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759) became known for its extensive and lengthy argument which utilized three of his favorite words: sympathy, duty, and propriety. David Garrick, the actor and Smith’s fellow club member, called Smith’s conversation “flabby” (although Smith’s biographer, Ian Simpson Ross, in The Life of Adam Smith (1995), ascribes the remark to Oliver Goldsmith). The critic Peter Ackroyd has written that Smith’s voice was harsh, that he was easily embarrassed, that he was prone to stammer. He dictated to an amanuensis, because he could wield a pen only with great difficulty and “his own handwriting remained clumsy, large, and almost childish.” Smith traveled on the Continent from 1764 to 1766 as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch. While in France he met some of the Physiocrats and began to write An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was finally published in 1776. Led by the rationalist current of the century and influenced by Hume and others, he came to believe that in a laissez-faire economy the impulse of self-interest would bring about the public welfare. His pragmatism, as well as the leaven of ethical content and social insight in his thought, differentiates him from the rigidity of David Ricardo and the school of early 19th-century utilitarianism. His Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) appeared posthumously. In 1751, as Professor of Moral Philosophy in Glasgow University, he upset the orthodox by abandoning the Sunday class on Christian Evidences, and he petitioned the Senatus to be allowed to be relieved of the duty of opening his class with prayer. When permission was not given, word got out that the compulsory prayers were “thought to savour strongly of natural religion.” Smith was well-founded in rationalism before he met Voltaire and other French freethinkers, and his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) contained a positive hostility to certain ecclesiastical forms of theistic optimism. Smith’s Wealth of Nations, states Robertson, “is so completely naturalistic that only the habit of taking the Christian religion for granted could make men miss seeing that its account of the conditions of the rise of new cults applied to that in its origin no less than to the rise of any of its sects. As a whole, the argument might form part of Gibbon’s fifteenth chapter. And even allowing for the slowness of the average believer to see the application of a general sociological law to his own system, there must be inferred a great change in the intellectual climate of Scottish life before we can account for Smith’s general popularity at home as well as abroad after his handling of ‘enthusiasm and superstition’ in the Wealth of Nations. The fact stands out that the two most eminent thinkers in Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century [Hume and Smith] were non-Christians, and that their most intellectual associates were in general sympathy with them.” According to McCabe, Smith “was cautious about expressing his Deism, and shortly before he died he had sixteen volumes of his manuscripts burned.” In the 20th Century, particularly with the fall of communism, Smith’s laissez-faire views have been misappropriated by some. Nobel laureate James Buchanan, a conservative economist at George Mason University, has written that Smith “was certainly not an extreme advocate of laissez faire.” Journalist Sylvia Nasar adds that, far from being a conservative, Smith was a philosopher who inspired French revolutionaries, American suffragettes, and Japanese political reformers. He had the fundamental view that charity alone, while essential, cannot suffice to create prosperity: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” He was a person who thumbed his nose not only at the church but also at university and empire. His “invisible hand,” often misinterpreted as implying divine approval of greed, was a reference to the fact that self-interest, not charitable impulses, motivated butchers, brewers and bakers to feed society. Every individual, he concluded, is “led by an invisible hand to . . . without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society.” Ian Ross in The Life of Adam Smith (1995) tells how Smith claimed he had been kidnapped by gypsies at the age of three, a story entirely untrue. Ross also tells how Smith was visited by a certain noble lady “as he was going to breakfast, and falling into discourse, Mr. Smith took a piece of bread and butter, which, after he had rolled it round and round, he put into the teapot and pour’d water upon it: some time after he poured it into a cup, and when he had tasted it, he said it was the worst tea he had ever met with.” Samuel Johnson, who disliked Smith’s skepticism, called him a dull dog. In Hume’s words, Smith was affected by “indolence and love of solitude.” Smith’s mother, who lived into her nineties and was a person in his words who “loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me,” was the only woman in his life. Smith died six years after his mother’s death of “chronic obstruction” of the bowels. {CE; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; The Economist, 11 November 1995; TRI; TYD}
Smith, A. D. Howell (20th Century) Smith, a freethinker, wrote In Search of the Real Bible (1943). {GS}
Smith, Alfred E. (20th Century) In 1954, Smith, a marketing consultatnt, was a counselor for the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association.
Smith, Arthur H. (1845–1932) Smith, in Chinese Characteristics (1892), wrote, “There never was on this earth a body of educated and cultured men so thoroughly agnostic and atheistic as the mass of Confucian scholars.” {TYD}
Smith, Carol (20th Century) Smith, a member in Milwaukee of Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin, has written for the group’s newsletter, Humanist Quest, and for Secular Nation. A regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism, she edits “Humanist Quest” on the Internet. E-mail: <csmith@omnifest.uwm.edu>. On the Web: <humanist1@juno.com>.
Smith, Charles (1887–1964) Smith from 1926 to 1964 edited the Truth Seeker, a rationalist journal in New York City. He is one of the foremost American atheist leaders of the century. With W. L. Oliphant he authored the Debate on Atheism, a debate in the Shawnee, Oklahoma, Church of Christ (1929). Although Smith wrote extensively, little has been written about him. Gordon Stein, however, has compiled many stories about Smith’s having gone from Harvard to Vladivostok to Little Rock. In Arkansas, when he was found guilty of distributing obscene, slanderous, or scurrilous literature, he insisted upon working off the $25 fine by serving time in jail at $1 per day—he then commenced a hunger strike and was hospitalized. When the case was dismissed, he again opened his bookstore and again was found guilty, this time being sentenced to ninety days in jail. Smith’s intent was to “nullify the anti-atheist laws of this country,” and Arkansas suffered from publicity in newspapers which painted it as some sort of primitive backwater. In 1925 he and Freeman Hopwood founded the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (the 4A’s), which soon had over 3000 members and chapters on twenty college campuses. The 4A’s conducted an Ingersoll Forum and brought suit to stop such things as the employment of chaplains in Congress and the reading of the Ten Commandments in schools. In 1930 he purchased the Truth Seeker, which in the 1950s was converted into a small monthly. Smith had an antipathy to Jews and non-whites which (perhaps because of the influence of his assistant, Woolsey Teller) became increasingly apparent in the journal. “In a sense,” Stein has written of the famed libertarian, “Smith was born at the wrong time in history. He would have done much better if he had lived as an adult during the last half of the 19th century, when freethought was in its Golden Age.” Negative about the subject of humanism, Smith wrote as follows:
That is Humanism: an all-over-the-lot gush-out that hopes to cure the world’s ills by a flood of sentimentalism. There is only one kind of "atheist plus" or "atheist minus"; it depends on whether he believes in full steam ahead for atheism or in rumbling along at slow-freight speed. This is an age of specialization, and the atheist, as an atheist, is a specialist, with one objective in mind: the smashing of the God superstition. What he may do apart from this, in matters of social interest, is a matter of individual taste. The atheist can be just as interested in art, music, architecture, literature, drama, finer human relations, public health, new housing, and the making of a better noodle soup as the most enthusiastic “Humanist,” but he does not have to become a cultist to do it, nor splatter his “humanitarianism” onto public billboards. It is precisely this sentimental rhapsodizing that causes my distaste for Humanism, which, apart from its desire to do good, is burdened by wishy-washy methods and an old-maid’s outlook.
Smith’s Manhattan office was a dark, seemingly disorganized clutter of books, magazines, and papers. Just before his death from a heart attack, he responded to a request, after the present author’s visit, for an updating of his views on humanism:
Sensism, to be published about the end of next month (1956), may contain usable material [about atheistic humanism].
In that book, he restated his lifelong acceptance of the logic of and need for atheism. {EU, Gordon Stein; WAS, 26 March 1956}
Smith, Colin (20th Century) Smith, a journalist, was a leader in 1910 of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales in Australia.
Smith, David (20th Century) Smith, while a student at Pennsylvania State University, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Smith, Edward Garstin (20th Century) Smith wrote The Life and Reminiscences of Robert G. Ingersoll (1904). {GS}
Smith, Francis Barrymore (1932– ) Smith, a professor of history at the Australian National University, wrote a study, “Religion and Freethought in Melbourne, 1870–1890,” along with other research articles on freethought and secularism. {FUK}
Smith, Frank (1907– ) An attorney now retired as a professor at George Washington University, Smith is author of Robert G. Ingersoll, A Life (1989), the only biography of Ingersoll which is in print. He has written for Truth Seeker and Free Inquiry.
Smith, George Augustus (Born 1861) Smith, a freethinker and member of the North London Ethical Society, wrote “A Humanist Religion” (1920) and Little Essays in Religion (1926). From 1917 to 1923 he edited the society’s publication, The Humanist. {GS; RAT}
Smith, George H. (1949– ) Smith is the author of Atheism: The Case Against God (1979) and is president of Signature Books. In the work, he holds that the belief in God is irrational to the point of absurdity and that this irrationality, when manifested in specific religions such as Christianity, is quite harmful. “Belief in God is irrational to the point of absurdity,” he declared, “and . . . this irrationality, when manifested in specific religions such as Christianity, is extremely harmful.” Smith is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He also is author of Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (1991). {CA; E; Free Inquiry, Spring, 1981}
Smith, Gerritt (1797–1874) Smith was an American reformer who was graduated by Hamilton College. Elected to Congress in 1850, he served one session. Though of a wealthy slave-holding family, he largely devoted his fortune to the anti-slavery cause, perhaps spending over £8,000,000. Smith is thought to have aided John Brown in planning the Harper’s Ferry raid. In religion, originally a Presbyterian, Smith came to give up all dogmas and wrote the deistic Religion of Reason (1864) and Nature the Base of a Free Theology (1867). McCabe states that although Smith dissented from all the churches, he tried to establish an independent church, a sort of Theistic Ethical Society, and preached for it. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Smith, Glenn (Died 1999) Smith, who served in World War II and was a steam locomotive engineer in the Rocky Mountains, was a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Denver chapter. He was a plaintiff and witness in a lawsuit to have the Ten Commandments monument removed from the Colorado State Capitol grounds. His objecting to the Ten Commandments was partly based on his having some Native American ancestors.
Smith, Goldwin (1823–1910) From 1858 to 1866 Smith was Regius professor of modern history at Oxford. He had conveyed to America a message of British sympathy with the north in 1864, and been warmly received. When his father committed suicide in 1867, Smith migrated to the United States and was appointed honorary professor of English constitutional history at Cornell. The corrupt public life of the United States drove him in 1871 to Canada, where he lived for the rest of his life. Smith’s rationalist views are found in Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897), Lines of Religious Inquiry (1904), and No Refuge but in Truth (1908). In the latter book he entirely rejected the Christian creed, while pleading for its ideals. He left open the question of a future life, and he accepted “some moral power” but thought it “impossible that we should ever have direct proof through human observation and reasoning of the existence of Deity.” {RAT}
Smith, Goldwin (1823–1910) Smith was an English educator, historian, and journalist. While a student at Oxford, he helped execute reforms at the university and in 1858 became professor of modern history there. Smith became known for his ardently democratic, strongly anti-imperialistic, and antimilitaristic outlook. In 1868, “driven to America by a domestic tragedy” according to McCabe, Smith became a professor of English literature and constitutional history at Cornell University. In No Refuge But the Truth, Smith rejects Christianity, is skeptical about a future life, and thinks it “impossible that we should ever have direct proof through human observation and reasoning of the existence of deity.” {CE; JM}
Smith, Grafton Elliot [Sir] (1871–1937) An Australian by birth, Smith came to England and became professor of anatomy at London University (1919–1936). He is said to have been so thorough that he examined 20,000 bodies in Egypt. His Evolution of Man (1924) is materialistic. An agnostic, Smith was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {JM; RE}
Smith, Harold D. (20th Century) A freethinker, Smith wrote A Criticism of Christian Dogma (1964). {GS}
Smith, Harry Clark (1887–1975) Smith, an Iowa grain dealer, played third base for the Portland farm team of Chicago Cubs in the 1910s and had a .400 batting average. During the winters, he was employed to oversee snowbound grain elevators in Saskatchewan. Wounded in the Battle of Verdun while fighting in World War I with the 33rd Infantry Division, Smith was hospitalized at the Buckingham Palace barracks and received the Purple Heart medal. When Queen Mary visited the American soldiers and inquired where he had come from, she was surprised at his mention of Canada and said, “Why, then, you’re one of my boys!” Smith’s father, Spencer, had indeed been born in Aylmer, Ontario, Canada, and Smith had lived and worked grain elevators in several Canadian provinces. Again wounded by a German plane which swooped down over the trenches, Smith later received a second Purple Heart. The founder of the first American Legion chapter in Iowa, Smith was secretary of the Masonic Lodge in Minburn, a town of 328. In the 1930s or 1940s he showed a booklet concerning the Essenes, possibly one obtained through Masonic Lodge channels, to his son, Warren Allen Smith. Although the large number of Dead Sea Scrolls were not discovered until 1947, and it was not until the 1950s that Edmund Wilson’s and Duncan Howlett’s books were published about the small Jewish religious order that developed in the 2nd century B.C.E., Smith was not the only person who considered the possibility that Jesus may have been an Essene or was influenced by Essenes. Smith was a nominal Methodist, but his son in retrospect thinks his father was basically a deistic Mason. A stickler for accuracy, Smith would have been infuriarted to know that Iowa’s Greene County Clerk would one day list his middle name as Carl on the death certificate. Ruth Marion Miles Smith (1891-1975), his wife, was a South Dakota equestrienne who fell in love with the baseball player. It was her second marriage—in 1921 she was one of the first divorcées in a state which had only entered the union in 1889. The daughter of a successful homesteader, she was a nominal Methodist, but she could not explain who John or Charles Wesley were and had no idea whatsover how the concept of trinitarianism came about. When a Christian minister solemnly told her that she would not be with her son in Heaven because he had become a Unitarian, she for the first time questioned what religion was all about. For her, the Order of Eastern Star was a kind of religion, particularly because, at the auction bridge games members played while socializing, she was able to serve her popular popcorn balls with the secret ingredient she would reveal to no one: vinegar. {WAS}
Smith, Henry Dorr (20th Century) Smith, a freethinker, wrote “Thoughts—Read and Digest Them” (19–?). {GS}
Smith, Homer W. (20th Century) Smith’s Man and His Gods (1952) is a masterful study in freethought.
Smith, I. B. (19th Century) A freethinker, Smith wrote The Speculative Dictionary (1835). {GS}
Smith, Isaac (19th Century) In the 1830s, Smith was president of the United Moral and Philosophical Society in England. {GS}
Smith, Jack Clifford (1916–1996) Smith, a journalist and author, was a reporter for the Bakersfield Californian, the Honolulu Advertiser, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and the Los Angeles Daily News. A newspaper columnist, he wrote books including Three Coins in the Birdbath (1965); Smith on Wry (1970), and Alive in La La Land (1989). According to Atheist Celebrities on the internet, Smith was a non-believer. Smith, John Maynard: See entry for John Maynard Smith.
Smith, Joseph (1805-1844) The American Mormon leader who founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, Joseph Smith, said that in 1827 he found golden tablets God had sent to him. In 1829 upon translating the tablets, he wrote The Book of Mormon. In his short life, he took thirty-three wives, including a mother and a daughter, the widow of his brother, and two sisters. Eleven were between 14 and 20 years of age, nine were 21 to 30, eight were in his own peer group (31 to 40), two were 41 to 50, and three were 51 or over. Counting Emma, his first wife, he may have had an additional eight wives. After his death, almost all of the wives married again, many having already been in secular marriages—thus, in addition to polygamy (plural wives) the early Mormons practiced polyandry (plural husbands). According to Todd Compton’s In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (1998), the wives experienced depression, despair, anxiety, helplessness, abandonment, and anger by fulfilling “their sacred duty.” (See entry for Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.) {Vern L. Bullough, “What God Has Joined,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1998}
Smith, Karl (20th Century) Smith is Secretary of the Thomas Paine Pennsylvania Memorial Committee (Box 242, Pocopson, PA 19366). Smith, Katie Kehm (1868–1895) Smith, born in Indiana, moved to Iowa and became a prominent freethought lecturer when sixteen. When she moved to Oregon in 1893, she and her husband organized the First Secular Church of Portland. Three to four hundred attended regularly, and she became secretary of the Oregon State Secular Union. {PUT}
Smith, Kay Nolte (1932–1993) Smith was an actor, teacher, atheist, and award-winning novelist. She and her husband ran a summer theater in Michigan, where they performed at dinner theaters and co-produced Ayn Rand’s “Penthouse Legend” (known as “Night of January 16”). She wrote Watcher (1980), a novel which won the Edgar Allen Poe award, followed by Mindspell (1983), Country of the Heart (1988), and Tale of the Wind (1991). In 1983 she spoke to the Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Peoria, Illinois. {WWS}
Smith, Kenneth J. (20th Century) A leader of the Ethical Culture Society in Philadelphia, Smith signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2; EU, Howard B. Radest}
Smith, L. Windsor (20th Century) In Little Falls, New York, from 1833 to 1834, Smith published Mohawk Liberal. {FUS}
Smith, Lee (20th Century) A freethinker, Smith wrote “The Truth Shall Make You Mad” (c. 1960). {GS}
Smith, Lila (20th Century) Smith is on the Executive Board of the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York.
Smith, Lillian (1897–1966) Author of Strange Fruit (1944), Smith depicted the love of a white boy for a black girl, an unusual topic for its time. A social critic and a social worker in George, the Florida-born novelist supported the use of violence as a means to its ends. Her Killers of the Dream (1949) included the following:
Belief in Some One’s right to punish you is the fate of all children in Judaic-Christian culture. But nowhere else, perhaps, have the rich seedbeds of Western homes found such a growing climate for guilt as is produced in the South by the combination of a warm moist evangelism and racial segregation.
{TYD}
Smith, Michael (1932- ) A Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry in 1993, Smith has achievements which include research in nucleic acid and nucletide chemistry and biochemistry using in-vitro mutagenesis gene expression. English-born, he lives in Vancouver. In an autobiographical sketch, Smith said, “My only prizes from the Sunday School were ‘for attendance,’ so I presume my atheism, which developed when I left home to attend university, although latent, was discernible.” {CA}
Smith, Morton (1915–1991) Smith, a professor emeritus of ancient history at Columbia University, was for many years a member of the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. In 1958 he discovered a previously unknown fragment of the Gospel of Mark, and in 1973 his The Secret Gospel theorized that early Christian groups owed some of their appeal to the magical rituals which played an important part, as well as their licentiousness. His Jesus the Magician (1978) developed the theory that some of Jesus’s charisma is attributable to his ability to use “magic.” With R. Joseph Hoffmann, Smith has edited What the Bible Really Says.
Smith, Noel W. (20th Century) A professor of psychology at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, Smith specializes in the history of psychology and current theoretical systems of psychology. He is author of An Analysis of Ice Age Art: Its Psychology and Belief System (1992) and Greek and Interbehavioral Psychology (1993).
Smith, Orlando J. (1842–1908) Smith, a freethinker, wrote A Short View of Great Questions (1899) and The Agreement Between Science and Religion (1906). {GS}
Smith, Peter R. (20th Century) Smith was born in London and studied nuclear engineering at the University of London. In 1982, he became a consulting engineer at Niagara Falls in Canada and has worked for the Polysar Rubber Corporation since 1987. From 1991–1993, Smith was the first Vice President of the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC), and in 1993 he became President. Smith is a writer and researcher for Ontario Skeptics and is a member of the United Kingdom’s National Secular Society as well as of the Rationalist Press Association. In 1994 at the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Smith was one of the leaders.
Smith, Preservèd (1880–1941) Smith, a famed Harvard, Williams, Amherst, and Cornell University historian, once wrote a book on theophagy (god-eating), leading quite a few individuals to research the origins of the Christian communion service, which involves symbolically drinking the blood and eating the flesh of God. That 1922 work was entitled A Short History of Christian Theophagy. Among his comments about religion are the following:
There can be no doubt that the Bible . . . became a stumbling-block in the path of progress, scientific, social, and even moral. It was quoted against Copernicus as it was against Darwin.
The common assumption, hardly disputed even now, that the moral influence of the Bible has been wholly good, and that all that is needed to improve our society is to “spread the gospel,” is not borne out by a candid study of history.
Smith, known as an expert on Erasmus, was an editor of the Journal of Modern Medicine and of the American Historical Review (1936–1941). He was the author of The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (1911); The Age of the Reformation (1920); and Erasmus—A Study of His Life, Ideals, and Place In History (1923). Preservèd Smith was the father of humanist editor and historian Priscilla Robertson. {CE; TYD}
Smith, Quentin (1952– ) Smith, a supporter of Internet Infidels, is professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University. He has published five books, including Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (1993), which he co-authored with William Lane Craig. In 1996 at the Atheist Alliance convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he addressed the group. Smith holds that “[t]he claim that the beginning of the universe has a cause conflicts with current scientific theory,” concluding that “scientific cosmology is not only not supported by any theistic theory, it is actually logically inconsistent with theism.” For Philo, of which he is a contributing editor, Smith wrote “Why Stephen Hawking’s Cosmology Precludes a Creator” (Spring-Summer 1998). {Free Inquiry, Spring 1998}
Smith, Robert (20th Century) A recording artist with the band called The Cure, Smith stated during a press conference in 1992, “I don’t believe in God. I wish I did.” Smith, lead singer from the band The Cure, stated in a press conference in 1992: "I don't believe in god. I wish I did." --JQ --- Update (28-May-01): A quote from a 1989 issue of The Face magazine (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ChainofFlowers/theface.htm) that further clarifies Smith's religious position: "....I used to lay myself open to visions of God, but I never had any. I come from a religious family, and there have been moments when I've felt the oneness of things, but they never last, they fade away, leaving me with the belief that it's only fear that drives people to religion. And I don't think I'm ever going to wake up and know that I was wrong."{CA}
Smith, Robert James (21 April 1957 - ) A British punk rocker, guitarist, and songwriter, Smith is the lead singer of a group called The Cure. The band’s albums have sold over twenty-seven millions copies and are into their third decade of successes, the most recent being Bloodflowers. Smith is the mastermind (voice, guitar), and the current band includes Simon Gallup as bassist, Perry Bamonte as guitarist, Roger O’Donnell on keyboards, and Jason Cooper is the drummer. When seventeen and a student of St. Wilfrid’s Comprehensive in Crawley, Sussex, Smith formed The Easy Cure. In 1978 the “easy” in the title was dropped, and in 1981 Faith, a mournful, atmospheric album of bleak and barren soundscapes evoking a world of dissolution and fear, broke the United Kingdom Top 10 as #9. Disintegration in 1989 entered the UK charts at #3. Wish in 1992 was hailed by some as The Cure’s best work yet—it reached #1 in the UK and #2 in the USA charts. In 1997 Smith was invited to perform at David Bowie’s 50th birthday party, held in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. In 1998 he appeared in an episode of “South Park,” saving the world from the evil Mecha Streisand. During a 1992 press conference, Smith told one reporter, “I don’t believe in god. I wish I did.” Similarly in The Face (1989), Smith said, “I used to lay myself open to visions of God, but I never had any. I come from a religious family, and there have been moments when I’ve felt the oneness of things, but they never last, they fade away, leaving me with the belief that it’s only fear that drives people to religion. And I don’t think I’m ever going to wake up and know that I was wrong. (On the Web:(http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ChainofFlowers/theface.htm) {CA}
Smith, Robin (20th Century) Smith, who lives in Northumberland, England, participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. His interests include assisting individuals with physical disabilities.
Smith, Samantha (1972–1985) When Smith as a youngster asked Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov if the USSR and USA were going to get into a nuclear war, he replied to her letter by inviting her to visit Moscow. She then became an American celebrity, turning attention to the need for the two nations to improve international relations. After her early death on a foggy Maine night when a small commuter plane crashed, killing everyone on board, Smith was depicted on a commemorative postage stamp. The Soviets named an asteroid after her. Samantha had attended Unitarian Universalist churches in Houston and Augusta. {EG; UU}
Smith, Thomas Southwood (1788–1861) A nonconformist minister who abandoned Christianity and took up medicine, Smith became prominent in medical and social reform. He was Bentham’s physician and, when he dissected Bentham’s body (as directed in his will in the interest of science), Smith said that he shared Bentham’s atheistic humanitarianism. {RAT; RE}
Smith, Thomas Vernor (1890–1964) Smith wrote The Democratic Way of Life (1926), Beyond Conscience (1934), Creative Skeptics (1934), and The Ethics of Compromise (1959). {EW}
Smith, Warren Allen (1921– ): Smith, a roué and sybarite currently living in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was Methodist Church pianist in his home town of Minburn, Iowa (population 328). When a teenager, he loudly disputed the existence of the Holy Ghost with visiting Methodist Bishop Oxnam. The discussion had taken place at a church supper where, after the bishop had just given a homily about miracles, everyone was shocked upon seeing ripples atop the bishop’s bowl of oyster stew. The hushed speculation was that the oysters were somehow alive and were . . . miraculously . . . swimming. When it was determined that, no, the disturbance had been caused by Smith’s pumping air through a rubber palpitator hidden under the tablecloth, the teenager was not so miraculously removed from the speaker’s table, to the bishop’s obvious relief. Upon leaving home for college, Smith left the dour Methodist group and experienced, in succession, nihilism, agnosticism, deism, Emersonianism, pantheism, transcendentalism, Unitarian humanism of the John H. Dietrich-Curtis W. Reese vintage, freethought, rationalism, naturalistic humanism, and humanistic naturalism. Drafted into the Army and wearing identifying “dog tags” which listed his religion as “None,” Acting First Sergeant Smith led his company onto Omaha Beach in 1944, experienced being an atheist in a foxhole (with an absentee ballot he voted for Norman Thomas of the Socialist Party), and was chief clerk in Headquarters Oise of the Adjutant General’s office in the Little Red Schoolhouse in Reims, General Eisenhower’s headquarters, in which Nazi General Alfred Jodl eventually signed the surrender. Upon returning home unwounded, Smith used the “G.I. Bill of Rights”—a government payment for furthering soldiers’ education—to study philosophy with logician Charner Perry and metaphysician Charles Hartshorne at the University of Chicago. At the University of Northern Iowa, he majored in English and in 1948 founded the first Humanist Club on any college campus. For the Des Moines Unitarians in the 1940s, he wrote “Song of the Pantheist,” an atonal selection which was performed by their choir and organist. Hitchhiking from Iowa to New York City in 1949, he became a graduate student at Columbia University, studying with Corliss Lamont, George Counts, Paul Tillich, and Allen Walker Read, among others. The present study is partly an extension of his research with Lionel Trilling, sponsor of his M. A. thesis and chairman at that time of the English Department. At Columbia, Smith founded a second Humanist Club and secured John Dewey as the first dues-paying ($1.) member. In addition to teaching high school English in New York City and New Canaan, Connecticut, he founded with Fernando Vargas a major Manhattan independent recording studio (Variety Sound Corporation, 1961–1990), working with such showbiz figures as Harold Prince, Robert Whitehead, Arthur Miller, John Guare, and Tito Puente. He was book review editor of The Humanist during the editorships of Edwin Wilson and Priscilla Robertson; wrote a syndicated column, “Manhattan Scene,” in West Indian and Caribbean newspapers; and was on the board of directors of the American Humanist Association (voting in 1957 for Margaret Sanger to become Humanist of the Year). Smith, who is an editorial associate for Free Inquiry and has written for The American Rationalist, Gay and Lesbian Humanist (United Kingdom), The Freethinker (England), Humanist in Canada, New Humanist (London), and Skeptical Inquirer, is continuously seen in the company of Allen Windsor, with whose pen he has written widely. In 1989, upon the death of Vargas, his companion of forty years, Smith arranged a secular humanist memorial at their recording studio, playing Vargas’s own recording of Liza Minnelli’s first demonstration record as well as music by Marvin Hamlisch, Paul Simon, Barry Manilow, David Amram, Celia Cruz, and other notables whom Vargas had recorded. Vargas was the first member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York, which was initially formed and which first met in the recording studio. Smith was the group’s president and edited its newsletter, Pique. Upon his own death, Smith has directed that his ashes be comingled with some of Vargas’s that he saved and are to be buried at the Smith family plot in Waukee, Iowa. In 1994, Smith helped arrange the founding in San José, Costa Rica, of Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU), a Spanish-speaking humanist group for Central and South America which is on the net at <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>. Smith signed Humanist Manifesto II as well as Humanist Manifesto 2000 (for which he suggested part of the wording in Part VII, “Society should not deny homosexuals, bisexuals, or transgendered and transsexuals equal rights”); is a member of the Black Hawk County (Iowa) Unitarian congregation, which he finds inconvenient to attend; of the Rationalist Press Association in England; the Hume Society; has been a director of the Bertrand Russell Society since 1967; was a founding member of the Voltaire Society of America, a founding member and treasurer of Stonewall Riot Veterans; and has headed Mensa’s oldest interest group, the M[ensa] Investment Club (1967 to date). In 1991 after purchasing a Macintosh computer with a font called “symbol,” he was the first to end correspondence with the salutation “humanist©ically.” In 1998, after years of Taslima Nasrin’s hiding in Sweden as well as elsewhere in Europe, and upon her return to Bangladesh despite the fatwa on her head, Smith was a key person in publicizing her plight. Their friendship began when they were introduced at a conference of humanists in Mexico—“I tell friends I found her hiding in a Mexican cave, for that is where the restaurant was”—and he visited her after she was forced to flee for asylum in Sweden, following which she hid with him for a time in New York City. In 1999 he finally finished the present project—Who’s Who in Hell—that he had started five decades earlier. The phrase which he had used to describe his outlook had been “Unitarian humanist,” but as the result of his extensive research he now describes his outlook as that of a “humanistic naturalist.” Smith’s home page on the World Wide Web is autobiographical: <http://idt.net/~wasm>. His e-mail address: <wasm@idt.net>. (See entries for John Cowley, Martin L. Grant, Greenwich Village Humanist Club, Humanist Club, Humanistic Naturalism, Horace Kallen, Pique, Augustus Reccord, Margaret Sanger, Jun Sczesnoczkawasm, Lionel Trilling, Fernando Vargas, and Allen Windsor.) {CL; FD; HM2; HNS; LEE}
Smith, Warren Sylvester (1919– ) Smith is the author of a scholarly book, The London Heretics, 1870–1914 (1968), which contains highly original research concerning non-Christians and non-theists.
Smith, Wilford B. (1884–1939) “I was born bare-footed in a thorny world with a tin spoon in my teeth and a bottle of paregoric close by,” Smith wrote. “I was born in a log house, chained with mud, built at the brink of an alkali pond, where the bumblebee bumbed and the woodpeckers pecked and the straddle bugs straddled around, where the sage hen sang her complaint to the moon and the whippoorwill called to its mate thru the gloom, where the briars grew hard by the door and the centipede crawled on the floor; I slept to the trill of the nightingale and awoke at dawn as the tarantula tickled me under the chin with his hairy legs.” After being admitted to the bar in 1905, Smith started Plain Talk, a newspaper which was suppressed three times and, finally, “thousands of copies were burned by order of the Chief of Police.” In Dallas he began a monthly, The Pitchfork, which was satirical in nature. Ana ardent foe of Prohibition, he staged a mock funeral for John Barleycorn when the nation went “dry.” He attacked a Baptist preacher, J. Frank Norris, for his anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism. Although he remained a believer, he was greatly influenced by freethought, especially in its attacks on puritan repression. {Freethought History #15, 1995}
Smith, William Benjamin (1850–1934) After teaching mathematics or physics at various universities, Smith taught philosophy at Tulane. He wrote Der vorchristliche Jesus (1906) and Ecce Deus (1912), in the latter of which he denied the historicity of Jesus. {RAT; RE}
Smith, William Henry (1808–1872) Smith wrote chiefly for Blackwood’s Magazine, although he completed some plays and poems and novels. Smith had discarded orthodoxy in his early years, was a friend of Mill, and admired Comte. {RAT} Smith, William Robertson (1846–1894) Smith was deposed from his chair at the Free Church College of Aberdeen, and from the ministry, because of articles he wrote for the 1881 Encyclopaedia Britannica. He then taught Arabic at Cambridge. Smith wrote Prophets of Israel (1882) and The Religion of the Semites (1889), showing that he rejected supernaturalism but was a theist. {RAT}
Smoker, Barbara (20th Century) Smoker, a “cradle Catholic,” is author of a British Rationalist Association pamphlet, “Humanism.” In the late 1960s she was editor of the South Place Ethical Society’s magazine. A Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) and a president of the National Secular Society for over twenty years until she was defeated by Daniel O’Hara for the office in 1996, she is a vigorous proponent of liberal and militant causes. She is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Smoker has officiated at more than four hundred secular humanist funerals. Many know her as the publisher of “anti-Xmas” greeting cards, known as Heretic Cards. She wrote Good God! (1977), a collection of satirical verse. {FUK; WWS}
Smolin, Lee (20th Century) A physicist and cosmologist, Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos argues that universes have the capacity to “reproduce,” just as organisms do. In Lingua Franca (July 1997), Smolin was asked about the metaphysical implications of his research. He replied, “As a friend of mine says, the whole show of the universe is so extraordinary that the absence of God is God enough.” (See entry for Cosmology.) {CA}
Smyth, Brettena Bridgetena (1842–1898) A lapsed Roman Catholic, Smyth was an Australian feminist, family planner, and secularist. One of the early campaigners for the Australian Women’s Suffrage Society, she favored birth control, which was a radical proposal in the 1880s. She wrote Diseases Incidental to Women (1895) and a book on birth control, The Limitation of Offspring. {SWW}
SNAKE WORSHIP Snakes have played a role in many religions, adored as a regenerative power by some, and by others a god of evil, as a god of good, as Christ (by the Gnostics), as a phallic deity, as a solar deity, and as a god of death. The snake also has served as a symbol of Satan and many deities, including Apollo and the Egyptian god Ra. The Columbia Encyclopedia details the extent to which the snake has been considered divine in Ancient Greece, in Buddhism, in Siam, and elsewhere. David L. Kimbrough, in Taking Up Serpents: Snake Handlers of Eastern Kentucky (1995), has detailed what he learned in more than three hundred Holiness churches in the Appalachian area. {CE; Joe Nickell, “Snake Handling,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1996}
Snedeker, Caroline Dale (20th Century) Snedeker wrote The Town of the Fearless (1931). {GS}
Snell, Henry [of Plumstead] (1865–1945) A British statesman, Snell was a poorly-educated peasant boy who rose to a high position in the political world, on the Labor side. For some years he was chairman of the London County Council and Deputy Leader for his party in the House of Lords. In 1898 he was appointed lecturer to the English Union of Ethical Societies, and in 1905 general secretary of the Union. An agnostic from youth, Snell eventually became President of the Rationalist Press Association. {FUK; JM; RAT; RE}
Snider, Kellie (20th Century) Snider, a self-described “recovering Fundamentalist,” has spoken about “The Trauma of Dogma” to the North Texas Church of Freethought. {Freethought Observer, November-December 1996}
Snitzer, Herb (20th Century) Snitzer, a professional photographer, is on the board of directors of the Humanist Association: St. Petersburg (HASP). In their newsletter, “Arts and Issues” (July 1996), he wrote that art has a grand and noble history “too often ignored and certainly not understood.” He added in 1995 that humanists must recognized that art “is one of the foundations upon which we know that we are a very special species, similar to but so different form other life forms and that we as artists have a responsibility to continue making art because it is a wonderful thing to do. We also have a special responsibility to those who will inhabit this planet in 2095, and through our art (and science) those distant relatives will know us and their own world more deeply, lovingly, and intelligently.”
Snoilsky, Karl Johan Gustav (1841–1903) Count Snoilsky was a Swedish poet who displayed his freethought in works published under the name of “Sventröst.” He translated Goethe’s ballads into Swedish and followed the German poet’s pantheistic philosophy. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Snowden, James Keighley (20th Century)
Snowden, a freethinker, wrote Myth and Legend in the Bible (1915). {GS}
Snyder, Carl (1869–1946) Snyder, a writer on science, specialized in the popular presentation of science in the press and in books which had a wide circulation. In New Conceptions of Science (1903), Snyder wrote that “the influence of the Christian Church was evil, incomparably evil.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Snyder, Eric (20th Century) Snyder has been president of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists (UMAH). He edited their newsletter, The Heretic, which commenced in 1994 and in 1995 he edits their Minnesota Atheists.
Snyder, Louis Leo (1907– ) Snyder, a German-born historian, was foreign correspondent from Germany of the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune (1928–1931). He taught at New York’s City College and the University of Cologne. Among his many books are The Age of Reason (1955), The Dreyfus Affair (1971), and Historical Guide to World War II (1982). {GS}
Sobczak, A. H. (20th Century) Sobczak, the editor of Fade Away and Radiate, a bi-monthly publication of opinion and science fiction, is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker.
SOCIAL CONTRACT A major work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762) states that governmental organization should be based on the general will of a society and should conform to the nature of human beings. The majority in a government, he held, had a right to banish resistant minorities. {DCL}
SOCIALISM Socialism has been defined as any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. Many adherents call it a humanistic outlook in political science. Nicolas Walter (New Humanist, September 1996) has categorized some of the socialists who are theists:
Keir Hardie, Lansbury, Clement Attlee, Stafford Cripps, Harold Wilson, Smith
and listedsocialists who are not theists:
Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Laski, Hugh Gaitskell, Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock
SOCIETY AGAINST RELIGION Society Against Religion (PO Box 76, Commack, NY 11725) is “a national organization dedicated to creating an open forum of discussion in order to educate the populace to the dangers of religion and hold religion itself answerable to its crimes against humanity,” according to its founder and president Vincent Bruzzese. Its board members include Maire Caruso, Scott Cziepl, and Adam Turner. E-mail: <nogod1@ol.com>.
SOCIETY FOR HUMANISM AND INDEPENDENT ETHICS The Society for Humanism and Independent Ethics (SHIE) was established in Poland in 1991. The group opposes anti-democratic and anti-pluralistic activities; the subordination of government policies to any ideology; nationalism, racism, and all forms of discrimination; threats to the use of reason and science; and restrictions on human rights. The group cooperates in publishing and distributing a journal, Bez Dogmatu (Without a Dogma). The headquarters is in Warsaw, but branches are found in other Polish cities, according to Jan Wolenski, a professor in the Institute of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
SOCIETY FOR HUMANISTIC JUDAISM
The Society for Humanistic Judaism (28611 West Twelve Mile Road, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334) was established in 1969 to create a humanistic alternative to Jewish life. It sponsors the journal Humanistic Judaism and the newsletter Humanorah. The 1997 officers were Rick Naimark, President; Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, Rabbinic Advisor; M. Bonnie Cousens, Executive Director; Stacie Fine, Community development Director; Yehuda Bauer and Albert Memmi, Honorary Presidents of the International Federation; and Yaakov Malkin and Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, deans of the International Institute. The Society is affiliated with the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews. Vern Bullough has said the Society’s members observe many of the Jewish traditions and customs but are atheists. They hold that humanism, even secular humanism, is tainted with Christianity, and they want to keep a Jewish cultural identity. “My own experience with [a] secular humanist Jewish organization [the Vancouver Peretz Institute]” is that “Jewish secularism shows no interest in promoting humanism—at least not in British Columbia.” Expressing this view Herb Fears, past president of the British Columbia Humanist Association, added that the Institute’s president, Sol Jackman, never worked with his organization to join in a humanist alliance. Chicago’s Sherwin Wine, asked at the Institute about the matter of co-operation between humanist groups, was evasive. And Fears concluded, “It would seem that the secular Jews who adopt the humanist nomenclature are, by their isolationism, merely subscribing to the conceit of the ‘chosen ones’ held by their religious counterparts. Not exactly a productive way of achieving common goals considering how few we secularists are, methinks.” On the Web: <http://www.shj.org/>. (See entry for Sherwin T. Wine.) {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1998; International Humanist News, December 1997}
SOCIETY FOR LOGIC AND REASON The Society for Logic and Reason is at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Daisy Peel is its President. On the Web: <http://osu.orst.edu/groups/slr>.
SOCIETY OF EVANGELICAL AGNOSTICS In the early 1980s, the Society of Evangelical Agnostics (SEA) was formed and gained around twelve hundred members. Bill Young in 12 Years at SEA described the group, which was dissolved in 1987.
SOCIETY OF FRIENDS: See entry for Quakers.
SOCIETY OF HUMANIST PHILOSOPHERS The Society of Humanist Philosophers publishes Philo, a magazine for analyzing humanist ethics, naturalism, and arguments for and against theism. Lewis Vaughan is its Executive Editor. On the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org”.
SOCIETY OF SEPARATIONISTS: See entry for Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
SOCINIANS Socinians were adherents of a sixteenth-century Italian sect of humanists which held unitarian views, including a denial of the divinity of Jesus. They were influenced by Servetus’s criticisms of the Trinity. Forced to flee the Inquisition they first sought refuge in Switzerland. Those who survived persecution took shelter in a tolerant Poland, where their views of doctrinal reform found acceptance in the Reformed Church of Poland (1565). From a center at Raków (Racovia), they maintained a press that sent books and emissaries throughout western Europe. The Racovian Catechism (1605) was a compilation of doctrines which had no little influence on doctrinal thinking among Protestants. It based its teachings strictly on Scripture and adhered to the Apostles’ rather than the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. Socinians taught non-resistance, refused to partake in war, and would not hold serfs. In 1638 when the Raków center was broken up, the school abolished, and their press destroyed, members found themselves harshly suppressed and in 1658 the whole sect was banished on pain of death. Those who chose not to conform to the Catholic Church went into exile, some to Transylvania and some to East Prussia and Holland. They influenced the Dutch by their liberalizing views and by the middle of the eighteenth century lost their separate identity, having become absorbed in the general religious life of the country. Their influence was long felt in the growth of rationalistic views. Through their contact in Holland with Dissenters from England or liberal Anglicans, their views were transplanted into England, where they became the most important single source of Unitarianism,, according to Earl M. Wilbur, once the President of the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. {ER}
Socinus, Faustus (Sozzini, Fausto) (1539–1604) “Jesus saved men not by dying for them, but by setting an example for them to follow,” wrote Socinus, leader of the Polish Socinian or Unitarian movement. He arrived in Poland in 1579, and under his leadership Kraków became an intellectual center of religious liberalism. Socinus, who had left the Roman Catholic Church because he denied the Trinity, knew that anti-trinitarianism had occurred as early as 1546 in Poland. In 1585, the first official Unitarian press, Rakow, began. Socinus traveled over half of Europe teaching his creed, and he was bitterly persecuted everywhere. In 1591, a mob destroyed the Socinian Church in Kraków, and by 1638 the movement had been seriously damaged because of severe Roman Catholic persecution. By 1658, the Polish Diet banished Socinians. {BDF; CE; EU, Paul H. Beattie; JM; RE; U}
Socinus, Laelius (or Sozzini, Lelio) (1525–1562) Laelius, the uncle of Faustus Socinus, was an Italian religious reformer. Escaping the Inquisition, and attracted by the writings of Martin Luther, he moved to the Swiss cantons and became good friends with Heinrich Bullinger and John Calvin. When the anti-trinitarian Servetus was burned in 1553, however, Socinus became an anti-trinitarian also and developed a friendship with Bernardino Ochino, who had been vicar general of the Capuchins but who had turned to belief in justification by faith alone, becoming an independent Protestant. In 1598, he fled from Kraków when an enraged mob of Christians tried to kill him. Socinus’s writings, left to his nephew Faustus, became the basis for the anti-trinitarian religious movement known as Socinianism. {CE; JM; RE; U}
Socolow, A. Walter (1907–1994) Socolow, a lay leader in the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, was a founder of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. He had been president of the Board of Jewish Education of Greater New York (1968–1971) and president of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (1949–1952). Reconstructionism redefines Judaism not only as a religion but also as a civilization that includes language, customs, and culture. (See entry for Reconstructionism.)
Socrates (469?–399 B.C.E.) One of the ancient humanists whom today’s secular humanists often cite as a forerunner of today’s humanism, Socrates used a dialogue or dialectic that required students to question the implications of their answers. Virtue, he said, is knowledge of one’s true self. Upon being tried for religious heresies and corrupting the morals of youth, he endured a martyr-death because he would not recant and believed that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” His confession that he knew nothing but the fact of his own ignorance continues to inspire many skeptics. There is the story that he was so involved with helping his fellow citizens seek wisdom that he neglected his own affairs (changing his undergarments)—whether or not it is true, it does make one of the wisest men of all time understandably “human.” According to Robertson, Socrates started all inquiries from a position of professed ignorance, thereby repudiating all dogmatics. Although he had no real faith in the current religion, he never explicitly dissented. Tales abound that an example of “Socratic love” was his own love for Alcibiades, the general who was said to have knocked the penises off many statues but who was so powerful that he could not be punished for such. Sophisticates who check on people’s competence by inquiring if they have read any of Socrates’s work know very well that he left no writings, that most of what we know about him came from the writings of his most famous pupil, Plato, who may not have been an objective reporter. Whether Plato intends “Socrates” in his dialogues “to be merely the mouthpiece of his own opinions” is unknown, Bertrand Russell has written. In addition to being a philosopher, Plato was an imaginative writer of great genius and charm and Russell has questions about Plato’s being an objective historian. But Plato was at the trial of Socrates, and the main facts are not in doubt, says Russell: “The prosecution was based upon the charge that ‘Socrates is an evildoer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heavens, and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.’ The real ground of hostility to him was, almost certainly, that he was supposed to be connected with the aristocratic party; most of his pupils belonged to this faction, and some, in positions of power, had proved themselves very pernicious. But this ground could not be made evident on account of the amnesty. He was found guilty by the majority, and it was then open to him, by Athenian law, to propose some lesser penalty than death. The judges had to choose, if they found the accused guilty, between the penalty demands by the prosecution and that suggested by the defense. It was therefore in the interest of Socrates to suggest a substantial penalty, which the court might have accepted as adequate. He, however, proposed a fine of thirty minae, for which some of his friends (including Plato) were willing to go surety. This was so small a punishment that the court was annoyed, and condemned him to death by a larger majority than that which had found him guilty. Undoubtedly he foresaw this result. It is clear that he had no wish to avoid the death penalty by concessions which might seem to acknowledge his guilt.” According to Bury, the real reason the judges found Socrates guilty was that he needed to be punished for his association, through Pericles and his group, with the cultured anti-democrats. Upon being condemned, Socrates bathed to avoid “giving the women the trouble of washing me when I am dead.” Surrounded by his students and friends, he asked his friend Crito to bring the glass of poison which he had been sentenced to drink. Crito, hesitating, suggested that there was really no hurry, that there was plenty of time. To which Socrates responded, “I believe that I should gain nothing by drinking the poison a little later—I should only make myself ridiculous in my own eyes if I clung to life and hugged it when it had no more to offer. Come, do as I say and don’t make difficulties.” Whereupon he drank it down with no sign of revulsion, then reprimanded those who were crying. “Calm yourselves and be brave.” As related by Plato and paraphrased by Slater and Solomita, “When he began to feel numb he lay down and the coldness spread from his legs upward. When it reached his heart, he’d been told, he would die. He covered himself in a sheet from head to toe. Just before the end he pulled the sheet from his face and said, ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it and don’t forget.’ Asclepius was the god of healing. The offering was Socrates’s gesture of thanks for being cured of life.” As is the case with his teacher Socrates, Plato is not really a humanist in the contemporary meaning of that word, but humanistic elements are seen in both of their philosophies. McCabe says of Socrates that he “must, however, be classed as a great freethinker inasmuch as he rejected the current religion and urged men to reason out the problems of life. On this pretext he was condemned to death, but the real ground was political.” (See selection by I. G. Kidd on Socrates in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; CL; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; ER; JM; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RE; TYD; TYD}
SOCRATES An associate member organization of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), Socrates is the foundation for professorships in humanist studies. It is at Nieuwegracht 69A, 3512 LG Utrecht, Netherlands.
Soddy, Frederick (1877–1956) Soddy, an English chemist, worked under Lord Rutherford at McGill University and with Sir William Ramsay at the University of London. He taught at the University of Glasgow, the University of Aberdeen, and at Oxford. His special research was in radioactivity. With others he discovered a relationship between radioactive elements and the parent compound, which led to his theory of isotopes. For this work he won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. An advocate of technocracy and of the social credit movement, Soddy wrote several books setting forth his political and economic views. In Science and Life (1920), Soddy wrote that “the ancient creeds are working an infinitude of harm in the world” and called upon everyone to disown them. Although vaguely theistic, Soddy held that the universe is eternal, not created, and “the task of controlling it is man’s, not God’s.” (See entry for Elenchus, Socrates’s method of refutation.) {JM; RE; TRI}
Söderberg, Hjalmar (1869–1941) Söderberg, a Swedish novelist, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Steven Soderbergh, Filmmaker ent Internet Movie Database
In the September 6, 2000 edition of The Onion A.V. Club titled "Is There A God?", celebrities were asked the question. Soderbergh was among those asked.
Steven Soderbergh directed sex, lies and videotape, The Limey, Out Of Sight, Erin Brockovich and Traffic.
The Onion: Is there a God?
Steven Soderbergh: No.
See the feature at http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html.
Soderberg, Steve (14 Jan 1963 - ) Soderberg, who in 1989 won the Palme D’Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Sex, Lies and Videotape, has been called “an actors’ favorite.” A double Academy Award nominee, he is a writer, director, and editor who has worked on such films as Kafka (1991); King of the Hill (1993); Suture (1994); The Underneath (1995); Schizopolis (1996); Gray’s Anatomy (1996); The Daytrippers (1997); Pleasantville (1998); Out of Sight (1998); The Limey (1999); Erin Brokovich (2000); Traffic (2000); and Nightwatch (1998). A registered Democrat, Soderberg has gone on record as not believing in God. {Freethought Today, March 2001).
Södergran, Edith (1892–1923)
Södergran, a Swedo-Finnish poet, conveyed a Nietzschean, anti-Christian view of life in Septemberlyran (September’s Lyre, 1918) and Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar, 1919). Landet som icke är (The Country That Is Not There, 1925) was published posthumously, and the collection of poetry reveals in its title her view of any afterlife. {EU, Faith Ingwersen}
SODOMY The term “sodomy” is an antiquated euphemism which in Genesis 19:1 referrs to the alleged inhospitality of the biblical inhabitants in Sodom. In the Hebrew bible, Sodom and Gomorrah were two cities said to have been destroyed by God. Religionists and the U.S. Supreme Court find that sodomy is criminal, defining it as performing oral sex, receiving oral, or indulging in anal intercourse. The term was coined by a Christian reformer and zealous hermit, Peter Damian, during the eleventh century. “Sodomy is a custom in all of Tuscany,” Bernardino of Siena lamented in the 1420s. Michael Rocke, in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (1996), found that a special magistracy—the Ufficiali di Notte, or Officers of the Night—found that in Florence some 17,000 people were incriminated at least once and nearly 3000 were convicted of sodomy in the 1400s, this in a city of only 40,000 people. In Florence, however, no subculture of homosexuals existed, such as was found in the Molly-houses of 18th-century England where sex for effeminate adult males centered, or as is found today worldwide. Mary McCarthy in The Stones of Florence wrote, “In the Florentine quattrocento, the well-turned, sturdy male leg and buttock cased in the tight hose of the day is always painted with a flourish; this leg is seen from all angles, in profile, in demi-profile, full on, and perhaps most often, from the rear or slightly turned, so that the beauty of the calf can be shown.” In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Geneva, Switzerland, put to death twenty-eight men convicted of homosexual acts. Holland executed sixty in 1730-1731. The British hanged 105 between 1703 and 1829. At one time all fifty states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia forbade anal sex as well as fellatio and cunninlingus: lawmakers usually cited Leviticus (which book also contains an injunction to establish slavery). In the 1960s, two men risked being jailed if they were caught dancing in a public place. Often this led to psychiatric examination, possible incarceration in a mental hospital, and publishing of their names in the local newspapers.
Mark D. Jordan, in The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997), wrote, “To invent sodomy was to invent a pure essence of the erotic without a connection to reproduction. It was to isolate the erotic in its pure state, where it could be described in frightening colors and condemned without concession. ‘Sodomy’ is a name not for a kind of human behavior, but for a failure of theologians. ‘Sodomy’ is the nervous refusal of theologians to understand how pleasure can survive the preaching of the Gospel.” Jordan, a professor in the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame, has written essays on medieval medicine, ancient rhetoric, gay film, and the paradoxes of histories of philosophy.”
Christian theology must abandon its past condemnation of sodomy as a capital crime, according to Mark D. Jordan, a professor in the Medieval Institute at Indiana’s University of Notre Dame. His The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (1997) not only declares that he is gay but also that to be openly gay and a practicing Catholic need not be a paradox. In 1999, Florida has a law in which “any unnatural and lascivious act”—from oral sex to toe sucking, apparently—can result in sixty days in jail, although mothers breast-feeding are exempt. Oral-genital contact in Michigan carries a penalty of up to fifteen years’ hard time in jail. In Massachusetts, an “abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with a beast, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not more than twenty years.” In five states—Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Texas—gays and lesbians are exclusively targeted. In Texas in 1999 a bill was introduced in the state legislature to prohibit the state from placing children in adoptive or foster homes if those homes are the likely sites of “deviate sexual intercourse,” which includes oral, anal, or “object-assisted acts,” presumably involving everything from dildos to cigars. Oral sex (both giving and receiving) is illegal in twenty states for heterosexuals and twenty-seven states for homosexuals, according to Peter Mc Williams’s Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do. What usually is not clear in the public press, when an individual is accused of sodomy, is whether receiving or giving oral sex, or anal sex, is involved. (See entries for bugger and fucking. Also, for a discussion of the distaste for, as well as the popularity of, sodomy—as discussed in the Bible, in Colonial America, and elsewhere—see Queering the Renaissance [1994], edited by Jonathan Goldberg.) {Debbie Nathan, “Sodomy for the Masses,” The Nation, 19 April 1999}
Soeters, G. C. (20th Century) A Dutch humanist leader, Soeters has written for Free Inquiry. {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1986-1987}
Sohl, Jerry (20th Century) Sohl, who has been a metropolitan newspaper editor, music critic, and drama critic, is a charter member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was a staff writer for and wrote the first segment of the “Star Trek” television series. Also, he wrote for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The New Breed” in addition to writing for “The Twilight Zone,” “G. E. Theater,” “Naked City,” “The Outer Limits,” and “The Invaders.” Sohl is a life member of Writers Guild of America, West, Inc., the Authors Guild, and Authors League of America. A Unitarian, he has written books which have been printed in seventeen foreign languages. His titles include The Spun Sugar Hole, The Lemon Eaters, The Resurrection of Frank Borchard, Costigan’s Needle, The Altered Ego, Point Ultimate, and The Transcendent Man. Television segments of his have been shown in all countries where television is broadcast. For 20th Century Fox he wrote “Twelve Hours to Kill,” and for American International he wrote one of Boris Karloff’s last films, “Die, Monster, Die.” E-mail: <76232.2761@compuserve.com>.
Sohlman, Per August Ferdinand (1824–1874) Sohlman was a Swedish publicist who edited the Aftonbladet of Stockholm in 1857. Sohlman was a distinguished Liberal politician. {BDF}
Sokolov, Alexej (20th Century) In 1996, Sokolov along with Professor L. Yakovleva organized a Centre for Inquiry in Russia. The centre monitors activities of clerical groups and paranormal phenomena. He has named difficulties for the humanist movement in Russia: (a) the impoverishment of the people, the decrease of the middle class, the concern for one’s daily bread reduce the concern about culture; (b) the indifference to the fate of the secular culture of the plutocratic state, because an egotistical and short-sighted oligarchy in power cannot derive the short-term benefits from it; and (3) the spread of ideology and values in society that emphasize above all profit and commercial success also make an unfavorable atmosphere for the development of secular culture. Sokolov is a philosopher at Moscow State University. in Russia. {International Humanist News, November 1996}
Solarin, Tai (1922–1994)
Solarin was a social critic who wrote for the Guardian and Punch in Nigeria. Once sacked as a headmaster of a boys’ school for refusing to march the students to church on Sunday and to start the day with hymns and prayers, he founded in 1956 the Mayflower School, which is fully residential and has several thousand students, 800 of whom are girls. Upon his and his wife’s retirement, Mayflower continued to run as a secular school, the only one in Nigeria which teaches neither the Christian nor the Muslim religion. He became chairman of the People’s Bank of Nigeria. An atheist, Solarin wrote Towards Nigeria’s Moral Self-Government (1959). Just before his death, Solarin said of his junior school, “It is special because of its secularity. We go all out to tackle the problems of life instead of spending several hours of the week explaining the significance of the deity. We have been able to debunk the conservative idea that morality is only realized from the menu of religion. We have been visited by no end of employers who openly declare they would opt for our finished products any time as compared with the products of religious schools. They are convinced our graduates work harder. And we know that, too. Our products are more sure of themselves. They are more ready to take risks. Education in self-reliance has positive results.” Solarin has said that Robert Green Ingersoll was a major influence upon his thinking, that “he gave me the courage to stand on my feet and declare my stand on issues where for years I was too afraid to air my doubts. He tore off the dingy curtains across my mind’s eye, and let me stand, unafraid, to wend my way through life.” As for philosophy, Solarin said, “Humanism and atheism develop in the mind of man, not for a special breed of Homo sapiens, but for humanity, just as the wheel has been invented, not for whatever race invented it, but for humans everywhere. Whatever are branded ‘un-African,’ ‘for the Aryan races’ are epithets for cheating.” {Free Inquiry, Spring, 1992 and Winter 1993}
Solbrig, Otto Thomas (20th Century) In 1998, Argentine-born Solbrig, the Bussey Professor of Biology at Harvard University, was awarded the International Prize for Biology at a Tokyo ceremony attended by the emperor and empress of Japan. The prize, considered the most prestigious in the field, was for his work on the biology of biodiversity. He is a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Harvard, Massachusetts, where he serves as the chair of the social responsibility committee. (World, March-April 1999)
Solheim, Rolf (20th Century) Solheim, who is Ceremonies Secretary of the Norwegian Human Etisk-Forbund, has developed a flexible guideline for humanist funeral counseling. At the 1995 European Humanist Federation/European Humanist Professionals meeting in Oslo, he conducted a workshop on the topic.
SOLIPSISM In philosophy, solipsism is the theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified, that the self is the only reality and that the only person existing in the universe is one’s self. Were we, Flew has pointed out, to concede (following Descartes, Locke, and others) “that the immediate objects of sense experience are mind-dependent (ideas, impressions, sense data, etc.), it is indeed questionable whether we can argue validly to the existence or nature of a mind-independent external world. Modern critics have, however, challenged this initial premise as misuse of terms; similarly objections have been raised against the use of ‘I’ which eliminates its normal contrasts. And Wittgenstein’s private language argument, if valid, in effect makes solipsism incompatible with our having a language to express it.” {AF}
Solomon, Abraham (20th Century) Solomon was instrumental in the formation of the Rationalist Youth League in Bombay in 1934. When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Solomon was coordinator of the Indian Secular Society. To the Norwegian editor of Human-Etisk, Levi Fragell, Solomon told of his high praise for the family planning project being carried out in India by Dr. Indumati Parikh. But, he added, “Mother Teresa has been a disaster for India.” Although Dr. Parikh remained discreetly quiet on the subject, her associates nodded they were entirely in agreement. Solomon is President of the Indian Secular Society and has drafted “A Declaration of Human Values.” In 1998 at the congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union held in Mumbai, Solomon was presented with a distinguished service award and was noted as having founded the IHEU Endowment Fund. He told the congress of having heard someone advise years ago that “one who is born must die, so why not die for a good cause,” to which he decided that “one who is born must live, so why not live for a good cause.” {HM2; International Humanist News, December 1998}
Solomon, Anita (Mrs. Herbert E. Solomon): See entry for Anita Weschler.
Solomon, Carol (20th Century) An ethical humanist, Solomon attended the 1996 international conference of humanists in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <rsolomon@hcfa.gov>.
Solomon, Herbert E. (1902–1995) Solomon, a freethinker, was a financial analyst in New York City. He was a fiercely independent thinker, one whose mental acuity always led him to be quietly amused by the claims of believers.
Solomon, Robert C. (20th Century) Solomon is author of Entertaining Ideas: Popular Philosophical Essays, 1970–1990 (1992) and A Passion for Wisdom (1997). “Philosophy, I have always believed,” he writes in the preface, “is one of the most enjoyable activities in the world, comparable to food and sex in both its urgency and intensity.” A humanist as well as a humorist, he includes such observations as the following:
Illiteracy is an established part of American life—not just the obvious tragic illiteracy of those who cannot read at all, but of the more subtle tragic illiteracy of those who can read quite well and read all the time—sports-page headlines, the front page of the National Enquirer at the checkout stand, food-can labels, billboards, and an occasional People magazine photo option. But they don’t read books. Or any article that requires a turn of the page (as in, “cont’d, p. xxx.”).
Solomon, Ronald (20th Century) Solomon is an ethical humanist who attended the 1996 international conference of humanists in Mexico City. Solomon’s e-mail: <rsolomon@hcfa.gov>.
Solon (c. 639–559 B.C.E.) Although Solon, the eminent Athenian statesman, lawgiver, and reformer, is not included by many freethought scholars, he is included in a listing by Stanley Charles W. Stokes of Australia. At a time of social stress in Athens, Solon was elected the chief Archon in 594 and he achieved humanistic goals in granting liberty to the Athenian citizens. The assembly was now opened to all freemen, the propertied classes became represented by a Council of Four Hundred, and Solon prepared the agenda for a popular assembly. Although Solon endured much opposition, his reforms became the basis of the Athenian state and his introduction of a more humane law code replaced the prior code of Draco. {CE; “The Rational Calendar and Compendium,” PO Box 189, Geebung, Queensland, 4034, Australia}
Soloviev, Vladimir Sergievitch (1853–1900)
A Russian philosopher who taught at Moscow and St. Petersburg, Soloviev was deposed for demanding the abolition of the death penalty at a time when the Tsar was using it liberally. In his Crisis of Western Philosophy, he followed Hegel. In his French work, La Russie et l’église universelle (1889), Soloviev was believed by some to have discarded all supernaturalism.
However, Alexei Gostev has called him a Christian believer, a philosopher of religion who helped turn Russian philosophical thought from positivism and naturalism to idealism and mysticism. (WAS, interview with Alexei Gostev, 1998) {RAT}
Somerby, Charles Pomeroy (19th Century) Somerby was an American publisher who issued many freethought books. He was business manager of the Truthseeker. {BDF; FUS}
Somerset, Edward Adolphus (1804–1885) Somerset, the 12th Duke of Saint Maur, was educated at Eton and Oxford. He sat as M.P. for Totnes in 1834–1835 and was Lord of the Treasury from 1835 to 1839. After being First Lord of the Admiralty, 1859–1866, Somerset startled the aristocratic world by a trenchant attack, Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism (1872), on orthodoxy. He also wrote on mathematics, monarchy, and democracy. {BDF}
Somerville, John (1905–1994) Somerville, a philosopher and peace advocate, wrote books and plays on peace themes. During the years of the “cold war,” he founded the International Philosophers for the Prevention of Nuclear Omnicide.
Somerville, Mary (1780–1872) Somerville was a British educationist, the daughter of Admiral Sir W. G. Fairfax. The discovery of Neptune was ultimately based upon observations of hers, and she also won several gold medals for her work in geography. Somerville was an anti-ecclesiastical theist who never went to church and was once “publicly censured by name from the pulpit of York Cathedral.” One of the chief women’s university colleges in Britain, Somerville Hall, bears her name, and there is a Somerville Scholarship at Oxford. In her Personal Recollections (1873), Somerville wrote that she was once “publicly censured by name from the pulpit of York Cathedral,” and she said she had rejected Christianity early in life. {JM; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; WWS}
Sommerfeld, Ernest (20th Century) Sommerfeld, a former Unitarian minister, has been a leader at the Westchester Ethical Culture Society in New York.
Sommerhof, Gerd (20th Century) A theoretical biologist and cognitive scientist, Sommerhof is a member of Trinity College, Cambridge. He founded and chairs the Cambridge University Humanist Workshop. Somerhof wrote Life Brain and Consciousness (1990).
Sommers, Christina Hoff (20th Century) Sommers, an associate professor of philosophy at Clark University and the W. H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is author of numerous articles on ethics, feminist philosophy, and moral education. For Free Inquiry (Winter 1997-1998), she wrote, “Where Have All the Good Deeds Gone?”
Sone, Robert (20th Century) Sone was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Sonne, Niels Henry (20th Century) Sonne, in Liberal Kentucky (1939), tells of the spread of deism in Kentucky. He traces the conflict between liberal and Calvinist forces, especially at Lexington’s Transylvania University. {FUS; Freethought History #14, 1995} Sontag, Susan (1933- ) Sontag, the critic and “new intellectual,” may or may not have gone on record concerning her non-theism, but she wrote, “Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing away their minds.”
Sontarck, John (20th Century) Sontarck, with Anne Nicol Gaylor and Annie Laurie Gaylor, founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (See entry for Freedom From Religion Foundation.)
SOORYAGATHA A Malayalam monthly of the Kerala Rationalist Association, Sooryagatha is at P.B. 3517, T. D. Road, Kochi, Kerala 682 035, India.
Soos, Wolfgang (20th Century) Soos is chairman of the Austrian freethinker group, Freidenkerbund Österreichs. (See entry for Austrian Freethinkers.)
Soper, Kate (20th Century) Soper wrote Humanism and Anti-Humanism (1986).
SOPHISTS Originally itinerant teachers who were paid for their lectures, the Greek Sophists in the 5th century B.C.E. taught the art of successful living. Protagoras was an early Sophist, and those who followed became known for their adroit, subtle, and allegedly often specious reasoning. Today, a sophist is one more interested in winning arguments through crafty rhetoric than in pursuing truth. Sophists would contrast the law and convention with nature’s eternal universally binding morality. According to Flew, this was “identified with some sort of hedonism (as by Antiphon) or ‘the right of the stronger’ (as by Callicies in Plato’s Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic). The contrast was to provide a basis for Cynic critiques of society, eventually finding a certain resolution in the Stoic concept of ‘natural law.’ ” (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {CE; DCL; AF; RE}
Sophocles (c 496–406 B.C.E.) In his Antigone (c. 441 B.C.E.)., Sophocles states, “Many are the wonders of the world / And none so wonderful as Man.” Lamont calls Sophocles a forerunner of contemporary naturalistic humanists. Robertson, however, states that although Sophocles dramatized the cruel consequences of Greek religion, he “never made any sign of being delivered from the ordinary Greek conceptions of deity, or gave any help to wise thought.” Still, whereas Aeschylus emphasized the gods, the struggles of the gods, and destiny, “it is with man that Sophocles is concerned.” His Ajax, Oedipus and King (c. 429 B.C.E.), and Electra represent the epitome of classical Greek drama. {CE; CL; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Sorce, Carol (20th Century) Sorce is vice president of the Humanists of New Jersey.
Sorel, Albert (1842–1906) Sorel was a French historian and sociologist. In 1876 he became general secretary to the President of the Senate. His historical and political works (chiefly L’Europe et la révolution française, 8 volumes, 1885–1891), were numerous; and his Châte de la Royauté (2 volumes, 1885–1887) was crowned by the Academy. Sorel became a member of the French Academy and the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. {RAT}
Sorel, Edward (1929– ) Sorel is a noted artist whose cartoons are familiar to readers of The Nation, The New Yorker, American Heritage, and The Atlantic. In 1988 he received the Page One award of the Newspaper Guild of New York for best editorial cartoon in magazines. His satiric drawings are noted for their wit and timeliness. A free-lance artist since 1956, Sorel is author-illustrator of Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy (1972) and illustrator of Gwendolyn the Miracle Hen (1963), Superpen (1978), The Zillionaire’s Daughter (1990), Fine Encounters (1994), and Unauthorized Portraits (1997). At the 1997 Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Tampa, Florida, Sorel was one of the featured speakers. (See entry for George W. Lucas Jr.)
Sorel, Edward (26 Mar 1929 - ) Sorel, a noted New York City-born artist, studied at Cooper Union School of Art. With two others students, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, he formed Push Pin Studios, a venture that had a major influence on graphic design in the 1950s. In 1958 he left Push Pin Studios to become an independent, and his illustrations have appeared in Time, New Yorker, American Heritage, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, The Village Voice, and Nation. In 1988 he received the Page One award of the Newspaper Guild of New York for best editorial cartoon in magazines. His satiric drawings are noted for their wit and timeliness. Sorel is author-illustrator of Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy (1972) and illustrator of Gwendolyn the Miracle Hen (1963), Superpen (1978), The Zillionaire’s Daughter (1990), Fine Encounters (1994), and Unauthorized Portraits (1997). At the 1997 Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Tampa, Florida, freethinker Sorel was one of the featured speakers. (See entry for George W. Lucas Jr.)
Sorley, William Ritchie (Born 1855)
Sorley taught philosophy at London University, Cardiff, Aberdeen, and Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Sorley edited Adamson’s works (2 volumes, 1903) and wrote a number of volumes on philosophy, including The Ethics of Naturalism (1885). He rejected “revealed religion” in the Hibbert Journal (April, 1913). {RAT}
Soros, George (1930- ) Soros, a fund management executive who became one of the world’s richest men, was born in Budapest. His prosperous Jewish parents arranged his escape from the Nazis by having him pose as the godson of a non-Jew. According to Celebrity Atheists online, Soros now is a non-believer. In 1956 he came to the United States, where he became an arbitrage trader for F. M. Mayer (1956-1959), an analyst for Wertheim & Co. (1959-1963), vice president of Arnold and S. Bleichroeder (1963-1973), and CEO and CFO of Soros Fund Management (1973 to date). One of his funds, the Quantum Fund, grew rapidly as the result of daring speculations, and in 1979 a network of Soros Foundations, mainly in Eastern Europe, was established to advance opportunities in education and business. Soros reportedly gave, then lost, an estimated two billion dollars to Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union, in order to prop up its economy. {CA}
Sorrentino, Roger (1930- ) A retired New York teacher and a visiting teacher at Beijing Language and Culture University as well as Yan Shan University, Sorrentino found at the age of fifty-four that “my Roman Catholic faith totally collapsed.” It took three years of psychological counseling to recover. Reading Skeptical Inquirer was a help. Sorrentino, knowing now that there is no afterlife, has left “a written declaration abjuring any deathbed confession or reconciliation I might make. I shall ask my sisters to give it after my cremation to the priest who attended me.” {Pique, November 1998}
Sorvino, Mira (1968- ) Sorvino in 1995 won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s “Mighty Aphrodite.” In GQ (August 1997), she told an interviewer
When you are a Christian, your law is laid out for you in codified form. You can have some kind of debate about this or that, but basically you’re supposed to accept God’s will. There is no argument about whether there is a definitive right and wrong. And once you know this law, nobody else can be right unless they agree with you. And so you wind up with, “You are wrong. You are mistaken. You are sinning. You are in error.” I find that extremely restrictive and impossible. . . . Think, just think, about how every last man and woman and child of the Pharisees was killed for their blasphemy and their infidelity when their greatest crime was they were mistaken. So they believe in the wrong God—they should be killed for this? Is this justice? Is it? [When the interviewer challenged her]: No, this is not what a fair God would do. And why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? It only says that you should treat your slaves well. Well, I don’t care if you treat them well. How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn’t that one of the Ten Commandments? “Thou shalt not own another person.” You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone? {CA} Sorvino, Mira (28 Sep 1968 - ) Sorvino is the daughter of Paul Sorvino, a veteran character actor, one.who played Henry Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s controversial Nixon. She graduated from Harvard with a major in East Asian Studies. She has played an enormous range of characters: a Spanish translator in Barcelona (1944); a Jewish intellectual wife in Robert Redford’s Quiz Show; a modern-day Mary in an irreverent short, “The Second Greatest Story Every Told” (1993); a 19th century Brazilian-born beauty in a television adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers; a foul-mouthed stripper who gives her child up for adoption in Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1955, winning an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress); and Marilyn Monroe in an HBO biopic, Norma Jean and Marilyn (1996). . In GQ (August 1997), she told an interviewer
When you are a Christian, your law is laid out for you in codified form. You can have some kind of debate about this or that, but basically you’re supposed to accept God’s will. There is no argument about whether there is a definitive right and wrong. And once you know this law, nobody else can be right unless they agree with you. And so you wind up with, “You are wrong. You are mistaken. You are sinning. You are in error.” I find that extremely restrictive and impossible. . . . Think, just think, about how every last man and woman and child of the Pharisees was killed for their blasphemy and their infidelity when their greatest crime was they were mistaken. So they believe in the wrong God—they should be killed for this? Is this justice? Is it? [When the interviewer challenged her]: No, this is not what a fair God would do. And why does it not say anywhere in the Bible that slavery is wrong? It only says that you should treat your slaves well. Well, I don’t care if you treat them well. How is it possible that it is not immoral to own another person? Why isn’t that one of the Ten Commandments? “Thou shalt not own another person.” You want to sit here and tell me that fornication is worse than owning someone? {CA}
SOS The Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS), also called Save Our Selves, was founded in 1986 in North Hollywood, California, by Jim Christopher. It is an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Unlike AA and other support groups, SOS takes a strictly secular approach, emphasizing that each individual must draw upon his or her own resources to deal with the problems of addiction. The SOS support groups are flexible and accommodate family members and friends of alcoholics and addicts, compulsive overeaters, and those addicted to drugs other than alcohol. No appeal to a “higher power” is made, because addiction is held to be a physical rather than a “spiritual” problem, and most of its members are uninterested in organized religions. SOS (5521 Grosvenor, Los Angeles, California 90066) is sponsored and supported by the Council for Secular Humanism. Over 1000 groups have been formed worldwide. On the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/sos/>. A similar humanistic organization, Rationalist Recovery Organization. is at <rational.org/recovery/index.html>.
SOS INTERNATIONAL NEWSLETTER SOS International Newsletter, a quarterly of the Secular Organization for Sobriety, is at PO Box 5, Amherst, New York 14215-0005. E-mail: <sosla@loop.com>.
SOTERIOLOGY (CREATIONISM Soteriology, with roots in the Greek soteria, or deliverance, is a term to designate the traditional branch of Christian theology devoted to the doctrine of salvation. Soteriologists posit the following: (a) souls exist; (b) humans have [or are] souls; (c) souls survive corporeal death; and (d) at death, souls go to Heaven or Hell. Anthropologist Richard A. Fox of the University of South Dakota finds that “most Christians rely on faith in Christ for salvation, embracing the Bible as a moral and spiritual aid, not as a scientific document. Not so the peculiar soteriologists—‘creationists’ as they are called. They insist on a fifth requirement for salvation: you must accept scripture literally as the inerrant word of the Bible-deity.” Fox and other secular humanists have objected strongly to a CBS television airing of “The Incredible Discovery of Noah’s Ark,” an independently produced program purchased by and shown by CBS television 20 February 1993. “CBS should have known better,” he complains, adding that anthropologists and archaeologists were disregarded and soteriologists were featured. The telecast purported that archaeologists had conclusive proof that Noah’s ark still is atop Mount Ararat in Turkey, as claimed in Genesis. A hoax was involved, however, for an actor had purposely charred a piece of fresh pinewood, soaking it in various substances to make it appear ancient, then gave it to producers and claimed he had found it on Mount Ararat. The actor later reenacted his performance on television, except that fewer saw the hoax revealed than saw the original program. “Carbon-14 testing would have revealed immediately that the wood was a modern forgery,” said Gerald A. Larue, a noted biblical scholar and secular humanist. “But the fundamentalists who produced ‘Discovery’ do not believe in the accuracy of Carbon-14 research,” he added, so the phony “relic” was accepted and presented to millions of viewers as a genuine piece of Noah’s Ark. {ER; Free Inquiry, Summer 1993}
Soukup, Ottakar (20th Century) Soukup wrote Essays in Cartoons (c. 1960?). {GS}
SOUL
Heaven, Hell, Paradise, where’s your soul to go? Into Heaven, into Hell, just like so.
(Song from a children’s game)
“Soul,” in light of the Verification Principle, is unverifiable and is considered meaningless by freethinkers except as a poetic abstraction. Believers in reincarnation speak of the unverifiable transmigration of souls. The Stoics taught the doctrine of logos, or world-reason, with the soul being an offshoot of fine material substance like warm air. And they introduced the word pneuma, something like a pervasive spirit or principle which possessed a meaning more than soul or psyche.
Non-believers appreciate the symbolism of Psyche, the princess who was so beautiful that Eros, god of love, pursued her. For many Westerners, including Descartes (who denied there was an animal soul but located man’s soul in the pineal body), soul is synonymous with mind. Others, including Kant, say the soul is undefinable but see it as a useful element in a system of ethics. William James, citing that undefinability, postulated ethical systems based upon a humanistic conception of man’s nature. Many non-believers, who do not use the word, do use Freudian terms, terms which also are unverifiable: psyche, id, ego, superego, libido. Dr. David E. H. Jones of the University of Newcastle-upon Tyne, better known by his pen name Daedalus, has wittily proposed applying advanced laboratory techniques to measure the soul and put theological ideas to a quantitative test. He suggests that by attaching piezoelectric transducers, inertial-navigation acceler- ometers, and other instruments to a dying person, it should be possible to measure the direction, velocity, and spin of the soul as it leaves the body, causing the body to recoil slightly. “Traditional theology is silent on the spin of the soul,” Daedalus writes, “though it may predict that the soul of a sinner would depart downward and might weigh less than that of a righteous believer.” His tongue-in-cheek proposal was greeted with merriment by many. However, Dr. Brian D. Josephson, co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics and an outspoken believer in spiritualism, wrote to Nature, “Any scientific study of religion should take account of the fact that a central theme of religion (pathological variants excluded) is the attempt to maximize human ‘goodness.’ I speculate that religious practices have in part a genetic basis, involving genes linked to the potential for goodness.” (See entries for Francis Crick and Spirit.) {CE; ER; RE}
SOUL OR MIND
Neither the soul nor the mind can serve as a term in the causal explanation of anything unless it is interpreted as the word for a substance. If “having a soul” is defined as equivalent to “being alive,” or “having a first-class mind” as being able to perform at that level, then the soul or mind cannot be said to produce the phenomena; and to say that this has a soul or that has a first-class mind is just another slightly more picturesque way of expressing (and therefore cannot explain) the facts that this is alive or that that displays high academic ability. (You cannot explain why it is the case that p simply by reiterating that p!) If, on the other hand, “having a soul” or “having a first-class mind” are understood as referring to the possession and presence of entities that, although presumably incorporeal, are nevertheless in the present sense substantial, then it does at least make sense both to say that these entities might survive the dissolution of the bodies to which they are temporarily attached and to suggest that various important phenomena are to be attributed to their activity.
As for Aristotle’s above account of the soul in De Anima, Flew concludes it is “just nonsensical to suggest that this might survive the death and dissolution of its body.” (Freethinkers generally speak of “consciousness,” not “soul.” See entry for Consciousness.) {AF}
Soury, Auguste Jules (1842–1906) Soury was a French philosopher who became librarian in 1865 at the Bibliotèque Nationale. In Jesus and the Gospels (1878), he maintained that Jesus had an unbalanced mind. His Studies of Psychology (1879) indicated a new direction in his freethought. Among his many books are A Breviary of the History of Materialism (1880), in which he confessed his Agnosticism; Naturalist Theories of the World and of Life in Antiquity (1880); and Natural Philosophy (1882). {BDF; RAT; RE}
SOUTH AFRICAN FREETHOUGHT South African freethinkers are discussed in Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, by Gordon Stein. In 1997, a South African Freethinkers’ Homepage, <http://www.eec.co.za/free> was launched by John van Zelst, whose e-mail is <eec@eastcoast.co.za>. The University of South Africa humanists are at: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>
SOUTH AFRICAN UNITARIANS
In 1867 the Rev. Faure of the Dutch Reformed Church, who had absorbed liberal views while studying for the ministry in the Netherlands, was rejected upon returning home and established an independent congregation. After his retirement, the congregation was served by a succession of ministers from Britain and the United States. The Johannesburg Unitarian Fellowship was formed in 1956 and has been served by Cilliers de Wet as lay minister since 1995. The Durban Fellowship is served by the Rev. Graham Brayshaw, formerly a Presbyterian minister. The newly established Pietermaritzburg Fellowship (1996) is led by Professor Martin Prozesky of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Natal and author of A New Guide to the Debate About God. The Somerset West Fellowship was formed in 1985 and was served by the Cape Town minister, the late Rev. Robert C. Steyn. On the Web: <http://www.uua.org/icuu/icuu-africa.html#South Africa>.
SOUTH AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT, HUMANISM South American freethinkers have an organization, Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU). On the World Wide Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>. (See entry for Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista.)
SOUTH ASIAN HUMANIST NETWORK The South Asian Humanist Network (SAHN) includes groups in that geographical area. Included is the Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj. (See entry for Southeast Asian Humanist Network.)
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN HUMANIST POST A monthly of the Humanist Society of South Australia, South Australian Humanist Post is at GPO Box 177, Adelaide 5001, Australia; e-mail <rmc@adelaide.on.net>.
SOUTH CAROLINA HUMANISTS • American Humanist Association, Mid-Atlantic Region (AHA), A-140, 1 College Row, Brevard, North Carolina 28712. O. Andrews Ferguson is coordinator. • College of Charleston Humanists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Monkey’s Uncle, 109 Burwood Drive, Simpsonville, South Carolina 29681. Ed Babinski is the contact. • Secular Humanists of Greenville, Suite 168, Box 3000, Taylors, South Carolina 29687. Jacques Benbassat is the contact. • Secular Humanists of the Low Country (ASHS), PO Box 32256, Charleston, South Carolina 29417; (803) 577-0637. David Peterson is a contact. E-mail: <sechumlo@mail.serve.com>. Web: <www.serve.com/sechumlo/>. • Secular Humanists of the South Carolina Midlands, PO Box 5123, Columbia, SC 29250; (803) 731-9378. David Kennison is a contact. E-mail: <neoabs@scsn.net> • Skeptical Humanists at the Grand Strand, 1414 Twelve Oaks Drive, Pawleys Island, South Carolina 29585; (843) 237-7262 • Upstate South Carolina Secular Humanists (ASHS), Suite 168, Box 3000, Taylors, South Carolina 29687. Contacts are Lee Deitz and Jacques Benbassat. E-mail: <leeingvl@aol.com>. On theWeb: <http://home.earthlink.net/~joannmooney/humanism.html>. • Winthrop University’s Atheist Students Assn. is at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
SOUTH DAKOTA HUMANISTS, FREETHINKERS • Bernie Schatz is American Humanist Association coordinator of the northern region of the United States.
• The Humanist Association of South Dakota, 815 Beta Place, Sioux Falls, South Dakota 57106. Mary Groethe is contact member.
• South Dakota School of Mines and Technology’s Tech Freethought Society is found on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. (See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists)
SOUTH DAKOTA SCHOOL OF MINES AND TECHNOLOGY The Tech Freethought Society of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology is on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
SOUTH PLACE ETHICAL SOCIETY South Place Ethical Society (Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP; telephone 0171 831 7723) is the oldest freethought organization in Britain, having evolved from a radical religious congregation formed in East London in 1793. It meets in Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, Holborn, London WC 1. It began as a Christian congregation in February 1793. The first sermons were entitled “The Three Woe Trumpets; of which the First & Second are already past; and the Third is now begun; under which the Seven Vials of the Wrath of God are to be Poured Out Upon the World. Being the Substance of two Discourses, from Revelations xi, 14, 15, 16, 176, 18, delivered at the Chapel in Parliament Court, Artillery Street, Bishopsgate Street, on February 3 & 24, 1793.” Ethanan Winchester, an American Baptist preacher who had converted to Universalism in 1781 and come to England in 1787, was the first minister. He was followed by William Vidler, an English Baptist preacher who was converted to Universalism in 1792, and then by William Johnson Fox, a Congregationalist preacher who was converted to Unitarianism in 1811. Fox led the Society for 35 years. It was Moncure Conway who in his twenty years as leader took the society from theism to humanism. Stanton Coit followed, persuading it to become an Ethical Society, and later leaders have been J. A. Hobson, J. M. Robertson, Joseph McCabe, Cecil Delisle Burns, C. E. M. Joad, Barbara Smoker, Harry Knight, and Peter Cadogan. In 1897 it ceased to have a minister, and from 1899 it had a panel of appointed lecturers. South Place slowly abandoned religious forms, from prayers in the 1860s to secular humans in the 1960s, and in 1980 it acquired the status of a non-religious charity. (See “Freethought Congregations, South Place and Others” in London Heretics, by Warren Sylvester Smith.)
Southack, Theodore L Jr. (20th Century) Southack in 1954 was Vice President and a member of the board of directors of the Humanist Fellowship of Boston, a group affiliated with the American Humanist Association.
SOUTHEAST ASIA HUMANIST NETWORK Some of the humanist and ethical organizations in India have formed a Southeast Asia Humanist Network which is allied with the International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Southern, Terry (1924–1995) A noted entertainer, Southern wrote a variety of works: novels (Flesh and Filigree, 1958; The Magic Christian (1959); Blue Movie (1970); an anthology (Writers in Revolt, with Alex Trocchi, 1960); short stories (Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, 1967); and screenplays (“Dr. Strangelove,” with Stanley Kubrick, 1963); “The Loved One” with Christopher Isherwood, 1964); “The Cincinnati Kid,” with Ring Lardner Jr., 1965); “Easy Rider,” 1968). His first writing was in the 1950s for Paris Review. At his memorial in the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, Peter Matthiessen lamented the passing of Southern, whom he dubbed a “delicious eccentric.” George Plimpton spoke lovingly of the “rumpled, soft-spoken, and rather owlish” Southern who had a tendency to freeload. Mindful of the 1960s, David Amram played twin flutes out of either side of his mouth, and Larry Rivers played “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on his saxophone. The memorial was noted for its laughter, particularly when actor Rip Torn told a story about Southern’s last hospital stay. A nurse, he said, shook him and inquired, “Mr. Southern, do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” Southern opened his eyes. “Yes, my dear,” he told the inquiring nurse, “I’m afraid I do.” Southern, Terry (1 May 1924 - 29 Oct 1995) A noted entertainer, Southern wrote a variety of works: novels (Flesh and Filigree, 1958; The Magic Christian (1959); Blue Movie (1970); an anthology (Writers in Revolt, with Alex Trocchi, 1960); short stories (Red Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes, 1967); and screenplays (“Dr. Strangelove,” with Stanley Kubrick, 1963); “The Loved One” with Christopher Isherwood, 1964); “The Cincinnati Kid,” with Ring Lardner Jr., 1965); and “Easy Rider,” 1968). His first writing was in the 1950s for Paris Review. At his memorial in the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York City, Peter Matthiessen lamented the passing of Southern, whom he dubbed a “delicious eccentric.” George Plimpton spoke lovingly of the “rumpled, soft-spoken, and rather owlish” Southern who had a tendency to freeload. Mindful of the 1960s, David Amram played twin flutes out of either side of his mouth, and Larry Rivers played “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” on his saxophone. The memorial for the admitted freethinker was noted for its laughter, particularly when actor Rip Torn told a story about Southern’s last hospital stay. A nurse, he said, shook him and inquired, “Mr. Southern, do you know where you are? Do you know where you are?” Southern opened his eyes. “Yes, my dear,” he told the inquiring nurse, “I’m afraid I do.”
SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION The Southern Baptist Convention, organized in 1845, is at 901 Commerce Street (Suite 750), Nashville, Tennessee 37203. It has around 40,500 churches and 15,600,000 members.
SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AT CARBONDALE Humanists and freethinkers at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale are on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Southwell, Charles (1814–1860) A maverick British freethought leader, Southwell was a publisher responsible for reviving the wave of blasphemy prosecutions that occurred during the early 1840s. His publishing The Oracle of Reason is credited with moving the freethought movement into a more open and defiant atheistic phrase. For one article, on “The Jew Book,” he was tried for blasphemy and was sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of one hundred pounds. According to Berman, Southwell took over the championship of atheism from Richard Carlile, “who had moved away from atheism in the 1830s to a confused form of mystical theism.” Berman makes the point that Southwell and Holyoake “claimed only to disbelieve in God, because there was no sufficient reason for belief. They did not, as they put it, directly deny there is a God.” He was an editor of Oracle of Reason (1841–1843), Lancashire Beacon (1842), and Investigator (1843). In Auckland, New Zealand, he edited Auckland Examiner (1857–1860). Although recorded as a stage performer and an orator of considerable capacity and endurance, Southwell developed a reputation that was largely defined by his work as a publisher. His placement among the founders of rationalist freethought and activities in Australasia is more firmly based on his earlier reputation in England rather than what he achieved later. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; HAB; RAT; SWW; TRI; VI}
Souverain, N. (17th Century) Souverain was a French author of Platonism Unveiled (1700), a posthumous work. He had been a minister of Poitou and was deposed on account of his opinions. {BDF}
Souza, Armand de (20th Century) A Sri Lankan freethinker, Souza wrote The Credentials of Christianity Examined by the East (1909). {GS}
SOVIET ATHEISM: See entry for Daniel Peris.
Sower or Sauer, Christopher (1693–1758) The German-born Sower migrated to Pennsylvania in 1724 and, after having a medical practice and farming, established a press in Germantown. Here, with the assistance of George de Benneville in 1743, he produced the first Bible in America translated into German. In it, Sower used large type to emphasize the universal character of religion. A Universalist Quaker, he was joined in his business by his son Christopher Jr. (1721–1784), who became a deacon of the German Baptist Brethren, popularly called Dunkers (also called Dunkards or Tunkers), from the German tunken, to dip. {CE}
Sowerby, John (1924– )
Sowerby, a freethinker, was secretary of the League Against Cruel Sports in England. {GS}
Soyinka, Wole (Adkinwande Oluwole Soyinka) (1934– ) • With the blood-soaked banner of religious fanaticism billowing across the skies as one prominent legacy of this millennium, Martin Luther’s famous theses against religious absolutism struck me early as a strong candidate for the best idea of the last thousand years. By progressive association, so did the microprocessor and its implications—the liberalization of access to knowledge, and a quantum boost for the transmission of ideas. There is, however, a nobler idea that has spread by its own power in this millennium and that has now begun to flourish: the idea that certain fundamental rights are inherent to all humanity.
Thus spake Soyinka, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He wrote such works as Lion and the Jewel (1963); The Interpreters (1965); La danse de la foret (1971); Les gens des marais (1971); Collected Plays (1973); Myth, Literature, and the African World (1976); and Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems (1988). He founded a national theatre, which is now called Orisun Theatre. When he dropped a stage production of Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” critics attacked him as being a crypto-Marxist. Other critics, however, complain that he is not radical enough. To counter his critics, Soyinka in 1994 published Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, a volume which updates one published in 1988. In it, he states that Islam is not an African religion and reminds readers of “the unspeakable cruelties perpetrated on African humanity in the name of Islamic conversion.” Michael Gorra, of Smith College, feels the “Outrage” of the title is well chosen, for Soyinka “excoriates African intellectuals for both their reliance on ‘Western intellectual caucuses’ and their ‘self-abnegating posture before . . . Eastern Communism.’. . . Yet just when one thinks he might be ready to embrace the banner of African authenticity, Mr. Soyinka repudiates that idea as well, as a ‘rag’ behind which too many authoritarian regimes have tried to hide.” Gorra notes that although Soyinka’s parents were Christian, the Yoruban writer himself takes the Yoruba god Ogun, the deity of creativity and destruction alike, as his patron.” In 1991, Adewale Maja-Pearce wrote Who’s Afraid of Wole Soyinka? Essays on Censorship, detailing how Soyinka was considered a threat by Nigerian military leaders. Although regarded as a hero by millions of Nigerians, certain leaders of the establishment disliked him for having issued a “call for the abolition of the theocratic ideal in all forms of government.” In the 1960s, he backed what many thought was the wrong side in his country’s civil war, for which he had to spend two years in prison, much of which was in solitary confinement. Soyinka also has written,
As a state instrument of internal control, and even in the conduct of foreign policies (including terrorism), it is possible to suggest that religious fanaticism has once again attained prime position as the most implacable enemy of the basic rights of humanity. . . . I have one abiding religion: human liberty.
“I have nothing but contempt for religions that kill in the name of piety,” Soyinka wrote in “Why I Am a Secular Humanist.” During the 1990s when Soyinka was critical of the military government in Nigeria, he complained that votes in a June 1993 presidential election had not accurately been counted. As a result, his passport was seized and the government refused to let him attend a human rights conference in Sweden. He then fled in 1994, calling for an international effort to isolate the military government of General Sani Abacha. Charged in absentia with treason, he supported Ken Saro-Wiwa, a human rights activist who upon General Abacha’s orders was executed. Upon Abacha’s death in 1998, Soyinka again called upon the military to step aside and allow Ken Wiwa, son of the executed Nigerian dissident, to become president. In 1998, ever the activist, he announced the creation of a truth tribunal to expose human rights abuses by Nigeria’s military government. “He’s a humanist, he’s a radical, and he’s always been fearless,” Dudley Thompson, the former Jamaican Ambassador to Nigeria, has said of Soyinka. Thompson resigned his post in 1995 after seeing a man set afire by a mob on the streets of Lagos. In The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis (1995), he summarizes his views about the Abacha regime, which he feels is “yet another circus of political mutants and opportunists” and “back-alley abortionists” of democracy. And he laments that Nigeria has become a “tightly sealed can within cans, within cans of worms.” His most important thesis, however, is that “ethical maps” rather than geographical ones are better for determining national boundaries. As the world becomes more transnational, he declares, nations will of necessity need to be politically progressive in order to withstand the pressures from global corporatism, racial and ethnic squabbles, and a population explosion in which fewer resources will be fought over by more and more human beings. In 1999, now a member of the Emory University faculty in Georgia, Soyinka addressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City at its 101st annual ceremonial. In his Blashfield Address, “Liberty Hall and the House of Correction,” he discussed changes in the English language, remarking about “political correct” objections to words such as human, mankind, and history—hero, he noted, was named after Hero, a female, again without regard to gender. In his indictment of our culture for its compromising truth in light of the proliferation of euphemisms and jargon, he remarked that in our quest to become politically correct we risk losing reality. (Free Inquiry, Fall 1997). (See the article about Soyinka by Ketu H. Katrak of the University of Massachusetts in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism [1994].) {The New York Times, 1 May 1997}
Spaink, Pierre François (Born 1862) Spaink was a Dutch physician who studied in Amsterdam and wrote for a time on De Dageraad, using the pen names “A. Th Eist” [sic] and “F.R.S.” Spaink translated Romanes’ Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. {BDF}
SPANISH ACADEMY In 1713, La Real Academia Española was founded in Spain. Like the French Academy, the Spanish Academy serves as an authority concerning what is and is not “correct” in the language. The motto of the forty-six member group states that the academy “cleanses, fixes, and adds splendor” to the language of Spanish that is spoken by an estimated four hundred million, protecting it from debasing infiltrators. Nine out of ten who speak Spanish now live outside Spain. “It’s wonderful that our language, which is so dispersed, has kept a single set of spelling rules,” the academy’s director Victor Garcia de la Concha told reporter Marlise Simons. Unlike Hindi and Arabic, also widely spoken languages, spelling is universal and based upon phonetics. English spelling, he lamented, is not uniform; however, some Anglicisms have been accepted: mitin (meeting), fûtbol (football), and guisqui (whisky). Although the academy has branches in most Latin American countries, they are subordinate to Madrid. {The New York Times, 23 June 1999}
SPANISH HUMANISM Robertson has detailed the problems of freethinkers in Spain, including the paralysis wrought by the combined tyranny of Church and Crown, incarnate in the Inquisition. During the dominion of Philip II there are said to have been 58 archbishops, 684 bishops, 11,400 abbeys, 23,000 religious fraternities, 46,000 monasteries, 13,500 nunneries, 312,000 secular priests, 400,000 monks, 200,000 friars and other ecclesiastics. Spain had 9,088 monasteries. Robertson states, “In the opening years of the seventeenth century (1610–1612), under Philip III, on the score that the great Armada had failed because heretics were tolerated at home, it was decided to expel the whole race; and now a million Moriscoes, among the most industrious inhabitants of Spain, were driven the way of the Jews.” The dramatic literature was “notably unintellectual, dealing endlessly in plot and adventure, but yielding no great study of character, and certainly doing nothing to further ethics. Calderon was a thorough fanatic, and became a priest; Lope de Vega found solace under bereavement in zealously performing the duties of an Inquisitor; and was so utterly swayed by the atrocious creed of persecution which was blighting Spain that he joined in the general exultation over the expulsion of the Moriscoes.” Even Cervantes was affected by the iron wall of Catholic orthodoxy, Robertson states. “Humanism” does not translate well into contemporary Spanish, for there is a Humanist Party and the political overtones clash. But in Spain a movement exists which shares many of the ideals of the International Humanist and Ethical Union: The Ateneos (The Atheneums). According to International Humanist News (July 1993), “The Ateneos were founded in the nineteenth century, stimulated by classical Athens and devoted to humanist values and freethought. Indeed, the Spanish Republic was inspired by the Ateneo, and Spain’s leadership, including many presidents and prime ministers, have come from the Ateneo.” Dr. Cesar Navarro de Francisco is a former president of the Ateneo of Madrid, which was built in 1884 and contains a library, lecture halls, and a cafeteria, all open to students and the general public. Spaniards who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 included José M. R. Delgado and Alberto Hidalgo Tuñon. (See entries for classical humanism and Cervantes. Also, consult the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) SPANISH INQUISITION: See Erna Paris’s The End of Days: A Story of Tolerance, Tyranny and the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1995). Paris describes the politics of the Inquisition and its psychology of terror.
SPANISH PHILOSOPHY: See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
SPANISH UNITARIANS Contact for the New Age Universalist Movement, which was started in 1992, is Jaume de Marcos, c/o Pare Rodes, 11, 24, 08208 Sabadell, Spain. E-mail: <jmarcos@lix.intercom.es>.
SPANISH-AMERICAN HUMANISM In 1994, an organization was founded in Costa Rica for Spanish-speaking humanists: Asociación Iberoamericana Ético Humanista (ASIBEHU, PO Box 374-2050, San Pedro, Costa Rica). Participants from Argentina to Mexico, as well as from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic to Cuba, were invited to join. The association’s first president was Alexander Cox Alvarado.
Sparks, Jared (1789–1866) Sparks, an eminent historian and educator, was pastor of a Unitarian church in Baltimore (1819–1823). He founded and edited (1821–1822) the Unitarian Miscellany and was chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives (1821–1823). Sparks bought and edited the North American Review (1824–1830) and founded and edited (1830) The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge. From 1849 to 1853, he was president of Harvard University. His historical works were about the diplomatic correspondence of the American revolution and the lives of Gouverneur Morris, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. He edited the twenty-five-volume Library of American Biography (1834–1848). {CE; FUS; U} SPARTA Sparta was settled by Dorian Greeks who invaded around 1100 B.C.E. and who were culturally and linguistically distinct from the Greek world. It reached its pinnacle in the 6th century B.C.E. Jacob Burckhardt’s The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1998) praises the Spartans for their military excellence. He describes Alcibiades’s dislike of democracy. (See entry for Athens.)
Spaventa, Bertrando (1817–1888) Spaventa was an Italian philosopher who, starting in 1861, was professor of philosophy at Naples. Spaventa wrote upon the philosophy of Kant, Gioberti, Spinoza, Hegel, and others. {BDF; RAT}
Spear, Charles (1801–1863) Spear, a Universalist minister, was a noted prison reformer during the 19th century. {U}
Specht, Karl August (Born 1845) Specht, a German writer, was for many years editor of Menschenthum at Gotha. He wrote Brain and Soul, Theology and Science, and A Popular History of The World’s Development. Dr. Specht was a leading member of the German Freethinkers’ Union. {BDF; PUT}
SPECIES As a result of natural selection, species—or more precisely, the organisms composing species—generally perform brilliantly in the niche to which they are specialized. There are probably 10 million or more species alive on earth. Which are the best at filling their niches? All are, I guess. Consider this Zenlike question: Can a bird fly better than a fish can swim? Live species are by definition all successes, because the losers are extinct, having fallen victim to nature’s equivalent of the Foreign Legion command, March or die.
Edward O. Wilson, after expressing the above, was asked which of the species is most abundant (“There are more E. coli and other intestinal bacteria in your colon at this moment than there are human beings who have ever lived.”); the longest lived (Homo sapiens as a species is less than 1/100th as old as ancient forms); the most likely to survive (“Without doubt, bacteria and allied organisms known as archaea win again, especially the species that use photosynthesis or inorganic chemicals to grow and reproduce.”); the most social (ants, termites, honeybees); most intelligent (humans); most powerful (humans, except that we humans must learn to wisely manage the environment, “an enterprise for which we have so far shown little dedication or talent”). {The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999}
SPELLING Although spelling allegedly is not a problem for students of Spanish, it is for students of English. George Bernard Shaw had ideas for resolving the problem. In his final will, he left the bulk of his sizable fortune for the development of a British alphabet having forty letters. The request was contested and a legal compromise was accepted: with only a £500 prize being offered in a competition to select a letter design; the four winners who split the award were also asked to continue their studies in the search for a replacement to Dr. Samuel Johnson’s alphabet. Samuel Clemens also had some tongue-in-cheek ideas about the spelling of English words:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replaced either by “k” or “s,” and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 1 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Yar 3 might well abolish “y,” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c,” “y,” and “x”—bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez—tu riplais “ch,” “sh,” and “th” rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spikingwerld.
Others, however, point to the romance of tracing words to their various sources. How else, they reason, would we know that the Taino Indians gave the word hamaca to the Spanish, or hammock in English. The Taino and Carib Indians in the West Indies (not tribes dining on missionaries, for example) also gave us our word for cannibal. English, unlike many other tongues, has borrowed words from all other languages. Linguists as well as philosophers delight in studying the origins of such words, concentrating particularly on their spelling for clues as to their past meanings. (See entry for Allen Walker Read.) {PA}
Spencer, Anna Carpenter Garlin (1851–1931) A Unitarian, Spencer was the first woman ordained in Rhode Island. However, she associated with Unitarian, Universalist, and Ethical Culture congregations and, rather than considering herself a “member,” identified with the broder “free religion” of the Free Religious Association. An important social philosopher, she was a professor of sociology and ethics at Meadville Theological School. After marrying the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878 and becoming ordained in 1891, she held a pastorate in Providence, Rhode Island. Later, she was an Ethical Culture Leader from 1904 to 1913 in New York, then moved on in feminist protest to teaching. Her Woman’s Share in Social Culture (1913) advocates not only equality for women in the masculine world but also the evolution of new ethical and social positions based on women’s perspectives and insights. She also wrote The Family and Its Members (1922). Spencer was a founder of thE National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. One of her popularly sung hymns included
Hail the hero workers of the might past (present and future)
and concluded
Hail ye, then, all workers, Of all lands and time, One brave band of heroes With one task sublime!
Spencer was the anthropologist who suspected an antomist—not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—was behind the 1912 hoax involving the Piltdown Man. Piltdown, a Scientific Forgery (1990), established that the scientist with the most to gain from the Piltdown discovery was Sir Arthur Keith. He allegedly provided the technical expertise and possibly the bones, which were stained to look prehistoric, and Charles Dawson then planted them in the gravel pit where he then led others, including Dr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, on fossil hunts. When the fraud was discovered in 1953, numerous explanations were given, but it was Spencer’s work and that of Dr. Ian Langham in Australia which solved the mystery. (See entries for Ethical Culture, CE, and Piltdown Man.) {The New York Times, 3 June 1999)
Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903) An agnostic before Thomas H. Huxley originated the word, Spencer did not believe there is sufficient evidence either to prove or to disprove the existence of God and immortality. He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and is credited with establishing sociology as a discipline. His parents were originally Methodists, but at an early age Spencer showed an inclination to think for himself concerning theological matters. His philosophic and religious beliefs are not easily labeled, for his philosophy was distinct from that of the various movements. He was a philosopher who offered the Victorians both metaphysical and moral certainty, and an explanation of the place of religion in a scientific world. His Introduction to Society (1873), in the chapter on “The Theological Bias,” contained his First Principles, a mordant attack on the Christian creed. The Rationalist Press Association (RPA) was chosen to publish his Education (1861). One of Spencer’s prayers included the following: “O Lord, you know that I do not believe in you as you are described in the Bible and believed in by the Church. You know that I do not believe the Bible as the word of God. If it be true, as affirmed, that you created the universe, it follows that you have created all that is in it. You have created evil as well as good, the devil as well as the angels, hell as well as heaven. If you have made men at all, you made them as they are. If they are good, it is because you have made them so; if they are wicked, it is equally your work. If you are omnipotent and universal, as you are said to be, there can be no evil or wicked deed that is not the result of characters and conditions which you have created. If there is a hell and men are to be burned, it is because you have wished it to be so. It has pleased you to make them evil and wretched. You are not, then, good, nor do you love your creatures.” Five or so minutes later, he concludes, “I can only be thankful that I am not cowardly enough to fear nor weak enough to worship so horrible a creature as you, the God of the Church. Amen.” In Facts and Comments, written the year before his death, he denies emphatically the common Christian assertion that Freethinkers “occupy themselves exclusively with material interests.” But he finds no ground whatever for belief in a future life, which is a superstition handed down from the savage. As there is no evidence of the existence of consciousness apart from brain, Spencer wrote, “we seem obliged to relinquish the thought that consciousness continued after physical organization has become inactive.” Spencer “passed peacefully away” on 8 December 1903, and his remains were cremated at Golder’s Green. On September 16 he wrote to John Morley stating that he contemplated the end “as not far off—an end to which I look forward with satisfaction”—and that he had “interdicted any such ceremony as is performed over the bodies or ashes of those who adhere to the current creed.” (See Jack Kaminsky’s article on Spencer in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, Mark Francis; FUK; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RAT; TRI; TYD}
Spender, Stephen Harold [Sir] (1909–1995) Spender, an English poet and critic, was son of E. H. Spender, a liberal journalist on whose mother’s side he was partly “of German-Jewish descent.” During the Spanish Civil War he did propaganda work in Spain for the Republican side. With Cyril Connolly he co-edited Horizon (1939–1941) and Encounter (1956–1966), the latter of which was paid for secretly and to his embarrassment by the United States Counter Intelligence Agency. Spender’s essay in The God That Failed told of his relationship with the Communist Party. In the diaries of George Orwell, the creator of Big Brother speculated that Spender was a “sentimental sympathiser” of the Party and “very unreliable,” “easily influenced, “with a “tendency towards homosexuality.” Virginia Woolf, whom he admired, once called him “rattle-headed.” Spender characterized his father as a “Puritan Decadent” who taught him that the human body “is a nameless horror of nameless desires which isolate him within a world of his own.” In The Temple (1929; published 1988), he tells how he liberated himself of such nonsense. It was W. H. Auden, his teacher, who told him that “guilt and inhibition stood between oneself and the satisfaction of one’s needs,” and in 1933 he began a stormy homosexual relationship with Tony Hyndman. Suddenly in 1936, after being engaged for only three weeks, Spender married Inez Pearn, whom he divorced in 1939, then married Natasha Litvin, with whom he had two children. Spender told Francis Bacon he was “Christian; at least in believing, we must help each other.” (See entry for Francis Bacon.) {CE; David Leeming, Stephen Spender; OEL}
SPERM
Sperm, the male gamete or reproductive cell, is every adolescent boy’s mystery when first it appears. Instead of urine, a white substance is found exiting the penis, and some children who have not been educated on the subject fear they are somehow defective and in rare cases consider committing suicide. Some become aware only after having a “wet dream,” or involuntary ejaculation of the semen while one is asleep. Corresponding to the female ovum in organisms that reproduce sexually, sperm in higher animals is produced in the male’s testis. Smaller than the ovum and consisting primarily of a head, its nucleus bears the hereditary material of the male parent. A slender whiplike process (flagellum) provides the motility necessary for fertilization in a fluid medium. A California woman in 1999 gave birth to a girl using sperm retrieved from her dead husband, raising ethical questions over whether a man must give his consent to be a father. The sperm was retrieved thirty hours after the man’s death and was then frozen for fifteen months before use. Some medical ethics experts argue that the procedure should not become a standard medical service. Others argue that it is an issue of reproductive freedom that society has no right to prevent. (CE) {The New York Times, 27 March 1999}
Spetter, Matthew Ies (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Spetter was chairman of the department of ethics of the Ethical Culture Schools. He has since 1955 led the Riverdale-Yonkers Society for Ethical Culture, and he has represented the American Ethical Union on the board of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), of which was a founding member. From 1953 to 1955, he led the Brooklyn Ethical Culture group. At the Eighth World Congress of the IHEU held in Hannover (1982), at the Ninth held in Oslo (1986), and also at the Tenth held in Buffalo (1988), he addressed the groups. Spetter is a Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City and one of the IHEU’s representatives to the United Nations. A Dutch humanist, he has related that the 1957 gala dinner of the British Ethical Union in the House of Commons was arranged by Lord Snell. As guests arrived, they were loudly announced by name. Some of the Americans were so impressed by hearing their names trumpeted out at the House of Commons that they passed twice through the wide opened doors. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {CL; HM2}
Spicer, Richard (20th Century) Spicer is honorary secretary of the Association of Irish Humanists and is secretary of the Irish Campaign to Separate Church and State. He is author of The Humanist Philosophy, With an Irish Guide to Non-Religious Ceremonies (1997). At the Eleventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Brussels (1990), Spicer addressed the group. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {“Irish Democracy Continues Its Advance,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1996; and New Humanist, February 1996}
Spiegelstein, Max (20th Century) With Robert F. Bartley, freethinker Spiegelstein wrote Paul, the Saint Who Ain’t (1980). {GS}
Spiller, Gustav (20th Century) Spiller wrote The Mind and Man (1902) and was editor of Generation of Religious Progress (1916). {FUK; GS}
Spinner, Michel (20th Century) Spinner is one of the IHEU’s representatives to UNESCO, Paris.
SPINO A Dutch publication published five times per year by Jonge Humanisten, Spino is at Langeviele 39, 4331 LR, Middelburg, The Netherlands.
Spinoza, Baruch (or Benedict de) (1632–1677)
A Dutch philosopher, Spinoza was the son of one of the Sephardic Jewish fugitives from Spain who had settled in the Netherlands to escape the Inquisition. Developing an independent mind at an early age, he broke from the teachings of his family and teachers and, after many vain admonitions, was excommunicated. Foote described the experience: “His anathema was pronounced in the Synagogue on July 27, 1656. It was a frightful formula, cursing him by day and night, waking and sleeping, sitting and standing, and prohibiting every Jew from holding any communication with him, or approaching him within a distance of four cubits. Of course it involved his exile from home, and soon afterwards he narrowly escaped a fanatic’s dagger.” Spinoza, wrote James Martineau after reading a Dutch pastor’s description, “was of middle height and slenderly built; with regular features, a broad and high forehead, large dark, lustrous eyes, full dark eyebrows, and long curling hair of the same hue. His character was worthy of his intellect. He made no enemies except by his opinions. Even bitter opponents could not but own that he was singularly blameless and exacting, kindly and disinterested. Children, young men, servants, all who stood to him in any relation of dependence, seem to have felt the charm of his affability and sweetness of temper.” According to McCabe, Spinoza “is the best-known of Pantheists, holding that God and Nature, mind and matter, are one reality. His system differs from Monism in the fact that he insisted that this reality is God and the object of religious feeling.” According to H. James Birx, Spinoza’s pantheism represented a daring transitional stage in philosophy between earlier theism and modern atheism. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Spinoza as being only a “possible” atheist. It was, at any rate, not politically expedient to be identified as his friend, such was his notoriety as an atheist. The Israeli philosopher, Ryarmiyahu Yovel, in his Spinoza and Other Heretics (1989), considers Spinoza to have been “the first secular Jew,” for he was the one who took the initial steps necessary to lead to the eventual secularization of Jewish life. For him, secularism was an alternative to theism. In his Theological-Political Treatise (1677), he writes, “Philosophy has no end in view save truth; faith looks for nothing but obedience and piety.” Robertson points out that Spinoza’s teacher, Van den Ende, was a scientific materialist, hostile to all religion, and it was while under his influence that Spinoza was excommunicated by his father’s synagogue. . . . Still more profound, probably, was the effect of the posthumous Ethica (1677), which he had been prevented from publishing in his lifetime. In it, he not only propounded in parts an absolute pantheism but also definitely grounded ethics in human nature. Prof. E. E. Powell in his Spinoza and Religion (1906) equates that “absolute pantheism” with atheism, agreeing with Martineau that Spinoza has no valid ground for retaining the word “God.” Powell states that “the right name for Spinoza’s philosophy is Atheistic Monism.” The bi-centenary of his death was celebrated with an address by M. Rénan. At the time of his death, Spinoza lodged with a poor Dutch family at the Hague. They regarded him with veneration and gave him every attention. But he had a delicate constitution and became emaciated. On 20 February 1677, he sent for a medical friend, Dr. Meyer, from Amsterdam. Martineau hints that inasmuch as the hosts were at church and Spinoza died alone with his physician that the two may have arranged to carry out a method of euthanasia. However, he wrote, “There is no tittle of evidence” for such a thing. Neither, as Colerus found, is there evidence that Spinoza had cried out several times in dying, “Oh God, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner!” Dr. Meyer was the only person with Spinoza when he died, so it would have been impossible for any scandalmongers to have heard Spinoza’s last words. (See the article by Alasdair MacIntyre on Spinoza in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.) {BDF; CE; CR; ER; EU, John L. McKenney; FO; FUK; HNS2; ILP; JM; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
SPIRIT Sir Arthur Keith, the British anatomist and author of Human Embryology and Morphology (1902, 6th edition), wrote concerning spirit: “Medical men can find no grounds for believing that the brain is a dual organ—a compound of substance and of spirit. Every fact known to them compels the inference that mind, spirit, soul are the manifestations of the living brain, just as flame is the manifest spirit of a burning candle. At the moment of extinction, both flame and spirit cease to have separate existence.”
SPIRITISM Some spiritists, such as mediums who interpret a person with an aura which may appear small to lay individuals as meaning that he will not live long, are involved in clairvoyance or telepathy, trance speaking, apparitions, levitation, automatic writing, and poltergeistic, and ectoplasmic activities. Skeptics have been unable to document the validity of any such claims. Non-believers are highly amused by such nonsense. (For an estimate of the number of spiritists, see entry for Hell.)
SPIRITUALISM: See entry for Science and Non-Science.
SPIRITUALITY • “Spirit” comes from the Latin word “to breathe.” What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however, thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word “spiritual” that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. —Carl Sagan,The Demon-Haunted World
• Believers in supernaturalism are incapable of experiencing spirituality the way a scientist can when he sequences genes, views distant galaxies, or looks into the eyes of a betta, a burmese cat, a bluebird, or a newborn babe. —Fernando Vargas
“In the world in which I was raised,” Antony Flew has written, the word ‘spiritual’ was pretty well synonymous with the word ‘religious’; and, since that was long before the mass immigration into Europe of adherents of non-Christian religions, ‘religious’ was in practice equivalent to ‘Christian.’ For me, therefore, talk about spiritual life was talk about worshipping and praying to the Mosaic God of Judaism and Christianity. Since ceasing, in my middle teens, to believe in the existence of that God, I have in consequence simply not had, at any rate in that understanding, any spiritual life at all.” In The New Humanist (May 1995), Flew gives typically humanistic views about “spirit,” “spirited,” “spiritual,” and “spirituality.” (For discussions of “modern spiritualities” by Margaret Chatterjee, Paul Kurtz, Justin Meggit, Joseph E. Barnhart, R. Joseph Hoffman, Harry Stopes-Roe, James Penney, Ian Coton, Bernard Farr, H. James Birx, and Lawrence Brown, see New Humanist [May 1995].)
Spitteler, Carl Friedrich George (1845–1924) A Swiss poet who won the 1919 Nobel Prize in Literature, Spitteler used the pseudonym Carl Felix Tandem. His chief works were the epics Prometheus and Epimetheus (1881) and Olympischer Frühling (Olympian Spring), the latter a complex allegory of the necessity for ethics in the modern world. Biographer W. Raith, spoke of Spitteler’s “thoroughgoing hostility to Church and priesthood and quotes his saying that the clergy ought to be put upon “a diet of locusts and wild honey with cold-water sauce.” He referred to “the long-buried gods” and elsewhere said that “the gods are sick to death.” {RE}
Spitzer, Hugo (Born 1854) Spitzer, an Austrian philosopher, taught at Gratz University and was one of the earliest advocates of Darwinism in Austria, writing Beiträge zur Descendenztheorie (1885). He distinguished himself in tracing aesthetic evolution, proclaimed himself a “pupil of Haeckel,” and spoke highly of The Riddle of the Universe. He thought the only philosophers who ought to attack it are those who embrace a “childish Dualism” or who want “not the clearing-up, but the further obscuring and complicating, of the great problems of existence.” {RAT}
Spitzer, Lyman Jr. (1914- ) Spitzer is an astronomer whose specialties include research on interstellar matter, space astronomy, stellar dynamics, broadening of spectral lines, conductivity of ionized gases, and controlled release of thermonuclear energy. He is author the monograph “Physics of Fully Ionized Gases” (1956, revised 1962); “Diffuse Matter in Space” (1968); “Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium” (1978); “Searching Between the Stars” (1982); “Dynamical Evolution of Globular Clusters” (1987); and “Dreams, Stars in the Sea” (1946). The recipient of numerous astronomical awards and honors, Spitzer is a Unitarian.
Spock, Benjamin McLane (1903–1998) “You know more than you think you do,” pediatrician and author Spock wrote in The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). The work is said to have sold more copies that any other original title ever published in the United States. ‘Don’t be afraid to trust your common sense,” he wrote. “What good mothers and fathers instinctively feel like doing for their babies is usually best.” Such a view differed radically from that found in the 1928 book, Psychological Care of Infant and Chil, by Dr. John B. Watson. “Never, never kiss your child,” Watson had warned. “Never hold it in your lap. Never rock its carriage.” His break with authority, Dr. Spock said in 1972, gave “practical application” to the ideas of Sigmund Freud and John Dewey. “John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will.” In 1968 he was named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In The Humanist January-February 1968 issue, he was quoted:
The nation that brings up its children with the idea that all they have to be concerned about is their future well-being and their own success in life is headed for trouble. We must bring up our children with a strong sense of service to their community, to their country, and to their world. This education has to start way back in the family.
That same year he was tried and convicted for having counseled draft evasion during the United States involvement in Vietnam. On appeal, the conviction was overturned. In 1972, he was the pacifist People’s Party presidential candidate. Dr. Spock has been termed “the American physician everyone knows.” According to biographer Thomas Maier, Spock was a product of too little love from his parents, flirted wildly with his female patients, gave little consideration to his first wife’s dependence on the antidepressant Miltown, and seldom touched, hugged, or kissed his own sons. Dr. Spock’s entry in Who’s Who:
In pediatric practice I was trying, with difficulty, to reconcile concepts gained in psychoanalytic training with what mothers told me about their children. After ten years of that I was able to write Baby and Child Care, which, in turn, brought invitations to research and teaching jobs. To save children from radiation I became a public supporter of a test ban treaty and co-chairman of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) in 1962 which led, eventually to full-time opposition to the Vietnam war, conviction for conspiracy, conversion to socialism.
{CE; E; HNS2; Eric Pace, The New York Times, 17 March 1998}
Spong, John Shelby [Bishop] (1931– )
A controversial Episcopal bishop, author of Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (1991), Spong holds that St. Paul, the first great teacher of Christianity, was a “self-loathing and repressed gay male.” His Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus (1992) suggests that Mary, whom he describes as being far from a virgin, was “a sexually violated teen-age girl.” By holding Mary up as a virgin, he holds, women have been hurt. Her humanity is lessened, and this becomes a weapon against women. “Someone known as the Virgin Mother,” he writes, “cannot be presented with credibility to contemporary men or women as an ideal woman.” In Resurrection: Myth or Reality (1994), he argued that the details of Jesus’s life and his crucifixion are not historical but, instead, derive from the Jewish tradition of Midrash. Spong suggested, according to critic James A. Cox, that the physical bodily resurrection of Jesus was not originally part of the Christian Easter claim; that the Resurrection actually occurred in Galilee, not in Jerusalem; that the phrase “on the third day” does not refer to chronological time; that the story of Jesus’s burial and the account of the empty tomb are late-developing Christian legends; that the Jerusalem account of Easter was created from the Jewish Festival of Tabernacles (or Sukkot); that the triumphant journey of Palm Sunday was undertaken not by Jesus but by Peter well after the crucifixion. Bishop William Wantland of the Diocese of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, has called his fellow bishop “anti-Christian.” Asked by Bruce Bawer for a New York Times article 28 May 1996) about Spong, Bishop Wantland replied, “I’m sure you’re aware of his presentation at Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington a few months ago. He said the Ten Commandments are immoral, he said that Joseph, the foster father of Our Lord, and Judas Iscariot weren’t real people, he’s denied incarnation, virgin birth, resurrection.” Spong’s Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile, A New Reformation of the Church’s Faith and Practice (1998) further attacks the idea that the monotheistic god is other than a human invention. Freethinkers have been known to place bets on how long Spong will remain in the theistic camp and when he will formally exchange his clerical collar for the non-theists’ sports shirt. {TYD}
Spooner, Lysander (1808–1887) Spooner was an American writer whose first pamphlet was Deist’s Reply to the Alleged Supernatural Evidences of Christianity (1836). Spooner published works against slavery and was in favor of individualism. Called a “libertarian pietist,” he had a strong belief in individual rights and in harming no one. {BDF}
SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION “There is not any scientific evidence whatsoever that any person ever spontaneously combusted, and no scientifically known means by which it could happen,” Joe Nickell claims. He is a senior research fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. In the 19th century, temperance movement leaders promoted the idea that the body could spontaneously ignite. Charles Dickens in Bleak House had a drunkard burned in such a manner. But according to Nickell, “Why these people burn like this must be examined on a case-by-case basis. Just as with freak auto accidents, not all burning deaths, even unusual ones, happen in one way.” {The New York Times, 26 May 1998}
SPORTS • A hit, a very palpable hit! –William Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Because it’s there. –G. H. L. Mallory, explaining why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest
• Europeans definitely do not mix sports and religion. They even keep their sports apart from nationalism. . . . Until a couple of decades ago, the sports field in the United States was one arena in which religion played no part. Sadly, those days are gone, and the trend is toward more of a sports/religion mix with little or no opposition from athletes. The media have become willing collaborators in solidifying the new alliance. –Jeff Archer, Editor, The Alternative
• Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting. –George Orwell
• God absolutely could not play basketball, tennis, or soccer. Because He is omnipresent, He would always be out of established bounds. –Anonymous
• When I watched the World Cup last summer and saw the supporters of the various national teams waving their country’s flag and singing patriotic songs, I understood that the Europeans had finally found a substitute for war. –Paul Auster
Sporus: Sporus was Nero’s boy “bride.” (See entry for Alexander Pope.)
Sprading, Charles T (20th Century) An atheist, Sprading wrote What Freethinkers Affirm (19–?) and The Science of Materialism (1942) and Liberty and the Great Libertarians (1972). {GS}
Sprague, H. (20th Century) In 1957, Sprague was Secretary of the United Secularists of America in Clifton, New Jersey.
Spuhler, Andrée (20th Century) Spuhler is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. She was President and founder of Freethinkers, Inc., a Winter Park, Florida, group that disbanded in 1996 after years of activities in the Orlando, Florida, area. {FD}
SRI LANKAN FREETHINKERS Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, by Gordon Stein, discusses Sri Lankan freethought, which dates to the Sri Lankan Rationalist Association in the 1950s. (See entries for Arthur C. Clarke, Royston Ellis, and Buddha’s Tooth. Also, see entry for Tissa Balasuriya, a Sri Lankan Catholic priest excommunicated in 1996 for heresy.)
SRI LANKAN UNITARIANS Walter Jayewardene is the Director-Secretary General of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Sri Lanka (UUSL, 61/3 Old Road, Nawala, Rajagiriya, Sri Lanka). Although wounded in 1996 by a Tamil bomb attack, he has led his group to establish a business making and selling silver chalice jewelry. Sumanasiri Hullugalle, who is secretary to the Ministry of Labor and Vocational Training in Sri Lanka, is President of the UUSL. There are seven main branches of Unitarians with a total membership of around five hundred. Because the island is multi-ethnic, members are Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims, Eurasian, and Malays. The UUSL was founded in 1992. (See entry for Walter Jayewardene.)
Srikanth, Gautam (20th Century) Srikanth, while a student at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, was one of the founders of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
St.: See Saint and Sainte.
Staaf, Karl (19th Century) Staff, who was a prime minister of Sweden, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Stacpoole, Henry de Vere (1863–1931) A novelist and ship’s doctor, of Irish ancestry, Stacpoole wrote a best-selling romance, The Blue Lagoon (1908), the story of two cousins marooned on a tropical island at the age of eight. They grow up, mature, produce a baby, and eventually are swept away by accident across their lagoon to the ocean and the oblivion of “the never-wake berries” which they providentially carry with them in their dinghy. Stacpoole had studied Carlyle and German philosophy, then the French stylists. He translated from the Italian, Spanish, French, German, and Swedish. In 1916, he wrote a Life of François Villon and translated Villon’s work. {RAT}
Staël-Holstein, Anne Louise Germaine de [Baroness] (1766–1817) A French-Swiss woman of letters, whose full name was Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Staël was born in Paris and early absorbed the intellectual and political atmosphere of her mother’s salon. Her father was the French Minister of Finance. Early on in life she shed her Protestantism and became a Voltairean. In 1786 she married Baron Staël-Holstein, a Swedish diplomat. Although moderately sympathizing with the French Revolution, she left France in 1792, returning to Paris under the Directory. After separating amicably from her husband, she became intimately associated with Benjamin Constant. In 1803 because of her opposition to Bonaparte, she was exiled from Paris and retired to her estate at Coppet, on the Lake of Geneva. She wrote Delphine (1802) and De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800), a study of the influence of social conditions on literature. Copies of her principal work, De L’Allemagne (1810), the result of a tour through Germany, were destroyed in Paris by order of Napoleon, who resented the book as an invidious comparison between German and French culture and mores. Threatened by Napoleon’s police, Mme. de Staël fled to Russia and England, later returning to Switzerland. John Quincy Adams, when an ambassador in Paris, knew her and described her to his mother: “She spoke much about the preservation of religion, in which, she gave me to understand, she did not herself believe.” {JM; RAT; RE; WWS}
Stafford, Russell Henry L: See entry for Theism.
Stahl, Harold: See entry for Eldon Scholl.
Stalker, Bill (20th Century) Stalker is Treasurer of Free Inquirers of Northeastern Ohio.
Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich (1879–1953) The Georgian cobbler’s son (who was named Ioseb Dzhugashvili) moved from being a seminarian to becoming leader of the Communist Party and one of the internationally best-known atheists. Accepting the view in Karl Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that “Religion . . . is the opium of the people,” Stalin (a pseudonym meaning “man of steel”) ruled as dictator of the state without the need for any sanction from the church. Early on, Stalin became the darling of much of the international intelligentsia (McCabe in 1940 wrote that “it is now generally agreed that he is one of the greatest statesmen in Europe and a distinguished strategist”), but his rule was marked by a paranoia that led to periods of terror, and he has become a symbol of a ruthless dictator without real feelings for the uplifting of mankind. A story current in the 1940s had it that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin were breakfasting at Teheran. Roosevelt mentioned his odd dream last night, that God had appointed him head of the United Nations. Churchill piped up that, indeed, that was a coincidence, that he, too, had dreamed God had appointed him Premier of the United Nations. Stalin, still a bit groggy from a sleepless night, retorted, “I had a dream last night, too, but I don’t remember appointing anyone to anything.” Scholars are still estimating the enormous numbers of people who were killed because of Stalin’s ruthlessness, illustrating that, although he was an unbeliever, Stalin was by no stretch of the imagination a humanist. {CE; JM; RE}
Stallard, H. H. (20th Century) Stallard in 1928 wrote The Debunkers. {GS}
Stallman, Richard (20th Century) Stallman at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City spoke about education and global humanism for the cyber-age. His e-mail is <rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu> and homepage is <http://www.gnu.org/people/rms.html>.
Stallone, Sylvester (1946– ) Stallone is an entertainer cited by Paul Edwards in Reincarnation as being a believer in reincarnation. “Stallone thinks he may have been a monkey in Guatemala,” Edwards noted jocularly about the Hollywood star, “something I find entirely credible.”
Stamm, August Theodor (19th Century) Stamm was a German humanist who wrote The Religion of Action (1866). After the events of 1848, Stamm went to England, then to America. {BDF}
Stamos, David N. (20th Century) Stamos is author of “A Stumper for Theists Revisited” in American Rationalist, November-December, 1990.
Standley, Albert (Deceased) Stanley was a member of the National Secular Society, South Place Ethical Society, and the Fabian Society. An annual Albert Standley lecture, organized by the South London Republican Forum, is arranged to honor his contribution to Republicanism and other progressive causes. The 1999 speaker was Terry Liddle. (The Freethinker, April 1999)
Standring, George (1855–1924) Standring was an English lecturer and writer. For some years he was chorister at a Ritualistic Church, but he discarded theology after independent inquiry in 1873. He then became honorary secretary of the National Secular Society, started Republican Chronicle (1875), which afterwards was called The Republican, and still later The Radical (1888). Standring was contributor to the National Reformer, Freethinker, Progress, and other publications. His older brother, Sam Standring Jr. (born 1853), was also a freethinker. Their father, Sam Standring Sr., was what was later to be called an “agnostic.” Their mother was a Wesleyan who had brought the boys up as Wesleyans. George, who was highly critical of G. W. Foote, formed the Freethought Federation in 1896. In his later years, George devoted himself to the Fabian Society and the Malthusian League rather than the National Secular Society. Standring wrote An Atheist At Church (1894). {BDF; FUK; PUT; RAT; RSR; TRI}
Stanfield, Marion Baar (Died 1967) In 1949, Stanfield created a fund of art scholarships for Unitarian artists of the “conservative New England Type.” A resident of Westport, Connecticut, she included in her will a stringent gender requirement: To qualify, art students had to be female. That stipulation has since been overturned in court and her stipulations about the recipients’ Unitarian faith is now “interpreted loosely.” Since 1977, more than one hundred art scholarships (generally ranging from $1,000 to $3,000 a year) have been presented. {Susanne Skubik, “The Stanfield Art Scholarships,” World, November-December 1994}
Stanford, Leland [Governor; Senator] (1824-1893)
A Unitarian, Stanford was Governor of California from 1861 to 1863 and was U. S. Senator from 1885 to 1893. A capitalist who was one of the four founders of Central Pacific Railroad and was President of Southern Pacific Railroad from 1885 to 1890. He founded Stanford University with an endowment in memory of his son, Leland Stanford Jr.
Stanford, S. (20th Century) Stanford is on the editorial committee of New Zealand’s Rationalist and Humanist.
Stanhope, Hester Lucy [Lady] (1776–1839) Stanhope, the daughter of Earl Stanhope and grand-daughter of Lord Chatham, was the niece of William Pitt. Reared in a freethinking atmosphere, she kept house for Pitt in his later years. Then, disgusted with the hypocrisy of English religious life, she went to live in the Near East. Adopting Eastern male dress and a religion that was a composite of Christianity and Islam, she settled among the Druses of the Lebanon Mountains in an abandoned convent that she rebuilt and fortified. The indigenous population regarded her as a prophetess as, in time, she came to regard herself. Stanhope incited them to resist an Egyptian invasion (1831) of Syria. According to McCabe, Lady Lucy “scorned Christianity and was a woman of great ability and character.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Stanley, F. Lloyd (19th Century) Stanley was the American author of An Outline of the Future Religion of the World, a deistic work in which he criticized preceding religions. {BDF}
Stanosz, Barbara (20th Century) Stanosz, a professor of philosophy in Poland who specializes in logic, has been active in supporting a Polish humanist magazine, Bez Dogmatu. In an interview (International Humanist News, June 1995), Stanosz was concerned that democracy is in danger in her country. In 1996, she was a participant not only in the Polish Humanist Conference on European Integration in Utrecht but also in the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. She signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entries for Polish humanism and for the Society for Humanism and Independent Ethics.) {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}
Stansbury, Hubert (20th Century) A freethinker, Stansbury wrote In Quest of Truth (1913). {GS}
Stansfield, James [Sir] (1820–1898) Stansfield, a warm friend of Holyoake, supported Secularist societies and was a lawyer who contributed generously to reform movements. He entered Parliament and became Under-Secretary of State for India, Financial Secretary of the Treasury, and President of the Local Government Board. {RAT; RE}
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1815–1902) “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation,” Stanton once wrote. “The religious superstition of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.” A leader of the woman suffrage movement, she with several others called the first woman’s rights convention in the United States in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York. With Susan B. Anthony as publisher, she and Parker Pillsbury edited (1868–1870) the Revolution, a magazine of militant feminism. With Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, Stanton compiled the first three volumes of History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1886). Feminists, however, point to Stanton’s daring work with a small committee in 1895 on The Women’s Bible. At that time, few women dared to involve themselves in a scholarly commentary on the entire Bible. Of her group’s work, Stanton wrote, “The Old Testament makes woman a mere afterthought in creation; the author of evil; cursed in her maternity; a subject in marriage; and all female life, animal and human, unclean. The Church in all ages has taught these doctrines and acted on them, claiming divine authority therefor. . . . This idea of woman’s subordination is reiterated times without number, from Genesis to Revelation; and this is the basis of all church action.” In 1898, Stanton wrote Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897. In a life of William Lloyd Garrison, Stanton is described at a public meeting as having said, “In the darkness and gloom of a false theology I was slowly sawing off the chains of my spirit-bondage when, for the first time, I met Garrison in London. A few bold strokes from the hammer of his truth, and I was free!” Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, in their editing of The Women’s Bible Commentary (1992), mention that Stanton edited an expurgated version of the Bible for women in 1895. Women are particularly sensitive about passages such as Exodus 22:18 (a warrant for witch burning); I Corinthians 14 (Paul’s outburst against women speaking in church); Nahum 3:5 (in which the Lord of Hosts threatens to lift the women’s skirts over their faces to reveal their nakedness); I Timothy 2:12 (instructing women to be silent and let only men to do the teaching); Genesis (in which Eve is the woman-as-evil temptress); and, as described in Friend Journal (January 1993) by Chuck Fager, the Commentary points up “the repeated images, beginning with Hosea, and including Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum and others, portraying God’s relationship to Israel and humans in general as a marriage. Here God is the steadfast, long-suffering (but all-powerful) husband, and Israel / humankind a chronically adulterous, promiscuous whore of a spouse. The female sinner is repeatedly punished by the righteously angry Divine Husband, through the most gruesome violence imaginable: exposure, multiple rapes, the murder of her children, dismemberment, cannibalism, etc.” Some of the forty-one contributors to the study, faced by the near-total androcentricity of the biblical text, were “tempted to toss the entire cultural tradition it epitomizes aside and start over” but decided to examine it, as did Stanton, “from a consciously female perspective, if only to resist its negative impact on them.” {BDF; JM; PUT; RE; TRI; TYD; WWS}
Stanton, Luke (1960–1993) Stanton, a native of Trinidad who moved to New York City, was a secular humanist who died of AIDS. A member of AASH, he had helped advise others who were HIV-positive, and he owned a New York City hairdressing shop. At his memorial, which was attended by several hundred, “A Letter From Luke” was distributed which contained not only the Council for Secular Humanism’s “Affirmations of Humanism” but also stated the following:
I was raised Roman Catholic and spent the greater part of my teenage years trying to come to terms with the hypocrisies and contradictions of Catholic dogma. The realization that my sexual orientation was homosexual and the church’s adamantly homophobic position of opposing all issues that pertain to the Gay and Lesbian community finally solidified my feelings about Catholicism—this religion was not for me. I spent some time thinking about and exploring other forms of worship and spirituality and just wasn’t convinced with their doctrines, either. I began to realize that I was very much a skeptic and held all religious dogma, including all the New Age free form spirituality, at bay. I kept saying to myself, ‘they can’t seriously believe that people are gonna go for this stuff?’ But, yes, people do go for that stuff and sometimes with zest and vigor. This was something that I had to come to terms with. Even though I did not believe in supreme beings, deities, spirits, saints, goblins, and the hereafter, there are many people who do and it was important to me that I respected their feelings on these issues. So it became apparent that I, an atheist, could live among the masses who were believers with little or no problems. In my late twenties I became interested in a philosophy called “Secular Humanism.” I read a few books about it, subscribed to some publications about Humanism, and even discovered that the Unitarian Church and the Ethical Culture Society were outstanding examples of humanistic organizations. The tenets of humanism were exactly how I felt about life on planet Earth as it pertained to Luke Stanton. It gave me quite a bit of joy discovering this facet of my life and today I am very pleased to call myself a “Secular Humanist.” Well, anyway, if anybody knows anything about humanism—it’s about the farthest thing from Catholicism that you can find.
Stanton instructed his companion, Michael Stanton—the two had agreed to take the same final name—that he wished to be cremated and have a niche in an outdoor mausoleum at Trinity Church Cemetery in Upper Manhattan. He further requested that Aaron Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” be played.
Stap, A. (19th Century) Stap wrote Historic Studies on the Origins of Christianity (1864) and The Immaculate Conception. {BDF}
Stapledon, Olaf (20th Century) Stapledon’s Beyond the Isms (1942) called for a synthesis of religion and materialism.
Stapp, Owill V. (20th Century) Stapp wrote “Why the Doctor Will Not ‘Condesund’ ” (1913). {GS}
STAR DUST AND STARS “Look, a beautiful shooting star!” “Beautiful, my dear, yes; but stars do not shoot! You just saw a meteor that fell into Earth’s atmosphere!” According to scientists, stars are self-luminous bodies consisting of a mass of gas that is held together by its own gravity. Their energy is generated by nuclear reactions in the interior that are balanced by the outflow of energy to the surface, and the inward-directed gravitational forces are balanced by the outward directed gas and radiation pressure. According to humanists, and in the words of Ann and Jane Taylor from their Rhymes for the Nursery (1806),
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are, Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky.
What neither the scientists nor the humanists are sure about is what “star dust” is. In 1999 NASA sent an unmanned craft to rendezvous with a comet for the purpose of collecting some of its microscopic particles in order to test this interstellar dust. If successful, the mission will be the first ever to retrieve extraterrestrial material from beyond the Earth’s Moon.
Starbuck, Edwin Dilles (1866–1947) Starbuck taught philosophy at Iowa State University. His rationalistic views are found in his Psychology of Religion (1899) and The Forward Look in Philosophy (1913). Holding a vague pantheism, Starbuck made “no distinction between divine and human beings.” {RAT; RE}
Starcke, Carl Nicolay (1858–1926) Starcke was a teacher of philosophy in the University of Copenhagen. A decided disciple on Feuerbach, on whom he published a dissertation in 1883, Starcke wrote critical surveys of the views of Lubbock, Maine, McLennan, and Feuerbach. {BDF} Stark, Rodney (20th Century) Stark, a sociologist, wrote The Rise of Christianity, in which he tries to explain the success of Christianity. In A Theory of Religion, Stark and collaborator William Bainbridge wrote, “Neither of us is religious, as that term is conventionally understood and as we use it in this book. Neither of us belongs to a religious organization, and neither of us believes in the supernatural.” {CA; E}
Starkes, George (20th Century) An African American, Starkes is a writer and atheist activist from Tampa, Florida. He is an admirer of the works of Robert G. Ingersoll, who he believes should inspire contemporaries by his freethinking activism.
Starkey, David (20th Century) Starkey, a historian and broadcaster, became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1995. He has written Wishes and Fears (1988), British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (1990), Henry VIII: A European Court in England (1991), Koan Americana (1991), and Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politicians (1992). In 1996, Starkey gave the 70th Conway Memorial Lecture at Conway Hall in London. He has been described as “the rudest man in Britain” and “the thinking man’s Alf Garnett.” In The Sunday Telegraph, he was reported as saying, “My first boyfriend called himself a High Church atheist. I remember going with him to a church with altars crammed with statues and crosses; four Knights of Malta with purple socks. I’d like to have taken a sledgehammer to it all.” Starkey was formerly chairman of the Gay Tory group, Torche. Starkey has written of his past and his views:
As usual, origins say much, if not all. I was born into a Quaker family in the 1940s. The secret of Quakerism’s extraordinary fertility in so many areas—from science and the arts to business—is that Quakers are marginal but self-confidently so. And my family was marginal even within the minority. The Quaker Meeting in Kendal was high bourgeois, prosperous and dominated by old, local families; my parents were working class, poor and “off-comers” into this stand-offish little town. Personal traits added to this sense of not quite belonging. I was born pretty badly crippled. Brilliant surgery corrected the problem almost completely. But for much of my boyhood I had to wear surgical boots. And I was soon aware that I was different sexually. I did not yet have a name for it. But this was the early intimation of my homosexuality. All this could have led to mere chippiness. I was saved by two things. The first was the confidence instilled into me by my mother. The second was that I was academically very successful—so much so that, in the 1960s, becoming an academic seemed the obvious choice of career. I became an historian, I suppose, because history was the subject that best answered to my sense of being both outsider and insider. My most important work is on the Tudor Court. Choosing this topic was another act of dissent. The orthodoxy was that Tudor England was becoming a modern bureaucratic state; to me it was obvious that it was a personal monarchy. There were intrinsic reasons as well: the history of royal Courts is doubly satisfying. It shows high politics at its most brutal. This is universal. But it also deals in a set of values radically different from our own: aristocracy, hierarchy, magnificence. This is where my academic history connects with my role as a media antimoralist on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze and Talk radio, where I have my own show on Sunday mornings. For the relativism of values and morality is, it seems to me, not a debatable philosophical position but a demonstrable historical fact. And this, in turn, is the intellectual basis of my atheism. Values are a changeable human construct; they are not the immutable gift of an eternal God. But nor are they a necessary deduction from the Laws of Nature. This is why for me atheism is necessarily individualistic, not socialistic. The world is something we have to make sense of. We start with both the help and the hindrance of inherited traditions. But finally the meaning we give to our lives is our own. Humanism is simply the best way of arbitrating between these individual perceptions. {The Freethinker November 1997; New Humanist, March 1998}
Starkey, Marion: The American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998) cites Starkey’s The Tall Man From Boston as often being banned because it “would lead children to believe ideas contrary to the teachings of the Bible.” (See entry for Banned Books.)
Starosta, Miroslav (20th Century) Starosta is chairperson of the Czech Unitarian Association. (See entry for Czech Unitarian Association.)
Starr, Lillian (20th Century) Starr is on the editorial board of The Truth Seeker, a San Diego, California, freethinkers’ magazine.
Starr, Mark (1894–1985) Starr, an American Federation of Labor union leader, was educational director in New York City of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. With Harold U. Faulkner, he wrote Labor in America (1944). He also was chairman of the Esperanto Information Center and, in 1965, the United Nations representative of Universala Esperanto-Asocoo. On the subject of humanism, he wrote the present author:
Bearing in mind all the semantic weakness that persists in the use of words, I think my closest association is with #7, “naturalistic humanism.” While not forgetting how dark and deep are the passions from which all men and women yet suffer, I still have faith that human beings can become progressively the masters of their fate. The basis for that hope is the record of past progress as shown by history. Because of the circumstances of my upbringing where I saw the class struggle operating in actual life, I became interested in the Marxian theories as, of course, clearly distinguished from the totalitarian applications of a minor part of them concerned with the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It is indeed fascinating to see how men’s ideas and morals and ethics are the sublimations and rationalizations of their economic needs. The way in which men, as members of social groups, make their living can be correlated with their beliefs in a very illuminating way. There is, of course, no automatic reaction between economics and ideas. Outstanding individuals can be the exceptional cases who raise themselves above their social environment. The way itself by which men get their living depends upon a mass of geographic, climatic, cultural, and economic factors which are all in process of continual change. I think my humanism is less individualist than that of some of my colleagues. I think we must develop a group ethic in order to make any application of public enterprise operate satisfactorily. What happened in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia shows that collectivism can be applied at the expense of the liberty and integrity of the individual. The importance of the healthy, happy human being as the end product of any effective society has been impressed upon our minds by such experiences. In pessimistic moments we wish that there were some Universal Intelligence upon which one could rely to solve all our problems. Even the acceptance of any kind of humanist principles does not make unnecessary the hard, tough job of applying those principles to specific instances. The acceptance of any dogma or faith in some anthropomorphic omniscient force seems to me to be an understandable demonstration of human weakness and the natural desire for explanation and solution of things which still have to be understood and overcome. I am constantly amazed at the wonder and the immensity of the Universe and the power of thinking man (as a conscious part of that universe) to use his mind to generalize the One out of the Many. Also the slow evolution, which has achieved in man its highest and articulate expression, awakens reverence and a sense of responsibility to aid in future progress. These are the premises of my humanism which has relations to other forms but cannot be encompassed by any simple label. Here is the challenge and the response to further progress without mystic and supernatural connotations. Here, I hope, is the basis for all men and women of good will, irrespective of their individual beliefs and theologies, to find a basis for cooperation in helping men to improve the world and simultaneously themselves.
Starr, a signer of Humanist Manifesto II, was a member of the New York City humanist group, writing in The Humanist Newsletter (Summer 1953),
I feel that the humanist should participate in politics, and it would be surprising if he did not cooperate with the most progressive group available in his locality. My own view is that the humanist should be led by logic and facts to advocate social planning plus the Bill of Rights. In the fight for civil liberties, he cannot take a back seat. My guess would be that, at the present moment, most humanists would feel close to the position of the Americans for Democratic Action generally, and in New York State to that of the Liberal Party. {HM2; HNS; WAS, 18 April 1956}
STARGAZER Stargazer, Star Walker, and Sunrise Journal are at PO Box 4153, Salem, Oregon 97302. E-mail: <lloydk@teleport.com>.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, ALBANY Humanists at the Albany branch of the State University of New York are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, BUFFALO Humanists at the Buffalo branch of the State University of New York are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. Statham, Francis Reginal (19th Century) Statham wrote Rational Theology (1872). {GS}
Statius, Publius Papinius (c. 40–c. 96 CE) A Latin poet and a favorite of Emperor Domitian, Statius was much esteemed both in his time and through the Middle Ages. He agreed with Petronius that it was fear first made gods in the world, and his ranking of Domitian with the gods made its truth no less pointed. {CE; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Stauffer, James (20th Century) Stauffer is active with the South Bay Secular Humanists. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Stavrum, Lorentz (20th Century) Stavrum is President of the Norwegian Humanist Association.
Stcherbatsky, Th. (20th Century) In India, Stcherbatsky wrote History of Materialism in India (19–?). {GS}
Stebbing, Susan (1885–1943) Stebbing was a philosopher who criticized Eddington and was, according to Colin McCall, “a model of clarity and demolition. In his day, Eddington made “picturesque” pronouncements which are amusing today but were eagerly devoured by the religiously inclined then. Stebbing’s logical and linguistic analysis are commendable, McCall stated. {Freethinker, June 1996}
Stebbing, T. (20th Century) Stebbing, a freethinker, has written, “The Christian God knew before He created man that man would sin, and so He condemned the human race to Hell and endless suffering. What dreadful demon could rival such a Creator?”
Stebbins, Horatio (1821–1902)
Although it was Starr King who established a Unitarian presence on the West Coast, it was Thomas Lamb Eliot and Horatio Stebbins who maintained that presence through their steady leadership of the San Francisco and Portland churches. He wrote Prayers (1903). Criticized at the outbreak of the Civil War for what some of his congregation thought was a too-blatant expression of patriotism and politics in the pulpit, Stebbins replied: “I have great respect for the people, and it gives me pain to come in collision with their convictions; but there is one man whose respect I must have, and his name is Stebbins.” {U&U}
Stec, Michael (20th Century) On the Web, Stec sells books of interest to atheists: <http://members.tripod.com/~mstec/atheism.html>.
Stecher, Carl (20th Century) Stecher is a former Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a professor of English at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts. In “Looking for God in All the Wrong Places” (The Humanist, May-June 1998), he tends toward using the Christians’ terminology but finds that in his own search for God he has settled more for “a God freed from the barbarism of ancient origins, a God who does not need editing or sanitizing or rationalizing. Perhaps we can have a God who embodies only our highest ideals.”
Stedman, D. B. (19th Century) Stedman, a freethinker, wrote “Why I Am Not a Christian” (189–?). {GS}
Steeg, F. W. (20th Century) Steeg wrote Babylon the Great (1913). {GS}
Steegman, A. T(heodore) (1936– ) A professor of anthropology at State University of New York in Buffalo, Steegman is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. In 1983 Steegman wrote Boreal Forest Adaptations.
Peter Steele, Recording Artist music
Steele is the lead vocalist, front-figure and producer of the metal band Type O Negative.
From the SonicNet Chat, January 28, 1998:
Lord Judas: Are you Wiccan?
Type O Negative (Steele): I don't have any religion. Science is my religion.
---
From a Peter Steele Interview in an (August 2000???) issue of Faces magazine.
"I am a Social Dawinist. Do you honestly think that we should have more privileges than those large, two-inch maggots gorging themselves on the filthy streets outside my subterranean apartment's ground-level window? No. As a matter of fact, we should have lesser privileges because we cease to evolve. The archaic Christian, liberal and democratic ideologies cater only to the inferior: those who lack motivation, ability, and intelligence. There are certain people that should not be allowed to breed because their offspring will only taint the species." "Wouldn't it be wonderful if only 100,000 people inhabited the entire world? All the finest of each race with the same moral code, same sense of right and wrong, and a strong appreciation of art and science? But we are obsessed with the imagined superiority of our species. We think we are better than anything else that craws, creeps, or slithers on the this anemic globe. And who propagates this unnatural and grotesque philosophy? None other than the slanted media and its lackeys. The pathetic defenders of the so-called defenders of the so-called defenseless. They shove their corrupt retrosocial theories down the throats of the mindless masses who will believe everything they're told, so they don' have to think for themselves. I don't need a journalist or newscaster to tell me all men are equal. No man is my equal! Some are better. But most are worst." "Once a healthy, unemployed young male on the street asked me for money to help his children. Well, I don't have a cent for him or any of his slothful kind. There are plenty of Help Wanted signs posted. Maybe the jobs aren't high paying, but I'd rather flip burgers than become a parasite. And before you attempt to voice a reply. Don't waste your breath, because I don't care what you think. I will die for what I believe, and I'd like to take quite a few of you out with me. So keep in mind that pity is a weakness and, most of all, believe in yourself. But, be warned, people should be given respect until you learn that they don't deserve it Women should be worshipped and man should be able to settle hid differences in a physical manner without any repercussions from the law."
Steele, Peter ( º Steele, a recording artist, is a bassist in a metal band called Type O Negative, named because when he was reading the phone book he noticed an ad for a blood bank that was paying top dollar for a particular blood type. Slow, Deep, and Hard (1991) was one of the group’s albums. Unsuccessfully Coping with the Natural Beauty of Infidelity reflected homicidal anger of a relationship that was so deep Steele attempted suicide over it. Origin of the Feces was initially released with a cover photo of a lamprey, but an attentive Kmart staffer found that, in reality, it was a close-up of Steele’s anus. The group’s work often focuses on explorations into the worlds of dark sexuality and gothic imagery. In 1993 they released Bloody Kisses. Asked by a reporter of SonicNet Chat (28 Jan 1998) if he was Wiccan, Steele responded, “I don’t have any religion. Science is my religion.” Similarly he told a Faces interviewer,
I am a social Darwinist. Do you honestly think that we should have more privileges than those large, two-inch maggots gorging themselves on the filthy streets outside my subterranean apartment’s ground-level window? No, as a matter of fact, we should have lesser privileges because we cease to evolve. The archaic Christian, liberal and democratic ideologies cater only to the inferior: those who lack motivation, ability, and intelligence. There are certain people that should not be allowed to breed because their offspring will only taint the species. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if only 100,000 people inhabited the entire world? All the finest of each race with the same moral code, same sense of right and wrong, and a strong appreciation of art and science? But we are obsessed with the imagined superiority of our species. We think we are better than anything else that crawls, creeps, or slithers on the this anemic globe. And who propagates this unnatural and grotesque philosophy? None other than the slanted media and its lackeys. The pathetic defenders of the so-called defenders of the so-called defenseless. They shove their corrupt retrosocial theories down the throats of the mindless masses who will believe everything they're told, so they don't have to think for themselves. I don't need a journalist or newscaster to tell me all men are equal. No man is my equal! Some are better. But most are worst. Once a healthy, unemployed young male on the street asked me for money to help his children. Well, I don't have a cent for him or any of his slothful kind. There are plenty of Help Wanted signs posted. Maybe the jobs aren't high paying, but I'd rather flip burgers than become a parasite. And before you attempt to voice a reply. Don't waste your breath, because I don't care what you think. I will die for what I believe, and I'd like to take quite a few of you out with me. So keep in mind that pity is a weakness and, most of all, believe in yourself. But, be warned, people should be given respect until you learn that they don't deserve it Women should be worshipped and man should be able to settle hid differences in a physical manner without any repercussions from the law. {CA}
Steenhaut, O. (20th Century)
At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985), Prof. Steenhaut of Belgium addressed the group.
Stefanoni, Luigi (Born 1842) Stefanoni was an Italian writer and publicist. His first romance, The Spanish in Italy, was suppressed by the Austrians. Joining Garibaldi’s volunteers, Stefanoni contributed to Unita Italiana. In 1866 in Milan he founded the Society of Freethinkers and its organ, Il Libero Pensiero. Stefanoni wrote A Critical History of Superstition, compiled a philosophical dictionary (1873–1875), and translated Büchner’s Force and Matter. {BDF; RAT}
Stefansson, Vilhjalmur (1879–1962) A Canadian-born U.S. explorer of the Arctic Circle (1913–1918), Stefansson became curator of the Stefansson collection of polar material at the Baker Library, Dartmouth College, and author of My Life with the Eskimo (1913). Encyclopedist Sherman Wakefield wrote the present writer (29 August 1956), “In connection with your Humanist questionnaire to prominent people, I wonder if you ever sent one to Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Arctic explorer. His address is Dept. of Northern Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He attends a Unitarian church in Hanover, but he may be more than an orthodox Unitarian. I met him several years ago at a party, and he told me then he had studied Comparative Religions at Harvard under Moore. Several weeks ago I sent him an old copy of The Arbitrator in which I quoted from Peary and an Eskimo to the effect that Eskimos have no religion but they had all the virtues. I have been surprised that he did not acknowledge its receipt and wonder if he was shocked. Without mentioning my name, I wish you would send him your questionnaire (if you have not already done so) and let me know his answer.” Stefansson in 1954 had written,
I have not read Corliss Lamont’s Humanism As A Philosophy, but he and I have conversed in that field and I suppose us to be in general agreement, at least enough so that we might both be tagged [naturalistic] humanists. I have read others of his.
On the subject of religion he has written:
The Stone Age people had a religion by which they believed themselves able to control their environment, but it was neither a religion of hope nor of fear. There was no permanent future life; there was nothing resembling heaven or hell. The spirits were powerful but they were not in themselves good or evil, though they might do the good or evil bidding of people who controlled them. . . .They had as much desire to live as any of us but less fear of dying than most of us. . . . These people who lived were to all appearances so much happier than any other group I have ever known. . . . The chief factor in the happiness of the Stone Age Eskimos was they were living according to the golden rule. . . . The successful man stood above his fellows in nothing but their good opinion. . . . Your importance in the community depended on your judgment, your ability, and your character, but notably upon your unselfishness and kindness.
{CE; CL; RAT; WAS, 5 October 1954}
Steffens, (Joseph) Lincoln (1866–1936) An American author, known as a Muckraker, Steffens turned out articles exposing municipal corruption. He wrote The Shame of the Cities (1904) and Upbuilders (1909), but it was his autobiography in 1931 which particularly described his era. Among his observations:
• Why is it that the less intelligence people have, the more spiritual they are? They seem to fill all the vacant, ignorant spaces in their heads with soul. Which explains how it is that the less knowledge they have, the more religion. {TYD}
Steiger, Rod (1925- ) Steiger, a well-known actor, has appeared in numerous movies and plays. In 1967 he won an Academy Award for “In the Heat of the Night.” He occasionally is asked to give speeches on the kosher dinner circuit, for he has played Jewish characters in such films as “The Pawnbroker” and “The Chosen.” However, according to Tim Boxer’s Jewish Celebrity Anecdotes, Steiger is an agnostic whose parents were Lutheran. {CA}
Steiger, Rod (14 Apr 1925 - ) Steiger, a well-known actor, has appeared in numerous productions. In 1967 he won an Academy Award for In the Heat of the Night. He also was in such movies as On the Waterfront (1953); Big Knife (1955); Oklahoma (1956); Al Capone (1959); Convicts 4 (1961); Moby Dick (1962); The Pawnbroker (1964, Berlin Film Festival Award); The Loved One (`1964); Doctor Zhivago (1966); The Amityville Horror (1979); The Magic Mountain (1982); The Chosen (1982); The Ballad of the Sad Café (1991); Incognito (1997); and Crazy in Alabama (1998). Steiger’s theatrical credits include Night Music (1951); Enemy of the People (1953), and Rashomon (1959). His television credits include Marty (1953, winner of the Sylvania Award); The Movie Maker (1967); Sinatra (1992); Strange Bed Fellows (1995); and EZ Streets (1996). Occasionally, Steiger is asked to give speeches on the kosher dinner circuit, for he has played Jewish characters in such films as The Pawnbroker and The Chosen. However, according to Tim Boxer’s Jewish Celebrity Anecdotes, Steiger is an agnostic whose parents were Lutheran. {CA}
Stein, Anita (20th Century)
Stein was in the Birmingham project that was organized by the American Ethical Union’s Commission on Race and Equality. {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946) Philosophic naturalists like to quote Stein’s observation, “There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.” They do not, however, share her attraction to saints, as shown in her and her companion Alice B. Toklas’s Lucy Church Amiably (1930). Lansing Warren in a 1934 interview with Stein related one of her controversial, opinionated, and ironic viewpoints: “I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize because he is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.” Her critics accused her of supporting Marshal Henri Pétain and his armistice with Germany, which embroiled her with the general public as much as did her open lesbianism. The author of “Rose is a rose is a rose” was praised for her creative work, however, by such as the composer John Cage and the Living Theater’s Julian Beck and Judith Malina. {GL; Seymour I. Toll, “A Loopy Genius,” The New York Times, 9 February 1997; TYD}
Stein, Gordon (1941–1996)
Stein was one of the most extensive researchers on the topic of unbelief. For humanist and rationalist publications, he wrote in excess of six hundred book reviews. He was associated with such journals as The American Rationalist, Free Inquiry, and The Truth Seeker. Also, he was an officer of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, and that group’s director of the Center for Inquiry libraries. Dr. Stein wrote a number of basic, exhaustive, and definitive references on freethought topics. In 1981, he wrote Freethought in the United Kingdom. In 1980, he edited An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism. In 1987, he edited A Second Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism. In 1990, he wrote the scholarly God Pro and Con: A Bibliography of Atheism. In 1993 he wrote not only the Encyclopedia of Hoaxes but also The Sorcerer of Kings: The Case of Daniel Dunglas Home and William Crookes, which describes the rise in spiritualism, or survival of the spirit after death, that began in the 1840s in upstate New York; he details how the “phenomena” of spiritualism was produced. In 1994 at the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Stein spoke on “What Is the Good Life? A Humanist Perspective.” His consummate achievement was the editing of The Encyclopedia of Unbelief (1985). Just before his death from cancer, Stein’s editing of The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal (1996), a comprehensive and major collection, was published. The work examined “a wide range of claims, claimants, phenomena, and beliefs, from the certifiably false to the intriguingly possible, and all stops between,” according to Jerome Clark. Wendy M. Grossman, founder of the United Kingdom’s The Skeptic, praised the work highly as “an ambitious and difficult project.” Contributors included Geoffrey Dean, Arthur Mather, Ivan W. Kelly, Joe Nickell, Ray Human, Terence Hines, Paul Kurtz, and other experts. Carl Sagan wrote the foreword. Nicolas Walter, in The Independent (6 September 1996), described Stein as “a leading activist in the English-speaking free-thought movement,” one who “will be missed as a key figure in a growing movement.” Walter also wrote, “Stein was an unusual personality among Americans and humanists, being rather introverted and taciturn, but he was a loyal colleague and a stimulating if abrasive conversationalist. He was a severe critic of work by other people, yet sensitive to criticism by others. “ Stein, he noted, had “helped to found the best paper in the American free-thought movement, Free Inquiry,” and became “a considerable scholar in a movement which contains many considerable scholars.” Some 8,000 of Stein’s books were contributed to the Center for Inquiry Libraries. They represent important works on atheism, Bible criticism, the historicity of Jesus, freethought history, spiritualism, the occult, and parapsychology. {EU, Anne N. Gaylor and Eldon Scholt; FUK; FUS; SHD}
Stein, Robert M. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Stein was co-chairman, Public Affairs Committee, American Ethical Union. Stein in 1990 wrote Urban Alternatives: Public and Private Markets in the Provision of Local Services. {HM2}
Stein, Stuart (20th Century) Stein, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a member of the board of directors of the American Ethical Union. {HM2}
Steinbart, Gotthelf Samuel (1738–1809) A German rationalist, Steinbart was brought up in a pietist school but upon reading Voltaire became a freethinker. In 1874 he became professor of philosophy at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder and wrote A System of Pure Philosophy (1878). {BDF}
Steinbeck, John (1902–1968) Steinbeck is the Pulitzer- nd Nobel Prize-winning novelist of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. Asked his views about humanism, he wrote the present author:
Forgive me for not answering your letter. I have been working very hard. Too hard indeed for self-scrutiny. My approach to philosophy is usually on tiptoe ready to run like hell at the first growl. Frankly, I haven’t the slightest idea what my approach is or even whether I have one. I think my favorite evaluation is one wherein a very erudite man proved beyond doubt with parallel quotations that my whole body of thinking was stolen from an eighteenth-century Frenchman of whom I had never heard. I can’t help further. Working on a long and difficult book. These [post]cards are designed to break me of a vicious habit of writing letters.
That “long and difficult book” was East of Eden (1952), in which Adam Trask considers naming his children Cain and Abel, because his Chinese servant had interpreted the Biblical story to show that although God exiled Cain to the land east of Eden, He had said to him, “if thou doest well . . . thou mayest rule over sin.” Instead, Adam names them Caleb and Aron. Also humanistic is his Of Mice and Men (1937), which is capable of drawing tears from some highschoolers who are assigned to read the work and who find in the 1990s an understanding of the poor and homeless which may have not been quite so evident to their parents. “Guys like us,” says George to his fellow itinerant worker with the feeble intellect, “are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don’t belong no place.” What they have, however, is each other and human warmth. Called misogynistic by some, the short work was inspired by a person Steinbeck had worked alongside, one who did not kill a girl but who did kill a ranch foreman by sticking a pitchfork right through his stomach. Steinbeck’s empathy for hobos, drifters, field hands, and the destitute is unique. Humanists also enjoy reading his Grapes of Wrath (1939; a Japanese edition mis-titles the work Angry Raisins), especially noticing Steinbeck’s outlook concerning the social scene. Casy the preacher (with the symbolic initials J. C.) is a “homely” humanist capable of offering prayers of the humanist variety. “Ma,” one of the most memorable characters in American fiction, knows that her Joad family faces starvation, but she valiantly cries out, “We ain’ gonna die out. People is goin’ on—changin’ a little, maybe, but goin’ right on.” The novel’s final scene, which is shocking in its realism, has been said to be the most inspiring to be found in any humanistic work of fiction. The Unitarian minister, L. M. Birkhead, head of Friends of Democracy, wrote Steinbeck apologetically on 2 May 1940, “There is very widespread propaganda, particularly among the extreme reactionary religionists of the country, that you are Jewish and that Grapes of Wrath is Jewish propaganda.” A few days later, Steinbeck responded,
I am answering your letter with a good deal of sadness. I am sad for a time when one must know a man’s race before his work can be approved or disapproved. . . . It happens that I am not Jewish and have no Jewish blood.
He then added, “I find that I do not experience any pride that it is so.” George Orwell, the creator of Big Brother, described Steinbeck in his diaries as a “spurious writer, pseudo-naif.” To his personal physician, Dr. Kenny Fox, Steinbeck wrote the following toward the end of his life:
Now finally, I am not religious so that I have no apprehension of a hereafter, either a hope or reward or a fear of punishment. It is not a matter of belief. It is what I feel to be true from my experience, observation, and simple tissue feeling.
His final estate was about $4.35 million in 1990 dollars. Following Steinbeck’s wishes, and in spite of his non-theism, his funeral was performed according to the rites of the Church of England. Actor Henry Fonda read from Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. (See entry for George Orwell.) {WAS, 24 April 1951}
Steinberger, Jack (1921- ) A physicist who won the Nobel Laureate in 1988, Steinberger came to the United States in 1935. He taught at Columbia University (1950-1968) and currently is with the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneve, Switzerland. Steinberger signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Newly elected to Academy of Humanism
Steinem, Gloria (1936– ) Steinem, an American journalist and noted feminist, declared, “By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.” She also observed, “We are discovering, with the very helpful tutelage of the religious right, the ways in which organized religion is very often politics made sacred. Religion decrees the proper structure here on Earth by placing it in heaven, so to speak, and sanctifying it.…It’s an incredible con job when you think of it, to believe something now in exchange for life after death. Even corporations with all their reward systems don’t try to make it posthumous.” When Pope John Paul II visited New York City in 1995, Steinem told a crowd, including humanist activists Dennis Middlebrooks and Warren Allen Smith,
We will live to see the day that St. Patrick’s Cathedral is a child-care center and the Pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.
{HNS2; The Humanist, July-August 1998; TYD}
Steiner, Franklin (Born 1872) Steiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa, of Lutheran parents, but he rejected Christianity upon carefully reading the Bible. In 1924, he co-founded Chicago’s American Rationalist Association. Steiner wrote Infidels and Charity (1893) and Religion and Roguery (1924). In a 1936 work first published as a Haldeman-Julius Blue Book, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents from Washington to F.D.R., he made it known that President Washington did not kneel when he attended church. Four Presidents (Harrison, Johnson, Grant, Hayes) were not members of any church. Four were Unitarians (John as well as John Quincy Adams, Fillmore, Taft). Garfield, he noted, was our only “preacher President,” one who came out of the Disciples of Christ (“Campbellites”); although he at first opposed Darwinian concepts of the earth’s age, he came around to more liberal views. When Blaine eulogized Garfield, he said that among his friends were the names of “a pious Catholic priest and of an honest, high-minded and generous-hearted Freethinker.” {Freethought History #17, 1996}
Steiner, Robert (20th Century) Steiner, the chairman of the Occult Committee, Society of American Magicians, is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project. Steiner wrote The Truth Shall Make You Free (1980).
Steiner, Rudolf (1861–1925) Steiner, once an occultist and theosophist, developed a German school of “anthroposophy” which dealt with knowledge produced by the spiritual side of man. (See entry for Anthroposophy.)
Steinmetz, Charles Proteus (1865–1923) An electrical engineer, Steinmetz discovered the law of hysteresis and developed a process that led to the making of lightning rods. He participated in and preached at the First Unitarian Society of Schenectady, but he never actually joined the church. In American Freeman (1941) he was quoted as saying, “In the realm of science, all attempts to find any evidence of supernatural beings, of metaphysical conceptions, as God, immortality, infinity, etc., thus have failed, and if we are honest, we must confess that in science there exists no God, no immortality, no soul or mind as distinct from the body.” Steinmetz wrote The Place of Religion in Modern Scientific Civilization (1922). {CE; TYD; U; UU}
Steinmetz, Sebald Rudolph (1862-1940) Steinmetz taught sociology and ethnology at Leyden University. His long residence in the Dutch East Indies made him the chief authority in Holland on political geography and ethnology as well as an authority on comparative religion. In Social Papers (1906), Steinmetz wrote, “Religion was very rarely, if ever, a progressive way-making power. . . . In higher culture I think religion is a very dangerous help to living, for it makes us forget the realities of life for imaginary gratifications.” {RAT; RE}
Steinthal, Hajjim (1823–1899) A German philologist, Steinthal wrote works on language and mythology. From 1852 to 1855 he studied Chinese at Paris, and in 1863 he was appointed professor of general philology at Berlin. With Lazarus, he was joint editor of the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft. His rationalist views are best seen in his Allgemeine Ethik (1885) and Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (1890). {BDF; RAT}
Steller, Johann (17th Century) Steller was an advocate at Leipzig. He published a heretical work, Pilatus Liberatoris Jesu Subsidio Defensus (1674). {BDF}
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) (1783–1842) Stendhal was an art historian, a musicologist, journalist, biographer, and diarist. But his fame is based on his having written two of the world’s greatest novels, The Red and the Black (1831) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839). His acute character analysis shows up in a hero which possesses a personal moral code along with an ambitious and passionate pursuit of happiness. The Vatican prohibited reading Omnes fabulae amatoriae in 1828 and again in 1864. His De l’amour (1822) was a psychological analysis of love, one that predated Sigmund Freud by several decades and is a notable work. The Red and the Black uses red to symbolize liberalism and the army; the black symbolizes a reactionary clergy. The story of Julian Sorel, who shoots his mistress and eventually is guillotined, is played out as if life is a chessboard in which some win and some lose. When Louis Philippe appointed Stendhal to the consulate at Trieste, Metternich objected to Stendhal’s liberalism and in 1833 he was shifted to a post in Civitavecchia. During a three-year leave of absence, he wrote The Charterhouse of Parma, which many consider his best work. Its hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, shares with Julian Sorel a special egoism which Stendhal calls “Beylism.” Both derive great energy from passion, have their own moral code, and pursue happiness in the form of love and power. “All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few,” he observed. Balzac esteemed him highly. Edith Wharton considered Stendhal her favorite novelist and liked to cite his epigram, which he had told Prosper Merimee, “The one thing that excuses God is that he does not exist.” (Ce qui excuse Dieu, c’est qu’il n’existe pas.”) While on leave from the consulate, Stendhal died in Paris after suffering from a stroke. Although he was born in Grenoble, France, his tombstone in Montmartre is inscribed, “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese.” {CE; ILP; JMR; RE; TYD}
Stenerson, Douglas C. (20th Century) Stenerson is author of H. L. Mencken: Iconoclast from Baltimore (1975). {GS}
Stenger, Victor (1935– ) A professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Stenger is a secular humanist. In Free Inquiry (Winter 1992-1993), he wrote that data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite “made the first observation of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Overly enthusiastic statements on the significance of the experiment from several of the scientists interviewed prompted the media to interpret the COBE results as an unprecedented verification of the biblical view of creation. Consequently, an important scientific result was so grossly misrepresented to the public as to turn its actual meaning on its head.” But the data provides no evidence for the creator which believers are seeking and, in fact, “make the existence of a creator that much more unlikely.” Stenger concludes that “those who look to science to bolster their faith in the fantasies of a creator and an invisible world of the spirit won’t find it in the ripples of the big bang or any other scientific observation.” He wrote Not by Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988) and Physics and Psychics, the Search for a World Beyond the Senses (1990). In The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995), he argues that the materialist stance does justice to explaining both quantum phenomena and mental activity. He finds no need to resort to holistic cosmology, idealistic ontology, or outmoded theology. Stenger, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, is president of Humanists of Hawaii. (See entry for Hawaii Humanists. Also, see Stenger’s article about New Age Physics in Free Inquiry, Summer 1996.) {FD}
Stephans, Hildegard (20th Century) Stephans gave the Thomas Paine Collection of Richard Gimbel to the Library of the American Philosophical Society in 1976. {FUK}
Stephen, James Fitzjames [Sir] (1829–1894) Stephen, the brother of Leslie Stephen, was a baronet, a judge, a professor of law, and author of many books on law. A General View of Criminal Law (1863) exposed certain legal anomalies. His most famous book is History of the Criminal Law of England (1883). Like his brother, according to Joseph McCabe, Stephen entirely abandoned his belief in the orthodox dogmas. He was counsel for the Rev. Rowland Williams when tried for heresy for writing in Essays and Reviews, and Stephen’s speech was reprinted in 1862. Of his brother, Sir Leslie wrote that he had “entirely abandoned his belief in the orthodox dogmas.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Stephen, Leslie [Sir] (1832–1904) The first serious critic of the novel, Sir Leslie was editor of the monumental Dictionary of National Biography. Although ordained a minister in 1859, he took up a study of philosophy which led him to relinquish his holy orders. In an 1865 journal entry he wrote, “I now believe in nothing, to put it shortly; but I do not the less believe in morality.” Defending his agnosticism, he wrote Essays on Free Thinking and Plain Speaking (1873), in which he details how he reached a point when the Christian viewpoint of life, which he had accepted on faith, simply collapsed and fell away into unreality. Stephen was an expert on English thought in the 18th century and was a well-known, fearless mountaineer. Virginia Woolf was his youngest daughter by his second wife. In his house, wrote Miranda Seymour in Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (1993), the subject of God was not to be discussed. Ever. His History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) dealt with the deistic movement. His final work was An Agnostic’s Apology (1904). Stephen was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), and his signature appeared on the RPA’s initial financial appeals for £1,000. Sir Leslie died of a painless cancer and retained to the last his complete disbelief in all forms of religion. {BDF; CE; FUK; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Stephens, Alfred George (1865–1933) Stephens was a secularist, writer, and literary critic. In 1891 he was leader of the radical Boomerang in Brisbane. In J. F. Archibald’s Bulletin his literary column known as “The Red Page” selected and encouraged promising authors. In a 1904 book, The Red Pagan, his anti-clerical freethinking was evident in the following: “Thought and speech and writing should be as free as the winds. . . . There is no opinion so sacred that it ought not to be ridiculed and opposed. If it be rooted in truth it will triumph over ridicule and opposition; if it be rooted in falsehood, let it perish quickly.” {SWW}
Stephens, Samuel Eugene (20th Century) Stephens wrote The Philosophy of the Great Unconscious (1908). {GS}
Stephens, Zela (19th Century) Stephens was the author of Orthodox Prayer (1896). {GS}
Stephensen, Percy Reginald (1901–1965) “Inky” Stephensen was an Australian rationalist, publisher, and author. A Rhodes Scholar, he managed two publishing companies in England, then returned to Sydney where he issued the Australian Mercury and in the mid-1930s produced The Publicist with rationalist William J. Miles. The latter became a pro-fascist Australia First movement, and although Stephensen is said by Ray Dahlitz to have been one of the best creative writers to explore the potential of a native Australian culture, the publication did not help the cause of rationalism nor the development of Australian freethought. {SWW}
Stephenson, George (1781–1848) An English engineer, Stephenson invented the first locomotive. He has been said to have been a Unitarian, although Elizabeth Gillis does not list him as having joined a specific church. {UU}
Stepsay, David (20th Century) Stepsay is treasurer of Atheists United, which publishes a monthly newsletter in Sherman Oaks, California.
Sterling, John (1806–1844) Sterling was a minister of the Church of England who became a skeptic and turned to literature. Just before his death, Sterling wrote to Carlyle, who later wrote his biography, “I tread the common road into the great darkness without any thought of fear and very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none.” Sterling did not believe in a personal God. {RAT; RE}
Stern, Howard Allan (1954– ) Stern, a much-publicized radio disc jockey and television show host, wrote Private Parts (1993). In 1994, he arranged to be the Libertarian candidate for New York State Governor. Many of his views are delivered tongue-in-cheek, as in his response to a New York Daily News poll in 1997 which asked if he believed in God, “I actually believe in a God who looks like Leon Russell and acts like Rosie O’Donnell.” At another time, “I believe in God—I’m afraid not to.” Some say that on his radio show he said, “I definitely believe in God and I thank him for me being alive.” However, when Camille Paglia interviewed him in the Advocate to promote his book, Miss America, she asked how he felt about religion and politics. “I’m sickened,” he responded, “by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the Pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.” {CA; E; Daily News, 19 January 1997}
Stern, Howard Allan (12 Jan 1954 - ) Stern, a much-publicized radio disc jockey and television show host, wrote Private Parts (1993, which was issued as a recording and also filmed in 1997). Known as a “shock jock” because of his sometimes-outrageous style and bizarre program content, Stern has a large following of enemies as well as supporters. In 1994, he arranged to be the Libertarian Party's candidate for Governor of New York State. Many of his views are delivered tongue-in-cheek, as in his response to a New York Daily News poll in 1997 that asked if he believed in God, “I actually believe in a God who looks like Leon Russell and acts like Rosie O’Donnell.” He previously had told E! (12 Apr 1995), “Here’s what happens when you die—you sit in a box and get eaten by worms. I guarantee you that when you die, nothing cool happens.” At another time, “I believe in God—I’m afraid not to.” Some say that on his radio show he said, “I definitely believe in God and I thank him for me being alive.” However, when Camille Paglia interviewed him in The Advocate to promote his 1995 book, Miss America, she asked how he felt about religion and politics. “I’m sickened,” he responded, “by all religions. Religion has divided people. I don’t think there’s any difference between the Pope wearing a large hat and parading around with a smoking purse and an African painting his face white and praying to a rock.” On the other hand, some listeners have heard him say, “I believe in God—I’m afraid not to” and “I definitely believe in God and I thank him for me being alive.” When a 14 Apr 1999 drunk called his show and asked if he believed in God, Stern retorted, “I can’t believe there’s a God stupid enough to create an idiot like you.” {CA; Daily News, 19 January 1997}
Stern, J. (19th Century)
Stern, whose father was a rabbi in Liederstetten, went to the Talmud High school, studied the Kabbalah, and researched Spinoza. A convert to Spinoza’s views, Stern wrote Old and New Faith Among the Jews (1878), which was attacked by the orthodox Jews. In Women in the Talmud (1879), he pleaded for mixed marriages. Stern translated Spinoza into German. {BDF}
Stern, Madeleine B. (1912– ) Stern wrote The Pantarch: A Biography of Stephen Pearl Andrews (1968). {Freethought History #15, 1995}
Stern, Richard (20th Century) Triangulo Rosa, a “pink triangle” association commenced with the help of individuals from ASIBEHU in Costa Rica, was founded with money which Stern rounded up. He has been instrumental in working with Guillermo Murillo, director of the group that counsels HIV-positives and people with AIDS in Costa Rica. In 1998, because of problems within the group, the two founded Asociación Agua Buena Pro Defense de Los Derechos Humanos y Minorias (The Agua Buena Human Rights Association, Apartado 366-2200, Coronado, Costa Rica). “AIDS in the Developing World: Where Is Your Anger?” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1999) pleads for activists to pressure Americans, for “about one and a half yards of a Stealth Bomber,” to donate the stockpiled medications that sit in pharmaceutical factories throughout the developing world. Stern’s e-mail: <rastern@sol.racsa.co.cr>.
Stevens, Charles E. (20th Century) The Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library and Archives Inc. was formed by Madalyn Murray O’Hair after Stevens became a donor to her various causes.
Stevens, Don (20th Century) Stevens is a professional comic in San Francisco, California. He has entertained at numerous secular humanist events.
Stevens, Edward A. (Born 1846) Stevens, of Chicago, was secretary of the American Secular Union. He wrote God in the State and contributed to American freethought journals. {BDF; PUT}
Stevens, Fritz (20th Century) Stevens is Executive Director of Free Inquiry-West in Los Angeles, California, and a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. He has lamented that the Thomas Paine Coffeehouse, a community center managed by Tim Groya and gathering place for local freethinkers, had been vandalized in August 1997. Eggs had been flung at the storefront and an anonymous phone caller had warned that “heretics must heed the word of God.” Stevens also lamented that the local television stations and the San Diego Union did not report upon the vandalism.
Stevens, Halsey R. (19th Century) Stevens, a freethinker, wrote Faith and Reason (1879). {GS}
Stevens, Phillips Jr. (20th Century) An anthropologist on the staff of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Stevens wrote “Dealing with Religious Beliefs: Some Suggestions from Anthropology” on Free Inquiry (Winter 1995-1996). Religion, he noted, “is a deeply rooted and powerful cultural system, interrelated with other institutions in culture. Certain forms of supernatural beliefs, such as magic, operate according to universally similar principles of cognitive reasoning that are, in fact, not irrational; moreover, religious beliefs answer some questions that science cannot answer, such as ‘Why me?’ and “Why just then?’ ” He also has written, “Children, Witches, Demons, and Cultural Reality” in Free Inquiry (Spring 1997).
Stevens, Wallace (1879–1955) Stevens, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, author of Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), was Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, Hartford, Connecticut. Asked in 1951 for his views on humanism, Stevens wrote the present author, “I am afraid that I am allergic to pigeonholes. Some one of these days I shall look at all this, which is of the greatest interest to me, but I just cannot do it now.” He died in 1955. In a 1902 journal entry, when he was twenty-two, he wrote,
An old argument with me is that the true religious force in the world is not the church but the world itself.
In his obscure but meditative poem, “Esthétique du Mal,” Stevens remarks that without Satan we are “shaken realists” who no longer have the old supernatural explanations. He hoped to find in a realism purged of the supernatural “the imagination’s new beginning”:
Natives of poverty, children of malheur, The gaiety of language is our seigneur.
Such a new and imaginative apprehension of evil as illustrated in poetry, he held, would give us the needed resource against the natural evil of life, what critic Frank Kermode has called “against the unhappiness to which we are born, in a world called poor because the old consolations and remedies are no longer valid. A further resource is love, itself allied to language: ‘phrases/Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice,/Once by the lips, once by the services/Of central sense. . . .’ ” Stevens’s wife, Elsie Kachel Moll, posed as the model for the iconic head on the Mercury dime (1916-1945), so called because Miss Liberty wears an anomalous winged headdress atop her icy female profile. She also posed for the full-length Miss Liberty on the fifty-cent piece; and posed for the Standing Liberty quarter (1916-1930), whose figure was criticized for showing too much naked flesh and was more heavily draped in the second year of its issue. {John Updike, The New Yorker, 26 April-3 May 1999; WAS, 26 March 1951}
Stevenson, Adlai Ewing (1900–1965) Stevenson, a Governor of Illinois and a Unitarian, was an eminent spokesman for internationalism and liberal reform, but he was unsuccessful as the Democratic presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956. His grandfather had been Vice-President under President Grover Cleveland. Called Adlai by most, he was said to have felt that he inherited his Democratic politics from his father’s side of the family and his Unitarian religion from his mother’s. Few in his time were so witty, and Stevenson was likened to Abraham Lincoln, also from Illinois. A reader once wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, “I know Adlai Stevenson and other important people have belonged to the Unitarian Church, but to me a Christian religion that does not admit the divinity of Christ just isn’t a religion. It’s certainly not much of a test of your faith, is it?” To which the President’s wife responded in McCalls,
I have always had a great respect for Unitarians. My husband’s mother was brought up a Unitarian and later became an Episcopalian, but there never was any question that she was a good Christian; and most of the Unitarians I have known have been extremely good Christians. The Trinity is not essential, evidently, to leading a Christian life, nor does its denial seem to detract from the reverence in which Christ is held.
Wags and gossips still discuss the meaning of Washington Post owner Katharine Graham’s autobiography, on page 378 of which she says that Stevenson left his tie and glasses in her room the night before he dropped dead on the street in London. {CE; EG; U; UU}
Stevenson, Ian (1918– ) Stevenson is the prominent psychiatrist cited by Paul Edwards in Reincarnation as actually believing in reincarnation. Edwards found his views “sincere but deluded.”
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894) Stevenson, the Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist, was the son of Thomas Stevenson, joint-engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. A sickly child, he was unable to follow his father’s strenuous profession and although he studied law and was admitted advocate in 1875, Stevenson was fascinated by Edinburgh low life and cultivated a Bohemian life style. In 1875 he met the author of “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley, who was hospitalized after having a foot amputated, and the two collaborated on several plays, none of which had much success. Another friend was Charles Baxter, with whom he drank in pubs and grimy dives frequented by sailors. Baxter, “the only person I ever knew who could advise,” was the one to whom he confided about his problems at home. His father’s Scots Presbyterian theology was fanatical and did not allow any disagreeing with his viewpoint. This led Stevenson to write Baxter,
The thunderbolt has fallen with a vengeance now. You know the aspect of a house in which somebody is still waiting burial—the quiet step—the hushed voices and rare conversation—the religious literature that holds a temporary monopoly—the grim, wretched faces; all is here reproduced in this family circle in honour of my (what is it?) atheism or blasphemy. On Friday night after leaving you, in the course of conversation, my father put me one or two questions as to beliefs, which I candidly answered. I really hate all lying so much now…but if I had foreseen the real Hell of everything since, I think I should have lied as I have done so often before. . . . I do not think I am thus justly to be called a “orrible atheist” and I confess I cannot exactly swallow my father’s purpose of praying down continuous afflictions on my head.
To escape such comments from his father as “You have rendered my whole life a failure,” and from his mother as “This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me,” Stevenson left on a visit to his cousin Maud Babington. She was married to a clergyman in Suffolk, and Stevenson’s letters at this time indicate that he fell in love with Frances Sitwell, who was estranged from her husband and had recently lost her older son. To her he confided about the rift with his parents as well as his moods, his fears, his thoughts about writing. Much of his life was spent traveling in search of health, for he suffered from a chronic bronchial condition (possible tuberculosis). In France in 1876 he met his future wife, the American Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, whom he married after her divorce in 1880. She was ten years his senior and cared for him through many bouts of serious illness. His first full-length work of fiction, Treasure Island (1883) brought him fame, which increased with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Kidnapped (1886). Although he returned to Europe, settling at Bournemouth for three years, he then set out with his family entourage for the South Seas. He settled in Samoa at Vailima, where he temporarily regained his health and gained a reputation as “Tusitala,” or the story teller. While working on unfinished masterpieces, Weir of Hermiston (published 1896) and St. Ives (published 1897), Stevenson died from a brain hemorrhage. His biographers, A. Johnston and F. Watt, both reported that Stevenson was an agnostic until his death, although he had prayers said at his house daily on account of a pious mother. “I am religious in my own way,” Stevenson once wrote, “but I am hardly brave enough to interpose a theory of my own between life and death. Here both our creeds and our philosophies seem to me to fail.” In 1994, the first two volumes of The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson were published. The 2,800 letters in eight volumes included one love letter that referred to what was an admission of physically unrequited passion and included, “I believe in you as others believe in the Bible.” Tusitala, the teller of tales, was how Stevenson was called by Samoans, who seldom used his given name. He had lived in a sprawling, two-story villa at Valima. Some 1,500 feet above, on the summit of Mount Vaea, Stevenson’s body lies in a cement-block tomb which is topped by a plinth. A bronze plaque on one side bears the words “The Tomb of Tusitala” and a biblical passage. On the other side, a bronze plaque is inscribed with the words of Stevenson’s “Requiem”:
Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Stevenson, T. J. (20th Century) Stevenson wrote Reason: A Million Dollars in Cash for a Devil (1946). {GS}
Steward, Ann and Mike (20th Century) The Stewards edited Comfort Women in Comfort History (1993). The work of short biographies emphasizes community and church activities. {Freethought History #15, 1995}
Stewart, A. G. (20th Century) Stewart, an industrial radiologist, is a freethinker and a poet who built a house “with my own hands.” His “Jeffersonian Democracy” was printed in Freethought History (#21, 1997).
Stewart, Al (20th Century) Stewart, a recording artist, has two gold albums (“Past Present and Future” and “Modern Times”) and two platinum albums (“Year of the Cat” and “Time Passages”). Had compulsory school prayers left him with any religious belief?” an interviewer asked from Rock ‘n Reel (Issue 22, 1995). “No, absolutely no,” Stewart responded. “I’m actually of the opinion that idealism in any form is to be avoided at all costs, just because I see what happens when idealists get hold of almost anything. . . . The Bolsheviks were all idealists originally, well Stalin probably wasn’t, but they made a hell of a mess of the Soviet Union. Intellectuals are also very dangerous, especially intellectuals with a chip on their shoulder.” Asked following a performance in Philadelphia if he was Catholic, Stewart responded that he was an agnostic. {CA}
Stewart, Al (5 Sep 1945 - ) Stewart, a recording artist, has two gold albums (Past Present and Future and Modern Times) and two platinum albums (Year of the Cat and Time Passages). Had compulsory school prayers left him with any religious belief?” an interviewer asked from Rock ‘n Reel (Issue 22, 1995). “No, absolutely no,” Stewart responded. “I’m actually of the opinion that idealism in any form is to be avoided at all costs, just because I see what happens when idealists get hold of almost anything. . . . The Bolsheviks were all idealists originally, well Stalin probably wasn’t, but they made a hell of a mess of the Soviet Union. Intellectuals are also very dangerous, especially intellectuals with a chip on their shoulder.” Asked following a performance in Philadelphia if he was Catholic, Stewart responded that he was an agnostic. {CA}
Stewart, Chauncey (19th Century)
Stewart wrote The Usefulness of Prayer (c. 1890). {GS}
Stewart, D. J. (20th Century) In 1990, Dr. Stewart was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA). He has written,
I joined the RPA when I was at university, reading Philosophy and Psychology, but my first close contact with it was when I submitted a winning entry in the F.C.C. Watts Essay Competition. The set topic was “rationalism as a positive philosophy” and I wrote: Continued success in destroying old beliefs together with a shirking of the problems which the destruction raises for many people could give rise to a situation worse than that which the RPA set out to improve. Perhaps rationalists should be thankful that they are likely to become ineffective before they can become dangerous. They have indeed bombed with precision, but can they rebuild?’ The positive philosophy I advocated was that there is no area of problems in which scientific thinking is not competent—in which one cannot or must not use it. The practical role I recommended to the RPA was to be educational as well as militant, predicting that, without this constructive side, all sorts of irrational beliefs would rush in to fill the vacuum. In the event, this was much too optimistic: today we have, not only a flood of new superstitions, but repaired versions of all the old ones, and some not seen since medieval times. Some years later, I developed the same theme, of how unceasing logico-empirical probing in all things is the essence of rationalism, and provides a guide to behaviour as well as to belief, at the 1971 RPA Conference. In the meantime, I had become Secretary of a local humanist group, helped to found another, and then gone on to other roles, including Chairman of the University Humanist Federation, Chairman of the British Humanist Association, Chairman of the RPA, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Moral Education. Experience in these helped to confirm my view, that the only sort of humanism worth having is one based on scientific rationalism, and that, if you do not educate positively in a scientific way of thinking and living, people will regard what you offer as shallow and limited, and may be tempted to look elsewhere. Seeing the rationalist and humanist organisations as they are today, my main feeling is one of sadness at opportunities they have missed. It would not have been possible for me to devote so much time to voluntary work for these organisations if my professional career had not been conceptually related: at first at university in lecturing in psychology, and then directing post-graduate and post-doctoral research—chiefly of projects connected with management, government, and design—combined with consultancy and writing. The part of my own research that pleases me most has been the development of an augmented mechanistic theory of purpose and directiveness, one application of which is to give an improved formal basis for rationalism. {New Humanist, February 1995}
Stewart, John (1750–1822) Commonly called “Walking Stewart,” he walked through India, Africa, and America. Stewart was a materialist. {BDF)
Stewart, M. A. (1937– ) In England, Stewart is a corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume. He is author of The Kirk and the Infidel (1995) and Hume and Hume’s Connexions (1995).
Stewart, Rod (1933–1994) Stewart at the time of his death was district executive of the Pacific Northwest District of the Unitarian Universalist Association. A chartered accountant, he helped found the district’s leadership school, which became a model for similar schools in the Americas and the United Kingdom.
Stiebing, William H. (20th Century) Stiebing in 1984 wrote Ancient Astronauts, Cosmic Collision, and Other Popular Theories About Man’s Past. A skeptic and a freethinker, he then wrote Out of the Desert? Archaeology and the Exodus/Conquest Narratives, a summary of archaeological findings. His research found that facts do not support the biblical accounts of the exodus and later wars of conquest.
Stifler, James Madison (20th Century) Stifler wrote The Religion of Benjamin Franklin (1925). {GS}
Still, James (20th Century)
Still is secretary of Internet Infidels. E-mail: <jims@infidels.org>.
Stiller, Richard (20th Century) Stiller wrote Commune on the Frontier: The Story of Frances Wright (1972). {FUS}
Stilpo (fl. 307 B.C.E.) Stilpo of Megara, of the school of Euclides, is said to have been hailed before the Areopagus for the offense of saying that the Pheidian statue of Athênê was “not a God.” Although he was clearly an unbeliever, he shrewdly admitted with the jest that, true, she was not a god . . . but a goddess . . . whereupon he was exiled. {JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Stipe, Michael (1960– ) Stipe is a musician who has received numerous major awards, including gold and platinum records. In 1983 “Murmur” became a gold record and won the Rolling Stone Critics Poll for Best Album of the year. In 1992 he was the recipient of the MTV Video Music Video of the Year Award and was the Rolling Stone Male Vocalist of the Year. In 1994 he received a Breakthrough Video Award for “Everybody Hurts.” “I don’t believe in God,” he told Cornerstone, “but [The Reverend] Howard [Finster, a folk painter whose work graces album covers] has given me respect for people that do.” {CA; E}
Stipe, Michael (4 Jan 1960 - ) Stipe is a Georgia-born musician whose father was a military officer, and Stipe moved often from place to place with his family, never staying anywhere very long. Lead singer for R.E.M., he and his group achieved cult status in the early 1980s, for in 1983 Murmur became a gold record and won the Rolling Stone Critics Poll for Best Album of the year. It was “The One I Love” on Document (1987), however, with which the group achieved commercial recognition. In addition to the group’s earning gold and platinum records, Stipe in 1992 was the recipient of the MTV Video Music Video of the Year Award and was the Rolling Stone Male Vocalist of the Year. In 1994 he received a Breakthrough Video Award for Everybody Hurts. In 1997, R.E.M.’s drummer, Bill Berry, left the band, but instead of breaking up the group returned to the studio and in 1998 released Up. Stipe is co-producer of Being John Malkovich through his independent film company, Single Cell Productions. Although he had been shy as a youth, Stipe found himself thrown into the spotlight because of R.E.M.’s notoriety, and questions arose as to his sexual identity, answers for which he avoided until finally saying he was bisexual. In 1990, R.E.M. wrote a hit song called “Losing My Religion,” a Southern slang term for going insane. In the song Stipe sings, “That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion.” He also has come out in favor of education to prevent AIDS and in favor of a woman’s right to choose. “I don’t believe in God,” he told Cornerstone, “but [The Reverend] Howard [Finster, a folk painter whose work graces album covers] has given me respect for people that do.” {CA; E}
Stirner, Max (1806–1856) A freethinker, Stirner rejected all religion. For him, morality is a belief, too. Religion continues through morality. Although they are believed in, ethical commandments cannot be proved. He loved man because love made him happy and seemed natural to him. The order of society, he felt, needs founding on the interdependence of its members. The individual in society remains dependent on society, nature, and its laws. But Stirner wondered how Feuerbach could hope to turn people away from God if he let them keep the idea of the divine, so he ridiculed Feuerbach’s humanism. The Ego and His Own (1845) is a criticism of Feuerbach’s conceptual system. Some find that his line of thinking has been a source of 20th-century existentialism. {EU, 223, 289, Dale Riepe, Karl Becker}
Stites, Tom (20th Century) Stites is Editor-in-Chief of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Stitt, M. (19th Century) Stitt was a grocer in Crook, England. A secularist, he was known for issuing a placard appealing to his friends in Wolsingham, Willington, Tow Lane, and other districts to meet at his house to form a Crook Secular Society. He exemplifies how the initiative for starting freethought groups often rest with a single individual. {RSR}
Stocker, Barbara (20th Century) Stocker is president of the Rationalist Society of St. Louis, Missouri, and a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. In 1994 in Rochester, New York, she appeared on a program, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton Meets Susan B. Anthony,” in which she played the role of Stanton. The meeting was a commemoration by the Robert Green Ingersoll Committee of Ingersoll’s work on behalf of women’s equality. In the November 1994 election, she ran for a seat in the Missouri House of Representatives from the 100th District. Her observations upon attending the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1994 include the view that “very few of the women at the conference seem to recognize the fundamental role that religion plays in patriarchies and the degradation of women.” She lamented that many were ready to embrace “New Age” ideas or return to ancient goddess religions in an attempt to circumvent patriarchy. Muslim women, she found, “were intent on explaining that their religion was ‘misunderstood’ and that they were very happy with their freely chosen lot.” Stocker added, “It is still difficult for me to believe that a woman wrapped up in heavy black cloth in 90-degree heat is ‘liberated.’ ” Stocker, who is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <rsslbarb@aol.com>. {Viewpoints,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996}
Stöcker, Helene (1869–1943) Stöcker, a German writer who graduated in philosophy, wrote on child-welfare and ethical and social questions in Nietzsche und die Frauen, Die Liebe und die Frauen, etc.). She was a member of the Goethe Society and the Progressive Women’s League, and she was President of the Society for the Protection of Mothers. A Monist, she was a great admirer of Haeckel. {RAT}
STOCKPORT (England) SECULARISTS For information, write Carl Pinel, 85 Hall Street, Offerton, Stockport SK1 4DE; telephone 0161 480 0732.
Stockton, Eric (1924– ) Stockton was the founding editor of Scottish Humanist and continued until 1995. He has written, “We owe it largely to the feminists that personal autonomy has become a live ethical issue. The feminist claim is that men have explicitly, and tacitly, imposed upon women the status of non-autonomous objects—sexually, reproductively, domestically usable chattels.” Just as women have been objects in the sense that they are not seen as human ends but as men’s means to this or that male-determined end, Stockton reasons, so people in the medical world often use terminally-ill people just to show how “pro-life” they are—instead of allowing the voluntary aspect of voluntary euthanasia, they “keep the old banger on the road somehow!” “The truly freethinking person,” stated Stockton, “is an autonomous person neither intruding upon others nor being intruded upon by them.” “I am glad I am not a theist because,” Stockton has also written, “if I were, I would have to fight Christianity tooth-and-nail. As it is, I am an atheist and, to me, one bent faith is much like another, even if Christianity is, in some ways, the worst of them. But in any case one ought to love the Christians while hating the Christianity, ought one not?” Stockton, who lives in Orkney, publishes a freethought journal, Lady Godiva. On the Web:<http://www.shetland-news.co.uk/godiva/godiva.html>. His e-mail: <stockton.sanday.orkney@zetnet.co.uk>. {The Freethinker, June 1994; September 1995}
Stockton, Richard (20th Century) Stockton is a playwright, the author of A Plot on Robert Ingersoll.
Stockwell, C. T. (19th Century) Stockwell is author of The Evolution of Immortality (1887). {FUS)
Stockwell, Wallace (20th Century) Stockwell wrote A Shield Has Two Sides (c. 1946). {GS}
Stoddard, George D. (1897–1981) A naturalistic humanist, Stoddard was President of the University of Illinois. When ousted, he gave two reasons for his discord with university trustees: (a) that isolationists in the Illinois legislature regarded his active role in the formation of UNESCO as “only one step from communism,” and (b) that animosity against him existed among some Roman Catholic legislators because his book, The Meaning of Intelligence, had been termed “godless” in 1945 by the then Roman Catholic Bishop of Springfield.
During the 1950s, he was critical of a drug called Krebiozen, about which he wrote a controversial book dedicated to another eminent humanist, Anton J. Carlson. Stoddard, who commenced his professional career as a psychologist, was a Unitarian. {HNS}
Stoddard, Lothrop (20th Century) An American, Stoddard wrote Scientific Humanism (1926).
Stoessinger, John George (20th Century) Author of The Refugee and the World Community (1956), Stoessinger was a lecturer in government at M.I.T., a professor of government at the Babson Institute, and an associate professor of political science at Hunter College. In 1962 he wrote Why Nations Go To War.
STOICISM Zeno of Citium around 300 B.C.E. founded the school of philosophy known as Stoicism, having been influenced by Socratic ideals and by the thought of Heraclitus, Aristotle, and Plato. The Stoics held that wise men should not be affected by or show passion or feeling. All reality, they held, is material, but it is shaped by a universal working force (which some call God) that pervades everything. By putting aside passion, unjust thoughts, and indulgence, and by performing one’s duty with the right disposition, one can live consistently with nature, thereby achieving true freedom. Romans who were Stoics included Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. A prime concern of the Stoics was ethics. Right behavior had to be grounded on a general understanding of the universe. Their “Physics” taught that everything was material, the universe being a continuum. Thought was an ethereal form of matter which had the power to shape and control its grosser forms. Given the name of Providence, it functioned as a World-Soul or immanent God. Man’s soul was said to be a part of the World-Soul, which made all human beings brothers, and the ethereal element in Man—his Reason—was in harmony with the purposes of Providence. To be virtuous consisted, therefore, in following Reason undeterred by pain, pleasure, desire, or fear, emotions that belong to a lower level of existence. By extolling Providence, the brotherhood of men, and the need to curb natural desires, Stoicism had some things in common with Christianity. The Stoic viewpoint enjoyed a revival at the time of the Renaissance, and it has been said that Stoicism was the effective religion of the Victorian public schools. (See the entry for ancient humanism. Also see Philip P. Hallie’s article on stoicism in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8.) {CE; OEL; RE}
Stojanovic, Svetozar (20th Century) A Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, Stojanovic was elected in recognition of his defense of human rights and democracy. A professor of philosophy at the University of Belgrade, he signed Humanist Manifesto II and is a contributing editor on Free Inquiry and Philo. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Buffalo (1988), Stojanovic addressed the group. In 1973, Stojanovic wrote Between Ideals and Reality: A Critique of Socialism and Its Future. In 1988, he wrote Perestroika: From Marxism and Bolshevism to Gorbachev (1988). With Paul Kurtz, Stojanovic co-wrote Revolution and Tolerance. In an interview with Paul Kurtz (Free Inquiry, Summer 1996), Stojanovic told of his early days as a Marxist humanist, of being repressed by the Tito regime, of his difficulties on the faculty of the University of Belgrade, and of his now calling himself a “social-eco-democrat, because I put in the center of my concerns global ecological problems in the widest possible sense of the world, including the concern for sheer survival of humankind.” Although Karl Marx is dead, he noted, “What is not dead in Karl Marx is his critical insights into alienation and reification phenomena, ideology, the economic dimension of social classes, capitalism. There is no way to avoid recognizing that Marx was pretty successful in his critical but not in his constructivist approach, and that radical conclusions ought to be drawn from that. For instance, I do not buy his rejection of a market economy.” As for whether the wars in Yugoslavia are religious in origin, Stojanovic explained, “In my opinion, there is no doubt that our conflicts are fratricidal, inter-national, and inter-religious civil wars. . . . Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are of the same ethnic stock. These three nationalities, all South-Slavs, speaking one language (Serbo-Croatian) are divided by religion and history. You first have a division between Christians (Serbs and Croats) and Muslims (former Christians, Serbs, or Croats, who converted to Islam during the Turkish rule). And the second division is within Christianity, between Catholics (Croats) and Orthodox Christians (Serbs). In other words, the basic constituting and defining characteristic of these three main nationalities in the former Yugoslavia is religion.” “We have to build,” Stojanovic continued, “to build a ‘quasi-religion’ of humanity, or at least to poeticize the existence of humankind. Admiration, thrill, amazement, awe—that is how astronauts describe the spectacle of Earth and us on it when they are temporarily separated from it and can view it from space. Unfortunately, the most radical positive humanist utopia is increasingly going to be the survival of humankind and the most radical negative utopia the self-annihilation of humankind. This is humanism and post-humanism at once.” At the time of the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Stojanovic complained that “The whole world is shocked by the plight of ethnic Albanian refugees but at the same time overlooks tens of thousands of Serbs and other minorities fleeing from Kosovo to the other parts of Serbia and to Montenegro.” He was critical of the part played by the United States. Stojanovic signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {Free Inquiry, Summer 1996 and 1999; HM2; SHD}
Stoker, Bram (Abraham) (1847–1912) Stoker is internationally known for his Dracula (1897). Dracul is Romanian for Devil, which partly explains why mystics and religionists are interested in Prince Vlad Tepes, known to the peasants of Wallachia and Transylvania as the impaler of up to 20,000 human beings. Vlad impaled live victims upon stakes at a time when Turks and Romanians were battling, but he impaled, boiled, decapitated, scalped, skinned, and generally maimed anyone who offended him, even fellow Transylvanians. Stoker was born in Dublin. In 1878 he started a twenty-seven year stint as secretary and touring manager for Sir Henry Irving (John Henry Broadribb), who was manager of the Lyceum Theatre. In 1906, Stoker wrote the two-volume Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Barbara Belford, in a 1996 biography, found it difficult to discover details of Stoker’s life. A six-foot two-inch Irishman with a red beard, he suffered from some mysterious illness that made him unable to stand upright until he was seven. He married Florence Balcombe, and they had one son. He liked Walt Whitman’s work and was fascinated by Tennyson’s long canine teeth—”the vampire’s forks.” Lady (Speranza) Wilde’s son and her son, Oscar, were friends. Mark Twain asked him to represent his plays. Stoker may have died of syphilis, although Belford thinks not. {Margot Peters, “The Boss From Hell,” The New York Times, 7 April 1996}
Stokes, Anson Phelps (20th Century) Stokes, with Leo Pfeffer, wrote Church and State in the United States. {FUS}
Stokes, Geoffrey (1940–1995) Stokes was a Village Voice (New York City) and Boston Globe columnist and feature writer. Once a director of a New York City drug treatment program, he also was deputy commissioner of the city’s environmental protection agency. He wrote books on rock music, baseball, and food, leading some to call him the “house polymath” inasmuch as he was capable of writing on so many subjects. His “A Parent Comes Out” is about a teacher whose son informed her he was gay. At Woodstock, Vermont, Stokes served on the North Universalist Chapel Society board.
Stokes, Stanley Charles W. (20th Century) An Australian, Stokes has compiled “The Rational Calendar and Compendium” (Box 189, Geebung, Queensland, 4034 Australia). The work lists not only freethinkers going back to Imhotep and Ptahhotep but also includes them on a “new era” calendar which combines Esperanto and rationality. Noting that 1995 is 5756 in the Jewish calendar, 2539 in the Buddhist, 1917 in the Saka, and 1363 in the Muslim, he suggests that everyone call it 19 of Mondo Erao, the World Era in Esperanto, thereby celebrating antau lego, “before the law in 1976.” Included are birthdays or names of several hundred individuals whose names were gleaned from standard freethought books.
Stoll, James Lewis (1936–1994) Stoll was a gay rights pioneer. In 1965 he joined Martin Luther King’s call to religious leaders to join the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in memory of murdered civil rights workers, including Jim Reeb, a Unitarian minister. In 1969, Stoll became the first Unitarian clergy person to declare his homosexuality. In 1993, he was president of the San Francisco chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Stoller, B. B. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Stoller from Minnesota was a director of the American Humanist Association.
Stone, Irving (1903–1989) Stone, whose original name was Irving Tennenbaum, was an editor and an author of best-selling books. In 1937, he edited Dear Theo, the autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh. Stone wrote Lust for Life (1934), about Van Gogh; Sailor on Horseback (1938), about Jack London; Clarence Darrow for the Defense (1941); Adversary in the House (1947), about Eugene V. Debs; Love Is Eternal (1954), about Mary Todd Lincoln; The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961); I, Michelangelo, Sculptor (1962); Passions of the Mind (1971), about Sigmund Freud); The Greek Treasure (1975); and The Origin (1980), about Darwin. {GS}
Stone, Lucy (1818–1893) A leader in the American feminist movement, Stone founded and edited Women’s Journal, the official organ of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She was called Mrs. Stone, although actually she was married to Henry Brown Blackwell, brother of famed physician Elizabeth Blackwell. It was her way of protecting against the unequal laws which applied at that time to married women. Lucy Stone believed that all should vote, that no adult should be denied the vote, a position not held by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who opposed giving black men the vote unless white women also were allowed to vote. This difference led to a break in their working together. “Christianity,” she wrote, “that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried. . . . A wall of Bible, brimstone, church, and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.” After Stone’s death, the journal was continued by her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, and in 1921 the Lucy Stone League was formed to continue its namesake’s efforts to fight for women’s rights. “Lucy,” wrote Alice Stone Blackwell in Lucy Stone, “had become a Unitarian through listening to Professor Finney’s lectures on God.” {CE; EG; Lois K. Porter, “Lucy Stone: Woman of Firsts,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997); YD; U; UU}
Stone, Merlin (20th Century) Stone is author of When God Was A Woman (1976).
Stone, Oliver (1946– ) Stone, a director and screenwriter, was awarded the American Humanist Association’s Arts Award in 1996. Stone has directed such Academy Award-winning movies as “Midnight Express” (1978) and “Platoon” (1986). His works interpreting presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon received mixed reviews.
Stone, Peter (1971– ) Stone, a graduate student studying political science at the University of Rochester, is a member of the Bertrand Russell Society. Asked about humanism, he wrote the present author:
I do not believe in any form of supernatural existence. I have no reason to believe there is an afterlife and, therefore, I don’t. My practical attitude is that of Woody Allen’s father in “Hannah and Her Sisters.” When confronted by his son’s desire to know what happened after death, his response was, “When I’m dead, I’m dead. . . . I’ll worry about it then.”
Politically, Stone admits to being something of an anarchist. Philosophically, he adds, “I’m definitely an agnostic. For all practical purposes, however, I’m an atheist. Without any evidence of the existence of God or the supernatural, I must for practical purposes assume there is no God or supernatural realm of which to speak.” {WAS, 27 August 1996}
Stone, Robert (20th Century) Stone is a past president of The Jewish Humanist.
Stone, William (19th Century) Stone wrote The Story of the Garden of Eden (1873). {GS}
Stones, N. L. (20th Century) Stones, who has called himself/herself “a gender dysphoric,” is aware that most have not heard of the phrase, which describes a syndrome in which people suffer from gender identity conflict/distress. More recognize the word “transsexual.” Stones then offers further definitions: “Under the umbrellas of gender dysphoria are found ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ transsexuals (TSs), transgenderists (TGs), and transvestites (TVs). Hermaphrodites are a separate category, since they have a definite intersex medical condition at birth. TSs and TGs can be celibate or heterosexual, or their sexual orientation may be homosexual or bisexual. TVs are normally heterosexual men, who although they cross-dress are content with their sex of birth.” Stone, who was born biologically female, adds that as a primary TS “I felt ‘male’ from a very early age (4 or 5). Although I have now been living as a ‘man’ for 20 years, I am still trying to decide how androgynous I am and whether I’m bisexual in a platonic sense (since I am celibate, but can be attracted to both sexes). I’m having to accept that my gender identity is on a continually moving spectrum. As society confuses us, I find I confuse myself.” In Samoa, a “fa’afafine” is a son brought up as a daughter. In India there are 1.2 million “Hyjpas,” who are male transsexuals. Among North American Indians a “Wintke” is a “two-souls person, a gender-crosser and mysterious spirit-person who has the gift of prophecy.” Stones suggests that a breaking down of gender barriers might be advantageous to society. {New Humanist, June 1996}
STONEWALL RIOT Early in the morning of 28 June 1969, a routine police raid on the Stonewall Bar at 53 Christopher Street in New York City turned into a riot. When police arrived at about 3 a.m., they ordered customers to leave, began arresting employees, and started to remove several “homo’s” and “drag queens.” Such incidents had been routine, but this morning the customers as well as those outside unexpectedly began chanting “Pigs!” at the police, and they fought back. The police barricaded themselves inside until rescued by other officers. For the next several evenings, further disturbances took place—the incidents have been referred to as the Stonewall Rebellion or the Stonewall Riot, the event that sparked the contemporary lesbian and gay movement which spread nationally as well as internationally. Four secular humanists known to have been present—names associated with one of the major human rights fights of the century—later became officers or friends of the Stonewall Riot Veterans group: Howard Cruse, Martin Duberman, Warren Allen Smith, and Randy Wicker. (See entry for Homosexuality.) {AA}
Stong, Phil (1899–1957) Stong, the Iowa author of State Fair (1932), was a journalist and Hollywood scenarist. Asked to comment on humanism, Stong responded to the present author:
I’ve never gone deeply enough into any of the various definitions of “humanism” to be able to make any intelligent or instructive comment on the subject. When I read any of these tenuous expositions, they remind me (a) of the blind men and the elephant and (b) that I’d better have a glass of beer and get to bed. I don’t see how you distinguish between the humanism of More and that of Dewey or of Aristophanes or Lackland or Chaucer or Bunyan or Saintsbury or Taine. The boys that practice it seem to me tremendously more effective than the ones who preach it from the varied pulpits.
{WAS, 13 February 1951}
Stopes-Roe, Harry (1924– ) A senior lecturer in science studies, University of Birmingham, Stopes-Roe is the former president of the British Humanist Association and is on the board of directors of the Rationalist Press Association. In Buffalo, at the 1988 Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress, he proposed that humanism should be considered a “life stance.” He suggests that the question whether humanism is a philosophy, a culture, an academic discipline, or a religion is best resolved by considering it a life stance. His proposal is to avoid dividing humanists into two camps according to how they respond to the word “religion.” The new term, he holds, incorporates the idea and ideal of religion but opens it out so that it is not discriminatory. Thus, a life stance “is theistic or naturalistic according to whether it sees ‘that which is of ultimate importance’ in terms of God; or something naturalistic. It is fundamental that a god-religion—or simply ‘religion’ as these people would say—is precisely a theistic life stance. The two terms are synonymous, each carrying the same depth of meaning. ‘Life stance’ has latent in it all the power of ‘religion’ (in the sense ‘god-religion’); this power is realised (as the god-religious would say) on the acknowledgment of God.” He adds, “I hope that even those who are most antipathetic to creeds and dogmas will concur in my suggestion that sentient beings, with their enjoyments and sufferings, and moral sensibilities, are of ultimate importance to Humanists.” Nicolas Walter (New Humanist, December, 1988) gives ten specific arguments against the use of “life stance.” For example, he questions whether humanism is a stance, adding it is not necessarily about life. Most humanists, he holds, do not see humanism and religion as two equal and opposite entities—most see humanism as a rejection of all (not just some) of the essential features of religion. It is the “religious humanists” who see humanism as an actual form of religion. In short, states Walter, “life stance” is of little use and probably will do more harm than good to whatever it is that we do all have in common. In a response (New Humanist, December, 1988), Stopes-Roe says Walter misunderstands the issues and his basic attitude is anti-rational. He does admit, however, that one genuine difficulty is that “life stance” is difficult to translate into French. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Stopes-Roe addressed the group. In 1994 at the conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), he spoke on “Humanism and Ethics.” In 1995 at the International and Humanist Ethical Union’s meeting in India, he spoke about the tradition of humanism from the ancient Greeks to the Enlightenment and the current day, emphasizing the importance of David Hume and the British empirical tradition. Stopes-Roe, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, is a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA). In 1996 he was a participant at the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. {New Humanist, February 1996; SHD}
Stoppard, Tom (1937– ) Stoppard, a dramatist born in Czechoslovakia but who moved with his parents to Singapore when two, left school at the age of seventeen and worked as a journalist. His given name was Tomas Straussler, but when his widowed mother remarried he took his stepfather’s name. Stoppard is the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), The Real Thing (1982), and Hapgood (1988). His writing is notable for its intellectual word-play. Arcadia (1995), for example, starts with a thirteen-year-old’s asking her tutor, “Septimus, what is carnal embrace?” To which Septimus responds, “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.” “Carnal” does indeed mean sensual, and who could overlook the phallus which is implied. Stoppard’s work is full of such verbal pyrotechnics, and he long has been fascinated with linguistic philosophy, particularly as found in the writings of Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore, and A. J. Ayer. His telecast, “Professional Foul” (1977), portrays an English philosopher and English football team in Prague, during which the G. E. Moore-like professor is caught between the abstractions of his own discipline and the realities of a regime which stifles free intellectual exchange. As Anne Barton of Cambridge University has pointed out, “when various philosophical journals sniped at his account of Wittgenstein and British logical positivism as incorporated in Jumpers, he was able to take comfort from the fact that no less a figure than A. J. Ayer instantly rose to his defense.” Jumpers (1972) has as its central character a professor of moral philosophy, George Moore, who like G. E. Moore teaches about intuitionist ethics. Stoppard’s parodies of academic philosophy have made him a favorite among theatergoers. {CE; OEL}
Storm, Carl A. (20th Century) Storm, a liberal minister, has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Storer, Morris R. (20th Century) Storer was editor of Humanist Ethics (1980). {GS}
Storey, David (1965-1999) Storey obtained a degree at York in 1985, trained as a civil service accountant in Coventry, then became a registered nurse in the field of mental handicap. While at York, he stood for the Student Union Presidency on a gay platform and came in a respectable third. He favored vegetarianism and was concerned about gay rights, women’s rights, and racial equality. When he died of a chronic stomach problem, a Humanist funeral ceremony was conducted by John Hemsley, parts of which had been arranged by Storey himself. [Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Autumn 1999]
Storr, Anthony (20th Century) A British psychiatrist, Storr in Human Destructiveness (1991) wrote, “What chiefly concerns and alarms many of us are the problems arising from religious fanaticism. As long as large numbers of militant enthusiasts are persuaded that they alone have access to the truth, and that the rest of us are infidels, we remain under threat. Lord Acton’s famous phrase about power can be used of another danger. Dogma tends to corrupt, and absolute dogma corrupts absolutely.” {TYD}
Story, Joseph (1779–1845) Story, an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, was the youngest person to be appointed to the court. Writing to William Williams (17 February 1823), Story stated, “[I am] a decided Unitarian.” {U; UU}
Stosch, Friedrich Wilhelm (1646–1704) Stosch, also called Johann Friedrich Stoss, published Concordia rationis et fidel (1692), which was rigorously suppressed. Anyone possessing the work was threatened with a penalty of five hundred thalers. Lange classed Stosch with German Spinozists, saying, “Stosch curtly denies not only the immateriality but also the immortality of the soul.” {BDF; RAT}
Stout, Alan Ker (1900–1983) Stout, an Australian humanist and philosopher, was born in England and educated at Edinburgh and Oxford. From 1939 to 1965 he was professor of Moral and Political Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He edited the Australian Journal of Philosophy and contributed “Morality Without Religion” to A Humanist View (1969). A member of the New South Wales Humanist Society, he was a foundation member and president of the Council for Civil Liberties, New South Wales, from 1963 to 1967. Stout also was chairman of the Prison Reform Council. {SWW}
Stout, George Frederick (Born 1860) Stout, a philosopher who taught at Aberdeen University, Oxford, London, and St. Andrews, was editor of Mind starting in 1891. He was admitted to the British Academy in 1903. His chief works are Analytic Psychology (1896) and Manual of Psychology (1899). {RAT}
Stout, Robert [Sir] [Chief Justice] (1844–1930) Stout, one of New Zealand’s leading public figures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had few rivals as regards the range of his contributions to public life. He played a prominent role in the Dunedin Free Thought Association, where he encouraged large numbers to ask questions, demand proof, reject dogma, and take nothing for granted. He was closely associated with the Unitarian church and frequently spoke at their meetings. In Dunedin, he edited Echo in the 1860s to 1880s. Stout in 1884 was President of New Zealand’s Freethought Federal Union. The 1887 New Zealand census showed 3,925 Freethinkers, with a further 189 Secularists, 105 Atheists, 207 Agnostics, 83 Deists and Theists, 11 Materialists, and 668 of no religion. In 1899 he was appointed Chief Justice. Throughout his life, Sir Robert remained a freethinker and agnostic, and he was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. According to Royle, “Stout was to New Zealand what Ingersoll was to the United States and Bradlaugh to Britain.” {BDF; EU, D. A. Hamer; FUK; JM; RAT; RE; SWW; TRI}
Stowe, Emily Jennings (1831–1903) A Canadian leader for women’s rights, Dr. Stowe founded Canada’s first woman suffrage society. She was a member of the Second Unitarian Church in Toronto. {U; UU}
Strachey, (Giles) Lytton (1880–1932) An eminent biographer and essayist, Strachey was the eleventh child of a father who had served for more than thirty years in India as a public administrator. Following an unhappy and sickly childhood, he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a friend of G. E. Moore, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf. Becoming a prominent member of the Bloomsbury group, he spent the last sixteen years of his life in a ménage à trois with the painter Dora Carrington and her husband, Ralph Partridge. In 1918 his Eminent Victorians received critical acclaim, and he became noted for his satiric edge, his wit, and his iconoclasm. Strachey was interested in the humanities, not in organized religion, and his homosexuality was well-known among his contemporaries. Strachey is credited with writing biography, not necessarily with respect for the individual but with “warts and all,” as shown in his Queen Victoria. Lasting love proved elusive for Strachey, according to Lee Arnold of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. “He did, however, have one person totally devoted to him, the painter Dora Carrington,” Arnold has written. “Carrington knew Strachey was gay but was still hopelessly in love with him—even to the exclusion of several well-meaning suitors. She committed suicide after Strachey’s death from cancer in 1932.” When, as a conscientious objector in World War I, he was asked what he would do if a foreign soldier was found trying to rape his own sister, the sharp-tongued Strachey replied dryly, “Do my best to get between them.” {AA; GL; OEL}
Straczynski, J. Michael (20th Century) Straczynski is a producer, author, and script writer, a creative force behind the science fiction television series “Babylon 5.” While online (3 November 1994), he commented, “Speaking as an atheist, if there is to be a Church of J. Michael Straczynski, then I must become its first apostate and refuse to believe in myself (adding further insecurity to my life), and nail a whole bunch of theses to the front door on the way out.” {CA; E}
Strahan, Ronald (1922– ) Strahan is an Australian humanist, zoologist, historian of science, author, and editor. A youthful chorister in an Anglican church, he became an agnostic by age eleven, an atheist by age fourteen. From 1967 to 1974, he was a zoo director. Strahan is an active proponent of the materialist interpretation of evolutionary theory and a strong opponent of “creation science” in radio broadcasts, public lectures, and contributions to symposia. He has articles in A Humanist View (1969) and wrote Confronting Creationism: Defending Darwin (1987). {SWW}
Strahler, Arthur N. (1918– ) Strahler, a professor of geology at Columbia University, is a secular humanist who has written for Free Inquiry. In 1972 he wrote Modern Physical Geography and, in 1987, Science and Earth History. {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1991}
Strain, Daniel T. (20th Century) “The lack of an absolute authoritative source for morality,” Strain wrote in the Houston, Texas, newsletter, HSH News (January 1999), “means that we may not ever know for certain what the ‘best’ behaviors are, but we can make rational arguments in support of, or in opposition to, various behaviors. We can come to general consensus on the more clear issues.”
Straker, Jean (20th Century) Straker was a secularist who, in 1966, had some of his artistic nude photos seized in England for what he claimed was in contravention of Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Articles 19 and 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As a result, Straker founded Freedom of Vision.
Strange, Thomas Lumsden (Died 1884) Long, at first an Evangelical Christian, became one of the Plymouth Brethren, then became a weak theist, always an earnest advocate of practical piety in life and conduct. When a judge, he once sentenced a Brahmin to death, seeking to bring the prisoner “to Jesus.” At the gallows, however, the person “proclaimed his trust to be in Rama and not in Christ,” which set Judge Strange to thinking. He then investigated Christianity’s claims, writing The Bible, Is It the Word of God? (1871), The Development of Creation on the Earth (1874), and The Legends of the Old Testament (1874). Strange was a friend of T. Scott and General Forlong. McCabe labels him a theistic rationalist. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Stranneby, Ebron (20th Century) Stranneby is the chairperson of Human-Etiska Forbunder I Sverige. Her group publishes Human-Etik. (See entry for Swedish Secularism.) {FD}
Stratton, Richard F. (20th Century) Stratton, a non-believer, writes for The American Rationalist.
Straub, Gerard Thomas (20th Century) Straub, a former producer of “The 700 Club,” is author of Salvation For Sale: An Insider’s View of Pat Robertson’s Ministry (1986). {HNS2}
Straus, Nathan (20th Century) “A Forgotten Founding Father” by Straus appeared in Joseph Lewis’s magazine, Age of Reason (June 1959).
Strauss, Bernice (1924–1996) Strauss, a World War II veteran who worked as a medical lab technician for the Women’s Army Corps, was one of the family members which founded Marial Whippets, a successful whippet kennel in Wisconsin. She had long been interested in and raced as a hobby the small, greyhound-like dogs.
Strauss, David Friedrich (1808–1874) When he wrote The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835), Strauss was dismissed from a theological teaching post at the University of Tübingen in Germany because, along with other things, he rejected the Biblical miracles, and his work had applied the “myth theory” to the life of Jesus, treated the Gospel narrative like any other historical work, and denied all supernatural elements in the Gospels. The work excited as much discussion as Renan’s later work. Littré translated it into French, and George Eliot translated it into English (1844). The Zürich government in 1839 appointed him professor of church history, but it was obliged to repeal the decision because of a storm of Christian indignation. In 1870 Strauss published Voltaire, and In his final work, The Old Faith and the New (1872), Strauss declared he was no longer a Christian nor did he believe in immortality nor a personal God. Specifically, he wrote, “If we would speak as honest, upright men, we must acknowledge we are no longer Christians.” Famed novelist George Eliot made the first translation of his Life of Jesus in 1846. McCabe wrote, “The fact is generally suppressed that [Strauss] had a faithful disciple and friend in the German Empress,” a reference to Victoria, the Empress of Germany and eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. The Empress, daughter of the prim and pious Queen Victoria, was a freethinker. Strauss died of cancer of the stomach. Of his illness his biographer, Edward Zeller, wrote: “But in these very sufferings the mental greatness and moral strength of the sufferer proclaimed their most glorious victory. He was fully aware of his condition. With unshaken firmness he adhered to the convictions which be had openly acknowledged in his last work (The Old Faith and the New), and he never for a moment repented having written them. But with these convictions he met death with such repose and with such unclouded serenity of mind, that it was impossible to leave his sick room without the impression of a moral sanctity which we all the more surely receive from greatness of soul and mastery of mind over matter, the stronger are the hindrances in the surmounting of which it is manifested.” Strauss left directions for his funeral. He expressly forbade all participation of the Church in the ceremony, but on the day of his interment a sum of money was to be given to the poor. “On February 10 (1874) therefore,” Zeller reported, “he was buried without ringing of bells or the presence of a clergyman, but in the most suitable manner, and amid the lively sympathy of all, far and near.” (See entry for Princess Maud Mary Alice.) {BDF; CE; CL; ER; EU, G. A. Wells; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Strauss, Leo (1899–1973) Strauss, who moved from Germany to Paris in 1932, moved then to London, settling eventually as a teacher at the University of Chicago. There, according to historian Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990), Strauss developed a systematic political doctrine based on the history of philosophy from Socrates to Nietzsche. His views became popular with American conservatives. He wrote, “A just political order must be grounded in immutable demands of natural right. Nature, however, is inherently unequal. The capacity to discover truth is restricted to a few, and to endure it exhibited by scarcely more. The best regime will therefore reflect differences in human excellence, and be led by an appropriate elite. But although the highest virtue is philosophical contemplation of truth, this does not mean (contrary to a superficial reading of The Republic) that a just city will be ruled by philosophers. For philosophy gazes without faltering, not only at the necessary conditions of political order, discomfiting as these may be to demotic prejudice, but at the far more terrible realities of cosmic disorder: the absence of any divine authority, the delusion of any common morality, the transience of the earth and its species.” To Strauss, philosophers should teach the “leisured gentlemen” to rule, which made him popular at the National Security Council during the time of President Ronald Reagan and later by Vice President Dan Quayle. Both Reagan and Quayle, political conservatives were Christians. Strauss was an atheist.
Strauss, Richard (1864–1949) Strauss, the German composer and conductor, began composing when he was six years old. His “Symphony in D Minor” (1880) was performed when he was but a teenager. He wrote romantic symphonic poems. “Death and Transfiguration (1889), “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks” (1895), and “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (1895) are evocative and richly orchestrated. His dramatic operas include “Salomé” (1905) and, with librettos by Hofmannsthal, “Electra” (1909), “Der Rosenkavalier” (1911), and “Ariadne auf Naxos” (1912). A close student of philosophy, Strauss expressed his convictions in the symphonic poem based upon Nietzsche’s work, Also Sprach Zarathustra, which the clergy angrily denounced. Alex Ross, calling him in The New Yorker (20 December 1999) the “the composer of the century,” added, “He did not believe in God, and he saw no spiritual dimension in his art.” {JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Strauss, Richard (11 Jun 1864 - 8 Sep 1949) Strauss, who was no relation to the Viennese composer of waltzes, was a German composer and conductor who began composing when he was six years old. His father was a musical conservative, but influenced by Robert Schumann young Richard was never at home with the sonata form. His Symphony in D Minor (1880) was performed when he was but a teenager. Death and Transfiguration (1889), Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895), and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1895) are evocative and richly orchestrated. A student of philosophy, Strauss expressed his freethought convictions in the symphonic poem based upon Nietzsche’s work, Sprach Zarathustra, which members of the clergy angrily denounced. Electra (1909, a work that led to his being called an “awful modernist”), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) were widely acclaimed. Music critics have stated that, almost single-handedly, he carried the Wagnerian opera tradition and the romantic Lisztian tone poem into the twentieth century. He is also one of the great composers of lieder. Salomé (1905), based on the play by Oscar Wilde, stretched tonality and used dissonance and chromaticism. According to Steve Schwartz, in a Strauss homepage on the Web, the composer “became an official of the Third Reich, although his job was largely ceremonial, and he considered most of the powerful Nazis Philistines and barbarians. The fact that his grandchildren were part Jewish made him keep his criticisms private. Even so, his private letters were read and he was warned. His silence and his continued residence in Germany caused him problems during the postwar de-nazification programs.” Schwartz added that in the 1940s, Strauss’s Capriccio showed his interest in the chamber ensemble and counterpoint and this “produced such masterpieces as the second horn concerto (1942); Metamorphosen (1945) for twenty-three strings; the oboe concerto (1945); and the Duett-Concertino (1947) for clarinet, bassoon, strings, and harp. For those used to Strauss's earlier ‘punch-and-flood’ idiom, typified by Heldenleben and the Symphonia domestica (1904), the late works present a puzzle. Indeed, many conductors today have trouble with them— the pieces require a degree of give-and-take found in the greatest chamber music.” His final work was Four Last Songs (1948). Alex Ross, calling Strauss “the composer of the century” in The New Yorker (20 December 1999), added, “He did not believe in God, and he saw no spiritual dimension in his art.” {JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Straczynski, J. Michael ( Straczynski, a producer, author, and scriptwriter, was the producer and creative force behind the science fiction television series Babylon 5. On the Web (3 Nov 1994), Straczynski confirmed that he is an atheist. An interviewer for Sci-Fi Entertainment (October 1995) said to him, “You count yourself as an atheist, yet spiritual matters often set the theme for episodes of the show and seem to be a large part of the arc. Some would see that as a contradiction.” Straczynski responded,
You have to understand that the writer's job is to be as honest as he humanly can in his characterizations and his storytelling. And, as I look at the long parade of human history, religion has not gone away in the past 4,000 years of recorded history, nor does it show any sign of going away any time soon. If I have to be honest in looking at the world 250 years from now, I have to say that people will still believe at that time, and I must treat that with respect—the same way I'd deal with scientific concepts. Because, truthfully, science and religion are two sides of the same coin. The methodology is vastly different—one relies on faith while the other relies on scientific method—both are endeavors to understand who we are, how we got here, where we are going, and what we are here to do. I feel that one must approach both of those endeavors with equal respect. {CA}
Strayer, Gordon
Strayer, James (1935– ) Strayer, a retired biology instructor who taught thirty-four years, is a member of the Board of Atheists of Florida. His father was an atheist, his brother is an atheist, he is a second generation atheist, and his two sons are atheists. Strayer leads the Florida East Coast Freethinkers. He spoke on the subject “Evolution of Structure and Function” at the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida. {Humanists of the Palm Beaches Newsletter, October 1997}
Streams, Michael L. (20th Century) Streams, a physician and civil rights activist in Century City, California, is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
STREE SWETCHA A monthly publication of the Telugu Women’s Liberation group, Stree Swetcha is at 9 MIGH, Mehdipatnam, Hyderabad 500 028, India.
Streedhar, Katharine (20th Century) Streedhar is director for the Unitarian Universalists of the Holdeen India Program, which distributes trust income that has been designated for use in India. Money is allotted for social justice, maternity, child welfare, education, and migration expenses.
Streiker, Lowell D. (20th Century) A counselor and therapist in California, Streiker is a secular humanist who has written for Free Inquiry. His books include The Jesus Trip (1971), The Gospel Time Bomb: Ultrafundamentalism and the Future of America (1984); and Mind-Bending: Brainwashing, Cults, and Deprogramming in the 80s (1984). {Free Inquiry, Spring, 1984}
Streminger, Gerhard (1952– ) Streminger’s biography of Hume, David Hume: Sein Leben und sein Werk (1995), received critical acclaim in Germany.
Strindberg, Johan August (1849–1912) Strindberg was a major Swedish playwright, historian, writer of stories, and poet, one whose work combined psychology and literary naturalism. He has been termed the greatest master of the Swedish language. Known for having led a tumultuous life, with three disastrous marriages, he suffered from a persecution mania. Mäster Olof (1872–1878) was about God but, rather than perpetuating Christianity, was basically an exploration of the inhuman nature of idealism. Men meet their fate, not because of God: They meet their fate because of the result of human instinct and cultural ideologies. The Father (1887) was misogynistic, seeing man as being victimized by woman in a war between the sexes. The Red Room satirized Swedish hypocrisy and injustice. Married (2 vols., 1884–1885), which derogated women and denounced the practices of conventional religion, was confiscated by the authorities because of its content. Miss Julie (1888) told of an upper-class woman seduced by an insensitive chauffeur. Like Creditors (1889), it showed the influence of Zola and Nietzsche. From 1894 to 1896, influenced by Swedenborg, he experienced an “inferno crisis,” exploring the occult and believing he was being persecuted by other-worldly creatures, which he depicted in Inferno (1897). After marrying the actress Harriet Bosse in 1901 but parting in 1904, he lost, as in his two previous marriages, custody of his offspring. Strindberg then experimented with visual effects as well as other aspects of dramatic form, becoming internationally known for expressionist dream sequences and symbols that were combined with religious mysticism. A Dream Play (1902), To Damascus (1898–1904), and The Ghost Sonata (1907) illustrated this new experimentation, all showing man’s discordant existence along with varying degrees of pessimism. Gustav Vasa (1899) was a historical drama, and The Great Highway (1909) was a symbolic study of his own life. In 1884, after being a leader in the Rationalist group of young followers of Edvard Brandes, he was driven abroad but, when he returned to face a charge of ridiculing the Eucharist, he was found not guilty. Son of a Servant (1886) is Strindberg’s bitter autobiography. The Swedish Academy never inducted him, but his works influenced Sean O’Casey and Eugene O’Neill. According to critic Robert William McKay, Strindberg was an atheist during most of his life “but he had a mental breakdown, lost his virility, and drifted into mysticism.” However, Strindberg despite his interest in Swedenborgianism, never returned to the church. {BDF; CE; EU, Faith Ingwersen; JM; JMR; RE}
STRING THEORY In physics the string, or superstring, is a reference to the study of an elementary particle in a theory of space-time incorporating supersymmetry. The hypothetical particle consists of a short one-dimensional string that exists in ten dimensions. Although it has never been proved experimentally, the theory rests on a simple premise which has been described by Jennifer Senior (New York, 1 February 1999): “that the smallest building blocks of the universe—muons, photons, gluons, and all those other particles that sound like Santa’s reindeer—are generated by the vibrations of tiny, quivering loops of string. The whole universe is made up of them, tied up with them, if you prefer, as if the cosmos were a shimmering aeolian harp.”
Columbia University’s Brian Greene described the theory in The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (1999). One of the leading exponents, Senior found, Greene is working to reconcile two previously incompatible tenets of contemporary physics,
the theory of general relativity (which describes the behavior of very large things, like the steady outward streaming of the galaxies) and quantum mechanics (which describes very small things, like the flighty path of an electron). The former supposes that space is gently curving; the latter implies that space is jittery and unpredictable. String theory modifies Einstein’s theory in just such a way that these two conceptions of space are brought into alignment . . . . Space [it is postulated] only seems like space to us. And time . . . only feels like time to us. But if human beings were smaller, they’d see that space and time were merely the perceivable facets of a much more nuanced series of organizing principles—the same way that crude patterns are the only thing one sees, at first, when thumbing through the pages of a Magic Eye book. “So if we were born not 20 inches long, but 10-to-the-minus-33 inches long–that’s a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of an inch—then we would know what those organizing principles were,” says Greene. “They would be of second nature to us, just like time and space.”
Skeptics of string theory include Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist at Harvard. One objection physicists have is that until recently five different string theories are competing to describe the same world. Greene, however, showed that the five are simply different views of a single underlying theory. Despite the skeptics, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel-laureate physicist at the University of Texas, has written that “I still think string theory is the only game in town.”
Ken Stringfellow, Recording Artist music
Stringfellow is the singer of the Seattle band the Posies. The following entry of his is from a published studio log:
"When Bob was building the studio--actually he's still building it--he was cutting some Chinese marble up into various floor & wall pieces, when he came across what appeared (to him) to be an image of Jesus (I'm not kidding about this) in one of the chunks of marble. We've seen it and personally it looks more like a Klingon warship than an object of worship...anyhow now it rests in the corner of the room where we have the drums set up, but it since its return from Az. we believe it to be the source of some serious bad juju. Being a band of atheists, maybe it's angry Haysoos getting us back. Here's some examples of curse-like symptoms that started plaguing us today w/"His" return: I sat down in one of the chairs in the control room, and immediately one of the legs slid into a hole in the floor, knocking it & me over.
I leaned against a section of wall, which suddenly collapsed and brought a heavy ceiling board down on my head...oooooh, child.
- None* of Joe's basses or bass amps sounded good, and
- None* of Brian's snare drums sounded good.
Not to mention the swarm of huge, cow-like flies that coated every wall."
Stringfellow, Ken ( ) Stringfellow, a singer and recording artist who started with a Seattle band called The Posies, was adopted by the Stringfellow family from a San Francisco orphanage. In 1998 when The Posies broke up and disbanded after five albums, he formed Saltine, a new band, and toured and recorded with REM. A prolific songwriter, he recorded Touched with the re-formed Posies, which has toured extensively. In a log, Stringfellow told about building a studio and cutting some Chinese marble up into various floor and wall pieces, coming across what appeared to some to be an image of Jesus in one of the chunks of marble. He, however, thought it looked “more like a Klingon warship than an object of worship” and said “we believe it to be the source of some serious bad juju. Being a band of atheists, maybe it’s angry Haysoos getting us back.” {CA}
Stromer, Hjalmar (1849–1887) Stromer was a Swedish astronomer who published not only works on astronomy but also wrote Confessions of a Freethinker. {BDF}
Strong, Charles (1844–1942) Strong was an Australian clergyman and social reformer. Born in Scotland of a Presbyterian clerical family, he rejected Calvinist scholasticism and adopted a liberal theology. After being threatened by the Presbytery for a libel for heresy, he helped found the Australasian Church in 1885. Charles Strong was its first minister. Known as “Melbourne’s high priest of ethical religion,” Strong taught that Christianity was more endangered by theological obscurantism than critical historical investigation, and that failure to love one’s neighbor was more serious than doctrinal doubt. {SWW}
Strossen, Nadine (1950– ) Strossen, who is president of the American Civil Liberties Union, is a law educator and human rights activist. A Harvard graduate, she was named in 1986 one of the ten outstanding young Americans by the Jaycees International. In Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995), she holds that free speech and thought are essential to achieving the needed equality of the sexes. Differing with those militant feminists who see free speech as the enemy and who try to purge all forms of speech and expression of “degrading” elements, Strossen counters that a censorship movement such as Feminists Against Pornography would lead to a dead end, that without free speech progress toward the eventual equality of the sexes is impossible. Those feminists who argue for censorship, therefore, are the arch reactionaries who never wanted equality for women in any case. Strossen has been cited by many freethinkers as being one of the most eloquent spokespersons on behalf of human rights.
Strothman, Wendy J. (20th Century) Strothman, who had been vice president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and director of Beacon Press since 1983, left in 1995 to become vice president and publisher of adult trade and reference books at Houghton Mifflin Company. Beacon Press, she has noted, is the second oldest independent publisher—Houghton Mifflin is the oldest.
Strozzi, Piero (1500–1558) Strozzi, who was of a noble Florentine family, became an Italian general in the service of France. Intended for the Church, he chose to abandon religion for a military career and around the year of 1555 was created marshal of France by Henry II. Being injured at the siege of Thionville, he was exhorted by the Duc de Guise to think of Jesus. But Strozzi calmly declared himself an atheist. {BDF} STRUCTURALISTS Structuralism in philosophy is a method, not a distinct philosophy, of analyzing phenomena. It is chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition—for example, good/evil; internal/external; universal/particular; transcendental/empirical. Structuralists include Althuser, Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Lévi-Strauss. Post-structuralists reject such binary opposites. In linguistics, structuralism is best described in terms of its irreducible structural units in morphology and phonology. {AF}
Struve, Gustav von (1805–1870) Struve was a German reformer, son of a Russian State-Councilor. He studied law in Germany and edited the Mannheimer Journal. Several times, he was jailed for taking an active part in the attempt to set up a republic in Baden. When it failed, he fled to Switzerland. Venturing back in 1849, he was condemned to five and one-half years in prison. Republicans released him, but they again failed, and Struve migrated to America where he wrote his most important work, Allgemeine Weltgeschichte (9 volumes, 1853–1860). His rationalist views are given in this and in his Pflanzenkost (1869). After fighting in the American Civil War, he returned to Germany in 1868. {RAT}
Stuart, Carole (1941- ) Stuart wrote Why Was I Adopted; To Turn You On; 39 Sex Fantasies for Women; Why Am I Going to the Hospital? (with Claire Ciliotta); I’ll Never Be Fat Again; and How to Lose 5 Pounds Fast. A resident of New Jersey, Stuart is publisher of Barricade Books in New York City. She has gone on record as being, like her husband Lyle Stuart, a non-believer. {WAS, numerous conversations]
Stuart, Gilbert (1755–1828) Stuart, an eminent American artist, has been said to have been a Unitarian, although he is not included by Elizabeth Gillis as having been a member of a specific church. He is noted for his portraits of George Washington, the best-known of which is found on the United States $1 bill. {CE; UU}
Stuart, Lyle (1922- ) When a young man, Stuart wrote a country song, “Someone Left That Golden Gate Open,” that was recorded by Grand Ole Opry star Red Foley. An atheist, he nevertheless wrote “Go to Church on Sunday Morning” for retailer and philanthropist J. C. Penney. Stuart was once a reporter for International News Service (1945) and Variety (1945-1946), editor of Music Business (1946-1948), founder of Exposé (1951), publisher of The Independent (1951-1975), business manager of MAD (1952-1954), and president of Citadel Press (1970-1989). Since 1990 he has been President of Barricade Books. Never one to shun taboo subjects or controversial books, he has published The Anarchist Cookbook, Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich, Running Scared (an exposé of Steve Wynn as “emperor” of Nevada), The Sensuous Woman, The Sensuous Man, The Marriage Art, and Where Did I Come From?, a book for youngsters about sex. He is author of God Wears A Bowtie (1949); The Secret Life of Walter Winchell (1953, a time when the gossip columnist was most powerful); Mary Louise (1970); Casino Gambling for the Winner (1978); Lyle Stuart on Baccarat (1983, revised 1997); and Winning at Casino Gambling (1995). Known as a skilled casino gambler, he once entered two baccarat tournaments in Atlantic City, winning first place both at Bally’s Grand and the Taj Mahal for a total of $245,000. In 1999 on Radio WEVD’s Alan Colmes’s talk show, Stuart livened the discussion by saying,
There is no god. There are no gods. There is no life before conception, and there is no life after death. Religion thrives on ignorance, fear, superstition, and ignorance.
Callers immediately telephoned their objections, but Colmes has no taboos on his show and, according to Stuart, “is one of the few sound liberal voices still on any major radio station.” {WAS, numerous conversations]
Stuart, Lyle (11 Aug 1922 - ) When a young man, Stuart wrote a country song, “Someone Left That Golden Gate Open,” that was recorded by Grand Ole Opry star Red Foley. An atheist, he was paid to write “Go to Church on Sunday Morning” for retailer and philanthropist J. C. Penney. Stuart was once a reporter for International News Service (1945) and Variety (1945-1946); editor of Music Business (1946-1948); founder of Exposé (1951); publisher of The Independent (1951-1975); founder of Lyle Stuart Inc. (1956); business manager of MAD (1952-1954); and president of Citadel Press (1970-1989). Since 1990 he has been President of Barricade Books. Never one to shun taboo subjects or controversial books, he has published The Anarchist Cookbook; Ferdinand Lundberg’s The Rich and the Super-Rich; Running Scared (an exposé of Steve Wynn as “emperor” of Nevada); The Sensuous Woman; The Sensuous Man; The Marriage Art; and Where Did I Come From?, a book for youngsters about sex. He is author of God Wears A Bowtie (1949); The Secret Life of Walter Winchell (1953, a time when the gossip columnist was most powerful); Mary Louise (1970); Casino Gambling for the Winner (1978); Lyle Stuart on Baccarat (1983, revised 1997); and Winning at Casino Gambling (1995). Known as a skilled casino gambler, he once entered two baccarat tournaments in Atlantic City, winning first place both at Bally’s Grand and the Taj Mahal for a total of $245,000. In 1999 on Radio WEVD’s Alan Colmes’s talk show, Stuart livened the discussion by saying,
There is no god. There are no gods. There is no life before conception, and there is no life after death. Religion thrives on ignorance, fear, superstition, and ignorance.
Callers immediately telephoned their objections, but Colmes has no taboos on his show and, according to Stuart, “is one of the few sound liberal voices still on any major radio station.” {WAS, numerous conversations]
Sutherland, Donald McNichol (17 Jul 1934 - ) A Canadian, Sutherland was born in St. John, New Brunswick, and at the age of fourteen was a deejay in Nova Scotia and became the star of an Italian horror picture at the age of thirty. The six-foot-four actor appeared as Hawkeye Pierce, the irreverent surgeon, in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H. He has also been in Klute, Don’t Look Now, The Day of the Locust, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Casanova, and, Ordinary People. Divorced twice, he lives with French-Canadian actress Francine Racette. He is the father of Keifer Sutherland from his marriage to Shirley Douglas. Although said to be a Protestant, he was asked during a broadcast of Inside The Actors Studio (13 June 1999), “If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you are at the Pearly Gates?” His response: “Oh, you know something? I’m so far away from believing that it exists, and the only thing I know are jokes about it.” Pressed further by the interviewer, he joked to her, “You’re just in time. We’re casting the film. God has this girl. . . .” {CA}
Stuck, Franz Ritter von (1863–1928)
A German painter, von Stuck was a professor at the Munich Academy of Plastic Arts. He was a member of the Société Internationale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and the Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Milan, Antwerp, and other academies. Von Stuck, an outspoken supporter of Haeckel, was one of the founders of the Monist League. {RAT}
STUDENT FREETHINKERS: See entry for Campus Freethought Alliance. A list of student freethought organizations is found on the Web at <http://www.infidels.org/org/student.html>.
STUDY GROUP OF THE HISTORY OF WESTERN HUMANISM A Chinese group with associate membership in the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the Study Group of the History of Western Humanism, the Library of Chinese, Political College of Young, Beijing, China.
STUDY OF RELIGION IN POLITICS For a study of religion in politics, see the Web: <http://www.isrp.org/>.
Stuhr, Christian (20th Century) Stuhr, a writer and teacher in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, has written humanistic articles in Humanist in Canada.
Sturoc, William C. (Born 1822) By the age of sixteen, Scottish-born Sturoc had read Volney, Voltaire, d’Holbach, and others. In 1846 he migrated to Canada, then moved to New Hampshire where he became a lawyer. An agnostic, Sturoc attended the International Congress of Freethinkers at Chicago in 1893 and was one of the vice-presidents of the American Secular Union. {PUT}
Styer, Timothy M. (20th Century)
In 1996, Styer was awarded the Rudi Gelsey Social Justice Award by the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which was celebrating its 175th anniversary. During the 1960s, Gelsey, then minister of the church, led a campaign against “blockbusting,” a real estate practice that involves scaring white residents into selling their houses because people of color are moving into the area.
Styron, William (1925– ) Styron’s novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), won a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. But after the work’s initial praise, many African American intellectuals objected to the novel’s recreation of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia, claiming as a white man he was unable to depict a black man’s experiences. This despite his statement that blacks had “a constant hold on my boyhood” and “black experience motivated much of my writing.” One defender, Henry Louis Gates Jr., remarked, “He set himself up as a sacrificial victim, and I believe he knew it. A black hero as gay? Of course, he knew it.” Gates deliberately did not include Styron in his Dictionary of Global Culture (1997). His first novel, Lie Down in Darkness (1951), also received great critical praise. Other of his works are Sophie’s Choice (1968); a play called In the Clap Shack (1972); and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990), a description of his bout with clinical depression. Styron is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of Académie Goncourt. In “A Case of the Great Pox,” Styron describes the news that a nineteen-year-old U.S. Marine received from his physician. That news was that he had syphilis, which had been detected by a medical Kahn test “was so high it had gone off the chart.” It was a time when the very word syphilis was taboo, was uttered sotto voce, if at all, and if cited at all was called a “social disease” or a “vice disease.” Styron explained further: “But it was the doctrine of original sin, falling upon both Catholics and backslid Presbyterians like me, that made the sufferers of syphilis pay a special price in moral blame unknown to those who acquired other diseases. . . . [S]yphilis, in a puritanical culture [had] a peculiar aura of degradation. As Susan Sontag has shown in “Illness as Metaphor,” her study of the mythology of disease, all the major illnesses have prompted a moralistic and punitive response, and have given rise to entire theoretical systems based on phony psychologizing. The bubonic plague implied widespread moral pollution; tuberculosis was the product of thwarted passion and blighted hopes, or sprang from ‘defective vitality, or vitality misspent’; out of emotional frustration or repression of feeling has come the curse of cancer, whose victims are also often demonically possessed.” In a secular age, Styron related, “gags were appropriate for an inexplicable calamity that in olden times was regarded as divine retribution. Previous centuries had seen people calling on God for help, and God had not answered.” The physician, he now detected, had had a “personal fixation” about the disease all along. He was “supposed to be free of such proscriptive attitudes, but there are always some who are as easily bent as anyone else by religion or ideology. Klotz (the physician) was one of these . . . a doctor who hated not the disease but its victims . . . . Klotz was obviously the inheritor of a tradition with a firm root in Southern Christian fundamentalism.” When it transpired that Styron had had Vincent’s disease, not syphilis, and that it was easily cleared up by old-fashioned applications of gentian violet. Styron revealed in “A Case of the Great Pox” that his stepmother, “an observant Christian, curiously illiberal for an Episcopalian,” considered his own skepticism and fealty to Camus “diabolical.” He thought her a prig. Meanwhile, she disapproved of hearing that he had a fealty to Camus’ “Le Mythe de Sisyphe,” which he had read “laboriously but with happiness in French at Duke.” Among Styron’s literary admirers are Peter Matthiessen, Carlos Fuentes, and Arthur Miller. Asked which writer he wishes he could have been and of what book, Styron chose the historian C. Vann Woordward for his The Burden of Southern History: “[I]t is so mageristerial in its understanding of the spirit and the traditions of the South and the way they evolved that it’s really kind of a work of almost perfect authority.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996; Mary B. W. Tabor, The New York Tims, 7 November 1998}
Styvesant, Peter (c. 1610–1672) When Styvesant, the Dutch director-general of the North American colony of New Netherlands (1647–1664), battled the Spanish in the Caribbean in 1644, he suffered a badly mangled leg and was rushed to Curaçao for medical treatment. The shattered limb was amputated and accorded a Christian burial with full military honors. Twenty-eight years later, the rest of the body of the harsh, autocratic ruler who was intolerant of religious dissenters, was buried. {PA}
Suard, Jean Baptiste Antoine (1734–1817) Suard was a French writer. He became a devoted friend of Baron d’Holbach and of Garat. He also corresponded with Hume and Walpole. Working as the censor of theatres, Suard wrote Miscellanies of Literature and other works related to the humanities. {BDF}
Suarez, John M. (20th Century) Suarez, a physician, spoke in 1997 on “The Radical Religious Right—Beyond Stealth” at the 20th Anniversary convention of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He is a member of the Outreach Committee at the Center for Inquiry West.
Subbamma, Malladi (20th Century) Subbamma [original name in Telugu: Mahila Abhyudaya Samstha], who wrote Women and Social Reforms (1994), is editor of Stree Swetchcha in Hyderabad, India and head of the Institute for the Advancement of Women. She is the wife of M. V. Ramamurthy, and both are active in the Indian Rationalist Association. Subbamma is one of the few humanist-feminist activists in India, working in many developmental activities for the empowerment of women. Specifically, she is concerned about the following subjects:
• the anti-women agenda which is apparent in Muslim countries, as exemplified by an Afghani Mujahideen’s statement that it is time to send women “back to the bag.”
• sati, a custom in which childless widows allow themselves to be burned along with their dead husbands because of tremendous social pressure and the veneration shown toward a person who commits sati. In the period 1815–1825, at least 8,142 widows burned themselves. The practice was abolished by the English government at the instance of Raja Rarn Mohan Roy.
• kanyasulkam, a custom designed to enable the parents to sell away in marriage their daughters to the person offering the highest amount of money, whatever his age, the result of which was an increase of widows.
• dowry, a universally practiced system by which the prospective groom is willing to marry only that girl whose parents pay the highest amount in dowry and also tender valuable gifts. The default in paying a dowry either in full or in part has often resulted in what is called dowry deaths or bridge burnings. In 1985, at least 989 were reported. In 1987, the figure increased to 1,793.
(See entry for G. Vijayam.)
Subedi, Ganga Prasad (20th Century) Subedi from Nepal was a participant in 1996 at the Mexico City humanist congress. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
SUCCESS
• There is an old motto that runs, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” This is nonsense. It ought to read, “If at first you don’t succeed, quit, quit at once.” –Stephen Leacock
• Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. –Oscar Wilde
• It is not enough to succeed; others must fail. –Gore Vidal
Sudermann, Herman (1857–1928) Sudermann was a German dramatist and novelist. His play, Die Ehre (1889), was one of the first successes of the burgeoning German naturalist movement. One of his finest dramas is Fritzchen, which portrays the harshness of the Prussian officer code. Heimat (1893; tr. Magda, 1896) was a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt and for Mrs. Patrick Campbell. His novels bare the crudity and immorality of the Prussian aristocracy and the corruption of Berlin society. With Haeckel, Sudermann helped found the Monist League, openly expressing his agnosticism. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Sue, Marie Joseph (1804–1857) Sue, called Eugène, was a French novelist. He wrote many romances, including The Mysteries of Paris and The Wandering Jew (1842–1845). In 1850 he was elected deputy and sat at the extreme left, then was exiled by the coup d’état. Sue was a declared freethinker. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Suffocation (20th Century) According to Celebrity Atheists, the recording artists known as Suffocation are non-theists. {E}
Sühl, Klaus (20th Century) Sühl, who is president of the Humanistischer Verband Deutschlands, spoke at the 1993 Congress of the European Humanist Federation (EHF), at which he said that following the fall of the Berlin wall many had naively dreamed of a unified Europe and a peaceful world. “There is no likelihood of former Eastern Germany being converted back to Christianity,” adding that “the humanist movement faces new tasks in this situation.” Sühl also is Treasurer General of the European Humanist Federation. He wrote Auf dem weg Mach Europa (1994).
Suhl, Yuri (19th Century) Suhl in 1889 wrote “A Defense of Atheism.” In a posthumous printing, his Ernestine L. Rose and the Battle for Human Rights (1959) was published.
Suhre, Richard (1911- ) In 1994 in a North Carolina county courtroom, Suhre challenged the district court’s right to place the Ten Commandments in a courtroom. He said he was "repulsed" by the marble tablets hanging in the Haywood County courtroom in his hometown of Waynesville. “They have the laws of Moses prominently displayed where they have the laws of North Carolina adjudicated,” he complained, “and they do not mesh. I see the state is promoting a religion.” The county has spent well over $133,000 to maintain the tablets, and a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in 1998 to hear the case. (Freethought Today, September 1998}
SUICIDE • The thought of suicide is a great consolation; with its help you can get through many a bad night. –Friedrich Nietzsche
• There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say. –Cyril Connolly
• There is only one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
–Albert Camus
• Suicide kills two people. That’s what it’s for! —Arthur Miller a point made in “After the Fall” that most suicides have a devastating impact on family and friends
“Suicide is against Roman law,” says a character in the Broadway musical, “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. “The penalty is death.” Socrates is a major example of a pre-Christian suicide. Recent suicides have been photographer Diane Arbus, actress Judy Garland, writer Abbie Hoffman, camera inventor George Eastman, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, novelist Ernest Hemingway, musicians Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain, writer Primo Levi, novelist Jack London, actress Marilyn Monroe, musician Jim Morris, writer Sylvia Plath, painter Jackson Pollack, painter Mark Rothko, composer Robert Schumann, poet Ann Sexton, painter Vincent Van Gogh, and author Virginia Woolf. Taking one’s own life, according to some Christians, is condemned—unqualifiedly—as an offense against God’s will, grace, and judgment. Although harakiri (disembowelment) and seppuku (a more polite Japanese term for suicide by disembowelment) have been recommended by some non-Christians under certain circumstances, Christian theologians generally consider suicide reprehensible legally, morally, and religiously. Judaism and Islam also expressly proscribe the act. Unitarian Universalists and others of more liberal religious groups often approve “living wills,” in which individuals condone the refusal of life-sustaining treatment in the event they are hopelessly ill; and of “health care proxies,” which appoint friends to make treatment decisions on their behalf in the event they are rationally unable to do so. Charles Francis Potter, the Unitarian minister who in 1929 founded and led the First Humanist Society in New York, was founder in 1938 of the Euthanasia Society of America. Euthanasia is the practice for reasons of mercy of permitting the death of a hopelessly sick or injured individual (a person, or an animal), in a relatively painless way. In 1994, Judge Barbara Rothstein of the United States District Court in Seattle ruled that the Constitution guarantees people not only the right to terminate pregnancies without Government interference but also the right to end their own lives. By striking down a 140-year-old Washington State ban on assisted suicide, she said the law violated the 14th Amendment clause against state infringement of individual liberty. This, coupled with a Michigan jury’s acquitting Dr. Jack Kevorkian of charges that he had violated that state’s law against helping people kill themselves, has encouraged various humanistic groups that euthanasia may eventually be legalized with appropriate and specific restrictions. In 1995, Peter Singer discussed the subject in Rethinking Life and Death. So did Herbert Hendin in Suicide in America. Singer argues that euthanasia should be allowed if the person suffers from the absence or irreversible loss of cortical capacity. He also argues that assisted suicide should be legal—as both have been in the Netherlands since November 1993—to those unimpaired cortically but who have a painful, irreversible disease and plead for the right to die. Hendin, a psychiatrist, might better be treated for their depressive condition and states that many who are counseled then become grateful that they have additional time to live. Singer approves of Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s efforts, whereas Hendin does not. In 1996, the Episcopal Diocese of Newark ruled that committing suicide is morally acceptable for the terminally ill. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say that there is a value to suffering simply for the sake of suffering,” said the Rev. Lawrence Falkowski of West Orange, New Jersey. Bishop John Shelby Spong, the leader of the 40,000-member diocese and an advocate of assisted suicide, agreed, saying the time has come for religious faiths to “redefine what life means.” Dennis Rodman, the professional basketball player sometimes seen sporting feminine articles of clothing and yellow hair, takes a positive stand on suicide. Once when he was terribly depressed and had a gun in his hand, ready to end his life, he used logic to determine the causes of his unhappiness—when young he had been called a sissy; when in his 30s and having become wealthy, people only wanted his money: he had become the person others wanted him to be. So he killed his outer self. He became what he really was, and this included a well-publicized liaison with the actress-singer Madonna and book-signings of his work, Bad As I Want To Be (1996), during which he appeared in drag (but insisted he is not gay or bisexual), all made possible by the “suicide” of his outer or other self. Rodman’s frank confessions to such a wide audience resulted in much discussion by individuals recognizing that they, also, should not allow arbitrary mores to keep them from being their true self. Kay Redfield Jamison’s Night Falls Fast (1999) estimates that every seventeen minutes someone in the United States commits suicide, that it ranks third among causes of death for young people and second for college students. More young people died of suicide in 1995 than of AIDS, cancer, stroke, pneumonia, influenza, birth defects, and heart disease combined. The World Health Organization reported that in 1998 suicide was the cause of almost 2% of deaths worldwide and is increasing—thus, more are dying from suicide than from war or homicide. (See entry for Ralph Mero of Compassion for Dying and for Derek Humphry, who describes successful means which individuals have used in order to commit suicide when their terminal illness brings them unbearable pain. Also, see the article by Glanville Williams which includes Anthony Flew’s views in favor of euthanasia in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 7.)
Sullivan, Andrew (20th Century) Sullivan, the gay editor of The New Republic, spoke on “The Gay Catholic Paradox” at Notre Dame University in 1995. Asked how he can be openly gay and Catholic, he responded, “I am openly gay because I am Catholic.” His church, he explained, had taught him to witness to the truth and to love one another. What he has trouble understanding is why his church insists on the dignity of the homosexual person and the blamelessness of homosexuality in itself but teaches that “if this blameless condition was acted upon, it would be always and everywhere evil.” Meanwhile, an unresolved debate at Notre Dame continued as to whether the Catholic institution should give official status to the organization of gay and lesbian students which had arranged his visit. In Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (1995), Sullivan tackles the Biblical condemnation by St. Paul of those who “change the natural use into that which is against nature.” This Sullivan reads as meaning that homosexuals do not “change the natural use” in their sexual act—thus, it is not they who are being condemned. “What Paul is describing here is heterosexuals engaging, against their own nature, in homosexual behavior.” {Peter Steinfels, The New York Times, 18 February 1995)
Sullivan, Claudia (20th Century) Sullivan is Secretary of the Arizona Secular Humanists, PO Box 3738, Scottsdale, Arizona 85271.
Sullivan, J. (19th Century) Sullivan wrote Search for Deity, an inquiry as to the origin of the conception of God (1859). {BDF}
Sullivan, Marilyn and Michael Sullivan (20th Century) The Sullivans were founding directors of the North Texas Church of Freethought (NTCOF), a fellowship of unbelievers which commenced in 1995. Their mail address: PO Box 111894, Carrollton, Texas 76011.
Sullivan, Walter Seagar Jr. (1918–1996) Sullivan, a science reporter and editor for The New York Times, was noted for his articles that took him from pole to pole and ranged from the seabed to the shifting continents. In the 1960s, he told of the marvels of galaxies, explaining in clear prose what readers found understandable for the first time. He became known for his knowledge of science and his skill in making it comprehendable. Sullivan visited Antarctica seven times, and a thirty-mile mountain chain there is named the Sullivan Range in his honor. Among his published works are White Land of Adventure (1957), about the Arctic; Assault on the Unknown (1961); and Continents in Motion (1974). He was editor of America’s Race for the Moon (1962). Sullivan, a naturalist in philosophy, was a Unitarian.
Sullivan William Laurence (1872–1935) A chief advocate of Christian theism in 20th-century Unitarianism, Sullivan once had been a Catholic priest and a professor of theology. But Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical condemning modernism turned him to the writings of James Martineau and in 1911 he became a Unitarian. He scornfully rejected the Humanist movement, seeing Humanists as atheists or agnostics who were unwilling to accept that designation, styling themselves Humanist to preserve their respectability in a church that historically had been Christian. In his own time, however, Unitarianism dropped its Christian label. {U&U}
Sully, James (1842–1923)
Sully taught psychology at London University College. He was a declared agnostic. {RAT; RE}
Sully-Prudhomme, René François Armand (1839–1907) Sully-Prudhomme was a French poet associated with the Parnassians. His major works are two long philosophical poems, La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1889, Happiness). They treat abstract, humanitarian themes. His prose, Que sais-je? (1896, What Do I Know?) was awarded the first Nobel Prize in literature, in 1901. In 1882, Sully-Prudhomme had become a member of the French Academy. His poems were of a pessimistic cast, described by Wheeler as being “full of the delicacy of philosophic suggestion.” According to McCabe, Sully-Prudhomme “declared his skepticism in a preface to his first volume of poems but he was a freethinker of the very rare type that wants to believe in religion and cannot. He came to believe at the most in a sort of pantheistic halo of the moral universe which he called ‘the divine.’ ” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Sulzberger, Arthur [“Punch”] Ochs Jr. (1951- ) The editor of The New York Times is an agnostic. After studying at Tufts and Harvard, Sulzberger worked as a reporter for The Raleigh (North Carolina) Times, a correspondent in London for the Associated Press (1976-1978), and then a series of jobs on the newspaper that was founded by his grandfather in 1896. Lazarus Ochsenhorn, a prosperous diamond merchant and Talmudic scholar in Bavaria, emigrated to America in 1845 to escape the oppressive laws that restricted Jewish marriages and professions, according to a seven-year study of the noted journalistic family by Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones (The New Yorker 19 April 1999). His son Julius (1858-1935) shortened the name to Ochs; married Iphigenia Miriam Wise, daughter of the Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise who was instrumental in the formation of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and of Hebrew Union College, and is generally considered the founder of Reform Judaism in America; and used the Wise connection to his advantage to acquire the failing New-York Times by forming a new company, the New York Times Company. William Randolph Hearst attacked Ochs as an “oily little commercial gentleman with . . . obsequiously curved shoulders” who took orders from Jewish banker August Belmont and passed them along to his editor. Ochs, however, was so rattled by this Shylock-like portrait of himself that he bent over backwards to downplay any Jewish slant to stories in the newspaper. Upon his death, his son-in-law, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who had been acting as the effective publisher for two years, became controlling owner of the Times. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, like his father-in-law, “was skittish about showcasing Jewish talent in the paper,” Tifft and Jones found in their research. Called “Punch” by his family members, he rejected the idea that Jews were members of a “race” and vehemently opposed the use of collective phrases such as “the Jewish people”; instead, he instructed editors to use “people of the Jewish faith,” or simply “Jews”—expressions that he felt subtly conveyed the notion that being Jewish “was something one could freely choose, like being a Methodist or a Presbyterian.” His daughter Judy told the two researchers, “Deep down, my father probably would just as soon not have been Jewish.” Like his father, he became a strong opponent of Zionism, suggesting that as an alternative to a Jewish Palestine a “great state” carved out of several nations in the Holy Land should be created, one that would “welcome all who wish to come,” Jews and non-Jews alike.” He was attacked for being a “self-hating Jew” and a “Jewish Bourbon.” As the result of the attacks, he became an anti-Zionist. He also became what is called an “assimilated Jew,” marrying outside the Jewish heritage. He remained editor from 1963 to 1992, at which time his son, Arthur Jr., became editor. Arthur Jr.’s mother, Barbara Grant, was not Jewish. Shortly after her divorce from “Punch” in 1956, she became an Episcopalian. Arthur Jr. and his sister Karen were confirmed at Manhattan’s St. James Episcopal Church, and although Arthur (“Pinch”) read books about Judaism and erratically attended Jewish services he told Tifft and Jones that in London as an Associated Press reporter during the 1970s he held a Passover seder in his flat. His grandmother Iphigene, who happened to be in Britain, came as an honored—and somewhat nonplussed—guest. "I consider myself Jewish. No one else would, but I do," Arthur Jr. told an oral historian for the American Jewish Committee several years later. The Trust (2000), by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones, includes the gossip that in the 1950s Sulzberger fathered an illegitimate child with a widowed reporter and that in the 1980s then-executive editor Abe Rosenthal had an affair with “a young Times secretary” whom he later promoted “to an executive position.” In 1994, two years after Sulzberger became publisher, Tifft and Jones asked him to describe his personal faith. His freethinking became clearly evident in his unhesitant reply:
I have the Times. That’s my religion. That’s what I believe in, and it’s a hell of a thing to hold on to.
Sumberg, Chris (20th Century) Sumberg’s “Living Humanism” appears in The Humanist. A freelance writer, he was born in Boston and now lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Summa Theologica The Summa Theologica, in which Thomas Aquinas treats the whole of theology by careful analysis of arguments, contains his five ways of attempting to prove that there is a God.
Summers, John H. (20th Century) Summers, a graduate student in American History at the University of Rochester, wrote in Free Inquiry (Spring 1998) the media should take seriously the notion that they should engage, not pander to, their audiences. “A healthy democracy demands journalistic integrity and intelligence,” he wrote. “Alas, as things currently stand, tough ideas in the wastelands of Gannett and Times-Mirror are too often fugitives: rarely sighted, never captured. We deserve better.”
Sumner, Charles (1811–1874) An American statesman, Sumner was quite vocal against slavery and openly criticized Abraham Lincoln. He supported the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson and opposed President Ulysses Grant’s project for the acquisition of Santo Domingo. In one speech to the Senate, Sumner made personal attack on Senator Butler of South Carolina. Later, Congressman Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler, attacked Sumner as he sat at his Senate desk. The injury was so serious that it took over three years before Sumner could resume all his duties in the Senate. Such occurrences were typical of the emotions which eventually led to the War Between the States. According to McCabe, Sumner was “a non-Christian theist” who once wrote a letter in which he rejected the supernatural theory of Christ, saying, “I am without religious feeling.” He believed in God, he said, but he “rarely thought about him or prayed.” Sumner’s funeral was at King’s Chapel in Boston, where he and his family had worshiped as Unitarians for many years and where the funeral service was held by the Rev. Henry W. Foote, according to his biographer, Walter Shotwell. {CE; EG; JM;RAT; RE; TYD; U; UU}
SUN
Mythologies throughout the world have included Sun myths. Sun symbols have been found in Neolithic deposits, which implies that sun worship was the earliest form of religion. The Sun, however, may have been more directed toward the elaborate calendars of ancient peoples and the simple calculations of the most primitive tribes on the course of the sun. In the Babylonian and Mayan civilizations, the study of the Sun’s movements correlated with that of moon and stars, leading to the science of astronomy and aiding the development of mathematics. Sun worship reached its highest development in Egypt, Mexico, and Japan, according to Maynard L. Cassady, then chairman of the department of religion at the University of Rochester. In Egypt, the pyramids were probably associated with Sun-worship. The Sun god Ra persists throughout Egyptian ancient history. In the 13th century B.C.E., Ikhnaton established a monotheistic religion of high ethical character, centering about the Sun god Aton, represented by a disk with rays extended as beneficent hands. Solar worship spread to Greece and into Western Europe. In Mexico, the Mayans pictured the Sun god as a jaguar. In Japan, the royal house was believed to stem from the Sun goddess Amaterasu and to have maintained an unbroken line for at least twenty-six centuries. “Where it is the duty to worship the sun,” John Morley once quipped, “it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.” During a 1994 solar eclipse, Aymara or Quechua Indians in Bolivia lit fires on hillsides to warm the Earth for the brief period when the Sun could not. According to Aymara tradition, an eclipse means the Sun is sick and near death. In Andean mythology, a puma devours the Sun, a belief reflected in stone engravings that date to pre-Colombian times. To prevent the Sun’s death, the puma is frightened away by the screams of children and of animals beaten with sticks. Just as the Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way. One revolution—traveling a distance that is about ten billion times the distance between the Sun and the Earth—takes 250,000,000 Earth years. Even as the Sun moves around in the Milky Way, the Earth moves with the Sun, revolving around it. The entire solar system zips by at 155 miles per second. Also, the Sun rotates on its own axis. The Earth rotates about thirty times—thirty days—during the time it takes Sun to complete one rotation. Rationalists are intrigued by eclipses but not by the mythology which has accompanied them. A total solar eclipse can have particular scientific importance, providing information about the motions of the moon and about the surface phenomena of the sun and permitting tests of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. {CE; ER}
SUNDAY • Sunday: A day given over by Americans to wishing they were dead and in heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in hell. –H. L. Mencken
SUNDAY SCHOOL • A Sunday School is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents. –H. L. Mencken
Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) Sun Yat-sen, also known as Sun Wen or Sun Zhong Shan, was a Chinese physician, a revolutionary leader of the 1920s who is said by Corliss Lamont to have been a naturalistic humanist. Sun was influenced by the writings of Karl Marx. In 1905 he organized in Japan a revolutionary league based upon the Three People’s Principles (nationalism, democracy, and the people’s livelihood). After a revolution in China, he was elected (1911) provisional president of the Chinese republic, then becoming director of the party or Kuomintang. {CE; CL}
Sunderland, Jabez Thomas (1842–1936) Sunderland was a leading participant in the theological controversy which took place in the Western Unitarian Conference (WUC) in the 1880s and was known as the “Western Issue.” In it, he played a conservative role. He also publicized to Unitarians and others the injustice of the colonization of India. Following a visit to India, he supported the Indian nationalist movement and strengthened ties between American Unitarianism and India. His India in Bondage (1928) was suppressed in India. In one of his sermons, he stated, “The rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity by Channing was the solemn revolt of what was deepest and holiest in the moral nature of man against the conception of an immoral God, against a God who could do so unspeakably unjust, so morally monstrous a thing as to create a human race of sentient beings and of his own will elect one part to be happy forever, and the other part with no fault of their own, and with nothing they could do to prevent it, to writhe in endless torment.” A Biblical scholar, Sunderland wrote the following: “There is no use trying to evade it; the Bible contains errors of many kinds. It contains incredible stories, as for example those of the talking serpent, the speaking ass, and Jonah living three days in the fish. It contains historic inaccuracies, as the statement in Luke that the governor of Syria at the time of the birth of Jesus was Cyrenius (Quirinus), when in fact it was Quintus Sentius Saturnius. It contains contradictions, as when in connection with David’s numbering of Israel we are told in one place that it was the devil and in another that it was the Lord that tempted him to do the numbering. It contains exaggerations, as when the statement is made that Jeroboam, the king of only about one-half of little Palestine (the whole of Palestine was smaller than New Hampshire) went into a certain battle with 800,000 picked men, and of that number 500,000 died, a number twice as large as the combined armies of North and South at the battle of Gettysburg. It contains contradictions of science, as when we are told of the creation of the world in six days. It contains cruel, unjust and immoral teachings, as in the imprecatory Psalms (CIX and CXXXVII); the injunction to establish slavery (Leviticus XXV: 44-46); the permission to sell bad meat to strangers (Deuteronomy, XIV: 21); and the command, ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ It contains morally degrading representations of God, as in Exodus VII: 13 and XI: 10, where we are told that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart that he should not let the children of Israel go, and then punished him severely for not letting them go; and in Joshua X: 28-42, where the leader of the Israelites is commanded of God to murder innocent women and helpless babes.” {U&U}
Sunderland, La Roy (1803–1885) Sunderland, an American author and orator, started as a Methodist preacher prominent in the temperance and anti-slavery movements. Leaving the church and calling it a great bulwark of slavery, Sunderland for the forty years preceding his death then opposed Christianity. He wrote many works against slavery and Pathetism (which term he did not define), including Book of Human Nature (1853) and Ideology (3 volumes, 1886–1889). {BDF}
Suner y Capderila (19th Century) Suner y Capderila was a Spanish physician who became deputy to the Cortes in 1829 and was noted for his discourses against Catholicism. {BDF}
SUNRISE JOURNAL Sunrise Journal ,Stargazer, and Star Walker, are children’s publications edited by Lloyd Kumley (POB 4153, Salem Oregon 97302). They are for children up to eight years, from eight to twelve years, and from twelve to sixteen years, respectively. {FD}
Supek, Ivan (20th Century) Supek, from Yugoslavia, addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966). In Drame (1971), Supek writes about Serbo-Croatian drama.
SUPERMAN Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, describes the Übermensch, which has been translated as Superman, or Overman, and is the single goal of all human striving, for which people must be willing to sacrifice all. It is doubtful that Nietzsche thought of the Overman as an individual person but, rather, as an ideal superior man who forgoes transient pleasure, exercises creative power, lives at a level of experience beyond standards of good and evil, and is the goal of human evolution. Some have suggested that the comic book character of Superman is a freethinker and a secular humanist. He is devoted to helping mankind, and he has no connection with organized religion. (See the material on Superman by Paul Edwards in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)
SUPERNATURALISM • There used to be fairies, goblins, trolls, pooks, gnomes, snow maidens, munchkins, sylphs and hobbits who seized and transported us to other dimensions, where time got funny. There used to be saints, Christian or Sufic and variously possessed by Clouds of Unknowing, Uncreated Light, ecstasy and automatic writing. There have always been freaks—Wild Men and Missing Links, wolf boys and zombies, witches and geeks. –John Leonard, {Nation, 15-22 May 1998}
Supernaturalism, unlike naturalism, is a belief in forces which transcend the laws of nature and relate to God or a god, demigod, spirit, devil, or some such other-worldly or invisible agent, such as a ghost or spirit. Judaism and Christianity are built upon a belief in a supernatural creator, God, although apologists following attacks by the rationalists have argued that God is above nature and therefore is not supernatural. Supernaturalism also has its supporters in Asia, from Filipino healing techniques to Chinese card-reading to Japanese ghosts. Fen shui is (wind and water) is a practice followed in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore, as well as Japan and Vietnam, in which a practitioner will recommend the most favorable conditions for any venture. For example, suggestions include placement of office buildings and the arrangement of desks, doors, and other items in business. To have good feng shui a building should face the water and be flanked by mountains. It should not block the view of the mountain spirits. Thus, many Hong Kong office buildings have see-through lobbies. Similarly, elevators are often placed on a diagonal to the front of a building to prevent its own good spirits from escaping. The American architect, I. M. Pei, is said to have designed bad fen shui with his Bank of China building in Hong Kong, for it has sharp angles. The Bank of China, however, opened on the luckiest day of the century: 8/8/88 (8 August 1988). In Japan, the Sony Corporation has had a four-member “esper” (extrasensory perception and excitation research) laboratory which studied such phenomena as telepathy and ki. Ki is said to be the fundamental life force. Yoichiro Sako, a Tokyo University engineering graduate, heads the ki lab and has reported, “Our ultimate goal is to discover the mind or consciousness that all humanity, and the whole of creation, must possess—to pursue the spirit or soul that exists in our universe.” P. V. Narashimba Rao, the seventy-four-year-old Prime Minister of India, had in 1995 a “spiritual adviser” by the name of Chandraswamy, a forty-six-year-old faith healer, self-professed psychic, and rags-to-riches millionaire. Chandraswamy has been called by The Indian Express “Rao’s Rasputin,” a “controversial godman,” and a person with “enormous, extra-constitutional clout in the higher echelons of power and public life.” Mr. Rao has a strong belief in the supernatural, and in India it is not considered unusual for politicians, industrialists, entertainers, and others prominent in public life to take a Hindu holy man into their entourage. When over one thousand swamis, sadhus, yogis, and gurus justified their support of Chandraswamy by protesting in New Delhi, many were said to be unsure of what they were protesting, but one man replied, “I am accompanying the brothers to attain nirvana.” Saeed Naqvi, a columnist for The Pioneer, responded, “It may seem like so much humbug to those inclined toward agnosticism, but irrational faith is a fact of life in India. What we do in our private lives with the Chandraswamis is our business, but it is the transgression of superstition into public life that is unseemly.” “Belief in the supernatural,” wrote Ernest Renan in the 1800s, “is the shame of civilization.” The tenaciousness of supernaturalism in being accepted by hoi polloi is legendary. In the United States, Nancy Reagan reportedly relied on the occult, using an astrologer for advice to influence the schedule of her husband, Ronald Reagan, when he was President. Major newspapers carry daily astrological tables. Psychic hotlines in the 1990s were the rage on television and the World Wide Web. (See entries for Amulets and Superstition.) {The New York Times, “Indian Premier’s Swami Has a Run of Bad Karma,” 21 September 1995}
SUPERSTITION Superstition is an irrational belief or practice resulting from ignorance or fear of the unknown. Carol Orsag has listed the seven most common superstitions in the United States:
• sneezing—When God made man, the Judeo-Christian story goes, He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Roman citizens feared sneezing when a plague hit their city during the reign of Pope Gregory the Great. Maybe it was the devil which could enter a person during that unguarded moment of sneezing? After all, some did die from sneezing. Ergo, “God bless you” if said in the person’s presence seemed to keep the person from dying. The Gesundheits and God-bless-you’s annoy many non-believers and rationalists who are aware that the explosive, spasmodic and involuntary action results mainly from an irritation of the nasal mucous membrane.
• getting out of bed on the “wrong” side—The Romans thought the left side to be the “evil one.” Citizens entered a friend’s home with the right foot forward. At times, a “footman” was hired to insure proper entry of all guests. The English word sinister (meaning wicked or evil) is derived from the Latin word meaning “left side.”
• breaking a mirror—before mirrors, humans saw their “other side” by looking into lakes and pools. If the image was distorted, it was a mark of impending disaster. An “unbreakable” metal mirror of the early Egyptians and Greeks was valued because of its magical property of having no distortions. After glass mirrors were introduced, the Romans tagged the broken mirror a sign of bad luck which would last seven years, seven because that was the number of years the Romans believed humans are rejuvenated and become, in effect, a new person.
• spilling salt—salt once was rare and costly, and it was an economic waste to spill any. It was mixed into the foods used in the religious ceremonies of both the Greeks and Romans. In da Vinci’s painting of the “Last Supper,” Judas is shown having accidentally spilled salt onto the table.
• walking under ladders—a ladder which leans against a wall makes a triangle, and this signifies the Holy Trinity. Ergo, to cross into the sacred enclosed area is to weaken the powers of the gods and unleash the powers of evil spirits.
• encountering a black cat—Egyptians worshiped the cat and punished anyone who dared to kill one. In the Middle Ages, however, the black cat was linked to witches and Satan. Inasmuch as a witch was thought to be able to transform herself into a cat, a cat who crossed one’s path must be a witch in disguise.
• opening an umbrella indoors—as early as the 11th century B.C.E., umbrellas were used in the East by the political and religious hierarchy, not only as a protective measure against the hot sun rays but also to ward off any spirits who might do them harm. Because of the umbrella’s sacred relationship to the sun, it is wrong to open it in the shade.
• three vital good luck charms to protect one—(a) When Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden, Eve snatched a four-leaf clover as a remembrance of her days in Paradise; (b) when St. Dunstan, a blacksmith, encountered the Devil who asked to be “shoed,” St. Dunstan tied him up, inflicted pain until the Devil screamed for murder, and let him loose only when he promised never to enter a home protected by a horseshoe; also, the reason witches rode broomsticks was that they were deathly afraid of horses, so a horseshoe provided protection; also, a horseshoe’s crescent-shaped size like a moon is a sign of prosperity; and because a rabbit is so clever, speedy, and meets with other rabbits on moonlit evenings, carrying a rabbit’s foot became a sign of good fortune and the hind feet became a treasured amulet.
• nine rules of superstitious etiquette—(1) Eve and Adam were tempted on Friday; the biblical Flood began on Friday; Jesus died on Friday; thirteen men were at the Last Supper; Greek philosophers and mathematicians scorned thirteen as an “unperfect” number; in Norse mythology, there were twelve gods present when Loki, spirit of evil and dissension, stormed a banquet hall, making him the thirteenth guest, and killed Balder, hero and most revered of all the gods; ergo, take no risks or attempt any new enterprise on Friday the Thirteenth; (2) Do not hang a horseshoe with its prongs pointed upward, or the good luck will “run out”; (3) Do not light three cigarettes with one match, three being usually a lucky number but it represents the Holy Trinity and one should be careful of its use; (4) Wear clothing inside and out, for it is an excellent disguise to keep Death from recognizing you and singling you out as a victim; (5) Do not get married in May, the month Romans honored their dead and an unlucky time for lovers; (6) Do knock on wood three times after mentioning good luck, for Jesus died on a wooden cross; (7) Do not cross knives on the dinner table, for that would symbolize the crossing of daggers and swords in dueling matches and could bring on arguments; (8) Do enter and exit from the same door when visiting a friend’s house; also, if you leave for a time, then return, sit down outside the door and count to ten before your second entrance; and (9) Do not trip before you start out a new day; if you do, turn around three times and say, “I turn myself three times about and thus I put bad luck to rout.”
Noted individuals have been superstitious or commented about the subject:
• Shakespeare wrote, “For many men that stumble at the threshold / Are well foretold that danger lurks therein.”
• Mary Queen of Scots was said (by some) to have had her fortune told by a deck of cards before her death and was dealt a hand full of spades.
• Samuel Johnson never entered a house with his left foot first because it “brought down evil on the inmates.”
• Samuel Pepys wrote, “Now I am at a loss to know whether it be my hare’s foot which is my preservative against wind, for I never had a fit of collique since I wore it.”
• Napoleon Bonaparte suffered from ailurophobia (fear of cats) and the number thirteen (triskaidekaphobia).
• Charles Stewart Parnell never signed a legislative bill that contained thirteen clauses, not until one was added or subtracted.
• Thomas Henry Huxley told his son, Leonard, “The most remarkable achievement of the Jew was to impose on Europe for eighteen centuries his own superstitions.”
• Cornelius Vanderbilt had the legs of his bed placed in dishes of salt to ward off attacks from evil spirits.
• Al Jolson always wore old clothes to open a new show.
• Adolf Hitler favored the number seven (planned major military battles on the seventh of the month) and had the Nazi swastika designed to resemble an ancient Buddhist symbol representing, among other things, the wheel of life.
• Winston Churchill petted black cats to obtain good luck.
• President Harry S. Truman displayed a horseshoe over the door of his office in the White House.
• Somerset Maugham had the “evil eye” symbol carved into his fireplace mantel and had it stamped on his stationery and books.
“Have we lost our common sense?” Le Matin headlined a front-page story in Dakar, Senegal in 1997. At issue was a story about lynch mobs that had burned and beaten to death suspected sorcerers with powers to cause a man’s penis to vanish or shrink with a mere handshake. Le Soleil in Niger reported similar cases, saying that five had been killed by mobs. Scores of people died in similar bouts of hysteria in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. Meanwhile, police in West African cities tried to assure the public that allegations of vanishing penises are baseless and often are started by thieves who profit from the ensuing panic. The United States Social Security Administration has ruled that anyone assigned a number that includes the biblical mark of the Antichrist—666—can request a different number. “Christians are supposed to refuse the mark of the beast,” a mother complained to the Orange County register in California, and the father added, “I’m not a religious fanatic. The number is as offensive to me as if an African American were given a KKK on his card or a Jewish person had to have a swastika.” Astute “business” people—for example, psychics, fortune tellers, occultists, spiritualists—can make considerable amounts of money playing on people’s superstitions. Two practitioners of feng shui—the Chinese art of arranging the environment “harmoniously”–charged the real estate development firm Kaufman and Broad $6,000 to perform a four-hour “seven-star blessing” to cleanse the area—which previously had been a Native American burial site—of “negative” or “stagnant” energies. “So if nothing dreadful happens there, like in the movie Poltergeist, joked science writer Robert Sheaffer, “it’ll be proof that the feng shui was successful.” (See Eric Maple, Superstition and the Superstitious and Julie Forsyth Batchelor and Claudia De Lys, Superstitious? Here’s Why!) {CE; PA, Playboy, March 1997; Skeptical Inquirer, March-April 1999}
Suplee, Zelda (20th Century) Suplee was on the advisory board in 1972 of the Humanist Society of Greater New York.
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES In 1999, the eight of the twelve members of the U.S. Supreme Court were known to be members of the following religious denominations:
Roman Catholic
Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas Protestant Sandra Day O’Connor (Episcopalian); David Souter (Episcopalian); John Paul Stevens (no denomination given) Jewish: Stephen Breyer; Ruth Bader Ginsburg Humanist: None
Suri, Surindar S. (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Suri was a member of the sociology department at the University of California in Berkeley. In 1974 Suri wrote Politics and Society in India (1974). Upon returning to India, he worked to establish a college at Bangalore based on humanistic principles blended with Indian philosophy. {HNS}
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST: See the entry for Herbert Spencer.
SURVIVAL OF THE LUCKIEST: See the entry for Stephen Jay Gould.
Suryanarayana, A. (20th Century) In 1971, Suryanarayana and Jyothi Sankar founded for the Indian Rationalist a monthly, Free Thought. His wife, Ms. Vasundhara, has also been an active member of the Indian rationalist movement. {FUK}
Susanne, Charles (20th Century) Dr. Susanne, Director of the Centre for Bioethics at the Free University in Brussels, spoke at the Humanist World Congress in 1990. Enormous developments have taken place in genetics since DNA’s structure was discovered forty years ago. Biologists were accused of playing God. Now, however, “they can do better than God. They can reduce congenital diseases.” The human application of genetic research is enormous, and he feels humanists must look seriously at all its ramifications, formulating appropriate guidelines.
Susterich, Edward (20th Century) Susterich, from Wisconsin, is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Susterich, Maria (20th Century) Susterich, from Wisconsin, is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Sutherland, Alexander (1852–1902) Sutherland was taken from Glasgow by his father to Australia in 1864, where he eventually purchased Carlton College. He was a prolific writer and able teacher. His Victoria and its Metropolis (1888) is a history of Victoria. Sutherland’s rationalist views are the main inspiration for The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct (2 volumes, 1898). For eight years he was secretary of the Royal Society of Victoria. {RAT}
Donald Sutherland, Actor ent Internet Movie Database
Sutherland appeared on the June 13, 1999 broadcast of "Inside The Actors Studio" on the Bravo channel.
This program always ends with the interviewer asking the same series of questions of the featured actor. One of the questions is:
"If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you are at the Pearly Gates?"
Sutherland chuckled and replied:
"Oh, you know something? I'm so far away from believing that it exists, and the only thing I know are jokes about it."
When pressed by the interviewer to take the question hypothetically, he replied with this joke:
"You're just in time. We're casting the film. God has this girl..."
Suttner, Bertha (Gräfin Kinsky) [Baroness] (1843–1914)
An Austrian baroness, Suttner is known chiefly as an ardent pacifist. Her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder (1889, tr. Lay Down Your Arms), had a great social impact. Through her subsequent friendship with Alfred Nobel, she influenced him to establish the Nobel Prizes. She was the first woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1905. In her Memoirs, Suttner tells that in early years she rejected all religious beliefs. Later, she took up Spencer, Darwin, and Haeckel, adopting a vague pantheistic creed which is similar to Spencer’s agnosticism. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Sutton, Henry S. (19th Century) Sutton was the anonymous author of Quinquenergia, or Proposals for a New Practical Theology and Letters From a Father to a Son on Revealed Religion. {BDF}
SUTTON (England) HUMANIST GROUP The Sutton Humanist Group (IHEU) is at 29 Fairview Road, Sutton, Surrey SMI 4PD, United Kingdom; or telephone 0181 642 4577. {FD}
Sveen, Barbro (20th Century) A Norwegian humanist, Sveen attended in 1996 the international conference of humanists in Mexico City. A new law in Norway, she laments, has made it compulsory for children to attend some religious education. She is editor of the HEF magazine. E-mail: <sveen@human.no> and <fri.tanke@human.no>.
Svendsen, Borre (20th Century) A Norwegian humanist, Svendsen participated in 1996 at the international conference of humanists in Mexico City. Borre’s e-mail: <umoe@sn.no>.
Svensson, Gunnar (1951– ) Svensson, a computer consultant in Sweden, is a secularist and non-theist.
Svuták, Ivan (20th Century) Sviták, an author in Czechoslovakia, called himself a humanist.
Swableses, Margaret Ann (1869–1963) Swableses was a freethinker and an activist in Australia. A pioneer of the Victoria Socialist movement with Tom Mann in 1905, she was a colleague of Scott Bennett and Bernard O’Dowd. Swableses requested that upon her death that her body be cremated and there be no religious service. The eulogy address by Sir John V. Barry quoted from writings by Robert G. Ingersoll. {SWW}
Swaminathan (20th Century)
Swaminathan the Magician accompanied Abraham T. Kovoor, President of the Ceylon Rationalist Association, on a tour of India in order to advance the cause of rationalism. He and hypnotist P. K. Narayan in the 1970s exposed with their magic and hypnotism shows the tricks of Satya Sai Baba, educating the audience as to how suggestion sways devotees into getting into trances. With their speeches, they exhorted the audience to cultivate a critical outlook and a scientific spirit. {Chirala, India, Rationalist Essays, 1993}
Swan, Frederick W. (1903–c. 1975) Swan was an Australian atheist, rationalist, and architect. An early secretary of the Rationalist Society of South Australia, he became in 1970 president of the new Atheist Society of Australia. Later, he was active in Tasmania in promoting secular matters. {SWW}
Swancara, Frank (20th Century) A freethinker, Swancara wrote Bad By Products of Religion (1947) and Religion and Crime (1947). {FUS}
Swamy, Dalip S. (20th Century) Swamy, a Delhi academic, presented a paper, “Globalization, Nation State and Human Rights Movement, at the World Humanist Congress at Mumbai in January 1999. {The Radical Humanist, June 1999}
SWEARING
• Swearing includes
making profane oaths or cursing, drawing upon religious terms; i.e., “God damn you!”; “For Chrisake!”; “Jesus bloody fucking Christ on a crutch!”; “You Jesus freak!”; “Jew the person down [on his price]!”; “She’s a JAP [Jewish American princess]”; “the yin and yang dynamic”; “buddha sticks [herbal marijuana]; “Hymie-town [New York City]”; “priest bait [young boys]”; “and may Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all shit on your mother’s bones.”
and
making solemn declarations which invoke a deity or make some solemn vow: In United States courts, witnesses are required to swear on the Judeo-Christian Bible before testifying, swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth “so help me God.” Those who find this medieval, however, are allowed to “affirm” they will tell the truth. Lawyers Roger Cossack and Greta Van Susteren, who appear often on television programs, have noticed that “Witnesses can put their hand on the Bible and swear to tell the truth, or simply raise their hand and ‘avow’ to tell the truth. Both are promises to testify truthfully. We have seen witnesses promise just about every deity that they will testify truthfully—and five minutes later lie through their teeth.”
“Bad” or “foul” swearing presents a problem to rationalists. It is considered illogical for freethinkers to imitate the various religious examples, for how could a non-existent God damn anyone. And it is not “politically correct” to use some of the other swear words. For example, “bitch” is rightfully frowned upon by feminists, who cite it as a proper noun to describe the female dog. “Asshole” is understandably frowned upon by sodomists, who might cite it as an erotic source of pleasure. “Fuck” is certainly frowned upon by all with a happy sex life and who would not, not even to an enemy, suggest that copulation is an unpleasant experience. A 1970s musical group, the Sex Pistols, gained much notoriety by their use of vulgate swear words. As soon as these musicians appeared with their singer Johnny Rotten on radio or television and were asked by their host to say something, they eagerly complied, leaving station managers and networks with outcries from some of their listeners as well as complaints from their advertisers. In the 1990s, however, “realistic” scenes on television or in movies become box office hits. Martin Clunes, a British sit-com star, has suggested that by 2006 “the dreaded F-word” will be thought acceptable even in programs for children, adding, “It’s only a word!” Many agree, but they pity the rebellious today, young or old, who find it almost impossible to say anything in order to shock. {The Economist, 22 June 1996; USA Weekend, 26-28 April 1996}
Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772) Swedenborg the scientist was a mystic known for “his odd mixture of scripturalism and innovating dogmatism.” Of the Adam and Eve myth, he wrote, “For who can suppose that the creation of the world could have been as there described?” He reportedly disliked hearing trinitarian sermons and for many years avoided going to church. But after professing that he understood spirituality because “heaven was opened” to him in 1745 (his having received the true sense of the Scriptures from the Lord Himself), Swedenborg inaugurated the New Church and, although he may not have intended to establish a new sect, Swedenborgianism developed. An eighteen-volume edition of Swedenborg’s writings was published between 1901 and 1916. Some followers believe a few individuals can see auras over other people’s heads, indicating (depending upon the aura’s color) the number of past existences the people have had. One follower, Gustavus III, an ardent admirer of Voltaire, was said to have died “with the fortitude and resignation of a Christian” on the occasion of his having been assassinated. Robertson, however, states the King “was indeed flighty and changeable, and after growing up a Voltairean was turned into a credulous mystic, the dupe of pseudo-Swedenborgian charlatans; but there is small sign of religious earnestness in his fashion of making his dying confession.” Robert Frost, asked Abbott religion, replied that his mother had been attracted to Swedenborgianism, avoiding any other answer to the question. The sect is exceedingly small in numbers today, but it appeals to numbers of mystics. Upon his death, Swedenborg was buried in London in 1772. In 1908, however, the body was removed to the cathedral in Uppsala, Sweden. Outside are striking mounds in which early Vikings were buried. {CE; ER; JMR; JMRH; RE}
SWEDENBORGIAN CHURCH The Swedenborgian Church, organized in 1792 in the United States, is at 48 Sargent St., Newton, Massachusetts 02158.
SWEDISH HUMANISM AND SECULARISM Finngeir Hiorth, the Norwegian scholar, has written Secularism in Sweden (1994), the fullest history to date of humanism in Sweden. He estimated that twenty-eight percent of the Swedes in 1994 are secularists but that only eight hundred are members of the Swedish Human-Etiska Forbundet i Sverige, or Humanist-Ethical Association. In 1995, Mikael Goransson was elected its presiding officer. Its bi-monthly publication is Human-Etik, Box 108, S-649 23 Hallsberg. In 1996, Sweden voted to denationalize its Lutheran Evangelical Church, one of the world’s oldest remaining state churches. The king no longer had to be a Lutheran, and the long union of church and state started its planned end. Since 1593, all Swedes have had to belong to the Lutheran Church. Since the 1850s, however, they were no longer forced to be baptized, and in 1951 they could legally quit the church and stop paying it 1.1% of their annual income in taxes. Commencing in the year 2000, the church, rather than the state, will appoint bishops. Botulf-bladet, a quarterly of HEF-Västeras, is at Torsgatan 47, 1 tr., 113 37 Stockholm, Sweden. The journal’s e-mail: <christiaan.vos@vasteras.mail.telia.com>. The E-mail address for Fri Tanke is <gunnar.staldal@stockholm.mail.telia.com>. Fritänkeren (Freethinker), a Swedish quarterly, is at Torsgatan 47, 1 tr., 113 37 Stockholm, Sweden Humanisten, the humanist magazine, is available from Box 5048, S402 21 Göteborg, Sweden. E-mail: <mikael.goransson@migor.se>. Human-Etiska Forbundet i Sverige, which is an associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, is at Box 5048, 402 21, Göteborg, Sweden. The Swedish Humanist and Ethical Association on the Web is at <http://hem.passagen.se/humanist>. Fredrik Bendz, the Swedish webmaster for humanism, is online with “The Page of Reason” at <http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz>. (See entries for Fredrik Bendz, Mikael Göransson, Per Christian Jersild, Scandinavian Unbelievers, and Herbert Tingsten.)
SWEDISH-AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT Swedish-American freethinkers are described in Gordon Stein’s Freethought in the United States.
Julia Sweeney, actress/comedian ent Internet Movie Database UPDATED
Sweeney is probably best known for her sexually-ambiguous character 'Pat' on Saturday Night Live when she was a cast member a few years back.
Michael Shermer recounts a joint appearance with Sweeney on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect in his e-Skeptic Newsletter for December 12, 2000:
[Julia] was raised a Catholic, did the K-12 Catholic school sequence, etc. But then a few years ago she went to the Galapagos islands and had an epiphany of sorts. Instead of finding God, she found Darwin. She actually read the Origin of Species (a rarity these days, even among evolutionary biologists), and she described it to me as "a page turner." Wow! Then she read my book HOW WE BELIEVE, joined the skeptics, ordered all of the back issues of Skeptic and plowed through them, and has been reading skeptical and free thought literature ever since. On the show she talked about how she realized that all these creation stories are myths, and, in as articulate a manner as I've ever heard, she explained why living in a world of reality is so much more fulfilling than living in a world of fantasy. She is a wonderful ally to have for science and skepticism and I can't wait to watch her video monologue "And God Said, 'Ha!'" and her upcoming monologue she is working on about all these experiences of finding Darwin, science, and skepticism.
Julia Sweeney, actress/comedian ent Internet Movie Database UPDATED
Sweeney is probably best known for her sexually-ambiguous character 'Pat' on Saturday Night Live when she was a cast member a few years back.
Michael Shermer recounts a joint appearance with Sweeney on Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect in his e-Skeptic Newsletter for December 12, 2000:
[Julia] was raised a Catholic, did the K-12 Catholic school sequence, etc. But then a few years ago she went to the Galapagos islands and had an epiphany of sorts. Instead of finding God, she found Darwin. She actually read the Origin of Species (a rarity these days, even among evolutionary biologists), and she described it to me as "a page turner." Wow! Then she read my book HOW WE BELIEVE, joined the skeptics, ordered all of the back issues of Skeptic and plowed through them, and has been reading skeptical and free thought literature ever since. On the show she talked about how she realized that all these creation stories are myths, and, in as articulate a manner as I've ever heard, she explained why living in a world of reality is so much more fulfilling than living in a world of fantasy. She is a wonderful ally to have for science and skepticism and I can't wait to watch her video monologue "And God Said, 'Ha!'" and her upcoming monologue she is working on about all these experiences of finding Darwin, science, and skepticism.
Sweeney, Julia (10 Oct 1961 - ) Sweeney launched her show business career with the Groundlings improv troupe in 1986. In 1990 she began as a four-season cast member of Saturday Night Live, appearing as an androgynous character, Pat, one that led to It’s Pat, her own movie. She also had a role in Pulp Fiction. In a solo performance titled “God Said, ‘Ha!’ ” she made her theatre debut. She discussed family, career, love, and death, telling how in 1994 she had learned that her brother Mike had lymphoma. After he moved into her Hollywood bungalow, the two were joined by her parents along with ten suitcases, leading to all kinds of comic happenings, to the point that life became almost surreal. Michael Shermer, in his e-Skeptic Newsletter (12 Dec 2000), tells of being with Sweeney on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect:
[Julia] was raised a Catholic, did the K-12 Catholic school sequence, etc. But then a few years ago she went to the Galapagos Islands and had an epiphany of sorts. Instead of finding God, she found Darwin. She actually read the Origin of Species (a rarity these days, even among evolutionary biologists), and she described it to me as "a page turner." Wow! Then she read my book How We Believe, joined the skeptics, ordered all of the back issues of Skeptic and plowed through them, and has been reading skeptical and free-thought literature ever since. On the show she talked about how she realized that all these creation stories are myths, and, in as articulate a manner as I've ever heard, she explained why living in a world of reality is so much more fulfilling than living in a world of fantasy. She is a wonderful ally to have for science and skepticism and I can't wait to watch her video monologue "And God Said, 'Ha!' " and the upcoming monologue she is working on about all these experiences of finding Darwin, science, and skepticism. {CA}
Sweet, Nick (20th Century) Sweet is an English poet and novelist. He has reviewed Camus’ The First Man in New Humanist (February 1996). Also, he has written about Raymond Carver, an American short story writer; and about the respective worth of literature and working for the poor, with special reference to Sartre and Vargas Llosa. {New Humanist, June 1996, November 1997}
Sweet, William Warren (20th Century) Sweet wrote Religion in Colonial America (1942). {GS}
Swenson, May (1917–1989) Swenson, a poet and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, wrote In Other Words, New Poems (1987). She was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. Of humanism she wrote in 1989 to the present author:
I subscribe to Secular Humanism. Thank you for taking notice of the opinions of women, which I think, was not the case in the questionnaire some 40 years ago.
Swenson, a lesbian, was an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. {GL; WAS, 4 February 1989}
Swerdlow, Lanny (20th Century) Swerdlow is president of Portland’s Center for Rational Thought. He wrote, “Atheists Arise! We Too Can Be Warm and Fuzzy” in Secular Nation(April-June, 1999). (See entry for Oregon Rationalists, Humanists.) {FD}
Swift, Graham (20th Century) Peter Faulkner, reviewing Swift’s Last Orders (1996), found it the most interesting of his novels since Waterland. “Swift’s view of life,” Faulkner states, “is that of a kind of stoic humanist who respects those who make whatever they can out of the small changes that life gives them (or us). And he leaves us with the question of how far humanism might hope or help to give shape and commitment to lives that in our present culture so manifestly lack it.” {New Humanist, June 1996}
Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) Swift, the English author of Gulliver’s Travels, was ordained an Anglican priest and in 1695 was given the small prebend of Kilroot in Ireland. Unable to make a success there, he returned to England. His A Tale of a Tub (1696, published 1704) was a satire on religious excesses which was intended to divert Hobbes’s Leviathan and the wits of the age from picking holes in the weak sides of religion and government. His series of pamphlets, Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708), was followed by Letter Concerning the Sacramental Test, an attack on the Irish Presbyterians which made him unpopular with the Whigs. In 1713 Swift became dean of St. Patrick’s, all the while writing many political works and spending the final thirty years of his life there. Nearly all his works were published anonymously. Only one, Gulliver’s Travels, resulted in a payment (£200). Despite its author’s never having traveled abroad, the work described Lemuel Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput, a land inhabited by tiny people who diminutive size renders all their pompous activities absurd. He then goes to Brobdingnag, a land populated by giants who are amused when Gulliver tells them about the glories of England. Then on to Laputa and Lagado, peopled by quack philosophers and scientists. Then to the land of the Houhnhnms, where horses behave with reason and men, called Yahoos, behave as beasts. The work was a ruthless satire of human follies. Swift attacked Bishop Burnet in his A Preface to the B–p of S–r–m’s Introduction (1713). His Mr. C–ns’s Discourse on Free Thinking, Put into Plain English, By Way of Abstract, For Use of the Poor (1713) was a satire on Anthony Collins, the leading freethinker of the day. His pamphlet, A Modest Proposal (1729) satirically suggests that children of the poor be sold as food for the tables of the rich: “a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, baked or boiled.” Victoria Glendinning’s biography, Jonathan Swift (1998), discusses Swift’s love life, tells the nature of his meeting and his relationship with the eight-year-old Esther Johnson (whom he called Stella) as well as with Vanessa (Hester Vanhomrigh), and speculates that Swift possibly married Stella in some kind of garden ceremony. Gossip was that perhaps he was gay, for no union appears to have occurred—however, at that time up to 20% of the aristrocacy never married. Glendinning found possibly another reason: Stella could have been the daughter of Sir William Temple and Temple’s sister, Martha Giffard; and Swift just possibly could have been the son of Temple’s father, Sir John Temple. Swift spent a third of his income on charities and saved another third to found St. Patrick’s Hospital for Imbeciles (opened 1757). Toward the end of his life Swift suffered the decay of his faculties, because of Ménière’s disease, leading to gossip that he was insane. Swift is buried in St. Patrick’s, Dublin, with the following epitaph: ubi saeva indignatio ulterius cor lacerare nequit. {CE; OEL; TYD}
Swift, Lindsay (19th Century) Swift wrote Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (1901). {FUS}
Swift, Morrison Isaac (Born 1856) Swift, a freethinker, wrote The Evil Religion Does (1927). {GS}
Swift, W. Frank (1901–1933)
Swift was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I in 1933. A British-Canadian Unitarian in training for Ethical leadership in St. Louis, New York, and Boston, he unfortunately died in an automobile accident, according to James F. Hornback, “as a good Samaritan on icy roads.” (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EW; HM1}
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837–1909) The London-born Swinburne was brought up piously, but before his twenty-first year he had abandoned all belief in Christianity. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) were attacked for their pagan sentiments and sensuality, and this English Victorian poet was an iconoclast in virtually all he undertook. His Atalanta in Calydon (1865) denounced “the supreme evil, God,” a phrase which disturbed, among others, Christina Rossetti. The book’s aggressive hedonism and skepticism was liked by generations of younger readers. His contempt for theism also repudiates the asceticism of Christianity, in keeping with his being a nominal Unitarian. “Hertha” he described as one of his “mystic atheistic democratic anthropologic” poems that contained “the most in it of my deliberate thought and personal feeling or faith.” In Songs Before Sunrise (1871), Swinburne glorifies freethought and republicanism. McCabe wrote of Swinburne: “Like Shelley he became an atheist and a republican at Oxford and, although he somehow blended his hatred of tyrants—he openly rejoiced when Orsini tried to assassinate Napoleon III and wrote magnificent poems in praise of European rebels—with High Toryism in domestic politics, he never wavered. In some of his Poems and Ballads he is very contemptuous of Christianity and its ascetic rules.” For his last thirty years he was in poor health and was cared for by a friend of Rossetti, Theodore Watts-Dunston, who in 1879 possibly saved Swinburne’s life by weaning him from alcohol and from friends who had encouraged him to drink. Swinburne continued to write for thirty years, as a result. The story is told in The Alyson Almanac (1989) that when he was living alone with a monkey on the Isle of Wight Swinburne invited a person home and, “once there, began making advances on the young man. The monkey, overcome with jealousy, attacked his guest, who ran away.” Upon his death in 1909, to quote his lines on the death of Edward Trelawny, Swinburne was “moored at last on the stormless shore.” His complete works, in twenty volumes, were edited by Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise. He died peacefully. Up to the last he chatted with his friends, and his illness was brief and almost painless. Swinburne was buried in the cemetery at Bonchurch “in the midst of the graves of his family.” His will directed that there should be no religious ceremony at his funeral; however, his executor, Watts-Dunton, allowed the rector of Bonchurch to read part of the Church of England burial service, and to offer some pious reflections of his own. Several of those present cried “Shame!” {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Terry L. Meyers; Freethinker, 25 April 251909; GL; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Swinburne, Richard (20th Century) Swinburne has been described by Paul Edwards in God and the Philosophers as “one of the most influential Christian philosophers in the Anglo-Saxon world.” He developed a new formulation for the existence of God, emphasizing that “[t]he orderliness of the universe is a very striking fact about the universe,” then holding that the universe “might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not—it is very orderly.” Thus, “If there is no explanation in terms of the action of God,” this orderliness must be one of “coincidence.” Because “the order of the world” is “very improbable a priori,” Swinburne concludes that it is evidence for the existence of God. According to Edwards, such an argument is logically and philosophically invalid. {Free Inquiry, Winter 1998-1999}
Swindler, Adrian C. (20th Century) Swindler, in The Trinity: An Absurdity Borrowed from Paganism, wrote, “At first, Christianity did not hold to the Trinity doctrine. That doctrine developed slowly and did not become officially a creedal fact until C.E. 325.”
Swinny, Shapland Hugh (Born 1857)
Starting in 1901, Swinny was President of the London Positivist Society. In 1904 he became President of the English Positivist Committee. In 1905, he edited the Positivist Review. Swinny was a member of the Council of the Sociological Society, which he chaired from 1907 to 1909. His chief work is a History of Ireland (1890). {RAT; TRI}
SWITZERLAND FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS The following Swiss groups and magazines are humanistic:
• Frei Denker is published by Freidenker Vereinigung Der Schweiz (IHEU), Postfach 14, 8545 Rickenbach, Switzerland. • Le Libre Penseur (The Freethinker), a quarterly of Association Suisse des Libres Penseurs, Case Postale 131, CH-1000 Lausanne-17, Switzerland • World Union of Freethinkers, Postfach 6207, 3001 Bern, Switzerland. Swiss signers of Humanist Manifesto 2000 were Diana Brown and Roy W. Brown. {FD}
SWITZERLAND UNITARIANS Unitarians in Geneva or Bern can be contacted by telephoning (41) 31-352 3721 or (41) 52-232-0051.
Swomley, John M. (20th Century) Swomley, an emeritus professor of social ethics at St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, is president of Americans for Religious Liberty. He has written for The Humanist (USA) and in 1998 was named the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Distinguished Service Awardee.
Swope, Herbert Bayard (1882–1958) In 1917, Swope, a journalist and policy consultant, won a Pulitzer Prize for being the best newspaper reporter. In the 1950s, he was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
SYCHOPHANT • Sychophant, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Syers, Edgar (20th Century) Syers, after being a lieutenant in the Middlesex Regiment, was a member of the Compton Comedy Company. He has written for various freethought magazines and was a director of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT}
SYLLOGISM • Syllogism, n. A logical formula consisting of a major and a minor assumption and an inconsequent. e.g.,
Major Premise: Sixty men can do a piece of work sixty times as quickly as one man. Minor Premise: One man can dig a posthole in sixty seconds; therefore— Conclusion: Sixty men can dig a posthole in one second.
This may be called the syllogism arithmetical, in which, by combining logic and mathematics, we obtain a double certainty and are twice blessed. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Sylvester, Arnold E. (20th Century)
Sylvester has been a president of the American Ethical Union, and he was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2; EU, Howard B. Radest}
SYMBOLIC LOGIC or MATHEMATICAL LOGIC Symbolic logic is a formalized system of deductive logic which employs abstract symbols for the various aspects of natural language. In the mid-19th century, Augustus De Morgan and George Boole developed the study, and it was further developed by W. S. Jevons, C. S. Peirce, Ernst Schröder, Gottlob Frege, Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, David Hilbert, and others. Negation, conjunction, and alternation: these are the basic connectives. The negation of a statement is false if the original statement is true and true if the original statement is false—negation corresponds to “it is not the case that,” or simply “not” in ordinary language. The conjunction of two statements is true only if both are true; it is false in all other instances—conjunction corresponds to “and” in ordinary language. The alternation, or disjunction, of two statements is false only if both are false and is true in all other instances—alternation corresponds to the nonexclusive sense of “or” in ordinary language, as opposed to the exclusive “either . . . or . . . but not both.” (Texts which go into detail are David Hilbert and Wilhelm Ackermann’s Principles of Mathematical Logic (1950); and two books by W. V. Quine: Mathematical Logic (1968) and Methods of Logic [3rd Edition, 1972].) {CE}
SYMBOLS A symbol is something that represents something else. Scales often are the symbol of justice; the scepter, royal power; a thistle, Scotland; ichthus, Christianity. A scepter, symbolic of a god’s or a human’s authority, is often a phallic symbol. A lily is associated with purity, innocence, resurrection, chastity, the Virgin Mary, and Easter. Freethought organizations are more apt to utilize a logo, which is short for logogram. (See entry for Ichthus.}
Syme, David (1827–1908) Syme was a Scottish rationalist, social reformer, and newspaper proprietor. Rejecting Calvinism, he proclaimed that the doctrine of original sin, of predestination, and of the arbitrary salvation of the elect were all abhorrent to his sense of justice. Upon visiting Germany in 1848, he became more interested in Hegelianism than in theology. After he and his brother Ebenezer migrated to Australia in 1852, they purchased The Age, which helped play a dominant role in setting examples for civic discussion and social dissertation. McCabe writes of Syme, “In several works on religion he rejects Christianity and calls himself a pantheist, though his biographer says that ‘his religion was humanity.’ ” {JM; RAT; RE; SWW}
Symes, Agnes Taylor (1866?–1935) Symes, formerly Wilson, was an early Australian secularist. The second wife of Joseph Symes, she helped in the printing and publishing of his tracks as well as Charles Knowlton’s birth control pamphlet, “Fruits of Philosophy.” {SWW} Symes, Joseph (1841–1906) A Scottish-Australian freethinker and publisher, Symes became vice president of the National Secular Society and helped launch the Freethinker in London, with George William Foote as its first editor. Originally, Symes had been a Methodist circuit preacher. But, doubting orthodoxy, he resigned in 1872 and preached his first open freethought lecture at Newcastle in 1876. He made major contributions to secularism on two continents, and his views on sex have been said to have been a century ahead of their time. From 1882 to 1884, Symes and Thomas Walker were lecturers for the Australasian Secular Association. In 1883 he established The Liberator. From 1884 to 1904, Symes edited the weekly Melbourne publication, Liberator. He has been called one of the most effective freethought journalists. His militant atheism and propagandist style did not endear him to all secularists, but his ability, sincerity, and sense of purpose place him in the top bracket of secular achievers. He wrote for the Freethinker “My Twenty Years’ Fight for Freethought in Australia,” and other of his works included “Christianity Essentially a Persecuting Religion” and “The Christ of the New Testament not Historic but Dramatic.” Symes returned to England in 1906, dying December 29 of the same year. The conclusion of a series of articles, “They Are Coming Round,” appeared in the Freethinker of December 30. He was lucid within a few days of his death. Shortly before his last illness, which came very suddenly, he spoke to Foote, with some feeling of pride, of the way in which he was standing the English winter. “A few days afterwards he was very ill,” Foote reported, “but he refused to have a doctor until Christmas night.” {BDF; EU, Nigel H. Sinnott; FO; FUK; RAT; RE; RSR; SWW}
Symes, Stella Bradlaugh (1894–1935) Symes was an Australian secularist, gynecologist, and venereologist. The only child of Joseph and Agnes Symes, she chose the field of medicine. In 1935 when a fire destroyed their house, she died from burns after unsuccessfully trying to save her mother. {SWW}
Symonds, Carol (20th Century) A marriage counselor, Symonds signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Symonds, Emerson (20th Century) Symonds, when he signed Humanist Manifesto II, was a director of the Sensory Awareness Center. {HM2}
Symonds, John Addington (1840–1893) Symonds was an English poet and author, the son of an eminent physician. Because he suffered from tuberculosis, he spent much of his life in Italy and Switzerland. In his work, Symonds scoffed at the idea that the Renaissance artists owed their excellence to religious inspiration. Symonds’s largest work was Renaissance in Italy (1875–1886, 7 volumes), but he wrote volumes on Jonson, Sidney, Shelley, Whitman, and Michelangelo. In addition he translated the autobiography of Cellini and much Greek and Italian poetry. Among his wide circle of literary friends were Lear, Swinburne, Stephen, and Stevenson. Although his father had taught him that the love of men was evil, Symonds became infatuated with one choirboy after another while a fellow at Magdalen College, and he suffered several nervous breakdowns. In Switzerland, where he moved, he found that homosexuality was not a crime and one could admire the human body more openly than in England. Symonds was much attracted by the Hellenism of the Renaissance, and both his prose and poetry show his concept of Platonic love and his admiration for male beauty. Although he married in 1864, he acknowledged his homosexuality and campaigned, discreetly, for legal reform and more outspoken recognition of homosexuality as being a congenital condition. After siring four daughters, he arrived at a liberal understanding with his wife which allowed him the asexual freedom he craved. “We maintain,” he wrote as a homosexual, “that we have the right to exist after the fashion which nature made us. And if we cannot alter your laws, we shall go on breaking them. You may condemn us to infamy, exile, prison—as you formerly burned witches. You may degrade our emotional instincts and drive us into vice and misery. But you will not eradicate inverted sexuality.” He also wrote in his Memoirs (1890), “I can also defend, on what appears to me sufficient grounds, a large amount of promiscuity. In the very nature of the sexual contract between two males there inheres an element of instability. No children come of the connection. There can be no marriage ceremonies, no marriage settlements, no married life in common. Therefore, the parties are free, and the sexual flower of comradeship may spring afresh for each of them wherever favourable soil is found.” H. D. Brown, one of his biographers, wrote that Symonds rejected not only Christianity but also any belief in a future life. {BDF; CE; GL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Symons, Arthur (1865–1945) Symons is a poet and dramatist who said he did not reject Christianity because “it had never taken hold of me.” He was a leader of the Symbolists in England and interpreted French decadent poetry to the English through translations. Symons edited Savoy (1896) until a period of insanity, which he described in his Confessions (1930) and which incapacitated him from 1908 to 1910. His chief critical work is The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). In Spiritual Adventures (1905), Symons wrote that as a boy the prayers in church “made me ashamed as if I were unconsciously helping to repeat absurdities to God.” {CE; RAT; RE; TRI}
SYNCRETISM In philosophy or religion, syncretism is the reconciliation or fusion of differing systems of belief. For example, Umberto Eco, in mentioning “the Black Rome” in a novel, referred to the mixing in Brazil of Roman Catholicism and Candomblé. St. George, for instance, is also called Ogum, the god of war and of metals. Cardinal Lucas Moreira Neves in 1987 found the trend toward fusion of the two religions harmful, adding, “I am going to continue combating syncretism.” Such practices were understandable when slaves were forced to abandon African beliefs, he said, but “now, with total freedom of religion in Brazil, everyone must follow their own faith, without mixtures.” The Rev. Pierre Mathon illustrated his being in agreement, celebrating a “Mass of repudiation” of religious practices that he described as “demonic.” (See entry for Candomblé.) {Larry Rohter, The New York Times, 10 January 2000}
SYNECHISM: See entry for Charles Sanders Peirce.
Synge, (Edmond) J(ohn) M(iddleton) (1871–1909) Synge, the Irish poet and dramatist born of Protestant parents, was an important figure in the Irish Literary Renaissance. His first play, In the Shadow of the Glen (1903), was a grim one-act peasant comedy, in which an elderly husband feigns death to test his wife’s fidelity. Riders to the Sea (1904) is an elegiac tragedy in which an elderly mother stoically anticipates “a great rest” after the death of the last of her six sons. His most controversial play was The Playboy of the Western World (1907), because it created a furor of resentment among Irish patriots stung by Synge’s spoof of heroic ideals and nationalism. David Tribe labels Synge an outright freethinker, pointing to his anti-clerical The Tinker’s Wedding. However, Synge is not known ever to have professed being a non-theist. From 1897 on, Synge suffered from Hodgkin’s disease, and his last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, was completed while he was dying. Yeats said of Synge, “He was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind,” and described him in “In Memory of Major Gregory” as one who had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart In a most desolate stony place, Towards nightfall upon a race Passionate and simple like his heart. {CE; OEL}
Syphers, John (19th Century) Syphers, a freethinker, wrote Gods and God-Houses (189–?) and The Devil’s Due Bills, or Give the Devil His Due (c. 1890?). {GS}
SYPHILIS A most dangerous venereal disease, syphilis is probably ancient in origin although evidence exists that it may have been transported to Europe by Columbus’s returning crew members. It is almost always transmitted by sexual contact, but one can be infected through an open wound or lesion that could permit the organisms to enter a body. It can also occur through infected blood or plasma and from an infected mother to her fetus. Pandarus’s farewell speech from the epilogue of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida includes the line, “Neapolitan bone-rot,” Neapolitan being the period slang for syphilis. Measure for Measure includes references to infectious sores and madness due to the disease, as do A Comedy of Errors, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. (A&U, June 1999; CE}
SYRIAN HUMANISTS: See entry for Sadik Al Azm of the University of Damascus, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Sytsma, Curt (20th Century) In every age, the bigot’s rage requires another focus, Another devil’s forced on stage by hatred’s hocus-pocus. The devil used to be the Jew and then it was the witches; And then it was the Negroes who Were digging in the ditches. The devil once was colored pink And labeled Communistic; Now, all at once, in just a blink The devil’s humanistic. {The Utah Humanist, January 1998}
Szabo, Arpad (1934– ) The Rev. Szabo is Vice President of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists. He was secretary of the Romanian Bishopric in Chuj from 1958 to 1965 and from 1965 to 1976 the minister of the Chuj Unitarian Church. From 1977 to 1978, Szabo studied at Meadville/Lombard Theological School in Chicago. An estimated 80,000 Romanians are Unitarian Universalists. (See entry for Romanian Unitarians.)
Szalanski, Andrea (20th Century) Szalanski is the managing editor of Free Inquiry. She is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism.
Szasz, Thomas (1920– ) A professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Medical School, the Hungarian born Dr. Szasz (pronounced: sass) was named 1973 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. Szasz is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and is a contributing editor on Free Inquiry. He has written Psychiatric Justice (1965);The Insanity Plea and the Insanity Verdict (1974), which argues that the insanity plea should be abolished; Cruel Compassion (1994); and Our Right to Drugs (1996). With Milton Friedman, he wrote On Liberty and Drugs (1992). Szasz has been criticized negatively by many whereas others credit him with having done more than most in alerting the American public about the potential dangers of an excessively psychiatrized society. “In a free society,” Szasz claims in one of his controversial views, “a person must have the right to injure or kill himself.” He also holds that “the poor need jobs and money, not psychoanalysis.” {HNS2} Szilard, Leo (1898–1964) A Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist and biophysicist, Szilard with Enrico Fermi developed the first self-sustained nuclear reactor based on uranium fission. Although he was one of the first to realize the military possibilities of his discoveries, he actively protested nuclear warfare and supported the use of nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes. In 1960 he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In Second Thoughts About Atomic Power: Report of the Committee on Social and Political Implications (1945), Szilard wrote, “If no efficient international agreement is achieved, the race for nuclear armaments will be on in earnest not later than the morning after our first demonstration of the existence of nuclear weapons. . . . The best possible atmosphere for the achievement of an international agreement could be achieved if America could say to the rest of the world, ‘You see what sort of weapon we had but did not use.’ ” {CE; HNS2} Szimhart, Joseph P. (20th Century) Szimhart is a specialist in controversial new religions, therapies, and cults. He has worked as a consultant to help groups and individuals to understand or reevaluate participation in questionable behaviors and beliefs. Szimhart writes for Skeptical Inquirer.
Szykowny, Rick (20th Century) Szykowny was an executive editor as well as an interim co-editor of The Humanist. In 1994 he wrote a searing attack on the journal’s publisher, the American Humanist Association (AHA):
Let’s face it: Organized humanism in the United States doesn’t have anything near the resources or the political clout wielded by the religious right; nor is it attracting significant numbers of young people, working-class people, people of color, or women to its ranks.
The AHA president, Michael Werner, berated Szykowny and tried to get co-editor Gerry O’Sullivan to intervene. When O’Sullivan declined, citing editorial autonomy, Werner dismissed him. The honorary AHA president, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., immediately pulled his name from the magazine’s editorial advisory board and reportedly said he was looking into resigning his honorary presidency, also, noting that “to have an organization is, in a sense, antihumanist.” Following the disruption, Szykowny in the November-December 1994 issue of The Humanist was listed as “Associate Editor/Permissions” but is no longer with them.
