American Atheist Magazine Dec 1979

v
.-
American ~heii
Volume
December,
21, No. 12
articles
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Roy P. Lingle - The Ballad of Santa Claus
17
24
Joseph
McCabe - Our Personal
MANAGING EDITOR
Jon Garth Murray
Robert
G. Ingersoll - What I Want for Christmas
ASSISTANT EDITOR
G. Richard Bozarth
features
Editorial
READING EDITOR
Barry Cashman
Atheist
STAFF
Bill Baird
Angeline Bennett
Wells Culver
Conrad Goeringer
Connie Perozino
Ignatz Sahula-Dycke
Elaine Stansfield
Gerald Tholen
The American Atheist magazine is

published monthly by American Atheists, located at 2210 Hancock Drive,
Austin,
Texas, 78756,
a non-profit,
non-political,
educational
organization. Mailing address: P.O. Box 2117,
Austin, TX, 78768. Copyright 1979
by Society
of Separationists,
Inc.
Subscription
rates: $20.00 per year.
Manuscripts submitted
must be typed,
double-spaced
and accompanied
by a
stamped, self-addressed
envelope. The
editors assume no responsibility
for
unsolicited manuscripts.
magazine
INDEX.
Morals
38
- Jon G. Murray - And Not to Entertain
Letters to the Editor
NON-RESIDENTIAL
The American
Atheist
indexed in:
MONTHLY PERIODICAL
1979
is
News
Atheists
Confront
Roots of Atheism
The Pope
- Joseph
.4
McCabe, Part 3
18
Columnists
Angeline
Bennett
Gerald Tholen
- It Could Be Verse
- Popes Will Be Popes
Ignatz Sahula-Dycke
G:"Richard
American
Madalyn
Bozarth
Atheist
16
27
- The Case for Free Ideation

- The Canon Comedy
29
35
Radio Series
Murray O'Hair - The Solstice
:"31
Season
Poems
34
Film Review - Elaine Stansfield
- The Last Wave
Book Review - Crime and Immorality

Catholic Church
39
in the Roman
40
our cover
PICKETING
THE POPE, OCTOBER
3, 1979
WINTER: ACT ONE

No season marks where years begin
Time's minstrels -corne and go
And often skies are laden with
The softly falling snow
And even though the Solstice Sun

Seems cold and insecure
The frigid stage of Winter's play
Is always clean and pure
A simple setting then is staged

And things turn out this way
As Earth aligns itself in space
To spawn each wintery day
So it would seem a fitting time

To end the epic here
And cherish future warming roles
In yet another year
Gerald Tholen
GREETINGS OF
Solstice
is: Dec. 22, 1979

11:10 G.M.T., or 6:10 E.S.T.
WINTER SOLSTICE
December,
Austin, Texas
1979
Page 1
Editorial
Jon G. Morra
AND
NOT TO. ENTERTAIN
As my media involvement on behalf of American Atheism

scenario. A talk show host invites an expert in some field or
expands, I find within myself a growing resentment toward the with some point of view onto his (usually the host is a male)
way media celebrities handle, not alone Atheists, but the pro- show. The host then makes the guest lower himself (or herself)
ponents of many "causes."
to the level of the most ignorant, badgering, member of the
Entertainment has its place on the screen and on the air- audience, all under the banner of "freedom of speech." The
ways but it is now rapidly overstepping the dictates of bal- underlying premise is that "Everyone is entitled to their (sic)
anced programming by moving into the educational sector. A own opinion." or "My opinion is as good as your opinion."
This is just not the case. When a guest has been involved in
pretty face is now far more valuable than a sharp, inquiring
and - above all - an impartial, objective, mind. Talk shows the research, delineation, promulgation of a particular point of
view he has superior knowledge in that area - beyond one
change hosts as often as producers change underwear. Why?
who has a spur of the moment opinion in a talk show audiThere are three answers to that question. First, a movement
ence. The opinion of anyone in the audience, however, is given
exists in our country today dedicated to the making of "fun"
out of education as a primary goal of education itself. The priority by the host over that of the guest. One's right to say
something, however, does not lend any validity to the statemost dramatic example of this is the controversy over "mathtrauma." This is the notion that a supposedly complicated or ment.
Yet, the right is used as an excuse to downgrade the opin"hard" subject such as mathematics can traumatize a child if it
ion of the expert. The emphasis is placed on an emotional and
is forced on him in a learning situation. It is, therefore, argued
that math must be presented "gently" and "pastorally" so as momentary interest in the subject, not a lasting understanding
not to induce a reaction on the part of the student - a draw- or appreciation of it. In the specific case of Atheism, we have
been viewed as an oddity - something momentarily unique,
ing back from it.
something, or someone expressing something, concerning
There is nothing either gentle or harsh about the multiplicawhich the audience may exercise its curiosity. The educational
tion table. It must be memorized as one of the essential factual
conventions of mathematics. Structure is neither gentle nor value of the position of Atheism is never allowed to surface,
harsh per se , so neither is any structured system of data analy- . only the entertainment value of it.
Why must everything have an entertainment value? Besis such as math or the scientific method. Gravity, after all, is
cause entertainment, as religion, puts off the facing of essential
"structured." It is also "dogmatic," as is often said of math.
But there is nothing emotionally frightening about facts, or issues. If one does not face life because he is waiting for death,
why face problems when one can be entertained by them?
systems of analyzing facts.
The two aspects' of the media go hand in hand. Escape
Facts are facts regardless of any emotion that man engend- .
ers in respect to how they are presented. The emotion does from reality is promoted. If one can make an oddity out of
something substantial, one can pass judgment on-it casually,
nothing to change the facts. Presentation of factual materials
like one passes on reality to opt for god ideas.
must be made - let the emotional chips fall where they may.
This is particularly true in journalism of any kind.
If a show appeals to the mediocre, it stays; if it confronts
There is, unfortunately, a changing standard. The media
real issues, it goes.
There is a third attitude of the media which is the personalnow take into account the reaction to a statement, with more
weight on that reaction than on the statement itself. To the' ization of issues, again, to avoid dealing with them.
When the Pope came to the United States he was heralded
proponent of a cause this makes a presentation particularly
by the news media as a "humanitarian." All coverage focused
hard. Virtually any minority viewpoint, as all cause viewpoints
on his media invented "personality." No one looked at the
axiomatically are, stirs up emotion.
The media are currently experiencing pickets and boycotts
doctrines he presented or what he actually represented. His
on this very issue. Why boycott advertising over an emotional
call was a call to a dying church to regroup and circle the
response to the presentation of an ongoing factual situation?
wagons. It was a call to return to the most conservative of
Must we be entertained by serious life situations in lieu of Roman Catholic church doctrines, a reliance on the fundamenfacing them? If the Christian community has its way, we tal principles of catholicism to withstand the continued onwill. It intends to prevent the airing of anything that upsets
slaught of progress, the enemy of the church.
What the Pope mayor may not be as a person has absolutethe "emotions" of the Christians. Emotion is, of course, the
ly nothing to do with his role of perpetuator of the traditional
foundation of faith. I, for one, am not willing to be entertained by human problems, to wait for some after-life solu- catholic doctrine. However, I prefer to refer to him as the
Pimp of Peace, for he has the same function as any ordinary
tions. Escaping from real situations is no solution. They must
be recognized, defined and dealt with. The media are a pri- pimp. He gathers together and sells momentary relief through
his agents, with no concern for the long term effects of coping
mary vehicle for this. We need to keep media personalities who
with human sexuality - as in the case of any pimp. Overtly, as
confront major issues instead of bringing them down to enterthe pimp, he is a kindness merchant doling out pleasure.
tainment levels.
Secondly, the media try to appeal to mediocrity. Why? Covertly, he undermines the position of women, human sexuality and equality, as well as self worth.
Because, the American people are mediocre. They identify
with mediocrity. A good example is the following repeated
Continued on p. 26
Page 2
December, 1979
American Atheist
Letters to The Editors

MURDER BY COMMAND
Dear Believers in Man:
Just thought you guys would like
to see a copy of the Unrecognized Ten
Commandments. Here they are:
1. Exodus 20:13 - Thou shalt not
kill.
2. Ex. 21:12 - Thou SHALT kill.
3. Ex. 21:14 - Thou'SHALT kill.
5. Ex. 21:16 - Thou SHALT .kill.
If you bleeding-hearted Atheists
don't keep these biblical commands,
god himself will kill: Ex. 22:24; Ex.
23:23.
Bored? This second of "The Ten
Commandments"
is in the. biblical
book of Deuteronomy (supposed to
have been written by Moses [who
killed], but was not), and it begins
authentically:
1. Deuteronomy 5:17 - Thou shalt
not kill.
2. Deut. 7:2 - Thou SHALT kill.
If you stubborn Freethinkers still
refuse to slaughter your neighbors, god
himself will steal land and terrorize
and kill: Deut. 4:34; 7:4,10,20,23;
8:19; 9:14. (Maybe the Zionists, not
"Jews," are this god's chosen people.)
Charles Amlin
California
Dear Charley,
Thanks for pointing out the "holy"
commandments that Christianity and
Judaism, when able, have obeyed
faithfully all these centuries. The Bible
commands death for everyone who is
condemned
in its pages. Atheists
should keep in mind that we are one
of the most condemned groups in the
Bible. Given theocratic power, these
commandments you have pointed out
would become civil law used as a
weapon against all Atheists.
SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE

WORSHIPPER
Dear Mrs. O'Hair,
I just finished reading your interview in "Hustler" magazine. What an
excellent interview! I'm going to have
to write Mr. Flynt and congratulate
him on bringing you and the American
Atheist Movement out more in the
open. Hell, I didn't even know you
were still alive, much less leading an
active organization for Atheism!
I, like you, was brought up Presbyterian in New Jersey. (I'm 22 now,
married, with a year old son named
Lennon - after John, the ex-Beatle, a
very proclaimed Atheist.) I could
never believe all that crap I was taught
in Sunday school, either.
I remember once my daddy and
6-year-old me were taking a walk. It
was Christmas time and we were talking about Santa Claus. I kinda doubted
the existence of this cat and asked Pop
to explain how this one old, ageless
coot could load up all the presents for
every kid in the world into a pillow
case; how he could visit every goddamn house in the world in one night
and still. have time to enjoy milk and
cookies and a nap everywhere he went.
I went on to ask how his deer flew
without wings, how he got around
down south, etc., etc.
So my father finally confessed, "I
think you're old enough, son - there
is no Santa Claus."
I replied, "And there's no Easter
Bunny, right?"
"No, son, there isn't."
"And no tooth fairy, either, is
there?"
"No, son."
"And no god or Jesus, either, is
there?"
"Now WAIT a minute, son ..... "
Ever since .then I, never really believed. I remember sitting in church
afterwards thinking, "I know there's
no god, but all these people don't
know I know that, and they're just
putting on an act to .fool me, so I'll
go along with their game!"
When I was about that age, you
were battling the Supreme Court about banning prayer in schools. (I always meant to thank you for that.)
Mommy and Daddy used to tell me
you were "not a very nice lady" and
December, 1979
Austin, Texas
that god was going to send you to hell.

Well, Mommy and Daddy were also
the same ones who "told me about
Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, so
I really didn't believe too much of
anything they said from then on.
So, in short, I am a devoted Atheist wanting to help other Atheists
change society to keep these damn
Christian hypocrites out of our lives.
Bill Sullivan
illinois
Dear Bill,
Welcome to American Atheism!
Someone who could make the so obvious logical connection between the
Santa-myths and the god/Jesus-myths
so young is surely one with a' bright
future in Atheism. It is amazing, and
somewhat disappointing, how many
Agnostics and Freethinkers and other
closet nomenclatures write in to insist
that we must allow the possibility that
god exists. Yet these same "intellectuals" would never write in insisting
that we must allow the possibility that
Santa Claus and the tooth fairy exist!
It's really absurd, and you can be
proud you never go1i trapped in
the agnostic pit clever religionists dig
to snare the less-than-courageous nonbeliever.
With the support of Atheists such
as yourself, we WILL keep the damn
Christian hypocrites out of our lives!
Dear Madalyn,
If P. T. Barnum were alive today,
he no doubt would say:
"There's a sucker born-again every
minute."
Charles R. Sheasley
Pennsylvania
Dear Editor,
Among some religionists the question often comes up: "Is god a he, she,
or it?"
Answer: She-It.
Milan Rafayko
Kentucky
Page 3
NEWS
The news is chosen to demonstrate, month after month, the dead reactionary hand of religion. It dictates your habits, sexual conduct, family
size. It censures cinema, theater, television, even education. It dictates life values and lifestyle. Religion is politics and, always, the most authoriarian 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.
ATHEISTS CONFRONT THE POPE

The Board of Directors of the American Atheist Center met
in full session, at the Center, on September 14, 15 and 16, for
its regular fall meeting, which for this meeting was an early
scheduling. The Board meets quarterly,
usually on January 1,
April 13th - at the national conventions,
July 1, and October
1, each year. The Board Chairman is Dr. Madalyn Murray 0'Hair, the Vice Chairman Jon G. Murray and members of the
board are (alphabetically)
Lou Alt, Conrad Goeringer,
Mary
Holder, Eric McCann, Richard C. O'Hair, Ralph Shirley, Gerald Tholen and Lloyd Thoren. At that time it was unanimously agreed that the projected
litigation to attempt to stop a
high ceremonial religious sacrificial Roman Catholic Mass, said
by the Pope, on the federally owned Washington
Mall, was
a proper undertaking
of the American Atheist Center.
The Pope's scheduled visit to the United States had very
rapidly advanced, in its planning, that his appearances
should
be on publicly owned land, with high visibility of governmental officials and with much intermingling
of religion and
government,
in derogation
of the prohibitions
of such activity
spelled out in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution
of the United States. As the plans progressed it was obvious that the
Pope's advance team, and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the
United States, had carefully picked out the spots most historical and important
to the American people: the Boston Commons, the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia,
Grant
Park in Chicago, and the Washington Mall in D.C. Everywhere
carefully orchestrated
events were to lead to a climax 'in each
city, where the obvious plan was for street demonstrations
of
Roman Catholic political strength.
No petty politician voted into office from the third ward in
one of these cities would dare to look over a massed group of
rosary mumblers,
led by the Pope, with the entire affair garnished with state officialdom
and not worry about obtaining
the votes of those Roman Catholics to keep him in office. It
was a grandiose
plan to influence
legislatures,
intimidate
government
officials, display power to the politicians and to
what is called "Protestant
America."
The mass media, particularly
television, made this into a
religious media spectacular,
especially in the cities along his
route of stops. They not alone bowed, but rather cringed,
seeking his favor. Scheduling was thrown to the winds as every
move, every expression, every word was reflected to the best
possible advantage.
It was obvious that Roman Catholics and
the companies which they command were a sought-after class
of advertisers to the media. The media saturation was finally
insulting in its total subservience.
Therefore,
litigation was undertaken
on September
17th
when two cases were simultaneously
filed in the Federal District Court for the District of Washington,
D. C. One of the
cases, filed against Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II, a.k.a.
(that means "also known as") the Pope of Rome, sought to enjoin his presiding at a high Roman Catholic mass on the Wash-
Page 4
December,
ington Mall. The second case was against the National Park
Service and sought to prohibit that governmental
agency from
permitting the use of such federally owned land for a religious
service.
American
Atheists did not sue in Boston, Massachusetts
because the Boston Commons is owned by the City of Boston,
where the Murray/O'Hair
team does not have legal residence.
In like manner Benjamin Franklin Parkway belongs to Philadelphia and Grant Park to Chicago. The only chance was to
file where federally owned park land was a projected site.
It was found in the legal research necessary for the suit that
the staff attorney
of American Atheists could not appear in
the Washington,
D.C. federal district because of local rules of
the court. Therefore,
it was necessary for Dr. O'Hair and for
Jon Murray, Director of the American Atheist Center, to file
the suits "pro se ," which is simply a Latin term meaning that
they were filed by the persons themselves, without an attorney. It has been useful over the years to file in this manner
since, often, attorneys could not be found who would support
the cause of Atheism by handling a court action for the same.
The Board of Directors, at the suggestion of Conrad Goeringer, undertook

consideration
of picketing the Pope. In the history of the world, there has never been a picket line, by a
group representing
the interests of Atheism.
It was such a
novel and shocking idea, that it was first decided to contact
the only person who has ever picketed the Roman Catholic
Church - alone. Chris Drew, the Director of the Northern illinois Chapter of American Atheists, has for years, resolutely.
and alone, picketed one Roman Catholic Church after another
in Chicago. The Board called Chris, and on the speaker telephone in the conference
room, he immediately
was enthusiastic. "I was going to picket him, myself, alone, if necessary,"
he said. Then, one by one the Chapter Directors in the area
were contacted.
AI Haugen, of Wisconsin, was delighted.
He
had long felt that a little positive action with bodies on the
line was necessary. John [Michigan' Chapter]
Cruz's vote was
with the action, and "Uncle Henry" [he is the "Uncle" of the
entire Atheist movement - always there when he is needed] ,
Henry Schmuck; of Michigan was planning how he would get
there before he got off the telephone.
Richard Scholten of
Ohio would come. Patricia Voswinkel of North Carolina would
come. Richard Richardson of Missouri, Keith Berka of Kansas,
Lloyd Thoren of Indiana, also a Board Member, saw the necessity of the event.
The Board of Directors still deliberated
for an hour. It
wanted a good turnout,
a safe picketing where no one was
hurt. When Eric McCann, Jon Murray, Conrad Goeringer and,
finally,
Dr. O'Hair, agreed to man the picket line it was
unanimous
that the picketing would be done -,. in Chicago,
where one Atheist, Chris Drew, had had some experience.
1979
American
Atheist
It should be noted here that Dr. O'Hair was reluctant to

have another beating at the hands of Roman Catholics.
She
and every member of her family had been hospitalized
from
such beatings in the long career of working with and for American Atheists. Having attained age 60 in April of 1979, she
was reluctant to (1) be attacked by Roman Catholics again, or
(2) go to jail again. [She has been arrested and jailed eleven
times in her struggle for the civil libertarian rights of American
Atheists.] Some time was, therefore, spent on her insistence
that any picketing be structured in such a way that no physical
harm could come to the pickets, and that there would be no
police harassments or arrests.
In addition,
both Dr. O'Hair and Bill Baird had received
many death threats when the suits were announced and several
of these had assumed ominous overtones.
a.k.a. the Pope of Rome. In the former there was a request

for an injunction against the National Park Service to stop the
use of the federal land and in the latter suit there was a request for an injunction
against the Pope to restrain him from
saying the mass on the mall.
The American Atheist Center was in close touch with Bill
Baird in Boston, Massachusetts,
and he filed a similar suit in
Boston, Massachusetts,
on September
19th, since the Pope
there proposed to say a mass on the Boston Commons. There
were Some threats of other suits, but none actually materialized. The suit of Bill Baird, filed in a local Boston court
quickly came on for hearing and during the pendency of it,
as it proceeded,
the Boston Diocese of the Roman Catholic
Church agreed to pay for the cost of the construction
of the
altar, a bill which the city had proposed to pay. Bill agreed
and the upshot of that COUr;!,2,,c}ion was~tQ} rce tbe Chljrcb
With agreement
that every conceivable
safety factor be
built into the plan, it was unanimous that it was GO for the
suits against the mass on the Mall and Go for a body-on-theline picket demonstration
by American Atheists contra the
Pope.
Chris Drew agreed that he and the Chicago chapter would
clear all plans with the Chicago police, obtain a permit if one
was necessary, use his home for a base and commit the chapter
to cooperation
with the endeavor.
Although the American Atheist Center had asked for an immediate hearing on the request for a temporary
injunction to
bar the Federal Park Service from permitting the Washington
Mall to be used for a Roman Catholic religious ceremony and
to prohibit the Pope himself from saying a mass, the only
'timing' factor was the actual schedule of the Pope who was to
be in Chicago on October 5th and in Washington,
D.C. on
October 7th. The picketing - of necessity - was scheduled for
the. 5th and it was necessary to finish the suits and possible
appeals by that same date, the last day of the week the federal
courts were sitting.
On September
17th a news conference
was called and a
suit was filed against [1] the National Park Service for issuing
a permit and against [2] Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II,
Austin,
Texas
December,
19'79
Page 5
News
Washington,
DC Archdiocese
of that church, but he is not in
any sense a delegate to the United States government.
Jimmy
Carter has a "personal representative"
at the Vatican, but this
is not an official governmental
envoy.
The situation becomes muddy, for one office of the State
Department
announced
itself to be the "Office of Ital ian and
Vatican Affairs,"
but when the Director of that office was
personally
reached (his name is Lacy Wright, at telephone
number
[202] 632-2453,
he denied that there was such an
office - something his staff does not know!!).
The State Department
advised that the Pope would not
be given a 21-gun salute and that he was not being met by
State Department
representatives,
as is customary
with heads
of states. The information
given was that he was traveling as a
"private citizen" at his own request.
The New York Archdiocese
made a public statement,
supported
by the Washington,
DC Archdiocese
that the Pope
had requested
that he meet people in public places and on
public lands. It was a direct, premeditated,
affront
to the
Constitution
of the United States, with a full papal awareness
and understanding
of the attempt
to violate, or to scorn, a
founding principle of our nation, the separation
of state and
church.
there to pay over $200,000

- a beautiful tax savings for the
city. Instead of the Boston citizenry applauding
Bill for his
efforts, he was roundly denounced,
invectives were hurled
and even more threats were issued against him. The ACLU, a;
well as Americans United, through the statement of Edd Doerr,
had promised Bill that these organizations
would stand with
him. He was as stunned, therefore,
as the American Atheist
Center when the ACLU entered his Boston suit on the side of
the Pope and Americans
United issued a press release commending the Roman Catholic Church for its "sensitivity"
in
respect to state/church
separation matters!!
Meanwhile,
a thorough
check had been made with the
State Department.
The United States does NOT recognize the
Vatican as a nation, has no established
diplomatic
retations
with it and the Vatican has no embassy in the United States.
There is an "apostolic
delegate"
to the Roman Catholic
Church of the United States
and he is headquartered
in the
The Queen of England is also the head of the Church of

England. During her visit to the United States she did not
demand an Episcopal mass on the mall, and the American
Atheist Center took care to emphasize this. It was also pointed
out that if the Ayatollah Khomeini would visit this country, a
great hue and cry would issue" if he demanded the Washington
Mall for a Muslim wailing session.
The issue was squarely put
that the Pope was being given different, preferential treatment
in a- country which had a history of Protestantism
and free
thinking.
Despite the fact that the Roman Catholic Church in the
United States owns $162 billion worth of land, the Pope did
not want to meet his people privately. He wanted a public
spectacle
and he wanted
involvement
of state-owned
park
lands. Incidentally,
as soon as land is bought in the United
States by any part of the Roman Catholic Church that deed
is registered with the Vatican. In addition to its cathedrals,
churches,
administrative
buildings, vast lands for its orders,
that land owned by related organizations
such as the Knights
of Columbus, the church has many hundreds of thousands
of
Page 6
December,
1979
American Atheist
acres of land on which set its colleges and universities.

The
Pope could have had a mass in any of the big football stadiums
at those colleges - at Notre Dame for example.
Instead, he
was insistent that public lands be utilized. Our native soil was
not good enough for him, either, for in each park it was
ordered that a canopied alter be built for him, ranging in price
from the $200,000
altar in Boston to the $500,000
altar in
Chicago - at public expense.
The Pope would not rent land as did those who put on the
much remembered
"Woodstock,"
nor was he interested
in
comporting
himself with the dignity exhibited
by Martin
Luther King when he called for a gathering on the Washington
Mall in defense of the civil rights of American Blacks. Protestors have always utlized the mall, but never in the history
of the nation has it been defamed for the specific use of a
cult gathering for a mystic prayer meaningful
only to the
initiated.
It is obvious that the Pope, a showman, wanted to demonstrate the political power of the Roman Catholic Church by
massing its communicants
on the streets where legislators and
heads of cities and states could be impressed therewith.
The media in the United States debased itself with servility.
closed off so that buses could be parked on them to accommodate the faithful. Public schools were arbitrarily
dismissed
for the day, and public employees given a day off from work.
There were literally hundreds of violations of the doctrine of
state/church
separation,
at every level - state, city, county
and by federal government.
The focus was on the "superman"
white cape and' attendant razzle-dazzle.
The cameras focused on the fanatic faces,
only. Few, if any, media ~ either electronic
or hard - reported the reactionary,
repressive, total texts of his messages.
The Pope is a medievalist. He would take the world by the
scruff of its neck and drag it screaming and howling to the
12th century,
if that were possible. He is fully aware of the
difficulties
in which the Roman Catholic Church finds itself
worldwide
and knows that unless he puts the iron clamp of
discipline and ancient doctrines
upon that church it will not
survive. Rigid, unbending,
humorless,
the media deliberately
painted a different picture - for the masses he'was pictured as
a unique physical specimen,
"athletic"
was the word most
often used. The mental gymnastics
of the media exceeded '.
It created an artificial "personality"
for this stiff, unbending,
unyielding,
antihuman
medievalist. Just weeks before, Jimmy
Carter, going down the Mississippi, had picked up a child [for
the camerasl .and kissed her. The media immediately
labeled
it "politicking.".
The Pope 'picked-uo a child [for the cameral
and kissed her in Boston and this was immediately
labeled as
a rare touch of universal love and commitment
to brotherhood
for all mankind. Standing on a steamboat
and bewailing the
plight of the poor, Carter was labeled indifferent.
The Pope
stood on an altar built at a cost of $500,000
with clothing
sewn with gold thread, hands bejeweled, and asked that -the
wealthy help the poor. He was hailed as a saviour of mankind
and a' voice of the oppressed.
His vestments,
if sold, could
have bought food for a blockful of slum residents for a year.
But, the Pope represented
the milk of human kindness. The
hypocrisy of the media event was patently obvious.
The Governor
of Massachusetts
decreed a legal holiday
for the day that the "Vicar of Christ on Earth" set his feet
in that state. The loop in Chicago was closed down for one
day, with merchants
losing millions of dollars in business so that the streets would be cleared for the Pope and his entourage.
In Iowa three separate
Interstate
Highways were
Austin, Texas
December,
'I
1979
Page 7
Atheist Center staff attorney to argue the cases, it was necessary to find a Washington,
D.C. attorney who would lend his
name. The Center contacted
scores of them. A D.C. attorneyfinder organization
was consulted and it called scores of attorneys. No one would represent American Atheists against the
Pope! It finally came down to the need for Dr. O'Hair to go
to D.C. herself to argue her case. Since Jon Murray is a business executive and not an attorney,
there was no one to represent him.
A further word of explanation:
Dr. O'Hair files all of her
cases pro se which simply means "by myself" and since she is
an attorney she briefs and argues them. Someone, who thus represents themselves,
does not need to purchase
a "front"
attorney,
but on the other hand that person can not represent
anyone
else but themselves. Therefore,
Dr. O'Hair could not
represent Jon Murray.
If the Murray/O'Hair
team left for Washington, D.C. before
going to Chicago, this threw an extra burden on the shorthanded Atheist Center. Everyone
in the Center should have
Medals of Honor for the enormous amount of work that was
accomplished
for the suit and the picketing.
v::':
however, the claims of the abilities of the Pope. If he is a man

of steel, he cannot hold it together. With his priests and many
cardinals in array against him - he turns to the uneducated
masses of the church to attempt a personal appeal. This was
the substance
of his performance
in the United States. He
hopes that the simple man, the "little" Roman Catholic can
coerce both the educated clergy and the politicians of every
state to return to the basics of the old church. It was because
of this that the Murray-O'Hair
suits were specifically against
the Pope himself. There was a need to demonstrate
to the
world that this man was not beyond the reach of the state, or
beyond the reach of ordinary educated persons.
Meanwhile, legal difficulties
began to appear in the- Atheist
suit. A word of explanation
is necessary. The American Bar
Association has a union which is a closed shop. For a Texas
attorney to practice in another state, he must pay an attorney
there to be the nominal attorney,
sign his name to all papers,
etc., while the Texas attorney does all the work. And the situation is vice versa, in all states of the union. For our American
"f
The situation was that Paul Funderburk,

staff attorney, Jon
Murray, Director of the American
Atheist Center and Dr.
O'Hair, American
Spokeswoman
left for Washington,
D.C.
and the hearing on the suits against the Pope and the Federal
Park Service and the stalwarts Alisa and Richard' Bozarth,
Barry Cashman, John Mays and Chuck Knipp were left to run
the badly overworked Center.
The federal court system of the United States has long been
maKing political decisions as opposed to justiciable decisions.
On the one hand, it was hoped that the justices would uphold
the Constitution
of the United States since the matter was an
issue before the world, with the Pope visiting the United
States. On the other hand, the same old, tired, power politics
of the judicial system weighed heavily against an honest constitutional decision.
Every news media person was astute enough to know what
was at stake - and probably every attorney. The country waited with bated breath, even as did we. A Roman Catholic sacramental, communal mass on the Washington Mall was patently
Page 8
December,
1979
American
Atheist
unconstitutional,
particularly
under the Nyquist tripartite
test.
On October 1st, the case was heard in Washington, D.C. In
that impressive court there were two very long (14 tt.) tables
for legal counsel. On the one side sat a dozen lawyers representing the Federal Park Service, the City of Washington,
D.C., the Washington
Archdiocese
of the Roman Catholic
church, the Pope, and A.C.L.U. The attorneys for Americans
United had delivered the written argument - against Atheists
and in favor of the Pope - directly to the judge without notifying the Atheist Center that it had done so.
At the other table, on one end of it, sat Paul Funderburk,
representing
Jon Murray who also was at the table, Madalyn
O'Hair and Joel D. Joseph, a young attorney from Washinqton,
D.C., who had agreed to act as the liaison attorney so that Paul
could 'argue for Jon. He was an observer, after he had introduced Paul to the court, which had been his function there.
The court immediately
insisted that the suit against the
Pope be dismissed. A motion had been made by the Archdiocese of Washington,
D.C., supported
by the American Civil
Liberties Union and it was the first order of business. The issue
was argued, with an Atheist insistence that the Pope was
properly before a United States court of law. However, it was
the judge who was most anxious that the suit against the-Pope
be dismissed - since the "merit" of the cases would "not be
effected"
if "His Holiness" [the judge's wording] was dropped
as a party. He was quite determined that the Pope had nothing
to do with the litigation!! Since the permit to say the mass had
been issued to the Archdiocese
of Washington,
D.C. the
Atheists could not prevail. The Pope could and should have
remained
a party litigant, but it was apparent
that as the
"Vicar of Christ on Earth" it was important to all the Atheist
opponents
that Karol Wojtyla, alias John Paul II, a.k.a. the
Pope of Rome, be free from any legal jurisdiction on earth.
News
emphasized
and reviewed in one Supreme Court case and we
were [and still are] confident that our suits would be successful since the Pope's use of the Washington
Mall to deliver a
Roman Catholic, sacrificial,
communion,
mass was so completely in violation of all such tests.
The tripartite
test for determining
violations of the so-called "establishment"
clause of the First Amendment,
found best
reviewed in the case of Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist, 413 U.S. 756, 37 L.Ed.2d 948, 93 S.Ct. 2955 [1973J
is as follows:
a statute (law, rule, requlation,
practice, custom):
(1) must reflect a "clearly secular" purpose;
(2) have a primary effect which neither advances nor inhibits religion; and
(3) avoid excessive governmental
entanglement
with religion.
The Pope's saying of a Roman Catholic mass on the Washington Mall, on a $400,000
canopied altar built only for the
occasion, involving a cost of $2,500,000
to the city of District
of Columbia and a cost of $200,000
to the Federal Park Service, consuming
planning time of both city and federaloffi-
During the years from 1941 forward, the United States Supreme Court has very carefully, deliberately,
drawn up guidelines and tests as to what is or is not constitutional
or unconstitutional
in respect to the "establishment"
or the "free exercise" of religion protected
by the First Amendment
to the
Constitution
of the United States. These have lately been re-
Austin, Texas
December,
1979
Page 9
News
needing to' file a suit such as this against both religion and government - in a nation which is premised on the proposition of
state/church separation.
As it was obvious that the line of attack was to be through
the "free speech" protections
which we have rather - significantly - than through the "free exercise" of religion protections, in the oral argument
to the court, Dr. O'Hair emphasized that neither Atheists, nor any other state/church
separation purists, would object to the Pope giving a secular speech
on the mall. It was clearly placed before the court that the objection was to an apparent government sponsorship of religion
and the actual mass on the Mall, with all of the government
arrangements
therefore that were objectionable.
We agreed: the Pope had the right to walk in the Mall and
to .rnumble his prayers to himself there. What was unconstitutional was that the United States government gave a permit for
the construction
of a canopied
altar, the erection of sacrament stations to pass out a possible 1 million communion
wafers, with wine [which were, by some Roman Catholic
magic to turn to the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ even as the
Pope mumbled over them],
building of a $50,000~nce
for
j\
cials (meeting three to four times a week) for six weeks, was
hardly a case of no "entanglement."
The primary purpose of
the entire mass was to advance not only religion, but the Roman Catholic religion in particular.
In addition,
no "clearly
secular" purpose could ever be seen in this peculiar use of the
Mall for a high religious ceremony.
There was no interest, on the part of the attorneys for the
Pope and the government,
in arguing concerned
with this
being an "establishment"
of religion. They all damned well
knew that it was. Therefore another legal tactic was taken:
(1) the Pope has the right of "free access" to any public
lands, and
(2) the Pope has the right to "freedom of speech" without
the content of the speech being censored;
therefore,
the Pope has the right to say a sacramental,
communal Roman Catholic Mass on federally owned property and
it is right for the state to aid him in this, as in the present situation.
Not one person, other than American Atheists, understood

the1:.o..nv?f two individual citizens (representing all Atheists)
\~tltJH\"~'S
\<\fi\f"t
<lEAtIiNW
CS')
RtilAH:
,,,>iWERSTITlU!I$
SA C If! FI CI:
crowd control, total combined

expenses of over $2,750,000
for the cost of this one prayer, months of excessive administrative entanglement
of state and church - all to the benefit of
the Roman Catholic church. Not one Jew, one Protestant
or
one Atheist would have understood
what was going on there.
It was a political power plavv a super circus, for the benefit of
Roman Catholicism only. The game-plan could not pass muster under the Nyquist tripartite test.
Tbe judge was asked to give a bench verdict (i.e., an immediate one) but he declined to do so. The Pope was scheduled to
appear on the Mall on 7th October, just six days from the trial.
It was impossible to do anything but wait. Meanwhile,
Paul
Funderburk,
Dr. O'Hair and Jon Murray visited the Mall.
Construction
of the $400,000
canopied
altar was almost
completed.
That area of the Mall was prohibited
to visitors and had been so for a month. It was apparent then that the
court would do nothing to stop that Constitutional
violation.
The city was geared for the visit. The President was planning
to have the Pope visit the White House - the first time any
Page 10
December,
1979
American Atheist
Pope had been invited in the history of the nation.

We knew we did not have a prayer.
The next point of assemblage was at Chicago, Illinois, at the
home of Chris Drew. Paul Funderburk
accompanied
Dr .
.O'Hair and Mr. Murray to that city so that he, as a lawyer,
would be able to help if anyone was arrested or if difficulties
began. A night and two days were spent finishing the picket
signs, with a number of stalwarts from the Chicago chapter doing their part. Every other organization
backed out of a challenge to the Roman Catholic church at high speed. As the electronic media gushed with adoration
at the Pope's every qesture,it became more and more obvious that American Atheists
stood absolutely alone in the nation against the repressive doctrines of this medievalist
man and that American
Atheists
stood equally alone in an attempt to protect the First Amendment to the Constitution
of the United States.
Meanwhile,
back in Austin, Texas, the American Atheist
Center team. was struggling against a flood of work for the
scheduled picketing.
It had been decided that massive mailings
would be made - in addition
to every Atheist within 200
leaflets and members of that chapter went to the train terminals and handed the leaflets to commuters
coming off trains
to go to work in the Loop. They had no difficulties or unpleasant experiences.
The press at the American
Atheist Center ran steadily.
The personnel there should receive medals for their increased
activity and hard work.
Chris recommended
that picket signs be made which would
be sturdy with carrying handles six feet long, stiff posterboard
that would withstand
a 20 rn.p.h, wind and to be uniform in
size, generally 4 ft. wide and 3 ft. tall. Twenty such doublesided signs were made and packed with an entire automobile
trunk full of literature.
It was at this point that everyone headed for Chicago, while
the suit was pending in Washington,
D. C. There was no way
of knowing how many persons would coma.out. Invitations
had been sent to 8,000 American Atheists in"the area. Every
one hoped that one out of a thousand would show up! There
was no way of kn()win who would come.
miles of Chicago - to every conceivable group which had ever
had an argument with the Roman Catholic church. They were
all asked to picket also - not necessarily with American Atheists, but at least to picket.
'
A word of explanation
is necessary. This invitation was to
the effect that American
Atheists had a quarrel with the'
Pope's visit and if these groups, for their own reasons, also had
a difference
of opinion with the Roman Catholic church, it
made sense for all concerned to seize the Chicago opportunity
to doit.
'
The invitations
were issued to Zero Population
Growth,
Planned Parenthood,
NOW, all ERA proponents,
all abortion
advocates, all Black groups, all Gay groups, ACLU, union organizations, student groups. American Atheists wasn't endorsing any of their programs and didn't ask them to endorse Atheism.
None of them had courage enough to make an appearance
and both Planned Parenthood
and Zero Population
Growth
openly condemned
American Atheists for the action!
Undaunted
Chris Drew with his cha ter
ordered 5
Austin, Texas
December,
1979
Page 11
But our chapter directors

began to report in: of course,
Chris Drew was there for Chicago and Kay Langley, Director
of the Sacramento,
California, chapter had arrived before the
Murray/O'Hair's
did. Conrad Goeringer, heading a group from
the Arizona Chapter arrived next. They were followed
by
'Eric McCann, representing
the Austin, Texas Chapter as well
as the national Board of Directors of the American Atheist
Center. Eric drove in. Keith Berka, the Kansas Chapter Dir
ector, and Richard Richardson, the Missouri Chapter Director
arrived in time to help with the signs. Henry Schmuck, the
delegate from the Michigan Chapter, arrived with an automobile trunk full of signs. Patricia Voswinkel, the Chapter
Director from North Carolina was able to obtain a room at
a Loop hotel, near the projected
picket line. Lloyd Thoren,
the Indiana Chapter Director was needed at the American
Atheist Museum but he asked Charles Jackson of Indianapolis
to represent that chapter.
Richard Scholten,
Ohio Chapter
Director arrived in time for the picketing as did AI Haugen,
the Wisconsin Director.
When the group headed for the Loop it was not known
what could be expected.
What was found was a deserted
city. The police had prohibited
entry into that area of Chicago anticipating
a<:~oV\l.<:!...?f1~!?_1Y, million persons. There
simply were not that many there. Trains were not full. The
stations
were not crowded,
only handsful
of persons were
here and there scattered
on the streets. Everywhere
police
cars were being used as taxi service for various officials of
the Roman Catholic church, usually in drag (long dresses).
On every lamp post a Vatican flag flew - the cost must have
been enormous for these expensive decorations.
The anticipated
crowd did not turn out. Since we had a
problem of security and being in touch with the mayor's office
for the same we found that the police and firemen had been
called in from outlying suburbia to handle the crowds and that
there was much concern that the incident of crime would
increase in those areas when it was known that the police and
firemen had been diverted to the Loop.
Mayor Byrne is quite concerned
that Chicago should not
again have the reputation
which it had under Mayor Daly and especially the renown which had come from the Democratic Convention
in that city during his regime. Therefore,]
after some negotiating
difficulties with the Chicago police, the
mayor's office had intervened and ordered the utmost cooper-:
ation with the picketing. That mattered.
Generally speaking,
the police were cooperative,
courteous
and considerate.
The
mayor had given approval for the picketing to be done on
Michigan Ave., and that it could be extended along that street

according to the discretion of the picketers, including picketing directly opposite
the entrance
to Grant Park where the
mass was to be said. After several days of uncertainty,
after
dozens of telephone calls to clear the matter, we were pleased.
When the picketers actually
arrived at the assembling point, the ranking field officer noti-~~~~fied
that he had decided that the perimeters within which the
;,,;,'~;.;::~
"picketinq would be confined would be reduced. Since this was
. 't~1
the- first time in the history of the world that a group of Athe, ir."h " ists had ever picketed anywhere, the decision
was made to
'~, obey police orders, do a good job of orderly picketing, come
out of it uninjured
and not arrested.
It was more important
to establish a precedent,
exercise the civil right of free speech
and to get the message across than to become martyrs.
The police ordered additionally,
a three-hour
delay. Although the picketers could assemble beginning at 11 :00 AM,
signs could not be brought into the street, nor picketing begun
until 2:00 PM. The ruling had the necessary consequences
of
discouraging
some who came to participate.
The area was
Page 12
December,
-r
1979
American
Atheist
thick with media. From this came a 7-minute segment that

was shown over the CBS network in most cities. The showing
included statements
made by the chapter directors at a press
conference,
questions
answered
by individual
picketers,
an
interview with Dr. O'Hair, some mild confrontations
between
Atheist picketers and passing Christians. The Roman Catholic
church sent in a film crew, in two limousines. They were interested in interviewing
Dr. O'Hair and took perhaps 20 minutes
,of footage. Later, in Boulder, Colorado, an article appeared
'with a United Press wire service credit purporting to be an exchange between an old, wise, priest and the brash Mrs. O'Hair
- the "father" defending his faith from the attacking Atheist.
It was an unabashed
mish-mash
hard-copy
of the Roman
ICatholic interview, in which no priest had been involved.
Generally speaking, the news coverage was fabulous. From
the day of the announcement
of the suit, the Center's attorney, Paul Funderburk,
Richard Bozarth (at the Center while
others were on the road). Dr. O'Hair and Jon Murray finished
about 200 phoners [interviews with television, radio and news
media via long distance telephone,
being recorded for later.
broadcast
or being broadcast
at the time of the telephone
call}. At least 50 television interviews were done, including
"Good Morning, Canada" [the Murray/O'Hairs
flew to Toron-
to for that 0",1 nd the
''T0T''OW''
show with
J",;"
Savitch subbing for Tom Snyder. Phil Donahue called three

times - and three times the Murray/O'Hairs
refused to appear
on his show.
In Chicago, alone, from the home of Chris Drew, at least 50
more phoners were finished.
Friends in the media estimated
that there was about $10 million worth of publicity over the
papal suits and the papal picketing.
Television
clips were
seen in Australia, Argentina,
England, France, Germany and
Brazil of which there is knowledge.
It is presumed that the
coverage was world wide
American Atheists stood up to the Pope, legally and person- '
ally, !IS an organized group and as individuals. The first time is
now behind everyone - now YOU can be in the next effort.
No Sexist Pope
Pope Should Resign and Denounce Religion
Pope Should Sell His Riches and Give to The Poor
State and Church - Keep Them Separate
Jesus Christ - Super Fraud
The Only Thing The Pope Needs Is A Woman
Religion is The Problem - Not The Solution
The Mass is a Con Game
Belief Misleads
Poor Need Pope's Money
Divorce Is A Human Right
Birth Control Is A Human Right
Religion Is The Problem - Not The Answer
Pope Should Resign and Try Poverty Himself
God Beliefs Are Fantasies
Christ Never Lived
God Never Answered Any Prayer
America's Atheists
'Abortion Is A Woman's Right
Tax All Churches' Businesses, Stocks, Bonds
Ignorance + Fear = Religion
Creeds Mislead
The Pope Is Full of Papal Bull
Racism - Chauvinism -- In The Name of Christ
Bar The Pope's Sexism
At 2:00 PM when the police permitted signs to be brought

on to the street, it was a cheering sight to see them go up.
Ninety percent of them were the large sturdy type and Chris
Drew had carefully superintended
so that the slogans would
be themic. The were:
Austin, Texas
December, 1979
Page 13
NeWTs
The Chicago 47 proved that it is not alone safe for Atheists

to come out of the closet, but for them to get on a picket line
during a time when religious fanaticism is at its height in the
country. No one has an excuse, now, anymore.
Nothing happened to the Chicago 47.
No one was hurt.
No one was arrested.
The Chicago mayor and the Chicago police force were helpful - even courteous - in the final analysis.
From the picketing came massive news coverage. The news
conference
drew 48 media men, equipped with cameras, tape
recorders, pads and pencils. Scores of stories were released across the country and the world. Every country
on this old
ball, Earth, knew that some group had had courage enough to
stand up to the Pope - sue him to force him to have respect
for one nation's laws - picket him to let him know face on
that he is considered a menace to mankind.
Every Atheist in the world can stand a little prouder, walk a
little taller, now.
MASS - Meaningless Archaic Superstitious

Sacrifice
Women's Place is Her Choice
Atheism Makes Sense for America
Religions Prevent Jerusalem Solution
Religions Prevent Ireland Solution
Religions Prevent Iran Solution
No Sexist Pope
There had been a total of 35 two-sided signs made. When
they all were hoisted in the air, it was a heart-warming
sight.
To the amazement
of everyone, there were more people than
signs. A total of 47 picketers were there staying resolutely
from 11 :00 AM to 2:00 PM and then picketing with equal
enthusiasm from 2:00 to 3:30 PM.
A large number of persons came and asked questions and
Kay Vining determined
to and did pass out to each a flyer put
together
by the Chicago,
Illinois, chapter.
Questions were
politely answered.
Some give-and-take
occurred,
but on the
whole the Atheists
used humor to respond to jibes or to
hostile pejoratives yelled at them.
At 3:30 PM it was decided to stop the picketing because
the mass was concluded and it was agreed that it was best to
try to avoid the rush of 250,000 persons heading for the
trains and suburbia.
At about the time of the ending of the picketing, the media

informed that the federal district judge in Washington,
D.C.
had ruled against a temporary
injunction to stop the Pope. The
court chose to bicker, attempting
to delineate between a' permit for the use of a federal park for a "special event" and a
permit for a "demonstration,"
holding that the Pope's mass on
the Mall was the latter. The Park Service argued that it did no
more for the Pope than it had done for anyone else in the use
of the Mall - probably the most blatant governmental
lie to
ever be put on legal record.
Since it was the only hope for a
decision for the Pope, the judge used the excuse and reduced
the appearance
of the Pope to the same category as a wild~yed e~angelist, stopping in the park, exhorting religion to the/
Immediate passersby.
,--.
The United States government,
through its Park Service,
and through the orders of the President of the United States,
and the military, blatantly,
deli beratelv, premeditatively
and
. with the thought of politics at hand, had violated the Constitution. The federal district court judge gave his stamp of ap-]
proval on it in a specious, jumbled decision that would make
any logician blush with shame.
if%lil
-. ,/
}i;:;:: .~~~~'
Page 14
.:.:,
December,
1979
American
Atheist
It was immediately
agreed that an appeal should be taken
to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Joel Joseph was contacted and agreed to handle an immediate appeal. Within twenty-four
hours it was filed
in the court, asking for a review of the lower court decision.
The three-judge
appellate court handed down its opinion on
5th October. This decision took another tack. It held, along
with the oral argument of the Roman Catholic church, that
the Pope had the right to access of public land. And, he also
had the right to freedom of speech. Putting these two together
the court held that he had the right to utilize the Mall for a
mass. An analogy is important:
since all legislative halls are
publicly owned, all schools are publicly owned, stations are
publicly owned, hospitals
are publicly owned - this means
that the government
must accommodate
any priest who wants
to use those facilities at any time to have masses held therein.
One of the arguments
of the appellate court was that the
"content"
of an utterance
could not be censored and so the
Pope was free to say a mass. This is in absolute direct contradiction to the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Murray v. Curlett, the famous school prayer case. In that case, the prayer
was forbidden simply because it was a prayer - i.e., a religious
exercise. In this case, the prayer was approved because it was a
prayer - i.e , a religious exercise, and one cannot have "content" of an utterance
censored! Some of the language in the
decision was chilling:
"To the Framers, the Establishment
Clause and the Free
Exercise Clause were supplemental
and cornpati ble means
i to the real ization of the goal of religious freedom. "
,There is no recognition
given that anyone can have a goal of
freedom from religion.
The conclusion
of this curious and twisted logic of the
court was revealed in its closing sentences:
"The principles
of the First Amendment
support
such
neutral use of a public park. To strike down a regulation rooted in neutrality
so as to deny access to the Pope for a massIcum-sermon
would thwart First Amendment
values communication and religious freedom. The Establishment
Clause is not
an abstraction
in logic. It permits an accommodation
in furtherance of the spirit and purpose of the First Amendment.
The motion for an injunction pending appeal is denied.
"So orde red."
NeWTs
~
the cases ask that the action of the Federal Park Service and
the Pope both be declared post hoc to be unconstitutional.
The legal fight costs money. Every Atheist reading this article is asked to send $10.00 as a contribution
to the legal fund
so that the Washington,
D.C. law firm can be paid in this continuing action. Make the check, or money order pavableto:
Legal Fund - Mass on the Mall suit
American Atheist Center
P.O.Box2117
Austin, Texas, 78768
If you were not a part of the action in Washington,
D. C. or
in Chicago, Illinois, you owe it to those who were, to put your
checkbook where they put their bodies - on the line.
Send that $10.00 contribution
NOW before you go on to
read the next article!
.-
Make no mistake about the magnitude of this case. It will

be used over and over and over again for the religious to intrude now everywhere there is publicly owned land, buildings,
or parks.
It was a necessary confrontation
because the United States
and the Atheists in the land must know where they stand vis-avis religion. Because 'of this suit, and probably only because of
it, the Pope emphasized
in every city that the United States
was "One nation under God." Note where the United States is
in reference to god.
The Pope said his mass on the Mall. But, American Atheists
are not through with the complaint.
Joel Joseph is continuing
the appeal and it will go until the United States Supreme
Court is reached. The cases are asking that the citizens of the
United States be reimbursed by the Archdiocese of the Roman
Catholic church of Washington,
D.C. the $2,500,000
which
this sin Ie ra er cost the taxpayers of this nation. In addition
Austin, Texas
December,
1979
Page 15
NeWTS
91 ~
flJe P(!Me~
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~
.
Christianity
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A judge ruled for Papal freedom
I
\
Gerald Tholel1l
Popes WiU Be Popes

Germany
rose to power.
On the
smaller
end of the scale we also
witnessed the unfolding drama of the
late Rev. Jim Jones. All such fanatical
maggot-like
conglomerations
of humanity end the same way. The willing
mindlessness
of their followers
becomes their undoing.
How long will it take for all of
society to finally become aware of the
futility of worshipping
paper heroes?
-How long will Popes act like Popes?
Page 16
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,-.
~
_
#
Conceding
of speech
fi
~{~
Thanks,
.~ ~
l~';
to Romish John Pauli
Still the voice repeated insistently

;"'Keep
the Pope off the Mall!"
..,
~
i'i!
L:.f
~
With its myth and typical gall

But a voice for freedom tang out strong
"Keep the Pope off the Mall!"
from p. 27
gnawed at my TV set
I,:.
i
:1'
Continued
PAPA'S VISIT
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M,d,IYn
NO REGRETS
:,r.~.'.
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:t
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tl!
There uiere times when we shook hands
f.~
Th
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~
s~
ii
h and called iltdabdrYlw

mes w en you wou
u v ...
I would cry
I laughed and I loved and we argued, Life,
But never did I let you pass me by.
ere were
ti
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~,
..
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~~"~~'~~~:1!~~~'!Wf;.'!?..!'h.J
December,
1979
American
Atheist
By ROY P. LINGLE
(Reprint
from Princeton
Class of 1913 "Bull.")
In the south, Holy Nicholas - San Nic-Iaus,

(Corrupted by etymological
laws)
Appeared in our time as the pot-bellied elf
Of "The Night Before Christmas"
(on ev'ry book-shelf);
In the years before Christmas, all over the earth
The multitudes gathered to greet the rebirth
Of the Sun-god, who rose from the darkness again
At the solstitial season to light and warm men.
With reindeer and sleigh, and a suit all of red,

He slid down the chimney with kiddies in bed Filled stockings with goodies and toys from his pack
That cleaned out the chimney and crippled his back.
So Nata/is Solis /nvicti - remember Was a time of rejoicing in latter December;

And when churchmen established Christ's
birthday by guessing
They looked for a saint to share the day's blessing.
Already the Bishop of Myra, enshrined
As the patron of schoolboys and schoolgirls so kind
And fatherly - rated a saint's day unique
In that month oftheSun-god
as well asSaintNick.
As an orthodox bishop - historical Asian Saint Nicholas defended the creed Athanasian;
Proved the Nicean Doctrine was true, as he saw
He could frustrate Arius with a sock on the jaw!
So this muscular holy man, famous in legend,
Was the children's protector, with deeds unimagined:
When the innkeeper pickled three schoolboys in death,
Nick assembled the fragments gave life with his breath.
When three schoolgirls were destined for fate
worse than doom,
The saint tossed fat purses of gold in their room;
Saved from poverty, sin and the shame of white slav'rv,
They traded thei r dowries for marriages savory.
Thus stories developed from true to irrational
Till the clerical Saint was a myth international
Whom the peoples accepted and published his fame,
With linguistic variants based on his name.
Then with Rudolph the Red-Nosed supplying the light

He rose from the roof-tops
in orbital
flight;
Like Elijah of old, blasted off into space (Or the Virgin's Assumption, by heavenly Grace).
Still one skeptical maiden was left in the lurch Wrote her doubts to The Sun, care of Editor Church
Who parried the question by Little Virginia
With "Santa
is really the Spirit
within
ya!"
Not defining the nature of spirits in frolic Whether
bottled
or happily
non-alcoholic
As when office-gals dance on the table-tops, shocking
The guests, who can see how they fill
their own stocking!
While Saint Nicholas,
multiplied
iqto satiety
On every street-corner
the modern
variety,
With whiskyfied
breath and tobacco-stained
beavers,
Or chimney and bell - the Salvation receivers;
And sponsored in Parades by Macy's and Gimbel's
Among their assortment of huckstering symbols!
But little Virginia, to meet your appeal,
Amid thousands of Santa's, there's one who was real!
MORAL
- With wild contradictions
and mythical zeroes,
From miracles,
legends and sanctified
heroes
Look back through the hist'ry of Science and true-mart.
You'll find that the god-saint was merely a human.
In the nations up north he was hailed as Kris Kringle

(Derived from the Christ-child) with sleigh
bells a jingle;
With mistletoe, Yule-log and Tannenbaum tree,
While pagans and heathen rolled drunken with glee.
December, 1979
Austin, Texas
!I
Page 17
Ro ts------of theism.
Joseph.
McCabe
Part 3
[Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from Joseph
McCabe's Twelve Years in a Monastery and 80 Years a Rebel.]
In the year 1895 Joseph McCabe had reached the point
Secession,
like any great change in a person's established
in his priestly career when it was time to make the hard delife, was a painful decision for any priest to make because it
cision about whether or not to continue that career. He was
usually came after the priest "has formed definite habits of
unhappy with much about the Roman church due to the in- thought
and of life and innumerable
attachments
whose
credible hypocrisy that permeated
it from the pope's throne
breaking off is accompanied
with a pain akin to the physical
down to the humblest novitiate to the most obscure order of
pain of dislocation
and the wrenching asunder of nerves and
monks. But all priests knew this. Why did McCabe secede
fi bres. For in the Church of Rome, at least, secession means
when most, like his good friend and confessor Father David,
farewell to the past - farewell to whatever honor, whatever
managed to live with the hypocrisy?
It was that in trying to
esteem and affection may have been gained by a life of indusunderstand the hypocrisy of the church, he came to question
try and merit."
the religion it represented.
The decision to finally go was helped a bit when he took
into his confidence
a Catholic woman he had considered
a
The real deciding factor that drove McCabe out of the
friend. She became incensed at his refusal to be persuaded
church were his doubts about dogma and god's existence.
by her arguments for his remaining in the priesthood,
and punThese were not uncommon
in the priesthood,
but though
ished him, or so she thought,
by telling all to his;~uperiors.
"doubts do enter into the clergy .....
What time has the ordiThey dispatched
Father David, who was now cold and hostile
nary priest to make a sincere and protracted
study of his
to the man he had been friends with for years, to discharge
opinions?
....
The fact that the actual seceders had special
McCabe as rector of St. Bernardine and to order him to go into
opportunity
and a well-known
tendency
for study issignifiexile at a friary in a remote locality. McCable refused to, precant."
ferring to start his new career in a place where he had sympaMcCabe was such a priest possessed of both opportunity
and tendency
for study. He did not study Atheists like Niethetic friends.
tzsche and Meslier, nor Deists like Voltaire and Jefferson, nor
On 19 February,
1886, Joseph McCabe packed up his few
Agnostics like Hume and Huxley; he studied no anti-Christian
possessions
(a telescope,
microscope,
and some books) and
scholars and philosophers
at all. He studied the great theowalked away from the darkness and chains of religion to begin
logians like Augustine,
Aquinas,
Scotus,
Vasquez,
Herinx,
a new life in the bright light andfreedom
of Atheism.
and others. This was supposed to be the surest way to restore
One of the obstacles to secession was that the ex-priest
his faith, for the Roman church persistently
taught "that
finds himself out of employment,
with few marketable
skills.
their claims only needed to be studied to be admitted."
Outside the Roman church there is little use for priestly skills.
It did not work, which would surprise no Atheist then or . This intimidation
kept many in the church, and was no small
now, and the great moment was reached at Christmas, 1895.
consideration
to McCabe. One of his Buckingham
friends was
"I shut myself in my cell and faced my destiny .....
1 took a
a businessman,
who, after McCabe had discussed his desire to
sheet of paper and - was it the Manchester influence? - disecede, offered him a job as a junior cashier if he did leave the
vided it into debit and credit columns on the arguments for
priesthood.
It made the decision easier.
god and immortality.
On Christmas Eve I wrote 'Bankrupt'
The Roman church had another,
also highly effective,
at the foot."
means to intimidate
priests contemplating
secession.
It was
Still he allowed a few more weeks for the god he no longer
the knowledge
that the church would immediately
begin a
believed in to miraculously
intervene. He also talked his probcampaign to discredit the character of the man and thoroughly
lems over with several non-Catholics
in Buckingham
he had
ruin his reputation.
The church could not bear to admit that
formed friendships with. Most urged him to quit the church,
a priest would quit as the result from an honest, sincere, wellbut still it was not an easy decision.
reasoned change of convictions.
The ecclesiastical
policy was
Page 18
December, 1979
American Atheist
"to conceal a secession, if possible, and, when made public, to

represent it as dishonest and immoral." The usual slur was the
ex-priest had become corrupt from wine and women and was
seeking the freedom to indulge in his wretched vices.
Knowing this, McCabe was not surprised when the next
day Father David, who knew the high ethical nature that was
the outstanding
feature of McCabe's character,
went to his
friend and employer to accuse McCabe of theft and generally
slander his character. The "theft" was based on the Franciscan
vow of poverty, which meant the monk had no possessions,
only the order did. McCabe had "stolen" those items he had
acquired over twelve years and which he had come to look upon as his property.
However, when confronted
with a policesergeant, who was totally befuddled
about whether or not a
law had actually been broken, McCabe surrendered
all rather
than start his new life with a court battle. His autobiography
implies that later this great fighter came to regret he had not
fought that battle.
His friend, and now employer,
knew the man McCabe was,
and threw Father David out with the contempt
this "moral
leader" deserved. However, his Catholic "friends" and all his
relatives except his immediate family accepted their religion's
description
of his character, and he became an object of scorn
to them. "It was the beginning of the venomous and unprincipled persecution
I was to endure for half a century."
At age 28, McCabe began life anew on $7.50 a week, of
which five dollars went to room and board in the cottage of a
widow. But he was ambitious.
He had grown up in one of
those great English industrial cities where he had learned to
see himself as part of a "great commercial army in which every
soldier had a million dollars in his pack." Part of his priesthood had been in the most exciting, and the most opportunity-offering
city of England, London. By iron-rigid economy,
he saved $50 and went "badly dressed, awkward as a schoolgirl, to make my fortune in the Big City."
His life was set upon his glorious future when he met a
non-Catholic
friend he had known while still a priest in London. This friend introduced
him to "the then poor and obscure Rationalist society."
He wrote for them two forgettable
books, which may have significance only in that seeing himself
in print turned his ambitions toward a career as a writer.
This same friend introduced
him to George Bernard Shaw,
but that was to be a short-lived
friendship when Shaw gave
McCabe advice on writing in the form of dogmas. The beginner
disagreed with the master, and the result was a feud. A more
profittable
introduction
by his friend was to the Ethical
Lecturer
Moncure
D. Conway,
who took a liking to McCabe enough to become "ill" for his next Sunday lecture and
send McCabe as his substitute.
He would follow this lecture
Hon. Mrs. Ives, "an aristocratic

lady of 90." Thanks to this
employment,
he got to spend six months around the Mediterranean and the lower Alps. The significance of this part of his
life was that he found himself in Nice with plenty of free
time and no money-worries
- so, being a literary fellow, he
wrote a book: In the Shade of the Cloister, a fictional account
of his life as a monk.
Before he had left London with Mrs. Ives, his very useful
friend had introduced
him to Leslie Stephen,
the Dean of
British Letters and England's leading Agnostic. Stephen took
a solid liking to McCabe, who now asked him to read his manuscript. Stephen was more than willing to help McCabe get his
literary act together,
but his reaction was: "If this incredible
stuff is true, for god's sake tell it in non-fiction."
Though the
novel was critically well-received,
McCabe was determined
to
act on his friend's advice.
Mrs. Ives died about this time, thus freeing McCabe to return to London and "mean lodging" with a determination
to
establish himself in a writing career. He wrote his Twelve Years
in a Monastery, and Stephen used his influence to get the best
London publisher to bring out the book. The book was a success, despite the Roman church's somewhat successful attempt
to get the London papers to condemn it or at least ignore it.
(Stephen broke an old friendship with a critic who confessed
he didn't have guts enough to offend the Catholic church by
praising Twelve Years.)
There followed a fantastic year of instant celebrity. Though
the book sold well, it was the publisher,
not McCabe, who
reaped the profits. His book did not relieve his financial. insecurity, but it did make him a very in-person. The two pressures
of insufficient money and people trying to use him to promote
themselves or their 'isms worked strange things in his mind.
More than one writer has been ruined by instant celebrity.
McCabe had sense enough to retreat to get hold of himself.
He did this by becoming "a sort of chaplain" to a group of
closet Atheists who called themselves
the Liecester Secular
Society,
one of the last remnants
of the famous Owenite :
Movement. What they wanted was a secular "parish priest,"
which McCabe would not be for them. After a year, he quit
his post, but they parted friends and he lectured before them
unce a year even after he gave up the lecture c(fcuit. He felt
it was "a worth-while experience
I never regretted."
In Liecester he wrote his first historical work, Peter Abelard, entering into a field he was to master as few humans have
been able. Most historians
shudder
before the complexity
and vastness of history and safely specialize on one subject
or reign or empire or time period. Few take up the challenge
to write "world history." for the greater the scope, the greater
with several thousand allover the world, for this was the era
when people attended
lectures for entertainment
like they
now attend movies. (Significantly,
McCabe never expressed a
regret that motion pictures cut down the public's demand for
lectu res.)
,
McCabe's literary triumphs
still lay in. the future. Meanwhile, his money was vanishing. He sought work. He had a
chance to earn money as a tutor in private schools, but only
if he pretended to be Protestant.
Hypocrisy not being one of.
McCabe's defects, he refused. Another job opportunity
was
$15 a week proofreading
Latin, French and German school
books. When he understood
how much work the printer expected for his $15, he passed up this chance, to be exploited
criminally (no doubt another brick in the socialist economic
philosophy he was to champion all his life).
When he was really near to hitting bottom, he answered an
advertisement
and was hired to be the private secretary of the
Austin, Texas
December,
Joseph McCabe's Cottage, at 22 St., George's Road,

Golders Green, London, England
1979
Page 19
the chance of error. H.G. Wells was a successful "world historian," and so was McCabe. A smaller scope would have been
too petty for him.
His interest in history had begun at the monastic college
where he had taught "ecclesiastical
history"
as well as scho'Iastic theology. He saw "the monstrous falsity of the Catholic
version" of history and his Peter Abelard and another similar
work, St. Augustine and His Age, were his beginning attempts
"to write the true version." This was the spirit with which he
wrote history for all his life.
In Liecester he met and married the 18-year-old daughter
of a hosiery worker. In 1900 he took his bride back to London, determined
to pursue his literary career and now strong
enough not to become a victim of stardom. Abelard and Augustine impressed Stephen and everyone else, but all their
encouragements
to follow this literary path did not pay bills.
He was living sparingly in three rooms in a cheap district and
he knew his wife would eventually become a mother as a result
of their copulation.
He became a writer and lecturer for both
the Ethical Movement and Rationalist
Movement because it
offered a steady income. He felt this was "entirely congenial"
work.
Though in the end only a fourth of the 200-plus books he
wrote and maybe a tenth of the 3,000 to 4,000 lectures he
gave were about the Roman church, in the beginning he knew
little else with any degree of thoroughness.
Twelve Years was
selling well (but not making money for McCabe!), and an anticlerical sentiment
was raging, flaming interest in the Roman
priesthood.
Fortunately
for McCabe, the one subject he was
an undisputed expert on was in hot demand.
McCabe became at this time one of the original directors
when George Jacob Holyoake founded the Rationalist Association and became its chairman.
He thus began a relationship
that really did little for him but bring hardship and aggravation
into his life. Early on he became disillusioned with the people
he met in the Association and other anti-clerical movements.
He found them as petty, as backstabbing,
as power-grubbing
as
the priests he had known. He also discovered they wanted to.
'be known as anything but an Atheist, and McCabe refused to
be known as anything other than an Atheist.
For instance,
Ramsay MacDonald,
the Socialist who became Premier, was McCabe's friend until he saw he had a
chance for political success, then he wanted no taint of Atheism to cost him votes. Not only did he cast McCabe out as a
friend, he prevented the Socialist Party from making McCabe
one of its parliamentary
candidates. He feared McCabe's Atheism would reflect badly on his party as well, and thus the
churches triumphed over English Socialism.
McCabe, never an idealist about human nature, had the admirable virtue of being able to never let dislikes turn into
hatreds. He did not even hate the Roman church; he merely
despised it with total contempt.
Hatred might have led him on
to a ranting, emotional
assault the church could have easily
turned against him. He always treated religion with scornfully
precise logic and tauntingly
exact facts - before which both
the mightiest "intellects"
of the Roman church, or any other
church, were powerless.
While the Rationalists
squabbled,
McCabe went on with
his life. In 1902 he gained fame throughout
the Englishspeaking world by offering it a translation
of Ernst Haeckel's
famous Riddle of the Universe. In his autobiography,
he confessed his command of German and knowledge of science had
been inferior to the task, but the" world did not notice. It was
a big bestseller.
Ironically,
McCabe got only fame for the
book - plus the piddling $100 the publisher had paid him for
the translation.
In 1908 McCabe's two-volume
Life and Letters of G. J_
Holyoake was published amid controversy
and hard feelings
Page 20
December,
between himself and many powerful Rationalists.

McCabe had
written the biography
obeying "the wicked maxim that as a
biographer and historian I must tell the truth."
He would not
write biographies like the Roman church, such as "one written
about an English cardinal who had died while McCabe was still
a priest. The biography of the cardinal suppressed all the lessthan-saintly
details all priests knew, but the church preferred
the laity not know.
One fact of Holyoake's
life was that he did not get along
at all with Charles Bradlaugh.
Robert Ingersoll did not like
Bradlaugh, either and Bradlaugh was not at all well-spoken
of in the correspondence
between
Holyoake
and Ingersoll.
McCabe honestly
dealt with this facet of Holyoake's
life.
Also, he included material that showed other leaders of the
British Freethought
Movement in a bad light.
Bradlaugh's
daughter,
J. M. Robertson,
and other Bradlaughites reacted with swift hostility. They edited out the offending material as much as possible without McCabe's permission or knowledge.
They demanded the Association
let them
commit this immoral censorship
or they would quit. Others
wondered how McCabe could be so disrespectful
of the Association's "saints and martyrs."
The Bradlaughite
faction never
forgave McCabe.
McCabe carried on. In 1909, he stirred up the Rationalist
Association
again - this time with his Martyrdom of Ferrer,
which was about the Spanish Anarchist Francisco Ferrer, who
had been legally murdered by the Homan Catholic-controlled
government
of Spain. The English Rationalists
all howled at
this publication,
for they wanted no part of Anarchism any
more than they wanted to be thought of as Atheists. Wasn't
respectable, what!
McCabe considered
the book a distinct profit for himself,
for in researching
it he got to know the notorious
Anarchist
Charles Malatesta,
who taught him "more about European
politics than I had learned in ten years."
By 1909, McCabe was making $2,000 a year writing (mainly for the Rationalist Association,
which evidently could not
come up with a talent to replace the up-front Atheist), and
lecturing (100 that year). He also had added by now two boys
and two girls to his family, which lived in a seven-room villa.
He had one servant and took his family to spend a summer
month by the sea. He was very middle-class,
but never bourgeois.
..
Alas, not all was happiness.
In 1900, he got intothe Feminist cause, and was the only male writer or lecturer in Britain
to side with the Feminists at that time. He wrote and lectured
for them free of charge. He helped them win favorable public
opinion (at which point the churches hushed their conservative anti-feminist
clergymen and ushered their liberal pro-feminist clergymen
forward
to suddenly
present
religion as a
champion
of feminism).
However, what won the day for the
English Feminists was WWI, when the demand for women
workers by industry gave them a power the politicians could
not withstand.
Unfortunately
for McCabe, he paid a sad price for his
courageous activism on behalf of women. His wife came under
the influence of some super-radicals:
Their slogan was: "All
men are tyrants; all women are slaves." That slogan became
unquestioned
dogma for McCabe's wife, and from then on
their
once-happy
marriage
became
increasingly
unhappy.
In 19"10, McCabe accepted invitations from the Australian
and New Zealand Rationalists and made his first world lecture
tour. He sailed over in a "no-class, 10,000-ton
hulk" and had
to contend with a hostile ship's chaplain. Unable to best the
Atheist on the field of ideas, the religious leader bribed one of
the ship's officers to lose some of McCabe's luggage. However,
despite this and catching anthrax, the tour was highly success-
1979
American
Atheist
,
l
ful.
McCabe made two more trips to Australia and New Zealand, both catastrophes.
The second, in 1913, was screwed up
by a bungling agent and by the Australian churches, which coordinated
an anti-McCabe campaign. The third, in 1923, was
evidently a result of anti-McCabe sentiment
in the Rationalist
Association.
McCabe made the trip when the Association told
him he had been requested
by the Rationalists down under,
but he arrived in Australia to their total surprise. Nevertheless,
they exploited his presence, failed to pay him his lecture fees,
and afterwards sided with the Bradlaughites.
McCabe was often cheated by those who had him come
lecture, yet this never soured his enthusiasm.
McCabe had
taken upon himself the life-purpose of educating the common
person with the truth about history, science, and religion that
the churches sought to suppress. The opportunity
to educate
compensated
in the long run for the cheating he had suffered.
Do not believe that McCabe was scornful of money! MeCabe was a Socialist, but he appreciated
the middle-class lifestyle as only one who had grown up in poverty can. He soon
learned that though "heretical
work" could provide a steady
income, it did not pay well. In pursuit of a higher income, he
worked hard to broaden the scope of his writing and lecturing
career beyond Rationalism.
His natural interest in science and
history pointed the direction of his labor.
Once out of the monastery,
he really got into studying science, and discovered evolution.
"The idea of evolution put a
vertebral column and a spinal cord into what had been my
loose collection
of scientific facts, and I began to organize it
and fill up the deficiencies."
Evolution
became his guiding
idea, his conception
of reality. Evolution of humans was its
central theme - as well as the subject of his most popular
lecture.
As a science-writer,
he had the vision of a science-fiction
author . Dnce in 1925 he predicted in a manual on physics
that in the future people would be able to see who they talked
to on the telephone. The "experts" of the day responded with
a lot of pompous scorn. As a science-lecturer,
he was able to
explain the complexities
of science in language intelligent nonscientists could understand.
He became so popular asa sciencelecturer that even religious groups who knew he was an Atheist
demanded him.
In history he did not feel entitled to the honorable name of
historian, which is too modest. He was definitely not a "modern" historian, for he did not specialize narrowly. History only
had meaning to him as the means to explain the evolution of
civilization, so he took upon himself the history of human existence.
The experts
sneered; they could always mention
some obscure, largely unimportant
fact in their specialty he
did not know. However, they could not discredit his books,
for McCabe was a meticulous
scholar and often he had read
more books in more languages than the experts.
These same sneering experts had almost to a man betrayed
their scholastic integrity out of love for or fear of organized
religion. Their histories, so jammed with exact, piddling, details, always became inaccurate in those facts that would harm
religion. Not so McCabe's histories! He proudly clairned tto
"unearthed
large numbers
of facts that modern historians
ought to and do not take into account."
These facts were
those the churches wished to keep their sheep ignorant of. He
believed "the entire history of Europe ought to be rewritten
with a strict regard to the historical facts," and did his best to
do it himself.
His main th.emes were that any advance in civilization
always comes in an age when skepticism
is flourishing,
and
that religion is not necessary to the maintenance
of civiliza
tion.
Ironically,
McCabe's great success outside
the realm of
Austin, Texas
Joseph McCabe Age 75
Rationalism
incited bitter jealousy among many Rationalists
who were unable to broaden their scope and were frustrated
that the Association was not providing the-m with the income
they had expected.
Too many had joined the Association
thinking only of the money they believed could be made out
of it - and they envied McCabe for having found a way to
gain the income they lusted after.
When WWI arrived, McCabe did his patriotic duty. First
he volunteered
to help care for the wounded,
as well as entertaining
them with his popular lectures (which must have
aggravated the hospital chaplains). But the government
needed
writers for its propaganda
efforts, and McCabe ended up as
"chief neutral-press
journalist."
He wrote fairy tales - well,
semi-fairy tales - that the Information
Department
bribed
foreign papers to print.
In 1919, England was confronted
with a nearly mutinous
army of homesick men who had had their fill and more of the
ugliest style of warfare ever waged. The War Office arranged
to have lecturers tour the troops to provide' entertainment.
McCabe volunteered
and was accepted - much to the dismay
of the priests who had tried to monopolize
the project. Think
of how infuriated these priests were when they discovered the
troops, who had learned there is no god in the trenches, wanted none of their sermons, but all of McCabe they could get.
He debated as well, but he felt debates had no educational
value because of the emotionalism
of the conflict.
Besides,
debating clergymen was like boxing with infants. He became
so contemptuous
of the abilities of the clergy to actually produce a challenging argument that when he did debate priests,
he did not even honor them by preparing for the contest.
McCabe was back at his regular work after the war. In
1920, his A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists
was published, and praised by all except George Bernard Shaw.
The great playwright had a petty streak and could not forgive
McCabe for having criticised in 1914 his "Living Menof
Letters Series."
In 1924 he went to Paris to attend the International
Freethought
Congress. He had attended
the 1904 Congress and
had found it a pleasant, stimulating,
atheistic experience he
shared with thousands.
The 1924 Congress was a sad affair
poorly attended.
After the Russian Revolution,
Europe was
in terror of Socialism. The Freethinkers
had joined politically
with the churches to combat Socialism, giving up their open
Atheism
to appease
their strange
bedfellow.
Though
the
December,
1979
Page 21
but a kangaroo court: a shameful exhibition

of all the worst
Freethinkers
gave up criticising religion, the churches naturally
human faults united to ruin a man whose life was 'singularly
did not slack up on their hostile assault on Atheism. The guts
admirable and who had done nothing but good service for an
had gone out of the movement.
In 1925, McCabe toured America. He had visited once beorganization
he had little respect for. That he had had anyfore in 1916. He had met Theodore
Roosevelt, who liked the
thing to do with the Rationalists
at all was because he felt
that an organization
of closet Atheists was better than no
aggressive Atheist even though
he was against the war in
Atheist organization
at all.
Europe; became friends with the Ingersoll family; and had
The next day, McCabe was at his desk writing his "Key to
fallen in love with New York and San Francisco. He had left
Culture" series for Haldeman-Julius.
He claimed this work was
with the impression
that most Americans
were "generous,
"a greater and far more useful enterprise than any I had underand in most respects fine, but narrow as the gates of heaven
taken for the Rationalists,
and this enabled me to shake off
on ethical questions."
One sour experience of the 1916 trip happened when two
the showers that had pelted me and recover my poise."
professors of history at Columbia University got their departHe undertook
a lecture in Canada that was flawed by poor
ment head to engage McCabe to lecture in the Historical
organization.
He went on to tour America, where he was
School on the evolution of science out of medieval thought.
cheated out of fees by the Rationalists
there. However, he
The Catholic church, ever ready to take a blow at McCabe,
made a nice profit when the more honest Socialists set up a
put hostile pressure on the department
head, who out of fear
series of debates on evolution
between
him and a leading
for his job, turned against McCabe. The sting of this insult
Christian fundamentalist.
was lessened a bit when Harvard made him an honorary memIn 1930, he returned to America to make his last "apostolic
ber of the Harvard Club.
journey."
He lectured for a month in Dr. L. M. Birkland's
Unitarian
Chapel in Kansas City, Missouri. The lectures had
As a lecture tour, the 1925 trip was mostly a debacle.
been arranged by Haldeman-Julius,
over the furious protests of
He arrived to lecture for three months for the Chicago Ralocal Roman Catholics.
tionalists University Society just when that organization
was
in turmoil. Some aggressive Atheist members were pressuring
for the Society to publicly admit it was an Atheist group. The
closet Atheists were in an uproar at the very idea of being exposed.
The real importance
of the 1925 trip was that McCabe
traveled to Girard, Kansas, where he met and became friends
with E. Haldeman-Julius,
the famous paperback publisher for
whom nearly every major Atheist thinker of the first half of
the 20th century wrote. Haldeman-Julius
was eager to commission this top Atheist writer to write Little Blue Books for him,
and McCabe was glad to accept the commission that gave him
massive 'access to America. When news of this reached the Rationalist Association in England, the bitter envy that so many
would be superstars had of successful McCabe only became
nastier.
1925 was not a good year for McCabe. In the summer,
his wife left him. She had reached the point of radical antimale sentiment that she now hated her husband and their marriage had become ugly with many nasty scenes. She left, and
he was never to see her again, yet he provided her with an income without rancor he was still providing when he wrote his
autobiography
at 79. One can see what sort of "tyrant"
the
poor woman had to put up with!
He left for America, "quitting my treasured home forever,"
in September.
Upon his return, he was presented with a bill
for $570 for books the Rationalist
Association
had sent to
America in conjunction
with his tour. The Association's
pubJoseph McCabe, at 80, Working in His Study
lisher was claiming McCabe had agreed to pay for any books
the Chicago Society did not pay for. He had agreed to no such
thing and refused to pay.
This issue was made much of for over two years, and when
the Bradlaughites
felt they had whipped up sufficient
antiHe returned to England to settle down. For the next 17
McCabe sentiment, they moved to oust him from the Associa- , vearshe
kept busy writing books for Haldeman-Julius,
turntion. There were four reasons for his "excommunication":
ing out an average of 500,000 words per year. He covered
[1) The Bradlaughites had never forgiven him for the negaeverything from a history of morals to a history of Atheism to
a damning analysis of the Roman Catholic Church's partnertive things about Bradlaugh he had put in his Holyoake biography.
ship with the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists.
[2) J. M. Robertson, who was envious of McCabe's HaldeThe British Rationalists,
as the Bradlaughite
leaders died
man-Julius commission, wanted to be the only literary star in
off, carne to esteem him again, and in 1934 he was commisthe Rationalist Association.
sioned to write again for them. He found one thing had not
changed:
Rationalists
with no writing
ability
wanted
to
[3) Envious would-be stars in the Association
wanted to
damage McCabe's career.
dictate how he should write, and persons with a slim fraction
[4) The many closet Atheists in the Association wanted to
of his scholarship 'bloated their egos by finding "errors"
in
punish McCabe for his open, honest,
aggressive Atheism.
his work. This was how it had always been for him with the
The event took place on 12 March, 1928. It was nothing
Rationalist Association.
Page 22
December,
1979
American
Atheist
It had always annoyed McCabe to constantly

have to keep
talentless nitwits from turning his masterful prose into "journalese" while proving to other dummies that the "errors" they
thought they had found were only proofs of their ignorance
of the subject. Now in his late 60's, he was less tolerant of
this abuse, mainly because it wasted his time and he was now
aware of how precious his time was getting. He lost his temper
over the outrageous editorial treatment
of his manuscript
for
A Rationalist Encyclopedia. Thereafter, the old familiar hostility returned.
It aid not get any better, for the Association
at this time was changing its nature as members who were
against any criticism of religion gained control. By WWII the
Association was an unfit place for even a closet Atheist!
The Depression included McCabe as one of its millions of
victims. Haldeman-Julius
could no longer buy his work. His
income declined
to $1,000
below his outgo: Fortunately
for McCabe - though he would rather have lived in poverty
than to have had such good fortune - WWII returned America
to prosperity,
and Haldeman-Julius
returned to full production. He wrote over two million words for the American publisher between ages 75 and 80. Often he wrote even as bombs
fell on London!
There are no final words with which to end a life of Joseph
McCabe finer than those with which he concluded
his autobiographY,80
Years a Rebel:
"I go on, cheerfully, with the work which, as a new citizen
of the planet, I took up 50 years ago: to refute and pour irony
upon all lies and hypocrisies,
to denounce all cruelties and in-
justices, to give to such part of the world as I can reach all

truths and facts that may help them in charting their lives. I
have had a grand time in spite of all the malice, meanness, and
ingratitude;
and the last hour of the day is not marred by any
of the weariness that usually punishes the octogenarian,
for
lingering so long on this planet. I am never tired, and I have
forgotten what a headache is .....
"I have no desire for a long life if it means the usual penalty
of a tired brain, nor do I ever concern myself nervously about
health. To work cheerfully every day, to eat temperately,
and
to spare an hour or an hour and a half each day for a brisk
walk - I live on the fringe of the great city - are the only
secrets of my medicine chest. I rarely visit or receive visitors,
not from churlishness
but quiet taste, and this summer I have
taken my first vacation in seven or eight years.
"But I work with one ear lazily open for the tinkle of the
camel-bell that heralds the approach of the caravan of death,
I neither seek relief in sleep, as I have seen so many of my generation do, nor do I fret or repine at the thought that the pen
must soon drop from my nerveless fingers and the dear sunlight must fade. How I have always loved the sunlight!. ....
"Life has been too good for me to complain that it cannot
run forever. I neither, with Whitman,
talk of 'Sweet Sister
Death: nor shall I murmur, with Beethoven, that 'the comedy
is over.' To me, the devout harvester of facts, death will be just
the last fact."
Joseph McCabe - his life is a magnificent
rebuttal to the
Christian dogma of innate human depravity.
So, we were wonderin'

if you'd be interested
in changing your
name to Christ. This "Merry Goldberg-mas"
doesn't sound catchy
enough
~.
"
Austin, Texas
December,
1979
Page 23
OUR PERSONAL MORALS

Let us try, in our usual way, to conceive exactly the meaning of our words. Most religious controversies would be admirably simplified if the disputant first spent an hour brooding
upon the meaning of the fun.damental terms of the controversy.
Religion, we are told, is necessary for personal morality.
Yes, well, what precisely is necessary? We at once split these
confident people into three violently antagonistic groups: the
Catholic group, which refuses to recognize any other religion
as adequate, the blood-of-Christ group, and the Modernist-Unitarian group. All that they agree upon is a useful phrase, "Religion is necessary." That is about as profitable as telling a sick
man that medicine is necessary. He wants to know which medicine. These religious people no more agree in their hearts that
any religion will do than a doctor would say that any medicine
will do for a patient. The medicine of the Catholic is in the
Baptist's opinion moral poison.
So we not only rule out the great majority of the writers
and orators who urge the necessity of religion, since they are
either insincere or are economically interested, but we encounter a difficulty at once with the others. They are certainly insincere when they say that any religion will do. The only formula upon which they can honestly agree is, "Any religion is
better than none."
But if you know these religious folk as well as I do, you
know that they do not put much heart into that formula. Mere
belief in god, without ministers or a divine Christ, will not do,
they are convinced. Thus they rule out for us the second
group, the anemic professors. They have a sneaking contempt
for Unitarianism - a diet, they would say, of cereals and apricots for dock-laborers - and as the Christian Science, Theosophy, Spiritualism, Steinerism, Keyserlingism .....
So the best thing to do is to use a little robust language and
tell them all, in the name of humanity, that we want neither
gods nor Christs nor priests nor hells, but we can manage our
own business without any of them. That is the proper and
only way to settle this question.
A Bloody Mush
We are not even going to say that "we have conducted god
to our frontiers, thanking him for his provisional services." His
disservice has been greater than his service. It is time that
scholars, or any writers, grew ashamed of the crude and hypocritical practice of picking out a few saints who were inspired
by the love of god (and the promise of a mighty reward in
heaven) or a minority of refined folk who took their guidance
from religion. It is either stupid or hypocritical to urge upon
us this minority and never glance at the vast majority.
The thesis that these people put before us is that religionis necessary precisely for the great majority, not for the refined or educated or naturally amiable minority. I have shown
that a moral culture (the Stoic, the Epicurean, the Confucian,
or the pure Buddhist), which entirely ignored gods, always
proved at least as effective as any religion that ever existed. I
have minutely, on contemporary evidence, examined the morals of Europe in every age since it became Christian, and I
have shown that the idea that any Christian generation was
morally superior to ours, or nearly equal to ours, is a grotesque
historical absurdity.
I have just read Jeffery Farnol's Beltane the Smith. Farnol
is the best historical novelist of modern times in the sense at
'Page 24
Joseph McCabe
least that he is the most conscientiously historical; and in this
novel he depicts life in the most developed and most esteemed
century of the Middle Ages. It is a bloody mush of coarseness,
misery, violence, and unbridled license. It is a true picture.
And from that day to this the world has slowly and gradually improved, almost in exact proportion to the decay of religion. While Christianity made this stinking mess of Europe,
the essentially godless empire of the Moors in Spain was prov. ing that culture was a real inspiration of honor, justice, and
refinement.
That is the second mortal weakness of this cry that we
need religion. The first is the insincerity of nine-tenths of the
writers and speakers who keep it in the public mind. The
second is that it is mockingly belied by the whole of history.
'I have given a mass of evidence, logically arranged, that the
morals of Europe sank into anarchy when it became Christian,
improved a little under Moorish and Greek influence, but were
still foul when the great decay of religion began in the nineteenth century.
Did you ever know any clerical writer or any religious historian to attempt, in the same scientific and orderly manner,
to survey the general state of morals from the fifth to the
nineteenth century? There is no such book. They dare not
write it. And then they unctuously repeat the parrot cry that
our morality needs the support of religion.
The New White Hope
I have many friends in the new movement which claims
that we need religion, but a religion without any doctrines,
even a belief in god. Some of its oracles, like Professor Felix
Adler, the leader of the Ethical Culture movement, are as
bigoted and narrow-minded as orthodox ministers - significantly, these are Theists - and will never have the least influence on the mass of people. Most of them are men and
women of fine character, more or less broadmirrded (according to their degree of Puritanism), who sincerely think ethical
culture as a religion is vitally necessary. Many Unitarian and
some Congregationalist bodies hold the same position - the
good life for its own sake, without any emphasis on god and large numbers of unattached Agnostics and Theists favor
the movement. It is the new white hope of civilization.
Now religion in this sense is small, but it is going to become
a serious question. The inexorable pressure of culture will in
the course of the twentieth century oust dogmatic Christianity and dogmatic Theism, ana the churches will gradually become Ethical Culture societies, still claiming that they stand
for religion. Priesthoods do not die. They shrink and evolve.
These existing societies will never make much impression on
the world that has already ceased to attend church, but such
societies themselves will increase in number as churches shed
their dogmas and become societies.
The psychology of this kind of religion is in part the same
as that which we found for religion in the ordinary sense. The
momentum of the tradition of churchgoing takes some social
considerations take others, and the activity of organizers or
leaders brings many others. There is also in this world a kind
of vanity of virtue which is, psychologically, just the same as
the vanity which others find in vice or dress or sport. Further
there are numbers who are convinced that it helps them to remain virtuous if they listen to a man talking to them about
December, 1979
American Atheist
virtue for an hour every Sunday and then stand in rows and
sing a hymn about it.
And the answer to this last group, the serious people of the
new religion, is that most of us get no help whatever from that
kind of performance. It rather tends to make us bilious. A
second and more drastic answer is that this new religion has pardon the expression in so august a connection - no kick in
it. It offers less motive than a Christian Church does .....
It has never made up its own mind what is the nature of
moral law, yet it says that moral law is the most important
thing in life. It has not come to any agreement as to the nature
of moral law because, while men like Felix Adler have the fantastic philosophic idea of it, most of their followers know that
moral law detached from a divine will is simply social law, and
therefore the virtue of chastity as such loses its foundation.
The only formula on which these people can agree is, "The
good life for its own sake": which either means that honor
and honesty pay in the world, or that we think them very
pretty in themselves - and that is the very feeblest of all motives that you could offer to people under "temptation."
A Feeble And Unpractical
Thing
So that is where we stand. The majority of religionists urge

that we must at least believe in god; and that is one of the
most disputed and vulnerable beliefs of modern times. The
minority say that moral idealism is so fine that it of itself commands allegiance; and that is a kind of language which the
mass of people in any modern civilization will greet with
smiles.
There is not the least need for either one or the other. Suppose you appointed a committee of scientific men to work out
this problem on the methods of a practical scientific inquiry.
What would they do? They would at once establish two facts:
first, that somehow through the ages moral conduct has not
varied with changes of religion, and secondly that there has
been a very considerable moral advance in the last hundred
years: They would then ascertain the causes of the modern
advance, and would at once rule out religion.
It is plain as an arc lamp that religion has not had more influence on this and the last generation than it formerly had.
It has lost enormously in influence. The millions who do not
go to church or read the Bible mayor may not have some sort
of belief in god, but you know them, and you know what a
feeble and unpractical thing it is. General education is the
principal cause of the advance. Better and wiser education will
mean further advance.
The next chief influence is the evolution of higher standards of character by a minority of lay writers and thinkers, and
most of these either had no religion or thought out human
problems independently.
The other great problem of this practical and scientific
committee would be to ascertain why "immoral" people are
immoral. The clergy have the most stupid ideas on this point.
They do not realize the revolutionary change in the nature of
what they call immorality. People do not now so much transgress a recognized law as question whether there is a law.
The fiction that the law is universally recognized is as hollow as the fiction that it needs the support of religion. Anybody who now asserts this is lamentably ignorant of the facts
of life, and he takes an utterly superficial view of the facts of
life. The august and eternal moral law of Emerson or Eucken
or Adler has no more existence than the Olympic family. What
exists is a moral tradition, handed from generation to generation; and this generation of ours is asking if it really has a more
solid foundation than the tradition of royalty or bishophood.
The confusion is made worse by the common habit, especially of religious and ethical people, of insisting that the tra-
Austin, Texas
ditional code of conduct is an indivisible thing of equal authority in every line. Some parts of it 'are clearly disputable, and
the effect of this insistence upon taking it as a whole is that
many people reject it as a whole and get confused.
It is, in fact, an open question whether the time has not
come to drop the word "morality" as well as the word "religion." Its associations are hopelessly sentimental, antiquated,
and antagonizing. It is like the syrupy drinks of our childhood.
I doubt if we shall be more successful in giving the word a
new and palatable meaning than the ultra-Modernists have
been in giving a new meaning to "religion." I should not be
surprised if the scientific committee I have imagined would
not recommend this course. People will be more moral when
they do not know it.
Let us talk plain English. There are a few paradoxical
people who say that it will be just as bad to talk about hon- _
esty, truthfulness, kindliness, generosity, justice, and self-control. Apart from the love of speaking or writing paradoxes,
which is supposed to be an imitation of Nietzsche - it generally reminds one of children trying to talk to each other in
Shakespearean language - these people must mean one of two
things. Either they want to find other people honest, truthful,
just, etc., in their relations with them, or they don't.
Medieval
Nonsense
If they choose the former, they lay down the law: they
recognize that it is desirable that we should all cultivate those
qualities. But if they are determined to be "unprejudiced," as
they would say - there is much vanity and pose in it - and
reply airily that they ask no virtues of others, they obviously
mean that they rely on their cunning or strength or the law to
hold their own. That ends the argument.
We may leave a few young folk the luxury of feeling superior to prejudices in this way. The disease will not spread. Most
of us do not contemplate a social order in which our relations
with each other will be a series of lies and counter-lies, frauds
and counter-frauds, without an atom of mutual respect or attachment. It is not the odor of virtue that attracts us; it is the
stink of disorder that repels us.
The quarrel is one of those verbal and hollow quarrels
which arise in every age that writes and disputes .much. It is
not worth discussing further. I am arguing against the religious
man, not the Nietzschean (or pseudo-Nietzschean). The religious man entirely agrees with me .....
What? Yes, of course you do, my friend. You picture to
yourself this world in which there would be no recognized
standard of conduct but only a battle of cunning and spite and
cupidity, and you shudder with horror. You agree that it is a
social matter. You needn't shudder. Men have too much common sense to drift into such a state of things. We don't want
the good life (in these respects) for its own sake. We want it,
we will have it, and we are getting it in more abundance every
decade, for its value.
That is precisely why you hope to slip in a word for your
antiquated religion. You are offering us crutches. Thank you,
we know the need to get along, but we discover that we have
legs. If a well-ordered society or a manly and reliable character
is so very desirable - you agree, don't you? - why such a
roundabout way of getting it? It is medieval nonsense. This is
a business age.
December, 1979
Page 25
Editorial:
Continued
Not to Entertain
from p. 2
It makes a great deal of difference whether one looks at the

personality or the issue. Some of the most outgoing, dynamic,
personalities in the world have espoused some of the most
repressive doctrines.
Sister Theresa, an undeserving Nobel Prize winner, trades
the goodness of her compassion for the poor for their unconditional surrender of their minds to Catholicism as a prerequisite
for receipt of aid. Consistently, I maintain - as an Atheist that goodness can be offered without the religion. Let us look,
with the media, at Sister Theresa, as a person.
The same logic is applied in reverse to a sane, non-repressive ideology, such as Atheism. Concentrate on the personalities who espouse Atheism and one can skirt its value. My personal feeling or reaction to Atheism has no bearing on its superiority as an intellectual position.
In summary, the duty of the news media in the United
States should be that of delineating the facts and giving a
neutral presentation. An interviewer should not argue with a
guest but simply solicit the basic facts of the guest's position.
In view of this it is imperative that Atheism gain control of
its own portion of the airways, as has the Christian community, to put forth its ideas completely to be judged on their own
merits rather than on the basis of collateral considerations,
such as entertainment value, appeal to the established order,
mediocrity or to the personality of the exponents .
This journal, in itself, is a part of the outreach of American

Atheism to exert control over the contents of its presentments. It is obvious that this outreach must be enlarged by our
acquiring time blocks on the electronic media to bring to all
our nation's citizens an unbiased, structured, intelligible message concerned with the fundamental tenets of Atheism.
'I
Page 26
December, 1979
American Atheist
NATURES WAY
Gerald Tholen
Popes Will Be Popes

As the frantically cheering crowds
of "ring-kissing"
grovelers die in the
distance,
I would like to reflect for a
moment on the somber lasting effect
that John Paul's visit must have on
the American public. I include all of
the American
public because of the
unprecedented
propaganda
campaign
that the media dumped upon us all Atheists included.
Why
should
the
supposedly
secular news media devote a multitude
of news articles and TV time to a
single denomination
of religious influence? One would surely guess that
every TV and radio station and every
journalistic
enterprise
in the US was
actually
owned
by the Vatican.
I
would have thought
that such publicity would be reserved for the announcement
of a cure of cancer or
possibly
for the' discovery
of an
equitable
fuel substitute.
In keeping
with media "priorities"
I suppose that
the journalistic
world assumes that a
visit by the living Catholic god is ultimately more important.
As things worked
out, it seems
that we should be pleased with the
enterprising
ability of the small businessmen
in America.
The carnival
atmosphere
of the event displayed the
ability of the street hawking salesmen
to
move
thousands
of
T-shirts,
whistles,
pennants,
buttons,
and of
course, tons of Pope-corn.
How is that so many American
people can allow themselves
to be
waved like strands of kelp in a tide of
supernatural
ignorance?
This should
merit psychological
study by qualified
professi onals.
The fact is, with all this attention
and all this alleged adoration
- the
Pope blew it! What real human need
did Wojtyla actually
fill? Were the
crowds of admirers actually admiring,
or were they simply hoping to receive
some sort of welcomed change in the
iron-headed
unresponsive
dictates
of
Vatican "law"? Only the future will
tell! Meanwhile every hope that the
great majority
of Catholics
in this
nation hold was dashed 'on the rocks
of despai r. They must now reti re to
the beds of their lovers and mates with
increased
fear and guilt because the
"king" has spoken out again against
birth control. To all the Catholic followers, I must say - sleep on that for
a while! The hypocrisy
of such a
policy, which is supposedly
observed
by these many hapless individuals,
is
self-evident.
They kissed his ring in
reverence yet knew all the while that
they could never agree with his statements concerning contraception.
The
homosexual
community,
which I am told numbers in the millions, openly damns his views on their
lifestyles. Will any among them dare to
remain
"devoutly
Catholic"
and in
the silence of their own reality, sink
into
a meaningless
existence? When
will their pride demand that they renounce
the now obsolete
stigmas
which are still demanded
by the selfserving egotist?
How long will people, who should
know
better,
repond
to the antiabortion
fantasy
that
sexual intercourse is a "blessed event"? The abnormality. of accepting
the idea that
conception
validates
the immediate
appearance
of a viable human individual is too absurd to argue! What of
the period of
gestation?
Have they
never heard of gestati on? The legal
system of this nation, as religiously
patent as it is, has even conceded that
a human individual is formed through
gestation
and not through
sexual
contact.
Has anyone
ever tried to
claim timber
rights on a sack of
acorns?
Even Colonel Sanders serves
ch icken legs - not eggs! I suppose it
may sound selfish on my part, but I
would like to think that my existence
was a little more important
to the
world than a female ovum which had
unfortunately
been "goosed" by a bit
of male sperm. I KNOW there are
those
unfortunate
"parents
to be"
who have been accidentally
trapped
by pregnancy and wish .to remove this
burden on society before it is too late
- before a child actually
develops!
What hope did John Paul offer the
American woman - the NOW organization? I'm sorry dear ladies, but you
must continue to be satisfied with leftovers. Try again at another time and
Austin, Texas
December,
1979
with another
Pope. Your efforts to
further
human
rights are admirable,
but this is simply not the time or the
place. There can be no compassion for
those whom "god" has put in their
proper place.
As if these areas were not brewed
in enough
ignorance,
what of our
Constitution?
The dirty footprints
of
our legal geniuses, civil authorities,
and
politicians are now added to Wojtyla's
as uncaring
blotches
on the First
Amendment.
That once fine, proud
document
is now tattered
and torn
even more than before. It would seem
that the great American public is more
concerned
with the quality of their
toilet tissue than they are of the parchment that gave them the right to freedom and self-respect.
We are rapidly
becoming just another weak link in the
chain of religiously dominated
nations
that rattle the annoying antics of Iran,
Ireland, Jerusalem, etc.
Soon the turmoi I and furor of
banner waving idol worshippers
will be
quiet. Perhaps others then will reflect
with me on the consequences
suggested by this grand public spectacle
that
was supposed
to- inspire
the
"common
people" to a higher station.
Will we experience that higher station
by feeling
more
guilty
about
our
natural
sexuality?
Will we be more
tolerant
by casting out the rights of
women
or
gays
or
non-religious
countrymen?
Will any among us take
the time to search through the ticker
tape and confetti of circusdom to try
to find that now nearly worthless bit
of paper called the First Amendment
- then, very sadly, try to brush off the
soil of ignorance and return it to its
proper place over the mantles of our
hearts? - I wonder.
Dear friends, the Pope has spoken
- it's your move. The mass demonstration of total sub-intellect
has now
been properly displayed by those who
are willing to blindly follow an inept
ruler even though
their own pitiful
attempts
at rationality
will be squelched. The same style of idolization
was witnessed
by many of us on an
even larger scale as the Fuhrer of Nazi
Continued
on p. 16
Page 27
The Winter Solstice

will occur this year
1979
at
11: 10, Greenwich Mean Time
6:10 A.M., Eastern Standard Time
22nd December
/'
The Utah Chapter

American Atheists
.. ~.
J!
'/
./
r: -
extends to you a warm invitation to attend a

A Winter Solstice Party
at
Park Place Condominium Club East
1580 East 5600 South
Salt Lake City, Utah
9:30P.M.
2nd December, 1979
This festive affair immediately follows a speech which
is to he given by Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair on the
same day, at 7:00 P.M. [with questions from 8:00 to
9:00 P.M.] at:
Salt Palace Little Theatre
Temple Square
Salt Lake City, Utah.
The California Chapter

American Atheists
_I
The Detroit Chapter

American Atheists
~~~~f.~~
i$~i'it,.~
cordially invites you to join its members at a

Solstice Party
at
Salvatore's Italian Villa
6327 Middlebelt Road
Garden City, Michigan
6:30 P.M.
22nd December, 1979
would be pleased to have you join the festivities at

A Solstice Dinner Banquet
at
Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel
:7000 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, California
7:00 P.M.
15th December, 1979
Dinner is $15.00, the plate
Happy Hour at the bar is 6:00 to 7:00 P.M.
The Murray-O'Hair family may be in attendance
[ details need yet to be worked out]
Page 28
December, 1979
" American Atheist
ON OUR WAY
Ignatz Sahula-Dycke
The Case For Free Ideation

From the very outset, the thing that made our country
grow preeminent in the world was Freedom. This freedom
came to us through the foresight of our nation's founders:
it didn't blow in by accident like an errant wind. Too, if we
won't prize it, and protect it against those who'd delight in
depriving us of it, then, like the wind, it will blow away. And
history warns us that the freedom, once gone, is almost impossible to regain. Hence, let's watch over it.
But, freedom, precious though it be, is meaningless until
it is used for something - until aimed at a purpose. People
like ourselves, who are free, can employ their freedom in ingenious ways both foolish and wise. We are at liberty to waste
it in running about aimlessly, or employ it in rationally purposeful action, remembering that all action of this latter kind
starts with thinking - with ideating. Hence it follows that intelligent application of ideation (its production of a beneficent
result) dictates it must be well-planned before implemented.
The dictionary tells us that ideation is the generation of
thoughts, of concepts.
Now, very few people realize that the greatest obstacle to
the generation and implementing of thoughts has always been
Religion; and that throughout all history the most active opponent of Religion has been Atheism. Most dictionaries preface their definitions of the word religion with the apt parenthetical note that its meaning derives from taboo or restraint.
Hence, it doesn't demand much insight of anyone to realize
that for every "Do this!" in the religious scriptures, there are
ten or more "Don'ts."
Thus Christianity forbids; discourages; is antihuman. For
more than ten centuries it mostly concerned itself with the
murdering of anything new, and to this day hasn't changed.
And Atheism? Atheism forbids nothing at all, is interested in
propriety: in progressiveness of ideation and outlook.
That's why it isn't overly difficult to understand why any
Atheist who's lived a few decades in this world of ours - seeing it torn by religious malice, greed, bigotry, and hatred speculates about ways in which life in it might be improved.
Too, during the unceasing process of our evolution, we humans - the world's children - are at long last coming to
realize that the force of Nature and not some god produces
us - perhaps only as a wry mutation - and that we don't
always behave as we do because we planned it that way, but
mainly because we've acted instinctively as ordained by Nature. How else shall we explain some of the actions we enthusiastically engage in, and only later on recognize as wrong?
Now, whose ethical rule was it we broke?
A Lying Idea
Once we evolve into creatures a bit more intelligent than we
presently are, we won't make mistakes of this kind; we'll understand, long before we go into action, that they're irrational
and foolish; that they actually impede our way to the goal
which the civilized kind of people wish to reach. People are
presently thwarted in this to lesser or greater extent.
They enter a church, and there the preacher engaged in telling them how to behave is a person who in -his private life belies everything he is being heard to say publicly. It is common-
Austin, Texas
ly believed that churches are places where people go to worship a god. But no matter what the people gathered in church
call themselves: whether Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or
what not; all go there to be reassured that their churchliness
will keep them marching straight ahead to the gates of immortality in paradise: a lying idea they got from the religion. Religion is full of ideas which, even if we were punctiliously to
follow every one of them, would only play hob with our
normal ideation.
Anyone who examines the various dogmas of Christianityor any other religion - knows that every one of them is like
a hand-me-down garment far from a perfect fit: each one having been stitched together in ancien try by people much less
informed than we and, besides, now long dead. If now alive,
they'd see that the purposes for which their religion was devised no longer exist, and how badly outdated the religion now
is.
Although this sounds as though I'm trying to update something as useless as religion, I'm only showing that today's
theologian is an automaton who no longer thinks, but goes
strictly by the book peddling the same old buncombe. He still
tells us he was ordained by a deity to reveal the "grace" in his
religion's tenets. But those of us who've impassively examined
his dogmas can't help but see that he, due to his prejudice,
actually knows far less about them than we do.
Thus the humanity of today, provided that some debacle
will awaken it from it's trance into thought, will discover that,
to live contentedly and happily, its own conscience - not religious instruction - is the best guide and that, at least for the
time being, in our self-determined behavior rests the compensation for life's perplexities. Perhaps this only points out how
little we know of all now still unknown about tlie riddle of existence.
But we do know that so long as life exists, there can be no
final answers to the riddle; and that no matter how miserable
our existence, we can identify its cause and correct it - if only
of a mind that's been set free. There'll always be much in life
that makes people cooperative. It spices life.
Ideational Rapport
When someone does what we dislike, and another one
pleases us, we call the first one wrong and the other one right.
Are we just in this? Our next door neighbor sees it the other
way, approving the actions of the first and disapproving of the
other. In any case, our differing reactions arise within us from
the interplay of the billions of cells and nerves of which our
bodies are constituted. We feel first rate when everything
within us works in harmony.
In much the way the cells work in harmony within us, we
individuals affect one another - as in families, communities,
and nations - when in ideational rapport with all minds on a
common goal. Call it empathy, gregariousness, or whatever
you please, mutuality is a characteristic of our species, an inborn human trait - and free ideation its cohering medium.
lll-advised beliefs - such as those of religion- often cause
our bodies to malfunction and, as recognized by psychiatrists,
can lead to serious psychoses, to disoriented comportment,
December, 1979
Page 29
faulty judgment, hallucinations, and other problems. We can

safely assume that no trusting in some god will make our congenitally inherited id function better than could any other disturbing, outside force, mental or physical, if permitted to interfere in our natural ideating and outlook.
We are in one sense fated to live precisely as the forces of
evolution had billions of years ago begun programming it;
in response to Nature's laws - or perhaps only whimsy. Who
knows? Explanations abound - all attempting to explain the
mystery of it - but none yet wholly suffice or satisfy. Yet,
to an important extent such attempts more or less in one way
or another inform us about the life-laws of whose existence
we, until then, had not been aware. We can feel sure that information about this matter won't come to us from Religion and most certainly not from Christianity, which has been lying
about it for almost two thousand years, opposing anything and
everything that might increase our understanding of it.
Christianity says that we mustn't know what we want to
know until god permits it - in the meanwhile trying to figure
out something more credible that, put in her god's mouth,
might in these somewhat enlightened times help her get off the
hook. Religion knows, probably better than anyone, that her
two thousand years of lies have come home to roost. The fear
of her vindictive god still keeps a good many people from freely ideating, but their numbers are every day decreasing.
Are joy and happiness and contentment life's ultimate goal?
No one can truly say: We find that we are able to reply quite
sanely to some questions that perplex us - but not to all. Why
are there so many poor, miserable, pitiful, ignorant people in
the world today? Because they've been poorly taught, and
consequently fail to realize that they themselves are the element increasing the numbers of the poor and miseried whose
condition is directly ascribable to the religious teaching they
trust and obey.
Mind-Killins Routine
We won't come to grips with problems of this nature until
we will acknowledge the fact staring in our face that their
chief cause is our traditional Christian training. The Christians
train their unsuspecting young to believe that god commands
man to copulate and multiply, and that misery has been loosed
upon the world so that patient sufferers of it may that way
earn a place in the god's heaven. What a bonanza for the other
good (and smarter) Christians to exploit!'
Has any mind, even if by the merest of chances, ever devised a system more injurious to free ideation than that? Can
anything so stupid and so arrogant be described as holy? Can
those who call it holy justify it? Or death-bed penitence make
up for it? We see its victims all around us; all of them strapped
and bound by the outlook for which this devious religious
training has conceived.
Who really loosed this stupendously criminal, mind-killing
routine on the world? Should anyone venture to reply, let him
next answer why anyone would do so except in furtherance
of selfishness, and in desire for psychic control over his fellows. To this day the virus of the religions has been turning
potentially sprightly people into dull slaves ready to obey any
given order without asking if right or wrong. Look at Ireland,
Lebanon, Israel, Iran, and others. How many of them would
you call sane? All are victims of religion's profanation of
ideation. Should we emulate them? Hospitals are jammed
with psychically aberrated minds that revered religious commands.
In this impasse, should any American disgusted with such
imbecilities be blamed for embracing American Atheism? Are
those who would kill free ideation to lead us? Should now a
god dreamed up by a weak-kneed Roman emperor in Asia
Minor two thousand years ago be preferred in our US to the
wisdom of this nation's Founding Fathers?
Thank God It's Friday!
Page 30
December, 1979
American Atheist
The American Atheist Radio

Madalyn
Murray
O'Hair
Solstice Seasofl
In 1968, the first year of broadcasting for the American
Atheist Radio Series, we sent out, all over the United States,
copies of what we called "The Solstice Season" program. We
printed it in our literature and distributed it in a small broadside.
When The American Atheist magazine was issued later
(we could not afford to publish it in 1968), we reprinted the
article as the featured radio program script in December. Since
then, for a number of years it has been repeated yearly in the
magazine.
We are happy to do so again this year. We hope that our
new subscribers will come to love it as much as have our old
subscribers and the listeners who have requested a repeat of
it in our American Atheist Radio Series.
Program 30 ....
23 Dec. 1968 ....
KTBC ....
Austin, TX
******************************************
Hello there,
This is Madalyn Murray O'Hair, American Atheist, back to
talk with you again.
Someone stole something from me. I don't like it. What
was stolen from me - and from you - was one of the most
beautiful holidays in the world. Robert G. Ingersoll (an
American Atheist hero of earlier days) was also angry about
this theft. Let me read to you what he had to say about it.
He wrote a very famous "Christmas Sermon." It was printed
in the Evening Telegram newspaper, New York City, New
York, on 19 December,1891. The ministers of the day attacked
the newspaper and demanded a boycott of it. The Telegram
accepted the challenge and set off an issue across the country.
The paper printed the Rev. Dr. J. M. Buckley's attack, and
Robert Ingersoll's answer. It developed into a real donnybrook.
Let's hear what Ingersoll had to say.
"The good part of Christmas is not always Christian, it
is generally Pagan; that is to say, human and natural.
"Christianity did not come with tidings of great joy, but
with a message of eternal grief. It came with the threat of everlasting torture on its lips. It meant war on earth and perdition
thereafter.
"It taught some good things, the beauty of love and kindness in man. But as a torch-bearer, as a bringer of joy, it has
been a failure. It has given infinite consequences to the acts of
finite beings, crushing the soul with a responsibility too great
for mortals to bear. It has billed the future with fear and flame,
and made god the keeper of an eternal penitentiary, destined
to be the home of nearly all the sons of men. Not satisfied
with that, it has deprived god of the pardoning power.
"And yet it may have done some good by borrowing from
the Pagan world the old festival we know as Christmas.
.
Austin, Texas
"Long before Christ was born, the sun god triumphed over
the Powers of Darkness. About the time that we call Christmas
the days began perceptibly to lengthen. Our barbarian ancestors
were worshippers of the sun, and they celebrated his victory
over the hosts of night. Such a festival was natural and beautiful. The most natural of all religions is the worship of the sun.
Christianity adopted this festival. It borrowed from the Pagans
the best it has.
"I believe in Christmas and in every day that has been set
apart for joy. We in America have too much work and not
enough play. We are too much like the English.
"I think it was Heinrich Heine who said that he thought
a blaspheming Frenchman was a more pleasing object to god
than a praying Englishman. We take our joys too sadly. I am
in favor of all the good free days, the more the better.
"Christmas is a good day to forgive and forget, a good day
to throwaway prejudices and hatreds, a good day to fill your
heart and your house, and the hearts and houses of others
with sunshine. "
Would you believe that such a warm Christmas sermon
could cause religious people to launch a vicious attack on a
newspaper for publishing it? Ingersoll used the word "borrow."
He said that Christians borrowed the Pagan holiday. I use a
stronger word. They stole it. They stole the most beautiful
holiday of man - and for what?
.They claim that this is the birthday of Jesus Christ. Let's
look at their scholars, and their history, and see if this is a
fact. You most probably all know of A.T. Robertson, the late
professor of New Testament Greek at the Southern Baptist
Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He had written
a standard textbook on the so-called Broadus Harmony of the
Gospels and it is used in every school of religion across the
land. In this book is summarized all the findings of religious
scholarship in relationship to Jesus Christ and, among other
things, the date of his birth. .
After a lengthy exploration of when Jesus Christ may
have been born, Dr. Robertson sets the date at - hold on now
- the summer or early fall of the year 6 or 5 B.C. Did you
hear that? He set the date in the SUmmer or the fall. Recently,
the idea of the first week of January has gained some following.
But no one who is a religious scholar anymore accepts or believes 25 December as the birth date of Christ.
One must calculate from the possible death of Herod, or
the appearance of the so-called star in the East, which could
have been a comet recorded by the Chinese or a conjunction
of the planets Jupiter and Saturn. But the Greenwich Observatory says that the conjunction appearing as a single star was
very unlikely. Or one can judge the "time of universal peace,"
that is the "time of no war" about which the heavenly host
sang. But there was never any stoppage of war in that time.
One can guess from the so-called ministry of John the
Baptist, or the age of Jesus upon his ('nt .. into the ministry,
December, 1979
Page 31
or the building of the Temple of Herod, or the closing of the

Temple of Hanus, or the so-called census of Augustus Caesar.
All of these lead the poor theologians in ever-increasing directions away from the idea of Christmas and the year "zero" or
"one" of our present calendar.
Actually, the idea of December the 25th is untenable. All
the ancients in Christian history had various days for Christ's
birth. Clement of Alexander, who was closer to that alleged
event in time, said it was May 20th. April 20th and January
6th have always appeared as possible dates. Why did the
Christians want the 25th day of December? Why that particular date? Why did they deliberately steal this very important
date from the Pagans?
There are four points in our calendar which we use and
which we call "solstice" or "equinox" points, two of each.
The latter is easy: we say that the equinox is when the sun
crosses the equator of the earth and day and night are everywhere of equal length. The sun does not actually cross the
equator, we all know that. But with the earth's natural tip on
its natural axis as it whirls around the sun, this seems to be
so. Then, either one or another part of our old ball or earth
gets the most sun. But on these two occasions, the days are
equal in length everywhere and this occurs about 21 March
and 23 September by our current calendar.
ance that all the greens would return in their seasons. The
light of the sun and the twinkling light of stars became important in symbolism as well as in fact.
The mysterious parasite, mistletoe, ever green, intrigued
primitive peoples. It all needed to be celebrated, to be noted
with awe. If one could not give life as the sun did - one could
give else, such as a sharing of food or the precious few personal
items they had. But, above all it was a time for revelry. Life
had been renewed. It was the most joyous of all human occasions. There were universal singing and dancing and laughing and well being. It was wild and wonderful and human and
warm. It was the best of all festivals. It was the gayest of all
feasts. It was the warmest and best of all collective human
activities.
The Christians were no fools. If they permitted the Pagan
holidays to continue to exist, it could challenge the basis of
the mournful Christian religion, with its great emphasis on
death. First came edicts outlawing the Pagan holiday. But
nothing so wildly wonderful and natural as this could ever be
outlawed.
Then the solution came to incorporate it into the Christian religion. Oh, it took some time. It took many years to
effect the change. It took much propaganda. It took many reprisals and sanctions against those who continued with the old
{r*-' 'f6~~6'66A'b
d~;~bH-'
.~~~
~IO~II
U ~IUl~lIJIU
U Uu
11~nJI.IfI~'~lm
The solstice is something different. We don't go around
the sun in a circle; we tour around it - on our earth - in an
ellipse, which is a flattened circle, or oval. When weare in the
points furtherest away from .the sun, we have another phenomenon. Twice a year, when the sun is at its greatest distance
from the celestial equator, about 21 June when the sun
reaches its northernmost point on the celestial sphere, or
about 22 December when it reaches its southernmost point,
we call these moments the solstice. The solstice in December is
the time when the days of the year, in our hemisphere, are the
shortest.
Primitive and pagan peoples were not idiots, you know.
They saw this. Apparently at the first, they feared that the
days would get shorter and shorter and shorter and finally what if there were only night! What a frightening thing, when
the sun was so necessary for life, from common observation.
So when the day came for the sun to overcome the darkness,
and for the sun to cause the days to be longer - even if just a
minute longer - it meant that there was not going to be eternal night. The sun had won a fight again. Darkness had had to
recede and slowly the days would get longer and longer until
spring and summer, with food growing again and the life cycle
being renewed again, would be everywhere on the earth.
And so every primitive culture had a festival or a feast
on this day. It was celebrated in China, in India, in South
America, in Mexico, in Africa, in every single place where man
could watch days and nights and seasons. There were presents
given on this great day, exchanged as a symbol, for the sun had
brought the most precious gift of all to man: the warmth
needed for life and a recycle of the seasons again.
The ancient people noticed other things also. Certain
trees stayed green all year round, a promise of the abundance
of spring and summer to come again after winter, a reassurPage 32
festival. But, eventually the Christian religion won the day.

There were changes in calendars, also. When the Gregorian
Calendar was changed to the present day calendar, the Winter
Solstice - or Christmas - shifted a few days, so that 25
December, by our present calendar, came officially to be designated as a Christian day.
_
It took a thousand years, and more, to rob- the people of
the earth of this grand holiday and to replace it with a personalized myth story of a "new god born," a god of a horrible,
punitive, new religion called Christianity.
But, it is even easier now, with mass media. There are
many of you in the listening audience old enough to remember Armistice Day. That was the day on which World War I
ended and it was celebrated for 30 years or more until a
second global war broke out. After we veterans came home
from that second war we found that there was no more
Armistice Day. Instead, there was a Veterans' Day. All the
people in the listening audience tonight who are 25 years
old or younger have never even heard of Armistice Day. They
only know Veterans' Day, for that is all that they were ever
taught.
That's how it is with Christmas. That is how it was with
the Winter Solstice. Finally, no one ever heard of the solstice and its festivities - and everyone came to believe that
the Christians were celebrating the birthday of Christ and that
was all that this holiday had ever been.
But biblical scholars know better and Atheists know better and we celebrate that old and wonderful and joyous season. We even sell Winter Solstice greeting cards for this season
of the solstice and the New Year - which, really, are both one
and the same. Let me read to you what we print traditionally
on our Winter Solstice cards.
Joyful and cheerful, with mistletoe and signs of the sea-
December, 1979
American Atheist
son, the greetings are to wish one and all the glad tidings of
a wonderful Winter Solstice season. The legend inside the card
reads:
December 25th, by the Julian Calendar, was the Winter
Solstice. This -day, originally regarded by the Pagans as the day
of the nativity of the sun, the shortest day of the year - when
the light began its conquering battle against darkness - was
celebrated universally in all ages of man. Taken over by the
Christians as the birthday of their mythological Christ, this ancient holiday, set by motions of the celestial bodies, survives
as a day of rejoicing that good will and love will have a per-
------...,:
petual rebirth in the minds of men - even as the sun has a

symbolic rebirth yearly.
This informational broadcast is brought to you as a public service by the Society of Separationists, Inc., a non-profit,
non-political, tax-exempt, educational organization dedicated
to the complete and absolute separation of state and church.
This series of American Atheist Radio Programs is continued
through listener generosity. The Society of Separationists, Inc.,
predicates its philosophy on American Atheism. For more
information, or for a free copy of the script of this program,
write to P.O. Box 2117, Austin, Texas. That zip is 78768.
..
"...AND! TELL yoU \TS A U.t=.O.~'\

Austin, Texas
December, 1979
Page 33
Oral Hygiene Discrimination
Jingle Harps
God is the Santa Claus
An 'eye for an eye,' a 'tooth for a tooth,'
For grown-ups,
For those who pursue sinful ventures.
Heaping a bagful of immortal lies
But what they've forgotten, these sayers of sooth,
Upon their fears.
Are those of us folks wearing dentures.
Abra-Cadabra
Keep Looking
Immortality, of the biblical kind,
All clergymen become a bore,
Does not exist,
When speaking of contrition,
Except in man's
For Jesus Christ was nothing more
.Eternal search for it.
Than earth's first real magician .
Thank You, Voltaire
Straight and Narrow

A friend of mine told me
Gods exist,
That he didn't believe in
So that when we fail,
Astrology, or
We do not have to blame,
Magic, or
Superstitution,
Ourselves.
because
[all of the above, by]
He believed in God,
Dave Brachman
And I laughed.
I NEVER PRAY ON CHRISTMAS

I never pray on Christmas
Quite frankly it's because
God never gave me one darn thing
I write to Santa Claus
And Easter I stay home from church
(Those Christians are so funny)
For all they get is sermons
(I get eggs from Easter Bunny)
Those Christians talk and talk and talk
About their great god's powers
But good Tooth Fairy wheels and deals
In far less than eight hours
Old God is sort of like a bum
Page 34
He always wants some cashie

Compared to my good friends th' elves
God seems a little. trashy. : ...
REFLECTIONS
ON THE POPE'S VISIT
I for one see little hope

When we got visited by th' pope
He said (in nice words) "kiss my ass
A woman's place is second class
Go feed th' poor (goodbye, amen)
But I will keep my Mercedes Benz"
Then, off he flew to eat and sleep
(And once again he'd fleeced his sheep)
Yet still I think that I might barter
That S.O.B. for Jimmy Carter .....
John B. Denson
December, 1979
American Atheist
A JOYOUS ATHEIST
G. Richard
Bozarth
CJ'he Cllnon Comed~

It was natural, if not
Very few books ever attain the distinction of becoming god-become-human-to-die-for-our-sins.
part of the very root system of civilization, profoundly in- inevitable, that Jesus stories [1] conformed to so-called Old
fluencing human life and thought for centuries after them. Testament prophecies, [2] reflected the political realities of
In Western Civilization, the Dialogues of Plato and Treatises Israel in the first half of the 1st century A.D., and [3] folof Aristotle must be given such honors. So, too, must On the lowed the plot set down by myths about other savior gods
Revolution of Celestial Orbs by Copernicus, Origin of the such as Buddha, Krishna, Horus, etc. [See Pagan Christs by
Species by Charles Darwin, and the works of Nietzsche. And, J. M. Robertson and Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth by John
whether we Atheists like it or not, the Bible must also be re- G. Jackson.])
Every Christian who could write, it seems, was producing
cognized as one of the major roots of Western Civilization as
gospels, acts and letters. I have a book entitled The Lost Books
we know it today.
of the Bible containing 24 books that make up the New TestaHow did such a seminal book come into existence?
"God wrote it!" most fundamentalist Christians of all ment Apocrypha, those gospels, acts, and letters judged in
the 4th century not to be "divine truth." This includes such
sects will enthusiastically inform us.
To drive a wedge into such unity, the Atheist need only works as the Gospel of the Birth of Mary, the two Gospels of
ask, "Did god write Tobit, Judith, the two Maccabees, Wis- the Infancy of Jesus Christ, the Gospel According to Peter;
dom, Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch?"
various letters such as the General Epistle of Barnabas and
And, behold!
Protestants will unite to proclaim, "No!"
some espistles of Ignatius: the Acts of Paul and Thecla; and
Catholics will unite to just as positively proclaim, "Yes!"
the once influential (i.e., "divine truth") The Shepherd of
And both will glare at each other, certain each is a scandalous
Hermas.
heretic because one group sees the other as rejecting parts of
Table 1 in the back of the volume contains titles and hints
the "divine truth," while that group looks upon the other as of other similar works no longer existing except as mentioned
destroying the "divine truth" by adding books that god never
or quoted in the works of the church fathers. The list is 67
wrote.
entries long. Add to this the 24 survivors and the 27 books
Today there are two Bibles to serve Christianity. Once there
selected as "divine truth" to make up what we call the New
was no Bible at all.
Testament, and you can see that an abundance of literature
The early church was served largely by oral tradition had been circulating among the infant Christian cult.
meaning wandering evangelists went about spreading tge word
as each perceived it and telling Jesus stories they had heard or
Suppressing Heresies
invented. Human imagination always being fertile, it is easy to
Creation of the Old and New Testament Canons - that is,
see how distorted the word would become until each individual version would contain only a few uniting core tenets (or the Bible - was one of the major problems '-bf the early
church. As one might expect, the process doesn't resemble at
traditions, as theologians like to call them) distinctive to what
all the operations of a divine being interested in the orderly
has become Christianity. And those who were persuaded to
and intelligent presentation of his eternal truth to mortal hubelieve one of these mendicant apostles would be as firmly
mans. "The compilation of the Bible was not an act of any
convinced they had received the truth as the next group down
definite occurance. It was a matter complicated and abstruse.
the road who had fallen for another.
It was an evolution at the hands of churchmen of various beliefs and purposes. In the formulation of early church docDrawing Up Accounts
trines there was dissension, personal jealousy, intolerance,
persecution, bigotry." ("Preface" to The Lost Books of the
Christianity sank its roots in the low classes of slaves and
peasants who couldn't have read a Bible had there been one. Bible, p. 11) In other words, ordinary Christian behavior.
In the beginning, Christianity and Judaism related to each
But not all converts were illiterates, and give someone who can
other much better than they did after the Roman church came
write a burning idea, and he will write about it. And each, with
the egotism of authors (which must have been even more ex- to its full theocratic power in Europe. The early church fathers
cessive than it is today in that age when maybe one out of had no trouble accepting the Old Testament Canon worked
out by the Jews. However, the one they took came from the
a hundred could write), would assert the dogmas he favored,
Hellenized, Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, no doubt beperhaps add a few of his own, and tell the Jesus stories he had
cause these Jews shared the cultural orientation of the Chrisheard or invented. One definitely true statement in Luke must
tians of that day. This theological center evidently had added
be the opening observation that "many others have underbOOKSand material not included in the canon accepted in
taken to draw up accounts of the events that have taken place
Hebrew Palestine. However, after Rome had demolished Jeruamong us."
(One must always keep in mind that the "prophecies" of salem in 70 A.D., the power of the Palestinian Jews (like that
of the Palestinian Christians the Pauline letters constantly
the Old Testament give a natural outline for any gospel writer,
complain about and argue against) in the area of theology was
and this outline need only be fleshed out with details provided
shattered. The Old Testament Canon was not seriously chalby the then current cultural and political conditions - one
lenged until the Reformation.
such cultural condition being the wide-spread theme of the
Austin, Texas
December, 1979
Page 35
The New Testament, though, was another matter! Its importance to Christianity far exceeds that of the Old Testament, and the 27 books that finally became the New Testament were not quickly or easily arrived at. The central issue
to establishing the New Testament was to create a written
authority - rock, if you will - upon which to build a unified
theology capable of enduring.
The first Christians expected the Second Coming shortly
after the time they believed JC Superstar had died. When this
did not happen, the leadership realistically began to consider
the survival needs of the church. Clearly, Christianity could
not last in a state of undisciplined enthusiasm always expecting the end of the world shortly. Such apocalyptic enthusiasm
was breeding strange theologies like Gnosticism, Arianism and
Montanism. The church needed to establish one theology and
upon it found its authority, and with it suppress heresies by
commanding all the faithful to believe it absolutely, or else!
There was an embarrassment of literary riches to work
with (another problem, because the multitude of holy books
contributed to spawning heresies), yet there existed early
on a body of writings that did nothing but rise in esteem as
the decades passed after their composition. These were the
Pauline letters, which are the product of a first-class, though
mystically befuddled, genius. After the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish Christians lost their power and influence,
which allowed the Hellenized Christians to fill the void. It is
the Hellenized Christian theology expressed in the Pauline
letters that became the intellectual spirit of Christianity.
Of Heretics And Jewishness
And so it was in the 4th century, when the New Testament canon was worked out by the Councils of Hippo (393)
and Carthage (397), that "Paul's authority was so firmly entrenched that any apostolic letters differing from his own,
even without contradicting them, were rejected." ("Foreward
to the 1979 Edition" by Solomon J. Schepps, The Lost Books
of the Bible, p. 10).
What really got the church hot on the chore of canonization was Marcion, who arbitrarily established his own canon in
the early 2nd century A.D. He repudiated the Old Testament
and all things Jewish. The Marcion Bible consisted of Luke
(cleansed of its Jewishness), and the Apostolikon. The latter
was "ten Pauline letters with Old Testament references and
apologies edited out, without Hebrews, 1 and 2 Timothy, and
Titus." (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Macropaedia, Vol. 2, p.
340)
Such audacity had to be challenged with a canon more in
line with the general desire by church leaders to bring into the
fold as many heretics as possible. They rejected Marcion's restrictive canon, perceiving "an inclusive canon allowed the
church to make a wider appeal to heretical populations."
(A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson, p. 55) Unity of
purpose, however, does not mean unity of opinion.
In the last part of the 2nd century, Irenaeus, Bishop of,
Lugdunum (now Lyons, France), used a canon that excluded
Hebrews, 2 Peter, 3 John, Jude and James, but included The
Shepherd of Hermas. The Muratorian Canon (c. 170-180)
excluded Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 3 John, and The
Shepherd of Hermas, while giving approval with reservations
to the Apocalypse of Peter. Clement of Alexandria used the
Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Letter of Barnabas, the Didache, and other now extracanonical
works.
God, it seems, was not too interested in helping the early
church get its act together.
The problem of the canon was finally solved at the end of
the 4th century, by men no more capable of knowing what
Page 36
really happened in the first half of the 1st century in regards

to Christianity than we are today. Their selections of books
for the New Testament were to solve the problems of their
day, not to recapture whatever may have been the original
nature of Christian theology in the 1st century.
So, there they were with the Pauline letters as their starting point. But, they couldn't allow the church to focus entirely on Paul lest Paul become mythicized by the ignorant
faithful into a competing deity much in the way Mary became
deified and is even today frankly worshipped as a goddess in
countries south of the United States border where illiteracy
and cultural primitiveness preserve that old time Roman
Catholicism that has all but vanished in Europe and the USA.
To prevent this, some acceptable epistles were thrown in to
dilute Paul's importance.
The Old Testament is full of doomsday visions, Christianity
was itself founded in the eschatological hopes of Jews, whose
inferior status in the world god had promised they would rule
caused them to lust for its destruction, and the Second Coming was too essential to the evolving Christian message to
exorcise. All these factors compelled the inclusion of an apocalypse. The Revelation of John received the honors because it
was favored by Rome.
Lastly, biographies of JC Superstar were extremely essential, because the so-called savior of the world is not an established historical person like Julius Caesar or Plato or Herod.
It was necessary to establish him historically by selecting gospels that told his life story, yet did not wander too far from
Pauline theology. The reason four gospels were selected evidently was due to a bit of superstitious nonsense, for Irenaeus
"says in his Adeversus haereses that, just as there are four
winds, there must be four gospels, for the holy spirit, the inspiration for all divine writing, is embodied in the wind."
(Schepps, p. 9)
(While browsing through Joseph McCabe's A Rationalist
Encyclopaedia, I came across the humorous fact that once
it was believed that the four gospels in the New Testament had
selected themselves by leaping onto the altar at the Council
of Nicaea!)
\
/
December, 1979
--~/
""
r~,~
--
')}
THE SON Of GOD TAKES TI ME OUT TO

CURSE
A FIG TREE!
MarkX'I, 1214,2021
American Atheist
Biographical
Problems
Some gospels never stood a chance of canonization, like

the Gospel of Basilides, which did not describe JC Superstar
as being crucified! Of course, the crucifixion-resurrection is so
essential to Christian theology that any tale of the life of JC
Superstar had to include it. Not only was Basilides' gospel not
selected to be "divine truth," it was not even allowed to survive.
(But think on its significance! Imagine any biography of
Napoleon that did not have him defeated at Waterloo or one
of John F. Kennedy that told his life without an assassination.
Obviously, the early Christians really knew nothing of the
"life" of JC Superstar other than what details the Old Testament prophecies and common savior god myths suggested to
fertile imaginations.)
One should note how insignificant, evidently, the virgin
birth was to the church in the 4th century, for neither Mark
nor John include it - once again showing that real biographical knowledge of Christ never did exist. Schepps, in his "Foreward," tells us that the Gospel of Peter, "which was once held
as highly as those of Matthew and Mark, and more highly than
those of Luke and John, was ultimately rejected because it
differs too much in its details from the three chosen synopses." (p. 9 - emphasis mine)
One of the last obstacles was the conflict between Rome
and Alexandria, which in those days was an ecclesiastical
power equal to Rome. Alexandria approved of Hebrews, but
Rome didn't because the book taught that any baptized
Christian who committed apostasy was damned regardless of
how repentant he or she became later.
On the other hand, Rome approved of the Revelation of
John, but Alexandria didn't because that book taught JC Superstar would reign a thousand years on earth before the end.
The problem was solved by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria,
when he persuaded both sides to allow both books into the
canon.
Both Hebrews and the Revelation of John got in. Hebrews
was even called an epistle of Paul, even though, as Johnson
bluntly states, "Hebrews, as most of the early fathers knew,
was not by Paul." (A History of Christianity, p. 55) Does this
surprise anyone? When has Christianity ever resisted telling an
outright lie if that lie would serve its lust for power and
wealth?
The deed was done. With the New Testament the infant
church now had a written authority to build a viable survival
institution on, as well as to give it some degree of intellectual
respectability. With the New Testament, it had a large enough
theological base to appeal to many heretics, though the price
for such broadness was "accepting a large number of theological and ethical, and indeed historical-factual contradic-
A CONVENTION
tions." (Johnson, p. 54)

But I am sure the church fathers understood that the exegetic inventiveness of theologians could resolve any contradiction, and when exegesis is backed by the power of a state religion, which Christianity had become in the 4th century, one
need not be too concerned over contradictions; anyone bold
enough to not accept the theological gymnastics could be
quickly done away with. Could they have imagined the secular
world of flourishing Atheist thought to come in 1600 years,
perhaps they might have been more careful.
\
Canonical
Controversy
The New Testament also gave the clergy authority "to

destroy all non-canonical works that, like the Gospel of Basilides, were too divergent from the selected books. This is why
few former holy books, such at those published in The Lost
Books of the Bible, survived the centuries. Of course, this immoral destruction was necessary to control the birth of heresies, one of the main reasons for putting together a New Testament canon, and today censorship of ideas remains one of
Christianity's main weapons of self-defense, as well as offense.
The Bible was not embroiled in serious canonical controversy until the Reformation. The Protestants had in their possession the Hebrew Old Testament canon, and it was their
authority to deny canonical status to any of the Alexandrian
books approved by the Roman church not found in the Hebrew canon. Although these disputed books had been questioned ever since the days of Jerome and Augustine (Jerome
had voted against them, but the church had been persuaded by
Augustine's approval), the Council of Trent reacted to this
challenge in the expected manner: in 1546 the canonical
status of the disputed Old Testament books was affirmed by
making their "holiness" a dogma of the church.
The Protestants came close to having a different New Testament canon. Luther felt Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation ought not be in the New Testament canon, but he bowed
to tradition and left them there. I suspect he also considered
the fact that any tampering with the New Testament would
bring more harm to Christianity by opening all the books to
question than a similar tampering with the OId,T
. estament.
Such was the process of creation of one of the most influential books in Western Civilization. Does the student of
history find the presence of god evinced in the struggle for
canonization? No. The creation of the Bible is obviously entirely human; a long process of culling, debate, and compromise motivated by the church's need to organize itself into a
surviving institution.
Only a born-again idiot could possibly detect the presence
of an omnipotent deity amid a collection of books that still
aren't entirely agreed upon by. all Christians.
YOU WON'T . EVER

FORGET ...
-
AMERICAN ATHEISTS
IN DETROIT
Aprii, 1980
Helen Weaver, Convention Coordinator
Detroit Chapter, American Atheists
POB 37056
Oak Park, MI, 48237
Austin, Texas
December, 1979
Page 37
What I Want For

Christmas
by Robtrt G. Instrsoll
If I had the power to produce exactly what I want for next
Christmas, I would have all the kings and emperors resign and allow the people to govern themselves.
I would have all the nobility drop their titles and give their
lands back to the people. I would have the pope throwaway
his
tiara, take off his sacred vestments, and admit that he is not acting
for God-is not infallible-but
is just an ordinary Italian. I would
have all the cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests and clergymen
admit that they know nothing about theology, nothing about hell
or heaven, nothing about the destiny of the human race, nothing
about devils or ghosts, gods or angels. I would have them tell all
their 'flocks' to think for themselves, to be manly men and womanly women, and to do all in their power to increase the sum of
human happiness.
I would have all the professors in colleges, all the teachers in
schools of every kind, including those in Sunday schools, agree
they would teach only what they know, that they would not palm
off guessesas demonstrated truths.
I would like to see all the politicians changed to statesmen-to
men who long to make their country great and free=to men who
care more for public good than private gain-men who long to be
of use.
I would like to see all editors of papers and magazines agree to
print the truth and nothing but the truth, to avoid all slander and
misrepresentation,
and to let the private affairs of the people
alone.
I would like to see drunkenness and prohibition both abolished.
I would like to see corporal punishment done away with in
every home, every school, in every asylum, reformatory, and prison. Cruelty hardens and degrades, kindness reforms and ennobles.
I would like to see the millionaires unite and form a trust for
the public good.
I would like to see a fair division of profits between capital and
labor, so that the toiler could save enough to mingle a little June
with the December of his life.
I would like to see an international court established in which
to settle disputes between nations, so that armies could be disbanded and the great navies allowed td rust and rot in perfect
peace.
I would like to see the whole world free-free from injusticefree from superstition.
This will do for next Christmas. The following Christmas, I may
want more. (1897)
Page 38
December, 1979
American Atheist
Film
Review
The Last Wave
elaine stansfield
The Last Wave was made in Australia in 1977, and is just being released here. It's an interesting picture
in that it has appeal on many levels:
[1] It was in Australia where another apocalyptic movie, On The
Beach, was filmed.
[2] It's a thriller, enough to send
frightened impulses down anyone's
spine.
[3]
It's a disaster picture, using
natural phenomena as part of the
apocalypse.
[4] It pits one culture against another, one mysterious
religious
tribal ethic against modern man's
"logic. "
[5] It's well crafted and almost
tightly plotted.
[6] It leaves the audience wondering.
Richard Chamberlain, in fleeing the
U.S. from his Dr. Kildare image, has
in the process of working at his profession in Europe, England and Australia become a fine actor (including
the demands of Shakespeare). It is his
performance, and those of his co-stars,
Olivia Hamnet and the aborigine Gupulil, which knit the film together:
plus, of course, The Rain.
Chamberlain
plays a corporate
lawyer who is asked by a colleague at
the local legal aid society to defend
five aborigines on a charge of murdering a sixth. He agrees, and is thereby
drawn into a series of incidents which
lead him to believe it was a tribal,
ritual murder, and not just a drunken
brawl in a bar; a murder performed by
the tribal magician, who is a kind of
Casteneda's
Don Carlos translated
into aborigine.
Visions And Black Men
The picture opens and sets the tone

needed, with a group of children playing in the school yard, when suddenly
they hear the sounds of a tremendous
rainstorm building up - ominous
thunder, but one of the children
points out "there are no clouds." The
rain comes, accompanied by hail
which cuts holes in the roof, breaks
pots and cups in the schoolroom,

wounding one child bloodily as the
terrified teacher herds them into a
more protected back closet.
The film then moves to Chamberlain leaving his office and going home
in the driving rain. As the family sits at
dinner, the hallway is filling up with
water. Then the scene shifts to the
sewers underneath the city, and we see
a frightened black man climbing up
from the depths (was that a little alligator we saw slither away, or some
other creature we can't even name?) to
some friends waiting above. "You
saw?" they ask. "You die," he replied,
flinging down the sacred stone and
running. He is the man who is subsequently murdered when they are all
gathered at the bar.
Chamberlain, having taken the case,
realizes they are holding back information from him, and begins digging on
his own. He begins having nightmares.
The sound track gives off noises like a
huge, angry frog (actually, the music
scoring is excellent except for that).
He has visions of strange figures, and
of the fifth black man holding up the
sacred stone for him to see. His wife,
terrified at the change in him, takes
the children to stay with her mother,
and he asks her to go, too, for by now
he also is frightened and wants her
safe. Thus is the film setting up the
audience to believe the eerie, metaphysical witchery and phenomena to
come
Logic No Match Mumbo-Jumbo
BUT (now pay attention) the script
carefully protects itself from us cynics
by having one -of the characters say to
him, "You do not know where your
dreams become reality."
Now the film is free to show us
natives dressed in ceremonial headgear and face paint suddenly appearing before him at night; of ancient
caves belonging to the aborigines under the city; of strange rain containing little frogs, or black goo; of storms
that shatter windows and blow in
roofs; of Chamberlain's premonitions
and intuitions to the extent that the

tribal leader says that he, too, is a
Muglu (ancient psychic). The implication is that modern man's logic is
no match for psychic tribal wisdom.
The giant, engulfing wave coming towards the city at the end of the film
is therefore either another of his
visions, or is about to happen then, or
will happen according to the warnings
on the cave walls, but we do not
know, since the picture ends on a
stop-frame of the wave.
Is it possible that we know where
we stand with this picture? Obviously
the commercial intent was to make
something to turn coin at the box office. However, equally obviously, they
wanted to make an art film, one that
possibly anthropologists and psychologists would take seriously. One that
would appeal to religious and non-religious, to serious students of the occult
(is there such a thing?) and to those
who would debunk it. A warning, indeed, about man's abuse of his environment.
Parenthetically, I might note that in
a book called The Weather Conspiracy
published by Ballantine, the long appendix includes a report by the CIA
in 1974 to the government that said,
in part, "It is evident that Intelligence
must understand climatic changes as
international threats, to forewarn of
economic and political collapse of
nations caused by world-wide failure
in food production resulting from such
changes. Also, we must study our
ability to initiate large-scale migrations." The authors comment that the
CIA is well aware that changing weather may be the greatest single challenge we will face in coming years.
The book documents a case that the
coming ice age may not be thousands
of years away, but may have impact
in as little as 200 years, is already
starting, and will result in plague
and famine, which is also already
starting.
In any case, comparison with The
Wicker Man, which I reviewed in the
Octobe-.
197 ,1 m=ricon Atheist certail' ,. (''. 'nes:
in the sense that
C.m
Austin, Texas
December, 1979
p. 40
Page 39
Book Review
Crime and Immorality
Former Franciscan priest Emmett
McLoughlin
was to the
Catholic
Church
what one-time
agent Philip
Agee is to the CIA - a factual embarrassrnent,
Like Agee, McLoughlin's
writings have been denounced
by his
fomer employer and he had become a
burr under the ecclesiastical saddle as
he presented
documented
evidence
showing
that the Roman
Catholic
Church in its most important
work fostering morality among its adherents
- is a resounding failure.
"By their fruits you will know
them."
With this Biblical dictum in
mind, McLoughlin
analyzed
government statistics
and utilized
studies
made by official Catholic agencies to
show that
the fruits
of Catholic
indoctrination
are found
in widespread immorality
and crime among
the clergy as well as the laity. He
surveyed 319 penal institutions
in 48
states housing 158,857 prisoners. Even
when
using the
National
Catholic
Almanac's
inflated
statistics
on the,
proportion of Catholics in the total US
population,
the high percentages
of
Catholic criminals populating
America's
state
penal
institutions
was
shown by the author to be far beyond
those of other religions or for unchurched convicts.
Catholicism's
perpetual
preoccupation with an overemphasis on sins of
sex has resulted in a de-emphasis
of
the gravity of routine everyday violations
of common
morality
upon
which the integrity of nations is built.
Hence lying is a "venial" sin which
need not be mentioned in the medieval
practice of confession,
yet every sin
concerning sex, whether in deed, word
or even in passing thought is a serious
and mortal sin. Manslaughter
is not a
mortal sin, yet for a Catholic to attend
Protestant religious services is.
McLoughlin's
12 years
in a
Catholic seminary and 15 years as a
Franciscan
priest exposed
him to a
particularly facile and effective pattern
of lying indulged in by the Catholic
hierarchy to conceal or distort thought
through semantics.
Under this divine
distortion,
"freedom
of thought"
means freedom
to accept the truth.
The Catholic
church
alone has the
truth. Therefore,
freedom of thought
means the freedom
to accept
the
Catholic faith.
The Catholic hierarchy conditions
Page 40
in The Catholic Church ....
its "flock" to accept such gross distortions in its parochial

school systems
which seek to "strangle
the human
mind and stifle mental initiative."
In a
previous book, American Culture and
Catholic Schools, McLoughlin demonstrated
how the hierarchy
"anesthetizes" the minds of Catholic youngsters
with
blighted
versions
of history,
philosophy
and morals which few even
question
and most pass on to their
offspring.
And
lest
the
Catholic
mind should somehow rise above such
medieval
conditioning,
the church
erects a wall of censorship
around it
topped
with the barbed
threat
of
damnation to everlasting hellfire.
It is this fear of hell, rather than a
love of god or one's fellow man, which
motivates
the Catholic to confess his
"sins"
to supposedly
celi bate (the
author
told otherwise)
priests who
regard stealing,
lying and regard for
civil law as less important
or interesting than masturbation,
fornication
or
adultery.
As an ex-priest
who had
heard
many
such confessions
and
known
many such confessors,
McLoughlin
stated
that
the bulk of
Catholic
preists
are psychologically
unequipped
to cope with many of the
personal
problems
they meet in the
confessi onal. Most of these problems
pertain to sex, because the clergy in
the confessional
usually do not focus
attention
on anything
besides sex,
except perhaps attendance
at Sunday
mass.
From his research as superintendent of Memorial Hospital in Phoenix,
McLoughlin
had interviewed
many
doctors and psychiatrists
(both Catholic and non-Catholic)
who attested
to the frequency
of mental illness in
their patients brought on by the strain
of religious indoctrination.
He believed
that Catholics
who do go to prison
"are those
who
take their
moral
code too lightly, -while many who go
to insane asylums are those who take
it too seriously,"
The latter are the
very devout who try to avoid "bad
thoughts"
and are the indoctrinated
Catholics
whose
minds < have been
atrophied
by the parochial
schools,
who have let the church and its priests
think
for them
and have simply
snapped under the strain of facing the
realities and problems of life.
Emmett
McLoughlin
has been
villified
by most Catholic
critics as
December,
1979
being an embittered,
biased, renegade
priest whose opinions were unreliable.
He admitted
to being bitter
only
when he thought
of the 41 years it
took for him to awaken to Catholicism's institutionalized
repression.
He
was not more anti-Catholic
than the
verifiable
statistics
of penitentiaries
and insane asylums
with which he
substantiated
his conclusions.
He drew
heavily on the works of the eminent
historian
Henry Charles Lea for his
"personal
reeducation"
since leaving
Catholicism
to marry and embrace
Protestantism.
Crime and Immorality

in the
Catholic Church is valuable to Atheists
because of its scholarly reasoning and
documentation
of the utter failure of
Catholicism's
two millennia
in the
production
and sale of its most important
product
- morality
and the
better
life for the majority
of its
people.
This book would
make an
excellent
gift for those millions of
marginal Catholics
whose awakening
lacks
only
the cold,
cruel,
stark
facts of what Roman Catholicism does
to the human mind.
Continued
from p. 39
both pictures do concern themselves

with cults, which we fondly believe
are beyond the norm in our society conveniently
forgetting
that
EST,
Scientology,
Synanon,
Krishas,
and
evangelists
(including
James
Jones)
belong in that categoryr But whereas
the human
sacrifice
in The Wicker
Man warned of the danger of that
cult, there is ambivalence
in point of
view about the aborigine cult with its
"ancient
wisdom."
Then the warning,
can be seen, not so much that man
must change his ways, as that the
Great Wave has been predicted by the
Ancients and is coming. An act of god,
so it speak. Take your pick.
By the way, we Atheists
would
like to remove the legal phrase "act of
god" from the books, but did you
know that most lawyers interpret
this
as meaning
"nobody
caused it"? A
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" American
Atheist
GREATCH~
(AT THE PRESENT RAJ]
TO GIVE GIFT
SUBSCRIPTIONS
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SEASON
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redress of grievances . AMENDMENT
I Congress shall make
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American Atheist Magazine Dec 1979

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American Atheist Magazine Dec 1979

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v

Roy P. Lingle - The Ballad of Santa Claus

McCabe - Our Personal

G. Ingersoll - What I Want for Christmas

The American Atheist magazine is

- Jon G. Murray - And Not to Entertain

Letters to the Editor

- Popes Will Be Popes

- The Case for Free Ideation

Murray O'Hair - The Solstice

Film Review - Elaine Stansfield

- The Last Wave

Book Review - Crime and Immorality

THE POPE, OCTOBER

WINTER: ACT ONE

And even though the Solstice Sun

A simple setting then is staged

So it would seem a fitting time

is: Dec. 22, 1979

NOT TO. ENTERTAIN

As my media involvement on behalf of American Atheism

Letters to The Editors

SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE

that god was going to send you to hell.

ATHEISTS CONFRONT THE POPE

The Board of Directors, at the suggestion of Conrad Goeringer, undertook

It should be noted here that Dr. O'Hair was reluctant to

a.k.a. the Pope of Rome. In the former there was a request

there to pay over $200,000

The Queen of England is also the head of the Church of

acres of land on which set its colleges and universities.

however, the claims of the abilities of the Pope. If he is a man

The situation was that Paul Funderburk,

Not one person, other than American Atheists, understood

crowd control, total combined

Pope had been invited in the history of the nation.

But our chapter directors

Michigan Ave., and that it could be extended along that street

thick with media. From this came a 7-minute segment that

to for that 0",1 nd the

Savitch subbing for Tom Snyder. Phil Donahue called three

At 2:00 PM when the police permitted signs to be brought

The Chicago 47 proved that it is not alone safe for Atheists

MASS - Meaningless Archaic Superstitious

At about the time of the ending of the picketing, the media

Make no mistake about the magnitude of this case. It will

A judge ruled for Papal freedom

Popes WiU Be Popes

to Romish John Pauli

Still the voice repeated insistently

With its myth and typical gall

There uiere times when we shook hands

h and called iltdabdrYlw

Class of 1913 "Bull.")

In the south, Holy Nicholas - San Nic-Iaus,

With reindeer and sleigh, and a suit all of red,

So Nata/is Solis /nvicti - remember Was a time of rejoicing in latter December;

Then with Rudolph the Red-Nosed supplying the light

In the nations up north he was hailed as Kris Kringle

"to conceal a secession, if possible, and, when made public, to

Hon. Mrs. Ives, "an aristocratic

Joseph McCabe's Cottage, at 22 St., George's Road,

between himself and many powerful Rationalists.

Joseph McCabe Age 75