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From Philosopedia

Xanthopoulos, John (20th Century) A writer, editor, and scholar at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, Xanthopoulos spoke at the 1995 Atheist Alliance Convention in North Hollywood, California, and at the 1997 convention in Florida. He is author of Equity and Empowerment of Women and has written for Secular Nation and is chairman of the board of Atheists of Florida (PO Box 130753, Tampa, Florida 33681-0753).

Xenophanes (c. 570 B.C.E.–c. 480 B.C.E.) Xenophanes of Colophon, unlike Homer and Hesiod, did not portray the gods anthropomorphically. Nietzsche, as pointed out by H. J. Blackham in New Humanist (January 1990), contrasted “the healthy Greek popular idea of lusty human gods, decried by Xenophanes, with the pathological Judaeo-Christian slavish obedience to their idea of an Almighty. The idea of Xenophanes is neither the one nor the other, and can be assimilated to the Socinian or Deist disbelief in orthodox Christian dogmas.” Xenophanes’ outlook was somewhat pantheistic, if not entirely unbelieving, in his elegies and poetry. He was a satirist who preached the importance of understanding virtue. His contemporaries, Robertson writes, likely called Xenophanes an atheist more than anything else, for his references to any god was not physically or mentally anthropomorphic. “Mortals,” he wrote, “suppose that the Gods are born, and wear man’s clothing, and have voice and body. But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and make works of art as men do, they would paint their Gods and give them bodies like their own—horses like horses, cattle like cattle. . . . Ethiopians make their Gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have reddish hair and blue eyes; so also they conceive the spirits of the Gods to be like themselves.” Like Epicurus, Xenophanes absolutely rejected all divination and also held the unpopular view that the Greeks erred by worshiping athletes extravagantly. {BDF; CE; ER; HNS2; JMR; TYD}

Xiao, Xuehui (1950?– ) In 1995, the International Humanist and Ethical Union started an international campaign against the Chinese government, charging it with persecuting Dr. Xiao, a humanist philosopher in Sichuan province. She had led the pro-democracy movement in Sichuan in 1989, causing a nationwide controversy by rejecting the official Marxist doctrine that morality is determined by economics. She argued that individuals must take responsibility for their own actions, wrote Matt Cherry in The Freethinker (June 1995). As a result, she was imprisoned and regularly beaten, worsening her serious kidney and liver problems. International pressure forced her release after nineteen months, but then she was deprived of her teaching post and continued to be harassed. “Like Sakharov,” stated IHEU Co-President Jane Wynne Willson, “Xiao Xuehui is a leading thinker who has the great courage to make a stand for her principles, no matter what the personal cost.”

Ximenes, Augustin Louis (1726–1817) A French marquis, Ximenes was an intimate friend of Voltaire, was a freethinker, and wrote several plays. McCabe reports that Ximenes and Voltaire had some kind of quarrel and states “it is suspected that in the quarrel with Rousseau the works written against him professedly by Ximenes were really written by Voltaire.” Ximenes had joined with Voltaire against Rousseau’s optimistic deism. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

XTC (20th Century) The recording artists known as XTC, according to Celebrity Atheists, are non-theists. Those in the cognoscenti are aware of the title’s sounding like Ecstasy, a drug. {E}