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From Philosopedia.org
Laas, Ernst (1837–1885) Laas was a German writer, a professor of philosophy at Strasbourg, who wrote and Kant’s Place in the History of the Conflict Between Faith and Science (1882) and Idealism and Positivism (1879–1884). {BDF; RAT}
Labanca, Baldassarre (Born 1829) Labanca was a professor of moral philosophy in the University of Pisa. He took part in the national movement of 1848, and in 1851 he was imprisoned, then expelled from Naples. Labanca, writing in 1886 on progress in philosophy and a study on primitive Christianity, dedicated his work to Giordano Bruno, the martyr of freethought. {BDF; RAT}
La Barre, Jean de: See entry for Weston La Barre
La Barre, Weston (1911– ) A Duke University anthropologist, author of The Human Animal (1954) and Neurotic Defense Mechanisms in Supernatural Religion (1970s), La Barre wrote the present author about humanism:
Within the limits of your admirable definition—“that man through the manipulation of physical and social forces can attain the good life by means of a naturalistic, as contrasted with a supernaturalistic, philosophy”—I should say that, quite emphatically, I belong to the classification of “naturalistic humanism.” I do not, however, like Ferm [editor of The Encyclopedia of Religion], consider that “religious humanism” is this at all, for religions in my view are invariably supernaturalistic, both de jure and de facto. How else can one be genuinely humanist except as a naturalist? Our experience since the Chevalier de La Barre was burned at the stake as a Voltairean radical in the Eighteenth century has been that the supernaturalists are distinctly inhumanists. [Voltaire wrote Le Cri du Sang Innocent (Cry of Innocent Blood) about François-Jean de la Barre, who was executed in Abbeville in 1766]. In my book, The Human Animal, I have attempted to be consistently naturalistic in my approach to the study of man.
Jean de La Barre’s Continuation de l’histoire universelle de Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was included in the Vatican’s list of prohibited reading in 1745. “I wish I knew how to get my own books on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum,” Weston La Barre wrote after America, the national Catholic weekly, panned his latest book and accused him of “objective blasphemy” and of being “flatly damnable.’” La Barre added,
Discerning characters, these Jesuits! {TYD; WAS, 13 August 1954}
LABELING Those with a philosophic bent are inclined toward being antinomenclaturists: • You ask me whether I call myself a Scientific Humanist or a Naturalistic Humanist. I am not in the habit of giving myself labels, which I leave to others. I should not have any inclination to call myself humanist, as I think, on the whole, that the non-human part of the cosmos is much more interesting and satisfactory than the human part. But if anybody feels inclined to call me a Humanist, I shall not bring an action for libel. –Bertrand Russell in a 1951 letter to the present writer
Labiche, Eugène Marin (1815–1888)
Labiche, a French dramatist whose La cuvette d’eau brought him success and a successful career, wrote more than a hundred comedies. Jules Claretie described Labiche as “Voltairean.” A member of the French Academy, he was an Officer of the Legion of Honour. {RAT}
Labouchere, Henry Du Pre (1831–1912) Although of French extraction, Labouchere was a British editor and politician who rose high in the British diplomatic service, then founded and edited a radical weekly, Truth. According to his biographer, Thorold, Labouchere was “a strict agnostic . . . as completely non-religious as a man could be.” When he lay slowly and placidly dying, a lamp in the room flickered. He raised his head and said, “Flames? . . . No, not yet.” Others cite this as showing how hard it is to overcome what we are taught when young. Or, likely, he was simply showing he had a commendable sense of humor. {JM; RAT; RE}
Labregere, René (20th Century) In Paris, Labregere started editing Raison in 1957.
La Bruyère, Jean de (1645–1696) La Bruyère, a French writer who was tutor in the house of the prince de Condé, wrote Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec; avec Les Caractères ou les Moeurs de ce siècle (1688). He was a defender of classical writers in the “quarrel of the ancients and moderns.” “A sanctimonious man is one who under an atheist king would be an atheist,” he observed. He also wrote, “To what excesses will men not go for the sake of a religion in which they believe so little and which they practice so imperfectly.” Le Bruyère was admitted to the French Academy in 1693. {CE; TYD}
Lacaita, James Philip [Sir] (1813–1895) Lacaita was an Anglo-Italian statesman. The Revolutionaries of 1848 appointed him secretary to the Neapolitan Legation at London, but they failed, and the reactionaries canceled the appointment. It was mainly from Lacaita that Gladstone in 1850 got the information about the clerical-royalist horrors which he afterwards published in a Letter to Lord Aberdeen. Lacaita was imprisoned for a few days, but when the Letter was published (1852) he fled to Naples, then settled in England. Later, Lacaita was elected to the Italian Parliament. {RAT}
Lacépede, Bernard Germain Étienne de la Ville de [Count] (1756–1825) Lacépede, a French naturalist and a friend of Voltaire and D’Alembert, composed operas and symphonies and wrote works on science. During the Revolution, he held office although he protested against the Terror. Napoleon made him Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor and Minister of State. Lacépede remained a deist and was stripped of his honors when royalty and the Church were restored. {JM; RAT}
Lachatre, Maurice (Born 1814) Lachatre, a French writer, edited Library of Progress, in which has appeared his own History of the Inquisition and History of the Popes (1883). {BDF}
Lachs, John (1934– ) Lachs, who was born in Hungary, is an educator and philosopher who co-translated Fichte, Science of Knowledge (1970). An Episcopalian, he is a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994). Lachs, an expert on Santayana, has written favorably about epiphenomenalism and the notion of cause.
La Clair, Paul L. (20th Century) La Clair is a contributor to Family Matters, the newsletter of the Secular Family Network.
Lacour, Léopold (19th Century)
A French feminist, Lacour in Humanisme intégral (1897) called for equality of the sexes and “a humanism no longer virilist, but integral.”
Lacroix, Sigismund: See entry for Adolph Krzyzanowski.
Lacy, George (19th Century) In Sydney, Australia, Lacy and Charles Bright were editors of Liberal (1882–1884). {FUK}
Ladd, Parish B. (19th Century) A freethinker, Ladd wrote Commentaries on Hebrew and Christian Mythology (1896) and The Hebrews: Never in Egypt (c. 1898). {GS}
Lader, Lawrence (1919– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Lader was chairman of the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws. In 1987, he wrote Politics and the Church. He also wrote A Private Matter (1995). {HM2}
Lafan, Tony (20th Century) The Freethinker’s Picnic: Newcastle’s Secular Hall of Science 1884-1893 (1998) is Lafan’s important description of the Australian city of Newcastle and how the laboring classes lived. He also wrote about how secularism came to flourish among them. {Fred Whitehead, Freethought History #28, 1998}
Lafargue, Paul (1842–1911) A freethinker, Lafargue wrote The Myth of Adam and Eve (1928). {GS}
Lafayette, Marie Jean Paul [Marquis] (1757–1834) Joseph McCabe, among others, points out that General Lafayette, who fought in the American army during the War of Independence, was a deist. Five barrels of soil from far off Boston Common New England were shipped to an obscure corner of Paris near the Place de la Nation, in which the general’s body was buried. Overhead hangs an American flag, and nearby lies his son George-Washington de Lafayette. On 4 July 1917 an American colonel, C. E. Stanton, traveled to the French site, observed the American soil, snapped to attention, and saluted while uttering the famous phrase, “Lafayette, we are here.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
LaFerla, Roberto (20th Century) In Italy, Dr. LaFerla, whose doctorate is in chemistry, is general secretary of the Central Committee of the Giordano Bruno National Freethought Association (29, via Bessarione, 1-20139 Milano M1, Italy) and of the Italian Committee for the Control of Claims about the Paranormal. During the first part of this century, his office—before the establishment of Vatican City—was intimidatingly opposite the Pope’s Office. The two organizations collaborate with groups such as the Association for Religious Freedom in Italy. LaFerla addressed the Eleventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Brussels (1990). {Free Inquiry, Winter 1990-1991}
Laffitte, Jacques (1767–1844) Laffitte was a French statesman who, in 1814, became Governor of the Bank of France and President of the Chamber of Commerce. During the Restoration he was an anti-clerical member of the Chambre. He financed the Revolution of 1830 and was appointed Minister of Finance and Premier. But by supporting Polish and Italian revolutionaries, he annoyed the king, resigned in 1831, and by then had lost most of his fortune. {CE; RAT}
Laffitte, Pierre (1823–1903)
A mathematician who became Auguste Comte’s successor as “director of positivism,” Laffitte in 1892 was appointed to the newly created chair of the history of science at the Collège de France. Laffitte wrote The General History of Humanity (1859) and The Great Types of Humanity (1875–1876). In 1878 he founded La Revue Occidentale. {BDF; CE; EU, 516-517, Christopher Kent; RAT}
La Follette, Robert (Marion)[Governor](1855–1925) A Wisconsin governor and Congressman, La Follette founded the National Progressive Republican League and received nearly five million votes as U.S. President on the Progressive Party slate. He was a freethinker and a Unitarian. {CE, U, UU}
La Fontaine, Jean de (1621–1695) La Fontaine, whose fables rightfully place him among the masters of world literature, wrote twelve books of some 230 fables drawn largely from Aesop. Popular with children, they are particularly appreciated for their wit and satirical views about French society and humanity in general. Marc Fumaroli, in Le Poète et le Roi: Jean de La Fontaine en son siècle (1997), points out that, when sixty-two, La Fontaine was admitted to the Académie Française, taking the seat of Jean Baptiste Colbert, the prime minister who had died the year before. Praising his work, the pianist-critic takes issue on the point of La Fontaine’s so-called “conversion” at the age of seventy-one and his repenting of past libertinism. Fumaroli credited Fénelon, the archbishop of Cambrai who is inclined to mysticism. Rosen felt no such intellectual inspiration was needed to explain the conversion. He credited a young abbé, Poujet, who was told by La Fontaine that “I have just been reading the Bible, and it is really a very good book.” What he did not understand, however, was the idea of eternal damnation, particularly for infants. The abbé responded that it was not something to be understood; it is just an idea to be accepted. And when he insisted that the poet publicly condemn his past indecent stories because they had harmed people by corrupting readers, La Fontaine’s housekeeper objected that “God would never have the courage to damn him. Stop tormenting him; he’s much more stupid than wicked.” Nevertheless, the abbé won out and the poet, although insisting he had not been corrupted by writing such work, made a public and humiliating condemnation of his stories, even burning a comedy he had just written. For the last two years of his life he translated the Psalms. After his death, it was discovered that he wore a hairshirt and that he had been flagellating himself. According to Rosen,
A conversion or reform of this sort in old age was commonplace during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries. (When it did not take place, relatives and friends sometimes claimed that it had in order to save the reputation of the loved one.)
A year after his conversion and shortly before his death, La Fontaine wrote to a friend, “I would die of boredom if I had to stop writing verse.” {CE; Charles Rosen, The New York Review of Books, 18 December 1997}
LaHaye, Tim (20th Century) LaHaye, one of the leading negative critics of secular humanism, is author of The Battle for the Mind (1983).
Lagarrigue, Jorge (1854–1894) Lagarrigue, a Chilean positivist, edited Comte’s letters to Edger (1889) and wrote La róle de la France dans l’histoire de l’humanité, Positivisme, et Catholicisme. {RAT}
Lagarrigue, Juan Enrique (Born 1852) Lagarrigue, brother of Jorge Lagarrigue, was a Chilean positivist. He wrote La religion de la Humanidad (1893) and other positivist works besides a volume on Diderot and several pacifist pamphlets. {RAT}
Lagerborg, Robert (19th Century) Lagerborg, a Finnish non-theist, wrote on freedom of religion in 1863. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Lagerkvist, Pär Fabian (1891–1974) The Swedish winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in literature, Lagerkvist is said to have been a philosophic naturalist. The Hangman (1933) is concerned with good, evil, and man’s search for God. Lagerkvist is an unbeliever who, although preoccupied with the plight of unbelievers, states Ingwersen, “turns a reassuring myth around to show the ludicrousness of its promise. The novel Barabbas (1950) may be, in fact, the ultimate characterization of the unbeliever who cannot transcend his own belief.” (See letter from Walter Gustofson, above. Also, see entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.) {CE; Faith Ingwersen, EU}
Lagerlof, Selma (1858–1940)
A Nobel Prize-winning Swedish novelist, Lagerlof in Jerusalem (1901) wrote, “Here [in Jerusalem], no mercy is shown. One hates one’s fellow man to the glory of God.” In 1909, she was the first gay woman, the first woman, and the first Swedish writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. {TYD}
Lagrange, Joseph Louis [Comte] (1736–1813) A French mathematician and astronomer, Lagrange was a freethinker during the Revolution. He solved isoperimetrical problems, on which the calculus of variations is based in part. He researched the nature and propagation of sound, studied the libration of the moon, and was influential in causing the adoption of the decimal base for the metric system. His Analytical Mechanics was called “one of the masterpieces of the human intellect” by Wheeler. Lagrange was a friend of D’Alembert, Diderot, Condorcet, and Delambre. Under Napoleon, Lagrange was made senator and count. Although an agnostic, he “was too famous for them to touch him,” observed McCabe. Lagrange is buried in the Panthéon. {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
La Grasserie, Raoul de (Born 1839) La Grasserie was a French sociologist whose rationalism is expressed in his poetry (Hommes et singes, 1899) and work on the sociological aspect of religion (Des religions comparées au point de vue sociologique, 1899). {RAT}
La Hontan, Jean (1666–1715) An early French traveler to Canada, La Hontan wrote Dialogues With an American Savage (1704), in which he states his objections to religion. {BDF}
Lahr, Bert (1895–1967) Lahr, the American comic actor, first performed in burlesque and vaudeville, becoming known for his morose facial expressions. He appeared in many Broadway shows, in films, and on television. His 1956 performance in Waiting for Godot is considered the high point of his career, but he is best remembered as the Cowardly Lion in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939), with Judy Garland. Lahr married a Ziegfield Follies girl, Mildred Schroeder. Theirs was an eventful twenty-seven-year marriage, according to a biography by his son, critic John Lahr, who, in “My Mother the Ziegfield Girl” (The New Yorker 13 May 1996), recalls the following concerning his mother:
She once upbraided me for letting my friends call me Lahrheim, which was Dad’s original name. (He changed it by deed poll in 1959.) “Your name is Lahr,” Millie insisted over tea.” “Face it, Mom,” I said. “You were married to one of the great Jewish entertainers.” Millie folded her napkin carefully in front of her and fixed me with a look. “John, your father was not Jewish,” she said. “He was a star.”
{CE}
Lainez, Alexandre (1650–1710) Lainez was a French poet, of the same family with the general of the Jesuits. He lived a wandering Bohemian life, going to Holland where he met Bayle. {BDF}
Laing, R. D. (1927–1989) Laing was a British psychiatrist who founded a therapeutic community in which the hierarchical distinction between physicians and patients was essentially eliminated. In his autobiography, The Making of a Psychiatrist (1985), and in his other writings, he developed what was termed Humanistic Psychology. {CE}
Laing, Samuel (Born 1812) Laing was a Scottish-born politician and writer, the son of S. Laing of Orkney. After being secretary of the railway department of the Board of Trade, he became Liberal M.P. for Kirkwall in 1852 and helped repeal duty on advertisements in newspapers. In 1860 he became finance minister for India. His Modern Science and Modern Thought (1885) is an exposition of the incompatibility of the old and new view of the universe. In Modern Zoroastrian (1887), he gives the philosophy of polarity which, however, was anticipated by Crozier who in turn was anticipated by Emerson. Laing in 1888 entered into a friendly correspondence with Mr. Gladstone on the subject of agnosticism, his portion of which was published. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Laisant, Charles Ange (Born 1841) A French mathematician who became President of the Mathematical Society of France, Laisant was an Officer of the Legion of Honour and Vice-President of the Astronomical Society. Laisant was an active rationalist and agnostic. {RAT}
Lakanal, Joseph (1762–1845) Lakanal was a French educator who, giving up the career of priesthood, entered with ardor into the Revolution, was a member of the Convention (1792–1795), and worked to protect the interests of science. At the restoration in 1814 he retired to America, where he was welcomed by Jefferson and became president of the University of Louisiana. {BDF; RAT}
Lake, Greg (20th Century) Lake, a lyricist, bassist, and lead singer for King Crimson, wrote in the recording entitled “Tarkus”
Can you believe God makes you breathe Why did he lose Six million Jews
Lal, Surendra (20th Century) Lal is a director in England of the National Secular Society.
Lalande, Joseph Jérôme Lefrançais de (1732–1807) A French astronomer who became director of the Paris Observatory, Lalande was a freethinker during the Revolution. In his twentieth year, Lalande was made a member of the Academy of Sciences. In 1762 he became professor of astronomy at the Collège de France. In 1764 he published his Treatise of Astronomy, to which Dupuis subjoined a memoir, which formed the basis of his Origin of All Religions, an idea taken from Lalande. In 1793, Lalande hazarded his own life to save Dupont de Nemours and some priests whom he concealed in the observatory of Mazarin college. Upon Lalande’s observations the Republican calendar was drawn up. At Lalande’s instigation, Sylvain Maréchal published his Dictionary of Atheists, to which the astronomer contributed supplements after Maréchal’s death. Lalande professed himself prouder of being an atheist than of being an astronomer. His Histoire céleste française (1801) included a catalog of over 47,000 stars. {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
La Libre Pensée In France, La Libre Pensée publishes the monthly La Raison and a philosophical journal, L’Idée Libre. (See entry for French Humanists.) {FD}
Lambe, Mick (31 Dec 1957- ) London-born he emigrated to Australia in 1967 on the last ship through the Suez Canal during the Six Day War. Traveling around Australia on high-powered motorcycles, he observed "feral budgies and caged humans". He became a shop steward on numerous building sites, considered as a radical for his labor union organizing.
He built a stone house in the middle of a land claim in the Northern Territory(NT) and was adopted as family, by local Aboriginal people, eventually tutoring them for Batchelor Aboriginal College. Armed vigilantes and quasi-legal machinations by the NT government attempted to remove him from his home. He has written, "this only strengthened my Irish resolve and my bond with the Aboriginal people." Out of such Australian racism, he founded PARIAH (People Against Racism in Aboriginal Homelands). When the land under claim was finally awarded to local Aboriginal people, local bigots destroyed his home. Lambe blames the NT Country Liberal Party for many of the problems, but is not optimistic that feelings concerning the country's indigenous people will change quickly, even if a different political party were to win.
Lambe describes himself as a "social logician" preferring "freethinker" to "rationalist." "People often believe," he states, "that my criticism of their social actions is judgmental and defines my personal view. In actuality, I challenge belief that is hypocritical or logically inconsistent. My own position has always been to accept human frailty on an individual level. It is social frailty, militarism, fascism, racism, and conformity that are the real abominations." As for atheism, "It shores up organized religion. It posits an absurdity by challenging it.The absurdity being an implied knowledge of the unknowable, akin to sub-molecular science. Religion is a necessary part of social evolution and a universal metaphor for the inexplicable, but we must keep evolving socially and that means planetary humanism. I can accept the existence of a spirituality that taps into Nature, but only because its absence is so concretely - an ugly and harmful illogic. Hardly a claim that organized religion can make." As for life after death, Lambe holds that "matter cannot be destroyed and that science and religion for all their internicine squabbling are merely segments of the same philosophy: human thought. I do know that if there is an afterlife there will be a logical explanation, so I've never understood why it is such a controversial subject - Apart from the 'fear of death syndrome' or our innate survival instinct. Maybe this blasé fatalism is my way of dealing with the death-fear, who knows!"
Lambe, Mick (31 Dec 1957- ) London-born Lambe emigrated to Australia in 1967 on the last ship through the Suez Canal during the Six Day War. Traveling around Australia on high-powered motorcycles, he observed feral budgies and caged humans, was hired as a shop steward on numbers of building sites, and became known as a radical for his labor union organizing. He built a stone house for his family amongst the Aboriginal people in the middle of a land claim in the Northern Territory, then tutored at Belyuen’s Batchelor Aboriginal College. Armed vigilantes threatened to remove him, and their quasi-legal machinations, he has written, “only strengthened my Irish resolve and my bond with the Aboriginal people.” Out of such Australian racism, he founded PARIAH (People Against Racism in Aboriginal Homelands). His actions, however, led to his being imprisoned for trespassing in the middle of the land claim but also to being accepted as “family” by the Aboriginals. When the area’s land was finally awarded to local Aboriginal people, local bigots destroyed his home. Lambe blames the country’s Liberal Party for many of the problems but is not optimistic that feelings concerning the country’s indigenous people will change quickly, even if a different political party were to win. Lambe describes himself as a social logician, preferring “freethinker” to “rationalist.” “People often believe,” he states, “that my criticism of their social actions is judgmental and defines my personal view. In actuality, I challenge belief that is hypocritical or logically inconsistent. My own position has always been to accept human frailty on an individual level. It is social ‘frailty,’ militarism, fascism, racism, and conformity that are the abominations.” As for atheism, “It shores up organized religion. It posits an absurdity by challenging it, the absurdity being an implied knowledge of the unknowable, akin to sub-molecular science. Religion is a necessary part of social evolution and a universal metaphor for the inexplicable, but we must keep evolving socially and that means planetary humanism. I can accept the existence of a ‘spirituality’ that taps into Nature, but only because its absence is so concretely an ugly and harmful illogic, hardly a claim that organized religion can make.” As for life after death, Lambe holds that matter cannot be destroyed and that science and religion “for all their internicine squabbling are merely segments of the same philosophy: human thought. I do know that if there is an afterlife there will be a logical explanation. I’ve never understood why it is such a controversial subject, apart from the fear of death syndrome or our innate survival instinct. Maybe this blasé fatalism is my way of dealing with the death-fear, who knows!” {WAS, 5 Aug 2001}
La Mothe Le Vayer, François de (1588–1672) A French skeptical philosopher, La Mothe Le Vayer was patronized by Louis XIV and was preceptor to the Duke of Anjoy. His skepticism shows in The Virtue of Pagans and Dialogues After the Manner of the Ancients. {BDF}
LA NUOVA RAGIONE An Italian humanist publication, La Nuova Ragione is at Via dei Serpenti 35, 00184 Roma, Italia.
LA PENSÉE ET LES HOMMES La Pensée et les Hommes, an associate member of the IHEU, is at Avenue Adolphe Buyl 105, 1050 Brussels, Belgium.
LA RAISON A French humanistic journal, La Raison, is at 10-12 rue des Fosses-Saint Jacques, 75005 Paris, France.
LA VOIX DE LA LIBRE PENSEE/DAS FREIE WORT
La Voix de la Libre Pensée/Das Freie Wort (Freethinker), is a quarterly in French and German of La Libre Pensée Luxembourgeoise, B. Postale 198, L-2011 Luxembourg.
LAMA • Although both a lama and a llama are wooly, the latter is pronounced YAH-ma in Spanish and is not a “superior one,” whereas the former is neither a beast of burden nor a ruminant. –Warren Allen Smith
In the Buddhism of Tibet, a lama is a monk or priest. The chief of the lamas is the Dalai Lama.
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet [Chevalier de] (1744–1829) An eminent natural philosopher, Lamarck compiled the first comprehensive theory of organic evolution and coined the word “biology.” Originally trained as a Jesuit, he became a deist. His theory of acquired characteristics, that the giraffe’s neck eventually extended out of need to reach high, for example, was rejected once the principles of heredity were established. His contribution mainly is that at a time when most naturalists advocated divine creation and the fixity of species, he championed the evolutionary framework which Charles Darwin later propounded. The two differed, especially in their view of the part played by “appetency” (organic changes resulting from environmental pressures) and the active exertion of the organism. According to McCabe, “The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that he was a Catholic but even the anti-evolutionary Quatrefages said that he was ‘essentially deistic,’ and no Catholic of Lamarck’s time could be an evolutionist. In some passages, in fact, he is practically agnostic.” Several years before his death, Lamarck became blind. {BDF; CE; EU, H. James Birx; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
Lamarque, Pierre (20th Century) Lamarque is a signer from France of Humanist Manifesto II. He was a tireless worker for the separation of church and state in France. His Essai de topographia du Paris macconique (1974) is about the Masonic Lodge. {HM2}
Lamarque-Osmin, Mireille (20th Century) In 1978 at the Seventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in London, Lamarque-Osmin of France addressed the group.
Lamb, Charles (1775–1834) An essayist who wrote many children’s books including Tales from Shakespeare (1807), Lamb was a boyhood friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was in Leigh Hunt’s literary circle, along with William Hazlitt, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Suggesting that a final will contains the element of self-fulfillment, he playfully included in his own will, “I am not, therefore, going to die!” Before leaving the Unitarians a few years before his death, he wrote, “O Southey, Southey, how long would it be before you would find one of us Unitarians propagating such unwarrantable scandal?” And to a Mr. Moxom, he wrote, “Did George Dyer send his tract to me to convert me to Unitarianism? Dear, blundering soul, Why, I am as old a One-God-ite as himself!” McCabe tells that in a late edition of his Essays of Elia, Lamb “included a letter to the reactionary poet Southey in which he says: ‘The last sect with which you can remember me to have made common profession were the Unitarians,’ and E. V. Lucas in his authoritative life of Lamb quotes letters which show that he was an agnostic (October 1831).” {CE; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; U; UU}
Lamb, Edward (20th Century)
When Lamb signed Humanist Manifesto II, he was president of Lamb Communications, Inc. He discusses lawyers and business in The Sharing Society (1979). {HM2}
Lamb, Gilbert D. (20th Century) In the 1950s, Lamb was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York.
Lamb, Helen Boyden (1906?–1975) Helen Lamb [Lamont], an economist, was the second wife of philosopher Corliss Lamont. The author of Studies on India and Vietnam (1976), she signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Lamb, William [Viscount Melbourne] (1779–1848) An eminent British statesman, Lamb became Prime Minister of England (Whig, 1834; Whig, 1835–1841) and the chief counselor of the young queen, Victoria, granddaughter of George III. McCabe reports that Greville, who knew Lamb well and often discussed religion with him, was an atheist; and that Allen, who also knew him, said Lamb had “a perfect conviction of unbelief.” All agreed that it was not a mere question of indifference, for Lord Melbourne was a serious student of religious matters all his life. {JM; RAT; RE}
LAMBETH CONFERENCE: See entry for Anglican Communion.
Lamborelle, Louis (Born 1874) A Belgian author, Lamborelle wrote The Good Old Times (1874), The Apostles and Martyrs of Liberty of Conscience (1882), and other anti-clerical works. He lost a post under government because of his anti-clericalism, but Lamborelle was one of the council of the Belgian Freethought Party. {BDF}
Lamboy, Leo (20th Century) Lamboy is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism (AAAA). (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.)
Lamennais, Hugues Felicite Robert de (1782–1854) Lamennais was a French writer, one who described Rome as “the most hideous sewer that was ever opened up to the eye of man.” Although Lady Blennerhassett cites his being a priest, from 1825 to 1835, the Catholic Encyclopedia states that Lamennais “died rejecting all religious ministration.” {JM; RAT; RE}
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–1751) During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited La Mettrie as one of the major atheists of all time. A philosopher and physician, he first studied theology, then switched to become surgeon to the Guards of Paris. His materialistic philosophy expounded in L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745), which he wrote under the pretense of its being a translation from the English of Charp [Sharp], held that psychical phenomena can be explained as the effects of organic change in the brain and nervous system. His work was burned, and he fled to Leiden. When he wrote L’Homme machine (1747), he escaped under threat of arrest to Berlin, where Frederick II the Great of Prussia provided him protection. He then wrote L’art de jour (1751), a hedonistic work on ethics. Diderot and Holbach, who were influenced greatly by him, never acknowledged their indebtedness to his ideas. For La Mettrie, the only real pleasures are those of the senses, which he held are the only avenues to knowledge. The only god of life is pleasure, and it is absurd to assume a god to explain motion. Virtue is self-enlightened self-interest. The “soul” perishes with the body. Only under atheism will religious strife cease. Unfortunately, La Mettrie died from something he ate. Frederick himself penned La Mettrie’s biography, describing his life of hedonism and the death from food poisoning, which his opponents said was a providential punishment for such an atheist. La Mettrie is buried in the garden of Lord Tyrconnel. A recent intellectual history of his thought and its influence is Kathleen Wellman’s La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlightenment (1992). {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Aram Vartanian; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE}
Lamm, Richard D. [Governor] (1935– ) Lamm, a former Governor of Colorado (elected in 1975), was named 1993 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. {HNS2}
Lamont, Beth K. (20th Century) Corliss Lamont married his third wife, Beth Keehner, in 1986. A devoted humanist who cared for him in his final years and helped develop humanist telecasts, Lamont is on the Executive Board of the Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association. For The Humanist (November-December 1998), she wrote “Establishing an International Criminal Court,” in which she argued that the United States was negligent in being one of seven nations—including China, Iraq, and Libya—which did not sign a Rome agreement to establish such a court. Lamont is a program director for the Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York, which is on the Web at <http://www.corliss-lamont.org/hsmny/>. Her e-mail: <info.hsmny@corliss-lamont.org>. (See entry for Human Values Network.) {HNS2}
Lamont, Corliss (1902–1995) A leading exponent of the philosophic movement of naturalistic humanism, Lamont was the son of J. P. Morgan’s partner, Thomas William Lamont. Active on behalf of civil liberties, he left the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over policy differences and became chairman of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (NECLC). In the 1940s and 1950s, he taught a class, naturalistic humanism, at Columbia University, the notes for which became the basis of his book, The Philosophy of Humanism (1949; reprinted 1990). It is considered by many a standard text on the subject. Known as a rebel at Columbia, he organized aid for Harvard scrubwomen who had been dismissed in a dispute over a new minimum-wage law. A key advisor and financial backer of the American Humanist Association, he wrote extensively about humanism, opposed the Vietnam War, and championed the Bill of Rights in numerous forums. In 1952 he was the candidate for U.S. Senate of the American Labor Party, receiving 10,000 votes. Six years later, on the Independent Socialist ticket, he received 49,000 votes. Included among his works are the following: Issues of Immortality (1932); The Illusion of Immortality (1965); You Might Like Socialism: A Way of Life for Modern Man (1939); Freedom Is As Freedom Does, Civil Liberties Today (1942, 1956); Freedom of Choice Affirmed (1967); A Humanist Funeral Service (1947, 1977); A Humanist Wedding Service (1970); and The Independent Mind. He edited Dialogue on John Dewey (1959); Dialogue on George Santayana (1959); Man Answers Death: An Anthology of Poetry (1936, 1952); Voices in the Wilderness: Collected Essays of Fifty Years (1974); and Yes To Life: Memoirs of Corliss Lamont (1981). In the latter book, he wrote, “My final word is that in the battles that confront us today for America’s freedom and welfare, our chief aim as public-spirited citizens must be neither to avoid trouble, nor to stay out of jail, nor even to preserve our lives, but to keep on fighting for our fundamental principals and ideals.” Several legal victories were dear to his heart. In the late 1950s, he won a case against the State Department, which had refused for nearly a decade to issue him a passport on the ground that his travel abroad “would be contrary to the best interests of the United States.” And in 1965 he won a suit against the Postmaster General for violating his First Amendment rights by opening and withholding his mail, including propaganda from Peking. In 1961 the Supreme Court held a 1961 anti-propaganda mail law to be unconstitutional. In 1965, he won a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency, which had opened letters mail or received by him, some from his wife. A Federal Court declared that “illegal prying into the shared intimacies of husband and wife is despicable.” Over the years, he was criticized negatively from all quarters. He was cited for contempt of Congress at the behest of Senator Joseph Mc Carthy. In 1956, however, he was exonerated of all charges by the U.S. Appeals Court and was editorially praised by The New York Times for his courageous stands on behalf of civil liberties. In 1956 he was quoted in the Times, “The truth is that I am an independent non-Communist radical closest in my thought to such British Socialists as Aneurin Bevan and the late Harold J. Laski. I have always done my own thinking and traveling; and am critical of Communist parties as well as the Soviet Union, without adopting the blinding anti-Communist and anti-Soviet obsession that is leading the West to destroy its own highest values.” For decades Lamont and Sidney Hook carried on a running battle, more political than philosophic. When shown Hook’s letter, above, Lamont, then eighty-eight, responded:
In the first place, let me say that I never praised or overpraised the Soviet Union without criticizing that country for its lack of democracy and civil liberties. In the second place, I never praised the tyrant Stalin when I was praising the Soviet Union. In the third place, Humanism as such does not support or criticize foreign political regimes. Our business is in the United States and the American Humanist Association does not expect its members to take correct positions on foreign affairs. Therefore, Hook had no right to denounce me as a Humanist because I admittedly made serious mistakes in judgment about the Soviet Union. Of course, in World War 2 it became necessary for Americans to cooperate with the Soviet Union, even though Stalin was still in power. And I in a patriotic way took part in the movement for the United States to aid the Soviet Union as an ally against Hitler and the Nazis.
James T. Farrell (quoted herein), like Hook, was critical of the political stands taken by Lamont. But Lamont insisted he had not been deceived or politically naive, that any nation transformed from feudalism to superpower in a few decades could not be expected immediately to develop democratic institutions like those in the West. In 1977 Lamont was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. He had said that his fusion of militancy and philosophy was based on humanist principles, “not Christian service to an improbable God, but service here and now to our fellow human beings.” In 1981, he received the Gandhi Peace Award. In 1982, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. He was a signer of Humanist Manifesto II and was on the editorial board of The Humanist. In 1988 at the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress, Lamont addressed the group. The American Humanist Chapter in New York City is named after him. Although attacked for his politics by many within the humanist movement, Lamont was a major influence, one who helped considerably in publicizing the goals of naturalistic humanism. His 1928 marriage to Margaret Hayes Irish, a writer, ended in divorce. His second wife, Helen Lamb, whom he married in 1962, died in 1975. During his final years, he was happily married to his third wife, Beth Keehner, whom he married in 1986 and who is a devoted humanist. He is survived by a son, Hayes; three daughters—Margot Heap, Florence Antonides, Anne Jafferis; six grandchildren; one great-grandchild; fourteen step-children of his last two marriages; and fifty step-grandchildren. A memorial held at Columbia University featured talks by family members Beth Lamont, Jonathan Heap, Edward M. Lamont Jr., Edward M. Lamont Sr., and Lansing Lamont. On the Web: <http://www.corliss-lamont.org/>. (See entry for Helen B. Lamb. For negative views, see entries for James T. Farrell, Sidney Hook, and Priscilla Robertson.) {Fred Edwords, “Requiem for a Freedom Fighter,” The Humanist, July-August 1995; FUS; HM2; HNS; PK; TYD; WAS, 22 September 1989 and numerous tête-a-têtes}
Lamptey, Micah (1966– ) When six years of age, Lamptey was baptized in Ghana as a Presbyterian. After being educated at Polytechnic, however, he wrote, “I realized that the larger portion of what the preachers said consisted of pure lies. They didn’t apply to real-life situations, and I didn’t feel that I would be losing anything if I never went to church again—and I haven’t been back since. . . . When I told my friends about my disappointment with Christianity, they tried to convince me to become a Muslim. But I knew that Islam would have been worse, because the degree of tolerance I enjoyed in Christianity was nonexistent in Islam. Moreover, I knew that sooner or later I would be branded an infidel who would receive an infidel’s punishment, and thus I did not accept Islam.” Lamptey considers himself typical of many Africans who find their neighbors have minds and hearts filled with fear, ignorance, and superstition. “I decided to find out,” he has written, “if our belief in superstition and idolatry was worthwhile, and I eventually realized that belief in witches who were capable of siphoning off people’s wealth and talents was not entirely true. The bulk of African superstitions can be violated with impunity. Many Africans go to good schools and universities to study science and perform scientific experiments, and then come out to practice superstition.” Lamptey has become an active member of the Rational Centre in Accra, Ghana.
Lancelin, Pierre F. (c. 1770–1809) Lancelin was a French materialist, a constructive engineer in the French Navy. He wrote Introduction to the Analysis of Science (1801–1803) and expressed original physico-mathematical theories. {BDF}
Land, Jan Pieter Nicolaus (1834–1897) A Dutch writer, Land wrote critical studies on Spinoza and brought out an edition of the philosopher’s work in conjunction with J. van Vloten. {BDF}
Landers, Caleb (20th Century) Landers, a freethinker, wrote The Skeptic’s Defense Against All Christians and Other Priests (1920). {GS}
Landor, Walter Savage (1775–1864) Landor was an English poet, an ardent Republican who served as a volunteer colonel in the Spanish Army against Napoleon from 1808 to 1814. Termed the greatest English writer of his age, and one of the richest for he inherited a large fortune, Landor was nominally a Christian but scattered many freethought sentiments over his various works. He wrote the epic poem Gebir (1798) and Imaginary Conversations (1824–1853), which consists of nearly one hundred fifty dialogues between notables both ancient and modern. His other works include Pericles and Aspasia (1836), Hellenics (1847), and Heroic Idylls (1863). {BDF; CE; RAT; RE; TYD}
Landoy, Adèle Eugénie Sidonie: See entry for Jules-Joseph Colette.
Landry, Bolder (20th Century)
Landry, the founder of the Thomas Paine Foundation, is a freethinker and an anthropologist. He has written for Truth Seeker.
Lane, Margaret (20th Century) Lane wrote Frances Wright and the “Great Experiment” (1971). {GS}
Lane, Ralph Norman Angell [Sir]: See entry for (Sir) Norman Angell, winner of the 1933 Nobel Peace Prize.
Lane, William (20th Century) An American who migrated to Queensland, Lane became a leader of the Brisbane Socialists and edited the Boomerang and the Worker. In 1893 he led a party of Australians to Paraguay to found “New Australia,” a Scottish colony which failed. Lane, a theist or a pantheist, was hostile to Christianity. {RAT}
Lanessan, Jean Louis de (Born 1843) Lanessan was a French naturalist who at the age of nineteen became a naval physician. In 1879 he was elected as a Radical member of the Municipal Council of Paris. Dr. Lanessan founded Le Reveil, edited the Marseillaise, and started the International Biological Library, to which he contributed a study on the doctrine of Darwin. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Lanfrey, Pierre (1828–1877) A French author and senator, Lanfrey wrote The Church and the Philosophers of the Eighteenth Century (1855) and History of Napoleon I (1867–1875). Lanfrey’s The Political History of the Popes merited being placed on the Roman Index. {BDF; RAT}
Lang, Andrew (1844–1912) Lang was a man of letters who translated Odyssey with Butcher and wrote In the Wrong Paradise. A disciple of E. B. Tylor, Lang upheld the evolutionary view of mythology. An authority on comparative religion, Lang from a theistic viewpoint wrote Custom and Myth, Magic and Religion. {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Lang, Arnold (1855–1927) A Swiss zoologist, Lang taught phylogeny (evolution) at Jena and anatomy at Zurich, where he became Rector. His Text-book of Comparative Anatomy (1891) was a standard for years. In the symposium, Was Wir E. Haeckel Verdanken (1914), Lang pays a glowing tribute to Haeckel and described himself as “an Agnostic Freethinker.” {RAT; RE}
Lang, Heinrich (1826–1876) A German rationalist, Lang studied theology under Baur at Tübingen, then became a teacher at Zürich. {BDF}
Lang, J. Jack (20th Century) Lang has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Lang, Jerome D. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Lang was president of the Humanist Association of Greater Miami, Florida. {HM2}
Lange, Bonnie (20th Century) Lange has been President of the Truth Seeker Company in San Diego, California, and editor of Truth Seeker, the freethought journal.
Lange, Friedrich Albert (1828–1875) Lange was a German neo-Kantian philosopher, author of Gesckhichte des Materialismus und Kritik senier Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866; tr. A History of Materialism, 3rd ed., 1950). In its introduction, Bertrand Russell wrote that Lange was “an opposite of the Kantian view of the world.” Lange held that materialism is unable to explain consciousness and is refuted, on scientific grounds, by the psychology and physiology of sensation, which shows that the world studied by physics is a world dependent upon our modes of perception, not a world existing independently on its own account. Lange praised Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), but, according to Gordon Stein, was unsympathetic to materialism. Lange’s view on pantheism included the thought that some truths of nature are not only unknowable but also unverifiable. Consciousness he regarded as subjective experience, not just the effect of matter. (See entries for materialism and for Richard C. Vitzthum.) {BDF; CE; ER, George J. Stack; RAT; RE}
Lange, Fred E. Jr. (20th Century) Lange is author of Famous Unitarians/Universalists (1987), which includes a listing of over one hundred noted individuals including five United States presidents who have been Unitarians or Universalists: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, Millard Fillmore, and William Howard Taft.
Lange, Richard H. (20th Century) Chief of nuclear medicine at Ellis Hospital, Schenectady, New York, Lange is a member of the Council for Secularism’s Faith-Healing Investigation Project.
Langfeldt, Gabriel (Born 1895) A Norwegian who has written about novelist Knut Hamsun, Langfeldt presided over the Third International Humanist and Ethical Union Congress held in Oslo (1962). He wrote Abnorme karakterer (psykopater) 1976.
Langhorne, John (1735–1779) An English poet, Langhorne in The Country Justice wrote, “Fanatic fools, that in those twilight times / With wild religion cloaked the worst of crimes!” {TYD}
Langley, John Samuel (1889–1959) In Perth, Australia, Langley was secretary of the Rationalist Association of Western Australia in 1918 and in 1924 established The Rationalist as a monthly. Langley lectured throughout Australia and New Zealand and was an admirer of Thomas Paine. When his leadership was challenged by Walter D. Cookes, who he declared wished to use the rationalist movement as a distribution vehicle for pro-fascist propaganda, Langley objected but lost because the Rationalist Association of Australia, in need of Cookes’s financial support, voted to appoint a new editor and secretary, William Glanville Cook. Langley has been incorrectly described as having had an “addiction to drunkenness,” and he fought back by editing his own monthly Freethought from 1939 to 1944 and by writing Why I Am Not a Rationalist (1944). Langley died a bitter and shattered man, disillusioned by those he believed loyal. {FUK; SWW}
Langley, Vera Lucy (1894–1978) Mrs. John Langley was the only woman committee member of the Victorian Rationalist Association. {SWW}
Langley, Walter (Born 1852) A painter, Langley won many gold medals for his pictures at Paris and Chicago, and he painted an autograph portrait for the gallery of the Uffizi at Florence. A rationalist, Langley was an admirer of Bradlaugh. {RAT}
Langsdorf, Karl Christian (1757–1834) Langsdorf was a German deist, the author of God and Nature. In that work he discussed the immortality of the soul, and in other books he wrote on the subject of mathematics. {BDF}
LANGUAGE
• Cricketers assume that the cognoscenti know all about crosspieces, wickets, batsmen, and bowlers. Theists assume everyone should know about Jordan, Calvary, Original Sin, and Armageddon. Non-theists make no such assumptions, relying instead on the the scientific method of reasoning—first, observing phenomena, then formulating a hypothesis concerning the phenomena, then experimenting to determine the truth or falseness of the hypothesis, and finally making a conclusion that validates or modifies the hypothesis. –Allen Windsor
Judeo-Christian theists, starting with the faulty major premise that in the beginning were Adam and Eve, assume that the first two humans logically spoke the same language. Later, Noah’s descendants (who spoke one language) tried to build a tower (of Babel, the word in Hebrew meaning “confused”) reaching up to heaven to make a name for themselves, but God “confounded” them so that each spoke a different language and all were scattered over the face of the earth. Some individuals assume language was given to man by God. Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908) jocularly described Heaven’s dilemma when on Earth a near-sighted priest erroneously baptized a group of penguins, whose language, if any, did not include French. His satiric approach to treating the evolution of the Church’s institution—Are animals baptized with certain sacred words eligible for eternity in Heaven?—was not appreciated by theologians. Freethinkers are aware that language is the systematic communication by vocal symbols, that it is a universal characteristic of the human species. Nothing is known of how language originated, but scientists generally hold that it has been so long in use that the length of time writing is known to cover (7,900 years at most) is trifling by comparison. Today, there are between 3,000 and 4,000 speech communities, with numbers ranging from many millions of speakers down to a few dozen or even fewer. (See Martin Gardner, “Klingon and Other Artificial Languages,” Skeptical Inquirer, July-August 1995.) {CE}
LANGUAGES AND HUMAN COMMUNICATION • “I Saw the Pope,” translated into Spanish by an American T-shirt maker, became “I saw the potato.”
• When a beer company, Coors, used “Turn it loose” as its slogan, the Spanish translation became “Suffer from diarrhea.”
• Clairol’s curling iron, “Mist Stick,” in German connoted “manure stick.”
• Colgate introduced a toothpaste, Cue, in France, then found that Cue is the name of a French pornography magazine.
• “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation,” translated into Chinese, became “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.”
• The chicken slogan of Frank Perdue’s American company, “It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken,” when translated into Spanish, became “It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate.”
• Coca-Cola, advertised in China first as “Ke-kou-ke-la,” actually meant “Bite the wax tadpole” or “Female horse stuffed with wax,” depending on the dialect.
• Parker Pen marketed a ball-point pen in Mexico with an ad that was supposed to have read, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” Thinking embarazar (to impregnate) meant to embarrass, the ad then read, “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.”
• The American car named Nova connoted to the Spanish it was a vehicle that “no go.”
• . . . and religionists think God dotted every “i” and crossed ever “t” in the variously translated Bible?
Lankester, Edwin Ray (1847–1929) Lankester was an English scientist who revised the translation of Haeckel’s History of Creation and publicized evolutionary ideas. In 1876 he exposed the spiritist medium Slade, procuring his conviction. At the University of London, Lankester taught zoology and natural history. According to McCabe, Lankester was “a virulent agnostic in private conversation though discreet in public utterances, but for many years before he died he was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Lannstrand, Viktor (19th Century) In 1888, Lannstrand founded the Utilitarian Society in Sweden.
Lanpher, Larry (20th Century) Lanpher is treasurer of Humanist Association: St. Petersburg, Florida.
Lanson, Gustave (1857–1934) Lanson was a French historian at the University of Paris. His Histoire nationale de la littèrature Française (1896) is useful to rationalists, and he edited Voltaire’s Letters philosophiques (1908). Lanson is a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. {RAT}
Lanza, Robert Paul (1956– ) Lanza contributes material to The American Rationalist as well as to The Humanist. He is an associate in surgery at the Harvard Medical School and senior scientist at BioHybrid Technologies in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts.
Lao-zi (Lao-tzu)(Lao-tse) (Born c. 604 B.C.E.) Lao-zi is the Chinese philosopher who reputedly founded Taoism. If he actually lived, he likely knew Kongfu-zi [Confucius], who was younger, and neither was a religious supernaturalist. Both were freethinking conservatives. Lao-zi (which means “old philosopher”) is, according to Robertson, “the first known philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that being the infinite”; and he avowed “the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous to the Logos of later Platonism. . . . His system is one of rationalistic pantheism.” He reduced religion to a minimum, denying superstition and teaching the rule of returning kindness for evil. However, Robertson laments, “the quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tze and the practicality of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population.” In fact, in a short time both men came to be worshiped as a God. Contemporary Taoism (Daoism), McCabe has remarked, “has as little relation to his teaching as the Roman Catholic system has to the teaching of Jesus.” Although some contemporary scholars think Lao-zi did not actually live, if he did he is credited with the poetic passages in the main Daoist text, Dao De Jing (Way and Virtue Classic). {CE; ER; HMS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; New Humanist, October 1998; RE}
Laplace, Pierre Simon (Marquis de) (1749–1827) Laplace was the astronomer who, when asked by Napoleon why he did not mention God in his Mecanique celeste, reportedly replied, “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis.” With L. L. Lagrange, he is known for establishing, beyond a doubt, Newton’s hypothesis of gravitation. In addition to his famous Mécanique (1799–1825), Laplace wrote the popular summary of the history of astronomy, Exposition du système du monde (1796). He was elected to the French Academy in 1816. Among Laplace’s sayings was, “What we know is but little; what we know not is immense.” McCabe wrote a different description of Laplace:
As he lived to the days of reaction in France, when a rebel against the Church could not be sure of a decent funeral, he formally returned to his practice of Catholicism and is counted amongst the pious. As a number of public men did this solely for the sake of peace, we do not know the state of his final opinions, which is doubtful. I have never found any authority for the statement that when Napoleon asked him (which he is not in the least likely to have done, since he was probably an atheist himself) where God came in in his theory of the volution of the solar system, he answered, ‘Sir, I did without that hypothesis,’ but it justly represents him in his prime.” {BDF; CE; CL; JMR; JMRH; RE; TYD}
Lappé, Frances Moore (20th Century) Lappé, a Unitarian, is a nutritionist who wrote Diet for a Small Planet.
Lardner, Ring Wilmer Jr. (1915– ) Lardner, son and namesake of the American humorist and short-story writer, has been a reporter for the New York Daily Mirror, a press agent for Selznick International Pictures, and a renowned author. In 1942 he was recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for best original screenplay, “Woman of the Year.” In 1945, during the “Cold War” period of the 1940s and 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was set up, a group that was to cause him much grief. Nineteen in the entertainment industry were subpoenaed by the committee, which was looking for Communists and for the possible injection of Communist propaganda into movie scripts. Appearing before a new Congressman, Richard Nixon, and the HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, Lardner was asked, for example, if he belonged to the Writers Guild. “I could answer the question, Mr. Chairman,” Lardner responded, “but I’d hate myself in the morning.” Whereupon Thomas had him removed from the stand. Lardner, who came to be known as one of “the Hollywood 10,” all of whom became blacklisted by the movie industry, reasoned that “If you were not a Communist you could say no to that question but you would be acknowledging the committee’s right to ask the question. If you were a Communist and said yes, the next question was all about who else was, and asking you to name names where you had even less constitutional protection than about yourself.” Refusing to cooperate further with the committee, he was cited for contempt and spent ten months of a one-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Imprisoned with Lester Cole, he found that Thomas, the Republican congressman from New Jersey, was already an inmate, having meanwhile been convicted of misappropriating Government funds. Seeing Thomas in the chicken yard, Cole made the memorable observation, “Oh, still handling the chicken shit, I see!” Others who were blacklisted included Frances Chaney, an actress married to Lardner; Dalton Trumbo, author of “Spartacus”; Waldo Salt, who eventually won Oscars for “Midnight Cowboy” and “All the Way Home”; Merle Debuskey, a theatrical publicist; Madeline Lee Gilford, an actress and the widow of the actor Jack Gilford; and the actress Kim Hunter, all of whom found it next to impossible to find work because of the blacklisting. In 1970, however, Lardner received the award for the best screenplay, “M*A*S*H,” adapted from another medium, It was not until 1997 that the Screen Writers Guild West, representing more than seven thousand writers, restored screen credits on twenty-four films of “the Hollywood 10.”
Lardner, who writes provocative articles such as “The Age of Reason, 1794–1994” in The Nation (21 February 1994), has been a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. He holds that censorship, not searching for Communists, is the new problem facing Americans in the 1990s. “The people behind it are basically the fundamentalists, the Christian right. And I think the First Amendment is being threatened in a great many ways from this censorship effort.” (See Brandon M. Stickney, Free Inquiry, Summer, 1998, on how Lardner’s work has been censored by the media.) {CA; WAS, 2 March 1998}
Lardner, Ring Wilmer Jr. (19 Aug 1915 - 31 Oct 2000) Lardner, son and namesake of the American humorist and short-story writer, was a reporter for the New York Daily Mirror, a press agent for Selznick International Pictures, and a renowned author. In 1942 he was recipient of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award for best original screenplay, Woman of the Year. In 1945, during the “Cold War” period of the 1940s and 1950s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was set up, a group that was to cause him much grief. Nineteen in the entertainment industry were subpoenaed by the committee, which was looking for Communists and for the possible injection of Communist propaganda into movie scripts. Appearing before a new Congressman, Richard Nixon, and the HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, Lardner was asked, for example, if he belonged to the Writers Guild. “I could answer the question, Mr. Chairman,” Lardner responded, “but I’d hate myself in the morning.” Whereupon Thomas had him removed from the stand. Lardner, who came to be known as one of “the Hollywood 10,” all of whom became blacklisted by the movie industry, reasoned that “If you were not a Communist you could say no to that question but you would be acknowledging the committee’s right to ask the question. If you were a Communist and said yes, the next question was all about who else was, and asking you to name names where you had even less constitutional protection than about yourself.” Refusing to cooperate further with the committee, he was cited for contempt and spent ten months of a one-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut. Imprisoned with Lester Cole, he found that Thomas, the Republican congressman from New Jersey, was already an inmate, having meanwhile been convicted of misappropriating Government funds. Seeing Thomas in the chicken yard, Cole made the memorable observation, “Oh, still handling the chicken shit, I see!” Others who were blacklisted included Frances Chaney, an actress married to Lardner; Dalton Trumbo, who wrote Spartacus; Waldo Salt, who eventually won Oscars for Midnight Cowboy and All the Way Home; Merle Debuskey, a theatrical publicist; Madeline Lee Gilford, an actress and the widow of the actor Jack Gilford; and the actress Kim Hunter, all of whom found it next to impossible to find work because of the blacklisting. In 1970, however, Lardner received the award for the best screenplay, M*A*S*H, adapted from another medium. According to Greg Lawrence, when Jerome Chodorov’s brother Edward was named as a Communist by choreographer-director Jerome Robbins, Edward has said, “Stabbed by the wicked fairy.” Robbins allegedly had complied with the Congressional committee because he was threatened that if he did not his mother would be told he was homosexual. “I suppose I won’t know for years whether I did the right thing,” Robbins confided to his friend. “Oh, I can tell you right now,” said Arthur Laurents, “You were a shit.” It was not until 1997 that the Screen Writers Guild West, representing more than seven thousand writers, restored screen credits on twenty-four films of “the Hollywood 10.”
Lardner, who wrote provocative articles such as “The Age of Reason, 1794–1994” in The Nation (21 February 1994), was a member of the Secular Humanist Society of New York. He held the view that censorship, not searching for Communists, was the new problem facing Americans in the 1990s. “The people behind it are basically the fundamentalists, the Christian right. And I think the First Amendment is being threatened in a great many ways from this censorship effort.” (See Brandon M. Stickney, Free Inquiry, Summer, 1998, on how Lardner’s work has been censored by the media.) {CA; Greg Lawrence, “Ballets Over Broadway,” Vanity Fair, May 2001; WAS, 2 March 1998}
Larevellière-Lepaux, Louis Marie de (1753–1824
A French politician attached from youth to the ideas of Rousseau, Larevellière-Lepaux was a moderate Republican who defended the proscribed Girondins, was doomed himself but escaped by concealment, and distinguished himself by seeking to replace Catholicism with theophilanthropy, or “natural religion.” He wrote Reflections on Worship and the National Fêtes. Larevellière-Lepaux became President of the Directory but refused to swear fealty to the empire, although he was offered a pension by Napoleon. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Larkin, Edgar Lucien (1847–1921) An astronomer and the director from 1900 onward of the Lowe Observatory in California, Larkin wrote in the New York Truthseeker that “religion is totally useless in a universe based on law, and every creed and belief will be swept from the earth when men get out of infantile stages of growth.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Larkin, Philip (1922–1985) Larkin, a librarian at the University of Hull in England, and a poet and novelist, was a non-believer whose Selected Letters reveal that he lamented his inability to complete more than two poems a year. In his work, he chronicled England’s post-1945 problems, and he was highly opinionated. Being a librarian, for example, involved handing out “tripey novels to morons.” Literature needs no definition, for it is simply “what one thrills to.” As for England, “God, what a hole [with its] witless crapulous people, delivered over gagged and bound to TV, motoring, and Mackeson’s Stout!” As for parents: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with faults they had, then add some new ones, just for you.” A mordant humorist, he wrote shortly before his death, “How good the 1950s seem as far as rhyming and making sense and being clever go.” Larkin has the distinction, according to Martin Seymour-Smith, “of being the last Englishman to write a viable non-expressionist body of poetry. We should be grateful to and for him.” A 1993 biography by Andrew Motion, however, points out that recently located Larkin’s letters show him to have been an anti-Semite, a racist, and a misogynist. Anthony Thwaite, one of Larkin’s literary executors, found the following ditty entitled “How To Win the Next Election”: “Prison for the strikers / Bring back the cat / Kick out the niggers / How about that?” And in a 1985 letter written two months before he died, Larkin wrote to a childhood friend, Colin Gunner, “I find the ‘state of the nation’ quite terrifying. In 10 years’ time we shall all be cowering under our beds as hordes of blacks steal anything they can lay their hands on.” Larkin’s father, Sydney, was known to have been openly sympathetic to Adolf Hitler, and Larkin is widely said to have “adopted and adapted” some of his father’s views.
Larkin, Tom (20th Century) A Boston school psychologist and political activist, Larkin has been a student at the Humanist Institute. {Family Matters, Fall 1998}
Laromiguière, Pierre (1756–1837) Laromiguière, a French philosopher, joined the Congregation of the Christian Brothers, taught philosophy in their schools, then left the Church and wrote a Projet d’éléments de métaphysique (1793), which earned him the position of professor of philosophy at the Central School and later at the Faculty of Letters. Laromiguière, whose work was theistic but empirical, was “the father of university-philosophy in France.” {RAT}
Larousse, Pierre Athanase (1817–1875)
François Diderot and the Encyclopedists were not the only lexicographers banned by the Vatican. In 1873, Larousse’s Grand dictionnaire Universel du XIXe siècle, consisting of seventeen volumes (1866–1876), made the list of prohibited reading. According to Wheeler, most of Larousse’s colleagues were also freethinkers. McCabe cites Larousse as being an atheist. {ILP; JM; RAT}
Larra, Mariano José de (1809–1837) Disappointed in love, Larra shot himself. But before his early death, Larra was a distinguished Spanish author who, at eighteen, published a collection of poems, followed by El Duende Satirica (The Satirical Goblin). In 1831 his Pobrecito Hablador (Poor Gossip) newspaper unmercifully attacked the public affairs and men of Spain and was suppressed after its fourteenth issue. He then wrote for Revista Espanola, signing his articles “Figaro.” A friend, describing Larra, wrote, “Larra could see too deep to possess any faith whatever. All the truths of this world, he was wont to say, can be wrapped on a cigarette paper!” {BDF; RAT; RE}
Larrabee, Harold A. (1894–1979) A philosopher at Union College in Schenectady, New York, Larrabee wrote the present author about humanism:
I have stated recently in a review in The Journal of Philosophy of Ralph Barton Perry’s The Humanity of Man that it appears inevitable that any term derived from “man” or “human” should have meanings and interpretations almost as diverse as men themselves are. It is, therefore, rather presumptuous for any limited group of men to insist upon a monopoly of “human” or “humanism” for their own particular position. Nevertheless I find Naturalistic Humanism the label which comes the closest to my own views, for, while rejecting the supernatural as the ground and justification of human values, I should maintain that such values remain intact, unimpaired, and of great significance to man, although the cosmos may be indifferent to them. I sometimes refer to this sort of philosophy as “Aspiration Without Nonsense” or “Mythless Idealism.” I should also emphasize as crucial for Naturalistic Humanism a moderating or a partial renunciation of familiar human demands, not only of the above demand for a cosmic warranty for human values, but also of the demand for absolute certainty in knowledge. These are the renunciations associated with scientific method. Naturalistic Humanism will obviously fail to satisfy those who insist upon having, or seeking, what it regards as beyond human finite knowing powers to supply. But I doubt that Naturalistic Humanists can wrest the label “Humanist” from those who claim it for other purposes.
Larrabee is author of What Philosophy Is (1928), and Reliable Knowledge (1945). He edited Selections from Bergson (1949); Bentham’s Handbook of Political Fallacies (1952); and In Quest of New Ethics (1953). {CL; HNS; WAS, 8 September 1956}
Larroque, Patrice (1801–1879) A French philosopher, Larroque was rector of the academies of Cahors, Limoges, and Lyons (1836–1849). But he was denounced for his opposition to clerical ideas and lost his position. Among his many works was De l’Esclavage chez les Nations Chrétiennes (1857), in which he proves that Christianity did not abolish slavery. His Religious Renovation (1859) proposed a moral system founded upon pure deism and was, for a time, prohibited in France. {BDF}
Larsen, Wayne Erik (1946–1996) Larsen, an admirer of Ayn Rand as well as of secular humanism, was an honor graduate of Henry High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after which he was a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam. He conceived, organized, and worked as President of the Sousa Society, an International Arts Olympics, but was unable to realize the group’s successful completion because of his ill health. Larsen, a graduate of Columbia University, was an active member of a New York support group—Agnostics, Atheists, and Secular Humanists Who Are Infected / Affected with AIDS/ HIV Illness (AASH). Upon his death from Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) and in keeping with his wishes, family members scattered his cremains in New York, Oregon, and Minnesota. {WAS, numerous conversations}
Larson, Edward J. (20th Century) Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, was the featured speaker at a 1998 Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Madison, Wisconsin. {Freethought Today, November 1998}
Larson, Martin Alfred (1897–1994) Larson was a member of the National Advisory Council of Americans United. His early doctorate on the subject of Milton’s theological concepts led him into teaching at Eastern Michigan University and the University of Idaho. A Unitarian, he wrote Milton and Servetus (1926); Praise the Lord for Tax Exemption (1969); The Religion of the Occident (1959); The Story of Christian Origins (1971); and The Religious Empire in America (1975). The Essene Heritage (1967) was an early study of its kind, and Larson postulated that, after Jesus left the Order of Essenes, he became a key figure of a new movement in which he attracted his own disciples. William B. Lindley in Truth Seeker (#2, 1994) wrote an obituary, lamenting the loss of such an important freethinker.
Larson, Orvin (20th Century) Larson wrote An Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll (1962, revised as American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll, 1995). {FUS}
Larue, Gerald Alfred (20th Century) Larue is professor emeritus of archaeology and biblical studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He is a member of the Secretariat of the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism and president of the Council’s committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. Also, he is on the editorial board of The Humanist, is a senior editor of Free Inquiry, and signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. He wrote Homosexuality and the Bible (1983), Sex and the Bible (1983), Euthanasia and Religion (1985); The Way of Ethical Humanism (1989); The Way of Positive Humanism (1989); and Freethought Across the Centuries. The Supernatural, the Occult, and the Bible (1990) demonstrates that all belief systems have in common a dependence on magical thinking disguised as divine truth. In Ancient Myth and Modern life, Larue tells of the mythic origins and their acceptance as truth in the absence of science, then explains how the dysfunctional nature of religion is negatively affecting contemporary society. Larue addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988), and he helped dedicate the Council’s Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, in 1995. In 1989, Larue was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association. In 1994, he became a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. Reviewing Larue’s Freethought Across the Centuries: Toward a New Age of Enlightenment (1996), Joe Barnhart wrote, “Its author is a humanist in the noblest sense of the world. He strives to find the common humanity in every culture and historical period. Most humanists are proud to identify in depth with the Enlightenment. Larue will help humanists today to sense their kinship with the struggling freethinkers of the past.” (See entry for Soteriology.) {Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997; HMS2}
Laska, Andrew (20th Century) Laska, of the North Texas Church of Freethought in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, wrote “Dissecting Dr. Laura” for Secular Nation(April-June 1999).
Laski, Harold J. (1891–1950) A British Labour Party and Fabian Society official, one of the most famous speakers of his era, Laski was listed by Corliss Lamont as having been a philosophic naturalist. Nicolas Walter has called Laski “a leading freethinker, an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association and our second President from 1930 to 1933, and he was certainly a very popular writer and speaker among freethinkers.” Laski was chairman of the Labour Party in 1945 and 1946 and was a professor of political science at the London School of Economics from 1926 until the end of his life. He once wrote,
The test, surely, of a creed is not the ability of those who accept it to announce their faith; its test is its ability to change their behavior in the ordinary round of daily life. . . . I cannot see, in the historic process, that the churches have been other than the enemies of reason in thought and of justice in social arrangements. Their concentration upon the life to come—for the reality of which I see no evidence—has, it seems to me, done more than most factors in history to deflect the attention of men from the realities of our life here and now. The result of the deflection has always been to the interest of those who live by privilege.
Despite his open rejection of all religion, Laski, according to Walter in The New Humanist, “remained very conscious of his Jewish identity—not surprisingly, in view of the personal anti-Semitism which he encountered and the terrible events which he witnessed.” {CE; CL; FUK; TRI}
Laski, Margharita (1915– ) Laski, an author, is a freethinker, according to David Tribe. {TRI}
Lasley, Jack (20th Century) Lasley edited Priestcraft and the Slaughterhouse Religion (1987). He also wrote Threat of Radical Fundamentalism (1995). {GS}
Lassalle, Ferdinand Johann Gottlieb (1825–1864) Lassalle, who was born of Jewish parents, founded the German Social Democratic Party. A follower of Hegel and Feuerbach, he published a profound work on the philosophy of Heraclitus. Heine was charmed with him in 1846, and Humboldt called him “Wunderkind.” McCabe wrote that Lassalle “might be described with Marx and Engels as one of the Three Musketeers of German atheistic Socialism.” For planning an insurrection against the Prussian Government, Lassalle was arrested but won his acquittal. In mid-career, he died in a duel. {BDF; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}
LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT Wills often provide an insight into the mind of the deceased. Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer, had no final will, thereby dying “intestate.” Lincoln’s net worth of $110,295 was awarded by a court to his wife and two sons. The U.S. Congress, with strict observance of accounting rules, paid his salary only to the day of death. The purpose of a will is to allow the deceased to express one final wish for the disposition of his worldly goods. Following are some of the recorded bequests:
• Nek’ure, Egyptian Pharoah’s son who died c. 2601 B.C.E.
His will, the oldest known to exist, provided for the disposition of fourteen towns and two estates. Its opening words pointed out that King Khafre’s son had made the decisions about his property “while living upon his two feet and not ailing in any respect.” • Aristotle, who died 322 B.C.E. His will left three executors to handle his affairs until his chosen son-in-law, Nicanor, came of age. If Nicanor died prior to the time when Aristotle’s daughter was old enough to marry him, Theophrastus was named as the second choice. He designated other individuals in the event Herpylis married. • Vergil, died 19 B.C.E. Vergil asked that his Aeneid be burned with his death, a request he later canceled. • Petrarch, died 1374 The poet left 200 gold florins to Boccaccio, to buy a robe that would stave off the cold. • Henry VIII, died 1547 The much-married monarch in just under 7,000 words stated that he would not object if his cadaver were buried “in any place accustomed for Christian folke.” However, he continued, “because we would be lothe in the reputation of the people to do injurie to the dignitie which we unworthilie are called unto,” a better choice would be at Windsor, “midwaye between the Stalles and the high aulter.” • François Rabelais, died 1553 His entire will read: “I have nothing. I owe much. The rest I leave to the poor.”
• William Shakespeare, died 1616
Shakespeare left considerable real estate holdings in and near Stratford to his two daughters, Susanna and Judith. Curiously, he gave his wife “my 2nd-best bed with the furniture.” • John Donne, died 1631 The metaphysical poet left £500 to maintain his mother and a fifty-four-line poem entitled “The Will.” Earlier in his Devotions, he wrote, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” • Peter the Great, died 1725 He advised his ministers to keep Russia continually at war for the good of the nation. In addition, he wrote a complete plan of strategy for a Russian conquest of Europe. • Patrick Henry, died 1799 Henry provided generously for his widow Dorothea unless she remarried, in which case he cut her off without a cent or “no more of my estate than she can recover by Law.” She voted for freedom of choice and married his cousin, Judge Winston. • Marquis de Sade, died 1814 He gave Madame Quesnet 80,000 livres because “during the Reign of Terror, she saved me from the revolutionary blade all too surely suspended over my head.” He insisted that his corpse be kept in an open coffin in the death chamber for a full 48 hours, “at the end of which period the said coffin shall be nailed shut.” Only then, after he was found to be definitely dead, was he to be buried in the woods at Malmaison. • Napoleon Bonaparte, died 1821 His will, written twenty-one days before his demise, stated, “I die prematurely, assassinated by the English oligarchy.” Although he left bequests that totaled six million francs, he had no funds for the purpose. • Jeremy Bentham, died 1832 Bentham’s entire estate was given to London Hospital, provided that his preserved remains were permitted to preside over its board meetings. As a result, his body was turned over to Dr. Southward Smith, who performed the complete dissection and the anatomical lecture, for public and medical student alike that Bentham had stipulated. The bones were reassembled into a skeleton topped by a wax mask cast from the philosopher’s expressionless face. The likeness was outfitted in Bentham’s clothes and placed within a glass-fronted mahogany case, sitting upright in an armchair. For ninety-two years, the wax apparition was present, although duly noted as “not voting,” at the meetings. The skeleton is on display at University College, London. • Heinrich Heine, died 1856 The German poet left his entire estate to his wife, provided she would marry again. “Because,” his will read,” then there will be at least one man to regret my death.” • Charles Dickens, died 1870 Dickens left £80,000 to his family. He noted that he had paid to his wife, from whom he was separated, £600 annually, while assuming all expenses for the family. He asked that those who came to his funeral “wear no scarf, cloak, black bow, long hatband, or other such revolting absurdity.” • Brigham Young, died 1877 The Mormon Church leader left $2.5 million in cash and real estate which was distributed to his seventeen wives and forty-eight children. • Karl Marx, died 1883 The founder of Marxism accumulated no personal wealth, leaving a scant £250. • Phineas T. Barnum, died 1891 The American showman left $4.1 million but gave his daughter Helen, whose notorious conduct he disliked, only some useless western property in return for a “quit claim” on his estate. The land proved to have valuable mineral deposits, which made Helen wealthier than all the other Barnum heirs put together. • Cecil Rhodes, died 1902 Rhodes in his first five wills called for a “. . . Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be the extension of British rule throughout the world,” and, eventually, “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America.” • Florence Nightingale, died 1910 She refused burial in Westminister Abbey, giving her body “for dissection or postmortem examination for the purpose of Medical Science.” Her wishes were ignored. She was buried at East Wello. • Adolf Hitler, died 1945 Mentioning that he and Eva Braun were marrying and then choosing to die “to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation,” the dictator wanted it clearly understood that his painting collection “bought by me during the years” had always been intended to establish a picture gallery in his hometown, Linz. Although a nominal Christian, he left nothing to the church. • George Bernard Shaw, died 1950 See entry for Shaw. • Albert Einstein, died 1955 After disposition of an estate of $65,000, Einstein left his manuscripts and royalties to Hebrew University, and his beloved violin to his grandson. • George Orwell, died 1959 Orwell requested that his grave be marked with his real name, Eric Arthur Blair. He left £9,909. • Marilyn Monroe, died 1962 She left over $1 million, although the estate was later declared insolvent. • Jawaharlal Nehru, died 1964 Following his cremation, Nehru asked that a handful of his ashes be scattered in the Ganges River. He took care to explain that his request bore no religious significance, noting, “. . . the Ganges has been to me a symbol and a memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing on to the great ocean of the future.” To insure that no portion of his remaining ashes were preserved, he directed that they be disposed of by carrying them aloft “. . . in an airplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil.”
An estimated two-thirds of Americans die without leaving wills. But, in addition to Lincoln, they have historic company: Andrew Jackson, D. H. Lawrence, Howard Hughes, and Pablo Picasso. (See Herbert E. Nass, Wills of the Rich and Famous , NY, Warner Books, 1991.) {PA}
Lastarria, José Victorino (1812?–1888) Lastarria was a Chilean statesman and a positivist. He founded several journals and literary societies and served as minister to Peru and Brazil. In 1873, he founded the Santiago Academy of Science and Literature. As a representative of the Chilean Congress, he helped promote the secularization of education, and he was active in trying to abolish the fueros (privileges) of the church. To Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in 1876, Lastarria wrote, “There is nothing worse for our societies than Catholic morality.” Among his anticlerical works were Investigaciones sobre la influencia social de la conquista i del sistema colonial de los españoles en Chile (1844) and Recuerdos literarios (1868). {BDF; EU; RAT}
Laszecki, Karol (20th Century) Laszecki, from Poland, addressed the 1966 Fourth International Humanist and Ethical Union World Congress held in Paris.
Latha, Chandra (20th Century) Latha is a rationalist from Hyderabad, India, the author of Seeds of Fertile Soil and winner of a $3,000 prize by the Telugu Association of North America for her novel written in the Telugu language. The work is partly autobiographical, covers three generations of one family, and details a humanist hero’s attempts to deal with superstitions and violence. {International Humanist News, September 1997}
Latham, John Greig [Sir] (1877–1964) Latham, who represented Australia at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, was active in the Melbourne branch of the Rationalist Press Association and became president of the Rationalist Association of Victoria. From 1935 to 1952, he was Chief Justice. {SWW}
Latham, Robert (1812–1888) Latham, an ethnologist, taught language and literature at London University College, then turned to medicine and lectured on forensic medicine at the Middlesex Hospital. In 1849 he abandoned medicine for philology and ethnology. Of him, Huxley wrote that “the existence of the Established Church was to his mind one of the best evidences of the recency of the evolution of the human type from the simian.” Latham was a rationalist, “one who for brilliance of intellect and range of knowledge had scarcely an equal among his contemporaries,” according to the Dictionary of National Biography. {RAT; RE}
Latimer, Donald (20th Century) In 1978, when director of the Los Angeles Chapter of American Atheists, Latimer protested that public funds were being used to light and maintain a twenty-seven foot high Christian cross overlooking Cahuenga Pass, opposite the Hollywood Bowl, in Hollywood, California. He has been active in fighting for the separation of government and religion.
Latimer, Lewis H. (1848–1928) Latimer, an inventor and a pioneer in the electric light, was the son of Virginia slaves. He had a difficult childhood inasmuch as his parents had escaped and were actively being pursued by James Gray, their owner. Fortunately, they succeeded in escaping and young Latimer secured work as a draftsman, although he had no experience. His drawings were so good that Alexander Graham Bell used his services. In addition, he was for a time an associate of Thomas Edison. In 1890 Latimer wrote Incandescent Electric Lighting, the first book written on that subject. “Lights outside as well as in,” he wrote, “are equally under control, and the coming or retiring guest may be lighted top the farthest point of the most extensive grounds without the necessity of the host being in any way exposed to the weather.” This meant no more gaslights, and soon he was asked to set up lighting systems for buildings and streets in New York, London, Montreal, and Philadelphia. Latimer was a founding member of a Unitarian church near his New York home in Flushing. For the Encyclopedia of Religion, he wrote the section on Latin American philosophy. In 1993, his granddaughter, Dr. Winifred Latimer Norman, wrote a biography, Lewis H. Latimer, Scientist. {EG; U}
LATIN AMERICAN MARXISM Jorge J. E. Gracia and Iván Jaksic, in Encyclopedia of Unbelief, note that Marxism, like positivism, “interprets religion as superstition and an obstacle to social advancement. They also share en emphasis on science, a deterministic and materialistic view of reality, and the goal of social progress.” Marxists generally are more antireligious and anticlerical than positivists, but Marxism was one of the forces in Latin America which challenged the predominance of Catholic thought and influence. “As a result,” they note, “one can only conclude that orthodox Catholicism has perhaps seen its influence diminished through the efforts of these movements but that the bases of religious faith in the area, inspired by Catholic doctrine, remain strong.” Fidel Castro has at times called his philosophic outlook that of “communistic humanism.” Raya Dunayesvskaya, former secretary to Leon Trotsky, stated the Karl Marx was a thoroughgoing naturalist in philosophy and that, at first, he had called his outlook “a new humanism.” Sidney Hook, however, and other major figures in United States secular humanist circles predicted all along that communism and Marxism were doomed to fail because of their opposition to any beliefs not founded upon freedom, the significance of the individual, and political democracy.
LATIN AMERICAN UNITARIANS A Unitarian minister, Lawrence Peers, heads Luuna Luz, a Latin-Unitarian Network Publication.
LATIN AMERICAN POSITIVISTS Positivism, which was inspired by the writings of Comte, was found in various Latin American countries:
• Argentina—J. Alfredo Ferreira (1863–1935) • Brazil—Constant Botelho de Magalhaes (1836-1891); Luis Pereira Barreto (1840–1923); Miguel Lemos; Raimundo Teixera Méndez; Tobias Barreto (1849–1923); Silvio Romero; Clovis Brevilaqua • Chile—Valentín Letelier (1852–1919); Jorge Lagarrigue (died 1894); Juan Enrique Lagarrigue (died 1927); Luis Lagarrigue (died 1948) • Cuba—Enrique José Varona—as minister of education, his reforms remained in place until Fidel Castro’s revolution • Honduras—Ramón Rosa (1848–1883) was minister general under President Aurelio Soto, and the two carried out ecclesiastical and educational reforms • Mexico—Gabino Barreda (1818–1881); Juso Sierra • Peru—Mariano H. Cornejo (1866–1942) • Uruguay—Alfredo Vázquez Acevedo (See entry for Positivism) {EU}
LATINUS: See entry for Roman Civilization.
Latourette, Keith Scott: See the entry for Theism.
LATTER-DAY SAINTS The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is a denomination that separated from the Mormons in the 19th century. It rejects the name Mormon for itself. The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, organized in 1830, is at PO Box 1059, Independence, Missouri 64051. {DCL}
LATVIAN UNITARIANS Vija Vetra is founder of a Latvian congregation of Unitarians. They have no regular meeting place but can be reached by writing the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists, 1-6 Essex St., Strand, London WC2R 3HY, United Kingdom.
Lau, Theodor Ludwig (1670–1740) Lau was a German philosopher. His Philosophical Medications on God, the World, and Man excited an outcry for its materialism, whereupon the work was suppressed. A follower of Spinoza, Lau held several official positions from which he was deposed because of his presumed atheism. {BDF}
Laubach, John Herbert (20th Century) Laubach wrote School Prayers, Congress, the Courts, and the Public (1969). {FUS}
Laube, Heinrich (1806–1884) Laube was a German dramatist and rationalist. In 1834 he was expelled from Saxony for his advanced opinions. In 1848 he sat in the National Assembly, and in the following year he became art director of the Vienna Court Theatre, which he raised to a high level. His novels, dramas, and literary works were published in sixteen volumes (1875–1882). {RAT}
Laubeuf, Maxime Alfred (Born 1864) In the French Qui est-ce?, Laubeuf is described as the creator of the submersible submarine. He constructed the first boat of the type, the Narval, in 1898, then built a large number more for the French Navy. In his Luttes maritimes prochaines (1908), Laubeuf forecast naval wars. He was a chevalier of the Legion of Honour and an officer of the French Academy. An agnostic, he wrote in 1920, “As to another world, I must declare myself unable to say anything, though it would, perhaps, be unphilosophical to deny everything a priori.” {RAT}
LAUGHTER • Laughter, n. An interior convulsion, producing a distortion of the features and accompanied by inarticulate noises. It is infectious and, though intermittent, incurable. Liability to attacks of laughter is one of the characteristics distinguishing man from the animals—these being not only inaccessible to the provocation of his example, but impregnable to the microbes having original jurisdiction in bestowal of the disease. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• [L]aughter is not a lack of seriousness. On the contrary, irony and lightness are one of the highest forms of intelligence. –Dario Fo commenting upon Roberto Benigni’s winning an Oscar Award for his acting in the best foreign film of 1999, “Life Is Beautiful”
Freethinkers revel in laughter, some saying you can tell a religious person by the way his or her mouth turns downward, a non-religious person by the number of jokes that she or he tells. Even Krishna, Vishnu’s avatar, amused himself by stealing the clothes of the goat-herd girls as they bathed in the river, Arthur Chappell happily relates in Freethinker (March 1999). Zeus seduced mortal women and turned men into donkeys. The Greek and Roman gods were known for their high jinks. But the closest one comes to humor in the Bible is some children’s referring to Elisha (Kings 2, 23-25), saying “unto him, go up, thou bald head, go up, thou bald head.” But, as many a periwigged freethinker might complain unto them, “Dost thou find baldness is something laughable, ye intolerant louts?” The 1291 Council of Salzburg found it necessary to order that “the clergy must not be jesters, goliards, or buffoons; if they pursue such disgraceful accomplishments for a whole year, they are to be stripped of all ecclesiastical privileges.” Better just to strip them of all their clothes, a freethinker might suggest . . . and listen, instead, to Phaedrus (the 1st Century Macedonian, born a slave, who translated Aesop’s fables into Latin verse):
A fly bit the bare pate of a bald man, who in endeavouring to crush it gave himself a hard slap. Then said the fly jeeringly, “You wanted to revenge the sting of a tiny insect with death; what will you do to yourself, who have added insult to injury?”
Laurence, Margaret [originally Jean Margaret Wemyss] (1926- ): A Canadian author, Laurence is best known for works depicting the lives of women struggling for self-realization in the male-dominated world of western Canada. This Side Jordan (1960) describes her experiences in Ghana. New Wind in a Dry Land (1963) is an account of her years in Somaliland (now Somalia). The Tomorrow Tamer (1963) is a collection of short stories set in Ghana. A fictional Canadian prairie town of Manawaka is the setting for The Stone Angel (1964), A Jest of God (1966), and The Fire-Dwellers (1959). A Unitarian, Laurence twice received the Governor General’s Award for Fiction.
Laurence, James (1773–1841) Laurence was a versatile writer, one who knew Goethe, Schiller, and other rationalists. His heterodox novel, The Empire of the Nairs (1807), was written in German, French, and English. When Robert Owen denounced “all the religions of the world” at the London Tavern in 1817, Laurence applauded him in a poem. {RAT}
Laurent, François (1810–1887) Laurent was a Belgian jurisconsultant who was born in Luxembourg. His principal work is entitled Studies in the History of Humanity. He was a strong advocate of the separation of church and state, upon which subject he wrote (1858–1860). François also wrote Letters on the Jesuits (1865). {BDF; RAT}
Laurie, James Stuart (1773–1841) Laurie was an educationist who at one time was Director of Public Education in Ceylon. His theistic views are given chiefly in Religion and Bigotry (1894) and Gospel Christianity versus Dogma (1900). {RAT}
Lauritsen, John (20th Century) Lauritsen, author of Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality (1974) and The AIDS War (1993), is a thorn in the side of the American AIDS establishment, supporting molecular biologist Peter Duesberg’s widely circulated assertion that the human immunodeficiency virus’s relation to the acquired immune deficiency syndrome is one of “correlation but not causation.” Lauritsen asserts that physicians and others are getting rich out of the present set-up, that some of the doctors who are now worth millions “were second-rate ‘clap doctors’ back in the 1970s” and for hundreds of individuals “the AIDS organizations have provided an opportunity for personal gain.” Charities have little accountability, leading one AIDS worker to say, “There are more folk living off AIDS than dying from it here!” Lauritsen claims AZT is a poison-like substance which is toxic, and his disagreement with the more orthodox views leads him to liken his stand as similar to the child who uncovers the truth about Father Christmas, a truth they and their parents do not want to hear. In “Hate Comes to Provincetown,” Lauritsen has lamented how the Rev. Fred Phelps, pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, preached hatred of homosexuals in his Massachusetts vacation town, which is known as a leading gay resort. In 1998 Lauritsen, who describes himself as an atheist and an admirer of Voltaire, wrote A Freethinker’s Primer of Male Love. {“My Atheism,” Freethinker, January 2000; Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Spring 1998}
Lavan, Spencer (20th Century) Lavan is author of Unitarians and India: A Study in Encounter and Response (1977).
Lavanam, Hemalata (20th Century) In Vijayawada, India, Lavanam edited Insaan (1956–1962) and the monthly Atheist (1969 to the present). Sometimes described as “the Robert Ingersoll of India,” “a Gandhian atheist,” and “a most visionary and humanitarian human,” Lavanam spoke in 1993 to Massachusetts humanists and, as head of India’s Atheist Center, in 1996 she spoke on “Positive Atheism for a Positive Future” at the fourth World Atheist Conference which was held in India and of which she was a co-convener. She pointed to those pessimistic religious people who on the approach of the second millennium prophesied Armageddon and Doomsday and said that on the contrary we needed to give hope to humanity that the future would be bright and positive. Today’s atheists, she advised, have a double role to play: they have to save humanity from pessimistic adventurism and to invent and promote tools to build a positive future in every walk of life. Now it is the responsibility of atheists to take positive strides toward promoting universal humanism and universal human identity without which it would become impossible to save even our physical and social environment. Atheists must work with liberal minded non-atheists in common cause, for they have a responsibility of restructuring the unjust and exploitive cultural, moral, social, political institutions and ideas and values, at local, national, and international levels. Mrs. Lavanam has an international following, is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and has traveled around the world several times. (See entry for G. Vijayam and for World Atheist Conference. For a 1995 interview in La Jolla, California, in which among other things he tells why he thinks Christians hate theists, see Secular Nation, Summer 1995.) {CA; E; FUK; New Humanist, February 1996}
Laveleye, Émile de (1822–1892) A Belgian economist, Laveleye in 1864 received the chair of national economy at Liège University. He was elected a member of the Institut in 1869 and was associate editor of the Revue de Belgique. His rationalism is expressed in Le parti clérical en Belgique (1874). {RAT}
Lavender, Julia Margaret (Bella) (1858–1923) Lavender was an Australian rationalist, feminist, and teacher. She was the first woman to graduate from an Australian University, receiving her B.A. in 1888. Lavender was described as a “witty, cogent, and instructive” commentator on social issues such as the rights of illegitimate children, sex discrimination, defense of English suffrage, anti-conscription, anti-militarism, and vindication of the rights of assembly and free speech. Known also as Bella Guerin, she moved from Catholicism to rationalism and described her political evolution as from “imperialistic butterfly” to “democratic grub.” {SWW}
Laveran, Charles Louis Alphonse (1845–1922) The chief French authority on tropical diseases, Laveran was a Nobel Prize winner (1907) and a professor at the Pasteur Institute. While an army surgeon in Algiers he discovered (1880) the parasite that causes malaria. Asked by a French journal to comment about a report that Edison had adopted spiritualism, Laveran responded that he did not believe it. As a scientific man, Laveran added, he “did not believe in spirits.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Lavine, Thelma Zeno (20th Century)
Lavine, a philosophy educator, professor of philosophy at George Mason University, and president of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, was named in 1993 a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. She is a contributor to American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (1994). “The Case for a New American Pragmatism,” which was originally printed in Free Inquiry, is reprinted in Challenges to the Enlightenment (1994). She has written TV Course from Plato to Sartre (1980), From Socrates to Sartre: The Philosophic Quest (1984); and was co-author of History and Anti-History Philosophy (1989).
A John Dewey scholar who wrote the introduction to the Collected Works of John Dewey, Vol. 16 (1990), Lavine has also taught at the University of Maryland, George Washington University, and Inter-American Defense College. Lavine signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Lavisse, Ernest (1842–1922) A leading French historian, Lavisse taught for many years at the Sorbonne. With Alfred Rambaud he edited Histoire générale du 4e siècle à nos jours (12 vols., 1893–1901) and, alone, edited Histoire de France depuis les origines jusqu’à la révolution (19 volumes, 1900–1922). His volumes are a synthesis of political, cultural, economic, and social history. In a biography of the historian Duruy, to whom he had once been secretary, Lavisse tells his agreement with him in freethinking. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Lavrov, Pytr Lavrovich (1823–1900) Lavrov, a Russian mathematician, taught mathematics at the Artillery School but, because of his revolutionary opinions, was banished to the provinces. He escaped to Paris in 1870 and edited the revolutionary Uperyod. His chief work, The Evolution and History of Human Thought , was left unfinished at his death. Lavrov was a close student of philosophy and was an agnostic. {RAT}
LAW • Lawful, adj. Compatible with the will of a judge having jurisdiction. • Litigant, n. A person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones. • Litigation, n. A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
• “Are you trying to show contempt for this court?”
“No, your honor, I’m doing my best to conceal it.”
–Mae West
The basis of law in Canada and the United States is English common law, which was imposed on England by a Frenchman, Henry II, in the 12th century. He had standardized local laws into a “common” law, adding some precepts from Roman law that had survived in the canon law of the medieval church. The church played a great role in establishing our legal precepts, but it was by keeping alive Roman law, which survives today as civil law in much of Europe, Louisiana, and Quebec, not by promulgating the Judeo-Christian tradition via the Ten Commandments. In short, or at least as past Supreme Court justices have understood, the Holy Bible did not form the basis for law in Canada and the United States. Rome did. For Christian fundamentalists to argue that the Ten Commandments formed the basis of the laws of the United States is, as noted by Canadian legalist Jerry Gilbert, patent nonsense. He has added, “To suggest that because early statute writers in the United States were Christian it is therefore a Christian state is like saying that because ancient Romans believed in a pantheon of gods Europeans should today bow at the feet of statues of Jupiter and Juno.” Meanwhile, others point out that most of America’s Founding Fathers were not, in fact, believers in the Christian Trinity. {The New York Times, 23 April 1997).
Law, David A. (20th Century) With Corliss Lamont and Peter A. Angeles, Law wrote “Dewey’s Idea of the Religious—Critical Evaluations” in Religious Humanism (Winter 1968).
Law, Harriet Teresa Frost (1831–1897) An English freethinker, Law was a women’s-rights lecturer who edited Secular Chronicle, a publication for which Karl Marx sometimes wrote. The journal was printed in Birmingham from 1872 to 1879. A lecturer, Law became engaged in numerous debates, aided by her husband, Alfred. The two organized the Walworth Association of Freethinkers. The only woman Secularist lecturer in England, she endured much insult as well as assault. Law, writes Royle, “had the distinction of being one of the few Secularists of whom Karl Marx approved.” She was a member of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association and an advocate of women’s rights. {BDF; EU, Gordon Stein; FUK; PUT; RAT; RSR; TRI; VI; WWS}
Law, Tim (20th Century) Law, while a student at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was one of the founders of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
LAW OF NON-CONTRADICTION In logic, the law of non-contradiction is a basic principle: A sentence and the denial of the sentence cannot both be true—e.g., Jesus was a supernatural man, born by Immaculate Conception of a natural mother; Jesus was the son of Mary and an un-named human father, to whom she was not married. {DCL}
Lawler, James M. (20th Century) Lawler, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is author of IQ, Heritability and Racism and the Existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1976).
Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) (1885–1930) Lawrence, a novelist who held that industrial culture dehumanizes, preached a glorified union with nature and its corollary, sexual fulfillment. Although his Sons and Lovers was a success in 1913, it was not so until a publisher (Cambridge) bothered to print Lawrence’s original version, the “naughty parts” of about 10% which had been cut by his original editor, Edward Garnett. What Garnett cut had to do with the hero putting on women’s stockings and his references to “white, glistening globes” and other such descriptions of the female breast. Garnett had not, however, cut the part about the son’s being in love with his mother and his failure to experience love with other women. When Lawrence visited Mexico, to gain material for The Plumed Serpent (1926), he stayed with the humanist and poet, Witter Bynner. Bynner wrote an account of their stay, in which he described the skinny, bronchitic miner’s son from Nottinghamshire and Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Baroness (Freiin) von Richthofen Weekley (a stoutly built, German noblewoman six years his senior whom he married, having eloped with her at a time when she was married to a Nottingham professor of etymology. Wags claimed she seduced him sexually within twenty minutes of their first meeting. They also related that in their numerous moves from southern Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Sicily, India, Australia, New Mexico, Mexico, England, and the south of France, it was Frieda who did the shopping and it was Lawrence who sewed the curtains as well as Frieda’s underwear. Frieda was a cousin of von Richthofen, the German air-ace in World War I). The book was entitled Journey With Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences (1951). According to Bynner, Lawrence’s horror at the Spanish obsession concerning blood (Jesus dripping on the cross) and their love of bullfighting (first plunging the banderillas, then adeptly stabbing with the sword) did not sit well with numbers of Latinos. When something was thrown at Bynner’s house to show their dissatisfaction, Lawrence was so terrified that he jumped into Frieda’s arms (she of the “big glistening globes”). Bynner withheld this and other tales until long after Lawrence’s death. Frieda was not Lawrence’s only love, according to his biographer, Richard Aldington. Lawrence had written, “I believe the nearest I have come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about sixteen,” and Aldington added, “I should say Lawrence was about eighty-five percent hetero and fifteen percent homo.” (Frieda never allowed a farmer’s boy, William Henry, into their house, although Lawrence maintained relations.) A Warden of All Souls, however, failed to see that Lawrence was homosexual at all, leading A. L. Rowse to observe, “but there is nothing like an intellectual for obstinate obtuseness.” Rowse added that in his rough mining community of Eastwood, Lawrence was laughed at and persecuted by schoolmates as girlish, “for he was refined and delicate. It was his fate to be persecuted by imperceptive fools most of his life, and it maddened him.” Meanwhile, biographer Brenda Maddox in D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (1994), doubts that Lawrence was unconsciously homosexual, despite his alleged attraction to anal penetration in lovemaking. She argues that what he longed for was the strong father missing from his childhood. At the time Lawrence met E. M. Forster, who was then thirty-six years of age and still a virgin, Maddox states, Lawrence was deeply attracted to men but was repelled by homosexuals. According to his early poems, Lawrence also was attracted to his mother. Upon her death, he carried her downstairs, found her hairs on his jacket, and wrote of her being on her sickbed:
My love looks like a girl to-night,
But she is old.
The plaits that lie along her pillow
Aren’t gold,
But threaded with filigree silver
and uncanny cold.
A few lines later we discover she is, indeed, dead. “And her dead mouth sings/By its shape, like thrushes on clear evenings.” His dead mother is called “my love,” “the darling,” “like a young maiden,” “like a bride,” and indeed the poem is called “The Bride,” the groom clearly being Lawrence. Critic James Fenton, an Oxford Professor of Poetry, notes Lawrence’s further indebtedness:
You sweet love, my mother Twice you have blooded me, Once with your blood at birth-time Once with your misery. And twice you have washed me clean, Twice-wonderful things to see.
Lawrence’s three great novels—Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1921)—concern the consequences of trying to deny man’s union with nature. Some critics found The Plumed Serpent fascistic in that Lawrence began to believe that mankind must be reorganized under one superhuman leader. But what really startled everyone was his Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), in which readers exclaimed that he had described feminine sexual feelings better even than any woman had ever before been able to do. The book was banned in England and the United States for years. But copies were always somehow available and the intimate story of an English noblewoman who found love and sexual completion with her husband’s gamekeeper became a topic of discussion of the intelligentsia for a long time. (Those in the cognoscenti were aware that the gamekeeper in the story was wish-fulfillment fantasy on Lawrence’s part and, as Rowse points out, “It is significant that the double thrill the working-class fellow gives the sex-starved lady is not only sexual but also anal.) Lawrence inspired other writers to imitate his daring, and he became one of the primary molders of 20th-century fiction. T. S. Eliot, writing about atheism, once stated, “There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism of our friend Mr. J. M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of Mr. D. H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. [Bertrand] Russell.” Lawrence would have agreed with the last, for he detested Russell’s “arrogant rationalism,” according to Rowse. Meanwhile, his biographer, H. Kingsmill, wrote in 1938 that Lawrence had a “home-made” religion which hovered between agnosticism and pantheism. “There is no God, but everything is Godly,” Lawrence held. When Lawrence visited Ceylon, eight years before his death, he found “oriental mysticism” repellent, according to critic Simon Leys. In Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936) is found, “I know the greatness of Christianity; it is a past greatness.…I live in 1924, and the Christian venture is done.” Although he openly had written and spoken about illicit sex, Lawrence seems never to have written or spoken about what he truly feared: tuberculosis. Lawrence died of consumption after years of a hacking cough. When Frieda was out of the room for a moment at the very end, he is said to have grasped Maria Huxley’s wrists and said, “Maria, Maria, don’t let me die.” According to another version, his last words to Frieda were “Wind my watch.” Even before his death, Frieda had picked his successor: Angelo Ravagli, the husband of their landlady, an army lieutenant “with a well-known penchant for foreign women.” During the last two years of Lawrence’s life, Frieda found that Ravagli “gave her a feeling of being desired she had not had in years.” Eventually, the two married. Janet Byrne’s A Genius for Living (1995) writes of Frieda and Ravagli that they then lived a tranquil life despite his constant philandering. Years after Lawrence’s death, Frieda had his remains disinterred from their grave in Vence, France, cremated, and returned to San Cristobal, New Mexico. Catherine C. Robbins in The New York Times (6 August 1998) visited the site where the Lawrences had spent fifteen months on 160 wooded acres in the early 1920s and which his patron, Mabel Dodge Luhan, had given him in exchange for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers. In 1998 the shrine with its memorial had deteriorated allegedly because of neglect by the University of New Mexico, leading the D. H. Lawrence Center at Nottingham University in England to demand that the cremains be returned there for better safekeeping. However, Frieda—fearful that some of his admirers might find the cremains and scatter them across the ranch—had arranged for their being mixed into the concrete used to build the memorial. Moving the cremains and cement were therefore considered impractical. Meanwhile, the university claimed in 1998 that the site which in “St. Mawr” Lawrence described as “Ah! It was beauty, beauty absolute, at any hour of the day,” had been carefully repaired. Lawrence had once complained that to protect furniture from gnawing rats they had hoisted it up to the ceiling on ropes, and Ms. Robbins confirmed visitors’ complaints “of rat droppings in the shrine.” {CE; James Fenton, The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; GL; HAB; RE; TRI; TYD}
Lawrence, Gil (20th Century) Lawrence has a talk show on WALE Radio in Providence, Rhode Island, on which he features the atheist/agnostic point of view. (See entry for Rhode Island Atheists, Freethinkers.) {FD}
Lawrence, Harold T. (20th Century) Lawrence edited “The Humanist Pulpit” in the early The New Humanist publication, and in 1929 he and A. Wakefield Slaten were succeeded by Edwin H. Wilson. {EW}
Lawrence, Jacob (1917– )
A painter, Lawrence was one of the Harlem Renaissance Group. His parents had migrated from the South, and he was born in Atlantic City. He lived for a time with foster parents in Philadelphia, then settled with his mother in 1930 in Harlem, where he met Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Claude McKay, Augusta Savage, and others. “I remember hearing folks in the street in Harlem tell the stories of John Brown and Harriet Tubman in such a passionate way,” he told a New York Times Reporter. When only twenty-three, he painted what has been called his masterpiece, the Migration of the Negro series. He is also known for his Harlem and Coast Guard series. Since the late 1930s, his subjects have included Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Haitian revolutionary; Harriet Tubman; John Brown; Frederick Douglass; and the migration of blacks to the North from the South after World War I. In New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art are shown his War (1946–1947) and Tombstones. Asked about the subject of humanism, Lawrence wrote to the present author:
“Humanism” is to be human, to think, to analyze, and to probe. To respond and to be stimulated by all living things—beasts, fowl, and fishes. To respond through touch, sight, smell, and sound to all things in nature—both organic and inorganic—to colors, shapes, and textures—to not only look at a blade of grass but to really see a blade of grass. These things, to me, are what life and living are all about. I would call it “Humanism.“
Lawrence is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. {The New York Times, 12 April 1996; WAS, 7 July 1989}
Lawrence, James (1883–1941) A Knight of Malta, Lawrence became acquainted with Schiller and Goethe at Stuttgart and Weimar and was detained with English prisoners at Verdun. In 1807 he published The Empire of the Nairs, or the Rights of Women, a free-love romance which he wrote in German, French, and English. Lawrence once addressed a poem on tolerance to Mr. Owen on the occasion of his having denounced the religions of the world, a poem that appeared in The Etonian Out of Bounds. {BDF}
Lawrence, Jerome (1915- ) Lawrence is an educator, director, and playwright. He directed “Auntie Mame” (1956); “The Gang’s All Here” (1959); and “Inherit the Wind,” the latter of which was translated and performed in three languages and was named best foreign play of the year by the London Critics Poll in 1960. According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), the work is regularly banned because of its alleged “anti-religious nature.” (See entry for Banned Books.)
Lawrence, Thomas Edward [Lawrence of Arabia] (1888–1935) The illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish landowner, Lawrence was educated at Jesus College, Oxford. He studied Arabic, traveled to Syria in 1909, and from 1910 to 1914 he worked on the excavation of Carchemish on the banks of the Euphrates. During this period, he became involved with British Intelligence, and the Arabs admired exploits he made during World War I. In 1918 he entered Damascus with the Arab forces after the Turks were defeated. Subsequently, his career was marked by mental breakdown, self-accusation, and anxiety about his own legend. Enlisting in the RAF in 1922, he then joined the tank corps under the legally adopted (1927) name of T. E. Shaw. In 1935, in a motorcycle accident near his home at Clouds Hill, Dorset, he was killed. The motorcycle had been a present of George Bernard Shaw, with whose wife [Charlotte] Lawrence is said to have confided his most intimate anxieties. Known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” a person who appeared to have a pathological aversion to publicity, Lawrence was cited as a man of action, a poet, ascetic, neurotic, and leader of men. E. M. Forster, from whom he had sought literary advice, found his style “granular.” Auden based The Ascent of F6 in part on the Lawrence legend. Lawrence appeared, complete with motorcycle, as Pvt. Meek in George Bernard Shaw’s Too True to be Good. Robert Graves wrote the first authorized life in 1927. In 1955 Aldington portrayed Lawrence as a hysterical homosexual, which outraged many inasmuch as no evidence exists that he ever was sexually involved with anyone. In The Seven Pillars, he wrote about being raped. However, it is speculated that this was connected with the passionate feelings he had for a handsome Arab youth, Dahoum, whom Lawrence called “Sheik Ahmed.” Upon Dahoum’s death during the war, Lawrence dedicated The Seven Pillars of Wisdom “to S.A.” Many in gay circles speculate as to whether Lawrence was “a top” or “a bottom” with his handsome Arab friends, and few go on record as believing he was a repressed homosexual. Lawrence’s biographer, V. Richards, wrote that Lawrence was an atheist and had at an early date “shaken free of the half-dead sentiments of formal religion.” {CE; GL; JM; RE; TRI; TYD}
Lawrence, William [Sir] (1805–1867) Sir William was professor of anatomy and surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. While there, he delivered his “Lectures on Man,” which when published roused a storm of bigotry. Although an earnest advocate of radical reform, he is said to have acquired a most lucrative practice. Lawrence denied the inspiration of the Bible, praised Voltaire, and made an open profession of deism. {BDF; RAT; RE}
Lawson, David (Deceased 1999) When a visiting professor at Xi’an Teachers University in China, Lawson wrote as a secularist for International Humanist. His “Humanism in China” in The Humanist (May-June 1993) suggested that ancient Chinese humanism may be playing a larger role in the West than is ordinarily supposed. Lawson wrote about literary figures such as Wallace Stevens, John Reed, and Thomas Mann. {Humanist in Canada, Summer 1999}
Lawson, Louisa (1848–1920) Lawson was an Australian freethinker, editor, and feminist. Starting as an Anglican, she was brought up a Methodist, then joined a Mudgee spiritualist group. After separating from her husband, she moved to Sydney with her son, Henry, a poet, and both came under the influence of the freethinker, Thomas Walker. Lawson established Dawn, Australia’s first feminist journal, and helped found the Suffrage League in 1891. {SWW}
Lawson, Sarah (20th Century) Lawson is a poet, a translator, and a regular contributor to the New Humanist. She has taught at Suzhou University in China and is author of a pamphlet, “Down Where the Willow is Washing Her Hair.”
Lawton, Walter (20th Century) Lawton has since 1958 been a leader of the Northern Westchester Ethical Culture Society. He was instrumental, in the American Ethical Union’s Commission on Race and Equality, for taking on integrated projects in the South, and he led a much-publicized one in Birmingham, Alabama. Originally a Baptist minister turned businessman, Lawton also has been a Leader in Queens and Chicago. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest}
Layard, Austen Henry [Sir] (1817–1894) A British Assyriologist, Layard combined archaeology with diplomacy, completing some excavations at Ninevah in Mesopotamia and serving as Minister to Spain (1869–1877) and Ambassador to Constantinople (1877–1880). He wrote Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon (1853). In his autobiography (1903), Layard exposed the fraud of Palestine’s “Holy Places.” In an 1853 letter he wrote that “the best thing the Turks could do would be to turn all the Christians out of Jerusalem.” Layard was a freethinker who explained in the autobiography that lectures he heard in early years “rapidly undermined the religious opinions in which I had been brought up.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Lavine, Thomas Z. (20th Century) Lavine, a Robinson professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
LAYING ON OF HANDS: See entry for Healing.
Laycock, Don (20th Century)
A professor of linguistics at the Australian National University, Laycock has written for Free Inquiry. He has edited Linguistic Trends in Australia (1970). {Free Inquiry, Summer, 1987}
Layton, Henry (1622–1705) A lawyer, Layton wrote anonymous observations on Dr. Bentley’s Confutation of Atheism (1693) and wrote a Search After Souls, and Spiritual Observations in Man (1700). {BDF; RAT}
Lazarus, Mark (c. 1868–1938) Lazarus, a rationalist and barrister, was a member in England of the Rationalist Press Association and of the Rationalist Association of Australia. {SWW}
Lazarus, Moritz (1622–1705) Lazarus was the son of a Yorkshire gentleman. Between 1692 and 1704 he published, anonymously, a series of quarto pamphlets (Search After Souls, etc.) in which he denied the immortality of the soul, bringing upon himself a violent controversy. Curiously, he believed in the divinity and Second Coming of Christ. {RAT}
Lazarus, William Paul (20th Century) A Unitarian who is a biblical historian living in Florida, Lazarus has written The Life of Jesus, History and Myth.
LE LIBRE PENSEUR Le Libre Penseur (The Freethinker), is the quarterly of the Association Suisse des Libres Penseurs, Case Postale 131, CH - 1000 Lausanne - 17, Switzerland.
Lea, Everett (20th Century) A freethinker, Lea wrote Straightening the Record on God, Man, and the Devil (1955). {GS}
Leach, Edmund (Ronald) [Sir] (1910-1989) A British anthropologist, Leach was an expert on the social anthropology of South Asia. A freethinker, he wrote Rethinking Anthropology (1961), Lévi-Straus (1970), and Genesis as Myth (1970). From 1966 to 1979, he was Provost of King’s College at Cambridge. {Ibn Warraq, 1999}
Leach, Henry Goddard (1880–1970) In the 1950s, Leach was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. He had been editor of The Forum (1923-1940) and had written The Scandinavia of the Scandinavians (1915).
Leake, Chauncey D. (1896–1978) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Leake was a professor at the University of California, San Francisco. He also has been executive director of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. A pharmacologist, he wrote Old Egyptian Medicine (1952) and Practical Philosophy: The Ethics (1973), The Logics (1974), and The Esthetics (1976). With Anatol Rapaport, Leake once approached the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggesting that the American Humanist Association could appropriately be its philosophical branch. The proposal was declined on the basis that the humanists’ membership did not include a high enough percentage of Ph. D’s. {HMS2; HNS2}
Leakey, Louis Leakey, Richard Erskine (1944– ) Newly elected to Academy of Humanism Human evolution centered in East Africa, not Asia, the Leakey family of anthropologists and archaeologists has concluded. In 1931 Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey(1903–1972) began excavating at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. With his wife, Mary Leakey (1913–1996), he discovered Zinjanthropus (1959; now regarded as Australopithecine), which has been dated at 1.75 million years of age, and Homo habilis (1961). Mary Leakey then discovered Homo fossils over 3.75 million years old. Their son, Richard, discovered another type of hominid skull, which he and Roger Lewin described in Origins (1979). In 1993 Richard, who lost the bottom portion of his legs in a plane crash, was ousted as head of Kenya’s wildlife service. In 1995 he was one of the founders of an opposition party with the aim of “cleaning up” Kenya. The Kenyan president accused him of being a white racist colonialist with foreign ties. In 1996, he entered wholeheartedly into politics, running as a candidate for the presidency. With Lewin, Leakey wrote Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1993), which holds that man was not created nor did he evolve by some grand design. Slight changes in climate, disasters from the sky, geological shifts: too many complexities exist for any god or gods to have arranged or even to have wanted to arrange. “I am not religious,” Leakey wrote, “at least not in the formal sense. As a schoolboy I adopted a kind of personal atheism and was much ridiculed because my uncle was Archbishop of East Africa at the time. There developed a campaign to ‘save’ me, to which I reacted by being even more adamantly atheistic. I came to be critical of formal religion, particularly of the damage that missionaries were doing to the culture of the people of Kenya. I have no difficulty in accepting the notion that standards of ethics and morality could be derived in the absence of religion. And I now believe that such standards are an inevitable—and predictable—product of human evolution; altruism is part of the behavioral repertoire of social animals, so it can be expected to develop much further in intelligent and intensely social animals, like our human ancestors. This is the humanists’ position.” In One Life (1983), he wrote, “I do not believe in a god who has or had a human form and to whom I owe an existence. I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other way around; also, I see no reason to believe in life after death.” In 1995, Richard Leakey became an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists, and he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Of his outlook, Leakey has written,
I am deeply influenced by what I see as the hypocrisy and negative influence of religion in people’s lives and although I do see the positive contributions that the institutions of religion have made in the development of society, I am unashamedly irreligious myself. My paternal grand parents were CMS missionaries to East Africa and two of their four children married into church families. My father, as a successful human palaeontologist, was curiously ambivalent and, although he refused to have any of his children christened, he seemed to have a strong Christian sympathy. My mother, raised as a Catholic, had no time for religion of any kind and left her children in no doubt about her views. My own career has developed in Kenya where I have had modest success in my own work on human ancestry. I was fortunate to locate an important fossil site on the shores of Lake Turkana in 1968 and I spent a good number of years leading successful field expeditions. In 1989, I changed careers and became engaged in revamping Kenya’s wildlife conservation programme. This work was a chance to gain insight into how corruption and greed in public institutions in Kenya was pulling the country to its knees and, without exception, the real villains were regular church-going Christians and prominent persons in the mosque. The ease with which people seem to pass on responsibility for their own failures and incompetence to their god is surely a handicap to progress. In Kenya, God’s will is a frequent excuse and explanation for disasters that are simply the result of poor management, negligence, and professional incompetence. It seems to me that a rationalist approach which stresses personal responsibility in all actions would bring better results. Although I see religion as one of the greatest frauds, it is obvious that most people do need something that humanists can do without. We are a minority and perhaps we always will be. This we need to accommodate, especially where we are in public life where co-operation with various institutions seems to be essential for social if not socio-economic progress. Surely free thought and free speech is what we expect and so we must accept it too.
(See Genesis and Lucy for a Chinese view that mankind may not
have begun in Africa.) {CA; E; New Humanist, November 1997}
LEAP DAY AND LEAP YEAR Leap Day, February 29th, has been called Bachelor’s Day because when St. Bridget and St. Patrick of Ireland agreed that women could propose marriage one year in every four, St. Patrick gave womankind the extra day. Leap Year happens only every four years except in centennial years not divisible by 400; for example, 1900. (See entry for Calendar.)
Lear, Norman (1922– ) In the 1995 Ware Lecture at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, Lear attacked the religious right’s exclusivist theology. “Religious experience ought to bear a closer resemblance to ‘love thy neighbor,’ to the essence of the Sermon on the Mount,” he said, “than to pietistic pistol-whipping.” He is known as the television producer and founder of People for the American Way, the creator of television’s Archie Bunker. Holding a Doctorate of Humanities from Emerson College, Lear began in public relations, then became a comedy writer for television and films such as “Come Blow Your Horn” (1963) and “The Night They Raided Minsky’s” (1968). He received four Emmy awards for the television show “All in the Family” and created “Maude” (1972). Lear has been named one of the top ten motion picture producers, and he has received numerous awards including the Mass Media award of the American Jewish Committee’s Institute of Human Relations. In 1984, he was inducted into the TV Academy’s Hall of Fame. When asked to cite the American they dislike most, many religious fundamentalists have responded, “Norman Lear.” Many rationalists and humanists, however, respond that Lear is one of the Americans they most admire.
Lear, Norman (27 Jul 1922 - ) Lear is a noted producer, writer, and director. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Air Force from 1942 to 1945 and received the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters. In his forties he was a comedy writer and director for television, working on films such as Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968). He also produced films that included Never Too Late (1965), Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), Sanford and Son (TV, 1972), and Maude (1974). Lear, who holds a Doctorate of Humanities from Emerson College, has received four Emmy awards for the television show All in the Family (with its memorable Archie Bunker, the right-wing hothead who represents everything that Lear is not). He has been named one of the top ten motion picture producers, and he has received numerous awards including the Mass Media award of the American Jewish Committee’s Institute of Human Relations. In 1984, he was inducted into the TV Academy’s Hall of Fame. In addition to having been President of Southern California’s American Civil Liberties Foundation, he has been a member of the Board of Directors of People for the American Way and is the founder of The American Business Trust. In the 1995 Ware Lecture at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, Lear attacked the religious right’s exclusivist theology. “Religious experience ought to bear a closer resemblance to ‘love thy neighbor,’ to the essence of the Sermon on the Mount,” he said, “than to pietistic pistol-whipping.” Asked to cite the American they dislike most, a large percentage of fundamentalist leaders would place Lear up toward the top of their list. A larger percentage of freethought leaders however, would place Lear up toward the top of their list of the “most admired.”.
Leatherbee, Brigham (19th Century)
A freethinker, Leatherbee wrote The Christian Mythology (c. 1885). {GS}
Lebed, Alexander Ivanovich [General] (1950- ) General Lebed served in Afghanistan (1981-1982) and the Caucasus (1988-1990), becoming in 1992 commander of the 14th Army in Moldova. In 1996 during the presidential elections, he finished third, receiving 15% of the vote. Yeltsin appointed him National Security Advisor, and he acted as chief negotiator in the Chechen conflict later in 1996. No longer a Communist, he has said he is still an atheist although many former party members have expediently wrapped themselves in the patriotism of the Russian Orthodox Church. {CA}
Leblais, Alphonse (Born 1820) Leblais was a French professor of mathematics, the author of a study in positivist philosophy entitled Materialism and Spiritualism (1865). Littré contributed the preface. {BDF}
Le Bon, Gustave (Born 1841) A French sociologist, Le Bon wrote about medical and anthropological subjects. The Academy of Sciences and the Anthropological Society crowned one of his early works, and he made a research mission to India on behalf of the Government. He wrote L’homme et les sociétés (2 volumes, 1881) and a thoroughly rationalistic Evolution of Matter (1907) and Evolution of Force (1908). Le Bon was an Officer of the Legion of Honour and a member of the Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences. {RAT}
Lebowitz, Fran (20th Century) Writer Lebowitz has gone on record: “I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.” She has written columns for Madamoiselle and Andy Warhol’s Interview. She is known for her biting, aphoristic commentary. (See entry for Afterlife, Speculations About.)
Lebrun, Harvey (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Lebrun was chairman of the Chapter Assembly, American Humanist Association. {HM2}
Lecky, William Edward Hartpole (1838–1903) Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism (1865) is considered a classic study of rationalism. He also wrote Democracy and Liberty (1903). An Irish-born historian, Lecky had moderately liberal views and a dislike of democratic reforms, which colored his view of history. In History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (1866), he wrote, “When it began, Christianity was regarded as a system entirely beyond the range and scope of human reason; it was impious to question; it was impious to examine; it was impious to discriminate. On the other hand, it was visibly instinct with the supernatural. Miracles of every order and degree of magnitude were flashing forth incessantly from all its parts.” Other of his observations about religion:
• Almost all Europe, for many centuries, was inundated with blood, which was shed at the direct instigation or with the full approval of the ecclesiastical authorities.
• There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.
• Whenever the clergy were at the elbow of the civil arm, no matter whether they were Catholic or Protestant, persecution was the result.
• The church fathers laid it down as a distinct proposition, that pious frauds are justifiable and even laudable.
• Fierce invectives against women form conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Church fathers.
McCabe, finding fault with some of his generalizations, says that Lecky’s “compliments to Christianity are often so opposed to the facts he gives that George Eliot imagined him saying: ‘It is true that 2 and 2 make 4 but one must not press these things too far.’ Lecky was an agnostic . . . with an ethical regard for Christianity, but many of his tributes to it, and harsh censures of the Romans, which apologists quote, are refuted by other general statements and the facts in his own book. A critical edition would be useful.” {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD}
Leclerc de Septchenes, N. (18th Century) Leclerc was secretary to Louis XVI and translated the first three volumes of Gibbon. He also wrote an essay on the religion of the ancient Greeks (1787). A friend of Lalande, he prepared an edition of Freret, which was published after his death. {BDF}
Leconte, Joseph (1823–1901) Leconte, an American geologist, is sometimes cited by religious writers as being orthodox. However, McCabe notes, Leconte’s Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought (1888) rejects all supernatural religion. Leconte described himself as a pantheist, recognizing “no test of truth but reason.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie René (1818–1894)
A French poet, Leconte de Lisle became a leading figure of a group known as the Parnassians when his Poèmes barbares (1872) was published. Anti-Christian and a pessimist, Leconte saw death as the only existing reality, and he drew inspiration from antiquity. A member of the French Academy, being elevated to the seat of Victor Hugo in 1887, he wrote A Popular History of Christianity (1871), which Robertson says would have delighted d’Holbach. Leconte did not delight Jews, however, when, upon taking the place of Victor Hugo at the Academy, he spoke of Moses as “the chief of a horde of ferocious nomads.” {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}
Lecount, Peter (19th Century) Lecount was a lieutenant in the French navy. After the battle of Navarino, went to England as a mathematician in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway, of which he wrote a history (1839). Lecount also wrote A Few Hundred Bible Contradictions and A Hunt After the Devil, and Other Matters (1843), citing himself as “the Rev. Peter Lecount.” {BDF; FUK}
Le Dantec, Félix Alexandro (1869–1917) Le Dantec was professor of biology at the Sorbonne. During the war, he “worked himself to death,” McCabe states. Nature (16 August 1917) in its obituary notice said Le Dantec had “a passion for veracity” and “a hatred of superstitious and intellectual hypocrisy.” He wrote in Athéisme (1906) that he believed in “the mysterious and universal agent which we call energy.” {RAT; RE}
Lederman, Aleta and Karl (20th Century) The Ledermans are activists with Rationalists of East Tennessee, 1036 Thompson Bridge Road, Maryville, Tennessee 37801.
Ledo, Michael (20th Century) Bible Bloopers: Evidence That Demands a Verdict, Too! A Skeptic Answers Josh McDowell (1997) is a non-scholarly work that uses freethinking humor to make fun of religious views. A Hebrew midrash, he found, says that Canaan’s children “shall be born ugly and black” and elsewhere warns that God will punish those who dared see his nakedness by swelling their lips and making their male members “shamefully elongated.” {Freethought History #26, 1998}
Lee, Alfred McClung (1906–1992) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Lee was professor emeritus of sociology-anthropology at the City University of New York. He worked with and wrote for Priscilla Robertson when she edited The Humanist, upon which he was an associate editor in the 1950s. His extensive books include How to Understand Propaganda (1952), Toward Humanist Sociology (1973), and Race Riot (1968). He edited and co-edited several textbooks in sociology. Throughout his career, Lee was involved in some of the most critical national and international issues of the time. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he wrote extensively on the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Among the many honors he received were the Distinguished Career Award of the American Sociological Association and the Distinguished Career Award of the Clinical Sociology Association. Lee was a Unitarian. {HM2; HNS}
Lee, Charles [General] (1731–1782) Lee, whose father was a Major General in the British Army, settled in America in 1773 and became second in command to Washington in the War of Independence. He was a deist, as is shown in the “Memoir of J. Lee” which is appended to The Correspondence of Sir. T. Hanmer. {JM; RE}
Lee, Earl (20th Century)
A freethinker, Lee writes for Truth Seeker. He has listed three major myths of Christianity:
1. Christianity is important to our society because it serves as a moral rudder . . . but the ancient Greeks, among others, proved that it is possible to have an ethical culture without having a religiously “moral” culture;
2. Christianity is important as a patron of the arts and sciences, and of learning in general . . . but although this may have been partially true in the Medieval and Renaissance periods, today most religions are not particularly interested in art, except architecture; and “Christian rock music” shamelessly rips off the style and music of main-stream rock musicians.
3. Christianity, the religion of the Founding Fathers, is necessary as a bulwark of democracy around the world . . . but this is not a fact, for the movers and shakers of the Revolutionary war were Deists and members of liberal Protestant religions, and the Church in no way can be considered democratic.
Lee, author of Drakulya (1994), is an associate professor of library science at Pittsburg State University in Pittsburg, Kansas. He is a Unitarian. {Truth Seeker, #6, 1993}
Lee, Elizabeth Briant (1908– ) Lee, an author, signed Humanist Manifesto II. {HM2}
Lee, Gypsy Rose (Rose Lee Hovick) (1914–1970) An internationally noted ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee is quoted by E. Haldeman-Julius as having said, “Praying is like a rocking chair—it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.” As for the deity, “God is love, but get it in writing.” She was known to have smiled that an ecdysiast, the term made popular during the 1940s for a stripteaser, depended upon audiences that had been taught by Puritans to enjoy thinking of sex as something bad. As she danced, she utilized large, colorful fans to conceal whether or not she had any clothes on. Author Arthur Laurents (The Advocate 16 May 1995) states that in the memoirs of her sister, actress June Havoc, mention is made that both Gypsy’s mother and Gypsy were lesbians. He added that he had been told that Rose “had a big fight with a hotel manager because she put too many people in her room. So she pushed him out the window and killed him.” Laurents, who wrote “Gypsy,” one of the greatest of Broadway musicals, said, “So how can you resist doing a musical based on a woman like that!”
Lee, Gypsy Rose (Rose Lee Hovick) (9 Feb 1914 - 26 Apr 1970) An internationally noted ecdysiast, Gypsy Rose Lee started in showbiz as a four-year-old in vaudeville with her sister, June Havoc. Author Arthur Laurents (The Advocate 16 May 1995) has noted that the sisters’ mother as well as Gypsy Rose were lesbians, according to June Havoc’s own memoirs. He also states that Rose once “had a big fight with a hotel manager because he put too many people in her room. So she pushed him out the window and killed him.” In addition to stripping, Lee wrote, appeared in films, and became a talk show hostess, once saying, “Honey I go where the dough is.” Also, she once admitted that she was not a great dancer or singer, but audiences disagreed or at least came to see her because of her onstage personality. Laurents, who wrote Gypsy, one of the greatest of Broadway musicals, said, “So how can you resist doing a musical based on a woman like that!” And he did. E. Haldeman-Julius quoted Lee as saying, “Praying is like a rocking chair—it’ll give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.” As for the deity, “God is love, but get it in writing.” She was known to have smiled that an ecdysiast, another term for a stripteaser, depended upon audiences that had been taught by Puritans to enjoy thinking of sex as something bad. Easily the best-known stripper in the 1930s and on into the 1940s, she utilized large, colorful fans to conceal whether or not she had any clothes on. Who better for a freethinker to entertain than Puritans with feelings of guilt! And her audiences included approving women as well as men. Her son with, Erik Lee, made and narrated a film collage that illustrated his mother’s life, “Gypsy Rose Lee’s Home Movies.” His mother, he found, had been married three times, all disappointments. When he inquired who his own father was, she finally told him when he was twenty-two: film producer Otto Preminger. Previously, she had indignantly responded, “It’s none of your business!” {Heather Clisby, <http://www.shoestring.org/mmi_revs/grl-home-movies.html>}
Lee, Robert E. (1918– )
Lee, with Jerome Lawrence, wrote Inherit the Wind (1955) about Clarence Darrow. Lee is a Congregationalist. {FUS}
Lee, Tony (20th Century) A secular humanist in Victoria, Australia, Lee has questioned how Noah managed to get to Australia to pick up a couple of Koalas, plus sufficient eucalyptus trees of a certain species upon which they feed.
Leedom, Tim C. (1945– ) Leedom is editor of The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You To Read (1993) (Box 5009, Balboa Island, California 92662), in which Kersey Graves tells of the sixteen known crucified saviors before Jesus, also of virgin birth, and other materials of interest to freethinkers. Contributors include Steve Allen, Dan Barker, Annie Gaylor, Gerald Larue, Skipp Porteous, and Sherwin Wine. Gordon Stein, reviewing the book in The American Rationalist, cites errors in the research. For example, Catholic Bishop Mark Hurley is included as a freethinker, although he was part of the Vatican’s Secretariat for [really to] Non-Believers.” Alfred Russel Wallace was “as credulous a believer as there ever was” but is listed as a non-believer. Stein also was critical of a number of definitions of “freethought terms” which are given, and he states, “To call Siddhartha Gautama [the Buddha] an ‘Indian philosopher’ and Carl Jung a freethinker at all is amazing if not plain wrong.” Nevertheless, Stein says, “it would be a good gift to give your wavering Christian friends.” {LEE}
LEEDS (England) HUMANISTS For information about the Leeds Humanists, contact Robert Tee by telephone: 0113 2577009.
Leenhof, Frederick van (Born 1647) Leenhof, who was born in Zeeland, became a minister of Zwolle, the Netherlands, where he published Heaven on Earth (1703), which subjected him to accusations of atheism. {BDF}
Leeper, Geoffrey Winthrop (1903–1986) Leeper, son of the warden of Trinity College, a lay cannon of St. Paul’s Cathedral—five of his students became bishops in the Anglican Church—was a professor of agricultural chemistry, 1962 to 1969, then became dean of the agricultural science faculty at the University of Melbourne, Australia. A world authority on soil science, he gave lectures in which he said, “Human beings have evolved as temporary denizens of a second-rate planet of a fourth-rate star.” Leeper was a director of the Rationalist Association of Australia Ltd., and he became honorary vice president of the Humanist Society of Victoria in 1964. {SWW}
Leeson, John (20th Century) Leeson was the first President of the European Humanist Federation/Federation Humaniste Européene (EHF/FHE), which formed on 12 October 1991. He remains its networking officer. Founding organizations included those from Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Britain. In 1993, its membership included 20 associations from 11 different countries. Its aims included the following:
• to carry out educational, scientific, and cultural action in order to promote a humanist vision of cultural, social, and ethical values in Europe;
• to promote exchanges among members and the circulation of information and experience which could contribute to the development of humanist values in Europe as well as to social and cultural progress;
• to propose such European legislation as it likely to facilitate the development and promotion of the activities of member organisations in Europe;
• to promote the development of cooperation among member organisations.
According to Leeson, EHF/FHE is a regional organization within the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Leeson is Treasurer of the British Humanist Association. In 1998 he was elected a Vice President of IHEU. E-mail: : <john.leeson@btinternet.com>.
Lefévre. André (1834–1904) Lefévre was a French writer who, at the age of twenty-three, was one of the editors of Magasin Pittoresque. He translated Lucretius in verse (1876) and rote Religions and Mythologies Compared (1877). Léfevre also edited the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu, some Dialogues of Voltaire, and Diderot’s La Religieuse (1886).
Lefebvre, Henri (20th Century) In France, Lefebvre wrote about socialist humanism.
LeFevre, Edwin (Died 1994) A former professor of mechanical engineering at Queen Mary College, London, LeFevre was a life member of humanist organizations. At his secular funeral, Nicolas Walter represented the humanists.
Lefkowitz, Mary R. (1935– ) Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth As History (1996) is Lefkowitz’s convincing refutation of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena. Lefkowitz, with Guy MacLean Rogers, edited Black Athena Revisited (1996), a work in which nineteen international scholars refute Bernal’s thesis that “Dead White European Males” have erred purposely, refusing to admit that virtually all the creative contributions of Greece to the civilization of the West derive in reality from Egyptians, whom he claims were black. (See Jasper Griffin, “Anxieties of Influence,” The New York Review of Books, 20 June 1996)
Lefort, César (19th Century) Lefort was a disciple of Comte and author of a work on the method of modern science. {BDF}
LEFT-HANDEDNESS Being left-handed, like being a homosexual or being red-haired, is a fact of life but is treated by some as worthy of being stigmatized. Although approximately 90% of humans are thought to be right-handed, not to be right-handed has been considered to be awkward and gauche (a French word meaning left, warped, clumsy). Psychologists have shown, however, that up to the age of one year infants will use either hand indiscriminately. It is between the ages of one and three that a preference appears and becomes established. Until recently, left-handed individuals were encouraged to become right-handed, much as homosexuals were encouraged to choose heterosexuality. The former often became stutterers, the latter became closeted in their behavior, sometimes siring a family, then exiting with a lover. (“No cure has been found for red-hairedness, either,” a Manhattan comic has observed.) Meanwhile, James A. Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States, was not merely the first ambidextrous chief executive. He was observed writing classical Greek with his left hand and classical Latin with his right. Simultaneously. {CE; PA}
LEGAL AID SOCIETY: See entry for Henry Booth.
Le Gallienne, Eva (1899–1991) Le Gallienne, a grande dame of the theatre, died somewhat appropriately in 1991 on the night of the annual Tony Awards in New York City. In her prime she had earned a Tony, an Emmy, and an Oscar (“Resurrection,” 1980), and some said she would have approved making her exit at the age of ninety-two at a time when others were now receiving applause. Her career as an actress commenced in 1914 in a London production of “Monna Vanna,” ending in 1982 as a director-actress in New York of “Alice in Wonderland.” On television, she had been in “Alice in Wonderland” (1955) and “St. Elsewhere—The Women” (1984). She was in a number of radio shows, and she recorded starting in 1943 with “The Rivals” for Harvard and including “Dick Cavett Talks with Le G” for CCS (1979). In 1918 she had supported Ethel Barrymore in “The Off Chance.” In 1929 she was on Time’s cover, a recognition of her roles in “Hedda Gabbler,” “Peter Pan,” and other hits of the period. As Elizabeth I in a 1957 production of “Mary Stuart,” she received critical acclaim. But hers was a troubled life, one made difficult because she chose not to hide her lesbianism. She refused to arrange a convenient marriage, and she was public about the various companions who shared her life, one of whom was the poet May Sarton. At New York’s Hotel Algonquin, where she had her first apartment, Le Gallienne was known as one of “the four horsemen of the Algonquin,” the others being Tallulah Bankhead, Estelle Wynwood, and Blyth Daly. After a falling out with Josephine Hutchinson, the consummate love throughout her years, LeGallienne was “so distressed and lonely at one point that she even turned to religion. She dressed like a nun, carried a beautifully bound missal, and attended mass daily,” according to biographer Robert A. Shanke in Shattered Applause (1992). She liked to read the prayers of St. Thomas Aquinas or those of religious mystics such as Anchoress Juliana of Norwich. When she became very old, she was asked if she feared death and replied, “I don’t think so. Of course this is something one cannot know for sure, but I don’t feel any fear. It’s part of life, part of the rhythm of the universe. And I am not a believer, so I don’t fear anything that may come afterwards. I don’t think that there is anything. Going to sleep is certainly not frightening. The very best thing is just going to sleep—eternal sleep. Remember, ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d.’ ” Just the same, some years earlier she had taken instruction in the Roman Catholic faith in Westport, Connecticut. But the priest’s lack of knowledge amused and disillusioned her, so she made it clear that the church was not to be allowed to bury her when she died. Commented Shanke, “LeG’s range of acting was incredible. She went from the classic ‘Trojan Women’ to the contemporary ‘Exit the King,’ from sentimental ‘Lilion’ to the bare simplicity of ‘Ghosts,’ from the fantasy of ‘Peter Pan’ to the operatic bravado of ‘Mary Stuart.’ No other actress in her time, certainly not Katharine Cornell or Helen Hayes, could possibly boast such a colorful palette.”
Le Gallienne, Eva (11 Jan 1899 - 3 Jun 1991) Le Gallienne, a grande dame of the theatre, died somewhat appropriately on the night in 1991 of the annual Tony Awards in New York City. In her prime she had earned a Tony, an Emmy, and an Oscar (Resurrection, 1980). Some said she would have approved, at a time when others were now receiving applause, making her exit at the age of ninety-two. Her career as an actress commenced in 1914 in a London production of Monna Vanna, ending in 1982 as a director-actress in New York of Alice in Wonderland. On television, she had been in Alice in Wonderland (1955) and St. Elsewhere—The Women (1984). She was in a number of radio shows, and she recorded starting in 1943 with The Rivals for Harvard and including “Dick Cavett Talks with Le G” for CCS (1979). In 1918 she had supported Ethel Barrymore in The Off Chance. In 1929 she was on Time’s cover, a recognition of her roles in Hedda Gabbler, Peter Pan, and other hits of the period. As Elizabeth I in a 1957 production of Mary Stuart, she received critical acclaim. But hers was a troubled life, one made difficult because she chose not to hide her lesbianism. She refused to arrange a convenient marriage, and she was public about the various companions who shared her life, one of whom was the poet and fellow freethinker May Sarton. At New York’s Hotel Algonquin, where she had her first apartment, Le Gallienne was known as one of “the four horsemen of the Algonquin,” the others being Tallulah Bankhead, Estelle Wynwood, and Blyth Daly. After a falling out with Josephine Hutchinson, the consummate love throughout her years, Le Gallienne was “so distressed and lonely at one point that she even turned to religion. She dressed like a nun, carried a beautifully bound missal, and attended mass daily,” according to biographer Robert A. Shanke in Shattered Applause (1992). She liked to read the prayers of St. Thomas Aquinas or those of religious mystics such as Anchoress Juliana of Norwich. When she became very old, she was asked if she feared death and replied, “I don’t think so. Of course this is something one cannot know for sure, but I don’t feel any fear. It’s part of life, part of the rhythm of the universe. And I am not a believer, so I don’t fear anything that may come afterwards. I don’t think that there is anything. Going to sleep is certainly not frightening. The very best thing is just going to sleep—eternal sleep. Remember, ’tis a consummation / Devoutly to be wish’d.’ ” Just the same, some years earlier she had taken instruction in the Roman Catholic faith in Westport, Connecticut. But the priest’s lack of knowledge amused and disillusioned her, so she made it clear that the church was not to be allowed to bury her when she died. Commented Shanke, “Le G’s range of acting was incredible. She went from the classic Trojan Women to the contemporary Exit the King, from sentimental Lilion to the bare simplicity of Ghosts, from the fantasy of Peter Pan to the operatic bravado of Mary Stuart. No other actress in her time, certainly not Katharine Cornell or Helen Hayes, could possibly boast such a colorful palette.”
Le Gallienne, Richard (1866–1947)
LeGallienne was an English man of letters, the father of Eva Le Gallienne. He was associated with the fin-de-siècle aesthetes of the 1890s before becoming a resident of the United States. In his Religion of a Literary Man (1893), he rejected the belief in a future life and said that “organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founder’s than any other agency in the world.” In If I Were God (1897), Le Gallienne professed a vague and unorthodox theism. {RAT; RE; TYD}
Legate, Bartholomew (c. 1572–1612) Why is my King James Version of the Bible not dedicated to “Bartholomew Legate?” complained Pique’s New York City editor facetiously in 1992. The reference was to the anti-trinitarian native of Essex who, in 1611, was thrown into prison on a charge of heresy. Visited by King James in many personal interviews, Legate was asked if he prayed to Jesus Christ. Replied Legate, no, not for the last seven years but he had done so in the days of his ignorance. “Away, base fellow!” His Majesty had exclaimed. “It shall never be said that one stayeth in my presence who hath never prayed to the Savior for seven years together.” The King then prepared a writ, De Heretico Comburendo, 18 March 1612, authorizing Legate to be burned at Smithfield, one of the last persons to be so punished in England. {BDF}
LeGoff, Jacques (20th Century) LeGoff, who in France is a specialist in French Medieval Civilization and Literature, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Leguin, Ursula Kroeber (1929– ) Leguin, in the introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, wrote, “I am an atheist.” However, the introduction is found in only some editions of the book. Her many works include the following: Rocannon’s World (1966); The Word for World is Forest (1967); The Wizard of Earthsea (1968); The Lathe of Heaven (1971); and Unlocking the Air (1996). She has received awards for her short stories, poems, criticism, science fiction, screenplays and, in 1995, Asimov’s Reader’s Award. {E}
LEGUMES Without legumes, humanity would not have made it to the Dark Ages, Umberto Eco has argued. Citing Jacques Le Goff’s La civilisation de l’Occident médiévale, Eco notes that indigence, hunger, and insecurity confronted mankind prior to the year 1000. People were dying of tuberculosis, leprosy, ulcers, eczema, tumors, and by dread epidemics like the plague. Underpopulation combined with under-cultivated land left nearly everyone undernourished. In the centuries before 1000, a new triennial system of crop rotation was slowly adopted, allowing the land to be more fruitful. In the second millennium, as a result, Europe’s population doubled, maybe even tripled. Without sufficient food, mankind could not have continued, let alone doubled. The poor did not eat meat, unless they happened to be able to raise a few chickens or did not get caught poaching lands owned by the lords. In short, Eco states, “Without beans, we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this [material], would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am not sure everyone agrees.” As for the future? “We have all known for a long time that if the West ate unmilled brown rice, husks and all (delicious, by the way), we would consume less food, and better food,” Eco advised. {Umberto Eco, The New York Times Magazine,18 April 1999}
Lehman, Karl (20th Century) Lehman wrote Thomas Jefferson: American Humanist (1947). {FUS}
Lehn, Jean-Marie Pierre (1939– ) Lehn, who has contributed over five hundred articles to scientific publications, has received numbers of French as well as foreign honors. He became a Nobel Laureate in chemistry (1987), and he signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Newly elected to Academy of Humanism
Le Hon, Joseph (1809–1872) Le Hon was a Belgian scientist, a captain in the Belgian army, professor of the military school of Brussels, and Chevalier of the Order of Leopold. Le Hon translated Professor Omboni’s exposition of Darwinism and wrote L’Homme Fossile en Europe (1866). {BDF}
Lehrer, Thomas Andrew (1928– ) Lehrer, a songwriter, entertainer, and lecturer, wrote Tom Lehrer Song Book (1954) and numerous other works, including An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1959). A favorite of Isaac Asimov was Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag”:
First you get down on your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! Do whatever steps you want if You have cleared them with the Pontiff, Ev’rybody say his own Kyrie eleison, Doin’ the Vatican Rag. Get in line in that processional, Step into that small confessional, There the guy who’s got religion’ll Tell you if your sin’s original. If it is try playin’ it safer, Drink the wine and chew the wafer, Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate! So you get down on your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! Make a cross on your abdomen, When in Rome do like a Roman, Ave Maria, Gee, it’s good to see ya, Gettin’ ecstatic an’ sorta dramatic an’ Doin’ the Vatican Rag.
In a 1996 interview online Lehrer was asked if he was an agnostic or an atheist. He responded:
No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has The Truth. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
So did he consider himself a fan of organized religion and is he a “spiritual” person? He responded
To say that I am not a “fan” of organized religion is putting it mildly. My feeling about even disorganized religion is summed up in James Taylor’s immortal line in “Sweet Baby James”: “Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep.” I have no desire to promote secular insomnia. As for being “spiritual,” not in the New Age sense, certainly. I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (Don’t get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn’t enough, how about fractals? Or quantum mechanics? {CA}
Lehrer, Tom [Thomas Andrew] (9 Apr 1928 - ) Lehrer, a songwriter, entertainer, and lecturer, wrote Tom Lehrer Song Book (1954) and numerous other works, including An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer (1959). A favorite of Isaac Asimov was Lehrer’s “Vatican Rag,” which Asimov would sing to friends with very little encouragement:
First you get down on your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! Do whatever steps you want if You have cleared them with the Pontiff, Ev’rybody say his own Kyrie eleison, Doin’ the Vatican Rag. Get in line in that processional, Step into that small confessional, There the guy who’s got religion’ll Tell you if your sin’s original. If it is try playin’ it safer, Drink the wine and chew the wafer, Two, four, six, eight, Time to transubstantiate! So you get down on your knees, Fiddle with your rosaries, Bow your head with great respect, And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect! Make a cross on your abdomen, When in Rome do like a Roman, Ave Maria, Gee, it’s good to see ya, Gettin’ ecstatic an’ sorta dramatic an’ Doin’ the Vatican Rag.
In a 1996 interview online Lehrer was asked if he was an agnostic or an atheist. He responded:
No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has The Truth. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
So did he consider himself a fan of organized religion and is he a “spiritual” person? He responded:
To say that I am not a “fan” of organized religion is putting it mildly. My feeling about even disorganized religion is summed up in James Taylor’s immortal line in “Sweet Baby James”: “Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep.” I have no desire to promote secular insomnia. As for being “spiritual,” not in the New Age sense, certainly. I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (Don’t get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn’t enough, how about fractals? Or quantum mechanics? {CA}
Lehrman, Nathaniel (20th Century) Lehrman is on the Executive Board of New York City’s Corliss Lamont Chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Lei Yong-Sheng (20th Century) Lei is professor of philosophy, dean of the Department of Social Sciences, and chief librarian at the Chinese Political College of the Young in Beijing, China. He is author of The History of Western Epistemology, among other works, and has written “The Hard Course of Humanism in China.” He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (Free Inquiry, Summer 1996).
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von (1646–1716) Leibniz’s rationalistic philosophy was satirized in Voltaire’s Candide. Little wonder, for Leibniz tried to use rationalism to prove the existence of God. His Theodicy (1710) should, according to one humanist, have been spelled Idiocy. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Leibniz as one who seems atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. Robertson has commented that Leibniz’s philosophy, “with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. However, Bertrand Russell among others has pointed out that in some of the unpublished works Leibniz anticipated some of the ideas found in contemporary symbolic logic. When Leibniz died, his passing was scarcely noticed by the intellectuals and royal patrons of his day. {CE; CL; ER; EU, Aram Vartanian; HNS2; JMR; JMRH}
David Leibowitz, Arizona Columnist / Radio Talk Host media NEW
Leibowitz's column can be found in The Arizona Republic (http://www.azcentral.com). His radio show can be heard on 620 AM in Phoenix (http://www.620ktar.com) On his Phoenix radio show the morning of February 26, 2001, Leibowitz said during a discussion on the difference between religion and spirituality: "I would describe myself as agnostic, bordering on atheist." A pic and bio can be found at http://www.620ktar.com/KTAR/leibowitz.html Leibowitz, Irwin (20th Century) Leibowitz was a founder and is active with the Secular Humanists of South Florida. (See entry for Florida Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Leibson, Helen (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Leibson was president of the Philadelphia Ethical Society. {HM2}
LEICESTER (England) HUMANISTS
In 1995 Fred Whitehead visited the Secular Society Hall in Leicester and described the main meeting room, which can hold several hundred people. On the outside are terra cotta busts of Paine, Owen, Voltaire, Socrates, and (to the amusement of some) Jesus. At the building’s opening on 6 March 1881, George Jacob Holyoake, who had coined the word “secularism,” spoke on “Secularism, a religion which gives heaven no trouble.” For information about the oldest secular society in the world, write Secular Hall, 75 Humberstone Gate, Leicester LE 1 1WB; telephone 0116 2622250.
Leidy, Joseph (1823–1891) Leidy, a physician and American naturalist, taught biology at the University of Philadelphia and was an eminent paleontologist. He received the Lyell Medal of the London Geological Society. Sir William Osler, who knew Leidy, thought him “one of the greatest naturalists of America” and said he was an agnostic: “I have often heard him say that the question of a future state had long ceased to interest him.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Leigh, Henry Stone (19th Century) Leigh was the English author of a deistic work, The Religions of the World (1869). {BDF}
Leigh, Mike (1943- ) An English film director, Leigh has directed plays (“Goose Pimples,” 1981, winner of the Critics’ Choice Best Comedy Award, London Evening Standard); numbers of feature films (including “Bleak Moments,” 1971, Golden Hugo Award, Chicago Film Festival and Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Film Festival, 1972); and radio plays (“Too Much of a Good Thing,” 1979). When his “Secrets and Lies” was nominated for an Oscar Award, he told biographer Michael Coveney, who inquired about his religious views, “I walked away from all that as early as I can remember and certainly, by the time of my bar-mitzvah, I did not believe in God. And I still don’t.” {CA}
Mike Leigh, Filmmaker ent Internet Movie Database
The director of the Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies told a biographer, "I walked away from all that as early as I can remember and certainly, by the time of my bar-mitzvah, I did not believe in God. And I still don't." Source: Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, p. 54.
Leigh, Mike (20 Feb 1943 - ) Leigh, a prominent movie director and screen-scriptwriter, was born in Salford, Lancashire England. His grandfather was a Russian portrait miniaturist who emigrated in 1902, and his father was a physician who changed the family name from Lieberman to Leigh—both his parents were Zionist youth. “As a kid in the ‘40s and ‘50s,” he told salon.com, “I would sit in movies endlessly—and that’s mostly Hollywood and British films, for we didn’t see any other films—and think wouldn’t it be great if you could see people in films like people actually are.” He studied acting briefly at the royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, the Camberwell School of Art in London, the London International School of Film Technique, the Central School of Art and Design in London, and he became director for the BBC of experimental theater. In 1973 he married Alison Steadman, Toby was born in 1978 and Leo in 1981, and the couple divorced in 1996. In 1989 with producer Simon Channing, Thin Man Films was formed. As director of Naked (shown at Cannes in 1992, winning Best Director Award), Life is Sweet, and Secrets and Lies (nominated for an Oscar), he has received many awards and honors including in 1995 the BAFTA Award for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema. Critics point out how he is able to depict the often (superficially) uneventful lives of ordinary people, doing so often with biting satire and deep humanism. According to salon.com, “His forlorn, stubborn, deluded, and occasionally radiant characters, each miraculously acted, could suspend the disbelief of the flintiest critic—these people are real, heartbreakingly so.” According to Michael Coveney’s The World According to Mike Leigh, the director is not involved in religion: “I walked away from all that as early as I can remember and certainly, by the time of my bar-mitzvah, I did not believe in God. And I still don’t.” {CA}
Leigh, Richard (20th Century)
Leigh, with Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln, wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail (1982).
Leight, Jenna (20th Century) Leight is an editor of World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Leighton, Frederic [Baron] (1830–1896) A distinguished English painter and sculptor, Leighton was president of the Royal Academy and received numerous honors from many countries. His first picture, purchased by Queen Victoria in 1855, showed Cimabue’s “Madonna” being carried through the streets of Florence. In Addresses Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, Leighton candidly refutes the common idea that Christianity inspired medieval art. On the contrary, the serious Christianity of the Middle Ages was a blight on art, he maintained. It was the Humanism of the Renaissance that delivered it. Although he sometimes used the language of theism, McCabe wrote, Leighton approaches agnosticism when he speaks of “the mysterious and eternal Fountain of all good things.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Leighton, J. A. (20th Century) Leighton has been an active member of the American Humanist Association. {HNS}
Leiss, Fred (19th Century)
In New York, Leiss published Freidenker in 1872. It was a freethought publication printed in German.
Leitner, Gloria Jewel (1946 ) Leitner, a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado, contributes articles to The Humanist. She has written that humanists, who often mockingly poke holes in the New Age nostrums, need to come to terms with the scientifically oriented person who also embraces “spirituality,” a word she defines to include what others say they experience during prayer, contemplation, meditation, and communal rituals of sanctity. “In its highest manifestation,” she claims, “spiritual enrichment can result in a giving, loving, lucid life.” {The Humanist, May-June 1996}
Leithauser, Gladys Garner (20th Century) Leithauser, a retired teacher of writing and communication at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, is co-editor of The World of Science: An Anthology for Writers (1987). In 1994 she was a member of a panel discussing “What is the Good Life? A Humanist Perspective” at the 1994 conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT) in Toronto.
Leland, Charles Godfrey (1824–1903) An American author, Leland used the pseudonym of Hans Breitmann, writing poems with a German dialect while editor of Graham’s Magazine. In 1869 he published Hans Bresitman’s Ballads, and in 1862 he founded and edited in Boston the Continental Monthly in order to further the Union cause. Leland wrote more than fifty books, and in the 1880s he successfully introduced industrial and craft arts into American schools. He fought at the barricades in the French Revolution of 1848, translated Heine, and wrote a life of Abraham Lincoln. In his Memoirs, he speaks satirically of “the grandeur of monotheistic trinitarianism,” wavering according to McCabe between theism and atheism. {CE; JM; RAT}
Leland, Lilian (Born 1857) The daughter of Theron C. Leland, Ms. Leland said she never heard a prayer until she was six years old, when a religious woman undertook to teach her and her sister to say, “Now I lay me down to sleep” whereas her parents just before bedtime had played a game, “What are you going to give the old bachelor to keep house with?” A world traveler, Leland was a freethinker and a writer who married the son of Stephen Pearl Andrews, an abolitionist and freethinker. {PUT; WWS}
Leland, Theron C. (1821–1885) Leland was an American journalist who edited with Wakeman a journal called Man. Leland was born in a log cabin in Cattaraugus County, New York, “amid the howling wolves and woods.” Although he graduated with the highest honors from the Wesleyan Seminary at Lima, New York, he became interested in Fourierism and became a convert to that form of socialism. Leland was an advocate of phonography, which many at that time denounced as a humbug. But when he reported on the speeches of Daniel Webster and Kossuth and others for the New York Tribune and other papers, he began a reputation that placed him at the head of all stenographers. At the fourth annual congress of the National Liberal League in 1880, Leland was elected secretary. Leland was a total disbeliever in Christianity. {BDF; PUT}
Lem, Kristin (20th Century) A feminist folksinger and songwriter, Lem in 1996 was awarded the Charline Kotula Freethought Heroine Memorial Award at the convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin. Gloria Steinem has called Lem “a one-woman argument against the notion that the women’s movement doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
Lem, Stanislaw (20th Century) An estimated six million copies of Lem’s novels, short stories, and plays can be found in print throughout East Europe and Russia. Over two dozen of his works have been translated into English, including Solaris(1970; the Soviets made a major film from this novel); The Cyberiad (1974); The Futurological Congress (1974); and The Star Diaries (1976). Trained to be a physician and “brought up with the scientific outlook” by his father, also a physician, Lem subsequently “spent many hours over coffee arguing about God” with his friend Karol Wojtlya, who taught theology in Krackow (and is better known as Pope John Paul II). As for religion, “For moral reasons I am an atheist—for moral reasons. I am of the opinion that you would recognize a creator by his creation, and the world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created by anyone than to think that somebody created this intentionally.” {CA}
Lemaire, Charles (19th Century) A member of the Academical Society of Saint Quentin, Lemaire wrote an atheistic philosophical work entitled Initiation to the Philosophy of Liberty (2 volumes, 1842). {BDF}
Lemoine, Brett (20th Century) With Jeffery Jay Lowder, Lemoine started Internet Infidels in 1995 and is its honorary president. Theirs is a major site for nontheistic materials: <http://www.infidels.org>.
Lemon, Alton (20th Century) In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), named after the plaintiff, the Supreme Court set a standard for judging separation of church and state. The “Lemon Test” states that a law is in violation of the constitutional separation of church and state, unless it meets all the following criteria: (a) It must have a secular legislative purpose; (2) its principal or primary effect must be one that neither advances nor inhibits religion; and (c) it must not foster excessive entanglement with religion. The Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia honored Lemon and his wife, Augusta, in 1996 for their important efforts on behalf of the separation of church and state. He has been named an honorary officer of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Lemonnier, Camille (1845–1913) Lemonnier was a Belgian writer, author of stories on hysteria, death, and other topics in which he evinces his freethought sentiments. In 1987, Lemonnier wrote Le Mort. {BDF}
Lenau, E. (19th Century) Lenau edited from Chicago The People’s Press from 1896 to 1905.
Lenau, Nicolaus (1802–1850) Lenau, a Hungarian poet whose name was Nicolaus Franz Niembusch von Strehlenau, wrote in German. His poems were pessimistic and his constitutional melancholy deepened into insanity. A freethinker, he died near Vienna in Ober-Döbling. {BDF}
Lenbach, Franz von (1836–1904) A German painter whose portraits were inspired by the models of Rembrandt and Velasquez, Lenbach used a fineness of coloring and was noted as an eminent German artist. He was ennobled by the Prince Regent of Bavaria and had many gold medals and orders. One of Lenbach’s portraits is that of Haeckel, with whose philosophical outlook he agreed. {RAT}
Lenin [originally Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov] (1870–1924) “God-making is the worst way of spitting in one’s own face,” declared Lenin, the Bolshevik ideologist and founder of the USSR. He argued against the “God-building” of Lunacharski, Bogdanov, and Gorki. (Ironically, Lenin himself ended as somewhat of a godlike figure, entombed at Red Square.) Lenin believed that religion should be abolished, and he called for developing “the most widespread scientific education and antireligious propaganda,” cautioning against “insulting the [religious] feelings of believers since this would only lead to the strengthening of religious fanaticism.” “Religion,” a fifty-six page pamphlet Lenin wrote, was not published in English until 1930. Lenin’s grandfather was Israel Blank, born around 1804 in Staro-Konstantynov, Ukraine, to Moshke (son of Isaac) Blank, a Jewish businessman. Isaac Blank had converted to the Russian Orthodox Church at one point, changing his name to Aleksandr Dmitrivich Blank and becoming a physician. His daughter, Mariya Aleksandrovna Blank, was the mother of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin’s actual name. Lenin’s elder brother, Sasha, was hanged in 1887 for conspiring against the life of Tsar Alexander III. Dimitri Volkogonov, in a biography, Lenin (1994), states that Lenin’s maternal grandfather was Jewish and that Lenin had an affair with Inewssa Armand, his fellow revolutionary. A former Soviet general, Volkogonov was a believing communist who revered Stalin, then revered Lenin, then used secret Soviet documents to expose Lenin’s iniquities. Lenin, he states, endorsed terror in general terms but avoided associating his name with any concrete acts of violence. During a kulak uprising in 1918, Lenin wrote, “Hang (and I mean hang so that the people can see) not less than 100 known kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers. . . . Do this so that for hundreds of miles around the people can see, tremble, know, and cry: they are killing and will go on killing the bloodsucking kulaks.” To punish Latvia and Estonia for declaring their independence in 1918, he wrote, “Cross the frontier somewhere, even if only to a depth of half a mile, and hang 100 [to] 1,000 of their civil servants and rich people.” Concluded Volkogonov, once a disciple of Lenin and now accused by some of overstatement, it was Lenin who sowed “the seeds of the murderous collectivization . . . the appalling purges . . . and the postwar ‘punishment’ of entire nations.” It was Lenin who was “the father of domestic Russian terrorism, merciless and totalitarian.” Contemporary humanists find that the flaw in Lenin’s dialectic is that no democratic processes were in place, that the resultant “communistic humanism” did not include political democracy as it purported to work for the benefit of the masses. Yuri Buranov, in Lenin’s Will, Falsified and Forbidden (1994), claims that in 1922 and 1923, while Lenin lay incapacitated by severe strokes, the Central Committee of the Communist Party deliberately collaborated to falsify Lenin’s last political testament, which led to Stalin’s success in obtaining power. Revisionists such as the Harvard historian Richard Pipes place the blame for the evils of the Stalinist regime squarely on the shoulders of Lenin and his concept of the one-party state. Pipes and others hold that Lenin was the progenitor of modern revolutionary violence and radical, bloody social change, that he, not Stalin, gave the world a blueprint for the ideology-based terror state which Hitler and others would use to such deadly effect. According to Pipes’s The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives (1996), Lenin was ruthless, mean, had a closed mind, and was ignorant of the world outside Russia. Not “Christ-like, at least in his compassion” nor “as excited and lovable as a little child,” as viewed by the Australian Marxist historian Manning Clark. Lenin’s body was placed into a granite mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, drawing huge crowds that could see the familiar face, now somewhat waxy in appearance. When the German army approached in 1941, the body was rushed to Siberia for safekeeping—minus his brain. The brain, pickled and sectioned, remained at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Brain Institute, the 1926 academy which also has probed the brains of Stalin, Maxim Gorky, and Andrei Sakharov. The eventual disposition of Lenin’s body, once the Soviet Union ceased, is uncertain. {CB; CE; CL; EU, Rolf H. W. Theen; JM; PA; RE}
Lennon, Ann (1906– ) Lennon, who during the 1940s was secretary of the Rationalist Association of South Australia, was once fined £10 for having said in a public park that God loved bloodshed and the smell of burning flesh. . . . This God of you Christians is a Jewish God, not an Aussie God, not a fair-dinkum Aussie God, just a Jewish god with money bags around his neck.” Upon appeal, she was told by Judge Nield that despite Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which showed that the gods of primitive races were neither the Christian nor the Jewish gods, rationalists of Miss Lennon’s type still adhered to the view of the 1880s. He upheld the fine. Meanwhile, she continued as a rationalist and atheist lecturer at the Sydney Domain and Ingersoll Hall. {SWW}
Lennon, John (1940–1980) Lennon was the rock ‘n’ roll superstar who, at the height of the group’s fame, said the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” During a drug episode when he was taking LSD, according to Mark Hertsgaard in A Day in the Life, Lennon allegedly thought he was Jesus Christ come back again. Hertsgaard claims Lennon continued the belief when he woke up the following day. However, Lennon later called himself an atheist, writing that “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” His atheism is found in the song, “Imagine,” perhaps written as an LSD reaction, in which he conjures up a world without countries or religion:
Imagine there’s no heaven—it’s easy if you try; no Hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people livin’ for today.
Imagine there’s no countries—it’s not hard to do; nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people livin’ life in peace.
Imagine no possessions: I wonder if you can; no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, all the people sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, And the world will be as one.
Asked once if he was worried about the prospect of nuclear destruction, Lennon replied, “Well, like everyone else I don’t want to end up a festering heap, but I don’t stay up nights worrying. I’m preoccupied with life, not death.” His January 1981 interview in Playboy showed Lennon as something of a waverer. As for Dylan’s having become a born-again Christian, Lennon replied, For whatever reason he’s doing it, it is personal for him and he needs to do it. But the whole religion business suffers from the Onward, Christian Soldiers bit. There’s too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I’m not pushing Buddhism, because I’m no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian, but there’s one thing I admire about the religion: There’s no proselytizing.
Lennon’s very interest in cult leaders in India, however, was highly criticized by many non-theists. (See entries for Royston Ellis and Sam Phillips.) {PA; TYD}
Lennon, John (9 Oct1940 - 8 Dec 1980) Lennon was the rock ‘n’ roll superstar who, at the height of the group’s fame, said the Beatles were “bigger than Jesus.” During a drug episode when he was taking LSD, according to Mark Hertsgaard in A Day in the Life, Lennon allegedly thought he was Jesus Christ come back again. Hertsgaard claims Lennon continued the belief when he woke up the following day. However, Lennon later called himself an atheist, writing that “God is a concept by which we measure our pain.” Lennon’s atheism is found in the song, “Imagine,” perhaps written as an LSD reaction, in which he conjures up a world without countries or religion:
Imagine there’s no heaven—it’s easy if you try; no Hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people livin’ for today.
Imagine there’s no countries—it’s not hard to do; nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people livin’ life in peace.
Imagine no possessions: I wonder if you can; no need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man, all the people sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope some day you’ll join us, And the world will be as one.
Asked once if he was worried about the prospect of nuclear destruction, Lennon replied, “Well, like everyone else I don’t want to end up a festering heap, but I don’t stay up nights worrying. I’m preoccupied with life, not death.” His January 1981 interview in Playboy showed Lennon as something of a waverer. As for Dylan’s having become a born-again Christian, Lennon replied,
For whatever reason he’s doing it, it is personal for him and he needs to do it. But the whole religion business suffers from the Onward, Christian Soldiers bit. There’s too much talk about soldiers and marching and converting. I’m not pushing Buddhism, because I’m no more a Buddhist than I am a Christian, but there’s one thing I admire about the religion: There’s no proselytizing.
Lennon’s very interest in cult leaders in India, however, was highly criticized by many non-theists. (See entry for Royston Ellis.) {PA; TYD}
Lennon, William F. Jr. (20th Century)
In the 1950s, Lennon was a director of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist Fellowship of Boston.
Lennstrand, Viktor E. (1861–1895) A lecturer and journalist, Lennstrand started in 1888 and was prosecuted for his anti-Christian propaganda. Twice he was fined 250 crowns and imprisoned, but he extended his influence with the general public, which discredited his opponents. He founded “Utilitarian Associations” which still survive in Sweden. Lennstrand wrote What We Believe and What We Want (1888), Jehovah is Dead (1891), and The Republic, the Popular Vote and Freethinking (1891). With A. Lindkvist, he founded the organ of Swedish freethought, Fritankaren. {BDF; EU, José M. F. Santana; JMR; PUT; TYD}
Lenowitz, Harris (20th Century) Lenowitz wrote A Big Jewish Book, Poems and Other Visions (1978. He also wrote Origins: Creation Texts from the Ancient Mediterranean; a Crestomathy (1976). Lenowitz’s translation of the familiar Genesis story in Rudolph Kittel’s Biblica Hebraica (3rd Edition, 1937), is what might be called the “prick and hole” translation. Bernard Katz in American Rationalist (Sep-Oct 1991) reports the translator came up with the following:
so the gods god made man as he looks looking like the gods they godmade them prick and hole they godmade them and the gods blessed them and the gods said to them: BREED A LOT AND FILL THE EARTH AND TAKE IT OVER. RULE. . . .
at the first of the gods’ godmaking skies and earth, the earth was all mixed up—darkness on top of deepness; so the gods’ spirit swooped down on the waters. The gods said LIGHT so there was light, and the gods liked the light so they made it different from the darkness.
they called the light Day called darkness night; so that was Evening and that was Morning the first Day. . . .
Then the gods said, LET THE EARTH BRING OUT BREATHING LIFE OF ALL SORTS; CATTLE AND CRAWLER, EVERY EARTH LIFE and that’s how it was:
gods made all earth life cattle and red-dirt crawler too all of all kinds and liked it
so the gods said LET’S MAKE SOME RED DIRT THAT’LL LOOK LIKE US, JUST LIKE US IT’LL BOSS THE FISH IN THE SEA THE BIRD IN THE SKY AND CATTLE AND ALL THE EARTH AND ALL THE CRAWLERS CRAWLING THE EARTH
so the gods godmade man as he looks looking like the gods they godmade them prick and hole they godmade them . . . etc.
As noted, the original concept of monotheism (oneness of God) tacitly postulates that the original Original was bisexual. When the document was written, according to a founding member of the New York secular humanists, “Individuals must not have been prudes and the author or authors did not need to bowdlerize. Their earthiness and their holes and pricks verily stuck out, being without benefit of the King James scholars who dressed the work up . . . a tad.”
LENT Borrowing from a celebration of spring, lencten in Old English and lenzin in Old High German, Lent in Christianity is a time of fasting and repentance of the sins (for example, “taking God’s name in vain,” masturbating, drinking too much alcohol) which the church fathers have conditioned the faithful to avoid. It begins on a holiday known as Ash Wednesday and ends several weeks later on another holiday known as Easter. “To give something up for Lent” is the way of abandoning a pleasurable habit, a practice freethinkers and humanists find masochistic. The practice is observed by the Roman Catholic, Eastern, and some Protestant churches. Originally, the Lenten season was a period of preparation for baptism at Easter, and the imposition of ashes—adherents, for example, walk around all day with an incongruous, even disconcertingto freethinkers, dab of ashes on their foreheads–is a survival of a later practice. {DCL; ER}
Lenz, John (20th Century) Lenz, a professor of classics at Drew University, became president of the Bertrand Russell Society in 1995. He is author of Bertrand Russell and the Greeks. Lenz has been critical of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. On the Web: http://daniel.drew.edu/~jlenz/brs.html {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990}
Leo X, Pope (1475–1521) See entry in Joseph McCabe’s Rationalist Encyclopedia, which cites Leo as “a thoroughly vicious and unscrupulous man, and, in view of the position of the Church on the eve of the Reformation, one of the most scandalous Popes of the series.”
Leo XIII, Pope (1810–1903) The Pope from 1878 to 1903, Leo XIII in his Quadragesimo anno wrote, “To suffer and endure is the lot of humanity.” In 1896 he issued an encyclical pronouncing Anglican orders invalid. {CE; ER; RE}
Leon, Herbert Samuel [Sir] (Born 1850) Leon was the third Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. He was M.P. for the Northern Division of Buckinghamshire from 1891 to 1895 and was created Baronet in 1911. {RAT}
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) The consummate Renaissance genius, the “love child of a peasant girl named Caterina and the respected notary Piero da Vinci, Leonardo was an architect, engineer, painter, musician, and sculptor. No longer painting the ideal human being as an ascetic monk, he as well as Michelangelo constructed the universal man who enjoyed life and reveled in existence. As such he represents one of the greatest humanistic minds of all time. Robertson points out that Leonardo’s passion for knowledge “is not Christian and that his reiterated rejection of the principle of authority in science and in literature tells of a spirit which, howsoever it might practise reticence, cannot have been inwardly docile to either priesthood or tradition.” In addition to Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, Leonardo painted exquisite examples of the human form. Like the spirit of the Renaissance itself, Kenneth MacLeish has written, “the mind of this man destined to become its living symbol was fashioned in the quickening spring of the Western world’s awakening from the shriveling darkness of the Middle Ages. He was free, as few human beings have ever been free, to become whatever his gifts might make of him. . . . A gracious person, pleasing if not loving, a singer, versifier, maker of marvelous illusions, he was both performer and showman. He devised puzzles and games, and jokes that made people ‘roar with laughter.’ He won the friendship of dukes and kings. Admirers called him ‘the Divine Leonardo’ and said he could do anything.” Born a Tuscan, he left for Milan at the age of thirty and subsequently wandered to Florence and Rome before dying an expatriate in France. But many facts concerning his life are sketchy, and it was left to the 16th-century critic Giorgio Vasari to invent much of what currently is known about his life. Vasari, for example, described Leonardo as a paragon of physical and spiritual beauty, a man who bought caged birds for the sole purpose of setting them free. Vasari wrote that Leonardo died in the arms of King Francis I of France. Whether Vasari was objective or not, it is known that Leonardo was once imprisoned for two months, with four other Florentines (for sodomy with a seventeen-year-old boy). Also, Leonardo described his apprentice, Andrea Salaino [Salai], as “a thieving, lying glutton,” a lovely lad with curly blond hair and the disposition of a weasel. Leonardo and Salaino remained inseparable for twenty-five years. In his will, Leonardo left Salai, now a fat and coarsened grown-up, a bequest as well as a dowry for Salai’s sister. Leonardo’s book, Treatise on Painting (1651), reveals him to have been an artist and scientist united in one personality. {AA; CE; CL; JM; JMR; RE; TYD}
Leontium (c. 300 B.C.E.) Leontium was a disciple and the mistress of Epicurus. An Athenian hetaera, she acquired distinction as a philosopher and wrote a treatise against Theophrastus, which Cicero praised as being written in an elegant manner. {BDF}
Leopardi, Giacomo Conte (1798–1837) An Italian poet and scholar, Leopardi has been called “the supreme poet of modern Italy” and “one of the most definitely rationalistic as well as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature.” He also was called Il Gobbo, “the hunchback.” Because of his spine’s curvature and his melancholy he complained to his brother Carlo in 1822, “I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life. The world does not seem to be made for me.” A liberal and a freethinking agnostic at a time when independence of thought was dangerous in Italy, he wrote poetry deeply patriotic but contemptuous of the Italian rulers of his day. His fame rests primarily on his Canti [poetic songs]. Unfortunately, his short life was one long disease. McCabe called him “a deist without belief in immortality.” {BDF; CE; JM; JMR; RAT; RE}
Leopold, Richard William (20th Century) Leopold wrote Robert Dale Owen, A Biography (1940). {FUS}
LePoidevin, Robin (20th Century) In Defending Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1996), LePoidevin in a scholarly way presented the arguments against belief. He is a contributing editor for Philo.
Lépine, Louis Jean Baptiste [Governor-General] (1846–1933) Lépine, a French statesman, was Governor-General of Algeria in 1897. He wore the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and supported measures against the French Church. In Lyons, he was Prefect of Police. {RAT}
LePlongeon, Augustus (20th Century) LePlongeon, in Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayas and the Quiches (1945), compares in an 1886 study the mysteries of the Mayas to those of Egypt, Greece, Chaldea, and India. The book also discusses Freemasonry.
Le Poidevin, Robin (1962- ) Le Poidevin wrote Arguing for Atheism: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1996). According to Keith M. Parsons (Philo, Spring-Summer 1998), the book “is a logically deft and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of religion. It should be useful for undergraduate courses, though parts, such as the discussion of the modal ontological argument, are quite complex and certain to confuse beginners. The book is also a brief for atheism.” Parsons critiques the book, pointing out places it could be improved, but he finds Le Poidevin a young “but already highly accomplished philosopher.”
Lequinio, Joseph Marie (1740–1813) A French writer and Conventionnel, once the mayor of Rennes (1790), Lequinio professed atheism. He voted for the death of Louis XVI, “regretting that the safety of the state did not permit his being condemned to penal servitude for life.” In 1792 Lequinio published Prejudices Destroyed, which he signed “Citizen of the World” and in which he considered religion as a political chain. Liquinio took part in the Feasts of Reason and wrote Philosophy of the People (1796). {BDF}
Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastian [President] (1825–1889) Lerdo de Tejada was in succession Minister of Foreign Affairs, President of Congress, President of the Supreme Court of Mexico, and, to the great anger of the clergy, President of Mexico (1872–1876). Like his friend Juarez, whom he succeeded, Lerdo de Tejada was, according to McCabe, “a drastic Rationalist.” {RAT; RE}
Lermina, Jules Hippolyte (Born 1839) Lermina, a French writer, founded the Corsair and Satan and published an illustrated biographical dictionary of France (1884–1885). {BDF; RAT}
Lermontov, Mikhail Yur’evich (1814–1840) A major novelist and poet, Lermontov developed a reputation that is second in Russia only to Pushkin’s. Lermontov began writing poetry when fourteen. His 1837 inflammatory poem, “On the Death of the Poet,” protesting the death in a duel of Pushkin, resulted in his being temporarily banished to the Caucasus. Lermontov’s family was said by Wheeler to have had some Scottish in its background and said that Lermontov studied at Moscow University, from which he was expelled. Another rebel, Byron, influenced his early work. The Demon (1829–1841), which featured Satan, a fallen angel in love with a mortal, was the basis of an opera by Anton Rubinstein. The Circassian Boy (1875) reflects Lermontov’s antireligious feeling and idealization of primitive life. A Hero of Our Time (1840), a novel that is partly autobiographical, is considered a classic of Russian psychological realism. Ironically, like Pushkin, Lermontov was killed in a duel. {BDF; RAT}
Lerner, Alan Jay (1918-1986) An American lyricist and librettist, Lerner in an association with composer Frederick Loewe wrote popular musicals including Brigadoon (1947, film 1954), Paint Your Wagon (1951, film 1969), Camelot (1960, film 1967), and Gigi (1958), which won an Academy Award. Their My Fair Lady (1956, film 1964) ran for more than six years on Broadway. Lerner wrote Love Life (1948) with Kurt Weill and the book for the film An American in Paris (1951). Lerner’s will directed that he be cremated and that “there be no funeral and no religious ceremony of any kind in connection with my death. If God does not know me by now, no words by a stranger will help to inroduce me.” {CE}
Lerner, Gerda (1920– ) Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to 1870 (1993) tells of the many aspects of women’s culture, development and history, and reflects a positive definition of feminine values which are implicit in belonging to a group with distinct characteristics and interests. From the outset, she shows, the Christian church has been a major factor in the oppression of women. Lerner credits Sarah Grimké, Mathilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the view that “the Bible and the orthodox church were the two greatest obstacles in the way of women’s advancement.” She has described her experiences as a female Jewish atheist:
More difficult and public was my refusal, four weeks before the appointed date, to go through with my Bar Mitzvah on the grounds that since I no longer believed in God nor in what was taught in religious instruction, it would be hypocritical for me to go through the ceremony. This provoked a family crisis, much noise, anger, and pressure of various sorts, but in the end I prevailed. But more—I refused to set foot in a synagogue again and kept to that refusal for over fifty years.
{CA; Freethought History, #10, 1994}
Lerner, Lawrence (20th Century) Lerner is a contributor to Freethought Today, which is published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
Lerner, Leo (1907–1965) A humanist, Lerner wrote The Itch of Opinion (1956) and co-wrote Lincoln for the Ages (1960). {HNS}
Lerner, Max(well) (Allen) (1902–1992) Lerner was a noted journalist, syndicated columnist, and editor of The Nation (1936–1938). He wrote six thousand columns for the New York Post and was widely syndicated in PM, The New Republic, and The Nation. A rival of Walter Lippmann but a friend of Hugh Hefner (“I teach him sex,” he joked, “and he teaches me politics.”), Lerner was a classic immigrant who arrived at Ellis Island from Russia when he was five. His twin siblings did not survive, and the Lerners barely did so on money his father earned in the garment district and milk-delivery business. He entered Yale in 1919, winning prizes in English, German, and patriotism, but was told when he neared graduation that “You ought to know that, as a Jew, you’ll never get a teaching post in literature in any Ivy League college.” Lerner’s MA thesis adviser in economics, Isaac Lippincott, at Washington University, called him “the most capable graduate student I have had.” He was granted a Ph. D. in 1927 solely “on the strength of the papers he had written.” Sanford Lakoff’s Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land (1999) relates how the 5’ 7” Lerner became managing editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as well as the first Jew appointed to the faculty at Williams College. He also relates his sexual escapades, including an affair with Elizabeth Taylor. Believing as a “neo-Marxian liberal” that collectivism was destined to replace individualism in the United States, he turned instead to Franklin Roosevelt’s “level-headed American pragmatism,” finding that it would be the best thing both for democracy and for whatever part of capitalism was worth retaining. A friend of Harold Laski and Felix Frankfurther, Lerner was known as a spokesman for Popular Frontism before World War II and for favoring early American involvement against fascism. Lakoff thought Lerner was least attractive when, in the 1980s, he became more centrist. In his last chapter of Actions and Passions (1949), Lerner wrote,
I am speaking of an understanding frank enough to recognize that man is part of a naturalistic order, an animal with bestial impulses that can be multiplied by the multiple cunning of his brain. . . . I call this tragic humanism. I call it tragic because it must strip itself of the barren belief that men are wholly rational, and of the smug assumption that progress and happiness can come out of systems of power as such, whether capitalism, socialism, or communism. This is not a religion, or even a mystique. It is an idea to which the American creative thinker can dedicate himself with passion and wholeness. An idea with passion and wholeness behind it can move the world.
Of humanism, Lerner in 1951 wrote to the present author:
Yes, I do consider myself—if anything—a kind of “naturalistic humanist.” The phrase I use is “tragic humanist.” You will find the closest approach to a deliberate formulation of in an editorial I did a few years back for the American Scholar, called “Toward A Tragic Humanism,” and which I have included in my book of essays, Actions and Passions (1949), as an epilogue (pp. 258–259). I am now writing a brief book elaborating on this view and applying it to the war crisis.
In addition to a philosophic Preface to Morals, Lerner was the author of It Is Later Than You Think (1938), The Portable Veblen (1948), The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (1961), and Education and a Radical Humanism (1962). A major work was a collection of the PM editorials, America as a Civilization, Life and Thought in the United States Today (1957). Summing up his life for a Who’s Who in America entry, Lerner wrote: “I have believed in love and work, and their linkage. I have believed that we are neither angels nor devils, but humans, with clusters of potentials in both directions. I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, but a possibilist.” (Lamont thought that Lerner, in calling his philosophy tragic humanism, “stresses too much the traumatic aspects of life.”) {CL; WAS, 9 March 1951}
Leroux, Pierre (1797–1871) Leroux was a French socialist and philosophic writer. At first a mason, then a typographer, he invented an early composing machine that he called the pianotype. In 1824 he became editor of the Globe, making it the organ of a Saint Simonian sect. Anti-Catholic, Leroux wrote author of De l’Humanite (1840). In 1848 he was elected to the Assembly. {BDF; RAT}
Lerroux y Garcia, Alejandro (1864–1949) Lerroux y Garcia was a Spanish politician who for a quarter of a century fought for republicanism, socialism, and rationalism in Spain. He was editor and owner of El Progreso and thrice represented Barcelona in the Cortes. No fewer than three hundred times was he condemned for his press utterances, which resulted in his spending thirty years in prison and several years of being exiled. {RAT}
Leroy, Charles Georges (1723–1789) Leroy, a lieutenant ranger of the park of Versailles, was one of the writers on the Encyclopédie. He defended the work of Helvetius on the Mind against Voltaire, and he wrote Philosophical Letters on the Intelligence and Perfectibility of Animals (1768). {BDF}
LES IDÉES EN MOUVEMENTS A French humanistic journal, Les Idées en Mouvement is at 3 rue Recamier 75341 Paris, Cedex 07, France. <info-ligue@ligue.cie.fr>.
LESBIANISM Lesbianism is a term to describe the sexual orientation of women to other women, one that comes from the putative homosexuality of Sappho, the lyric poet of Lesbos. Some lesbian freethinkers—citing the mother of Jesus as a woman who allegedly gave birth to a child without a heterosexual act or the help of a man —have been known to use the argument, jocularly, to legalize lesbian marriages. (See entry for Homosexuality.)
Leslie, Charles (1650–1722) Leslie’s Short and easie method with the deists (1698) led Charles Gildon to forsake his Catholicism and become a leading deist. {FUK; HAB}
Lespinasse, Adolf Frederick Henri de (1819–1881) Lespinasse was a Dutch writer who wrote in the Dageraad under the pen name of “Titus.” In 1870 he emigrated to America and became director of a large farm, dying there in Orange City, Iowa. {BDF}
L’Espinasse, Julie Jeanne Elónore de (1732–1776) A French beauty and wit, L’Espinasse became the protégé of Made du Deffand and gained the favor of D’Alembert. Her letters are models of sensibility and spirit. {BDF}
Lesser, Wendy (1952- ) Wesser is the founding editor of The Threepenny Review. A California-born writer who in 1988 became a Guggenhim fellow, she wrote The Life Below the Ground (1967); His Other Half (1991); Pictures at an Execution (1994); A Director Calls (1997); and The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters (1998). Reviewing an Annie Dillard novel about why, if God exists, wickedness is permitted, Lesser wrote
As a Jewish atheist with little or no feel for nature, I am admittedly not the ideal reader of For the Time Being. (The Jewish part is important, for it means that Dillard’s frequent references to the Baal Shem Tov and Rabbi Isaac Luria lack, for me, the appeal of exoticism). {The New York Times, 28 March 1999}
Lessing, Doris May (1919– ) Lessing, a novelist and short story writer who was born in Persia of British parents and who moved when she was five to a farm in Southern Rhodesia, knew by the age of twelve how to set a hen, raise rabbits, worm dogs, churn butter, cook and sew, go down mine shafts in a bucket, make cream cheese and ginger beer, drive cars, walk on stilts, and shoot pigeons and guinea fowl, all of which she said “is real happiness, a child’s happiness: being enabled to do and to make, above all to know you are contributing to the family, you are valuable and valued.” Critic John Leonard has pointed out that Lessing, who left school at the age of fifteen, spent four years in a convent school “and was so admiring of holy water, rosary beads, Sanctus bells, and a coffin as pink as a cake, in the shape of a violin, she actually converted, for a couple of minutes, to Roman Catholicism.” But when her mother explained the Inquisition, “she promptly quit religion.” Lessing was influential in assisting an entire generation to understand Africa as a continent in transition, particularly drawing attention to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she lived for twenty-five years before moving to London. She wrote about Africa, communism, women, and global catastrophe in a series collectively titled The Children of Violence which included Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A Ripple From the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965), and The Four-Gated City (1969). She is best known for The Golden Notebook (1962), an ambitious novel that was hailed as a landmark by the Women’s Movement. Lessing was interested in the works of Idries Shah as well as Sufism, the Muslim philosophical and literary movement that emerged among the Shiites in the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Her Collected Stories (2 volumes, 1978) contain varied works including meditations on the material and spiritual life in “The Temptation of Jack Orkney.” In 1994, Under My Skin, volume one of her autobiography (to 1949), although it abounds, says Leonard, “with unpleasant smells from the past—horses, camphor, petrol, paraffin, chamber pots, dead fish, wet wool, the habits of nuns, her father’s crotch—none is as redolent as the very idea of Anna’s compulsive washing of herself in The Golden Notebook, so that she won’t smell of her own period.” The work also abounds with tales of her life until she was thirty. She tells what she read, when the nuns let her; what music she enjoyed; where she went and what she thought. Presumably in volume two, she will tell how she became interested in Outer Space, for she wrote five volumes of the Canopus in Argus: Archives series. “Nothing in history,” she writes in the autobiography, “suggests that we may expect anything but wars, tyrants, sickness, bad times, calamities, while good times are always temporary. Above all, history tells us nothing stays the same for long. We expect gold at the foot of always-renewable rainbows. I feel I have been part of some mass illusion or delusion. Certainly part of mass beliefs and convictions that now seem as lunatic as the fact that for centuries expeditions of God-lovers trekked across the Middle East to kill the infidel.” Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962 (1998) relates obtaining her official Communist Party card in the 1950s at a time she had already become disillusioned by communism. Everyone was a communist in those days, she said—more would say, however, that intellectuals were left-wing. What Lessing disliked was the semi-dogmatism of her comrades’ thinking, so the book attempts to evaluate her later views about society. Upon her return in 1956 to Africa, she was termed a “Prohibited Immigrant.” Of her break with communism, she wrote:
I knew that I had accepted the Marxist package for no deeper reason than that the communists I met in Southern Rhodesia had actually read the books I had, were in love with literature, and because they were the only people I knew who took it for granted that the white regime was doomed. . . I began a systematic search for something different.
{CE}
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–1781) A deist and aestheticist who was born in Kamenz, Saxony, where his father was a pastor in the Lutheran Church, Lessing studied at the University in Leipzig. He studied theology, medicine, and philo-sophy, but became particularly interested in literary criticism. Foote has written, “At an early age Lessing showed his independent nature, and this independence was especially noticeable in his views on religion. In his essay, ‘How the Ancients Represented Death,’ he contrasts the attitude of classical antiquity to death as the natural end of life with that of the Christian faith, which considers death a penalty for sin. Some of the posthumous essays of Hermann Samuel Reimarus, ‘The Principal Truths of Natural Religion’ and the ‘Doctrines of Reason,’ in which he subjects the important claims of Christianity to a profound examination and rejects them as untenable, were edited by Lessing, who took them with him to Wolfenbuettel. Lessing himself was greatly impressed by Reimarus’s work, though he dissented from many of its conclusions. His part in circulating these heterodox views and his own ideas of the need of free discussion in religion, as expressed in ‘The Education of the human Race,’ were distasteful to the orthodox of the time, and Pastor Coeze pursued him as viciously as Talmage pursued Ingersoll a century later.” Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (1779) spoke of the need for the peaceful coexistence of all religions. His Education of the Human Race (1780) spoke of the ideas of progress and evolution as related to religion. Rather than the French classical theatre, Lessing preferred Shakespeare as a model whom Germans should revere. A Mason and “a deist with a difference,” unlike Voltaire he was profoundly interested in theology and confronted Christianity on its own grounds. Volker Dürr tells how in A Rejoinder Lessing formulated his credo and his legacy most eloquently: “If God were holding all the truth that exists in his right hand, and in his left just the one ever-active urge to find the truth, even if attached to it were the condition that I should always and forever be going astray, and said to me: ‘Choose!’ I should humbly fall upon his left hand and say: ‘Father, give! Pure truth is surely for thee alone!” In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–1769), which concerned the Moslem faith in general and one Ismenor in particular, he observed that the Crusades, “which in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition has ever made itself guilty: the true religion had then the most and the bloodiest Ismenors.” His Origin of Revealed Religion (c. 1760) professes to hold to a naturalist view of religion, for he believed that Christianity was established and propagated “by entirely natural means”—this before Gibbon. In 1780, Lessing in a conversation with Jacoby expressed high appreciation of Goethe’s Prometheus. “If I am a follower of anyone, it can only be Spinoza,” he added. “There is no other philosophy but Spinoza’s.” According to Robertson, Lessing with his versatile genius and vast reading was “a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker,” that “in his strongest polemic there was always an element of mystification; and his final pantheism was only privately avowed.” Although he did not array himself as a champion of rationalism, at the end he proved to be one of the strongest promoters of its reign. Heine called Lessing, after Luther, the greatest German emancipator. In contemporary times, Paul Edwards has cited Lessing’s sympathy toward the idea of reincarnation. Toward the end of his life, Lessing suffered severely from asthma. In February 1781, the malady became acute. According to Foote, he felt that the hand of death was upon him but conversed with his friends “with much of his old liveliness.” To one of them who spoke of the annoyance which the clerics caused Voltaire on his deathbed, Lessing exclaimed: “When you see me about to die, call the notary; I will declare before him that I die in none of the prevailing religions.” On February 15 he rallied “and joked with some of those who came to visit him,” wrote his biographer James Sime. However, in the evening of the same day “a stroke of apoplexy followed, and after life’s fitful fever he slept well.” Meanwhile, Bishop J. F. Hurst’s History of Rationalism (1865) reports that upon Lessing’s death, some believed “the devil came and carried him away like a second Faust.” (See the article by Karl Becker in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief.) {BDF; CE; CL; EU, Volker Dürr; FO; JM; JMR; JMRH; PE; PUT; RAT; RE}
Lessona, Michele (1823–1894) Lessona was an Italian naturalist who translated some of Darwin’s works. {BDF}
Lester, Toni P. (20th Century) Lester, an associate professor of law and the Johnson Term Chair holder at Babson College, works as an employment discrimination law consultant. A Unitarian Universalist, she has been an at-large candidate for the board of directors of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee.
L’Estrange, Thomas (Born 1822) Thomas was an attorney and a writer. Having read F. A. Paley’s introduction to The Iliad, he became convinced that the “cooking” process therein described had been undergone by all sacred books extant. He edited Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, was author of The First Ten Alleged Persecutions, and wrote various tracts. {BDF}
LeSueur, Meridel (1900–1996) A Minnesota freethinker, LeSueur wrote The Girl, a collection of stories, and North Star Country, a folk history about the farmer-labor party. Before Voltairine de Cleyre’s death in 1912, LeSueur met her and admired her beauty, brilliance, and ability to speak. Mencken, LeSueur declared, taught her the joy of going to taverns, “my first break with puritanism, with the rollicking midnight command of the wonderful midnight ride of Paul Revere, the great drunken carousel of American workers. The conversation of The Girl came from that,” she added, “so don’t let the new puritans throw any lace on him.” Her library has been preserved at Augsburg College. {Freethought History # 7, 1993; and #12, 1994; WWS}
Le Sueur, William Dawson (1840–1917) After Le Sueur, a freethinker, wrote a controversial biography of William Lyon Mackenzie (1795–1861), the work was suppressed by the Canadian rebel’s grandson, William Lyon Mackenzie King. Le Sueur, a Canadian man of letters, has been called “the Sage of Ottawa.” (See entry for his biographer, Clifford Holland.)
Letourneau, Charles Jean Marie (Born 1831) A French scientist, Letourneau was educated as a physician. He wrote La Penseé Nouvelle and has published Physiology of the Passons (1868) and Biology (1875). Other of his works are Science and Materialism (1879), Sociology Based on Ethnography (1880), and The Evolution of Marriage and the Family (1885). Letourneau translated Büchner’s Man According to Science, Light, and Life and Mental Life of Animals; Haeckel’s History of Creation and Letters of a Traveller in India; and Herzen’s Physiology of the Will. McCabe cites him as being an atheist and materialist who said, “We know that there is nothing in the whole universe except active matter.” {BDF; JM; RAT; RE}
Leuba, James H(enry) (1868–1946) A psychologist and an expert on religious mysticism, Leuba was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. Earlier, he had been a leader of the Ethical Culture Society. One of his provocative books is The Belief in God and Immortality (1916). He also wrote A Psychological Study of Religion (1912), in which his own agnosticism is explained, The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1925), and God or Man (1933). Leuba once wrote,
History is the record of the many dead that are still alive; and of the reasons why so many who expected to live on are dead. {CL; EU, Howard B. Radest; FUS; HNS; HNS2; JM; RAT; RE; TRI}
Leucippus (5th Century B.C.E.) Epicurus declared that Leucippus (Leukippos) was an imaginary person, but others say he was one of Protagoras’s teachers. Aristotle believed it was Leucippus who originated the atomistic theory, although Democritus usually is credited. At any rate, Leucippus of Miletus is said to have demonstrated that matter is composed of tiny, indivisible properties in constant motion, an idea later developed by Lucretius. Two of his fragmentary works are believed to be The Great World-system and On Mind, although the latter may have been by Democritus. {BDF; CE; JMR; JMRH}
Leufstedt, G. J. (1830–1901) Leufstedt was a Swedish non-theist. He sometimes was called “Lennstrand’s predecessor” as well as “The Antichrist” for his lectures. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Levallois, Jules (1829–1903) Levallois, a French writer who in 1855 became secretary to Saint Beueve, wrote Deism et Christianisme (1866). His Corneille inconnu (1876) was crowned by the French Academy. Although a theist, he gave frank testimony to the agnosticism of Sainte Beuve, whose life he wrote (1872). {BDF; RAT}
Le Vayer, La Mothe (1588–1672)
A scholar, heretic, and rationalist, Le Vayer was tutor of Louis XIV’s brother and one of the early members of the new Academy that had been founded by Richelieu. He was a skeptic of the school of Sextus Empiricus. Robertson believes that Le Vayer’s influence upon Richelieu, who became Minister to Louis XIII in 1624, resulted in forty years of there being no burning of heretics or unbelievers in France. {JMR}
Levey, Michael Vincent [Sir] (1927– ) An art historian and author, Levey is a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of Ateneo Veneto. He has taught at Cambridge University, Oxford University, and New York University. Levey wrote National Gallery Catalogues (1956, 1959, 1971); Painting in XVIIIth-Century Venice (1959); From Giotto to Cézanne (1962); The Life and Death of Mozart (1971); and Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 (1992), among numerous books. He edited Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1985). Sir Michael is a Vice President of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association. Of his philosophic outlook, Levey has written,
I was brought up in an unostentatiously but fervently Roman Catholic household and fully reached a state of reason only after I rejected that faith in my twenties and on deciding that the child of my marriage to Brigid Brophy should receive no indoctrination comparable to mine, which had been onwards from birth. My wife (herself brought up a pious Christian) totally concurred, though she had scrupulously refrained from trying to influence my views. I then experienced the emotional havoc religion causes, since my decision about his grand-daughter nearly broke my affectionate father’s heart. I have always felt how fortunate it was for me that my professional existence at the National Gallery and in London art-historical circles was blessedly secular. There were none of those academic-collegiate, pseudo-religious rituals, involving chapel and “grace,” which human academics presumably endure—but should they? I believe that non-believers tend to be too politely passive in these matters, and in quietly conforming British intellectuals are often most at fault. God still gets a respectful nod at official dinner-tables where barely 1% of the diners can seriously suppose that he exists. My idea of a true feast of reason is one without thanks to him but also without the serving up, courtesy of Sainsbury’s or Tesco, of once living slaughtered creatures. As I come towards the end of my life I feel the more passionately—yet rationally too, I would assert—that we must stop torturing (in the name of science) and killing (for mere love of it, or greed) the animal kingdom, inclusive of course of birds. Until humanists and rationalists start being humane and rational in treatment of species other than mankind, I shall continue to regard them as, in religious terminology, non-practising, whatever affirmations they may make about wanting to work for a civilised society. All my life I have been accused of absurd optimism, but on this score I feel the most profound and sad pessimism. {New Humanist, March 1997}
Levee, Joseph R. (20th Century) Levee, founder of thee Cincinnati-area Free Inquiry Group, is a Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism. In 1995 he became a member of the Council’s board of directors, and in 1998 he became its treasurer. Levee, a fervent activist, is one of the more forward-looking secular humanists. {FD; WAS, conversations}
Levertov, Denise: See the entry for Theism.
Levett, Arthur (20th Century) Levett, a freethinker, wrote A Martian Examines Christianity (1934). {GS}
Levi-Montalcini, Rita (1909— ) Levi-Montalcini, of the Institute of Neurobiology in Italy, won the Nobel Prize in physiology in 1986. She signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Levin, Alan (20th Century) Levin and his wife, Jane Wong Levin, a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, are Unitarians. He is President of the American Humanist Association’s Humanists of Iowa (2101 Hickory Lane, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50613). Long an activist, Levin also is the group’s webmaster. E-mail: <alevin@cfu.net>. Web: <http://humanists.net/iowa>.
Levin, Benjamin H. (20th Century) A freethinker, Levin wrote To Spit Against the World (1970), a novel about Thomas Paine. {GS}
Levin, Harry: See entry for Neo-Classical Humanism.
Levin, S. (20th Century) Levin, a physician-pediatrician in Johannesburg, South Africa, writes on medical and psychological aspects of biblical and religious issues. He has coined “sinosis,” which he defines as “a word I use to label people who suffer, yes, suffer, from a subjective and inchoate feeling of being in sin—not a state of wickedness, but of spiritual taint, blemish, defect, imperfection. This disorder is better known in Christian culture as the inevitable consequence of original sin, that is, Adam’s primal disobedience and fall from divinely intended perfection. (In jocular terms we are dealing with Murphy’s Flaw.)” In “The Primal Dream: St. Paul’s Vision” (New Humanist, February 1996), Levin examines the origins of Christianity, looks at the role of Paul in creating Christianity, and postulates a possible influence of hallucinogens. {“Sinosis,” New Humanist, March, 1993; “Jewish Atheism,” New Humanist, May 1995}
Levin, Simon S. (20th Century) Levin is a freethinker who wrote Jesus, Alias Christ (1969). He also wrote Adam’s Rib (1970), about medicine in the Bible. {GS}
Lévinas, Emmanuel (20th Century) Lévinas in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Humanism of the Other Man, 1972) concerned Jewish humanism and called for an “alter-humanism.”
Levine, Hermon M. (20th Century) Levine’s The Naked Emperor was published in Mexico in the 1970s. {GS}
Levine, Jack (1915– ) Levine, an American painter whose works treat social themes in a bitter, satirical vein, stated in 1953 that one of his paintings, “The Magician,” expressed his fundamental opposition to anything which intellectually deludes large numbers of people. The painting appears to excoriate a world which, he held, is still deceived by magic. That magic might be superstition, fear, or political double-talk. Or it might be the abracadabra of spokesmen for fashionable art movements. In 1992, he responded to the present author about humanism:
Writing is not my trade and I must take care that your question may not become obsessive and usurp my remaining years away from the easel. Many years ago I tended to use the term humanism in the sense of a predisposition towards the human image, as that approach which makes man the center of a work of art. This, most particularly, as a position countering abstractionism, concretism, and the like. A feeling grew on me that I was misusing the term and a term is all that it is. I now understand it as that new understanding of man in the universe which gave birth to the Renaissance, nearly overthrew church theology, and gave the arts a command of empirical phenomena that had not existed before (or since). All the above without once looking it up in the dictionary! I don’t know where I stand in relation to the word and its meaning. Somewhere near, I hope.
Levine is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. {WAS, 14 June 1992}
Levy, Ben (20th Century) David Tribe has described Levy as an outright freethinker. (TRI)
Levy, Gabor (1914-1999) A chemist who wrote editorials on humanistic morality as a consulting editor of American Laboratory, Levy in a last article wrote, “There is no Devil to blame, and no Supreme Power to forgive. . . . You must accept that there is no particular meaning or purpose to existence. {Washline, November 1999}
Levy, Irving (20th Century) Levy, who assisted in the 1958 formation of the New York Chapter of the Rationalist Press Association, was a freethinker. To the New York City 42nd Street Library, he contributed an extensive collection of atheistic, agnostic, and freethought materials. The chapter’s bulletin quoted his definition of a true rationalist as being one “who has divorced himself from supernatural beliefs and prevailing theologies.” {FUK; FUS}
Levy, Janey (20th Century) Levy, an art historian, has written for Free Inquiry.
Levy, J. H. (1838–1913) Levy, writing in National Reformer as “Dialecticus,” taught political economy at the City of London College. He became a regular contributor on politics, economics, ethics, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Levy was an anti-vaccinator and an anti-vivisectionist, activities related to his belief in individualism. He founded the Political Economy Circle of the National Liberal Club. {RAT; RSR}
Levy, Judith Anne Winstanley (1934– ) Levy is an Australian humanist and a politician. In 1986 she became the first woman to be president of any Australian legislature. Since 1975, she has been a member of the Legislative Council of South Australia. Since 1960 Levy has been a patron of the Humanist Society of South Australia. In 1986 she was named Humanist of the Year. {SWW}
Levy, Leonard W. (1923– ) Levy is author of Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, From Moses to Salman Rushdie (1993), a massive history of blasphemy from ancient to modern times. He also wrote Treason Against God (1981). Levy is a scholar of Constitutional history. “At the time of the American Revolution,” Levy wrote, “perhaps only four percent of the population belonged to churches.” {Freethought History #13, 1995}
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien (1857–1939) A French writer, Lévy-Bruhl was a professor of literature at the Sorbonne and lecturer at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. He edited Letters of J. S. Mill to Comte (1899). Although not a positivist, he was described by F. Harrison: “[N]o one abroad or at home has so truly grasped the assimilated Comte’s ideas” as Lévy-Bruhl had done. {RAT}
Lewes, George Henry (1817–1878) George Eliot had Lewes as her devoted companion for twenty-five years and, although he was a considerable writer in his own right, he has been described as being the main inspirer of her creative work. Lewes was one of the first to introduce English writers to the positivism of Auguste Comte and the evolutionism of Spencer and Darwin. Lewes was a close friend of G. J. Holyoake. In addition to being one of the founders of the Leader, he wrote about Aristotle and Goethe. A recent biography of the thoroughgoing empiricist is G. H. Lewes: A Life (1992) by Rosemary Ashton. {BDF; CE; FUK; RAT; RE; TRI}
Lewis, Arthur M. (20th Century)
Lewis is a freethinker who wrote The Struggle Between Science and Superstition (1934). {GS; FUS}
Lewis, Clarence Irving (1883–1964) Lewis, a philosopher, combined symbolic logic with an essentially pragmatic epistemology. In opposition to the Principia Mathematica of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Lewis developed his own system. In Mind and the World-Order (1929), he developed a position according to which the choice between logical (and thus philosophical) systems must be based on pragmatic grounds. Asked about humanism, Lewis responded to the present author:
Classification sometimes involves over-simplification. I could not classify myself with those mentioned under any of your seven heads without disregarding some points, important to me, on which I would differ from each.
(CE; WAS, 2 August 1954}
Lewis, C. Day (1904-1972): See entry for George Orwell, who considered the poet “not now completely reliable” because of his former membership in the Communist Party.
Lewis, C(larence) S(taples) (1898–1963) A distinguished literary scholar, Lewis was a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925–1954. Afterwards he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His science fiction novels, such as Out of the Silent Planet (1938), contain obvious Christian overtones. His popular religious and moral writing included The Problems of Pain (1940), The Screwtape Letters (1940), and The Four Loves (1960). His spiritual autobiography is Surprised by Joy (1955). Lewis’s close friend and intellectual sparring partner was Owen Barfield, a writer and philosopher of language. The two loved to hike, calling themselves “cretaceous perambulators.” The two were key members of the Inklings, a group of Oxford intellectuals. It was Barfield who is credited with Lewis’s celebrated transition from atheism to Christianity. {Sarah Lyall, The New York Times, 20 December 1997}
Lewis, H. H. (1901–1985) A Missourian, Lewis wrote poetry which caught the attention of William Carlos Williams and others. A sampling of his freethought poetry, originally published in New Masses, can be found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992).
Lewis, James R. (20th Century) Lewis, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the World University of America, edited The Encyclopedia of Cults, Sects, and New Religions (1998). Included are references to the Branch Davidians; the Church of Scientology; the Church of Satan; Society for Krishna Consciousness; Heaven’s Gate; the Solar Temple; the Church of All Worlds; Church of Jesus Christ at Armageddon; the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord; Commandment Keepers Congregation of the Living god; Church of the psychedelic Mystic; and the Nudist Christian Church of the Blessed Virgin Jesus.
Lewis, Joseph (1889–1968) A major representative of atheistic thought, and a publisher of atheist and sex-education books, Lewis as a young person read Ingersoll and Paine. He was elected president of Freethinkers of America, which had first been organized in 1915. The Bible Unmasked (1926) was considered one of the most shocking books of the day. Obsessed by Paine, he called his freethought publication Age of Reason and arranged for statues of Paine to be placed in Paris; in Morristown, New Jersey; and at Thetford, England, in front of Paine’s birthplace. His activism included trying to have the phrase “under God” stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance; protesting government celebrations of Thanksgiving; objecting to the annual Christmas stamps sold by the Post Office; and arguing against public-school children’s “released time” for religious study. In the Name of Humanity (1956) argued against the practice of circumcision. His Eugenics Publishing Co. published books on sexology which were inexpensive and generally unavailable elsewhere, and he distributed a book banned for many years in the United States, Marie Stopes’s Married Love. Lewis easily was one of the better known atheists of his era. {EU, William F. Ryan; FUS; TRI}
Lewis, Michael (20th Century) Lewis wrote Liar’s Poker about his experiences as a bond trader on Wall Street. A senior editor of New Republic, he wrote in that publication (8 November 1993),
Several months ago, I received a letter from the Bishop of Durham in England inviting me to participate in a public debate about God and religion. . . . I wrote back to say that God wasn’t my line of work: that I did not believe in him, that I thought the church had done more harm than good.
As a journalist covering the 1996 Republican presidential primary campaign, he went to the First Annual Black Pro-Life Unity Conference in order to meet candidate Alan Keyes. While sitting at a table with two pastors who were Keyes’s supporters,
. . . it isn’t five minutes before I am forced to admit that I am an atheist. The news is met as it always is: tell a Christian that you are an atheist, and he invariably responds with the uncomfortable smile of a man who thinks a joke is being played on him.
{CA; E; New Republic, 8 July 1996; YD}
Lewis, Naomi (20th Century) An English critic, Lewis attended the festive launch for Bradlaugh House in 1994. She is author of The Emperor’s New Clothes (1997).
Lewis, Sinclair (1885–1951) Lewis was a leading Midwestern author and Nobel Prize winner in literature. He wrote Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922—originally, he had intended Pumphrey as the title), Arrowsmith (1925), and Elmer Gantry (1927), the last of which was a freethinking critique of the clergy. Will Durant’s On the Meaning of Life (1932) quotes Lewis as having said, “It is, I think, an error to believe that there is any need of religion to make life seem worth living.” In Elmer Gantry, Lewis used Birkhead as his technical advisor concerning ecclesiastical matters. What the novel turned out to be was a scathing satire of a Baptist-Methodist minister who changed into a voluptuous hypocrite, remarkably resembling most of the professing Christians in his congregation—a humanistic comment on the state of affairs of contemporary organized religion. Lewis had long lambasted humanity for being what it is, rather than what it might be, as shown in Main Street and Babbitt. Kingsblood Royal (1947) is a powerful indictment of man for his cruel injustice to fellow men, another popular humanistic theme. Of Main Street, H. L. Mencken wrote to George Jean Nathan: “Grab hold of the bar-rail, steady shock! I’ve just read the advance sheets of the book of that Lump (Nathan had described Lewis as “a tall, skinny, paprika-headed stranger”) we met at Schmidt’s and, by God, he has done the job! It’s a genuinely excellent piece of work. Get it as soon as you can and take a look. I begin to believe that perhaps there isn’t a God after all.” The novel was inscribed to his first wife, born Grace Livingstone Hegger: “To Gracie [Lewis], who is all the good part of Carol,” a reference to the work’s heroine, Carol Kennicott. When asked specifically about humanism just before his death, he wrote the present author: Just back from Italy. I find your letter. Yes, I think naturalistic humanism—with dislike for verbalistic philosophy—is my category.
[Shown the postcard, Harrison Smith of The Saturday Review of Literature wrote that he had not known that while in Kansas City during the Elmer Gantry period, Lewis had accepted Unitarian minister Rev. L. M. Birkhead’s offer to speak to some assembled Unitarians. Lewis looked out over the pews and exclaimed, “Now if God exists, I’ll give him exactly two minutes to prove it—to strike me dead!” Most of those present probably did not expect heavenly flashes of lightning to challenge his dare and, of course, he was applauded when the building remained intact. “Well, that settles that,” he told those in the audience. Harrison Smith responded, “I did not know that he had labeled himself a humanist, a mild term for an angry crusader.” But Smith promised to publicize the information. . . . Lewis may or may not have known the story that Charles Bradlaugh had done the same decades previously, giving God all of five minutes. George Bernard Shaw thought such a story fit Bradlaugh’s character and was amused, adding if God had struck Bradlaugh dead it would prove “He is a savagely violent and vindictive idol like Blake’s Nobodaddy.”]
Lewis was elected to the American Academy’s Institute in 1922, despite his scathing portrait of small-town America in Main Street and the resultant negative publicity. However, he politely declined. In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize, and during his acceptance speech he lambasted the American Academy, charging “It represents only Henry Wadsworth Longfellow” and naming twenty-one writers he considered were more deserving than members who were then in the Academy. He also attacked the “New Humanism” of Irving Babbitt, saying, “Of course humanism means so many things that it means nothing.” Lewis, on his deathbed, reportedly said to the Catholic nurse, “God bless you,” leading to speculation that he had had “a death-bed conversion.” But columnist Dorothy Thompson, once his wife, unequivocally denied such had taken place, and she cited such evidence as the above 3 June 1950 postcard. Lewis had been raised a Christian, she held, but became a non-believer after his sophomore year at Yale. (See entry for H. L. Mencken, who comments about Dorothy Thompson.) {CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; FUS; HNS; JM; RE; TRI; WAS, 3 June 1950—postcard was stolen and its whereabouts are unknown.}
Lewis, Stephen: See entry for Isabella Grigoroff concerning Lewis, who was Canada’s former Ambassador to the United Nations.
Lewis, Teresa (19th Century) Lewis wrote Cremation (c. 1875) at a time when the subject was quite unpopular. {GS}
LEWISHAM HUMANIST GROUP (England) The Lewisham Humanist Group has discussions at the Unitarian Meeting House, 41 Bromley Road, Catford, London SE6.
Leyds, Willem Johannes (1859–1970) Leyds, who was born in Java and educated at Amsterdam University, went to South Africa where in 1893 he became Secretary of State. In 1897 he came to Europe as representative of the Transvaal. A rationalist , he wrote a number of works on law and on South African history. {RAT}
Leykis, Tom (1956– ) A nationally syndicated talk-show host and radio director, Leykis has openly discussed his atheism while on the radio. “I’m an atheist. I don’t subscribe to a belief in any god or deity,” he has broadcast. A moderate who belongs to no political party, he bashes all sides when he feels they do something stupid. He has been associated with WBAI Radio and WABC Radio in New York City; WNWS Radio in Miami, Florida; WQBK Radio in Albany, New York; and KFYI Radio in Phoenix, Arizona. {CA; E} On February 10, 1995, in pointing out another Ted Kennedy "faux pas", Leykis said (paraphrased), "[Mitt Romney] saying women should become priests was not a politically expedient thing to do. I happen to agree with [Ted Kennedy] though I speak as an atheist..."
A regular listener writes "[Leykis] says he's an atheist virtually daily and takes on fundamentalists like a wild cat!"
--CDA
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A listener reports that on a show broadcast the night of January 21, 1998, Tom responded to a caller who was insisting on the religious values of this nation by saying "I'm an atheist. I don't subscribe to a belief in any god or deity."
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Another listener reports a (March 1998?) exchange:
Q: If Tom is an atheist, why does he say "For god's sake" so much?
A: It's a joke! Get over it, for god's sake!
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A confirmation sent in by a listener: I am a regular listener to Tom Leykis' radio broadcast. In June of 1999, I heard Tom say in reaction to one of his callers, "Thank God, I am an atheist." He said it more than once.
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In the September 6, 2000 edition of The Onion A.V. Club titled "Is There A God?", celebrities were asked the question. Leykis was among those asked.
The Onion: Is there a God?
Tom Leykis: No, there is no God. Period.
O: End of sentence.
TL: End of story.
O: No God at all.
TL: There is no God.
See the feature at http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3631/avfeature_3631.html.
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Leykis has a website at http://www.blowmeuptom.com.
Li Hung-chang (1823–1901) A Chinese statesman and general, Li was viceroy of the capital province of Zhili (1870–1895) and controlled Chinese foreign affairs for the dowager empress Tz’u Hsi. During the Boxer Uprising (1900), he protected foreigners and was able to reduce the demands of the foreign powers for reparations. The British inventor Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, who knew him, said Li was a disdainful atheist. {CE; JM}
Li, Virginia (20th Century) Li, who is a professor of community health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Li, Youzheng (20th Century) Li, who is in the Institute of Philosophy, CASS, in Beijing, China, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
LIBERAL ARTS In a college or university, the liberal arts are the areas of learning that cultivate general intellectual ability rather than technical or professional skills. The phrase is often used as a synonym for the humanities, although the liberal arts also include the sciences, languages, literature, history, philosophy, and mathematics. Liberalis in Latin means “suitable for a free man,” as opposed to a slave, which liberals enjoy pointing out. {DCL}
Liberman, Norman (20th Century) Liberman in 1972 was on the advisory board of the Humanist Society of Greater New York.
LIBERO PENSIERO An Italian humanistic publication, Libero Pensiero is at 11 via Consolata, 10122 TO, Torino, Italy. <roberto.laferla@agora.stm.it>.
LIBERTARIANISM A libertarian advocates the doctrine of free will and believes in absolute and unrestricted liberty, particularly of thought and action. Ayn Rand disavowed any connection, calling libertarians “hippies of the right.”
LIBERATION THEOLOGY Liberation theology, which is found particularly in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, emphasizes a Gospel call to free people from political, social, and material oppression. Among the leaders in liberation theology are Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, and Juan Luis Segundo. Richard McAfee Brown, a Christian theologian who taught at Pacific School of Religion, wrote Liberation Theology and Its Critics. Books in Spanish include some by José Miguel Bonino, an Argentinean Evangelical Methodist; and Tissa Balaysuriya, a Catholic priest.
LIBERTINAGE Libertinage refers to freethinkers, or libertinism in religion. The word was coined in 1616 by theologians and continues to be used mainly by theologians.
LIBERTY • The secret of liberty is courage. –Pericles
Isaiah Berlin’s view was that liberty essentially means that “I am not prevented by other persons from doing what I want.” {The Economist, 13 June 1998}
LIBERTY Liberty, an English quarterly of The Principality Publishers, is at PO Box 918, Cardiff CF2 4YP, United Kingdom.
LIBRARIES A collection of clay tablets in Babylonia (21st century B.C.E.) is evidence of mankind’s early interest in conserving information. The Ancient Egyptian temple libraries were described by Greek writers such as Diodorus Siculus, who wrote about the library of Ramses III (c. 1200 B.C.E.). In Ninevah the library of Assurbanipal (died 626 B.C.E.?) was the most noted before that of Alexandria, which was conceived by Ptolemy I (c. 306 B.C.E.). Alexandria became the center of scholarship, attracting Euclid and Archimedes and its library may well have achieved its goal of amassing a copy of every known book under a single roof, according to Douglas Jehl (The New York Times, 6 November 1999). The Vatican Library—Platina was its first librarian—is the oldest public library in Europe. The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., had as its prime mover Thomas Jefferson, who contributed his own library to Congress after the library burned in 1814. Among the chief modern libraries are the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Mazarine in Paris; the British Museum, London; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Ambrosian Library, Milan; the Laurentian, Florence; the Lenin Library, Moscow; the Huntington Library, San Marison, California; the New York Public Library; and university libraries throughout the world. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which will open in 2000, has been designed by a Norwegian firm and will have space for four million works, a French-designed computerized catalog, and five hundred built-in Internet ports. It represents the largest and most advanced in the Arab world.
Licher, Lloyd (20th Century) Licher is active with the Secular Humanists of Marin and has written “A Test To Determine If You Are You Humanist.” (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (1742–1799) Lichtenberg was a German satirical writer and scientist, a friend of G. Forster. He was a freethinker whose work showed his advanced opinions. “There is,” he wrote in Aphorisms, “a sort of transcendental ventriloquy through which men can be made to believe that something which was said on earth came from heaven.” {BDF; TYD}
Lichtenberger, Henri (1864–1941) Lichtenberger, a French writer, followed the rationalism of Nietzsche, writing La philosophie de Nietzsche. He also wrote on Heine and on Wagner. {RAT}
Lick, James (1796–1876) A freethinker, Lick is known as the individual who helped finance the Lick Observatory at Mt. Hamilton, California. A wealthy former piano maker, a flour miller, a political scientist, atheist, and materialist, Lick wrote On Civil Liberty and Self Government (1853). During the Civil War, he advised the U.S. Government about military law. {BDF; CE; GS; JM; PUT; RAT; RE}
Lidforss, Bengt (1868–1913) Linforss, a Swedish botanist, was a non-theist. (See entry for Scandinavian Unbelievers.)
Lieberman, Jerome (20th Century) At the 1999 convention of Humanists of Florida, Lieberman co-led a think tank discussion on “How and Why Humanists of Florida Should Lead the Banner of Humanism.”
Liebknecht, Karl (1871–1919) A German socialist and leader of the Spartacus Party, Liebknecht was an extreme left-wing member of the Social Democratic party, refusing to support the government during World War I. He and Rosa Luxemburg formed the Internationale, a revolutionary, antiwar socialist group. The Spartacus Party became the German Communist party, and when in 1919 Liebknecht led an uprising against the government he was arrested and killed while being taken to prison. Liebknecht was an atheist and a materialist. In 1995, on the seventy-sixth anniversary of his death, legions of Berliners marched through eastern Berlin to honor his memory. {CE; JM; JMR; RAT}
Liebling, A. J. (1904-1963): See entry for George Orwell, who considered the New Yorker author a possible fellow traveler of the Communist Party in the 1940s.
Liénard, Georges (20th Century) Liénard, vice president of the Centre d’Action Laïque in Belgium, spoke at the 1993 Congress of the European Humanist Federation in Berlin. He finds two opposing ways of approaching humanism. There is the idea of the secular—but the communist secular state has discredited that. Humanism cannot be represented as purely secularism, he explained, because it implies tolerance and democracy. He represented the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and the European Humanist Federation (EHF) at a 1997 International Symposium on Bio-Ethics, organized by the Council of Europe, and also one in 1998. (See entry for Belgian Humanists.)
Liening, John H. (Born 1818) The son of a great-grandfather who had been a soldier in the Thirty Years’ war, Liening emigrated from Germany to the United States when he was fourteen. Although educated as a Catholic, Liening became an atheist. When the war broke out, he enlisted and became a second lieutenant. Liening retired in California. {PUT}
LIES A lie is an untrue statement that is made with the intent to deceive. An individual, for example, who claims to have spoken to God is, from a rationalist’s viewpoint, a liar. In Psalms 116, it is written,
I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore will I call upon him as long as I live.
and
I believed, therefore have I spoken: I was greatly afflicted: I said in my haste, All men are liars . . . etc.
Rationalists find amusing that “he hath inclined his ear [sic] unto me.” They ask if the writer was telling the truth or telling a lie when he said, “All men are liars.” Or in another context, when the Cretan said, “All Cretans are liars,” was he being truthful or was he lying? Lying is universal. The American judicial system presumes innocence until guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is proven, leading cynics to observe that guilty parties are practically required to plead “not guilty” when they stand before a judge and jury. Freethinkers, knowing that children lie because they fear punishment, attempt to teach that many people make mistakes and do things they later are ashmaed of; but in telling the truth and admitting one’s shame it is easier to avoid further lies. President George Washington, they are told by parents who know they are lying, could not tell a lie. A case can be made that sometimes lies are permissible. Asked how he would respond in court if asked how old he is, the famed black baseball pitcher replied, “The goat ate the Bible with my birth certificate. That goat lived to be twenty-seven.” Children, however, find it difficult to understand why President Eisenhower lied about a U-2 spy plane that erroneously flew over the USSR; why President John F. Kennedy lied to his staff about the Bay of Pigs invasion in which numbers of Cuban patriots died; why President Lyndon B. Johnson lied about an American patrol boat’s attack in the Bay of Tonkin, in which over forty thousand Americans lost their lives as did untold numbers of South Vietnames soldiers and civilians; why President Richard Nixon lied about the Watergate scandal, which involved abuse of power by public officials, violation of the public trust, contempt of Congress, and attempted obstruction of justice; why President William Jefferson Clinton lied about not having sex “with that woman,” Monica Lewinsky, in the White House.
LIFE • In the great game of human life one begins by being a dupe and ends by being a rogue. –Voltaire
• Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window. –Charles Baudelaire
• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. –George Bernard Shaw
• Why shouldn’t things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
–George Santayana
• Life is a predicament which precedes death. –Henry James
• Human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. –Alfred North Whitehead
• The first half of our life is ruined by our parents, and the second half by our children. –Clarence Darrow
• There are few things easier than to live badly and die well.
–Oscar Wilde
• The meaning of life is that it stops. –Franz Kafka
• Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards. –Theodore Dreiser
• Life can little else supply
But a few good fucks and then we die.
–John Wilkes
• Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. –Woody Allen
LIFE AND EDUCATION IN FINLAND A Finnish humanistic journal in English, Life and Education in Finland, is at Museokatu 18 A 2, 00100, Helsinki, Finland.
LIFE STANCE “Life stance,” a coinage in the 1970s and cited often by Harry Stopes-Roe, has been defined as follows:
A life stance is an individual’s (or a community’s) relationship with what they accept as of ultimate importance, and the theory and practice of this in everyday living.
Jane Wynne Willson, who was a co-President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, has commented, “The function of the term ‘life stance’ is to encompass both theistic and non-theistic positions without favouring one more than the other. Christianity (for example) is a theistic life stance; humanism (for example) is a non-theistic life stance. God is what is of ultimate importance to theists; the natural world and the people in it are what is of ultimate importance to humanists.” (See entries for Harry Stopes-Roe and Nicolas Walter.) {New Humanist, February 1996}
LIFELINE: See entry for Long Distance Telephone Service.
Lightman, Bernard (1950 ) Lightman, a believer and an associate professor of humanities at York University in Canada, is author of The Origin of Agnosticism (1987) and Victorian Faith in Crisis (1990). {GS}
Lightner, A. M. (20th Century): According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Lightner’s Gods or Demons? “promotes a secular-humanistic belief in evolution and portrays the ‘Bible as myth.’ ” (See entry for Banned Books.)
LIGUE FRANÇAISE DE L’ENSEIGNEMENT ET DE L’EDUCATION PERMANENTE A specialist member of the IHEU is the Ligue Française de l’Enseignement et de l’Education Permanente at 3, Rue Récamier, 75341 Paris Cedex 07, France.
Lilienfeld, Paul von (1829–1903) In 1867 Lilienfeld was appointed Vice-Governor of Petrograd. In 1885 he became Governor of Courland and Senator. Lilienfeld was one of the leaders of “organistic” sociology. Although he rejected supernatural claims and did not admit personal immortality, Lilienfeld was a theist who had an ethical regard for Christianity. {RAT}
Lilienthal, Alfred M. (20th Century)
Lilienthal is author of The Zionist Connection: What Price Peace? (1978)
Lilja, Nicolai (1808–1870) Lilja was a Swedish writer who became parish clerk in the Lund diocese. He wrote Man: His Life and Destiny. {BDF}
Lima, Sebastião de Magalhaes (Born 1850) An outstanding figure in Portuguese rationalism, Lima published Priests and Kings and The Pope Before the World, both of which were considered offensive by the clericalists. An enthusiastic republican and pacifist—he wrote O livro da Paz, 1896)—Lima published a Lisbon daily, O Vanguarda, which was often suspended before the Revolution. Lima is credited with helping Portugal obtain disestablishment of the church at the time of the Revolution. {RAT}
LIMBO Limbo is a theological invention. In Roman Catholic theology, Limbo is located on the border (limbus, Latin for border) of Hell, and it is a place where “souls” remain that cannot enter. It has two parts: (a) the limbo of the Fathers—a place and state of rest wherein the souls of the just who died before Christ’s ascension were detained until He re-opened Heaven to them, hitherto closed in consequence of Adam’s fall; and (b) the limbo of the children—containing all children or adults who die without the baptism of water, blood, or desire and therefore in a state of original sin. St. Augustine taught that such children and unbaptized adults as are free from grievous actual sin eternally enjoyed a state of perfect natural happiness, knowing and loving God by the use of their natural powers, explained Joseph F. Thorning, who taught ethics in Mount St. Mary’s Seminary and College, Emmitsburg, Maryland. In short, those in limbo do not suffer damnation, but they do not enjoy “the presence of God.” In Limbo, according to Dante, are Socrates, Plato, Homer, Ovid, Horace, Democritus, Zeno, Thales, Anaxogoras, Heraclitus. For freethinkers and humanists, limbo (from limba, to bend in Jamaica) is a colorful West Indian dance in which the dancers bend over backward, pass under a pole that is lowered slightly each time, and invite ectomorphic onlookers to join in. (See entry for Dante.) {CE; DCL}
Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Lin, a Chinese-American, wrote a humanistic work, The Importance of Living (1937), which included the following:
The pagan lives in this world like an orphan, without the benefit of that consoling feeling that there is always some one in heaven who cares and who will, when that spiritual relationship called prayer is established, attend to his private personal welfare. It is no doubt a less cheery world; but there is the benefit and dignity of being an orphan who by necessity has learned to be independent, to take care of himself, and to be more mature, as all orphans are. It was this feeling rather than any intellectual belief—this feeling of dropping into a world without the love of God—that really scared me until the very last moment of my conversion to paganism. I felt, like many born Christians, that if a personal God did not exist the bottom would be knocked out of this universe. . . . Finally my salvation came. “Why,” I reasoned with a colleague, “if there were no God, people would not do good and the world would go topsy-turvy.” “Why?” replied my Confucian colleague. “We should lead a decent human life simply because we are decent human beings,” he said. This appeal to the dignity of human life cut off my last tie to Christianity, and from then I was a pagan. . . . A Chinese writer, Kung Tingan, said: “The Sage himself loved very much to argue! . . . The Sage talks about life, as he is directly aware of it; the Talented Ones talk about the Sage’s words and the stupid ones argue about the words of the Talented Ones.”
But no philosophy of life is complete, Lin noted, and “no conception of man’s spiritual life is adequate, unless we bring ourselves into a satisfactory and harmonious relation with the life of the universe around us. Man is important enough; he is the most important topic of our studies: that is the essence of humanism.” When older, Lin was less favorable toward his earlier views of humanism. Many then no longer found him to be a naturalistic humanist, but the earlier views which led some to call Lin a “laughing humanist” included the following:
• Religion in our country has so narrowed down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not any longer dare to show his face in the church.
• Man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed aside. . . . The earth, after all, is real, as the heaven is unreal: how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!
• I sometimes think what a terrible punishment it would be for a ghost or an angel to have no body, to look at a stream of cool water and have no feet to plunge into it and get a delightful cooling sensation from it, to see a dish of Peking or Long Island duck and have no tongue to taste it, to see crumpets and have no teeth to chew them, to see the beloved faces of our dear ones and have no emotions to feel toward them.
• As for the superfine metaphysician who says that the teeth belong to the devil, and the Neo-Platonists who deny that individual teeth exist, I always get a satirical delight in seeing a philosopher suffering from a tooth-ache and an optimistic poet suffering from dyspepsia.
• So then, instead of holding on to the Biblical view that we are made in the image of God, we come to realize that we are made in the image of the monkey, and that we are as far removed form the perfect God, as, let us say, the ants are removed from ourselves.
• The difference between cannibals and civilized men seems to be that cannibals kill their enemies and eat them, while civilized men kill their foes and bury them, put a cross over their bodies, and offer up prayers for their souls. Thus we add stupidity to conceit and a bad temper.
• The average mind is charming rather than noble. Had the average mind been noble, we should be completely rational beings without sins or weaknesses or misconduct, and what an insipid world that would be! We should be so much less charming as creatures. I am such a Humanist that saints without sins don’t interest me.
• There is still a greater philosophy than this naturalism, namely, the philosophy of Humanism. The highest ideal of Chinese thought is therefore a man who does not have to escape from human society and human life in order to preserve the original, happy nature.
• I should not presume that there must be necessarily a purpose, a meaning of human existence. As Walt Whitman says, “I am sufficient as I am.” It is sufficient that I live—and am probably going to live for another few decades—and that human life exists. Viewed that way, the problem becomes amazingly simple and admits of no two answers. What can be the end of human life except the enjoyment of it.
• [On immortality]: Deprived of immortality, the proposition of living becomes a simple proposition. It is this: that we human beings have a limited span of life to live on this earth, rarely more than seventy years, and that therefore we have to arrange our lives so that we may live as happily as we can under a given set of circumstances.
• [On Adam]: If the writer of the Genesis story had been a Paoyü and knew what he was talking about, he would have written a different story. God took a handful of mud, molded it into human shape and breathed into its nostrils a breath, and there was Adam. But Adam began to crack and fall to pieces, and so He took some water, and with the water He molded the clay, and this water which entered into Adam’s being was called Eve, and only in having Eve in his being was Adam’s life complete. At least that seems to me to be the symbolic significance of marriage. Woman is water and man is clay, and water permeates and molds the clay, and the clay holds the water and gives it substance, in which water moves and lives and has its full being.
• [On food}: Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks. . . . Eventually we have to come to a conception of health and disease by which . . . men eat in order to prevent disease instead of taking medicine in order to cure it.
• [On writing]: The technique of writing is to literature as dogmas are to the church—the occupation with trivial things by trivial minds.
• [On Man]: So many people presume to know God and what God disapproves that it is impossible to take up this subject without opening oneself to attack as sacrilegious by some and as a prophet by others. We human creatures who individually are less than a billionth part of the earth’s crust, which is less than a billionth part of the great universe, presume to know God! Yet no philosophy of life is complete, no conception of man’s spiritual life is adquate, unless we bring ourselves into a satisfactory and harmonious relation with the life of the universe around us. Man is important enough; he is the most important topic of our studies: that is the essence of humanism!
[See entry for Laughing Humanists.) {CE; Warren Allen Smith, “Two Laughing
Humanists: Lin Yutang, Carl Jonas,” Humanist World Digest, August 1955}
Lin Zixin (20th Century) Lin Zixin from China addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988).
Lincoln, Abraham [President] (1809–1865) President Lincoln’s biographer, Douglas L. Wilson, found some rare details about the private man innumerable previous writers had not described. In Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998), Wilson tells of Lincoln’s having been raised a Baptist who never outgrew a sense of fatalism, even “a nameless sense of . . . doom.” But upon reading a Paine work in which “a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost,” Lincoln developed a new take on the Virgin Mary. Was Lincoln a religious man, or was he not? Each generation appears to reinvent Lincoln in its own image. Robert Ingersoll adulated our 16th President, and Ingersoll’s granddaughter’s husband, Sherman Wakefield, insisted that Lincoln was not “religious.” In 1889, Wheeler quoted Lincoln’s friend, Ward H. Lamon, as saying, “Lincoln read Volney and Paine and then wrote a deliberate and labored essay, wherein he reached conclusions similar to theirs. The essay was burnt, but he never denied or regretted its composition.” Others, however, have called him a mystic. Lincoln himself wrote, “There was the strangest combination of church influence against me because I belonged to no church. Both northern and southern Christians read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes aid against the other.” As a young man, Lincoln had the reputation of being an outspoken non-believer who read Thomas Paine, one who argued with friends against the tenets of organized religion. In his 1846 Congressional campaign, he found it necessary to say (in his high squeaky voice), “That I am not a member of any Christian Church is true, but I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures, and I have never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general or of any denomination of Christians in particular.” Some evidence exists, claims Michael R. Beschloss in The New Yorker (28 February 1994), that Lincoln’s maternal grandmother was illegitimate and even that Lincoln was sired by someone other than his father of record. “The President’s former law partner and eventual biographer, William H. Herndon, interviewed dozens of Kentuckians who had known the Lincoln family, and he became convinced that Thomas Lincoln was sterile and could not have been Abraham’s father,” Beschloss wrote. “As early as the eighteen-seventies, there was speculation that Lincoln’s father had actually been, ironically, John C. Calhoun, the champion of states’ rights, or perhaps even Samuel Davis, the father of the President of the Confederacy.” In Lincoln at Gettysburg, The Words That Remade America, Garry Wills terms Lincoln a Transcendentalist. At Gettysburg, Lincoln and Edward Everett had been chosen to give an “Oration” and “Dedicatory Remarks” on the field where so many warriors had fallen. Everett, a transcendentalist trained in the classics in Germany and a professor of Greek at Harvard, orated for two hours. Lincoln followed with a 272-word address which, although he had never studied with Everett, attained a classical Greek epitaphios with its two essential and Periclean sections: epainesis, or praise for the fallen; and parainesis, or advice for the living. Remarked Wills, calling it the greatest of all political speeches, “The address does what all great art accomplishes. Like Keats’s Grecian urn, it ‘tease[s] us out of thought / As doth eternity.’ ” Lincoln was a member of no church, but he is called by Wills “a Transcendentalist without the fuzziness,” one who drew on a shared philosophic tradition which Everett also honored. Lincoln’s law partner, John T. Stuart, however, said “Lincoln was an avowed and open infidel whose beliefs sometimes bordered on atheism. . . . [He] went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.” Another biographer, William Barton, has written, “Was Lincoln a Unitarian?” No, he knew the view of certain Unitarians, and these assisted him at important points in defining certain aspects of his faith. The Unitarian books which Mr. Lincoln read cursorily, the books by Parker and Channing, must have assisted him in this, but they gave assurance that there were forward-looking men who believed in God and in human freedom as he did, and who were quite as far from holding the teaching which he had taught to call orthodox as he was, yet who were not infidels, but counted themselves friends of God and disciples of Jesus.” Barton also wrote, “Herndon asserts that Lincoln habitually spoke in his presence in terms of denial of the supernatural birth of Jesus. On a book of Lincoln’s he had changed John 16:27 from ‘Ye have loved me, and have believed that I came from God’ to ‘from nature.’ ” Unitarians often do not realize that Lincoln’s Vice President, Hannibal Hamlin, was a Unitarian—whether the two ever talked about their views is unknown. McCabe cites the various authorities about Lincoln’s religion: “As in the case of Washington, the evidence on the side of the angels is strained or tainted while there is ample evidence that he was at the most a deist. His partner and intimate friend [William H. Herndon] affirms it and quotes the support of Mrs. Lincoln in his life of the President. Colonel Lamon, another close friend who has written on him, says emphatically, ‘He was not a Christian.’ General Collis, the chief claimant of orthodoxy, can say no more than that he attended a church (which is a common ailment of politicians) and spoke about God (as, of course, every deist does). Rankin, the second principal claimant of orthodoxy, mainly relies on an old woman’s recollection of a conversation with Lincoln. The most impartial biographer, C. G. Leland, says that ‘as he grew older his intense melancholy and his emotional temperament inclined him towards reliance on an unseen Power and belief in a future state’—which is not far from agnosticism—and suggests that there is some political tinge in his public references to the deity. It is the way of all political flesh.” Still another biographer, Herbert Donald in Lincoln (1995), grants that Lincoln had early doubts about religion and that he wrote “in early life I was inclined to believe in what I understand is called the ‘Doctrine of Necessity’—that is, that the human mind is impelled to action, or held in rest by some power, over which the mind itself has no control.” But as Lincoln experienced war, by his Second Inaugural Address he—who had said that he “couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken” and got sick “sick at the sight of blood”—turned to the Bible and theology for some justification of the need to lead the North in the killing of fellow Americans. He expressed the belief that “if God now wills the removal of a great wrong,” then “the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” Did Lincoln believe in racial equality? The People’s Almanac (1975) responds: “Never a believer in true racial equality, Lincoln moved to free the slaves only after the overwhelming majority of his party had demanded it. Unlike the so-called ‘Radical Republicans,’ Lincoln never considered the possibility that the freed Negroes might some day function as full-fledged American citizens. Lincoln favored colonization in Central America as the ‘final solution’ to the Negro problem.” On the one hand, as he wrote to Horace Greeley in 1862, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” On the other hand, in an 1855 letter to Joshua F. Speed, he wrote, “How can any one who abhors the oppression of the Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘All men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘All are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” Was Lincoln gay? Playwright Larry Kramer once asked novelist Gore Vidal why in his study, Lincoln, he had not included Lincoln’s relationship with Joshua Fry Speed, which historian Jonathan Katz claims was a gay friendship. Vidal replied, “Well, I wasn’t writing about that era of his life. It seems fairly obvious that he had this very close male relationship.” Kramer proceeded to promise that he would write about “Abe’s sleeping side by side in a double bed with another man every night for four years.” What is known is that the lanky twenty-eight-year-old lawyer did not have enough money to buy bedding from Speed, a twenty-three-year-old merchant, who told Lincoln, “I have a large room with a double bed upstairs, which you are very welcome to share with me.” For the next several years, the two men shared the Springfield, Illinois, bed. Kramer gave a speech in Wisconsin (Advocate, 30 March 1999) in which he previewed part of his forthcoming book, The American People. Quoting from diaries and letters of Joshua Speed, Kramer found such tidbits as “He often kisses me when I tease him, often to shut me up. He would grab me up by his long arms and hug and hug. Yes, our Abe is like a schoolgirl.” Eight people shared the one-room log cabin after Lincoln’s mother died. During his lifetime and because of the lack of space and beds in many homes, it was not atypical for males to sleep in the same bed. Speed then moved home to Kentucky, marrying Fanny Henning a year later. A year following that, Lincoln married Mary Ann Todd. Martin Duberman, of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, has cautioned that it is “irresponsible to quickly label someone from the past ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ unless we have very concrete evidence of genital activity and probably a romantic connection . . . and we almost never do.” As a young man, Lincoln was said to have enjoyed telling stories with sexual overtones and about beds. Wilson’s Honor’s Voice (1998) cites one such: Once when Mr. L. was surveying, he was put to bed in the same room with two girls, the head of his bed being next to the foot of the girls’ bed. In the night he commenced tickling the feet of one of the girls with his fingers. As she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did he then tickled a little higher up; and as he would tickle higher the girl would shove down lower and the higher he tickled the lower she moved. Mr. L. would tell the story with evident enjoyment. He never told how the thing ended.
Wilson described an incident in which Lincoln visited a prostitute and, undressing, realized he had only $3., not the needed $5, whereupon he left the woman, who remained astonished at such integrity. Wilson adds that although this sounds like “a deliberate parody of the Honest Abe Lincoln legend,” another biographer could claim the incident was evidence of the possibility of a bi- or homosexual young man. Stephen B. Oates, in Abraham Lincoln: The Man Behind the Myths (1984), has pointed out that after Tad’s birth in 1853, Mary contracted a gynecological disease that likely ended sexual intercourse between the Lincolns. The two had separate bedrooms installed when they remodeled their Springfield home. Herndon wrote that his law partner told him about contracting syphilis in the 1830s during a “misadventure” in Beardstown, Illinois. However, Herndon may have told the story to irritate Mary Todd Lincoln, whom he did not like. Again, there is no concrete evidence that Lincoln ever had the disease that was common during his lifetime. During his first term, in 1864, “In God We Trust” appeared on the two-cent coins. Ironically, when he was murdered he was found to have had a Confederate $5. bill in his wallet. The 6’ 4” Lincoln’s net worth of $110,295. was awarded at his death to his wife and two sons. The only U.S. President to die intestate (without a will), he has been claimed both by naturalists and supernaturalists. However, Robertson, writing that Lincoln “was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at that,” cites Lamon’s Life of Lincoln and J. B. Remsburg’s Abraham Lincoln: Was He A Christian? (1893). Lincoln was assassinated 14 April 1865 while attending a performance at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., and sitting in a specially installed Victorian rocker. He was shot by the actor John Wilkes Booth, whose extravagant acting style Lincoln had admired so much that at one time he had invited Booth to the White House. (Booth declined the invitation, according to David S. Reynolds in Walt Whitman’s America.) (In the audience the night of the assassination had been Peter Doyle, Whitman’s intimate companion.) Mary Lincoln was so grief-stricken that she could not attend the funeral, crying out for Lincoln to take her with her, incredulous that he was dead. The White House which she had helped decorate was, at that very moment, being pillaged by souvenir hunters who cut pieces of the velvet carpet, stole china and silverware, and even carted off some of the furniture. In 1876, more than a decade after Lincoln’s burial in Springfield, Illinois, an attempt was made to steal the body for a $200,000 ransom. The coffin was then hidden, for safety, between the walls of his tomb. When in 1900 the old tomb was torn down and a new one was built, Robert worried that another attempted theft would be made and decided against a burglar alarm in favor of burying the remains in a ten-foot hole deep inside the tomb and covered with twenty inches of cement. On 26 September 1901, despite Robert’s order that the coffin not be opened, local officials opened it to stop rumors that the body was not really there. When workers pried the lid open, the twenty-three witnesses smelled a pungent odor, then gaped at the body, which they recognized because of the beard, hair, and famous wart. His French kid gloves had rotted away on his hands. Fleetwood Lindly, a witness, remembered, “Yes, his face was chalky white. His clothes [were] mildewed, and I was allowed to hold one of the leather straps as we lowered the casket for the concrete to be poured. I was not scared at the time, but I slept with Lincoln for the next six months.” Lindly, who died in 1963, was the last witness to Lincoln’s last public appearance. Of the four sons Mary Todd Lincoln bore (Robert Todd, Edward Baker, William Wallace, and Thomas or “Tad”), only Robert lived to manhood. In 1985, he died in a nursing home in Saluda, Virginia. An American lawyer and public official, Robert had his mother committed to a mental hospital after she was adjudged insane in 1875. Jean Baker, in Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987), claims that he had done this because he had designs on his mother’s money and his desire to get her out of public view. According to Baker, after Mary managed to spring herself from the asylum, having been incarcerated for only four months, she threatened to kill Robert, her “monster of mankind son,” that she demanded restitution for his “wickedness,” on the ground that “you have tried your game of robbery long enough.” But she did not change her will, resulting in Robert’s inheriting $84,035 and her sixty-four trunks of dresses, jewelry, flatware, and other goods. In a biography of Myra Bradwell, America’s First Woman Lawyer (1993), Jane M. Friedman describes Bradwell’s correspondence with noted women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, detailing her successful strategy to secure Mary Todd Lincoln’s release from the mental hospital. (See entries for William H. Herndon and Oratory.) {CE; FUS; JM; JMR; PA; PUT; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}
Lincoln, Alexander Jr. (20th Century) Lincoln, a New Hampshire humanist, was devoted to farming, nature, ecology, and sound common sense. The Humanist Association of Massachusetts (AHA) names its lecture series after the Harvard 1932 graduate. Alexander Lincoln Jr. Lecturers have included Tom Ferrick, Judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court Richard J. Goldstone, and Bangladeshi physician-poet Taslima Nasrin. Lincoln, Henry (20th Century) Lincoln, with Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail Holy Grail (1983).
Lindbergh, Charles Augustus (1902-1974) Lindbergh was the American aviator who astounded the world in 1927 by making the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in a plane, The Spirit of St. Louis, described by one overly enthusiastic journalist as “the greatest event since the Resurrection.” His plane’s name also became the title in 1953 of his best-known work. “Slim” Lindbergh married Anne Morrow, the daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and the two made several long flights together, publicizing the growing importance of aviation. In 1932 in a highly publicized kidnapping for ransom, their son Charles was kidnapped and killed by a blow to the head. Bruno Hauptman was convicted as the child’s murderer and was electrocuted in 1936. Lindbergh’s father, Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1859-1924), was a Swedish-born congressman from Minnesota. He consistently attacked the methods of large industrial trusts and incurred vilification by his denunciation of war propaganda and war profits. In 1938 after inspecting European air forces, the congressman’s son favored isolationism with respect to the political and military struggle threatening in Europe, convinced that the Germans had air superiority. His anti-war speeches for the America First Committee led to his being branded pro-Nazi, and he resigned his reserve commission and quit the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Lindbergh was dubbed a fascist when in Des Moines, Iowa, he made a speech in which he said,
The leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war. . . . A few far-sighted Jewish people . . . stand opposed to intervention. But the majority still do not. Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our Government.” His wife warned him that he would be called anti-Semitic for saying this. However, he responded, “But I’m not!”
President Franklin Roosevelt, however, never allowed him to forget that he once had accepted a Nazi decoration. With Alexis Carrel he worked in 1936 on the invention of a perfusion pump that could maintain organs outside the body. During World War II, Lindbergh offered his services to the air force, subsequently flying combat missions in the Pacific. In his later years he became a spokesman on conservation issues. His wife’s Gift from the Seae” outsold her husband’s account of his flight over the Atlantic Ocean. Although Anne Lindbergh (1906- ) is a Presbyterian, the celebrated aviator was described by his daughter Reeve (The New Yorker, 24-31 August 1998) as being a
. . . deeply reserved, independent outdoorsman from the Midwest. All his life, he displayed a courteous indifference to convention, whether it was intellectual, religious, or political. He rarely attended church, and he hated school. His grandparents were Swedish immigrants on the American frontier, and he found his first love on a Minnesota farm, where he spent his boyhood, and in the natural world extending far beyond it—a child’s infinity of river and field and forest. Above my father’s head in those early days, and ever afterward, there stretched the even more compelling infinity of the sky. (See entry for Race.) {CE}
Lindeman, Eduard C. (1885–1953) A humanist, Lindeman edited Emerson: The Basic Writings of America’s (1947). {HNS}
Lindet, Robert Thomas (1743–1823) A French bishop, Lindet was elected to the States-General by the clergy of his district. He embraced Republican principles and was made Bishop of L’Eure. But in 1792, he publicly married, then renounced his bishopric and proposed that civil festivals should take the place of religious ones. Lindet became a member of the Conseil des Anciens and upon his death was buried without any religious service. {BDF}
Lindh, Anders Theodor (Born 1833) Lindh was a Finnish lawyer and a poet who wrote in Swedish. He published freethought essays that brought him into considerable controversy with the clergy. {BDF; RAT}
Lindkvist, Alfred (Born 1869) Lindkvist was a Swedish writer who, at the University of Uppsula, studied Mill, Darwin, and Spencer. He lost a stipend at the university by translating from the Danish a rationalistic life of Jesus entitled The Reformer from Galilee. In 1888 he joined Lennstrand in propagating freethought, for which he received a month in prison for having translated one of J. Symes’s anti-Christian pamphlets. Lindkvist was an editor of Fritankaren. {BDF}
Lindley, Mark (20th Century) Lindley, a humanist activist, has supported a fund-raising project for the Atheist Centre in India whereby locally woven fabric will be sold in the United States and at the Centre. A visiting professor at the University of Kerala (1997-1998) and Mahatma Gandhi University (1998-1999), Lindley is a member of the Humanist Association of Massachusetts.
Lindley, William B. (1933– ) Lindley is an editor for the freethinking journal, Truth Seeker. In one article, he pointed out that his reading of Psalms 51:5 is that whereas Christians believe in guilty babies, Catholics believe in guilty embryos. Lindley has degrees in physics from the California Institute of Technology. “The Bible is kinda like a high school band on the first day of school,” he has observed. “ ’Tain’t easy to harmonize.” (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Lindner, Ernst Otto Timotheus (1820–1867) A German physician, Lindner was a friend of Schopenhauer, whose philosophy he maintained in several works on music. Lindner edited the Vossische Zeitung starting in 1863. {BDF; RAT}
Lindsay, (Nicholas) Vachel (1871–1931) Although little evidence is available that Lindsay was a freethinker, he is included along with some of his poetry in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier. Lindsay’s Campbellite background, mixed with a touch of pantheism and romanticism and common sense, led him to preach the gospel of beauty. Few American schoolchildren have not been taught parts of General Booth Enters into Heaven (1913) or The Congo (1914), a rhythmic poem that has a dramatic conception and vivid imagery. In a 1935 biography, his friend Edgar Lee Masters recorded how Lindsay’s “higher vaudeville” included the dramatic use of gesture and chant, and Lindsay was in great demand during his lifetime as a public reader of his own works, although eventually he tired of making money that way. His Collected Poems (1938) was published posthumously. Rumor had it that he once lost his heart to Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger, as had the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg before him. Lindsay’s poetry is noted for its virility. His death in 1931 was reported as heart failure. However, biographer Eleanor Ruggles has described his final days. Lindsay was depressed by his financial situation, his declining reputation as a writer, and by some undiagnosed disease—perhaps idiopathic epilepsy. Like an insane person, he accused his wife Elizabeth of infidelity and her father of plotting to kill him. From moments of quietly reading poetry in bed, he would turn to weeping inconsolably. On December 4th, when she thought he was much calmer than usual, he left their bed and went downstairs. ”Yes, dear,” he told her, “I’ll be up in a little while.” But there was a terrific commotion, he ran upstairs, and she feared his mind had snapped and that he was going to murder their children. “I just tried to kill myself by drinking Lysol,” he exclaimed. She started to run for a doctor, then heard him shout, “I got them before they could get me—they can just try to explain this, if they can!” Ironically, the writer who had specialized in writing and speaking about beauty died in minutes, after having drunk the poisonous disinfectant. {CE}
Lindsay, Norman (1879–1969) Lindsay, author of The Curate in Bohemia, was a noted freethinking painter in Australia. Much of his work was donated to the Australian National Trust. A biography by John Hetheringon, Norman Lindsay: The Embattled Olympian (1973), stated of his work,
Whatever his rivals or professional critics might say for or against it, his work made an extraordinary impact on laymen. No artist had ever before stirred Australians in general as he did. Some marvelled and some fulminated; but they took notice. His riggish fauns and frolicking satyrs, bacchanals, bewigged gallants, wantoning nude ladies and all the rest captured the attention of people who had never heard of Rembrandt or Velasquez, never been inside an art gallery, never thought of a picture except as something to fill a blank space on a wall. They might not understand what he was driving at but the exuberance, verve, and gaiety of what he did excited and held them. More than anything else it was his treatment of sex that drew the public spotlight on to him and his work and kept it there. To Norman, sex was a wonderful and joyous thing. “Sex is not only the basis of life, it is the reason for life,” he wrote. He was driven by an overmastering purpose to take sex out of the darkness.
Lindsay had been the son of a physician and the grandson of a Methodist minister. He once described his credo as “that the Greeks and Romans established all that the word civilization can mean, while Christianity, that communist uprising of the underworld, sought to destroy it and very nearly succeeded in doing so. All through my work I have maintained that theme, and that is the reason why it was attacked, although the attack took the crude device of denouncing it as indecent and immoral, because I took the nude human body as my symbol of the free spirit of man.” Angered that the Tasmanian Public Library banned his work, Lindsay described the Australian national ego as “a crude and bastardly conglomeration of the basest contents of English nonconformism, Scottish Presbyterianism, and Irish Catholicism.” Lindsay was depicted in “Sirens,” a movie which shows his wife, children, and an entourage which includes nude models. The work, directed by John Duigan, shows libertarianism winning out over a repressive form of Christianity. In Australia, the film was praised by freethinkers and attacked by religionists. His freethinking son, Jack Lindsay, is an artist and a critic. {Freethought History, #10, 1994).
Lindsay, Ronald A. (20th Century) An attorney, Lindsay is a contributing editor for Free Inquiry. He has represented the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism in the federal courts, and he is on the Council for Secular Humanism’s Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. {Free Inquiry, Fall, 1990, and Fall, 1993}
Lindsey, Ben (20th Century) Judge Lindsey gave the address at the memorial service for Luther Burbank. As noted by Maynard Shipley, who was at the 1926 event, several Roman Catholic priests at the memorial were seen leaving, “offended in their narrow dogmatism by Lindsey’s ringing challenges.” (See entry for Luther Burbank) {Freethought Today, August 1993; TYD}
Lindsey, Theophilus (1723–1808) Lindsey was one of the founders of the English Unitarian movement. He wrote The Apology of Theophilus Lindsey, M.A., on resigning from the Vicarage of Catterwick, Yorkshire, 1775. {U}
Lingås, Lars Gunnar (1947– ) Lingås was Secretary General of the Norwegian Humanist Association from 1993 to 1997. He has managed a university textbook division and been a social worker. A lecturer who has given seminars in ethics, professional ethics, and human rights, he has written textbooks on those subjects. Lingås is a life member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. “I believe that the greater number of the 500,000 Norwegians who sympathise with us will join in,” he has written. The Association in 1993 had 50,000 members, and in 1998 more than 60,000. Lingås participated in the February 1995 European Humanist Seminar in Oslo. At the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City, he lamented that colonialists had destroyed so many beautiful cultures over the years. He emphasized that there is a need for an ethical dimension, which must be enlarged to create a common human identity. Humanists must examine whether they accept diversity within themselves. We must have our own tolerance and our own self-criticism. “We will not grow without an element of self-criticism and without the ability to have dialogue with other life stances,” Lingås stated. His e-mail: <lingulv@online.no>. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Lingeman, Richard Roberts (1931- ) An editor and writer, Lingeman was executive editor of Monocle (1960-1969), a columnist for the New York Times Book Review (1969-1978); and an editor of Nation since 1978. He wrote Drugs from A to Z (1969); Small Town America (1980); and Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City 1871-1907 (1986). Shown Sinclair Lewis’s postcard about humanism, Lingeman, who was writing a book about Lewis, observed,
[Regarding the Sinclair Lewis statement], it’s good to have his belief in his own words—and late in his life. Though I’m not surprised at his self-characterization.
As for myself, I lean toward naturalistic humanism but with some perhaps irrational faith that there is an unknowable creative spirit at the heart of it all.
(See entry for Sinclair Lewis) {WAS, 10 April 1999}
Lingwood, D. P. E. (20th Century) In 1978, Lingwood wrote Buddhism and Blasphemy (1978). {GS}
Liniere, François Payot de (1628–1704) A French satiric poet, Liniere was known as “the Atheist of Senlis.” Boileau said the only act of piety Liniere ever did was drinking holy water because his mistress dipped her finger in it. In addition to writing many songs and smart epigrams, Liniere wrote a criticism of the New Testament. {BDF}
Link, Janet (1962– ) An artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, Link is a lifelong Unitarian. In her work, Link expresses her appreciation of beauty, once stating that “Every once in a while, say, in my figure-drawing class, the model will strike a pose, and the light will fall in and hit her just so, and it’s just unspeakably beautiful. Then there’s this frantic rush to get it all down on paper, to catch what exists in that moment only, and I never, ever do. But that’s a lot like what I think about religion: It’s the striving, the looking, the thinking that’s important.” {World, November-December 1994}
Linton, Eliza Lynn (1822–1898) Linton, a novelist and journalist and the daughter of the vicar of Crosthwaite in Cumberland, was an agnostic who wrote for leading radical journals. In 1872 she published The True History of Joshua Davidson, Christian and Communist. On the subject of women’s rights, she once wrote, “I think that the Christian religion has brought far more misery, crime, and suffering, far more tyranny and evil, than any other.” She was married to William James Linton. {BDF; RE}
Linton, Eliza Lynn (1822–1898) Linton was an English novelist and journalist, the author of Azeth the Egyptian (1846) and Amymone (1848), which she followed with many more successful novels. Her essays attacking feminism offended many of her female contemporaries. In a posthumously published memoir, My Literary Life (1899), she wrote a notably hostile portrait of George Eliot. Linton also was a frequent contributor to the Agnostic Annual and, according to Tribe, was an outright freethinker. {OEL; TRI; RAT}
Linton, William James (1812–1897) Linton was a poet, engraver, and author. A Chartist in early life, he was acquainted with the chief political refugees. He wrote the Reasoner tract on “The Worth of Christianity.” One of the founders of the Leader, Linton was an editor of The Truthseeker, the National, and the English Republic. According to McCabe, Linton’s religious creed was “a large loose jumble of Christianity and Pantheism.” {BDF; FUK; VI; RAT; TRI}
Lipman, Mel (1936 - ) AHA President, Mel Lipman hails from Las Vegas where he's lived for the last 25 years. Raised in New York City by immigrant parents, Mel first began supporting his family at age 14. Mel was raised Jewish and didn’t question his faith until one of his two children asked if he believed in God. He soon became involved in the freethought movement.
A lawyer, a chartered bank auditor and a former supervising examiner for the Federal Reserve Board, Lipman brings business savvy to the world of Humanism. He is a former board member of the Nevada Civil Liberties Union and remains active in many ACLU efforts. A Humanist minister, Lipman is a member of the Las Vegas Interfaith Council and frequently lectures on church-state issues.
Lipman is also a founding member of the Humanist Association of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada, has served as its president for four years, and is now a board member and spokesperson for the group. As a prominent leader in the chapter, and now as president of AHA, Mel welcomes the opportunity to clarify the Humanist perspective. He frequently uses letters to the editor and participation in talk shows as means of voicing his advocacy for the community of reason. In a recent Las Vegas Review-Journal article, Lipman asserts; "My biggest concern is to counter the propaganda from people who think that people who don't believe in a supernatural being can't live moral, ethical lives."
Mel Lipman's top priority is to change people's attitudes about Humanists. "It is not OK to discriminate against somebody simply because they do not believe in God." Though retired from full-time legal practice, he works as an arbitrator and mediator while teaching constitutional law and U.S. history at the Nevada campus of the University of Phoenix and at Nevada State College. Lippard, James (20th Century) A skeptic and activist freethinker, Lippard works for GlobalCenter on internet security and abuse issues. He is webmaster for “The Celebrity Atheist List” and a supporter of Internet Infidels. On the Web: <http://www.primenet.com/~lippard>.
Lippert, Julius (1839–1909) A German scholar, Lippert wrote Soul Worship (1881), The Universal History of Priesthoods (1883), and A Cultural History of Mankind (1886–1887). {BDF; RAT}
Lippmann, Walter (1889–1974) An eminent journalist, once secretary to muckraker Lincoln Steffans, Lippmann was a founder of New Republic. A syndicated columnist, he was also author of A Preface to Politics (1913) and A Preface to Morals (1929). Lippmann wrote the present author concerning humanism:
The only way I can answer your question [about the connotations of humanism] is to tell you that Professor Mercier’s comments [in American Humanism and the New Age, in which he stated that Lippmann had given up his naturalistic humanism in favor of theistic humanism] are based entirely on my published work and constitute, as I understand it, his interpretation of what I wrote in The Good Society, a book published about nine or ten years after A Preface to Morals. I should like to add that if there is any implication in your letter that I have recently changed my views profoundly, that is not the case. I delivered recently at the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an address which in substance was prepared as part of a manuscript of a book which I plan to publish as a sequel to A Preface to Morals. In my view it marks the evolution of some of the ideas of A Preface to Morals but not a change in any fundamental sense.
In the above-mentioned address, Lippmann included the following:
There are those who, if they had to describe their own religious condition, might say what Alexis de Tocqueville said of his friend Jean Jacques Ampere, the son of the great French physicist and mathematician. It was that his friend was not “a good Christian by belief,” but that he was one, as de Tocqueville put it, “by intention, by taste, and, if I may so put it, by temperament.” This would describe a great multitude in our western society today. They are those, you will recall, whom Dante placed in Limbo, reserving for them a special tenderness and compassion. . . . As long as the preacher expounds the law, he will be most successful if he is literal and concrete. He will be talking, as politicians and journalists do, to the old Adam in the language that the old Adam understands. But if the preacher is to go beyond this in an attempt to induce a transformation of the will, he will find that the very style of his discourse must be changed. He must go beyond the prosaic language of commonsense to metaphors and poetic parables. He is entering a realm where nothing can be made completely articulate or easily communicable. His words can convey only approximately, only by intimation, by suggestion, by analogy, what he means to say. For he is beyond the boundaries of the commonsense, where what is most poignant is inexact and the last things are ineffable. . . . He must, therefore, resort to metaphors, parables, and poetic fantasy. For the transcendent truths of the spirit are beyond the limits of commonsense and cannot be stated directly by language, which works within the limitations of commonsense. They can only be suggested to the imagination. Here, surely, we come upon the innermost problem of religious teaching in our age. For the transcendent experience is not easily evoked where there is not already a disposition to transcend experience and common sense. Yet the disposition to respond to revelation was, I think you will agree, greater in the ages of faith than it is in modern times. May I, venturing greatly, presume to say that the problem of irreligion has become so poignant because it has become necessary, as it was not in the ages of faith, to clear up the ambiguity between the supernatural and the eternal? “Ours is an age,” says the English philosopher, C. E. M. Joad, “which has . . . no beliefs in regard to the existence of an order of reality other than that which we can see and touch”—that is to say an order of reality which, however abstrusely it may be described mathematically can nevertheless be verified by events. Now in the Ages of Faith the common sense of mankind took it for granted that the order of reality which men can actually see and touch was a small part of what we should now call a supernatural order. The old believer did not think of this supernatural order as being, in our sense of the term, supernatural. What we now call supernatural was for him the natural order of things. There was no conflict with his commonsense. Indeed to him it was commonsense to believe that the visible life of man on earth was the prelude to a larger and different life in an everlasting scheme of things. There was, therefore, an ambiguity in the old religion. Men did not have to distinguish between the supernatural and the eternal, between the Kingdom of God as having an existence in time and lace, and the Kingdom of God within them as an essence outside of time and place. . . . The critical change which has come in the Modern Age is an alteration of the commonsense of mankind. It is no longer natural to believe that the mundane experience of each individual is not his whole experience. In physics and the metaphysics of modern men, it is no longer self-evident, indeed it is not easily credible, that his experience continues in everlasting time and in some other place. He does not believe in the cosmic framework—as Dante for example visualized it—with its geography, its history, and its constitutional system. Thus for modern man the transcendent experience does not have the support of his common sense, and of his science, and of his cosmogony. If he is to attain it, he must reach it by a steeper and abrupter ascent from his mundane experience, and he must seize it in a much purer form. For the multitude there were the parables and in all the organized religions a much simpler and easier standard of religious life than that which the seers and the saints demanded of themselves. The alteration of commonsense by the development and popularization of science has not discredited the truth of religion. It has, however, left the churches and the preachers the task of making the harder standard of religious experience credible and convincing in itself—without the support of a supernatural physics and a supernatural history. They will have, I believe, to determine, after deep meditation and searching self-examination, how they can demonstrate that the life of the spirit is in fact the fulfillment of the nature of man. That demonstration, if it can be made, will become the support, as supernaturalism was in the Ages of Faith, of the religious life. . . . If the great hypothesis is valid, then there is no conflict, as the worldly believe, between the deepest needs of the old Adam and the idea of the New Man. Then we are so constituted that our paramount needs are identical with our moral obligations. In so far as we know the true needs of our natures and serve them, we do in fact fulfill the moral law. And as we understand the moral law truly and obey it, we live according to the dictates of our own natures. And so it can be argued, and perhaps in the end demonstrated, that the disorder which oppresses us comes because modern men do not transcend their immediate experience—that though they become educated, they do not become transformed. Today the moralists speak of this disorder as sin and vice. The statesmen speak of it as lawless and anti-social conduct. The physicians speak of it as maladjustment disclosed by symptoms of anxiety. Are they not talking about the same thing? Are they not talking about the person who has failed to understand and to live in the order to which man, as he is actually constituted, belongs? If that is so, then by the research and the meditations of dedicated men, and by the inspired disclosures of men of genius, the life of the spirit and the common sense of men may again be brought into harmony.
“When men can no longer be theists,” wrote the author of A Preface to Morals, “they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. They must live by the premise that whatever is righteous is inherently desirable because experience will demonstrate its desirability. They must live, therefore, in the belief that the duty of man is not to make his will conform to the will of God but to the surest knowledge of the conditions of human happiness.” Haught quotes the following Lippmann views, found in The Public Philosophy (1955) and A Preface to Morals (1929):
• There is no arguing with the pretenders to a divine knowledge and to a divine mission. They are possessed with the sin of pride, they have yielded to the perennial temptation. . . . No more than the kings before them should the people be hedged with divinity.
• The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the preferences of the human heart.
• Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of righteousness wholly within human experience.
• The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the infinite goodness of God with his omnipotence. Nothing puts a greater strain upon the faith of the common man than the existence of utterly irrational suffering in the universe. {CE; CL; Humanist Newsletter, September- October 1953; TYD; WAS, 6 April 1949}
Lipps, Theodor (1851–1914) A professor of aesthetics at the Royal Bavarian Academy, Lipps showed the influence of Hume, whose Treatise on Human Nature he edited in the German in 1895. He also showed the influence of Kant’s pantheism, believing in “a divine world-I” or world-spirit. {RAT}
Liscow, Christian (1701–1760) Liscow was one of the greatest of German satirists. His principal satires are The Uselessness of Good Works for Our Salvation and The Excellence and Utility of Bad Writers. He has been called the German Swift, and his writing shows him to have been an outspoken freethinker. {BDF; RAT}
Lisle, Lionel (19th Century) Lisle wrote The Two Tests: The Supernatural Claims of Christianity Tried by Two of Its Own Rules (1877). {BDF}
Lismer, Arthur (1885–1969) Lismer, a Canadian Unitarian, was an artist and an educator. {U}
Lisnoff, Howard (20th Century) A college educator and counselor, Lisnoff has written for The Humanist.
Liston, Robert (20th Century) Liston, in the Saturday Evening Post (11 July 1964), wrote an article about Madalyn Murray O’Hair, “Mrs. Murray’s War on God.” {GS}
Listowell (Richard Granville Hare) [4th Earl of] (1866–1931) Listowell was a freethinker who served with the Yeomancy Cavalry in South Africa, receiving in 1900 the Queen’s Medal, four clasps. He was president of England’s Euthanasia Society. His son, the Earl of Listowell (1907– ), was a founding member in 1935 of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. In 1996, he handed over the presidency to Sir Ludovic Kennedy, who remarked, “What a change in our fortunes there has been in the sixty years that Lord Listowell has been associated with our movement. The barriers against voluntary euthanasia are beginning to crumble, one after another.” {TRI}
Liszinski (Lyszczynski) [Count] (17th Century) Count Liszinski in 1688–1689 was found to have written that there is no God, or that man had made God out of nothing. As a result, the Polish bishops of Posen and Kioff investigated and found that not only did he deny the existence of God but also the doctrine of the Trinity and the Virgin Birth. He was then tortured and, according to Robertson, “the first step was to tear out his tongue, ‘with which he had been cruel towards God’; the next to burn his hands at a slow fire. It is all told by Zulaski, the leading Inquisitionist.” He then was beheaded, burned, and his ashes were scattered from a cannon. Unitarianism may have been tolerated somewhat in the sixteenth century, but positive atheism was forbidden. King John Sobieski made no attempt to stop the execution, but later Pope Innocent XI bitterly censured the incident. At issue was Liszinski’s statement that man was the creator of God, whom he had formed out of nothing. {BDF; JMR; JMRH}
LITANY In many religions, litany is a ritual repeating of prayers. The shaman or clergyman or singer will chant some words, and the congregation will make a response. One such response is the Medieval litany, “Lord, have mercy.” {DCL}
LITERARY REALISM, ROMANTICISM, AND NATURALISM: See entry for Naturalism.
LITERATURE AND SECULAR HUMANISM Rejecting the pedestrian view that literature is boring, Lionel Trilling in “On the Modern Element in Modern Literature” wrote, “I have been read by Eliot’s poems . . . and by Ulysses and by Remembrance of Things Past and by The Castle. . . . Some of these books at first rejected me; I bored them.” Trilling, in short, bolstered W. H. Auden’s view that a real book reads us. For any philosophic movement to succeed, it ideally would be accompanied by supporting literary influences. Christian theism has its Bible, deism had its pamphleteers, transcendentalism had its poets, existentialism had its Sartre. A major weakness of naturalistic humanism has been its emphasis upon the academically abstruse writings of Homo academicus, professor-type philosophers. The author of a “Potpourri” column for Free Inquiry, who was critical of the journal’s content, advised that for naturalistic humanism to succeed as a movement it must have the input as well as the output of critics, comics, satirists, poets, playwrights, and journalists as well as painters, sculptors, musicians: all who represent the humanities. [Not that there was a documentable connection, but “Potpourri” was soon thereafter discontinued by Free Inquiry.] “What author or novels should I recommend to my growing young intellectual?” humanists are often asked. Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and his The Razor’s Edge are often cited as starters.
Little, Lawrence (20th Century) Little wrote a useful bibliography for humanists, “Religion and Public Education” (1968). {GS}
Little, Shannon (20th Century) Little has written about current films for New Humanist.
Littré, Maximilian Paul Émile (1801–1881) Littré, a French philologist and philosopher, edited the works of Hippocrates (1839–1861), embraced the doctrines of Comte, and in 1845 published a lucid analysis of the philosophy of positivism. His Dictionary of the French Language, in which he applied the historical method to philology, was a colossal work. Although proposed for the Academy in 1883, he was bitterly opposed by Bishop Dupanloup, who successfully delayed his acceptance. But Littré was finally elected in 1871, at which time Dupanloup resigned. Under the Empire Littré twice refused the Legion of Honor. He was a positivist (agnostic) without any mysticism. Littré’s wife was an ardent Catholic. He did not interfere in her beliefs. According to Foote, however, she was less scrupulous than her husband. When he was dying, she excluded his friends from the deathbed, had him baptized, and secured his burial in consecrated ground with pious rites. Further, she said that her husband had recanted his heresy and died in the bosom of the Church. The Abbé Huvelin, her confessor who frequently visited Littré during his last illness, assisted her in the alleged fraud. At the funeral, according to a correspondent of The Standard, his friends were “very angry at this recantation in extremis, and claimed that dishonest priestcraft took advantage of the darkness cast over that clear intellect by the mist of approaching death to perform the rites of the Church over his semi-inanimate body.” At the grave, M. Wyrouboff, editor of the Comtist review, La Philosophie Positive, which Littré had founded, delivered a brief address to the Freethinkers who remained, concluding,
Littré proved by his example that it is possible for a man to possess a noble and generous heart, and at the same time espouse a doctrine which admits nothing beyond what is positively real and which prevents any recantation. And, gentlemen, in spite of deceptive appearances, Littré died as be had lived, without contradictions or weakness. All those who knew that calm and serene mind—and I was of the number of those who did—are well aware that it was irrevocably closed to the “unknowable,” and that it was thoroughly prepared to meet courageously the irresistible laws of nature. And now sleep in peace, proud and noble thinker! You will not have the eternity of a world to come, which you never expected; but you leave behind you your country that you strove honestly to serve, the Republic which you always loved, a generation of disciples who will remain faithful to you; and last, but not least, you leave your thoughts and your virtues to the whole world. Social immortality, the only beneficent and fecund immortality, commences for you to-day.
However, the Catholic Encyclopedia counts him “amongst the lambs,” states McCabe, who adds that—with blatant untruth—it says when Littré was near death that he “asked to be baptized, and he died a Catholic.” Echoing this, the Morning-Advertiser wrote, “There can hardly be a doubt that M. Littré died a steadfast adherent to the principles be so powerfully advocated during his laborious and distinguished life. The Church may claim, as our Paris correspondent, in his interesting note on the subject, tells us she is already claiming, the death-bed conversion of the great unbeliever, who for the last thirty-five years was one of her most active and formidable enemies. She has attempted to take the same posthumous revenge on Voltaire, on Paine, and on many others, who were described by Roman Catholic writers as calling in the last dreadful hour for the spiritual support they held up to ridicule in the confidence of health and the presumption of their intellect.” Meanwhile, one year before his death, Littré was found to have written “Pour La Dernière Fois” (For the Very Last Time) for The Comtist. In it, he noted that he realized he did not have long to live: “For many months, my suffering have prostrated me with dreadful persistence. . . . Every morning when I have to be put to bed, my pains are exasperated, and often I have not the strength to stifle cries which are grievous to me and grievous to those who tend me.” Fearing the worst, he wrote to his friend, M. Caubert: “Last Saturday I swooned away for a long time. It is for that reason I send you, a little prematurely, my article for the Review. If I live, I will correct the proofs as usual. If I die, let it be printed and published in the Review as a posthumous article. It will be a last trouble which I venture to give you. The reader must do his best to follow the manuscript faithfully.” Referring to Charles Greville, Littré said, “I feel nothing of what he experienced. Like him, I find it impossible to accept the theory of the world, which Catholicism prescribes for all true believers; but I do not regret being without such doctrines, and I cannot discover in myself any wish to return to them.” He concluded:
Positive Philosophy, which has so supported me since my thirtieth year, and which, in giving me an ideal, a craving for progress, the vision of history and care for humanity, has preserved me from being a simple negationist, accompanies me faithfully in these last trials. The questions it solves in its own way, the rules it prescribes by virtue of its principle, the beliefs it discountenances in the name of our ignorance of everything absolute; of these I have in the preceding pages made an examination, which I conclude with the supreme word of the commencement—for the last time.
In short, Littré’s recanting never occurred. {BDF; FO; JM; RAT
Live (20th Century) The recording artists known as Live have stated on one of their record jackets that they are non-theists. {E}
Livermore, Abiel A. (1811–1892)
Livermore, a Unitarian minister, was a 19th-century educator. He wrote Liberal Christianity (1886). {U}
Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1820–1905) A Universalist and suffragist, Livermore became President of the American Woman Suffrage Association from 1875 to 1878. As a child brought up by the strict Calvinist doctrines taught in her devout Baptist home, she recalled (her) younger sisters,” already admitting that “I expect to be lost.” The Story of My Life (1897) further relates that she thought of God as “only a judge, who tried human beings, condemned or acquitted them, and sent them to reward or punishment.” As a result, she directed her prayers to “Our Jesus who art in heaven.” Upon marrying a Universalist minister, she “was finally liberated from this religious torture” and felt that the “faith of the Universalist church is to be the faith of the church of the future.” She helped her husband edit New Covenant, and she was active in the Temperance movement, which she characterized as “the anguished protest of hopeless and life-sick women against the drunkenness of the time, which threatened to fill the land with beggary and crime.” {U; U&U; UU}
Livesay, Dorothy (1909- ) A Canadian lyric poet, Livesay shows in her work the influence of the French Symbolist poets and the impact of having participated in Montreal as a social worker during the Depression. She has acknowledged the affinity she has for the social gospel of such liberal poets as C. Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, and W. H. Auden. In 1944 and 1947 she received the Governor General’s award for poetry. Two of her works are Collected Poems (1977) and Selected Poems: The Self-Completing Tree (1986). Livesay is a Unitarian.
Livingston, Bob (20th Century) Livingston and his wife Pat Livingston are newsletter editors of Atheists United, published in Sherman Oaks, California.
Livingston, Herbert (20th Century) Livingston has been president of Atheists United in California, and he has been active in fighting for the separation of church and state.
Livingston, Rosetta (20th Century) Livingston, a member in California of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, wrote Every Time We Say Goodbye (1997), a novel with humanistic underpinnings.
Llewellyn, Jean (20th Century) Llewellyn in Scotland is active with the Edinburgh Humanist Group.
Llorente, Juan Antonio (1756–1823) A Spanish historian, Llorente wrote A Critical History of the Spanish Inquisition (1822, 10 volumes). Although Catholic writers have said Llorente was a superficial and untruthful critic of the Church, Llorente had been a canon of the Toledo Cathedral, Knight of the Caroline Order, and General Secretary of the Inquisition: an important cleric and a scholar. He became a Voltairean skeptic, moved to France where he published his history, and then was driven out when the restored Catholic royalty and Church returned. {JM; RAT; RE}
Lloyd, Caitlin (20th Century) Lloyd is a contributor to Family Matters, the newsletter of the Secular Family Network.
Lloyd, G. J. Henry (20th Century)
Lloyd, a British rationalist and once head of the Humanist Council, was concerned about the semantic overtones and meanings of the words “rationalism” and “humanism.”
Lloyd, John T. (1851–1928) Lloyd, a Welshman born at Felin-y-wig, Denbighshire, was brought up in the Calvinistic faith, the form of Christianity handed down to him as a sacred legacy through a long line of ancestors. As a boy, he said, he was “resolutely ambitious to enter the ministry of the gospel.” After studying for three years at Bala College, he spent twenty years as a Presbyterian minister in Johannesburg. A popular preacher, he officiated often in buildings that were too small to accommodate the crowds which flocked to hear him. In a series of 1903 articles in the Freethinker, republished as From Christian Pulpit to Secular Platform, Lloyd told how he “converted” to freethought when fifty-two, discarding “God, Christ, and Immortality, with all the absurd dogmas concerning them.” He rapidly became a stalwart of the freethought platform and an active member in England of the Rationalist Press Association. Lloyd wrote God-Eating: A Study in Christianity and Cannibalism (1921), a study of the superstitious history custom. An attack of cerebral hemorrhage in 1927 prevented him from working further for freethought causes, but he was remembered for his activism, including his vigorous protest against the imprisonment in 1922 of J. W. Gott for blasphemy. He died calmly, simply losing consciousness. {FO; RAT; RSR}
Lloyd, John William (Born 1857) Lloyd, of Welsh-English stock, was an American poet and writer. Although raised an orthodox Christian, Lloyd became an agnostic and anarchist, writing extensively in Liberty and Lucifer. {BDF}
Lloyd, Noel (1924-1998) Lloyd, who was born in Liverpool, joined the RAF at the age of seventeen and served in Canada. With Geoffrey Palmer, who was to be his partner for fifty-three years, he was a member of the Rock Theatre Company. The two collaborated in writing more than thirty books, including a biography of E. F. Benson and Father of the Bensons (1998). A supporter of the Labour Party and gay rights, Lloyd was an activist humanist. {Gay and Lesbian Humanist, Winter 1998}
Lloyd, Richard (20th Century) Lloyd in 1919 wrote an atheistic critique about an English curate at Midhurst, Robert Taylor. {GS}
Lloyd, Victor Henry (1921– ) Lloyd is an Australian humanist, teacher, lecturer, and writer. He was active with the Rationalist Society and became first president of the subsequent organization, the Humanist Society of Queensland. Lloyd has coordinated the society’s policies on Civil Marriage Celebrants, Abortion Reform Movement, Homosexual Law Reform Movement, the Vasectomy Information Service, and the Sex Counseling Service. He led the group’s opposition to Australia’s involvement in Vietnam and the South African Tour. In 1989 he was named Humanist of the Year. {SWW}
Lloyd, William Watkiss (19th Century) Lloyd was author of Christianity in the Cartoons (1865), in which he criticizes Rafael and the New Testament side by side. He also wrote The Age of Pericles and several works on Shakespeare. {BDF}
Llunas, D. José (19th Century) In Barcelona, Spain, Llunas edited Tramontana from 1894 to 1895.
Locke, Alain Le Roy (1886–1954)
Locke, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, edited in 1924 a special edition of a magazine called Survey Graphics, which included Langston Hughes and other literary figures of the time. He then developed an anthology called The New Negro (1925), which included art by Winold Reiss and other black intellectuals. In an interview with Norm Allen Jr., Purdue philosopher Leonard Harris details how Locke attended Harvard, studying under William James, Josiah Royce, and Hugo Munsterberg; how he was the first black American to become a Rhodes Scholar; how, because Locke was black, many white scholars asked, “Could it be possible for a Negro to be that intelligent?”; and how he completed his doctoral degree under Ralph Barton Perry (1917), graduating from Harvard in 1918. He was a friend of Max Otto, Horace Bernard Stern, and Leeman Bryson. Locke was part of the pluralist movement “which maintained that (1) there was something common among all humans, (2) various cultural orientations should be respected and that people ought to be given regard for their preferences, and (3) those preferences should not be prioritized.” In his The Philosophy of Alain Locke, Harris looks “at what was behind his promotion of and associations with George Padmore, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Sterling Brown, Jean Toomer, Aaron Douglas, Wallace Thurmond, Roland Hayes, and the other literary giants of the era.” Locke taught philosophy at Howard University in Washington, D.C., for forty years. He is said to have used his connections to secure patronage for young, male writers deserving assistance, allegedly after they had shown their appreciation in the bedroom. Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were so rewarded, and others in his circle of gay associates were Richard Bruce Nugent and Claude McKay. An apocryphal story has it that he graded women writers, regardless of talent, with an automatic “C,” or average, on the first day of classes. Zora Neale Hurston, whom Locke liked, described him as “a malicious, spiteful little snot.” Locke clearly was a pragmatist with a scientific outlook, at a time when in the 1930s and 1940s, states Harris, many felt “Africans and African Americans were inferior because they were not scientific; that is to say, they were deemed inferior because they were not producers of scientific products. They were also seen as being emotional. Locke, in a way, reverses this whole process and rejects the foundation upon which these claims are made.” In his Who’s Who entry, Locke listed himself as an Episcopalian, but Allen claims Locke was a non-religious humanist, adding that it was common for freethinkers and rationalists and secularists to disguise their true beliefs within a community which itself was a minority. {AAH}
Locke, John (1632–1704) Locke, the English founder of empiricism, although not a deist was related to deists in a variety of ways. He attempted to denude religion of all mystery. With Plato, he held that a human being on earth is a body and a mind, that upon death the mind will continue to exist without any body. His philosophic approach was used by deists who abandoned traditional jargon. In the main, however, Locke sought to defend and justify Christianity and in Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) he went so far as to show that belief in the revealed truths of the Christian faith is reasonable. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Locke as one who seems to be an atheist only from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. According to Robertson, the theism in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) “undermined even his Unitarian Scripturalism, inasmuch as it denies, albeit confusedly, that revelation can ever override reason.” But he adds that the effect of Locke’s work, “especially of his naturalistic psychology, was to make for rationalism; and his compromises furthered instead of checking the movement of unbelief.” His Letters on Toleration (1689) advocated religious freedom for all groups except atheists and Roman Catholics. Locke died while Lady Masham was reading the Psalms to him, and she wrote, “His death was like his life, truly pious, yet natural, easy and unaffected.” (See entry for Patrick Romanell.) {BDF; CE; ER; EU, Ross Rudolph and Aram Vartarian; FUK; HAB; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; TYD}
Lockridge, Ross Jr. (1914-1948)
According to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), Lockridge’s Raintree Country (1948) allegedly contains “1066 pages of blasphemy and sacrilege inimical to faith and morals and within the prohibition of the Catholic Index.” The Indian-born novelist taught at Simmons after doing graduate work at Harvard. His sole novel told with many flashbacks of a single day, 4 July 1892, in the life of a high school principal in a mythical Indiana county. The work obtained acclaim, in the midst of which Lockridge mysteriously committed suicide. (See entry for Banned Books.) {OCAL}
Lockroy, Étienne Auguste Édouard [Vice President] (1838–1913) Lockroy was elected to the French National Assembly in 1871. From 1886–1887, he was Minister of Commerce and Industry, from 1902–1905 he was Vice President, and from 1895 to 1896 and 1898, and in 1898 he was Minister of War. Lockroy wrote a number of political and naval works. In Au hazard de la vie, Lockroy writes of his rationalistic outlook. {RAT}
Lockwood, Helen Drusilla (20th Century) A staunch supporter of Priscilla Robertson's editorship of The Humanist, Lockwood headed the English department at Vassar College. She was a philosophic as well as botanical naturalist. In addition to being an outstanding scholar of the humanities, Lockwood with her brother invested in a young company (Eastman Kodak) which increased in value to such an extent that she was instrumental in setting up and paying for the Shakespeare Garden on the Vassar campus. {WAS, conversations}
Lockwood, Ingersoll (20th Century) A freethinker, Lockwood wrote "Superstition" (1910). {GS}
Locurcio, Georgeia (20th Century) Locurcio is on the staff of Free Inquiry.
Loeb, Jacques (1859–1924) Loeb, an American physiologist, was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He is best known for his tropism theory and for his experiments in inducting parthenogenesis and regeneration by chemical stimulus. He also propounded the mechanistic philosophy that all ethics were the outgrowth of man’s inherited tropisms. He founded and edited the Journal of General Physiology. Loeb’s Organism as a Whole was dedicated “to the group of Freethinkers, including D’Alembert, Diderot, Holbach, and Voltaire, who first dared to follow the consequences of a mechanistic science to the rules of human conduct.” {JM; RAT; RE}
Loeb, John Langeloth (1902–1996) In 1995, Harvard University received from banker-broker Loeb a $70.5-million gift, which ranked as one of the largest gifts ever given to higher education. The gift included a grant of $800,000 to endow the “humanist chaplaincy” at Memorial Church. Loeb has explained that he first became aware of Harvard’s humanist chaplain, Thomas Ferrick, through an article in The Harvard Gazette, which said Ferrick lived on only $15,000 a year. “He had been a Jesuit and a Catholic priest, but had left the church and concentrated on good will among men,” Loeb learned. “I sent him a gift out of the clear blue. It occurred to me that I wanted to make a statement while I was still alive. I didn’t even discuss this with him, but I’m sure he can use it.” Saying “I’ve always sort of been a humanist,” Loeb explained further: “More crimes are being committed in the name of God every year. The humanistic approach of deeds, not creeds, appeals to me. This is a small step in having someone professors and students can talk to.” Loeb played a significant part in Loeb, Rhoades & Co.; Loeb, Rhoades, Hornblower & Co.; and Loeb Partners Corporation. From 1951–1954 he was governor of the New York Stock Exchange. (See entry for Thomas Ferrick.) {The New York Times, 9 Dec 1996}
Loewen, James W. (20th Century) Loewen, a historian, is critical of the fact that United States high school history texts do not tell the truth, are chauvinistic, and exalt the country, right or wrong. In Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995), he details how the American Legion insists on celebrating past wars and how it holds that justice was always on our side. Southern states minimize the evils of slavery and brag about the glories of the Confederacy. Students are never told that Helen Keller became a radical socialist agitator or that President Woodrow Wilson was personally racist and segregated the government and civil service. He notes that after World War II, the Allied Forces prohibited German schools from teaching German history until they could revise and censor the textbooks. Meanwhile, students suffer because of their lack of objective history texts. Freethinkers would hail educational programs which include reference to individuals who are not theists rather than, as present, citing individuals as if they are all members of some organized religious group.
Lofmark, Carl (Died 1991) Lofmark in 1986 was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. He was author of Bards and Heroes (1989), Does God Exist? (1990) and What is the Bible? (1990). The latter book is a short treatise in which Lofmark looks at the Bible’s sources, its intentions, and what an unbeliever thinks is its value in the present age. Lofmark was a devoted secular humanist. {The Freethinker, May 1997}
Lofton, Saab (20th Century) Lofton is the author of A.D. and Battle Never-ending, two works of science fiction. In "Faith vs. African Americans" (Free Inquiry, Summer 1999), he explains why as an African American he gave up faith:
Africans had various tribal mythologies or Islam before being forcibly introduced to Moses and Jesus and the like, and unfortunately, all too many black nationalists out there are under the impression that, if blacks were to simply return to what was once worshiped, then “everything’ll be alright.” Well, it ain’t that simple.
If you are going to be religious, he says tongue-in-cheek, “Be a part of the religious Left as Gandhi or Martin Luther King Junior or Pastors for Peace or those nuns who keep getting raped and massacred by graduates of our taxpayer-funded School of the Americas.”
LOGIC • Logic is like the sword: those who appeal to it shall perish by it. –Samuel Butler
• Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence. –Joseph Wood Krutch
Logic, the systematic study of valid inference, is concerned with the formal properties of an argument, not its factual accuracy. In the early 20th century, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead worked to develop logical theory as the basis for mathematics. Logic, aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology are disciplines at the core of philosophy’s pursuit of wisdom. In 1945, in his History of Western Philosophy, Russell wrote of logic:
I conclude that the Aristotelian doctrines with which we have been concerned are wholly false, with the exception of the formal theory of the syllogism, which is unimportant. Any person in the present day who wishes to learn logic will be wasting his time if he reads Aristotle or any of his disciples. Nonetheless, Aristotle’s logical writings show great ability, and would have been useful to mankind if they had appeared at a time when intellectual originality was still active. Unfortunately they appeared at the very end of the creative period of Greek thought, and therefore came to be accepted as authoritative. By the time that logical originality revived, a reign of two thousand years made Aristotle very difficult to dethrone. Throughout modern times, practically every advance in science, in logic, or in philosophy has had to be made in the teeth of the opposition from Aristotle’s disciples.
In 1968, in The Art of Philosophizing, Russell wrote further on the subject:
Logic was practically invented by Aristotle. For nearly two thousand years, his authority in logic was unquestioned. To this day teachers in Catholic educational institutions are not allowed to admit that his logic has defects, and any non-Catholic who criticizes it incurs the bitter hostility of the Roman Church. I once ventured to do so on the radio, and the organizers who had invited me were inundated with protests against the broadcasting of such heretical doctrines. Undue respect for Aristotle, however, is not confined to Catholic institutions. In most universities, the beginner in logic is still taught the doctrine of the syllogism, which is useless and complicated, and an obstacle to a sound understanding of logic. If you wish to become a logician, there is one piece of advice that I cannot urge too strongly, and that is, DO NOT learn the traditional formal logic. In Aristotle’s day, it was a creditable effort, but so was Ptolemaic astronomy. To teach either in the present day is a ridiculous piece of antiquarianism.
An exercise in logic:
Any sentence within this rectangle is false.
If the sentence within the rectangle is true, then it is false? If it is false, then it is true? What is illustrated is the “double contradiction,” also called the “paradox of the liar.” Typical of non-philosophy majors who enrolled in Charner Perry’s University of Chicago class in logic was one who concluded, “Logically speaking, I didn’t understand 49/64 of what Prof. Perry was saying.” (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, volumes 4 and 5, for the international history of logic.) {CE}
LOGICAL ATOMISM Although in 1951 Bertrand Russell wrote that he would not bring an action for libel if called a “naturalistic humanist,” he responded, “When I have to describe my own philosophy I call myself a ‘logical atomist.’ “ Later, both Russell and Wittgenstein abandoned the label. Russell Wahl, of Idaho State University, in reviewing Ali Benmakhlouf’s Bertrand Russell: L’atomisme logique (1996), warned that the work contains various errors and “should be approached somewhat sceptically by scholars or more advanced students.” (See entry for Bertrand Russell.) {Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives, Winter 1998-1999; WAS, 24 February 1951}
LOGICAL PARADOXES In his Principles of Mathematics (1903), Bertrand Russell evidenced great interest in statements which appear to be contradictory but actually have a basis in truth.
• There are two types of sets: Type A sets contain themselves. Type B sets do not contain themselves. So what type of set would the set that contain all Type B sets be?
Other logicians have shown a similar interest:
• I must be cruel only to be kind. –Hamlet,Shakespeare
• I prefer to be a man of paradox than a man of prejudice. –Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. –From 1984 by George Orwell
• Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. –Oscar Wilde
• What is the answer? . . . In that case, what is the question? –Gertrude Stein’s alleged last words
• In novels one is forced to tell the truth . . . whereas in biography one can invent more freely. This will sound like a paradox only to those who do not practice either art. In fiction the accuracy and coherence of the imaginative narrative must be strong enough to impart a vision of truth to the reader; in biography the devices and tricks of historical narrative are so abundant that it is much easier to disguise lack of knowledge or less of comprehension. Biography is the art of concealment; fiction is that of revelation. –Peter Ackroyd, novelist and biographer
Paradox forces the search for a deeper level of meaning, and many claim that it is not just a rhetorical or illustrative device but a basic aspect of all poetic language. Meanwhile, if a person insists that he is lying, is what he says true or false? (See the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.) {CE}
LOGICAL POSITIVISM Logical positivism is a 20th century philosophical movement, one holding that all meaningful statements are either analytic or conclusively verifiable or at least confirmable by observation and experiment. Also called logical empiricism, the movement is noted for showing that metaphysical theories are strictly meaningless. It began in the group called the Vienna Circle, forming in the 1920s around Moritz Schlick, and included Friedrich Waismann, Otto Neurat, Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Victor Kraft, Hans Hahn, Carl G. Hempel, Karl Menger, and Kurt Godel. The Vienna Circle influenced A. J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle. In general, the logical positivists subscribed to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that linguistic clarification is necessary in order to avoid meaningless questions. "Why" is meaningful, for example, in a question such as “Why is my piano pedal broken?”, which according to the verification principle can be tested. But it is not meaningful, linguistically, in questions such as “Why did God create the universe?” or “Does God have blue eyes?”, which according to the verification principle cannot be tested. The movement of logical positivism is now considered dead, but it influenced many as well as left its imprint on empiricism. (See entries for Carl G. Hempe, Verification Principle, and Principle of Verifiability. Also, see the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.)
Lohman, Scott (20th Century) Lohman is a contributor to The Freethought Observer, a Texas publication that commenced in 1994. He is president of the Humanist Association of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Lohmann, Hartwic (Died 1642) A native of Holstein, Lohmann occupied a good position in Flensburg in 1616 but, accused of atheism, fled to Copenhagen, where he practiced medicine. Lohmann wrote Mirror of Faith. {BDF}
Loisy, Alfred Firmin (1857–1940) A French biblical critic and theologian, Loisy was ordained (1879) a Catholic priest. From 1881 to 1893, he was a professor at the Catholic Institute in Paris. Around the turn of the century, he became leader of a movement called Catholic Modernism, one that accepted theories of a higher criticism and defined a liberal type of humanitarianism. As a result, the Holy See condemned his books, and he was excommunicated in 1908. In My Duel with the Vatican, Loisy wrote, “I have given myself a lot of trouble in this world with small result. I took my own life and that of the Church seriously, and the consequence is that I have wasted the one and disturbed the other. The search for truth is not a trade by which a man can support himself; for a priest it is a supreme peril. For a long time now I have not really been a Catholic in the official sense of the word. I have strewn my intelligence and my activity to the four winds of an empty ideal. . . . Roman Catholicism, as such, is bound to perish, and it deserves no regrets.” John Ratté’s Three Modernists (1968) describes Loisy’s many attacks on the Church. The Vatican’s 1948 Index Librorum Prohibitorum has fourteen entries for Loisy, including opera omnia (1932), starting with his Études évangeliques (1903). R. Joseph Hoffmann has written an introduction to a recently published edition of The Gospel and the Church (1988). In 1927, Edwin H. Wilson interviewed Loisy, “the excommunicated leader of the modernist movement in Roman Catholicism. He showed me a thrice-edited manuscript containing a philosophy of religion which the modernists had hoped to use as a replacement for the thought of Thomas Aquinas. ‘All we wanted,’ said Loisy wistfully, ‘was to have the church accept the fact of change.’ ” {CE; EW; JM; RAT; RE}
Lollard, Walter (14th Century) Lollard was a heretic and martyr who was born in England. While preaching in Germany in 1315, he rejected the sacraments and ceremonies of the Church. Wheeler reports that Lollard was said to have chosen twelve apostles to propagate his doctrines and that he had many followers. But, arrested in Cologne, he was burned to death in 1322, “dying with great courage.” {BDF; RE}
Loman, Abraham Dirk (Born 1823) Loman was a Dutch rationalist. He held the entire New Testament to be un-historical and the Pauline Epistles to belong to the second century. Loman wrote many critical works of religion. {BDF}
Lombardi, Franco (1906-19--?) A professor of philosophy at the University of Rome, Lombardi was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Humanist Academy. In 1941 he wrote La Libertà del volere e l’individuo. An anti-fascist, Lombardi wrote about Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, and Marx. His history of philosophy is Dopo lo storicismo (1970).
Lombardi, Jolé (20th Century) An organizer of the New University for the Third Age, Lombardi is a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Humanist Academy.
Lombroso, Cesare (1835–1909) An Italian criminologist and physician, Lombroso in his L’uomo delinquente (3 volumes, 1896–1897) compared anthropological measurements and developed the concept of the atavistic, or born, criminal. Although this concept has been questioned by other criminologists, Lombroso continues to be credited with turning attention from the legalistic study of crime to the scientific study of the criminal. He also believed in humane treatment of criminals and felt limitations on the use of the death penalty are needed. Lombroso introduced Darwinism to Italy. He was honored by becoming an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association, which Charles A. Watts founded in 1899. Even when in the last stage of his life he was duped by a Spiritualist medium, he clung to his materialism. His daughter in her biography of him states that by that time he was a physical and mental wreck, not at all in his prime. {BDF; CE; JM; RAT; RE}
LONDON (England) HUMANISTS For information about Central London Humanists, phone Cherie Holt on 0171 916 3015 or Hilary Leighter on 01895 632096.
London, Jack (1876–1916) London, who wrote Call of the Wild (1903), was a novelist with a humanist viewpoint, according to Corliss Lamont, who liked his socialistic outlook. The “bastard son of a wandering astrologer [William Chaney] whom he never saw” and of a Welsh farm girl [Flora Wellman, who later married John London, whose name was given to Jack], London started out as a gold-seeker in the first Klondike rush, a newspaper correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, and in 1914 a war correspondent in Mexico. His crude Call of the Wild and White Fang (1906), both of which show empathy with animals, are more complex than some of his Soviet admirers appreciated or his English detractors granted. In the former, Buck—an offspring of a St. Bernard and a Scotch shepherd dog—is stolen in California and shipped to the Klondike where he is trained as a sledge dog. Loyal to his new master, John Thornton, Buck wins a wager by dragging a thousand-pound load on a sledge. But when Indians murder Thornton, Buck responds to the call of the wild, abandoning humans and returning to a wolf pack. The other novel tells the story of White Fang, offspring of an Indian wolf dog and a wolf, whose Indian owner had tormented him to make him more savage but whose new owner subdues him by kindness. London liked Marx as well as Nietzsche, finding their diametrically opposed theories of value both in his writing and in his personal outlook. London’s freethought is most evident in Before Adam (1907). “I am a hopeless materialist,” London once declared. “I see the soul as nothing else than the sum of activities of the organism plus personal habits—plus inherited habits, memories, experiences, of the organism. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.” Critic Scott L. Malcomson has written that “London wrestled with the implications of individualism. He wrote in a 1905 letter of having ‘recently emerged’ from the Nietzsche ‘sickness.’ The fight against individualism became an article of faith for him. ‘I have been more stimulated by Nietzsche than by any other writer in the world. At the same time I have been an intellectual enemy to Nietzsche. Both Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf were indictments by me of the Nietzschean philosophy of the superman.” Socialism, however, provided little more than a placebo for the Nietzsche sickness. In his “How I became a Socialist,” London took the position that individuals would convert to socialism out of a terror of remaining in the lower class. Of this Malcomson remarks, “Hatred of one’s class position is probably not the best way to build class solidarity.” When eighteen, London had experienced how strong men much like himself could be brutalized by an all-powerful, unforgiving system he called “John Law” and which punished poverty. He was arrested in Niagara Falls 29 June 1894 on a charge of vagrancy, for the police had commenced a crackdown on vagrants who were alleged to be giving the city a bad name. The Buffalo Courier headlined its story, “Swarms of Dude Hoboes,” reporting that “[t]hese fellows are not deserving of charity as they wear good clothing and one fellow had a valuable gold watch and several gold rings. The authorities are bound to rid the city of these gentlemen.” One of the thirteen cases cleared from the docket was “John Lunden.” Young London was handcuffed to a tall black prisoner, shackled to the remainder of the troop of convicted vagrants, and unceremoniously led through the streets of Niagara Falls. After a thirty-day sentence, he and a fellow prisoner panhandled some change in Buffalo, went to a German saloon which his new friend wanted to rob, and London made a quick exit, jumping from the men’s room window in the back of the saloon. He then hopped a freight train and returned to California. Until the day of his premature death, London maintained that he was not allowed to plead guilty or not guilty. Reporter David Florek has speculated that London’s jailing may have inspired his description of Buck, the canine hero of Call of the Wild:
Then the rope was removed and he was flung into a cagelike crate. There he lay for the remainder of the weary night, nursing his wrath and wounded pride. He could not understand what it all meant. What did they want with him, these strange men? Why were they keeping him pent up in this narrow crate? He did not know why, but he felt oppressed by the vague sense of impending calamity. Several times during the night he sprang to his feet when the shed door rattled. . . .
According to the police docket, London said he was single, had a mother and father who were living, listed his occupation as “sailor,” and said his religion was “atheist.” On another occasion, London was an arson suspect. In 1910 upon becoming famous but broken in health and frayed in spirit, he planned a house to be called Wolf House at Glen Ellen, a few miles north of San Francisco. Its two-story living room ran the length of the 15,000-square-foot U-shaped house, and it was built around a spring-fed pool stocked with fish. “It will be a happy house—or else I’ll burn it down,” he once wrote in an essay (published in The House Beautiful, 1960). Just days before he was to move in, the house went up in flames. London was one of several suspects. A few weeks prior he had insured the place for $6,000., a small amount inasmuch as it was estimated to have been worth $80,000 at the time. However, in 1980 Professor Robert N. Anderson of San Jose State University wrote that workers polishing a wooden mantle had left oil-soaked rags in the dining room, that deprived of circulating air they heated to the point that they started smoking, and that they eventually caught fire. An alcoholic, London committed suicide at the age of forty.
THE STONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED
His plaintive epitaph, above, is near the burial plot in Sonoma, California. {Buffalo News, 26 June 1994; CE; CL; JM; RAT; TYD}
London, Rick (20th Century) A cartoonist syndicated by Great Southern Writers Syndicate, London is an active Unitarian and considers himself an agnostic. {CA}
London-Stetelman, Rick (16 July 1954 - ) London-Stetelman, born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is a cartoonist, playwright, and humanitarian. He has made “pet presidents,” puppets of US Presidents, the Nixon puppet seen when Eddie Murphy displayed it during his debut performance on Saturday Night Live in October of 1981. He is the creator and founder of London’s Times and Panel Hollywood cartoons. He now lives in Arkansas but has worked as a standup comedian, playwright, and television-radio producer in Washington, D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. He is syndicated by Great Southern Writers Syndicate. London is an active Unitarian and an agnostic. {CA}
Long, Becky (20th Century)
In 1996 Long spoke at a conference of the Alabama Freethought Association about the continuing Virgin Mary apparition saga which occurs in her state, Georgia. {Freethought Today, May 1996}
Long, Gabrielle Margaret (Born 1888) Long at the age of eighteen published an historical novel, The Vampire of Milan (1906), and under the pen-name of Marjorie Bowen or George R. Preedy has written about one hundred forty novels, biographies, historical works, or plays. She has been a director of the Rationalist Press Association. {RE}
Long, George (Born 1856) Long was an American chemist who from 1913 to 1917 was Dean of the School of Pharmacy at Northwestern University Medical School. He was a rationalist who severely criticized all the church. {RAT}
Long, Marcus (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Long was a member of the philosophy department at the University of Toronto.
LONG-DISTANCE TELEPHONE SERVICE Lifeline is a long-distance telephone service, which according to one of its earthly co-founders Carl Thompson, was founded by Jesus Christ. The Oklahoma City company bills $6 million a month in the Lord’s name, rents established lines, and prays that in four years it will have its own line in order not to use the Devil’s line, American Telephone and Telegraph. AT&T, Thompson complains, “helps gays and lesbians.” Lifeline donates 20% of profits to the Founder—to “conquer the world in the name of Jesus.”
LONGEST WORD: See entry for Aristophanes.
Longet, François Achille (1811–1871) Longet was a French physiologist who published a Treatise on Physiology in three volumes. A freethinker, he wrote several medical works. {BDF}
LONGEVITY Longevity, n. Uncommon extension of the fear of death. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807–1882) A professor of modern languages at Harvard for eighteen years, Longfellow wrote “Song of Hiawatha” and other works. His daughter Alice is quoted as saying that her father was born a Unitarian and remained one all his life. William Dean Howells, in his Literary Friends and Acquaintances, says that at the most Longfellow was a non-Christian theist. “I think, he says, “that as he grew older his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ.” The poet, he added, “did not latterly go to church.” {CE; JM; RAT; RE; U; UU}
Longfellow, Samuel (1819–1892) Brother of the poet Henry, Samuel made his place in Unitarian history as a hymnist, collaborating with Samuel Johnson on the well-known collection, Hymns of the Spirit (1864). In contrast to many of the Transcendentalists, Longfellow was interested in the act of corporate worship as well as individual devotion. O. B. Frothingham characterized the hymns of the two men as reflections of their complementary personalities: “Johnson’s were the more intellectual, Longfellow’s the more tender; Johnson’s the more aspiring, Longfellow’s the more devout; Johnson’s the more heroic and passionate, Longfellow’s the more mystical and reflective.” {TRI; U; U&U}
Longman, Heber Albert (1880–1954) Longman, a freethinker, rationalist, and paleontologist in Australia, came to Australia from England in 1902. In Toowoomba, he met Irene, his wife-to-be who became the first woman to be elected to the Queensland parliament. Longman was foundation President of the Queensland Rationalist and Ethical Society in 1914. While he was director of the Queensland Museum from 1917 to 1945, it was said that the staff never celebrated Christmas Day because of the director’s atheism. Longman achieved international recognition for his scientific work on vertebrate paleontology, and he was probably the first to give courses on vertebrate fossils at the university in the geology department. Longman wrote Religion of A Naturalist (1914). {SWW}
Longo, Gabriel (20th Century) Longo is author of Spoiled Priest: The Autobiography of an Ex-priest (1966).
Longue, Louis Pierre de (18th Century) Longue was a French deist. A writer in the service of the house of Conti, he completed Les Princesses de Malabares, in which he satirized religion. The work was condemned to be burned in 1734, but a new edition was published in Holland with the imprint of Tranquebar was made in 1735. {BDF}
Loomans, Diane (20th Century) Loomans is a contributor to Family Matters, the newsletter of the Secular Humanist Family.
Loomer, Ralph (20th Century)
In 1980, Loomer was awarded the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award.
LOOMPANICS Loompanics (Box 1197, Port Townsend, Washington 98368), is a company which resells and publishes off-beat books of a freethought nature. Its owner, according to David Briars, is a “libertarian-gun-nut, anarchist, and a sometimes misogynist.” {FD}
Lopes, Jose Leite (20th Century) A Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism, Lopes is professor emeritus of Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas in Brazil. Two of his works are La ciencio y el dilema de America Latino (1975) and Quantum Mechanics (1977). An essay, “Science and the Making of Society in Latin America,” is included in Challenges to the Enlightenment, Essays in Defense of Reason and Science (1994). Lopes signed Humanist Manifesto 2000.
Lopez Zaragoza, Patricia (20th Century) Lopez is President of Mexico’s Asociación Mexicana Ética Rationalista. She spoke at a 1992 inaugural meeting in Toronto of the Coalition for Secular Humanism and Freethought as well as in 1995 at the dedication of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York. “Sowing the Seeds of Secular Humanism in Mexico” (Free Inquiry, Summer 1994) details the plan being evolved to promote humanism in a country of practicing Catholics, many under the influence of an extremist right-wing sect, the Opus Dei. Lopez’s description of secular humanism in Mexico is found in English in International Humanist News (June 1995). Her original article was published in the Mexican quarterly, Razonamientos. In 1996, speaking in India at the Fourth World Atheist Conference, Lopez said, “To spread humanism throughout our countries is a great responsibility, since we can see every day how fundamentalist and theist ideas try to take over the many facets of daily life. This is a great problem in underdeveloped countries like India and Mexico, that openly declare themselves as secular states. . . . We must work for freedom from irrationality and superstition for even the humblest and most marginalized of all human beings.” Also in 1996, she was instrumental in planning the Humanist World Congress in Mexico City, at which she was a participant as well as organizer. Her e-mail: <mendez@spin.com.mx>. {New Humanist, February 1996, April 1996, December 1996}
Loptson, Peter (20th Century) Loptson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan and a member of the Hume Society, is author of Theories of Human Nature (1995). The work explores the idea of human nature and the many understandings of it put forward by such diverse figures as Aristotle, Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Darwin, and E. O. Wilson.
Lorand, Georges (1851–1918) Lorand was a Belgian journalist, an active propagator of atheistic doctrines among the youth at the university of Bologna and in workmen associations. He edited La Réforme at Brussels, and he campaigned against standing armies and for pacifist causes. {BDF}
LORD OF FLIES: See entry for Beelzebub.
Lord’s Prayer: See a critique in the entry for Harold Hillman.
Lorenz, Marguerite (20th Century) Lorenz is president of the Freethinker’s Society in California. (See entry for California Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}
Loria, Rudolf Hermann (1817–1881)
Loria was a professor of political economy at Turin University and a distinguished member of the Accademia dei Lincei, the Royal Economic Society, the Sociological Society, and the International Institute of Sociology. He was a positivist of the Ardigo school and had no place for religion. {RAT}
LOS ALAMITOS HIGH SCHOOL ATHEISTS The Los Alamitos (California) High School Atheists are on the Web at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.
Loti, Pierre (1850–1923) “Pierre Loti” was the adopted name of Louis Marie Julien Viaud, a French novelist. In 1867 he entered the French navy, attaining the rank of lieutenant before his resignation in 1898, and he wrote novels about his experiences. Aziyadë (1879) and Rarahu (1880) established his reputation. He was admitted to the French Academy in 1891. Loti’s romantic works contain his rationalist ideas. {RAT}
Lotze, Rudolf Hermann (1817–1881) A German philosopher and psychologist, Lotze attempted to reconcile the views of mechanistic science with the principles of romantic idealism. All phenomena, he posited, are determined by the interaction of atoms. He saw the atoms as centers of force operating in a matrix of a more basic substance. By analogy from the immediate knowledge of spiritual existence in the self, Lotze argued that the centers of force are stages of development within the underlying substance of the world. His theory of space perception was an important contribution to philosophy. Lotze accepted no Christian doctrine and admitted God only in the impersonal form of the Absolute. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Loubet, Emile [President] (1838–1929) Loubet was President of the French Republic (1900–1906), a lawyer who took up politics and was of the anti-clerical wing led by Gambetta. His hesitance as premier in 1892 to investigate the Panama Canal scandal forced his resignation, but he continued as minister of the interior until 1893, becoming president of the senate in 1896. During his presidency of the French Republic, Premiers René Waldeck-Rousseau and Émile Combes secured the limiting of Church privilege, culminating (1905) in the separation of church and state in France. {CE; JM; RAT; RE}
Loucks, Terry and Ursula Loucks (20th Century) Mr. and Mrs. Loucks are the authors of Burning Woods (1998), a novel in which Christina Sheridan, an anthropologist, pursues the most important manuscript known to Christianity. Concerning their book, they have commented:
There are more dangerous places to travel than Kashmir, Upper Egypt, and the West Bank in spite of the perils of religious strife in these blood soaked regions. The most dangerous places to travel these days are the pages of New Testament scholarship, where the origins of Christianity are under siege. The historicity of Jesus and his disciples is undoubtedly the most controversial subject in our times. The long held Christian beliefs of our society are being threatened by scholarly research on recently discovered manuscripts like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices. The debate raging between New Testament scholars and the orthodox clergy often erupts on television and our weekly new magazines. In the past few months Jesus has appeared on the covers of Newsweek, Time, and Atlantic Monthly almost as often as Princess Diana. Most of us, however, do not know enough about these manuscripts or the ongoing scholarly research to know whether or not they impact our most sacred beliefs. Is our New Testament Jesus preserved in these scrolls and codices? If not, what new picture of Jesus emerges? What impact does this have on our core beliefs about life, both now and hereafter? These questions and many more, including the impact of Eastern religions are addressed in Burning Words, as are the religious implications of recent physics discoveries. We are confident that the adventures of Christina Sheridan, an anthropologist who pursues the most important manuscript known to Christianity, will be so captivating that the reader will be unaware of how much they have learned until the smoke clears in the final scene of the chase.
Tom Flynn, however, found that the book shows “a New Age mix of quantum mysticism, the anthropic principle, and Eastern spirituality.” {Free Inquiry, Summer 1999}
LOUISIANA HUMANISTS
• New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, 2905 Bryant St., Metairie, Lousiana 70003; (504) 456-6550
• Shreveport Secular Humanists (Council for Secular Humanism), 9476 Boxwood Drive, Shreveport, Louisiana 71118-4003; telephone (318) 687-8175. E-mail: <wwatkins40@aol.com> and <dan@softdisk.com>. Web: <http://www.softdisk.com/comp/shume/>.
Louÿs, Pierre (1870–1925) A French poet and novelist, Louÿs (whose real name was Pierre Louis) translated the Greek poets and completed thoroughly pagan novels about ancient Greek life. Aphrodite (1896) has been presented on the stage and in 1906 was made into an opera. Chansons de Bilitis (1894) are lyrics in the manner of Sappho. {RAT}
LOVE Love, the most humanistic of feelings, has been described variously over the centuries:
• She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen. –Homer (around 850 B.C.E.)
• There are two days when a woman is a pleasure: the day one mar ries her and the day one buries her. –Hipponax (c. 570–520 B.C.E.)
• Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife. –Euripides (484–406 B.C.E.)
• Sometimes give your services for nothing, calling to mind a previous benefaction or present satisfaction. And if there be an opportunity of serving one who is a stranger in financial straits, give full assistance to all such. For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art. For some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician. –Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.E.)
• I think I had better bathe before I drink the poison, and not give the women the trouble of washing my dead body. –Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.)
• In childhood a woman must be subject to her father; in youth, to her husband; when her husband is dead, to her sons. A woman must never be free of subjugation.
–Hindu Laws of Manu (c. 200 B.C.E.–300 C.E.)
• Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. –David, King of Judah and Israel (c. 1016–976 B.C.E.), lamenting the death of Jonathan, II Samuel I:26
• Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. –Song of Solomon (3rd Century B.C.E.?)
• I hate and I love. Why I do so, perhaps you ask. I do not know, but I feel it and I am in torment. –Catullus (84?–54? B.C.E)
• Love conquers all. –Vergil (70–19 B.C.E)
• Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. –St. John 15:13 (2nd Century C.E.?)
• When you see a woman, consider that you face not a human being, but the devil himself. The woman’s voice is the hiss of the snake. –Saint Anthony, (251?–350)
• When Eve was created, Satan rejoiced.
–Muhammad (570?–632)
• Men are the supporters of women. . . . Good women are therefore obedient. . . . Admonish those women you fear will desert you, and leave them alone in the sleeping places, and beat them. –The Qur’an (651–652)
• . . . in divine matrimony man receives by divine institution the faculty to use his wife for the begetting of children. –Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
• But love a womman that she woot it nought,
And she wol quyte it that thow shalt nat fele; Unknowe, unkist, and lost, that is unsought.
–Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
• Up from the earth I rose with his wings,
And death itself I could have found sweet.
–Michelangelo (1475–1564) from a sonnet to Febo di Poggio, a model and young male prostitute
• I live and love in God’s peculiar light. –Michelangelo (1475–1564)
• Love me, love my dog. –John Heywood (1497–1580)
• Nature doth paint them [women] further to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish; and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel, and lacking the spirit of counsel. –John Knox (c. 1514–1572)
• Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty. . . .
–William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
• Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great. –Comte de Bussy-Rabutin (1618–1693)
• Whatever you do, stamp out abuses, and love those who love you. –Voltaire (1694–1778)
• Friendship is Love without his wings. –Lord Byron (1788–1824)
• Love’s like the measles–all the worse when it comes late in life. –Douglas Jerrold (1803–1857)
• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. –Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
• Faint heart never won fair lady!
Nothing venture, nothing win— Blood is thick, but water’s thin— In for a penny, in for a pound— It’s Love that makes the world go round!
–William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
• Woman was God’s second mistake. . . . Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. –Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
• Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin. –Anatole France (1844-1944)
• I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.
–Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
• Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse. –George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
• Married life presupposes the power of the husband over the wife and children, and subjection and obedience of the wife to the husband. –Pope Pius XI (1857-1939)
• A pushing lady: What are your views on love?
Mme. Leroi:
Love? I make it constantly but I never talk about it. –Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
• The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. –Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
• Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. –Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
• Sappho wrote only of one theme, sang it, laughed it, sighed it, wept it, sobbed it. . . a song of love. –Willa Cather (1876–1947)
• “Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”
“She ain’t no lady; she’s my wife.”
–Joseph Weber and Lew Fields in an 1887 vaudeville routine
• The program of our National Socialist women’s movement contains really only one single point. This point is the child that must come into being that must thrive. –Adolf Hitler (1889–1945)
• As the girl said, “A kiss on the wrist feels good, but a diamond bracelet lasts forever.” –Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
• Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child’s play. –Nancy Mitford (1904–1973)
• Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. –Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980)
• Take my wife . . . please. –Henny Youngman (1906– )
• It’s not only this we praise, it’s the general love:
Let cat’s mew rise to a scream
on the tool-shed roof. –W. H. Auden (1907–1973)
• The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul. –Roman Catholic Encyclopedia (1912)
• Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)
• Each of us who takes a wife does so only for the purpose of bringing children into the world. He is like the farmer who entrusts the soil with his seed and then patiently waits for the crop. –Patriarch Athenagoras (20th Century)
• Love means never having to say you’re sorry. –Erich Segal (1937– )
• I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all, So tell me why should it be true That I get a kick out of you.
–Cole Porter, 1934
• I sleep with Mr. Williams. –Frank Merlo (1922–1963), secretary to Tennessee Williams, when asked by Hollywood mogul Jack Warner, “And what do you do, young man?”
• Crucifixes are sexy because there’s a naked man on them. –Madonna, pop star in the 1990s
• Come on, baby, light my fire. –The Doors, a 20th-Century rock and roll group
• I Wanna Sex You Up. –Color Me Badd (2 million music albums sold, 1993)
• So if you at a show in the front row
I’m a call you a bitch or a dirty-ass ho You probably get mad like a bitch is supposed to . . . So what about the bitch who got shot? Fuck her. You think I give a damn about a bitch?
–N.W.A., “Straight Outta Compton” (1993), an African American musical rap group
• Her body’s beautiful so I’m thinkin’ rape
Shouldn’t have had her curtains open so that’s her fate . . . . Slit her throat and watched her shake.
–The Geto Boys, “Mind of a Lunatic,” (1993) an African American musical rap group
• In the ancient world, romantic love would seem to have been virtually unknown, and rarely celebrated. Our generic term “love” didn’t exist. The sentiment of romantic love as we know it was the homoerotic love of older Greek men for boys; marital love, which surely existed, seems oddly not to have been much honored, at least in surviving literature. Plato’s elaborately extended metaphor of the republic, or the perfectly balanced state, discusses marriage primarily as mating; by contrast, Plato’s “Symposium” celebrates homoerotic love in the most blushingly romantic terms. How different this is from the extramarital erotic attraction of heterosexuals, which results in devastation and violent death. In Euripides’ “Hippolytus,” for instance, the young Queen Phaedra falls in love with her husband’s illegitimate son, who rejects her, and causes her to commit suicide; Phaedra is no romantic, but rather the victim of an ungovernable, unwished-for passion imposed upon her by Aphrodite. Such sexual desire is akin to a curse. . . . Just as the majority of humankind will continue to believe in gods of various denominations when no actual gods have been sighted, so men and women will continue to fall under the spell of romantic love and to shape, or misshape their lives to that end. Biologists may grimly describe for us the mammalian underpinnings of courtship, mating, bonding, fidelity (where there is in fact fidelity)—but, being human, knowing full well as the song warns us that “falling in love with love is falling for make-believe,” we are the species that demands to be lied to, in the nicest ways. –Joyce Carol Oates The New York Times Magazine, 18 April 1999
• It starts when you sink in his arms and ends with your arms in his sink. –Anonymous
• love n [ME, fr. OE lufu; akin to OHG luba love, OE leof dear, L lubere, libere to please] (bef. 12c) . . . (1) : strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties; (2) : attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers; (3) : affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests. . . . (8) a score of zero (as in tennis).
–Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition (1993)
Love, John (1868–1947) Love was a secularist and atheist. He supported Joseph Symes, secretary of the Australian Secularist Association during the time of a factional split and a fight for control of the Melbourne Hall of Science in 1888. {SWW}
Love, Stephen A. (20th Century) Love wrote “And the Truth Shall Make You Free, An Atheist’s Philosophy” (1965). {GS}
Lovecraft, H(oward) P(hillips) (1890–1937) Lovecraft, called “The King of Weird” by Joyce Carol Oates, has been a generally overlooked American writer. Asexual and an atheist, he has been compared favorably with the gothicist Edgar Allan Poe for his grotesque tales. His The Shadow Out of Time (1936) told of a researcher’s body taken over by a member of an ancient race that had lived 150,000,000 years ago, one driven underground by the Great Race of giant living cones from the transgalactic world of Yith. One of the group, in the commandeered body and using ESP routinely, finds in the world he visits big airships and atomic-powered vehicles. Lovecraft is said to have been proud of his life-long atheism, that the Cthulhu Mythos he wrote about was an “anti-mythology,” described by Oates as “an ironic inversion of traditional religious faith. It constitutes an elaborate, detailed working-out of an early recurring fantasy of Lovecraft’s that an entire alien civilization lurks on the underside of the known world: as a ‘night-gaunt’ may lurk beneath a child’s bed in the darkness, or as mankind’s tragically divided nature may lurk beneath civilization’s veneer.” In the Cthulhu Mythos were no “gods,” just displaced extra-terrestrial beings, the Great Old Ones, leading to his view that deluded human beings mistake the Great Old Ones and their descendants for gods, worshiping them out of ignorance. Like Poe, Oates has written, Lovecraft “set forth an aesthetics of the art to which, by temperament, and family history, he was fated. (Lovecraft’s frequently updated essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ [1927] is a pioneering effort in tracing the history of the gothic sensibility from Ann Radcliffe, Hugh Walpole, ‘Monk’ Lewis, and Charles Maturin through Emily Brontë, Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft’s contemporaries Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, and others.) Both tried to sell their writing and editing skills in a debased and demeaning marketplace, with little financial reward, burning themselves out in the process. Both were beset by dreams, nightmares, ‘visions.’ Both entered upon brief, disastrous marriages (though there are bleakly comical overtones to Lovecraft’s marriage to a woman seven years his elder.) Both left no heirs. Both died prematurely. Poe at forty, Lovecraft at forty-six, having egregiously mistreated their bodies.” For him, “weird fiction” is a product of an age that has ceased to believe collectively in the supernatural but still retaining the primitive instinct to do so. S. T. Joshi almost single-handedly has kept his work in the public eye. His H. P. Lovecraft: A Life (1996) was preceded by his editing of Lovecraft’s fiction: The Dunwich Horror and Others; At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels; Dagon and Other Macabre Tales; Miscellaneous Writings; and five volumes of Selected Letters. Lovecraft was so unattractive that he is said to have hidden from everyone and did not like to walk where people would gaze at him. Following his father’s death from syphilis, Lovecraft wore his deceased father’s clothes. As a child he repudiated his mother’s family’s Baptist faith. Although he had stark, melancholy eyes, had a peculiar and stiff conduct, and wore “archaic” clothes, Sonia Greene, a writer-businesswoman, fell in love with him, and he consented to marry her. However, the marriage failed and after two years she asked for a divorce. Lovecraft is said to have been kind, patient, generous, unassuming, and gentlemanly in his personal relations, but in keeping with his Tory sensibility Oates found that he was an anti-Semite (despite his affection for Sonia Greene and other Jewish friends), racist, and an all-purpose Aryan bigot. Like Poe, Lovecraft died with the self-estimate that his life had been a failure. Little could he have imagined that Lovecraft’s Best Supernatural Tales would one day sell more than 67,000 copies in hardcover in a single year. Lovecraft is buried in Providence, Rhode Island’s Swan Point Cemetery, his granite monument simply inscribed with name and vital dates. {Joyce Carol Oates, “The King of Weird,” The New York Review of Books, 31 October 1996}
Lovejoy, Arthur Oncken (1873–1962) Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian. He founded and was the first editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas. He made a distinction between the history of a philosophical system and the history of an idea—which may be shared by different systems and unlike the system may originate in or influence areas far removed from philosophy. His work argued for and encouraged an interdisciplinary approach in the study of philosophy, history, literature, and science. Lovejoy translated Bergson. His dissent from the creeds, which he wrote about in the Hibbert Journal (January 1907), stated that Christianity would be “invaluable” if it were stripped of its “historical elements,” or characteristic doctrines. {CE; RAT}
James Lovelock, Atmospheric Scientist science
James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory, was interviewed by Lawrence E. Joseph in the August 17, 2000 edition of Salon Magazine.
LEJ: E.O. Wilson has called for a spiritualization of the environmental movement. He says we need to invest some of the passion now reserved for traditional religion into caring for our environment.
JL: I agree wholeheartedly. I am a great admirer of his. I especially like Wilson's characterization of human beings as unfortunate tribal carnivores that have acquired intelligence.
LEJ: But Wilson is an atheist. So isn't he saying, in essence, "Here's what everyone else should believe?"
JL: I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.
Lovett, Robert Morss (1870–1956) Morse was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. A University of Chicago professor of English, he wrote Edith Wharton (1950), a critical study. He also wrote A Preface to Fiction (1930), the play Cowards (1914), and an autobiography, All Our Years (1948). He edited The Dial (1919) and was long an associate editor of The New Republic. A distinguished literary figure, Lovett signed Humanist Manifesto I. {HM1; FUS}
Low, Clarence Harry (1884–1970?) Low, who was treasurer of the New York Democratic State Committee from 1934 to 1941, was on the advisory board of Charles Francis Potter’s First Humanist Society of New York. {HNS}
Low, David [Sir] (1891–1963) Low, a freethinker, was a vice president in England of the National Council for Civil Liberties. {TRI}
Lowder, Jeffery Jay (20th Century) Lowder, a freethinker and officer at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, spoke in 1996 at a meeting of the Alabama Freethought Association. He is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. An activist on behalf of freethought, he and Brett Lemoine in 1995 started Internet Infidels, a major site for nontheists on the World Wide Web: <http://www.infidels.org>.
Lowe, Ian (1942– ) Lowe is an Australian humanist and scientist. Since 1980 he has been director of the Science Policy Research Centre. Active in environmental groups, he is a member of the Council of Australian Consumers’ Association and Scientists Against Nuclear Arms. In 1988, Lowe was awarded Humanist of the Year. {SWW}
Lowell, Amy (1874–1925) An imagist poet, Lowell received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1925 for Whot’s o’Clock. Independent and defiant of social norms, the unmarried and lesbian poet enjoyed a good cigar and credited Ada Dwyer Russell, an actress, with giving her the emotional support she needed. A unitarian in her outlook, she was quite the nonconformist. In What’s o’Clock (1925), she wrote, “I know that a creed is the shell of a lie.” “Her confirmation as a member of Trinity Church did not last long,” Jean Gould writes in the biography, Amy (1975). “She renounced conventional Christianity after a few years. . . . She would declare herself an atheist, although she was more of an agnostic. . . . Amy became convinced through her own sufferings and those of others that the god of this world, if there was one, was a devil and she did not hesitate to reject demonstration of deity.” Further, she stipulated “that there be no formal funeral or gathering, and no religious service.” A collateral descendant of James Russell Lowell, she is identified with the literary movement of Imagism and, after Ezra Pound, became its main leader. Imagists advocated freedom in choosing subject matter, use of common speech, new rhythmic forms, concentration, and bringing about images in hard, clear common speech, precision, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration. Its adherents wrote for Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Although D. H. Lawrence and others were attracted, language teachers in general have had trouble explaining to neophyte poets why a work has to have complete sentences, in order to communicate, when the imagists got by using fragments like . . .
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, Lilac in me because I am New England.
Exceptionally obese and suffering ill health brought on by an injury suffered while lifting a buggy out of a ditch, Lowell died of a stroke. {CE; EG; GL; TYD; U; UU}
Lowell, C. Stanley (20th Century) Lowell, a freethinker, wrote The Great Church-State Fraud (1973) and The Religious Empire (1976). {GS}
Lowell, James Russell (1819–1891) A professor of modern languages at Harvard, an abolitionist, and a minister to Spain and Great Britain, Lowell was a Unitarian and the son of Unitarian minister Charles Lowell. “Toward no crimes,” Lowell once wrote, “have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.” He also declared, “It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest.” While minister to London from 1877 to 1885, he influenced European opinion as to the growing stature of American letters and institutions. A Fable for Critics (1848), The Bigelow Papers (1848 and 1867), and The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848) are among his best works. Also, he was an editor of The North American Review and was the first editor of Atlantic Monthly (1857–1861). McCabe found that Lowell did not believe in a future life and, when Howells asked him whether he still believed in “a moral government of the universe,” Lowell replied evasively that “the scale is so vast and we see so little of it,” an admission of his agnosticism. {CE; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TYD; U; UU}
Lowell, John A. (1798–1881) Lowell, the founder of Boston’s Lowell Institute, was a Unitarian. {U}
Lowell, Josephine Shaw (1843–1905) Lowell was appointed by New York Governor Samuel Jones Tilden to the State Board of Charities, becoming its first woman commissioner. He had admired her interest in improving the conditions of mentally retarded women and women in trouble. Lowell came from a family of dedicated Unitarians and was friends with actress Fanny Kemble, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Her marriage in 1863 to Colonel Charles Russell Lowell ended a year later when he was killed in battle. General Sheridan had said of her husband, “He was the perfection of a man and a soldier.” Mrs. Lowell’s brother, Robert Gould Shaw, was leader of the black 54th Massachusetts Regiment. {EG}
Lowell, Maria White (19th Century) Lowell, the wife of poet James Russell Lowell, was an ardent abolitionist and liberal who encouraged her husband in his work. She was a Unitarian.
Lowell, Percival (1855–1916) A distinguished astronomer, Lowell spent ten years in Japan where he learned to disdain Christianity and became an agnostic. His sentiments are expressed in his Soul of the Far East (1886). {JM; RE}
Lowell, Robert (1917–1977) According to David Tribe, Lowell became an outright freethinker. The American poet, whose work was richly symbolic and often autobiographical, was influenced by “new critic” John Crowe Ransom. “The kind of poet I am was largely determined by the fact that I grew up in the heyday of the New Criticism,” Lowell wrote in the Kenyon Collegian (1974). “From the beginning I was preoccupied with technique, fascinated by the past, tempted by other languages.” Upon marrying his first wife, the novelist Jean Stafford, Lowell became a fanatical convert to Roman Catholicism, but his Land of Unlikeness (1944) betrays the conflict of Catholicism and his Boston ancestry. In the Second World War, he was jailed for six months as a conscientious objector. His second wife was Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell reached the height of his public fame during his opposition to the Vietnam war and support of Senator Eugene McCarthy. He then married the writer Caroline Blackwood in 1973, and his later work is said to have indicated a philosophic acceptance of life and the world In 1946 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Lord Weary’s Castle, and he received another Pulitzer in 1973 for The Dolphin. Humanists have highly praised his translation of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (1969). {TRI}
Lowen, Jeanette (20th Century) Lowen is a secularist who has written in Free Inquiry about the humanism of Albert Camus. She is author of Imagine a World Without Boundaries and Anger in Twentieth-Century American Living. Löwith, Karl (20th Century) Löwith wrote Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (1935) during the days of National Socialist Germany. Harvey Lomax in 1997 translated the work, which H. James Birx (Philo Spring-Summer 1998) has called a key work that “presents a clear, focused, scholarly, and level-headed analysis and evaluation of the great philosopher’s awesome and central concept of the eternal recurrence. Löwith often lets Nietzsche speak for himself, but this does not detract from a splendid presentation of the controversial thinker’s system of ideas. Special attention is given to Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885), which Löwith points out is Nietzsche’s major work.”
Lowry, Michael (20th Century) Lowry, while a student at the University of Texas in Austin, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Loynes, Paul E. (20th Century) Loynes is a contributing editor to the Secular Humanist Bulletin.
Lozano, Fernando (19th Century) In Madrid, Spain, Lozano edited Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento from 1894 to 1910. He used the pseudonym “Demófilo.” He also wrote Battles of Freethought, Possessed by the Devil, and The Church and Galeote. {BDF; RAT}
Lubar, Katherine (20th Century) Lubar is the women’s contact for tht English Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association. E-mail: <KatLubar@compuserve.com>.
Lubbock, John [Sir] (1834–1913) Lubbock was a banker, an archeologist, a scientist, and a statesman. He wrote Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains, and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savage (1865) and The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man (1870). {BDF; RAT}
Lucas, George W. Jr. (1944- ) Lucas is the film director whose financially successful works include being director of “Star Wars” (1977) and its companion films about the distant future. He told Time that he put the Force into “The Phantom Menace” (1999) “to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people.” Asked if he believed in a higher being, he said, “I think there is a God. No question. What that God is or what we know about that God, I’m not sure.” Edward Sorel, a freethinker known for his satire and art, was so amused by the answer that he wrote (The Nation, 7 June 1999), “Contrary to rumors that circulated before the film opened, God is not the phantom menace referred to in the movie title.”
Lucas, H. (19th Century) Lucas was a freethinker who wrote “The Revolution Which Began in Heaven, or Coela-Tartaraterra” (1850). {GS}
Lucas, Helen M. (20th Century) Lucas wrote A View of Lambert’s “Notes on Ingersoll” (1909). {GS}
Lucas, Jeff (20th Century) Lucas is treasurer of Internet Infidels. E-mail: <jlucas@infidels.org>.
Luchaire, Achille (1846–1908) Luchaire taught mediaeval history at Paris University. He wrote the six-volume Innocent III (1904-1908) and France at the Time of Philippe Augustus (1912), the latter work a refutation of the myth of mediaeval virtue, piety, and chivalry. Luchaire was a rationalist. {RE}
Lucian (c. 125–180) A Greek prose writer, also called Lucianus, Lucian wrote masterly Attic prose in which he satirized Olympian fables and exposed the ineptitude of contemporary philosophers. Rabelais and Swift claimed they were greatly influenced by him. The Montreal critic M. Morgan Holmes has pointed out that Lucian, in Dialogues of the Gods, describes Zeus’s “pederastic infatuation with the lunkheaded Ganymede . . . in keeping with the sensuality of the heterosexual gods. Lucius, or the Ass includes a rollicking tale of priests who capture a village youth and force him to have sex with them, thus making a minor point on moral hypocrisy.” In A True Story, Lucian describes a voyage to the moon where it is found there are no women and where marriage and procreation is between men under twenty-five. But moonmen do not have an anus, so intercourse is through an opening above the calf, and new men are thus conceived in the thigh. Alternately, ‘tree people’ emerge from acorns that grow on enormous penis-shaped trees of flesh produced by the planting of right testicles in the ground.” When Marcus Aurelius appointed the freethinking Lucian to a post of high authority in Egypt, Aurelius showed that Lucian’s writings gave no great offense at court, where, reports Robertson, “religious seriousness was rare.” According to Suidas, Lucian was named “the blasphemer” and torn to pieces by dogs for his impiety, but Wheeler reports Suidas was wishful-thinking. On the ground of his dialogue Philopatris, Lucian has been supposed an apostate Christian, but Wheeler states that work may not be genuine. What is known is that Lucian was skeptical, truth-loving, and an enemy of the superstition of the time, which he depicts in his account of Alexander, the false prophet. Thomas Wise in A confutation of the reason and philosophy of atheism (1706) attempted to repress the fact that Lucian was atheistic. His works have contemporary overtones:
• We were all drunk but Akindynos and so Akindynos seemed the only drunkard of us all.
• O lovely Whiskers O inspirational Mop! But if growing a beard, my friend, means acquiring wisdom, any old goat can be Plato. {BDF; CE; GL; HAB; JMR; JMRH}
Luciani, Luigi (Born 1842) Luciani succeeded Moleschott as professor of physiology at Rome University and Director of the Physiological Institute. His Localizationi funzionali del cervello (1885) was crowned by the Lombard Institute. A Senator, a Commander of the Orders of S. S. Lazarus and Maurice and the Crown of Italy, Luciani also is a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. His views resemble those of Moleschott and are of a materialist tendency. {RAT}
Lucifer Lucifer is the planet Venus, or the morning star, “the bringer (or herald) of the light.” In Latin, luc- and lux refer to light, and -fer means ferous. In addition, the word became a theological invention referring to an archangel who was cast from Heaven into Hell because he rebelled against God. Lucifer is usually identified with Satan. Because the name Lucifer means “bearer of light” or “morning star,” apologeticians explain that this refers to his former splendor as the greatest of the angels. Meanwhile, for freethinkers and humanists, Lucifer is the planet Venus. {DCL; RE}
Lucilius, Gaius (c 180–102 B.C.E.?) Lucilius, the Latin satiric poet and founder of Latin satire, influenced Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. His works contain pungent wit and humanistic sentiment not unlike that heard in contemporary times (and as shown in a translation by Dudley Fitts):
• Darling, at the Beautician’s you buy Your [a] hair [b] complexion [c] lips [d] dimples, & [e] teeth. For a like amount you could just as well buy a face. • When as in sleep the slender Artemidôra lay, Demetrios fanned her with an ostrich-plume, & Blew her clean out of the house.
• Firmly, as with one voice,
The entire Faculty of the College of Applied Astrology Foretold a healthy old age for my father’s brother. Hermokleidês alone Maintained that he would die young;
but he made this statement
At the funeral service we held for my father’s brother.
{CE}
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) (c. 96–c. 55 B.C.E.) In De Rerum Natura, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius wrote, “Nothing can be created out of nothing” and “Tantus religio potuit suadere malorum” [So much wrong could religion induce]. Little is known of Lucretius, some of whose works were destroyed. St. Jerome alleges that Lucretius produced his didactic masterpiece—six books totaling 7,400 hexameter lines—in a fit of madness, culminating in suicide. Thoughtfully, states Antony Flew in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief, “the saint added that his affliction was the result of taking a poisoned love philtre.” Flew explains that what Jerome held against Lucretius was that his work expounds the most coherent system of materialism in the ancient world, that of Epicurus. Hobbes agreed, that stuff is all there is and that everything which is not stuff is nonsense. Stuff consists of atoms. All our knowledge of all there is must, therefore, be based upon sensory perception. Although Aristotle did not accept his theory, Lucretius developed Leucippus’s and Democritus’s idea that matter is composed of tiny, indivisible particles in constant motion. It was not until the 18th century that the atomic theory was updated, and in 1808 John Dalton held that all the atoms of an element are of exactly the same size and weight. During the French Revolution, Maréchal cited Lucretius as being one of the greatest atheists of all time. According to Robertson, On the Nature of Things, “with its enthusiastic exposition of the doctrine of Epicurus, remains to show to what a height of sincerity and ardour a Roman freethinker could rise. No Greek utterance that has come down to us makes so direct and forceful an attack as his on religion as a social institution. He is practically the first systematic freethinking propagandist; so full is he of his purpose that after his stately prologue to alma Venus, who is for him but a personification of the genetic forces of Nature, he plunges straight into his impeachment of religion as a foul tyranny from which thinking men were first freed by Epicurus.” A contemporary who has been significantly influenced by Lucretius is novelist Gore Vidal who, in Palimpsest (1995), told how Lucretius anticipated Darwin by two thousand years. Lucretius reasoned, “For it is not true as I think, that the race of mortal creatures [man] were let down from on high by some golden chain,” to which Vidal added, “So much for the antique notion of Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth to create human beings or the peculiarly silly story of Adam and Eve believed by so many of my countrymen.” Vidal continued: “Lucretius is aware—how, I wonder?—that we evolved. I’ve often quoted his law that nothing can come from nothing, but wonder about his corollary that nothing can go to nothing since, if the it is transitive—the going, that is—then it must be something and so, by definition, not nothing.” Further, Vidal notes, Lucretius was a “proto-ecologist, fretting about overpopulation. Nature ‘of her own accord first made for mortals the bright corn and the luxuriant vineyards of herself; she gave forth sweet fruits and luxuriant pasturage,’ but now ‘we exhaust our oxen and the strength of our farmers, we wear out the plow share, and then are scarce fed by our fields’; man seems congenitally unaware that ‘all things gradually decay, and go to the reef of destruction, outworn by the ancient lapse of years.’ Thus he anticipates,” wrote Vidal, “the second law of thermodynamics, not to mention giddy entropy.” Christians generally frown upon Lucretius’s work, calling it the ravings of a mad man. Many philosophers, however, are favorably impressed by his sociology or philosophy of history. Wheeler wrote of Lucretius, “Full of animation, dignity, and sublimity, he invests philosophy with the grace of genius.” McCabe, taking Lucretius literally rather than figuratively, finds it interesting “that Lucretius seems to take seriously Epicurus’ idea of gods, more or less of the Olympian type but respectable, living a lotus-life in some remote part of space.” Others take Lucretius’ ideas figuratively, not literally. (See entries for Death and for Gore Vidal.) {BDF; CE; CL; EU; ER; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RE; TSV; TYD}
Lucy The oldest known freethinking naturalistic humanist? That could be Lucy, the skeleton found in 1974 and estimated by geologists to be 3.2 million years old, plus or minus 10,000 years. Named for the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” and inarguably not a theist, Lucy has been exhibited in various galleries but rests permanently in a wooden box in a safe in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. (See entries for Catopithecus, Donald Carl Johanson, and Paleontology.)
LUDDITES Luddites oppose technical or technological changes. Named after Ned Ludd, or King Ludd, who allegedly destroyed knitting machines in an English industrial center, the group rioted between 1811 and 1816 in Nottinghamshire because of low wages and prevailing unemployment. This they attributed to machinery. In the 1990s, some Luddites have fled to the woods and have replaced items in column one with those in column two, according to Bob Ickes in New York (24 July 1995):
voice mail secretary rollerblading jogging computer spellcheck proofreaders supermarkets farmer greenmarkets computer chess chess halogen lamps beeswax candles faxes messengers tele-democracy town meetings digital watches watches that need winding electric mowers mowers that are pushed touchtone telephones rotary phones cybersex sex laptop computers typewriters with 43 gravity-controlled keys
Lüdemann, Gerd (20th Century) Lüdemann is a professor of New Testament Studies at the University of Göttingen, Germany. In The Great Deception, and What Jesus Really Said and Did (1999), he charges that church authorities have long covered up historical evidence about Jesus. Jesus, he holds, was an inspiring person. However, those Christians who cannot separate what he authentically said and did are lending support to falsehoods that make traditional Christianity unbelievable. The German Confederation of Protestant Churches in Lower Saxony demanded Lüdemann’s dismissal from the theological faculty, and although he has retained his university post the chair he holds had to be renamed to disassociate him from the training program of German pastors.
Ludendorff, Erich (General) (1865–1937) A German political leader, Ludendorff in a 1935 press interview stated, “I am not merely an opponent of Christianity; I am a heathen—and proud of it.” {TYD}
Ludovici, Anthony (Born 1882) Ludovici, an artist and illustrator, became interested in Nietzsche and translated six of Nietzsche’s works. In 1910 he wrote Nietzsche and in 1911 Nietzsche and Art. Ludovici shared Nietzsche’s view of religion. {RAT}
Ludvigh, Samuel (19th Century)
In New York and Baltimore, Ludvigh edited Fackel in the 1840s.
Ludwig, Emil (1881–1948) Ludwig, a German biographer (said to have written unreliable portraits of Goethe, Napoleon, and Bismarck), wrote of his pantheism:
Son of a naturalist and humanist, I was brought up in the precepts of neither Moses nor Jesus. Moral values were self-evident. . . . And why salvation? From what? The thought of man’s fall and his original sin as the medium between God and myself, as well as the whole conception of a transfigured Son of God who will save me from the hell burning beneath paradise: this is alien to me. I have never disturbed this belief in others, nor have I envied them for it. To me Jesus—whom I later was to represent as a fighter and prophet—was as worthy of reverence as Socrates, because he died for truth, as men are doing again today. Goethe spoke the daring words, “The conviction of my continuation after death springs from my belief in action. For if I continue to work ceaselessly until my death, then nature is obliged to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer house my spirit.” The force of this argument impressed me even in my youth, and I have arrived at similar sources of a faith which rests, fundamentally, upon realistic forms. On this account my belief is all the more easily associated with a pantheism which sees God in all manifestations of nature, whether peopled with discrete gods or seen as one all-inherent spirit. . . . I recognize God in the logical construction of a crystal no less than in that of a Bach fugue. I see God in the pleading look of a dog as well as in the lovely bosom of a woman. I find him in the iridescent wings of a butterfly, and in the early-morning frost which means its death. . . . I see him in a playful kitten which seeks its play-fellow in the mirror, and in the murderous eyes with which it follows the movements of a robin. I recognize God in the inspiration which he sends me as if in a dream, and in the long labor by which I must carry it out. . . . {CE; GS}
Ludwig, Ernst Ludwig (1839–1903) A German writer who used the pen name of “Carus Sterne,” Ludwig [sometimes called Krause] became well-known for his scientific works on evolution, chiefly Werden und Vergehen (Growth and Decay, 1876). In 1863, he wrote The Natural History of Ghosts. With Haeckel, Otto Caspari, and Gustav Jaeger, he established in 1877 the monthly magazine Kosmos, in which appeared the germ of his little book on Erasmus Darwin and to which Charles Darwin wrote a preliminary notice. BDF; RAT; RE}
Luetzelberger, Ernst Karl Julius (Born 1802) Luetzelberger was a German controversialist, a friend of the Feuerbachs. He wrote on The Church Tradition of the Apostle John and a work on Jesus, which was translated in Ewerbeck’s Qu’est ce que la Religion. In 1856, Luetzelberger was appointed town librarian at Nuremberg. {BDF}
Lugg, George Wilson (Born 1902) Lugg was a freethinker who wrote Religion? No! Good Living? Yes! (1980). {GS}
Luik, John (20th Century) A professor of philosophy at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, Luik is one of the editors of The Question of Humanism, Challenges and Possibilities (1991).
Lukács, György (20th Century) A Marxist, Lukács termed his outlook that of humanism.
Lumet, Sidney (1924– ) Lumet is a noted film director who was once married to Gloria Vanderbilt. As a child he appeared in “Dead End” (1935), “George Washington Slept Here” (1940–1941), and “My Heart’s in the Highlands” (1939). He has directed over two hundred television plays and such movies as “Twelve Angry Men” (1957); “Stage Struck” (1958) “A View from the Bridge” (1961); “Long Days Journey into Night” (1962); “The Pawnbroker” (1965); “The Anderson Tapes” (1971); “Serpico” (1974); “Garbo Talks” (1984); and “Critical Care” (1997), the latter a satire about American medicine. With Alfred A. Knopf, he wrote Making Movies (1995). Asked by reporter David Wallis, “When you die, how do you want to go out?”, Lumet responded,
I don’t think about it. I’m not religious. I do know that I don’t want to take up any space. Burn me up and scatter my ashes over Katz’s Delicatessen. {The New York Times Magazine,
23 November 1997}
Lumet, Sidney (25 Jun 1924 - ) Lumet is a noted film director who was once married to Gloria Vanderbilt. As a child he appeared in Dead End (1935), George Washington Slept Here (1940–1941), and My Heart’s in the Highlands (1939). He has directed over two hundred television plays and such movies as Twelve Angry Men (1957); Stage Struck (1958) A View from the Bridge (1961); Long Days Journey into Night (1962); The Pawnbroker (1965); The Anderson Tapes (1971); Serpico (1974); Garbo Talks (1984); and Critical Care (1997), the latter a satire about American medicine. With Alfred A. Knopf, he wrote Making Movies (1995). Asked by reporter David Wallis, “When you die, how do you want to go out?”, Lumet responded,
I don’t think about it. I’m not religious. I do know that I don’t want to take up any space. Burn me up and scatter my ashes over Katz’s Delicatessen. {The New York Times Magazine, 23 November 1997}
Lumis, Daylene (20th Century) Lumis is secretary of the Humanist Association of Canada. She is a Montessori school administrator and teacher in Hamilton.
Lunacharsky, Anatole (1875–1933) A member of the Union of Militant Atheists, Lunacharsky took part in the 1936 conference of the World Union of Freethinkers. {TRI}
Lundberg, George (20th Century) Lundberg, who taught philosophy at the University of Washington, was a naturalist and a this-worldly rather than an other-worldly person.
Lundqvist, Alfred (Born 1860) A Swedish writer, Lundqvist lost a scholarship at the university by translating from the Danish a rationalistic life of Christ. He then took to journalism and joined the active rationalist movement. For translating a pamphlet by Joseph Symes, Lundqvist was once imprisoned one month. {RAT}
Lundy, John (19th Century) Lundy, in 1882, wrote Monumental Christianity, or the Art and Symbolism of the Primitive Church (1882). {GS}
Lunn, Arnold (20th Century) With C. E. M. Joad, Lunn wrote Is Christianity True? (1933). {GS}
Lunn, Edwin (19th Century) Lunn was an Owenite lecturer. He published pamphlets such as “On Prayer, Its Folly, Inutility, etc.” (1839) and “Divine Revelation Examined” (1841). {BDF}
Luoma, Martti (20th Century) Dr. Luoma, from Finland, addressed the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Hannover (1968).
Lusky, Louis (20th Century) An attorney in Louisville, Kentucky, Lusky was a reviewer of books for The Humanist when his friend Priscilla Robertson was the editor. He wrote By What Right? A Commentary on the Supreme Court’s Power to Reverse the Constitution (1975) and worked valiantly on behalf of American Civil Liberties Union causes. {WAS, interview 1956}
LUST Although freethinkers consider sexual craving normal, lust to some is a disordered desire for or inordinate enjoyment of sexual pleasure. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.” President Jimmy Carter, in an ingenuous admission for a Baptist Sunday School teacher, stated that he, too, had lusted in his heart. Freethinkers endearingly speak of their “lust for life” and feel no need to apologize for sizing up others’ body parts or for fantasizing about what they might jocularly term “making the nasty.” (See entry for Adultery.)
Lustig, Vera (20th Century) Lustig, in “Holier Than Thou” (New Humanist, August 1994), notes that religious education “is of course both a politically and culturally sensitive issue; and one about which we seldom consult the young people themselves.” The Belgians, she reported, have an anti-discrimination law that states that “Nobody should be forced to participate in any way in acts of worship.” In England, however, Muslim girls are segregated. Lustig describes herself as “a secular Jew.”
Lutes, Della (1872–1942) Lutes, a little-known novelist, wrote a little-known work, Gabriel’s Search, about a nineteenth century agnostic pioneer. The Country Kitchen (1936), about Michigan life in the 1870s and 1880s, was a best seller.
Luther, Martin (1483–1546) Unable to convert the Jews to Protestantism, Luther described them as “this insufferable devilish burden.” His solution was to encourage that their homes and synagogues be burned, their prayer books and property taken away, and their movements severely restricted. Meanwhile, in his 1513 study of the Scriptures, particularly St. Paul, Luther found a loving God who bestowed upon sinful humans the free gift of salvation, received by faith alone, and not by works. But as for man, “We have altogether a confounded, corrupt, and poisoned nature, both in body and soul; throughout the whole of man is nothing that is good,” he pronounced. A 1994 statement by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America admitted that “in ‘The Jews and Their Lies’ (1543), Luther called for Jewish homes and synagogues to be destroyed, for prayer books to be seized, and for rabbis to be forbidden to teach.” The group, however, continued to honor his “bold stand for truth, his earthy and sublime words of wisdom and, above all, his witness to God’s saving Word.” Erasmus’s Freedom of the World (1524) contained an attack on Luther’s doctrine of the enslaved will, leading to Luther’s break with the humanists of the day. Married (1525) to a former nun, Katharina von Bora, he raised six children. He was a bitter opponent of Desiderius Erasmus, who, unlike Luther, remained a Catholic. {CE; ER; RE}
LUTHERAN CHURCH–MISSOURI SYNOD The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, organized in 1847, is at 1333 South Kirkwood Road, St. Louis, Missouri 63122 and represents over 2,500,000 members. (See entry for Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.)
Luttrell, Henry (1857–1918) Luttrell entered the Irish Parliament in 1798, but in 1802 he went to the West Indies to manage his father’s estates. A natural son of Earth Carhampton, he returned to London and was a frequent guest at Holland House. Greville said of him that he was “one of the most accomplished men of his time,” an “honourable and high-minded gentleman,” and “a sceptic in religion.” {RAT}
LUXEMBOURG HUMANISTS AND JOURNALS ADMD-L Bulletin, a quarterly in French and German of the Association pour le Droit de Mourir dans la Dignité, is at 50 Boulevard J. F. Kennedy, L-4170 Esch-Alzette, Luxembourg. La Voix de la Libre Pensée/Das Freie Wort (Freethinker) is a publication in French and German of La Libre Pensée Luxembourgeoise, B. Postale 198, L-2011 Luxembourg. The Union Radical-Humaniste Luxembourgeoise is at 39 Rue de Hollerich, 1741 Luxembourg, Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
Luxemburg, Rosa (1871–1919) Luxemburg, an atheist, was one of the founders of the Polish Socialist Party (1892). She acquired German citizenship through marriage and became a leader in the German Social Democratic Party. Upon becoming a Marxist, she was forced to flee to Switzerland. In 1905, Luxemburg participated in the 1905 revolution in Russian Poland and was active in the Second International. With Karl Liebknecht, Luxemburg formed the German Spartacus Party. Both, while being taken to prison, were killed by soldiers. In 1995, legions of Berliners marched through eastern Berlin to honor the two martyrs of the left. Luxemburg is remembered as having been critical of Lenin in his triumph, foreseeing his dictatorship over the proletarian and predicting that his control would become permanent. {CE}
Luys, Jules Bernard (Born 1828)
Luys was a French alienist, a physician at l’Hopital de la Charité in Paris. He wrote The Brain and Its Functions in the International Scientific Series. {BDF}
Luz y Caballero, José (1812–1862) Luz y Caballero, working with Father Félix Varela, is credited in Cuba with attacking scholasticism, promoting liberal principles, and introducing the rationalist philosophy that would enrich the intellectual life. {EU}
Lwoff, André Michel (1902–1994) In 1965 Lwoff shared with Jacques Monod and François Jacob the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. The three were among the pioneers of modern molecular biology. They showed how some genes control the function of others in regulating the cell’s metabolism. According to science editor Walter Sullivan, they found “that while one type of gene in the nucleus of a cell contains blueprints for the substances to be made, another type of gene regulates the rate of production of these substances.” Lwoff joined the Pasteur Institute in 1921, and he studied the role of vitamins, finding that some function as vital aids to enzymes. He also studied viruses that infect bacteria, helping lay the basis for much of modern biology. From 1959 to 1968 Dr. Lwoff, who earned doctorates in both medicine and science, taught microbiology at the Sorbonne. Until 1972, he directed the Institute for Scientific Research on Cancer at Villejuif. He was known, according to Le Monde, as an opponent of capital punishment but a lover of painting, music, sculpture, and “those things that awaken the spirit.” Dr. Lwoff edited Origins of Molecular Biology (1979). The son of a father who was a psychiatrist and a mother who was a sculptor, both of whom had fled czarist Russia, Dr. Lwoff was a distinguished Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism.
Lyall, Alfred Comyn [Sir] (1835–1911) Lyall, a statesman, rose to the position of British Governor of the Northwest Provinces of India. His contact with Asia changed his earlier Christian belief, and he wrote a poem, “Theology in Extremis,” which McCabe describes as “the highbrow way of saying ‘The Church at its Wit’s End.’ ” In his retirement the Right Honorable Sir Alfred was a friend of the rationalist, Clodd, who tells in his memoirs that Lyall was an agnostic. {JM; RAT}
Lyczynski, Kazimierz (1634-1689) A Polish atheist, Lyczynski wrote De non existentia Dei (Of God’s Non-existence). For his non-belief, he was executed. {Finngeir Hiorth, New Humanist, December 1998}
Lydon, John [Johnny Rotten] (20th Century) Lydon is a recording artist best known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. On the liner notes of a 1992 single, “Cruel,” he included,
Where is God? I see no evidence of God. God is probably Barry Manilow. {CA} Lydon, John [Johnny Rotten] (31 Jan 1956 - ) Lydon is a recording artist best known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. On the liner notes of a 1992 single, “Cruel,” he included,
Where is God? I see no evidence of God. God is probably Barry Manilow.
Lyell, Charles [Sir] (1797–1875) A British geologist, Lyell influenced geologists of his time and also those of later periods. A popularizer of scientific ideas, he won general acceptance for James Hutton’s theory of uniformitarianism, which is in opposition to catastrophism. The latter holds that at intervals in the earth’s history all living things have been destroyed, as for example by floods or earthquakes, then replaced by an entirely different population—the theory correlated with some religious doctrines, such as the Mosaic account of the Flood. His work facilitated later acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and among his important contributions was the division of the Tertiary period into the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene epochs. Sir Charles was a member in London of the Unitarian Church called Little Portland Street. According to McCabe, Lyell was a theist until 1870, at which time he rejected all Christian doctrines and the belief in immortality and merely thought it “probable” that there was some sort of “Supreme Intelligence.” But he had no tenderness for theology at any time, as is shown in the Life, Letters, and Journals of Sir C. Lyell (1881, 2 volumes). {BDF; CE; FUS; JM; RAT; TRI; U; UU}
Lyle-Wilson, Kimberly (20th Century) Lyle-Wilson is president in Georgia of the Atlanta Freethought Society.
Lynch, Arthur (20th Century) During the South African War, Lynch held a commission in the Boer forces and was prosecuted. He since has been M. P. for West Clare. In his Religio Athletae (1895), he disdains all religion but the cult of the beautiful. His chief work is Psychology: A New System (2 volumes, 1912). {RAT}
Lynch, Joe (20th Century) Lynch, while a student at the University of Houston in Texas, was one of the founding members of Campus Freethought Alliance. {International Humanist News, December 1996}
Lyngzeidetson, Albert E. (20th Century) Lyngzeidetson, who was a former chairman of the board of Atheists of Florida, spoke in Toronto at the 1994 Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT) saying, “We need to face the destructive aspect of the Christian right.” His advice was that humanists must take the moral high ground and proclaim that the principles of liberal democracy and tolerance are basic to society, that humanists need a positive message emphasizing that atheism can lead to a good life. A professor of philosophy and psychology at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, he is the author of The Meaning of Atheism and The Challenge of the Christian Right and “The Meaning and Purpose of Atheism” (Secular Nation, Fall 1994). (See “The Threat to the Atheists’ Good Life,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995–1996.)
Lynn, Ken (20th Century) Lynn and his wife Monica Madden-Lynn are active members of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. He is an Air Force officer who has written articles in Freethought Today. {Freethought Today, October 1997 and January-February 1998}
Lynn, Loretta (1935– ) Lynn is an entertainer cited by Paul Edwards in Reincarnation as being a believer in reincarnation.
Lyons, Lois (20th Century) Lyons is president of the Humanist Association of Los Angeles.
Lyons, Sherrie (20th Century) Lyons is a contributing editor on Philo.
LYSISTRATA Lysistrata is a favorite fictional character among freethinkers and humanists. Aristophanes in 411 B.C.E. devised her character in order to encourage pacifism. In his satire, Lysistrata, Aristophanes suggested that women of Sparta and Athens could stop war by boycotting their husband-soldiers and not having sex until they agreed to stop fighting. Plato is said to have died with Aristophanes’s works under his pillow. {CE; DCL}
Lyttle, Charles H(arold) (20th Century) Lyttle was one of the first Unitarian ministers to use “humanist” in his sermons. He wrote Humanist Sermons (1917) and Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1942) as well as edited The Liberal Gospel (Channing Anthology) in 1925. Lyttle’s account of the Western Unitarian Conference is Freedom Moves West (1952). In that book, he writes of Humanist Manifesto I that it “sought to replace despondency and doubt of God’s loving Providence by confidence in the power of human intelligence and co-operative good will to become its own Providence.” {HNS}
Lyttleton, Edward (20th Century) With C. Cohen, Lyttleton wrote The Parson and the Atheist, A Friendly Discussion on Religion and Life (1919). {GS}
