V
From Philosopedia
V FOR VICTORY SIGN: See entry for its originator, Sir John Alexander Hammerton.
Vacherot, Étienne (18091897) Vacherot was a French writer. In 1839 he replaced Victor Cousin in the chair of philosophy at the Sorbonne. For his free opinions as expressed in his Critical History of the School of Alexandria, he was crowned by the Institute. But he was attacked by the clergy so effectively that he lost his position. He also was sentenced to a year in prison for writing a republican work. Afterwards, he wrote Essays of Critical Philosophy (1864) and La Religion (1869). In spite of his radical reputation, Vacherot was admitted to the Academy of Moral and Political Science, and he held high office under the Third Republic. He explained that when he spoke of God, he meant only “the ideal of perfection in the mind of man.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Vacquerie, Auguste (18191895) A French writer, Vacquerie wrote many dramas and novels and was director of Le Rappel. When Victor Hugo founded the Événement, Vacquerie was an able member of the staff until it was suppressed at the coup d’état of 1851 and the group was scattered. Vacquerie voluntarily accompanied Hugo in exile, although he continued to produce plays at the Paris theatres. His rationalist views are best seen in his long philosophical poem, Futura (1890). {BDF; RAT}
VACUUM Theoretically, a vacuum is space without matter in it. However, a perfect vacuum has never been obtained. In ancient times, it was widely held that “nature abhors a vacuum,” but Galileo and the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli demonstrated the essential fallacy of that viewpoint. Torricelli created a nearly perfect vacuum in his mercury barometer. (Asked in a high school examination what a vacuum is, one student wrote, “A vacuum is a large empty space where the Pope lives.”) {CE; The Secular Humanist Bulletin, Summer 1996}
[[Vahanian, Gabriel (1927 )]] Vahanian is the author of Wait Without Idols (1964) and The Death of God (1962). In the latter, he declared, “We live in a post-Christian era because Christianity has sunk into religiosity.” {GS; TYD}
Vaihinger, Hans (1852–1933) People act “as if” the real is what they assume it to be, Vaihinger held, or at least it was his view that we cannot actually know what reality is. Unable to know, we construct systems of thought which make us feel good, and we then assume that what actuality is agrees with this constructed system. The Philosophy of “As If” (1911, translated into English in 1924), by the German philosopher, was an important work that advocated the notion of “useful fictions.” It followed his Kant—ein Metaphysiker? (1899). Vaihinger taught philosophy at Halle, where he was known as one of the great Kant scholars, an explicit atheist, and a follower of Schopenhauer. {CE}
Vaillant, Denis d’Alais (17th Century) Vaillant was a French writer of the seventeenth century who became both soldier and lawyer. He wrote Histoire des Severambes (1677), imaginary travels in which he introduced free opinions and satirized Christianity. {BDF}
VAISHWIK MANAVVAD (Cosmopolitan Humanism) A Gujarati monthly, Vaishwik Manavvad is at IRHA, 4 Sanmitra Society, Jivraj Park Area, Opp. Malav Talav, Ahmedabad 380 051, India.
Valdar, Stewart (20th Century) Valdar, writing in The Freethinker (January 1996), holds that after sixty years of reading about Jesus he finds that the best source has been Chapman Cohen, particularly his over half-century old pamphlet, “Did Jesus Christ Exist?” In “The Crucifixion That Never Was,” Valdar notes that the Christian symbol of the cross actually was a hieroglyph used more than seven thousand years ago and is associated with the ankh, the symbol of life, the Chinese character for Earth which also was used by the Assyrians to represent the sky god, Anu. {The Freethinker, April 1996}
Vale, Gilbert (1788–1866) An Anglo-American freethinker, Vale settled in New York in the 1820s and expounded his version of rational religion and rational republicanism with clarity and vigor. Although never an outright unbeliever, he wrote Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence (1835) to warn individuals about coming under the influence of deluded religious figures. He published A Life of Paine (1841), which contained materials about and poetry of Thomas Paine, including A Catalogue of Persecuted Infidels (c. 1845). Vale raised money for a monument at Paine’s grave site and for the sixty-acre Paine farm in New Rochelle, New York, which he envisioned as a home for elderly, indigent freethinkers. From 1836 to 1846, he edited from New York a monthly Beacon. Vale died in Brooklyn. Of him, Appleton’s Encyclopedia of American Biography wrote, “Mr. Vale was a Freethinker, and all his writings are arguments for his peculiar tenets.” {EU, Roderick S. French; BDF; FUK; FUS; JM; RAT; RE}
Valéry, Paul (1871–1945) Valéry, a French poet, wrote in Tel quel I (1943) “That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false.” {TYD}
Valk, T. A. F. van der (19th Century) Valk was a Dutch freethinker who, after having been a missionary in Java, changed his opinions and wrote in De Dageraad between 1860 and 1870, using the pen name of “Thomas.” {BDF}
Valla, Lorenzo (1406–1457) One of the leading humanists of the Renaissance, Valla when twenty-six wrote De Voluptate et Vero Bono, a vindication of Epicurus at a time when “Epicurean” connoted freethinker. That dialogue, in three books, analyzed pleasure and offered a humanist condemnation of scholasticism and monastic asceticism. Because of its aggressive tone, it was received with hostility by the Church. In De libero arbitrio, he demonstrated that theological disputes over divine prescience and human free will could never be resolved. In a pioneering work of criticism. Valla proved that the long suspect Donation of Constantine was a forgery, because the Latin text was written four centuries after Constantine’s death. When he impugned the authenticity of the Apostles’ Creed and challenged many of the translations in the Vulgate, he was summoned before the Inquisition at Naples and was condemned to be burned, at which point he found reconciliation with the papacy and spent the rest of his days in Latin scholarship, not visionary reformation. Valla’s investigations into the textual errors in the Vulgate spurred Erasmus to undertake the study of the Greek New Testament. {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH}
Valle, Michael S. (20th Century)
Valle, when a student at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the University of Minnesota, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Vallée, Geoffrey (1556–1574) At the age of sixteen, Vallée had written a freethinking treatise, La Béatitude des Chrétiens, ou le fléau de la foy, which was a discussion between a Huguenot, a Catholic, a libertin, an Anabaptist, and an atheist. Charged with being an atheist himself, Vallée, a man of good family in Orléans, was not only hanged at the Place de Gréve in Paris but the eighteen-year-old also was burned. {BDF; JMR; JMRH}
Valliss, Rudolph (19th Century) Valliss was a German author. He wrote The Natural History of Gods (1875, The Eternity of the World (1875), and Catechism of Human Duty (1876), among other works. {BDF}
VALUES Religious groups often teach exactly the values which should be discouraged, rather than encouraged, in our public life, according to Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore in The American Prospect. For example, most evangelicals, both black and white, are said to agree that “churches should express views on social and political matters,” Kramnick and Moore add. “In its more authoritarian forms, religion punishes questioning and rewards gullibility. . . . Faith denies facts, and that is not always a virtue. . . . Government can help make people comfortable, ensuring access to health care, housing, education, and the workplace,” they continue, “but government cannot make people good.” Nicholas Tate, writing in the London Times, produced a list of good values: honesty; respect for others; politeness; a sense of fair play; forgiveness; punctuality; non-violent behaviour; patience; faithfulness; and self-discipline. The British Humanist Association, in a leaflet, “Education for Living,” suggested that pupils should have a commitment to: taking responsibility for their own actions; honesty and the open-minded pursuit of truth; fairness and justice; respecting the knowledge and experience of others; mutual understanding and co-operation between people of different backgrounds and beliefs; recognising that situations and relationships are rarely ideal , and have to be “worked at”; contributing to, rather than detracting from, the welfare of life on earth. To those who hold that Western in contrast with non-Western values consists of toleration, respect for individual liberty, and brotherly love, Bertrand Russell replies, “I am afraid this view is grossly unhistorical. If we compare Europe with other continents, it is marked out as the persecuting continent. Persecution only ceased after long and bitter experience of its futility; it continued as long as either Protestants or Catholics had any hope of exterminating the opposite party. The European record in this respect is far blacker than that of the Mohammedans, the Indians, or the Chinese. No, if the West can claim superiority in anything, it is not in moral values but in science and scientific technique.” What Lord Russell personally valued most were knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection. (See entry for Family Values, in which Jesus’s statements show he was against such.) {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}
Vámbéry, Armin (1832–1913) Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish philologist, knew a dozen languages before he was out of his teens, and he was tutor to the sons of a Turkish prince. At one point, he nearly got to Mecca in the guise of a pilgrim. His Turkish-German dictionary became a standard. In his autobiography, The Story of My Struggles (1904), Vámbéry tells that he was an agnostic and considered that “religion offers but little security against moral deterioration, and it is not seemly for the 20th Century to take example by the customs and doings of savages.” As to the religious solution of cosmic problems, he added, “One grain of common sense is worth a bushel of theories.” {JM; RE}
Vambery, Renate (20th Century)
Vambery, when she signed Humanist Manifesto II, was associated with the Ethical Society of St. Louis. {HM2}
VAMPIRES The University of British Columbia’s David Dolphin speculated in 1985 that vampirism is related to an illness known as porphyria, one in which the skin becomes sensitive to sunlight. Sufferers—King George III of England may have been a victim—tend to avoid the sun, their teeth appear to be larger because their gums have retracted, and their urine is red “which might, in a convoluted way, have led to the notion of drinking blood,” states The Economist (31 October 1998). However, a Spanish neurologist, Juan Gomez-Alonso, thinks the vampire legend is inspired by rabies. Insomnia, an aversion to mirrors and strong smells, and an increased sex drive are symptoms of rabies, and rabies is transmitted by biting. Also rabies is the explanation for lycanthropy—the apparent tendency of some people to turn into wolves from time to time. Lycanthropy is transmitted by a wolf’s bite. In his Philosophic Dictionary, Voltaire discusses many topics. One topic was vampires, and he wrote nineteen paragraphs, including the following material, which reveals his wit and wisdom:
What! is it in our eighteenth century that vampires exist? Is it after the reigns of Locke, Shaftesbury, Trenchard, and Collins? Is it under those of D’Alembert, Diderot, St. Lambert, and Duclos, that we believe in vampires, and that the reverend father Dom Calmet, benedictine priest of the congregation of St. Vannes and St. Hidulphe, abbé of Senon,—an abbey of a hundred thousand livres a year, in the neighborhood of two other abbeys of the same revenue,—has printed and reprinted the history of vampires, with the approbation of the Sorbonne, signed Marcilli? These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumptions; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer. We never heard speak of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess, that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad day-light; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces. Who would believe that we derive the idea of vampires from Greece? Not from the Greece of Alexander, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, and Demosthenes; but from christian Greece, unfortunately schismatic. For a long time, christians of the Greek rite have imagined that the bodies of christians of the Latin church, buried in Greece, do not decay, because they are excommunicated. This is precisely the contrary idea to that of we christians of the Latin church, who believe that corpses which do not corrupt are marked with the seal of eternal beatitude. So much so, indeed, that when we have paid a hundred thousand crowns to Rome, to give them a saint’s brevet, we adore them with the worship of “dulia.” The Greeks are persuaded that these dead are sorcerers; they call them broucolacas, or vroucolacas, according as they pronounce the second letter of the alphabet. The Greek corpses go into houses to suck the blood of little children, to eat the supper of fathers and mothers, drink their wine, and break all the furniture. They can only be put to rights by burning them when they are caught. But the precaution must be taken of not putting them into the fire until after their hearts are torn out, which must be burned separately. The celebrated Tournefort, sent into the Levant by Louis XIV, as well as so many other virtuosos, was witness of all the acts attributed to one of these broucolacas, and to this ceremony. After slander, nothing is communicated more promptly than superstition, fanaticism, sorcery, and tales of those raised from the dead. There were broucolacas in Wallachia, Moldavia, and some among the Polanders, who are of the Romish church. This superstition being absent, they acquired it, and it went through all the east of Germany. Nothing was spoken of but vampires from 1730 to 1735; they were laid in wait for, their hearts torn out and burned. They resembled the ancient martyrs—the more they were burned, the more they abounded.
Voltaire then cites stories of vampires in the Jewish Letters of D’Argens, “whom the jesuit authors of the journal of Trevoux have accused of believing nothing.” He states that the theologians of Lorraine, of Moravia, and Hungary “related all that St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and so many other saints, had most unintelligibly said on the living and the dead.” People may have believed that the dead drank and ate, since in so many ancient nations food was placed on their tombs, adding their difficulty must have been to know whether it was the soul or the body of the dead which ate. They decided, apparently, that it was both. The kings of Persia the first who caused themselves to be served with viands after their death, he notes, adding, “Almost all the kings of the present day imitate them, but they are the monks who eat their dinner and supper, and drink their wine. Thus, properly speaking, kings are not vampires: the true vampires are the monks, who eat at the expense of both kings and people.” “It is true,” Voltaire continues, “that St. Stanislaus, who had bought a considerable estate from a Polish gentleman, and not paid him for it, being brought before king Boleslas, by his heirs, raised up the gentleman; but this was solely to get quittance. It is not said that he gave a single glass of wine to the seller, who returned to the other world without having eaten or drunk. They afterwards treated of the grand question, whether a vampire could be absolved who died excommunicated, which comes more to the point.” Voltaire, admitting that he was certainly no expert in theology, observed that “I would willingly be for absolution, because in all doubtful affairs we should take the mildest part.” Voltaire, still amused, concluded by observing that a great part of Europe has been “infested with vampires for five or six years, and that there are now no more; that we have had convulsionaries in France for twenty years, and that we have them no longer; that we have had demoniacs for seventeen hundred years, but have them no longer; that the dead have been raised ever since the days of Hippolytus, but that they are raised no longer; and lastly, that we have had jesuits in Spain, Portugal, France, and the two Sicilies, but we have them no longer.” “No longer?” literalists ask. {VOL}
Van Beber, Ruth (1925– ) Van Beber’s freethinking views have been described in Freethought Today (June-July 1996).
Vanbergen, Pierre (20th Century) Vanbergen is the chairman of the Belgian Ligue de l’Enseignment as well as the President of the European Teachers’ Association. He addressed the 1994 symposium of humanist associations in Brussels. {International Humanist News, March 1994}
Van Bergen, Scott (20th Century) A freethinker, Van Bergen won a Freedom From Religion Foundation award for writing of his experiences in keeping prayer out of public schools. {Freethought Today, October 1996)
van Brakel, Ernst (20th Century) At UNESCO, van Brakel represented the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), an organization which gained status on the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) within the UN.
Van Cauberg, Adolphe (Died 1886) Van Cauberg was a Belgian advocate. He was one of the founders and the president of the International Federation of Freethinkers. {BDF}
Vance, Edith Maurice (Born 1860) Vance in 1877 was a Sunday school teacher who visited the Hall of Science and prayed for the conversion of Mrs. Besant. But then she herself became an atheist and a follower of Bradlaugh. Revolting against parental bigotry, Vance left home and toured the provinces with a theatrical company. In 1878 she joined the National Secular Society, becoming London branch Secretary and Vice-President in 1887. She later became General Secretary. As representative of the National League of the Blind, for she had become sightless, Vance was in 1919 elected Poor Law Guardian and Borough Councilor of St. Paneras in London. {RAT}
Vance, Thomas L. (20th Century) Vance, a freethinker, wrote Yahweh—A God of Blood and Fire (1924). {GS}
Van Coesant, Marcel (20th Century) Van Coesant is a member of the board of the Netherlands Humanist Broadcasting Foundation. He was a participant in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City and is the media secretariat for the International Humanist and Ethical Union. His e-mail: <mvan.coesant@net.hcc.NL>.
Vanderlaan, Eldred C. (20th Century) Vanderlaan is a lecturer who signed both Humanist Manifesto I and II. He once wrote to the present author concerning humanism:
After one pastorate in the Dutch Reformed Church at Kinderhook, New York, I decided I wanted to be a theological professor rather than a pastor. I took some work at Union Theological Seminary in church history, also some work in Marburg, Germany, and in 1924 got a Th. D. from Union—which is now comical, for how can a man be a Doctor of Theology after he has lost his theology! Then I got located in Berkeley in a combined post as Professor in the Pacific Unitarian School (now Starr King School) and minister of the Berkeley Unitarian Church. The school had a financial crisis owing to embezzlement by the Treasurer of the Board, and my position was abolished. For a few years I continued in the church. I imagined I was a darn good preacher, but I lacked other qualifications for making a church prosper. Thanks to the generosity of my wife, I then went to Stanford and acquired a teaching credential, spending 20 years as a high school teacher. A few years ago I reached retirement age. My wife died soon after, and I am living in our house alone, taking my meals out. Some time during this last period, Ed Wilson got me on the staff of The Humanist . . . . I found in Saul Padover’s big volume, The Complete Jefferson, that Dr. Benjamin Rush reported to Jefferson around February 1, 1799, that on the occasion of Washington’s leaving office a group of clergy sent him an Address containing some wording designed to make him declare once and for all whether he was a Christian. Dr. Rush then said, “The old fox was too clever for them. He answered every point in their address but left this matter untouched.” Jefferson then comments: “I know that Gouverneur Morris, who pretended to be in his secrets and believed himself to be so, has often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Orthodox Christianity) than he himself did.”
In the mid-1950s, Vanderlaan was a consulting and contributing editor for The Humanist. He wrote Fundamentalism vs. Modernism (1925). {HM1; HM2; HNS; WAS, 4 November 1958}
Vanderpuye, Franz (20th Century) A member of the Rational Centre of Accra, Ghana, Vanderpuye has written extensively on the need to develop humanism on the African continent. In Norm Allen Jr.’s book, African-American Humanism, Vanderpuye discusses problems Ghana educators have in the field of sex education. “Shhh! Who Is Talking About Sex?” states that in public the word “sex” is shunned and avoided in Ghana, leading to distorted information which peers transmit to each other. Because of political turmoil in Ghana, Vanderpuye has sought sanctuary in the Netherlands. E-mail: <vanpee@ighmail.com>. {AAH}
van der Schaaf, W. (20th Century)
At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU‘s) International Peace Conference in Zutphen (1983), van der Schaaf of the Netherlands addressed the group.
Van der Spuy, Manie (20th Century) Van der Spuy is a professor of psychiatry at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Also, he is Director of Psychology at the Chedoke-McMaster Hospital. His “The Anatomy of Ideology” was printed in Humanist in Canada (Summer 1997).
Vandervelde, Émile (1866–1938) Vandervelde, a Belgian statesman and socialist leader, entered parliament in 1894 and served in many cabinets, notably as minister of justice (1918–1921), foreign minister (1925–1927), and vice premier and minister of public health (1936–1937). When Belgium recognized the Franco government during the Spanish civil war, Vandervelde resigned in protest. He played a leading role in the Second, or Socialist, International (1889–1914), serving as the first president of the International Socialist Bureau. McCabe labeled Vandervelde “an atheist and zealous humanitarian.” {CE; JM}
van der Wal, L. (20th Century) In 1952, van der Wal was on the first Board of Directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He addressed the organization’s First International Congress in Amsterdam (1952).
Van der Weyde, William M.(20th Century) Van der Weyde wrote Life of Thomas Paine (1925). {FUK; FUS}
Van Deventer, Betty (20th Century) A freethinker, Van Deventer wrote Why Preachers Go Wrong (19–?) {GS}
van Dijk, Pieter (20th Century) Dr. van Dijk, professor of the Law of International Organisations at the University of Utrecht, was interim successor following Dr. I. Samkalden as the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s Human Rights Commissioner. Prof. Jan Glastra van Loon succeeded him.
Van Doren, Carl (Clinton) (1885–1950) Van Doren, a Columbia University professor, was a Pulitzer Prize winning author for his biography of Benjamin Franklin (1938). He also wrote a biography of Thomas Paine (1925) and one of Sinclair Lewis (1933). He was literary editor of The Nation (1919–1922) and Century Magazine (1922–1925), managing editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1922), and editor of the Literary Guild (1926–1934). His autobiography, Three Worlds (1936), described his illustrious achievements. In Why I Am An Unbeliever, Van Doren wrote, “The race of men, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.” {TYD}
Van Doren, Mark (1894–1972) Van Doren, poet, critic, a staff member of The Nation (1924–1928), and author with his brother Carl Van Doren of American and British Literature Since 1890, taught English at Columbia University. He was a Pulitzer prize-winner for Collected Poems (1929). Asked by the present author about humanism, he responded,
I don’t recognize any of those [seven categories of humanism that you sent] as containing me. One may, but I’d rather have somebody else say which one—and then, perhaps, disagree with him.
In his class, Twentieth Century British literature at Columbia University, Van Doren professed to be in tune with naturalistic humanism, but with his own special qualifying reservations. {WAS, 3 March 1951}
van Doren, Wim (20th Century)
A professor of philosophy at Delft University of Technology in Holland, van Doren is a secular humanist.
Van Dyk, Gen (20th Century) A Dutch humanist, Van Dyk in 1996 participated in the international conference of ethical humanists in Mexico City. His e-mail: <hu@euronet.NL>.
Van Eck, Stephen (20th Century) Van Eck, a Pennsylvanian from Rushville who has written for The Skeptical Review (January-February 1997) and Freethought Perspective (April 1999), holds that Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem “is almost certainly a fictional element.” He adds that skeptics have the job of distinguishing fact from fiction “in the man from Galilee.” In “The Naked Truth: Freeing the Mind and Body with Naturism” (Secular Nation, April-June 1998) he described nudism, adding that “freeing your mind is incomplete until you’ve freed your body. If you have body hangups, this is a problem in your mind, but it can be remedied with a little resolve and effort, and it’s an enjoyable process to boot. If you still have clothes on by this point, shame on you!” Van Eck heads what he calls “Wet Water Ministries.” (See entry for Wet Water Ministries.)
Van Gogh, Vincent (1853–1890) The Dutch postimpressionist painter, Van Gogh, produced most of his work, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, “in 29 months of frenzied activity interspersed with epileptoid seizures and despair that finally ended in suicide.” During a six-week companionship with painter Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh threw a glass of absinthe in Gauguin’s face. The next day he attacked him with an open razor in his hand. In an ensuing argument, Van Gogh ran back into the house they shared and, watching himself in a mirror, hacked off part of his left ear, wrapped the part in a scarf, and took it to the local brothel, where he gave it to a girl who had preferred Gauguin to himself. The prostitute, expecting it to be a present, opened the package and, upon finding the blood-covered object inside, fainted. Van Gogh’s mental health then deteriorated rapidly, and two years later he committed suicide by shooting himself, dying two days later in the arms of his brother, Theo. In his letters to his brother, who supported him through years of poverty and unsold pictures, Van Gogh showed a sense of humor, such as, upon arriving in Arles, noting “the priest in his surplice, who resembles a dangerous rhinoceros.” The letters show the painter’s once having had a bout of religious fervor during which his sister described him as “groggy with piety.” (See The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, 1996.) {CE; PA}
van Heijenoort, Jean (1912–1986) When eighteen, van Heijenoort arrived on a state scholarship in Paris, the son of an humble Dutch restaurant worker. Besides his major studies in mathematics and philosophy, according to Anita Burdman Feferman’s Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort (1993), “he had taken chemistry and physics, seven years of Latin, four of Greek, four of German, as well as French history, literature, and language. Independently, he had read widely, and he had even taught himself Russian, because he had a vague notion that, one day soon, he might go to the Soviet Union for a visit.” In 1932, van Heijenoort sailed to Prinkipo Island, where for seven years he served as fellow atheist Leon Trotsky’s additional bodyguard and amanuensis. Totally devoted to the man hunted by Stalin’s agents, van Heijenoort sided with Trotsky and served as his translator, secretary, and courier. In Mexico, when Trotsky and Diego Rivera began their acrimonious disputes, van Heijenoort tended to favor the painter. Upon divorcing his distant French wife and marrying Loretta (Bunny) Guyer, a New Yorker, van Heijenoort was sent in 1939 to New York to try to reconcile factions among the North American Trotskyites. Upon Trotsky’s assassination the following year, van Heijenoort lamented that he might have saved Trotsky’s life had he stayed in Mexico, that with his native French he could have detected the fake accent of the assassin, Ramón Mercader. van Heijenoort obtained his Ph. D. in New York University’s mathematics department, carefully disguising his past. He then taught at Brandeis, wrote forty-three reviews in The Journal of Symbolic Logic, and for the Encyclopedia of Philosophy wrote an analysis of Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox of 1901. His classic work is From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931 (1967). Meanwhile, New York Trotskyites began exposing his past and accusing him of treason. At the same time, rumors spread that he had obtained U.S. citizenship because the F.B.I. had helped him. A consultant to the Trotsky Archive at the Harvard College Library, van Heijenoort in his move from dialectical materialism questioned, according to critic George Steiner, whether a Trotskyite victory over Stalin “would have guaranteed a humane regime for the Soviet Union.” In 1969 van Heijenoort married Anne-Marie Zamora in Mexico City, then divorced her, remarrying her in 1984. In 1986, his unbalanced wife shot three 3.8-caliber bullets into the head of her sleeping husband, then fired one into her own mouth. (See entry for Leon Trotsky.)
Van Howe, Annette (20th Century) In 1996, Van Howe received the Humanist Heroine of the Feminist Caucus award, given for her “lifetime dedication to women’s education, history, and rights.” A Unitarian, she has headed the Voice for Choice in Florida and participated in the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention.
Van Hyatt, P. (20th Century) Van Hyatt, a freethinker, wrote “Christ, A Myth” (19–?). {GS}
Vanini, Giulio Cesare (1585–1619) Lucilio Vanini, an Italian freethinking priest and alleged believer in witchcraft, tried to break with the dogmas of scholasticism and the authority of Aristotle. He denied the current views on immortality, knew that the world could not have been created out of nothing, and said Jesus was not divine. As a result, Lucilio—who gave himself the name Julius Caesar—was driven from one country to another, preaching such views in France, England, Holland, and Germany. Vanini published a pantheistic work in Latin, On the Admirable Secrets of Nature, the Queen and Goddess of Mortals, which was condemned by the Sorbonne and burned, forcing him to flee to Toulouse in 1617. Four of his books made the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum. An attempt was made to force him to beg God, the king, and the judicial body for pardon, but he insisted he believed neither in God nor in the devil. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Vanini as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. Robertson, however, writes, “He was in fact a deist with the inevitable leaning of the philosophic theist to pantheism; and whatever he may have said to arouse priestly hatred at Toulouse, he was rather less of an atheist than Spinoza or Bruno or John Scotus.” In Paris, he reportedly had fifty thousand followers. The Church brought him to trial, he was convicted at Toulouse by the voices of the majority. At the trial, he protested his belief in God and defended the existence of Deity with the flimsiest arguments, so flimsy, noted Foote, that one can easily suspect he was pouring irony on the judges. They found him guilty, ordered that his tongue be cut out, then that he burned alive. It is said that, afterwards, he confessed, took the communion, and declared himself ready to subscribe to the Church tenets. However, the sentence was carried out on the same day, February 9, 1619. Drawn on a hurdle, in his shirt, with a placard on his shoulders inscribed “Atheist and Blasphemer of the name of God,” he cried out in Italian that he rejoiced to die like a philosopher. “Jesus facing death sweated with fear,” he said. “I die undaunted.” Or, as described by President Gramond, author of History of France Under Louis XIII, “I saw him in the tumbril as they led him to execution, mocking the Cordelier who had been sent to exhort him to repentance, and insulting our Savior by these impious words, ‘He sweated with fear and weakness, and I die undaunted.’ ” Before burning him, his Christian benefactors did tear out his tongue by the roots, although he was said to have been so obstinate they had to use pincers. One Christian historian found humorous the victim’s long cry of agony. Vanini then was strangled, his body was burned in Toulouse, and the ashes of the thirty-four-year-old person described as the Antichrist, the disciple of Satan, were scattered to the wind. {BDF; CE; EU, Giovanni Papuli; ILP; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
van Loon, Hendrik Willem (1882–1944) An eminent historian and biographer, van Loon wrote The Story of Mankind (1921), The Story of the Bible (1923) for children, and Tolerance (1925). His Liberation of Mankind, The Story of Man’s Struggle for the Right To Think (1926) is a classic study of rationalism. At the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1905, he was an Associated Press correspondent. In 1914, at the outbreak of the European war, he was an Associated Press correspondent in Belgium. In New York City, he was a member of All Soul’s Church (Unitarian). In 1938, van Loon wrote:
Instinct . . . taught me at a very early age, to beware of those citizens who went around with blueprints of The Truth in their pockets. I am all for truth. But The Truth, in the Pauline sense of the word, is as little to my liking as cyanide of potassium. For not only is it apt to be equally fatal, but, unlike cyanide of potassium, there are no legal restrictions upon its sale and distribution. Indeed, it is given away for nothing at all to even the meekest of applicants. . . . I greatly prefer Socrates to Moses. . . . I have never been an admirer of either the tyrant or the dictator; and Moses in his personal aspirations and his public fulminations was much too much like Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini to be admitted to my private Pantheon of those who were true prophets. “What think you of the Christ?” I think everything of him. I unqualifiedly accept him as one of the greatest of my gay [sic] philosophers. But I have always experienced great difficulties in getting at him because his figure was completely obscured by the dark shadow of that Paul of Tarsus who in his Pharisaic self-righteousness and arrogance had undertaken to explain him to the rest of the world as he thought he ought to be explained. The simple, lovable carpenter of Nazareth, so beautifully and sublimely unconscious of the practical world around him, so bravely fighting his lonely battle against those forces of malice and evil and greed which turn our lovely planet into a perpetual vale of tears—yet, he is a teacher whom I would most happily follow unto the ends of the earth. But not if Paul the tentmaker has to be one of our companions. For that brash individual would forever be pushing his unwelcome self between us, and instead of letting me listen to the Master, he would volunteer to explain what the Master really intended to say (even before he had said it) until in despair I would either have pushed him aside (in which case he would have called me a dirty Nazi or something equally unpleasant) or I would have been obliged to bid these wanderers farewell and strike out for myself—as indeed, I have been obliged to do. . . . I know that it (the earth) was started by some force outside of myself but, having humbly accepted that fact, I refuse to waste my energies on a futile quest (which will never lead me anywhere anyway). I prefer to concentrate my powers upon that which it is within my reach to do: to make this world with its tremendous, with its incredible potentialities, for beauty and happiness—a place in which every man, woman, and child will be truly able to say, “We are grateful that we are alive, for life indeed is good!” {CE; U; UU}
van Loon, Jan Glastra (20th Century) Prof. van Loon succeeded Pieter van Dijk as the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s Human Rights Commissioner, or ombudsman. He is the former president of the Dutch Humanist League, the former Secretary of State of the Ministry of Justice, the former President of the Democratic Party, and a member of the Senate and Professor of law at the University of Amsterdam. van Loon is committed to international human rights. Individuals who have cases of interest are invited to submit them to the Commissioner for Human Rights (Plompetorengracht 19, 3512 CB, Utrecht, Holland). At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), van Loon addressed the group.
VAN MENS TOT MENS A Dutch monthly publication of Humanitas, Van Mens tot Mens is at Postbus 71, 1000 AB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. E-mail: <info@lb.humanitas.nl>.
Vannerus, Allen (1862–1946) Vannerus, a Swedish non-theist, wrote Atheism Versus Theism. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
van Noordwijk, Jacobus (20th Century) A medical pharmacologist in the Netherlands, van Noordwijk is a rationalist who has written for New Humanist.
van Noordwijk-Van Veen, Johanna C. (20th Century) With her husband Jacobus, Mrs. van Noordwijk-Van Veen is a rationalist who has written for New Humanist. She is a former chairman of the Netherlands National Council for the Environment.
Van Nostrand, Walter (20th Century) A freethinker, Van Nostrand wrote A Freethinker in the Holy Land (1930). {GS}
Vannucci, Atto (1810–1883) Vannucci entered the Roman priesthood and was for some years professor of literature at the ecclesiastical college of Prato. A student of Latin literature, he published commentaries on Tacitus, Sallust, Catullus, and other ancient Roman writers. The increasing demand for reform in the Papal States aroused his enthusiasm and, after a fruitless period as a liberal Catholic, he adopted a definite attitude of hostility to the Papacy and quit the Church. In 1848 he became the Tuscan ambassador to the Roman Republic. At the restoration of the Papacy, Vannucci fled to Switzerland and then to France, where he began his chief work, La Storia dell’ Italia antica (4 volumes, 1884). Returning to Italy in 1854, he collaborated on the Archivio Storico Italiano and the Rivista di Firenze, becoming the editor of the latter. In 1859 he was elected Deputy, later becoming a Senator. Vannucci was admitted to the Accademia dei Lincei. His Martiri della libertá Italiana (2 volumes, 1887) is an account of the struggle with the Papacy. {RAT}
van Oosten, Aad (20th Century) At the 1992 Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), van Oosten, who has been secretary and managing director of Humanitas, addressed the group on “Tolerance and Social Assistance.”
van Paassen, Pierre (1895-1968) A novelist and a Unitarian minister who was born in Gorcum (Gorinchem), Holland, van Paassen was a religious humanist. In That Day Alone (1941), he wrote, “Half of our misery and weakness derives from the fact that we have broken with the soil and that we have allowed the roots that bound us to the earth to rot. We have become detached from the earth, we have abandoned her. And a man who abandons nature has begun to abandon himself.” Van Paassen’s Earth Could Be Fair satirizes the ridiculous aspects of Calvinistic and Catholic religious orthodoxy. It exposes racial hatred, colonial greed, and the harmful belief in the inherent badness of man. In 1949 van Paassen wrote Why Jesus Died, pointing out that the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as depicted in the Bible is “pure fabrication, causing its utter rejection as unhistorical and untrue by a long and impressive line of savants from Reimarus and Strauss to Loisy, Guignebert, and Eysinga.” In 1960, he turned his attention on the Dominican religious reformer who had attacked the moral laxity of his time: A Crown of Fire, the Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola, who had called for a reformation of the scandalously corrupt court of Pope Alexander VI, ignored the pope’s order to stop preaching. Found guilty of being a false prophet, Savonarola was finally executed in 1498. {U}
van Praag, Jaap P. (1911– ) Van Praag, a professor of philosophy at Utrecht, was the first chairman of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). The World Union of Freethinkers had been founded in 1880, and the International Ethical Union followed in 1896. According to van Praag, after the Dutch Humanistish Verbond was founded, Harold Blackham, J. Hutton Hynd, and he spoke in 1947 about the possibility of closer international cooperation. So, with the help of Julian Huxley, and despite some differences inasmuch as Humanism was the favored word in the United States but the Ethical Culture group was opposed to using the term, it was decided to embrace both notions. As a result, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) was formed in 1952. When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, van Praag presided over the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He read papers at the First International Congress of the IHEU in Amsterdam (1952), at the Third Congress in Oslo (1962), at the Fifth in Boston (1970), at the 6th in Amsterdam (1974), and at the Seventh held in London (1978). In 1978, he received a special award “for 25 years of devoted service to IHEU.” {HM2; HNS2; PK; TRI}
Van Rompaey, Wim (20th Century) A Belgian humanist, Van Rompaey participated in the 1996 international conference of humanists in Mexico City. His e-mail: <wim.vanrompaey@lichtpunt.be>.
Van Ryswyck, Hermann (Died 1512) The Inquisitors accused Van Ryswyck, a Dutch priest, in 1502. As described by Robertson, Van Ryswyck declared “with his own mouth and with sane mind” that the world is eternal, and was not created as was alleged by “the fool Moses,” that there is no hell, and no future life; that Christ, whose whole career was flatly contrary to human welfare and reason, was not the son of Omnipotent God but a fool, a dreamer, and a seducer of ignorant men, of whom untold numbers had been slain on account of him and his absurd evangel; that Moses had not physically received the law from God; and that “our” faith was shown to be fabulous by its fatuous Scripture, fictitious Bible, and crazy Gospel. “The most learned Aristotle and his commentator Averroës,” he declared, “were nearest the truth.” Never one for understatement, Van Ryswyck added, “I was born a Christian, but am no longer one: they are the chief fools.” Sentenced in 1502 to perpetual imprisonment, he was given a second chance ten years later. But he remained unbroken, refusing to recant. Therefore, the unrepentant heretic was told by the inquisitor, “Nimis infelix quidam,” whereupon the same day Van Ryswyck was burned to death. {JMR}
Van Vloten, Johannes (1818–1883) Van Vloten was one of the foremost freethought authors of Holland. Deposed for his views that theological schools should reconcile religion with science, he became a writer. Van Vloten wrote De Levensbode and Life of Spinoza. {PUT}
Van Zelst, J. (20th Century) In 1997, van Zelst launched a South African Freethinkers’ page. His e-mail addresses are <eec@eastcoast.co.za> and <members.wbs.net/homepages/k/a/p/kaptein.html>.
VAPAA AJATTELIJA A Finnish freethought publication, Vapaa Ajattelija is at Neljäs linja 1, Helsinki, Finland; <http://personal.eunet.fi/pp.val/>.
Vapereau, Louis Gustave (Born 1819) Vapereau was a French man of letters. In 1841 he became the secretary of Victor Cousin. He collaborated on the Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques and the Liberté de Penser, but he is best known for his Dictionnaire Universel des Contemporains. In 1870 he was nominated prefect of Cantal, but because of violent attacks by clericals he was suspended in 1873 and resumed his literary labors, compiling A Universal Dictionary of Writers (1876) and Elements of the History of French Literature (1883–1885). {BDF; RAT}
Varela, Félix (1787–1853) Varela, although a priest, and José Luz y Caballero attacked scholasticism, promoted liberal principles, and introduced the rationalist philosophy that would enrich the intellectual life of Cubans. {EU}
Vargas Llosa, Mario (1936– ) A Peruvian novelist and Anti-Marxist politician, Vargas Llosa in 1990 unsuccessfully ran for the presidency. His works emphasize the ugly and grotesque, and he delves into the minds of his characters, overcoming barriers of both time and space. His fiction paints a portrait of Peruvian society that is both severe and tender. His novels include The Time of the Hero (1962; tr. 1966), The Green House (1966, tr. 1968), Conversation in the Cathedral (1969, tr. 1975), The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta (1984, tr. 1986), and The War of the End of the World (1981, tr. 1982). Vargas Llosa also wrote The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary (1975, tr. 1986), Writer’s Reality (tr. 1991), and Death in the Andes (1996). Although his doctoral dissertation had been about Gabriel García Márquez, he came to disagree with Garcia Márquez’s support of Fidel Castro, and the two one night got into an argument in a Mexico City theater. Vargas Llosa punched García Márquez, and the novelist returned the punch, writing later that it was “something that one hardly ever gets to do to the subject of one’s doctoral dissertation.” Vargas Llosa is a non-theist who, in 1995, was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Humanist Academy. {CE}
Vargas Z., Luis (20th Century) A Mexican, Vargas was moderator of a panel that discussed humanism and the arts at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Vargas Zamora, Fernando Rodolfo de Jesus (1928–1989)
Raised a Catholic, Vargas renounced Catholicism when as a teenager he left Costa Rica. The co-founder of Variety Recording Studio in New York City, Vargas was a significant figure in show business from the late 1950s until his death in 1989.
Corliss Lamont came early one morning to his 103rd Street Manhattan apartment to speak with Vargas’s roommate. Finding Vargas in red pajamas, he said, “Oh, your roommate rooms with the Devil?” It was Vargas’s first introduction both to a Columbia University professor and to a bona fide naturalistic humanist. On another occasion he attended Charles Francis Potter’s humanist “church,” laughing at the lecture on the joys of sex. But astronomy, not religion or academic philosophy, was his major diversion. A nominal member of the Bertrand Russell Society, he was only mildly interested in the various philosophers. For its founding meeting in 1989, he allowed the New York Chapter of Secular Humanists to meet in his recording studio and became its first member.
To have lived a great life, no matter how long, is life’s purpose, he believed. To that end he mastered acetate disks, using his own inventive modification of a Scully lathe and being one of the few in the Greater New York Area who could operate such a machine; recorded Broadway plays, working with Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayevsky, Robert Whitehead, Hal Prince, David Amram; worked with internationally known songwriters and performers (he recorded Liza Minnelli’s first demo record, at which Marvin Hamlisch was accompanist); worked with songwriter Jerry Bock on “Fiorello” and “Fiddler on the Roof”; completed master acetates for Sun Ra, arguing over wine with him about mysticism; and was well-known among a who’s who of Broadway and Latino musicians and artists. Vargas produced a collector’s LP of “Costa Rica’s Caruso,” Manuel Salazar; sang “I-gotta-be-me”; and fearlessly ventured on life’s less-traveled roads.
Vargas, who died six months after being diagnosed with having Kaposi’s sarcoma in the lungs, was resigned to his condition and spent much of his final and painful weeks studying the latest developments in astronomy.
A portion of his cremains were scattered in the Hell’s Kitchen and Times Square neighborhoods of New York City, where he had spent most of his life. Another portion was saved to be mixed with the cremains of his companion of forty years, Warren Allen Smith. The bulk was returned to Costa Rica, where his cremains are buried in the family tomb next to his father (Elias) and mother (Elena) at San José’s Central Cemetery. The homepage of Spanish-speaking ethical humanists, a memorial, is at <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>. In his honor, an AIDS support group was formed in Costa Rica. (See entries for José Figueres, Secular Humanist Society of New York, and Warren Allen Smith.)
Varisco, Bernardo (1850–1933) Varisco, an Italian philosopher, was a critical idealist or neo-Kantian, as shown in his Scienza e Opinioni (1901) and Le mie opinione (1903). Varisco departed from Kant’s personal theism and was a pantheist, rejecting the idea of personal immortality. {RAT}
Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August Ludwig Philipp (1785–1858) Varnhagen von Ense was a German author who studied medicine and philosophy, entered the Austrian and Russian armies, and served in the Prussian diplomatic service. He was an intimate friend of Alex. von Humboldt and shared his freethinking opinions. In his Diary, Varnhagen von Ense vividly depicts the men and events of his time. {BDF; RAT}
[[Vasileff, Nick D. (20th Century)
When Vasileff signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was associated with the St. Louis Ethical Society. {HM2}
Vassin, Vladimir (20th Century) Vassin, in Canada, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Vasudevan, K. (20th Century) Vasudevan is a National Council Member of the Indian Rationalist Association.
VATICAN CITY (The Holy See) “The Vatican should be a church, not a state,” Rob Tielman of the Netherlands has stated. Freethinkers are in general agreement. Even by its unusual standards of membership, the United Nations has only two entities that are nonmember states with permanent observer status: Switzerland and the Vatican. The Holy See’s status became official in 1964 when Pope Paul VI appointed its first UN envoy. Catholics for a Free Choice, leading a coalition of more than seventy nongovernmental organizations from around the world, similarly challenges the Vatican’s Non-Member State Permanent Observer status at the United Nations. As noted by Katha Pollitt in The Nation 19 April 1999),
Because of the superficial resemblance of Vatican City to an independent city-state, the Catholic Church is the only one among thousands of religions to enjoy an official designation that gives it voting rights at some conferences and agency meetings, which it has used to block, [regarding] contraception, sex education, and AIDS prevention. Why should one religion—that is, the all-male hierarchy, not the laypeople, who increasingly differ with the Pope on such issues—be able to impose its views on people who don’t believe in it?
Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice, agrees:
Why should an entity that is in essence 100 square acres of office space and tourist attractions . . . with a citizenry that excludes women and children have a place at the table where governments set policies affecting the very survival of women and children?
VATICAN RAG: See entry for Tom Lehrer.
VATICAN, GONE WITH THE WIND IN THE Gone With the Wind in the Vatican (1999) created a furore upon publication, for it documented intrigue, homosexuality, and corruption within the Vatican bureaucracy. Infuriated Roman Catholic Church officials were red-faced upon finding that one of the book’s two authors has remained anonymous and the other, the Rev. Luigi Marinelli, a priest who had worked in the Vatican’s Congregation of Eastern Churches, was ordered by a letter in Latin to ne damna graviore forte provocentur (to prevent further serious damage by stopping any new printing runs and to remove the offending book from stores). But Father Marinelli had no authority to do this. Besides, he insisted, “the book does not question the sanctity of Jesus Christ, the Eucharist, or the Catholic Church. It just points out that the Vatican is made up of men who, like me, are flawed.” No dissolute priests or scheming cardinals are identified by name. However, anecdotes include one about a priest who tried to smuggle a suitcase full of cash in Switzerland, and one was about a priest who had engaged in homosexual acts and was reassigned and promoted to sweep the scandal under the rug. Father Marinelli, who was seventy-two at the time of the book’s publishing, compared his present persecution by the Vatican to that of Savanarola, the reformer who was burned at the stake, and Padre Pio, the mystic friar who was investigated by the church many times before he was beatified in 1999. {Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times, 17 July 1999}
Vatke, Johann Karl Wilhelm (1806–1882) After teaching theology in Berlin, Vatke was appointed extraordinary professor at Berlin University although his rationalist views excited hostility from the orthodox theologians. His Religion des Alten Testaments nach den kanonischen Büchern entwickelt (1835) was one of the foundations of the science of Biblical criticism. His Menschliche Freiheit (1841) is Hegelian in philosophy. Although said to have been a Protestant, Vatke wrote to Strauss: “Are we Christians?” and replied that neither is a Christian in the customary or the primitive-Christian sense. “Have we any religion?” he asked, answering that he believed in Hegel’s Absolute. {RAT}
Vaughan, Henry Halford (1811–1885)
Vaughan, a British historian, was for some years a professor of modern history at Oxford University. In one of Benjamin Jowett’s letters, the Oxford leader confides that Vaughan’s opinions go far beyond his own and have to be concealed at Oxford. Vaughan wrote a work, Man’s Moral Nature, which gave his views, but he was persuaded to destroy the manuscript. {JM; RAT; RE}
Vaughan, Percy (Died 1917) A London barrister, Vaughan upon reading rationalist literature became an agnostic. For some years he was a Director of the Rationalist Press Association, and he was associate editor of “The Inquirers’ Library.” Vaughan fought in World War I in the Anti-Aircraft Corps, and soon after returning to the front, after an illness, he was instantaneously killed. {RAT}
Vaughn, Erin (20th Century) Vaughan, while a student at Cornell University in 1998, signed the Campus Freethought Alliance’s “Bill of Rights for Unbelievers.”
Vaughn, Lewis (1950- ) In 1997, Vaughn was named executive editor of Free Inquiry, of which in 1999 he became editor. He also is executive editor of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and Philo, a philosophical journal. With co-author Theodore Schick Jr., Vaughn wrote two college textbooks, How to Think About Weird Things and Doing Philosophy: An Introduction Through Thought Experiments. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <fivaughn@aol.com>.
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapier [Marquis] (1715–1770) Vauvenargues, a Marquis, was a French moralist. At eighteen he entered the army, leaving the service with ruined health in 1743. In 1746 he wrote An Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind, Followed by Reflections and Maxims, which was praised by his friend Voltaire as “one of the best I know for the formation of character.” Although his work was only mildly deistic, it was rigorously suppressed and not reprinted until about 1770. McCabe, discussing Vauvenargues, remarked, “He was a Deist, of great promise, but cut off prematurely.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Väyrynen, Gunn (20th Century) Väyrynen is chairperson of the Finnish Humanist Union. In “The Humanist Movement in Finland” (International Humanist News, October 1995), she wrote a concise history of humanism. (See entry for Finnish Freethinkers, Humanists.)
Veblen, Thorstein (1857–1929) Whitehead and Muhrer have described the economist Veblen as being openly agnostic, one who compared the publicizing of religion to the techniques of “modern” salesmanship. An intellectual vagabond who taught for a while, then got forced out and moved on, he applied for a position teaching science at St. Olaf College in Minnesota. Although his brother was a trustee, Veblen was found deficient in his religious beliefs and a bad influence. He also taught at the University of Missouri, which dismissed him. He called the college “a woodpecker hole in a rotten stump.” Henry Steele Commager described Veblen as follows: “His rebellion went so deep that it confounded even dissenters; his heresies were so profane that they baffled orthodoxy and heterodoxy alike.” In 1973, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote an introduction for Veblen’s internationally provocative Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen’s studies helped lay the foundations for the school of institutional economics. Of Veblen, Wesley C. Mitchell has said, “No other such emancipator of the mind from the subtle tyranny of circumstance has been known in social science, and no other such enlarger of the realm of inquiry. . . . He was like a visitor from another world.” Veblen was a pioneer in describing the role of technicians in modern society, describing a basic conflict between the processes of technology for “industry” (which tend toward maximum efficiency of production) and those of “business” (which, in his view, restrict output and manipulate prices to maximize profit. Although his views were not widely acclaimed during his lifetime, they have since become profoundly influential. {CE; Freethought History #12, 1994}
VEDA In Hinduism, Veda is a reference to any of the oldest Hindu sacred texts. They were composed in Sanskrit and gathered into four collections.
VEDANTA Vedanta, which means “the end of the Veda,” is one of the six classical systems of Indian philosophy. It refers both to the teaching of the Upanishads, the last section of the Veda scriptures, and to the knowledge of its ultimate meaning. Well-known modern Vedantists include Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Swami Vivekananda, and Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo). (For a negative critique, see the entry for V. R. Narla.) {CE; ER}
Eddie Vedder, Recording Artist music
Vedder is lead singer and lyricist of the band Pearl Jam.
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From http://www.cmj.com/NewMM/QandA/veddergarofalo.html:
This is Janeane Garofalo. I'm interviewing Eddie Vedder and we're at Brendan's, on the Lower East Side.
JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God?
EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet -- [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me.
JG: Funny ha-ha or funny strange?
EV: Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time.
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From http://www.addict.com/MNOTW/hifi/980122/980122_2754.shtml:
Vedder explains in the interview that he "doesn't mind touching on spirituality in the songs," but that it's really "an individual thing; I've been open to some interesting theories, and I don't really consider it ... the word 'religion' has such bad connotations for me, that it's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion."
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From http://www.fivehorizons.com/archive/articles/rs103191.html:
Vedder has made a variety of comments about God and/or belief, at one point saying, "When you're out in the desert, you can't believe the amount of stars. We've sent mechanisms out there, and they haven't found anything. They've found different colors of sand, and rings, and gasses, but nobody's shown me anything that makes me feel secure in what happens afterward. All I really believe in is this moment, like right now." (Rolling Stone, Oct 31 1991, "Right Here, Right Now")
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At a July 22, 1998 Pearl Jam concert in Seattle's Memorial Stadium, Vedder said about the unusually beautiful weather, "I would thank God, but I don't believe in it."
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The July 22, 1998 edition of the Seattle Times (page E3) says of Vedder: "Later he tried to keep a straight face as he mockingly confessed: 'While we were away, I found God.' He rambled on about the Bible before concluding, 'We found God. He was right in our stomachs...'"
(The rambling had to do with finding a Bible in every hotel room, "Every hotel has Holy Bibles." July 23, 1998 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, page C3)
Vedder, Eddie (23 Dec 1964 - ) Edward Louis Seversen III, born in Evanston, Illinois, adopted the name Edward Mueller and is known as Eddie Vedder, a musician who was a member of Bad Radio before joining Pearl Jam in 1990. Pearl Jam achieved popularity with albums such as Ten (1991), Vitalogy (1994), and Yield (1998), winning a Grammy for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1996.
Inspired by the World Trade Organization riots, as Pearl Jam’s frontman he promoted the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, performing in Seattle at a 26 Sep 2000 political rally and going on record against corporate greed and for grass-roots democracy. "I ain't no Communist, and I ain't no socialist/I ain't no capitalist, and I ain't no imperialist/I ain't no Democrat, I sure ain't no Republican either/I only know one party, and that is freedom, I am, I am/I am a patriot, and I love my country/Because my country is all I know," Vedder sang to a crowd of thousands who had not expected him to appear.
At a Pearl Jam concert in Seattle's Memorial Stadium (22 July 1998), Vedder said about the unusually beautiful weather, “I would thank God, but I don't believe in it.” The Seattle Times that day reported that Vedder “tried to keep a straight face as he mockingly confessed: ‘While we were away, I found God.’ He rambled on about the Bible before concluding, ‘We found God. He was right in our stomachs.’ ” Also, Vedder did not hesitate expressing his views about religion when interviewed by Janeane Garofalo at Brendan’s on New York City’s Lower East Side:
JG: Can I ask what your feelings are about God? EV: Sure. I think it's like a movie that was way too popular. It's a story that's been told too many times and just doesn't mean anything. Man lived on the planet— [placing his fingers an inch apart], this is 5000 years of semi-recorded history. And God and the Bible, that came in somewhere around the middle, maybe 2000. This is the last 2000, this is what we're about to celebrate [indicating about an 1/8th of an inch with his fingers]. Now, humans, in some shape or form, have been on the earth for three million years [pointing across the room to indicate the distance]. So, all this time, from there [gesturing toward the other side of the room], to here [indicating the 1/8th of an inch], there was no God, there was no story, there was no myth and people lived on this planet and they wandered and they gathered and they did all these things. The planet was never threatened. How did they survive for all this time without this belief in God? I'd like to ask this to someone who knows about Christianity and maybe you do. That just seems funny to me. JG: Funny ha-ha or funny strange? EV: Funny strange. Funny bad. Funny frown. Not good. That laws are made and wars occur because of this story that was written, again, in this small part of time.
Vedder explained in the interview that he “doesn't mind touching on spirituality in the songs,” but that it’s really “an individual thing. I've been open to some interesting theories, and I don't really consider it. . . . The word religion has such bad connotations for me, that it's been responsible for wars, and it shouldn't be that way at all, it's just the way the meaning of the word has evolved to me. I have to wonder what we did on this planet before religion.” In Rolling Stone (31 Oct 1991), Vedder further explained his outlook: “When you’re out in the desert, you can’t believe the amount of stars. We’ve sent mechanisms out there, and they haven’t found anything. They’ve found different colors of sand, and rings, and gasses, but nobody’s shown me anything that makes me feel secure in what happens afterward. All I really believe in is this moment, like right now.” {CA}
Vediner, David (20th Century)
Vediner holds the facetious title of “High Exalted Lord of Publicity” for Oregon State University’s Society for Logic and Reason in Corvallis. His e-mail: <vedinerd@ucs.orst.edu>.
Veeramani, K. (20th Century) Veeramani leads a socio-political and atheistic movement in Tamil Nadu in southern India. It is called the Self Respect Movement. He heads the Periyar Rationalist organization, which focuses on achieving social equality for members of the lower castes and women. At the fourth World Atheist Conference in 1996, he gave the welcoming address, declaring, “The oncoming century will be definitely a century of fast-growing science which will result in the triumph of atheism and equality. The atheists have ample scope and prospects for the furtherance of activities and betterment of society. Every atheist today is a potential liberator of a section of humanity from the shackles of injustice, inequality, superstition, maladjustment with fellow-beings, wastage of money, time and energy, and lack of reasoning power and freedom of expression.” (See entries for Self Respect Movement and for World Atheist Conference.) {FD; New Humanist, February 1996 and April 1996}
VEGETARIANISM • I have always eaten animal flesh with somewhat guilty conscience. —Albert Einstein The Quotable Einstein
• “Corpse-food was on the way out even in your time.” Anderson explained. “Raising animals to—ugh—eat them became economically impossible. I don’t know how many acres of land it took to feed one cow, but at least ten humans could survive on the plants it produced. And probably a hundred, with hydroponic techniques. But what finished the whole horrible business was not economics but disease. It started first with cattle, then spread to other food animals—a kind of virus, I believe, that affected the brain, and caused a particularly nasty death. Although a cure was eventually found, it was too late to turn back the clock—and anyway, synthetic foods were now far cheaper, and you could get them in any flavor you liked.” —Arthur C. Clarke
3001 (1997)
• Ethical vegetarians feel that it is morally wrong to kill animals to eat when one can live a healthy life without doing so. . . .In Genesis, we are told that God gave man [dominion over the fish, fowl, cattle and every creeping thing]. It was denied that animals had souls or felt suffering. Despite this belief, in the Middle Ages cats, pigs, cows, and sheep were tried for such crimes as stubbornness, damage to property, lack of respect, etc. They were punished by hanging, flogging, and whipping. Religions, as far as I know, no longer punish animals, but neither do they condemn cruelty to them. Humanists, however, regard animals, including fish and invetebrates, as being capable of feeling, and there is plenty of physicological evidence that this is. . . . I would suggest that humanists follow these guidelines: (1) We should avoid all pain to animals and the use of products requiring animals to suffer; (2) When animals have been used for medical research, experiments should be designed to minimize the number of animals to be used and to avoid the animals’ suffering; and (3) Where there is a choice of animals to be used, one should choose those lower in evolution in preference to the higher. —Harold Hillman {Free Inquiry, Fall 1998}
Veil, Simone [President, European Parliament] (1927– ) Veil, a French woman who was the former President of the European Parliament, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. With Prof. Launay and Dr. Soule, she co-wrote Les donnees psycho-sociologiques de l’adoption (1969). In 1974, Veil was Minister of Health in France, also being responsible for Social Security. She has been chairman of the Information Board on Nuclear Power (1977).
Veitch, John (1829–1894) Although his parents wanted him to study theology, Veitch abandoned Christianity and wrote, “With all [Shelley’s} blasphemy and denunciation of Deity and Christianity, I immensely prefer him to all the whining evangelicals I ever heard or read of.” In 1856 he was appointed assistant to Sir W. Hamilton in the chair of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh University, and he became in 1860 professor of logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics at St. Andrews. In 1864 he moved to Glasgow, becoming professor of logic and rhetoric. Veitch wrote a number of philosophical works, a History and Poetry of the Scottish Border (2 volumes, 1893), and several small volumes of verse. He was a theist of the sentimental Wordsworth school, but far less definite in his natural theology than Wordsworth. “I know no theory of the relation of the infinite to the finite which is not merely a wandering in cloud-land,” he wrote in his Essays in Philosophy (published 1895). {RAT}
Veld, Joris in ’t (Born 1895) At the Second International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress in London (1957), Dr. Veld from the Netherlands addressed the group. One of his works on politics and government is Ons staatsbestuur in een stroomversnelling (1945).
Velthuysen, Lambert (1622–1685) Velthuysen was a Dutch physician who in Latin wrote many works on theology and philosophy. De Officio Pastorum and De Idolatria et Superstition resulted in charges, but he was let off in 1668 with a fine. {BDF}
Vena, Andrew (20th Century) An atheist activist, Vena has commissioned pamphlets for publishing by the American Atheist Press. He has placed some of the 35,000 pamphlets of eleven different titles on car windshields, in his personal mail, and enclosed others in postage-paid business return envelopes that he receives in his “junk mail.” Vena considers himself a missionary . . . of atheism.
Venetianer, Moritz (19th Century) Venetianer was a German pantheist, the author of Der Allgeist (1874) and a work on Schopenhauer as a Scholastic. {BDF}
VENIAL SINS Venial sins, according to Roman Catholic theology, are not so serious as mortal sins. A venial sin is done without deliberate intent and thus does not estrange the soul from the grace of God. Putting salt in a disliked parson’s sugar bowl would be a venial sin; putting arsenic would be a mortal sin. Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales depicts venial sins, often quite humorously, as when in “The Miller’s Tale” a lover who expects to kiss a married lady’s lips is blindfolded and kisses her “nether-eye” (anus).
[[Venkatadri, Ravipudi (20th Century)
In India, Venkatadri edits Hetuvadi. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Venkateswarareddi (20th Century) Venkateswarareddi is editor in India of a freethought journal, Misimi.
Ventura, Jesse [Governor] (1951— ) A professional wrestler and former Navy SEAL who became Minnesota’s governor, Ventura was a member of an American third party movement, the Reform Party, which at the end of the century vied with businessman Ross Perot for its leadership. In a Playboy interview (November 1999), the professional athlete well-known for his dramatic television wrestling, blamed organized religion for the unpopularity of legalized prostitution, which he feels should be debated by legislatures and which he personally favors. He also said,
• Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people’s business.
He added, however, that although he did not need organized religion, which is for the “weak-minded,” he did not fault those who do.
Vera, Augusto (1813–1885) Vera was trained in law, but he deserted it for archaeology, which he studied in Paris. Under Victor Cousin’s influence, he was appointed professor of philosophy in a French provincial college. A friend of Thiers and Vacherot, he left France at the coup d’état of 1851, returning to his native Italy in 1860. He received the chair of philosophy at Naples University and was throughout in sympathy with the anti-Papal movement. In philosophy he was a follower of Hegel, and Hegel translated some of Vera’s writings into German. One of the most eminent Italian philosophers of the century, he wrote Philosophie de la nature (3 volumes, 1863–1865). {RAT}
Vera, Ernesto (20th Century) Vera, a Cuban, spoke about current problems of the media at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Verb, Hal (20th Century) Verb is president of the Atheists of San Francisco Region. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.)
Vercruysse, Jeroom (20th Century) Vercruysse wrote Bibliographie Descriptive des Écrits du Baron d’Holbach (1971), the first full biography of France’s most outspoken atheist. He wrote Voltaire et la Hollande (1966). {GS}
Verdi, Giuseppe (1813–1901) Verdi, the foremost composer of Italian opera, may have been interested in Nebuchadnezzar (in 1841 his third opera was Nabucodonosor), the First Crusade (I Lambardi alla prima Crociata), Manzoni (Requiem, written in 1874); and Shakespeare (Macbeth in 1847, Otello in 1867, Falstaff in 1893). But in one of the best examples of grand opera, Don Carlos, Verdi exuded an obvious dislike for the institutional Roman Catholic Church. As detailed in Verdi (1993), a biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi had an affair in the 1870s with a soprano, one that was callously conducted in front of his heart-broken second wife, whom belatedly he had married. Also, when twenty-one he fought for the position in Busseto of maestro di cappella and organist. The Church, however, objected to hiring a theatrical composer. Whereupon fistfights resulted between partisans, and Verdi thereafter expressed a strong anticlericalism. He mockingly called one of his pet dogs Pretin (Little Priest). And he boasted that as a youth he had cursed a priest with death by lightning, an event that somehow took place some time later. In 1861 Verdi served as a representative to the first Italian parliament. According to McCabe, F. T. Garibaldi showed in his biography that Verdi expressly ordered in his will that he should be buried “without any part of the customary formulae.” He was a man of generous character. In 1898 he gave 2,000,000 lire to the city of Milan to build a home for aged and inform musicians. Upon his death in Milan, an estimated 300,000 mourners turned out, but the Church continued to claim him although Verdi was one of the many apostates from the Roman faith who were employed to compose music for its services. In its coverage of Verdi’s “Macbeth,” New York City Opera (September 1997) wrote
Of all the level-headed, down-to-earth, and unshakably practical men who ever earned a living composing music, Giuseppe Verdi stands at the very top of the class. He loved clarity and hated obfuscation; he made fun of anything that suggested the supernatural, superstition, spiritualism, and seances. Everything in his world had to be examined in the light of day, or in bright sunshine, for he was a model rationalist. In a letter to a friend, Verdi’s wife Giuseppina Strepponi wrote that he was an atheist. She then crossed that word out, and over it she wrote, “not much of a believer.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD} Verdi, Guiseppe (Fortunino Francesco) (10 Oct 1813 - 27 Jan 1901)
Verdi, the foremost composer of Italian opera, may have been interested in Nebuchadnezzar (in 1841 his third opera was Nabucodonosor), the First Crusade (I Lambardi alla prima Crociata), Manzoni (Requiem, written in 1874); and Shakespeare (Macbeth in 1847, Otello in 1867, Falstaff in 1893). But in one of the best examples of grand opera, Don Carlos, Verdi exuded an obvious dislike for the institutional Roman Catholic Church. As detailed in Verdi (1993), a biography by Mary Jane Phillips-Matz, Verdi had an affair in the 1870s with a soprano, one that was callously conducted in front of his heart-broken second wife, whom belatedly he had married. Also, when twenty-one he fought for the position in Busseto of maestro di cappella and organist. The Church, however, objected to hiring a theatrical composer. Whereupon fistfights resulted between partisans, and Verdi thereafter expressed a strong anticlericalism. He mockingly called one of his pet dogs Pretin (Little Priest). And he boasted that as a youth he had cursed a priest with death by lightning, an event that somehow took place some time later. In 1861 Verdi served as a representative to the first Italian parliament.
According to McCabe, F. T. Garibaldi showed in his biography that Verdi expressly ordered in his will that he should be buried “without any part of the customary formulae.” He was a man of generous character. In 1898 he gave 2,000,000 lire to the city of Milan to build a home for aged and inform musicians. Upon his death in Milan, an estimated 300,000 mourners turned out, but the Church continued to claim him although Verdi was one of the many apostates from the Roman faith who were employed to compose music for its services. In its coverage of Verdi’s Macbeth, New York City Opera (September 1997) wrote
Of all the level-headed, down-to-earth, and unshakably practical men who ever earned a living composing music, Giuseppe Verdi stands at the very top of the class. He loved clarity and hated obfuscation; he made fun of anything that suggested the supernatural, superstition, spiritualism, and séances. Everything in his world had to be examined in the light of day, or in bright sunshine, for he was a model rationalist. In a letter to a friend, Verdi’s wife Giuseppina Strepponi wrote that he was an atheist. She then crossed that word out, and over it she wrote, “not much of a believer.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Vereshchagin, Vassili Vasilyevich (1842–1904)
Vereshchagin was a Russian painter, soldier, atheist, and traveler. He is best known for his military pictures, which portrayed war in all its horror and brutality. He also is known for his studies of Turkistan and Asian life. Most of his works are collected in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. During an explosion of the flagship Petropavlovsk in the Russo-Japanese War, Vereshchagin was killed while seeking battle material.
The realistic and anti-religious conceptions of his “Holy Family” and “Resurrection” were the cause of their being withdrawn, by order of the archbishop, from the Vienna Exhibition (1885). In his autobiographical sketches (1887), Vereschagin unequivocally rejected Christianity and deplored the widespread hypocrisy, especially in England, of professing to believe it. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
[[Vergil [or Virgil], Polydore]] (70–19 B.C.E.) Vergil (the spelling Virgil is not found earlier than the 5th century) became part of the literary circle in Rome that was patronized by Maecenas and Augustus. His Ecologues, or Bucolics (37 B.C.E.) idealized rural life much in the manner of his Greek predecessor Theocritus. He then wrote Georgics (40 B.C.E.), seeking as had the Greek Hesiod before him to interpret the joy of farm life. For the rest of his life he worked on Aeneid, a national epic, which honored Rome and foretold the prosperity to come. Vergil’s pastoral poems were not merely a literary convention, the University of Nebraska’s Louis Crompton has noted. Vergil was born on a farm near Mantua and throughout life struck his contemporaries as being shy, awkward, and countrified. Although of sturdy build, he suffered from poor health and was often ill from headaches and hemorrhaging lungs. His lack of aggressiveness and modesty earned him a nickname, “the Virgin.” When the Commentary of Donatus characterized Vergil as “inclined to passions for boys,” it was considered unusual for a Latin biographer to also name the boys, Cebes and Alexander, two of his students. Vergil’s Corydon eclogue, a poem in which shepherds converse, is considered the most famous poem on male love in Latin literature. Vergil never married but owned a slave named Alexander, with whom he fell in love. Dante, Marlowe, Byron, and Jeremy Bentham are but three of Vergil’s admirers. Dante, who apparently knew the Donatian biography, made Vergil his guide through Hell and Purgatory. Crompton comments, “[A]nd the unusual courtesy he shows to sodomites in both domains may stem partly from his knowledge of his mentor’s tastes. Nevertheless, an unamiable medieval legend (traceable to the thirteenth century) held that all sodomites had died at the moment of Christ’s birth, and some ecclesiastics who were confused about the date of Virgil’s death maintained that he too had died in the holocaust.” As creator of one of the greatest long poems in world literature, Vergil is not believed to have been actively involved in any religion. His epitaph, which might have been written by the poet himself, is
Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope; cecini pascua rura duces.
Mantua was my birthplace; I died in Calabria; And now I rest at Parthenope. I sang of pastures, farms, and leaders. {CE; GL}
Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien (1759–1793) Vergniaud was a French Girondist orator who once said, “Reason thinks. Religion dreams.” Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, he also became President of the Convention. At the trial of the King he voted for the appeal to the people but, when that was rejected, later voted for death. With Gensonné and Guadet, he opposed the sanguinary measures of Robespierre and, being beaten in the struggle, was executed with the Girondins. He had prepared to take poison but, inasmuch as there was an insufficient amount for his comrades, he chose to suffer with them. {BDF; RAT}
Verhaegen, Pierre Théodore (1800–1860) A lawyer, Freemason, and freethinker, Verhaegen was a prominent supporter of the 1830 revolution which led to the establishment of the independent kingdom of Belgium. Verhaegen also was one of the founders of the anti-clerical Free University of Brussels. {RAT; TRI}
Verhaeren, Émile (1855–1916) Verhaeren was a Belgian poet and critic, a Fleming who wrote in French. His passion for social reform was accompanied by a disgust with mankind, as in the naturalistic verse of Les Flamandes (1883); in pessimism over the growth of urban industrialization, as in Les Villages illusoires and Les Villes tentaculaires (both 1895); and finally in optimistic glorification of the energy of man, as in the lyrical Les Forces tumultueuses (1902) and La Multiple Splendeur (1906). Verhaeren, the son of a devout and wealthy Catholic, had studied with Maeterlinck and had shed his faith for agnosticism. His freethought is found particularly in his poems, for example in “The Monk,” in which he tells the monks, “You alone survive of the Christian world that is dead.” In his later years, Verhaeren became more mystic but never returned to the Church. {JM; RAT; RE}
Verhoeven, Paul (1938- ) A film director, Verhoeven was born in the Netherlands. He directed such films as “Wat Zien Ik?”, “Turkish Delight” (1973; “The Fourth Man” (1983); “Robocop” (1987); and “Showgirls” (1995). “The Fourth Man,” he said, “has to do with my vision of religion. In my opinion, Christianity is nothing more than one of many interpretations of reality, neither more nor less. Ideally, it would be nice to believe that there is a God somewhere out there, but it looks to me as if the whole Christian religion is a major symptom of schizophrenia in half the world’s population: civilizations scrambling to rationalize their chaotic existence. Subsequently, Christianity has a tendency to look like magic or the occult. And I liked that ambiguity, because I wanted my audience to take something home with them. I wanted them to wonder about what religion really is. Remember, that Christianity is a religion grounded in one of the most violent acts of murder, the crucifixion. Otherwise, religion wouldn’t have had any kind of impact.” {CA}
VERIFIABILITY, or VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE
Logical positivists hold that the verification principle enables one to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless statements as well as between meaningful and meaningless questions. A statement is meaningful only if it is at least in principle verifiable or testable in experience. If it is not, then it must be condemned as meaningless, or nonsense. A statement is testable in practice if humans can actually subject it to a test here and now. To say a statement is testable in principle is to say we can describe what a test of it would be like, whether or not we can carry out the test. It is evident that if a statement is testable in practice it also is testable in principle, but the converse does not hold. According to the verification principle, a statement does not need to be testable in practice in order to be meaningful, but it must be testable in principle. A requirement for the meaningfulness of a factual statement is its susceptibility to the possibility of being either theoretically or actually proved true or false by reference to empirical facts. Meanwhile, according to the confirmability theory the meaningfulness of a factual statement depends upon the statement’s reducibility of its descriptive predicates to a set of observation predicates. Bertrand Russell has given the example that 4000 miles down to the center of Earth one can find iron—although it may be unlikely that any actual test is possible, it does follow that, if through some mining operation a hole could be cut and a camera could record iron deposits 4000 miles down, the question as to the evidence of iron in the center of the earth is meaningful when the verification principle is applied. As to whether fate exists, or if karma is a true doctrine, or if eating is an absolute, or if God has four eyes, the verification principle reveals the meaninglessness of such ideas inasmuch as no tests can be made to verify them. (See some negative criticism of verificationism in the entry for Isaiah Berlin. For discussions of the principle by R. W. Ashby, see Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8; and by Ernest LePore of Rutgers University in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.)
Verigan, Vitaly (20th Century) Verigan is associated with a Moscow Unitarian group at A/J 667, OTD/Sv 5, Zhukovske, Moskow, OBL Russia 140160.
Verity, Walter (20th Century) An Illinoian, Verity once was a director of the American Humanist Association.
Verlag, Angelika Lenz (20th Century) Verlag publishes Kristall (Fasaneweg 8, W-3057 Neustadt 1, Germany). {FD}
Verlet, Henri (19th Century) Verlet was the French founder and editor of La Libre Pensée (1871) and author of a pamphlet, “Atheism and the Supreme Being.” {BDF}
Verliere, Alfred (19th Century) A French author, Verliere wrote Guide du Libre-Penseur (1869), and he collaborated with La Libre Pensée and Rationaliste. To Bishop Dupanloup’s Atheism et Peril Social, he replied with Deisme et Peril Social, for which he was condemned to several months’ imprisonment. {BDF}
Verma, Ramswaroop: See entry for Ramendra.
Vermeer, Jan (or Johannes) (1632–1675) Vermeer was a Dutch genre and landscape painter, one who is ranked among the greatest Dutch masters and the foremost of all colorists. Nicolas Walter has observed that although it is true that Vermeer was a Christian, indeed a Catholic convert, “yet his religious paintings are his weakest and his masterpieces are scenes of ordinary people (probably his wife and daughters) doing ordinary things—to my mind better representations of humanism in art than anything produced by the Italian Renaissance.” {New Humanist, June 1996}
Vermersch, Eugène (18th Century) Vermersch was a French journalist who took part in the Commune and wrote on many radical journals. {BDF}
VERMONT HUMANISTS Arpad Toth and Valerie White are contacts for the Humanist Association of New Hampshire-Vermont, POB 23, Keene, New Hampshire 03431. B. J. Nelson is secretary-treasurer of the group. {FD}
Vernes, Maurice (19th Century) A French biblical critic, Vernes published Melanges de Critique Religieuse and translated works by several freethinkers. For many years, Vernes had been a Protestant minister who led the Liberal Christians in France and edited their magazine. The orthodox protested when he was appointed professor of Protestant theology at Paris University. Vernes issued volumes on the lines of the Higher Criticism, and he collaborated in translating the Bible into French. In 1904 he became Vice-President of the French National Association of Freethinkers and, McCabe reports, “sent a rousing message to the International Freethought Congress at Rome.” {BDF; JM; RAT}
Vernet, Émile Jean Horace (1789–1863) Vernet, who came from a French family of painters, was one of the most famous military painters of the 19th Century. He is known for his decorations of the Constantine Room at Versailles and his “Defense of the Barrier at Clichy,” which is in the Louvre. His father, Antoine Charles Horace Vernet (1758–1835), was also an atheist, and Émile sustained the anti-clerical tradition. He won and became director of the French Academy at Rome, was Commander of the Legion of Honor, and was a Grand Medallist. {JM; RAT}
Vernial, Paul (19th Century) Vernial was a French physician and member of the Anthropological Society of Paris. He wrote On the Origin of Man (1881). {BDF}
Vernon, Thomas S. (1914– ) A professor of philosophy at the University of Arkansas, Vernon is a secular humanist who has written for Free Inquiry and American Rationalist. He is author of Untimely Discourses (1986), The Age of Unreason (1987), and The Complete Secularist (1994). Once a Baptist minister, Vernon became unhappy about the “charlatanism and boobery” of our age and had the intellectual courage to reject Protestantism. “Today we are witnessing such a resurgence of religious bigotry,” he lamented in Great Infidels (1989), “that one cannot help wondering how long it will be before ‘equal time’ in our schools is demanded for geocentrism and flat-earthism as well as for creationism.” {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1984-1985; Freethought History #10, 1994; TYD}
Véron, Eugène (1825–1889) Véron was a French writer and publicist. He founded La France Républicaine at Lyons. In his later years he was General Inspector of Museums and editor of L’art in Paris. His agnostic views are seen in his Progrès intellectuel dans l’humanité (1862), La morale (1884), and Histoire naturelle des religions (2 volumes, 1885). Véron was an aesthetician of wide repute.
Verwey, Bellicent (20th Century) Verwey, who was born in Richmond, Virginia, in her words “to an alcoholic father and a delusional poetess of a mother,” has published a poem, “An Atheist’s Faith,” in Atheist Nation (July-August 1998).
Verworn, Max (1863–1921) A German physiologist, a colleague and close friend of Haeckel at Jena, Verworn rose to the first rank in his science. His General Physiology became a standard work throughout Europe. Verworn openly professed agnosticism, especially in his Science and Philosophy, and he contributed to a work commemorating Haeckel’s eightieth birthday. {JM; RAT; RE}
VESAK Vesak is a Buddhist holiday that honors Gautama’s birth, enlightenment, and death.
Very, Jones (1813–1880) Very, upon graduating from Harvard in 1836, tutored Greek there while studying at the Divinity School. He began having poetic visions of the Holy Ghost and claimed that the poetry he was writing was being communicated to him through mystical visions. According to Bronson Alcott, Very was “diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity.” Carlos Baker considered him “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost.” Emerson liked Very’s poetry, but the Harvard faculty questioned Very’s sanity and Very was committed to an asylum for the insane. Although a friend of the Transcendentalists, Very became such a mystic that he believed in the absolute surrender of the will to God. Upon leaving the asylum, and without a degree in divinity, he temporarily held pastorates in Maine and Massachusetts but for his last four decades was a recluse who lived with his sister. J. F. Clarke edited Very’s Poems and Essays (1866), which contained some six hundred poems. A mild Unitarian, he was clearly a theist. {Carlos Baker, Emerson Among the Eccentrics; CE; U}
Vesalius, Andreas (1514–1564) A Flemish anatomist, Vesalius made many discoveries by dissecting human cadavers. His work overturned many of the doctrines held by the second-century anatomist Galen and caused much criticism from other anatomists who objected to his stealing the bodies of criminals from the gallows. He countered that it was the only way, in light of the Church’s teachings, to obtain cadavers. His work was revolutionary inasmuch as he was among the first to dissect cadavers. This allowed him to show that Galen’s anatomy was simply an attempt to apply animal structure to the human body, that it was not based on any direct knowledge of human anatomy. Chased from country to country, he left Padua to become physician to Emperor Charles V and to his son Philip II of Spain. McCabe writes, “There is a grossly inaccurate account of him in the Catholic Dr. Walsh’s Popes and Science—the account in White’s Warfare of Science with Theology is perfectly correct—and the very just appreciation of him by the Vice-President of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain in the Encyclopedia Britannica has been expunged from the last (Catholic-revised) edition, though he was one of the greatest scientists of the Middle Ages.” In 1563, Vesalius made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and, on the return voyage, died in Greece. Throughout his life he incurred the hostility of the clergy, and he died carrying out a sentence of the Spanish Inquisition, which had sought to burn him at the stake. The Emperor saved him, but on condition that he make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The hardships of a shipwreck hastened the end of Vesalius’s broken life. {CE; JM; RE}
VESPERS According to Claude Bernard, the Sunday evening service in Catholic churches known as Vespers is “the servant girls’ opera.” (See entry for Claude Bernard.)
Vetter, George B. (20th Century) Vetter wrote “Personality and Group Factors in the Making of Atheists,” which was published by the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1932). In his Magic and Religion (1973), he declared that “Supernaturalism is, in its social functions and consequences, a dangerous opiate. And, what is perhaps even worse, it discourages objective attempts at intelligent social trial-and-error, planning, and even research, and undermines man’s faith in his own resources.” {FUS}
Via, Arnold (20th Century) Via was an officer of American Atheists and was one of the last to see Madalyn O’Hair, who visited him in Grottoes, Virginia, in mid-August 1995 just before she disappeared with son Jon and granddaughter Robin. To journalist David Van Biema, Via said that during working hours “they didn’t bother one another unless they wanted to get into another’s throats,” in which case screaming fights ensued. However, they dined together and lived together, “three peas in a pod. . . . Jon had no girlfriend, and Robin had no boyfriend, and Madalyn was too far gone to have anything.” Madalyn seemed healthy, he said of their last visit, despite her chronic medical problems. {Time, 10 February 1997}
Viardot, Louis (1800–1883) A French writer, Viardot founded the Revue Independante with George Sand and Pierre Leroux. He made translations from the Russian. In addition to many works on art Viardot, wrote The Jesuits (1857) and Apology of an Unbeliever (1869), which was republished as Libre Examen (1871). {BDF; RAT}
Viau, Théophile de (1590–1626) A poet and an atheist, Viau was persecuted for alleged libertinism. When in 1622 for political reasons Théophile converted to Catholicism, Father Garasse accused him of leading a band of atheists, calling him the king of libertines. Convicted in 1623, he was condemned to the stake but was only burned in effigy. Théophile was then banished forever from France, as was the Jesuit father Voisin, one of his chief adversaries. Although he was generally acknowledged to have been a homosexual, according to Kathleen Collins-Clark of the University of Michigan, “all of his intimate relationships remain largely a matter of inference drawn from his highly personal poetry. His contemporary Tallement des Réaux refers to Jacques la Valée as Théophile’s widow, thus indicating that their physical relationship was common knowledge at the time.” Viau wrote the tragedy, Pyramé et Thisbe (1621). The poems which he contributed to La Parnasse satyrique were considered obscene. His credo, “Follow Nature’s law,” takes on added resonance, Collins-Clark notes, “when natural inclination leads the lover outside relationships condoned by the Church.” {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1991; GL}
Vick, Lesley (1944– ) Vick is an Australian rationalist and humanist. In 1977 she became secretary of the Rationalist Society of Victoria, and in 1982 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Rationalist Association of Australia Ltd. When she became president of the Rationalist Society of Australia in 1987, her presidential address was published as a booklet, “The Role of Rationalism Today.” {SWW}
Vickery, Alice Drysdale (19th Century) Drysdale was honorary president of the Neo-Malthusian league, which Margaret Sanger credits as having inspired her birth control efforts.
Vico, Giovanni Battista (1668–1744) Vico, who is among the great freethinkers in philosophy, is a forerunner of cultural anthropology, or ethnology. His Principles of a New Science (1725), according to Robertson, “on the whole excels Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws.” Although his vocabulary used the words ordinarily associated with faith, he “grappled with the science of human development in an essentially secular and scientific spirit.” He posits “Deity and Providence, but proceeds nevertheless to study the laws of civilization inductively from its phenomena. He permanently obscured his case, indeed, by insisting on putting it theologically, and condemning Grotius and others for separating the idea of law from that of religion. Only in a pantheistic sense has Vico’s formula any validity; and he never avows a pantheistic view, refusing even to go with Grotius in allowing that Hebrew law was akin to that of other nations. But a rationalistic view, had he put it, would have been barred. The wonder is, in the circumstances, not that he makes so much parade of religion, but that he could venture to undermine so vitally its pretensions, especially after he had found it prudent to renounce the project of annotating the great work of Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis, on the score that (as he puts it in his Autobiography) a good Catholic must not endorse a heretic.” But his method of writing history was systematic, far in advance of his time and not fully recognized until the nineteenth century. He taught that history is the account of the birth and development of human societies and their institutions—others had written that it was the development of God’s will. In short, he taught that history is a valid object of human knowledge because man himself created history, that the historian can never be a prophet. To manage such in the Catholic world of 1720 was difficult, and when his motives were questioned he is said to have had “a tendency to hedge.” Benedetto Croce, in The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (1913), writes that Vico is fundamentally at one with the Naturalists: “Like them, in constructing his science of human society, he excludes with Grotius all idea of God, and with Pufendorf considers man as without help or attention from God, excluding him, that is, from revealed religion and its God.” Upon his death, Vico was carried to his house, the stairway of which was too narrow so the coffin had to be lowered through a window. Fellow professors tried to save his remains from the indignity of Christian burial. But, after being carried without ceremony to the church of the Oratarian priests, the body remained with them and remains with them to this day. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT}
Victor, Jeffrey S. (20th Century) Victor, a professor of sociology at Jamestown Community College, is author of Satanic Panic (1993), which won the 1994 H. L. Mencken Award for best book from the Free Press Association. Victor finds that a Satanism scare has penetrated our society but that objective investigators find no evidence to support the allegations that Satanist cults are responsible for conspiracies to enslave, abuse, molest, and kill children. Victor find that the claims of a Satanist conspiracy are a social phenomenon, and his book provides guidelines for investigating their false claims.
Victor, Viggo Floria (20th Century) In 1934 for his M.A. thesis at Northwestern University in Illinois, Victor wrote about Robert G. Ingersoll’s use of history and literary materials. {FUS}
Victoria, (Adelaide) (Mary) (Louisa), [Empress] (1840-1901) Victoria, Empress of Germany, was the eldest daughter of Victoria of England and the mother of the Kaiser. In 1858 she married the German crown prince (later Emperor Frederick III). Upon her husband’s death, she was often called Empress Frederick. A dogmatic English liberal, she was bitterly hostile to the imperial chancellor Otto von Bismarck but was unable to make her dislike effective. McCabe noted that “it is interesting that the two daughters, Victoria and Alice, of the very prim and pious Queen Victoria of England were freethinkers of the advanced type, probably agnostics.” He added, “Even the cautious Dictionary of National Biography, which generally conceals heresies, says of Victoria that although she retained her attachment to the Church of England her religion was undogmatic and she ‘sympathized with the broad views of Strauss, Renan, Schopenhauer, and Huxley.’ ” Prince von Buelow, who knew both princesses well, wrote in his Memoirs that “the Grand Duchess Alice was as liberal in politics and especially in religion as her sister the Crown Princess,” that Victoria was “an out and out Rationalist of the temper of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill.” Reportedly, Victoria was a sincere patroness of culture who detested her son, the Kaiser, and Prussian ideas. In fact, she is quoted by Prince von Buelow as having said, “My son will be the ruin of Germany.” {CE; JM; RE}
VICTORIAN HUMANIST An Australian publication, Victorian Humanist is at GPO Box 1555 P, Melburne, Victoria 3001, Australia. E-mail: <leeman@connexus.apana.org.au>.
Vidal, Gore (1925– ) Vidal’s original name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, the first two being his father’s names. Although his forte is history, he is better known as a novelist whose Myra Breckenridge (1968) was turned into a movie that starred Mae West, among other novels. Vidal, also a playwright and critic, shocked the public in 1948 when The City and the Pillar was published, its main character being a homosexual. Known for being highly acerbic, Vidal for example said of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the United States.” Of Ronald Reagan: “A triumph of the embalmer’s art.” Of Truman Capote: “Truman Capote has made lying an art. A minor art.” Upon hearing about Capote’s death: “Good career move.” Of fame: “Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.” Of America: “The civilization whose absence drove Henry James to Europe.” Of theology: “Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.” He is not so well-known for a first-rate essay, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” (1976). In 1992, the gospel according to Gore Vidal was entitled Live From Golgotha, a Vidalian satire as blasphemous as anything Salman Rushdie might imagine. It describes an NBC camera crew that somehow is able to break the time barrier and photograph Jesus’s crucifixion, live from Calvary. The well-endowed bishop of Ephesus, the heterosexual Timothy, who is represented as having once been an acolyte and “love toy” of St. Paul, is the storyteller whose relationship with Paul is revealed. This leaves the telecasters certain the show will boost NBC’s fall ratings. “I’m really interested now,” Vidal stated in 1992, “in trying to destroy monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all the problems.” The novel was both praised and panned by Robert Gorham Davis in Free Inquiry (Spring, 1993): “Vidal can make his alter ego, the rascally slangy Timothy (with ‘the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor’), a charming though unlikely narrator. But Vidal’s satire on television moguls is too trite and predictable to teach us anything, and his travesty of early Christianity so outrageously broad as to be irrelevant to those holding present-day Christian beliefs and unilluminating to those who have already rejected them.” The Essential Gore Vidal (1998), the title implying one really should read everything by the author, is an anthology edited by Fred Kaplan, one that spans five decades of his work. Kaplan’s Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999) contained few new facts about his subject. Kaplan cites Vidal’s affair with Anaïs Nin and mentions his being a regular customer at a Times Square gay hangout, the Astor Bar. The Smithsonian Institution: A Novel (1999) includes a what-if plot; for example, what if key historical events had happened differently; e.g., if Mr. Lincoln had been rescued at Ford’s Theater, if there had been no Adolf Hitler on the scene in 1939; if Franklin Roosevelt had had only the Japanese to fight in the 1940s. A revealing work, Sexually Speaking (1999), suggests that George Washington had a homosexual side, that a touch of Norman Mailer’s feminism is apparent, and that Eleanor Roosevelt had sapphic tendencies. The autobiograpy, Palimpsest (1995), remains one of his best works. It describes the major love of his life, a school-friend Jimmy Trimble, who was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945. He tells of his father’s fame as a football star, his success in aviation, and his having three testicles; relates stories about his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma; writes of his mother’s alcoholism and his decision when thirty-two to cut all ties with her; gossips about VIPs in Washington, D.C., including sexual references about President Kennedy; has stories about Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Princess Margaret, Christopher Isherwood, and numerous others. Christopher Hitchens has made a shrewd observation about the wide variety in Vidal’s work, that his achievements as a writer
. . . can recur to a favored subject many times without repeating himself. Three Vidalian commitments seem to undergird what he writes on any topic. The first is the curse of monotheism: enemy of pleasure and foe of rational inquiry. The second is the blight of sexual stereotyping. (He insists that acts, not persons, are homo- or heterosexual.) The third is the awful temptation of America to meddling and blundering overseas: imperialism, to give it the right name.
In 1954 he wrote the present author concerning humanism:
I have put most of my attitudes into The Judgment of Paris (1952; revised, 1965), a comedy, and Messiah (1954; revised, 1965), a tragedy. I can think of no one label which particularly fits me, though some odd ones have got applied along the way! I should say, though, right off, that I am not interested in any of the theologies I have ever heard of, despite the indubitable charm of the divers sacred books of this world. I do not see any law to the universe though I am perfectly prepared to entertain the idea that one exists. Though I am no mathematician, I am reasonably confident that Einstein’s Unified Field Theory will prove inconclusive, to say the least. The origin of the universe is a fact not in the mind of man. Therefore, I doubt if it can be discovered at the far end of a syllogism, much less an equation. “We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing,” as Anaxandrides put it. I have always thought the game of first causes amusing but pointless. The origin of the universe is mystery and its fate is a mystery. We know it is in a state of flux. We know it is changing. That is all we know, or are ever apt to know. In one short century we have discarded so many ‘undying’ truths that I suspect soon we will be able, a few of us at least, to get along without absolutes, other than those expedient ones we use to regulate society. I suppose I am closer to Lucretius and the Atomists than to any of the Christian divines or their philosophic antagonists in the last century, writers amongst whose works I have sniffed like a curious but not a hungry dog. I do not, very simply, believe. I have attitudes, opinions, and I observe but that is all. I attempt, through literature, to make order in the moral, the human sphere (and only in the human scale do our actions matter—the stars are inattentive, I suspect). I reject the idea, even semantically, of the supernatural because all is natural. We call supernatural only those events which are inexplicable or, worse, inconvenient. In human affairs, political affairs, I am continually at sea. Sometimes I incline toward benevolent tyranny, other times toward oligarchy in the Platonistic sense. I have even thought an enlightened Republic might work, but since I have never had the experience of living under any one of these governments I shall probably never know what I think. Finally, au fond, I have a sense of reality which prevents me from being either optimistic or gloomy. I can imagine vividly all the millennia when this world was uninhabited by men and I can imagine, with equal equanimity, a cold, dusty planet on which the race of man has long since perished, his entire history a brief instant in creation, his works and days all gone at least in that spiraling bright flux we call the universe. This sense of eternity (there is no better word), of unhuman duration makes it possible for me to live without too much agony in an unreasoning civilization where men seldom contain for long the predatory life force within which exists only by the displacement, the assimilation of other life. We are cancers: the body we prey on is the earth . . . and one another. The most one can do, that I can do, is to arrange my better daydreams so that they may prove communicable to others, decorating their solitude, relieving my own. I take pleasure in writing, and in the act indulge myself in a double vision hard to explain to others: realizing poignantly on the one hand that I and my race are nothing in eternity and yet aware, at the precise same moment, that, to me at least, literature, art together matter more than anything else, save kindness. The dogmatic, needless to say, cannot entertain two conflicting realities at the same time in their pursuit of certainty and its devilish accomplice power. I am more modest, less ambitious. I know we shall not endure. But the present is all time . . . and enough.
Vidal also went on record concerning religion:
I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—god people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied, and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Vidal declined, stating, “Thanks, but I already belong to the Diners Club.” In 1999, to the surprise of many, he accepted membership in the Academy but was not present on the date of the awards. In 1995, after leaving unanswered many offers to become listed as Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism, he was approached by the present writer, whom he had never before seen. “Mr. Vidal,” he was told in a dour voice, and brusquely, “you and I are in love with the same man!” Conversation in the vicinity hushed. A publisher’s representative approached. The novelist was taken aback, looking quizzically ahead and wondering what was about to transpire. After a studied pause, during which I looked somewhat stonily into his eyes, I relaxed. “The man? Lucretius.” “Oh,” he laughed uproariously, “and Tiberius and Apuleius, too?” The amused Vidal then accepted an envelope containing a copy of Free Inquiry along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a typed statement, “I agree to be listed as a Humanist Laureate,” under which was a “Yes” and a line for him to sign his name. In the mail two days later was the envelope, in which, indeed, was the signed agreement. {CA; CE; E; GL; Christopher Hitchens, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999; TYD; WAS, 25 August 1954; WAS 12 October 1995.}
Vidal, Gore (3 Oct 1925 - ) Vidal’s original name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, the first two names being those of his father. Although his forte is history, he is better known as a novelist whose Myra Breckenridge (1968) was turned into a movie that starred Mae West, among other novels. Vidal, also a playwright and critic, shocked the public in 1948 when The City and the Pillar was published, its main character being a homosexual. His essay, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” (1976), is not so well known but illustrates his profundity. Vidal is known for his acerbity; e.g.,
America: The civilization whose absence drove Henry James to Europe. Truman Capote: Capote has made lying an art. A minor art. [Upon hearing about Capote’s death]: Good career move. Fame: Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. Ronald Reagan: A triumph of the embalmer’s art. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the United States. Theology: Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
In 1992, the gospel according to Gore Vidal was entitled Live From Golgotha, a Vidalian satire as blasphemous as anything Salman Rushdie might imagine. It describes an NBC camera crew that somehow is able to break the time barrier and photograph Jesus’s crucifixion, live from Calvary. The well-endowed bishop of Ephesus, the heterosexual Timothy, who is represented as having once been an acolyte and “love toy” of St. Paul, is the storyteller whose relationship with Paul is revealed. This leaves the telecasters certain the show will boost NBC’s fall ratings. “I’m really interested now.” Vidal stated in 1992, “in trying to destroy monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all the problems.” The novel was both praised and panned by Robert Gorham Davis in Free Inquiry (Spring, 1993): “Vidal can make his alter ego, the rascally slangy Timothy (with ‘the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor’), a charming though unlikely narrator. But Vidal’s satire on television moguls is too trite and predictable to teach us anything, and his travesty of early Christianity so outrageously broad as to be irrelevant to those holding present-day Christian beliefs and unilluminating to those who have already rejected them.” The Essential Gore Vidal (1998), the title implying one really should read everything by the author, is an anthology edited by Fred Kaplan, one that spans five decades of his work. Kaplan’s Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999) contained few new facts about his subject. Kaplan cites Vidal’s affair with Anaïs Nin and mentions his being a regular customer at a Times Square gay hangout, the Astor Bar. The Smithsonian Institution: A Novel (1999) includes a what-if plot; for example, what if key historical events had happened differently; e.g., if Mr. Lincoln had been rescued at Ford’s Theater, if there had been no Adolf Hitler on the scene in 1939; if Franklin Roosevelt had had only the Japanese to fight in the 1940s. A revealing work, Sexually Speaking (1999), suggests that George Washington had a homosexual side, that a touch of Norman Mailer’s feminism is apparent, and that Eleanor Roosevelt had Sapphic tendencies. The autobiograpy, Palimpsest (1995), remains one of his best works. It describes the major love of his life, a school-friend Jimmy Trimble, who was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945. He tells of his father’s fame as a football star, his success in aviation, and his having three testicles; relates stories about his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma; writes of his mother’s alcoholism and his decision when thirty-two to cut all ties with her; gossips about VIPs in Washington, D.C., including sexual references about President Kennedy; has stories about Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Princess Margaret, Christopher Isherwood, and numerous others. Christopher Hitchens has made a shrewd observation about the wide variety in Vidal’s work, that his achievements as a writer
. . . can recur to a favored subject many times without repeating himself. Three Vidalian commitments seem to undergird what he writes on any topic. The first is the curse of monotheism: enemy of pleasure and foe of rational inquiry. The second is the blight of sexual stereotyping. (He insists that acts, not persons, are homo- or heterosexual.) The third is the awful temptation of America to meddling and blundering overseas: imperialism, to give it the right name.
In 1954 he wrote the present author concerning humanism:
I have put most of my attitudes into The Judgment of Paris (1952; revised, 1965), a comedy, and Messiah (1954; revised, 1965), a tragedy. I can think of no one label which particularly fits me, though some odd ones have got applied along the way! I should say, though, right off, that I am not interested in any of the theologies I have ever heard of, despite the indubitable charm of the divers sacred books of this world. I do not see any law to the universe though I am perfectly prepared to entertain the idea that one exists. Though I am no mathematician, I am reasonably confident that Einstein’s Unified Field Theory will prove inconclusive, to say the least. The origin of the universe is a fact not in the mind of man. Therefore, I doubt if it can be discovered at the far end of a syllogism, much less an equation. “We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing,” as Anaxandrides put it. I have always thought the game of first causes amusing but pointless. The origin of the universe is mystery and its fate is a mystery. We know it is in a state of flux. We know it is changing. That is all we know, or are ever apt to know. In one short century we have discarded so many ‘undying’ truths that I suspect soon we will be able, a few of us at least, to get along without absolutes, other than those expedient ones we use to regulate society. I suppose I am closer to Lucretius and the Atomists than to any of the Christian divines or their philosophic antagonists in the last century, writers amongst whose works I have sniffed like a curious but not a hungry dog. I do not, very simply, believe. I have attitudes, opinions, and I observe but that is all. I attempt, through literature, to make order in the moral, the human sphere (and only in the human scale do our actions matter—the stars are inattentive, I suspect). I reject the idea, even semantically, of the supernatural because all is natural. We call supernatural only those events which are inexplicable or, worse, inconvenient. In human affairs, political affairs, I am continually at sea. Sometimes I incline toward benevolent tyranny, other times toward oligarchy in the Platonistic sense. I have even thought an enlightened Republic might work, but since I have never had the experience of living under any one of these governments I shall probably never know what I think. Finally, au fond, I have a sense of reality which prevents me from being either optimistic or gloomy. I can imagine vividly all the millennia when this world was uninhabited by men and I can imagine, with equal equanimity, a cold, dusty planet on which the race of man has long since perished, his entire history a brief instant in creation, his works and days all gone at least in that spiraling bright flux we call the universe. This sense of eternity (there is no better word), of unhuman duration makes it possible for me to live without too much agony in an unreasoning civilization where men seldom contain for long the predatory life force within which exists only by the displacement, the assimilation of other life. We are cancers: the body we prey on is the earth . . . and one another. The most one can do, that I can do, is to arrange my better daydreams so that they may prove communicable to others, decorating their solitude, relieving my own. I take pleasure in writing, and in the act indulge myself in a double vision hard to explain to others: realizing poignantly on the one hand that I and my race are nothing in eternity and yet aware, at the precise same moment, that, to me at least, literature, art together matter more than anything else, save kindness. The dogmatic, needless to say, cannot entertain two conflicting realities at the same time in their pursuit of certainty and its devilish accomplice power. I am more modest, less ambitious. I know we shall not endure. But the present is all time . . . and enough.
Vidal also went on record concerning religion:
I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—god people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied, and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Vidal declined, stating, “Thanks, but I already belong to the Diners Club.” In 1999, to the surprise of many, he accepted membership in the Academy but was not present on the date of the awards. In 2001 he wrote The Last Empire Essays 1992-2000), a work that was praised by friends and criticized by others. In 1995, after leaving unanswered many offers to become listed as Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism, he was approached by the present author, whom he had never before seen. “Mr. Vidal,” he was told in a dour voice, and brusquely, “you and I are in love with the same man!” Conversation in the vicinity hushed. A publisher’s representative approached. The novelist was taken aback, looking quizzically ahead and wondering what was about to transpire. After a studied pause, during which I looked somewhat stonily into his eyes, I relaxed. “The man? Lucretius.” “Oh,” he laughed uproariously, “and Tiberius and Apuleius, too?” The amused Vidal then accepted an envelope containing a copy of Free Inquiry along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a typed statement, “I agree to be listed as a Humanist Laureate,” under which was a “Yes” and a line for him to sign his name. In the mail two days later was the envelope, in which, indeed, was the signed agreement. {CA; CE; E; GL; Christopher Hitchens, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999; TYD; WAS, 25 August 1954; WAS 12 October 1995.}
VIDUTHALAI
A Tamil rationalist daily, Viduthalai is at 50, E. V. K. Sampath Salai, Chennai (Madras) 600 007, India.
Vidyasagar, Isvar Chandra (19th Century) According to Sibnarayan Ray of City College, Calcutta University, Vidyasagarwas one of the outstanding secular humanists in India of the 19th century. However, his work has not been translated from Bengali into English. (See also the entries for Nehru and Sibnarayan Ray.)
[[Vigeland, Gustav (1869–1943) Vigeland is a Norwegian sculptor whose nude figures in Oslo’s Frogner Park, according to Corliss Lamont, symbolize “the life and aspirations of man.” The park contains tree groups, reliefs, thirty-six large granite groups in twelve rows radiating from a column more than fifty-five feet tall, containing 121 figures in gray granite. Vigeland is author of The Condition of Man. {CE; CL}
Vigeland, Kari (20th Century) Vigeland is a Norwegian humanist leader who is Secretary-General of the Norwegian Humanist Association (HEF). Also, she has been a Board member and co-president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union from 1983 to 1987. A professor of psychology at the University of Oslo, Vigeland has described the humanist movements in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland in “The Norwegian Humanist Movement and Its Emphasis on Non-Theistic Ceremonies.” She is co-chair of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).
Vigny, Alfred Victor Comte de (1797–1863) A French poet, novelist, and dramatist, Vigny was one of the foremost romantics. He expressed a philosophy of stoical pessimism, stressing the lonely struggle of the individual in a hostile universe. Unlike the other romantics, Vigny did not emphasize personal emotion; instead, he presented his ideas through general symbols with dramatic force. Although his reputation temporarily was dimmed by that of Hugo and Lamartine, it was revived by the time of Baudelaire. Vigny was known for professing a sort of sentimental Christianity in his early works, but according to McCabe in his later work “he is completely atheistic.” {CE; JM; RE}
Vijayam, G. (20th Century) Dr. Vijayam is executive director of the Atheist Centre in Vijayawada, India. Article 51A(h) of India’s Constitution states that it is the fundamental duty of every citizen “to promote scientific temper, spirit of enquiry, reform and humanism.” The Indian humanism is based on compassion, fellow-feeling, and on rendering timely help to the needy. For example, Indumati Parikh’s “Stree Hitakarini” works in the slums of Bombay. Malladi Subbamma renders assistance to women in distress. Hemalata Lavanam works among the jogins. V. M. Tarkunde strives for civil liberties. Dr. Samaram leads a crusade for sex education and for dispelling superstitions. India’s humanist pioneers were Periyar, E. V. Ramaswamy, M. N. Roy, Gora, and A. T. Kovoor. In The Atheist (India, August 1991), Vijayam wrote an article, “Charles Bradlaugh: Ardent Champion of Atheism and Secularism.” Vijayam was a participant in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.
Vikin, Joe (1933– ) Vikin, formerly a professor of chemistry at Corning Community College, is a trainer at the Center for Diversity Training (PO Box 515, Corning, NY 14830). A freethinker, he was a member of the NY Society for Ethical Culture when he lived in Brooklyn. When he moved upstate, he joined the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Big Flats. He is the author of “Diversity, Trust and Tolerance” and “Diversity: A Poetic Celebration,” both used by the Center in their training. He also wrote “Herstory: A Sampling from 1421 to 1775” and “Biblical Stories: Throw the Water Out, Keep the Baby.” Born in Colombia, Vikin had a grandmother of the Quimbaya tribe and other ancestors who were Basques. He has been in the United States since 1954. (WAS, interview by Internet.)
VILAGOSSOAG (Light) A Hungarian publication, Vilagossoag is at H-1054 Budapest, Szenese Street 10, Hungary.
Villard, Oswald Garrison (1872–1949)
Villard was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. A journalist, he wrote Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (1939) and in 1943 a biography of John Brown. As the editor of Nation, Villard made it a leading liberal journal. When in 1940 the magazine became non-pacifist, he severed all connections. {CE}
Villari, Pasquale (1826–1917) An Italian historian and statesman, Villari fought against the Papal troops in the Revolution of 1848, served in the legislative chamber (1867–1882), and was minister of education (1889–1892). He wrote works on Savonarola, Machiavelli, Dante, Cavour, Galileo, and Garibaldi. McCabe wrote of Villari that “after the liberation of Italy from the Popes, he attained the highest honors in the state (Minister of Education, etc.) and the academic world. He does not conceal his freethinking in his preface to Negri’s Julian the Apostate.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Vincent, Henry (1813–1878) Vincent was a reformer who, at the age of eleven, had to earn his living as an apprentice to a printer. As he matured, he was active in the early reform movement and threw himself into the Chartist agitation. Molesworth said of Vincent that he was “the Demosthenes” of the movement. In 1839 Vincent was condemned, though plainly innocent, to a year in prison, and he was so vilely treated that Lord Brougham protested in the House. A body of 20,000 armed miners tried to release him. In 1840 Vincent again suffered a year’s vile treatment in prison, after which he moved to Bath and edited the Vindicator. He made successful lecture tours in America. Although he never joined any denomination, Vincent gave lay sermons at services of the Society of Friends. He was married in a Registry Office and was a theistic “Free Christian.” {RAT}
Vincent, Tom (20th Century) Vincent is President of the Arizona Secular Humanists. On the Web: <http://getnet.com/ ~huey/ash.html>.
Vinson, John (20th Century) Vinson, lawyer for Madalyn Murray O’Hair, declared bankruptcy after working for, and then falling out with, O’Hair. “She treated the organization as her own charity,” he complained. “The money would come in and it would all just basically go to the same place,” one of her companies. {Vanity Fair, March 1997}
Virchow, Rudolf (1821–1902) Virchow was a German pathologist, a founder of cellular pathology. He became director of the Pathological Institute in Berlin in 1856. Virchow contributed to nearly every branch of medical science as well as to anthropology, and he introduced sanitary reforms in Berlin. He was a member of the Prussian lower house and later of the Reichstag (1880–1893). Also, he was a leader of the liberal Progressive party opposed to Bismarck. In 1847, Virchow founded the Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medizin. Although Virchow’s scientific views were advanced, he opposed Haeckel in regard to absolute teaching of evolution. For some years he led the Freethinking Liberals in the Reichstag, especially in the attacks on Catholics. Virchow thought that Darwinism led to Socialism, leading Darwin to write Haeckel, “Virchow’s conduct is shameful, and I hope he will some day feel the shame.” However, contemporary freethinkers often cite Virchow as one of their inspirations. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Viret, Pierre (17th Century?) Viret was the first to use “Deist” to describe those who believe in God but not in the divinity of Jesus. He was a Swiss Protestant. {FUS}
VIRGIN BIRTH Egyptians have believed that their queens were impregnated by the gods, and the Japanese have believed that the first emperor was born of a goddess—a part of the collusion of kings and priests in order to sustain the power of both. Diogenes Laertius in his Life of Plato wrote that the Greek philosopher’s nephew, Speusippus, claimed that Plato’s mother conceived him by a god, and later Buddhist literature says the same of Gautama’s mother. Plutarch gave and defended the legend of Plato. Justin in the second century appealed to the pagans to see the reasonableness of the Christian belief that Mary conceived Jesus by a miracle, without male contact, in light of their own belief in the divine impregnation of Leda, Semele, Danae, and others by Zeus. When in the early 1920s the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of America tried to enforce the belief in the Virgin Birth, the professors of their chief theological school (Cambridge) issued a work, Creeds and Loyalties (1923), in which they pointed out that the legend was a late interpolation in the New Testament, and to be rejected. This interpretation is confirmed by several reference in the Gospels to the “brothers” of Jesus, and the apologetic reply that this means “cousins” is strained and arbitrary, according to McCabe. Modernists are said to reject Virgin Birth although Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and others strictly adhered to it up to the 1940s. Meanwhile, secular humanists, upon hearing about virgin births, suspect sexual cover-ups. (See entry for William Provine.) {RE}
[[VIRGIN MARY: See entry for the Great Mother Goddess.
Virgin Mary, the Holy: See entry for Chris Ofili, an African whose painting “The Holy Virgin Mary” is collaged with lumps of elephant dung and close-up photographs of female genitalia. Shown in Berlin and London to throngs, it faced trouble in New York City when Mayor Rudy Giuliani—a Catholic—found it “offensive” and threatned to evict the museum in which it was shown.
VIRGIN MARY SHRINES Shrines to the Virgin Mary are ubiquitous around the world. Mary is often depicted with baby and halo, and the shrines are found not only on but also off church property. Some are placed in the countryside, and others are featured in art museums. “La Adolorida de Bucay” at the Guayaquil Municipal Museum in Ecuador appears at first glance to show a sad Virgin Mary, her hands folded, and the words (translated, “The Afflicted One of Bucay”) in the background. Upon closer inspection, however, one notices that the virgin, her heart pierced with miniature swords, holds a knife in one of her crossed hands, a dismembered penis in the other. The work is framed by condoms and an urn of plastic feces. This “virgin” is Lorena Bobbitt, who angrily had cut her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis off to the delight of the international media, which featured the story about the dysfunctional married couple during the 1990s. The work won artist Hernán Zúñiga second prize in Ecuador’s annual art show, “Salón de Julio.”
VIRGINIA FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS Virginia has the following groups:
• American Humanist Association, Mid-Atlantic Region (AHA), 3708 Brightview Street, Wheaton, Maryland 20902. Roy R. Torcaso is coordinator for the District of Columbia, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. • Central Virginia Secular Humanists (ASHS; chapter of WASH), PO Box 184, Ivy, VA 22945 (804) 979-2508. E-mail: <cvsh@rlc.net>. • Humanists in the Jefferson Tradition (AHA), R-4, Box 411, Bassett, Virginia 24055. Preston Page is the president. • Northern Virginia Secular Humanists (ASHS; chapter of WASH), 6400 Lyric Lane, Falls Church, VA 22044 (703) 256-4192. E-mail: <secularhumanists@hotmail.com>. On the Web: <http://www.noves.org/> and <http://www.jjnet.com/jjtalks>. • Radford University humanists and freethinkers: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/ orgs.html>. • Richmond Area Free-Thinkers (RAFT) (ASHS, a chapter of WASH, c/o Kim Carlton, PO Box 3916, Richmond, VA 23235; (804) 560-0055 or (804) 560-6903. E-mail: <freethinkers@hotmail.com>. • Savant of Virginia, POB 911, Rocky Mount, Virginia 24151. Abram B. Carter edits the publication for members who were in the (now formally dissolved) Society of Evangelical Agnostics and for a wide range of independent thinkers.
• Secular Humanists of Roanoke, 180 Bailey Blvd., Hardy, Virginia 24101; (540) 890-3957. E-mail: <NurXand@aol.com>.
• University of Virginia’s Atheist-Freethought Alliance is on the Web at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University’s freethinkers are on the Web at <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Virtual Ethical Society has a homepage at <www.aeu.org>. • Washington Area Secular Humanists (WASH), PO Box 15319, Washington, DC 20003; (202) 298-0921. E-mail: <secularhumanists@hotmail.com>. Web: <www.wash.org>.
VIRGINITY • Virginity is like a bubble. It lasts until it meets up with a prick. “The Mystery of Irma Vepp” a 1984 play by Charles Ludlam and Everett Quinton
A 1966 Playboy survey of 10,000 people in fifteen countries found that the average age for loss of virginity in the United States was 16.2 years. The global average for loss of virginity was 17.6 years.
VIRGINS Elizabeth Bailey, sixty-four, became the first officially consecrated virgin in almost 900 years when the Vatican revived a holy rite in 1970, one which had encouraged life-long vows of chastity among lay people. The tradition had ended in Britain in the 3rd century and was phased out entirely by the Church during the 10th century. Although the virgins have no official network or organization within the Church, according to the news agency Reuters, more than twenty-five countries have reinstituted the ancient rite in which virgins pledge themselves as servants of God. Freethinkers are aghast at such a cruel practice. (See entry for Virgin Mary.) {NY Daily News, 20 May 1997}
Virolleaud, Charles (1879–1968) Virolleaud, a freethinker, wrote The Legend of Christ (1908). {GS}
VIRTUAL ETHICAL SOCIETY: See entry for Jone Johnson.
VIRUSES, RELIGIOUS Religion is a virus of the mind, Richard Dawkins posits in Viruses of the Mind, the 1992 Voltaire Lecture. If it were judged by criteria best adapted to selecting true beliefs and beneficial behavior, religion would not be accepted, he holds. In the future, tests might be devised to show that religious viruses, like other self-replicators, are harmful to their hosts. In Free Inquiry (Summer 1993), the cover of which has the heading IS RELIGION A FORM OF INSANITY?, Dawkins develops his argument: “It is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies (followers of the Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon, who was convicted in 1982 of brainwashing converts and of various illegal activities), scientologists, and nuns. Like immune-deficient patients, children are wide open to mental infections that adults might brush off without effort.” (See entry for Richard Dawkins.)
[[Vischer, Friedrich Theodor (1807–1887) Vischer was a German art critic. Educated for the Church, he became a minister, then renounced theology and became professor at Zürich. In 1844, because of his Jahbücher der Gegenwart, Vischer was accused of blasphemy for his freethinking opinions, and he was suspended for two years. Vischer wrote Aesthetic, concerning the science of the beautiful. {BDF; RAT}
VISHNU In Hinduism, Vishnu is known as the Preserver. He has appeared as Krishna and as the Buddha, according to Hindus. {DCL}
Vispo, Adolfo (20th Century) Vispo, an Argentinean, is a member of the Ibero-American Commission, a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries.
Visscher, Maurice Bolkes (Born 1901) Dr. Visscher, a physician and professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota, signed Humanist Manifesto II. He wrote Chemistry and Medicine (1940) and Humanistic Perspectives in Medical Ethics (1972). In 1952, he was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Visser, H. (20th Century) A Dutch humanist, Visser spoke at the first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism. The conference was held in 1995 in Delphi, Greece.
Vitale, A. (20th Century) An Italian, Vitale addressed the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966).
Vitry, Guarin de (19th Century) A French author, Vitry wrote Rapid Examination of Christian Dogma, which he addressed to the Council of 1869. {BDF}
Vitzthum, Richard C. (1936– ) Vitzthum wrote Materialism: An Affirmative History and Definition (1995), a short but thorough history of materialism. He has chapters on Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, d’Holbach’s The System of Nature, and Büchner’s Force and Matter. In the present century, Vitzthum discusses the speculations about materialism by C. D. Broad, Roy Wood Sellars, Gilbert Ryle, D. M. Armstrong, John J. C. Smart, John R. Searle, and others. In a critique, Gordon Stein wrote that Vitzthum’s study is far better than that on materialism by F. A. Lange. {The American Rationalist, March-April 1996)
Viviani, René Raphael (1863–1925) Viviani was Minister of Labor under Clemenceau, and he secured the opening of the legal profession to women in France and other reforms. In his first speech as Minister, he created a sensation by saying that we have “slain the religious chimera” and “extinguished stars in the firmament which will never shine again.” Viviani was an agnostic. {RAT; RE}
Vizetelly, Henry (1820–1894) With his brother, Vizetelly started the Pictorial Times in London. In 1865 he went to Paris as correspondent of the Illustrated London News, remaining there until 1880. Vizetelly issued translations of Zola in 1884, and in 1888 he was fined £100 for publishing The Soil. In the following year, he courageously republished the whole of Zola’s novels and was condemned to three months in prison. He described his life experiences in Glances Back Through Seventy Years (1893). Vizetelly had no more regard for religion than did Zola. {RAT}
Vizzuet, Juan A. (20th Century) Vizzuet, a Mexican, spoke on new forms of production and the diffusion of art at the 1996 Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City.
Vladár, Leo V. (20th Century) Vladár, from Czechoslovakia, addressed the Third International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Oslo (1962).
Vloten, Johannes van (1818–1883)
Vloten was a Dutch author who studied theology at Leiden, receiving his Doctorate of Divinity degree in 1843. He then devoted himself to literature, translating Shakespeare, editing Spinoza, and writing a life of Spinoza. Vloten edited De Levensbode (1865). {BDF; RAT}
Voas, David (20th Century) Voas is author of The Bad News Bible: The New Testament (1995), in which he aims to make the least-read best-seller readable. He points out that studying the work can be an alarming experience. Jesus, for example, does not live up to his Good Shepherd reputation. And the promise of heaven comes from Paul, whose views on sex, women, and the family do little for his credibility. Voas is professor in the division of mathematics, science, and technology at New Mexico State University.
VOCABULARY: See entry for Language.
VOCAL VOCAL is an abbreviation for Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup, Inc. (See the entry for Jeanne Miller, its founder.)
Voelkel, Titus (Born 1841) A German lecturer and writer who was born in Prussian Poland, Voelkel was a sprecher of freethought associations and an editor of Neues Freireligioses Sonntags-Blatt at Magdenburg. He was prosecuted several times in 1888 for blasphemy and each time was acquitted. At the Paris Congress of Freethinkers in 1889, Voelkel represented several German societies. {BDF; PUT; RAT}
Vogel, Catherine (Died 1539) Vogel, a Polish noblewoman, was accused of being a heretic, and the Church set her ablaze along with others of her time who questioned religious doctrines. {U}
Vogel, Johann (17th Century) A propagandist who in 1649 wrote Meditationes emblematicae de restaurata pace Germaniae in Nuremberg, Vogel was a practicing Socinian prior to his forced recantation.
Voglet, Prosper (Born 1825) A Belgian singer, Voelkel was blinded through his baptism by a Catholic priest and, in consequence, earned his living as a street singer. His compositions are anti-religious, and many appeared in La Tribune du Peuple, which he edited. {BDF}
Vogt, Carl (1817–1895) Vogt, the son of a distinguished naturalist, was a German scientist, a geologist, a physiologist, an atheist, and a scientific materialist. Finngeir Hiorth has compared Vogt with Karl Marx, “but it is clear that Vogt’s anarchism and laissez-faire ideology were quite different from Marx’s ideas. Vogt spoke of ‘false prophets’ without thinking of Marx. But eventually his words applied to authoritarian Marxism.” (New Humanist, February 1994). In fact, he came to dislike Marx, and the hatred was mutual. Vogt at one time worked as an assistant for Louis Agassiz in Neuchâtel, met anarchists such as Michael Bakunin and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in Paris, and wrote books on physiology and science. According to Hiorth, Vogt came to denounce the middle class, religion, and all forms of government, and he called for the establishment of anarchy. He attacked Rudolph Wagner as a superstitious scientist who still believed in a Creator. Vogt’s importance, Hiorth writes, is that he “influenced the philosophical pattern of ‘scientific’ or physicalistic materialism, as different from historical and dialectical materialism. In this way Vogt played an important role in the rise of atheism and materialism in Germany. He once referred to Christmas as “the festival which brought the hypocrisy of humility into the world.” In addition Vogt’s activity as a political radical is of great interest.” Vogt’s lectures on Man, His Position in Creation and in the History of the Earth (1863) endorsed Darwinism. He contributed to the leading freethought journals of Germany and Switzerland. {BDF; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
VOICE OF REASON A quarterly, Voice of Reason is at PO Box 6656, Silver Spring, Maryland.
Voisin, Marcel (20th Century) Voisin, a professor of philosophy, is a Belgian who has written Vivre La Laïcite (Experiencing Humanism). For him, it is not enough “merely to suppress the reference to a divinity or the supernatural,” for moral teaching must build up alternate ideas. These include relativity of values; systematic doubt; concern about search for evidence; a constant endeavor to conquer rationality; an optimistic vision of man inspired by the thought “If pleasure is easy, happiness has to be taught”; promotion of a responsible citizenship and active civic duties; a special care about justice; self-awareness and curiosity about the world around us; and dialogue with others, generosity, and humor.
Volkmar, Gustav (1809–1893) Volkmar was a Swiss critic. Among his many rationalist works are The Gospel of Marcion (1852), Justin Martyr (1853), The Origin of the Gospels (1866), and Jesus and the First Christian Ages (1882). {BDF; RAT}
Volney, Constantin François de Chasseboeuf de [Comte] (1757–1820) A French scholar, Volney wrote Méditation sur les révolutions des empires (1791), popularizing religious skepticism. His work was influential both in England and in the United States, where he spent some time. His freethinking books were translated widely and stimulated much controversy because of their deistic attacks on Christianity. A friend of d’Holbach, Count Volney was a wealthy landlord who wrote and spoke for the division of landed property. During the Terror, he was imprisoned for ten months. When Napoleon asked him to become a colleague in the consulship, Volney declined. Volney also wrote A History of Samuel (1819), which sometimes is wrongly ascribed to Voltaire, and The Law of Nature. A religious tract alleged that during a storm, Volney became cowardly and threw himself on the ship’s deck and cried, “Oh, my God, my God!” When one of the passengers inquired, “There is a God, then, Monsieur Volney?, he responded, “Oh, yes, there is, there is. Lord save me!” But, when the vessel arrived in port, the story continued, Volney “returned to his atheistical sentiments.” The fictional story appeared in Tract Magazine (July 1832) and in the eighth volume of the Evangelical Magazine. Adolphe Bossange, in a notice prefixed to an 1838 edition of his works, gave the following account of Volney’s last hours: “His health, which had always been delicate, became languid, and soon he felt his end was approaching. It was worthy of his life. He dictated his will with the utmost calmness, and not abandoning at the last moment the idea which had never ceased to occupy his mind during twenty-five years and doubtless fearing that his labors would be brought to a cessation by his death, he devoted the sum of 24,000 francs to founding an annual prize for the best essay on the philosophical study of languages.” Three days prior, when Volney spoke to his doctor, he said, “I know the custom of your profession, but I wish you not to play on my imagination like that of other patients. I do not fear death. Tell me frankly what you think of my condition, for I have arrangements to make.” When the physician appeared to hesitate, Volney said, “I know enough. Let them bring a notary.” Abbé Migne, in the Catholic Dictionary, wrote, “It appears that in his last moments he refused the consolations of religion.” {BDF; CE; FO; FUK; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de (1694–1778) One of the most beloved of writers named by other humanists, Voltaire is a towering genius in intellectual and literary history. A skeptic and deist, he has the distinction of having merited thirty specific works on the Vatican’s index of prohibited reading. Son of the Paris notary Arouet—Voltaire is a later pen-name—he was educated by the Jesuits, who found that early on he distinguished himself by his wit. Among his witty Gallic morsels: “England has 42 religions and only 2 sauces.” Of martyrs, he wrote, “We can only burst into laughter at all the humbug we are told about martyrs. . . . Can it be seriously repeated, that the Romans condemned seven virgins, each seventy years old, to pass through the hands of all the young men of the city of Ancyra—those Romans who punished the Vestals with death for the least gallantry?” Today he is best known for his Candide (1759; the word comes from the Latin for “glowing with innocence”), in which he satirizes Leibniz’s philosophy of optimism. “Let us cultivate our garden,” he concludes in common sense fashion instead of advising that we should spend our lives speculating about unanswerable questions. Voltaire opposed atheism as well as materialism, reportedly saying of Helvétius and Holbach, although some claim it is a false quotation, that “if God did not exist, he would have to be invented.” He smiled, however, that “atheism is the vice of a few intelligent people.” He thought Christianity was ideal for chambermaids and tailors but thought deism was best for the elite. He had learned about deism as a boy, for his godfather, a priest, is said to have taught him at the age of three a poem by J. B. Rousseau (not Jean Jacques Rousseau). That was a poem in which Moses and religious revelations in general are derided as being fraudulent. Voltaire’s anticlericalism was such that he called the Jews “an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition.” In “For and Against,” Voltaire wrote, “I am not a Christian.” He also wrote
I tried to believe in God, but I confess to you that God meant nothing in my life, and that in my secret heart I too felt a void where my childhood faith had been. But probably this feeling belonds only to inviduals in transition. The grandchildren of these pessimists will frolic in the freedom of their lives, and have more happiness than poor Christians darkened with fear of Hell.
This he confirmed in a letter to Frederick the Great:
Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.
For a satirical pamphlet on the death of Louis XIV Voltaire was sent to the Bastille for a year (1716) and, afterwards, was committed again for a quarrel with the Chevalier de Rohan—he threatened to duel his footmen, having been assaulted by them. On his liberation Voltaire went to England at the invitation of Lord Bolingbroke, where he became acquainted with the English freethinkers. He spent most of his life in exile for the right of free speech, moving to Prussia and, from 1758 until his death, on the border of Switzerland in the event he had to flee. “During all this time,” McCabe wrote, “most of the chief bishops and archbishops lived in open license and luxury, and their modern successors profess to be shocked at the wicked Voltaire!” According to Wheeler, Voltaire dedicated Mahomet to the Pope, “who was unable to see that its shafts were aimed at the pretences of the church.” Wheeler adds that in 1750 Voltaire accepted Frederick II’s invitation to reside at his court, “but he could not help laughing at the great king’s poetry.” Wheeler holds that Voltaire “did more than any other man of his century to abolish torture and other relics of barbarism, and to give just notions of history. To the last he continued to wage war against intolerance and superstition,” using more than one hundred thirty different pen-names. Parton’s Life of Voltaire (Vol. II) tells of the following insight into Voltaire’s personality: While the great philosopher was living at Ferney in 1768, he gave a curious exhibition of that profane sportiveness which was a strong element in his character. On Easter Sunday he took his Secretary Wagniere with him to commune at the village church, and also “to lecture a little those scoundrels who steal continually.” Apprised of Voltaire’s sermon on theft, the Bishop of Anneci rebuked him, and finally “forbade every curate, priest, and monk of his diocese to confess, absolve, or give the communion to the seigneur of Ferney, without his express orders, under pain of interdiction.” With a wicked light in his eyes, Voltaire said he would commune in spite of the Bishop; nay, that the ceremony should be gone through in his chamber. Then ensued an exquisite comedy. Feigning a deadly sickness, Voltaire took to his bed. The surgeon, who found his pulse was excellent, was bamboozled into certifying that he was in danger of death. Then the priest was summoned to administer the last consolation. The poor devil at first objected, but Voltaire threatened him with legal proceedings for refusing to bring the sacrament to a dying man, who had never been excommunicated. This was accompanied with a grave declaration that M. de Voltaire “had never ceased to respect and to practice the Catholic religion.” Eventually the priest came “half dead with fear.” Voltaire demanded absolution at once, but the Capuchin pulled out of his pocket a profession of faith, drawn up by the Bishop, which Voltaire was required to sign. Then the comedy deepened. Voltaire kept demanding absolution, and the distracted priest kept presenting the document for his signature. At last the Lord of Ferney had his way. The priest gave him the wafer, and Voltaire declared, “Having God in my mouth,” that he forgave his enemies. As soon as he left the room, Voltaire leapt briskly out of bed, where a minute before he seemed unable to move. “I have had a little trouble,” he said to Wagniere, “with this comical genius of a Capuchin; but that was only for amusement, and to accomplish a good purpose. Let us take a turn in the garden. I told you I would be confessed and commune in my bed, in spite of M. Biord.” His Mahomet remains controversial. In 1994, when it was proposed to stage the play in Geneva, representatives of rival Islamic cultural centers denounced the threatened “blasphemy,” and vague threats were made as to what might befall the actors, the directors, even the theatre-goers. In 1742 when the play had first been staged, an austere Catholic movement based at the Abbey of Port-Royal was similarly successful in stopping the production. A profound and philosophic discussion of Voltaire’s achievements is found in Encyclopedia of Unbelief, in which Paul Edwards discusses how Voltaire covered the problem of evil, the argument from design, mortality, and miracles. What, Voltaire was asked, would he say if he saw the sun stop, if all the dead came back to life, and if all mountains fell into the ocean at the same time. “I would turn Manichean,” replied Voltaire. “I would say that there is one principle that unmakes what the other principle has made.” More than any of the other Founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson admired Voltaire. He had begun to read Voltaire during his student days at the College of William and Mary. While America’s envoy to France, he acquired a complete set of Voltaire’s works and also shipped a copy of Voltaire’s memoirs back to James Madison in America. At Monticello Jefferson showed off a plaster bust of Voltaire made by the French sculptor Houdon and an inkwell bearing the likeness of the French philosophe, said to have been given him by Lafayette during his farewell tour to America in 1824. Michael Foot (New Humanist, December 1988) states that, if virtue consists of doing good and if loving mankind with a passion constitutes being a saint, then Voltaire is one. He quotes Voltaire’s witty description of a true saint, Professor Zapata, of the University of Salamanca: “He isolated truth from falsehood and separated religion from fanaticism. He taught and practised virtue. He was gentle, benevolent, modest; and was roasted at Valladolid in the year of grace, 1631.” His criticism was not merely directed against Christianity, for his Mahomet (1742) dealt with the fanaticism of Islam. In his Selected Works, Voltaire apparently glimpsed into his own future when he wrote, “The man who says to men, ‘Believe as I do, or God will damn you,’ will presently say, ‘Believe as I do, or I shall kill you.’ ” “Animals have these advantages over man,” Voltaire wrote in 1769. “They never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death; they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.” A translation in English of Voltaire’s Philosophic Dictionary is not in print, but a two-volume work in 1856 was advertised as the first American stereotyped edition. Under the A’s, Voltaire included such as the following: Abraham, Adam, Adultery, Angels, Apocrypha, Apostate, Apostle, Ararat, Arianism, Aristotle, Army, Armies, Arts and Fine Arts, Ass, Astrology, Astronomy, Atoms, Avbarice, Augustine, Austerities, Authors, Authority. Under “Religion” in the dictionary, Voltaire starts as follows:
The Epicureans, who had no religion, recommended retirement from public affairs, study, and concord. The sect was a society of friends, for friendship was their principal dogma.
He then says, while contemplating nature,
when one of those genii who fill the spaces between worlds came down to me in order to reveal some of God’s works. . . . [The genie took him to a desolate spot to show him] the 23,000 Jews who danced before a calf, together with the 24,000 who were slain while ravishing Midianitish women. . . . “Here,” said the spirit,” are the 12 millions of Americans, slain in their own country for not having been baptised . . . etc.
Voltaire, in Micromégas, wrote about “aliens from outer space” visiting earth. They came from Saturn and from a planet in the solar system of the star Sirius, sometimes traveling by comet, sometimes by light waves. Unlike humans, with their five or six senses, the Sirian had a thousand senses although the poor Saturnian had only seventy-two. Presumably, the expression, “aliens from outer space,” was first used by Voltaire. The work contains jibes at the Jesuits, the sage who believes “God does everything for me,” and other philosophical or religious outlooks. As noted by Jim Herrick, the work approves “the Lockean who thinks humans must rely on their senses for knowledge, must revere the eternal power, and be content to believe ‘that more things are possible than we like to think.’ “ Interesting fabrications have occurred concerning Voltaire’s death. One is that in his last illness Voltaire sent for Dr. Tronchin. When the Doctor came, he found Voltaire in the greatest agony, exclaiming with the utmost horror, “I am abandoned by God and man.” He then supposedly said, “Doctor, I will give you half of what I am worth, if you will give me six months’ life.” The doctor answered, “Sir, you cannot live six weeks.” Voltaire replied, “Then I shall go to hell, and you will go with me!” and soon after expired. Carlyle, the historian, relates the following: “Two days before that mournful death, M. l’Abbé Mignot, his nephew, went to seek the Curé of St. Sulpice and the Abbé Gautier, and brought them into his uncle’s sick room; who, on being informed that the Abbé Gautier was there, ‘Ah, well!’ said be, ‘give him my compliments and my thanks.’ The Abbé spoke some words to him, exhorting him to patience. The Curé of St. Sulpice then came forward, having announced himself, and asked of M. de Voltaire, elevating his voice, if he acknowledged the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ? The sick man pushed one of his hands against the Curé’s calotte (coif), shoving him back, and cried, turning abruptly to the other side, ‘Let me die in peace (Laissez-moi mourir en paix).’ The Curé seemingly considered his person soiled, and his coif dishonored, by the touch of the philosopher. He made the sicknurse give him a little brushing, and then went out with the Abbé Gautier.” However, the Columbia Encyclopedia has a different account:
In 1778, his 84th year, Voltaire attended the first performance of his tragedy, Irène, in Paris. His journey and his reception were a triumph and apotheosis, but the emotion was too much for him and he died of uremia in Paris soon afterward. In order to obtain Christian burial he signed a partial retraction of his writings. This was considered insufficient by the church, but he refused to sign a more general retraction. To a friend he gave the following written declaration, “I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting persecution.”
“Contrary to Catholic libels,” wrote McCabe, “he died peacefully (at 27 Rue des Sts.-Pères, near 1 Quai Voltaire), and he courteously declined to see the priest who wanted to be present.” Richard Holmes described the end as follows:
Voltaire was exhausted, and in the privacy of his bedroom spitting blood. He died in much pain on May 30, 1778. He had received a Jesuit priest in his dying hours, whom he seems to have teased, as in the old days: on being urged to renounce the devil, Voltaire gently replied, “This is no time for making new enemies.” But to the relief of Enlightenment Europe, he refused to renounce any of his works.
An abbot secretly conveyed Voltaire’s corpse to an abbey in Champagne, where he was buried in ‘unholy ground’ but given Christian burial. His remains were brought back to Paris during the Revolution in 1791 and buried in the Panthéon. Carlyle’s description was as follows:
He expired about a quarter past eleven at night, with the most perfect tranquillity, after having suffered the cruelest pains in consequence of those fatal drugs, which his own imprudence, and especially that of the persons who should have looked to it, made him swallow. Ten minutes before his last breath he took the hand of Morand, his valet-de-chambre, who was, watching him; pressed it, and said, “Adieu, mon cher Morand, je me meurs (Adieu, my dear Morand, I am gone).” These are the last words uttered by M. de Voltaire.
Sir Charles Morgan published further details, using extracts from a letter by Dr. Burard who, as assistant physician, was with Voltaire in his last moments:
I feel happy in being able, while paying homage to truth, to destroy the effects of the lying stories which have been told respecting the last moments of M. de Voltaire. I was, by office, one of those who were appointed to watch the whole progress of his illness, with M. M. Tronchin, Lorry, and Try, his medical attendants. I never left him for an instant during his last moments, and I can certify that we invariably observed in him the same strength of character, though his disease was necessarily attended with horrible pain. (Here follow the details of his case.) We positively forbade him to speak in order to prevent the increase of a spitting of blood, with which he was attacked; still he continued to communicate with us by means of little cards, on which he wrote his questions; we replied to him verbally, and if he was not satisfied, he always made his observations to us in writing. He therefore retained his faculties up to the last moment, and the fooleries which have been attributed to him are deserving of the greatest contempt. It could not even be said that such or such person had related any circumstance of his death as being witness to it; for at the last, admission to his chamber was forbidden to any person. Those who came to obtain intelligence respecting the patient, waited in the saloon, and other apartments at hand. The proposition, therefore, which has been put in the mouth of Marshal Richelieu is as unfounded as the rest.
Further proof that Voltaire made no recantation, according to Foote, lies in the fact that the Bishop of Troyes sent a peremptory dispatch to the Prior of Scellieres, which lay in his diocese, forbidding him to inter the heretic’s remains. The dispatch, however, arrived too late, and Voltaire’s ashes remained there until 1791, when they were removed to Paris and placed in the Pantheon, by order of the National Assembly. Foote insists that Voltaire made no recantation and refused to utter or sign a confession of faith. With the connivance of his nephew, in fact, he tricked the Church into granting him a decent burial, not choosing to be flung into a ditch or buried like a dog. His heresy was never seriously questioned at the time, and the clergy actually clamored for the expulsion of the Prior, who had allowed his body to be interred in a church vault. Another slander appears to emanate from the Abbé Barruel, who was so well informed about Voltaire that he called him “the dying Atheist,” when, as was well known at the time, he was a Deist. In the 1860s when Voltaire’s tomb was opened in the 1860s, Voltaire was no longer there. Fanatics had pillaged his grave, throwing the remains onto a rubbish heap. His brain, kept in a jar and sold at auction to an unknown buyer, remains somewhere. His heart, bequeathed by the third marquis de Villette to the bishop of Orléans, who sold it to Napoleon III, who gave it to the National Library in Paris, remains in the National Library in Paris. (See entry for Intellecutals. Also see Norman L. Torrey’s article on Voltaire in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8. For samples of Voltaire’s wit and wisdom, see the entry for Vampires in the present work. Also, see Richard Holmes, “Voltaire’s Grin,” The New York Review of Books, 30 November 1995—the extensive article includes Voltaire’s writing about priests of every denomination who “rise from an incestuous bed, manufacure a hundred versions of God, then eat and drink God, then piss and shit God.”) {CB; CE; CL; ER; EU, Paul Edwards; FO; FUK; HNS2; LP; JMR; JMRH; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}
VOLTAIRE SOCIETY A Board of Directors composed of four governs the Voltaire Society of America: George W. Gowen, chairman; James W. Reid, president; Garry Agpar, secretary-treasurer; and Katrina de Carbonnel. On the Web: <http://humanities.uchicago.edu/homes/VSA>. By e-mail one can receive information about the newsletter: <garryapgar@aol.com>.
VOLTAIRE’S HOME AT FERNEY The French government in 1998 was close to purchasing Voltaire’s home at Ferney and turning it into a Centre culturel de rencontres to be known as L’Auberge de l’Europe. The title comes from Voltaire who liked to refer to himself as l’aubergiste de l’Europe (the innkeeper of Europe) because of the numerous visitors he received at Ferney over the years. The Centre, which will be set up on Voltaire’s former estate, is seen as having essentially three roles: (1) as a museum devoted to Voltaire’s life and work; (2) as a focus of artistic creation, notably in the realm of the theater; and (3) as a center for the defense of human rights and of writers, like a Salman Rushdie, who are victims of persecution. Concurrently, there are plans at Ferney for a Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle. {Voltaire Society of America Newsletter, April 1998. For information, e-mail: <garryapgar@aol.com>.}
[[von Behrens, Dierk (1938– ) Von Behrens arrived in Australia from Jaffa, Palestine, in 1951. He was founding secretary of the Humanist Society of South Australia (1962) and later was President of the Humanist Society of Canberra. In 1976 he initiated the first bibliography of humanism for the National Library. His interests include voluntary euthanasia, pro-choice, social justice, and participative democracy. {SWW}
von Braun, Wilhelm (19th Century) A Swedish poet, von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical warfare in his work, according to Robertson. {JMR}
von Frankenberg, Gerhard (20th Century) Representing Germany, von Frankenberg addressed the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture in Amsterdam (1952). At the 1968 Second European Conference (1968) in Hannover, von Frankenberg presided.
von Schiller: See entry for Johann Schiller
von Sydow, Max (Carl Adolph von Sydow) (1929– ) Von Sydow, the Swedish-born actor, is said “to look like God,” or at least the one many Scandinavians envision. In the words of one Scandinavian Lutheran on the Internet, Von Sydow is tall, gaunt, and has white hair, pale skin, grey eyes. “In dark clothes, he stands on a lone, cold, wind-swept cliff, under a grey sky, gazing out over an empty grey sea. He has all the existential anxiety of ancient Odin. He knows he’s not the God we’d like him to be, that God does not exist, but he is too proud to waste words explaining himself or apologizing. It makes him rather sad that we think God should be something else, but he’s resigned himself to the situation.” Von Sydow acted at Malmo Stadsteater (1955–1960) and Stockholm’s Dramaten. Ingmar Bergman movies he has played in are “The Seventh Insight” (1956), “The Face” (1958), “As In A Mirror” (1961), and “The Shame” (1968). He also was in “The Man From Nazareth” (1965), “The Exorcist” (1973), and “Flash Gordon” (1980). During the filming of the “Exorcist,” Von Sydow had troubles with his lines. His director, William Friedkin, said, “I threw the script on the bed, grabbed him, and said ‘What the fuck is wrong?’ He said, ‘I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in this,’ I said, ‘But Max, you played Christ in ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ He said, ‘Yes. But I played him as a man.’ ” {CA; Thomas D. Clagett, William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession, and Reality, 1990; E}
von Sydow, Max (Carl Adolph von Sydow) (10 Apr 1929 - ) Von Sydow, the Swedish-born actor, is said “to look like God,” or at least the one many Scandinavians envision. In the words of one Scandinavian Lutheran on the Internet, Von Sydow is tall, gaunt, and has white hair, pale skin, grey eyes. “In dark clothes, he stands on a lone, cold, wind-swept cliff, under a grey sky, gazing out over an empty grey sea. He has all the existential anxiety of ancient Odin. He knows he’s not the God we’d like him to be, that God does not exist, but he is too proud to waste words explaining himself or apologizing. It makes him rather sad that we think God should be something else, but he’s resigned himself to the situation.” Von Sydow acted at Malmo Stadsteater (1955–1960) and Stockholm’s Dramaten. Ingmar Bergman movies he has played in are The Seventh Insight (1956); The Face (1958); As In A Mirror (1961); and The Shame (1968). He also was in The Man From Nazareth (1965); The Exorcist (1973); and Flash Gordon (1980). During the filming of the Exorcist, Von Sydow had troubles with his lines. His director, William Friedkin, said, “I threw the script on the bed, grabbed him, and said ‘What the fuck is wrong?’ He said, ‘I don’t believe in God, and I don’t believe in this,’ I said, ‘But Max, you played Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told.’ He said, ‘Yes. But I played him as a man.’ ” {CA; Thomas D. Clagett, William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession, and Reality, 1990; E}
Vonnegut, Bernard (1914–1997)
Vonnegut was a physicist, one of two researchers who first figured out how to wring more raindrops from cloud cover for croplands below. He taught atmospheric sciences at the State University of New York at Albany. During the 1940s, when his colleague Vincent J. Schaefer found that a tiny grain of dry ice produced millions of ice crystals when dropped into a cloud of water droplets below the freezing point, Vonnegut established that silver iodide got better results in nucleating clouds than did dry ice.
About his brother, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote
There is original virtue as well as original sin. My late brother, Bernard Vonnegut, whom I loved, had original virtue. He was a Ph. D. physical chemist out of M.I.T., famous for discovering that silver-iodide particles can make it snow or rain sometimes. From birth to death, Bernard was merrily appreciative of all the physical universe was doing, and was always generous and amiable, although somewhat absent-minded, no matter what was going on in the human sphere.… When he died of cancer at the age of 82 last April, a widower for 25 years with five sons, he had become, arguably, the world’s outstanding theoretician about thunderstorms. And, as I have said, Bernard was kind and reasonable. He was funny, often verging on hilarious, because devising and carrying out experiments was for him so terrifically amusing. It was almost as though, man and boy, he were playing jokes on Mother Nature, putting salt in her sugar bowl, say, to make her reveal a previously unsuspected facet of her personality.
Following Vonnegut’s death from cancer, a private non-religious service was held. Peter, one of his five sons, has confirmed that his father was not a member of any organized faith. {The New York Times, 27 April 1997; The New York Times Magazine, 4 January 1998; Peter Vonnegut to WAS, 28 Apr 1997}
Vonnegut, Clemens (19th Century) Vonnegut wrote A Proposed Guide for Instruction in Morals from the Standpoint of a Freethinker (published 1900). {FUS}
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. (1922– )
Vonnegut, a fourth generation German-American, has said, “For at least four generations my family has been proudly skeptical of organized religion.” His father designed a Unitarian chapel, and Vonnegut is a nominal Unitarian.
Once described by Graham Greene as “one of the best living American writers,” Vonnegut writes wry, whimsical, and satirical works about organized religion and the horrors of contemporary life. His Slaughterhouse Five (1969) appealed to collegiates, although some have complained that he shows the lack of humanity which his works advocate. Pollution of the environment, dehumanization, mass death: All rate his disapproval as he evaluates this latter half of the century, despairing of the human condition. Martin Seymour-Smith, however, criticizes his work, saying its black pessimism, guiltily convoluted irony, and black humor tend to rob his work of lucidity. Others have objected to such of Vonnegut’s statements as, “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.” In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut wrote, “During World War II, while I was serving with the Third Army in Germany, I removed a belt buckle from the uniform of a dead German soldier. The lettering on the buckle read Gott Mit Uns (God Is With Us).” “So it goes,” he often comments about the human condition in which we find ourselves. Cat’s Cradle (1963) has Deweyan overtones of pragmatism, and many of his short stories also show humanistic touches. Its character, Bokonon, rejects the New Testament message of “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” to “Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea of what is going on.” Bokonon, like a guru-figure, is humorous, anarchistic, pleasant, humanistic, and skeptical. To him, only man is sacred. Well-meaning lies help humanity more than absolute truths, he holds. What is sacred is not the beautiful sunrises, sunsets, and other delights of nature: What is sacred in Bokononism is man. Just man. In 1969, J. Michael Crichton who had then received fame for his Andromeda Strain and since has become known for his Jurassic Park, wrote in New Republic (26 April 1969):
A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. . . . The ultimate difficulty with Vonnegut is precisely this: that he refuses to say who is wrong. The simplest way . . . is to say that everything is wrong but the author. Any number of writers have done it, with good success. But Vonnegut refuses. He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties. His commentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is the same as his comment on all other deaths: “So it goes,” he says and nothing more.
His work also includes Player Piano (1951) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Life, Vonnegut appears to say in his writings that some term “wacko stories,” is a series of errors, orchestrated by a few mighty technocrats whose power is leading humanity into the ridiculousness of these our times. He neatly brings the message, but he implies, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” So it goes! In a 1994 concert, the Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble performed a Vonnegut poem, of which critic Bernard Holland wrote the following: “After intermission came Edgar David Grana’s choral setting of ‘Stones, Time and Elements,’ a ‘Humanist Requiem’ in poetry written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. What Mr. Grana’s curious jumble of music does most egregiously is render Mr. Vonnegut helpless. Through the maze of overlapping musical styles, rhythms, meters and instrumental colors words rarely penetrated. All the musical gestures are familiar but are rearranged in new contexts. Post-modernism is meant to thrive on nonsense but here drowns under its weight.” So it goes! Whereas the 19th century boasted large numbers of Unitarians who were writers, Vonnegut is one of the few contemporary Unitarian authors. Asked why, he once said contemporary Unitarianism appears not to be so intellectually appealing in our time as it was in Emerson’s and Coleridge’s era. His Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991) confirmed this, for he wrote, “I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot).” In 1992, Vonnegut was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association (AHA), of which he had become Honorary President and was on the editorial board of The Humanist. He is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and in 1993 accepted an honorary membership in the Secular Humanist Society of New York. In 1994, when AHA President Michael Werner battled with the two co-editors of The Humanist, both cited editorial autonomy and left. This led Vonnegut to pull his name from the magazine’s editorial advisory board. In doing so, he accused the AHA of being “highly politicized,” adding that he might also resign his honorary presidency. He did not, however. Timequake (1997) included the following:
I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. That we have an organization, a boring business, is to let others know we are numerous. We would prefer to live our lives as humanists and not talk about it or think amore about it than we think about breathing. Are we enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn’t like that. I thought that was too much to lose. I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much. I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. . . . When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.” . . . The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the humanists’ Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them. {CA; CE; E; HNS2; The Village Voice, 6 Sep 1994; TYD; U}
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. (11 Nov 1922 - ) Vonnegut, a fourth generation German-American, has said, “For at least four generations my family has been proudly skeptical of organized religion.” His father designed a Unitarian chapel, and Vonnegut is a nominal Unitarian. Once described by Graham Greene as “one of the best living American writers,” Vonnegut writes wry, whimsical, and satirical works about organized religion and the horrors of contemporary life. His Slaughterhouse Five (1969) appealed to collegiates, although some have complained that he shows the lack of humanity which his works advocate. Pollution of the environment, dehumanization, mass death: All rate his disapproval as he evaluates this latter half of the century, despairing of the human condition. Martin Seymour-Smith, however, criticizes his work, saying its black pessimism, guiltily convoluted irony, and black humor tend to rob his work of lucidity. Others have objected to such of Vonnegut’s statements as, “Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.” In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut wrote, “During World War II, while I was serving with the Third Army in Germany, I removed a belt buckle from the uniform of a dead German soldier. The lettering on the buckle read Gott Mit Uns (God Is With Us).” “So it goes,” he often comments about the human condition in which we find ourselves. Cat’s Cradle (1963) has Deweyan overtones of pragmatism, and many of his short stories also show humanistic touches. Its character, Bokonon, rejects the New Testament message of “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” to “Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea of what is going on.” Bokonon, like a guru-figure, is humorous, anarchistic, pleasant, humanistic, and skeptical. To him, only man is sacred. Well-meaning lies help humanity more than absolute truths, he holds. What is sacred is not the beautiful sunrises, sunsets, and other delights of nature: What is sacred in Bokononism is man. Just man. In 1969, J. Michael Crichton who had then received fame for his Andromeda Strain and since has become known for his Jurassic Park, wrote in New Republic (26 April 1969):
A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. . . . The ultimate difficulty with Vonnegut is precisely this: that he refuses to say who is wrong. The simplest way . . . is to say that everything is wrong but the author. Any number of writers have done it, with good success. But Vonnegut refuses. He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties. His commentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is the same as his comment on all other deaths: “So it goes,” he says and nothing more.
His work also includes Player Piano (1951) and Deadeye Dick (1982). Life, Vonnegut appears to say in his writings that some term “wacko stories,” is a series of errors, orchestrated by a few mighty technocrats whose power is leading humanity into the ridiculousness of these our times. He neatly brings the message, but he implies, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” So it goes! In a 1994 concert, the Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble performed a Vonnegut poem, of which critic Bernard Holland wrote the following: “After intermission came Edgar David Grana’s choral setting of ‘Stones, Time and Elements,’ a ‘Humanist Requiem’ in poetry written by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. What Mr. Grana’s curious jumble of music does most egregiously is render Mr. Vonnegut helpless. Through the maze of overlapping musical styles, rhythms, meters and instrumental colors words rarely penetrated. All the musical gestures are familiar but are rearranged in new contexts. Post-modernism is meant to thrive on nonsense but here drowns under its weight.” So it goes! Whereas the 19th century boasted large numbers of Unitarians who were writers, Vonnegut is one of the few contemporary Unitarian authors. Asked why, he once said contemporary Unitarianism appears not to be so intellectually appealing in our time as it was in Emerson’s and Coleridge’s era. His Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage of the 1980s (1991) confirmed this, for he wrote, “I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot).” In 1992, Vonnegut was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association (AHA), of which he had become Honorary President and was on the editorial board of The Humanist. He is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and in 1993 accepted an honorary membership in the Secular Humanist Society of New York. In 1994, when AHA President Michael Werner battled with the two co-editors of The Humanist, both cited editorial autonomy and left. This led Vonnegut to pull his name from the magazine’s editorial advisory board. In doing so, he accused the AHA of being “highly politicized,” adding that he might also resign his honorary presidency. He did not, however. Timequake (1997) included the following:
I am Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, whose headquarters in Amherst, New York, I have never seen. I succeeded the late author and biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov in that functionless capacity. That we have an organization, a boring business, is to let others know we are numerous. We would prefer to live our lives as humanists and not talk about it or think amore about it than we think about breathing. Are we enemies of members of organized religions? No. My great war buddy Bernard V. O’Hare, now dead, lost his faith as a Roman Catholic during World War Two. I didn’t like that. I thought that was too much to lose. I had never had faith like that, because I had been raised by interesting and moral people who, like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were nonetheless skeptics about what preachers said was going on. But I knew Bernie had lost something important and honorable. Again, I did not like that, did not like it because I liked him so much. I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. . . . When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.” . . . The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, who had syphilis, said that only a person of deep faith could afford the luxury of religious skepticism. Humanists, by and large educated, comfortably middle-class persons with rewarding lives like mine, find rapture enough in secular knowledge and hope. Most people can’t. Voltaire, French author of Candide, and therefore the humanists’ Abraham, concealed his contempt for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church from his less educated, simpler-minded, and more frightened employees, because he knew what a stabilizer their religion was for them. {CA; CE; E; HNS2; The Village Voice, 6 Sep 1994; TYD; U}
Voo, G. W. van der (Born 1806)
A Dutch writer, Voo for more than half a century was a schoolmaster and teacher of the French language at Rotterdam. He contributed articles to De Dageraad. {BDF}
VOODOO Vodoun or Vaudou, commonly called voodoo, refers to the Vodoun religious beliefs and practices which are West African in origin (In Ouidah, Benin, the center of the Vodoun religion, it is called vodoun) and are found in Haiti, where Voudou is found for example in the village of Soukre. Mixed with Catholicism and West Indian influences, voodoo is based upon an animistic belief in Gran Met (God), Guine (ancestral Africa, particularly the area of Dahomey, now called Benin), and loa (spirits). The African spirits have been identified with certain Christian saints among practitioners who claim also to be Catholics. Houngans (sorcerers) are believed to be able to use for evil purposes a zombi or zombie (a person raised from the grave)—such an individual appears to resemble the so-called “walking dead” (and the term is also used to describe drugged individuals who appear not to be in command of their faculties). However, such necromancy, or appeal to the spirits of the dead to reveal the future or influence the course of events, is claimed to be of a positive nature by its adherents. Outsiders, however, have the picture of a group of worshipers who speak of hounsies, who bite into a chicken’s neck as they dance to haunting drum beats, who stick pins in dolls in order to bring unhappiness to its enemies, and so forth. In the various voodooistic services, ecstatic trances and magical practices can be involved. Related movements are Candomblé, a voodooistic religion found in Brazil; Santeria, which is found in Cuba and in which Yoruba deities are identified with Roman Catholic saints; Wanga or Ouanga, sorcery or witchcraft with Angolan overtones; and Obeah, which is found throughout the West Indies, the Guianas, and the southeastern United States, in which sorcery and magic ritual are used. Non-believers rarely observe authentic services “back in the bush,” although the present writer has gotten blood on his pants after a dancing worshiper bit into a live chicken’s neck, then veered backwards as if in a trance, knocking the accompanying musicians off a small Haitian stage. Journalist Howard W. French has written extensively about Voodoo. In 1996 in Benin, he met Daagbo Hounon Houna, the Supreme Chief of the Grand Council of the Vodoun Religion of Benin, whose followers think of him as their Pope and throw themselves at his feet and kiss the sand before him. Vodoun, the leader laments, has been vilified like few other religions. “When the first Europeans walked on our soil, “Mr. Houna said, speaking in his native Fon language through a translator, “they began calling us fetishists. That was the first of many efforts by whites to introduce their beliefs and destroy our culture.” He explained that there is one god, Mawu, but countless names for this supreme deity’s manifestations—spirits like Gu, Legba, Damballa, and Hevioso. Vodoun, he added, has nothing to do with the common Western perception of sticking pins in dolls to persecute real or imagined enemies. “There are women who cannot conceive children, men who cannot find work, and elders who cannot find peace. Vodoun restores hope. It protects our land and brings the cool breeze.” French wrote, “To the charge that their ancestor [Viceroy Don Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian who allegedly came to Ouidah in 1754 to run a Portuguese slaving fort) was a principal actor in the deportation of many thousands of slaves, today’s de Souzas portray the first Viceroy as something of a humanist. ‘Our ancestor traded in slaves, but it isn’t fair just to stop there,’ said Marcellin Norberto de Souza, son of the sixth Viceroy, whose white mustache and hair offsetting his dark sin are characteristic of the deSouza clan. ‘He was in fact a very generous man living in what you might call a barbarous time.’ ” This, it was noted, was uttered at the very site where 1,500,000 million “pieces of ebony” were shipped off to the Western hemisphere. (See entries for Candomblé and Santeria. Christianity, to some, is “the white man’s voodoo.”) {CE; Howard W. French, The New York Times, 10 March 1996}
VOODOO, WHITE MAN’S AND WHITE WOMAN’S : See entry for Christianity.
Vosmaer, Carel (1826–1888) Vosmaer was a Dutch writer who edited the Tydstroom (1858–1859) and Spectator (1860–1873). Vosmaer also wrote works on Dutch art and other subjects. {BDF}
[[Voss, Anna (20th Century)
Voss is one of the counsels for Secular Nation, the International Atheist Alliance magazine. She holds that religion “is greatly to blame for women being raised as tame, frightened, and passive individuals,” and she disagrees with the good religious people who use the phrase “passed away.” “When I die,” she says, “tell people that I died. Anything else is worse than euphemism.” “Away” is an undesirable concept in relation to dying, she reasons, for we are taught to throw things “away.” In 1996, she and her husband Howard Kreisner were reportedly in the process of an amicable divorce. Voss resigned as President of San Diego’s Atheist Coalition upon moving to Los Angeles. {Secular Nation, Fall 1995}
Voss, Carl Hermann (20th Century) Voss wrote Rabbi and Minister: The Friendship of Stephen S. Wise and John Haynes Holmes (1980). {EW}
Voss, Johann Heinrich (1751–1826) Voss, a German poet and philologist, studied for the Church at Göttingen but became a rationalist and turned to philology. He was editor of the Musenalmanach and in 1781 published a translation of Homer’s Odyssey. He then translated into German Vergil’s Bucolics, the Iliad, Horace, Theocritus, Tibullus, Aristophanes, and others. He rendered into German thirteen of Shakespeare’s plays (1818–1829). In 1805 he was appointed professor of classical philology at Heidelberg University. When his personal friend, Count von Stolberg, joined the Roman Church, Voss severely attacked him. {RAT}
Voss, William J. (1921–1997) Voss, a Life Member of the Freeedom From Religion Foundation, was founder and president of Voss Industries, Inc., a company which pioneered the design and application of V-band couplings for industrial, defense, and aerospace applications. Robert Ingersoll was one of his favorite authors, and he was active in humanist chapters. {Freethought Today, November 1997}
Vostrovsky, Jaroslav (Born 1836) Born in Bohemia, Vostrovsky traveled in Europe and went to America in 1864. He engaged in business enterprises in Nebraska, Iowa, and California. Vostrovsky contributed in the Bohemian language to liberal journals and was vice-president of the California State Liberal Union. {PUT}
Sarah Vowell, Editor/Writer art
Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor to the NPR show "This American Life," as well as a columnist at Salon Magazine and otherwise active essayist. On the "This American Life" broadcast on the weekend of April 2-4, 1999, she told the story of surviving three apocalypses. When she was a child, she grew up with very religious parents. She refers, at one point, to her "atheistic adulthood."
Here are some further details from the contributor, transcribed directly from "This American Life," episode 125: "Apocalypse," Act 3 (http://www.thislife.org/pages/archive99.html):
[Vowell discusses growing up in a fundamentalist family. She describes a lifelong recurring dream in which she's left behind after the Rapture, but gets to heaven by refusing to purchase goods with the Mark of the Beast on them and being executed.] "I still have that dream sometimes, and thinking about it now, as an atheistic adult, I realize how many things are going on in it, that it is a microcosm of my childhood world."
Check out her website, http://www.thislife.org for archives of her show.
Voysey, Charles (Born 1828) Voysey was an English non-Christian theist, a vicar at Healaugh, Yorkshire (1864–1871) who was deprived of his position in 1871 for heresy in sermons published in The Sting and the Stone. (See “Freethought Congregations: South Place and Others” in Victorian Heretics, by Warren Sylvester Smith.) {BDF; FUK; RAT; WSS}
Vredenburg, Charles Edwin (19th Century) Vredenburg wrote The Case Against the Church (1876). {GS}
Vukadinovic, Radovan (20th Century) A professor in Croatia, Vukadinovic is a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Vuletic, Mark (20th Century) Vuletic, a graduate student of philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is an atheist who wrote “The Moral Foundations of Atheism and Christianity” in The Free Mind (February 1996). E-mail: <mvuletic@infidels.org>.
VULGARITY • Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of taste. —Cyril Connolly
Vulpian, Edme Felix Alfred (1826–1887)
A French physician, Vulpian wrote several medical works. Upon being appointed lecturer at the School of Medicine in 1869, he was violently opposed because of his atheism. Vulpian was afterwards elected to the Academy of Sciences. {BDF; RAT} Vye, Mel (20th Century) Vye is President of Free Inquirers of Northeastern Ohio. {FINO, 1 January 1998}
