Category: Great Minds

Historians have been reluctant to acknowledge that India’s most famous prime minister—Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964)—was not only an atheist but an extraordinarily learned atheist. His atheism did not develop as a reaction to a religious upbringing or the suffering of the Indian people (though he thought only a secular society could alleviate that suffering). Nor did …

Thornton Wilder wrote his acclaimed novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey more than sixty years after the world was first dismayed by Charles Darwin’s great discovery. Was Wilder prompted to write his book because the world in 1925 was still disturbed by Darwin? The answer seemed obvious to me at first. However, after a …

Susan Jacoby, in her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004), wrote about the “Golden Age of Freethought” and specifies the years 1875 to 1914 as freethought’s heyday. Understandably, Robert Green Ingersoll was the era’s standard-bearer for the freethought cause. Ingersoll was probably the most-heard speaker in the United States before the advent of …

A RELIGION of just being kind would be a pretty good religion—don’t you think so? But a religion of kindness and useful effort is nearly a perfect religion. We used to think it was a man’s belief concerning a dogma that would fix his place in eternity. This was because we believed that God was …

In December 1885, Robert Green Ingersoll wrote a tribute to Elizur Wright, who had died the previous month. Ingersoll said Wright had been “one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the Gods, of his time … at the peril of his life.” Because during Wright’s lifetime “a majority of Christians were willing to enslave …

Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly east to west across the Atlantic, was undoubtedly an atheist. Raised in colonial Kenya by her British expatriate father, Markham was a “wild child” who spent much of her youth hunting—half naked—with local African tribesmen. There is no evidence she ever received religious instruction or attended church. In …

When you think of famous past American atheists, who comes to mind? Robert Green Ingersoll? Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Mark Twain? Clarence Darrow? Carl Sagan? Madalyn Murray O’Hair? No matter who’s on your list, it’s a safe bet that most are white males. As Melanie Brewster notes in Atheists in America, “studies find almost unanimously that …

When it comes to classical music, it’s hard to swing a dead Bach progeny without running into a sacred motet, a Magnificat, a Mass, or a Requiem. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Reformation, the greatest composers were firmly harnessed to the task of employing the massive machinery of compositional technique to extol the …

Back when Public Intellectuals still existed—and their tussles, splashed across the pages of a dozen different journals of note, were avidly consumed by a public not yet stultified by lower-hanging fruit—there lived a writer whose knife cut deeper than anybody’s in the field, wounding friend and foe alike with strokes of remorseless but profound psychological …

As we begin, McCarthy has decided to pretend to lose her faith to get the popular students at school to notice her. The ruse will soon take an unexpected turn …   People are always asking me how I came to lose my faith, imagining a period of deep inward struggle. The truth is the …

When talking about the meaning of modernity, there is a tendency to focus on the interplay between the products of the modern age and the psychological conditions those products give rise to: factories and nervous exhaustion, atomic bombs and existential anxiety, eight dozen different kinds of cereal and world-weary ennui. These products are all very …

From The Nineteenth Century, No. CXLIV, February 1889. pp. 181–192.   Looking back nearly fifty years, I see myself as a boy, whose education had been interrupted, and who, intellectually, was left, for some years, altogether to his own devices. At that time, I was a voracious and omnivorous reader; a dreamer and speculator of …

Although mostly ignored in anthologies of American literature, Philip Freneau is still recognized as “The Poet of the American Revolution.” During the War of Independence, he was unyielding in his criticism of the British and in his praise for the colonists’ patriotism, bravery, and sacrifices. In his poem about the Battle of Eutaw Springs, Freneau …

A hunk of cheese. A glass of watered-down wine. The company of a good friend. That, according to the most influential philosopher of the Hellenistic Age, is pretty much the summit of human happiness. Epicurus of Samos (341 bce–270 bce) inherited an Athens that had been broken by the Macedonian might of Alexander the Great …

Bloomsbury. A century ago that word stood for everything loathsome to the dying Victorian Age. Homosexuality and impiety, infidelity and socialism, all were embraced at one time or another by the roughly dozen figures of the Bloomsbury Group while even the most freethinking of their Imperial elders scratched their heads, wondering what their small acts …

From Mrs. Dalloway. (Harcourt Brace and World, Inc., 1953 Paperback edition), pp. 186–192. Yes, Miss Kilman stood on the landing, and wore a mackintosh; but had her reasons. First, it was cheap; second, she was over forty; and did not, after all, dress to please. She was poor, moreover; degradingly poor. Otherwise she would not …

So, what does a purely humanist civilization look like? What do people do and need, when it is taken as given that life is material and beyond it lies nothing?” For decades, the best we could do in answering this question as to the lived-in feel of a prospective humanist society was to point toward …

It was … 1975, I think; have to check my diaries to be sure. I’d finished at Uni that spring and gone off hitchhiking through Europe over the summer. Paris, Bergen, Berlin, Venice, Rabat and Madrid defined the limits of the whirlwind tour. Three months later I was on my way home, and after staying …

I have always been struck by the way people go through life oblivious to past struggles to understand life, ignorant of the intellectual tools and creative efforts by which distant or past cultures have benefited. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his 1937 essay “On Being Modern-Minded”: We imagine ourselves at the apex of intelligence, and …

Asimov dared to ask how humanity would be saved from enervation brought on by its own success.

Asimov considers science fiction’s obligation toward religious sensitivities.

From Plato to Kant to Russell, philosophy has been in the business of describing the mind in a way unavailable to the lesser disciplines.

The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society . . . consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self-creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires, besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms.”

Ambrose Bierce, the compleat cynic whose insights sear even as they sparkle.

“Pray, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

“Darrow’s approach remained the same:
a full and frank determinism with a boundless empathy
t its core.”

“People talk of criminals as though they were utterly different from ‘good’ people.”

“For pure, unadulterated, We-Are-Atheists-Hear-Us-Roar unity and
pride, there was one beginning and one place to be: Thursday evenings at Baron d’Holbach’s joint.”

In every way the reality of man negates the goodness of God.

Above all Robert Ingersoll demonstrated that an exuberant, joyful life without religion was possible.

“Theologians have filled thousands of volumes with abuse of this serpent, but it seems that he told the exact truth.”

“Paine would suffer for this book, but then he had suffered for every book he had ever written.”

“Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author . . . and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies.”

“He was a cultural commentator who helped usher in a new era
of American thought, and then he arbitrarily dug in his heels against any further progress
nce he saw his gals achieved.”

Walter Kaufmann saved skepticism, almost singlehandedly, from McCarthyite repression and Eisenhoweresque torpor.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar unlocked the secrets of dwarf stars and black holes, but never needed the belief in God.

It would be a mistake to consider the works of Sinclair Lewis irrelevant to modern times and freethought’s role.

Lorraine Hansberry’s drama stressed both the humanity of humanism and the need for critical thinking.

Critias? In the Great Minds series? Have we run out of really great minds already? Who was this guy Critias anyway? (And how do you pronounce his name?) The last question is the easiest to answer. There are two choices in pronounciation: to Americanize or to pseudo-Hellenize. The Americanized form, used even by professional classicists, …

The resonant voice of Ashley Montagu (1905–1999), London-born anthropologist, social biologist, and anatomist, rang throughout the twentieth century. He was an often controversial, highly influential scientist, humanist, and witness-participant in the world around him. Named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 1995, Montagu sought to demystify the social sciences. His life’s …