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From Philosopedia

Waaldijk, Kees (20th Century) A member of the Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association in England, Waaldijk lectures in law at the University of Leiden.

Wachtelaer, Claude (20th Century) Dr. Wachtelaer is secretary-general of the European Humanist Federation. On the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) Board, he represents Belgium’s Centre d’Action Laïque. Wachtelaer is author of “Secularism, Humanism and Freethought in Belgium and France,” in the International Humanist (July 1992). The article describes the difficulties Belgium has had throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Clericals and anticlericals, Catholics and free thinkers, all have fought over the question of free schools, civil burials, Church-controlled education, and the rights of the Grand Orient de Belgique (a Masonic organization, which is open to deists, agnostics, and atheists). The Flemish counterpart of the Centre d’Action Laïque is the Unie Vrijzinnige Verenigingen, and both receive public funds from the Belgian Department of Cults. He was a participant in 1996 at the Polish Humanist Conference on European Integration held in Utrecht. E-mail: <cwachtelaer@arcadis.be>.

Wächtershäuser, Günter (20th Century): See entry for Genesis.

Waddell, John Henry (20th Century) Waddell, a sculptor, is active in the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix, Arizona, on whose grounds stand one of his works, “That Which Might Have Been, Birmingham 1963.” The bronze sculpture memorializes the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He wrote The Beauty of Individual Differences (1985). {World, November-December 1994}

Waddell, W. A. (20th Century) In 1939, Waddell was President in Canada of Regina’s Rationalist Club. {FUK}

Waddington, C. H. (1905– ) Waddington, a biologist, was a non-theist. He is listed in Victorian Infidels. {TRI}

Waddington, Samuel (Born 1844) Although Waddington followed Pusey in his earlier years and intended to enter the Church, “more Rationalistic impulses prevailed,” wrote R. le Gallienne, in the introduction to Waddington’s poems. After becoming private secretary to Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Waddington then became secretary to Thomas Burt. He compiled English Sonnets by Living Writers (1881) and wrote Arthur Hugh Clough (1883) and Sonnets and Other Verses (1884). In many of his poems, Waddington expresses his agnosticism in regard to any future life. {RAT}

Wade, Benjamin (20th Century) Wade, president of Thinking Skills in Maynard, Massachusetts, and a member of the Humanist Association of Massachusetts, spoke on “Critical Thinking: A Paradigm for Education in the Age of Cybernetics” at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. He teaches critical thinking courses throughout the United States.

Wade, Robert (19th Century) Wade, originally of England, moved to Troy, New York, where he was a supporter of Freethought and wrote columns in The Truth Seeker and Investigator. {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.

Wagner, Phil (20th Century) Wagner edits a literary magazine, The Iconoclast (1675 Amazon Road, Mohegan Lake, NY 10547).

Wagner, Wilhelm Richard (1813–1883) Wagner is the German composer whose operas represent the fullest musical and theatrical expression of German romanticism. Instead of using the sharply differentiated recitative and aria, he used a continuous flow of melody, calling his operas “music-dramas” to signify their fusion of text and music. Wagner’s operas include Rienzi (1838–1840), The Flying Dutchman (1841), Tannhäuser (1843–1844), and Lohengrin (1846–1848). A participant in the Revolution of 1848, Wagner fled to Dresden. Aided by Liszt, he escaped to Switzerland where he stayed for ten years. His Der Ring des Nibelungen (1852–1874) is a tetralogy that embodies his aesthetic principles, and in 1872 Wagner moved to Bayreuth, Bavaria, where he completed the Ring cycle and built a theater. His later compositions include Tristan und Isolde (1857–1859) and Parsifal (1877–1882), called a sacred festival drama. Many authors claim that Wagner was anti-Semitic. W. H. Auden described him as “an absolute shit.” James Wood in The New Republic (29 July 1996) compared Wagner’s with T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism:

Eliot’s eccentric praise of the Jewish poet [Isaac Rosenberg] is consistent with his larger deprecations. “That a Jew can do this!” registers the surprise of the anti-Semite. What is it to write like a Jew? Richard Wagner explains: “The Jew speaks the language of the country in which he has lived from generation to generation, but always speaks it as a foreigner.” A Jew cannot compose German music; when he purports to do so, he deceives. The Jewish composer could only compose music as a Jew by drawing on the “ceremonial music” of the synagogue service, a “nonsensical gurgling, yodelling and cackling.” These “rhythms . . . dominate his musical imagination”: they are irresistible. So while the talented Jewish composer is disqualified by his race from composing German music, he is disqualified by his talent from composing Jewish music. Rosenberg was luckier. He was able, by “almost a miracle,” to write in English “like a Jew.” The difference between Eliot’s anti-Semitism and Wagner’s is defined, on this point, by the possibility of this “miracle.”

The composer’s fifty-one-year-old great-grandson Gottfried Wagner, who has written an autobiography, Twilight of the Wagners, was interviewed by Alex Ross (The New Yorker, 10 August 1998), who observed,

It’s a strange kind of autobiography—a quarrel with an ancestor who has been dead since 1883. Gottfried, a musicologist who wrote his dissertation on Kurt Weill, views his great-grandfather as a prophet of Nazism and as an unambiguously political composer. He attacks his grandmother Winifred for befriending Hitler, and he attacks his own father—Wolfgang, the current director of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth—for concealing the family’s dismal history. He writes that the festival and the city at large have been infiltrated by neo-Nazi elements, with skinheads demonstrating nearby in sympathy. He writes that James Levine and Daniel Barenboim are hypocrites for conducting in Bayreuth in spite of their Jewishness. As a result of his agitations, he is no longer welcome at the festival. . . . Gottfried is not clinically insane, as one Wagnerite has suggested, but he is plainly in the grip of an obsession.

Gottfried, however, holds that Wagner

• allowed Hermann Levi, a Jew, to conduct the premiere of “Parsifal” for no other reason than that King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was supporting Wagner and paying for the premiere, ordered him to. The King, who liked Jews, brought enormous pressure on Wagner. Wagner fought till the last moment and treated Levi sadistically, ordering him to convert. Levi refused. • did not sign the anti-Semitic petition of 1881, not because he wished to protect the civil rights of Jews, but because the petition was insufficiently restrictive to Jews. By 1880, Wagner was contemplating ridding Germany of Jews entirely. How this was to be accomplished, Wagner left to a future generation. • portrayed all his major characters in depth, including his “Jewish villains.” The fact that Wagner was capable of creating multi-dimensional figures does not make him less of a Jew-hater or less of a revolutionary german chauvinist. His portraits of the Germanic gods sometimes show them as being venal, selfish and stupid, and capable of being deceived by the dwarfish [translation: Jewish], hairy and clever Jewish types. Wagner was an artist—an evil artist.

Contemporary Jews appear divided about Wagner: one group holds that Israel needs to lift its ban on performances of Wagner’s music in public halls and outdoor venues. Another group holds that the ban should remain. Wagner was a follower of Schopenhauer, who is often termed “the philosopher of pessimism” and one of the first of avowed atheists. (Ironically, Schopenhauer did not care for Wagner’s music.) Of Wagner, McCabe wrote:

All admit that he was an atheist and radical—he took part in the revolution of 1848—in the first part of his life but when he produced Parsifal in 1882 Nietzsche (who had once been his greatest admirer) and others charged him with having lapsed into mysticism. It is clear that he was then in a romantic and more or less mystic mood, but all experts admit that he never returned to the Christian faith. The chief writer on his religious ideas, Otto Hartwich, says: “Wagner was a Christian in a large sense, though not a man of the Church. He had little taste for the other-worldly speculations of dogmatic theology and none at all in the Church’s pressure on faith and conscience.” In other words he began to admire what he believed to be the Christian ethic–hence the bitterness of Nietzsche who thought it the worst feature of Christianity—and no more. The British musical critic and freethinker Ernest Newman, who has a work on Wagner, reminds us that by the age of fifty all his greatest work had been done (while he was an atheist) and his intellectual powers were now less vigorous though his art was still great.

{CE; BDF; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD;

Gottfried Wagner, The New York Times, 22 November 1998}

Wahba, Mourad (20th Century) A professor of education at the University of Ain Shams in Cairo, Egypt, Wahba is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1994 his essay, “Peace and Progress,” was included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science. Prof. Wahba is chairman of the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association. In 1996 he participated in the Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. Creativity, he holds, is the antidote of dogmatism. If the cyber-age leads to a Second Enlightenment, either Ortega y Gasset’s “mass man” will be involved or civilization as we know it will change for the worse. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

WAHHABISM: See entry for Islamic Fundamentalism.

Waisbrooker, Lois (1826–1909) 

When Moses Harman, editor of the anarchist weekly, Lucifer the Light-Bearer, was having trouble because of his having published obscene literature, he asked Waisbrooker to co-edit while he went to jail. According to Freethought on the American Frontier by Whitehead and Muhrer, she quoted a section of a U.S. Department of Agriculture book on diseases of the horse, comparing it to a passage from one of the objectionable letters Harman had published and gotten in trouble over. The post office confiscated the entire issue, the dispute coming to be known as the Horse Penis Affair. Just before her death, she published “The Curse of Christian Morality.” Freethinker Ezra Heywood, upon first seeing her in 1875, wrote that Waisbrooker “seemed to be a Roman Sibyl, Scott’s Meg Merrilies, enacted by Charlotte Cushman, Margaret Fuller, and Sojourner Truth rolled into one. . . . She rose, went up the aisle, mounted the platform, and the tall, angular, weird, quaint kind of a she Abraham Lincoln was introduced to the audiences as ‘Lois Waisbrooker.’ ” “Until you let go of God,” Waisbrooker wrote in “The Curse of Goddism,” “and take hold of yourselves, of the innate powers of your own beings, there is no hope for you. . . . Stop praying and go to work.” {WWS}

Wait, Margie (20th Century) Wait is Colorado State Director of American Atheists, Inc. E-mail: <mdwait@atheists.org>.

Waite, Charles Burling Lame (1824–1895) Waite, an American judge, was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to the Supreme Court of Utah. In 1881, Waite issued his History of the Christian Religion, a rationalistic work which is negatively critical of the evangelical narratives. Waite became president of the Philosophical Society and the Secular Union of Chicago. He assisted in the formation of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., of which President Garfield, then a congressman, was a member. A strong fighter for woman suffrage, Waite became president of the American Secular Union. {BDF; FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}

Waite, Lucy (20th Century) Waite in 1923 issued the Freethought Year Book.

Waitz, Theodor (1821–1864) Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist who taught at Marburg. He edited Aristotle’s Organon (2 volumes, 1844) and wrote works on psychology at a time when he was a Herbartian. He developed along more empirical lines and became an authority on anthropology. Waitz’s mature views are found in his Anthropologie der Naturv Uolker (4 volumes, 1859–1864). {RAT}

Wakefield, Eva Ingersoll (1891–1970) The granddaughter of Robert Ingersoll, an atheist who called herself a naturalistic humanist, Mrs. Wakefield succeeded Warren Allen Smith in 1954 as president of the New York City Humanists, which then affiliated with the American Humanist Association. As was her husband Sherman, Wakefield supported liberal causes and was outspoken as a freethinker. In 1959, she edited the work of her famous grandfather, whose letters she previously had edited. Typical of her activism, Wakefield took part in a 1953 “squabble” over a New York City Health and Welfare Council decision, observing,

I am happy to report that the fight waged by the Planned Parenthood Federation’s Committee of Mothers’ Health Centers for reinstatement on the Health and Welfare Council of New York City, has finally been successful. A majority of the Board of the Council has recently voted to admit the Planned Parenthood agency to membership. In consequence, the fifty-three Roman Catholic agencies have resigned from the Council. This controversy is merely another in the endless series of controversies pointing up the vast and irreconcilable differences between this mighty totalitarian institution, the Roman Catholic Church, and the liberal religious and secular institutions and principles that form the substance and spirit of the democratic way of life. Roman Catholicism, no less than Soviet Communism, is seeking world domination, through political and social, as well as religious, channels. It infiltrates every governmental, economic, and social agency, and works unceasingly in every direct and devious manner to achieve its objective of total control of the minds and destinies of mankind everywhere. Humanists must be alerted to this Catholic menace, and must come out of their intellectual cloisters into the heat and turmoil of the market place of ideas, and take up the challenge uncompromisingly and courageously that this totalitarian church has presented to us.

When she wrote Mayor Elect Robert F. Wagner Jr., a Catholic, on behalf of the New York Humanists for his views on the separation of church and state, she received his response:

In connection therewith, I wish to advise you that I am fully in accord with the constitutional problem (doctrine?) of separation of church and state and I am opposed to using public funds for the support of private and parochial schools. I deeply appreciate your writing to me about this matter.

Wakefield was humiliated late in life, fleeced out of a sizable amount of money in a Gypsy bajour, but to all who knew her she was a generous, wise, kind, and stately person. Her interests included world federalism, euthanasia, Indian affairs, civil liberties, and the separation of church and state. (See entry for K. M. Whitten.) {FUS; HNS; The Humanist Newsletter, November-December 1953; WAS, numerous conversations}

Wakefield, Edward (1774–1854) Wakefield, whose father had been a Quaker but became a rationalist, was brought up as a rationalist. His son, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, also was a rationalist. {RAT; RE}

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796–1862) Wakefield was a standard authority on colonization and had much to do with the founding of the colonies of South Australia and New Zealand. He served as advisor to Lord Durham in Canada and later as Acting Governor of New Zealand. His biographer, R. Garnett, quoted Lord Lyttelton as saying that Wakefield is “the man in these days beyond comparison of the most genius and the widest influence in the great science of colonization.” Garnett adds, “His sympathies were by no means ecclesiastical: His creed appears to have been a masculine Theism.” {RAT; RE}

Wakefield, Gilbert (1756–1801) For a time Wakefield was classical professor at Hackney seminary, but, finding the creed impossible, he took to literature. His translations of Latin and Greek classics, including one on Lucretius (1796–1799, 3 volumes) gave him “a distinct position in the history of English scholarship,” according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Because he once wrote an attack on Paine, Wakefield is sometimes described as a Christian. However, according to McCabe, Wakefield “was not even a Unitarian. In 1798 he was sent to prison for two years for a criticism of the Bishop of Llandaff. He never went to church, but was a simple Theist of high character and idealism.” {RAT; RE}

Wakefield, Homer (20th Century) Dr. Wakefield, writing under the pseudonym of Prescott Locke, wrote a freethought novel, The Conversion of Hamilton Wheeler (1917).

Wakefield, Sherman D. (1894–1971) 

Wakefield was an encyclopedist, atheist, and naturalistic humanist, the husband of Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and grandson-in-law of Robert G. Ingersoll. He wrote extensively about Lincoln’s lack of religion and other topics related to rationalism. Although not a charismatic speaker, he was a consummate correspondent and collector. Finding The Humanist tame for his tastes, Wakefield edited a humanistic journal, Progressive World, for the United Secularists of America. Wakefield wrote “Theodore Roosevelt and Robert G. Ingersoll as Revealed in Their Letters” (1969). Like his wife, Wakefield was active in New York City humanist activities, becoming a member of the local chapter’s executive committee in 1953. (See entries for Viljamur Stefansson and for K. M. Whitten.) {CL; HNS; HNS2; The Humanist Newsletter, November-December 1953; TRI; WAS, numerous conversations}

Wakeman, Thaddeus Burr (1834–1913) Wakeman was an American lawyer and positivist. In New York, he was one of the editors of Man (1878–1884) and was president of the New York Liberal Club. Wakeman was an editor of Torch of Reason (1896–1903, a newspaper of Liberal University) and Liberal Review (1904–1906). McCabe wrote of Wakeman, “He called himself a Positivist, but broadly, he was an agnostic, a great admirer of Haeckel (who loathed Positivism), and an aggressive freethinker.” {FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}

Wakerlin, George E. (20th Century) A physiologist at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Dr. Wakerlin like his friend Anton J. Carlson was a naturalistic humanist.

Walcott, Derek (Alton) (1930– ) An Antillean dramatist, poet, and 1992 Nobel Prize winner, Walcott was born in St. Lucia and has taught at Boston University, Columbia, and Harvard. An honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is known for such dramas as “A Branch on the Blue Nile” (1986) and poetry such as Collected Poems (1986). Much of his work describes the West Indian conflict between its local culture and that of Europe’s, “the choice of home or exile, self-realisation or spiritual betrayal of one’s country.” His epic poem, Omeros (1990), sounds based upon Ancient Greek literature, but Achille is the “main man” and son of an African slave; Patroclus becomes a crippled Philoctetes whose wound fails to heal but whose cure marks the end of the war; Hector is not killed by Achille but dies as the result of his own recklessness. If the gods brought order to Homer’s world, in Walcott’s poem all of us who are exiles return to a home which has so changed we no longer remember it. {OEL}

Walckenaer, Charles Athanase [Baron] (1771–1852) A French writer, Walckenaer during the Revolution emigrated to Scotland, returning in 1816 and becoming one of the Mayors of Paris. He wrote several novels, the lives of Lafontaine (1820) and Mme. de Sévigné (5 volumes, (1842–1852), and Histoire de la vie et des poésies d’Horace (1 volumes, 1840). The Baron did not abandon the Voltaireanism of pre-Revolution days, and his rationalist showed in his various works. {RAT}

WALDO, H. H.: See Raube Marks.

WALES, HUMANISM AND RATIONALISM IN Richard Paterson cites Zephaniah Williams as the pioneer freethinker of Wales. Humanist groups include the following:

• Cardiff: Richard Paterson, Fir Tree Cottage, Royal Oak, Machen, Newport NP 8SN (01633) 441044. • Humanist Society of Mid-Wales: Thalia Campbell, Glangors, Ynyslas, Borth SY24 5JU (01970) 871360. • North Wales Humanist Group: Zonia Bowen, 6 Stad Glandwr, Caeathro, Caernarfon LL55 2SG (01286) 673488. • West Glamorgan Humanist Group: Julie Norris, 3 Maple Grove, Uplands, Swansea SA2 OJY (01792) 206108.

In Wales, an estimated twenty-five Unitarian congregations are found mainly in the south, and services are in Welsh. These congregations, according to John Clifford, are in the Black Spot, named as such by 19th century Methodist revivalist missionaries who made little headway in the area because of the Unitarian influence. The average size of the congregations is around fifty, their leaning being toward theism of the liberal Christian type.

(See entry for Zephaniah Williams.)

Wales, Hubert (20th Century) Wales wrote The Rationalist (1917). {GS}

Walferdin, François Hippolyte (1795–1880) Walferdin, who was a friend of Arago, contributed with him to the enlargement of science and was decorated in 1844 with the Legion of Honor. He published an edition of the works of Diderot (1857) and left the bust of that philosopher to the Louvre. Among the new instruments he invented were a new thermometer, a hypsothermometer, and the hydrobarometer. {BDF; RAT}

Walinski, Joe (20th Century) In 1999 Walinski was elected Vice President of the Humanists of North Jersey, which is affiliated with the American Humanist Association.

WALKAWAY WalkAway was a newsletter for ex-fundamentalists. Now defunct, it was published by Skipp Porteous.

Walker, Albert C. (20th Century) Walker is active in the Humanist Fellowship of the First Unitarian Society of San Francisco (AHA). (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Walker, Alice (1944- ) Walker, an African American novelist and poet, received the Pulitzer Prize for her 1982 work that focused on women and their struggle for racial and sexual equality, The Color Purple. The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) described a kind of emotional slavery that spanned three generations. In 1997 Walker was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

Annika Walter, Athlete sports

The German Annika Walter, Olympic silver medalist in diving, told the public in a television interview after her success that she is atheist. The reporter, Dieter Kurten, promptly asked: "What does atheism mean to you?" Annika Water hesitated for a moment, then she replied: "I haven't been educated to believe in god."

Walker, Barbara G. (1930– ) Walker was named 1993 Humanist Heroine by the American Humanist Association. She is author of The Skeptical Feminist and The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983), the latter of which is often banned, according to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), because the book “is of no benefit to anyone.” An atheist, she finds “the archetypical Goddess image” to be of psychological importance to women, calls fortune-telling “just a parlor trick,” and delights in debunking New Age assertions about crystals. “Our culture,” she has written, “has been deeply penetrated by the notion that ‘man’ . . . not woman . . . is created in the image of god. This notion persists, despite the likelihood that the creation goes in the other direction: that god is a human projection of the image of man.” (See entry for Banned Books.) {WWS}

Walker, Dwayne (20th Century) Walker, a Long Beach, California, freethinker, is director of a movie, “Waco, Bible Madness” and supplier of various freethought videos. On the Web: <http://www.netcom.com/~wilsie/biblemadness.html>.

Walker, E. (19th Century) A native of Worcester, England, Walker was an Owenite who wrote Is the Bible True? and What Is Blasphemy? (1843). {BDF}

Walker, Edwin C. (Born 1849) Walker, of Valley Falls, Kansas, was editor of Lucifer and Fair Play. At first a Universalist, he later became a writer for The Truth Seeker and “a radical of the radicals,” according to Putnam. Walker held that the great danger threatening liberty in America was the machinations of the Protestant organizations; that the Catholics are dangerous only as the Protestants prepare the way for them. {BDF; FUK; PUT}

Walker, Ernest (Born 1870) A composer, Walker edited the Musical Gazette and wrote a number of works on music. He made his profession of Rationalism in an article in the Almanacco del Coenoblum (1913) and was for years a member of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT; RE}

Walker, Imogene B. (20th Century) Walker wrote James Thomson: A Critical Study (1950). {GS}

Walker, James (1794–1874) One of the early defenders of the liberal theology in the 19th century, Walker took an active role in the formation of the American Unitarian Association in 1825. His tolerance of mind allowed several of the Transcendentalists to publish their works in the Christian Examiner, and he added the intuitionist doctrine of the Transcendentalists to his own “Common-Sense philosophy” which he had learned from the Scottish thinkers Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. {U&U}

[[Walker, Jeff (20th Century) Walker is a freelance Toronto writer who wrote the two-hour Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “Ideas” radio documentary on Ayn Rand, which aired in 1992. Rand’s followers, he notes, consider her Atlas “not just the greatest novel of all time but the greatest human achievement of all time,” much greater than that of Plato, Shakespeare, Galileo, Mozart, Einstein, etc. His evaluation: “To paraphrase Voltaire: ‘Every sensible man, every honorable man, must hold the Randian sect in horror.’ ”

Walker, John (1759–1830) Walker began life in a blacksmith’s shop, became an engraver, then a teacher, and at the age of thirty-five took up the study of medicine, becoming admitted to the Royal College of Physicians. An ardent humanitarian, he admired the Quaker religion. The Friends, however, declined to receive him inasmuch as he was a well-known Deist and a friend of Paine. {RAT; RE}

Walker, Joseph (20th Century) Walker, a prominent Boston attorney, was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I. Edwin H. Wilson in The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995) has described Walker’s connection with that document. He had been a Republican candidate for governor of Massachusetts and, for two years, Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 1932, with the encouragement of John Dietrich, Walker published Humanism As A Way of Life. “I signed the Humanist Manifesto,” Walker wrote, “because I am in general accord with the statements therein contained. If men are to discover a satisfactory way of life they must face squarely the facts of life. Realistic thinking must take the place of wishful thinking. Men may wish to believe in a personal God, like the Christian God. Men may wish to believe in a future life; but the question is, not what men wish to believe but rather what, with intellectual honesty, they can believe.” {EW; HM1}

Walker, Kenneth C. (20th Century) A liberal minister in Illinois, Walker once was a director of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Walker, Stanley (1898–1962) A Texan who once was city editor of New York’s Daily News, Walker in 1933 wrote The Night Club Era, an earthy picture of New York City. In the 1950s he reviewed for The Humanist David W. Maurer’s Whiz Mob, A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets With Their Behavior Pattern. He included among his memories that almost forty years ago old Frank Notfleet, who appears in “The Big Con” and in Va Cise’s excellent account of the Blonger account of the Blonger mob of Denver, “came to see me in New York while on the trail of the men who had robbed him. I got two moderately honest detectives to help and we went up to the Ansonia Coffee Shop and nabbed Joe Furey, one of the mob of con men. Joe later died in bad shape, after a prison term. Norfleet, though of course he must have had a streak of larceny in him, was the damnedest one-man nemesis I ever heard of. He put everybody in jail, often at great personal risk. He scared hell out of me when I first met him. I was having breakfast and he threw two big 45s on the table by way of introduction. . . . I used to know the wonderful Detective Dan Champion in New York and heard much from him. Also, former Commissioner Mulrooney once told me a strange tale—of the worst woman he had ever known. She trained her children to be pickpockets, using a tailor’s dummy as a model, and thwacking the little nippers briskly with a switch for their clumsiness.” Walker was both dis- and un-interested in religion. As a journalist, he reported disinterestedly. As an individual, he was a freethinker who openly expressed his naturalistic humanism. Walker wrote The Story of the Dominican Republic and Its People. Also, he wrote Dewey: An American of This Century. In 1995, Walker’s City Editor (1934) was cited by The New York Times as one of the best books ever to have been written about New York City. The book was described as follows: “Some of these wornout gaffers [city editors] pass their old age boring helpless listeners with tales of how good they were in the days when there were giants in journalism. Others putter around in gardens, and the great stories of yesterday, which once were so urgently important and so exciting with life, now seem dim and pale. The memory of the throbbing office—the incessant ringing of the telephones, the daily attempts to keep the office boys awake, the clean inky smell of the fresh editions just off the press, the practical jokes on the office half-wit, the cruse for some cause which at the time was like another Holy War, the parade of freaks and fakers and mountebanks, the complaints and libel suits, the reporters who got drunk and couldn’t write their stories, the campaign to get a $5 a week raise for a deserving reporter with a wife and too many children, the pictures with the wrong captions, the tense speed of election night, the patient drive to instill a few sensible don’ts into the heads of the young men—all grow indistinct and without meaning.” {WAS, 6 May 1957 and 26 April 1958}

Walker, Thomas (1858–1932) 

Walker, an Englishman, migrated to Canada in the 1870s, then to Australia in 1877, where in 1881 he became editor of Reflector. He was a secularist, lecturer, editor, parliamentarian, journalist, newspaper proprietor, farmer, lawyer, and legislator who as a precocious child had been a Wesleyan preacher. His first spiritualist lecture in Melbourne was delivered in a trance said to be under the “control” of Giordano Bruno. Splitting with the spiritualists in 1882, Walker became a materialist, founding the Australasian Secular Association with himself as salaried president and lecturer. Convicted in 1885 for exhibiting obscene pictures while advocating birth control, he conducted his own appeal and won. A controversial freethinker, he was president of the West Australian Rationalist Association in 1916. As Attorney-General in Western Australia, then Minister for Education and finally Speaker, Walker successfully placed a number of secular reforms on the statute books. {FUK; SWW}

Walker, William C. (20th Century) Walker is a Pennsylvanian who has written for Freethought Today. He is a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

Wallace, Alfred Russel (1823–1913) Wallace, doing scientific research in the Malay archipelago, sent Charles Darwin an 1858 manuscript, “On the Tendencies of Varieties to Part from the Original Type.” Wallace’s concept of evolution was so like that of Darwin’s that he asked his fellow English naturalist to look it over and show it to other scientists. Darwin was troubled by the work’s similarity to his own thinking, remarking, “I would far rather burn my whole book than that Wallace or any other man should think that I behaved in a paltry spirit.” A compromise was reached, one in which a short abstract of Darwin’s theory was read at the Linnaean Society, along with Wallace’s manuscript. Both had been influenced by the works of Malthus and Lyell, but Wallace’s specialty was biogeography, shown in his The Geographical Distribution of Animals (1876). That work postulated a dividing line, which is still called Wallace’s Line, between Asian and Australian fau na in the Malay Archipelago. When Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1859, Wallace remarked, “The one great result which I claim for my paper of 1858 is that it compelled Darwin to write and publish his Origin of Species without further delay.” As reported in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), Wallace was “in no way connected with Christianity, for he had long before given up all belief in revealed religion.” “Unfortunately,” wrote McCabe, “Wallace allowed himself to be duped by a fraudulent and impudent Spiritualist medium and the works of his later years were pathetic. He refused to admit the evolution of the mind. But he never returned to the Christian Church.” McCabe adds that most of Wallace’s distinctions were awarded on the ground that he was the co-discoverer with Darwin of Natural Selection, whereas “in point of fact there was nothing like equal merit, and he owed his recognition to Darwin’s modesty and generosity. For Darwin, it was the outcome of twenty years of research; in the case of Wallace, a sudden and rather superficial guess.” Michael Shermer, in Skeptic (Vol. 3, No. 1 and 2, 1995), goes into detail as to how Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, came to believe in the supernatural, which he calls a lesson on the limitations of science. Gordon Stein has written in The American Rationalist that Wallace was anything but a freethinker, that he “was as credulous a believer as there ever was.” {CE; JM; RE; TDY}

Wallace, Graham (1858–1932) Wallace, a freethinker, was a Fabian Society member who believed in education and reform rather than agitation and revolution. {TRI}

Wallace, Henry (1888-1965): See entry for George Orwell, who thought the former Vice President of the United States and Editor in Chief of New Republic somewhat of a fellow Communist Party traveler, one who had an unofficial connection with the Progressive Citizens of America.

Wallace, William (1844–1897) A Scottish philosopher, Wallace taught moral philosophy at Oxford and was a Hegelian theist. He translated Hegel’s Logic and Phenomenology of the Mind. In his Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology (published 1898), Wallace rejects supernaturalism and the belief in personal immortality. {RAT; RE}

Wallach, Judith D. (20th Century) Wallach, President of the Society for Ethical Culture, is an activist in New York City. She is on the Board of Governors of the Humanist Institute.

Wallach, Sylvan (20th Century) Wallach is editor of the New York Society for Ethical Culture’s newsletter.

Wallin, Robert (19th Century) In the Boston Investigator, a freethought newspaper, Wallin made a call in 1857 for an organizational meeting to set up an Infidel Association of the United States. {FUS}

Walling, Frank M. (20th Century) In the mid-1950s, Walling was an editorial assistant on The Humanist.

Wallwork, Daniel (1824–1909) Wallwork was a chartist and freethinker. Although he had been a Sunday School teacher and a church member in his native England, he discarded the religious convictions of his youth in 1853 and became a belligerent and outspoken atheist. In 1857, denying the truth of the Bible, he insisted as a witness in Court that he be allowed to affirm, rather than testify on oath. In 1865, two years after emigrating to Australia, he was secretary of the Newcastle Secular Society, now believed to be the first Freethought Society in Australia. A prolific writer on the subject of temperance, he also was a prime mover and claimed to be the originator of the eight hour day system in New South Wales. {SWW; RSR}

Wally, Stefan (20th Century) An Austrian member of the Freidenkerbund Oesterreichs, Wally was a participant in 1996 of the Mexico City congress of humanists. E-mail: <swally@fc.alpin.or.at>.

Walpole, Horatop (Horace) [4th Earl of Orford] (1717–1797) Walpole was the youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole. He toured the Continent with his friend Thomas Gray from 1739 to 1741, when the two quarreled and parted. An admirer of the medieval, he built a pseudo-Gothic (showpiece castle at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, and in 1757 started a press there, publishing Gray’s Pindaric odes and his own works. “A Gothic church,” he made it clear, “or a convent fills one with romantic dreams—but for the mysterious, the church in the abstract, it is a jargon that means nothing, or a great deal too much, and I reject it and its apostles.” Walpole and Thomas Gray, the most popular poet of the century, went on the “Grand Tour” after Cambridge University, during which they had a falling out that lasted for years. According to George E. Haggerty of the University of California, “Walpole shared Gray’s devotion to other men, and though he is as little likely to have actually had sexual experiences with men, he did love several in his long life, for a great portion of it devoting himself to one cousin, Henry Conway.” Walpole’s reputation rests on more than three thousand letters written from 1732 to1797—he was the most famous letter-writer of his age—that give an invaluable picture of Georgian England and speak of his freethought. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) anticipated the literary movement of romanticism. Almost singlehandedly, Haggerty has written, the work instituted the Gothic novel vogue. McCabe wrote that Walpole was one of the most brilliant authors of the Deistic school and was skeptical about immortality. In a letter to a clergyman in 1783, Walpole ridiculed the Christian heaven, or “the absurd idea of the beatified sitting on golden thrones and chanting eternal allelujahs to golden harps.” (See the Earl of Orford’s caustic comment about Christianity in the entry for Joseph Addison.) {CE; GL; JM; RE; TYD} Walpole, Robert [1st Earl of Orford] [Sir] (1676–1745) Walpole was a noted British statesman. In 1702 he took the seat in Parliament for King’s Lynn, from which he was regular returned thereafter. In 1708 he became secretary of war, and his successful handling of the financial wreckage known as the South Sea Bubble led to his appointment in 1721 as first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer. A Whig, he shared power with Viscount Townshend until 1730. Enjoying the confidence of George I and George II, he mollifed the largely Tory gentry by reducing the land tax. In foreign affairs he favored friendship with France but was drawn into a war with Spain. Because of military reverses, he was forced to resign in 1742. Walpole usually is described as the first prime minister. A. C. Ewald referred to Walpole’s “genial paganism.” McCabe has written of Walpole that “he was cynical and not over-scrupulous in promoting his own affairs—political life was at the time thoroughly corrupt—and promoted his bastards to bishoprics, but folk must have smiled when he described himself in the House of Commons as ‘a sincere member of the Church of England.’ He went beyond the Deism that was then prevalent at court (the queen being a serious skeptic), and it is fairly clear that he was an atheist. The English translation of Bayle’s freethinking dictionary was dedicated to him, and the letter dedicating it spoke blandly of ‘the blind zeal and stupidity cleaving to superstition.” When Queen Caroline was dying, and there was a discussion as to whether the Archbishop should minister to her, Sir Robert said, “Let this farce be played; the Archbishop will act it very well. . . . It will do the Queen no hurt, no more than any good.” {CE; JM; RAT}

Walser, George Henry (1834–1910) After reading some of Robert Ingersoll’s works, Walser, a state legislator and attorney in Ohio, started a small group of agnostics known as “The Sacred Brotherhood.” He also founded a town in Missouri—Liberal—which contained a Freethought University but had no priest, church, chapel, or drinking saloon. That town achieved notoriety because a fire-and-brimstone Methodist minister built a church nearby and accused Walser and the 300 townspeople of being heathens, whereupon Walser built a quarter-mile fence through the middle of town, to keep out the Christians. The story is related, along with some of his poetry, in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992). From 1881 to 1889 in Liberal, Ohio, he edited Liberal. {BDF; FUS}

Walsh, Anthony (20th Century) Walsh, while a student at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, was one of the founders of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Walsh, J. (20th Century) An English writer who once was a head teacher and a contributor to the Literary Guide, Walsh in looking at modern physics finds no evidence that the universe had a beginning. “It is legitimate,” he reasons, “to consider the universe after the explosion not as a newly-created entity but as merely a change of form. So those who seek an absolute beginning must range further back than the Big Bang and ascertain where the fireball came from in the first place. Such a search introduces the possibility commonly found in cosmological speculation, that the dense fireball may be the result of a preceding big crunch itself preceded by a previous Big Bang and consequent expansion. And, in fact, it renders feasible the possibility of a whole series of such events ad infinitum.” The task for rationalists, he adds, is for the inquirer, “if he can detach himself from the universe as he experiences it, to see it as an unconscious though changing assembly of matter. Then to realise that into one tiny and possibly insignificant part of its immensity circumstances have caused something called life to arise. And that life, in the course of its evolution, has thrown up a creature which has developed consciousness and self-consciousness.” (New Humanist, February 1994)

Walsh, Jill Paton (20th Century) Walsh’s novel, Knowledge of Angels (1994), received considerable attention in England, partly because many British publishers rejected it. The author imported copies of the American edition and published it herself in England, where it was short-listed for the Booker Prize. The fable about belief in God is a double story set in an Mediterranean island in the 15th century. A wild girl who has lived with wolves and cannot talk is captured and confined with the expectation that once she learns English she will show an intuitive knowledge of God. Meanwhile, a man from another island who has been shipwrecked and is found to have no belief in God is interrogated by a theologian to see whether he can be converted by reason. Walsh is a lapsed Catholic writer. {New Humanist, November 1994}

Walsh, Walter (Born 1857) Walsh was a theistic preacher who succeeded Voysey. He was Vice-President of the Universal Peace Union and described himself as “a non-Christian Theist,” or “Leader of the Free Religious Movement in London.” {RAT}

Walter, Annika (20th Century) Walter, a German Olympic silver medalist in diving, told in a television interview after her success that she is an atheist. The reporter, Dieter Kurten, promptly asked, “What does atheism mean to you?” to which Walter hesitated for a moment, then replied, “I haven’t been educated to believe in God.” {CA; E}

Walter, Edward (20th Century) Walter is a contributor of material to The American Rationalist.

Walter, Nicolas (20th Century) Walter was an editor of the New Humanist, a well-known British freethought activist, and head of the Rationalist Press Association from 1975 to the end of 1999. In Blasphemy in Britain (1977) and Blasphemy Ancient and Modern (1990), he argued that the legal dodo of blasphemous libel was not dead in England, that it was reprieved from extinction by Mary Whitehouse, who in 1977 successfully prosecuted Gay News for its publication of James Kirkup’s homo-erotic poem, “The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name.” In 1980, Walter signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. He argued, when opponents spoke of “the right not to be offended,” that a world without offense would be a world without speech. Walter wrote from the viewpoint of the blasphemers rather than of the religions they offended or the laws they transgressed, his concentration being Britain although he referred to the United States as well as other countries. “In 1940,” he illustrated, “A. R. Woodhall was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment in Jersey for making a passport photograph resemble Christ on the Cross, but after protest he was released by the Home Secretary after a fortnight.” Similarly, he cited other cases, supplying representative selections of literary texts and allowing the reader to judge their content. As for Harry Stopes-Roe’s suggestion that humanism is a “life stance,” Walter disagreed (in New Humanist, December, 1988), explaining that, for most, humanism is not a stance and it is not necessarily about life. “It is not in any significant way analogous with religion. Most who call themselves humanists, in fact, see humanism as a rejection of all (not just some) of the essential features of religion; but the people who call themselves religious humanists see humanism as an actual form of religion.” A statement of Walter’s outlook is found in “There is War Between Religion and Humanism” (The Freethinker, January 1996), in which he states the three most important elements of Humanism:

• that all the factors, interests, criteria of any situation are always subordinated to human factors, interests, criteria;

• there is no spirit or mind or principle or force or power or pattern behind the universe, no point to it other than what we give it;

• the rejection of authority.

Because of the wide gap between religion and Humanism, there may be a truce between them, but never peace. Of his outlook, Walter has written: “My own Humanism is a pretty minimal one. It involves neither religion nor ritual; I am not a religious or ritualistic animal. It is entirely sane; my right-brain is fully occupied with art, music and literature, and humour. It is not a ‘life-stance’ or ‘eupraxophy’; I have no more need for secular than for sacred nonsense. It avoids such terms as ‘spirit’ and ‘worship,’ however defined; I have no need for alien vocabulary. It perceives nothing as ultimately important; as A. J. Balfour said, nothing matters very much, and most things don’t matter at all.” He continued: “I agree with Freud that religion is a neurosis; but so is psychoanalysis. I agree with the Marquis de Sade that nature is hostile to us. I agree with Matthias Claudius that ‘man is not at home in the world.’ I agree with Max Stirner that there is no such thing as ‘Man,’ only me and others like me. We should exorcise all the spectres which have haunted us, from God to Humanism itself. I am atheist about God, and agnostic about most other things in the same category. Questions about the value of existence or the meaning of life have no value or meaning. There are no categorical imperatives or fundamental principles. The ultimate reality is that there is no ultimate reality. The golden rule is that there are no golden rules. Here I may not share much common ground with some other Humanists, but I can speak for many others.” Typical of his understanding of philosophic naturalism, Nicolas in “Oh, God!” laments in a book review how “so many seemingly intelligent people can talk about such obvious nonsense (as supernaturalism and religion), and that such poor treatment of such important subjects can be produced by a leading journalist, a leading philosopher, and a leading scientist (Russell Stannard, author of Science and Wonders), and circulated by leading periodicals, publishers (Faber & Faber), and broadcasting organisations.” However, he noted, “The encouraging thing is that most people—including most scientists and philosophers—remain unaffected by such stuff and get on with their lives without worrying about where they came from or where they are going or what, if anything, it all means.” Walter is probably the only freethinker in decades who has written about ditheism, noting that Paul Johnson’s The Quest for God fails to discuss “a god of some kind but the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, not pantheism or deism or ditheism or polytheism but strict monotheism.” The grandson of S. K. Ratcliffe, Walter has long been on the board of directors of the Rationalist Press Association—he attended only one of four meetings in 1998, however. In December 1999, he wrote in New Humanist: “This is my farewell to arms. I am at the same time retiring from the Rationalist Press Association and moving out of London, leaving the organisations I have belonged to and dropping the periodicals I have subscribed to, and saying goodbye to my native city and to many of my friends and all of my enemies.” Explaining that he had been a professional humanist for too long and “it is time to take my leave of all this,” he looked forward to becoming “an amateur human being again.” He added that he was sorting papers which have accumulated and which he would give to the South Place Ethical Society library at Conway Hall. He also had thousands of letters to be kept somewhere: “Future archaeologists will wonder at the papyraceous layer deposited by our civilisation, and I am afraid I have contributed more than my fair share to it.” (See entry for Humanisms. Also, see Walter’s article, “Are Humanists Human?”, New Humanist, November 1989; “Oh Hell! Christians Deny Christianity Again,” in The Freethinker, February 1996; and “Oh, God!” The Freethinker, May 1996. A capsule summary of Walter’s philosophic outlook is contained in the entry under Humanisms. In 1996, mailed a draft of the present book plus $75 for return postage along with an inquiry about the possibility of acceptance for publishing by the Rationalist Press Association, Walter never got around to making suggestions for changes, nor did he return the manuscript and cash—his Humanism: What’s in the Word [1997] covers some similar material. Edward Royle has reviewed the work favorably, but Harry Stopes-Roe has taken issue with some of its contents (New Humanist [December 1997]. Walter has written a history of the RPA, found in issues #2 and #4 of New Humanist [1999]). {FUK; SHD}

Walter, W. Grey (Died 1977) Walter, the father of Nicolas Walter, was an atheist. But upon his death, his college arranged a funeral that was dominated by the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. “Here is yet another reminder,” Nicolas Walter has written, “that unbelievers should make sure that whatever rituals mark their deaths should not contradict their known beliefs during their lives.” {New Humanist, November 1997}

Walters, Kerry S. (20th Century) In his The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic (1992), Walters points out that in America the first reaction against orthodox Christianity was the philosophic movement of deism. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Elihu Palmer, Ethan Allen, Philip Freneau, and Constantin Volney wrote voluminously on the subject. Walters underlines the point that deism was a direct precursor of American freethought.

Walther, Eric (20th Century) Walther, a professor at Long Island University in New York, is knowledgeable not only about philosophy but also about communication. A member of Freethinking Activist Non-believing New Yorkers (FANNY), he took part in a 1999 remembrance of Robert Green Ingersoll which was held at one of Ingersoll’s former residences, the Gramercy Hotel in Manhattan. Walther long as been active in humanist and freethought circles.

Walther, Jeff (20th Century) Walther edits Green Light, the newsletter of the International Naturalist Church. {See entry for International Naturalist Church.)

Walther, Johannes (Born 1860) From 1886 to 1906 Walter was a private teacher at Jena University. In 1906 he was appointed Haeckel Professor of Geology, after which he taught paleontology at Halle University and became director of the Royal Geological Institute. Walther was a pupil of Haeckel and holds that, in importance, Haeckel must be named after Goethe and Humboldt. Walter is a thorough and outspoken Monist. {RAT} Walton, Don (Died 1999) Walton, a member in Oxford of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, met Bernard Conolly, an editorial executive on the Daily Mail in the 1950s, and their partnership lasted forty years. Conolly became deputy editor of the Oxford Mail. When he knew in the last few weeks that he was dying, Walton set to work recording the music he wanted to be played at his Humanist funeral ceremony. {G&L Humanist, Winter 1999-2000}

Walwyn, William (1600–1681) Walwyn, a grandson of a Bishop of Hereford, was a writer, described by Edwards in his Gangraena as “a seeker, a dangerous man.” Walwyn attacked all the sects and professed to “seek” truth apart from them. Although respecting the Bible, he was imprisoned in the Tower on political charges and was accused of communism and atheism. The government charged that he had urged people to read Plutarch and Cicero on Sundays instead of going to church. Walwyn replied in his Fountain of Slander Discovered (1649). {RAT}

Walz, Frederick (20th Century) Walz wrote New vs. Old: The Guilt of Organized “Religions” in the Decline and Fall of the United States of America (1971). {GS}

Wang, Ch’ung (Chong) (c. 27-c 100) “One of the greatest men of his nation in any age” was the description of Wang given by science historian Joseph Needham. Wang was a monistic naturalist with ideas similar to those of Lucretius. A teacher and minor official, he wrote about politics, morality, and how to prolong life. Lun Heng (Critical Essays, written c. 82-83) fills 750 pages in an English translation. Wang’s outlook was that of the “hatred of fictions and falsehoods.” He rejected all the supernatural assumptions of Chinese metaphysics and physics, not the natural ones. He denied the existence of divinity, saw ying and yan as natural substances, heaven and earth as natural elements. Fate he saw as an impersonal necessity, not a personal reward or punishment. Earthquakes, floods, thunder, lightning were natural events not the work of something supernatural. Nicholas Walter has further summarized Wang’s views:

He believes in the reliability of astrology and physiognomy and the significance of dreams and omens, but for scientific rather than magical reasons. He believes in spirits but not as dangerous beings, in portents but not in the power of prayer or ritual. All living things are born and die, and meanwhile struggle for existence. We are animals, living on the earth as lice live on us. The death of a person is like the extinction of a fire, and both the soul and the body are physical entities which come and return to universal existence. He repudiates reverence for the past, and although he cites the Confucian masters he criticises them. His moral doctrine is a modified and moderate version of Confucianism: do as you would be done by, within reason and following common sense. His position was a combination of scepticism and naturalism, materialism and secularism, rationalism and empiricism, which was as rare in China as elsewhere. Yet this attitude never quite faded, and such thinkers continued to appear—especially in the Neo-Confucian tradition—until the 18th century and the beginning of Western influence. {New Humanist, October 1998}

WANTED/NURTURED CHILDREN Wanted/Nurtured Children is a monthly published by the American Humanist Association, PO Box 1001, San Jacinto, California 92581.

WAR Although the Early Church had no concern with social or collective problems and before the year 300 opposed military service, chiefly because it involved a profession of paganism, from the time of Constantine onward the opposition relented. For a thousand years after the fall of Rome there was no Christian pacifism. Popes Gregory VII and Innocent III ordered wars as freely as most princes did, and the Papacy had its own army, often led by cardinals and sometimes by the Popes themselves, down to the middle of the nineteenth century. The Church further held that war upon infidels and heretics was holy work, and that war upon any prince they excommunicated was more than just. They blessed the banners of any prince, for example William the Conqueror, who promised them docility. In his introduction to the translation of Kant’s Perpetual Peace, Campbell Smith wrote that the Church, instead of denouncing war, made it worse than ever. The Church of Rome, he said, was “in some respects a more warlike institution than the states of Greece and Rome” and “the history of the Middle Ages came nearer to a realization of the idea of perpetual war than was possible in ancient times.” At the time of the Reformation, Erasmus the humanist and Grotius the Protestant spoke out against war, and during the 18th century a French priest, St. Pierre, published his Project of Peace, which was received with general disdain. But inasmuch as neither the Catholic nor Protestant church supported these individual utterances, they had little or no significance so far as the growth of a world-feeling against war is concerned. That world-feeling against war commenced during the age of skepticism that opened with Rousseau, Voltaire, and the Encyclopedists. Kant, whose Perpetual Peace (1795) was the first direct attack, stood apart from the Churches. Bentham the atheist, author of the phrase “International Law,” organized a humanitarian campaign in England. The atheist Robert Owen took up the challenge. The Quakers were encouraged to join. In 1816, the first Peace Society was founded in London. No Church gave the weight of its support, for, in McCabe’s words, “it was still the fashion to sneer at infidels as a few eccentric individuals.” McCabe makes the case that of twenty-six major individuals who have attacked war in principle and worked for the substitution of arbitration, thirteen were Rationalists, three were avowed Christians, and ten were, to him, of unknown attitude. In 1994, Steve Karr in the Secular Humanist Bulletin listed religion-inspired violence then current around the world in these countries: Afghanistan; Algeria; Azerbaijan; Bosnia; Burma; Croatia; Egypt; Ethiopia; Lebanon; Northern Ireland; India; Iran; Iraq; Israel; Serbia; Sri Lanka; Somalia; Sudan; Tibet; United States. Although even the most optimistic of individuals do not envisage a future which will ever be devoid of war, Christopher Logue in the following sample from Selected Poems (1996) thinks poetry through satire and humor has the potential for changing things:

When I was serving my country a staff-sergeant said: There’s dozens of ways, but if everything fails, put your head on her shoulder your prick in her hand, and cry.

The French comic, Fernand Reynaud, had an unforgettable definition of wars, that they are fought by people who do not know each other on behalf of those who do know each other but don’t fight. A coincidental and satirical view, by novelist Joseph Heller in Closing Time (1994), is that “People with force have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” (See entry for Pacifism.) {The Economist, 13 July 1996; RE}

Warbasse, James Peter (1866–1957) A world leader in the cooperative movement, Warbasse was a surgeon who switched his interests and devoted full time to the cooperative movement, which was based on mutual aid in the conduct of economic enterprises and on a social theory that finds expression in these enterprises. During the Spanish-American War, he was a surgeon. In 1892, he set up the first laboratory of surgical pathology and bacteriology in America, at Methodist Hospital. He wrote Surgical Treatment (3 volumes, 1919), What is Cooperation? (1927), and Peace Through Cooperation (1949). In 1955, he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association, of which he was a member. {CL; HNS; HNS2}

Ward, Charles (20th Century) 

Ward writes for The Freethinker in England. In “Caring, Co-Operation, Clarity” (March 1994), he holds that humanists need not imitate the old-fashioned custom favored by religious bodies, of listing aims, beliefs, and modes of behavior in rigid phraseology with which they clearly expect all recruits to agree. Instead, he suggests humanists are beyond such. Ward, looking into the future, also warns that the last thing needed on our voyage into the new millennium is the Ten Commandments, which he finds of negative value and a “museum piece.” {The Freethinker, May 1996}

Ward, H. Percy (20th Century) In Bradford, England, Ward edited Secularist in 1902.

Ward, Lester Frank (1841–1911) Ward was an American sociologist and paleontologist. One of the first and most important of American sociologists, he developed a theory of planned progress, called telesis, whereby man, through education and development of intellect, could direct social evolution. According to William F. Ryan, Ward “was one of the first theorists to state that the female sex had preceded the male on this planet, and that women were in several ways superior to men, especially in prehistoric times.” Ward, an agnostic, viewed Christianity as a calamity. From Washington, DC, he edited Iconoclast (1870–1871). His Applied Sociology (1906) had a wide audience. Ward was wounded during the Civil War, after which he became librarian of the United States Bureau of Statistics and later curator of botany and fossil plants in the national museum. (See entry for Emily Cape.) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}

Ward, Mary Augusta (1851–1920) The granddaughter of Thomas Arnold, Mary Augusta Arnold married Thomas Humphrey Ward, an editor of the Oxford Spectator, in 1872. She made her reputation as a novelist with Robert Elsmere (1888), a story which defended an ethical rather than a mystical interpretation of the Bible. Christians saw it as a description of a hero’s lapse into unbelief, but others found that the hero’s commitment to the welfare of other human beings shows that, after Christianity’s supernatural elements are gone, the former Christians can be inspiring people. Ward translated Amiel’s Journal. {CE}

Ward, Percy (20th Century) Ward, a former Wesleyan, was a co-founder in 1924 of Chicago’s American Rationalist Association. Previously, he had been secretary of the British Secular League in Yorkshire, England. Ward wrote What I Believe and Why (1915) and Atheism and Americana in the Public Schools (1919). {FUK; FUS; RSR}

Ward, Robert (1917– ) A composer who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Ward wrote the present author concerning humanism: “Both Theistic Humanism and Naturalistic Humanism would be included in my set of beliefs and my view of ‘humanism.’ Aspects of all the other definitions have been considered in arriving at my conclusion.” {WAS, 13 July 1992}

Ware, Henry (1764–1845) Ware’s election as Hollis Professor of Divinity in 1803 was one of the earliest public manifestations of the growing split between Calvinists and liberals in New England, and the opposition voiced to his election by the Calvinists constituted the first phase of the Unitarian controversy. He was minister of the First Parish in Hingham, Massachusetts, and he taught at Harvard until 1840, founding the divinity school. His son, Henry, took a leading role among the next generation of liberals. {FUS; U&U}

Ware, Henry, Jr. (1794–1843) A pastor of Boston’s Second Unitarian Church (1817–1830), Ware left the church in the hands of his young colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Despite poor health, he became a professor in the Harvard divinity school (1830–1842), where he argued that the aim of religion is the cultivation of the ability to give “your heart a permanent bias toward God,” this despite the denomination’s reputation of being a church of rational rather than pietistic religion. {U; U&U)

Waring, E. Graham (20th Century) Waring edited Deism and Natural Religion (1967). {FUK; GS}

Waring, John A. (1914–1997) Waring was a researcher who was an authority on the social impact of technological development. He retired in 1978 from Fort Belvoir as editor of Defense Systems Management Review. Afterwards, he was research director for a report of the Mahler Institute on nuclear radiation hazards. Waring was a member of the Washington (D.C.) Area Secular Humanists. {Washington Post, 15 June 1997}

Warm, Anna (1946- ) A seasoned teacher of high school literature and writing in Fairfield County, Connecticut, Warm has written, “I became an atheist in Methodist Sunday School when, one day, I looked around and said to myself, incredulously, ‘These kids are buying this?’ Also, I hated the Welch’s grape juice communions.” {WAS, 21 April 1999}

Warner, Sylvia Townsend (1893–1978) Warner, an English novelist and poet, began working as one of the editors of Tudor Church Music (10 volumes, 1922–1929), and her interest in music continued for the rest of her life. In her twenties, she wrote The Espalier (1925), a book of poetry followed by Whether A Dove or A Seagull (1933), the latter written in collaboration with her companion of forty years, Valentine Ackland. Warner was an admirer of such poets as Thomas Hardy and George Crabbe. Her fiction, which reveals her freethought, included Lolly Willowes (1926), about a maiden aunt who realizes her vocation as a witch, and Mr. Fortune’s Maggot (1927), about the visit of an ex-clerk missionary to a remote South Sea island of Fanua, where he makes only one doubtful convert, then loses his own faith out of love for the islanders. Her Letters (1982) and her diaries (1996) tell of an intense feminism, an interest in “Uncle Joe” Stalin and communism (Summer Will Show, a 1936 novel, ends with the heroines sitting down and reading “The Communist Manifesto”), and her love for Ackland. As pointed out by Claire Tomalin, “In her published work, Townsend Warner did not proclaim her lesbianism, following in the tradition of kindred British women writers like Mansfield, Woolf and Sackville-West, all of whom tiptoed discreetly around this fascinating but dangerous subject. There was good reason for caution, since writings that edged too close to homosexual themes had brought both D. H. Lawrence and Radclyffe Hall to the law courts and led to the banning of their work.” After the war, during which her and Ackland’s home was destroyed by a bomb dropped by a German warplane, the two spent the remainder of their lives at Frome Vauchurch, Dorset. Warner was shocked when Ackland converted to Roman Catholicism near the end of her life. As a result, according to I’ll Stand By You, Selected Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland (1999), she had to put up with the sight of rosaries and prayer books around the house. Warner wrote numerous stories for The New Yorker, “potboilers,” she sometimes called them. Patricia Juliana Smith of the University of Connecticut claims that “lesbian and feminist critics are increasingly recognizing [Warner] as an important lesbian voice of the early twentieth century.” {GL; OEL; Claire Tomalin, “Burning Happiness,” The New York Times, 18 February 1996}

Warnock, Mary (20th Century) Warnock’s Women Philosophers (1996) lists, among other women philosophers, the following: Anne Conway (1631–1679); Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797); Harriet Martineau (1802–1876); Victoria Lady Welby (1837–1912); Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930); Susan Stebbing (1885–1943); Hannah Arendt (1906–1975); Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986); and Iris Murdoch (1919– ). Her Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics (1998, according to Colin McCall, is “an intelligent person’s guide to ethics” by “a very wise woman.” {Colin McCall, The Freethinker, June 1996 and November-December 1998}

Warrag, Ibn Al (1928- ) In The Radical Humanist (June 1999, as adopted from New Humanist), Warrag related the story of Anwar Shaikh, an ex-Muslim who became a liberal humanist. (See entry for Anwar Shaikh)

Warraq, Ibn [pseudonym] (20th Century) Warraq is a pseudonym for a former Muslim said to be “a lecturer in cultural studies at a Western university.” In “Islamic Intolerance” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1993), he detailed why Muslims are intolerant of Christians, Jews, Hindus, Bahais, and Buddhists, concluding that “even Islam’s staunchest supporters will testify to the uneasy and precarious position of non-Muslims in the Muslim states of today—the Copts of Egypt, the Jews in Syria, the Christians, and Hindus in Pakistan.” Why I Am Not A Muslim (1995) discusses the totalitarian nature of Islam and its law, Islamic colonialism, how Islam treats heretics and freethinkers, the status of women, the undemocratic pressures applied by Islamic immigrants in the West, and its taboos (wine, pork, and homosexuality). G. A. Wells, professor of German at the University of London, has praised the book not only for being “courageous” but also for scrutinizing the fundamental tenets of Islam so uncompromisingly. Religion, Warraq finds, “is largely a reshuffling of ideas of a yesterday, and to this Islam is no exception. It has taken a great deal from both Jewish and Christian traditions, but I doubt whether many Christians are aware of in what strange guise Christianity figures in the Koran. According to Sura 4, Jesus was not crucified: the Jews ‘Killed him not, they did not crucify him, but it was made to appear that way to them.’ This strikes at the heart of what is now established as Christian doctrine. If there was no atoning death, there is no redemption, through such a death.” What is in the Qur’an about Christianity, Warraq claims and Wells notes, derives from heretical sects. Writes QWarraq, “The Qur’an looks more authentic than the Gospels, in that its author works no miracles and makes no claim to divinity. . . . Also, there are so many variant readings that it is misleading to speak of the Koran: The definitive text still had not been achieved as late as the ninth century.” Islam never really encouraged science, if by science is meant “disinterested inquiry,” according to Warraq. What Islam means by “knowledge” is religious knowledge, for all other knowledge is dangerous to the faith. Whatever real science occurred under Islam occurred despite, not because, the religion. Further, he holds, the Muslim world has been indebted from the beginning to the Greeks and is indebted now to science for understanding its own intellectual and cultural history. He concludes that he is “convinced that despite all the shortcomings of Western liberal democracy, it is far preferable to the authoritarian, mind-numbing certitudes of Islamic theocracy.” Few other works have dared touch such subjects, and like Salmon Rushdie Warraq is afraid to reveal his exact whereabouts for fear of being assassinated. He did, however, participate in the 1996 Mexico City conference of humanists, and he is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists. In Mexico, he said that fundamentalists fear the humanities and history more than science, for they relativize human outlooks. Many humanists are to be found of Muslim origin, but one should see himself or herself as, for example, an Egyptian, not as an Egyptian Moslem or an Egyptian humanist. He looked forward to the time when the humanist movement will be as well known as Amnesty International. Warraq has written,

My close family members identify themselves as Muslim: some more orthodox, others less. My earliest memories are of my circumcision and my first day at Koranic school—psychoanalysts may make what they wish of that. Even before I could read or write the national language I learned to read the Koran in Arabic without understanding a word of it—a common experience for thousands of Muslim children. As soon as I was able to think for myself, I discarded all the religious dogmas that had been foisted on me. I now consider myself a secular humanist who believes that all religions are sick men's dreams, false—demonstrably false—and pernicious.

The Origins of the Qur’an: Classic Essays in Islam’s Holy Book (1998) is a controversial work which undermines the traditional account of the origin of the Qur’an and of the role of the Prophet in its formation. Muslim history is a fantasy, Warraq wrote, and Muslim “revelation” is actually a human, not a divine, construction. Warraq, a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000 and one of the members of the IHEU’s Committee on Religious Extremism and Rational Inquiry, is Executive Director of the International Society for Islamic Secularization (ISIS, PO Box 229, Buffalo, NY 14215). The group’s e-mail address: <info@secularislam.org>. On the Web: <http://www.secularislam.org>. (See “Standing Up to Scrutinize Islam,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996.) {WAS, numerous conversations}

Warren, Barbara (20th Century) Warren, a Seattle-area lawyer and a member of Seattle’s University Unitarian Church, is executive director of the Unitarian Universalist Affordable Housing Corporation (UUAHC).

Warren, Josiah (1798–1874) An American reformer, Warren took an active part in Robert Owen’s communistic experiment at New Harmony, Indiana (1825–1826). His own ideas were illustrated when he established in Cincinnati a “time store.” Warren’s outlook is found in his True Civilisation. {BDF; RAT}

Warren, Sidney (20th Century) Warren was an American freethinker. Historian Allan Nevins wrote the foreword to his American Freethought 1860–1914 (1943). {FUS}

WARS OF RELIGION

The Wars of Religion (1562–1598) spread throughout France following the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) in Paris. (See entry for Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.) {CE}

Warwick, Frances Evelyn (Countess of) (1861–1938) Warwick, who was the daughter of Colonel Maynard the wife of the Earl of Warwick, became known for her Socialist views. She disliked the name “philanthropist,” but she was generous in helping many institutions. In the Hibbert Journal (July, 1917), Warwick called for “a religion of humanity” without theology, ritual, or priests, and she pronounced the Church of England “bankrupt.” She was, however, a theist. {RAT; RE}

Washburn, Cadwallader Colden [Governor] (1818–1882) A Unitarian, Washburn was active in politics and founded the Gold Medal flour company. He was Governor of Wisconsin from 1867 to 1871 and again from 1872 to 1874. {U}

Washburn, Elihu (Benjamin) (1816–1887) Washburn, a diplomat and American politician, was the U.S. Representative from Illinois (1853–1869) and became known as a radical Republican who insisted upon limiting expenses. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Washburne Secretary of State but, feeling unqualified, he resigned within two weeks to become minister to France (1869–1877). A Unitarian, he wrote Israel, Elihu, and Cadwallader Washburn (1925). {CE; U}

Washburn, Israel (1813–1883) A Maine Universalist, Washburn had four sons out of seven who served in the United States Congress. One, Representative Israel Washburn Jr., called the meeting of an anti-slavery political party which resulted in the Republican Party, according to David Johnson, minister of First Parish in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Washburn, Lemuel K. (Born 1846) Washburn was an American lecturer and writer. Ordained in Ipswich as a Unitarian in 1870, he popularized the work of Parker, Emerson, and others rather than the Bible. In Minneapolis, he organized the first Freethought Society in Minnesota. Washburn was editor of the Boston Investigator, and he wrote Cosmian Hymn Book (1888) and Is the Bible Worth Reading? (1911). {BDF; PUT; RAT}

Washington, Corey (20th Century) At the University of Washington in 1995, Washington debated the existence of God with Christian apologist Dr. William Lane Craig. Washington, an atheist-agnostic philosopher, discussed abstract objects, the cosmological argument, the anthropic principle, objective moral values, the resurrection, religious experience, and the problem of evil. He is a supporter of Internet Infidels.

Washington, David M. (20th Century) An artist living in Chicago, Illinois, Washington is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.

Washington, George [President] (1732–1799) “There is no doubt that George Washington, a rather indifferent member of the Episcopal Church, and John Adams, second President of the United States and sympathetic to Unitarianism, were strongly influenced by Deism, both through their colleagues and as a result of the general intellectual atmosphere,” wrote Corliss Lamont. Washington was a member of the Masonic Lodge, which is open to individuals of all religions and uses a ritual that utilizes deistic terminology. Masonic practice is to use a deistic term such as “Supreme Architect” instead of God or Allah, and although Masons are required to believe in a “greater power” than themselves, they are allowed to define that power as they see fit. Washington consistently abstained from any public mention of the Christian religion. In his valedictory letter to the governors of the States on resigning his commission, Robertson points out, he did speak of the “ ‘benign influence of the Christian religion’—the common tone of the American deists of that day.” Richard Brookhiser, in Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1995), also mentions that the Anglican Church, the Bible, Freemasonry, the theater, and farming were important to Washington. But his familiarity with the Scriptures was limited to a few quotations which were clichés expressed by others around him, such as “every man under his vine and under his fig tree.” The Bible and Freemasonry may have been important to him, but Washington’s mind was not that of an intellectual so much as it was a mind of practicality. Like Cincinnatus, he was devoted to farming. As pointed out by Michael S. Medved, “One of the most seriously misleading of the Washington legends is the story of the pious general kneeling in prayer in the snow at Valley Forge. Not only is there no evidence to support this tale but also Washington was notorious in his parish church for refusing to kneel at any of the customary moments in the Episcopal service. As his minister declared disapprovingly after the President’s death, ‘Washington was a Deist.’ Although Martha was a devout churchwoman, George never shared her enthusiasm. On communion Sundays he always walked out before taking the Eucharist, leaving Martha to participate in the service alone.” In short, the first United States President was not interested in promised heavenly treasures in the hereafter. Even Jefferson had difficulty getting Washington to go on record concerning organized religion. Of Washington, McCabe wrote: “Clerical writers are naturally unwilling to admit that he was a freethinker—a non-Christian theist—but, while the evidence of faith which they allege is of the flimsiest description there is ample and solid proof of his heresy. Jefferson says that Morris, who was intimate with Washington, ‘often told me that General Washington believed no more of that system (Christianity) than he himself did.’ He quotes a chaplain to Congress who said that when the clergy presented an address to the President at his retirement, they pointed out that in his acknowledgment he had not said a word that identified him with Christianity, and in a further reply ‘the old fox’ evaded that point. In a sermon delivered at Albany and reported in the Daily Advertiser (Oct. 29, 1831), one of the chief ministers of the city said that ‘among all our Presidents from Washington downward not one was a professor of religion,’ which gives us the clerical tradition on the question. It is true that while he was President he attended the Episcopal church, but the rector, Dr. Abercrombie, told this preacher, Dr. Wilson (who says it in the same sermon), that Washington always left before the communion and when the rector pointed this out ceased to attend any service that was followed by communion. It is admitted that he did not send for or have a clergyman in his last hours; and the statement that he asked his family to leave the room and let him ‘spend his last hour with his Maker’ shows only that he believed in God, which nobody ever disputed. Some apologists give us the prayer he said when he was ‘alone with God,’ who must have let them into the secret. It cannot be disputed that he said in his will: ‘It is my express desire that my corpse may be interred in a private manner, without parade or funeral oration.’ Against all this the chief champion of the angels, Jared Sparks, who edited Washington’s writings nearly forty years after the death, urges such matters as that Washington wrote a hymn when he was a boy of thirteen; that (being a Deist) he often spoke of ‘the Author of the Universe;’ that a granddaughter, who was still a child when Washington died, said he prayed every day in private (which Washington’s adopted daughter questioned and was, in any case, consistent with deism); and that once or twice he spoke favorably of the Christian religion. The man is obviously a religious twister. He ignores decisive evidence in the very letters he edited—as when Washington speaks of ‘the professors of Christianity’ or Bishop White says that he never saw him kneel at prayer or heard him speak about religion—and most of the evidence given above. The evidence on both sides is given in Franklin Steiner’s The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents (Haldeman-Julius, 1936) and Remsburg’s Six Historic Americans.” For some patriots, Washington has himself become somewhat deified. But the man who personally surveyed the future boundaries of Washington, D.C., and who personally signed every passport issued during his presidency was once joked about by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The novelist, seeing a statue of the half-clad Washington which was erected in the Capitol Rotunda in the 1840s, remarked, “Did anybody ever see Washington naked? It is inconceivable. He has no nakedness, but I imagine was born with his clothes on and his hair powdered, and made a stately bow on his first appearance in the world.”

Upon becoming President, Washington had only one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. He had many pairs of false teeth – made of everything from animal tusks or human teeth – but none made of wood. It was an age when many had dental problems that dentistry was then unable to help. Little wonder he spent an estimated 7% of his salary on booze, according to Cormac O’Brien’s Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents.

Although known as “the father of his country,” Washington sired no children and allegedly showed little interest in women. “As a young unmarried man,” states the Alyson Almanac,

. . . he told friends that there was only one woman that he would ever consider marrying and that she was already married to his friend George William Fairfax. He did eventually marry Martha Dandridge Custis after being persuaded that it was unseemly for a public figure to remain unmarried. Nevertheless, his closest attachments were always to men, particular Alexander Hamilton. Throughout the Revolution, Hamilton served as Washington’s aide-de-camp, personal secretary, and closest companion. During Washington’s term of office, Treasury Secretary Hamilton was the guiding force of the administration and was the author of Washington’s Farewell Address. Due to the fact that Hamilton also had a history of intense friendships with men, there has been speculation—but no hard evidence—that the relationship went further than that.

Scandalmongers of his time, however, said Washington illegitimately fathered dozens of children and alleged, without documentation, that Alexander Hamilton was one such; some implied, on the contrary, that Hamilton was his secret love. Others said he did not smile because his wooden false teeth hurt—according to Ben Swanson, executive director of the National Museum of Dentistry, Washington had dentures that were made of ivory, sometimes even of human tooth enamel, but not wood. They were hinged together with gold springs and caused considerable pain. When he died of quinsy, or acute laryngitis, Washington owned 33,000 acres of land in Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, and the Northwest Territory. He had 640 sheep, 329 cows, horses, and mules. He also owned hundreds of slaves. His will stated,

Upon the decease of my wife, it is my Will & desire that all Slaves which I hold in my own right, shall receive their freedom. . . . And whereas among those who will receive freedom according to this devise, there may be some, who from old age or bodily infirmities, and others who on account of their infancy, that will be unable to support themselves; it is my Will and desire that all . . . shall be comfortably cloathed & fed by my heirs while they live. . . . And I do expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth of Virginia, of any Slave I may died possessed of, under any pretence whosoever. . . . And to my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee) I give immediate freedom; or if he should prefer it (on account of the accidents which have befallen him, and which have rendered him incapable of walking or any active employment) to remain in the situation he now is. . . . This I give him as a testimony of my sense of his attachment to me, and for his faithful services during the Revolutionary war.

At the time of his death, he had been bled heavily for four times and given gargles of molasses, vinegar, and butter. On his throat was placed a preparation, a blister of cantharides, made from dried beetles. On his deathbed, he uttered no words of a religious nature nor did he ask for a clergyman. “I die so hard,” he said, “but I am not afraid to go. I feel myself going. I thank you for your attention, but I pray you to take no more trouble about me. Let me go off quietly. I cannot last long.” (See also the entry for E. C. Vanderlaan, who confirms Washington’s lack of interest in religion; and for Gouverneur Morris, who told Thomas Jefferson that Washington believed no more of Christianity than he himself did. Paul Boller’s George Washington and Religion discusses the topic, also.) {AA; CE; CL; FUS; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

WASHINGTON ATHEISTS, HUMANISTS • Atheist League of Washington (Atheist Alliance), POB 1785, Seattle, Washington 98111. • Free Mind, a bi-monthly, 4116 Candlewood Dr. S.E., Lacey, Washington 98503-4422 • Humanist Association of Palouse Area (AHA), A-9, 600 Crestview SW, Pullman, Washington 99163. Tyre Newton is the contact. • Humanists of North Puget Sound, PO Box 405, La Conner, Washington 98257; phone (360) 466-4513. E-mail: <apptwo@halcyon.com>. Harry App is President. • Humanist Society of South Puget Sound (AHA–Bette Chambers is the contact. Phone (360) 491-8671), 4116 Candlewood Drive SE, Lacey, Washington 98503. • Spokane, Washington, Freedom from Religion Chapter, PO Box 436, Greenacres, WA 99016. Contact: <hhforester@aol.com> • University of Puget Sound Humanists are at: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Western Washington University’s Atheists, Heathens, and Agnostics on the Web:: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

WASHINGTON, D.C., HUMANISTS The District of Columbia has the Washington Area Secular Humanists (ASHS), POB 15319, Washington, DC 20003; (202) 298-0921. Ken Marsalek is the contact for the Maryland and District of Columbia chapters. E-mail: <wash@poboxes.com>. On the Web: <http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kaugust/asatext/wash.html>.

Wason, C. R. (20th Century) Wason writes for the English Freethinker. “Modern Jews claim that they have a right to rule Palestine because this right was given by a promise made to their ancestor Abraham,” he has stated. But the curious conclusion of history, he finds, is that the Palestine Arabs have the best claim to be the “Children of Abraham” inasmuch “as the original population of Israel has occupied the country since the days of Moses, though it has been diluted by successive invasions.” Wason holds that the Jews have every right to be proud of their noble tradition of democracy and learning, which was given to them by Moses, but not “if they rob and oppress the legitimate population and justify this by the fraudulent claim that this was promised to them by a fictitious Jehovah.” {The Freethinker, July 1994}

WASP “WASP” refers to White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The term usually has negative connotations. Inasmuch as the “W” is redundant, many shorten the expression to ASP. E(dward) Digby Baltzell (1912–1996), a sociologist, wrote The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (1964), a work credited with being the inspiration for “WASP,” although Baltzell was not pleased at the prospect of being remembered for but a single word. His sociological concern was that the American elite maintained barriers against minorities and was often racially prejudiced against talented outsiders. Surprisingly, Baltzell admired Al Capone, whom he called “one of the organizing geniuses of his generation.” Capone had made his money exploiting the market created by prohibition (a law passed by traditional Protestants largely to curb the drinking habits of the ethnic masses). Capone, said Baltzell, simply had followed in the tradition of the American dream of the self-made man and was not much different from the self-made Protestant “robber barons” of an earlier era. {The Economist, 31 August 1996}

Wasserman, Yoel (20th Century) Wasserman, a Coloradoan who is fluent in Hebrew, is one of many who term the Septuagint translation of the Bible “a bad one.” He claims that “the only reason its existence is in any way seemingly relevant in modern theology is because most early Christians did not know Hebrew but did know Greek. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than another old document. The language of the Jews was Hebrew, not Greek, and the language of the Old Testament was Hebrew, not Greek. That’s just the way it is.” {The Skeptical Review, January/February 1997}

Wassil-Grimm, Claudette (20th Century) A Unitarian, Wassil-Grimm is author of Diagnosis for Disaster: The Devastating Truth About False Memory Syndrome and Its Impact on Accusers and Families (1995) and The Twelve-Step Journal (1996). She debunks the idea that people repress memories of abuse, retrieving them only years afterwards. Those memories, she holds, are often false but are encouraged by therapists. Her work quotes many “retractors,” people who once believed they had remembered sexual abuse but have since come to doubt such memories.

WATER Water, the most familiar and abundant liquid on earth, is the essential ingredient of life. If non-believers were forced to name something that is “sacred,” they would name water, without which life as we know it would be an impossibility. In 1994, when a radiotelescope found water 200 million light-years ago in Markarian 1, the constellation of Pisces the fish, non-believers speculated that water may be present throughout the universe. “If this stuff is out there,” said Jack Welch at the American Astronomical Society’s national meeting, “then there is a good chance that there are living beings elsewhere. . . . The presence of water makes for the likelihood of life emerging in a number of places.” The water in Markarian 1 is contained in clouds that are rotating at thousands of miles an hour around the center of the galaxy, where a black hole could exist. (See entry for Air.)

Waterman, William R. (20th Century) Waterman wrote Frances Wright (1924). {GS}

Waters, Ann (20th Century) Waters, who works on the Fitchburg Star in Wisconsin, is President of the International Internet Leathercrafters Guild of Chicago. At the 1998 Midwest Horse Fair in Madison, Wisconsin, she displayed work that included three-dimensional leather portraits of horses. Waters is a freethinker whose journalistic stories have been critical of organized religion. E-mail: <clearh20s@aol.com>.

Waters, Brianna (20th Century)

In 1995 Waters and Ali Aliabadi founded the Atheist Students Association (ASA) at the University of Maryland in College Park. The two also were founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}

Waters, Nathaniel Ramsey (19th Century) Waters was the American author of Rome v. Reason (1888). {BDF}

Watkin, Frances (20th Century) Watkin in Britain is active with the Oxford Humanists.

Watkins, Bert (20th Century) Watkins has been editor of The Shreveport Humanist Bulletin. E-mail: <wwatkins40@aol.com>.

Watkins, Steve (20th Century) A novelist who teaches at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Watkins wrote The Black O. The work describes how Shoney’s, a billion-dollar chain with restaurants in thirty-five states, ended up paying out $132.5 million, most of it to nearly 21,000 former employees. The title comes from one of the company’s bizarre hiring practices: manager were instructed to blacken the o in Shoney’s on job applications as a secret code indicating the applicant was African American. A Unitarian, he left the United Methodist church because “I didn’t believe what they believed and couldn’t pretend otherwise.” {World, July-August 1998}

Watson, Alan (20th Century) Watson is an activist in Ireland of the Ulster Humanist Association. His e-mail: <alan.watson1@virgin.net>.

Watson, Geoffrey (20th Century) Watson, a psychologist, was Principal Lecturer at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, England. In “Life—A Meaning and a Morality” (New Humanist, December 1997), he argues that it is possible to give meaning to our lives at the same time creating moral values ourselves. Watson, Goodwin (1899?–1976) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Watson was an association coordinator of Union Graduate School. He was on the editorial board of the Journal of Social Psychology. {HM2}

Watson, James (1799–1874) Watson was known as one of the bravest heroes in the struggle for a free press in England. During the prosecution of Carlile and his shopmen in 1822, Watson volunteered to come from London to Leeds. For selling a deist book, Palmer’s Principles of Nature, Watson, a British freethought publisher, was convicted of blasphemous libel in 1823 and sentenced to one year in Cold Bath Fields prison. More a deist than an atheist, he took part in Robert Owen’s agitation for universal suffrage, and he was active in trade-union matters and in the struggle for an unstamped press. He was one of Richard Carlile’s shopmen, and took his share of imprisonment when the Government tried to suppress Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and several other Freethought publications. His forte was as a publisher, and he issued many anti-Christian works in cheap editions by Paine, Mirabeau, Palmer, d’Holbach, Frances Wright, Shelley, Haslam, Holyoake, Volney, and others. W. J. Linton, a biographer, reported that Watson died at the age of seventy-five, “passing away in his sleep, without a struggle, without a sigh.” {BDF; EU, Joel H. Wiener; FO; FUK; RAT; RE; VI; TRI; Nicholas Walter, New Humanist, September 1999}

[[Watson, James Dewey (1928-	)

A 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine winner, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, Watson is a Chicago-born geneticist. He became professor of biology at Harvard in 1961 and in 1994 President of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory at Long Island, New York. Interviewed in 1996 for a BBC film, Watson said:

I don’t think we’re for anything, we’re just products of evolution. You can say, “Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don’t think there’s a purpose,” but I’m anticipating a good lunch. [Asked if he knew many religious scientists]: Virtually none. Occasionally I meet them, and I’m a bit embarrassed [laugh], because I can’t believe that anyone accepts truth by revelation.

In a Youngston State University speech, he said:

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don’t have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. {CA; The Vindicator, 2 Dec 2003}

Watson, John (20th Century) Watson is a director of William Sinclair Holdings and is chairman of Sinclair McGill (Scotland) Ltd. He is an activist member of the Humanist Society of Scotland.

Watson, Paul (20th Century) Watson is an environmentalist and agnostic. In 1995, Heather Ramsay asked him whether he had any personal relationship with a spiritual being. He said he was not spiritual at all. She then asked where he got his morality from, his sense of purpose, and he said,

I have an understanding of who and what I am, which is a part of the earth. So that’s what I identify with, is the planet as a whole. We come out of the earth and go back into the earth. What gives me great joy is knowing that everything around . . . is a part of my body. Almost all theological thought is anthropocentric, and I just cannot buy into the anthropocentric ideology. Basically we’re a bunch of conceited apes.

As for the importance of man to protect his environment, Watson said, “To be responsible for an extinction [of a species] is to commit blasphemy against the divine. It is the greatest of all possible crimes, more evil than murder, more appalling than genocide, more monstrous than even the apparent unlimited perversities of the human mind. To be responsible for the complete and utter destruction of a unique and sacred life form is arrogance that seethes with evil, for the very opposite of evil is live. It is no accident that these two words spell out each other in reverse.” {CA; E}

Watson, Thomas (19th Century) Watson wrote The Mystagogue (1847). {BDF}

Watson, William [Sir] (1858–1935) An English poet, Watson wrote Wordsworth’s Grave (1890), followed by a meditative elegy on Tennyson, Lachrymae Musarum (1892). His agnosticism is shown in such of his poems as “The Unknown God” and “The Hope of the World.” God to him was “the mystery we make darker with a name,” and, according to McCabe, Watson scorned the “God for ever hearkening unto his self-appointed laud” of his Churches. Watson was knighted in 1917 for his distinction as a poet. {CE; JM}

Watt, Fergus (20th Century) Watt, the Executive Director of the World Federalists of Canada, wrote “Why Does the UN Need a Criminal Court” for Humanist in Canada (Summer 1998). “The impunity enjoyed by Pol Pot and other architects of this century’s worst massacres,” he wrote, “underscores the urgent need for a global judicial body.”

Watt, James (1736–1819)

The Scottish inventor of an improved steam engine, Watt coined the term “horsepower.” The unit of electrical power, watt, is named for him. His new type of engine, upon which Matthew Boulton helped, was vastly more efficient than that of Thomas Newcomen, whose crude machine had been invented sixty years earlier. Watt’s steam engine had a separate condensing chamber, and parts of the engine were insulated. When James Boswell came to inspect the invention, Boulton told him, “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have: Power!” Not perpetual power, of course: Watt, a Deist who never attended any church, believed that to be an impossibility. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}

Watters, Wendell W. (20th Century) A professor emeritus of psychiatry at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario), Watters is a secular humanist who has written for Free Inquiry and for Humanist in Canada. At the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), and at the Eleventh held in Brussels (1990), Watters addressed the groups. In Deadly Doctrine: Health, Illness, and Christian God-Talk (1992), Watters, who is a physician, disbelieves that Christianity brings contentment, physical and emotional health, spiritual (psychological) healing, and personal well-being. On the contrary, he holds that many aspects of Christian doctrine—for example, beliefs about sin, sex, personal sacrifice, pleasure and guilt, self-esteem, and the like—actually damage lives and predispose believers to ill-health by creating a world of artificial contrasts (God and the Devil, sin and salvation, flesh and the spirit) designed to encourage dependency, self-effacement, denial, ignorance, intolerance, and alienation. Further, the addictive power of Christian beliefs frequently results in antisocial behavior, poor psychological development, sexual dysfunctioning, depression, anxiety, low self-image, and even schizophrenia. Watters has written, “People who are no longer religious are more able to be honest with themselves and with others, about how they feel, whatever that feeling is.” During World War II, Watters was a bomber navigator and flew with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in Burma. {Free Inquiry, Winter, 1989-1990}

Wattleton, Faye (1943– ) A President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Wattleton was named Humanist of the Year in 1986 by the American Humanist Association. In 1981 she wrote How To Talk With Your Child About Sexuality. {HNS2}

Watts, Charles (1836–1906) An English freethought writer-publisher, the son of a Wesleyan minister, Watts in 1899 founded the Rationalist Press Association (RPA) and gave forty years of his life to the freethought movement. The RPA published its first best-seller, Joseph McCabe’s translation of Ernst Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe. Hundreds of thousands of cheaply printed freethought books followed. In 1894 he had started Watts’s Literary Guide, which in 1894 became The Literary Guide and more recently The Humanist (1956) and New Humanist (1972). The initial appeal of the Rationalist Press Association for £1000 bore the signatures of such Honorary Associates as Leslie Stephen (author and father of Virginia Woolf), Émile Zola, and Ernst Haeckel. Other Honorary Associates have included Arnold Bennett, the novelist; G. J. Trevelyan (the historian); Albert Einstein; Somerset Maugham; Sigmund Freud; and A. J. Ayer. Watts started the Secular Review with G. W. Foote and, afterwards, Secular Thought of Toronto. He wrote a portion of The Freethinker’s Text Book and has published Christianity: Its Origin, Nature and Influence; The Teachings of Secularism Compared with Orthodox Christianity, and other brochures. Andrew Carnegie, who wrote about Watts’s life, described him as a deist who never went to church. A sample of his writing:

About six thousand years ago an all-wise, all-powerful, and beneficent God made man and woman, and placed them in a position surrounded by temptations it was impossible for them to withstand. For instance, he implanted within them desires, which as God, he must have known would produce their downfall. He next caused a tree to bear fruit that was adapted to harmonize with the very desires which he had previously imparted to his children. God, all-good, then created a serpent of the worst possible kind, in order that it might be successful in tempting Eve to partake of the fruit. God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat of this fruit, under the penalty of death, knowing at the same time that they would eat of it, and that they would not die. The serpent is allowed to succeed in his plan of temptation, and then God curses the ground for yielding the tree which he himself had caused to grow; further, the almighty Being dooms both man and woman to lives of pain and sorrow, and assures them that their posterity shall feel the terrible effects of their having done what was impossible, under the circumstances, for them to avoid. Although at first God pronounced his creative work to be “very good,” it proved to be quite the opposite. So bad did the human family become that God determined to bring a flood upon the earth and wash every member, one household excepted, out of existence. This ‘water-cure’ was not, however, sufficient to correct the ‘divine’ errors, for the people grew worse than ever. God now decided upon another plan, namely to send his son—who was as old as himself, and, therefore, not his son—to die, but who was invested with immortality and could not die, to atone for sins that had never been committed by people who were not then born, and who could not, therefore, have been guilty of any sin. As a conclusion to the whole scheme, this all-merciful God prepared a hell, containing material fire of brimstone, to burn the unmaterial souls of all persons who should fail to believe the truth, justice, and necessity of this jumble of cruelty and absurdity.

The death in 1870 of his first wife, Mary Ann, at the age of thirty-one was followed closely by the deaths of two of their sons, leaving one son, Charles who in 1877 began sharing his father’s life and work. Watts’s second wife was Kate. In 1881 the Radical described Watts in hostile fashion as “thick-set, black, podgy, round-headed, goggle-eyed.” Others were more generous, writing that “His trunk is square and well-built, and in his walk there is something of quiet and careless dignity. Although his frame is adipose rather than muscular, it has a fine, free outline, and is far from flaccid. He meets you, he recognises you. With a frank and jovial, but somewhat noisy and stagey bon-hommie, he shakes you by the hand repeatedly, addressing you ‘My friend.’ He uses this expression indiscriminately to everybody he knows, for it does not seem to have occurred to the genial and kindly man that anybody who knows him can be less than his ‘friend.’ ” Royle adds, “Watts was, in fact, just short of greatness in everything: without the ruthlessness of Bradlaugh, the culture of Besant, or the style of Ross and Foote, he was par excellence the ordinary man’s leader—effective but limited; a little dull, a little plodding, and, as Ross recognised, ‘deficient in originality of conception and boldness of generalisation.’ ” {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; FUS; RAT; RE; RSR; TRI; VI; WSS}

Watts, Charles Albert (1858–1946) 

Watts, the son of Charles Watts, started as a compositor. At the death of Austin Holyoake in 1876, Charles Watts acquired the business, which in 1882 passed to Charles. In 1885 he inaugurated The Literary Guide and, later, The Agnostic Annual (now The Rationalist Annual). His children, Frederick C. C. Watts and Gladys Watts, began working with their father as soon as their scholastic career was over. Frederick became chairman and managing director both of the Rationalist Press Association and C. A. Watts & Co., Ltd., as well as editor of The Literary Guide and The Rationalist Annual. Gladys Watts (who became Mrs. Dixon) became secretary and a director of C. A. Watts & Co., Ltd. The fourth generation of the family is represented by the two daughters of F. C. C. Watts, Doreen and Marion. A thorough description of Watts has been written by Nicolas Walter for Rationalist Review 8 (Spring 1996). {BDF; FUK; PUT; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}

Watts, George Frederic (1817–1904) Watts, an English painter and sculptor, studied at the Royal Academy and in Italy, where he developed an enthusiasm for Renaissance painting and Greek sculpture. His works are found in London’s Tate Gallery, London’s National Portrait Gallery, New York’s Metropolitan Museum, and elsewhere. Twice offered a baronetcy for his distinction in art, he refused. His paintings were symbolic and “of an ethical tendency, but they were humanist not Christian,” observed McCabe. The orthodox Mrs. Barrington, his biographer, admitted his freethought in the usual diplomatic language: “No formalities of any Church appealed personally to Watts’s feelings,” and “he did not feel so definitely the sense of the reality of the spiritual life.” McCabe adds, “In honest English, he was an Agnostic.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Watts, Isaac (1674–1748) Watts, a deist and hymnist, wrote “Joy to the World” and “O God, Our Help In Ages Past,” a fact which trinitarians find difficult to justify. He wrote The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, which was attacked in two works by Martin Tomkyns, leading Robertson to remark that “the result seems to have been an unsettlement of the orthodoxy of the hymn-writer. There is express testimony from Dr. Lardner, a very trustworthy witness, that Watts in his latter years, ‘before he was seized with an imbecility of his faculties,’ was substantially a Unitarian.” John Murray, the Universalist, has told about hearing that upon Watts’s death some friends had discovered among his papers a defense of universal salvation, which they had burned in order to prevent any injuring of his other works’ credit. {CE; JMR; JMRH}

Watts, John (1818–1887) A reformer, Watts was the son of a weaver and was partly paralyzed as a child. He became assistant secretary and librarian at the Mechanics’ Institution (1831–1838), setting up a business in 1838 but giving it up in order to become an Owenite lecturer. Watts was an important influence in the establishment of the first Free Library at Manchester, and he fought for the repeal of the “taxes on knowledge.” A promoter of the People’s Provident Assurance Society, he drafted the Life Assurance Act of 1870. An active leader in various humanitarian groups, Watts was a rationalist. {RAT}

Watts, John (1834–1866) Watts, the brother of Charles Watts, was the son of a Wesleyan preacher and was converted to freethought by his brother Charles. Watts became sub-editor of the Reasoner and for a time edited the National Reformer. He also edited, in collaboration with Charles Bradlaugh, Half Hours With Freethinkers and published pamphlets such as “Logic and Philosophy of Atheism,” “Origin of Man,” “Is Man Immortal?” “The Devil,” and “Who Were the Writers of the New Testament?” At the time of his death, Dr. George Sexton published the following in National Reformer: “At about half past seven in the evening he breathed his last, so gently that although I had one of his hands in mine, and his brother the other in his, the moment of his death passed almost unobserved by either of us. No groan, no sigh, no pang indicated his departure. He died as a candle goes out when burned to the socket.” {BDF; FUK; RAT; VI; TRI}

Watts, Kate (19th Century) Watts, an actress and well-known British freethinker, expressed the classic radical position, according to Royle, who added, “In a series of articles on ‘The Education and Position of Women’ in the Secular Review in 1879, Watts saw the educated woman not only as an asset in the home and to her husband, but also as a person in her own right, capable of earning her own living, marrying at leisure, or if need by not marrying at all without having to fear the alternative of the life of a spinster in a sweatshop.” Watts’s greatest rival was Annie Besant. {PUT; RSR; WWS}

Watts-Dunton, Walter Theodore (1832–1914) For years the leading critic on the Athenaeum, Watts published several volumes of poems and wrote a novel, Aylwin (1898). Swinburne lived in his house for thirty years and, although he offended many by giving the rebel-poet a Christian burial, Watts-Dunton himself was a Rationalist. (See entry for Swinburne.) {RAT; RE; TRI}

Watts [of Lewes] (19th Century) Watts of Lewes, Sussex, was author of Yahoo (1833), a satire in verse, and The Great Dragon Cast Out. {BDF}

Wayne, Gordon (20th Century) Wayne in “A Rational Perspective on Religion” in Humanist in Canada (Spring 1999) suggests that if the Creator had the power and the inclination to communicate with prophets in millennia long gone, and in light of improvements in communication since that time, is it not reasonable to expect that an all-powerful entity would utilize the extant multimedia systems to reveal the cosmic secrets to all people simultaneously? A thoughtful Creator would give the media sufficient advance notice, then demand prime time coverage.

WEB The internet contains several sites concerning agnosticism, atheism, freethought, humanism, and rationalism; for example:

• The American Humanist Association: <http://www.humanism.net> • The American Rationalist: <http://www.infidels.org/org/ar>. • Council for Secular Humanism: <http://www.secularhumanism.org> • Freedom From Religion Foundation: <http://www.ffrf.org> • Humanist Net <http://humanist.net> • The Secular Web: Volunteers run this United States-based non-profit organization <http://www.infidels.org>

Webb, Beatrice (1858–1943)

A follower of Herbert Spencer and a freethinker, Webb was prominent in the Fabian Society. Born into a wealthy and well-connected family, she was interested in both the theoretical and practical aspects of social reform, political economy, and sociology, concerns were shared by her husband, Sidney Webb (1859–1947), whom she married in 1892. The two appear in H. G. Wells’s novel, The New Machiavelli (1911), as the Baileys, “two active self-centred people, excessively devoted to the public service . . . the most formidable and distinguished couple conceivable.” {OEL; TRI}

Webb, Benjamin (19th Century) Webb, with W. W. Baker, published The Delaware Free Press (1830–1833). {FUS}

Webb, David (20th Century) Webb is honorary director of the National Campaign for the Reform of the Obscene Publications Acts (NCROPA) in England. He writes for The Freethinker.

Webb, George (20th Century) Webb is author of The Evolution Controversy in America (1994), in which he describes objections to evolution not only by religionists but also by some scientists.

Webb, Jack (1920–1982) Webb, a radio, TV producer, writer, director, and actor, had a character, Joe Friday, who coined the phrase that sums up the rationalists’ position: “Just the facts, ma’am.”

Webb, Sidney (1859–1947) Webb, who was influenced first by J. S. Mill, was prominent in the Fabian Society, as was his wife Beatrice Webb. Both were freethinkers. {TRI}

Webbe, Joseph (19th Century) Webbe, whose Latinized name was Josephus Tela, edited the Philosophical Library (1818), which contained the life and morals of Confucius, Epicurus, Isoscrates, Mahomet, and others. Cushing cites Webbe as an American writer, a grand master of Freemasons in America, but Wheeler believes that was a different individual, Joseph Webb. {BDF}

Webber, Harold W. (20th Century) A Groton, Massachusetts, scientist, Webber supported Priscilla Robertson when she was editor of The Humanist and also wrote book reviews for the magazine in the 1950s.

Webber, Zacharias (Died 1679) A Dutch painter, Webber wrote heretical works such as On the Temptation of Christ and The Seduction of Adam and Eve. He defended Bekker and, under the pen name J. Adolphs, wrote The True Origin, Continuance and Destruction of Satan. {BDF}

Weber, Karl Julius (1767–1832) Weber was a German author who studied French philosophy while in Switzerland and found it suited his satirical turn of mind. He wrote a history of Monkery (1818–1820); Letters of Germans Travelling in Germany (1826–1828); and Demokritos, or the Posthumous Papers of a Laughing Philosopher (1832–1836). {BDF; RAT}

Weber, W. (20th Century) 

Weber, a freethinker during the early part of the century, wrote What Does Life Mean to You? (190–?). {GS}

Webster, Daniel (1782–1852) An orator, attorney, and champion of conservative economic policies, Webster ran for President and served as Secretary of State. “When you came to Boston, you went to the Unitarian Church and now they speak of you as a Unitarian,” Webster’s biographer Peter Harvey relates. “I am not a Unitarian,” Webster replied. I should be regarded as perhaps rather liberal in my views. . . . When I came to Boston, many of my friends went to Brattle Street Church. . . . Then the divisions were not so marked as now.” According to Harvey, Webster also attended Congregational and Episcopal churches. Webster’s legalistic mind persisted to the end, as evidenced by his informing his physician, “Doctor, you have carried me through the night. I think you will get me through today. I shall die tonight.” Biographer George Ticknor Curtis wrote that the doctor answered, “You are right, sir.” When Mrs. Webster cried hysterically at the bedside, Webster said, “My dear wife, when you and I were married at the Bowling Green we knew that we must one day part.” That evening, October 23rd, he tried to stay awake, not to avoid death but because he wanted to experience the event he knew was about to happen. “Am I alive, or am I dead?” he inquired, having dozed off. A little after midnight, he struggled to see where he was, then stated, “I still live!” Three hours later, apparently believing in an afterlife, he died. His funeral was conducted at his home by a Congregational minister from Marshfield. {CE; EG; TYD}

Webster, John (c. 1580–c. 1625) An English dramatist, Webster observed, “Religion, oh, how it is commedled with policy! The first bloodshed in the world happened about religion.” {TYD}

Webster, Richard (20th Century) Webster is author of A Brief History of Blasphemy (1990).

Wechsler, Joseph R. (20th Century) Wechsler has written articles critical of organized religion in American Rationalist, including “The Biological Aspect of Religion” (October 1992) and “Behold a New Religion!” (October 1994).

Wedderburn, Robert (19th Century) Wedderburn wrote The Address of Rev. R. Wedderburn to the Court of King’s Bench at Westminster (1820). {GS}

Wedgwood, Josiah (1730–1795) An English potter, Wedgwood founded Wedgwood pottery in England. He was a member of the Unitarian Chapel at Newcastle-under-Lyme in England. {CE; U; UU}

Weeks, Caleb (19th Century) Weeks, a freethinker, wrote My Religious Life Experience (1893). {GS}

Weeks, Daphne Edith (1905– ) Weeks, whose family were practicing Presbyterians, is an Australian teacher and humanist. In 1960 she founded the Australian Humanist Movement after placing an advertisement in the London Humanist seeking other Australians who might be interested. She remained its secretary from 1960 to 1975. {SWW}

Weeks, William George (1909–1975) Weeks, whose family were Congregationalists, was an Australian teacher and humanist. He chaired the first meeting in 1960 of the Sydney Humanist Group, which that year changed its name to the New South Wales Humanist Society. Weeks remained chairman and committee member until 1975. {SWW}

WEGE OHNE DOGMA A German freethought publication, Wege ohne Dogma is at Freirelogopse Verlagsbuchandlung, L 10.4-6, 68161 Mannheim, Germany

Weidhorn, Manfred (1931– ) Weidhorn has written scholarly articles for The American Rationalist. He is author of Sword and Pen; A Survey of the Writings of Sir Winston Churchill (1974).

Weightman, John (20th Century) Weightman is a rationalist who has written for England’s New Humanist. Most contemporary believers or half-believers, he finds, “are not really interested in the literal truth of Christianity. They accept the Bible story more or less consciously as a psychological shield against raw existential awareness. If the need for such a shield is a recurrent feature in some individuals, no amount of argument will eliminate it, and indeed there may even be favourable things to be said about Christianity as a therapeutic sado-masochistic fantasy, so long as it remains non-aggressive.” Granting but regretting this, Weightman adds that total humanists “are still a long way from knowing whether total humanism is a possibility for mankind in general.”

Weil, André (1906-1998) Weil, the eminent mathematician, was a precocious child who taught himself Greek before he was twelve years old, was fluent in Latin, and could declaim speeches from Corneille and Racine. As a teenager he became interested in philosophy but, upon receiving what he thought was an inflated grade on an examination, decided that “a subject in which one could do so well while barely knowing what one was talking about was hardly worthy of respect.” His 1928 thesis at the University of Paris solved a problem concerning elliptic curves that had been posed by the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Weil (pronounced VAY) was known as an ill-tempered, impossible character who, avoiding the French draft—he believed he had the duty not to be slaughtered as his country’s young scientific élite had been in World War I—went to Finland and was returned to be imprisoned by the French for six months. During the confusion that followed the German invasion of France, Weil obtained an American visa. In his autobiographical Souvenirs d’apprentissage he described how President Franklin Roosevelt had sent him to France expressly to try to save French intellectuals. A former professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, he won in 1994 the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which is not awarded in mathematics, when he received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Science from the Inamori Foundation of Kyoto, Japan. The award honored the part of his work known as “the Weil conjectures,” which provided the principles for modern algebraic geometry. The patterns of numbers he discovered are now applied, for example, in writing almost-unbreakable secret codes and in enhancing the accurate transmission of computer data. One of the founders of an influential Bourbaki group of French mathematicians, which rebelled against the French establishment, Weil and only his close friends knew that the group was named after an imaginary Russian general from an invented land of Poldavia. At his death, the only honor listed in his official biography at the Institute simply said, “Member, Poldavian Academy of Science and Letters. He is believed to have been a non-theist, one not interested in religion or mysticism the way his younger sister, Simone, was. His obituary (The Economist, 22 August 1998) pointed out that he “took particular pride in the way he solved ‘a problem of combinatories concerning marriage rules in a tribe of Australian aborigines’ for Claude Lévi-Strauss. This achievement at least would have made his sister proud. Simone identified with downtrodden people everywhere, and starved herself to death in England in 1943 to express her solidarity with the suffering of her compatriots after the French Resistance refused to parachute her into occupied France.” {Ford Burkhart, The New York Times, 10 August 1998}

Weil, Simone (1909–1943) Weil, a French philosopher and mystic, was deprived of her lycée teaching job because of her “Jewish race.” However, according to Alfred Kazin, she “coupled Pascal with Racine in demonstrating her cultural reverence as a French patriot. She hotly denied the Jewish roots of Christianity, to the wonder of Catholic friends impatient to see her in the Church; saw the Jews as the ‘impure element’ that kept her out. She liked to recite the Lord’s Prayer in Greek, but made nothing of Jesus’ praying to Our Father and in the Gospels reiterating ‘My Father, Our Father.’ She called herself a Christian, and in her extraordinary notebooks described herself as a tormented pilgrim coming close to the Church but never able to join it.” In 1940, although originally Jewish, she became a practicing Roman Catholic, believing that Christ on the Cross was a bridge between God and man. However, Kazin concludes after reading her First and Last Notebooks (1970), “In the ghastly trial of humanity that was Hitler’s war, she, too, would have been obliterated if her posthumously published notebooks had not revealed her, in all her excess, as a genius of the spiritual life. Representing nothing and no one but herself, she was no more with the Church than she was with the Jews. As William Blake said, ‘Organized religion: an impossibility.’ Like so many homeless believers before her, she was speaking as ‘the Alone to the Alone.’ ” (See entry for André Weil.) {CE; Alfred Kazin, “A Genius of the Spiritual Life,” The New York Review of Books (18 April 1996)}

Weinburg, Arthur (20th Century) Weinburg wrote Attorney for the Damned (1967), about Clarence Darrow. {GS}

Weinberg, Steven (1933– ) In Dreams of a Final Theory: The Search for the Fundamental Laws of Nature (1992), Weinberg illustrates as he did in The First Three Minutes (1977) that he is an author worthy of being called one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists. Weinberg finds no place for God, or for a reconciliation between science and religion. “The more we refine our understanding of God to make the concept plausible,” he wrote, “the more it seems pointless.” For him, science has demystified to the point where the “retreat of religion from the ground occupied by science is almost complete.” Further, he holds that “though we shall find beauty in the final laws of nature, we will find no special status for life or intelligence.” Weinberg attacks the religious conservatives for standing in the way of scientific inquiry, but also he criticizes religious liberals for reducing theology to vacuousness in attempting to reconcile religion with science. In The New York Review of Books (12 June 1997), Weinberg made some salient points:

The Milky Way is not something out there, far from us—rather, we are in it. It is our galaxy: a flat disk of about a hundred billion stars, almost a hundred thousand light years across, within which our own solar system is orbiting, two thirds of the way out from the center. What we see in the sky as the Milky Way is the combined light of the many stars that are in our line of sight when we look out along the plane of the disk, almost all of them too far away to be seen separately. Staring at the Milky way and not being able to make out individual stars in it gave me a chilling sense of how big it is, and I found myself holding on tightly to the arms of my lawn chair. . . . Here is the account that is now accepted by almost all working cosmologists. About 10 to 15 billion years ago, the contents of the universe were so crowded together that there could be no galaxies or stars or even atoms or atomic nuclei. There were only particles of matter and antimatter and light, uniformly filling all space. No definite starting temperature is known, but our calculations tell us that the contents of the universe must once have had a temperature of at least a thousand trillion degrees centigrade. At such temperatures, particles of matter and antimatter were continually converting into light, and being created again from light. Meanwhile, the particles were also rapidly rushing apart, just as the galaxies are now. This expansion caused a fast cooling of the particles, in the same way that a refrigerator is cooled by the expansion of the freon gas in its coils. After a few seconds, the temperature of the matter, antimatter, and light had dropped to about ten billion degrees. Light no longer had enough energy to turn into matter and antimatter. Almost all matter and antimatter particles annihilated each other, but (for reasons that are somewhat mysterious) there was a slight excess of matter particles—electrons, protons, and neutrons—which could find no antimatter particles to annihilate them, and they therefore survived this great extinction. After three more minutes of expansion the leftover matter became cold enough (about a billion degrees) for protons and neutrons to bind together into the nuclei of the lightest elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. . . . No one is certain what happened before the big bang, or even if the question has any meaning. When they thought about it at all, most physicists and astronomers supposed until recently that the universe started in an instant of infinite temperature and density at which time itself began, so that questions about what happened before the big bang are meaningless, like questions about what happens at temperatures below absolute zero. Some theologians welcome this view, presumably because it bears a resemblance to scriptural accounts of creation. Moses Maimonides taught that “the foundation of our faith is the belief that God created the Universe from nothing; that time did not exist previously, but was created. . . .” Saint Augustine thought the same. But opinions among cosmologists have been shifting lately, toward a more complicated and far-reaching picture of the origin of the universe. (He then reviewed books by Timothy Ferris, Alan H. Guth, and Martin Reese, all three of which he said “give clear introductions to the standard big-bang theory and to the physical theories used by cosmologists.”)

In Washington, D.C., in a 1999 debate with John Polkinghorne that was held in the same National Museum of Natural History auditorium as a famous 1920 debate on the size of the universe between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Weinberg deplored any science-and-religion trend—it “could help to give religion a kind of legitimacy it shouldn’t have.” “With or without religion,” he said, “you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” In 1979 Weinberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Abdus Salam and Lee Glashow. In 1996, he was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1999, for his plain speaking by public figures on the subject of religion, he was presented with the “Emperor Has No Clothes” statuette by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. As to his predictions about what will be the physicists’ “wave of the future,” Weinberg cited Brian Greene’s projections about the “string theory” as being “the only game in town.” (See entry for Christian de Duve.) {CA; CE; E; New York, 1 February 1999; Carey Goldberg, The New York Times, 20 April 1999}

Weiner, Neal O. (20th Century) In The Harmony of the Soul: Mental Health and Moral Virtue Reconsidered (1993), Weiner details a humanistic and naturalistic basis for ethics.

Weinstein, Jacob J. (1902–1974) 

Weinstein was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I. A rabbi, he advised students at Columbia University in 1932 and 1933. {HM1}

Weinstein, Steven (20th Century) “It is very hard to realize that this all is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” wrote Weinstein in The First Three Minutes (1977).

Weis, May H. (20th Century) Weis was a UN representative for the International Humanist and Ethical Union when she signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}

Weismann, August (1834–1914) Weismann, a German biologist, is known as the originator of the germ-plasm theory of heredity. His doctrine, formerly called Weismannism, stresses the unbroken continuity of the germ plasm and the nonheritability of acquired characteristics. His works include The Germ-Plasm (1892) and a series of essays translated into English as Essays Upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (1891–1892). According to McCabe, “Although Weismann was an agnostic and materialist—the Unitarian and bigoted Sir Arthur Thompson deliberately altered several materialistic passages in translating his principal work into English—he wrote nothing on religion.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Weiss, John (1818–1879 With O. B. Frothingham, Weiss worked to found the Free Religious Association. His acerbity combined with wit resulted in the observation that “Time was that when the brain was out a man would die, but now they make a Unitarian minister out of him.” Frothingham called Weiss “eminently religious,” but his faith was “purely natural, scientific . . . unorthodox to the last degree.” Weiss looked to Theodore Parker as a leader, and his biography of Parker (1863) is a monument to the man who Weiss believed had “conscience and humanity enough to feed a generation.” {U&U}

Weitling, Wilhelm (1808–1871) A German social democrat, Weitling was leader of “Der Bund der Gerechten,” the League of the Just. In Zürich, he published The Gospel of Poor Sinners and wrote Humanity, As It Is and As It Should Be. Weitling emigrated to America, where he died in 1871. {BDF; RAT}

Welby, Victoria [Lady] (1837–1912) Lady Welby is described in Women Philosophers (1996) as “a thoroughly independent thinker” whose long correspondence with C. S. Peirce “contributed to the development of pragmatism as a kind of systematic epistemology.” Undeniably, the freethinking Lady Welby wrote, “obscurity or confusion in language, if it does not betray the same defect in thought, at least tends to create it.” {Freethinker, June 1996}

Welch, Brett (20th Century) Welch is a co-director of ATVOP, the Atheist TV Outreach Project.

Weld, Madeline (20th Century) Weld wrote “How Does Canada Determine Its Population Policies?” and “Our Native Land” for Humanist in Canada (Summers 1997 and 1998).

Wellhausen, Julius (1844–1918) 

Wellhausen was a German critic who had studied theology at Göttingen and then became professor in Griefswald, Halle, and Marburg. Wellhausen is recognized for his documentary hypothesis that sought to account for both the composition of the Penateuch (Genesis-Deuteronomy) and for the evolution and history of Judaism. He is also known for his Prolegomena to the History of Israel (1883) and his contributions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Although he remained a theist, his great work in the naturalistic criticism of the Bible at the end of the 19th century, which helped considerably in understanding the hows and the whys of that book. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}

Wellman, Greydon (20th Century) Wellman is president of the Humanist Community of the Peninsula (AHA). (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Wellman, Robert J. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Wellman was a humanist chaplain at the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University. {HM2}

Wells, George Albert (1926– ) An emeritus professor of German at the University of London, Wells is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. In 1989, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. His Religious Postures: Essays on Modern Christian Apologists and Religious Problems (1988) attempts to demolish notions of biblical inerrancy. Wells cites inconsistent passages of scripture, shows the historical impossibilities, and suggests why apologists persist. He discusses Kant’s fantastic view of mind, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Paul Tillich, lamenting the continuance of biblical inerrantism. He also is negatively critical of Julian Huxley’s brand of religious humanism. Wells is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. He has been a director as well as Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. Among his other books are The Historical Evidence for Jesus (1982); Did Jesus Exist? (1986); and Belief and Make-Believe: Critical Reflections on the Sources of Credulity (1992), in which he acknowledges the impact on his thinking of F. R. H. Englefield, one of his teachers—Jesus never existed, Wells holds, and religion is a form of make-believe. What’s In A Name? Reflections on Language, Magic, and Religion (1993) is a major work by a humanist linguist. His 1994 essay, “The Difficulties of Today’s Religious Apologists,” was included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science. In 1996 he wrote The Jesus Legend, noting that Christians argue the man must have existed because reports of his exploits spread quickly after his reported demise, that therefore they must be based on actual events. Such an argument Wells solidly refutes. In 1999, the Rationalist Press Association published his booklet, “The Origin of Language.”

Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge) (1866–1946) Wells was an author, historian, and social thinker who “strenuously championed during most of his career all of the main Humanist ethical and social goals,” according to Corliss Lamont. A Unitarian, he also was an associate of the Fabian Society with George Bernard Shaw. Wells wrote the highly successful Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898). He is said to have had a number of unusual sex affairs and is known to have had a child with Rebecca West. After one night of sex in 1924 with Margaret Sanger, for instance, he wrote her, “Wonderful! Unforgettable!”, to which she responded that he was “a sort of naughty boy-man,” one who while at a conference would whisper ribald things in her ear that she feared were being heard over the PA system. Intimate Lives of Famous People reports that once when depressed he wrote to his wife Rebecca, “I can’t—in my present state anyhow—bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life. When one calls to him in the silence of the night he doesn’t turn over and say, ‘What is the trouble, Dear?’” Outline of History (1920) listed Jesus as a non-supernatural human being:

Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.

In Crux Ansata (1899), he tells how the church “stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind” and details why he believes so. In the 1930s, and as head of the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN), Wells interviewed Stalin and Roosevelt because of his concern over the dangerous divisions between state and private capitalism. Wells’s influence on his contemporaries, particularly on the younger generation, was pervasive and permanent. His more than one hundred books significantly helped to shape the thinking of the 20th century, especially in the matters of popularizing science and liberalizing sexual mores. Those in the cognoscenti know that Wells had an excellent foundation in zoology, having studied at the London Royal College of Science as a youth. They knew, also that it was Wells who invented the term “atomic bomb” in his 1914 novel, The World Set Free. Leo Szilard has said that the work was his inspiration for having come up with the process that led to the Manhattan Project. Wells also predicted the advent of tanks (“land ironclads”), aerial warfare, and an eventual Japanese attack on the United States. In his autobiography, Wells told of visiting the Portsmouth Roman Catholic Cathedral and hearing a sermon about Hell:

I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at me. I realised something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or I had to declare the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its divines, sages, saints, and martyrs, with successive thousands of believers, age after age, wrong.” From that moment on, he found, “I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of Hell, had become the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of credulity.

Wells was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, which published his First and Last Things (1908). {CE; CL; EU, Warren Sylvester Smith; Freethinker, July 1996; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

WELSH FREETHOUGHT AND RATIONALISM: See entry for Wales.

Welsh, Elizabeth (20th Century) At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Welsh spoke at a workshop for young adults on “What Is the Good Life?” Welsh is in the Continuing Education Department of Brock University.

Welsh, Elliott (20th Century) 

Welsh, a secular humanist, is a contributing editor of Freethought Today.

Welsh, Patrick (1924–1996) Welsh was assistant director of the Tampa Bay chapter of the Atheist Alliance. An artist and sculptor, he was a mechanical and civil engineer.

Wendt, Gerald L(ouis) (1891–1973) An expert on nuclear industry and its uses in peace, Wendt was a leading Ethical Culturist and member of the American Humanist Association. Of humanism, he wrote to the present author:

Humanism connotes to me a sense of fellowship, if not of brotherhood, with every human being; a sense of responsibility for the genetic inheritance of man as the highest product of evolution, and for its best use in man’s creative functions; awareness of man’s ignorance of his environment, of his own nature, and of the possibilities of human society; a conviction that he can increase his understanding and thus improve all three by the use of his intelligence in research; a willingness to consider any hypothesis, recognized as such, concerning the vast, pervading and surrounding unknown, but freedom from any mythical, mystical, or authoritarian dicta concerning it; a fervor to bring the best that man has achieved within the reach of all men through education; and a faith that future generations will use improved understanding to accelerate the processes of psychic and social evolution, and to solve the mysteries amid which we, in this infancy of the human race, must live. Certainly, of the seven categories, I fit only into the seventh, naturalistic or scientific humanism. I cannot answer for others, though they must be legion. Perhaps it will do to mention Jean Rostand and Julian Huxley. I deplore the use of the same word to cover both the first three and the last four categories. The first three are literary classifications, not philosophical. Aristotle may have been a member of one of the last four categories, but he was not a devotee of Aristotle and not a “classical humanist.” Present devotees of Aristotle, Montaigne, or Babbitt are literary devotees, or devotees of the literature of humanity. “The proper study of mankind is man” is a literary, not a scientific or philosophic statement. In general, the first three categories are literary, the last four philosophical.

From 1938 to 1940, Dr. Wendt was director of science and education at the New York World’s Fair that opened in 1939. He was science editor of Time from 1942 to 1945 and then editorial director of Science Illustrated until becoming head of UNESCO’s division of teaching and dissemination in the department of natural science at its Paris headquarters, from 1950 to 1954. From 1959 to 1964, Wendt edited The Humanist, and he was chairman of the North American Commission of the International Humanist and Ethical Union from 1965 to 1968. At the Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris (1966), Dr. Wendt addressed the group. Among his books were Atomic Energy and the Hydrogen Bomb (1951), You and the Atom (1956), and The Prospects of Nuclear Power and Technology (1957). {EU, Howard B. Radest; HM2; HNS; HNS2; WAS, 1 May 1956}

Wendte, Charles William (1844–1931) Son of German immigrants, Wendte met Theodore Parker because his mother gave him language lessons. He later met Starr King in California. Choosing after graduating from Harvard’s Divinity School in 1869 to be a Unitarian missionary, Wendte became an important force in the establishment of Unitarianism on the West Coast and was a leader in Unitarian efforts to establish cooperation with religious liberals throughout the world. As described by Samuel A. Eliot, Wendte “combined German diligence, California optimism, and New England idealism.” {U&U; WSS}

Wentz, Wendell (20th Century) Wentz is a Missouri freethinker who has written for Freethought History.

Werbe, Peter (20th Century) Werbe, a freethinker, has written for Freethought Today about church/state issues in Michigan.

Werkmeister, William Henry (Born 1901) In his A History of Philosophical Ideas in America (1953), Werkmeister wrote, “The strength of humanism lies in its criticism of, and opposition to, the absolutism of a barren idealistic-theological tradition and in its staunch assertion of human freedom and creativity. In this opposition, it allies itself with modern science wherever such an alliance is possible; and out of such alliance the conception of a ‘scientific humanism’ has arisen.” Werkmeister wrote Kant and Critique (published 1993).

Werner, Michael W. (20th Century) Werner was President of the American Humanist Association’s Board of Directors until 1995, at which time Ed Doerr replaced him. In 1994, in a flare-up with The Humanist’s co-editors, Rick Szykowny and Gerry O’Sullivan, Szykowny resigned after a “prolonged and vociferous argument” with Werner. When O’Sullivan was ordered by Werner to intervene, O’Sullivan refused, citing editorial autonomy. Werner then fired O’Sullivan. James Ledbetter in The Village Voice (6 September 1994) noted that “the 53-year-old magazine’s internecine battle caught the ear of America’s best-known humanist (and honorary AHA president) Kurt Vonnegut. Since O’Sullivan’s departure, Vonnegut pulled his name from the mag’s editorial advisory board (which also includes Betty Friedan and Walter Mondale’s brother Lester). Although he’s had no oversight of the magazine, Vonnegut told me he ‘approved of the editorials in The Humanist,’ and described AHA as ‘highly politicized,’ ” adding that he was considering resigning as its honorary president. He remains, however, the honorary president. Previous AHA boards had similar battles over editorial autonomy, resulting in the removal of Paul Kurtz and Priscilla Robertson. Werner’s e-mail: <mwwerner@aol.com>. {FD}

Wernig, Erich (1927– ) With Joachim Kahl, Wernig of Köln wrote Freidenker, Geschishte und Gegenuart (1981), a study of freethought in Germany.

Weschler, Anita (1903– ) Weschler, a sculptor, is known for her representational statues and groups. She studied at the Parsons School of Design and graduated from the National Academy of Design. She also studied with Albert Laessle at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and with William Zorach at the Art Students League. One of her life-size works, “The Humanist” (1955), received national notice when a photograph in Look showed the statue being carried on the back of the diminutive sculptor, a feat made possible because it was the first such to be made out of lightweight, unbreakable glass fibers and plastic resins. It depicts a man of ambiguous race, two arms outstretched, one for giving, one for receiving. The Humanist (#6, 1956) described the work and Weschler’s artistic philosophy. Her sculpture includes multi-figure groups, single figures, portraits, constructions, collages, and stone collages. She has used such media as bronze, aluminum, cast stone, stone, durastone (hydrocal), wood, plastic, plaster, terra cotta, and fiber glass. Her paintings include “organic abstractions” (synthetic glazes on panels), “translucencies” (plastic resins, abstractions backlighted in shadow box frames); and “linear abstractions” (works on paper). Her work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum in New York City; Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Brandeis University; Wichita State Museum; and a variety of other United States as well as foreign collections, both private and public. Her sculpture has been commissioned by the United States Treasury Department, and various portraits were commissioned by the U.S. Post Office in Elkin, North Carolina. Ten life-size portrait heads in bronze are in the Institute for Achievement of Human Potential, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has had forty one-person shows nationwide. Weschler has been a delegate to the US Committee of the International Association of Art, on the board of directors of the Sculptors’ Guild, and on the executive committee of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors. She is the author of a book of poems, Nightshade, the recipient of many awards including the Audubon Artists Medal of Honor, and is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Weschler, who since her youth has considered herself an atheist and a deist. She is an honorary member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. Her husband, Herbert Solomon, also was a freethinker. Her “The Humanist,” a life-size statue, was donated in 1995 by Warren Allen Smith to the Council for Secular Humanism, at the time of the dedication of the Center for Inquiry building in Amherst, New York. Visitors have said it is noteworthy for its texture and symbolism. “A statue,” Weschler often declared, “should be touched,” an outlook frowned upon by gallery and museum guards. Shown a photo of Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Herbert Hauptman speaking at the Center for Inquiry’s dedication ceremony while, just behind, someone had placed a hat atop “The Humanist,” Weschler laughed appreciatingly. {WAS, numerous conversations}

Wescott, Glenway (20th Century) Wescott, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, kept a frank homosexual journal from 1937 until the 1950s. He described relationships with lovers and fellow homosexual artists, including Monroe Wheeler, George Platt Lynes, and Paul Cadmus. The work was not published until 1990, under the title Continual Lessons. Alfred Kinsey once interviewed as well as filmed him and his lover Wheeler, finding that at the point of orgasm Wescott was so violent that he “jackknifed” off the bed. Asked in the 1970s his views about naturalistic humanism, Wescott responded that his generation had lived through a period of fear about openly discussing religion as well as sex. He said, however, that belief was not a subject he cared to discuss, that finesse in writing articularte prose had always been his interest. (See entry for Alfred Kinsey.) {WAS, interviews at several of the annual ceremonials of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.}

Wesker, Arnold (1932– ) Wesker, an English playwright born of Jewish immigrant parents, at various times has been a carpenter’s mate, a seed sorter, and a pastry cook. He wrote a trilogy (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958; Roots, 1959; I’m Talking About Jerusalem, 1960) about a family of Jewish Communist intellectuals, and the socialist point of view he used came to be known as “kitchen sink drama.” His socialism is reflected in other plays, notably The Kitchen (1961), Chips With Everything (1962), and The Four Seasons (1969). The Old Ones (1972) describes the enforced isolation of the elderly. The Merchant (1977) treats the story of Shylock in a manner that constitutes an attack on anti-Semitism. His Caritas (1981) shows the spiritual anguish of a 14th-century anchoress, a person who lived in seclusion for religious reasons, then realized she had mistaken her vocation. In The Merchant (1977), Wesker treats the Shylock story in a manner that constitutes an attack on anti-Semitism. In 1991 two world premieres took place: an opera based on Caritas for which he wrote the libretto, music by Robert Saxton; and his fifth play for one woman, The Mistress, was premiered in Rome. The following year saw two more premieres: Three Women Talking in Chicago and his sixth play for one woman Letter to a Daughter in Seoul. His autobiography is entitled As Much As I Dare (1994). In 1995, Wesker became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {OEL; TRI}

West, Cornel Ronald (1953– ) West, a noted African American intellectual, wrote The American Evasion of Philosophy, using “evasion” as a term of praise. In 1977 he became an assistant professor of philosophy at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He also has taught at the Yale Divinity School. Marx and Emerson, West has held, herald self-realization and promote democracy. Marx is even more important after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than it was before. World War II was a major setback for anti-imperialist struggles in black America. Malcolm X moved “toward a more informed humanist position just prior to his assassination.” And “the classical Marxist critique of religion is not an a priori rejection of religion.” Speaking to fellow blacks, West wrote in 1988, “The relative unity and strength of our capitalist foes requires that we must come together if our struggle is to win!” For him, the Black Panthers were “the leading black lumpenproletarian revolutionary party in the sixties,” and the black middle class is described as collaborators with the market, creatures of “conspicuous consumption and hedonistic indulgence.” Critic Leon Wieseltier in “The Unreal World of Cornel West” (The New Republic, 6 March 1995), notes that West describes himself as a “prophetic pragmatist, by which he means a Christian who believes in the gospel according to John Dewey, for whom there are no stable and lasting essences, no self and no world except the self and the world that we created, no invisible reality at the end of visible reality, no expression of the human spirit that refers to anything more than its experience.” West, he adds, “is not a philosopher, he is a cobbler of philosophies; and so he reports the pragmatist and historicist tidings and proceeds to the manufacture of what he needs.” When West concludes, “To put it bluntly, I do hope that the historicist turn in philosophy of religion enriches the prophetic Christian tradition and enables us to work more diligently for a better world.” But, Wieseltier counters, West will be disappointed because “[T]he Christian tradition will not be enriched by a faith for which God is not real. Before what, exactly, does the postmodernist bow his head? For the anti-essentialist, what kingdom is at hand? Rorty claims that the abolition of transcendence is necessary for liberalism, but West claims that the abolition of transcendence is necessary for religion. He does not see that his position is a dire contraction. ‘Prophetic pragmatism’ is not rich and revolutionary; it is indulgent and impossible. He can have the prophets or he can have the pragmatists, he can have truth or he can have truths, but he cannot have both. (It was Pilate who spoke in the voice of the pragmatist.)” Noting that Wieseltier feels West’s work is “almost completely worthless,” Columbia Professor Andrew Delbanco in The New York Times Book Review (16 April 1995) disagrees, writing, “Mr. West is still trying to transmit the American progressive tradition as it comes down from Emerson through William James and John Dewey to Richard Rorty, when deriding those thinkers has been fashionable.”

West, Don (20th Century) A Southern freethinker, West wrote In a Land of Plenty: A Don West Reader (1982). A radical minister from north Georgia, he wrote about the freedom-loving culture of Southern mountain folk. His home and extensive library were burned out by the Ku Klux Klan. {Freethought History #14, 1995}

West, Emory Scott (20th Century) West, a freethinker, wrote Impeachment of the Bible (1923). {GS}

West, Dame Rebecca (1892–1983) West is the adopted name of Cecil Isabel Fairfield, a pseudonym she chose from a character in Ibsen. She was the daughter of Charles Fairfield, of Anglo-Irish descent, who was known for his witty defense of extreme individualism in debates with Herbert Spencer and George Bernard Shaw. A writer of psychological novels, West is best known for a historical study of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) and an insightful look at traitors and spies, The New Meaning of Treason (1964). She has written:

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise. . . . Creeds pretend to explain the total universe in terms comprehensible to the human intellect, and that pretension seems to me bound to be invalid. I feel this as strongly about the non-Christian and anti-Christian creeds as about the Christian creeds, insofar as they make the statement, which seems to me the lie of lies, that seeks to cut down the growing tree of life before it has borne fruit, “All is now known.” But I have faith in process. . . . I find an ultimate value in the efforts of human beings to do more than merely exist, to choose and analyze their experiences and by the findings of that analysis help themselves to further experiences which are of a more pleasurable kind. . . . The fear that pleasure is an unreliable standard because the common man will identify pleasure with debauchery has two sources, neither of which is discreditable. . . .

  The belief that all higher life is governed by the idea of renunciation poisons our moral life by engendering vanity and egotism. . . . I do not believe people are cruel because they are greedy; I am sure they invent greed as a pretext for cruelty. I am as sure that the sexual caprice which makes people desert still loving mates or thrust their attentions on those who are offended by them has not its origin in the pure sexual instinct, but is a use made of it by cruelty, seeking an instrument. . . . If we do not live for pleasure we will soon find ourselves living for pain. . . . I can imagine no better news than to hear that there had emerged from the South American forest or the Australian desert specimens of a new species which would, by reason of some new organ or adaptation of an organ, be able to dominate man as man has dominated the other animals. 

Although her reputation tended to lessen because of her reportage and journalism, today’s feminists and others have re-assessed her strong and unconventional heroines as well as her fine craftsmanship. They also note that she had an affair with historian H. G. Wells. {CE; OEL}

West, Mae (1892–1980) West was born Mary Jane West to an unhappy German mother and a drunken prizefighter father, Emily Wortis Leider wrote in Becoming Mae West (1997). She had lovers at the age of thirteen, went steady with a vaudeville pianist and singer when fifteen, then professed to have remained chaste until her marriage to Frank Wallace when she was seventeen, a marriage she later denied had ever happened. An unparalleled mistress of the double-entendre, she was a Brooklyn-born film actress who took a comic approach to hedonism, religion, and sex. “To err is human . . . but it feels divine,” she ethicized. “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?” she epistemologized. “I like a man what takes his time,” she aestheticized. And “Some men are all right in their place—if they only knew the right places!” she moralized. West was always depicted as being surrounded by men. In one scene, for example, would be a muscular type male at whose groin area she would gaze, following which she would remark that he appeared to be a new face in town. In “Diamond Lil,” her memorable line was, “Come up some time and (pause) see me.” Another variation of the line was, “Whyncha come up some time and see me?” Another often quoted Westism was made to her black maid, “Beulah, peel me a grape.” In 1926 at Daly’s Theater in New York City, at which religious lectures and Biblical movies had previously been shown, she starred in “Sex,” a play she wrote and produced. The place was soon raided, and she spent ten days in jail for “corrupting the morals of youth.” The following year she wrote but did not appear in “Drag,” which was successful in Paterson, New Jersey, but she never brought it to New York. The play led to rumors that she really was a man, a transvestite, but she wrote:

I have a double-thyroid, ya know. . . . It means I have twice as much sexual vitality. That sort of thing runs in the family. My father was a boxer and my mother was famed far and near for her hourglass figure—she was New York’s top corset model at one time. And one of my grandmothers had three breasts.

As for homosexuals, she disliked lesbians. Gay men were perverts, victims of a tragic disease that needed to be treated like cancer, Leider claims. He also said that as a teenager West devised sexually suggestive acts based on ideas picked up from belly dancers such as Little Egypt. In 1930 she wrote The Constant Sinner, a novel about a white woman who worked in Harlem, took a black lover who was a prizefighter and ex-pimp, but she denied having had liaisons with her chauffeur-boxer Chalky Wright or with any other black men. On Broadway, appearing as Catherine the Great, she penned the material for Catherine to ask of her male hairdresser, “And what do you want me to give you for Christmas?”, followed by his fey response, “One of your discarded lovers, your highness,” or lines to that effect. In another production, West offered a plan to insure that whoever passed the plate at church services could not pocket the money: Choose parishioners with one arm. According to legend, novelist Frank O’Hara claimed that by her demeanor and pronouncements West was the inventor of “small-town faggot psychology.” Humorists enjoy pointing to other of her one-liners:

• When a woman goes wrong, men go right after her. • Marriage is a great institution—but I’m not ready for an institution. • Give a man a free hand, and he’ll try to put it all over you. • I wrote the story myself. It’s all about a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it. • Between the two evils I always pick the one I haven’t tried before. • It’s better to be looked over than to be overlooked. • I was in a tight spot, but I managed to wriggle out of it. • It’s not the men in my life that count—it’s the life in my men. • A man has more character in his face at forty than at twenty—he has suffered longer. • I like a man who’s good, but not too good. or the good die young, and I hate a dead one. • When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better. • (Hatcheck girl): Goodness, what lovely diamonds!

(Miss West):  Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.

At the age of seventy-seven, by her count, West made what some critics termed a “creepy” appearance in Gore Vidal’s movie, “Myra Breckenridge,” six decades after her start on Broadway in burlesque: a rococo figure in curls, feather bow, and Cheshire-cat face. Returning from the set to her beach home in Santa Monica, West was surrounded with murals of naked men who had golden phalluses and disembodied testicles. Philosophers weary of analyzing ratiocinative processes have been known to consult her The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West (1967) and Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It (1959). However, the little educated performer was not known for her intellectual profundity and was, in fact, intrigued by occult matters. She enjoyed attending Catholic mass with a friend, never quite comprehending why the Church disapproved of her. {CE; Emily Wortis Leider, Becoming Mae West, 1997

West, Robert Nelson (1929– ) West was the second President of the Unitarian Universalist Association. He presided from 1969 to 1977. {U}

WEST GLAMORGAN HUMANIST GROUP (England) The West Glamorgan Humanist Group’s contact is Julie Norris, 3 Maple Grove, Uplands, Swansea SA2 OJY

WEST VIRGINIA HUMANISTS Larry Reyka, POB 3208, Columbus, Ohio 43210, is the coordinator of the north central region of the AHA. West Virginian humanists interested in meetings in their area consult him. {FD}

Westbrook, Richard Brodhead (1820–1899) Westbrook was an American author who first was a Methodist preacher, then a Presbyterian, and in 1888 was elected President of the American Secular Union. Westbrook wrote The Bible: Whence And What? (1882) and Man: Whence and Whither? (188–?). {BDF; FUS}

Westcott, Thompson (19th Century) Westcott, a freethinker, wrote the Life of John Fitch, Inventor of the Steamboat (1878). {FUS}

Westerkamp, José (20th Century) Westerkamp, an Argentinean, is a member of the Ibero-American Commission, a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries.

Westerman, W. B. (19th Century) 

Westerman from 1856 to 1868 was an active co-operator on De Dageraad, the Dutch freethought publication. {BDF}

Westermarck, Edward Alexander (1862–1939) A Finnish anthropologist and founder of Finnish sociology, Westermarck started a student association, Prometheus, in 1905. As its president he supported the fight against religions and churches. A professor of philosophy at London University and a professor of sociology at Helsinki University, Westermarck wrote The History of Human Marriage (1891), Ethical Relativity (1932), and Christianity and Morals (1929). Why, he wondered, did Jesus not forbid his disciples to use weapons? Why did Christianity recognize the right to make war? Why did St. Peter and St. Paul approve of slavery? Why did Abraham have slaves? “Abolitionists of slavery,” he noted, “were the name by which atheists were known . . . because only through slavery—the Christians said—could the Negroes enjoy the blessings of Christianity and civilization.” A world traveler, he also wrote Belief in Morocco (2 volumes, 1926) and Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco (1914). In The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas (1906), he delves into why “sodomy” is thought to be disgusting. After looking at ethnography, he contends that as “people emancipated themselves from theological doctrines,” they regard homosexuality with “somewhat greater leniency.” McCabe has written that, from personal knowledge, Westermarck was an atheist. He also was an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Association. {CE; GL; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

WESTERN AUSTRALIA—HUMANIST NEWS Western Australia—Humanist News is at GPO Box T1799, Perth 6001, Western Australia.

WESTERN CIVILIZATION, WESTERN WORLD Asked about Western Civilization, Mohandas K. Gandhi was quoted as replying, “It would be a good idea.” “The Western world,” explained the poet Patricia Storace, “is called the Western world because it descends from the western Roman Empire, while Greece belonged to the eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium.” (For a critique, see entries for Afrocentrism and for Greek Civilization.)

Westlake, John (1828–1913) Westlake, a jurist, was professor of international law at Cambridge from 1888 to 1908. He was a rationalist who, from 1900 to 1906, was one of the members for the United Kingdom of the International Court of Arbitration set up by the Hague Conference. He was Honorary President of the Institute of International Law. Although there is no biography and Westlake never wrote on religion, his fellow jurists stated that he had “a reverent faith in reason.” {RAT; RE}

WESTMINSTER ABBEY Westminster Abbey is a national shrine in London. Nearly every English king and queen since William I has been crowned there, and it is the burial place of eighteen monarchs. In addition, England’s most notable statesmen and distinguished subjects have been given burial in the Abbey since the 14th century. In the Poets’ Corner in the south transept rest the tombs of Chaucer, Browning, Tennyson, and other great English poets. Although one would expect all who are buried there were members of the Church of England, Foote smiled that somehow freethinkers are buried there. He named as early examples Ephraim Chambers, Sir Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and George Grote.

Weston, Paul D. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Weston was a leader of the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County. {HM2}

Weston, S(amuel) Burns (1855–1936) 

Weston was the father of metaphysician Charles Hartshorne, and he was one of Felix Adler’s colleagues. He was a victim of a Unitarian “heresy” trial for not preaching the “Unitarian Christianity” specified in the bequest supporting his Unitarian church in Leicester, Massachusetts, so he became Adler’s founding Ethical Culture Leader in Philadelphia (1885). In 1887, he founded a settlement house in Philadelphia. {EU, Howard B. Radest; RAT}

Westra, P. (Born 1851) Westra was a Dutch freethinker, secretary of the Dutch Freethought Society, De Dageraad. {BDF}

Westwood, Arnold (20th Century) Westwood, when minister of the Westport, Connecticut, Unitarian Society, was a liberal who evidenced his comprehension of theism, humanism, and Unitarian history.

WET WATER MINISTRIES A person-to-person outreach to “poor benighted Christians,” Wet Water Ministries (RR1, Box 63, Rushville, Pennsylvania 18839) is dedicated to undermining religious delusions. Stephen Van Eck edits its newsletter.

Wettstein, Hermann (Born 1840) Wettstein was born in Barmen, Elberfeld, Germany, but migrated with his parents to America in 1848. A jeweler, he was a freethinker in Wisconsin and Illinois. Wettstein wrote The Teleo-Mechanics of Nature (1911). {GS; PUT; RAT}

Wettstein, Otto (Born 1838) Wettstein was a German-American materialist who contributed to the Freethinkers’ Magazine, The Ironclad Age, and other journals. He was a treasurer of the National Secular Union. Wettstein wrote The Suicide of Christianity (c. 1900). {BDF; GS; PUT; RAT}

We’wha (1849-1896) One of the most famous Native American berdaches, We’wha was a member of the Zuni nation. To the anthropologist Matilda Coxe Stevenson, he recited numerous myths, one concerning the supernatural two-spirit Ko’lhamana (ko, supernatural + lhamana, “berdache”). By using traditional tribal literature, according to Will Roscoe, author of The Zuni Man-Woman, We’wha constructed and expressed his gay identiy as a two-spirit.

WHALE: See entry for Animal.

Whale, George (1849–1925) Once the Mayor of Woolwich, Whale was a lawyer who wrote works on the history of London. He was a founder of the Omar Khayyam and the Pepys clubs. An agnostic, Whale was Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association (1922–1925). {FUK; RAT; RE}

Whale, James (1896–1957) Whale was a magazine cartoonist who was imprisoned by the Germans during World War I. He is best remembered as the film director in the 1930s of a quartet of horror classics: “Frankenstein,” “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Old Dark House,” and “The Invisible Man.” He depicted Frankenstein as a helpless outcast, one much nobler than so many of those with whom he came into contact. For the role of the doctor’s creation, Whale chose his friend Boris Karloff. Openly gay and a lover of Hollywood producer David Lewis, Whale was known as an eccentric in an industry more comfortable with compromise and predictability. After a bitter artistic dispute with Universal Studios, Whale retired. He attempted a comeback in 1949 but, suffering a series of debilitating strokes, committed suicide in 1957 by drowning in his swimming pool. Whale was a non-theist. {AA}

Whale, James (22 Jul 1896 - 29 May 1957) Whale was a magazine cartoonist who, while a lieutenant, was captured and imprisoned by the Germans, during which time he acted to entertain himself and fellow prisoners. After the war Howard Hughes brought him to Hollywood as a dialogue director for Hell’s Angels (1930), and he directed films through the early 1940s. Whale is particularly remembered for being the film director in the 1930s of a quartet of horror classics: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), He depicted Frankenstein as a helpless outcast, one much nobler than so many of those with whom he came into contact. For the role of the doctor’s creation, Whale chose his friend Boris Karloff. His versatility is evident in an array of films such as Journey's End (1930); Waterloo Bridge (1931); Showboat (1936); The Impatient Maiden (1932); The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933); By Candlelight (1933); One More River (1934); Remember Last Night? (1935); The Road Back (1937); The Great Garrick (1937); Sinners in Paradise (1938); Wives Under Suspicion (1938); Port of Seven Seas (1938); The Man in the Iron Mask (1939); and They Dare Not Love (1941). Camille, Dark Victory, Kings Row Openly gay, he was a lover in Hollywood of David Lewis, who produced Camille, Dark Victory, and King’s Row. Whale was known as an eccentric in an industry more comfortable with compromise and predictability. After a bitter artistic dispute with Universal Studios, Whale retired. He attempted a comeback in 1949 but, suffering a series of debilitating strokes, committed suicide in 1957 by drowning in his swimming pool. Whale was a non-theist. {CA}

Whatley, George B. (1921- ) A physician and a Life Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), Whatley was raised in poverty in Alabama, put himself through medical school, practiced for thirty years, and retired in 1985. In “Scientific Medicine vs. Theology” (Freethought Today, April 1999), he laments that “Through ignorance, superstition, and reliance on the bible as the ‘word of God,’ the Church opposed all scientific endeavors, including medicine.” In 1999 he was awarded FFRF’s first “Freethought Medal of Honor.” Willa Mae Whatley, his late wife, is the person after whom the Freedom From Religion Foundation auditorium at Lake Hypatia is named.

Whedon, Joss (20th Century) Whedon is a producer, director, and scriptwriter. He created “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” telling a Web group that redemption, hope, purpose, and Santa are all important to him, whether or not he might believe in an afterlife or some universal structure . . . but added, however, “I’m an atheist.” {CA}

Whedon, Joe (Joss) (23 Jun 1964 - ) ) Whedon is a producer, director, and scriptwriter. The creator of Buffy, he was involved both in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie and in the television show. A graduate of Wesleyan, he studied film, following his father and grandfather as a television writer, perhaps being the first such third-generation writer. He helped in the writing of Toy Story, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He worked as a scriptwriter on Roseanne and the TV series Parenthood before selling his script for the Buffy movie. At the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” posting board on the Web, he was asked to provide some background on an episode of the show that featured some religious themes. Part of his response included the following: . . . . Was it God? Well, I'm an atheist, but it's hard to ignore the idea of a “Christmas miracle” here (though the PRAY on the marquee was an unintentional coincidence). The fact is, the Christian mythos has a powerful fascination to me, and it bleeds into my storytelling. Redemption, hope, purpose, Santa, these all are important to me, whether I believe in an afterlife or some universal structure or not. I certainly don't mind a strictly Christian interpretation being placed on this episode by those who believe that—I just hope it's not limited to that.

Wheeler, Daniel E. (20th Century) Wheeler edited the ten-volume Life and Writings of Thomas Paine (1915). {GS}

Wheeler, Joseph Mazzini (1850–1898) A British scholar of unbelief, Wheeler was a prolific writer and reader. He converted from Christianity by reading Newman, Mill, Darwin, and Spencer, among others. His Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers (1899) has been called by J. M. Robertson the nearest approach “to a general historic treatment” of atheism and freethought, along with Maréchal’s Dictionnaire des Athèes. Wheeler was responsible for the publishing of David Hume’s Essay on Miracles and a work known as The Jewish Life of Christ, also called the Sepher Toldroth Jeshu. According to Gordon Stein, Jews carefully concealed the latter book from Christians because of its plot. The work depicted Jesus as a bastard son of a Jewish soldier, Ben Pandera (son of the panther). Jesus becomes a magician of the conjuror variety, stealing the magic name of God (the Tetragrammaton) from a temple and using it to achieve recognition from the general population. Wheeler’s last work was Footsteps of the Past (1895). He contributed to all the freethought publications of his day. Describing himself, Wheeler once wrote that he was “a willing drudge in the cause he loves, and hopes to empty many an inkstand in the service of Freethought.” When he wrote his own obituary, he attributed his atheism to having read Newman, Mill, Darwin, and Spencer. Others saw him as a person suffering from nervous diathesis, one prone to mental breakdowns with outbursts of uncontrollable mania. Confined for a time to an asylum, Wheeler recovered with the help of Foote and Wheeler’s wife, but eventually he had a final breakdown in 1898. A gentle, honest scholar, he was respected by many, including the secretary of the Christian Evidence Society, who was moved upon his death to send a letter of condolence. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; FUS; JMR; JMRH; PUT; RAT; RE; RSR; TRI; WSS}

Wheelright, Farley (20th Century) Wheelright was a member of the American Humanist Association’s board of directors.

Wheless, Joseph (Born 1868) Wheless, an attorney and associate of the atheist Joseph Lewis, is author of Is It God’s Word? (1926) and Forgery in Christianity (1930). His work exposes textual inconsistencies, contradictions, discrepancies, anachronisms, forgeries, and mythical content in the Holy Bible. {FUS}

Whicher, George F. (1889–1954) Whicher, a freethinker, wrote The Transcendentalist Revolt Against Materialism (1949). {FUS}

Whims, Davilyn (20th Century) Whims is treasurer and membership chairperson of Humanists of Palm Beaches in Florida.

Whistler, James Abbott McNeill (1834–1903) Whistler, whose mother became one of the best-known Americans upon his having painter her, was an eminent American painter, etcher, wit, and eccentric. The painting of his mother was fancifully called “Arrangement in Gray and Black.” To advertise and defend his credo of art for art’s sake Whistler resorted to elaborate exhibits, lectures, polemics, and more than one lawsuit. He sued Ruskin in 1878 for writing that Whistler asked “two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” He won the argument in court but payment of the court costs left him bankrupt. When first he studied art in Paris, he shed all religious beliefs. Armstrong describes in his Reminiscences with what gusto Whistler used to sing blasphemous songs and ridicule the Bible. Few painters of the time were so rich in international honors. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Whiston, William (1667–1752) Whiston was an English clergyman and mathematician who, in 1701, became deputy to Sir Isaac Newton and whom he succeeded (1703) as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Whiston aroused opposition by proclaiming his opinion that the faith of the early Christian centuries was Arian. As a result, he was dismissed from the university in 1710 for heresy. He propounded his Arian views in Primitive Christianity Revised (5 volumes, 1711–1712). Whiston’s translation of Josephus has been many times reprinted. {CE; FUK; TRI}

Whitaker, Thomas R. (20th Century) A professor of English at Oberlin in the 1950s, Whitaker reviewed books for The Humanist. Also, he published articles Yeats and on the poetry of Robert Herrick and Ralph Waldo Emerson, comparing the conflict between Christianity and a variety of pantheism in their thought. In 1977 he wrote Fields of Play in Modern Drama, in 1983 Tom Stoppard, and in 1989 William Carlos Williams.

White, Andrew D(ickson) (1832–1918) White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (2 volumes, 1896), according to Corliss Lamont, “proved of signal service to the documentation of Humanism by showing that the theologians had fought practically every forward step in scientific investigation since the founding of Christianity, much to the detriment of religion as well as of science.” White had been the first president of the American Historical Association and also was the first president of Cornell University (1867–1885), which he largely endowed with funds for a land-grant college. Prior to being at Cornell, White had been a history teacher at the University of Michigan, where he had developed the idea of a university detached from all sects and parties and free to pursue truth without deference to dogma. Ezra Cornell had been a fellow senator in the New York State Senate and had helped him with financial aid. White, who was gay, also wrote Studies in General History and in the History of Civilization (1885), and he was chairman of the American delegation to the First Hague Conference in 1899. He also is known for having persuaded Andrew Carnegie to build the Palace of Justice to house the Hague Tribunal. {BDF; CE; CL; FUS; Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

White, Edward A. (20th Century) White wrote Science and Religion in American Thought (1952). {GS}

White, James H. (20th Century) White has been an activist member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

White, John (c. 1860–1920?) White was an Australian freethinker and anarchist. In Melbourne, he was fined in 1892 for distributing a manifesto, “Anarchy, the Principles of Revolutionary Communist Anarchism,” without the correct printer imprint. Insisting in court that he be allowed to read the manifesto, the magistrate cleared the court to insure that outsiders would not hear him. {SWW}

White, John (20th Century) A former teacher, White is secretary of the British Humanist Association’s education committee.

White, Maria (Lowell) (19th Century): See entry for Maria White Lowell.

White, Micah (1982- ) White, upon moving from the liberal environment of Columbia, Maryland, to the fundamentalist Christian environment of Grand Blanc, Michigan, started an Atheist Club in his junior year of high school. Despite objections by the school administration, he successfully and with the help of Americans United for Separation of Church and States was able to found the group. “Burn in Hell” messages were received, but over forty students attended the first meeting. “Becoming my school’s number one enemy didn’t take a single insult, a single disruption in class, or a single disciplinary action. Instead it took seven simple words: ‘I want to start an Atheist Club,’ ” he lamented. “Atheists Under Siege,” published as an op-ed article in The New York Times (21 June 1999), argues against prayer in schools, concluding that it makes for ugly social divisions. White is president of the Young Freethinkers Alliance. {Secular Humanist Bulletin, Spring 1999}

White, Michael James Denham (1910–1983) White was a world leader in the field of evolutionary genetics. Educated privately at University College in London, he visited Australia in 1953 as a refugee from McCarthyism. In 1959 in Melbourne he was appointed professor of zoology, and in 1962 he became an Australian citizen. White was active in Australian rationalist organizations. {SWW}

White, Oliver (19th Century) White was vice president of the United Moral and Philosophical Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in the 1830s. {GS}

White, Paul Dudley (1886–1973) A physician and authority on heart disease, White taught at Harvard Medical School, treated President Dwight Eisenhower, and served with the Unitarian Service Committee in France and Italy. He was an active member of the First Unitarian Church in Belmont, Massachusetts, as was his wife. {UU}

White, Valerie (20th Century) White, an attorney and author of Protect Your Interests in Family Court, spoke at the 1995 Atheist Alliance Convention in North Hollywood, California. She is a senior editor of The Humanist, is Vice-President and on the American Humanist Association’s board of directors, and is a regular columnist for the Secular Organization for Sobriety (SOS) newsletter. White wrote Choosing Your Children’s Books (1991). Her e-mail: <vw@jacks.place.mit.edu>. (See entry for Vermont Humanists.) {FD}

White, William (20th Century) White is an American humanist who retired in Costa Rica. He participated in the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.

White, William Allen (1868–1944) White, editor of the Kansas Emporia Gazette, has written, “For who is to tell you the truth? . . . No one. You must search it out yourself! The Department of War will not tell you. Certainly the Church isn’t going to tell you the truth. . . .Search in all the obscure places . . . not the established high towers and cathedrals for the answers.” The spokesman for those with a grass roots political opinion, he wrote mainly on political subjects. His autobiography won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize.

White, William Hale (1830–1913) White, a writer who used the pen name “Mark Rutherford,” became a clerk in the Admiralty and rose to the position of Assistant Director of Contracts. In his leisure, he attracted much attention by his Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, Dissenting Minister (1881), which was followed by Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance (1885) and The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane (1887). They formed a prolonged autobiography in the form of fiction. The character, Rutherford, attends a Dissenting college, becomes a minister, is beset both by theological doubts and by distress at the narrowness and hypocrisy of his colleagues and congregations, and becomes an easy prey to melancholy. He gradually loses his faith, becoming as disillusioned by the Unitarians as he was by his own church. The work is an account of the progress of 19th Century doubt. White’s work shows an interest in Wordsworthian pantheism. White translated Spinoza’s Ethics (1883), then returned to a non-Christian theism and to his love of the Bible. He added, however, the change “has not solved any of the great problems which disturbed my peace.” His own life was overshadowed by the prolonged illness of his wife, who died in 1891, and whose patient suffering he began to see as “salvation through Crucifixion.” {OEL; RAT}

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947) Whitehead, who taught mathematics at the University of London (1911–1924) and philosophy at Harvard University (after 1924), wrote Principia Mathematica (3 volumes, 1910–1913) with Bertrand Russell. Like Russell, Whitehead was critical of organized religion: “The greatest disaster in the history of the human race has been Christian theology,” he wrote. But unlike Russell, Whitehead was a metaphysician whose “philosophy of organism” concerned a view that what we experience consists of processes of becoming. God, he held, is interdependent with the world and, in fact, develops from it. Lovejoy called his system “the most large-minded synthesis since Hegel,” adding that it recalled views of Alexander, Bergson, Lloyd Morgan, and Peirce. God, Whitehead believed, receives enrichment from the world process, thereby being in a sense temporal. Some have exaggerated that only Russell understood Whitehead’s mathematics and only Charles Hartshorne understood his metaphysics. Whitehead had a wry sense of humor, once defining Unitarianism, according to James Luther Adams, as a “belief in up to one God.” Whitehead and his wife lived an eventful life. Bertrand Russell apparently fell in love with Whitehead’s wife while writing the Principia Mathematica. Meanwhile, Whitehead’s affair with Christiana Morgan has been documented by Morgan’s Jungian biographer, Claire Douglas, in Translate This Darkness (1993). Under Carl Jung’s guidance, Morgan had “plumbed the depth of her unconscious” and had contributed to the early development of psychoanalysis. Morgan, who was married to William Morgan and who became a celebrated psychologist, had an affair not only with Whitehead but also with writer Lewis Mumford, with Chaim Weizmann before he became Israel’s first President, and with Harry Murray, head of Harvard’s Psychological Clinic. Twenty years after the eighty-six-year-old Whitehead had died, the seventy-year-old Morgan, drunken, depressed, and with Murray’s love turned to loathing, drowned herself in 1967 in the sea off St. John in the Caribbean. {CE; ER; TYD}

Whitehead, Fred (20th Century) Whitehead, who with Verle Muhrer edited Freethought on the Frontier (1992), is on the administrative staff of the University of Kansas School of Medicine. For several decades he has collected scarce materials on American cultural history, especially concerning labor, radicalism, and intellectual controversy, and has published extensively on these subjects. His Freethought History is a well-documented publication about the heritage of freethought. Included are articles and photographs about authors as well as freethought memorabilia. (Freethought History, Box 5224, Kansas City, Kansas 66119 $10/year, quarterly)

Whitehead, George (20th Century) Whitehead, a freethinker, wrote Gods, Devils, and Man (1928) and The Case Against Theism (1930s). {FUK; GS}

Whitehorn, Katherine (20th Century) Whitehorn, a British journalist, declared, “Why do born-again people so often make you wish they’d never been born the first time?” {TYD}

Whitenack, Oscar O. (20th Century) A freethinker, Whitenack wrote Theological Delusions of the Clergy and the Futility of Guessing and Drifting (c. 1910?). {GS}

Whitford, O’Dillon B. (19th Century) Whitford, a freethinker, wrote Origin of the Christian Bible (1888). He also wrote Christianity, A Reward for Crime (190–?). {GS}

Whiting, John (1917–1963) Whiting, an English playwright, wrote works which, at first ill-received, marked a historic break from the prevailing vogue for drawing-room comedy. He wrote A Penny for a Song (1956), Saint’s Day (1951), and The Gates of Summer (1956), which all showed his talent. But he did not achieve success until he adapted Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon as The Devils (1961), a play which deals with a case of hysterical demonic possession in a French nunnery. Tribe calls Whiting an avowed freethinker. {OEL; TRI}

Whitman, Walt (1819–1892) Whitman is a, if not the, major American poet. “Although by no means free of supernaturalist illusions,” Corliss Lamont has written, Whitman sang of the robust pleasures of the whole man, body and soul, and heartily disbelieved in all asceticisms.” As a youth he met his father’s friend, Elias Hicks of Hicksville, New York, leader of a liberal branch of Friends somewhat similar to the Unitarians in their non-trinitarianism. Sometimes mystical, sometimes transcendental, the Good G(r)ay Poet liked Robert Ingersoll so much he requested that Ingersoll speak at his funeral. Wrote Whitman in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”: “Piety and conformity to them that like, / Peace, obesity, allegiance, to them that like . . . / I am he who walks the States with a barb’d tongue, questioning every one I meet, / Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before?’ / Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in the nonsense?” His free verse, use of “barbaric yawp,” baring his soul (saying he was bisexual, although there is little evidence of his feminine interest), his poetic belief in democracy, and his belief in fairness for all have inspired many, repelled others. “But for opera, I could never have written Leaves of Grass,” he once remarked. Whitman read Paine, Homer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Dickens, Scott, and the Bible. He worked for Martin van Buren’s presidential campaign in 1840 and from 1846 to 1848 edited the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, from which he was fired because, according to the management, “He is too indolent to kick a musketo.” His interests were universal, his dynamism great, his advocacy of abolitionism and the “free-soil” movement vehement. Whitman’s love of peace and his distaste of war—he served as an unofficial nurse for Northern as well as Southern soldiers in army hospitals—is evidenced in “Reconciliation”:

Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost, That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;

For my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself is dead, I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin—I draw near, Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

When the English poet and sexologist, John Addington Symonds, inquired in a letter if Whitman was a homosexual, Whitman hotly denied any such tendencies. But Whitman’s verses leave little doubt. In the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass (1847 was the earliest edition, and revisions were made until 1892), he deals with the “institution of the dear love of comrades.” (In 1841 when he was in his early 20s, Whitman suffered the disgrace of being tarred and feathered and ridden out of Southold, Long Island, on a rail for an alleged act of sodomy.) In “When I Heard At the Close of Day,” he describes his truly happiest moment as being when “the one I loved most lay sleeping by me under the same cover in the cool night. . . . And his arm lay lightly around my breast—and that night I was happy.” Also, a revealing selection about sexual ecstasy exists in which Whitman uses the word “God,” later replacing it with “hugging and loving bedfellow:

I am satisfied . . . . I see, dance, laugh, sing; As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all night and close on the peep of the day, And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels bulging the house with their plenty, Shall I postpone my acceptation and realization and scream at my eyes, That they turn from gazing after and down the road, And forthwith cipher and show me to a cent, Exactly the contents of one, and exactly the contents of two, and which is ahead?

Whitman’s most intimate friend was a trolley-car conductor, Peter Doyle, and in their 1868 to 1880 correspondence Whitman expressed intense feelings for Doyle, closing with such phrases as “Many, many loving kisses to you.” Doyle, interestingly, had been in the audience the night President Lincoln, about whom Whitman wrote “O Captain, My Captain,” was assassinated. When fifty-seven, Whitman gave eighteen-year-old Harry Stafford a ring, then posed with him in a formal photographic portrait (which is in the collection of Jonathan Ned Katz). In Walt Whitman’s America (1995), David S. Reynolds points out how acceptable up to the 1890s was the “eroticized language of same-sex affection,” at which time in 1890 the word “homosexual” came to be used. “But who cares?” about Whitman’s homosexuality, Alfred Kazin has written. “The important thing about Whitman’s sexuality was his affirmation of sex as the basic life force and the effect this had on his living, breathing, propulsive style.” That style Whitman continued, even though Emerson suggested that the sexual poems be removed from later editions of Leaves of Grass. “Whoever degrades another degrades me,” he wrote, “and whatever is done or said returns at last to me.” During the Civil War, according to the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., he and Clara Barton worshiped there. Whitman in 1873 had a paralytic stroke and lingered for twenty years in poverty. Stricken with paralysis in his old age, he retired to Camden, New Jersey, where he lived with the family of a Unitarian physician. As noted in his “Sister Death,” he did not believe in immortality. (See entru for Elias Hicks. Paul Berman in The New Yorker [12 June 1995] delineates Whitman’s link to Brooklyn. Also see entry for Alfred Kazin) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; GL; HNS2; JM; JMR; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}

Whitney, Willis R. (20th Century) A scientist, Whitney was a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Whittaker, Thomas (1856–1935) Whittaker was assistant editor of and frequently contributor to Mind (1885–1891). He wrote The Neo-Platonists (1901), The Origins of Christianity (1904), and with Bain edited Crooms Robertson’s Philosophical Remains (1894). Whittaker was a director of the Rationalist Press Association. {RAT; RE}

Whittemore, Thomas (1800–1861) The most prominent publicist and popularizer of Universalism in the early 19th century, Whittemore edited Trumpet and Universalist Magazine (1828–1861). It was the chief Universalist periodical in the pre-Civil War era and one of the most widely circulated of any Boston religious periodicals. He fought against the Massachusetts tradition of tax support for the Standing Order churches, and in theology he defended Ballou’s ultra-Universalism against the Restorationists. Whittemore wrote The Modern History of Universalism, From the Era of the Reformation to the Present Time (1830). {U; U&U}

Whitten, K. M. (20th Century) Whitten was president of the Friendship Liberal League in Philadelphia that published the rationalist and freethought journal, The Liberal, from 1947 to around 1970. The group in 1956 dedicated a Thomas Paine Center, which was enthusiastically supported by Eva Ingersoll Wakefield and Sherman D. Wakefield.

Whitworth, T. (19th Century) Whitworth wrote An Apology for Deism (1820). {GS}

Whyte, Adam Gowans (Born 1875) A writer, Whyte was sub-editor of the Glasgow Weekly Citizen, the editor of Electrical Industries, and the author of several novels. Also, he wrote The Religion of the Open Mind (1913) and The Natural History of Evil (1920). Whyte was one of the original directors of the Rationalist Press Association. He is author of The Story of the Rationalist Press Association (1949), in which he wrote,

Humanism, which is still used occasionally as a mild synonym for Rationalism, suffers from vagueness which permits too wide a variety of interpretations. {FUK; RAT; RE; TRI}

WICCA

Wicca (wicca, necromancer) is a pagan nature religion with roots in pre-Christian western Europe. In the present century it has been revived, particularly in the United States and Great Britain. Calling themselves benevolent witches, Wiccans honor masculine and/or feminine divinities and practice magic and folk traditions which involve healing and the mystical development of the self. Many freethinking Unitarians are not happy at being associated with the Wiccan groups that have made inroads into some UU groups. (See entries for Pagan and Witchcraft.)

Wichern, Calvin (20th Century) Wichern is President of Atheists of Northern Colorado. E-mail: <cwichern@aol.com>.

WICKEDNESS • I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest. —Alexander Dumas père

• Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others. —Oscar Wilde

Wicker, Randolfe (Randy) (20th Century) Wicker, an “Atheist on Call” according to his business cards, has actively led a New York City AIDS Atheist Ministry. The owner of a Greenwich Village lamp store, he was a key member of a campaign to expose and replace the Christopher Street Festival Committee, which in the early 1990s had run the “festival” part of an annual Gay Pride Day celebration but which he accused of being a profiteering venture. The group was selling $25 plaques honoring those who had died of AIDS, and the church received a percentage of the profits. “I’ve always been political,” he told a Village Voice reporter (2 July 1996). “I was one of the first openly gay media spokespeople, way back when I was in the Mattachine Society. I was on the radio in 1962.” Once a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York and of AASH (a support group for agnostics, atheists, and secular humanists who were HIV-positive), Wicker nursed a number of people with AIDS and housed them up until their deaths. With Kay Tobin, Wicker wrote The Gay Crusaders (1972). Wicker has been an activist upon behalf of Stonewall Bar veterans, appearing in a movie which documented the 1969 uprising by homosexuals at that Greenwich Village site. The New York Times Magazine (25 May 1997) featured him for his having founded CRUF, Cloning Rights United Front. He was quoted as saying, “I’ve already contacted a scientist rumored to be developing human cloning technology. My decision to clone myself should not be the Government’s business, or Cardinal O’Connor’s, any more than a woman’s decision to have an abortion is. Cloning is hugely significant. It’s part of the reproductive rights of every human being.” Additionally, he said of cloning that heterosexual reproduction is now obsolete, a fact which pleased him but raised other freethinkers’ eyebrows. E-mail: <rwicker@gateway.net>. (See entry for Larry Gutenburg.)

Wicks, Ben (20th Century) Wicks, a Canadian cartoonist, is a non-theist.

Wicks, Frank S. C. (20th Century) Wicks was a signer of Humanist Manifesto I. {FUS; HM1}

Wicksell, Anna B. (1862–1928) Wicksell, a Swedish pacifist, was a member of a League of Nations committee. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)

Wicksell, Knut (1851–1926) Wicksell was a Swedish author and lecturer. He wrote brochures on population, emigration, and prostitution. Under the name Tante Malin, he wrote a satirical work on Bible stories. During the Paris Conference in 1889, Wicksell represented Sweden. He joined the Freethought Federation of Sweden in 1890. Wicksell followed Lennstrand as editor of the Freethinker and Think for Yourself! (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.) {BDF; PUT; RAT}

Widdicombe, T. C. (20th Century) Widdicombe wrote “Science Versus Religion” (19–?). {GS}

Wiedenfeld, Esther (20th Century) Wiedenfeld edited Lasting Faith (1991), a well-documented history of the Lutheran Church in Comfort, Texas. {Freethought History #15, 1995}

Wieland, Christopher Martin (1733–1813) One of the foremost German men of letters of his time, Wieland became a deist of the school of Shaftesbury. A poet and novelist, he wrote in a style typical of the German rococo: elegant, satiric, often playful. John Quincy Adams translated his Oberon (1780, translated in 1799), and Wieland had translated Shakespeare, thereby helping pave the way for future literary developments in Germany. He edited Teutsche Merkur (1773–1810), an influential literary journal in which he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of faith. He read the British deists as well as the French encyclopedists and was a deist without any belief in future life. Wieland was called the Voltaire of German, and his translations of Shakespeare helped to pave the way for future literary developments in Germany, such as those of Goethe and Schiller. Wieland’s last words were said to have been, “To be or not to be.” {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE}

Wieman, Henry Nelson (1884–1975) A professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago, Wieman is said by Lamont to have produced “a new concept of Deity every time he puts pen to paper.” One such definition of his theological outlook, which involved “creative interchange,” was that “God is that interaction between individuals, groups, and ages which generates and promotes the greatest possible mutuality of good.” Among his books are Religious Experiences and Scientific Method (1926) and The Source of Human Good (1964). A Unitarian who represented the furthest extreme of Christian modernism, he was critical of 20th Century supernaturalism and neo-orthodoxy because both excluded science as a tool and both denied religious responsibility. He found Tillich’s work and Barth’s neo-orthodoxy pernicious because of their stress on a theism that transcended human reason. He held that ultimate reality does not consist of levels or orders of disconnected atomic agents of beings but, rather, of the “organic process of events and their qualities.” Wieman signed Humanist Manifesto II. {CL; HM2; U}

Wiemhoff, Henry (Died 1995) Wiemhoff was an active member in the Unitarian Universalist Buddhist Fellowship and in the UUS for Socialism. A gay activist, he was a member of the New York Fourth Universalist Church.

Wiener: See Weiner, Neil O.

Wiener, Christian (19th Century) Wiener was the German author of a materialistic work on the Elements of Natural Laws (1863). {BDF}

Wiener, Norbert (1894–1964) Wiener, the American mathematician, is best known for his theory of cybernetics, the comparative study of control and communication in humans and machines. He wrote God and Golem Inc. (1966). {GS}

Wierdu, Kwasi (20th Century) 

A professor of philosophy at the University of South Florida, Wierdu has written in the Norm Allen Jr. volume about “Morality and Religion in Akan Thought.” The Akan group is found in Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and parts of Togo. They hold, basically, that even were there no belief in God there would still be rules of good conduct so “it follows also and a fortiori that morality, as a set of rules of good conduct, is for the Akan, logically independent of the minor ‘deities.’ ” He finds “it is pleasing to me that the Akan moral outlook is thus logically independent of religion, for it means that the ethics of our culture can survive the withering away of the belief in God, a belief for which I know no good arguments.” {AAH}

Wiessner, Alexander (19th Century) Wiessner was a German writer, author of an examination of spiritualism (1875). {BDF}

WIFE, HOW TO OBTAIN A The Separationist (December 1996) suggested fifteen Biblical ways to acquire a wife:

1. Find an attractive prisoner of war, bring her home, shave her head, trim her nails, and give her new clothes. Deuteronomy 21:11-13 2. Find a prostitute and marry her. Hosea 1:1-3 3. Find a man with seven daughters and impress him by watering his flock. Exodus 2:16-21 4. Purchase a piece of property and get a woman as part of the deal. Ruth 4:5-10 5. Go to a party and hide. When the women come out to dance, grab one and carry her off to be your wife. Judges 21:19-25 6. Have God create a wife for you while you sleep. Note: This will cost you. Genesis 2:19-24 7. Agree to work seven years in exchange for a woman’s hand in marriage. Get tricked into marrying the wrong woman. Then work another seven years for the woman you wanted to marry in the first place. Total: 14 years. Genesis 29:15-30 8. Cut 200 foreskins off your future father-in-law’s enemies and get his daughter for a wife. Samuel 18:27 9. Even if no one is out there, wander around a bit and you’ll definitely find someone. It’s all relative, of course. Genesis 4:16-17 10. Become the emperor of a huge nation and hold a beauty contest. Esther 2:3-4 11. When you see someone you like, go home and tell your parents to get her for you. Judges 14:1-3 12. Kill any husband and take his wife . . . but prepare to lose four sons, however. 2 Samuel 11 13. Wait for your brother to die. Take his widow. It’s not just a good idea—it’s the law. Ruth–Onana and Boaz; also described in Deuteronomy and Leviticus 14. Don’t be so picky. Make up for quality with quantity. 1 Kings 119-123 15. A wife? Not! I Corinthians 7:32-35

Wigand, Otto Friedrich (1795–1870)

A German publisher, Wigand established himself in Leipzig, where he issued the works of Ruge, Bauer, Feuerbach, Scherr, and other freethinkers. He also was a powerful orator and for some years was a member of the Prussian Diet. {BDF; RAT}

Wiggam, Albert Edward (1871–1957) Wiggam was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. An author and lecturer, Wiggam wrote a newspaper column, “Let’s Explore Your Mind.” He also wrote The Next Age of Man (1927) and The Marks of an Educated Man (1930).

Wightman, Edward (Died 1612) Wightman was an English anti-Trinitarian, a martyr of Burton-on-Trent. He was burned at Lichfield 11 April 1612, allegedly the last person burned for heresy in England. (See entry for Heretics.) {BDF}

Wihl, Ludwig (1807–1882) Wihl was a German poet, whose work depicted his freethought. {BDF}

Wijetunga, Chandranie (20th Century) Wijetunga, the Assistant Director of Ministry of Finance in Sri Lanka, is a Unitarian as are her two children and her husband Walter Jayewardene, the Director-Secretary General of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Sri Lanka.

Wilbrandt, Adolf (1837–1911) A German author, Wilbrandt wrote about Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin, the poet of pantheism. He also published novels and plays, one of which was Giordano Bruno (1874). His rationalism is chiefly found in a novel, Geister und Menschen (1864) and Hölderlin, der Dichter des Pantheismus (1870). {RAT}

Wilbur, Earl Morse (1866–1956) The most prominent modern student of the history of Unitarianism in Europe, Wilbur described the historical development of Socinian and Unitarian theology. He was a President of the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. Wilbur wrote Our Unitarian History (1925) and later a two-volume History of Unitarianism (1945; 1952). {FUS; U&U}

Wilbur, Richard: See entry for Theism.

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler (1850–1919) Wilcox, a poet, hovered in her views between pantheism and theism, as shown in her New Thought Common Sense. She rejected orthodox Christianity, saying, “I am neither a Roman Catholic nor a Protestant. . . . (I believe in) the Divinity which dwells in us.” Her popular sentimental poetry had a favorable influence in breaking the crust of orthodoxy, and her Poems of Passion (1883) sold 60,000 copies in two years. Freethinkers like her four-line poem, “The World’s Need”:

So many Gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, When just the art of being kind Is all this sad world needs.

{JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; WWS}

Wild, George John (19th Century) Wild, a freethinker, wrote Sacerdotalism (c. 1873). {GS}

Wilde, Oscar (1854–1900) Swinburne wrote of Oscar Wilde, “It was for sinners such as this / Hell was created bottomless.” Wilde, in his characteristic style, wrote, “The public is wonderfully tolerant.” An aesthete, Wilde glorified beauty for itself alone, influenced as he was by Pater and Ruskin. This resulted, however, in his being satirized in Punch and in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, “Patience.” Sensual indulgence and moral indifference are featured in his The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Generally considered to be his best work is The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which contains such examples of his wit as . . .

• It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression. • The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. • To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. • All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. • I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Elsewhere,

• I couldn’t help it. I can resist anything except temptation. • There is no sin except stupidity. • We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. • (A cynic is) a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. • There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. • A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. • The English country gentleman galloping after a fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable. • A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. • He hasn’t a single redeeming vice. • He is old enough to know worse • Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly. • Conscience and cowardice are really the same things; conscience is the trade-name of the firm. • Work is the curse of the drinking classes. • The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. • To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. • (While imprisoned) If this is the way the Queen treats her convicts, she doesn’t deserve to have any. • (At the New York Custom House) I have nothing to declare except my genius.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, and they had two boys, Cyril and Vyvyan. “When I married, my wife was a beautiful girl, white and slim as a lily,” Wilde wrote Frank Harris, but “[i]n a year or so all the flowerlike grace had vanished; she became heavy, shapeless, deformed.” By 1887 he had had a “same sex” romance with Robbie Ross, and in 1891 he took up with Lord Alfred (Bosie) Douglas, one of the Marquis of Queensberry’s two homosexual sons. Critic Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker, 18 May 1998) and others believe that the Marquis, who codified the rules of boxing, seemed to think his son and Wilde were “playing at buggers” in order to épater the bourgeoisie, for he left a card at Wilde’s club inscribed “For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite” (sic). Surprisingly and self-destructively, Wilde commenced a libel case against Queensberry, knowing that Bosie hated his father and desiring to see him humiliated. The noted case, however, resulted in Wilde’s being asked about his involvement with “rent boys,” leading to his observation that sex with the young and Victorian poor was like “feasting with panthers,” which according to Gopnik “might be how the boys would have described it, too.” The trial was scandalous and included Wilde’s reference to “the Love that dare not speak its name.” The opposing counsel, Edward Carson, made a strong case, and to the surprise of many Wilde was found guilty and unmercifully jailed. “An argument has been made,” wrote Gopnik, “that Queensberry got the government to go on with the prosecution of Wilde after the libel suit was dropped by threatening, in effect, to blackmail the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, who was said to have had an affair with another of Queensberry’s sons.” After spending two years in jail for homosexual “offenses,” unprepared for the suffering which this involved, Wilde at last was released and escorted by two prison officials to a train station. “At the sight of a budding bush at the station,” Gopnik observed, “[Wilde] opened his arms and cried, ‘Oh beautiful world! Oh, beautiful world!’ Knowing that only one prisoner would say such a thing, one of the warders turned to him, chiding, ‘Now Mr. Wilde, you mustn’t give yourself away like that.’” Freed, Wilde found his former friends had left him. One of the few who did not, journalist W. T. Stead who had exposed child prostitution in London, wrote, “If all the persons guilty of Oscar Wilde’s offenses were to be clapped into jail, there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester (England’s famous schools). Moving to France, Wilde suffered the recurring ear trouble he had had in prison, and surgery was performed. In the hospital, he regaled his close friends Reggie Turner and Robert Ross while sipping iced champagne and saying, “I am dying as I’ve lived: beyond my means.” Advised by his friends not to stop consuming so much alcohol, Wilde congratulated them: “You are qualifying for a doctor. When you can refuse bread to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty, you may apply for your Diploma.” But when he developed a cold, his ear condition worsened and, depressed, he told Turner and Ross that the night before he had dreamed he was “supping with the dead.” Their response delighted him: “My dear Oscar, you must have been the life and soul of the party.” (Oscar’s mother, Speranza Wilde, was a friend of the mother of Djuna Barnes, Zadel, who once introduced her to Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter. What transpired among these unlikely three, according to Phillip Herring’s Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (1995), is not known. Zadel Barnes was sent in 1880 by the American journal, McCall’s, as a correspondent in London, and interviewing the famous writer’s mother was a journalistic goal.) According to biographers H. Montgomery Hyde and Hesketh Pearson, Wilde contracted cerebral meningitis, an acute brain inflammation, and on November 30th, 1900, after being baptized into the Catholic Church, he died. As to why he made such a decision, and why the Church agreed, there are unanswered questions. Most of his life, he had been a non-believer who was aware of the hypocrisy of church officials, particularly in regards to their morality. Gopnik suggests it was because of his “insistence on seeing his own suffering in Christian terms,” that Wilde the Catholic was in denial. “His Catholicism has become as much an embarrassment to his admirers as his homosexuality used to be. But there is a sense in which his Christianity, like Auden’s years later, was conceived not in opposition to his homosexuality but as a reflection on it, and it ennobles the most exasperating thing about his last years: his reconciliation with Alfred Douglas, long after it should have been clear to him—indeed, he had announced that it was clear to him—that Bosie had been poison. (‘He once played dice with his father for my life and lost,’ Wilde had said once.)” Speaking of death, Wilde once remarked to his lifelong friend Robert Ross: “When the Last Trumpet sounds, and we are couched in our porphyry tombs, I shall turn and whisper to you, ‘Robbie, Robbie, let us pretend we do not hear it.’ ” It likely is not the case that on his deathbed he opened his eyes and murmured, “Either that wallpaper goes or I do.” But he did say, “I am dying beyond my means.” When he died in Paris with syphilis at the age of forty-six, he was laid to rest in the unfashionable Bagneaux cemetery outside Paris, after which ten years later an English woman later provided money to remove the remains to the more elegant Pére Lachaise in eastern Paris. Upon that exhumation, however, the English funeral director Harold Nicholson described what became a fiasco: “On the previous night the sextons had dug up the grave, leaving the coffin exposed with two ropes underneath it. The soil had been placed on each side of the grave and, since it had been raining during the night, the sextons thought it wise to put three tombstones on the top of the earth so as to hold it down. There were many official representatives and journalists present at Bagneaux cemetery, and as they pressed forward to gaze into the grave one of the heavy stones became dislodged and fell upon the coffin, splitting the lid open. For a few seconds the face of Wilde could be seen, peaceful and white. Then the earth followed and in a few seconds his face was obliterated by mud.” Wilde, after this brief reappearance, was then transferred to another coffin, and in 1914 some of his admirers unveiled an Epstein statue suggested by Wilde’s poem, “The Sphinx.” However, the fig leaf along with the figure’s private parts beneath the leaf were hacked away by someone, and the severed testicles reportedly now serve as paperweights in the cemetery conservator’s office. Meanwhile, in 1995 a stained-glass window in his memory was installed in the Poets’ Corner of London’s Westminster Abbey. {CB; CE; GL; TYD}

Wilder, Gene (1935- ) Wilder is an actor, director, and writer. He received a 1967 Academy Award nomination for “The Producers); received a 1974 Academy Award nomination for his co-writing of “Young Frankenstein”; and appeared in numerous Broadway plays and films. In 1968 he campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, Allard Lowenstein, and Paul O’Dwyer. Asked in 1998 on Bravo, a US-based cable television network, what heaven is, he responded in agnostic fashion that he wasn’t even sure that heaven exists, then added they everyday life can be thought of as heaven. {CA}

Wildes, Harry Emerson (Born 1890) Wildes wrote Lonely Midas, the Story of Stephen Girard.

Wile, Ira Solomon (20th Century) Wile was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. He wrote The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult (1987).

Wilgus, Neal (1937 - )

Wilhelmi, Hedwig Henrich (19th Century) A German lecturer, Wilhelmi wrote Vortrage, a work published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1889. She attended the Paris Freethought Congress of 1889. {BDF}

Wilkenson, Jemima (1752–1829) The daughter of a Quaker farmer in Rhode Island, Wilkenson “died” when she was twenty. Before her family could bury her, however, she rose as a reincarnation of Christ. She then was sent on a divine mission to found the Church and prepare the Chosen Few for the Second Coming, scheduled to occur, she claimed, in her lifetime. When she died the second time, members in keeping with her instructions did not bury her but, instead, waited anxiously for her to rise once again. When her body merely decomposed, the faith of many of the Universal Friends declined. By 1874, the last of the believers had died. {LEE}

Wilkes, Eliza Tupper (1844–1917) Wilkes was one of the first women to be ordained as a Universalist minister. She was the first female to preach in the Dakota territory and, in 1886, founded the Church of All Souls, Unitarian, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Wilkes was active in the campaigns for temperance and women’s suffrage. {World, Mar-Apr 1997}

Wilkes, John (1727–1797) Wilkes was an English politician and journalist. He entered Parliament in 1757, and while Lord Mayor of London he was recognized by the King as one of the best the city had ever had. Wilkes was the idol of many workers, but the public hangman burned some of his writings. In his periodical, North Briton, Wilkes attacked George III in one issue, going so far as to criticize the speech from the throne. He was immediately arrested, but Chief Justice Charles Pratt ruled that the general warrant which had been issued did not specify who was to be arrested and was therefore illegal. The government then secured Wilkes’s expulsion on the grounds of seditious libel and obscenity—Wilkes had issued an obscene parody of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. Upon being released from prison, he was greeted by large group of supporters. According to McCabe, “the clergy were shocked and the young bloods delighted at his vices, frivolities, and irreligion.” Although repeatedly reelected, he was not allowed to take his seat, despite being supported by Edmund Burke, until 1774., the year he became Lord Mayor of London. McCabe quotes a biographer, Bleackly, who “reluctantly admits that Wilkes once said that the word ‘religion’ would be as incongruous on his lips as the word ‘liberty’ on the lips of Dr. Johnson.” Although termed a demagogue by some, he is remembered as an atheist and a champion of freedom of the press and the rights of the electorate. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Wilkins, Leslie T. (20th Century) Wilkins, a writer, editor, and consultant, was Dean of the School of Criminology, University of California at Berkeley (1966—1969) and from 1979 to 1980 was visiting professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. For the English Freethinker (April 1994), he re-assessed drug controls and concluded that marijuana “is almost universally accepted as a medically-desirable treatment in some illnesses” and should “forthwith and without question be made available on medical prescription without constraint as to the ailment for which it may be prescribed.”

Wilkinson, Christopher (Born 1803) Wilkinson wrote with Squire Farrah An Examination of Dr. Godwin’s Arguments for the Existence of God (1853). {BDF}

Wilkinson, Pat (20th Century) Wilkinson is the state director of Arizona for American Atheists, Inc. E-mail: <pwilkinson@atheists.org>.

WILL TO BELIEVE Under certain specified conditions, William James wrote in his 1897 article, “The Will to Believe,” we have a right to let our passional nature decide which of two alternative hypotheses to adopt. As summarized by the University of Edinburgh’s T. L. S. Sprigge, “These are that the matter cannot be settled on intellectual grounds, and that the choice between them is living (we find each credible), forced (we must act in the light of one or the other), and momentous (really important). Examples are the choice between theism and atheism or free will and determinism.” {OCP}

Willans, Angela (20th Century) Willans is a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. (GALHA). She is author of Breakaway: Family Conflict and the Teenage Girl (1977).

Willard, Emma (1787–1870) An American educator who was a pioneer in women’s education, Mrs. John Willard was invited by Gov. Clinton to start a school in Waterford, Connecticut, but when financial help did not follow she opened the Troy Female Seminary in 1821, which offered education to women and jobs to teachers and which later was renamed in her honor. She was a freethinker. {CE}

Willard, Frances Elizabeth (1829–1898) President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Willard was an activist upon behalf of women’s suffrage. Her autobiography is Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889). {CE; UU}

Willdigg, Ronald (20th Century) Willdigg is on the Executive Board of New York City’s Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association.

Wille, Bruno (Born 1860) A prominent German Freethinker, Wille edited Der Freidenker and was president of the Free Religious Society of Berlin. A follower of Darwin and Haeckel, Wille was a member of the Freethought Federation of Germany and upon several occasions was fined and imprisoned for his attacks on the government and church. {PUT; RAT}

William of Occam (or Ockham) (c. 1285–c. 1349) Robertson calls William of Occam the most rationalistic of medieval philosophers. William, an English Franciscan who taught at Paris, had been a pupil of the Realist Duns Scotus, but William became the renewer of nominalism, which is the specifically rationalistic as opposed to the religious mode of metaphysics. Occam had such a strong anti-clerical bias that he had to flee France to Bavaria for protection from the clergy. Pope John XXII (or XXI) directed his prosecution, and in 1328 Occam was imprisoned in the papal palace at Avignon. Also imprisoned there was Marsiglio of Padua, the author of Defensor Pacis (1324), “the greatest and most original political treatise of the Middle Ages.” The two escaped to Bavaria, where William supported the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV in his struggle with Pope John. It is believed William died in the “black plague” which swept Europe in the 14th century. The Columbia Encyclopedia explains that Occam “denied the existence of universals except in men’s minds and in language. An empiricist, Occam disputed the self-evidence of principles of Aristotelian logic (such as the final cause) and of Christian theology (such as the existence of God). For this reason Occam severely restricted the province of philosophy in order to safeguard theology, denying the competence of reason in matters of faith.” He is remembered for his use of the principle of parsimony, “Occam’s razor”: “What can be done with fewer [assumptions] is done in vain with more.” One of Occam’s pupils was Buridan, rector of the University of Paris (fl. 1340) and famous for the Buridan’s Ass story (about the hungry animal standing between two haystacks that, unable to make up his mind from which of the two to sup, died of starvation). Robertson notes that “it appears to be broadly true that Occam had at Paris an unbroken line of successors down to the Reformation.” In 1376, the distinguished university’s freethought was evidenced by a startling list of 219 theses, under cover of the doctrine of two-fold truth. In them, the students (a) “denied the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the resurrection, and the immortality of the soul; (b) affirmed the eternity of matter and the uselessness of prayer, but also posited the principles of astrology; (c) argued that the higher powers of the soul are incapable of sin, and that voluntary sexual intercourse between the unmarried is not sinful; and (d) suggested that there are fables and falsehoods in the gospels as in other books.” The students were strongly scolded, but the element of the perseverance of the spirit of reason by youth in those times of darkness is memorable. {CE; JMR,; JMRH}

Williams, B. W. (20th Century) Williams, a freethinker, wrote The Joke of Christianizing China (1927). {GS}

Williams, Barry (20th Century) Williams is president of the Australian Skeptics.

Williams, C. (20th Century) Informed that the 1953 Humanist Newsletter in New York City had fewer than one hundred subscribers, Williams wrote,

In the whole of New York City? For about two years, Smith, I’ve watched you knock yourself out organizing meetings and publicizing humanism. Get smart—utilize your efforts more wisely, in ADA or some similar organization. Let these N.Y. bitches wake up after the hierarchy and McCarthy have taken over. Don’t you know that New Yorkers are the most conservative of animals; take a look at N.Y. Unitarians if you think local liberals are ready for humanism. . . . If three others match me, I’ll send $50 to wipe out your deficit, though. But what you really need is about $500 to buy a mimeograph and pursue humanism in a big way.

Williams, Charles Hanbury [Sir] (1708–1759) Williams was Paymaster to the Marine Forces (1739–1742) and Lord Lieutenant of Herefordshire (1742–1747). When he became Envoy-Extraordinary to Berlin, Williams became an intimate friend of Voltaire. Known in skeptical circles at Holland House as “the Atheist,” Williams shocked many when the Quarterly in 1822 published his “horrible blasphemies.” Williams died by his own hand and was buried in Westminster Abbey. {RAT; RE}

Williams, Daniel Hale (1858–1931) Williams is said to have become a successful physician, partly because there were so few black doctors at the time. One of his friends, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, was a Unitarian minister, and although Williams did not attend services regularly he considered himself a Unitarian, too. He attended Chicago Medical College and became a physician. He found, however, that often he needed to operate on patients in their own homes, because they did not have the funds to go into a hospital. So Williams arranged for such a place to be built, a place for training black women to be nurses and to give black medical students a chance to get experience under competent supervision. In 1893 when James Cornish, a young black, was brought into Provident Hospital, there were no X-ray machines, no way to determine how deeply a stab wound had gone. Because Cornish continue to get worse, Dr. Williams with other physicians watching made a deep decision, found an important artery had been damaged and the heart itself had sustained a tiny cut from the stabbing incident. As a result of his experimental surgery on the dying patient, who recovered, “Dr. Dan” is cited as having been the first surgeon to perform successful heart surgery. {CE; EG}

Williams, Dar (20th Century) Williams, a folk recording artist, was asked on Audio Chat (22 Jan 1998) what an alleged “existential crisis” was that happened to him when he was sixteen that he blamed for his creativity and sharp sense of humor. Williams replied, “I decided there was no God. So I had to [muddle] my way out alone.” [CA]

Williams, Dar ( ) Williams, a folk recording artist, was born in Mount Kisco, Massachusetts. Her albums include The Green World, containing eleven short-stories-in-song—explaining the title, she has said that in an undergraduate Shakespeare class at Wesleyan University she learned that the bard often centered his plays on the conflict between the “closed world” and the “green world.” The former, representing court life in Elizabethan England; the latter, representing the unpredictable and chaotic: the forest, the wilderness, the place where you learned things you don’t necessarily want to know about yourself. Asked what was the “existential crisis” that happened to her when she was sixteen that you blame for your creativity and sharp sense of humor,” Williams responded, “I decided there was no God. So I had to [muddle] my way out alone.” {CA}

Williams, David(1738–1816) A Welsh deist, Williams, after publishing two volumes of Sermons on Religious Hypocrisy (1774), gave up his post as a dissenting preacher. In conjunction with Benjamin Franklin and other freethinkers, Williams opened a short-lived deistic chapel in Margaret Street, Cavendish Square, London (1776), where there was used a “Liturgy on the Universal Principles of Religion and Morality.” The only creed he professed was, in his own words, the deistic, not theistic, “I believe in God. Amen.” {BDF; FUK; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}

Williams, David (20th Century) Williams has written for the English New Humanist. Criticizing Francis Crick’s The Astonishing Hypothesis, Williams regrets that Crick “misses an important point by ignoring or playing down the contributions made by philosophers and other wordsmiths of this century in the exploration of ideas about brains and what they do.” He cites Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, which came out four years before the DNA discovery. In 1995, he edited A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought, a collection of quotations, short pieces, poetry, and other comments on thought, philosophy, and the human condition. [[Williams, David Allen (1939– ) Williams, a writer from Utah and a world-traveler, is author of A Celebration of Humanism and Freethought (1995), which contains poetry, prose, and steel engravings which celebrate humanism.

Williams, David Rhys (Born 1890) When Williams signed Humanist Manifesto I, he was leader of the First Unitarian Church in Rochester. In correspondence with Bragg and Wilson, however, he took exception to point three of the manifesto, which deals with body-soul dualism. Although he signed, he later renounced the humanist position, attacking its nontheism. {CL; EW; FUS; HM1; HNS}

Williams, F. R. J. [O.B.E] (20th Century) Williams, an officer of the Order of the British Empire, wrote Science and a Global Ethic. He considers different types of societies and their potentiality for approaching a global ethic, in particular contrasting the open, civil society with the autocratic (sometimes theocratic) closed society. {“Creating a Global Ethic,” New Humanist, December 1995}

Williams, Gardner (20th Century) Williams, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toledo, is author of Humanistic Ethics (1951). {CL; HNS; PK}

Williams, George (1914– ) A church historian, Williams in a 1949 work on Frederic Henry Hedge noted that a “spiritual ambivalence of Unitarianism constitutes one of the most remarkable features of our body.” This he summed up in the simultaneous existence of a “broad-churchly tradition” and a dissenting sectarianism. “Unitarianism will do well to preserve both the broad conserving churchmanship of the former and the latter’s intense spirit of prophetic dissent.” He favored connecting Unitarian Universalism to the worldwide history of the Christian church. He is author of American Universalism: A Bicentennial Historical Essay (1983). {U&U}

Williams, Glanville (1911– ) Williams, a jurist and freethinker, was described by David Tribe as a “champion” of every cause that might raise legal eyebrows.” He was president of the Abortion Law Reform Association and committee member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society. {TRI}

Williams, Gwyn A. (19th Century) Williams wrote Rowland Detrosier, A Working-Class Infidel, 1800–1834 (1956). {GS}

Williams, H. W. (20th Century) In The True Wilderness (1965), Williams wrote, “All fanaticism is a strategy to prevent doubt from becoming conscious.” {TYD}

Williams, Hayward A. (20th Century) Williams wrote Fifty Years to Atheism (1966). {FUS}

Williams, Lorrie (20th Century) A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Williams was named Humanist Heroine in 1999 by the American Humanist Association. She founded and is the president of the Canadian Harambee Education Society, has instructed teachers in Ethiopia and Thailand with Project Overseas, and has served as a workshop facilitator with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation. E-mail: <lorriew@home.com>. {The Humanist, March-April 1999; Humanist in Canada, Autumn 1999}

Williams, Paulette: See entry for Ntozake Shange.

Williams, Robert L. (20th Century) Williams, a college teacher interested in researching Thomas Paine, has written for Truth Seeker. Williams, Robyn (1944— ) Williams, who was born in England, arrived in Australia in 1972 and is a humanist, scientist, journalist, and broadcaster. In 1975 he produced the ABC “Science Show,” then “Ockham’s Razor,” and many other radio and television documentaries. Williams is president of the Australian Museum Trust and Chairman of Committee for the Future. He is author of Best of the Science Show (1983) and Uncertainty Principle (1989). Williams has been awarded the United Nations Peace Prize five times, the Order of Australia (AM) in 1988, the Australian Skeptics Journalist of the Year award in 1989, and the Humanist of the Year award in 1993. {SWW}

Williams, Roger (c. 1602–1683) The founder of Rhode Island, Williams left Massachusetts to escape religious persecution by the Puritans. An advocate of religious freedom, he was one of the architects of the principle of separation of church and state, a belief he held not out of liberalism but out of his profound religious conservatism. He held that Puritans who are “saved” should not worship with the “unregenerate,” those who did not hold his strict Puritanism. Knowing that all family members would not be among the godly, he reasoned that it is wrong to pray with one’s children or even one’s spouse. For Williams, wrote Lew Petterson in The New York Times (29 June 1992), the state did not have the power to say you can pray nor that you cannot pray, for both are equally destructive if one believes in the right to worship as one pleases. Petterson extrapolates that Williams would have said “Amen” to the 1992 ruling in Lee v. Weisman which reaffirms the ban on school prayer. Williams is known for having, during the time he was Governor of Rhode Island from 1654 to 1657, protecting the Quakers, while dissenting strongly from their creed. {CE; ER; RAT}

Williams, Thomas (18th Century) Williams wrote Speeches of the Honorable Thomas Erskine, in the Court of King’s Bench, On the Trial of the King vs. Thomas Williams for Publishing The Age of Reason (1797). {GS}

Williams, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) (1911–1983) Williams, one of America’s foremost playwrights, was born on Palm Sunday, “a kind of righteous pagan, who, like Shannon, the defrocked priest in ‘The Night of the Iguana’ (1961), saw himself as ‘a man of God, on vacation,’ ” critic John Lahr has written. Williams was raised by his beloved grandfather the Reverend Walter Dakin, of whom Williams wrote, “My grandfather was very, very High Church (Episcopal). He was Higher than the Pope.” At the age of sixteen, Williams had a religious brainstorm in which he thought “the grace of God touched me,” and his 1943 diary contains the prayer, “Help me, dear God, to find what I need.” An image of the Virgin Mary was by his bedside and Williams converted “only for one day” to Catholicism in 1969, a time when he was having severe personal problems. “I wanted to have my goodness back” was the reason Williams gave for converting, encouraged by his brother, a convert. But Christianity never really consoled Williams, although it tempted him with its ideas about salvation and the glory of self-sacrifice. Particularly in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” Lahr holds, Williams dreamed of salvation. His character, Chance, says, “Something’s got to mean something.” The story concerns an aging movie star whose kept young man is castrated by the father of the girl he deserted. The castration is a kind of leap of faith, Lahr writes, an explanation of Williams’s own longing to reclaim his belief. Williams’s outlook is found in The Glass Menagerie (1945), a partly autobiographical work that immortalized his sister, Rose, who like its character Laura “is like a piece of her own glass collection, too exquisitely fragile to move from the shelf.” Rose (1919–1996) was a schizophrenic who underwent a prefrontal lobotomy and was institutionalized until her death. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947—winner of a Pulitzer Prize) further details his outlook and is known for the hypersensitive and lonely Blanche DuBois who exits saying, “Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” His outlook is further shown in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1955—winner of a Pulitzer Prize), in which characters live by a full emotional involvement in life rather than shrinking from or denying it, despite the terrible violence they encounter; and Memoirs (1975), in which he candidly discusses his career, his love affairs, his homosexual one-night stands, his thoughts. When Hollywood mogul Jack Warner at dinner one night asked Frank Merlo (1922–1963), “And what do you do, young man?” Merlo responded, “I sleep with Mr. Williams.” Williams made no secret of the fact, writing that when Merlo died, “I went to pieces. I retreated into a shell. For nine months, I wouldn’t speak to a living soul. I just clammed up. I wouldn’t answer the telephone and I wouldn’t leave the house.” Tallulah Bankhead, over drinks, once told him, “You and I are the only constantly ‘high’ Episcopalians I know.” Lyle Leverich in Tom (1995) quotes a journalist to whom Williams said, “Of course, God exists. I don’t understand how. But He exists. How can there be a creation without a Creator? Still, I don’t think there is an afterlife. At least I’m afraid there isn’t.” He echoed that thought in his little-known 1980 work, “Something Cloudy, Something Clear,” in which a character representing him says, looking up at the sky, “Life is all—it’s just one time. It finally seems to all occur at one time.” Williams did not wish to be cremated or buried in the family plot, writing in Memoirs that he wanted his body sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped as close as possible to the area at sea where Hart Crane committed suicide. He specifically did not want to be buried in the family plot in St. Louis, where he once had been locked up in a psychiatric ward. As his biographer Lyle Leverich has pointed out, “Unfortunately, he failed to make this a provision in his will, or his attorney failed to include it.” Tennessee’s brother Dakin made the decision to have his brother buried in St. Louis, saying, “When I arrived in New York on February 26th, my brother’s body was already placed in a very handsome ‘orthodox Jewish’ casket. The decision to bury him had previously been made by trustees Maria St. Just and attorney John Eastman. The funeral director, Frank Campbell, took me aside and said, ‘We are planning to ship the remains to Waynesville, Ohio, to be buried alongside his grandparents.’ I then selected St. Louis, where visitors could come to pay their respects, rather than inaccessible Waynesville.” The open casket at the Campbell funeral parlor displayed a shaved face, but it was Tennessee and not Dakin who had shaved the beard shortly before he died. One viewer scarcely recognized the body lying with an object on the breast, an icon temporarily placed by Maria St. Just. Tennessee was said to have had suffered a lifelong dread of confinement, and to be enclosed in a coffin anywhere, not just St. Louis, was what he had never wanted. However, his remains were placed into a large “Orthodox Jewish” casket, the funeral was held in an ornate Byzantine cathedral, and over twelve hundred attended the final rites. “Lamentably,” says Leverich, “he left the final decision to others.” {CE; John Lahr, “Fugitive Mind,” The New Yorker, 18 July 1994; GL; Lyle Leverich letter to WAS, 3 June 1991; OCAL; TRI; TYD}

Williams, Thomas Rhondda (20th Century) Williams wrote The Working Faith of a Liberal Theologian (1914). {GS}

Williams, William Carlos (1883–1963) The first decisively pragmatic poet of America, Williams is said to have delivered babies by day (he was a New Jersey physician) and poems by night (sometimes vice versa). He won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his Pictures From Brueghel (1963), a collection of poems, and he is the author of Paterson (1946–1958), a book in five parts (which was written party, and ironically, after he had suffered a series of strokes; he was unable to write a sixth part). By describing life in an American city, Williams voiced his feelings as to a poet’s duty. This meant for him writing about what he could see, touch, and be certain of—coming in late, doing his rounds, watching his wife do chores, parking the car, looking at a wheelbarrow or at flowers or birds. Wallace Stevens thought Williams’s work was too casual, and Martin Seymour-Smith says his poetic achievement is but a minor one. Others, however, consider him to be one of the most important and original American poets of the century. Still others have praised his witty play, “Many Loves” (1940), about a playwright loved by his leading lady as well as by a rich homosexual patron. The work was one of the first to portray realistic homosexual and lesbian relationships on Broadway. He wrote the present author concerning humanism:

There is no good to be got in my pondering the question as between a “theistic humanism” or a “humanistic humanism” for more than a passing moment. Atheism is laughable as a positive belief. The death of every man is for him the end; knowing nothing about it, I am forced by common observation to believe it. I can’t say positively that this is so; I can only say that since all data in the case are withheld from me, I find myself absolutely unconcerned. As a physician I do not find any basis for believing in the supernatural. I live side by side with men who believe in the miracles of Christ and, though they are my friends, we never discuss our beliefs together. I am not interested in their beliefs. Nor am I interested in the existentialists, whose more or less complex beliefs are of no more importance to me than the demonstrations of Descartes. The brain is a complex mechanism and the fascination for man in becoming involved in its complexities has always intrigued me. This is a necessity for the development of our mechanistic sciences including the theories of Dr. Freud, but it has nothing to do with the beginning and the course and the death of a man. Since I can’t exclude what I do not know and can’t at the same time believe in it, I am forced to spend my time on earth with other occupations. Laughter at the fools does not completely fill my days, though it occupies many of my idle moments—accompanied by tolerant tears as befits a man of my predilections. I was bred a Unitarian, but whether I transect the cone of my preferences nearer or farther from the light has become, as I grow older, indifferent to me. There is much that is attractive in polytheism to the artist—the poet, that is—when he contemplates the spectrum. All that is left to me, being forced back from any knowledge except the report of the senses, is a humanistic naturalism, lit by the lightnings which play about the minds of saints and sinners.

	Dr. Williams was a member of the Rutherford Unitarian Church in New Jersey, which his parents had helped to found. {CE; TYD; UU; WAS, 25 March 1956}

Williams, William Mattieu (1820–1892) At the age of fourteen, Williams was apprenticed to a mathematical and optical instrument maker, and having inherited a little money attended Edinburgh College for two years. He spent two years in a walking tour over Europe, earning his living as an artisan. Later, he became headmaster of the Birkbeck School but found the clergy were hostile inasmuch as they had been criticized in his Who Should Teach Christianity to Children? (1853). Williams, a rationalist, was a successful chemist, one who was zealous for popular education. {RAT}

Williams, Zephaniah (1775–1854) A pioneer freethinker of Wales, Williams was a Chartist. In 1995, Ron Davies MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State, described Williams as “one whose name deserves to be remembered by all who value freedom of thought.” A master collier, Williams was born in Monmouthshire and was prominent in the National Union of the Working Classes. A leader in agitating for the Six Point Charter, he led an 1839 march on Newport during which at least twelve Chartists were shot and killed by soldiers garrisoned in the Westgate Hotel. Captured later, he was tried and sentenced to be hanged. The death sentence was changed, but he endured floggings, hard labor, and news that his wife had been told he was dead. In 1854, he received a conditional pardon, joined his wife and daughter, and died in 1874 “full of years and prosperity.” Rationalism and freethought were at the bedrock of his principles and activities, according to Richard Paterson (The Freethinker, December 1995). He considered Christ “to have been simply a good man who, had he been living in that time and place, would have had his house pulled down by the ‘friends of order.’ ” Paterson added, “It was said, however, that Williams kept at the Royal Oak a large portrait of Christ crucified, with the caption, ‘The Man who Stole the Ass.’” A vocal enemy of hypocrisy, Williams made a special plea for rationalism: “I would advise all men to take nothing upon trust, but all upon trial; whether in politics, religion, ethics, or any thing else: to sit down with a determined resolution; to examine closely; and to be directed by that which reason most approves.”

Williamson, Audrey (20th Century) Williamson wrote Thomas Paine, His Life, Work, and Times (1973). {FUK; GS}

Williamson, Clarence Charles (1877–1965) Williamson was graduated in 1907 from Columbia University, where his doctoral dissertation was The Finances of Cleveland. For a time, he was chairman of the department of economics at Bryn Mawr College, then accepted the job of heading the economics and sociology division of a new library building to be opened in New York City at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. In 1921, he left library work to become the director of the information service of the Rockefeller Foundation. The culmination of his professional career was being named in 1926 as director of Columbia University Libraries and of the University’s School of Library Service, remaining until his retirement in 1943. Working under President Nicholas Murray Butler, he developed what has come to be known as Butler Library, a major research center. At the time of his retirement, the Columbia libraries, with 1,844,600 volumes, ranked third behind the collections at Harvard and Yale. The French government named Williamson the “Chevalier of the Legion of Honor” for his work toward the publication of the catalog of the Bibliothèque Nationale. Williamson’s major book was Training for Library Service, but with Alice Jewett he edited the first edition of Who’s Who in Library Service (1933). In the 1960s, a retiree living in Greenwich, Connecticut, Williamson often drove to nearby New Canaan to chat about naturalistic humanism with The Humanist’s book review editor. His knowledge of ancient and Renaissance humanism was superlative (and he insisted that VERGIL [not Virgil] be inscribed in stone on the front of the Butler Library). Williamson was a student of philosophers from ancient Greece to the present; he had known and admired John Dewey, but the final years of his life found him particularly interested in what young philosophers were thinking and writing, especially the philosophic naturalists.

Williamson, W. H. (20th Century) Williamson wrote Thinker or Believer? (1928). {GS}

Willis, Annie B. (1893–1977) Willis, a Unitarian Universalist, was director of the Jordan Neighborhood House and principal of the Jordan School, a Universalist institution in Virginia which emphasized character-building, self-discipline, and self esteem for its African Americans students. (See “Black Universalist Centennial,” The World, January/February 1995.)

Willis, Bruce Walter (1955- ) An actor-singer who was born in the Federal Republic of Germany and came to the United States in 1957, Willis is married to Demi Moore. He has appeared in numerous off-Broadway productions (e.g, “Heaven and Earth,” 1977); television film (e.g., “Trackdown”); and feature films (e.g., “Prince of the City,” 1981; “The Verdict,” 1982; “Blind Date,” 1987; “Sunset,” 1988; “Die Hard,” 1988, “In Country,” 1989, for which he received the 1990 Golden Globe nomination); “Die Hard 2”; “Bonfire of the Vanities,” 1990; and “Billy Bathgate,” 1991. He has appeared on the television series “Miami Vice,” received an Emmy award in 1987, and appeared in numerous commercials. On the subject of religion, Willis has said:

Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were all very important when we didn’t know why the sun moved, why weather changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened. Modern religion is the end trail of modern mythology. But there are people who interpret the Bible literally. Literally! I choose not to believe that’s the way. {CA; John Mahony, New York Post, 15 June 1998}

Willis, Bruce Walter (19 Mar 1955 - ) An actor-singer who was born in the Federal Republic of Germany and came to the United States in 1957, Willis is married to Demi Moore. He has appeared in numerous off-Broadway productions: Heaven and Earth (1977); a television film, Trackdown; and feature films: Prince of the City (1981; The Verdict (1982; Blind Date (1987; Sunset (1988); Die Hard (1988); In Country (1989, for which he received the 1990 Golden Globe nomination); Die Hard 2 (1990); Bonfire of the Vanities (1990); and Billy Bathgate (1991. He has appeared on the television series Miami Vice, received an Emmy award in 1987, and appeared in numerous commercials. On the subject of religion, Willis has said:

Organized religions in general, in my opinion, are dying forms. They were all very important when we didn’t know why the sun moved, why weather changed, why hurricanes occurred, or volcanoes happened. Modern religion is the end trail of modern mythology. But there are people who interpret the Bible literally. Literally! I choose not to believe that’s the way. {CA; John Mahony, New York Post, 15 June 1998}

Willis, Edward Henry [Baron] (1918–1992) Lord Willis, a playwright, was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1966. In 1990, he moved an amendment to the Broadcasting Bill, proposing that “in addition to Christianity, the religious programmes shall, from time to time, cover the other great religions of the world and include, in a balanced way, the viewpoint of agnosticism and humanism.” Then he gave a statement of his position:

Let me be quite honest with the Committee. I happen to be an atheist. I am not an agnostic. An agnostic is simply a shame-faced atheist. I am a total non-believer. I do not apologise to the Committee for that. I was brought up as a primitive Methodist. I do not think they exist any more. If one sat in chapel on a cushion that was a great sin. I lost my faith when I was about 14. I went to the bottom of the garden and said, “If there is a God, please lift that dustbin lid. Let that dustbin lid rise and that will prove him to me.” I am sure that we have all done that at some time or another. Of course God ignored me and the dustbin lid did not rise. More seriously, my faith was lost in the Holocaust during the Second World War. I could not believe that a God could exist who would allow such things to happen or who would allow man to allow such things to happen. Later in Cambodia I could not believe that a God could exist who could allow these things to happen. How could one square the idea of God with that horrible slaughter. Neither could I believe in a selective God. When my father was dying of cancer, a neighbour of mine also had a relative who was dying of cancer. She said, “We prayed and prayed to God to save our father,” and in fact he survived. My father died. I did not pray; perhaps that was my sin. But I could not believe that God could be so selective. Why should he pick one person out and say, “You will be saved,” and pick another out and say, “You will not be saved”? I am simply indicating my position to the Committee. It does not mean that I do not have moral standards or do not live by moral standards. It does not mean that I have not brought my children up by moral standards. I believe deeply in the Ten Commandments and what they preach. Above all, I believe in the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence, which states that all men are created equal, and by virtue of that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe in all those things. I am trying to make the point that there are hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who believe exactly as I do. They would not call themselves Christians—some of them might but they do not go to church—but they have the same moral standards that I have. I would not steal my neighbour’s wife or his ox or anything else and there are millions of people the same as me. I want their views to be represented on television.

Some of the resultant reactions by the Earl of Halsbury, Lord Dormand, Earl Ferrers, and Lord Houghton are cited in New Humanist (October 1990). Halsbury said, “Post-war immigration has given rise to hospitality and to tolerance for the faiths of others, but do not let us call ourselves a multi-faith culture. We are a Christian culture, and, on any assessment of it by pollster methods, anything from 75 to 85 per cent of this country confesses the Christian religion. . . . Agnosticism is not a viewpoint; it is a lack of viewpoint and was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in order to avoid answering the question, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Humanism means all things to all men. . . . I cannot believe that anything as variegated as man can be the measure of anything as though he were a standard yard or the standard metre.” Halsbury was supported by the Bishop of Southwark: “Humanism and agnosticism are not religions. It has to be said, and it would be unkind not to say this, that considerable irritation is sometimes caused by using religious slots in programming for programmes which appear to have no religious content whatever in the usual sense of the word.” Lord Houghton supported Lord Willis’s amendment, stating, “If we are to have freedom of discussion about religion and broadcasting of a wider kind, we must get rid of the law of blasphemy.” Speaking for the Government, Earl Ferrers emphasized that humanism and agnosticism were not religious and it would create confusion to include them in religious broadcasting. He then opposed The Earl of Halsbury’s amendment, and the amendment was defeated by 34 votes to 24. “Ted” Willis’s best-known TV series, Dixon of Dock Green, lasted twenty-five years. He wrote two volumes of autobiography: Whatever Happened to Tom Mix (1970) and Evening All: Fifty Years Over a Hot Typewriter (1991).

Willis, Edward Henry [Baron] (1918–1992) Lord Willis, a playwright, was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1966. In 1990, he moved an amendment to the Broadcasting Bill, proposing that “in addition to Christianity, the religious programmes shall, from time to time, cover the other great religions of the world and include, in a balanced way, the viewpoint of agnosticism and humanism.” Then he gave a statement of his position:

Let me be quite honest with the Committee. I happen to be an atheist. I am not an agnostic. An agnostic is simply a shame-faced atheist. I am a total non-believer. I do not apologise to the Committee for that. I was brought up as a primitive Methodist. I do not think they exist any more. If one sat in chapel on a cushion that was a great sin. I lost my faith when I was about 14. I went to the bottom of the garden and said, “If there is a God, please lift that dustbin lid. Let that dustbin lid rise and that will prove him to me.” I am sure that we have all done that at some time or another. Of course God ignored me and the dustbin lid did not rise. More seriously, my faith was lost in the Holocaust during the Second World War. I could not believe that a God could exist who would allow such things to happen or who would allow man to allow such things to happen. Later in Cambodia I could not believe that a God could exist who could allow these things to happen. How could one square the idea of God with that horrible slaughter. Neither could I believe in a selective God. When my father was dying of cancer, a neighbour of mine also had a relative who was dying of cancer. She said, “We prayed and prayed to God to save our father,” and in fact he survived. My father died. I did not pray; perhaps that was my sin. But I could not believe that God could be so selective. Why should he pick one person out and say, “You will be saved,” and pick another out and say, “You will not be saved”? I am simply indicating my position to the Committee. It does not mean that I do not have moral standards or do not live by moral standards. It does not mean that I have not brought my children up by moral standards. I believe deeply in the Ten Commandments and what they preach. Above all, I believe in the first draft of the American Declaration of Independence, which states that all men are created equal, and by virtue of that all men are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe in all those things. I am trying to make the point that there are hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who believe exactly as I do. They would not call themselves Christians—some of them might but they do not go to church—but they have the same moral standards that I have. I would not steal my neighbour’s wife or his ox or anything else and there are millions of people the same as me. I want their views to be represented on television.

Some of the resultant reactions by the Earl of Halsbury, Lord Dormand, Earl Ferrers, and Lord Houghton are cited in New Humanist (October 1990). Halsbury said, “Post-war immigration has given rise to hospitality and to tolerance for the faiths of others, but do not let us call ourselves a multi-faith culture. We are a Christian culture, and, on any assessment of it by pollster methods, anything from 75 to 85 per cent of this country confesses the Christian religion. . . . Agnosticism is not a viewpoint; it is a lack of viewpoint and was coined by Thomas Henry Huxley in order to avoid answering the question, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Humanism means all things to all men. . . . I cannot believe that anything as variegated as man can be the measure of anything as though he were a standard yard or the standard metre.” Halsbury was supported by the Bishop of Southwark: “Humanism and agnosticism are not religions. It has to be said, and it would be unkind not to say this, that considerable irritation is sometimes caused by using religious slots in programming for programmes which appear to have no religious content whatever in the usual sense of the word.” Lord Houghton supported Lord Willis’s amendment, stating, “If we are to have freedom of discussion about religion and broadcasting of a wider kind, we must get rid of the law of blasphemy.” Speaking for the Government, Earl Ferrers emphasized that humanism and agnosticism were not religious and it would create confusion to include them in religious broadcasting. He then opposed The Earl of Halsbury’s amendment, and the amendment was defeated by 34 votes to 24. “Ted” Willis’s best-known TV series, Dixon of Dock Green, lasted twenty-five years. He wrote two volumes of autobiography: Whatever Happened to Tom Mix (1970) and Evening All: Fifty Years Over a Hot Typewriter (1991).

Willis, Robert (1799–1878) A physician and writer, Willis became librarian to the College of Surgeons in London. Besides many medical works, he wrote a Life of Spinoza (1870) and Servetus and Calvin (1877). Other of his works are The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua in the Face of the Science and Moral Senses of Our Age and A Dialogue by Way of Catechism. Willis followed Spinoza’s pantheism as he indicated in his life of the master. {BDF; RAT}

Willis, W. L. (19th Century) Willis wrote Remodeling the Government Bible Defense of the Saloon and Liquor Business (1894). {GS}

Willis, William (1830–1894) Willis was an Australian bookseller and secularist. Migrating to Australia from England in 1885, he became in 1886 President of the Australasian Secular Association of New South Wales. Also in 1886, he purchased E. B. Skinner’s Sydney Bookshop. {SWW}

Williscroft, Robert G. (20th Century) Williscroft is a freethinker who writes for Truth Seeker. He has lived at the South Pole, and he has wide experience in management, editing and publishing, computer applications, and undersea engineering.

WILLPOWER • Free will and determinism are like a game of cards: the hand that is dealt you is determinism; the way you play your hand is free will. —Norman Cousins

[[WILLS: See entry for Last Will and Testament.

Willson, Jane Wynne (20th Century) Willson, former chair of the British Humanist Association and one of the directors of the Rationalist Press Association, is author of Funerals Without God, A Practical Guide to Non-Religious Funerals (1991) and Parenting Without God: Experiences of a Humanist Mother (1997). She is Vice-President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Willson stated that humanism needs to be accessible, not just a movement for philosophers. Humanists need to present a united front in giving the message of humanism. She is of the view that humanists should omit “secular” and other qualifying adjectives: “Let’s all just be Humanists!” The Norwegians, she finds, are succeeding in increasing their numbers whereas in Britain although one-third of the population is said to be sympathetic to Humanism there are only five or so thousand humanists there. “We Humanists need to attack the non-joiner syndrome,” she explained, for it is important to make Humanism influential throughout society. “The only immortality for humanists,” she points out, “lies in the memories of those who knew us and any influence we have left behind. So it is doubly important for us to remember and to celebrate in an honest and appropriate way.” Willson in 1996 gave the Narsingh Narain Keynote Address, “The Role of Alternative Ceremonies in Transforming Societies,” at the World Atheist Conference held in India. Also in 1996, she was a participant in the Humanist World Conference held in Mexico City. She signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. E-mail: <janewynnew@aol.com>. (See her article, “Humanist Celebrations,” in Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996.) {New Humanist, February 1996}

Wilmot, John (1647–1680) Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, was a poet and a wit. On the one hand, he “believed neither in God nor Jesus Christ.” But on his deathbed, he reportedly said, “I think I can never sufficiently admire the goodness of practices, by which I have hitherto lived without Hope, and without God in the world.” Such sentiment differed remarkably from his previous stands. However, Berman, calling him an “apostate free-thinker,” concludes that Rochester “was not only an atheist but an avowed atheist who associated with other avowed atheists, such as Fanshaw. But the oral and second-hand nature of his surviving statements preclude a conclusive judgment.”

John Wilmot second Earl of Rochester was born in Oxfordshire on 1 April 1647, and died there on 26 July 1680, notorious because - as Samuel Johnson put it - "in a course of drunken gaiety and gross sensuality, with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal, with an avowed contempt of decency and order, a total disregard to every moral, and a resolute denial of every religious observation, he lived worthless and useless, and blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptuousness". Rochester's mother was Parliamentarian by descent and inclined to Puritanism for possibly expedient means. His father, a hard-drinking Royalist from Anglo-Irish stock, had been created Earl of Rochester in 1652 for military services to Charles II during his exile under the Commonwealth; he died abroad in 1658, two years before the restoration of monarchy in England. At twelve Rochester matriculated at Wadham College, Oxford, and there, it is said, `grew debauched'. At fourteen he was conferred with the degree of M.A. by the Earl of Clarendon, who was Chancellor to the University and Rochester's uncle. After a tour of France and Italy, Rochester returned to London, where he was to grace the Restoration Court. Courage in sea-battle against the Dutch made him a hero. In 1667 he married Elizabeth Malet - a witty heiress whom he had attempted to abduct two years earlier: Pepys' Diary, 28 May 1665: "Thence to my Lady Sandwich's, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester's running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower.". Rochester's life is divided between domesticity in the country and a riotous existence at Court, where he was renowned for drunkenness, vivacious conversation, and "extravagant frolics" as part of the Merry Gang (as Andrew Marvell called them) who flourished for about fifteen years after 1665. As well as Wilmot they included Henry Jermyn, Charles Sackville Lord Buckhurst (later Earl of Dorset), John Sheffield Earl of Mulgrave, Henry Killigrew, Sir Charles Sedley, the playwrights Wycherley and Etherege, as well as George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. In banishment from Court for a scurrilous lampoon on Charles II, Rochester set up as `Doctor Bendo', a physician skilled in treating barrenness; his practice was, it is said, `not without success'. Deeply involved with theatre, his coaching of his mistress Elizabeth Barry began her career as the greatest actress of the Restoration stage. At the age of thirty-three, as Rochester lay dying - from syphilis, it is assumed - his mother had him attended by her religious associates; a deathbed renunciation of atheism was published and promulgated as the conversion of a prodigal. This became legendary, reappearing in numerous pious tracts over the next two centuries. Rochester's own writings were at once admired and infamous. Posthumous printings of his play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery gave rise to prosecutions for obscenity, and were destroyed. During his lifetime, his songs and satires were known mainly from anonymous broadsheets and manuscript circulation; most of Rochester's poetry was not published under his name until after his death. One of the most accessible and attractive of the major English poets, Rochester has long been the least available. Though his poetry is as persistently literary as it is lively, it has been marginalised by the very forces which gathered and gave profile to, the writings that compose English Literature. Rochester has not lacked distinguished admirers. Defoe quoted him widely and often. Tennyson would recite from him with fervour. Voltaire admired Rochester's satire for 'energy and fire' and translated some lines into French to 'display the shining imagination his lordship only could boast'. Goethe could quote Rochester in English, and cited his lines to epitomise the intensely 'mournful region' he encountered in English poetry. Hazlitt judged that 'his verses cut and sparkle like diamonds', while 'his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity'.

{CE; HAB}

Wilmut, Ian (20th Century) Nature ( 27 February 1997) featured the news that Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland, had cloned their first sheep back in 1995, using the cells of an embryo rather than an adult. After a twenty-five-year odyssey that led to the electrifying accomplishment, they had succeeded in cloning the first mammal from the tissue of an adult animal. Dolly, they named the cloned sheep in July 1996. Scientists around the world took note that it now was clear that the cloning of an adult mammal is possible. Wilmut, called a meek and affable researcher who lives in a village where sheep outnumber people, was said to earn the equivalent of $60,000-a-year as a government employee and will not stand to earn more than $25,000 in royalties if the breakthrough is commercial successful. “I give everything away,” he told the media. “I want to understand things.” The father of three, Wilmut in 1971 went to Darwin College at Cambridge, receiving his doctoral degree two years later after submitting a thesis on freezing of boar semen. Sheepishly admitting that he scarcely reads science fiction, Wilmut added to reporters that his wife is an elder in the Church of Scotland but that he “does not have a belief in God.” {CA; Michael Specter with Gina Kolata, The New York Times, 3 March 1997}

Wilson, Agnes (19th Century) Wilson, the wife of Joseph Symes, was the Australian publisher known as A. T. Wilson, having founded the firm in 1890.

Wilson, Andrew (1852–1912) A Scottish physician and lecturer, Wilson was a university lecturer in zoology and comparative anatomy. In What is Religion? (1884), Wilson showed he was a Spencerian Agnostic who rejected “the petty conceptions which theologies in their anthropomorphism have devised.” {RE}

Wilson, A(ndrew) N(orman) (1950– ) Wilson, a novelist, journalist, and biographer (of Milton, Belloc, Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis), is a provocative writer. In 1991 he wrote Against Religion: Why We Should Live Without It. In 1992, he wrote Jesus, in which he finds it impossible “to believe that a first-century Galilean holy man . . . believed himself to be the Second Person of the Trinity. It was such an inherently improbable thing for a monotheistic Jew to believe. Nor . . . could I find the smallest evidence that Jesus had ever entertained such beliefs.” In How Can We Know? (1985), Wilson had been something of an apologist for Christianity. Now, he contends that Jesus never saw himself as anyone except someone to cleanse the old law-ridden Judaism, never wanted any following among non-Jews, never thought of himself as anything but a Jew. Wilson’s “Against Religion” was a pamphlet in which he described a trek from being religious to his present agnostic, anti-religious stance. Religion, he held, is “to live happily, to deal mercifully, to act justly in all things.” We cannot, New Humanist has said of his outlook, hope for organized religion to die out. In face of frightening threats from religious people we should remember that “it is a definition of cowardice it is felt that we should feel frightened of saying boo to a goose: The Pope is a very powerful goose. The Ayatollah Khomeini is an even greater goose. Mrs. Whitehouse is a minor goose. The Reverend Tony Higton and Ian Paisley are noisy little ganders. Boo, boo, boo to them all.” Wilson’s ability to gain publicity is well-known. In a newspaper column, he described Robert Runcie, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, as “a nasty tenth-rate figure,” whom he also referred to as Agatha Runcieballs. A. J. Ayer he craftily described in The Healing Art as an academic drone who “liked good-looking women so long as they listened to his monologues without interruption.” Although once a convert to Catholicism, Wilson according to The New York Times editor James Atlas was thought to be anti-clerical and intended by Jesus to provoke:

He argues, among other things, that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth instead of Bethlehem; that few if any of the mythic events surrounding his life—the Virgin Birth, the Last Supper, the Annunciation—could have happened the way they’ve been represented in religious mythology over the past 2,000 years, and probably never happened at all; and that Christianity as it has evolved since the death of Christ bears virtually no resemblance to his teachings. Indeed, Christianity’s main achievement, Wilson contends, is the deadly legacy of anti-Semitism’ that culminated in the Holocaust. If Jesus had foreseen “the whole of Christian history,” he writes on the last page, “he would have exclaimed with Job: ‘Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?’ ”

God’s Funeral (1999) declared that humankind, “which had worshiped God or the Gods time out of mind, from the era of the cave men until the French Revolution, went crazy and thew off God” during the late 19th century. Hume, he noted, brought into question the very notion of Causation (and the image of a Designer behind the Universe), while Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire made it difficult to admire many of the church’s greatest saints and popes, exposing them as “morally absurd.” He pointed out that Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels uniformly made the point that religion had had its day; Swinburne liberated us from “the sexual constraints and intellectual absurdities (as they saw things) of Christianity”; and Samuel Butler’s work had as themes the “dismissal of Christianity and hatred of family life.” Wilson’s conclusion, wrote The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani (2 July 1999), is that “that ‘the God-idea’ was not wrenched from human consciousness with the ease that so many late Victorians predicted. Kakutani noted Wilson’s view that the Christian ethical ideal would retain immense potency in the 20th century and that women and men—as disparate as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Pierre Tielhard de Chardin—would decide to ‘ignore the death of God in the 19th century’ and put their trust in One who said, “I was dead, and see, I am alive for evermore.” ’ ” {Jim Herrick in New Humanist September 1999 wrote that God’s Funeral “witnesses the wake of the deity but gives the impression that he would prefer to be at the resurrection. . . . There is much to fascinate in Wilson’s intelligent book. But I think if he starts by saying ‘Goodbye’ to God, by the end he is ready to say ‘Hello’ again”; Timothy Madigan has observed that Wilson, once an Anglican-turned-atheist, had now become an anti-atheist and that God’s Funeral showed him to be “a mushy liberal Catholic”; RAT; A. N. Wilson, “The Flesh Made Word,” New Humanist, December 1996}

Wilson, Angus (Frank) (Johnstone) (1913–1991) A novelist who described English middle-class life in The Wrong Set (1949) and Setting the World on Fire (1980), Wilson had a vision of life which is far from optimistic. Peter Faulkner, in New Humanist (September, 1991), stated that “the recent death of Angus Wilson has deprived humanism of one of its most committed and deviously eloquent voices.” Faulkner also has written that “although the majority of contemporary British authors write with generally humanistic rather than religious assumptions, few have associated themselves directly with the humanist movement. E. M. Forster and Angus Wilson are exceptions to this.” Wilson in 1972 wrote, concerning his As If By Magic, “My theme is always humanistic. . . . Life today is junglelike. . . . It is inhuman in its materialism. Almost everybody in the book . . . seeks a short cut answer to a long term (eternal?) complex human problem. The ‘magics’ they offer are many and fashionable. . . . All are deceptions, substitutes for the hard job of using reason and industry and intuition and compassion to solve even a little bit of the muddle with humaneness and awe for the natural world and the complexity of human being.” This and other details about Wilson are found in Margaret Drabble’s Angus Wilson: A Biography (1995). {CE; New Humanist, August 1995}

Wilson, Colin Henry (1931– ) Wilson, an English writer, has in more than eighty books exhorted humankind to expand its powers and realize its full potential. In The Outsider (1956), he described an individual who realizes that life is futile, that society conceals this unpleasant truth. Wilson has shown a considerable interest in the occult and mysticism, although David Tribe lists him as a freethinker. Wilson helped popularize a version of existentialism in Britain. {TRI}

Wilson, David Alex (1864–1930) Although called to the Scottish Bar, Wilson entered the Indian Service in Burma and served the full term of office as a judge. Returning to Scotland in 1912, he devoted himself to research and wrote a leading biography of Carlyle (1912–1929, 6 volumes). In earlier works he professed belief in an “eternal unchanging Spirit of the Universe,” but in later years he was an agnostic. {RAT; RE}

Wilson, Dawn (20th Century) Wilson is associated with the Atheist League of the State of Washington. (See entry for Washington Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Wilson, Edmund (1895–1972) A, if not the, foremost American social and literary critic of the century, Wilson, primarily as a journalist, explored the conditions which have shaped literary ideas. He studied symbolism in Axel’s Castle (1931), a work he called “Asshole’s Cactus” in his letters; compared writers’ critical views of one another in The Shock of Recognition (1943); investigated European revolutionary traditions in To the Finland Station (1940); analyzed Freudian and Marxist views in The Wound and the Bow (1941); wrote Memoirs of Hecate County (1949), which many librarians at the time put on side shelves because of its alleged obscenities. For a model he used Frances, a Ukrainian whom he once had met after buying tickets at a dance hall on New York’s 14th Street, then danced and rubbed up against her. The memoirs depicted a character named Anna, for whom cunnilingus left her “weak with pleasure” and who enjoyed the ecstasy of having “her little mouth under the moist kisses of my mouth and my finger on her little moist cunt rubbing its most sensitive spot.” (He failed to mention that the real-life Frances gave Wilson not only self-satisfaction but also a case of gonorrhea.) He criticized religionists in The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955). The latter book when printed in The New Yorker brought the news that a small Jewish religious order, called the Essenes, emphasized the philosophy of love and that Jesus assented to and preached their ideas, the implication being that the ideas were not original with Jesus, who was thought to be a non-supernatural man with an admittedly charismatic personality. In 1956, Wilson wrote A Piece of My Mind, which expressed many of the provocative ideas which led many to call him the most important social and literary critic of his century. Patriotic Gore (1962) was a study of major and minor writers of the period as well as of the war’s roots in the national psyche and the futility of war. For Wilson, just as sea slugs stupidly and blindly devour other sea slugs, Lincoln, Bismark, and Lenin were sea-slug-like imperialists who devoured their neighbors–Lincoln, he lamented to many Southerners’ delight, devoured the South. Irrational forces are everywhere, Wilson thought, and the intelligent person’s problem

is to recognize that, as Lincoln illustrated, reason can often be powerless. The viewpoint piqued many.

Wilson, once married to the Catholic-born author, Mary McCarthy, encouraged her well-known non-belief in God, for he had been an outspoken atheist since youth. McCarthy in her Intellectual Memories, New York 1936–1938 (1992), describes him as being “short, stout, middle-aged, breathy . . . with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin.” At one point she says she might have married him because “I may have felt a kind of friendship for the poor minotaur in his maze, so sadly dependent on the yearly sacrifice of maidens.” At another she says, “I agreed to marry him as my punishment for having gone to bed with him.” At yet another point, “I could not accept the fact that I had slept with this fat, puffing man for no reason, simply because I was drunk. . . . Marrying him, though against my inclinations, made it make sense. There is something faintly Kantian here. But I did not know Kant then. Maybe I was a natural Kantian.” But although she has said “I never loved Wilson,” she stayed married to him for seven tempestuous years and had a child by him. Wilson’s first sexual experience had been with Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was not interested in repeating the episode, whom he described in the epilogue to The Shores of Light as well as in his first novel, I Thought of Daisy. Scholars revel in talking about Wilson’s eccentricities. He quibbled about absolutely everything. He once drew a mustache on his passport photo, explaining it was a poor picture. Observing Alfred Kazin working on galley proofs for a review of one of Wilson’s books, Wilson grabbed the paper and started rewriting the evaluation. His high-pitched voice took many off guard, particularly when he spoke with a little gasp, and he detested giving the very few lectures he ever did agree to give. When some British publishers threw a party in his honor, Wilson retired to a corner and said to Kazin, “Let’s get away from these Limeys.” His Memoirs of Hecate County (1949) was deemed so pornographic librarians kept it behind their counters. Although he was an Anglophobe, Wilson was (in the words of Harvard Professor Daniel Aaron) “drenched” in English literature and an expert on all of its literary aspects. Women and booze were constantly on his mind. He did not approve of America’s getting into World War II, saying the Jews had already been killed so why endanger any American lives. Many of his other outlooks were considered shocking by his friends. His interest in butterflies along with his clinical observations about sex led some to observe that Wilson was a naturalist in the zoo of his own life. They added that the zoo was well equipped, pointing to The Forties, a work in which he described Elena, soon to be his wife number four, as follows: “Her white bosom with the pink just above it looked like a delicious ice-cream brick with strawberry against vanilla.” Although he had wanted to marry Anaïs Nin, she showed no interest, nor had an English woman who, instead, married Arthur Koestler. “Although his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls brought him into contact with intelligent Jesuits,” John Updike in The New Yorker (29 November 1993) has observed, “[Wilson] stopped reading a book by Father Martin D’Arcy with the remark ‘I can’t enter into the point of view of someone who talks about this love between God and the human race.’ He sat Wilfrid Sheed down at a party and complained that ‘I couldn’t even understand the idea about Christ: sent down by the Father to suffer and redeem the human race. If you believe this, you will be forgiven. What sense does this make? [Wilson] commented on the moon landing, ‘Heaven and God are not up there,’ and marvelled that ‘we have not yet completely sloughed off the absurdities of those old theologies . . . that have been hanging around our lives for thousands of years.’ ” To poet Allen Tate, Wilson wrote, “You are wrong, and have always been wrong, in thinking I am in any sense a Christian. Christianity seems to me the worst imposture of any of the religions I know of.” Wilson’s interest in Judaism may have started when he found his grandfather’s Bible in Hebrew along with a Hebrew dictionary, according to Mark Krupnick of the University of Chicago’s School of Divinity. This challenge to out-do his grandfather led him to study Hebrew, and Krupnick suggests that when Wilson was no longer intrigued by communism or Freud, he continued his interest in Judaism by research the Dead Sea Scrolls, that he thought of himself as a “kind of Jew,” or at least he incorporated some of Judaism into his “ego ideal.” As a result, and because of his balanced critiques, many Jewish authors looked to Wilson as if he were some kind of Yankee messiah. Marx, Wilson had felt, was a Jewish moralist but a kind of non-Jewish Jew whose emphasis was not on religion but on social philosophy. Although on the printed page Wilson may have appeared forbidding, two of his friends—Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—found him delightful: a good listener, particularly when trivia was described that he did not know about; and a splendid conversationalist, particularly when he was interested in the topic. Aaron has said that upon returning from researching the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wilson took a shower, then regaled him for an extended period with news of what he had found, all the while standing in his shorts. Schlesinger has said that Wilson greatly enjoyed New York City’s dynamism, even impulsively choosing to go to a Broadway play in the middle of a first act. Others have described Wilson as an agreeable man who, like Emerson, dearly loved to deal in ideas and who kept a notebook in order to “Boswellize” himself. Elizabeth Hardwick’s main complaint was that Wilson kept a journal and wrote about his visit in her Boston home. Beware of entertaining individuals who keep journals, she has joked. When Wilson received the National Medal for Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave him an award, he wrote in his summer 1966 journal: “These awards I am getting make me rather nervous. They mean that I am an O.K. character like Thornton Wilder. When I think about how stupid old frauds like Herbert Hoover and John F. Dulles get buildings and things named after them, without people’s seriously protesting or considering it inappropriate, I realize that an accepted reputation can be derived from no real merit whatever.” When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked Wilson if he was willing to go to the White House to accept a Presidential medal, Wilson answered in the affirmative but only if the President was aware he was writing a diatribe against the Internal Revenue Service, with which he was having a long battle. Although the Internal Revenue Service vociferously objected to giving any such honor to Wilson, the President disagreed, saying the medal was not for Wilson’s mathematical accuracy or honesty but for his skill in writing. His criticisms were known for being provocative. For example, he called the Qur’an “unreadable” (and continued to call the religion Mohammadenism). Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust he found lacking all “sense of form.” “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” the film, he found boring and annoying. W. H. Auden’s wrinkled face, he observed, looked “like some kind of technical map.” Truman Capote, he said upon meeting him, “seemed to me a not unpleasant little monster, like a fetus with a big head.” He had many negative views of Bennett Cerf, Roger W. Straus, the publisher, has reported. Wilson also enjoyed reporting gossip. In The Last Journal 1960–1972 (1993), he said that Tennessee Williams had once asked Jacqueline Kennedy her analysis of the Warren Commission Report. Also, that Robert Frost, although in Rio de Janeiro at a time when William Faulkner was attending a literary congress, avoided sharing the spotlight with Faulkner. Wilson denied, however, ever having punched a business executive’s wife in the nose when she asked, “You wrote “Finlandia,” didn’t you?” Rather, he said he had replied, “No: that was written by a Finn.” Wilson was not a joiner. He never became a Unitarian, but he enjoyed playfully criticizing the Unitarians, many of whom—like himself—were “old American patriots” with whom he sided and who stood in contrast to the less intellectually inclined who were members of other churches. Neither did he ever join the Communist Party, although he flirted with communism in 1932; upon investigation, however, he argued that Americans should take communism away from the Communists because he disliked what he saw when he visited Russia. Although he had become interested in socialism through the writings of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, Wilson scoffed at wording such as “the toiling masses” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But Wilson found politics only a side issue and, as others have noted, he often jumped to conclusions and was not a student nor an evangelist. In 1995, the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s birth, Jeffrey Meyers published Edmund Wilson: A Biography. Jason Epstein, critiquing the Meyers volume, called it a squalid work in which Meyers describes Wilson as “an irascible erotomaniac, short, stout, and red-faced, whose chronic irritability is relieved mainly by alcohol. Meyers concedes that Wilson was his country’s foremost literary critic, even though he often overpraised the work of women he had seduced or wanted to seduce and underestimated the work of Robert Frost, whom he disliked personally, as well as that of Wallace Stevens, while largely ignoring American writers who came of age after World War II.” Epstein, the Executive Vice-President of Random House, noted that Wilson in an essay once depicted Abraham Lincoln “as a rationalist disciple of Darwin for whom God does not exist but later professes to be an instrument of God’s will or even God’s spokesman. Wilson sees not a spiritual but a political or, more precisely, a rhetorical conversion reflecting the greater intensity of the occasion.” Wilson is depicted as “a man of the last century, a Darwinian who believed that nature, including his own nature, could be understood by distinguishing its components and identifying their logical connections. “His criticism,” Epstein continues (The New York Review of Books, 8 June 1995), “was essentially journalistic and reflected the same conviction: that if he arranged the components of a work of literature, including the author’s intentions, in a coherent, critical narrative, the various meanings implicit in the work would become clear or at least clearer.” Wilson exasperated individuals who wrote to him. He responded to the present author’s three requests with the following check marks on printed cards: _______________________________________________ Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to

x read manuscripts contribute to books or periodicals do editorial work judge literary contests deliver lectures address meetings make after-dinner speeches broadcast

Under any circumstances to

x contribute to or take part in symposiums take part in chain-poems or other collection compositions contribute manuscripts for sales donate copies of his books to libraries autograph copies of his books to libraries supply personal information about himself supply photographs of himself allow his name to be used on letter-heads receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him. _______________________________________________________________

For Wilson, the irrational components of actual life or of a literary work were themselves data to be fitted rationally into the narrative account.” Wilson is said to have disliked Frost and also T. S. Eliot, except that when he met them he changed his mind somewhat. Although he had thought of Eliot as “too Episcopalian,” he was impressed favorably upon learning that Eliot was cuddly and loving with his new bride, Valerie. Contemporary critics, Epstein argues, do well to turn to Wilson as the master of literary criticism. Wilson’s final years were physically uncomfortable for him, for as he complained in his autumn 1967 journal: “Monotony of my life and its limitations: I wake up first about 4 and read for a couple of hours. I look up from time to time and gauge how near morning is by the blue of dawn outside the window. Then I go to sleep again and have an unpleasant dream, from which I wake feeling rather worse than I had at 4 o’clock. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while and stare at my bare feet. . . . I then go to my bathroom and sit on the toilet, reading Jules Renard’s journal or something, which helps me to face the rest: getting the yellow good off my tongue with a washcloth or towel, hawking up blood-embrowned phlegm, perfunctorily brushing my largely artificial teeth. (After supper) I read or play more solitaire or am so muggy and sleepy that I go to bed and take a Nembutal or a whisky and go right to sleep. . . .” Just the same, Epstein has observed, toward the end of his life when he was having trouble breathing Wilson was still involved with two love affairs. At the age of seventy-seven, with his daughter Rosalind present, Wilson died in his easy chair while his nurse, Elizabeth Stabb, administered oxygen to him. His wife’s tombstone inscription contains Greek, but his own contains Hebrew. (See entry for Mary McCarthy, his third wife, who tells of her reasons for marrying Wilson. Also, see the article on Wilson by Louis Menand of the City University of New York in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism [1994].) {CE; OEL; conversations with Alfred Kazin, 12 April 1995; Daniel Aaron and Arthur Schlesinger, 19 April 1995, and with Lewis Dabney, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Meigs, and Rogert W. Straus Jr., 24 May 1995}

Wilson, E(dward) O(sborne) (1929– ) Wilson, who was the undersized only child of Southern Baptist parents who divorced when he was seven years old, had a father who drank, gambled, and was a peripatetic accountant. The father, who changed “his job and location of his home every year or two,” took him and a second wife to a variety of places before committing suicide in 1951 at the age of forty-eight. In Naturalist (1994), Wilson describes having started his formal education at the age of seven in a military boarding school, then going to a succession of fourteen schools in and out of Alabama, at that time known as one of the most racist and segregated parts of America. Wilson suffered from impaired hearing and, while fishing and having the spine of a pinfish pierce the pupil of his right eye, became virtually blind in that eye. Admittedly poor at mathematics and memorization, he compensated by collecting lizards, snakes, butterflies, cave insects, bats, and ants. At sixteen, he became intent upon studying Alabama ants, and his zeal eventually led him to become a Junior Fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows as well as a science researcher in Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. In 1994 with Bert Holldobbler, he wrote Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration, which was an updating of the definitive 1990 reference book on myrmecology which won them a 1991 Pulitzer Prize. (Fellow humanist Julian Huxley also was a leading authority on ants.) Wilson admits that he finds the theists’ appeal of supernaturalistic religion understandable:

On religion I lean toward deism but consider its proof largely a problem in astrophysics. . . . [T]he existence of a biological God, one who directs organic evolution and intervenes in human affairs [as envisioned by theism] is increasingly contravened by biology and the brain sciences. . . . Religions are analogous to superorganisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and, in the fullness of time, most die.

A professor emeritus of Harvard University, and a leading proponent of sociobiology, Wilson spends part of his time defending the controversial views he expressed in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1977), views which concern the genetic factors in human behavior. Among other works, he wrote Insect Societies (1971), Of Human Nature (1978), Biophilia (1984), The Diversity of Life (1992), and an essay, “Scientific Humanism and Religion,” in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994). Naturalist revives the controversy caused by the 1977 work on sociobiology. In 1978, for example, during a speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he was assaulted for his views. Anti-sociobiologists actually seized the dais and dumped a pitcher of ice water on his head, chanting, “Wilson, you’re all wet!” To which Wilson later observed, the episode “may be the only occasion in recent American history on which a scientist was physically attacked, however, mildly, simply for the expression of an idea,” adding “I had been blind-sided by the attack.” In Naturalist, Wilson wrote that

Human beings inherit a propensity to acquire behavior and social structures, a propensity that is shared by enough people to be called human nature. Although people have free will and the choice to turn in many directions, the channels of their psychological development are nevertheless—however much we might wish otherwise—cut more deeply by the genes in certain directions than in others.

He added,

History did not begin 10,000 years ago in the villages of Antolia and Jordan. It spans the two million years of the life of the genus Homo. Deep history—by which I mean biological history—made us what we are, no less than culture.

His emphasis is that the architecture and physiology of the brain both evolve together, that the brain is like a vast road map of interconnecting nerve cells and that the brain learns in patterns determined by one’s genes. In a provocative article, “Back From Chaos” (The Atlantic Monthly, March 1998), Wilson detailed his views about how the Enlightenment thinkers knew a lot about everything whereas today’s specialists know a lot about a little. Although postmodernists doubt that we can know anything at all, he claims that we can know what we need to know and that we will discover underlying all forms of knowledge a fundamental unity. He focuses on the ideas of Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Condorcet, explains the attraction of deism and the weaknesses of postmodernism, then introduces the idea of “consilience”: The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and the resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The key to unification is consilience. I prefer this word to “coherence,” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas “coherence” has several possible meanings. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience—literally a “jumping together” of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He wrote, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.” Consilience can be established or refuted only by methods developed in the natural sciences—in an effort, I hasten to add, not led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but consistent with the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe. . . . If contemporary scholars work to encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe, the enterprises of culture will eventually devolve into science—by which I mean the natural sciences—and the humanities, particularly the creative arts. These domains will continue to be the two great branches of learning in the twenty-first century.

A way exists out of the chaos of all the information we have at hand, he says. It involves understanding that a balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces but, rather, “the consilience among them must be pursued.” What has been achieved in the natural sciences needs, in short, to be extended to the humanities and the social sciences. Wilson argues that an empiricist ethic is needed, mindful as he is that because of the divorce between ethics and empirical knowledge, ethicists contend that one cannot go from “is” to “ought”:

Moral reasoning will either remain centered in idioms of theology and philosophy, where it is now, or it will shift toward science-based material analysis. . . . Because the success of an ethical code depends on how wisely it interprets the moral sentiments, those who frame it should know how the brain works, and how the mind develops. The success of ethics also depends on the accurate prediction of the consequence of particular actions as opposed to others, especially in cases of moral ambiguity.

Such an ethic, Peter B. Denison has noted, must be based on science, inowledge of our biology and brain functioning, and also an understanding of evolution. Wilson, whose love of life led him to coin the word biophilia, is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, a member of the Humanist Association of Massachusetts, and a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000. (For Richard Rorty’s critique of Wilson’s ideas, see entry for Consilience.) {CA; CE}

Wilson, Edwin H(enry) (1898–1993) Wilson was raised in Concord, Massachusetts, where he attended the First Parish Church, a Unitarian fellowship. His mother introduced him to Unitarianism, but his father had no use for the church. “The people,” said the father, “worship God Almighty half the time and Ralph Waldo Emerson the other.” After serving in World War I, Wilson attended Meadville Theological School, graduating in 1926 with a doctorate degree, after which he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1928, he was the Unitarian minister in Dayton, Ohio, later having pulpits in Schenectady, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Yellow Springs, Ohio; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Cocoa Beach, Florida. Early in his ministry, he composed “Where Is Our Holy Church?” A Unitarian minister, Wilson in 1929 became a regular contributor to The New Humanist, a mimeographed newsletter published in Chicago by the Humanist Fellowship. The following year, he managed the publication. In 1936, The New Humanist ceased because of lack of funds, so using his own funds he commenced a modest Humanist Bulletin which, in 1941, was succeeded by The Humanist, which is still being published. He edited the journal for sixteen years (1941 to 1956) and was interim editor from 1963 to 1964. In addition to editing and contributing to The Humanist, he was one of the founders of the American Humanist Association (AHA) in 1941 and served as its executive director from 1949 to 1970, then becoming its official historian. In 1952 he participated in the founding and named of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Wilson was one of several editors of The Humanist who would be “eased out” of his job, Herbert A. Tonne has observed, by the AHA board of directors. In 1933, Wilson was the guiding force behind the formulation of Humanist Manifesto I. That document, signed by thirty-four liberal humanists, defined and enunciated the philosophical and religious principles that they considered to be fundamental. It was committed to reason, science, and democracy, and many of the signers were Unitarian clergymen. The document emphasized the view that human beings determine the moral principles which govern their lives. Wilson gathered leading thinkers of the time into a group which rallied behind the philosophy variously termed religious, scientific, or naturalistic humanism. They criticized religious dogmatism, called for universal education, advocated more participatory democracy, and declared that nationalism and war were obsolete. Further, they affirmed euthanasia as well as the right of women to choose abortion and the right to birth control. In 1941 he moved from Chicago to the Unitarian pulpit at Schenectady, New York, for a five-year war-time ministry. Corliss Lamont and Max Otto encouraged him to resume publication of The New Humanist, now as editor and under a new title, The Humanist. By 1952 the magazine circulation had grown and its sponsor was changed from the Humanist Press Association to the American Humanist Association (AHA). Writing of the controversy at that time, Wilson explained,

Because various philosophic points of view emerge religiously and ethically as humanism, there came a time in the 1940s when there was a rather vigorous complaint that the editorial policy of The Humanist was too pragmatic in its orientation. (This was the position of philosopher Arthur Murphy who chose to drop out.) Roy Wood Sellars was a critical realist and therefore, in epistemology, anti-Dewey. Eventually there was also a rather sharp conflict between the logical positivists, as represented by Charles Morris, John Dewey, and Arthur Bentley, and conflict between Bertrand Russell and John Dewey.

Wilson was able to keep the group together and in 1953 published a symposium about the original manifesto, asking a number of people what they would change now that twenty years had passed. Sellars called humanism a religion, “the next great religion,” and he suggested what could be the next big push. In The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995), Wilson collected further critiques, calling them “The Symposium: Part I” from J.A.C. Fagginer Auer; E. Burdette Backus; Harry Elmer Barnes; L. M. Birkhead; Edwin Arthur Burtt; Ernest Caldecott; A. J. Carlson; Frank H. Hankins; A. Eustace Haydon; Llewellyn Jones; Robert Morss Lovett; Harold P. Marley; Lester Mondale; Charles Francis Potter; J. H. Randall Jr.; Curtis W. Reese; Oliver L. Reiser; Clinton Lee Scott;V. T. Thayer; E. C. Vanderlaan; Jacob J. Weinstein; and David Rhys Williams. Later, in “The Symposium: Part II,” he published further critiques from Van Meter Ames; Fred G. Bratton; Albert C. Dieffenbach; John H. Dietrich; Corliss Lamont; Harold A. Larrabee; Alfred McClung Lee; Francis Meyers; Lloyd Morain; Arthur E. Morgan; Herbert J. Muller; Harold Scott; Mark Starr; Gerald Wendt; and Gardner Williams. Wilson was expert in collecting humanistic comments, and The Humanist in the 1950s was noted for its intellectual content and a growing reputation among a large variety of philosophers. Wilson in 1956 wrote these views concerning humanism:

Humanism appears wherever thinkers or doers meet the problems of man and life in terms of the scientific world view rather than of the pre-scientific world view. Today’s Humanism shares with all Humanisms—including the Christian Humanism of the Renaissance—a central concern for the good life for men here and now. Humanism is always this-worldly and regards life this side of the grave as the locus of fulfillment and moral achievement. But today’s Humanism more clearly yields to man a place of dignity in his own right. It does not need theological sanctions. It refuses to rob man to pay theology. It is itself a new synthesis, naturalistic rather than supernaturalistic, unitary rather than bifurcated. The old vertical dualisms of body and mind, spirit and matter disappear in Naturalistic Humanism. Humanists claim that man’s unique rationality emerges from his sub-rational animal past. Naturalistic humanists see the spiritual as an emergent quality of the material. Nature is relatively predictable; right and wrong are relative to a human nature that is much the same in all cultures and times. Man lives in relation to a relatively more stable universe. All is part of one web of relationships to which man belongs, yet in which he has achieved a grandeur of his own. In our own day man has developed his rationality to the point at which scientific method and cooperative skills exist in sufficient potential to enable him to place control of the major obstacles to planetary control of his own destiny within his reach. But there remains the stirring of the will to do so, the growth of that confidence and vision that makes it possible. Humanism, as an organized movement slowly growing around the world, must accept the moral responsibility of the Humanist idea—the idea that all men are one and that potentially they have what it will take to end war and create a significant common life for a qualitatively produced race. Their task is to articulate the implications for man’s common destiny, of the new knowledge that is science and the promise of the method that is scientific method.

A long-time editor of The Humanist, he remained for years on its editorial board despite having been eased out of the editorship. In 1979, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year. At the age of over ninety, he helped form an active humanist group in Salt Lake City, Utah. Wilson was in demand at dinners to say grace, and he was always pleased to accept:

Oh, God, for as much as without Thee We would be unable to doubt Thee, Give us power by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.

Whereupon those present responded with loud and boisterous amens. Wilson wrote “A New Synthesis: Among the Intellectuals” (The New Humanist, January 1930); “A New Synthesis: The Development of Method in Cooperative Problem Solving” (The New Humanist, February 1930); “A New Synthesis: The Organization of Knowledge” (The New Humanist, March 1930); “A New Synthesis: Integrating Science” (The New Humanist, April 1930); “A New Synthesis: Adult Education, England” (The New Humanist , May 1930); “A New Synthesis: Adult Education, the United States,” The New Humanist (June 1930); and “The Origins of Modern Humanism,” The Humanist (January-February 1991). Three years after his death, in a work edited by Teresa Maciocha, Wilson’s The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995) was published. It contains candid descriptions of the various individuals involved in the writing of the Manifesto and clarifies who specifically contributed what, who failed to sign the drafts and why, and who even twenty years later were still its supporters as well as who remained its critics. The work, which contains much new information, is surprisingly gentle in its treatment of some individuals who are known to have irked Wilson tremendously. (See entry for American Humanist Association. Also see a critique of Wilson’s humanism by Herbert A. Tonne in Free Inquiry, Fall 1996.) {CL; EW; FUS; HM1; HM2; HNS; HNS2; PK; WAS, 3 November 1956, and numerous conversations.}

Wilson, Georgia H. (20th Century) A retired member of Brooklyn College’s political science department, Wilson signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}

Wilson, H. H. (20th Century) A book reviewer for The Humanist in the 1950s, Wilson taught at Princeton.

Wilson, H. Van Rensselaer (20th Century) When Wilson signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was professor emeritus of philosophy at Brooklyn College. He is on the editorial advisory board of Religious Humanism, the quarterly published by the Fellowship of Religious Humanists. {HM2}

Wilson, John (19th Century) An Irish author, Wilson wrote Thoughts on Science, Theology, and Ethics (1885). {BDF}

Wilson, J. B. (20th Century) Wilson wrote a Funeral Oration Giving An Exposition of the Principles of Agnosticism and Freethought (c. 1906). In 1899, he became a medical doctor and worked for three years in the slums of Cincinnati. At different times, he was president of the American Secular Union and of the American Freethought Association. {Cincinnati, Ohio, Fig Leaves, May 1995; GS}

Wilson, Jim (20th Century) Wilson is editor in Georgia of the Atlanta Freethought Society’s newsletter, Atlanta Freethought News. E-mail: <jkwilson@cris.com>.

Wilson, John Bowie (1820–1883) Wilson was a Scottish-born freethinker and radical politician who migrated to Australia twice, first in 1840 and again in 1854. Opposed to his father’s religion, Wilson developed a lifelong interest in spiritualism and freethought. Entering New South Wales Legislative Assembly in 1859, he became a radical opponent of State Aid to Religion. In 1861, he moved to have the Church and school lands be declared as waste lands to insure that any money raised from them would go into consolidated revenue. Wilson was one of the founders in 1882 of the Liberal Association of New South Wales, an attempt to fuse religious and atheist freethought groups into “one party of progress.” He was buried without religious rites in the Unitarian section of the Rookwood cemetery, and his friend and associate Charles Bright gave the panegyric. {SWW}

Wilson, J. M. (20th Century) Wilson wrote Religion, A Primitive Fable (1959). {GS}

Robert Anton Wilson, Author art

A poster to the [message board] reports that Wilson refers to himself consistently as an "agnostic" in his various books, and on the website "Mavericks of the Mind", in an interview, calls himself a "mystic agnostic".

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In the May 2000 issue of High Times RAW says, "Every time I have to attach a seat belt I say 'God damn Ralph Nader,' with the fervid intensity of a child's prayer, even though I don't believe in God or damnation."

The official website for RAW is http://rawilson.com/main.html.

Wilson, Roland (Died 1919) A jurist, Wilson was a reader in Indian law at the University of Cambridge and author of numerous legal works. In later years, he concerned himself much with religion and, according to McCabe, ended as an agnostic. In an article a few weeks before he died, he wrote in the Hibbert Journal that for thirty years he had followed Francis Newman, the theistic brother of the Cardinal, but “I have of late felt myself less and less able to affirm with any confidence the existence of any supreme mind behind the visible universe.” Even if there were such a thing, said Sir Roland Knynet of Delhi, men must ignore it in practice and follow human ideals. {JM; RAT; RE}

Wilson, Sloan (1920– ) Wilson wrote The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), in which the hero is commended for being a corporate cog but one who has a nice home and family to come home to. Corporations might be evil to some, who possibly prefer going “on the road” in the 1950s with Jack Kerouac and “the beat generation.” But to Wilson, who was on the school board of the benchmark school of New Canaan, Connecticut, was asked his views on humanism. He responded to the present author:

I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested in my thoughts on this subject, but I guess I’m a convert to Naturalistic Humanism, with certain qualifications. I don’t reject any and all forms of supernaturalism. Although I can’t accept a dogma, and do set up as a supreme value the long-range welfare of all humanity, I am at heart a sort of optimistic mystic. The only standard of morality I understand is the ultimate effect of any action on the welfare of all humanity, but I don’t see how one can avoid admitting there must be a higher power. Certainly the mind tells us that. My heart goes on to assert that it must, despite all evidence to the contrary, be an ultimately benign power. One must belief that, I think, to achieve any real serenity in the face of death and the other trials we all face. This is what “humanism” connotes to me. I think that probably Tolstoy and other Russian writers of his general period influenced me, as well as most of the good contemporary American and British writers. Perhaps I simply read what I believe into their work. I don’t have any other comments pro or con the other concepts of humanism, except to say that any philosophy which tends to set man against man, such as Communism and the more rigid sectarian beliefs, can scarcely qualify as “humanism” to me. The heart of humanism, I think, is the hands-off attitude toward any human action which does not hurt other human beings. I cannot imagine a true believer in humanism trying to convince another man that his faith is wrong, or enlisting men in an army to force “humanism” down the throats of others. The philosophy I’ve worked out for myself is really very simple: within his power, a man should try to do all he can to help all other men; he should, within his power, avoid any action which would hurt anyone; and he must have faith that even when he has not the strength to behave properly himself or to withstand the evil actions of others, he is still a small part of an overall design that has purpose, justice, and charity.

{WAS, 7 May 1956}

Wilson, Thomas (19th Century) Wilson, a Scot, wrote “Priestly Systems Repugnant to Christian Principles” (1851). {GS}

Wilson, William E. (20th Century) Wilson wrote The Angel and the Serpent, the Story of New Harmony (1946). {GS}

Wilson, Woodrow [President] (1856–1924) Writing to an academic in 1922, Wilson stated, “May it not suffice for me to say . . . that of course I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised.” His uncle, Prof. James Woodrow, had been fired by Presbyterian Theological Seminary in South Carolina in 1884 for defending evolution. {TYD}

Wiltsee, Herbert (20th Century) In 1941 for his Ph. D. dissertation at the University of Chicago, Wiltsee wrote “Robert G. Ingersoll, A Study in Religious Liberalism.” {FUS}

Wiltshire, Thomas (20th Century) Wiltshire wrote “The Ultimate Authority in Matters of Faith” (1976). {GS}

Wimble, Joan (20th Century) 

Wimble in Britain is secretary of the Brighton and Hove Humanist Group.

Winans, R. (19th Century) Winans was a freethinker who wrote “Extracts From ‘One Religion’: Many Creeds” (1871) and Modern Scepticism (1873). {GS}

Winchester, Elhanan (1751–1797) When as a Baptist minister in 1781 Winchester proclaimed “universal salvation,” he was ousted from his church and took a large portion of the congregation with him to form a Universalist society in Philadelphia. Because God was all-powerful, he reasoned, and because God was benevolent, the eventual restoration of all souls was assured. In 1787 he took his Universalist ideas to England and had his asthmatic condition not worsened he might well have come to rival John Murray as the leader of his denomination. {FUK; U; U&U}

Winckler, Hugo (1863–1913) A German orientalist, Winckler was appointed professor of oriental languages and history at Berlin University in 1904. He had written Geshichte Babyloniens und Assyriens (1892) and translated into German the Hammurabi Code (Gesetze Hammurabis, 1904). His rationalist views are freely expressed in Alttestamentliche Untersuchungen (1892) and Geschichte Israels (1898). {RAT}

Windelband, Wilhelm: See entry for [[Hominism.

Winkler, Kenneth (20th Century) Winkler, of Wellesley College, is a 1997 Hume Conference Director of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Windeyer, William Charles (1834–1897) Windeyer was an Australian social reformer, jurist, and parliamentarian. Judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court, 1879–1896, he delivered a seminal judgment in the William Whitehouse Collins case. Collins, who had been convicted for selling Annie Besant’s Law of Population advocating birth control, had appealed to the Supreme Court to have his conviction set aside. Windeyer’s judgment effectively put an end to almost all prosecutions for selling or publishing books on birth control. {SWW}

Windship, Charles W. (19th Century) Windship was a freethinker who wrote Discourse on Religion and Doctrines (1829). {GS}

Windsor, Allen (1921– ) In 1994, Windsor was a contributing editor for the short-lived QWER Quarterly, a publication of North America’s Lesbian and Gay Secular Humanists. To conceal his gender, nationality, and identity, Windsor, ever the practical joker, writes for a variety of publications under pseudonyms—G. Hovah, Rev. DooDoo, Jesús Ethelbert Plaisir, W. Allen Smith, Jun Sczesnoczkawasm. Although accused of it, he denies being related to any of several queens, including Elizabeth II. Following is one of his erotic poems:

		  Ratiocination From On High

They believe omniscience is My given. Still, they fail to comprehend the joy with which, as his Tommasso jealously looked on, I goaded Michelangelo to shape the thighs and grasp the balls, his chisel with a tender movement carving love.

What if they knew that I—original Original, hermaphrodite— am not alone but, like Jove, burn with joy not for his Ganymede but for my own adored, my David, my angelic one-of-all!

They, I know, look heavenward, yet will not know of Heaven ’til they feel the warmth of phalli ’neath the skin, of tongues entwined, the very acts they foolishly call sin.

In One (July 1958), an early American homosexual journal, he wrote, “If One Needs Religion”:

One’s viscera has more to do with his religion than most realize. There are other factors which determine one’s religion, of course—geography, environmental conditioning, family influence, etc. But basically if one’s biological makeup leads him to be the cool, reflective, and intellectual type like Adlai Stevenson, there is every chance that he will be a Unitarian rather than a Jehovah’s Witness. And if he is a searcher for order, absolutes, and the truth like Bing Crosby, there is every chance that he will be a Catholic rather than a Congregationalist. Were God Himself to declare, in the morning newspaper, that a particular religion or a certain bible were the only true one—say the Buddhist Order of Circumcised Vegetarians—can you imagine the nervous breakdowns which would be experienced by Cardinal Spellman, Nehru, Eisenhower, Sartre, Elvis Presley, or Jane Russell in abandoning their old religion in order to please God?

His conclusion was that most homosexuals, if happy with their present religion, should probably make no changes. But any who are uncomfortable feeling like second-class humans in the various organized religions, he continued, might well look into groups such as the Friends, the Ethical Culturists, the Universalists, and the Unitarians. Specifically, he recommended an alternative: the philosophic outlook of naturalistic humanism as described in The Humanist and in the writings of H. L. Mencken, Robert Ingersoll, and Bertrand Russell.

Wine, Sherwin T. [Rabbi] (1928– ) Rabbi Wine, an atheist, founded the Society for Humanistic Judaism. He celebrates traditional Jewish holidays, has founded temples, and conducts “religious” services although they are non-theistic and naturalistic. He is generally regarded as a religious rather than a secular humanist, but he signed Humanist Manifesto II and, in 1980, the Secular Humanist Declaration. He wrote Judaism Beyond God (1985) and Staying Sane in a Crazy World, the latter a reference to Alcoholics Anonymous: “One of the signs of personal strength is that we take blame for what we do wrong. The other sign is that we take credit for what we do right. We do not alienate our power by assigning it to someone else. . . . Strong people are comfortable in recognizing their own power . . . nor do they call their power ‘a higher power.’” Rabbi Wine has written articles in Free Inquiry and was one of the principal founders of Americans for Religious Liberty. Wine is the Founding Chairman of The Humanist Institute. Since 1977, he has edited the quarterly Humanistic Judaism. Wine’s take on God is one that he describes as ignosticism, by which he means he regards the question of God’s existence to be meaningless—it has no verifiable consequences. From this, he concludes that people can and should live without reference to such a supernatural being. (See entries for the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews and for The Jewish Humanist. For a negative critique, see Society for Humanistic Judaism.) {E; FD; HM2; HNS2; SHD}

Winell, Marlene (20th Century) Winell is author of Leaving the Fold (1993), which describes how a missionary’s daughter became a freethinking psychologist. Her A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion (1994) investigates the dangers of religious indoctrination and outlines what therapists and victims can do to reclaim their lives in order to have a healthier outlook on life. She lives in Brisbane, Australia, and is involved with art and film-making. {Secular Nation, Fall 1994}

Wineriter, Florien J. (20th Century) Wineriter, an activist with the Salt Lake City, Utah, humanists, is on the Board of Directors and is treasurer of the American Humanist Association. Winewriter’s e-mail: <jdht30a@prodigy.com>.

Winetrout, Kenneth (1912– ) A book reviewer for The Humanist in the 1950s, Winetrout was head of the education department at American International College in Massachusetts. In 1974, he wrote Arnold Toynbee, the Ecumenical Vision.

Wing, Joseph (c. 1840–1910?) In Australia, Wing edited The Spiritual Inquirer (1874 to 1875) and The Reformer (1880 to 1883), both spiritualist and freethought journals. {FUK; SWW}

Wingrove, Nigel (20th Century) Wingrove’s 1996 film, “Visions of Ecstasy,” depicted St. Teresa of Avila having a sexual fantasy about a nun and an imagined erotic relationship with Jesus. {New Humanist, December 1996}

Winslow, Moses (18th Century) Winslow was one of the “coterie of infidels.” (See entry for North Carolina Freethinkers.)

Winsor, Doreen (20th Century) Winsor has been on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.

Winsor, Ellen (20th Century) The pseudonymous Ellen Winsor writes for Freethinker. Her articles include “The Case of Robert Ferguson,” “The Freethinker Fire of 1886,” and “The National Secular Society Almanack, 1870–1904.”

Winsor, Mary (20th Century) Winsor has been a member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}

Winspear, William Robert (1861–1944) Winspear was an Australian freethinker, publisher, and socialist. In 1877 he launched the Radical, the nation’s first regularly produced socialist journal. Moving away from the Labor Party, he used his journalistic and poetic efforts to expose the hypocrisy of established religion and political practices. Following are some of his irreverent versions:

Of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount: • Blessed are the cruel in spirit: for theirs are the kingdoms of men.

Of the Ten Commandments of Capitalism:

• I, the Capitalist, am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Of a Christian hymn: • Praise Gold from which all blessings flow—of all your gods praise it the most.

During Australia’s first conscription campaign in 1916, Winspear’s poem, “The Blood Vote,” was forceful propaganda against compulsory militarism.

Winston, George R. (20th Century) Winston wrote John Fiske (1972). {GS}

Winter, Alice Ames (1865-1944) Winter, a Unitarian and a Woman’s Club leader, was an author. Her mother was Fanny Baker Ames.

Wintermute, Carol (20th Century) Wintermute is a director and a former secretary of the American Humanist Association. Also, she is on the Board of Governors of The Humanist Institute. {HNS2}

Wintermute, Harry (20th Century) Wintermute, who wrote “Christianity or Natural Law?” (19—?), was described by Gordon Stein as being a freethinker. {GS}

Wiredu, Kwasi (20th Century) Wiredu, a professor of philosophy at the Unviersity of South Florida, is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.

Wirmarsius, Henrik (18th Century) Wirmarsius is the Dutch author of Den Ingebeelde Chaos (1710). {BDF}

Wirtz, Raoul (20th Century)

A Dutch humanist, Wirtz participated in the 1996 the international conference of humanists in Mexico City. E-mail:

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WISCONSIN HUMANISTS • Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin, PO Box 290, Madison, Wisconsin 53701 (608) 233-7239; E-mail: <mbr@execpc.com> and on the Web: <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~krisna/aaw/> • Freethought Society of Wisconsin, 8816 W. Greenfield Ave., West Allis, Wisconsin 53214. (414) 771-0743. E-mail: <fsw@teamwork.com/fsw/>. Glenn Curry, President, is at <gcurry@inc.net>. Web: <http://www.teamworkweb.com/ftsm/>. • Humanist Quest, 3402 North 40th St., Milwaukee, WI 53216. Contact is Wendell Harris. • Humanist Quest of Milwaukee, 3458 North Newhall, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53211; phone (414) 964-5585. Ted Scher is President. Carol Lee Smith, the e-mail contact, is at <human@csd.uwm.edu>. • Milwaukee Area Unbelievers, 1908 East Edgewood, Shorewood, Wisconsin 53211; telephone (414) 964-5271 • Milwaukee Freethought Society(ASHS), PO Box 13204, Milwaukee, WI 53213; (414) 771-0743. Carol Smith can be e-mailed at <csmith@omnifest.uwm.edu>. Another contact is at <ftsm@rocketmail.com>. On the Web: <http://www.teamworkweb.com/ftsm/>. • North East Wisconsin Humanists, PO Box 8114, Green Bay, WI 54308 (920) 866-9707.

• Secular Humanists of Madison, Wisconsin, 5322 Fairway Drive, Madison, WI 53711; (608) 274-2152. E-mail: cmdejoie@facstaff.wisc.edu>.

• Bernie Schatz is American Humanist Association coordinator of the northern region of the United States • University of Wisconin at Madison Atheists and Agnostics are on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee humanists are on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

(See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists.) (FD}

WISDOM “Too soon old; too late smart,” a Buffalo-Rochester editor has observed. Wisdom can be defined as accumulated philosophic or scientific learning. Believers hold that wisdom is found in the teachings of the ancient wise men. Non-believers point to numerous examples of the lack of wisdom in, for example, biblical writings and look instead to contemporary research. Sir William Osler (1849-1919), the most brilliant and influential teacher of medicine in Canada, illustrated his own wisdom when he wrote, “The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.” Bertrand Russell in Fact and Fiction (1961) wrote of wisdom, “It is a word concerned partly with knowledge and partly with feeling. It should denote a certain intimate union of knowledge with apprehension of human destiny and the purposes of life. It requires a certain breadth of vision, which is hardly possible without considerable knowledge. But it demands, also, a breadth of feeling, a certain kind of universality of sympathy. I think that higher education should do what is possible towards promoting not only knowledge but wisdom. I do not think that this is easy; and I do not think that the aim should be too conscious, for, if it is, it becomes stereotyped and priggish. It should be something existing almost unconsciously in the teacher and conveyed almost unintentionally to the pupil. I agree with Plato in thinking that this is the greatest thing that education can do.” (See the essay on wisdom by Brand Blanshard in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8.) {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell}

WISE MEN The anecdote is told about Earl Shaftesbury that when overheard by a scrubwoman remarking that “All wise men have the same religion,” she eagerly inquired what this religion of all wise men was. “Wise men,” he reportedly responded, “never tell.” (See entry for Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury.)

Wise, Herbert A. (20th Century) Wise, who has been a member of the American Humanist Association, is a naturalistic humanist. {HNS}

Wise, John Richard de Capel (1831–1890) An authority on birds and natural history, Wise also was an authority on Shakespeare. Wise was an agnostic who was a friend of George Henry Lewes and George Eliot. {RE}

Wise, Thomas E. (19th Century) An African American, Wise was minister of the First Universalist Church of Norfolk, Virginia, and of St. Paul’s Universalist Church of Suffolk, Virginia, in the 1890s. (See “Black Universalist Centennial,” The World, January/February 1995.)

Wiseman, Richard (20th Century) Wiseman, a professor of psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, England, wrote “Participatory Science and the Mass Media for Free Inquiry (Fall 1998).

Wislicensus, Gustav Adolf (1803–1885) Wislicensus was a German rationalist who, after studying theology at Halle, became suspended as a minister because of his Letter or Spirit (1845). He then founded the Free Congregation. For writing The Bible in the Light of Modern Culture, he was sentenced in 1853 to two years in prison. After serving his sentence, he went to America, lecturing in Boston and New York. Wislicensus’s chief work was The Bible for Thinking Readers (1863). {RAT}

Wisotsky, Morris (20th Century) In 1972, Wisotsky was on the advisory board of the Humanist Society of Greater New York.

WISSELKRANT A Dutch quarterly magazine for humanist activists, WisselKrant is at Postbus 75490, 1070-AL Amsterdam, The Netherlands; <HV@euronet.NL>.

WIT • The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. —Mark Twain

• An example of old words now bereft of meaning but still is use [is] “to wit,” where the [early meaning of the] word—wit, as a verb meaning “know”—has been lost. —William Safire

WITCH-CHILDREN: See entry for Hans Sebald.

WITCHCRAFT • Witch, n. (1) An ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.

—Ambrose Bierce

The Devil’s Dictionary

Naturalists are amused by, but not convinced by, various supernaturalists’ claims of being able to use black magic, sorcery, enchantment, Satanism, and other occult arts, either for good or for bad. During the Spanish Inquisition, as many as one hundred alleged witches were burned in a day. Pope Gregory IX had established the Inquisition in 1233 to root out witches, heretics, and other of Satan’s helpers. Two centuries later, Pope Innocent VIII commissioned a guide, The Malleus Maleficarum (1484), which was written by prominent inquisitors in heresy-riddle Germany to stop those thought to be destroying the clerical and political orders. For example,

• We excommunicate all followers, protectors, defenders, and patrons of [accused witches]. . . . When any such has been so sentenced and has scorned to recant his heresy . . . he shall be considered an outlaw.

• Concerning witches who copulate with devils. . . . What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil of nature, painted with fair colors! . . . They have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women those things which by the evil arts they know.

• What, then, is to be thought of witches who . . . sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box . . . as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? . . . For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one, adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.

• Soothsayers and diviners . . . whose art involves some worship of or subjection to devils, and who by essay of divination predict the future or something of that nature which manifestly savours of heresy are . . . liable to the Inquisitional Court.

In 1692, twenty persons were executed as witches in Salem, Massachusetts. Of approximately 350 who were accused of witchcraft in colonial New England from 1620 to 1725, an estimated 78% were women, many of whom according to The Gay Almanac(1996) were thought to be lesbians. More than any other heresy—for the Catholic church considered witchcraft heretical—medieval and Renaissance witchcraft has provoked a wide variety of incompatible explanations. It was not a reinterpretation of the teachings of Jesus, a new formulation of church doctrine, or a reform movement within Christianity. An enormous literature has grown concerning the subject and its relation to religion. Included are books by Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926); R. H. Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (1959); and L. L. Martello, Witchcraft (1973). Sprenger estimated that Christians put 9,000,000 witches to death, although it is not clear how he determined that figure. In the present century, witchcraft continues, mainly to cloak an ulterior motive—an unforgiven grievance, a bad debt, sheer jealousy—which includes drumming up business for witch doctors. In South Africa at a time when the votes in the first free elections were being counted in a town with the self-effacing name, Nobody, a mob accosted Sinna Mankwane in front of her home. They pinioned her arms with three gasoline-splashed tires, forced her husband, Johannes, to set fire to his wife, and made the couple’s son and daughter watch as she burned alive. A few days later, they returned, doused Johannes with gasoline, and set him aflame inside his house. The two children were similarly killed. Their crime? They were accused of casting a lethal spell on a neighbor. Journalists estimated up to one hundred had been put to death as witches in 1994 in one area alone. The usual technique is to use gasoline filled tires—a “necklace”—and it is a practice used in Haiti and elsewhere, sometimes to get rid of political enemies. “In the old days, the victim of the witch would go and hire a nyanga, a witch doctor, to reverse the spell,” said Abram Maharala in South Africa. “Everyone knows you cannot smell out a witch. Only a nyanga can do that.” He added to a journalist that he suspects one of his two wives turned his village against him, and he fled to safety. Observed Piet Magnate, a grandfather banished from the village of ga-Kolopo under suspicion of calling down the lightning that killed a young girl, “There has been witchcraft form time immemorial. But witches were never necklaced until recently.” Proof that witches existed, Andrea Dworkin jocularly pointed out in 1987, was that the witches “have sex with men while they sleep; they use a man against his will, especially at night when he is asleep and helpless. He ejaculates proof that, by magic, a woman came to him in the night and did something to or with his penis.” Those who were touched obviously were ignorant about male “wet dreams.” “Witchcraft springs out of the notion that any misfortune—a death, or an accident—is caused by something,” a South African policeman observed in Motonawabaloi. “They just don’t believe in accidents,” he added of the Genda, Sotho, and Shangaan tribes. The Venda believe in zwivhuya, the idea that only a certain amount of material and spiritual goods are available. Thus, if anyone has more than another, it is the result of witchcraft: success cannot be earned. As a result, those named and killed as witches often are prosperous with large numbers of cattle, or had worked in the cities and earned a pension for their old age. “Jealousy is probably the most common motivation for the killing of witches, regardless of gender, Anthony Minnaar has written in To Live in Fear: Witchburning and Medicine Murder in Venda (1995). Although hundreds of suspects are killed, another 200,000 or so traditional “healers” practice witchcraft. They are consulted for advice before taking a long journey, for protection from physical danger or evil spirits, or even by white businessmen with many black employees who seek to obtain protection for their company from theft. Victor Ralushai, an anthropologist who heads a South African witchcraft commission, stated, “We hope that, with better education, we’ll at least live in a society where people aren’t killed because of their beliefs.” In 1996, a witch trial was held in Maine. The board of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches held a closed-door trial of Ms. Valerie Van Winkle. Accused by a former Northport, Maine, town clerk of declaring herself a witch, hissing, and threatening to hex the official, she was convicted not only of calling herself a witch but also of breaking church bylaws in the way she managed a spiritualist summer camp. Ms. Van Winkle, however, insisted she has never maintained she is a witch. The camp has meetings three weeknights and twice on Sundays. The services include hymns, healings, a lecture or sermon, and messages from beyond. “Message services” occur in which a medium communicates a message from the spirit world to each of about fifteen people, who pay $8. per person. The Rev. Brenda Wittich is President of the National Spiritualist Association of Churches. Claviceps purpurea, a fungus, has been implicated in witchcraft. Claviceps is a natural source of LSD, a hallucinogen, which grows as a parasite on rye. When eaten, the “trip” that is produced by eating infected rye is called ergotism. In Salem, where rye was widely cultivated, it is possible that the fungus was connected with the unusual behavior alleged by the religionists looking for Satanists. Another hallucinogenic drug is muscarine, the active ingredient of the fly agarics—the red and white toadstools illustrated in books of fairy tales. Even a small amount of fly agaric could enable a diner to talk with the gnomes that inhabit the toadstools, or perhaps, to fly. (See entries for Pagan, Halloween, and Wicca. Also, see “The Science of Hallowe’en,” The Economist, 31 October 1998; and “Witchcraft in South Africa,” The Economist, 9 Dec 1995) {CE, EH; ER; The New York Times, 1 May 1996; Joe Sharkey, The New York Times, 24 January 1999}

Witkin, Jerome (1939– ) An artist who has taught at Syracuse University since 1971, Witkin is a Unitarian. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Witkin has resuscitated “the tradition of European narrative painting presumed dead by twentieth-century modernism. . . . More than any other painter working today, except perhaps Lucian Freud, Witkin recapitulates, at the level of fine detail, the emergence form traditional structures of modern painting’s distinct expressive freedom.” Among his works: “Benny La Terre,” which confronts AIDS; “A Jesus for Our Time,” a five-panel work portraying the career of an evangelist who believes he is called upon to heal the world and eventually winds up drunk in a hotel room; and “Terminal,” an expressionless Jewish man who stares out from a railroad car on his way to a death camp. Witkin has described himself as “a religious painter but not a religious person.” {Neil Miller, “The Paintings of Jerome Witkin,” World, November-December 1994}

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (Josef Johan) (1889–1951) Wittgenstein is a major philosopher, an Austrian who had been secretary for Bertrand Russell and whose Principles of Mathematics (1903) had greatly influenced him. Wittgenstein differed from other logical positivists in that he allowed for a metaphysics. Although he did not believe in God or any metaphysical system, he is said by Paul Edwards to have had a strong mystical streak in him, that “Emotionally he was much closer to such gloomy Christian believers as Blaise Pascal and Sören Kierkegaard than to the thinkers of the Enlightenment revered by the Vienna Circle.” His work greatly influenced the Vienna Circle of logical positivists. “A proposition,” Wittgenstein held, “is a picture of reality. A proposition is a model of reality as we think it to be.” Language, thought, and the world are inter-related. Language can posit things which do not exist (which is where metaphysics comes in). Sentences, which can be formulated to state nonsense, can still result in philosophical insights. An unworldly man, Wittgenstein was the son of a millionaire steel industrialist and the sister of Margaret Stonborough, both individuals of culture and conviction. His sister had helped to arrange Freud’s escape to England in 1938, and his father (Karl) took his violin with him on business trips and counted Brahms, Mahler, and Bruno Walter among his house guests. Wittgenstein attended Cambridge. While in England for aeronautical research, he designed a jet engine, concentrating on propellers—the mathematics needed for such led him to the foundations of mathematics, followed by his meeting Bertrand Russell. Although it was said that Russell could not make a cup of tea, Wittgenstein could and did build a house. The young Austrian also lived to hear Russell admit that much of his and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica was in error, made so because in Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein had in somewhat revolutionary fashion had demonstrated that logical truths are merely tautologous. Bertrand Russell thought that Wittgenstein somewhat resembled Pascal, the mathematician of genius who “abandoned mathematics for piety,” and Tolstoy, who “sacrificed his genius as a writer to a kind of bogus humility which made him prefer peasants to educated men and Uncle Tom’s Cabin to all other works of fiction.” Russell admired Tractatus “but not his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.” He was aware that Wittgenstein’s followers set forth a number of arguments against his views but remarked, “I have been unable, in spite of serious efforts, to see any validity in their criticisms of me.” Further supporting his view, Russell wrote, “There had been two views about empirical statements: one, that they were justified by some relation to facts; the other, that they were justified by conformity to syntactical rules. But the adherents of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations do not bother with any kind of justification, and thus secure for language an untrammeled freedom which it has never hitherto enjoyed. The desire to understand the world is, they think, an outdated folly. This is my most fundamental point of disagreement with them.” Wittgenstein gave away his fortune to his siblings, refused to wear a tie, furnished his rooms with deckchairs, whistled entire concertos, played a clarinet, and wolfed down cream doughnuts while watching John Wayne films, The Economist reported. “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” Bertrand Russell once asked him as Wittgenstein paced for hours up and down his room in agitated silence, like a wild beast. “Both,” he replied to Russell, then continued his pacing. Wittgenstein and Karl Popper differed greatly in their outlooks. Popper thought scientific theories can be proved false but cannot be proved true, that genuine philosophical problems exist; Wittgenstein, on the other hand, argued that puzzles caused by language’s imprecision exist, not genuine philosophical problems, that the puzzles could be “dissolved” through a better understanding of language. In 1937 at Cambridge, Wittgenstein succeeded G. E. Moore in the chair of philosophy, retiring in 1947. In World War II, he worked in hospitals. He was, however, himself often ill and, upon finding in 1949 that he had cancer, remarked that he was not concerned, that he had “no” wish to live on. Describing his impact, The Economist (17 April 1993) wrote: “Monty Python hymned his beer-drinking abilities in a memorable verse. Harper’s & Queen has dubbed him the ‘Elvis of philosophy.’ He has been made the hero of a detective story (‘Philosophical Investigations’) and the subject of many memoirs (including one by the man who delivered peat to his cottage). Poems have been written about him, paintings inspired by him, and, so rumour has it, a West End musical is soon to be devoted to him. Now Derek Jarman has made him the subject of a startlingly cliché-ridden film.” The 1993 movie starred Karl Johnson as Wittgenstein, Michael Gough as Bertrand Russell, John Quentin as John Maynard Keynes, and Tilda Swinton as Lady Ottoline Morrell. In one scene, Jarman has the dying philosopher tell economist John Maynard Keynes (with whom he had once shared a lover), “I’d quite like to have composed a philosophical work that consisted only of jokes.” Asked by Keynes why he had not, Jarman has Wittgenstein reply, in words that define the clever philosopher’s thinking rather than serve as mere fact, “Sadly, I had no sense of humor.” How Wittgenstein influenced and changed the history of philosophy is detailed by P. M. S. Hacker in Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (1996). Described are the origins of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein’s achievements in the Tractatus, the impact of that work on the Vienna Circle, Cambridge and Oxford during the inter-war years, the achievement of his Philosophical Investigations, his impact on post-war philosophy, post-positivism in the United States, and the decline in analytical philosophy. John Shosky of American University evaluates the Hacker book as being a consummate study of Wittgenstein, one that is better than other similar works by Anscombe, Malcolm, Pitcher, Hintikka, Fogelin, Kripke, Pears, and Genova. Paul Wijdeveld’s Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (1994) describes Kundmanngasse, a house in Vienna which he designed and built for his sister, Margaret, and which now is the Bulgarian Cultural Institute. Though not an architect, Wittgenstein rethought and refined preliminary plans made by Paul Engelman, an architect. “Ludwig,” wrote his sister, “designed every window and door, every window lock and radiator, with as much care and attention to detail as if they were precision instruments.” Critic Adele Freedman has written, “(Wittgenstein) allowed no baseboards, mouldings, exotic woods, carpets, curtains, built-ins, or chandeliers. Walls and ceilings are finished in fine white plaster; floor slabs are of lustrous artificial stone called xylolite; doors and windows are greyish green painted steel; lighting is courtesy of naked lightbulbs. Rhythm and proportion were all, necessitating craftsmanship of the utmost precision. Wittgenstein’s final act before handing the house over for occupancy was to have the ceiling of the salon pulled down and rebuilt three centimetres higher. ‘Nothing was unimportant,’ wrote (his sister) Hermine, ‘except time and money.’ ” In 1973, Stanford scholar W. W. Bartley III published Wittgenstein, which included several pages concerning Wittgenstein’s homosexuality. Many knew that Wittgenstein cruised Vienna looking for “rough young men [who] were ready to cater to him sexually,” that later he lived with a lover in England. But others denied the accusation, and some launched a writing campaign to have Bartley “drummed out” of the international academic community. Upon Wittgenstein’s death in 1951, his executor complained about revealing aspects of Wittgenstein’s personal life: “There are certain stories which it would be foul to relate or tell about somebody even if they were true.” In 1975, Wittgenstein’s posthumous writings, Philosophical Remarks, were edited by Rush Rhees. (See entries for Logical Atomism and Jacques Bouveresse; also, see Norman Malcolm on Wittgenstein in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8; and an essay on Wittgenstein by Jules David Law of Northwestern University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism [1994].) {CE; EU, Paul Edwards; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; Sarah Lyall, The New York Times, 21 March 1998; John Shosky, The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, November 1997; TRI}

Wittichius, Jacobus (1671–1739) A Dutch Spinozist, Wittichius wrote On the Nature of God (1711). {BDF}

Wixon, Susan Helen (1847–1912) Author of the first freethought children’s book, Summer Days At Onset (1887), Wixon was a Universalist, later writing the children’s corner of Truth Seeker, the atheist weekly. Also, she wrote extensively on the subject of women’s rights, including what in her time was considered radical, Sunday Observance, How to Spend Sunday (1883). Wixon was a schoolteacher and a member of the board of education of Fall River, Massachusetts. Her The Story Hour (1885) was described as the “only illustrated Freethinkers’ children’s story-book in the world.” {EU, William F. Ryan; BDF; PUT; RAT; WWS}

WIZARD OF OZ There are four characters in The Wizard of Oz in search of secular humanistic qualities: the Scarecrow wants a brain (reason, rationality). The Tin Woodsman wants a heart (compassion and integrity). The Cowardly Lion wants courage (reality). And Dorothy wants to get back home (security, peace). The Wizard or Supreme Being is revealed to be a quasi-theological no-such-thing. The four obtain what they want by using their own strengths and sharing them with each other for a life of quality. (See entry for L. Frank Baum.) {Quoted from the Secular Humanistic Jewish Newsletter by the Humanists of North Jersey News & Views 11 December 1999}

Wodehouse, P(elham) G(renville) [Sir] (1881–1975) Wodehouse was a British-born American humorist, novelist, lyricist, playwright, columnist, and critic. His mother was the daughter of a clergyman, his father a British judge in Hong Kong. Until the age of four, he lived with his parents in Hong Kong, then was cared for by various aunts in England. He established himself as one of the most widely read humorists, writing for Strand Magazine, Punch, and others. Of the more than 120 volumes which he wrote, the first novel to include characters Bertie Wooster, a “stage dude,” and Jeeves, his imperturbable valet who rescues him at every turn, was Thank You, Jeeves (1934). The two characters, however, had been introduced earlier in his short stories, a collection of which was The Man With Two Left Feet (1917). During World War II he was captured by the Germans at Le Touquet on the French Riviera and was interned in upper Silesia, where he wrote Money in the Bank (1942), about a bumbling nobleman who converts his fortune into diamonds, then forgets where he stashed them. When a CBS representative talked him into giving some talks by shortwave radio in June-July 1941, Wodehouse, a political innocent, agreed and made light of his experiences and the war. In Britain, his reputation plummeted as a result, despite support from Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh, who reasoned the remarks were innocuous. Had he returned to England after the war, according to British intelligence papers released in September 1999, Wodehouse might have faced charges of treason. Evidence was provided that showed he had received payments and favors from the Germans. However, Norman Murphy of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, disagreed, arguing that payments from the German Embassy were either royalties or maintenance “because the Germans didn’t want their world-famous prisoner to die in their hands. It is as likely that Wodehouse performed treacherous acts as it is for the sun not to rise tomorrow,” he retorted. On Long Island, New York, Wodehouse settled on a ten-acre estate and became a U.S. citizen in 1955. Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate of letters degree in 1959. “Plum,” as his family called him, was a tall freckled man who liked television soap operas and was a non-theist uninterested in deep religious matters. {The New York Times, 18 September 1999; OEL}

Wodehouse, P(elham) G(renville) [Sir] (15 Oct 1881 – 14 Feb 1975) Wodehouse was a British-born American humorist, novelist, lyricist, playwright, columnist, and critic. His mother was the daughter of a clergyman, his father a British judge in Hong Kong. Until the age of four, he lived with his parents in Hong Kong, then was cared for by various aunts in England. He established himself as one of the most widely read humorists, writing for Strand Magazine, Punch, and other journals. Of the more than 120 volumes that he wrote, the first novel to include characters Bertie Wooster, a “stage dude,” and Jeeves, his imperturbable valet who rescues him at every turn, was Thank You, Jeeves (1934). The two characters, however, had been introduced earlier in his short stories, a collection of which was The Man With Two Left Feet (1917). During World War II Wodehouse was captured by the Germans at Le Touquet on the French Riviera and was interned in upper Silesia, where he wrote Money in the Bank (1942), about a bumbling nobleman who converts his fortune into diamonds, then forgets where he stashed them. When a CBS representative talked him into giving some talks by shortwave radio in June-July 1941, Wodehouse, a political innocent, agreed and made light of his experiences and the war. In Britain, his reputation plummeted as a result, despite support from Malcolm Muggeridge, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh, who reasoned the remarks were innocuous. Had he returned to England after the war, according to British intelligence papers released in September 1999, Wodehouse might have faced charges of treason. Evidence was provided that showed he had received payments and favors from the Germans. However, Norman Murphy of the P. G. Wodehouse Society, disagreed, arguing that payments from the German Embassy were either royalties or maintenance “because the Germans didn’t want their world-famous prisoner to die in their hands. It is as likely that Wodehouse performed treacherous acts as it is for the sun not to rise tomorrow,” he retorted. On Long Island, New York, Wodehouse settled on a ten-acre estate and became a U.S. citizen in 1955. Oxford gave him an honorary doctorate of letters degree in 1959. “Plum,” as his family called him, was a tall freckled man who liked television soap operas and was a non-theist uninterested in deep religious matters. {The New York Times, 18 September 1999; OEL}

Wolenski, Jan (20th Century) At a 1996 Polish Humanist Conference on European Integration, Wolenski spoke about humanism and rationalism, both historically and philosophically. Humanism, he said, was founded on the concepts of Cicero, who proposed education as a means of cultivating the liberal arts. The word humanism, he said, is both descriptive and evaluative.

Wolf, Rolland (20th Century) Wolf, in What Is the Bible?, wrote, “The Bible is simply inadequate as a textbook for people living in so altered a world as our own. All things considered, it is a very limited asset, a vastly overrated guidebook for the good life. It requires too much explanation, revision and cutting, to make it practical. We are beguiled by its poetry and overawed by its claims to authority. We have given it more credit for moral insight than it deserves. The biblical tradition has become a chain upon the ankle.”

Wolf, William (20th Century) Wolf was vice-president of the Friendship Liberal League in Philadelphia, which published the rationalist and freethought journal, The Liberal, from 1947 to around 1970.

Wolf, William J. (20th Century) Wolf wrote The Religion of Abraham Lincoln (1963). {FUS}

Wolfe, Bertram D. (1896–1977) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Wolfe was associated with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. He wrote Diego Rivera: His Life and Times (1939), Three Who Made A Revolution (1948), and Strange Communists I Have Known (1965). {HM2}

Wolfe, Gregory (20th Century) Wolfe’s The New Religious Humanists: A Reader (1997) “is not about the mainstream religious humanism found in the Unitarian Universalist, Ethical Culture, and Humanistic Judaism movements and congregations,” according to Edd Doerr. {The Humanist, May-June 1998}

WOLFENDEN REPORT A remarkable and humanistic document, the Wolfenden Report was published in 1957 by the British government. The report was issued by a group headed by Baron John Frederick Wolfenden, a librarian and educator, author in 1932 of The Approach to Philosophy and a member of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution from 1954 to 1957. The report recommended the legalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults:

There must be a realm of private morality and immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law’s business.

Most of the report’s recommendations were implemented by 1967, and the British Medical Association endorsed it. The Catholic Church, although emphasizing that homosexuality is a sin, did recommend decriminalizing homosexuality. However, after a nationwide debate ensued, the House of Commons defeated by a two-to-one margin the proposal to adopt the report’s recommendations. In the United States, homosexuals were classified as security risks during this time. Vern Bullough was commissioned by then Humanist book review editor Warren Allen Smith to write a critique for the magazine. Bullough has marked the review as the beginning point of his becoming an historian of homosexuality. {AA}

Wolff or Wolf, Christian von (1679–1754) Called the German thinker of his age, the foremost German representative of rationalism, Wolff was one of the first to use German rather than Latin, and he systematized and popularized the doctrines of Leibniz. His philosophic view of apparent fatalism aroused the Pietists to secure his banishment, but later he returned to become Halle’s university chancellor. His major work is Vernünftige Gedanken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele der Menschen (Rational Thoughts on God, the World, and the Soul of Humankind) (1719). He promoted a rationalistic temper in his works, and Voltaire is said to have been pleased by the dictum that men ought to be just “even though they had the misfortune to be atheists.” Wolff’s warm praise for the ethics of Confucius was thought by many to be a disparaging of Christianity, but basically he was inviting all thinkers to be clear and precise in their thinking. Along with fellow “neologist” Christian Thomasius, Wolff opened the way for the biblical criticism of their successors. {CE; EU, Volker Dürr; JMR; JMRH}

Wolfgang, Otto (Born 1898) Wolfgang was a staff member of the National Council for Civil Liberties. {TRI}

Wolfson, Theresa (Born 1897) With A. J. G. Perkins, Wolfson wrote Frances Wright: Free Engineer (1939). {GS}

Wollaston, William (1660–1724) Wollaston was a philosopher who was a master of Birmingham School in England. At the age of twenty-eight he inherited money and retired from teaching as well as abandoned clerical work. He made a thorough study of philosophy and religion and was regarded as “an infidel.” Unfortunately, before he died he burned all the manuscripts he had written except that of a work entitled The Religion of Nature Delineated, which was published (1724) after his death. It sold ten thousand copies in a few years. Wollaston ignores Christianity as only a discreet deist would ignore it in those days. The speculations about man’s future state, which he regarded as only probable, entirely excluded the Christian idea of Hell. At the most he concluded that the wicked will be “really unhappy” after death. {RAT}

Wollastone, William Hyde (1766–1828) An English scientist and physician, Wollastone discovered in 1802 the dark lines (Fraunhofer lines) in the solar spectrum. He invented the reflecting goniometer (an instrument by which the angles of crystals are measured). And he discovered the elements palladium (1803) and rhodium (1804). After establishment of the equivalence of galvanic and frictional electricity, Wollaston created an endowment with the Wollaston medal to be awarded annually by London’s Geological Society. Wollastonite, a mineral named in his honor, is a mineral compound of calcium, silicon, and oxygen. {CE; FUK; FUS; JM}

Wollny, F. (19th Century) Wollny was the German author of Principles of Psychology (1887). In the preface of the book, he notes that he is an atheist. {BDF}

Wollpert, Frederick (20th Century) Wollpert wrote A Man Amongst Men (1901). {GS}

Wollstonecraft, Mary (Godwin) (1759–1797) An English writer who was once called “a hyena in petticoats” by a male who denigrated her feminism, Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), the first great feminist document. She lived in Paris with Gilbert Imlay during much of the French Revolution, but they did not marry and she relished being his wife “in everything save the sanction of the law.” When, however, he tired “of what to him was only a bit of romance,” she twice attempted suicide, once succeeding so far in her design as to throw herself in the Thames, being rescued in a state of insensibility. Imlay pretended to take her and their daughter (Frances) back, but she found after he sent her on a business trip to Scandinavia that he had left for America with some new love. In 1797 after having lived with William Godwin for some time, she married him, fearful of the legal rights of their unborn baby. “Their short marital experience was, apparently, one of unclouded happiness,” Underwood reports, and Wollstonecraft died while giving birth to Mary Godwin, who later became the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Underwood cites Wollstonecraft as a heroine of freethought. When in 1785 she journeyed to Portugal to be with her dying friend, Frances Blood, she became indignant upon Blood’s death that Portugal would not allow her friend, a Protestant, to be buried in consecrated ground. Successfully arranging to “steal her friend a grave,” she experienced her first defiance of the “powers that be.” She then challenged Edmund Burke for his “Reflections on the French Revolution,” saying it contained perfidy to his previously enunciated principles. Whereupon she wrote, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, which introduced her to fame and helped place her among the celebrities of that period. She followed with a companion work on the rights of women, which Underwood describes as “a passionate defense of the true dignity, and an eloquent plea for the fitter education, of woman; a work coming directly from her heart, and sanctioned by the deliberate reasoning of her brain.” She “is almost masculinely severe and contemptuous in her estimate of her own sex, attacking with sarcasm and pitying scorn its attempts to hold men’s hearts in bondage by sensual attraction, rather than by superior excellence of morals or high intellectual attainments.” According to Underwood, “Mary’s religious opinions, like many other things in regard to her, have been misrepresented. She has been called a Materialist, and Atheist; she was neither of these, though a Freethinker. She was a Deist: a devout and reverential believer in the existence of an all-wise and all-loving God.” As proof, she cites Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she “found it impossible to accept the dogmas of the churches as true, and yet in unison with the idea of an all-pervading, all-wise, and all-creative Power, such as she believed God to be, she could not narrow her God within the church limits, so, rather than loose her hold of her high conception, she let go the churches and their narrow creeds, but held fast, with all the deep ardor and breadth of her nature, to the unknowable, but all-sufficient God.” Elizabeth Larson, in an extensive article in Free Inquiry (Spring 1992) tells of Wollstonecraft’s fight for women’s rights and how, in 1788, she wrote the first lesbian novel, Mary, A Fiction, based upon her real-life passion for Fanny Blood, an emotion which Mary’s husband once described as “so fervent (that it) constituted the ruling passion in her mind.” She died several days after giving birth to a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft is buried in the Godwin family plot at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, England. The tombstone cites her as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Adjacent is the tomb of her daughter, Mary (who is buried with Shelley’s liver, or possibly his heart).

	Underwood has described the scene prior to the entombment: 

The orthodox preacher who officiated in the church to which this graveyard belongs objected seriously to having the bodies of such notorious heretics interred within its sacred precincts, but the present Lady Shelley, wife of Sir Percy, evidently a woman of determination and spirit, as well as an enthusiastic admirer of the noble dead whom she wishes thus to pay honor to, made up her mind that the bodies should be buried there; and, says Mr. Conway, my authority for this statement, one day actually came from Christchurch in her carriage, following a hearse which bore the bodies. She sat in her carriage before the locked iron gates, and expressed her resolution to sit there until the bodies were admitted for burial. The rector, dreading perhaps the scandal which would be caused, yielded; the gravedigger did his work with haste; and by night, without any ceremonial, the bodies were let down into their graves. When afterward the baronet and his lady wished to place over the graves a marble slab, the rector again protested, on account of the inscription, which said that Mary Wollstonecraft was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lady Shelley asked him rather pointedly if he had ever read Mary Wollstonecraft’s book; and he having said he had not, she said he had better read it and state his objections afterward. So she sent him the volume, and he read it. He then said he could not find fault with it, and so the inscription went on. (See the entry for Percy Bysshe Shelley. Also see an article on Wollstonecraft by Esther H. Schor of Princeton University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994). Schor writes, “Wollstonecraft’s admonition to women to ‘effect a revolution in female manners’ and to ‘labour by reforming themselves to reform the world’ remains the manifesto of modern feminism.”) {CE; FUK; JM; PA; RAT; RE; SAU; TRI; TYD; U; WWS}

Wolpert, Lewis (1929– ) Wolpert, a professor of anatomy at University College, London, was named an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association in 1993. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists and the author of Malignant Sadness: the Anatomy of Depression. In New Humanist (June 1996), he wrote:

My family in South Africa, where I was born (1929), was more Jewish than religious. I had a traditional Bar-Mitzvah and continued to study Hebrew through matriculation. All my friends at the University of the Witwatersand were, not surprisingly, involved in Anti-apartheid activities—they were left-wing liberals and communists. After becoming a civil engineer, I worked as the assistant to the Building Research Institute, hitch-hiked up Africa, and worked for Water Planning in Israel, and took a Diploma in soil mechanics at Imperial College, London. The Nuffield Foundation, to whom I am eternally grateful, gave me a scholarship to convert to biology and I did a Ph. D. at King’s College on the mechanics of cell division. Since then I have concentrated on the problem of pattern formation (Triumph of the Embryo). I became involved in the media early on and was Bronowski’s biological advisor for his Insight series, gave the 1986 Christmas lectures and have done numerous radio interviews (A Passion for Science, with A. Richards). I am proud of The Unnatural Nature of Science and am best-known for my article in The Guardian on my recent clinical depression. Presently I am Chairman of the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine at University College.

In Birmingham, England, at the centenary conference of the Rationalist Press Association in 1999, he spoke on “Belief and the Unbelievable.” Wolpert signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 but added that “I am not supportive of an international parliament—it is unrealistic. Not enough attention is given to helping those with genetic disabilities and those affected by environmental disasters. Not enough attention is given to removing the stigma from mental illness. Not enough attention is given to the importance of openness in the applications of science and medical treatments. Telling the truth as best one knows it is paramount. Nevertheless I wish to sign the Manifesto.”

Wolsch, Lois and Robert (20th Century) The Wolsches are active with the Humanist Friendship Center of Western Connecticut and the Thomas Jefferson Society of Freethinkers. He is the author of Poetic Composition Through the Grades (1970), From Speaking to Writing to Reading (1982, and Literacy Assured (1996). (See entry for Connecticut Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

WOMAN: See entries for Female and for Wife, How To Obtain A

WOMEN Sir Arthur C. Clarke tells a favorite joke of his, one that “will be appreciated by at least half the race”: Question: What is the correct name for the useless piece of skin at the end of the penis? Answer: A man.

WOMEN IN POLITICS Swedish women have more than 40% of the seats in Parliament, putting them atop gender-equality ranks in legislatures around the world, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Geneva at the end of 1999. The United States is 43rd when ranked by the House of Representatives, the larger chamber of Congress, with women in only 13.3 % of the seats. {The New York Times, 24 December 1999}

Wonner, Monique (20th Century) Wonner is one of the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s representatives to UNESCO in Paris.

Wood, Charles Erskine Scott (1884–1919) Wood, after an army career in the West became an Oregon lawyer and published his first poetry in A Masque of Love (1904). A dialogue in The (1852–1944) Poet in the Desert protests against social injustice and champions humanitarian ideals. Wood is best known for Heavenly Discourse (1927), a series of forty dialogues written during World War I for The Masses, although few were published before the magazine was suppressed. He satirized the folly and inhumanity of war, as well as other manifestations of meanness, irreligion, economic inequality, sentimental art, Puritanism, political abuses, and persecutions. The humorous conversations take place in Heaven among God, Satan, Jesus, and such angels or temporary visitors as Rabelais, Voltaire, Paine, Clemens, Jefferson, Carry Nation, Bryan, Billy Sunday, Ingersoll, Joan of Arc, Anthony Comstock, and Charles Evans Hughes. A second collection of Earthly Discourse was published in 1937. {GS; OAL}

Wood, Forrest (1937 – ) Wood, a professor history, is the freethinking author of The Arrogance of Faith: Christianity and Race in America From the Colonial Era to the Twentieth Century (1990). In 1986 he wrote Whiteheadian Thought as a Basis for a Philosophy of Religion (1986).

Wood, Henry Joseph [Sir] (1869–1944) Wood was a popular concert-conductor in England. He conducted at a number of the annual musical festivals in British cathedrals but, according to McCabe, was an atheist. Sir Henry was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. Arthur Jacobs, in Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (1994), wrote, “On matters outside music he made hardly any display of his opinions. There is one striking exception. In June 1906 he enrolled as a member of the Rationalist Press Association, at that time the principal outlet for intellectual opposition to the claims of religion—a mode of thought now more generally known as humanism. In 1937 the RPA would elect Wood an Honorary Associate.” Writing about “an all too familiar irony,” Nicolas Walter observed that “[Wood’s] funeral was held in Hitchin parish church and his ashes were buried at St. Sepulchre’s church in Holborn, London, where a memorial window was later installed and where annual services are still held in his memory. Like George Eliot, he was denied a place in Westminster Abbey not because of his unorthodox views about religion but because of his unorthodox attitude to sex, living with someone he wasn’t married to!” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Wood, Henry Joseph [Sir] (1869 – 21 Aug 1944) Wood, the son of an optician who was an amateur singer, studied at the Royal Academy of Music. He became a conductor for a traveling opera company, then became a concert-conductor in England. He conducted at a number of the annual musical festivals in British cathedrals but, according to McCabe, was an atheist. Sir Henry was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. Arthur Jacobs, in Henry J. Wood: Maker of the Proms (1994), wrote, “On matters outside music he made hardly any display of his opinions. There is one striking exception. In June 1906 he enrolled as a member of the Rationalist Press Association, at that time the principal outlet for intellectual opposition to the claims of religion—a mode of thought now more generally known as humanism. In 1937 the RPA would elect Wood an Honorary Associate.” Describing “an all too familiar irony,” Nicolas Walter observed that “[Wood’s] funeral was held in Hitchin parish church and his ashes were buried at St. Sepulchre’s church in Holborn, London, where a memorial window was later installed and where annual services are still held in his memory. Like George Eliot, he was denied a place in Westminster Abbey not because of his unorthodox views about religion but because of his unorthodox attitude to sex, living with someone he wasn’t married to!” {JM; RAT; RE; TRI}

Wood, James B. (20th Century) Wood, a critic who has written for The New Republic, wrote Religion and the State: Essays in Honor of Leo Pfeffer. He has told of his interest in authors’ philosophic outlooks:

In literature, it is often very difficult to determine what people believe: Tolstoy, for instance, could not be called a Christian in any proper use of the word, but is always banging on about God and Christ. Melville is tough. Using the word “theist” to mean a belief would say that Melville was a theist. But he was not a Christian theist. I think he was tormented by the impossibility of God, and equally tormented by a sense that he could not relinquish this idea of God. There is nothing in his early development like George Eliot’s clear awareness, at 22, that she did not believe in a supernatural God. Melville, I think, did believe—and hated God for existing. This is my own reading. I was brought up in the Church of England in a strongly evangelical English household. I am strongly non-theistic, with a slight Melvillean urge to attack the Biblical God, or the idea of the Biblical God. But I do not believe that we were created by a God, nor that a creating God exists. I think that we are a miraculous and tragic accident—though even to say such a thing is terrifying. This is always my test, when confronted by “new religionists”—do you believe that you were created by a force that you are willing to call “God”? On this test, very, very few people are non-theists; though most people act as if they were.

In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), Wood described his conversion from the “charismatic” evangelicalism of his childhood to his present embrace of atheism: “Life-under-God seems a pointlessness posing as a purpose . . . life-without-God seems to me also a pointlessness posing as a purpose (jobs, family, sex and so on—all the usual distractions).” For Wood, belief must include the freedom not to believe: “The gentle request to believe is what makes literature so moving. Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt, knows itself to be a true lie. . . .” The title refers to Christianity’s losing its claim to divine truth, and literature’s attempt to fill in that which was lost. With literature, one can accept fictional truths; however, this does not imply belief, for “one can always close the book, go outside, and kick a stone.” Wood: not the typical non-theist! {The Economist, 13 March 1999; WAS, 5 August 1997}

Wood, John (19th Century) A freethinker, in the 1830s Wood was vice president of the United and Moral Philosophical Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. {FUS}

Wood, Keith Porteous (1948– ) “Small clouds of white smoke have floated over Bradlaugh House,” Peter Brearey described as the National Secular Society convened and voted to make Wood its General Secretary in place of Terry Mullins, who had held the post since 1979. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants who spent twenty-five years in senior managerial and professional roles covering administration, accounting, legal, and company secretarial issues. Wood has been active in the Humanist Forum, is auditor of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association, is a Life Member of both the British Humanist Association and the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, and belongs to the Rationalist Press Association. Wood has campaigned for (a) pensions equality, with attention to the significant financial discrimination suffered by unmarried partners over pension issues compared with those who are married; (b) the West Highland Line, a campaign that was successful in saving the Euston to Fort William sleeper service; (c) sex education in schools, with attention to removing parents’ right of withdrawal of children from sex education classes, increasing awareness of the significantly higher teenage suicide rate for lesbians and gays, and replacing with constructive ones the pejorative references in sex education guidelines to homosexuality. Wood has worked with Stonewall and other groups to reduce the age of homosexual consent from 21 to 18, and he has backed campaigns for the removal of criminal sanction on homosexual activity in the Merchant Navy and the Armed Forces. An opponent of the teaching of religion in schools, he has written for The Freethinker and has been described as “a radical campaigner in a business suit” by that journal. E-mail: <kpw@secularism.org.uk>. (The Freethinker, June 1996)

Wood, Raymond (20th Century) Wood in Britain is active with the Tyneside Humanist Group.

Wood, Robin (20th Century) In Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland, Wood is Secretary of the Scottish Humanist Council. When the Girl Guides movement in the United Kingdom found that her daughter was a humanist and therefore could not promise to do her duty to “God, Queen, and Country,” she was dismissed. Ironically, where the daughter was training to be a leader had to disband soon thereafter because of a lack of leaders. Wood, an admirer of Robert Burns and Robert G. Ingersoll, writes for Humanism Scotland.

Woodbridge, Frederick J(ames) E(ugene) (1867–1940) Philosophic naturalism took place mainly in the United States where, according to Corliss Lamont, “its strongest and most influential school developed at Columbia University under the original inspiration of original inspiration of Professors John Dewey and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge.” Woodbridge was editor of Archives of Philosophy and the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods. Among his many books are The Purpose of History (1916) and The Realm of Mind (1926). In An Essay on Nature (1940), he wrote, “Nature is the domain in which both knowledge and happiness are pursued.” Work by Woodbridge in included in American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994). {CE; CL}

Wooden, W. Frederick (20th Century) Wooden is the senior minister in New York of Brooklyn’s First Unitarian Church.

Woodhall, A. R. (20th Century) Woodhall, according to Nicolas Walter’s Blasphemy Ancient and Modern), was sentenced in 1940 to a month’s imprisonment in Jersey for making a passport photograph resemble Christ on the Cross. After a protest, however, he was released by the Home Secretary. {Freethought History #13, 1995}

Woodman, Jean (20th Century Woodman was an administrator of the British Humanist Association. She helped to lead all the national humanist organizations into a single Humanist Centre.

Woodress, James (20th Century) Woodress wrote A Yankee’s Odyssey, the Life of Joel Barlow (1958). {GS}

Woodrow, James E. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Woodrow was executive director of Asgard Enterprises, Inc. {HM2}

Woods, Brian (20th Century) A British televisiondocumentary maker and member of Rosslyn Hill Unitarian Chapel in London, Woods in 1999 won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. With his co-producer Kate Blewett, he won the first prize in the International Television Broadcast category for a documentary, “Innocents Lost,” which exposes the exploitation of children in eight different countries, ranging from domestic child slavery in Togo to abuse of disabled children in Greece to the participation of young girls in sex tourism in Costa Rica. {World, July-August 1999}

Woods, Leonard (1774–1854) Woods was a freethinker who wrote The Province of Reason in Matters of Religion (1830). {GS}

Woodward, Joanne (27 Feb 1930- ) Woodward, who was born in Thomasville, Georgia, attended Louisiana State University, acting in campus productions. In New York she studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse and the Actors’ Studio, signing in 1953 as an understudy in William Inge’s Picnic. At the time she met and fell in love with Paul Newman, she starred in 1954 in The Lovers, then appeared in many telecasts. Her film debut was in a 1955 western, Count Three and Pray, after which came A Kiss Before Dying (1956) and The Three Faces of Eve (which won her a “Best Actress” Academy Award in 1957). In 1958 she and Newman co-starred in The Long Hot Summer, marrying the same year. They reunited in Leo McCarey’s Rally ‘round the Flag, Boys!, after which she co-starred with Marlon Brando in The Fugitive Kind, then teamed again with Newman in From the Terrace (1960) and Paris Blues (1961). Upon becoming a mother, she focused on domestic duties until 1963, when she returned to Hollywood and appeared in several movies that fared poorly at the box office. In 1968, Newman directed her in Rachel, Rachel, and together they won four Oscar nominations including those for “Best Actress” and “Best Picture.”

	They reunited for the auto-racing drama Winning and W.U.S.A., becoming known for supporting liberal causes. Newman directed her in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, which won Woodward “Best Actress” honors at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival. She earned another Academy Award nomination for Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams. In 1978 she won an Emmy for See How She Runs and an Emmy nomination for her work in Crisis at Central High. In 1996 she played herself in James Dean: A Portrait and in 1998 narrated My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports, which was a documentary about children who had been rescued from Nazi concentration camps. 

Jason Ankeny, in All Movie Guide, lists more of her many honors and concludes that the two have become the most successful husband-and-wife tandem in Hollywood history.

	Newman and Woodward have attended the Westport (Connecticut) Unitarian Society, where Woodward has taught Sunday School.

Woodward, William (20th Century) Woodward, a freethinker, wrote Thomas Paine, America’s Godfather (1945). {FUS}

Woodworth, Fred (20th Century) Woodworth is author of a pamphlet, “The Atheist Cult” (available from Atheist Coalition, POB 4786, San Diego, CA 92164), in which he alleges that Madalyn Murray O’Hair was “ego-mad” and once tried to have him jailed. {Fred Whitehead, Freethought History #22, 1997}

Woolcock, Peter George (1945– ) Woolcock, who was raised in a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses, left his religion after reading Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy and the poetry of Shelley and Swinburne. He is a professor of philosophy and education at the University of South Australia. Woolcock is co-author of Dissent in Paradise: The Religious Controversy in South Australia and has been President of the Humanist Society of South Australia (1973–1977), editor of the Australian Humanist, and President of the Skeptics in South Australia since its inauguration in 1984. Most recently he has written Secular Humanism—Ethics Without Religion (1989), sometimes called “The Little Red Book.” {SWW}

Wooley, Celia Parker (1848-1919) A Unitarian minister and member of the Free Religious Association, Wooley was an activist upon behalf of social reform.

Wooley, Milton (Died 1885) Wooley was the American author of Science of the Bible (1877), The Career of Jesus Christ (1877), and a pamphlet on the name of God. {BDF}

Woolf, Leonard Sidney (1880–1969) An author, Fabian, and social reformer, Woolf was the second son of a Jewish barrister who died in 1892. Much influenced by G. E. Moore while at Cambridge, he entered the colonial service and in 1904 went to Ceylon, which was to form the background for his first novel, The Village in the Jungle (1913). It was a study of the difficulties and dangers of rural life, threatened by superstition, drought, disease, and the encroaching jungle. Woolf married Virginia Stephen (1912), and their home became known as the gathering place for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group. He wrote his second and last novel, The Wise Virgins (1914). In 1917, Woolf and his wife founded the Hogarth Press. Woolf was literary editor of the Nation (1923–1930) and wrote on the co-operative movement, the League of Nations, and international affairs. The five volumes of his autobiography, written after his wife’s death, reached a wide audience. They included Sowing (1960), Growing (1961), Beginning Again (1964), Downhill All the Way (1967), and The Journey not the Arrival Matters (1969). Woolf was a freethinker. {CE; OEL;TRI}

Woolf, Virginia (Stephen) (1882–1941) Woolf, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, was an innovator whose novels included Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1917), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), the latter being a classic of the feminist movement. Her love-life has been the subject of much speculation. When five, her half brother Gerald and George Duckworth examined her private parts, according to Quentin Bell, her nephew. Even when she was a teenager, George would come to her bedroom and paw her. Disagreeing with others, Bell insists in Bloomsbury Recalled (1996) that George never raped, just pawed. George, in fact, was said to have been a virgin when he married. Bell’s father, Clive, is said to have flirted with Woolf, two years before Bell was born in 1910. Many speculate as to why Virginia would marry the “penniless Jew” Leonard Woolf, for generally she did not like Jews. But after marrying Woolf, a writer on economics, the two set up Hogarth Press in 1917 and their home became a gathering place for what came to be called the Bloomsbury Group, a large number of whom professed atheism or were rationalists, as was she. Rather than emphasize plot or characterization, Woolf described a character’s consciousness and feelings. She became a leader in utilizing the stream of consciousness method. Meanwhile, it was Leonard Woolf who asked Bell to write about Virginia, who then divulged her painful secrets. Woolf is known for having had a lesbian affair with Ethel Smyth, to whom she once wrote concerning her intense interest in reading as a means “of transcending the self,” “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” But her greatest love in life, wrote Martin Greif, was Vita Sackville-West, the wife of Sir Harold Nicolson, a poet who was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Mrs. Sackville-West, she said, made her feel like “a real woman” for the first time, although there is no documentation whatsoever that the two ever had any physical intimacy. Many at the time believed that they did. For her she wrote what some consider is the longest love poem in the English language: Orlando, in which the main character starts out as a man and becomes a woman. (In a 1993 movie, Orlando starts as a woman and becomes a man.) A 1995 biography by James King, Virginia Woolf, after telling of her menstrual problems, her attacks of diarrhea, and her sexual frigidity, hypothesizes that Woolf never received the attention from her mother that she so badly wanted and that Sackville-West was thought of as a substitute mother. In a Freudian interpretation, King argues that having been molested as a young girl by her half-brother, Woolf mistrusted men, and that the early deaths of her half-sister, Stella, and her older brother, Thoby, resulted in her being obsessed with the subject of death. King states that Woolf flirted with Clive Bell, her sister Vanessa’s husband, and speculates that she had an incestuous relationship with Vanessa herself. However, by the time of her last book, Between the Acts (1941), Woolf is said to have felt deeply alienated from Leonard, Vanessa, and Vita, and that the affair with Vita had long since wound down. In a June 1926 letter to her sister, Vanessa Bell asked, “But do you really like going to bed with women?” Woolf responded: “Women alone stir my imagination. . . . Vita (Sackville-West) is now arriving to spend two nights alone with me. . . . I say no more; as you are bored by Vita, bored by love, bored by me, and everything to do with me. . . . Still, the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees, mingling in the asparagus beds.” Meanwhile, Camille Paglia, for one, discounts any such gossip that Woolf was lesbian. Her periods of depression have been well documented, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison in Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993). Shortly before her death, she wrote her husband Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, on 28 March 1941: “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” But, as described by biographer Quentin Bell, she also wrote Leonard, “I feel I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times . . . . Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.” Then, mindful of her previous mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915, and after finishing Between the Acts (1941), she took her walking stick, crossed the meadows to the River Ouse, put a heavy stone into her coat pocket, walked into the river, and drowned. Remarked King,

She carefully chose the time and circumstances of her death, very much in the manner of an artist imposing her will upon life. Her decision was deeply courageous: although she would not be able to write about death, she would actually face the experience itself.

	Edward Albee’s three-act 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was not about her but, rather, described a middle-aged professor and his wife who torture each other verbally. This has been said to be Albee’s illustration of our need to “try to claw our way into compassion.” Virginia Woolf experienced that need, also. 

“I read the Book of Job last night—I don’t think God comes well out of it,” Woolf wrote in one of her criticisms of organized religion. (See an article by Queen’s University’s Susan Dick in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994); and Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf [1997].) {CE; GL; OEL; TRI; TYD}

Woolley, Celia Parker (1848–1918) Woolley worked with Jenkin Lloyd Jones as a member of his All Souls Church and worked with his periodical Unity from the middle 1880s on. Her interest in racial justice led her to found the Frederick Douglass Center in South Chicago. She was important both for her work in social reform and her presence as a woman in the Unitarian ministry. {U&U}

Woolley, Milton (19th Century) A freethinker, Wooley wrote The Career of Jesus Christ (1877) and Hebrew Mythology (1888). {GS}

Woolner, Thomas (1825–1892) Woolner, a British sculptor, exhibited his first work when he was seventeen. Three years later he had a work admitted by the Royal Academy. He joined the pre-Raphaelites and moved in a circle of brilliant artists, but he made so little money that he left to make a fortune in the Australian goldfields. Failing this, he returned to England and became one of the most distinguished sculptors of the time. Like so many other great artists, McCabe noted, Woolner did church work but was no churchman. He was a freethinker like his friends Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and George Holyoake. {JM; RAT; RE}

Woolnough, James (1915–1992) Woolnough was an Australian humanist and medical practitioner. From 1964 on, he edited Viewpoints for the Humanist Society of New South Wales. In 1966, he was joint editor of the Australian Humanist. One of the authors of Sex for Modern Teenagers (1969), a radical book for its time, he listed four-letter words and added their explanation, had a chapter on the choices facing an unmarried mother, and provided a descriptive view of coitus. A foundation and committee member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and the Abortion Law Repeal Society, he was invited by the Auckland Medical Aid Trust to go to New Zealand, where he was the operating doctor at that nation’s first abortion clinic. Accused of performing illegal abortions, he was acquitted. In 1982 he co-produced a booklet on Humanist Funerals. In 1990, Woolnough received the Ray Carr Award for outstanding service to humanism in New Zealand. {SWW}

Woolston, Thomas (1669–1731) Woolston was an English parson who was deprived of his fellowship at Cambridge University for writing heresy, so he set out to found a new Christian sect. From his studies of ecclesiastical history, he determined that miracles were incredible and that all the supernatural stories of the New Testament must be regarded as figurative. For this, he was prosecuted on a charge of blasphemy and profaneness. In 1705 he published The Old Apology for the Truth of the Christian Religion Against the Jews and Gentiles Revived. In it, the historicity of Moses practically disappeared, and he interpreted Moses as a “type” of Christ and the Israelites as a “type” of the Christian Church. Between 1727 and 1730, he wrote six Discourses on the Miracles of Our Saviour, in which he ridiculed the absurdities of what so many believed as literal truth and dedicated the work to six bishops. In these the Church was assailed in homely language and her doctrines mercilessly ridiculed. A fresh prosecution for blasphemy was commenced by the bishops, and the Attorney-General declared the work to be the most blasphemous that ever was published in any ages whatever. Woolston defended himself but was found guilty, sentenced to one year’s imprisonment, and fined £100. Being too poor to pay the fine, he was detained permanently in the King’s Bench Prison. Voltaire said that 30,000 copies of his Discourses had been sold, while sixty pamphlets were written in opposition. Woolston’s style was to jest, and he swayed many of the light-hearted when his cause called for the winning-over of the earnest. To him, the Old Testament was only allegorical. In 1729 he was tried for blasphemy and sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of £100. Inasmuch as he had no money—he had given away his money paying the fines imposed upon his publishers—he was relegated to the Debtors’ Prison and remained there until he died. Woolston called himself a Christian, but he was a quasi-deist who rejected the miracles of the Gospels, including the resurrection and the virgin birth. William H. Trapnell in Thomas Woolston: Madman & Deist? (1994) states that although Woolston was never formally associated with the deists, they considered him one of them. The Daily Courant (29 January 1733) carried the following story: “On Saturday night, about nine o’clock, died Mr. Woolston, author of the ‘Discourses on our Savior’s Miracles,’ in the sixty-sixth year of his age. About five minutes before he died he uttered these words: ‘This is a struggle which all men must go through, and which I bear not only with patience but willingness.’ Upon which be closed his eyes, and shut his lips, with a seeming design to compose his face with decency, without the help of a friend’s hand, and then he expired. ‘Without the help of a friend’s hand!’ Helpless and friendless, pent in a prison cell, the brave old man faced Death in solitary grandeur.” {EU, E. Graham Waring; FO; FUK; FUS; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}

Wooton, Barbara [Baroness of Abinger] (1897–1988) Lord McGregor of Durris, at Wootton’s memorial service, spoke of her having written that in her early twenties she had “discarded the religion in which I had been brought up, and adopted an attitude which could equally well be described as agnostic or atheistical.” Her agnosticism was, she said, “more outspoken than is usual even among many of those who share the same fundamental philosophy.” Instead of swearing the oath, she affirmed it. She did not attend church. She was a professor of social studies at the University of London. An honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, and President from 1970 to 1973, she amicably resigned, saying her views on abortion were different from those of many in the humanist movement. Wootton also was associated with the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society. In 1952, she addressed the First International Congress on Humanism and Ethical Culture in Amsterdam. In 1965, she introduced into the House of Lords a bill which led to the abolition of the death penalty. In 1976, she introduced an Incurable Patients Bill, which might have legalized a limited form of voluntary euthanasia but failed to gain a second reading. Wootton was one of the first women appointed a British life peer. Her many books include Crime and the Criminal Law: Reflection of a Criminal Magistrate and Social Scientist. Wootton was named a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and in 1980 signed the Secular Humanist Declaration. The baroness’s secular humanist funeral ceremony took place at Golden Green Crematorium in 1988. {FUK; SHD}

Wootton, David (20th Century) Wootton is co-editor with Michael Hunter of Atheism From the Reformation to the Enlightenment (1992). The period covered, from about 1500 to 1780, has previously not been covered in as great detail. For example, the chapter on “Unbelief and Atheism in Italy, 1500–1700” is said by Gordon Stein to be relevant and confirms that atheism has had an unbroken tradition since ancient times.

WORD In the beginning, according to humanistic lexiphanes, was the word. Humanists like to research not only a word’s meaning but also its genesis:

• abcedarian a novice, tyro • agelast someone who never laughs • aristophren someone of superior intelligence • asyndeton omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily coordinate words or clauses, as in “I came, I saw, I conquered” • Augean stable a staggering accumulation of corruption and filth • autotonsorialist Christopher Corbett’s coinage for a person who looks as if he cuts his own hair • badaud, numquid, polypragmon, quidnunc, yenta all words to describe foolish, meddling gossip • bel-esprit a person of refined intellect and graceful wit • bibliobibuli an H. L. Mencken proposal for “people who read too much” • borborygmi rumbling sounds made by the movement of gas in the intestine, heard often by freethinkers at speakers’ tables • bubo an inflammatory swelling of a lymph node, especially in the groin that is due to the absorption of infective material (as in

	gonorrhea, syphilis, or the plague)

• coprophilia use of feces or filth for sexual excitement; in man, coprophagy, or eating of dung, is related to insanity but in many insects, birds, and other animals it is normal behavior • chronophobe one who dreads the passing of time • derriere-garde those not in the avant-garde; those who are unoriginal, unpro- ductive, uncreative • dysphemism the opposite of euphemism • dystopia the opposite of utopia • epicene having characteristics typical of the other sex • esprit escalier having an idea just after it is untimely to express it; e.g., As the judge began to state his ruling, it occurred to me I had forgot- ten to supply an important fact • evitable avoidable; “Even unhistorical events are evitable,” said Sidney Hook • gallimaufry a hodgepodge, jumble; e.g., a unique gallimaufry of contestants • glabrous having a smooth even surface, free of roughness, • heliolaters worshipers of the sun, including scantily clad sun-bathers • hoi polloi [ = the many, in Greek; “the” hoi polloi is redundant] ordinary people, the masses; slang: the élite or people of wealth • hominist someone who advocates equal rights for men (proposed by G. B. Shaw) • horripilation a bristling of the hair; gooseflesh • ipsedixist a person given to dogmatic assertions • lexiphanes word show-offs who exude lexiphanicism • lickdish, or smellfeast a person who drops in uninvited at mealtime • macrologist an infernally dull conversationalist • oligophrenia mental deficiency; feeblemindedness • philodox someone in love with his or her own opinions • pleonasm iteration or repetition in speaking or in writing by using more words than are necessary to denote mere sense (e.g., the man he said) • retromingent an animal such as a cat that urinates backward • scrutable capable of being deciphered • solipsism the epistemological theory that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and states; a metaphysical theory that all real entities are modifications and states of the self

• steatopygia

an unusually large development of fat on the buttocks, especial- ly of Hottentot females; a sign of beauty to some Hottentot males • theomicrist someone who mocks God • theophagy [the-, god + -phagy-, eating of] the sacramental eating of a god; “the body and the blood” at communion—a popular practice among cannibals and Christians • theophilanthropist member of a deistic society established in Paris during the peri od of the Directory aiming to institute in place of Christianity,

	which had been officially abolished, a new religion affirming 

belief in the existence of God, in the immortality of the soul, and in virtue • vinciple capable of being overcome • Zyp (See entry herein for Zyp.) {Charles Harrington Elster, “Naming Names,” The New York Times, 4 August 1996}

Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) Wordsworth is known for his love of nature, and as one of the “Lake Poets” he introduced romanticism into England. Not so well known was that in 1791 the twenty-one-year-old went to France where Annette Vallon, the daughter of a surgeon and whom he never married, bore him a daughter, Caroline. Also in the 1790s, he acted as a low-level British spy. Imbued with the spirit of the French Revolution, however, he returned to England unable to return to France because of the Reign of Terror. Why he switched from radical rebel to counter-revolutionary agent will probably never be known for sure, a point detailed in a 1998 biography, The Hidden Wordsworth, by Kenneth Johnston. Wordsworth and the Victorians (1998) by Stephen Gill supplied evidence concerning the Wordsworth family’s failure to cover up many controversial parts of the poet’s life. Although Mrs. Humphrey Ward disapproved of the private lives of Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and even Keats, she wrote of Wordsworth that he was “a respectable genius.” Wordsworth’s son, William Jr., felt the rumor of his father’s having sired Caroline was scurrilous “gossip.” They lived at a time during which such matters were considered “no laughing matter,” as critic Anne Barton has observed. Not until 1916, in George Harper’s two-volume biography of Wordsworth did Harper admit to having suppressed certain facts as found in Henry Crabb Robinson’s diaries Robinson had written that Caroline had called Wordsworth “father” when they met years later in Paris. Wordsworth settled in Dorsetshire with his sister Dorothy (1771–1855), a fellow writer who shared his life and his poetic vision. In 1799 the two moved to the Lake District of England, staying there for the rest of their lives. As best he could, he helped support Annette and their daughter Caroline, finally in 1835 settling a sum of money on them. In 1802, he married Mary Hutchinson, and the couple had five children. A close friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had been a Unitarian minister, Wordsworth similarly had an intense interest in David Hartley’s empiricist philosophy. With Coleridge, Wordsworth wrote Lyrical Ballads (1798), a landmark in the history of English Romanticism and using the language of ordinary people in poetry. Included was Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” in which he stated his faith in the restorative and associative power of nature, all the while recognizing the philosophic pleasures of maturity informed by “the still, sad music of humanity.” The work became a manifesto of romanticism for other poets. For a time he became estranged from Coleridge, and in his later years he became far more conservative in his views. In 1843 Wordsworth succeeded Robert Southey as poet laureate. Byron and Shelley mocked Wordsworth as being “simple” and “dull.” Keats distrusted his “egotistical sublime.” Hazlitt and Browning deplored him as “the lost leader,” one who had abandoned his early radicalism. Robert Browning was displeased that Wordsworth had betrayed his youthful ideas, and one Victorian satirist dubbed him “an old half-witted sheep.” However, Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill venerated him for his work which, in an age of doubt, emphasized the transcendent in nature and the good in man. DeQuincey in 1835 wrote of Wordsworth, “Up to 1820 the name of Wordsworth was trampled underfoot; from 1820 to 1830 it was militant; from 1830 to 1835 it has been triumphant.” Bertrand Russell summarized his view: “In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry.” Wordsworth was both a literary and a philosophic naturalist, one whose religion was bound up with his appreciation of Nature. (See Joseph Warren Beach’s comments on the British poet.) {Anne Barton, The New York Review of Books, 14 January 1999; CE; The Economist, 29 August 1998; HNS2; OEL; TYD}

WORLD World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association, began publishing in its current magazine format in 1987. But it descends from a long line of Unitarian and Universalist publications going back almost two centuries: Universalist Magazine was founded in 1819, and the Unitarian Christian Register in 1821. World is at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 02108. E-mail: <world@uua.org>. On the Web: <www.uua.org/world>. Its staff in 1999 included the following:

Editor-in-Chief: Tom Stites Editor: David Reich Executive Editor: Amy Hoffman Contributing Editor: Warren R. Ross Production Editor: Hanna Bordas Editorial Assistant: Angela Clarke Art Director: Joe Polevy Advertising Manager: Myha Nguyen Circulation Manager: Irene Greene

WORLD ATHEIST CONFERENCE The fourth World Atheist Conference was held January 4th to 6th, 1996, at the Atheist Center in Vijayawada, India. Jointly sponsored by India’s Atheist Center and by the Periyar Rationalist organization, it featured addresses by Lavanam (of India’s Atheist Center), K. Veeramani (leader of the Periyar Rationalists), Sir Hermann Bondi (President of the British Humanist Association), Norman Taylor (of the Atheist Foundation of Australia), Patricia Mendoza (representing the Mexican Ethical Rationalist Association), Jim Herrick (British editor of International Humanist News), Dr. Joseph Gerstine and Jerry Rauser (American atheists), Levi Fragell (of Norway’s humanist group), Marie Castle (co-chair of the Minnesota Atheists), and others. {Secular Nation, November-December 1996}

WORLD HUMANIST DAY (June 21st) World Humanist Day was first celebrated in the 1980s by humanists in Belgium. It currently is June 21st. WORLD RELIGIONS READER Ian S. Markham, editor of an educational text, A World Religions Reader, begins the book with Secular Humanism, including readings from Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, A. N. Wilson, Fay Weldon, Mary Daly, and Michael Goulder. He starts with John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” one of the best-known humanist tests.

WORLD UNION OF DEISTS The World Union of Deists has a bi-monthly publication, Think! (Box 47026, St. Petersburg, Florida 33743). On the Web: <www.deism.com/>.

WORLD UNION OF FREETHINKERS The World Union of Freethinkers, coordinated by Jean Kaech, is at PF 6207, 3001 Bern, Switzerland. In 1998 they met in Luxembourg.

WORLD WIDE WEB: See entry for Cyberspace. Also see entry for the Unitarian who was its brainchild: Tim Berners-Lee.

Worrell, Donald (20th Century) Worrell, from Alabama, is on the board of directors of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

Worsfold, Robert (20th Century) Worsfold has been active in New Jersey humanist circles and is a Unitarian. He was a president of Estée Lauder International Inc., the Executive Vice President of Estée Lauder Inc., and a member of the board of directors of Johns Hopkins University. In 1995, Worsfold, a practical as well as a theoretical humanist, became one of the directors of the Council for Secular Humanism.

WORSHIP • Justice is the only worship. Love is the only priest. Ignorance is the only slavery. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now, The place to be happy is here, The way to be happy is to make others so. —Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899)

• Worship, n. Homo Creator’s testimony to the sound construction and fine finish of Deus Creatus. A popular form of abjection, having an element of pride. —Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)

• Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. —Psalms XXX:2

• O unbelievers, I will not worship that which ye worship; nor will ye worship that which I worship. . . . Ye have your religion, and I my religion. —The Qur’an, Chapter 109

• Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. —John Morley (1838–1923)

WORTHING (England) HUMANISTS For information, telephone Mike Sargent on 01903 239823.

Wortman, Fred P. (20th Century) An atheist, Wortman wrote “Christian Principles,” an atheistic work.

Wright, Austin (20th Century)

Wright is author of Disciples (1997), a novel with freethought overtones. The work, about a small religious cult in New Hampshire, is about how members think about sex, love, belief, and discipleship. Its leader-minister actually convinces his followers he is God. Wright taught English at the University of Cincinnati from 1962 until 1993, when he retired. {Fig Leaves, March 1998)

Wright, Bruce (McMarion) [Judge] (1918– ) An outspoken critic of racism in the U.S. criminal justice and political system, Wright was a New York Supreme Court justice (1982-1994). He wrote Black Robes, White Justice (1998), about his experiences as a judge. Love Hangs Upon an Empty Door (1999) is a collection of his poems and contains the message, “The law has not civilized America. Poetry might.” Because of his policy of setting low bail where he deemed it appropriate, he was derisively called “Turn ’Em Loose Bruce” by some journalists. Son of a West Indian (Montserrat) agnostic father and an Irish Catholic mother, Wright has described his Catholic background and education in Peter Occhiogrosso’s Once A Catholic (1987). In it he relates that when Cardinal Spellman was informed Wright was an intellectual and a poet, the two met and Wright concluded that “Spellman was a lousy poet, by the way—wrote like somebody in the fourth grade.” Wright came to find that religion and superstition were one and, as a lawyer, he demanded evidence for the existence of a Holy Ghost or God and found none. As for the afterlife, he suggests that at his memorial service the Duke Ellington tune played by Randy Weston be aired: “Do nothing till you hear from me.” As for being an altar boy, he humorously advised kids to be careful because “you know what happens when you renounce sex and take to whiskey and things like that: chasing lads.” Wright was one of the most outspoken African American humanists of his time. “Whites,” he once stated, “almost have a chemical reaction when they see a black face and assign to that face a place. White judges don’t fraternize with us. What they know about us is what they get from novels, the silver screen, or servants in their own homes.” He admitted to liking radicals, saying, “I have always made fun of well-behaved blacks who I think should be radicals in this country. There’s a lot to be radical about. If we’re going to consider ourselves Americans, we should be able to aspire to anything every other American has. That does not mean keeping your mouth shut.” One of the few good things he has to say about religion is, as he put it, “What’s the black bishop’s name in Harlem? Emerson Moore—he knows how to kiss the proper ass. Where did the pope stop when he came to Harlem? Emerson Moore’s church. . . . ” Wright has been married five times and is the father of a daughter and five sons, one born when he was in his seventies. On Father’s Day in 1996, Keith told the Daily News that when six he and his twelve-year-old brother Geoffrey (now an Assemblyman in Harlem) had been five minutes late to meet their father, and he left them. Penniless and stranded on Wall Street, the brothers walked in the snow from lower Manhattan to their home on 138th Street in Harlem. “It took us a long time to get home,” said Keith, 41. “My mother hit the roof when she found out Daddy left us. From that day on, I’ve tried my best to be on time.” In 1975 the New York Ethical Culture Society gave him their 1975 Humanist Award, of which award he has said “I’m really proudest.” Wright, who in retirement became a visiting professor at Cooper Union, wrote the following poem:

Some orthodox wear a yarmulke, Some Christians sport a cross: I wonder who, among all the gods, Is absolutely boss. {AAH; CA; E}

Wright, Cedric (20th Century) Wright, author of The Words of the Earth, wrote for Humanist World Digest, A Quarterly of Liberal Religion in the 1950s.

Wright, Charles Conrad (1917– ) The leading historian of American Unitarianism, Wright has led a movement in the reinterpretation of Unitarian history that has influenced both American historians and literary scholars. He has stressed the indigenous origins of the American Unitarian movement, locating them in the Arminian theology of 18th-century New England. Those liberals who called themselves Arminians did so “not because they were directly influenced by Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609), the Dutch Remonstrant, but because their reaction to Calvinism was similar to his,” Wright wrote in his The Beginnings of Unitarianism in America (1955). Thus it was in the reaction to the Puritan Calvinism of the New England churches that liberal Christianity took shape. At issue was their rejection of the doctrine of original sin, a “supernatural rationalism” that stressed the need for both human reason and biblical revelation, and an Arian Christology that rejected the doctrine of the Trinity in orthodox Calvinism. He also wrote The Liberal Christians (1979), Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker (1986), and A Sesquicentennial History of American Unitarianism (1975). {U&U}

Wright, Chauncy (1830–1875) Wright was a mathematician who greatly influenced the pragmatists. After publishing a series of papers, he was appointed corresponding secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and made an instructor at Harvard. Wright is known as one of the ablest champions of Herbert Spencer and Darwin in America. {JM; RAT}

Wright, Elizur (1804–1885) Robert Ingersoll described Wright as “one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the gods, of his time.” A graduate of Yale (1826), Wright became secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, editor of the Abolitionist, President of the National Liberal League, contributor to the Boston Investigator and the Freethinkers Magazine, and an aggressive atheist. Wright was an expert on life insurance and was instrumental in compelling insurance companies to hold reserve funds to be applied against policies, and he has been called “the father of life insurance” because of his development of actuarial tabulations. Lawrence B. Goodheart wrote his biography, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse (1990). At Wright’s funeral, Ingersoll delivered the oration. {CE; FUS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}

Wright, Frances [d’Arusmont] (1795–1858) A Scottish-American women’s rights and freethought lecturer, Wright when eighteen years of age wrote about Epicureanism in A Few Days in Athens (1822)—Walt Whitman wrote of this radical deist novel, “I kept it about me for years.” In 1825 she published A Plan for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery in the United States Without Danger of Loss to the Citizens of the South. With Robert Owen she co-edited New Harmony Gazette, which changed its name to the Free Enquirer. With Owen, she had founded in 1825 the publishing concern of Wright & Owen. Wright bought 2000 acres near Memphis, Tennessee, peopling it with slave families she had purchased and redeemed, calling it Nashoba. The experiment of helping thirty or forty slaves proved a failure, so “Fanny” as she became known gave her slaves freedom, sending them to Hayti, where they were placed under the protection of the President and were given an amount of money in order to begin a life of freedom. Afterwards, she took editorial charge of the Owenses’ New Harmony Gazette, changing its name to Free Enquirer. Later, she assisted in the founding of the Boston Investigator. Although she did not live to see the emancipation of black slaves and better education for women, her courage in defying the conventions about female propriety in order to speak on behalf of both was recognized in later years. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who also came to believe that the clergy were responsible for restricting women to a narrow sphere of home and church, lauded Wright as the first woman to lecture in public on behalf of women. Frances Trollope, the English author, was a friend and supporter, writing that she had accompanied her to an 1830 lecture in Philadelphia at which a bodyguard of Quaker ladies dressed in the peculiar costume of that sect applauded her strong anti-slavery stand. Mrs. Trollope, the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope, after attending one of “Fanny” Wright’s lectures in Cincinnati, commented:

That a lady of fortune, family, and education, whose youth had been passed in the most refined circles of private life, should present herself as a public lecturer, would naturally create surprise anywhere. But in America, where women are guarded by a sevenfold shield of habitual insignificance, it caused an effect that can hardly be described. I shared the surprise but not the wonder.

The clergy, however, called her the “high priestess of Beelzebub,” “infidel,” and “dog,” whereas General Lafayette called her “daughter.” In 1838, according to Underwood, Wright “took what seems to have proved a most disastrous step for her happiness, in marrying her old-time friend, M. Phiquepal d’Arusmont, whose acquaintance she first formed at New Harmony, where he was a teacher of some new system of education, and of whom in her fragmentary autobiography she speaks in the most enthusiastic and laudatory manner. How long they lived happily together I do not know, but they did so at least until 1844.” Elizabeth Oakes Smith quoted Mrs. d’Arusmont’s lawyer as saying she had been treated in an ungenerous and unmanly way and tried to wrest her property from her. The marriage was dissolved in 1845. “Halfhours with Freethinkers” contains an account of Wright’s death: “Madame d’Arusmont died suddenly in Cincinnati, on Tuesday, December 14, 1852. She had been for some time unwell, in consequence of a fall upon the ice, the previous winter, which broke her thigh, and probably hastened her decease, but the immediate cause of her death was the rupture of a blood-vessel. She was aware of her situation, knew when she was dying, and met her last hour with perfect composure.” Wright is buried in the Cincinnati Spring Grove Cemetery. In 1997, in a joint venture by Freedrom From Religion Foundation, the American Humanist Association Feminist Cause, and the Free Inquiry Group of Cincinnati, the cemetery monument was cleaned with fine sand and treated to retard future deterioration. Whereas formerly it appeared dark, after 150 years of exposure to the weather its white marble stands out. {BDF; EU; Fred Whitehead, “An Expedition to Ohio,” Freethought History, #23, 1997, is a thorough article about Cincinnati’s Freethought heritage; FUS; JM; Phyllis Palmer, Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990; RE; SAU; TRI; RAT; VI; WWS}

Wright, Frank Lloyd (1867–1959) 

Wright was the son of a Unitarian minister who left his wife and children when Frank was a teenager. The father was never again seen. His mother was of the Welsh Lloyd-Jones clan and attended Unitarian services which were held in Welsh. Garry Wills of Northwestern University has written that “The Welsh relative who had greater influence on Wright than anyone but his mother was the liberal Unitarian preacher, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Wright’s ‘Uncle Jenk,’ who became a surrogate father to him after his own father’s defection. Jones was one of Addams’s principal allies, a regular presence at Hull House. Wright met her at his uncle’s dinner table, and was frequently at Hull House himself, where his mother and first wife did volunteer work. He gave one of his most important early lectures there, in 1901, pleading with Morrisites like Ellen Starr not to reject machinery in their regard for handmade arts and crafts. (Wright wrote of William Morris that he) did the best in his time for art and will live in history as the great sociologist, together with Ruskin the great moralist: significant fact worth thinking about, that the two great reformers of modern times professed the artist.” Wright studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin but left as a sophomore to obtain a drafting job with the skyscraper builder, Louis Sullivan, around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—Wright was booted out of the firm for moonlighting. He then commenced his own “organic architecture” business, which led to “Prairie style” buildings in Iowa, Illinois, and elsewhere in the Midwest. Wright was radically innovative both as to structure and aesthetics, and his work has been imitated widely around the world. An unrealized project was his proposed mile-high skyscraper (“The Illinois”) for Chicago. A Testament (1957) and an autobiography (revised 1943) contain his personal ideas on architecture and philosophy. Of the 800 buildings he designed, roughly half were built. In Madison, Wisconsin, the Unitarian church he built became one he joined as its 696th member. His career had actually begun with his uncle’s construction of a Unitarian chapel, one to which, almost a century later, Wright returned in order to build his own tomb. Unconventional in his personal life, Wright proclaimed that it was more honorable to be open and have a mistress than to have secret affairs. In 1910 Wright abandoned the first of his three wives, Catherine Tobin, for the wife of a client, Mamah Borthwick Cheney. But because Catherine would not give him a divorce, he built in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a home of “organic architecture” called Taliesin (Welsh for “shining brow”), in which he and Mamah lived, unmarried. When a disgruntled West Indian butler-handyman impulsively set fire to the building, possibly because asked to leave, Mamah, her two children, and four neighbors were chopped to death with the servant’s ax as they attempted to escape the fire. Mamah’s skull was split. “In his grief,” Ken Burns wrote (Vanity Fair, November 1998), “Wright refused to let the undertaker touch the body of the woman he had loved. Instead, he had his own carpenters fashion a simple wooden box for her. There was no formal funeral either. The coffin was placed on a plain farm wagon, covered with flowers, and drawn by horses. Wright’s son John and two cousins helped him bury her in the little cemetery behind his mother’s family chapel. “I wanted to fill the grave myself,’ Wright remembered. ‘No monument yet marks the spot where she was buried. . . . Why mark the spot where desolation ended and began?’ ” Today, however, a small stone resting against a tree marks Mamah Cheney’s grave. Wright then rebuilt Taliesin as a memorial, installing another mistress, Miriam Noel, a sculptor who wore a monocle and who had fallen in love with his photograph. When Catherine thirteen years after their initial separation granted him a divorce, he and Miriam wed but five months later ended the “luckless love affair.” At the age of fifty-seven, Wright then fathered a child with twenty-six-year-old Olga Milanoff Hinzenberg (Olgivanna Lazovich), a Montenegrin dancer. Miriam sued Wright but was unable to abort the affair, once even trying to move back into Taliesin and forcing Olgivanna into temporary hiding. After their daughter Iovanna was born in 1925 and Wright finally secured a divorce from Miriam, he and Olgivanna wed in 1928 and the two were devoted to each other for Wright’s final three decades. Biographer Meryle Secrest states that Wright had the religious impulse, yes, but he was the god he wanted to be worshiped. He was outraged by Ayn Rand’s portrayal of him in The Fountainhead—one of Rand’s secretaries, however, is said to have claimed that she had another famous architect in mind. Secrest believes that Wright lied through his teeth half the time. This Wright was said to have justified, for after all he was an artist! That he was, as evidenced by the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (which survived an earthquake that killed 150,000), the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and the numerous distinctively designed contemporary homes constructed throughout the nation. Soulless modern architecture he despised, leading many to describe his hedonistically designed structures as spiritually humanistic. Wright’s collective writings cite the individuals who had most influenced him. Included were Pythagoras, Aristophanes, Socrates, Lao-tze, Gautama, Jesus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Milton, Voltaire, Cervantes, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Melville, Thorstein Veblen. And the man, Louis Sullivan, whose firm once had fired him. He also approved of Samuel Butler’s acronymic name for the United States: Usonia. From the 1930s through the 1950s, dozens of his affordable Usonian houses were built all around the country. They were sleek, stretched-out ranch-style structures which helped define the suburban style that later came to be called “contemporary.” “I hated him, of course,” said the noted architect Philip Johnson, “but that’s only normal when a man is so great. It’s a combination of hatred, envy, contempt, and misunderstanding. All of which gets mixed up with his genius. . . . Trying to find the genius of a man like that, who you realize is a genius when you’re talking to him, and more of a genius as you get to know his work, is one of those things that probably doesn’t go into words.” Wright’s 800 or so works included a variety of constructions: churches, banks, businesses, a filling station, a synagogue, an art museum, a hotel, skyscrapers, resorts, a European-style beer garden, houses for the wealthy as well as Usonian structures that cost only $5,500. Unfortunately, many complained, his flat-roofed buildings often leaked water during a rainstorm. In 1959 when the Guggenheim Museum (which some have derisively called “the washing machine by the park”) was being finished, Wright’s eyesight had begun to fail. That spring when his wife, Kitty, died, his son David waited a day before informing him. “Why didn’t you tell me as soon you knew?” Wright wept. “Why should I have bothered?” his son answered. “You never gave a goddamn for her when she was alive.” It was not long afterwards that Wright had surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction, and although the operation was successful the ninety-one-year-old died quietly in his sleep. His coffin was loaded onto a pickup truck, and his architectural family drove for twenty-eight hours to Wisconsin where, just as Mamah had been, he was carried on a flower-strewn farm wagon and buried at the Unity Chapel Cemetery in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The gravestone is a narrow triangular building stone that is surrounded by a circle of wildflowers, and it is inscribed with name and vital dates. A Unitarian clergyman read Emerson’s “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” In 1995, after fifty-seven years of false starts, political sabotage, and dashed hopes, Madison, Wisconsin, construction workers started building the Monona Terrace Convention Center. Wright originally had unveiled the plan in 1938 and revised it in the 1950s, but businessmen who despise his politics and complained about the building’s costs successfully delayed its start. He had the reputation of being a habitual deadbeat who bounced checks and dodged bill collectors, but in making the announcement that finally the civic complex was to be realized George Nelson, a broadcasting executive and head of the development commission, observed, “The money that the city will make off of this—in the economy and the jobs created—will be enough to pay every bill that Frank Lloyd Wright stiffed people for many times over. People said he never paid his debts. He’s paying them now.” When Olgivanna died in 1985 and her ashes were placed at Taliesin West, her followers secretly exhumed the body of her husband in Wisconsin, had it cremated, and had the ashes transported to Arizona. So despite his having been buried in Wisconsin, Wright’s body was “grave-robbed” to his son David’s and others’ outrage. To this day the remains rest near Olgivanna’s in a garden wall. Wright, in addition to creating numerous architectural works, wrote his Autobiography (1932, revised 1943) and A Testament (1957). “I believe in God,” he wrote, “only I spell it Nature.” His widow reportedly was heavy into mysticism. His granddaughter, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham, in a postscript to John Lloyd Wright’s My Father Who Is On Earth (1994), explained that the absence of a memorial service following her father’s (John’s) death “was consistent with a desire—inherited from his father—to keep the emphasis on the living; and, if he cared little for other details of what happened after he had departed, such as legacies, that too was an attitude he inherited.” Her father was an accomplished architect, a noted toy manufacturer, and an active member of his community. {CE; PA; TYD; U; UU}

Wright, Henry Clarke (1797–1870) Wright was an American reformer, a conspicuous anti-slavery orator and a friend of Ernestine Rose and Lucretia Mott. He wrote The Living, Present, and the Dead Past. {BDF}

Wright, J. A. (19th Century) Wright wrote “Was President Garfield Providentially Removed by the Assassin, Guiteau, or Do Liberals Fear to Die?” (1882?). {GS}

Wright, John (20th Century) Wright, of the University of Windsor, is on the Executive Committee of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Wright, Larry M. (20th Century) Wright is author of Jesus the Pagan Sun God (1996), a restatement of the myth theory: that the Jesus of the Christian Church is not an historical character, being based upon ancient solar mythology. It shows how the developing Christian church adapted and adopted numerous “Pagan” customs, rituals and traditions for its own ends—in particular the ancient legend of the dying and resurrected savior god. Wright, a freethinker and member of the National Secular Society, is a lecturer and teaches sociology, philosophy, and comparative religion. {The Freethinker, June 1996}

Wright, Michael (1818–1881) An Owenite, Wright early in life settled in Manchester, meeting George Jacob Holyoake and accepting the social teaching and rationalism of Robert Owen. For a time he lived on one of the Owenite farm colonies in Cambridgeshire. In 1857 he settled at Leicester. He and Josiah Gimson and others founded the Leicester Secular Society, afterwards building the Leicester Secular Hall (1881). {RAT}

Wright, Richard (1908–1960) Born on a Mississippi plantation, the African American novelist Richard Wright came to be as estranged from God as he was by the oppressive religious practices of his Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother, according to Michel Fabre. “On the whole,” Fabre adds, “he is a humanist whose values are not created by a transcendental entity but by the common workings of mankind. Wright makes no difference between religion and superstition in his short stories, “Superstition” and “Man, God Ain’t Like That.” He was mainly a rationalist, one who in Blueprint for Negro Writing, stated, “I abhor the very notion of mysticism.” In 1932 Wright joined the Communist party, later leaving it in disillusionment. His work deals mainly with Southern racial problems, and Native Son (1942), which is an example of literary naturalism, tells of the victimized Negro fighting against the complicated political and social conditions of Chicago in the 1930s. Fabre states that “American naturalism, both as a philosophy and as a literary technique in the line of Dreiser and James Farrell, provided (Wright) only with a starting point; then either, as we suggested, a larger definition of naturalism must be given—if it is to encompass the many facets of Wright’s writing—or it must be recognized that he often overstepped its boundaries,” for he also included the fanciful, the mysterious, the irrational. {AAH, Michel Fabre; CE; TYD}

Wright, Robert (20th Century) Wright is the freethinking author of The Moral Animal (1994) and Nonzero, the Logic of Human Destiny (2000). His outlook, rather than on revelation, is based on evolution.

Wright, Roy Douglas (1907–1990) “Pansy” Wright, a Tasmanian, was an atheist, iconoclast, maverick freethinker, freethinker, professor of physiology, and university chancellor. He taught physiology at the University of Melbourne, and he was a founder of the Australian National University, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute, and the Florey Institute of Experimental Medicine. Wright was known as a person willing to rock the boat, often and hard, “to keep the passengers awake.” His interpretation of nonconformity was linked to the ancient principle that the liberty of the individual is above reproach. He identified with the minority in many unpopular causes of social injustice, often to the distaste of the conservative establishment. {SWW}

Wright, Susannah (19th Century) 

Wright was one of Carlile’s shopwomen. For selling pamphlets by Carlile, she was tried in 1822 and, according to Wheeler, made a good defense. {BDF}

Wright, Theodore (19th Century) Wright wrote the “Address at the Opening of the New Hall of the Leicester Secular Society” (1881). {GS}

Wright, Thomas (19th Century) Wright shocked his contemporaries with a book on phallic worship, The Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe (1866). In it, he includes some of the practices incident to membership in certain orders and societies and represents, according to Ashley Montagu in Sexual Symbolism (1957), a continuation of the work of Richard Payne Knight. When Wright’s work was published in the Age of Victoria, it was immediately withdrawn because of complaints by puritan authorities.

WRINKLES Wrinkles are, by far, more apt to concern freethinkers than worry about any hereafter. Dr. Larry Meyer, a dermatologist and geriatrician at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center in Salt Lake City, has advised that to avoid wrinkles in old age one should avoid smoking, stay out of the sun, routinely use hats and sunscreens, and use a moisturizer that will hold water in the dermis and plump it up. An exception so far as smoking is Jeanne Calment of Arles, France, considered the world’s oldest human until her death in 1997 at the age of 122. She saw Vincent Van Gogh when she was twelve or thirteen, remarking that he was “very ugly, ungracious, impolite, sick—I forgive him, they called him loco.” Treated by the French as “the doyenne of humanity,” she for much of her life ate more than two pounds of chocolate a week, treated her skin with olive oil, rode a bicycle until she was 100, and only quit smoking five years before her death. Of her many bons mots, Calmen when asked about wrinkles responded,

I’ve never had but one wrinkle. And I’m sitting on it.

Writer, Clement (end of 16th Century) Writer, appropriately, was a writer. He started as a master tailor in London, a Presbyterian who left the church about 1638, a person whose heresy turned into atheism. Not only did he reject the authority of the Bible, the doctrines of the church, and the immortality of the soul, but also he was aggressively outspoken at a time when it was dangerous to do so. Jus Divinum Presbyterii, an anti-clerical work of his with an ironical title, has been lost, but reference was made to it in Richard Baxter’s Unreasonableness of Infidelity. {RAT}

Wrybisz, Andrzej (20th Century) Wyrbisz, president of the Polish Association for Humanism and Independent Ethics, is a professor of history. At the 1993 Congress of the European Humanist Federation in Berlin, he stated that communism was never accepted wholeheartedly in Poland, even by those who profited from it. In Poland, he said, there was a hatred of everything non-Polish. Minority groups were supported then, but he regretted that they are not supported now.

Wünsch, Christian Ernest (Born 1744) A German physician and freethinker, Wünsch was professor of mathematics and physics in Frankfort on the Oder (1828). Wünsch has been labeled by McCabe as being “half a heretic”, or a moderate rationalist. {BDF}

WUFT: The letters refer to the World Union of Freethinkers.

Wundt, Wilhelm Max (1832–1920) Wundt was a German scientist, the son of a clergyman. A freethinker, he wrote Principles of Physiological Psychology (1874); A Manual of Human Physiology, Logic (1883); Essays (1885); and Ethik (1886). According to McCabe, Wundt was “one of the leading workers in the gradual shift of psychology from its old metaphysical character to that of a positive science. At Leipzig, where he taught, he founded an Institute of Experimental Psychology, which was the forerunner of the psychological laboratories of our time. He had been trained in physiology, and he carried its empirical method into psychology (and was followed by William James in America). This compelled him to reject the idea that the mind is a spiritual and immortal entity, and he admitted God only as a ‘divine world-ground’ or little more than a symbol of the unity of the universe. He was one of the founders also of folk psychology and probably the greatest psychologist of his time.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Wurtz, Charles Adolph (1817–1884) A French chemist, Wurtz was noted for his research in organic chemistry. He discovered methyl and ethyl amines (1849), glycol (1856), and aldol condensation (1872). He developed (1855) a method of synthesizing hydrocarbons by treating alkyl halides with sodium (called the Wurtz reaction), and this was adapted by the German chemist Rudolf Fittig to the preparation of mixed aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons (called the Wurtz-Fittig reaction). Wurtz also invented a bulbed fractioning column known as the Wurtz column. He wrote in support of the atomic theory and on medical and biological chemistry, and one of his works is the Dictionaire de chimie pure et appliquée (1868–1878, 3 volumes). The Third Republic made him a Life-Senator, and Wurtz took his seat amongst the anti-clericals. {JM; RAT}

Wyclif, John (c. 1328–1384) Wyclif (also spelled Wycliffe and Wickliffe) was an English reformer who taught theology and philosophy at Oxford University. He believed in the doctrine that Christ is man’s only overlord, that power should depend on a state of grace. This made him a champion of the people against the abuses of the church. Such views led him to be condemned as a heretic in 1380 and again in 1382, and his followers were persecuted. In 1428, forty-four years after his death, his bones were dug up, burned, and his ashes were thrown into the River Swift to stamp out his “unsavory” memory.

Wyeth, N(ewell) C(onverse) (1882–1945) A major painter, Wyeth once gave his “Parables of Jesus” to the Wilmington Unitarian Society, of which he was a member. It shows Christ with an aura, a baby on his lap. Wyeth’s son, Andrew, was raised in the church, but none of the Wyeth family currently is a Unitarian. {U}

Wylie, Philip (1902–1971) Wylie, the author of Generation of Vipers (1942), was asked about humanism and responded to the present author:

None of the definitions of ‘humanism” supplies, in my view, any acceptable semantic for my philosophical position. The word “humanism” leaves too little room, at one end of the evolutionary scale, for the fact of our relation to and derivation from other animals; it is, so to speak, too “precious,” biologically. At the other end, it leaves no adequate room for the conjectural possibility of other, non-human forms of awareness in the universe. Exponents of the various “humanisms”—furthermore—have corroded the term with old mythologies, supernaturalism, sentimentality, fatuity. I regard humanity as an incident—however important to you, to me, to us—in space and time and evolution—and feel this broader view will better serve to make us wiser, nobler, more humble and more honest, more aware of our ignorance and limitations—more eager to improve on them—than any further terms which lead almost automatically to a further doting upon ourselves, unexamined, insufficiently, examined, or examined by prior and arbitrary rules, creed, faiths, and the like. If my attitude needs a name, a brand, and a slogan, doubtless I shall think of adequate ones in due course. Meanwhile, the above indicates, without characterizing, what it is I believe.

{WAS, 24 August 1954}

Wynne Willson, Jane: See entry for Jane Wynne Willson.

Wyrouboff, Grigorio Nicolaievich [Count] (Born 1842) Wyrouboff was a Russian positivist who established with Littré the Revue de Philosophie Positive. Also with Littré, Wyrouboff edited the review from 1867 to 1883. In Paris, Wyrouboff abandoned the Orthodox Church for the Church of Humanity, but he thought more of the negative or atheistic side of positivism than the ceremonial. The count wrote on positivism and also on physics and chemistry. In 1904 he was appointed professor of the history of science at the College de France. {BDF; JM; RAT}