35 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
“What should a nontheist do when asked to swear in a courtroom? In the case of jury duty, there is an implied religious test. The option (to affirm, and without a Bible) is there by law; but it is not mentioned, and to ask for it makes one a nuisance. It is easier to take the whole process as akin to the Hippocratic Oath, sworn to Apollo: A way of saying, ‘This is a solemn statement, out of the ordinary’; but then one passes as a believer.
“To have recognized, institutionalized options would give us nontheists choices in times of crisis; it would permit nontheism itself to be acknowledged.”
—Elaine B. Oxman, “No Rabbi, Please: The Need for Nontheistic Options,”
Free Inquiry, Volume 6, no. 1 (Winter 1985/1986)
Editor’s Note: The author was reacting to the funeral of her culturally Jewish but nonbelieving husband, for whom a funeral director high-handedly “appointed” a rabbi to conduct a traditional Jewish service at odds with the husband’s beliefs. At the time of writing, Elaine B. Oxman was a psychologist at the Philadelphia State Hospital; she is now a clinical psychologist in private practice in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
25 Years Ago in Free Inquiry
“Atatürk’s revolution was also an attempt to modernize Turkish society. Still, what distinguishes this attempt is, among other things, that its aim was to introduce ideas and concepts, that were developed not in Turkey, but elsewhere and that proved to be more conducive to developing certain human potentialities. Atatürk and his collaborators first tried to reshape the social order according to those ideas and concepts, so that they could also develop in Turkey’s intellectual world. Thus considered, Atatürk’s was a cultural revolution, aimed at introducing the Enlightenment in Turkey and carried out through the modernization of the legal system.”
—İoanna Kuçuradi, “Secularization in Turkey,”
Free Inquiry, Volume 16 no. 1 (Winter 1995/1996)
Editor’s Note: At the time of writing, İoanna Kuçuradi was head of the Department of Philosophy at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and secretary general of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies. She is now president of the Philosophical Society of Turkey and a full-time faculty member of Maltepe University. She has received, among other honors, UNESCO’s Aristotle Medaille (2003) and Council of Secular Humanism’s Planetary Humanist Philosopher’s Award (2005). Kuçuradi’s article reads wistfully in the light of the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government’s determined campaign to dismantle Atatürk’s revolution since 2014.