THE

$2.50

AMERICAN ATHEIST
(Vol. 24, No.5) May, 1982

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

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AMERICAN ATHEISTS
is a non-profit, non-political, educational organization, dedicated to the complete and absolute separation of state and church.
We accept the explanation of Thomas Jefferson that the "First Amendment" to the Constitution of the United States was
meant to create a "wall of separation" between state and church.
American Atheists are organized to stimulate and promote freedom of thought and inquiry concerning religious beliefs,
creeds, dogmas, tenets, rituals and practices;
to collect and disseminate information, data and literature on all religions and promote a more thorough understanding
of them, their origins and histories;
to encourage the development and public acceptance of a human ethical system, stressing the mutual sympathy,
understanding
and interdependence
of all people and the corresponding
responsibility of each individual in relation to
society;
to develop and propagate a culture in which man is the central figure who alone must be the source of strength, progress
and ideals for the well-being and happiness of humanity;
to promote the study of the arts and SCIences and of all problems affecting the maintenance,
perpetuation
and
enrichment of human (and other) life;
to engage in such social. educational. legal and cultural activity as will be useful and beneficial to members of American
Atheists and to society as a whole.
Atheism may be defined
as the mental attitude which
unreservedly
accepts
the
supremacy
of reason and
aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook
verifiable by experience and
the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and
creeds.
Materialism declares that
the cosmos
is devoid of
immanent
conscious
purpose; that it is governed by
its own inherent, immutable
and impersonal
laws; that
there is no supernatural
interference
in human life;
that man - finding his
resources within himself can and must create his own
destiny. Materialism restores
to man his dignity and his
intellectual integrity. It teaches
that we must prize our life
on earth and strive always to
improve it. It holds that man
is capable
of creating
a
social system based on reason
and justice. Materialism's
"faith" is in man and man's
ability to transform the world
culture by his own efforts.
This is a commitment which
is in every essence life asserting. It considers the struggle
for progress
as a moral
obligation
and impossible
without
noble ideas that
inspire man to bold creative
works. Materialism
holds
that humankind's
potential
for good and for an outreach
to more fulfilling cultural
development is, for all practical purposes, unlimited.
P.O. Box2117

AUSTIN, TX78768-2117
Send $40 for one year's membership and you will receive our newsletters, a membership
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(Vol. 24, No.5) May, 1982

ARTICLES

AMERICAN ATHEIS'i

Life After Death - Barbara Sowder, PhD. . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . .. 5

Pope Wojtyla in Fatima Portugal, Part 1
- Jean Yves Riviere
8
The Phantom Phenomenon - (FCC Petition News)
10
An Atheist's View of the Arms Race and Nuclear War
- John Massen
20
The Future of Establishment Clause Cases
- Ron Lindsay, Atty.-at-Iaw
,
23

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FEATURED COLUMNISTS
Shaky Compromises and Shady Deals If Looks Could Kill - Gerald Tholen

Richard Smith

3
26

NEWS AND INFORMATION

Dial-An-Atheist

Listing

28

REGULAR FEATURES
Editorial -

Jon Murray

ILLUSTRA TIONS
Onward Christian Petition (Collage)

Editor-in-Chief
Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Managing Editor
Jon G. Murray

Poetry
Robin Murray-O'Hair

Production Staff
Art Brenner
Bill Kight
Richard Smith
Gerald Tholen
Gloria Tholen
Beverly Walker

14

The American
Atheist magazine is pub
lished monthly at the Gustav Broukal American Atheist Press, 2210 Hancock Dr., Austin, TX 78756, and 1982 by Society of
Separationists,
Inc., a non-profit, non-political, educational organization
dedicated to
the complete and absolute separation
of
state and church. Mailing address: P. 0
Box 2117, Austin, TX 78768-2117. A free
subscription
is provided as an incident of
membership
in the American Atheists organization. Subscriptions
are available at
$25. for one year terms only. Manuscripts
submitted
must be typed, double-spaced
and accompanied
by a stamped.
self-addressed envelope. The editors assume no
responsibility for un-solicited mariuscripts.

-Non-Resident Staff
G. Stanley Brown
Jeff Frankel
Ignatz Sahula-Dvcke
Fred Woodworth

Austin, Texas

The American Atheist magazine

is indexed in
Monthly Periodical Index
ISSN: 0332-4310

May, 1982

ON THE COVER
John Adams (2nd President of the
US) expressed it quite simply: "This
would be the best of all worlds if
there were no religion in it." There
have been other great people who
perhaps have made more eloquent
statements expressing the same sentiment. However, Adam's words
were clear and to the point. He, and
others like him, had experienced the
tyrannies of colonial America and
was insistent that this nation would
not tolerate a religio-political factory
of intellectual oppression as had enslaved the world since before known
history.
Unfortunately, for the 200 years
following Adams's courageous
words the persistent ideology of religious fanaticism and superstition is
still with us - perhaps to an even
greater degree than before.
Thus, the dreams of a society
where thought and expression are
free have again been dashed on the
rocks of hopelessness. Any such
hope for the world that Adams envisioned now lies in the hands of the
few who dare to flaunt their desire for
intellectual freedom in the ugly face
of godism.
The peaceful setting depicted on
our May cover could be a truely
peaceful scene if there were no religiously spawned bigotry and prejudice lurking in the minds of those
within.
- G Tholen
Page 1

EDITORIAL

JON GARTH MURRA Y

"PhD" in Ignorance I?
One of my duties as Director of the national American
Atheist Center is the handling of an increasing number of public appearances.
Due to the sometimes
uncertain
health of
American
Atheists'
President,
Dr. Madalyn O'Hair,
I have
found myself chosen to speak before more and more college
and university groups.
My most recent engagement
was before a class at a North Texas junior college.
What I find on the college level is an ever growing hostility
to the topics of Atheism and separation of state and church.
I
have been appearing at the college level for some five years
now and the situation seems to be worsening.
Apathy among
students is a much more easily understandable
phenomenon
than hostility toward a particular
position or lifestyle. After
all, what is the goal of attending college in the first place? It is
the attainment
of a "degree" which is a stamp of your worth
on the open market as you enter the job market, much like the
grade markings on a side of beef determining
the appropriate
price per pound. With the economic situation in this country
growing more harsh by the month, it is only natural that students would concern
themselves
with graduation
with the
proper qualifications
for that "good paying" job to the exclusion of much other than sports and sex. Those few students
around the country
who are attempting
to form University
Student Atheist (USA) groups can attest to this "blinders on"
view of hallowed college days by the vast lack of participation
in any of their programs.
In addition to mere apathy, however, the actual hostility
toward Atheism, Humanism, "Secular Humanism" and the like
among students is much more alarming. Part of the root of the
cooler and cooler receptions
Atheist speakers on campuses
receive may be that the parents of this generation of students
are turning to more traditional
values. This can be seen not
only from the election of Ronald Reagan but by increased
parent support of return to the basics in the public school system which include
basics such as corporeal
punishment,
book censorship,
"creationism,"
classroom prayer, dress codes
and the like. Who is to say: One group of sociologists will tell
you that students reflect parental attitudes and another group
will say that students generally turn from parental authority
and assume attitudes
in direct conflict
with those taught
at home.
The North Texas junior college class is a good case in point.
First, no matter what the topic one discusses, the questions
posed in the question and answer session are always along the
same line, most often having nothing whatsoever to do with
the topic. Even before the questions are put, a speaker can
sense the feeling tone of the audience. In this particular class I
could tell that the prevailing attitude
(before I said word one)
was "Atheist = amoral = no veracity = Whatever this guy says
is Atheist propaganda
so I can fall asleep now and avoid the
rush".
After I carefully explained what an Atheist was, clarified the agnostic differential and even went into the philosophical base of materialism,
the instructor
(no less) stopped me
to ask about my brother who had found the lord and what I
Page 2

May, 1982

would do if I were dying of some terminal desease. My assurance to him that I would not have the least interest in crying
out for god at a time of illness drew the usual "yeah, uh huh,
that's what you say now" verdict from the students.
It was
then that I noticed that every woman in the room, save for the
lone Atheist in the class who had invited me, had enough
makeup on to put on a circus.
The questioning
from the
students
then turned personal as it always does. "What do you
think happens to you when you die?" I replied that my dying
would be the same as a leaf dropping off a tree, just another
step in a natural cycle. Well, you would have thought that I
had grown horns on the spot. The negative reaction from the
leaf analogy rippled across the room as if a sudden cold draft
had come up.
Another
question
was "What about all the
miracles?"
which was posed by a women who seemed quite
sincere about their existence.
I said that no miracle had ever
been scientifically
verified to my knowledge
and that they
were all attributable
to natural phenomenona
The look I received back was one of "Well that's what you say!".
All in all I think that the class was struck with horror that
someone could actually exist in modern America who did not
"believe in god." The idea of being on your own, emotionally
and intellectually,
was so foreign to them all that they viewed
me as a freak. That is exactly what the problem is, in a thematic sense, with all of the student groups. Atheist speakers are
viewed as freaks and the attention they receive is the attention
of curiosity not that of academic interest or sincerity,
It is a
hard feeling to try to explain to those of you who do not
engage in this type of activity as do I. To be put in the initial
position of a freak, like in a sideshow, and then to need to
convince the audience otherwise,
often in a very short space
of time, is a unique feeling.
If you're waiting for a solution, I don't have one other than
to keep going and keep convincing one small audience after
another that we as Atheists are not freaks, we are not insane,
we are "normal"
people and our views need to be respected.
The fact that precursor Atheist organizations
did not got out
into the field and try to make the general public understand
about Atheism
has helped to bring us to this position
of
hostility through ignorance that I face today.
The fact still
remains that there are too many of them, the uneducated
with respect to Atheism, and too few of us. That is why it is
more important
than ever for all of you "rank and file"
Atheists to take the time to explain Atheism to at least one
person each day. It may take a generation or two of that sort
of grass roots outreach but it is time well spent.
While you take that generation
or two, we here at The
American Atheist Center are going to continue to try to do it
in "double time."

American

Atheists

Toward More Intelligence

Richard M. Smith

SHAKY COMPROMISES
AND SHADY DEALS
J

The recent judicial decision in Arkansas banning the

forced teaching of creationist pseudo-science
in public
schools brought some relief to the sane people in this
country who are tired of seeing fundamentalist christinsan
ity prevail. Although there is a similar law in Mississippi that
needs to be struck down (and there may be more to come),
it seems likely that at least on a lower court level such laws
will be so stricken. However, that does not end the matter,
because sitting at the top now is one of the most backward
supreme courts since the inception of that institution.
Fundamentalists
know they have friends 'up' there, and
someday they may surely take their case to them. They will
certainly keep up the political pressure on the court and the
politicians who appoint the justices. They don't give a damn
about separation of state and church, as anyone who has
heard the lies and distortions on Pat Robber's pass-the-loot
show can attest. They don't care about separation of state
and church because only "god's kingdom" is important to
them. They took over the romans, so why shouldn't they do
it to us? The insane theocrats could still do it.
At the present time it seems like a remote possibility that
the likes of Jerry Farback and Billy Gram-brain
could
completely take over, but we should bear in mind that
statistics show membership
in fundamentalist
churches
increased over the last few years, while it declined in the
'mainline' churches.
The number in the fundamentalist
churches may be misleading, however, since their members
reproduce more prolifically and irresponsibly, and many of
those children counted as members may promptly quit their
flock of sheep as soon as they are of age (as I did).
Nevertheless,
the spectre of millions of ignorant bigots
who will not listen to reason at all has frightened a number of
important scientists to make some strange bedfellows and
to make some strange statements that don't stand up under
scrutiny.
I first got a hint of this bizarre behavior when I received an
appeal from Isaac Asimov asking for money to help fight the
Arkansas creation law. In it he noted that clergy from the big
three cult-sects-jewish,
protestant,
and catholic-were
joining in the fight as if their presence were a plus. "What?!" I
said to myself. "So what? You're giving them respect they
don't deserve. If we can't stop creation pseudo-scientists
solely on the basis of the facts without invoking sham religiopolitical alliances, then we've lost the most important
thing-our
integrity." I refused to send my money to such a
group. If the hypocritical 'liberal' religionists want to oppose
the creationists on their own, that's fine, but they don't
deserve front row advertising from people who are supposed to be scientists. That smacks of a most shameful kind
of deal. It is religionists who make such deals to get
something for nothing. Good scientists who make such
Austin, Texas

deals only lose some of their objectivity and integrity. I lost

some respect for Mr. Asimov that day, but I suspect he may
feel a little uncomfortable with his new bedfellows anyway.
The second hint of this sham alliance appeared after the
case was over in a column written by none other than
Stephen Jay Gould. Stephen Jay Gould, for those of you
who may not know, is the foremost explicator of evolution
to the general public in the U.S. if not the world today. In the
earl v '70's he co-authored
the 'punctuated
equilibrium'
theory which posits that species can evolve rapidly under
special conditions and then remain relatively stable over
long periods of time. A good example of this is the famous
pre-Cambrian
'explosion'
600 million years ago during
which an abundance
of animal fossils 'appeared'
in the
record without other animal fossils preceding them. Creationists had long pointed to this as an example of divine
intervention,
and Darwin himself had had some trouble
explaining it. However, an exhaustive analysis of the fossil
evidence of that period shows rapid evolution of species
more or less uniformly gradated in rate of structure change.
After that period major bone structural evolution stabilized
somewhat. Since only bony animals readily leave fossils, the
real major revolution of this time was the successful survival
of an early such bony creature. There is no reason to doubt
that the very earliest primitive fishes of this period were a
major mutation from a previously existing non-bony animal
which did not leave fossils. Evidence for such creatures
exists in a pre-Cambrian
mudslide near Lake Louise in
Banff National Park in British Columbia, Canada. Because
of special conditions the mudslide preserved evidence of
non-bony animals and they are so different from anything
known today that they represent several whole new phyla of
animals.
Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist
from Harvard
University, writes a monthly column explaining this and
other aspects of evolution. I heartily recommend it to every
good Atheist who should be ready to answer any creationist
nut they might encounter. In this column he has explained
materialism as well. In the 12/74 issue he even stated point
blank that Darwin's theory (now fact) of evolution was
atheist. Gould's credentials are almost impeccable.
In his recent column written for the New York Times he
reviewed the Arkansas creationist
case. He noted the
political setting that gave rise to the creationist law and the
need to resist the primitive authoritarian religionists every
time they assert themselves into the political arena. However, he also made the same shameful deal with the 'liberal'
religionists that Asimov made. I quote: "The issue is not
religion vs. science, for no such opposition exists, but a
particular, narrow sectarianism opposed to knowledge and
learning in general. Thus, 12 of the 17 individual plaintiffs

May, 1982

Page 3

who sued successfully to invalidate Act 590 are ministers

and bishops."
This is not right.
First of all, it is wrong to associate religion with science in
any way because it reinforces the contention of the
creationists that the teaching of evolution in public schools
is an infringement of someone else's religion upon theirs.
For example, evolution is not part of an allegedly new
religion of 'secular humanism' or 'liberal theology'. These
latter cultural constructs could easily not exist, as they did
not for the millions of years before human life,and evolution
would still go on.
Secondly, it is wrong on principle. Religion, even 'liberal'
religion, is the automatic assumption of a belief (especially in
a god) without supporting evidence and even despite
contrary evidence. Religious people subordinate all evidence to their belief. The cardinal principle of science, on
the other hand, is precisely the opposite-i.e. to show solid
evidence for any claim, however big or small it may be.
Religion and science could not be more opposed to each
other and always willbe.
As an example I offer the comments of the 'mainline'
church educators (ifyou can honestly call them that) on the
Arkansas decision from a newspaper story put out by AP on
1/9/82:
1. "The church has no basis for saying how the
world was created or how it developed, but
affirms that whatever the means used, god did
it." (lutheran) Evidence please?
2. "We're more concerned with god as the
creator of the world than with how he created."
(catholic) They aren't even interested in evidence.
3. "The point is not how. The point is that the
universe and all that is in it is not an accident.
This is not doctrinaire, but sound philosophy ...but it is now possible for a student to go all the
way through public schools and through university, and never hear the word religion mentioned." (baptist) The obvious implication of this
last statement is that the church still wants to
inject religion into the schools.
These assertions are no less authoritarian and lacking in
evidence than the authoritarianism of the fundamentalist
creationists. They represent authoritarianism insidiously
adapted to modern understanding and on a vastly broader
scale. (For that reason this authoritarianism could be more
dangerous in the future than the less sophisticated fundamentalist variety.) I doubt very seriously that Mr. Gould
shares these clergymen's visions.
Thirdly, to say absolutely no opposition between religion
and science exists implies that the fundamentalists do not
exist or do not constitute a religion, which is plainly contrary
to the facts.
.
Fourthly, not one of the 12 ministers and bishops (all
males, no doubt) who filed against the creationists is
completely honest. Everyone claims an authority and a
source of income that is in some way derived from the
pretentious claim that the bible or some part of it is holy. If
their churches do not now make that claim, their original
authority was derived from that claim. 'Liberal' religionists
are nothing but hypocritical cheats. Fundamentalists are
simply a surviving vestige of the ancestral forebears of their
Page 4

May, 1982

'liberal' counterparts.
It's the same as if the nazis had conquered the world and
had forced everyone to believe and behave according to
their ideology (as the christians did to the roman world).
Then 2000 years later some intelligent people discover it
was wrong all along, but the 'liberal' minions of the nazi state
who can't argue with the facts try to preserve their position
by putting the mind of Hitler on an ever more abstract level.
Thus, they keep themselves in power by continually
reinterpreting Mein Kampf so that no blame can firmly be
laid on the original source of their power. No honest person
could compromise with such snakes, nor can they now with
their 'liberal' religious counterparts.
Fifthly, the methods of science apply to the bible itself.
Sound scienfific analysis will always demonstrate it to be
nothing but the confused rantings of an ignorant powerhungry tribe with some history and unoriginal nice words
thrown into a mass of myth. Religionists always oppose this
understanding with the confused claim that the bible is
god's word and any of its errors are mistakes of people- not
god, who could never have had any blame in the matter!
This is, of course, a sad obfuscation of reality by people who
put belief before the evidence, another example of the basic
opposition between religion and science.
I have yet to see any solid evidence that religion and
science are not opposed to each other.
Another scientist who has been lured by the sweet 'let'skiss-and-make-up' syndrome is a Nobel prize winner,
Steven Weinberg. His name should also be familiar to
knowledgeable Atheists because he is one of the principal, if
not the principal, architects of modern unification theory of
physics. Through his work we now have a coherent
connection of all the fundamental forces of physics excepting only gravity. He has also written a book called The First
3 Minutes which outlines, according to known physics, the
main events after the big bang of the present what -we-call
universe.
Recently he did an interview with a student magazine
called UTmost out of the University of Texas at Austin. It
was generally very good, and it's unfortunate that many of
you who would like to read such a personal interview won't
be able to do so in the near future. In the interview he rightly
panned the book The T ao of Physics which has enjoyed a
vogue amongst mystical pseudointellectuals. Weinberg
didn't hesitate to say that the book was nonsense, pointing
out that the development of quantum mechanics (another
subject with which Atheists should become somewhat
familiar)has not "restored any mystical quality that Newtonian
physics had driven out," as the book claimed. Weinberg
also commented on the speculation (which has even
reached the pages of Scientific American) that quantum
mechanics implies that the universe is all in the mind of the
observer. It is refreshing to hear a sober opinion from
someone who knows what he is talking about. As Weinberg
reiterated, there is an 'objective reality out there' that
operates according to its own laws regardless of the actions
or thoughts of any observers. He also noted that the laws of
nature really are something compared to which "human
beings look like an unimportant accident." This, of course,
is about the opposite of what the baptist 'educator' previously referred to in this column would like us all to believe.
Weinberg also belittled the creationists appropriately. He
even condemned textbook publishers for not standing
American Atheists

method of solving our problems, public and private; and

scientists have nothing to say about that? Weinberg urges
us to become familiar with science because it is a part of our
culture. We can't very well do so if we think that the sun
might have stood still once for 24 hours or that jesus is
coming back to redeem the world. Like it or not there is a
huge pressure on our cultural environment to conform to
supernatural beliefs. It is in almost every newspaper and it is
in our government. Scientists must make a unified stand
against this pressure in our public life. They can't say they
have absolutely no objection to it. Gullible people vote, and
when they vote, they put people into political and judicial
positions who may ignore basic reason. Alleducated people
must take a public stand, make it clear, and hold to it.
Religion and science are fundamentally opposed. When
all the ministers get out in public and admit that all of their
churches were founded in superstition; when they turn all of
their churches into schools, houses, theaters, hospitals,
etc.; when new cults cease to appear every year with some
new incredible scheme to bamboozle gullible people; when
all of the media everywhere report all of the facts about
religion instead of covering them up; when everybody
ceases to believe in mystical and supernatural phenomena
of any kind; only then willthere be an end to any opposition
between religion and science. Until such a time eternal
vigilance is the price of our intellectual liberty. No compromises. No deals.

together against the pressure of creationists, suggesting the

publishers "had behaved like whores" on the matter. We
need more scientists speaking frankly like this.
However, Weinberg also claimed that there was no
opposition between religion and science. Why? Because
some religious people don't believe in creationism and once
he received private assurances from vatican officials that
they "wanted no more Galileos." That ends the matter?
Besides the problems with that thesis that I have already
listed in this column I have these questions about the
church. Does it teach all of its adherents about all the crimes
against science and humanity that it has committed throughout history? I think not, and that is distinctly opposite to a
scientific commitment to reporting all the facts, whenever
they can be ascertained. Millions of people believe that the
pope is not just another human being but a special man of
god because he says he is. Does science have nothing to say
against that? The catholic church puts on a big fight to get
tax exemptions for their private schools so that its children
willlearn that some non historical personage rose from the
dead to save them from imaginary sin; and science has
nothing to say about that? The church still puts on
tantalizing shows with relics and frauds like the cloth of
Turin; and science has nothing to say opposed to that?
Churches get tax exemptions to advertise publicly that they
have a way to lifeafter death; and scientists have nothing to
say against that? The churches encourage prayer as a viable

LIFE AFTER DEATH

by Barbara J. Sowder, PhD

(Speech addressed to the National American Atheist Convention at Rosslyn, Virginia on April 11, 1982)
The exact time in history when belief in an afterlife
entered human thought is unknown. Some scholars postulate that man has believed in this concept for at least 100,000
years. Their hypothesis is based on excavations of Neanderthal graves in Iraq where the dead were buried with food and
flowers and markers were carefully placed over their graves
(Siegel, 1980).
Some creationists, of course, would have difficulty with
this hypothesis because they cannot concede that humankind existed before five or six thousand years ago. However, there are some more serious problems in inferring
belief in an afterlife from the behaviors of deliberate burial
and ritualism at death. One is that species other than man
engage in deliberate burial and/or ritualistic and even
religious-type behavior when encountering death (see, e.g.,
Siegel, 1980; Teleki, 1973; Wilson, 1971). Second, ancient
human societies - such as that of the biblical Hebrews practiced deliberate burial and ritualism at death without
seeming to believe in an afterlife.
Perhaps we will never identify the time in history when
belief in an afterlife entered human thought. No doubt
Atheists would like to see the concept dead, entombed in
libraries, and resurrected only by scholars interested in the
history of human beliefs and customs. But, the idea is very
much alive, an active part of human beliefs and customs,
and a favorite topic of religionists. For example, estimates
from a 1978 Gallup poll indicate that 70% of Americans
believe in a hereafter (in Siegel, 1980) and the revival of
Austin, Texas

fundamentalist christianity in our nation has provided a new

impetus for "pro-afterlifers" to preach the glories of heaven
and the horrors of hell.
Hereafter, I will briefly address two questions: (1) What
are some of the primary sources of "evidence" which
religionists are likely to cite in defense of an afterlife?; and (2)
What are some scientifically-based explanations for the
phenomena that religionists may cite as "evidence"? _
The source of "evidence" we are likely to hear most
about, of course, comes from religious texts and teachings.
The afterlife in these sources varies from culture to culture:
from ghosts that hover about the living in preliterate
societies (see, e.g., Driver, 1961), to a succession of
reincarnations in eastern religions (Addison, 1932; Gould,
1919), to at least two types of immortality recorded in the
book cited most often in our culture - the judaeo-christian
bible.
Consider for a moment the bible. Note that the notion of
an afterlife entered Hebrew thought only around the 28th
century, BP (before present), primarily through Persian
influence. The lead came from isaiah (29:19) who declared:
"The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise." This idea does
not appear in the 22 books that precede "The book of
isaiah." In "Genesis" (3:22) god casts adam and eve from
the garden of eden lest they" ...also take of the tree of life,
and eat, and live forever." God says to adam: "You are dust,
and to dust you shall return" (3:19). In these first 22 books,
god and angels come to earth; man does not enter their

May, 1982

PageS

realm. God promises one thing to all men - death. To the

obedient, he promises long life, many descendents, and
deliverance of enemies into their hands but not immortality.
(See also Smith, 1952). Isaiah changed all that by promising
that the dead shall rise. Two centuries later, the writer of
"The book of daniel" (12:2) qualified this promise by
declaring that afterlife applied only to some and, then, as a
reward or punishment correlated with merit: "...many of
those that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting contempt."
Such statements are the forerunners of the messianic
doctrine embodied in the "kingdom of god" and preached
by the jesus of the books of matthew, mark and luke, and
elaborated upon by the writer of "The revelation to john".
The common thread in this doctrine is a physical resurrection of the dead body. Verses referring to this early Hebrew
notion of a physical resurrection were retained in the "new
testament", together with the later Greek and Roman
overlays of the concept of an ethereal soul which ascends to
heaven after death.
Christianity has never resolved these conflicting concepts of an afterlife. Believers merely choose the verses that
best suit their belief system and declare them to be true
because they are the divinely inspired "word of god". This
argument is hardly scientific! It does, however, attest to
man's tendency to embody language with absolute and
supernatural origins and powers.
A second common line of "evidence" cited in support of
an afterlife comes from the so-called psychical powers.
Simply stated, this is a belief that certain humans, especially
mediums, have a special power to communicate with the
dead. This forms the cornerstone of modern parapsychology's study of an afterlife (Gauld, 1977).
In the 1800's and early 1900's, prestigious scholars
gathered the narrative accounts of people who had seen
and/or communicated with the dead and subjected these
reports to scientific scrutiny. These scholars concluded: (I)
that most such reports were too weak to support the
concept of life after death; (2) that some mediums were
frauds (Christopher, 1969); but (3) that a few accounts
could not be explained scientifically (Gurney, 1889; Hudson, 1901; Myers, 1903/1961). Those cases that could not
be explained primarily involved reproted instances where
an apparition appeared 12 hours after his or her death to
persons who had no knowledge of their death (Sidgwick,
Johnson, Myers, Podmore & Sidgwick, 1894). Parapsychologists still tend to take such psychic reports seriously; most
scientists do not, and some have recently posed viable
scientific explanations for such psychic phenomena. These
explanations are the same as some of those posed for a
third and relatively new type of "evidence" - the neardeath experience.
The near-death experience has been of some research
interest to physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists for
several decades. Professionals use these experiences to
frame therapeutic approaches to dying, some of which are
based on a sympathetic assurance that life does indeed
continue after death (e.g., Gordon, 1970; Grof & Halifax,
1977; Huxley, 1968; Kubler-Ross, 1969, 1975). Near-death
experiences have been reported by the terminally illand by
individuals who survived clinical death and near-death
accidents. Several common, prototypical experiences have
been reported: meeting others, such as dead relatives and
Page 6

May, 1982

friends, spirits and guides; ineffability; feelings of peace and

quiet; a loud ringing or buzzing noise; seeing a dark tunnel
through which one may feel oneself move; out of body
experiences; a being of light; a panoramic view of one's life;
a border or limit beyond which there is no return; cities of
light; visions of great knowledge; supernatural rescue from
death by spirits; and a return or coming back with changed
attitudes (Moody, 1977).
The data appeal to many christians because the experience sometimes results in a renewed interest in god and
because the commonality of themes in these experiences
has been said to substantiate the concept of an afterlife.
The near-death experience, however, is not the sole
province of christians. Descriptions of death experiences
and an afterlife are similar across cultures (Eliade, 195111964;Sheils, 1978). And, these experiences are remarkably
similar to drug-induced hallucinations and to sensory
isolation experiences (Siegel, 1980). For example, psychedelic drug hallucinatory episodes are marked by a suppression of verbal behavior; the hearing of voices and other
sounds is similar to the reported experiences of patients
recovering from anesthesia (especially nitrous oxide, ether,
and ketamine); and, the bright lights reported in near-death
experiences occur also in sensory isolation and in several
nondrug hallucinatory states (Lilly, 1977).
Such similarities can be illustrated by two examples of
reported experiences:
1. Tunnel in an Afterlife Report.
"My awareness of the room dimmed, and the world
immediately around me became like a tunnel with walls
that glowed with a slight orange-red reflected light" (in
Wheller, 1976, p.2).
2. Tunnel in a Drug Hallucination.
"I'm moving through some kind of train tunnel. There
are all sorts of lights and colors" (in Siegel & Jarvik, 1975,
p.1l6).
The "tunnel," as well as experiences like "cities of light,"
are probably caused by phosphenes, visual sensations that
arise from the discharge of neurons in the eye structures.
They also reflect the electrical excitation of organized
groups of cells in the visual cortex the brain (Siegel, 1977).
Various other near-death experiences also resemble hallucinations.
Recent electrophysical research (Winters, 1975) has
confirmed that hallucinations are related directly to excitation of the central nervous system. These excitation states
are coupled with a functional disorganization of that portion
of the brain that regulates incoming stimuli. What happens,
essentially, is an escape inward into private thoughts
(Siegel, 1980).
This inward process may be accompanied by the psychological defense mechanisms known as depersonalization
and dissociation. Depersonalization produces, under threat
of death, many of the reactions reported for near-death
experiences (Noyes, 1972; Noyes & Slymen, 1978-1979).
Depersonalization defends the endangered personality against the threat of death and also initiates an integration of
that reality. This may be accompanied by visions of an
afterlife, coupled with a sense of rebirth (Noyes & Kletti,
1976). Dissociation, on the other hand, usually operates
unconsciously. It permits emotion and affect to be detached
from an idea, object, or situation and has been postulated to
underlie various psychical phenomena, including trance

of

American Atheists

seances, automatic writing, and other behaviors that have

yielded so many descriptions of an afterlife. Dissociation
also produces hallucinations composed of many of the
themes common to near-death experiences (Siegel, 1980).
, "The specific context of complex hallucinatory imagery is
determined by set (expectations and attitudes) and setting
(physical and psychological environments)" (Siegel, 1980,
p. 926), A set such as fear of death and a setting like a
hospital ward may trigger eschatological thoughts and
images. Some researchers have suggested that the universal themes in such imagery may be related to stored
memories of intrauterine existence and birth (Grof &
Halifax, 1977). A more integrated explanation is based on
the perceptual-release theory (see West, 1975). This theory
assumes that normal memories and perceptions are suppressed by some mechanism that inhibits the flow of
information from the outside. If outside input is decreased
while awareness remains, as in shock or dying, the old
perceptions are released and may be dynamically organized
and experienced as dreams, fantasies, or hallucinations.
Or, if the perceptions stored in the brain are sufficiently
stimulated for a long enough period of time by fear, drugs,
or other stimuli, the released perceptions can enter awareness and be experienced as hallucinations (Siegel, 1980).
These major forms of "evidence" for the existence of an
afterlife are hardly convincing! They attest, primarily, to the
power of the human brain to translate a wish for eternal
consciousness and a fear of eternal oblivion into dreams,
fantasies, hallucinations, religious myths, and even quasiscientific inferences. Belief in an afterlife remains, in the face
of current knowledge, only a human wish and the ultimate
promise of religions. Being evidence-oriented, we as Atheists can only continue to believe that life begins and ends
with our short lifespan on this earth.

References
Addison, J.T. LIFE BEYOND DEATH IN THE BELIEFS OF
MANKIND. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1932.
Christopher,
M. HOUDINI: THE UNTOLD STORY. New York:
Thomas v Crowell, 1969.
Driver, H.E. INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA. Chicago &
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1961.
Eliade, M. SHAMANISM: ARCHAIC TECHNIQUES OF ECST ASY, Princeton, N,J.: Princeton University Press, 1964.
Gauld, A. Discarnate suruiual. In B.B. Wolman (Ed.), HANDBOOK OF PARAPSYCHOLOGY,
New York: Van Nostrand
Reinhold, 1977.
Gordon, D.C. OVERCOMING
THE FEAR OF DEATH. New
York: MacMillan, 1970.
Gould, F,J. COMMON-SENSE
THOUGHTS
ON A LIFE
BEYOND. London: Watts, 1919.
Grof, S" & Halifax, J, THE HUMAN ENCOUNTER
WITH
DEATH. New York: Dutton, 1977.
Gurney, E. On Apparitions Occurring Soon After Death. PROCEEDINGS
OF THE SOCIETY
FOR PSYCHICAL
RESEARCH, 1889,5,403-485.
Hudson, T,J. A SCIENTIFIC
DEMONSTRATION
OF THE
FUTURE LIFE. Chicago:
McClung, 1901.
Huxley, L. THIS TIMELESS MOMENT. Millbrae, Cal.; Celestial
Arts, 1968.
Kubler-Ross, E. ON DEATH AND DYING. New York: MacMillan, 1969
Kubler-Ross, E. DEATH: THE FINAL STAGE OF GROWTH.
Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
Lilly, J.C. THE DEEPSELF. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977.

Moody, R. REFLECTIONS
ON LIfE AFTER LIFE. New York:
Bantam/Mockingbird,
1977.
Myers, F.W.H. HUMAN PERSONALITY
AND ITS SURVIVAL
OF BODILY DEATH. New Hyde Park, N.Y. University Books,
1961. (Originally published in 1903.)
Noyes, R. The Experience of Dying. PSYCHIATRY,
1972.35,

174-183.
R., & Kletti, R. Depersonalization in the face of lifethreatening danger: An interpretation. OMEGA, 1976, 7,
103-114,
Noyes, R. U. SLymen, D.J. The subjectiue response to lifethreatening danger. OMEGA, 1977,8,181-194.
Sheils, D. A cross-cultural study of beliefs in out-of-body experiences, waking and sleeping. JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY
FOR
PSYCHICAL RESEARCH, 1978,49, 697-74l.
Sidgwick, J" Johnson,
A., Myers, F.W.H., Podmore,
F., &
Sidgwick, E.M, Report on the census of hallucinations. PRONoyes,

CEEDINGS
OF THE SOCIETY
FOR PSYCHICAL
RESEARCH, 1885,3,69-150.
Siegel, R.K. The psychology of life after death. AMERICAN
PSYCHOLOGIST,
35 (10), 911-93l.
Siegel, R.K. Hallucinations. SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, 1977,237

(4),132-140.
R.K. & Jarvik, M.E. Drug-induced hallucinations in
animals and man. In R.K. Siegel & L.J. West (Eds.), HALLUCINA-

Siegel,

TIONS: BEHAVIOR, EXPERIENCE,

AND THEORY. New
York: Wiley, 1975.
Smith, H,W, MAN AND HIS GODS, Boston: Little, Brown & Co.,

1952,
Teleki, G, Group response to the accidental death of Q chimpanzee in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, FOLIA PRIMATOLOGICA, 1973,20,81-94.
West, L.J. A clinical and theoretical oueruiew of hallucinatory
phenomena. In R.K. Siegel & L.J. West (eds.), HALLUCINATIONS: BEHAVIOR, EXPERIENCE,
AND THEORY. New
York: Wiley, 1975.
Wheeler, D,R. JOURNEY TO THE OTHER SIDE. New York:
Ace Books, 1976.
Wilson, E.O. THE INSECT SOCIETIES,
Cambridge,
Mass.:
Belknap Press, 1971.
Winters, W.O. The continuum of CNS excitatory states and
hallucinosis. In R.K. Siegel & L.J. West (Eds.), HALLUCINATIONS: BEHAVIOR, EXPERIENCE,
AND THEORY. New
York: Wiley, 1975.

--~h~"h

c:

Austin, Texas

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May, 1982

Page 7

United World Atheists

Jean-Yves

Riviere

POPE WOJTYLA IN FATIMA PORTUGAL

Part One - THE MARIAN CULT IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Jean-Yves Riviere is President of the recently created Association
pour fa Declericafisation des Institutions Republicaines (ADIR), and is
a member of the Union des Athees, in charge of international
relations.
(Editor's introduction: Many Atheists in this country are totally unfamiliar with the "Miracle of Fatima". Nevertheless,
hundreds of thousands of catholics make a pilgrimage to this shrine every year. To help you, the reader, be more familiar
with this particular superstition we draw from Chapter four of Avro Manhattan's book, Catholic Imperia/ism and World
Freedom: "Fatima, a desolate locality in Portugal, became a shrine when, in 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution, the
virgin mary appeared repeatedly, with a momentous message, to three illiterate children. The apparition was accompanied
by a somewhat irregular occurrence ... "After a few moments of brilliant sunshine, the sun became pale, three times it .
turned speedily on itself like a Catherine-wheel,
sending forth rays of the fairest colors of the rainbow. At the end of these
convulsive revolutions it seemed to jump out of its orbit and come towards the people in a zigzag course, stopped, and
returned again to its normal position". The message allegedly consisted of an appeal to the pope to "consecrate
the world
to her immaculate heart," followed by the "consecration
of Russia."
The stories surrounding Fatima have multiplied and grown with the years, and it has been a big propaganda item for the
catholic church especially during its more vehement anti-communist years. With this two-part article about the episode
Jean-Yves Riviere exposes what is, as they say in France, "un couf monte par les cures (a clerical trick)".
"There are two kinds of apparitions: those which
are called sensible, that is to say corporeal, and those
which are merely imaginary, because they happened
in the mind. Theologians may consider both real and
miraculous".
(Osservatore Romano, Nov. 28th, 1955)
It is obvious that one of the main purposes of Wojtyla's
trip on May 13th, 1982 to Fatima (Portugal) is to appear as a
new and solemn consecration
of "virgin mary", as the
goddess of the christian world. So we cannot but tell how
this character, whose status in the gospels was a rather low
and very humble one, rose along the centuries up to
become the object of an actual worship.
Of course, the church denies and will always deny that
mary is being worshipped since, according to the decalog,
only "god" (or the trinity, that is, those three deities which
are only one) must be worshipped. But these teachings did
not avert the devotees from building magnificent basilicas
and other holy places dedicated to their female idol, where
special prayers were addressed
to it, litanies chanted,
candles burnt, and the ritual gestures (kneelings, prostrations,and so on) performed.
If this is no worship, well, I wonder what is.

THE ORIGINS OF MARY'S CULT

As long as christianism remained a mere jewish concern,
there was no issue about jesus's mother. The gospels just
mentioned that she had conceived her divine son thanks to
the intervention of the holy spirit - an explanation which
left her husband somewhat puzzled for the rest of his life.
For the jewish christians this was good enough, but when
the evangelization of the pagans had started, things were
not so easy. According to the pagan religions, the mother of
a god had to be a virgin, or else the birth would not be a
Page 8

May. 1982

miraculous one. Such was the case with the Egyptian

goddess, isis, who had conceived horus after being stricken
by a sunbeam that osiris had cast at her. So was it also with
danae, a beloved of jupiter.
Thus, the christian preachers had to acknowledge mary's
virginal conception of jesus and Origen, one of the fathers of
the church (185-254),
wrote with the utmost gravity and
almost scientific conciseness: "What opens every woman's
vulva is the conjugal act. But the vulva of the lord's mother
was opened only at the time of parturition."
(Homilia in
Luc., 14).
So the virginity of the idol between jesus' conception and
birth had never been seriously contested, except by the
Roman philosopher Celse who lived in the 2nd century and
was firmly averse to the christian sect. His writings, as
everyone knows, were carefully destroyed, but part of them
have been quoted by his very opponents, the fathers of the
church, in order to vilify him. Here is an example of what
Celse had written about jesus (according to Origen):
"We exactly know how this happened. You were a
native of a little hamlet in Judea. You were born of a
poor country woman who worked for a living; accused
of adultery with a soldier named Panthera, she was
thrown out bv her husband. a professional carpenter".
It was not before the 7th century and after many
controversies
that the dogma of mary's perpetual virqiruty
was officially. recognized
and proclaimed
by a council
gathered in Latran. It resulted in allowing the former pagans
to identify mary with their goddess artemis whom zeus had
also granted with the privilege of everlasting virginity.
However, this was not enough. A god's mother had to be
exempt from any sin, even the original one, but the
establishment of this new dogma (the immaculate conception) revealed itself to be a lot more tricky and was to be
argued for many centuries. As a matter of fact, it was one of
American

Atheists

the main causes which provoked the rupture between

catholics and protestants
(aggravated by the jesuits' influence).
Finally, the marian cult was consecrated by two dogmas
besides the first, that of everlasting virginity. The dogma of
immaculate conception was officially promulgated by pope
pius IX in 1854. That of assumption by pope pius XII in 1950.
But both had actually been long since acknowledged and
celebrated by the roman catholic church.

APPARITIONS

IN THE CHURCH

Apparitions are likely to date back to the origins of

religion or humanity itself. The only condition for a supernatural being (god o'r goddess) to appear is that it already be the
object of a special reverence,
that is, of a cult. Then
anything may happen.
It is well known that jesus allegedly started appearing to
the apostles a few days after his death and so-called
"resurrection".
Thereafter he never ceased to "appear" in
various circumstances
until he was challenged in this line of
trade by his own mother, the holy virgin mary. But it is
worth noticing that it was only in the Middle Ages - as she
began to be worshipped
- that mary made her first
apparitions. And though she never appeared to calvinists or
lutherans - who rejected the belief in her deity - but only
to catholics used to worshipping her. One cannot help
wondering if it would not have been more profitable to her
to appear to protestants, in order to convince them of her
divine nature, than to catholics who did not need such
irrefutable evidence.
At any rate, it has nothing to do with our problem
at-hand.
Our problem at-hand is about Fatima and the wonders
which happened there. But before dealing with this matter,
we think it would be useful to recall some of mary's previous
comings-out,
because it is now clear that the church
somehow took up those events as a pattern when it built up
the hoax of Fatima. One of the places where they occurred
is most celebrated nowadays for its magnificent and populous pilgrimages, its miraculous healings and its enormous
commercial success. I mean Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, of course. But Lourdes deserves an extensive study
on account of its scientific involvements. So we will not have
space enough available to treat of it at length. The other
apparition, which happened in La Sallette (France, too) a
few years earlier, is by far less notorious. We will soon see
why, but I can already say that the reason is that it was a
failure. Nonetheless,
the affair was highly profitable to the
catholic clergy, as it made the priests aware of what had to
be done and what had to be avoided in order to arrange a
story not too far-fetched and thus credible enough for
average believers.

THE THING IN LA SALLETTE (1846)

La Salette-Fal!avaux
(the last name of which is derived
from the Latin "fallax vallis", which can be translated as
"Valley of the Deception") is a little parish in the French
Alps.
In the evening of September 19, 1846 there was a rumor in
the village that two children, while watching over their
employer's cows, had seen a mysterious lady who had given
them a long speech. One of the children was a girl, age 14,
named Melanie. The other was a boy of eleven, Maximin.
Austin, Texas

Neither of them could either read or write.

The sight of this lady had not filled Maximin with much
awe. He had not taken off his hat for a greeting and had even
thrown some stones at the "apparition".
Melanie gave a detailed description of the lady's attire:
"She wore white shoes with roses all around ... yellow
stockings, a yellow apron and a white dress with pearls all
over it.. .she had a crown of roses around her veil and a thin
chain on her neck from which a cross with its christ on it was
hanging ... ". Then she reported the lady's speech. As for
Maximin, he just confirmed Melanie's sayings.
On the following day, a Sunday, the story was written
down by their employer, who entitled it: "Letter dictated by
the Holy Virgin to two children in the mountain of La
Sallette-Fallavaux".
And the vicar of La Sallette himself,
who had been kept duly informed of the whole thing, took
the "apparition" as the subject of his preaching at mass.
The prodigious news expanded SWiftly, mainly thanks to
"Monseigneur"
de Bruillard, the bishop of Grenoble, who
entrusted 400 nuns with the mission to spread it all over the
diocese. Then he had the children sent to an institution held
by the "sisters of the providence".
Meanwhile, Melanie's
story had been considerably improved. According to the
new account that was to become the official one, virgin
mary - as there was no further doubt that it was definitely
she who had appeared in the mountain - had held her head
between her hands, as in despair owing to the common
people's lack of piety; she had wept; the grass under her feet
had not bent while she walked; she had been surrounded by
a sort of heavenly haze; and at the very place where her
tears had fallen onto the ground, a miraculous spring had
sprung. The water from this particular spring was embottied and sold by the priests (10,000 golden francs in one
year). Moreover, the "holy virgin" had entrusted each of the
children with a secret that was to be revealed only later.
Unfortunately,
the church had then to face several
worries, some of which were due to the children themselves. First, Maximin, who did not especially enjoy living at
the nuns home, would frequently escape and often he was
found in taverns where he used to drink rather strongly. In
1850, as he had been taken by priests to Lyon in order to be
exhibited to the pious people there as the "holy virgin's
faithful little messenger", he escaped again and went to a
priest to whom he confided that he had never seen christ's
mother.
This priest was a very holy and simple-minded
man,
.lean-Marie Baptiste Vianney, Cure d'Ars, who was to be
later canonized by pope pius XI (1925). He was horrified by
what he heard and wrote at once to his bishop about it. But
the bishop answered him to keep silent in order not to cause
a scandal.
During this time, pilgrimages had already begun in La
Sallette-F allavaux where they drew many people (100,000 in
1848, 200,000 in the following year). So there was no
retreating for the church. It had to let things keep going, in
spite of the many hitches; and the worst was still to come.
In 1852, a book was published whose author was a priest,
Joseph Deleon, parson of Villeurbanne, in the suburbs of
Lyon. It revealed that a lady had travelled in a stagecoach
between Grenoble and Valence a few days before the
"apparition". This lady was a very garrulous sort - she had
declared, in particular, that her sojourn in the mountain
(Cont'd on pg 28)

May, 1982

Page 9

THE PHANTOM PHENOMENON

. Xian Insanity Strikes Again'
In the two decades of the 1960's and 1970's two young
men were attempting to help minority groups set up small
non-commercial, educational FM radio stations to have
these groups reach each other, to have their grievances
made known and to have a solidarity of purpose. As they
tried with used radio equipment, with a struggle with the
regulations of the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), and with the continually dashed hopes of the
minorities, they became more and more angry to find that
the religious community of the United States had moved in
on the FM band and just about swallowed it up - when the
only hope of these small stations was to gain a place on that
band, rather than on AM where requirements were even
more stringent and much more elaborate and costly
equipment was needed.
Goaded by desperation, the two young men, Jeremy D.
Lansman and Lorenzo W. Milan, filed a "Petition for
Rulemaking" with the FCC "In the Matter of (1) Revision of
Rules Permitting Multiple Ownership of Non-commercial
Educational Radio and Television Stations in Single Markets; and (2) Request for 'Freeze' on all Applications by
Government Owned and Controlled Groups for Reserved
Educational FM and TV Channels; and (3) Request for
'Freeze' on all Applications by Religious 'Bible,' 'Christian,'
and other Sectarian Schools, Colleges, and Institutes for
Reserved Educational FM and TV Channels." The Petition
was mailed to the FCC on December 1, 1974, received by it
on December 5th and clocked into the Rules and Standards
Division on December 6, 1974. Given the file number of
RM-2493, it read as follows:
This Petition is filed by Jeremy D. Lansman and Lorenzo
W. Milam, who have individually and jointly operated,
financed, and encouraged many independent non-comrnercial, non-institutional, non-sectarian radio stations in the
United States over the past thirteen years. In this Petition,
they are acting independently, and not as a part of any
group or corporation, and envision no pecuniary gain to
themselves if the suggestions herein are enacted by the
Commission.
1] Petitioners ask that the Federal Communications
Commission delete paragraphs 73.240(b) and 73.636(b) of
the Commission Rules and Regulations which permit noncommercial educational licensees exemption from duopoly
(monopoly x 2) regulations. Under the existing rules, there
is no limit to the number of radio and television stations
which can be held by a non-profit corporation, school, local
or state political entity.
2] There are problems enough with government controlled or financed broadcasting outlets being permitted in each
market - but when these institutions control more than
one outlet, stultification of intelligent criticism and free
programming becomes irresistible. This is especially true in
the smaller markets, where the present rules would not
prohibit one hide-bound government entity from creating
and holding a virtual monopoly on the marketplace of ideas.
3] Non-commercial radio and television stations are
expected to have more community and public service type
programming, even though some of them avoid this heavy
Page 10

May, 1982

responsibility. Contrary to popular belief, it is possible for

the programming on non-commercial stations 'competing'
in the same market to be improved by the variety available
through different institutions. Permitting a single government or school body to control more than one outlet in one
city or town can do nothing but smother such healthy
growth and creativity.
4] Petitioners have found that many schools, colleges,
and quasi-governmental boards willprogram their radio and
television stations as if controversy were dangerous and
repugnant. As well it might be: financing of these stations
comes from school boards and legislative bodies that hold
the spirit of free inquiry to be anathema. They obviously fear
that robust, wide-open programming might destroy governmental income sources ~ proving that monetary stability is
closer to their institutional hearts than a diverse and lively
radio and television.
5] It is bad enough that these fearful groups should be
licensees in the first place; it is trebly bad that there should
be no restriction on the number of outlets permitted in a
single market. And, given the untrammeled ambitions of
many school and college administrators to show size if not
diversity, we would suspect that applications for such
monopoly outlets willincrease in the future. Because one is
'non-commercial' or 'educational,' it does not follow that
one doesn't have the ambition to lock out diversity. Such
monopoly situations will and shall continue to eliminate
non-institutional community groups (usually more racially,
socially, and economically integrated) from having their
own voice in these communities.
6] There is no possible way that monopoly ownership can
be healthy, necessary, or virtuous. Our experience with
school boards and college 'communications' departments
have shown that they can be just as greedily opposed to
competitition as IBM or AT&T. Some of our community
groups have been forced to rely on 'Petition to Deny' to get
school and government broadcasters to share-time on their
unused broadcast day, or even to move to another suitable
frequency so that new stations can be applied for.
7] We have listed in the appendix herein some of the
present monopoly situations existing in the country today.
We think that as a part of this freeze requested on
applications, the FCC should make inquiry to see if
communities like Rolla, Missouri, Minneapolis, Minn., and
Columbia, Missouri have richer and more diverse programming, or the opposite, with their monopoly government
broadcasting facilities.
8] One should not have to use "Petitions to Deny" against
educators to permit others to have access to frequencies, to
educate in the widest sense. Educational broadcasters
should not draw the Ivory Towers about themselves as
some sort of sacred cloak which permits them to choke off
efforts for new, diverse, more broadly based groups to have
access to radio and television permits. Yet this is the trend
- and we feel that it will continue, if not stopped at this
point.
9] Integral to the American system and philosophy of
radio and television broadcast regulation is the thought that
. American

Atheists

local independent broadcasters can better serve the public

interest. The philosophy envisions that small local broadcasters can better foster discussion of local issues than one
large, federal-sponosored agency (like the BBC or the
CBC.) But the FCC has at the same time freely licensed
broadcast and telecasting channels to local tax-supported
governmental bodies. Without question, these government
stations do not offer time nor do they encourage controversial programming about local political issues; in some cases,
these outlets have positive prohibitions on discussion of
local issues of far-ranging public importance.
10]This subversion of American broadcasting policy and
spirit should be the subject of a full Commission inquiry.
There should be no reason, for instance, that local educational broadcast outlets could not be licencsed to local
independent boards (like the BBC) with a guaranteed 20
year funding. When local school board stations have to beg
money annually from local or state legislatures - freedom
to program creatively and controversially goes out the
window. Even some of the great independently commissioned outlets (WGBH, KQED, WETA) are subject to unconscionable pressures at annual finance time. And we would
guess that the Alabama Educational Television Commission Case would never have transpired if AETC had been
free of the annual funding needs - of going before a
backwards legislative body for necessary operating monies.
11] Every state has radio and television stations licensed
to a government -school group. The daily toll on free speech
and free controversial programming is apparent. However,
rather than remove these goups as licensees, we would like
the Commission to make inquiry into the practicability of
requiring each shool or government licensee to set up an
independent board of control with guaranteed minimum
financing for twenty years. Even the most wimpish of
government-school administrators might find some good
and controversial programming out there in the woods with
twenty years of freedom. Or to put it another way: who
would ever have guessed that Earl Warren would become
the scourge of political conservatives when he was appointed to the Supreme Court twenty years ago?

12] Freedom of Religion should not presume a sacred

duty to program only the most bland and inoffensive; and to
enrich the licensee excessively by promulgating a comfortable, blond, Aryan view of the Godhead. Rather Freedom of Religion should involve a positive duty to
investigate the challenges of men and their gods, to utilize
the arts and creativity to define this relationship; this
dialogue between men and the divine. Until the religious
broadcasters of America learn this simple truth, we must
protect ourselves from the wanton growth of senseless,
inhumane, apostolic ism which clutters so much American
radio and television.
13] Religious broadcasters have shown a remarkable
cancer-like growth into the 'educational' portions of the FM
and TV bands. They control endless monies from 'free-will'
contributions, thrive on mindless banal programming aimed
at some spiritless, oleaginous God, and show the same
spirit as MacDonald's Hamburger Co. in their efforts to
dominate American radio and television.
14]It is dreadful enough that Oral Roberts, Family Radio,
Austin, Texas

and The Church of the Foursquare Gospel invade the

'commercial' band - but, not satisfied with that, we have
such doubtful 'educators' as Moody Bible Institute, Miami
Christian University, Nazarene Theological Seminary,
Southern Missionary College, Pacific Union College, Western Bible Institute among others rushing to crowd the
narrow FM band set aside for non-commercial, educational
stations. We have no doubt that their attack on reserved
VHF and UHF television bands will start soon enough.
15] Moody Bible Institute has started applying for 100
kilowatt FM stations in the reserved part of the band
outside of its home territory of Chicago. With each new
grant, the radio band will be that much poorer in diversity,
interest, in-depth public affairs and true education of the
whole man.
16] This is not a blanket condemnation of all 'religious'
broadcasters. KFUO in St. Louis, WRVR in New York, and
the late KXKX in San Francisco were and are honest,
inquiring stations run by religious groups. But these are the
exceptions, not the rule. Most religious broadcasters seem
to loathe the vitality and robust programming which should
be their obligation. They regularly and systematically ignore
the Fairness Doctrine, sabotage wide-open programming,
and even in their musical programming, deny the fullest
flowering of Western Christian Music (Bach, Handel,
Telemann, medieval and renaissance church music) and by
all means, they ignore completely the music of other
religions (African religious songs, Japanese Buddhist Tempie Music, Indian Hymns to Lord Vishnu.) Their programming is in no way 'educational:' rather it is narrow,
prejudiced, one-sided, blind and stultifying.
17]Therefore, we are asking in this petition that a 'freeze'
be imposed, immediately, on all further applications for
reserved educational FM and TV channels - not only for
state and local governmental bodies - but, as well, by any
and all 'Christian,' 'Bible,' 'Religious,' and other sectarian
schools, colleges, and institutions.
Concurrent with this freeze, we would like the full
Commission to investigate these sectarian institutions
which are presently licensed for 'educational' channels to
discover whether these licensees are actually living up to
the Fairness Doctrine in presentation of matters of controversial importance; and whether these groups are presenting educational, truly educational, programming on their
outlets; or whether they are relying solely on music and talk
which is tainted with the ennui so characteristic of American Fundamental Religion.
19] It is a continuing paradox to us that religious radio
should be so boorish. We - as petitioners - hold a great
affection for the potentiality of American radio. FM, between 1955 and 1965, when it was free of present financial
pressures, was a great and experimental medium. Now,
with the vulgarization of commercial FM, our hopes should
rest on the reserved part of the radio band.
20] The fears of the governmentally controlled, taxsupported radio outlets might be understandable. Controversy creates awareness and fear; fear threatens jobs. Fear
could explain why WSIE* in Edwardsville, Ill., runs an
automated station, or why WRAS* in Atlanta does top 40.
Fear might explain why KSLH* stays solely with in-school
programming, complete with hour long silences for tests.
Porridge is always a safe medicine for fear.
21] But religious broadcasters should be free of such

May, 1982

Page 11

fears. After all, with their excessive donations**** which

come from a large body of listeners, and their exclusive
reliance on The Great Upstairs, they should be willing to
involve themselves in any and all public controversy, even
debate over the existence of God.
22] We are convinced that the problem is one of scope
and vision. Religions, traditionally - over the centuries
-have been the repository of history, ethics, facts, apocrypha, and knowledge. Each branch of traditional religion
(Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Protestant) has an order,
branch, or sect which holds the core of knowledge. The
Jesuits, for instance, in their pursuit of their particular
divine, are willing to debate and discuss even the most
anti-religious tenet. Radio Vatican is no slouch in the
transmission of ideas, as well as ideals.
23] It seems to us that the particularly American institution - 'back to the Bible,' fundamentalism, The Gospel-is
ultimately vacuous when it comes to knowledge, history,
the spirit of learning because of its dependence only the
Bible, and its exclusion of the ideas, commentaries, and
thoughts of man through history, through time. This may
explain its peculiar hold on the American poor and country
folk: it demands no other resource than Belief with Bible in
hand.
24] Which is all well and good if we were addressing
ourselves to man's freedom to worship the god or gods he
may please. The interface - we would say the destructive
interface - is when fundamentalist churches and church
schools grab onto the rarest of spectrum space to purvey
their blank and questionless philosophy over the hapless
listener, and pretend that it is educational.
25] We would be delighted to provide for the Commission
random tapes made from random broadcast days over
stations such as WMBI, KANG, WDYN, KWBI to prove
conclusively that education and enlightenment are anathma
to these and similar stations. A day of listening to the end
product of countless Back to the Bible programs may be a
powerful soporific - but it might be the only way to
convince the full Commission that education - in the
truest, fullest, Renaissance sense - is furtherest from their
minds.
26] We are concerned because educational FM is just
beginning to grow into the areas that need it most - rural
and country areas 200 or 500 miles from major population
centers. How fine it would be if these areas could count on
an honest community radio, personal, with fullopen-access
and diversity of voices. What a pity if this opportunity were
squandered by fundamentalist religious 'schools' who (sic)
would block off frequencies, and continue to show scorn for
open access and minority employment and programming
such as they have in the past. The case of KGDN (King's
Garden, Washington) was not isolated nor special; religious
broadcasters have and will continue to examine would-be
employees as to their faith - they have just become more
discrete. (sic)
27] Over the past decade, Petitioners have shown dozens
of community minority groups how to apply for FCC
permission to establish open-access, free-forum radio stations that serve The Whole Man - with curiosity, humor,
and delight of knowledge. It saddens us to see a rampant
growth and squeezing out of our (necessarily) poorer
groups by large educational tax-supported, governmental
controlled institutions, and a further deterioration of the
Page 12

May, 1982

band by religious groups locked into a bleak, self-centered,

and miasmic view of man's capability for knowledge.
28] It is for these reasons that we file the instant petition
with the F.C.C., and hope that the body willinstantly try to
ameliorate these wrongs through the following actions:
A. Delete paragraphs 73.240(b} and 73.636(b} of the
Commission rules and regulations;
B. Add duopoly and concentration of control regulations to the non-commercial educational rules for radio and
television; such rules to be similar in language to 73.240(a};
C. Freeze granting of all construction permits for
educational radio and television stations to applicants
owned or controlled by sectarian schools, colleges, or other
institutions, and to groups owned, controlled, or directly
funded by state or local governments or other elective
political bodies including school boards;
D. Institute an inquiry into the restrictions on free
speech regularly practiced by the above-mentioned groups
on existing 'educational' radio and television stations; and
E. On the basis of that inquiry, institute some divestiture process (for religious broadcasters and duolopy violative government groups) and requirements for financial
independence on a long term basis for all remaining taxsupported licensees.
Respectfully submitted,

. >~t::!~
/?

L __.::

Jeremy

C;~
L/

D. Lansman

Lorenzo W. Milan
1 December, 1974
222 University Avenue
Los Gatos, California
*** Footnote.

It is common knowledge in the industry that Family Radio

stations (which broadcast on the 'commercial' part of the band with
programming indistinguishable from that described above) buy new
stations by begging 'goodwill' offerings on their existing stations - and that
when they move into a new area, usually suburb of large population area
-they payoff the cost of the new station in cash within six months of
purchase. The lost cost and high return of 'religious' stations is legion
within the industry. Mendicancy pays very well in this business.

APPENDIX A
Some Examples of Duopoly Situations Where A Governmental Body controls More Than One Radio or Television
Outlet in a Single Market.

I
)

++
The Curators of the University of Missouri:
KUMR [FM] and KMNR [FM] - Rolla, Missouri
Metro Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting:
WQED [TV] and WQEX [TV] - Pittsburgh, Penna.
Twin Cities Educational Television Corp:
KTCA [TV] and KTCI [TV] - Minneapolis, Minn.
American Atheists

University of Washington:
KCTS [TV], KUOW [FM], and KCMU [FM] Washington

WKOC [FM] Olivet Nazarene

88.3 mHz

Seattle,

WLCC [FM] Lincoln Christian College, Lincoln, II.

88.9 mHz
140'
4.6 KW.

Bay Area Educational Television Association:

KQED [TV], KQEC [TV] and KQED [FM]San Francisco, CA.
Curators, The University of Missouri:
KOMU [TV] KBIA [FM] and KCOU [FM] Missouri

WMBI [FM] Moody Bible Institute,

90.1 mHz
440\

Chicago,

II.
100 KW.

WMBW [FM] Moody Bible Institute (of Chicago)

Chattanooga,
Tennessee
88.9 mHz
1,270'
100 KW.

Columbia,

The Chicago Educational Television Association:

WTTW [TV] and WXXW [TV] - Chicago, III.

WMCU [FM] Miami Christian Univ., Miami, Fla.

89.7 mHz
890'
3 KW.

In addition, the State of Wisconsin Educational Board

(Auburndale) is licensee for seven FM and one AM station
- many of which have overlapping I mv/rn contours. Also,
the Alabama Educational T elevsiion Commission, subject
to recent FCC revocation proceedings, is licensed for nine
television stations, many of which have overlapping "A" and
"B" contours.
APPENDIX

College, Kankakee, II.

10 W

WNAZ [FM] T revecca Nazarene

Tennessee
88.9 mHz
WPCS [FM] Pensacola
Florida
89.3 mHz

College, Nashville,
10 W

Christian School, Pensacola,

510'

100 KW.

B
WPGT [FM] Roanoke Christian School, Roanoke
Rapids, S.c.
90.1 mHz
84'
860 W

Religious and Sectarian Groups with Licenses, Construction Permits, or Applications to Broadcast on the "Educational" Reserved Portion of the FM Band.

WYFL [FM] Anniston Road Christian Schools, Jack

son ville, Florida
89.1 mHz
90'
1.9 KW.
KANG [FM] Pacific Union College, Angwin, Cal.
89/9 mHz
800'
20 KW.
KCRH [FM] Northwest
91.5 mHz

Nazarene
300'

College, Nampa I.
10 W.

KDCR [FM] Dordt College, Sioux Center,

91.3 mHz
300'
KTSR [FM] Nazarene
City, Missouri
90.1 mHz

APPLI CATIONS
WMCU [FM] Miami Christian
HAS: 3 KW

University, Miami, Fla.

Req: 100 KW.

Moody Bible Institute (of Chicago),

Florida
REQ: 88.7 mHz,
477'

Iowa
48 KW.

Boynton,
50 KW.

Theological Radio Co., Kansas

Florida Bible College, Hollywood,
REQ: 88.1 mHz
132'

10 W.

FLA
3 KW.

KUCV [FM] Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska

91.3 mHz
10 W.

Illinois Bible Institute,

REQ: 91.1 mHz

KWBI [FM] Western

91.1 mHz

Colo.
26 KW.

Clear Creek Baptist School, Pineville, Kentucky

REQ: 90.9 mHz
744'
1.6 KW.

1.33 KW

Emmanuel Baptist Christian School, Toledo,

Ohio
REQ: 89.5 mHz
726'
3.0 KW.

Bible Inst., Morrison,

-250'

Criswell Bible Inst., Dallas, Texas

89.3 mHz
428'

WCSG [FM] Grand Rapids Baptist College & Sem.,

Grand Rapids, Michigan
91.3 mHz
350'
20 KW.
WDHS [FM] Goshen
91.1 mHz
WDYN [FM] Tennessee
nooga' Tenn.
89.7 mHz
Austin, Texas

College, Goshen,
65'

Indiana
390 W

Temple College, Chatta820'

62 KW.

Carlinville, III.
258'

Columbia Bible College, Columbia,

Carolina
REQ: 89.7 mHz
416'

50 KW.

South
330 W

Note: Information on the above-listed 25 stations was drawn from The FM

Atlas and Station Directory by Dr. Bruce EIving; Broadcasting
Maqazine
Yearbook
1974; and official lists of the FCC on FM pending CPs, and
stations on the air. It is not a complete list; in fact, because of the lack of
up-to-date materials; it does not include the plethora of applications for
reserved channels which has taken place in the past six months; nor the

May, 1982

Page 13

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Page 14
May, 1982
American

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Page 15
May, 1982

grants for some of the above-listed

applications.

It should be mentioned that Dr. Elving's Atlas lists an additional 131 FM

stations on the "commercial"
portion of the band which program".
religious ... country gospel/hymns/gospel/(and)
preaching ... " almost
exclusively. Under the Programming section of Broadcasting. 12 AM and
FM stations are listed as "Christian," 7 as "Sacred," 9 as "Inspirational,"
91
as "Gospel," and 111 as "Religious." This compares with 46 listed "Public
Affairs" stations.

End of the Lansman-Milam Petition

The young men were naive and the approach to the FCC
was an inexpertly drawn petition, an unsophisticated
handling of bureaucratic
procedure and legally, it was simply,
inept. They led with their hearts instead of their heads and
the consequences
on the nation were to be drastic.
Lansman later supplemented
the Petition with a summation of 24 hours of programming on one station: "For 24
hours they begged, pleaded, demanded, asked, requested,
intoned, suggested, whispered that I should come to Christ.
... They told of hope for my soul if I would get right with
God .... This is an educational station?"
Within about ninety days after the Petition had been filed
a rumor began that Madalyn Murray O'Hair had filed 27,000
signatures on behalf of the petition. The rumor held that this
was an attempt by Mrs. O'Hair to stop all religious
broadcasting. The Oklahoma-based
Christian Crusade and
the National Religious Broadcasters
immediately got into
the act in opposition to the petition, claiming that it would
destroy religious broadcasting
and calling for counter
petitions. By summer of 1975, the FCC had received
. 750,000 letters protesting the activities of Madalyn Murray
O'Hair - who had done nothing and who was in no wise
connected
with either Lansman or Milam. Meanwhile,
down in Austin, Texas, where the American Atheist Center
is located, neither the Murray-O'Hairs,
nor the Center had
any knowledge of the intense activity concerned with the
Petition since Texas newspapers are, by and large, very
parochial, giving little attention to national news and even
less to international.
However, the FCC was overwhelmed.
It had never
received so much mail over any issue before it for consideration. Yielding to the public pressures, the FCC rejected the
petition out of hand on August 1st, 1975 as a proposed
violation of the constitutionally required doctrine of separaof state and church. On August 2nd, 1975 the first wire
service story was issued by UPI (United Press International). In substance it was incorrect:
"The Federal Communications
Commission (yesterday)
rejected a proposal to ban fundamentalist
religious programs from television educational channels - an idea that
had caused the biggest public uproar in FCC history.
"The proposal of West Coast television promoters
Jeremy D. Lansman and Lorenzo W. Milam would have
denied use of channels reserved for educational broadcasting to universities and institutes with church affiliations.
"Lansman and Milam challenged the right of religious
broadcasters to use channels reserved for education on the
ground that the programs were not educational.
"But the FCC said such action would violate its First
Amendment obligation to observe neutrality toward religion, acting 'neither to promote nor to inhibit religion.'
"Since Lansman and Milam filed their proposal last
December, (1974) the FCC has received an estimated
Page 16

May, 1982

750,000 letters, the greatest outpouring

of protest the
agency has received on a single issue. The letters filled two
storage rooms.
"The FCC said it found, however, 'that the vast majority
of letters were premised on the mistaken view that the
petititon proposed to ban all religious broadcasting, which
was not the case.'
"The FCC did not mention it officially but Lansman and
Milam said that huge batches of identically worded protest
letters had been received."
By this time, inquiries were being received at the American Atheist Center about "the Petition(s) which Mrs.
O'Hair had filed," and they were so persistent that she
obtained the address of Lansman and Milam from the FCC
and telephoned them. They did not know how her name
had become attached to the Petition but hastened to add
that they were both religious, that their Petition had been to
decry the quality of the religious broadcasts only and not to
attack religion, that the counter petitions had heavily
invoked the name O'Hair and that they were glad to be out
of it. They would not appeal the ruling. In so far as
Lansman, Milam and the FCC were concerned the matter
of Petition R.M. (Rule Making) 2493 was finished. It was
otherwise with religious broadcasting,
the religious community of the nation and Madalyn Murray O'Hair.
Across the nation, church bulletins began to print urgent
appeals that the 27,000 signatures supporting the O'Hair
Petition RM 2493 should be countered by double that many
signatures from christians. No indication was given that the
matter was a dead issue and that no Atheist had ever been
associated with it. The doomsday tale was repeated that
religious television for "shut ins" and invalids unable to
attend church was going to be cut off by Atheist O'Hair.
Letters continued to pour into the FCC.
Some indication of who was behind it all came when the
executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals (of Wheaton, Illinois) held a meeting in early February,
1976, with John Dart, the prestigious religious writer for the
Los Angeles Times Newspaper. He pleaded with Dart to
calm down the. born-againers,
the evangelicals and the
fundamentalists
who had gotten out of hand. There were
three issues gone mad. (1) He noted that as "the churches
were trying to get the people to protest" there was one part
of the issue not communicated
to the man in the pew and
that the religious zanies were still writing about tax deductions for religious contributions being threatened when the
U. S. Congress had laid that to rest in 1972. (2) The rumors
that the government was trying to take children away from
families by providing extensive health care centers for
working mothers was also not true and would the zanies
please stop writing their congressmen
about that. (3) "A
number of letters and petitions urging mail response to the
FCC on the question of RM 2493 were still being circulated.
Many concerned christians are not aware that the LansmanMilam petition was denied and dismissed on August 1, 1975.
Not only is the petition a dead issue, but reports that
attached noted Atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, to the
petition are erroneous." However, he went on to thank the
christians
of the nation for their concerns
and their
communications
to their elected representatives
but noted
that for this "to be effective, such communications
must be
based on factual information."
By March, 1976, George Cornell, Associated
Press
American Atheists

religious writer, who is slow and not all that bright; had
picked up the story. This time he was catering to the Roman
Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting. The "father" in
charge had come to notice that across the country people
met, signed counterpetitions, lauched letter-writing campaigns and had now swamped the FCC offices with more
than 3,000,000 letters of protest against Madalyn O'Hair.
The frantic head of the FCC was quoted as saying "I've
never seen anything like this." But at the same time (then)
Sen. Walter F. Mondale was being staggered with 7,000
letters a week based on the false story about the child care
centers. When told about three million letters to the FCC
he signed and opined that "People simply willnot accept the
facts when we tell them."
In four months time it was worse and this time T. V. Guide
in its July 24th, 1976 issue attempted to stay the flood. By
then the FCC had 3,700,000 million letters and they were
coming in at the rate of about 4,300 a day. The story now
told was that Lansman and Milam had protested against
"certain fundamentalist religious institutions, which held
broadcast licenses for educational stations" but "were in
fact using them to air religious 'propaganda.' The petition
asked for a review of the performance of these outlets to
determine whether they were fulfilling their educational
function. In the meantime, the petition requested a freeze
on issuance of such licenses." This article disclosed that the
story of the 27,000 letters supporting RM. 2493, presumably from O'Hair Atheist types, had been perhaps started
with a brochure that the National Religious Broadcasters
had put out giving this statement (incorrectly.)
The article noted that in garden clubs and church
bulletins, on supermarket community boards, in letters-tothe-editor, Madalyn O'Hair was the villainand the call was
for more letters to the FCC.
The FCC now confirmed that by August 1, 1975, the date
of the denial of the Petition, it had received 750,000 pieces of
mail. Many had one signature, often more, and a few
contained as many as 3,000 signatures. By September 1st, a
month after the matter was closed, the mail had reached
1,000,000 pieces. Three additional staff members had been
hired to handle only the RM. 2493 matter.
Meanwhile, Lansman and Milam wanted to know more
about the content of the letters and had filed a Freedom of
Information Act request, which meant that the FCC had to
store the RM. 2493 mail until September, 1976. After that it
could be destroyed every 30 days.
Lansman and Milam found what they wanted to know.
The letters were just about the same. A typical letter would
read: "I personally appreciate and wholeheartedly support :
the Sunday morning worship services and other religious
programming that are broadcast over radio and television.
Many sick, elderly people and shut-ins depend on radio and
television to fulfilltheir worship needs. I urge you to see to it
that such programming continues and that the O'Hair
petition be denied."
September came and went and the first enormous
quantities of mail were destroyed. But by October, 1976 the
rumors were still going strong. Mail was now coming into
the FCC at the rate of 6,000 letters a day. The 4,000,000
mark had been reached and passed. The lutheran church of
America was attempting to get 1,000,000 letters in from
lutherans alone. The episcopalians, the presbyterians, the
churches of christ, the VFW and the OAR's were outdoing
Austin, Texas

each other in an attempt to stop Atheist O'Hair, who was

still doing nothing but digging out of her own opprobrious
mail on the matter. Meanwhile the rev. Carl Mcintire, a
rightwing fundamentalist, had sworn to the truth of the
Atheist Petition in his November 18th issue of "The
Christian Beacon."
The churchmen now started to worry that the FCC
Petition rumor might "blunt the effect of potential religious
influence on the real issues."
In December, 1976 the story surfaced again, this time
through Associated Press which now reported 4,600,000
million letters cresting at 7,000 a day. The head of the FCC
said that the only previous "hot" issue had been in 1974
when the FCC was considering whether to ban advertising
from children's television shows. At that time, 110,000
letters had been received. However, the Atheist Petition
story now had a new twist: the rumor was that a hearing had
been granted to Atheist O'Hair on her Petition number
RM.2493.
In February, 1977 the Petition was back again in the news,
with the FCC now having received 5,000,000 letters, at the
rate of 7,500 a day. A Fort Myers, Florida, newspaper, the
News-Press, sadly noted that the rumor now was that
Atheist O'Hair had introduced a bill into Congress that
would "outlaw religious broadcasting." The editor noted "It
shouldn't be necessary to point out that no one - not even
the country's best known Atheist - can introduce a bill in
Congress without first being elected to that body. But that
probably won't stop the rumor mongers. Mrs. O'Hair has
been falsely blamed for more diabolical schemes than we
can count. Look out, Washington, Here comes another
avalanche of mail."
And in April, 1977 the Senate of the Great State of Illinois
went into action and pushed through that august body a
resolution condemning Madalyn Murray O'Hair for her
Petition filed with the FCC to forbid religious programs on
radio or television. Now, the FCC count was at 5,500,000
letters. The resolution introduced by State Sen. LeRoy
Lemke (D. Chicago) was characterized in a newspaper
report in the Chicago Tribune of April 3rd. He predicted
that the resolution would clear the committee hearings and
pass the Senate (which incidentally it did) because "nobody'd have the guts to vote against it whether its true or
not. I've got a lot of religious people in my district, and they'd
want me to vote for it. Most of the other senators are in the
same boat, I think. So we're probably going to have to pass
it and send it to the FCC." The Senator was fullyaware that
such an O'Hair Petition had never existed in the first place.
Senator Lemke added his afterthought, "Besides, I don't
trust that Madalyn Murray O'Hair anyway. She might have
some petition like that there (FCC) in disguise."
In June of 1977, the state of Idaho was in turmoil. The U.
S. Senator from Idaho was innundated with religious mail.
There, the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints was
customarily "enriching" the state with its tabernacle choir
and its general conference broadcasts and the heavy
mormon population did not want to miss any of either. The
newspapers carried many calming admonitions from the U.
S. Senator, typical of which was this: "Americans should
not worry about a threat that is non-existent and there is no
serious threat to the continued broadcasting of religious
programming. "
There was not, however, one week which went by in The

May, 1982

Page 17

American Atheist Center that there was not a letter or a

telephone call from a newspaper, a news service, a radio or
a television station. Finally, in May, 1978, the story hit the
Associated Press wires again. This time, 13,000 letters a day
were coming into the FCC. The letters now were counted
as being 6,500,000. Sunday School classes took time out to
write letters, to sign petitions. Mimeographed sheets were
passed out in factories, hung up in washaterias, distributed
on campuses. Ladies' sewing circles and bridge clubs made
the gathering of letters a side project. There was no count
available as to the number of letters received by state and
federal legislatures, but they too were guesstimated to run
into the millions at every level.
By October, 1978 the journal of the seventh day adventists "Liberty" had finally discovered the truth of the matter
and again a survey was done. Again the story changed
somewhat: "Defeat Madalyn Murray O'Hair! She now has
been granted a Federal Hearing in Washington, D. C. on the
subject of religion and the airwaves by the FCC. Her
petition, (#2493) would pave the way to eliminate the
proclamation of the gospel via the airways of America. Ifher
attempt is successful, allSunday worship services currently
being broadcast, either by radio or television, would cease.
Many elderly people and shut-ins, as well as those recuperating from illnesses or hospital visits, depend on radio and
television to fulfilltheir worship needs every week. YOU
CAN STOP HER THIS TIME! Send your letter to the
FCC."
The magazine estimated that the cost of stamps on the
envelopes already received was roughly $1,650,000, and
that did not include the cost of salaries for the FCC.
employees hired to open each "worthless" letter of petition.
The quandary in which the FCC found itself was that it
needed to open all its mail since some of it did not pertain to
RM. 2493. In order just to see what was in the mail, every
letter needed to be opened for ordinary business to
proceed. And, at the end of 1978 there had been approximately 7,000,000 letters received.
By the beginning of 1979 the FCC had had enough. Now,
it issued letters to be printed in newspapers across the land.
It had released one television statement, and authorized
CBS, NBC and ABC to do the same. The letter to the
Oakland (California) Press on February 18, 1979 was
standard.
RELIGIOUS PROGRAMMING WILL CONTINUE,
SAYS FCC
Editor's note: Several inquiries have been made regarding a petition Atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair
supposedly has been distributing asking for the abolition of religious broadcasting. This letter from the
Federal Communications Commission should shed
some light on the matter.
"In December 1974Jeremy D. Lansman and Lorenzo W.
Milam asked the Commission to inquire, among other
things, into the practices of noncommercial educational
broadcast stations, including those licensed to religious
educational organizations. Pending the completion of the
requested inquiry, Messrs. Lansman and Milam asked that
no licenses be granted for any new noncommercial educational station.
"This petition, routinely designated as RM.-2493 was
denied by the Commission on Aug. 1, 1975. The Commission stated, among other things, that it was required by the
Page 18

May, 1982

First Amendment 'to observe a stance of neutrality toward

religion, acting neither to promote nor to inhibit religion.' It
also stated that religious and non-religious organizations
are treated alike with regard to eligibility for broadcasting
channels.
"Nevertheless, the rumors began to be circulated around
the country to the effect that petitioners had called for an
end to religious broadcasting and that the Commission itself
was about to forbid any further religious broadcasts. These
rumors are false. In recent months, we have received
additional mail and telephone calls indicating that many
persons believed that Mrs. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was
either a party to the original petition or has initiated another
proceeding seeking to restrict or abolish religious broadcasting. This rumor is also false.
"The Communications Act prohibits the Commission
from censoring broadcast material and both the Act and the
Constitution forbid any action by the FCC that would
interfere in any way with freedom of speech or of religions.
The FCC has neither the authority nor the desire to attempt
to direct any broadcaster to present or refrain from
presenting any announcement or program on religion or to
judge the wisdom or accuracy of such material. It is
broadcasters, not the Commission, who determine what
specific material, including religious programs or announcements, is to be presented by their stations.
"The Commission has received nearly nine millionpieces
of mail in connection with RM.-2493. Since April 1975,
when the first letters arrived, we have been swamped with
mail from all parts of the country. Some of the letters
contained petitions with as many as 10,000 names. The
letters continue to arrive. During the month of December,
1978, the RM.-2493 letters were received at the rate of
about 8,000 a day.
"We wish there were some way that we could stop the
flow of RM.-2493 letters. Nationwide newspaper publicity,
articles in TV Guide and in Time Magazine, and a mention
in the Congressional Record have not succeeded. We have
contacted and received cooperation from religious publications and spoken to many religious media conventions.
None of these efforts has resulted in any substantial
decrease in the number of letters received. Any help that
you can provide by telling people what the facts are willbe
greatly appreciated.
"We trust this information will explain the law and our
policy in this area."
ARTHUR L. GINSBURG, Chief
Complaints and Compliance Division
Broadcast Bureau
Federal Communications Commission"
The attorney for the FCC gave a release to the Knight
News Service. "No proposal is before us or has ever been
put before us by Mrs. O'Hair or by anyone else to ban
religious programming." he pleaded. He went on to decribe
what was being received by the FCC as "millions of letters in
apointless cause on an improbable issue that we were never
considering in the first place." A news bureau chief in
Washington, D.C. noted that churches had largely been
responsible for spreading the rumor. It became a newspaperman's game to find out which church had spread it to
which church, but it was impossible to track down the
source of the original campaign. By early 1979, however, the
American

Atheists

rumor had been in full operation for five years. In the

Charlotte Obseruer
one reported found that a North
Carolina woman who had attended a Florida convention of
the Federation of Women's Clubs had participated in widely
spreading the rumor in Boca Raton and then in North
Carolina. The woman remarked, "That Atheist is out and
determined to take all our religious programming off the air.
We got our club people to spread the word around Boca
Raton, and there's been a very, very good response." When
it was indisputably driven home to her that she was wrong,
she stated, "I'm very concerned.
I don't want to have
written a letter that is not correct." But, she was little
concerned with the reputation she had given Mrs. OHair.
One FCC official noted, "That's the way it always goes. It's
usually a woman's club or church group, and if you track it
back far enough, it turns out to be an anonymous pamphlet
or brochure that somebody didn't have guts enough to sign.
The FCC attorney was quite concerned
too that the
emotional plea on behalf of the disabled was a part of the
rumor. "That really troubles me. That there are those who
would exploit that fear when nothing of that nature has ever
been pending. Mrs. O'Hair has never been involved in the
thing except to protest that her name was being used."
By this time the FCC was actively contacting church and
community leaders to stem the flood of letters which was
virtually stopping the operation of the FCC.
However, by September
of 1979, it was still going.
National news columnist Tom Tiede, checking with the
FCC, now found that the mail often peaked at 60,000 letters
a day, with waves of it coming in for several months at a time
before it subsided. The letters varied from single sentence
expressions of outrage to awesome tomes citing scriptural
admonitions. The letters came from the OAR, the VFW, the
Boy Scouts. They came on form letters clipped from church
bulletins. One form read, "Our minister has advised us of
this terrible conspiracy." Another read, "How can you allow
this hateful woman to dictate the radio and TV programs?"
A number of the letters demanded that Mrs. O'Hair be
jailed. One wanted her burned alive. Four letter words in the
letters were common, perhaps, as one FCC aide says,
"because they can't spell the 12 letter ones."
But, in January, 1980 a small relief came and the FCC was
incautious enough to brag about it. The Associated Press
wire story in that month noted that after 12,000,000 letters
the end seemed in sight. Plagued by the deluge of mail over a
six year period the Chairman of the FCC had gone to
Congress for a special appropriation
of $250,000 to see
what it could do about getting the word out that only a
rumor was involved. The commission
used half of the
money it obtained to answer more than 100,000 of the
letters and when there was an encouraging drop, 20,000
letters went out to members of the clergy urging them to
reassure their congregations.
The relief was temperorary
and when all else failed the FCC made a special mailing to
30,000 religious leaders. It now was finally felt that this
additional appeal had turned the tide. Where often in one
month 300,000 letters had been received the Commission
reported with glee that only 9,000 had come in during
January, 1980. The hopes were soon to be dashed as the
rumor started to cycle again.
Meanwhile back in The American Atheist Center, the
telephone calls, the mail, the inquiries of the media continued. It takes only a small exercise in mathematics
to
Austin, Texas

calculate that a postage stamp costing only 12q: on 12,000,000 letters had cost about 1 Yz million dollars. The terrible
burden on the U. S. Post Office, on state and national
legislative bodies, on the FCC all testified to the intransigence of the religious mind in the United States.
But it did not stop in 1980, or in 1981, or even in 1982. In
January, 1982, Jon Murray personally stopped in the office
of the FCC in Washington, D.C., there to find eight persons
who answered the telephone for R.M. 2493 queries and five
persons who did nothing but open the mail. Just about all
count had now been lost. The destruction of the mail was
automatic. The remarks were cynical. After eight years of
combined effort from the FCC in Washington,
D.C. and
The American Atheist Center in Austin, Texas, the end was
no where in sight. At the end of April, 1982, as this article
was being prepared, Mrs. O'Hair made a final inquiry of the
F.C.C. to get absolutely current statistics. Incredibly, they
are:
The FCC currently has four people employed, supervised by a fifth, to open R.M. 2493 mail. Eight persons
answer telephones. Twelve to twenty Congressional
inquiries are received each day. A minimum of 100 telephone
calls are channeled into the Consumer's
Assistance Office
alone. On March 30th, 1982 the FCC put out an official
"Public Notice" concerned
with the rumor, asking the
assistance of media, business and religious groups to stop
the rumor. A pamphlet "Religious Broadcasting
and The
FCC" has been sent out in tens of thousands of copies.
Since the beginning of 1982, the rumor has started anew
and again mail is beginning to crescendo. The rumor is now
eight years old, beginning in 1974 and continuing with only
short intervals of moderate activity, until April, 1982, with
no end in sight. Approximately 13,000,000 letters have now
been received. Since many letters have more than one
signature, often the missile received being a petition bearing
from 10 to 30,000 names, the magnitude of the problem for
the FCC is apparent. With this writing the rumor enters the
ninth year.
But it was exactly during this time that the religious
community fought for and won control of the FM band,
obtained its own 24-hour a day non-stop religious TV
stations, inundated the airways with religion and gained
such a foothold in the electronic media that the politics of
the nation are now an open battleground where religion is a
major player in the field.
It is not untoward to ask the question: was this rumor a
deliberate religious geopolitical ploy to intimidate the FCC
to such an extent that the religious community could
receive anything that it demanded of that agency? Is this a
lesson to every other agency of government to yield or be
besieged?
The religious of our nation are mindless and could easily
have been encouraged to participate in this black geopolitical attack against an agency of government using the devil
as counterfoil in the endeavour. Madalyn Murray OHair
was the emotional bait in the trap. The blind, the following,
the obedient and the disciplined would be eager to obey
even a suggestion - an order would not be necessary.
And the lesson is driven home. One only need to call or to
write the FCC to have the stink of fear exhude from that
agency. Will the IRS dare to stand firm on its exclusion from
tax exemption of those religious schools which practice
segregation? Will the Congress need to yield on federal aid

May, 1982

Page 19

to parochial schools? Dare the United States Supreme

Court rule now against religion? The answer is obvious.
The FCC in early March, 1982, gave a final thrust to it all.
It, then, approved guidelines for the operation of low-power
television stations so that every church on every corner of
every city could start transmitting. Such mini-stations will
be licensed to use vacant TV channels around the country,
operating at low power levels that will extend their signal 10
to 15 miles. The mini-stations could be built for as little as
$100,000. Who has that much money in spare cash? There
already is a backlog of more than 6,500 low-power applica-

tions. Why? Because low-power stations will not be affected

by any of the restrictions governing commercials, news and
public affairs and pay-TV programming that regular broadcasters must observe, nor will there be any requirements
governing hours of operation. It is the ideal outreach for a
local church.
This is, Madalyn O'Hair feels, not a rumor but rather a
carefully orchestrated
implementation of a desire of religion
to take over as much of the airspace and airtime as possible.
Given success in this adventure, 1984 should arrive on time.

AN ATHEIST'S VIEW OF THE

ARMS RACE AND NUCLEAR WAR
by John B. Massen
(From the speech given at the American Atheist Convention Saturday April 10th, '82 at the Jefferson Memorial)
George F. Kennan is a former U.S. Ambassador to the
Soviet Union and a leading expert on Soviet history and
U.S.jSoviet
relations. In 1976 he said that the U.S. is
primarily responsible for the steady expansion and proliferation of nuclear weaponry and the preposterous
development of the export of arms from major industrial countries.
He said that projecting these trends much farther into the
future will invite catastrophes
too apocalyptic to contemplate, and time is running out on all of us. In December 1979,
he said that we are all being carried along towards a new
military conflict that will be disastrous to all parties; modern
history shows that possession of massive armaments leads
to hostilities; our measure of control over this fateful
process is no greater than that of past powers; we are not
greater or wiser than our ancestors.
With the situation
steadily worsening, Kennan on May 19, '81 said: "We have
gone on piling weapon upon weapon, missile upon missile,
new levels of destructiveness
upon old ones. We have done
this helplessly, almost involuntarily: like the victims of some
sort of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings
heading for the sea, like the children of Hamlin marching
blindly along behind their pied piper." He proposed that the
two superpowers immediately reduce their nuclear arsenals
by 50%, subject to national means of verification available.
To a significant degree, the prospect of the annihilation of
the human race is attributable to two basic facts.
The first is the historically irrefutable truth that. the
United States has been the initiator and leader of its arms
race with the Soviet Union.
That arms race began in 1945 in the bitter struggle
between our Air Force and Navy for supremacy in the
prospective new Department of Defense. Even though the
Soviet Union had been our war-time ally and was primarily
responsible for the defeat of Germany in Europe, the Soviet
Union was posited as our future enemy in war planning, as
the Air Force and Navy struggled for supremacy in strategic
protection of the U.S. and for the major share of dwindling
post-war military appropriations.
The Soviet Union's new
prominence in world affairs was a blessing in disguise for our
military planners.
The U.S. was the first nation to create atom bombs, use
Page 20

May, 1982

them in a war, and use the threat of using them in atomic

diplomacy. The U.S. has led in maintaining a world-wide
network of military alliances and bases, military assistance
to other countries, and military sales. The U.S. has introduced every major weapon system since World War II in the
strategic field, except for some medium range missiles in the
fifties and the rather small ABM deployment of '64. Just as
our unilateral actions are in large part responsible for the
current dangerous state of affairs, we must expect that
unilateral moves on our part will be necessary if we are ever
to get the whole process reversed.
The arms race, for which the U.S. government
is
primarily responsible, has created two enormous tragedies:
(1) the military security of both superpowers
has steadily
been reduced as they have multiplied their nuclear arsenals;
and (2) increasingly scarce economic resources have been
prodigiously wasted while world population and economic
inequalities have grown.
The second basic fact that is significantly
responsible for the present human condition is this fundamental
truth about our government: our military-industrial complex will AL WA YS use its enormous political and economic
power to prevent our government from EVER entering into
ANY agreement with the Soviet Union that will require that
the U.S. significantly reduce its military research-anddevelopment programs or scrap any significant weapons.
Time permits brief reference to only three episodes in past
history to illustrate that fundamental truth.
For three years, the U.S., France and Great Britain had
urged the Soviet Union to accept Western proposals for
complete nuclear disarmament and substantial conventional disarmament
under adequate inspection controls. On
May 10, '55, the Soviet Union substantially accepted those
proposals as it presented its own plan, which even went
further by offering additional inspection at all transportation
facilities to guard against surprise attack. Implementation of
the Soviet plan would have created an enormous breach in
the "Iron Curtain" since thousands
of U.N. inspectors
would permanently
reside in the Soviet Union with wide
inspection powers, and the NATO powers would have
become relatively stronger than the Warsaw Pact powers.
Although the immediate Western response to the Soviet
plan was favorable, the U.S. recessed
the conference
despite the Soviet's demand that negotiations begin promptAmerican

Atheists

ly on a binding treaty. Upon resumption of the conference,

increased those threats by installing intermediate-range
the U.S. withdrew all of its prior proposals, and the Soviet
ballistic missiles in Turkey, Germany,
Italy and Great
proposals were ignored.
Britain; and by '60 we had deployed even more threatening
In May, '60 President Eisenhower, Prime Minister MacMilPolaris submarine missiles in the Mediterranean
Sea. After
lan and Premier Khrushchev scheduled a summit meeting
President Kennedy announced to the U.S. the discovery of
in Paris to sign a comprehensive
test ban treaty, which
the construction
of missile sites in Cuba, the Soviets
would ban all testing of nuclear weapons and virtually end
proposed both (1) comprehensive
negotiations of all outthe nuclear arms race. This was political decision-making at
standing issues between the two nations, and (2) the limited
its best. All three recognized
that continuation
of the
proposal of mutual withdrawal of missiles from both Turkey
nuclear arms race was a greater threat to the national
and Cuba, with a mutual pledge not to invade, or interfere in
security of each nation than the possible risk that one of the
the internal affairs of Turkey and Cuba, respectively.
powers might conduct a clandestine
test of a nuclear
Kennedy had previously ordered
the removal of our
weapon so small that it would be undetected by the other
missiles from Turkey because they were now obsolete, and
two powers by detection techniques then available. But on
he assumed this had been accomplished when the Cuban
May 1, '60 a U-2 plane piloted by Gary Powers took off from
crisis arose. Kennedy was angry to learn that those missiles
Pakistan, even though such flights had been ordered
had not yet been removed from Turkey. Kennedy realized
terminated during the negotiating period. It was stated then
that the specific Soviet proposal for mutual withdrawal of
and is still widely believed that the U-2 plane was shot down
missiles from Turkey and Cuba was reasonable, that our
by the Soviets. In fact, saboteurs in our government placed
position was extremely vulnerable, and that it was our own
fault.
in the plane a vital hydrogen flask that was only half-full,
Nevertheless,
his final decision was an ultimatum delivthus ensuring that the plane would come down. President
ered by Robert Kennedy to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin:
Eisenhower had been unaware of the flight, but he had to
either you remove the missiles from Cuba very promptly or
appear in charge of his government
and he publicly
we would remove them by military force, with no quid pro
assumed full responsibility for the flight. Krushchev had no
quo of our making a corresponding
withdrawal of our
choice but to withdraw from the conference. Eisenhower's
missiles from Turkey. The Soviets withdrew their missiles
"Crusade for Peace" through a comprehensive test ban was
and suffered a humiliating diplomatic defeat. This was
sabotaged by people in his own government,
and soon
thereafter he made his famous remarks in his farewell
regarded as a great diplomatic victory for Kennedy and
speech about the "military-industrial complex."
America. But a high Soviet diplomat told an American
negotiator: "You'll never be able to do this to us again." The
In 1972 the SALT I agreement set modest limits on levels
U.S. at the time of the Cuban missile crisis had a 20- or
of nuclear weapons, and mankind got a break with the
30-to-1 advantage over the Soviet Union in deliverable
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed by the two superpowers.
nuclear warheads.
From the date of that humiliating
But there was also a major, tragic failure to halt the
withdrawal from Cuba, the Soviets set the goal of nuclear
development and deployment of MIRVs (Multiple Indepenparity which they achieved around '70, and they will never
dently targetable Re-entry Vehicles). The secret nature of
again permit us to have nuclear superiority. And we have
the negotiations contributed
directly to the failure. Our
the gall to object to that policy!
government
deliberately
designed the specifics of our
Another major illustration of the power and motivations
proposal to ensure Soviet rejection, and then two months .
of our military-industrial complex lies in the answer to the
later withdrew the proposal entirely with no possible
question: how many nuclear weapons do we need to deter a
participation by Congress or the public in that decision. Our
Soviet attack? In '68 Secretary
of Defense McNamara
military-industrial complex had a financial and technological
decided that we had a sufficient deterrent if we could be
interest in MIRVs that overrode the American and world
assured of delivering between 200-400 megatons of nuclear
public interest in curbing the qualitative arms race. Kissinexplosive power on the Soviet Union, since this would
ger commented two years later that he wished the governdestroy one-third of their population and three-fourths
of
ment had thought through more fully in SALT I the
their industry. Nevertheless,
we now have some 9,200
implications of a MIRVed world. One of those implications
strategic nuclear warheads aimed directly at the Soviet
is that, now, MIRVs on Soviet ICBMs are said to be so
Union from the U.S.; and many thousands more of tactical
threatening to our current ICBMs that we must develop and
nuclear weapons on aircraft carriers and other launchers
deploy a new generation of ICBMs, called the M-X.
throughout the world, many of which can hit the U.S.S.R.
The Cuban missile crisis of '62 is an excellent illustration
Many tactical weapons are as destructive as the Hiroshima
of our government's
reluctance to negotiate honestly and
and Nagasaki bombs.
sincerely with the Soviet Union. The Soviets did try to
Now, if the Soviet Union in a surprise attack could
introduce missiles into Cuba, but consider the provocadestroy all of our 1,052 land-based missiles (ICBMs), all of
tions. The U.S. economic blockage of Cuba had driven
our 413 land-based bombers, and 20 of our submarines
Castro to seek Soviet economic and military assistance. In
which might be in port.. .(The Soviet Union does not now
April '61 the CIA had clumsily tried to invade Cuba, and the
have this capability, and may never have it) ... what would we
Bay of Pigs was a humiliating disaster for Kennedy.
have left?
Thereafter the U.S. mounted a secret campaign of sabotage
We would still have left 21 strategic nuclear submarines
against Cuba with orders to the CIA to wreck the Cuban
with over 3.000 strategic warheads. One Poseidon submaeconomy, foment resistance to the regime of Fidel Castro,
rine with 160 50-kiloton warheads could destroy every largeand - if possible - assassinate the Cuban leader.
and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union, with at least 15%
But even more significant than these threats to Cuba
of Soviet population and 30% of Soviet industry. And 20
were our direct threats to the Soviet Union. By '57 we had
Austin, Texas

May, 1982

Page 21

remaining submarines would have more than 2,800 additional warheads with which to completely destroy the
Soviet Union as a functioning society. ISN'T THA T
ENOUGH? WHY CONTINUE TO ADD MORE NEW
WEAPONS?
There are three answers to that question of why we
continue to add more new weapons:
(I) The simplest answer is plain greed for profits and
military power.
(2) A more complex answer is that our military-industrial
complex would rather have a Soviet threat in order to
provide a means to counter it, than to have the Soviet
threat removed through negotiated agreements to reduce armaments.
(3}Still another answer lies in an important United
Nations report of September '80. Paragraph 493 says: "It
is clear that in many cases technology dictates policy
instead of serving it and that new weapons systems
frequently emerge not because of any military or security
requirement
but because of sheer momentum of the
technological process .. .This general trend, that technology rather than policy leads, carries with it an intrinsic
danger...In this situation, it is imperative that statesmen
and political leaders accept their responsibility. If they do
not, the arms race is certain to go out of control."
The same UN report says: "It is inadmissible that the
prospect of annihilation of human civilization is used by
some states to promote their security. The future of
mankind (sic) is then made hostage to the perceived
security of new nuclear-weapons
states and most notably
that of the two superpowers."
Yet, an American President, 20 years ago, consciously
made a decision that he expected to lead to war with the
Soviet Union, with millions of lives lost on both sides. Proof
of this is found in Robert Kennedy's book, "Thirteen Days."
Relating his conversation
with the President after Robert
had delivered the ultimatum on Saturday night to the Soviet
Ambassador:
"I returned to the White House. the President was not
optimistic, nor was I. He ordered 24 troop carrier
squadrons of the Air Force Reserve to active duty. They
would be necessary for an invasion. He had not abandoned hope, but what hope there was now rested with
Krushchev's
revising his course within the next few
hours. It was a hope, not an expectation. The expecta-

tion was a military confrontation by Tuesday and

possibly tomorrow ..." (Emphasis added).
Thus, an American christian President recognized that
his decision probably would lead to the most destructive
military conflict the world had yet seen. And a man and a
government - which our government and media contemptuously describe as "godless atheistic communists" - had
the wisdom and restraint to back down, and thus save us
and themselves from our folly.
What an enormously greater danger there is for us and
the entire world with the present occupant of the White
House, a man who believes that "this land was placed here
between the two great oceans by some divine plan," a man
who publicly pillories the Soviet government and people
because they don't believe in "our god" and don't have our
"standard of morality" (Hence, they can be trusted only to
always lie and cheat in international relations.) His Secretary of State has publicly averred that there is a personal
Page 22

May, 1982

corporeal devil walking on earth and that our main objective

is to come into direct confrontation with that representation
of evil. And, as a logical corollary, a President who is grossly
increasing our military expeditures and publicly preparing
for both limited and nuclear war and wars fought simultaneously and perhaps for an extended period in many areas.
Do not be deluded. There can be no limited nuclear war.
Keeping nuclear war limited is like limiting the mission of a
match thrown into a keg of powder. Once even small
battlefield nuclear weapons are used in a conflict between
the superpowers,
inevitably the escalating use of additional
and larger nuclear weapons will precipitate
an all-out
strategic nuclear exchange that will destroy both superpowers and make the planet virtually uninhabitable for most of
humanity. And there will be no place to hide. Those who
survive will envy the dead. There will be no doctors or
others to come to your aid or hospitals to aid you; no
uncontaminated
air, water, earth or food; and no god to
help you. If you should be unfortunate enough to survive the
nearest bomb, be sure you have your own supply of opium
or morphine to end your pain.
Is there any GOOD news? Yes, indeed. It is the reaction
and revulsion in Europe and the U.S. to our government's
enormous escalation of the arms race. The United Nation
General Assembly will hold its Second Special Session on
Disarmament in New York from June 7 to July 9 this year.
The First Special Session in '78 achieved very little, and
there has been only negative progress since. But this year
there will be a new participant at the Special Session: the
potential victims of a nuclear war, the human race. Enormous demonstrations
are being planned for Saturday, June
12, in New York, San Francisco, London and hopefully
other cities, to demand of governments
that they reverse
the arms race. The people of all the world must protest and
mobilize to survive. President Eisenhower said in '59:
"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to
do more to promote peace than are governments.
Indeed, I think that the people want peace so much that
one of these days governments had better get out of their
way and let them have it."
We Atheists have an important message to proclaim to
the people of the U.S. and the entire world as they struggle
for world disarmament
and true peace. Religion is the
process by which we are taught to accept the irrational. If
you can be taught to believe in a virgin birth, you can be
taught to believe that the Soviet Union is our enemy. If you
can be taught to believe that you have a life after death, you
can be taught to believe that you should die for your country
out of patriotism in a senseless war from which our
economic rulers always benefit. If you can be taught to
believe in the fulfillment of the biblical prophecy of a final
battle of the forces of good and evil - armageddon - you
will accept our accelerating rush toward war and nuclear
holocaust, because you have been taught to believe that
christ will come and take you to heaven. We believe that life
is for living, not for dying. We do not expect a "life after
death," and therefore we are proponents
of peace, NOW
and FOREVER.
We Atheists should be in the forefront of the movement
for a mutual nuclear freeze. We should work actively with
others for U.S. independent initiatives for disarmament; we
can be confident of positive and reciprocal responses from
the other side, because disarmament and real peace are as
American

Atheists

much in their national self-interest as in ours, and their

standards of morality are equal to ours. We Atheists should
work actively with others to establish an effective world
security system. Just as the slavery system was abolished in
the last century, we can and must abolish the war system in
this century.
If the human race can survive the present crisis, we have

more than enough problems

left to challenge human
intelligence, creativity and perseverance:
the preservation
and enhancement
of the human environment, the abolition
of poverty and reduction of gross inequalities of wealth, the
promotion of legal and social justice, the unleashing of
human creativity, and the intellectual triumph of rationalism
and Atheism.

THE FUTURE OF ESTABLISHMENT

CLAUSE CASES
by Ron Lindsay, Atty.-at-Iaw

(Speech addressed to the National American Atheist Convention at Rosslyn, Virginia on April 10, 1982)
My topic today is the future of establishment
clause
cases. "Establishment
clause" is, of course, a shorthand
reference for that portion of the first amendment
which
provides that "Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of religion." 1 think it would be useful to begin
by asking why Atheists should be interested in establishment clause cases. After all, it has been almost 200 years
since the First Amendment was adopted. Moreover, it has
been more than 200 years since the Enlightenment - since
Voltaire, David Hume, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson. Surely, after all this time, Atheists should not have to
worry about protecting their rights in the courts. This is also
the United States - supposedly
the freest country on
earth. Surely Atheists can expect to be treated decently and
fairly like other Americans. If Atheists have a problem, why
can't they write their state legislators or their congressmen?
In other words, why can't Atheists make use of the normal
political process to protect their rights without having to
worry about how the courts interpret the establishment
clause of the First Amendment?
I read to you now from the legislative history of Title VII of
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII, for those of you who
may not be aware of this fact, protects employees from
being discriminated
against because of their race, sex,
national origin or religion. When Congress was considering
this bill, Rep. Ashbrook introduced
an amendment
to
exclude Atheists from the protections afforded by the bill. In
support of his amendment
Rep. Ashbrook reasoned as
follows:
"I am thinking in terms of a private enterprise for
profit, which would be covered by this bill. A man
comes for employment and the employer is honest
enough to tell the applicant, while he is otherwise
qualified, he will not hire anyone of atheistic convictions. The atheist (sic) then uses his remedies provided by this measure. It is my interpretation
of the bill
that as a part of his civil rights purported
to be
extended by this ... title, he could allege he has been
discriminated against and proceed against the employer. "
Ashbrook then asked the then Chairman of the House
Judiciary Committee,
Emmanuel Celler, if this was a
correct interpretation
of the bill as it was then written; in
other words, whether the bill would in fact protect Atheists.
After Celler said that it was, Ashbrook continued:
"This would be a practice which the employer could
not do, according to what you said. He could not
Austin, Texas

discriminate against a person because he is an atheist.

That is what my amendment would endeavour to
correct; that is, to say the employer could discriminate because of the atheistic practices or beliefs of an
applicant for a job. My amendment
would seem to
speak for itself, and I certainly encourage everyone to
support it. It seems incredible that we would even
seriously consider forcing an employer to hire an
atheist."
Discrimination against Atheists speaks for itself. That is
the sum total of the reasoning offered by Rep. Ashbrook in
support of his amendment.
Rep. Ashbrook's amendment
passed the House by a lopsided margin. Fortunately,
his
amendment was deleted from the final bill- in conference,
where no one had to register his or her vote. So Atheists are
protected from employment discrimination
- at least in
theory.
Now you say - all this took place in 1964; that was almost
20 years ago. After all, in the sixties they were still trying to
break up civil rights demonstrations
with water hoses and
German shepherds. Surely things have changed since then.
Recently I have had the privilege of representing
the
organization on a pro bono basis in a suit seeking to enjoin
the payment of the salaries and expenses of Congressional
chaplains out of public funds. By the time 1 became involved
in the suit, the district court had dismissed the case on
procedural grounds, but we were successful in having the
case reinstated by the court of appeals. Just two weeks ago
the House of Representatives
passed a resolution condemning, in the strongest possible language, the decision of the
appeals court by a "close" vote of 388-0. More interesting
than the vote itself, however, were some of the remarks of
various congressmen.
Rep. Hall had the following to say
about Dr. O'Hair:
"I think it is a terrible thing to have to be faced with a
creature like Madalyn Murray O'Hair who believes in
neither hell nor heaven, but I would like, with all of the
force that 1 can command ... (to) earnestly request that
Mrs. O'Hair, since she does not believe in hell, that
she immediately go straight to hell."
However, abuse was not just directed to Dr. O'Hair,
although she received more than her fair share of it, but was
also directed to Atheists in general. Rep. Holt had the
following to say:
"Mr. Speaker, the very fiber of our moral core is
being challenged today by a militant, albeit relatively
small, group of atheists who are determined
to

May, 1982

Page 23

bankrupt our society and Nation of moral values and

religious freedom. First, no prayer in schools; then no
religious meditation in the concourse of the Pentagon
(Author's note: One must understand that for theists
it is very important to pray to the one, true, loving god
before bombing people back into the Stone Age.); and
now, no salaried Chaplain in Congress. Mr. Speaker,
when and at what point are the atheistic zealots going
to stop?"
There you have it. As far as Congress is concerned, that
old priestly canard that Atheists have no moral values is as
true today as it was when religion was first invented. As far
as Congress is concerned Atheists can go straight to hell.
Now, there is undoubtedly
a lot of prejudice in this
country against women, against blacks, and against the
members of other minority groups. But only as far as
Atheists are concerned
do people not only feel free to
harbor these prejudices in private, but also to flaunt them in
public. Heaping abuse on Atheists is as popular now as it
ever was. Bigotry and hatred directed toward Atheists is the
last "respectable" prejudice. No congressman, no leqislator, not interested in political suicide will ever cast a vote in
favor of the civil liberties of Atheists.
This is why Atheists must look to the courts. Not that a
person suddenly divests himself of his prejudices when he
puts on judicial robes. There have been plenty of judges
who have been irrational and bigoted and unconcerned
about the rights of religious minorities. However, not having
to stand for election, not having to cater to the least
common denominator, often does wonders for one's ability
to appreciate the rights of others. This is precisely why our
founding fathers incorporated
into the Constitution
the
First Amendment, along with the other provisions in the Bill
of Rights. If one thing is clear about the First Amendment
and the other provisions of the Bill of Rights, it is that they
were designed, in the words of the Supreme Court, "to
withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political
controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities
and officials, and to establish them as legal principles to be
applied by the courts." (West Virginia School Board of
Education u. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 638 (1943).
Unfortunately,
and I now turn to a discussion of some
recent establishment
clause cases, it may be becoming
more difficult for Atheists, and for other concerned groups,
to get into court to challenge practices which violate the
establishment
clause of the First Amendment.
That is
because the courts appear to be adopting a very strict
interpretation of the requirement of standing.
Standing issues are often misunderstood
by laymen. The
requirement
that a person have standing before he is
allowed to bring suit is often seen as nothing more than a
meaningless, irritating obstacle that is thrown up in the way
of an otherwise meritorious
suit. And sometimes it is.
However, at its core the doctrine of standing makes sense.
What the doctrine of standing says is that you have to have
suffered an injury before you have a right to come to court
seeking relief. In other words, if my car hits your car, you
can sue me, but your neighbor can't, even if your neighbor
thinks an injustice has been committed and I should be
sued. The reasons for this are really very simple. Number
one - nobody, presumably, has a greater stake in the
outcome of litigation than the person who has been injured.
If your neighbor could sue me on your behalf, he might lose
May, 1982

Page 24

interest halfway through the suit, or perhaps I could buy him

out. The doctrine of standing, by requiring that the party
who is in court has actually been injured, helps to ensure
that this will not happen; it helps to ensure that the plaintiff
and defendant will actually have adverse competing interests.
Secondly, the requirement of standing is a very practical
way of regulating the number of lawsuits that are filed.
There are only so many courts and so many judges. If
everyone could file a complaint every time he thought there
had been an injustice committed, then the courts would be
even more overcrowded than they are already. So as I say,
at its core the requirement of standing makes sense.
However, if you require that a person have a legally
recognizable injury before you allow him into court to seek
relief - how do you determine when the person has in fact
suffered a legally recognizable injury? In the late sixties and
early seventies the courts were fairly liberal in interpreting
the requirement of standing, at least when it came to the
type of injury that would get you into court. The definition of
injury to the complaining party was expanded to include not
only tangible economic injuries, such as my hitting your
auto, but also noneconomic injuries. At the more abstract
extreme, noneconomic injuries recognized by the Supreme
Court included, in a case brought by the Sierra Club,
injuries to a plaintiff's aesthetic and recreational interests in
environmental preservation. Nonetheless, despite the variety of interests that have been recognized as worthy of
protection - such as the aesthetic interests of Sierra Club
members - the courts have still required that the plaintiff,
whether his interests be economic, aesthetic or otherwise,
be personally affected by the action that the plaintiff is
complaining about.
Now the problem with the establishment
clause of the
First Amendment, as with other constitutional provisions, is
to determine when someone has been personally affected
by a violation of that provision. You may think that as
Atheists you are personally affected any time the federal
government,
or a state or local government,
violates the
First Amendment. After all, when the government supports
theistic organizations or groups it is at the very least making
a very public statement that belief in a god is something that
should be encouraged and supported - in other words it is
putting its stamp of approval on a specific set of religious
beliefs. If theism is officially approved then it follows that
Atheism is officially disapproved, and Atheists are thereby
holders of second- class beliefs and are second- class citizens. Moreover, since government is funded by taxpayers
- and some taxpayers are Atheists - you might thinkyou
would have the right as taxpayers to challenge any govern
mental support of religion, no matter how indirect.
Wrong again. First of all, the Supreme Court did not
recognize the concept of the taxpayer suit to challenge
federal expenditures
until its 1968 decision in Flast u.
Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968), the only case in which the
Supreme Court has granted standing to citizens on the
basis of their status as taxpayers. At issue in Flast were
federal expenditures authorized under a statute designed to
finance instruction and textbooks in elementary and secondary schools. The plaintiffs alleged that the expenditures
violated the establishment of religion clause because some
of the expenditures were earmarked for parochial schools,
and that they suffered as taxpayers from an unconstitutionAmerican Atheists

Where does Valley Forge leave us? It is not entirely clear.

al use of their tax dollars. The Court held that the plaintiffs
did have standing as federal taxpayers, thereby creating a If you are challenging prayer or bible reading in schools,
Valley Forge willnot affect you as long as you have a child in
narrow exception to traditional standing rules. The Court
determined that the establishment clause was a specific school. That is because your standing never really rested on
limitation on the power to tax and spend, reasoning that it taxpayer status, anyway, but on the direct impact the
had been included in the First Amendment by the framers of practice had on your child. However, if Valley Forge is
the Constitution as a "specific bulwark" against forcing a broadly interpreted it may affect your right to challenge, for
citizen to contribute even" 'three pence ...for the support of example, the building of a nativity scene on government
property, or the government's use of the slogan "In God We
anyone establishment.' " Therefore, the Court concluded
that a citizen, as a taxpayer, had standing to litigate the Trust." I think cases such as these can be distinguished
from Valley Forge, but whether the courts can be persuadissue of government support of religion.
After Flast a number of lower courts were fairly liberal in ed that they are distinguishable is, of course, another
granting taxpayers standing. In fact, after Flast it was not question.
unusual to read opinions in which the courts routinely noted
It is especially lamentable that standing requirements are
that the plaintiffs alleged that they were taxpayers and being more strictly interpreted now because - on the
therefore had standing to sue. Unfortunately, this era of merits - Atheists, and other groups concerned with
fairly liberal access to the courts may now be over. In a very religious freedom, have of late been winning a number of
recent decision the Supreme Court has interpreted the their legal challenges. For example, I am sure at least some
requirement of taxpayer standing very strictly. To put it as of you are familiar with the recent case that Pat Voswinkel
succinctly as possible, it may now be the law that unless you brought in Charlotte, North Carolina in which she succeedare challenging a congressional appropriation under Con- ed in removing a chaplain from the rolls of the city's police
gress's Article I & VIII taxing and spending powers, you do department. One or two years ago, I believe, some Coloranot have standing as a taxpayer to challenge the govern- do members of the organization were involved in a successment's support of religious institutions or practices. The ful suit to stop the city of Denver from paying for a nativity
case that may have all but obliterated the Flast decision is a scene with public funds. And, of course, there are those
case that was decided this past January entitled Valley various cases in which members of the organization have
successfully challenged provisions in state constitutions
Forge Christian College u. Americans United for Separawhich prohibit anyone who does not believe in a supreme
tion of Church and State.
being from holding public office.
In a five to four decision issued January 12, a sharply
Cases like these are important because they show that
divided Supreme Court held that Americans United could
not file a suit in federal court to challenge the transfer of slowly the courts are beginning to take seriously the threepart purpose-effect-entanglement test that was formulated
surplus government property to a bible college. Americans
United had urged the court to find that both as citizens and , by the Supreme Court in the Nyquist case. You all know the
test; in fact you probably know it better than I do. A statute,
taxpayers the group had "standing" to challenge a violation
of the establishment clause. The controversy arose from to pass muster under the establishment clause, must have a
the transfer of 77 acres of land and buildings to the Valley secular purpose, it cannot have a primary effect of advancing religion, and it must not result in excessive governmenForge Christian College, an assemblies of god bible school
tal entanglement with religion. In the past, a number of
in Pennsylvania. The property, originally costing a "measly"
courts have upheld clear violations of the establishment
$10 million, had been declared surplus by the federal
clause by finding secular purposes for clearly religious
government and was given away under the Federal Properactivities. Thus, for example, religious christmas carols are
ty and Administrative Services Act of 1949.
characterized as being merely "traditional" not religious,
In an opinion authored by Justice Rehnquist, the Court
and invocational prayers are excused by explaining that
ruled that Americans United had no legal standing to filethe
they are useful for reminding public officials of their moral
suit. Holding that the federal courts are not "omsbudsmen
duties. (Once again mistakenly equating religion with
of the general welfare" or "publicly funded forums for the
ventilation of public grievances", Justice Rehnquist de- morality!).
The new attitude of at least some courts suggests that if
clared that the members of Americans United had demonstanding problems can be overcome - and I believe they
strated no personal injury. Discounting any comparison
with the Flast decision, Justice Rehnquist said the Valley can be ifAtheists are careful in selecting the issues they wish
to litigate - Atheists and other concerned citizens will be
Forge case differed because it involved a property transfer,
able to go into court with at least a reasonable chance of
not a congressional appropriation of tax money. He noted
success.
that the transaction took place under the constitutional
I began this speech by asking why Atheists should be
provision giving Congress power over public property, not
interested in establishment clause cases, and I answered
its taxing and spending power.
that question by saying that Atheists - because of the fact
Moreover, contrary to Americans United's argument,
that they are still a very unpopular minority in this country
Rehnquist decided that the establishment clause gives no
- willnot be able to protect their rights through the normal
special privileges to file suit against the government.
political process, that they willhave to rely on courts to do
Rehnquist indicated that he was not concerned whether
that. But that is not really a complete answer to my
anyone, on his theory, would have standing to contest the
question. We can still ask why we should be concerned
alleged violation. He said the courts would have no "princiabout protecting our rights at all. In fact, at times, as I am
pled basis" for refusing standing to anyone who claimed a
sure Madalyn O'Hair can tell you, it can be a pretty risky
constitutional violation ifstanding were granted routinely in
business. It is much easier to sit back in your chair and keep .
. establishment clause cases.
Austin, Texas

May, 1982

Page 25

your beliefs to yourself. I know this is the attitude of many

nonbelievers. Let them put prayer back in schools, let them
teach creationism in schools, let public officials ridicule and
insult my beliefs with impunity - as long as it does not affect
my pocketbook, who cares?
Well, that is not my attitude, and I hope it is not yours.
You know, there are a lot of myths about Atheists and
Atheism. One, as I have said, is that there can be no
About

morality without a god. Another is that without a god or a

hereafter, life is meaningless. Well, actually, it is quite the
reverse. Indeed, it is precisely because our lives our finite
that our actions assume significance. We cannot rely on a
god or heaven to set things straight; we have to do that here
and now. I would like the one short life I have, and the lives
of other Atheists, to have some dignity. Perhaps if we work
together, we can accomplish that goal.

t he author })

RONALD A. LINDSAY
Born in Boston, MA on December 8,
1952. Graduated from Georgetown University with an A.B. cum laude in philosophy in 1974. Georgetown University
Fellow from 1974-77. M.A. in philosophy in 1976. University of Virginia Law
School-J.D.,
May 1980. Electedtothe
Order of the Coif, 1980; received the
Shawe Labor Relations Award, 1980.
Currently practices law in Washington,
D.C. Recently represented the Society
of Separationists in a suit seeking to
enjoin the payment of the salaries of
Congressional chaplains out of public
funds.

Nature's Way
Gerald Tholen

IF LOOKS COULD KILL

Consider for a moment the tremendous benefits that could
be derived if our militarists were capable of developing a
practical and efficient "evil eye". Disagreements
between
world "leaders" could be settled with mutual glaring looks
and humanity (and its environment) could be spared the
scattergun destructiveness
of nuclear attacks. Plus, the
only casualties generated by a good ole' western style icystaring match would be the two malcontents
involved.
Thus, intentional hatred and resentment would begin to be
reduced to rational levels as the world's great "haters"
eye-balled each other out of existence.
Now, on two separate occasions I have tried to adapt my
emotions to the "legitimate" guidelines of American patriotism as set down by governmental administrations.
I know
the paramount
importance of being able to immediately
"hate" on command. After all, if our "leaders" didn't think it
highly important to hate other nations of people at certain
and particular times, would they instruct us to do so?
I could have just died when Joseph McCarthy fell from
power. What one person (besides the king of hatred and
intolerance - Adolf Hitler) could inspire such magnificent
hatred of a nation as did McCarthy of Russia. During that
era, any "red-blooded
American" could probably have
strangled the entire USSR with his "bare hands". Boy'
Page 26

May, 1982

Those were the good old days. Too bad McCarthy was
unable to emit a stare-generated
laser capable of knocking
out the Kremlin.
It has occurred to me recently that the American public is
very lax in its duty as responsive defenders of truth, justice,
and the "American way". We never seem to instinctively
know exactly who to hate at a given time. We must
constantly be told by our government when and where it is
imperative to hate another nation or culture. Our government, of course, is not all wise and knowing either, and, on
.occasion,
must be reminded of necessary
hatreds by
religion. After all, it is the atheistic communists that we are
supposed to hate - not the catholic communists of Poland
and/or other places.
As I look back over the past, what fond memories I have
of the real great hate eras. Could any of us forget those
memorable years we spent hating Communist China! Boy
- those were great times! Just think what we could have
accomplished with a blood-curdling "whammy" stare directed at Mao. What flag-waving, John Wayne zealot wouldn't
have jumped at the chance' It really bothers me now when I
think of the beautiful opportunity we "Americans" missed
by not completely annihilating Communist China with our
devout christian American hatred. Now, all of a sudden,
American

Atheists

they are "good guys" again, and an avenue of needed hatred

has been all but cut off.
One of the darkest eras for the accomplished "hater" was
during the comical antics of one Jimmy Carter. Most of us
were laughing so hard that it was difficult to really muster a
deep- seated feeling of hate for anyone. But - hero Falwell
to the rescue in the nick of time to bring us to our
conservative
senses. Once again we are beginning to
display our masterful ability to shoot from the hip of hatred
on the religio-qovernmental
command of "draw". Thank
god for paranoia!!
Once again we're regaining our professionalism in the art
of hating. Folks like Jesse Helms and Reagan don't come
along every day. It is the honor bound duty of every citizen
to pay close attention now that we once again have such
notable "haters" in charge. Also, the pace of the hating
game has increased significantly. We all know that in a
matter of hours targeted areas can switch from Iran to
Albania to the PLO to Argentina and so on. Of course, we
can't lose sight of the fact that ALL EVIL in these areas is
imported directly from the devil's own store rooms in
Russia, Cuba, Liberia, etc., etc.! It just makes me do a slow
burn to know that all of those atheistic commies would dare
to hide their real identities behind screens of cuban canecutting catholicism and in archaic shrines of White Russian
orthodoxy. Give me a good solid American KKKer or a
Nazi any day! With those people you always know exactly
where you stand!
.
At times I fear we are completely losing sight of our great
heritage. Colonial bigotry was dealt a near fatal blow by
Jefferson's First Amendment
to the Constitution.
How
could we abide the audacity of such a man when he wrested
from our hands the use of stock and pillory to legitimately
punish those who would dare defy religious laws and abuse
the sabbath. What evil apathy could have possessed us?
Had it not been for the subsequent and necessary annihilation of the "dirty savage" American Indians we would have
experienced a period of virtual "hatelessness"!
Well - we
can at least be thankful for our god-fearing judicial system
that has riddled the First Amendment from the outset.
The tragic loss in the Civil War by the South was another
serious setback for "Americanism".
We can't even buy a
"good slave" anymore. Good thing we can still abuse
women and children covertly! I will admit that our courts did
a yeoman-like job of keeping the "niggers" from thrusting
their freedom upon us for many worry-filled years. This
gave us an opportunity to regroup our hatreds and apply
them to the world political arena. Religiosity, racism, and
culturally spawned politic ism now afford us sufficient target
for our gluttonous animosities. I can hardly wait for the next
"high priority hate orders" from our executive and military
leadership! Isn't it exciting to wonder who the "wizards" will
come up with next? It couldn't possibly be Mexico! We've
already hated them long ago. Besides - they are good
catholics and they have loads of oil!
At present it looks as if Argentina is a prime candidate.
They have had a slightly belligerent attitude for some time.
Even though its citizenry reeks with religiosity, can we
forgive them their less than foot-kissing love for our western
influence. It is not likely that they will concede to us their
natural national resources
as have many other of our
southern neighbors. This is reason enough to hate any
nation! Now they have really blown it. They have offended
Austin, Texas

our long time ally - England! Surely Russia must be behind

all of this! At any rate we have an ideal setting in which to
spawn all out hatred for Argentina.
Meanwhile, back at
the Middle-East, things have taken a rather confusing turn.
Can Begin be serious about not wanting to attack Lebanon
in order to smash the PLO? I suppose a cynical mind would
see this as a serious setback for hate-mongering;
but if you
"smash" them, who will you have left to hate? Remember,
the key to the game is ALWAYS have someone
or
something available to inspire instant hate. Otherwise you
lose the immediate attention of the bigot!
Sometimes a hypocritical smile forces itself upon my
otherwise stern countenance.
When I hear various ingrates
demand that we ban violence from our beloved TV
programs, I am angered immensely and feel slightly amused
at their senseless plight. Ban violence from TV? Nonsense!
That's also the American way! The first "movie" in history
was about a train robbery! The subsequent building of the
great movie industry was largely based on the "justifiable"
slaughter of our continental enemies - the Indians! I don't
know what society is coming to. Do we really want to give
up killing and hatred and deprivation? How then could we
allow injustice within our own community and consciousness? How could we dare to equate morality with an ancient
psychological system of absolute monarchical rule that is
singularly interpreted
by self-appointed
religious bigots?
How could people who claim to be "normal" register
respect and "reverence"
for an incredible mythological
book of murders and fairy tales when "mere" science is
available as an alternative? Also, how can a standard of "ban
nuclear energy" muster strength in a world where nuclear
weaponry is the daily menu for the human intellectual
palate?
All I can say is that our present administrative outlook
and the entire world's military leadership is really "on the
ball". While the insignificant proponents of world peace are
hopelessly
advocating
disarmament,
their pleas are
drowned by the greater sounds of a brand new slogan:
"second strike"! This new language should surely make the
peace advocates come their senses! After all, who could
have enough gall to suppose that our militarists would stand
by and see 161 billion good American tax dollars go down
the drain of inefficiency? Fair warning to anyone who
harbors the disillusioned idea that any peace loving "coward" might be allowed to survive our determined all-out
effort! After the initial attacks and counterattacks
from any
nuclear corner, we MUST have a remaining capability to
deliver a "second strike" - a coup-de-grace - for any living
thing that may somehow have survived the initial insane
activity of our sick society. Then, and only then, will a
desolate and lifeless planet know peace! Isn't this the
religious prediction of "god's word".
Although we may not have achieved the ability to deliver
a "look" that could kill, we have managed to devise other
methods that work equally well. Why worry that the side
effects are phenomenally devastating.
As I now recall some of the events of American history I
hear the faint sounds of a great patriot: "I regret that I have
but one life to give for my country"! Very noble indeed!
However, he's dead now. The usual method of payment for
a debt in his era was "cash on the barrelhead".
In other
words, when you paid for the existence of your country with
your life the payment was made in "cash" - usually in the

May, 1982

Page 27

form of a musket ball between the eyes. Now I find that I

don't mind paying for the existence of my country with my
life. But - I much prefer the modern method of economic
(FATIMA cont'd

credits and debits called VISA. I prefer to make long,

lengthy time payments so that I can hang around for a while.

from pg 9)

would be marked by a striking event.

After the "apparition", she had been seen in several
places, wearing the same attire the children had described:
a white dress with a garland of roses, yellow stockings and
apron, white shoes with roses all around, a golden chain at
her neck, and so on. She had also recognized, either
implicitly or overtly, that she was the "lady of La Salette".
This woman was a crank well-known in the district for her
religious exaltation as well as her propensity to disguise Constance de Lamerliere.
A second book was issued in 1854. It was signed by the
vicar Deleon and another priest whose name was Cartellier.
The latter had participated in an ecclesiastical commission
about the "apparition" in 1847 and was one of those who
had expressed the utmost restraints.
Constance de Lamerliere entered a lawsuit for defamation against both authors before the Court of Grenoble, but
there was such evidence against her that she voided the suit
(April 25th, 1855). An appeal to the Imperial Court was no
more successful.
However, this did not prevent the church from advertising boisterously on about the "apparition". The publication
of the proceedings of the case was prohibited by the Court
and the ground around La Sallette, which had been the
theater of the miracle, was bought by the clergy.
The bishop of Grenoble, Mgr. de Bruillard, had died
between times (1852). His successor, Mgr. de Ginouilhac,
carried on his work in La Salette. A church was built,

DIAL AN ATHEIST
CHAPTERS OF AMERICAN ATHEISTS
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(512) 458-5731

together with a convent, a house of missionaries and, of

course, a hostelry. The church was to be promoted to the
rank of a basilica by pope leo XIII in 1879.
But new difficulties arose. As one could have expected,
Maximin had grown a perfect drunkard. He was successively reported to work as a locksmith, a horsedealer, a phony
doctor and a pontifical zouave. Finally, he came back to his
native land where he took to making a liquor that he sold by
the name of "Salettine". He died in 1875 (probably of
cirrhosis) and his heart was kept as a relic in the basilica.
The clergy was no more lucky with Melanie who had
assumed the part of a tormented visionary. In 1851, she had
written down the" secret" imparted to her by the "lady" and
it had been sent to pope pius IX who, after reading it, just
declared that it was "a world of stupidity" ("un mondo di
stupidita"). Since nobody in her convent would pay attention to her, she became rather insufferable, so Mgr. de
Ginouilhac had her shut up in the Carmel of Darlington
(England). But she managed to escape from there and after
various experiences, she reached Italy where, with the
support of a little party, she published her so-called
"secret".
As for Mgr. de Ginouilhac, who had become archbishop
of Lyon, he died insane. At the end of his life he would do
nothing but ceaselessly play with dolls.
(to be continued)

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Page 28

May, 1982

(201) 777-0766

IF YOU ARE GA Y AND ATHEIST

PLEASE CONTACT:
Gay Atheists League of America
P.O. Box 14142
San Francisco, CA 94114
Membership: $lS.00/year
($lO.OO/yearfor students and senior citizens)
Send to the same address for subscriptions to the GALA
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American Atheists

Is Biased Opinion Spawned By Intimidation of Individual Thought?

The following is a report on a
letter-to-the-editor
featured in a leading American scientific journal, The
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. It consists of a letter of careful criticism
written by a concerned "friend and
correspondent
of Albert Einstein".
The letter is then followed by a brief
defensive answer by the journal's
editor in an attempt
to justify a
previous article published by that
journal. It presented a subtly subjective defense of the power-elite's "Americanism" over the past few decades and indicates the true source
of American animosity toward other
nations and other political systems.
As true Americans concerned for
survival it is our inherent right to
read, observe and judge world conditions as we see fit - not to be made
to peer through the clouded eyes of
greed and hatred often imposed on
uis by incompetent
politicians and
certain military bigots.

The Letter
It was, written, as stated above, by
a "friend and correspondent"
of the
late Albert Einstein, who was perhaps one of the most adamant and
noted peace advocates of our time.
The writer complains (timidly) that
he "regretted" to see an "appeal for
donations to the Einstein fund" beginning with a "statement that is unscientific, dangerously misleading, and,
if I (sic) may say so, un-Einsteinian".
The statement
had read: "The
state of the world has deteriorated to
the point where both the US and the
Soviet Union have officially declared
war thinkable". The writer presumes
that "you (the journal) did not mean
by this statement simply that both
governments
think about war but
that both governments
think the
same way about it, have the same
attitude toward entering into it".
The writer then suggests that any
criticism of American policy on situations concerning differences of opinions between the US and the Soviets automatically indicts the author
of the criticism as being pro-communist or at least pro-Soviet! In such
cases, the writer continues, we (Americans) "lose scientific objectivity
and Einsteinian integrity".
It is then pointed out by the letter's
contents that the Soviet government
"on three separate occasions" has
proposed
a mutual treaty of "no-

first-use"
of nuclear
weapons!
(These proposals came from Warsaw in 1976, Budapest in 1979 and
Moscow in 1980.) The proposals
were rejected by the US "behind
closed doors, without any discussion
in Congress, or any report or explanation to the American people". The
writer then states that this escalates
the "spirit of the Cold War" thus
reinforcing prejudice and bigotry.
The letter's author also wrote a
pro-peace book in 1950 for which
Albert Einstein wrote Letters of Introduction. The book was intended to
expose the "present state of hysterical fear" and would hopefully lead to
"more sane and constructive
political attitudes".
The writer continues, "The Soviet
government
has made many mistakes, but its peace policy is not one
of them." He pleads that it is of
crucial importance
to accept the
concept of a "no-first-use"
treaty
(which could only be beneficial to all
concerned) without hesitation or secretive avoidance.
This would at
least reduce world anxieties and al-

low further discussion and investigation of efficient disarmament

programs.

The Journal's Reply

The Editor-in-chief of the journal
then responded that "although Soviet leaders, including Brezhnev, have
on a number of occasions called for a
mutual no-first-use agreement, they
have also made it abundantly clear
that they reserve the right to use all
means, including nuclear arms, in
response to aggression against our
country (USSR) or its allies by another nuclear power".

To Such Irrelevant Defense

of Militarist Biases American Atheists Must Reply:
Dear Editor, understandably,
any
nation would be prone to counterattack if they had been initially attacked by another nuclear power.
We MUST agree to NO-FIRSTSTRIKE treaties - 1MMEDIA TEL V!
It's only using common intelligence!

redress of grievances . AMENDMENT

I Congress shall make

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"The establishment of christianity, beginning a new

evolution of theology, arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years. The cause of this arrest was twofold.
First, there was created an atmosphere in which all
seeking in Nature for truth as truth was regarded as
futile. The general belief derived from the new testament scriptures was, that the end of the world was at
hand; that the last judgment was approaching; that all
existing physical nature was soon to be destroyed;
hence, the greatest thinkers in the church generally
poured contempt upon all investigation into -the
science of Nature and insisted that everything except
the savings of souls was folly."

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Andrew Dickson White,

President of Cornell University
(from HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE
WITH THEOLOGY, Vol. I, p. 375.

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