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From Philosopedia.org

Naber, Samuel Adriaan (Born 1828) Naber, a learnèd Dutch writer, became rector of the Haarlem gymnasium and head teacher at the Amsterdam Athenaeum. With Dr. A. Pierson of Verisimilia, he wrote a Latin work showing the fragmentary and disjointed character of the Epistles attributed to Paul. {BDF} j NACH: See entry for the North American Committee for Humanism.

NACH NEWSLETTER A publication three times per year of the North American Committee for Humanism, Nach Newsletter is at Box 191, 5901-J, Wyoming NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109.

Nachtigal, Gustav (1834–1885) Nachtigal, a German traveler who became private physician to the Bey of Tunis, explored North Africa and wrote Sakara und Sudan. A freethinker, Nachtigal became German Consul General at Tunis. {BDF}

Naczelna, Rada (20th Century) Naczelna is associated with Wspolnota Unitarian Universalistow w Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej. (See entry for Polish Unitarians.)

Naden, Constance Caroline Woodhill (1858–1889) Naden was a follower of Hinton’s pantheistic mysticism. After seriously studying science, she moved to a position closer to Spencer’s agnosticism. Naden in 1885 won the Paxton Prize for a geological essay. She also was a respected poet. {RAT; RE}

Naewiger, G. E. Conrad (19th Century) A freethinker, Naewiger wrote “God Is Love: Is It True?” (1890). {GS}

Nagel, Ernest (1901–1985) An outspoken atheist and the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, Nagel was author of Logic Without Metaphysics (1956) and, with Morris Raphael Cohen, An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934). In the former book, according to Anthony Flew, Nagel contends that (a) the familiar universe, sometimes called nature, is in truth all there is; and its manifest plurality is no sort of false front for any hidden or transcendental unit; and (b) “Organized matter” is primary “in the executive order of nature.” In short, Nagel’s naturalism admits no incorporeal, purely spiritual agents. Nagel was, with Hook, one of the two philosophically most distinguished former pupils and lifelong admirers of John Dewey. He was editor of the Journal of Philosophy (1940–1956), of Philosophy of Science (1956–1959), and Journal of Symbolic Logic (1939–1945). Dewey, Hook, and Nagel all were atheistic and, in philosophy, naturalists. Nagel preferred the labels “materialist” and ”contextual naturalist.” His naturalism, wrote H. S. Thayer in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Vol. 5), included “a place for imagination, liberal values, and human wisdom.” Nagel was a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. {CE; CL; EU, Antony Flew; SHD}

Nagel, H. Kyle (20th Century)

When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Nagel was a minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Kinston, North Carolina. He is associated with the Humanists of Houston, Texas. (See entry for Texas Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists.) {FD; HM2}

Nagy, Peter Tibor (20th Century) Nagy spoke in Berlin at a 1995 meeting arranged by the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). He said that in Hungary, unlike in Poland, only about 13 to 17% are actively involved in the churches, the Christian Church being in a minority. An estimated 20% of Hungarians clearly reject religion. (See entry for Hungarian Humanists.)

Nahigian, Kenneth E. (20th Century) Nahigian, a biblical scholar, in “Isaiah’s Prophecy” (Truth Seeker, #2, 1993), wrote that prophecy is a muddy science, that Bible prophecy is muddier than most. For example, he cites that most Christians take at face value the prophecy of the child Immanuel as presented in Matthew 1: 22-23:

Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.

But in the Masoretic text of the Holy Bible, Isaiah 7:14 reads

Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold [the ha’almah] shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Explains Nahigian, “The Matthew interpretation of Isaiah has several problems, the largest hanging on the Hebrew word ’almah. Writing in Greek, the gospel author turned ’almah into parthenos, a word usually (but not always) meaning ‘virgin.’ In fact he had a precedent for this: the Septuagint, a translation of the Old Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews of the day, did indeed use parthenos in the Isaiah passage. But the Septuagint was for the most part a notoriously sloppy translation, and its version of Isaiah was more error-ridden than the rest. By the Middle Ages the Jews had abandoned the Septuagint, and other Greek translations, by Aquila, Theodotion, Lucien, and others, did not use the word parthenos.” Nahigian concludes, “ ’almah is an adolescent female, virgin or not.” Further, he declares that nearly all modern commentaries agree with Talmudic scholars that Isaiah’s “sign” had nothing to do with a messiah.

Naigeon, Jacques André (1728–1810) A French atheist, Naigeon was first an art student, then a disciple and imitator of Diderot. He became copyist to and collaborator with Holbach, conveying his works to Amsterdam to be printed. A contributor to the Encyclopédie, he also published Recuéil Philosophique (1770) and edited Holbach’s essay on prejudices and his Morale Universelle. In addition, Naigeon edited the works of Diderot, the essays of Montaigne, and a translation of Toland’s philosophical letters. His principal work is the Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Philosophy in the Encyclopédie Méthodique (1791–1794). In 1790 he addressed the National Assembly on “Liberty of Opinion,” asking them to withhold the name of God and religion from their declaration of the rights of man. Describing himself as an atheist, Naigeon defined the morality of the Church as an order “to love above all things a god whom we do not know and priests whom we know too well.” {BDF; RAT; RE}

Naiman, Dorothy N. (20th Century)

When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Naiman was a professor emerita at Lehman College, City University of New York. {HM2}

Naimark, Rick (20th Century) Naimark is President of the Society for Humanistic Judaism.

Naipaul, V(idiadhar) S(urajprasad) (1932- ) A Trinidian essayist and writer of Indian descent, Naipaul is known for works that examine exile as well as alienation. The son of Hindu Indians who immigrated to Trinidad as indentured servants, he attended the University of Oxford in 1950, subsequently settling in England. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) brought him critical acclaim and examined the disintegration of a family in a postcolonial nation—his own father was an inspiration for the hero, whose life from the job of sign-writer to that of journalist includes seeing younger members of his family depart for opportunities in Europe. A Bend in the River (1979) was set in central Africa and included a horrifying portrait of emergent Africa. A Way in the World (1994) was an autobiography in the form of a novel. His non-fiction includes An Area of Darkness (1965), a highly controversial and critical account of India; India: A Wounded Civilization (1977); India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990); The Middle Passages (1962); and The Return of Eva Peron (1980). A freethinker, Naipaul in his recurrent themes of violence, homelessness, and alienation has been compared to Joseph Conrad. (For Naipaul’s comments on Islam, see entry for Pakistan.) {OEL; Ibn Warraq, 1999}

Nakens, José (Born 1846) The founder and editor of El Motin, Nakens was a Spanish journalist. His Republican and freethought paper functioned in connection with a library. Nakens also wrote for La Piqueta (The Pick-axe). {BDF}

Nalladaroo, Soonnu M. (1969- ) Nalladaroo, in Pune and Mumbai, India, is a humanist interested in establishing an electronic office or clearinghouse of liberal ideas worldwide. On the Web: <www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/3318/>.

Nampudiribad, Unny (20th Century) Nampudiribad is a publicity chairman for an activist member of the University of Minnesota Atheists and Humanists.

Nansen, Fridtjof (1861–1930) Nansen, a Norwegian, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922. After his 1882 trip to the Arctic, he became curator of the natural history collection of the Bergen Museum. His expedition, the first to cross Greenland, laid the basis for all future Arctic work. After World War I, he received international acclaim for his work to repatriate war prisoners and to help famine-stricken Russia. In 1921, he was appointed High Commissioner for Refugees by the League of Nations. An agnostic, he wrote in Science and the Purpose of Life, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” {CE; Free Inquiry, Winter, 1990-1991; JM; RAT; RE}

Napier, Charles James [Sir] (1782–1853) Napier was a British general who served with distinction in the Napoléonic Wars. While stationed in Cephalonia, he met Lord Byron and was asked, although he declined, to command the Greek independence forces. “I would rather have finished the roads in Cephalonia,” he explained in his private journal, “than have fought Austerlitz or Waterloo.” In dealing with the Chartist unrest in Northern England, General Napier was a moderate. In 1841 he went to India, undertaking the conquest in 1843 of Sind. He then served as governor of Sind until 1847. In Life and Opinions, Napier although he believed in God was skeptical about a future life—“ ’Tis an idle waste of thought thus to dwell on what no thought can tell us,” he said—and he was disdainful of Christianity: “Jesus of Nazareth! The thing’s impossible,” he wrote. {JM; RAT; RE}

Napoléon I (1769–1821) Napoléon Bonaparte, the son of Carlo and Letizia Bonaparte (or Buonaparte), may have been caricatured by Gillray in England as but a deformed megalomaniacal dwarf. But in France he has always been an icon. Known as “the Little Corporal,” the Corsican-born future emperor of the French first attracted notice by his part in dislodging the British from Toulon (1793); thereafter, he had a series of major military and political victories. The Napoléonic legend, the picture of a liberal conqueror spreading the French Revolution throughout Europe, was a potent factor in French history and helped make his nephew French emperor as Napoléon III. Few will deny that Napoléon was one of the greatest military leaders in history, that he dominated European history between 1800 and 1815, a period known as the Napoléonic Era. But as noted by Alan Schom in Napoléon Bonaparte (1997), Napoléon was such a war-maker that he disillusioned many. Beethoven, for example, removed the dedication of the “Eroica” after Napoléon declared himself Emperor, in 1804. In Catholic France, he made peace with the Church by the Concordat of 1801, which reestablished the church in France. This neutralized the anti-revolutionary priests who had encouraged peasant unrest. Meanwhile, Napoléon declared that France had finished with the “romance of the revolution.” Lord Rosebery, who made a study, The Last Phase, of Napoléon’s position as regards religion showed that especially in his later years Napoléon did not believe in the divinity of Christ or in a future life. McCabe remarks of this, “Catholics boast that at the end he asked for the sacraments. In doing so, however, he gave his friends the excuse that ‘there is so much that one does not know.’ ” Haugh holds that Napoléon “was an agnostic during his years of triumph, but that as he neared death, broken by captivity, he uttered religious declarations.” Prior to that, he had these views:

• I would believe in a religion if it existed ever since the beginning of time, but when I consider Socrates, Plato, Mahomet, I no longer believe. All religions have been made by men.

• A soul? Give my watch to a savage, and he will think it has a soul. . . . If I have a soul, then pigs and dogs also have souls.

• If I had believed in a God of rewards and punishments, I might have lost courage in battle.

• I do not think Jesus Christ ever existed.

• It remains an open question whether Christ ever lived.

Napoléon died of cancer on St. Helena and was buried there. In 1840, he body was returned to France, first being checked by a physician, Dr. Guillard, who found “the features of the Emperor were so little changed that his face was instantly recognized by those who had known him when alive. His entire person presented the appearance of one recently interred.” The beard and nails had grown after death, however, his face was puffy, and the skin was “soft and supple.” His heart and entrails were preserved in two silver vessels in the coffin. Although many called him “the Little Corporal”—he was 5’ 6”—many democrats called him “the Little Prick.” Dr. John K. Lattimer, a retired urologist at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City, is something of an expert on the latter accusation. When Lattimer was contacted by the descendants of Ange Paul Vignali, a priest and doctor who had attended Napoléon on St. Helena and who conducted the autopsy when the Emperor died in 1821, he learned that in exile Napoléon had scorned Vignali, a fellow Corsican and “about twenty years ago I bought several things from the family, including the urological relic.” That relic, explained the eighty-year-old urologist, is Napoléon’s phallus. {CE; JM; PA; The New York Times, 9 July 1994; TYD}

Napoleon, Jérôme (1822–1891)

Napoleon, said by Tribe to be the generally distrusted relative to the hated Louis, was a freethinker and a republican. {TRI}

Naquet, Joseph Alfred (Born 1834) Naquet, a French materialist, became a physician in 1859. In 1867 he was imprisoned for fifteen months for belonging to a secret society. With M. Regnard, he founded the Revue Encyclopédique, which was suppressed at once for containing an attack on theism. After being a professor of chemistry at Paris and Palermo, Naquet upon returning to Paris expressed so openly the advanced views he had cultivated among the Garibaldians that in 1867 he received fifteen months in prison. In 1869, however, he continued the attack with a book, Religion, Propriété, Famille, this time being fined five hundred francs and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment and the loss of civil rights for life. From 1871 to 1882 he was in the Chambre, passing to the Senate in 1882. During that time, he secured the passing of liberal divorce laws. A leading champion at Paris of the innocence of F. Ferrer, Naquet was an agnostic. In 1883 he was elected to the Senate. Naquet represented Vaueluse in the National Assembly, where he voted with the extreme left. The divorce law in France was passed chiefly through his advocacy. {BDF; RAT; RE}

Narain, Narsingh (1897–1972) Narain in 1960 founded the Indian Humanist Union (IHU) in Naini Tal, Uttar Pradesh State, in northern India. He has pointed out that although Nehru used the word “spiritual” in the sense that many humanists do, there was no indication that he had turned a “theist” and had ceased to be an agnostic. E-mail: <pnarain@ignca.ernet.in>. (See entry for Ramendra.) {For his views on humanism and religion, see International Humanist News, November 1996; New Humanist, December 1996}

Narain, Prakash (20th Century) Narain, son of Narsingh Narain, was chairman of the Railway Board, secretary of Surface Transport, and Secretary of Urban Development for the Government of India. He edits Humanist Outlook and leads the Humanist Union in India. As its leader, he spoke at a 1995 conference of major humanist groups in India of the need to find a balance between traditional and modern societies: “The balance to be struck between continuity and change is a delicate one,” he stated. The caste system, which had begun as a tool for division of labor, has led to injustices and atrocities. Further, the denial of the rights of women and the mistreatment of Hindu widows demonstrates, he holds, the damage of religion to the community. Narain participated as a moderator in the 1996 Humanist World Congress in Mexico City. His concern was that the information revolution can be an instrument for the dissemination of humanist values but that caution needs to be paid to insure that humanist values not be hindered by this new cyber-revolution. He is one of the members of the IHEU’s Committee on religious Extremism and Rational Inquiry. E-mail: <pnarain@ignca.ernet.in>. {FUK; International Humanist News, December 1996; New Humanist, February 1996; December 1996}

Narasimhaiah, H. (20th Century) Narasimhaiah is a nuclear physicist, a household name in Karnataka State. He was formerly the Vice Chancellor of Bangalore University. Narasimhaiah inaugurated the International Humanist and Ethical Union India Congress. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. Narayan, P. K. (20th Century) Narayan, a hypnotist, assisted Abraham T. Kovoor, President of the Ceylon Rationalist Association in helping spread rationalism in India. He educated the audience as to how suggestion swayed devotees into getting into trance, thereby helping expose the tricks of Satya Sai Baba.

Narisetti, Innaiah (1937– ) Innaiah, as he is generally known in Hyderabad, did his doctoral work researching the subject of thesis and anti-thesis by the media. His degree was delayed because his university ineptly ruled that, despite his having passed the thesis in writing, he had to receive a unanimity of examiners’ votes in order to pass his oral exams. Eventually, the nation’s high court ruled that the university had been in error for demanding the examining committee’s unanimity of favorable votes. Meanwhile, his thesis was examined in detail by three committees over a ten-year period, from 1969 to 1979. In 1992 and 1994 he addressed the American Humanist Association conference in Washington, D.C., and in 1994 that group’s conference in Detroit. From 1992 to 1994 he was President of the Andhra Pradesh Rationalists Association, and in 1995 he became an executive member of the Indian Radical Humanist Association. In 1996 he was elected Vice President of the Rationalist Association of India. A former lecturer in philosophy at Osmania University, he is a journalist and author. Narisetti has written about Agehananda Bharati’s Ochre Robe, which he translated into Telugu, describing the book’s being banned in India. The work had recorded Bharati’s memoirs about editing Vivekananda’s eight volumes, finding nonsense in Vivekananda’s views and mischievously pleading that inasmuch as the views had been allegedly expressed by a divine person nothing should be deleted or edited. The swamis in the Ashram detected the mischief and denied Bharati’s plea, also asking him to quit. Later he wrote further negative views about Vivekananda, who at the time was considered an influential nationalist and a modern spiritualist whose Yoga system was touted by many. Ramakrishna Ashram put pressure on the Indian government, and the book was banned in 1967. Later Bharati added a few pages, the work was published in the United States, and Narisetti translated it into Telugu as well as had it serialized in the daily Andhra Prabha. In addition to being author of many books in Telugu, Narisetti has written Inside Andhra Pradesh (1980); The Philosophical Consequences of Modern Science (1982); The Birth and Death of Political Parties in India (1982); Politics for Power—Study of Contemporary Andhra Pradesh Politics (1982); Between Charisma and Corruption (1991); and M. N. Roy, Evelyn, Ellen: A Bibliography (1996). For the Encyclopedia of Unbelief, he wrote “Unbelief in India.” Narisetti has written for Delhi’s Radical Humanist and Hyderabad’s Indian Rationalist as well as translated many works from English to Telugu, including M. N. Roy’s Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution. He signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. His wife, Komala, is a retired assistant professor of English at Dr. Ambedkar Open University in Hyderabad. His daughter is a Washington, D. C., psychiatrist, and his son is a business writer for The Wall Street Journal. Dr. Narisetti’s e-mail: <hu92@aol.com>. His address: A-60, Journalists’ Colony, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad 500 033, Andhra Pradesh, India. (See entry for Agehananda Bharati.) {WAS, numerous conversations.)

Narla, V. R. (1908-1985) Popularly known as Narla Venkateswararoa, Narla edited two Telugu daily newspapers for thirty years, producing voluminous iconoclastic writings in Telugu. Influenced by M. N. Roy and humanistic thought, he became an ardent skeptic who lectured in several Indian universities. “The Poverty of Intellectualism in India” was one lecture given in Mysore, in which he explained how India had rejected the open mind of an ancient seer, Uddalaka. The seer felt that India had failed to accept the path of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio (1809-1831), instead following the path of Gandhi and his “inner voice.” According to Narla, Vedanta helped kill India’s vitality, denying reason as the way to discover truths. Narla also lectured on “East and West: Myth of Dichotomy” and “The Truth about the Gita.” The Gita, he complained, encourages and justifies violent killings of kith and kin and proudly declares that that the four-caste system (called Varna) is a noble creation. Gita, said Narla, has been tragic for India, and he appealed to contemporary Indians to discard Gita along with its rebirth and Karma concepts. The caste system, he complained, even included birds and animals. Instead, he spoke up for a humanism and rationalism that emphasized human values in all walks of life. His aphoristic sayings are found in Gods, Goblins, and Men. Narla had been a member of Rajya Sabha, the central legislative body in India, from 1958 to 1970. Upon his death, his library of thousands of books in English and Telugu was donated to the Ambedkar Open University in Hyderabad. {I. Narisetti to WAS, 13 July 1999}

Narlikar, Jayant (20th Century) Narlikar spoke at the 1998 Congress of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in Mumbai. Ignorance, he lamented, often produces anti-science. People in high office consult astrologers or become interested in Feng Shui (geomancy), and an understanding of science needs to be a key part of educating the general public. {International Humanist News, December 1998}

Narveson, Jan (1936– ) Narveson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Waterloo in Canada, is author of The Libertarian Idea. His article, “Humanism Is For Humans” (Free Inquiry, Spring, 1993), was challenged in the following issue (Summer, 1993) by Wolf Roder, of the Cincinnati, Ohio, McMicke College of Arts and Sciences. In 1993 Narveson wrote Moral Matters.

Nascimento, Francisco Manuel do (1734–1819) Nascimento was a Portuguese poet who entered the Church but, having been the translator of Molière’s Tartuffe, was accused in 1778 of heresy. As a result, he had to flee for his life from the Inquisition. Nascimento wrote many poems and satires under the name of “Filinto Elysio.” {BDF; RAT}

Nash, David (20th Century) Nash’s Secularism, Art, and Freedom (1992) is a history of the Leicester Secular Society, one of the oldest surviving British freethought organizations.

Nash, J. V. (20th Century) In the 1920s, Nash wrote “Homosexuality in Lives of the Great,” which E. Haldeman-Julius published as Little Blue Book No. 1564. Nash reportedly was a non-theist.

Nasrin, Taslima (1962– )

	Nasrin (also, Nasreen), a Bangladesh novelist, was attacked in print after writing Lajja (Shame, 1992, 1997). Hundreds of members of the Council of Soldiers of Islam demanded her death. In the novel, she depicts Bangladesh’s Hindu minority as having been picked out for revenge by Muslims after the incident in December 1992 in which a Hindu mob destroyed an ancient mosque in Ayodhya, northern India. Her work depicts a Hindu family attacked by Muslims in the aftermath of the razing of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu extremists. A reward of 50,000 taka (£850) was immediately offered to anyone who would kill the thirty-one-year-old former gynecologist, daughter of Dr. Rojab Ali, a government physician and practitioner of the Sufi tradition of Islam.

In December 1993, 5,000 zealots marched through Dhaka, demanding her death. A general strike there resulted in clashes in which one man was killed and more than two hundred were injured. “She is worse than a prostitute,” complained Maulana Azizul Haque, the mullah who has called for her execution. “She demands ‘freedom of the vagina.’ She says that if a man can have four wives, a woman should have the right to four husbands. Even within marriage, she says a woman should have the right to other men. This is against the Qur’an and Allah. It is blasphemy!” Although quoted as having said that “the Qur’an should be thoroughly revised,” she countered that her purpose was to suggest that “we have to move beyond these ancient texts if we want progress,” a comment which deepened the controversy. Muslim militants say Nirbachito Kolum, a collection of some of her newspaper columns, is blasphemous, and they publicize her separation after a few years from Bangladeshi poet Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah. Meanwhile, some publishers who fear Muslim fundamentalists stopped picturing pigs in children’s books, horse-riding and ballet are kept out because they are symbols of the wealthy, and witches are excluded for fear of satanism and the occult. Nasrin has been a bold advocate of sexual freedom in her newspaper columns, poems, and novels. Like Salman Rushdie of India, who rallied prominent writers to support her feminism, Nasrin was forced into a life of hiding. She fled to Sweden 1994 after the twelve nations of the European Union made a formal offer of asylum to the writer. Once there, she said, “The fundamentalists are destroying our society. The silent majority is afraid of them. They will do anything in the name of God. The progressives are not so organized, for they cannot bring together 300,000 people at one time.” As for the Muslim clergy: “The country is infected with them. Their long hair, beards, and robes conceal their insatiable lust for wealth and women.” Interviewed by Mary Anne Weaver for New Yorker (12 September 1994), Nasrin was described as “utterly ordinary,” a shy Marxist professor and poet who became an atheist at the age of eleven or twelve. She reiterated that she had never, never said the Qur’an (Koran) should be revised.

No, how many times do I have to say it? I’ve said it over and over again. I said that Shariat law should be revised. I want a modern, civilized law, where women are given equal rights. I want no religious law that discriminates, none, period—no Hindu law, no Christian law, no Islamic law. Why should a man be entitled to have four wives? Why should a son get two-thirds of his parents’ property when a daughter can inherit only a third? Should I be killed for saying this?

Bangladesh mullahs, giving no reasons, declared one woman’s second marriage was contrary to Islamic law and she was led to a fundamentalist stronghold where a pit had been dug overnight. She was lowered into the pit and buried waist deep. Then, slowly and methodically, the woman was stoned—a hundred and one times. Her death was said to have horrified even the Dhaka’s élite. In another town, a woman who was condemned by a fatwa for adultery was doused with kerosene and burned to death. Women everywhere, Nasrin declared, are humiliated and driven out of their villages by fundamentalist mullahs. In Stockholm, Nasrin remained secreted for several years. “They’ve taken everything from me,” she said. “My innocence, my youth, now my freedom. I know if I ever go back that I’ll have to keep silent, stay inside my house. I’ll never lead a normal life in my country, until my death.” Asked in an interview with Sara Whyatt (Index, September-October 1994) if she still thought herself a Muslim, Nasrin responded, “No, I am an atheist. All forms of religion are anachronistic to me. I dream of a world without religion. Religion gives birth to fundamentalism as surely as the seed gives birth to the tree. We can tear the tree down, but if the seed remains it will produce another tree. While the seed remains, we cannot root out fundamentalism.” In The Guardian (14 December 1994) when journalist Linda Grant mentioned that Muslim fundamentalists say that humanism is an import from the West, Nasrin responded,

Humanism is not western or eastern or southern or northern. It is just humanism. They protest against me, but I am surprised that they don’t protest against inequality and injustice. What I have done is protested against the system which is against women. I have seen that, in the name of tradition, society wants to keep women in ignorance and slavery. . . . I realised from childhood that women were treated as childbearing machines or decorations, not human beings.

A 1995 poem, “Self Portrait,” appears in New Humanist (December, 1995) and commences

I don’t believe in God. I look upon Nature with wondering eyes, However much I move forward grasping the hands of progress society’s hindrances take hold of my sleeve and gradually pull me backwards. I wish I could walk all through the city in the middle of the night, sitting down anywhere alone to cry. . . .

It ends

Throughout the world, religion has extended its eighteen talons. In my lone brandishing, how many of its bones can I shatter. How much can I rip discrimination’s farspreading net?

“Taslima,” Salman Rushdie wrote in an open letter published in The New York Times (14 July 1994), “I know there must be a storm inside you now. . . . You have done nothing wrong. The wrong is committed by others against you. You have done nothing wrong, and I am sure that one day soon you will be free.” In her Oxford Amnesty Lecture of 1995, Nasrin said

Again I dare to write against male-made religion. I believe that women are oppressed by every religion. If any religion allows the persecution of people of different faiths, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, if any religion keeps women in slavery, then I cannot accept that religion. Freedom for women will never be possible until they cross the barrier of religion and patriarchy.

In 1995, she wrote The Game in Reverse. Nasrin has published fifteen books, including Nirbachita Column (1991), which portrays the predicament of women in a male-dominated society. In 1996, Nasrin was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. She is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists and is the Vice-Chair of the International Society for Islamic Secularization (PO Box 229, Buffalo, NY 14215). At the 1996 Mexico City conference of humanists, Jim Herrick described her as being “an atheist from personal experience. She grew up in a country where people were forced there by the partition of India on religious grounds. She accepted that religion could cause great art, but said that it also did too much damage. She began to apply her powers of observation, analysis and reason to religion and found she could not accept it at all. She used her writings to expose the crimes of religion, which teaches people to hate one another and glorifies poverty. The position of women concerned her and she questioned why women in the East should be deprived of education. Democracy and secularism should be put in practice throughout the world.” Like Antigone and putting family above state, Dr. Nasrin alarmed her friends by returning in 1998 to Bangladesh after a forced four-year exile. She returned with her dying mother, whom she had brought to New York City for medical treatment. Upon her arrival, the religious fundamentalists immediately demanded her death. Again she was forced into hiding; again diplomatic overtures had to be made to rescue her for a return to Sweden. Her plight was described in Free Inquiry (Winter 1998-1999), with letters of support from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Wole Soyinka, Sir Hermann Bondi, Steven Weinberg, Sir Raymond Firth, Edward O. Wilson, and Mario Bunge. Included was an interview, “One Brave Woman vs. Religious Fundamentalism,” by Matt Cherry and Warren Allen Smith, in which she said:

• When I began to study the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, I found many unreasonable ideas. The women in the Qur’an were treated as slaves. They were nothing but sexual objects.

• I don’t find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn’t permit democracy and it violates human rights.

• When I was 14 or 15 years old, I found the Bengali translation of the Qur’an, and I learned what God says in the verses. I was surprised to read wrong information about the solar system in the Qur’an—for example, that the sun is moving around the earth and the earth is not moving but standing still because of the support of the mountains.

• [Religion] does not often teach people to love one another. On the contrary, it often teaches them to hate people of a different faith. Religion also leads people to depend on fate and thus lose self-confidence. It unnecessarily glorifies poverty and sacrifice and thus serves the vested interests of the wealthy few. In all countries and through all ages, conscientious people have exposed these unethical aspects of religion and educated people to see religion with the eyes of reason and logic.

• Nothing will be achieved by reforming Muslim scriptural tenets. What is needed is a change of the sharia, the code of laws based on the Qur’an. I want a uniform civil code that is equally applicable to men and women.

• I am an atheist. I do not believe in prayers. I believe in work. And my work is that of an author. My pen is my weapon.

Amar Meebela (My Girlhood Days, published as Enfance, au Féminin, 1998, in a translation from Bengali by Philippe Benoît) was immediately banned in Bangladesh because “its contents might hurt the existing social system and religious sentiment of the people and could also create adverse reaction in the country.” Time (the Asian edition) described her as “one of the 20 most influential women in the 20th century,” and she became noted throughout the world. As of the end of 1999, Nasrin had moved from her hiding place in Sweden to one in Europe. She signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. On the Web: <http://nasrin.humanists.net>. E-mail: ”Taslima” <wasm@idt.net>. (See Taslima Nasrin, “On Islamic Fundamentalism,” The Humanist, July-August 1996, which is an adaptation of her speech 28 April 1996 at Harvard University, sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy; on the Web, details of her legal problems are found at <http://www.pen.org>. Nasrin has expressed to the present author her dissatisfaction with the English translation of her Shame.) {CA; E; “An Interview with Matt Cherry and Warren Allen Smith,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1998; Freethought History #13, 1995; HNS2; International Humanist News, March 1994 and December 1996; New Humanist, December 1996; WAS, “Taslima Nasrin: An Intereview,” in Humanist in Canada, Summer 1998, and numerous conversations; WWS}

Nasrin, Taslima (25 Aug 1962 - ) Special Branch guards Are on twenty-four hour duty in front of my door. Who comes and who goes, when I leave, enter the house, They write down everything on a notebook. . . .

Once I had the body of a queen Now it’s lowly, decrepit, an old house Plaster falling off Sad, but true

Nasrin’s plaintive poetry so appealed to Steve Lacy that he wrote “The Cry,” music based on her biting words that he turned into what he called a “jam opera,” one performed in 1998 at the Jewish Community Center in Washington, D.C. He got the idea in September 1994 after reading her “Happy Marriage” in The New Yorker, for he was inspired by Nasrin’s outspoken feminism in the face of Islamic anger concerning her writing. The work in progress, which necessitated protecting her from renewed death threats made by Muslim fundamentalists, was presented in Calais, France, in November 1996. An incident-free world premiere was held in Berlin at the Hebbel Theatre in January 1997, followed by performances at the Women’s Festival in Palermo, Italy, in March 1997, and later in Geneva, Bordeaux, Vancouver, Washington (the United States premiere), and Chicago. Nasrin is the physician from Bangladesh upon whose head a mullah placed a fatwa, forcing her to seek asylum in Sweden to avoid being killed by Muslim fundamentalists. She has been called “the most dangerous woman in the world,” for she is a major spokesperson against patriarchy. If patriarchy were to be disbanded everywhere and males no longer took precedence over females as laid down in the Bible, the vested interests of Judeo-Christian-Muslim groups would be in jeopardy and religion would be replaced by something humanistic and in keeping with the times. Unable to practice medicine, she has turned to writing and to giving lectures in India, Africa, Europe, and North America. Because of her plight—of having been forced to leave her tropical country and settle in Scandinavia—she has inspired feminists as well as politicians and average people everywhere. Nasrin (also, Nasreen), now an unemployed physician but a poet, novelist, and journalist, was attacked for having written Lajja (Shame, 1992, 1997). Hundreds of members of the Council of Soldiers of Islam demanded her death, inside and outside Bangladesh. In the novel, she depicts Bangladesh’s Hindu minority as having been picked out for revenge by Muslims after the incident in December 1992 in which a Muslim mob destroyed an ancient shrine in Ayodhya, northern India. Her work depicts a Hindu family attacked by Muslims in the aftermath of the razing by extremists of the Babri temple. A reward of 50,000 taka (£850) was immediately offered to anyone who would kill the thirty-one-year-old gynecologist, daughter of Dr. Rojab Ali, a government physician and practitioner of the Sufi tradition of Islam. In December 1993, 5,000 zealots marched through Dhaka, demanding her death. A general strike there resulted in clashes in which one man was killed and more than two hundred were injured. “She is worse than a prostitute,” complained Maulana Azizul Haque, the mullah who called for her execution. “She demands ‘freedom of the vagina.’ She says that if a man can have four wives, a woman should have the right to four husbands. Even within marriage, she says a woman should have the right to other men. This is against the Qur’an and Allah. It is blasphemy!” Although quoted as having said that “the Qur’an should be thoroughly revised,” Nasrin countered that her purpose was to suggest that “we have to move beyond these ancient texts if we want progress,” a comment which deepened the controversy. Muslim militants say “Nirbachito Kolum,” a collection of some of her newspaper columns, is blasphemous. Meanwhile, some publishers who feared Muslim fundamentalists stopped picturing pigs in children’s books. Horse-riding and ballet are kept out because they are symbols of the wealthy, and witches are excluded for fear of satanism and the occult. Nasrin has been a bold advocate of sexual freedom in her newspaper columns, poems, and novels. Like Salman Rushdie of India, who rallied prominent writers to support her feminism and religious stand, Nasrin was forced into a life of hiding. She fled to Sweden in 1994 after the twelve nations of the European Union made a formal offer of asylum to the writer. Once there, she said, “The fundamentalists are destroying our society. The silent majority is afraid of them. They will do anything in the name of God. The progressives are not so organized, for they cannot bring together 300,000 people at one time.” As for the Muslim clergy: “The country is infected with them. Their long hair, beards, and robes conceal their insatiable lust for wealth and women.” Interviewed by Mary Anne Weaver for New Yorker (12 September 1994), Nasrin was described as “utterly ordinary,” a shy Marxist professor and poet who became an atheist at the age of eleven or twelve. She reiterated that she had never, never said the Qur’an should be revised.

Bangladesh mullahs, giving no reasons but illustrating Nasrin’s complaints, declared a particular woman’s second marriage was contrary to Islamic law, whereupon she was led to a fundamentalist stronghold where a pit had been dug overnight. She was lowered into the pit and buried waist deep. Then, slowly and methodically, the woman was stoned—one hundred and one times. Her death was said to have horrified even the Dhaka’s élite. In another town, a woman who was condemned by a fatwa for adultery was doused with kerosene and burned to death. Women everywhere, Nasrin declared, are humiliated and driven out of their villages by fundamentalist mullahs. In Sweden, Nasrin has remained secreted. “They’ve taken everything from me,” she said, “my innocence, my youth, now my freedom. I know if I ever go back that I’ll have to keep silent, stay inside my house. I’ll never lead a normal life in my country, not until my death.” Asked in an interview with Sara Whyatt (Index, September-October 1994) if she still thought herself a Muslim, Nasrin responded, “No, I am an atheist. All forms of religion are anachronistic to me. I dream of a world without religion. Religion gives birth to fundamentalism as surely as the seed gives birth to the tree. We can tear the tree down, but if the seed remains it will produce another tree. While the seed remains, we cannot root out fundamentalism.” When journalist Linda Grant in The Guardian (14 December 1994) mentioned that Muslim fundamentalists say that humanism is an import from the West, Nasrin responded,

A 1995 poem, “Self Portrait” (New Humanist, December, 1995) commences

It ends

Throughout the world, religion has extended its eighteen talons. In my lone brandishing, how many of its bones can I shatter. How much can I rip discrimination’s far-spreading net?

In 1995, she wrote The Game in Reverse and has published over fifteen books, including Nirbachita Column (1991), which portrays the predicament of women in a male-dominated society. In 1996, Nasrin was elected a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. She is an honorary associate of the New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists and is the Vice-Chair of the International Society for Islamic Secularization (PO Box 229, Buffalo, NY 14215). At a 1996 Mexico City conference of humanists, Jim Herrick described her as being “an atheist from personal experience. She grew up in a country where people were forced there by the partition of India on religious grounds. She accepted that religion could cause great art, but said that it also did too much damage. She began to apply her powers of observation, analysis and reason to religion and found she could not accept it at all. She used her writings to expose the crimes of religion, which teaches people to hate one another and glorifies poverty. The position of women concerned her and she questioned why women in the East should be deprived of education. Democracy and secularism should be put in practice throughout the world.” Like Antigone and putting family above state, Dr. Nasrin alarmed her friends by returning in 1998 to Bangladesh after a forced four-year exile. She returned with her dying mother, whom she had brought to New York City for medical treatment that was of no avail. Upon her arrival home, the religious fundamentalists immediately demanded her death. Again she was forced into hiding, and again diplomatic overtures had to be made to rescue her for a return to Sweden. Her plight—described in Free Inquiry (Winter 1998-1999)—contained letters of support from Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Wole Soyinka, Sir Hermann Bondi, Steven Weinberg, Sir Raymond Firth, Edward O. Wilson, and Mario Bunge. Included was an interview, “One Brave Woman vs. Religious Fundamentalism,” by Matt Cherry and Warren Allen Smith, in which she was quoted:

• When I began to study the Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, I found many unreasonable ideas. The women in the Qur’an were treated as slaves. They were nothing but sexual objects.

• I am an atheist. I do not believe in prayers. I believe in work. And my work is that of an author. My pen is my weapon.

Amar Meebela (My Girlhood Days, published as Enfance, au Féminin, 1998, in a translation from Bengali by Philippe Benoît) was immediately banned in Bangladesh because “its contents might hurt the existing social system and religious sentiment of the people and could also create adverse reaction in the country.” Time (the Asian edition) described her in a story about “the 20 most influential women in the 20th century,” and she became noted throughout the world. A signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000, Nasrin has a homepage that includes photos with François Mitterand, Jacques Chirac, Günter Grass, Jacques Derrida, and others: <http://nasrin.humanists.net>. E-mail: ”Taslima”<wasm@nyc.rr.com>. (See Taslima Nasrin, “On Islamic Fundamentalism,” The Humanist, July-August 1996, which is an adaptation of her speech 28 April 1996 at Harvard University, sponsored by the Humanist Chaplaincy; on the Web, details of her legal problems are found at <http://www.pen.org>. Nasrin has expressed to the present author her dissatisfaction with the English translation of her Shame.) {CA; E; “An Interview with Matt Cherry and Warren Allen Smith,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1998; Freethought History #13, 1995; HNS2; International Humanist News, March 1994 and December 1996; New Humanist, December 1996; WAS, “Taslima Nasrin: An Interview,” in Humanist in Canada, Summer 1998, and numerous conversations; WAS}

NASTHIKA YUGAM (The Age of Atheism) A Telugu monthly of the Atheist Society of India, Nasthika Yugam is at Pithani Dibba, Visakhapatnam 530 002, Andhra Pradesh, India.

NASTIKA MARGAM (The Atheist Way) A Telugu monthly, Nastika Margam is at Nastika Kendram, Benz Circle, Vijayawada, India.

Natanson, Maurice (1924–1996) Natanson helped introduce the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl in the United States. His many books include Phenomenology and Special Reality, an Essay in Memory of Alfred Schutz (1970); Phenomenology, Role and Reason (1974); Edmund Husserl, Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (1973); Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (1986); and Edmund Husserl, which won a 1974 National Book Award. His The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature will be published posthumously. When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Natanson was a member of the philosophy department faculty at the University of Houston. Afterwards, he taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of California at Santa Cruz. From 1976 until 1995, he taught at Yale. Natanson died of prostate cancer.

Nath, Ramendra (1957- ) Since 1983, Ramendra has been teaching philosophy at Patna University, from which he received his Ph. D. and his D. Litt. The dissertation for the former degree was written on the subject, “Bertrand Russell’s Ethical Philosophy,” for the latter, “M. N. Roy’s New Humanism and Materialism.” Ramendra is the founder-president of Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj (Bihar Rationalist Society, an Associate Member of the IHEU) and founder- trustee of Buddhiwadi Foundation, a registered, non-profit, educational trust for promoting rationalism and humanism. He has written many books, booklets, papers and articles in Hindi and English including Why I am Not a Hindu and Is God Dead? These and some of his other writings as well as his brief biography are available on the Internet. At the 1995 conference of humanists in India, he said, “Communalism and the caste-system are, in my opinion, two major obstacles that prevent integrated human development in the South Asian region.” He added, “Because communalism is linked to fundamentalism and religious identities, promotion of rationalism and humanism alone can provide a lasting solution to the problem of communalism. We must attack the fundamentalism of all religions in order to destroy the root cause of communalism.” Ramendra is a supporter of Internet Infidels. His E- mail addresses: <bobsoft@vsnl.com> and <brs_patna@yahoo.com>. On the Web: <www.myfreeoffice.com/buddhiwadi> and <www.geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/2035>. (See entry for his wife, Kawaljeet Kaur.) {New Humanist, February 1996; WASM, 1 March 1999}

Nath, Shivendra (20th Century) Nath is a trustee of the Buddhiwadi Foundation. (See entry for Buddhiwadi Foundation).

Nathanson, Jerome (1908–1975) Nathanson, a journalist and student of philosophy, followed Algernon D. Black in 1940 as a leader of the New York Ethical Culture Society. He remained until 1975, continuing his predecessor’s emphasis on activism. From 1943 to 1945, he secured the help of John Dewey in organizing the Conferences on Science and Democracy and was authorized by him to write a work that contains few direct quotations or phrases, John Dewey: The Reconstruction of the Democratic Life (1951). In 1952, he was on the first board of directors of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU). Also in the 1950s, Nathanson worked with Priscilla Robertson, editor of The Humanist, resigning with her and her staff when a dispute with Corliss Lamont and the American Humanist Association board of directors arose concerning her rights of editorial freedom. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {HM2; EU, Howard B. Radest; HNS2}

NATION OF ISLAM The Lost-Found Nation of Islam was established by Wallace D. Fard in 1930. Calling himself Prophet, Fard stated his mission: “to restore and to resurrect his lost and found people, who were identified as the original members of the Tribe of Shabazz from the Lost Nation of Asia.” In the 1930s he chose Elijah Poole of Detroit, Michigan, to be his “divine representative,” and Poole transformed into the Honorable Elijah Muhammad who, for forty-four years, suffered persecution and rejection from the very people among whom he was appointed as a Servant of God, not surprisingly because he renounced whites and preached a form of apartheid. In 1946 a black separatist organization was promoted by Malcolm X who broke away in 1964 and founded his own Organization for Afro-American Unity, preaching “active self-defence.” He persuaded teacher and singer Louis Farrakhan to join the organization, and when the group dissolved in 1985 Farrakhan formed the Nation of Islam. In 1986 Farrakhan was denied entry into the United Kingdom because of his inflammatory speeches against, among others, Jews and homosexuals. In 1995 Farrakhan organized a “Million Men March” of around 400,000 black men in Washington. {Barry Duke, The Freethinker, July 1998}

NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE EDUCATION The National Center for Science Education, B-9477, Berkeley, California 94709, was founded in 1982 to counter the creationist threat to science education in the public schools. Eugenie C. Scott is its leader. On the Web: <http://www.natcenscied.org>.

NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY (PEARL) The National Committee for Public Education and Religious Liberty (PEARL, 165 East 56th Street, New York, NY 10022) is dedicated to preserving public schools and church-state separation. The Council for Secular Humanism is one of the member organizations. (See “The Campaign to Overturn Felton v. Aguilar in Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997) NATIONAL COUNCIL AGAINST HEALTH FRAUD The National Council Against Health Fraud, POB 33008, Kansas City, Missouri 64114, is a group that fights quack remedies, including divine healing. On the Web: <http://www.primenet.com/~ncahf>. {FD}

NATIONAL FREETHOUGHT ORGANISATION The National Freethought Organisation, Giordano Bruno, is at 82, Via Teodosio, 30131 Milan, Italy.

NATIONAL LEAGUE FOR THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

The National League for the Separation of Church and State, POB 2832, San Diego, California 93112, was founded in 1876. It has published Truth Seeker and was connected with the James H. Johnson Charitable Trust.

NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY (NSS) The National Secular Society, which publishes The Freethinker, a secular humanist monthly, was founded in 1866 by Charles Bradlaugh before he embarked on his parliamentary career as a radical Liberal. It was formed to unite the various secular societies that had developed from the Owenite and Chartist movements. During the late nineteenth century, it was the main freethought organization in England. At first it attracted mostly self-educated working-class people, and it still retains some of its traditional forthright and down-to-earth character as the most militant element in the humanist movement. In 1881, G. W. Foote started The Freethinker, which is one of England’s boldest and liveliest progressive periodicals. Barbara Smoker served as the society’s president, according to Nicolas Walter’s tabulation, for twenty-four years and five months. Foote was president for twenty-five years and eight months. The longest serving president, however, was Chapman Cohen, from 1915 to 1949. The NSS is headquartered at Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X8SP, England. Dan O’Hara was succeeded as President by Denis Cobell, the current president. Vice presidents are Peter Brearey and Jim Herrick. E-mail: <kpw@secularism.org.uk.> (Telephone 0171-404 3126; fax 0171-430 1271) {The Freethinker, February 1998}

NATIONAL SERVICE CONFERENCE OF THE AMERICAN ETHICAL UNION The National Service Conference of the American Ethical Union is at 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023.

NATIONAL SUNDAY LEAGUE The National Sunday League, formed in 1856 by secularist R. M. Morrell, campaigned against the restrictions on Sunday entertainments imposed in England by the Act of 1781. Annie Besant was its vice-president. A similar organization, the Free Sunday Society, supported P. A. Taylor’s opposition to Thomas Hughes’s Sunday Trading Bill in 1872. Secularists took a leading part in the group, aiming to show that Sunday legislation was, in fact, aimed only at the poor. {RSR}

NATIVE AMERICAN RELIGION Native Americans, also known as American Indians, do not have a religion with a deity, Gayle Morse of the Akwesasne Mohawk Group told a secular humanist group in Upstate New York in 1993. The individual is dominated by the feeling of being part of a greater whole: the family, the tribe, the reservation. Concern for the group’s welfare is good, he said, but individual strivings for advancement or betterment relative to or at the expense of others is not. At the same meeting, Dr. Ron Hoskins of the Cherokee Nation identified the cardinal values associated with the traditional medicine wheel (“the symbol of how two-leggeds view the world”) as wisdom, vision, passion, trust, compassion, and thoughtful reflection. The universe and right behavior within it, he says, are governed by the original knowledge that lies deep in each individual at birth. Although the various Native American tribes differ in their views, they are generally pantheistic, emphasizing that they are a part of nature, not a special being above nature or one whose purpose is to exploit nature. Native Americans, in fact, were considered less than human when Europeans arrived on the continent from Christian Spain. In 1516 Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s De Orbo Nova was published and described Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s killing the leader of the Indians of Quarequa, Panama, and six hundred of his warriors. Balboa fed to his dogs forty more Indians whom he accused of sodomy. Peter Martyr’s Decades (1555), the anglicized version of Martire’s work, depicts the following:

[Balboa] founde the house of this kynge infected with most abhominable and unnaturall lechery. For he founde the kynges brother and many other younge men in womens apparell, smoth & effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte abowte hym, he abused with preposterous venus. Of these abowte the number of fortie, he commaunded to bee gyven for a pray to his dogges.

“Preposterous” refers to a confusion of before and behind, “venus” to sexual acts. In the battle that precedes the slaughter of the forty Panamanian sodomites, according to Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries (1994), there are no “good” Indians, all are sodomitical animals, and it was a religious duty that they be “hewed . . . in pieses as the butchers doo flesshe . . . , from one an arme, from an other a legge, from hym a buttocke, from an other a shulder, and from sume the necke from the bodye at one stroke.” Goldberg observes, “After the sodomites are fed to the dogs, there are two kinds of Indians in the text, sodomitical ones, and noble savages. As the latter lift their hands to heaven, it’s as if they’re proto-Christians, at the very least testifying to the universality of the Judeo-Christian condemnation of ‘unnatural’ sexuality. Serving as a mirror of European belief, this split representation of Indians permits the covering over of divisions within the invading troops. . . . . Balboa is not only the righter of sexual wrongs, the restorer of proper gender, he’s also the universal liberator of the underclasses.” The Carib Indians were the native people who formerly inhabited the Lesser Antilles, West Indies. Fewer than five hundred still survive on a reservation in Dominica, and many are half-breeds. A century before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the Caribs overran the Lesser Antilles and drove out the Arawak Indians. The original name by which the Caribs were known, Galibi or Calibi, was corrupted by the Spanish to Caníbal. It is said that Columbus, upon hearing of Caníba mistakenly associated the word with Grand K’han, for whom he was searching. When on a Sunday Columbus discovered an island with these people, he called the island Dominica, an “islande of the Canibales.” Cubans also told him they were Canibáles, and when he landed on “Hayti,” Columbus heard the name of the people as Caribes, their country Carib. They were described as being brave and daring, and rightfully or wrongfully they have been compared to the warlike Spartans whereas the Arawaks were Athenian-like and artistic. Because of their fierceness the Caribs gained the reputation of being anthropophagi, or eaters of human flesh, thus the English word cannibal. In 1525 Tomás Ortiz claimed that the Caribs were not merely cannibals (as Columbus first has declared) but “were sodomites more than any other race.” In 1526 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo repeated the formula, “The Indians eat human flesh and are sodomites.” However, In 1542, Las Casas wrote in Brevisima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias that although a “few” sodomites might be found among the Indians, “for whose sakes nevertheless all that world is not to be condemned. We may say as much of the eating of man’s flesh.” In short, he found diabolical the Spanish accusation that the Indians “all were polluted with the abhominable sinne against nature: which is a wretched and false slaunder.” Such a sentiment ran counter to the view that in New Spain the conquerors had every right to extirpate the pagans who, according to Cortez’s translator Aguilar,

pierce their ears and put very large and ugly objects in them; others pierce their nostrils down to the lip and put in them large round stones which look like mirrors; and others will split their lower lips as far as the gums and hang there some large stones or gold ornaments so heavy that they drag the lips down, giving a most deformed appearance.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in 1527 went to Florida and for a two-year stretch lived “alone among the Indians and naked like them,” sometimes as their slave, sometimes as their “medicine man.” He finally reported that “in the 2,000 leagues we sojourned by land and sea . . . we found no sacrifices and no idolatry.” Nor any native cannibalism. As an outsider, he was respected by the various Indian groups he met, and in his “preaching” he tells them that the god they pray to is the same as the one he calls Dios. What disturbed the Spaniards back home when they learned of it was that on Galveston Island Cabeza de Vaca had found some Spaniards ate each other, the very act they had accused the Indians of doing: “The Indians were so shocked at this cannibalism that, if they had seen it sometime earlier, they surely would have killed every one of us.” Cabeza de Vaca by this time knew six Indian languages and had become a shaman—he reported trying the native practice of sucking and cauterizing wounds “with good results.” The Native Americans fared no better further north. William Bradford (1590–1657), governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote History of Plymouth Plantation, which vividly describes the burning of the Pequot Indians at Mystic, in Connecticut:

All was quickly on a flame, and thereby more were burnt to death than was otherwise slain; It burnt their bowstrings and made them unserviceable; those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

The Native Americans, it transpired, “deserved” to be killed for the sake of Christianity. However, any Indians who somehow escaped death were fair bait to be converted to their conquerors’ religion . . . of love. The Native American Church, which claims to have at least 200,000 loosely organized members, call their religious orientation “the Peyote Road” and over fifty tribes in the United States and Canada utilized peyote by 1890. Although the use of the drug has been challenged in the courts, the rights of peyotists to religious freedom have generally been upheld. (See Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (1994. See the entry for Hopi, whose placed a large emphasis upon Nature.) {CE; DGC}

NATIVE AMERICANS: See entry for American Indians.

NATIVE AMERICANS, ETHNIC CLEANSING In the 1990s, when American newspapers described in detail the “ethnic cleansing” of Balkan groups which seek to gain a geographical area and kill or move all those who are ethnically different—Muslim-dominated Bosnians, Serbs, Croats, etc. —American history books continued to overlook the “near cleansing” of Native Americans by the whites who were forefathers of the country’s majority. Columbus was at the helm when the original cleansing began, except that his approach utilized forced labor more than genocide. The Massachusetts and Virginia colonists were far more successful, aided by disease and starvation, which almost killed themselves as well as the Native Americans. The mis-named Indians feared John Smith would kill them all, although historians downplay the fact. Played up is the story of Squanto and the Wampanoags who befriended the Pilgrims, helping them avert starvation and joining them in the first Thanksgiving. Omitted is the fact that, soon afterwards, the English settlers wiped out every tribe within striking distance. William Bradford, in a 1636 search-and-destroy raid, happily reported that “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer . . . but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave prayers thereof to God . . . .” Benjamin Franklin sponsored a Pennsylvania act that paid a bounty for Indian scalps. The Louisiana Purchase arranged by Thomas Jefferson resulted in eviction notices for the Indians. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren favored “removal” of Indians, resulting in the deadly forced march known as the “Trail of Tears” in 1836. The justification for believing that the entire continent belonged to the United States was termed “manifest destiny,” or a carrying out of the Divine Providence. The concept encouraged expansionism and was connected with slavery—both the North and the South wanted to admit those new states that supported its section’s economic, political, and slave policies. By the end of the 19th century, the belief was used to support expansion in the Caribbean and the Pacific. After the war between the states, battles against the American Indians continued, as did broken treaties between the two sides. There was a brutal war against the Apache; Custer’s Last Stand; the removal of the Nez Perce from the Northwest in 1877; the massacre of hundreds of surrendering men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890; and, in addition, the corrupt paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Defenders point out that Japanese historians fail to tell the story of the rape of Nanking; that Soviet books leave out the Stalinist terror; that Iraqi children are not given the facts of the Gulf War. Meanwhile, until multicultural textbooks address the situation, Indians continue to be romantically depicted as ecologically sensitive “noble savages.” {Kenneth C. Davis, “Ethnic Cleansing Didn’t Start in Bosnia,” The New York Times, 3 September 1995}

NATURAL LAW Natural law is the doctrine that human affairs should be governed by ethical principles that are part of the very nature of things and that can be understood by reason. The first two paragraphs of the American “Declaration of Independence” contain a clear statement of the doctrine. {DCL}

NATURALISM

• Naturalism, in philosophy,

is a position that attempts to explain all phenomena and account for all values using strictly natural (not supernatural) categories. The opposite of idealism, it is sometimes equated with empiricism and positivism.

In a broad sense, naturalism has been maintained in diverse forms by Aristotle, the Cynics, the Stoics, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, Auguste Comte, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, William James, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. These philosophers, however, differed widely on specific questions. Comte and Nietzsche, for example, were professed atheists whereas Aristotle, James, and Dewey attempted to explain phenomena in terms of biological processes of perception. Spinoza and the idealists emphasized metaphysics.

Peter H. Hare has written about the American naturalist tradition: “The Enlightenment naturalism found in Cadwallader Colden, Franklin, Jefferson, and others was enriched in the nineteenth century by German and British idealism—the concept of experience in American naturalism was much broadened by wrestling with idealism; the same sources contributed process logic to American naturalism. As is widely recognized, Darwinian biology also enriched American naturalism; to mention still another example, medieval logic enriched Charles Sanders Peirce’s naturalism. In the twentieth century, the close study of Aristotle enriched the naturalism of John Herman Randall Jr., C. I. Lewis’s naturalism was enriched by lifelong study of Kant. Marxism enriched the naturalisms of Roy Wood Sellars and Marvin Faber. W. V. O. Quine’s naturalism has been enriched by Rudolf Carnap’s linguistic philosophy, Alfred Tarski’s philosophy of logic, and Pierre Duhem’s philosophy of science.” Hare also cites the naturalism of Murray Murphey, Hilary Kornblith, James Gouinlock, Arnold Berleant, Peter Manicas, Wilfrid Sellars, and Paul Kurtz.

Contemporary naturalists place an emphasis upon unifying the scientific viewpoint with an all-encompassing reality. Some resources on the subject are Marvin Farber’s Naturalism and Subjectivism (1959), V. C. Punzo’s Reflective Naturalism (1969), Jamie M. Ferreira’s Skepticism and Reasonable Doubt (1987), and P. F. Strawson’s Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1987).

Thomas Clark has material on the Web about naturalism: <http://www.naturalism.org>.

• Naturalism, in literature,

includes an analysis of reality in terms of natural forces—heredity, environment, physical drives. Émile Zola in his Le Roman expérimental (1880) said that like a scientist a novelist should examine various phenomena in life and draw indisputable conclusions. Other literary naturalists were the Goncourt brothers, J. K. Huysmans, Guy de Maupassant, George Moore, George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, James T. Farrell, and James Jones. In the late 19th century, naturalism became associated with André Antoine, Otto Brahm, Constantin Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theatre, and dramatists such as Henry François Becque, Gerhart Hauptmann, Count Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky.

• One teacher has illustrated for laymen the nuances of the meaning of naturalism in philosophic circles:

For the theistic supernaturalist, “in the beginning” means Genesis.

For the philosophic naturalist, “in the beginning” means “the Big Bang” and “RNA.”

For the scientific naturalist, as John Muir said, “I find that if I touch anything, it’s connected to everything else in the universe.” . . . and in literary and artistic circles:

The literary realist sees a wastebasket which is rectangular, black, 2 feet wide by 3 feet high, and costs $30.83 postpaid, tax included.

The literary romantic sees the same item as an elegant, contemporary, Danish-designed receptacle which matches any decor and costs a mere $30.83

The literary naturalist sees a cheap, rectangular, black hospital container with pus and stains on one side, discarded bandages at the bottom, and an unidentified three-pound chunk of bone and flesh dripping with blood in the center.

The artistic naturalist sees an elegant woman seated on a porch overlooking a tree-shaded pond, a black Burmese kitten at her feet, an Apple Macintosh laptop perched on her skirt, her inexpensive wastebasket partly filled with discarded, unwrinkled drafts of sonnets. (See entry for James Thrower, whose Short History of Western Atheism describes non-and anti-theistic developments in pre-Socratic, Socratic, and Hellenistic times. See a discussion of naturalism by Arthur C. Danto in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5. See American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by John Ryder (1993); and “The Significance of American Philosophic Naturalism” by Patrick Romanell, Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996. See the entry for Humanistic Naturalism, a term John Dewey and others preferred.) {CE}

NATURALIST CHURCH: See entry for the “Supernaturalism minus super equals Naturalism” International Naturalist Church.

NATURALISTIC HUMANISM: See entry for Humanists, Naturalistic.

NATURALISTIC HUMANISM MOVEMENT An attempt to start a “naturalistic humanism movement” began in 1953 at the Rienzi, a roué’s hangout in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The attempt died the following year. Commenced by John Collins and Warren Allen Smith as a European-style student philosophic movement, it appealed to intelligentsia who were against the existentialism propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre and for naturalistic humanism, the philosophic outlook of Corliss Lamont. Although it was unable to appeal to large numbers who would have stormed St. Patrick’s and St. John’s cathedrals demanding an end to their tax-exempt status, or paraded on various campuses to stir up collegiates’ interest in philosophy, the group did form the Greenwich Village Humanist Club and worked with the American Humanist Association’s New York City chapter. (See entries for John Collins; Greenwich Village Humanist Club; Humanists, Naturalistic; and Warren Allen Smith.)

NATURALISTIC HUMANIST, THE OLDEST: See entry for Lucy.

NATURE • Nature is a perpetual circulatory worker, generating fluids out of solids, and solids out of fluids, fixed things out of volatile, & volatile out of fixed. –Isaac Newton

To some, nature is what God created in six days, an entity over which man was to be lord. Adam, the creation chosen to be lord and whose name is derived from adamah, or earth, developed a depraved nature, or so Paul taught in the Bible, and not only did Adam lose the original righteousness insofar as the supernatural gift of divine grace was concerned but also he transmitted this sin to all his descendants. Theologians then, as well as now, have found it difficult to explain how the sin of Adam could be transmitted that way. Present-day Protestants tend to reject the theory of the origin of sin as being in Adam’s “fall.” In 1925, Bertrand Russell in What I Believe wrote, “The philosophy of nature should not be unduly terrestrial; the earth is merely one of the smaller planets of one of the smaller stars of the Milky Way. Vitalism as a philosophy, and evolutionism, show, in this respect, a lack of sense of proportion and logical relevance. They regard the facts of life, which are personally interesting to us, as having a cosmic significance, not a significance confined to the earth’s surface. Optimism and pessimism, as cosmic philosophies, show the same naive humanism; the great world, so far as we know it from the philosophy of nature, is neither good nor bad, and is not concerned to make us happy or unhappy. All such philosophies spring from self-importance, and are best corrected by a little astronomy.” Arthur C. Clarke, in 3001, tells of a future space trip in which Nature is re-named:

When they were fifty thousand kilometers out, [Poole] was about to view the whole of Star City, as a narrow ellipse enclosing the Earth. Though the far side was barely visible, as a hairline of light against the stars, it was awe-inspiring to think that the human race had now set this sign upon the heavens. Then Poole remembered the rings of Saturn, infinitely more glorious. The astronautical engineers still had a long, long way to go before they could match the achievements of Nature. Or, if that was the right word, Deus.

(For a contemporary theory about the origin of life in nature,

see the entry for Richard Dawkins.) {Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; John Updike, “Immortal Isaac,” The New Yorker, 30 March 1998}

Naudé, Gabriel (1600–1653) A scholar, heretic, and skeptic, Naudé is cited by Robertson as one of the freethinkers in seventeenth-century France, along with La Mothe le Vayer and Gui Patin. Naudé, however, sided with the Catholics in politics. Because of his forensic defense of the Massacre, a brutal religious slaughter of that time, he is, along with Patin, sometimes claimed as a believer. {JMR; JMRH}

Navarro, Antonio (20th Century) Navarro has been the director of Radio and TV Marti and a senior vice president of W. R. Grace. In 1990 he was appointed director of the U.S. Information Agency’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting, overseeing the operation of Radio and TV Marti. From 1985 to 1990 he served on the Presidential Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting. In Tocayo (1981), he wrote of two suspenseful years of his life during the onset of Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. In his underground resistance movement against Castro, he was known by the code name “Tocayo” (namesake). In 1986, he received the New York City Liberty Medal, awarded to foreign-born citizens who have made a contribution to the city. And he has directed in Lima, Peru, the foundation of a graduate school of business in association with Stanford University. Navarro is a freethinker, as evidenced by an op ed article he wrote for the Miami Herald (9 February 1995):

I submit that a rightful life—not out of fear of eternal punishment or hope of eternal reward, but out of self-respect and love for your fellow human beings—is the true mark of an honorable man or woman. . . . Religion is necessary for many, and properly so. It is comforting, relieves anxiety, provides meaning to life. But some others, the silent minority, simply—and most of them quietly—accept our unexplainable world for what it is: unexplainable. Count me in.

{Freethought Today, June-July 1997}

Navarro, Osvaldo (20th Century) Navarro, a Cuban, spoke on “Man, Naturalism, and Literature” at the 1996 Humanist World Congress held in Mexico City.

Navarro de Francisco, Cesar (20th Century) Dr. Navarro de Francisco is a former president of the Ateneo of Madrid, a headquarters that was built in 1884. The Ateneos (The Atheneums) were founded in the nineteenth century, stimulated by classical Athens, and devoted to humanist values and freethought.

Navez, Napoleon (19th Century) Navez was a Belgian freethinker. He became the president of Antwerp’s Libre Pensée. Also, he was an active member of the Council of the International Federation of Freethinkers. {BDF}

Navias, Eugene B. (20th Century) Navias wrote Parish Ministry and Pedagogy 1823–1983: A Past and Future Look at Religious Education (1983).

Nayar, Kuldip (20th Century) Nayar delivered the M. N. Roy Memorial Lecture under the auspices of the Indian Renaissance Institute at New Delhi in 1999. In “Prospects of India-Pakistan Relations,” he detailed the problems between the two countries. {The Radical Humanist, June 1999}

Nayler, James (1617?–1660) A Quaker, Nayler was a disciple of George Fox. Gradually, however, he gained his own following and in 1656 rode into Bristol, his group crying, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Israel.” A parliamentary trial in 1656 was told that his disciples were worshiping, not Nayler, but the “Christ within him.” However, he was sentenced, whipped through the streets, pilloried, bored through the tongue with a hot iron, branded in the forehead, and sent to hard labor in prison. Nayler is typical of the many hundreds of Quaker “unbelievers” who were imprisoned and more or less cruelly handled during the 17th century. {CE; JMR; JMRH}

Naylor, B. S. (19th Century) In Australia, Naylor edited a spiritualist and freethought monthly, Glow-Worm (1869 to 1870). {FUK}

NAZARETH See entry for Christmas.

NCCL: See the entry for Brian Dyson, who wrote Liberty in Britain 1934–1994, A Diamond Jubilee History of the National Council for Civil Liberties. The National Council for Civil Liberties’ (NCCL’s) first president was the freethinker and novelist E. M. Forster.

NEANDERTHAL MAN Although students of prehistory have speculated that Neanderthal man had some part in the evolution of modern humanity, a 1997 study of Neanderthal DNA suggested it has no such connection, that interbreeding was not possible. The study of bones found in Germany that were over 30,000 years old also indicated that the Neanderthals split off much earlier from the hominid line than modern humans did. This left chimpanzees, the study found, as mankind’s closest living relatives. Not so, reported Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a paleonthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. His mid-1999 study alleged that Neanderthals and modern humans not only coexisted for thousands of years but also that they cohabited. Upon examining a 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy discovered in a shallow Portuguese grave, Trinkaus found not only that the boy was a hybrid but also that the discovey “refutes strict replacement models of modern human origins” and also seemed to undermine interpretations of the 1997 study, done by Dr. Svante Paabo of the University of Munich in Germany. The Paabo study was wrong because all that it showed “is that Neanderthal biology is outside the range of living humans, not modern Homo sapiens back then.” Scientists at the end of the century found the differing studies intriguing and only tentative. “But if you look deep enough in evolutionary time,” said Dr. Alan Templeton at Washington University, “you find a lot of interbreeding. That is what humanity is all about: we interbreed a lot.” {The Economist, 112 July 1997; The New York Times, 25 April 1999}

Nearing, Scott (183-1983): See entry for George Orwell, who considered the leftwing journalist and writer a possible member of the Communist Party.

Nebbeling, Dirk (20th Century) Nebbeling is active with the Humanist Fellowship of West Michigan. (See entry for Michigan Humanists.) {FD}

NEBRASKA HUMANISTS • Reason, PO Box 24358, Omaha, NE 68124; (402) 553-5607

NECROMANCY Necromancy, a word with its roots in the Greek nekros, corpse, includes black magic, sorcery, magic qualities, and predicting the future by communicating with the spirits of the dead.

NECROPHAGIA Necrophagia (eating of parts of a corpse, a practice followed in some primitive religions), necrophilia (an erotic interest in corpses), and theophagy (eating of a god) have figured in some religious beliefs. (See entries for Death and Corpse Worship. A 1997 movie in which necophilia is used as an erotic theme is David Cronenberg’s “Crash.”)

NECROPHILIA Necrophilia is an obsessive fascination with corpses and with death. (See entry for theophagy, the “eating of God.”)

Neale, Edward Vansittart (1810–1892) A freethinker, Neale wrote “Reason, Religion, and Revelation” (1875). {GS}

Needham, (Noel) Joseph [Terence Montgomery] (1900–1995) A scientist and China scholar, the “Erasmus of the Twentieth Century,” Needham is known for his Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West (1970). Dubbed an eccentric who in his middle age was a Morris dancer, the author of Molly Dancing in East Anglia, Needham became one of the few holders of fellowships both of the Royal Society (for scientists) and the British Academy (for the rest). He was a sociologist who edited Science, Religion, and Reality (1955) and wrote Science and Civilisation in China (6 volumes, 1954–1985). Needham had conceived the latter book when he traveled to China in 1942 and began wondering how the West could have overlooked such Chinese scientific inventions as printing, pest control, the magnetic compass, the casting of iron, stirrups, efficient horse harnesses, wheelbarrows, and gunpowder. The project became so extensive that he and dozens of associates worked on it for the next five decades. Experts often compare his work to that of Darwin and Gibbon for its size and scope. His interest in biochemistry at Cambridge University led him to write the three-volume Chemical Embryology, the lengthy forward of which was later published as a separate book, A History of Embryology, which is still regarded as a definitive work. Needham argued that a fundamental difference between Western and Chinese approaches to scientific advancement is the West’s preoccupation with natural law. The West follows scientific principles developed by Galileo and others, whereas the Chinese Taoist and Confucian tradition is more concerned with social ethics and the direct implications of science. “A wise ancient counselor advised against gunpowder,” Needham observed, “for it singed beards, burned houses, and brought Taoism into discredit.” An admirer of Taoism, regarding its initiates as primitive communists, Needham was a champion of China to the end of his life. At Cambridge, Needham was almost as well known for his left-wing beliefs as for his scientific achievements. An avowed Marxist, he along with J. D. Bernal and Julian Huxley charged America with using germ warfare during the Korean War, resulting in his being barred from entering the United States. During World War II, he called for the formation of a new international scientific agency, and he is sometimes credited with putting the “s” in UNESCO. From 1946 to 1948, Needham served as the group’s director of natural sciences. He was associated with Cambridge University for seventy years, and he and his first wife, Dorothy, were the first married couple (besides Queen Victoria and Prince Albert) to become Fellows of the Royal Society. After his first wife’s death, Needham married his longtime colleague, Lu Gwei Djen, who died in 1991. “I have always been an Anglican and a socialist,” Needham has written, for he admitted to liking William Laud (1573–1645), the archbishop who was hostile to Puritanism and who believed that the Anglican ritual should be strictly followed. “I have always been a rationalist in the sense that I think it is very good for the Church to be criticised and I suspect that some of the Fellows thought it peculiar, to say the least of it, on account of my reputation, that I was the one who introduced the New Humanist to the Senior Combination Room at Caius College. One of the most liberating experiences of my life was when I found that about a quarter of humanity (the Chinese and their congeners) have no need for the doctrine of a benevolent creator God. I therefore became, without giving up my Christianity, an ‘honorary Taoist’ because the Tao might be described as the order of nature and the way in which everything works. I even became a Lay Reader attached to the church of Thaxted in Essex where I served for many years. . . . Thus I have not been what is normally called a rationalist in all my life, but defined in my own way I am one, really.” In 1941 Needham was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association. {CE; TRI}

Nees von Esenbeck, Christian Gottfried (1776–1858) A German naturalist, Nees von Esenbeck first became a doctor of medicine, then a professor of botany at Bonn (1819) and Breslau (1831). He was leader of the free religious movement in Silesia and, in 1848, took part in the political agitations and was deprived of his chair. Nees von Esenbeck wrote several works on natural philosophy. {BDF}

Nefertiti or Nefretete: See entry for Ikhnaton.

Negri, Gaetano (1838–1902) An eminent Italian historian, Negri as a youth fought against the Papal troops but then became leader of the Conservatives at Milan. In the Senate, he was so lenient to the Church in his later works that he is claimed as being orthodox. His best known work, Julian the Apostate, speaks of Christianity as “an irrational illusion” and in the preface Villari describes Negri as “a confirmed Rationalist.” {JM; RAT; RE}

Negri, Maxine (20th Century) In 1990 Negri arranged with the Humanist Society of Friends to share American Humanist Association facilities for the performing of weddings, memorial services, and personal counseling. Negri is on the editorial board of The Humanist, and, in 1981, was named Humanist Pioneer of the Year. She has been published in New Zealand’s Rationalist and Humanist. “I consider humanism to be the hope of the world,” she said in 1994. “Scientific data led by human reasoning and human-created ethics is the future of our planet. Our job is to get the message and concept out—loud and clear—to every inhabited corner of Earth. The world’s greatest challenge at present is to defeat the fanaticism of religious fundamentalism. . . . America’s is in safeguarding our Constitution’s guarantee of separation of church and state.” {HNS2; The Humanist, March-April 1999}

Negri, Vitali (20th Century) Negri, a contributor of freethought articles to The American Rationalist, wrote The Creator and the Created (1933).

Negri-Garlanda, Ada (1870–1945) Negri-Garlanda was an Italian poet of works such as Fatalita (1892), Tempeste (1895), and Maternita (1896). In 1896 she married Garlanda, a merchant. Negri-Garlanda was a Socialist and rationalist. {RAT}.

Nehru, Jawaharlal [Prime Minister] (1889–1964) India’s first Prime Minister, Nehru was the son of a devoted Hindu mother and a humanistic father. Nehru, who thought spiritualism absurd and the belief in a personal god “very odd” indeed, wrote, “I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or a future life.” Sibnarayan Ray, a lecturer in English literature at City College, Calcutta University, wrote the present author in 1949 about Nehru,

His mind is a queer ensemble of scientific ideas and primitive beliefs; he lives in the Western style, speaks and writes excellent English, talks rationalism and democracy, and then observes all the ancient superannuated rituals of Hindu society. Take for example the custom of Sradh, of offering sacrifices to the dead. Nehru observed it when his father died some years before. He comes of a Kashmir Brahmin family and is quite openly fanatical about preserving the blood-purity of his caste. Most journalists and admirers from the West do not seem to have any guess about this facet of his personality. But what is more surprising is that they refuse to recognise by common consent what is patent and obvious—his insufferable arrogance, his messy thinking and wooliness, his fondness for self-exhibition, and his dictatorial temper. Quite recently (1949) an American journalist, Mr. Martin Ebon of McGraw Hill Co., interviewed him and had some taste of his greatness—ask him for his impression.” Ray adds that the real humanists in India have been Jyotirao Phule and Isvar Chandra Vidyasagar but that their work, unlike Nehru’s, has not been translated from Maharashtrian and Bengali, respectively. His will, read in part on All India Radio by his sister Madame Pandit, included the following: “My desire to have a handful of my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and the Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood and, as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. . . . The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. . . . And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and constrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from the past completely. . . . The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want these to be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.

Stanley Wolpert’s Nehru: A Trust With Destiny (1996) provides a negative view. For him, Nehru was a Fabian with an undying belief in the “benevolent despotism” of strong socialist government. Wolpert claims that Nehru did not understand the tension between India’s religious groups, and this allegedly led to the country’s double partition, Punjab and Bengal. He also has outraged certain sections of the Indian intelligentsia because, from the University of California in Los Angeles where he teaches Indian history, he wrote to The Indian Express (5 February 1997), explaining his suggestion that Nehru may have had homosexual experiences. According to the newspaper, Wolpert said he did not broach the subject during his three meetings with Nehru in 1957–1958. However, Nehru enjoyed dressing in drag:

Wearing his wig, made up with lipstick, powder and eye shadow, his body draped in silks and satins, Jawahar most willingly offered himself up night after night to those endless rehearsals for the Gaekwar’s At Home as a beautiful young girl, holding out her jug of wine and loaf seductively to her poet lover, Omar.

Wolpert claims that Nehru’s first attachment was with a young man called Ferdinand Brooks, his French teacher. A theosophist, the “handsome” man was a disciple and lover of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Anglican curate who was accused of child molestation and pederasty on several continents. Leadbeater openly advocated mutual masturbation among young boys. Wolpert also suggested that Nehru may have had a gay relationship in Harrow and he made much of Panditji’s admiration for Oscar Wilde. As a result, many Indians have generally been aghast at the accusation, but not Ashok Row Kavi of the Humsafar Trust, which publishes India’s only registered gay and lesbian magazine. Prakash Narain of the Indian Humanist Union has pointed out that although Nehru used the word “spiritual,” he did so in the sense that many humanists do and had not turned a “theist” nor ceased to be an agnostic. (See entries Prakash Narain and for Sibnarayan Ray. Also see “What Is Religion,” New Humanist, November 1989.) {CB; CE; CL; The Economist, 18 January 1997; HNS2; TRI; TYD; WAS, Sibnarayan Ray, 1949}

Neider, Charles (20th Century) Neider edited “Mark Twain—Reflections on Religion” in Hudson Review #16 (1963). {GS}

Neidig, H. (19th Century) A freethinker, Neidig wrote Mistakes in the Teaching of Jesus (1892). {GS}

Neill, A(lexander) S(utherland) (1883–1973)

Neill, a Scottish headmaster of the Summerhill School in Leiston, Suffolk, England, was internationally known for his Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (1960, with a foreword by Erich Fromm). Other of his works were The Problem Teacher (1939), Hearts, Not Heads (1945), The Problem Family (1948), The Free Child (1953); and Talking of Summerhill (1967, its American title being Freedom, Not License). Neill’s progressive coeducational Summerhill School at Leiston, England, included optional attendance, a school parliament, and no religious instruction. Some educators continue to debate his philosophy. A friend of Wilhelm Reich, Neill accompanied Reich’s wife, Ilse Ollendorff, to the public school in New Canaan, Connecticut, where she and the present writer were teachers in the 1960s. Neill was nonplused by the elaborate and air-conditioned facilities, the comfortable chairs, the imposing library, the planetarium, the audio-visual studio which piped programs to classrooms, the science laboratories, the athletic rooms and fields. “How can you teach in such a place!” he marveled, stating that his own school had only the most elementary facilities. Told of the influence of John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick upon the art and English department’s educational philosophy, Neill continued to marvel, highly approving of what he observed. Over coffee, he told of some of his “radical” ideas, adding that “radical” comes from radix, root, and his educational philosophy aimed at the roots of teaching. Asked about his philosophic outlook, he scoffed at organized religion and stated that he was continually formulating his philosophy, that he did not expect to finish the task nor did he think that that would be desirable. {TRI; WAS, conversation}

Neilson, John Shaw (1872–1942) Neilson was a South Australian freethinker and poet. In 1893, he won the Australian Natives Association Literary Prize.

Nelson, B. J. (20th Century) Nelson is secretary-treasurer of the Humanist Association of New Hampshire-Vermont. (See entry for New Hampshire Humanists.) {FD}

Nelson, Gustave (19th Century) Nelson wrote for the New York Truthseeker and is conjectured to be the author of Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, a learned work that shows how much of Christianity has been taken from paganism. Born in Denmark, Nelson moved to America, eventually becoming a physician. {BDF; PUT; RAT}

Nelson, Jon (20th Century) Nelson reviewed The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You To Read for Humanist in Canada (Spring 1997), finding it “the most talked-about book in the freethought movement.” Nelson, Margaret (20th Century) In Britain, Nelson is active with the Suffolk and North Essex Humanists.

Nelson, Richard (20th Century) Nelson, a Texas freethinker, was one of the planners of a January 1999 Humanist and Freethought Conference in Arlington, Texas.

Nelson, Ron (20th Century) In Culver City, California, Nelson edited the monthly Atheist Connection (1982 to 1983).

Nelson, Theodor (Ted) Holm (1938?– ) In 1960, Nelson created a computer project called Xanadu, one which resulted in his being called the “hypertext guru and design genius” of cyberspace, “one of the seminal thinkers of our century,” and “the greatest computer visionary of our time.” He predicted the universal knowledge repository known today as the World Wide Web. Xanadu as a software product changed its specifications a number of times. But it has been described as an ultimate vision of the “docuverse” and involves all documents in the world accessible to all people in the world, with a way to see and create connections among all the documents and their parts. His Project Xanadu is devoted to the idea that, in or out of cyberspace, we need freedom and availability of information. His dream is of a global hypertext publishing system, a universal library, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all such information within reach of all people, Xanadu is meant to eliminate scientific ignorance and help cure political misunderstandings. It links virtual documents from text or audio-visual elements widely dispersed on a computer network with easy version tracking. It also provides for micropayment of authors’ royalties nd coordinates copyright, ownership, and quotations functions. His concept of hypertext has made Nelson legendary in programming circles. Nelson in 1959 earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College but was almost expelled for his arguments in favor of sexual liberation. In 1963 he earned an M.A. in sociology from Harvard. Computer Lib/Dream Machines: You Can and Must Understand Computers NOW (1974) was published four months prior to the unveiling of the first commercial available personal computer. In “The Curse of Xanadu” (Wired, June 1995), Gary Wolf wrote, Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

Nelson is the son of actress Celeste Holm and playwright Ralph Nelson (1916–1987), who directed the 1962 movie “Requiem for a Heavyweight” and “Lilies of the Field” (1963). A designer, generalist, and contrarian, Nelson holds that “transclusive hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future” and in his Literary Machines has called himself a “Systems Humanist.” “I identify as a card-carrying atheist,” he has written, “but I can’t find anyone to issue me a card.” He is author of Computer Lib: Dream Machines (1987), an unusual book which Wired and other publications cite as indicating that he was the designer in 1965 of HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). A developer of software and zipper lists, he teaches at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. Explaining his coinages hypertex (http) and hypermedia, Nelson has told his students at Japan’s Keio University and others via <http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/> that

• Hypertext is Literature, not Technology. • Literature is a Two-God System. • There is a philosophy of interconnection behind Xanadu. • Xanadu is a Three-God System. • Xanadu may be a Four-God System. • Xanalogical Structure Is the Manifest Destiny of Literature.

	From the early 1980s until 1998, he worked on a design for ZigZag, a software program that uses no metaphors, no icons, no applications, “a Tinkertoy world for users to share, explore, and reconfigure.” An Australian, Andrew Pam, wrote a demo version of the program which uses a Perl 5 code and runs under the Linux operating system which Nelson describes as “the sexual revolution brought to the spreadsheet. In a spreadsheet, society required that a cell have an up connection, a downconnection, a left connection, and a right connection. In this system each cell’s connections are its own business.”

When fifteen, Nelson wrote the following:

YES

There are apparently people To whom a small bier From the bartender of the First Cause Signifies the ultimate binge. {CA; E; WAS, 1950–1998; Technology Review, September- October 1998; Wired, June 1995 and September 1995} Nelson, Theodor (Ted) Holm (17 June 1937 - )

		In 1960, Nelson created a computer project called Xanadu, one which resulted in his being called the “hypertext guru and design genius” of cyberspace, “one of the seminal thinkers of our century,” and “the greatest computer visionary of our time.” He predicted the universal knowledge repository known today as the World Wide Web. Xanadu as a software product changed its specifications a number of times. But it has been described as an ultimate vision of the “docuverse” and involves all documents in the world accessible to all people in the world, with a way to see and create connections among all the documents and their parts.

He is the son of Hollywood star Celeste Holm and playwright Ralph Nelson (1916–1987), who directed the 1962 movie Requiem for a Heavyweight and Lilies of the Field (1963). A designer, generalist, and contrarian, Nelson holds that “transclusive hypermedia will be the publishing medium of the future” and in his Literary Machines has called himself a “Systems Humanist.” “I identify as a card-carrying atheist,” he has written, “but I can’t find anyone to issue me a card.” Project Xanadu is devoted to the idea that, in or out of cyberspace, we need freedom and availability of information. Nelson’s dream is of a global hypertext publishing system, a universal library, a system to resolve copyright disputes, and a meritocratic forum for discussion and debate. By putting all such information within reach of all people, Xanadu would eliminate scientific ignorance and help cure political misunderstandings. It would link virtual documents from text or audio-visual elements widely dispersed on a computer network with easy version tracking. It also would provide for micropayment of authors’ royalties and coordinate copyright, ownership, and quotations functions. His concept of hypertext has made Nelson legendary in programming circles. In 1959 he earned a B.A. in philosophy from Swarthmore College, almost being expelled for his arguments in favor of sexual liberation. In 1963 at Harvard he earned an M.A. in sociology. In on online article by Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar, Nelson is said, while in a humanities computer course, to have been

struck by a vision of what could be. For his term project, he attempted to devise a text-handling system which would allow writers to revise, compare, and undo their work easily. Considering that he was writing in Assembler language on a mainframe, in the days before "word processing" had been invented, it was not surprising that his attempt fell short of completion. Five years later, he gave his first paper at the annual conference of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). It was around this time that he coined the term ‘hypertext.”

Further: The Xanadu software is as mythic as the place after which it was named. In Dream Machines, published in 1974, Nelson announced that it would be ready for release by 1976. In the 1987 edition of Literary Machines, the due date was 1988. The development of Xanadu was given a large boost in early 1988 when Autodesk (the company which made their fortune from AutoCAD) bought the Xanadu Operating Company. Code for a prototype of part of the system was made public later that year. In an article published in Byte in January 1988, Nelson expected to be fully completed by 1991. Then, nothing. Autodesk has since relinquished interest in Xanadu.

Nelson's conception of hypertext is a rich one. Dream Machines describes hypergrams (branching pictures), hypermaps (with transparent overlays), and branching movies, such as the film at the Czechoslovakian Pavilion at Expo '67. The modular layout of this book attempts to impart the interconnectedness of knowledge which hypertext can convey. Its large format, hand-drawn illustrations, and irreverent tone were inspired by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Review. Flip the book over, and you'll find a second polemic—Computer Lib. The book sold a total of 50,000 copies.

In Dream Machines, Nelson provides three categories of hypertext. The first, basic or chunk hypertext, supports what we have been calling reference and note links. The second, stretchtext, is a full implementation of expansion links. The third, collateral, stems from his work in 1971 with the Parallel Textface, which provides a view of two documents on one screen, with full support for versioning. Nelson also distinguishes between "fresh" or original hyperbooks on one topic, "anthological" hyperbooks linking different works, and "grand" systems:

Despite Nelson's unwavering optimism, Xanadu has failed to materialize. Nonetheless, its intellectual presence has exerted an enormous force on the evolution of hypertext systems. Few researchers would deny the influence of his ideas.

In “The Curse of Xanadu” (Wired, June 1995), Gary Wolf wrote,

Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

		A developer of software and zipper lists, Nelson teaches at Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. Explaining his coinages hypertex (http) and hypermedia, Nelson has told his students at Japan’s Keio University and others (via <http://www.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~ted/>) that

From the early 1980s until 1998, he worked on a design for ZigZag, a software program that uses no metaphors, no icons, no applications, “a Tinkertoy world for users to share, explore, and reconfigure.” An Australian, Andrew Pam, wrote a demo version of the program which uses a Perl 5 code and runs under the Linux operating system which Nelson describes as “the sexual revolution brought to the spreadsheet. In a spreadsheet, society required that a cell have an up connection, a down connection, a left connection, and a right connection. In this system each cell’s connections are its own business.” When fifteen, Nelson wrote the following:

YES

There are apparently people To whom a small bier From the bartender of the First Cause Signifies the ultimate binge. {CA; E; Technology Review, September-October 1998; WAS, 1950–2001; Wired, June 1995 and September 1995}

Nelson, Wallace (1856–1943) In 1892, Wallace was a lecturer in Queensland, Australia, of the Gympie Secular Society. Scottish-born, he was a rationalist, journalist, and politician. Only 4’ 8” tall, he was editor of Stockwhip (Sydney), People’s Newspaper (Rockhampton), and Westralian Worker (Kalgoorlie). In 1883 he wrote The Death of Adam. On his death, he was cremated and the obituary notice in The Rationalist included that he “never wavered in opposition to superstition.” {SWW}

Nemerov, Howard (1920–1991) Nemerov, an American author who writes poetry, fiction, criticism, often with a philosophic viewpoint, received a Pulitzer in 1977 for his Collected Poems. Asked about humanism, he responded to the present author:

I have not myself had much occasion to use the word humanism or its curricular form humanities. The latter probably began as an administrative convenience for separating what was science from whatever was not, but the tail soon began wagging the dog—as if the sciences were somehow not a human endeavor! —and people accordingly began treating the verbal distinction as a real border, or maybe a better chasm. Your investigation has as a side-effect the illustration of what happens when people meet the demand to define their terms, the demand is a sign of unease, possibly of disease, a crisis of faith in which what is demanded is demanded precisely because it has become impossible: the result is a splitting into orthodoxies and heresies of just that sectarian sort that has ever been characteristic of religion and its disputes, wranglings, hair-splittings, and burnings at the stake; the sort, maybe, that the term humanism was in the first place designed to evade. This is a Laodician response on my part, and I have long regarded the trimmers as the nicest people in hell. To be at home in one’s language is to be happy with its splendid inability to stick to one subject or to say only one thing about it. I’ll settle for being comfortably, or what others will call ignobly, vague. {WAS, 24 March 1989}

NEO-CLASSICAL HUMANISM—THE GREAT WORD WAR For several hundred years after the Renaissance period, there was not much concern for nor interest in classical humanism, and it was in the latter 19th and early 20th centuries that an adherent such as Matthew Arnold took center stage. He looked at the world of his day and decided that its “barbarians, Philistines, and the populace in general” suffered a great need in their intellectual life for Hellenism. He suggested that, to satisfy this need for intellectual nourishment, the world should look backward. It should look backward to the highest and best ideas which were available from the past and which could advantageously be imitated. The new Renaissance he envisioned was a “Renascence,” a word that never became popularly used. A quarter of a century after Arnold died, his concepts of culture were taken up and advanced by William C. Brownell, Irving Babbitt, and Paul Elmer More. These neo-classical humanists, “neo-humanists,” maintained that man cannot hope to go forward unless he looks backward for models of perfection. They argued that faith in science alone would never be sufficient to solve man’s problems, and they pointed to the unbridled arrogance of science and the unchecked dreaming of romanticism which they claimed had combined to give man a most dangerous and conceitful notion—that of the idea of progress. Science, they pointed out, only led men into the dens of naturalism and materialism and from there into the caverns of a decadent culture. Something more than science was needed, they said, and that something was close to a need for culture in the Arnoldian sense of the word. In 1929, over one dozen books and articles were written concerning “new humanism.” In 1930, no fewer than six books and over fifty articles appeared in Saturday Review of Literature, Bookman, New Republic, Yale Review, Commonweal, Scribner’s, Forum, and Christian Century. From 1928 to 1933, the movement was in its heyday. Support came from T. S. Eliot and Norman Foerster as well as from Stuart P. Sherman, L. T. More, G. E. Elliott, E. J. Mather, A. R. Thompson, Robert Shafer, H. H. Clark, G. B. Munson, S. B. Gass, R. L. Brown, and L. J. A. Mercier. Together, they turned out and defined their positions toward humanism in what amounted to thousands of paragraphs, barrels of printer’s ink, and tons of paper, leading one wag to describe the movement as “Word War I.” Of the many books on the subject, those by Babbitt and More are the most authoritative and Foerster’s Humanism and America (1930) the most representative. In 1989, Harry Levin, the Irving Babbitt professor of comparative literature emeritus at Harvard University, wrote, “Two generations ago my old teacher and Harvard predecessor, Irving Babbitt, was calling for a New Humanism. He had been protesting against certain modernistic tendencies that he—not I—thought were undermining the classical canons of literature. But culture itself was still focused upon the traditional habits of reading and writing, and more particularly upon great books. Subsequent developments in technology, leading toward audiovisual dependence and artificial intelligence, seem to be shifting away from humanism of any kind.” By 1930, however, the “new humanists” were being called “neo-humanists” and were being attacked by such influential writers as Mary M. Colum, Henry Seidel Canby, Max Eastman, C. H. Grattan, Henry Hazlitt, Lewis Mumford, G. N. Shuster, Edmund Wilson, and Rebecca West. Their main line of attack was on the cultural approach of neo-humanism. Allen Tate and other Catholics, as well as Charles Francis Potter and many liberal ministers, assailed the movement on religious grounds. In addition, it was attacked by philosophers and scientists who did not agree with the neo-humanist opinion concerning naturalism. Representative of the attacks was Critique of Humanism, edited by C. H. Grattan, a direct reply to the claims made in Foerster’s Humanism and America. Although the average man in the bread lines knew little about the great word war, many of the nation’s intellectuals were preoccupied with humanism from 1930 to 1933. Spectacular verbal battles were waged, some quite personal and disagreeable. Babbitt came in for the most criticism, and he fought back valiantly, never giving in on a point, especially in regard to his personal dislike of Rousseau. In one bout, Babbitt called H. L. Mencken an author whose writings were “nearer to intellectual vaudeville than to serious criticism.” Mencken replied that the new humanism was but “a somewhat sickly and shamefaced Christian mysticism.” Grattan accused the neo-humanists of being merely “skilled practitioners of the literary racket.” Other fights receiving top billing were O. W. Firkins vs. Edmund Wilson; Hazlitt vs. T. S. Eliot; and Tate vs. Shafer. Shafer called Tate a contemptible creature possessed of “self-confident readiness in the art of misrepresentation.” Canby criticized Babbitt and neo-humanism as being but examples of a narrow sectarianism, and Hazlitt accused the movement of trying to revive an outworn and discredited metaphysics. Rebecca West warned that anyone who followed More as a critic and guide of modern literature did so at his own heavy cost. She granted that the only man of genius whom the neo-humanists could claim was T. S. Eliot, but she added that all the rest of their supporters would hardly make an even exchange for Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Moore. Struggles such as these were commonplace in 1930 magazine columns. Their emphasis upon the literary gave the neo-humanists the reputation of being “literary humanists,” but they neither liked the title nor that of “neo-humanist.” In literature they were opposed to such writers as Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Mencken, and James Branch Cabell because of these authors’ “futile idealism.” Rousseau received the greatest part of the blame for this allegedly futile idealism, especially from the pen of Babbitt. Agreeing with Babbitt, William L. Sperry wrote that Rousseau was the arch-enemy and “We are not to forget those angels of darkness who have given his (Rousseau’s) heresy a local habitation: Cooper; Poe; Melville; Emerson; Whitman; Masters; Dreiser; and all their kind.” Sperry continued, adding Einstein, Eddington, and Walter Lippmann. In 1933, when L. J. A. Mercier’s Challenge of Humanism was published, neo-humanism was all but dead. A Catholic and a Harvard professor, he originally had published the book in 1928 as Mouvement Humaniste aux États-Unis. Upon its publication, however, wags described his efforts as analogous to those of a doctor giving a blood transfusion to a centenarian with collapsed lungs. Worse, Babbitt died in 1933. T. S. Eliot, the obvious leader to take over the movement, had other projects to finish. This left Mercier who, like a guerrilla, was attacking as late as 1948, saying the University of Chicago’s Chancellor Robert Hutchins was his type of humanist. In short, what started as “new humanism” and became “neo-humanism” died with its leaders. {For a discussion of the neo-humanists and their scorn of the determinism of Taine, of any form of “impressionism”—the term they loosely applied to theories such as those of Walter Pater and Benedetto Croce that accepted Immanuel Kant’s separation of aesthetic experience from practical life—see the article by Stephen C. Brennan of Louisiana State University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994). Also, see entries for Norman Foerester, theism, and Charles Trinkaus.}

NEO-HUMANISM: See entries for Neo-Classical Humanism and for Harold Bloom.

NEO-MARXISM: See entry for Consilience.

NEONATICIDE Neonaticide, a reference to the killing of a newborn, has been practiced and accepted in most cultures throughout history. As to whether it is immoral or an illness, professor of psychology Steven Pinker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology holds that it is difficult to call it an illness. In fact, neonaticide may be a product of “maternal wiring.” Mammalian mothers, he holds, must “decide” whether to allot their energy and food to their newborn or to their current and future offspring. If a newborn is sickly, or if its survival is not promising, “they may cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.” The religious orthodox would find substituting “neonaticide” for “infanticide” unacceptable, either for humans or, apparently, for other animals. {Steven Pinker, “Why They Kill Their Newborns,” The New York Times Book Review, 2 November 1997}

NEO-RELIGIONISTS: For an estimate of the number of neo-religionists worldwide, see the entry for Hell.

NEPAL HUMANISTS Nepal is known for having the world’s tallest mountain, Mt. Everest. It also is known for its apostle of peace, Raja Jayaprithvi Bahadur Singh (Raja Jaya Prithvi), an intellectual and secular humanist who in 1928 founded Humanistic Club in Europe, Asia, and America. The club’s objectives were as follows:

• to open Humanistic Clubs in as many places of every country as possible so that the ideals of unity, peace, and cooperation may be with us even in our play, in our recreation, and in our light-heartedness;

• to conduct research in sociology, philosophy, and psychic phenomena and other disciplines so as to get into the inner truth of every aspect in life;

• to spread the ideals of truth to all contending parties and classes and, thus, make it possible to bring mutual goodwill and understanding among them;

• to exchange ideas on human interest with other sister organizations of the world; but in doing so one ought to strictly avoid controversial themes like religion and political propaganda;

• to build linkages of the Club with other social and philanthropic bodies.

	In 1929 he started extensive travels to various countries to organize branches:

• a Geneva, Switzerland, club was formed at #3, Chemin de l’Escalade, Champel, Geneva, with Lady Blomfield, Baroness Tanfani, Myers Stolt (treasurer), Madam Myers, Hale White (secretary), Sindey [Cindy?] Brown, Mr. and Mrs. Rao;

• the Berlin, Germany, lecture took place under the auspices of the Mittwoch-Gesellschaft, whose President, Dr. Ludwig Stein, chaired the meeting;

• the Prague, Czechoslovakia, lecture took place at Sal Gregur Obseen Dum, with Dr. Professor Lesney chairing the meeting;

• In Vienna, Austria, the lecture took place in Industrishaus, the chair being Dr. Greiger of the University of Vienna;

• the Budapest, Hungary, meeting was held under the auspices of the Hungarian Club with many members of the Hungarian parliament present; Dr. Vamberi translated the lecture into the Hungarian language;

• The Belgrade, Yugoslavia, meeting was chaired by Alexander Yovicic, formerly Charge de Affairs in the Serbian Legation in London and held under the auspices of the Anglo-Jugoslav Club. Speakers included Dr. Brana Petronijevic, formerly professor of philosophy in the University of Belgrade; Dr. Sibe Melicic, a poet and member of the Ministry of Affairs. The lecture was translated by Dr. Vladeta Popovic of the University of Belgrade;

• In Bucharest, Romania, the lecture took place in Femme Casse, arranged for by Princess Kanta Kusino;

• In Warsaw, Poland, the lecture took place under the auspices of The Intellectual Union in Karmienica Duke’s Mansion. Prof. Liebinski chaired the meeting;

• A second meeting in Berlin took place in Hotel Esplanade under the auspices of the League of Meera Mundam. The chair was Graff Bedandroff, the League’s president;

• In Paris, France, the lecture took place in Salle des Fêtes du Grans Orient de France. The chair was Dr. P. Charpy and the speech was given as a poem:

Asantushtaa dwijaa nashtaah Santushtaa iva paatrhivaah, Salajjaa ganikaa nashtaah, nirlajjaashca kulastriyah. . . .

• The first lecture was held in one of the committee rooms of the House of Commons during the occasion of the anniversary of the International Peace Society. The second took place in Coxton Hall, 12 Palmer Street, under the auspices of the Three-fold Movement—Union of East and West, League of Neighbours, and Fellowship of Faiths. Speakers besides the Raja were Annie Besant, president of the Theosophical Society; Cecil H. Wilson, Member of Parliament; Charles Frederick Weller, the American founder of the League of Neighbours; and Kedar Nath Das Gupta, founder of the Union of East and West in India, England, and America. The meeting was chaired by Sir Francis Young Husband.

The Raja then traveled to Venice, Iceland, Rome, Egypt, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Japan during the year. His further trips included the following:

• 1931: Ram Dutta Awasthi from Askota was appointed as a teacher to start Satayavadi Primary School in Bajhang.

• 1931: In America, one of the Raja’s lectures was broadcast in Chicago by the National Broadcasting Company.

• 1935: the Raja procured 5,000 masks from Japan and visited Abyssinia to serve war victims.

• 1936: the Raja established a free army hospital, a nursery school, and a primary school; he visited Burma to establish a basic school about humanism, the Jaya Prithvi Institute, at Memio Rangoon.

• 1936: a Humanist Club was activated at Banglore and talks were given to oppose English rule in India and Rana rule in Nepal; the Raja expressed the view that the League of Nations was utterly failing to solve a rising threat of war and was not bringing peace into the world.

• 1938: a Satyavadi school in Bajhang was granted form approval by the director of schools, a royal a priest.

• 1939: Jaya Prithvi was perceived by the English rulers of India and the Rana rulers of Nepal as a trouble-maker and a threat to the status quo; he was kept under house arrest for one year in his Jai Bhawan Banglore, India, residence.

In Nepal, the Research Academica for Humanism & J. P. B. Singh, Nepal (RAFHAJ) is at PO Box 11201, Central Office, Kathmandu. Officers are as follows:

• Executive Committee President: Mr. Min Bdr. Singh Vice President: Mr. Dharma Bdr. Chand Treasurer: Mr. Narendra Bdr. Singh Member: Mr. Prem Bdr. Singh Member: Dr. Raja Ram Subedi Member: Ram Pd. Mishra

• Advisory Board Dr. Trailokya Nath Upreti Dr. Durga Pd. Bhandari Dr. Prem Raman Upreti Prof. B. C. Malla Mr. Yadav Kant Silwal

In 1998 the Humanist Association of Nepal (HUMAN) became an Associate Member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union. The group’s aims include the fight against social injustice, the struggle for moral and mental improvement by the advancement of humanism, and the study and dissemination of the principles of humanism. Ganga Prasad Subedi is the association’s secretary. Gopi Upreti, a Nepalese professor, is the humanist contact in Nepal. Ganga Prasad Subedi signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entries for Jai Prithvi Bahadur Singh and Gopo Upreti.)

Nerlich, Graham (20th Century) Prof. Nerlich, of the University of Adelaide, is a patron of the Humanist Society of South Australia.

NERO: For a reference to Nero’s “husband,” see the entry for Alexander Pope.

Nerren, Dan (20th Century) Nerren is president of the Humanist Association of Tulsa and is an activist on issues concerning church-state separation. He wrote “Prayer Just Doesn’t Work” for Freethought Today (June-July 1996), a description of the sign he and some Tulsa, Ohio, citizens displayed in their opposition to that city’s National Day of Prayer observance. E-mail: <gphil@ix.netcom.co>. {Freethought Today, June-July 1996 and June-July 1997}

Nesbit, Wilbur D. (1871–1927) A Midwesterner, Nesbit published volumes of poetry that contained his liberal outlook, according to Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier (1992). They include one example from The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (1921), which had been edited by Upton Sinclair with an introduction by Jack London.

Nesin, Aziz (1915–1995) A prominent leftist author and newspaper editor in Turkey, Nesin in a July 1993 conference was accused by Muslim militants of being an atheist. They were upset that in Sivas at the conference of writers Nesin had praised Pir Sultan Abdal, a 16th-century poet who preached rebellion against oppression. Also, they were angry that his newspaper had published excerpts from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran had condemned as blasphemous, imposing a death sentence upon Mr. Rushdie. As their anger increased, a group of religious fundamentalists congregated and set fire to the hotel in central Turkey, killing thirty-seven of his colleagues who were inside. Neslin had said he did not need God “because I want neither paradise nor hell.” Although in bad health during the 1980s, he was director of the Union of Turkish Authors from 1975 to 1989. He had a heart attack while visiting Moscow in 1982 and a stroke in 1983. His vision gradually worsened and before he died he was partially blind. A week before he died, he announced he was going to organize an anti-fundamentalist conference that would have taken place in Istanbul in 1996. He was survived by four children from two marriages and a female companion of his final years. Nesin was buried by friends without a religious ceremony in an unmarked, undisclosed location on the property of the Nesin Vakfi.” {Freethought History #9, 1994; and #17, 1996}

NESTORIANISM Nestorianism was a heretical view ascribed to Nestorius and ecclesiastically condemned in 431 CE. Ibas, the Bishop of Edessa in Syria (435–457), welcomed Nestorianism and established a famous Nestorian School at Edessa. This led some Syrian churches within the Empire to become Monophyite while others were Nestorian. It was mainly from Nestorian monasteries in Syria that the Arabs recovered what was left of Greek philosophy. (See entries for Monophysitism and for Christianity. Also, see a description by Joseph McCabe in his Rationalist Encyclopedia.) {ER; RE}

Netanyahu, Benzion: See entry for Anti-Semitism.

Nethercot, Arthur H(obart) (Born 1895) Nethercot’s The First Five Lives of Annie Besant (1960) and The Last Four Lives of Annie Besant (1963) depict the struggles of English atheists in the nineteenth century. {FUK}

NETHERLANDS, THE: See entry for Dutch.

Neufeld, Muriel (20th Century) When she signed Humanist Manifesto II, Neufeld was on the executive committee of the American Ethical Union. {HM2}

Neuhoff, Ralph R. (20th Century) When he reviewed books for The Humanist in the 1950s, Neuhoff was a St. Louis attorney.

Neumann, Henry (20th Century) Neumann, a college teacher of English and education, became a Leader of the Brooklyn Ethical Society from 1911 to 1966. A humanist and an octogenarian, he was highly regarded in liberal circles. (See entry for Ethical Culture.) {EU, Howard B. Radest}

Neumann, Johannes (20th Century) At the Eleventh International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Brussels (1990), Prof. Neumann of Germany addressed the group. Neumann, an educator, has written about the mentally handicapped, marriage, and mixed marriages.

Neumann, Walter B. (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Neumann was an American Ethical Union treasurer. {HM2}

Neureiter, Anton (20th Century) Neureiter is Secretary General of the Antiklerikaler Arbeitskreis, which was founded in 1985 in Austria. Its Teuflischer Almanach (The Devil’s Almanac) was under investigation by Austrian authorities, who charged the Austrian atheists with blasphemy for organizing a 1985 Salzburg Anticlerical Week.

NEUTRINOS Although the neutrino was known to be any of three electrically neutral subatomic particles in the lepton family, it was not until 1998 that neutrinos were found to have mass. At the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research of Tokyo University, Dr. Takaaki Kajita announced in June of 1998 the startling evidence that neutrinos can change form and therefore must have mass. Even a minuscule mass would amount for much or all of the so-called dark matter of the universe, In so doing, he and his group of fellow scientists challenged the existing theory about all matter. If neutrinos do have sufficient mass, physicists were quick to point out, the overall mass of the universe would increase, possibly slowing the universe’s present expansion. However, the elusive particles cannot be seen. Therefore, the evidence that they have mass is indirect and still not fully verified or understood. Nevertheless, the discovery appeared to have far-reaching consequences for all future investigations of the nature of matter. Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 had hypothesized the neutrino’s existence, and in 1956 the particle was finally discovered by Dr. Frederick Reines and the late Dr. Clyde Cowan of Los Alamos National Laboratory. For the discovery, Dr. Reines awarded a Nobel Prize. In comments about the discovery, Dr. Yoji Totsuka, leader of the Kamioka Neutrino Observatory in Japan, said that although the neutrinos are now known to have some mass, that mass must be very small. The difference between the masses of muon nutrinos (as distinct from the two other neutrinos, named electron and tau) is about 0.07 electron volts (a measure of particle mass). Although this does not yield a value of the masses themselves, only of the difference between those of muon neutrinos and other types, the mass of the neutrino is admittedly small. However, at any given moment every teaspoon worth of volume of space throughout the universe contains an average of 300 neutrinos, so their aggregate number is staggering. The early thinking about neutrinos, however, was entirely elementary. “The solar neutrino issue is far from settled,” according to Dr. John Learned of the University of Hawaii. It is possible that a fourth, a fifth, and even a sixth kind of neutrino will be found. Whereas in the 1930s there were just neutrons, protons, and electrons, physicists theorizing about the sun at the end of the century were increasingly puzzled by what they were finding. On the day the startling scientific discovery was announced, 224 members of the United States House of Representatives voted to amend the Constitution to allow organized prayer in public schools. The count was sixty-one votes short of the two-thirds necessary to pass a constitutional amendment. Freethinkers lamented that when the legislation lost, the bill’s sponsor, Oklahoma Republican Ernest Istook Jr., remarked, “It’s time we put the emphasis on what we believe, and almost every American believes in God.” Observers were quick to note that the Representative and his ilk had no comprehension whatsoever of neutrinos, only of how to replace science with a Bible-inspired “creation science.” {Malcolm W. Browne, The New York Times, 5 June 1998; The Economist, 13 June 1998}

NEUTRUM Neutrum, an associate member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, can be reached at UL. Zlota 72 M I, 00-821 Warsaw, Poland.

NEVADA HUMANISTS The Secular Humanist Society of Las Vegas (ASHS) is at 240 North Jones Boulevard (Suite 106), Las Vegas, Nevada 89107. Loretta Cardaronell is a contact. (702) 594-1125

Neville, Frank (20th Century) Neville, of Dundee, Scotland, is international officer of the Humanist Society of Scotland, for which he is Agenda 21 Officer. Originally in the Non-Combatant Corps during World War II, he later served with the Heavy Anti-Aircraft Artillery in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy until the end of hostilities, at which time he was sent as an interpreter to Austria for one year. From 1939 his civilian career has been in various roles, including an active interest in Green Politics. He favors a civilian peace service in which conscientious objectors to military conscription could be trained for non-violent conciliation work. {Humanism Scotland, Autumn 1997; International Humanist News, October 1995}

Nevins, Allan (1890–1971) Nevins, following a career in journalism, became a professor of American history at Columbia University (1931–1958), following which he became senior research associate at the Huntington Library. He won two Pulitzer Prizes in biography, one on Grover Cleveland and the other on Hamilton Fish. Nevins was a Unitarian. {CE}

Nevinson, Henry W. (1856–1941) A respected and idealistic British journalist, Nevinson after a 1904–1905 visit to Africa was indignant about the surviving traffic in slaves. The following year, he visited Russia and exposed Tsarism. An agnostic, he wrote in Essays in Rebellion (1913) about Maeterlinck’s speculation concerning a future life, saying that “talk of that kind rests on no sounder basis than the old assertions about the houris and the happy hunting-grounds.” {RAT; RE}

NEW AGE A 1980s movement relating to a complex of spiritual and consciousness-raising, New Age adherents in the 1990s sounded like evangelical Christians when they complained about how badly they were being caricatured. Joan Duncan Oliver, editor of New Age Journal, complained that some wanted to flee the label because it “has a very flaky load on it,” one of “crystals, and Shirley MacLaine, and Ouiji boards.” As Peter Steinfels has pointed out, “Drawing on humanistic psychology, Asian religions, occult practices, and subterranean religious traditions in the West, as well as the shamanism and nature worship, the movement assembled a smorgasbord of concepts and techniques for achieving personal peace and stretching capacities. Its defenders are quick to distinguish ‘fringe’ expressions like healing through crystals or channeling messages from extraterrestrial spiritual masters from its major concerns: cultivating awareness of every person’s tremendous inner potential, overcoming the dualisms and sharp distinctions that have marked Western culture—between body and mind, the divine and the human—and strengthening intuition and imagination over analytic reason.” Some Judeo-Christian thinkers, such as Doug Groothuis who teaches philosophy and ethics at Denver Seminary, find the varying degrees of New Age pantheism incompatible with their insistence on a personal God who cannot be identified with His creation. Integrating practices like yoga into Christianity “simply can’t be done,” he holds, and New Age activities are “dangerous because of the possibility of demonic intervention.” Others, such as Richard Kyle who teaches religion and history at the Mennonites’ Tabor College in Kansas, embrace some New Age concepts and practices as ways of correcting what they consider the unduly cerebral and masculine emphases of their traditions. Kyle likes the movement’s criticism of reductionism in science and materialism in the economy, and he welcomes its environmentalism and emphasis on equality of the sexes. In terms of underlying principles, however, “Christianity and the New Age are totally at odds.” Still others condemn the New Age movement as a sign of the Anti-Christ. Eugene Kennedy, a former priest and a Roman Catholic psychologist, calls summer school institutes and workshops catering to religious educators “McSpirituality, junk food for the soul. . . . . History, learning, and the vast poignant drama of human longing and suffering can be set aside. In matters of religious faith, this is Disneyland posing as Chartres.” James Kullander, a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary, believes New Age is no threat to religion. To the contrary, he wrote (The New York Times, 26 October 1998), “I’ll be the first to admit that the New Age is full of charlatans and misguided prophets. But it also offers guidance to people whose spiritual longings are not being met by traditional Christian teachings.” Freethinkers are more apt to view the movement as anti-intellectual, unable to utilize the hard-edged tests of scientific rationality. For a secular humanist, Paul Kurtz has pointed out in his varied writings, New Age involves fuzzy thinking which is unworthy of a rational person’s involvement. {The New York Times, 13 July 1996}

NEW HAMPSHIRE HUMANISTS

New Hampshire has the following groups:

• Humanist Association of New Hampshire-Vermont, POB 23, Keene, New Hampshire. B. J. Nelson, Arpad Toth, and Valerie White are contacts. • Secular Humanists of Merrimack Valley (ASHS), POB 368, Londonderry, New Hampshire 03053; (603) 434-4195. Margaret Bennett is a contact at <margbennet@aol.com>.

NEW HUMANIST (United States) In the 1930s, religious (or naturalistic) humanism had developed within and without religions—in particular, Unitarianism. In Chicago The New Humanist was a bimonthly (cost: $1/year) published in Chicago at a time when that city was a hotbed of humanism. “From 1930 through 1934,” Edwin H. Wilson has written, “Harold Buschman and I privately owned and published The New Humanist—an ownership necessary to obtain second-class mailing privileges. None of the several churches or churchmen who were trying to set up schismatic (Unitarian) humanist societies along church lines tried to establish a national organization. On paper, the New Humanist Associates was formed—persons privileged to help meet printers’ bills.” Raymond Bragg and Edwin H. Wilson were instrumental not only in running the magazine but also in doing the groundwork for arranging Humanist Manifesto I. {EW; Edwin H. Wilson’s The Genesis of a Humanist Manifesto (1995)}

NEW HUMANIST (United Kingdom) New Humanist, the quarterly journal of the Rationalist Press Association, is edited by Jim Herrick at Bradlaugh House, 47 Theobald’s Road, London WC1X 8SP. Numerous naturalistic, rationalistic, and secular humanists evaluate the publication as one of the most important humanistic journals of the time. A 1997 survey of its readership found that 91% were members of the Rationalist Press Association and 34% were members of the British Humanist Association. Only 16% attended 5 or more humanist meetings in the last year, and 66% attended none. As to the terms subscribers preferred in describing their outlooks:

33% Humanist 29% Atheist 14% Rationalist

	 5% 	Freethinker
	 4% 	Agnostic
	 2% 	Scientific Humanist
	 1% 	Ethical, Religious, or Secular Humanist

Only 4% found “Religious Humanist” an acceptable term whereas 63% voted for “Rationalist.” E-mail: <jim.rpa@humanism.org.uk>. (See entry for Rationalist Press Association.

NEW JERSEY FREETHINKERS, HUMANISTS New Jersey has the following groups:

• American Atheists Inc., PO Box 709, Holmdel, NJ 07733; <http://www.atheists.org/>. • Bertrand Russell Society, c/o 38B Loantaka Way, Madison, NJ 07940. (201) 765-0776. Allen Schwerin is the contact. E-mail: <aschweri@mondec.monmouth.edu>. On the World Wide Web: <http://daniel.drew.edu/njlenz/brs.html> • Essex County Ethical Culture Society, 516 Prospect St., Maplewood, New Jersey 07040 • First Unitarian Fellowship of Hunterdon County, Box 122, Baptistown, NJ 08803. Contact is the Rev. Mary Tiebaut (215) 766-9486. • Focus, a monthly, 687 Larch Avenue, Teaneck, New Jersey 07666 <rca001@aol.com>. • Freedom from Religion Foundation, NJ Chapter, 10 Westminster Place, Morristown, NJ 07960. (201) 984-6236. Allie Fuentes is the contact. • Freethought Commentary, POB 162 Park Station, Paterson, New Jersey 07513. • Hudson Humanists, pO Box 111, 113 Pavonia Ave., East Jersey City, NJ 07310; (201) 792-9434. Contact: Brian Lemaire t<lemaire.3@worldnet.att.net>. • Humanists of North Jersey (AHA), 27 Bedford Place, Glen Rock, New Jersey 07452. (201) 444-6627. Robert Drake was President up to 1999; Carol Sorce is Vice President; Martin Alboum is secretary; and Herbert Honig is Treasurer. Its new officers in 1999 are Maddy Urken, President; Joe Walinski, Vice President; Marty Alboum, Secretary; Herb Honig, Treasurer; and members-at-large are Fred Brack, Myrna Pelta, and Carol Sorce. Carl Shapiro is the contact at <rbgarber@aol.com>. • Humanists of South Jersey, 105 Maplewood Drive, Mapleshade, NJ 08052 (609) 482-2261. Marvin Zimmerman is President. • Jewish Cultural School and Society, PO Box 7038, West Orange, NJ 07052. Contact is Rhea Seagull at (201) 325-7247. The group operates a Sunday educational program for children aged 4 to 14 at the Jewish Community Center. The group is a member of the Congress of Secular Jewish organizations (CSJO) and the International Federation of Secular Humanist Jews. • New Jersey Humanist Network (ASHS), PO Box 51, Washington, New Jersey 07882; telephone (908) 689-2813. E-mail: <hbrown@nac.net>. Contact is Harley Brown. • New Jersey Secular Society; contact is Jim Mac Iver (973) 655-9054 • Princeton Ethical Humanist Fellowship, PO Box 3286, Princeton, NJ 08543. President is Gene Queval at (609) 588-8694; secretary is Dick Reichart at (609) 924-6492. • Princeton Freethought Association can be found on the Web: <daraujo@fas.harvard.edu> and <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Princeton Memorial Association, 48 Roper Road, Princeton, NJ 08540 (609) 924-5525. Contact is Durinda Putnam • Sect of Zarathustra, 30 Stockton St., Bloomfield, NJ 07003; (973) 748-8166 • Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing, 268 Washington Crossing Pennington Road, Titusville, NJ 08560. Contact is Paul Tuerf at (609) 737-0515. • Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sussex County, 1 West Nelson St., Newton, NJ 07860 (See entry for Charles B. Reynolds.)

NEW MEXICO HUMANISTS AND SKEPTICS Following are groups and publications in New Mexico:

• American Rationalist, a bi-monthly, is edited at PO Box 80182, Albuquerque 87198-0182 • Humanism Today, an annual, is published at Box 191, 5901-J Wyoming NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109. • Humanist Society of New Mexico (AHA), POB 4756, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196, has as its contacts Lois Kimbrell and Leland Franks. Phone (505) 265-7203. • North American Council of Humanism (NACH), Box 191, 5901-J Wyoming NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109. It publishes Dialogue quarterly. E-mail: <conachi@aol.com>. • Skeptical Inquirer, a bi-monthly, is edited at 944 Deer Drive NE, Albuquerque 87122

NEW YORK HUMANISTS, ATHEISTS, FREETHINKERS New York State has the following groups and publications:

• AAH Examiner, PO Box 664, Buffalo, NY 14226, a quarterly newsletter published by African Americans for Humanism. E-mail: <cfiflynn@aol.com>. • American Humanist Association, Northeast Region (AHA), POB 1256, Fair Lawn, NJ 07410. Theodora Dolores Trent is coordinator for New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. • Capital District Humanist Society (ASHS), POB 2148, Scotia, New York 12302. Larry Jones is Executive Director; Rick Gottesman is secretary; Lois Lewis is treasurer; Dennis Bender is the contact at (518) 381-6239. E-mail: <myrnabeckr@aol.com> and <cdhs@ global2000.net>. On the Web: <www.global2000.net/org/cdhs>. • Cornell University humanists are at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Dialogue, American Ethical Union, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023 • Family Matters, P. O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664. <familynews@secularhumanism.org>. • Free Inquiry, a quarterly of secular humanism, is at PO Box 644, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 <freeinquiry@secularhumanism.org>. • Free Mind, 7 Harwood Drive, PO Box 146, Amherst, NY 14226 • Freethining-Activist-Nonbelieving New Yorkers (FANNY), 31 Jane St. (10-D), New York, NY 10014. Dennis Middlebrooks and Warren Allen Smith, both of whom once presided over the Secular Humanist Society of New York, are co-directors. E-mail: <wasm@idt.net> • Harlem Atheist Association, 424 Vanderbilt Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Eugene Charrington was the director of this group that is inactive. • Humanist, The, a bi-monthly of the American Humanist Association, is published at 7 Harwood Drive, Amherst, NY 14226. <thehumanist@juno.com>. • Humanist Activists, Box 10-D, 31 Jane Street, New York, NY 10014. (212) 366-6481 • Humanist Fellowship of Brooklyn (AHA), A-2E, 334 Howard Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11233. Martin Morgan is the contact. • Humanist Society of Metropolitan New York (AHA), Corliss Lamont Chapter, 777 United Nations Plaza (lobby floor), New York, NY 10017-3521. (212) 353-2213. Dr. Julius Manson is President; Sala E. Farber is Executive Director; Beth K. Lamont is Humanist Advocate. Before his death, Jesse Gordon was its leader. On the Web: <http://www.corliss-lamont.org/>. • Humanist Society of Western New York (AHA), 7 Harwood Drive, POB 1188, Amherst, NY 14226. Fred Edwords is the contact. • Independent Rationalists, 31 Jane Street (10-D), New York, NY 10014 <wasm@idt.net> • Ithaca College freethinkers are at: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Journal of Humanism and Ethical Religion is no longer published by the Ethical Society at 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023 • Long Island Secular Humanists, Box 119, Greenlaw, NY 11740. Contact is Gerry Dantone, fax (516) 742-4618; E-mail: <infidelsre@aol.com>. • Northeast Atheist Association, RR-1 B-1090, Athens, NY 12015. Robert Blokesberg-Fireovid is the contact person. • New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York, NY 10023. The humanistic group publishes New York Society for Ethical Culture Newsletter. E-mail: <revbob@ix.netcom.com>. • New York University Humanists on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Philo, PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226 <fivaughn@aol.com>. • Platform, 4450 Fieldston Road, Bronx, NY 10471 • Rationalists NY, Box 10-A, 31 Jane Street, New York, NY 10014; <wasm@idt.net>. • Rensselaer Individuals for Freethought (RIFT), Rensselaer Polytchnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180. • Secular Humanist Bulletin is published quarterly at PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664 <shb-editor @ secularhumanism.org>. • Secular Humanist Society of New York (ASHS), POB 7661, FDR Station, New York, NY 10150. The group was founded by Warren Allen Smith, its president, who later resigned. It meets irregularly and publishes Pique. E-mail: <jarents@bestweb.net>. • Skeptical Beliefs, a bi-monthly, is at PO Box 703, Buffalo, NY 104226-0703 • State University of New York at Albany: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • State University of New York at Buffalo: <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Western New York Secular Humanists (ASHS), POB 664, Amherst, NY 14226. {FD}

NEW YORK CHAPTER, AMERICAN HUMANIST ASSOCIATION (AHA) The New York Humanists, founded by its President Warren Allen Smith, voted in 1953 to affiliate with the American Humanist Association. Eva Ingersoll Wakefield was Vice-President, and Dorothea Thayer was Secretary-Treasurer. The chapter had a Humanist Action Committee and a Greenwich Village Humanist Club. Its original plans were to form proposed clubs in Brooklyn and Morningside Heights. The present contact of the New York Chapter (AHA) is Beth Lamont, 315 West 106th St., New York, NY 10025. On the Web: <http://www.corliss-lamont.org/>. {The Humanist Newsletter, Summer 1953}

NEW YORK CHAPTER, COUNCIL FOR SECULAR HUMANISM: See entry for Secular Humanist Association of New York.

NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS: See entry for Irving Howe.

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY HUMANISTS New York University humanists are on the Web: <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>.

NEW ZEALAND ASSOCIATION OF RATIONALISTS AND HUMANISTS Officers in 1998 were as follows: President, Ngaire McCarthy; Vice President, Peter Hansen; Secretary, David Ross; Treasurer, Nick Pullar; and Councillors: Rachael Callender, Bill Cooke, Liz McKenzie, Marta McKenzie, Peter Russell. Honorary Associates are as follows: Gianni Bartocci; H. James Birx; Sir Hermann Bondi; Steve Cooper; Richard Dawkins; Warwick Don; Zoë During; Denis Dutton; Brian Edwards; Antony Flew; Ida Gaskin; Maurice Gee; Dame Barbara Goodman; Finngeir Hiorth; Bernard Howard; Paul Kurtz; Lavanam; Richard Leakey; Tim Madigan; Michael Martin; Taslima Nasrin; Ian Plimer; Barbara Smoker; Dame Catherine Tizard; David Tribe; Ibn Warraq; and Lewis Wolpert.

NEW ZEALAND ATHEISTS AND HUMANISTS

• The Auckland University Atheists, c/o Rationalist House, 64 Symonds St., Auckland, New Zealand, was founded in 1990. Web: <crash.ihug.co.nz/~remk/fnz/aua/index.html>; <www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Christchurch Branch, NZ Association of Rationalists and Humanists, c/o TMA Hooper, 42 Harris Crescent, Christchurch, New Zealand. • Christchurch Humanist Fellowship, 158 Panorama Road, Christchurch, New Zealand. • Hawke’s Bay Freethinkers, c/o Robyn Church, 2 Millar St., Napier, New Zealand. • New Zealand Association of Rationalists & Humanists Inc., Rationalist House, 64 Symonds Street, Auckland 1001, New Zealand. On the Web: <http://www.freethought.org.nz>. • New Zealand Humanist, a quarterly, PO Box 3372, Wellington, New Zealand. E-mail: <iain-middleton@clear.net.nz>. • New Zealand Humanist Society (IHEU), is at POB 3372, Wellington. Attempts in 1998 were made in 1998 to merge the group with the New Zealand Association of Rationalists & Humanists • New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist, a quarterly, 64 Symonds Street, Auckland 1001 <bill@freethought.org.nz>. • New Zealand Rationalist & Humanist Newsletter, 64 Symonds Street, Auckland 1001; e-mail: <nzarh@freethought.org.nz>. • Northland Freethinkers, c/o Peter Murphy, Box 5453, Hamilton, New Zealand. • The Skeptics (NZCSICOP), the New Zealand Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, 150 Dyer’s Pass Road, Christchurch 2, New Zealand. • South Taranaki Freethinkers, c/o Dr. D. S. Devadhar, 7 Kowhai St. Hawera, 4800 South Taranald, New Zealand • Waikato Freethinkers, c/o Peter Murphy, Box 5453, Hamilton • Bill Cooke, a lecturer at Manakau Institute of Technology, signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. {FD}

NEW ZEALAND HUMANIST A quarterly, New Zealand Humanist is at PO Box 3372, Wellington, New Zealand. E-mail: <iain-middleton@clear.net.nz>.

NEW ZEALAND RATIONALIST AND HUMANIST The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist (64 Symonds Street, Auckland 1, New Zealand) is edited by David Ross. E-mail: <bill@freethought.org.nz>.

NEW ZEALAND RATIONALIST COUNCIL The Rationalist Council is a group of nine, elected by the body of members of the New Zealand Rationalist Association, for two-year durations. Bill Cooke is President; Ngaire McCarthy is Vice President; and Peter Hansen is Secretary. The group’s councillors are Carl Brett; Rembrandt Kuipers; Elizabeth McKenzie; George Pirie; Nick Pullar; and David Ross. The Rationalist Council is found on the Web: <crash.ihug.co.nz/~remk/fnz/nzrats/index.html>. (See entry for William Cooke, author of Heathen in Godzone: Seventy Years of Rationalism in New Zealand.)

NEW ZEALAND UNBELIEVERS See an extensive article by Harry H. Pearce in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Also see Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth by Gordon Stein, which cites 1857 as the date of Charles Southwell’s Auckland Examiner. Unitarian groups are active in Auckland, Blenheim, and Wellington.

NEW ZEALAND UNITARIANS

John Maindonald (28 Alexis Avenue, Mt. Albert, Auckland 1003, New Zealand) is the contact for Australian and New Zealand Unitarians. (See entry for Gayle Feeney, head of the Australian and New Zealand Unitarian Association.)

Newcomb, Rexford (1866–1968) Newcomb, who has been a member of the American Humanist Association, wrote Spanish Colonial Architecture in the United States (1937). {HNS}

Newcomb, Simon (1835–1909) An American astronomer born in Nova Scotia, Newcomb worked on the Nautical Almanack and in 1877 became senior professor of mathematics in the U. S. Navy. He has been associated with the equipment of the Lick Observatory and wrote Principles of Political Economy (1885). The British astronomer, Proctor, quotes Newcomb as rejecting the idea of immortality, and according to McCabe Newcomb never made any secret in America of his freethought views. {BDF; JM; RE}

Newcomb, Steven (20th Century) A Shawnee/Lenape legal scholar, Newcomb has pointed out the role of Christianity in the historic oppression of American Indians. “Indian people are denied their rights in United States laws,” he wrote, “simply because they were not Christians at the time of European arrival.” Newcomb has proposed writing a book to be entitled Pagans in the Promised Land: Religion, Law, and the American Indian. {Freethought History #9, 1994}

Newkirk, Ingrid (20th Century) A non-theist, Newkirk is an animal rights advocate associated with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA, PO Box 42516, Washington, DC 20015).

Newland, H. Osman (Died 1920) A sociologist, Newland wrote A Short History of Citizenship (1904) and The Model Citizen (1908). He lectured in English literature, history, and sociology to the London County Council when the war broke out in 1914. In the army, he rose to the rank of captain. He then went to Mesopotamia, where he became President of the Baghdad Literary Society but succumbed to dysentery. Newland wrote Sierre Leone (1916), West Africa (1920), and articles on religion in the Literary Guide. He founded the British West African Association. Newland was an agnostic. {RAT}

Newman, Bobby (20th Century) Newman is author of The Reluctant Alliance: Behaviorism and Humanism (1992).

Newman, Charles Robert (19th Century) Newman wrote “Essays in Rationalism” (1891). {GS}

Newman, Ernest (1868–1959) Newman was a music critic on the Manchester Guardian, the Birmingham Post, the Observer, and Sunday Times. He wrote with particular authority on Wagner, and in his Study of Wagner (1899) rejects even the sentimental Christianity of the master, according to McCabe. Newman translated Albert Schweitzer’s J. S. Bach and Romain Rolland’s Beethoven the Creator. {RAT; RE; TRI}

Newman, Francis William (1805–1897) Cardinal Newman’s brother was an atheist. As a young man he went to Baghdad with the object of assisting a Christian mission, but his further studies convinced him he could not conscientiously undertake the work. Returning to England, he became classical teacher in Bristol College and, subsequently, Latin professor at London University. In The Soul: Its Sorrows and Aspirations (1849), Newman states his theistic position. In Phases of Faith (1856), he explains how he came to give up Christianity, how he became a Unitarian. He also wrote A History of the Hebrew Monarchy (1847); Theism: Doctrinal and Practical (1858); What is Christianity Without Christ? (1881); and Life After Death (1886). In Mature Thoughts on Christianity (1897), he passed beyond conservative Unitarianism when he discarded belief in a future life. He also wrote a number of tracts on the defective morality of the New Testament, the historical deprivation of Christianity, and the religious weakness of Protestantism. Charles Robert Newman, a younger brother, was an agnostic. {BDF; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}

Newman, Henry (20th Century) Newman was organizer and leader of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. He was a non-theistically oriented humanist. The group had much support among professional secularized Jews into the 1940s, according to present member Eric Freudenthal. During World War II, despite the Society’s support of the war, Newman was an outspoken pacifist.

Newman, Michael (20th Century) Newman, a secondary school teacher and an atheist, was arrested under England’s blasphemy law for selling the video, “Visions of Ecstasy.” He has worked to correct the inequities of the 1988 Education Reform Act, but he had to resign from his school position. As a result, he has been a subject of discussion in the media, including an appearance on Channel Four’s “Comment” program in England.

Newman, Paul (1925– ) Newman, actor, professional race-car driver, and food company executive, responded to a question put to him by television interviewer Barbara Walters that he does not believe in an afterlife. The 1986 recipient of an honorary Academy Award for career achievement, however, was not asked specifically if he is non-theistic. He sometimes attends a Unitarian society in Connecticut, and his wife, Joan Woodward, has taught Sunday school there.

Newman, Paul (26 Jan 1925 - ) Newman, actor, professional race-car driver, and food company executive, responded to a question put to him by television interviewer Barbara Walters that he does not believe in an afterlife. The 1986 recipient of an honorary Academy Award for career achievement, however, was not asked specifically if he is non-theistic. Newman, who studied at the School of Drama and the Actor's Studio in New York City, made his film debut in 1954, portraying idealistic rebels in Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He was also in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, and The Sting. He directed The Glass Menagerie (1987) and was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, receiving in 1986 a special Oscar for his services to film. In 1986 he won Best Actor Award for The Color of Money. Newman and Joanne Woodward, whom he married in 1958, often attend the Westport Unitarian Society in Connecticut, where Ms. Woodward has taught Sunday School.

Newman, Ralph A. (20th Century) Newman is author of The Evolution of Conscience (1981). {GS}

Newman, Randy (1943– ) A singer, songwriter, and musician, Newman in 1984 received a Grammy Award for the best instrumental composition. He appeared in “Ragtime,” a 1981 film, and he wrote “Sail Again” (1979), “Trouble in Paradise” (1983), “Land of Dreams” (1988), and “Faust” (1995), a rock musical. A professed atheist in the last work, he sings the part of the Devil in a retelling of the Goethe story and revels in telling God that He is a figment of the human imagination. His father also was an atheist. Visiting in a hospital with his son, he lampooned the idea of a benevolent and merciful deity: “That’s God will over there, and that’s God’s will over there, and that’s God’s will over there,” he said, pointing to the ill. In “Old Man,” he includes the lines, “Don’t need no god to comfort you,/ You taught me not to believe that lie.” But his son came to the view that people should be allowed to believe what they think they need to believe, that although he “never had faith,” still “I have respect for the idea. There’s no joy being an atheist.” {CA; E} Randy Newman, Recording Artist music

See lyrics to "God's Song" ("That's Why I love Mankind") and others. -CDA

Newman has stated that he is an atheist many times in interviews. Some lyrics from "Old Man":

	Don't need no god to comfort you,
	You taught me not to believe that lie.

---

Excerpted from a profile of Randy Newman by Mark Evangelista in the Houston Chronicle Interactive titled 'Newman pacts them in'...

Growing up in New Orleans and his father's atheistic view of life uniquely molded Newman. He was always comfortable in his own skin but wondering why he should be. Thus, the eight different versions of the same song on racism.

"I asked my mom why the black kids weren't getting ice cream from the same side of the ice cream truck I was getting mine," he said.

A visit to a someone in the hospital revealed his father's opinion on fate and the belief of a supreme being. While walking through a children's ward, the elder Newman pointed at the patients and lampooned the idea of a benevolent and merciful deity:

"That's God's will over there and that's God's will over there and that's God's will over there. . . "

Still, Newman lets people believe what they need to believe. Give the people what they want.

"I never had faith," said Newman. "But I have respect for the idea. There's no joy being an atheist."

"It'll be such a hit," he said, referring to religion in sarcastic tones.

Newman, Randy (28 Nov 1943 - )

		A singer, songwriter, and musician, Newman in 1984 received a Grammy Award for the best instrumental composition. He appeared in Ragtime, a 1981 film, and he wrote Sail Again (1979), Trouble in Paradise (1983), Land of Dreams (1988), and Faust (1995), a rock musical. A professed atheist in the last work, he sings the part of the Devil in a retelling of the Goethe story and revels in telling God that He is a figment of the human imagination.

Newman’s father was an atheist. Visiting in a hospital with his son, he lampooned the idea of a benevolent and merciful deity: “That’s God will over there, and that’s God’s will over there, and that’s God’s will over there,” he said, pointing to the ill. In “Old Man,” he includes the lines, “Don’t need no god to comfort you,/ You taught me not to believe that lie.” But his son came to the view that people should be allowed to believe what they think they need to believe, that although he “never had faith,” still “I have respect for the idea. There’s no joy being an atheist.” {CA; E}

Newnes, George [Sir] (1851–1910) A newspaper and magazine projector, Newnes was given his baronetcy for being “a pioneer of clean popular literature.” He applied much of his wealth to public purposes, including the building of a cable railway for use by invalids. Although he was the son of a clergyman, and married a clergyman’s daughter, he rejected Christianity and was merely a theist. Hulda Friedrichs, in her Life of Sir G. Newnes (1911), wrote that in regard to the idea of a future life Newnes was “a reverent and open-minded agnostic.” {RAT}

Newton, Isaac [Sir] (1642–1727) Called by some the greatest scientist of all time, Newton was President of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death. In addition to discovering the universal law of gravitation and developing the calculus, he built the first reflecting telescope. Along with Voltaire in France, Lessing in Germany, and Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine in America, Newton was a deist, one who had no interest in pantheism. Maréchal’s 1799 Dictionnaire des athés anciens et modernes listed Newton as one who seems an atheist from the standpoint of the strictest religious orthodoxy. Robertson, however, finds Newton “was always pathologically prepossessed on the side of his religion, and subordinated his science to his theology even in the Principia/.” The economist John Maynard Keynes, speaking in 1947 at the Royal Society’s Newton Tercentenary Celebration, said he had gone through some million of Newton’s words on alchemy and found them “wholly devoid of scientific value.” A non-trinitarian, Newton expressly formulates the propositions: (a) that “there is one God the father . . . and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus”; (b) that “the Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen or can see. All other beings are sometimes visible”; and (c) that “the Father hath life in himself, and hath given the Son to have life in himself.” He believed that God was somehow behind the influence of gravitation, keeping stars from collapsing into one mass. From time to time, Newton felt, although supplying no documentation, God stepped in to adjust the orbits of planets. Basically, his discovery of the universal law of gravitation did not directly undermine religious faith—Newton regarded his discovery, according to The Economist (16 March 1996) as being “not merely consistent with God’s existence, but tantamount to proof of it.” The power of his work was “that it demonstrated (or appeared to demonstrate) the staggering power of science and the susceptibility of the physical world to human understanding. In that way, Newton inspired later thinkers to demand ever more of reason. If the intellect could comprehend the universe, in its seemingly limitless complexity, then surely it could also comprehend justice, authority, right and wrong. It was in the face of these new demands, rather than in response to Newton’s discoveries in their own right, that faith retreated.” Had such thoughts been published, Newton under the Act of 1697 could have been liable to loss of office and all civil rights. Newton also wrote, “Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds, beats, and men have their right side and left side alike shaped (except in their bowels), and just two eyes, and no more, on either side of the face?” For Robertson, Newton was “some kind of Unitarian.” Michael White’s Isaac Newton: the Last Sorcerer (1997) describes his Arianism and how, between 1672 and 1675 he set out twelve points of faith that formed the foundations of Arianism. Newton in 1669 had promised to take holy orders as a requirement of the Lucasian professorship. When his friend Aston applied for an exemption from taking holy orders, the request was seen as setting a precedent that would destroy Trinity College’s reputation. In 1675 when he visited London to apply for a special dispensation, His Majesty granted the Lucasian professor and all subsequent holders of the chair exemption from holy orders and was willing “to give all just encouragement to learned men who are & shall be elected” to it. Martin Gardner, pointing out Newton’s belief in alchemy, terms Newton a fundamentalist. “Newton’s passion for alchemy,” he wrote, “was exceeded only by his passion for Biblical prophecy. Incredible amounts of intellectual energy were spent trying to interpret the prophecies of Daniel in the Old Testament, and the Book of Revelation in the New. He left more than a million words on these subjects, seeing himself as one who for the first time was correctly judging both books. Having been so successful in solving some of the riddles of God’s universe, he turned his talents toward trying to answer riddles posed by God’s Holy Word.” But Newton, as described by John Updike,

spent hours poring over the Bible, compiling charts and dictionaries…of his own, dangerously anti-Trinitarian views, and for the prisca sapientia—the wisdom that he, with the Rosicrucians, believed the ancients possessed and had secreted in their documents. The Middle Ages had, in truth, erased some ancient knowledge. The Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, in the third century B.C., calculated the circumference of the round earth to be twenty-four thousand miles (less than a thousand miles off the true value) and the distance to the sun to be ninety-two million miles, a stunningly close estimation. But the Old and New Testaments did not hold such mathematical wisdom; Newton researched the prophetic utterances of Daniel and St. John for a chronology of the future, and carefully concluded that Satan’s spell over the world would be broken in the year 1867. He did not know that his own science had excused God from running the universe, allowing Him merely the initial push—a push, astronomers recently concluded, that will carry everything infinitely outward, into darkness and heat death.

As for his personal life, “Newton had no interest in music or art, and once dismissed poetry as ‘ingenious fiddle-faddle.’ He never exercised, had no recreational hobbies, no interest in games, and was so preoccupied with his work that he frequently forgot to eat or would eat standing up to save time. He had few friends, and even to them he was often quarrelsome and vindictive.” Following the publication of Principia, Newton suffered a massive mental breakdown marked by severe insomnia, deep depression, amnesia, loss of mental ability, and paranoid delusions of persecution. Gardner speculates that Newton may have suffered from mercurial and other toxic metal poisoning caused by his alchemical experiments. Or, he adds, “Others have conjectured that throughout his life he was a manic-depressive with alternating moods of melancholy and happy activity. His breakdown was only the worst of such episodes.” (See entries for Gravity and for E. O. Wilson.) {CE; CL; ER; Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer, September-October 1996; JMR; JMRH; John Updike, “Immortal Isaac,” The New Yorker, 30 March 1998}

Newton, Jeremiah (20th Century) Newton, who calls himself an “atheist priest,” is a Stonewall Veteran and a humanist activist. (See entries for AASH and Herbert Huncke.)

Newton, Tyre (20th Century) Newton is associated with the Humanist Association of Palouse (AHA). He is professor emeritus of mathematics at Washington Sate University. (See entry for Washington Atheists, Humanists.) {FD; Freethought Today, January-February 1999}

Neymann, Clara (19th Century) Neymann was a German-American freethought lecturer, a friend and colleague of Fran Hedwig Henrich Wilhelmi. {BDF}

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1938– ) A writer in Kenya, Ngugi once began an address to the Fifth General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa by saying, “I am not a man of the church. I am not even a Christian.” His point was to censure the church for its role in the colonizing of his native land, and when he finished he was denounced for blasphemy. His novels include Weep Not, Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967). Theodore Pelton in The Humanist (March-April 1993) has written about Ngugi’s teaching at the University of Nairobi, his being imprisoned because of his differences with the Kenyan government, and his willingness to use literature in order to stir people to revolt.

NICENE CREED The creed, which begins, “I believe in one God,” asserts that Jesus was “of one substance with the Father.” The Arians contended that the Son was created and only the Father was eternal. The creed has been expanded from one that was issued in Nicaea (Nice) by the first Nicene Council in 325 CE. Most Christians who repeat the words are entirely unaware of the difficulties which have been involved in wording the material to satisfy the ecumenical, Eastern Catholic, Western Catholic, Provincial Church, confessional Protestant, democratic declarations, and American Protestant, sects and cults. The Apostles’ Creed, which merely said that Jesus was the Son of God the Father, conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary, has been popular in both the Catholic and Protestant churches. (See entries for Arius and for Christianity.) {ER}

Nichol, Charles Ready (Born 1876) With A. S. Bradley, Nichol wrote The Nichol-Bradley Debate (1907). {GS}

Nichol, John (1833–1894) Nichol, the son of John Nichol, shared his father’s rationalism, refused to graduate until the theological tests were abolished, then passed with first-class honors. In a biography by Knight, Nichol was described as follows: “Neither he nor his father ever belonged to the Unitarian community,” as had been claimed. Nichol was skeptical about immortality and rejected the Christian idea of God: “An omnipotent beneficence is flatly contradicted by the facts of the universe every hour.” Nichol professed only an ethical regard for Christianity. {RAT}

Nichol, John Pringle (1804–1859) Nichol was an astronomer who had been licensed as a preacher. After a few sermons, however, “his mind was turned away from the Church of Scotland,” his son stated. “In religion he thought for himself, and, of course, arrived at his own conclusion.” In 1836 Nichol was appointed Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow University. His chief work was A Cyclopaedia of the Physical Sciences (1857). An earnest theist and idealist, Nichol was a friend of Martineau and J. S. Mill. {RAT}

Nichols, Billy Joe (20th Century) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Nichols was minister of the Richardson Unitarian Church in Texas. {HM2}

Mike Nichols, Film Director ent Internet Movie Database NEW

Nichols list of credits is remarkable, including Silkwood, Catch-22, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate for which he won an Oscar for Best Director. On the March 21, 2001 broadcast of Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Nichols about his then-new film Wit based on the Pulitzer-prize winning play of the same name. He identified himself as a 'negative atheist' and said (paraphrased by the contributor) "I never consider what comes after this life, I have no interest in heaven, hell, god, etc..." A link to the segment which featured Nichols: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/fa/20010321.fa.01.ram

Nichols, Mike [Michael Igor Peschkowsky] (6 November 1931 - ) A Berlin-born American actor, director and comedian, Nichols and his family emigrated to the United States in 1939. Here, he founded The Second City, an improvisational group, and with Elaine May scored a Broadway hit as a satiric duo (1957-1961). He directed Barefoot in the Park (1963, winner of a Tony) on Broadway, then Luv (1964, winner of a Tony), and The Odd Couple (1965); Plaza Suite (1968); The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1971), and The Real Thing (1984). Nichols is married to television’s correspondent, Diane Sawyer. Moving to Hollywood, he started by directing Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), then won an Academy Award Oscar as Best Director for The Graduate (1967). Other of his films include Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998). Nichols, interviewed by Terry Gross about Wit, his forthcoming film, said on the “Fresh Air” broadcast (21 Mar 2001) that he is a “negative atheist,” adding that he does not consider what comes after this life and has no interest in Heaven, Hell, God, and so forth. (On the Web: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/fa/200010321.fa.01.rom).

Nicholson, Jack (1937– ) Nicholson is a noted actor, director, and producer. His acting debut in Hollywood was in a stage production of “Tea and Sympathy.” He has appeared in numerous films, including the following: “Cry-Baby Killer” (1958); “Studs Lonigan” (1960); “Easy Rider” (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, 1969); and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (Academy Award for Best Actor, 1975). “I don’t believe in God now,” Nicholson told a 1992 Vanity Fair interviewer. But “I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.” {A; CA}

Nicholson, Jack (28 Apr 1937 - ) Nicholson is a noted actor, director, and producer. His acting debut in Hollywood was in a stage production of Tea and Sympathy. He has appeared in numerous films, including Cry-Baby Killer (1958); Studs Lonigan (1960); Easy Rider (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, 1969); One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Academy Award for Best Actor, 1975); Terms of Endearment (Academy Award, 1983); The Witches of Eastwick (1987); Batman (1989); The Two Jakes (1990); Wolf (1994); and Mars Attacks! (1996). His sense of humor is legendary in Hollywood. “I don’t believe in God now,” Nicholson told a 1992 Vanity Fair interviewer. But “I can still work up an envy for someone who has a faith. I can see how that could be a deeply soothing experience.” {A; CA}

Nicholson, Katherine Conway (1907– ) “It was only by chance that I learned I had a great-uncle, Moncure,” Nicholson has stated. “When I asked about him I was told, ‘We never speak of him.’ In other words, he was the black sheep of the family.” Despite having a famous apostate in the family, she and her cousins were raised as Episcopalians, “but I am happy to say that four of us, entirely on our own, found the Unitarians and are Humanists, as well.” {Freethought Today, April 1997}

Nicholson, William (1753–1815) Nicholson was an English writer on chemistry and natural philosophy. At an early age, he went to India, then returned to London as a mathematics teacher. He published useful introductions to chemistry and natural philosophy, and he wrote The Doubts of the Infidels, Submitted to the Bench of Bishops by a Weak Christian (1871), a work that was republished both by Carlile and by Watson. His rationalist views are given in his Doubts of the Infidels (1781). Nicholson died in poor circumstances. {BDF; FUK; RAT}

Nickell, Joe (1944– ) A technical writer, Nickell is the author of Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1987). With John F. Fischer, he wrote Mysterious Realms (1993). In Looking for a Miracle (1993), Nickell examines miracle claims, weeping icons, relics, snake handling, speaking in tongues, stigmata, visions, and healing cures. He also is author of Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures (1993) and Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings(1995), in the latter of which he discusses the controversial claims of those who say they have experienced guardian angels, demonic spirits, and extraterrestrial visitors. A former stage magician and private detective, Nickell is on the editorial board of Skeptical Inquirer and has written for Free Inquiry. In 1995 he was named a senior research fellow of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York. Nickell signed Humanist Manifesto 2000. (See entry for Spontaneous Human Combustion.)

Nichols, John (20th Century) Nichols, a general practitioner in Surrey, England, has written for New Humanist. His expertise includes the relationship between Darwinism and physical healing.

Nichol, Brian (20th Century) Nichol is Chair of the Mid-Warwickshire branch of Amnesty International and a member of Coventry & Warwickshire Humanists. (See entry for Buddhism and Secular Humanism.)

Nicolai, Cristoph Friedrich Wilhelm (1733–1811 The most persistent spokesman of the Enlightenment in Germany, Nicolai advocated a “natural religion” in keeping with his neologist views. He opposed Pietism, mysticism, Protestant orthodoxy, crypto-Catholicism, and the Jesuits. His publishing of The General German Library (founded 1765) ran to 106 volumes and was praised by Heine. As a publication, it was instrumental in spreading a deistic rationalism, labeled Aufklärung, or enlightenment, through Germany’s middle class. Among the authors he published were Andreas Riem (1749–1807), who wrote anonymously against priestcraft as no other priest had yet done; Georg Schade (1712–1795), who although he believed in the immortality of animals, was a believer in Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), stating that “all who assert a supernatural religion are godless imposters”; J. B. Basedow (1723–1790), an active deist and educational reformer who liked Rousseau’s Émile. {BDF; EU, Volker Dürr; JMR; JMRH; RAT}

Nicolle, Charles Jules Henri (1866–1936) Nicolle, a French physician and microbiologist, won the Nobel Prize in 1928 for his work on typhus. His rationalism is found in La destinée humaine (1936), in which he treats sympathetically the ideas of God and immortality but confesses that he is an agnostic. {RE}

Niebuhr, Barthold Georg (1776–1831) An eminent Copenhagen-born German historian, Niebuhr read twenty languages and had an extraordinarily wide knowledge. From 1816 to 1823, he was the Prussian ambassador to the Holy See. His history of Rome (3 volumes, 1811–1832) is said to have inaugurated modern scientific historical method. Niebuhr related individual events to the political and social institutions of ancient Rome, seeking to recreate the past in terms understandable to the modern reader. His liberalism was antirevolutionary and he admired the Roman republic, favoring agrarianism as the basis of a well-balanced state. Niebuhr’s biographer, Winkworth, showed that while he refused in his later years to discuss religion—Niebuhr had been an aggressive skeptic in earlier years—he always rejected Christianity: “I would not overthrow the dead Church, but if she were to fall it would give me no uneasiness.” {CE; JM; JMRH; RAT; RE}

Niebuhr, Reinhold: See entries for George Orwell and for Theism.

Niel, André (1913– ) At the Second European Conference of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) held in Hannover (1968), Niel from France addressed the group. He writes on such subjects as publicity, literary analysis, and structuralism.

Niel, Mathilde (1926– ) A contributor to Erich Fromm’s Socialist Humanism, Niel is associated with L’Institut de L’Homme in Paris. She has written Psychanalyse du Marxisme (1967). {PK}

Nielsen, Kai (1926– ) When he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Nielsen was a professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary in Canada. Now emeritus, he has been called one of the century’s leading atheists. Nielsen is the author of Philosophy and Atheism: In Defense of Atheism (1985) and Ethics Without God (1990). In 1989, he wrote God, Skepticism, and Modernity, followed in 1990 by Does God Exist?: The Great Debate, in which he debates J. P. Moreland, a Christian and professor of philosophy at Biola University. Nielsen calls God a figment of human inspiration and states that disbelief in a god does not mean that an individual is immoral or will be unethical. In 1996 he published Naturalism Without Foundations, expressing the view that naturalism can avoid the pitfalls of both absolutism and relativism and showing what he terms the playful but still corrosive skepticism of post-modernism. Nielsen, a supporter of Internet Infidels, is a contributing editor on Philo, for which he wrote “Naturalism and Religion: Must Naturalistic Explanations Explain Religion Away?” (Spring-Summer 1998) and “On Being a Secularist All the Way Down” (Fall-Winter 1998). “The atheism I articulate and defend is a naturalism in that it rejects all forms of supernaturalism,” he states. It is a social naturalism that can also be termed a nonscientistic naturalism and a form of historicism. (See Nielsen’s entry for “Agnosticism” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas and for “Atheism” in Encyclopedia Britannica 1983.) {CA; E; HM2; SHD}

Niemojewski, André (1864–1921) Niemojewski’s chief work, Legends (1902) was suppressed in Austria and Russia, but after a prolonged struggle he won the right to continue its circulation. Deported from his native Poland for assiduous rationalist lecturing, he passed to Austria, narrowly escaping a sentence of ten years in prison. He returned to Poland in 1906 and was a leader among the rationalists. Niemojewski edited Wolny Mysl from 1906 to 1908. {RAT}

Nienkerk, Robert (20th Century) Nienkerk is active with Friends Free of Theism in Richfield, Minnesota. (See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844–1900) Nietzsche is the German philosopher credited with the phrase, “God is dead.” In fact, he wrote, “philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel ourselves irradiated by a new dawn by the report that the ‘old God is dead’; our hearts overflow with gratitude, hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, presentiment, and expectation. . . . You say you believe in the necessity of religion. Be sincere! You believe in the necessity of the police.” “What is it: is man only a blunder of God’s,” he asked, “or God only a blunder of man’s?” In his passionate opposition to Christianity, Nietzsche developed the concept of the Ubermensch (translated by some as “superman” and by others as “overman”). Since God is dead, in short, man is free to invent his own “values.” As to labels, he insisted, “There are no philosophies, only philosophers.” Lamont wrote of Nietzsche,

One is repelled by the cruel, egoistic, hard-boiled sort of Superman that Nietzsche had in mind, but the idea of a new species beyond man is invigorating . . . an eventual Superman who will surpass present-day man as much as man does the highest species of animals.

Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (1889) suggests that atheism came instinctively to him. In The Gay Science (1882), a madman announces that “God is dead,” then realizes he has come too soon—for Nietzsche, the death of God is a liberating idea that sets man free to explore vast possibilities. However, as noted by George J. Stack, the consequences of the loss of religious faith in God will be a 100-year period of “nihilism.” Nietzsche called God (if conceived of as a “providential” being) “the greatest immoralist in deeds that has ever existed.” In 1887, he wrote The Genealogy of Morals. His The Antichrist (1889) expresses his various anti-Christian sentiments and ideas, finding that Christendom had a “vampiric” effect on the Roman Empire and castigating its reversal of the “noble” values of the Greco-Roman world. As for Richard Wagner’s sentimental return to the Christian faith, Nietzsche passed up no chance to mock him. Joachim Köhler, in Nietzsche and Wagner (1998), found Nietzsche as anti-Semitic as Wagner. Both lived a comfortable bourgeois life but thought the bourgeois society would end in bloodshed and be replaced by warlike heroes who would be contemptuous of the masses. Most secular humanists shy away from Nietzsche, because he so inspired the German Nazis under Adolph Hitler and because of his condemnation of Mensch (Man). “Thus Spake Zarathustra” became a Hitler Youth motto. Although there is little if any reliable evidence to support Nietzsche’s alleged anti-Semitism, his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche was outspokenly anti-Semitic. In presiding over his archives from 1900 until her death in 1935, through selective editing, outright forgery, and toadying to Hitler, she recast her “beloved Fritz” as a Teutonic superman, according to journalist Ferdinand Protzman. Nietzsche’s philosophic views are discussed in Theories of Evolution (1984) by H. James Birx, who considers him a secularist but not a secular humanist. Bertrand Russell, himself a non-theist, denounced fellow non-theist Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche denied that he was a Social Darwinist, “this is precisely what he was,” Paul Edwards wrote in God and the Philosophers. Russell was also critical of other Social Darwinists and power-worshipers. Nietzsche’s last eleven years were spent in total mental darkness, first in an asylum in Basel, then in his mother’s and later his sister’s care in Röcken, Germany, where he is said to have been fond of playing the piano and splashing in the bathtub. McCabe said of this period, “His mind gave way under the strain of his fierce indignation against stupidity and hypocrisy but the clerical charge that this mental unbalance may be traced in his works is ludicrous. They are masterly indictments of the developing faults of the new age which have so fatally revealed themselves since death. His chief mistake was to assume that Christianity had introduced humanitarianism into the world and to fail to hold the balance in his mind between the need for virility and the need to help the weaker members of society.”

	Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin (1998), a friendly work, mentions not only that Nietzsche’s father and grandfather were parsons but also that his mother’s father was a parson. She wrote that Nietzsche carried an umbrella when he went walking in order to shade his sensitive eyes from light. Children were known to have filled it with pebbles that showered down on his head when he opened the umbrella. She also notes that when he walked his steps were oddly short and high—his myopia made him afraid of tripping.

In 1865, taken by friends to a brothel, he may have infected himself with syphilis. In 1867 he was treated for a syphilitic infection. As to his last days, Chamberlain wrote:

As for the drama of ill-health, it never left him after he reached his mid-twenties. Even in childhood he had suffered headaches and myopia, and the weakness seemed to run in the family since it also afflicted Elisabeth, and their father Carl Ludwig, who had died at thirty-six of a brain disease. Nietzsche gave out never to know quite what was wrong with himself, though he suspected a hereditary problem and congratulated himself on surviving beyond his father’s age. Yet how can he not have known he had syphilis, with a scar close to his foreskin and a history, albeit brief, of treatment? He surely lied to Wagner’s doctor, Otto Eiser. The syphilis caught from prostitutes in his student days was complicated by diphtheria and dysentery contracted as a medical orderly in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche was left with a delicate stomach and poor digestion and a recurring migraine, with constant vomiting and retching maximizing the pain in his head and the disruption [of] work. For days he could do nothing but lie in a dark room. . . .

From a clinical viewpoint, Dr. Archinto P. Anzil (The New York Times Book Review, 14 February 1999) has described the problem:

Friedrich Nietzsche suffered from a tertiary form of neuro-syphilis, namely, from general paresis of the insane or dementia paralytica. This is an inflammation of the brain tissue, i.e., an encephalitis caused by or at least etiologically related to the microbial agent of syphilis. A typical and early manifestation of dementia paralytica is the development of paranoid ideas, usually notions of grandeur: patients think of themselves as being one of the paramount historical figures of their time or of times past. Characteristically, Nietzsche, imbued as he was in classic pre-Christian antiquity, thought he was the god Dionysus. As for Carl Nietzsche, the philosopher’s father, he died of a stroke, a very common condition that as a rule has nothing to do with syphilis.

At the end, according to John Banville (The New York Review of Books, 13 August 1998),

His handwriting began to decay, to such a degree that only his mother could read his script. A fragment of one of the Dionysus Dithyrambs of this time comes through her: Lesley Chamberlain describes it, accurately, as being of “Rilkean purity and inwardness”:

Solitude is Not pain but ripening– For which the sun must be your friend.

The sun was the only friend left to him now. There was, as Kleist had said of himself, no help for him upon this earth. He suffered prostrating attacks of weeping, accompanied by trembling and facial grimaces. He hid in his room on the Via Carlo Alberto, watching the winter harden. Christmas came and went, and on January 3 in the Via Po he embraced a cabman’s nag and collapsed on the pavement. The police had already been called when his kindly landlord Davide Fino arrived. Nietzsche recognized him, and Fino brought him home, where behind the locked door of his room he raved and ranted and danced naked in the private bacchanal of his dementia. (See entries for George Eliot, Ernst Horneffer, and Karl Löwith. Also, see Theories of Evolution (1984) by H. James Birx and a discussion of Nietzsche’s philosophy by Walter Kaufmann in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.) {BDF; CE; CL; DCL; ER; EU, George J. Stack; JM; PA; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; TYD}

Nieuwenhuis, Ferdinand Jakob Domela (Born 1848) A Dutch publisher, Nieuwenhuis at first was a Lutheran minister. But one Sunday in 1877 he resigned, telling his congregation that he had ceased to believe in Christianity. Stunned, they accepted his resignation but commended him for his honesty. He then contributed to De Banier (Banner), de Dageraad (Dawn), and de Vragen des Tijds (Questions of the Time). In 1879 he started a socialist paper, Recht coor Allen, which became an important daily organ of socialism and freethought. His principle writings were With Jesus; For Or Against Socialism; The Religious Oath Question; The Religion of Reason; and The Religion of Humanity. In 1887 he was sentenced to a year of solitary confinement for an article he had not written, and he was harshly treated until the pressure of public opinion secured his release. {BDF; RAT}

Niezing, Johan (20th Century) At the International Humanist and Ethical Union’s (IHEU’s) International Peace Conference (1983), Niezing of the Netherlands addressed the gathering. He is the author of Sociology, War, and Disarmament (1970) and Strategy and Structure—Studies in Peace Research (1978).

NIGERIAN HUMANISTS The Humanist Friendship Center presided over by Charles Ufomadu is at Omuoma Onicha Ezinihitte Mbaise, Imo State. Action for Humanism is at PO Box 91, Ilishan Remo, Ogun State. General coordinator of the Nigerian Humanist Movement is Leo Igwe, PO Box 25269, Mapo Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria.

NIGERIAN RATIONALISM: See Freethought in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, by Gordon Stein, which describes that country’s rationalist association.

Nigg, Walter (20th Century) Nigg wrote The Heretics, Heresy Through the Ages, in which he describes rebels within the Christian community.

Nightingale, Florence (1820–1910) A nurse, a reformer, famous as the “Lady with the Lamp,” Nightingale influenced military hospital cleanliness and raised nursing standards. “I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women. . . . No woman has excited passions among women more than I have,” she wrote late in life to the surprise of those who considered her a conventional Victorian conformist. Nightingale, according to biographers Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, who edited Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale (1990), was attracted to Roman Catholic religious orders because of their commendable social work. But she “always distrusted dogma” and “throughout her life Nightingale remained a critical member of the Church of England, continually seeking to adapt its tenets to her emotional and religious needs.” Meanwhile, some Unitarians have claimed that her viewpoint was that of a theistic Unitarianism. She had, however, written W. G. Tarrant, “I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low; that he is not a Romanist or an Anglican—or a Unitarian.” From 1857 on, she lived as an invalid, corresponded widely, received countless visitors, became generally renowned as the founder of nursing, and was the first woman to receive the British Order of Merit (1907), three years before her death. “The Church,” she once wrote, “is now more like the Scribes and Pharisees than like Christ. . . . What are now called the essential doctrines of the Christian religion, Christ does not even mention.” {CE; EG; JM; RAT; RE; TYD; UU; WWS}

Nigro, Anthony (20th Century) Nigro is on the staff of Free Inquiry.

NIHILISM • Nihilist, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

Ivan Turgenev, in Fathers and Children (1861), has a character named Bazarov who holds that everything is so bad at that time that all should be destroyed in order that a better system can be constructed. Such a person, called a nihilist, had strong feelings against both the church and the state. Nihilists held that human life is meaningless, and therefore all religions, laws, moral codes, and political systems are thoroughly empty and false. According to Robert G. Olson in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, Nietzsche was an early user of the term and was “one of the first of the atheists to dispute the existence of a necessary link between atheism and nihilism.” Nietzsche disagreed with Ivan, in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880), that “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Nihilism was somewhat popular among Russian extremists until the fall of the Czarist government in 1917. Nihilism is apparent in Gaspar Noé’s 1999 film, “I Stand Alone,” one in which a middle-aged man is driven to despair by unemployment, rejection, and lack of love. “You are always alone, alone when you’re born, alone when you die, alone, always alone,” a character laments. “The older you get, the lonelier you are, alone with a few memories that life steadily destroys. Life is like a tunnel. Everyone has his little tunnel. But at the end of the tunnel, there is no light. There is nothing.” {DCL; Alan Riding, The New York times, 14 March 1999}

Nijinsky, Vaslav (1890-1950): See entry for masturbation, which the famous dancer believed, after becoming interested in Tolstoy’s religious philosophy and becoming schizophrenic, caused mental and physical breakdown. Also see Peter Ostwald’s Vaslav Nijinsky: A Leap into Madness (1991).

Nikarchos (Ancient Greece) Nikarchos illustrated an ancient Greek and humanistic sense of humor (Translation by Dudley Fitts):

• Yesterday Dr. Marcus went to see the statue of Zeus.

Though Zeus,

& though marble,

we’re burying the statue today.

• Fortunatus the portrait-painter got twenty sons

but never one likeness.

• To ease his rumbling stomach our Kritôn

[the miser] sniffs
not mint,
but the product of the Mint.

• Fatal, fatal is the song of the dire night-raven:

but when Demophilos [the popular tenor] 
sings
even the dire night-raven blenches & dies.

Nikolaevsky, Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevsky, the famed archivist and Russian historian, was a Menshevik who was known by many to be a non-theist. {The New York Review of Books, 28 May 1998)

NILE DELTA: See entry for Delta and its connection with the pudenda.

Nilsen, Steinar (20th Century)

A Norwegian, Nilsen wrote “Beyond the University—Humanism as a Popular Movement” in International Humanist (October, 1990). He is the former President of the Human-Etisk Forbund (Human Ethical Association), one of the largest humanist organizations in the world in ratio to the size of its population. About one quarter of the Norwegian population of 4.3 million attends a humanist ceremony of some kind every ten years, he reports. Once challenged by a Lutheran minister, who lamented that humanists have stolen the ceremony of confirmation by tagging the word “civil” to it, Nilsen countered by offering to give the confirmation ceremony back to the church “if the church would agree to return the Winter Solstice Celebration to us ordinary people and stop calling it Christmas!” In 1994, Nilsen was named President of the European Humanist Federation. E-mail: <steinar.nilsen@mimer.no>. (See entry for European Humanist Federation.) {International Humanist News, March 1994}

Nin, Anaïs (1903–1977) The daughter of the Spanish composer Joaquin Nin, Anaïs was a writer whose fiction contained searching portraits of women. A patient of Jung, she included much in her fiction about erotica and the subconscious. Nin is best known for her correspondence with Henry Miller (1965) and her six volumes of diaries (1966–1976). Upon her death, and knowing of her non-interest in religion, Rupert William Pole took her cremains over Santa Monica Bay in California to Mermaid Cove. “I told the pilot to fly there,” he explained, “and I let go of the blanket containing her ashes just as a ray of sunlight broke through the overcast sky.”

NIRVANA • Nirvana, n. In the Buddhist religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough to understand it. –Ambrose Bierce The Devil’s Dictionary

In Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism, nirvana is the highest state of consciousness. The soul is freed from all desires and attachments. Many non-Buddhists inaccurately cite Heaven or Paradise as synonyms for nirvana. One can attain Nirvana in life, however, and the death of one who has attained it is termed parinirvana, or complete nirvanah, a goal that is beyond description. Some in their search for nirvana utilize yoga in order to obtain the extinction of all attachment and ignorance. Freethinkers have been known to achieve nirvana, sometimes while listening to a cello, or cuddled up close to a mate on a wintry morning, or watching the skies on a moonlit night, or even while masticating. {CE; DCL}

Nisbet, Lee (20th Century) A professor of philosophy at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, Nisbet is a contributing editor for Free Inquiry. Also, he is on the executive council of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and is special projects director for Skeptical Inquirer. Nisbet is author of The Gun Control Debate (1990). {SHD}

NITRIC ACID A poisonous air pollutant, nitric acid contains properties that are used by the human immune system to kill disease organisms and destroy cancers. Also, the acid dilates the blood vessels leading to the erectile spaces in the penis, allowing the penis to become engorged with blood. As one Manhattan humanist observed, “One man’s poison is also his pleasure.”

NITROGEN Excluding water vapor, about 78% of air around us is made up of nitrogen. Oxygen comes second, with 21%. The remaining 1% consists of argon, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. Up to a height of almost fifty miles, where the mesosphere ends, this mixture of gases remains the same. Nitrogen is very important for plants.

Nitschke, Philip (20th Century) Nitschke was awarded the title of 1998 Australian Humanist of the Year for his pioneering work for the terminally ill. He invented the coma machine in order legally to assist the death of patients who had made their own choice to end their lives. Even in extremis, patients could operate the machine themselves. As a supporter of voluntary euthanasia, Dr. Nitschke claims that he sees little evidence that there is a god: “I haven’t seen any miracles at those last moments. People in their final moments, while I am expecting them to say something profound, rarely do.” {International Humanist News, May 1998}

Niven, Larry (20th Century) Niven is a science fiction author. In N-space, a collection of narrations and short stories, he writes of his agnosticism. {CA; E}

Nkrumah, Kwame (1909–1972) Nkrumah, Ghana’s president (1960–1966), wrote Consciencism (1964), in which he outlined what he called a humanistic philosophy. However, he has allegedly suppressed numbers of political opponents and, after a series of strikes in 1961, made himself supreme commander of the armed forces as well as assumed absolute control of the Convention People’s party. While on a trip to Peking in 1966, his government was overthrown and he took refuge in Guinea. {CE}

NOAH (or Noe) In the Bible, Noah built an ark when divinely directed to do so, and this saved human and animal life from “the deluge.” Afterwards, God established a covenant with Noah, whose three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth—are eponymous ancestors of races as mankind is divided in the Bible, according to Genesis 6-10. Critic James Fenton has pointed out that Noah, when Ham once accidentally saw his nakedness, laid a curse not upon Ham but upon Ham’s son: “Accursed be Canaan. He shall be his brothers’ meanest slave. . . . Blessed be Yahweh, God of Shem. Let Canaan be his slave. May God make space for Japheth. May he live in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his slave.” (Genesis 9:20-27). In short, Fenton explains, because Ham accidentally went into his tent and saw his father’s nakedness, thereby breaking a taboo, this explains how, “despite the single common origin of Man, some peoples of the world live together on unequal terms.” John Block Friedman’s The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (1981) shows more about Ham’s misdeed. He mocked Noah’s nakedness as well as unsuccessfully tried to get his brothers to do the same. But Ham also had sinned on the ark, failing to follow Noah’s rule to be sexually continent. With the aid of a magic demon, however, Ham slept with his wife, resulting in his being punished by being given a black skin. Thus, when the world was divided up, Japheth received Europe, Shem got Asia, and Ham was given Africa. Further, Fenton adds,

Ham became father to all the monsters of legend—including all the monsters of classical legend, the giants, the anthropophagi, the people with heads growing beneath their shoulders, and so forth. In some versions there was nothing necessarily bad about these monsters—they were after all a part of God’s creation—it was just that their ancestry had to be accounted for.

Freethinkers are appalled at the overtones of such a tale and hold that the resultant anti-Hamitism hurt race relations because of its unsound theories. Peter Gomes’s The Good Book (1996) cites a poll finding that 10% of those quizzed thought that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. (For Bruce Bagemihl’s disproving that Noah’s Ark contained an all-heterosexual group, see entry for Animal.) {The Economist, 18 January 1997}

NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS Alfred B. Nobel (1833–1896) was a Swedish chemist who made a large fortune by the invention and manufacture of explosives. He left the bulk of it for a foundation that would dispense prizes to the most distinguished workers in science, letters, and the peace movement. McCabe in the 1940s found that not more than three out of more than two hundred Nobel Prize winners are claimed in the voluminous Catholic Encyclopaedia—Carrel is one example. However, about one hundred fifty of the recipients did not write about or speak on religion, which McCabe noted squares with the findings of Leuba that seventy per cent of American scientists (including teachers in institutions under sectarian influence) are atheists or agnostics. He found that of the five definite Christians, two (Kipling and Mistral) are of doubtful orthodoxy, one (Eucken) is a theologian of no literary merit, one (Pearl Buck) had a serious quarrel with her Church, and one (Selma Lagerlof) is a sentimental writer of little more than local repute. Meanwhile, the following international rationalist writers received the prize: Björnstjerne Björnson, Anatole France, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Maurice Maeterlinck, Theodor Mommsen, Eugene O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Romain Rolland, George Bernard Shaw, and Rabindranath Tagore. The following did not: Bertold Brecht; Joseph Conrad; Anton Chekhov; E. M. Forster; Maxim Gorky; Henrik Ibsen; James Joyce; D. H. Lawrence; Marcel Proust; August Strindberg; H. G. Wells; and Virginia Woolf. Few rationalists, McCabe notes, “seem to be aware of the strength of their position, while the strength of the Churches is now in the less educated Fundamentalist masses.” He qualifies this by saying that “we must, however, take certain circumstances into account. The judges and their academic advisers are for the most part conventional Christians, and are apt to understand the qualification ‘of an idealist tendency’ in their own way, while, as men of one of the smaller States, they—as the awards show—are apt to strain matters in favour of small nations or to be swayed by broad political considerations. Thus, while the literary prize has been awarded repeatedly to men and women who are almost unknown outside their own small countries—G. Deledda, Gjellerup, Selma Lagerlof, Pontoppidan, Sigrid Undset, etc.—or to Christian writers of no literary distinction like Eucken, world-figures, mostly of a decided idealist (but Rationalist) tendency, like Wells, Conrad, Zola, D’Annunzio, Capek, Galdòs, Ibañez, Santayana, Gorki, Tolstoy, Sudermann, Sinclair, and Russell, etc., have been passed over. (Bertrand Russell in 1950 received the Prize in Literature). Further, the award for humanitarian work has occasionally been rather parochial (Archbishop Soderblom) or very questionable (Elihu Root, Theodore Roosevelt, Austen Chamberlain, A. Henderson, Gen. Dawes, or paid officials at Geneva). Of the recipients of the scientific awards, in fine, not one in five has ever declared his views on religion.” {RE} Nobel-winning unbelievers listed herein are Jane Addams, (Sir) Norman Angell, Klas Pontus Arnoldson, Svante August Arrhenius, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, Samuel Beckett, Baruj Benacerraf, Paul D. Boyer, Albert Camus, Frances Crick, Christian René De Duve, William Faulkner, Edward H. Fisher, Dario Fo, Murray Gell-Mann, Herbert Hauptman, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Harold W. Kroto, Pär Lagerkvist, Selma Lagerlof, Charles Laveran, Jean-Marie Lehn, Sinclair Lewis, André Lwoff, Naguid Mahfouz, Thomas Mann, Mario José Molina, Theodor Mommsen, Hermann J. Muller, Ferad Murad, Alva Myrdal, Fridtjof Nansen, Eugene O’Neill, Carl von Ossietzky, Linus C. Pauling, Octavio Paz, Henrik Pontoppidan, Ludwig Quidde, Charles Richet, Ronald Ross, Bertrand Russell, Andre Sakharov, José Saramago, Jean-Paul Sartre (who, however, refused out of principle—when his surviving relatives demanded the money that went with the prize, they were rebuffed), Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Schweitzer, George Bernard Shaw, Charles Scott Sherrington, Jens Christian Skou, Michael Smith, Wole Soyinka, John Steinbeck, Jack Steinberger, James Dewey Watson, and Steven Weinberg. Also, Emily Greene Balch, a Unitarian and Quaker, won the 1946 prize for founding, along with Jane Addams, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Although the Prize has gone to many of the finest writers of the century—e.g., Beckett, Faulkner, Hamsun, Mann, Yeats—neither James Joyce nor Vladimir Nabokov were so honored. Boris Pasternak, pressured by the Soviet government, rejected the prize. The 1998 Nobel Prizes in the sciences were $978,000 each. Meanwhile, the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1999 became the world’s richest award, $1,240,000.

Noble, Iris (20th Century) Noble, a freethinker, wrote Clarence Darrow, Defense Attorney (1958). {FUS}

NOBLE SAVAGE Primitivism has been shown as a revolt against luxury (Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village), against sophistication (Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian), and against neo-classicism. Primitivism supposed a belief in man’s natural goodness and in the inevitable corruptions of civilization. Boswell found a visiting Tahitian “elegant.” Readers delighted in books such as Burroughs’s Tarzan and Kipling’s Mowgli or with the Truffaut film, “L’Enfant sauvage.” The ideas of primitivism were in many ways continued in the Romantic movement, with its stress on Nature, freedom (both political and artistic), and the natural man. Jean-Jacques Rousseau advanced the idea that people who live within civilization are no more “civilized” and perhaps not so “civilized” as those worthy people who live in non-civilized places. Often the “noble savage,” another term for the primitive man, lived close to nature, not as a lord over nature, and the simple innocence of his desires inspired numbers of writers and thinkers, particularly those who were concerned about the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. {DCL}

Noelle, David C. (20th Century) Noelle is on the faculties of the Department of Cognitive Science and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. He is chairman of the San Diego Association of Secular Humanists (SANDASH); is vice president of the Freethinkers’ Society, which operates the Thomas Paine Coffeehouse in San Diego; and was one of the initial members of the Secular Humanists of Los Angeles (SHOLA); and in Pennsylvania is a regional director of the Council for Secular Humanism. On Easter of 1996, he was a speaker at the Mount Soledad Cross protest. For Free Inquiry, he interviewed Patricia Churchland. Noelle is the webmaster and internet coordinator of SANDASH; the San Diego Association for Rational Inquiry (SDARI, a group of skeptics); and the Council for Secular Humanism. On the Web: <www.cse.ucsd.edu/users/dnoelle/>. E-mail: <admin@secularhumanism.org> and <dnoelle@cs.ucsd.edu>.

Noffs, Theodore Delwin (1926– ) The Reverend “Ted” Noffs is an individualistic Australian theologian and social reformer. In 1974 he founded the Wayside Chapel, Kings Cross, Sydney. During the 1970s he established Australia’s first Life Education Centre, a rehabilitation program for young drug addicts, one which has been copied around the world. The Centre also establishes contact with the aged, lonely, migrants, and Aborigines. “All religious, political problems must be given a human face,” he once said, declining to join the humanists but claiming to be a non-believer in the Bible. In 1985 he received the Humanist of the Year award. {SWW}

Noiré, Ludwig (1829–1889) Noiré was a German monist whose works show the influence of Spinoza and Schopenhauer. He was the author of Aphorisms on the Monist Philosophy (1877) and a work on the Origin of Speech (1877). Noir contended, according to Wheeler, that “language originates in instinctive sounds accompanying will in associative actions.” {BDF; RAT}

Nokes, G. D. (20th Century) Nokes wrote History of the Crime of Blasphemy (1928). {GS}

Nöldeke, Theodor (1836–1930) Nöldeke, a German orientalist, taught theology at Kiel University in 1864 and in 1872 became professor of Semitic philology at Strasbourg University. The chief works he published were A History of the Koran (1856), Geschichte des Korans (1860) and Das Leben Muhammads (A Life of Muhomet, 1863), which show a divergence from Christianity. In addition to writing A Literary History of the Old Testament, Nöldeke wrote an estimated six hundred scholarly works, pamphlets, and articles. {BDF; RAT}

Nolte, Nick (1941- ) Nolte, an actor, has appeared in numerous plays and movies. During the 1960s he made money by selling phony draft cards to college students, saying he did it only to help underage kids get served in bars. The FBI, however, arrested him for dealing in counterfeit government documents and he was given forty-five years in jail, since suspended—as a result, he is now a felon, was not drafted into the armed services, and can never vote. Nolte has been married (and divorced) three times. Asked in a Playboy (April 1999) interview if he believed in God, Nolte responded, “I have difficulty with God and with beliefs. You have to ask the question, If God created man in his own image, what kind of an image is God?” If there is a God, the interviewer continued, what do you hope he overlooks about you? “I hope,” Nolte answered, “God would overlook that he made me in his image, because he sure fucked up.”

Nolte, Nicholas (Nick) King (8 Feb 1940 - ) Nolte, who was born in Omaha, Nebraska, graduated from an Omaha high school, then accepted an Arizona State University football scholarship but dropped out because of failing grades. During the 1960s he made money by selling phony draft cards to college students, saying he did it only to help underage kids get served in bars. The FBI, however, arrested him for dealing in counterfeit government documents, and he was given forty-five years in jail, since suspended—as a result, he is now a felon, was not drafted into the armed services, and can never vote. Moving to Oregon, he took up acting at the Pasadena Playhouse and for a time studied with Bryan O’Byrne at Stella Adler’s Academy in Los Angeles. He landed a breakthrough role in 1976 in the television miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man, and movie stardom soon followed. He appeared opposite Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep; played a drug smuggling Vietnam veteran in Who’ll Stop the Rain; a disillusioned football star in North Dallas Forty; as free-spirited beat-era writer Neal Cassady in Heart Beat; and a reclusive marine biologist in John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Awards he has received include three New York Film Critics Awards—Best Actor, Who’ll Stop the Rain? (1978); Best Actor, North Dallas Forty (1979); and Best Actor, Affliction, 1998—and in 1991 the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, The Prince of Tides. Nolte has been married (and divorced) several times, first to actress Shelia Page (1966 to 1971); actress Karen Louise Eklund (for seven years, at which time she sued in 1977 for palimony); dancer Sharyn “Legs” Haddad (1978 to 1983); and Rebecca Linger (1984 to 1997, during which they had one son, Brawley). Asked in a Playboy interview (April 1999) if he believed in God, Nolte responded, “I have difficulty with God and with beliefs. You have to ask the question, If God created man in his own image, what kind of an image is God?” If there is a God, the interviewer continued, what do you hope he overlooks about you? “I hope,” Nolte answered, “God would overlook that he made me in his image, because he sure fucked up.” {CA}

NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria): See entry for Stephen J. Gould. NONADORANTES The followers of Ferenc David in Transylvania were called Nonadorantes because they refused to accord “adoration” to Christ.

NONBELIEVERS: For statistics showing that non-believers outnumber believers, see entry for Hell.

NONCONFORMISTS Protestants in England in the 17th century and afterwards were called non-conformists if they refused to belong to the Church of England, which was the established church. They were also called dissenters. Freethinkers who do not conform to or refuse to be bound by accepted beliefs, customs, or practices, are also called nonconformists. {DCL}

NONCONFORMITY • How conventional all you unconventional people are! –George Bernard Shaw

NON-OVERLAPPING MAGISTERIA: See entry for Stephen Gould.

NON-REALISTS • Most Unitarians in Britain do not believe in a transcendent Deity who is really out there somewhere. Those who feel this way (“non-realist” is the trendy term over here) and who tend to emphasise religion as being about human relationships may well describe themselves as “religious humanists.” I have never heard a congregation here in Britain describe themselves as being “secular humanist,” but this is not to say that there aren’t any. —Matthew Smith, a British Unitarian <matjanros@aol.com>.

NON-RELIGIONISTS: For an estimate of the number of non-religionists worldwide, see the entry for Hell.

NONSENSE • When a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense. –Alfred North Whitehead

Noon, Richard (20th Century) Noon in 1996 was an unsuccessful candidate for membership in the National Secular Society’s Council of Management.

Noordenbos, D. (1896–1978) Noordenbos is author in the Netherlands of Het Atheisme in Nederland in De Negentiende Eeuw.

Noorthouck, John (19th Century) Noorthouck wrote a History of London (1773) and an Historical and Classical Dictionary (1776). He also has been credited with the Life of the Man After God’s Own Heart. {BDF; FUK}

Nordau, Max Simon (1849–1923) Nordau, a physician born of Jewish parents at Pesth, wrote several books of travels and earned much negative criticism for his trenchant work, Economic Lies of Our Civilisation (1978) and Degeneration (1993). {BDF; RAT}

Nordenfeldt, Johan (20th Century) Nordenfeldt, director of the United Nations Center Against Apartheid, addressed the Tenth International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) World Congress held in Buffalo (1988).

Norman, Andrew (20th Century) The Andrew Norman Foundation was an early donor to help fund the Center for Inquiry–West in the Los Angeles, California, area. Norman, C. H. (20th Century) Norman wrote The Neutrality of God (1931). {GS}

Norman, Winifred Latimer (20th Century) Norman, granddaughter of the African American scientist, Lewis H. Latimer, is author of Lewis H. Latimer, Scientist (1994). Dr. Norman has been a trustee of the Unitarian Universalist Association and is a member of the Fourth Universalist Society in New York City.

Norris, Henry Hadley (1771–1850) Norris in 1839 wrote Principles of the Jesuits, Developed in a Collection of Extracts from Their Own Authors to Which are Prefixed a Brief Account of the Origin of the Order and a Sketch of Its Institute. In the work, he described murder, deceit, intrigue, political chicanery, and bribery which he alleged Jesuits used to accomplish their goals.

Norris, Julie (20th Century) Norris in Britain is active with the West Glamorgan Humanist Group in Uplands, Swansea.

North, Luke (20th Century) North wrote Why I Am An Atheist (1916). {GS}

NORTH AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR HUMANISM (NACH) The North American Committee for Humanism (NACH), which was promoted by Sherwin T. Wine, was formed to provide humanist leaders a forum for resolving mutual problems and planning mutual goals. On its founding board were humanist leaders affiliated with the American Ethical Union; the American Humanist Association; the Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism (now the Council for Secular Humanism); the Fellowship of Religious Humanists (now Friends of Religious Humanism), an affiliate of the Unitarian Universalist Association the Humanist Association of Canada; and the Society for Humanistic Judaism. Its first project was the establishment of the Humanist Institute, which enrolled its first class in 1984. Howard Radest served as the Institute’s founding Dean. The Institutes annual journal is called Humanism Today. In 1997, sixty-eight had been graduated, and four of the Institutes graduates and students sit on the current board of directors of the American Humanist Association. Seven are Ethical Culture leaders. Eleven are Unitarian-Universalist ministers. The present dean is Robert B. Tapp. A specialist member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, the Committee is at Box 191, 5901-J Wyoming NE, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87109. (See entries for Jean Kotkin and Alfred W. Cook.) {The Humanist, January-February 1998}

NORTH AMERICAN FREETHOUGHT: See Freethought in the United States, which discusses the subject in detail, by Gordon Stein.

NORTH CAROLINA ATHEISTS Wayne Aiken is a contact for American Theists, Inc. E-mail: <waiken@atheists.org>.

NORTH CAROLINA FREETHINKERS Charles Alfred Human Jr., in “Pioneers of Freethought in North Carolina,” has noted that as early as 1761 complaints were being made about freethinkers. “One of them declared that the money he is obliged to give to a minister, he would rather give to a kind girl,” John MacDowell, a minister for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel complained. “Another believes there is neither Hell nor Devil, and there is here one gentleman of fortune in particular; he is not of the vestry, but strives to influence them as much as he can, whom I heard myself declare he could not believe in Jesus Christ & he despised the holy sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. To him, with two (sic) other gentlemen in the St. James Parish, a young phisician (sic) who was reputed to be an Atheist and (sic) who died since I came here, left Lord Bolingbroke’s works. What can a minister of God expect from these?” Human then cites an early alleged “coterie of infidels” by name: Ezekiel Polk (grandfather of President James K. Polk); Charles Polk, son of Colonel Thomas Polk; Charles and Ezra Alexander, two signers of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence of 1775; Moses Winslow; and James Brandon. Governor Willie Jones, a post-Revolutionary governor, was a freethinker who stipulated in his will that no one was to insult his body by mumbling religious words over it. North Carolina academia included the University of North Carolina’s co-founder, William Davie, who brought Continental ideas of dancing and polite society as well as religious skepticism. Dr. David Kerr, a Fayetteville Presbyterian minister, became a passionate republican and skeptic upon becoming a professor at Chapel Hill. Another professor, Delvaux, was a skeptical French ex-monk. Still another, Professor Richards, had a profession detested by the Puritans: He was a strolling actor. Samuel Allen Holmes was nihilistic and held that honesty and integrity were “deceptions and injurious pretenses” and incited a riot on campus in 1799. Joseph Gales, an early 19th century deist was a leading newspaperman who owned The Raleigh Register. Another deist, Nathaniel Macon, said that if a Hindu were to come to North Carolina and aspire to an office to which merit would entitle him, his religion should not be a bar. The avowed deist Christopher Dudley served seven times as State Senator for Onslow County. {Truth Seeker, Vol. 123:1}

NORTH CAROLINA HUMANISTS • American Humanist Association, Mid-Atlantic Region (AHA), A-140, 1 College Row, Brevard, North Carolina 28712. O. Andrews Ferguson is coordinator. • Duke University Humanist Society is at <http://www.secularhumanism.org/cfa/orgs.html>. • Humanists of North Carolina (AHA), POB 1491, Pisgah Forest, North Carolina 28768. Marge Glanzman is a contact. • Onslow Freethought Society, 704 Ireland Court, Jacksonville, North Carolina (810) 353-9362.

NORTH DAKOTA HUMANISTS • Bernie Schatz is the American Humanist Association coordinator of the northern part of the United States. (See entry for Minnesota Atheists, Humanists.) • Sheri Anderson, RR, Fargo, North Dakota, is coordinator for North Dakota Humanists. {FD}

NORTH TEXAS CHURCH OF FREETHOUGHT The North Texas Church of Freethought (PO Box 111894, Carrolton, Texas 76011) was founded in 1995 by Mike and Marilyn Sullivan, Deborah A. Boak, and Tim Gorski. On the Web: <http://www.churchoffreethought.org>.

NORTH-EAST HUMANIST NEWSLETTER A quarterly, North-East Humanist Newsletter, is at 58 Garmondsway Road, West Cornforth, Ferryhill, County Durham DL17 9HD, United Kingdom.

NORTHERN IRELAND HUMANISTS For information about the Ulster Humanist Association, contact Brian McClinton, 25 Riverside Drive, Lisburn, Northern Ireland BT27 4HE; telephone 01846 677 264

Northcote, Orford (19th Century) Northcote, a freethinker, wrote Ruled by the Tomb (1899). {GS}

Norton, Andrews (1786–1853) While Dexter Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard, Norton was characterized by Perry Miller as “the perfect summation of Unitarian scholarship.” His The Evidences of the Genuineness of the Gospels (1837–1844) was a rational interpretation of the Bible which sought to sweep away Calvinist orthodoxy and argue against Trinitarianism. In his later career, however, he became an agent of conservative reaction against Transcendentalism, remembered chiefly for his attacks on George Ripley and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their doctrine of religious intuition rejected not only the miracles but the need for any empirical justification for religious ideas, thus throwing Norton’s entire program out the window. Norton countered that the self and its intuitions were untrustworthy bases for a religious faith, and he saw in Transcendentalism the danger of self taking precedence over things of deeper importance. {U; U&U}

Norton, Charles Eliot (1827–1908) Norton, an American scholar and teacher, was professor of the history of art at Harvard from 1875 to 1898. As a man of letters, he had a stimulating influence on his time. “One may sigh for all that one loses in giving up the old religion,” he wrote in a 1905 letter to Goldwin Smith. “But the new irreligion is the manlier, honester, and simpler thing, and affords a better theory of life and a more solid basis for morality.” With James Russell Lowell, he edited (1864–1868) the North American Review and was a founder (1865) of the Nation. Although Norton was reticent about his skepticism, Sir Leslie Stephen, the British agnostic leader, dedicates his Essays on Freethinking to him and in his letters frequently describes Norton, of whom he was a close friend, as an agnostic. {JM; RAT; RE; TYD}

Norton, David (1930–1995) In the 1960s, Norton was an associate leader with Jeff Hornback of the Ethical Society of St. Louis. His books include Personal Destinies and Democracy and Moral Development.

Norton, W. L. (19th Century) Norton, a freethinker, wrote Try-Square, or The Church of Practical Religion (1887). {GS}

NORWEGIAN HEATHEN SOCIETY “Our goal is to contribute to reduction of the superior force the church and christianity has in Norway, with its exceptional position in Norwegian laws, school, and culture,” states the mission of Det norske Hedningsamfunn Collettsg on the Web: <http://www.hedning.no/hedning/e-index.html>.

NORWEGIAN HUMANISM Kristian Horn, who founded the Norwegian Humanist Association (Etisk-Forbund), did so because of his interest in fighting for the rights of Norwegian unbelievers. The association of academics that he started was then helped when Levi Fragell became its director and chose to make the movement strong by fighting against the state church. In 1995, out of a population of four million, Norway had 52,600 humanists. The humanist “coming-of-age ceremony” which is provided has been attended by 120,000 a year, and one study shows that of the several thousand new members per year more than one-half are less than thirty-four years old. The Norwegians, one of whom has boasted that for their leaders they have no philosophers but many working class people, at a February 1995 meeting in Oslo were optimistic as to the future of their group. Fri Tanke, a publication which comes out seven times per year, is at Boks 6744, St. Olavs pl. 0130 Oslo. At the same address is Humanist, a bi-monthly in English. Humanist in Norway can be e-mailed: <humanist@human.no>. Humanist Tidsskrift for Livssyndebatt, is a bi-monthly of Human-Etisk Forbund at Boks 6744, St. Olavs pl. 0130 Oslo. <skaara@human.no>. Lorentz Stavrum is the current president of the Norwegian Humanist Association. On the Web: <http://nettvik.no/foreningsgaarden/human_etisk/> and <http://nettvik.no/human_etisk>. Norwegians who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000 included Levi Fragell, Bernt Hagtvet, and Tove Beate Pedersen. (See entries for Lars Gunner Lingås and Det Norske Hedningsamfunn [Society of Norwegian Heathens and for Scandinavian Unbelievers].)

NORWEGIAN SKEPTICS On the Web, the Norwegian skeptical organization is at <http://www.skepsis.no/>.

NORWICH (England) HUMANISTS For information write Vincent G. Chainey, Le Chene, 4 Mill St., Bradenham, Thetford IP25 7PN; or telephone 01362 820982.

NOTHING (1) No such thing as “nothing” exists. Even the vacuum of empty space, devoid of even a single atom of matter, seethes with subtle activity. As described in Physical Review Letters, Dr. Steve K. Lamoreaux, an atomic physicist now at Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is possible to measure the force exerted by fleeting fluctuations in the vacuum that pace the universal pulse of existence. Such a view leads to the fact that the universe may have sprung from a virtual particle. {The New York Times, 21 January 1997}

NOTHING (2)

NOTHING (3) According to “Nothing (1)” above, “Nothing (2)” is in error.

NOTRE DAME The exceptionally beautiful Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, built by masons for the Catholic hierarchy, was home for the fictional hunchback Quasimodo. According to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in The Beggar and the Professor (1997), the Gothic building’s splendor included a choir full of pimps and madams, its bays sheltered foundlings, and in front were endless, irritating processions of priestlings and monks.

Nott, Josiah Clark (1804–1873) Nott was an American ethnologist who had been born in South Carolina. He wrote The Physical History of the Jewish Race, Types of Mankind (1854) and Indigenous Races of the Earth (1855). His purpose was to disprove the theory of the unity of the human race. {BDF}

Nott, Kathleen (1910–1999) Nott, whose father was a printer and whose mother ran a boarding house, displayed early intellectual brilliance and moved from King’s College London to Somerville College, Oxford. The prose work which brought her into the public eye was The Emperor’s Clothes (1953), a study of the dominant Christianity of writers such as Graham Greene, Dorothy Sayers, and T. S. Eliot and how current theological standards of Christian orthodoxy affected literature and literary criticism. Although her critique could be harsh, she adhered to positive humanist values. She wrote Philosophy and Human Nature (1970). Another of her works, The Good Want Power (1977), examined the problem that politicians are never good and the good never become politicians. Active in PEN, the international organization to support writers in prison or under threat, she edited its journal Pen International for twenty-seven years and was briefly elected President of the English Pen. While a student at Oxford, she became depressed by contemporary philosophy, “its contempt for ethics and hence for living. I went down with a strong dislike of the world I was entering. It appeared to be run by an alliance of force and fraud and there was something fraudulent about even philosophy’s linguistic exclusiveness.” In 1979, Nott was elected an honorary associate of the Rationalist Press Association, about which she commented,

I was much honoured to become an Associate of the RPA, but I sometimes wonder whether I am a Rationalist or a Humanist. However, I believe that I am human and I try to be reasonable and to know myself.

During the 1950s, she reviewed books for The Humanist, although she asked in the 1960s if a humanist was someone “who was rude to God or else someone who was kind to animals.” What she lamented was that writers like T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) and T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) disliked science more than they disliked totalitarianism. Francis King, a friend, wrote in The Independent (11 March 1999) that Nott was “a poet sadly underrated by those swept hither and thither on choppy tides of fashion, a prose writer who combines vigour with self-discipline, and a philosopher with a rare gift for exegesis not only of her own ideas but of the ideas of others.” {The Freethinker, April 1999; New Humanist, March 1999; TRI}

Noun, Paul (19th Century) Noun was the French author of The Scientific Errors of the Bible (1881). {BDF}

Novak, John (20th Century) Novak, professor of education at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, is editor of Insights, the newsletter of the John Dewey Society. A Secular Humanist Mentor of the Council for Secular Humanism, Novak has written for Free Inquiry. At the 1994 Toronto conference of the Coalition for Secular Humanism, Atheism, and Freethought (CSHAFT), Novak spoke on “John Dewey vs. Bertrand Russell on Religious Belief.” (See “Transatlantic Dewey,” Free Inquiry, Winter 1995-1996.)

Novak, Michael (20th Century) A theologian of the American Enterprise Institute, Novak is a vocal critic of secular humanism. He is the author with his daughter Jana of Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter’s Questions About God (1998). “Secular humanism,” he has lamented, “gave us answers for 500 years that no longer seem adequate even to many who tried hard to be faithful to them. That is why so many far-seeing souls announced that we have come to the edge of the Enlightenment and are stepping forth into something new, untried, not yet transparent.” He cited authors Norman Mailer and Vaclav Havel as examples of individuals in 1998 who recognize that “reason and faith spring from the same stream. The death of either reason or liberty means death for them, too.” {The New York Times, 24 May 1998}

Novikov, Yakov (Born 1849) Novikov was a Russian sociologist, the President of the first International Sociological Congress and a leading Russian pacifist. His rationalist views appear in his La justice et l’expansion de la vie (1905), and he has taken part in various International Freethought Congresses. {RAT}

Novoselic, Krist (20th Century) A recording artist who is the bassist for Nirvana, Novoselic participated in a Yahoo chat online in June 1998 for his new band, Sweet 75. Asked if he believe in God, he replied, “What is God?” (CA}

Nowell-Smith, Patrick Horace (1914– ) A professor of philosophy, York University, Canada, Nowell-Smith signed Humanist Manifesto II. In 1986, he was elected an honorary associate of the British Rationalist Press Association. His first and only book, Ethics, was published in 1954. In Toronto in 1980, he helped to found and became the first President of Dying with Dignity. He was President of the World Federation of Right-to-Die Societies from 1986 to 1988. Nowell-Smith is a member of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society’s London committee. {HM2}

Nowicki, Andrzej (20th Century) At a 1996 Polish Humanist Conference on Integration, Nowicki commented that the Catholic Church wielded power without authority, even though it exercised power indirectly. It has power without democratic control. He said, however, that it is important that religious teaching in Poland be replaced by the teaching of philosophy. {New Humanist, September 1996}

Nowlan, William (19th Century) Nowlan, who became Charles Watts’s father-in-law, was a secularist in Northampton at a time when in 1875 the town had both a National Secular Society branch and a separate Secular Propagandist Society. {RSR}

Noyes, Rufus King (Born 1853) Noyes spent his early years upon a farm in New Hampshire, then became a physician. He was house surgeon at Boston City Hospital, and he was known for holding that diseases can be cured without alcoholic liquors and that diseases can be cured without using poisonous drugs. A materialist, he found great satisfaction in the opinions of Haeckel, Darwin, and Spencer, but he was anti-vaccination. Noyes wrote Views on Religion (1906). {PUT; RAT}

Noyes, Thomas Herbert (19th Century) Noyes wrote Hymns of Modern Man (1870). {BDF}

Nozick, Robert (1938– ) Nozick, a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, has been described as being one of the most important of the contemporary secular philosophers. An unbeliever, he wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974); Philosophical Explanations (1981); The Nature of Rationality (1993), called by Prof. Russell Hardin of the University of Chicago, “an articulate defence of a barebones libertarianism”; and Socratic Puzzles (1997). Hardin has written that Nozick is notable for his cogent work on decision theory, epistemology, theory of value, and the good life. The state cannot have a very large role in the economy and society if the libertarian rights of individuals are to prevail, he holds. Nozick was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophic Association 1997-1998. {CA; OCP}

Nozzi, Dom (20th Century) Nozzi is active with the Humanist Society of Gainesville, Florida. (See entry for Florida Atheists, Humanists.) {FD}

NUCLEAR FUSION: See entry for Science and Non-Science.

NUDITY • Clothes make the man; naked people have little or no influence in society. –Mark Twain

Freethinkers are quick to point out that all humans are, when born, atheists as well as nudists. Ethnologists, in explaining how, why, and when societal mores operate for or against such conditions, note that forces within Western civilization, mainly male, have particularly been successful in clothing the males and hypocritically speaking out against premarital intercourse. This may or may not, according to a Manhattan wag (and “size-queen”), have inspired French artist Sylvie Blocher to paint “The Bride, Disappointed, Gets Dressed Again.” (See entry for Christian Nudists.)

Nuland, Sherwin B. (1930– ) The physician who wrote How We Die (1994), Nuland has called himself “a Jewish agnostic.” In his “reflections on life’s final chapter,” Dr. Nuland states that “Man is an obligate aerobe,” which maxim he says has “the simple directness of any of the most quoted aphorisms of the ancient Hippocrates.” He challenges the medical establishment to improve the quality of life for older people, “not to prolong its duration.” In doing so, he recalls Harvard’s Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Percy Bridgman, who at the age of seventy-nine faced up to the laws concerning suicide by shooting himself. Dr. Bridgman’s left a note: “It is not decent for Society to make a man do this to himself. Probably, this is the last day I will be able to do it myself.” The present U.S. laws do not permit the expedient end of life for those who are in pain and have no chance of surviving. However, Nuland admits to having helped some who were in pain to “ease a patient’s going.” The Reformed Church in the Netherlands, he points out, recently took the position that “the natural order of things is not necessarily to be equated with the will of God.” Nuland also wrote Origins of Anesthesia (1983), Doctors: Biography of Medicine (1992), and The Face of Mercy (1993).

NULLIFIDIAN A nullifidian, according to Webster’s Third International Dictionary, is

1. a person of no faith or religion: skeptic, unbeliever 2. one lacking in faith : disbeliever.

Naturalistic and secular humanists, in short, are nullifidians. (See entry for Greg Erwin.)

Numan, Gary (1958– ) Numan is a British-born vocalist and musician. His albums include “The Pleasure Principle” (1979) and “I, Assassin” (1982). His singles include “Cars” (1979) and “She’s Got Claws” (1981). “I am not religious, quite the opposite,” he wrote in a mailing list digest. “It would seem, particularly at the moment, that in certain countries to deny having faith is virtually to admit to being a worshipper of the devil. Such is the fear, hate, and hostility created by the believers of this so-called all-forgiving God. I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God’s amazing creation, then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.” Newman’s album, “Exile,” focuses on such ideas. {CA; E}

Numan, Gary (8 Mar 1958 - ) Numan, a British New Wave singer, synthesizer, songwriter, and recording artist, has stated that in certain countries “to deny having faith is virtually to admit to being a worshipper of the devil. Such is the fear, hate, and hostility created by the believers of this so-called all-forgiving God. . . . I worship nothing. Not a good lie nor a dark one. If nature is proof of God’s amazing creation then I have truly seen the light, and the light is black. Nature is genius at its most cruel and savage. No benevolent God could have come up with such an outrage.” Numan’s Exile album contains such sentiment. {CA}

Numbers, Ronald (20th Century) Numbers, a professor of history, was “born and reared in a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist family of ministers.” In a preface to one of his books, Numbers continues,

I learned Price’s version of earth history at my parents’ knees. I subsequently attended Adventist church schools from first grade to college, and though I majored in science I saw no reason to question the claims of strict creationism. In fact, I do not recall ever doubting the recent appearance of life on the earth until the late 1960’s, while studying the history of science at the University of California, Berkeley. I vividly remember the evening I attended an illustrated lecture on the famous sequence of fossil forests in Yellowstone National Park and then stayed up much of the night with a biologist friend of like mind, Joe Willey, first agonizing over, then finally accepting, the disturbing likelihood that the earth was at least thirty thousand years old. Having thus decided to follow science rather than Scripture on the subject of origins, I quickly, though not painlessly, slid down the proverbial slippery slope towards unbelief. In 1982, when attorneys for both sides in the Louisiana creation-evolution trial requested my services as a possible expert witness, I elected to join the ACLU team in defending the Constitutional wall separating church and state. In taking my pretrial deposition, Wendell R. Bird, the creationists’ lawyer who had tried to recruit me for his side, devoted two lengthy sessions to probing the limits of my historical knowledge and the thinness of my religious beliefs. On the basis of this inquisition, Bird publicly labeled me an “Agnostic.” The tag still feels foreign and uncomfortable to me, but it accurately reflects my theological uncertainty. {A; CA}

NUMEROLOGY • Numerology is an entertaining, sociable superstition like astrology—benign except to paranoid schizophrenics. It pretends that the inevitable, predictable, clockwork behavior of Arabic numerals locked into the decimal system can, on occasion, give us occult messages we should not ignore. If a year number 2000 isn’t an all-points bulletin from on high, what is? Any excuse for a party. That the odometer is slightly out of whack, that Jesus was born in 5, 6, or 7 B.C., shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the party. Jesus was born a few years before himself? Chalk that up as another miracle and party on. –Kurt Vonnegut Jr. “Last Words for a Century,” Playboy, January 1999

NUN • A Manhattan test-maker holds that “a deceased nun” is analogous to “Nun of the Above.”

A nun is a woman belonging to a religious order and is one under solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Numbers of believers have confessed that they have more love for nuns than for priests or other members of the hierarchy. Freethinkers particularly like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an “order” of drag performance artists who, clad in nuns’ habits and vibrant facepaint, have been damned by the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco since the 1980s. Lavender Lists (1990) lists the following ten nuns who were lesbians:

• Benedetta Carlini—Judith Brown, in Immodest Acts, describes how Benedetta, born in the Tuscan mountains of Italy in 1590, had a sexual relationship with another nun, then spent her last thirty-five years in prison. • Virginia Apuzzo—When she entered a convent at the age of twenty-six, few could have predicted that she would leave and in 1982 become head of the National Gay Task Force. • Mary Kregar—She was charged with having seduced a married woman and breaking up a twelve-year marriage, for which the husband was awarded $1,500,000 in damages. Mary was a nun in Our Lady of the Sea Church in Port Isabel, Texas. • Jeanne Cordova—She did not enter the Immaculate Heart of Mary order for entirely spiritual reasons, and in Kicking the Habit she tells of her having had a crush on one of the nuns. • Marge Helenchild—After finding existence as a nun too regimented, Marge left the order and played tackle for a women’s pro football team, then co-founded the Radical, Lesbian, Feminist, Terrorist Comedy Group. • Diana DiPrima—DiPrima left her convent after onlyeighteen months, displeased that she and other nuns had to gather in the chapel and whip themselves or one another to atone for the sins of people who were out of town. • Mary Mendola—Mary, first a newswriter in the Women’s Army Corps, then a nun, left the order to become author of The Mendola Report, a far-reaching look at gay and lesbian couples. • Jean O’Leary—Soon after graduating from high school, O’Leary entered a convent, had eight lesbian relationships while in the convent, then left and became executive director of the National Gay Rights Advocates. • Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan—an anthology about lesbian nuns.

Nuñez, Rafael [President] (1825–1894) President Nudes of Colombia wrote many poems and political articles. In philosophy, he was a follower of Mill and Spencer. During his presidency, a new constitution created the centralized Republic of Colombia in 1886. {CE; BDF}

Nureyev, Rudolf (1938-1993) A Russian ballet dancer who defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 while on tour in Paris, Nureyev was one of the leading classical ballet dancers of his generation. His major roles included the leads in “La Bayadère,” “Les Sylphides,” “Giselle,” “Swan Lake,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Le Corsaire,” “Raymonda,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” He often danced with Margot Fonteyn and because of his virtuosity and expressiveness was one of the greatest male dancers of the 1960s. In 1982 he became an Austrian citizen Like the Russian-American dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Nureyev focused on the humanities, not on religion. He conducted orchestras in America, Europe, and the former Soviety Union. When Nureyev was accused of being anti-Semitic, Baryshnikov angrily denied the accusation. Nureyev, well-known in gay circles, died in his mid-fifties of AIDS. His autobiography, Nureyev, appeared in 1962. {CE}

Nureyev, Rudolf (17 Mar 1938 - 6 Jan 1993) A Russian ballet dancer who defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 while on tour in Paris, Nureyev was one of the leading classical ballet dancers of his generation. His major roles included the leads in “La Bayadère,” “Les Sylphides,” “Giselle,” “Swan Lake,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Le Corsaire,” “Raymonda,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” He often danced with Margot Fonteyn and because of his virtuosity and expressiveness was one of the greatest male dancers of the 1960s. His autobiography, Nureyev, appeared in 1962. In 1982 he became an Austrian citizen Like the Russian-American dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, Nureyev focused on the humanities, not on religion. He conducted orchestras in America, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. When Nureyev was accused of being anti-Semitic, Baryshnikov angrily denied the accusation. Upon Nureyev’s death in 1993 his friend and physician, Michel Canesi, said the dancer had died of “a cardiac complication, following a grievous illness,” refusing to comment further. But because he was well known in gay circles, the word spread that “the greatest ballet star since Pavlova and Nijinsky” had died of AIDS. Novelist Paul Monette complained about their having kept the illness a secret, saying, “I consider him a coward. I don’t care how great a dancer he was.” Dr. Canesi eventually confirmed that Nureyev had indeed died of AIDS, stating,

If I clarify things now, it is because there is no such thing as a shameful disease. I am thinking of all the anonymous patients who are suffering from being ostracized. Rudolf lived for 13 or 14 years with this virus, thanks to his force, his combativeness. People should know that. He was too famous to be able to hide the truth.

As to why the secret was kept, a number of countries, including the United States, refused entry to people known to be HIV-positive. In 1984, like many gay men, Nureyev was filled with anxiety over the new disease being discussed so widely in the United States. When an HIV-antibody test was given him, the result was positive, and a rumor started in Paris that Nureyev had AIDS. However, he was in good health at the time and believed that only about ten percent of the seropositives would get sick. He took an experimental French medicine, HPA 23, and followed a demanding professional schedule, dancing and directing choreography in France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. He achieved a personal triumph conducting Romeo and Juliet at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. According to some, Dr. Canesi disapproved of his taking AZT but Nureyev had insisted, once claiming that various treatments were too expensive, which led to a strong argument, Nureyev telling him, "No. I don't need you any more!" Three days later he called back to apologize. Nureyev’s last public appearance was at a gala premiere on 8 October 1992 at the Palais Garnier, where he received a ten-minute standing ovation from the audience. Helped by two dancers onto the stage, he remained seated as the French Minister of Culture and Education decorated him as a Commander of Arts and Letters. Though weak, tired and emaciated, he was very happy, and said, in English, "It's good to be alive." Eventually, he died from a rare case of pericarditis (inflammation of the heart) brought on by an infection from cytomegalovirus (CMV), a member of the herpes family. The usual AIDS-orthodox interpretation here would be to say that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) caused an underlying condition of immune deficiency, which then caused CMV (a normally latent microbe) to become pathogenic, and in turn the CMV infection caused the pericarditis. However, molecular biologist Peter Duesberg has held that the pericarditis was a toxic side effect of AZT therapy, that when administered to healthy, HIV-positive individuals like Nureyev, AZT undermines the health. Medical authorities continue to argue about the two opposite opinions concerning the administering of AZT, with Duesberg followers claiming that Nureyev was poisoned by the AZT drug pushers. {Jack Anderson, The New York Times, 7 Jan 1993; Le Figaro, 15 Jan 1993; John Rockwell, The New York Times, 16 Jan 1993}

Nussbaum, Martha C. (20th Century) Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity is an important philosophic defense of the need to be a “citizen of the world.” The book’s title comes from the Roman philosopher Seneca: “Soon we shall breathe our last. Meanwhile, while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity.” {Free Inquiry, Winter 1997-1998)

Nute, Ephraim (1819–1897) Nute, who had been a Unitarian minister in Chicopee, Massachusetts, moved to Kansas and was granted $3,500 by the Boston Unitarians to build a church in Lawrence. But fighting between pro- and anti-slavery forces resulted in the Kansas Territory’s being a frightening place for settlers. “The condition of affairs in the Territory is on the whole far worse than I expected to find,” he wrote. “Bands of robbers are prowling about and every night some outrage is committed. Men are fired upon, knocked down, plundered, and left for dead. Houses are burned.” When Nute’s brother-in-law was “shot and scalped by the Border Ruffians,” according to an 1856 account in the Boston Evening Transcript. Nute himself was captured by proslavery sympathizers, and he “was prevented from leaving on the ground that he was ‘obnoxious.’ ” He was, however, released after two weeks. The building of the church was delayed for a long time, and not until 1861 was Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state. {EG}

Nuytz, Louis André: See entry for Louis André-Nuytz.

Nyblaus, Claes Gudmund (Born 1817) Nyblaus, a Swedish bookseller, published a number of anti-Christian pamphlets. {BDF}

Nygaard, Karl-Henrik (20th Century) Nygaard is President of the Norwegian Humanist Association. At a February 1995 Humanist European Seminar in Oslo, he spoke on “Death in the Humanist Tradition.” First quoting Wittgenstein, “Death is not an event of Life. Death is not lived through,” he said that, “It is difficult to demand that doctors who are bound by their Hippocratic Oath should kill other people. There is a risk that we might consider the value of human life as not necessary or too expensive to sustain.”

Nyström, Anton Christen (1842–1931) Nyström was a Swedish positivist. A medical doctor, he served as assistant and field doctor in the Dano-Prussian War of 1867. In Stockholm, he established a Positivist Society and a Workmen’s Institute, and he was a member of the Freethought Federation of Sweden. Nyström wrote History of Civilisation. {BDF; PUT; RAT; RE}

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