THE LAST PERSON TO BE CONVICTED OF BLASPHEMY IN THE UNITED STATES WAS IN 1834

The last person convicted of blasphemy in the United States, in 1834, was Abner Kneeland, a minister who lived in Massachusetts and who was shifting his views as he read more about religion and corresponded with other ministers of different faiths.  He argued that there was no evidence for miracles, no evidence for the Trinity, no evidence  for the existence of souls, and no evidence for any specific god.  He did not consider himself an atheist, but described himself as a pantheist.  He did so because he felt the entire universe or what is called Nature could be considered as God.  In his correspondence with other ministers he wrote lengthy arguments to defend his views and they wrote equally lengthy replies. The letters are friendly, unlike those of John Calvin and Michael Servetus, where Calvin was so outraged over Servetus’s arguments against the Trinity that he ordered him arrested if he ever set foot in Geneva.  Servetus unfortunately did come to Geneva to plea his position personally with Calvin and instead Calvin turned him over to civil authorities where he was burned at the stake for heresy.  Kneeland had two trials and was convicted in the second trial and served 60 days in jail and paid a fine.  He then moved to Iowa to live out the rest of his life as a farmer.

In his speech to the jurors at his second trial, Kneeland argued that one of the charges, obscenity, was spurious because he used satire to reject the conception of Jesus by the Holy Ghost.  He argued that the Holy Ghost is not a material being and his name implies he was a spirit and immaterial.  As such, he claimed, he lacked the male genitalia to impregnate Mary. Neither the prosecutor nor the ministers who brought charges against Kneeland were amused.  When the jury found him guilty, the judge denounced Kneeland as a cantankerous person who deserved punishment for libeling religion.  Ministers were divided.   Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing, early Unitarians, were his supporters.  But other Protestant ministers, including some Unitarians and Universalists (otherwise thought to be  liberal) condemned Kneeland.
  

You can read Kneeland’s correspondence and his speech to the jury on line if you go to the Digital Library of America and select “bookshelf” and then enter “Abner Kneeland” and then select “Speech of Abner Kneeland delivered to the City of Boston in his own defense for blasphemy, November term 1834. 

Fortunately blasphemy is rarely used as a criminal charge in municipal, state, or national law.  It would likely be found unconstitutional.  Blasphemy is usually considered an insulting way of describing God or the religion of other people.  Blasphemy was usually selective and invective descriptions of non-Christian religions were quite common when I was growing up.  “Bible belt” Protestants often equated Roman Catholics with Satan.   “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” was even a campaign slogan against Democrats in the 1896 Presidential election because Democrats drew a large portion of Irish voters on the East Coast. 

OUR EVOLVING VIEWS OF RELIGION

When I was in fifth grade in Brooklyn, I recall reading books in the school library on mythology. I was engrossed by the ancient Egyptian and Greek deities.  At the time I had no religion because both of my parents had abandoned their religious beliefs before I was born. This gave me the freedom to think about religion without feelings of guilt.  One thought I had was almost astounding to me.  No one in 1942 believed that Zeus, Hercules, Athena, Aeolus, Medusa, and dozens of other Greek gods were actual gods.  We referred to them as myths of the past.  But at their time (and for many centuries) virtually all of those living in the Greek civilization from Homer to the rise of the Roman empire believed in those deities, worshipped them, prayed to them, and made sacrifices to them.  If gods come and go over the millennia, why do we believe any religion is the one true religion and all others are mistaken? Later, in high school, I took a somewhat different view of religion as an attempt to make sense of the universe, especially our own lives at a time when science was non-existent or knew very little about the universe and how it works and its past history.  

About 1960 I took an interest in Unitarians because it was a creedless religion and Nedra and i sought a place where both of us would be comfortable. Some of the Unitarian ministers over the years have considered themselves atheists or agnostics. Like me, they thought religion provided something valuable but it wasn’t the supernatural.  What attracted me to them was their belief that humans form and need communities.  A religion that does not offer a creed, but instead offers humans a chance to think about questions that are important—like why there is existence, how life began, what meaning do we create for the one life we have on earth, and why we have so many diverse answers to these questions, I found immensely appealing.  Despite efforts of religious leaders to make religion permanently fixed in its creed, rituals, and status among hundreds of other contending religions, religions undergo change. There are hundreds of Christian denominations ranging from liberal to rigid (“fundamentalist”) in their interpretations.  A similar spectrum (but with fewer denominations) exist for Jews. There are many forms of Buddhism. There are different Muslim traditions; the most familiar to those who are not Muslims are the Shiite and Sunni branches in the Middle East. 

Everything changes.  I expect many religions will be demoted to the status of myths and new ones will arise to meet the needs of cultures that may not arise for hundreds of years.  They will have different views of life and society we cannot predict.  If humans can extend life so that most people could live reasonably healthy lives for 100 to 120 years, I expect those with 50 years of retirement will have different needs from those who are considered old today in their 70s.  If we do colonize the moon or Mars in the next two or three centuries, I would not be surprised that their religious views will show the same tendency to diversity as those that have evolved on earth. 

REASON, SPIRITUALITY, AND HUMAN NEEDS

 

 

Theologically I am a non-theist, that is, I live my life without a need for a personal God (or gods).  I don’t pray but I do hope, worry, and celebrate depending on the events that happen in my life and the world. I am also religious in the sense that I have, like Socrates, tried to know myself (a difficult task) and I do believe we need what can be called “ideals to live by.”  For me those ideals are simple—do as little harm to others as possible and accept a premise that people prefer to be decent than to be mean and treat them with that respect and expectation. Find what gives you meaning and try to do as well as you can in that talent or interest.  For me that is learning, teaching, and writing.  If possible I try to contribute something that will last longer than my lifetime.  I think some of my books will still be consulted generations from now. I hope that what I have taught in my courses has helped my students both in their careers and in their individual lives.   I accept my mortality and expect no afterlife exists.  I prefer reason to revelation for my behavior.  I am not very interested in proofs of God’s existence or non-existence or which of hundreds of religions is the best for humanity.  I liked being a Unitarian when I first went to the Unitarian Fellowship in Westwood, California in 1960.  Nedra and I have been Unitarians (now Unitarian-Universalists) ever since.  Why would someone who is a non-theist take an interest in a religion that has no fixed creed?  I like to be around people who seek to serve others, especially by working for human rights and social justice.  Unitarians were leaders in the abolition of slavery.  They were leaders in getting women the right to vote, to divorce, to own property, and to work for a decent living in whatever professions or occupations suited their talents.  They opposed child labor.  They supported workers who tried to form unions.  They favored peaceful uses of taxpayers’ money and have sought ways to generate more peaceful resolution of conflicts and less resort to war.  Those go with my Humanist leanings and my liberal philosophy of life which is simple to describe.  Live your life but accept those enacted regulations that protect the public from abuses of ignorance, greed, or neglect.   Reason, I believe, provides more beneficial things to humanity than does a belief in the supernatural.  Surgery, antibiotics, public health measures, and the germ theory are more effective than prayer to preventing disease or in treating patients.   Our infant mortality has shifted from 50% to less than 1% in the United States over the past 150 years because of pasteurization of milk, chlorination of water, the preservation of foods, and refrigeration to keep food fresh.  A balanced diet with sufficient vitamins and essential nutrients has been more effective in getting us to live into our 80s or 90s than the erratic and nutrient deficient diets of our ancestors 100 or more years ago.  What brings this about?  I say it is the use of reason and a reliance on science to solve and prevent the threats that curt short our lives.  Is it perfect? No.  Is it better than praying for deliverance from plagues?  I think so. 

COMPOSING ONE'S LIFE: SIGMUND FREUD AND SUBLIMATION

 

In 1929  Sigmund Freud wrote  Civilization and its Discontents. I first read this book in 1953.  It was the last work I read aloud to my blind high school teacher, Mr. Cohen.  It shaped my life in three ways.  Freud begins with his criticism of organized religions.  He feels religion is a transfer of a child’s fears allayed by a strong father as protector to a non-existent invented god who plays that role and to whom we can petition our desires for help by prayer. He said that his friend, Nobel laureate novelist Romain Rolland, chided him by saying surely he must have felt an “oceanic feeling” looking at the vastness of the universe which conveys a Creator’s presence.  Sorry, Freud replied, he had no such feeling so it clearly wasn’t universal. I was struck by Freud’s integrity and I resonated to his claim because I had never experienced either such an oceanic feeling about the presence of some supernatural being.  The second thing I was struck by, was Freud’s effort to understand why so many sexual themes occupied our lives.  These can appear in doodles, in sudden thoughts that pop into our heads at inappropriate times, in Freudian slips, and in our responses to seeing other people (such as arousal).  Freud was my introduction to the scientific effort to understand human sexuality.  It was an interest that years later resulted in my book The 7 Sexes (2013) which is a history of how our ideas on sexuality --  anatomical,  physiological, and behavioral, arose.   

               The third aspect was Freud’s introduction of the idea of sublimation.  He argued that some people take the tensions brewing in their minds and use it in destructive ways—acting defensively, having paranoid-like interpretations of others, striking out in destructive or aggressive ways.  If such feelings are sublimated in this way by national leaders it can lead to wars.  But others who are psychologically struggling with their problems of insecurity, disappointment, or anger may sublimate their feelings into creative work.  They may write books, compose music, paint masterpieces, designing magnificent architecture, carry out brilliant experimental or theoretical scientific work.  In short—Freud argued that civilization which we admire is an outcome of the same psychic energy that drives us to self destructive or externally destructive activity.  Freud felt a second world war was imminent and that the technology it would introduce could lead to mass destruction of humanity.  His book is a plea for those studying human behavior to find the switches that can shunt discontents into that productive life-enriching direction of civilization instead of the destructive energies that we pour into destroying our enemies, real or imagined.  I consider the book a masterpiece in the study of the human condition although I have doubts about the triune mind of ego, superego, and id that he proposed for our minds or about the Oedipal theory he proposed as a type of Lamarckian acquired characteristic from a primal horde of sons murdering their fathers. I benefitted from reading this work because I have found that switch in my head to turn disappointments into creative activity – teaching, writing, and pursuing scholarly activities.  Instead of feeling “there but for the grace of God go I,” my response has always been, “thank you, Freud, for giving me the insight to sublimate defeat and failure into works that endure and contribute to our understanding of science”.  

 

Life Lines 26

evolutio,ERNST HAECKEL: THE MOST HATED GERMAN SCIENTIST DESERVES A BETTER REPUTATION.

The most hated name from the 1870s to the 1940s by those who despised an evolution of life was not Charles Darwin but Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Haeckel was a German biologist who published hundreds of articles and about two dozen books. Some of his books were popularizations of science and they were translated into many languages so most of the world learned about evolution not by reading Darwin (whose books were intended for scholarly readers and not the general public).

I read a recent biography of Haeckel by Robert J. Richards The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (2008) and I learned a lot about German science in the 1800s. It was strongly influenced by the poet Goethe (whose Faust we know) who was trained as a scientist (he made his living as a mining engineer). Goethe helped launch the Romantic Movement in both the arts and sciences. Like Spinoza, he saw God in nature and this tinged German science with views of vitalism (animated matter). Haeckel started out that way but in 1864 he read the first German translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species and this enabled him to classify hundreds of marine protozoa called radiolarians (they have exquisitely beautiful shells but are single celled organisms). Using natural selection, Haeckel constructed a phylogenetic tree of their descent. He also coined three new terms –ecology (the study of organism in their environments), phylogeny (the study of a diverse group of organisms organized by their relatedness), and ontogeny (the study of life cycles, especially the embryological process that begins as a single fertilized egg).

Haeckel abandoned religion after his wife, whom he adored, died on his birthday, 18 months after their marriage, probably of an ectopic pregnancy. He felt a god who kills good people does not deserve to be worshipped and he became an atheist (he called his outlook monism) – only the world of matter existed; the supernatural being our own wish fulfillment. His popular books aggressively promoted both his evolutionary and atheistic views. Darwin avoided all mention of religion and tried hard to avoid a confrontation with those offended by his evolutionary views. This is why Haeckel was more hated than Darwin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Richards’ biography restores Haeckel’s good name. Haeckel was accused of fraud (in his illustrations used in popular science books), of being an academic lightweight, and of assisting German racism and anti-Semitism that led to Nazism, and of stultifying the progress of science (especially embryology). All of these are studied at great length by Richards, using primary sources, and all of them he shows to be false or distorted by his critics. Haeckel paid a price for his efforts to popularize science and his monist philosophy. Most of his contributions are now forgotten – he was the first (in 1866) to suggest heredity resided in the nucleus of the cell; he was the first to popularize the use of phylogenetic trees to depict the relations of species; and he was the first (in the 1870s) to develop experimental embryology (which two of his students extended some 20 years later)