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: 05/12/12)

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 was the 51st birthday of American actor and director George Clooney (1961). The nephew of the singer and actress Rosemary Clooney (1928-2002), he is also the cousin of actor Miguel Ferrer (b. 1955). Clooney was profiled in the Washington Post in 1997 and told writer Sharon Waxman, “I don’t believe in Heaven and Hell. I don’t know if I believe in God. All I know is that as an individual, I won’t allow this life – the only thing I know to exist – to be wasted.”

Last Sunday May 6, but 156 years ago, the Viennese psychoanalyst – and much-caricatured icon of psychoanalysis – Sigmund Freud was born (1856). Freud founded modern psychoanalysis and guided the systematic study of neuroses out of the supernatural realm of demon-possession and into the science of physical causes of mental maladies. And Freud turned the old theory on its head, considering religion the disease rather than the cure of mental problems. In 1927, Freud wrote, “Religion … comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amnesia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” In a letter to Charles Singer, Freud wrote, “Neither in my private life nor in my writings, have I ever made a secret of being an out-and-out unbeliever.”

Last Monday, May 7, brought us birthdays of four famous Freethinkers—

It was on May 7, 172 years ago, that composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский) was born (1840). Though he composed sacred as well as secular music, Tchaikovsky was a secret Freethinker. In a letter to his brother Modest, he wrote that he had been reading Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and remarked, “I think there is no more sympathetic personality in all the work of literature. A hero and martyr to his art. And so wise! I have found some astonishing answers to my questionings as to God and religion in his book.” Flaubert was an Atheist.

It was on May 7, 179 years ago, that German composer Johannes Brahms was born (1833). Brahms also was equally adept at composing sacred and secular music. And he was an apostate from Christianity. His letters to his friend Heinrich von Herzogenberg (1843-1900), who was likewise a Freethinker, show that Brahms was an agnostic. The lyrics of the first of his Four Serious Songs express his disbelief in personal immortality: “For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts, as the one dieth, so dieth the other. All go unto one place; all are of the dust and all turn to dust again. Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?”

Last Monday was the 200th anniversary of the birth of English poet Robert Browning (1812). A well educated man from a wealthy family, Browning was able to emancipate himself from Christian belief by the time he was 18, although he remained a Theist. “Who knows most,” said Browning, “doubts most.” And, 34 years later, in a poem called “Gold Hair,” he wrote, “The candid incline to surmise of late / that the Christian faith may be false, I find.” His writings speak much of God, but Browning himself admitted, “I am no Christian.”

And born on May 7, 301 years ago, was the Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711). Hume professed a belief in God. However, when he applied the scientific method to determining how knowledge is acquired, and formulated the theory that all knowledge is subjective, he pretty much undercut the basis for even Deism. In his Natural History of Religion, he wrote, “Examine the religious principles which have, in fact, prevailed in the world, and you will scarcely be persuaded that they are anything but sick men’s dreams.” Hume was friends with Adam Smith and James Boswell. It was Boswell who attended him as Hume lay dying in 1776 and, hoping to convert him at last, was frustrated when Hume said flatly that “the morality of every religion was bad” and that “when he heard a man was religious, he concluded that he was a rascal.”

It was 275 years ago last Tuesday, May 8, that English historian and MP Edward Gibbon was born (1737). His father died in 1770, leaving Gibbon enough money to begin writing the first volume of his masterwork, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared in 1776-1788. It was Gibbon’s aim to elevate history above “the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind,” and to wrest the study of the past from clerical confines. He outraged the clerics of his time by describing Christianity as a factor that hastened the decay of Ancient Rome. Gibbon wrote, “… the church and even the state were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny, and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.” Although Gibbon is accused of Atheism and of bias against religion, in his master work he is more charitable toward Christianity than it deserves.

It was 52 years ago last Wednesday, May 9, that the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first oral contraceptive for women (1960). The effect on sexual freedom for women, a freedom until that time enjoyed only by men, was astonishing. The pill was envisioned by legendary birth control crusader Margaret Sanger. Sanger was in her 80s in 1953 when she met with Roman Catholic Dr. Gregory Pincus (1903-1967). She gave him $150,000 and tasked him to research and develop an oral contraceptive for women that was safe and effective. In defiance of his church, and amid much negative publicity for attempting to thwart God’s will – a will Sanger once described as “biological slavery” – Dr. Pincus succeeded. The reaction of the churches was predictably punitive. The reaction of the Catholic Church in particular was to cobble together reasons why “artificial” forms of birth control were bad and “natural” birth control – also known as death – was good. The result, an encyclical from Pope Paul VI in 1968, known as Humanae Vitae (Human Life), was a masterpiece of mendacity and slippery scholarship. In fact, the modern world, with its longer lives, survival of women through their childbearing years and material prosperity, is only possible through such “artificial” impositions on God’s plan: The contraceptive pill, and that other artificial stuff humans created are all that stand between a humane habitation of planet Earth and devastation by overpopulation.

Last Thursday, May 10, was the 79th anniversary in Berlin that about 20,000 anti-Nazi, Jewish-authored books were burned during a student rally as the Nazis rose to power in Germany (1933). This particular suppression of free speech and ideas was a tactic of Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda. But the burning of books, often culminating in the burning of people (as Heinrich Heine famously observed), is an old idea. Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang (秦始皇) – who created and then buried the famous Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi’an, China – before he died in 210 BCE, ordered the burning of most extant books. Just to be sure, he had the leading scholars executed, too. In Christendom, John Calvin was probably the most efficient when, in 1600, he burned Michael Servetus at the stake for heresy, and “around his waist were tied a large bundle of manuscripts and a thick octavo printed book.” In early March 2001, about 200 right-wing Hindus burned Korans in New Delhi. In May 1981 Sinhalese police officers burned the second largest library in Asia, in northern Sri Lanka, destroying 97,000 books. The largest single act of book burning in modern history took place in August 1992, when the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo was attacked by Serb nationalist forces, who immolated the National and University Library of Bosnia, destroying a priceless collection of over 1.5 million volumes. But it’s the same old story as when the Nazis burned books on this date 79 years ago: “We know better than you do what’s best for you to read.”

Last Friday, May 11 was the birthday of two famous Freethinkers—

It was on May 11, 94 years ago, that American Nobel-laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman was born (1918). In 1965, along with two other scientists, Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics for expanding the understanding of quantum electrodynamics. In his spare time he translated Mayan hieroglyphics – what were left after Bishop Diego de Landa destroyed most of them in 1562. After the Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, Feynman reluctantly joined the Rogers Commission which led to the finding that faulty O-rings were the principle cause of the shuttle explosion that killed seven astronauts. It was Richard Feynman who once said, “God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. … God is always associated with those things that you do not understand.”

Also on May 11, but 124 years ago, the American songwriter who gave us “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” Irving Berlin, was born (1888). He emigrated from Russia at the age of five and spent his next 95 years becoming one of the most celebrated film and stage songwriters in US history. In her biography of her father, daughter Mary Ellin Barrett refers to her father’s “agnosticism,” and describes him as a “nonbeliever.” Irving Berlin follows a long tradition of freethinkers who used the religious vocabulary familiar to the majority.

Today, May 12, brings us the birthdays of three more famous Freethinkers—

It was 75 years ago today that American stand-up comedy Hall of Famer George Carlin was born (1937). Carlin minced no words about his Atheism, as he said in 1999:

“When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time! But He loves you. And He needs money!”

Notable as a social critic, after his inspiration, Lenny Bruce, Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” routine brought about the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, in which the Court affirmed the government’s power to abridge free speech on the public airwaves when is includes “indecent” material. George Carlin summed up his feeling about Christianity by saying, “I would never want to be a member of a group whose symbol was a guy nailed to two pieces of wood.”

It was also 105 years ago today that the First Lady of Cinema, Katharine Hepburn, was born (1907). She was the daughter of a doctor and a suffragette, both of whom always encouraged her to speak her mind and develop it fully. Hepburn distinguished herself in strong leading-lady roles. From Morning Glory in 1933, which won her her first Oscar – to On Golden Pond in 1981, which won her her fourth Oscar, Hepburn was considered a national treasure. “I’m an atheist, and that’s it,” Hepburn told the Ladies’ Home Journal in 1991. “I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.” And, as for religion in politics, said Katharine Hepburn, “Our Constitution was not intended to be used by … any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us.”

And it was 192 years ago today that English nurse Florence Nightingale was born (1820). Her father believed women should get an education, so Nightingale learned Italian, Latin, Greek, history, and mathematics. During the Crimean War she used her mathematics training to invent a statistical model to plot the incidence of preventable deaths in the military, developing the “polar-area diagram” to dramatize the needless deaths caused by unsanitary conditions. “Were there none who were discontented with what they have,” said Nightingale, “the world would never reach anything better.” Few who know of her life realize that she despised the churches and was an advanced Freethinker. “I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low,” said Nightingale, “that he is not a Romanist or an Anglican – or a Unitarian.” For most of her ninety years, Florence Nightingale pushed for reform of the British military health-care system and brought increased respect to the nursing profession.

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 segmentby 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: 05/05/12)

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, April 29, is the feast-day of the Abbot of Cluny known to the Catholic Church as St. Hugh the Great. He was born into a noble French family in 1024 and died on the 28 of April 1109, when the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny was 200 years old. The period in which Abbot Hugh lived was the beginning point of the so-called Age of Chivalry! As Thomas Bulfinch describes it, “Chivalry … framed an ideal of the heroic character, combining invincible strength and valor, justice, modesty, loyalty to superiors, courtesy to equals, compassion to weakness, and devotedness to the Church.” In fact, the next 300 years of Christendom were characterized in the noble and knightly classes (and both sexes) as steeped in corruption, theft, violence, and every imaginable (and some unimaginable) sexual deviations, including rape, incest, pederasty, prostitution and general sexual license. This behavior was so generalized that, time and again, the contemporary chroniclers of not only France, but Spain, England and Germany complain of it. The only behavior that was not tolerated was infidelity to the Church!

Last Monday, April 30, but 223 years ago, George Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States (1789). It is significant, in light of those who would argue that the U.S. was conceived as a Christian nation, that Washington made many euphemistic references to God in his inaugural address, but never – in this address, or in any of his writings – does he make direct reference to Jesus Christ. Every contemporary who knew of his church habits agrees that Washington was never seen to accept communion, and indeed, his wife wrote that he left the church on the occasions when communion was offered. As president, Washington addressed religion with the tolerance we would expect from the leader of a religiously diverse nation. In answer to a congregation that objected to the “godless” US Constitution, Washington wrote, “The path of true piety is so plain as to require but little political direction…. In the progress of morality and science, to which our government will give every furtherance, we may confidently expect the advancement of true religion and the completion of our happiness…” – without defining true piety and true religion!

It was last Tuesday, May 1, but 126 years ago, that the first “Labor Day” was celebrated in the US (1886). It is known now as May Day and no longer celebrated as a recognition of the workers who create the wealth that supports our capitalist economy. From the 13th century of the classical era, where worker protections were built into the Code of Hammurabi, to the ancient Greek and Roman colleges, which were unions for workers, the value of labor has been recognized by most advanced civilizations. When the Empire fell, the social protections built up for workers disintegrated. Only a quarter of the population in Ancient Rome were slaves, but the Christian Church saw no reason to interfere when four-fifths of workers then became agricultural serfs. This persisted from 600 to 1100. Then political and economic changes began to create a middle class between the lords and the peasants. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions met and voted to designate May 1, 1886, as the day for a general strike to demand an 8-hour day in the U.S. The May Day strike itself was peaceful until, as the strikers over the next few days swelled to 65,000 in Chicago, and industry got nervous that workers might actually succeed, the police were called in. Someone threw a bomb among them. A riot followed and then the Haymarket Massacre ensued, in which police shot and killed several strikers and wounded 200. Without compelling evidence, eight labor leaders were arrested, and all but two were executed by hanging. The Haymarket Massacre forever tarnished May 1 as a day to celebrate labor in the US – although the day is still a holiday in at least 110 other countries!

It was last Wednesday, May 2 (N.S.), but 283 years ago, that the future Catherine the Great of Russia (Екатерина II Великая) was born (1729). She was crowned Catherine II in 1762 – after deposing her own husband, whom she married at age 15 by political arrangement. She was well-read and selected able advisors, so Catherine proved more than suited to the task of ruling the largest empire in Europe. Her goal was to complete the Westernization of the Russian Empire that had ceased 37 years earlier at the death of another Romanov Emperor, Peter the Great (Пётр Вели́кий, 1672-1725). Empress Catherine was initially sympathetic with the French Revolution and its intellectual leadership: she corresponded with Voltaire and d’Alembert and invited Diderot to settle in Russia. A skeptic with advanced humanitarian ideals, in her letters she professed Deism and scorned the “mummeries” of the Russian Church to which she was converted. But after the peasant rising under Pugachev (1773-74), and having heard of the excesses following the French Revolution, by 1790 she became fearful of popular revolt. Catherine imposed repressive measures to achieve stability, which in turn alienated the educated in Russian society.

It was last Thursday, May 3, but 543 years ago, that Niccolò Machiavelli was born in what is now Italy (1469). Although it was not published until after his death, what may have helped his career in Florence was a little work Niccolò wrote in 1513: The Prince (Il Principe). Based on his own experiences under two monarchies, The Prince was a survival guide for despots. It advised against virtues that could be harmful and in favor of vices that could helpful. Although it is not necessary to actually have all the virtues, argued Niccolò, it is most important to “appear merciful, faithful, humane, religious, upright…” and that, “in order to maintain the state,” it is necessary “to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion.” Though no stranger to such hypocrisy, the Catholic Encyclopedia pronounces The Prince an “immoral work.” Making the nickname of the Devil “Old Nick,” based on Niccolò Machiavelli’s name, somehow brings to mind pots and kettles!

Friday was the birthday of two famous Freethinkers—

It was last Friday, May 4, but 216 years ago, that the father of American education, Horace Mann was born (1796). He abandoned his rigid Calvinist upbringing for Unitarianism at age 23 and contrived to get his own education before becoming an educator himself. He created the first Board of Education in Massachusetts and recommended a comprehensive public school system, along secular lines, as a great cultural and national equalizer. Many thought this approach anti-Christian. Mann was called to be the first president of Antioch College. He accepted in 1854 because of Antioch’s non-sectarian, coeducational status – the college accepted women and black people on an equal footing with white males, something unique in the nation. But the founding Christian Church thought Mann a little too secular and withdrew its funding. This deficit Mann replaced by persuading the Unitarian Church to help. The Dictionary of American Biography describes Horace Mann as, “a Puritan without a theology.”

It was also last Friday, May 4, but 187 years ago, that Thomas Henry Huxley was born (1825). Largely self-educated, as a medical apprentice, Huxley signed on as assistant surgeon with the H.M.S. Rattlesnake, to chart the seas around Australia and New Guinea. It was an opportunity much like the one Darwin had aboard The Beagle, and, as with Darwin, the experience changed his life. In 1859, when Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, Huxley read it and at once remarked, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.” He wrote to the author, “I finished your book yesterday… As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite… And as to the curs which will bark and yelp – you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which … may stand you in good stead – …I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.” His defense of Darwin’s theories, and especially to their application to the evolution of the human species, earned him the nickname, “Darwin’s Bulldog.” Huxley invented the term “agnostic” to describe his view that the mind cannot reach realities beyond the senses. He disdained Christian doctrines.

Today brings us the birthdays of two more famous Freethinkers—

It was on May 5, but 194 years ago, that the theorist of modern Socialism, Karl Marx, was born (1818). Marx’s politics continually got him into trouble with the police, so he was compelled to flee from country to country. He and Friedrich Engels settled in London, with Engels supporting Marx, while the two of them collaborated on the Communist Manifesto – published in 1848, in time to be read in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As for religion, Marx’s ideas were more nuanced than the popular brief quotation. Marx wrote, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.” Even with the triumph of capitalism over communism, every civilized nation today – except the United States – provides relief to workers from the capitalist excesses about which Marx warned the world 150 years ago.

It was also on May 5, but 201 years ago, that American chemist and scholar John William Draper was born (1811). It was his 1874 History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, preceding the two-volume work of Andrew Dickson White’s by 11 years, that stirred the notion that religion and science are irreconcilable. In his introduction, he writes, “The antagonism we … witness between Religion and Science is the continuation of a struggle that commenced when Christianity began to attain political power. … [F]aith is in its nature unchangeable, stationary; Science is in its nature progressive; and eventually a divergence between them … must take place. … As to Science, … she has never subjected any one to mental torment, physical torture, least of all to death, for the purpose of upholding or promoting her ideas.” Although Draper believed in God and life after death, his skepticism toward organized religion made him a Freethinker until the day he died.

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.