March Exam Questions

March Exam in A&P

Freethinkers (pre-2)

1. What conviction rooted in Enlightenment philosophy have all freethinkers shared?

2. Insistence on what distinction separates secularists from "the religiously correct"?

3. Why was Elizabeth Cady Stanton censured by her fellow suffragists?

4. What made room for freethought in colonial America?

5. Whose interests coincided and coalesced in common support for separation of church and state?

6. How must "the religiously correct" explain the Constitution's omission of God?

7. Of what is the shunning of Tom Paine paradigmatic?

8. What changed in America between 1787 and 1797?

9. What did Jefferson say about the legitimate powers of government, with respect to belief in a god or gods? And what did his critic John Mason say about that?

10. What French names became "a kind of shorthand for freethought and deism" in America?

11. How did Universalism contradict Calvinism?

Freethinkers (3-4)

1. In what way did New England and the Deep South trade places in the first half of the 19th century?

2. What was the "utilitarian justification for slavery"?

3. How have women's rights movements generally been seen, historically?

4. About what are contemporary religious conservatives mistaken?

5. How did William Lloyd Garrison say the Bible should be judged?

6. How did the Grimke sisters shock their most radical coreligionists?

7. Who were Garrison's heroes of conscience?

8. What was Lucretia Mott's motto?

9. [ch4] What words did not appear in the earliest drafts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?

10. How have Lincoln's views been variously described, over the years?

11. In Lincoln's day the word "unbelief" connoted what?

12. In his 2d inaugural address Lincoln spoke not as a theologian or saint but as a what, in Jacoby's judgment?

Freethinkers (5-6)

1. Who was the first important American scientist to insist there need be no conflict between science and religion?

2. What would have been unimaginable to the 19th century heirs of the Enlightenment?

3. What was Mark Twain's reaction to Darwin?

4. What "impression" really mattered for freethinkers ("agnostics") , in the absence of a scientific explanation for the origin of life?

5. Herbert Spencer was a favorite for those who wanted to "have their God and evolution too" because of what he called the _____.

6. When for Darwin did natural selection become "subordinate" to other factors?

7. Who did Vanderbilt fire in 1878 for disputing literal readings of the Bible with respect to the age of life on earth?

8. What was Robert Ingersoll's "larger and nobler faith"?

9. Who were some of Philo Beckwith's heroes?

10. How did freethought lecturers have to appeal to their audiences?

11. What was the intellectual turning point in Ingersoll's life?

12. What does it say about 19th century America that Ingersoll was in demand to speak on behalf of both Republicans and Democrats?

Freethinkers (7-8)

1. What did all freethinkers strongly support, in the embryonic culture wars?

2. What Augustinian idea did Elizabeth Cady Stanton deplore as antagonistic towards women's dignity and self-respect?

3. What prayer did Stanton recommend for Jewish men?

4. What did Ingersoll say censors applying the Comstock laws should take a close look at?

5. What forged the bond between freethinkers and leftists?

6. What were freethinkers consistent in upholding?

7. What should the first world war have taught Americans?

8. What was the consistent message of freethinkers in the late 19th century?

9. How did William Jennings Bryan's witness stand concessions at the Scopes Trial make him appear?

Freethinkers (9-10)

1. What happened to the balance of religious power in America by the end of the '30s?

2. How did the film industry respond to the Legion of Decency's 1934 boycott in Philadelphia?

3. What offended some vigilant Catholics in April 1938?

4. Who blazed the trail for Billy Graham and other Protestant evangelicals?

5. What did it mean to be a "liberal" in Fulton Sheen's day (c.1940)?

6. Whose reputation was even lower than atheists' by the mid-'30s? Why?

7. Who was the last well-known secularist crusader in the tradition of Paine and Ingersoll?

8. Who was labelled "the Atheist Mother" in 1948? Why?

9. What dealt a decisive blow to the Comstock law in 1959?

10. What did Billy Graham write in 1954 about communists?

11. Whose abrasiveness "seemed even more abrasive because she was a woman"?

Freethinkers (11-12)

1. Who said he had no wish to claim infallibility?

2. Who called school desegregation "a most dangerous trend"?

3. What did MLK wrap in Billy Graham's book jackets?

4. What was Andrew Goodman's "key word"?

5. What significant change in poll results occurred between 1968 and 1972?

6. What fueled the delusion that the abortion battle was over, after Roe v. Wade?

7. If we follow Justice Scalia's view of the "enduring" Constitution, what should courts be free to rule?

8. Justice Scalia failed to mention what, regarding our "supposedly sacred symbols and practices"?

9. What unexamined assumption has the extreme right exploited brilliantly?

10. What need is especially urgent today, in light of the right's policy goals?

11. What language must secular humanists reclaim?

12. What label does Jacoby prefer to "secular humanist"?

Nature’s God (pre-2)

1. Who was the "cheese" to John Locke's "chalk"?

2. The Declaration of Independence really stands for what?

3. What false impression do millions of Americans have of Ethan Allen?

4.  The author of Moby Dick might have been thinking of Allen when he said what?

5. What "engine" did Thomas Young co-found?

6. Who called Young a "little dirty Screw"?

7. Who did his contemporaries call "a confirmed infidel" and a "howling atheist"?

8. The important infidels at the end of the 18th century were all what?

9. Name two of the  "scrupulous and worthwhile" scholarly efforts about the American revolutionaries cited by Stewart.

10. What "solemn journey" did Jefferson take at age 23?

11. From where did Allen claim to have learned everything worth knowing?

12. What did Young decide was "one big fraud"?

13. What "individualistic side of Protestantism" did Jonathan Edwards push to its extreme?

14. Whose poem/essay won the admiration of Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Young?

15. Young and his fellow "natural-born rebels" sought what, beyond freedom of religion?

Nature’s God (3)

1. What was Epicurus's dangerous idea?

2. What did Thomas Hobbes say about Epicureanism?

3. According to Epicurus, nature acts according to ___, not ___.

4. The best general statement of the guiding Epicurean principle is what?

5. What did Einstein identify as the eternal mystery of the world?

6. Who said it's better ("less remote from the truth") to believe nothing than to believe what's wrong?

7. Why is the Epicurean philosophy more robust than a narrower materialism?

8. How did Jefferson describe "the dead"?

9. How did Epicurus account for the complexity and diversity of life?

10. How did Lucretius account for the creation of better and more just arrangements of society?