Y

From Philosopedia

Yablon, Irving J. (1921– ) Yablon has been a generous supporter of freethought, atheist, and humanist causes. He appeared in a televised American Atheist Forum with Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Jon G. Murray which was shown in one hundred twenty cities. Yablon was one of the original members of the Secular Humanist Society of New York City, and he is a member of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. “It’s amazing how many non-believers are present in our society,” Yablon has written. “Most of them are bound to family, career, neighbors, tenure, and discretion. By presenting myself as a living, day-by-day, godless person, I pin-prick the protective bubble these people hide. As an atheist in Alcoholics Anonymous, with a record of over three decades of continuous sobriety, I talk about atheism in a light atmosphere and with jokes and laughter perhaps I encourage a few to emerge.” When the Pope arrived in Missouri in 1999, Yablon joined freethinkers there who picketed his visit. (WAS, numerous discussions)

Yaciw, Brent (20th Century) Yaciw, a contributor to The Freethought Observer., was a participant at the 3rd Annual Atheist Alliance Convention.

Yadava, R. S. (20th Century) Professor Yadava was president of the Indian Rationalist Association from 1958 to 1965.

YAHWEH: See entry for God.

Yakovleva, L. (20th Century) Yakovleva and A. Sokolov have organized a Centre for Inquiry in Russia. Its task is to monitor the activities of clerical groups and paranormal phenomena.

Yallop, David A. (20th Century) Yallop’s In God’s Name (1984) makes an investigation into the murder of Pope John Paul I. He speculates as to whether or not it was “an inside job.” Quentin Crisp, among many others, has suggested such a possibility.

Yaroslavski, Emel’Yan Mikhailovich (20th Century) Yaroslavski, whose real name was Miney Izrailevich Gubel’man, was the son of a Jewish deportee whose father had been banished to Siberia for trying to evade military service. Yaroslavski, as a leading figure among the older Bolsheviks and head of the All-Union Society of Exiles and Former Political Convicts, worked his way up to being elected in 1939 to the USSR Academy of Sciences and being awarded the Order of Lenin and the State Prize. He was the chief antireligious propagandist following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He felt that religion “poisons the brain” and produces an “incorrect” and “mutilated” understanding of the world and human relationships. Religion is harmful because it sanctions slavery and is an obstacle to social progress and the creation of a more rational and better world. “Religion,” he wrote in Religion in the USSR (1932), “acts as a bandage over the eyes of man, preventing him from seeing the world as it is. It is our task to tear off this bandage and to teach the masses of workers and peasants to see things correctly, to understand what does exist and what does not, so as to be able to rebuild this world to fit the needs of the workers and peasants. We must, therefore, convince the masses that Communism and religion cannot go together, that it is not possible to be a Communist and at the same time believe in devils or gods, in heavenly creatures, in the Virgin Mary, in the saints, in pious princes and princesses, bishops, and landowners, who have been canonized by the priests.” His life is best summarized by Fédor Dostoyevski’s remark that only in Russia could atheism become a kind of religion. Yaroslavski wrote Religion in the USSR (1932). {EU, Rolf H. W. Theen}

Yarros, Victor S. (20th Century) Yarros is author of My Eleven Years With Clarence Darrow (1939). With Darrow, he had written Prohibition Mania (1927). In the 1950s Yarros was an editorial associate on Humanist World Digest, A Quarterly of Liberal Religion.

Yarwood, Vaughan (20th Century) Yarwood, in “God’s Work: Does Business Need Religion?” (New Zealand Rationalist, April 1994), observes the “The United States, a nation seemingly bewitched by off-the-wall ideas,” has business leaders interested in offering such personal growth experiences as stress reduction and creativity enhancement, a “New Age without the glazed eyes.” He details other instances from the time of the ancient Chinese to the contemporary New Zealanders in which business and religion have been mixed. “Even straight-laced corporates these days are beginning meetings with karakia when Maori are present,” he notes. “A surprising number of companies invoke Him,” Yarwood quotes Alan Farnham in Fortune. “Cleaning colossus Service Master, for example, spurring its employees to vacuum major pet hair out of the carpets, manages to invoke—in its values statement and in annual reports—not just God, but Christ and Mother Theresa too.” However, as Yarwood notes, “A church may excommunicate an occasional heretic, but it doesn’t impose layoffs on the congregation.” {New Zealand Rationalist, April 1994}

YAZIDI The Yazidis have been described as devil worshipers. (See entry for Satan.)

Yearsley, Percival Macleod (1867–1951) Yearsley, a freethinker, wrote The Story of the Bible (1922). He was an aural surgeon, an otologist, and Chairman of the Medical Publications Committee of the National Bureau for the Welfare of the Deaf. He translated Forel’s Sensations des insectes. Yearsley was a member of the Rationalist Press Association. {GS; RAT}

Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939) The greatest lyric poet that Ireland has produced and one of the major figures of 20th-Century literature, Yeats was the acknowledged leader of the Irish Literary Renaissance. Son of a painter, William studied painting but turned instead to writing. He was fascinated by the legends of Ireland and by the occult, and he fostered Irish nationalism with his writing about Maud Gonne, an Irish patriot for whom he had a hopeless passion. In 1898 with Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn, Yeats founded the Irish Literary Theatre in Dublin, their first production being his own “The Countess Cathleen” (1899). in 1917 Yeats married Georglie Hyde-Lees, and his interest in occultism was encouraged by his wife’s power of automatic writing. Her “communicators” ultimately provided him with the system of symbolism described in A Vision (1925) Yeats was intrigued by Madame Blavatsky’s understanding of symbolism, and the story has been told by William York Tindall and others that Yeats once placed a rose in a closed bottle that somehow was devoid of any air on the inside. At a time thought to be occultly opportune and while the full moon was shining, he pointed the bottle upwards toward the moon and expected to see the rose’s “soul” rise to the heavens. The experiment did not work the first time, and he made several other unsuccessful efforts which always ended “in a vacuum.” Yeats was interested not only in psychical research and the occult but also in the philosophy of G. E. Moore. In 1923 Yeats, who was known for spending so much time with spiritualists, mediums, and bogus wizards, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. McCabe points out that, so far as organized religion was concerned, Yeats was not a Catholic. In his youth he had been friends with freethinkers like Morris, Huxley, and Symons, at which time he did not conceal his skepticism. Ideas of Good and Evil (1903) speaks of a “divine love in sexual passions,” stating that “the great passions are angels of God,” which is not a Christian viewpoint. He had a vague belief in a “supersensible world” and wrote about mystical events, but, according to Joseph McCabe, basically he was critical of the Catholicism in which he had been born. In addition, he was repelled by Protestantism’s concern for material success. Upon his death in the south of France, he was buried there, but in 1948 his body was brought back to Ireland and interred in a little Protestant cemetery at Drumcliffe in Sligo, where much of his childhood had been spent. The epitaph came from “Under Ben Bulben” in his Last Poems:

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!

 {CE; JM; OEL; RE; TYD}

Yelanich, Stephen (20th Century) Yelanich is an activist with the Humanist Community of Pittsburgh (AHA). (See entry for Pennsylvania Humanists.) {FD}

Yel’tsin, Boris Nikolayevich (1931– ) When Peter Jennings of ABC News (6 Sep 1991) asked Gorbachev and Yel’tsin about their religious views, Gorbachev responded that he is an atheist. Yel’tsin said he personally is superstitious and sometimes goes to church services “because during the service there’s a kind of internal feeling of moral cleansing, as it were.” (See entry for Gorbachev.)

Ye’or, Bat (20th Century) Bat Ye’or is author of The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, 7th to 20th Century (1996). According to Tariq Ismail, the “daughter of the Nile” is finally getting the recognition that she richly deserves. Her book openly criticizes Islam and explodes the myth of absolute Islamic tolerance of non-Muslims. {New Humanist, December 1996}

Yesenin-Volpin, Alexander S. (20th Century) A mathematician, Yesenin-Volpin signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}

Yeulett, David (20th Century) In Greenwich, England, Yeulett has gone on record concerning his views about Darwinism:

EVOLUTION : People out of monkeys. RELIGION : Monkeys out of people. (The Freethinker, June 1995)

Yevtushenko, Yevgeny Aleksandrovich (1933– ) Yevtushenko is the Russian poet whose “Babi Yar” (1961) and “The Heirs of Stalin” (1962) exposed what he considered wrong in Soviet society. Decrying the lack of freedom among Soviet creative artists, he helped organize opposition to Soviet policies by announcing in 1985 that such artists demanded a free and open literature, not one dictated by Kremlin leaders. A friend of international writers, including Norman Cousins, Yevtushenko became known as the angry young man of Soviet poetry. In 1993, Boris N. Yeltsin, awarding the 6’ 3” Siberian the honorary Order of People’s Friendship, sent a congratulatory message saying that poets during the period of the post-Stalinist thaw had “played an immense role in the cultural and spiritual emancipation and awakening of people in Russia. Profound gratitude to you for your courage and unflinching devotion to the ideals of democracy and humanism, which you upheld in the most dramatic days of our history.” Yevtushenko reportedly is a freethinker and an atheist.

YHWH: See entry for God.

YIDDISH-AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT PUBLICATION Gordon Stein, in Freethought in the United States, describes numbers of Yiddish-American freethought publications.

YIN AND YANG Two symbols, yin and yang, are found in the humanistic and rationalistic system of Confucianism and are always contrasting but complementary. Yin denotes the feminine passive principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in darkness, cold, or wetness. Yang is the masculine active principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in light, heat, or dryness. Yin and yang combine to produce all that comes to be. {ER}

Yóer, Bat (20th Century)

Bat Yóer is a specialist on Dhimmis, the non-Muslims in Muslims countries. She resides in Switzerland but frequently visits the United States.

YOGA Yoga, in Hinduism, is a set of mental and physical exercises aimed at producing spiritual enlightenment. Those exercises often are self-taught. {DCL}

Yokie, Gary (20th Century) Yokie wrote “Frank Zappa: A Tribute” (Secular Nation, Fall 1994). (See entry for Frank Zappa.)

Yoltan, John (20th Century) Yoltan is a corresponding member of The Hume Society, a group engaged in scholarly activity concerning David Hume.

Yong-shen, Lei (20th Century) Yong-shen, a professor at the Chinese Political College of the Young in Beijing, heads its discussion group on humanism.

York, James L. (Born 1830) An American blacksmith who became a Methodist minister, then a Unitarian, and finally a freethought advocate, York for many years was a member of the California legislature. He lectured widely about freethought not only in the United States but also in Australia. York wrote Freethought Lectures and Poems (1888). {BDF; FUS}

Yorke, J. F. (19th Century) Yorke was the English author of Notes on Evolution and Christianity (1882). {BDF}

Yost, Frank H. (20th Century) Yost, with Alvin York, wrote Separation of Church and State in the United States (1948). {GS}

Youmans, Edward Livingstone (1821–1887) An American scientist, Youmans although partially blind was an exceptional student who became a physician. He popularized Herbert Spencer, planned the “International Scientific Series,” and in 1872 established the Popular Science Monthly, in which he wrote many articles. His brother, Dr. W. J. Youmans, studied under Huxley in England, adopted his views, and collaborated on the Popular Science Monthly. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}

Youmans, William Jay (1838–1901) Youmans, the brother of Edward Youmans, was an American editor who studied in England under Huxley, then practiced medicine in Minnesota. He joined his brother in editing Popular Science Monthly. Youmans edited the American edition of Huxley’s Lessons in Elementary Physiology (1867). {RAT}

YOUNG FREETHINKERS ALLIANCE (YFA): See entries for Micah White and Youthful Humanists, Freethinkers. On the Web: <www.secularhumanism.org/ashs/>.

Young, Andrew Jackson Jr. (1932– ) Young, a Congregational minister, noted civil rights activist, and former mayor, ambassador, and congressman, was awarded in 1997 the Frederic Melcher Book Award for An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (1996). The General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association voted it “the most significant contribution to religious liberalism during the past calendar year.”

Young, Ann (1942– ) Young, born in the United Kingdom and a third-generation freethinker, arrived in Australia in 1953. In 1969 she joined the Humanist Society of New South Wales. In 1986 she initiated the Australia-wide Funeral Information Network. A humanist, teacher, and dancer, she wrote the humanists’ submission for the New South Wales religious education syllabus, some items of which were incorporated in the final draft. From 1991 to 1993, Young presided over the New South Wales Humanist Society. {SWW}

Young, Frederick Rowland (19th Century) Young, who was attracted by Holyoake’s views, became a Unitarian minister in 1855. {GS}

Young, John Zachary (1907—1997) In 1952, Young was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. An anatomist, he wrote The Life of Vertebrates (1951); Programs of the Brain (1978); and Philosophy and the Brain (1987). His ancestry includes long Quaker associations: Thomas Young, F.R.S., the physicist who first formulated the wave theory of light and also translated the Rosetta Stone; his great-great grandfather Eliot Howard, F.R.S., who discovered how to free quinine from toxic substances and so opened Africa to travelers; and his father, Luke Howard, F.R.S., a meteorologist who named the clouds Cumulus, Nimbus, and Cirrus. A cousin, Henry Eliot Howard, was a naturalist who established the function of territory and birdsong. Young, who taught zoology at Magdalen, taught anatomy and developed his interest in the nervous system of animals at University College, London, until his retirement in 1973. “I was brought up as an Anglo-Catholic,” Young has written, “and Bishop Gore was my godfather. I remained a believer until I was about twenty and then revolted because of the obvious incompatibility of belief in spirits with scientific knowledge. I still think that religion does more harm than good and is one of the main causes of human strife. Yet religion is a comfort to many people and humanists must look for other ways of giving them equal help with their lives.” {New Humanist, February 1996}

[[Young, [Lord of Darlington]] (1932– ) In 1986, Baron Young was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association.

Young, Owen D. (1879–1962) An industrialist and lawyer, Young founded the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). In 1924, with Charles G. Dawes, he was a U.S. representative at the reparations conference following World War I. In 1929, his formulation, called the Young Plan, made reparations a financial, rather than a purely political, matter. He was a member of the Universalist National Memorial Church in Washington, D.C., which has “The Owen D. Young Peace Tower” in his honor. {CE; U; UU}

Young, Perry Deane (20th Century) Young is author of God’s Bullies: Power Politics and Religious Tyranny (1982) and Lesbians and Gays and Sports (1995).

Young, Richard (20th Century) Young is on the editorial committee of Humanist in Canada.

Young, Thomas: See entry for Ethan Allen.

Young Jr., Whitney Moore (1921–1971) A United States civil rights leader, Young was Executive Director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971. He was one of the leading civil rights activists of the 1960s. Young was a member of the White Plains Community Church (Unitarian) in White Plains, New York. Many of his specific proposals were incorporated into President Lyndon B. Johnson’s antipoverty programs in the mid-1960s. He wrote To Be Equal (1964) and Beyond Racism (1969). A 1998 biography, Militant Mediator by Dennis C. Dickerson, challenged the black militant view that Young was an “Oreo cookie” who favored corporate chieftains rather than his own people. Young, he found, depended upon corporations and the government for funds to support the Urban League’s services. He condemned Stokely Carmichael’s “black power” fights and, yes, may have “failed to maintain the delicate balance between acceptability to powerful whites and credibility with grass-roots blacks.” But his was a patriotic message of self-help, and he was widely respected for his efforts to improve interracial cooperation. {U; UU}

Young, William Henry (20th Century) Founder of the Society of Evangelical Agnostics, Young is a secular humanist who writes for Free Inquiry. He has been instrumental, with the Cedar Springs Library in Auberry, California, of editing the newsletter of the San Joaquin Valley Humanists and maintaining a collection of freethought materials, including over forty newsletters from freethought organizations. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) { FD; FI, Summer, 1985}

Younghusband, Francis Edward [Sir] (1863–1942) Younghusband, a British explorer, was born in India and in 1886 explored Manchuria. The following year he journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass of the Karakorum range. In 1904, he was sent with a military expedition into Tibet, where he forced a treaty upon the Dalai Lama, opening Tibet to Western trade. Later he surveyed the Brahmaputra and Sutlej rivers and the upper reaches of the Indus. Three times he tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest. McCabe reported that Younghusband had strong religious sentiments, “but his views about doctrine are decidedly freethinking. In an article pleading for the reform of religion in the Hibbert Journal and in his books he wishes to see public worship maintained—he detests aggressive rationalism—but his ‘God’ is ‘not a separate personal Being wholly outside men’ but ‘what results from the Mutual Influence of all men and all the component parts of the universe.” Younghusband rejected all creeds and formularies. {CE; JM; RAT}

Yourcenar, Marguérite [Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour] (1903–1987) Yourcenar (an anagram of her birth name) was the first female “immortal” admitted to the French academy (1981) since its founding in 1635. The Belgian-born writer also was elected (1969) to the Royal Belgian Academy. In 1939 when she came to the United States to be with Grace Frick, an American college professor who remained her lifelong collaborator and translator until her death in 1979, Yourcenar ended up exiled by the outbreak of World War II. The two moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Frick found a job, then moved permanently into a house they nicknamed “Petit Plaisance” at Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Yourcenar, who was not attracted to organized religion, wrote in French and adapted classical humanism to contemporary concerns, gaining a wide readership. Her Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) recounts Hadrian’s life in the first person. She also wrote Oriental Stories (1938), Coup de Grace (1939), Alexis (1968), and a work about Ms. Frick, Two Lives and a Dream (1982). “Her frequent use of transgressive eroticism, expressed through ‘in extremis’ characters and situations, underscores certain similarities to Colette, Marguerite Duras, and Violette Leduc,” Wisconsin journalist Jacob Stockinger has observed, adding that she “dwelled in history, to be sure, but she also resided in her own age.” {CE; GL}

YOUTHFUL HUMANISTS, FREETHINKERS

High school humanists or freethinkers on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. (See entry for Young Freethinkers Alliance.)

YOUTHSPEAK YouthSpeak is a British organization for British lesbians and gay men under the age of twenty-five. The group opposes the demand by churches to be exempted from the provisions of the Human Rights Bill. On the Web: <http://www.youthspeak.org.uk>.

YUGOSLAVIAN HUMANISM, ATHEISM Two who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 were Jovan Babic, chair, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade; and Svetozar Stojanovic, professor and president, Institute of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. Although it no longer is active, a Yugoslav group, the Humanist and Ethical Section of the Yugoslav Association of Philosophy, was once operated by Dr. Vogislav Kostunica at N Fronta 45, 11000 Belgrade, Yugoslavia. A Yugoslavian atheist homepage is on the Web: <http://SOLAIR.Eunet.yu/~milane/msesbook.html>. Its webmaster is Milan Elesin. (See the entry for Svetozar Stojanovic. Also, see the discussion of Yugoslav philosophy by Mihailo Markovic in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 8.)

YUKTHI REKHA A Malayalam monthly, Yukthi Rekha is at 115 Hill Gardens, Thrissur - 14, Kerala, India.

YUKTHI VICHARAM A Malayalam monthly, Yukthi Vicharam is at Kuttipuzha Nagar, Thrissur District, Kerala State 680 004, India