American Heathen®

(The following is a transcript of a segment by John Mill. John is a noted free thought advocate and broadcaster. “This Week In Freethought” airs on my American Heathen® internet radio show. Air date of this particular segment: 05/26/12)

Here’s your Week in Freethought History: This is more than just a calendar of events or mini-biographies – it’s a reminder that, no matter how isolated and alone we may feel at times, we as freethinkers are neither unique nor alone in the world.

Last Sunday, May 20, but 206 years ago, my namesake, John Stuart Mill, “the Saint of Rationalism,” was born (1806). Mill’s philosophy was influenced by the freethinker Jeremy Bentham and, to this day, John Stuart Mill’s name is almost synonymous with the philosophy of Utilitarianism. In his 1859 essay, On Liberty, Mill masterfully details why free speech is a logical necessity and most profoundly influenced yours truly: “First, if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility. Secondly, though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied. Thirdly, even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds. And not only this, but, fourthly, the meaning of the doctrine itself will be in danger of being lost, or enfeebled, and deprived of its vital effect on the character and conduct: the dogma becoming a mere formal profession, inefficacious for good, but cumbering the ground, and preventing the growth of any real and heartfelt conviction, from reason or personal experience.”

Also on May 20, but 213 years ago, the prolific French writer, Honoré de Balzac was born (1799). Sometimes ironically called “the Christ of Modern Art,” his radical Rationalism pervades all Balzac’s work. Indeed, the work for which he is chiefly known, a prodigious collection of novels and short stories giving a view of French life in city and country called The Human Comedy, which he conceived in 1830, was patterned on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but with an obviously secular worldview. In an 1836 short story, “The Atheist’s Mass,” Balzac describes his main character, Dr. Desplein, as having an “atheism … like that of many scientific men… such as religious people declare to be impossible. This opinion could scarcely exist otherwise in a man who was accustomed from his youth to dissect the creature above all others … to hunt through all his organs without ever finding the individual soul, which is indispensable to religious theory. …

Monday, May 21, but 324 years ago, the English essayist, critic, satirist and poet Alexander Pope was born (1688). The son of a Catholic convert, and in spite of the anti-Catholic prejudice of the time, Pope became one of the brightest lights of the Enlightenment. By the time he published his Essay on Man (1733), Pope had abandoned Catholicism, and begun associating with skeptics. In his Essay on Man we find proof of Pope’s Deism: “Know thou thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man.” Pope was temperate in an age of heavy drinking and drug use, as well as kind and generous to friends – among whom he counted Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels. Although the Catholic Encyclopedia claims him for one of the faithful, in an earlier age, a Deist of Pope’s beliefs would have been tried and either burned or hanged for impiety. Today, no longer having the power to do that, the Catholic Church lovingly takes him in his arms, so long at it can call him a Catholic poet. It was Alexander Pope who wrote, “To err is human, to forgive divine.”

Tuesday, May 22, but 199 years ago, German Romantic composer Richard Wagner was born (1813). Wagner was largely self-taught in music. He is justly criticized for his anti-Semitism, but that Adolph Hitler agreed with Wagner in this respect is not Wagner’s fault. Yet opera (Music Drama) was never the same after Wagner. His librettos, most of which he wrote himself, were chiefly based on Germanic traditions and legends, so his investment in Christian theology was slight: one critic said that Wagner was “a Christian in a large sense, but not a man of the Church,” and that he had “little taste for the otherworldly speculations of dogmatic theology.” Wagner subscribed to the Atheistic views of German philosopher Karl Feuerbach, but had a sentimental regard for Christian mythology. Therefore, Nietzsche’s attack on Wagner for reverting to Christianity was unfair: Wagner wrote his most powerful music in his Ring years, when he was an Atheist.

Wednesday, May 23, under the sign of Gemini, which places the date between 18 May and 17 June, but 747 years ago, the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri, was born (1265). Dante is chiefly remembered for his three-part poem, the Divine Comedy, written in vernacular Italian when most writers used Latin. What is telling about the Divine Comedy is that it was the first book written in Christian Europe since Augustine’s City of God (completed in 426) which any but a professor of literature now reads – including the pagan epic Beowulf (c. 725). Think about it! In nearly 900 years of the Ages of Faith, there was nothing written, inspired by Christian civilization, that is now considered of literary merit. There is no comparable dry period of world literature, before or since. The Catholic Encyclopedia claims Dante for the Church, but it is dishonest to claim, as the Catholic Encyclopedia does, that Dante’s “theological position as an orthodox Catholic has been amply and repeatedly vindicated,” when there are numerous and important doctrinal differences in his greatest work. But Dante’s standing as a precursor of the Reformation, and as a giant of early Italian poetry, is beyond debate.

Thursday date, May 24, but 168 years ago, Samuel Morse received the message “What hath God wrought,” which inaugurated long-distance coded communication over the first telegraph line strung from Baltimore, Maryland, to an astonished Congress at the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol (1844). The four words are the coda to a bible verse in Numbers 23:23. “What hath God wrought” seems a peculiar reference, but considered in context, the choice of the biblical line is better understood: Samuel Morse (1791-1872) was an organizer and polemicist of the anti-immigrant and anti-Roman Catholic “Nativist” movement of the mid-19th century. Moreover, more than a decade before the American Civil War, Morse came down on the wrong side of history in defending the institution of slavery in the United States as divinely sanctioned. So “What hath God wrought” comes from the same source that propagates bigotry and oppression. Giving credit to God for a work of man may in some circles be a sign of humility, but it is better described as a characteristic of intellectual slavery. It deflects credit to praise God for what man has wrought, without any measure of help from skygods.

Friday, May 25, brings us three famous freethinkers—

English actor Sir Ian McKellen was born on this date 73 years ago (1939). In addition to his many theatrical roles, McKellen showed up in memorable film roles, such as the Middle Earth wizard Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, based on the books by J.R.R. Tokein. The films somehow dodged much of the fundamentalist Christian outrage consequent to the Harry Potter films. “[M]aybe Tolkien’s work is relatively immune from Christian attacks because of his own Catholic faith,” mused McKellen in 2002, “On the other hand, an atheist friend of mine said how refreshing it was to see a film about good and evil which doesn’t link morality to religion.” In a 1996 profile, McKellen said, “I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.”

On May 25, 77 years ago, Canadian novelist W.P. Kinsella was born (1935). A writer of baseball fiction, Kinsella’s bestselling 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe, was made into the very successful 1989 motion picture Field of Dreams. Kinsella won the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame’s Jack Graney Award for Shoeless Joe. Many of Kinsella’s novels and stories have supernatural elements. Even so, he is reported to be a member of American Atheists by the British Columbia Humanist Association. In the 1996 book Brave Souls: Writers and Artists Wrestle with God, Love, Death and the Things that Matter, by fellow Canadian Douglas Todd, W.P. Kinsella is profiled as an atheist.

On May 25, 209 years ago, American poet, essayist and moralist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born (1803). After graduating Harvard in 1821, and teaching for a few years, Emerson was ordained into the Unitarian ministry. Six years later he resigned over doctrinal differences to form the group coming to be known as Transcendentalists, a company of writers and thinkers expressing an ethical idealism. The author of such well-known essays as “Self-Reliance,” “Circles,” “The Poet” and “Experience,” Emerson repudiated even the amorphous Unitarian God and believed instead in a vaguely Pantheistic “Over-Soul.” Emerson also rejected the idea of personal immortality.

Today, Saturday, May 26, but 365 years ago, the first witch was hanged in America for the crime of witchcraft (1647). Alse Young was arrested, tried for this capital offense in Windsor, Connecticut, and hanged at Meeting House Square in Hartford, on what is now the site of the Old State House. There is no further record of Young’s trial or the specifics of the charge, only that Alse Young was a woman, as 80% of those executed for witchcraft were, and that her execution anticipated the 1692 Salem witch trials by some 45 years. There is no doubt that theologians reasoned, after the line from Leviticus, that “If the All-wise God punishes his creatures with tortures infinite in cruelty and duration, why should not his ministers, as far as they can, imitate him?” Consequently, torture was a favorite method, not for finding the truth of witchcraft, because witchcraft never contained any, but for quite effectively extracting confessions, because people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Witchcraft jurisprudence itself anticipated the anti-communist purges of the 1950s in the US: To confess to witchcraft was to earn a life sentence in jail; to deny the charge often resulted in a death sentence. The crime of witchcraft was not prosecuted in Connecticut after 1715, but the stain of execution for the imaginary crime of witchcraft remains.

We can look back, but the Golden Age of Freethought is now. You can find full versions of these pages in Freethought history at the links in the American Heathen blog, which take you to my blog, FreethoughtAlmanac.com.

(The following is a transcript of a segment by John Mill. John is a noted free thought advocate and broadcaster. “This Week In Freethought” airs on my American Heathen® internet radio show. Air date of this particular segment: 05/19/12)

Here’s your Week in Freethought History: This is more than just a calendar of events or mini-biographies – it’s an affirmation that we as freethinkers are neither unique nor alone in the world, no matter how isolated and alone we may feel at times.

Last Sunday, May 13, but 440 years ago, was the election of Pope Gregory XIII at age 70 (1572). The former Ugo Boncompagni was noted for his attempt to force Catholicism back onto the intransigent Protestants – indeed, he struck a gold medal commemorating the massacre of Huguenots on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 1572. But Gregory XIII is also remembered in history for one innovation: the reform of the calendar that now bears his name. Catholic Europe, and especially the vehemently anti-Protestant Gregory, saw the Gregorian calendar as a weapon in the Counter-Reformation, a singularly stupid strategy. As a result, Protestant countries in particular, including the United States, took centuries to adopt the new calendar and enter a more astronomically accurate age.

Last Tuesday, May 15, but 143 years ago, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) was created by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – two famous Freethinkers (1869). The group joined with a less radical sister group and, on August 18, 1920, got the 19th Amendment ratified, giving women in the US the right to vote. There are still some countries, mostly Muslim, that don’t allow either sex to vote, but the trend is clear for the evolution of all other rights for women: they begin with a vote. Where were the Christian churches in this debate? Before the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a peasant woman in both Catholic and Protestant countries, was not a person. A husband could beat his wife, or sell her, take all her property and her children. Few occupations outside of wife and mother (or prostitute) were open to women. But when the churches realized that most of the reform was coming from atheists, agnostics and Quakers, they soon discovered God favored equality.

Last Wednesday, May 16, would have been the 100th birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning American author “Studs” Terkel (1912). Terkel received the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1985 for The Good War. He has also written such memorable oral histories as Hard Times (1970) and Working (1974). Born Jewish, this self-described “guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder” considered himself an atheist. In a 2001 Rolling Stone interview, Terkel said, “I think of myself as an agnostic, but an agnostic is really a cowardly atheist.”

It was also on, May 16, but 121 years ago, that Pope Leo XIII issued the encyclical Rerum novarum, on the “Condition of Labor,” about the relations of employer and employee (1891). That the churches provided any service whatsoever to working people until the 20th century, aside from relieving them under false pretenses of much of their hard-earned money, is about as phony a claim as that of faith-healers. “Let it be taken for granted,” wrote Leo, “that remuneration should be sufficient to maintain the wage-earner in reasonable and frugal comfort.” But when asked to define just what such a “living wage” should be, Leo fell mute. Worse, in 1931 Pius XI issued the encyclical Quadragesimo anno, which (¶¶ 91-94, 133) endorsed the Fascist-Corporate State. The Nazis eagerly complied, as did many other (mostly Catholic) countries. So, without God’s help, workers had to fight for and win the things we take for granted today: the eight-hour day, a five-day work week, overtime pay, workers compensation, retirement, health care and, most especially, the right to organize.

Last Thursday, May 17, was the 41st anniversary of the opening of the musical Godspell in New York (1971). Godspell ran for 2,651 performances on Broadway and features the parables and lessons of the Gospel according to Matthew, rather than the life of Jesus. The lessons in Godspell, are surprisingly secular; the parables are of the simple-minded 1970s variety: a gentle Jesus preaches virtuous behavior, adoration of God, doing good works, promoting justice and mercy, and rejecting materialism – without the inherent irony that, if you reject materialism, you pretty much guarantee you’ll never have anything material to reject! None of these things, except for loving God, requires a belief in the supernatural. However, we know that hell awaits the unbeliever because the song, “Learn Your Lessons Well,” threatens “You better pay attention, / Build your comprehension, / There’s gonna be a quiz at your ascension. / Not to mention any threat of hell, / But if you’re smart you’ll learn your lessons well!” In a bizarre twist for any Christian, Godspell ends with the crucifixion – but there is no mention of a resurrection!

Yesterday, May 18, would have been the 140th birthday of British mathematician, philosopher and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (1872). His chief work was the Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, co-authored by Alfred North Whitehead. Throughout his life, Russell was an outspoken critic of religion. In Why I Am Not a Christian, he wrote, “You find as you look round the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, … every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized Churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the … Christian religion … has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.”

Today, May 19, but 476 years ago, was the date that Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was executed for adultery (1536). King Henry married her, secretly, in early 1533, when she was pregnant with the future Queen Elizabeth. But for Henry, an heir was not good enough: Anne failed to produce a male heir. It is instructive to note that adultery was treated by ancient civilizations as a property crime, with punishment benefiting only an injured husband. The biblical story of Potiphar’s wife was adapted from the Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers” to illustrate a similar condemnation in the Old Testament. Adultery is addressed by the Seventh Commandment, but, outside of fundamentalist Christian or Muslim circles, the penalties for adultery are not so drastic, if there are any at all. In fact, our modern, secular society sees adultery rarely punished in law, except as grounds for divorce. And the injury is considered equally grievous for a husband or a wife. Yet the “property crime” mentality persists, as evidenced in the 2002 film Unfaithful, in which the aggrieved husband kills his wife’s lover but not his wife. And in the case of Anne Boleyn, one might think divorce a lesser crime than execution, but that wouldn’t have been the “Christian” thing to do!

We can look back, but the Golden Age of Freethought is now. You can find full versions of these pages in Freethought history at the links in the American Heathen blog, which take you to my blog, FreethoughtAlmanac.com.