January 15
Molière
On this date in 1622, playwright and poet Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who adopted the stage name Molière as an actor, was born in Paris. His father was an upholsterer/valet to King Louis XIII. Molière studied philosophy in college, started a Parisian acting troupe and toured the provinces with it for many years, acting, directing and writing.
As a favorite of King Louis XIV, he produced a succession of 12 popular comedies still being performed, including “The School for Wives” (1662), “Don Juan” (1665), “Le Misanthrope” (1666) and “Tartuffe” (1667), all irreverent and increasingly irreligious. “Tartuffe,” a satire on religiosity, originally featured a hypocritical priest. Although Molière rewrote Tartuffe’s profession to avoid scandal, some religious officials nevertheless called for him to be burned alive as punishment for his impiety. He would claim he was attacking hypocrisy more than religion.
He married actress Armande Bejart when she was 19 and they had a daughter, Esprit-Madeleine, in 1665. Becoming ill while playing the lead in his play “Le Malade imaginaire” (“The Imaginary Invalid”), Molière insisted on finishing the show, after which he died. He had long suffered from tuberculosis. The church refused to bury him in sanctified ground because he had not received the last rites and did not renounce his profession as an actor before his death. When the king intervened, the archbishop of Paris allowed him to be buried only after sunset among the suicides’ and paupers’ graves with no requiem Masses permitted in the church. (D. 1673)
“Though living in an age of reason, he had the good sense not to proselytize but rather to animate the absurd …”
— Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Molière
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Martin Luther King Jr.
On this date in 1929, Martin Luther King Jr., was born. The civil rights leader, Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference believed in a strict separation of church and state. Although his many speeches are peppered with references to Jesus and God and often depend for the force of their authority upon “the natural law of God,” King knew that the religious status quo tended to support segregation. The Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday is observed on the third Monday in January.
In a sermon known as “Paul’s Letter to American Christians” (delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Ala., Nov. 4, 1956), King said: “You must face the tragic fact that when you stand at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning to sing ‘All Hail the Power of Jesus Name’ and ‘Dear Lord and Father of all Mankind,’ you stand in the most segregated hour of Christian America. They tell me that there is more integration in the entertaining world and other secular agencies than there is in the Christian church. How appalling that is.” (D. April 4, 1968)
“In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" addressed to "My Dear Fellow Clergymen" for criticizing the civil rights movement (April 16, 1963)
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Robert Silverberg
On this date in 1935, acclaimed science fiction author was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the only child of Jewish parents Helen and Michael Silverberg, an accountant. He read a lot to entertain himself and started submitting his own stories to magazines in his early teens.
“Gorgon Planet,” his first published story, appeared in 1954 when he was a sophomore at Columbia University, where he graduated. In 1956 he won his first Hugo Award, for Most Promising New Author. The runner-up was Harlan Ellison. “Revolt on Alpha C,” his first novel, was published in 1955 when he was 21. He went on to publish literally hundreds of award-winning stories, navels and novella under his own name and numerous pseudonyms.
Silverberg has said little about his personal religious beliefs over the years, but that reticence doesn’t extend to his characters who often have plenty to say. Like the narrator in “Thomas the Proclaimer” (1972): “I never became a believer. I had a natural predisposition toward skepticism. If you can’t measure it, it isn’t there. That included not only Old Whiskers and His Only Begotten Son, but all the other mystic baggage that people liked to carry around in those tense credulous years: the flying saucers, Zen Buddhism, the Atlantis cult, Hare Krishna, macrobiotics, telepathy and other species of extrasensory perception, theosophy, entropy-worship, astrology, and such. … I couldn’t buy the other stuff, the irrational stuff, the assorted opiates of the masses, When the Moon is in the seventh house, etc., etc. — sorry, no.”
“Good News from the Vatican” (1971) features the election of a robot to the position of pope of the Church of Rome and won that year’s Nebula Award for Best Short Story for its “integration of the robot into human religious culture.” Some critics noted the story’s satirical and ironic content. (Encyclopedia of Science Fiction)
The novella “The Feast of St. Dionysus” (1974) focuses on a guilt-ridden astronaut and mysterious Dionysian communal rites conducted by a Charles Manson-esque leader. The story explores themes of guilt, religion and communal ecstasy. (Google Books) It won the Jupiter Award for Best Novella.
Prolific applies to Silverberg’s output. One year he wrote 40 novels (though many were “quick-cash” efforts with adult sexual themes). By 1961 he had grown wealthy enough, largely through investments, to buy a mansion that had belonged to New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. (Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2016)
Silverberg married Barbara Brown in 1956. She was an electronics engineer specializing in radar and optics whom he had met through her science fiction fandom. They separated in 1976 and divorced a decade later. He married science fiction writer and editor Karen Haber in 1987.
He was named president of the Science Fiction Writers of America and served in 1967–68. He was elected SFWA grand master in 2004 (the year after Ursula K. Le Guin), which was about the time he decided it was time to retire from imaginative writing: “I think most writers do their strongest work … between thirty-five and fifty. Certainly I did. Plenty of my work later than that needs no apology but … it does not have, line by line, the intensity of what I was doing twenty years earlier. So I stopped writing.” (“Conversations with Robert Silverberg” by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, 2016)
“My only writing ambition is to keep my work of yesterday visible for the readers of today and tomorrow. But I am beyond the age when one has aspirations.” (Science Fiction and Fantasy World, July 31, 2015)
PHOTO: Silverberg in 2009 at Worldcon 67 Anticipation in Montreal; photo by Edward Swatschek under CC 3.0.
“As for spiritual matters, well, I am painfully aware of the ultimate solitude in which we all live, and have searched for some sense of connectivity with a universal entity, while at the same time I am utterly unable to connect with any sort of conventional religious faith.”
— Silverberg on the connection between mortality and spirituality as "fertile ground" for fictional exploration (Strange Horizons magazine, Dec. 11, 2000)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
