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From Philosopedia
Tabash, Edward (20th Century) Tabash spoke on the need for tolerance among atheists at their First Annual Atheist Alliance Conference in 1994 in California. A Beverly Hills, California lawyer, he is the chairman of the Outreach Committee of the Council for Secular Humanism for the Los Angeles area. Tabash has served on the board of directors of the California Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Also, he is a trustee of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. {“Why I Support President Clinton,” Free Inquiry, Spring 1996}
Taber, Henry Morehouse (Born 1825) Taber, who was born in Westport, Connecticut, engaged in the cotton business in New York City. He married a Presbyterian clergyman’s daughter and attended church with her “for the pleasure of her company” up until the time she died, at which time he stopped. Taber wrote Faith or Fast (1897). Highly esteemed by Robert Ingersoll, Taber ordered that there be no religious services and that his body be cremated. Like so many, he was a churchman in name only. {PUT}
Tabler, Barbara M. (1916–1996) A founding member of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, Tabler signed Humanist Manifesto II. She was noted for singing freethought songs at humanist conferences. {HM2; HNS2}
Tabler, Ward (20th Century) Tabler, who has taught at Starr King School, signed Humanist Manifesto II. He is on the editorial board of The Humanist. {HM2}
TABOO: See entry for Animism.
TABULA RASA John Locke believed that a child’s mind is a tabula rasa, Latin for “blank state.” We start life, he explained, with a mind that is new, fresh, unmarked, uninfluenced. {DCL}
Tacitus (Cornelius Tacitus) (c. 55–c. 117) Tacitus, the Roman historian, was known for his high moral tone as well as his criticism of contemporary Rome. His observation of the Jews was that they, unlike members of other religions, refused to bow to polytheism on certain occasions, as if their views were exclusive. As a result, he viewed Judaism negatively. In addition, he wrote in Thebaid, “Christianity is a pestilent superstition.”
Tadema, Lawrence Alma [Sir] (1836–1912) Tadema became an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1876 and a full Academician in 1879. His first notable picture, “Clothilde at the Tomb of Her Grandchildren,” was exhibited in 1858, and for years he was devoted to historical subjects. He also painted scenes of Greek and Roman life. Tadema was knighted in 1899 and received the Order of Merit in 1905. He was an agnostic. {RAT}
Taft, William Howard [President; Chief Justice of the Supreme Court] (1857–1930) Taft, the 27th United States President, also served as Chief Justice from 1921 to 1930. He defeated William Jennings Bryan in 1908 and became Theodore Roosevelt’s successor. Taft once wrote: “If a man can be a Christian only when he believes in the literal truth of the creed as it is recited in the orthodox evangelical churches, then we Unitarians are not Christians. A Unitarian believes that Jesus founded a new religion and a new religious philosophy on the love of God for man, and of men for one another, and for God, and taught it by his life and practice, with such Heaven-given sincerity, sweetness, simplicity, and all-compelling force that it lived after him in the souls of men, and became the basis for a civilization struggling toward the highest ideals. Unitarians, however, do not find the evidence of the truth of many traditions which have attached themselves to the life and history of Jesus to be strong enough to overcome the presumption against supernatural intervention in the order of nature. They feel the life of Jesus as a man to be more helpful to them as a religious inspiration, than if he is to be regarded as God in human form.” Had he made the letter public, he would most certainly have hurt his chances in politics. When offered the presidency of Yale University, he had declined, saying all previous presidents had been Congregationalists and “I do not believe in the divinity of Christ, and there are many other of the postulates of the orthodox creed to which I cannot subscribe.” Although doubters have stated the 332-pound Taft changed his mind, he is quoted in Henry F. Pringle’s The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (1939) as saying, “I am a Unitarian. I believe in God.” {CE; TYD; U; UU}
Tagore, Rabindranath [Sir] (1861–1941) Tagore, a Bengali poet and guru who wrote the national anthem of India, was a Unitarian. He was the author of more than fifty dramas, one hundred books of verse, forty volumes of novels and other fiction, much of which denounced nationalism and violence. In Sadhanaq: The Realization of Life (1913) Tagore emphasized philosophic sentiments in keeping with sacred Hindu writing. Writing in Bengali, he translated his work into English. Tagore traveled widely, liked the West’s ability to industrialize but deprecated what he said was its lack of spirituality. In 1913, he received a Nobel Prize in Literature, especially for Gitanjali (1912), his collection of poetry. According to McCabe, Tagore had rejected both Christianity and all forms of the Hindu religion, and his biographer, H. D. Brownshows that he had no belief in any future life. McCabe calls Tagore an atheist, the Unitarians claim he was a Unitarian, and some say he was a Unitarian atheist, a category not uncommon among Unitarians. The Tagore Center in Urbana, Illinois, holds annual festivals in Tagore’s honor. When Tagore visited Urbana in 1912, he addressed the Unitarian congregation and returned several times to lecture. (For a discussion of Tagore’s differences with Gandhi, for whom he had popularized the descriptive term “Mahatma,” or great soul, see Amartya Sen’s “Tagore and His India,” The New York Review of Books, 27 June 1997.) {CE; HNS2; JM; RE; U; UU}
Tailliandier, René Gaspard Ernest (1817–1879) Tailliandier, the French writer commonly known as “Saint René,” taught at Strasbourg, Montpelier, and the Sorbonne. He belonged to the Republican anti-clerical party and became general secretary to the Minister of Education at the Revolution of 1870. He was admitted to the Legion of Honour in 1870 and to the French Academy in 1873. Tailliandier translated into French the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller. His views are given in his Histoire et philosophie religieuse (1860). {RAT}
Taine, Hippolyte Adolphe (1828–1893) Taine, the French critic and historian, was the typical French rationalist of his time according to Robertson. However, he was in his latter years a reactionary on political grounds. For 20 years, he was a professor of aesthetics and art history at the École des Beaux-Arts. His French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century (1856) sharply criticized the spiritualist and religious school. In 1878 Taine was elected to the French Academy, much to the regret of the clergy, which had tried for years to keep him out. But his History of English Literature (1864), Origins of Contemporary France (1876–1894, 6 volumes), and other works gave him worldwide acclaim, and he was recognized, along with Renan, as “one of the intellectual guides of the generation which formed between 1860 and 1890,” according to the Grande Encyclopédie. Taine’s socio-historical method of analysis had considerable influence on philosophy, aesthetics, literary criticism, and the social sciences. Boutmy, a biographer, showed that, although Taine became conservative in politics, he remained an agnostic to the end. {BDF; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Tai-tsung [Emperor] (600–650) Tai-tsung, a Chinese emperor of the T’ang dynasty, was described by McCabe:
His name was Shih-min but he was named Tai-tsung (Great Ancestor) after his death and lives as such in Chinese history. The missionary expert on China, Dr. Giles, says that his was “a reign of unrivalled brilliance and glory,” and the historian of China, D. Boulger, says, “No ruler of any country had had sounder claims to be entitled Great.” He had in a quarter of a century done more for China than any other emperor and raised it to a wonderful height while Europe was in semi-barbarism; but you will find your encyclopedias and history books full of Europe at the time and rarely mentioning Tai-tsung. His character was very high and his ideas, especially in the treatment of crime and in toleration, beyond anything in 1,500 years of Christian history.
McCabe added that “the three really great monarchs of the Christian Era are Hadrian, Tai-tsung, and Abd-er-Rahman III, all atheists.” {JM}
Talandier, Alfred (Born 1828) Talandier was a French publicist who, after entering the bar, became a socialist and took part in the revolution of 1848. He became professor at the Lycée in 1870 but in 1874 was deprived of his chain. Elected on the Municipal Council of Paris, he later was chosen deputy and was re-elected in 1881. In 1883 Talandier published a Popular Rabelais and also wrote on freethought topics. {BDF; RAT}
Talbert, E. L. (20th Century) A member of the sociology department in the 1950s at the University of Cincinnati, Talbert was an associate editor of The Humanist. Asked in the 1950s who he considered were the top exponents of humanist viewpoints, he named E. A. Burtt and H. J. Muller. {HNS; WAS, 26 December 1954}
Talbot, Kate (20th Century) An American humanist, Talbot attended in 1996 the international conference of humanists in Mexico City. Her e-mail: <ktalbot@earthlink.net>.
Talleyrand-Périgard, Maurice de Maurice de [Prince] (1754–1838) Talleyrand was a French statesman and diplomat. Born into the high nobility, he was early destined for the Roman Catholic Church because of a childhood accident that left him partially lame. Despite his notorious impiety, King Louis XIV made him bishop of Autun (1789). As a representative of the clergy in the States-General of 1789, he sided with the revolutionists. He then proposed the appropriation of church property by the state, endorsed the civil constitution of the clergy, and was excommunicated in 1791 after having consecrated two “constitutional” bishops. Talleyrand supported the French Revolution at first, but, after the fall of the monarchy, fled to England in 1792 and then to the United States in 1794. Returning to France in 1796, he became foreign minister under the Directory (1797–1799) and Napoleon I (1799–1807). However, Napoleon tended to ignore Talleyrand’s cautious advice. After Napoleon’s defeat, Talleyrand persuaded the allies in 1814 to restore the Bourbon monarchy and represented France at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Later, he served Louis Philippe as ambassador to London. Although often labeled an opportunist, Talleyrand consistently aimed at peace and stability for Europe as a whole. According to McCabe, Talleyrand was an atheist “and went, rather cynically, through a form of reconciliation with the Church in his last year solely, and expressly, to ensure that he should have a funeral undisturbed by the new Catholic mob.” {JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Tallien, Jean Lambert (1767–1820) Tallien was a journalist who became a leading member of the Paris Commune and saved many from cruel treatment. He was one of the corps of savants whom Napoleon took to Egypt, but after the fall of the Emperor Tallien refused to be reconciled with the throne and the Church. {RAT; RE}
TALMUD An Aramaic word, Talmud means learning and is a compilation of Jewish oral law. Its Mishna, written in Hebrew, contains the oral law and the Gemera, in Aramaic, is a commentary on and supplement to the Mishna. Written from around 200 to 500, it contains hairsplitting arguments. For example and as explained by Nat Hentoff, “A rabbi in the Talmud tells the story of a roofer who took his clothes off while on the job because it was hot. Below, in the courtyard, also feeling the heat, a woman also removed her clothes. A gust of wind caused the roofer to lose his footing. He fell, landed on top of the woman, and through the force of his descent, his penis accidentally entered her. The result, however brief, was sexual intercourse.” Because the roofer did not fall with the intent of landing on the woman in order to have sex with her and because he had no control over where he was going to land, the man was not liable. But when Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said that “Anyone who so much as looks with lust on a woman has already committed adultery with that woman,” it follows that if you think about doing the act you have therefore done it. {Village Voice, 26 July 1994}
Tamassia, Arrigo (Born 1849) Tamassia, an Italian physician, was professor of legal medicine at Padua University and editor of the Rivista di Medicina Legale. Tamassia supported Ardigó in his effort to eliminate, as he said, “all tyranny, all corruption, and all villainies.” {RAT}
Tambureno, Anthony (20th Century) Tambureno won the Humanist Association of Canada’s 1998 essay contest for young writers. The Mississauga, Ontario, resident laments that “the job of the media is selling consumers to advertisers, not informing the public. {Humanist in Canada, Autumn 1998}
Tamlyn, John (19th Century) Tamlyn wrote The Dream Heaven of Our Fathers, and the Heaven That Is to Be (c. 1885). {GS}
Tampieri, Susana Elisa (1934– ) In the late 1950s and 1960s, Tampieri was an active leader of the humanist movement in Córdoba, Argentina. A leading personality in university circles, she engaged in the democratic revolution in 1955 that pulled down the Perón regime. She was a leader of the Pro-Democracy Revolution in Paraguay (1957-1958). Tampieri has written twenty-six plays, two novels, three works of poetry, and many essays. Her work depicts the situation of women and the middle class in the changing moral world of the past half-century. Tampieri was the first president of the Argentine Humanist Society. {WAS, conversation July 1999 with Hugo Estrella.}
Tan, Cheng Imm (20thCentury)
The Maylaysian daughter to devout Buddhist parents, Tan attended Catholic school for twelve years. She found the two different religious outlooks had in common a certain ethics: do good, reap good fruits; do evil, reap evil fruits; every action has a result; if you harm yourself or others, you will be punished in this life or the next. Reincarnation, however, seemed like Catholic Hell. Although she found Buddhism legalistic and lacking in warmth, Catholicism offered a loving, forgiving God. But Catholicism taught that females were sinful, had no willpower, and her feminism took precedence. After entering Harvard’s Master of Divinity program, Tan became active with Arise, a program that proposes to empower all immigrant and refugee women. Frustrated with a Christian dualism that condemned women and the earth as base, she returned to her ancestral Buddhism in 1986. Now a Unitarian Universalist minister, she holds that “[l]ife is uncontrolled. You must receive it with openness and compassion and acceptance. Accept that injustice is happening—and then work against it. . . . You do what you can do, but you can’t get attached to your results. If you’re attached to your results, well, that will lead to your suffering.” [World, November-December 1998}
Tanase, Al (20th Century) Tanase, from Romania, addressed the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Hannover (1968).
TANDEM PROJECT The Tandem Project is a non-sectarian, nonprofit international human rights organization founded in 1985 to promote, implement, and monitor the 1981 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief. (See entry for Michael Roan.)
Tangherlini, Frank R. (20th Century) “Catholic Girl and Atheist” (1947) was written by Tangherlini, a freethinker. {GS}
Tango, David (20th Century) Tango, an activist-atheist in Costa Mesa, California, writes for Secular Nation. E-mail: <tango@deltanet.com>.
Tanner, James (c. 1817–1870) Tanner was the son of Kentuckian John Tanner, who had been captured by Indians when seven or eight years of age. His father, brought up by the Chippewas, married an Indian woman, as did his son James. Seeking money for farming implements needed by the Indians, James journeyed to Boston and talked with officials of the American Unitarian Association, who were helpful. Tanner is considered the first missionary in the territory that became North Dakota. He sided wholly with the Indians in their complaints that they were being defrauded of moneys legally owed them. {EG}
TANTALUS A son of Zeus in Greek mythology and the father of Pelops and Niobe, Tantalus was a legendary king of Lydia who got into so much trouble that he was condemned by the gods to suffer eternally at Tartarus. One legend has it that he had divulged divine secrets and stolen the gods’ sacred food. Another told that he had murdered Pelops and served his body to the gods to test their omniscience. As punishment, Tantalus was hanged from the bough of a fruit tree over a pool of water (although another version had him standing up to his neck in that pool). When he bent to drink, the water would recede. When he reached for a fruit, the wind would blow it from his reach. The word tantalize is convenient to describe one’s frustration in being exposed to something desirable, yet not being able to have it. {CE}
Tapp, Robert B. (20th Century)
Tapp, a professor emeritus of humanities, religious studies, and South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota, is dean of the Humanist Institute in New York City. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {The Humanist, January-February 1998}
Tappan, Caroline Sturgis (1819-1868) A transcendentalist and a Unitarian, Tappan was a poet and a children’s author. Her sister was Ellen Sturgis Hooper.
TARAKBODH Tarakbodh (Rationalist), is a bi-monthly in Punjabi of the Tarksheel Society Bharat. It is at B-XI-413, Ram Bagh Road, Barnala- 148 101, Punjab, India.
Tarde, Gabriel (1843–1904) Tarde was a French sociologist whose criminological and sociological works were widely recognized. He was appointed head of the statistical department at the Ministry of Justice and professor at the Collège de France. He is known for his theory of imitation in sociology—that a few individuals initiate changes, and the majority imitate them. In 1900, Tarde was admitted to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. {RAT}
TARKJYOTY Tarkjyoty, a rationalist monthly in Hindi of the Rationalist Society of Haryana, is at G. H. S. Badsikri, The. & Distt. Kaithal, Haryana 136 027, India.
Tarkunde, V(ithal) M(ahadev) (1912– ) A retired Supreme Court judge and chairman of the Indian Radical Humanist Association, Tarkunde is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1952, he was on the first Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). In 1976, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. In Amsterdam at the Sixth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress (1974), he addressed the group, as he did also at the Seventh held in London (1978). In 1978, he received that group’s Humanist Award for defending the values of democracy. For Freedom in 1984 commemorated his seventy-fifth birthday. In 1983 he wrote Radical Humanism. Tarkunde is a contributing editor to Free Inquiry and, in his eighties, is editor emeritus of Mumbai’s Radical Humanist. Indian humanists regard him both as a theoretician and as an activist on behalf of humanism. He has written,
I believe in a country of mass poverty and ignorance, like India, humanism must take a radical form. It must be concerned with developing a movement aimed at spreading the humanist-democratic values of freedom, rationalism, and secular morality among the people so that they can take the necessary initiatives for the elimination of poverty and removal of mass ignorance.
Speaking in 1995 at a conference of humanists in India, Tarkunde said, “In many post-colonial countries, democracy was replaced by dictatorial regimes and democracy almost disappeared from India in 1975 when Mrs. Gandhi took emergency powers. At present, Indian democracy is being threatened from a different direction. A Hindu chauvinist party (the BJP) which also claims to be ardently nationalistic, has a chance of coming to power in New Delhi. A party which combines religious chauvinism with aggressive nationalism is likely to establish a Fascist regime of an Indian variety.” To resist this, he called upon Indian humanists to provide a democracy of the people, “not of political parties which represent them” as in Western Europe and America. “The State should consist,” he continued, “of a network of local republics which may be called People’s Committees, that as much power as is possible should be invested in the primary People’s Committee, that power which is required to be exercised at higher levels of government should be in the hands of persons who are the real representatives of the people and who are subject to their control and recall and that Parliament should be the apex of such People’s Committees and intermediate centres of power.” In 1996, Levi Fragell interviewed Tarkunde in India. As to the conflicts between humanism and religion, Tarkunde saw no danger, stating, “I believe that we are so strongly committed to rationalism that contact between us and religious humanists is likely to augment their rationalism without affecting ours.” In 1998 at the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s congress in Mumbai, Justice Tarkunde was cited as the “father of modern humanism and human rights in India.” In an address, he lamented that of India’s population of 900+ million one-third live below the povery line and 60% of women and 40% of men are illiterate. Tarkunde signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for G. Vijayam.) {FUK; HM2; HNS2; New Humanist, February 1996; SHD}
Tarozzi, Giuseppe (1831–1907) Tarozzi, an Italian philosopher, taught at Palermo University and was a positivist. He scorned not only orthodox theology but also the whole “modern delirium of pseudo-idealism.” He wrote Lezioni di filosofia (2 volumes, 1896–1897) and La coltura intellettuale contemporanea (1897). {RAT}
TARTARUS In Greek mythology, Tartarus was the lowest region of the underworld, a place where wicked individuals such as Sisyphus, Tantalus, and Ixion were sent as punishment. It was presided over by Hades. The concept is believed to be far older than that of the concept of Hell.
Tarter, Jill (20th Century) Tarter, who holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair of the SETI Institute, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Tatchell, Peter (20th Century) Following a peaceful protest during the Archbishop of Canterbury’s 1998 Easter sermons at Canterbury Cathedral, Tatchell—a gay rights campaigner—was arrested and charged with “indecent behaviour in a church,” specifically that of interrupting services in violation of Section 2 of the Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act of 1860. Tatchell countered that his protest “highlighted the perverted moral priorities of many Christians. They are more offended, apparently, by a brief peaceful protest in a church than by [the Archbishop’s] opposition to lesbian and gay human rights. The real indecency was not our peaceful protest but the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury says that gay people are not entitled to equality and fair treatment under the law.” The National Secular Society and others immediately called for changes in that archaic law. Saying he once was a Baptist Sunday school teacher, he continued that
I gave up my religious faith for a number of reasons. Firstly, I was very distressed by the way in which the Church, or some of the churches, was endorsing the barbarism of capital punishment and the genocidal war being waged by Australia and the United States in Vietnam. I was also very angry at the way in which they were taking aboriginal kids away from their parents and opposing aboriginal land rights. And then, of course, when I realised I was gay, I felt furious that my love and commitment to another man could be treated (a) as a sin and (b) as a criminal offence endorsed by the Church.
Pressed further, Tatchell said, “The Church of England is an oppressive, homophobic institution. I think that any lesbian or gay person who is a part of that Church, unless they are overtly, actively campaigning to change things, they are a part of the problem. . . . And I’ve got to say that the Bible is to lesbian and gay people what Mein Kampf is to Jews. {The Freethinker, October 1998; Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998}
Tate, Allen (1899–1979) Tate was the Tennessee-born writer of metaphysical poetry, editor of Fugitive (1922–1925) and of Sewanee Review (1944–1946). He taught English at the University of Minnesota. Asked about humanism, Tate responded to the present author:
I have written two essays on the general subject, or at least touching it, and I should think that my views could be partly derived from them: first, “Humanism and Naturalism” in Reactionary Essays (Scribner, 1936), and “The Hovering Fly” in On The Limits of Poetry (Swallow-Morrow, 1948). A third essay, in the latter volume and entitled “Techniques of Fiction,” touches upon literary aspects of naturalism. It is difficult to make a short statement on the literary value of naturalistic humanism that could have much value; it would be merely ad hoc, without supporting argument. In general, I should say, humanism cannot maintain itself as naturalism; for man, if he is to remain human, must have access to truths of which unaided he is not capable. The great literary “naturalists,” Flaubert and Joyce, were overtly anti-Christian; but the configuration of meaning in both is supra-rational. I need not allude to Joyce’s idea of “epiphanies,” or to the Christian allegory implicit in Un Coeur Simple, to say nothing of the death-scene of Emma Bovary. This is a very large subject. I may add that there has been a great deal of misunderstanding of literary naturalism in our time, as it comes to us from Flaubert, James, and Joyce. These men embodied the symbol in the natural object, and thus returned to the kind of symbolism that Dante gives us, rather than the symbolism of Bunyan, which is superimposed upon the natural order of experience. The naturalism represented by the influence of Zola seems to me to have come to a dead-end. {WAS, 16 February 1951}
Taubert, A. (19th Century) Taubert was the maiden name of Dr. Karl Hartmann’s first wife. She wrote The Pessimists and Their Opponents (1866). {BDF}
Taubert, Kenneth F. Sr. (20th Century) Taubert is a contributor to Freethought Today, which is published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, of which he is a member of the board of directors. Also, he is treasurer of that group’s Executive Council.
Taule, Ferdinand (19th Century) Taule was a physician born in Strasbourg. He wrote Notions on the Nature and Properties of Organised Matter (1866). {BDF}
Taurellus, Nicolaus (1547–1606) Taurellus was a German physician and philosopher. Wheeler reports that “for daring to think for himself, and asking how the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world could be reconciled with the dogma of creation, he was stigmatised as an atheist.” He wrote many works in Latin, including Philosophiae Triumphans (1573). Dr. Taurellus died of the plague in 1606. {BDF}
Tavris, Carol (20th Century) Tavris, a psychologist and author, is on the executive council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which publishes Skeptical Inquirer. She wrote Psychology in Perspective (1997).
Tawiah, Hope N. (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Tawiah, who is chairman of the Rational Centre in Accra, Ghana, addressed the group. In Pokuasi, a village near the capital of Accra, Tawiah has gathered a group of followers in what he calls the Rational Centre of Ghana, the motto of which is “Down with Superstition.” The chief of the village, Nii Otto Kwame II, considers himself a rationalist and has given land for the center. (See entry for Rational Centre.)
TAXES AND RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS
In the United States, churches that are 501(c)(3) organizations cannot involve themselves in partisan political campaigns. Contributors to churches are allowed certain tax deductions if the church remains out of politics. The Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Anchorage is unique inasmuch as it voluntarily makes an annual check to the city of Anchorage for “payment in lieu of taxes” (PILOT). Art Curtis, the group’s minister, said, “There is no reason why churches should be exempt from municipal services. It is only fair.” PILOT, which is the brainchild of Stanley J. Erickson, was first instituted in 1968. {World, March-April 1999}
Taylor, Alan John Percivale (1906–1990) In 1986, Taylor was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. A historian and journalist, he wrote Beaverbrook (1972), about Baron William Maxwell Aitken Beaverbrook. He also has written over thirty books, including Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1918 (1954), Trouble Makers (1957), English History 1914–1945 (1965), The Last of Old Europe (1976), How Wars Begin (1979), and A Personal History (1983). One work, which aroused passionate hostility, was his Origins of the Second World War (1983), in which he suggested that historical events are often shaped by accident. His biography, A Personal History, was published in 1983. A biography by Adam Sisman, A. J. P. Taylor (1993), describes his tangled personal life and mentions his early abandonment of nonconformist Christianity and adoption of militant atheism.
Taylor, Carol (20th Century) Taylor, a Los Angeles psychologist and author, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Taylor, David (20th Century) Taylor is author of Was Jesus the Essene [[Teacher of Righteousness? (1990).
Taylor, E. G. (19th Century) Taylor, a freethinker, wrote Shall Thought Be Fettered in England? (1895). {GS}
Taylor, G. H. (Died c. 1957) Taylor wrote Can Materialism Explain Mind (1950). His “Chronology of British Secularism” is found in An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism (1980), edited by Gordon Stein. {FUK}
Taylor, George (20th Century) Taylor is Vice President for Membership of the Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio, Texas.
Taylor, Harold (1914–1993) Dr. Taylor was president of Sarah Lawrence College from 1949 to 1959. When he took office at the age of thirty, he was the nation’s youngest college president. A critic of traditional educational practices, he said, “What is wrong with a great deal of higher education in America is that it is simply boring.” To counteract this he became a leading proponent of change. As a result, the college became nationally known as the one which gave no grades or report cards. Classes were few and small in size. Independent study by students was evaluated by close consultation with professors. During his presidency, Taylor defended academic freedom against McCarthyism, and he pressed for racial integration at the school, which had been predominantly white. Taylor’s On Education and Freedom was reviewed for The Humanist by William Clark Trow of the University of Michigan, who described the Canadian-born educator as having written “with the literary flare of the past but with an observant eye on the present.” Trow quotes Taylor: “But what John Dewey suggested throughout the whole of his life was not that we give up reading any serious book of any period of history, but that we read such books in order to help with the matter of testing our ideas in action.” Trow agreed with Taylor that the humanities departments often assume they teach values whereas the students learn facts in the other departments, which Taylor reasons is nonsense. In addition to signing Humanist Manifesto II, Taylor was on the editorial board of The Humanist. {HM2; HNS}
Taylor, Harriet (19th Century) Taylor, along with Eliza Flower, Sarah Flower, and Harriet Martineau, was one of the 19th-century freethought activists known as “Ladies of South Place,” a reference to the South Place Ethical Society. {Freethought History #9, 1994}
Taylor, Helen (1831–1907) In 1851 Taylor’s mother married J. S. Mill. Upon her death seven years later, Miss Taylor devoted herself to the care of her stepfather and was esteemed by him. She co-operated with him in writing his Subjection of Women (1869). After Mill’s death, she lived mainly in London, where she edited Buckle’s works (1872) and Mill’s Autobiography (1873) and Essays on Religion (1874). Taylor was a humanitarian who worked for the abolition of school-fees and the provision of free food and boots for the children of the poorer workers. She worked also for land nationalization and the enfranchisement of women. {RAT; WWS}
Taylor, James (20th Century) Taylor, a singer-songwriter, when interviewed by Bill Flanagon in Rolling Stone (July 10-24, 1997), was asked how an unbeliever could make sense of life. “Well, I find myself with a strong spiritual need,” Taylor responded. “And, certainly, it’s acknowledged as an important part of recovery from addiction. Yet, it’s hard for me to find an actual handle for it. I’m not saying that it’s not helpful to think of having a real handle on the universe, your own personal point of attachment. But . . . I think it’s crazy. It’s an insanity that keeps us sane. You might call a lot of these songs ‘spirituals for agnostics.’ ” Asked if not having faith in a personal god makes it harder to stick with a 12-step recovery program, Taylor said, “Twelve-step programs say an interesting thing: Either you have a god, or you are God and you don’t want the job.” (See entry for Secular Organization for Sobriety.) {CA}
Taylor, James (12 Mar 1948 - ) A singer, songwriter, cellist, and guitarist, Taylor was the husband from 1972 to 1982 of Carly Simon. He has earned forty gold, platinum, and multi-platinum awards, starting with his 1970’s Sweet Baby James to 1997’s Hourglass to 1998’s platinum-selling Live at the Beacon Theatre DVD/VHS release. In 1998 he was honored by receiving Billboard’s highest accolade, the Century Away, for distinguished creative achievement. Although said to be a Protestant, he was interviewed in Rolling Stone (10-24 July 1997) by Bill Flanagan:
Flanagan: One of the themes of [your work is] trying to make sense of life without believing in God. In “Up From Your Life,” you sing, “For an unbeliever like you/There's not much they can do.” In "Gaia,” you call yourself a "poor, wretched unbeliever." Taylor: Well I find myself with a strong spiritual need - in the past five years, particularly. And, certainly, it's acknowledged as an important part of recovery from addiction. Yet, it's hard for me to find an actual handle for it. I'm not saying that it's not helpful to think of having a real handle on the universe, your own personal point of attachment. But...I think it's crazy. But it's an insanity that keeps us sane. You might call a lot of these songs "spirituals for agnostics." BF: Does not having faith in a personal god make it harder to stick with a 12-step recovery program? JT: Twelve-step programs say an interesting thing: Either you have a god, or you are God and you don’t want the job. {CA}
Taylor, Joan Kennedy (20th Century)
Taylor wrote Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered and “In Support of the Right To Choose” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1996). She is national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists and is on the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression. Taylor wrote Women’s Issues (1993).
Taylor, Karyn (20th Century)
Taylor, who hosts “Common Ground,” an online environmental forum on Women’s WIRE in San Francisco, has written for The Humanist.
Taylor, Keith R. (20th Century)
Taylor wrote “Beliefs of a Nonbeliever” in Atheist Nation (July-August 1998). He noted that “God doesn’t seem to mind fornication if one kills the victim afterwards. I think it says so in that book of his.”
Taylor, Norman (20th Century) Taylor, of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, s poke in 1996 at the fourth World Atheist Conference held in Vijayawada, India. He called for an end to the religious brainwashing of children and urged standing up to the fear used to quiet potential critics of religion.
Taylor, Richard (1919– ) Taylor, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Union College and the University of Rochester, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is a member of the Society of Friends and, in addition, is a contributing editor of Free Inquiry. Among his books are Good and Evil (1970), Having Love Affairs (1982), Ethics, Faith, and Reason (1985), Reflective Wisdom (1989), and Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age (1996). Taylor, who taught many years at Brown University, is author of “Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics, Once Again.” At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Taylor, who is known as a leading exponent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, addressed the gathering. “Taylor is a peculiar humanist,” Paul B. Cliteur has observed. “He combines his humanist stance with adherence to what he calls a kind of ‘theism.’” He has a belief in God that “springs from an awareness of the profound mystery of nature and of life.” But he adheres to no church, affirms no creed, and abominates organized religious practice. Taylor is “a fideist with decided pantheistic proclivities,” according to Jack Donnelly, who thinks his religiosity is “rather idiosyncratic.” Taylor signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 but added, “There is much that I do not agree with in this document, but I do accept the overall thesis.” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1995; Philo, Fall-Winter 1998).
Taylor, Robert (1784–1844) An English clergyman who converted to unbelief, Taylor became a deist which, in 1818, was considered by many to be a crime worse than murder. In 1827 he was arrested for blasphemy, and during the year spent in Oakham jail he wrote two books: Syntagma of the Evidences of the Christian Religion (1828) and The Diegesis: Being A Discovery of the Origin, Evidence, and Early History of Christianity, Never Yet Before or Elsewhere So Fully and Faithfully Set Forth (1829). His friend Richard Carlile published both. After his release from jail, he and Carlile went on “an infidel mission” about the country. In 1833, he edited a London publication, Philalethian. When Carlile published Taylor’s weekly lectures as The Devil’s Pulpit, Taylor against was charged with blasphemy and was sentences to two years in Horsemonger Lane jail. In jail, he was badly treated but, upon being released, married a wealthy woman. He then moved to France, became a surgeon and never again published another word about unbelief. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUS; FUK; PUT; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}
Taylor, Thomas (1758–1835) Taylor, known as “The Platonist,” devoted his life to the propagation of the Platonic philosophy. He translated the works of Plato, Aristotle, Porphyry, five books of Polotinus, six books of Proclus, Gamblichus on the Mysteries, Arguments of Celsus taken from Origin, Arguments of Julian against the Christians, Orations of Julian, and more. So thorough a pagan was Taylor, it was alleged, that he once sacrificed a bull to Zeus. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Taylor, W. (19th Century)
In 1883, Taylor edited Freedom in Brisbane, Australia. {FUK}
Taylor, Warren (1903–1992) In the 1950s when he was on the staff at Antioch College, Taylor was an associate editor of The Humanist. He wrote Poetry in English (1970).
Taylor, William (1765–1836) Taylor was an English acquaintance of Southey who translated from the German, notably Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. He also wrote a Survey of German Poetry and English Synonyms (1830). In his Who Was the Father of Jesus Christ? (1810), Taylor argues that it was Zacharias and that Jesus was an illegitimate son of Mary. {BDF; RE}
Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich (1840–1893) Tchaikovsky (also spelled Tschaikovsky and Chaikovsky), the Russian composer, was a towering figure in Russian music and one of the most popular composers in history. His father was a mining inspector who arranged for his son to study music, and at the age of twenty-one Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition with Anton Rubinstein. An annuity from a wealthy patroness, Mme. von Meck, allowed him for years to devote himself to music, and it is not clear why she terminated her friendship and support without apparent reason. His music, richly orchestrated, is melodious, intensely emotional, and often melancholy. Among his works are his last three symphonies; the fantasy “Romeo and Juliet” (1869); the ballets “Swan Lake” (1876), “The Sleeping Beauty” (1889), and “The Nutcracker” (1892); the “Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor” (1875); and the “Violin Concerto in D” (1878). His operas include “Eugene Onegin” (1879) and “The Queen of Spades” (1890). His influence was great not only during the Soviet era but also in England, the United States, and elsewhere. Tchaikovsky was known for his high-strung temperament. He also was known for his homosexuality. In 1876 in a letter to his brother he wrote that “I am aware that my inclinations are the greatest and most unconquerable obstacle to happiness; I must fight my nature with all my strength. I shall do everything possible to marry this year.” The following year, in fact, he did marry. But their union was doomed and his wife, frustrated by his lack of interest in her, finally took another lover and, later, was institutionalized. His many affairs included one with his student, Vladimir Shilovsky, and with his nephew, Vladimir Davidov, whose nickname was Bobyk and to whom he dedicated his famous “Pathétique Symphony.” “Bob will finally drive me simply crazy with his indescribable fascination,” Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary about his teenaged nephew. “I begin to crave Bob and get lonely without him. . . . Frightful how I love him!” Frightful also, complain contemporary homosexuals, that the Church had so brainwashed him that he felt he had to fight his nature and that he was driven to such despair. And then there was fifteen-year-old Eduard Zak, who came to Moscow to study acting but killed himself instead. Fourteen years later Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary, “How amazingly clearly I remember him, the sound of his voice, his movements, but especially the extraordinarily wonderful expression on his face. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone so strongly as him.” His brother edited his letters, which appear to show an interest in theism. When the Kirov Opera Chorus performed his music in New York City, the 1998 program notes noted that neither Tchaikovsky nor Rachmaninoff “expressed anything approaching religious fervor,” suggesting that “exhaustion, not spirituality, provided the impetus” for Tchaikovsky’s “Liturgy.” Vladmir Morosan, writing in Musica Russica, however, averred, “By all evidence, faith and religion played an important role throughout his life.” According to McCabe, Tchaikovsky “seems in the end to have become an atheist after reading Flaubert’s letters. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘found some astonishing answers to my questions about God and religion in this little book.’ He was unconscious when his brother summoned a priest,” McCabe says, “to smear him with the sacrament.” Although The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians chooses to repeat a Soviet-era rumor that Tchaikovsky poisoned himself at the behest of a “court of honor” of former law-school classmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality, Alex Ross in The New Yorker (30 November 1998) wrote that such a “penny-dreadful version” may have satisfied some but is untrue. Alexander Poznansky’s Tchaikovsky’s Last Days refutes the tale that the composer duplicated the symptoms of cholera. Further, he had no free time during his St. Petersburg visit to have seen such schoolfellows—the day after he allegedly took poison, he wrote a letter inquiring about possible dates for a trip to Odessa. Meanwhile, four physicians gave cholera as the cause of Tchaikovsky’s death. Not only did he not contract cholera deliberately, he had no fatal obsession for a young nephew, as Klaus Mann claimed in a 1935 novel, Pathetic Symphony. The musicicologist Richard Taruskin has noted that in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial critics began to describe the composer as “pathological” and “hysterical,” suggesting that his manly Beethovenian forms were weak and effeminate. Nonsense, Ross retorts, for the composer was not neurotic nor hysterical in the least. As Poznansky showed, Tchaikovsky was a proud, aristocratic, libidinous person who, despite a disastrous marriage and “various silly flings with peasant boys,” at the end of his life had an inspiring electricity in his mind and his creative works. {The Advocate, 19 August 1997; CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Tchekov, Anton Pavlovich: See entry for Chekhov.
TEACHING • On the subject of teaching: If you see a turtle atop a fence, you know it didn’t get there on its own. —Anonymous
“I never thought of myself as a teacher,” a retired English department chairman from New Canaan High School in Connecticut has observed. “Students were not assigned to me in order that I, the fountain of all knowledge, could have them memorize textbooks. Nor was I a know-it-all professor, one who would require that they take notes about whatever ideas I might profess, then be tested to make sure they had been awake. Rather, I preferred the role of a mentor, a guide, a counselor, a friend. The classroom was a laboratory, not a room for grade-grubbing. Examinations, yes, included tests over factual material: ‘When did Sophocles and Shakespeare write, who came first, and what did they write?’ But the examinations also included the pragmatic: ‘Antigone or Hamlet—which says the most to you at this time in your life, and why? Your essay will be read with attention to how well you communicate your ideas.’” As to how one best prepares to be a teacher, the person responded, “Others might point to John Dewey’s books or to education classes, but my approach has simply been to imitate those few teachers who managed to inspire me over the years.”
Tead, Ordway (1891–1973) A naturalist and a humanist, Tead in the 1950s was an editor of social and economic books for Harper & Brothers. While on the Columbia University staff, he wrote, “Toward the Knowledge of Man, an Unorthodox Approach to College Studies,” for Main Currents. Basically, he liked Paul Valéry’s “fecundity of opposites,” or the value one receives when probing the reasons why others hold opposite views. On the one hand, he found merits in the arguments of the various either-or groups: absolutism or relativism; objectivity or commitment; authority or freedom; egoism or altruism; the state and other large corporate organizations or the individual; the secular or the sacred. On the college level, he finds that studies need to identify and clarify the elements of this inevitable problem of world conflict among plural value systems. He asks if the public schools and colleges are “godless” in some detrimental way. He asks what is the nature of the sacred, and is there in our thought too sharp and rigid a dualism. He asks if scientific humanism is enough or if the sacred helps by giving height and depth and universality of meaning to the human career. The secular humanist view, he laments, can be too imperious, too apt to overlook the basic values inherent in the religious quests. For him, “a religious way of life” includes creativity, flux, permanency, aloneness, dependency, tranquility, orderliness, community and fraternal love, beauty, meditation, value, restoration (or redemption), freedom, and an innate imperative. As did the Hindu philosopher Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, whose Recovery of Faith (1955) he liked, Tead attempted to reconcile the either-or camps of thinkers, finding much in religion to be admired but finding much in secular humanism also to be admired. In 1969, Tead wrote Instincts in Industry. {WAS, 23 January 1957}
Teagle, Jeffrey J. (20th Century) Teagle heads the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches (1-6 Essex Street, Strand, London, WC2R 3HV, England). (See entry for General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.)
Tedder, Henry Richard (Born 1850) Tedder in 1873 and 1874 was librarian to Lord Acton. He then became librarian to the Athenaeum Club. In addition to organizing the First International Conference of Librarians, he became President of that body. Besides many contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and other volumes, he edited the continuation of Herbert Spencer’s Descriptive Sociology. Tedder is a member of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT}
Tee, Bob (20th Century) Tee in Britain is active with the Leeds and District Humanist Group.
Teeple, Howard Meade (1911– ) Teeple, author of How Did Christianity Really Begin (1992), is interested in the historical-archeological approach to Christian origins. A former fundamentalist, he has written Historical Approach to the Bible (1982) and The Noah’s Ark Nonsense (1978).
TEESIDE (England) HUMANISTS For information, write J. Cole, 94 High Street, Norton, Stockton-on-Tees, telephone 01642 559418; or telephone R. Wood at 01740 650861.
Teimourian, Hazhir (20th Century) Teimourian, a journalist and broadcaster, specizlises in the Middle East. In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, Teimourian spoke on “Fundamentalism in the Next Century.” In 2001 he became an honorary member of the Rationalist Press Association. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Tela, Josephus: See the entry for Joseph Webbe.
Telesio, Bernardino (1509–1590) Telesio, born of a noble Italian family, was a philosopher known for his optical discoveries and for his new opinions in philosophy. He wrote On the Nature of Things According to Proper Principles (1565), opposing the Aristotelian doctrine in physics and employing mathematical principles to explain nature. Telesio’s works were placed on the Index but were published in Venice despite complains by the clergy. {BDF}
Telle, Reinier (1578–1618) Telle, or Regnerus Vitellius, was a Dutch humanist who translated Servetus’s On the Errors of the Trinity (1620). {BDF}
Teller (20th Century) Teller, of the comedy team of Penn and Teller, in addition to being a magician is an accomplished musician. Asked by Chris Carter, creator of “The X-Files,” if he believed in God, Teller as well as Penn replied no. “Do any scientists believe in God?” they were asked. “None of the important ones,” they humorously responded. However, he was quoted in the New England Skeptics Society newsletter (Summer 1998) as saying, “Atheists do look for answers to existence itself. They just don’t make them up.” Asked if even the most hardened atheist doesn’t have to believe, Teller answered, “I might qualify as the most hardened atheist, and I have not the slightest need to believe in stuff that is not in some way verifiable. I believe in art, mind you. I don’t believe that art is supernatural. I think that beauty and humor are wonderful things, and quite important to us—in fact, one of the major distinguishing features between us and some of the lesser species. My mother, who is eighty-nine now, says, ‘Oh, you know, I see these old people going to church, and I really envy them. It must be so consoling for them to be able to believe in that stuff. [Laughs] I think she genuinely envies people who are suckers in the sense that there are some things that might be a little easier to confront. It’s not going to change her point of view, because it doesn’t make any sense to her. It seems like non-sense. And it is!” [Laughs] In the team act, Penn is the verbal one, Teller the one who comically does not speak but plays piano expertly. On the Web: <www.theness.com/teller.html>. (See entry for Penn Jillette.) {E}
Teller (14 Feb 1948 - ) In 1985 when Penn & Teller opened off-Broadway, their magic and comedy act led them to appearances on Late Night with David Letterman, Saturday Night Live, and Miami Vice. They became guests on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman, and Live! with Regis & Kathie Lee, and they are often seen on other television shows. The 1985 PBS special, Penn & Teller Go Public, won two Emmys and the International Golden Rose. Other television projects have included Emmy-nominated variety series Penn & Teller’s Sin City Spectacular, the ABC special Penn & Teller's Home Invasion, the Showtime movie Penn & Teller's Invisible Thread, the NBC special Don't Try This At Home, the PBS Children’s series Behind The Scenes,, and The Unpleasant World of Penn & Teller and Penn & Teller's Phobophilia, both for Britain's Channel 4. Penn & Teller Get Killed, directed by Arthur Penn, saw the pair in their big screen debut. Together they wrote Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends, How To Play With Your Food, and How To Play in Traffic. Teller, in addition to being a magician is an accomplished musician. Asked by Chris Carter, creator of “The X-Files,” if he believed in God, Teller as well as Penn replied no. “Do any scientists believe in God?” they were asked. “None of the important ones,” they laughed. However, he was quoted in the New England Skeptics Society Newsletter (Summer 1998) as saying, “Atheists do look for answers to existence itself. They just don’t make them up.” Asked if even the most hardened atheist doesn’t have to believe, Teller answered, “I might qualify as the most hardened atheist, and I have not the slightest need to believe in stuff that is not in some way verifiable. I believe in art, mind you. I don’t believe that art is supernatural. I think that beauty and humor are wonderful things, and quite important to us—in fact, one of the major distinguishing features between us and some of the lesser species. My mother, who is eighty-nine now, says, ‘Oh, you know, I see these old people going to church, and I really envy them. It must be so consoling for them to be able to believe in that stuff. [Laughs] I think she genuinely envies people who are suckers in the sense that there are some things that might be a little easier to confront. It’s not going to change her point of view, because it doesn’t make any sense to her. It seems like non-sense. And it is!” [Laughs] In their team act, Penn is the verbal one, Teller the one who comically does not speak but expertly plays the piano. On the Web: <www.theness.com/teller.html>. (See entry for Penn Jillette.) {CA}
Teller, Woolsey (20th Century) Taller, once an associate editor of The Truth Seeker, wrote, “How can men whose diet is intellectual sawdust and who can’t tell us the size of a feather or an angel’s wing, or the length of Lucifer’s tail, expect to enlighten us on such matters as burning forever hereafter, or whether men should be sprinkled or dunked?” During World War II, he wrote, “In a poll taken by the Armed Forces Radio Service, our men under arms are not at all partial to religious music. Popular music registered 38.3%; comedy-variety, 25%; and light concern music, 10.8%. Religious music trailed the list, with the insignificant showing of 2.5%.”. . . As for family values, he noted that “Religious ‘morals’ are concerned not with justice and everyday decency, but with whether a man should eat pork or not, whether he should eat meat on Friday, or whether, after brawling in a tavern or seducing a minor, he can get forgiveness by a priest.” Woolsey wrote The Atheism of Astronomy (1938) and Essays of an Atheist (1945). {FUS}
Temple, William [Sir] (1628–1699) A famed English diplomat, Temple wrote an essay, “Of Ancient and Modern Learning” (1690), which precipitated a famous “ancients versus moderns” controversy, leading Swift to write The Battle of the Books (1697). Temple was just one of several eminent public men who were accused of being deists. Bishop Burnet has a description in which he writes, “He had a true judgment in affairs, and very good principles with relation to government, but in nothing else. He seemed to think that things are as they were from all eternity; at least he thought religion was only for the mob. He was a great admirer of the sect of Confucius in China, who were atheists themselves, but left religion to the rabble.” The praise of Confucius is the note of deism; and Burnet rightly held that no orthodox Christian in those days would sound it, observes Robertson. {JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY HUMANISTS In Pennsylvania, Temple University humanists are found on the Worldwide Web at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion If the ultimate measure of success is money, wrote Malcolm W. Browne, religion is gaining on science. The Nobel Prizes in the sciences (which in 1998 came to $978,000 each) have been exceeded by the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which in 1999 was $1,240,000. (See entry for John Templeton.) {The New York Times, 18 May 1999}
Templeton, Charles (20th Century)
Templeton, for two decades one of North America’s most successful preachers, described in Free Inquiry (Winter 1997-1998) how although the Billy Graham of Canada he left the faith. He has been Executive Managing Editor of the Toronto Star, editor-in-Chief of Maclean’s, and director of news and public affairs for the CTI television network. Templeton has written twelve books, hosted Canadian and American telecasts, and broadcast daily radio program, “Dialogue,” with Pierre Berton for eighteen years. He wrote Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith (1996). {CA}
Templeton, Chris (20th Century) Templeton, an experienced radio and television producer in England, has suggested to the British Humanist Association and the Rationalist Press Association that they should create humanist material to be sold to radio and television stations. He aims “to explore and advance humanist approaches to thinking and living” and believes such programs “will promote the ideals of free inquiry, social cooperation, individual responsibility, and freedom from authoritarian and supernatural beliefs.” The first series he has planned has the title, “Living Without Religion.” In a December 1995 New Humanist interview, he outlined his plans for Humanist Horizons, a production company to make radio and television programs relating to humanism. For his Human Horizons production company, Templeton produced a radio version of Ms. Ad de Bont’s Mirad, a work about the Bosnian war by the Dutch dramatist. On the Web: <human-horizons@easynet.co.uk>. {New Humanist, August 1997}
Templeton, John [Sir] (1912– ) Templeton is the British-born investment counsellor whose foundation gives the largest monetary award, the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In 1973, the first recipient was Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity. In 1996 the prize went to Bill Bright, head of Campus Crusade for Christ. In 1997 the $1.21-million prize was given to Pandurang Shastri Athavale, a seventy-six-year-old from Bombay who preaches swadhyaya (a Sanskrit word for self-study), which he says leads people to cultivate greater self-respect and love for others by believing that God dwells in everyone.
TEMPTATION I love the girls who don’t. I love the girls who do; But best, the girls who say, “I don’t . . . But maybe just for you.” —Willard R. Espy (1911-1999)
• Lead me not into temptation. . . . I can find the way myself. —Rita Mae Brown
TEN COMMANDMENTS
The Ten Commandments, as freethinkers are aware, flew in out of the sky. The Code of Hammurabi, however, can be seen at the Louvre and is an eight-foot pillar of black diorite, discovered at Susa, Iran, in 1901 by J. V. Scheil. Hammurabi was the sixth king of the first Babylonian dynasty, ruling the entire area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and composing the Code in the fortieth year of his reign, approximately 1910 BCE. According to the Code, woman was the equal of man. Forty-four sections provided justice and a minimum wage to workers of all classes. Priests had no privileges and were mentioned only as citizens. Any point-by-point comparison of the latter half of the Commandments with the Code, according to David L. Kent, “shows clearly how crude, vague, and ethically inadequate the Jahvist edition is.” For example:
Moses: Thou shalt not kill. Hammurabi: If a man strikes the daughter of a man and causes her to lose the fruit of her womb, he shall pay 10 shekels of silver. If a surgeon causes a man’s death . . . they shall cut off his forehand. If a man strikes a man in an affray, and if he dies of the striking, he may swear, “Surely I did not strike wittingly” and pay 1/2 maneh of silver.
Moses: Neither shall thou commit adultery. Hammurabi: If a married lady is caught lying with another man, if her husband wishes to let his wife live, the king shall let his servant live. If a man has taken himself off and there is not means for food in his house, his wife may enter another man’s house; that woman shall suffer no punishment. If a woman hates her husband and states, “Thou shalt not have me,” her history shall be determined in her district and, if she has kept herself chaste and has no fault, while her husband is given to going about out of doors and so has greatly belittled her, that woman shall suffer no punishment; she may take her dowry and go to her father’s house.
The commandments, which serve as a basis of Mosaic Law, were allegedly given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Robert Korn is one of many who are not impressed by the ten, finding “the average modern high school student could write a better set of commandments than these from the Bible. . . . It seems strange that a set of commandments that condemns someone who draws pictures, works on Saturday, or covets a neighbor’s ox would neglect to find fault with the drug addicted, bigoted, child molesting rapist, arsonist, and torturer.” Nicholas Tate, chief executive of a British group, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority, called in 1995 for the development of a modern, secular Ten Commandments. So few are familiar with the old set, he reasoned, and a new set might include “punctuality,” “patience,” and “a sense of fair play.” Cullen Murphy, writing in The Atlantic Monthly (November 1996), suggested the Day of Judgment might then change to the Day of Assessment if Tate’s idea was carried out. Murphy found some cynics suggested adding “Thou shalt not get caught” and “Thou shalt not get involved,” whereas others questioned why the need for ten, rather than seven. As for seven, why not revise the Seven Deadly Sins as well, he added. Religious fundamentalists with backers in the American Congress demanded in 1999 that the Ten Commandments be posted in all public schools. One Manhattan wag liked the idea: “Condemn those who place engraved statuary in their cathedrals or draw images, who work on Saturday, and who covet their neighbor’s ox,” he reasoned, adding that “These are far more important than condemning the bigots, the absolutists, the drug pushers, the child molesters, the arsonists, the torturers, and the homophobes.” The Catholic author Hillaire Belloc facetiously suggested, concerning the Ten Commandments, “Candidates should not attempt more than six of these.” {Secular Nation, October-December 1998}
Tendys, John (20th Century) Tendys, in New South Wales, was succeeded as editor of Humanist Viewpoints by Affie Adagio. E-mail: <jtendys@triode.net.au>. (See entry for Australian Humanists.)
TENGRI In an early Mongolian religion, Tengri was god of the sky. {LEE}
TENNESSEE HUMANISTS
Tennessee has the following groups:
• American Humanist Association, Mid-Atlantic Region (AHA), A-140, 1 College Row, Brevard, North Carolina 28712. O. Andrews Ferguson is coordinator. • Humanist Association of Middle Tennessee (AHA), POB 24970, Nashville, Tennessee 37202. Edward Morris is the contact. Bill Conte at 8070, Regency Drive, Nashville, Tennessee, is at (615) 646-6245. E-mail: <fcvs53a@prodigy.com>. • Rationalists of East Tennessee (ASHS), 2123 Stonybrook Road, Louisville, TN 37777. E-mail: <ledker@aol.com> and <reality@kornet.org>. Web: <www.korrnet.org/reality/> • University of Tennessee at Martin’s Humanists: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Tenney, Daniel Kent (20th Century) Tenney, a freethinker, wrote “Jehovah Interviewed, or Orthodoxy From Headquarters” (1901). {GS}
Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson [1st Baron] (1809-1892) The first Lord Tennyson, and the most famous English poet of the Victorian age, was a profound spokesman for the ideas and values of his times. He once wrote, “It is inconceivable that the whole universe was merely created for us who live in this third-rate planet of a third-rate son.” He was the son of an intelligent but unstable clergyman in Lincolnshire. In 1850, Tennyson became poet laureate, and in 1853 he was made a peer. He had not married until 1850, the stated reason for the delay being his poverty that was caused by the disinheritance of the Somersby Tennysons in favor of his socially ambitious uncle Charles Tennyson. R. B. Martin, however, suggested in Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart (1980) that Alfred feared the “black blood” of the Tennysons, a notoriously melancholic and unstable family, and suspected that he, like his father, suffered from epilepsy. Although expressions of love between men and androgynous characters are found in his early poetry, Tennyson was heterosexual, had many unrequited romantic attachments to women during his twenties and thirties, and in his forties married Emily Sellwood, with whom he later had two children. “In Memoriam,” written for his beloved friend Henry Hallam portrays a chaste male love. So does his “Mort d’Arthur” (1842), in which the great medieval king is attended by a loving attendant Sir Bedivere, in whose arms he dies. Also, so does “The Holy Grail” (1869), in which King Arthur meets a “beautiful” Sir Galahad and in which Sir Percivale fails to find the Grail but does not fall into the clutches of the monk with whom he ends, one who tries unsuccessfully, in the words of the University of California’s Donald E. Hall, “to elicit an admission of love from Percivale.” Tennyson was a member of the Metaphysical Society, at which one of his long poems on pantheism was delivered. McCabe wrote that Tennyson was severely condemned by British freethinkers for his Promise of May and his use of theistic language, leading preachers to quote him as an orthodox Christian. “But there is ample evidence,” adds McCabe, “that he was a pantheist and skeptical about a future life. Allingham who knew him well so testifies in his Diary, and his son reluctantly confirms this in his biography of his father. Dr. Jowett says the same, and the cautious trimmer Masterman, who wrote a book on his religion, has to admit it. Tennyson received the ‘communion’ shortly before he died, but his son admits that he protested that he did not take in the Church sense, and a few days later he said of the pantheist Giordano Bruno, ‘His view of God is in some ways mine.’ Bruno, of course, had been burned at the stake for heresy.” Tennyson was buried in Westminster Abbey, and a biography by his son Hallam appeared in 1897. (See entry for Joseph Warren Beach.) {GL; JM; RAT; TYD}
Tenuta, Judy (20th Century) Tenuta, the author of The Power of Judyism (1991), is a satirist whose comic television performances put one into a joyous Spike Jones mood.
As you know [she has explained], I was not born. I am the Eternal Goddess, the Aphrodite of the Accordion. Once, at the dawn of time (before Nintendo), I sprouted from the left nostril of Toadra, Goddess of the Horny Water Lily. My father, Blowhard, God of Boxer Shorts, just stood there like a troglodyte on wheels and chanted, “Right on time, slime,” as I popped out of my mom’s pulchritudinous proboscis into a patch of petunias. Thus I was christened “The Petite Flower.”
The Petite Flower then finds that “all men are begging to pollinate me.” Calling herself “a major cult figurine,” she says she is a Saint (“I have the power to bleed from my hands and talk to small animals, especially critics.”) who thinks of the Pope as a “guy in a dress.” Recalling her early years when laughing was not allowed in the living room, “We had to wait until Sunday mass, when the priest asked for money. Right, Pop, I really have a quarter for your Cadillac. I was so religious that at the dinner table every Easter I’d shout, ‘Jesus rose from the dead, have a chocolate egg.’ Then of course I had to go to confession; of course I would confess things I did not do, because I would listen to other trolls and their sins sounded a lot better.” She parodies writers of advice columns, and she undermines our preoccupation with fatness, thinness, God, respectability, the suburbs, celebrities, food, and sex. When the U. S. Navy started fretting about gays aboard ships, she quipped, “Like there would be a Navy without them!” Tenuta is a freethinker with an unforgettable sense of humor. {Fred Whitehead, Freethought History #22, 1997}
TERATOLOGY Thomas Jefferson’s view, that it is self-evident that all men are created equal, is inspiring to secular humanists and teratologists, who interpret Jefferson to mean that all are equal under the law. Teratology is the study of biological malformations. Teratologists do not think in terms of “physical imperfections” or “mistakes of nature.” Rather, the teratologist observes very special people such as the following:
• Chang and Eng, “the original Siamese twins joined at the chest for life,” who married sisters, set up separate homes, and fathered twenty-two children between them;
• Myrtle Corbin, who had two lower bodies, bore three children with one and two with the other;
• John Merrick, the so-called “Elephant Man” whose neurofibromatosis caused tumors to grow around the nerves under his skin and in his bones and who was dragged from town to town and from fair to fair as if a strange beast in a cage . . . but who once was visited by Queen Alexandra—then Princess of Wales—who sat by his chair and talked to him as to a person she was glad to see;
• Grace Gilbert, one of many bearded ladies who were shunned by the general population and forced to make a living by being exhibited at circuses;
• Frieda Pushnick, who although born without arms and legs was able to type and sew;
• Francesco Lentini, who used his third leg for soccer;
• Johnny Eck, the legless runner (on his hands) who said, “To ask me if I’m sorry I have no legs is like asking an Eskimo if he’s sorry he never tasted an artichoke”;
• Charles Tripp, who had no hands but used his feet as hands;
• Eli Bowen, who had no legs but had feet;
• The Tocci brothers, who were two down to the sixth rib but only one person with two legs below;
• Tom Thumb, whom President Abraham Lincoln knew as the smallest human of that time and who at his death of a stroke was three feet four inches tall and weighed seventy pounds;
• Luciz Aarate, the Mexican-born woman who was under twenty inches tall and weighed but five pounds;
• Robert Wadlow, a giant who was 8’ 11.1” tall;
• Jean Libbera, who had a miniature twin called Jacques that grew out of his body;
• Carl Unthan, the armless fiddler who perfored in Vienna with Johann Strauss conducting.
All the above were termed “freaks” by hoi polloi. Humanists, however, consider natural—specimens of nature—any so-called oddities of any of the various organisms in plant or human life. We all are humans, whether we are giants, dwarfs, midgets, hairy, legless, having two penises, having two vaginas, having no eyes or three eyes, having one breast or three breasts, having three legs or four legs, having green eyes, being homosexual or bisexual, being left-handed or right-handed, being large- or thin-lipped, having red hair, etc. We are all humans whether or not we lack such variations and, instead, more closely resemble individuals featured in commercial advertising, dramatic productions, and movies. (See entries for Exceptional People and for Frederick Drimmer, Very Special People, the Struggles, Loves, and Triumphs of Human Oddities, (1973) and Leslie Fiedler, Freaks [1993].)
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) (c. 175 or 195–c. 159 B.C.E.) Terence, the Roman writer of comedies, penned the famous humanistic saying, “I am a man, and nothing that concerns mankind do I deem a matter of indifference to me.” {CE}
Teresa (Mother) (1910–1997) Agnes Goxha Bojaxhiu, the Albanian known in Catholic circles as Mother Teresa, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She is one of the Church’s most vocal exponents of the total ban on artificial methods of birth control. At the age of eighty-three in Calcutta, she videotaped a message to a Catholic conference in Omaha, Nebraska, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the church’s order banning artificial birth control: “The same selfishness that wants to prevent the child by contraception will grow until it wants to kill the child already conceived. We must fight selfishness with a true, generous, and sacrificing love.” Asked by the conservative Catholic Malcolm Muggeridge if “you wouldn’t agree with people who say there are too many children in India?” Mother Teresa responded, “I do not agree because God always provides. He provides for the flowers and the birds for everything in the world He has created. And those little children are his life. There can never be enough.” Christopher Hitchens, in Vanity Fair (February 1995), is an American who writes mercilessly and negatively about the “presumable virgin,” Mother Teresa: “If M.T.’s such an innocent, how come her political timing is so thoroughly consistent and always ends up supporting either the fundamentalists or the status quo—if she’s so unworldly, how come she knows men such as (publisher Robert) Maxwell and (Charles) Keating [who was found guilty of improper financial dealings during a Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal]? If she’s so darn modest, why does she claim the divine warrant? If she’s so sweet and tender, why did she say that no family using contraception should be allowed to adopt a child? If she’s so nonideological, why did she say that the Inquisition was right and Galileo was wrong?” Hitchens added that when Dr. Robin Fox, the editor of The Lancet visited her Home for the Dying in Calcutta, he found that “patients admitted to the home are not being properly investigated or treated and that those in pain are being denied powerful analgesics.” The sign on the morgue reads, in English, “I AM ON MY WAY TO HEAVEN.” Dr. Fox wrote of his visits: “There are doctors who call in from tie to time but usually the sisters and volunteers (some of whom have medical knowledge) make decisions as best they can. I saw a young man who had been admitted in poor shape with high fever, and the drugs prescribed had been tetracycline and paracetamol. Later, a visiting doctor diagnosed probably malaria and substituted chloroquine. Could not someone have looked at a blood film? Investigations, I was told, are seldom permitted. . . . Mother Teresa prefers providence to planning; her rules are designed to prevent any drift towards materialism. . . . I was disturbed to learn that the formulary includes no strong analgesics.” Her hostel for homeless men with HIV follows her philosophy of penance through suffering—the men were not allowed to watch the Olympics (xbecause they were making their “Lenten sacrifice”), nor could they smoke, drink, or have visits from close friends. Other critics, Arthur C. Clarke included, have complained that she helps to exacerbate the world’s overpopulation problem, particularly, in all places, India. Indumati Parikh, for example, has called her “a disaster for India.” Similarly, law clerk Debasis Bhattachariya in Calcutta, where she worked with the poor and received the Nobel Prize committee’s attention, has said, “We believe that Mother Teresa is not at all any better than all the other godmen and godwomen, because she helps to place a more kindly mask on the overall exploitation in our society.” Furthermore, Indian freethinkers entirely disapprove of her recognizing India’s caste system, even tacitly. In April 1966, Mother Teresa told Ladies’ Home Journal that Princess Diana would be better off when free of her marriage, adding, “It is good that it is over. Nobody was happy anyhow,” a statement which Christopher Hitchens says supports his view that he consoles “the rich and powerful, allowing them all manner of indulgence, while preaching obedience and resignation to the poor.” Further, Hitchens points out that Mother Teresa makes no real effort at medical or social relief, “and that her mission is religious and propagandistic and includes surreptitious baptism of unbelievers.” To some, in short, Mother Teresa can do no wrong. To others, she is a prime example of wrong. (See entries for Bill Baird and Christopher Hitchens. The entry for Susan Shields describes the nun’s “house of illusions.” For a review of the Hitchens book by Barbara Smoker, see New Humanist, February 1996. Anne Sebba’s Mother Teresa: Beyond the Image is reviewed by Charlotte Franklin in New Humanist December 1997.) {CE; The New York Review of Books, 19 December 1996}
Terry, William Henry (1836–1913) Terry, a London-born freethinker, Unitarian, bookseller, clairvoyant, herbalist, and spiritualist, arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in 1853. In 1857, he discovered spiritualism and was editor from 1870 to 1905 of The Harbinger of Light, a publication described as a monthly journal devoted to “zoistic science,” freethought, spiritualism, and “the harmonial philosophy.” A bookshop he started served as headquarters for the Victorian Association of Spiritualists, whose platform was used for activities by the early freethinkers. Spiritualism at that time was considered the first stepping stone away from Christian orthodoxy. Terry, who was known as the “Father of Australian Spiritualism,” also was a fellow of the Theosophical Society in Australia. {SWW}
Terzian, Yervant (20th Century) Terzian, who is David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences at Cornell University, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Tessler, Albert Denis (1900–1996) Tessler, a pianist, composer, and humanist, died at the age of ninety-six.
Testa, Giacinto (19th Century) Testa was an Italian author who wrote Storia di Gesù di Nazareth (1870), a curious work maintaining that Jesus was the son of Giuseppe Pandera, a Calabrian of Brindisi. {BDF}
TESTAMENT “Testify,” “testimony,” “intestate” have a common origin in testis, the diminutive testiculus referring to one’s testicles. During the time of the Roman Empire, a man at court covered himself by folding his hand on his testicles, his most prized possession, and literally swore to tell the truth.
TESTICLE • When Voltaire was asked why no woman has ever written a tolerable tragedy, “Ah (said the Patriarch), the composition of a tragedy requires testicles.” —Letter from Lord Byron to John Murray,
2 April 1817
A testicle is a testis, the reproductive gland in the male vertebrate. Testicles contained within the scrotum are the sperm-secreting organs described in English as far back as 1425, then in reference to their unusual swelling during some sickness. Justamond in 1785 erroneously wrote that “It is very certain and has often been observed that the Hottentot men have but one testicle. According to Rudolph Bell in How To Do It (1999), Renaissance Italian wives were advised to tie up one of a husband’s testicles before having intercourse, the best time for balling being early in the day. Some contemporary female freethinkers have been heard, slightly gesticulating as they whispered, that male freethinkers of their acquaintance do far too much testiculating, too little anything else. “All balls!” the males could respond after 1931, when the interjection meaning “nonsense” was held by a non-puritanical court to be non-obscene.
TETRAGRAMMATON
For reasons of reverence, Jews found ineffable, or not to be uttered, the name of the god of Israel. Jehovah originally was pronounced Yahweh (Jahve). When first the vowels were inserted into the Hebrew Bible in the 7th century, the vowels of the “aDoNaY,” or “Lord,” were written with the consonants YHWH. This word was to be substituted when reading aloud. As a result, a transliteration of the resulting hybrid, according to R. B. Y. Scott, who taught at the United Theological College in Montreal, Canada, “first came into use in the 14th century through the failure of Christian scholars to recognize the origin and purpose of the vocalization; it has now acquired by usage independent standing in English.” Those four letters, YHWH, are called a tetragrammaton, and the name is never supposed to be pronounced save with the vowels of Adonai or Elohim. {ER}
TEUTHOLOGY Architeuthis, the giant squid, is one of more than fifty thousand species in the phylum Mollusca. Early legends of the kraken and the sea serpent have been described in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A squid expert—a teuthologist—knows that the creature lives only in the deep ocean where it is icily cold and dark. It does not rise to the surface unless it is dying or already dead. Richard Ellis’s The Search for the Giant Squid (1998) illustrates the fascination of teuthology. Although the largest Architeuthis can grow to a known length of sixty feet, little is known about this animal, one of the largest on Earth. Ellis found it has eyes as big as dinner plates, is without eyelids, and if eaten tastes like household cleaner because it contains so much ammonium chloride. In a humanistic overture to this fellow animal, Ellis asks that we “envision the giant squid lurking almost invisibly in the blackness of the depths, its amazing eyes able to pick out the tiniest light or movement, its muscular tentacles shooting out to capture its unsuspecting prey.”
TEUTONIC GODS: See the entry for Germanic Religion.
TEXAS HUMANISTS, FREETHINKERS, ATHEISTS Texas has the following groups:
• American Atheist Newsletter is no longer coming from Austin, Texas. Ellen Johnson in 1997 did revive the publication. However, some groups, such as the Atheist Community of Austin, refused to affiliate, citing as their concerns the American Atheist’s corporate structure’s lack of democracy, its financial secrecy, its future direction, and an alleged lack of real benefits from affiliation. Johnson’s newsletter, however, continued to portray Madalyn O’Hair as an atheist heroine and cited the need for continuing the organization. American Atheists Inc. has since moved to Box 5733, Parsippany, New Jerseey 07054-6733. On the Web: <www.atheists.org/>. • American Humanist Association, Mid South Region (AHA) A-J2, 1301 Richmond Avenue, Houston, Texas 77006. Steven Schafersman is the contact. E-mail: <frankprahl@earthlink.net>. • Atheist Community of Austin’s e-mail: <tankgirl@swbell.net>. On the Web: <http://www.atheist-community.org>. In November 1998, the group voted against affiliation with American Atheists, Inc. • Atheist Experience is a Sunday 9 a.m. call-in show on Austin public access TV. • Atheist Network (Atheist Alliance), POB 130898, Houston, Texas 77219. Gipson Arnold is its president (713) 686-6310. • Atheists and Freethinkers United, 1730 Clydesdale, Louisville, Texas 75267. Gene Geirman is its president. • Corpus Christi freethinkers can be contacted by e-mailing Brian Meyer <bmmagic@earthlink.net> or Kathy Risinger at <steigener@aol.com>. • Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex Secular Humanists, 3616 Bryce Ave. (26-B), Fort Worth, TX 76107 (817) 737-8190 • Dial a Gay Atheist: (713) 880-4242 • Dial-the-Atheist in Austin: (512) 458-5731 • Ethical Culture Fellowship of Austin can be contacted at (512) 306-1111, <ccfa@usa.net>, and <http://www.main.org/cc>. • Freethinkers Association of Central Texas (ASHS), PO Box 160881, San Antonio, TX 78280; (210) 491-6829. Contacts: Blake Olson, Don Lawrence at: <blakeo@flash.net> and <lawdon99@earthlink.net>. On the Web: <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8317>. • Freethought Forum is an 11:00 Tuesday morning program on San Antonio public access TV. • Houstonians for Secular Humanism, PO Box 925872, Houston, TX 77292 (713) 864-0363. Daniel Strain’s e-mail: <dts2000@flash.net>. On the Web: <http://www.flash.net/~dts2000>. • Human Concerns Center (AHA), 7481 Daingerfield, Dallas, Texas 75227. H. Bruce Hunter is the contact. • Humanist Association of Montgomery County, 224 Dawns Edge, Montgomery, Texas 77356. Phone (409) 447-4745. Ralph D. Davis is President. • Humanists Involved in Greater Houston (HIGH)(AHA), POB 5888, Pasadena, Texas 77508. • Humanists of Austin (AHA), POB 4721, Austin, Texas 78765. Steve Bratteng is the contact. • Humanists of Greater Dallas, 7417 Alto Caro Drive, Dallas, Texas 75248; phone (214) 980-7706. Dick Nelson is a contact member. • Humanists of Houston (AHA), 8423 Burwood Park Drive, Spring, Texas 77379. Kyle Nagel is the contact. (713) 479-6829. Robert Finch, a contact at 211 Lombardy Drive, Sugar Land, Texas 77478. Phone (713) 491-1608. E-mail: <frankprahl@earthlink.net>. • Lufkin Area Freethinkers and humanists can contact Lou Cable at <skeptic@inu.net> or <http://www.inu.net/skeptic>. • Metropolex Atheists, Arlington, Texas. Contact Colin Sewards at (817) 473-8213. • North Texas Church of Freethought, Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas (817) 461-2145. E-mail: <church@freethought.org>. On the Web: <http://church.freethought.org>. • Post-Christian Support Group. E-mail: <postxian@aol.com> and <JCnot4me@aol.com> • Secular Humanist Association of San Antonio (ASHS), POB 160881, San Antonio, Texas 78280. Jimmie Barnes is the President. The newsletter is The Alternative Approach. • Texas A&M Atheists and Agnostics are on the Web: <http://atheist.tamu.edu/~aasg>. • The Texas Atheist, edited by Howard Thompson, is on the Web at <http://gofreemind@aol.com>. • Texas Hill Country Freethinkers. Contact is Julie Fisher at (210) 354-3311. E-mail: <txfreethinker@geocities.com>. • University of Houston humanists are on the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University of Texas at Austin humanists are at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University Skeptics Society in Austin is on the Web: <www.utexas.edu/students/skeptics>.
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811–1863) Thackeray, the Calcutta-born English novelist, was a brilliant satirist. He left Trinity College, Cambridge, without taking a degree, because he lost some of his inheritance through gambling. During the winter of 1830–1831 he visited Weimar, where he met Goethe. By 1833 virtually all his inherited money had been lost, probably in the collapse of the Indian agency-houses. Thackeray lived in Paris from 1834 until 1837, making a meager living from journalism. There, in 1836, he married Isabella Shawe, who three years later became hopelessly insane. She was cared for by a family in Essex and survived her husband by thirty years. Thackeray sent his two young daughters to be raised by his parents in Paris, then lived the life of a clubman in London and worked to support his family. As a contributor to Punch, he often parodied the false romantic sentiment pervading the fiction of his day. His eldest daughter, Lady Anne Ritchie, was also an author. His younger daughter Harriet married Sir Leslie Stephen, an ordained minister who became an agnostic. Thackeray frequently wrote against the use of tobacco, including in his fiction such lines as, “Cigars introduced with the coffee, do, if anything can, make us forget the absence of the other sex.” In 1841, Thackeray wrote Comic Tales and Sketches, followed in 1848 by the popular Book of Snobs and, the work which led him to become known as a major English novelist, the satirical Vanity Fair. (That work, inspired by a phrase from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, he had originally been titled The Novel Without a Hero: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society). According to McCabe, Tennyson was a theist but was skeptical about a future life. “About my future state I don’t know,” he was quoted as saying in Melville’s Life of Thackeray. In The Letters of Dr. J. Brown, there is a letter in which Thackeray says that he has listened to a preacher “on the evangelical dodge” and he adds, “Ah, what rubbish.” Melville states that Thackeray “formed no very definite creed.” (See entry for Joseph Warren Beach.) {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Thaer, Albrecht Daniel (1752–1828) Thaer was a German agriculturist who is said to have inspired Lessing’s work on The Education of the Human Race. {BDF}
Thales (c. 636–c. 546 B.C.E.) The first recorded Western philosopher, Thales reputedly founded the Milesian school of philosophy in Ionia, a Greek province on the Aegean coast of what is now Turkey. Although little is known about his teachings, he is said to have concerned himself with the “nature of things,” with understanding the elements and origins of the physical world. Denying the approaches used by mythology in explaining the physical world, he taught that nature is composed of one basic stuff, which he thought to be water. It is not his answer but his approach which is significant. He is believed to have introduced geometry into Greece as well as to have predicted an eclipse of the sun in 585 B.C.E. By predicting an eclipse, Thales thus contributed to the idea that the heavens are separate from the gods. McCabe calls Thales “the first freethinker in history.” Plato’s Theaetetus tells this tale:
It seems that while Thales was engaged in studying the stars and gazing upwards he fell into a cistern; whereupon he was jeered at (they say) by a witty and attractive serving-wench from Thrace for being so eager to know what was happening in the sky that he did not see what was under his nose.
Matt Cherry has observed that Thales was undeterred by the jeers of saucy serving-wenches and that several younger colleagues of Thales continued his study into the “nature of things.” Chief among these first philosophers were the Ionian Greeks Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Xenophanes. {CE; JM; TYD}
Thandeka (20th Century)
An African American and a Unitarian theologian, Thandeka works with various Unitarian Universalist societies on subjects relating to race. In “A Conversation on Race and Class” (World, July-August 1998), she said she is writing a book on “race, money, and God.” THANKSGIVING DAY: See entry for Blamesgiving Day.
Thaxter, Celia (Laighton) (1835–1894) Thaxter lived in New Hampshire where her father was a lighthouse keeper on the Isles of Shoals. She depicted the various moods of the sea in such of her works as Poems (1872), Drift-Weed (1879), and Idyls and Pastorals (1886). Thaxter’s family ran a hotel, and she became a favorite of visiting artists and authors such as Thoreau, Lowell, and Whittier. Thaxter was a Unitarian. {EG}
Thayer, Dorothea (20th Century) Thayer was secretary-treasurer of the New York City Humanists when Warren Allen Smith founded the group and led it until 1953. She then continued when Ingersoll’s granddaughter, Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, succeeded to the post. Thayer never missed a meeting, joyfully greeted such speakers as Erich Fromm and George Axtelle, and helped considerably to give the group a feeling of togetherness and purpose. A person with little money to spare, she contributed heavily to humanist causes both in time and resources.
Thayer, Sylvanus (1785–1872) Founder of the U.S. Military Academy, Thayer was its superintendent from 1817 to 1833. He was a Unitarian. {U; UU}
Thayer, Thomas Baldwin (1812–1886) Thayer’s Theology of Universalism (1862) has been called “the most thorough and systematic treatment of Universalist theology before the Civil War.” He edited Universalist Quarterly from 1884 to 1886. One of the intellectual leaders of mid-19th-century Universalism, he also wrote The Origin and History of the Doctrine of Endless Punishment (1855). {U&U}
Thayer, V(ivian) T(row) (1886–1979) Thayer, a director of Ethical Culture Schools (1928–1947), was trusted by Felix Adler although Thayer was a Deweyite and Adler disliked Dewey. He signed both Humanist Manifesto I and II. A progressive educator, he wrote Religion in Public Education (1943) and Formative Ideas in American Education (1965). In 1964 he was named Pioneer Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In 1969, he was recipient of the John Dewey Society award for distinguished lifetime service to education. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest; FUS; HM1; HM2; HNS}
THE FIRST NATIONAL CHURCH OF THE EXQUISITE PANIC, INC.: See the entry for dadaist Robert Delford Brown.
THE GREATEST STORY EVER SOLD The cover of Thee Freethinker (May 1998) was entitled “The Greatest Story Ever Sold,” a take-off on religionists’ reference to the Bible and implying the adeptness of its early marketing.
The Residents (20th Century) The Residents are a 26-year-old band whose members’ identities have never been divulged. In photographs and performances, they appear with giant, veiny eyeballs on their heads, crowned with top hats. The San Francisco-based group has dealt with everything from fascism to Elvis Presley, but its “Wormwood” (1999) specifically mocks religion. In their appearances they sometimes sing, to the tune of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” a song, “God business is our business!” Other songs emphasize the Bible’s cruelty to women, as in the Genesis story of Dinah, whose marriage causes her brothers-in-law to kill all the men and enslave all the women of her town. Or about God’s brutality: ordering Abraham to kill his son, rejecting Cain’s offering of grain, transforming Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Their female singer (Jephthah) intones, “I’m gonna die with no tears in my eyes, ’cause God digs my daddy!” The performance might end with a disorderly version of “That Old Time Religion,” the words including, “It was good for making millions/selling platitudes to pilgrims.” The group typefies an end-of-the-century freedom to attack what previously had been called blasphemy. {Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 7 April 1999}
The The (20th Century) In 1979 The The was formed by then seventeen-year-old Matt Johnson. During an online chat session in 1995, a participant observed that the song “I Saw the Light” is a long distance from “I Ain’t Never Been to Church or Believed in Jesus Christ” and asked if Johnson’s religious feelings had changed. Replied Johnson, “I’m a born-again agnostic!” {CA; E}
The The: See entry for Matt Johnson.
THE UNITARIAN The Unitarian is a monthly publication of the British Unitarians. (See entry for General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches.)
THEISM • Polytheism—ancient man’s invention • Monotheism—14th Century BCE retro-invention • Theism—successful Middle Ages commercial idea • Zerotheism—21st Century outlook —Jun Sczesnoczkawasm
Theism in philosophy and religion is the belief in a personal God. Atheism is its denial. Unlike pantheism, theism refuses to identify God and the universe. Unlike deism, theism rejects the insistence on the purely transcendent nature of God, holding that God is at once immanent and transcendent. William of Ockham at the end of the Middle Ages denied God’s existence could be proved solely by reason. Those who agreed have been Kant, the Barthians, existentialists, and empiricists who reject the possibility of metaphysics in any form. However, some philosophers and theologians remain theists, including Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, E. L. Mascall, and A. M. Farrer. Robert Coles, an essayist and psychiatrist, wrote of his own “spiritual” quest in The Secular Mind (1999), an example of a scientist who is interested in the sacred but not that of the contemporary right in the United States. Numbers of American authors are theists: Protestants, such as Toni Morrison and John Updike; Jews such as Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer; Catholics such as G. K. Chesterton and Seamus Justin Heaney. Popular writer Stephen King on “60 Minutes” (2 August 1998) mentioned his belief “in a personal God.” Asked about humanism, the following authors responded to the present author:
• Faith Baldwin: My belief is simple. It is in God and His spirit in mankind. It is in man and his struggle. It is in the Golden Rule and in the valor of men, however ignoble their shortcomings. {WAS, 11 February 1951}
• Paul de Kruif: Humanism connotes to me only what can be read in St. Matthew, 5, verses 38 to 48. Forgive me if this is old-fashioned. I know it will leave agnostics and eggheads cold. What it teaches is an ideal, not attainable, but worth striving for. If one so strives, then in my book one is a humanist. {WAS, 1 November 1956}
• Alan Dowling: I am looking forward to neo-supernaturalistic humanism with intense eagerness. {WAS, 28 February 1951}
• Lynn Harold Hough: My book, Christian Humanism and the Modern World, best answers the question. In a general way, I belong with Babbitt and More (see my book, Great Humanists). Louis Mercier’s American Humanism and the New Age deals with my position. My books, The Christian Criticism of Life and The Meaning of Human Experience were Religious Book of the Month Club selections. . . . My book, The Meaning of Human Experience, remains the fullest statement of my position. {WAS, 21 August 1956}
• Keith Scott Latourette: I am not entirely clear as to what reply to give, for I am not sure that I belong under any classification of humanism. If I fall under any one of the seven categories in your scheme, it would be under the fourth, namely theistic humanism. Obviously I am a Christian and a Protestant and have a deep concern for human values. I believe profoundly that with the help of God as He has revealed Himself in Christ, individual men can become what Saint Paul describes as “heirs of God, joint heirs with Jesus Christ,” that such are what the New Testament calls “the light of the world” and “the salt of the earth,” and that through them many of the chronic ills that beset mankind and indeed the animal creation can be mitigated and some of them removed. I do not expect a perfect society in history. That must wait for a stage beyond the boundaries of time and place. But we do have the high privilege of working toward a society that is better than what we have now. {WAS, 18 April 1956}
• Denise Levertov: Theistic humanism would probably come closest to my position, though I don’t think or speak of myself as a theistic humanist. We human being are far too self-important in any case. {WAS, 15 May 1989}
• Jacques Maritain: (commenting on his new book): (Integral humanism), considering man in the integrality of his natural and his supernatural being and setting no limits a priori or the descent of divinity into man, can also be called Humanism of the Incarnation.
• E. L. Mayo: When it comes to cold prose, I suspect that most poets have difficulty in stating their philosophic views. It is notorious, of course, among poets like Coleridge and Santayana, who have also written philosophy, that their philosophy is often at odds with their poems; and I suspect that the principle works the other way, i.e., from poetry to philosophy. I know where I began. In the twenties I thought of myself as a disciple of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. I am not a Harvard man, but I have attended lectures by both men and am still deeply impressed by their courage and learning, courage especially, for it took plenty of it to stem as they did the whole tide of scientific and literary opinion of the twenties. At the time, in 1925, I wrote an early poem dedicated to Babbitt; not a very good one, I’m afraid, but it reflects my admiration of the man along with a certain skepticism about the “Inner Chec”’ or “frein vital” which he made the cornerstone of his humanist philosophy. I suspected then as I suspect now that the Inner Check was simply Irving Babbitt himself, slightly disguised in Buddhistic trappings. T. S. Eliot, also at one time one of Babbitt’s disciples, has expressed much the same view in a well-known essay.
For Irving Babbitt
Now salamander-like you thread the flame Of Tophet with a certain decent poise, And several friends of ours are also here And exchange salutation. We are come For many reasons, but a single end: This Chastening. The newly damned Are prone to shriek among the bluer flames. You scorn such things as not aristocratic, And that is well—you will go far. And now Come, let us visit Irving in his cave. Strange snorts, and grunts, and very heavy breathing Are to be heard there, but of all the Hells In Torment his is coolest. We’ll discuss The Inner Check, a thermal hardening process For turning lava into sterner stuff And many other better things than death.
Perhaps you have noted how the adjective “human” has undergone a sea-change in ordinary American colloquial speech, has become, in fact, a noun, the use of which somehow puts the speaker outside the biological phylum he is discussing. “Humans”—not human beings—collect in bargain basements, pack the subways, have their opinions tested by the Gallup Poll. It is a symptom no doubt; I cannot quite say of what, but I suspect that as the concept ‘human’ has gradually changed in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy—in Dewey’s, for example—it has lost something that we used to call “spiritual values”—notions I mean that tied it up with traditional Christianity with its fixed beliefs in Original Sin, equality before God, and the rest. Insensibly, such associations as these have come to be replaced with new ones drawn from biology, economics, etc. In a word, humanity’s conception of itself seems to be changing, and the “new” man is a biologico-political unit; that, as far as I can tell, is what a “human,” as opposed to a human being, really is. Now, since this is a development uncongenial to me, I look about me for some means of changing it. As William Blake said, “We become what we contemplate,” and if we contemplate ourselves as biologico-political mechanisms that is what we will become. The only solution of the difficulty, it seems to me, is first to recognize that there is a difficulty and a serious one. The next is to face the fact that humanism, as a historical movement (whether in China with Confucius, in India with Buddha, or in Europe with Erasmus) has never existed as an independent system of thought but rather as a corrective and criticism of an already existent body of thought religious in nature. If not exactly a parasite, humanism has at any rate become a symbiote; and it is hard to think of it as existing as a complete philosophy in its own right. It is as though for man to remain human he must take into account factors as much beyond ordinary humanity as he himself is beyond the water-spider. Nietzsche, who was, after all, the son of a Lutheran clergyman, was quite right, I think, in maintaining that in essence man is a bridge between something less and something greater than his ordinary self. Religion heightens man’s inner tension; humanism relaxes it; so we need both. But with a secular and naturalistic humanism alone, I doubt whether we can succeed in remaining fully human. Rather, to use a word popular with the science-fictioneers, we shall become “humanoids,” creatures that look like men until they are subjected to a closer examination. Yes, as you no doubt by this time suspect, so far as I am a humanist at all (it has always been an ambition of mine, at any rate, to become human), I am a theistic humanist along with William Blake, Soren Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil. {WAS, 3 August 1954}
• Howard A. Murphy: In general, I would say that my position corresponds most closely to the theistic humanism exemplified by Maritain, Niebuhr, and Tillich. Actually, my position is most clearly stated by Raynor Johnson’s new book, The Imprisoned Splendor, which I consider one of the clearest and best statements of the place of ESP and mysticism in life. {WAS, 18 August 1954}
• Reinhold Niebuhr: I suppose it is right to put my thought in the category of “theistic humanism.” {WAS, 24 March 1949}
• J. B. Priestley: My wife (Jacquetta Hawkes, the pre-historian) and I find your categories of humanism puzzling. Men like Eliot and Niebuhr do not seem to us humanists at all. Both of us reject, for varying reasons, Huxley’s scientific humanism. But we do not accept Christianity. We might be described as religious persons without a religion. In this we probably follow Jung. In your categories I come closest to “theistic humanism,” believing as I do that Man should not regard himself as a sort of end product and that higher levels of being exist (symbolised in the Unconscious by the archetype of deity, the “numinous,” while being sceptical in my attitude towards the theologians, who talk about God as if they had been to college with him. I do not pretend to be a philosopher and am certainly no mystic, but would if necessary side with the mystics against the “scientific humanists.” I have just been correcting the proofs of a little piece called “Pigs at Sea” for the September number of Encounter, in which I deal humorously with these various views. I hope you will see it. Of contemporary thinkers Jung, whom we know, has had the greatest influence upon my wife and me. {WAS, 26 July 1954}
• Dorothy L. Sayers: . . . Other people might reasonably include me in the category of theistic humanism; but I do not call myself a “Theistic Humanist.” I call myself a Christian. . . . All Christians are “humanists,” in the sense that they believe the individual human person to be infinitely precious in the sight of God. No Christian is a “humanist” insofar as that excludes belief in God. {WAS, 5 April 1956}
• Paul Scherer: The humanism that stems from the perversion of man’s place in the universe brought about by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment finds no welcome to my mind. Lynn Harold Hough, whom you may know, calls himself a Christian humanist; with that I have some measure of sympathy. Harry Overstreet’s statement [See entry herein.] seems to me utterly self-contradictory. If nature includes more than any of our systems of knowledge have ever included or now include, how can the only way of knowing be through the natural processes of the mind? And what if man were incapable of knowing himself apart from his relationship to God? You can see that the only contribution I should feel called on to make would be in the nature of an explosion. {WAS, 1 May 1956}
• Karl Shapiro: I believe in God, the Constitution, and poetry, in that order. What kind of Humanist does that make me? Thomas Jefferson said, “I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know.” John Milton, a man of God, despised every and all churches. Both would have believed in the Constitution in my sense. And poetry too, it goes without saying. This is neither Secular nor Theological nor Humanistic, I think. {WAS, 22 February 1989}
• Russell Henry Stafford: By contrast with secularism or positivism or scientism, so widely the temper of our time—the doctrine that there is no God, nor any future that makes any difference—this other way of seeing life is what I like to call humanism: Christian humanism. Humanism, on the tongues of people who know history, does not mean the same thing as secularism. For hundreds of years it has meant a concentration of interest and effort upon the life of man in this world; because this world is where we are, and only fools will day-dream of what lies beyond while there is so much to do right now. But we are to do it by the light that comes to our souls from beyond, as light comes to our bodies from sun and moon and stars. . . . Jesus was the first Christian humanist. There is never a taint of otherworldliness in his teaching, save for faint echoes of popular folklore which he twisted for his own purpose, so that it was easy to see through. He takes the life to come for granted; “If it were not so, I would have told you,” says he, as if that depressing news would be astonishing indeed to any sensible person. Then he goes on to tell and show us how to live where we are now as God’s children, and not donkeys or hyenas of a larger growth. {WAS, 1 May 1956}
• Richard Wilbur: I’ve been a student of the humanities, and I know that my view of human capacities for greatness and corruption has been shaped in part by Renaissance art and letters. I also adhere to a religious position which is not scornful of this life or of humanity. You might there, I should think, admit me as a humanist to as many as three of your categories. It seems to me that we should not despair of any word—”democracy,” for example—merely because it has various and conflicting meanings. Yet it is good to be alert to words which are in a temporary state of confusion—words such as ‘experimental,’ which is often applied at present to the most imitative and repetitive of our artists. Your enquiry makes it plain that “humanist,” if it is to be currently useful, must be employed in clear contexts which enforce the intended sense. . . . I don’t think much of atheism, because it is foolish to be sure of a non-existence. I think agnosticism an honorable state of mind. As for me, I am a theist; I know at all times that God exists and is good. Beyond that, my beliefs come and go. {WAS, 9 February 1989 and 1 December 1994}
Meanwhile, some theologians, such as Emory University’s Thomas J. J. Altizer, were changing the usual meaning of theism. In 1965 he said, “We must recognize that the death of God is a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence.” However, J. C. A. Gaskin, in Varieties of Unbelief From Epicurus to Sartre (1989), defined theism as being “[b]elief in a single God who created and sustains the ordered universe and who also knows about and cares about each individual human being (Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all, in this sense, theists).” (For a discussion of theism, see the article by H. P. Owen in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8; See John Updike’s The Future of Faith: Confessions of a Churchgoer, The New Yorker, 29 November 1999) {CE; RE; TYD}
THEISTIC HUMANISM The “Back to Aristotle” trend in the 1930s developed into a “Back to God” movement as well. When the former designation lost favor as a battle cry some individuals still remained who continued the second slogan, one which ordinarily has commanded respect throughout the ages and one which appeared to have a better chance of surviving. Catholic support of neo-humanism gave that movement a substantial though temporary shot-in-the-arm, but when Catholic periodicals such as Thought, Commonweal, America, and the organ of the Knights of Columbus withdrew their support; and when Bookman and Saturday Review of Literature no longer showed interest, the attempted revival of classical humanism died along with its main founders. More than any other, it was Jacques Maritain who shaped Catholic thought toward humanism. At first, he was counted by neo-humanists as being within their fold. But by 1936 upon publication of l’Humanisme Integral it became evident that he was going to solve the Catholic dilemma over humanism by founding a separate branch of philosophy and giving it his own trademark. Speaking of it, he said, “Such a humanism, considering man in the integrality of his natural and his supernatural being and setting no limits a priori on the descent of divinity into man, can also be called Humanism of the Incarnation.” His views were contested by many, including M. C. Otto, Roy Wood Sellars, Harold A. Larrabee, and Blodwen Davies in New Humanist (and later in The Humanist), a magazine which served as the pivoting point around which opposition to supernaturalistic, and defense of naturalistic, humanism revolved. Maritain was criticized as being anti-pragmatic, anti-naturalistic, pro-Kierkegaard, pro-Barth, and neo-Thomistic. In 1945, as pointed out in Educational Principles of American Humanism by J. T. Foudy, many Catholics accepted Maritain’s views if they were interested in the subject of humanism. However, a few might be “common sense humanists” with Babbitt and Foerster; or “metaphysical humanists” with Hutchins and Adler; or “religious humanists” with Paul Elmer More, to repeat the terms Foudy used. Protestants were not so united in their views. A. J. B. Balfour, as early as 1915, had warned that humanism without theism was inadvisable and, if effected, would lose more than half its value. Although most Protestants agreed, they did not agree upon how to achieve this. One of the most vociferous proponents of Protestant theistic humanism was Lynn Harold Hough, the former dean of Drew Theological Seminary. Just as materialism robs man of his dignity, he preached, so do some theologies. “God does not want to speak to man flat on his face,” he wrote. “He wants man to stand erect and on his own feet.” In the main, theistic humanism emphasizes human values and denies the complete impotence of man to work out his own salvation. Without vigorous self-effort, it is reasoned, man can never expect to achieve this salvation. But man’s efforts toward that end are not entirely without support, for the good and wise God who created man is working with him all the time. Though not wholly this-worldly, the theistic humanist places little stress upon the future life. Humanism, Another Battle Line (1931), a symposium of ten authors edited by W. P. King, served as one of the best rallying points around which Protestant theistic humanism could group its forces. The several authors expressed deep concern over the advances being made by naturalistic humanism and summarized their views: “Our present battle is with materialism in the realm of philosophy and science; Humanism, which is religion without God; and behaviorism, which is psychology without a soul.” A constructively critical approach came in 1937 when Charles Hartshorne, a University of Chicago professor and the biographer of Alfred North Whitehead, wrote Beyond Humanism. He outlined the new trend toward humanism, suggesting that it was insufficient and that its proponents should go from their present positions to a type of theistic humanism which he believed could be called either “theistic naturalism” or “naturalistic theism.” Hartshorne, known for his mystical profundity, received some support from those theists who could comprehend what he had written. That which the Catholic and Protestant humanist hold in common is an adherence to Christianity, an insistence upon human values and upon man’s capability of working out his salvation with his God, and a concern over the growing forces of non-theistic philosophies. Yet, other than scattered books and articles on the subject, no united action has been taken and theistic humanism as a movement has little present support. Mostly, it is confined to seminary conversation, articles of description in church magazines, and serious discussions in theological treatises. Although Paul Tillich’s theistic existentialism was also a kind of theistic humanism, other theologians seldom use such terminology. {ER}
THEO- AND THE- The roots of theo and the are Latin and Greek and mean “god” or “God.” Over the centuries theists and religious institutions have developed theological studies that have invented such as the following, which are of little empirical value to secular humanists:
THEODICY Theodicy is a theological coinage to describe “the defense of God’s goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.” If bad things occur, God may have done to illustrate His mysterious ways. Secular humanists find that such thinking borders on idiocy.
THEODY
A theody is a religious hymn that praises God. It is not to be confused with threnody, which is both a lamentation for the dead and, in animals, the rare sound made for example by a mother if any of her offspring are dying.
THEOLOGIAN “I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest,” wrote Denis Diderot. “Up comes a theologian and blows it out.”
THEOLOGICAL “Theological,” according to one of the New York City editors of Pique, “not only sounds like, but is, illogical.”
THEOLOGOUMENON If a theological statement or concept is an individual opinion rather than authoritative doctrine, it is a theologoumenon.
THEOLOGY In Christianity, theology is the systematic study of the nature of God and His relationship with man and with the world. Judaism, which holds that God is unknowable, is not inclined toward theology. Non-believers are more apt to consider it a study leading to a huge bureaucratic expense which church officials justify through pointing out that they are fine-tuning religion by making relevant to the ordinary man-on-the-street such studies as homiletics, apologetics, polemics, metaphysics, theopneustia, religious ontology, religious epistemology, religious cosmogonies, dogmatics, etc. How else would parishioners know about grace, revelation, salvation, sacraments, immanence, symbolics, exegesis, tetragrammatoms, etc., which are so important to a person in understanding “why” he needs religion. One theologian who was a student of Cardinal Newman, Frederick W. Faber (1814–1863), inexplicably explained in his Spiritual Conferences, “Religious talk is a very feast to self-deceit.” Another, Archdeacon Frederic William Farrar (1831–1903) of Westminster Cathedral, observed, and it is unknown whether he was pleased or displeased, “Science has had to struggle for life against the fury of theological dogmatists, but in every instance the dogmatists have been ignominiously defeated.” For Baron d’Holbach, in The System of Nature (1770), “Theology is but the ignorance of natural causes reduced to a system.” (See entry for Bullshitus Episcopalis.) {CE; ER; TYD}
THEOMACHIST A theomachist resists God, the gods, and divine will. From a semantic viewpoint, theomachist is a snarl word, one with negative overtones.
THEOMANIA Theomania consists of a religious madness in which the patient believes that he or she is actually the Deity or is inspired by the Deity. Psychiatrists find that theomaniacs are difficult to treat.
THEOMANCY Individuals who can divine the future by the way oracles respond practice theomancy.
THEONOMY Theonomy, a word based upon the Greek for “God’s law,” was described by an authoritative theonomist in The Scotsman (12 May 1997): Theonomy applies to drunkards and gluttons and children who are violent towards their parents. This wouldn’t apply to younger children. The parents would give testimony to civil magistrates and the child would be put to death on the basis of that. I would stress that it would be an absolute last resort applied to children who ignored repeated attempts at discipline. Teaching “that murderers, homosexuals, people who have had premarital sex and even teenagers who are abusive to their parents should all be stoned to death,” the group believes that capital punishment is necessary in order to deter people from certain crimes. According to The Scotsman, the Free Church of Scotland general Assembly Committee on Public Questions, Religion, and Morals has warned that the Church could be fertile soil for Theonomy because of the common strict theological stance of the two sects. {The Freethinker, June 1997}
THEOPHAGY Theophagy is eating the god: theos, god; phagein, to eat. The religious practice can be traced to the eating of a sacred animal in order to secure mana, or the god in the form of an animal. Mystery religions encouraged theophagy, and the practice is carried over into Christian practice where it is known as sacramental meal, or communion. H. R. Willoughby wrote about the subject in Pagan Regeneration (1929), as did Preservèd Smith in A Short History of Christian Theophagy (1922). In 1994, a representative sample of American Catholics was asked which statement came closest to “what you believe takes place at mass.” According to the New York Times/CBS poll, only one out of three chose “the bread and wine are changed into Christ’s body and blood.” More than sixty percent preferred “the bread and wine are symbolic reminders of Christ.” Even among theophagists going to mass regularly, more said that “symbolic reminder” came closest to their belief. Since ancient times, however, the church has taught that the bread and wine offered at mass during the sacrament of holy communion are mysteriously changed into the actual body and blood of Christ, in keeping with Jesus’s words at the Last Supper. {ER}
THEOPHILANTHROPIST A theophilanthropist (an adorer of God and of Mankind) was a member of a deistic society established in Paris during the period of the Directory aiming to institute, in place of Christianity, which had been officially abolished, a new religion of theophilanthropism affirming a deistic belief in the existence of God, in the immortality of the soul, and in virtue. After being suppressed in 1801 by Napoléon, the group members often became Freemasons.
THEOPHOBIA
Theophobia is a dread of the wrath of God, a phobia of which God is the object.
THEORY OF RELATIVITY: See entries for Albert Einstein and for String Theory.
THEOSOPHY • Theosophy, n. An ancient faith having all the certitude of religion and all the mystery of science. The modern Theosophist holds, with the Buddhists, that we live an incalculable number of times on this earth, in as many as several bodies, because one life is not long enough for our complete spiritual development; that is, a single lifetime does not suffice for us to become as wise and good as we choose to wish to become. To be absolutely wise and good—that is perfection; and the Theosophist is so keen-sighted as to have observed that everything desirous of improvement eventually attains perfection. Less competent observers are disposed to except cats, which seem neither wiser nor better than they were last year. The greatest and fattest of recent Theosophists was the late Madame Blavatsky, who had no cat. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Theosophy as interpreted by Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky followed Buddhist and Brahmanic theories concerning pantheistic evolution and reincarnation. Individuals properly trained to interpret auras (symbolized by artists as an arc over a person’s or a holy person’s head) and other mystical symbols. Madame Blavatsky’s books were accused of being fraudulent. She countered that Master Koot Hoomi, an invisible spirit which had dictated letters to her, had indeed copied a passage verbatim from a speech by Henry Kiddle, another American medium. Her followers believed she could create supernatural miracles. At the 1922 Australian Convention of Theosophists, Charles Leadbeater was accused of ventriloquism as well as pederasty, and his colleague, James Wedgwood, was seen to have visited no fewer than eighteen public lavatories in two hours. Wedgwood explained to police that he was searching for a friend he had known in a previous life. In addition to William Butler Yeats, Vice President Henry Wallace became intrigued by Blavatsky’s theosophy. Wallace was introduced to the doctrines by Yeats’s friend George W. Russell (“AE”), who was a firm believer in what he called “an order of reality which can be contacted by people who have certain types of perception. “A direct line of descent,” claims Frederick Crews, “connects Theosophy to an array of ludicrous and generally harmless New Age practices that now surround us, from astrology, crystal gazing, homeopathy, and pyramid power to Wicca nature worship, prophecy, channeling, past-life regression, goddess theology, belief in extraterrestrial visitation, and obeisance to self-designed gurus and ascended masters.” Crews adds, “Although one can agree with Carl Sagan’s contention, in his recent book The Demon-Haunted World (1996), that such fads reflect a popular revolt against science and a lamentable resurgence of superstition, it would be perverse to mention them in the same breath with Nazi ideology.” (See entries for William Emmette Coleman, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Annie Besant.) {Frederick Crews, “The Consolation of Theosophy,” The New York Review of Books, 19 Sep and 3 Oct 1996; ER; RE; Peter Washington, Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon: A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America}
Theobold, Erwin (20th Century) Theobold was an instructor at Pasadena City College in California when he signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Theodoric the Great (c. 454–526) Theodoric was King of the Ostrogoths, and the end of his reign was clouded by a quarrel with his subjects and Pope John I over the edicts of Emperor Justin I against Arianism and by his hasty execution of Boethius. An Arian himself, Theodoric was impartial in religious matters. {CE; RE}
Theodorus (c. 312 B.C.E.) David Berman cites Theodorus along with Diagoras and Epicurus as being atheists. However, Thomas Wise in A Confutation of the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism denies that they atheistic. Berman makes the better argument, suggesting that “Wise wishes to conflate absolute and plain speculative atheism so as to suggest the impossibility of the latter as well as the former, and thereby eliminate Diagoras, Theodorus, etc. from the class of dangerous atheistic precedents. Thus as the passage proceeds the qualifiers ‘absolute’ and ‘speculative’ drop out, leaving the more general ‘Atheists’: the suggestion is that there have never been atheists in any respectable sense of the term.” Meanwhile, according to Robertson, Diogenes Laërtius said that Theodorus was nicknamed “the God,” implying an emphasis upon “the.” When threatened with crucifixion, Theodorus reportedly said it mattered little whether he rotted in the ground or in the air. {BDF; JMR; JMRH; TYD}
Theophile de Viau (1590–1626)
Theophile was a French satiric poet. For the alleged publication of Le Parnasse Satyriques, he was accused of atheism, condemned to death, and burned in effigy. He fled and was received by the Duc de Montmorency at Chantilly, where he died. {BDF; RAT}
THERALI A Malayalam monthly, Therali is at 779, Pocket 5, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi 110 091, India.
THERMOPYLAE In ancient times a narrow mountain pass, Thermopylae, was used as an entrance into Greece from the north. In 480 BCE, Leonidas with his Spartans and their allies lost a heroic battle here to the Persians under Xerxes. In 279 BCE at the pass, the Greeks held back the Gauls under Brennus, who ultimately broke through. In 191 BCE, Antiochus III of Syria was defeated there by the Romans. Steven Pressfield’s novel, Gates of Fire (1998), tells the story of how the Persians and their allies defeated the Spartans in a battle “that saved democracy.”
Thibaudeau, Antoine Claire [Count] (1765–1854) Thibaudeau, a French historian, was a lawyer who joined the revolutionaries and, after the death of Robespierre, became President of the Council of Five Hundred. Napoleon made him a count, but he was exiled by the royalists, returning after the Revolution of 1830 to devote himself to writing. His chief work was Histoire generale de Napoléon Bonaparte (1827–1828, 3 volumes). {RE}
Thiebaud, Wayne (1920– ) An artist who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Thiebaud wrote the present author about humanism:
It seems to me that painting is somewhat anti-categorical by its “nature.” So naturalistic (or aesthetic) humanism is closest to my easel and my life.
His works include “Watermelon Slices“ (1961), which has thick paint slopped on as if with a mop; “Yo-Yos” (1962–1963); “Window Cakes” (1963); “French Pastries” (1963); and “Kneeling Woman” (1964). Following his first one-man show in Manhattan in 1962, Thiebaud has exhibited throughout the nation. Critic Michael Kimmelman has written, “Not precisely Pop, his choices of gum ball machines and window displays as subjects for paintings, not to say the sumptuous and eye-popping way he depicts them, make him an uneasy ally of sober Realists like William Bailey. He’s obviously not a Photo-Realist, despite his precision in rendering objects, because his handling of paint is so opulent and sensuous and is so much about paint as a physical and expressive medium.” Kimmelman adds that Thiebaud “doesn’t fit easily into any of the usual slots, which means he’s on the periphery, an odd man out. That is an artistic niche in itself.” In 1994, Thiebaud was honored at the White House and awarded a National Medal of Arts. {WAS, 24 August 1992}
Thiers, Adolphe [President] (1797–1877) Thiers, a French statesman, journalist, and historian, was one of a group of writers that attacked the reactionary government of King Charles X. His History of the French Revolution (1823–1827, 10 volumes) illustrated his moderate liberal views. Thiers held ministerial posts under Louis Philippe, whose candidacy as king of the French he had promoted. As minister of the interior, he brutally suppressed in 1834 the workers’ insurrection in Paris and Lyons. In 1836, he became premier, but his projected intervention against the Carlists in Spain caused his dismissal. After the February Revolution of 1848, Thiers opposed the Second Empire of Napoleon III, and he headed the provisional government after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Thiers crushed the Commune of Paris and was president (1871–1873) of the republic. Contemporary historians criticize his historical works as being superficial and inaccurate. Although many Frenchmen returned to the Church, politically, after the Commune, Thiers remained an agnostic all his life. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
THING-IN-ITSELF Kant had the philosophic notion of a thing-in-itself. A thing-in-itself is an object as it would appear to us if we did not have to approach it under the conditions of space and time. {DCL}
Thilly, Frank (Born 1865) Thilly taught philosophy at Cornell, Missouri University, and Princeton. He edited the University of Missouri Studies (1901–1904) and was associate editor of the International Journal of Ethics. In 1917 Thilly, a rationalist, was President of the American Association of University Professors. {RAT}
THINKING • Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. —Bertrand Russell
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa: See entry for Ngugi.
THIRTY YEARS WAR (1618-1648) As many as ten million people died in the general European war, the Thirty Years War, fought mainly in Germany over territorial, dynastic, and religious issues. German Protestant princes and foreign powers (France, Sweden, Denmark, England, the United Provinces) fought against Ferdinand II and the power of the Holy Roman Empire as represented by the Hapsburgs, who were allied with the Catholic princes. “Compromise was impossible,” wrote Fareed Zakaria of Foreign Affairs. “Either the Pope was Christ’s vicar on earth or he wasn’t. Protestants were heretics or heroes. You couldn’t split the difference.” The big losers were the Hapsburgs of Austria and the Catholics. The Peace of Westphalia “ended the idea that Europe was a single Christian empire, governed spiritually by the Pope and temporally by the Holy Roman Emperor. The treaty also gingerly extended the idea of religious tolerance.” {The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999}
Thoenes, Piet (Died 1995) At the Sixth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Amsterdam (1974), Prof. Thoenes of the Netherlands addressed the group. A retired professor of sociology, he has said, “Humanism is both a philosophy and a lifestyle. . . . We must maintain an equilibrium between the philosophical (as represented by Jaap Van Praag) and the practical (represented by Rob Tielman). Equilibrium between individuality and the collective is also important.” In 1969, he wrote of utopias in Utopie en ratio, and in 1971 he wrote Sociologie in Europe. From 1975 to 1978, he was co-chairman of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. According to Howard Radest, Thoenes “remained a socialist even when socialism became unpopular and the ‘free-market’ became everyone’s solution to the world’s problems. A kindly sceptics, he was never a dogmatist and had little use for either sloppy thinking or ideological rigidity. . . . I can recall his never-failing good humour particularly when board meetings—as board meetings often do—were more like bored meetings. He would lean over and whisper some bit of nonsense to me and I, in turn, could stop being as ‘serious’ as the ‘chairman’ is supposed to be. At the same time, Piet was a very serious social scientist, social critic, and humanist as indeed his research and numerous publications on community and social organisation demonstrate.” {International Humanist News, October 1995}
Thomas, Antoine Léonard (1732–1785) In 1756 Thomas, a writer, published Réflexions philosophiques et littéraires sur le poême de la Religion Naturelle de Voltaire, a criticism of Voltaire. But by 1762 Thomas was a thorough rationalist, as shown in his Éloge de Descartes (1765), a work crowned by the Academy but attacked by the clergy. His Éloge de Marc Aurèle, which he read at the Academy in 1770, was forbidden publication until l775. Thomas’s collected works were published in four volumes in 1775. {RAT}
Thomas, Art (1908– )
Thomas is a somewhat typical small-town American non-believer. He and his father, a physician, were atheists “but not the ‘Village Atheists’ ” that would startle their fellow townspeople. Just as his father liked the works of Thomas Paine, his son subscribed to the American Freeman and built a library of about six hundred of E. Haldeman-Julius’s Little Blue Books. He subscribed to Joseph Lewis’s Common Sense, later called The Age of Reason, and to Progressive World, the latter being a publication of the United Secularists of America.
In Oregon, Thomas has helped launch The Center for Rational Thought, an atheist community center. “Generally,” Thomas told Freethought History (#23, 1997), “I don’t like to be labelled, although I am comfortable as a freethinker to call myself an Atheist.” His heroes include Confucius, Voltaire, Paine, Jefferson, Darrow, Haldeman-Julius, Joseph McCabe, Noam Chomsky, and Gore Vidal. Despite his age, he occasionally pickets or leaflets. In short, Thomas is a typical American non-believer. {Freethought History, #23, 1997}
Thomas, Hugh (20th Century) Thomas is a psychologist in industry and is the secretary of the Bristol Humanist Group. In “Last Word,” he noted that it is difficult to answer why so many people become interested in organized religions. He holds that young minds turn to objects—people, ideas, habits, vices, political or religious ideologies—which become the subject of fixations which continue to influence them thereafter. Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, as the saying goes. “Our job as Rationalists and Humanists,” he suggested, “is to try to change people’s beliefs and inbred attitudes.” {The Freethinker, September 1995}
Thomas, John (1926–1996) Thomas was acting president of the Humanist Association of Canada (1977–1978). In 1947 he came from Wales to Canada with Baptist Bible training, then taught philosophy at McMaster University after questioning fundamentalist aspects of his religion. His popular undergraduate course, Moral Issues, examined abortion, euthanasia, and organized religions. As resident ethicist at Chedoke-McMaster Hospital, Thomas championed the patient’s right to make choices about treatment. {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1997)
Thomas, Keith [Sir] (1933– ) Thomas has been President of the British Academy since 1993 and the President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, since 1986. A historian, he wrote Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971) and Man and the Natural World (1982). With Donald Pennington, he edited Puritans and Revolutionaries (1978). He was named Knight Bachelor in 1988. Sir Keith is a member of the Council for Secular Humanism’s Academy of Humanism.
Thomas, Norman (Mattoon) (1884–1968) Thomas in 1911 was a Presbyterian minister, one who opposed World War I in 1918 and remained a pacifist for the rest of his life. In 1931 he demitted, withdrawing from the ministry. He led the Socialist party in 1926 and was its candidate for president in 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, and 1948. Thomas was a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and from 1921 to 1922 he was editor of The Nation. With Paul Blanshard, he wrote What’s the Matter with New York? (1932). Although coming from a Protestant background, Thomas attended New York’s Community Church (Unitarian), and he shared Paul Blanshard’s criticism of Catholicism and organized religious groups within Protestantism. {CE}
Thomas, Philip (20th Century) Thomas wrote A Religion of This World (1913). {GS}
Thomasius, Christian (1655–1728) In De jure principis circa haereticos (1697) and other words, Thomasius separated theology from philosophy, and belief from knowledge. Along with Christian Wolff, he developed a “neologism,” or new term, which opened the way for successive biblical critics. Robertson commented that in philosophy Thomasius was “an unsystematic pantheist [who] taught, after Plutarch, Bayle, and Bacon, that ‘superstition is worse than atheism’; but his great practical service to German civilization, over and above his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture, all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though judicial torture subsisted for another half-century.” {CE; EU, Volker Dürr; JMR; JMRH}
THOMISM The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, called thomism, underwent a revival starting in the middle of the nineteenth century. The thomistic approach teaches that philosophy and theology are separate, one seeking truth through reason, the other through revelation, but their conclusions support each other. Theologians teach student theologues are taught the relation between “efficacious grace” and “free will” as “a free determination of the will accomplished by virtue of a divine physical premotion.” {DCL}
Thompson, Claude W. (20th Century) Thompson, an assistant dean of Sir George Williams College at Montreal, in the 1950s, was an active naturalistic humanist who believed that the job of the modern humanist is to establish a philosophy suitable for present-day living. For The Humanist in the 1950s, he wrote a review of Will Durant’s The Reformation. {HNS}
Thompson, Daniel Greenleaf (1850–1897) An American author, Thompson wrote The Problem of Evil (1887) and The Religious Sentiments, among other works. Thompson was President of the Nineteenth Century Club, and he was an agnostic. {BDF; JM; RAT}
Thompson, Donald]] (20th Century) Thompson, whose outspoken commitment to civil liberties in and around Jackson, Mississippi, resulted in his receiving multiple gunshot wounds in the 1960s, typifies the Unitarian Universalist minister’s concern for social justice.
Thompson, Donald Claude (20th Century) In 1952 for his M. S. degree at the University of Wisconsin, Thompson wrote about Robert G. Ingersoll and the freethought press. {GS}
Thompson, Donald Kingsley (1908–1989) Thompson was an Australian humanist, administrator, and flying instructor. From the age of ten he questioned religion, finding himself in adult life to be an atheist. A pilot and flying instructor during World War II, he was the co-founder and administrator of motor sport in Australia. A sub-editor at The Herald, Thompson was known as a Renaissance man with erudite literary skills and an engaging blend of seasoned and contemporary attitudes. When eighty, he wrote, “Some men, when they die after busy, toilsome successful lives, leave a great treasure stock of scrip and securities, of acres or factories or the goodwill of large undertakings.” To this Thompson added, “I hope that none of you will depart today without the knowledge that part of my treasure is banked in your hearts.” {SWW}
Thompson, Dorothy B. (20th Century) Thompson, an atheist and poet who wrote Blasphemous Satire and Other Reflections on Life, was brought up in the Methodist and Baptist churches, always hating the hymn that says “such a worm as I.” When the Baptist preacher she married was abusive, she divorced him. Living in Bandon, Oregon, she has been a teacher for twenty-three years and is associate editor of Freethought Perspective. Typical of her parodies of “favorite hymns” are the following:
CROCK OF AGES
Crock of Ages, not for me, I’m too smart to swallow thee. You’re just bunk, you can’t atone, Christian nutes, leave me alone. Crock of Ages, what a lie. We live once, and then we die!
AMAZING FAITH
Amazing faith, repulsive sound, Devoid of harmony. Once long deceived my brain I found. Now I’m untied and free. I spent a lot of years in fear. Guilt was my middle name. But now I’ve dumped my church career, I’m one old happy dame!
(See entry for Frank Tiefenbach.) {African Americans for
Humanism Examiner, Fall 1998; Freethought History, #25/1998}
Thompson, Edward (20th Century) With Stuart Hall, Thompson edited two journals of “socialist humanism,” New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review.
Thompson, Henry [Sir] (1820–1904) A British surgeon, Thompson painted well enough to exhibit in the London Academy and the Paris Salon. Also, he published two novels. In a 1902 booklet, “The Unknown God,” according to McCabe, “he rejected all beliefs except the ‘great power’ (impersonal) which many scientific men vaguely invoke.” To Edward Clodd, who criticized him in a friendly way, Sir Henry said, “I am agnostic to the backbone.” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Thompson, Howard (20th Century) Thompson edits The Texas Atheist, a Web magazine found at <http://gofreemind@aol.com>.
Thompson, Patricia (20th Century) Thompson is the daughter of Vladimir Mayakovsky, the celebrated poet of the Russian Revolution. Secretly brought up as a daughter by her mother’s husband, an Englishman named George Jones, she has refused to be called “illegitimate.” Incensed in 1992 when Variety Fair referred to Mayakovsky’s having had an illegitimate daughter with a Russian-American woman, Thompson of Lehman College retorted, “I am his natural or biological daughter. I am also a feminist, and we are moving away from those kinds of pejorative, patriarchal terms.” She has made reference to Pope Alexander VI, allegedly the father of ten illegitimate children by four mistresses, whose daughter Lucrezia Borgia inspired Victor Hugo’s drama and Donizetti’s opera. Thompson disapproves of the negative connotations of “bastard,” as did humanist writer Miriam Allen deFord, who compiled a list of “famous bastards,” in which Jesus was included as one whom the father did not recognize as his own.
Thompson, Sheila (20th Century) Thompson wrote “Misogyny Is the Sweetest Story Ever Told” (1979). {GS}
Thompson, William (1785–1833) Thompson, a native of Cork, was a disciple of Bentham and wrote The Distribution of Weatlh (1824), An Appeal for Women (1825), and Labor Reward (1827). Adopting Bentham’s and Robert Owen’s atheistic and humanitarian views, Thompson worked to help the poor peasants by introducing cooperation. His 1824 Distribution of Wealth pre-dated similar views by Karl Marx, for he stated that all wealth ought to go to the producer. A freethinker, he wrote for the Co-operative Magazine. Thompson’s writing on behalf of the rights of women stirred many. In his personal life, Thompson was said by McCabe to have been “very strict and ascetic,” a teetotaller and vegetarian. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Thomson, Ann (20th Century)
Thomson wrote Materialism and Society in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1981), which was about Julian La Mettrie. {GS}
Thomson, Charles Otto (Born 1833) Thomson was a Swedish-born captain. At Eskilstuna he started a Utilitarian Society in 1888, of which he became president. He supported Lennstrand in his freethought work in Sweden, translated articles by Ingersoll and Foote, and lectured on behalf of the movement. {BDF; RAT}
Thomson, James (1834–1882) A Scottish poet and essayist, Thomson wrote The City of Dreadful Night (1880; republished 1993), a darkly pessimistic poem said by some to be the most powerful pessimistic poem in the English language. It was a favorite of Gordon Stein, and excerpts from it were read at Stein’s memorial service. Robertson described him as the ill-starred but finely gifted author who, though he celebrated the liberating power of unbelief, was a despairing unbeliever. Thomson’s sense is that there is nothing to live for in a world without God. For a time, he lodged with and was a friend of Charles Bradlaugh. Thomson died an alcoholic derelict at the age of forty-eight. {BDF; CE; EU, Victor N. Paananen; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}
Thomson, Virgil (1896–1989) Thomson, an eminent American organist, composer, and critic, wrote two operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947), with librettos by Gertrude Stein. From 1940 to 1954, he was the noted music critic of The New York Herald Tribune. Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (1997) relates the composer’s varied musical successes. Included are details of the composer’s various loves as well as his lack of interest in the Christian theology believed in by his family and the small Missouri community in which he had grown up. At one point, in fact, Thomson had dissected a collection of Baptist hymns and had found closeted erotic feelings throughout. God, he found, interested believers less than Jesus, “the perfect, though very human ‘lover of my soul.’ ” This love-is-the-theme message led to hymnal exhortations to “taste his delights” and “Resist Him no more!” H. L. Mencken, himself a non-believer, failed to be convinced, however, that closeted erotic feelings are to be found everywhere in church hymns. At Kansas City Polytechnic Institute Thomson founded the Pansophists, writing in its publication, Pans, that the club aimed to emulate the Sophists of Greece, who “disputed for the sake of dispute, and who discussed merely for the pleasure of talking well.” When accused of heading an artificial, narrow, elitist, and undemocratic group, Thomson pleaded guilty: “Any attempt to unite distinct classes of minds is necessarily artificial. . . . Humanism itself is narrow.” As for the club’s and its members’ being different, “Conventionality is its own punishment,” he retorted, Wilde-like.
Thomson lifted fragments of ideas from Schopenhauer (his view of the world as a constant conflict of individual wills resulting in frustration and pain), said Tommasini, and from Nietzsche (his contemptuous rejection of Christian “slave morality” in favor of a “will to power”). When the club publicized Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and the campus heard of the poetry’s tales of abortion, lust, lesbian relationships, hypocrisy of small-town neighborliness, and corruption of civic officials, Thomson had to appear before a disciplinary committee which threatened him with expulsion.
Thomson had tried peyote once during his junior college days in Kansas City. His supplier had been Dr. Frederick Madison Smith, whose grandfather had founded the Mormon religion and who became head of the church. Smith described his peyote “highs” to Thomson, with their “characteristic excitation to feats of endurance and to colored visions,” then supplied him with “five bumpy little buttons, less than an inch across and hard as wood” obtained from Texas Indians. Although the Mormons had prohibitions against alcohol and drugs, as head of the church Smith reasoned that peyote was a natural substance, not a drug, an ancient means to tap one’s inner powers. He had observed native American Indians who ate the drug in pellet form and had seen others, Catholic converts, who made from it a tea for communion. Smith’s Ph. D. dissertation, subsequently a book, was The Higher Powers of Man (1918), an examination of ecstatic states, a phenomenon that some men and, likely, that Jesus had experienced. After further study at Harvard, Thomson became one of America’s best music critics, a master of the organ, and a composer with an international standing. Flamboyantly homosexual, Thomson when ninety showed a new secretary around his Hotel Chelsea apartment on 23rd Street in New York, telling him,
This is what you do if you show up and I’m dead. Don’t call a doctor; it will be too late. Call the lawyer. He knows what to do. Then call the locksmith to come change the locks. Then call AP, UPI, and The New York Times—the culture desk, not the obit boys.
Thomson also wanted to make sure his final memorial would be a memorable one and requested that it be held in Manhattan’s biggest cathedral. Asked if he wanted to be buried or cremated, Thomson told his friend Dick Flender, “Cremated. Easier to ship.” Thomson’s memorial was held per his instructions at New York City’s largest church, which he termed “St. John’s the Too-Too Divine.” Despite his wish that absolutely no words be spoken, the minister successfully insisted that he say something at the very beginning. Tommasini’s biography makes it clear that Thomson was not into organized religion but, however, did not go on record any further concerning his freethinking. Although he was not a card-bearing secular humanist and had written church music, Thomson had said, wryly, “I just didn’t take to salvation.”
Thomson, Virgil (25 Nov 1896 - 30 Sep 1989)
Thomson, the Kansas City-born composer and critic, studied at Harvard. While studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, he came under the influence of Les Six and met Cocteau, Stravinsky, and Satie. He then became an eminent American organist, composer, and critic, writing two operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947), with librettos by Gertrude Stein. He also wrote symphonies, ballets, and choral, chamber, and film music. From 1940 to 1954, he was the noted music critic of The New York Herald Tribune.
Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (1997) relates the composer’s varied musical successes. Included are details of the composer’s various loves as well as his lack of interest in the Christian theology believed in by his family and the small Missouri community in which he had grown up. At one point, in fact, Thomson had dissected a collection of Baptist hymns and had found closeted erotic feelings throughout. God, he found, interested believers less than Jesus, “the perfect, though very human ‘lover of my soul.’ ” This love-is-the-theme message led to hymnal exhortations to “taste his delights” and “Resist Him no more!” H. L. Mencken, himself a non-believer, failed to be convinced, however, that closeted erotic feelings are to be found everywhere in church hymns. At Kansas City Polytechnic Institute Thomson founded the Pansophists, writing in its publication, Pans, that the club aimed to emulate the Sophists of Greece, who “disputed for the sake of dispute, and who discussed merely for the pleasure of talking well.” When accused of heading an artificial, narrow, elitist, and undemocratic group, Thomson pleaded guilty: “Any attempt to unite distinct classes of minds is necessarily artificial. . . . Humanism itself is narrow.” As for the club’s and its members’ being different, “Conventionality is its own punishment,” he retorted, Wilde-like.
Tommasini said that Thomson lifted fragments of ideas from Schopenhauer (his view of the world as a constant conflict of individual wills resulting in frustration and pain) and from Nietzsche (his contemptuous rejection of Christian “slave morality” in favor of a “will to power”). When the club publicized Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and the campus heard of the poetry’s tales of abortion, lust, lesbian relationships, hypocrisy of small-town neighborliness, and corruption of civic officials, Thomson had to appear before a disciplinary committee which threatened him with expulsion.
Thomson had tried peyote once during his junior college days in Kansas City. His supplier had been Dr. Frederick Madison Smith, whose grandfather had founded the Mormon religion and who became head of the church. Smith described his peyote “highs” to Thomson, with their “characteristic excitation to feats of endurance and to colored visions,” then supplied him with “five bumpy little buttons, less than an inch across and hard as wood” obtained from Texas Indians. Although the Mormons had prohibitions against alcohol and drugs, as head of the church Smith reasoned that peyote was a natural substance, not a drug, an ancient means to tap one’s inner powers. He had observed native American Indians who ate the drug in pellet form and had seen others, Catholic converts, who made from it a tea for communion. Smith’s Ph. D. dissertation, subsequently a book, was The Higher Powers of Man (1918), an examination of ecstatic states, a phenomenon that some men and, likely, that Jesus had experienced. Flamboyantly homosexual, Thomson when ninety showed a new secretary around his Hotel Chelsea apartment on 23rd Street in New York, telling him,
This is what you do if you show up and I’m dead. Don’t call a doctor; it will be too late. Call the lawyer. He knows what to do. Then call the locksmith to come change the locks. Then call AP, UPI, and The New York Times—the culture desk, not the obit boys.
Thomson also wanted to make sure his final memorial would be a memorable one and requested that it be held in Manhattan’s biggest cathedral. Asked if he wanted to be buried or cremated, Thomson told his friend Dick Flender, “Cremated. Easier to ship.” Thomson’s memorial was held per his instructions at New York City’s largest church, which he termed “St. John’s the Too-Too Divine.” Despite his wish that absolutely no words be spoken, the minister successfully insisted that he say something at the very beginning. Tommasini’s biography makes it clear that Thomson was not into organized religion but, however, did not go on record any further concerning his freethinking. Although he was not a card-bearing secular humanist and had written church music, Thomson had said, wryly, “I just didn’t take to salvation.”
Thorburn, James Alexander (1924– )
Thorburn, the son of parents who were nominal Christians, was a Scottish-born socialist who was active in the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He moved to New Zealand in 1953 and to Australia in 1955. Thorburn, who was proprietor of the Pocket Bookshop in Sydney from 1959 to 1979, was a member of the Rationalist Association of New South Wales and was an early member of the North South Wales Humanist Society. {SWW}
Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862) Thoreau’s philosophy of life combined diverse strains, and his heritage—French, Scottish, Quaker, Puritan—was similarly mixed. Carlos Baker described Thoreau as having a nose that “resembled the beak of a predatory bird” and arms “thickly matted with fur, like the pelt of an animal.” On the one hand, Thoreau called himself “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” On the other, he was a quasi-Unitarian, Emerson’s disciple, and a non-joining individualist who, unlike some of his Unitarian acquaintances, said, “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” He was fond of quoting the line of Ennius, “I say that there are gods but they care not what men do.” Thoreau’s building a cabin for $28.12 1/2 near Walden Pond (1845–1847) resulted in his most famous work, Walden (1854). When he went to Walden, his brother John had recently died. The two had previously run a private school, one of whose students was Bronson Alcott’s daughter, Louisa May. Unlike other transcendentalists, who retreated to Brook Farm to make cooperative plans, Thoreau according to James D. Hart chose the naked simplicity of life where he could “subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh,” chew the cud of his thoughts, and get to the very core of the universe by living deep and sucking out all the “marrow of life.” His desire was “so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust . . . to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. When he was imprisoned a day for refusing to pay a poll tax to the government that supported the Mexican War, which he considered merely a land-grabbing scheme of the Southern slaveholders, he was met by Emerson’s “Henry, what are you doing in there?” to which he replied, “Ralph, what are you doing out there!” Thoreau is pronounced THOR-o by his relatives, although pronounced thor-O by most academics and THERR-o as in “thorough cleaning” by Elizabeth Witherell, who edited his writings. In his “Civil Disobedience,” he expresses his belief in passive resistance, a means of protest which later is said to have inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Tolstoy, and untold others. Although he enjoyed the scientific view of nature, he also was a transcendentalist who longed for the wideness of heaven more than the limits of the microscope. He contributed to their journal, The Dial. Active in the anti-slavery movement, he at the time when he met Walt Whitman was beginning to be weakened by tuberculosis. Despite becoming an invalid, he worked on a long, unpublished ethnological study of American Indians and edited his journals for publication. Robertson has categorized Thoreau as being a more stringent thinker than Emerson, calling him “either a pantheist or a Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches.” Bradbury P. Dean, the editor of the Thoreau Society Bulletin, has combined newly found and organized Thoreau writings which include “Dispersion of Seeds” with other writings of natural history, entitling his editing Faith in a Seed (1993). Commenting upon the book, Professor of American Literature Robert D. Richardson Jr. of Wesleyan University has remarked that “the new book tells us that Thoreau is a pioneering scientist as well as a humanist.” Instead of being characterized merely as an eccentric who fished in Walden Pond, lived off nuts and berries, and had little human contact, Thoreau is being described as one who participated in the Underground Railroad, sheltering escaping slaves in his family’s house. In addition, he was an abolitionist, an early advocate of civil disobedience, and one of the first American writers to believe that knowledge comes from knowing the links between the humanities and nature. “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been,” said Thoreau, one of the nation’s first ecologists, “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” One “seed” of life which caught his fancy was a rare and remarkable fungus, which in Walden he describes:
The whole height [is] six and three-quarters inches. It may be divided into three parts, pilcus, stem, and base—or scrotum, for it is a perfect phallus. One of those fungi named impudicus, I think. In all respects [it is] a most disgusting object, yet very suggestive. It was as offensive to the eye as to the scent, the cap rapidly melting and defiling what it couched with a fetid, olivaceous, semiliquid matter. In an hour or two the plant scented the whole house wherever placed, so that it could not be endured. I was afraid to sleep in my chamber where it had lain until the room had been well ventilated. It smelled like a dead rat in the ceiling, in all the ceilings of the house. Pray, what was Nature thinking of when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.
This was not Thoreau’s only interest in the phallus, claims Martin Greif, who states that Thoreau meditated on the higher meaning of male friendship in his notebooks, fell in and out of love with his male acquaintances, and never married. Thoreau’s only proposal of marriage, to Ellen Sewell, had been rejected because her father, a Unitarian minister, found Thoreau a rabble-rouser with his antislavery and freethinking ideas. “People talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives,” he would tell them. “Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.” In 1840 Thoreau proposed to Ellen Sewall, who rejected the offer, and he never married. Critic Marylynne Diggs has noted that it is uncertain if Thoreau was a “repressed” homosexual or if he was asexual. Two men Thoreau found attractive, however, were Tom Fowler, his guide on a trip to the Maine woods; and Alek Therien, a Canadian woodchopper who visited him at Walden Pond. Nowhere in his writing does he refer to women. As Diggs points out, “But his Journals, his essay ‘Chastity and Sensuality,’ and the long discourse on ‘Friendship’ in A Week are prolific expressions of the beauty, and the agony, of love between men.” Thoreau’s final day was spent in Concord, surrounded by family and friends. Slater and Solomita have described the scene, in which Thoreau is dying of tuberculosis:
“Never spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace,” noted Thoreau’s former jailer, the tax collector Sam Staples, after a visit. Thoreau was writing, editing, and revising (“You know it is the fashion to leave an estate behind you,” he said), despite the fact that to do so was an exhausting, nearly impossible chore for him. Thoreau was aware the end was near; when reminded of this he was invariably good-humored. “It is better some things should end,” he told one comforter. During a visit the Quaker abolitionist Parker Pillsbury mused, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.” Thoreau replied, “My friend, one world at a time.” When his Calvinist Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau protested, “I never knew that we had quarreled.” Concord was enjoying a beautiful spring in 1862, the morning of May 6 being no exception. Thoreau’s room was filled with flowers, fruits of the season, game, sweetmeats, and get-well messages—the gifts of friends, villagers and even strangers who knew he was ill. Thoreau was deeply touched by these attentions, knowing nature was being brought to him because he could not go into nature. At eight o’clock, as Thoreau lay tossing and turning in this room he murmured his last words—“Moose . . . Indian.”
After his death, selections from his journals were edited by his friend, Harrison G. O. Blake. Thoreau’s funeral took place at First Parish (Unitarian), at the behest of Emerson, who delivered the funeral oration. Thoreau is buried at Authors’ Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. His gravestone is a small granite marker on the Thoreau family plot, inscribed only with his first name. {Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics; CE; CL; EG; FUS; HNS2; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TYD; U; UU}
Thoren, Lloyd H. (20th Century) Thoren, who founded Dial-an-Atheist and was instrumental in maintaining the American Atheist Museum in Petersburg, Indiana, has received the Pioneer Atheist Award from American Atheists, Inc.
Thorild, Thomas (1759–1808)
Thorild, or Thoren, was a Swedish writer. In 1786 he wrote Common Sense on Liberty, with a view of extending the liberty of the press. He was a partisan of the French Revolution, and for a political work he was imprisoned and exiled. Thorild also wrote a Sermon of Sermons, attacking the clergy and maintaining the rights of women. {BDF; RAT}
Thorne, Tony (20th Century) Thorne is an activist supporter of the Pink Triangle Trust in England. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998}
Thorpe, Robert (Born 1818) Thorpe, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, lawyer, became an abolitionist and personally knew President Lincoln as a lawyer long before the war. After the war, he wrote that he wanted to devote himself strictly to legal business but “the encroachments of the church on the rights of the people have become so great and unjust that I feel it necessary to go again upon the war-path.” {PUT}
Thorvaldsen, Albert Bertel (1770–1844) Thorvaldsen (also, Thorwaldsen) was a Danish sculptor who, going to Rome in 1797, shared with Canova the leadership of the neo-classicists. His adherence to Greek art is seen in his “Jason” (1802–1803), which is rendered with respect for antique prototypes. In 1819 he designed the “Lion of Lucerne,” a memorial to the Swiss Guard, and his historical portrait sculptures include “Conradin, Last of the Hohenstaufen.” In Copenhagen, the Thorvaldsen Museum has a large collection of his work. The son of an Iceland wood-carver, Thorvaldsen did much work based on religious themes, including a statue of Pope Pius VII. According to McCabe, “His pious biographer Thiele admits, almost with tears, that [Thorvaldsen] rejected Christianity, and in fact he had from youth a passion for ancient Greece and Rome, but in his time there was not much money in classical art.” Asked how he could produce such beautiful religious statues, Thorvaldsen replied, “Neither do I believe in the gods of the Greeks, but for all that I can represent them.” {CE; JM; RE}
THOTH In mythology, Thoth was the Egyptian god of wisdom, learning, and the moon.
THE THOUGHT The Thought is a bi-monthly journal of the Philosophers Guild (PO Box 10760, Glendale, Arizona 85318). Edited by Ronald C. Tobin, it discusses monopolistic capitalism, individual collectivity, and freethought subjects.
Threlkeld, Simon (20th Century) Threlkeld is a Toronto lawyer who thinks “juries” should select many of the decision-makers now selected by the government. Such a change, he has described in “Democratizing Public Institutions,” would represent a major advance for democracy. {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1997}
Threlfall, Violet Dorothy 1898–1993) Threlfall was an Australian humanist, teacher, scholar, and Esperantist. She was a lecturer in English literature at Claremont and Graylands colleges, and she studied at the Sorbonne and in Germany. A founding member of the Humanist Society of Western Australia, Threlfall campaigned for peace studies in Australian schools, saw Esperanto as an agent of peace, translated from the original Esperanto, and published Longing for Peace (the story of a Nagasaki victim) and Private Life of Gandhi. {SWW}
Thresh, William Henry (Born 1868) Convinced that “Christianity is opposed to progress,” Thresh opened a school (Ruskin House) along rationalist lines in 1903 at Southend-on-Sea for the education of children. He was Principal until, in 1916, the abnormal conditions set up by the War compelled him to close it. The school was commended to rationalists in the Literary Guide and Freethinker. {RAT}
Thressell, Robert (20th Century) Thressell is a New Zealand freethinker.
Thrower, James (20th Century) Thrower is the Scottish author of A Short History of Western Atheism (1971); The Alternative Tradition: Religion and Rejection of Religion in the Ancient World (1980); and Western Atheism, A Short History, 2000). In the latter work, the University of Aberdeen professor takes up atheism in classical antiquity, then western atheism to the 17th century, then modern atheism up to the present. He holds that unbelief rose significantly in Western Europe as a result of the clash in the Middle Ages between the powerful force of faith and the limits it placed on reason. Both John Stuart Mill and his godson, Bertrand Russell, are termed humanists. Angelo Juffras, noting in 1985 that Thrower believed that “the rejection of a religious understanding of the world, and of life” is not a modern phenonomenon but that a consistently held naturalistic view of the world was evident in the ancient world, editorialized: “It may be that Thrower’s position will prove to the correct as more evidence is found. As yet, however, his views are not sufficiently backed by evidence.” {Angelo Juffras, EU}
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 B.C.E.) Thucydides, the Greek historian of Athens, was a general and a student of politics. His one work, which made him the greatest of ancient historians, is a History of the Peloponnesian War to 411 B.C.E. He was unable to prevent the surrender of Amphipolis to the Spartan commander Brasidas, being exiled until the end of the war. But during his exile he had the opportunity to observe both the Athenians and the Spartans, and from his observations and firsthand information he created a new style of historical writing. His work contains the eloquent funeral oration by Pericles, and he adeptly describes the plague which beset Greece at that time and which he lived through. William T. Bluhm, in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8, states that the writings of Thucydides build self-consciously “on a clearly defined philosophical position, an antimetaphysical naturalism and positivism which he probably learned from the practices of Hippocratic medicine and from the Sophists.” Why still read Thucydides? Bertrand Russell answers: “Thucydides, the second of the great historians, has a smaller theme than that of Herodotus, but treats it with more art and also with a more careful regard for accuracy. His subject is the conflict of Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. His history, as Cornford has pointed out, is modeled on Greek tragedy: Athens, his own beloved city, which was finally defeated, is like the typical hero, driven by Fate and overweening pride to a disastrous but not inglorious end. His writing is severe, and confined strictly to what is relevant; there are no gossipy digressions, and there is little that is amusing. But there is a presentation, full of epic grandeur, of the spectacle of men driven by destiny into folly, choosing wrongly over and over again when a right choice would have brought victory, becoming wicked through exasperation; and falling at last into irretrievable ruin. The theme is one that appealed to the Greek mind. A great impersonal Power, called indifferently Fate or Justice or Necessity, ruled the world, and was superior to the gods. Whatever person or country or thing over-stepped the ordained boundaries, suffered the punishment of pride. This was the real religion of the Greeks, and Thucydides in his history magnificently illustrated it.” {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Thulié, Jean Baptiste Henri (Born 1832) Thulié was a French physician and anthropologist. In 1856 he founded a journal, Realism, and in 1866 he published a work on Madness and the Law. In La Pensée Nouvelle, he defended the view of Büchner. Thulié was a President of the Paris Municipal Council. {BDF; RAT}
Thurber, James (1894–1961) Thurber, a principal contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker, was known to his inner circle as a freethinker and joyful humanist, one with a deep psychological insights into man’s foibles and man’s obsessive interest in supernaturalism. Half-blinded when only seven when his brother struck him with a toy boy and arrow, he spent a life wearing glasses that eventually were “as thick as binoculars.” In this respect, he resembled James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake he enjoyed hearing his secretary read aloud. When he drove, “. . . flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me often like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front ends of barges and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.” Harrison Kinney in James Thurber: His Life and Times (1996) related that, for Thurber, undoing a woman’s girdle “is likely to lead to a grave and determined effort, in which the gentleman goes about the process much as if he were trying to fix a gasoline engine.” Kinney speculated that the handicap led Thurber to dislike himself and others who are dependent, leading to his drawing of women as daisy-plucking airheads or emasculating harridans. What he took comfort from, particularly, was his dog. Thurber wrote, “For some curious reason Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. . . . The survival of almost any species of social animal, no matter how low, has been shown to be dependent on Group Cooperation, which is itself a product of instinct. ‘Group struggles to the death between animals of the same species, such as occur in human warfare, can hardly be found among non-human animals,’ says W. C. Allee in his extremely interesting The Social Life of Animals. One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. . . . It is surely permissible to hazard the guess that somewhere beyond Betelgeuse there may be a race of men whose intelligence makes ours seem like the works of an old-fashioned music box. The Earth, it seems to me, may well be the Siberia, or the Perth Amboy, of the inhabited planets of the Universe.” In 1950 he tackled anti-communist hysteria:
The Thing can blacken a man at a distance of 10,000 miles, by using one or another of its many stings: the thundering charge, the sweeping generalization, the bold assumption, the mysterious record, the secret testimony, the overheard insinuation, the patriotic gesture, the enormous lie, the fearful warning. . . . Do not attempt to take the Thing single-handed. It is armed and dangerous and, what is worse, it has a lot of friends.
With E. B. White, Thurber wrote a satire concerning psychoanalysis, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). His other works include The Male Animal (1940), The Thurber Carnival (1945), and Credos and Curios (1962). His later career was hampered by a growing blindness, and by 1953 he was almost totally blind. A fellow cartoonist, Stuart E. Hample, said when Thurber spoke he looked directly at people through his thick, magnifying lenses, leading many to be unaware that he was blind. Hample found him unpretentious and anecdotal, once relating how an American woman in Paris told him she had read translations of his stories and thought they were funnier in French. His response, illustrating that his humor extended to words as well as cartoons, was to agree, adding, “They tend to lose something in the original.” According to biographer Harrison Kinney, “Thurber had never allowed his probing, restless mind to settle on any single theological insurance policy concerning the possibilities of the hereafter. He remained agnostic and probably about where he was, philosophically, in 1927, when he was 34 years old and the best part of his life was ahead of him.” Once, however, when writing about his brother’s dog, Muggs, Thurber implied that he was curious as to whether the afterlife might be “lovelier and more happy, than this life.” Thurber died of a blood clot in his lung. A Methodist minister read some brief prayers, and Thurber’s cremains were placed in a bronze urn. {CE}
Thurber, James (8 Dec 1894 - 2 Nov 1961) Thurber, a principal contributor of cartoons to The New Yorker, was known to his inner circle as a freethinker and joyful humanist, one with a deep psychological insights into man’s foibles and man’s obsessive interest in supernaturalism. Half-blinded when only seven when his brother struck him with a toy boy and arrow, he spent a life wearing glasses that eventually were “as thick as binoculars.” In this respect, he resembled James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake he enjoyed hearing his secretary read aloud. When he drove, “. . . flecks of dust and streaks of bug blood on the windshield look to me often like old admirals in uniform, or crippled apple women, or the front ends of barges and I whirl out of their way, thus going into ditches and fields and up on front lawns, endangering the life of authentic admirals and apple women who may be out on the roads for a breath of air before retiring.” Harrison Kinney in James Thurber: His Life and Times (1996) related that, for Thurber, undoing a woman’s girdle “is likely to lead to a grave and determined effort, in which the gentleman goes about the process much as if he were trying to fix a gasoline engine.” Kinney speculated that the handicap led Thurber to dislike himself and others who are dependent, leading to his drawing of women as daisy-plucking airheads or emasculating harridans. What he took comfort from, particularly, was his dog. Thurber wrote, “For some curious reason Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. . . . The survival of almost any species of social animal, no matter how low, has been shown to be dependent on Group Cooperation, which is itself a product of instinct. ‘Group struggles to the death between animals of the same species, such as occur in human warfare, can hardly be found among non-human animals,’ says W. C. Allee in his extremely interesting The Social Life of Animals. One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. . . . It is surely permissible to hazard the guess that somewhere beyond Betelgeuse there may be a race of men whose intelligence makes ours seem like the works of an old-fashioned music box. The Earth, it seems to me, may well be the Siberia, or the Perth Amboy, of the inhabited planets of the Universe.” In 1950 he tackled anti-communist hysteria:
The Thing can blacken a man at a distance of 10,000 miles, by using one or another of its many stings: the thundering charge, the sweeping generalization, the bold assumption, the mysterious record, the secret testimony, the overheard insinuation, the patriotic gesture, the enormous lie, the fearful warning. . . . Do not attempt to take the Thing single-handed. It is armed and dangerous and, what is worse, it has a lot of friends.
With E. B. White, Thurber wrote a satire concerning psychoanalysis, Is Sex Necessary? (1929). His other works include The Male Animal (1940), The Thurber Carnival (1945), and Credos and Curios (1962). His later career was hampered by a growing blindness, and by 1953 he was almost totally blind. A fellow cartoonist, Stuart E. Hample, said when Thurber spoke he looked directly at people through his thick, magnifying lenses, leading many to be unaware that he was blind. Hample found him unpretentious and anecdotal, once relating how an American woman in Paris told him she had read translations of his stories and thought they were funnier in French. His response, illustrating that his humor extended to words as well as cartoons, was to agree, adding, “They tend to lose something in the original.” According to Kinney, “Thurber had never allowed his probing, restless mind to settle on any single theological insurance policy concerning the possibilities of the hereafter. He remained agnostic and probably about where he was, philosophically, in 1927, when he was 34 years old and the best part of his life was ahead of him.” Once, however, when writing about his brother’s dog, Muggs, Thurber implied that he was curious as to whether the afterlife might be “lovelier and more happy, than this life.” Thurber died of a blood clot in his lung. A Methodist minister read some brief prayers, and the remains of Thurber the freethinker were placed in a bronze urn. {CE}
Thurman, Uma Karuna (1970– )
Thurman, an actress, was an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress in “Pulp Fiction” (1994). She has appeared in such other films as “Kiss Daddy Good Night” (1987), “Dangerous Liaisons” (1988), and “A Month by the Lake” (1995). On television, she appeared in the movie “Robin Hood” (1991).
In a brief autobiography in Cosmopolitan (November 1995), she listed “Religion: Agnostic (Buddhism if must choose).” Her father, she explained, was the first American to be ordained as a Buddhist monk and now “he teaches Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University and is regarded as this country’s foremost authority on Buddhism. When the Dalai Lama comes to America, it’s my father who is his host. When asked if I consider myself Buddhist, the answer is, Not really. But it’s more my religion than any other because I was brought up with it in an intellectual and spiritual environment. I don’t practice or preach it, however. But Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.” {CA; E}
Thurman, Uma Karuna (29 Apr 1970 - ) Thurman, an actress, was an Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actress in Pulp Fiction (1994). She has appeared in such other films as Kiss Daddy Good Night (1987), Dangerous Liaisons (1988), and A Month by the Lake (1995). On television, she appeared in Robin Hood (1991). In a brief autobiography in Cosmopolitan (November 1995), Thurman listed “Religion: Agnostic (Buddhism if must choose).” Her father, she explained, was the first American to be ordained as a Buddhist monk and now “he teaches Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University and is regarded as this country’s foremost authority on Buddhism. When the Dalai Lama comes to America, it’s my father who is his host. When asked if I consider myself Buddhist, the answer is, Not really. But it’s more my religion than any other because I was brought up with it in an intellectual and spiritual environment. I don’t practice or preach it, however. But Buddhism has had a major effect on who I am and how I think about the world. What I have learned is that I like all religions, but only parts of them.” {CA; E}
Thurtle, Ernest (1884–1954) Thurtle was the general secretary of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) from 1932 to 1940 and was chairman in 1941. He wrote The Fellowship of Reason (1938). {FUK; TRI}
THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche put forth the idea of the Superman, or Overman. (See entry for Nietzsche.)
Thwaites, William (20th Century) Thwaites, a biology professor at San Diego State University, was honored in 1995 by the American Humanist Association for his valiant defense of biology against biblical creationism.
Tichenor, Henry (20th Century) Tichenor, a leading forethought figure, wrote The Life and Exploits of Jehovah (1915). {GS}
Ticknor, George (1791–1871) A professor of language and literature at Harvard, Ticknor wrote a significant survey of Hispanic literature. Ticknor’s Unitarian minister was William Ellery Channing. Upon his death, Ticknor’s extensive library of Spanish and Portuguese books were donated to the Boston Public Library. {CE; EG; U; UU}
Tieck, Johann Ludwig (1773–1853) Tieck, a personal friend of Goethe and Schiller, was a rationalist who joined the romantic movement in opposition to the Aufklärung. He was a medievalist in his artistic nature but a thinker on the lines of heterodoxy in the eighteenth century. Tieck was one of the early German enthusiasts for Shakespeare, and he edited Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare (9 volumes, 1825–1833). From 1825 onward, Tieck composed pieces for the Dresden Court Theatre. {RAT}
Tiefenbach, Frank (Died 1993) A Czech attorney, Tiefenbach refused when the Nazi invaders required professionals to sign a document that they agreed with Hitler. As a result, he was forced to work with the underground. Following the war he and his wife for fifty-five years, Mila Tiefenbach, worked with the British Red Cross to help survivors of a Belsen concentration camp. Mrs. Tiefenbach, an atheist, is a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Oregon. She has written for Freethought Perspective (April 1999). {Dorothy B. Thompson, “A Czechoslovakian WWII Story,” Freethought Perspective, May 1998}
Tiele, Cornelis Petrus (1830–1902) A Dutch scholar, Tiele though brought up in the Church wrote works with freethought overtones. He edited the poems of Genestet together with an account of his life, wrote articles on comparative religion, and published Outlines of the History of Religion (1888), and Comparative History of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian Religions (1882). He was a theist, but he felt that the creeds have “fallen far below the level of the science and philosophy, the knowledge of the world, and the civilization of a later age.” {RAT}
Tielman, Robert A. P. (1946– ) Tielman, a professor of sociology at the University of Utrecht, is vice-president of the European Humanist Federation. At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) Second Moral Education Conference held in Brussels (1985), and at the Tenth held in Buffalo (1988), Tielman addressed the groups. In 1998 he resigned as President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). In 1982, he wrote Homosessualiteit in Nederland and, in 1991, Bisexuality and HIV / AIDS: A Global Perspective. In 1994 at the Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), he spoke on “International Humanism in the 21st Century,” mentioning a census which shows that currently 55% are non-religious in the Netherlands, that 25% are humanists, and that 40,000 children voluntarily have enrolled in humanist education courses. Tielman is chairman of the board for Dutch public schools, is a member of the Dutch mental health board, and is a Dutch representative to the WHO. For his being President of the Dutch Humanist League from 1977-1987, Dr. Tielman received a knighthood. A contributing editor to Free Inquiry, Tielman is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. Also, he is a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA). In 1995 he spoke in Delphi, Greece, at the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. Also in 1995, at the IHEU meeting in India, he noted that there is still discrimination in Europe against atheists and humanists. Also, there is a struggle to create a secular European Union, but the Vatican is working for a Christian union. The Vatican, he holds, should be a church, not a state. In 1996 Tielman was a participant in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. “[The] close ties between humanism and the homosexual rights movement can be explained by the fact that they both accept the principle of human self-determination,” he wrote in “Homosexual Rights: Why Humanism Cares” (Free Inquiry, Fall 1997). The article tells of his and his companion’s being gay foster parents for twenty-five years. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Tielman’s e-mail: <r.tielman@aps.NL>. On the Web: <http://www.aps.NL/>. {HNS2; New Humanist, February 1996; International Humanist News, December 1998}
Tiernan, Robert (20th Century) Tiernan, a Denver attorney for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), spoke at that group’s 1994 convention in Madison, Wisconsin. He has defended the Foundation’s challenge of a Ten Commandments monument on the Denver Capitol grounds, and he has represented the group in a challenge of the motto “In God We Trust” on U.S. currency. Tiernan practiced law for twenty-five years in Washington, D.C., before moving to Denver. He is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Tiffin, Lee (1906– ) Tiffin, in Creationism’s Upside-Down Pyramid (1994), relates how science refutes fundamentalism.
Tiger, Lionel (1937– ) Tiger, a Canadian social scientist, is a fellow of the Great Britain Anthropology Institute and of the American Sociology Association for the Study of Evolution. He is author of Men In Groups (1969) and, with Robin Fox, The Imperial Animal (1971). With Joseph Schepher, he wrote Women in the Kubbutz (1975) and Optimism: The Biology of Hope and the Pursuit of Pleasure. Tiger is known for the “pleasure principle” and studies on male bonding. A member of the Humanist Association of Canada, Tiger signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Till, Farrell (20th Century) Till is editor of The Skeptical Review (PO Box 717, Canton, Illinois). A Biblical scholar, he writes also for The Secular Humanist Bulletin and American Rationalist. He debates in person and in writing individuals who are Biblical inerrantists. In 1994, he spoke on “From Bible Thumper to Atheist” at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Till was once an ordained Church of Christ minister and he has taught English at Spoon River College in Illinois. E-mail: <jftill@midwest.net>.
Tillich, Paul Johannes (1886–1965) Tillich, a German-born American philosopher and theologian, embraced the concept of the “Protestant Principle” and aimed at correlating questions arising out of the human condition and the divine answers drawn from the symbolism of Christian revelation. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, at Harvard University, and the University of Chicago. As pointed out by Paul Edwards in God and the Philosophers, Tillich in his Systematic Theology disagrees with a traditional theism that “has made God a heavenly, completely perfect person who resides above the world and mankind.” Against such a highest person, Tillich agrees, “the protest of atheism is correct.” Tillich repeatedly pours scorn on what he terms “monoarchic monotheism” and the theology of the “cosmic-policeman.” Edwards holds that Tillich’s reconstruction of belief in God “is consistent with a thoroughgoing atheism. “God” does not now stand “for a reality transcending the natural world but for a certain feature of certain human beings. If human beings disappeared from the world, so would God in this sense of the word.” The philosopher W. V. Quine was once told by Tillich that he was not an atheist since logic and philosophy were objects of his ultimate concern, to which Quine replied, “I protest against conversion by definition.” At Union Theological Seminary, asked by the present author during a course on existentialism if he would make clear his objections to naturalistic humanism, Tillich replied that he was a Christian humanist, that he therefore was a believer, and that he felt naturalism was not the solution to the human condition. {CE}
Tillier, Claude (1801–1844) A French writer born of poor parents, Tillier served as a conscript, wrote some telling pamphlets directed against tyranny and superstition, and completed a romance, My Uncle Benjamin. His works were edited by F. Pyat. {BDF}
Tillotson, John (1630–1694) Tillotson, an English prelate and the Archbishop of Canterbury, was chaplain to Charles II and was admitted to the special favor of William and Mary. According to Anthony Collins, Archbishop Tillotson was the one “whom all English free-thinkers own as their head. Inasmuch as T. H. Huxley once called Collins a “Goliath of freethinking,” Tillotson was one of the more liberal Protestant thinkers of his day.
Tilney, Frederick]] (1875–1938) Tilney, a neurologist, was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Theoretically, were we able to travel to some point light-years from Earth and have a spy satellite—something with advanced photoreconnaissance capable of reading the washing instructions on a black silk chemisette from 22,300 miles in geosynchronous orbit—we could actually observe ourselves in the past. But until we can outrace light, until we can set up our hyperresolution telescope on some planetoid fifteen, twenty, thirty light-years from Earth and—by dint of its optical wizardry—watch our youth unfold, we must make do with our memories, our diaries and notebooks, our videotapes, microcassettes, floppy disks, our photo albums, our evocative souvenirs and bric-a-brack—all the various and sundry madeleines we use to goad our hippocampi into reverse-scan.
Mark Leyner, preface to The Tetherballs of Bougainville (1998)
Archbishop Ussher in 1654 dated the creation as having been in 4004 B.C.E. Rosalind, in As You Like It, described the world as “almost 6,000 years old.” “The French Revolution’s calendar, adopted in 1792, had months that were each 30 days long (with a five- or six-day end-of-year festival), three 10-day weeks a month, and days divided into 10 hours. Each of the hours was divided into 100 minutes, and each of the minutes was divided into 100 seconds. Watches and clocks from the era survive,” Jay M. Pasachoff, a professor of astronomy at Williams College, has reported. As the World Wide Web expanded toward the end of the century, interest increased in some similar such decimal system for marking time. One plan, that breaks the day into 1,000 units each equivalent to 86.4 seconds, was offered. Thus 3 p.m. on a 24-hour clock would be the equivalent in universal time of “@625”:
Midnight @000 Noon @500 01:00 @041 13:00 @541 02:00 @083 14:00 @583 03:00 @125 15:00 @625 04:00 @166 16:00 @666 05:00 @208 17:00 @708 06:00 @250 18:00 @750 07:00 @291 19:00 @791 08:00 @333 20:00 @833 09:00 @375 21:00 @875 10:00 @416 22:00 @916 11:00 @458 23:00 @958 24:00 @000
Critics of such a new global Internet time, or decimal “milliday,” point out that Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) already works. Watches easily display local times anywhere on earth. The offset from GMT can be contained in any E-mail message’s header. (See entry for Time.) [On the Net: <http://www.universal-time.org/index.htm>; Kenneth J. Kahn, Albert S. Kirsch, and Jay M. Pasachoff, The New York Times, 11 March 1999]
Timofeyev, Victor (20th Century) At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), Timofeyev of the USSR addressed the group.
Timon of Phlius (c. 320–c. 230 B.C.E.) The chief disciple of Pyrrho, Timon was a skeptical philosopher who denied that possibility of certain knowledge. If one can learn to suspend judgment and be indifferent to externals, he taught, one can achieve peace of mind. Little is left of his writings, but his importance lies in his having continued Pyrrho’s philosophy of skepticism. Bertrand Russell (History of Philosophy, 1945) cites two of Timon’s statements: “The phenomenon is always valid” and “That honey is sweet I refuse to assert; that it appears sweet, I fully grant.” He then observes, “A modern Skeptic would point out that the phenomenon merely occurs, and is not either valid or invalid; what is valid or invalid must be a statement, and no statement can be so closely linked to the phenomenon as to be incapable of falsehood. For the same reason, he would say that the statement ‘honey appears sweet’ is only highly probable, not absolutely certain.” Hume, Russell states, similarly maintained “that something which had never been observed—atoms, for instance—could not be validly inferred; but when two phenomena had been frequently observed together, one could be inferred from the other.” {CE}
Tindal, Matthew (1657–1733) An English deist writer who had converted to Roman Catholicism, then became a freethinker, Tindal wrote Christianity as Old as Creation: or, the Gospel, a Republication of the Religion of Nature, which often is described as “the deist’s Bible.” Some consider he was an atheist, not a deist, and on his deathbed he uttered blasphemies “scarce fit to be repeated,” according to a witness, and “as proud of dying hard as ever he was to be reputed a Top Free Thinker.” From Robertson’s viewpoint, Tindal believed “that the idea of a good God involved that of a simple, perfect, and universal religion, which must always have existed among mankind, and must have essentially consisted in moral conduct. Christianity, insofar as it is true, must therefore be a statement of this primordial religion; and moral reason must be the test, not tradition or Scripture.” Like Collins, Tindal wrote anonymously and so escaped prosecution. The second part of a book he had been written was, upon his death, deliberately destroyed by Bishop Gibson, into whose hands it came. In 1736 Tindal and Shaftesbury are described by an orthodox apologist as the “two oracles of deism.” Although Tindal wrote a second volume of Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), of which Voltaire made some use, upon his death the manuscript was destroyed by order of Gibson, Bishop of London. {BDF; CE; EU, David Berman; FUK; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Tingsten, Herbert]] (1896–1973) Tingsten was a Swedish expert in political science. A publicist and professor at the University of Stockholm from 1935–1946, he was editor of Dagens Nyheter from 1946–1960. Because of his sharpness in logic, personal engagement, and polemic brilliance, according to Fredrik Bendz, Tingsten reached a unique position in the Swedish press. His efforts, for example, led to the removal of mandatory school prayers from public schools.
Tippett, Michael (Kemp)]] [Sir] (1905–1998) Tippett, a composer and the artistic director of the Bath Festival, was Director of Music of Morley College, London, from 1940 to 1951. His father was a liberal and a rationalist, his mother a suffragette who went to prison, was a novelist, and was a member of the Labour Party. At school he rejected religion and stopped accompanying the school hymns. In his autobiography he wrote that he and his father “both had this feeling that we had come to the end of a world that was god-centered.” During the Second World War he was imprisoned for his failure to comply with some of the conditions laid down for conscientious objectors. He remained a leading figure in the Peace Pledge Union throughout his life. As for his homosexuality, he wrote in his autobiography, “I accepted it without reservation as something instinctive and therefore natural.” One of his musical compositions is a love song Achilles addresses to Patroclus. Jim Herrick, in Gay & Lesbian Humanist (Spring, 1998), described Tippett as an outstanding Humanist in his concern for justice, for the individual, for the future. “He put into his music all his vigour, humanity, imagination, and exuberance. Many may find his work difficult, but the difficulty lessens as it becomes more familiar—and it is worth it, to experience the sound and insight of an extraordinary twentieth-century Humanist.” {New Humanist, March 1998}
Tippett, Michael]] [Sir} (2 Jan 1905 - 8 Jan 1998)
Tippett, a composer and the artistic director of the Bath Festival, was Director of Music of Morley College, London, from 1940 to 1951. His father was a liberal and a rationalist, his mother a suffragette who went to prison, was a novelist, and was a member of the Labour Party. At school he rejected religion and stopped accompanying the school hymns. In his autobiography he wrote that he and his father “both had this feeling that we had come to the end of a world that was god-centered.”
During the Second World War he was imprisoned for his failure to comply with some of the conditions laid down for conscientious objectors. He remained a leading figure in the Peace Pledge Union throughout his life. As for his homosexuality, he wrote in his autobiography, “I accepted it without reservation as something instinctive and therefore natural.” One of his musical compositions is a love song that Achilles addresses to Patroclus. Jim Herrick, in Gay & Lesbian Humanist (Spring, 1998), described Tippett as an outstanding Humanist in his concern for justice, for the individual, for the future. “He put into his music all his vigour, humanity, imagination, and exuberance. Many may find his work difficult, but the difficulty lessens as it becomes more familiar—and it is worth it, to experience the sound and insight of an extraordinary twentieth-century Humanist.” {New Humanist, March 1998}
Tippitt, Jason (20th Century) Tippitt, while a student at the University of Tennessee at Martin, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Tishler, H. (20th Century) In 1959 for his M.A. thesis at Columbia University, Tishler wrote about Robert Ingersoll.
Tisserand, François Félix (1845–1896) In 1869, Tisserand was professor of astronomy at the Sorbonne. In 1873 he became director of the observatory and professor of astronomy at Toulouse University. In 1874 he went to Japan, and in 1882 to Martinique, to observe for French science the transit of Venus. Tisserand edited the Bulletin Astronomique. His Traité de mécanique célese (4 volumes, 1888–1896) was well received, and his Leçons de cosmographie (1895) and other manuals were of high academic value. {RAT}
Tissot, Pierre François (1768–1854) During the Revolution, Tissot volunteered for the Vendean War (against the Catholic Royalists). In 1810 he became assistant professor of Latin poetry at the Collège de France. He translated Vergil’s Bucolics (1800) and in 1813 was appointed professor. The Bourbons deposed him, but the Revolution of 1830 restored his position. Tissot founded the Pilote in 1823, but the clergy suppressed it. In 1833, he was admitted to the French Academy for his Études sur Virgile, but his most important work was Histoire complète de la révolution Française (6 volumes, 1833–1836). Tissot was staunchly anti-clerical and Bonapartist. {RAT}
TITHE A tithe is one-tenth of one’s annual income or produce, a sum suggested by some religious groups and based upon Biblical tales for raising money to pay expenses. The tithe could be paid as dues to the priests and the Levites. Freethinkers in leadership positions jocularly state they also would happily accept one-tenth of people’s annual incomes “for services rendered.” (See entry for Pledges.) {ER}
Tittle, Peg (20th Century) Tittle, who teaches at Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, has written “Rational Bases of Identity: Toward Cultural Anarchy” for Humanist in Canada (Autumn 1996). She is on that journal’s editorial committee and has written “The Humanist View of Animal Rights” for The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (Winter 1998). {New Humanist, September 1999}
Tizard, Catherine [Dame] (20th Century) Tizard, the former mayor of Auckland and Governor-General of New Zealand, is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists.
Tobin, Ronald C. (20th Century) Tobin edits The Thought, a bi-monthly journal of the Philosophers Guild (PO Box 10760, Glendale, Arizona 85318).
Tocco, Felice (1845–1911) An Italian philosopher and anthropologist, Tocco taught philosophy at the University of Pisa. He wrote in the Rivista Bolognese on Leopardi and on positivism in the Rivista Contemporanea. Tocco’s books include A. Bain’s Theory of Sensation (1872); Thoughts on the History of Philosophy (1877); The Heresy of the Middle Ages (1884); and Giordano Bruno (1886). {BDF; RAT}
Tocqueville, Alexis de (1805–1859) An astute French social philosopher, de Tocqueville was briefly foreign minister after the Revolution of 1848. When he visited the United States, he wrote a classic work about his findings, Democracy in America (2 volumes, 1835), in which he predicted that America’s ideas about social equality and political democracy would one day replace Europe’s aristocratic institutions. He also observed that “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.” {CE}
Todd, Amanda (Died 1997) Todd, the administrator of the British Humanist Association, committed suicide in 1997. Her friends were asked to make any donations to the Voluntary Euthanasia Society in London.
Tóibin, Colm (1955– ) An Irish novelist and writer of travel books, Tóibin was born in Enniscorthy. When a friend mentioned that he had lost his faith, Tóibin realized, at the age of fourteen, that “I had always known that the interest all around me in security, money, power, and status was greater than any love of God or belief in his mercy.” Religion, he felt early in his life, “was consolation, like listening to music after a long day’s work; it was pure theatre, it was a way of holding people together.” In The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (1995), he went to university (“I knew no one who believed”), moving on to Barcelona. “I did not think about Catholicism again for some years,” he mentions, adding, “It did not cost me a thought.” Of the book, critic Paul Elie remarked, “When he was a boy, Tóibin’s Catholicism consisted of watching Catholics stick out their tongues for the communion wafer; now he is a man, and he is free to stand aside and stick his tongue out at them.” Tóibin described his travels to various places: the climb u Croagh Patrick in Ireland, the pilgrimage of St. James in Spain, the trip to the site of the Medjugorje visitations in Croatia. At Lourdes, he decided to “take the waters,” baths believed to cure the sick, and wondered if bathing suits would be provided. No, he found out, he had to strip to the underwear. “I wondered if I was wearing underpants, and when I realised that I was, I panicked once more, wondering if they were clean.” After dropping his drawers and having a handler wrap a towel around him while holding him down in the waters, he came up shaking and quickly put his underwear on (but backwards, with the fly in the rear). The handler kindly interceded: “He . . . suggested that I come back and do it right. There was all the time in the world,” he said, then held up the towel as a shield in order that Tóibin could put his pants on the right way around. Such, he found, is “the twilit world of half-medieval Catholicism.” {“Smells and Bells,” The New Republic, 11 December 1995}
TOILET PAPER • People in many of the poorer parts of the world use only the right hand for eating. And for good reason: the left hand is reserved for wiping while at the toilet. —Anonymous
• Queen Victoria lived before the advent of sewers, when raw sewage was thrown directly into rivers. Visiting Cambridge University in 1843, Her Majesty asked the master of Trinity College as they walked along the banks of the Cam why pieces of paper were floating down the river. With great tact and very little hesitation, the diplomatic master responded, “Those, Ma’am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.” {Playboy, September 1996}
TOILET ETIQUETTE OF THE GODS: See entry for Gipson Arnold.
TOILETS Conservative religious fundamentalists, ordinarily, are averse to saying toilet aloud. It is often described as “the necessary room” or “the little boys’ [or girls’] room.” The word has come to describe a disgusting, squalid, or depressing place. “A place to wash my hands,” however, can result in being shown just that. Euphemisms for the toilet include powder room, bathroom, ladies’ room, men’s room, lavatory, restroom, comfort station, and watercloset (WC). Usually avoided are terms such as shithouses, johns, heads, cans, slop pails, outhouses, privies, chamberpots. In Europe, the socially acceptable euphemism, of unknown origin, is loo. Similarly, freethinkers are apt to choose a euphemism rather than ask for directions to the can. Comedian George Carlin always speculated as to why we “take” a shit when what we mean is that we “leave” it. “Make your deposits now,” Army sergeants used to advise if no toilet facilities would be available for a period of time. Two who literally died “on the throne,” as the toilet stool is sometimes called, were singers Judy Garland and Elvis Presley. Presley’s medical examiner wrote that Presley “underwent his terminal event while on the commode.” In the vulgate, individuals can be expected to inquire where they can take a shit, crap, or piss. Studies are not readily available as to preferred terms of hoi polloi during past centuries. Biblical scholars avoid the subject altogether. (See entry for Allen Walker Read.)
Toland, John (1660–1722) Toland, an Irish-born deist and one of the first to call himself a Freethinker, tried in his Christianity not Mysterious (1696) to reconcile the scriptural claims of Christianity with the epistemology of John Locke. The work was “presented” by the Grand Jury of Middlesex and condemned by the Lower House of Convocation. It also was burned in Ireland in 1697, and one member of the Irish House of Commons moved “that Mr. Toland himself should be burnt.” His Life of Milton (1698), which, mentioning Eikon Basilike, referred to the “suppositious pieces under the name of Christ, his apostles, and other great persons.” For this he was denounced by Dr. Blackhall before Parliament. He replied with Amytor, in which he gives a catalogue of such pieces. Toland was the first to use the term “pantheism,” and in 1720 his most exotic work, Pantheisticon, was published, containing a liturgy that was taken to be a burlesque of the Christian liturgy. His pantheism is generally considered to be closer to that of Giordano Bruno than to that of Benedict Spinoza. Deists (1718) and the Pantheisticon (1720), “opened new windows.” Robertson considers Toland “a thorough deist until he became pantheist,” saying a certain amount of evasion was forced upon him because of the Blasphemy Law of 1697. Jonathan Swift described Toland as “the great Oracle of the anti-Christians.” For some years before his death, Toland lived in obscure lodgings with a carpenter at Putney. His health was broken, and his circumstances were poor. His last illness was painful, but he bore it with fortitude. According to one of his most intimate friends, Toland looked earnestly at those in the room a few minutes before breathing his last, and on being asked if he wanted anything, he answered, “I want nothing but death.” His biographer, Des Maizeaux, said that “he looked upon death without the least perturbation of mind, bidding farewell to those that were about him, and telling them he was going to sleep.” Wheeler added that Toland “died with the calmness of a philosopher, at Putney. Lange praises him highly.” {Tony Akkermans, The Freethinker, June 1997; BDF; CE; EU, David Berman; FO; FUK; JM; JMR; JMRH; Sean Kearney, “John Toland: Father of Secular Philosophy, New Humanist, November 1997; RAT; RE}
TOLERANCE Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (1969) gives Russell’s definition of tolerance: “Toleration of opinion, if it’s really full-blown, consists in not punishing any kind of opinion as long as it doesn’t issue in some kind of criminal act.” Lord Russell explains: “The first really tolerant state was Holland. All the leading intellects of the seventeenth century at some period of their lives had to take refuge in Holland, and if there hadn’t been Holland, they’d have been wiped out. The English were no better than other people at that time. There was a parliamentary investigation which decided that Hobbes was very, very wicked, and it was decreed that no work by Hobbes was to be published in England. And it wasn’t, for a long, long time.” Russell believed that “the true test of a lover of freedom comes only in relation to things that he dislikes. To tolerate what you like is easy. It is toleration of what you dislike that characterizes the liberal attitude.” Russell realizes there are limits to tolerance. For example, “If there were no law against murder, we should all have to go armed and avoid solitude and be perpetually on the watch. Many liberties which we now take for granted would disappear. It is, therefore, in the interests of liberty to curtail the liberty of would-be murders,” and here he includes states, concluding that “if a civilized way of life is to continue, it will be necessary to arrive at a method of preventing aggressive war.” Russell also recognizes that where any large group is basically out of sympathy with the rest of the citizens of the State, “democracy is apt to become unworkable, except by a use of force, which will produce great discontent in the subordinate group, and a harsh temper in the dominant group.” As examples, he cites the situation of Jews in a country where popular sentiment is strongly anti-Semitic, of Muslims in India, of Hindus in Pakistan. Then, he writes in Fact and Fiction (1961), “Democracy in such cases can only be successful if there is a diffused sentiment of tolerance.” “Humanists cannot limit their battle for tolerance,” French astronomer Jean-Claude Pecker has written, “to the rather narrow views of the religiously minded preachers. We have to speak for a positive kind of tolerance, a tolerance that considers, on equal footing, men and women throughout the world over as having the same right to be confident in their beliefs, and the same freedom to express them, without any exclusion. In no case should the color of skin, social origin, language, religion or beliefs, philosophical attitude, nationality, sex, etc., be the cause of any discrimination in any field of the human activity.” As to whether we should tolerate everything, Pecker responded, “As Locke considers the Catholics intolerable, as Saint Paul found intolerable those who refused the true God, there are several behaviors that we do not tolerate either. Where is the line? All that is criminal is of course intolerable. All the preaching for the superiority of any doctrine in that it can lead to intolerable actions is intolerable. Xenophobia, Nazism, fundamentalism, etc., are intolerable.” On the subject, Paul Kurtz has written, “What libertarian humanists insist upon as part of the private sphere are inner thoughts and conscience, religious belief or unbelief, control over one’s own body, sexual preference between consenting adults, abortion, reproductive freedom, euthanasia, the right to die with dignity, artistic expression , and so on. . . . In a free society where racists abound, where a drug culture runs rampant (I am in favor of the decriminalization of drugs), where promiscuity, violence in the media, and wasted lives are everywhere in evidence, humanists need to defend moral excellence, noble deeds, and qualitative standards. . . . We have an obligation to encourage the finest cultural expressions, intellectual, aesthetic, and moral appreciation.” As for tolerance regarding ethnicity, Kurtz added, “You cannot find a defense of human rights in the Bible or the Koran. They have emerged only with the democratic and humanist revolutions of the modern era. Included in this are the rights of the child. . . . Humanists need to defend tolerance provided it is accompanied by moral responsibility, which should be achieved by education rather than legislation. Similarly, we need to encourage the development of a humanist culture in which no ethnic, racial, or religious pockets exist and in which we reach a new planetary culture.” To test one’s tolerance, humanists discuss such matters as to whether certain customs should be “tolerated”; e.g.,
• In Maine, a refugee from Afghanistan was seen kissing the penis of his baby boy, a traditional expression of love by this father. • In Seattle, a hospital invented a harmless female circumcision procedure to satisfy conservative Somali parents wanting to keep an African practice alive in their community. • In India, some widows are immolated. • In many Muslim countries, removal of the female clitoris at a minimum is practiced as well as male circumcision. • In Cambodia, hot objects are pressed on a child’s forehead or back in a practice called “coining” that is meant to cure various maladies but leaves welts. • In Afghanistan, a wronged family may demand the death penalty and carry it out themselves with official blessing. • In Madhya Pradesh State in India, marriages of seven-year-olds occur. • Rastifarians use marijuana in their religious ceremonies.
Inasmuch as many immigrants have moved into countries in which legal systems do not permit certain acts, more and more law schools have taken an interest in religion and the different customs of other cultures. While some may want judgment-free considerations of immigrants’ practices and traditional rituals in the countries they come from, others from those same countries beg to be admitted in order to escape from tribal rites in the name of human rights. {Barbara Crossette, The New York Times, 6 March 1999; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996}
TOLERATION • Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. —Thomas Paine
Tollemache, Lionel Arthur (Born 1838) Tollemache was the son of Baron Tollemache, a friend of C. Austin, of whom he wrote. He had many articles in Fortnightly Review and published Safe Studies (1884), Recollections of Pallison (1885), and Mr. Romanes’s Catechism (1887). {BDF; RAT}
Toller, Ernst (1893–1939) A German dramatist and poet of the expressionist school, Toller was imprisoned (1919–1924) for participating in the Communist Bavarian revolution. He wrote many works of social protest, including Die Maschinen-stürmer (1922, The Machine-Wreckers), based on the Luddite riots in England. A non-theist, he wrote an autobiography, Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1933). {CE}
Tolley, Howard Jr. (20th Century) Tolley has worked as a senior law clerk in the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, as a professor at Wilberforce University, and as a U. S. Peace Corps volunteer in Nigeria. He formerly was president in Ohio of the Yellow Springs Unitarian fellowship and now is on the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
Tolson, Melvin B. (1898–1966)
An African American columnist for the now defunct Washington Tribune, Tolson according to Norm Allen Jr. was a rationalist. In 1947 he was appointed poet laureate of Liberia by Liberian President V. S. Tubman, and in 1954 he was awarded the Order of the Star of Africa by Liberian Ambassador Simpson. {AAH}
Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolayevitch Tolstoi)]] [Count] (1828–1910) Tolstoy, a major Russian novelist and philosopher, wished for a “rationalized” Christianity. Like characters in his novels, he struggled between belief and unbelief. He liked much of what he read about William Ellery Channing and the Brahmo-Somaj movement in India. He particularly liked a pioneering work on nonviolence, Christian Non-Resistance, by Adin Ballou, a Universalist minister, whom he described as being one of America’s greatest writers. But when he satirized the Orthodox church in his Resurrection (1889–1899), he was excommunicated. He remained, however, a Christian of sorts whose relations with his God, thought Maxim Gorki, were “very suspicious: they sometimes remind me of the relation of two bears in one den.” McCabe labeled him “a mystic theist” who enjoyed flogging “the Churches.” Tolstoy was a brawny man who, at the time of his marriage when he was thirty-four, had lost most of his teeth. He married Sofya Andreyevna Behrs, daughter of the chief court physician of Czar Alexander II. Tolstoy’s mother-in-law, who with her family of three daughters lived in the Kremlin, was only two years older than he. His young bride, the middle child of the three, had been mesmerized since childhood by the writer, and Tolstoy was enamored of the young bride who was said to have had du chien, a “bite” that combined stylishness and sex appeal. Following a custom of the Czar and others at that time to exchange the reading of each other’s diaries, Tolstoy required as a condition of marriage that Sofya, whom he called Sonya, agree that the two should read each other’s diaries in order that they might never conceal secrets from each other. She agreed. Before the wedding, therefore, he read her chaste and meditative entries. However, she was shocked to learn about his past gambling, drunken orgies, whoring even at the age of fourteen, homosexual longings, venereal diseases, and an affair with a peasant woman, Axinya, who lived nearby with their illegitimate son. Just the same, she consented. According to historian William L. Shirer’s Love and Hatred (1994), the two lived in Yasnaya Polyana for most of the next forty-eight years, during which time he gained world-wide fame, she had sixteen pregnancies, and she had thirteen childbirths. Only eight of the offspring survived into adulthood, all such details dutifully noted in their diaries. Sonya, a devout, traditional Orthodox Christian, wrote that she had not particularly enjoyed making love to her husband almost nightly when she was not expecting a child. After her fifties when she was beyond child-bearing, however, she noted that she rather enjoyed sex. Although theirs was a stormy relationship filled with strife, she faithfully researched for her husband, made translations, and copied his difficult-to-read handwriting into legible script. Meanwhile, twenty-two years into their marriage Sonya read in her husband’s diary that “[s]he will remain a millstone around my neck . . . until I die.” Still, he assigned her all copyrights from his writings, and she acted as his literary agent and publisher, notes critic Francine du Plessix Gray. When Tolstoy began to change his philosophy, saying he was a sinner, rejecting the Church, repudiating private property, and declaring he would no longer write “artistic” novels, Sonya at first declared the renunciation of worldly goods was a publicity ploy. Although Tolstoy was denouncing marriage and family and sex, the diaries show he continued to lust for his wife into his seventies and eighties. Sonya had become pregnant for the tenth time, in fact, the year he began to preach marital chastity. The new villain on the scene, his biographers explain, was Vladimir Chertkov. Although not exactly a charlatan, Shirer writes, Chertkov cast a spell over Tolstoy in order to try to get control of the diaries and take the manuscripts away from Sonya. She considered Chertkov an intruder, writing to him, “ (My husband’s) diaries are the holy of holies of his life, and consequently of mine with him.” She accused him of trying to take from her “all I have lived by for forty-eight years.” Getting no support from Alexandra (Sasha), their youngest surviving child, and unable to get her husband away from Chertkov, she wrote, “Falling for men was more in his line as a boy! And now he is absolutely at that man’s beck and call.” Her jealousy became so blinding, according to Leigh W. Rutledge, that she threatened to kill Chertkov, left the house, and was found “babbling incoherently and lying face-down in some wet grass on the estate.” Although she had thought the two men were writing love letters and were confiding secrets as they walked together in the woods, Chertkov said they had only been conversing and exchanging letters on the terms of Tolstoy’s will, which left sole control of Tolstoy’s manuscripts to Chertkov. Sonya later was successful in getting that will revoked, following her husband’s death. Meanwhile, Sonya brandished part of a diary entry Tolstoy had written six decades earlier, when he was twenty-three: “I have never been in love with a woman,” the entry read, “but I have quite often fallen in love with a man. . . . I feel in love with a man before I knew what pederasty was. . . . Beauty has always been a powerful factor in my attractions; there is D—, for example. I shall never forget the night we left Pirogovo together, when, wrapped up in my blanket, I wanted to devour him with kisses and weep. Sexual desire was not totally absent, but it was impossible to say what role it played.” To a friend, Tolstoy complained, “Tell her (Sonya), that if she’s trying to kill me, she’ll soon succeed.” Tolstoy did leave, writing to her that “My position in this house is becoming—has already become—intolerable.” Although she threatened suicide if he did not return, he refused. With a doctor friend and Sasha, he set out in search of some peace. In a railroad junction town, Astapovo, Tolstoy developed pneumonia, a fact reported in the newspaper. This resulted in crowds of journalists eager to record and even make photojournalistic movies of the dying author. Tolstoy, who had thought that by leaving home he could meditate further on the Meaning of Life, now found himself at the center of unwanted attention. An emissary from the Holy Synod arrived to receive, unsuccessfully, his repentance and return to the Church. Chertkov and Sasha found themselves part of the media circus. Sonya, kept from her husband for fear he would die of anger upon seeing her, was only allowed in to his bedside after he had lost consciousness. In his last three hours of life, she whispered prayers over the still excommunicated Tolstoy. Upon her husband’s death, Chertkov, also, departed from her life. Until her own death, ten years later in 1919, Sonya Tolstoy walked daily to her husband’s burial site near their home, which after the Russian Revolution was turned into a government farm. Lenin decreed that she was to be allowed to remain there for the rest of her life. (See entry for James Wood, who states, “Tolstoy, for instance, could not be called a Christian in any proper use of the word, but is always banging on about God and Christ.”) {CE; JM; RAT; TYD}
Tomashevich, George Vid (1927– ) Tomashevich, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Buffalo State University College, signed the Secular Humanist Declaration in 1980. In 1981, he wrote Aging in America and Other Cultures. Originally, Tomashevich was from Montenegro. {SHD}
Tomavic, Victor (20th Century) Tomavic is professor emeritus of sociology at Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, and adjunct professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He spoke at the 1994 humanist conference in San José, Costa Rica.
Tombaugh, Clyde William (1906- ) Tombaugh is an educator and astronomer. He was associated with White Sands Proving Grounds, Las Cruces, New Mexico, starting in 1946; was chief optical measurement section of the Ballistics Laboratories in 1948; was chief of the research and evaluation branch planning department of the Flight Determination division from 1948 to 1953, among his many positions. He taught astronomy at New Mexico State University. Tombaugh is credited with having discovered Pluto in 1930. He was a Unitarian.
TOMBSTONES: See entry for Death and Tombstones.
Tomkyns, Martin: See entry for Joshua Toulmin.
Tommasi, Salvatore (19th Century) An Italian evolutionist, Tommasi wrote Evolution, Science, and Naturalism (1877). He also wrote a pamphlet in 1882 in commemoration of Darwin. {BDF}
Tompkins, Henry (20th Century) Tompkins was a noted British positivist and non-theist.
Tompkins, Jerry R. (20th Century) Tompkins edited D-Day at Dayton: Reflections on the Scopes Trial (1965). {FUS}
Tompson, Marian Leonard (20th Century) Tompson was given the 1999 A. D. Black Award of the Ethical Humanist Society for her pioneering work in educating mothers, physicians, and the public about breasteeding. She is the founder and for twenty-four years was president of La Leche League International. On the Web: <http://lalecheleague.org>.
Tone, Theobald Wolfe (1763–1798) An Irish patriot, Tone founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791. He related to the French revolutionists and in 1796 induced the French Directory to send an expedition against England. Tone, eventually taken prisoner, committed suicide in prison before his execution could be carried out. In 1826, his son edited his father’s journals and an autobiography, which confirm that Tone was a deist. According to McCabe, that fact is suppressed in Eire, where Tone remained a popular idol. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
TONGUES, SPEAKING IN Glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, is defined as the ecstatic utterances usually of unintelligible sounds made by individuals in a state of religious excitement. Various Pentecostal groups cite for authority the Acts of the Apostles 2:4. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 encouraged the practice. In Acts, however, the use of the gift produces speech in other human languages as a kind of reversal of the confusion of tongues produced at the Tower of Babel. Some American Negro sects that are pentecostal in character call the emotional automata “tongue talking.” Others suggest it is a sign of demonic possession. Meanwhile, polyglottal freethinkers are known for speaking intelligble sounds. (See Martin Gardner, “Klingon and Other Artificial Languages,” Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1995.) {CE}
Tonkin, Don (20th Century) Tonkin has written for the South Australian Humanist Post, and he is in favor of Australia’s devising legislation concerning euthanasia which will allow a physician to give a lethal dose to a patient in great pain and with absolutely no chance of recovery.
Tönnies, Ferdinand (Born 1855) A German sociologist who held a modified version of Schopenhauer’s theory of reality, Tönnies called his outlook “Critical Voluntarism.” For him, will is the ultimate reality, and all sound knowledge is rationalistic and empirical. He wrote several works, including Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887) and Das Wesen der Soziologie (1907). Tönnies supported the German Monist League and wrote in Das Monistische Jahrhundert. {RAT}
Tonne, Herbert A. (1902–1998) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Tonne was on the editorial board of the Journal of Business Education. He was active in the American Humanist Association and in humanist circles in the New Jersey and New York areas. Tonne, who was a professor of business education at New York University and the State University of New York at Albany, wrote a number of texts on education: (with P. S. Lomax), Problems of Teaching Economics (1932); (with M. H. Tonne) Social-Business Subjects in the Secondary Schools (1932); Consumer Education in the Schools (1941); (with L. L. Jones and R. G. Price) Functions of Business (1941); A Realistic Philosophy of Education (1942); (with E. L. Popham and M. H. Freeman), Methods of Teaching Business Subjects (1957); (with S. I. Simon and E. C. McGill), Business Principles: Organization and Management (1958); (4th and 5th editions with L. C. Nanassy), Principles of Business Education (1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1973); and (with L. C. Nanassy and D. R. Malsbury) Principles and Trends in Business Education (1977). He also wrote Looking Ahead to 2084 (1974); The Human Dilemma: Finding Meaning in Life (1980); Scribblings of a Concerned Secular Humanist (1988); and “Why Are There So Few Humanists?” Tonne was an articulate secular humanist who knew many influential humanist leaders and, in turn, influenced many. (See entry for Humanist Manifestos. Also see “Religious Belief in America: A New Poll,” Free Inquiry, Summer 1996, which he commissioned. Among other facts, the study showed that over 88% of Americans believe in a personal God who can answer prayer; that only 8.2% believe God is an invention of the human mind; that 88% believe an atheist is anyone who does not believe in the existence of a superior being who created and rules the universe; that 93.2% believe miracles are performed today by the power of God; and that 80.3% believe in life after death, as contrasted with 26.1% among people who consider themselves very non-religious. Tonne found the Goldhaber Research Associations poll’s findings, which he funded, surprising. Do people just ignore or disbelieve what they read and hear? he wondered. {HM2}
Tooke, John Horne (1736–1812) Tooke was an English radical politician and philologist. Born John Horne, he adopted the name Tooke in 1782 after being designated heir to the estate of a rich friend, William Tooke. In 1760 he became an Anglican priest but soon abandoned his clerical duties for politics. In 1771, he founded the Constitutional Society to promote parliamentary reform and support for the American colonists. Fined and imprisoned in 1778, he was later tried for treason but was acquitted. In 1801 he was elected to Parliament, but in the same year the government passed an act specifically directed against him which disqualified clergy from sitting in the House of Commons. McCabe reports that when Tooke “threw off his cassock,” he said that he had had “the infectious hand of a bishop waved over him.” McCabe labeled Tooke a Deist. Philologists have complained that Tooke’s speculative etymologies delayed for decades the introduction of the new and sounder philology from the Continent. Tooke left instructions (which were disregarded) that he was to be buried in his garden at Purley and the only speaker was to be his atheist friend Sir F. Burdett. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Tool (20th Century)
The recording artists known as Tool include the following in liner notes for their album “Aenima”:
This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on T.V. every day letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.
{CA; E}
Tool: See entry for Maynard James Keenan
Toomey, Samuel (Born 1830) At first a blacksmith, Toomey became a carriage maker and invented various improvements on carriages. In 1868, he invented what was then widely known as Toomey’s method of constructing bent-rim wheels. He wrote of religion, “My father and mother belonged to the old German Lutheran church, but I was taken away from home so very young that I got little religious instruction from them, but I mainly fell into the hands of the same class of people, so I had to go to church. In this way I grew up, and being a natural abolitionist from my youth up, I joined the United Brethren church when eighteen years of age but never could fully believe the Bible stories. At the same time I became a reader of the Antislavery Bugle published in Salem, Ohio. Salem was at that time the headquarters for those then known as Broad-gangers, or Infidels. Such reading brought about thinking and investigation, and, as you know, investigation brings Infidelity. So for the last thirty years I did my own thinking, reading such books as any unbiased man should read; and, of course, as with the great Darwin, it ended in Agnosticism, and very strongly in Atheism.” {PUT}
Toon, Nicholas (20th Century) For The Freethinker (October 1997), Toon wrote “Fallacious Arguments for God.” “Freewill is an illusion,” he stated. “There are no absolute standards of right and wrong; we make our own morality.”
Topazio, Virgil W. (20th Century) When he reviewed books on Diderot and Sterne for The Humanist in the 1950s, Topazio taught French at the University of Rochester.
Topinard, Paul (19th Century) Topinard was a French anthropologist and physician. He edited the Revue d’Anthropologie, the standard work on that subject published in the Library of Contemporary Science. In Science and Faith (1899), he did not, he said, want “a grain of mysticism” in life. {BDF; RAT}
Topp, Arthur Manning (1844–1916) Topp was an Australian secularist, journalist, and editor. Son of an English wool importer, he emigrated to Melbourne, Australia, in 1858 and, with H. G. Turner, launched the Melbourne Review. Topp was an admirer of Herbert Spencer’s analysis of religious belief and philosophy. In 1867 he was an Australian leader in the Eclectic Association of Victoria, some of whose members joined the Secular Society. {SWW}
TORAH The Torah (which in Hebrew means law) is the law on which Judaism is founded. It is contained in the first five books of the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy). Torah can also refer to the entire body of Jewish law and wisdom, including what is contained in oral tradition. {DCL}
Torcaso, Roy R. (20th Century) Torcaso was a notary public from Wheaton, Maryland, whose commission was withheld because he refused to take an oath declaring belief in God. The Supreme Court ruled against the provision of the Maryland Constitution which stated, “No religious test ought ever to be required as a qualification for any office of profit or trust in this state, other than a declaration of belief in the existence of God.” Corliss Lamont has written that “in delivering the unanimous opinion of the Court that this statute was unconstitutional under the First Amendment, Justice Hugo L. Black observed in a footnote: ‘Among religions in this country which do not teach what would generally be considered a belief in the existence of God are Buddhism, Taoism, Ethical Culture, Secular Humanism and others.’ ” Justice Black’s observation upsets those secular humanists who consider themselves part of a philosophic movement, not a religion. Torcaso is on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association and of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (See entry for Hugo L. Black and the 1995 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which ruled that secular humanism is not a religion.) {CL; FD}
Torquemada, Tomás de (1420–1498) Señor de Torquemada was the highly efficient Spanish Inquisitor-General who sent mis-believers, for example Jews, as well as non-believers to their deaths. In addition to being Queen Isabella’s and King Ferdinand V’s confessor, he is credited “with having burned over ten thousand persons in his eighteen years of office as Grand Inquisitor, besides torturing many thousands. Close upon a hundred thousand more were terrified into submission; and a further six thousand burned in effigy in their absence or after death.” He punished crypto-Jews, apostates, witches, and spiritual offenders. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia admits some 2000 were executed and vast other numbers were punished. He encouraged the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and, ironically, was of Jewish descent. In 1571, Cardinal Alonso Manrique of Seville compiled a work which thoroughly details the Inquisition’s work: Compilacion de las instrucciones del oficio de la Santa Inquisicion, hechas por el muy reverendo Señor Fray Tomas de Torquemada . . . E por los otros reverendissimos señores Inquisidores Generales, que despues sucedieron. The work was republished for Diego Diaz de la Carrera in 1667 and again in 1747 for Francisco Perez de Prado y Cuesta. In a 1992 movie, “Christopher Columbus: The Discovery,” Marlon Brando had a bit part in which he played the part of Spain’s most notorious inquisitor. Comedian Mel Brooks, in a song, “The Inquisition,” noted that his prisoners couldn’t “torquemada (talk him out of) anything.” {CE; JMR; JMRH}
Torrey, Jesse Jr. (19th Century) In Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1835, Torrey edited Herald of Reason & Common Sense. {FIS}
Torrey, Norman L. (1894–1980) A professor of French at Columbia University, Torrey was author of Spirit of Voltaire (1938) and co-editor with Otis Fellows of Diderot Studies (1953). Active in New York City humanist circles, Torrey wrote to the present author about humanism:
I was a student of Irving Babbitt but reacted against his brand, becoming a naturalistic humanist. My idea of humanism is a development of my special interest in French literature and history of ideas. A clear notion of the growth of humanism can be found in the Preliminary Discourse (1750) of the first great Encyclopedia, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. The spirit of the enterprise was modeled after Alexander Pope’s couplet, “Know thyself. Presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is Man.” In the Preliminary Discourse, d’Alembert explains the French Enlightenment, represented by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau, as the natural fulfillment of the Renaissance, which he understood as the rebirth of pagan philosophy and culture. The first step in this return, after the Dark Ages, to the wisdom of the Greeks and the Romans was of necessity the thorough understanding of the languages of those peoples. The sixteenth century Humanists (with a capital H), were a group of scholars, composers of grammars and dictionaries, jealous pedants whose unsavory reputation as wranglers was compensated for by the genuine contribution they made to the comprehension of such authors as Cicero, Lucian, and Lucretius. The full development of this pagan culture took place two centuries later. D’Alembert connects it with the “light of reason” and the rise of the scientific spirit, but cannot yet use the word humanist in its modern sense. The appeal to humanity, however, and to the inalienable rights of man, becomes more and more frequent both in France and America; for example in our Declaration of Independence. In Montesquieu’s plea to the Spanish Inquisitors, he urges them, since they have shown that they cannot be Christians, to at least be men. Voltaire likewise reminded man of his essential dignity and righted many an injustice in the name of humanity. With an assist from Jefferson, the century was fittingly summed up in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, one of the great humanist documents of all time. It has taken another two centuries for the word humanist to recapture its fundamental historical meaning. There is every indication that the present decade of the twentieth century is witnessing this victory.
Dr. Torrey was an active member of secular humanist groups in New York City. For the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8, he wrote the selection on Voltaire. {FUK; HNS; WAS, 24 April 1956}
TORTURE The Rationalist Encyclopedia details forms of torture in Ancient China, in Babylonia, and particularly in the Dark Ages. During the Norman Conquest, McCabe points out, kings and nobles devised and inflicted the most horrible torture on Anglo-Saxons or any—even clerics, monks, and nuns—who were suspected of having concealed money or treasure. During the Age of Chivalry (1100–1400), the knights, nobles, and even princes and “noble” ladies (who often led their own bandit troops) wrought fiendish tortures, sometimes with their own hands, on travelers, priests, monks, nuns, and others believed to have hidden treasure. Not to be outshone, pious abbots castrated monks for irregularities as early as the year 600. Cutting or burning out the eyes was an even more common practice. Chopping off hands or feet or ears, and cutting out tongues or piercing them with a hot iron, were equally common. Also, cheaters of the King were boiled in oil. Molten lead was poured over offenders, people were “broken on the wheel” or nearly torn asunder on the rack; the bones of the lower leg were broken with the “Spanish Boots,” and the thumbs with thumbscrews; weights were hung from the genitals; water dripped from a height onto the stomach; the feet were washed with salt water and goats were brought to lick the soles; intense hunger and thirst were inflicted; men were hung up for hours by the wrists or (sometimes in the case of nuns) smeared naked with honey and spread in the sun to attract insects; hot boiled eggs were fixed under the armpits of men or to the breasts of women; legs were wrapped tight in calf-skin and boiling oil poured over; hands or feet were burned off; string was tied tight round the head; nails were torn out and teeth broken; the flesh was torn with red-hot pincers. Voltaire’s Treatise on Toleration states that Protestants were broken on the wheel as late as 1762. However, the French Revolution resulted in abolishing the official use of torture in all countries which its armies conquered. With the fall of Napoleon, torture resumed by the joint authorities of the State and the Catholic Church. Rationalists of the 17th and 18th centuries (Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Beccaria, and others) stirred the conscience of Europe against using the kinds of torture which the Church had used for more than a thousand years. But torture continued to be used, as pointed out in McCabe’s Papacy in Politics Today (1937). (See entry for George E. Macdonald. Also, see McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia for a thorough discussion of torture.) {RE}
Linus Torvalds, Uber-Programmer tech
Torvalds is the original creator of Linux, a free Unix-type operating system.
The San Jose Mercury News profiled him in a piece titled "Linus the Liberator" by David Diamond (1999):
Unlike many in Silicon Valley, the newcomer is guided by a strong set of ethics. "There are like two golden rules in life. One is 'Do unto others as you would want them to do unto you.' For some reason, people associate this with Christianity. I'm not a Christian. I'm agnostic. The other rule is 'Be proud of what you do.'"
See the full article at http://www.mercurynews.com/svtech/news/special/linus/
---
From an interview in the November 1999 Linux Journal magazine, some excerpts
Margie: How about religion?
Linus: Hmmmm, completely a-religious -- atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both. It gives people the excuse to say, "Oh, nature was just created", and so the act of creation is seen to be something miraculous. I appreciate the fact that, "Wow, it's incredible that something like this could have happened in the first place." I think we can have morals without getting religion into it, and a lot of bad things have come from organized religion in particular. I actually fear organized religion because it usually leads to misuses of power.
Margie: As in holy wars?
Linus: Yeah, and I find it kind of distasteful having religions that tell you what you can do and what you can't do. Catholicism is an example of that kind of non-permissiveness, and I think that is very easy to get into if you are an organized religion. Religion is a very strange idea. In Finland, nobody cares. Many people are religious in Finland, but it's not a political issue. Over here, religion has become politicized, so you have the fringe people in the news. And then people are afraid to talk about it because it has political implications, and that's usually not true in most of Europe. Religion is a personal matter, but does not matter for anything else. That's how I think it should be done.
Margie: Yes, we were founded to keep the two separated. Then the Moral Majority found out what a large constituency they had, and...
Linus: Yeah, it's kind of ironic that in many European countries, there is actually a kind of legal binding between the state and the state religion. At the same time, in practice, religion has absolutely nothing to do with everyday life. Maybe the taxes to the church, but that's it. They don't have any political power.
Margie: Here it's called tithing, not taxes.
Linus: Actually, in Finland they call it taxes -- you pay taxes to the church. If you are a member of the church, you pay 2% tax to the church. And that's the amount of legal binding between the church and the state. Apart from that, they are completely separate. In the U.S., church and state claim to be very separate, but you still see the church has a lot of power in politics.
[...]
Margie: What about school for the kids? Are y'all going to stay here in the states for them to go to school?
Linus: Well that used to be kind of a major worry between us. We've seen some strange things. Tove was off looking for preschools, because you start so early here in the U.S. I looked closer at one of the papers she brought home, and found it mentioned L. Ron Hubbard. I started asking around about the place, and it turns out there are a scientology school, and they don't mention the fact that they are associated with scientology anywhere in their literature. And that kind of makes me nervous. I don't want to put my child in a scientology school by mistake. [....]
TOTEM: See entry for animism.
Toth, Arpad (20th Century) Toth is active with the Humanist Association of New Hampshire-Vermont. A retired Commander of the United States Navy, he chose as his New Hampshire license plate ATIEST. (See entry for New Hampshire Humanists.) {FD; Freethought Today, October 1996}
Toth, Judith (20th Century) Toth in the 1980s joined Ethical Leadership after intensive training. She has served several years as executive secretary and an organizational trainer in the Washington Society, and in 1985 continued her leadership in Baltimore. (See entry for Ethical Culture.)
Toulmin, George Hoggart (18th Century) Toulmin wrote The Antiquity and Duration of the World (1785). A physician, he also wrote The Eternity of the Universe (1789). Dr. Toulmin was born in Wolverhampton, England. {BDF}
Toulmin, Joshua (18th Century)
A Unitarian “antipaedobaptist,” or one who opposed infant baptism, Toulmin was a one-time Anglican vicar who wrote lives of Socinus (1777) and Biddle (1797). His sermon on “The Injustice of Classing Unitarians with Deists and Infidels” (1797) was termed inconvenient, and the effigy of Paine was burned before his door and his windows were broken. His businesses of schoolkeeping and bookselling had to be given up. Robertson mentions that it was a time when the Unitarians were doing a considerable amount of freethinking, and among these authors were E. Evanson, Martin Tomkyns, Isaac Watts the hymnist (“Joy to the World”; “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”), and Joseph Priestley. {JMR; JMRH}
Toulmin, Stephen Edelston (1922– ) Toulmin is a London-born humanities educator who teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He wrote The Place of Reason in Ethics (1949); Wittgenstein’s Vienna (with A. Jankik, 1973); The Return to Cosmology (1982); and Cosmopolis (with J. Goodfield, 1989). He has contributed numerous scientific articles to professional journals and has revived an interest in ethical casuistry. In 1994 in Utrecht at the University of Humanist Studies, he spoke at a conference entitled “Embarrassment of Identities: Humanism and the Future of Europe.” In discussing “Are Nation States Obsolescent?” he responded in the affirmative. Among other factors, Dr. Toulmin suggests that the growth of human population and the evolution of society have reached a point, ecologically speaking, at which attempts to preserve the system of Nation States will be maladaptive. How to move into a different, multiethnic, and transnational future, however, is not clear. {New Humanist, May 1994}
Touré, Ahmed Sékou [President] (1922–1984) Touré was President of the Republic of Guinea (1958–1984) and founder of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. He led Guinea out of the French Community (1958) and, at the time of his death, was seeking the position as chairman of the Organization of African Unity. A Marxist, he called his philosophic outlook “a new humanism.” {CE}
Tourin, Jack (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Tourin was president of the American Ethical Union. {HM2}
Toy, Anne (20th Century) Toy is a leader in England of the Humanist Speakers Network.
Toynbee, Polly (1946– ) Columnist for The Guardian and broadcaster Polly Toynbee spoke at Conway Hall in 1995 at the first joint annual dinner of Secular and Humanist organizations. The great-granddaughter of Gilbert Murray, Toynbee lamented the fact that “just as conventional religions are on the wane, so a New Wave of nonsense is rising up to engulf us. Cults, superstitions, astrology, numerology, every kind of ism and ology seems to gain an astonishing tolerance and credulity these days in the most surprising paces. As people turn away from the church, all too often they turn towards things that are even worse. Anything goes these days, in the way of belief.” “What I find even odder,” she continued, “is that the beleaguered conventional religions are responding by drawing closer together. Ecumenicism is everywhere. The Methodists want to join the Church of England. Many Protestants even want to get into bed with the Pope, if only he were willing to use contraception. Multi-faith worship is all the thing. The Jews who killed Christ are being forgiven by Christians who have been killing them in pogroms for generations. Sikhs and Hindus are welcomed by Christians keen on cultural diversity. Religious leaders everywhere are coming together across ancient divides in an attempt to protect their interests collectively.” But what this shows non-believers, she explained, “is that they don’t really believe, either. After all, if you believe that Jesus Christ is the one and only son of God, sent to earth with a unique message; if you believe the secret of your particular religion had been revealed to you exclusively and that it is your duty to go out and proselytise the rest of the world, how can you suddenly decide that somebody else’s religion is just as valid as yours, just as worthy of respect, understanding, and so on?” In short, “If one God and one Prophet is as good as another, if wearing a turban and a dagger is just as good as putting a wafer on your tongue, then it’s all exposed as the nonsense that it really is.” {The Freethinker, June 1995}
Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de [Count] (1754–1836) Tracy was a Field-Marshall during the French Revolution. During the Terror he studied science and philosophy and was a friend of Cabanis and Condorcet. His principal work, Elements d’Idéologie (1817–1818, 4 volumes) is materialistic and regards theology as “a part of zoology.” Jefferson, a friend and admirer, translated the work into English. In his later years, Tracy enjoyed the company of Voltaire, who read to him. {RAT; RE}
Tracy, César Victor Charles Destutt d’ [Marquis] (1781–1864) Tracy, the son of Count Antoine Tracy, served in all of Napoleon’s campaigns. In 1822 he was sent to Parliament, where he sat on the anti-clerical left with Lafayette’s son, who married his sister. In Parliament, he worked for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, the freedom of education, the suppression of the hereditary peerage, and other reforms. Although made Minister of Marine by Louis Napoleon, Tracy protested against the coup d’état and retired to the study of scientific agriculture, on which he wrote several works. {RAT}
Tracy, Henry C. (20th Century) An American, Tracy wrote Towards the Open (1927), a work about scientific humanism.
TRAGEDY • Tragedy is a form of drama exciting the emotions of pity and fear. Its action should be single and complete, presenting a reversal of fortune, involving persons renowned and of superior attainments, and it should be written in poetry embellished with every kind of artistic expression. —Aristotle
• The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer but rather what they miss. —Thomas Carlyle
• There are two tragedies in life: one is to lose your heart’s desire, the other is to gain it. —George Bernard Shaw
Journalists and others constantly confuse tragedy with pathos (a quality, as of an experience or a work of art, that arouses feelings of pity, sympathy, tenderness, or sorrow) and comedy (a dramatic work that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone and that usually contains a happy resolution of the thematic conflict). A headline, 200 KILLED IN TRAGIC CRASH, will need to be accompanied by a story that indicates what the pilot chose to do that he should not have done, perhaps aiming the stricken plane at a busy shopping center instead of an open space. A headline, PATHETIC LADY STARVES, needs to be accompanied by a story that indicates why the person chose to deprive herself of food.
Traherne, Thomas: See entry for Ganymede.
Traiger, Saul (20th Century) Traiger, a professor of philosophy, is secretary-treasurer of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.
Traill, Ralph Cuthbert (1905–1991) Traill was an Australian rationalist, humanist, and scientist. In 1963 he was vice principal of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. During the McCarthyism of the 1950s, he found it expedient to use the pseudonyms John Arcot for his musical compositions and Ross Tracy for his poetry, one a play on his initials, the other a play on his name. He was president and a life member of the Rationalist Society of Australia, and from 1965 to 1973 he was vice president of the Humanist Society of Victoria. {SWW}
Traina, Tommaso (19th Century) Traina was an Italian jurist, the author of a work on The Ethics of Herbert Spencer (1881). {BDF}
TRANSACTIONAL ANALYSIS: See entry for Mary Bancroft Boulton, one of the practitioners of this form of group therapy.
TRANSACTIONALISM: See entry for Arthur F. Bentley.
TRANSCENDENTALISM Transcendentalism as a literary and philosophic movement flourished in New England from the 1830s to the 1860s, partly as a reaction against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church. Its strongest influence came from Kantian idealism, and evidence of its eclecticism is found in its owing much to Platonic and Oriental influences, relying on intuition, and being optimistic regarding human nature. Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) had declared, “I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori.” Other German philosophers—Fichte, Herder, Jacobi, Schleiermacher, Schelling—emphasized mysticism and practical action as an expression of the will. In England, Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were influential in developing the philosophy, which was never rigorously systematic. In the United States, Louisa Mae Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Emerson, and Thoreau were representative of the literary movement. Emerson’s Nature (1836) and The American Scholar (1837) expressed his transcendental ideas, as did such of his poems as “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” and “The Rhodora.” Thoreau’s Walden (1854) was indicative of his transcendentalism. Whereas in the previous century deists had emphasized the possibilities of science, transcendentalists were citing Plato, Polotinus, Confucius, the Muhammadan Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddhists, the eclectic idealist Victor Cousin, the Hebrew and Greek scriptural authors, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Swedenborg. Bronson Alcott in 1843 started a Fruitlands commune in 1843 which centered around his bizarre and quixotic experiments with food and sexuality—e.g., cold showers, sexual abstinence, and a diet confined to grain and fruit. Lacking Ripley’s organizational gifts, he failed to build any lasting structure. Sometimes the transcendentalists met at Emerson’s home in Concord, and those intellectuals (in what became known as the Transcendental Club) included Emerson, Alcott, J. F. Clarke, the younger W. E. Channing, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Augustus Brownson, Jones Very, C. P. Cranch, Charles Follen, W. H. Channing, and Convers Francis. Brook Farm, from 1841 to 1847, was a cooperative community near West Roxbury, Massachusetts, which the Transcendental Club formed and about which Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in The Blithedale Romance. Its members were supposed to share in the work and the educational and social advantages, but the experiment did not long survive after the burning of its uncompleted central building. Brook Farm was mainly an outgrowth of Unitarianism, for many of its members had left that church and were now advocates of philosophic transcendentalism. The movement’s literary magazine was a quarterly, The Dial, first edited by Margaret Fuller and later by Emerson. It was attacked by the press and was considered obscure by the general public. Although transcendentalism was basically monist and held to the unity of the world and God and the immanence of God in the world, its very spirit permitted contradiction. As pointed out by James D. Hart, “Because of this indwelling of divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within itself all the laws and meaning of existence. Likewise, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rapt mystical state, in which the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and originating in the Over-Soul. Thus occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul’s intuitions and impulses, based on this identification of the individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self-reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority, tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of the movement.” {Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait (1996); CE; Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (1997); ER; RE; World, November-December 1997}
TRANSFERENCE Transference is a Freudian term to represent the process by which emotions and desires originally associated with a person are unconsciously shifted to another person, often an analyst. Paul Edwards has given the illustration of a girl who had been in his class, one who thought that as the professor he was a figure of authority like the father she did not like. She therefore chose to sit in the very back row of a large room although told to move up closer in order that she could hear.
TRANSGENDER: See entries for N. L. Stones and Transsexuality.
TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS: See entry for reincarnation.
TRANSPARENT EYEBALL: See entry for Christopher Pearse Cranch, who drew Emerson as a “transparent eyeball.”
TRANSSEXUALITY To wear clothing of the opposite sex is to be a transvestite. However, to identify mainly with the opposite sex, or particularly to have undergone a sex change, is to be a transsexual. Transgendered individuals are those who have chosen to have a sex-change but have not completed the surgery. Although transsexual feelings have been written about over the centuries, only since the 1930s have physicians developed the surgical skills to perform sex-change operations. In the late 1950s a celebrated case of genital reconstruction for Christine Jorgenson in Denmark led transsexuals to use the language of core gender identity in their demand to be operated upon. Neither transvestites nor transsexuals are necessarily homosexuals. Nan Alamilla Boyd’s “Bodies in Motion: Lesbian and Transsexual Histories” in Martin Duberman’s editing of A Queer World (1997) details examples of the controversial operations. Following are two 1999 descriptions by theists, the first by an American, the second by an Indian, that were found on the World Wide Web:
In 1993 I was part of a movement of transsexuals to discover who we were—the medical model of “a woman trapped in a man’s body” was unsatisfying. It simply wasn’t a good explanation, and it put us in the role of victim. This model placed psychiatrists and doctors in the position of playing God with our lives, and so we were looking for other ways of understanding ourselves, ones that gave more dignity and agency to our experience. I had been reading an anthropologist’s report about a religious sect called the Hijras in N. India. I travelled to India to meet these folks, and was impressed with the community, so I ultimately joined it. Now I split my time between the US and India.
I was born as one who was neither man nor woman. When someone comes to know that they are neither a man nor a woman, we pray to the Goddess that she will protect us, for we have no protection in society. We give up our useless organ and in this way dedicate our lives to her, and she takes us up into her protection and gives us some power. We take up women’s clothing and live as brahmacharis with our guru. We have no contact with our families, and live together, calling one another sister or mother. When we die our property must go back to our community, for we own nothing ourselves. When a woman gives birth, we go to that place and sing and dance to celebrate. Our coming is considered very auspicious. We live on the alms we are given at this time, and at the time of marriage.
“Humanist Manifesto 2000,” Part VII, states the humanist view that because all humans are members of the planetary community such individuals should not be discriminated against:
Gender discrimination should not be permitted. Women have a right to be treated equally with men. Discrimination in job opportunity, education, or cultural activities is insupportable. Society should not deny homosexuals, bisexuals, or transgendered and transsexuals equal rights. {See entries for Deborah Hartin and N. L. Stones.}
TRANSUBSTANTIATION According to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, the way in which Jesus becomes present in the Sacrament of Communion is through transubstantiation. This is done with bread and wine consumed by worshipers in communion, but the bread and wine is in “appearance,” not in “substance.” In substance, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus when a priest, acting on Jesus’s behalf, speaks the words, “This is my body” and “This is my blood” over them. (See entries for cannibalism and theophagy.) {DCL}
TRANSVESTISM: See entries for Cross-Dressing and for N. L. Stones.
TRANSYLVANIAN UNITARIANS Prince John Sigismund in the mid-16th century proclaimed Unitarianism the official religion of Transylvania. According to Andrei Codrescu, a regular commentator on National Public Radio and a native of Transylvania, the prince convened the first debate on religions in 1566 in the town of Alba Iulia, known as Gyulafehérvár in Hungarian. Francis David, who had been a Lutheran and a Calvinist before developing the doctrines of Unitarianism, convinced the prince by convening the heads of all the churches, then asking them what they would do if they were made official. The Catholic replied he would insure the complete triumph of Catholicism by persecuting all others. The Lutheran and the Calvinist had basically the same idea. The Unitarian said he would tolerate all the faiths, and the prince preferred his way. “There is only one Father for whom and by whom is everything. . . . Outside of this God there is no other God, neither three, neither four, neither in substance, neither in persons, because the Scripture nowhere teaches anything about a triple God.” David also held that Jesus was a man, the son of God certainly, but not God. Transylvania, said Codrescu, became the freest, most tolerant region of Europe for a brief but significant time. In 1571 Unitarianism reached the peak of its popularity, with almost 500 congregations. After Prince Sigismund died, intolerance, which was more the norm, seized the day again. The Calvinists condemned Unitarianism and imprisoned Francis David. He died in prison in 1579. Codrescu’s criticism of the group is that “it has no other nationalities—no Romanians, Germans, Gypsies, or Jews. Their attitude toward women also leaves quite a bit to be desired.” Some hold that Codrescu had an anti-Hungarian bias. Further, according to Richard Beal of the Louisville, Kentucky, Unitarians, during the Holocaust, “Not all Jews were deported to death camps because, with the blessing of the Unitarian bishop, Jews [and Gypsies] were listed as members of Unitarian churches.” Beal also disagrees with Codrescu about women, replying that the Unitarians are “the only church training women for its ministry. [While] there is a great deal to be done to improve women’s rights,” Unitarian women are among those “helping to do that.” Beal, while visiting the various churches, found that men and women sit on different sides of the church, that the members of the one hundred twenty Unitarian churches speak Hungarian and are considered a minority church in Romania. The Rev. Donald Harrington, retired senior minister of the Community Church of New York, and his Hungarian wife, Aniko, moved in 1991 to Transylvania, where they both preach and work with various Unitarian groups. (See entry for Unitarianism.) {The World., July-August 1995}
Trapp, Jacob (1899–1992) Trapp, who was raised as a member of the Christian Reformed Church, was charged with heresy and was excommunicated by them when he was only nineteen years old. He was then recruited for the Unitarian ministry by Earl Morse Wilbur and was ordained in 1929 as an assistant minister at the Berkeley church, after which he was minister of the First Unitarian Church of Salt Lake City from 1930 to 1941. In 1945, he was called to succeed A. Powell Davies at the Unitarian Church in Summit, New Jersey. A prolific writer, Trapp gathered his sermons, essays, and lectures into Return to the Springs (1987), his meditations in In Stillness Renewal, and his thoughts about secularity and world religion in The Light of a Thousand Suns: Mystery, Awe, and Renewal in Religion (1973).
Travis, Henry (1807–1884) Travis, whose interests included the socialistic aspect of co-operation, became a friend and the literary executor to Robert Owen. During 1851–1853 he edited Robert Owen’s Journal. He also wrote Free Will and Law, among other books, and contributed to the National Reformer. {BDF; RAT}
Treadway, Oswell (20th Century) In 1952, Treadway was secretary of the American Humanist Association.
Treby, Ivor C. (20th Century) Treby wrote Translations from the Human (1998), a collection of poetry that at times is openly gay and strongly anti-religious. Witty, as for example describing the priest found in the “submissionary position,” he thinks that at the end there will be “no self, no Heaven, no Hell, no gain, no loss.” “In the end, in his own image/man created God,” Treby concludes. {Jim Herrick, Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998}
Tree, Herbert Beerbohm [Sir] (1853–1917) Tree was an English actor-manager whose original name was Herbert Draper Beerbohm. He was a half brother of Max Beerbohm, the essayist, caricaturist, and parodist. Tree married the actress Helen Maud Holt (1863–1937), who became his leading lady. His greatest distinction as manager was his staging of Shakespeare at the Haymarket theater (1887–1897) and at Her Majesty’s Theatre, which he built and opened in 1897. In his Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1913), Tree expressed his freethought. All sects will die, he predicted, and only “a religion of humanity” will be left. Of Shakespeare, he wrote, “His wide spirit will outlive the mere letter of narrow doctrines, and his winged words, vibrant with the music of the larger religion of humanity, will go wilting down the ages while dogmas die and creeds crumble in the dust!” {JM; RAT; RE}
Treilhard, Jean Baptiste [Count] (1747–1810) Treilhard was a lawyer who accepted the Revolution and pressed the Assembly for the secularization of the Church and the burial of Voltaire in the Pantheon. He held many important offices and was a key person in the drafting of the Code Civil. Treilhard was a Voltairean deist. {RAT; RE}
Trelawny, Edward John (1792–1881) Trelawny became an intimate in Italy with Shelley, was at Livorno when he drowned, and not only recovered but also helped cremate Shelley in August 1822. Legend has it that during the cremation he reached in and retrieved Shelley’s heart, although it has been speculated he might have grabbed the liver from the flames. Trelawny accompanied Byron on his Greek expedition, serving with him in the Greek War of Independence and marrying a daughter of a Greek chief. Trelawny wrote a party autobiographical novel, Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), and Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878). Upon his death, he was cremated at Gotha, his ashes being afterwards placed beside those of Shelley. He once had told Carpenter, in My Days and Dreams, that Shelley “couldn’t have been the poet he was if he had not been an atheist.” Trelawny was a vehement pagan who despised the creeds and conventions of society. Swinburne called him “world-wide liberty’s lifelong lover.” (See entry for Shelley.) {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Trelawny, John Salisbury [Sir] (1816–1885) As chairman of the committee on Church Rates, Trelawny issued a report which was full of thrusts at the Church, which he detested. He translated The First Two Books of Lucretius (1842) and was a supporter of Holyoake. {RAT}
Trench, Frederic Herbert (1865–1923) Trench from 1909 to 1911 was artistic director of the Haymarket Theatre. Although his own plays had little success, a poem entitled “Apollo and the Seaman” (1907) received favorable notice. It tells of a debate between Apollo and a seaman who discuss the sinking of a great ship, Lost Immortality, and the future of the soul. His work contained anti-Christian sentiment. In his New Poems (1907), Trench vigorously rejects Christianity and says of Jesus in his “Stanzas to Tolstoi,”
The Man upraised on the Judaean crag Captains for us the war with death no more. His kingdom hangs as hangs the tattered flag Over the tomb of a great knight of yore.
{JM; RAT; RE}
Trenchard, John (1699–1723) Trenchard was an English deist and political writer. He once was the Commissioner of Forfeited Estates in Ireland. In conjunction with Gordon, he wrote Cato’s Letters on civil and religious liberty, and he conducted The Independent Whig. Trenchard sat in the House of Commons as M.P. for Taunton. Although he wrote The Natural History of Superstition (1709), La Contagion Sacree, attributed to him, is by d’Holbach. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Trent, Barbara (20th Century) In 1992 Trent won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for “The Panama Deception.” Other of her award-winning productions include “Destination Nicaragua,” “Bus to Topanga,” and “Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair.” Known for being a grass-roots organizer and social activist, she has been a three-time target of FBI counterintelligence operations. Trent has written that
Democracy is dependent on a free press, but ours is being strangled by corporate and government interests. . . . The videomaker has the potential to blast a hole through that corporate image of reality. {The Humanist, January-February 1998}
Trent, Theodora Dolores (20th Century) Trent has been on the Board of Directors of the American Humanist Association (AHA). She is AHA coordinator for New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. (See entry for New York Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD}
Trenwith, William Arthur (1846–1925) Trenworth was the second son of a convict parent in Tasmania, but he became a militant leader of the Labor movement in Australia. In 1897, he became the only Labor member elected to the Australasian Federal Convention. On his death, commentators noted that he once had refused to pledge himself to a party or platform and that he had fallen out with the Bootmaker’s Union. His obituaries decried the apostasy of his earlier achievement, deeming the avowed rationalist to be “unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.” {SWW}
Trevelyan, Arthur (1802–1878) Trevelyan was a Scottish landowner who was prominent in the progressive movement in Britain. He worked on the Reasoner and National Reformer. Trevelyan published The Insanity of Mankind (1850) and numerous tracts. In 1844, he wrote to Holyoake, “I will thank you to propose me as a member of your atheistical society.” The historian, George Macaulay Trevelyan, was of a different family but also was a freethinker. At one time, Arthur Trevelyan was vice-president of the National Secular Society. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; VI}
Trevelyan, George Macaulay (1876–1962) In 1958 when Bertrand Russell was its president, the distinguished historian Trevelyan was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. A master of the so-called “literary” school of historical writing, he held that historians should be imaginatively speculative when they wrote rather than historically “scientific.” V. H. Galbraith described him as being “probably the most widely read historian in the world: perhaps in the history of the world.” A. N. Wilson, reviewing G. M. Trevelyan, A Life in History by David Cannadine (1993), has described the Trevelyan family as being high-minded patricians “who wished to extend the values of their class and kind throughout the world. They genuinely believed that after the limitation of religious and monarchical tyranny in the 17th century, and the passing of the Great Reform Bill in 1832, which spelled the end of the ancien régime in Britain, civilized values and liberalism, in the best sense of the word, would make the world a better place. Religion, if not eliminated altogether, was diluted to the point of near nonexistence.” Cannadine notes that Trevelyan came from Northumbrian gentry, never needed to earn a living, and lived so frugally that once, upon delivering a honeymoon present to the rooms of John Elliott, he was mistaken by the cleaner for a tramp. When Trevelyan married Janet Penrose Ward, daughter of the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, Trevelyan’s mother described the “very high-toned and ‘ethical’ ” ceremony, “all allusions to the Deity being qualified by the words ‘If thou existest.’ ” To this, Wilson adds, “In later life, Trevelyan relaxed his agnosticism somewhat, saying ‘I am a flying buttress of the Church; I support it, but from the outside.’ ” {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Trezza, Gaetano (Born 1828) Trezza, an Italian writer, was brought up and ordained a priest known for his eloquent sermons. Study, however, led him to resign , he published Confessions of a Sceptic (1878), and became professor of literature at the Institute of High Studies in Florence. To the first number of the Revue Internationale (1883), Trezza contributed Les Dieux s’en Vont. He also wrote Religion and Religions (1884). His study of Lucretius enjoyed several editions because of its popularity. {BDF}
TRIANGULO ROSA Triangulo Rosa, a “pink triangle” association commenced by ASIBEHU in Costa Rica, was founded with money from the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Richard Stern was instrumental in its working with HIV-positives and people with AIDS under the direction of Guillermo Murillo. In 1998, because of problems within the association, the two founded Asociación Agua Buena Pro Defensa de Los Derechos Humanos y Minorias (The Agua Buena Human Rights Association).
Tribe, David (1931– ) Tribe is an Australian-born secularist and polymath writer. From 1955 to 1972, chiefly in England, he was a freelance journalist, author, poet, editor, critic, lecturer, Hyde Park orator, and public relations consultant. He was an executive of the United Kingdom National Council for Civil Liberties (1961–1972), chairman of Humanist Group Action (1961–1964), and the first and only Australian president of the National Secular Society (1968–1972). He edited Freethinker (1966), returned to Australia in 1972, and has been a philosopher of freethought in relation to education ethics, law reform, and libertarianism. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. Reminiscing about the 1960s, Tribe has recalled that remarkable progress was achieved so far as reforms involving “abortion, censorship, contraception, suicide, adoption, penology, feminism, sex education, and voluntary euthanasia.” Tribe is author of Why We Are Here? (1965); 100 Years of Free Thought (1967), in which he takes up Owenism, Chartism, Holyoake, secularism, Paine, and international movements; Nucleoethics: Ethics in Modern Society (1972); and The Rise of the Mediocracy (1976). He has written on the subject of religion for The Raven, an anarchist quarterly. In 1995, Tribe became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {FUK; PK; SWW}
Tribonian (Died 545?) A Roman jurist, Tribonian under the command of Justinian I directed the compilation of the Corpus Juris Civilis. Much of it is believed to have been authored by Tribonian. According to McCabe, “The code of law which is attributed to the Christian emperor Justinian was mainly compiled (as Dean Milman admits in his History of Latin Christianity) by this skeptical jurist who held high office in his court.” Milman wrote that there is “no sign of Christianity” in the work, and he favored the tradition that Tribonian was an atheist, as the Greek Suidas says in his Lexicon. Gibbon said of Tribonian that “his genius embraced all the knowledge and business of his age.” {CE; JM}
TRICKERY • Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. —Anonymous
Tridon, Edme Marie Gustave (1841–1871) Tridon was a French publicist who, although educated with a doctorate of law, never practiced. In 1864 he published in Le Journal des Ecoles his study of revolutionary history, Les Hébertistes. In 1865, he founded with Blanqui and others Le Candide, the precursor of La Libre Pensée (1866), in both of which the doctrines of materialism were expounded. In 1865 he was a delegate to the International Students Congress at Liége. His speech was furiously denounced by Bishop Dupanloup. Tridon received more than two years in prison for articles in the two journals, and in Ste. Pelagie he contracted the malady which killed him. While in prison he wrote the greater part of his work, Du Molochisme Juif, a philosophical study of the Jewish religion. After 1870 he founded La Patrie en Danger and in 1871 was elected deputy to the Bordeaux Assembly. After voting against the declaration of peace, however, he resigned, becoming a member of the Paris Commune. Upon his death, Tridon received what Wheeler has described as “the most splendid Freethinker’s funeral witnessed in Belgium.” {BDF}
Trilling, Lionel (1905–1975) Known as the “intellectuals’ intellectual,” Trilling was an eminent critic who wrote The Liberal Imagination (1950) and The Opposing Self (1955). His work not only contained literary criticism and scholarship but also included his views on political and psychological subjects. Trilling was known at the time as “the first Jew” to gain a permanent position in Columbia University’s English department. He also was known as one of the New York Intellectuals (Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell) who helped make the Partisan Review, according to historian Richard Hofstadter, the “house organ of the American intellectual community.” Isaiah Berlin, however, said that in comparison with the critic Edmund Wilson, he preferred Wilson: “Trilling was like other critics, just intelligent sentences. But in Wilson’s case the writing was filled with some kind of personal content. That’s why one would read him.” When in the late 1940s Trilling, the present author’s department chairman, was shown the very earliest material in the present work, including a letter from Thomas Mann and a bibliography detailing works about humanism, he jocularly noted,
Your seven categories have led me to understand that I must never use the word humanism again!
He added that he felt akin to the position of the naturalistic humanists but disliked all labels. Asked about his own lecturing to the class and calling Emerson a transcendentalist, Trilling smiled and speculated that one day lecturers might label him (Trilling) a naturalistic humanist. However, when asked specifically if humanism had a connection with Judaism, Trilling not only showed little interest in the subject but also did not go care to be quoted, partly confirming some of his critics’ views that he was “insufficiently Jewish.” During one conversation, when asked if a person could be a “partial atheist” or a “partial Jew,” Trilling smiled as if the query was meant as a rhetorical question. In one of his classes in American literature at Columbia University, Trilling remarked that “in the 19th century the religion of most of the great writers, unlike Poe whose religion was alcoholism, was Unitarianism.” Asked if he was a “partial Unitarian,” Trilling again smiled without responding, but the implication was there: He may have had Hebrew ancestors, but he was not theologically or linguistically a Jew, although he was known as such, and, further, that he was not much interested in organized religion or supernaturalism. His interest was in how religion did or did not affect individual authors, such as E. M. Forster or Matthew Arnold, neither of whom was a Jew. His son James, an independent art historian who specializes in the history of ornament, feels that his father was blinded by his love of Freud and psychoanalysis, so much so that he overlooked his own problem, that of attention deficit disorder. Writing in The American Scholar (April 1999), James Trilling told not only of his father’s neurological condition but also of his mother’s “panic disorder with agoraphobia, which made her an emotional cripple for many years.” Tourette’s syndrome ran in the family, and the son added that “the most insidious culprit in my family” is attention deficit disorder, “the inability to maintain a productive level of concentration (‘focus’) through the normal range of daily activities.” The son also challenges his father’s literary judgment: “During his entire career as an interpreter of literature, I doubt my father ever solved a problem, in the sense of marshaling evidence to prove or disprove a theory. On the contrary, he built his career on the mistrust of certainties and was rarely content with a simple answer when a complex one could be found. . . . Of all ‘simple’ solutions he mistrusted happiness the most. The idea of living happily ever after must have seemed almost crass to him. Certainly it left him all dressed up with no place to go.” Lionel’s wife, Diana Trilling, in The Marriage of Diana and Lionel Trilling (1993), tended to confirm his lack of interest in religion. She wrote that “as far back as anyone knew, the family name had always been Trilling,” that he had not fabricated his name to disguise any Jewish origins, and that he was as indifferently religious as were his parents. She added that, like her husband, she grew up in a largely secular home and, like him, “had the childhood of an American who happened to be a Jew, not that of a Jew who happened to be an American”: her husband might well have inquired if she meant Jew or Hebrew. The poet Richard Howard, who visited her often during her later years, said she once remarked, “Seventeen years have now passed since Lionel’s death, and hour by hour, minute by minute I still listen for a clock which no longer ticks.” {See the article on Trilling by William M. Chace of Wesleyan University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism. Lewis M. Dabney’s interview with Isaiah Berlin is in The New York Times Book Review, 29 November 1998; Sarah Boxer, “A Son’s Simple Diagnosis of His Father’s Complexities,” is in The New York Times, 25 April 1999}
Trimpey, Jack and Lois (20th Century) The Trimpeys founded the Rational Recovery Systems. He is author of The Small Book and edits the Journal of Rational Recovery (Box 800, Lotus, California 95651). {FD; HNS2}
TRINIDAD FREETHOUGHT In the 1890s, the National Secular Society had a branch in Trinidad. For a discussion of freethought in Trinidad, see Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth by Gordon Stein. (See entries for Edgar Maresse-Smith and Emanuel dos Santos.)
TRINITARIAN • The Trinitarian believes a virgin to be the mother of a son who is her maker. —Roger Bacon
TRINITY
We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite (immensus) and unchangeable, incomprehensible, almighty, and ineffable, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit; three persons indeed, but one essence, substance or nature entirely simple.
The above is the official dogma from the Cathechism of the Catholic Church (1994). A key aspect of Trinitarian Christianity is the view that God is one in being (or substance), power, and majesty, but subsists eternally in three co-equal, perfect persons or hypostases, to which are appropriate respectively the individual names Father, Son or Word (Logos), and Holy Spirit. The doctrine is accepted as a dogma by all Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians and by the principal Protestant Churches. In 382 of the Christian Era, the doctrine was formally adopted in a synodical letter of a council held in Constantinople. In 1993, a Roman Catholic priest, the Reverend William Larkin, instead of saying God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, said, “God our Creator, through Jesus the Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit,” believing such a wording was more sensitive to women believers. However, Auxiliary Bishop John P. Boles of the Archdiocese of Boston immediately wrote to Father Larkin’s order, the Paulist Fathers, declaring that any baptisms performed using such terminology were invalidated. Non-believers have been known to refer to the Trinity as Big Daddy, Sonny Boy, and The Bird. Also, the Big Three, Daddy-O, J.C., and Spook. Thomas Jefferson believed in the Trinity: Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. (See entries for Holy Ghost and for Origen.) {ER}
Trinius, J. A. (1722–1784) Trinius was a compiler of the four-volume Freydenker Lexicon (1759–1765). The work covered deist literature in all languages up to 1765. {FUK; GS}
Trinkaus, Charles (1911-1999) Trinkaus was a leading scholar of the Renaissance, one who in the 1940s and 1950s “launched the wonderful flowering of Renaissance historical scholarship in North America,” according to John O’Malley, president of the Renaissance Society of America. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (1970), a two-volume work, re-evaluated the religious aspects of the Italian Renaissance. He also wrote Adversity’s Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (1940), which criticized past academic views of Renaissance humanism. Collected Works of Erasmus: Controversies (1999) examined Erasmus and the 16th-century religious conflict between humanism and the Reformation. Trinkaus taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1936 until 1970, then spent twelve years teaching at the University of Michigan. He was a past president of the Renaissance Society of America and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Tripp, Edward Howard (Died 1953) In 1998 the Rationalist Press Association Ltd. received a legacy of £166,000 from the residuary estate of Dr. Tripp, who died in 1953. Trollope, Anthony (1815–1882): See entries for Marriage and Frances Wright.
Trombly, Dennis (20th Century) Trombly, a student at the University of Michigan-Flint, is a freethinker. In 1997 he started to form a group, Atheist and Freethinkers Organization (AFO), at his university.
Trotsky, Leon (1879–1940) Trotsky, the noted Russian Communist revolutionary and atheist, was a principal figure in the establishment of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. Born Lev Davidovich Bronstein of Jewish parents, he became attracted as early as 1896 to Marxism. Imprisoned, he theorized that Russia could combine a bourgeois and a socialist revolution which could serve as a proletarian model for the world. Trotsky was one of the organizers of the October Revolution, which brought the Bolsheviks to power. In 1917 he became the people’s commissar for foreign affairs under Lenin. In 1918 he became commissar of war. Trotsky clashed both with Lenin and Stalin and, following Lenin’s death in 1924, was dismissed by Stalin, who by this time headed the Communist Party. In 1929, upon being ordered to leave the USSR, Trotsky fled to the Princes’ (Prinkipo) Islands near Istanbul, Turkey, then to France, then Norway. In 1936, 1937, and 1938 Trotsky was charged with heading a plot against Stalin, and Trotsky now fled with his family to America (where he is rumored to have acted as an extra in silent films) and to Mexico City. An unrepentant freethinker, he observed about organized religions and individuals’ outlooks that
Today, not only in peasant homes but also in the city sky-scrapers, there lives alongside the twentieth century the tenth or thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. . . . What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery!
In 1940, Trotsky was working on a full-scale “antibiography” called Stalin, in which he would detail Stalin’s crimes and his methods of falsifying history. That same year, on 20 August 1940, while feeding his pet rabbits, Trotsky was approached by a nervous twenty-six-year-old visitor, Ramón Mercader, who asked him to read an original article. The two retired to Trotsky’s study, where Trotsky sat at his desk and began to read. Mercader, standing to the left and blocking an alarm button which could have summoned a dozen armed guards, later confessed, “I put my raincoat on the table on purpose so that I could take out the ice ax which I had in the pocket. . . . I took the piolet out of my raincoat, took it in my fist, and, closing my eyes, I gave Trotsky a tremendous blow on the head. . . . The man screamed in such a way that I will never forget it as long as I live. His scream was Aaaaaaa! . . . very long, infinitely long, and it still seems to me as if that scream were piercing my brain. . . .” The three-inch hole in the skull led to Trotsky’s death twenty-six hours later. Jaime Ramón Mercader del Rio Hernandez (alias Jacques Mornard and Frank Jackson) was the son of an undistinguished middle-class Barcelona businessman. His mother, a Cuban who developed into an ardent Stalinist, had fought in the Spanish Civil War and allegedly became the mistress of the Soviet secret police general who later organized the conspiracy to kill Trotsky. Mercader was severely beaten, arrested, tried, convicted of murder, and spent twenty years in prison before being released in 1960, at which time he fled to Czechoslovakia. Years before, John Dewey chaired a famous simulated “trial” that cleared Trotsky of all the charges hurled at him during the Moscow purges. George Bernard Shaw, describing Trotsky’s brilliance in slaughtering his opponents by the pen, not by the sword, observed, “When he cuts off his opponent’s head, he holds it up to show that there are no brains in it.” (See entry for Jean van Heijenoort.) {CE; Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, February 1999; PA}
Trow, William Clark (Born 1894) Trow, professor of educational psychology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, was author of Religious Development of Adolescents and editor of The Journal of Educational Psychology. He wrote the present author concerning his humanism:
If Humanism means anything at all, it means, in my opinion, the acceptance of the same intelligent attitude toward human nature that we have toward inanimate nature. The evidence from astronomy has banished the myths of the earth-centered universe, and that from the physical and biological sciences has largely freed us from animistic and supernaturalistic interpretations of natural events. Similarly the evidence from the behavioral sciences is beginning to reveal the intricacies of human behavior and interaction, and the nature and sources of beliefs, convictions, and conscience. Many of the dogmas of an earlier day have come to be recognized as systematic delusions, often with strong institutional backing, and their fallacies and inconsistencies noted. Just as it was difficult for many to abandon the friendly little universe with God and the angels floating among the nearby clouds as represented in Renaissance art, so it will be difficult for many to abandon the idea that God is whispering in their ears and the devil in the ears of their rivals. But Humanism, for an increasing number of people, is making it unnecessary to resort to tortured logic, and is freeing them from primitive, irrational tabus so that they can study facts and their consequences impartially. There is doubt about “truth” that leads deductively to conflicting conclusions or to the condemnation or destruction of men, women, and children, either in this life or in any other. I look to Naturalistic Humanism to spearhead the attack on present day superstition, and to seek out and gradually to institutionalize human values, freeing the spirit of mankind from thralldom to past errors and opening the way to new heights of accomplishment and happiness.
{WAS, 19 July 1957}
Trübner, Nicolas (Born 1817) Trübner was a German-born publisher who, after serving with Longman and Co., set up his own business. He distinguished himself by publishing works on freethought, religions, philosophy, and Oriental literature. Trübner’s house was a meeting place of culture, and he received the orders of the Crown of Prussia, the Ernestine Branch of Saxony, the Francis Joseph of Austria, the St. Olaf of Norway, the Lion of Aähringen, and the White Elephant of Siam. {BDF; RAT}
Truelove, Edward (1809–1899) An English publisher, Truelove early in life embraced the views of Robert Owen and for years was secretary of the John Street Institution. Truelove published Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Paine’s complete works, d’Holbach’s System of Nature, and Taylor’s Syntagma and Diegesis. In 1858 he was prosecuted for publishing a pamphlet on Tyrannicide by W. E. Adams, but the prosecution was abandoned. In 1878 he was, after two trials, sentenced to four months in prison for publishing R. D. Owen’s Moral Physiology. Upon his release Truelove was presented with a testimonial and a purse of two hundred sovereigns. {BDF; FUK; PUT; RAT; RE}
Truett, Bob (20th Century)
Truett wrote The Apostle Frankenstein, in which he develops his opinion as to what motivated Paul to concoct his story of a supernatural deity. For thirty years, Truett was director of the Birmingham, Alabama, Zoo. He edits Along the Way, an educational magazine published by the Church of the Natural Way (PO Box 97, Vandiver, Alabama 35176).
Trumbull, Matthew M. (Born 1826) An American general but a native of London, Trumbull at the age of twenty went to America, served in the army in Mexico and afterwards in the Civil War, and then by Ulysses S. Grant was made the Collector of Revenue for Iowa. After holding that office for eight years, he then visited England before traveling to Chicago, where he exerted himself on behalf of a fair trial for the anarchists. Wheeler lists Trumbull as being a freethinker. {BDF; RAT}
TRUTH • Truth is relative. What is true for some is not true for others. Non-believers search for truths, not Truth. The only Truth is that everything changes . . . even Truth. —Heraclitus (c. 553–475 B.C.E.)
• “Nothing is easier than self-deceit, for what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.
—Demosthenes (384–322 B.C.E.)
• “What is truth?” said a jesting Pilate, and did not wait for a reply. —Anatole France
• The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other and I trust I never shall. —Thomas Paine
• To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact. —Charles Darwin
• Truth is so precious we should use it sparingly. —Oscar Wilde
• Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived. —Oscar Wilde
• One thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. —Oscar Wilde
• The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood. —Leslie Stephens
• If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. —Albert Einstein
• Until the tide goes out you don’t know who’s swimming naked. —Warren Buffet
Truth, philosopher Max Hocutt has observed, is not synonymous with knowledge and belief. “Knowledge consists of truths that are known, but since there are truths that are not known, truth cannot be identified with knowledge.” Thus, he continues, “ ‘Truth’ is what has been called true, presumably because it is believed to be true; but what is believed may not be true, and what is true may not be believed.” Further, although truth may be relative to belief because all facts are interpretations, all interpretations “are not facts; instead, some interpretations are false.” And as to whether belief in objective truth implies dogmatism, Hocutt states that “only those who believe that there is such a thing as the objective truth can admit that they might not know what it is. These truisms matter politically, because the doctrine that there is no truth, just equally good competing beliefs, has always been the great enemy of reason and the great excuse for arbitrary power.” {Reason, January 1996} In 1928, Bertrand Russell wrote in Sceptical Essays, “In the State of New York, it was till lately illegal to teach that Communism is good; in Soviet Russia, it is illegal to teach that Communism is bad. No doubt one of these opinions is true and one is false, but no one knows which. Either New York or Soviet Russia was teaching truth and proscribing falsehood, but neither was teaching truthfully, because each was representing a doubtful proposition as certain.” The solution, Lord Russell held, is to allow the freedom to find facts without being threatened with penalties for doing so. “Truth,” he added, “is for the gods; from our human point of view it is an ideal toward which we can approximate, but which we cannot hope to reach. Education should fit us for the nearest possible approach to truth, and to do this it must teach truthfulness. Truthfulness, as I mean it, is the habit of forming our opinions on the evidence, and holding them with that degree of conviction which the evidence warrants. The degree will always fall short of complete certainty, and therefore we must always be ready to admit new evidence against previous beliefs.” The scientist, he noted, states his result along with the “probable error.” “But who ever heard of a theologian or a politician stating the probable error of his dogmas, or even admitting that any error is conceivable. That is because in science, where we approach nearest to real knowledge, a man can safely rely on the strength of his case, whereas, where nothing is known, blatant assertion and hypnotism are the usual ways of causing others to share our beliefs. If the fundamentalists thought they had a good case against evolution, they would not make the teaching of it illegal.” {The Economist, 25 September 1999; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
TRUTH SEEKER The Truth Seeker, A Journal of Independent Thought (PO Box 2872, San Diego, California 92112) is called the “World’s Oldest Freethought Publication—Since 1873.” It is a continuation of the publication first printed by D. M. Bennett. Over the years, as pointed out by Fred Whitehead, “the journal has passed through numerous intellectual migrations, including racism, anti-Semitism, etc. Now, under the editorship of William B. Lindley, it has largely been given into the hands of New Age fringe belief systems.” Whitehead adds, “I wonder if anyone at the Truth Seeker ponder[s] on what Bennett himself would think of the magazine today.”
Tschirn, Gustav (Born 1865) Although in his youth he had been religious and was training for the Church, Tschirn read Haeckel and anthropological works and turned to rationalism. In 1889 he was in charge of the Free Religious Community (a sort of Ethical Society) at Breslau. In 1892 he founded and edited Geistesfreiheit. Tschirn was a President of the German Union of Freethinkers. In 1906 he was prosecuted, and received a month in prison, for a moderate rationalist pamphlet. He recounted his experiences and told his creed in Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken. {RAT}
Tschirnhausen, Walthier Ehrenfried (1651–1708) A German count, Tschirnhausen was a friend of Leibniz and Wolff. In philosophy, he was a follower of Spinoza’s general outlook. {BDF}
Tubino, Francisco Maria (1833–1888) A Spanish positivist, Tubino took part in Garibaldi’s campaign in Sicily. He contributed to the Rivista Europea. {BDF}
Tucker, Abraham (1705–1774) A wealthy provincial, Tucker took up the study of philosophy, followed Locke, and became a deist. He wrote, under the pseudonym of Edward Search, Freewill, Foreknowledge, and Fate (1763), eight years after which he became blind. {RAT; RE}
Tucker, Benjamin Ricketson (1854–1939) Tucker was an American writer born in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. In Boston, he edited Liberty. Tucker adopted the views of Herbert Spencer in philosophy and of Proudhon in politics and economics. He translated works of Proudhon and Bakunin and wrote a rationalist book, Instead of a Book (1893), State-Socialism and Anarchism (1899), and other works. {BDF; RAT}
Tucker, Cynthia Grant (20th Century)
A Unitarian, Tucker is author of a group biography of pioneering female Unitarian and Universalist ministers, Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880–1930 (1994).
Tucker, Helen (1904– ) In 1994, Tucker was given the Mark DeWolfe Social Action Award from the Unitarian Congregation of South Peel, Ontario. She had founded the international peace group, the Voice of Women, in 1960 and worked for many years with other peace and United Nations group. Then 90 at the time of the award, Tucker described her philosophy as “One people, one planet, one flag.” {World, May-June 1995}
Tucker, Nicholas (20th Century) Tucker, an educationist, was a friend of Edward Blishen and, at a secular funeral, described his friend as a “humanist” who was “an advertisement for the human race, which is something all humanists should aspire to be.” {New Humanist, December 1996}
Tucker, Scott (20th Century) Tucker has written as a radical socialist in publications ranging from Drummer to The Humanist. A 1996 pamphlet called “Fighting Words: An Open Letter to Queers and Radicals” gave his views about being a sadist-masochist activist and a person with AIDS. “I would really like to see a socialist democracy,” he told an interviewer. “To talk that way at this point in the United States is considered cloud-cuckooland. Queers should be a little more sophisticated because to talk about a public gay culture was once considered cloud-cuckooland. We were resigned to having nooks and crannies that were subject to police raids.” Tucker is author of The Queer Question: Essays on Desire and Democracy (1997) and, although he draws on academic sources from Michel Foucault to Jeffrey Weeks, decries the tendency of intellectuals to theorize rather than find tangible, practical solutions. An artist and a founding member of the Philadelphia chapter of ACT UP, Tucker lives with his lover of over twenty years, Contested Closets author Larry Gross. {New York Blade News, 9 January 1998}
Tuckerman, Joseph (1778–1840) Under the leadership of William Ellery Channing and Henry Ware Jr., Unitarians in the early 1820s began to take measures to address the growing problem of poverty in Boston. Tuckerman was called to be the first full-time minister-at-large in Boston, and he entered upon the difficult task not only of addressing the needs of the poor but also of educating the sometimes obtuse Unitarian clergy and laity about the nature of urban poverty. In 1830, Tuckerman wrote An Essay on the Wages Paid to Females For Their Labor. He founded the Benevolent Societies of Boston, a council of social agencies, in 1834. {U; U&U; EG}
Tuckett, Ivor (Born 1873) Tuckett, a physiologist brought up in the Society of Friends but who became “a convinced agnostic,” wrote a critical study of Spiritualism, The Evidence for the Supernatural (1911). In 1920 he gave the Conway Memorial Lecture, Mysticism and the Way Out) {RAT}
Tufts, James Hayden (1862–1942) Tufts was co-writer with John Dewey of the humanistic and naturalistic study, Ethics (1908, 1922). He was editor of the International Journal of Ethics (1914–1930) and President of the American Philosophical Association (1914). In 1992, James Campbell edited Tufts’ Selected Writings. {CL}
Tunnecliffe, Thomas (1869–1948)
Tunnecliffe was an Australian rationalist, politician, and bootmaker. A delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Sydney in 1888, he wrote regularly for Ross’s Magazine. Tunnecliffe was a member from 1921 to 1947 of the Victorian Legislative Assembly.
Hidalgo, Alberto Tuñon (20th Century) Prof. Hidalgo is president of the Sociedad Asturiana de Filosofia in Oviedo, Spain. He is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In Spain, because humanism carries a connotation of a current political party, humanists are more apt to organize Ateneos, or Atheneums, rather than humanist chapters. Hidaglo in 1993 spoke in Madrid on the subject, “Liberal Humanism and the Spirit of Our Ateneos.” In 1995, he spoke to the Spanish Association of Rational Humanism and the Ateneo of Madrid on the subject, “Entre relativismo y fundamentalismo.” Hidalgo signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Turati, Filippo (1857–1932) Turati was an Italian lawyer and writer, the Provincial Councilor at Milan. He adopted socialism and edited the Critica Sociale (1891–1903), the chief organ of his views. Turati was a rationalist. {RAT}
Turbiglio, Sebastiano (Born 1842) Turbiglio was an Italian philosopher. He wrote Spinoza and the Transformation of His Thoughts. {BDF}
Turchin, Valentin (20th Century) A Soviet dissident, Turchin is a computer scientist at City College of the City University of New York. He is one of the signers of the Secular Humanist Declaration of 1980. {SHD}
Turgenev, Ivan (1818–1883) Turgenev was a Tsarist Russian whose writings “showed distinct Humanist leanings,” according to Corliss Lamont. Hugh McLean also states that Turgenev is “the typical unbeliever of modern times, much influenced in his philosophical thinking by Arthur Schopenhauer.” Robertson terms Turgenev “the Sophocles of the modern novel.” An enthusiastic advocate of the westernization of Russia, Turgenev attacked serfdom in A Sporsman’s Sketches (1852), a work which is said to have led Alexander II to emancipate the serfs. His masterpiece is Fathers and Sons (1861), in which he depicts the differences between generations. One character, Bazarov, is an unforgettable nihilist, philosophizing that everything is so bad the only way to bring about progress is to destroy all that is, then rebuild. The novel of nihilism was so severely criticized by the Establishment that Turgenev remained outside Russia, continuing a passionate, lifelong love affair with Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a French singer. Pavlovsky says of Turgenev in his Souvenirs that he “was a freethinker and detested the apparatus of religion very heartily.” {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Hugh McLean; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques (1727–1781) A famed French economist, Turgot advocated free trade and was a disciple of the physiocrats. “No bankruptcy, no increase in taxes, no borrowing, but economy” was his motto, and as comptroller general of finances, he introduced such reforms as abolishing some sinecures and monopolies. In his youth, he trained for the Church, but when he adopted deistic views he decided that he “could not bear to wear a mask all his life.” Turgot antagonized the clergy because he favored toleration of the Protestants. Because his opponents were so numerous, and included Marie Antoinette, he retired to a life of scientific, historical, and literary study. One of the Encyclopedists, he was a freethinker and deist. {CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
TURIN SHROUD The Cathedral of San Giovanni in Turin, Italy, has an urn containing a shroud. Believers have held that the shroud was the one in which the body of Jesus was wrapped after his crucifixion. Many traveled from all around the world in order to be in the presence of the cloth, and photographs were widely disseminated for the general public. However, in 1988 the shroud was given radiocarbon tests by three independent laboratories, who found the material dated only to the period from 1200 to 1400. Fundamentalists challenged the findings, refusing to believe the shroud is a fake. Others claim Leonardo did the faking, using his own image as the face, an ironic twist inasmuch as he was a non-believer. Still others claim that would have been impossible, for the shroud dates to the late 1300s before Leonardo’s time. A fireman, breaking through four layers of bullet-proof glass to rescue the shroud when the Guarini chapel was gutted by fire in 1997, was able to save. Remarked the Archbishop of Turin, Cardinal Giovanni Saldarini, “It is intact. It is a miracle!” (“A miracle that God gutted the chapel?” freethinkers might well respond.) Meanwhile, the Cathedral enjoys a profitable tourist trade. An estimated three million lined up to view the shroud in 1998, when it was displayed publically for the first time in twenty years. In Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin (1999), Walter McCrone, a scientist trained in chemistry, microanalysis, materials analysis, painting authentication, and chemical microscopy, gives a complete account of his findings. In 1974 he had been asked by the Catholic Church to submit a proposal for the study of the shroud, and after studying 32 samples he concluded that the shroud dated only back to 1325, that it could not possibly have been Jesus’s. In 1999, however, another study appeared to contradict radiocarbon dating tests that in 1988 concluded the shroud was likely a medieval forgery. Avinoam Danin, a botanist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told attendees at the 16th International Botanical Congress in St. Louis, Missouri, that the 1988 analysis was performed on a small corner of the cloth whereas a new one involved the whole shroud. He concluded that the cloth’s origin placed it in or near Jerusalem before the eighth century. Alan D. Whanger, of the Duke University Medical Center, countered that the tested sample came from a water-stained, scorched edge of the shroud, that carbon could have been added to the cloth, and that living fungi and bacteria that had been found possibly had contaminated the sample. A creation by freethinker Joe Nickell, seen in Buffalo, New York, has been not nearly so profitable: a shroud of Bing Crosby. (See Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, In Whose Image? The Truth Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence [1994].) {The Freethinker, June 1997}
George Broadhead, when reviewing my WHO'S HO IN HELL, gave two examples of individuals I should have included: Alan Turing, "the UK gay atheist mathematician who broke the German Enigma code during World War Two and was the founder of the modern computer"; and Larry Adler "who wrote the score for the film Genevieve."
Turing, Alan Mathison – see G&L H Autumn 2000
TURKISH SECULARISM: See “Secularization in Turkey” by Ioanna Kuçuradi, Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996. Also see the entries for Oruc Aruoba and Aziz Nesin.
Turkot, Andy (Deceased 1996) Turkot was treasurer of Humanists of the San Joaquin Valley in California. At his memorial service, the Unitarian minister Stephanie Nichols in a humanistic service emphasized that Andy lives on in the genes and minds of the lives he left behind.
Turmel, Joseph (1859–1943) Turmel wrote The Second Epistle to the Corinthians, etc. (1927). {GS}
Turnbridge, William (19th Century) Turnbridge wrote A Report of the Proceedings in the Mock Trial of William Turnbridge, for the Publication of a Book Called “Palmer’s Principles of Nature,” as an Alleged Blasphemous Libel Upon the Christian Religion (1833). {GS}
Turner, Adam (20th Century) Turner is on the board of directors of Society Against Religion.
Turner, Alice K. (20th Century) Turner is author of The History of Hell (1993), which focuses on the concept of Hell as depicted by artists and writers throughout the years.
Turner, Ben [Sir] (1863–1942) Turner, an alderman and mayor of Batley, was chairman in 1911 of the Labour Party. David Tribe includes him in Victorian Heretics. {TRI}
Turner, Christy (20th Century) “I was baptized without being consulted. Presbyterian. I hated it so much it turned me quickly to Darwin,” Turner, an Arizona State University professor, told Douglas Preston (The New Yorker, 30 November 1998). Turner is the physical anthropologist who is best known for work he has done on dental morphology—the shapes of human teeth. In recent years, looking at teeth while tracing the various waves of human migration from Asia to America, he has achieved notoriety for his view that a great civilization in the Southwest, the Hopi, was cannibalistic. Some time in the late 1600s Hopi villagers of Awatovi, who had largely converted to Christianity under the influence of Spanish friars, set out to purge witchcraft and after murdering those considered to be witches they ate parts of them. The Hopi have objected to such a crude slur about their ancestors, but Turner identified many Anasazi sites believed to represent “charnel deposits”—heaps of cannibalized remains. With his wife, Jacqueline, Turner described his conclusions in Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (1998).
Turner, E. L. Dwight (20th Century) Turner, a freethinker, was a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Turner, Henry Gyles (1831–1920) Turner was a Unitarian, banker, liberal, and historian who, although born in London, emigrated to Melbourne in 1854 upon receiving an appointment in the Bank of Australasia. A writer, he contributed to journals in Victoria and projected the Melbourne Review, of which he was an editor and a contributor. Turner, a Spencerian individualist, was the founder, leading contributor, and first President from 1868 to 1870 of the Eclectic Association. He was instrumental in having Moncure Conway lecture in Australia, although the humanistic lectures by the South Place Ethical Society’s leader were broken up by “singing Salvationists.” A determined opponent to ecclesiastical harassment, Turner supported George Higinbotham and Charles Strong in the 1883 Scots Church conflict and was on the committee of the anti-Sabbatarian Sunday Liberation Society. {SWW}
Turner, James (20th Century) Turner wrote Without God, Without Creed (1985), a study of the origins of unbelief in the United States.
Turner, Joel (20th Century) Turner is vice-president of Free Inquirers of Northeastern Ohio, PO Box 2379, Akron, Ohio 44309.
Turner, Joseph Mallard William (1775–1851) Turner, a major English landscape painter, completed works which conveyed a romantic vision of the magnificence of nature as well as the violence of elements. He painted storms at sea, fires, snow, wind, floods, avalanches. Turner, who received almost no general education and was the son of a London barber, at the age of fourteen had already become a student at the Royal Academy of Arts and at sixteen had exhibited there. Although he encountered criticism as his style became increasingly free, he was defended by Sir Thomas Lawrence and the youthful Ruskin. Turner left a fortune of $700,000 to found a home for needy artists, and he left more than 19,000 watercolors, drawings, and oils to the nation. Ruskin, his executor, said Turner was “an infidel,” and P. G. Hamerton primly reported in a biography that Turner “did not profess to be a member of any visible Church.” In plain English, McCabe added, “he was a thorough-going freethinker who despised religion.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Turner, M. M. (19th Century) Turner wrote The Bible God, Bible Teachings, and Selections from the Writings of Scientists (1899). {GS}
Turner, Martha (1839–1915) A Unitarian and feminist, Turner was one of the pioneers of the Australian Woman’s Movement. The sister of Henry Gyles Turner, she was congregation’s third regular minister and became the first female minister of any church in Australia. A conservative, Turner was critical of the humanist evaluation of Christ, and her sermons were described as academic in style as well as quite devoid of religious fervor. {SWW}
Turner, Matthew (Died 1788 or 1789) The first avowedly atheistic book published in Britain was Turner’s Answer To Priestley (1782). Because so many had been claiming there could be no such individual as an atheist, Turner wrote, “As to the question whether there is such an existent Being as an atheist, to put that out of all manner of doubt, I do declare upon my honour that I am one. Be it therefore for the future remembered, that in London in the kingdom of England, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-one, a man publicly declared himself to be an atheist.” To which Samuel Badcock retorted, “He swears to the truth of it. But what doth he swear by? Whom doth he appeal to? not to God: for he believes there in none. And as he thinks he can swear by nothing better, he swears by his HONOUR!” Playing it safe, Turner, a chemist who had popularized the use of ether for medical purposes, wrote the work under the feigned name of William Hammon. {FUK; HAB; RAT; RE}
Turner, Muriel Winifred [Baroness of Camden] (1927– ) In 1989 Baroness Turner was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. Commencing in 1988, Turner became the principal opposition Spokesman on Employment. She is a vice-president of the British Humanist Association and a member of the Parliamentary Humanist Group. She has written, “I grew up on a London County Council housing estate in South East London. My father was an active Labour supporter—a skilled manual worker who was sceptical of all religions, but my mother was a Roman Catholic who had attended a convent school. Children of such ‘mixed’ marriages were expected to be raised as Roman Catholics, and my early recollections are of a home with a predominantly Catholic atmosphere. My father, however, would not allow his children to be sent to Catholic schools, so we attended the excellent LCC schools of the time. My father was a great admirer of Herbert Morrison—then Leader of the LCC (this was just before the Second World War). Herbert Morrison probably did more of practical value for working-class people in London than any other Labour Leader, before or since. Standards in housing and education were generally acknowledge to be a very high indeed.” “The Jesuits,” she continued, “are alleged to have claimed that if they had charge of a child up to the age of seven, he or she would be won over for life. This did not happen to me. By the time I had reached my mid-teens, I had begun to question basic religious assumptions. Much of these seemed to be based on cruelty and fear—on retribution and revenge—and I soon abandoned all religious belief.” She then turned away from the Labour attachment of her father and, to his concern and regret, joined the Young Communist League. At the end of the war, she realized “there is a religious dimension to Communism—it is a belief system which demands the faithful adherence of its supporters. It does claim to provide answers to everything. And of course it punishes its heretics severely.” Although she does not regret her youthful decisions and beliefs, “the revelations of the Khrushchev era were therefore devastating.” In 1957, she rejoined the Labour Party. “I have long since abandoned the search for an all-embracing philosophy,” Baroness Turner of Camden has written, “and am content, pragmatically, to do the best I can. I am proud to call myself a Humanist and to be an Honorary Associate. At the same time, I recognise that for many people, life is so sad—and in many instances, tragic—that the ‘crutch’ of religious belief is necessary for them. If the world were a better and more caring place, perhaps the search for rigid systems of belief would cease.” {New Humanist, May 1995}
Turner, Robert (1931-1999) Turner was an Australian who taught in England, the United States and Australia. A committed humanist, he was a fighter for gay rights. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Summer 1999}
Turner, Ted Robert Edward (1938– ) Founder of CNN Television, an international business that importantly changed the nature of news reportage, Turner is a humanist who majored in the classics at Brown University. In 1980 he launched Cable News Network (CNN) and took an interest in planetary survival. In 1985 he founded the Better World Society, to develop television documentaries dealing with the global crises confronting humanity. He received the 1987 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. In his acceptance speech when awarded the 1990 Humanist of the Year Award by the American Humanist Association, Turner stated,
Though the danger of nuclear war has receded greatly, I’m not going to really feel comfortable until all nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction are destroyed by mutual agreement. I certainly can’t believe that we wonderful human beings should keep killing and torturing and maiming each other as we have throughout the past centuries.
In 1997 he pledged $1 billion to the United Nations to aid refugees and children, clear land mines, and fight disease. Turner is one of the leading freethinkers to speak out boldly against supernaturalism. He has described Christianity as “a religion for losers.” At a 1999 speech to the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association in Washington, he chided Pope John Paul, saying, “Welcome to the 20th Century” and advising him to “get with it” on the subjects of abortion and artificial contraception. Asked what he would say if he actually were to meet the Pope, Turner mused that he would probably respond with ethnic humor, something like (and he pointed to his foot), “Ever seen a Polish mine detector?” The Ten Commandments, he continued, are “a little out of date. If you’re only going to have ten rules, I don’t know if [prohibiting] adultery should be one of them.” Turner is married to actress Jane Fonda, daughter of Henry Fonda who is known for being politically active in anti-nuclear and feminist peace movements. Update (28-May-01): as a result of fallout from the recent publicized breakup of Turner's marriage to Jane Fonda, I've moved him from the 'ambiguous' category to the 'atheist' category. An April 20, 2001 wire service story describes the reasons for the divorce:
Fonda's divorce papers, however, were filed on the same day the New Yorker
published an interview with Turner in which the 62-year-old media mogul
said he and Fonda split up partly because of her decision to become a
Christian.
"She just came home and said 'I've become a Christian,' " Turner told the magazine. "Before that, she was not a religious person. That's a pretty big change for your wife of many years to tell you. That's a shock."
Replied Fonda: "My becoming a Christian upset him very much--for good reason. He's my husband and I chose not to discuss it with him--because he would have talked me out of it. He's a debating champion."
Turner--an atheist who previously questioned whether prohibiting adultery should've been one of the 10 Commandments--also acknowledged that he had become suicidal after his breakup with Fonda, and after losing of control over Turner Broadcasting when AOL Time Warner was reorganized.
"I felt like Job," he told the magazine. Turner's own father, Ed Turner, killed himself when Ted was 24.
Found at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/eo/20010420/en/fonda_files_for_divorce_1.html
{The Humanist, January-February 1991) {CA; E; HNS2; New York Daily News, 18 February 1999}
Turner, William (18th Century) Turner was a surgeon of Liverpool who, under the name of William Hammon, published an Answer to Dr. Priestley’s Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever (1782). In it, he avows himself an atheist. {BDF}
Turpin, François Henri (1709–1799) Turpin, a professor of philosophy who was a friend of Helvétius, translated into French E. W. Montague’s History of Government in the Ancient Republics (1769) and wrote La France illustrée, ou le Plutarque Français (5 volumes, 1777–1790). {RAT}
Turnipseed, Thomas (20th Century)
Turnipseed is a South Carolina Unitarian Universalist who once served as George Wallace’s national campaign manager. He presently is board president of the Center for Democratic Renewal, an Atlanta-based civil rights group.
Tussman, Joseph (20th Century) Tussman edited The Supreme Court on Church and State (1962). {FUS}
Tutankhamen: See entry for Ikhnaton.
Tuthill, Charles A.H. (19th Century) Tuthill wrote The Origin and Development of Christian Dogma (1889). {BDF}
Tuttle, Hudson (19th Century) Tuttle, a freethinker, wrote Career of Religious Ideas, Their Ultimate, the Religion of Science (1878). {GS}
Tuuk, Titia, Van der (Born 1854) Tuuk, a Dutch lady, was converted to freethought by reading Dekker (whose pseudonym was Multatuli). She became one of the editors of De Dageraad. {BDF}
Tvind Although touted as a humanistic and charitable organization which began in Denmark, Tvind (or “Humana” in English-speaking countries) was found by a Swedish government report in 1992 to have given only 2% of money raised by the organization to recipients in Third World countries. Almost 80% went for the salaries of project leaders and to train “solidarity” workers. {The Guardian (UK), 8 July 1993; Lotte Lund, “Mysterious Organization Behind LLCD,” Dagbladet Politiken (Copenhagen), 22 Sep 1991}
Twain, Mark: See entry for Samuel Clemens.
TWELVE-STEP PROGRAMS: See entries for Jim Christopher, Rational Recovery Self-Help Network, Secular Organization for Sobriety, and James Taylor.
Twesten, Karl (1820–1870) A German publicist and writer, Twesten became a magistrate in Berlin and one of the founders of the National Liberal Party. He wrote on the religious, political, and social ideas of Asiatics and Egyptians (1872). {BDF}
Tweyongyere, Silver (20th Century) Tweyongyere and M. J. Collins founded the Humanist Friendship Association in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
Twomey, Sean (20th Century) Twomey in 1995 was President of the Humanists of North Jersey, a regional chapter of the American Humanist Association and which group publishes News and Views.
Tyerman, John (1820?–1880?) Tyerman, who had once been an Anglican clergyman, was an Australian freethinker and spiritualist lecturer who toured Australia and New Zealand. At an 1883 Freethought Conference in Melbourne, Tyerman discussed contemporary “spiritualism,” which included investigation into “zoistic science, freethought, and the harmonial philosophy.” It was a time when freethought and spiritualism were linked, and he was editor from 1873 to 1874 of the Melbourne weekly, Progressive Spiritualist and Freethought Advocate. {SWW}
Tyler, Alice Felt (20th Century) Tyler wrote Freedom’s Fermant (1944). {FUS}
Tylor, Edward Burnet [Sir] (1832–1917)
Tylor was an English anthropologist who devoted himself to the study of the races of mankind and is said to have been the first living authority upon the subject. He wrote Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans (1861); Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865); Primitive Culture (1871), researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and customs. In his work he traces religion to animism, the belief in spirits. Tylor also wrote Anthropology and contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He became President of the Anthropological Society. McCabe has commented that Tylor “is now best-known for his theory of the origin of religion: Animism, which held the field for half a century and is still widely accepted in a modified form. It plainly destroys the whole supernatural theory of religion but, like Frazer and others, Tylor was very unwilling to tell his own creed. It was hardly necessary.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Tyndale, William (c. 1495–1536) Theists, not just atheists, were also burned as heretics. Tyndale (also, Tindal) was the English biblical translator and a Protestant martyr. After he translated the Scriptures into the vernacular (c. 1522), disputes with the clergy led him to move to Hamburg, where he visited Martin Luther, began printing the New Testament in Cologne, was interrupted by an injunction, had the edition completed at Worms, found the English bishops denounced and suppressed the work, and was forced to live in concealment because Cardinal Wolsey had ordered him seized in Worms. His work was suppressed in England (1526), but he continued translating the Scriptures and writing tracts which defended the English Reformation. Tyndale became a follower of Ulrich Zwingli, irked Sir Thomas More for defending the Reformation, and by condemning the divorce of Henry VIII angered the king. In 1535 he was seized (1535) in Antwerp upon Cardinal Wolsey’s order and imprisoned at Vilvorde Castle. Tried, he was condemned for heresy, was tied to the stake, was strangled, and was then burned. His last words (supposedly) were, “Lord, open the king of England’s eyes.” {CE}
Tyndall, John (1820–1893) Tyndall, an Irish scientist, succeeded Michael Faraday as professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in 1867. In 1856 he had studied in Switzerland with Professor Huxley, and they wrote a joint work on glaciers. His philosophical writings are reprinted in a two-volume work, Fragments of Science (1881), and show him to be a naturalist and an agnostic. He contributed in 1866 to the Fortnightly Review, notably an article on miracles and special providence. In 1874, when he was appointed President of the British Association, Tyndall, according to McCabe, made his address “so pointedly materialistic that it roused a storm throughout Britain.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
TYNESIDE HUMANIST SOCIETY The Tyneside Humanist Society (IHEU) is at 58 Garmondsay Road, West Cornforth County, Durham, United Kingdom.
Tyson, John Harrison (19th Century) Tyson, a musician, used the Secular Chronicle in 1875 to float the idea of a “Secular Church,” making available to freethinkers “the glories of harmony” and he heritage of the poets. It was proposed that a secular libretto be written for “The Messiah.” At a Stalybridge lecture in 1876, Mozart’s “Gloria In Excelsis Deo” was performed, its words changed. Tyson urged fellow freethinkers to compete with the churches in attractiveness, and C. A. Watts later expressed a general sentiment that singing would attract more women and children to the meetings. Alice Bradlaugh, in fact, played the piano before a morning lecture at the Hall of Science in 1869. {RSR}
Tyson, Orin (20th Century) “Spike” Tyson was the office manager and live-in caretaker of the Madalyn Murray O’Hair home in Texas. Asked in 1997 what happened to Madalyn and asked if the O’Hairs who had disappeared are dead, the Vietnam veteran said, “It’s easy to hide bodies. I’m not gonna pray for ’em, that’s for sure.” (See entry for Madalyn Murray O’Hair.) {Vanity Fair, March 1997}
Tyssot de Patot, Symon (Born 1655) A professor of mathematics at Deventer, Tyssot de Patot wrote Voyages et Avantures de Jacques Massé (1710), which was published in Amsterdam. It was a romance, written under the pen name of “Jacques Massé,” in which a traveler discovers a strange land inhabited by surprisingly rational people. It along with a similar work, Histoire de Calejava by Claude Gilbert (1700), was immediately suppressed. The Tyssot book puts into the mouths of priests of the imaginary land such mordant arguments against the idea of a resurrection, the story of the fall, and other Christian ideas, that there could be small question of the author’s deism, Robertson notes. As to why the book was allowed, he adds, “For the moment the Government was occupied over an insensate renewal of the old persecution of Protestants, promulgating in 1715 a decree that all who died after refusing the sacraments should be refused burial, and that their goods should be confiscated. The edict seems to have been in large measure disregarded.” {BDF; CE; JMR; JMRH; RAT}
Tzanetakos, Christos (20th Century) Tzanetakos is president of the Atheist Alliance. At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Tzanetakos spoke on the need for nonreligious ceremonies. E-mail: <athalflc@aol.com>. At that meeting, Tom Flynn, seeing Tzanetakos sitting next to Jesús Antonio Puertas Fuertes from Spain, supplied the wittiest introduction of the event. He approached and introduced them by pointing and saying, “Jesús, Christos!” {FD}
