35 Years Ago

“The obvious implication—uncomfortable, no doubt, for rationalists and freethinkers—is that atheism does not at all ensure a free society. Indeed, as I’ve tried to suggest, it seems more comfortable with fundamentalism than with liberation.

“Atheism is not the same as naturalism either. It is instead a narrowly drawn mirror-image of its opponent. Naturalism, by contrast, deals with processes, inquiries, discoveries, developments, emergents, etc. For naturalism, the edges are blurred and surprises are likely. Possibilities are worth exploring. There is a mood of fascination, of curiosity. So the meanings carried by atheism are by no means the same as those carried by naturalism. They do intersect in a common denial of an extra-natural reality, but they depart widely from each other after that. Humanists who confuse the two are making a mistake.”

—Howard B. Radest, “Atheism Is Not Humanism: Reflections on a Visit to the Soviet Union,”

Free Inquiry, Volume 7, No. 1 (Winter 1986/87)

Howard B. Radest, PhD, is dean emeritus of the Humanist Institute and a member of the Council of Ethical Culture Leaders. He is the former director of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and a former chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Moral Education. Radest traveled to Moscow in the summer of 1986 with twenty-five members of the North American Committee for Humanism and met with the Institute for Scientific Atheism.

25 Years Ago

“Leaving aside its primal, etymological meaning of ‘rule by God,’ theocracy can be understood in two ways: first, as political domination by the clergy and the abolition of the difference between religious and secular authority (as in pre-communist Tibet or today’s Iran); second, as a political system in which the division between the two orders is preserved, but in which the clergy demands that the state compel individuals to observe religious norms (as in medieval Europe). In this second instance, sin is not only a violation of the divine commandments but also a misdemeanor punishable by the secular administration—and the clergy, the repository of supernatural law, sits in judgment of that administration. In this second instance the clergy becomes something on the order of a super-authority or, to put it another way, an authority over the authorities, since only the clergy knows what is good and what is evil, and the clergy alone, thanks to the competence it enjoys, has the right to assess whether man-made law agrees with supernatural law and to evaluate the observance of that law by all actors in public life, including the state administration.”

—Andrzej Flis, “The Polish Church as an Enemy of the Open Society,”

Free Inquiry, Volume 17, No. 1 (Winter 1996/97)

Andrzej Flis (1953–2009) was professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Cracow and the founder of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations. His article discussed how instrumental the Catholic Church was in shaping the Polish society at the time.