Here’s your week in Freethought History. This is more than just a calendar of events or mini-biographies – it’s a reminder that, no matter how isolated and alone we may feel at times, we as freethinkers are neither unique nor alone in the world.
Sir Karl Popper
The moral decisions of others should be treated with respect, as long as such decisions do not conflict with the principle of tolerance. We have the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should tolerate even them whenever we can do so without running a great risk; but the risk may become so great that we cannot allow ourselves the luxury. (Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945)
Urban VIII
It takes great skill to assemble so many distortions into so few words. Urban was hated by the Romans for his nepotism. Far from being a friend, Urban directed Galileo’s every punishment, having taken great offense at his arguments against the Copernican, earth-centered system being annihilated in print by Galileo (Dialog, 1632). The contemporary documents show that “he was menaced with torture again and again by express order of Pope Urban.” Galileo’s “small inconvenience,” as the apologist puts it, was for the world-renowned scientist, already ailing and nearly blind, to be confined to his home, forced to recant and forbidden to teach and write what he knew to be true – and what he had demonstrated to be true! Urban ended his days by pouring the papal treasury into his corrupt family’s coffers, rather than financing the Catholic powers in the Thirty Years War. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia has to admit that “Urban’s greatest fault was his excessive nepotism.”
E. Haldeman-Julius
Le Morte D'Arthur (1485)
James Gleick
Yesterday, August 2, but in 1924, African-American writer, civil rights activist and social critic James Baldwin was born. Known chiefly for his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, and for his essay collections, Baldwin took bold and critical looks into largely uncritically accepted racial, sexual, and class distinctions in American society. By age 17, he had come to believe Christianity is based on false premises. He left the church, but retained the cadences of its pulpit rhetoric and its worldview in his writing. As recounted in “Down at the Cross” (in The Fire Next Time), while visiting Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin was asked about his religious beliefs. He answered, “I left the church 20 years ago and haven’t joined anything since.” Elijah asked, “And what are you now?” Baldwin replied, “I? Now? Nothing. I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.” At a time when the religion-inspired civil rights activists, like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, got most of the press, the skeptics in the movement, like Baldwin, novelist Richard Wright, poet Langston Hughes, labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and historian W.E.B Du Bois, seem to disappear. Although he never described himself as an atheist, it was James Baldwin who said, “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. … If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.”
Rupert Brooke
…Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
…
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time,
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
…And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.
Other birthdays and events this week—
July 28: German philosopher Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was born (1804).
August 1: French botanist, zoologist, and natural philosopher Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck was born (1744).
August 1: American novelist Herman Melville was born (1819).
August 2: British physicist John Tyndall was born (1820).
August 3: Étienne Dolet, the French printer of books critical of religion, was burned alive for his opinions (1724).
We can look back, but the Golden Age of Freethought is now. You can find full versions of these pages in Freethought history at the links in my blog, FreethoughtAlmanac.com.
Yesterday, August 2, but in 1924, African-American writer, civil rights activist and social critic James Baldwin was born. Known chiefly for his semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), which examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, and for his essay collections, Baldwin took bold and critical looks into largely uncritically accepted racial, sexual, and class distinctions in American society. By age 17, he had come to believe Christianity is based on false premises. He left the church, but retained the cadences of its pulpit rhetoric and its worldview in his writing. As recounted in “Down at the Cross” (in The Fire Next Time), while visiting Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, Baldwin was asked about his religious beliefs. He answered, “I left the church 20 years ago and haven’t joined anything since.” Elijah asked, “And what are you now?” Baldwin replied, “I? Now? Nothing. I’m a writer. I like doing things alone.” At a time when the religion-inspired civil rights activists, like Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, got most of the press, the skeptics in the movement, like Baldwin, novelist Richard Wright, poet Langston Hughes, labor organizer A. Philip Randolph and historian W.E.B Du Bois, seem to disappear. Although he never described himself as an atheist, it was James Baldwin who said, “Christianity has operated with an unmitigated arrogance and cruelty – necessarily, since a religion ordinarily imposes on those who have discovered the true faith the spiritual duty of liberating the infidels. … If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him.”
