February 1989

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

The Church's Holy War Against Hygiene

Dan Quayle on Atheism
How did life begin?

$2.95

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Alerican Atheist

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

American Atheist

February 1989

Editor's Desk
R. Murray-O'Hair

Director's Briefcase
Jon G. Murray

The Probing Mind

Frank R. Zindler

An attempt to tell college students

about the links between international
aggression and religion was an encounter between "The Emir and L"

Ask A.A.
The Church's Holy War Against Hygiene
Dan Quayle on Atheism
How did lire begin?

12

The death tolls of Nietzsche and

Christ are compared; the sanity of
theists is questioned; and the efficacy
of nonviolent protests is queried.

News and Comments

ing to religious arguments? A new feature comes to the rescue and in its
first installment finds "Pascal's Wager
Revisited. "

14

Dan Quayle on Atheism - The

vice president has determined the
cause of all the ills afflicting the world
(and particularly the Soviet Union):
the arrogance of Atheism. - 14

28

"How Did Life Begin?" A three-part

series seeks natural (not supernatural) explanations to the questions surrounding the origin of the first living
systems.

Poetry

34

Report from India

Margaret Bhatty

35

As gods pop up in pigpens and coconuts, India is "Leading the Field" in

superstitious gullibility and the socalled science of the paranormal.

Historical Notes

37

Ninety years ago Kentucky Atheist

C. C. Moore was sentenced to two
years in prison for allegedly advocating free love.

American Atheist Radio Series

Madalyn O'Hair
Joseph McCabe asks "Who Are Freethinkers?" and finds answers among
the greatest names in history.

The Honorable George - Are nonbelievers non-citizens? Apparently

President Bush feels that their patriotism is doubtful. - 17

The Church's Holy War

Against Hygiene
Soledad de Montalvo

Under the Covers

20

Christianity may not have invented

body parasites - but its doctrines improved their standard of living and
paved the way for the ravages of the
Plague.

Talking Back
Volume 31, No, 2

Austin, Texas

39

43

A law professor uncovers "The Conservative Campaign to Rewrite the

Constitution" through appointments
to the federal judiciary.

Me Too

45

Is it time for Atheists to start fighting

for "Religion's Other Victims"?

Letters to the Editor

46

Classified Advertisements

48

27

Ever been short of words when replyFebruary 1989

Page 1

American Atheist
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Page 2

Editor's Desk

The bounty system

o you're an out-of-the-closet Atheist? Good. You've admitted to

yourself and a friend or two that
you really don't accept the myths and
legends of gods that others believe. You
subscribe to this magazine to learn further reasons for not likingreligion and to
read about other out-of-the-closet Atheists, past and present. Perhaps you are
even a member of American Atheists.
But I would entreat you to stop being
an out-of-the-closet Atheist.
No, I don't mean for you to hang your
Atheism back up in that dusty hall closet
- or even cover it with a cloak of "liberal" religion (lest someone see it even
behind all the brooms and mops).
What I mean is that you should not
only take your Atheism out of the closet,
you should take it out of the livingroom,
off your porch, and into the streets, legislatures, and public forums. You should
be an out-of-the-house Atheist.
The contents of this issue of the
AmericanAtheist should make you anxious to get your Atheism into the great
outdoors. First, Jon Murray, in his "Director's Briefcase," recounts his recent
encounter with the sorry state of religious knowledge in a respected university. That a university professor would
hold that there is no such animal as an
Atheist should raise your hackles. If it
doesn't, you willbe truly appalled that a
religious leader could insist that a person's soul "journeys" when he is asleep
- and not be laughed off campus.
But religious ignorance and prejudice
is not restricted to our nation's universities - our "News and Comments"
section finds both flourishing right in the
White House. Apparently Dan Quayle
feels that the "arrogance of Atheism"
will bring our world to ruin. His boss,
George Bush, goes a step further: we
Atheists are apparently not eligible for
citizenship in these United States. Allattempts to get the president to apologize
for his statement that he wasn't sure

R. Murray-O'Hair
Austin, Texas

that Atheists "should be considered as you the information you need to be an

effective part of the American Atheist
citizens, nor should they be considered
patriots" have resulted in a rendition of movement. But you need to give all that
the Washington sidestep. As you read you can to make our struggle succeed.
the two articles, you will see that it is Next time a picket or protest is orgahigh time that we show our political nized by your local Chapter of Amerileaders that the last minority, Atheists, can Atheists or the National Office, you
should be a part of it. Show up to protest
must not be slighted in this fashion.
From time to time, Christianity tries in the offices and at the public appearto pass itself off as a civilizinginfluence. ances of those who would deny us our
Soledad de Montalvo, in our cover arti- civil rights and who would bulldoze the
cle "The ,Church's Holy War Against wall of separation. Next time a branch of
Hygiene," ably demonstrates that such government demands that you pray claims stray from the truth. As she re- whether at a graduation ceremony, at a
veals, Christianity's victims didn't just public hearing or city council meeting don't. And tell everyone why you object.
die on the rack, or on the battlegrounds
of the Crusades; they fell to the centuIfyou can't, for whatever reason, fight
for state/church separation in person,
ries of disease nurtured by the Church's
opposition to common cleanliness. This do it by mail. Start with letters to Bush
article willleave you with an unshakable
and Quayle and work your way down:
conviction that the last thing that should senators, representatives, governors,
be taught to our children is Christianity. and mayors need to know that to insult
"Historical Notes" and the "American American Atheists is downright unAtheist Radio Series" demonstrate the American.
Perhaps you feel you can't do anydistinguished company you will join as
you take your Atheism out the front thing for the American Atheist movedoor. A president of a nation made the ment at all. You don't have the free time;
case for secularism; a distinguished sci- your spouse would head for the divorce
entist fought for Darwinism; the father court; your boss would give you a pink
of psychoanalysis made known his dis- slip; your teacher would give you an "E"
dain for religion. Aren't they better col- Or maybe you're afraid that the Grand
Wizard of the KKK who lives next door
leagues than St. Simeon Stylites?
A new feature, "Talking Back," will might figure out that you're not for onehelp you find quick answers to the hack- half of the "God and Country" duo.
We would prefer to have you holding
neyed questions and accusations lobbed
at Atheists. Frank Zindler's "How Did the banners with us at the next Atheist
Life Begin?" willgive you a better under- Pride March, but we understand that
standing of what is so exactly right with sometimes personal situations may ima natural explanation of the origin of our pede Atheists with the best intentions.
and of all species. And, of course, our So why not resurrect something from
new format includes a membership ap- the CivilWar days? (No, it's not slavery.)
Back then, if a Northerner wished to
plication for American Atheists - just
opposite this page as a matter of fact. If get out of the draft, he could pay a
you aren't a member of American Athe- "bounty" to purchase his replacement
ists, you can use it to join. And all you on the front lines. If you can't take your
members can put it directly under the Atheism out of the house and onto the
writing hand of the next fellow Atheist streets, why not pay a tax-deductible
you meet. We are continuing to run a bounty? We can't "buy" another good
series on "How to Help" the cause of Atheist to replace you, but we could pay
Atheism. This month's installment ap- expenses of another Atheist who wants
to come and doesn't quite have the
pears on page 11.
The American Atheist tries to give money to swing it.~
February 1989

Page 3

Director's Briefcase

The emir and I

n my position as president of American Atheists, I am from time to time
invited to speak at various colleges
or universities. Lately the format of
most of these appearances at educational institutions has been a panel discussion of some type. Universities particularly are enamored of hosting small
clusters of persons with conflicting positions, each given a wholly inadequate
amount of time in which to present his/
her viewpoint, or the viewpoint of a
group (s)he represents, to what is often
a meager student audience.
I must say here that I have found over
the years, when either lecturing myself
or attending the lecture of another Atheist leader, that students of the 1980s
seem to be generally disinterested in
real-world situations and are more
tunnel-visioned, directing their energies
to obtaining a degree en route to a job,
unlike their counterparts of previous
generations. The economic times are
hard, and ifpersons can go to college at
all, they must concentrate on their
grades and any part -time job, or jobs, in
order to stay in school. The object of
"staying in school" is to land one of a
dwindling supply of well-paying positions. This is a more "vocational" objective than the strictly or idealistically "academic" purpose of higher education of
years past. While it is true that the purpose of a college education has been all
along, for many, the path to greater income or a higher position on the socioeconomic ladder, for others there has
also been the personal satisfaction of
learning new things, acquiring a skill,
gaining technical expertise, or becoming expert in an academic area. I do not
sense much of that latter "personal excellence" motivation anymore when I
am on a campus. Most of the students
to whom I talk want to just "get by," "get
through the easiest way," and get out
with their diplomas to start "making
money." When an individual is working
sometimes multiple jobs, while trying to
complete an "education," there is little
time remaining for socially conscious

A visit to a university to
discuss the role
of religion in
international aggression
brings home the need
for Atheism in
education.

A graduate of the University of Texas

at Austin and a second generation
Atheist, Mr. Murray is a proponent of
"agressive Atheism." He is an
anchorman on the "American Atheist
Forum" and the president of American
Atheists.

Jon G. Murray
Page 4

February 1989

activity unless, it seems, that activity is

church related. The religionists always
find the time to be a force of influence
on both private and state campuses. I
fear that the days of campus concern of
the 1960s,and to some extent the 1970s,
particularly in the areas of peace, ecology, political reform, and race relations,
are fading. It costs so damn much to go
to college now, and so much is riding on
post-graduate job placement, that students don't want to sidetrack any time,
energy, or money to other considerations. Allof the campus student groups
are having a hard time getting students
interested in anything that is not basically "partying." I posit this view not alone
on my own observations but on conversations with numerous faculty members, Atheist and non-Atheist alike, at
the institutions I visit.
In speaking to student audiences, I
also find them to be both more religious
and more politically conservative than
the audiences of, say, five to ten years
ago. It used to be that students were capable of listening to a "radical" point of
view, such as Atheism, with some openmindedness. Now I am greeted by a hostile, snarling mass of persons who just
want to shout me down and let me know
how much they "love Jesus." The students also seem to know less in allareas.
They don't know their American or European history and they know little or
nothing about the history or development of religion. I am told by instructors
frequently that the students who are
coming to them as freshmen now are
less prepared to face college-level courses than students of past years. They
have generally poor verbal communication, language, reading, and composition skills, and lack both adult attention
spans and the academic background
that they need to proceed with a further
education. Many college instructors tell
me that they need to provide high
school-level reeducation to their students before they can go on to any actual college-level work.
I have also heard from some of the
American Atheist

few student activists that I know that

out of thousands of undergraduates at a
given institution they can find at most
only five or ten to come out or get involved in any activity.
I don't know the reasons for all of the
above. I am only reciting symptoms and
I don't know what the root causes are.
Are upcoming generations of Americans actually getting "dumber"? Is the
influence of drugs so pervasive that the
students are all "high" constantly and
unable to think? I don't know. AllI know
is what I find on campuses.

Religion in the "Crossfire"

vitation and received a confirmation

letter, I saw that the panel was to consist
of a representative of United Campus
Ministries, an associate professor of Sociology, the emir! of the Austin Mosque,
and myself. We would each have five
minutes to present our points of view on
the subject and then take questions
composed by the committee, followed
by questions from the audience. This
was, again, typical. The site of the forum
was one of the lobby areas of the Student Union building.
I prepared notes for a five-minute presentation and went downtown to the
university. It was raining that day and it
was a rather nasty walk from the car
onto campus and into the Student
Union building. When I arrived, I found
a short riser with five chairs on it (instead of four) facing a grouping of perhaps fiftychairs which were occupied by
about thirty students. The fifth chair
was for a last minute addition to the panel, a rabbi. I knew it! I introduced myself
to the Campus Ministries person, who
had (naturally) arrived first, ever eager
as the religious are, and then to the sociologist, and then I sat down. To my
right sat the rabbi and to my left the emir
entered, in costume, and sat down. I
wanted to begin laughing at that point
and to ask why the Texas Union Student
Issues Committee had invited "Lawrence
of Arabia" onto this panel, but I held my
tongue. After all, I know the reputation
of Moslems with infidels and I didn't
want to provoke him into whipping out
a scimitar and cutting off my heathen
tongue. You see, I have little toleration
for clergy, particularly those in full costume. My standard line with priests I
confront is to tell them that I see they
have dressed in black, in mourning for
their minds that have died. The clergy,

Given all of these observations, I was

recently invited to participate in a panel
discussion at the University of Texas at
Austin sponsored by the Texas Union
Student Issues Committee. This is rather typical; these panel discussions are
usually run by a "student union" on
campus. This particular panel was to be
part of a "Crossfire" series (no doubt
named after the Cable News Network
show) on "Religion: A Unifying or Dividing Force?"
I was contacted by a student, by telephone, and asked if I would like to be a
part of a panel discussion on "the role of
religion in international aggression." I
talked the subject matter over with Dr.
Madalyn O'Hair, founder of American
Atheists. We both came to the conclusion that I would find myself on a panel
of clergy, with a professor or two thrown
in for good measure, all of whom would
be apologists for religion. They would all
hold the view that religion was basically
a good thing and that if religion did foster international aggression at any time,
it really did not mean to do so. We both
knew this in advance and knew that I
would be simply outnumbered, and that
the cluster of my opponents, together,
would have four or five times the time
allotment for presentation than I would 1"2. a title of honor of the descendants of
have. However, I decided to go ahead Muhammad .... also, emeer, amir, ameer.
with it since it was local and neither of [1615-25; Ar (Arabic) amir commander]"
us had been on campus in Austin, Tex- Random House Dictionary, 2d ed.,
as, for awhile. When I accepted the in- unabridged.
Austin, Texas

February 1989

as the shock troops of religion, have

done more harm to humanity than they
could ever possibly make restitution for.
True to form and just as both Dr.
O'Hair and I had thought, first the Campus Ministries person, then the sociologist, and then the emir launched into a
string of apologetics for the religiously
motivated violence in Ireland, Europe,
and particularly the Middle East and
Iran. Their thesis was that god was great
and pure and that religion did not teach
aggression but taught love for all mankind. People who are intolerant of their
fellow inhabitants of the earth or who
participate in acts of aggression are simply not true religionists. A true Roman
Catholic would not bomb a pub in a
Protestant neighborhood. That would
require a Roman Catholic not loyal to
the faith or one who simply did not understand the message of his church.
Religion has, they said, been a unifying
factor in all cultures. It is the "glue," I
was told, that holds the fabric of civilization together and separates us from the
heathen.

Allah the nifty

When the emir spoke, he mentioned
Allah many times, naturally, and each
and every time he did so he paused to
mutter, sometimes in English and sometimes in Arabic, a phrase of praise for
the supreme being of his faith. In midsentence he would stop after the name
Allah and say, "Allah the magnificent,
the stupendous, the splendid, the glorious, the superb, the wondrous, the miraculous," or some such other phrase.
I was struck by the senselessness of this
activity. He pontificated that in order to
live all humanity had to have a system of
rewards and punishments. When he followed a secular law he was not rewarded, he said. He was only punished for
disobeying the secular law. When he followed Allah's law, though, he said, he
was rewarded with everlasting life.
Therefore, he opined, he had no incentive to follow the laws of a given state. I
have never heard a religious version of
Page 5

Roman Catholics killed many French

Protestants (Huguenots) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

the separation of state and church argument put quite like that before. He went
on to point out that all things are created
by Allah as a pair. Light and dark were
created by Allah in pairs, and likewise
good and bad. Each thing had its counterpart, so Allah had created kindness
to moderate aggression.
Well, when my turn came, I must admit that I had something different to say
on the subject at hand. A version of
what I said follows, as reconstructed
after the fact from my notes. This is somewhat expanded beyond what I had time
to say in five minutes in that it includes
my answers to inquiries directed to me.
In the context of this journal I can elaborate with footnoting of my examples.

The Atheist view

It is NOT the "role" of religion "in"
international aggression that should be
the proper topic here today. Religion is
aggression. Religion and international
aggression are synonymous.
Any serious student of history knows
that religious wars have dominated
human history.
A few examples here will suffice. The
early history of the Hebrews is one of
armed conflict (1225-1025 B. C.), and the
Hebrew monarchies were established
and maintained by means of war (1025586 B.C.).2 The Crusades alone continued for over one thousand years (622 to
1683), wholly or partially motivated by
differences in theology. The Holy Span-

2PaulJ. Achtemeier, gen. ed., Harper's Bible

Dictionary (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1985), pp. 1118-19.
Page 6

ish Inquisition (1480 to 1834), particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kept Europe in a living nightmare. The massacre of French Protestant leaders
on the night of Saint
Bartholomew in 1572 is legendary. That
same year a number of Dutch cities,
home of devoted followers of Luther
and Calvin, were attacked by the duke
of Alba, sent by Roman Catholic Philip
of Spain to bring Protestant "sinners" to
terms. In 1573 the duke of Alba then
besieged Leyden, the manufacturing
center of Holland. When Ferdinand II of
the House of Habsburg, a devout Jesuit,
was elected emperor in the German
states, the Thirty Years War (1618 to
1648) was off to an almost immediate
start as Ferdinand
sent troops into
Bohemia against Frederick, the Protestant Elector of the Palatinate, to fulfill
the vow of his youth to eradicate all
sects and heresies from his domains.
Five-sixths of all German towns of the
period were destroyed and a population
of eighteen million was reduced to four
million.? The chronicle
of examples
could go on and on.
A famous Atheist author, James M.
Robertson, had this to say on the subject of religious wars:
It is not conceivable that the
gradual
dissolution
of supernaturalist notions will ever of itself
work such evil as is told in the
story of the military evangel of
Christianity in the Dark Ages, the

3Hendrik Van Loon, The Story of Mankind

(Garden City, NY: Star Books, 1938).
February 1989

Crusades,
the Albigensian massacres," the conquests of Mexico
and Peru, the Anabaptist movernent- at the outset of the Reformation, or the massacre
of St.
Bartholomew,
to say nothing of
the death-roll of the Inquisition
and the mania against witchcraft.
Even the bloodshed of the Reign
of Terror in the French Revolution, wrought under peculiar political perturbation,
was under the
auspices not of atheists but of
theists.s
In addition to the human pugilism, the
single greatest aggressive force of religion has been mobilized, both psychologically and physically, against science,
education, women, and human sexuality.
The very foundation and hallmark of
religion is intolerance.
The derivation of the word religion
itself is from the Latin religare meaning
to "bind fast."? This basic intolerance, as
manifested in Judeo-Christianity,
is posited in the idea that the Jews were god's
"Chosen People." As the "chosen" or
"elect" of god, they felt that they were
somehow
entitled to dominion over
those of other religions or of no religion
at all. The early Jews were indeed intolerant of the religions that were already
in place when they were developing

+The Albigenses were members of a

Catharistic (ascetic and dualistic Christian)
sect of southern France, in Albi, between
the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Ascetics practice strict self-denial as a means
of religious discipline. Dualism is a doctrine
that the universe is under the dominion of
two opposing principles one of which is good
and the other evil.
sProtestant sectarian movement arising in
Zurich in 1524 advocating the baptism and
church membership of adult believers only.
6John M. Robertson, A Short History of
Christianity (London: Watts & Co., 1902), p.
386.
7 The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982).
American Atheist

their own brand of insanity. That intolerance has been passed down to this day.
"Thou shalt have no other gods before
me" (Deut. 5:7) was the first of the Ten
Commandments when the pagan world
was full of other gods. The character
Jesus, a Jew, built. on this first commandment and said that he did not
come to change any of the existing laws
that god had supposedly given directly
and only to the Jews (Matt. 5: 17, 18}.8 He
sent his twelve disciples out only to the
Jews and not to the Gentiles (Matt. 10:5,
6 and 15:24},9 not being very tolerant of
those who were not of the tribe. He insisted on being number one among the
Jews; he was not going to play secondfiddle to anyone (Matt. 10:33}.10 He cemented himself into his position at the
top through war (Matt. 10:34},11 by fostering contention (Matt. 10:35, 36), 12and
by demanding unwavering loyalty (Matt.
10:38}.13 He made certain that all his followers knew that they could only be

8Matt. 5:17: "Think not that I am come to

destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not
come to destroy, but to fulfil.
Matt 5:18: "For verily I say unto you, Till
heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle
shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be
fulfilled."
9Matt. 10:5: These twelve Jesus sent forth,
and commanded them, saying, "Go not into
the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of
the Samaritans enter ye not:
Matt. 10:6: "But go rather to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel."
Matt. 15:24: But he answered and said, "I
am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the
house of Israel."
10Matt.10:33: "But whosoever shall deny me
before men, him will I also deny before my
Father which is in heaven."
11Matt. 10:34: "Think not that I am come to
send peace on earth: I came not to send
peace, but a sword."
12Matt. 10:35: "For I am come to set a man
at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in
law against her mother in law.
Matt. 10:36: "And a man's foes shall be
they of his own household."
Austin, Texas

"saved" through him (Matt. 11:27)14 and

that ifthey were not for him then he considered them his enemy (Matt. l2:30 and
16:24}.15 He told his group that all who
offended god would be punished there would be no tolerance (Matt.
13:41, 42}.16 Everyone had to accept his
Judaism or suffer the consequences
meted out by god, his alleged father
(Matt. 18:3},17 and had to spread the
word (Matt. 28:19 and 24: 14}.18In return
for all the Jews doing exactly what he
wanted them to do and being intolerant
of everyone else, they would be rewarded - only they would have to wait until
after they died (Matt. 19:29}.19 When his
followers went out to badger others into
becoming followers too, they were
armed with the propaganda that those
13Matt. 10:38: "And he that taketh not his
cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy
of me."
14Matt. 11:27: "All things are delivered unto
me of my Father: and no man knoweth the
Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any
man the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son shall reveal him."
15Matt. l2:30: "He that is not with me is
against me; and he that gathereth not with
me scattereth abroad."
Matt. 16:24: Then said Jesus unto his
disciples, "If any man willcome after me, let
him deny himself, and take up his cross, and
follow me."
16Matt. 13:41: "The Son of man shall send
forth his angels, and they shall gather out of
his kingdom all things that offend, and them
which do iniquity;
Matt. 13:42: "And shall cast them into a
furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and
gnashing of teeth."
17Matt.18:3: And said, "VerilyI say unto you,
Except ye be converted, and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the
kingdom of heaven."
18Matt.28: 19: "Go ye therefore, and teach all
nations, baptizing them in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost."
Matt. 24:14: "And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a
witness unto all nations; and then shall the
end come."
February 1989

who did not convert would be dealt with

accordingly (Mark 6:11 and 8:34-38}.20
But again those who would follow would
be rewarded for their success (Mark
10:29-31}.21 This character, Jesus, was
even afraid of other holy books and demanded that only the Jewish Bible be
distributed (Mark 13:1O}.22 His followers
were asked to do anything to support

19Matt. 19:29: "And everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or
father, or mother, or wife, or children, or
lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting
life."
20Mark 6:11: "And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear you, when ye depart
thence, shake off the dust under your feet
for a testimony against them. Verily I say
unto you, It shall be more tolerable for
Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city."
Mark 8:34: And when he had called the
people unto him with his disciples also, he
said unto them, "Whosoever willcome after
me, let him deny himself, and take up his
cross, and follow me.
Mark 8:35: "For whosever willsave his life
shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life
for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall
save it.
Mark 8:36: "For what shall it profit a man
if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his
own soul?
Mark 8:37: "Or what shall a man give in
exchange for his soul?
Mark 8:38: "Whosoever therefore shall be
ashamed of me and of my words in this
adulterous and sinful generation; of him also
shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he
cometh in the glory of his Father with the
holy angels."
21Mark 10:29: And Jesus answered and said,
"Verily I say unto you, There is no man that
hath left house, or brethern, or sisters, or
father, or mother, or wife, or children, or
lands, for my sake, and the gospel's,
Mark 10:30: "But he shall receive an
hundredfold now in this time, houses, and
brethern, and sisters, and mothers, and
children, and lands, with persecutions; and
in the world to come eternal life.
Mark 10:31: "But many that are first shall
be last; and the last first."
Page 7

and distribute only his word and that included killing and being hated by all
others (Mark 13:12, 13).23 The Jews
were reminded, again and again, that
those who were not with this Jesus character were against him (Luke 11:23and
12:9)24and that he hadcome to make di-

vision within the Jews as to who would

and would not do his bidding (Luke
12:51-53).25The Jews were told they
could only serve god and nothing else
(Luke 16:13)26and for this their reward
would come posthumously (Luke 18:2930).27

22Mark 13: 10: "And the gospel must first be

published among all nations."
23Mark 13:12: "Now the brother shall betray
the brother to death, and the father the son;
and children shall rise up against their parents, and shall cause them to be put to
death.
Mark 13:13: "And ye shall be hated of all
men for my name's sake: but he that shall
endure unto the end, the same shall be
saved."
24Luke 11:23: "He that is not with me is
against me: and he that gathered not with
me scattereth."
Luke 12:9: "But he that denieth me before
men shall be denied before the angels of
God."

25Luke 12:51: "Suppose ye that I am come to

give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but
rather division:
Luke 12:52: "For from henceforth there
shall be five in one house divided, three
against two, and two against three.
Luke 12:53: "The father shall be divided
against the son, and the son against the
father; the mother against the daughter, and
the daughter against the mother; the mother
in law against her daughter in law, and the
daughter in law against her mother in law."
26Luke 16: 13: "No servant can serve two
masters: for either he willhate the one, and
love the other; or else he willhold to the one,
and despise the other. Yecannot serve God
and mammon."

The intolerance of early Christianity

has been retained as a core concept to
the present; it is completely intolerant of
any other "idea set." That intolerance
leads to what I call both passive and
active aggression.
I can give some examples of active aggression. Perhaps the best example is
the missionary system. Missionaries are
an idea attack team formed to insult, demean, and degrade the cultural values
of a host country in which they are
guests. They specialize in going after the
uneducated in the underdeveloped
countries.
In Africa, the number of Christians expanded, mainly through
conversion, from fewer than 10
millionin 1900to 236 million in 1985
and is on course to total nearly 400
million by 2000. In Latin America
the figures are 62 million in 1900,
392 million in 1985,and 571 million
in 2000; in South and East Asia, 19
million, 148 million, and 225 million, respectively .... Meanwhile,
Poland is in a class of its own [in
Europe]. Nationalism and Catholicism go together there and make
a potent mix. By 1980the country
had twice as many churches and
priests as it had before World War
II, ... 28
Then we have the televangelists who
are intruding religion by means of the
airways into other countries, and the
written "word" is not far behind. The
largest yearly total of Bibles in the past

"You put up quite an argument for religion, Harold, but I'm stH!an Atheist_"
Page 8

February 1989

.27Luke 18:29: And he said unto them, "Verily

I say unto you, There is no man that hath left
house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or
children, for the kingdom of God's sake,
Luke 18:30: "Who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the
world to come life everlasting."
28From the newsmagazine The Economist of
London, reprinted in World Press Review,
March 1989, pp. 33-34.
American Atheist

German leaders required soldiers to

wear this belt buckle with the slogan
Gott mit uns (God is with us) during
World War I. Similiar buckles were used
during World War II.

more than thirty countries around

the world.P About the same era of
time there was a clockmaker in
Belfast, Maine, by the name of Phineas
The total of 692,754,925was an
Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866).Quimby
11% increase above 1987as reportbecame interested in mesmerism and
ed by the United Bible Societies,
animal magnetism through lectures and
which now has work in more than
a popular book of the day by an Austrian
180 countries. . . . The largest
physicist, Franz Mesmer. He formed a
numerical increase was in Asia
new philosophy based on a combination
and the Pacific, where the total of
of Mesmeritic thought and transcenden300,874,234 Scriptures representtal metaphysics. In 1859Quimby moved
ed an increase of 38 million over
to Portland, Maine, and set up an office
1988.29
for "healing." One of his pupils was
It is damned aggressive for Christians Mary Patterson, who later became
to be shipping that many Bibles around known as Mary Baker Eddy. She split off
the world and intruding them, like it or from Quimby and his three other closest
not, into other countries with other cul- students and claimed sole rights to what
she called "Christian Science," a term
tures and many other religions.
During World War II England and Quimby had coined in an article written
Japan, Avro Manhattan and the infa- in February 1863.31The Christian Science
movement is renown for its worldwide
mous "Tokyo Rose," in their respective
countries, had their propaganda broad- missionary outreach.
Turning now to passive aggression, I
casts, but the Voice of America continues from this country as a peace-time define it as aggression that does not call
for the direct conversion of others
endeavor sponsored by the United
States government. The content of through violence or the insulting of their
Voice of America programming is more culture. It is a more subtle form of relithan half religion. This is because most gious aggression, but nonetheless effecof its broadcasts are aimed at the "East- tive. When the Buddhist monks burned
ern bloc" countries in which there are themselves in the streets in Vietnam,
large proportions of Atheists in the pop- that was passive religious aggression.
ulation. What other country does this? They did not burn others, but were willing to sacrifice their own lives to make
I can think of none.
It is curious that of those denomina- a point. The "Operation Rescue" forces
tions which have helped make religion which encourage teams of religious nuts
one of America's leading exports, two of to block access to abortion clinics to enour homegrown American religions lead force their religious morality on all womthe way: the Mormons and the Christian en is another example. They will happiScientists. The Church of Jesus Christ ly go off to jail, not harming anyone but
of Latter-day Saints was founded in 1830 themselves, but they drive home a vivid
after Vermont-born Joseph Smith mi- point.
Another form of passive aggression is
grated at the age of ten to western New
York in 1815,and in 1827,at the age of the seizing of the symbols of a country
twenty-two, received, as the legend by religion. Oaths of office, opening of
goes, gold plates from an angel upon public meetings with religious services,
which was engraved what is now known
as the Book of Mormon. The Mormons
have established missionary work in 30J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of
forty-three years was distributed worldwide in 1988:

29LosAngeles Times, 25 March 1989.

Austin, Texas

American Religions (Wilmington, NC:

McGrath Publishing Co., 1978),pp. 2-8.
31Ibid., pp. 51-53.
February 1989

and blasphemy laws (in present-day

Germany and Austria) are being debated in many countries. In Europe the
freethought groups are trying to have
their secular marriage celebrants legitimized by the state to break the monopoly that religion has silently imposed in
that area. In countries like Finland,
Atheists have to establish their own
burial grounds because they are not
permitted in the nation's Christian dominated cemeteries. Virtually every European country requires religion to be
taught in the state (public) schools,
which is religious aggression against
children. In Nepal the constitution declares that it is a Hindu state32 and the
"law forbids people from trying to convert anyone to another religion 'so as to
disrupt the traditional religion of the
Hindu community.' "33 Three former
Hindus were found guilty of converting
and were sentenced to a year in prison
in February of this year.
Each country attempts to indoctrinate its citizens into a particular religion
so that it may call on that religion to
muster persons for aggressive actions
against other nations. In World War II
Germany the standard issue infantry
belt buckle bore the words Gott mit
Uns, meaning "God is with us." American. troops have died for "God and
Country" in many wars. Young men and
even boys have died in the Islamic
Jihads between Iran and Iraq.
Here in this country Supreme Court
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor recently
dubbed the United States a "Christian
Nation" in a letter to Arizona Republicans. In the 1988 races the presidential
candidates ran on platforms of our
nation having been founded on "Christianity." The Pledge of Allegiance, abor-

32Denver Post, 11 February 1989.

33The Washington Post, 17 March 1989, p.
E5.
Page 9

tion, and "Christian family values" were

major campaign issues. These types of
domestic political proselytizations keep
the "God and Country" spirit alive so
that more young men can be sacrificed
to it. '
The ultimate form of international religious aggression is the use of nuclear
weapons. The United States has already
practiced this form of religious aggression against the Japanese at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The United States government would not have used the atom
bomb on Roman Catholic and Lutheran,
White Germany.
The Cold War brought to us the concept of fighting a "godless enemy." The
"Atheistic" foundation of the Soviet
Union was used to whip the population
of the United States into raping our domestic economy to produce and fund an
arms race forcing the developing Soviet
Union to keep pace. The Soviets have
now come to the point of needing to give
in and let religion take over their nation
in order to keep from going bankrupt in
a senseless arms race. The price of
peace equals submission to religion.
The same scenario is being played out in
China and Cuba as these two nations
are opening up to the Roman Catholic
church. With the church comes our
CIA and its financing of "Christian Democratic Parties."
In Vietnam we were in that "war" to
save two to three million Roman Catholics whom we had persuaded to flee to
the South from North Vietnam.
We are threatening to destroy all life
on earth unless it accepts our political
system, our economic system, and
Christianity.

Audience reaction
When I ended my five minutes, there
was a moment of stunned silence from
the small gathering of students in the audience and from my fellow panel members. None of them had anticipated anyone being honest and telling the students the truth. They had all come to
apologize for their religions. The quesPage 10

tion was then asked of all of us, What

would you do to minimize international
aggression? Each of the other panel
members beat around the bush, but basically said that the answer was more
religion. I said that I would begin byestablishing an enforced separation of
church and state in every country of the
world. Ifreligion could be removed from
the process of world decision making,
then the nations of the world could get
down to the needed basics: the health,
education, and welfare of all people. Religiousdifferences and conflicts, through
the aggression they foster, get in the way
of pragmatic problem solving that needs
to be a cooperative venture between all
nations. Every country faces the same
problems with food, housing, energy,
education, technology, health, population control, and ecology. We need not
add to that the mental problems of religion.
The sociology professor then said
that he thought that there was no such
thing as an Atheist. He said that he felt
there were just persons who were simply "angry at god." The emir then asked
me where I go at night when I am asleep.
I replied, "Nowhere. I just lie there
asleep." He insisted, "No, your soul
journeys when you are asleep." On that
note of irrationality, a question came in
from a young lady in the audience. She
asked the United Campus Ministries
representative why religion did not like
women or let women have an equal part
in it. None of the religious panelists
could give the young woman a straight
answer. To a man the panelists lied,
claiming that their denominations had
women in seminaries or training as
rabbis. Even the emir said that Moslems
treated women equally. Not a single one
had guts enough to say that his religion
was basically sexist in its foundations
and that women could never be equal to
men "in the sight of god." After the
panel broke up the young woman who
had asked the questions spoke to me
and said that she had not received a
satisfactory answer to her question. I
February 1989

told her that was because none of the

religious panelists could have given her
one. She said that she understood that
and that she had asked the question for
that reason. I hoped that she was a
budding Atheist in the raw.

Atheists and education

The entire experience drove home a
point to me. Day after day in city after
city and state after state, the cream of
the intellectual crop of this nation flows
out of high schools and into colleges.
They are there confronted with the
same archaic philosophical approaches
to life with which students were confronted two hundred years ago. The
technology has changed, but not the
thought patterns behind it. How can we
hope to have a world based on reason
when we have the purveyors of irrationality both in and around our institutions of higher learning and an Atheist is
only invited in now and then to a small
audience? Atheism needs to have a
presence in these institutions so that
young minds can be challenged by the
rigors of rational thought instead of being held within the religious patterns of
their childhoods with which they come
to college. When these young people
are away from home for the first time,
making new friends and facing new surroundings and challenges, is when the
religions of their upbringings need to be
hit squarely in the face with hard, cold
reality. Ifstudents can get through a college education with their parents' religion intact, they are likely lost to that
religion for the rest of their lives.
Yet the Atheist community has paid
less attention to our schools and colleges
than almost anything else. This needs to
be corrected and we, as Atheists, need
to get involved in the educational process. We cannot afford to turn upcoming generations over to the likes of those
with whom I shared this recent panel at
the University of Texas. I was appalled at
the thought that a sociologist could
think that it was impossible to be an
Atheist, or that a Moslem could speak
American Atheist

What can I do to help

educate my community about Atheism?

gibberish at a college forum and not be

laughed off the stage, or that no one was
willingto challenge a rabbi trying to pass
off Israel as the model of a perfect society. These persons must have opposition and must have to fight for every
young mind they "tie back" instead of
having those young minds led to them
like sheep to the slaughter.
I don't know how we willdo this, but
Atheists simply must inject themselves
into the education process.
If you recall what I said about college
students at the beginning of this article,
I now know part of why they are like .
they are. If they live in a world of faith,
are reared in a world of faith, what do
they need with facts? We can be part of
the process to change the deteriorating
education scene by bringing reality into
the picture. Educational institutions
should not be reinforcing religious faith
systems, they should be breaking them
down. The only persons who can get educational institutions on the track of doing that are Atheists.~

Animals
(Continued from page 45)

feel pain, not because he can do mathematics .... " Similarly,Bentham stated:
"The question is not 'Can they reason?',
or 'Can they talk?', but 'Can they suffer?'."
Religion has played a key role in forming society's ingrained attitudes and
practices in respect to nonhumans.
Freethinkers can play an important role
in our fight against religious oppression
of people by recognizing religion's other
victims as well: animals.
- Chris Tiedje
Iowa

A lot! Do you have cable television in your area? If so, there

may be a public access channel willing to broadcast the
"American Atheist Forum" to your community.
The "Forum" is a thirty-minute, weekly television program
which provides an 'in-depth analysis of state/church separation
issues and current events of interest to the Atheist community.
It is one of the most popular cable access programs in the u.s.
and is currently broadcast on over ninety stations nationwide.
If the "Forum" is not being shown on your local access
channel. the reason is probably because no one has taken the
initiative to request that it be aired. If you think that there
should be an alternative view to religion being broadcast in
your area, here is what you can do:
1. Contact the program manager at your local cable access

station and find out if the station accepts outside programming. (A cable access station is not the same as a PBS
station.) If it does, tell the program manager that you would
like the "American Atheist Forum" to be aired. The program
is available on whatever format (3/4 inch, YHS, Beta) the
station prefers.
2.

If the station is interested, and most are, the manager will

probably request a sample tape of the "Forum." At this point,
you should call or write American Atheist GHQ and request
that a sample tape be sent to you. Be sure to specify the
correct format.

3. AAGHQ will promptly send you the "Forum" sample. You

should take the tape to the program manager and request
that the station review it.
4. Hopefully, the station will recognize its obligation to provide
both sides of this very important subject, and will decide to
begin airing the weekly "Forum" program.
5. We will send the tapes each month to either the station or
you or a local person, to bring the tapes to the station once
each month.
AAGHQ has found that areas where the "Forum" is broadcast
usually enjoy strong, successful Chapters of American Atheists.
This is because the "Forum" is Atheism's primary outreach. If
you think that you're the only Atheist in town, you're wrong!
There are others just as intelligent as you in your community.
Unfortunately, many are hiding behind closet doors, or perhaps they are simply unaware that a national Atheist organization exists. Having the "Forum" aired on your local access
channel is the best way to educate your community about
Atheism and bring other Atheists out of the closet.
For more information, write or call:
American

Austin, Texas

Atheist General Headquarters

P.O. Box 140195
Austin, TX 78714-0195
(512) 458-1244

February 1989

Page 11

Ask A.A.

Not for sale

I'm happy to know I can give and my
name won't be given to others who will
ask me to give one thousand times a
year.
James A. Marsh
Oregon
Your remarks need to be noted.
American Atheists does not sell its
"mailing lists." When you contact us,
your name and address is confidential
forever.

Death tolls
It would be interesting to get your
response to the following:
In order to analyze any religion or
philosophy, one can usually look to the
damage that system has brought on this
world. One easy statistic of damage is
the number of persons killed in wars,
political repression, or various other
kinds of violence.
If you consider all of recorded history
and the number of persons killedbecause
of religion, the figure is about 3 million.
If you look at the number of persons
killed because of the philosophies of
Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx
since 1940, the figure is somewhere
around 57 million.
Perhaps you would like to look at the
results the Nazis obtained when they
cast off the "shackles of Christianity."
Philip M. Buckley
California

In "Letters to the Editor," readers give

their opinions, ideas, and information.
But in "Ask A.A.," American Atheists
answers questions regarding its
policies, positions, and customs, as
well as queries of factual and historical
situations. Please address your
questions to "Ask A.A.," P.O. Box
140195, Austin, TX 78714-0195.

Page 12

Well, what should we say to a man

who has made up his mind without the
facts?
Religion has caused more misery to
all of humankind in every era of history
than any other single idea. JudeoChristianity alone killed off such high
percentages of the populations of nations that even historical counts are impossible.
Nietzsche, however, never killed anyone. There have been economic wars
February 1989

since 1940, but no wars of which we

know that have been premised entirely
on the theories of Marx. Your figures
are make-believe and we cannot help to
reinforce your aroused hatred for ideas
which you do not like. Presumably before it is all over, you will go out and kill
a commie for Christ.

Fighting back
Well, the hysterical fundamentalist
evangelists on television are trying not
only to write history all over again but
are betraying public trust in the airwaves and what "information" the people are getting.
What can be done with this onslaught
of 1984-style mind-control going on?
Orville W. Louton, Jr.
Oklahoma
Yours is an open-ended query. American Atheists is set up as an educational
organization. All we can really do is to
pour out as much information in as
many directions as we can. Already we
have the "American Atheist Forum" on
over ninety outlets on cable access; the
American Atheist magazine is widely
distributed and is in over one thousand
libraries; we print and distribute Atheist
books; we have a network of Chapters
of American Atheists on local levels in
about fifty locations; we sponsor a national convention each year.
As we get more money and more
members we will be able to do more.
Hang in and help as you can.

Sanity and religion

Iwould like to ask a few questions and
also give you some fundamentalist pet
peeve points of view if you don't mind.
1. You say that religious persons are
insane. How could you call someone
like James Dobson insane? He's a
noted psychologist.
2. Does your organization have anything against role playing games like
Dungeons and Dragons, Traveler
American Atheist

Are all religionists nuts? Well, some of

them can be real clowns. This one protested the Atheist Pride March in Denver, Colorado, on April 18, 1987.

against its books. I could go on, but

I think you catch my drift.
Devlin Johnson
Minnesota
The classic definition of psychosis
(insanity) is that the person affected has
an inability to relate to reality. If James
Dobson believes in the efficacy of prayer, in life after death, in the cleansing of
his sins by the bloody death of the
mythological god J.C, to that extent
this man is completely off his rocker.
American Atheists do not accept the
concept of a compartmentalized
mind.
A chemist working in a laboratory
cannot leave that laboratory and hie
Run Quest, etc. Religious idiots say himself to a Roman Catholic church in
order to drink wine which he believes
that adolescents who play these
games go nuts. Has anyone from has the chemical composition of blood.
He cannot eat a wafer which has the
your organization done any research
biochemical composition of living flesh.
on these games?
What he is ingesting is wine and a small
3. Do you feel that this so-called academic freedom proposed by the 700 dough wafer. If he thinks otherwise, to
Club is really academic freedom or that extent this man is completely off his
rocker.
really a smoke screen for academic
A healthy mind in a healthy body
selective freedom? What I mean by
academic selective freedom is, for simply cannot be infected with such irexample, that the 700 Club wants to rationality, such inability to relate to repropagate its wacko views in public ality. These people who have such an
schools. Knowing that it couldn't do inability need psychological counseling.
American Atheists has only hearsay
this openly, it convinced the school
knowledge about Dungeons and Drasystem to adopt a fifty-fiftybalancewhich is really the biggest farce of all. gons and is therefore not sufficiently inWhat it really does is select which formed as to be able to formulate an
secular books willbe allowed in pub- opinion. We know of no members of
American Atheists who are involved in
lic schools. Even so, the secular
this "role playing. "
books willamount to only 10 percent
of the total. The other 90 percent will
The "academic freedom" proposed
be 700 Club-endorsed books. In that by the 700 Club is a device to include
way the 700 Club can get school kids religion in public schools. In the United
to its side. By making it look like States children are in educational instiacademic freedom, what really hap- tutions supported by tax dollars and
pens is that with 90 percent of the attendance is compulsory. Every wacko
in 'the land sees this system as a tailorbooks being Christian, the humanist/
secularist 10 percent won't have an made vehicle for indoctrinating children
impact on young persons' minds. of an impressionable age into his pet
And you can bet your bottom dollar theories. Religion has been at the forethe 700 Club willmake sure that the front of the groups seeking entry into
secular books in school will be so the public schools because religion has
never been able to gain as adherents all
weak that they won't have a chance
Austin, Texas

February

1989

of the populace of the United States.

With all of its coercive methods, its
financing, its support from the state, in
the three hundred plus years of existence
of this land, religion has never been able
to coax even 50 percent of Americans
into church membership. That speaks
to the common sense of the average
American and the abysmal failure of
religion which, in the final analysis,
really has nothing to offer anyone.

Nonviolent protest
We have seen that the protest tactic
of nonviolence has served (sort of) to
stop the Vietnam War, to integrate public conveyances, restaurants, schools,
etc., in the United States. Now it is being used against the apartheid policies of
the racist regime in South Africa and its
toadies, the United States universities
and Wall Street.
Does Atheism take a stand on the efficacy of this tactic for social protest?
Should Atheists "turn the other cheek,"
as it were, or should they take up arms
against oppression? What has been the
tactic of American Atheists in its struggle?
Michael Dews
Texas
American Atheists is currently experimenting with picketing.
What Dr.
O'Hair has discovered in her eleven
arrests is that one cannot fight when
one is in jail. Since those on the Atheist
frontlines are few and do not have the
hefty support that they should have, the
tactics currently are "stay out of jail. "
Recently, when Robin Murray-O'Hair
was arrested and jailed, the first effort
made was to get her out from behind
those bars - before anything else was
done.
There are literally hundreds of tactical maneuvers that are efficacious. As
our turn for confrontation
becomes
more necessary, we will then evaluate
the situation and make an appropriate
decision.~
Page 13

News and Comments

Dan Quayle on Atheism

The new vice president

told the National
Religious Broadcasters
Convention exactly
what he thought of
Atheism - and his
remarks were hardly
favorable.

The news in this magazine is chosen to

demonstrate, month after month, the
dead reactionary hand of religion. It
dictates our habits, sexual conduct,
and family size; it dictates life values
and life-style. Religion is politics and,
always, the most authoritarian and reactionary politics. We editorialize our
news to emphasize this thesis. Unlike
any other magazine or newspaper in
the United States, we are honest
enough to admit it.

Page 14

ment to our Constitution, which prohibits Congress from making any law "respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof," is
the best gift the Founding Fathers have
given to us. And he taught his son
Eugene, my grandfather, to love both
t's been ten days since Ibecame Vice the Bible and the First Amendment.
President, and they've been pretty
Grandfather Eugene went into the
remarkable for my family and me. newspaper business, where he tried to
I've learned a lot. A most important les- apply his father's lessons to the roughson for me is the need to keep the pomp and-tumble of everyday life.His lifebore
and glitter in perspective. That's why I witness to the vitality of another part of
so admire the behavior of one of our the First Amendment, the clause progreat Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt. Be- hibiting Congress from enacting any
law, "abridging the freedom of speech,
fore retiring to bed at night, Roosevelt
and his friend, the naturalist William or of the press." And since I too worked
Beebe, would go to and look up at the on a newspaper for several years, I consky. "That's that Spiral Galaxy in sider myself a First Amendment fan, as
Andromeda," they would chant. "It's as well. So I guess you could call us all a
large as our MilkyWay. It is one of a hun- First Amendment Family.
Of course, all the parts of the First
dred million galaxies. It consists of one
hundred billion suns, each larger than Amendment - the clauses guaranteeour sun." Then Roosevelt would turn to ing freedom of religion, speech, of the
his friend and say, "Now I think we're press, and the right of petition - all of
these parts are related, since they all
small enough. Let's go to sleep."
Contemplating the heavens every
derive from the idea that God has given
night is certainly one way to avoid a mankind certain inalienable rights.
swelled head. But it's not the only way. Which brings me to the main point I
Worshipping God in our churches and would like to stress this afternoon: that
synagogues is another, even more effec- you, as religious broadcasters play a
vital role in maintaining the foundations
tive way of coming to terms with our
of our democracy. You do this in part by
own limitations, our own mortality.
"What is man that Thou art mindful of strengthening the moral values of our
him?" asks the Psalmist, "And the son of citizens, by reminding them of the difference between right and wrong, good
man that Thou visitest him?"
These words are very important. For and bad, true and false; but equally
they remind us, as do so many other important is your role in reminding all of
verses in the Bible, that there is a higher
us that the state is not the be all and end
standard against which all our worldly all of human life, that there is a higher
authority to which even the mightiest
actions must be measured.
Ten days ago I took an oath to uphold among us must submit.
and defend the Constitution of the
In Chapter 22, verse 21 of Matthew,
United States. I took the oath on our we read the following: "Render therefamily Bible, the Bible my great-grandfore unto Caesar the things which are
father gave to his bride back in 1890. Caesar's, and unto God the things
Great-grandfather Pulliam was a Meth- which are God's." This biblical injuncodist preacher, a man who lived by the tion teaches us that the individual must
Bible and its values. I'm sure he agreed not be subordinate to the state. It
with Abe Lincoln, who called the Bible, teaches us that there exists an inviolable
"The best gift God has given to men." realm of individual thought, action and
He also believed that the First Amend- expression that is totally beyond and
The following is the complete text
of the remarks by the vice president
to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, on January 30,
at the Sheraton Washington Hotel,
Washington, DC.

Il

February 1989

American Atheist

News and Comments

outside of state control.

Our Founding Fathers believed in the
existence of such a realm. As the Declaration of Independence makes clear,
the Founders based their democratic
conviction on the belief that "all men are
endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights." "To secure these
rights," the Declaration continues,
"governments are instituted among
men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed." Thus, rather
than subordinating the individual to the
state - as virtually all previous forms of
government had done - the Founders
created a system of government whose
avowed purpose is the protection of the
God-given rights of the individual.
Today we are so used to our democratic form of government - and its
attendant liberties - that we sometimes
forget how remarkable it all seemed 200
years ago. But let's think back into the
world of the 18th Century. Think of all
the intolerance, all the persecution that
went on then, and that had been part of
the daily landscape since time immemorial. And now listen to these words,
addressed by George Washington to
the Hebrew Congress of Newport on
August 17, 1790."It is now no more that
toleration is spoken of, as ifit was by the
indulgence of one class of people, that
another enjoyed the exercise of their
inherent natural rights. For happily the
government of the United States, which
gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that
they who live under its protection
should demean themselves as good
citizens, in givingit on all occasions their
effectual support ... May the children
of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in
this land, continue to merit and enjoy
the good will of the other inhabitants,
while everyone shall sit in safety under
his own vine and figtree, and there shall
be none to make him afraid."
The meaning of those eloquent words,
spoken nearly 200 years ago, was truly
revolutionary! No wonder the great British historian, Lord Acton, said that, "In
Austin, Texas

the strictest sense, the history of liberty creasingly aware and concerned that,
dates from 1776,for never till then had almost a year after they cut off aid to the
men sought liberty knowing what they democratic resistance in Nicaragua, the
sought."
situation for democracy and human
Of course, since the American Revo- rights in that country has, if anything,
lution of 1776,the idea of liberty - and worsened.
The yearning for freedom, and for reof religious liberty - has captured the
imagination of the world. Millions of im- ligious freedom, is nowhere more deepmigrants have come to this country in ly felt than in the communist world.
search of liberty. And millions more con- There, too, positive changes are haptinue to look to the United States for pening. In Poland, the authorities have
support and encouragement. We dare finally agreed to negotiate with Solidarnot let them down. For America is never ity. And throughout the entire Soviet
true to herself unless she defends the empire, pressures for change are mounting. Let us probe and examine to see if
cause of freedom.
During the Reagan-Bush years, the perestroika really does mean change.
cause of liberty made some truly re- Let us hope for change - but let us be
markable strides. In the Philippines and realists. As President Bush said a few
the Republic of Korea, "people power" months ago, it's still an iron curtain, but
has won stunning victories. In Pakistan, it's beginning to rust, and shafts of light
free elections have been held. And in are pressing through.
These shafts of light are illuminating a
Latin American more than 90% of the
population live under democratic rule universe that many Americans barely
today, compared to only about a third a knew existed. It's a universe whose inhabitants, until quite recently, have
decade ago.
I'll be leaving for Latin America on been unable to voice their true thoughts.
Wednesday to visit Venezuela, an estab- But now ordinary citizens are speaking
lished democracy, and EI Salvador, a out, and what they say bears heeding.
democracy still struggling against total- Listen, for example, to what Arunas
itarian forces trying to strangle it. My Zebriunas, Chairman of the Filmmakers
Union of Lithuania, told the New York
message willbe democracy, democracy,
and more democracy. Because with de- Times last week: "The root of the probmocracy comes freedom, and with free- lem," he said, "goes back to the first
dom comes hope and opportunity. And years of Soviet rule. The Party, right
so as Vice President, I will seek to help from the beginning, felt it knew best,
extend the cause of democracy and that it had all the answers. So it set out
human rights around the world. I will on a chosen path that led, inevitably, to
consider my time in this office well spent a concentration of power in the hands of
if, by the time I leave it, I have done my the Party, to central control of the economy, to a culture in which individual
part to see to it that more people around
the world can worship their God in initiative was suppressed. This was all a
mistake."
freedom.
But how did this mistake happen?
When I think of freedom and democracy in this hemisphere, I can't help but How did the Communist Party gain
such appalling confidence in its own
think of some of the glaring exceptions
wisdom, indeed, its own omniscience. I
to this movement toward democracy
and freedom - exceptions like Cuba, think the root of the matter all comes
and Panama, and Nicaragua. But what- back to a hatred of God, to a rejection
ever the obstacles, the United States is of the entire concept of religious freecommitted to democracy and human dom. The founder of the Soviet state,
rights throughout this hemisphere. And Lenin, put it very bluntly. "Every religious
I'm sure that many in Congress are in- idea," Lenin said, "every idea of God,
February 1989

Page 15

News and Comments

even flirting with the idea of God, is

unutterable vileness ... vileness of the
most dangerous kind. Every defense or
justification of the idea of God, even the
most refined, the best intentioned, is a
justification of reaction."
Well, the contrast- could hardly be
plainer, could it? On the one hand, we
have the Fathers of the American Revolution, with their belief in the existence
of a Creator whose laws have placed irrevocable limits on the power of the
state; on the other hand, we have the
Father of the Soviet Revolution, who
denied the existence of a Creator and
who believed that there should be no
limits to the power of the Party. Look
how differently both revolutions turned
out. Look how much good has come
into the world as a result of the first
revolution and how much evil has entered the world because of the second.
Who says ideas don't have consequences?
Religious freedom is, in a way, the fundamental freedom, because it serves as
the foundation for allthe other freedoms.
When the state recognizes the religious,
freedom of its citizens, it also recognizes
the limits to its own power, limits within
which all the other freedoms can take
root and grow. Conversely, when the
state refuses to recognize the religious
freedom of its citizens, it proclaims that
even in the most intimate recesses of
the human soul, the will of the state
must reign supreme. How then can any
of the other, more public freedoms
flourish?
But it is not enough for us merely to
congratulate ourselves on the superior
wisdom of our forefathers. We must
continue to advance the cause of de, mocracy and human rights at home and
abroad. In particular, we must see to it
that, ifthere is to be a human rights conference in Moscow in 1991,[it] is not just
a public relations extravaganza for the
Soviet leadership; and we must insist
that all the agreed-upon conditions for
such a conference are met - conditions
such as free contact of Soviet citizens
Page 16

with delegates and visitors, and that all

scheduled meetings take place in
conditions of unimpeded access and
openness. And here at home, we must
insure that all the First Amendment
freedoms - including the freedom of
religion - are accorded their just and
proper due.
My friends, I have spoken a good deal
about freedom this afternoon, and especially about religious freedom. Let me
close these remarks with one of the

finest statements about freedom that I

have ever heard. It comes from the late
General Omar Bradley, one of the
greatest soldiers this nation ever had. It
goes like this: "Freedom - no word was
ever spoken that has held out greater
hope, demanded greater sacrifice, needed more to be nurtured, blessed more
the giver . . . or came closer to being
God's will on earth."
Thank you and God bless you.~

The telephone listings below are the various services where you may listen to
short comments on state/church separation issues and viewpoints originated by
the Atheist community.
Phoenix, AZ
Tucson, AZ
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA __
Sonoma County, CA _
San Jose, CA
God Speaks
Greater DC
Denver, CO
Southern Florida
Tampa, FL
Atlanta, GA
Northern Illinois
Detroit, MI
Minneapolis, MN
February 1989

(602) 273-1336
(602) 623-3861
(619)660-6663
(415)668-8085
(707) 792-2207
(408) 377-8485
(408) 257-1486
(703) 280-4321
(303) 252-0711
(305) 474-6728
(813)677-7731
(404) 662-6606
(312) 506-9200
(313)272-1981
(612) 422-1126

Northern New Jersey

Keene, NH
New York City, NY __
Dial-a-Gay-Atheist _
Columbus, OH
Findley (Toledo), OH
Portland, OR
Philadelphia, PA
DIAL-THE-ATHEIST
Austin, TX
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
Dial-a-Gay-Atheist
Salt Lake City, UT __
Seattle, WA

(201) 777-0766
(603) 352-0116
(212)861-6520
(718)899-1737
(614)294-0300
(419)423-4090
(503) 771-6208
(215)533-1620
(512)458-5731
(214)824-5800
(713) 522-5964
(713) 880-4242
(801) 364-4939
(206) 859-4668
American Atheist

, News and Comments

The honorable George

11

midst the speculation as to what

kind of president Bush would be if
elected, American Atheists carefully watched his campaign to see if
there was any overt manifestation of his
religion, what his opinions about state/
church separation were, or how he felt
about the lack of civilrights of American
Atheists. By and large Bush was cagey,
identifying with mainstream Protestantism and depicting himself as involved
with the political arena alone. He did not
excessively seek out members of the
clergy for photograph opportunities, although the Republican convention itself
had a plethora of prayers and religious
figures - most notably Billy Graham
constantly seated with the Bush family.
Then Robert I. Sherman, who was
covering the presidential campaign for
American Atheists, decided to openly
confront the then vice president to clarify where he stood on the issue of civil
rights for American Atheists. This Sherman did on August 27, 1988,when Bush
was in Chicago. The answer was so startling as to be unbelievable.
Sherman had asked Bush what he
would do to win the allegiance of American Atheist voters. Receiving an evasive reply, Sherman pressed the issue:
did the vice president recognize the
equal citizenship and patriotism of the
Atheist community? The shocking answer was that the vice president did not.
Throughout his presidential campaign, Bush emphasized the issue of requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in public
schools - a pledge which excludes
Atheists from the ranks of "loyal citizens." At the time American Atheists
was again challenging the constitutionality of a pledge "under god," this time on
behalf of the Illinois schoolchild Ricky
Sherman. On October 29,1988, Robert
Sherman confronted the co-chairman
of the Bush-Quayle '88 Illinoiscampaign,
Ed Murnane, seeking the Republican response to American Atheists' activity.
Murnane held that"Everything American
Atheists does ... is bullshit."
American Atheists waited to see if
~

Are Atheists secondclass citizens?

The president answers
- sort of.

The news in this magazine is chosen to

demonstrate, month after month, the
dead reactionary hand of religion. It
dictates our habits, sexual conduct,
and family size; it dictates life values
and life-style. Religion is politics and,
always, the most authoritarian and reactionary politics. We editorialize our
news to emphasize this thesis. Unlike
any other magazine or newspaper in
the United States, we are honest
enough to admit it.

Austin, Texas

February

1989

Bush would be elected and then in December wrote to him to ask him to apologize to American Atheists for his remarks in the August 27 encounter and
those of his representative on October
29. Vice President Bush ignored the
letter, which is reproduced here. Amazingly, the news media of the nation, to
which a copy of the letter was also sent,
also ignored the letter. Would such an
insult to any other minority have been
accepted? We doubt it.
But until Bush assumed office, the
only response to our demand for an
apology was silence. Later, Bush's actions in regard to religion spoke for him
when he had no words for American
Atheists.

The first week

The first indication of how Bush felt
about the propriety of including personal religious belief in public lifecame in his
inaugural address. He began it with a
prayer of his own composition:
Make us strong to do your work,
willingto hear your will, and write
on our hearts these words: "Use
power to help people." For we are
given power not to advance our
own purposes, nor to make a
great show in the world, nor a
name. There is but one just use of
power, and it is to serve people.
Help us remember, Lord. Amen.
Needless to say, Bush was not sworn in
with his hand on a copy of the Constitution as American Atheists had demanded.
Apparently all the praying and Biblefondling at the inauguration did not satiate the Bush thirst for god, for immediately after the ceremony the new president led his clan to St. John's Episcopal
Church (conveniently located by the
White House) for a service complete
with hymn-singing.
Bush's first act as president, on January 20, was to sign a proclamation that
the first Sunday of his presidency be a
Page 17

News and Comments

To the president-elect

Before you take office, we are interested in having you clarify to us and to
the media if you really think that the 9
percent of the populace who are Atheists (U.S. Bureau of Census) cannot
be citizens and patriots. It would appear that to heal wounds an apology to
the Atheists of the nation by our
president-elect is in order.
December 19, 1988
At a later time, after the inordinate
fuss you made in respect to the recitaThe Honorable George Bush
tion of the Pledge of Allegiance with its
Vice President of the United States
reference to "one nation under God,"
The White House
Robert Sherman brought a case in the
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Federal District Court in Chicago, IlliWashington, D.C. 20500
nois, (Sherman v. Community Consolidated School Dist. 21, filed October
Dear Mr. Vice President,
28, 1988) because his son, Ricky, age
During the recent presidential cam- six, is forced - as an Atheist - to acpaign when you were in Chicago, Illi- knowledge the existence of god each
day in the all-school pledge in his classnois, you were in a short confrontation
(preserved on news video) with Mr. room under Illinois statutory law.
Robert I. Sherman, the national spokes- When your office was informed of this,
man for American Atheists. You will, the followingrecorded dialogue between
Ed Murnane, Co-Chairman of the
no doubt" remember the exchange
which was recorded as follows at your Bush-Quayle '88 Illinoiscampaign, and
Rob Sherman occurred on October
media interview, O'Hare International
29, 1988:
Airport, Chicago, August 27, 1988.
The following letter, sent to Mr.
Bush before the inauguration, described the offensive incident in
which Bush had insulted the integrity of all American Atheists and
demanded his apology.

Sherman: What willyou do to

win the votes of the Americans
who are Atheists?
Bush: I guess I'm pretty weak
in the Atheist community. Faith
in god is important to me.
Sherman: Surely you recognize the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are
Atheists?
Bush: No, I don't know that
Atheists should be considered as
citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
Sherman: Do you support as
a sound constitutional principle
the separation of state and
church?
Bush: Yes, I support the separation of church and state. I'm
just not very high on Atheists.

Page 18

Sherman: American Atheists

filed the Pledge of Allegiance lawsuit yesterday. Does the Bush
campaign have an official response to this filing?
Murnane: It's bullshit.
Sherman: (taken aback) What
is bullshit?
Murnane: Everything that
American Atheists does, Rob, is
bullshit.
Sherman: Thank you for telling me what the official position
of the Bush campaign is on this
issue.
Murnane: You're welcome.
The Federal District Court in which
the suit is filed does not consider the
legal activity to be "bullshit." The child,
Ricky Sherman, who is being deprived
of his freedom of conscience and free-

November 1988

dom of speech, does not consider the

activity to be "bullshit." American
Atheists and Mr. Robert Sherman do
not consider that the Illinois state
breaching of the U.S. Supreme Court
decision in the case of West Virginia
State Board of Education v. Barnette
(391 U.S. 624, June 14, 1943) is
"bullshit."
It would appear that, to heal wounds,
an apology to the Atheists of the nation
from Mr. Murnane is in order.
We desire, at this time, and because
of the above incidents, that you consider being sworn into office with your
hand upon a copy of the Constitution
of the United States instead of upon a
Bible. You would be the first president
in history who would thus show a symbolic presentation of consideration to
the document which he swears to protect and defend and which bases our
government, as amended, upon the
premise of separation of state and
church. A secular act of acceptance of
office would be more in accord with
the spirit and purpose of the Constitution than would the intrusion of religion
by use of a Bible.
We would appreciate a reply in this
matter 'before Inauguration Day. We
want to know the attitude that your administration will take in regard to
growing American Atheism.
AMERICAN ATHEISTS, INC.
Jon G. Murray,
President
JGM:eis
copy to all media
Every Atheist in the United States
must write Bush insisting that an
apology be given to the hundreds
of millions he has insulted by his
remarks. And if you are an Atheist
veteran, remind the president that
you, as a patriot, have already
risked your life for your country.

American Atheist

News and Comments

Proclamation 5936 of January 20, 1989

National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving, 1989

National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving. So that Atheists would know who
was in charge during the next four
years, in the proclamation Bush declared that "I am humbled before God
and seek His counsel and favor on our
land." The full text of the proclamation
accompanies this article. Apparently he
is keeping good on his promise to his
god, for in early February he mentioned
that he prays daily for guidance.

February developments
American Atheists was stillwaiting for
a formal reply to its December 19 letter,
when Bush remarked at a prayer breakfast on February 1:
All of us should not attempt to
fulfill the responsibilities we now
have without prayer and a strong
faith in God .... I can also tell you
from my heart that I freely acknowledge my need to hear and to
heed the voice of Almighty God. I
began my inaugural address with a
prayer out of a deep sense of need
in desire of God's wisdom in the
decisions we face. And ifwe're going to walk together toward a
more caring, more generous America let us all share in paving the
way with prayer. Thank you all.
God bless you.
Atheists, of course, do not hear the
voice of any imaginary beings, whether
a god or the tooth fairy, so at this point
the staff of American Atheist General
Headquarters rather doubted that a
reply would ever be received or that
Atheists would be included in Bush's
vision of a "kinder, gentler America."
But wonders never cease. President
Bush finally instructed his counsel, C.
Boyden Gray, to answer American
Atheists' letter in late February 1989.
Perhaps the numerous letters received
from American Atheist veterans, peeved
at having their patriotism questioned,
prompted the reply. Gray's letter hardly
constituted an apology, but it read as
Austin, Texas

By the President of the United States of America

A Proclamation
On this Bicentennial of the Presidency of the United States of America, it is
fitting to recall our first President, George Washington, who believed in our
country's divine destiny. He said, "No people can be bound to acknowledge and
adore the invisible hand, which conducts the affairs of men, more than the
people of the United States."
As we celebrate this American Bicenntenial Presidential Inaugural, we celebrate America's brotherhood - our common ideals, our common kinship, our
national unity. We celebrate America as "one nation under God."
As I assume the office of President, I am humbled before God and seek His
counsel and favor on our land, and join with our first President who said, "...
it would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act, my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe ... that his benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United
States, a government instituted by themselves for these essential purposes."
NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE BUSH, President of the United States of
America, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the
United States, do hereby proclaim January 22, 1989, a National Day of Prayer
and Thanksgiving and call upon the citizens of our great Nation to gather
together on this day in homes and places of worship to pray in thanksgiving for
our blessings of peace, freedom, prosperity, and Independence. Let all Americans kneel humbly before our Heavenly Father in search of His counsel and for
His divine guidance and wisdom upon the leaders of the United States of
America.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of
January, in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and eighty-nine, and of the
Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirteenth.
follows:
February 21, 1989
Dear Mr. Murray:
Your letter of December 19,
1988,to President Bush has been
referred to me for reply. As you
are aware, the President is a religious man who neither supports
atheism nor believes that atheism
should be unnessarily encouraged
or supported by the government.
Needless to say, the President
supports the Constitution and
laws of the United States, and you
may rest assured that this Administration will proceed at all times
with due regard for the legal rights
of atheists, as well as others with
whom the President disagrees.
Sincerely
C. Boyden Gray
Counsel to the President
That sort of non-reply hardly reassures American Atheists that Bush perceives that "due regard" means "equal
regard." As for the Constitution - well,
not long after this letter was mailed,
February 1989

Bush proclaimed yet another "National

Day of Prayer" on March 17, 1989.This
second proclamation began, "Throughout our Nation's history, Americans
have been a prayerful people, giving
thanks to our Creator for the blessings
of liberty and seeking His help and guidance in preserving them." What about
Americans who are not "prayerful"?
The National Day of Prayer is set for
May 4.
Is all the proclaiming Bush has done
just pomp and circumstance, not signifying a disregard for Atheist rights?
Bush does appear to be a very religious
man. News cameras usually caught Reagan by a helicoptor, but Bush is most
often seen by church doors. Bush has
already made clear his religious stance
on the abortion issue in numerous public statements. Our conclusion: President Bush is a much more formidable
foe of Atheism than was the bungling,
amiable fool, Ronald Reagan. American
Atheists must be wary of this man who
earnestly believes that there is a god and
who would, "in his name" move against
the Atheist community if need be. - R.
Murray-O'Hair and Madalyn O'Hair 21t
Page 19

The Church's Holy War Against

~~gicnc
Il

ames Anthony Froude (1818-1894),

who was ordained bishop in 1845
and then came to his senses and
wrote The Nemesis of Faith, 1 labeled the
generations and beliefs between 400 and
1500 as "the long night of ecclesiasticism." Indeed, that "long night" which
engulfed Europe was a period, with only
minor exceptions, of infinite squalor and
degradation, and it was not until the
middle of the eighteenth century that
Europeans finally managed to crawl out
of the sewer, or the manhole, of Christian
filth and superstition and begin taking
baths again. Unfortunately, the resurgence of this pernicious religion in the
nineteenth century sent many tobogganing back into the cesspool.
It has been said, and rightly so, that
lying by omission soon adds up to very
positive lying. Quite. Even nowadays,
the "shovel brigade" - to quote Mr.
Reagan - or the vested interests of the
Church still manage to sweep embarrassing truths aside while industriously
propagating enormous lies. For instance, in school texts, as well as in the
pious eulogies written by Roman Catholic historians, one reads of the spiritual solace and alleged material benefits
which "heroic" Christian missionaries
brought to those sorely tried European
peasants in the sixth century of our era,
after the poor devils had been chased
11847;reprint, Brockfield, VT: Gregg international.

from pillar to post by Attila and his

merry men, the Visigoths. Unfortunately, there is a thunderous silence regarding the truly appalling consequences of
Christianity's victory over Roman hygiene. Now, of course, judged by the
alien yardstick of the new mythology,
Christianity, the sexual morals of the
Romans were nothing to write home
about. The fact remains that those pagan Romans had created a more than
civilized state in which hygiene, social

What was one of

Christianity's first gifts
to the world?
Filth and disease.
behavior, manners, and the status of
women had been of an exceptionally
high order. After Christianity had triumphed, it became de rigeur to decry all
things Roman and to eulogize our "great
Christian heritage." One is invited to believe in the "civilizing" influence of
Christianity although there is more than
ample incontrovertible evidence which
proves that this strange religion which
glorified celibacy, poverty, and filth actually plunged all of Europe into Paleolithic squalor and physical, moral, and
intellectual degradation and atrophy.

It is far from easy to follow the thread

of reason through those unwashed generations and demented beliefs between
400 and 1500. And the efforts of the
"shovel brigade" of Roman Catholic historians has not facilitated matters. According to their pious scenarios, Christian missionaries - all pure, highminded idealists, corseted in virtue advanced resolutely towards the ravaged provinces, offering spiritual consolation to the miserable survivors of the
Great Invasions. In order to convert
those pagan peasants, as well as feed
them - for they were all half-starved those godly men turned themselves into
ploughmen. Soon the unfortunate inhabitants of the devastated regions began to group themselves around these
saintly men, and villages sprang up
around monasteries, which were the
first islets of peace to emerge from the
chaos. Mind you, had it not been for the
chaos which followed the dissolution of
the Roman empire and the barbarian invasions, it is more than doubtful that the
Christian ethos would ever have succeeded in obtaining such a stranglehold
on Occidental thought. The new religion had shocked and disgusted the last
Gallo-Roman aristocrats, and years before even the Gallo-Roman hoi polloi
had been hostile toward the very first
Christian missionaries who had turned
up in or around A.D. 150 coming from
Asia Minor, not from Rome. The state of
affairs in the sixth century could not
have been worse, and this is precisely

Soledad de Montalvo
The author is a fourth-generation Atheist, all of whom were educated by Jesuit tutors.
In her case, Soledad's mother was advised that Sol's mind appeared to be "hermetically sealed against religion and mathematics." Known throughout Europe for her
culinary expertise, she is the author of a four-volume book on Women, Food, and Sex
:published by American Atheist Press.

Page 20

February 1989

American Atheist

what facilitated the task of evangelization; in fact, it turned out to be an ideal

setup. All law and order had disappeared, and so had all public and private
schools. Practically all of the survivors
were totally illiterate and therefore incapable of asking any awkward questions
as educated pagans had back in the
fourth century, to which Frazer alluded
somewhat pointedly in The Golden
Bough.2 An educated mind is a cutting
tool, and the greatest obstacle which
the new religion, Christianity, had always
had to circumvent was education. Educated people are generally not amenable to the instruments of persuasion
provided by Roman Catholicism. And
even stupid people, if educated, no longer swallow the "miracles" which their
predecessors unquestioningly accepted. So, for the Church, it was more than
fortunate that Europe at this particular
time was an inexhaustible reservoir of
illiterates, half-starved, severely traumatized, incapable of thinking straight or of
discerning the invidious spiritual parasitism of Jesus Christ's Fifth Columnists
- the missionaries. Had the poor devils
been able to guess what lay in store for
their descendants as a result of embracing this newfangled religion, they would
certainly have slain every missionary.
The heritage of the Great Invasions
was frightful. Famine stalked the land.
Commerce, agriculture, transport had
come to a full stop. Europe swarmed
with gangs of murderous bandits and
footpads who ambushed travelers and
raided isolated farms and dwellings.
After awhile, the best way to stay alive
and to eat one's fillwas to enter a monastery. Come hell or high water, monks,
or most of them, managed to live high
off the hog.
The Church wasted little time showing its true colors. Soon those wretched
"villeins," or peasants, who had become

2Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A

Study in Magic and Religion (New York:
Macmillan, 1925),p. 361.
Austin, Texas

bored vermin upon their persons, but

for centuries all Christian Europeans reigning monarchs, the aristocracy,
popes, the higher and the lower clergy,
monks, nuns, the affluent bourgeoisie,
or middle classes, peasants, and begChristians were forced to labor for free gars - all or 99 percent - harbored
and to pay tithes to the rapacious clergy vermin in their hair and upon their bodand the equally rapacious aristocracy.
ies. For almost two thousand years the
For centuries, the ordinary standard of Church conducted a veritable Jihad
livingin all Christian countries was actu- (holy war) against hygiene, which it won
ally lower than it had been in Neolithic hands down and which had sinister contimes. Between the ninth and the elev- sequences, as we shall see.
enth centuries, famines killedoff half the
As mentioned in my previous article
population of Europe. In Germany and ("The Church's Holy War Against HyFrance cannibalism was rife, and canni- giene," American Atheist, October
balism persisted in Poland, Silesia, and 1987),St. Jerome (ca. 340-420),cited the
Bohemia until the very end of the Mid- "great Christian scholar" Eusebius>
dle Ages. But even when there were no whose influence lasted until well into the
famines, harvests were wretched and Middle Ages and issued that famous fiat:
"All those who have been washed in
the overwhelming majority of European
peasants suffered from chronic malnu- Jesus Christ [baptized] need no further
trition and an endemic lack of proper vi- purifications. "6
In other words, anyone who had been
tamins, particularly in the winter months.
In passing, it is interesting to note that immersed in the filthy, germ-laden wait was in the sixth century - just about ters of any grotty baptistry tank could
the time when the bishops of the Coun- - for as long as (s)he lived - not only
cil of Macon had been bickering acri- abstain from taking baths but also abmoniously to decide whether or not stain from indulging in any ablutions
women should be classified as animals whatsoever. Of course, as already noted
or human beings - that the plague in my previous article, all of Jerome's
arrived for the very first time in Europe, distinguished predecessors (the "Holy
part of the great cycle of pestilence, fif- Fathers") and his successors (the VIPs
teen in all, which spread like a tide and of the Church) had also strenuously opposed hygiene and soon managed to
caused millions to die." The pestilences
in England, described by Bede- in 664, brainwash Europeans into believing that
672, 679, and 683, appear to have been filth and vermin were posters to holipestis inguinaria, which was also re- ness. They put their heavy foot on the
corded in what was left of Rome in 690. neck of civilization and indefatigably
As soon as Christianity had triumphed, broadcast the news that the "wicked"
Roman hygiene was replaced by pious custom of bathing was really nothing
grime, and what I call the "caste sys- but a shortcut to hell. The end of the
tem," once quite as rigid as that of India, world was imminent; preparation for
broke down completely. Only the most this event was the only useful occupation
disreputable pagan Romans had har3See La Peste au Debut de Moyen Age by J.
N. Biraben and L. LeGolf.
4The Venerable Bede (673-735),Ecclesiastical
History of England (London: Oxford University Press, 1969).
February 1989

5Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260-ca. 339),

theologian and church historian.
6Ecclesiastical History: The History of the
Church from Christ to Constantine, tran. G.
A. Williamson (New York: Penguin Books,
1981).
Page 21

for doomed humanity. Fasting, flagellation, prayer, penitence, and pious grime
were agreeable to the "almighty" and his
"only begotten
son," Jesus Christ.
Apart from this, they never tired of cataloguing the Father's and the Son's hostility toward all those who wavered in
these ascetic pursuits. Ulcered, gangrenous perverts, crawling with maggots,
like Simeon Stylites? and others of his
ilk, were canonized.
Roman hygiene
was excoriated, and the full fury of the
Church was reserved for clean individuals.
By the sixth century, Christians of recent vintage in Western Europe had already become conditioned, so to speak,
and were displaying immense energy
and resourcefulness to auoid any contact
with soap and water. In fact, plain water
appears to have literally terrified them.
This, presumably, is why the Irish had
been shocked and incredulous when
they heard that St. Bridget (453-520),
one of the patron saints of Ireland, announced that she had been vouchsafed
in a vision that all Christians might without fear of offending either god or Jesus
Christ wash themselves twice a month.
The mere idea of washing at all, let alone
twice a month, struck most everyone as
not only frightfully impious, but horribly
risky to boot. This, because like all
Christians everywhere, the Irish were
still hourly expecting the "Second Coming." To risk being caught red-handed
washing one's self when the Savior
turned up! What would Jesus think? All
efforts to propitiate his inevitable indignation would be vain! Needless to say,
Bridget's advice went unheeded, and St.
Asella - the virgin saint - was held up
as the ideal model for all Christians. Not
only had she never washed at all, but
she had acquired huge and revolting
lumps on her knees "like those on the
legs of camels" from kneeling in prayer
upon boulders and stones. If you think

7Saint Simeon (389-459) mortified his flesh

on a stylite (pillar) on Mt. Telanissae in Syria.
Page 22

this an improbable
tale, check your
hagiography. And if you think that hygiene improved, well, it did not. On the
contrary, as the power of the Roman
Catholic church increased, what little
hygiene remaining shrank and shrank,
like La Peau de Chagrin, that magic bit
of shagreen which Balzac wrote about
which simply vanished completely. The
followers of St. Thomas
Becket (11181170) had not only extolled his grime but
had praised the astonishing number of
lice to which he was host. And all serious historians have confirmed that la
pouacrerie (sheer filth) reached its zenith in the allegedly civilized seventeenth century, at the precise time when
the Roman Catholic church was allpowerful in France.
However, make no mistake, Protestants and Protestant countries were no
cleaner than Roman Catholics or Roman Catholic countries. Calvin's Geneva
has been officially classified as being one
of the three filthiest cities in Europe, together with Edinburg and Lisbon. And
this is one of the reasons why Geneva
was a favorite hangout for bacillus pestis
(Black Death). Sad but true, the most
outstanding figures not only of the Roman Catholic church but later those of
the Protestant church all exhibited signs
of what modern psychiatrists
would
classify as serious - very serious psychological disturbances. And it was
invariably the most severely psychopathic individuals who succeeded in influencing the Roman Catholic and, later,
the Protestant churches' policies in sexual matters and corporeal hygiene, or
rather the lack of it. For pious Roman
Catholics and pious Protestants,
hygiene was abhorrent. Christianity made
depredations in all fields and ushered in
bloody horrors for humanity, or a large
portion of humanity, but - as I wrote Christianity ushered in a Golden Age, a
time of epic splendor for pulex irritans
(the human flea), a magnificent plague
vector, and for phtirus pubis (crabs).
D' Aubigne, a contemporary of Henri IV
(1553-1610) and an habitue of the royal

February 1989

court of France,

wrote:

Le rai etaii enuahi de parasites,

ces poux espagnols qui las de
posseder les parties basses, ou
etani trap presses au logis auaient
pris un domicile dans les aisselles
et Ie rand des cheueux, siege de la
couranne. (The king was invaded
by parasites, those Spanish lice
[as crabs were called in sixteenthand seventeenth-century
France,
then at loggerheads with Spain]
which, tired of possessing the lower parts, or being too crowded in
their home, took up their domicile
in the armpits and the hair, seat of
the crown.)"
No doubt, due to improved diet, the
birthrate of these insects soared. Whereupon, they thought increasingly of Lebensraum and turned their attention to
new frontiers. Hitherto, crabs had been
content to exercise their untrammelled
authority in those regions of the human
anatomy known as "the parts of shame,"
but suddenly they were no longer satisfied to live in squalid promiscuity
in
those dark, dank, odoriferous ghettoes,
and the most enterprising ones emigrated to more airy, congenial surroundings.
Let me hasten to add at this point, lest
the reader jump to the conclusion that
crabs occupied a privileged position in
the kingdom of France alone, that - on
the contrary - they were present in full
force in all of the courts of Christendom.
England was even filthier and more verminous than France, Italy, and Germany. It will be recalled that Desiderius
Erasmus." the greatest humanist and
theologian of the Renaissance, had been

8Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigne (1552-1630),

French poet and historian, Oeuvres (New
York: French and European Publications,
Inc., 1980) - contains Historie universelle
depuis 1550 jusqu'a l'an 1601, which is the
cited work.
9(1466?-1536), Dutch scholar.
American Atheist

so revolted by the squalor of London

that he turned down the offer of a royal
pension with a sumptuous residence
tossed in to boot.
Very possibly Erasmus had also been
frightened of the "Sweating Sickness,"
that loathsome and "generally fatal disease which made its maiden bow in England in 1485and caused "great mortality" not only in England but also in
northern and western Europe when it
went on its fourth rampage. To this day,
no one knows whether syphilis was
"Made in America" or not, but the
"Sweating Sickness" was certainly
"Made in England." It was attributed to
the intemperate habits of the English
and the vile climate of England. According to the Roman Catholics, it was a
punishment, the result of having incurred the wrath of the "almighty," a
timely rebuke destined to bring those
"heretical" Protestants off their high
horses. The general consensus among
modern scientists and doctors is that
this particular disease had been caused
by the frightful want of cleanliness of
English houses and their surroundings,
as well as by the equally frightening lack
of corporeal hygiene of the "natives,"
which Erasmus himself described in a
well-known passage and about which
others were more than explicit. Those
sixth-century Christian missionaries
had been the Fifth Column of Jesus
Christ. Bishops and the clergy were
now the army of occupation, and like all
armies of occupation they were extortionate and venal. But unlike the Nazis
who occupied France, they were physically filthy. And soon megaloid Jesus
worship had gotten completely out of
hand, and Jesus was butting into everything, including bedrooms. Apart from
this, Christianity, a profoundly ascetic
and pessimistic religion, had not only
caused vermin to become ubiquitous which was bad enough - but what was
infinitely worse, as Professor Georges
Vigarello noted in his Le Propre et Ie
Sale (The Clean and the Dirty},l0 was
that as late as the sixteenth and the sevAustin, Texas

there continuously.)

enteenth centuries the most eminent

European doctors, as well as educated
laymen, had still failed to grasp the fact
that there was any connection whatsoever between filth and vermin. Everyone
- the world and his wife - was convinced that fleas, lice, crabs, and all of
the assorted fauna which infested men,
women, and children of the highest
rank, as well as the most crapulous beggars, were generated spontaneously by
"corrupt humors" and perspiration.
Furthermore, those swarms of parasites were believed to emerge "naturally"
from all living flesh, precisely as worms
and maggots from decaying flesh. This
"familiarity" or intimate contact with
vermin, as Professor Vigarello wrote,
"served the great melancholy argument
of the Middle Ages." It underscored the
"weakness of man, and the constant
presence of death, and the rapport between this vermin and decomposition
imposed itself. A livingman was already
decaying .... "
Here is one of the typically gloomy
fourteenth-century texts, published in
the admirable book, Le Peche et la Peur
et la culpabilisation de I'Occident (Sin
and Fear and the Culpabilization of the
Occident) by Delumeau Fayard in 1984:
Quels sont les fruits qui naissent
de nous? Les fruits agreables et
tres utiles que nous produisons
sont les lentes, les poux et les
vers, qui sont crees par notre
corps et y croissent continuellement. (What are the fruits born of
us? The agreeable and very useful
fruits which we produce are nits,
fleas, lice, and worms which are
created by our bodies and grow

lOEditions Seui11985.
February

1989

This is both more curious and disgusting than it might at first appear. Not only
the French, but all Christian Europeans,
at this time had been literally eaten up
alive by vermin, yet they manfully resisted washing because they had been indoctrinated since childhood to regard
vermin as natural and washing themselves as unnatural and impious. The
only parts of medieval anatomies that
were washed - at least once a day were hands. A few soigne individuals
would also slosh cold water upon their
faces upon arising, but they were few
and far between, a sort of elite. But apparently no one bothered to cleanse any
other regions of their bodies. Of course,
once a year, during Lent, some pious
bishops, monarchs, and aristocrats
would wash the unspeakably filthy feet
of a number of beggars. The pope, to
this day, still engages in this ceremony,
as all television fans know; popular tradition notwithstanding, the feet which
"His Holiness" allegedly washes have all
been carefully sandblasted beforehand,
as has been derisively pointed out by impious journalists. This totally absurd
ceremony originated because - according to John 13: 10 - Jesus, who had
a foot-washing fetish, informed Simon
Peter, "He that is washed needeth not
save to wash his feet, but is clean every
whit. ... "
One thing is certain - if nothing else
- Christianity had relieved medieval
humanity of the fatigue of thought and
had decerebrated a large portion of hitherto civilized individuals to such an extent that although still alive they were
convinced that their bodies were already
in an advanced state of decomposition
and, like sanious corpses, produced
worms and maggots, as well as fleas and
lice.
In ancient Rome, "every day at the
fifth hour" all slaves would be allowed to
depart from their masters' homes and
would head for the thermae (baths).
Jerome Carcopino de l'Academie FranPage 23

caise in his La Vie quodi tienne a Rome there had been twenty-six public baths the alleged popularity of baths, vermin
a t'apogee de l'Empire'! - a chef
in Paris; by the thirteenth century a pub- remained omnipresent and ubiquitous.
d'oeuvre, incidentally - mentions that lic crier marched through the streets ev- Any number of French women in the
when a famished "parasite," or scrounger, ery morning to inform Parisians that all fourteenth century were still making
turned up long before the time for cena etuves (steam rooms) and bains (baths) their living as professional epouilleuses
(supper) at Martial's home - the fifth were open for business. In Germany,
(delousers) and their job consisted in
hour had not arrived, yet all of the slaves even in villages, bathkeepers made the skillfullytrapping and killing the vermin
had taken off and gone to the baths. rounds in the mornings and would an- which infested their rich clients' hair.
And, by the way, most of those magnif- nounce by earsplitting blasts of horns Anyone who doubts that Europeans
icent Roman baths and thermae provid- that everything was ready in their estab- were verminous to a man should read A
ed their services for free. Wealthy indi- lishments. A contemporary eyewitness, Book of Precedence, which was pubviduals would arrive accompanied by Guarinonius, left posterity an amusing lished in 1869 and contains translations
description of "well educated burghers
their own slaves, who would scrape
of many of those courtesy books which
them off with strygi/s, those ingenious and their wives" as well as the hoi polloi began to appear all over Europe in the
gadgets which removed grime and dead marching barefooted through the streets
early Middle Ages and were written by
skin, or would pay the bath attendants
on their way to the baths, either com- German, French, and Italian authors."
- who were slaves - to do so. Poor in- pletely naked or sporting "Bath Honors,"
Table manners prevailing in all of Eudividuals had to get friends to scrape off short linen robes which concealed the rope were literally hair-raising. The autheir backs or cope as best they could. wearers' fronts but not their backsides
thors of all those courtesy books enUntil the time of Hadrianv men and and obliged modest individuals to hold joined their readers to abstain from
women attended the baths together, but one hand behind for propriety's sake. blowing their noses upon their fingers or
it is unnecessary to say that most "liber- Apart from this, according to Guarino- table cloths and begged them not to
ated" females were the only Roman nius, most of those "Bath Honors" were plunge their hands up to their elbows
women who did so, for obvious reasons.
so badly torn that they failed to conceal into the serving dishes, and they were all
Contrary to Christian propaganda, "af- anything." Those medieval sweating
virtually paranoid of the necessity for all
ter Hadrian, men and women no longer rooms and baths were a very far cry diners to have clean hands. Bear in mind
attended balnae or thermae together, from the sumptuous balnae and thermae that at this time in history fingers were
but went at different hours."13
of Rome; in fact, they were quite prim- the only eating tools. Only reigning monFor all pious Mohammedans, "The itive, a single dressing room shared by archs, princes of the blood, and men of
hamman (bath) was the entrance to the men and women alike. The so-called the highest rank ate out of their own
mosque." For all pious Christians, hy- baths were wooden tubs, encircled by private porringers; all other diners had
giene was abhorrent. What is indeed heavy iron bands, large enough to con- to share a porringer with his or her
ironic is that those Crusades - which tain five or six seated individuals, or two neighbor because they ate in pairs: Evwere undertaken by Western Christians
seaters for couples wishing to be en tete ery diner had his own trencher, thick,
from 1096 to 1291, after the Church had a tete.
rectangular slices of coarse, stale bread
lashed them into collective insanity, euAfter a while, shrewd bathhousethat had to be at least two days old.
phemistically described as decumus
keepers in Germany, France, Italy, and There were no serving spoons or forks,
fluctus (religious revival) - caused
England, began serving food and bever- so all had to fish about with their fingers
baths to be re-introduced in Europe. Re- ages in their establishments. Some peo- in that porringer which they shared with
turning Crusaders were to blame. While ple even practiced their music in bath- their neighbors, grab a portion of food,
in the Orient they had adopted the dec- houses, as did the Meistersingers of transfer it dripping with sauce to their
adent, sinful, "infidel" habit of frequent- Nuremburg, surrounded by bevies of trenchers, and then finally to their
ing hammans. By the twelfth century charming, unclad or scantily clad fe- mouths. That old French expression,
males.f A few aristocrats and mon- Avoir mange a la meme ecuelle, simply
archs installed private etuues and woodllDaily Life in Ancient Rome: The People en tubs in their residences. But despite
and the City at the Height of the Empire,
trans. E. O. Lorimer (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1940).
I2Hadrian (A.D. 76-138), Roman emperor
(117-138).
I3Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome.
Page 24

I4W.Rudeck, A History of Public Morality in

Germany (Jena: 1897).
IsFloss and Bartels, Woman (London:
Dingwall, 1935).
February 1989

I6The Book of Precedences cites, among

others, The Italian Guest by Thomasin von
Zerclaere.published in l215; The Fifty Courtesies of the Table by Fra Bonvicino da Riva,
published in l290; and Courtly Breeding by
Tannhauser.
American Atheist

meant that one had shared an ecuelle

(porringer) with someone during the
course of a meal.
It is fascinating indeed to note that all
of the authors of those courtesy books
had invariably stressed that their readers try to scratch themselves as discreetly as possible. Obviously, they had realized that it was humanly impossible not
to scratch, since men and women of the
very highest rank continued to be the legitimate prey of infinitely mobile armies
of fleas who moved about with disconcerting rapidity and, like the Parthians,
not only gave the impression of being in
several places at once, but possessed
the fine art of seeming to vanish after a
successful raid.
Apart from those maddening fleas, all
upper- and lower-class men and women
had also been tormented by crabs,
which in the thirteenth century had not
yet broken into apotropaic defiance, but
were ganging up. Due to their codware
- as cod pieces were called - gentlemen, in particular, must frequently have
been placed in more than invidious predicaments. According to scholars, the
medieval codpiece was a unique and isolated example of European males attempting to attract attention to their
sexual characteristics. Compared to
these extraordinary objects, even the
most outre, suggestive feminine clothes
- from "see-through blouses" to "miniskirts" - seem almost coy and modest.
However, obviously that cod ware had
not only attracted attention to masculine
endowments but had also provided
warm, cozy, safe havens for crabs happy hunting grounds and ideal breeding grounds - where they had set themselves up like feudal lords, then sent
forth their progeny to grab more and
more territory from their rivals, the
fleas. What is indeed more than curious
is the fact that although in the thirteenth
century public baths and sweating
rooms had become virtually ubiquitous
throughout all of Europe, despite the
presence of these establishments, as
well as a number of private etuves and
Austin, Texas

no longer dared to set foot in them, and

even self-respecting prostitutes avoided
them.
Dutch, French, English, and Italian
archives are stuffed with records of the
wild goings-on in bathhouses and stews.
baths which some affluent individuals In Ghent, Belgium, in 1479, fourteen
had installed in their homes, this failed to hundred crimes were committed in the
have any effect whatsoever on vermin, stews during the course of only ten
which had remained omnipresent and months. In England, in 1411,Henry V orubiquitous. There were two reasons for dered all stews to be shut down because
this. One was that most people, includ- of the "wounds, abominations, damages,
ing monarchs, took an average of one troubles, murders, homicides, larcenies,
bath every four or five months - as did and other nuisances" caused by the
the French monarch Philippe III,known men and women who frequented the
as Philippe Ie Bon (13%-1467)- as in- stews. It is obvious that bathhouses and
dicated in Les Comptes de Philippe Ie stews were then nothing but rowdy, il\Bon, Due de Bourgogne - Collections conducted whorehouses, not at all like
des Voyages des Souverains aux Pays, the decorous, properly managed ecclepublished in Brussels in 1896. Apart siastical brothels often owned by bishops - like that model establishment
from this, it is obvious that any number
of people would go to sweating rooms, built in 1309by the bishop of Strasbourg,
where they perspired abundantly but in which he had installed hard-working
afterward did not bother to bathe or to prostitutes, who soon provided him
change their grotty chemises - if they with an enviable, regular income. Apart
from which, many serious brothels had
owned chemises. But even monarchs,
who at this time possessed the most ex- received ecclesiastical sanction. For
pensive gardes robes, whose inventories instance, the noble family of the Count
have been preserved and which had in- of Hennenberg had been graciously
granted the right to run a family brothel
cluded sumptuous furs and elaborate
velvet or silken gowns, had generally by the archbishop of Mainz in 1457. In
England, prostitutes were known as
only owned one or two undershirts
which they had been in the habit of "Winchester Geese" because most of
wearing next to their skins until the the whorehouses in which they labored
things literally disintegrated and which, belonged to the bishopric of Winchester.
The proliferation of bathhouses and
apparently, were rarely if ever washed.
Needless to say, they stank abominably stews led to bitter rivalry between the
clergy and those upstart bathhouseof stale sweat and body odors.'?
and stew keepers. The clergy considered
Furthermore, innumerable records
that those individuals were barging into
indicate that most European bathwhat had hitherto been the Church's
houses and sweating rooms had turned
into brothels. Respectable women now territory. Reprisals were in order. In a
praiseworthy effort to again attract a respectable female clientele, a number of
bathhouse owners announced that
17A lay poem written by Marie de France in
henceforth, in their establishments, certhe thirteenth century is based on the hero's
tain hours would be reserved for men
filthy shirt, which he had worn nonstop
and others for women only: no more
during his peregrinations. When he returned
mixed bathing, which encouraged familto Brittany, his "dame" was able to find the
iarity of the grossest type. Unfortunatetuck she had stitched into this garment ly, unlike the Romans, Christian Eurothe only shirt the filthy knight had owned
peans did not enjoy unlimited supplies
and which he had worn for donkey's years.
February 1989

Page 25

of running water. All water had to be

fetched in barrels or buckets by professional barreliers, a time-consuming, tedious, and expensive business. So, for
reasons of economy, those bathhousekeepers and stewkeepers had simply
kept the water in which their male customers had bathed for their female customers to use later, following which any
number of what became known as grossesses d'etuues - steamroom pregnancies - resulted. According to learned
doctors, these had been "due to the impregnation of the female sex by itinerant
sperm in the warm waters." It was held
that any woman could conceive by
using baths in which men had remained
for some time. And doctors and priests
continued to circulate this rumor until
the very tail end of the seventeenth century. Anyone harboring any doubts regarding this question may check by
reading Histoire anatomique des parties
genitales de l'homme et de la femme
(Anatomical History of the Genital Parts
of Men and Women) by R. de Graff, first
published in Bale, Switzerland, in 1678,
reedited in 1699.
You laugh? Ah, how limited your
scope, how trivial your imagination!
Stop! Think! Devout Roman Catholics
even nowadays believe in the Immaculate Conception. Now according to the
"inerrant" Bible, at first there had been
one god. Suddenly, there were three:
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
- or the Holy Spirit, as the present
pope calls him. Things were already a bit
complicated; then suddenly this fatherson-holy ghost who are one had a sort
of conference. The "Holy Ghost" goes
charging off and impregnates the Virgin
Mary, resorting, so we are assured, to a
somewhat unusual technique, which
was a chef d'oeuvre of chaste, sublimated
sensuality, infinitely superior to any of
the grosser, noisy deliriums. Now, although the Virgin Mary achieved maternity without losing her virgin status practically a cottage industry in the
Ancient World - she gave birth to the
son, who had already existed - a true
Page 26

tour de force if there ever was one.

Figure that out, if you are able. I never
could.
Do you really think that it was at all
odd that people had actually also believed in those "bathhouse pregnancies"?
And, now, picture one of those "itinerant sperms," lolling about languidly in
the warm, albeit rather grubby, water of
a medieval bathhouse, treacherously
biding its time. A splash! That "itinerant
sperm" points its little ears, feels a sort
of warmth begin to pulse behind its little
eyes. Aha! A female has just stepped
into the water. Its little face wears a
knowing leer as it zooms off at top speed
like a guided missile and zeroes unerring~yin on its target. Christianity had
decerebrated people to such an extent
that they swallowed ludicrous "miracles" as well as the most startling doctrinal absurdities. It is interesting to note
that all of those "noble knights," as well
as the lowliest peasants, exhibited a
peculiar and unnerving mixture of guttersnipe devoutness and the most squalid cruelty, and they were as credulous as
they were dirty. Pigs and rats were the
only refuse collectors in those intricately squalid medieval streets of London
and Paris, which were redolent of fecal
smells: human feces, pig merds, horse
manure. Most people blithely tossed the
contents of their chamber pots into the
streets; some were decent enough to
shout a warning, "Gare l'eau" ("Beware
the water"). Others did not bother, and
pedestrians were often drenched. All
butchers threw the entire entrails and
the blood of slaughtered animals into
the Thames, the Seine, and Lake Geneva, which not only contaminated the
water - hence those far from infrequent outbreaks of lethal dysentery but also caused such fearsome prodigious stinks "in all streets, lanes, parts
adjacent to slaughterhouses
and
shambles" that all those unfortunate
enough to live nearby hardly "dared to
venture to abide in his house there."
French and English monarchs
constantly fulminated and tonitruated
February

1989

against "slaughterhouses and knackers'

yards" which threw "blood and filth"
into the Seine or the Thames. Historical
evidence everywhere in Europe is insistent on the omnipresence of vermin and
the unsuccessful attempts of the authorities to try and impose basic laws of
hygiene and get pigs off the streets. The
Church's lists of injunctions against
bathing and/or washing trails down the
centuries. Pious souls, for a few years,
were no doubt torn by an agonizing conflict between the dictates of religion on
one side and hygiene on the other. Unfortunately, religion won.
And so, in 1347, the Plague, or the
Black Death, returned to Europe. No
one has yet figured out why it did not return long before. As may be expected,
since conditions were absolutely ideal, it
got off to a flying start, and since nearly
all Christian Europeans harbored fleas,
bacillus pestis enjoyed "a splendid
career," to quote the historian Tuchman
(Initiation a I'Histoire de France).l8 Onefourth of the population of Europe, or
twenty-five million people, perished in
the whole of the epidemics, and Christians perished in far greater numbers
than either Mohammedans or Jews,
who had practiced ritual ablutions.
Jesus Christ as a deodorant had been a
flop, and the alleged spiritual purity
resulting from baptism failed to afford
the slightest protection against the
Black Death.
One of the most startling consequences of the Black Death was that it
caused what little hygiene had existed to
recede and to become remoter than the
farthest star. All Europeans turned into
hydrophobes, and they gave up washing
completely, as we shall see.2ft
18Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: the
Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1979).

American

Atheist

Talking Back

Pascal's wager revisited

Gipson Arnold, assistant director of
the Houston Chapter of American
Atheists, replies:

This month's question:

If you're right about
god, when we both die,
we both just die. But if
I'm right, then when I
die I go to heaven and
you go to hell. So why
not believe in god, just
in case?

So you're having a hard time dealing

with the religious zanies who bug you
with what you feel are stupid
questions? Talk back. Send the question you hate most and American
Atheists will provide scholarly, tart, humorous, short, belligerent, or funpoking answers. Get into the verbal
fray; it's time to "talk back" to religion.

Austin, Texas

joys and disappointments that come

with human life; the only shot you have
at loving and delighting in all the people
If the Ayatolla Khomeini is right, then important to you; the only time you
we'll both go to hell. If the Rev. Moon is have to taste everything in this phenomright, then we'll meet the ayatolla when enon we call life - parenthood, friendship, travel, learning, romance. And
we get there. You are characteristically
assuming that your god idea is the only" why? On the off chance that the garbled
one when there are, in fact, an infinite set of instructions some wandering,
number of god ideas. If you choose to malnourished tribe gave on how to get
believe in a god "just in case," then you to someplace called heaven (that no
have no better chance of getting into one's ever come back from) is right and
heaven than I will, because I once con- that all the other sets of instructions
sidered the idea of a god that wanted written down by all the other wandering
malnourished tribes of the world are
only Atheists in heaven.
wrong. Now that's what I would call a
Madalyn O'Hair, founder of Ameri- poor wager.

can Atheists, replies:

This question is a pretty old chestnut,
known as "Pascal's Wager." It was first
thought up by Blaise Pascal (1623-1662),
a French religious philosopher. An odd
character, one of the earliest tales about
him is that he was bewitched as a youngster. He became a Jansenite (after he
was released from the "spell") and then
later became a religious recluse. His
works, Pensees, were published after
his death from a brain lesion.
The answer is obvious. Just as you
do, Pascal strictured the only life he
knew, or experienced, to take a gamble
on another life, unknown and after
death. The Atheist chooses instead to
live fully, richly, deeply, completely now. He does not circumscribe himself
with fears, doubts, and anxieties. The
Atheist knows that "what you see is
what you get." We live our lives while
you waste yours planning to "live" after
your body and your personality are
destroyed.

R. Murray-O'Hair,

David Roth, attorney from Austin,

Texas, replies:
If god is the benevolent, all-powerful
supreme being of the universe, no one,
even Atheists, will be denied heaven (if
such exists). Conversely, the malevolent, destroying, avenging god of the
Bible will always find or contrive some
transgression barring entry. Why waste
precious real-world-time on zero-sum
games about oxymorons?

Kathleen Miller Chase, typesetter

from Austin, Texas, replies:
Personally, I prefer blackjack. The
odds are better.

editor of the

American Atheist, replies:

. You are willingto throwaway the only
life you have; the single, precious, irreplaceable existence you will ever
know; the only opportunity you have to
drink in allthe wonders of this altogether
natural and material world; the only
chance you will ever have to savor the
February

1989

Page 27

The Probing Mind

How did life begin?

Part I:
Approaching

The Problem

Pasteur is reported to have died with a

crucifix in one hand and the hand of his
wife in the other. Despite his pioneering
studies of the purely chemical underpinnings of living cells, he seems never
completely to have given up the Vitalistic
beliefs that sprang so easily from the
religious milieu in which he lived But if (and oh! what a big if!) we although it is now known that he pricould conceive in some warm little vately allowed for the possibility that life
pond, with all sorts of ammonia and might arise spontaneously as the result
phosphoric salts, light, heat, elec- of an "asymmetric force" acting on organic and inorganic materials.
tricity, etc., present, that a protein
The Vitalists, it will be remembered,
compound was chemically formed
believed that living things could not be
ready to undergo still more complex
changes ...
explained completely in terms of matter
Charles Darwin, Letter of 1871 and ordinary energy. Translating into a
more modern jargon the mythological
t took a long time for Europeans to view inherent in the passage from Genestart thinking about the origin of life sis quoted above, the Vitalists' mainin naturalistic terms. Before the de- tained that living beings differed from
velopment of modern biochemistry, it nonliving or dead beings by virtue of
wasn't even possible to define what life their possession of an elan vital - a
was, let alone account for its origin. "vital force." What should have been
the death-blow to this idea had actually
Moreover, the intellectual strangulation
resulting from the triumph of Christianity been delivered back in 1828 by the
in the West lingered long after the period German chemist Friedrich Wohler
known as "The Age of Enlightenment,"
when he synthesized the organic comwhich flowered in the eighteenth century. pound urea from ammonium cyanate,
The magical thinking which permeated
an inorganic substance. (Organic comChristian societies made it all but impos- pounds were so named because they
sible for even great scientists to contem- were found only in organisms.) When
plate the origin of life in purely material- Wohler demonstrated that livingkidneys
istic terms.
were not needed to produce this humble
It is one of the great ironies in the his- substance, he dispelled much of the
tory of science that it was a major ad- mystique that had enveloped the chemvance in scientific understanding which istry of life. By the time of Pasteur's
caused a crippling setback in research
elegant experiments disproving the idea
concerning the origin of life.In the 1860s of spontaneous generation (see Figure
when the colossus of French science,
1), numerous "organic" compounds
Louis Pasteur, disproved the hypothesis
had been synthesized in laboratories. A
of spontaneous generation - the idea mechanistic view of lifehad been steadily
that life can come from nonlife (e.g., advancing, but Pasteur's authority
maggots from rotting meat, or bacteria stopped it cold. It would not be until the
from beef broth) - he effectively ruled twenties of the present century before a
'out the notion that it could be scientifi- completely mechanistic, materialistic
cally respectable to maintain that life view of living systems could resurface
had originated spontaneously in the re- and turn its attention to the problem of
mote past. Pasteur, despite his magnif- how life had arisen on the primordial
icent discoveries in what today would be earth.
called enzymology, remained a Roman
It is not surprising that the first subCatholic throughout his life. In fact, stantial efforts to account naturally for
And the LORD God formed man
of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life:
and man became a living soul.
And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; ...
Genesis 2:7-8

Il

Formerly a professor of biology and

geology, Frank R. Zindler is now a science writer. He is a member of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American
Chemical Society, and the American
Schools of Oriental Research. He is
the director of the Central Ohio Chapter of American Atheists.

Frank R. Zindler
Page 28

February 1989

American Atheist

the origin of life came from the Soviet

Union, where completely Atheistic
views were free to flourish, and from
England - where the steadily growing
Darwinian tradition had rendered the
Anglican church as impotent as the
monarchy. The Russian theorist was a
man by the name of Alexandr I. Oparin;
the British scientist was the multifaceted
freethinker J. B. S. Haldane.
It was in 1924that Oparin systematically first set forth his ideas on how life
could have originated, with the publication of a small book titled The Origin of
Liie.' This was then greatly expanded
into a major treatise, The Origin of Life
on the Earth,2 which underwent progressive revisions throughout the author's life(the third edition was published
in 1957). Haldane's first publication on
the subject (in which he introduced the
idea of a "hot, dilute soup," now referred
to as "primordial soup"), so far as I can
determine, appeared in 1928,in an essay
published in the Rationalist Annual.3
Once the taboo against scientific investigation of the origin of life had been
broken, scientists all over the world
jumped into the fray, and the last fifty
years have witnessed an explosive
growth of information and ideas relative
to the problem of biopoiesis (the formation of living systems). Today, the International Society for the Study of the
Origin of Life publishes a fine journal,
Origins of Life and Evolution of the
Biosphere, which is devoted entirely to
the subject of biopoiesis. While we must
admit that we do not yet have a com pre]Alexandr I. Oparin, Proiskhozhdenie Zhizni
[The Origin of Life](Moscow: Izd. Moskovskii
Rabochii, 1924).
2Alexandr I. Oparin, Vozniknovenie Zhizni
na Zemle, 1st ed. (Izd. Akad. Nauk SSSR,
1936); The Origin of Life on the Earth, 3d
English ed., trans. Ann Synge (New York:
Academic Press, Inc., 1957).
3J. B. S. Haldane, "The Origin of Life," Rationalist Annual, 1928;Science and Human
Life (reprint; New York and London: Harper
& Brothers, 1933).
Austin, Texas

hensive theory explaining biopoiesis

with the degree of reliabilityand comprehensiveness, say, as the origin of species
- or even the origin of stars and planetary systems - we are closing in on
such a theory at an excitingly rapid rate.
Not a week goes by which lacks some
new report of findings relevant to the
problem of biopoiesis.
It was, however, Charles Darwin himself who resolved the dilemma posed by
Pasteur's experiments. In a letter quoted
in part at the beginning of this article, he
explained why Pasteur's demonstration
that life does not arise spontaneously
today is not adequate proof of the
notion that lifecould not have originated
spontaneously in the early days of the
earth.
It is often said that all the conFebruary 1989

ditions for the first production of a

livingorganism are present, which
could ever have been present. But
if (and oh! what a big if!)we could
conceive in some warm little pond,
with all sorts of ammonia and
phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein
compound was chemically formed
ready to undergo stillmore complex
changes, at the present day such
matter would be instantly devoured
or absorbed, which would not
have been the case before living
creatures were formed.'
In short, it is the presence of life already developed which rules out the
40parin, The Origin of Life on Earth, p. 79.
Page 29

emergence of new life from the earth.

Darwin could also have noted that the
confines of Pasteur's swan-necked
flasks were too small to allow for the trillions of different chemical interactions
which must have been required, and
that Pasteur's life was too short to pass
judgement on processes which must
have required millions of years to come
to completion. Scientists attempting to
make theoretical models of proccesses
extending over large volumes of space
and vast stretches of time have to find
ways to scale down both time and
space. It is only in recent times that we
have begun to learn how to design experiments in which we scale down for
time as well as space.
Although Oparin devoted considerable attention to the problem Pasteur
posed for studies of the origin of life,
Haldane was altogether unawed by the
French authority. In his 1928essay, "The
Origin of Life," he disposed of Pasteur's
experiments in one paragraph:
It is hard to believe that any
lapse of time willdim the glory of
Pasteur's positive achievements.
He published singularly few experimental results. It has even been
suggested by a cynic that his entire work would not gain a Doctorate of Philosophy today! But every
experiment was final. I have never
heard of anyone who has repeated
any experiment of Pasteur's with a
result different from that of the
master. Yet his deductions from
these experiments were sometimes too sweeping. It is perhaps
not quite irrelevant that he worked
in his latter years with half a brain.
His right cerebral hemisphere had
been extensively wrecked by the
bursting of an artery when he was
only forty-five years old; and the
united brain-power of the microbiologists who succeeded him has
barely compensated for that accident. Even during his lifetime
some of the conclusions which he
Page 30

had drawn from his experimental

work were disproved. He had said
that alcoholic fermentation was
impossible without life. Buchner
obtained it with a cell-free and
dead extract of yeast. And since
his death the gap between lifeand
matter has been greatly narrowed.?

Before we examine the writings of

Oparin, Haldane, or subsequent students who have pondered the problem
of biopoiesis, it is necessary first to consider just what it is that we seek to
explain. Just what is life, anyway?
Ignoring, for the moment, the question of whether viruses should be considered living, we may note that all
forms universally agreed to be alive
share certain basic features. For example, they are cellular in structure and are
comprised of at least one cell - a jellylike object bounded by a structurally dynamic membrane composed of lipids
(fatty substances) and proteins. Allliving things are able to reproduce - at
least at the cellular level. (Worker ants
and Roman Catholic nuns, although
alive, tend not to reproduce very often
at the organismallevel!) All living things
are capable of evolutionary change, i.e.,
producing offspring that differ from
them to a certain degree. Living things
interact with their environment, (eliminating wastes and taking in raw materials
needed to produce energy), replace
worn-out parts, and grow. The energy
produced may be mechanical (used for
movement) or chemical (used to synthesize the components of the cell).
Light energy also may be absorbed and
used by some cells, and certain types of
cells may actually produce light although light production is not considered a fundamental process of living
systems in general.
In addition to the features listed -

SHaldane, Science and Human Life, pp. 143144.

February 1989

features which can be found listed in

every high school biology textbook published since 1920- we may note that all
modern forms of life can be thought of
as information-containing systems in
which information (specifically, instructions on how to build a living organism
according to certain specifications) is
stored in the form of giant, self-replicating molecules (the genes), which are
maintained by a regular cycle of chemical
changes involving subordinate types of
molecules. The chemical cycle we call
life is diagrammed in Figure 2. Readers
will note that the keystone molecule in
the chemical cycle of life is DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) - the stuff that
genes are made of. Given the proper
raw material (medium-sized molecules
known as deoxyribonucleotides), DNA
molecules are able to reproduce themselves. To produce the raw materials,
however, requires a number of chemical
reactions.
As can be inferred from Figure 2, just
about every chemical reaction occurring
in the cell is regulated by enzymes workhorse proteins which are able to
speed up chemical reactions and cause
them to be carried out with high precision. Enzymes, however, like allproteins,
require the help of RNA (ribonucleic
acid) to be formed. RNA, in turn, is dependent upon information stored in
DNA in order to be formed.
How did this cycle of interlocking
chemical reactions begin? That is the
fundamental problem we have to solve.

In search of the primitive

It is fairly certain that the first living
things were neither elephants nor orchids
- still less were they human beings, as
claimed in Genesis 2:7!In accounting for
the appearance of the first living things,
therefore, we shall ignore such complex,
highly-evolved forms. Quite obviously,
the first living things were extremely
primitive and simple things - simpler
than anything alive today. In seeking
clues to the nature of the first living
things, clearly, we are better off studying
American Atheist

the simplest forms of life available,

rather than worrying about complex organisms such as poppies or penguins. If
we can account for the origin of the
simplest known organisms, the rest of
the living world can be explained by
known principles of evolutionary transformation.
In searching for the most primitive
forms of life,we have to go way down lower than televangelists, even. This
constraint rapidly narrows the field to
just two candidates:
viruses and
bacteria.
Although viruses are structurally simpler than bacteria, it no longer appears
that they are more primitive than bacteria. Moreover, there is dispute over their
Austin, Texas

being completely "alive." Viruses lack a

cellular structure and typically are
composed of just two components: a
core molecule of DNA or RNA, and a
shell or envelope composed of a small
variety of protein molecules. Many viruses are so simple that they were
synthesized in the laboratory years ago.
Allknown viruses are parasites: although
they carry genetic information on how
to reproduce themselves, in fact they do
so only inside the cells of other organisms, and it is really the host organisms
that provide the machinery to reproduce
the viruses! No free-living viruses are
known. Unlike all indisputably living
things known, viruses can be crystallized
like salt or sugar, stored indefinitely, reFebruary

1989

dissolved, and found to be fully capable

of infecting host cells - as if their "lifecycles" had never been interrupted!
Rather than being connecting links
between the nonliving and livingworlds,
as once supposed, it now appears that
viruses are actually the product of a long
evolution and represent the ne plus
ultra of parasitic reduction. Whereas
parasitic animals such as tapeworms
have lost eyes, digestive tracts, and
other anatomical features that their
free-living ancestors once possessed,
viruses seem to have lost all but the
absolute essentials in becoming the
world's most perfect parasites. Having
lost even a cellular structure, viruses are
essentially "naked genes" - clothed
only in a few proteins, which are needed
to assist entry into host cells and subversion of their metabolic machinery.
If viruses are not the most primitive
forms of lifetoday, then we must search
among the bacteria and their kin - the
so-called prokaryotes. Unlike the eukaryotes (organisms which have cells
containing nuclei and other complex
organelles such as chloroplasts and
mitochondria), the prokaryotes are
characterized by extreme austerity of
construction. Their genome (their entire
set of genes) - instead of being organized into chromosomes and surrounded
by a nuclear membrane - typically consists of a long, circular strand of DNA
which is anchored to the cell membrane
and dangles into the cytoplasm of the
cell.In keeping with their overall simplicity,
prokaryotic cells tend to be smaller than
eukaryotic cells: when there's less to be
packaged, the package is smaller.
Of all the prokaryotes known today,
the smallest and least complicated are
the mycoplasmas, the so-called pleuropneumonia-like organisms (PPLO).
Ironically, these organisms were discovered by Louis Pasteur, but he was
unable to isolate them or see them, electron microscopes in those days being as
hard to find as the present king of
France. The smallness (and the necessary simplicity) of these cellular beasties
Page 31

is hard to imagine without help.

In a classic article written long ago in
Scientific Americcn,> Harold Morowitz
and Mark Tourtellotte gave some helpfulcomparisons to help readers visualize
just how small these organisms are. The
smallest PPLO "elementary bodies"
(reproductive cells) are about 0.1 micron
in diameter - about one-tenth the diameter of the average bacterium. This is
one-hundredth the size of mammalian
tissue cells, and about one-thousandth
the size of an amoeba. Thus, a PPLO
cell is as close in size to an atom as it is
to a 100-micron protozoan! (See Figure
3). A better measure of the simplicity of
these organisms is their mass, however,
since that gives one a sense of how
much material is actually packed into
the cell. Considered in terms of mass,
an amoeba is about a billiontimes bigger
than a PPLO, and a laboratory rat is
about a billion times bigger than an
amoeba!
There are theoretical limits to how
small a self-reproducing entity can be,
and a lower limit to the number of
"worker molecules" it can contain. The
PPLO elementary body comes very
close to this theoretically smallestpossible cell, being only about twice its
diameter and eight times its mass. In
terms of molecular content, the PPLO
elementary body is simple enough that
synthesis in the laboratory is not at all
out of the range of possibility in the near
future.
Some numbers: The hypothetically
smallest cell possible would have to contain at least 1.5millionatoms (not counting the atoms of water molecules). The
PPLO elementary body contains twelve
millionatoms. The DNA molecule which
encodes the PPLO genome has a molecular weight of 2.88 million daltons, and
the smallest theoretically adequate
molecule would weigh about 360,000

6Harold J. Morowitz and Mark E. Tourtellotte, "The Smallest Living Cells," Scientific
American, March 1%2, pp. 117-126.
Page 32

PPLO
Elementary
Body

daltons (a dalton is approximately the

weight of a hydrogen atom). In terms of
the number of amino acid and nucleotide
units required (the building blocks of
proteins and DNA/RNA, respectively),
the PPLO gets by with only 600,000, as
compared with the minimum possible of
75,000 (by contrast the "adult" PPLO
contains nearly 9.4 million such building
blocks, and bacteria contain vastly
greater numbers). The most exciting
statistic, however, is the small number
of macromolecules (proteins, DNA, or
RNA) needed to keep a PPLO elementary body running: about twelve hundred. This is so small a number that one
would have to be skeptical to the point
of pathology to suggest that creation of
such an organism in the laboratory will
be forever impossible.
Of course, the creation of PPLO in
the laboratory would not be proof that
life has ever originated without intelligent guidance. It willbe our task in Part
U ("Stardust in the Primordial Soup")
February 1989

and Part III ("The First Cells") of this

article to show that it is possible to
simulate the conditions of the primitive
earth, and to explain first how the chemicals of lifecould have originated without
intelligence, and then how the dynamic
organization of living systems could
have begun. We end Part I with the assurance that the simplest forms of life
known today are very simple indeed,
and they are a realistic target at which
to aim in trying to account for the origin
of life on planet earth. They possess no
frills to sidetrack us in our quest, and
allow us to reconstruct more easily the
intermediate stages which must have
been involved in the transition from the
pre biotic world to the world of life. In
Parts II and III we shall see that life is a
natural product of cosmic chemistry,
and that there is no need to invoke
supernatural powers - breathing or
otherwise - to imbue earth's productions with the pulse of life.~

American Atheist

By Arthur Frederick Ide

Robertson:
The Pulpit and the Power
Don't count Pat Robertson out of the running. He has
wanted to be at the helm of the United States for decades.
He feels that either he - or god - has all of the answers,
and since his communication channels to god are open,
there is no reason that he should not take over.
He lost in the primaries? Are you certain? His showing
was remarkable. His lieutenants are currently at work at
precinct level, county level, state level. He even targets
school boards.
Currently he is back on the "700 Club," doing nicely,
thank you. Tune in to it. You can hear what he is plotting
and planning and pretending even now. He pontificates.
His knowledge on every subject is total; his political
acumen is superb - he thinks.
This book was written at the time of the presidential
primaries of 1988 and is a historical record of what was
possible when a religious loon entered realpolitik - and
scared the bejesus out of the opposition.
Nothing was missed in this book: starting with his
parents' incestuous marriage (they were first cousins),
going to Robertson's lust-filled life in the Marines,
reaching through his own shotgun wedding, to the rush
for doctors when it was discovered that his wife Dede had
cancer, every denouement that you have hoped for is
collected here.
And every looney tunes local politician who helped
him along the way is named so that you will have the
references you need in your own local political arena.
It is important that you take a "morning after" look at
this man and his aspirations.
Paperback. 323 pages. $10.00. Product #5289.

Unzipped:
The Popes Bare All
What about the Vicars of Christ, the Holy Men of the
Roman Catholic Church, the Representatives of God on
Earth? Are they chaste, pure-minded, reasonable tenders
of the flock, having humankind's best interests at heart?
Not exactly. Dr. Ide knows them well and exposes them
for what they have been and are: gluttons, sodomites,
rapists, necrophiliacs, hedonists, slave-owners, pedophiliacs, tyrants, murderers, drug abusers, and drunkards.
Dr. Ide has had an extensive and varied education at
numerous North American and European institutes of
higher learning. He has authored more than 200 books,
making him one of the world's leading names in print.
Unzipped is "Dedicated to all Roman Catholics who
confess their sexual sins to priests who do as they do and
who believe in a pope who claims to be infallible, primaAustin, Texas

ry, and supreme, having the power to the keys to the kingdom of heaven, which history shows actually open the
doors to sex, vice, and violence."
This is one of the most dispassionate, quiet, authentic
books of our times. Heavily footnoted to original historical documents, no one - not even a Jesuit - can say
Ide nay or dispute the counter-revelations which he
brings to you.
Paperback. 189 pages. $6.00. Product #5510.

Evangelical Terrorism:
Censorship, Falwell, Robertson and
The Seamy Side of
Christian Fundamentalism
The tone
introduction:

of this book

is set

III

the author's

With the advent of Ronald Reagan's misadministration, America has slid into the death-grip of social insensitivity, judicial injustice, political fraud
and intimidation, and religious intolerance. The
survival of America is possible only if her citizens
awaken from complacency in the style of Reagan
oratory to see the reality of oppression generated by
the minions of the Reagan government led by the
nefarious Ed Meese who plots a course for the high
priests of the radical right: Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and those who cloak their lust to rape the
Constitution, defile basic freedoms, and fornicate
against civil liberties under the guise and disguise of
being "Christian fundamentalists."
In this heavily documented work written during the
Reagan Administration, Dr. Ide goes after the radical
religious right and most particularly Jerry Falwell, Pat
Robertson, and the Southern Baptist Convention. He
also takes apart the current attack on sexuality through
the attempted suppression of pornography and "deviant"
sex.
Paperback. 193 pages. $13.00. Product #5507.
All three titles available from:

American Atheist Press

7215 Cameron Road
Austin, TX 78752-2973
(512) 458-1244
Please add $1.50 for orders under $20.00 and $2.50 for
orders over $20.00. Texas residents please add 7%% sales
tax.

February 1989

Page 33

Poetry

Two grandmas

Lands end
Flotsom strewn on reefs of ignorance
Midst the rotting ravaged mind
Of the cultures thrusting reverence
To a god they'll never find

My grandson has two grandmas,

One they say is "good."
She tells him Bible stories
As most grandmas would.

And as addled prayers betray them

Hapless wreckage is their pay
Soon the witless seas of trivia
Cover over where they lay

The other is unpopular;

To him she wouldn't tell
That lie ... that bad boys when they die,
Will burn up in a hell.

Had they charted truer passage

In the quest to reach their goal
Sailing winds of wisdom homeward
Steering past each troubled shoal

Nor when his playful day is done

Would she ever say,
Before his little body rests,
To spirits he should pray,

Favoring only leeward thinking

Sheets draw tight before such wind
None save wise and learned sailors
Reach their pleasant journey's end
But alas now floundering helpless
Errant minds take tragic tolls
And instead of logic's lifeboats
They are lost in mystic souls
I'll have only knowledge swamp me
As I tend my final chore
There to yield in full contentment
On my closing quiet shore

Many are called

He was young and practicing
to become a hellfire preacher.
Behind him
long, warm slants of sun
pierced the figure on the tree.
He looked at my blouse and
what twelve years had furnished;
later gave me a swimsuit
and a baseball.
My father said
he would make a fine minister.
Angeline Bennett

Then leave him with that awful thought

That "god is everywhere"
Watching every move he makes
With a giant judgemental stare;
Or any other horrid tale
Unthinking adults read,
Which their parents read to them
About some crazy creed.
I'd rather stay unpopular
Than filla child's mind with
Frightful superstitions
Based on a frightful myth.
Louise Braf

G. Tholen
(1929-1987)

Ignorance
Blind ignorance is the thing to blame,
For the curse that's on us all.
Religion is its generic name,
And it's draped upon us like a pall.
We must now repel this holy shroud,
Not waste a single day,
And ask no help from the kneeling crowd,
For we know what theyshall say.
How came they unto the notion
That faith is some kind of virtue?
Ignorance is the mother of devotion,
And intellect, this fact, willnurture.

"Seek and ye shall find,"

Depends on how you go about it.
If truth is what you have in mind,
My first impression is to doubt it.
For truth is a well-kept secret,
Not revealed to one and all.
Its great revelations, I must regret,
Are never at beck and call.
So how think they that truth is found,
By having faith in childish fable?
They're not as bright as a mangy hound,
Who knows when meat is on the table.
Robert King

Page 34

February 1989

American Atheist

Report from India

Leading the field

n American couple once stayed

with us in Bombay. Like many
other young people from the
West, they had come to India in search
of something they couldn't quite define.
They went away somewhat disillusioned. He, being Black, had found himself at the receiving end of Indian racial
contempt during their travels. She, on
her part, had discerned a good bit of the
covert fraud and hypocrisy of Indian
spirituality. "But why," she asked, "does
so much psychic phenomena occur
chiefly in India?" My answer was that
the darkness here is probably thicker
than elsewhere.
Arthur Koestler, in The Lotus and the
Robot, wrote
~

Twentieth-century
technology
and prehistoric
superstitions both
abound in India. But
which will control
future scientific
research there?

India has never severed its ties

with the magic world .... Though
India is going through an Industrial Revolution of sorts, it has never
undergone a scientific revolution
of the kind which changed the
structure of European thought in
the seventeenth century, supplanting magical causation by
physical causation. In Europe,
that transformation of thought
preceded the transformation of
society. In India it is the other way
round.

In 1978, your editors, assisted by

Joseph Edamaruku, editor of an Indian
Atheist publication, combed India
seeking writers who would consistently
offer an interpretation of Indian religious events. Margaret Bhatty, in
Nagpur, a well-known feminist journalist, agreed that she would do so in the
future. She joined the staff of the
American Atheist in January 1983.

Margaret Bhatty
Austin, Texas

One should hope so. Judging by what

goes on, it would seem that technical
know-how, rather than changing society, is being harnessed to the spreading of
superstition.
Two years ago our one and only government-controlled television network
ran a series much like Ripley's Believe it
or Not, only much worse. The very first
episode concerned a story of rebirth declared to be absolutely true. Viewers
were told the woman concerned now
lives in Bangalore, in case anyone wanted to rush off and check. Other stories
were about ghostly encounters, alien
visitations, and similar far-fetched paranormal nonsense. The programme was
taken off when Rationalists protested
February 1989

about its superstitious content. For a

while there was some heated debate in
the press, for and against. A retired
chief justice of the Punjab High Court
wrote a spirited defence of the paranormal. "Just because a thing cannot be
scientifically proved, that doesn't mean
it doesn't exist," he thundered. Among
some of the inexplicable marvels of
modern times he mentioned were Uri
Geller, the Bermuda Triangle, pyramid
power, and ESP. I sent him a list of recommended reading for former chief justices. But I wonder whether he was indeed interested in knowing the truth.
How many people really are?
I recall an argument with a highly articulate young college student about the
importance of skepticism. The debate
ended with her grasping a pebble firmly in the palm of her hand and saying, "If
I'm convinced that this stone has supernatural powers and it can help me when
I ask its help, what harm is there?"
Not much harm, perhaps, at that individual level. But suppose the contagion spreads, transforming the entire
nation into pebble-worshipping morons? Possibly this prospect is what
makes skeptics like me worry when I
read a news story concerning a miraculous event which took place on January
18in the neighbouring town of Akola. A
sow gave birth to seven piglets and the
devout began thronging the Kohlapuri
Gate area to worship one of the little
pigs as an "incarnation" of the elephantheaded Hindu god, Ganesh.It has a long
trunk for a snout, two prominent tusks,
and a high, broad forehead.
It is rare for pigs to incarnate as
Ganesh. Pawpaws, marrows, and other
gourds do it more often. Though I did
read once about a Hindu householder
who broke open the customary coconut
as part of his puja and was overjoyed to
find it was enceinte with a tiny little Ganesh floating in its water. Such events
are regarded as highly auspicious because Ganesh is a god of prosperity and
good beginnings. He is known to incarnate in the human form in freak babies.
Page 35

As in the Dark Ages in Europe, so in modern India today,

physical deformities and mental defects in humans,
and strange malformations in plants and fruits are seen as
manifestations of divinity.
Hanuman, the monkey-headed god,
sometimes does so, too. As in the Dark
Ages in Europe, so in modern India today, physical deformities and mental defects in humans, and strange malformations in plants and fruits are seen as
manifestations of divinity.
V. S. Naipaul, in India: A Wounded
Civilization (London: Andre Deutsch,
1977),quotes psychotherapist Dr. Sudhir
Kakar as saying that the Indian grasp on
reality is "relatively tenuous," because
the Indian ego is underdeveloped and
"the world of magic and animistic ways
of thinking lie close to the surface."
"We Indians," says Kakar, "use the
outside reality to preserve the continuity of the self amidst an ever-changing
flux of outer events and things." This,
according to Naipaul's understanding of
his own people, means that they do not
"actively explore the world; rather they
are defined by it." With individual judgment reduced and even nullified, our intellectual second-ratedness generates
not "ideas but obsessions."
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that
Western science is now discovering
what Indians have known for centuries,
from Vedic times. Parapsychologists are
merely uncovering our truths. All was
already known here, though not investigated. The civilisation which donated
the concept of the zero to human
thought is now proving how much it can
offer in the realm of the supranormal.
Undeniably, India's greatest contribution to parapsychology is the Hindu theory of rebirth. Hypnotic regression has
proved the scientific basis of this belief:
In man's quest for a cosmic explanation to the Universe, curious
things continue to happen that
shake the solid pillars of science. A
vivid dream that comes true the
next morning. A telephone call
from a person just thought of. A
sudden remembrance of a past
life.
Such experiences, however,
were rarely questioned in a counPage 36

that traditional faith healers do indeed

possess psychokinetic powers. For two
years now a parapsychologist has been
studying the behaviour of a sorceress
who becomes possessed by a local Hindu deity. In her trances she heals the
sick and solves financial and marital
These quotations are taken from a problems. There is always a long queue
special feature on the paranormal in our of people waiting for an audience with
foremost newsmagazine, India Today her.
The scientist tested the woman's psy(Delhi), dated December 31, 1988, ending the year on a heartening note that chokinetic power by having her bless
India is marching steadily forward even wheat seeds and water for sprinkling on
in the realms of the unknown. Until now, them. These seeds were planted along
with another control group. The ones
according to the report, these secrets
were jealously guarded by mystics and blessed by the sorceress grew signifitraditional faith healers. Now our para- cantly faster. The parapsychologist then
psychologists are proving them valid by did further tests and discovered that the
paranormal powers were in the water
laboratory tests with the help of modern
she had blessed. A spectroscopic study
technology.
proved it had changed colour. So potent
Leading the field are Dr. Satwant
Pasricha's celebrated souls, numbering was it that even poison injected into this
two hundred and fifty,who have chosen water was neutralised by the woman's
to take rebirth (see "Recycling Old powers.
In Andhra University psychokinetic
Souls," American Atheist, March 1984).
In twenty-six of these cases, subjects ex- powers are being tested on computers.
hibited strange phobias of those very Subjects sit in front of the machines and
things that caused their deaths. A for- try to make them flash the numbers
merly drowned girl feared wells. A rail they have in mind.
Our parapsychologists
cannot be
accident victim hated trains. Other giveaways were also valuable pointers - a faulted on the sophistication of their lab
boy showing remarkable dexterity with equipment. What eludes them, howan adze proved to be a carpenter in his ever, is replicability. With the wisdom of
last life.A girl who spoke in a bass voice the ages behind us, no doubt this will
when questioned showed she had under- also be achieved sooner or later.
Antisuperstition campaigns always
gone a sex switch from the last birth into
this one. A Muslim boy's becoming a come up against resistance when they
vegetarian and preferring to eat just two expose certain fallacies and find themmeals a day, at sunrise and sunset, clear- selves confronting religious beliefs.
ly proved he had been a Jain. This last Then even educated people exhibit the
kind of conclusive data validates the shut-down syndrome in which the ratioHindu afterlife belief and makes non- nal mind automatically switches itself off
sense of the Christian and Muslim con- because it doesn't care to hear the
truth. But unless skeptics persist in their
cepts of eternity.
Making a quick round of our seats of efforts to disperse superstition, its rehigher learning, we are given a peep by cent resurgence in the guise of religious
the writer into a few "scientific" labora- revivalism is bound to increase. Educattories. Andhra University in Vishakha- ed and uneducated alike are all inpatnam has found that people adept at fected.~
yoga and transcendental meditation
chalk up higher ESP scores. Garhwal
University in Uttar Pradesh has found
try that gave the world the concept of reincarnation. Long before
the term paranormal phenomenon was coined, ancient Indians
had already discovered the ultimate consciousness.

February 1989

American Atheist

Historical Notes

---

TRYING

---.. ~

TO GET GOD IN A GOOD -HUMOR.

Aud the Lord said unto !loses, Take all the heads 01 the people, and hang them up belore the Lord against the sun,
that the ftercc anger 01 the Lord may be turned away from lBrael.-Num. xxv, 4.

110 years ago

The Index of February 1879(vol. 10,
no. 480) reported that in the state of
Maryland, witnesses are stillheld incompetent to give testimony in court if they
do not believe in the existence of god
and a future state of rewards and punishments. This was decided in the Baltimore Court of Common Pleas on February 13, as reported in the Baltimore
Sun of the next day.

90 years ago
Lucifer, The Light-Bearer in its issue
of February 18, 1899(3d ser., vol. 3, no.
7), reported as follows on the fate of C.
C. Moore:
"On Monday, Feb. 7, C.c. Moore and
J.E. Hughes, editor and publisher of the
'Blue Grass Blade,' appeared before the
United States District Court in Cincinnati to be tried on a charge of sending obscene literature through the
mails. . .. Mr. Moore had engaged no
attorney and refused to accept the services of ... an attorney provided by the
court.
Austin, Texas

"Mr. Moore's case was called first. He

shouldered the responsibility for the
publication, and made what the reporters called a 'long, rambling talk.' He said
he did not advocate free love, and could
prove the truth of his statement by
'prominent free love papers in ChicagO.'1 He went back to the [Civil] war,
and told of the position he had taken
then; told the jury he was a prohibitionist and an infidel and an advocate of
morality....
"The jury took ten minutes to find
that the defendant was 'guilty as
charged.' ...
"The followingmorning ... Mr. Moore
was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary ....
"The newspapers say that Mr. Moore
was charged with advocating free love;
but as a matter of fact, this is not true.
The technical charge was simply the

IThis is an obvious reference to the journal

in which the report is written, that is, Lucifer,

The Light-Bearer.
February 1989

100 years ago

The February 2,1889, issue of The Truth
Seeker carried a very interesting interpretation of a Bible verse, seen at left.
usual accusation regarding the depositing in the mail of lewd and obscene
matter. I do not believe Mr. Moore understands what free love is, nor that he
either would or could seriously defend
it. One of the paragraphs on which the
indictment is based consisted of the
statement that it might possibly be
better for the health of men and women
if they should associate as freely sexually as they associate any other way....
"But whether C.c. Moore advocated
or condemned free love, whether he
called white black or black white, has
nothing to do with the case. He has a
right to publish his opinions on these or
on any other subjects, and neither the
postoffice inspector nor the judge nor
the jury nor any other person is compelled to read his paper ....
"Moore's conviction is an outrage of
the principle of freedom of speech and
of the press, although he himself seemingly invited suppression by publishing
in his paper as the first demand of the
'Blue Grass Blade':
Such suppression, peaceably if
possible, by force, if necessary, of
the Christian religion of the United
States,
"... Moore's conviction is due to the
personal enemies he has made by his
peculiar and virulent syle of journalism.
There is not the shadow of proof of
crime against him, unless his crime is annoyance of certain persons who imagine
that his imprisonment may check the
advance of freethought in America."
The remarks were initialed as the
product of the editor of this journal,
M[oses] Harman.

70 years ago
The February 1, 1919, issue of The
Truth Seeker (vol. 46, no. 5) reported extensively on the efforts of the clergy to
depict the head of the German government, Kaiser Wilhelm.s as an Atheist
after the defeat of Germany in the First
World War.
Page 37

Charles C. Moore was sentenced to two

years in jail by a federal court for the
crime of printing something that someone
else didn't like.

.~

Quoting a former Berlin correspondent writing in The Christian World, the

editor pointed out that the word religiosity
was used to describe what was formerly
held to be the "religious devotion" of the
kaiser. The theory bruited about was
that he had not had "real religion":
"It is no hasty assertion, but my deliberate opinion, that the vaunted religiosity of the kaiser did more than any other
one cause to sap the foundations of the
religious life of the country. All through
the thirty years of his ascendancy men
and women pointed to him, and declared
that, if he was the bright and shining example of the influence of religion on the
hearts of men, they would prefer to be
without religion."
This was hardly the truth. The Truth
Seeker editor was forced to comment
on it:
"A more barefaced travesty of the
facts was never written. There was no
'paralyzing materialism' about the kaiser.
He was a deeply religious man and he
never hesitated to declare his belief in
'revealed religion as a vital necessity in
the souls of men.' His educational system and his personal supremacy were
alike built on 'revealed religion,' ... "
Several lengthy articles in this issue
then explained that the pope referred to
the kaiser as "Our Most Holy Emperor
of Germany" since he knew that the
kaiser had persistently persecuted the
"higher critics" of the Bible, and that,
"owing to the hostile attitude of the German government, the German Freethought Federation had experienced
great difficulties."
Under the kaiser "an amendment to
the Criminal Code was introduced making it a crime punishable with three
years' imprisonment to attack religion."
At the swearing in of the recruits of the
Potsdam garrison on November 14,
1905, they were told to "make the cru-

2Frederick Wilhelm Viktor Albert (18591941),king of Prussia and emperor of Germany (1888-1918).
Page 38

cifix their Generalissimo."

In July 1916,the kaiser preached to his
army chaplains on the necessity of
bringing "our lives into harmony with
the personality of Christ."
The diverse articles in this issue also
pointed out that at the time of the outbreak of World War I, there were in the
German empire 35,231,104 evangelical
Protestants (62.5percent) and 20,327,913
Roman Catholics (36.1 percent) and
that Austria was, basically, a Roman
Catholic nation and that the head of the
nation could hardly be anything but a
Christian example to them all.

40 years ago

the Atheist family dog.

The March 1949issue (vol. 76, no. 3)
of The Truth Seeker reported briefly, as
it did from time to time, on the receipt
of a bequest left to it by an Atheist. The
item read:
"At his death in 1935, Blanchard G.
Hughes of Washington, Pa., left a will
naming the Truth Seeker Company,
Inc., 'publisher of The Truth Seeker, a
freethought magazine,' as one of the legatees. The will provided that the estate
be distributed after the death of a relative who received a general bequest for
life.
"The specific bequest of $700 and a
share in the residuary estate totaled
$2,737.38, for which amount a check
was received February 14 [1949] from
the trustee of the estate."
Please note that the man died in 1935
and the Truth Seeker Company received
the check fourteen years later. Often in
wills such as these, there is such a time
gap and, as often as not, the money
never gets to the cause organization.

The February 1949 issue of the Progressive World magazine (vol. 11,no. 12)
reported on a vicious article which had
appeared in The American Weekly, a
Christian newspaper magazine distributed in the Sunday Hearst newspapers.
The article was directed against Terry
McCollum, age thirteen, whose experiences in the public schools of Champaign, Illinois,led to the successful United States Supreme Court decision
which outlawed preachers coming to
public schools to teach religiouscourses.'
The unsigned article stated that Terry 30 years ago
On February 23, 1959,four represenwas a maladjusted boy and an example
of what to expect when religion is tatives in the state legislature of Texas
"thrown out" of public schools. The introduced a bill which would require
unknown author claimed that he had that teachers in Texas' tax-supported
personally heard Terry and his younger schools, colleges, and universities annubrothers use such profanity and ob- ally take an oath that they believed in
scenity that had not been heard except the existence of a supreme being. Associated Press quoted the congressmen as
in barrooms.
The next Sunday the same magazine saying that any person who did not beconcluded with an article claiming that lieve in a supreme being ought not to be
"When Religion Was Thrown Out,
allowed to teach in such institutions.
Actually, the bill was unnecessary exCommunism Moved In" the public
cept for the provision that the swearing
schools.
It is ever such with the theists; the should be done annually. Article 1,
name of their game is always defamation
Section 4 of the Constitution of the state
-.:..one can rely on their attacking men, of Texas already required such a belief of
women, or children, and perhaps even all persons holding office or in a position
of public trust. This was not declared to
be unconstitutional until it was chal3McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 US lenged by American Atheists in a federal
court.~
203 (1948).
February 1989

American Atheist

American Atheist Radio Series

Who are freethinkers?

s we try to delineate who were

Atheists and who were not in the
history of our times, we run into
the variable names "Rationalist," "Humanist," "Freethinker," and it is very difficult to try to sort out those who were
frankly Atheist and those who were
theists but who were "liberal," whatever
that meant at each stage of history.
We had one compiler of biographical
material in our ranks, Joseph McCabe.
He got together A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval and Modern
Freethinkers,' and I have had a very difficult time with it attempting to figure
out what is what and who is who. The
booklet has a preface which is interesting, and I read that to you now:
"The clergy of all denominations
share our zeal for reconstruction today
and loudly announce a campaign to
'bring the world back to God.' I have not
yet encountered the religious writer
who explains why God leaves it to their
puny efforts to do this. According to
them he could convert New York in a
day by making, for instance, the Statue
of Liberty take a stately walk around the
waters of the Harbor or bidding the Empire State Building stand on its head for
an hour. And this would clear his servants of the suspicion of evil minds that
in their zealous campaign they have too
much thought of their own treasuries.
However, there is one serious and transparent fallacy in their pretensions. I have
shown in earlier works ... that skepticism or freethinking grows in all ages in
exact proportion to the grant of freedom of expression and the diffusion of
knowledge, and that this skepticism, beginning with a challenge of the prevailing
religious form, rapidly deepens into
atheism. These conditions were ideally
fulfilledin the present half-century until
Fascism and semi-Fascism spread over
the earth, so the prodigious spread of
atheism is as natural as the develop~

Rejection of religion ran

the gamut of great
thinkers.

When the first installment of a

regularly scheduled, fifteen-minute,
weekly American Atheist radio series
on KLBJ radio (a station in Austin,
Texas, owned by then-President
Lyndon Baines Johnson) hit the
airwaves on June 3, 1968, the nation
was shocked. The programs had to be
submitted weeks in advance and were
heavily censored. The regular production of the series ended in September
1~7, when no further funding was
available.
The fonowing is the text of "American
Atheist Radio Series" program No. 209,
first broadcast on September 2, 1~2.

Madalyn O'Hair
Austin, Texas

IGirard, KS: Haldeman-Julius Publications,

1945.
February 1989

ment of radio or the cinema. Do the

clergy propose that we should curtail
our liberties or restrict the diffusion of
knowledge so that their churches and
conventicles be filled once more?
"Some willwonder why, if this is a law
of history, as I have repeatedly proved,
it is so little recognized that in popular
literature the freethinker or the Atheist
is treated as a rare if not morbid phenomenon. Ought it not to be possible to
collect from the best ages of history a
gallery of great men and women whose
names would rebuke the common superstition? That does not follow.In most
ages the scholar and the statesman, the
leading writer or artist, are the least free
to express their skepticism. The priests,
whether of Zeus or Jahveh, Allah or
Christ, rouse the mob against them. In
our time, for instance, Professor Leuba
has twice shown, from their own private
assurances, that three-fourths of the
five hundred leading men of science and
history in America 'disbelieve' in God,
and that is the dictionary definition of
atheism. But how many of them tell that
to the public? The late President Roosevelt was a skeptic in his pre-political
years, and biographers do not tell of a
'conversion,' but ... yet one can collect
a gallery of great names or notable personalities far too vast for the limits of this
small work, which offers just a selection
of freethinkers of interest or profit to the
reader. For ancient times few can or
need be included. All the thinkers during seven centuries of ancient Greece
except Plato and Pythagoras rejected
the idea of spirit or a personal God and
immortality. So did nearly all the writers
of ancient Rome. At the other end of the
scale it is hardly necessary to record
that such men as Haldeman-Julius,
McCabe, Bertrand Russell, Joseph
Lewis, etc., are Atheists. [Well, they are
all dead now and I fear that the radio audience knows none of them at this point
either.] The list is a selection, but it is
hoped that while it does include some
two score monarchs and heads of
states, more than a score of the world's
Page 39

Joseph McCabe

greatest musicians and artists, and hundreds of famous scholars and writers,
the less illustrious names that are included will prove of interest to the reader.
The great majority are atheists, but it
was clearly inadvisable to apply a criterion of freethinking that would exclude
Jefferson and Paine, Voltaire and Rousseau, Lafayette, Washington, and lincoln. Writers on the subject (Wheeler,"
Robertson," etc.) have too readily admitted liberal members of organized religions, but beyond noticing one or two
of special interest I exclude them."
Well,let's see who he lists and what he
has to say about them. I am tempted to
do this alphabetically, as he has done,
and I will try to find in this ninety-sixpage list of about five hundred persons,
one from each letter of the alphabet,
Americans mostly, and women where I
can find them.
Adams, John (1735-1826), Second
President of the United States. His
rejection of Christianity, which he
professed to admire morally, runs
all through his letters to Jefferson,
of which there is a good selection
edited by Welstach (1925), though
it is better to read them in the original edition (1856). The correspon-

2J. M. Wheeler, A Biographical Dictionary of

Freethinkers of All Ages and Nations (London, Progressive Publishing Company,
1889).
3J. M. Robertson, A History of Freethought
Ancient and Modern to the Period of the
French Revolution, 2 vol. (London: Watts &
Co., 1936).
Page 40

dence of the two men, the most

accomplished who ever rose to
high political office in Americathey freely quote Greek, Latin,
Italian and French to eitherother
- is very free and most interesting. The attempt of his grandson
and a few others to represent
Adams as a Unitarian is not honest. He was not even a very firm
Deist. One letter he wrote to Jefferson (May l2, 1820), who says
that its "crowd of skepticisms"
kept him awake at night, has been
suppressed by the pious Unitarian
grandson, but in another (January
17, 1820) he defines god as "an essence that we know nothing of"
and says that the attempts of philosophers to get beyond this are
"games of push-pin." He calls the
Incarnation an "awful blasphemy,"
and says of the First Cause "whether we call it Fate or Chance or
God". He believed in personal immortality but admitted that he
knew no proof of it. He was, he
says in a letter of May 15, 1817,
often "tempted to think that this
would be the best of all possible
worlds if there was no religion in
it." His family fell away to respectable Unitarianism, but his grandson Charles Francis Adams (18351915) the distinguished historian,
was an Agnostic of the Leslie
Stephen school, as is shown in the
Life and Letters.

his language in the athletic field

was robust. In time he reached the
front rank of British writers - in
his later years he was known as
"the Dean of English Letters" and was regarded as the leading
literary critic and a very sound historian, widely respected on both
sides of the Atlantic. He was an
outspoken agnostic (Free Thinking, An Agnostic's Apology, etc.)
and a man of genially austere character. His brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, baronet, a judge,
professor of law, and author of
weighty works on law, also "entirely abandoned his belief in the orthodox dogmas."

Well, this is how we learn. Who in the

world was Leslie Stephen? Let's see
what McCabe has to say about him. Ah!
here he is on page 79. Sir Leslie Stephen, LL.D., Litf.D. (1832-1904), British
writer:

Well, frankly, I have never heard of

him, or of his books. Let me see ifhe has
any books listed as extant in the volumes
of All The Books in Print. I find twentytwo books listed and a set of about fifteen volumes of his works, the latter
costing about $400. Not one of those
titles listed are either Free Thinking or
An Agnostic's Apology. Anyone checking a listing of this man's works would
not know that he was anything but a
good Christian, for there is not mention
that he ever wrote anything about ag-

, He took orders in the Church of

England when he was at Cambridge, but the fit of piety soon
passed. He told me that even
there he was a member of a sort of
secret society of heretics and that
February 1989

Sir Leslie Stephen

American Atheist

nosticism, much less been the head of a

kind of intellectual posture called the
Agnosticism of the Leslie Stephen
school.
Tut. Tut. Let's try another. It willbe a
"B" this time, the entire thing we just
went through came only from choosing
names listed under the "As":
Sarah Bernhardt (1845-1923),
the greatest French actress of recent times. A. Carel says in his
Histoire anecdotique des contemporains, (1885,p. 46) that Gounod
once asked her in her studio ifshe
ever prayed. "I," she said, "Never.
I'm an atheist." To her disgust
Gounod went down on his knees
there and then and prayed for her.
Gounod, the favorite composer of
modern Roman Catholics, was
neurotic and inconsistent. He
"vacillated between mysticism
and voluptuousness," says one of
his biographers.

loathed him and I had private

knowledge of attempts to trap and
prosecute him. His agnostic views
are explained in his Affirmations
[written in 1897]and My Life [written in 1940].
Theodore Dreiser

life he gave away $350,000,000,

generally for sound social objects
such as public free libraries. Dr.
Moncure Conway, who knew him,
says that he was an Agnostic, and
a few references to his religion in
his Life of James Watt confirm
this. He refers to "the mysterious
realm which envelops man" and
says in regard to discussion of religion that "we are but young in all
this mystery business." The Truthseeker of August 23, 1919,quoted
a confession of faith of his in
which, a few years before his
death, he rejects "all creeds" and
says that he was "a disciple of
Confucius and Franklin." His confusion of an Atheist and a deist is
due to the fact that he shed religion
without any serious interest in it
and avoided the subject as far as
possible.
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945),novelist:

Sarah Bernhardt

Well, that's interesting. That hasn't

happened to me yet.
Let's try "C":
Andrew Carnegie (1837-1919),
philanthropist. In the course of his
Austin, Texas

His hostilityto religionruns through

all the grim, realistic novels that
have made him famous. In one of
them he says: "Assure a man that
he has a soul and then frighten him
with old wives' tales as to what is
to become of him afterwards, and
you have hooked a fish, a mental
slave."
Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-1939),
sexologist:
It is hardly necessary to show
that the famous psychologist of
sex was a freethinker. The clergy
February 1989

Well, again, I have just checked him

out. Seventeen of his books are available and three biographers have written
about him - and naturally these two
books are the among the missing.

Henry Havelock Ellis

Let's try some more. We are up to "E"

Sigmund Freud, M.D., LL.D. (18561939),founder of psychoanalysis:
In his last work, Der Mann
Moses and die monotheistische
Religion (1939),he showed that, as
most folk had assumed, he was a
thorough freethinker. In his last
few years he was an Honorary Associate (like myself) of the British
Rationalist Press Association.
Mathilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898),
writer:
One of the many able American
women who, in spite of general
public hostility, took an active part
in the abolitionist and feminist
Page 41

Sigmund Freud
movements of the last century.
Mrs. Gage was President of the
National Women Suffrage Association, edited their paper, and collaborated with Miss. Anthony in
writing the history of the movement. Her freethought is emphaticallygiven in her Women, Church,

scientific bodies all over the world

.... When I went to stay with him
in Jena, I found that streets and
squares of the city had been named
after him. The clergy put out a legend that he had "forged" illustrations for his books - he was a
good artist - which I completely
disproved
twenty-six
years
ago ....

Georg Brandes, LL.D. (18421927),Danish critic:

Although born and educated in
Denmark he lived in so many
countries and had so remarkable
a knowledge of the literature of
each that he was the nearest approach to a [continental]. He was
a member also of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the British Royal Society of
Literature. His position did not
deter him in the least from professing freethought and helping the
cause. Both he and his brother
Carl were outspoken Agnostics.

and State (1893).

And then, of course, there was Benito
Juarez (1806-1872), president of the
Republic of Mexico:

Ernst Haeckel
Henrik Ibsen (18281906), the great
Norwegian dramatist:

Mathilda Joslyn Gage

Ernst Haeckel (18341919),the famous
German zoologist:
As Haeckel outspokenly rejected all religion all his life and wrote
the very anti-religious Riddle of the
Uniuerse, which sold several million
copies in a score of languages, reo
ligious writers have been untruthful about his scientific distinction
; . . . His many large scientific
works brought him four gold medals and seventy diplomas from
Page 42

A druggist's boy who worked

his way up to the position of probably the greatest dramatist of
modem times. His biographer Aall
shows that he discarded orthodoxy in his later teens but was
quietly skeptical until 1871, when
he met Georg Brandes. A few
years later he wrote The Emperor
and The Galilaean to express his
new militant mood. He remained
agnostic and anti-religious to the
end. "Bigger things than the state
will fall," he wrote Brandes, "all
religion will fall."
And, in case you wonder who Brandes
was who so influenced him, he was
February 1989

Benito Juarez
He was a full-blooded Indian
who was admitted to the Mexican
bar and became a judge. As governor of Oaxaca, then Minister of
Justice, he "oppressed" the clergy
- that is to say, curtailed their
privileges and checked their corruption - and rendered fine service to the people. He was President 18581862and 1867-1872and
left a great memor}' behind him.
He was an atheist.~
American Atheist

Under the Covers

The conservative campaign

to rewrite the Constitution
his is a standard size (6~" x 9Y2")

book, with the usual prohibitive

T price
now being charged for the

Young ideologues now

control the courts of
the United States.

Packing the Courts

by Herman Schwartz
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
Hardback, 1988,242 pages, $19.95

Austin, Texas

printed word.
The author is a law professor at the
American (Roman Catholic) University
in Washington, D.C. He was the person
called in to mediate the Attica, New
York, prison uprising in 1971, since he
had founded the American Civil Liberties Union Prisoners' Rights project in
1969. He is characterized as a wellinformed constitutional scholar, who
has the good sense to write crisply and
succinctly - not at all like a law professor. Although the book was published in
1988, it was written during the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Constitution (1987) and during the bitter fight
over the nomination of Judge Robert H.
Bork to the United States Supreme
Court. The author points out in his introduction that this was fortuitous since
both events occurred when there was
an intensive national examination of
what the Constitution means, how it
should be interpreted, and what the
actual role of the federal judiciary was
meant to be.
Everyone aware of the functioning of
the court system in the United States
knows that the federal judiciary was
very slow in extending the rights of the
First Amendment to the states. In addition, when the federal courts have recognized violations of constitutional
rights, often the various states continue
to ignore the decisions which are made.
This has been especially true of the case
of Bible/prayer in the public schools.
Although the decision prohibiting the
same was handed down in 1963, a decade later many school districts continued the exercise. Additionally, there
were literally hundreds of schemes introduced to "sneak" both prayer and
Bible back into the schools whenever
and wherever possible - always with
the approval and consent of school
boards, legislative bodies, and state
courts.
When it became clear that the federFebruary 1989

al judiciary was going to step into forbidden ground, a coterie of organizations

and persons were formed to resist such
judicial activity. This consisted of formidable economic institutions which drew
on the economic theoretics of Frederick
A. von Hayek and Milton Friedman;
those who, threatened by the new civil
rights gains, supported Alabama governor George Wallace; fundamentalist
Christians who flocked to the banner of
Falwell, Bakker, Robertson and Swaggart; the Southern Baptist Convention;
and neo-fascist "think tank" organizations and foundations headed up by persons such as Paul Weyrich and Richard
Viguerie. All were inspired by the doctrines of Eisenhower, Nixon, Goldwater,
and finally Reagan.
The author attempts to delineate
these combined forces, determine what
the underlying principles are which support them and to clarify their purposes,
intents, and victories. Six of his chapters
constitute historical analysis as he looks
at judicial selections from 1793to 1980almost a two-hundred-year span, and
then the quick movement which has
come about first in the 1981-84period,
and yearly from thence to date.
What he describes is a court-packing
scheme which has been carried out and
the consequences of that scheme. He
then prognosticates the immediate and
the far-reaching effects of it.

What happened
The United States Supreme Court,
coming late to our times, began to face
the modern issues of the nation about
150 years after its founding. It quickly
prohibited racial segregation in the public schools (1954), ordered meaningful
remedies for discrimination (1961), removed Bible reading and prayer recitation from the public schools (1963),proposed fairer electoral district apportionment (1964), insisted on constitutional
rights for an accused person (1966),protected free expression (1971),and recognizing that women had rights, created a
broad constitutional right to abortion
Page 43

Reagan's judges were young (under forty)

and required to be ideologues of the radical right.

aged, if not severely limited. The federal judiciary was the instrumentality chosen for this action, and the determined
decision to proceed was made about
1980 when Reagan took office. The
search for "right-thinking" judges began.
What the influence of the Reagan appointments has been is dramatically illustrated by checking the list of current
occupants of the judgeships and noting
which recent past president appointed
them:
Roosevek
Truman
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Ford
Carter
Reagan

(1973). The groups which had been in

power since the inception of the nation
could simply not tolerate such behavior,
and a campaign was begun to turn back
the clock to the nineteenth century,
where most state courts remained.
But the federal judiciary is not alone
the United States Supreme Court.
There are approximately 750 judges of
federal district and federal appellate
courts in eleven circuits. The federal appointments of these are by and large inveigled by the dominant politicians in
each state. The posts are affirmed by
the United States Senate, which, of
course, protects states rights in such
selection.

The Republican judiciary

However, with the Republican party
firmly entrenched in the White House
since the end of the Vietnam War (except for the short break of the most inept president of our times: Jimmy Carter), it became increasingly clear that
progress to a more democratic government was to be systematically discourPage 44

4
15
54
65
122
161
55
247
304

The anecdotal history which the author gives of some of these appointments, or of the near misses, is instructive. The senators of the diverse states
routinely scratch one another's backs in
accomodation on the great majority of
choices. When Reagan went into office,
the federal judiciary was divided about
about three to two between Democrats
and Republicans. At that time, the
courts were - by and large - committed to the protection of individual rights
and the idea that they should interfere
as little as possible with economic and
other activities not related to civilrights.
By the end of December 1987,when
the book was written, Reagan had appointed 76court of appeals judges out of
168authorized appellate positions (with
9 more pending) and 258 district court
judges out of the 575authorized (with 19
more pending). The federal courts were
about 60 percent Republican. Reagan's
judges were young (under forty) and required to be ideologues of the radical
right. The eight-year process of accomplishing this is clearly detailed in several chapters. The incredible nominations
and selections of Manion, Rehnquist,
February 1989

and Scalia are covered at length, and

the fights which developed over Bork,
Ginsburg, and Kennedy are given special attention. So also are the Meese
doctrines of original intent and incorporation.

The Supreme Court

Although most attention has focused
on the Supreme Court of the United
States, it must be remembered that only
a small handful of cases are determined
at this level. In a typical year there are
hundreds of thousands of federal district court decisions. Of these only a few
are appealed, so that the federal courts
of appeals decide about 19,000 cases. If
any of these are appealed further, the
Supreme Court can review only 100 to
150 of them annually.
It is obvious at this point that Bush will
probably appoint three new Supreme
Court justices since William J. Brennan,
Thurgood Marshall, and Harry Blackmun are eighty or more years old now.

What's ahead?
The conclusions of the author are
grim: the appellate courts, particularly,
have utilized every device to close the
courts to appeals, especially of individual rights. The courts are more conservative and more regressive. The book is
filled with horror stories of justice betrayed. Although the lower federal judiciary is not as rigidly unresponsive to
change, the general tenor of the courts
at all levels is that of ultraconservatism,
And as the author looks to the future, he
is grim.
The book has several appendices,
one of which is "Questions by the Honorable John P. East, the Honorable Jeremiah Denton, and the Honorable Orrin
G. Hatch for Jospeh H~ Rodriguez,
Nominee for the United States District
Court for the District of New Jersey."
The full impact of the author's exploration of the court-packing scheme is given to denouement here. These four
pages of questions tell exactly where we
are headed. - Madalyn O'Hair ~
American Atheist

Me Too

Religion's other victims

nd God said, Let us make man in
our image, after our likeness: and
.,
let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the
air, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing
that creepeth upon the earth ... " (Gen.
1:26): words to which both religionists
and freethinkers alike have adhered for
over two thousand years.
Being both open-minded and critical
of religion, freethinkers seem an ideal
audience to which to address the issue
of humans' domination and exploitation
of other animals. Among historical freethinkers who also criticized society's attitudes toward animals were Mark
Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Percy
Bysshe Shelley, Jeremy Bentham, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, and others.
We are guilty of "speciesism," similar
to both racism and sexism, in that we
are chauvinistic toward our own species
and feel that we have a right to dominate
all others. Here is a fitting example: society readily sanctions the use of chimpanzees in scientific experiments, but
would NEVER think of using, e.g., a
retarded human child - only because
the child belongs to our own species.
The traditional arguments proffered by
the scientific establishment and other
defenders of animal research - that the
chimp is less intelligent, has less capacity for pain, less potential to lead a meaningfullife, etc. - do not apply here (yet,
ironically, they do apply to the child).
Each of the major uses of animals by
humans has its basis or justification in
religion. The Bible's words, and the subsequent formation of societal attitudes
and practices, now supposedly justify
using animals as food, tools of vivisection, sources of entertainment, clothing,
and beasts of burden. (As religionists so
often remind us: "Why do you think
'god' put them here?" - Why are there
cows if not to serve as hamburgers for
us?!) These statements, all based on a
false premise - that a BigBrother in the
sky created the "fish, . . . fowl, . . .
cattle, ... and earth" for humans (made
~

Should Atheists
be in the forefront
of the animal rights
movement?

"Me Too" is a feature designed to

showcase short essays written by
readers in response to topics recently
covered by the American Atheist or of
general interest to the Atheist
community.
Essays submitted to "Me Too" (P.O.
Box 140195,Austin, TX 78714-0195)
should be 650 to 1500 words long.

Austin, Texas

February 1989

in his image) to dominate - are irrelevant.

It is for the "betterment of mankind"
that cruel, too-often unnecessary, repetitive experiments and product testing
are performed on animals: "sacrifice
one mouse to save millions of human
lives." (Unfortunately, the majority of
this is propaganda from the scientists
and government officials who have a
vested interest in keeping this country's
animal research alive and well, instead
of allocating funds toward promoting
prevention, which could eliminate the
majority of our most common diseases.)
The use of other animals as food is
truly unnecessary and unethical and inefficient (the water and land used to
feed a meat-eater is about ten times that
of a vegetarian; the grain fed to cattle
each day could provide every human
being with a half-cup) and inhumane
(modern "factory farm" conditions are
shocking; intensive confinement and
drugging, with hormones and antibiotics,
of animals are the means to high production and profit). Evidence shows
that we were not "meant" to be omnivores; we don't have suitable teeth, enzymes, or intestines for digesting meat.
Our human and primate ancestors did
not eat meat for sixty million years, until
just three million years ago. The typical
American diet of meat, eggs, and dairy
products leads to various cancers, diabetes, and other diseases. So it seems
that humans made a wrong turn when
they took so literally the Bible's insistence that fowl, cattle, and fish were all
theirs, to use as they chose.
Many people defend animal exploitation by asserting that only humans are
rational beings, therefore it is justifiable
for them to cause suffering to other animals. Writer James Rachels agreed that
there are indeed many differences between man and other animals, but "are
they relevant here? A man can learn
mathematics and a rabbit can't. . . .
[A] man has an interest in not being tortured because he has the capacity to
(See "Animals" on page 11)
Page 45

Letters to the Editor

God and geometry

"Letters to the Editor" should be either questions or comments of general

concern to Atheists or to the Atheist
community. Submissions should be
brief and to the point. Space
limitations allow that each letter
should be three hundred words or,
preferably, less. Please confine your
letters to a single issue only. Mail them
to: American Atheist, P. O. Box
140195, Austin, TX 78714-0195.

Page 46

tended to make students THINK!

It must have worked, for at about that
One time the writer of the "Director's
Briefcase," Mr. Murray, expressed curi- time I lined up the concepts of god, devosity as to how Atheists other than him- il, heaven, hell, soul, spiritual needs,
self handled the struggle to free them- churches, and preachers and by meticselves from religious indoctrination. For ulous examination, bowled them over.
me it took just one word - ANALYSIS. And for an ensuing sixty-seven years
Of course, I was born an Atheist, as they stayed down.
It is said of Abraham Lincoln that at
has been everyone else. My parents immigrants - seemed to have followed the age of forty years he took up the
the example of the majority in their new study of geometry so he could better
country, to the extent of having me deal with the arguments of his political
adversaries. It must have worked, for
sometimes, during summer vacation,
not long afterward, he was president.
walk three miles to Sunday school.
Apart from that, there was so much And does not some of his study show in
his Gettysburg Address?
work to do in carving out a homestead,
Only in two cases did any tenpins try
there was not much time for religion. If
they worshipped anything, it was the a wobbly stand - shall we call them exceptions that prove the rules? First, in
public school system.
Preachers were constantly trying to some cases I accept the concept of hell.
worm. their way into school. Every few It is hell when one marries out of admiweeks one would request and usually be ration for the intellectual brilliance of
granted ten or fifteen minutes to give a his/her partner and discovers an incurspiel. I remember one in particular. His able religious nut. Having a religious nut
face resembled a Greek statue in that for a parent or child is equally hellish.
The second concerns the expectahis eyeballs had no pupils, seeming to be
just white. The reason was soon appar- tion of an afterlife. Although it is only a
ent - his eyes were rolled upward as far fractional one, it is postulated a sort of
as they would go; to look at him was to half-lifeis manifested by one's offspring.
look up at the ceiling, as I noticed every- However, in the frequently encountered
one else in the schoolroom was doing. case of no progeny, no hereafter can be
The only conclusion to be reached was allowed at all.
So come all ye faithful, after twentythat to some people ceilings and roofs
five hundred years isn't it about time we
are holy.
When school progressed far enough, took off from where Euclid left off?
I began to encounter a word: axiom. It
Eric M. Frederick
seemed to be a challenge, which, like a
Montana
chip on the shoulder, should be knocked
off, just for the hell of it. I think religion
for me was first shaken when I noticed Security risks
I am writing to praise Mr. Murray's
that preachers and Bibles steered clear
wonderful article on the Pledge of Alleof axioms.
Then along came geometry. Soon I giance. "A Pledge Too Far" (November
was wondering what it was good for, as 1988) was a very thorough account of
.Ihad already learned in arithmetic about the history and current controversy
angles, areas, and cubic contents. The over the Pledge. One thing I have never
teacher patiently explained to me that understood, however, is this: How can
this was a special geometry called Eu- an elementary school student be unalleclidean geometry. Sure, arithmetic took giant in the first place? I can understand
care of my needs, but this, with its prop- a person in the military or CIA having to
ositions and Q.E.D.s (Questions Empir- pledge his or her allegiance to this counically Disposed of?) was deliberately in- try, but I fail to see why young children
February 1989

American Atheist

Letters to the Editor

are such a high risk.

Derek Robert
Texas

Two of a kind
Although Protestant fundamentalism
and the New Age movement are ostensibly antagonistic to each other, they
are basically the same syndrome elaborated from different socio-economic
groups. Both are attempts to regress, to
flee from the present into the womb of
the past, to escape from the essential
moral ambiguity of the universe, to reject autonomy and moral responsibility
and the terrors thereof. Both spit on
what they regard as human pride while
simultaneously pandering to it - fundamentalism by placing humanity "a little
below the angels," the New Age by
claiming that we are all really gods, sort
of, who have fallen from our true glory.
Both offer to the victims of natural disaster and human violence the cold comfort
that their suffering is their own fault.
Both are anti-intellectual. Both credulously embrace the supernatural. Both
exploit the gulliblefinancially. Both even
share a belief that we are on the eve of
a new world: fundamentalism with the
doctrine that Jesus is about to return,
the New Age with its fantasies of Harmonic Convergences and the imminent
dawn of a New Age. And while both give
some kind of meaning to the lives of
their adherents, both are ridiculous and
fraudulent insults to the human mind,
heart, and spirit.
The difference, as I mentioned, lies in

class. Though there are undoubtedly

exceptions, the kind of Protestant fundamentalism that has provided a spiritual rationale for the Reagan regime's
right-wing blitzkrieg flourishes mainly
among upwardly-mobile working-class
whites. New Age seems to be popular
among supposedly sophisticated middleclass types, who are often, ironically,
scornful of born-again superstition.
Adam Starchild
Minnesota

Hope for a New Age?

I was surprised by the pessimistic
tone of Jon Murray's article on the New
Age Movement, {"Director's Briefcase,"
October 1988}.I live in the middle of it;
many of my acquaintances are involved
in its buffoonery. I wondered if you had
noticed it.
.
But, as I said, your response surprises
me. The New Age Movement at least
shows a widespread disaffection with
Christianity that could no longer be suppressed. It shows that the power of traditional religion has declined and the social pressure of keeping "the flock" in
line no longer exists.
The fact that people would give $50 to
see a channeler call down "Ramtha" and
do a bad imitation of Linda Blair without
makeup, special effects, or emetics is
encouraging to me. They would rather
do this than go to a minister of a "legitimate" religion, pay $10, and hear him
yell, "Amen!" and "Healed!" and "Praise
the Lord!" Don't you find that encouraging?

Perhaps people are not turning to

Atheism in droves, but at least it means
that they are now putting the minister,
priest, and witch-doctor on the same
level. Christianity and Judaism have lost
their aura of righteousness. Not only
that, they've lost much of their coercive
power. I heard that Jesse Helms put a
rider on a bill to take away tax-exempt
status for religions practicing witchcraft.
As far as I could tell from the loonies
here, they have kept right on practicing
it. (I haven't confirmed the rider story
yet; it is just a rumor.) Also, with the
New Age Movement drawing fire, it will
give the Atheists more room to maneuver - another cause for optimism.
It is not as good as people turning to
reason, but it is my perception that this
generation in the United States is just
not ready to do without spiritualism.
Psychologically, it does too much for
them. Reason cannot replace it - they
have got to have something to be reasonable about.
But give it another twenty years. The
next generation will probably be more
ready. Television, believe it or not, will
probably prove to be the worst thing to
ever happen to Christianity.
Just you wait. You will probably find
that Publishers' Weekly was actually
prescient in calling you a New Age
Movement. If the world is just, your organization would deserve the title above
all the others.
Charles W. Haines, III
Missouri

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American Atheist

suggested

American Atheist
introductory reading list

III

Literature on Atheism is very hard to find in most public

and university libraries in the United States - and most of
the time when you do find a book catalogued under the
word Atheism it is a work against the Atheist position.
Therefore we suggest the following publications which are
available from American Atheist Press as an introduction

into the multifaceted areas of Atheism and state/church

separation. To achieve the best understanding of thought in
these areas the featured publications should be read in the
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1. Why I Am An Atheist, including a history of material14. Atheist Truth vs. Religion s Ghosts by Col. Robert G.
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6.00
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#5440
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8. Essays on American Atheism, vol. I by Jon G. Murray.
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22. The Bible Handbook (All the contradictions, absurdities,
9. Essays on American Atheism, vol. II by Jon G. Murand atrocities from the Bible) by G.W. Foote, W.P.
ray. Paperback. 284 pp. #5350
7.50
Ball, John Bowden, and Richard M. Smith. Paperback.
372 pp. #5008
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..
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10. Essays in Freethinking, vol. I by Chapman Cohen.
Paperback. 229 pp. #5052
7.00
23. The X-Rated Bible by Ben Edward Akerley. Paperback.
428 pp. #5000
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...
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11. Essays in Freethinking, vol. II by Chapman Cohen.
Paperback. 240 pp. #5056
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12. Life Story of August Comte by F. J. Gould. Paperback.
179 pp. #5132
.. .
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13. The Logic and Virtue of Atheism by Joseph McCabe.
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"I have given myself a lot of trouble in this world

with small result. I took my own life and the
Church seriously, and the consequence is that I
have wasted the one and disturbed the other. The
search for truth is not a trade by which a man can
support himself; for a priest it is a supreme peril.
For a long time now I have not really been a
Catholic in the official sense of the word. I have
strewn my intelligence and my activity to the four
winds of an empty ideal. ... Roman Catholicism,
as such, is boundto perish, and it deserves no
regrets."
- Alfred Loisy

My Duel with the Vatican