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Materialism declares that the cosmos is devoid of immanent conscious
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Summer 2001

American Atheist
A Journal

of Atheist

The State of Atheism in

France
35
Christian Eyschen
The Secretary General of La
Libre Pensee reports on the vicissitudes of the struggle for Atheist
civil rights in the Vaticandominated European Union.

News and Thought

EDITOR'S DESK
Jesus The Storm God
Frank R. Zindler

American Atheists
Convention 2001
4
Ellen Johnson
The president of American
Atheists reports on our wildly successful 27th National Convention in
Orlando.
In Memoriam: The
Murray-O'Hair Family
Conrad F. Goeringer
Cover art: Collage by Ann
Zindler of photos by Ed Gauci,
Conrad Goeringer, and Frank
Zindler commemorating the
27th National Convention of
American Atheists in Orlando
Florida, April 12-15, 2001.

Atheist Heroes
9
Ellen Johnson
The presidential address to the
Orlando convention of American
Atheists.
One Nation Under God:
The Crusade to Capture
the American Flag
18
Whitney Smith
An internationally famous flag
expert reports on Christian revisionist claims that Old Glory is and has always been - a Christian
symbol.

Volume 39, No.3

Parsippany, New Jersey

Apocalypse Kitsch: Tim

LaHaye's LEFT BEHIND Series
and Its Impact on American
Politics and Culture
Conrad F. Goeringer
A survey of rapture-readiness
America past and present.

Summer 2001

Creating Creationists:
Creationists' Use of "Science"
Texts
37
Jim Strayer
A scary peek into the antiscience textbooks used in
Christian schools.
Steverino's Closet Window:
Allen, the Elitist
43
Tony Pasquarello
Was Steve Allen an Atheist? Yes
he was, and no he wasn't. Definitely.
Belief and Knowledge:
A Conceptual Analysis
47
David Eller
The American Atheists director
for the state of Colorado shows that
knowledge is not belief.
Vardis Fisher: An American
and Atheist Novelist On The
History Of Religious Ideas.
Part IV
49
Earl Doherty
The author of the widely
acclaimed The Jesus Puzzle continues his review of the monumental
20th-century work THE TESTAMENTOF MAN,examining the novel
Jesus Came Again: A Parable.

25
in

Page 1

American
Atheist
Volume 39 Number

Membership Application for

American Atheists Inc.
3

EDITOR / MANAGING EDITOR

Frank R. Zindler
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Ann E. Zindler
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Conrad F. Goeringer
BUSINESS MANAGER
Ellen Johnson
The American Atheist is published by
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Summer 2001

American Atheist

Editor's Desk

there
f
is anything India does not
need more of, it is religion. Since
time immemorial, the subcontinent has been parasitized by fakirs
of all sorts. The Hindu clergy have
tapped into the life-blood of the
nation so successfully that they now
sit undisputed at the top of the food
pyramid. Over the centuries, flow of
blood into the maws of Hindu leeches became reduced somewhat as
blood-sucking parasites of other
types - Roman Catholics and
Muslims - jumped onto the succulent body of India. These were joined
in modern times by Protestant missionaries who brought yet further
debility to the beleaguered people
and increased the parasite load to
impossible limits. Now, Campus
Crusade for Christ International has
found a vulnerable field of exposed
skin into which it can sink its proboscis to inject the Tox-spel of Jesus
- but it needs my help.
According to a letter Campus
Crusade just sent me, it needs your
help too - in the form of Mammonfodder. Because of a challenge grant,
your gift of $50 will become $100,
"helping to reach 1,000 people to [sic]
Christ." How will this work? By
showing them the wonderful film
"Jesus," that's how.You must under-

Frank R. Zindler
Parsippany, New Jersey

Jesus The
Storm God
stand that this "is the most accurate
film ever produced on the life of
Christ, based completely on the
Word of God." You might very well
want to give $1,250 - the cost of one
16-mm film print - which, thanks to
the heaven-sent challenge grant, will
buy two film prints.
Just imagine how much the poor
people of India can be helped by
viewing a film on the life of Christ!
(Of course, if they get popcorn and
ghee along with the movie, it will
help them even more.)
You see, this is a most propitious
time to push Protestant missionary
work in India. Jesus has just
knocked the resistance out of Hindu
militants who had been opposing the
Campus
Crusade's
cinematic
endeavors. He did this by means of a
massive cyclone and tidal wave that
caused more destruction "than anything we've seen in recent history."
According to the money-begging letter, the storm - which affected more
than 15 million people who had been
highly resistant to the evangelistic
film - came ashore close to the very
spot where Hindu militants had
burned a car, killing a missionary
and his two young sons. It seems the
missionary had been showing the
very film we are being asked to make
more copies of. The storm - which I
think should have been named Jesus
- surged inland for 44 miles, swamping millions of people, drowning
50,000 recalcitrant
Hindus and
destroying half a million homes. But
it is an ill wind that blows nobody
any good, and we are told there is a
bright side to this disaster: ''Yet,''the
letter declares, "a wonderful tribute
to our God is emerging."
"For as yet, we have not heard of
a single Christian who was killed.
One island off the coast was totally
destroyed, except for one village - a
village of Christians. The believers
Summer 2001

ran into the church for shelter and

were spared. The Campus Crusade
for Christ staff lost the roofs off some
of their homes, but all of their lives
were spared."
It is curious that the missionary
solicitors haven't wondered why
their god wasn't able to spare the
roofs too. After all, if Jesus sent the
storm to punish the militant Hindus
for their opposition to Campus
Crusade, shouldn't Crusader roofs
also have been preserved as a visible
emblem of the One True Faith?
The front of the Crusade envelope proclaims, "This storm was
God's judgement upon us ... for shedding innocent blood." Preposterous
as this statement is by itself, inside
the letter it is attributed to "two
Hindu leaders." One wonders which
god they had in mind. Shiva? Kali?
Of course a major purpose of the letter is to make us think the Indians
are now guilt-ridden and begging to
be exposed to the film we are being
asked to pay for. People are much
more likely to send money to support
a project that is certain of success.
Meanwhile, the Indian Rationalist Association has done a lot to lift
the burden of superstition from the
billion inhabitants of their subcontinent. Their debunking of holy men of
all sorts has helped to bring many to
a life of reason and science.
Unfortunately, they now have another superstition to detoxify. Campus
Crusade for Christ is extremely well
bank-rolled and it has all the energy
and motivation of a malaria mosquito that has just smelled blood
beneath the skin of its victim.
Campus Crusade has done incalculable harm to institutions of higher
learning in America, and it is frightening to think how much damage it
can do in India. The Indian
Rationalists need all the help they
can get.
Page 3

By Ellen Johnson
he Twenty-Seventh annual national convention
of
American
Atheists was held on April 1315, 2001, at the beautiful
Orlando Airport
Marriott
Hotel.
The convention was preceded by a memorial tribute to
the Murray-O'Hairs - Madalyn, Jon, and Robin - on
Thursday, April 12. Over one
hundred people attended the
tribute. Since it has been years
since many of the attendees
have heard the voice of
Madalyn O'Hair we began the
tribute with a viewing of
videotapes of her on television
and giving a speech at the
1993 convention of American
Atheists. The attendees were
then invited to come up to the
podium and say a few words.
These personal statements
were interspersed with more
video footage of Jon and Robin.
Frank Zindler brought a selection of music from Chopin that
Madalyn had in her piano
bench at home. It was a piece
that she had played many
times. I read a selection of
poetry that Robin had written a
decade earlier. I also read tributes
that came in from around the coun-

Page 4

AMERICAN ATHEISTS
21TH

NATIONAL CONVENTION
2001

ORLANDO FLORIDA
APRIL 12-15. 2001

try and around the world. The

memorial lasted for four hours,
because there were so many people
who wanted to say something.
It was a sad evening in many
ways, but I am thankful for the
heart-warming recollections of our
guests and the participation of so
many old friends of the MurrayO'Hairs. I am very happy that so
many old friends came to Orlando to
be part of the event. I think the
Murray-O'Hairs would have been
pleased.
Friday began with a warm welcome to the attendees from our
Florida State Director Greg Me
Dowell. As president of American
Atheists, I, Ellen Johnson, was the
first speaker of the convention. I
addressed the current state of affairs
under the Bush Administration visa-vis the First Amendment, how it
Summer 2001

got that way, and what we need

to do to change things. The rest
of the afternoon was filled with
interesting
speeches
from
experts on a wide variety of
topics
beginning
with
Whitney Smith, a flag consultant, who spoke on the subject of "Is The 'Stars And
Stripes' Catholic, Protestant,
or Jewish?"
Conrad Goeringer, Associate Editor of American
Atheist magazine spoke on the
topic of "Apocalypse Kitsch:
Tim LaHaye's 'Left Behind'
Series And Its Impact On
American Politics And Culture."
After lunch William B.
Davis, second-generation Atheist and talented actor best
known for his role as the "cigarette-smoking man" on the
popular TV series The X-Files
spoke about "Being A Skeptic
In An Alien World." No, he
doesn't accept claims of paranormal entities or activities; he
just happens to be in a show
that does.
That interesting talk was
followed by a failed attempt to
have a debate with a Christian
apologist. We tried to arrange a
debate between Frank Zindler and a
creationist because we know that so
many of you like a good debate and

Florida Director Greg McDowell

American Atheist

"faith" to prove his point, but did just

that in the debate. Along with faith,
Comfort liberally sprinkled his arguments with ad hominems against
Atheists. Comfort was not the best
representative
for the Christian
point of view, and most of us were
very disappointed. Ron presented a
masterful case against the spookernatural world and identified the
fallacies of Comfort's pitiful presen-

Actor William B. Davis

no one is better at that than Frank
Zindler! Frank insisted upon debate
topics that required the creationists
to present
evidence for their
hypotheses, rather than merely
attack evolutionary science. To Kent
Hovind he proposed the thesis "The
Genesis account of a world-wide
flood is true in all its aspects." To
John Morris and Henry Morris
Frank proposed "Scientific evidence
indicates that humans and all other
life forms have existed on earth for
less than ten thousand years." None
of the creationists were interested in
having to prove the "theory" of creationism. We went with a man
named Ray Comfort who agreed to
debate Ron Barrier on the existence of gods. He agreed that he
would not rely on the argument of

separation
and the rights
of
Atheists.
Distinguished Service Award
- Robert J. Bruno. In recognition
of his outstanding and selfless commitment to the cause of freedom
from religion in America.
Outstanding
Member of the
Year - Larry Darby. For being a
strong, steadfast, and committed
voice to the public on Atheism and
state-church separation.
State Director of the Year Susan Harrington.
For her outstanding contribution to the cause of
Atheism and state-church separation in Idaho.
Defending the Wall - Raul
Gallegos. For his successful defense
of the separation of state and church
in El Paso, Texas.

Humorist Mike Page

tation. He confessed later, however,
that it is not easy to box with a
marshmallow.
At this time we thought everyone would like a little humor and
Mike Page of Fade To Black magazine had us all laughing at his spoofing of Christian right-wing organizations' desires to protect the "welfare
of our children."
After the day's presentations, the evening
was set aside for the
annual member's dinner
and . awards banquet.
Our speakers joined us
for the dinner and we
presented the following
persons with their muchdeserved awards.
Atheist of the Year
- Jim Senyszyn.
In

Ellen & Jim Senyszyn

Distinguished Service - CarlEric Boberg. In recognition of his
outstanding work as editor of the
American Atheist Newsletter.
Certificate of Appreciation Lance Wilhelm. In recognition of
his many hours of volunteer work at
the American Atheist Center.
First Amendment
Award Mike Suetkamp. For the successful
removal of the Ten Commandments
tablet from Elkhart, Indiana City
Hall property.
Lifetime of Service Award Richard
Andrews
and Chris
Allen. In recognition of their
decades of work on behalf of
American Atheists and state-church
separation.

1~;~;;I=:~~~~!!~~~:~=t
Ron Barrier pondering his next rebuttal
to Ray Comfort
Parsippany, New Jersey

recognition
his outstanding andofcontinuous
dedication to the need for
protest in America on
behalf of state-church
Summer 2001

Page 5

Dave Silverman, Carl-Eric Boberg, and Liz Burcin between speakers

Certificate of Recognition Dave Kong. For organizing the
first-ever protest by Atheists of the
Democratic National Convention.
Certificate of Recognition Dave Silverman. For organizing
the first-ever protest by Atheists of
the Republican National Convention.
Pioneer Atheist Award - Paul
Marsa. In recognition of his many
years of activism with American
Atheists.
Best Letter to the Editor Steven Neubauer.
First Annual
Scholarship
Recipient - Alex Wellerstein.
Early on Saturday morning, the
Military Association of Atheists and
Freethinkers held their annual
meeting with Jim Heldberg filling
in for Kathleen Johnson to lead
the meeting. The first speaker of the
day was Jordan Riak who discussed the widespread abuse of children with corporal punishment,
which is often religion-based.
In a continuing effort to inform
American Atheists of the state of
Atheist groups around the world, we
invited representatives from The
French Freethought group La Libre
Pensee to the convention. Roger
LePeix,
National
Chairman,
Christian Eyschen, and Claude
Singer spoke about their efforts in
Europe.
Next Philip Stahl spoke on the
title of his new book, The Atheist's
Handbook to Modern Materialism.
Page6

Then, William Smith, Director of

Policy for SIECUS, (Sexuality
Information and Education Council
of the United States) discussed federal support of abstinence-onlyuntil-marriage education: putting
religiosity
and
hyper-moralism
above sound public health policies.

Frank Zindler
more as Jim Strayer talked about
"Creating a Creationist," and how
Christian schools use textbooks that
teach that the "science" presented in
the Bible is accurate.
The evening's events included a
dinner for our Life Members and
Legacy members. Legacy members
are those individuals who have been
members of American Atheists for
fifteen years or more. Directors and
officers of American Atheists also
took part.
Afterwards there was a showing
of the new film Blasphemy which
was open to all. The movie's writer-

William Smith
Frank Zindler gave a talk on
"The Jesus The Jews Never Knew,"
the title of his new book to be published this summer. Careful examination of Jewish writings from the
first several centuries CE turns up
no evidence whatsoever implying
that Jesus was an historical figure.
Arlo J. Pignotti gave us more
than a few laughs with a presentation of some of his religious "collectibles" - such as the blood of Jesus
in a spray can and The Bible For
Dummies book. But there was still
Summer 2001

Arlo J. Pignotti delights the

crowd with his presentation
of religious kitsch.

American Atheist

Blasphemy direc.tor John

Mendoza and actor
Carlos Leon.

State Director's meeting presided over

by Neal Cary

tAding
Aneitts'

director John Mendoza and lead

actor Carlos Leon were there to
talk about the movie and autograph
Blasphemy movie posters. We thank
them for their appearance there.
For those persons staying in
Orlando on Sunday there were still
more activities. The day began with
a members business meeting and
then a meeting of our state directors.
A leisurely poolside brunch followed
as conventioneers enjoyed the sunshine and conversation in the beautiful Florida spring weather.
During the afternoon hours
everyone was invited to learn more
about Atheist activism at a workshop on that subject, conducted by
The Trammell Group, a national
public affairs and government
resource group.
The convention came off without
a hitch - thanks to the help of many
volunteers. Special thanks to Greg
McDowell, Ed Gauci, Conrad
Goeringer, Ron Barrier, Joe Zamecki,
Jodi Greene, Denise McDowell,
Frank and Ann Zindler, Henry
Morgan, Dick Hogan and Karla
Lowe. I hope I haven't left anyone
out.
Next year's convention will be in
Boston, Massachusetts.
See you
there!

Parsippany, New Jersey

Our speakers from France: (left to right) Roger LePeix,

Claude Singer, Christian Eyschen

Ellen Johnson, Ron Barrier, and Ray Comfort

Summer 2001

Page 7

IN MEMORIAM
The Murray-O'Hair Family

Conrad Goeringer
On Thursday evening, 12 April 2001
(the evening before theopening of the
27th
National
Convention
of
American Atheists), a lengthy memorial ceremony was held in memory of
Madalyn
Murray
O'Hair, Jon
Murray, and Robin Murray-O'HairAmerican Atheists leaders who had
been brutally murdered in September
of 1995. During that ceremony,
Conrad Goeringer delivered the
following eulogy.
its said that events such as this
are not for the dead, but for the
living; so in that spirit, I want to
say a few things about the MurrayO'Hairs, and about us. There are lessons to be learned here - in how
these people lived, how they died,
and the journey we all take together.
Not everyone liked Madalyn
O'Hair, or the rest of the family for
that matter. Some worshipped her. It
was a dubious gift of nature that
Madalyn especially had that rare
quality of bringing forth in others
the extremes of human temperament. The strength that sustained
her through nearly four decades of
philosophical and political activism,
not only as a social rebel, but as a
woman fighting to be heard, brought
equally heavy liabilities.
Her fight took place in the midst
of dramatic change on the American
landscape. When she took up the
challenge of defending the separation of church and state, she did so
with two strikes against her - she
was both an Atheist and a woman.
She would never hear the end of it.
I think some of those qualities
were passed on to her offspring.

Page 8

Robin Murray-O'Hair was also a

woman - defiant, and fighting to be
heard. In 1988, she went to jail for
refusing to swear a religious oath in
order to serve on a jury. Jon Garth
Murray demonstrated a comparable
mettle, such as when he testified in
front of a congressional subcommittee, and proudly announced his position as an Atheist and a state-church
separationist. How many of their
critics would even come close measured by such a standard?
I certainly don't come here
tonight to elevate these people to
secular godhood, or place them on a
pedestal. Atheists don't need gods of
any sort, and we should also beware
the tendency to fabricate heroes. The
O'Hairs didn't want that anyway.
They didn't want to be heroes, they
wanted to be winners. Madalyn
O'Hair often remarked that when
she died, she wanted Jon, and Robin,
and the rest of us "back in the office"
the very next day. It's the ideas and
principles that are important, she
said, not the personalities.
Organize. Go on with your lives,
and get on with the fight.
I suspect that the O'Hairs would
want us to learn from their successes and victories, as well as their failures and mistakes ... and there were
plenty of both: For the past five
years, we've tried to do that.
One lesson, for me anyway, is
about understanding and compassion. Before we put anyone up on a
pedestal, or cast them down into a
pit with their shortcoming and failures, perhaps we need to look at ourselves. Plenty of people may not have
liked the O'Hairs; but those who pronounced them guilty of even more
heinous crimes after they disappeared spoke too soon. They decided,
Summer 2001

without evidence, too quickly. They

rushed to judgment.
We should judge, when possible,
only on the basis of facts, not prejudices. We should temper those judgments with compassion, and realize
that life's roads are often painful and
difficult, even for those with whom
we might disagree. Sheer common
humanity demands of us that we
abhor and resist the violent fate
these three people met - not just for
them, but for anyone.
Another lesson is to give credit
where it is due. It saddens me when
I hear those motivated perhaps by
envy and bitterness, minimize the
role of Madalyn O'Hair in helping to
end coerced prayer and Bible-verse
recitation in the public schools. True,
had she not filed suit, someone else likely a Christian - would have, and
in fact did. But she did file suit, and
did so as an Atheist. And one can
turn that argument around: if a
Christian didn't file suit to defend
the First Amendment, well, sooner or
later an Atheist would have. That
suit, along with the others from the
1960s, took guts, persistence and
dedication. The O'Hair critics who
might have found her style abrasive
and confrontational may be right
about some things. At least, though,
let them acknowledge the legal and
historical truth.
Pioneers of any sort, those who
explore a new geography or call us to
a new political terrain, are often a
different sort of person. They are
restless with their ideas, often irascible in their temperament. Study the
history of any social cause movement, and you find the same qualities in its activists. Their faults are
strong and pronounced, but so are
their strengths and virtues. Madalyn
American Atheist

was like this. She lived broad and

deep and intense. It was a full life by
many measures. Perhaps the greatest part of this tragedy was that Jon
and Robin were snuffed out as they
entered that great part of their lives,
so filled with possibilities.
Madalyn was a rebel, an
American original. Which is why, I
learned in conversation with her
many years ago, she liked a guy
named Joe Hill. Joe was a "Wobbly,"
a labor organizer in the early part of
the last century, who wrote songs
like "The Rebel Girl," and "The
Preacher and the Slave." He was
arrested for a murder he probably
didn't commit. He didn't ask for
clemency; he maintained his innocence to the end - likely to protect a
married woman he had fallen in love
with. And there's a song that
Madalyn knew and liked, and I think
that while it's called "The Ballad of

Ellen Johnson
The president's address presented to
the 27th National
Convention of
American Atheists in Orlando, Florida,
Friday, 13April 2001.
hank you Greg. Good morning
everyone and welcome to the
27th annual national convention
ofAmerican Atheists!
I want to thank Greg McDowellfor
giving very generously of his time over
the past year to help us put this event
together. We are very grateful for that,
and he's done a wonderful job. Thank
you Greg. And I want to thank all of
you for being here today. It is very
gratifying and encouraging for those of
us who work for the organization to
see and meet all of you and spend this
weekend with our fellow Atheists. It
does us a lot of good being around so
many like-minded people. This is a
wonderful turnout!
I thought I would begin my talk by
sharing with you some of the religious

Joe Hill," it reminds me a lot of her,

and it speaks to the tenacity of her
ideas and principles. She didn't die a
"martyr," and she probably would be
repulsed by the term. But she
admired Joe Hill, and loved the
"Ballad" because both exemplified a
commitment to ideas and action. She
especially loved the defiant spirit in
its verses, one of which comes from
one of the last bits of correspondence
between Joe Hill and another titan
of the union movement, Big Bill
Haywood, where Joe says "Don't
mourn for me - organize!" I want to
close with some verses from "The
Ballad of Joe Hill." The words go like
this ...

Joe Hill ain't dead he says to me,

Joe Hill ain't never died;
Where working men are out on strike,
Joe Hill is at their side,
Joe Hill is at their side.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

Alive as you or me:
Said I, but Joe you're ten years dead;
I never died said he.
I never died said he.

And standing there as big as life

A-smiling with his eyes,
Said Joe, what they forgot to kill
Went on to organize,
Went on to organize!

mail I get: "Someday....you're all going

to literally wake up dead and realize
you're wrong..."

Answer: The SAME place you will

spend it if you are RIGHT! (better
stock up on ice and cool drinks)"
"What if you are wrong and there
is a God?What do you intend to do in
your eternal damnation? I would
rather believe and die hoping for my
next life, then [sic] not believe and perish forever. Just a deep thought for
you."
"I really hope and pray for you. I
think that you are all sick. I know in
the bible [sic] it says not to judge, but
you are sick. I only hope that you wake
up."
''Your organization is not going to
last much longer. You see, GOD is
going to bring you down...Your rebellion will be permitted for a short time,
however, GOD will be glorified after
HE brings you down. You are Satan's
puppets and the strings are going to be
cut soon. For the HOLY spirit is in
your meetings and secret places."
"Say, would you guys and gals
know how I could e-mail women in the
Middle East? I think this would be

Parsippany,NewJersey

"Why do you guys not believe in

God? Do you ever catch yourself wanting to pray to him?"
"If you are wrong (and you are)
where will you spend eternity?
Summer 2001

In Salt Lake, Joe, Great God, said I,

Him standing by my bed;
They framed you on a murder charge,
Said Joe, but I ain't dead;
Said Joe, but I ain't dead.
The copper bosses framed you Joe
They shot you Joe said I;
Takes more than guns to kill a man,
Said Joe, I did not die.
Said Joe, I did not die.

Page 9

interesting and maybe even sexy.

Please e-mail me soon."
"Work like yours is one of the reasons this once great nation has become
a cesspool... I won't go on as I know I'm
wasting my time but I just wish to
say... I hope God allows me to be the
one to cast YOU into the "lake of fire".
At the same time, God loves you, I too
love you and will try to forgive you."
"Our church is interested in knowing a telecommunications telephone
giant that we may discuss a deal to
rent space for a cellular phone tower."
"We are building a church for the
community and the youth and we need
all the funds that we can get. If you can
do that thank you for being a blessing.
May god bless you."
Heavy Breathing In Washington
My talk is supposed to be about
"Atheist Heroes," but because of recent
developments out of Washington I
decided to revise it and focus on the
political situation that we find ourselves in vis-a-vis religion in America,
and how I think we need to address
that situation.
The mail I just read to you reflects
the comical side of religion. The not-socomical side is that the Bush Administration now wants government funding of church maintenance.
John
DiIulio, the Director of the White
House Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, is asking for taxpayer money to
be used to pay for church repairs. It is
not unconstitutional,
he maintains,
because it is "compassionate" - after
all the churches provide social services. So, if we are now going to pay them
to provide social services through the
Faith-Based Initiative, then we had
better make sure that their buildings
are big enough and in good condition.
And it's only a matter of time
before they get that funding. After all,
we have already begun to fund religious schools in the form of vouchers.
The Milwaukee
experiment
with
vouchers is still in existence. Some
Experiment! They have been experimenting with it for ten years now! We
now provide computers, teachers, textbooks, nurses, remedial programs and
busing to religious schools, so there is
no question in my mind that we will be
fully funding religious schools and pay-

Page 10

ing for church maintenance

and
expansion in the near future as well.
How far has religion crossed the
line separating church and state and
how did it get that way?
One of the important reasons why
our Founding
Fathers
wrote the
Establishment
Clause
is because
Christians do not respect the rights of
others. A clause had to be included in
our United States Constitution
to
make sure that religious folks don't
trample over your rights, because they
are unable and unwilling to do it on
their own. The Christian majority in
America cannot be trusted to NOT
push their religion down our throats to them the Constitution is a hindrance. For instance, in Minnesota last
year, under Republican control, the
opening legislative prayers extended
to a choir opening the session with a
musical rendition
of the Apostle's
Creed. How did that happen?
The poor, beleaguered theists in
America have it so bad that, well, more
special-rights legislation is needed to
protect the Boy Scouts so they can continue to discriminate
against their
friends and classmates in the name of
Jesus. So Arizona lawmakers are considering new protections for nonprofit
organizations (the Boy Scouts) that
would keep local governments from
withholding public funding or access to
public facilities based on a groups'
beliefs. This, of course, will require government funding of groups that discriminate like the Scouts. How did this
happen?
Our politicians and judges have
become as deceitful and cowardly as
the Christian right wing. I refer to the
Christian religion because it is always
the Christians who try to shove their
religion on everyone else. We just don't
see this from the Hindus or Buddhists
or the Jews.
The religion clauses of the First
Amendment have been so distorted by
the courts that they are the basis upon
which more ridiculous rulings are
made. As long as the courts uphold the
religious phrase "In God We Trust" as a
constitutionally
permissible national
motto, then they cannot object when
the United States Congress issues a
resolution encouraging its display in
all of our public buildings. Liberal reli-

Summer 2001

gious groups that see nothing wrong

with having a religious phrase as our
national motto cannot now complain
when it is posted in our public buildings. The new attempts by the religious right-wing to get that motto posted everywhere is very clever, for how
could anyone say that our National
motto should not be allowed in our
public schools or buildings? If it is not
appropriate for the public schools, then
it is not appropriate as a motto either.
I am sorry, but I think the Christians
are right on this one. How did this happen?
It is okay for the government to
print "In God We Trust" on our money,
but the United States Court of Appeals
for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati
ruled last year that the state of Ohio
could not use the phrase "With God, All
Things Are Possible" on its official seal.
While we may like the decision, it is
the reasoning
that is bizarre. In
essence they said that references to a
particular religion are forbidden; but
general references to a god are not.
Imagine the claim that there is an
obvious distinction between ''With God
All things are possible" and "In God We
Trust"! Let's see if this little ditty from
the ruling clarifies it any: Ohio's slogan
is a quotation from the New Testament
(With God All Things Are Possible) and
is therefore
clearly Christian
and
unconstitutional.
"In God We Trust"
comes
from "The
Star-Spangled
Banner" by Francis Scott Key and is
not a reference to a specific faith and
so it is okay. Does that make you feel
better?
"In God We Trust" as a national
motto is a clear establishment of religion, and now the courts have to dance
around that fact as exemplified by that
beautiful two-step of the 6th Circuit.
Not one judge has the guts to say, hey
- if one is unconstitutional, so is the
other.
Unfortunately, an en bane panel of
that circuit has just decided last
month that the Ohio motto is now constitutional. How did this happen?
This intellectual
sellout of the
First Amendment
extends
to the
Congress as well, which passed the
"Religious Land Use And Institutionalized Persons Act," which was signed
into law by President Clinton. This leg-

American Atheist

islation was full of unconstitutional

special-rights provisions for religion,
but many politicians who acknowledged those problems, sacrificed their
integrity and the First Amendment to
vote for it "for appearance sake" and
figured that the US Supreme Court
would clean up their mess. They voted
for it knowing full well that it was
unconstitutional. Yet, people still want
to know what we Atheists can do to
clean up our image. How did this happen?
As an organization that works to
protect the civil rights of Atheists, our
goal is to have Atheism included in the
protections of the Federal Civil Rights
Act. That Act protects your right not to
be discriminated against on the basis
of race, national origin, sex, age, disability, or color. One of the greatest
indignities we face is that we cannot
make a claim that our civil rights have
been violated, since there is no category for us to bring the claim under. In
order to bring such a claim now you
have to say that your "religious" rights
have been violated. Really. When
author and Atheist Fred Whitehead
filed a discrimination complaint with
the Equal Employment Opportunity
Office, he could only file his complaint
based on religion. It was an employment-related issue, and Fred felt that
he was being denied a position because
of his commitment to and writings on
Atheism and freethought.
The upshot of this is that since he
had to file his complaint about his socalled "religious rights" being violated,
there is now one more complaint the
religious can use to claim that they are
discriminated against. A discrimination against an Atheist dissolves into a
discrimination against a religious person, and Atheists have no record of any
grievances committed against them by
the religious. How did this happen?
When I testified before the United
States Commission on Civil Rights and
told them that we had to be included in
the Civil Rights Act as a protected
group of citizens, one commissioner
argued that the category of religion
covered Atheists because, discrimination against a person who holds religious beliefs is the same as discrimination against a person who holds
beliefs about religion. And the lunacy
continues.
Parsippany, New Jersey

Not only do we have to contend

with fighting the majority view in
America, the fraudulent
reasoning
from the courts, the lack of recognition
that we have rights, we have to deal
with the "Special Rights" given to the
religious as well. Representative Ed
Royce from California, who is a member of the House Banking Committee,
introduced "The Faith-Based Lending
Protection Act" last year that would
exempt credit unions serving non-profit religious organizations
from the
12.25 percent-of-assets cap on member
business loans. Representative Royce
said the measure would guarantee
that churches and other religious
groups would have plenty of financial
resources (read: your money) to carry
out their missions
of community
service.
Under the category of "chutzpah"
we can add legislation introduced by
Representative
John Hostettler CRIndiana) who submitted "The Public
Expression of Religion Act of 2001" to
exempt state officials from penalties or
financial damages if they are found
guilty of violating the First Amendment's Establishment Clause. This is a
green light for the government to continue to violate the separation of state
and church. Of course, no such legislation was introduced to protect those
officials who violate the free exercise
clause of the First Amendment. How
did this happen?
Last year Senator Trent Lott of
Mississippi was behind legislation that
would give special licensing rights to
religious broadcasters. Titled the ''Noncommercial Broadcasting Freedom of
Expression Act," the legislation would
change federal communications law to
give religious broadcasters virtually
unlimited access to noncommercial
educational radio and television stations that have traditionally been used
by universities and nonprofit educational organizations - as if there isn't
enough religious programming on teleVISIOnnow.
And in another move to grant special rights
to religious
groups,
attempts have been made to grant
them immunity from the legal claim of
wrongdoing. Since the 1980s the number of lawsuits
filed against the
churches for such things as brainwashing, sexual abuse, and wrongful death
Summer 2001

have skyrocketed. So once again, the

churches need to be sheltered from
those earthly laws that apply to the
rest of society. So churches in Colorado
have banded together to form the
Colorado Religious Coalition. The
group says that punitive
damage
awards, often in the millions of dollars,
threaten to bankrupt religious groups.
(Well sorry, but doesn't their god provide?) Republican State Senator John
Evans last year sponsored legislation
that would have shielded churches
from legal actions under the fiduciaryduty law. Again, how did this happen?
One of the more egregious abuses
of our government has come into office
with the Bush administration. No surprise there.
President Bush's Executive Orders
creating a White House Office of FaithBased and Community
Initiatives
invites religious groups to compete for
government money to operate social
welfare programs. Such groups would
be allowed to "maintain their religious
character" - in other words proselytize.
American Atheists has been sounding
the alarm over this issue for years,
beginning with the 1996 "Charitable
Choice" provision
of the Welfare
Reform Act. This program is tantamount to levying a "Tax for Religion"
on the American Welfare Reform Act.
This program is tantamount to levying
a "Religion Tax" on the American people. It compels millions of Americans
who are Atheists to open their wallets
to groups that engage in blatant proselytizing.
Secular programs already exist to
handle these outreaches. The only
thing that religious groups would do
differently is administer religion, in
various ways, along with services. Of
course, gods will be given credit for the
services administered, not the taxpayers who fund them.
I must say that I am pleased when
religions employ "Atheism" to help
America's needy. Feeding the hungry,
sheltering the homeless, giving medical treatment to the sick and injured
is the philosophy of Atheism. Praying,
preaching, reading holy books, converting, engaging in religious rituals, or
invoking the aid of the "spirit world,"
does not solve those problems and does
not deserve the aid of government. If
Americans want theology they should
Page 11

Atheists eagerly awaiting the premiere of Blasphemy

go to their local houses of worship. And
there is the crux of the matter. Because
of "empty pew syndrome" and stagnation in the ranks of many denominations, the religious are begging the
government to fund them and keep
them going. Without the support of
government, many religions would
begin to crumble. They have always
turned to government to promote their
cause. Governor Bush's proclamation
of "Jesus Day" in Texas, or the posting
of religious documents like the Ten
Commandments, in public buildings
are good examples.
So are the
demands that taxpayers support religious schools, which are simply extensions of churches
Bush's claims that proselytizing
won't occur is hollow, because there are
no provisions for enforcement. All he is
asking for is a "promise" to behave; a
promise religious groups have historically failed to keep. To give an example, recent court documents, from a
case from George W. Bush's state of
Texas involving a job training program
administered by a coalition of neighborhood churches, reveals that clients
were pressured to change their views
about religious faith and that the program included Bible study and other
religious materials.
Many of the claims being made
about the efficacy and cost-efficiency of
these programs are self-serving. There
is little or no outside monitoring to
confirm alleged success rates. In
Texas, under Governor Bush, religious
ministries and faith-based programs
Page 12

have become the rage in the state's

prison system. Claims of rehabilitation
rates and other alleged successes for
similar programs are made without
the benefit ofthird-party confirmation.
Also, general studies that claim high
rates of success for faith-based programs are often based heavily on anecdotal evidence, and those who make
these claims simply cite each other as
sources of confirmation, rather than
good, raw data.
The necessary government supervision of religious programs would of
course add to the cost of these programs, negating any claims of cost efficiency. Bush and other supporters of
the new Faith-based initiatives speak
of creating a "level playing field"
between
secular
and
religious
providers, but religious organizations
can only be compared to government
and secular organizations when they
both operate under the same rules which they don't. Religious groups are
exempt from anti-discrimination laws;
they may use a religious litmus test in
hiring and other policies, something
secular groups receiving government
money cannot do. They are also exempt
from any government regulations, and
they do not need to report back to us
on how they spend our money. But success of these programs is not the issue:
even if successful, American Atheists
would still oppose giving money to
religious organizations
on constitutional grounds.
I also fear giving more financial
support to Catholic institutions whose
Summer 2001

clergy have abused and molested

America's children for generations and
whose hierarchy engages in cover-ups.
If Catholic institutions have to take
out insurance policies against sexual
misconduct and have to require background checks for priests, do we really
want to give them our money to have
more access to our children and vulnerable citizens? Definitely not!
While American Atheists is not
established to provide social services,
we support the time-tested secular
institutions that abide by civil rights
laws, government regulations on building, health and safety, are financially
accountable to the American people
and employ modern, effective methods
of care and services.
The single thing. that "Christians"
hate more than an "uppity" Atheist is
competition with their beliefs. They
hate having to compete with other religions as much as with Atheistic ideas.
They created the concept of "Equal
Access," but they will do everything
possible to keep from extending it to
others. For example, the Altoona,
Pennsylvania School District had a
display with the Ten Commandments
in it, and they realized that to be fair
they had to open the displays (in all
the districts 13 schools) to other documents. When they ended up having to
put up displays for Wiccans, gays, and
Atheists they did so, but then decided
that they should review the policy for
the following year. Utah decided to
eliminate all school clubs before they
would be forced to allow a gay-straight
American Atheist

alliance club in the school. Senator

Orrin Hatch said that the Equal
Access Act wasn't intended "for those
kinds of clubs."
A proclamation from the mayor of
Asheville, North Carolina, extolling
pagan religions irked the Reverend
Jim Dykes, who asked the mayor to
take back her proclamation and designate one week in recognition of Jesus.
Some residents wanted her to rescind
the proclamation altogether and declare
instead "Lordship of Jesus Christ
Week."
Even the military is involved in
this issue. Christian,
Jewish and
Muslim groups are allowed to hold
meetings on military bases, but when
news that the military was giving
equal access to Wiccans, a coalition of
religious conservatives called upon
Christians to boycott the US Army calling the meetings, "A direct assault
on the Christian faith that generations
of American soldiers have fought and
died for."
Congressman Bob Barr of Florida
stated that the presence of witches at a
military base would affect national
security and combat readiness, and
referred to unspecified "detrimental
effects on our society." That old saw
has been said about gays and blacks as
well.
In the Congress itself a major conservative group complained that an
invitation to a Hindu priest to give the
prayer at the opening of a House session is another indication of the nation
drifting from its Judeo-Christian roots.
The Family Research
Council, a
Christian organization said that, "Our
founders expected that Christianity
and no other religion would receive
support from the government as long
as that support did not violate peoples'
consciences and their right to worship." Actually, I'm waiting for the
Santerians to ask to sacrifice a chicken
or the Rastafarians to light up a joint
before the opening session of Congress.
My favorite example ofthe lengths
to which Christians will go to avoid
giving any other ideas equal access
comes from our Internet Representative Larry Mundinger. A few years ago
he related the following story: "Several
years ago, when my youngest son was
in high school, he was amused by the
SYATP demonstration in front of the
Parsippany, New Jersey

school. He convinced a number of his

friends to stage a mock "Druid" ceremony around a tree in front of the
school. The next morning people dropping off their children saw a group of
students dancing about and worshipping the tree. Before it all died down in
a couple of days, some of the fanatical
fundies were organizing to petition the
school board to have the tree cut
down!" They can dish it out, but boy
they sure can't take it.
I first demanded "equal access" for
Atheism in 1993 when I was the
Northeast
Regional
Director
for
American Atheists. The issue involved
a display of a creche and menorah on
public property in the town of Wyckoff,
New Jersey. Someone had questioned
the constitutionality of the display. It
was clearly an "establishment of religion." The town had to come up with
some other excuse to maintain it, and
they came up with the concept of the
"public forum." The property in front of
the municipal building was simply a
"public forum." Oh, really, I thought.
Okay, if it's a public forum then I
would like to erect a display for
Atheists. Well they tried everything
they could to stop me but - hey - it was
their idea, and what could they say
now? The sign was about six feet by six
feet. It had a big yellow sun in the middle with the words "Solstice Is The
Reason For The Season." Imagine this
right next to a Christian creche. Of
course, they like to proclaim that
"Jesus Is The Reason For The Season."
The bottom of the sign had the date
and exact time of the Solstice and the
words American Atheists with our
address. The town tried to get me to
make the words "smaller" saying that
people driving by might have an accident trying to read the words! I think
they were more worried that accidents
would occur if they saw the word
"Atheist" next to the creche. Of course,
I argued back that making the words
smaller would cause passersby to look
longer and harder to read the words
and be more of a traffic hazard.
Anyway, I didn't let them alter my sign.
So my beautiful $500 sign went up
right next to the creche and menorah
and then my sign came down. It was
stolen after one day. But the town did
decide that the following year it would
discontinue the "public forum." So I
Summer 2001

think that Atheists should ask for

equal time for the following reasons.
First, it doesn't violate the constitution
to erect an Atheist sign because the
constitution says Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of
religion - not Atheism. Second, oftentimes the public entity will remove all
displays, or cease all activities in question in order to see that any "Atheist"
ideas not be expressed. It is an indirect
way to stop a constitutional violation.
Third, even if the religious display or
activity is not stopped - our message
gets a lot of publicity in the media and
in the display or action, and that is
great. Fourth, it is not as costly as a
lawsuit, and it doesn't risk losing a
case and being stuck with a bad legal
precedent.
It must be remembered that it is
not our position that an unconstitutional display or activity is acceptable
as long as we have equal access. No. It
is our contention that the unconstitutional action should cease, but when
the courts rule in favor of the religious
activity then we have to try a new tactic.
So, you can see there is no shortage of civil rights and state-church
separation issues for Atheists to tackle. The American Atheists organization
does not involve itself in such ancillary
issues as race, AIDS, the drug war,
abortion rights or the environment
unless there is a direct state-church
separation component to it. There are
some freethought groups that do take
on these issues and one of them went
so far as to file a lawsuit on behalf of a
Christian pastor who claimed that a
Wisconsin
program
called
the
Community Marriage Policy Project
was an unconstitutional interference
with his religious practice. Are there so
few Christian lawyers and Christian
legal foundations that a freethought
group has to use its time and resources
to defend the clergy? Would a
Christian group take a case defending
an Atheist's civil rights? The point is
that we are committed to working for
Atheists' rights and not the free-exercise rights of theists.
This particular organization I just
referred to claims that it is not "antireligion" - to use their own words. Well
I am anti-religion. Just as I am antiracism, and anti-sexism, I am also
anti-theism. I do think that this world
Page 13

would be a better place without the

junk ideas of theology.
So, how did all of this happen? It's
simple: we didn't vote the bastards out
of office. It is time to stop pointing the
finger at them and time to stop expecting them to do the right thing. They
aren't going to do the right thing. All of
us parents know that when young children don't stop or can't stop playing
with harmful things you have to
remove them from those objects. It is
time to remove these politicians from
playing dangerously with our rights.
If we don't like the theopolitics of
the White House and Capitol Hill then
we have to vote these politicians out of
office. Let's send them packing. They
aren't going to change - so we had better change. We need to put them on
notice that Atheists in America are
going to back those politicians that
support us and those that don't are
history. To do this we need a political
action committee; we need to register
voters, and we need to endorse political candidates.
There are 27 million Americans
who are "Atheists" or are described in
polls as non-religious. In fact the
January 1995 issue of Time magazine
puts the figure of "non-religious" at
18.5%. No politician should ignore that
large a segment of the population, but
they do - because they don't hear from
us. I invited John DiIulio to speak to
all of you this weekend and I didn't
even get a reply. John DiIulio can't
hear you. The Bush White House can't
hear you. It's time that they heard
from us. It's time we let Mr. DiIulio
know that we don't like being treated
this way.
If I could mobilize just a fraction of
the number of Atheists that are in
America, we would be on our way to
where we want to be.
The only way to have influence
where it is needed most is either with
money or with numbers of people and I'll take either. Ideally you need
both. Unfortunately, Atheists are notorious for withholding
both. Think
about it, how much money have you
donated to this cause? How much time
have you given as well? I am not trying
to put you on the spot. If you have not
done much of either - well then you
are like most Atheists. Atheists would
rather talk about issues and gripe
Page 14

about Pat Robertson than get active.

And yet, activism is sooo eeeasy. It is
soooo eeeasy.
Signing
petitions.
Making phone calls to your representatives.
Calling the White House. Going to
a protest. Standing in one place holding a sign. How easy is all that? You
can give a donation to an activist
organization like American Atheists or
you can let George Bush give your
money to a church to administer
social-welfare programs. That sucking
sound you hear, my friends, is the
sound of your money being funneled
into the coffers of the religious by our
government.
Not only is it important to contact
politicians with whom we disagree, we
need to support those few that support
our issues - like Melvin Watt, Rush
Holt, John Conyers, Jesse Ventura, and
Bobby Scott of Virginia. Bobby Scott,
Democrat from Virginia was the lone
dissenter of the resolution "Expressing
the sense of the Congress regarding
the national motto for the government
of a religious people." This resolution
which was passed by Congress encouraged the display of the motto "In God
We Trust" in public buildings.
New Jersey Congressman Rush
Holt deserves our support because he
is on our side and has given Dave
Silverman our NJ State Director a 45minute meeting as well as coming to
speak at a NJ brunch. He is absolutely
opposed to faith-based initiatives.
When the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to affirm
its support for the Vatican's unique
"observer"
status
at the United
Nations, one man stood in defense of
the separation of state and church.
Democratic Representative Pete Stark
of California voted against the measure, stating that it "may very well be
unconstitutional" and that it violated
the First Amendment's separation of
church
and
state."
Stark
is a
Unitarian. American Atheists set up
an on-line letter writing campaign to
thank Representative Stark.
We did the same when Minnesota
Governor Jesse Ventura continued to
refuse to issue an official proclamation
to recognize May 4 as the National
Day of Prayer. He said that it was an
insult to "freethinking"
Americans
everywhere.
Summer 2001

So the question I have to ask all of

you today is: Do you have the political
will to make your Atheist vote count?
Will you stand with us on this? Can we
pull together and put the politicians on
notice that we will vote them out of
office? I want to know what you think.
The politicians need to hear that
this organization
champions those
politicians that support us. They know
there are millions of Atheists
in
America and now they need to hear us
asking them to vote their Atheism.
We are working to encourage all of
you to communicate
your Atheist
points of view to your elected representatives. This is why we have letterwriting campaigns in our monthly
newsletter and on our Web-site; and
you seem to like that very much.
We are also working hard to make
Atheists a visible force in America
from San Francisco to New York City.
We are taking to the streets in protest
or support, depending on the issue. On
January 29, we protested in Washington, DC, at the presidential inauguration. At issue were the many proposals
by the Bush administration for such
things as voucher money for religious
schools, faith-based initiatives and the
then nomination
of Senator John
Ashcroft for Attorney General.
Our protesters came from as far
away as Indiana,
Illinois, Rhode
Island, North Carolina, New Jersey
and Pennsylvania to join together in
the cold and rain - to make a public
stance for their rights.
So the question I have to ask all of
you today is: Do you have the political
will to make your Atheist vote count?
Will you stand with us on this? Can we
pull together and put the politicians on
notice that we will vote them out of
office? I want to know what you think.
We need to focus on our issues and
vote those issues at the ballot box. If
environmental groups can warn that
George W. Bush's environmental policies could cost his party their votes in
the next election and get the attention
of the White House, then why aren't
we doing the same? When it comes to
the National Rifle Association, their
supporters look at candidates' stands
on gun issues and that is how they
vote. They don't go beyond that to
other issues. Like it or not, I think we
have to start doing the same.
American Atheist

The beauty of this idea is that

there are so many Atheists in America
who can make this feasible. Granted,
your politics are not alike. Some of you
would never consider voting Green or
Libertarian; but unless we change our
tactics we can expect more erosion of
our rights. I have already received correspondence from some of you reflecting this need. Joseph Lieberman's wallowing in religiosity turned off many
Democratic Atheists. Some wrote to
me saying that they went over to the
Green Party because of it.
We are building a grass-roots
movement of Atheists across America
to make the Atheist voice part of the
American cultural and political dialogue. But before we can move ahead
as an organized group, we need to convince our fellow Atheists that it's time
to be proud of their Atheism.
Last February we held a regional
Atheist meeting in Phoenix and a
member of the local humanist group
there said to me, "You know Ellen, the
problem with the name Atheist is that
it implies that we are just 'against'
things." Are we just against things?
Our speakers at the RAMTMtalked
about saving children's lives from
faith-healers, spoke about the real science of cosmology, and defending the
Constitution
of the United States.
When did these things become negative? Answer - when we let the religious right wing say that it does.
The single overriding reason why
other organizations
shun the word
Atheist is to please religionists. That is
the reason. The religionist doesn't like
the word Atheist. The religionist
thinks it's negative, harsh, and offensive. So, many Atheists have decided to
please the adversary instead of doing
what they should be doing, and now
unfortunately, Atheists are influenced
by religious "shaming" techniques. The
religionists motives are clear - to keep
the word Atheist from being heard. The
less people hear it, the less they have
to worry that others might embrace it.
It's an idea that they just cannot compete with because it empowers people.
We at American Atheists do not let our
adversary dictate to us what we call
ourselves. WE determine what we will
call ourselves, and if they don't like our
name - too bad. Would blacks allow the
whites to determine what they are
Parsippany, New Jersey

called? Heck, they'd still be called colored if they did. An old Chinese
proverb is "One of the first steps to
truth is to call things by their rightful
names."
I
remember
hearing
Robin
Murray-O'Hair
at an Atheist pride
march in Texas one year, and she
addressed this issue. I am paraphrasing here but she said, If you ask an
Atheist if they think that the supernatural exists, they will answer in the
"negative." If you ask an Atheist if we
should pray instead of solve problems
they will say "negative." If you ask an
Atheist if churches should be built
instead of schools, they will say "negative." You get the idea. Is Greenpeace
called a negative organization? No. Is
the American Association of Retired
Persons called a negative organization? No. Is Judicial Watch negative, No.
My humanist friend has decided
that he will agree with the religious
and adjust his name accordingly. This
is wrong.
We call ourselves that which we
are most proud of - our name - Atheists. We do not call ourselves Humanists, Secular-Humanists,
Agnostics,
Religious- Humanists,
Religion-Free,
Rationalists,
non-theists,
non-religious, Secularists, Realists, or Skeptics. Skeptic. I've always wondered
about that name because I am not
skeptical about the claims of things
like alien abduction, psychic healing,
pyramid power or dowsing: I know it's
crap. That is why I call myself an
Atheist.
At American Atheists we don't
allow our adversaries to dictate what
we call ourselves nor do we allow them
to dictate our actions. The theist does
not want you to organize for your
rights either - that is, to be "activists."
To keep you off balance they have you
instead spending your time trying to
"prove" that you are a good person.
This in turn gives legitimacy to their
claim that you aren't a decent, ethical,
and patriotic American. They have
taken control of the discussion and we
must take it back.
Oklahoma
Governor
Frank
Keating asked the citizens of his state
to join him in summoning the rain
gods last year, declaring a day of
prayer for rain - and we have to clean
up our image?
Summer 2001

We at American Atheists will not

be distracted by these bigoted claims.
We will not waste our time trying to
prove their bigoted ideas. We have
issues to address, challenges to face,
and goals to meet. We are not going to
get side-tracked with peripheral nonsense. WE determine our agenda and
our name, not the theist.
Organizing blood drives, promoting organ donations, cleaning the highways and being abortion clinic escorts
to get public approval isn't going to get
you liked by the theist. We could wash
the streets on our hands and knees,
but if we do not submit ourselves to,
and turn our lives over to the mythical
Jesus, they aren't going to like us. That
is it. There is no middle ground.
And remember, doing a good deed
to get approval is wrong. That is what
theists do. They do good deeds because
they think a god told them to. The
Atheist does good things because it is a
good thing to do, because that is how
we make the world a better place in
which to live. So please remember, the
only person you have to prove something to is yourself.
Along with voting our way into
power, if we want freedom from religion we will have to work for it and
that means "activism." If you don't like
sitting in the back of the proverbial
bus, you have to "get up" in order to get
to the front. You cannot "ask" for your
rights. You have to "demand" them.
With those of you who have been willing to come forward and help out we
have, in the past, five years, picketed
the religious right-wing, patriarchal
organization known as the Promise
Keepers in California, Washington DC,
Arizona, Michigan, and New Jersey.
We have picketed the Pope in New
York City and St. Louis, Missouri. We
are litigating in San Francisco to bring
down the 103 foot cross on public property there and expect to win.
We have filed a lawsuit to challenge federal statutes
that create
unique Medicaid and Medicare benefits for religious institutions, including
Christian Science faith-healing Sanitoria. The Christian Science sect operates 23 nonprofit centers across the
country that claim to treat physical
maladies with prayer and spirituality.
The approach is based on the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy who founded
Page 15

the First Church of Christ, Scientist in

Boston in 1879. Eddy preached that
physical illness stemmed from false
thinking and could only be cured by
religious rituals and divine intervention. The centers receive about $7.5
million per year in federal funding to
do nothing to help the sick.
We have lobbied hard against the
Religious Freedom Amendment and
the Religious Liberty Protection Act. I
have personally delivered thousands of
petitions opposing the RFA from our
members and supporters
to every
Senator in Washington, DC.
Our state directors in New Jersey
and California organized the first-ever
protests of the national Democratic
and Republican Party Conventions
because of the positions of those
party's candidates in respect to statechurch separation issues. Our members in Texas and Redding and San
Jose, California protested government
sponsored "Days of Prayer." Again, in
California they protested in support of
our lawsuit against the illegal Mount
Davidson cross.
We challenged the religious displays in Massachusetts, Texas, and

Ohio by asking for equal time for

Atheists' Winter Solstice Displays.
We have instituted letter-writing
campaigns on issues like the Religious
Liberty Protection Act, and in support
of Fred Whitehead
and against
Senator Joseph Lieberman's calls for
more religion in the public arena.
We picketed the execution of Karla
Faye Tucker at Huntsville Prison, to
speak out against those like Pat
Robertson who called for a stay of execution for her because she was a fundamentalist Christian.
I testified before the United States
Commission on Civil Rights on the
subject of the "Unconstitutional Religious Expression
in the Public
Schools" when they held hearings on
"Religious Expression in the Public
Schools." Due to the extreme importance of this subject, we have produced
a document titled, "Atheists Rights
and Religious Expression
In The
Public Schools" which has been mailed
to our membership and will be sent to
every member of Congress. This document is the Atheists' response to the
various papers issued on this subject
by the Department of Education in the

Clinton administration as well as various religious and liberal religious

groups. None of their documents
addressed the extent to which Atheists
can express their Atheism in the public schools or how to protect their fundamental right to be free from unwanted religious proselytizing and intrusion. We are taking back control of this
issue and not leaving it to the government or the religious to tell us what
rights we have. We'll tell them how we
are going to exercise our rights in the
public schools - thank you very much.
We protested outside the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington
DC
because of that government's call for
the execution
of writer
Taslima
Nasreen because of her Atheistic writings. John Obst of Maryland actually
went inside the Embassy to talk to the
officials there.
These are only a partial list of our
actions on behalf of reason, Atheism
and state-church separation in America.
Our speakers today will be discussing some of these important issues
and others.
We are leading the way towards
building a new institution in America.

Some Atheist Heroes: Annual Convention of United Secularists

8 October 1952, in Los Angeles, California
Page 16

Summer 2001

of America,
American Atheist

I am proud to be the President of this

organization, and I will do my best to
keep our cause alive and our organization strong. I will be out on the picket
lines and on the airwaves talking
about the issues that concern us as
Atheists as long as I am needed, and I
will save a sign for you on the picket
lines.
In closing, I hope that if you are an
Atheist who wants to see our culture
progress out of primitive ideas, if you
are tired of our society trying to make
you feel like there is something wrong
with you because you have a rational
mind, that you will partner with us on
our mutual interests.
So finally a word about Atheist
heroes. I realize that there are many
worthy causes in America that deserve
our support, but how many Americans
will help with our cause? Who will
speak for the Atheist? You and I are
the only ones who can do it. There is no
shortage of people to help with femi-

nist, environmental,
cancer, AIDS,
poverty, education, illiteracy causes,
etc. There are plenty of folks who are
involved with these issues. Even the
United States government is their to
help with these causes. We can only
count on you to help. Fifty or one-hundred years from now Atheists will be
reading about you and your struggles
as Atheists in America. You determine
today what they will read about tomorrow.
Fifty years ago the brave men and
women of the United Secularists of
America, an associated corporation of
American Atheists, had a conference in
1952 and this photograph was taken of
them. They were pretty brave to do
that back then, and we don't even
know who these people were. Fifty
years from now when Atheists look at
pictures of this convention I want
them to know who you are. One way to
do that is to put your life histories on
video tape for our library and archives

as part of our Oral History Project.

Future generations of Atheists will
look back to what you have accomplished and think of you as their
heroes.
Let the women's groups, gay
groups, Jewish groups, and the Latino
groups have their celebrity spokespersons who give credence to their causes.
We don't have the celebrities, although
there are many celebrities who are
Atheists. They just don't have the
courage that you do. So many Atheists
are looking for celebrities to validate
their Atheism that there is a Web-site
listing the names of celebrity Atheists.
We don't need celebrity Atheists to validate our Atheism. As Jon Garth
Murray once wrote: "If you want an
Atheist hero, look in the mirror."
thank you once again for coming to
the convention and I look forward to
seeing you all next year at our convention in Boston, Massachusetts.
Thank you.

Ll

Ll

JESU5

5AVES

Parsippany, New Jersey

Summer 2001

Page 17

"ONE NATION
"
The Crusade to
Capture the
Atnerican Flag
By Whitney Smith, Ph.D.
A lecture given Friday, 13 April 2001,
at the 27th National Convention of
American Atheists in Orlando, Florida.
Dr. Smith is a flag consultant and editor of The Flag Bulletin. He has been
the Director of the Flag Research
Center since 1962. He is the designer of
the national flags of Guyana, Aruba,
and Bonaire, as well as the coat of arms
of St. Maarten and the flags of the
Royal Saudi Naval Forces.

the power of life and death which the

rulers demand over all citizens, on the
premise
that
they represent
an
ineluctable force of the universe.
When the Constitution
of the
newly formed United States was drafted in 1787, its provision that "no religious test shall ever be required as a
qualification to any office or public

ince earliest
times fetishes,
relics, icons, and other objects
believed to be imbued with
sacred power have provided the social
cohesion that guarantees the success
of a government, an army, a social system, and the country as a whole.
Understandably,
symbols associated
with those holy objects came to be
incorporated in the battle standards,
royal banners, and modern national
flags of countries in all parts of the
world. The tattoo of the Polynesian,
the amulet of the Ashanti, the scapular
of the European, the sanjak sharif of
the Afghani, and the Blood Banner of
the Nazis are all linked together in
essence and in function, if not in form.
Each is the embodiment of the highest
principles of a given society, justifying
Page 18

trust under the United States" therefore constituted one of the most revolutionary and far-reaching of its provisions. The exact opposite idea - namely that the fundamental qualification
for every public servant was defined by
his profession offaith in the state reliSummer 2001

gion - had always been, in practice if

not in law, the operating principle.
Even mere citizenship or participation
in the society depended on adherence
to the religious faith of the ruler.
The premise of this new secular
state was that domestic harmony could
be achieved by having the government
avoid either supporting or suppressing
religious sects, allowing each individual and each group to pursue Its own
vision of the "true faith" or to abjure
religious beliefs and practices entirely.
In this way truth would presumably
evolve from the free intercourse of
ideas, the most successful religions
being those capable of convincing others of the correctness of their tenets
and interpretations,
yet leaving the
unconvinced
to pursue their own
beliefs. In return the government was
to provide an even-handed administration of the whole society, free from the
fanatical attempt to promote belief
among unwilling converts which had
characterized so much of the past in
Europe and elsewhere. This principle
was embodied in the terse phrase in
the 1791 First Amendment to the US
Constitution stating that "Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof. .."

American Atheist

Americans
slowly established
myths about the meaning of their
country and of citizenship. Over time
the Stars and Stripes, the highest and
most widely beloved of its symbols,
came to be the embodiment and focus
of that Americanism. While the flag
was and is a statement about the
meaning, the origins, the future, and
the principles that Americans adhere
to, the adulation,
reverence,
and
respect associated with the flag has in
no way replaced or dimmed the religious fervor of American citizens.
Indeed among developed countries
today few match the United States in
the percentage of citizens who profess
an active religious belief and a faithbased lifestyle.
The importance of the flag to the
country has, however, meant that
many religious organizations and individuals have sought to co-opt the
meaning of the flag, to achieve in the
eyes of the entire citizenry an ineradicable association between the spirit
and meaning of the flag and the specific religious principles which they hold
dear. This sectarian campaign to "capture the flag" under the slogan "One
Nation Under God" forms the theme of
this presentation.
The first national flag of the
United States, the Continental Colors,
was intentionally chosen to incorporate two concepts in its design and colors. The thirteen stripes, by referring
to the number of colonies participating
in the Continental Congress, made a
political statement. The colors - red
and white or red, white, and blue were the traditional ones of England
and Scotland and thus of the British
American colonies. The Union Jack
was associated with the mother country and, appropriately, indicated the
status of the colonists prior to the
Declaration of Independence as British
subjects united in demanding respect
from the sovereign for their rights. In
this context its crosses did not have
religious significance per se but were a
symbol of the state and the Crown.
The adoption in 1777 of the first
Stars and Stripes provided Americans
an opportunity to express military,
political, religious, ethnic, or other
characteristics of their new republic.
Instead, the design chosen focused on
the constitutional
structure
of the
Parsippany, New Jersey

country by symbolizing the thirteen

states (as the colonies had been
renamed), united in a confederation as
free and equal units. The distinctive
American national color, blue, formed
the background of the canton which
replaced the Union Jack. The thirteen
stars "representing a new constellation" referred to the same units
already symbolized by the stripes. It
would not be until 1818 that the present flag pattern - with the stripes representing the original colonies and the
stars representing
all the current
states - would be established. While a
ring of stars has, among other uses,
long been a Marian symbol, in the first
Stars and Stripes it clearly made a
secular reference to the thirteen
states. As Preble! pointed out, "Thirteen crosses would have shocked the
sentiments of a portion of the people,
who looked upon the cross as an
emblem of popish idolatry."
This secular symbolism was reinforced with the adoption in 1782 of the
Great Seal of the United States. The
original explanation of the design and
symbolism of the obverse, while having
no legal validity, indicates the direction of thinking at the time. It states
that 2
the colours of the pales are those
used in the flag of the United
States of America; White signifies
purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valor, and Blue, the colour
ofthe Chief signifies vigilance perseverance & justice ... The Constellation denotes a new State taking
its place and rank among other
sovereign powers.
While the eye over the pyramid
and the motto Annuit Cceptis ("He Has
Favored Our Undertakings") on the
reverse of the seal are said to "allude to
the many signal interpositions of providence in favour of the American
cause," it is significant that the reverse
of the seal has never been cut and put
into use, nor has it ever played any significant role in American national
political symbolism. Moreover, the
source of the motto Annuit Cceptis was
Virgil's Aeneid, where reference was
made not to the Judeo-Christian deity
but to the Roman god Jupiter.

Summer 2001

Many proposals for the Great Seal

contained very explicit references to
the Judeo-Christian God, all of which
the committee
rejected.
William
Barton recommended a Latin motto
meaning "With God's Favor"; others
suggested inclusion in the seal of the
"God of Liberty,"
the
"Eye of
Providence," a representation of Moses
and the pharaoh at the dividing of the
waters in the Red Sea, the "Children of
Israel in the Wilderness," or the motto
"Rebellion to Tyrants Is Obedience to
God." Religious sentiments were also
largely absent from the battle flags
carried by the Patriots during the
American Revolution. It might be
imagined that the slogan Appeal to
Heaven
appearing
both
on
a
Connecticut regimental color and on
the flag of the Massachusetts Navyf
was a religious sentiment. In fact it
was a cynical statement, referring in
that era to the use of weaponry in the
event that
logical argumentation
should fail in some dispute. In contemporary usage to "appeal to heaven"
simply meant to resort to warfare to
obtain one's ends, the presumption
being that the victor would have
achieved his success because of divine
favor+ Indeed that phrase was routinely inscribed on cannon barrels.
Part of the modern sectarian campaign to define the United States government
and political
system in
avowedly Christian terms involves the
misinterpretation of historical symbols
in order to imply that it had been overwhelmingly the intention and practice
of those who established the nation to
organize it as a Christian rather than
a secular country. In this spirit the
symbols and colors of the Stars and
Stripes are repeatedly defined as being
Christian and the assertion is often
made that divine inspiration
was
responsible for its choice.f Given the
exalted role that the flag plays in
American nationalism, culture, and
history, these claims about the origin
and meaning of the flag are highly significant.
Lawrence Phelps Tower advanced
the thesis in several publicationsf that
the Stars and Stripes was based on
Dutch precedents of which the central
theme was the advancement of religion, specifically Protestant
Christianity. According to Tower, the red and
Page 19

white stripes of the flag were presaged

in Isaiah 53:5, the phrase "with his
stripes we are healed" being interpreted as meaning that Christ's favor was
shown those who honored his sacrifice
on the cross by manifesting it in their
striped national flag. Tower claimed
that the Dutch used red and white
striped flags throughout their struggle
for independence
against
Roman
Catholic Spain. English dissenters living in the Netherlands then adopted
that flag and brought it to the New
World where the 1643 New England
Confederation is said to have flown a
flag off our red stripes on a white field.
The number
of stripes
was then
increased at the time of the American
Revolution.
Tower hypothecated that the stars
in the Stars and Stripes "symbolized
the Star of Bethlehem which guided
the wise men to the manger in which
the Christ Child was born."7 The "Star
of Bethlehem
thesis"
had
been
advanced decades earlier by Schuyler
Hamilton.f who said of the Patriots:
"They cast their eyes to the Star of
Bethlehem, and saw the stars singing
together in God's blue heaven. They
looked to God rather than man [for
inspiration in the flag design]." The
National Flag Foundationf speaks of
"possibly providential" events during
the Revolution which were to lead to
the success of the free enterprise economic system under the direction of
"those men of extraordinary
vision
who were America's Founding Fathers
[and who] saw even in 1776 and 1777,
that their nation would have many
states and their flag many stars." The
new constellation referred to in the
Flag Act of 1777, according to the
Foundation,
had been intended by
them to represent "a new relationship
of man to government, government to
man, and both to God" and not simply
a union of thirteen states.
One religious leafletl? explains the
colors of the flag as referring to "the
spotless throne of God" (white), "the
blood-drops of Christ which one day
dripped on Calvary's hill for the sin of
the world" (red), and "the color of the
heavens" (blue); "the shining stars
remind us that those who are saved
shall shine as the stars forever." This
salvation theme is reinforced in a
handbill.U
where the Stars
and
Page 20

Stripes appears in color, which directly

associates
the
promise
of the
Crucifixion with the United States
flag. Its text proclaims ''Your freedom
pass to heaven, at no cost to you - for
God paid the charge in the red, white,
& blue."
"British Israel" adherents - who
insist that Anglo-Saxons rather than
Jews are the true descendants of the
original Israelites - have made the
Stars and Stripes a part of their own
theory. One of their publications
states.V
It was [George] Washington-f
who described [the flag] in these
words: "We take the star from
Heaven, the red from our mother
country, separating
it by white
stripes, thus showing that we have
separated from her, and the white
stripes shall go down to posterity
representing liberty." It was destined to be! This separation and the
new nation had been on the agenda
of God...
That we should have a flag at all
is found in the early days of our
Israel
forefathers...
When the
United States selected their flag it
was chosen of the Israel colors of old,
only new in arrangement and design
to conform to their national destiny.
This flag of ours is a testimony
in emblazonry of the history and
destiny of this servant nation in
Israel - and therefore it is of God.
This is the Bible-based story of Old
Glory ... The climax chapter - titled
"The Kingdom of God on Earth" ... is
to be written with the peoples of the
world as His manuscripts
and,
under the direction of the Author
himself, Old Glory will take on a new
glory as America becomes dedicated
to the glory of God!

banners of the astral worshippers of

ancient Egypt and Babylon and the
12-starred
flag of the Spanish
Conquistadors ... to the present patterns of stars and stripes ...
Not all the attributions of symbolism and origin for the flag are based on
the predominantly Protestant segment
of America's Christians. Professor J. C.
Monahan wrote.If "A feature of our
flag, long neglected ... is the fact that a
red, white, and blue flag is a Catholic
Flag." The red, he claimed, is for St.
Joseph, blue for the Blessed Virgin
Mary, and white for Christ. Colonel
James A. Moss-'' insisted that "the colors red, white and blue may trace their
ancestry back to Mount Sinai, when
the
Lord
gave
Moses
the
Ten
Commandments
and the book of the
law and they were deposited in the Ark
of the Covenant within the Tabernacle
whose curtains were of scarlet (red),
white, blue and purple."
It is a small step to take from the
flag having been divinely inspired to
its having been designed by God himself There are many poetic expressions of this concept, including the
poem "The Flag's Birthday" by Mary A.
p. Stansbury.!?
N ow, as the stars above us
together show His praise,
Who set them in their courses
and marked their trackless ways,
Let us upon our banner our
states united shine,
And a new constellation proclaim the hand divine!
There are also many who hint that
the whole world will eventually be
united under the Stars and Stripes.tf
I'll bear thee up, thou dear old
flag,

An official booklet issued by the

US Marine Corps= takes a more ecumenical point of view in describing the
supposed divine origins of the Stars
and Stripes:
The star, a symbol of the heavens and the divine goal to which
man has aspired from time immemorial, and the stripe, symbolic of the
rays of light emanating from the
sun, have long been represented on
the standards of nations, from the
Summer 2001

Of origin divine,
Until upon thy azure fold
A hundred stars shall shine.
Float on, old flag, until thy
stripes
Shall all the nations heal,
And tyrants over all the earth
Shall thy just vengeance feel.
The nation's Manifest
Destiny,
which many Americans believed in
especially following the Civil War of
1861-1865, led to widespread expresAmerican Atheist

sions of that sentiment ofthe heavenly

mission of the Stars and Stripes.
Explaining national success in terms
of divine approbation was characterized by such poems as Kate Putnam's
"Our Flag":19
Oh, symbol-hope of all the
world!
The pledge of Liberty!
A stronger hand than ours
unfurled
Thy mighty prophecy.
Let all thy starry splendors
shine!
Chime, bells, in sweet accord!
Earth cannot harm that holy
sign, The banner of the Lord!
Franklin B. Ham, a chaplain of the
Civil War (Union) veterans' organization, the Grand Army of the Republic,
told students of the Vineyard Street
Grammar School in Providence, Rhode
Island.s?
And so I say to you to-day, and I
solemnly declare it to be my honest
belief, that that flag ... was created
by a mind which was directed by
God Himself... Now if the Creator
inspires men to write and think, is it
not just as reasonable to assert that
He inspired men to make our flag,
which has proved a boon to the
searchers for freedom and liberty?
Many members of the Church of
Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints
(Mormons) hold traditions regarding
"the standard of the nation" which is to
be raised as the flag of "the Kingdom of
God and his Laws."21 The design of the
flag of the Earth under that future
universal republic to be known as Zion
America has not yet been revealed but
it may prove to be the Continental
Colors since, according to the claims
made by High Priest Francis
M.
Darter of the Kingdom of God, a
Mormon dissident, that design had
been presented by a divine messenger
to a committee of Congress meeting on
13 December 1775 to decide on the
first American flag.22
The Stars and Stripes has been
widely vaunted as a flag symbolizing
both the will of God and the divine
mission of America, yet paradoxically
there are a number of circumstances
where attempts have been advanced to
Parsippany, New Jersey

In 1985 the Flag Research Center

modify the national flag of the United
received a letter from the Reverend
States, in order to reflect its presumed
Charles L. Abraham Cayton of Trinity
Christian
orientation
more clearly.
World Mission in Maysville, Missouri,
Although similar modifications made
by others, such as the imposition ofthe
concerning his proposed alteration of
figure of a Native American or of the
the Stars and Stripes. Based on his
Biblical studies, he had come to the
peace symbol on the Stars and Stripes,
conclusion that the star which attracthave frequently led to charges of flag
ed the Magi to Bethlehem when Jesus
desecration, the use of a cross on the
flag or as a finial for its staff or as a
was born must have been a six-pointed
shape into which the stars may be
star, since it was to symbolize the
Messiah. He therefore concluded that
rearranged does not seem to engender
six-pointed stars should be incorporatsimilar public opposition, nor has nonmilitary usage of a religious pennant
ed into the Stars and Stripes "out of
over the Stars and Stripes, although
respect, honor, and reverence to the
such is forbidden by the Flag Code.
Christ of our Salvation ... the flag of a
In 1964, for example, following a
Christian nation." He further insisted
decision of the US Supreme Court that
that
group prayers in public schools were
our beloved Christian president
unconstitutional,
religious organizaGeorge Washington commissioned
tions in New Jersey, New York, and
Betsy Ross to use the six pointed
Connecticut started a campaign to fly
star in the American Flag [and] she
a pennant inscribed One Nation Under
talked him out of it. It occured [sic]
God above the Stars and Stripes. The
to me, that she may have been
Knights of Columbus and the Holy
another Madeline O'Hara [sic for
Name Society of the Corpus Christi
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, described
Roman Catholic Church were successas the "most hated woman in
America" for her role as president of
ful in getting not only private homes
American Atheists].
and businesses to fly that pennant but
Cayton's proposal for changing
also a number of public buildings. The
the flag included the statement
American Civil Liberties Union, the
that
"our constitution,
which
Americans for Democratic Action, and
a number of Jewish and
Unitarian
groups resisted
SNAPSHOTS at jasonlove.com
use of the pennant on public
buildings under the same
provision
of
the
US
I just want to thank Lord God
Constitution
which
had
Our Savior, who made all thi~
been cited by the Supreme
possible, even as I'm talking
Court in the school prayer
to you today ...
cases
the
First
Amendment prohibition of
state-promoted
religion. In
rejoinder
Mayor
John
Knowlan
of Hasbrouck
Heights, New Jersey, stated
that:23
The pennant
is a
reminder that we have
Almighty God looking out
for our national welfare. It
is in the Declaration of
Independence, it is in the
flag salute, it is part of the
history and tradition of our
country. This is not a specific religion. The great
things in our history have
been done acknowledging
God.
Summer 2001

Most train wrecks and mass murders occur

because God was busy helping others win
football games.
Page 21

states that we are one nation

under God, having the inscription
through out our monitary [sic] system, in God we trust, then it follows that the American flag should
be graced with the biblical six
pointed stars."
While Cayton erred in his claim
about the Constitution - nowhere does
it include the word God - his argument
is a widespread one in the community
of those seeking to promote official
recognition for Christianity in public
institutions, procedures, ceremonies,
and publications. Every victory in a
legislature
or court allowing the
encroachment of religion on public
property such as courthouses, other
government buildings, military bases,
and vehicles, and every new medium of
expression for religious sentiments
such as coinage, postage stamps, or
documents becomes the basis for a
claim to the legitimacy of further
encroachment. Legislators generally
support those demands because it is
clear that opposition could mean
potential loss of a future election.
Defending the constitutional principles which protect the secular character of state-supported institutions is
disvalued by a significant portion of
the American public. Even judges frequently feel great pressure to find justifications for allowing the spread of
religious symbolism within government.
One of the difficulties faced by
opponents of religious symbols in public life is the fact that many familiar
examples go back for a century or
more. Not surprisingly in a country
characterized by strong local political
autonomy and with a population that
has always had a professed majority of
Christians, many graphic and written
expressions of religious beliefs were
adopted decades ago when minorities
which might have felt them unacceptable did not protest. One of the widest
areas of usage was in the civic heraldry of American cities, counties, and
states. The number of instances and
the detailed legal arguments and proceedings involved in legal challenges
to them would require an extensive
separate study.
One of the great difficulties for
those who have attempted to maintain
America's constitutionally-mandated
Page 22

secularism by objecting to publicarena use of symbols that are clearly

sectarian is the recent development of
two arguments which turn all traditional definitions and understandings
on their head. Secularism, the strict
neutrality of government in all matters relating to religion, neither favoring nor disfavoring
it, has itself
become a "religion" according to the
sectarian argument. In other words,
those who insist that religion is a personal matter
which governments
should not interfere with and that no
religion should be allowed to control
public institutions and practices, simply form one more sect in a country
known for constantly inventing new
religions and cults.
At the same time symbols which
for hundreds or even thousands of
years have been considered essentially
religious in meaning are now often
designated by sectarian forces as nonreligious "cultural artifacts." According
to this argument, to display (as in the
seal of Bernalillo County, New Mexico)
a cross with the slogan "In This Sign
Conquer" - the well known Constantinian symbols of militant Christianity - is no more a religious act
than displaying a photograph of the
Statue of Liberty while quoting the
well-known poem by Emma Lazarus.
Therefore those in opposition to that
cross and slogan are identified by the
sectarians as adherents of a perverse
anti-American cult they refer to as
"Secular Humanism."
In this spirit Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor of the US Supreme Court in
County of Allegheny u. ACLU, 492 US
at 630 (1989) - a court case concerning
the utilization of public land for religious displays - referred to a certain
class of religious practices as "ceremonial deism," suggesting that their religious significance had been so diluted
that one could reasonably label them
simply as American cultural traditions. The fraudulence of that argument is revealed in the aggressiveness
of those sectarian forces who seek by
every avenue to maintain and expand
the frequency and venues of such
actions.
Practices
supposedly "grandfathered" into national life by the concept of ceremonial
deism - even
though all were instituted long after
Summer 2001

the adoption of the Constitution include the use of paid chaplains for
legislative bodies and for the armed
forces, public invocations of God (at
presidential
inaugurations,
in the
opening of court sessions, and in the
taking of public oaths), presidential
proclamations of prayer, and use of the
slogans "In God We Trust" and "One
Nation Under God." Thus the courts
found no problem with the prayer
offered by the Reverend Billy Graham
at the inauguration
of President
George Bush in 1989:
We recognize on this historic occasion that we are a nation under God.
This faith in God is our foundation and
our heritage ... all this we pray in the
name of the Father, The Son, and The
Holy Spirit. Amen.24
Proponents of state-endorsed religion constantly use these supposedly
harmless exceptions in their attempt
to enlarge the sphere of their privileges and activities. When the city of
Zion, Illinois, for example, in revising
its civic seal under court order introduced In God We Trust into the new
design, the US Court of Appeals for the
Sixth Circuit determined that that
phrase had "no theological significance."25 In 1959 the state of Ohio
adopted the motto "With God All
Things Are Possible," which is quoted
directly from Matthew 19:26 - "but
Jesus beheld them, and said unto
them, With men this is impossible; but
with God all things are possible." On
16 March 2001 the same US Court of
Appeals voted 9 to 4 that the Ohio
state motto was constitutionally acceptable, so long as no reference was made
to the source.ef
The main thrust
of the "One
Nation Under God" campaign began in
the 1950s during the Cold War era
when many believed that Americanism and Communism were the only
possible alternatives for a world under
the threat of nuclear war. Since the
Soviet Union was avowedly atheistic,
many believed that the United States
needed vigorously to support religion
-specifically Christianity - in order to
be successful in the titanic struggle.
"One Nation Under God" was added to
the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 and
"In God We Trust" was made the
national motto of the United States in
1956. Several amendments to the US
American Atheist

Constitution
were
submitted
to
Congress which would have recognized
the country officially as a Christian
nation.
In 1968 flag desecration for the
first time became a federal offense and
twenty years later, following two
Supreme Court decisions determining
that such laws were unconstitutional,
a campaign began - which is still
active today - to add an amendment to
the Constitution giving Congress the
power to enforce anti-desecration laws.
In 2001 "In God We Trust" was added
to the new state flag of Georgia, and it
has been proposed as an addition to
the state flag of Tennessee.
The history of the flag-desecration
movement and the use of the mottoes
"In God We Trust" and "One Nation
Under God" are only part of many
facets in the political struggle between
sectarians and secularists. Religious
symbols, including sectarian flags displayed in the armed forces, aspects of
the Pledge of Allegiance ceremony in
schools, use of crosses, mottoes, and
the Ten Commandments
on public
lands and buildings, and the "See You
at the Pole" movement are all deserving of extended study.
These symbols and ceremonies are
only a small part of a wider campaign
aimed at capturing legal recognition
for Christianity
- largely but not
exclusively fundamentalist
Protestantism - throughout the civil and military structure of the nation, its subdivisions, its schools, and court systems.
As has been indicated, in some cases
documented history has been misrepresented
and supernatural
claims
have been advanced relative to the
design and symbolism ofthe Stars and
Stripes. In a free country it is the right
of all individuals and groups of citizens
to hold and promote any philosophy,
political agenda, or religion they favor
and to seek success in the electoral
arena for those points of view by all
legal means. Victory for the "One
Nation Under God" partisans would,
however, radically alter the political
and social life of the United States.
Symbols have no inherent meanings. They are void of any content of
their own but rather reflect the beliefs
and actions of the people who interpret
and use them. Thus over time the
cross flags of the Scandinavian nations
Parsippany, New Jersey

have lost most of their religious symbolism, essentially becoming purely

national symbols for countries which
are largely secular in their orientation.
Likewise despite the clear historical
and legal precedents which exist in the
United States for considering the
Stars and Stripes a secular symbol,
there is nothing to guarantee that the
"One Nation Under God" adherents
will not be successful in converting the
flag to an avowedly Christian emblem,
both legally and in the minds of the
majority.
Relative
to the
substantive
changes which the "One Nation Under
God" campaign also promotes in government and social policies, flag symbolism is a minor issue. Moreover,
there will always be Americans who
believe that their religious faith is a
personal matter, not to be vaunted
publicly and certainly never to be
imposed on others. The nation has
experienced too much discrimination
throughout its history, however, for
anyone to be sanguine that success by
the sectarian campaign would not in
fact create a de facto second-class citizenry. Just as African-Americans and
homosexuals
(among others) have
been widely and persistently discriminated against despite the existence of
a system of government supposedly
committed (in the words of the Pledge
of Allegiance) to "liberty and justice for
all," an avowedly Christian America
could not but engender still more discrimination in the public and private
lives of non-Christians
than now
exists.
Agnostics and Atheists would not
be the only ones to suffer. The government-funded
faith-based
activities
which President George W. Bush has
actively promoted, an important part
of the "One Nation Under God" campaign, immediately
elicited public
statements by sectarians making it
clear that not all faiths were to be considered equal. For example, any public
monies for religious groups like the
Nation
of Islam or the Branch
Davidians or Scientology will certainly
be vigorously opposed by the Religious
Right.
A scenario clearly understood and
anticipated by those who wrote the US
Constitution threatens to be realized
with vengeance in the 21st century.
Summer 2001

The secular state tolerates any and all

religious faiths which do not break the
law. In a multi-faith country, a sectarian state can only lead to a struggle for
power and privilege as various sects
first marginalize non-believers, apostates, and "cults" and then turn upon
each other in an internecine struggle
for primacy as the sole true representative not only of religious truth but of
political power.
Ultimately, in a Christian America
no Atheist could be allowed to vote, no
Jew could be permitted to teach school,
no Muslim could be trusted to give testimony in court, no Hindu social service agency could be accredited. It was
not so many decades ago that Roman
Catholics were disenfranchised
and
persecuted in the American South and
both private mobs and US Army troops
attacked Mormons. In the 20th century Jehovah's Witnesses and Quakers
were often treated as traitors for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance or
for refusing to serve in the armed
forces. America has always been a
Christian nation, if judged by the number of adherents to various religions,
but it has also been basically a land of
religious freedoms. If official recognition or preference were ever given to
any religion in America it would be the
beginning of the end of liberty and of
domestic harmony. The success or failure of the "One Nation Under God"
campaign is thus of overwhelming
importance for all Americans, regardless of religious persuasion.

NOTES
1.
George Henry Preble, History of the Flag
of the United States of America... (Boston:
Williams, 1880), p. 264.
2. Quoted in Richard S. Patterson and
Richardson Dougall, The Eagle and the
Shield... (Washington: Department of State,
1976 [1978]), p. 85.
3. The design is misrepresented in a contemporary British engraving of Commodore
Hopkins as having the motto An Appeal to
God.
4
For example, General Nathaniel Greene
wrote on 20 December 1775 during the siege of
Boston (quoted in American Archiues, Iv, p. 367):
There are great preparations going on in
England, to prosecute the war in the spring ...
we can no longer preserve our freedom and
continue connection with [England]. With
safety we can appeal to Heaven for the necessity, propriety, and rectitude of [resisting the
British by armed force].

Page 23

In 1834 William Ladd in the Pacificator

(quoted in Devere Allen, The Fight for Peace
[New York NY: MacMillan, 1930], p. 34) stated:
The "appeal to heaven" by duel has long
since been condemned by all true Christians,
but the "appeal to heaven" by war, a much
greater barbarism, still remains sanctioned by
the Church, and is preceded by fasting and
prayer.
5. There is an apparently unnoticed incongruity inherent in attributing Christian symbolism to a flag which contains thirteen stars
and thirteen stripes, given the traditional
Christian triskaidekaphobia.
6. The best statement appears in The
Untold Story of Our Flag (New York: United
States Flag Foundation, 1956),passim.
7. Harry Millican, "Historian Believes Stars
and Stripes Were Filched from the Early
Dutch," The Milwaukee Journal Green Sheet,
26 August 1955, p. 1, based on an interview
with Tower released by United Press. Tower
made several major factual errors in the flagrelated information he presented, vitiating his
religious interpretation of their origin and
symbolism.
8. In his article "The Stars in Our Flag,"
The Magazine of American History, Volume
XIX, No.2 (February 1888), pp. 150-153.

9. The New Constellation, the Story of

America As Told Through Its Flags ...
(Pittsburgh PA: National Flag Foundation,
1977), passim.
10. The Flag I Love (Westchester IL: Good
News Publishers, circa 1971).
11. Les Cox, This Is Your Freedom Pass
(Indianapolis IN: the author).
12. C. S. Warner, "The Story of Old Glory,"
Destiny (July 1943), pp. 9, 252-253, and 255.
13. There is no evidence that Washington
ever made this statement attributed to him.
The earliest citation of the quotation apparently is in Wayne Whipple, The Story of the
American Flag (Philadelphia: Altemus, n.d.
[1910]), p. 46. It has often been quoted - and
misquoted. On www.smn.co.jp/gallery/amanol
flag.html on 10 August 1999 it appeared in
this form: "The first President of the United
States, George Washington, said 'On the Stars
and Stripes, the Stars represent the heaven,
the red our homeland, Britain, and the white
stripes intersecting over the red background
the independence from Britain'."
14. How To Respect and Display Our Flag
(Camden NJ: Alpha Litho, 1942).
15. American Catholic Historic Researches,
Vol. 28 (January-October 1911), p. 257.
16. The American Flag: Its Glory and
Grandeur (Washington: United States Flag
Association, 1929), p. 25.

17. Quoted in Reverend George W. Gue, Our

Country's Flag (Davenport IA: Egbert, Fidlar,
and Chambers, 1890), p. 44.
18. R. Tompkins, "The Soldier's Pride" as
quoted in Gue, p. 33.
19. Quoted in Julia A. M. Furbish, The
Flower of Liberty (Cincinnati: White, Corbin,
Bouve, 1869), p. 48.
20. Our American Flag, Unique Features of
its Conception and Adoption... (Providence:
Snow and Farnum, 1901).
21. Francis M. Darter, Ensign of the Nations,
Kingdom of God... (Salt Lake City: the author,
1946), p. 10.
22. Francis M. Darter, The Kingdom of God,
the USA British Empire ... (Salt Lake City: the
author, 1941), p. 19.
23. Quoted in "The Pennant on a City
Flagpole Stirs up a Growing Religious Storm,"
The National Observer, 16 November 1964.
24. 135 Congo Rec. S67 (daily edition of 20
January 1989).
25. United Press and Associated Press
reports of 7 and 8 January 1993.
26. John Nolan, "Ohio Motto Given Stamp of
Approval," The Boston Globe, 17 March 2001.
Copyright 2001 Whitney Smith. All rights
reserved.

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Page 24

Summer

2001

American Atheist

Tim LaHaye's Left Behind Series

And Its Impact On American Politics And Culture

Conrad F. Goeringer
A lecture given at the 27th National
Convention of American Atheists on
Friday, 13 April 2001 in Orlando,
Florida. Conrad Goeringer is Director of
On-Line Services for American Atheists
and a contributing editor to American
Atheist.

et me begin by recounting something that's probably happened

to many of you. You're driving
down the highway and you see a car in
front of you with a bumper sticker. It
says: THIS CAR UNMANNED IN
CASE OF RAPTURE, or WHEN THE
LAST TRUMPET SOUNDS, I'M
OUTTA' HERE.
If you're like me, you find
this unusual, a bit incongruous in modern times. The slogan seems more bizarre than
"Jesus Saves" or "Warning:
Angels On Board." Who is the
person driving that car? What
are "The Last Trumpet" and
"The Rapture"?
Today, millions of people
believe that we are living in
an era of history known as the
End of Days or the End Times
- the final period when
Biblical prophecies of the
Apocalypse are unfolding.
Surveys reveal that as many
as 40% of Americans believe
that they will likely live to see
Parsippany, New Jersey

the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

Millions more await an event known
as The Rapture, when they will rise
into the air to meet Jesus. Those left
behind will endure seven years of
calamitous events, known as the Great
Tribulation, after which Jesus will
return to earth with an army of saints
and angels, and preside for a thousand-year period known as the millennium. At the end of this, according to
some accounts, there will be a titanic
battle between good and evil, followed
by the Final Judgment and the end of
the world.
Not all Christians believe that
these events will occur literally, but in
the United States, much of Europe,
---~---,

Rapture in the buff!

Summer 2001

Latin America, and elsewhere, the

fastest growing Christian sects are
those which embrace a high level of
apocalyptic beliefs. Among those who
do, there is disagreement over the precise chronology and other details; but
apocalyptic ideas and movements are a
seductive, compelling, and evocative
force in American society. They have
played a role in our nation's history;
and today, these beliefs are percolating
through modern culture as never
before.
Last year, for instance, over one
hundred books were published in the
United States dealing with some
aspect of apocalyptic belief The idea of
the End Times, The Rapture, and other
trappings of the Apocalypse
are discussed on television, in
radio programs, and magazine articles. They have penetrated into modern culture at
nearly every level, including
the more prosaic artifacts of
everyday life, like the bumper
sticker
warning
of the
Rapture
and
the
Last
Trumpet.
Many identified the
year 2000 with expectations
of an apocalypse or some
other
cataclysmic
event.
Some believed that on or
after New Year's Eve, Jesus
Christ would descend on
Jerusalem
for the Second
Coming. Another group in
Page 25

Japan followed the teachings of a man

named Shokou Asahara, who fused
Buddhist, Christian,
and new age
beliefs into an apocalyptic shake-andbake doctrine. The Aum Shinrikyo cult
released deadly Sarin gas in the Tokyo
subway, believing they could jumpstart the apocalypse, and survive to
takeover the world. In Israel, a small
but determined
sect of so-called
Messianic Jews believes that their
Messiah will come soon to rid them of
their enemies. Along with many fundamentalist Christians, they also believe
that the a new Temple must be constructed on the ruins of two previous
temples before this Messiah appears.
This area, known as the Temple Mount
also is considered one of the most
sacred sites for the Muslim religion, so
it is the geographical and metaphorical "ground zero" in the confrontation
of three major world religions. A
Muslim mosque happens to stand over
or near the location of the earlier
Jewish temples, so imagine the political and military consequences
of
Messianic Jews and their Christian
fundamentalist allies trying to storm
this 26 acres of Middle-East flash
point. This is Gershon Salomon who is
head of a group called the Temple
Mount Faithful, an organization that
demands that Muslims be expelled
from the Temple Mount and a new
Temple constructed. Add nuclear and
biological weapons into this volatile

Reproduction of the Ishtar Gate

at Babylon. The imagery of
beasts and other mythical
depictions were
incorporated into apocalyptic
narratives.

Page 26

mix of confrontational politics and religion, and you have the ingredients of
an apocalypse.
In the United States, most apocalyptic ideas are identified with energetic fundamentalist and evangelical
sects. Evidence that these ideas are
alive and well can be found everywhere - on that bumper sticker declaring the immanence of The Rapture, or
in the brisk sales of a fictional series
known as the LEFT BEHIND books.
Over thirty million copies of these
books have been sold since 1995 when
the series began, and the pace of sales
is accelerating. Critics were dumbfounded when the titles began reaching the New York Times bestseller list
- a remarkable feat, since the list is
based on reported sales from mainstream bookstores, not the thousands
of Christian retail outlets across the
country. One of the books has been
made into a movie which was released
earlier this year, and opened in nearly
a thousand theaters across the county.
It had a $15 million budget, starred
some fairly big name actors including
Kirk Cameron, and it is doing surprisingly well at the box-office and in video
stores.
To give you some idea of the success of these books, the eighth in the
series, The Mark, released on 14
November oflast year, was on the USA
TODAY "TOP 150 List" in 9 days, and
by 24 November was Number One on
the New York Times bestseller list.
The authors of the LEFT BEHIND
series are Tim LaHaye and Jerry
Jenkins. LaHaye is essentially the theologian in this project of grinding out
doomsday thrillers.
Jenkins
is a
mechanic who fleshes out the story
line, trying to bring Biblical text into a
modern-day context that readers can
identify with. While the books are marketed as fiction, the authors, along
with millions of readers, believe that
they describe events that will take
place in our time.
Warnings about the end of the
world are nothing new. What makes
the' LEFT BEHIND books significant,
though, is that they convey both a theological and a political message. Tim
LaHaye graduated from Bob Jones
University, a fact which is rarely mentioned in press handouts and stories

Summer 2001

about the series. In the 1970s, he

helped co-found a group called The
Moral Majority, along with evangelist
Jerry Falwell. It was the most ambitious effort to date in organizing the
nation's millions of fundamentalist
and evangelical Christians into a cohe-

Theopolitico Tim LaHaye

sive political unit. His wife, Beverly
LaHaye, founded her own group called
Concerned Women for America, which
today has hundreds of thousands of
members, and mobilizes over issues
such as school prayer, banning abortion, and combating rights for homosexuals. In 1984, LaHaye formed the
American Coalition for Traditional
Values, and later on the semi-secret
Council for National Policy.
It's easy and tempting to dismiss
the LEFT BEHIND series as pure escapism. The overt message is about sin
and redemption; the true believers find
salvation literally by rising into the air
to meet Jesus. You might ask, with
that type of doomsday belief, why
would anyone be concerned with the
politics? I think we interpret the LEFT
BEHIND phenomenon in such a fashion
at our own risk, however. This is not
just a modern-day adaptation of the
Book of Revelation, although it is partly that. It conveys a social-political
message, and its real power is not in
the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, but
rather in how it can motivate believers
and affect the political and cultural
landscape.
It divides the world into camps:
the godly, and everyone else - those
"left behind," those nonbelievers and
occasional churchgoers
and liberal

American Atheist

Christians, and Secular Humanists

and Atheists and every one else who
does not adhere to the literal inerrancy
of the Old and New Testament.
It is also easy to say that this is
bad writing, and I doubt that LaHaye
and Jenkins will be winning any prizes
for bestowing upon the world a new
canon of great literature. Nearly every
major reviewer has panned the series,
and despite the high production credits, the film adaptation of LEFT BEHIND
has suffered a similar fate. None of
this seems to affect the popularity of
the series, though, or quenched the
enthusiasm of the growing ranks of
fans.
The authors never say exactly
when the world is to end, and Jenkins
carefully notes, "One of the major
tenets of our belief is that not even
Jesus knows the time and hour of his
return. Only God knows." But there
are mixed signals here, because
Jenkins and other Rapturists believe
that this generation is living in the socalled End of Times, that there are
"signs and wonders" around us that
confirm the ticking of an apocalyptic
clock, a Biblical time bomb about to
explode with the mysterious and dramatic events of the Final Days.

History of Apocalypticism
The idea of an apocalypse, while it
is best identified with Christian fundamentalist and evangelicals, grew out of
ancient Hebrew writings and is found
in other religious belief systems as
well. Today, even Islamic movements
embrace a view of an impending apocalypse. The confluence of these expectations - Christian, Jewish, Muslim is centered on the Middle East, specifically Jerusalem and on the Temple
Mount.
Books of the Old and New
Testament, as well as writings omitted
from the official canon of the Bible, all
speak of an apocalypse. If we want to
understand Tim LaHaye - or the last
trumpet motorist, or perhaps the
friend or neighbor enthusiastically recommend that you read "this great
book," and the whole LEFT BEHIND phenomenon, you have to begin by learning the meaning of terms and beliefs
rooted in ancient history.
Apocalypse is derived from the
Greek, and means 'unveiling'. It is synParsippany, New Jersey

onymous with the last book included in

the New Testament, the Revelation of
St. John, written several decades after
the purported death of Jesus by an
unknown author on the island of
Patmos. It is a book replete with symbols and metaphors, many derived
from earlier apocalyptic texts. Scripturally, apocalypse refers to writings
which deal with the final kingdom or
the end of the world.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition,
apocalyptic texts often present
a
prophetic and highly symbolic element. They rely extensively on the use
of metaphors and codes; and their origin lies in the political history of the
Jews. Central to this narrative are the
great events in their history, such as
the conquest of Jerusalem in the sixth
century BeE by the Babylonians under
King
Nebuchadnezzer,
and
the
destruction of Solomon's Temple. After
the conquest, large numbers of the
Israelite people were enslaved.
The city of Babylon came to be
used as a metaphor in apocalyptic literature to signify all of the evil of this
period. The wealth of the Babylonians,
the decorative motifs of their cities winged beasts, wooden gates, altars
studded with gold - were all important
imagery. More important, though, was
that for the early Jews, the conquest of
Jerusalem meant that the Israelites
and their temple were no longer protected by their god. Evil had overcome
good; and Jewish tradition had to
rethink its place in history and its
relationship
with the sacred. The
covenant with Jehovah had been shattered. The Jews had built a temple,
they followed the "Laws of God," and
the deity had seemingly abandoned his
chosen people.
Another influence was transmitted through the Zoroastrian religion.
Within half a century of the destruction of the Temple of Yahweh in
Jerusalem, the Persians invaded and
conquered the Babylonian empire. In
Isaiah, the Persian king Cyrus is
referred to as a liberator, God's instrument. Cyrus ends the exile of the Jews,
and allows them
to return
to
Jerusalem. Later, he is immortalized
in the famous Cyroptedia ofXenophon,
a historical romance.
With the return, though, the Jews
bring with them the essential eleSummer 2001

ments of the Zoroastrian faith, named

after its prophet Zoroaster, also called
Zarathustra. At the core of this is a
dramatic confrontation between good
and evil. The deity of darkness,
Ahriman the devil, is locked in constant struggle with Ahura Mazda. This
struggle becomes incorporated into a
staggering array of apocalyptic texts.
The Jews rebuild the sacred
Temple in hopes of again sealing the
Covenant with Jehovah. What they do
not anticipate
is the coming of
Alexander the Great in the fourth century BeE. With Alexander
comes
Hellenism, and a new line of rulers.
The Greeks bring with them new sensibilities about the human body, new
ways of worship, and a new view of the
world that is quintessentially pagan.
Greek temples are built, and many
Israelites begin to absorb the beliefs
and practices of Hellenic culture, but
some see all of this as corruptive and
blasphemous. Around 225 BeE, the
book First Enoch is written, metaphorically
reflecting
this
dichotomy
between the new ideas of the invaders,
and the ancient ways of the Covenant.
It talks about Satan and the fallen
angels, and the timeless
conflict
between good and evil.
At the beginning ofthe second century, control over Judea passes from
the Ptolemaic Greeks to the Seleucid
Greeks of Syria, who are less tolerant
of the traditional
Jewish religion.
Antiochus the Fourth marches into
Jerusalem, desecrates the Temple of
Yahweh by making sacrifice of a pig,
and soon Judea is in political revolt.
Out of this comes the Book of Daniel,
which is actually set centuries earlier
and tells the story of the Babylonian
captivity.
At this point, a dramatic addition
is about to made in the apocalyptic
narrative. The political and social circumstances now mean that Apocalypse .
is thought of not just in the loss of
Covenant, but in the active contest
between good and evil. The language of
struggle, revolt, and liberation is incorporated into this narrative, in part
because of a man named Judas the
Hammer - Judas Maccabee. After the
desecration of the Temple of Yahweh,
Judas and his small band of guerrilla
warriors begin a military campaign
against the Greek occupation, and
Page 27

they even re-conquer the Temple of

Yahweh and conduct a purification ritual, and this become part of the feast
known as Hanukkah.
This ushers in a period known as
the Second Hebrew Commonwealth,
and there is a line of Hasmonean
rulers who are descendants of Judas
the Maccabee. But a bit more than a
century later, there is another threat,
and this is the Roman Empire. Rome is
extending its political hegemony, and
under the military commander Gneeus
Pompeius Magnus, or Pompey the
Great, Roman Legions march through
the Middle East taking-over the territory once controlled by Alexander and
his descendants. In Jerusalem, there is
a civil war within the Hasmonean line.
The leaders of the city actually call
upon Pompey to settle the dispute, but
to their dismay, he ends up staying and
incorporates Judea into the Roman
Empire.
At first the Romans are relatively
tolerant of Jewish religion and cultural
identity. Under Herod the Great the
Temple of Yahweh is rebuilt. Herod is a
sort of proxy ruler, appointed Governor
of the province by Julius Ceesar and
then made King by Marc Anthony. The
rebuilt temple assumes an ambiguousl
character. On one hand it becomes a
symbol of national and religious aspirations, but on the other it is identified
with foreign rule, and the corruption
and pagan ways of the Romans. Herod,
for instance, has ten wives, and rules
the land in a draconian style.
Now, during this time, many Jews
await a Messiah, and this god-man is
seen in many different ways. For some
he is a spiritual redeemer, but there
are those who look for a military commander who will rally the people and
expel the foreigners, and restore the
Covenant. And people act upon these
perceptions in different ways as well.
In some cases, they stage political
uprisings; in others, they retreat into
the mountains
and remote places
where they establish small, cloistered
communities and essentially disengage from the outside world and they
await the conflagration of the apocalypse.
So now, you have another element
in apocalyptic belief You've got the
cosmic struggle between good and evil.
You have the lamentation
over a
Page 28

wicked oppressor; and you have the

expectation and hope that a messiah
will come and liberate you. In some
cases, there is the belief that you or
perhaps some leader that you follow is
the Messiah, so you can become a soldier of the Apocalypse or an apocalyptic agent of change. And now, you have
this notion of withdrawing from the
world to await the calamitous end
times.
Along with the armed uprisings
and self-appointed
Messiahs
who
emerge during this period, you have
another strain of apocalyptic belief
that has the devout hunkering down
for the events that are to come. These
people withdraw from the towns and
cities and establish remote communities. There is considerable debate over
one group known as the Essenes, who
by some accounts withdrew to a group
of caves by the Dead Sea. And here
they may have established a priestly
community, and possibly saw themselves
not
as
soldiers
of the
Apocalypse, but rather as what we
might label apocalyptic scribes. They
believed they were keeping their own
Covenant with Yahweh, but from the
little we known of them, they saw
themselves possibly in part a repository of apocalyptic and related texts.
From here, of course, in 1947, you have
the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
at Qumran. Among these are texts
that were never incorporated into the
canonical Bible.
Another thing the Essenes may
have done - and again, there is a lot of
debate over this, but if they didn't do
this, other remote communities
of
believers probably did - was to take
early Apocalyptic texts and reinterpret
them for their present days, and this is
a form of narrative called pesharim,
which means "this is interpreted." And
here you have yet another characteristic of Apocalypse, which is taking earlier texts and looking for ways in which
they can be interpreted to correspond
to present-day circumstances. So, what
you have, in effect, is the continually
recycling of texts and narratives and
symbols and themes and everything
else.
Among the documents found in
the Essene collection or library is
something known as The War Scroll.
And this is a prophetic text which
Summer 2001

vividly describes
the final battle
between the Yahad, or the Sons of
Light and the forces of darkness, which
stretches out over a forty-year period.
Each side wins three battles. Then, in
the fmal confrontation, Yahweh intervenes with a host of angels and defeats
Satan. It is a very detailed text; it
describes the different groups that will
be among the Sons of Darkness, and it
has much of the language and narrative structure that you find in subsequent apocalyptic texts.

Christian Apocalypticism
All of this carries on well into the
time associated
with Jesus;
and
whether or not he existed as a historical personality,
these
apocalyptic
beliefs resonated
within the early
Christian communities. There is good
evidence that most Christians of this
period believed that the prophetic
vision - an apocalypse, the return of
the Messiah - would occur in their lifetime, or shortly thereafter. Jesus supposedly said: "Repent for the kingdom
of heaven is at hand." In Mark 9:1 he
declares, "Truly, I say unto you, there
are some of those who are standing
here who will not taste death until
they see the kingdom of God after it
has come with power." And this became
a problem for the early church. There
was this tension between the organizational needs of Christianity as a social
movement with a doctrine and ecclesiastic hierarchy, and this vision of
immediate redemption
and return.
And as time goes on, the church
becomes more of a hierarchical assembly with a priesthood and formalized
doctrines and rituals - in other words,
it becomes an institution, and apocalyptic expectations are increasingly
out of step with this trend. So what
happens is the established church reinterprets these texts, and essentially
calls a time-out on The End Times. You
have people like Augustine emerging
at the turn of the fourth century
declaring that all of these apocalyptic
writings pertain to a distant future, or
maybe they are symbolic and not literal, or in some cases you have the claim
that all or most of the events have
already occurred on some profound
spiritual level.
Another curious and unanticipated thing happens at this time: there is
American Atheist

no apocalypse or second coming, but

instead the Church essentially conquers the western world. The evil
pagan empire of Rome falls pretty
much without a shot when Constantine first defeats the Gauls at the battle of the Milvian bridge in 312 CE, and
supposedly has a vision of a fiery cross
in the sky with the words in hoc signa
vinces, 'in this sign you will conquer',
and he converts to Christianity! And
by 324 Christianity is the official state
religion, and the following year, when
the Church calls the Council of Niceea
and really begins to bureaucratize as a
formal institution, the persecution of
pagans begins. And none of this is part
of the apocalyptic scenario!
But there are still groups that
believe in the imminence ofthe Second
Coming. There are heretical sects that
the church never fully manages to
stamp out; and if they do, more heresies flower, and often they are constructed around a belief in an apocalypse, perhaps the creation of an earthly
utopia. Apocalyptic ideologies are identified again with outsiders, those
removed from the cultural, political,
and religious mainstream. As time
goes on, even the papacy is identified
by some with the forces of darkness.

Millennium, Rapture,
& Tribulation
Another term we need to understand is millennium, the thousand
years. It is not a date, but it describes
a period during which Jesus Christ
will rule over the Earth. By some
accounts, this is prior to the final battle between good and evil. In a wider
sense, Millenarianism
has come to
describe any religious or even secular
movement which seeks to construct,
sometimes through violent upheaval
and confrontation, an earthly paradise.
The Rapture is an event which
some Christians believe will take place
prior to the Second Coming of Jesus.
Living and dead will rise into the air to
meet Christ. Rapturists believe that
this is a physical event, not a symbolic
or metaphorical
idea. In LaHaye's
book, thousands disappear from the
face of the Earth. Passengers vanish
from planes, people disappear from
their homes, cars, all of the children
are gone. Those "left behind" behind
Parsippany, New Jersey

face years of persecution, as the AntiChrist, false prophet, and others in

this Biblical drama, rule the earth.
The details of this Rapture event
are debated, and it is a doctrine which
is a bit of a challenge to convey visually. There are a couple of pop-culture
renderings of what the Rapture is all
about, and you also have a rather lowbrow, comical portrayal of someone literally flying out of his shoes. Another
feature of the Rapture is that believers
in the doctrine frequently have to
resort to a time-line to explain how
this event is said to fit in with other
events in their apocalyptic scenario,
such as the Second Coming and the
Millennium.
Tim LaHaye believes in the
Rapture and in the Final Days, he
writes nonfiction defenses of these
teachings as well as the more imaginative accounts found in the LEFT BEHIND
series.
There is an interesting rendering
that I call Apocalyptus Suburbanicus,
or the Suburban Apocalypse. This is a
rather incredible drawing. It is from a
book on the End Times by a 70s-era
preacher named Salem Kirban, and it
is the ultimate conceptual intersection
of biblical theology and modernity.
Mom is flying off in her Sears
Catalogue dress to be the Bride of the
Returning Christ; Dad and kids are
left behind at the three-bedroomrancher-with-mortgage,
and I think
that this is an imaginative, if desperate, attempt to make this arcane idea
of the Rapture accessible to modern
readers. Somehow, to me, this is right
up there with alien abduction.
The Tribulation is a seven-year
period during which Satan unleashes
horrific persecution against those who
oppose his rule. Pre- Tribulationists
such as LaHaye believe that true
Christians,
a spiritual
elect, will
escape these bloody events. Some
Christians believe that the Rapture
will occur half-way through
the
Tribulation;
others
hold
that
Christians must endure the full seven
years, before Christ arrives.
Christians
argue
over
the
sequence and details of this cosmic
event. Pre-millennialists believe that
Christ must return first before the
thousand year reign of good. Post-millennialists,
though,
insist
that
Summer 2001

Christians must take dominion over

the world first, purifying it, and
preparing the way for Christ's return.

Antichrist
The Antichrist is another component of apocalyptic ideology. He is
Satan's henchman on earth and has
been described as a sort of evil twin of
Jesus. Modern apocalypticists believe
that the Antichrist will create a oneworld government during the Tribu-lation and, in concert with a "false
prophet," also will preside over a
fraudulent religion. The Antichrist is
supposedly doomed to failure, since
Jesus will defeat him and his legion of
followers in a final titanic conflict.
The Book of Revelation even provides a location for this, which is
Armageddon,
near
the
town of
Megiddo in Palestine. This area was
the site of numerous ancient battles
and is located on what was once a
major trade route. Incidentally, on
New Year's Eve, 2000, while Christians
were descending on Jerusalem
to
await the apocalypse, a group of Israeli
Atheists
and science fiction fans
reportedly gathered at Armageddon
for a party.
The term Antichrist appears three
or four times in the New Testament
(depending on translation), where this
agent of Satan is described as "the
man who denies that Jesus is the
Christ."
John
declares
that
the
Antichrist "even now is already in the
world," and that the same being is also
a "deceiver." In Thessalonians 2 he is
equated with the "beast" and described
as "the lawless one."
During the Middle Ages, roughly
the 7th to 11th centuries CE, descriptions of the Antichrist become more
horrific and detailed. Much of the
imagery drew upon the Book of
Revelation,
or the Book of the
Apocalypse. There also emerges a close
link between the Antichrist and the
persecution of the Jews as those who
supposedly killed Jesus. Again, in
Medieval Europe Jews are described
as evil and sinister, and it is even proposed that the Antichrist is or will be a
Jew, and that mythology lives on today.
You may recall that Jerry Falwell
made a statement to that effect last
year. And as time goes on, various
depictions and descriptions
of the
Page 29

Antichrist emerge from the Christian

imagination.
An abbess known as Hildegard of
Bingen, for instance, who was a very
prolific writer of her time (the twelfth
century), had a series of visions which
included the Devil and the Antichrist
as a black beast with flaming eyes.
Hildegard produced numerous books
and other writings, and renderings of
her visions which include the birth of
the Antichrist from the belly of Satan.
Between 1499 and 1504, the
Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli
produced two of the most disturbing
and controversial frescos of the period.
They are known as The Preaching of
the Anti-Christ and The Last Judgment, and they reside in the San Brizio
Chapel in the Orvieto Cathedral. And
here, for the first time is the visual
imagery of the Antichrist - not so
much as a monster but a being who
resembles a fraudulent Messianic figure and prophet.
In the sixteenth century, along
comes Martin Luther who is a Professor of Biblical Exegesis
at Wittenberg,
and he
begins to preach the doctrine of salvation by faith
rather than works; and in
1517
he
indicts
the
Catholic Church with his
list of 95 Theses. One of
his books from this period
discusses the Babylonian
captivity. The Protestant
Reformation is underway,
and the papacy becomes
identified with Babylon
and the Antichrist.
Now,
Luther
had
much to say on many subjects, but one theme was
that the institutionalized
church had become corrupted. He translated the
Bible into the vernacular
German and used the
printing press to spread
the word, because
he
believed that the masses
of people needed to read
this work, and not have it
filtered
through
the
priesthood.
But when he came to
the final book of the New
Testament,
which
IS
Page 30

Revelation, Luther had a problem. He

did not believe that it should be given
the same status as the other Biblical
texts, and he didn't identify the author
as a Saint. On the other hand, it was
the only book in his Bible that was
illustrated with woodcuts. And these
portrayed the whore of Babylon with a
papal crown; another, a Seven-Headed
beast is identified with the papacy as
well. And toward the end of his life,
Luther became more fascinated by the
Book of Revelation, and the whole
message of apocalypse.
During this same period in Germany there is a priest named Thomas
Muentzer, and while he is first a fan of
Luther, he later becomes a critic; he is
also outside of the theological mainstream, and he fuses radical social
ideas with an apocalyptic ideology.
He is a paradigm of what can happen when apocalyptic texts become
widely accessible. For Muentzer, the
wealthy aristocracy of his time, the
Princes and land owners, are the evil
ones foretold in the book of Revelation.

Summer 2001

He believes that the impoverished

members of the peasant class are the
Sons of Light, and the repository of
saintly virtue, and in 1525, Muentzer
is at the head of a rebellion that
becomes known as The Peasant's War.
Luther,
incidentally,
denounces
Muentzer for turning to violence.
Muentzer tells his followers that a
military showdown is that apocalyptic
moment when they will triumph over
evil; even though they are outgunned
and out-manned, he says that they will
prevail. He says that he personally will
catch cannon balls in the sleeves of his
coat. His battle flag includes the image
of a rainbow, which reminds them of
Noah seeing the rainbow from the ark.
And as the battle begins, a rainbow
appears in the sky. Muentzer's followers are singing religious hymns. They
are up against a professional army,
though. Five thousand peasant warriors are slaughtered at the bloody
Battle of Frankenhausen.
All during this period there are
similar revolts and movements involv-

American Atheist

ing charismatic leaders fusing an apocalyptic religious message with some

kind of political or social ideology.
Melchior Hoffman, for instance, prediets the second coming in 1533 and
teaches that the Lord will establish his
millennial kingdom in Strasbourg.
Another is John Hus, who precedes
Luther as a critic of the established
church. He and followers set up a theocratic movement; they take control of
the city of Prague; and some of them
become known as Taborites, after
Mount Tabor, the place of the transfiguration of Jesus. They construct ------a fortress there and they believe
that this is their citadel for the
Apocalypse, and they await the
second coming. One writer says
that they saw themselves as "the
army sent by God into the whole
world to execute all the plagues
of the time of vengeance ... Each
of the faithful out to wash his
hands in blood of Christ's ene.
"
mles...
Even more extreme factions
come out of this movement, like
the Pikarts who preach that they
can engage in any kind of licentious
behavior they desire since they are
Saints of the Last Days and incapable
of sin.

Coming to America
Now, apocalyptic ideology comes to
America, beginning with Christopher
Columbus. Columbus first proposes to
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
that he lead a crusade to the Middle
East to regain control of Jerusalem.
Instead, he ends up searching for a
new route to the East. He writes a document called the Book of Prophecies,
and he very much thinks of himself as
part of an apocalyptic tradition. He
feels that his voyages will usher in a
new age marked by the rise of a messianic figure called The Last World
Emperor.
He is followed by the Puritans, and
they come out of a period in English
history where the country is swept up
in apocalyptic fervor. There is the
revolt against Catholicism, an English
Reformation, and religious leaders
believe that they can literally create a
New Jerusalem or some millennialist
society based on "God's Law." There is
also the Puritan revolt against the
Anglicans, and they head for what
Parsippany, New Jersey

later would become America, and they

bring with them this idea of creating a
theocratic paradise, their version of
the New Jerusalem.
You have John Winthrop, who
obtains colonial charters from Charles
II, and in one of his sermons he says:
"The eyes of the world will be upon us.
We are as the city upon a hill raised
up." And all of this rooted in the Book
of Revelation, where a New Jerusalem
descends from the sky at the end
times. Winthrop also draws upon the
biblical lamentation in Jeremiah, "I
------".

But in the nineteenth

century,
along comes a man named John
Nelson Darby, and he is an Anglican
who has a falling out with his church,
and goes on to become part of a group
in 1830 known as the Plymouth
Brethren. Darby will have a profound
influence on what later emerges as
American fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and he will also shape the
doctrine expressed for the next century
or more that becomes known as
Premillennialist
Dispensationalism.
Within the scheme of the apocalypse,
Darby preaches what he calls

The Rapture.
The Rapture
Rapture is not a term found in

The Antichrist
had planted thee a noble vine, wholly a
right seed: how then are thou turned
into the degenerate plant of a strange
vine unto me?" And thus you have
what becomes The American Jeremiad, the invoking of an idealized
vision of society based on a religious
standard, which for Winthrop and
many of the Puritans is a fulfillment of
millennial prophecy. And centuries
later, a man named Ronald Reagan
takes the oath as President of the
United
States,
and talks
about
America as this "city on the hill."
There are also periodic outbursts
of religious zeal. There is the first socalled Great Awakening in the 1740s.
There is another one, the Second Great
Awakening, about 75 years later, and
both of these involve very complex and
often contradictory
effects on the
American religious scene. A lot of people caught up in the religious enthusiasm come to believe that they must
work to build the New Jerusalem and
prepare
the way for the Second
Coming; and in that case they are postmillennialist, meaning that the church
has to purify society and construct the
Millennium and that during or after
that time Jesus Christ comes.
Summer 2001

the Bible; and what Darby

does is take various verses and
blend them inductively
to
establish
this
new belief.
Darby and his movement
teach that The Second Coming
will take place in two phases.
First, Jesus comes to "rapture"
his followers and remove them
from the world so that they
escape
the
persecution
of the
Tribulation; and then he, and the
saints, and by some accounts the raptured faithful,
return
in another
advent to dispense Yahweh's wrath on
the world; and this of course leads to
the Millennium, Final Judgment, and
the End of Time.
In the 1820s something like this is
preached in London by a man named
Edward Irving, and he incorporates
other elements into this scenario such
as the speaking in tongues, with
people suddenly having the gift of
prophecy. And this becomes one of the
roots of Pentecostalism. Irving is driven out of the Presbyterian church for
all of this, but there is an evangelical
revival already on, and in Scotland
there are reports of people being possessed by a spirit and engaging in glossolalia, or the speaking in tongues, and
one of them is a woman named
Margaret MacDonald. She is close to
death, but suddenly she experiences
prophetic visions and claims that God
communicated with her - and part of
her prophetic message is this idea of a
two-stage Second Coming.
John Darby visits the area to see
first hand these reports of a religious
Page 31

revival; and when he returns

to
London, he too begins to preach this
doctrine as well. There's even evidence
that Darby actually visited MacDonald. But it is Darby, drawing upon
Irving and MacDonald, and possibly
even earlier sources, along with the
biblical notion about the second coming, who preaches that when history
has reached a certain period or age
known as a "dispensation," this twostage Parousia or second coming will
occur. And even though rapture isn't
mentioned in either the Old or the
New Testament, or in the non-canonical texts of the period, there are verses
that suggest to Darby the prophetic
reality of this phenomenon. Paul in 1
Corinthians, 15:51-52:
Behold I show you a mystery, we
shall not all sleep, but we shall all be
changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet:
for the trumpet shall sound, and the
dead shall be raised incorruptible,
and we shall all be changed ...
And that verse is so compelling
and evocative, and so captivated the
imagination of that time - as it does
today - that nearly a century before,
the great German composer George
Frederic Handel included it in his
masterpiece, Messiah.
Back in America, there is a farmer
named William Miller. (One account I
found says that Miller was a deist,
someone who believed in "nature and
nature's God.") Miller is a captain in
the Army during the War of 1812, and
he gradually comes to believe that
America is a predestined nation; and
that is a belief widespread at the time.
We even hear this claim made today
that God has given America a special
role in history. At the Battle of
Plattsburg, 15,000 British troops are
defeated by a much smaller US contingent, and Miller believes this is a sign
of divine intervention, and he plunges
into a period of intense Biblical study.
And as with so many who embark on
this sort of search for ultimate truth,
he lands in the fever swamp of apocalyptic literature, in texts like Daniel
and Revelation.
Miller is also affected by "date setting," and this involves trying to assign
a calendar to the chronology of the
Bible. Nearly two centuries earlier
Page 32

(this would be about 1650-1654), a

Bishop of the Irish Protestant Church,
James Ussher had written a book and
fixed the moment of creation precisely
at 4004 BeE. And some believed that
by scrutinizing the generational time
line in the Bible, you could also arrive
at the time of the Second Coming, and
this is what William Miller believes he
has accomplished. He begins speaking
about his findings in 1831, and by all
accounts was a very compelling orator.
Part of his message was the world
would end, so to speak, on 21 March
1843. And Miller predicts something
else, a form of the Rapture where the
faithful will rise into the air to be with
Jesus.
Miller's followers are very excited
about this, and some start newspapers
with names like The Midnight Cry and
Signs Of The Times. Incidentally,
maybe it's a coincidence, but the theme
song to the movie version of LEFT
BEHIND is by a Christian musical
group called The Midnight Cry. Miller's first prediction, of course, turns
out to be wrong, and he announces a
new calculation, and - behold! - this
attracts
even more curiosity
and
believers. It is wrong, of course, and
Miller then caomes up with a third
date, and even more people are caught
up in the enthusiasm and join the socalled Advent movement. People sell or
give away their worldly possessions,
some of the Millerites are selling what
they describe as "Ascension robes."
The religious establishment looks
warily upon this, and the Millerites
denounce it as "Harlots" and "the
whore of Babylon," using quintessential apocalyptic imagery. When the
third date passes, it becomes hard to
sustain the level of emotional excitement, and so this affair later becomes
known, amusingly, as "The Great
Disappointment."
Two years later, the remnant of
the Millerite movement calls a meeting in Albany, New York, and organizes
the Mutual Conference of Adventists.
Out of this "Great Disappointment"
bursts a slew of apocalyptic sects and
movements, including the SeventhDay Adventist movement headed by
Ellen White. Another group to emerge
is the Watchtower Society, headed by
Charles Taze Russell, who lived from
1852 to 1916. Russell had been a
Summer 2001

Congregationalist
minister
whose
preaching had become increasingly
prophetic and apocalyptic. Russell was
fascinated by Pyramidism, and this
was a teaching that held that the
Great Pyramid dated to the period
around the Noachian flood and had
encoded in its dimensions the entirety
of Biblical history and prophecy.
As you trace all of these different
prophetic and apocalyptic strands, you
can actually follow them to the origins
of many movements we have in the
modern era. The Adventist message of
William Miller and Ellen White eventually found its way into the teachings
of a man named Victor T. Houteff who
in 1934 formed a group known as "The
Shepherd's Rod," and established a
small enclave near Waco, Texas known
as Mount Carmel. This group later
became the Davidian
Seventh-day
Adventists, and it ended up under the
leadership of a man named Vernon
Howell, who called himself David
Koresh -"Koresh" referring to the
ancient King Cyrus. Koresh had traveled to Jerusalem and surveyed the
Temple Mount to see if it had room for
the 144,000 thousand
people he
thought would be raptured
at the
Apocalypse. But as the siege at Waco
began, he began to reinterpret those
events taking place as the unfolding of
prophecies
found in the Book of
Revelation.
In the 1970s, this belief in' apocalypse and rapture is far from dead. It's
a doctrine of groups like the Seventhday Adventist
and Jehovah's Witnesses, and the latter are constantly
setting dates about the end of the
world. In the 1970s, writings by a man
named Hal Lindsay begin to captivate
the public imagination. Now, like many
apocalyptic scribes, Lindsay is a man
of little formal education, especially in
theology, but he begins pouring over
biblical texts, and in 1970 comes out
with The Late Great Planet Earth. He
espouses the Rapturist view of John
Darby, but he fits all of this into the
current events of the day; so he's weaving together three narratives - biblical
text, current events, and prophetic
claims-speaking.
For Lindsey, the Middle East,
specifically Jerusalem, is ground zero
for dramatic events of an apocalypse in
our time, and he points to the estabAmerican Atheist

lishment of the State of Israel in 1948

and then the Israeli conquest of
Jerusalem in 1967, as evidence that an
apocalyptic clock has begun to tick.
The world is knee-deep in the cold war,
there is profound social and political
upheaval, and this is the sort of climate that the end times imagination
just thrives on. Lindsey's book becomes
the all-time, "non-fiction" bestseller of
the entire decade, and it is a wake-up
call for publishers to realize the cultural Angst and potential market that
is involved.
Tim LaHaye
Another thing is happening, and
this brings us to Tim LaHaye. I've
spent all of this time talking about
what really is the history of the idea of
the Apocalypse, because when you
read Hal Lindsey or Tim LaHaye or
other other modern writers of this
genre, you need to understand what is
going on here. They are drawing upon
ancient texts and ideas, and they are
involved in the pesharim process, looking for ways to fit these ancient writings into the circumstances of the modern world.
What is so significant
about
LaHaye, in my opinion, is that he tries
to blend a theological and political
message. It used to be the case that
pre-millennialists
were not social
reformers or activists; they have traditionally been far more focused on salvation and spiritual things than on
politics, which they traditionally associated with the evil, material world.
LaHaye, I think, has managed to span
these two realms. Today, the most
politically energized segment of the
American religious spectrum is fundamentalist evangelicals who adhere to a
pre-millennialist doctrine. So, one of
the tasks I think we face is to not just
understanding the theological underpinnings of LaHaye and this whole
"Left Behind" phenomenon, but appreciating its political import as well.

Utility of Apocalyptic Belief

I would say that in this cases,
there are "Uses For Apocalyptic
Belief."

One use comes from the act of

dividing the world into two camps: the
Children of Light and the forces of
Darkness. If you combine this with a
Parsippany, New Jersey

political agenda, what you have done is

literally demonize your opponents.
Your political adversaries
are not
flesh-and blood people that you happen to disagree with; they are actors or
dupes in some supernatural
drama.
Once you create these sorts of categories, just by putting someone on one
side or the other of this cosmic ledger
sheet, you alleviate the responsibility
of having to really think about what
you're doing. You create a whole narrative landscape that operates by your
rules, not necessarily the common language. I think that just one example of
this is the kind of harsh rhetoric that's
been used against gay people, and it
become so divisive and brutal that
even some religious groups recently
had to caution Jerry Falwell to tone
down his denunciation of homosexuals.

I think that LaHaye is also

providing relatively simple answers in
a world of very complex events and
often ambiguous situations. There is a
lot of uncertainty around us; there is a
lot of technological, economic, and cultural change and this often creates the
periods of social stress in which various apocalyptic or millenarian movements can flourish. The Millerite phenomenon, for instance, came during a
period of profound economic transition
in the United States. Being able to provide some kind of explanation for all of
this - especially one that fabricates a
future scenario - can be very reassuring and comforting.
Another thing I'd add here is
that LaHaye's premillennialism
contains a political message, or goes with
a political agenda, but it is not like
many of the other messages you find in
other religious movements. Postmillennialism was often the ideology of
groups bent on social reform, for good
or bad, because they saw this as part of
a gradual process of reforming and
perfecting the world. And there are
secular millenarian groups that also
buy into this assumption, that the
world can be refined, and perfected,
and made unified and whole.
But LaHaye's message is more
about fighting the Antichrist
and
building up the fear level in Christians, and winning more souls - let's
make that "minds" - in the process. So,
with this message you don't have to
worry so much about reforming the
Summer 2001

world. You worry about spreading the

word, and any social program is subordinate to that agenda.

I'd also suggest that the LEFT

BEHIND books need to be viewed in a
larger context, where some people are
turning to authoritarian
religious or
political or cult ideologies for assurance and solutions. The Jesus of the
Tribulation is not a whimpy, love-andforgiveness Messiah. I recently heard
an evangelist speak on this topic, and
he made it pretty clear that the Jesus
that is coming back is a god of
vengeance. This isn't some pencil-neck
Jesus who talks about forgiveness, or
love, or inclusiveness. This is Jesus on
apocalypse steroids; this is the final
battle, and all of those who have not
obeyed are going to get theirs. And I
suspect that this even feeds into very
basic human feelings such as the
desire for revenge: They haven't listened to our message, they don't think
or believe like us, now they will be
punished for their wickedness while
we look on. I see a connection between
the god of the Rapture
and the
Apocalypse, and the emergence of
what I call "muscular Christianity,"
the Jesus of the Promise Keepers, for
instance, a view of Christianity that
places emphasis on punitive retribution, punishment, and judgment. It is a
view that encourages Christians to
"take dominion" over all social and
political institutions.

Now, another feature has to do

with something that is very basic to
many apocalyptic narratives, and that
is the notion of "duality," or inclusion
and exclusion. Those who anticipate
some kind of apocalyptic or millennialist .moment - whether it's a peasant
army in the middle ages or some
prophet writing texts in a desert
wilderness - need to divide the world,
and they divide it into light and darkness, good and evil. And in the context
of modern times, this means constructing a sort of conspiracy theory to
explain the events around us. This provides a simple, self-validating template to explain what are otherwise
perplexing
and often ambiguous
events from the past and present. And
all of the future is like that, it's unwritten, it's filled with surprises
and
uncertainty
and often conflicting
trends. But an apocalyptic vision
Page 33

------

addresses all of that uncertainty. Just

as you demonize your political or religious opponents, you fit their actions
into a larger plot line that is orchestrated as part of a cosmic or eschatological drama.
LaHaye does this in two stages.
First, the LEFT BEHIND books which
focus mainly on several characters
including an airline pilot and a news
reporter, are supposedly fiction but
they are also presented as "fact" in
their prophetic vision. LaHaye is more
blatant in some of his other writings,
and I think these inform us more when
we evaluate the LEFT BEHIND series. For
instance, LaHaye has recently come
out another book, and it is titled Mind
Siege, and it is already a hot seller. Let
me read you a couple of paragraphs
from the flyleaf The co-author, by the
way, is David Noebel. He is head of
Summit Ministries and an associate of
James Dobson, who is head of Focus on
the Family. Noebel goes way back on
the religious right; in the early 1960s
he was associated with Billy James
Hargis, and for years he denounced
rock and roll music as a communist
plot to create what he called "a generation of American
youth useless
through nerve-jamming, mental deterioration, and retardation."
The flyleaf reads:
Authors Tim LaHaye and David
Noebel are sounding trumpets of
alarm, calling us to wake up and
defend our right to believe and
behave as Christians.
Already, Christianity has been
silenced in our schools and driven
from the public arena. Abortion
rights, gay and lesbian rights, feminist rights and atheists' rights have
virtually
eclipsed
any rights
Christians used to enjoy.
The authors insist that the conflict is between the biblical Christian and the Secular Humanist
world views. This is a battle for our
minds, a war to decide whether our
thoughts will be shaped by the wisdom of men like Marx, Darwin,
Freud, and Nietsche [and Nietzsche
is misspelled], or by the wisdom
God shared through Moses, the
prophets, the apostles, and Jesus.
LaHaye goes on to list what he
says are the five basic tenets of Secular
Page 34

Humanism, namely Atheism, Evolution, Amorality, Human Autonomy, and

Globalism. He even has one chapter
titled "Humanists control America,"
which I think would be news to most
humanists!
I don't think we have to dwell on
the problems with this view, especially
since "Secular Humanists," or at least
the ones I've met, often still can't figure out what they stand for. I'm an
Atheist, but I resent being consider
"amoral," and since I'm a First
Amendment voluptuary who distrusts
big government, there are plenty of
things about Globalism that I don't
endorse. This sort of disagreement is
what being a Free-Thinker
is all
about!
But what does this remind you of?
I'd suggest that in many ways,
LaHaye's LEFT BEHIND series, and especially his battle cry for Christians to
mobilize against the evil of Atheism,
evolution, and modernity, is apocalyptic. Mind Siege is a type of modern-day
War Scroll, carefully delineating who
are the Sons of Darkness. Apocalyptic
believers divide the world into absolutist encampments of good and evil,
and usually in such a scheme, evil is by
far the more pervasive. Like the vision
of the Essenes, good is confined only to
the cultural nooks and crannies. Your
"enemies" are always more powerful,
more malevolent, more sinister. Only
the intervention ofthe Final Judgment
can save the day.
Another
method
I think
LaHaye uses to emphasize this dualism and cosmic struggle between good
and evil is by promoting the notion of
Christian
persecution.
This view
seems to fit with an emerging narrative that is increasingly used by many
religious fundamentalists
and evangelicals. Traditionally,
evangelicals
especially saw themselves as "apart"
from the secular world, but LaHaye's
writing are part of a larger phenomenon which suggests that somehow secular culture is "persecuting" or violating the "rights" of Christians. This is
now part of the rhetorical battle over
everything from school prayer and the
display of religious symbols on public
property, to issues like faith-based
social programs and the Religious
Liberty Protection Act. You hear even
liberal religious partisans suggesting
Summer 2001

that thanks to secular culture, their

religious freedoms are somehow at
jeopardy, or that religion is "under
attack."
Finally, and there is a lot more
that can be said here, are the political
ramifications of this sort of apocalyptic
belief in the Middle East. Jerusalem is
"ground zero" for many religious
groups. It is the cultural intersection of
three of the world's oldest and largest
faiths, and it has been overrun and reconfigured politically and culturally
for literally millennia. It is a volatile
region; and when groups talk about
storming the Temple Mount, or perhaps seeing in some kind of military
action (like the Seven Day War in 1967
when the Israeli Army took Jerusalem)
an apocalyptic sign, this only fuels the
tensions. I think that all of the different factions there should be suspect
when any type of apocalyptic rhetoric
appears. We are no longer talking
about armies
with chariots
and
swords, but nation-states with potential nuclear and biological capability.
The same can, or probably will, be said
of other players in the region, from terrorist sects to extremist political movements.
So, I hope that this excursion
through one of the obscure corridors or
human history, gives you some idea of
how apocalyptic ideas have worked in
the past, and how they are affecting us
today. We know for sure that all of
these predictions have failed to come
true. That doesn't mean that some
won't in the future; but for us, the best
evidence is that none of this is going to
occur. That's unfortunate on one count:
every time I see a "Last Trumpet"
bumper sticker on a nice sports car or
SUV, I think of that sticker that says:
"In case of Rapture, can I have your
wheels?"

COERCED EXERCISE
IS NOT

FREE EXERCISE
OF RELIGION!
-FRZ

American Atheist

The State Of
Atheism In
France
By Christian Eyschen
A speech given by Christian Eyschen,
Secretary General of La Libre Pensee,
on Saturday, 14 April 2001 at the 27th
National Convention of American
Atheists in Orlando, Florida. The
address by Roger LePeix will appear in
the Autumn Issue.
Dear Friends,
We are meeting you for the second
time, and we are always learning
something new.
From the point of view of a lot of
people in France, the United States is
a churchy, religiously fanatic country.
But as we are here for a while, we are
discovering that things are not as simple as that. Our countries have a lot of
differences, but also a lot of resemblances.
When we study the history of the
United States of America, we are
struck by the resemblance between
our Revolutions and Republics. The
American Revolution is the mother of
the French Revolution. The American
Republic, like the French Republic, has
nothing to do with religions. George
Washington said something like: "The
United States is not based, neither
closely nor far away, on Christian doctrine."
The French law of Separation in
1905 is philosophically identical to the
first Amendment of your Constitution.
This philosophy doesn't accept any
divine power over individuals. This
philosophy wants free men and women
in a free society. And that, of course, is
unacceptable for any religion. That's
why they never consider human beings
except for when they kneel down for
Parsippany, New Jersey

prayer, and obviously, when they contribute with money to their god's charities. You and we agree, on both sides of
the ocean, that "God" doesn't exist; neither do his son, his brother or son-inlaw, nor his mother and her one-nightstand lover.
I would like to talk about Europe.
Since the collapse of Stalinism, a
true war of religions has broken out in
the East of Europe. Whereas social
poverty is spreading over the world as
an epidemic, churches, all the churches,
can't bring any answer but to pray.
The pope and the Vatican, the
Holy See as they say, attempt to contact as soon as possible states and governments in all countries to insure the
Vatican's position as the leader of the
European Union. And why? Because
the E.U has decided that after the ratification of the European treaty of
Amsterdam, states and people will
never be allowed to modify the legal
relations between state and church in
a given country.
So, you can see that the churchy
attitude is not only a US. specialty.
That's the reason why La Libre
Pensee, the French Free Thinkers
organization,
fights in France, in
Europe, and all around the world, to
insure the complete freedom of conscience; and, for us, the complete freedom of conscience can't be assured
without
a
complete
separation
between churches and state. This fight
is, of course, also yours. It's the fight of
all men and women who really aspire
to freedom.
The first time we met your organization was in February 2000; we have
been warmly received by your president Ellen Johnson. Thank you one
more time for her kindness.
Summer 2001

Since then,
we proposed
to
American Atheists to take part in the
constitution of an international liaison
Committee
of Atheists
and Free
Thinkers, and we have written a preliminary document, the name of which
could be "International Manifesto for
an Atheist Humanism."
For us, real humanism can't be
anything but an Atheist humanism.
Protagoras, a Greek philosopher, a
long, long time before the so-called
Jesus Christ said:
"Man is the measure of all things."
If it be true, a god is of no interest.
In this manifesto we say, "Religion
is prehistory.
Religion is dogma.
Religion is the negation of science.
Religion is oppression." I would quote
an extract of this preliminary manifesto:
''A free man in a free society:
"From all the materials we have
discussed in this manifesto, we draw a
conclusion: human beings must be free
in a freely and voluntarily organized
society.
"Conscience must condition what
they want to be and must condition the
social ways in which they move.
Freedom of conscience is therefore a
first principle for societies that are
totally free and established on a crosscontinental, planetary scale.
"The acknowledgment of this freedom of conscience has been demonstrated many times in history: in the
First Amendment of the Constitution
of the United States in 1789, in the
1905 law of Separation of Church and
State in France, in the Separation of
the Churches and State in Mexico in
1917, and in the Decree of Separation
of Church and State in the USSR in
1918.
Page 35

"Therefore,
three
things
are
required:
"The affirmation of the complete
freedom of conscience, can only express
itself by a complete neutrality of the
state and public services in metaphysical matters
(religious or anti-religious). That's why we demand the complete separation of churches and states,
for no institution, whether religious or
nonreligious, has any right to impose
upon anyone a belief or non-belief
which the human being refuses and
which he chooses not to recognize for
himself. Clearly, on the constitutional
level, i.e. the model-for the organization of a society, we unconditionally
stand for a secularized society which
leaves the individual free in his own
beliefs and allows him to express them
in complete independence and without
any repression of any nature whatever.
There must be respect for the forms of
organizations which the people have
freely chosen for their institutional

forms of state. No supranational body,

of whatever nature, can be allowed to
decide the future of the nation in their
stead.
"On the personal level, the level of
individual commitment, we stand for
the development of Atheism, which is
the only foundation of a true humanism. If there is a god, there can be no
place for man. We have to choose, and
we have chosen the human being. We
remember that Atheism (as in India) is
a very old philosophy, earlier than
most of the monotheist religions and
sects."
The separation between churches
and states is a democratic necessity.
It's the reason why we would hope,
with your organization and others, to
organize a symposium in the prestigious university La Sorbonne, which
has seen so many revolts against religious oppression.
This symposium
would celebrate the two hundredth
birthday of Thomas Jefferson's decra-

tion about the wall of separation

between church and state which is
embodied in the First Amendment.
We would on this occasion launch
a great action, on the international
level, for the separation
between
churches and states. This action might
end in a world congress of Atheists and
Free Thinkers in 2005, in Paris, in the
UNESCO headquarters,
at the same
time as the hundredth birthday of the
French Law of Separation.
One more time, a thousand thanks
to American Atheists, and to Ellen
Johnson for your invitation and your
welcome.
The great German writer Goethe
said about the great victory of Valmy
in 1792, in the beginning of the great
French Revolution: "This day is the
beginning of a new day." The day after,
the first French Republic was proclaimed. Together, let us proceed on the
way of freedom, and maybe, this day
will be a new day for Atheists and Free
Thinkers all around the world.

CREA,\ON1SM AWL\e:O 1"0 ROC\<ET SCiENCE.

"Lora.- take this here rocket we built, and cast it into arbit!tI
Page 36

Summer 2001

American Atheist

..n

Creating
Creationists:
Creationists' Use Of
"Science" Texts

By Jim Strayer

A lecture given Saturday, 14 April

2001, at the 27th National Convention
of American Atheists in Orlando,
Florida. Mr. Strayer has published
widely on the teaching of science, with
such titles as "The Scopes Evolution
Trial: The Battle Continues," "The
Golden Silk Spider," and "Thomas
Huxley Debates Bishop Wilberforce."

book that are being used in science

classes. I reviewed Bob Jones 1st
(1980) and 2nd (1997) editions of the
seventh
grade, Life Science For
Christian
Schools by William S.
Pinkston and David R. Anderson, the
8th grade book, Earth Science for
Christian Schools, by George Mulfin
and Donald E, Snyder (1995), and the

resident George W. Bush and

Governor Jeb Bush have both
opened the door for evaluation
and criticism of schools involved in the
voucher system and in other faithbased endeavors. It should be obvious
that tax-payer money should not be
spent in the public arena without some
sort of evaluation.
A very effective method of evaluation of any school curriculum is to
examine the books that the school
uses. This would give some indication
as to the teaching of religion to the
voucher students, which both Bushes
allegedly oppose.
There are a number of publishers
who sell text books to private schools.
In Florida, A Beka Books of Pensacola
Christian College, claims to be the
world's largest publisher of Christian
text books. Bob Jones University Press
also publishes books on every level,
and they distribute thousands of books
to religious schools
My background is in biology and I
have evaluated several biology texts in
the thirty-two years that I was a high
school and community college teacher.
I purchased and read for review
four Bob Jones books and one A Beka
Parsippany, New Jersey

10th grade, Biology for Christian

Schools by William S. Pinkston (1999).
The A Beka text

that

I review

is

Biology, God's Living Creation.

The overall assessment of these
texts is that they are not science books;
they are religious books. They are very
well done on a craftsmanship level.
They have the highest quality paper,
the art work is excellent, and they
have first-class photography.

Summer 2001

There are five major points concerning these texts:

1. Rather than describing them
as science books, I would say that they
are anti-science. The attitude they promote at all times is a disregard for science and the accomplishments of science. In several chapters in all four of
the Bob Jones books students are told
that if scientific evidence disagrees
with the Bible, disregard the scientific
evidence. None of the books give any
reference to any science book, science
journal, or publication found in science
literature. Students are told to disregard any statement found in encyclopedias that disagrees with the Bible.
2. The appeal is to authority and
not the scientific method. In all three
books God, Lord, Creator, or Jesus is
referred to several time and the Bible
is the only reference ever used. The
major tenet of science - that with new
evidence scientists, and the rest of us,
can change our minds - is completely
lost in the authority of the Bible.
Life Science (2nd ed.) refers to God
or Jesus over 380 times; the Bible is
given as a reference over 150 times;
Satan is referred to three times, and
Hell at least twice. In Earth Science
God or Jesus is referred to over 200
times, and Bible verses are given as
references 82 times. Biology has over
600 references to God or Jesus, over
350 references to Bible verses, and
refers to Satan over 40 times. Biology God's Living Creation has over 100 references to the Bible. It refers to God or
Creator over 425 times, and makes no
reference to any science book or journal.
3. Moralizing is common in all
texts. Fear of eternal damnation and
Page 37

Satan are used to control student

thinking, a negative form of the appeal
to authority. Students are told that the
Bible tells what type of thoughts they
should think, what type of thoughts
they should not think, and, since a
thought can be right or wrong, it is
spiritually significant and has "eternal" consequences.
A few examples from the text
books will illustrate that these are religious books that teach inaccurate
science and do not measure up to the
standards of text books used in public
schools.

Life Science For Christian Schools.

William S. Pinkston, Jr. & David R.
Anderson. Second Edition. Bob
Jones University Press, 1997.
"Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., stated the only
logical position that a Christian can
take regarding creation and evolution
when he said, 'Whatever the Bible says
is so; whatever man says mayor may
not be so.' Our belief in a holy and
righteous God, our salvation through
Jesus' blood, and our hope of spending
eternity in heaven all depends upon
the truth of the Word of God. If the
Bible is not true, or if it is only partially true, then we along with the Apostle
Paul, 'are of all men most miserable.' (I
Corinthians 15:19)." [page 131]

the doctrine of Creation, in time he

could cause us to doubt everything the
Bible says." [page 132]
"When an evolutionist says that
the world and man evolved by chance,
he is really saying that God is a liar
and that He does not have the power to
create. ... In Genesis 1 God describes
what He created each day. But according to evolutionists, having the sun,
moon, and stars created after the
plants were created or creating light
and dark on the earth before creating
the sun is 'out of order.' This sequence,
however, is the way God said He did
it." [page 133]
"Since Darwin's time people have
been studying the fossil record. Today
scientists know a great deal about it.
What the evolutionists had hoped to
find in the fossil record is not there. In
fact, what was found did not support
evolution at all." [page 157]
"The biblical teaching that the
Flood was universal
supports the
Flood theory of fossil formation. If this
theory is true, most fossils are a record
of Noah's day, and not a progressive
record of long ages of time. The Flood
theory also provides some interesting
material to support different ideas
about the time in which dinosaurs
lived." [page 136]

"Since the Bible is always accurate, we can use it to judge scientific

observations
and any conclusions
based on observations. Any observation or conclusion will fit one of three
categories. It will
1. contradict the Bible and be
wrong,
2. agree with the Bible and be
accurate, or
3. not be discussed in the Bible
and mayor may not be accurate." [page
22]

"Scientists have calculated that if

two of every land-dwelling
animal
were put into a cage and stacked
inside the ark, the ark would be only
half full. Noah may have used the rest
of the ark for his family, the sacrificial
animals, and food.
"Noah did not have to personally
gather all of the animals from far corners of the earth. God brought them to
the Ark in pairs (Gen. 6:20; 7:9,15)."
[page 137]

"Once we accept the Word of God

as true and accurate, we must believe
the Bible when it says God designed,
created, and sustains the physical
world (John 1:1-5). Satan, however,
wants us to doubt God. He bends facts,
supplies twisted interpretations,
and
plants thoughts in our minds to make
us doubt what the Bible says about
Creation. If he can cause us to doubt

"Flood theorists often use the fossils to provide direct support for the
Flood theory of fossil formation. For
example, fossils are found in randomly
arranged layers. This lack of order
could be easily explained if fossils were
formed by the Flood. According to the
Bible the Flood waters contained all
kinds of organisms. Sediment from the
Flood probably settled to the bottom

Page 38

Summer 2001

during the forty-day rain. If the sediment was pressed down during the
year the water was on earth, mixed-up
layers of fossils could have resulted."
[page 141]
"Evolutionists believe that it took
a long period of time (along with possible series of catastrophes) to form the
fossil layers. They say that these layers
contain a record of evolution. The older
layers at the bottom contain tiny
'early' organisms, and the younger layers at the top contain larger 'advanced'
organisms. One problem with this
interpretation is that some fossils are
found passing through several layers.
Does this mean that one part of the
fossilized organism evolved long before
another part of the same organism."
[page 144]
"In Job 41 God describes a second
creature. The leviathan is a mighty,
untamable, fearless animal with tightlyfitting scales and a mouth full of 'terrible teeth,' out of his mouth go burning
lamps, and sparks of fire leap out. 'Out
of his nostrils goeth smoke... His
breath kindleth coals, and a flame
goeth out of his mouth' (Job 41:19-21).
"Was leviathan a fire-breathing
dragon? Some skeptics point to this
passage and say that since fire-breathing dragons are myths, the Bible must
be a book of fairy tales. Christians
must reject such interpretations.
"Is it possible that fire-breathing
animals existed? Today some scientists
are saying yes. They have found large
chambers in certain dinosaur skulls.
These chambers do not exist in skulls
of living organisms, and scientists are
not sure of their function.
"Is it possible that the large skull
chamber contained special chemical
producing glands? When the animal
forced the chemicals out of its mouth
or nose, these substances may have
combined to produce fire and smoke.
This chemical might have been similar
to the bombardier beetle's reaction.
This beetle is able to produce chemicals that cause an explosion when
released.
"Job was probably familiar with
behemoths and leviathans
because
they were animals he had seen on the
earth. Many creationists believe that
before the Flood, and for a short time
American Atheist

afterwards, dinosaurs and men lived

near each other. If this is so, then behemoth and leviathan may have been
seen by Job around four thousand to
five thousand years ago." [page 143]
"As Bible-believing Christians we
cannot accept any evolutionary interpretation. Dinosaurs and men may
have lived side by side within the past
few thousand years. This could not
have happened if evolution were true."
[page 143]

Earth Science For Christian

Schools. George Mulfinger and
Donald Snyder, Second Edition,
Bob Jones University Press, 1995.

in his rebellion against God, has put

forth various theories to satisfy himself that the moon could have come
into existence without the need for a
Creator. As we discuss each of these
theories, you will begin to understand
the inadequacy of man's reasoning
when it comes to the question of origins." [page 136]
"Every theory of the moon's origin
has failed. The moon expeditions provide information that expose the weaknesses of the theories. Nothing reasonable has come along since to replace
them. These theories show man's
unwillingness to give God the glory
that is rightfully His." [page 138]

Structure of the Atmosphere

Science and the Bible
"For the Christian, earth science is
the study of God's creation. As such, it
is subject to God's infallible Word, the
Bible. The final authority
for the
Christian is not man's observations,
but God's revelation.
Being the
inspired Word of God, it can be trusted
to be correct in every point.
Anything that does not fit the
Bible-derived framework must come
under the heading of 'science falsely so
called.' (1 Tim. 6:20). True science
always agrees with the Bible." [page
VIII]

The Planets
"The only way we can know for
certain how the planets came into existence is to learn from the one who
made them. Thus the only statements
on the subject of origins that will
endure are those set down by 'holy
men of God [who] spake as they were
moved by the Holy Ghost' (II Pet.
1:21)." [page 98]
The Moon
"God created the moon to be 'the
lesser light to rule the night' (Gen.
1:16)" [page 120]
"When men reject the Word of God
on the subject of origins, they cut
themselves off from the only true
means of gaining any real knowledge
of the subject. No man was present
when the earth and the moon were created. We must therefore accept the
account of the one who was present
when these bodies were formed. Man,
Parsippany, New Jersey

"The Bible describes the creation

of the atmosphere as a direct act by
God rather than any evolutionary
process. According to Genesis 1:6-8,
God made the atmosphere on the second day of creation and made the dry
land appear on the third day of creation. The Lord divided the water that
covered the earth's surface, placing
some of it in the atmosphere and leaving the remainder on or below the surface." [page 168]
"Some environmentalists
fear for
the future, but for the wrong reasons.
They do not want the earth to be
destroyed. Yet the earth will be
destroyed in a manner more terrible
than their worst fears - not by pollution, but by a sudden judgment of God.
Only a fool will give his life to save
the earth. Our fears should impel us,
instead, to serve the Lord." [page 171]

Why should a person desire to be

ignorant of these events? Why do unregenerate scientists tend to disregard
the three events describes above?
First, man by his sinful nature does
not like to face responsibility. Second,
man does not like to confront the fact
of sin. The fall of man shows that man,
by nature, is sinful and he is incapable
of doing right.
In spite of all the ways man has
set out to disprove and discredit the
Word of God, God's Word still stands
the test of all true scientific research.
Man is responsible to a superior being,
there is such a thing as right and
wrong, and there will one day be a day
of judgment for the wrongs that a person has done." [pages 246-247]

The Big Bang Theory

"It is actually a form of blasphemy
to say what the intricate handiwork of
God we see all around is nothing more
than the fallout from a cosmic blast.
This is completely contrary to the
Scriptural picture of Creation. Also the
Bible tells us that God created the universe out of nothing. The big bang theory assumes that matter was already
present before the explosion. Thus the
theory avoids the question of the creation of matter." [page 248]
Be alert to these fallacies as you
read science articles and test the ideas
and thoughts to see whether they are
of God. As Christians, then we should
always examine scientific information
in the light of God's Word in the Bible.
Of course, any information that is contrary to the Bible is wrong. [page 252]

The Fall and Curse

The Age of the Earth

"The second event recorded in

Scripture that influenced the world in
which we live is the fall of man as
recorded in Genesis 3. Sin is a concept
that many do not like to reckon with.
Not only did sin enter the world at this
point, but also God cursed the earth."

"The evolutionists reject dating

methods that indicate a young earth,
not because the methods are wrong,
but because they do not fit their theory.
Creationists can estimate the age
of the earth, not because they rely on
dating techniques, but because the
Bible contains an eye witness account
of creation. We can only guess at conditions in the early days, before the
Flood destroyed most of the evidence.
Modern accumulations
of various
materials in the earth help us study
changes since the Flood, but the value
is limited in study conditions before
that time. Any attempts to date the

The Flood
"The third event of the Biblederived framework is also recorded in
the early chapters of Genesis. The
event is the worldwide Flood of Noah's
day. God's Word says that a person who
cannot see the evidence for it is, 'willingly ignorant' (Pet. 3:5).
Summer 2001

Page 39

earth based on accumulations of different materials is misleading and unscientific." [pages 266-267]

Biology For Christian Schools.

William S. Pinkston Jr. Second
Edition, Bob Jones University
Press, 1999.

The Quotes
"Biology for Christian Schools is a
high school textbook for Bible-believing Christians.
Those who do not
believe that the Bible is the inspired,
inerrant Word of God will find many
points in this book puzzling. This book
was not written for them." [page vii]
"You may find a description of the
insect that the grasshopper evolved
from, and what insects evolved from
the grasshoppers. These statements
are conclusions based on 'supposed science.' If the conclusions contradict the
Word of God, the conclusions are
wrong no matter how many scientific
facts may appear to back them." [page
vii, CHAPTER ONE, The Science of
Life and the God of Life]
"AIDS, cancer, crowding, heart disorders, and pollution are but a few of
the biological problems facing us today.
Scientists are looking for solutions,
and since they have often been successful in the past, most people seem
confident that a better life is just
around the corner. But is it?
The Bible states, 'Ye have the poor
always with you.' (Matt. 26:11). There
will be sickness, suffering, and death
until Christ returns for His thousandyear reign on the earth (Isa. 35:5-10;
Matt. 24:5-14; Rev. 21:4). Man must
now earn his bread by the sweat of his
brow because of God's curse upon the
earth (Gen. 3:19)." [page 3]

Truth: the Wordof God

"Our God is a God of truth. Christ
said, 'I am ....the truth' (John 14:6) and
later called the Holy Spirit the 'Spirit
of truth' (John 14:17, 15:26, 16:13).
What the God of truth says must be
true. Thus Scripture, the Word of God,
is truth (John 17:17). Logic, observations, workability, and common beliefs
or personal faith cannot disprove these
claims of the Bible." [page 9]

Page 40

A Classification of Truth

Dinosaurs

"When man looks at a statement,

whether based on repeated observations, logic, or even faith, it must fit
under one of these four categories.
1. Revealed truth: that which is
revealed in scripture, whether or not
man scientifically proved it. If it is in
the Bible, it is already true, without
other proof
2. Theory: that which is thought to
be true, is not revealed truth, but may
be part of unrevealed truth.
3. Fallacy: that which is contradicted by God's revealed truth, no matter how scientific, how commonly
believed, or how apparently workable
it may seem.
4. Truth by definition: that which
because man has defined it, as mathematics, grammar, and meaning of
words. [page 12]

"Biblical and scientific evidence

tend to support the idea that men and
dinosaurs existed at the same time.
Two references to animals believed to
be reptiles are found in the final chapter of Job.
Although Job may never have seen
these animals, it is safe to assume he
was at least familiar with oral traditions about them. This is a good indication that man was alive at the same
as time dinosaurs." [page 413]

Miraculous healing
"The Bible teaches us that God
controls sickness and health
and
works His will through both.
If God wants to heal miraculously
He will. The will of God, however, often
includes man's using his intelligence.
Most medical drugs are tools that God
uses to effect his will." [page 616]

Biblical Creation
"Many Bible Scholars agree that
there was no rainfall before the Flood,
plants being watered by mist which
rose from the earth. (Gen. 2:5-6)." "This
canopy of water is believed to have fallen when 'the windows of heaven were
opened' (Gen. 7:11) at the time of
Noah's Flood. The layer of water vapor
must have been a transparent layer,
not obscuring the sun, moon, and stars
but probably affecting the radiation of
the sun on the earth. [page 175]
"Water covered the highest mountain to a depth of over 20 ft. God made
a covenant with Noah that there would
never again be such a Flood. The rainbow symbolizes His Promise (Genesis
8:21; 9:11)." [page 180]

Creation with apparent age

"People often fail to consider that
the earth must have been created with
Apparent age. Adam was not an infant
on the seventh day of creation. Even
though he was just a day old, he had a
body of at least a young adult who was
able to care for himself The same was
true of the animals. The Garden of
Eden had fruit-bearing plants, not just
seeds and seedlings." [page 188]
"Noah's Flood which covered the
mountains, is an explanation of when
the ranges formed, and what force
formed them." [page 186]
Summer 2001

Homosexuality
"God calls homosexuality a sin,
and those who engage in this act are
reprobates. (They are sinners against
God, and they know it.) Thus, God condemns them for it along with adultery,
fornication, idolatry, and other sins.
Today Satan has convinced people
that adultery and fornication are so
much a normal part oflife (since everybody is doing it) and so natural (since
humans do have a reproductive inclination) that such acts are not really
sins. God's word tells us that the pleasures of sin are for a season (Heb. 11:25)
and that we should not sin under any
circumstances" (Rom. 6:12-13). [page
646]
"The Christian view of man - that
man was created perfect but is now a
wicked sinner who is responsible for
his sin - is by comparison unappealing. The Bible places the blame for sin
on the individual. It says that man
cannot save himself but is in need of a
savior.
Darwinian
evolution
promises
great things in the future ifman works
at it. Darwinism is, therefore, contrary
to God and His word in that it blames
natural causes for man's future. In
contrast, the Bible blames man for his
condition and presents God as man's
only hope." [page 197]

American Atheist

Biology: God's Living Creation.

Gregory Parker, Keith Graham,
Delores Shimmin and George
Thompson, A Beka Book, Pensacola Christian College, 2000.
"Since the day that Darwinism
invaded the classroom, God's glory has
been hidden from students. Now there
is an opportunity in the Christian
Classroom to declare that glory with
Biology: God's Living Creation." [page iii]
"People as well as animals are discouraged from using plants with
thorns. In Genesis 3:18 is recorded the
origin of thorns as a result of man's sin
and God's curse upon the earth." [page
79]
"God created for man a perfect
body. Until Adam and Eve sinned,
their bodies were without flaw. Ever
since their sin, however, the human
body has been subjected to disease,
decay, and death." [page 128]
"Since the curse of sin changed
man's relationship
to nature (Gen.
3:17-19), man has been carefully
choosing and breeding plants to make
them more fit for human consumption.
Because of the curse, wild varieties of
many food plants are highly toxic to
man." [page 233]
"Hence, the study of the human
body reveals, more than all the other
wonders of creation put together, the
infinite wisdom, power, and goodness
of the omnipotent
Creator,
who
designed this master piece of His hand
to be His viceregent here upon earth."
[page 120]
"The Bible makes reference many
times to the significance of hair and
how God expects us to respect it. There
are between 100,000 and 150,000
hairs on the average human scalp and
God keeps track of everyone." [page
284]
"Statistics show that most new
cases ofHIV infection in the U.S. result
from disobedience to God's standard of
morality." [page 331]

Parsippany, New Jersey

"Scripture verses indicate that the

fear of the lord is essential to good
health.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS FROM THE END OF

CHAPTERS.

"Proverbs 4:20-22 tells us that taking heed to God's instructions results

in 'health to all their flesh.' By simply
observing the lives of those who do not
obey the commandments we can see
the truth of these verses." [page 333]

7. Explain how grass reveals God's

care and provision for people and animals. Read Romans 1:20. What does
grass (a thing that is made) reveal
about God's eternal power? Why does
its widespread presence make all men
responsible
to God and without
excuse? [page 23]

"The scriptures teach that the

earth was originally created in a perfect state, but man's subsequent fall
into sin plunged the world into a state
of imperfection and death. The curse of
sin also effected the plant and animal
kingdoms; instead of being in perfect
harmony with each other, animals and
plants had to struggle to survive."
[page 360]
"Man 'always misses the mark'
when he shuts God out of this thinking, and man has a distorted picture of
all nature when he refuses to accept
God's explanation for the beginning."
[page 392]
"Why did God make all of this
variety possible? The answer is the
same as why creation exists at all - to
GLORIFY GOD." [page 475]
"Although the Bible does not use
the term 'dinosaur' (the term was first
used in 1842), many Bible scholars
believe
the
two creatures
God
describes in Job 40 and 41 may have
been dinosaurs living during the time
of Job." [page 494]
"Many creationists
think that
Leviathan, which God describes in Job
41 as a fire-breathing, aquatic animal
with scaly skin, thick armor, powerful
jaws, and terrible teeth, may have
been a type of pliosaur or plesiosaur."
[page 495]
"When God cursed the earth after
the fall (Gen. 3:17-19; Rom. 8:20-21),
the relationship
between man and
some of the insects changed. Sin, disease, suffering, and death entered the
world; as a result, some insects became
transmitters of disease and the cause
of suffering." [page 538]

Summer 2001

"4. Describe the divine prOVISIOn

evident within the process of pollination. [page 57]
"5. In a paragraph, explain how
Linnaeus's belief in a special creation
was the foundation of his system of
classification. [page 90]
"8. Explain how the structure and
composition of bone reveals its design
by an intelligent Creator. [page 143]
"8. Describe how the process of
aging relates to the fall of man and
man's present sinful condition. [page
310]
"6. Read Genesis 3:19 and Isaiah
51:6. How do these verses confirm the
second law of thermodynamics?" [page
600]
Religion is taught in every class
and the subject matter comes second.
These "science books" surely illustrate
that, but it should be noted that the
same is true of the other texts that
these publishers distribute to private
schools. A review of the history books
published by Bob Jones University
Press and A Beka books reveals that
they also are basically religious books.
A few examples should prove the
point.
"The superstition of the Hindus
keeps them living lives of fear. Their
gods stand in the way of the people's
health, the country's progress, and the
people's knowledge of the one true God
Who promises to take care of all those
who follow and trust Him. The Hindus
feed, wash, and dress their gods as a
child would care for a doll. How thankful we ought to be that we do not have
to take care of our God, but that He
will take care of us."
Page 41

- Old World History and

Geography, Pensacola, FL: A Beka
Books. 1991, page 211.
"To help them endure the difficulties of slavery, God gave Christian
slaves the ability to combine the
African heritage of song with the dignity and power of Christian praise.
Through the Negro spiritual,
the
slaves developed patience to wait on
the Lord and discovered that the true
freedom is freedom from the bondage
of sin. By first giving them spiritual
freedom, God prepared the slaves for
their coming physical freedom. Today,
the spiritual is recognized as America's
greatest contribution to the field of
music."
- Michael R. Lowman, George
Thompson, and Kurt Grussendorf,

United States History in Christian

Perspective: Heritage of Freedom, 2d
ed. Pensacola, FL. A Beka Books, 1996
"African religion had many ceremonies involving large groups. These
groups might be a single village or sev
eral villages from the same clan.
Ceremonies celebrated different
events, such as initiation for boys and

girls. The witch doctor led the people in

the rituals performed for the celebration. Almost every group ceremony
included music, both vocal and instrumental. And every ceremony had its
specific dances to be performed. It was
not uncommon for a dancer to become
possessed by an evil spirit. Some religious ceremonial dances even had
demon possession as their purpose.
Every part of these ceremonies - from
rituals to dances - promoted magic
and demonism, holding Africa in spiritual darkness.
This religion, like all false religions, is based on works and cannot
give blessing or salvation (Ephesians
2:8-9). The strong influence of magic
and demonism on African religion
made much of African life unhappy
and savage. Satan's strong hold on
these people kept them worshipping
him rather than the true God. Lions
were a very real danger to the
Africans' bodies, but the roaring lion of
the Devil (I Peter 5:8) was a much
greater enemy to their souls."

- World Study for Christian

Schools, Greenville, SC: Bob Jones

"The fear of nuclear war that pervades men's hearts and motivates our
foreign policy-makers is perfectly natural - natural but not spiritual. As
Christians we have not been given "the
spirit of fear: but of power, and of love,
and of a sound mind" (II Tim. 1:7). In
spite of who sits in the White House or
who rules in the Kremlin, or how many
treaties or hydrogen bombs are produced, God is still on the throne, and
our confidence is in Him. No one will
accidentally "push the button" that
destroys the world. God remains in
control, and his timetable for the world
will not have to be hastily rewritten."
- Timothy Keesee, American

Government

for Christian

Conclusion
Parents may choose to send their
children to schools using these books,
but it should seem obvious that tax
payer money should not be spent on
vouchers to have children taught using
these books.

University Press, 1993, page 353.

You
Page 42

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Schools,

Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University

Press, 1998, page 184.

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Summer 2001

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American Atheist

Tony Pasquarello
eloathed Elvis and everything
he represented.

That alone made Steve Allen one

ofmy heroes. He found the entire country-western, rock'n'roll, rhythm and
blues explosion and expansion of the
last century's last half appalling and
repellent. With extraordinary
prescience, he foresaw, then lived to see
the Tsunami of trash music wash all
musical standards down to the lowest
cultural levels. Successive waves of
hard rock, acid rock, punk rock,
grunge, soul, hip-hop, rap, gangsta rap,
and their many combinations and offshoots have resulted in a current pop
scene that flaunts first-grade rhymes
as lyrics, and a "music" whose highest
aspiration is to produce primitive
movements in human bodies.
Steve Allen sawall this coming
and challenged it. To no avail. The
pathogens of American popular culture
have infested and infected the entire
globe.
Tony Pasquarello
is an emeritus
professor of philosophy
at The
Ohio State University, Mansfield,
a professional musician, and philatelist.
Major articles
by him
have appeared in Free Inquiry, The
Skeptical Inquirer, and American
Atheist. His quasi-autobiographical The Altar Boy Chronicles, published by Gustav Broukal Press, is
available for $16.00 from American Atheists (Product #5583)

Parsippany, New Jersey

When the coarse and the crude

were becoming marks of excellence in
the arts, the intellectual analog was
the dumbing down of America, onwhidl
Allen also commented
with such
eloquence.

Allen was a formidable pop-jazz

pianist and composer of some good
tunes.
A humorist
in the Will
Rogers/Mark Twain tradition, he was a
master of the pithy anecdote, told with
the driest of wits. Intellectuals praised
his PBS series Meeting of the Minds
with nearly the same enthusiasm they
lavished on Sagan's Cosmos. And, last
but not least, Allen authored over fifty
books on a wide range of topics.
In his latter decades, Allen had
become one of the luminaries in the
various skeptic/humanist movements.
I recall, with great fondness, the first
world Skeptics Congress, Buffalo,
1996, for which I was the cocktail
Summer 2001

pianist. Steve Allen was the stellar,

featured speaker and entertainer. It
was there that he, a Humanist
Laureate, was given the Distinguished
Skeptic: Lifetime Achievement Award.
None of those accomplishments
made him much loved by the general
public. By the advent of the new century, notwithstanding his status as a
show business, television, humanist
icon, the populace considered him an
old-timer of Milton BerlelBob Hope
vintage, but nowhere near as funny as
those gentlemen. Yes, he had had
something to do with creating the
Tonight Show format, but, again, he
couldn't match the personality
of
Johnny Carson.
Dead, October 30, 2000
Shortly after Steve Allen's death, a
Larry King tribute featured reminiscences from a host of show-business
luminaries.
One prominent Jewish
entertainer
mentioned some trivial
past incident that had demonstrated
Allen's lack of religious bias; the entertainer was Jewish but" ... Steve was a
good Christian."
That piqued my curiosity. What
further slander would be bandied
about to sully the memory of a great
secular humanist?
Some twenty years ago in these
pages.! I had cautioned freethinkers of
all stripes to beware the frightening
power of the religious juggernaut, a
monster which would almost certainly
"get" them "in the end." That is to say,
1 Pasquarello, Tony. "On Avoiding That
Last Visit" (AmericanAtheist, Feb. 1982)

Page 43

even confirmed Atheists can anticipate

the likelihood of a religious funeral or
memorial service unless they take specific measures to prevent post-mortem
"conversions." With bad logic and
deliberate disregard for the ordinary
meanings of English words, clergy will
cite an Atheist's integrity, sincerity,
fervor, depth, christen these "Christian" virtues, and, miraculously, the
deceased
Atheist
becomes
a
"Christian."
Madalyn Murray O'Hair warmly
praised the article, commenting that it
had made her aware of a danger to
Atheism she had never "before considered. She thanked me personally for
having alerted her to take the necessary precautions.
In thinking
of Steve Allen's
posthumous fate, I suddenly had a
flashback to a year earlier and the
treatment accorded another celebrity one from the world of sports.

The Payne Stewart Memorial

Still fresh in my mind was the
sanctimonious travesty that was the
Payne Stewart memorial service. Over
the years, golf fans had observed
Stewart in countless tournaments and
heard numerous comments from his
peers. These all conveyed a picture of a
fun-loving guy with a fine sense of
humor, a player not averse to partying.
This was a good guy and good-time
guy, with an aura of naughtiness and
irreverence.
This golfer was much
more in the Lee Trevino mold rather
than the business-like seriousness of a
Nicklaus.
Yet, when the two bumbling clergymen who conducted the service were
through with him, he emerged a saintly
figure: God's toady, whose sole ambition was to praise Jesus. Those ministerial fools could not even consistently
unfold the hyper-sentimental
scenario
they concocted, in narrating the events
of Payne's
recent
afterlife.
Sure
enough, they assured us that, shortly
after dying, Payne had found himself
floating by, or over, the most beautiful
golf course he had ever seen. Many
earthly courses bear similar names,
but this was the real "Paradise Hills";
the genuine article. When he saw the
manicured
fairways
and carpeted
greens, the crystalline lakes and magnificent vistas, Payne knew that he
Page 44

just had to play that course. How to get

admitted? Here, the reverends faltered
a bit. In their muddled metaphor, they
had to introduce Jesus as a mysterious
old man encountered by Payne, but
couldn't quite specify his job description. He was either head groundskeeper or course superintendent. Or maybe
just a starter or gatekeeper - but, then,
wasn't that traditionally Peter's job?
At any rate, when Payne asks the
old man about the greens fees, he is
told that, in order to play the course,
all he must do is fall on his knees and
worship
the ticket-taker,
who Surprise! - turns out to be Jesus! After
sufficient groveling, Payne is admitted
to Paradise Hills and tees off.
While our preachers carried the
service to interminable lengths, somehow, the saga of Stewart and his celestial round of golf got lost in all the
exhortation. Some rather important
matters were omitted: What was par?
How deep was the rough? How many
water holes? What was his score? Was
he playing against Bobby Jones? Does
he ever play the course again? What
was the prize (since he was already
admitted to Heaven)? And so forth.s
And when this pitiable parable but not the service - draws to a close,
yes, there is Payne at the 18th green,
as we would have expected. But, inexplicably, he is in the gallery! What in
hell - pardon - what in heaven is he
doing there? Why, they tell us, he is
cheering vigorously as Jesus putts out!!
(And, just what does a Supreme Being
score? Presumably, he aces every hole;
an "18" for the round. So, why is he
putting? Unless he just wills the ball
into the cup on each hole; then, his
score is "0."2 )
Did Payne ever get to play? Who
knows? I submit that this flawed fable,
the pious concoction of that synaptically challenged duo, was an insult to
the memory of the vital, life-affirming
man who was one of our great golf
champions. No one is suggesting that
Stewart was an Atheist or Agnostic.
Just that he was not the mawkish, fundamentalist lackey created by those
inept imaginations.

Unfortunately, numerous exhaustive computer searches failed to turn

up any record of the remarks made at
Steve Allen's memorial service at the
Academy
of Television
Arts and
Sciences, Los Angeles, on 12 November
2000. Most media reports omitted any
mention of Allen's skepticism
and
humanism. However, there were at
least two that were curiouser and curiouser.
Paul Kurtz is perhaps the most
famous humanist of all and the driving
force behind Prometheus Press, Free
Inquiry, and the Skeptical Inquirer. He
was Allen's close friend and publisher.
He wrote of Allen3
"... Steve Allen identified himself
as a humanist
a humanist and skeptic in religion
a Humanist Laureate ...
Allen made it clear that he was not an
atheist, but a freethinker...
Steve
Allen was a secular
humanist ... "
[emphasis mine]
Funny, I had always thought that
"secular humanist" was a synonym for
''Atheist.'' If not, what's the "secular"
doing there? If it isn't adding the "godless" qualification, then it's obviously
redundant.
"Religious
Humanism"
must be the intended contrast. So ...
Steve Allen was a "secular humanist"
who was "not an atheist." Curious.
A somewhat different perspective
is afforded by a columnist famed for
his directness, clarity, and home-spun,
yet sophisticated wisdom. But Andy
Rooney's "tribute" to Steve Allen+ was

2 These tedious comments are meant to

illustrate the foolishness and meaninglessness of talking about a "perfect" golf
course, a "perfect" score, or indeed, a
"perfect" being.

3 Kurtz, Paul. "Steve Allen: Renaissance

Humanist"
(Free Inquiry,
Winter
2000/01)
4 Rooney, Andy. (Tribune Media Service,
Nov. 4, 2000)

Summer 2001

How could I help wondering if

Steve Allen had been given the same
Payne-ful,
posthumous
treatment?
Were the many secular humanists,
Jews, et al., in attendance assaulted
with childish fantasies of Steve's afterlife longing to be the pianist in J.C.'s
Big Band in the great beyond? Then,
just when Steve believes he will get to
swing with the band, that egomaniacal
J.C. slides onto the piano bench. He
reminds Steve that, like the earthly
Duke Ellington, he is both band leader
and pianist. And Steve doesn't mind.
He applauds anyway. (!)

The Media Mess

American Atheist

none of these, but a murky enigma

whose intent was impossible to decipher. The Rooney behind the writing
could not be read.
Rooney accurately notes that Allen
was "... more of an intellectual than he
was a comedian ... " He characterizes
their relationship as that of "... distant friends ... " Then comes the shocker: Rooney notes that media obituaries
were "... well done, but none mentioned what ended up being an obsession with Steve. He was a student of
the Bible and a dedicated atheist
intent on proving the Bible was a seriously flawed book ... " There follow ten
excerpts form Allen's writings; Rooney
assures the reader that he'll" ... be surprised" at them, and concludes by stating that "... the quotations ... will not
make him much loved by a great many
people who thought they knew him but
did not. I'm sure he'd prefer they knew
the real Steve Allen."
What was that all about? Damning with faint praise? An accurate
assessment of Allen's strengths and
weaknesses? A mean-spirited attempt
at maligning the public's image of a
carefree comic and musician? A malicious, "involuntary-outing"
of the
"true" Steve Allen after he could no
longer defend himself? Or, perhaps, an
honest effort to enlighten a public,
drowning in "dumbth"; to demonstrate
that one of their heroes was really an
Atheist and hope they would draw, not
the negative conclusion - "So Steve
Allen was really a demon in disguise" but the positive one - "Wow, so
Atheism can't be all bad!"
I wrote Rooney on these matters.
His gracious reply, while still evasive,
indicated that his original intent was
to be evasive: "When I wrote the Steve
Allen column I decided wisdom would
best be served if the clarity was missing." Rooney gave no documentation
for his claim that Allen was an Atheist,
but did, unequivocally state that he Rooney - is an Agnostic. He also sent
me photocopied excerpts from his book
Sincerely, Andy Rooney, that express
his position on religion. That position
is at least as critical and "surprising"
as Allen's, if not more so. Talk about
the pot calling the kettle ...

Parsippany, New Jersey

Steven Says
If there is some confusion in the
foregoing, perhaps the wisest tactic
would be to go to the source. What did
Steve Allen say he was? Numerous
passages from the pertinent booksf
provide a decisive, yet somewhat unexpected answer:
"... My own belief in God is ... we
Christians have been just as dangerous... As a Christian, I am grieved to
report... I am among the majority
who assume that a God does exist ... "
So, that was it. Steve Allen was a
theist and a Christian. Why? Well, he
appears to have considered Jesus
Christ to be an exceptionally virtuous
person.f But, what of the claims of
Kurtz and Rooney?
Let's compile some of what we
have learned:
Steve Allen was a good Christian
who was a freethinker who was not an
Atheist who was a secular humanist
who was a Christian who was an
Atheist who was a theist. Any questions?

But, in the marketplace, in the

real world of communication
and
intention, of speaking and understanding, words mean something. Something standardized and definite that
enables them to function as the invaluable tools they are. And that common
meaning is the one codified in the
priceless catalogue and final arbiter
we call a dictionary.
In the real world, a "free thinker"
cannot be a "believer"; a "secular
humanist" cannot be a "Christian"; an
"atheist" cannot be a "theist"; "good
Christians" do not author volumes of
scathing Biblical criticism. Were we to
embrace such contradictions, we would
be as credulous, and as demented, as
Lewis Carroll's Queen, who "believed
as many as six impossible things
before breakfast."

When Good Words Go Bad

So, who bears responsibility for
this terminological insanity? In this
case, I would suggest that Steve himself is the culprit. If only I could resurrect him, give him a good shaking (to
clear his head), and scold him:

Semantic Chaos
This way lies madness, linguistic
anarchy, the war of wiggly words
against
which Alice stands
firm
through all her Wonderland adventures. Eventually, in terminal exasperation, she makes the key point, challenging a babbling Humpty Dumpty
with incisive logic and a commonsense semantics.
"The question
is" said Alice,
"whether you can make words mean so
many different things." And, of course,
the only sensible answer is "NO,"
unless all your conversations
are
monologues. If you talk only to yourself, you can make anything mean anything; designate any symbol or sign to
stand for anything you like. No rules;
just whimsy. (There is significant
debate over whether such a subjective
procedure could justly be called a "language" at all.)
5 See, e.g., Dumbth: And 81 Ways to Make
Americans Smarter, (Prometheus Books,
1989); Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion
and Morality (Prometheus Books, 1990)
6 Steve should have read what Bertrand
Russell had to say on that precise point.

Summer 2001

"Well, Steve, see the fine mess

you've left us! You didn't really think
that Jehovah was any more real
than Allah or Zeus, but you wouldn't
call yourself an Atheist. You recognized that the whole concept of the
'supernatural'
was nonsense, but
claimed that you believed in God.
Which god was that Steve? You recognized, much more than most, that
the Bible was a mixed bag of babble,
with nowhere near the wit and wisdom of Plato's Dialogues; indeed,
you acknowledged the very real possibility that the Christ figure is
wholly mythological. Yet, you called
yourself a 'Christian,' while rejecting every essential, substantive doctrine of traditional
Christianity
(except the purely humanistic ones
concerning love and brotherhood).
What sort of Christian is that,
Steve? If you like egg rolls, that
doesn't make you a Chinese communist. If you admire the humanistic
part of Christianity, that doesn't
make you a Christian. It makes you
a humanist. It's that simple.
Yes, Steve, you fiddled with
meanings, rationalized this way and
that, and maybe got suckered in by
Page 45

some of the bad 'agnostic' arguments. But you didn't like the term
'Atheist.' That's really rich, Steve,
because, in fact, you were an
Atheist. All we have to do to demonstrate that is turn to your trusty dictionary and read what it says under
the entry 'G-O-D' or 'g-o-d.' Now,
truthfully Steve, did you think,
believe, suppose... that any such
being really existed? Of course not;
no intelligent person does. And
that's what an Atheist is! (Look
under 'a-t-h-e-i-s-t)."

Truth in Labeling
General terms like "Christian" or
"Democrat" are extremely useful labels
for quick and handy classifying. They
purchase their utility at the price of
vagueness. Call yourself a "Democrat"
and we have a rough and ready characterization of your politics. You may
favor school vouchers; you may not
have voted for Gore, and still be a
democrat. You're allowed some leeway;
some flexibility is included in the
vagueness. But, if you voted for G. W.
Bush and support most or all of his
policies, then you'd better explain why
you wish to be called a "Democrat."
This is the quandary of religious
humanists, Jews for Jesus, Christian
Atheists, "Death of God" theologians,
all those who desperately attempt to
retain an old label while thoroughly
rejecting the content. The FDA would
never permit the food or pharmaceutical industries to keep the same label
for a complete change of ingredients.
Neither must we, in the semantic
domain. All those contorted, hybrid
titles reflect their dilemma.
Following in the great philosophic
tradition of coining new words, I created what I considered a label, necessary
to accurately categorize most of these
seemingly self-contradictory
groups,
thinkers like Steve Allen, and, regrettable, so many others. I think they're
all closet Atheists. They usually reject
the standard religious doctrines and
the ordinary concepts of God, but they
cannot make a clean break. For one
reason or another, they revise and
redefine, then return to some form of
renovated belief, while keeping the old
labels like "Christian" and "theist."
Page 46

They are incurable recidivists. I called

them Rebelievers
to indicate their
backsliding into a "religious," but often
much fuzzier, belief system." When
pressed, all terms require explanation.
All general terms, all compound terms,
all invented terms like "Agnostic," even
standard terms like "Atheist." Since
you've going to be clarifying anyway,
why not use "Atheist" to indicate your
general convictions? "Atheist first;
explain later" isn't a bad rule of thumb.
That one word speaks volumes. It tells
everyone that you have a materialistic
ontology, with no slot for the "supernatural"; an empirical/scientistic epistemology or theory of knowledge; a
humanistic ethic in which values arise
and evolve as naturally as the species
itself It says that you are, probably, a
political liberal, opposed to censorship,
supportive of equal rights and freedom
of inquiry, and think there aren't many
credible challengers to the scientific
method. You are a strong supporter of
church-state
separation and believe
that, on balance, humanity would have
been better off had there never been
any such thing as religion. You feel
strongly that, when in the public
square, you should not have to endure
a constant battering by the naive fantasies of the majority's disordered
imaginations. Indeed, you insist that
our constitution guarantees that.
Of course there are negative connotations
- Josef Stalin, e.g. But
increased usage by those who are, in
most respects, normal and moral citizens, can help to normalize and regularize the term "Atheist." Eventually,
the stigma - largely the public's misperception - will disappear.

The Enormous Window

And that is precisely how a public
avowal of Atheism from Steve Allen
could have been of immense value. He
could have acknowledged his Atheism,
discreetly
but definitely,
without
shouting, but without hedging, either.
To do so these past twenty years would
have cost him absolutely nothing. His
7 Pasquarello, Tony. "God: 12,000 - the
Faith of a Rebeliever" (American Atheist,
Summer 2000)

Summer 2001

reputation as a major figure and innovator in the entertainment/television/music fields was a matter
of
record. His family, friends and associates were surely aware of his beliefs.
His fifty-plus books would not have
become unwritten; his 8000 songs decomposed. His finances were lavish
and secure.
In another article.f I noted that in the matter of professing Atheism some have a much wider window of
opportunity than others. Age, financial
status, community, peer groups - these
and many other factors determine the
practical, and usually negative, consequences of coming out of the closet.
But, to mix metaphors, the window in
Steve Allen's closet was enormous.
Much bigger than the door. De-closeting would have been easy for him, and
so beneficial for the cause of enlightenment. And a simple moral might have
been
indelibly
engraved
in the
American consciousness - "A good guy
can be an Atheist." And, conversely ''An Atheist can be a good guy." (Are
you listening Kurtz, Gould, Dershowitz, Rooney, ... ?)
Thanks, Steve
I'm so sorry Steve. We shared so
many interests - good music, jazz,
piano, writing, humor, critical thinking. You were a special kind of hero,
the renaissance man. And you were a
good guy. How I regret the loss of the
good, the good publicity that Atheism
would have gotten from your explicit
avowal.
Instead, we are left to grapple with
your murky legacy. To know what you
really were, we have to deduce, infer,
surmise, guess, extract,
speculate,
piece together, ... We have to figure it
out, when you could simply have told
us.
I know this letter to you has been
mainly a disenchanted downer. It came
form my box of Sarcastic "Thank You"
Notes. The next one will go to Ralph
Nader, thanking him for George W.
See Steverino page 52
S Pasquarello, Tony. "The Story Behind
The Altar Boy Chronicles" (American
Atheist, Summer 1999)

American Atheist

Belief And Knowledge:

A Conceptual Analysis
David Eller, Ph.D.
David Eller holds a doctorate in
anthropology and is the American
Atheists State Director for Colorado.
neveryday language, and even in
professional philosophy, it is common to hear knowledge defined as
"true belief" or ''justified true belief"
The implication is that knowledge is
not significantly
different from or
superior to belief, or worse yet that it is
or at the very least entails belief in
some crucial way - that knowledge is
not possible without belief I will take
the position, to the contrary, that the
equation of knowledge with true belief
is logically and psychologically false
and misleading and that the usage of
belief should be severely constrained to
a few very specific kinds of human cognitions.

To Know is To Believe
For those who take seriously the
idea that knowledge is true belief, to
know is to believe. In other words,
every "knowing" either is or entails a
"believing." It is possible to identify
three ways in which knowledge is
claimed to be or to involve belief We
will call these the sequential, the
dimensional, and the foundational
relations.
The sequential
relation
asserts that knowledge is a kind of
belief - the true or justified kind.
Human cognition goes through
a
sequence: all knowledge starts out as
belief that, if verified, becomes knowledge. Knowledge then is a subset of
belief - true or justified belief as
opposed to false or unjustified belief
The dimensional relation, as the name
suggests, conceives that belief is a
complementary and necessary dimension to knowledge. In this interpretation, everything that is "known" is also
Parsippany, New Jersey

"believed." For example, if you say, "I

know that the earth is round," you
would also have to say, "I believe that
the earth is round." The foundational
relation is more sophisticated, arguing
that knowledge is founded on a belief
or set of beliefs that could not be considered knowledge because it could
never be tested or proven. A good
example is geometrical knowledge,
which builds on a base of unverified
and unverifiable axioms like "Two parallel lines will never intersect." But
even everyday life is filled with such
foundation-beliefs, such as "The sun
will come up tomorrow" or "The ground
will stay solid beneath my feet." These
axioms are beliefs, and knowledge (or
even life) could not proceed without
them.
Hopefully it is already apparent
that each of these relationships is logically confused and psychologically
inaccurate. In regard to the sequential
argument, if knowledge is true belief,
then what is false belief? Is it merely
belief? If so, then by definition knowledge is true and belief is false (which is
not where believers want this debate
to gol). What is simply as-yet-unverified belief? In other words, the truthstatus of a statement is not sufficient
to distinguish knowledge from belief
The dimensional argument is a
rather silly fallacy based on the preposterous premise that no one would
say he disbelieves what he knows. But
that is a spurious dichotomy, and it
could just as easily be maintained that
every belief presupposes some "knowledge." After all, you cannot believe in a
god or a ghost or a vampire unless you
have some notion of what a god or a
ghost or a vampire is.
Finally, the foundational
argument actually refers to a true relationship but one that has nothing to do
with belief. In most if not all fields of
Summer 2001

human thought, reasoning begins from

certain "givens" or "things taken-forgranted." But we did well above to
refer to them as axioms, not beliefs. It
is wrong and ridiculous to call axioms
or postulates "beliefs": the proposition
about parallel lines is a definition (one
which, in alternate geometries, may be
untrue given certain other more fundamental axioms about the nature of
space), and the statements about the
sun and the ground are inductions
based on experience. But geometricians do not "believe" anything about
lines, and regular people do not
"believe" anything about the sun or
ground.
This last point illustrates
how
these knowledge-belief relationships
fail as descriptions of human cognition. It is simply not the case that
humans first believe something, then
test it, and ultimately assign it the status of knowledge or non-knowledge.
Knowledge may - and usually does form without a prior belief-condition.
For instance, we say that we know that
Mars has two moons, but we did not
start out believing that Mars had two
moons or three moons or no moons and
verify the belief The knowledge
emerged directly from observation; the
knowledge
was the
observation.
Truths that are known by observation
do not have to "believed." I know I have
ten toes, and I do not need to believe I
have ten toes also. The whole reference
to belief in this case is irrelevant: one
would neither say he believes nor disbelieves he has ten toes. No belief is
involved at all; it is simple fact. And, as
we already saw, much of what the
knowledge-is-belief proponents count
as belief is actually something else,
like definition or induction.
To conclude this section, not only
is the conflation of knowledge and
belief empirically false as an account
Page 47

of the psychology of knowing, but it is

also an inaccurate
description
of
believing. Most religious believers, 1
am sure, would never agree that their
belief is unjustified knowledge or notyet-justified knowledge or secondary
knowledge or unprovable knowledge.
To them, it is just knowledge. They are
every bit as sure of the truth of their
belief as of the solidity of the ground or
their own ten toes.

The Language of Belief

In the final analysis, a word or
concept is its usage and its referents.
What do we mean when we say that
we believe something, and what kinds
of things do we say we believe? We
have already seen above that the word
belief is sometimes used to express
concepts or cognitions that would best
be expressed as something else. The
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said
that every word or concept in natural
language is really a "family" of words
or concepts, unified only by usage. 1
will show now that belief is such a
"language family" or "language game,"
jumbling together a variety of other
and quite different predicates. Let us
look at some examples.
1. I believe in god.
2. 1 believe in dragons.
3. 1 believe in love.
4. I believe that it will rain tomorrow.
5. I believe that my brother is innocent of the crime.
6. I believe that the sun will rise
tomorrow.
7. 1 believe that liver tastes awful.
8. 1 believe that the earth is round.
9. 1 believe that two parallel lines do
not intersect.
10. I believe that the 1972 Miami
Dolphins were the greatest football
team in history.
11 I believe that the universe began
in a Big Bang.
Hopefully, this list covers most of
the semantic range of the word
"believe." Notice first and foremost
that there are two distinctly different
predicates in use in the above list "believe in" and "believe that." (Often,
in normal speech, we omit the "that" for example, "1 believe it will rain
tomorrow," thus obscuring this distinction.) It is common to use the predicate
Page 48

"know that," but I cannot think of one

instance in which one would say "know
in." Setting aside that point, think
about sentences (4) through (11). What
are they really saying?
Sentence (4) is not a belief at all. It
is a prediction. It is either a good prediction or a bad prediction, depending
on what happens with the weather
tomorrow. It is justified if the prevailing meteorological conditions are consistent with rain, and it is verifiable in
the sense that tomorrow we will see
whether it was accurate or not. We
often hear something like sentence (5)
when family members are interviewed
at trials, even when the evidence is
overwhelming against the defendant.
What they are really expressing is a
refusal to accept the facts, an emotional commitment to their family member, or a cognitive dissonance between
the person they know and the person
portrayed in court. Sentence (6), which
we have encountered before, is not a
belief but an induction, and inductions
are based on good sound experience;
the sun has risen every day so far, so
we can induce fairly confidently that it
will rise tomorrow too. Sentence (7) is
not a belief and it is not even a truth
claim; it is a taste or preference.
Sentence (8) is a restatement of a fact
based on observation and interpretation of observation and reflects neither
real language usage nor psychological
process. Sentence (9) is a definition or
stipulation. Sentence (10) is an opinion, perhaps based on study, perhaps
based
on loyalty
or ignorance.
Sentence (11) is an acceptance of a
reigning theory as the best available
explanation for an observed phenomenon.
So, clearly, most of the time when
we say that we ''believe that" something, we are really not "believing" at
all. We may really mean that we "predict," "induce,"
"opine," "prefer,"
"accept/refuse to accept," "define/stipulate," "hypothesize," etc. Some of these
are truth claims and thus potentially
knowledge, but others are not claims
about the truth at all ("liver tastes
awful" is not knowledge in any sense).
"Belief that" often has nothing to do
with knowledge whatsoever, and when
it does - as in (4), (6), (8), and (11) - it
seems to have nothing to do with belief
whatsoever.
Summer 2001

What about belief in? To say "1

believe in love" is surely not a truth
claim, since the existence of love is not
in dispute; there is such a thing as
love, just as there is such a thing as my
foot, whether 1 "believe in it" or not.
What is really being said in sentence
(3) is that I "have a commitment to" or
"value" or "opine the goodness and
power of" love. It mayor may not be
true that love is good or powerful, but
my "belief in" it is not a truth claim
and can in no way constitute knowledge. "1 love my wife" would be an
example of (verifiable or defeasible)
knowledge.
That only leaves belief in god and
belief in dragons. Notice that what
these sentences share is a reference to
an unverified and potentially unverifiable "reality." 1 will now make my most
radical claim in this article: only this
usage of belief constitutes belief in any
serious way. It cannot be substituted
for except by a definition of the predicate (such as "accept as real without
verification"), not by any other predicate such as "predict," "induce," "prefer," or even "have a commitment to" or
"value," etc. Sentence (3), while appearing similar, is different in one critical
way - the thing it refers to (love) can
be demonstrated quite easily to exist.
Sentences (1) and (2) also make or
depend on a truth claim; in fact, each
of these sentences is actually, on closer
analysis, a tightly packed set of truthclaims or "beliefs that." Sentence (1) on
its own is a vacuous statement; you
cannot "believe in god" but must
believe in some specific god with specific attributes. When a Christian, for
instance, utters sentence (1), what he
or she is really saying is "1 believe that
a god exists," "I believe that this god is
an invisible creator-person in heaven,"
"I believe that this god made rules for
us to live by," "1 believe that this god
died for the sins of humanity," and an
indefinite
set of others including
beliefs about heaven and sin. The one
thing that is true about all of these
statements is that they are unverified
and unverifiable truth-claims. There is
no good evidence or argument for
them, and there is even some good evidence and argument against them.

American Atheist

Conclusion
If "I believe in god" or "I believe in
dragons" is the only accurate and real
usage of the notion of belief, then two
conclusions follow. The first conclusion
is that it is possible, even necessary, to
distinguish "belief" from all the other
cognitive processes that masquerade
in normal usage as belief and to define
belief in such a way that this distinction is crystal clear. The one thing we
can say with assurance about belief is
that it makes a truth-claim or a collection of truth-claims which is/are unjustified, even if not conclusively so.
Therefore, I posit that the only accurate and meaningful definition of belief
is "acceptance of a truth-claim without
supporting evidence or argument, or in
the face of contradictory evidence and
argument." The second conclusion is
that, since we would define knowledge
as "acceptance of a truth-claim on the
basis of the evidence or on arguments
or interpretations grounded on the evidence," knowledge is not only distinct
from belief but is the very antithesis of
belief. If I know something, I do not
and need not believe it; and if I believe
something, I do not and cannot know it.

From the
Cutting Room
Floor
And Jesus said unto
them, "And whom do
you say that I am?"
They replied, "You're the
eschatological manifestation of the ground of
our being, the ontological foundation of the
context of our very selfhood revealed."
And Jesus replied,
"What?"

Parsippany, New Jersey

REVIEWS

VARDIS FISHER
An American and Atheist Novelist
on the History of Religious Ideas
PART IV
This series of articles on Vardis Fisher's TESTAMENT OF MAN is adapted from an
unpublished work written in the late 1980s, titled A Journey Through History in
Fiction: A Reader's Guide to History and Historical Novels. Earl Doherty will continue in the next issue of American Atheist with a review of the following novel of the TESTAMENT, A Goat For Azazel, tracing the process by which the Jesus figure generated the
movement that became Christianity.
By Earl Doherty
In previous installments of this series on
Vardis Fisher's ll-volume work of historical fiction, the TESTAMENT OF MAN, Earl
Doherty examined the five prehistoric
novels and the two on pre-Christian
Israel. He moves now to the next novel of
the TESTAMENT, about the figure of Jesus.
JESUS CAME AGAIN: A PARABLE
Alan Swallow,Denver, 1956 (359 pages)
Who was Jesus? What was he? These
are questions on which scholars and historians have labored for almost two centuries. They call it "the problem of the
historical Jesus." Was Jesus a Jewish
teacher whom later Hellenized Jews and
gentiles molded into a new image for
themselves? Was he a political rebel? Did
he exist at all, or was he a mythical figure like so many of the savior gods who
littered the ancient world, one who

Earl Doherty is a member of the

Humanist Association of Canada,
with a degree in History
and
Classical Languages. As a longtime researcher into the subject of
Christian origins, he supports the
position that no historical Jesus
existed. His own contributions
to
that theory have been embodied in
a Web-site that has gained worldwide attention,
and in a recent
book called The Jesus Puzzle: did

Christianity Begin with a Mythical

Christ? published
by Canadian
Humanist Publications. For information, visit the Jesus Puzzle
Web-site: <http://www.magi.com!

-oblio/jesus.htmlcSummer 2001

underwent a unique transformation into

an historical person? These theories and
others have been put forward, and each
generation of scholars evolves a fresh
portrait and analysis of him. What has
been universally acknowledged from a
critical study of the New Testament is
that the picture of Jesus contained in the
Gospels is a picture of the faith about
Jesus, as held by the Christian community perhaps two or three generations
after his alleged life. How much resemblance it bears to an actual person who
may have lived and died in Palestine
early in the first century CE continues to
be the great issue in dispute.
In this novel, Vardis Fisher is not
presenting a picture of Jesus which he
believes might be historically accurate.
Jesus is not to be equated with his
Joshua. Rather, the author is telling a
story about the sort of man and events
whose perceived meaning could have
given rise to Christianity. Perhaps such a
man did live; perhaps such a story was
merely imagined. Imagined by someone
or some group, somewhere in the eastern
Mediterranean, possibly in Judea, possibly in Alexandria or Antioch, a story giving expression to all the mythical searching strands of the time that were coming
together: about a pure suffering one who
would be sacrificed to rescue mankind
from its fear and hopelessness, one who
would release them from the anger ofthe
Father by taking that anger upon himself, one who would offer an example to
lead human minds into a new truth, a
new attitude about the world and their
place within it. He would be an example
to show how they could relate to one
another on a higher moral level, with
love and compassion. The folk-soul
(Fisher uses this term in his autobiographical summation to the TESTAMENT,
Orphans in Gethsemane) has always
Page 49

needed a divine example to show the

direction of human behavior, which is
why gods have always reflected something in the prevailing human makeup.
To change the pattern of human behavior, to bring out other, more desirable,
elements to the fore, the folk-soul must
embody its sought-for new ideal in myth.
This myth may become attached to actual figures and events; or it may simply
create such figures and events and give
them historical flesh. Whether Joshua!
Jesus really lived is beside the point.
Either way he has served his purpose. As
such, Fisher's Jesus Came Again (for
similar figures have come in the past and
will continue to come to serve the folksoul's needs) is a symbolic tale: A
Parable.
Speculation and expectation about a
coming messiah and the cataclysmic
change he would bring had been fermenting in Judea for two centuries until
it almost had reached the level of national insanity, especially among the common folk. Migrations across the land of
vast numbers of people - farmers, city
dwellers, rabbles of poor and sick - are
recorded during the early decades of the
first century, and many a man who
sought to lead them, or claimed to be a
wonder-worker, teacher, or even the actual messiah, was seized and executed by
the Roman authorities as an instigator of
public disorder. Such disorder was easily
provoked. The average man and woman
outside the privileged classes were
ground down by a crush of tithes and
taxes. Working of the land was crude and
injurious. Slavery caused major human
misery. Rampant superstition and a
belief in a world full of demons who tormented with illness and possession produced nervous disorders and psychotic
behavior among many. In an era of primitive medicine, sickness and physical
degeneration made millions wretched.
Fisher creates a heart-wrenching view of
a world full of pain, insanity, and injustice.
At one such fevered moment during
the reign of Herod Antipas, a young Jew
named Joshua joins the throngs of poor
and sick who crowd the roads of Judea,
making their disorganized way to
Jerusalem and other holy places. They
are expecting the imminent appearance
of the messiah, who will rescue the
downtrodden, heal the sick, right all
wrongs. Several people attach themselves to Joshua, mostly women: from
the simple widow with child, to the educated Greek, to the mystic who has
visions of heaven. Some of them begin to
Page 50

believe that Joshua is himself the messiah, though he vigorously denies it. Fisher
has shaped his story in the classic
"quest" mold: the little traveling band of
diverse characters who pass through
experiences and trials in their search for
something to give them hope and a new
life. With childlike faith, they scan earth
and sky for the signs heralding the
awaited one; they look for him in each
notable figure they encounter along the
way.They are alternately buoyed by hope
and dashed by disappointment.
But the quest is leading Joshua to
his own unlooked-for destiny. To the few
around him, and then to the world at
large, despite the dangers, he begins to
express his unorthodox ideas: that the
messiah will come not with anger and
vengeance to annihilate Israel's enemies,
but with mercy, forgiveness and love, to
be a teacher to all people. Bravely he
tells a hostile synagogue in Jerusalem:
"He will come not to destroy but to heal;
not with the pomp and splendor of kings
and tyrants, but as the physician among
us to bind up wounds, to proclaim peace
and justice throughout all the lands of
the earth."
When a growing number of those following him imagine that he has healed
the sick and even caused a dead man to
return to life, Joshua is at last seized and
led before Pilate. His humble admission
that he believes the messiah will conquer
even Rome with love, clashes with the
sympathetic Pilate's need, in a land ever
teetering on anarchy, to keep in check all
ideas and advocations which encourage a
belief that Rome's authority will be overthrown. For one Jew among many, it
means crucifixion as a "rebel." But
among Joshua's followers, a seed of belief
has been planted.
Fisher continues to develop important themes that have run through previous novels. Like so many of his predecessors, Joshua is enveloped in an atmosphere of loneliness and isolation. Like
the society around him that has rejected
the Mother and the female principle, he
is deprived of his own mother's love, for
she is a woman who is consumed by the
letter of the Law, rather than its spirit,
and can give him nothing but rules and
admonitions. Joshua himself represents
the spirit of the Law, with its depth of
intuitive wisdom, embodied in the teachings of Rabbi Hillel whom Joshua often
quotes. It is a spirit which Fisher sees as
having been submerged beneath the
strictures of literal observance (which
would also happen in Christianity). As
Summer 2001

for the Father figure, he lurks only in the

background of this novel, but we sense
him awaiting the inevitable sacrifice of
his pure innocent son. (This, for Fisher, is
the mythic significance of Jesus' outburst on the cross: "My God, why hast
thou forsaken me?") Having emotional
access to neither father nor mother,
Joshua is the symbolic "orphan" which
Fisher sees as the prototype of western
society.
Joshua's love goes instead to those
around him, and it is especially sensed
and returned by the women. The Greek
Sirena warns that a loving messiah's
destruction is inevitable, for "People
destroy what loves them most; they don't
want love, they want hate, for hate gives
them strength, but love makes them
weak before their enemies." It is Sirena
who delivers a scathing indictment of the
prevailing negative view toward women,
from Greece to Judea to Buddhist India
(all male-dominated religious societies).
In line with the development of misogyny which Fisher has been tracing, various men, from prophet to leper, whom
the group meets along the way, scorn and
avoid the company of women. A common
prayer of the day gives thanks to God for
not having been "born a woman." Joshua
does not share this fear and contempt,
and women are attracted to him in consequence. Fisher up to now has envisioned the more positive human attributes (most of them instinctual) to reside
in women, and if God is to be equated
with the most positive, namely love, he is
working his way toward identifying the
God concept with the female. The Jesus
figure, of course, is male, but Fisher gives
Joshua many features he has been associating with his women characters.
Fisher
also
illuminates
the
antecedents
of beliefs about Jesus.
Similar expressions of the needs of the
'folk-soul' have developed in Greek and
Egyptian society: cults that worshiped
savior gods like Osiris, Dionysos,
Mithras, most of whom were believed to
have died and returned to life (whether
physically or spiritually), some of whom
were born in caves or stables to virgin
mothers, in whose honor sacred meals
were eaten. Many of the ethical ideas
and sayings attributed to Jesus were
already current in Jewish and pagan circles of thought. These antecedents are
explored more fully in the next novel, A
Goat For Azazel.
There is a magical atmosphere to
this profoundly touching book. It sings
with a wonderful lightness, glows with
American Atheist

naive innocence. Fisher achieves a felicitous simplicity of expression that surpasses any of the other novels of the TESTAMENT. He makes us feel for Joshua's
people, for these poor and diseased and
rejected, kept going only by a desperate
trust that their lives will be transformed
by a miraculous event. We yearn with
Joshua when he pleads: "Send us, our
heavenly father, one to save us, to deliver the sick from their torments, the famished from their hunger, the slaves from
their masters, the weak and helpless
from the tyrannies of their rulers, that
we may all rejoice and give thanks for
deliverance from the evils that possess
us." When the idea is planted and grows
that Joshua himself is the messiah, the
hope catches in the reader's own throat:
if only this could be so! Fisher brings
home in a fashion to make the heart
weep why the figure of Jesus, be he God,
man, or myth, has been so powerful and
so enduring for two thousand years.
In the Notes and Commentary
which he appends to this novel, Fisher
discusses the scholarly picture of Jesus
at great length, in all its vast variety and
contradiction. By the time Fisher was
writing, it was acknowledged by critical
scholarship that a reliable biography of
Jesus the man was hopelessly impossible
to construct. On the larger question of
his very existence, Fisher lists the many
who had argued that "no such person
ever lived," but he declares his own opinion to be that "I have none. Either side
can make out a plausible case (and I
would say almost equally plausible."
That battle for plausibility has been
ongoing in the half century since Fisher
wrote Jesus Came Again, and both sides
have been steadily engaged in demolishing the Christian myth. Even those liberal scholars who retain some figure of
Jesus in history, such as John Dominic
Crossan and John Shelby Spong, have
come to the conclusion that the Gospel
account does not represent what actually
happened. Crossan admits 1 that everything in the narrative of Jesus' trial and
crucifixion is scripture-derived, "individual units, general sequences, and overall
frames," that is, everything from the
smallest details to the overall pattern of
the story. There is nothing left to constitute "history remembered."

1 John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of

Christianity, HarperSanFrancisco, 1998,
pp.521-2.

Parsippany, New Jersey

Such critical scholars as the Jesus

Seminar have fallen back on two documents to try to glean a better picture of
the historical Jesus. One is the reconstructed "Q" which has been extracted
from common elements in Matthew and
Luke. This document, no longer extant,
was a collection of sayings and a few
anecdotes, reflecting the preaching of the
Kingdom of God in Galilee, and it can be
seen to have undergone evolution and
revision over several decades in the mid
to late first century. In Q's stratification
of different types of sayings, all represented as proceeding from a Jesus, only
the earliest, they say, is to be attributed
to the genuine figure. This 'authentic'
stratum is said to be corroborated by a
similar early stratum within the Gnostic
Gospel of Thomas, another collection of
sayings attributed to Jesus and part of a
cache of documents unearthed a half century ago at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
But neither Q nor Thomas have anything to say about a death and resurrection, or even a redemptive role for their
Jesus, and there is little of specifically
Jewish concern. Certain signs within the
Q document, in fact, would indicate that
there was no Jesus figure at all in its earlier strata. Moreover, the bedrock layer of
sayings bears a strong resemblance to
the teachings and lifestyle of a Greek
counter-culture movement of the period,
spread by wandering preachers: the
Cynics. Thus, for some modern scholars,
the 'genuine' Jesus has become a Cynicstyle sage.
Whether this figure should also be
seen as having given rise to the other
dimension of Christianity, the movement
of which Paul was a part, preaching the
death and resurrection of a heavenly
Christ and Son of God, has become the
great conundrum. The two sides of the
Christian coin seem to have little or
nothing in common, for the New Testament epistles, reflecting the Pauline type
of early faith, do not equate their divine
Christ with the Jesus of Nazareth of the
Gospels, or place him in their narrative
setting. The dying and rising Christ
Jesus of the epistles does not move in
either Jerusalem or Galilean circles.
When and where he may have lived is
never stated. The teaching, miracleworking and apocalyptic prophecy of the
Galilean Jesus of Q are nowhere in sight,
and Paul's Jesus inhabits a world of preexistence, creation, and rule of the heavens, in contact with angels and demons,
but never with Pilate, Judas or the
women at the tomb. Paul's Savior is spoSummer 2001

ken of as an entity long-hidden, now

revealed by God to inspired apostles
through scripture and the Holy Spirit.
Q and Paul were worlds apart, with
virtually no points of contact, until they
were brought together, sometime in the
late first century, under one symbolic figure in the Gospel of Mark. That story is
a composite creation, a representation of
the Kingdom preaching centered in
Galilee joined to an allegory of death and
rising of the savior god Christ Jesus
placed in an earthly setting. Mark, in
combining his two antecedents, brought
the imagined founder of the Kingdom
movement to Jerusalem, and there had
him tried and crucified by Pilate, to rise
from his tomb on Easter morning and
bestow salvation on the world.
When Fisher cast his novel of Jesus
as "A Parable," he could not have known
that the next half century would reveal
him as prescient. If a parable is basically
a device which conveys some insight or
comment on a larger perceived truth or
contemporary situation by means of a
symbolic anecdote or allegorical piece of
fiction, recent scholarly research has
shown that this is essentially what the
Gospels consist of, almost in their entirety. That grand Gospel parable was a tapestry whose threads have now been
unraveled and exposed.
First, Jesus as sacrificial redeemer
conformed to the class of ancient world
salvation deities who were worshiped in
a range of pagan mystery cults. The
deaths and resurrections imputed to
most of these deities go back to prehistoric mythologies rooted in the annual
cycle of dying and rising plant life, and in
the movements of the sun and other
astronomical bodies. They, like the
Pauline Christ, guaranteed personal salvation for the devotee. They, too, were
united with the believer, through rituals
of baptism and sacred meals like the
Christian Eucharist. Their sacramentalism was cut from the same cloth. The
new Christian savior god possessed some
uniquely Jewish features, having originated in Jewish circles or among gentiles
who had assimilated Jewish beliefs, but
he belonged essentially to the world of
the Greco-Roman mysteries flourishing
across the empire.
This dimension of Mark's Gospel
served as the myth of the savior god
Christ Jesus, and it borrowed elements
from the composite myth of the pagan
cults. In addition to the features noted
above, these secondary gods were (variously) born of the high God and a mortal
Page 51

virgin, usually at the winter Solstice,

attended by shepherds or magi. They
performed miracles, healed, cast out
demons, raised the dead. They established communal meals with sacramental significance, rose from or overcame
death (or in the case of Mithras slew a
bull), and would come to earth as judge
at the end of time. All were pathways to
salvation and rescue from inimical
forces. In the time of Christianity's inception, such myths, under the influence of
Platonic philosophy, were placed in the
higher supernatural world, and indications within the New Testament epistles
and other early documents locate the
Christ myth and his sacrificial death in
the same spiritual setting. The Gospel
expansion on that myth, eventually
regarded as history, brought this new
savior god to earth and placed him in
recent historical time.
The second dimension of Mark's
composite Gospel, Jesus' ministry in
Galilee, served to symbolize the Q type of
Kingdom movement and its view of itself
as a new Israel in a new covenant with
God, preaching repentance and a counter-culture ethic, working miracles and
predicting the impending arrival of the
Kingdom. The details of that ministry,
together with those of the passion story
in Jerusalem, are almost entirely the
product of midrash, a Jewish practice of
commentary and enlargement on scripture. Mark constructed his account, supplemented by Matthew and Luke, out of
stories and themes from the Old Testament. Rather than these being regarded
as prophecies of a contemporary Jesus,
the scriptural elements generated the
story and its symbolic events.
Jesus' actions were patterned after
those of Moses in Exodus, from his forty
days in the wilderness mimicking Moses'
forty years in the desert, to the
Transfiguration scene mirroring Moses
on Mt. Sinai, to the Last Supper's institution of the new covenant being a
reworking of Moses' ritual words at the
establishment of the old one, and so on.
Jesus' miracles were a direct reworking
of the miracles of Old Testament figures
like Elijah and Elisha, such as the feeding of the 4000 and 5000 which copied
Elisha's feeding miracle in 2 Kings 4,
down to small details. Many miracles put
flesh on the predictions of prophets like
Isaiah, about the healing wonders that
would take place with the arrival of the
Kingdom.
Virtually the entire sequence of the
passion story is constructed out of verses
Page 52

from the Psalms and prophets. Jesus'

entry into Jerusalem on an ass's colt is
derived from Zechariah. The cleansing of
the Temple is a construction based on
Malachi 3:1, "The Lord whom you seek
will come to his Temple," and Hosea 9:15,
"Because of their evil deeds I will drive
them from my house." The figure of
Judas was prompted by passages of
betrayal in the Psalms, the Gethsemane
scene by passages of anguish and doubt.
The involvement of the Sanhedrin, the
false accusers at the trial, Jesus' silence
before Pilate, the scourging, the crown of
thorns, all have their sources in the
scriptures. The very concept of the crucifixion itself would have been inspired by
Psalms passages about piercing and
nailing that were considered messianic.
The actions of the soldiers, the taunting
of the crowds, the presence of the two
thieves, the darkness at noon, such
things were a product ofthe sacred texts.
The overall story retold the tale of the
Suffering Righteous One, found throughout centuries of Jewish writing. Thus
was the great parable of a human Jesus
put together by the evangelists.
Features of popular Hellenistic
romances of the time are now recognized
to parallel details of the empty tomb and
post-resurrection appearances, as well as
the sea voyage of Paul to Rome in Acts.
But yet another pagan dimension seems
to have contributed to Mark's inspiration. All knew the great epics of Homer;
they served as models in rhetoric, poetry,
and prose. A recent scholar 2 has shown
that a multitude of details in Mark, from
the character of the apostles, to the incident of the Gerasene swine, to the burial
after the crucifixion, can be seen as patterned on elements of the Iliad and
Odyssey, in a kind of 'inverse' imitation.
Just as Jesus imitates but surpasses
Moses, so does he outdo the great Greek
heroes like Achilles and Odysseus. This
type of symbolism in the Gospels, culling
from a rich contemporary culture, linked
these fledgling sects to heritages that
were ancient and hallowed, bestowing on
them a stature and sanctity rooted in the
past. It supported their convictions of a
present, and their own central role within it, that was about to give way to a glorious future.
Such a multi-source picture has
made it impossible to arrive at a likely or
even feasible historical man lying in the

background to any of it. Even were there

some individual who supplied a seed to
one of the stems which evolved into the
profuse growth of Christianity, that historical man would be little more than
incidental, a role that could have been
filled by many. Vardis Fisher may have
perceived this, and offered a Jesus who
was only a parable, a symbol of the ideas
of a time of innovation and turmoil, when
people were ready to generate a new synthesis that would erupt into an energetic
faith destined to conquer half the world.
That energy is now winding down,
losing its momentum. While faith in the
ancient world's triumphant savior god
enjoys a twilight flare in our present-day
society, reason and research are overtaking the Christian myth and will eventually dissolve it. Fisher stood near the
onset of that disintegration. His Jesus
Came Again: A Parable was the first significant piece of popular fiction to
embody those new insights of scholarship and rationality.

Steverino from page 46

A Futuristic Epilogue
As our nation swirls ever downward into the theocratic abyss, how
will the future faithful - the faithful
will be all there is - remember Steve
Allen?
"He definitely said he was a good
Christian
who loved Jesus. Praise
God!"
"Hallelujah! And I think he was one of
the pioneers of late-night-TV religious
programming. I believe he started the
original 700 Club. A devout and holy
man.
"Praise Jesus. And I understand that
he composed hundreds of hymns."
"Thousands, really. He wrote his first
on the very day that he accepted Jesus
as his personal savior and was born
again. I think it was called "This Could
Be the Start of Something Big."

2 Dennis MacDonald, The Homeric Epics

and the Gospel of Mark, Yale University
Press, 2000.

Summer 2001

American Atheist

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. . religion and what Atheism are all
about. It is a great introduction to
Atheism for readers of any age.
Grades 2-4. Illustrated.
30 pp.
Stapled.
ISBN 0-911826-10-9
$6.00

Be.fore.

Christianity
Before Christ

CHRIST

by John G. Jackson.
A historical survey of the components of Christianity, showing that
they existed before that religion was
invented. An excellent starter book
on the historicity of Jesus Christ.
Illustrations.
Index.
237 pp.
by John G. Jackson
Paperback.
ISBN 0-910309-20-5
$14.00

Stock #5200

CD-ROM from "Bank of

Wisdom"
FREETHOUGHT AND
THE BIBLE
25 volumes on a single CD!
With Adobe Acrobat's PDF
format, it works on both IBM
& Macintosh computers.
Includes: The Bible
Comically Illustrated (2 vols.), The Bible, by John
Remsburg, The Jefferson Bible, Bible Myths and their
Parallels in Other Religions, by T. W. Doane, and
much more!
Stock #4504

$30.00

The Altar Boy Chronicles

by Tony Pasquarello
The hilarious romp of a logical mind
trying to grow up Catholic in
Philadelphia's Little Italy during
World War II.
214 pp. Paperback

Stock #5583

S
NFIDEr
I
TlEGREAT

To order, please include check (payable to American

Atheists) or credit card payment for the price of the
books plus shipping and handling ($2.50 for the first
title plus $1.00 for each additional title.
Send order to:
American Atheist Press
P.O. Box 5733
Parsippany, NJ 07054-6733
Credit card orders may be faxed to:
(908) 276-7402

$16.00

The Great Infidels

By Robert G. Ingersoll, with
foreword by Jon G. Murray
Newly reprinted and reformatted,
Ingersoll's sketches of the lives of
great Freethinkers is one of his most
inspiring works. Includes his amusing discussion of the fallacy of informal logic known as the "appeal to the
cemetery."

76 pages, paperback
Stock #5197

ISBN 0-910309-08-6
$7.00

CHRISTIAN
FUNDAMENTAUSM

IL-------~

Canadian author David W. Hopewell

has produced a work we feel to be a
major contribution to the study of
that worrisome phenomenon Christian Fundamentalism. showing that
those who are drawn into its vortex
are embarking upon A Journey Into
The Heart Of Darkness - to borrow
a title from Joseph Conrad.
ISBN 1-57884~952-7

$14.00

Stock #5581

BLASPHEMY
This sacrilegious comedy
starring Carlos Leon, written
and directed by John
Mendoza, which had its
premiere at the American
Atheists convention in
Orlando, is not likely to be
shown at your flammable
neighborhood theater.
View it in the safety of your
own home!
Stock #7009

$25.00

The Hitchhiker's Guide

to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams

A Life
by Keay Davidson
A detailed biography of one of the
all-time masters in the popularization of science. Filled with
reminiscences of admirers and
detractors alike, the book is
meticulous in exploring the science that made Sagan famous.
xx + 540 pages. Hardcover,
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
ISBN 0-471-25286-7
Stock # 5593

American Atheists
www.atheists.org
Stock #4600

Sleeping with ExtraTerrestrials

The Rise of
Irrationalism and Perils
of Piety

Sleeping
with

ExtraTerrestrials

~P-Ail.a

L~~

"..-:c_'

THE RISE OF IRRATIONALISM

AND

PERILS

Of

!:,~>~:~r

With wit and style and cold hard

facts, Kaminer skewers contempor----------' rary credulity, from New Age spirituality and alien abduction to the growing power of organized
religion and our refusal to reexamine the ill-considered "war
on drugs."

279 pages. Hardcover

ISBN 0-679-44243-X

SIXTYFIVEPRESS
INTERVIEWS WITH
ROBERT G. INGERSOLL

~~-..--"'
rnaGaliAT~nIU>

(postage pd. with book order.)

$1.00

Pantheon Books

$24.00

SIXTY-FIVE PRESS
INTERVIEWS WITH ROBERT
G. INGERSOLL

A~~

What the Great Agnostic Told

Numerous Newspaper Reporters
During a Quarter-Century
of
Public Appearances as a Freethinker and Enemy of Superstition.
Introduction by Madalyn Murray
O'Hair

$15.00

Let the world know where you

stand. Goes on the inside of a home
or car window. 3.5" wide.

by Wendy Kaminer

PlfTY

Window Sticker
e

$30.00

Stock #5596

It's science fiction and it's

extremely funny - inspired lunacy
that leaves hardly a science
fiction cliche alive.
215 pages. Hardcover
Harmony Books
ISBN 0-517-54209-9
Stock # 5595

CARL SAGAN

CHRISTIAN
FUNDAMENTALISM

Collected from over two dozen newspapers, Ingersoll comments on freethought, the Bible, heaven and hell, miracles,
church creeds, missionaries, Sunday blue laws, prohibition,
anarchism, aging, and even theater, music, literature, and
summer vacations.
xvi + 262 pages. Paperback
ISBN 1-57884-910-1

Stock # 5589

$15.00