June 13
Ann Druyan
On this date in 1949, multi-talented author, popular science promoter, writer/producer and activist Ann Druyan was born in Queens, N.Y. Druyan was the longtime collaborator and spouse of astronomer Carl Sagan (until his death in 1996). The two science enthusiasts had two children together and co-wrote the best-sellers Comet (1985) and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1992).
Sagan credited her as a contributor to his books Contact (1997), Pale Blue Dot (1997), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1997) and Billions and Billions (posthumous, 1998), in which Druyan wrote the poignant epilogue addressing Sagan’s nonbelief and death.
Druyan co-wrote the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning television series “Cosmos,” viewed by half a billion in over 60 countries. She also wrote and produced the two updated “Cosmos” series: “A Spacetime Odyssey” hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson that aired on Fox and ran on The National Geographic Channel in 2014 and won multiple awards, including a Peabody; and “Cosmos: Possible Worlds,” also hosted by Tyson that debuted in 2019 on the same channels.
She served as creative director of the NASA Voyager Interstellar Record Project affixed to the Voyager I and II spacecrafts. Her articles have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Parade, Discover and The Washington Post. She co-produced and co-created the hit film “Contact,” which starred an atheist-scientist heroine played by freethinker Jodie Foster.
Druyan produced and wrote the screenplay for “Comet,” a 3-D IMAX motion picture. Druyan, who has organized for peace and against nuclear testing, is founder and CEO of Cosmos Studios, served as secretary of the Federation of American Scientists, on the board of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and directed the Children’s Health Fund. She was named Harvard’s Humanist of the Year in 2017.
Druyan has always made time to advocate for science and speak out against the illusion of religion. “By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves,” Druyan wrote in The Skeptical Inquirer (November/December 2003).
She received FFRF’s 1997 Freethought Heroine Award. She told Freethought Radio in October 2006: “The Universe revealed by science is one of far more awesome grandeur than any religion has ever posited.”
“I don’t have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.”
— The Skeptical Inquirer, "Ann Druyan Talks About Science, Religion, Wonder, Awe ... and Carl Sagan" (November/December 2003)
Compiled by Bonnie Gutsch; 2008 NASA photo
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Diane Uhl
On this date in 1937, public educator Diane Rochelle (née Suckow) Uhl was born to Elsie and Emil Suckow in Milwaukee, grew up in Evansville, “where where we drank beer but didn’t tell anyone” and “survived high school in a small Wisconsin town where there were no divorces and the only ethnic groups were Germans, Swedes and Norwegians.” (Freethought Today, June/July 2013)
As a child, she wished and prayed for peace on Earth, Uhl later wrote. “Religion in my childhood home was not a big thing. I enjoyed singing in choir with my friends. In college I was reading more philosophy. … The one action item I took from my Lutheran upbringing that seemed to make sense was the Golden Rule.”
At college in Ripon, Wis. (birthplace of the Republican Party), she read philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, whose “Why I Am Not a Christian” put her on the path as a sophomore to freethought and rejection of religion. Teaching became her educational goal instead of nursing after she found out she couldn’t tolerate the sight of blood.
At Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., she earned an M.A. in speech correction/special education, “which equipped me (I thought) to save all those children with special needs. Those children taught me more about life than I ever imagined,” she wrote. Her students with special needs ranged in age from preschool to adult and she spent 33 years mentoring them. Working with adults was the most challenging.
Along the way she met Stephen Uhl, a psychologist who had quit the Catholic priesthood. They married on the Winter Solstice in 1968 and spent the rest of their lives together. They retired in 1993, sold everything, bought an RV and traveled full-time to all 49 continental states before settling in Arizona. They joined FFRF in 1999.
The Uhls became major donors to FFRF and over the years contributed well over a million dollars to its programs, including $250,000 for a five-floor expansion to its two-story building in 2015. The legal wing is named for Diane, who also purchased a $50,000 Steinway piano for use in FFRF’s small auditorium. The studio where FFRF’s radio, TV and online shows are produced is named the Friendly Atheist Stephen Uhl Studio.
A year after her husband died at age 90, Uhl brought an end to her own at age 84 by using nitrous oxide. According to Arizona End-of-Life Options (June 1, 2022), she stated that “due to constant physical pain in my back, legs and feet, as well as headaches and now blindness, I wish to die. My quality of life has deteriorated in the last several weeks (on a scale of 1 to 10) from an eight or nine to a one.”
In her 2013 FFRF member profile in answer to the question “Where I’m headed?” Uhl wrote, “To dust, but I like to think of it as my personal sunset.” (D. 2022)
“As an adult, I’ve learned that reason, science, critical thinking and acceptance of others’ views and perceptions are what would bring peace. Deeds, not creeds.”
— Freethought Today, June/July 2013
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Billy Joel (Quote)
“I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.” (Billy Joel lyric from “Only the Good Die Young.”)
— Written and recorded by Joel for his 1977 album "The Stranger."
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
