I
From Philosopedia
IAGO Why, instead of always being equated with Good, is God not equated with Evil? In Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice (c. 1602-1604), Iago is depicted as an older soldier, bitterly resentful of being passed over for promotion and now planning revenge. A villainous character, he exemplifes, in the words of Bertrand Russell, “how many of the villains in Shakespeare are Italians. Iago is perhaps the most prominent instance.” Coleridge laments Iago’s soliloquy, which reveals “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity—how awful it is!” Verdi’s Otello (1887) further delineates Iago’s evil character. From a philosophic viewpoint, particularly in light of the obvious pain observed throughout the world, not only by humans but also by other animals, a case can be made that the concept of God the Creator is that God is the consummate Iago. Would a loving and omnipotent God allow the Holocaust? Murder? War? Disasters such as earthquakes? Physical imperfections? Inequalities? Pain and suffering? Freethinkers who have been able to avoid being inculcated with the good-evil concept, or have somehow overcome its widespread acceptance, use a different terminology, one based upon ethics. (See entries for Ethics and for Pain.)
IBERO-AMERICAN COMMISSION The Ibero-American Commission is a group of humanist leaders in Spanish-speaking countries of South, Central, and North America. On the Web: <http://idt.net/~wasm/asibehu>.
Ibn Al-Haytham [or Alhazen] (965-c. 1040) An Arab mathematician born in Basra, Persia, Ibn al-Haytham made his career in Cairo, supporting himself by copying scientific manuscripts. Although he wrote extensively, only his works on optics, astronomy, and mathematics survive. Optics, relying on experiment rather than on authority, introduced the idea that light rays emanate in straight lines in all directions from every point on a luminous surface. The work influenced Kepler and Descartes. As a cosmologist, al-Haytham attempted to find mechanisms by which the heavenly bodies could be shown to follow the paths determined by Ptolemaic mathematics. Ptolemy had used math and reason to develop him views about vision, whereas Aristotle had only offered conjectures. Al-Haytham’s findings, by shifting from authority to observation, devastated Aristotle’s guesses on the subject. Doubters were simply asked to stare at the sun or any other bright object. Doing so resulted in their eyes being burned, and therefore without appeal to geometry or anything else he showed the light started outside the eye and reflected into it. In mathematics Al-Haytham elucidated and extended Euclid’s Elements and suggested a proof of the parallel postulate. {Richard Powers, The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999}
Ibn Rushd: See entry for Averroës.
Ibry, David (20th Century) Ibry has written for Humanist in Canada and in 1994 gave a lecture concerning “How Humanist Started” to the Ethical Society of London (UK). He edited Exodus to Humanism: Jewish Identity Without Religion (1999). {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1997}
Ibsen, Henrik (1828—1906) Ibsen, the Norwegian author of The Enemy of the People (1882) and Hedda Gabler (1890), was an open unbeliever who had written strong humanist materials in a country with such a strong Lutheran church. He discarded orthodoxy in his later teens but was quietly skeptical until 1871, when he met Georg Brandes. A few years later, to express his new militant mood, he wrote The Emperor and the Galilaean. Far in advance of his time, he was condemned by society for revealing truths which society preferred to keep hidden. A Doll’s House (1879) is a powerful statement of feminism and women’s rights. An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck (1884) take up the effects of true and false idealism. Robertson cites all his later work as showing himself to be a thoroughgoing naturalist. Ibsen’s influence upon 20th century drama is profound, and his dramas continue to be performed widely. To the Danish critic Georg Brandes, Ibsen once wrote, “Bigger things than the state will fall. All religion will fall.” At the time of his death, for he had become debilitated by a series of strokes, his masseur was asked about Ibsen’s condition. “Not too bad. He’s sworn a couple of times,” the masseur noted. And when a nurse remarked to friends in his room that he seemed to be getting better, Ibsen spoke up: “On the contrary.” According to biographer Michael Meyer, it was Ibsen’s last correction. {BDF; CE; CL; JM; JMR; PUT; RAT; RE}
ICELANDIC HUMANISTS An associate member of the IHEU is the Icelandic Ethical Humanist Association (Sidmennt), Aesufell 4 2F, 111 Reykjavik, Iceland. The president is Hope Knutsson, an American from New York who married an Icelander and has lived in the country for twenty-three years. The group publishes a newsletter. An estimated two-thirds of the population of Iceland wants a separation between the church and the state. Frettabref Sidmenntar [the Sidmennt Newsletter] is on the Web in Icelandic: <www.islandia.is/sidmennt>. Andrew Greeley, an outspoken Catholic priest, sociologist, and author of best-selling novels that by some have been termed “salacious,” was asked about celibacy, whether priests have always practiced it. “For much of Catholic history,” he responded, “celibacy was only a rule in theory. A friend of mine tells me a third of the population of Iceland are descendants of the last Catholic archbishop. [Laughs] Celibacy as a norm really only became typical after the Council of Trent.” Mikael Karlsson, of the University of Iceland, is on the Executive Committee of the Hume Society, a group that engages in scholarly activity concerning David Hume. {Modern Maturity, May-June 1996}
ICHTHUS The fish symbol, also known as ichthus, appeared in the second century of the Common Era and was used as a secret sign of Christianity. The first Greek letters of the phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” spell out “fish” in Greek. Whatever or whoever feeds on fish is ichthyophagous, and serious students of fish are ichthyologists, not theologists.
ICONOCLAST • Iconoclast, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reëdify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: “Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it.” —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
ICUU: See entry for International Council of Unitarians and Universalists.
IDAHO HUMANISTS • Humanists of Idaho, PO Box 44913, Boise, Idaho 83711. Contacts Chris Struble and John B. Harms. E-mail: <hoi@pobox.com>. On the Web: <http://www.freeyellow.com/members3/humanists>.
Ide, Arthur Frederick (20th Century)
Ide is one of the editors of Resurrection, Sex, and God: Essays on the Foundation of Faith (1990). An ex-Catholic and ex-theologian, he has written, Unzipped: The Popes Bare All (1987), in which he details some of the perversions, greed, and corruption of Roman popes. He also wrote The Qur’an on Woman, Marriage, Birth Control, and Divorce (1996).
IDEALISM • The idealist cannot be reformed; if he is driven out of his heaven, he makes an ideal out of his hell. —Friedrich Nietzsche
• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup. —H. L. Mencken
• An idealist is a more dangerous animal than the Philistine just as a man is a more dangerous animal than a sheep. —George Bernard Shaw
In philosophy, idealism is a view that mind and spiritual values are fundamental in the world as a whole. It is, therefore, opposed to naturalism and to materialism. Plato’s early idealism conceived a world in which reality was constituted by eternal ideas. George Berkeley in the eighteenth century referred the source of ideas to the individual’s consciousness. Immanuel Kant developed a transcendental idealism in which the phenomenal world of human understanding opposes a world of things-in-themselves. Other idealists have been Benedetto Croce, Frances Herbert Bradley, Ernst Cassirer, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. {CE; RE}
IDEOLOGY Bertrand Russell, among others, has complained that the habit “of teaching some one orthodoxy, political, religious or moral, has all kinds of bad effects.” As an example, he says that “the immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.” As to morals, “practically all men are unchaste at some time of their lives; clearly those who conceal this fact are worse than those who do not, since they add the guilt of hypocrisy.” Thus, “It is only to the hypocrites that teaching posts are open. So much for the effect of orthodoxy upon the choice and character of teachers.” Adding that ideology accompanies fanaticism, he laments that since 1914 there has been “anti-German fanaticism following the First World War, leading to the victory of the Nazis”; there was “anti-Semitic fanaticism, with the inevitable response of Zionist fanaticism”; and there was “Communist and anti-Communist fanaticism. While mankind remains in this temper, Lord Russell wrote in 1951, “the sort of cooperation required for the inauguration of world government is clearly out of the question.” {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell (1993).
IDIOT • Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling. The Idiot’s activity is not confined to any special field of thought or action, but “pervades and regulates the whole.” He has the last word in everything; his decision is unappealable. He sets the fashions of opinion and taste, dictates the limitations of speech, and circumscribes conduct with a dead line. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Ignell, Nils (1806—1864) Ignell, a Swedish rationalist, was brought up as a priest and his free views gave offense to many. He translated Renan’s Life of Jesus, which many believed was an affront to orthodox Christianity. {BDF; RAT}
IGNORANCE
• I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. —Thomas Carlyle
Rationalists are understandably concerned that “the cards have been stacked” against the scientific method of reasoning and free inquiry by historical developments and the control of religionists over much of citizenrys’ everyday activities. Among the many examples which rationalists cite are
• superstition and ignorance • believers’ faith in what they call “sacred” scriptures • pseudoscience that touts perpetual motion, parapsychology, U.F.O. abductions, quack medicine, ancient astronauts, bio-rhythm theories, cold fusion, astrology, psychic readings, fortune telling
Igwe, Leo (20th Century) Igwe is general coordinator of the Nigerian Humanist Movement (PO Box 25269, Mapo Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria).
Ihering, Hermann von (Born 1850) Ihering, a German zoologist, was director of the São Paolo Museum in Brazil. A special authority on the Mollusca, he was an editor of Revista do Museu Paulista. In Was Wir Ernst Haeckel Verdanken, Ihering records his high appreciation of Professor Haeckel and his Riddle of the Universe. {RAT}
IHEU: See entry for International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Ikhnaton (or Akhenaton) (Died c. 1354 B.C.E.) The oldest known monotheist? In Egypt, Ikhnaton was king of Egypt of the XVIII dynasty, son and successor of Amenhotep III. Upon becoming king, he changed his name to honor the god Aton, and because of his religious innovations has been called “the heretic king of Egypt.” First, he abandoned his early polytheism and became a monotheist. The sun, called Aton, was god, and god alone, and Ikhnaton declared he was Aton’s son. The new capital was named Akhetaton [the modern Tel-El-Amarna}, and new provincial capitals were founded in Nubia and Syria. Because the sun nourished everything, artists to show the power of the sun turned to scenes from nature. Akhenaton, because of his fanaticism, defaced all statues on which the previously greatest god, Amon, had appeared. This so infuriated large numbers of Egyptians that the cult of Ikhnaton / Akhenaton died and, with it, Egypt lost Nubia and Syria, provinces which he had seriously neglected. Joy Collier, in The Heretic Pharaoh (1972), mentions the most familiar relic today of that time, a bust of Ikhaton’s wife, Nefretete. His successors, Sakere and Tutankhaton (Ikhnaton’s son), inherited only Egypt and some of the upper valley, not Nubia and Syria. Tutankhaton, because his father had replaced Amon with Aton, changed his name to Tuthankamen, restored the name of Amon to monuments his father had defaced, and returned the capital to Thebes. McCabe complains that it is remarkable how, when King Tut’s tomb was discovered, apologists and others continued to pretend that the Hebrews had first introduced monotheism. However, it was Ikhnaten, five centuries before the first prophet appeared in Judaea, who first had imposed monotheism. {CE; RE}
Iles, George (1852—1942) Iles, an American writer, was a Canadian who in New York was an admirer of Ingersoll. An agnostic, Iles was editor of The Reader’s Guide on Economic, Social, and Political Science. He also edited Little Masterpieces of Science (6 volumes, 1902). {RAT}
Ilive, Jacob (c. 1705—1768) Ilive was an English printer and letter founder. He was prosecuted for blasphemy in Some Modest Remarks on the Late Bishop Sherlock’s Sermon and sentenced to two years in prison. While confined in the Clerkenwell House of Correction, he published some pamphlets exposing the bad condition of the prison and suggested means for its improvement. {BDF; FUK; RAT; RE}
ILLEGITIMACY “Illegitimacy,” in a definition by Ernest R. Mowrer, a professor who taught sociology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, “is the act of giving birth to a child out of wedlock. Ordinarily the child conceived out of wedlock is the consequence of illicit sexual relations. However, in some cultures, sexual intercourse is looked upon as a normal part of courtship and conception is regarded as a guarantee of the potential fertility of the marriage. Under these circumstances, the marriage is consummated and the position of the child is no different from one born in wedlock.” Mowrer notes, however, that Christians place a stigma upon such mothers as well as their children, who are called “bastards.” In Colonial America, for example, mothers like Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) were required to wear a symbol, the letter A, to warn people they were seeing an adulteress, the mother of a bastard. Partly because of Hawthorne’s novel, in which the bastard’s father turned out to be a fictional Puritan —minister, the severity of treatment for mother and child has diminished considerably. Bastards are now called by a milder term: “illegitimate children of unmarried mothers.” Nevertheless, particularly in smaller communities, pregnant unmarried women likely leave town in order to have their babies, some of whom are then placed for adoption and reared by foster parents. Some rural communities often sanction the compulsion of marriage between a couple about to give birth, and these have become colloquially known as “shot-gun” marriages. Most secular humanists, freethinkers, Friends, Unitarians, Universalists, and others who ordinarily celebrate all human births are more apt to make no distinctions between “legitimate” and “illegitimate births.” A number of states and communities sanction marriage without any initiating ceremony, so-called Common Law marriage, but this is considered an anachronism by the major organized religions. A sign of the change in attitude was French President François Mitterand’s retort when asked if he had an illegitimate daughter in addition to his two legitimate sons from his fifty-year-old marriage to his wife, Danielle: “Yes, I have a natural daughter. So what?” (See entries for Miriam Allen deFord and Patricia Thompson.) {CE}
ILLINOIS ATHEISTS, HUMANISTS, AND FREETHINKERS Illinois has the following groups:
• College of Lake County humanists are at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Dial An Atheist can be reached by telephoning (708) 506-9200. • Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (AEU), 1700 Maple, Evanston, Illinois. • Free Inquiry Network (ASHS), POB 2668, Glen Ellyn, Illinois 60138; (630) 469-1111; Jim Zaluba is its founder. E-mail: <fin@freeinquirynetwork.com>. On the Web: <http://www.freeinquirynetwork.com>. • Friends of Robert G. Ingersoll (Council for Secular Humanism), POB 5082, Peoria, Illinois 61601. • Independent Atheist, 1127 North College, Decatur, Illinois 62522. Jeff Frankel is its contact. • Humanist Association of Greater Chicago (AHA), 6439 Coach House Road, Lisle, Illinois 60532. Mike Werner is its contact. E-mail: <mwwerner@aol.com>. • Midwest Committee for Rational Inquiry, MCR-1 B-2792, Des Plaines, Illinois 60017. • Peoria Secular Humanists (ASHS), PO Box 994, Normal, Illinois 61761 (309) 452-8907; e-mail: <ahumanist@aol.com>. • Secular Humanist Society of Chicago, 1023 West Vernon Park (Suite H), Chicago, IL 60607; (312) 226-0420. E-mail: <mocekwalker@mw.sisna.com>. • Southern Illinois University at Carbondale: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • University of Chicago humanists on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
ILPES ILPES is a Costa Rican association, Instituto Latino Americano de Prevencion y Education en Salud (Latin American Institute for Health Education). Its director, Dr. Jacobo Schifter Sikora (Apartado 561, 1002 San Jose, Costa Rica), focuses on health problems, including sexually transmitted diseases, and AIDS.
Iltis, Hugh (1925- ) Iltis, a freethinker, is professor emeritus, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Concerned about the growing human population—when he was born the human population was 1.7 billion but has now become over 6 billion—Iltis in “Extinction Is Forever” in Resurgence wrote that
we must abandon the fallacies of agricultural hope, for it is not a question of raising more food, but of raising fewer people! If population growth is not curtailed voluntarilty, the brutal powers of the state (as in China) or the brutal catastrophes of nature (as in Africa’s Sahel) will surely do it for us.
IMAGINATION • Were it not for imagination, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess. —Samuel Johnson
• I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you, anyhow, I’d rather see than be one. —Gelett Burgess “The Purple Cow” (1895)
• Ah, yes, I wrote the “Purple Cow”— I’m sorry, now, I wrote it! But I can tell you, anyhow, I’ll kill you if you quote it. —Gelett Burgess (1866-1951) “Cinq Ans Aprés”
IMAGISM Imagism was a successor to the French Symbolist movement. Its credo, inspired by the critical views of T. E. Hulme, was formulated around 1912 by Ezra Pound in conjunction with fellow poets Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Richard Aldington, and F. S. Flint. In 1914 after Pound turned to “Vorticism, Amy Lowell, who scorned convention, took over the spiritual leadership of the group and became so influential Pound once referred to the group’s “Amy-gism.” The movement influenced the poetry of Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, and T. S. Eliot. Concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, freedom in the use of meter, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes characterized imagist poetry. H. D., however, included mysticism in her work. {OEL}
Imgault-Huart, Clément (Born 1854) Imbault-Huart was a French Orientalist with a knowledge of Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and modern Greek. He was appointed to the French embassies at Damascus and Constantinople. His La Religion du Bab (1889) is a study of Behaism. {RAT}
IMMACULATE ABIOGENESIS Abiogenesis refers to the supposed spontaneous origination of living organisms directly from lifeless matter. Anything immaculate, as in the Immaculate Conception, has no stain. Anyone believing in the concept is directed to the entry herein for Zyp.
IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
The immaculate conception is a quaint theological invention. As defined by Leo Ward, who once taught at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, it is “the doctrine that by Christ’s merits and in view of the fact that she was to be his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary was from the moment of her conception in St. Anne’s womb kept free from original sin.” Others, assuming that Joseph did not know who had impregnated his wife, find the theologians’ explanation a self-evident bastardization of the facts. In 1997, the Rev. Tissa Balasuriya in Sri Lanka was excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church for his “relativism” and for challenging the Immaculate Conception in his preaching. (See entry for Catholic Relativism.)
IMMACULATE DECEPTION • The Virgin Birth? Immaculate deception! —Anonymous
Immerman, Karl Leberecht (1796—1840) Immerman was a German poet and dramatist. For some years he was director of the Düsseldorf Theatre. Immerman followed Goethe in his pantheism, as shown in a poem “Merlin,” in his novel, Die Epigonon. (RAT; RE}
IMMORALITY • I wonder why murder is considered less immoral than fornication in literature. —George Moore
• Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time. —H. L. Mencken
• Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality. —Henry Fielding
• Immoral, adj. Inexpedient. Whatever in the long run and with regard to the greater number of instances men find to be generally inexpedient comes to be considered wrong, wicked, immoral. If man’s notions of right and wrong have any other basis than this of expedience; if they originated, or could have originated, in any other way; if actions have in themselves a moral character apart from, and nowise dependent on, their consequences—then all philosophy is a lie and reason a disorder of the mind. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
In 1998 when the President of the United States was accused of immorality—allowing oral sex with a female intern in the White House—the Christian right cited the Bible and demanded not only Bill Clinton’s impeachment but also his resignation. However, Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a New York City lawyer, disagreed with the Bible-quoting sexual McCarthyites (Daily News, 10 October 1998). “Nathan was brutal in his denunciation of King David for his adulterous affair with Bathsheba and for sending her husband, Uriah, to his death,” he noted, then continued:
When David admitted his guilt, Nathan told him God would spare his life but his unborn child would die. Nonetheless, God allowed David to remain king. After King Ahab had contrived to murder Naboth the Jezreelite to steal his vineyard, the prophet Elijah cursed him. Indeed, an unusual aside in Scriptures (I King 21:25-26) notes that “there never was anyone like Ahab, who committed himself to doing what was displeasing to the Lord. . . . He acted most abominably.” Yet after Ahab rent his clothes, put on sackcloth, fasted and “walked about subdued,” God told Elijah, “Because [Ahab] has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring distaster in his lifetime.”
In other words, Rosensaft concluded, “the concept of high crimes and misdemeanors was well understood by the prophets. Disobeying God when the safety of the nation was at stake was the biblical equivalent of an impeachable offense. Mere human frailty or moral failing was not.” Or, as freethinkers often say, “Beauty and immorality are in the eye of the beholder.”
IMMORTALITY • . . .the eternal life of the dead in our lives. —Playwright Harold Pinter
• Millions long for immortality who do not know what do do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
—Susan Ertz
• I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. —Woody Allen
In many religions and philosophies, immortality is an attribute of deathlessness ascribed to the soul. It is rare to find belief of the body, but immortality of the soul is a cardinal tenet of Islam and, although not essentially a Jewish idea, is held generally in Judaism. The ancient Greeks believed only the gods are truly immortal, although both they and the Romans believed in some possibility of an afterlife. The ancient Celts believed in immortality. Zoroastrianism posited immortality. However, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism generally considered individual immortality undesirable, believing instead in the reincarnation of men as a chain which eventually would lead to reunion with Nirvana, the infinite. In Christianity, the resurrection of the body (in the sense of survival of personality) is believed in, as well as immortality of the soul. William Ernest Hocking’s The Meaning of Immortality in Human Existence (1957) describes the Christian outlook. Paul Edwards, in “Kierkegaard and the ‘Truth’ of Christianity” [in A Modern Introduction to Philosophy (1973)], is critical of the Christian concept of the “proof” of immortality, and most non-believers use the word only in observing the connection a person has with his parents and their ancestors: “How like her great-grandmother she looks and acts.” Edwards also covers the subject in his Immortality (1992), as does Anthony Flew in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4. Lucretius, Hume, and Santayana held that the idea of nothingness before one’s birth is in principle no more difficult to imagine than that of nothingness after one’s living. “The fact of having been born,” wrote Santayana, is a bad augury for immortality.” For decades it has been known that a body’s mortality is mirrored on the cellular level of an immutable rule called the Hayflick limit. Dr. Leonard Hayflick, now of the University of California, San Francisco, discovered that when tissue cells are taken from the body and cultured in a laboratory dish, they grow and divide about fifty times—the number varies with the kind of tissue—then lapse into senescence. In 1998, Dr. Michael D. West of Geron and Advanced tell Technology announced that the Hayflick limit could be broken, leading to the speculation that biologists will one day be able to immortalize some of the body’s cells using the Geron method. Some scientists, in short, see an immortality in endlessly dividing cells, a practical application of which could be using the cells for organ repair. {CE; Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, 17 November 1998}
IMPERIALISM: See entry for Islamic Imperialism.
IMPIETY (of which Socrates was accused) • Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.
—Ambrose Bierce
The Devil’s Dictionary
• Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.” —Herbert Spencer
• When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway,
The post of honour is a private station.
—Joseph Addison
IMPOSSIBILITIES • Some things are possible. Some things, like herding cats, are simply impossible. —Anonymous
Imray, I. W. (Born 1802) Imray was an author who wrote in Carlile’s Republican and Lion. In 1828, his “Altamont,” an atheistic drama, was published. {BDF}
“IN GOD WE TRUST” “In God We Trust” was a phrase worn by Nazi God-fearing soldiers in Adolf Hitler’s battles while they fought their God-fearing Allied Army enemies. In 1996, in Gaylor v. United States of America, the United States Supreme Court ruled that it would not review a case brought by the Colorado chapter of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. That group had argued that the nation’s official motto implied a government endorsement of religion and sought to have the words removed from American coins and currency. A Federal trial judge and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier had rejected the suit, saying the words do not violate constitutional guidelines for the separation of church and state.
IN THE BEGINNING: See entries for Evolution, Genesis, Richard Hawkins, and RNA.
INCARNATION Incarnation is a Christian belief devised by theologians to the effect that the Son (the second person of the Trinity) was incarnated, or made flesh, in the person of Jesus in order to save the world from Original Sin. Freethinkers and humanists meet such a vapid concept with the utmost of incredulity.
INCEST “The incest taboo,” wrote Bertrand Russell in New Hopes for a Changing World (1951), “is perhaps the most successful example known of the victory of custom over instinct. The great majority of mankind at the present day go through life without at any moment experiencing any conscious impulse towards incest. There are, it is true, savage tribes where the impulse is still difficult to resist, and where adult brothers and sisters take pains not to meet. But in the main the prohibition has proved effective not only outwardly but inwardly, presumably because it is ancient and absolute and does not demand anything superhumanly difficult. To the social psychologist it is important, since it shows what custom can achieve.” In ancient Egypt and among the Inca, some royal families were involved in incestuous relationships. The subject is mentioned often in mythology and, as found in the Oedipus complex, in psychoanalytical speculation and theory. A humanist “take” on the subject is illustrated by Sir Arnold Bax’s (1883—1953) statement about life: “You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.”
INCUNABULIST Humanists of all stripes have an interest in incunabulum, for example a book printed before 1501. Incanubula are works of art or of human industry of an early period. A person with original jazz materials from the latter part of the 19th century, as a further example, is an incunabulist.
INDEPENDENT ATHEIST Jeff Rankel is editor of Independent Atheist, 1127 North College, Decatur, Illinois 62522.
INDEPENDENT PUBLICATIONS Independent Publications (POB 102, Ridgefield, New Jersey 07657), publishes freethought literature.
INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM In a classic case of an attempt to censor books, The Holy See authorized a Congregation of the Index to compile a list of publications that Catholics should be forbidden to be read. If the purpose of the church was to preserve and propagate Christ’s teachings, it was reasoned, no Catholic should be allowed publicly to contradict those teachings. Any book disallowed from 1599 on was called “on the Index,” and because it was made up only from decisions referred for judgment on specific works no consistency of inclusion followed; as a result, the failure of a book to appear in it did not imply that the book was in keeping with Christ’s teachings. As a result, Cervantes, Descartes, Pascal, Stendhal, Swift, and hundreds of others landed “on the Index,” a device that boomeranged somewhat inasmuch as non-Catholics used it as a “must“ reading list. The last edition of the Index was published in 1948. In 1966 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly, the Holy Office) announced that the Index and its related penalties of excommunication would no longer have the force of law in the church. {CE; ER}
INDIA, RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION OF The Indian Rationalist Association was founded in 1949 to “promote the spread of rationalism, defined as an attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority.” It was a successor to the Rationalist Association of India founded in 1930 and influenced by the British Rationalist Press Association. It was weakened by the Second World War and Quit India Movement, but re-formed in 1949. The Association has been active in undermining superstition and in defense of freedom of speech. Contacts are President R. Venkatadri; and Vice President N. Innaiah, A 60 Journalist Colony, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad 500033, India. E-mail: <HU92@aol.com>. (See entries for N. Innaiah and Jyoti Shankar.) {New Humanist, February 1996}
INDIAN ATHEIST PUBLISHERS In 1981 Sanal Edamaruku started Indian Atheist Publishers, which has published numerous rationalist books including several translations of western freethought classics and contemporary books.
INDIAN FREETHOUGHT: See entry for Jyoti Shankar. A history of Indian freethought is on the Web: <http://www.avana.net/~jshankar/hist0001.htm>.
INDIAN HUMANIST UNION The Indian Humanist Union, an associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, was founded by Narsingh Narain, a senior civil servant and magistrate. He retired from Government service to undertake social work and to promote freethought and the scientific approach to religion. The Society for the Promotion of Freedom of Thought was founded in 1954 and became the Humanist Union in 1960. Humanist Outlook is edited by his son, Prakash Narain, who leads the Humanist Union (PO Box 448, New Delhi 110 001, India). E-mail:<pnarain@ignca.ernet.in>.
INDIAN HUMANISTS, RATIONALISTS In India, where more Indians speak English than do Englishmen, almost two hundred languages and over sixteen hundred dialects are to be heard. The influence of gurus, swamis, yogis, and others claiming mystical powers is great. Jawaharlal Nehru had a guru, as did his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Mrs. Gandhi’s favorite was Dhirendra Brahmachari, who fell from favor when it was discovered that his holy messages appeared on blank sheets of paper but that this was because he had developed a new application of an old high school science experiment involving the use of invisible ink. When he attempted a comeback and greeted devotees with electric shocks, he was exposed as having a car battery with wires beneath his throne. Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao was accused of having contacts with many swamis. One, Chandraswamy, is said to have been behind the showing of sacred idols which apparently drank milk, which strained the credulity of many Hindus but caused individuals throughout the country to stay away from work in 1995 and line up at temples to watch what they believed to be proof of a mystical miracle. Americans were reminded during the same period that the wife of their President Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer. Britishers were reminded that their Duchess of York consulted Madame Vasso, a faith healer. However, significant numbers of Indians are not mystics. For example, Prabhir Ghosh, president of the Science and Rationalists’ Association of India, claims to have 86,000 members in 300 branches across India. But that is fewer than can be seen at dawn daily as they dip themselves along the banks of the muddy, garbage-strewn Hooghy River, a branch of the Ganges that flowers through the heart of Calcutta, believing that washing in the water cleanses the spirit. B. Premanand, editor of Indian Skeptic, has written the following concerning an article, “Indian Guru Busters Debunk All That’s Mystical,” written by John F. Burns in The New York Times (10 October 1995):
• The Indian Science and Rationalist Association was started by Prabir Ghosh only in the 1980s, not in 1949. In the 1980s, I gave more than 200 lectures in West Bengal, and the people got inspired and started the association. More than a dozen associations working in West Bengal are connected with Indian Skeptic. They are not, however, an All India Organisation and do not have 86,000 members and 300 centres in India. The largest state organisation in India is Dravida Kazhakam, or the Dravidian Association. They have about two million members in Tamilnadu.
• The Ganesha idols were not only of porous ceramics but also were of stones and metals. The trick of the gods drinking milk is explained in Indian Skeptic of November 1995: the milk simply flows down under the idol and is collected at the back side.
• It was not in 1993 but on 29th August 1992 at the inauguration of the Marriage Hall that Sai Baba produced a gold chain for presentation to the architect who built the hall where the Prime Minister, the Speaker, two state chief ministers, two governors, and two union ministers were present. This episode was to be incorporated with the propaganda film made by a Dutch film company on Sai Baba at an expense of $400,000 to show to people that even our Prime Minister was a witness to the creation of a gold necklace. Somehow, however, the trick got exposed in the film, and the government suppressed the video film produced by the Central Government corporation, Doordarshan. Before it was suppressed, I got a copy and now hundreds of copies are being shown to the people around India. One copy was given by me to the BBC for the documentary, “Guru Busters,” shown on 10 September 1995.
• Mr. Prabir Ghosh has not travelled all over India, as mentioned in the article. It was I who gave more than 7,000 lectures and demonstrated “miracles” all over India.
• Dhirendra Brahmachari did not show any miracles. He only taught yoga. It was Balti Baba who showed the trick of how, if any question was written on a piece of paper and kept it in his pocket, the question would appear on another paper when immersed in milk. Answers did not appear on the paper, only the questions.
• It was not Dhirendra Brahmachari but Sadachari Sai Baba who, in the guise of raising or activating your sexual power (Kundalini power) gave electric shocks. He was exposed at Bombay, for I had demonstrated the equipment to our members there wherein six volts is transformed into 10,000 volts. He is now in jail for murdering his first wife and for running a prostitute den in the guise of training people in Tantra yoga (Kundalini Yoga).
• About 150 tricks of the godmen have been explained in my book, Science Versus Miracles (Vol. 1), and I propose to bring out nine more volumes in order to describe perhaps 1500 other tricks of the godmen which I have been able to explain since I started investigating them.
The National Council for Science and Technology Communication, Department of Science and Technology honored Premanand in 1998. It presented him with its national award for the Best Effort in Science Popularization during the period 1992—1996. The many humanist groups in India, Jim Herrick has noted, are conscious of the problem of “communalism” as being a major issue with which humanists must deal. The Indian Radical Humanist Association (IRHA) and the related Indian Renaissance Institute (IRI) were largely responsible for organizing the IHEU’s 14th World Congress in Mumbai in 1999. The two organizations were founded by M. N. Roy. The IRI seeks to provide the intellectual grounding for a renaissance of thought in Asian civilization. The IRHA works at a caompaigning grass-roots level. The Radical Humanists work with people in rural as well as urban areas to bring “awareness and confidence to common people so that they can change their conditions and [be] makers of their own world.” Other Indian humanist groups are the Atheist Centre (founded by Gora and his wife Saraswathi Gora), the Indian Secular Society (founded by A. B. Shah, an expert on Islam), and the Indian Rationalist Association. Indians who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 included G. R. R. Babu; Pushpa Mittra Bhargava; Amlan Datta; Sanal Edamaruku; Narisetti Innaiah; H. Narasimhaiah; Indumati Parikh; Avula Sambasiva Rao; Sibnarayan Ray; V. M. Tarkunde; and Ravipudi Venkatadri. Humanists and rationalists and their organizations and publications in India include the following groups:
• Age of Atheism, The (a quarterly in English), Pithani Dibba, Visakhapatnam 530 002, Andhra Pradesh • Ambedkar Mission Patrika, a Hindi monthly, Chitkohara P.O., Anishabad, Patna 800 002 • Art Today, Artsacre 37C, College Road, Calcutta 700 009 • The Atheist, an English Monthly, Atheist Centre, Benz Circle, Vijayawada 520 006 • Ayudh (The Weapon, a Marathi Monthly, Centre for Study of Social Change, c/o Dr. Indumati Parikh, 276, Telang Road, Matunga, Bombay 400 019 • Bengali Monthly of Bengal branch of IRHA, Renaissance Publishers, 15, Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 012 • Bheem Patrika, an Ambedkar journal published fortnightly in Hindi and English, ES - 393A Abadpura, Jalandhar - 144 003, Punjab, India • Bihar Rationalist Society (IHEU), 216-A, S.K. Puri, Patna-800 001, Bihar • Buddhi wadi (in Hindi, the Rationalist Quarterly of the Bihar Rationalist Society), 216-A, S. K. Puri, Patna-800001, Bihar • Charvakam, a Telugu monthly, B. Ramakrishna, Nidamarru, Mangalagiri 522 503 • Dravidian Association, 50 EVK, Sampath Road, Madras 7 • Free Thinker—started by Sanal Edamaruku, the journal which was at 779 Pocket 5, Mayur Vihar, New Delhi 110 091, is published occasionally. • Freedom First’s e-mail: <freedom@bom3.vsnl.net.in>. • Hetuvadi (The Rationalist, Oriya monthly), 779, Pocket-5, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi 110 091 • Hetuvadi (The Rationalist, Telugu Rationalist monthly), 4-13-6, Ithanagar, Tenali, Andhra Pradesh 522201 • Humanist Outlook, PO Box 448, New Delhi 110 001 <pnarain@ignca.ernet.in>. • Humanist-Rationalist Publications, publisher of books and Rationalist Essays, Chirala-523115, Andhra Pradesh • Indian Human Union (IHEU) is at Kotwara House,Kaisarbagh, Lucknow U P • Indian Radical Humanist Association (IRHA), 276 Telang Road, Matunga, Bombay 400 019. This is the important group founded by V. M. Tarkunde and presently led by Dr. Indumati Parikh. • Indian Rationalist Association, contact is S. Edaramuku, 779, Pocket-5, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi, 110091. • Indian Renaissance Institute in 1998 became an Associate Member of IHEU; its President is Dr. Gauri Malik. The group aims to rescue the positive contributions of Indian thought and learning from ancient to modern times in order that they may inspire an intellectual and cultural resurgence. It publishes the writings of M. N. Roy and the monthly Radical Humanist. • Indian Secular Society (IHEU), 850/8A Shivaji Nagar, Off Bhandarkar Road, Pune 411004, Maharashtra State • Indian Skeptic, 11/7, Chettipalayam Road, Podanur, Tamilnadu, 641 023, Tamilnadu • Jijnasa (Inquiry, a Bengali Quarterly of Ideas, edited by Prof. Sib Narayan Ray, Renaissance Publishers, 15, Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 073
• Misimi (Golden Hue, Telugu Monthly of Humanist Ideas), Editor was the late Alapati Ravindranath; current editor is Venkateswarareddi; Plot No. 337A, Road No. 10, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad 500 034
• Modern Freethinker, Pocket 5 Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi • Modern Rationalist, 50, E.V.K. Sampath Salai, Chennai (Madras) 600 007 <periyar@giasmd01.vsnl.net.in>. • Nasthika Yugam (The Age of Atheism, a Telugu monthly), Pithani Dibba, Visakhapatnam 530 002, Andhra Pradesh • New Humanist, Telugu Monthly of the A.P. branch of IRHA, Chirala 523 155 • New Quest, 850/8A, Shavaji Nagar, Off Bhandarkar Road, Pune 411 004, Maharasta State • Purogami (Vanguard, a Bengali monthly), 15 Bankim Chatterjee Street, Calcutta 700 073 • Radical Humanist, a monthly; Sassoon Building, 1st Floor, 143 Mahatma Gandhi Road, Bombay 400 001 E-mail: <mrcssc@bom2.vsnl.net.in>. • Satya Shodhak Sabha in 1998 became an Associate Member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). The group aims to popularize science and the scientific temper, to expose the so-called miracles of the godmen, to propagate humanism and atheism, to work for gender equality, and to mobilize opinion against religious exploitation of the masses. • Satyan Veshan (Prabodh)(Gujarati monthly), 3 Abhinav Park, Ghod dod Road, Surat, Gujarat, 395001 • Science and Rationalist’s Association of India, Calcutta—see entry for Prabhir Ghosh • Secularist, The (bi-monthly in English), 15 Zapurza, Sahitya Sahawas, Bandra East, Bombay 400 051 <freedom@bom3.vsnl.net.in>. • Self Respect Movement, Periyar Thidal 50 EVK Sampath R, Madras 600 007 • Stree Swetcha (Women’s Liberation Telugu, monthly), Editor M. V. Subbamma, 9 MIGH, Mehdipatnam, Hyderabad 500 028 • Tarakbodh, Tarksheel Society Bharat, B-XI-413, Ram Bagh Road, Barnala - 148 101, Punjab, India • Tarkjyoty, journal of the Rationalist Society of Haryana, G.H.S. Badsikri, The. & Distt. Kaithal, Haryana 136 027 • Therali (Malayalam monthly), 779, Pocket 5, Mayur Vihar-1, New Delhi 110 091 • Vaishwik Manavvad (Cosmopolitan Humanism, Gujarati Monthly of Gujarati Branch, IRHA, 4, Sanmitra Society, Jivraj Park Area, Opp. Malav Talav, Ahmedabad 380 051 (See entries for B. R. Ambedkar; G. R. R. Babu; G. M. Bazaz; P. N. Bazaz; Amlan Datta; T. L. S. Joshi; Maniben Kara; V. B. Karnik; H. Narasimbhaiah;Innaiah Narisetti; G. D. Parikh; Indumati Parikh; B. Premanand; M. V. Ramamurthy; Sibnarayan Ray; S. Rap; Ellen Roy; Evelyn Roy; M. N. Roy; A. B. Shaw; Abraham Solomon; D. K. Veeramani; Ravipudi Venkatadri; in Free Inquiry [Fall 1996], see “Humanism in India” by Matt Cherry, who describes fire walking, religious prostitution, combating Karma, and current developments in India; see entry for International Humanist and Ethical Union, which had its 14th Congress in Mumbai in 1998.)
INDIAN NATURALISM Dale Riepe wrote The Naturalistic Tradition in Indian Thought (1961). In it he discusses the early Ajivikas and Carvakas views as well as the naturalistic elements of Jainism, Hinayana Buddhism, Samkhya, and Vaisesika.
INDIAN PHILOSOPHY: See the entry for Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. Also, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4; and an extensive bibliography in United Kingdom and the Commonwealth by Gordon Stein. INDIAN RADICAL HUMANIST ASSOCIATION (IRHA) The Indian Radical Humanist Association started in 1920 and evolved with the evolution of M. N. Roy’s intellectual development. Originally a Marxist, Roy during his imprisonment by the British in the 1931—1936 period announced that “a philosophical revolution must precede a social revolution” and founded the association. Initially, it was a political party taking part in the Indian National Congress and working for independence. The Radical Democratic Party, which was inaugurated n 1940, was disbanded in the belief that political parties would not bring about social change. The IRHA was formed in 1969 with the aim of bringing about change at the grass-roots level. (See article in New Humanist, February 1996)
INDIAN RELIGIONS: See entry for Riepe Dale.
INDIAN SKEPTIC A monthly in English, Indian Skeptic is at 11/7 Chettipalayam Road, Podanur, Tamilnadu, 641 023, India.
INDIAN UNITARIANS Not satisfied with traditional Christianity as taught by the missionaries, Hajor Kissor Singh learned about Unitarianism through contacts with Boston and London, preached the faith, walked all over the hills of Meghalaya, and established many congregations. In 1887 he founded the Indian Council of Unitarian Churches. The Khasi Unitarian Union of Meghalaya in the northeast corner of India presently has thirty-two congregations and five fellowships with about 9,000 members. Its minister was formerly the late Rev. Robert Steyn, a South African who was ordained after studying at Oxford and who served the group starting in 1981. It publishes ICUC Bulletin, a quarterly in English. The general secretary today is Mr. Carley Lyngdoh, Jowai, 793150, Meghalya, India. Unitarianism was brought to Madras in the late 18th century by an Indian, William Roberts, who had been taken to England as a slave. While there he learned about Unitarianism and when his master died returned to India. The church provides education and religious services to ten or fifteen families in 1998. In 1995 it celebrated its 200th anniversary. The present leader-minister is Harrison Kingsley, 686 Mount Road, Madras 600 006. The Indian Council of Unitarian Churches (ICUC) held its fourth conference at Mahabalipurum (Madras) in 1995 with over one hundred delegates in attendance. In 1996, the 96th annual conference of the Unitarian Union of Northeast India was held at Shillong, Meghalaya, with over two thousand Unitarians in attendance. Unitarian congregations are also found in Hyderabad and Udaipur. On the Web: <http://www.uua.org/icuu/icuu-asia.html>
INDIANA HUMANISTS • Humanist Friendship Group of Central Indiana, PO Box 254, Greenwood, IN 46142 (317) 885-1612.
INDIANS, AMERICAN: See entry for American Indians.
INDIFFERENCE • Nothing matters to the man who says nothing matters. —Lin Yutang
INDOCTRINATION “I had to undergo at least 1,300 hours of heavy Christian indoctrination,” Sir Ludovic Kennedy has estimated. “What a terrible waste of time.”
INDUCTION In logic, induction is the process of deriving general principles from particular facts or instances. In mathematics, it is a two-part method of proving a theorem involving a positive integral variable. First, the theorem is verified for the smallest admissible value of the integer. Then it is proven that if the theorem is true for any value of the integer, it is true for the next greater value. The final proof contains the two parts. {American Heritage Dictionary, 1992)
INDULGENCE Sports cars can be an expensive indulgence, a gratification of a wish. Grandparents have been known to be fondly indulgent of their grandchildren, supplying them with gifts and attention. Pope John Paul II in 1998 declared 2000 to be a year for “millennial penitence” and a time to receive “early salvation.” Penitents—people convinced they are “sinners”—who do a charitable deed such as giving up cigarettes or alcohol for a day, can earn an “indulgence” to eliminate punishment on earth or in purgatory. Indulgences for Catholics have long been a church-granted amnesty from certain forms of punishment, in this life or hereafter, for sin. Some liberal Catholics find themselves embarrassed by the practice, which seems to offer a shortcut to salvation. {Alessandra Stanley, The New York Times, 28 November 1998}
INDUSTRIALISM Bertrand Russell wrote, “The aesthetic indictment of industrialism is perhaps the least serious. A much more serious feature is the way in which it forces men, women, and children to live a life against instinct, unnatural, unspontaneous, artificial. Where industry is thoroughly developed, men are deprived of the sight of green fields and the smell of earth after rain; they are cooped together in irksome proximity, surrounded by noise and dirt, compelled to spend many hours a day performing some utterly uninteresting and monotonous mechanical task. Women are, for the most part, obliged to work in factories, and to leave to others the care of their children. The children themselves, if they are preserved from work in the factories, are kept at work in school, with an intensity that is especially damaging to the best brains. The result of this life against instinct is that industrial populations tend to be listless and trivial, in constant search of excitement, delighted by a murder, and still more delighted by a war.” {Atlantic Monthly, June 1921}
INEVITABLE • Exploit the inevitable: one of my favorite pieces of advice. —Arthur C. Clarke
INFALLIBILITY, PAPAL Papal infallibility is a belief of the Roman Catholic Church that the Pope is kept by God from making a mistake when he speaks on a question of faith or morals. {DCL}
INFANTICIDE • The killing of infants. Sanctioned by God as an appropriate punishment for the heathen. (Psalm 137:9) —Carol C. Faulkenberrgy Atlanta Freethought Society
Infeld, Leopold (1898—1968) A Polish physicist, Infeld wrote with Albert Einstein The Evolution of a Scientist (1941). In 1950 he wrote Albert Einstein, His Work and Its Influence Upon Our World. In 1962, Prof. Infeld, of the Physics Institute in Warsaw, was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {CE}
INFERENCE An inference, in logic, is the deriving of one idea from another: Inference can proceed through either induction or deduction. {DCL}
INFIDEL • Infidel, n. In New York, one who does not believe in the Christian religion; in Constantinople, one who does. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
“Infidel,” a word that comes from the Latin infidelis, or lacking in belief, denotes one who is not a believer. In Islam it is the Christians who are infidels. In Christianity anyone who is not a believer—e.g., Corneille, Molière, and Bayle (whom Calvin attacked)—are called infidels because they were known for their esprit fort and libertin. Tyndale in England added the Turkish infidels although they “knowledge one God,” yet they “have erred and been faithless these eight hundred years,” describing the Jews in a similar vein. Throughout Elizabeth I’s reign, “infidel” signified only a “heathen” or Jew or”Muhammadan,” and Jonson in his New Inn (1628—1629) has a phrase, “I did not expect / To meet an infidel, much less an atheist, / Here in Love’s list.” Infidel, atheist, rationalist, skeptic. In 1713, Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking, Occasion’d by the Rise and Growth of a Sect Called Freethinkers led to Ambrose Philip’s weekly journal, The Freethinker, along the lines of the Spectator. For Collins, “freethinker” was a name “for simple freedom from prejudice in secular affairs,” but the orthodox were disturbed because if some men think more “freely” than others “they are (a) not terrorized by any veto on criticism, and (b) not hampered, or less hampered, by ignorant pre-suppositions.” A freethinker’s rationalism could easily lead to rejecting organized religion and, as pointed out by Bury’s History of Freedom of Thought (1913), that is what happened.
INFIDEL NETWORK
The Infidel Network is on the Web: <http://infidels.org>.
INFIDEL SOCIETY: See the entry for James M. Beckett, a recording secretary of a New York group in the 1840s, the Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty.
INFIDELITY • The lover thinks of possessing his mistress more often than her husband thinks of guarding his wife. —Stendhal
INFIDELS RECORDS “My Name is Thomas” is a humanistic rock opera. It was recorded by a band called UniversalDice.com for Infidels Records. (See entry for Gerry Dantone.)
INFINITY • Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former. —Albert Einstein
To most, “the infinite” refers to having no boundaries or limits, something like X to the nth degree, that which is immeasurably great, world without end. However, another kind of infinity is that of the infinitely small, the infinitesimal. Jim Holt, a writer about philosophy and science for Lingua Franca and The Wall Street Journal, has surveyed philosophers’ views about the subject and in an article (The New York Review of Books, 20 May 1999), wrote,
In his biography of Frederick the Great, Carlyle tells us that when Leibniz offered to explain the infinitely small to Queen Sophia Charlotte of Prussia, she replied that on that subject she needed no instruction: the behavior of her courtiers made her all too familiar with it. (About the only nonpejorative use of “infinitesimal” I have come across occurs in Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers, when the narrator is talking about the exquisite vegetables served at the tables of the really rich: “The greenest petits pois, infinitesimal carrots. . . .”)
Holt then relates the Greek debate over the nature of being:
On the one side of this debate stood the monists—Parmenides and his followers—who argued that being was indivisible and that all change was illusion. On the other stood the pluralists—including Democritus and his fellow Atomists, as well as the Pythagoreans—who upheld the genuineness of change, which they understood as a rearrangement of the parts of reality. . . . But when you start parsing reality, breaking up the One into the Many, where do you stop? Democritus held that matter could be analyzed into tiny units—“atoms”—that, though finite in size, could not be further cut up. But space, the theater of change, was another questions. There seemed to be no reason why the process of dividing it up into smaller and smaller bits could not be carried on forever. Therefore its ultimate parts must be smaller than any finite size.
However, to imagine that it is possible to find something smaller than the smallest quark, and that there is still something smaller than that, ad infinitum, is analgous to imagining that out of nothing something came. In his review of four current works on the subject, Holt explains the thinking of Zeno, Aristotle, Euclid, Saint Augustine, Kepler, Galileo, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Bishop Berkeley, Voltaire, Lagrange, Laplace, d’Alembert, Hegel, Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Abraham Robinson, and others. His general conclusion is that the last word has not yet been written about so mammoth a topic as the infinitesimal.
INFRALAPSARIAN • Infralapsarian, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have sinned unless he had a mind to—in opposition to the Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person’s fall was decreed from the beginning. Infralapsarians are sometimes called Sublapsarians without material effect upon the importance and lucidity of their views about Adam. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Ingersoll, Ralph (1900-1969): See entry for George Orwell, who considered the editor of PM a “dishonest demagogic type.”
Ingersoll, Robert G. [Colonel] (1833—1899) A famed lawyer and agnostic, the son of a Congregationalist clergyman, Ingersoll was inspired by Paine’s fight for political and religious freedom. “To hate man and worship God exist without God just as well as he could exist without me. And I also feel that if there must be an orthodox God in heaven I am in favor of electing him ourselves.” Roger E. Greeley, who impersonates Ingersoll in dramatic performances throughout the country, writes that Eugene Debs had called Ingersoll “the Shakespeare of oratory.” Ingersoll became attorney general in Illinois shortly after the Civil War and might have become governor had he been willing to modify his strong anticlericalism and agnosticism. In 1876, he nominated James G. Blaine for President in what came to be called “the famous plumed knight speech.” In various lectures, he questioned the tenets of Christian belief, and these included “The Gods” (1872); “Some Mistakes of Moses” (1879); “Why I Am An Agnostic’ (1896); and “Superstition” (1898). These drew huge audiences, with praise for his eloquence and irreverent wit as well as denunciations from the orthodox. In “Faith and Fact” (1887), he declared: “I know no more (of the immortality of the soul) than the lowest savage, no more than a doctor of divinity—that is to say, nothing.” In “God and Man” (1888), he is emphatic concerning the worthlessness of what is called the Christian hope: “It offers no consolation to any good and loving man.” In “Repairing the Idols” (1888), he pours all that refined scorn of which he was a master on the promise of a future life to the oppressed as compensation for their sufferings here. At the grave of the child, Harry Miller, speaking of the question, “Whither?” he said: “The poor barbarian weeping over his dead can answer the question as intelligently and satisfactorily as the robed priests of the most authentic creed.” A partial reprint of his 1874 edition is On the Gods and Other Essays (1990). A biographies include Frank Smith’s Robert G. Ingersoll: A Life (1990) and Mark A. Plummer’s Robert G. Ingersoll: Peoria’s Pagan Politician (1993). As for his philosophic outlook,
This is my creed: Reason is the only torch; Justice is the only worship; Humanity the only religion; Love the only priest; Happiness the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to help make others so.
Many admirers praised Ingersoll:
• One of the constellations of our time . . . a bright magnificent constellation. —Walt Whitman
• No finer personality ever existed. —Thomas A. Edison
• How handsome he looked as he stood on that table, in the midst of those 500 shouting men and poured the molten silver from his lips! What an organ is human speech when it is employed by a master! —Samuel Clemens
• His life and work have been an inspiration to the whole earth. —Luther Burbank
• One of the bravest, grandest champions of human liberty the world has ever seen.
—Clarence Darrow
In the pages of the North American Review, Colonel Ingersoll defended freethought against Judge Black, the Rev. H. Field, Mr. Gladstone, and Cardinal Manning. What almost all observers have noted is that, although his printed speeches have been touched up since delivery, Ingersoll was one of the most eloquent speakers of his entire age. Often overlooked is that his wife, Eva Parker Ingersoll, was a freethinker. So was his daughter, Eva Ingersoll-Brown, as were her younger sister and aunt who lived with her. Roger Greeley is honorary chairman of the Robert G. Ingersoll Memorial Committee, which is dedicated to restoring Ingersoll’s birthplace in Dresden, New York, and to keeping his memory alive. At the house one can hear a wax cylinder recording which his friend Thomas Edison made in which Ingersoll states:
While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself. 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. This creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, long enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed. This creed will certainly do for this life.
The committee publishes a newsletter, Ingersoll Report. In addition, the Secular Humanists Society of New York have installed a plaque at the site of his home, now the Gramercy Park Hotel, 2 Lexington Avenue, in New York City. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, his granddaughter, was once president of the New York City humanists. Richard F. Stockton, a playwright whose work about Ingersoll has been performed in New York at La MaMa La Galleria, holds that there are four dramatic events that stand out in Ingersoll’s life. First was the death of his father, the Reverend John Ingersoll. Stockton has written, “Despite their opposing religious views, the old revivalist on his deathbed asked Bob to read to him from the black book clutched to his chest. Bob relented, took the book, and was surprised to discover that it wasn’t the Bible. It was Plato describing the noble death of the pagan Socrates: a moving gesture of reconciliation between father and son in parting. The second event was Bob’s painful realization that his outspoken agnosticism not only invalidated his own political career but ended his brother Ebon’s career in Congress, as well. Third was the exquisite anguish of seeing his supportive wife Eva and his young daughters made to suffer for his right to speak his own mind. And fourth was the dramatic tension of having to walk out alone on public stages, in a glaring spotlight, time after time with death threats jammed in his tuxedo pocket informing him that some armed bigot in that night’s audience would see to it that he didn’t leave the stage alive.” However, at the age of sixty-six Ingersoll died of a heart ailment at his married daughter’s estate up the Hudson River at Dobbs Ferry. His last lecture, titled “What Is Religion?” was delivered in Boston a few days earlier to the Free Religion Association. His last letter, written the day before he died, lamented Yankee imperialism in Cuba.” The Council for Secular Humanism has made Ingersoll’s birthplace in Dresden, New York, into a museum. Ingersoll died of angina pectoris on 21 July 1899. He passed away peacefully, his last words reportedly being, “I am better now.” His friend, W.J. Armstrong, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times: “He died unexpectedly and suddenly, after conversing cheerfully a few minutes before with the members of his family.” {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Roger E. Greeley; The Freethinker, 4 October 1908; FUK; FUS; Ingersoll Report, Winter 1995-1996; HNS2; JM; JMR; Northeast Atheist, September-October 1997; PA; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD; U}
INGERSOLL REPORTER
Ingersoll Reporter is published three times per year by the Council for Secular Humanism, PO Box 664, Amherst, New York 14226-0664.
Ingham, Samuel (19th Century) Ingham, a councilor, was a trustee in the 1860s of the National Secular Society in Manchester, England. {RSR}
Ingram, H. A. (19th Century) Ingram wrote Life and Character of Stephen Girard (1885). {FUS}
Ingram, John Kells (1823—1907) Ingram, an Irish economist, was a fiery patriot who wrote the rebel song, “Who Fears to Speak of Ninety-Eight?” A writer on economics, Ingram also wrote a work on slavery and serfdom, in which he did not spare the church. McCabe labels him a positivist. {JM; RAT; RE}
Inman, Thomas (1820—1876) Inman was a physician and archaeologist known chiefly for his work on Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names (1869), in which he deals with the evidences of phallic worship in different nations and among the Jews. {BDF; RAT}
Innaiah: See entry for Innaiah Narisetti.
Inniss, Patrick (20th Century) Formerly the Vice President of the Seattle, Washington, Rationalist Society, Inniss is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism.
Innocent III (1161—1216) Innocent III, Pope from 1198 to 1216, wrote in a letter to Count de Nevers, “The Jews, like Cain, are doomed to wander the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces are covered with shame. . . . Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword.” {CE; RE}
INQUIRER The Inquirer is a British Unitarian fortnightly publication.
INQUIRY • The crime of inquiry is one which religion never has forgiven. —Percy Bysshe Shelley
INQUISITION Gregory IX (1227—1241) instituted the Inquisition as a medieval ecclesiastical tribunal for the preservation of Christianity. Its purpose, according to the Very Reverend Raphael M. Huber, a professor of church history at the Catholic University in Washington, DC, was (a) to inquire into the spread of doctrines opposed to the Faith; (b) to call before its tribunals all Catholics suspected of heresy; and (c) to punish their infidelity, to convince them of error, and to exhort them to repentance. In the 16th century, a number of Protestant reformers (Calvin, Servetus, Bullinger) were treated with religious intolerance, and torture became a device used by the Inquisitors, who usually were selected from among the members of the Franciscan and Dominican Orders, preferably the latter, according to an anti-Catholic book, A History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1887), by the American historian Henry Charles Lea. Clifton points out that at its pinnacle of power in the late thirteenth century, the medieval Inquisition was largely staffed by Dominican monks. These monks, of a preaching order begun by St. Dominic in 1216, made a pun on their name in Latin: domine cani—loosely, “God’s dogs”—a pack of black-and-white hounds pursuing heretics. He adds that by the 1220s some Franciscan monks “were also employed by the Inquisition for their skill in preaching and turning the people away from heretical doctrines; they were officially called to inquisitorial work by Pope Innocent IV in 1246.” Today, “the modern equivalent of the Inquisition is a section of Vatican bureaucracy known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which periodically condemns certain Catholic theologians and professors for heretical tendencies. One example is the one year ‘silencing’ of the Dominican priest Matthew Fox of Holy Names College in Oakland, California, in 1988.” A 1995 work, Benzion Netanyahu’s The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain, contests the usual view that the Inquisition developed out of the religious tensions spawned by the conversion of thousands of Spanish Jews to Christianity. Rather, he holds that the Inquisition had little to do with religion, that only a few were “Judaizers,” and that most were Christians to the core. During his eighteen years as the first Inquisitor General, Friar Tomás de Torquemada oversaw the “relaxing” to secular authorities of as many as two thousand conversos, and these were burned at the stake. Another three thousand were burned in effigy after they died in prison or escaped. Meanwhile, nearly forty thousand others were “reconciled” to the Church, first losing their property and then being sentenced to prison. Netanyahu’s argument is that racial hatred previously reserved for Jews now was directed toward the conversos, and he develops the view that Spain’s racists were hypocrites who knew the conversos were sincere Christians but deliberately led the Spanish clergy and the monarchy to institute an inquisition in order to combat the “Judaic heresy.” (See entries for Tomás de Torquemada and Matthew Paris. Also see an extensive discussion by Joseph McCabe in his Rationalist Encyclopedia.) {CE; EH; ER; RE}
Inskip, Conrad (20th Century)
Inskip, a senior technical officer for the biological sciences department, is publicity chairman in New Zealand of the Auckland University Atheists. To taunt the anti-atheists, he wittily and sophomorically brags that he “keeps an excellent ritual sacrifice altar in his basement and endeavours to maintain a stock of black cats, virgins, and other important offerings.” E-mail: <c.inskip@auckland.ac.nz>.
INSPIRATION • The inspiration of the bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman. —Robert G. Ingersoll
• All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love, And its familiar voice wearies not ever. . . . They who inspire it most are fortunate, As I am now; but those who feel it most Are happier still.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
INSTITUTE FOR FIRST AMENDMENT STUDIES The Institute for First Amendment Studies, POB 589, Great Barrington, Massachusetts 01230, is run by Skipp Porteous, author of Jesus Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Challenging the Christian Right, an Activist’s Handbook. The Institute publishes a newsletter that defends the separation of church and state, and “Walk Away,” a newsletter for ex-fundamentalists. On the Web: <http://apocalypse.berkshire.net/~ifas/>.
INSTITUTE FOR RATIONAL EMOTIVE THERAPY The Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy, 45 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10021, is presided over by Dr. Albert Ellis. As president and founder, he has developed the psychological strategy used by Rational Recovery groups.
INSTRUMENTALISM In philosophy, instrumentalism is the doctrine that scientific theories are not true descriptions of an unobservable reality. Rather, they are useful instruments that enable us to order and anticipate the observable world. Inasmuch as past scientific theories have been proved false, instrumentalists claim, present and future theories can possibly be proved false, also. John Dewey advanced the doctrine by developing the pragmatism of William James. Instrumentalists, unlike realists, look for theories that work, rather than complete explanatory theories that are descriptively true—an intelligible but unattainable goal. (Denying instrumentalism are groups of realists, who hold that science can give an accurate description of an objective and fixed reality. See entry for Instrumentalism.) {AF; OCP; The Economist, 31 May 1997}
INTELLECTUAL • An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows. —Adlai Stevenson
To be intellectual is to be rational rather than emotional. An intellectual explores and evaluates new ideas. To intellectualize is to find a rational explanation. A religionist or freethinker who claims to have found “the truth,” revealed or otherwise, whose mind is closed to alternative conclusions, is an anti-intellectual. In Russia, the élite of a society’s intellectuals have been called members of the intelligentsia. Intellectuals generally avoid labeling their outlook, unless—as pointed out by a wag who went to Columbia University—the label is based upon their own name.
INTELLECTUALS Nicolas Chauvin, a legendary French soldier known for his devotion to Napoleon, was the inspiration for “chauvinism,” a belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, group, or kind. Intellectuals often illustrate their chauvinism by claiming their gender, group, or kind was the first or is the best. “Contra los Franceses,” a 1998 pamphlet by Manuel Arroyo Stephens, is a Spanish satirical broadside that takes French culture to task for numbers of faults including fraud, restraint of trade, and theft. Arroyo claims the French pilfered ideas from others and “sold them to the world” as examples of their home-bred genius. Corneille, for example, allegedly plagiarized his plots from 16th-century Spanish drama. Voltaire was an opportunist whose Lettres philosophiques rehashed mostly English ideas in vogue at that time. Others accuse the French of being pretentious, superficial, priggish, bad-mannered, adding that their philosophy is a fad, their wine overrated, their novels unreadable, and they have not done anything since Matisse or Picasso, the latter of whom was not even French. “Frog-bashing” is discussed in Jonathan Fenby’s On the Brink: The Trouble with France (1998). He found that George III urged Etonians to hate the French, that the British still enjoy having fun at French expense. Fenby details what he believes are France’s ills: a melancholy list that includes social division, widespread corruption, falling school standards, and an overweening state. On the other hand, Tony Judt of New York University wonders if Arroyo’s pamphlet should be read as a satire of Spanish inferiority and small-mindedness faced by the next-door riches of France with its art, its food, its countryside, and its writing. As for American intellectuality, Europeans have been known to claim the phrase is an oxymoron. Depending upon the person’s background, similar criticism is directed at Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Australians, Southeast Asians, Africans, and at females vs. males, believers vs. non-believers, or others in such arbitrary divisions. (The Economist, 12 December 1998}
INTELLIGENCE Although some have claimed that the more intelligent one is the more likely he or she will be a non-believer, no research is known to have proved or disproved this. Intelligence quotient (IQ) data show people differ in their mental ability, and that inequalities are largely inherited. Those who test low have substantially fewer options in life than those who test high. Daniel Seligman’s A Question of Intelligence: The IQ Debate in America (1992) indicates that IQ tests are superior predictors of job success; that the rich average higher intelligence than the poor; that IQ scores have approximately the same predictive power for African Americans as for whites; that East Asians test higher than whites, with different structures; that men do better at quantitative tasks whereas women are somewhat better at verbal tests. Dr. Catherine Cox, a psychologist, has made estimates of the IQs of famous people—pathologists conducting an autopsy say they can estimate, because there are more folds on the cerebral cortex of intelligent people, how smart a subject was based upon the convolutions. Although Cox’s estimates have been highly criticized, partly because intelligence is thought to be an attribute of the entire personality and thus cannot be measured in isolation, and partly because her methodology is questioned, Seligman has documented some IQ test scores (shown in italics):
210 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 190 Sir Isaac Newton; Voltaire 185 Galileo Galilei 180 Leonardo daVinci; René Descartes 175 Immanuel Kant 170 Martin Luther 165 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 160 Benjamin Franklin 155 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn 150 Abraham Lincoln 143 Richard M. Nixon 138 Hermann Goering (tested prior to Nuremberg Trials) 134 Franz von Papen (tested prior to Nuremberg Trials) 130 Ulysses S. Grant 119 John F. Kennedy 110 John Gotti (gangster)
100 Average score, from which deviations are figured
78 Muhammad Ali, also known as Cassius Clay (Because he was
tested when he was eligible to be drafted into the Army, it has been alleged that, as did many others, he scored low in order to avoid service. Gerald Early, director of African and Afro- American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, holds that the score was an honest reflection of his mental abilities, that he was neither literate nor analytical.)
In 1994, Charles Murray’s and the late Richard J. Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life suggested the alarmist interpretation of intelligence that blacks as a group score fifteen points lower than whites on IQ tests. (Meanwhile, Asians were said to score a few points higher than whites, and a brief mention was made that “Ashkenazi Jews of European origins . . . test higher than any other ethnic group.”) Their study drew heavily on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which studied 12,686 high school students who had graduated between 1980 and 1982. The findings were not particularly new, for William Shockley, winner in 1956 of the Nobel Prize in Physics, had in the late 1960s and 1970s lectured on his theory that, because blacks were intellectually inferior and reproduced faster than whites, blacks were causing a retrogression in human evolution. Low-IQ parents produce large families, Murray and Herrnstein argue with statistics, dragging average IQ’s yet lower and leading to poverty, welfare dependency, crime, and out-of-wedlock births. High-IQ parents, on the other hand, have fewer children but better income and behavior. What this will lead to, they suggest, is a polarized world in which the IQ elite will separate themselves from the dumb poor, using totalitarian methods. In short, they paint a picture of an America which will be increasingly divided by race, one which will slide unavoidably into castes based on IQ. The first humanists to react echoed the conclusion of an op-ed article by Frank Rich in The New York Times: “Such clever merchandising may make The Bell Curve the best-selling unread book since the last novel by Umberto Eco. Then again, Mr. Murray and Mr. Herrnstein may have outsmarted themselves. A book that blames low IQ’s for what ails America may have tough sledding in a culture where even conservatives have been rushing to deify the 75 IQ of Forrest Gump,” a reference to a movie directed by Robert Zemeckis and which features an idiot-savant. Humanists generally counter-argued that schools can overcome and alleged effects of hereditary determination and home environment on intelligence. Otherwise and among other points, if cognitive abilities cannot be changed, then schools could not be blamed for the blatant inequalities that The Bell Curve documents but never fully explains. Or, as pictured by E. D. Hirsch Jr., professor of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, “If we cast the net wider than our current programs by considering older studies and those from other countries, we find striking exceptions to [the book’s] discouraging results. After all, an agronomist who confines his research to the desert is likely to conclude that cactuses are genetically superior to rice.” Editorialized The Times: “Mr. Murray’s findings are not wrong because they are ugly. They are wrong because they blind us to more compelling interpretations and because they ignore the huge gaps in understanding the precise nature of intelligence. What is right about the book was already well known: skills have taken on increasing importance in the economy and they are difficult to acquire. What is new about the book—the fixation on genes as destiny—is surely unproved and almost surely wrong: programs here and abroad produce measurable, if unspectacular, results. These sobering lessons were clear before The Bell Curve was published.” Editorialized The Nation: “In the mid-nineteenth century, British craniologists ‘proved’ the inferiority of Africans and the Irish. And as Stephen Jay Gould wrote in 1973 during another periodic flare-up of these old arguments, ‘What craniometry was to the nineteenth century, intelligence testing has been to the twentieth.’. It is tempting to shrug The Bell Curve off as a momentary blip on the country’s racial radar. But it will be so only if its ideas are engaged and hooted out of respectable forums.” Alan Ryan, Princeton teacher of politics and a John Dewey expert, concludes in a lengthy critique in The New York Review of Books (17 November 1994), “The Bell Curve is not only sleazy; it is, intellectually, a mess.” And Richard A. Gardner, of Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, has written that if IQ tests “were properly named, they would be called Tests That Predict Success or Failure in the School System From Which the Questions Have Been Derived.” As to why Albert Einstein was “so brilliant,” The Lancet (June 1999) reported that the scientist’s brain has been found to have had an inferior parietal lobe that was fifteen percent wider than normal because a groove that typically runs through the parietal area of the brain took an unusual course. This, according to pathologist Dr. Thomas Harvey and McMaster University neuroscientist Dr. Sandra F. Witelson, may have allowed more brain cells, or neurons, to establish connections between each other and work together more easily. Their findings astonished many about the man who did not speak until he was three. {CE; Gerald Early, The New York Review of Books, 28 May 1998; Lawrence K. Altman, The New York Times, 18 June 1999; PA}
INTELLIGENCE TESTING Howard Gardner of Harvard has written the following:
The most overrated idea is that our intelligence is an entity we can measure by sticking a mental dipstick into our mind/brain. We pull it out and we read 80 or 100 or whatever. Psychologists can tell us how smart we are, or maybe now geneticists. Then there’s the “Bell Curve” twist that says society’s problems are due to the dummies. The biological, psychological and anthropological evidence is strongly against this unitary notion of intelligence. There are many human intelligences, nobody is equally good at all, and cultural opportunities determine which are developed and to what extent. But there has been a conspiracy between the industry of psychometrics and the seductiveness of a familiar word. And that conspiracy yields this ubiquitous conviction that there’s a single thing called smartness. {The New York Times, 31 October 1997}
INTERCOURSE The Ancient Romans saw the body as the sensual, sometimes hard-to-control part of the spirit. The body, although it needed sensual gratification, had to be disciplined. The spirit was the body’s friendly caretaker. Christianity, however, taught that the body is the enemy of the soul.
Clement of Alexandria held that sex is pure only if it is for procreation within marriage. Jesus the Christ said nothing of the kind, nor was St. Paul so harsh. By the 2nd century, Clement’s view predominated, as did complementary views: no masturbation (very important), no sex if conception is unlikely (during lactation and menstruation), no sex in positions that preclude conception (anal, oral, etc.), no sex for the barren (it would only be pleasure), and no sex for homosexuals.
In the United States, twenty-four states ban humans from having sex with animals. {David Marr, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 November 1999;The Village Voice, 28 December 1999}
INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF HUMANISM In 1983, the Council for Secular Humanism established The International Academy of Humanism. It is composed of non-theists who are (1) devoted to the principle of free inquiry in all fields of human endeavor; (2) committed to the scientific outlook and the use of reason and the scientific methods in acquiring knowledge about nature; and (3) upholders of humanist ethical values and principles. It was founded with thirty members, the total membership is limited to sixty living individuals, and additional Humanist Laureates are nominated and elected by Academy members. Prospective Laureates must have demonstrated a commitment to the principles of humanism in order to be eligible for consideration. They should also have distinguished themselves by creative scholarship, scientific discovery, artistic or literary production, or other achievements of outstanding merit. They hold lifelong membership in the Academy. Humanists in the International Academy of Humanism reject supernaturalism or occult explanations of the universe, focus on the use of reason and science, and seek to encourage the moral growth and ethical development of the individual, based upon experience. The activities of the Academy include the convening of seminars and congresses, the issuing of public statements, and the publication of articles, monographs, and books presenting the humanist outlook. In 1985, the Academy met at the University of Michigan; in 1986, at the University of Oslo; in 1988, at the State University of New York; in 1992 at Universiteit Voor Humanistick in Utrecht, The Netherlands; and in 1996 in Mexico City, Mexico. Its Secretariat includes Paul Kurtz (President), Vern Bullough, Antony Flew, Gerald Larue, and Jean-Claude Pecker. Its membership in 2002 was as follows: Pieter Admiraal, medical doctor, The Netherlands; Steve Allen, author, humorist; Shulamit Aloni, Israeli Education Minister; Ruben Ardila, professor of psychology, Universidad de Colombia; Kurt Baier, professor of philosophy, U of Pittsburgh; Etienne-Emile Baulieu, French inventor of RU-486, the abortion pill; Baruj Benacerraf, immunologist and 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiciology or Medicine; Sir Isaiah Berlin, professor of philosophy, Oxford U; Sir Hermann Bondi, Fellow of the Royal Society, Past Master of Churchill College, London; Yelena Bonner, noted defender of human rights and wife of the late Andrei Sakharov; Paul D. Boyer, American who shared with John E. Walker half the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the enzymatic mechanism by which adenosine triphosphate is synthesized in living cells; Vern Bullough (Secretariat), Historian, California State University at Northridge; Mario Bunge, professor of philosophy of science, McGill U; Jean-Pierre Changeux, Collège de France and Institut Pasteur; Patricia Smith Churchland, professor of philosophy, U of California at San Diego; Sir Arthur C. Clarke, C.B.E., writer, Sri Lanka; Bernard Crick, professor of politics, U of London; Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate in Physiology, Salk Inst.; Richard Dawkins, Fellow of the New College, Oxford University; José Delgado, chairperson of the Dept. of Neuropsychiatry, U of Madrid; Danniel C. Dennett, American philosopher and cognitive scientist; Jean Dommanget, astronomer, Belgium; Umberto Eco, Italian semiologist; Paul Edwards, professor of philosophy, New School for Social Research, New York; Luc Ferry, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and the University of Caen; Sir Raymond Firth, professor emeritus of anthropology, U of London; Antony Flew (Secretariat), professor emeritus of philosophy, Reading University; Betty Friedan, author, founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW); Yves Galifret, professor emeritus of physiology at the Sorbonne and General Secretary of l’Union Rationaliste; John Galtung, professor of sociology, U of Oslo; Stephen Jay Gould, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard; Adolf Grünbaum, professor of philosophy, U of Pittsburgh; Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel Laureate in physics, California Institute of Technology; Jürgen Habermas, University of Frankfurt; Herbert Hauptman, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and professor of biophysical science, SUNY at Buffalo; Alberto Hidalgo Tuñon, president of the Sociedad Asturiana de Filosofia, Oviedo, Spain; Donald Johanson, Institute of Human Origins; Sergei Kapitza, Chairman of Physics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; George Klein, Swedish cancer researcher; Gyorgy Konrad, Hungarian novelist; Sir Harold W. Kroto, atheist who received the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Paul Kurtz (President of the Secretariat), professor emeritus of philosophy, SUNY at Buffalo; Gerald Larue (Secretariat), professor emeritus of archaeology and biblical studies, U of Southern California at Los Angeles; Thelma Lavine, president of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy; Richard Leakey, Kenyan paleo-anthropologist who discovered the 1.6 million-year-old homo erectus “Turkana Boy”; Jean-Marie Lehn, French organic chemist who shared the 1987 Nobel Prize for Chemistry; Jolé Lombardi, Organizer of the New University for the Third Age; José Leite Lopes, Director, Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas; Paul MacCready, president, AeroVironment, Inc.; Adam Michnik, Polish historian and writer; Jonathan Miller, theater and film director, physician, actor; Taslima Nasrin, Bangladeshi physician, novelist; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Irish author, statesman; Indumati Parikh, president, Radical Humanist Association of India; John Passmore, professor of philosophy, Australian National U; Jean-Claude Pecker (Secretariat), professor of astrophysics, Collège de France, Académie des Sciences; Steven Pinker, Canadian atheist and experimental psychologist who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, psychotherapist and author; W. V. Quine, professor of philosophy, Harvard; Marcel Roche, emeritus researcher, Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Científica (IVIC), Venezuela; Max Rood, professor of law, former Minister of Justice in Holland; Richard Rorty, professor of philosophy, U of Virginia; Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., history educator; Jens C. Skou, Danish membrane physiologist who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; J. J. C. Smart, Australian philosopher; Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature, Nigeria; Jack Steinberger, sharer of the 1988 Noel Prize for Physics for his groundbreaking research using a high-energy neutrino beam; Svetozar Stojanovic, professor of philosophy, U of Belgrade; Thomas Szasz, professor of psychiatry, SUNY Medical School; V. M. Tarkunde, chairman, Indian Radical Humanist Association; Richard Taylor, professor of philosophy, Union College; Sir Keith Thomas, President, The British Academy; Rob Tielman, formerly, co-president, International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU); Peter Ustinov, noted actor, director, writer; Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian novelist, politician; Simone Veil, Deputy to European Parliament, France; Gore Vidal, novelist; Kurt Vonnegut Jr., novelist; Mourad Wahba, professor of education, U of Ain Shams, Cairo; Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics; G. A. Wells, professor of German, U of London; Edward O. Wilson, professor of sociobiology, Harvard. Deceased: George O. Abell, Isaac Asimov, Sir Alfred J. Ayer, Dame R. Nita Barrow; Brand Blanshard, Bonnie Bullough; Milovan Djilas; Joseph Fletcher; Sidney Hook, Lawrence Kohlberg, Franco Lombardi, André Lwoff, Ernest Nagel, George Olincy, Octavio Paz; Chaim Perelman, Sir Karl Popper, Carl Sagan, Andrei Sakharov, Leopold Sedar Senghor; Lady Barbara Wootton.
INTL. ALLIANCE AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM In 1996 at the World Atheist Conference held in India, the International Alliance Against Fundamentalism was formed.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION A cooperating organization of the IHEU is the International Association for Intercultural Education, c/o APBO ‘Pieter Batelaan,’ Sumatralaan 37, 1217 GP Hilversum, Netherlands.
INTL. ASSOCIATION FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM The International Association for Religious Freedom, consisting of over 60 groups in more than twenty countries, includes liberal Christians, Buddhists, Shintoists, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Jews. It is supported by the Unitarian Universalist Association, is at 2 Market St., Oxford OX 1 3 EF, United Kingdom. E-mail: <iarf@interfaith_center.org>. On the Web: <http://www.interfaith-center.org/oxford/iarf>.
INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HUMANIST EDUCATORS, COUNSELLORS, AND LEADERS
The International Association of Humanist Educators, Counsellors, and Leaders in 1994 was renamed the European Humanist Professionals.
INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
The Council for Secular Humanism’s International Development Committee works with individuals and groups in various parts of the world, especially in developing countries. It assists them in spreading the humanist point of view and brings them into the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), headquartered in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF SECULAR HUMANISTIC JEWS Sherman Wine heads the International Federation of Secular Humanistic Jews at 28611 West Twelve Mile Road, Farmington Hills, Michigan 48334. {FD}
INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST AND ETHICAL UNION (IHEU) The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) represents five million members of ninety organizations in thirty countries. It promotes non-theistic morality, has ninety-seven member organizations in thirty-five countries, and has consultative status with the United Nations, UNESCO, and UNICEF. The early sponsors, who founded IHEU in 1952, were also instrumental in the founding of the United Nations. They included Lord Boyd Orr (the first head of the World Food Organization), Sir Julian Huxley (the first head of UNESCO), and Brock Chisholm (the first head of the World Health Organization). Many Humanist principles have already found expression in international human rights conventions; indeed, the Humanist attitude forms the philosophical basis of the concept of human rights as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The IHEU has made submissions to the UN bodies on questions of environmental, economic, social, and cultural rights. Its concern for human rights and peace have been many and varied. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the UN Convention on Torture, and the Geneva Convention on Refugees, for example, find strong support from IHEU Member Organizations. In FAO, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the IHEU has participated in the five-year Freedom from Hunger Campaign and is a founding member of the UNESCO NGO Working Group on Science and Ethics. The IHEU has been represented at major UN conferences such as World Population (Belgrade 1965; Bucharest 1974), Environment (Stockholm 1972); the UN World Conference on Women (Vienna 1994, and Beijing 1995); UNESCO’s conference on the Power of Culture (Stockholm 1998), the Oslo Conference on Freedom of Religion or Belief (1998), of which the IHEU was a founding member, and others. It was an IHEU initiative that led to the adoption by the UN of the Right to Conscientious Objection to Military Service. The IHEU also raised with the UN bodies the issue of rights of religious and philosophical dissenters such as Taslima Nasrin of Bangladesh and Xiao Xuehui of China. In collaboration with its Dutch Specialist Member HIVOS, the IHEU funds Member Organization activities in the third world through the Humanist Networking and Development Program, one which has supported the following:
• community development projects by Humanists in Bangladesh • development of the Ibero-American and the South Asian Humanist networks
• Humanist groups in Africa
• Ibn Rushd and Enlightenment International Association’s project Enlightenment in the Muslim World • literacy and good citizenship youth programs for adolescents in Mumbai slums, and a Humanist school in Andhra Pradesh, India • projects promoting the scientific outlook • publication of Humanist books (Chinese) and magazines (Spanish, in Mexico) • campaigns against blasphemy laws • an expert committee examining the religious abuse of children
The IHEU facilitates the exchange of ideas of particular interest to humanists by publishing the journal International Humanist News (Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP), and by convening an international congress every two years. The first congress was at Amsterdam in 1951; the 14th in Mumbai in 1999; and the 15th will be in Melbourne, Australia. As a federation of national and regional Humanist groups, IHEU coordinates activities of its Member Organizations, stimulates their policies, guides their strategies, fosters the growth of new humanist groups, and represents the interests of Humanists at the United Nations (New York, Geneva, and Vienna), UNICEF (New York), UNESCO (Paris), and the Council of Europe. It is a clearinghouse for information and inspiration as well as a forum where Humanist organizations and individuals can exchange thoughts and expertise for improving the impact of national activities. By representing Humanism to the world media, the IHEU ensures that an ever-greater number of people learn of the humanist alternative. The IHEU is democratically organized and is funded by donations and membership dues from its Member Organizations and individual supporters. In 1993, IHEU had fifteen ordinary members (such as the Humanist associations of Canada, the United States, and India as well as the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism in Buffalo). It had seven specialist organizations (such as the Rationalist Press Association in London and Prometheus Books in Buffalo, New York). There were sixty-one specialist members (representing groups of freethinkers, secularists, and atheists in numerous countries). There were four cooperating organizations (e.g., the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, CSICOP); the Netherlands International Association for Intercultural Education; the Rationalist Association in Florissant, Missouri; and the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston, Massachusetts). In determining the eligibility of organizations that want to join, the IHEU requires acceptance of the following:
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free enquiry through human capabilities. It is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.
When he resigned as co-president in 1994, Paul Kurtz recommended tapping the reservoir of humanist energies with a militant outreach, developing programs in moral education for children and education in science and critical thinking, and dropping “Ethical” in the union’s title. In 1996 Babu Gogineni (of Hyderabad) was appointed Executive Director. Vice-presidents were Vern Bullough (U.S.); Fred Cook; Levi Fragell (Norway); and Jane Wynne Willson (U.K.). Treasurer was Robbi Robson (U.K.). Rob Tielman (Netherlands) led the organization until 1998. In 1998 at a meeting in Heidelberg, a new structure was formalized. The Board (consisting of representatives of IHEU member organizations) renamed itself the General Assembly. The Executive Committee was redesignated the Board of Directors of the IHEU. The General Assembly (formerly the Board) was given a policy-setting function. The new officers are Levi Fragell, President; Jane Wynne Willson, John Leeson, Liesbeth Mulder, and Fred Cook, Vice Presidents; Robbi Robson, Treasurer; and Babu Gogineni, Executive Director. The IHEU, which was headquartered at Nieuwegracht 69A, 3512 LG Utrecht, The Netherlands, moved in 1996. It is now at Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP. Membership in 1996 cost $50 annual or $625 lifetime. For subscription only to the magazine, $15 per year. On the World Wide Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/iheu>. (See Mary and Lloyd Morain, “Reminiscences of IHEU’s Founding from the U.S.A.” in International Humanist July 1992) {International Humanist News, December 1996}
INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST AND ETHICAL UNION (IHEU) THE 1999 CONGRESS IN INDIA In 1999 the 14th Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union was held in Mumbai, the first such held in the third world. Six hundred attended from twenty-three countries, of whom 450 were Indian. Dr. Indumati Parikh, President of the Indian Radical Humanist Association, was a key organizer. Speakers included Levi Fragell, President of the IHEU; Babu Gogineni, the Executive Director of IHEU; Professor Amlan Datta, who spoke on “The Finer Spirit of Humanism”; John Galtung, who was President of the Congress in Mumbai; Dr. H. Narasimhaiah, the former Vice-Chancellor of Bangalore University, who inaugurated the Congress; Justice V. M. Tarkunde; who gave a keynote address, stressing that humanism must reach out to the poor; Pekka Elo, a Finnish educator who spoke about the importance of teaching independent thinking; Babu Gogineni, who said that a chief aim of human development is the social and cultural fulfilment of the individual; Timo Airaksinen of Helsinki University, who looked at a range of philosophic theories of ethics and stressed the need to concentrate on facts and rational and logical conclusions; Rob Buitenberg from the Netherlands, who contrasted humanism as a public rights outlook and as an existential life stance; Professor Wahba from Cairo University, who described the tradition stemming from the Arab thinker, Averröes; Prof. R. Strinivassan, editor of Freedom First in India, who presented an account of rationalism in India; Jim Herrick of England, who discussed relations between British and Indian secularists; Hiranmay Karlekar, managing editor of the daily Indian Express; Fred Edwords, who discussed the problems connected with genetic modification, trans-hybrid species, neo-eugenics, pharmaceutical farming; Georges Liénard, who spoke about the ethical choices involved in the use of new biological possibilities; Jayant Narlikar, who spoke about the need to counter anti-scientific movements such as astrology and Feng Shu; Jean Claude Pecker, who addressed the importance of science’s not becoming distorted to fit the prevailing views of the time; Joe Chuman of the United States; Alexander Cox of Costa Rica; Hugo Estrella of Argentina; Kjartan Selnes; R. M. Pal, a human rights compaigner; and others. The congress took place at the M. N. Roy Human Development Campus. Ideas that were explored related to the future of humanism: fundamentalism and Islam; challenges to the global community; separating religion and the state; democracy and humanism; science and anti-science; education for social change. {International Humanist News, December 1998}
INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST NEWS International Humanist News (Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC 1X 8SP) was edited by Jim Herrick until 1999, at which time Babu Gogineni became its editor. A quarterly, it lists seventy-five or so humanist journals and a hundred or more organizations affiliated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union. E-mail: <im.rpa@humanism.org.uk>.
INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST AWARDS The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), as of 1999, had awarded International Humanist Awards to the following: Elena Bonner, Alexander Dubcek, Sir Julian Huxley, Paul Kurtz, and Andrei Sakharov.
INTERNATIONAL HUMANIST PROFESSIONALS The International Humanist Professionals (The Netherlands) have an e-mail address: <hsn@uvh.nl>.
INTERNATIONAL MULTIDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE ON HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE MEANING OF MODERN HUMANISM The first International Multidisciplinary Conference on Human Behaviour and the Meaning of Modern Humanism was held at Delphi, Greece, in June 1995. Dennis V. Razis, a Greek physician specializing in oncology, served as head of the conference. (See entry for Dennis V. Razis.)
INTERNATIONAL NATURALIST CHURCH The International Naturalist Church (PO Box 2469, Berkeley, California 94702-0469) is a secular church that calls itself “the only national non-profit membership organization that works to end supernaturalism and, instead, discover, teach, and promote religious Naturalism.” Jeff Walther, who edits its newsletter, Green Light, says that “supernaturalism minus super equals naturalism.” Religious Naturalism is a 325-page book that the group sells. In addition to being pacifistic and in-your-face heretical, the newsletter favors stopping the drug war by endorsing hemp and making marijuana legal. This will provide
• a completely new tree-free, better source for unlimited, higher-quality paper; • a completely new billions of dollars rescue crop and industry for our beleaguered family farmers and ranchers; • a way to provide a completely new source of human, animal, and wildlife protein, food, for hemp seed is one of the world’s best and cheapest sources of protein; • a new source of agriculturally-produced fuel, methanol; • a new and better fiber for clothing; • the means to eliminate organized crime’s primary source of income, power and the need for weapons; • complete food and drug inspection for purity and safety for any drugs used; • avoiding the primary negative trait of drug (ab)use—impoverishment, by cutting the cost to the user and supplier to a manageable small fraction of current prices; • a new revenue source for taxation; • for the elimination of prison overcrowding, for up to 40% of the current prison space is occupied by misadjudicated drug prohibition non-violent crimes; • an analgesic, pain reliever, stress reliever, that is relatively as safe or safer than all other known alternatives for those in distress.
INTERNATIONALER BUND DER KONFESSIONSLOSEN UND ATHEISTEN A German league of churchless individuals and atheists is Internationaler Bund Der Konfessionslosen Und Atheisten (IBKA), at Chausseestr, 8, D-10115 Berlin, Germany. Editor Rolf Heinrich publishes Miz.
INTERNET INFIDELS
Luree Dell-Bryan of Shawnee Lake, British Columbia, Canada, and Jeff Lowder of Colorado Springs, Colorado, are the promoters of Internet Infidels, a web site whose purpose is to provide a virtual library of information on nontheistic worldviews, including agnosticism, atheism, freethought, humanism, and secularism. For example, one can find entire books, can search for individual names, and can print the material without going to a library.
Internet Infidels is found on the World Wide Web: <http://www.infidels.org/>.
INTERNET WEBPAGES, HUMANISTIC: See entry for Web.
INTI Inti in the Inca religion was the supreme god, the god of the sun. {LEE}
INUITS Formerly called Eskimo people, the Inuits inhabit Arctic Canada and Greenland. Snowstorms with 75-miles-per-hour winds are common, as are days when it is minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The Inuit language is Inuktitut. Baffin Island and the rest of the eastern portion of Canada’s vast Northwest Territories in 1999 became Nunavut (“our land”), a region as big as Alaska and California combined. The Yukon census in 1996 listed 30,766 individuals; the Northwest Territories listed 64,401. The indigenous Indian and Inuit population accounts for only 1.5% of Canada’s population. In Nunavut and Igloolik, “the great darkness” is a time when the sun disappears and day becomes night for seven weeks. When the sun finally emerges from the horizon, it appears “like the nostrils of a bearded seal poking out of the ocean ice.” It used to be the most important day of the year. “The first person who saw the sun would rush back to the sod houses or igloos to tell everyone,” Rosie Iqualliyuqa, a ninety-six-year-old elder told reporter Anthony DePalma in the Northwest Territories. A great igloo would be built. Soapstone lamps that had provided the only illumination during the long night would be ceremoniously extinguished and relit from a single wick. Then, Mrs. Iqualliyuqa lamented, outsiders came from the south with their crosses and their schools and their strange notions about chopping up the day into small pieces called minutes, and the celebrations stopped. Now, with electric lights, alarm clocks and calendars, “the great darkness” came to mean almost nothing and young Inuits are now confronted with the tug of war going on between traditional culture and southern culture. {Anthony DePalma, The New York Times, 18 January 1999}
Ionesco, Eugène (1909—1994) A Romanian-born French playwright, Ionesco is known for expressing the absurdity of bourgeois values and the futility of human endeavor in a universe ruled by chance. His The Bald Soprano (1950) was a classic of the theater of the absurd, leading him to observe upon seeing a production, “To incarnate phantasms, to give them life, is a prodigious, irreplaceable adventure.” The play is still running in Paris after forty-eight continuous years. Just as Dario Fo uses “grammelot,” Ionesco before him lampooned the use of language as a means of communication. The very title of The Bald Soprano is nonsense—no soprano is in the play, bald or hirsute. It was followed by The Lesson (1951), The Chairs (1952), and Rhinoceros (1959), the latter work involving an act of reverse anthropomorphism—on Broadway, Zero Mostel without changing his costume or makeup transformed himself into a credible beast. To Esquire (1974), Ionesco declared in a statement typical of his art of exaggeration and worded as if teasing metaphysicians, “In the name of religion, one tortures, persecutes, builds pyres.” {CE; TYD}
IOWA HUMANISTS • Humanists of Iowa (AHA) are at 2101 Hickory Lane, Cedar Falls, Iowa. Alan Levin is President; Richard Pieart is Vice President; and Betty McCollister is Treasurer. E-mail: <iowa@humanists.net>. Web: <http://humanists.net/iowa>.
• The Iowa Ethical Union is at 2660 Third Avenue, Marion, Iowa 52302. President is Marion Carson; Vice President is Larry Carter Center; and Secretary is Betty Woods.
IOWA SISTERHOOD: See entries for Mary Safford and Eleanor Gordon.
IOWA UNITARIANS AND UNIVERSALISTS Iowa was once a “hotbed” of humanism. Unitarian ministers E. Burdette Backus, John Dietrich, and Curtis Reese were instrumental in encouraging “Unitarian humanism” to their congregations. Edwin H. Wilson’s The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995) describes the Midwestern influence upon the early American Humanist Association. Backus, Dietrich, and Reese wrote widely—all three signed the 1933 Humanist Manifesto I. Unitarian groups in Iowa tend to be more humanistic than theistic. Congregations with adherents more attuned to Universalism tend to be more theistic.
• Ames Fellowship, 1015 N. Hyland Ave., Ames, IA 50014; e-mail: <uufa@aol.com>. • Burlington UU Fellowship, 625 North 6th St., Burlington, IA 52601; e-mail: <inspirit@earthling.net>. • Cedar Falls-Waterloo, UU Society of Black Hawk County, 3912 Cedar Heights Drive, Cedar Falls, IA 50613; e-mail: <uu@cedarnet.org>. Dorothy S. Grant of the Cedar Falls group wrote a manual for religious education directors, Universalism in Iowa: 1830—1963, Symbols and Golden Rules of World Religions. She also wrote A Lay-Woman’s Unitarian World. In 1994, at the age of 89, she wrote The Unitarian Universalist Society of Black Hawk County, a 131-year history (1863—1994) with descriptive inventory of the group’s acquisitions. • Cedar Rapids, People’s Church UU, 600 3rd Ave. SE, Cedar Rapids, IA 52401 • Clinton UU Fellowship, 309 30th Ave. N., Clinton, IA 52732 • Davenport Unitarian Church, 3707 Eastern Ave., Davenport, IA 52807; e-mail: <qcuu@juno.com>. • Des Moines First Unitarian Church, 1800 Bell Ave., Des Moines, IA 50315; e-mail: <dsmuu@aol.com>. • Dubuque UU Fellowship, Windsor Park 801 Davis, Dubuque, IA 52001; e-mail: <loguidice@uwplah.edu>. • Iowa City UU Society, 10 S. Gilbert St., Iowa City, IA 52240; e-mail: <icuu@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu>. • Mason City, UU Fellowship of North Central Iowa, 606 N. Monroe Ave., Mason City, IA 50401 • Sioux City, First Unitarian Church, 2508 Jackson St., Sioux City, IA 51104 (See entries for E. Burdette Backus, John Dietrich, Dorothy S. Grant, and Curtis Reese.)
IRELAND, HUMANISTS IN
• Association of Irish Humanists: Ellen Sides, 5 Ailesbury Gardens, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 (00353) 1 269 3811 • Belfast Humanist Group: Les Reid (01232) 657060 • Church and State, a quarterly, care of P. Maloney, Box 159, Cork • Ulster Humanist Association: Brian McClinton, 25 Riverside Drive, Lisburn BT27 4HE
Richard Boeke has reported that an estimated 4,000 members of the Non-subscribing Presbyterian Church of Northern Ireland contains many of whom are Unitarian and that there are Unitarian churches in Dublin and Cork. The Cork church rarely has services but the Dublin church meets regularly. Both are connected with the British Unitarians and the Northern Ireland Non-subscribing Church. Unitarians in Ireland are on the Web: <http://www.unitarian.org.uk/>. (See entries for Mary McEvoy and Richard Spicer, authors of The Humanist Philosophy— with an Irish Guide to Non-religious Ceremonies)
Ireland, Alexander (1810—1894) Ireland was a journalist and businessman. After meeting Emerson in 1833, he became a life-long friend and disciple. Ireland was appointed publisher and business manager of the Manchester Examiner, and he was one of the founders of the Manchester Free Library. He arranged Emerson’s English tour in 1847—1848 and wrote a biography of Emerson that confesses his own ethical faith. {RAT}
Irion, Mary Jean (20th Century) Irion, in From the Ashes of Christianity (1968), wrote, “Christianity was a great religion. It has been over for a hundred years now; whatever the twentieth century knows of it can be thought of as a lingering unreality preserved in the church. When something even so small as a lightbulb goes out, the eyes for a moment still see it; and a sound after it is made will have, in the right places, an echo. So it is not at all strange that when something so huge as a world religion goes out, there remains for a century or more in certain places some notion that it is still there. Irion also wrote Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation (1970). {TYD}
IRISH FREETHINKERS AND HUMANISTS: See entry for Ireland, Humanists In. Also, see a survey by Tony Akkermans in The Freethinker (June 1997), in which are cited John Toland as being described by Jonathan Swift as “the great Oracle of the anti-Christians”; William Lecky, the politician and historian; and John Bagnell Bury, a classical scholar who held professorships at Dublin and Cambridge.
Iron, Ralph: See entry for Olive Schreiner.
Ironside, Isaac (1808—1870) Ironside was converted to freethought by listening to lectures of Frances Wright. He was a founding member in England of the Sheffield Mechanics’ Institute. {VI}
IRONY • One of my old formulas is to be an enthusiast in the front part of your heart and ironical in the back. —Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
IRRELIGION
• Irreligion, n. The principal one of the great faiths of the world. —Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Isaacs, Alan (1925— ) Isaacs, a freethinker, wrote The Survival of God in the Scientific Age (1966). {GS}
Isherwood, Christopher (1904—1986) Because the novelist and playwright Isherwood, upon deserting his native England in 1939 for the safety of the United States, fell in with Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, some may have assumed he was interested in rationalism and a non-theist outlook. Actually, however, he also fell in with Swami Prabhavananda, with whom he produced a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita; and with Aldous Huxley, sharing his interest in mescaline. Vedanta as well as Hindu philosophy became important, much as for his friend W. H. Auden, with whom he co-authored Journey to a War (1939), Anglo-Catholicism was important. Isherwood once argued with Russell and Julian Huxley, who were concerned about Aldous Huxley. Isherwood (in Christopher Isherwood: Diaries, Volume One: 1939—1960, published in 1997) wrote: “Did he—I mean—er, that is—do you mean to say he actually, er, really—prays?” “And why,” asked Bertie, “does Aldous talk about Ulltimate Reality? Surely one kind of reality isn’t any more or less real than another.”
Isherwood’s mysticism and Vedantism is featured in many of his writings. The frank description of the early days of his homosexuality is found in Christopher and His Kind (1976). His best-known work was the section “Sally Bowles” which John Van Druten dramatized in I Am A Camera (1951) and which was turned into a stage musical in 1968 as Cabaret. {OEL}
ISIS Isis (Ashet in Egyptian), queen of the Egyptian gods, was worshipped throughout the late Roman Empire. As the major image of female divinity, states Clifton, “Isis became blended in devotion with the Virgin Mary.” (See the entry for Christmas.) {EH}
Iska, Frank (20th Century) From 1909 to 1921, Iska published Vesmir, first in Oklahoma City, then in Chicago.
ISLAM In Arabic, Islam refers to submitting to, or having peace with, God. It is the religion of which Muhammad was the prophet. The adherents of Islam prefer to be called Muslims or Moslems rather than Muhammedans or Mohammedans, the latter two implying that Muhammed was a god (analogous to Jesus and the Christians) rather than a human. Muslims deny the divinity of Jesus, citing Jesus as another prophet, like Muhammad. More than one billion adherents of Islam live in the present world of almost six billion. But they do not share a single history, language, culture, or tradition. Over the 1,400 years of the religion’s existence, Islam has taken on many political, philosophical, theological, and mystical forms in a number of countries. Muslims are a diverse grouping of people who differ in gender, class, ethnicity, and experience. Although it may be thought to be a homogeneous group, it is not. The Qur’an (Koran), believed to be a revelation of God to Muhammad, is held sacred throughout large portions of Asia and Africa, especially North Africa, the Middle East, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. There are five essential duties, the Five Pillars, in Islam:
1. The Muslim must say, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet.” 2. Five times daily he must pray facing Mecca: at dawn, at noon, in midafternoon, at dusk, and after dark. 3. The Muslim must give alms generously. 4. The Muslim must keep the fast of Ramadan, which is the ninth month of the Muslim year. 5. Once in his life the Muslim male must, if he can, make the pilgrimage (Hajj) to Mecca.
Muslims follow injunctions against alcoholic beverages, touching or eating of pork, gambling, usury, fraud, slander, and the making of images. Although Islam permits polygamy—if a man can support four wives equally—it is not a typical practice in Islamic countries, except among clerics and the very wealthy. Islamic law includes prescriptions for family life, dress, commercial transactions, and diet. Like the Jews and Christians, Muhammadens revere the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. Although some contemporary Muslims argue that Islam can regain strength by integrating Western notions of freedom and social reform, a more visible group of fundamentalist Muslims rejects Western and secular influences. The demarcation between civil law and religious law is very difficult to make in an Islamic state. Further, there is no distinction between theology and philosophy. In Power (1938), Bertrand Russell noted that “One of the arguments against democracy is that a nation of united fanatics has more chance of success in war than a nation containing a large proportion of sane men.” The classic example he gives of power through fanaticism is the rise of Islam: “Mohammed added nothing to the knowledge or to the material resources of the Arabs, and yet, within a few years of his death, they had acquired a large empire by defeating their most powerful neighbors. Undoubtedly, the religion founded by the Prophet was an essential element in the success of his nation. At the very end of his life, he declared war on the Byzantine Empire. ‘The Moslems were discouraged, they alleged the want of money, or horses, or provisions, the season of harvest, and the intolerable heat of the summer. “Hell is much hotter,” said the indignant prophet. He disdained to compel their service; but on his return, he admonished the most guilty, by an excommunication of fifty days’ (Gibbon, Chap. L). Fanaticism, while Mohammed lived, and for a few years after his death, united the Arab nation, gave it confidence in battle, and promoted courage by the promise of Paradise to those who fell fighting the infidel.” Lee Kuan Yew, senior minister of Singapore and the country’s Prime Minister from 1959 to 1990, has written of predictions for Asia in the next century. He described Wang Chang, aged seventy, a fourth-generation Chinese Singaporean, who predicted the following: By the year 2150, Orthodox Islam will remain an all-embracing faith that will continue to lay down strict rules governing all aspects of a Muslim’s life. Muslims, Wang holds, will not join any broad ecumenical movement, and he also believes that in 2150 there will be no world confederation of democracies—there will be a civil community of nations in which a tolerant live-and-let-live relationship prevails, but the Islamic world will remain separate. Wang’s friend, Ali Alkaff, a fifth-generation Arab-Malay Singaporean, according to The Economist (11-17 September 1993), did not share Wang’s faith that man’s rationality will enable him to avoid obvious disasters. He did not, however, disagree with the viewpoint that the Islamic world will vary in its strict Koran-based religious practices. Such a strictness in Afghanistan was shown in 1996 when music was banned on Kabul’s radio stations and cinemas were closed because both lacked “suitably Islamic” material. Most non-Muslims are unaware that Islam has taken so much from both Jewish and Christian traditions. Few know that 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.” Thus, the heart of Christian doctrine is denied. Warraq and other critics point out that it was despite Islam that Islamic science developed, and he laments the fact that religion has so often been made the basis for perpetuating social injustices: the notion of a Holy War and making apostasy a capital offense are particularly intolerant. “In modern times,” he wrote, blasphemy has simply become a tool for Muslim governments to silence opposition, or for individuals to settle personal scores.” “Muslims,” wrote the philosopher Ernest Renan, “are the first victims of Islam. Many times I have observed in my travels in the Orient that fanaticism comes from a small number of dangerous men who maintain the others in the practice of religion by terror. To liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.” (See entries for Ibn Al-Rawandi, Civilization, Fatwa, Flat Earth Theory, Heaven—Muslim, Nation of Islam, and Ibn Warraq.) {CE; ER; RE}
ISLAMIC ASSOCIATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA The Federation of Islamic Associations in the United States and Canada is at 25351 Five Mile Road, Redford Township, Michigan 48239. Estimates of the number of members exceed three million in the two nations.
ISLAMIC FUNDAMENTALISM In Uzbekistan, according to The Economist (4 July 1998),
The government uses the term Wahhabism, which refers to the puritanical Islamic creed of Saudi Arabia, to demonise all those who oppose the strict controls it is placing on Islam. The deferential parliament has obliged the president by rubber-stamping a “freedom of worship” law, which among other things makes it a crime to teach religion without official approval, bans unlicensed religious organisations and forbids religious dress in public. (See entry for Taslima Nasrin, who is highly critical.)
ISLAMIC GAYS: See entry for Muslim Gays.
ISLAMIC IMPERIALISM “The imperialism of Islam is indeed destructive,” wrote Ian Buruma in London, who continued:
[I]t deadens the human mind. But I’m not sure it is the worst we have seen. The cult of sacred places and native soil has been at the core of other forms of pseudoreligious political fundamentalism. State Shinto in pre-war Japan turned the entire nation into a sacred shrine. Nazism was built on worship of the German “race.” The results were every bit as murderous and cruel as any Islamic revolution has been so far—indeed more so. The same is true of Communist imperialism, which is in some ways more comparable to Islamic fundamentalism.” {Ian Buruma, “In the Empire of Islam,” The New York Review of Books, 16 July 1998. Also see Ibn Warraq’s Why I Am Not A Muslim [1995]}
ISLAMIC LAW Bat Ye’or, in The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, 7th to 20th Century (1996), details how Muslims have been convinced of their own superiority over all non-Muslims and how this view is enshrined in law. Tariq Ismail, reviewing the book (New Humanist, December 1996), wrote: “In litigation between a Muslim and a dhimmi, the validity of the oath or testimony of the dhimmi was not recognised. Any fine imposed on a Muslim for a crime was automatically halved if the victim was a dhimmi. No Muslim could be executed for having committed any crime against a dhimmi. Accusations of blasphemy against dhimmis were quite frequent and the penalty was capital punishment. Since his testimony was not accepted in court, the dhimmi was forced to convert or die. The dhimmis had to wear distinctive clothing, was not permitted to build his house higher than that of a Muslim, forbidden to carry arms, and so on.” In the 19th and 20th centuries, Christians rebelled against the inferior position imposed upon them. Their struggle eventually led to the wars of national liberation for Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, Rumanians, Armenians, and Zionists.
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY: See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4. \
ISLAMIC SECULARIZATION The International Society for Islamic Secularization (ISIS, PO Box 229, Buffalo, NY 14215) publishes Separation of Mosque and State. Its Executive Director is Ibn Warraq, its Chairperson is Marvin Zeyed, and its Vice-Chair is Taslima Nasrin. On the Web: <www.secularislam.org>. Secular and religious rules can scarcely live side-by-side, the group holds, if the latter cannot allow compromise.
ISLAMIC WOMEN, RIGHTS OF In 1997 a group of born Muslims, primarily from Iran and South Asia, signed “A Declaration of the Rights of Women in Islamic Societies. They declared the necessity “of publicly submitting an alternative to the mind-numbing religious certainties of Islamic fundamentalism, and the ineffectual vacillation and tinkering of Reformist Islam. The alternative is secularism: the secular voice is seldom if ever heard in debates on reforming Islamic society.” They formed the Ar Razi Circle to promote secularism in the Islamic world, saying oppression of women is a grave offense against all humanity; accused orthodox and fundamentalists religions of having devised claims of divine justification for the subordination of women to men; and named as goals such as the following:
• A woman should have freedom of action, should be able to travel alone, should be permitted to uncover her face, and should be allowed the same inheritance rights as a man. • She should not be subject to gruesome ritual mutilations of her person. • She should be free upon reaching the legal age to marry a man of her own choice without permission from a putative guardian or parent. She should be free to marry a non-Muslim. She should be free to divorce and be entitled to maintenance in the case of divorce. • She should have equal access to education, equal opportunities for higher education, and be free to choose her subject of study. • In Islamic societies, she should enjoy the same human rights as those guaranteed under International Human Rights legislation. Signatories included the following:
Reza Afshari, Iran, Political Scientist Sadik al Azm, Syria, Philosopher Mahshid Amir-Shahy, Iran, Author, Social Critic, and Founder of the French Defense League for Rushdie Masud Ansari, Iran, Physician, Author, United States Bahram Azad, Iran, Scholar, Physician, United States Parvin Darabi, Scholar, Homa Darabi Foundation, United States Khalid Duran, Professor of Political Science, Editor and Founder of TransState Islam, Founder of the Ibn Khaldun Society, United States Ranjana Hossain, Executive Director of the Assembly of Free Thinkers, Bangladesh Mustafa Hussain, Sudan, Advisory Board, Ibn Khaldun Society, United States Ramine Kamrane, Iran, Political Scientist, France Ionna Kucaradi, Philosopher, Turkish Human Rights Commission and Secretary General, International Federation of Philosophical Societies, Turkey Luma Musa, Palestine, Communications Researcher, United Kingdom Taslima Nasrin, Bangladesh, Author, Physician, Social Critic Hossainur Rahman, India, Social Historian, Columnist, Asiatic Society of Calcutta Siddigur Rahman, Bangladesh, Former Research Fellow, Islamic Research Institute Armen Saginian, Iran, Editor, Publisher, United States Anwear Shaikh, Pakistan, Author, Social Critic, United Kingdom Ibn Warraq, India, Author of Why I am Not a Muslim, United States
ISLAMISM: Islamism conveys the meaning of Islam as a political movement. Islamic fundamentalism does not.
Isnard, Felix (Born 1829) Isnard was a French physician who wrote Spiritualism and Materialism (1879). {BDF}
Isnard, Maximin (1751—1830) Isnard was a Girondin revolutionist who, upon becoming a member of the Assembly, declared, “The Law, behold my God. I know no other.” He voted for the death of the King and was nominated president of the Convention. On the fall of the Girondins he made his escape, reappearing after Robespierre’s fall. {BDF}
Isoard Delisle, Jean Baptiste Claude (1743—1816) A French man of letters also called Delisle de Sales, Isoard left theology for literature. In 1769 he published the Philosophy of Nature, which in 1771 was discovered to be irreligious and he was condemned to perpetual banishment. While in prison he was visited by many philosophers. Voltaire gave five hundred francs for his benefit. Isoard went to the court of Frederick the Great and subsequently published many works of little importance. To the amusement of his friends, Isoard Delisle, a deist, jocularly wrote A Memoir In Favor of God (1802). {BDF; RAT}
Ison, Ralph E. (20th Century) Ison is active in England with the Chiltern Humanists, and he was a director of the Rationalist Press Association until 1998. A biologist, he wrote “The Miraculous Birth of Jesus—A Biologist’s View” (The Freethinker, December 1993), in which he questions how the Virgin Mary’s eggs stimulated to divide and proceed to develop into a healthy male child. How, he asks, did a male set of chromosomes get inside Mary? And he questions God’s omniscience in not setting Joseph’s mind at rest by informing him before the event took place rather than after the deed had been committed. Joseph, according to Matthew I:19, presumably believed he was not the father of Jesus and also at first did not believe in miracles.
ISRAELI HUMANISTS • The Israel Association for Secular Humanistic Judaism is at 14, Hatibonim Street, PO Box 4512, Jerusalem 92386. • The Israel Secular Humanist Association (IHEU) is at POB 17141, Tel Aviv 61171, Israel. • Secular Humanistic Judaism, 8 Itamar Ben Avi St., PO Box 4512, Jerusalem 91044
ITALIAN-AMERICAN FREETHINKERS: See Freethought in the United States by Gordon Stein.
ITALIAN FREETHINKERS: See entry for Beccaria. Also, see Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4.
ITALIAN HUMANISTS AND FREETHINKERS Italian freethought groups and publications include the following: • Ateo, Trimestrale di cultura laica (The Atheist), an Italian quarterly published by the UAAR), is at C.P. 989, I-35100 Padover PD <uaarpd@tin.it>. • Centro Coscienza, Corso di Porta Nuova, 16-20121, Milan • La Nuova Ragione, Via dei Serpenti 35, 00184 Roma • Libero Pensiero, 11 via Consolata, 10122 TO, Torino <roberto.laferla@agora.stm.it>. • National Freethought Organization, ‘Giordano Bruno,’ 82, Via Teodosio, 20131 Milan <http://www.agora.stm.it/anlp/> • Union of Italian Rationalists, Atheists, and Agnostics, c/o Lega Per l’Ambiente, Via Cornaro 1A, 35128 Padova. For information on the Webabout Unione degli Atei e degli Agnostici Razionalisti: <www.geocities.com/colosseum/8736/uaar.htm>
ITALIAN RENAISSANCE HUMANISTS: See entry for Cesare Beccaria.
ITHACA COLLEGE HUMANISTS Humanists and freethinkers at Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York, can be found on the Web at: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Ito, Hirobumi (1841—1909) Ito, a Japanese prime minister in the 1890s, declared, “I regard religion itself as quite unnecessary for a nation’s life; science is far above superstition; and what is religion, Buddhism, or Christianity, but superstition, and therefore a possible source of weakness to a nation?” {TYD}
Ivers, Gregg (20th Century) Ivers is author of Lowering the Wall: Religion and the Supreme Court in the 1980s. In 1992, he wrote Redefining the First Freedom: The Supreme Court and the Consolidation of the State.
Ives, Rosslyn (20th Century) An Australian, Ives is President of the Humanist Society of Victoria. She spoke about “Putting the ‘Who’ Into Humanism: A Feminist Perspective” at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City. “An important feature of Humanism is the lack of dogma and an openness to change,” she has written. “Thus Humanists never presume that an issue, such as gender, has been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.” Her e-mail: <rosslyn@netspace.net.au>. {Humanist in Canada, Spring 1998}
Ivins, Molly (1944— ) Ivins, a Texas-born writer and columnist, has worked on The Houston Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Texas Observer, and The New York Times. She wrote Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (1991) and Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead (1993). Ivins has gone on record as being a non-theist. {E}
IXION Ixion in Greek mythology was king of the Lapithes, the person who murdered his father-in-law in order to avoid paying a price for his bride. When no one on earth would purify him, Zeus took him to Olympus, where he was purified. However, there he tried to seduce Hera, resulting in Zeus’s creating a phantom of her and by it Ixion became the father of the centaur monsters. Now, Zeus punished Ixion by having him chained eternally to a revolving, fiery wheel in Tartarus. (See entry for Tartarus.) {CE}
Izzi, John (20th Century) Izzi, a freethinker, wrote Fact is My Evidence (1949). {GS}
