Tom Flynn (author)
Tom Flynn | |
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Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum Executive Director of the Free Inquiry magazine. | |
Notable work | The Trouble With Christmas The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief |
Website | CFI profile |
Thomas W. Flynn (August 18, 1955 – August 23, 2021)
Much of Flynn's work addressed church-state issues, including his 1993 book The Trouble with Christmas, in connection with which he made hundreds of radio and TV appearances in his role as the curmudgeonly "anti-Claus", calling attention to what he viewed as unfair treatment of the nonreligious during the year-end holiday season.[5] He edited The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of men and women who live without religion. He contributed a new Introduction to A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White[6] and blogged on The Washington Post's On Faith site during 2010 and 2011.[7] He blogged regularly on the Center for Inquiry's blog Free Thinking. He was also the author of several anti-religious, black comedy, science fiction novels.
Early life
In an autobiographical chapter in Flynn's 1993 The Trouble with Christmas, Flynn stated that he was born in 1955 in
Secular humanism
While working as a corporate and industrial filmmaker and later as an advertising account executive, he began to do volunteer work for the
Popular culture
In a 2006
The Trouble With Christmas
In this book Flynn summarized the history of the holiday from an atheist perspective, arguing that the Santa Claus myth is harmful for child development, and urged atheists, secular humanists, and other nonreligious Americans to push back, at the same time making themselves more visible during the Christian holiday season, by refusing to celebrate all aspects of the holiday, religious or secular.
Speaking to
Flynn told
The book's beginnings came from an installment of a column in the Secular Humanist Bulletin in 1992. The essay attracted national media attention including more than a score of local and national radio reports during the 1992 holiday season. It was as a consequence of this publicity that Prometheus Books offered Flynn a contract for the book.[15][16]
Science fiction novels
Flynn was the author of two published satirical science fiction novels whose themes include the media and religion.
Galactic Rapture, published in 2000 by Prometheus Books, concerns the rise of a consciously fraudulent false messiah on Jaremi Four, a ruined, quarantined world. Undercover documentarians from the galactic empire to which Earth belongs (human cameras known as Spectators) present the false messiah's story to eager audiences on many worlds. Earth religions have become a particular fascination for the galactic public, and the idea spreads that he is the next incarnation of Jesus Christ. (It is now accepted by Christians that God sends his son to one world after another.) Defying the ruined planet's quarantine, a corrupt mining magnate, a bumbling Mormon televangelist, and conspiring Catholic cardinals doing the bidding of the Pope jockey to establish influence on Jaremi Four and claim a piece of the alleged next Christ for themselves. Science fiction author John Grant reviewed the print book.[17] Galactic Rapture was briefly re-released as three shorter books by See Sharp Press in 2012/13.[18] Nothing Sacred (Prometheus Books, 2004) is a sequel to Galactic Rapture set ten years after the conclusion of that novel. It features the Mormon comic villain from the first novel; Gram Enoda, a young Earthman on the make who has accidentally acquired a hugely powerful, self-aware digital assistant, and a darkly charismatic televangelist whose theology is drawn from 19th century German and Russian nihilism who wind up interfering in a top-secret government plan to quite literally save the Galaxy. It was reviewed by Towing Jehovah author James Morrow in Free Inquiry.[19]
In October 2018, Galactic Rapture was re-released by Double Dragon Publishing with the title Messiah Games; Nothing Sacred was re-released without title change; followed by a third brand new novel released in December 2018 titled Behold, He Said. This series of novels is collectively referred to as the Messiah Trilogy.[20][21][22]
The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief
In 2007 Prometheus Books published The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, an 897-page reference work on atheism, agnosticism, humanism, and related philosophies edited by Flynn. The work featured a foreword by Richard Dawkins. Intended as a successor to the 1985 The Encyclopedia of Unbelief edited by freethought bibliographer Gordon Stein, the work earned mixed reviews. The International Review of Biblical Studies praised it, saying, "This is a most valuable addition to all existing encyclopedias of religion because it offers the calmly argued perspective of contemporary freethinkers, atheists and secular humanists".[23] Atheist blogger Santi Tafarella criticized the work's choice of topics and its pre-Internet approach to its subject matter, but still finds the book useful.[24][25]
Documentary
Flynn is executive producer for American Freethought,[26] a TV documentary series on the history of secularism and censorship in the United States. American Freethought was written, produced and directed by Roderick Bradford.
Robert Green Ingersoll
Flynn designed the
In 1986 the birthplace, a two-story frame house in the small village of Dresden (pop. 300), was badly deteriorated. CODESH Inc., as the Council for Secular Humanism was then known, purchased the property for $7,000 and pressed successfully for its inclusion on the
The Robert Ingersoll Birthplace Museum opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1993.[28] The Museum has been open to the public on weekends each summer and fall ever since. Conspicuous developments have included, in 2001, installation of a large bust of Ingersoll that decorated a Dowagiac, Michigan theater razed in 1968.[29][30] In 2003, a historically accurate front porch was added by volunteer contractor (and Ingersoll descendant) Jeff Ingersoll. In that year the Museum also adopted its current tagline, referring to Ingersoll as "the most remarkable American most people never heard of," a reference to his near-exclusion from history by religious detractors.[31] In 2004 a lost grand march titled Ingersolia, composed by prolific Gilded Age composer George Schleiffarth (died 1921), was rediscovered and its score displayed at the Museum.[32] In 2005 two interpretive Web sites made their debut: a virtual tour of the Ingersoll Museum and a celebration of freethought and radical reform history within a rough 100-mile radius of the Ingersoll Museum, the Freethought Trail.[33] In 2008 the large commemorative plaque marking the location of Ingersoll's New York City residence, removed from the Gramercy Park Hotel when that property was rehabilitated as a boutique hotel, was installed in the Museum.[34] In 2009, the current high-definition widescreen orientation video was installed, featuring the Ingersolia March unearthed in 2004.[35] In 2009, the museum received a large number of artifacts and papers from the estate of Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, Robert Ingersoll's, last surviving granddaughter. Selected items were displayed beginning in 2010.[36]
Principal contentions
The secularist movement should emulate the strategies employed successfully by
Secular humanists should stress that they are explicitly nonspiritual and should avoid using the word "spirit" and its cognates whenever possible.[38][39][40][41]
Since long-term social trends are causing nonreligious institutions, public and private, to displace religious organizations as providers of social and community services, there is no reason for humanist and atheist organizations to launch sectarian charitable initiatives of their own patterned on those conducted by churches. Instead, nonbelievers who take secularization seriously should welcome the gradual disappearance of providers who discriminate according to worldview from the ranks of service providers.[42][43][44]
The rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage is in one sense regrettable as it has co-opted the powerful LGBT movement to become a supporter of traditional matrimony. Before the emergence of same-sex marriage as an attainable reform goal, LGBT activism seemed more likely to compel the creation of a wholly secular civil union system that would have provided an alternative to traditional matrimony and would probably have seriously undercut it; in the long term this is a more desirable goal than simply expanding traditional marriage to include same-sex couples.[45][46]
Overpopulation remains an existential threat to human welfare, and has been so since the late 1950s. Human numbers have become so excessive that over several generations they will need to be reduced several-fold in order to achieve long-term sustainability for the human community. It remains to be seen whether the environment has already been so degraded that long-term human survival will be possible at all.[47][48]
Flynn also has written for Free Inquiry arguing that euthanasia in the form of mercy killing is acceptable. In the article, Flynn cast doubt on the usefulness of the doctrine of double effect which is used to justify a distinction between passive and active euthanasia.[49]
Death
Flynn died on August 23, 2021, aged 66.Bibliography (books)
References
External links