the eleventh day
It being that time of year, I have a little present for us, for the twelve days of Christmas. (Yes, I realize that the twelve days of Christmas are actually from Christmas to Epiphany. However, I would not dream of suggesting that my little project might lead you to an Epiphany, so I'm doing the twelve days leading up to Christmas, instead.
I present to you: Twelve Secular Saints. Twelve men and women who have given of their lives to free humanity from the heavy toils of religion. Not necessarily on purpose. Some of my saints were quite religious themselves. But through their work they loosened the stranglehold that religion can unfortunately hold on thought, and usually they suffered for it. In this atmosphere of return to traditional values - or at least, someone's idea of what their recent ancestors' traditional values might have been - it seems appropriate to celebrate those who did not look for what was traditional, but what was true.
Incidentally; you may wonder what some of my saints have to do with religion at all, when their area of work seems to be unrelated to religious concerns. I think this is an excellent question.
Saint No. 12: Alfred Kinsey
Kinsey was a researcher of gall wasps at Indiana University for eighteen years when the Association of Women Students petitioned the university to offer a course on marriage, and he became one of the new course's eleven teachers. (Wasp fanciers, be warned.) He was appalled to discover that he simply didn't have answers for many of the questions that his students asked, and began to collect data on the subject. In 1948, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and then in 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and fundamentally changed the way Americans talk about sex.
Kinsey's work had two major effects. First, he demonstrated that Americans - and remember, this was in 1948, long before the sexual revolution - were getting busy in ways that they were busy claiming they were not. 37% of men had had a homosexual experience. Women wanted clitoral stimulation. 69% of men had been with a prostitute. Half of married women had had premarital sex. While the word "normal" is still up for definition, at least now people had some sort of experimentally determined basis for defining what was common, and even in 1948 it wasn't all what James Dobson calls traditional sexual behavior.
The second major effect was that human sexuality became something that could be studied: weighed, measured, and most importantly talked about. Sex was no longer an awful mystery into which you must not inquire. Kinsey broke the taboo, and for that the right-wingers still hate him and try to discredit him.
P.S. I haven't made the final decision on who gets included; so if you have someone you'd like to see as a secular saint, now's the time to tell me!
(reply at DW | see
comments @ DW)
I present to you: Twelve Secular Saints. Twelve men and women who have given of their lives to free humanity from the heavy toils of religion. Not necessarily on purpose. Some of my saints were quite religious themselves. But through their work they loosened the stranglehold that religion can unfortunately hold on thought, and usually they suffered for it. In this atmosphere of return to traditional values - or at least, someone's idea of what their recent ancestors' traditional values might have been - it seems appropriate to celebrate those who did not look for what was traditional, but what was true.
Incidentally; you may wonder what some of my saints have to do with religion at all, when their area of work seems to be unrelated to religious concerns. I think this is an excellent question.
Saint No. 12: Alfred Kinsey
Kinsey was a researcher of gall wasps at Indiana University for eighteen years when the Association of Women Students petitioned the university to offer a course on marriage, and he became one of the new course's eleven teachers. (Wasp fanciers, be warned.) He was appalled to discover that he simply didn't have answers for many of the questions that his students asked, and began to collect data on the subject. In 1948, he published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and then in 1953 Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, and fundamentally changed the way Americans talk about sex.
Kinsey's work had two major effects. First, he demonstrated that Americans - and remember, this was in 1948, long before the sexual revolution - were getting busy in ways that they were busy claiming they were not. 37% of men had had a homosexual experience. Women wanted clitoral stimulation. 69% of men had been with a prostitute. Half of married women had had premarital sex. While the word "normal" is still up for definition, at least now people had some sort of experimentally determined basis for defining what was common, and even in 1948 it wasn't all what James Dobson calls traditional sexual behavior.
The second major effect was that human sexuality became something that could be studied: weighed, measured, and most importantly talked about. Sex was no longer an awful mystery into which you must not inquire. Kinsey broke the taboo, and for that the right-wingers still hate him and try to discredit him.
P.S. I haven't made the final decision on who gets included; so if you have someone you'd like to see as a secular saint, now's the time to tell me!
(reply at DW | see
comments @ DW)