August 1986

THE
THREE
FACES

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

F YAHWEH

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American Atheists - P.O. Box 2117 - Austin, TX 78768-2117

Vol 28, No.8

August 1986

American Atheist
A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

Editor's Desk
R. Murray-O'Hair

Director's Briefcase
Jon G. Murray

Karl Marx and Atheism

Yuri Pishchik
Did Marx wish to destroy religion? Or
did he look forward to something else?

The Probing Mind

Frank R. Zindler

"The Animal in All of Us" addresses

some fundamental problems in religion
~ and in the Atheist movement.

What is evil will?And are Atheists shut

out of the courts?

News and Comments

28

Mr. Zindler describes arkeologists

"Stalking the Elusive Mountain Boat:
The Quest for Noah's Ark."

Ask A.A.

The Three Faces of Jahweh - John

Paul II's latest encyclical gives the latest
scoop on the importance of the Holy
Ghost and what that spook's job is - 7
The Abortion Decision - The Supreme Court reaffirms Roe v. Wade
while debating which "fundamental liberties" apply to women - 13

Poetry

32

American Atheist Radio Series

Madalyn O'Hair

33

A look into "The Godless World of

Joseph Lewis."

Notes

35

Press Conference
Brian Lynch

36

Historical

On "Independence Day," did we celebrate 210 years of progress?

21

The Water Tower

Don McDermott

40

Book Review

A young man's first sexual. experience

should be an occasion for joy. But in this
short story about a boy and his religion,
it is only an occasion for guilt.

The Religious Slaughter

26

A new biography reveals a few rather

unattractive sides of Ayn Rand.

Me Too

41

Letters to the Editor

42

Crosswords

43

24

Debate

In this reprint from The Freethinker, the

cruelty of "kosher slaughter" is debated
by Jews, Moslems, and freethinkers.

Cover Art by Gerald Tholen

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August 1986

Page 1

American Atheist
Editor/R. Murray-O'Hair
Editor Emeritus/Dr, Madalyn O'Hair
Managing Editor/Jon
G_ Murray
Assistant
Editor/Gerald
Tholen
Poetry/Angeline
Bennett, Gerald Tholen
Non-Resident
Staff/John
M_ Allegro, Burnham
P_ Beckwith, Margaret Bhatty, Nawal El Saadawi,
Merrill Holste, Lowell Newby, Fred Woodworth,
Frank R. Zindler
Production
Staff/Laura
Lee Cole, Christina Ditter' Shantha Elluru, Keith Hailey, Brian J_ Lynch,
Jim Mills, John Ragland, Jes Simmons
Officers

of the Society

of Separationists,

Inc.

President/Jon G_ Murray
President
Emeritus/Dr. Madalyn O'Hair
Vice-President/Gerald
Tholen
Secretary/R.
Murray-O'Hair
Treasurer/Brian
J_ Lynch
Chairman
of the Board/Dr. Madalyn O'Hair
Members
of the Board/Jon G_ Murray (Vice
Chairman),
August Berkshire, Herman Harris,
Ellen Johnson,
Scott Kerns, Minerva Massen,
Robin Murray-O'Hair,
Shirley Nelson, Richard C.
O'Hair, Henry Schmuck,
Noel Scott, Gerald
Tholen, Lloyd Thoren, Frank Zindler,
Officers and Directors may be reached at P_O_
Box 2117, Austin, TX 78768_
Honorary
Members
of the Board/Merrill
Holste, John Marthaler
The American Atheist is published monthly by
American Atheist Press, an affiliate of Society of
Separationists,
Inc., d/b/a American
Atheists,
2210 Hancock Dr., Austin, TX 78756-2596, a nonprofit, non-political, educational organization dedicated to the complete and absolute separation of
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Copyright 1986 by Society of Separationists,
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All rights reserved. Reproduction
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Page 2

EDITOR'S DESK / R. Murray-O'Hair

BALANCED VIEWS
The American Atheist Center, we are
At often
asked by "liberal" theists and

anti-organized religionists (as opposed to

Atheists) why we persist in attacking and in
criticizing religion. Why, they ask, do we not
just go in a corner and contemplate our
A-theism? Every activist Atheist knows the
answer to that; we can explain in simple
terms why we must respond to the constant
intrusions of religion into the public arena.
Why then, the liberal theists and antiorganized religionists continue, do we not
stick to the freaks - the shamans, the Falwells, the Swaggarts, the faith healers - and
leave alone the more respectable species of
religion? (They do not of course use the
word freaks; they speak of "those who
abuse the trust of well-meaning Christians.")
It is that activity that many Atheists, and
anti-organized religionists, take up as a sort
of pastime. It is so refreshing to knock down
the claims of the showmen and freaks - and
so difficult to look at one's friends and relatives and tell them their chosen worldview is
fundamentally sick.
It has always been a challenge for Atheists
to balance the need to respond to immediate
assaults against reason with the necessity of
battling the dangerous fundamentals of
theism.
In this issue, we feature a critique of the
most recent papal encyclical, known to the
faithful as Dominum et Vivijicantem (The
Lord and Giver of Life), which achieves that
necessary balance. As excerpts from its text
and our commentary demonstrate, the
encyclical is the manifestation of a bizarre
theology and a life-negating weltanschauung_ But in the examination of this encyclical, we do not lose sight of the danger of its
implementation and of its effect upon Roman Catholics and their behavior.
One of the Roman Catholic church's chief
interests, a concern addressed in Dominum
et Vivijicantem, is abortion. It is only fitting
that in this same issue of the American Atheist we also feature an analysis of the U.S.
Supreme Court's decision in Thornburgh v.
American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists. The question in Thornburgh
settled upon the state's regulation of abortion, specifically, whether Pennsylvania
could establish various provisions which
would, or could be used to, discourage
women from undergoing that procedure.
The Roman Catholic church would, of

August 1986

course, prefer an outright prohibition of

abortions - but because anything willdo in
a pinch, its local representatives had supported this measure.
The Supreme Court has in many recent
cases shown a rather restricted view of individual liberty promised by the federal constitution. Surprisingly, its conclusion in Thornburgh upheld the principles outlined by the
original abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.
Excerpts from the decision willsurprise the
idealists among us even further; one always
envisages the Supreme Court as a collection
of aged, wise, and dignified judges. It is startling indeed to see the justices sniping at one
another in print. Tsk, tsk.

A note just received from the Michigan

Chapter of American Atheists informs us
that the Chapter is sponsoring an Open
House and State Convention on Sunday,
September 28, 1986, from 12 to 6 P.M. The
Michigan Chapter's annual Open House is
always an interesting event, but this year it
will feature a very special speaker: Frank
Zindler, the American Atheist columnist. If
you find his articles informative and amusing, you would especially enjoy him in person. The Open House willbe at the Fairlane
Holiday Inn, 5801 Southfield Freeway Service Drive, in Detroit, Michigan. An advertisement for the event will be in the September issue of the American Atheist, and a
map will be provided in that ad. We hope
that many of you will attend.

One way for Atheists to "spread the

word" is to try to have Atheist material
shelved in public libraries. We strongly
encourage all Atheists to ask that the American Atheist or books on Atheism be added
to their local public library's collection. Most
librarians do not bite, and many willenthusiastically receive the American Atheist. Special library discounts are available, and in
some cases the American Atheist Press will
send a library a subscription free of charge.
And if you have any questions or problems
about approaching your local library, The
American Atheist Center willbe glad to help.
So next time you check out a book, why
don't you check in a magazine?

American Atheist

DIRECTOR'S BRIEFCASE / Jon G. Murray

THE ANIMAL IN ALL OF US

Atheists
American
constituency to

has been urging its

"come out of the
closet" since its founding. The organization
has been needing to take a bit of its own
advice lately. Despite the urgings of the
national office, a good portion of the membership has wanted American Atheists to
maintain a low profile or to be less strident in
its outreach to the public. The rationale of
this segment of supporters is that a direct
confrontation with religion is to be avoided.
This is exactly the advice that the various
"freethought" and other preceding organizations to American Atheists had adopted.
Their thrust was to disagree with the prevailing religious doctrine only in so far as they
could while not offending the religionist. I
liken it to driving. Some drivers are so concerned about what the other drivers will
think about their driving or how they will
react to it that they are afraid to be aggressive enough, particularly in congested urban
areas. This type of driver actually becomes a
hazard by being too timid. I cannot understand having my position on a given issue,
especially concerning religion, delimited by
those who have the opposing view.
American Atheists has been subject lately
to increased pressure to soft-pedal its outreach. This is (seemingly) only natural with
the current rise in fundamentalism. The
upsurge of political religiosity of the Reagan
years could have only two effects on Atheists - either it would drive them deeper into
their closets, or make them mad enough to
stick their heads out. The latter reaction
must prevail over the former if the Atheist
movement in this country is to have any
hope of delaying a fundamentalist takeover.
This point has recently been driven home to
me by two events.
I have just been involved in manning display tables for American Atheist Press at the
10Sth annual convention of the American
Library Association, which was held in New
York City. I first organized such a display of
Atheist reading material last year at the ALA
convention in Chicago. The opinion of
almost all to whom I spoke in both Chicago
and New York prior to these conventions
was that a display of Atheist literature would
not be accepted by the librarians from
across the country who attend these large
annual meetings. Nothing could have been
further from the truth. During the entire
course of the displays, particularly in New

Austin, Texas

York, the American Atheist Press tables

were the most well attended among those
displays in the small press section of the
exhibit hall. One librarian after another was
both surprised and happy to see that a publisher of Atheist material existed. Most of
them expressed that they knew of little or no
material in their collection on the subject
matter of Atheism. Despite this fact, no
organization prior to American Atheists, of
which I know, had thought of attempting to
push such material alongside other vendors
at such conferences, many of which publish
exclusively religious works.
Where had the earlier groups been? Were
they ashamed of their position? They must
have been - or were they just so afraid of
angering the religious that they simply chose
to remain hidden? I think it was a combination of both.
Symptoms And Viruses
I also realized something else, looking
over the display of materials that American
Atheist Press had brought to New York. I
was suddenly aware that most of the titles
had little or nothing to do with the direct
promotion of an Atheistic life-style. The
majority of what we had on display could be
grouped in three areas: (1) biblical criticism,
(2) biblical inerrancy, or (3) anticlericalism.
Those are also the three subject areas that
had been the mainstay of "freethought" publishing for three hundred years. The emphasis of this material is to pick on specific portions of specific theologies. The authors of
these works would focus on that particular
thought system that had caused them discomfort, either emotional or physical, at
some stage of their life.Standing on the public side of the display looking in instead of my
normal view of looking out, I thought "how
petty and childish." A certain aspect of religion is the source of anxiety to a given individual, and he or she feels a need to strike
back at the cause of that anxiety. I can
understand that part of the scenario, but
what I cannot understand is striking back in
a petty and vindictive way directed at a narrow portion of the theology involved instead
of trying to determine the root cause or
principle of the theology as a whole and
attacking that. It would be like putting drops
of iodine on individual measles instead of
introducing medication into the blood to

August 1986

fight the virus. It is quite useless, from the

standpoint of a religionist, for anyone to pick
on a specific portion of a Bible or other socalled holy book with the intention of discrediting theology as a whole. One must
always keep in mind that religion is a matter
of faith, a very emotional thing, and not the
product of intelligence or rationalism. To the
believer, it is of little or no consequence that
whatever book reveals the thrust of their
belief system contains errors, contradictions, or absurdities. This is evidenced by
the fact that after some three hundred years
of the publication of biblical criticism we still
have religions based on a host of inerrant
"holy books." Additionally, the followers of
such doctrines are in a stronger position
than ever with respect to basing social controls on that written word. If picking out
contradictions, absurdities, and inaccuracies in "holy" books was the answer to the
struggle against religious thought, theism's
Achille's heel, most of the major religious
systems should have fallen by now. It is
obvious that this approach has not worked,
and I cannot see that it is likely to start
working in the future.
Here we were, in the twentieth century,
displaying material based on the same
approach as organizations that existed in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
This has to stop. Even some of the librarians
saw what was wrong. They asked, "Don't
you have any material on the positive
aspects of Atheists or what Atheist positions
are on the events of the day?" Iwas ashamed
to say that, except for this monthly journal,
the answer was no.
Iwould like to see American Atheist Press
begin to develop material that looks at the
basis for religious thought and for the
answer to the question of why such a mythological system of vast complexity evolved in
the minds of men at all. This is the crucial
question and in its answer lies the key to the
destruction of religion, as the discovery of its
causal virus leads to the elimination of a
disease.
The Ultimate Denial
When one gets down to basics it is immediately obvious that the entire thrust of religious thinking has been the cultivation of a
thought system which advocates a mental
escape from the common stresses of exis-

Page 3

tence which we all share into a fantasy world

where those problems are miraculously
solved for us by some mysterious outside
force. It is only predictable that all religious
systems must be based on the common
origin and day-to-day problems of life itself.
We are animals and part of a lifecycle that is
common to all of what we call life. How
strange indeed it is that we now find ourselves involved in a thought system that has
developed to define humans as outsiders to
the life cycle of all the otherorganisms with
which we must cohabitate. Think about it.
This is the ultimate fantasy escape, is it not?
Defining yourself right out of reality, right
out of the life cycle of which that physical
reality dictates that you are a part. Even our
technology cannot overcome our place as
part of nature. Talk about a trip on PCP;
religion has that beat by a mile. People convince themselves that they are not animals.
They pretend that the forces of nature do
not apply to them somehow, with the fantasy even extending as far as to "overcome"
the ultimate reality of death.
It is the denial of the biological state of
being an animal, a primate, that is at the core
of all religious thought, and that is what
needs to be addressed. It does not matter in
the least to the person who subscribes to a

belief system that places him, in his mind,

outside of physical reality that you or I have
found a contradiction or absurdity in his
"holy book." Instead, we must directly confront the notion of mental escapism being
somehow better or more comforting than
reality. That is the needed thrust of our fight
against religion.
The librarians who came by our tables and
commented that our display was lacking
something were correct. What was missing
was what should be the crux of our position
as Atheists, which is that religion is unnatural and not related to reality. What we presented instead was a series of childish
attacks on the peripheral aspects of religion
- not examinations of the core of religious
thought. If the American Atheist movement
is to grow, we cannot continue in this
manner.
Animal To Animal
Following the ALA conference exhibit, I
took the opportunity to take a couple of
days offon an invitation from Arnold Via, the
Virginia State Director of American Atheists
and the founder of the Prison Atheist
League of America. Mr. Via owns property
and has a country home at the foot of the

Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah

Valley area of Virginia. I began writing this
article at his home in Virginia while looking
out over the Blue Ridge Mountains. During
my stay, Mr. Via introduced me to various
members of the little community in which he
lives, and I experienced small town life firsthand, a big difference from "The Big Apple"
whence I had just come. I was struck immediately by the commonality of the human
experience in a rural atmosphere being in a
stark contrast to the so-called concrete jungle of Manhattan. Walking in the woods and
hiking in the mountains with my host in Virginia and seeing life go on in a small town,
comparing that with the boredom of New
York, I suddenly realized how simple life is
for us animals. It is both simple and pleasurable. Just being alive is exhilarating. I cannot
imagine how the human community went
from enjoying its collective existence to
bemoaning it and looking forward to something "better" after death. I am also profoundly impacted by the irrelevance of religious thought to it all. Nothing that religion
has to offer has anything whatsoever to do
with the day-to-day lives of the persons in
any environment, rural or urban. There is
not one thing that the people of this little
Virginia town or New York City do daily,

"Some gU4 in the paper here soqs there's been too much mixing of religion and politics lotelu.! dunno ... whodduo
think?"

Page 4

August 1986

American Atheist

other than going to church, that they could

not do in the complete absence of religion.
So, why is it necessary? The irrelevance of
religion to all animal life is the reality that
leaps out at one every day, and is accentuated by a radical change in environment
from urban to rural. Pointing this out to everyone, but particularly the younger upcoming generations, is essential. As funny as it
may sound, we must all learn how to be
animals again psychologically. Society has
deluded itself for so long that we have lost
track of the niche in which we fit into the
biosphere.
We must think as animals and as cooperating parts of a life cycle that continues despite any of its individual constituent parts.
How do we return to being a part of nature
mentally? We have never escaped physically, nor should we. How can we, as Atheists, turn the misdirected thinking of an
entire world population around? Our physical participation in the cycles of nature is
inescapable, but it cannot continue to be at
odds with our perceptions of ourselves. Iam
talking here about a basic, complete, and
systematic reeducation of generations of
persons and of an urgency in that redirecting
process since humankind now possesses
the technical capability to end life as we
know it on this planet. An ultimate escape
from animal desires (which the religionist
sees as perverse) through global genocide
seems to be crossing the minds of our theocratic politicians more often these days.
In order to foster this basic redirection in
human perception we, as Atheists, need to
become active parts of our communities.
We cannot back off and look at the religious
majority as "kooks" and form our own little
societies, isolating ourselves from the rest of
the world. We can neither withdraw from
daily interaction with our fellow humans, as
strange as we may sometimes find them, nor
can we allow ourselves to be pushed outside
of society by religious thinkers. The Blacks
and the homosexuals have by and large
retreated to their own communities for
years, as have the Hispanics who are now
immigrating in large numbers. The answer is
to become involved in our communities as
open and forthright Atheists. The Black and
homosexual populations have taken many
years to only partially realize this. They must
force others to accept them as they are.
These two communities are just now beginning to go everywhere and do everything
that everyone else does and not allow skin
color or sexual orientation to separate or
isolate them.

A Heritage Stolen
Sitting out on the deck of Mr. Via's home
with the mountains in view in the background, I watched on one of the television
networks a part of the national Fourth of

Austin, Texas

July celebration commemorating the one

hundredth anniversary of the gift of the
Statue of Liberty from France. I listened to
one speaker after another, particularly President Reagan, mix religion and patriotism.
Reagan reiterated his fantasy notion of the
North American continent being placed in
its present geographical location by divine
providence simply for the Puritans to find
and to establish thereon a theocratic colony.
I realized that what he and others who
shared the podium were doing was reinforcing the notion of a theological separation
between the United States and the other
countries and peoples of the world and robbing me and all other Atheists of our American heritage because we choose not to participate in religious ideas. Meanwhile, I am
sitting in rural Virginia, the state where my
ancestors on one side of the family originally
came to America on the first boat to land in
Jamestown colony in 1607 some sixteen to
eighteen generations ago. On the other side
of the family, my great -grandparents immigrated from Germany and were part of the
wave of those who passed by the Statue of
Liberty . Yet, I am excluded from any patriotic feelings, of love of this land which my
ancestors came to and lived and worked in
for generations, by our national leaders
because I am an Atheist. I have been robbed
of my heritage. How dare the religious
majority do such a thing! But there is
method in their madness. If I, and others
such as myself, are allowed to be full, participating members of society, we may be able
to change its predominate religious view. If
we can be labeled as outcasts, then our job
of redirecting a nation is made much more
difficult.
I love this land as does any other American. I cannot express that feeling publicly
because the only public vehicles for expression of patriotism have been purposely
mixed with religion. Every patriotic song, all
of our mottos, all of our symbols have been
saturated with religion as a continued reinforcement of one worldview being the only
acceptable one. Iam concerned with making
this land in which I live a better place to live
for all Americans. I am not only desirous of
"upholding" the Constitution, as most oaths
demand, but in strengthening it. I cannot do
that if I am told that I cannot participate
because of my lack of religion. The religious
community is so afraid that another mode of
thinking, another outlook on life, will gain a
foothold that it must isolate those in opposition to its worldview so that they can be
eliminated. This is what we cannot allow. It is
up to me and all other Atheists to live the
concept of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" on a daily basis and not just
acknowledge it as something that might one
day be. This is demonstrated by action to
those around us that - based on a rational
cognition of our role as animals in the life

August 1986

cycle - we can be better and more productive citizens than those who dedicate a part
of their lives to escaping from it. We are
participants in the reality of life and not
escape artists from it.
In conclusion, I have been trying to say
that we find ourselves in a twentieth century
society of advanced technology operating
on a philosophical basis that has not
changed since the Stone Age. The basis of
our thought systems and our view of ourselves has to be modernized, but at the same
time we cannot lose track of our biological
imperatives. When generation upon generation have perceived themselves and viewed
life in an erroneous manner, it is difficult to
envisage that changing anytime soon. It may
take generations more to accomplish, but
we can all take pride in being in on the start
of the change.
We must change the thrust of our writing
in this magazine and in the books we publish
to the end of weaning people away from old
thought patterns and into new ones. It does
no good simply to keep on pumping out the
same old line that earlier groups did. That
was not effective, so we can drop that
approach.
We must talk in terms of the irrelevance
and obsolescence of religion every chance
we get. No weakness can be shown in this
procedure, and no quarter can be given to
the obsolete ideas. They must go.
Finally, we must not allow ourselves to be
isolated. We must mingle and challenge and
foster change from every angle. Isolation is
the first step to eradication. Our presence as
Atheists must be felt in society openly at
every level. There are Atheists in every walk
of life in this country, as there are homosexuals' Blacks, Hispanics, and women. They
must all simply assert themselves. As with
the unfounded fears concerning the simple
act of displaying Atheist material at a librarians' convention, the only fear we have is of
fear itself. If someone can be proud of being
an idiot and expound irrational ideas in
every direction, why cannot we be proud of
expounding rational ideas?
While I was in New York City, I witnessed
the annual Gay Pride march. Over 10,000
gay men and women walked openly down
the street telling one and all that they must
be accepted for what they are. How many of
you would join a similar march for an Atheist
Pride day? If you would not - or cannot
imagine why you would need to do that then you had better rethink your position.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A second generation Atheist,

Mr. Murray has been the Director
of The American Atheist Center
for ten years and is also the Managing
Editor of the American Atheist. He
advocates "Aggressive Atheism."

Page 5

ASK A.A.

In Letters to the Editor, readers give

their opinions, ideas, and information.
But in "Ask A.A." American Atheists
answers questions regarding its policies, positions, and customs, as well as
queries of factual and historical situations.

In the absence of invincible ignorance

there can be only a guilt conscience or an
evil will.I am not certain that I read or heard
this, or whether it was conceived in my
mind, but I would like to know how you
interpret this and if you agree in part or in
total.
Loren A. Burnett
Connecticut
We presume that by "invincible" ignorance, you must mean ignorance (comprehension) which cannot be dissipated or
overcome through the attainment of knowledge. That is an unlikely shape for anyone
to be in. Just the passage of time brings
more knowledge in most every life. Since
you then lapse into religious terminology
such as "guilt" and "will," our presumption
is that this is a theological tenet and probably means that someone has "invincible
ignorance" concerned with Jesus Christ. All
Atheists would need to plead "guilty" to this
since we are allconvinced that Jesus Christ,
being a fictitious character, hardly can
become "a known" to any of us, Atheist or
theist alike.
Atheists do not carry around with them
the burdensome ideas of "sin" or "guilt." We
make mistakes; we err injudgment. All people do. What an Atheist must then do is to
assess the situation and see if it can be
restored to normal again. When Atheists
cannot intellectually align themselves with
an insane idea such as "believing on him
who saved us all," this is more likely to be
"invincible reason" refusing to be cuckold to
a crazy concept such as most religious ideas
are.
In respect to an "evil will," this is an
apparent reference to a "bad seed" born,
one dichotomous side of the good-evil syndrome which has plagued Christianity, lo!
these many years. Atheists scoff at the idea
of demon possession of any human animal,
which is basically what an "evil will" would
be. All persons are amenable to reason, to

Page 6

an increase of knowledge and to good will.

We are not lesser than others in the animal
kingdom all of which respond to all of these
stimuli.
What has happened here is that you have
stumbled upon another idiotic truism of religion which is supposed to set you thinking
toward the direction of acceptance of
dogma which will be less subtle than that
which you quote.

I received my calendar recently and was

so concerned by something I read I had to
write. You mentioned it is no longer possible
for the organization to seek correction of
state/church violations through legal action.
Does this mean the U.S. Supreme Court has
after all these years finally shut down the
American Atheist movement? Are you now
powerless to point out separation violations?
Ifthis is so, what's to prevent righteous Ronnie from combining church and state? It
looks like there is nothing to stop him now.
Especially since he put that creche on White
House land, violating the constitution and
no one seems to care!
Angelo Sammarco
Illinois
We care! We care!
The situation in which the nation finds
itself is uery bad for not alone state/church
separation but for the Atheist or anyone
else not committed to Christian fundamentalism. We are in the grips of religious hysteria in the nation. And, it is very obvious that
the fervor is being whipped up so that the
Christian capitalist good guys can fight the
Atheist communist bad guys. The red
herring has worked well before in the United
States particularly in the era that is now
known as the terror of McCarthyism when
anyone who was not a Rambo was "unAmerican."
';
What Americans, and particularly Atheists, do not understand is that it takes
money to fight. While the fundamentalists
casually rake in from $100 million to $200
million a year most other cause organizations in the United States do not even reach
that magic $1 million per year with which to
fight. The yearly income of religion in the
United States now is $75 to $100 billion a
year. Yes, you read that correctly: billion not million. In a lopsided battle such as this,

August 1986

the religious fundamentalists will win. That

is an easy prognostication.
The decisions of the US. Supreme Court
since Reagan took office, but particularly in
the last four years, can only be described as
disastrous for state/church separation.
Since the elevation of Rehnquist to Chief
Justice and the addition of Scalia to the
court, one can only expect the decisions to
be more militantly pro-fundamentalist and
god-idea supportive. All cases must be
viewed as susceptible of ultimately ending in
this court, the final authority in the land. For
so long as it remains contaminated with
god-idea solutions, both Atheists and the
nation are in trouble.
It would be ideal if The American Atheist
Center could add an in-house attorney to its
staff so that it could challenge every violation everywhere, even knowing that the
courts are stacked against us. But, this is ,
wishful thinking. There would need to be an
attorney (at probably $35,000 annually) and
a legal secretary (at at least $18,000 annually) added to the staff.
American Atheists has tried on at least
three occasions to secure such in-house
counsel. The membership simply will not or
cannot financially support such an effort.
Those who work at The Center know the
urgent need for this activity; those of you out there - simply do not respond to our
pleas. The result is that American Atheists
must sit and watch our nation being
reduced to a religious fundamentalist and
military fascist state.

CROSSWORDS
(From page 43)

SOLUTION
ACROSS: I-SEWER RAT S.ASLEEP 9-ALL SOULS 10METTLE 12-0CULAR
13WILL TELL IS-SEA ELEPHANTS 18-A MOUNTAIN
CAT 23-BALD PATE 24-COLORS 26-EARWIG 27-HITS UPON 28-SADDEN
29- TEA
DANCE
DOWN: I-SEA COW 2-WALRUS 3-ROOTAGE 4-AWLS 6STEALTH 7-EAT BEANS 8PEERLESS ll-GIDEONS 14RECANTS 16-WARBLERS 17COLLARED 19-NAP TIME
20-AROUSED 21-COUPON
22-USANCE 2S-TIME

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

THE THREE FACES

OFJAHWEH
Karol Wojtyla, alias Pope John Paul II,the
ultimate madman of our century, on May 18,
1986, issued the fifth encyclical of his eightyear pontificate. Titled Dominum et ViuiJicantem (The Lord and Giver of Life), the
thrust of the psycho babbling that the media
reported was "Damn the Atheists."
An encyclical is a pastoral (from the sheepherder to the sheep) addressed by a pope to
the entire Roman Catholic church. This 140page missive was the final part of three papal
messages dedicated to the Son (Redemptor
Hominis, 1979), the Father (Diues in Misericordia, 1980), and, now, the Holy Spirit.
Atheists know this trinity as "J.e., Big
Daddy, and the Spook." The last of these
messages, conceived in 1982, started in
1985, written originally in Polish, then translated to Latin and from that to other languages, was generally published in the United States about May 30 when first media
reports on it were given. The officialEnglishlanguage version was available from Roman
Catholic church officialsin the United States
on June 12.
The encyclical is a disaster. The thinking
is so convoluted and muddled, the themes
so out of touch with reality, the historical
references so fabricated, the style so laborious, repetitive, and disjointed, that one can
only conclude that the man is not alone mad,
but so imprudent as to advertise his mental
disabilities to the world. This is psychobabbling par excellence, nothing more, nothing
less, and malice-filled psychobabbling at
that. The media apparently recognized this,
and the wire stories and other press coverage was short, but not kind. One journal
characterized it as a "doomsday encyclical."
The New York Times emphasized that it
was a harsh critique of the modern world
"brimming with references to Satan." To
excuse the obvious mental condition of the
pope, that same newspaper described the
encyclical as "a highly personal revery." A
psychiatrist would be less kind.
Attempting to find some semblance of a
pertinent message, the media came down on
several paragraphs (near the close of the 140
pages) which can be construed as "an attack
on Marxism" or a "condemnation of Atheism." This, however, did not depict accurately either the content or the principal

Austin, Texas

message of the encyclical.

To this date The American Atheist Center
has not received one media report which
picked up an extraordinarily important,
special aspect of the encyclical. Abortion
clinics throughout the United States are
under siege, with terrorist bombings, attacks, and interference with ingress and
egress of women to those clinics. The
National Abortion Federation reports that
there have been thirty-four bombings and
twenty-seven arsons at abortion facilities
since 1977. In addition, there have been
literally thousands of incidents of picketing
and general harassment short of actual
damage-producing violence. NOW (National Organization for Women) has finally felt
constrained to charge the leaders of two
antiabortion groups in an antitrust suit with
inciting their followers to harass and intimidate abortion clinics. The principal organizations sued are Joe Scheidler's Chicagobased Pro-Life Action League and John
Patrick Ryan's Saint Louis-based Pro-Life
Direct Action League. With these two
organizations claiming that they have shut
down as many as eighty abortion clinics,
NOW moved under the Sherman Trust Act,
the same law which had been used to obtain
legal restraints against the activities of the
Ku Klux Klan. The courts of the United
States have numerous cases challenging
antiabortion laws, the last of which was a
review by the United States Supreme Court
in June of one passed by the Pennsylvania
legislature, reported elsewhere in this issue.
In all of these antiabortion actions, the
Roman Catholic church figures large, and in
all of the suits, that particular religion is
never openly named as a source of the antiabortion violence. This is regrettable.
In reviewing the current situation, it is
extraordinary then that the media failed to
mention that a part of this pastoral again
attacked abortion. In Part 3, Section 3, Subsection 57, the Pope notes:
But on the horizon of our era there are
gathering ever darker "signs of
death": a custom has become widely
established - in some places it threatens to become almost an institution of taking the lives of human beings

August 1986

even before they are born ....

NOW and other organizations dare not
attack this Roman Catholic doctrine which
comes directly from the papacy because
there are in their ranks dues-paying Roman
Catholics who would not countenance such
an attack. This short excerpt was as long as
those segments which attacked Atheism.
Yet the entire media focus remained on the
latter.
The Holy Spirit
But, it is necessary to return to the general
theme and the message of this Dominum et
ViuiJicantem. When the document was
released the Vatican press spokesman,
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, stated that it was a
"theological condemnation" of atheistic (i.e.,
Marxist) governments and "ideological materialism," both of which are "intrinsically
evil." This simply is not a true statement.
The encyclical is only the psychobabbling of
an aging madman. The Marquis de Sade
(1740-1814), writing from the asylum in
which he was housed, was more lucid.
What then does the encyclical state? Its
Introduction identifies the Roman Catholic
church as the heroic institution which recognized the Holy Spirit as the giver of life, a
part of the trinitarian mystery, which guarantees that the Word willnever "pass away,"
as will the material universe. Hence only
through the church can come the individual,
heart-recognized redemption through "believing on him" which will aid the true
believer in overcoming death.
In a boring, repetitive, wandering, almost
hallucinatory flow of words, the historical
and theological background for this idea is
given.
For purposes of analyzing what is said
only, it is necessary to accept the fictional
account of the mythological J.C. which is
given in the New Testament. In that story,
during the Last Supper J.e. tells his disciples, who later become his apostles, "Whatever you ask in my name, I willdo it, that the
Father may be glorified in the Son .... I will
pray the Father, and he will giue another
Counselor, to be with you forever, even the
Spirit ofT ruth." He called this Counselor -to-

Page 7

NEWS AND COMMENTS

This ultimate sin, "they do not believe," is expanded from Jerusalem at the time of J.C. to the
historic and total world. Therefore, "every sin,
wherever and whenever committed, has a reference to the cross of Christ."

come "the Paraclete" (Greek: parakletos,

advocate or intercessor). He went on to say,
"But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom
the Father will send in my name, he will
teach you allthings." In order to make everything clear, he continued, "When the Counselor comes, whom I shall send to you from
the Father, ... he willguide you into all the
truth" (John 15:26f).
Before the Passover supper (remember
that J.C. was a Jew and he celebrated Jewish religious rituals), while in "the Upper
Room," he says to the same people, "It is to
your advantage that I go away, for if I do not
go away, the Counselor will not come to
you; but if I go, I will send him to you. And
when he comes, he willconvince the world
concerning sin and righteousness and judgment" (John 16:7).
The final word is that all of this can only
occur through the Roman Catholic church
which J. C. was then and there building as he
said, "Go therefore and make disciples of all
nations." Throughout the encyclical, the
theme is repeated that as far as this church is
concerned, "every knee shall bow" (Romans
14:11). The church's task is "salvific," and
the pope repeats again and again that, like it
or not, its intention now is to save, or
redeem, the entire world.
Wojtyla is intent on identifying the Christian Trinity as the single allowable concept of
god, reaching back to the 1,400-year-old
fight of the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Ghost (which he now designates as the Holy
Spirit) being consubstantiaL The largest and
most lasting rifts in the church were over this
concept. To prove the point he cites Genesis and god saying, "Let us make man in our
image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26).
Little did the Old Testament scholars know
that this allusion was to the Big Three who
did not come into being until New Test ament times - but as the pope illustrates, a
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds.
Wojtyla is reaffirming the orthodoxy of
the Roman Catholic church's position. The

Page 8

Southern Baptist Convention did the same

in Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-June of this year,
when the leaders of the 14.4 million member
denomination met to reinforce their fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity.
Consubstantial
Arius (250-332), a Libyan who had studied
in Alexandria, started what was to become a
major rift in Christianity just as it was beginning. He held that "the Word" - "the Son"
- coming from god must have been begotten by god and hence had a beginning of
existence. Therefore, logically, it followed
that at one time "the Son" was not, i.e., he
did not exist. If this was true, the Son could
not be eternaL Others argued that J.e. had
existed consubstantially with god through all
eternity. The emperor of the Roman Empire,
Constantine, called the Council of Nicea in
325 in order to put an end to the quarreling.
It is from this date that Christianity has its
beginnings, and the Roman Catholic church,
as an institution, can claim its existence from
this time - a far cry from the year 33 and the
alleged death of the mythological J.C. The
dogma was put together in the Nicene
Creed that "the Father and the Son" were
consubstantial, of the same substance, and
had always existed. The quarrel brought
death to thousands. The clerics came down
on one side or the other of the homoousios
or the homoiusious interpretation. The
Greek word ousia meant "substance," and
the argument was over the idea of the Son
being the "same as the Father" - that is,
homoousious - or the Son being "like the
father" - that is, homoiusious.
Since religion, and the Christian religion
particularly, being complete nonsense, going only to subjective and not realistic ideas,
this battle had significant consequences.
Here, we see it even now being reaffirmed by
both Wojtyla and the Southern Baptist
Convention as if the idea really mattered to
humankind at all.
Moving on to the spook part of the Trinity

August 1986

- the Holy Spirit, as it is designated in this

encyclical - Wojtyla continues with his
analysis. Although he does not spell it out,
the underlying theme is, of course, that the
Holy Spirit is also homoousious and consubstantial with Big Daddy and J.e.
That Holy Spirit came to humankind at
the price of Christ's "departure." Since this
was god's big plan, it was necessary then for
the Jews to knock off J.C. by crucifying him.
His "departure" had to mean his death with god "calling him home" via his drifting
slowly upward. J.C., you see, had received
the fullness of the Holy Spirit, and the only
thing that could be done was to kill him. For
those of you who are thirsty after the Holy
Spirit, let this be a lesson to you. In this way,
the death on the cross is inextricably
involved in the plan for the return by the
Holy Spirit.
The pope then looks at J.C., and would
you believe that he lived for thirty years with
Mommy and Daddy in Nazareth? You
wouldn't dispute the pope, who himself is
infallible?[Part I, (4) (18)] And there the Holy
Spirit first evidenced himself, for that is who
"knocked up" Mary . To prove that all of this
is the divine plan, John the Baptist, the
precursor of Christ, who did not really know
he was such a precursor, declares about
J.e., "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes
away the sin of the world." He, J. e., is as one
with this Holy Spirit. The skies part, a dove
descends, and a voice from heaven says,
"This is my beloved Son, with whom I am
well pleased" (Matthew 3:17). The pope calls
this a trinitarian theophany, that is, a visible
manifestation of three deities in one. Now,
although the voice comes from on high,
inside J.e. there is another voice. The voice
within, of course, is always the Holy Spirit
manifesting itself.
J.C carries this inner voice with him,
always, even to the cross. And after J.C.
kicks the bucket - seven Sundays later who comes to visit the apostles and the
mother of Jesus in the "Upper Room in Jerusalem" but the Holy Ghost, a.k.a. the Holy
Spirit. He advises that he is the one through
whom the Father restores life to those who
are dead through sin, until one day he will
raise - in Christ - their mortal bodies.
When the Holy Spirit came to that Upper
Room, this time it was forever. And the
Roman Catholic church started when this
was announced. This is the justification that
every knee shall bow. Now, the apostles
who were there felt as if they were orphans,
their teacher having departed "this" life.But
the Holy Spirit was now on earth - unfortunately as "The Invisible Man" - so that the
apostles and others could only feel him "in

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

their hearts."
That heartfelt (not brain felt) inspiration
he gave, however, came to be transmitted in
episcopal ordination through the One True
Church, its hierarchy then, and its successors now. Therefore, the Holy Spirit ordained and sustains Karol Wojtyla himself.
Anyone who has read the history of early
Christianity knows that all of this is a crock
and that neither Christian pretensions nor
the era of the Roman Catholic church began
with the Pentecost.
The GREAT Councils
In order to tuck it all in nicely, this all had
to be tied to the First (in 1871) and the
Second (in 1962) GREAT Vatican Councils
of the Church. Sure enough, the teaching of
the Second Vatican Council, in retrospect,
is now seen by Wojtyla as essentially
"pneumatological" - that is, devoted to the
study of spiritual beings. Now who else
would qualify as spiritual beings but the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost - er,
excuse me - the Holy Spirit. The counciliar
constitutions Gaudium et Spes and Lumen
Gentium both held out to the world that the
Holy Spirit was and is abroad in the world to
lead in the journey to the kingdom of the
Father. Allone had to do to get there was die
- shades of J.e.! - for "The church truly
knows that only God, whom she serves,
meets the deepest longings of the human
heart, which is never fully satisfied by what
the world has to offer." Well, it is not possible to speak for the religious, but the Atheists of the world sure as hell are satisfied with
"what the world has to offer."
With all ends neatly tied together, with
"salvation" only available through the Roman Catholic church and its J.e., Big
Daddy, and the Spook, it is now necessary
to look again at what J.C. said about the
Holy Spirit. Remember, it was his advice to
the apostles, "It is to your advantage that I
go away, for ifI do not go away the Counselor will not come to you" (John 16:7). And
Jesus gives the reason for his coming, "He
will convince the world concerning sin and
righteousness and judgment: concerning
sin, because they do not believe in me; concerning righteousness, because I go to the
Father, and you will see me no more; concerning judgment, because the ruler of this
world is judged" (John 16:8-11).Aha! the fat
is in the fire. Damn the Atheists! The ultimate sin is that they do not "believe in" this
bizarre ideology that has been dreamed up
by diseased minds.
But Jesus did not come into the world
only to judge it and condemn it. He came to

Austin, Texas

save it. Well, that doesn't matter; the Roman

Catholic church and Wojtyla can both judge
and condemn, especially in regard to righteousness. Righteousness is really "definitive salvation in God, ... as it centers on the
crucified and glorified Christ." Now you
know. And why was J.C. crucified and risen
again? Ah, you finally have learned your
catechism - "to break the stranglehold of
personified evil, so that this world might be
fashioned anew according to God's design
and reach its fulfillment" (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 2).
This ultimate sin, "they do not believe," is
expanded from Jerusalem at the time of J.C.
to the historic and total world. Therefore,
"every sin, wherever and whenever committed, has a reference to the cross of Christ."
Wojtyla is going to reach out to everyone in
the world, all countries, in all periods of time,
to lay "sin" on everyone, so that the Roman
Catholic church can then, through the Holy
Spirit, save them from it. This is the exact
position taken by the Inquisitors once before
in church history.
Glossolalia Is Born
When the Holy Spirit came at the time of
the Pentecost to the Upper Room in Jerusa
lem, with the mother of J.e. and the apostles
in attendance on him, everyone began to
speak "in other tongues" as confirmation of
the Holy Spirit's presence. This is the phenomenon of glossolalia which, as everyone
knows, is evidence of mental illness, engaged in only by hysteric religious fanatics of
the radical right in the United States. For

August 1986

example, Falwell, Swaggart, and their ilk are

too high-toned to stoop to this kind of idiocy.
However, the pope now interprets the
speaking "in other tongues" to mean that
the Holy Spirit brought "back to unity the
scattered races and offering to the Father
the first fruit of all the nations." In fact,
"Peter comes forward and speaks before a
multitude of people of different languages,
gathered for the feast." Of course, they all
understood him, and he they. But, what did
he speak to them about? Peter, the first
witness to the power of the Paraclete, the
Redeemer, the Holy Spirit, laid upon them
all "concerning the sin which is the rejection
of Christ even to his condemnation to death,
to death on the cross of Golgotha." If the
Jews think that pope is ever really going to
forgive them for "doing in" J.e., they should
all read this encyclical. No way!
The rejection of Christ, by implication the
rejection of god himself, is therefore linked
with the paschal mystery - the crucifixion
and resurrection. And, there, by god, you
now have it all in one ball of wax. For Peter
goes on with his message to the world in
general and to the men of Jerusalem in particular: "Repent and be baptized everyone
of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the
forgiveness of your sins; and you shall
receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." He had, of
course, drunk some of the holy spirit
himself.
"Convert to Christ" is the entire message.
But what does conversion entail? Conversion requires convincing of sin - your
own interior judgment of your conscience
where the invisible Holy Spirit is working on

Page 9

NEWS AND COMMENTS

you:
"Receive the Holy Spirit!"
That, however, is the stuff of religion. It is
totally subjective, having no existence at all
in the real world. It is in the shadow of that
part of the mind that is still confused with
religious ideology drummed into it before
one has reached the age of consent.
The Greatest Sin
The greatest sin in the world was and is
the sin of those who "have not believed."
They have, one and all, sent Jesus to an
ignominious death. The greatest sin that
man could commit occurred - the killingof
Jesus, the son of god, consubstantial with
the father! Therefore every sin demonstrates its relationship with the cross of
Christ.
Where is the sin of nonbelief? This
unspeakable, abominable sin, in its original
reality, takes place in man's will- and conscience - first of all as "disobedience." The
disobedience consists of a rejection of (or at
least a turning away from) the truth contained in the word of god. And, at this point,
methinks the pope tries to slip in "scientific
creationism," which is even now before the
United States Supreme Court to see ifit can
gain entry to our nation's public schools. For
quite suddenly in this discussion he points
out that when the universe was created
"The Spirit of God was moving over the face
of the water" (Genesis 1:2) in order to
create. "To create means to call into existence from nothing." Man was thus created
in the "image and likeness" of god. And,
since the Holy Spirit did the creating, he
knows man in his heart - and that knowledge tells the Holy Spirit that the sin of non-

Page 10

belief, which is really disobedience, is the sin

which is the root of all other sins. For man
has an obligation that has been revealed to
him with the cross of Christ, that there is
only "obedience unto death." After all, J.C.
went to the cross just as he was told, and so
should all of us. What a harsh master is this
god!
But what is disobedience, thus defined? It
is "transgression of a prohibition laid down
by God." What was the prohibition - that
mankind could not eat of the fruit of the tree
of knowledge? For if Adam and Eve did this,
in the Garden of Eden, they would become
as gods, "knowing good and evil" (Genesis
3:5). No one, however, has the right to know
what good and evil is. "Man cannot decide
by himself what is good and what is evil cannot 'know good and evil, like god.' " Disobedience then as the original dimension of
sin means man's "claim to become an independent and exclusive source for deciding
about good and evil." God, and the Holy
Spirit, alone can define what is sin. Goodness, truth, and love mean a lifein union with
god; sin, the "breath of evil," is nonbelief and
disobedience. "Here we find ourselves at the
very center of what could be called the 'antiword,' that is to say, 'the anti-truth.''' What
malefactors would engage in such beastly
work, in such a spirit of darkness?
Well, now Wojtyla gets to the great beast
- Atheism! "[I]n the modern age, when the
atheistic ideologies seek to root out religion
on the grounds that religion causes the radical 'alienation' of man," it has come to such a
state, Wojtyla says, that there is "a process
of thought and historico-sociological prac-.
tice in which the rejection of God has
reached the point of declaring his 'death.' An
absurdity, both in concept and expression."

August 1986

Most Atheists would agree with the pope.

The concept of "the death of god" was put
forward by theologians - not Atheists. The
Atheist position is that there never was a god
and therefore caterwauling about "the death
of god" is the height of absurdity.
But whence sin? After all, god created
man in his image. What went wrong? Sin
appeared on earth and in the human community as an act of the will of the creatureman contrary to the willof god, to the salvific
will of god. It came through the "father of
lies." Aha! We have come to the first of the
references about which the New York
Times reported, that the encyclical was
"brimming with references to Satan." But,
the encyclical never, indeed, mentions
Satan, and the references are no closer than
this. What did god do when he saw sinful
man? He said, "I am sorry that 1have made
them" (Genesis 6:5-7) and laid the flood on
the whole shebang. Rejecting the love of god
thusly brought "suffering" to man. Wojtyla,
however, does not point out that the "suffering" was laid on man by that loving sadomasochistic god.
Sin, being abroad now in the land, can
only be overcome by god butchering his own
son, "sacrificing the lamb," which seems a
somewhat eerie way of solving the problem.
But, there you are - that's the drama after killing everyone on earth in a flood in a
fit of pique, after causing his own son to be
killed on a cross, god "returned to the love
which was betrayed by Adam through sin."
J.C., you see, when ordered to the cross
for no reason whatsoever, since he was
obedient and did "believe on him," went like
a whipped dog to his death. Eve, when
ordered not to eat the apple, told god to go
buzz off and nothing happened to her.

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

Indeed, she became the mother of all
humankind - a not insignificant achievement to which all women can only say "Vive
lafemme!"
. The sin of such disobedience cannot be
condoned under Wojtyla's theoretics. Instead of punishing Adam and Eve, however,
god waited for several score of millennia and
punished J.C. instead -:- by having him
killed. No wonder that, regarding J.C., the
quote Wojtyla uses is, "And his delight shall
be the fear of the Lord" (Isaiah 11:1-3). At
this point Wojtyla becomes helplessly confused and his efforts to extricate himself are
beyond his abilities. He takes, therefore, a
leap of faith and announces that the Holy
Spirit managed it all. "Proceeding from the
Father, he directs toward the Father the
sacrifice of the Son, bringing it into the divine
reality of the Trinitarian communion." You
figure that sentence out. But, to go on:
"Thus there is a paradoxical mystery of
love." You can bet your sweet behind there
is! "In Christ there suffers a God who has
been rejected by his own creature: 'They do
not believe in me.' " The pope, however,
does not add that it was god's own game
plan to hang his own consubstantial son on a
cross and killhim. To go on: "but at the same
time, from the depth of this suffering - and
indirectly from the depth of the very sin 'of
not having believed' - the (Holy) Spirit
draws a new measure of the gift made to
man and to creation from the beginning." As
we used to say back in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, "Put that in your pipe and smoke
it." If it is marijuana, it may get you close to
some understanding of this crazy language.
Out of this mess, this convoluted reasoning,
Wojtyla divines:
(1) J.e. sacrifices himself on the cross for
no apparent reason.
(2) He must do so, in order that the
Redeemer (Holy Spirit) can come.
(3) Before he takes flight into the wild blue
yonder, he tells his apostles they can forgive
sins.
(4) He kicks the bucket, and goes to his
father in heaven to ask him to send the
Redeemer (Holy Spirit).
(5) The Redeemer (Holy Spirit) comes.
(6) The Redeemer (Holy Spirit) now can
tell y'a11what sin is.
(7) The One True Church alone holds a
monopoly on theRedeemer (Holy Spirit) as
a transcendent principal agent of god.
(8) The Redeemer (Holy Spirit) has been
here - in the hearts of men - for a couple
of thousand years now, but for what purpose appears to be vague.
(9) The One True Church has been passing on to the successor hierarchies of the

Austin, Texas

Wojtyla feels, however, that "blasphemy" does

not properly consist of offending against the Holy
Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to
accept the salvation which god offers to man
through the Holy Spirit, working through the
power of the cross.
church the power to forgive sins, which it got
from J.e. (above), not from the Redeemer
(Holy Spirit).
(10) All you need to do is to give ten percent of your income (off the top) to The One
True Church and the pope will be able to
continue to wear lace trimmed pantaloons
under his fine silk robes, fly first class, and
damn all the Atheists and Communists.
Repent Of "The Sin"
Now, Wojtyla comes to the "conversion
of the human heart," where the Counselor
(formerly the Redeemer) is doing his work to
influence all men. The message to each man
from J.C. (not from the Counselor, who is
only working on seeing to it that the heart is
contrite) is, "Repent and believe in the Gospel" (Mark 1:15). Of what is one to repent?
The sin of unbelief, "they did not believe on
him," which is an act of disobedience. (Ifyou
are not following this, try the entire 140
pages. I'm doing damn well at untangling it
all.) The conscience on which the Redeemer
is working was "placed in man by the Creator," and "there is profoundly imprinted
upon it a principle of obedience," for "The
conscience is 'the voice of God.' " If one has
an upright conscience, one can call good
and bad by their proper names. (Earlier of
course, mankind's being able to tell the difference between good and evil had been
thoroughly damned in this very encyclical.)
But, when in doubt, read the constitution of
the Second Vatican Council. In that, it is
stated that "Whatever is opposed to life
itself, such as any type of murder, genocide,
abortion, euthanasia, or willfulself-destruction," is sin. That is half of the "social issues"
in the next presidential election, right there.
"Sin continues to exist." This is obvious
because of "the hereditary sinfulness of
human nature." There are sins which are so
bad that they cannot be forgiven. The most
important of these is the sin which is called
"blasphemy against the Holy Spirit." Woj-

August 1986

tyla comes down on this sin with a ven- ,

geance, citing Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Whoever says a word against the
Son of Man will be forgiven; but
whoever speaks against the Holy
Spirit willnot be forgiven, either in this
age or in the age to come [Matthew
12:31f].
All sins shall be forgiven the sons of
men, and whatever blasphemies they
utter; but whoever blasphemes
against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of eternal sin
[Mark 3:28f].
Everyone who speaks a word
against the Son of Man will be forgiven; but he who blasphemes against
the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven
[Luke 12:10].
(In order to make c-ertain that your
author, here, is "never forgiven," I hereby
revile, abuse, speak of, and address with
irreverence this idiotic, asinine, childishly
stupid Holy Spirit idea.)
Wojtyla feels, however-that "blasphemy" .
does not properly consist of offending
against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists
rather in the refusal to accept the salvation
which god offers to man through the Holy
Spirit, working through the power of the
cross. Whoever rejects the Spirit and the
drip, drip, drip of the blood remains in "dead
works," which is to say, sin. Jesus Christ
says that such blasphemy against the Holy
Spirit cannot be forgiven, either in this lifeor
in the next, since it is linked with "nonrepentance," in other words, to the radical
refusal to be converted. This is what sacred
scripture calls "hardness of heart" (Psalms
81:13; Jeremiah 7:24; Mark 3:5). (Your
author, who has hardness of heart you
would never understand when it comes to
religion, rejects it all, finding the ideology
non-rational and conducive to a debasement
of the human intellect. She is totally non>:

Page 11

NEWS AND COMMENTS

repentive, absolutely refuses to be converted, and thinks this and all other associated
ideas are a big load of bull.)
Happy Millennia, J.e. & The World
Now, the reason that this is so important
is that Wojtyla thinks that "whoever believes
in him should not perish but have eternal
life." This is based on the church's doctrine
of incarnation, "the key mystery" of the
Roman Catholic faith. This is that there had
been an actual embodiment of a deity in an
earthly form - J. C. The great jubilee at the
close of the second millennium, Wojtyla puts
allon notice, willbe for the celebration of the
birth of J.C. Somehow or other, the Holy
Spirit is itself responsible for his conception
and birth (after all, he did knock up Mary),
"which is the greatest work accomplished by
the Holy Spirit in the history of creation, and
salvation: the supreme grace." This union of
the divine nature and the human nature, the
"humanization" of the Word-Son ("The
Word became flesh." John 1:14), signifies
that "everything that is 'flesh'; the whole of
humanity, the entire visible and material
world" is a unified godhood. Therefore, the
Roman Catholic church has the duty, the
power, the obligation to reach out to the
entire world. The Holy Spirit is the one who
"overshadowed the virginal body of Mary"
(as noted above; I knew someone was
guilty!), knowing that Mary was "obedient in
the faith" (Romans 1:5), which is to say, a
good Jewish girl. The "word" made incarnate thus becomes the head of humanity, of
the people of every nation, every race, every
country and culture, every language and
continent, all called to salvation. This is all
for the benefit of "man's new life: divine,
supernatural life" (emphasis added). The
Holy Spirit, for god's sake, thus adopts all of
mankind so that they may all "become partakers of the divine nature"; so that they
may all cry out, "We have received ... the
Spirit which is from God" (1 Corinthians
2:12).
But in this celebration of "gathering in"
the entire world, it is necessary to go backward as well as forward. "The whole of the
action of the Holy Spirit even before Christ"
must needs be claimed by the church. "For
this action has been exercised in every place
and at every time, indeed, in every individual, according to the eternal plan of salvation." And we are back to the homoousious.
Remember, however, that this is the Holy
Spirit. For the other side of the coin is the
flesh. For sin is the desires of the flesh. This
can be overcome. Although it is a temptation with which one must cope, it can be

Page 12

overcome.
Materialism
Unfortunately the resistance to the Holy
Spirit
reaches its clearest expression in
materialism, both in its theoretical
form as a system of thought, and in its
practical form as a method of interpreting and evaluating facts, and likewise as a program for corresponding
conduct. The system which has developed most and carried to extreme
practical consequences this form of
thought, ideology and praxis is dialectical and historical materialism, which
is still recognized as the essential core
of Marxism.
In principle and in fact, materialism
radically excludes the presence and
action of God ... it does not accept
God's existence, being a system that
is essentially and systematically atheistic. This is the striking phenomenon
of our time: atheism .... The order of
values and the aims of action which it
describes are strictly bound to a reading of the whole of reality as 'matter.'
... It follows ... that religion can only
be understood as a kind of 'idealist
illusion' to be fought with the most
suitable means and methods according to circumstances of time and
place, in order to eliminate it from
society and from man's very heart
(emphasis added).
Hear! Hear!
Materialism is the systematic and logical
development of that "resistance"
condemned by Paul as "The desires of the flesh
... against the Spirit." Because of this, Wojtyla predicts that there will be a collision as
the church strives to affirm that "every man
willsee the salvation of God" (Luke 3:6; d.,
Isaiah 40:5). That "collision may in many
cases be of a tragic nature and may perhaps
lead to fresh defeats for humanity" since
"materialism, as a system of thought, in all its
forms, means the acceptance of death as the
definitive end of human existence ... the
human body is mortal ... death remains for
[man] an impassable frontier and limit." All
of this means that there is a "picture of death
being composed in our age." In the entire
140-page encyclical, only these few paragraphs speak to Atheism, materialism, and
Marxism. The three are viewed together as
one ball of wax.
The dark shades of materialistic civiliza-

August 1986

tion threaten the life-giving Spirit. But, the

clarion call is clear: "Receive the Holy
Spirit," for the church has been the perennial witness to the victory over death. The
church proclaims that life manifests itself
beyond the limits of death and lifeis stronger
than death. For, "although your bodies are
dead because of sin, your spirits are alive
because of righteousness" (Romans 8:1O}.1t
hardly seems reasonable that Wojtyla expects to sell life after death in the 1980s, but
the entire encyclical builds to this patent
absurdity. Meanwhile, the Holy Spirit transforms the human world from within, from
inside hearts and minds. Man must discover
that he belongs to Christ. When, under the
influence of the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit,
people discover this divine dimension of
their being and life, all will be right with the
world, especially in the great jubilee of the
year 2000.
There follow several pages dedicated to a
reaffirmation that the future can only be
adequately managed by the Roman Catholic
church. As the encyclical reaches its close,
Wojtyla notes that, finally, the Holy Spirit
expresses itself and makes itself felt in
prayer. "Many times, through the influence
of the Spirit, prayer rises from the human
heart in spite of prohibitions and persecutions and even officialproclamations regarding the nonreligious or even atheistic character of public prayer." For those who hope
for a better life here and now, he has little or
nothing to say; certainly there is no encouragement that they should struggle for better
living conditions. Instead, "Prayer always
remains the voice of all those who apparently have no voice .... Prayer is also the
revelation of that abyss which is the heart of
man." Prayer can only indicate that man is
participating in the divine life. That is small
help when one is ill-fed,ill-clothed, ill-housed,
sick, and needy. Such a person hardly needs
"to save him from himself' with prayer.
An astonishing assertion is also given in
the statement, "it is an historical fact that the
church came forth from the Upper Room on
the day of the Pentecost." This is a flat out
prevarication.
In order to retain the cult of Mary, he
drags in her intercessory role in the Catholic
institution, noting that the Roman Catholic
church perseveres in prayer with Mary since
the union of the praying church with the
mother of Christ and the power of the Holy
Spirit will lead ultimately to that eternal
kingdom that is brought about by participation in the life of the Trinity.
Wojtyla concludes then that the Holy
Spirit is the "spring of water welling up to
eternal life" as he acts as Counselor, Inter-

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

cessor, Advocate, ... unceasingly entering
into the history of the world through the
heart of man." He is, this Holy Spirit, "in our
created world ... uncreated gift. He is the
Spirit of the Father and of the Son; Like the
Father, and the Son he is uncreated, without
limit, eternal, omnipotent, God, Lord" who
"fills the universe." Voila! Another who is
homoousious!
The Roman Catholic church turns to this
Holy Spirit for all of humankind. Wojtyla
implores him "that happiness which only in
god has its complete realization" be given
mankind. He ends the encyclical, "Before
him I kneel at the end of these considerations and implore him as the Spirit of the
Father and the Son to grant to all of us the
. blessing and grace which I desire to pass on,
in the name of the most holy Trinity, to the

sons and daughters of the church and to the

whole human family."
And, In Summation
It is difficult to comprehend why Karol
Wojtyla spent over three years of his time
and energy investing it in this brutish cabala,
a mishmash of nonsense. This man, unfortunately, has the respect of the world.
Instead of using it for the benefit of humanity, to seek amelioration for the human condition, to attempt to be a voice for truth,
justice, humanity, he wastes his considerable influence by psychobabbling. At the
time of his coronation to the office of the
papacy, from his past record, American
Atheists perceived that he was a medievalist
- one who would grab humanity by the

scruff of its neck and attempt to drag it back

to the Dark Ages. He demonstrates his fixation with the dead past constantly, and this
encyclical is not alone no exception, but
rather a positive reaffirmation of Wojtyla's
inability to relate to the reality of our times.
It is, therefore, really not surprising that
the media elected to not outline the real
rubbish given in the encyclical. It would have
been too shockingly insensible to the problems and needs of humankind and our times.
- Madalyn O'Hair

A copy of the Encyclical is available from

The American Atheist Center, P.O. Box
2117, Austin, TX 78768-2117, for $3.00.

THE ABORTION DECISION

In the November 1985 issue of the American Atheist (Vol. 27, No. 11, pp. 15-23),in an
article titled " 'Regulated' Abortion," a
review was made of two cases which were
then pending before the United States
Supreme Court, the first coming in from
Pennsylvania and the second from Ohio.
Those cases have now been resolved with
much media attention. Unfortunately that
attention was superficial and consisted of
broad statements that there had been an
erosion of agreement among the justices on
the Supreme Court so that where the prior
abortion decision had been 7-2, the current
one was 5-4, indicating that there was every
possibility that another review of abortion in
still another test case might bring a reversal
of the famous Roe case.
In Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) the
Supreme Court had given constitutional
protection to a woman's choice whether to
terminate or to continue her pregnancy,
balanced against three identified competing
interests of the state. These were: (1) the
protection of maternal health, (2) the maintenance of medical standards, and (3) the
protection of fetal life. At some point in the
pregnancy each interest becomes compelling and justifies the state regulation of the
factors that govern the abortion decision,
the Supreme Court claimed.
When the two new cases came up, the
Department of Justice of the United States
filed its own amicus curiae (friend of the
court) brief on the side of the right-to-lifers,

Austin, Texas

the Roman Catholic church, and eighty-two

members of the U.S. Congress. Taxpayers,
of course, paid for the congressional brief as
well as that of the Department of Justice.
Both President Reagan and Attorney General Meese have openly emphasized, during
the course of the litigation, that this case
should be used to overturn Roe. The case
from Pennsylvania, which is titled Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians
and Gynecologists, reached the U.S. Supreme Court last year, was orally argued on
November 5, 1985, and a decision was
handed down on June 11, 1986.
The facts of the case are brief. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists filed suit in a Federal District Court in
Pennsylvania alleging that the Pennsylvania
Abortion Control Act of 1982 violated the
Federal Constitution and asked for an
injunction to restrain the state from enforcing the statute. Specific sections of the act
were attacked, but the lower court only
found some of those provisions to be
unconstitutional.
Pennsylvania has had a long history of
struggle with the abortion issue, much of
which flows from the power of the Roman
Catholic church in that state. The last figures available on religious belief in Pennsylvania are from 1980, but they are instructive.
At the time, there were 12,386 churches,
with 2,604,959 Protestant and Jewish communicants, confirmed full church members
out of a total of 7,231,834 adherents to reli-

August 1986

gion. The population of that state in 1980

was approximately 11,626,620, which left
4,394,786 outside of those counted in the
religious ranks, presumably all of whom
simply eschewed a religious appellation for
reasons known only to themselves. Of the
churches reported,l,855 (twenty-three percent) are Roman Catholic. Since this church
does not report actual communicants, only
the total number of 3,881,444 "adherents" to
Catholicism is available to researchers. *
This is a Roman Catholic church claim to
fifty-three percent of the Pennsylvania religious populace.
The only way that the Roman Catholic
church can control the women in its church
is to control the entire socio-cultural milieu
in which they live. The percentage of Roman
Catholic women using birth control methods not approved by the church has not
been acceptable to that church for many
decades. Consistently, a higher percentage
of abortions is performed on Roman Catholic women than on Protestant, Jewish, or
a-religious women. It is presumed to be an
incident of the lack of sex education given to
this group, and the inaccessibility of birth
control medications, devices, or education.

*The Roman Catholic church counts as an

adherent everyone born into a Roman
Catholic family. Its statistics are notoriously
unreliable.

Page 13

NEWS AND COMMENTS

Pennsylvania's Six Provisions

Six provisions of the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act of 1982 were
under review in the Supreme Court's discussion of Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians. What follows is a summary of each of the six
provisions.
#3205 - informed consent:
This provision required the woman to be informed of the name of the physician
who would perform the abortion, the "particular medical risks" of the abortion to
be used and of carrying her child to term, and the facts that there may be
"detrimental physical and psychological effects," that medical assistance benefits
are available for prenatal care, childbirth, and neonatal care, that the father is
liable to assist in the child's support, and that printed materials were available
from the State that described the fetus and listed agencies offering alternatives to
abortion.
#3208 - printed information:
This provision required that the State provide printed materials to include a
statement that there were other agencies willingto help the mother carry her child
to term and to assist her after the child was born and a description of the probable
anatomical and physiological characteristics of an unborn child at "two-week
gestation increm,ents."
#3214(a) and (h) - reporting requirements:
These provisions required the physician to report, among other things, identification of the performing and referring physicians; woman's residence, age, race,
marital status, date of last menstruation; the number of prior pregnancies; the
basis for any judgment that a medical emergency existed or for any determination
of nonviability; and the method of payment for the abortion. It further provided
that such reports "shall not be deemed public records but shall be available for
public inspection and copying in a form that willnot lead to the disclosure of the
identity of any person filinga report."
#3211(a) - determination of viability;
This provision required the physician, after the first trimester, to report the
basis for his determination that a child is not viable.
#3210(b) - degree of care required in postviability abortions:
This provision required a physician performing a postviability abortion to
exercise the degree of care required to preserve the lifeand health of any unborn
child intended to be born and to use the abortion technique that would provide
the best opportunity for the unborn child to be aborted alive unless it would
present a significantly greater medical risk to the pregnant woman's lifeor health.
#3210(c) - second-physician

requirement:

This provision required that a second physician be present during an abortion

performed when viabilitywas possible, which physician was to take all reasonable
steps necessary to preserve the child's life and health.

Page 14

August 1986

Statistics are suppressed, or skewed, frequently difficult to find, since there is a desire
on the part of the church to keep this information unavailable. But by the simple expedient of controlling the total culture, the
church is then able to control its own subset
within that culture. It has, therefore, consistently and aggressively attempted to controllegislative bodies in order to obtain legislative enactments which willbe supportive of
Roman Catholic ideology. The church has
actively opposed sex education, the dissemination of birth control information, and the
distribution of either medical or mechanical
prophylactics with which to prevent pregnancy. In a state in which the claim of the
church is to over half of the religious population, one would expect to find legislative battles to support its positions. This, of course,
is true in Pennsylvania.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. The
reaction of Roman Catholic-dominated
Pennsylvania was to immediately structure
laws within the framework of the defined
objectives of the Roe decision in order to
restrict all allowable abortion activity as
much as possible. Therefore, Pennsylvania's
first Abortion Control Act was passed in
1974 over the governor's veto. After extensive litigation, various provisions of the 1974
statute were ruled unconstitutional, especially those which required spousal or parental consent and those which proscribed
abortion advertisements and the choice of
procedure for a postviability abortion.
In 1978, the Pennsylvania legislature
attempted to restrict access to abortion by
limiting medical-assistance funding for the
procedure. This was also successfully challenged in a federal court.
In 1981, abortion legislation was proposed
again, this time modeled after a statute developed by a Chicago-based antiabortion organization. This bill was vetoed by the
govetnor.
In 1982, the statute under attack in
Thornburgh was formulated, enacted, and
approved by the governor of Pennsylvania
on June 11, 1982_By its own terms it was to
become effective 180 days thereafter, which
was to say, on December 8,1982_ After the
passage of the act but before its effective
date, the case decided by the u.S. Supreme
Court on June 11, 1986, was filed asking for
a preliminary injunction (to enjoin enforcement} until the statute could be fully considered by judicial review. The lower District
Court held that injunctive relief was not
available. The Third Circuit took the appeal
and enjoined enforcement of the entire Act
pending the appeal litigation. But it withheld
its judgment until after the U.S. Supreme

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

Court acted on Ohio, Missouri, and Virginia
cases, * at which point, seeing that the Roe v.
Wade decision was holding, the Third Circuit ruled that various provisions of the Pennsylvania Act were unconstitutional. There
was a petition for a hearing en bane, which
was denied, and then this case was accepted
by the U.S. Supreme Court to review not
alone the request for an injunction, but six
.provisions of the Act: #3205 (informed consent), #3208 ("printed information"),
#3214(a) and (h) (reporting requirements),
#3211(a) (determination
of viability),
#3210(b) (degree of care required in postviability abortions), and #3210(c) (secondphysician requirement). These six provisions had been found to be unconstitutional
by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
The case was in the U.S. Supreme Court
on motions for injunctive relief, supported
by forty-one affidavits, not on appeal from a
fact-finding trial. A local rule authorized that
a "stipulation of uncontested facts" could be
filed, and this was accepted by the court.
The Supreme Court was first faced with the
issue as to whether or not it had jurisdiction
on which it ruled:
We have concluded that it is time
that this undecided issue be resolved.
We therefore hold, ... that in a situation such as this one, where the judgment is not final, and where the case is
remanded for further development of
the facts, we have no appellate jurisdiction ...
We nevertheless treat the American College's jurisdictional statement.
as a petition for certiorari [review],
grant the writ, and move on to the
merits.
The Court immediately then went to a
review of the provisions in the statute which
the Third Circuit had found to be unconstitutional.
Majority Opinion
Blackmun, Brennan, Marshall,
PoweD, Stevens
Justice Blackmun delivered the opinion of
the Court in which Brennan, Marshall,
Powell, and Stevens joined. The Court's

*Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive

Health, Inc., 462 U.S. 416, (1983); Planned
Parenthood Assn. of Kansas City, Mo., Inc.
v. Ashcroft, 462 U.S. 476, (1983); and Simopoulos v. Virginia, 462 U.S. 506, (1983).

Austin, Texas

Our cases long have recognized that the Constitution embodies a promise that a certain private
sphere of individual liberty will be kept largely
beyond the reach of government. That promise
extends to women as well as to men .
- Majority opinion
introductory statement was,
Again today, we reaffirm the general principles laid down in Roe and in
Akron. Since Roe, a number of states
and municipalities have adopted a
number of measures designed to prevent a woman, with the advice of her
physician, from exercising the freedom of choice to abort an unwanted
pregnancy.
The Court, then, came down firmly, even
before reviewing Pennsylvania's provisions:
"The States are not free, under the guise of
protecting maternal health or potential life,
to intimidate women into continuing pregnancies." The states cannot deter a woman
from making a decision that, with her physician, is hers to make. Roe established protection for the woman from "unduly burdensome interference with her freedom to
decide whether to terminate her pregnancy."
Under the #3205 ("informed consent")
provision, failure to observe the required
conduct subjected the physician to suspension or revocation of his license and subjected any person obligated to provide
information to criminal penalties upon failure so to do.
The Court found that the information
which was to be given to the woman
involved was nothing less than an outright
attempt to give a message discouraging
abortion. It would seem, the court said, that
the information required would "serve only
to confuse and punish her and to heighten
her anxiety." Forcing the physician to show
the information to the woman made him an
agent of-the State, infringing upon his professional responsibilities. All information
requirements, the court held, were therefore facially (on their face) unconstitutional.
Under the #3214(a) (h) (reporting requirement) provisions, the Court noted that both
the woman and the physician would be more

August 1986

reluctant to choose an abortion if there

existed a possibility that her decision and
her identity would become known publicly.
The government does not have the right "to
chill the exercise of constitutional rights" by
requiring disclosure of protected, but sometimes unpopular, activities. With the record
of the forty-one affidavits showing a continuous pattern of violence and harassment
against the patients and staff of abortion
clinics, this would be increased by public
disclosure of names and quarterly statistical
reports.
Under the #3210(b) (degree of care
required in postviability abortions) provision, the Court found a "trade-off" between
the woman's health and fetal survival, with a
failure to require the woman's health to be
the physician's paramount consideration.
The woman, the Court said, may not be
required to bear an increased medical or life
risk in order to save the viable fetus.
Under the #321O(c) (second-physician
requirement) provision, the Court saw an
application which was too rigid.
The summary statement of the majority,
on the totality of the issues, was a good one.
Our cases long have recognized
that the Constitution embodies a
promise that a certain private sphere
of individual liberty willbe kept largely
beyond the reach of government.
That promise extends to women as
well as to men. Few decisions are
more personal and intimate, more
properly private, or more basic to
individual dignity and autonomy, than
a woman's decision - with the guidance of her physician and within the
limits specified in Roe - whether to
end her pregnancy. A woman's right
to make that choice freely is fundamental. Any other result, in our view,
would protect inadequately a central
part of the sphere of liberty that our
law guarantees equally to all.

Page 15

NEWS AND COMMENTS

Justice Stevens, in writing a supporting

concurring opinion, desired to note particularly that "the aspect of liberty at stake in this
case is the freedom from unwarranted
governmental intrusion into individual decisions in matters of childbearing." The rest of
his decision is an attack upon White's dissenting opinion and willbe analyzed later in
this report. (See "Reply to White," below.)
Burger's Dissent
Chief Justice Burger filed a separate dissenting opinion stating that he agreed with
much of the dissent of both White and
O'Connor.
White's Dissent
Justice White dissented, with Justice
Rehnquist joining. He began by noting that
the Constitution itself is ordained and established by the people of the United States, *
and therefore constitutional adjudication
cannot frustrate the authority of the people
to govern themselves through institutions of
their own devising and in accordance with
principles of their own choosing. When the
people, through their legislative bodies,
make decisions through legislation, it is not
up to the courts to usurp the people's
authority and disavow the legislation. In the
opinion of White, the Court in Roe v. Wade
"departs from a proper understanding" of

*The Constitution of the United States was

not accepted by popular vote. It was ratified
by the legislative bodies of the thirteen original colonies.

the Constitution and has overruled it.

As he sees it, Roe posits that a woman has
a fundamental right to terminate her pregnancy and that this right may be restricted
only in the service of two compelling state
interests: the interest in maternal health and
the interest in protecting the lifeof the fetus.
Such a right, created by the Court in a decision on a case before it, is not a constitutional right. "A reader of the Constitution
might be surprised ... for the text obviously
contains no references to abortion, nor,
indeed, to pregnancy or reproduction generally; and, of course, it is highly doubtful
that the authors of any of the provisions of
the Constitution believed that they were giving protection to abortion." The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
however, forbids the deprivation of "life, liberty, or property without due process of
law" and White agrees with the proposition
"which I deem indisputable - that a woman's ability to choose an abortion is a species
of 'liberty' that is subject to the general protections of the Due Process Clause." He
does not agree that this liberty is "fundamental," since it is nowhere mentioned in
the Constitution in the specifically enumerated rights. The Court has, therefore, "done
nothing more than impose its own controversial choices of value upon the people."
He goes on then to look at what a "fundamental liberty" might be:
(1) those interests that are "implicit in the
concept of ordered liberty" such that "neither liberty nor justice would exist if [they]
were sacrificed"; and
(2) those that are "deeply rooted in this
Nation's history and tradition."
Liberties must be that which is in the basic
choices made by the people themselves in

constituting their system of government,

rights located (a) in the traditions and consensus of the society as a whole or (b) in the
logical implications of a system that recognizes both individual liberty and democratic
orderThe Court recognized in Roe that "[t]he
pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her
privacy"; but the termination of a pregnancy
typically involves the destruction of another
entity: the fetus. All metaphysical, theological, or legal questions aside,first, the fetus is
an entity that bears in its cells all the genetic
information that characterizes a member of
the species Homo sapiens and distinguishes
an individual member of that species from all
others, and second, there is no nonarbitrary
line separating a fetus from a child or,
indeed, an adult human being. The life of
that entity is at stake in the woman's decision. The decision involves the destruction
of the fetus, Therefore, it follows that the
liberty to choose abortion is not "fundamental," another's rights being involved.
An extensive footnote is used by White to
emphasize the reasoning which he puts
behind his decision:
That the abortion decision concerns childbearing in no sense necessitates a holding that the liberty to
choose abortion is "fundamental."
That the decision involves the destruction of the fetus renders it different in kind from the decision not to
conceive in the first place. This difference does not go directly to the weight
of the state interest in regulating abortion; it affects as well the characterization of the liberty itself. For if the liberty to make certain decisions with

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Page 16

August 1986

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

respect to contraception without governmental constraint is "fundamental," it is not only because those decisions are "serious" and "important" to
the individual, but also because some
value of privacy or individual autonomy that is somehow implicit in the
scheme of ordered liberties established by the Constitution supports a
judgment that such decisions are
none of government's business ....
My point can be illustrated by drawing on a related area in which fundamental liberty interests have been
found: childbearing. The Court's decisions ... can be read for the proposition that parents have a fundamental
liberty to make decisions with respect
to the upbringing of their children. But
no one would suggest that this fundamental liberty extends to assaults
committed upon children by their
parents. It is not the case that parents
have a fundamental liberty to engage
in such activities and that the State
may intrude to prevent them only
because it has a compelling interest in
the well-being of children; rather, such
activities, by their very nature, should
be viewed as outside the scope of the
fundamental liberty interest.
It seems to Justice White that protection
for this unique choice must be "implicit in
the concept of ordered liberty," or, perhaps,
"deeply rooted in this Nation's history and
tradition" and that "it is neither." In denominating that "liberty" in the instant case the
Court "engages not in constitutional interpretation, but in the unrestrained imposition
of its own, extraconstitutional value preferences."
Continuing his attack on Roe, upon which
this decision had come to rest, White notes
further that there was a presupposition not
only that the woman's liberty to choose an
abortion was fundamental, but also that the
state's countervailing interest in protecting
fetal life (or as the Court put it in that decision, "potential human life")becomes "compelling" only at the point at which the fetus is
viable. The point at which the state's interest
becomes compelling is entirely arbitrary.
The explanation given is that "at viability"
the "fetus then presumably has the capacity
of meaningful life outside the mother's
womb." The governmental interest at issue
is in protecting those who will be citizens if
their lives are not ended in the womb. The
State's interest is "in the fetus as an entity in
itself ... and if compelling after viability, is
equally compelling before viability."

Austin, Texas

Both the characterization of the abortion

"liberty" as "fundamental" and the denigration of the State's interest in preserving the
lives of nonviable fetuses are essential to the
"constitutional rules" devised by the Court
to limit the States' power to regulate abortion. Ifeither or both were rejected, a broad
range of limitations on abortion, including
outright prohibition, now unavailable to the
States, would again become constitutional
possibilities.
To assert that a state interest in fetal life
before viability constitutes a "religious"
decision is specious. Because this opinion
coincides with the belief of one or more religions does not make it "religious" or intrusive. "The simple, and perhaps unfortunate,
fact of the matter is that in determining
whether to assert an interest in fetal life, a
State cannot avoid taking a position that will
correspond to some religious beliefs and
contradict others." Therefore, the most
appropriate course of action for the Court is
"to defer to a legislative resolution of the
issue: in other words, if a state legislature
asserts an interest in protecting fetal life, I
can see no satisfactory basis for denying that
it is compelling."
He goes on:
Abortion is a hotly contested oral
and political issue. Such issues, in our
society, are to be resolved by the will
of the people, either as expressed
through legislation or through the
general principles they have already
incorporated into the Constitution
they have adopted.
White then goes over each section of the
Pennsylvania law which the majority has
handled and writes a rebuttal. His general
statements come first. As it has evolved in
the decisions of this Court, the freedom recognized by the Court in Roe is essentially a
negative one, based not on the notion that
abortion is a good in itself, but only that
legitimate goals served by state coercion of
private choices regarding abortion are outweighed by the damage to individual autonomy and privacy that such coercion entails.
"In other words, the evil of abortion does not
justify the evil of forbidding it." Since abortion has not been found by the court to be
desirable, Roe does not command the
States to fund, encourage, or even to
approve of abortion. "Rather, we recognized that the States may legitimately adopt
a policy of encouraging normal childbirth
rather than abortion so long as the measures
through which that policy is implemented do
not amount to direct compulsion of the

August 1986

woman's choice." This is all, White says,

that Pennsylvania attempted to do. Yet, the
majority's decision "makes it clear from the
outset that it simply disapproves of any
attempt by Pennsylvania to legislate in this
area."
In regard to #3205 ("informed consent"),
he sees the law as providing a woman seeking an abortion an enhanced, or maximized,
freedom of choice by ensuring that her decision is an informed one. "State-promulgated
disinformation cannot be justified" and a recitation of a "parade of horribles" before the
woman is "a particularly dangerous procedure." However, the Pennsylvania statute
does not require any false or unverifiable
information. Why then does the majority say
that this is unconstitutional? It has three
replies:
(1) The information provided will,in some
cases, be irrelevant to the woman's decision.
White fails to see how providing information, relevant or irrelevant, could impair any
constitutionally protected interest. The majority hypothesizes that the information may
upset the woman, but this has no pertinence
to the question of the statute's constitutionality.
(2) The information required may increase
the woman's "anxiety" about the procedure
and even "influence" her choice.
Both observations are undoubtedly true,
but this does not cast the statute's constitutionality into question. If the information
required is accurate and not misleading, it
will have a salutary effect; the greater the
likelihood that particular information will
influence the woman's decision, the more
essential the information arguably becomes
for securing her informed consent. If as a
result of receiving the information some
women forgo abortions, this does not suggest that providing the information is unconstitutional. Since prior U.S. Supreme Court
decisions* all indicate that the State may
encourage women to make their choice in
favor of childbirth rather than abortion, the
provision of accurate information regarding
abortion and its alternatives is a reasonable
and fair means of achieving that objective.
(3) The provisions are invalid because
they "intrude upon the discretion of the
pregnant woman's physician," violate "the
privacy of the informed-consent dialogue
between the woman and her physician," and
"officially structure" that dialogue.

*Maher v. Roe, 432 U.S. 464 (1977); Beal v.

Doe, 432 U.S. 438 (1977); and Harris v.
McRae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980).

Page 17

NEWS AND COMMENTS

Abortion is a hotly contested oral and political

issue. Such issues, in our society, are to be
resolved by the will of the people, either as
expressed through legislation or through the
general principles they have already incorporated
into the Constitution they have adopted.
- Justice White

White's reply is that "This is nonsensical."

The government is entitled not to trust
members of a profession to police themselves and accordingly, for the protection of
the public, the state does impose restrictions on the practice of a profession or business. "Respect for the patient's right of selfdetermination on particular therapy demands a standard set by law for physicians
rather than one which physicians mayor
may not impose upon themselves."
In regard to #3214(a)(h) (reporting requirements):
The majority's decision to strike down the
reporting requirements is extraordinary
since the requirements obviously serve legitimate purposes. The information desired is
highly relevant to the State's efforts to
enforce the statute, which forbids abortion
of viable fetuses except when necessary to
the mother's health. Since the subject of
abortion is a matter of considerable public
interest and debate, the collection and dissemination of demographic information is
clearly a legitimate goal of public policy.
There is no undue burden since the physician would need the information in order to
perform the abortion and in prior decisions
the Court has held that reporting requirements are constitutional. *
The reports are to be made available only
with the explicit statutory command that the
manner of so doing would ensure anonymity. For the majority to say that the information is so detailed that the woman's identification is likely and that identification is the
obvious purpose of "these extreme reporting requirements" indicates that the major-

*Planned Parenthood Assn. of Kansas City,

Mo., Inc. li. Ashcroft, 462 U.S. 476 (1983)
and Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri u, Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976).

Page 18

ity view is indefensible. The provisions pose

little or no threat to the woman's privacy.
In regard to #321O(b) (degree of care
required in postviable abortions):
White characterizes the majority decision
as "nit-picking." The statute provides that
the physician use the method of abortion
most likely to result in fetal survival unless
that method would pose (I "significantly
greater medical risk to the life or health of
the pregnant woman" than would other
available methods. The majority, White
states, uses the word "significantly" to presume that the statute represents a "tradeoff' between the woman's health and the
chance of fetal survival. The majority's
statement is that the word "significantly"
renders the statute "not susceptible to a
construction that does not require the
mother to bear an increased medical risk in
order to save her viable fetus." Since the
State's interest in preserving the life of a
viable fetus is a compelling one according to
Roe, the State is at the very least entitled to
demand that that interest not be subordinated to a purported maternal health risk
that is in fact wholly insubstantial. The Court
has often held that a compelling state interest may justify the imposition of some physical danger upon an individual (draftees may
even be killed in a war in addition to being
wounded or placed in physical danger**),
but in this case that the majority shows its
unwillingness to tolerate the imposition of
any nonnegligible risk of injury to a pregnant
woman in order to protect the life of her
viable fetus in the course of an abortion is
baffling. The ruling of the majority directly
contradicts one of the essential holdings of
Roe - that is, that the State may forbid all
postviable abortions except when neces-

**Allgeyer

u,

Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578.

August 1986

sary to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman.

Pennsylvania has simply required that
when an abortion of some kind is medically
necessary, it shall be conducted so as to
spare the (postviable) fetus (to the greatest
degree possible) unless a method less protective of the fetus is itself to some degree
medically necessary for the woman. This
may impose some risk on the woman undergoing the abortion, but the law does not
require any significant health risk.
In respect to #321O(c) (second-physician
requirement):
The majority felt that an emergency situation was not covered and that a physician
could find himself penalized for not finding a
second physician in such circumstances.
White states, ''This reasoning eludes me,"
since the statute states that "[i]t shall be a
complete defense to any charge brought
against a physician for violating the requirement of this section that he had concluded,
in good faith, in his best medical judgment,
... that the abortion Wd5 necessary to preserve maternal life or health" (emphasis
added).
White's conclusion is:
The decision today appears symptomatic of the Court's own insecurity
over its handiwork in Roe li. Wade,
and the cases following that decision.
Aware that in Roe it essentially created something out of nothing and that
there are many in this country who
hold that decision to be basically illegitimate, the Court responds defensively. Perceiving, in a statute implementing the State's legitimate policy
of preferring childbirth to abortion, a
threat to or criticisms of the decision
in Roe li. Wade, the majority indiscriminately strikes down statutory
provisions that in no way contravene
the right recognized in Roe. I do not
share the warped point of view of the
majority, nor can I follow the tortuous
path the majority treads in proceeding
to strike down the statute before us. I
dissent.
O'Connor's Dissent
Justice Rehnquist joined in the O'Connor
dissent also. O'Connor was primarily concerned with the fact that there had been no
trial on the merits and that there had been
no opportunity to develop facts that might
have had a bearing on the constitutionality
of the statute. There had been a request for
preliminary injunction only, and this had

American Atheist

NEWS AND COMMENTS

reached the U.S. Supreme Court. She felt

that no preliminary injunction should have
been issued and that the U.S. Supreme
Court should not have taken the substantive
issue of constitutionality of several of the
provisions of the statute into consideration
without a lower court trial to develop the
facts so that there was a "full record."
The State has compelling interests in
ensuring maternal health and in protecting
potential human life, and these interests
exist "throughout pregnancy." If a state law
does interfere with the abortion decision to
an extent that is unduly burdensome, there
is then, i.e., at that time, a need to review the
law. The majority has now gone beyond this
criterion of "unduly burdensome" standards
to say that no conceivable facts which might
be offered could alter the result since it sees
the challenged provisions of the law as being
"facially unconstitutional" as a matter of law.
O'Connor concludes, "I dispute not only the
wisdom but the legitimacy of the Court's
attempt to discredit and preempt state abortion regulation regardless of the interests it
serves and the impact it has."
She concludes, "In my view, today's decision makes bad constitutional law and bad
procedural law." The Court has tailored for
the fiftyStates an "undesired and uncomfortable straitjacket."

children," and that these are among

"the basic civil rights of man." ...
These decisions affirm that there is a
"realm of family life which the state
cannot enter" without substantial justification .... Surely the right invoked
in this case, to be free of regulation of
the intimacies of the marriage relationship, "come[ s] to this Court with a
momentum for respect lacking when
appeal is made to liberties which
derive merely from shifting economic

arrangements."
White concluded that the statute could
not be constitutionally applied to married
persons, explaining:
I find nothing in this record justifying the sweeping scope of this statute,
with its telling effect on the freedoms
of married persons, and therefore
conclude that it deprives such persons of liberty without due process of

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Reply To White
Justice Stevens, concurring with the
majority, spent much of his opinion in an
attack upon White's dissent, using his opinions in other cases to refute him in this, so
that "the clarity of certain fundamental propositions not be obscured by his forceful rhetoric." Stevens then cites White's concurring
opinion in the Griswold v. Connecticut 381
U.S. 479 (1965) case, which had to do with a
State forbidding the use of birth control
devices, as an answer to his queries concerned with "liberty."
It would be unduly repetitious, and
belaboring the obvious, to expound
on the impact of this statute on the
liberty guaranteed by the Fourteenth
Amendment against arbitrary or capricious denials or on the nature of
this liberty. Suffice it to say that this is
not the first time this Court has had
occasion to articulate that the liberty
entitled to protection under the Fourteenth Amendment includes the right
"to marry, establish a home and bring
up children" . . . and "liberty . . . to
direct the upbringing and education of

Austin, Texas

August 1986

Page 19

NEWS AND COMMENTS

law.
In another case * Justice White concluded
that a similar Massachusetts statute was
invalid as applied to a person whom the
record did not identify as either married or
unmarried.
In still another case he enlarged on what
he had written in both of the above:
The fatal fallacy in the ... argument
is that it overlooks the underlying
premise of those decisions that the
Constitution protects "the right of the
individual ... to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into ...
the decision whether to bear or beget
a child.... The Constitution protects
individual decisions in matters of
childbearing from unjustified intrusion
by the State."
Therefore, continues Stevens, the "liberty" that is at stake is the freedom from
unwarranted governmental intrusion into
individual decisions in matters of childbearing.
For reasons that are not exactly
clear, however, Justice White abruptly announces that the interest in "liberty" that is implicated by a decision
not to bear a child that is made a few
days after conception is less fundamental than a comparable decision
made before conception. There may,
of course, be a significant difference in
the strength of the countervailing
state interest, but I fail to see how a
decision on childbearing becomes less
important the day after conception
than the day before. . . . Thus, it is
difficult for me to understand how
Justice White reaches the conclusion
that restraints upon this aspect of a
woman's liberty do not "call into play
anything more than the most minimal
judicial scrutiny."
In a footnote, Stevens carries the fight
further:
At times Justice White's rhetoric
conflicts with his own analysis. . . .
[H]is statement that an abortion decision should be subject to "the will of
the people," does not take us very far
in determining which people - the

*Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972).

majorities in state legislatures or the

individuals confronted with unwanted
pregnancies .... In view of his agreement that the decision about abortion
is "a species of liberty" protected by
the Constitution ... and in view of the
fact that "liberty" plays a rather prominent role in our Constitution, his suggestion that the Court's evaluation of
that interest represents the imposition of "extraconstitutional value preferences," seems to me inexplicable.
The footnote is not enough; his criticism
continues in the text of his concurring
opinion:
If Justice White were correct in
regarding the post-conception decision of the question whether to bear a
child as a relatively unimportant,
second-class sort of interest, I might
agree with his view that the individual
should be required to conform her
decision to the willof the majority. But
ifthat decision commands the respect
that is traditionally associated with the
"sensitive areas of liberty" protected
by the Constitution, as Justice White
[has] characterized reproductive decisions . . . no individual should be
compelled to surrender the freedom
to make that decision for herself
simply because her "value preferences" are not shared by the majority.
In a sense, the basic question is
whether the "abortion decision"
should be made by the individual or by
the majority "in the unrestrained
imposition of its own, extraconstitutional value preferences."
Then it is back to the footnotes again for
another attack, this one directly aimed at the
religious arguments.
Justice White's characterization of
the governmental interest as "protecting those who will be citizens if their
lives are not ended in the womb,"
reveals that his opinion may be influenced as much by his value preferences as by his view about the proper
allocation of decisionmaking responsibilities between the individual and
the State. For if federal judges must
allow the State to make the abortion
decision, presumably the State is free
to decide that a woman may never
abort, may sometimes abort, or, as in
the People's Republic of China, must
always abort if her family is already

too large. In contrast, our cases

represent a consistent view that the
individual is primarily responsible for
reproductive decisions, whether the
State seeks to prohibit reproduction,
... or to require it.
Then, back to the concurring decision
itself, again, punctuated by short footnotes.
Justice White is also surely wrong
in suggesting that the governmental
interest in protecting fetal life is
equally compelling during the entire
period from the moment of conception until the moment of birth. Again, I
recognize that a powerful theological
argument can be made for that position, but I believe our jurisdiction is
limited to the evaluation of secular
state interests .... **
For, unless the religious view that a
fetus is a "person" is adopted*** - a
view Justice White refuses to embrace - there is a fundamental and
well-recognized difference between a
fetus and a human being; indeed, if
there is not such a difference, the
permissibility of terminating the life of
a fetus could ... scarcely be left to the
willof the state legislatures ....
Acceptance of the fundamental
premises that underlie the decision in
Roe, as well as the application of those
premises in that case, places the
primary responsibility for decision in
matters of childbearing squarely in the
private sector of our society. The
majority remains free to preach the
evils of birth control and abortion and
to persuade others to make correct
decisions while the individual faced
with the reality of a difficult choice
having serious and personal consequences of major importance to her
own future - "perhaps to the salvation of her own immortal soul" remains free to seek and to obtain

**Stevens' footnote states: "The responsibility for nurturing the soul of the newly
born, as well as the unborn, rests with individual parents, not with the State. No matter
how important a sacrament such as baptism
may be, a State surely could not punish a
mother for refusing to baptize her child."
***Stevens' next footnote is: "No member
of this Court has ever suggested that a fetus
is a 'person' within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment."
(Continued on page 44)

Page 20

August 1986

American Atheist

Don McDermott

THE WATER TOWER

in which
Ihen hiskeptroomeverytherebookwasthata bookcase
he had ever read.

One of them he had received from his parents several years before on his thirteenth
birthday. Obviously, he had thought, they
hadn't looked closely at it, and he had never
shown it to them. It was named Lost Civilizations, and he never felt quite right in slipping it in among the others - there were
pictures of naked statues in it. Sharyn had
reminded him of one of these, and as he
drove home, he tried to remember which
one. It had been one of those little clay or
terra-cotta statues - an idol, he corrected
himself - that had been dug up in the Indus
Valley or somewhere around Babylon and
Ninevah. She was modeled of yellow brick,
and the lady's arms reached out as if to
entice him. There were large flowers in her
hair, and around her neck was a heavy
necklace.
Thousands and thousands of years agoit was a long time ago if you thought about it
that way. But he had thought about it differently, as though the lunchroom of his small
high school filled with 120 people or so, all
standing in a line, each being a parent to the
one in front, a child to the one behind. And
somewhere toward the front there would
have been a girl with a body shaped like
Sharyn, someone with lean and straight legs,
small breasts, shoulder-length hair with
short bangs. He slowed the large LTD down
almost to a stop and pulled off the two-lane
highway and onto the straight, but rutted,
dirt road that led home. He switched to
brights as he approached the narrow gateposts and watched for stray steers, but the
high beam was swallowed up in scrub brush
and yellow dust and reflected only the set
tling water tower which leaned toward the
farmhouse like a headless giant.
Suddenly the front wheel kicked up a rock
that struck the car frame, startling him as
though he had been hit - in fact he had felt
it. He sat up and scanned even more carefullythe barren path for the unforeseen. Just
last month he had been tearing around on
some back roads with some buddies and
high-centered the car. He had finally gotten
off center by driving off the jack, but in the
process he had punched a hole the size of a
nickel in the oil pan. Even now he could hear
his father's voice. So this evening, though he
was already late, he drove more cautiously
and slowly.

Austin, Texas

"You know, I think you're the kind of guy

who could talk a girl right out of her pants,"
Sharyn had said before the first feature had
even started. He could remember now every
word she had said to him that evening, and
how she had leaned toward him, supported
by one hand planted on the car bench seat
between them. "That is," she laughed, "if a
silly girl gave you even half the chance."
This hadn't been the first time she had

August 1986

given him the come-on, he realized now, but

before the situation had always been so
ambiguous. When he had first talked to her
.alone, she had asked if he had an "inner" or
an "outer."
"What?"
"Belly button, chucklehead." Then she
lifted her T-shirt to show him hers. "You see,
I have an 'outer.' " What a "cocktease," his
friends had said. Maybe this explained the
business earlier that evening about the underpants. He felt a cool
sweat forming on his
forehead just below his
hairline, and he turned
the car heater off.
"Now where do you
suppose
my panties
are?" she had asked,
reaching about in the
dark spaces on the floor
of the car, cracking her
straight face at last with a
grin.
"Whatcha
mean can't you find them?" He
didn't know how to take
anything she said now,
and it disturbed him.
She accused him of
taking them. "Come on,
giv'em back - I know
you've got them." But he
hadn't. It hadn't occurred
to him to take them as
some sort of momento,
though he knew guys
who did. "Well, if I hear
you've
shown them
around ... "
She tugged on her
white knee socks and
then pulled over a V neck
sweater that did little to
disguise the outline of her
naked
breasts.
She
turned around in her seat
and, hugging the headrest to steady herself,
reached into the back
seat where she retrieved
her lace bra. How naturally she moved, but so
foreign it was for him to
see her move about, stuff-

Page 21

ing a bra in a purse, buttoning a skirt, teasing

her hair. He felt a thickening, a seeping of
hot blood to the surface of his skin. It was
like holding his breath until he pulled her
over with a strength that surprised them
both. She squealed like one of his sister's
baby dolls and rolled right into his lap. He
marveled as his hands reached under her
pleated skirt and stroked her thighs.
"Listen, Tarzan," she said, twirling a little
knot of hair on his chest, "I'd love to go
another round, but I thought you were the
one who had curfew - I thought you were
the one who had to go to Sunday school
tomorrow."
"Yeah," he said and cleared his throat,
feeling suddenly weak, anxious. She found
her gold-plated safety pin on the dashboard
and pinned the flap of her scotch plaid skirt
while he glanced around for her panties. He
slipped his hands in between the sticky vinyl
seats, finding a few grimy coins, candy
wrappers, and peanut shells; he groped
under the bench seat where he found some
dried fruit in a cellophane sack; she even
checked the glove compartment. "I don't
know where they are - sure you didn't put
'em in your purse, too?"
"I'll bet I know," she said suddenly, smiling. "When we were at the drive-in - when
you got out to get popcorn. I'll bet they fell
out on your side - I'll bet they're at the
drive-in."
"Yeah, I'll bet that's where," he said
relieved, and smiled a little at the idea that
any of his buddies who had come over to
them after the first feature may have
noticed. Maybe that's what the smirks on
their faces had really meant when they
asked if he had needed any help?
"Sure, that was it," he said to himself as he
turned the last corner and saw the farmhouse, dark now except for the bright light
on the porch - motionless and quiet except
for the swirling and faint buzzing of hundreds of small gnats and moths about the
yellow porch lamp.
He pulled the family car up in front of the
house and remembered to put on the emergency brakes as his father had always
instructed him. Although he was tired, he
hesitated to get out of the car just yet. It was
almost as if she were still beside him in the
car. He took a deep breath, smelt her perfume; he held it in till he almost burst inside.
She had been so beautiful; he couldn't think
of any other words to decribe it - "Mesopotamian." But he had gotten out again - he
remembered just then - to replace the car
speaker, and he hadn't seen the panties
then.
Wouldn't he have noticed a thing like that
at the foot of the car door? He tied his shoelaces and dragged his fur-lined sheepskin
jacket from the backseat. As he got out, he
looked down at the ground beside the car,
half expecting to see them there. He closed

Page 22

the door again. Where did his eyes naturally

go? Didn't he always look down just before
he got in? He slammed the car door, and as
he approached the porch steps, started
unconsciously to hum a song until he saw his
mother's shadow move across the screen
door. It had never bothered him before nor had he even noticed until just recently
how she hovered around the place. He knew
he wouldn't see her in the hall as he went in,
and no doubt she would think that she had
not been seen - but she had. He had caught
her a lot lately, and it made him a little
uneasy now as he considered what she
would think - what she might say - what
both of his parents would say if they knew
what he had done. But they wouldn't know,
he told himself. Why should they? He knew
lots of guys who did it and were never
caught.
.
In his room, he combed his fingers
through his pubic hair and smelled the
unusual odor on the tips of his fingers. It was
like nothing he had ever smelt. He had
stripped down to his shorts and was pulling
his pajamas out of his bottom drawer when
his mother came in.
"Please, Mom!" he said, covering himself
with his pajama shirt.
"Oh, don't be silly, I won't look at you,"
she said, coming into the center of the room.
"I just wanted to know how your date went."
"Fine - good. We had a very pleasant
evening," he said, backing up against the
chest of drawers. She saw his coat lying on
the floor and picked it up and hung it in the
closet. He had thought he was so smart in
cleaning out the car at the drive-in, throwing
the bottle caps out with the beer bottles, the
Trojan packages out with the prophylactics.
But it had been meant for him to get caught.
His other friends could get away with it; they
weren't religious. But God knew who he
was, and he was going to see to it that he got
caught.
She smiled lovingly and walked right up to
him. He could plainly smell his and Sharyn's
scent, and he was sure she could smell it,
too.
"Goodness, don't be silly," she said, kissing him on the cheek. "When you were a
tyke you used to love running around here
with not a stitch on you." He had heard that
before. "You seem to forget, I diapered and
gave you baths tillyou were ... well, anyway
... " She finished with a pride that made him
feel false. "Sleep tight." She patted his cheek
and ran her hand along the top of the chest
of drawers checking for dust as she left. He
listened motionlessly as she walked down
the hall and heard her checking the lock on
the front door on her way to bed.
He sat down in relief. He could only think
of ~ing.
He had decided then that if he
had been caught, he would just have to leave
home. He wouldn't listen to his parents'
sermons - as true as they might be, and he

August 1986

wouldn't pray with them for forgiveness not that he didn't intend to. But he couldn't
face them like that. This was a sin he could
never livedown, at least not under their roof.
He couldn't imagine now what he had
been thinking of when he had asked Sharyn
out. Everyone had told him what kind of girl
she was. "I'd rather see my daughter lying
dead at my feet," his father had once said in
church, "than to see her come home without
her virtue!" He showered quickly and went
to the phone in the kitchen.
"Hello, Mark, this is Joel ... "
"Hey, 01' man, what's up?"
"I need to ask you some 'em." He paused
and listened to the house before he continued. "When you guys came by the car
tonight, you looked like you had found
something pretty funny, huh?"
"What?" his friend asked. Mark swore up
and down that he had seen nothing. "By the
way? Is she good as they say?"
Joel decided to go out and check the car
seats once more. His mother hardly ever
came into his bedroom like that. It had been
a warning. God didn't intend to embarrass
him, because he knew how that would destroy him. No, God would forgive him this
time because he could read into his heart
and he knew that this was the first time, but
obviously he had wanted to put a little fear
into him. That was all. He would never do it
again because sooner or later people who
commit fornication get caught. He expected
to find them in the car when he went back
out.
He had not wanted to turn on the porch
light, and the sky was full of clouds blocking
out whatever moonlight there might have
been. On top of that, the interior cab lights in
the car were once again on the fritz. All of
this seemed a portent as he blindly searched
through the car again and again. They must
be there, but he wouldn't find them. He
could just see his mother getting in the car
tomorrow to go to church and finding Sharyn's smelly panties, dangling down from
some obvious place like the visor or someplace he would be unable to think of because
he was meant to be caught. He couldn't be
sure that he wasn't looking right at them.
"What in the hell could have happened to
her panties?" he asked again in frustration.
He realized he was shivering, and he wished
he had thought to wear his coat. He finally
gave up and went back to his room where he
said a sinner's prayer and tried to get to
sleep.
He dreamed he was sitting at the dinner
table with his family. It was Thanksgiving
and all of the relatives were there. Then,
while they were eating, somebody said the
water tasted funny -like there was a skunk
or something in the water tower. His father
agreed. "We'd better check this out," his
father said, getting up from the table and
taking him along. Together they climbed the

American Atheist

ladder, his father trailing a few rungs behind.

At the top he had expected to see the furry
carcass of a skunk or possum floating on the
surface of the water. What he saw were her
black panties. He felt his father climbing up
beside him. Frantically, he stretched out for
them, lost his balance, and fellin. As he tread
the water, he sensed her, moving just below
the surface of the water, now pulling on his
legs, now trying to drag him under. Her eyes
were clear glass, her face alabaster, her
black hair spread like a fantail through the
water.
He awoke to the sound of his family getting ready for church. "But where is the
car?" he asked his mother at breakfast.
"Your father took it, of course - had a
deacon's meeting. He'll be back in time to
pick us up - so be ready when he comes."
Two hours passed, but he didn't come back.
"Now what could be keeping him?" she
asked later, sitting on the couch in her Sunday best, paging through the last issue of
Reader's Digest. She couldn't understand it,
but he could. His father had found the
panties. He was late because he had been
talking to the minister about it. That was it.
Perhaps he would bring the pastor home.
The phone rang and his mother had to
answer it.
"Cad, we are expecting you - did you
forget you have a family?" There was a long
pause. "You don't say," she said and pursed
her lips together tightly. "Yes, he's standing
right here." She broke off and held out the
phone to him. There was disgust on her face.
He took the phone in both hands and
slowly put it to his ear. "Once again, I am
disappointed with you," his father said.
"Obviously, we can't trust you to take the
car and go out on dates."
"I know, Dad." Tears were welling up in
his eyes, and he had to turn his face away
from his mother.
"I don't know how to get this point across
- without taking your car privileges away. If
you are going to borrow the car, you must
see to it that you return it as you found it with gas in it!"
Joel had never felt such dread and elation,
elation and then anxiety as he had going out
to start the tractor to take a can of gas out to
his father on the highway. It had been such a
beautiful day yesterday, before he had been
with her . Today seemed another season.
Winds were gusting about the little house,
and his mother had asked him to quickly
check the latches on a few of the shutters
before he went to the barn to start the tractor. He took off his suit coat and put on his
jacket before leaving. He circled quickly
around the house. There was one slapping
shutter by his bedroom window that had a
broken hook. He tied it back with some wire
he found blown into the bushes. Then on his
way to the barn, he passed the water tower
not far from the house. Some day, it would

fallon the house, he used to worry. I've been

warned twice, he suddenly realized, staring
up at it now as if it were some altar atop a
mountain or a ziggurat. His dream was still
fresh, and it didn't seem so crazy. He went
on to start the tractor, but halfway through
the yard he decided that he must look in the
tower.
Leaving the engine to idle, he jumped
down and ran back to the tower. He hit the
ladder at the fourth rung with his first step,
and took them two at a time until he was at
last at the top and staring down. Fifteen feet
across, the face of the water rippled in the
strong wind. He peered as deeply as he
could into the clear, green-tinted water.
Then he thought he saw it. At the bottom, a
black spot. Certainly this was too much of a
coincidence. He could see them plainly now
that he knew what he was looking at. Sooner
or later they would move over, slide over
and block the drain. His father would check
it out and find them - then they'd know
what had happened.

white, her hair dressed in golden flowers.

Suddenly, he panicked and came up choking. He believed in ghosts and devils and sin
and God. He had read about the Whore of
Babylon, and he knew about the Leviathan
who lived in the deep. But his dread overcame him, and he dived again. Eight feet
down and this time he did not come up until
he had searched the bottom of the tank. He
kicked and paddled to keep himself head
down. His lungs ached, but then he had his
hands on it and he brought it up - a piece o(
tar paper. A tar paper shingle had come off
the roof of the barn and gotten somehow
into the water tank. This had never happened before. Was God playing a prank on
him? he thought as he quickly bottoned his
shirt which stuck to him like flesh, threw on
his coat, and slipped into his shoes.
His father was sitting in the LTO as he
drove up. The hood of the car was up, the.
chillywind howling up the highway, throwing
dust and sand into the air.
"Here's the gas can," he said cheerfully,

He took off his coat and slung it over the

side. Then his shirt and shoes. On seeing the
tractor idling in the yard, his mother had
come out onto the porch and was looking for
him. She shouted out his name into a gust of
wind. He couldn't explain. He said nothing
as she scanned the yard for him. Miraculously, she hadn't looked up. He thanked
God that she hadn't looked up. He slipped
feet first into the cold water. Finally, he let go
of the side and dived for the bottom. He had
forgotten how deep it was and dark, and
then he remembered how he had seen
Sharyn down there - naked, her face pale

running up and tapping on the car window.

"What kept ya?" he asked, taking the can
from his son. "Get in the car and start it up
when I tell you."
"Yes, sir," he said, getting in. "Here, Dad,
you take my coat," he said, slipping out of his
fur-lined jacket. "Go ahead, put this on." His
father noticed his wet shirt and wrinkled his
brow as though he was about to say something - but then he didn't, as though he
wanted to save it up for later.
While his father put the gas in the tank and
primed the carburetor, Joel looked again in
the seats and on the floor. Finally his father
(Continued on page 44)

Austin, Texas

August 1986

Page 23

THE RELIGIOUS SLAUGHTER DEBATE

The following is reprinted from the
April 1986 issue of The Freethinker, a
monthly publication [rom England.
for the Jewish and Islamic
SPokesmen
faiths and the Royal Society for the

Prevention of Cruelty to Animals addressed

a public meeting in London last month on
the question of religious slaughter of animals
for food. The meeting was organised by the
National Secular Society whose representative, G. N. Deodhekar, was the first speaker.
Mr. Deodhekar said it was agreed on all
sides that as far as possible suffering by the
slaughtered animal must be avoided.
"The secularist contention is that old
methods of slaughter must be replaced by
new ones based on scientific observation,
new techniques, reason, and compassion.
Though Jewish and Muslim spokesmen usuallyargue that their method is less cruel than
the modern methods, the crux of the matter
is that even if it was proved beyond all reasonable doubt that their method was more
painful, Jews and Muslims would insist on
adhering to their own method as being
based on a command of a divinity in their
respective religious books."
The speaker quoted verses from a chapter of the Koran entitled "The Bee." He said
the essential spirit of the Koranic verses on
this issue was one of flexibility and this
should enable the Muslims to adjust their
practice to modern conditions.
He added that resistance to pre-slaughter
stunning "was based on the fear that the
stopping of the heart would result in failure
to drain the blood from the carcase.
"Observations now suggest that loss of
blood is not affected by stunning. The only
point at issue, therefore, is which method is
less painful.
"Through lack of knowledge or sheer
inertia, many Muslims would prefer the traditional method. But there are indications
. that some Muslim slaughter houses are willing to accept pre-slaughter stunning. It may
well be that patient explanation and unheated discussion may produce wider acceptance by Muslims of modern methods."
It is essential, the speaker warned, that
society should be on guard against the
exploitation of this issue by fanatical and
extremist organisations in order to foment
prejudice against Jews and immigrants.
"On the other hand," he said, "minorities
must realise that their claim to exemptions
from general practice on religious grounds

Page 24

has limitations based on the welfare of other

people and of animals. The lack of tolerance
of religious minorities in certain Islamic
countries, though not an excuse for democracies to display similar intolerance, does
not strengthen the case of the Muslim minority in the minds of the general public here."
Rabbi Berkovits declared that the Jewish
method of slaughter is as humane as any
other. He added: "I am not ashamed of saying that the basis of our beliefs is religious.
"The origin of our method of slaughter we
believe to be from the Bible and religious
law, and we believe that the Bible is of divine
origin, and therefore that it is binding upon
us, imperative, and eternal for all times. This
is our belief. It may go back for thousands of
years. I do not accept that anything which is
old is ipso facto primitive. We are not a
primitive, barbarian people. The Pyramids
are old, yet no modern engineer can explain
the engineering of the Pyramids. Just because something is old does not mean that it
is not necessarily good ....
"I believe that the Bible is divine, I believe
in God. I am quite sure that the National
Secular Society does not accept this. But my
contention is that you cannot prove your
point of view, and we cannot prove ours. We
cannot prove the existence of God, but you
cannot prove that He does not exist ....
"You are entitled to your beliefs and we
are entitled to our beliefs. Neither of us
should impose our beliefs upon the other.
We do not attempt to impose our practices
and beliefs on slaughter upon the wider
community; but then do not impose your
practices and beliefs upon us. Let us show
mutual respect for each other."
While agreeing that tolerance was all right
as a general principle, Rabbi Berkovits took
up the specific question of religious slaughter. "It is true that Jewish law is very strict
about the method of slaughter," he said.
"The knife must be perfectly and absolutely sharp, and it must not contain the
slightest, tiniest blemish. And there is a very
great skill in testing it - the slightest blemish, which no normal person would detect,
would disqualify it. There must be no pressure whatsoever during the incision, there
must be no pause whatsoever, no laceration, no tear. The person who performs this
is highly trained and highly qualified. And the
purpose, incidentally, of religious slaughter
in Jewish law is not to extract the blood, and
the reason why we oppose pre-stunning is
not because it impedes the extraction of the

August 1986

blood, but because it causes certain injuries

to the animal which are forbidden to Jews
under Biblical law. Not all injuries, by the
way, will render the slaughter invalid."
Rabbi Berkovits said critics may claim
science tends to show that Jewish methods
of slaughter are not quite as humane as others. He was sure that the N.S.S. is not
opposed to the Jewish method simply
because it is religious, but bases it arguments on science.
"But let us not be blinded by science. To
have faith in science as the answer to everything is just as credulous as faith in God ....
"We shouldn't have absolute faith in
science. We must be careful how we evaluate. And here I would also say that because
science requires evaluation, it is constantly
changing. What value can we place on
science ifyesterday's scientific facts, yesterday's empirical evidence, is tomorrow's fallacy, or today's fallacy? I will give you one
example. The R.S.P.C.A. has been telling us
for 30 years to stun animals electrically. In
their very latest report, however, they now
concede what we have said all along - that
electric stunning does not work. They call
for a ban on electric stunning."
Rabbi Berkovits said it was' the primary
duty of opponents of religious slaughter to
produce incontrovertible evidence to support their case. They had failed to do so.
He concluded: "I think that it is not merely
because we believe in God, and that our
practice of slaughter is of divine origin, that
we believe that it is not inhumane. I maintain
that secular humanism cannot possibly talk
about the ethics and morality of causing pain
to animals. Because if we are merely creatures who evolved out of the protozoic
slime, who are not created by God, who are
merely animals of a superior kind - our
genes are better than those of other animals,
perhaps - what use is it to talk of ethics and
morality? There is no such thing. Ethics and
morality cannot exist without a religious
underpinning. Secular humanism talking
about ethics is simply playing with words .. _.
"If you don't believe in religious underpinnings of society, then any system which you
choose to follow happens to be moral. There
is no point in talking about ethics and morality if one does not believe in religion. And
therefore I contend that our method of
slaughter is not inhumane; that we are not
the ones who are superstitious, obscurantist, or illiberal, but rather, perhaps, our
opponents."

American Atheist

Dr. H. El Essawy, a representative of the

Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious Tolerance in the U.K., declared that
Muslims and Jews had recently come under
"an orchestrated attack" for alleged cruelty
to animals in slaughter houses. He accused
the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals and the Animal Rights
Group, and said they were encouraged by
the National Front.
He invited "careful scientific and physiological assessment of the questions raised by
the campaigners, as we consider this issue
to be a serious potential threat to religious
tolerance in this country, especially when we
take into account the rather reckless accusations of 'barbarism' and 'cruelty' thrown at
Muslims and Jews.
"The way taught by God to the children of
Abraham and followed for thousands of
years by the Jews, Christians, and Muslims,
is to carefully and quickly cut the arteries
and veins of the animal's neck using a very
sharp knife.
"The general Islamic guidelines for the
production of Halal [allowed; like Kosher]
meat are first, to reduce the animal's suffering to a minimum; secondly, to let the blood
flow out, as it is harmful to humans; thirdly,
to mention God's name in recognition of him
having given us this meat and a stomach to
digest it."
On the question of pre-slaughter stunning, the speaker said that in the absence of
a common language between man and
animal, we have to look for a comparable
and available "human model" that can show
us which method is painful and which is not.
"The human model is demonstrated every
day by the man shaving, or the accidental
cut by a sharp kitchen knife which shows us
that a cut is not in itself painful. Many people
cut themselves without even realising that
they have done so until the wound comes
into contact with a pain-producing substance ....
"What happens to an animal that is being
slaughtered according to the age-old religious method is that the big carotid arteries
and the big jugular veins are cut, leading to
an interruption of the cerebral circulation
with an immediate loss of consciousness.
The effect is comparable, though on a
smaller scale, to the effect of a stroke; the
victim never really knows what happened to
him.
"There can be no quicker or more painless way of slaughtering the animal than that
taught by God and his messengers. The only
reason why some people think it is cruel is
their ignorance of the physiological processes involved."
Dr. El Essawy said it is a different question
whether mari should eat the meat of another
animal. This is the wider basis of vegetarianism, which is also promoted by animal rights
campaigners.

Austin, Texas

He asserted that "it is necessary for

humans to eat meat, though arguably not at
the present excessive levels.
"The biological distinction between an
animal, say, a rabbit, and a vegetable, say a
carrot, is a thin one. Animals and vegetables
share much of the same physiology. Both
feed, feel, breathe, communicate, and reproduce. Both are very much alive.
"It follows that a campaign to ban eating
meat on the basis of cruelty is obviously a
shallow one, prompted by sentimental and
good-hearted attachments to some animals
though not to others."
Dr. El Essawy claimed that although
examples of cruelty to animals are numerous, Muslim and Jewish methods of slaughter were not among them. To describe these
methods as barbaric is nothing less than
cruelty to Muslims and Jews, as it stirs up
racial hatred and religious intolerance.
John Douglas,
manager
of the
R.S.P.C.A's Farm Animals Department,
strongly denied that their criticism of religious slaughter without pre-stunning is
racially motivated. Nor is everything perfect
regarding conventional methods of killing
animals for food, he declared.
Mr. Douglas said that his and the
R.S.P.C.A's criticism of religious slaughter
is based on three main criteria.
First, there is the question of pre-slaughter
stress. While not dwelling on the method
used for casting animals prior to religious
slaughter, Mr. Douglas added: "Suffice to
say that turning any animal on its back is
distressing for the animal, and in the case of
ruminants, particularly sheep, it causes
death within a relatively short space of time
due to pressure on the diaphragm and
thorax.
"The Weinberg crate or pen, whilst an
improvement on the methods used for casting or hoisting by a back leg prior to slaughter 50 years or so ago, is now totally outdated and the cause of considerable stress.
"A far better pen used for some years in
the United States is the Cincinnati or
AS.P.C.A pen, in which the animal is held
upright and the cut made from below. It has
not been sanctioned by the Jewish authorities for use in this country. Its introduction
for Shechita and Halal slaughter would be a
major step in reducing the terror prior to
slaughter."
Secondly, there is the pain associated
with cutting the throat of an animal. Mr.
Douglas referred to the claim made by some
defenders of religious slaughter that the pain
involved could be likened to nicking oneself
with a razor.
"To suggest that severing skin, muscle,
nerves, oesophagus, and trachea, in addition to the major blood vessels, causes no
pain seems to me to be stretching credulity
too far," he said. "In addition to the likely
pain involved, the animal cannot vocalise its

August 1986

terror as both the windpipe and the nerves

supplying the vocal cords have also been
cut."
The speaker's third point concerned the
time taken for an animal to lose consciousness.
He said that "it is not possible to measure
consciousness directly in the laboratory, let
alone under commercial conditions in the
abattoir. .. _
"The problems involved in delayed loss of
consciousness are compounded by the not
infrequent failure, particularly in Shechita,
to cut one or both of the carotid arteries,
which lie close to the spinal column. This is
because the Shochetim is not supposed to
put any pressure on the knife, and because
he must make sure that the knife is not
nicked. Not only would such an event
render the animal unfit for Jewish consumption but he would have to spend a long time
resharpening the knife. Studies at the Food
Research Institute show that in such cases
time to loss of evoked response is delayed by
up to five minutes."
Mr. Douglas concluded by suggesting that
fear of change is perhaps the biggest fear
that reformers have to overcome.
"All of us have a tendency to resist new
ideas. Change is often considered a threat to
a way of life, or to undermine rich traditions
of culture ....
"No one would deny that both Jews and
Muslims have the interest of the animal at
heart. Both the Talmud and the Koran carry
many instructions on the care and welfare of
the animal kingdom. But the point is that
many of these instructions which were wise
and valid a thousand years or more ago,
simply do not apply now.
"Times have changed, knowledge has
increased. Science has made new inroads
and cannot be ignored. There are those in
both the Jewish and Muslim faiths who are
deeply concerned about their traditional
methods of slaughter and see no objection
to pre-slaughter stunning.
"The fact that a new Halal slaughter house
has just been opened in North Wales is testimony to this. Animals from there are
exported to Muslim countries all over the
world. All are stunned before being Halal
slaughtered."

Herbert W. Armstrong
and His Worldwide Church of God
Curious about Armstrong? Then read
this expose of him by John Bowden, an
Australian author (64 pp., paper).
To obtain this fascinating booklet, write
to AA.P. and ask for product #5028. Just
$3.50 including postage.
American Atheist Press
P.O. Box 2117
Austin, TX 78768-2117

Page 25

Yuri Pishchik

KARL MARX AND ATHEISM

n January 5, 1879, The Chicago TribO
une published a lengthy interview of its
London correspondent with Karl Marx, in
which the former, after mentioning that all
manner of instigatory speeches against religion were being ascribed to Marx and his
followers, said that the latter must certainly
wish to see "all this system" destroyed and
completely wiped out. Marx replied that,
though he knew that violent measures
against religion were senseless, he thought
that religion would disappear to the extent
that socialism developed. Its disappearance
must occur as a result of social development
in which education would have an important
role, he said.
More than a hundred years have passed
since the sixty-year-old leader of communism formulated this credo of the Marxists,
but throughout this time his critics from the
clerical camp have been trying to vilify the
meaning of Marx's attitude to religion, the
content of scientific Atheism.
Marx's path to a scientific view of religion
and Atheism began not from a painful break
with "fathers' faith," not from criticism of
biblical dogma. Since early childhood he was
surrounded with freethinking in the spirit of
the French Enlightenment, English Deism
and materialism, and an elevated perception
about antiquity as the time of genuine
human emotions and passions. The problem
of religion, its social and gnoseological function, its place in the social consciousness,
and its relation with scientific knowledge
confronted him later, during his university .
studies. Having made friends with the
Young Hegelians, he actively joined in the
polemics that went on among them on religion as the root cause of allevil, the abolition
and overcoming of which was to open a
kingdom of freedom and reason. Unlike the
Young Hegelians, however, Marx, who had
early developed a highly skeptical attitude to
religion, very soon understood that the
sources of inequality, the plight of the people, and the various forms of national and
spiritual oppression lay not in religion, but in
political and social realities.
The height of pre-Marxian Atheism was a
recognition of the fact that man has created
god, and not the other way round. But the
"mystery" of the origin, and so the essence,
of religion remained undisclosed. The rationalistic, enlightener's criticism of religion
and its anthropologization by Feuerbach,

Page 26

while carrying a huge Atheistic potential,

made it absolute as a natural and indispensable form of human existence. That was why
Marx, seeing the limitations of such forms of
Atheism, originally raised the task of disclosing the essence of religion as a social phenomenon, as a way of gnoseological delusion of man's reason, as an historical form of
ideology, law, and morality, and as a source
of ethical maxims.

Karl Marx
Studying the history of religious forms,
Marx arrived at a conclusion that the "mystery" of religion lay not in an individual, not in
his specific nature, not in his "self-consciousness," but in the character of social production. People "create religion," though not
subjectively but objectively as a product of
definite relations that inevitably push them
toward deification of alien forces that they
cannot comprehend. "The existence of religion," wrote Marx, "is the existence of a
defect." Religion, thus, is a reflection of
those stages of mankind's historical development when its social relations are imperfect and, as a result, have religious relations
as their supplement and addition. Human
powerlessness, helplessness, and weakness

August 1986

found expression in religion.

In the autumn of 1843, in his article "On
the Jewish Question," Marx said:
We do not assert that they [citizens] must overcome their religious
narrowness in order to get rid of their
secular restrictions, we assert that
they willovercome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological questions. We turn theological questions
into secular ones. History has long
enough been merged in superstition,
we now merge superstition in history.
This thesis sums up the period of his
interpretation of the essence of religion, its
origin, and its historical function, and of his
fundamentally new perception of Atheism.
On one hand, religion has lost its former a
priori substantiation, and on the other, Atheism has come to be seen not just as the
negation of religion, but as the affirmation of
positive social and moral values.
Both religion and Atheism have their historical content, determined by material prerequisites. Because of that, as Marx noted,
the overcoming of religion is achieved not by
an equivalent Atheistic sermon, but by a
"change of conditions." It follows that Atheism, too, becomes deprived of its decisive
role in the abolition of religion. But this does
not mean its unsubstantiveness. Being the
product of a definite stage of historical
development, it is called upon to theoretically expose religion and make out a case for
social development without religion on the
basis of a scientific materialist world outlook.
Acting as the "flesh" of Atheism is its historically specific and consistent link with the
social forces that expose religion as a spiritual sanction of obsolete socioeconomic
relations. So Atheistic ideas, as a rule,
became an effective weapon in the hands of
advanced social forces. Marx constantly
stressed the thought about the revolutionary character of freethinking, heresies, and
anti-clericalism.
At the same time, having revealed the true
nature of religion and its social origin, Marx
strongly came out against attempts to push
Atheism to the fore and insisted that "there
should be less trifling with the label of 'athe-

American Atheist

ism' . . . and that instead the content of

philosophy should be brought to the people." It is not accidental that Marxist-ideology countries have been the ones where
the principle of cooperation between believers and nonbelievers in a social struggle was
first theoretically established and practically
implemented during the socialist revolution.
Now, too, in face of the danger of thermonuclear war, the socialist countries appeal for
unity of allprogressive forces, irrespective of
their attitude to religion or Atheism, for their
doing everything for war prevention.
The pertinency of Marxist Atheism is
most manifest in countries where clerical
forces in league with the rightwingers are
trying to reverse historical progress: staging
"monkey" trials, preaching religious strife
and chauvinism, maintaining and implanting

mysticism, and covering up social and economic oppression with religion.

"Religion willdisappear to the extent that
socialism develops" - these words of Marx
have been confirmed by the entire course of
the development of Atheism in the socialist
states.
Bourgeois and clerical propaganda, distorting the process of Atheistic education in
the USSR, spreads rumors about "persecutions" and discrimination taking place here
against the believers and about the forcible
character of "Atheization." On the other
hand, in view of the existence of numerous
religious organizations in the Soviet Union
and a still high percentage of believers, they
have recently started talking about the "failure" of the practice of Atheistic education,
about the ineradicability of religion, and so

forth.
Both stands have nothing in common with
reality. Their proponents betray an absolute
lack of understanding of the essence of the
Marxist view of the process of overcoming
religion. The statement Marx made to the
American correspondent, having found its
embodiment in the practice of the USSR and
other socialist states, convincingly shows
the historical correctness of Marxism, based
on a deep scientific anaylsis of the nature of
religion and Atheism. ~
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Pishchik is a senior research
fellow at the Institute of
Atheism in Moscow.

DIAL-AN-ATHEIST
The telephone listings below are the various services where you may listen to short comments on state/church
issues and viewpoints originated by the Atheist community.

Tucson, Arizona
San Francisco, California
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God Speaks
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Greater DC
South Florida
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Northern Illinois
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Boston, Massachusetts
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Austin, Texas

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separation

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Mid-Hudson, New York
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Austin, Texas

(512) 458-5731

DIAL-THE-ATHEIST __

Houston, Texas
Outspoken Voice of Freedom
Salt Lake City, Utah

August 1986

(713) 664-7678
(713) 527-9255
(801) 364-4939

Page 27

THE PROBING MIND / Frank R. Zindler

STALKING THE ELUSIVE MOUNTAIN

BOAT: THE QUEST FOR NOAH'S ARK
"And the ark rested in the seventh
month, on the seventeenth day of the
month, upon the mountains of Ararat."
Genesis 8:4
Forget The Boat!
Where's The Mountain?
t. Ararat" never existed; a fortiori,
M neither
did the boat which legend

alleges came to rest upon it. The term "Mt.

Ararat" is the result of linguistic confusions
spawned and spun out thousands of years
ago. It is amusing, however, to retrace the
path taken by the sacred cow of tradition as
it wandered from the ziggurat-studded lowlands of southern Mesopotamia into the
volcano-covered highlands of what is now
the Armenian part of Turkey.
The biblical verse on which the Ararat
quest is based is weird: It speaks of Noah's
craft landing "upon the mountains of Ararat." Although The New English Bible cleans
this up to read "on a mountain in Ararat,"
the King James Version is more faithful to
the Hebrew text, which clearly has the big
boat (greater in tonnage than the U.S.S.
United States!) resting upon (not among)
more than one mountain! Such odd language is not altogether surprising, when one
considers the fact that the compilers of
Genesis were drawing from earlier legends
and traditions which had been passed from
one culture and language to another. It
appears that the compilers themselves did
not fully understand all the material handed
down to them. But, because of the great
antiquity of the material - and the presumed sanctity thereof - little if any of the
unintelligible material could be thrown away.
It all had to be stitched together into a single
narrative.
Almost certainly, the biblical legend of the
flood was derived from the much earlier
Mesopotamian flood legend - the story of
Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim (the archetype
of Noah) told by the Babylonians and the still
earlier Sumerians. Living on the floodplains
of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, quite naturally these people told stories of great
floods in the past. Flood stories, like fish
stories, improve with the retelling. So we
should not be surprised to learn that the
Mesopotamians came to believe that their

Page 28

whole world had once been covered by

water - right up to the distant mountain
ranges that surrounded that world. The
Babylonian Noah was said to have parked
his ark on "Mt. Nisir," undoubtedly one of
the peaks of the Iranian Zagros range perhaps in the north of Mesopotamia, where
the northwest-trending Zagros mountains
run into the east-west-trending Taurus
range of Turkey, in the ancient country of
Gordyene/Qardu (Kurdistan). Jews in Babylonia, however, located Mt. Nisir in the
Zagros farther south, at a point northeast of
present-day Baghdad.
By the time the flood legend had been
passed down to the Jews, Mt. Nisir had
been forgotten, and only the general region
in which it was thought to have been located
was remembered. According to Lloyd R.
Bailey, author of the lamentably out-of-print
book Where is Noah's Ark? (Abingdon,
1978, pp. 20-21):
During the period when the traditions in Genesis took their final shape,
the term "Ararat" meant a rather
extensive area with slightly fluctuating
boundaries. This area can be equated
with the Kingdom of Urartu, known
from Assyrian records. In general, the
Kingdom of Urartu was concentrated
in the extensive Qardu/Gordyene
Mountains around Lakes Van and
Urmia ...
By the beginning of the Christian
Era, the boundaries of Armenia were
roughly those of ancient Ararat!
Urartu, so that some translations of
Genesis justifiably read that the ark
came to rest in "the mountains of
Armenia." But the phrase "mountains
of Ararat," found in the Hebrew original ... might lead to a misunderstanding. By then Ararat was only a small,
northern district of Armenia. Undue
emphasis might then be placed on the
possibility that the ark landed in the
north, in the vicinity of Agri Dagi [the
mountain in northeastern-most Turkey identified as Mt. Ararat by American fundamentalists].
According to Bailey, Aghri Dagh (see Fig.
1) - the mountain now called "Mt. Ararat"

August 1986

- was not identified as such even by the

Armenians until the eleventh/twelfth centuries A.D.! Before that time, many other
mountains were thought to be Noah's
mountain.
The Koran, for example, places Noah's
landing on Jabal Judi, a mountain in the Aja
range in the Arabian desert. The name
"Jabal Judi" has also been applied to a
mountain in southern Kurdistan (Qardu)
just north of the Tigris, a mountain the
Turks call Cudi Dag. This seems to be the
mountain referred to by Berosus, a Babylonian writer of the third century B.C. who
retold the story of Ziusudra, the Sumerian
Noah. At any rate, the Nestorian Christians
built several monasteries on this 6,800-foot
mountain. One of these, called the Cloister
of the Ark, was destroyed by lightning in the
year A.D. 766.
As might be expected, considering the
non-historical nature of the Noah story,
complete chaos has reigned in pinning the
tail of myth onto the donkey of geography.
Mt. Ararat has been located in west-central
Turkey (Phrygia) near Celaenae, in the
Caucasus range in the Soviet Union, in Adiabene near the Iraq/Iran border, and in quite
a few other places. According to Samaritan
tradition, Noah debarked from the ark in
Ceylon, and another tradition has him go
aground in Afghanistan, in the Hindu Cush.
Despite the fact that there is no Mt. Ararat, and never was, enterprising Turks and
Armenians have sold gullible fundamentalists on the idea that Turkish Armenia has a
mountain with an ocean-liner-sized ship on
its top. In all fairness to the Turks and
Armenians, if they didn't take money to
guide the faithful to the top of their mountain, the true believers would be giving their
money to other guides, say in Ceylon or
Iran, to be shown their boat docks in the sky.
Although one occasionally hears of selfdesignated "arkeologists" looking for boats
on other mountains, the mountain boat hunters almost always stalk their prey upon the
summit of the mountain the Turks call Aghri
Dagh and the Armenians call Masis. Indeed,
so widely is this 17,000-foot volcano associated with the biblical Mt. Ararat, it is rare
to find anyone aware of the fact that its name
is not Ararat. We shall limit our discussion,
therefore, to claims that Noah's Ark has

American Atheist

been found on Aghri Dagh.

Don't Move That Glacier!
Before we examine the few specific cases
that space allows, a general idiosyncracy of
arkeologists must be noted. Regardless of
their nationality or the century in which they
have climbed Mt. Ararat, they have sought
the ship of Noah on the top of Mt. Ararat. To
be sure, most who have claimed to have
actually seen the wreck have said they saw it
thousands of feet below the summit. Nevertheless, since Genesis implies that the boat
beached itself on the top of a mountain, and
since arkeologists typically are quite innocent of any knowledge of geological processes, nearly all mountain-boat-hunting
expeditions try to reach Ararat's glaciered
peak.
Why is this amusing? It is amusing
because many of the alleged ark sightings
have been of objects frozen inside a glacier,
and because glaciers move. If Noah's Ark
had indeed been frozen into Ararat's gla-

ciers, it long ago would have been moved far

down the slopes of the mountain. The fragmented remains of Noah's navy would be
found below the snow line, in the mounds of
eroded debris (moraines) deposited by the
glaciers when they were bigger than at present and extended farther down the mountainside. Any object at the top of the mountain in the year 2348-47 B.c. (the year in
which the Egyptians perversely failed to
notice that Jahweh had ended the world)
would long ago have been transported
below the present snow line.
But glacial movements are not the only
reason one would not expect to find a boat
on this mountaintop. Apart from the obvious reasons, which will come to the mind
of any non-creationist reader, there is the
fact that Ararat is a volcano, and there is
evidence (at least some creationists think
so) that it has been active since 2348 B.c. In
their book The Ark On Ararat (Thomas
Nelson, Inc. and Creation-Life Pubs., 1976),
evangelist Tim LaHaye and "creation scientist" John D. Morris cite fellow creationist

Clifford L. Burdick in support of this idea:

Very likelysome time after the flood
waters had subsided [whither, if the
earth be round?], almost the whole
northeast side of the mountain blew
up. A long deep gash was opened in
the mountain, now known as the
Ahora Gulch. This is many miles long
and thousands of feet deep and wide,
and a conservative estimate would be
that from one to two cubic miles of
rock debris and volcanic ash were
blown from the mountain (LaHaye, p.
13).
LaHaye and Morris ask, on the next page of
their book:
Could the remains of Noah's Ark
have survived the turmoil that followed its landing on Mt. Ararat?
Could it possibly have withstood the
anger of an erupting volcano or the
onslaught of an unstable glacier? All

Figure 1. Great (right) and Little (left) Ararat, seen from the northeast, from the Tatar village of Syrbaghan.l..ittle
Ararat
(12,840 feet), the younger volcanic cone, is hardly eroded, whereas Great Ararat (16,916 feet) is greatly eroded by both glacial
processes and explosive volcanic and tectonic events which have created the deep cleft (the Ahora Gorge) in the northeastern
slope seen here directly beneath the snowy peak. The village of Ahora (Arghuri), before the earthquake of 1840, used to be
located near the mouth of the gorge. The monastery of St. Jacob, for eight centuries, was located farther up the gorge. Still
farther up was a small shrine. Just to the right of Little Ararat, on its foreslope, is T akjaltu (7,091 feet), a parasitic volcanic cone
the far side of which is cultivated and periodically inhabited (as is the saddle between Great and Little Ararat). [Reproduced
from Transcaucasia and Ararat, Fourth Edition, by James Bryce, Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1896.]

Austin, Texas

August 1986

Page 29

logic dictates that it should not have.

Of course, I agree with LaHaye and Morris that it is illogical to think that a wooden
ark could have survived all this. But do
LaHaye and Morris trust their own logic?
Apparently not, although I can't be sure.
After telling of the disastrous earthquake of
1840, which greatly enlarged the Ahora
Gorge and blew away the mountainside
monastery of St. Jacob, and after describing
the earthquake of 1883 which precipitated
catastrophic avalanches and rockfalls what do they conclude?
"We believe Noah's Ark exists today
encased in snow and ice somewhere up in
the mountains of Ararat" (p. 261). Fellow
cynics willnote the use of the plural.
The Atheists And The Ark
Creationists have not been very successful in their quest for the deluge dreadnought,
despite the immense size of :their slowmoving quarry. Although local shepherd
boys pasture their flocks on the 8,OOO-foot
saddle between the peaks of "Greater Ararat" and "Little Ararat"; despite the fact that
LaHaye and Morris mention the growing of
wheat between the saddles and the onetime
existence of a narrow-gauge railway up
there (p. 86); and despite the enormous
numbers of people who have swarmed over
the slopes of both Ararats, no fundamentalist museum as yet sells tickets for guided
tours of Noah's Ark. Whereas ordinary heathens manage to live on the mountain, fundamentalists have been thwarted by it at
every turn. Out of frustration, perhaps, have
the chosen of god developed the fantasy
which I call "The Tale of the Three Wicked
Atheists."
The tale was first published in 1952, when
a Seventh-Day Adventist minister named
Harold H. Williams tried to reconstruct from
memory a story told to him in 1915 by one
Haji Yearam, an Armenian convert. According to Williams, in 1915Yearam was seventyfive years old and had only recently recovered from an extremely debilitating illness.
Readers will have to judge for themselves if
that illness might have affected Yearam's
brain. As Williams tells it (reprinted by
LaHaye and Morris, pp. 45-49), The Tale of
the Three Wicked Atheists goes as follows:
It was the middle of the 1850s (1856, according to arkeologist Violet Cummings), and
three Londoners came to the foot of Mt.
Ararat, to the Armenian village in which
Yearam lived with his parents.
When Haji was a large boy, but not
yet a man fully grown, there came to
his home some strangers. If I remember correctly there were three vile
men who did not believe the Bible and
did not believe in the existence of a

Page 30

personal God. They were scientists

and evolutionists [three years before
Darwin published On the Origin of
Species!]. They were on this expedition specifically to prove the legend of
Noah's Ark to be a fraud and a fake.
They hired the father of young Haji
Yearam as their official guide. . . .
They hired the boy to assist his father
as guide.
The pious father and son decided to prove
to the Atheists that the biblical flood story
was true, so they took the wicked men right
up the mountain to the Ark:
As they reached this spot, there
they found the prow of a mighty ship
protruding out of the ice. They went
inside the Ark and did considerable
exploring. It was divided up into many
floors and stages and compartments
and had bars like animal cages of
today ....
The scientists were appalled and dumbfounded and went
into a Satanic rage at finding what
they hoped to prove nonexistent.
They were so angry and mad that they
said they would destroy the ship, but
the wood was more like stone than
any wood we have now ....
Unable to destroy Noah's Ark, the frustrated Atheists,
held a council, and then took a solemn
and fearful death oath. Any man present who would ever breathe a word
about what they had found would be
tortured and murdered. They told
their guide and his son that they would
keep tabs on them and that if they
ever told anyone ... they would surely
be tortured and murdered.
It is not recorded whether the Armenian
peasants took the oath in the Queen's English, or whether the cultured Britishers
condescended to administer the oath in
Armenian.
This so frightened Haji Yearam, that he
never broke his oath until the age of seventyfive! He died on May 3, 1920, at the age of
eighty-three (according to Violet Cummings). At about the same time as Haji's
death, Williams claims, a short article
appeared in a Massachusetts newspaper
(from Brockton or Boston, he's not sure
which). The story told how an anonymous
(!), elderly English scientist had made a
deathbed confession of the identical story
told by Yearam.
Although Williams claims he wrote Yearam's story down in 1915 and saved the
newspaper clipping of the Atheist's confession in 1920 (1918, according to Williams, in
contradiction to the date on Yearam' s death

August 1986

certificate), he never published his astonishing story until 1952. By then, of course, he
had neither his original manuscript nor the
clipping. It seems that both had been burned
up in a butane explosion in 1940.
Besides the many ways in which Yearam's
description of the Ark and its wood contradict the "true accounts" related by other
ark-seekers, and the fact that no one has
ever been able to find the newspaper which
carried the article, there is one serious flaw
in this tale. According to Yearam, the evil
evolutionists were "much older" than he at
the time of the climb. Since Yearam would
have been seventeen or eighteen years old
(sixteen or seventeen, according to Williams' reckoning), and the most modest
estimate would put the "much older" scientists in their late thirties, the sinful scientist
would have been at least 103 years old if he
died at the same time Yearam did! Unfortunately, finding the 1920 death record of any
centenarian Atheist pre-Darwinian evolutionist Ararat-climbing London scientist has
proven as elusive as the wild mountain boat
itself.
The Case Of The Russian Aviators
In 1940, long after the First World War,
The New Eden, a Los Angeles religious
magazine, carried an article titled "Noah's
Ark Found," allegedly written by a World
War I Russian aviator named Vladimir Roskovitsky. Written as a first person, eyewitness account, the article (reprinted in
LaHaye and Morris, pp. 76-79) told how "in
the days just before the Russian revolution,"
the author and his buddy had flown a Russian military plane (equipped with a supercharger!) around the peak of Mt. Ararat at
the 14,000-foot level. The supposedly Russian author seems unaware that there were
two Russian revolutions in 1917.
We suddenly came upon a perfect
gem of a lake, blue as an emerald, but
still frozen over on the shady side ....
Suddenly my companion ... pointed
down at the overflow end of the lake. I
looked and nearly fainted! A submarine! No, it wasn't, for it had stubby
masts [not mentioned in the Bible],
but the top was rounded over with
only a flat catwalk about five feet
across down the length of it.... We
were surprised when we got close to it
at the immense size of the thing, for it
was as long as a city block, and would
compare very favorably to the modern battleships of today. It was grounded on the shore of the lake with about
one- fourth of the rear end still running
out into the water, and its extreme
rear was three-fourths under water.
Roskovitsky told his captain what he had

American Atheist

seen, and the captain notified the Czar's

government. The Czar dispatched two large
companies of men to climb the mountain
and inspect the Ark. Inside the Ark the
ground forces found hundreds of rooms,
some with cages possessing wrought iron
bars. (What a pity Noah didn't show his
descendants how to work iron; the Iron Age
could have begun a thousand years earlier!)
Elaborate plans were drawn of the wreck,
and many photographs were taken. But -

reports by two Russian soldiers in the

World War I, which reports are being
circulated by some of their relatives ...
. I have letters from them. . .. As for
my neighbor with the exaggerated
"imagination," I told him about the letters I have .... The character "Roskovitsky" sprang "full blown" from the
brow of this eccentric mind of my
neighbor, along with about 99% of the
rest of it.

A few days after this expedition

sent its report to the Czar, the
government was overthrown and
Godless Bolshevism took over, so
that the records were never made
public and probably were destroyed in
the zeal of the Bolshevics [sic] to discredit all religion and belief in the truth
of the Bible.

The letter from Gurley is addressed "To

Whom It May Concern" and states that "All
of the basic material used in that article
came from the researches of Mr. Benjamin
Franklin Allen, and the article was written up
in story form with the intent of making it
more interesting to read."
Ordinarily, such letters as these would lay
a matter to rest. But not with arkeologists or
creationists. Even LaHaye and Morris assert
that "more data has [sic] appeared ... which
substantiates the original research of Ben
Allen." As evidence that Czarist expeditions
did go to Ararat, they cite information
obtained from Eryl and Violet Cummings
about Koor's testimony - even quoting
Koor's statement that the scouting parties
had to wait "until the summer of 1917." It
appears that LaHaye and Morris know as
little Russian history as do Koor and the
Cummings.
Curiously, LaHaye and Morris make no
mention of the most astonishing "evidence"
of all which Violet Cummings adduces to
save the Roskovitsky story: the testimony of
Eva Ebling.
Eva Ebling, according to Cummings (pp.
89-94), was the daughter of a high-ranking
medical officer in the Czar's White Russian
Cossack Army. Having escaped from Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, Eva
brought with her inside information about a
second expedition sent (by the deposed
Czar?) to Mt. Ararat "shortly after it was
learned that the report of the Czar's first
ill-fated expedition to the ship had been confiscated and the courier reportedly shot."
While readers may wish to think about this
for an hour or so before continuing, I must
add that Ebling claimed that the Czarina
herself went along with Eva's father on the
climb.
After mentioning the dangers involved in
the climb and "in successfully eluding the
revolutionary Bolsheviks who were overrunning the land," Cummings admits that
"There is some confusion in the story, since
history informs us that the Empress was a
partial invalid, sometimes confined to a
wheelchair because of the heart condition [a
bullet hole?] which later caused her death."
Instead of rejecting the testimony of
Ebling as being too absurd to consider,
Cummings makes an excuse to save Ebling's story - and the Roskovitsky story

Violet Cummings, in her book Has Anybody Really Seen Noah's Ark? (CreationLifePublishers, 1982)cites as corroboration
of this story the testimony of Gunner A.
Smars, Jr. to the effect that an old Turk had
told him "about the Russian expedition that
came by Aralik in 1918 on its way up Aghri
Dagh." She also cites an article by Alexander A. Koor claiming that the two research divisions of one hundred fifty infantrymen, army engineers, and specialists sent
by the Czar reached the Ark at the end of
December 1917 and tried to send their
report back to the Czar an unspecified
length of time later. Considering the fact that
Czar Nicholas Il had abdicated on March 15,
1917 (New Style), and had soon been
replaced by the Kerenski government, and
considering that the Bolshevik Revolution
took place on November 6-7, 1917, it is
unlikely that any expedition reaching Ararat
as late as December of 1917could have been
sent by the Czar. As for the expedition
(supposedly the same expedition) that
allegedly reached Ararat in 1918, we need
only to note that the Czar and his family
were executed on July 16,1918, after having
been out of power for well over a year.
Fortunately, we do not need to worry
about such details. LaHaye and Morris
found out that Roskovitsky is a fictional
character, invented by Floyd Gurley, the
editor of The New Eden! In their book The
Ark on Ararat (pp. 80-82), they publish letters from Benjamin F. Allen - the source of
the "information" used in the story - and
from Mr. Gurley.
According to, a letter written by Allen to
creationist Henry Morris:
The "story" you enclose on Noah's
Ark . . . was originally put out by an
off-center man here whom I know
very well. It is about 95% fiction, the
one real part being some vague

Austin, Texas

August 1986

supposedly corroborated by it - by suggesting that it was really Princess Anastasia

who climbed the mountain! Just how credulous an arkeologist can be may be judged
from the fact that Cummings passes on
without criticism Ebling's claim that she
escaped from Russia into Germany, met
Kaiser Wilhelm himself, was invited to a family dinner at his residence, met the ex-Czar
and Czarina (who were also dinner guests,
even though they had been fighting a war
against the Kaiser!), and had a perfectly
lovely evening. Cummings takes as gospel
the assertion of Richard Cotten and others
that the entire Romanoff family escaped to
Poland (not Germany, as Ebling alleges) in
July of 1918, that the Czarina died of a heart
attack in 1924, the Czar died in 1952, and
that the Tsarevich Alexei was still alive in
America in 1966. For all we know, Alexei
may still be alive - unless His Hemophiliac
Majesty has died of AIDS.
It is a pity that space does not permit us to
examine such cases as that of Fernand
Navarra, who brought back wood from Mt.
Ararat which supposedly carne from the Ark
- even though radiocarbon dating showed
the wood to date from the eighth century
A.D. - and who guided many creationist
expeditions to Ararat until it became rumored that he was buying pieces of wood
from villagers at the foot of the mountain and
planting them where mountain boat hunters
would find them!
More is the pity that we cannot tell about
Georgie Hagopian, who was carried up the
mountain (along with a donkey pack of supplies) by his uncle, discovered an ark twice
as big as the Bible boat (did Noah have a
whole marina up there?), and explored its
insides after his uncle - still not tired from
the climb or affected by the altitude - piled
up stones (about 8,000 one-foot boulders
would have done nicely) so the child could
get to the top of the four-story-high boat!
Greatest of pities, however, is the fact that
we cannot detail the Satanic conspiracy of
the Smithsonian Museum to cover up the
fact that it is hiding not only substantial portions of Noah's Ark right there in Washington, but also Noah himself, last seen resting
peacefully in an alabaster sarcophagus. ~
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Formerly a professor of biology and
geology, Frank R. Zincller is now a
science writer. A member of the
American Association for the
Advancement of Science, the
American Chemical Society, and the
American Schools of Oriental
Research, he is also co-chairperson of
the Committee of Correspondence on
Evolution Education, and Director of
the Central Ohio Chapter of
American Atheists.

Page 31

POETRY

DOWNTOWN FIRE
Concerning
The downtown fire
It was remarked
that the church burned
A bit more brightly
Than the bank
Clyde Childress

THE WISEMAN AND THE FOOL

IN THE NAME OF THE LORD?

(And the road to nowhere)

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

neither are your ways my ways, ... "
(Isaiah 55:8)

On a road that leads to nowhere

Near a sea that has no shore
Where events that never happen
Happen never - even more
Came the crafty ancient traveler
Who in reverential prose
Lectured with intrusive manner
Every listener he chose

In the name of the Lord, our saviour, we say,

Every child in a public school must pray
Or, at least, keep a moment of silence
If we cannot have everything our way.
Abortion is murder, God is our guide.
The law of God, not man, is on our side.
Picket clinics, vandalize, even bomb,
The Lord God does not sanction homicide;
Except in the case of capital crime
Or communistic, atheistic slime
Who seek to subvert some paternal rule
That would put everything right given time.
Out with Darwin, we demand compliance
With the teaching of creation science.
Purge sex from the schools and library books.
In the word of God is our reliance.
No Bill of Rights can restrict the right
Of God's anointed to defend the Right.

Now the lean and ruddy beggar

That he chanced to meet this day
Seemed to be the perfect buttress
For derisive things he'd say
And the beggar reeled in silence
At the chronicles of scold
Then in noble consternation
Countered all that he'd been told
But you see I do have treasures
Said the beggar in reply
While the values that you favor
Have the substance of a lie
You seek esoteric trifles
So forever you must roam
I find peace within my valley
And the place that I call home

Robert R. Hentz

Simple truth and classic beauty

Stem from consciousness within
And the zenith of my pleasure
Is the quiet lotus glen
Then the calm demurring beggar
Disengaging from the fray
Eyed the shimmering pool beside him
And the fool went on his way
Gerald Tholen

Page 32

August 1986

American Atheist

AMERICAN ATHEIST RADIO SERIES / Madalyn O'Hair

THE GODLESS WORLD OF

JOSEPH LEWIS
When the first installment of a regularly scheduled, fifteen-minute, weekly American Atheist radio
series on KTBC radio (a station in Austin, Texas, owned by then-president Lyndon Baines Johnson) hit
the airwaves on June 3, 1968, the nation was shocked. The programs had to be submitted weeks in
advance and were heavily censored. The regular production of the series ended in September 1977,
when no further funding was available.
The following is the text of American Atheist Radio Series program No. 418, first broadcast on
November 5, 1976.
is excerpted from an artiThecle following
by Al Burt in the July-August 1968
issue of The Age of Reason magazine.

Once during a storm, lightning

struck the home of Joseph Lewis'
next-door neighbor. When the storm
passed, a crowd gathered to see the
damage. Someone remarked that it
looked like hell, all smoke and fire.
"What happened?" a passerby asked.
"Bad aim," said Lewis. "He missed."
Lewis, an old Alabama boy, was
reverent about irreverence.
He thought god was a fake, that
Jesus Christ never lived, and that the
Bible is obscene. He once called Bishop Fulton J. Sheen a "Top Banana,"
BillyGraham a "Mercenary," and nicknamed Oral Roberts "Oral Wickedness."
"Looking for God in this universe is
like a blind man in a dark room looking
for a black cat that isn't there," he
said. That quote may not be entirely
original, but is entirely sincere. "It is an
amazing story what religion has done
to retard society."
Lewis, a lifelong crusader for Atheism, mail-order publisher, and president of the Freethinkers of America,
had the fire of a sophomore and the
white hair of a sage. Don Quixote
went around tilting windmills; Lewis
went around butting heads with sacred cows, with all the verve if not the
discretion of a billygoat.
He didn't even like venerated old
Moses, the man who brought the Ten
Commandments down from Mount
Sinai written in stone. "Mr. Moses was
guilty of a heinous crime," Lewis said.
"According to the Biblical narrative,
God gave Mr. Moses two tablets of
stone upon which he had written the

Austin, Texas

Decalogue. When Mr. Moses came

down from the Mount, he saw the
children of Israel worshiping a golden
calf. He became so angry at this sight
that he smashed the tablets to pieces.
In doing this, he committed the worst
act of sabotage in the history of man.
He destroyed God's own handwriting,
and we have never seen a sample of it
since."
For holding such views, he has been
called a communist, a dirty old man, a
professional Atheist, a nut, and,
among other things, a man who thinks
he is god.
A minister once warned him solemnly, "There is a God and an intelligence that created this body in His
own image." Lewis replied, "I want to
tell you right now that ifGod looks like
some people I know, I feel sorry for
Him." On another occasion, Lewis
remarked, "If that is so, I hope God
looks like Thomas Edison. He had a
magnificent head."
Lewis did like some people, but
most of them were dead. For him,
there never has been another man like
Thomas Paine. He was mad at
Thomas Jefferson for years because
he contended - and offered evidence
in support - that Paine wrote the
Declaration of Independence and
Jefferson edited it and accepted credit. Jefferson earned a good word
mostly because, Lewis said, he was an
Atheist, too.
Next to Paine, Lewis liked Robert
G. Ingersoll best. Voltaire, Spinoza,
Omar Khayyam, Lincoln ("They maligned this great president of ours.
Tried to make him appear a religious
man."), and Darwin. He knew and
liked Edison, Clarence Darrow,
Luther Burbank, and Albert Einstein.

August 1986

They agreed with him in one way of'

another.
"Religion is based on fear," Lewis
said. "It is the greatest fraud ever
perpetrated on the human race, and
hell is the most obnoxious and detestable doctrine that was ever born in the
mind of Man. I can't conceive of a
Creator with all the misery we have in
the world - cancer, blindness, disease. My heart bleeds. How the hell
can a Creator create something like
that?"
Lewis was fond of saying "If there
were a God, there'd be no mystery.
He could just write across the sky
what he wanted Man to know."
Lewis insisted he did not deliberately choose his words to shock, but
they are so consistently shocking that
the suspicion grows. He would not
even concede that the church is a
good influence in its teachings, apart
from the existence of God. "You
shouldn't tell a child that if he doesn't
do good God will punish him. It's not
true and it's no way to bring up a child.
You can't make him good by instilling
fear. You just make him a coward."
Lewis did not avoid talking about
anything, but details of his lifeand business were not his favorite subject. The
biographies that decorate the jackets
of the many books he had written and
published (Thomas Paine, Author of
the Declaration of Independence;
Atheism; The Bible Unmasked; In the
Name of Humanity) give a skeletal
outline, and he fleshed it out sparsely.
He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1889 to Jewish parents who
had ceased practicing the religion. He
had faint memories of going to services, but said his was not a religious
childhood. "We didn't observe the

Page 33

Sabbath or things like that. I lived in a

time of probably the worst economic
conditions which ever existed in the
United States of America. The Civil
War was over. The South was paying
an enormous debt. Cotton was at its
lowest prices. There was a yellow
fever epidemic and no one knew what
caused it. We lived from hand to
mouth."
The family moved to Selma, Alabama, where Joseph began school.
His father opened a general store. "I
went to school a couple of terms and
quit. I had to," Lewis said. "I helped in
the store." A friend of the family
became interested in Joseph's older
brother and ordered some books for
him. One of these contained the letters of Robert G. Ingersoll, and it
changed Joseph's life. "I used to read
them to my mother when the rest of
the family was out. Ingersoll wrote a
magnificent pamphlet on Paine. (The
world is better for his having lived. For
the sake of truth he accepted hatred
and reproach ... His life is what the
world calls failure and what history
calls success.') I became interested in
him."
The Lewis family, with young
Joseph impressed by Ingersoll and
absorbed in Paine, moved to New
York in 1912. "My brother went to
work and I went to night school. I
always wanted to be a lawyer, but they
kept changing the counts (requirements). They kept going up so rapidly.
Icouldn't make it. I couldn't afford it. I
had to bring home some money."
Ingersoll's lectures included advocacy of birth control: "Science,the
only possible saviour of mankind,
must put it in the power of woman to
decide for herself whether she will or
willnot become a mother."
Enchanted by such passages, Lewis
became attracted to another birth
control advocate, the feminist Margaret Sanger. He was still seeking a
vocation.
His introduction to Margaret Sanger served to combine interest and
ambition. "She was selling a book on
birth control. I wrote an ad for it. She
had another one I wanted to publish,
but she gave it to Brentano's. I sold
books for her. They were making all
the money and I was doing all the
work."
To remedy this, Lewis established
the Eugenics Publishing Company. "I
discovered many publishers had valuable books and did not know how to
advertise them. I asked for mail order
privileges. I did well."

Page 34

Among those he sold were his own,

published under the name of the Freethought Association, part of his Freethinkers Movement. In 1926 he wrote
The Bible Unmasked, an attack on
the Bible as obscene. He dedicated it
to "rabbis, priests, and ministers, in
the hope it may bring them to realize
the fraud they are perpetrating ... " It
has gone through twenty-nine editions.
But his first influence remained
Paine. In addition to his Freethinkers
(definition: "anybody who does not
accept the Bible as divine revelation
and thinks independently"), he established the Thomas Paine Foundation.
He had fought for Paine like a black
knight, and there have been substantial reflections of those battles - a
statue of Paine erected at his birthplace in Thetford, England; a statue of
Paine in Paris; a statue at Morristown,
New Jersey, Washington's headquarters; a plaque on the site of the Paine
burial ground in New Rochelle; election of Paine to the Hall of Fame. "My
aim is a statue in Washington," he
said. "If it were established on a basis
of comparing services to the country,
it would be more imposing than either
the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument."
While promoting Paine, Lewis often
ran into religious controversy. In 1968
he stormed out of a ceremony marking the issuance of the Thomas Paine
4O-centpostage stamp, after objecting
to the reading of an invocation and
benediction.
Lewis shocked about 125 persons
gathered in the old U.S. Supreme
Court building at Independence Hall
in Philadelphia when he asked that
prayers be eliminated
because
"Thomas Paine certainly would have
opposed the injection of religion in his
behalf." After his request was refused,
Lewis took a walk.
In pursuit of his beliefs, Lewis
attacked on allfronts. A favorite target
had been any link that showed between church and state. He had gone
into the courts to keep a cross off the
courthouse; to keep the Bible out of
the schools; to prevent faith healer
Jack Coe (now deceased) from "practicing medicine." He wrote regularly
to editors on everything from barring
invocations at official gatherings to
criticizing circumcision as inhumane
to infants. He once took out an ad in
the New York Times in which he
called Bishop Sheen a "Top Banana"
because of the bishop's television
show.

August 1986

"Some people give to the church. I

devote time and money to things I
believe in. My greatest pleasure comes
from intellectual activity," he said.
Lewis and his wife spent the winters
in Miami Beach; most of the rest of the
year at their other home in Purdys,
New York. They had a daughter in
New York and two grandsons in college.
Lewis was aware of the reality of
death. He stated that it changes nothing. "I faced death twice before. I had
two heart attacks. During my second
convalescence, I wrote An Atheist
Manifesto. "
Lewis answered critics by contending that if God wrote the Ten Commandments, He must have hands; if
He hears prayers, He must have ears.
Therefore, he insisted you should be
able to see Him sitting up there in
heaven. And besides, he added, as
though for a punchline, "If religious
people are so happy, why do they pray
so much?"
Lewis' crusade for recognition of a
godless world dwelled on the coattails
of science, in a sort of why-light zone,
and issued mottoes of such simplicity
that it leaves you blinking. He used
history ("When Columbus sailed, people got to their knees and prayed he
wouldn't fall off."), offered peculiar
combinations of logic, humor, and
opinion ("Even the [Roman] Catholic
church now permits its priests to pray
in the English language. Why? He
apparently didn't understand the language.").
The slings and arrows of many battles in many places left him less contemplative than eager for a new joust.
He was healthy, wealthy, and either
wise beyond the ken of his peers or
practicing the supreme folly.
The religious questioned him, and
questioned him, and questioned him.
He heightened it all with flip answers
and a smile at their frustrations. "You
know how it is," he said. "What the
hell do they know?" ~

Sympathy
I guess I really should show more tolerance toward all those evangelical colleges
springing up like stinkweed throughout
the country since they are unique in the
educational field. Where else could one
receive a doctorate in bigotry, ignorance,
and prejudice, plus a postdoctorate in
theological miscegenation?
- Hillary Bartholomew

American Atheist

HISTORICAL NOTES

70 Years Ago ...

The Melting Pot was published in St.
Louis, Missouri - a Roman Catholic stronghold if ever there was one. But this freethought paper was never afraid to speak out
against the Roman Catholic Church or any
other religion - as this article from its
August 1916 issue shows. Its original title
was "Ashamed of Its Own Mother."
''The capitalist papers and politicians of
St. Louis - and it's the same way all over the
country - are all 'het up' over a political
organization known as the 'Independent
Voters' League,' said League being composed of Protestants who, through ignorance or bigotry, or both, charge all the miseries that afflict us to the Roman Catholic
Church, and propose to save America by
voting no one but Protestants into office.
"No intelligent and truthful person would
attempt to paint the picture of the Roman
Catholic Church in anything but the blackest of the black.
"It has a history that nothing but a fiend
incarnate would be proud of.
"It has but one competitor in cussedness
and crime, and that is the Protestant faith.
"Don't forget that.
"In the record of crimes against humanity
honors are fairly even between the two since
the days of Martin Luther, persecutor of
German peasants, John Calvin, madman
and murderer, and other like saints, down to
the hour of the Baptist butcher of Ludlow.
"You can charge the Roman Catholic
Church with the outraging and ravishing,
the torturing and slaughtering of the French
helots before the voice of Voltaire shook all
France, but remember as you do it that it
was pious Protestants that drenched this
country in blood in an infamous attempt to
perpetuate the crime of chattle slavery aye! to make merchandise. of their own
offspring born of their own raping of their
female slaves.
"Disclose the horrors of the Holy Inquisition ifyou will- and they ought to be blazed
in the text books of our public schools - but
do not overlook the living horrors, the coining of the blood and flesh of little children
into dollars, done in the Protestant-owned
cotton mills.
"Look upon the one-time rack and stake
of Rome; and then turn your eyes to the
pinched and wan faces of the victims of the
sweatshops and factories of America today,
lashed by Protestant plunderers into untimely graves ....
"It's actually disgraceful to see the child
ashamed of its own mother, especially when
the child glories in all the filth and pollution

Austin, Texas

that the old lady ever possessed.

"The two follow the same faith.
"They both believe in the exploitation of
the workers, they both believe in bloody
war.
"They both believe in the God that bored
holes in the ears of slaves, that massacred
and raped the Midianites, and who runs a
flaming hell to dump you into forever if you
do not also believe these horrors.
"Again I say, it's disgraceful to see the
child ashamed of its own mother.
"They ought to kiss and make up."

30 Years Ago ...

Last month, "Historical Notes" included
an article about an attempt by the Friendship Liberal League of Philadelphia to buy a
permanent office. The information from the
July 1956 Liberal noted that nearly enough
funds had been raised to go ahead with the
purchase of a building. The next issue contained the following news under the headline
"Signed, Sealed, & Delivered":
"Last Monday (July 16, 1956) was a
dreary, rainy day to Philadelphians in general, but not to the officers and members of
Friendship Liberal League. On that memorable day we withdrew $10,000 from our Building Fund account and laid it on the line for a
partial payment on our new Thomas Paine
Memorial Center. This leaves a balance of
an equal amount which we hope to be able to
clear off in the not too distant future.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is the
first time a Rationalist and Freethought
society has been able to acquire its own
home. Of course the Milwaukee Jefferson
Freethought Society has the use of the
splendid home of its affiliate, the Freie
Gemeinde, and the St. Louis Rationalists
have the use of the St. Louis Freie Gemeinde's building but the organizations which
originally built these halls were Nationalist
rather than Rationalist, Social rather than
Secularist. Of the many nation-wide societies that have come and gone, such as the
American Secular Union and others, none
so far as we know ever had its own building.
"This is not said in any spirit of bragging or
implying that we are more capable than
they. Our own group here in Philadelphia
could not have accomplished this action.
The credit must go to the hundreds of our
supporters all over the country who gave
what they were able to this undertaking ....

August 1986

"We have no intentions of resting on our

oars now. This is only the first big step. A
long road lies ahead. It is not our intention
merely to build a strong Secular movement
in Philadelphia but to help build a nationwide organization."

5 Years Ago ...

After Paul Tirmenstein's recent death, it
might be difficult to remember the time
when he filed a suit in Mississippi which
expressed the hopes of all American Atheists for civil rights. But that was just five
years ago. And news of it was published in
the October 1981 American Atheist.
"In mid-August American Atheists filed
suits in both Arkansas and Mississippi challenging state constitutions which exclude
Atheists from holding office or public trust.
"In Mississippi, Paul Tirmenstein turned
out to be one of our bravest Atheists. He
met your national officers and our attorney
in Jackson and it was he who hassled with
the federal court for hours to put the suit on
the docket.
"After a hard day of searching for one
attorney with any guts (to be the attorney of
record) in the whole state of Mississippi,
Paul retired to his motel room and wrote out
the following statement which he read at the
news conference the next day - where he
also took on the entire press of that state.
I am bringing this suit on behalf of
every citizen of this state who has the
kind of patriotism that calls for obeying and supporting the Constitution of
the United States.
Section 265 specifically bars Atheists from holding office in Mississippi.
This mandates belief in a mythical
supernatural god, which an Atheist
refuses. This religiously motivated
attempt to bar men of the mental
capacity and calibre of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Luther. Burbank, Atheists
all, from holding office, is unequivocally unconstitutional, and should be
so declared by the court. A mere declaration of its unconstitutionality is
insufficient to correct this insult to and
discrimination against those Americans who have the mental capacity to
recognize a fraud and refuse to
believe in fairy tales and Santa Claus."

Page 35

PRESS CONFERENCE / Brian Lynch

INDEPENDENCE DAY
of the persons most revered by
OneAtheists,
elevated to nearly the status

of a "saint," is Thomas Paine. Many persons

say that the Age of Reason was the one book
which "turned them away from religion," or
"made them Atheists." All of these testaments and witnesses to Paine's persuasive
writing led me to purchase a copy of the Age
of Reason, only to find out that the book
opens with a vehement denunciation of Atheists and an attack on Atheism. Paine makes
it clear in the introduction that he wrote the
Age of Reason to prove the Atheists wrong
and make a case for deism. Why such a
work should be held in such high esteem by
today's Atheists is beyond comprehension.
The book is partially redeemed, however,
since the bulk of its content points out the
inconsistencies and absurdities in the JudeoChristian Bible.
Another book written by Paine, which is
said to have "lit the fuse" of the American
Revolution - at least among those who
could read - is Common Sense. This book,
if written today, would probably not be
touched by a major publisher and would
almost certainly be assailed as subversive,
Communist literature by the radical right.
Any teacher who introduced it into a classroom would be attacked by church groups
and the "gawd & kuntree" crowd for promoting anti-authoritarianism or secular humanism, or something even more pernicious. They would be right, of course.
Paine's intent was to stir up rebellion against
the economic and political stranglehold
which the British corporations, working in
concert with the British church and government, had over the colonists. As subversive, anti-corporate literature, it was very
successful, selling over 120,000 copies in the
first three months of 1776. Its success was
not limited to the fact that its prose struck
resonant dissatisfaction and anger felt by
most of the American population toward
England. The real factor in the book's success was the desire of the landed aristocracy
of America to establish their own plutocracy, one divorced from the plutocracy of
England. The British plutocracy had the
power to extract taxes, the military might to
enforce law and order, and a powerful
church which controlled the lives of persons
when they were away from its direct control.
But that regime showed no inclination to
grant the colonists any representation in

Page 36

government.
It's possible that the American Revolution
would have happened anyway, without publication of Common Sense, simply because
of the economic interests of the wealthy
owner-class in late eighteenth century America. Perhaps it would have been a year later,
perhaps ten years later, but it would have
happened. The publication of Common
Sense coincided with the desire to break
away from England and a perceived opportunity for profit without giving a cut to England, so the book was aggressively promoted and distributed. Since we celebrate
this revolt every July 4, it might be worthwhile to see just how far "we've" come in 210
years.
First, religion is as well entrenched now as
it ever was. Most freethinkers still give equal
credence to both religious superstition and
scientifically verifiable facts - so they attack
Atheists for taking the "extreme" position
that no gods exist and that religion is therefore either a farce or a lie.They pretend to be
too rational and sophisticated to accept religion, but will do anything and everything to
preserve and protect it from Atheists.
Hence (I suspect), the popularity of the Age
of Reason.
Second, America is still controlled by a
small economic elite which owns most of the
resources, capital, and property. The persons and corporations are American instead
of British. In 210 years, Americans have
gained independence from nothing. For
Atheists this is especially true: None of the
535 people elected to national legislative
offices are Atheists, and hardly any of the
state and local officials in the U.S. are,
either. Yet Atheists pay taxes to all levels of
government. This means that Atheists are
taxed without representation! (That was the
single issue over which the Revolutionary
War was fought.) To add insult to insult, in
three states Atheists are barred by law from
holding office, meaning that Atheists are
forbidden representation. Thus, religion is
established, in contravention to the First
Amendment.
Independence and freedom are two slogans which are always used to promote
adherence to or support of the U.S. political
and economic system. These words have no
meaning unless they are in a context which
makes them measurable. You have to specify what people are independent of, or free

August 1986

from, before you can say there is freedom.

Slaves and prisoners, for example, are often
told that they are free and independent; they
are free from having to make decisions and
independent of uncertainty in life. In the military, soldiers are marched through rigorous
drills and told that they are protecting freedom and independence - despite their own
conspicuous lack of both. So freedom and
independence can simply be a matter of
definition (a word game) or empty slogans
(words with no real-life meaning). Do Americans today enjoy any freedoms or independence from the sort of economic exploitation and oppression that characterized
colonial America?
Economics: Who Owns What
Forty corporations own half of all cropland in the U.S., eighty-five percent of all
citrus groves, eighty-nine percent of the
dairy industry; control ninety-five percent of
the raising and distribution of chicken, and
over half of all pork raising and distribution.
All packaged and processed food distribution is controlled by one to three regional
chains in every section of the United States.
This is why small farmers are "going under"
while the food conglomerates make record
profits: Farmers lack economic clout. Agribusiness concerns are buying up large tracts
of former small farms and will use the land
for producing profits - not food. It is more
profitable today to grow plants and make
alcohol for fuel than to grow food on all of
America's arable land. To drive food prices
up to a more profitable level, it willbe necessary to restrict the supply of food. This can
only be done if an oligarchy has control of
most of the potential food-producing land
and is vertically integrated in the food industry to control processing, distribution, and
financing of operations, in addition to "supply control."
The largest 200 corporations own over
seventy-two percent of the manufacturing
assets in the United States. And over twothirds of these are fifty-one to one hundred
percent owned by one family. Of those
which are owned by more than one family,
ownership is mostly the same people. For
example, the Mellons own thirty percent of
ALCOA, forty-one percent of Mellon National Bank, twenty-seven percent of Gulf
Oil, and twenty percent of Carborundum

American Atheist

Co., First Boston Corp., and Koppers Corporation. But they are small change compared with the Rockefellers and the Duponts - the latter are estimated to be worth
$240 billion.
These corporations and families accumulate and increase wealth the same way
ancient kings and feudal lords did - they
extract a part of the productive effort of
others for themselves. This means that our
current economic system concentrates
wealth in the hands of those who finance,
not those who work. It extracts from those
who produce and gives to others. Under the
feudal system, this extraction was obvious
to the serfs; the lord simply demanded part
ofthe grain, cloth, and other products which
the serfs produced. In the modern corporate
state, this profit from the work of others is
obscured. Workers are paid a salary which
isless than the economic value of their labor.
This excess value is retained by the owners
of the corporation; the workers see none of
it.
How much "value" is siphoned off from
workers to corporate owners? Since 1979
businesses have nearly doubled their profits
in constant dollars. Wages have not kept
pace. Profits rose from $180 billion in 1979to
$410 billion in 1985. Of that $230 billion
increase, $65 billion is due to tax cuts, and
$70 billion comes from increases in military
spending. The wages of Americans have
risen, on average, very slowly; from a 1979
median of $11,600 to a 1985 median of
$14,000. The increase in government deficits
from $80 billion in 1979 to over $220 billion in
1985 is almost entirely due to corporate tax
breaks and military contracts. Median
wages have risen slowly because most of the
jobs which have been "created" recently are
very low wage service jobs. Taxes on wages
have risen faster than wages for people earning less than $35,000 per year, meaning that
through the tax system, income has been
taken from working people and redistributed to major corporations - to the tune of
$125 billion per year. This is why there is no
serious effort to reduce the deficit (except
by cutting programs which benefit middleincome people) and why there is corporate
opposition to cuts in military spending.
It is not only working people who are
being cheated and robbed by politicians and
big business; retired people and people with
health or other needs have been cut off from
benefits or entitlements in recent years.
People over sixty-five years old, now fifteen
percent of the population and twenty-five
percent of the voting population, have had
their Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security,
and other benefits reduced or eliminated
since 1980. In order to pay for rising costs of
medical care, they have been forced to buy
expensive policies from private insurance
companies - which leaves many of them
unable to afford decent food or housing. As

Austin, Texas

a large voting bloc with common interests,

they have the numbers to influence all elections and place demands on politicians for
reforms. The fact that politicians have been
able to remain in office while not meeting or
servicing the needs of one-fourth of their
electorate who have a common set of interests indicates that something other than
"the people" or the interests of the people
determines policies in government. That
something is money, which purchases influence.
Why is there such passiveness in spite of
such massive exploitation? Why isn't there
revolt and a movement for change? I think
religion is to blame (or.credit).
Politics: Who Gets What?
Over and over Americans are told that
they live in a democracy. They are told how
fortunate they are to live in a country where
they have freedom of expression, freedom
of thought, freedom of belief, and so on. The
only problem with these freedoms is that
most Americans have no place to exercise
them. Anyone who tries in a major corporation will probably be fired or isolated for
being a troublemaker. Criticism of "the system" is ignored by everyone ifit's innocuous,
treated as a freak show ifit's loud, and stifled
by military or police force if it persists (particularly if the dissenters are minorities). If
people try to increase their share of benefits,
institutions are set up to prevent them unless they can influence the persons
responsible for administration.
In the United States the economic interests of an elite determine the economic conditions for everyone else. Every facet of
government is set up in such a manner that
only persons or institutions with wealth can
obtain desired results through established
channels. Ifyou want to exercise your "right
to free speech," your audience is limited to
those you can afford to reach. Your "right to
freedom of assembly" is limited in direct
proportion to how much your ideas threaten
the economic status quo. Unions, for example, are constantly denigrated by corporate
management, the media (owned by the
same corporate interests), and politicians,
who must depend on funds from the same
corporate elites to remain in office. And, of
course, anyone who advocates an economic
alternative to capitalism is punished and isolated by the political system. Rights cease to
mean anything if economic resources determine which rights a person can exercise
and the degree to which these rights may be
exercised.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated
than in the legal system. Alan Dershowitz, a
prominent civil attorney and professor of
law, has stated that in cases which he has
handled, wealth was the determining factor
in their final judgement. Klaus Von Bulow,

August 1986

for example, could afford an expensive

defense and was able to obtain a not guilty
verdict in a murder trial. Dershowitz freely
admitted that a person of average economic
means would not have been able to afford
such a defense and would possibly have
been found guilty.
For religion, this has been true also. Every
time religious groups sense a new opportunity to establish themselves in government,
with actual presence or through the use of
symbols, enormous sums of money are funnelled into the efforts. Churches have
enough financial clout to define the law
today and thereby define what crime is and
who is a criminal. When religious impositions are challenged, they are also able to
frame the conflict in their own terms. The
churches have managed to convince nearly
allAmericans (including many Atheists) that
the phrase "under god" in our Pledge of
Allegiance, the slogan "In god we trust" on
money and as a national motto, religionists
paid with tax money, religious messages on
government seals, are "trivial matters," of
no importance. Therefore, Atheists and
others should not be concerned about them.
This is false. Ifthey were truly trivial matters,
then the religious groups would not all fight
so tenaciously to preserve them.
Access: Who Has It?
Few people have direct access to their
elected officials, and fewer still will be listened to when they ask for changes. The
basis for power is money. Enough money
gives the power to determine who will be
elected, what agencies willbe implemented,
and thereby determine who willget what. He
who has the gold makes the rules. This system is inherently inequitable, but most people do nothing to change it. Here again, I
think religion is to blame.
Our government in the United States
today is beholden to a small elite group of
corporate interests and controlled by them
in the same manner as the British government was during the 1770s. Nothing that
benefits the majority of people in this nation
has come through the House or Senate (and
certainly not the White House) in years.
Gramm-Rudman-Hollings was a bipartisan
maneuver to justify further cuts in education, housing, and other programs which
help most people. The exportation of capital
(and jobs) to low-wage nations has been
made easier by the massive military buildup
(also financed by working people who willbe
paying for current weapons on the installment plan for the next thirty years). Future
weapons purchases promise to be even
more extravagant. The typical person is
barely able to keep up with mortgage payments (another massive transfer of wealth
from workers to major corporations) and is
vulnerable to an economic downturn. The

Page 37

typical American is barely more than a feudal serf; he or she works hard but never gets
ahead. The $410 billion in corporate profits
went to less than one percent of the people
in the U.S. Remember that, next time you
wonder why your increased productivity
doesn't translate into a higher standard of
living for you.
The Role Of Religion
Religion is the source of allirrational thinking. Certainly, nothing could be more irrational than the thinking of someone who
worships capitalism while they have to
struggle to make ends meet - getting
ripped off by capitalists everywhere they
turn: at the supermarket, in housing, in
credit, insurance, etc. But it is no different
from the irrationality of a person suffering
with a terminal illness or severe handicap
telling you about a god that loves everyone,
is all good and merciful -. Religious beliefs,
such as the sanctity of certain actions,
words, places, days, or combinations of the
above, lead to disintegrated, compartmentalized thinking, where nearly identical situations are perceived and acted on in radically
different fashions, depending on how they
are defined. The result is a society of people
with no coherent worldview, or weltanschauung, and a warping of human adaptations to life. Belief in the efficacy of intrinsically worthless actions, like praying, leads
people to believe in the efficacy of other
worthless actions, like holding rock concerts to eliminate hunger or holding more
committee meetings in Congress to improve
public education.
A recent cartoon in the Austin AmericanStatesman showed a poor family and was
captioned, "We're not poor, just stupid." It
was an editorial reaction to President Reagan's oblique response to a report citing
hunger and homelessness as serious problems in the U.S. Perhaps there's some truth
to this; if people were smart, they'd wonder
why, in a nation where thousands of pounds
of food are destroyed every day, and where
building space is unoccupied, people are
hungry and homeless. They would demand
that the political system remedy the deficiencies in the economic system. The problem is that the profit system in a capitalist
society is predicated on scarcity, actual or
contrived, In order for a profit to be made on
anything, the supply has to be restricted.
Probably the first contrived scarcity which
could be used to exploit people was sexual,
and here's where religion came into play.
It's possible that regulation of sex was the
most significant cultural development in history, since it gave the one who made the
rules tremendous control over those who
had to follow them. Most likely, it began with
the imposition of restrictions on one group
by another: women by men, conquered by

Page 38

conquerors, or slaves by masters. The fundamental means for creating sex-scarcity is

to attach sexual interest or desire to inaccessible, nonexistent, or irrelevant objects,
often by attaching symbols to these things.
A secondary means is the attachment of
special rites and! or symbolic meaning to the
sex act, and imposing punishments for deviations - up to castration or death.
Once the sex drive of a person is restricted and controlled, it can be channeled
into actions which those in control deem
useful and desirable. I can think of no other
reason why all religions have made extensive efforts to place taboos and restrictions
on sexual activity. If people can be conditioned to accept controls and restrictions on
the use of their own bodies, it is relatively
simple to impose controls on other aspects
of their lives. Religion exists to prop up the
ruling classes in a society, and controlling
sex drives is the most efficient, effective
means of keeping the lower classes in line like dogs eager to please their masters.
From the restrictions individuals accept
on their sexual activity come the restrictions
they accept in other realms of their lives. If
persons can be mystified in their understanding and enjoyment of sex, they can be
similarly thwarted in seeking material pleasures or benefits elsewhere. The misunderstanding of sex as a mystical union of souls
or something "spiritual" rather than a physical act which is normal and healthy can be
transduced or transferred, like the sex drive
itself, to a misperception of the political and
economic system as something too complex
for human understanding, rather than a
human invention that humans can modify to
accommodate their own needs.
Mystification is an essential tool for maintaining control over others. It is essential to
restrict access to useful information and to
constantly define life in terms of baffling or
insoluble problems. Today, in modern industrialized nations, this is done with television. The airwaves are full of "experts" who
claim to have found the answer to everything from sex enjoyment to raising children
to "making it" in business. Additionally,
there are endless presentations of "crises"
or "critical problems," which either have "no
solution" (because it's easier not to solve the
problem) or are being solved by "experts"
(the best of persons). Much of what is presented as important in the major media is
trivial - entertainment and sports - or
indoctrinates and does not inform (staged
events with Soviet Jews in Congress: for
example). Mystification is something at
which all religions are expert. They have
always sought to promote fear and dependency by instilling in followers the idea that
you cannot make it through lifeon your own.
There are two other religious teachings
which relate directly to the acceptance of
economic exploitation by Americans and

August 1986

that have been part of the culture for centuries. Most of our population is made up of
European immigrants who came from backgrounds fullof poverty, privation, and brutalization by state and church. To maintain
passivity when there was widespread, conspicuous inequity, the churches invented
dogma about the virtue of suffering and the
evil of selfishness (being concerned with
oneself). The divine-right monarchies,
where blood relatives were allowed to
assume the duties of rulers whether or not
they were qualified, led to the myths of birth;
people who were royalty were assumed to
be deserving - it was a gift from a god. The
rest of the people were poor because the
god wanted it that way.
With the rise of capitalism and mercantilism, myths of wealth replaced myths of
birth. But the suffering/selfishness dogmas
were useful still. In the United States, individualism was used to sell these. This served
the interests of the plutocracy since it kept
the "rabble" (common people) isolated and
vulnerable while they were collectively
exploiting them. Today, this is still done; the
owners and directors of all major corporations are interlocked, and big business in the
U.S. is a collectivist enterprise for the
owners. But collective effort in the form of
unions is intensely discouraged for workers.
The American fascination with "individualism" has led to isolation and powerlessness
for most people, but myths die hard.
Today's heroes are Rambo and Rocky, who
give people a vicarious sense of the strength
they know they lack.
Through mystification and a restriction of
the opportunities which people have open to
them, religions and the political leadership of
the U.S. have convinced a majority of citizens to accept encroachments on their
rights and freedoms, under a political and
economic system which does not meet their
needs, although it demands much from
them. Because economic resources are the
basis for power in the U.S., the power of
churches to set the nation's political agenda
has been enormously enhanced by the
government's giveaways of land, by government granting of tax exemptions, by
freedom from government scrutiny in operations, and by lack of government action to
stop religions from acquiring control of
communications media. Government concessions to religion in the past are having
devastating consequences today: Religion is
now the nation's largest industry, with
assets of over $400 billion and a gross
income of nearly $150 billion (all tax-free).
When you consider that a mere $25 or $30
million can corrupt a presidential election, it
is frightening to consider what five thousand
times as much money can do each year.
And religion is making its economic clout
felt in politics. Religious pressure is being
brought to bear on local school boards to get

American Atheist

non-religious subjects out of schools, especially ifthey foster independence and impart
useful information (courses which examine
history - warts and all - sex education,
science, and so on). In the place of educational courses, they seek to install religious
exercises and courses which indoctrinate.
These efforts are not always overt; in most
cases, there is an attempt to remove course
material which is held to be "inappropriate"
for children. This is particularly true for
science courses (which teach children that
religion is both false and useless), history
courses (which teach children unpleasant
truths about religion, politics, and other
facets of culture and may lead to radicalism),
and "social studies," especially if they
include "values clarification" as part of the
curriculum. (Values are something religions
try to force on people - it is important that
people never learn to derive their own values
from experience and learning to cope with
lifeif religion is to survive in a culture.) This
"dumbing-down" of education willhave devastating consequences for the U.S. in the
near future, as American graduates find they
are far behind those in Europe, Japan, and
the developed Communist nations.
Religious PACs are pouring money into
campaigns of candidates who favor weakening of the Bill of Rights, are pro-arms race,
pro-segregation, anti-equality, pro-church,
anti-education,
and antiabortion.
The
churches see the stuffing of the federal judiciary with religious judges under Reagan as
an opportunity to ram cases which promote
and secure the establishment of religion in all
areas of American life. They need to do this
for several reasons, but the most important
one is that their attendance is falling (especially among the educated, affluent segments of society) and in time this willcause
political support for them to wane. In a time
of record government budget deficits, they
fear middle-class Americans will demand
that government go after the enormous
wealth and income of churches to balance
budgets. This is what should happen, of
course. There is no reason why billions
should go untaxed while the middle class is
burdened with more taxes.
Religionists, savvy survivalists that they
are, have allied themselves with the ruling
class in the U.S. They are playing on the
traditional American paradigms of freedom
and independence, twisting them so that
they lead to an abhorrence of collective
effort and to anti-intellectualism. This has
left most Americans isolated, distrustful of
others, and powerless.
Religion has encouraged this isolation and
channelled peoples' yearning to prove individual achievement to its own ends in recent
years. In addition to encouraging followers
to serve the interests of political.and military
leaders, religious leaders have turned the
frustration of people against useful institu-

Austin, Texas

tions in society. Religion is responsible for

the irrational belief that anyone's position on
any subject is just as valid as anyone else's,
regardless of prior study or investigation.
Hence we have lunatics like the followers of
Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jerry
Falwell bombing medical facilities, attacking
public schools, terrorizinq stores which sell
erotica, and trying to saturate the culture
with their idiotic religious fetishism. Roman
Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and other
"mainline" religions are just as sick as the
extremists. They have supported all of the
censorship efforts, all of the attempts to
intrude religion into schools, and done
nothing but urge insane or useless actions,
like prayer, as a response to national problems (like poverty, pollution, or economic
inequity). The most dangerous manifestation of this is the religious campaign for
"local option." Terry Dolan of NCPAC let it
all hang out when talking to a group of high
school students on a recent C-SP AN program. He said that it was necessary (in the
interest of freedom and democracy) to allow
individual towns to decide whether or not to
have religion in public schools. No one he
addressed, including the moderator, understood that this implies that the entire Constitution can be selectively applied according
to the wishes of a small, powerful elite in
each town, in the minds of NCPAC leadership. This is not democracy at all: It's a program for the dismantling of democracy.
To blunt criticism of religion and to obfuscate the true agenda of churches, religious
leaders often talk about the "concern" and
"good work" of churches. Churches are
always using the poor as a foil to raise
money. If the churches were really interested in helping the poor, they would take
their billions and help them. Instead, religionists go on television and ask the non-poor to
give more money to religion.
The churches are playing the same old
game they have played for centuries. Do
nothing, keep the money rolling in, and
make sure that the people are kept passive.
As I mentioned previously, Atheists are
taxed without representation. Conversely,
religion has tremendous representation in
government, but pays no taxes. Clearly,
something is rotten in the United States.
With thirty-five percent representation in
the federal legislature, and over ninety percent of the Reagan cabinet in its pocket, the
Roman Catholic church has been able to
slowly worm its way into everyone's pockets
- taking billions of dollars each year to run
its schools, hospitals, nursing homes, childcare centers, and a host of other "social
service" organizations. If the government is
incompetent and incapable of running such
agencies, then it should not levy taxes for
such purposes. But it is obscene for governments (federal, state, and local) to take
tax money and give it to a church - espe-

August 1986

cially when the government does provide

the same services at lower cost. Remember
this when you hear about all of the hospitals
and charities churches claim to run:
Churches don't pay for them, taxpayers do.
Atheists should demand that their tax
money not be used to support churches.
Atheists comprise at least six percent of
the population, according to the most conservative religious polls. This means that
Atheists outnumber Jews at least two to one
and Mormons at least three to one. The
power which the Jews have over our
government is enormous - witness the
money we send to Israel each year to support that religious establishment.
Today, about $150 billion per year goes
into religion - from "believers," government, and from income on the considerable
financial holdings of religion in the U.S.
That's about three billion dollars per state.
The fact that government gives money to
religion means that Atheists are forced to
support religion, and they are forced to do it
without any representation in government.
What could states do each year with three
billion dollars? Clean up pollution, improve
education, reeducate all laid-off workers,
institute programs to get people off of welfare and into jobs, eliminate substandard
housing, provide care for the elderly ... the
list is endless. The point is, you and everyone else are paying too high a price to
satisfy someone's fantasies about getting
into heaven. But nothing willhappen as long
as Atheists don't care each time the religious
gain a new foothold, or obtain a new favoreither monetary or symbolic - from government. Atheists should stop deifying the
works of Paine, Ingersoll, and others who
did nothing to stop the onward march of
religion. Instead, they should think and act
on their own behalf, and work together for
freedom from religion and an end to taxation
without representation. ~
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian J. Lynch is the former Director

. of the Massachusetts Chapter of
American Atheists and the current
Media Coordinator for the
national office. With a BS/BA from
Babson College, he has often debated
on such topics as religion, Atheism,
politics, the arms race, history,
and science.

Page 39

BOOK REVIEW
The Passion of Ayn Rand
A Biography
by Barbara Branden
Garden City, NY
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
442 pages, $19.95, Hardback
his is a biography of Alice Rosenbaum,
T
(popularly known as Ayn Rand) written
by Barbara Weidman (now known as Barbara Branden), the wife who was the cuckold of her husband, Nathan Blumenthal
(now known as Nathaniel Branden), during
a fourteen year sexual affair which he had
with Rand, to which the wife gave full consent. With that as a basis, the book is billed
by the publisher as "an objective, truly
exceptional, and unforgettable life history."
It is at least unforgettable - but borders on
the unforgivable for allinvolved. Perhaps the
sweetest revenge is that Barbara gets to
make a profit by "spilling the beans" concerned with what was, basically, a very sick
agreement, arrangement, and life-style exchange among the four people involved.
. Your American Atheist spokespersons
have never addressed a university or college
audience without someone asking, "What
do you think of Ayn Rand?" Always taking
this to mean that the questioner is asking
about the "objectivist" philosophy which
Rand postulated, the stock answer given has
been that her discussions of Atheism were
correct, her solutions for the socio-culturaleconomic ills of any nation were not American Atheists' concern.
Ifher lifewas an indication of what she felt
Atheism represented, your reviewer wants
to retract - openly - every approval ever
given. Alice Rosenbaum, alias Ayn Rand,
was a "user." She used other people in a
continuing way, and this comes through
loud and clear in this biography. In return,
the biographer is using Ayn Rand's life story
to turn a buck, get her revenge through
publication of the facts, and denigrate the
fountainhead of the objectivist philosophy.
The biography is told from fifty hours of
taped interviews with Rand, transcripts of
unpublished writings, extensive discussions
with "those closest to her ," and "above all" it
is based on "the author's own unique relationship with the subject."
You can bet your life it was unique!
Barbara Branden is a Russophobe. Beginning with the first page of the book she begins her attack against the nation which,
after all, did produce the beloved "Ayn." The
actual childhood and early life is difficult to

ferret out from the adulation which is

heaped upon the subject's later post hoc
analysis from a mature perspective of what
she thought she might have felt as a child.
The author notes that Rand spoke of her
entire childhood and young adulthood only
with a loathing for the country in which she
was born. The alacrity with which she abandoned her family and her name once she left
Russia indicates that the loathing may have
been deeper and more personal, certainly
directed to her family. Whereas Nero fiddled
while Rome burned; Rand read Hugo while
"the Bolshevik revolution raged on the
streets of Petrograd." Facts contradict one
another in such an amazing way that one
can only conclude that the recollection is
through a glass darkly seen. (One example
willsuffice: A family without money for food
is able freely to bribe one official after
another with large sums.) In 1921 she entered the University of Petrograd. While
"people were collapsing on the streets from
malnutrition and disease," she studied Plato
under a distinguished international authority
and was moved to emotion by her reading of
Aristotle. After graduating in 1924, she
began work as a tour guide while she studied
further in a school for those interested in the
developing Russian movie industry. In 1925,
a relative who had been aided financially by
her mother's family to emigrate to the United States agreed to sponsor Rand for a visit
to this country. Her "impoverished" family
provided the money for the "six-month visit"
- from which, of course, Rand never returned. Her object was to make her way to
California to become a writer for the cinema
industry there.
She abandoned her Chicago relatives
quicker than she had abandoned her family
and her native land which was in the "stranglehold of a blood-soaked dictatorship, the
soul-shriveling terror of a life without hope
or a future." Conning the relatives of $100 in
cash and a railroad ticket she made her way
to the promised land: Hollywood. There she
worked as an "extra" and there she married
another "extra," Frank O'Connor, in 1929.
For some reason important to the author, it
is noted that "Sex was always important to
her life, and central in her relationship with
Frank." This certainly did not appear to be
the case when later, for fourteen years,
Frank had to leave his home one night a
week to wander the streets while Rand
bedded down with Branden - twenty-five
years her junior - in his own boudoir for an
all-night romp.
The squalid, narrow life is followed in a
narrative as barren as what it relates. Rand
moved to New York in the hope of writing

plays, while plugging away at her book We

The Living. In New York she began The
Fountainhead, while she dabbled in far right
politics, meeting many prominent conservatives. After the extraordinary trials and tribulations of a dozen rejects, The Fountainhead was finally published in May 1943. The
sales of the book mounted, it was purchased
by Warner Bros., turned into a movie, and
the Rand-O'Connor pair finally had the
financial security it needed.
Once at the pinnacle, of course, the thing
to do is to attack those who dissent against
the system which elevated one. The House
UnAmerican Activities Committee invited
her to testify and she obliged. She was proud
of her contribution: that "Communist propaganda on the screen vanished" and her work
"did that."
Now on an estate in California, enter the
youthful Brandens, and about 150-pages of
description of an arrangement with them
whereby Nathaniel "serviced" Rand sexually in return for her publically advancing
him as her intellectual heir. Atlas Shrugged
was written during the intoxication of this
highly improbable and irregular affair.
But Ayn missed New York and it was to
that city that they all returned to play the
drama to the bitter end. There objectivism
was born and some of the basic theoretics
for the Libertarian political persuasion. As
one reads the scenarios of personal psychological destruction of anyone in her admiring
group not atune to the premises which Rand
proposed as fundamental to her Roark-like
theories, one is aghast.
In 1966, the thirty-six year old Branden
had finally had enough of the sixty-one year
old Rand. The relationship came to an end
with Rand's determination (his now ex-wife
feels) to destroy him.
The Nathaniel Branden Institute was
closed; the Objectivist soon ceased to be
published; but ironically Nathaniel Branden
(who apparently had none for nineteen
years) issued his own book on The Psychology of Self-Esteem in 1969.
The Brandens finally went their separate
ways, each to a new marriage - the ends of
which are not important to this narrative.
Cancer caught up with Ayn Rand in 1974,
primarily from her two packs of cigarettes a
day habit. Surgical removal of one lobe of
the left lung was necessary. Frank O'Connor died in November 1979, and Rand's cardiopulmonary problems brought her end in
January 1982.
This is a sick book. It is almost as sick as
the life of the person it chronicles. Although
it only obliquely speaks of Atheism - Rand
was a known Atheist - it should be read.

~
Page 40

August 1986

American Atheist

ME TOO
"Me Too" is a feature designed to
showcase short essays written by readers in response to topics recently covered by the American Atheist or of
general interest to the Atheist community.

Essays submitted to "Me Too" (P.O.

Box 2117, Austin, TX 78768-2117)
should be 700 to 900 words long.
he symbol of the universe must surely
T
be the circle. Every part of nature
seems to travel along circles, ellipses, and
other cyclical paths. From the cosmologists'
great cycle of the universe's birth, death,
and rebirth, to the daily rhythm on earth,
everything returns to its starting point. The
passage of time itself is marked by the
apparent "turning" of the Big Dipper's handle about the Pole Star, echoed in the
twenty-four-hour circle of the medieval
clocks.
Nature's continuity is measured in returns
to the same point of the circle - dawn,
winter solstice, the periodic extinctions after
cometary bombardments, even the 250million-year galactic orbit of the sun. We are
all a part of nature. The cycles affect us as
surely as they do the migrating birds, the
reawakening of perennial plants, and the icecracked rock washed from the eroding
mountain by the spring flood. When nature
bursts forth in spring's exuberance, fruits in
the summer heat, turns gold and scarlet
after autumn's first frost, lies dormant and
still under winter's cold blanket, we, as all
other life, must be affected. We evolved in
these cycles, matured as a species in the
frigid freezer of the ice ages, and lived and
died by the cycles bringing us animals and
plants to eat.
Humans first started organizing their
lives. We left the senseless animal world of
our origins. We used our one species
marker, intelligence, as we developed agriculture and animal husbandry. We all know
the false promise of the January thaw, the
first flush of heat in early spring, the early
frost - the vagaries of the weather. But the
great astronomical clock keeps faithful time,
telling us when to plant, when to reap, to
hunt, to cull our flocks. These cycles meant
life and death. We evolved into a sympathy
with them just as we evolved our other
senses.
Over the last two hundred years we have
gained insight into the reasons for these
cycles. We have given up the gods of the last
20,000 years, as science has showed us the
why and how, more accurately and assuredly than the sun, moon, rain, or river
that we so eagerly animated in our species'

Austin, Texas

childhood. But we are the most intelligent

animal species on earth - and our reptilian
and pre-sentient mammalian underpinnings
still cry out at these cyclic changes.
Our intelligence explains the dying chlorophyll unmasking the yellows, reds, and
browns hidden throughout the spring and
summer. Yet how can one not be affected by
those brilliant colors cast up to the clear blue
of a perfect Indian summer afternoon? The
odor of leaf mold, burning wood, the crispness of the evening held back by a warm fire?
To acknowledge this conflict, to celebrate it,
is to be completely human - an intelligent
animal. To welcome the solstices and the
equinoxes as stopping points in our busy

lives, ever further from our upbringing in

nature, is to bring into perspective our
beginnings, our present state, and our future
as a species.
Don't celebrate? We have computers and
robots that operate by cold, clear logic only.
Not to celebrate is to deny that other part of
humanity - the bringer of art, music, literature, friendship, love. Rather revel in these
emotions, tempered with our understanding
of why and how _Throw out the gods, but not
the feasts - they're as old as life itself, and
our link to it!
A. Thomas Kashuba
Pennsylvania

~
-

"Tome,

religion is a state of mind ...

August 1986

kind of like mental mness."

Page 41

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

I suggest that whenever religionists hold

up anti-smut signs outside convenience
stores, Atheists move in beside them with
signs demanding the removal of incest, lust,
sodomy, and other sexual no-nos from the
Bible. I think this would be an effective way
of giving Jerry Falwell and his followers a
taste of their own medicine.
Robert M. LaFrana
Michigan
In "Director's Briefcase" (May 1986), Jon
G. Murray asserts that no one has ever
talked with god. I must disagree, since I
myself have talked with god. The contemplation of life and the universe, coupled with
a drastically reduced blood sugar level, can
produce a vivid anthropomorphic hallucination, which would, of course, make any religious person agog with the conviction that
he/she was in the presence of the holy spirit!
This kind of hallucination is a well-known
effect of lowered blood sugar. Atheists who
wish to talk with god may lower their blood
sugar with LSD, with self-flagellation to produce festering sores, with prolonged kneeling, or just wait until they have a high fever. I
have also communed with Mozart, and
Shakespeare has made clear his sonnets to
me.
A strenuous session on the toilet can also
produce divine rapture; Martin Luther
reports, with disarming honesty, that it was
in such circumstances that Protestantism
was revealed to him.
Jeff Wilson
California

on Armageddon. I have been listening to

fundamentalist television broadcasts; these
people are dangerous madmen. They are
power-hungry, greedy, and in my estimation, many of them are certifiably insane. I
have seen the likes of Paul Crouch (that may
not be the correct spelling) ranting and raving about building "devil-bustin' satellites" all
over the world - and receiving hundreds
upon thousands of dollars in pledges, although one might be led to ask if these
pledges are actually honored - and various
other television evangelists screaming, ranting and raving, and acting as though they
were rabid - Oral Roberts rolling his eyes
back into his head while screaming about
tithing ... the list is enormous. All of these
madmen have one thing in common: They
are saying nothing about controlling nuclear
weaponry, conserving peace; in short, they
are encouraging the masses to push the
button.
Does this frighten you? It scares me silly!It
scares me because, apparently, our efforts
are puny in comparison. We need a radio
station, too!
I would like to make a suggestion at this
time. The American Atheists must gather
together a delegation of educated persons to
go to the U.S.S.R. and make some attempt
to contact the Prime Minister; to let them
know there are some people in the United
States who are still sane, some who haven't
become religious fanatics ready to start a
global holocaust. Ifwe cannot form a delegation, then we must start writing letters lots of letters - indicating our wish for
peace, arms control, and our deep desire to
maintain sanity in the world.
I am currently reading Barbara Tuchman's book The March of Folly, and it has
become clear to me that throughout history
there have been more wars and human misery caused by religion than any other cause.
Religion has a miserable track record. Consider the Renaissance popes.
We must take a stronger stand on the
arms race. The fate of the world is at stake.

c....~
The May 1986 issue of the American Atheist was one of the best yet. I thoroughly
enjoyed ninety-nine percent of the articles in
it, and especially Brian Lynch's "Press Conference" on the arms race.
I personally feel that this should be the
primary topic of our efforts, to be given
much more coverage than anything else. A
growing number of Americans - not all of
them Atheists - are getting very worried
about the fundamentalist attempts to bring

Page 42

Morgan Allspach
Ohio

c....~
I notice that many Atheists take great
pains to always pay lip service to "religious
freedom" or to reassure others, in letters or
conversation, that they subscribe to a belief
in "freedom of choice."
If religious freedom includes the right to'
reduce a fairly normal human to the state
where he flops on his back, limbs shaking
out of control while he babbles incoherently,

August 1986

then we need to redefine either religion or

freedom.
W. D. Robinson
Oregon

c....~
In response to Rena L. Thompson's letter
in the May 1986 issue asking whether
televangelists use subliminal messages in
their programs, the answer may well be yes.
During a segment of the "700 Club" which
our local ABC-affiliated station carried on
the night of May 21-22, 1986, I heard what I
think was such a message. While Pat
Robertson was leading his audience in
prayer asking Jesus Christ to "come into my
life," I distinctly heard a female voice intoning softly, "Lord Jesus." At first I thought it
was background noise from the studio
audience, but as the camera panned the
audience and the same voice returned as
clearly as before, I realized it didn't seem to
be coming from anywhere in particular.
During Robertson's prayer, I distinctly
heard "Lord Jesus" three times and a possible fourth, which I couldn't make out
because it got blended with the prayer, and
finally an orgasmic-sounding moan of "Oh
God!" Apparently someone had left the
volume of the subliminal sound track turned
up too high so that it was easily audible. I
don't know whether or not subliminal messages have been proven to be effective, but
the idea that TV preachers would even try
something like this suggests they would stop
at nothing to enslave us all. Are there legal
grounds for American Atheists to filea complaint with the FCC or take CBN to court
over this issue if my claim was substantiated?
Royce J. Bitzer
Iowa
I have finished reading a sizable stack of
material I received in the mail after becoming
a member of A.A. I wish to express my deep
appreciation for the sheer existence of your
organization. I am quite impressed with
A.A.'s uncompromising position on maintaining publicly the label Atheist in spite of its
unpleasant connotations rather than hiding
behind such "safer" labels as "agnostic" or
"freethinker." I read Mrs. O'Hair's speech
"Atheists" and found myself falling easily
into several categories of Atheists she described. Publicly I have described myself as
either an Atheist or an agnostic, depending
on the people I am talking to and how truthful or inflammatory I wish to be. However, I

American Atheist

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

NOTICE
am an a-theist - as A.A. defines it; it is clear
that religion has been one of the most destructive elements in civilization and has no
place in affairs of the state. I am impressed
that you openly use the label Atheist in spite
of the abuse from the ignorant it lends itself
to. I suppose I could be called a closet Atheist by my reluctance to use the word. I am
greatly encouraged by your excellent example. Telling relations or friends that one is an
Atheist carries with it the same shock value
as confiding that one is gay or a communist

(although the three are not even casually

related). You have given me the encouragement to take a stand at the risk of disapproval (at the very least) of others.
Aaron W. Adams
Louisiana

Cryptic crossword puzzles are not like the puzzles seen

in most American publications; they are much more
devious. The clues are almost never what they seem to be.
Some of the clues are anagrams of the word sought; these
are indicated by clues such as "sort of" or "crazy." Some
clues are puns giving an association of sound or meaning.
Charade clues are built up by definitions of parts of the
answer word. In some cases the answer is actually hidden
among the letters of the clue. Punctuation ca~ be used to
obscure clues and change the apparent meamng.
In general, the cryptic clue consists of two parts ', One
part is a definition of the word sought, and the other IS t~e
cryptically constructed part. The fun and challenge of this
sort of puzzle is to figure out which part is which. Often the
relationship between clue and answer is a humorous one or
one that presents a peculiar view of the world of words ".
The numbers in parentheses are the numbers of letters In
each word of the answer.
If you would like a sample puzzle with answers and
explanations of clues, send a self-addressed, stamped enve-

"Letters to the Editor" must be

either questions or comments of
general concern to Atheists or
Atheism. Submissions should be brief
and to the point. Space limitations
allow that each letter should be two
hundred words, or preferably, less.
Please confine your letters to a single
issue only. Mail them to:
American Atheist
P.O. Box 2117
Austin, TX 78768-2117

lope to Steve Bratteng, Division of Biological Sciences,

University of Texas, Austin, TX 78712.
ACROSS
1. Is such a deserter beneath us? (5, 3)
5. Out, in a sense; disturb, please. (6)
9. Everyone has a day - maybe it's Nov. 2. (3,5)
10. Sounds like something hard to be tested. (6)
12. ACLU or a different organization - one that deals with
eyes. (6)
13. See 250.
15. Sounds like you might do it at the circus (but not these
carnivores ... ). (3, 9.)
18.... or one associated with more lofty habits. (1,8,3)
23. A bad pelt (actually, worse than bad) created from such
a smooth leader. (4,4)
24. Change protocol or search for flags stowed away. (6)
26. Insect whose usefulness to 23 would appear greater if
found a little higher up. (6)
27. "Eureka," may be appropriate comment if one finds
something so. (4, 4)
28. Does it make you unhappy to be sanded and refinished?
(6)

29. Need a cat, perhaps, for a late afternoon affair? (3, 5)

DOWN
1. Not really related to 15, but I hear bovine critter is
observed .... (3, 3)
2.... with tusks and fabled appetite for oysters. (6)
3. System suitable for determining longevity of plant part
... ? (7)
4.... or tools used to make slaw? (4)
6. Means by which Pope said to do good? (and blush to find
it fame). (7)
7. Use beet as an alternative, if one would consume
legumes? (3, 5)
8. Not look so often when unrivaled. (8)
11. Sort of digs found to contain long-time occupant of
many motel rooms. (7)
14. Abjures when one soaks can in it. (7)
16. Brews most of ale with birds scattered about. (8)
17. Real mixed up in cold. (Some are said to be when
arrested.) (8)
19. Give out cookware in return for period of rest. (3, 4)
20. Taro use denied when found excited. (7)
21. Radical change on certificate. (6)
22. Nuisance reveals that in's out, but some interest
remains. (6)
25. With 13A. Magazine reveals it in the long run. (4,4,4)
(Solution on page 6)
Austin, Texas

August 1986

Page 43

Don McDermott

NEWS AND COMMENTS

(Continued from page 20)

THE WATER TOWER

sympathetic guidance from those who

share her own value preferences.
In the final analysis, the holding of
Roe presumes that it is far better to
permit some individuals to make
incorrect decisions than to deny all
individuals the right to make decisions
that have a profound effect upon their
destiny. Arguably a very primitive
society would have been protected
from evil by a rule against eating
apples; a majority familiarwith Adam's
experience might favor such a rule.
But the lawmakers who placed a special premium on the protection of
individual liberty have recognized that
certain values are more important
than the will of a transient majority.
This summary of Justice Stevens in his
reply to Justice White is so cogent that no
comments need to be added by American
Atheists.

1&p1

(Continued from page 23)

signaled him to turn the engine over. It

started lip immediately, and his father got
into the passenger's side with the gas can.
"Here, take this back with you," he said and
slipped out of the coat. "And put the rig back
in the barn. I don't want it rustin' in the rain.
I'll take the car on to a gas station."
His father was still annoyed, and Joel tried
to say something that would budge him from
his sour mood. "Listen, Dad, I'm sorry about
this - really."
"Yeah, I've heard that before," he murmured without looking at him and put the
car in gear.
Joel sneezed and was beginning to shake
as he rode the old tractor home along the
deserted highway. The wind gusted tumbleweeds across the road, and he could feel
his blood cold and motionless in his thighs
and laced up in his shoes. He put up the
collar on his jacket and slipped a numb hand
into the pocket of his coat, and at the tip of
his aching fingers, he felt them. He knew
instantly what he then crushed in his

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Page 44

Zip,

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Don McDermott completed his
B.S. and M.A. at Brigham Young
University and is currently a
doctoral candidate at Oklahoma State
University. Despite his stint at
Brigham Young, he is an agnostic.

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chapped palm - it was her nylon panties.

But now, unlike the other times, he felt no
relief and there was no thanksgiving.
His father had overtaken him after a few
minutes, but he had neither waved nor
honked. He imagined now that he would get
pneumonia and die. That was it; that was
how it would allfit together - the dream, the
water tower, even the sudden and dramatic
change in the weather. It had all been contrived to bring about his destruction. It
would suit him right, he thought, for thinking
he could get away with things like other
people. ~

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American Atheist

Do you wonder how to refute the

television preachers? Do you not
know what to say to that Christian
friend who keeps telling you about
the certainties of the Bible? Do
you wonder how to explain to your
children how religion is harmful?
Help has arrived!

As you read The Bible Handbook, you will be

amazed at all the absurdities, indecencies, contradictions, unfulfilled prophecies, obscenities,
impossibilities,
ugliness, inaccurate history,
and outright nonsense there is in that socalled book of poetry and ethics: the Christian
Bible. Never again will you be unable to refute
Christians.
This clearly referenced book will put the very
words of the Bible at your fingertips and enable
you to defend yourself from theists' simple
arguments. Quotes straight from the King
James Bible will rock the faith of the religious.
Every Atheist who ever suffered the intrusion of a professional or amateur missionary

needs The Bible Handbook.

This all new (and improved) edition includes
not just the classic text of The Bible Handbook
compiled by G. W. Foote and W. P. Ball in 1900,
but also: Self Contradictions of The Bible, 144
Propositions (author anonymous), The Bible
Contradicts Itself by Australian John Bowden,
and American Atheist Addenda created by
former American A theist columnist Richard M.
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The Bible Handbook is only $8.00 including
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AMENDMENTI

CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LA W RESPECTING

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thought, but a very noxious fallacy, which is
largely responsible for the calamities the
world is at present enduring.

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