March 1990

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

$2.95

The Vernal Equinox

The New Zion

A theocracy enters the
twentieth century

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American Atheist

A Journal of Atheist News and Thought

March 1990

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Ask A.A.
The New Zion
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Cover art and design by

Czesraw Sornat.

Mormons may know the name of your

great -great -great -great -grandpa, but
is it safe to ask them about it?

News and Comments

I Didn't Realize - Confronted over
his practice of using city facilities to
promote evangelical events, a Christian mayor pretends he did not know
such procedures were wrong. - 13
John Alexander Dowie - A nineteenth-century faith healer left a legacy of state/church entanglement that
stretched into the 1990s. - 15
Zion - The Old - Zion, Illinois,
was founded as an ideal Christian
community in which crosses would
appear on every street corner and
children would be taught the earth
was flat. - 21
Zion - The New - A theocracy
enters the twentieth century at last,
thanks to a little shove from Illinois
Atheists. - 26

The Probing Mind

Frank R. Zindler

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13 Report from India

Margaret Bhatty

39

Working from her grandfather's diaries, Bhatty tells the story of the Salvation Army's invasion of India in
"Onward Christian Soldiers!"

44

American Atheist Radio Series

Madalyn O'Hair
At one time the government of the
United States attempted to sponsor
"Prayers in Space."

Under the Covers

47

How does one understand the hero of

the New Testament from both historical and mythological perspectives?
Dr. Fritz Erik Hoevels reviews "Three
Books About Jesus" which attempt to
do so.

Me Too

37

March 1990

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No one should be surprised when theism and racism mix and mingle, as the
history of "Race and Religion" demonstrates.

Years ago, Atheists helped promote

familyplanning and a Michigan fireman
just said no to state/church entanglement.

Despatch

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30

Historical Notes

Spocial

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52

"The Confusion of Religious Beliefs"

can be quickly untangled if one becomes familiar with the basic arguments of theists - and the answers to
them.

Letters to the Editor

53

Classified Advertisements

56
Page 1

Allerican Atheist

Membership Application For

American Atheists, Inc.

Editor

R. Murray-O'Hair
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Jon G. Murray
Poetry
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This is to certify that I am in agreement with the "Aims and Purposes" and
the "Definitions" of American Atheists. I consider myself to be Materialist or
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Page 2

o Atheist
o Freethinker
o Humanist
o Rationalist

o Objectivist

o Ethical Culturalist
o Unitarian
o Secularist

o Agnostic
o Realist
o I evade any reply to a query

o Other:

I am, however, an Atheist and I hereby make application for membership in

American Atheists, said membership being open only to Atheists. (Those not
comfortable with the appellation "Atheist" may not be admitted to membership
but are invited to subscribe to the American Atheist magazine.) Both dues and
contributions are to a tax-exempt organization and I may claim these amounts
as tax deductions on my income tax return. (This application must be dated
and signed by the applicant to be accepted.)
Signature

Date

Membership in American Atheists includes a free subscription to the monthly

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Upon your acceptance into membership, you will receive a handsome goldembossed membership card, a membership certificate personally signed by Jon
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American Atheists, Inc., P. O. Box 140195, Austin, TX 78714-0195

March 1990

American Atheist

Editor's Desk

A smorgasbord of
Atheist concerns
ne of American Atheists' Chapter directors once told me that
upon receiving the magazine he
always turned to my brief "Editor's
Desk" first. Alas, though, for my ego,
this habit of his was not out of appreciation for my deathless literary style. It
was simply because he felt that, as the
editor, I would point out in my column
the most significant items in the issue in
question.
I have always kept that comment in
the back of my mind, but I am sometimes at a loss to know how to succeed
at the simple task the Chapter director
set me. It is difficult to point at this or
that article and make a proclamation of
its overwhelming importance. In a nation and a world in which dissent to religion is continually both repressed and
suppressed, any and all information
concerning Atheism, the struggle for
Atheist rights, critical battles both current and past, and the unending parrying of religious assaults on our culture all
assume agonizing significance.
I find there must be another issue to
consider in evaluating the worth of our
various articles, and that is the point of
this particular magazine. While I have
the typical editor's vanity that all of you
willenjoy reading this issue, the underlying purpose and message of all of the
articles is to titillate you so that you will
do something with the information you
find in its pages, that you willparticipate
- in whatever degree - in the struggle
for Atheism or, ifyou are of fainter heart,
for state/church separation.
To fulfill the general purpose of the
magazine requires givingto you multiple
levels of information. Of course, you will
need examples of Atheist activism, to
give you pointers on what to do in your
own community. To this end, we publish
"News and Comments" articles on the
activities of representatives of American
Atheists. In this issue you will find two
such features: "I Didn't Realize" and

t+J
,

R. Murray-O'Hair
Austin, Texas

"Zion - the New." The first concerns

a real zany doing his incredible thing.
In our Western world, for instance,
the misuse of city government facilities
by a Christian mayor, and how the com- we are constantly bombarded with the
plaints of one Atheist put a stop to it. Jesus story. Our popular culture emThe second concerns how American phasizes this Christ-figure, reinforcing
Atheists took Zion, Illinois, a city which the position of Christianity. What could
put Christian symbols on all its proper- be more important, then, than to know
ty, to court.
that serious historians now - at long
It is not enough, though, for you to in- last - have no hesitation to say that the
stinctively know that religion and its story of Jesus Christ is a myth, a mere
fable? The lengthy, but compelling,
symbols shouldn't be on government
property. To be effective in your argu- book review in this issue by Dr. Fritz
ments against it, you need to know the Erik Hoevels will bring the reader new
history of various state/church separa- insights into this myth that permeates
tion violations and intrusions of religion our culture.
If we, as Atheists, are to make a
into government. Therefore two other
news articles, "John Alexander Dowie" change in our society, it is necessary
and "Zion - the Old" tell the history of also that we discuss tactics and methods,
Zion, Illinois. Often Christian symbols both current and historical. "Historical
on public grounds are defended as being Notes" this month will give you, the
merely decorative. But, as in the case at reader, a peek into the past struggles for
hand, when one turns to the pages of . free thought and free speech, issues
history one finds that the instigators of that are important to Atheists past and
the unconstitutional practice were at- present. In his article "Action, Not Actempting to serve the interests not of commodation," Jon Murray discusses
how Atheists should respond toqovernstate, but of church.
But if religion is a good thing, as its mental pressures for us to conform. to
marketers claim, why would we Atheists mainstream religion.
If our readers are to take this huge
be attempting to prevent its intermingling with government? To have a com- bundle of information and do something
mitted and effective outreach as separa- useful with it, one more item is necestionists, we must have an intellectual sary. Each and every Atheist must ununderstanding of the negative effects of derstand that he is not alone. This is the
religion. Atheists have learned from in- real importance of such monthly features as "Me Too" and "Letters to the
dividual encounters with the representatives of the god-idea that it is a nasty Editor." In these, readers can share in a
bit of business. But what about the soci- give-and-take with their peers and inetallevel? What has been its cumulative crease their participation in the commueffect? This month Frank Zindler an- nity of Atheism.
In sum, Atheists must be aware of the
swers this need by looking at the religious roots of racism in his article "Race activities of religion and of the Atheist
and Religion." Margaret Bhatty gives cause on all levels - historical and curanother perspective on "the good" that rent, ideological and practical. To defeat
religious intrusion into our rights as citireligious missionaries do in her "Onward
Christian Soldiers!"
zens, we must not only understand the
. It is very necessary that we have a his- mechanics of current campaigns against
torical understanding of the various re- our life-style, but we must understand
ligious myths and folk tales. We need to the logic and background of those who
know what theists have done in isolated would seek to repress us. All this reparts of our nation. The story of Zion is quires a smorgasbord of information on
instructive - not far from the large, the subjects which concern Atheists.
metropolitan city of Chicago, there was Read, enjoy - and be inspired. ai8
March 1990

Page 3

Director's Briefcase

Action, not accommodation

II

A visit to Congress to
try to have a civil rights
act for Atheists failed,
but it showed the way
for future attempts to
make Atheism an
accepted way of life.

A graduate of the University of Texas

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

Jon G. Murray
Page 4

hen the organizations which

later became American Atheists, Inc., were founded they
were established as nonprofit, nonpolitical, educational corporations. As a
result of this kind of designation as to
the nature of the corporations, an application for tax-exempt status, under "educational" classification, was initiated
with the Internal Revenue Service. The
first of what would later turn into multiple exemptions took many years of
struggle with the government authorities. Once they were obtained, we had
to fight to have them backdated to
cover the period of time that we had
spent in "paper wars," hurling forms
back and forth between our offices and
the offices of the IRS.
Other entities which qualified for
exempt status under either health, education, or welfare classifications were
normally given their exemptions, with
routine forms filings, in a matter of
weeks. This is particularly true with religious organizations or institutions,
which often receive exemptions before
they are legally formed.
That experience with the IRS left us
with an impression that has never left
this office - a shadow, if you will, that
has hung over everything we do here at
American Atheist GHQ. That shadow is
the specter of religious hate. We have
been so despised by government on all
levels, as Atheists, that it is a given in our
necessary dealings with governmental
personnel that they can hardly, on an
individual and personal basis as well as
a professional one, be even civilto us in
terms of common courtesy.
I have spoken in this journal before,
many times, about the perceived necessity of religion to government, with the
former being useful to tender docile and
willing-to-follow-orderscitizenries to the
latter.
It has been the standard, the expected
norm, for Americans of all walks of life
to attend church and to "believe" in a
god, and not just any god but only the
approved god, the White, JudeoMarch 1990

Christian god of the Old and New Testaments and his alleged offspring, for so
long that the mere thought of Atheists
or Atheism is repugnant and loathsome
to most Americans. It can be well said
that the majority of the population has
an aversion to Atheists. The very word
Atheist is a pejorative in many social circles. We all know this; we all know that
it will take generation upon generation
to change that attitude, in the same way
that it has taken and will take generations to erase the racism that has been
a firm part of the American national
character. In the meantime we must
deal with the facts as they are, and not
turn our backs on them hoping they will
go away, while we work to change them.
The very recognition that the situation
is the way it is with regard to Atheists
should be a factor that would encourage
individual action from Atheists to change
this cultural religious norm.
As a result of the type of vindictive
handling we receive, we have been
scared to try to involve ourselves with
government in terms of approaching
elected officials with our concerns as
Atheists. This has been so, generally,
both in regard to individual and organized Atheism.
It is high time for that timidity to be
reversed.
Let me give you a case in point. Since
the Murray v. Curlett decision of 1963
that removed Bible reading and prayer
recitation from the public schools, the
federal and various state congresses
have launched numerous attempts to
do an end run around that court decision to somehow get religious ceremonies back into official public school policy. Religiously zealous individual congressmen or congresswomen are usually behind these attempts. Most of them
are in the form of bills asking that children have the "right to pray" reinstated
to them, a "right" which the courts
never took from them in the first place,
but that is another whole and long story.
Many of these bills make it, in the legislative process, as far as a committee
American Atheist

There was an atmosphere of fear in the hearing room. It was a fear that
some member of the committee or one of the other individuals giving
information might agree with the Atheist, or even smile in his direction.
I felt like an unwanted intruder in the room.
hearing. Literally hundreds of such
hearings have occurred both in Washington, D.C., and in the several states,
allon the topic of "prayer in school," and
American Atheists has never been
asked - even once - to testify or present information at any of them on any
governmental level. We have found out
about these hearings, usually from
media sources, and have written letters
to the committee chairs asking to be included among those giving information
and we have been denied every single
time. Instead, government committees
hear from panels of religious folks, clergy, professors from theological schools,
and attorneys from the ACLU, an organization which refused to help with the
original Bible and prayer case.
In short, what this says is that we are
outcasts within our own nation. This is
a sad, but true, state of affairs. Over
what are we outcasts? The mere fact
that we choose to lead a rational lifestyle that does not include religious dogma or institutions. That is our "crime."
Does this mean that we should stop
asking to be heard?
Never!

Surrounded by hate
It was with a great deal of both shock
and joy then that Ireacted to a September
7, 1988, invitation from the House Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs and
Coinage to testify regarding a House bill
on redesigning existing coinage.' This
was only the second time in the history
of organized Atheism in this country
that a representative had actually been
invited by a committee of the Congress.
When I travelled to Washington, D.C.,
for that hearing I knew what I would
encounter and my expectations were
met. Those who testified before me, as
I waited, each made a point, somewhere
in their remarks, to say that they were
in favor of "In God We Trust" being on

lSee the September 1988issue of the American Atheist.

Austin, Texas

the money and that nothing that they

would say during their testimony could
or should be construed otherwise. In
short, there was an atmosphere of fear
in the hearing room. It was a fear that
some member of the committee or one
of the other individuals giving information might agree with the Atheist, or
even smile in his direction. I felt like an
unwanted intruder in the room, as if I
were a cat invited into a room full of
mice. There is no personal experience
quite like being in a room, for an official
function, in which there is so much aversion to you that, as the old proverb
goes, "one could cut the hate with a
knife." This is a singularly chilling experience that one has to have lived through
and one which is difficult to explain to
another who has not been placed in a
similar situation.
Ido not relate this to you, dear reader,
to frighten you into the closet. That is far
from my intent. Why should I do so as
one of the nation's most out-of-thecloset Atheists? I only wish to inform
you, bluntly as is my style, of the situation at hand with regard to potential involvement of activist Atheists with extant governmental bodies as a vehicle
for improving all of our lots as sane individuals trapped in what seems to be
the land of the insane. I have always felt
that we must approach the task of establishing our right to our Atheist lifestyle from a position of knowledge of the
reality of our opposition and not merely
a pleasing picture of what we wish or
hope that reality might be. Chasing
mirages is not efficacious. It has been
the case, throughout the history of this
nation and indeed the history of most of
the world, that those individuals or
groups who demand and seize their
rights have them and those who merely
attempt to assimilate into a culture at
variance to them do not. As an Atheist,
I have no desire for martyrdom. On the
other hand, I do not care to live my entire life in fear of my being "discovered"
to be (in a whisper) an "atheist," with a
small A. I know and have known thouMarch 1990

sands of individual Atheists who conduct their daily lives in terror of being
discovered to be unbelievers. It is for
them that I labor, literally day and night,
so that one day they can relax their
guard and be themselves and not give a
damn who might find out about their
disdain for religion. That I can already
do so matters not so much as my continued struggle to bring the rest of my
Atheist brethren along for the ride.

Facing one's own dissent

This is where the Black community
has an advantage. Black people can recognize one another by their skin color.
They cannot hide that factor. They must
cope with their "blackness" each and
every day. I only wish that Atheists had
some genetic distinguishing physical
characteristic, like skin color, to place
them in a position where they could not
"pass" as a non-Atheist. Given their
history, it might be difficult to arrive at
a "color" of mutual satisfaction to all of
that class anyway. As the situation is,
however, one can never tell who mayor
may not be an Atheist. It is, sadly
enough, always possible for an Atheist
to hide his position with regard to religion. The Gay community faces a not
dissimilar problem in that there are
many Gay men and women who do not
wish to deal with the social opprobrium
from carrying their sexual orientation
on their sleeves. It is difficult to encourage any individual to come out openly
for a position or preference that they
have which is overwhelmingly unpopular with those with whom circumstances
may dictate they need to associate.
Some Atheists are luckier in that regard
than others, but the acceptance of one's
chosen life-style should never depend
upon the "luck of the draw" as to the
social strata or neighborhood in which
one finds oneself. Still, the "path of least
resistance" is the natural preference in
terms of survival instincts. In the case of
the Black community, the Blacks have a
factor which, in a sense, forces a confrontation of the racial equality issue.
Page 5

We must drag our fellows out of the closet

and into the streets by any means
to let the religious majority know that we do exist and we do have rights
and that we demand them.
We do not have that luxury. At the very
same time that outspoken Atheists are
stumping for Atheist rights, the other
section of the Atheist community is expressing its preference for "closethood." It is difficult indeed for us activist Atheists to comport .ourselves based
on the position that we are Atheists like
it or not and that anyone who does not
like it can simply just deal with it, while
at the same time other Atheists are
undercutting that position by telling us
to be quiet, demur, and to take our place
in the closet and not "rock the boat" for
others who think they too cannot be
outspoken. Perhaps if we rock hard
enough, our fellows will be spilled into
the drink with us and the splash in the
face willbring them around.
It is, therefore, desirable to one day
reach the position where all Atheists are
of the outspoken variety and their ranks
are not split down the middle. In the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, "A
house divided against itself cannot
stand."2 That statement rings true for
organized Atheism as it did for the divided nation, on the issues of slavery
and states' rights, over which Lincoln
had the awesome task of presiding.

Approaching Congress
Given all of this, toward the end of
1989Robert Sherman, a national media
coordinator for American Atheists, began to work as instructed behind the
scenes with officials in Washington,
D.C., to see if he could make inroads
toward getting a hearing by the Congress on the issue of civilrights for Atheists. It was his desire and the desire of
the national headquarters of American
Atheists that Congress be made aware,
somehow, of the fact that millions of
Americans have to walk the streets of
life daily in fear because of their lack of

2Lincoln improved on a quote he found in

the Bible. Mark 3:25: "And if a house be
divided against itself, that house cannot
stand."
Page 6

religion. We all felt that if we could only

bring to the attention of the Congress
that a minority group was in the position
of its members needing to live hypocritical and often surreptitious life-styles
because of their nonconformity, perhaps some legislation to protect Atheists from reprisal or discrimination could
be leveraged out of the federal legislature. There is existing legislation against
interference with religious ceremonies,
desecration of religious property, and
discrimination on the basis of religion.
There is no such legislation which protects the right of an individual to be free
from religion. Those who are offended
by the act of smoking, for example, have
successfully passed legislation to prohibit that act in particular places. Such
legislation with regard to religion and
where it is and is not appropriate seems
then only reasonable also.

The problem with the courts

We exist now in a rather nebulous
world in which our only protection from
the theistic majority is a thin thread of
court decisions based, primarily, on a
single clause of the Constitution. This
organization has been engaged in some
twenty-five years of state/church litigation in which it has attempted, fact situation by fact situation, to define the
constitutionally accepted parameters
for religious activity, particularly as it
tends to interfere or overlap with government concerns. We are in a position
of needing to wait until religion inserts
itself into the governmental arena or infringes on free exercise and then try to
filesuit after the fact of the infringement
to ask the courts for redress. That is like
the police saying that they can do nothing about an irate boyfriend threatening
a woman until he actually murders her;
then they can arrest him. Once the damage is done, we must filesuit to try to recover from it. We are then, likelyas not,
told that the activity we are complaining
of is historical, traditional, and of hoary
precedent. Ifthe violation had been prohibited by statute, or seen for what it
March 1990

was all along by the courts, or legislative

bodies, it would never have come to be
"traditional. "
That is the rub. We have been beating our heads against the proverbial
brick wall for the past quarter century,
fighting over one particular fact situation or the other with regard to religion's
violation of the First Amendment while
the entirety of the judicial, legislative,
and executive branches of government,
on all levels, reeks with favoritism toward religion. How can one seriously
ask a judge to declare the swearing in of
jurors under the oath "So help me God"
to be unconstitutional when that selfsame judge enters the courtroom to the
cry of "God Save This Nation and This
Honorable Court"? That is like asking a
Jewish judge to rule against the public
observance of Passover. Our chances of
success are often slim at best. Yet we
have persisted as we found that we
must, sometimes using litigation as
more a way of drawing public attention
to an area of our concern than actually
figuring on prevailing in a legal sense.

Case by case, town by town

If we should then prevail (and we
occasionally do), on a particular issue,
based on a single fact situation in a
single jurisdiction, any court-ordered
prohibition on a religious intrusion into
a should-be secular area only holds
within that jurisdiction. If a given judge,
for example, holds that a nativity scene
is unconstitutional on the county courthouse lawn of a mythical Smithville,
USA, that would not stop another town,
say Thomasville, USA, just over in the
next county or across a nearby state
line, from putting up exactly the same
scene the next year. New litigation
would need to be initiated then in hundreds of various communities around
the country, one by one. In fact, the
Gideon Bible Institute has been able to
saturate public schools with Bibles
using this method, merely moving on to
the next county when prohibited in the
current one. It would be far more sensiAmerican Atheist

Marbletombstone-like monuments sporting the Ten Commandments are everywhere in the nation: in front of court
houses, county seats, city halls. This
one is at the Texas Capitol building, visited by Roger Devismes of France and
Georgia Tzanetakos of Florida in June
1988.

ble for the legislature, either on a state

or federal level, to lay down statutory
rules for separation of state and church
which would cover larger areas and
carry within them a penalty for infringement. That is, after all- with logic, alas,
failing more often than not - that to
which most Americans respond first:
the prospect of a penalty. All of the litigation that has gone down the pike with
regard to separation of state and church
for well over forty years has been civil
law,wherein the courts have given what
amount, primarily, to advisory opinions.
This means that if a court rules that a
nativity scene is unconstitutional and
the municipality involved puts it back up
again the next year, the litigation would
need to be reinitiatecl to ask the judge
for fines or other sanctions. Such action
would not, in turn, stop any other such
violations occurring just down the road.

The need for legislation

What is needed then is some legislation, rather than court interpretation,
with regard to separation of state and
church. It would be, we would hope as
Atheists, legislation that would augment
and enhance the prevailing First Amendment clauses. You might say that attempting to extract such legislation
from the Congress could be dangerous
and might backfire on us, resulting in
legislation that breaks down the First
Amendment so-called religion clauses.
It is true that such a reaction to our stimuli is possible, but "nothing ventured,
nothing gained." It has been the perennial argument of the assimilationist
branch of any minority movement, "that
speaking up willsimply rain more abuse
down on our heads." Sometimes it
does, at first, but the speaking up part
eventually leads to better conditions. It
seems to me, and to other informed
Atheists, that there exists ample federal court precedent which could form a
body of guidelines for the drafting of
federal legislation in the area of state/
church separation. The notion here is
actually to federally regulate, by statute,
Austin, Texas

permissible levels of religious activity a step toward putting religion in its proper place. The proper place for religion,
from a constitutional perspective, is
strictly in the private sector. That is in
the hearts, heads, hearths, and churches.
Intellectually speaking, I think that we
Atheists agree that its proper place is in
the trash can. With regard to laws and
constitutionality, though, it seems only
logical that religion could be regulated
as is smoking. If smoking is not allowed
on airline carriers, for example, then
why are they still allowed to put prayer
cards on meal service trays? Some carriers, like Alaska Airlines, still continue
this practice. There should be an equitable and constitutional means, based
on the body of over forty years' worth of
federal court decisions on a wide variety
of fact situations with regard to state
and church matters, of legislatingparameters to prevent the intrusion of religion
into the school, the home, the work
place, and official government functions. In this way, if the law was broken,
county, city,state, or federal prosecutors
could be called upon for enforcement.
As things now stand, there is virtually no
enforcement of court rulings in the
state/church area except for costly, privately initiated litigation.
It was the thought then, based on the
above logic, that we could approach
March 1990

both sides of the Hill in Washington,

D.C., to see ifwe could find any support
for the idea of legislating civil rights for
Atheists as a starting point for this
hoped for future legislative process.
Other minority groups, after all, have
been successful in getting anti-hate
crime legislation passed through the
Congress. Why not a billthat would prohibit hate crimes against Atheists? We
remain among the last of groups to have
no legislative protection of any kind.
The Jews got their protections first,
then the Blacks, then women, and now
the Gay community is proceeding in
that direction, so it is our turn at the legislative trough. Remember (in the words
of one of our founder's law school professors) the only difference between a
man and a hog is dignity, and we have
not had our portion of dignity served up
to us yet.

American Atheists
heads for the Capitol
Mr. Sherman, therefore, made appointments with one of the counsels for
the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, which works under the Committee on the Judiciary, and with a
counsel for the House Subcommittee
on Civil and Constitutional Rights. In
preparation for the meeting with these
two counsels, a white paper entitled "InPage 7

In February 1990, Jon Murray and

Robert I. Sherman visited the legal
counsel of the Judiciary Committees
of both the House and the Senate in
Washington, D.C. To their consternation they discovered a bronze "In
God We Trust" on the wall of the
Longworth House Office Building,
Annex I, on the entrance facing the
Capitol.

troductory information on the lack of

civil liberties and equal rights for Atheists in the United States" was tendered
to both gentlemen in multiple copy. It
was also mailed to Mr. Sherman's congressman from Illinoisand my congressman from Texas, as well as to the chairmen for the two committees involved.
Copies of this twenty-page document
can be obtained from this office for
$6.00 each, postpaid. In this document
we outlined points under various headings. The points were:

(4) A definition of religion was

given, to show that the two are
wholly dissimilar.
(5) An historical composite of the
Atheist view of what state/church
separation should consist of was
outlined.
(6) The concept of "systemic suppression of the civil liberties and
equal rights of American Atheists by
government," was outlined with regard
to the legislature, the courts, and the executive branch of government. In these
sectional breakdowns, both broad concepts and individual fact situations of
systemic suppression were addressed.
In the section concerning the courts, a
listing of the litigation in which American
Atheists had been involved was given,
showing forty-five suits over a twentyfive-year period.

Revising the Civil Rights Act

(1) That Atheism is not a "religion" in
either a legal or historical sense. This
argument is pivotal to any preliminary
considerations that may lead to formulation of legislation. IfAtheism could be,
indeed, defined as a religion, then it
could be said that the existing laws with
regard to nondiscrimination on the
basis of religious preference also covered Atheists. It is our contention that
they do not so cover. Although some of
the in-the-closet-and-enjoying-it bunch
have pled to be recognized as a religion
for tax and funding purposes in the past,
we Atheists prefer not to include ourselves in the ranks of the insane to garner government favoritism.
(2) Background information about
American Atheists and Atheism was
given. It was substantiated in this section
that organized Atheism has been alive
and well in the country for well over one
hundred and fifty years. Atheism is not
the new kid on the block. We have been
here actually since the founding of this
nation, so that it is about time that we be
recognized.
,
(3) A definition of Atheism was given,
from historical and legal angles.
Page 8

On the basis of all of this printed information and the discussions that Mr.
Sherman and I were to have with these
counsels, this office submitted, as the
conclusion of the white paper, proposed
revisions of the Civil Rights Act. The
proposed amendment was to be made
to Sec. 703 (a)(l).(2)(b), et ai., of the
Civil Rights Act as follows, with the
amendment portion in bold.

(k) The term "Atheism" includes

all aspects of the doctrine the tenets of which comprise the teachings or advocation of principles
that there is no god, (soul, life after death, nor efficacy in prayer)
and never has been and whose
adherents are Atheists.
In addition to the requested modifications of the Civil Rights Act, the white
paper advanced a resolution to be
passed by both houses of Congress admonishing President Bush for his statement that Atheists cannot be "citizens
or patriots" since ours is "one nation
under God." The following was suggested:
No person in public life may be
free to impugn the patriotism of
any minority group because of
that group's opinion in respect to
religion.
President George Bush is herewith censured for his public expression of August 27, 1988, at
which time he stated that: "I don't
think that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should
they be considered as patriots.
This is one nation under God."

Go away, kid
It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer
(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to
discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any
individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or
privileges of employment, because
of such individual's race, color,
religion, Atheism, sex or national
origin.
It was asked that the balance of that
section be similarly amended to cover
discriminations other than those involving employment. In addition, it was suggested that the following new definition
be added after Sec. 701 (j):
March 1990

Well, after mailing these white papers

to the two counsels, Mr. Sherman and
I arrived in Washington, D.C., for our
February 7, 1990, appointments. What
we found was not exactly unanticipated.
The counsel on the Senate side was a
very young, fresh out of law school,
ethnic minority person. He had been
stuck in an office so small that it was all
that Mr. Sherman and I could do to
squeeze into it with him. He had not
read our white paper prior to our arrival,
or any of the other information we had
sent to him. His position was simple: (1)
it is an election year for the chairman of
the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution; (2) the senator could not
touch the issue of Atheist rights with a
American Atheist

The religious are brazen enough to

advertise Bible Study courses to be
held in the halls of Congress itself.
The Rayburn House Office Building
harbors this advertisement, complete
with a biblical quote. And, of course,
the Bible classes are held in the
Rayburn Annex Building.

ten-foot pole; (3) he is facing a strong

challenge in his home state from a
well-funded opponent; (4) come back
after the election and we willsee ifwe
can talk about it then. It was also his
contention that the Civil Rights Act
and other federal legislation adequately covered the civil rights of
Atheists under their sections pertaining to no discrimination based on religion.He also said that it was obvious
from our history of cases that we had
been litigating under the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of
the First Amendment and not under the
provisions of the Civil Rights Act. That
is, in fact, correct. It was pointed out to
him that we had lost virtually all of those
cases over a twenty-five-year period,
while other plaintiffs had prevailed on
some of the same issues with identical
fact situations because they were religious minority groups and not Atheists.
Did this not then demonstrate some
kind of legal ingrained bias against Atheist plaintiffs? His reply was that perhaps
it did, so that what he advised is that we
now go back to square one and litigate
under the Civil Rights statutes for another twenty-five years and then come
back with that track record and try to
talk to Congress at that time.
In short, it was the old "go away, kid,
you bother me" line. Atheism is just too
much of a political hot potato, especially in an election year. So much for that
meeting.
We then went over to the House side
of the Hill toward our meeting with the
House Committee counsel. We had
intervening appointments with some
House members. One such member
had sponsored a bill to change the national anthem to "God Bless America."
He told us that he could find no real support for the measure and that it would
simply die in committee and not to worry about its passage. The other House
member was the representative from
my district in Texas. He was in committee and we spoke to an aide who was
very unsympathetic, reiterating that
Austin, Texas

BIBLE STUDY

ON CAPITOL HILL

II

"He who heeds the word wisely will find good,

And whoever trusts in the Lord, happy is he.
Proverbs 16:20
Walk

with
Jesus!

Information:

February's Schedule
Meeting from 1-2 pm.
Feb. 7, 28 - Annex #1 Rm 116
Feb. 14, 21 - Rayburn 2105

Bill NeSmith 226-6120 or Lois Cortese 226-6141

Atheism was just too hot for any politician to handle. We also met with the
House member from Mr. Sherman's
home district. He said that he agreed
that there was discrimination against
Atheists but that we were not going to
find any support in Congress for legislation or committee hearings on the
matter because support of any such
measure by any House member would
be political suicide, plain and simple.
When we met with the House counsel, his attitude paralleled that of the
Senate counsel. He said that he could
not imagine asking the Congress to
legislate "courtesy" toward Atheists.
We would just need to go the hard
knocks route of fighting for our civil
rights in the same way that the Black
community had done. He reaffirmed
that no House member would touch
either hearings on discrimination against
Atheists or any legislation. We could not
find a sponsor because all would be
convinced that the existing provisions of
the federal statutes covered Atheists
also. We pointed out ample judicial rulings that they, in fact, did not. Without
the support of anti-discrimination legislation for Atheists, we pointed out, we
would be required to go back to the
courts and litigate under the Civil Rights
Acts and the provisions of other such
existing laws rather than under the First
Amendment. He felt that this was indeed
what was needed. In summary, his options left us about as much room for air
as did his office.
March 1990

The need to say "NO!"

Mr. Sherman and I left Washington,
D.C., then, as you may suspect, with a
far less than optimistic attitude. We had
essentially been treated like fleas on a
dog. We were not worthy of any real
consideration because our political
clout was not large enough and our
community exposure not broad enough.
Where do we go from here?
I think that we need to keep pressuring Congress as we can. We can do so
by means of as many individual letters
from Atheists to their elected representatives as possible. And we need to hit
the telephones and the legislators' ears.
We can educate Congress also by continuing to send this journal to the federal Congress with the possible addition of
selected state legislatures. We can attempt to keep a closer watch on Congress and continue to demand that we
be given an opportunity to address any
committees examining any state/church
separation issues. We shall continue to
protest against discrimination against
Atheists everywhere we find it. If an
Atheist applies for a notary license and
it has a god oath on the form, the oath
should be scratched out before signing
the document and a protest letter written to accompany it when it is sent to
the proper government office. If an
Atheist is called for jury duty or as a
court witness, he must continue to refuse to be sworn or affirmed with any
reference to "God." We ask that Atheists remain seated whenever the Pledge
Page 9

Not every Atheist can mount

a Supreme Court landmark victory case,
but every Atheist can refuse to sit in the back of the bus.

of Allegiance to the flag is requested in

a public setting until the offensive
phrase "under God" is removed. We
advocate the crossing out of the phrase
"In God We Trust" on all paper money
that passes through Atheist hands.
This all amounts tojust saying "NO!"
to religion in a variety of ways.
It is now obvious, after my experience
in Washington, D.C., that the only way
that we Atheists are going to establish
our right to freedom from religion is to
directly speak out for that right in public
whenever the opportunity avails. We
must take to the streets in public protest
when the occasion calls for that type of
action. We must write letters of protest
to government officials where that is
expedient. We must show up at governmental functions and speak our mind
when that is efficacious. We must continue to address "Letters to the Editor"
to every conceivable media outlet, to all
legislative, judicial and executive officials. We all know the old saying, "the
squeaking wheel gets the grease."

Drag them out of the closet

It is also more imperative than ever
that we try to present a united front with
regard to issues affecting Atheists. It
does no good for a minority within a
minority, that is the activist Atheists, to
speak up while the rest of the Atheist
community feels content with accommodation to religion. We must drag our
fellows out of the closet and into the
streets by any means to let the religious
majority know that we do exist and we
do have rights and that we demand
them. It greatly minimizes the effect of
our efforts when only one or two determined Atheists will not, for instance,
vote in a church and demand that the
ballot box be brought out into the street
for them to vote without entering a religious edifice. If every Atheist voter
would refuse to enter a church to vote
and would write in advance of an election and demand that they have the
right to vote outside of a religious building, then and only then willthat situation
Page 10

begin to change. What cannot be accomplished by a single dissenter can be

accomplished by the magnification of
that act of defiance by hundreds, or
thousands, of dissenters. If you check
into a hotel room and find a Bible in it,
take it to the front desk and civillystate
that you find it offensive and would the
desk clerk please take it and tell the
janitorial staff not to place another one
in the room until you have checked out.
That is your right; you paid for the
room. Ifhotels get enough such requests
they might stop putting Bibles in sleeping rooms. If you as an Atheist get a
prayer card on the airline tray, take it
home and write to the airline a letter of
protest. Atheists should call in to radio
or television talk shows whenever the
topic is a state/church one and give
their opinions. The same goes for writing letters to the editors of periodicals of
any sort.
All of these types of action may seem
small, but when done by numbers of
persons, together, with solidarity of purpose, they can make a difference.
In the early years of post-World War
II America, the Black population found
itself in a similar situation. They were
not represented in the legislative or executive branches of government. They
could not really go to all-White courts
and juries and ask for their rights. They
had to do what was only logical: they
had to take to the streets and campuses
and the courts and to protest every type
of discrimination against them. They did
so, over and over again, with a very few
determined individuals leading the way

in the early going and paying dearly for

their effort. Over the years, though, as
more and more persons joined into the
effort, less and less discrimination
against Blacks was tolerated. Eventually, city by city, state by state, Blacks
began to occupy the very elected civic
and judicial positions from which their
opponents had oppressed them in the
past.
The women's movement has had a
similar history.
We Atheists can have that same kind
of success story, provided that we take
their lead, muster their courage, and
speak out. All during the history of the
civilrights movement, there were Black
people along the way who did not participate because they did not want to
place themselves in any jeopardy. Ifyour
own individual human rights are not
worth taking risks for, then what is?
That is a sobering question that it is time
for all Atheists to ponder. Other minority groups have shown us the path to self
help out of our situation and we must,
with our exalted intelligence, be at least
honest enough and determined enough
to follow a similar path. Not every Atheist can mount a Supreme Court landmark victory case, but every Atheist can
refuse to sit in the back of the bus.
So, the next time this journal asks you
to help by writing to a public official,
don't just sit there dawdling. Pick up
that pen, turn on that typewriter, power
up that computer, and go to work. You
will be surprised how good it will make
you feel. ~

Help make the news

We like filling the American Atheist with news of Atheist activism as
much as you enjoy reading about it. So why not help American Atheists make that news? Your tax-deductible donation will help American Atheists keep on the frontlines and in the headlines.
American

Atheists, P.O. Box 140195, Austin, TX 78714-0195

March 1990

American Atheist

Ask A.A.

Laughing is too good for them

I have heard Mrs. O'Hair on a number
of occasions and she laughs at the beliefs of the religious. She should stop doing that. Scorn and ridicule is not a
tactic Atheists should use. It is well and
good that she does say she is laughing
at ideas only and people who embrace
such ideas do so at their peril. But why
laugh at the ideas?

J. Zemanski
Ohio
The answer to your question has
already appeared in the book All The
Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask
American Atheists. 1 It reads as follows:

In "Letters to the Editor," readers give

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

Austin, Texas

But the answer is so obvious.

Their beliefs are ludicrous. One
cannot really believe that the devil appeared and wafted J. e. onto
a mountain from which he could
see the entire world and that the
devil, personally, tempted J.e. by
holding a long conversation with
him (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:2-13).
Or do you think that god did
"moon" Moses, that he shoved his
bare butt out at Moses? (Exod.
33:23: "And I will take away mine
hand and thou shalt see my back
parts: but my face shall not be
seen.") Or do you think that god
farts mighty farts? (Isa. 16:11:
"Wherefore my bowels shall sound
like a harp.") Or perhaps you plan
to change your diet to suit your
god. (Isa. 36:12 and 2 Kings 18:27:
"Hath he not sent me to the men
that sit upon the wall, that they
may eat their own shit, and drink
their own piss with you?") When
one accepts stories such as this as

IJon Murray and Madalyn O'Hair, All the

Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American Atheists with All the Answers, 2nd ed.
(Austin, Texas: American Atheist Press,
1986).
March 1990

"gospel" certainly people are going to laugh.

Au contraire, however, one
cannot laugh at Atheists because
we do not adhere to (largely) irrational ideas. If you find any humorous slip in our logic, we will be the
first to laugh with you at our mistakes.
But I'll tell you what JudeoChristians did with Atheists for fifteen hundred years - which was
somewhat more serious than laughing at them. They outlawed them
from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, ostracized them, blacklisted them, banned or burned
their books or their writings of any
kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy.
They dehumanized Atheists with
beatings and exquisite torture,
gouged out their eyes, slit their
tongues, stretched, crushed or
broke their limbs, tore off the
breasts if they were women,
crushed their scrotums if they
were men, imprisoned them,
stabbed them, hung them, strangled them, disemboweled them,
and burnt them alive.
And you have nerve enough to
complain to me that I laugh at the
religious and show them no respect?
171tellyou what I think that Atheists should do. You don't want us
to laugh at the religious, so what
we should do is to blacklist every
professor who is religious in every
college or university, then we
could fire them, hound them out
of town, ruin their reputations, destroy their writings, burn their
books, persecute them for their
ideas. We should do the same with
every Christian we find in a high
school, a junior high school, an
elementary school, or a kindergarten. With that for a good start
Page 11

THt FREETHINKER.
.I!IDITl!llJ HY

Vol. VI.

o.

W.

FOOTE.

No. 16 '

Even a century ago, Atheists found that

ridicule could be effective in inciting
theists to think about their religion. For
instance, the April 18, 1886 issue of The
Freethinker
ran a cartoon titled "A
Workman God," a sarcastic analysis of
the idea that an all-powerful god needed
a rest after creating the universe.

demned herself to eternal servitude.)

This resulted in huge clans with fierce
jealousies, raiding one another's available womanhood and creating dissension. Revelations were then put in place
extending "sealing" to include child-toparent as well as husband-to-wife, dirMormons and genealogy
I have recently discovered the joy of ecting that posthumous sealing of women
learning about my family tree. Ihave fin- to Smith and other big knobs would
ished interviewing relatives and I am cease, and requiring that henceforth
members would confine sealing to their
now ready to do some serious research.
The Mormons take a great interest in immediate families and to their direct
ancestors, as far back as they could
people's genealogies. My grandmother
identify them. So polygamy passed,
has warned me that Ishouldn't research
with the Mormons because they have genealogy got a powerful boost, and
the habit of converting people's dead Mormonism has been saddled ever
ancestors to Mormonism and bothering since with the impossible chore of idenpeople's living relatives with their zeal tifying every last person who ever lived.
The pleasant fiction behind this enfor proselytizing. I don't know how to
terprise is that these dead bodies will
take this advice because my grandmother has an Archie Bunker mentality choose to be Mormons or not, after the
and the Mormons are religious fanatics sealing is done: No coercion! exclaim
that are indeed capable of such things. the Mormons. Most people are put off
Ineed some information about why the by this morbidly necrophiliac mission,
Mormons are interested in genealogical but the church charges forward with
history. Ialso need some advice on what the plan, rabidly sealing anyone who
to watch out for.
has a name, birthplace, and date, up to
six or seven times (if there is a question
of reliabilityof the data). In recent years,
David Sternbergh
Texas mass sealing regardless of relationship
to anybody has taken over, and the
We asked David Kent, a staff member push is on to bring everybody into the
of the American Atheist, to answer you, big net. Genealogy has largely been
dropped in favor of record collecting.
as he is not only a recovered Mormon
One result is that the Mormons have
but a genealogist himself. His response
amassed the largest collection of genefollows:
The root of Mormon interest in gene- alogical data anywhere, microfilming
alogy is the lust of Joseph Smith, founder original records worldwide. These are
of that church. He excogitated a cere- not merely records of Mormons, and
are useful if you want to use the system
mony of marriage "sealing," whereby
he took as additional wives a number of for genealogical research.
Mormons are on the lookout for any
women, over the strong objections of
his first wife, Emma Hale. When, after interest in the church, but will usually
his death, Brigham Young extended the keep their distance if treated firmly.
practice of polygamy to some of the They are indeed religious fanatics, but
church hierarchy, an unseemly scram- professional genealogists do use their
ble ensued, with each patriarch pursu- data bases, which are useful and inexing the fairest maids he could find. (The pensive. As an Atheist you should reteaching was that the more "sealed" member that what a man does is more
wives a man had, the more glorious his important than who his ancestors were:
royalty and similar detritus are comstate in the hereafter, whereas a woman
who refused to be sealed to a man con- mon to 'almost everybody. ~
may even make him analyze his
position. We hope so as we go
merrily on our way scoffing at the
underpinnings of this - and all religions.

we should root out every clergyman and beat and torture them,
gouge out their eyes, slit their
tongues, stretch their limbs until
they pop out of the sockets, crush
their scrotums, imprison them,
stab them, hang them, burn them
alive. Then after we get done with
all of the clergy, we should turn to
each individual Christian and do
the same.
The Judea-Christians did that
to every Atheist they could find
for fifteen hundred years. Why
should we not do it to the Christians when we get into power?
What is sauce for the goose is
sauce for the gander.
We won't do it and I'll tell you
we would not do that even if we
could - because we are decent
human beings. We don't have the
insanity of religion to guide us; we
have the sweet light of reason.
Judeo-Christians have nothing to
fear from us but our laughter. We
had everything to fear from them,
including the taking of our lives,
because we would not join in their
mental aberrations and delusions.
We make fun of Judeo-Christian
ideas because that is a good educational technique. It makes the
religious determined to prove that
we are wrong. The Judeo-Christian
willlook up the quotation from the
Bible about "mooning" Moses and
find that this absurd bit of trash is
really in the holy book. He willfind
that we are right and he is wrong
and consequently will have a little
less respect for his god. The quote
Page 12

March 1990

American Atheist

News and Comments

I didn't realize

II

A new mayor realizes

that he has alot to
learn about state/
church separation and
courtesy to all his
citizens - not just the
Christian ones.

hen the new mayor of Waukegan, Illinois, thought that he

would begin the year spectacularly by inviting Pat Robertson to a
prayer breakfast, he made his first mistake. Taking the mayoral stationery, he
sent out a long press release. The sixpage document was elaborate - and
announced that the "First Annual Waukegan Prayer Breakfast" would be held
on February 24, at a country club in the
city. Tickets, priced at $30.00, could be
purchased at the mayor's office.
The mayor wanted to brag on himself
somewhat so he included a small portion
of his history:
Mayor Paravonian, a publicly proclaimed Christian, was elected to
his first term as Mayor in April of
1989. Throughout his campaign,
Paravonian spoke of his faith in
God and his active involvement in
his church and his directorship of
the Bible Land Mission in Beirut,
Lebanon.

The news in this magazine is chosen to

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

Austin, Texas

He then went into a really extravagant

praise of Pat Robertson and attached to
the press release a reproduction of a
picture of Robertson which took up an
entire page. Following this were three
very full pages of autobiographical material on Robertson.
Within a week a second press release
announced that a "National Christian
Artist" would sing at the "Pat Robertson
Prayer Breakfast." The Christian recording artist turned out to be Sandy
Rios (whoever she is) and the whole
gambit was described as "being hosted
by Mayor Haig Paravonian." With the
second release was another picture of
Robertson, and an announcement of
the ticket price of $30.00 - available at
city hall, with the city's community
events director (who turns out to be
Paravonian's daughter) in charge of the
sales.
The second sheet could only be described as an invitation to the event.
Needless to say both news releases and
March 1990

the several hundred invitations were

mailed in city envelopes and the city
postage meter was used.
At the time of the press release Paravonian had a lot to say:
The purpose [of the breakfast]
is to acknowledge our belief that
God is the supreme ruler and the
fact that we would like to have
God on our side.
Robert L Sherman, the American
Atheist national spokesman, was immediately on the situation. Headquartered in Chicago, he took his attack first
to radio, where he proclaimed that the
mayor had no right to use city facilities
for his religious endeavor. The mayor
name-called back,
He's a nit-picker. There might
be an argument there ifwe want to
get very technical and nit-pick. I
used my letterhead and I take
phone calls (about the breakfast)
.... It's convenient for me to do
it from my office.
I believe in God and the power
of prayer.
I take a very strong stance with
my religious beliefs. I believe in
God strongly, and thought that as
mayor of Waukegan I would like to
get people together, call it an official Waukegan Prayer Breakfast,
play some inspirational music, and
ask God to bless our community.
It developed that three hundred tickets
had been sold through City Hall. The
mayor had to admit, however, that
$30.00 was a little steep for a breakfast
and he finally disclosed that the excess
money above the cost of the meal would
go to the Bible Land Mission, a Christian
endeavor in Lebanon. The mayor had
been a director of the mission for about
twenty years and has made ten to
twelve trips to Lebanon on behalf of the
organization. He also revealed that all of
the expenses of flying Robertson to
Page 13

News and Comments

Waukegan would need to be paid.

Robert Sherman was not one to be
put down. He objected strenuously to
Paravonian:
... using the engine of government
to promote religion and raise
funds for his favorite Christian
charity.
It didn't help, since the moderator of
a Waukegan radio talk show said that
the overwhelming local response to
WKRS-AM was for Sherman "to mind
your own business."
Sherman, of course, felt that the separation of state and church was indeed
his business and he continued his complaints to every media which would
listen to him. The mayor kept right on
his theme:
My view is that our country was
based on a belief in God. Our people came here for freedom of religion, and the government should
not tell you or me or anybody
what we should believe. But Ithink
this country has to acknowledge
that it was based on God.
Tenacious Sherman would not let it
go at that - and finally on Tuesday,
February 13, he and the mayor had a
face-off. At the end of the session, the
mayor announced that he will"probably
do it differently" next year by using private stationery, by taking ticket orders
through a private number, and by not
selling the tickets in the City Hall. Although the mayor privately apologized
to Sherman, telling him that as "a new
mayor" he does make mistakes, he brazened it out with the media, saying, "I'm
not going to say it was a mistake. It's just
very hard to draw the line."
Of course it is - for a Christian. Madalyn O'Hair. ~

Dial A Minister Dial A Pastor -- _- _

Dial A Prayer --- __----------

DIAL-AN-ATHEIST
The telephone listings below are the various services where you may
listen to short comments on state/church separation issues and viewpoints originated by the Atheist community.
Anchorage, Alaska
Phoenix, Arizona
Tucson, Arizona
San Diego, California
San Francisco, California
Sonoma County, California
South Bay (San Jose), California
God Speaks

Greater DC
Denver, Colorado
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Northern Illinois
Dial-a-Gay-Atheist

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Dial-a-Gay-Atheist

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DIAL-THE-ATHEIST
Austin, Texas
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Dial-a-Gay-Atheist

Salt Lake City, Utah

Seattle, Washington
Page 14

n~,,<>('hp.r --

March 1990

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344-3086
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(512) 458-5731
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(206) 859-4668
American Atheist

News and Comments

John Alexander Dowie

Dowie later took up the study of religion with a private tutor, but interrupted
this to return to Edinburgh University in
Scotland as an Arts major. Because of
familybusiness concerns, he abandoned
this after three years and returned to
Australia. Once back in that country, he
was "called" in April 1872,at age twentyfive, to begin his career as a minister. In
the year 1874 "a plague" visited the
Sydney area and within several weeks
alone forty members of his congregation
died. One evening Dowie was called
upon to attend another dying member. In the midst of
her death throes it
came to Dowie
that the plague disease was "the
doing of Satan's
will." He immediately launched into
a fervent prayer
which turned the
woman from
death's door. He
then went down
the hallway and
An early start
similarly cured two
This remarkable
of her siblings. This
man had been
born in Scotland in Courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Library.
episode in his life
launched his "Gos1847and claimed to
have signed a pledge for and taken a pel of Healing through Faith in Jesus,"
vow of abstinence from all intoxicating which stayed the plague in his own
liquor, tobacco, and opium, when he congregation.
His marriage to his cousin, Jeanie
was six years of age - having read the
Bible through and understood the evil of Dowie, was on May 26, 1876,when he
alcohol. At age seven he "received a was twenty-nine years old. His first child
definite call from God" and began to was born in the fall of 1877 and was
preach along with his father. When he named Alexander John Gladstone Dowie,
was thirteen, the family emigrated to after the prime minister of the British
parliament, described by Dowie as "a
Australia to join his father's brother,
already there. Dowie found immediate Christian patriot." A daughter, Jeanie,
employment with his uncle and later was born several years later, but she
married the uncle's daughter Jeanie, his died while still a child.
first cousin, over the continuing objections of that uncle.
Dreams of independence
Dowie was, however, discouraged
with his accomplishments in the min"The disparaging word used by Jews to istry of the Congregational Church and
left it in 1878,at age thirty-one, to begin
describe people other than Jews.

he definition of "Zion" given in all

dictionaries and encyclopedias is
substantially, "the Jewish homeland that is symbolic of Judaism or of
Jewish national aspiration," or "the ideal
nation or society envisaged by Judaism." But in 1902 a goyl named John
Alexander Dowie, a Pentecostal minister and faith healer, decided that he
would found a town peopled by his followers tight near the Wisconsin state
border, on Lake Michigan, in upstate
Illinois - and he named it Zion.
Dowie was no
ordinary. religious
charlatan. His chief
claim to fame was
his selfpronounced ability
to cure cancer.
And, like Paul of
the New Testament, despite the
name he used for
his city, his appeal
was only to the
goyim.

The convoluted tale of

a strange, obsessed
man who did everything
wrong in his life and
whose dreams came to
naught even as did his
own life.

SUMMARY:John Alexander Dowie, a

Scottish-born preacher, founded a
Christian sect which emphasized faith
healing and the inerrancy of the Bible.
Finding this new brand of Christianity
to be a commercial success, he
founded a theocracy in Illinois, in
which he exercised his dreams of a
perfect Christian town. His claims to
be a prophet of his god .soon made him
an outcast within the Christian community, and by the end of his life he
began to see the financial ruin of his
ideal Christian city.

Austin, Texas

March 1990

Page 15

News and Comments

Below: The logo of The Coming City, a

newspaper published by Dowie, emphasized, of course, the Bible.

a free-lance attempt to found his own

church, with which idea he struggled
valiantly but without success. His insistence upon preaching temperance and
strictly adhering to biblical tenets did
not attract a congregation. It was only in
1883that he was finally able to organize
what he called the Free Christian Church,
for which he built a tabernacle in Melbourne, Australia. There, each February, he conducted a memorial convention to commemorate the beginning of
his divine healing ministry.
In this tabernacle Dowie performed
his second miracle of healing. A woman
with cancer of the eye came to him, and:
He laid hands upon her and prayed.
The miracle happened at once.
The cancer burst and discharged
into two handkerchiefs. The swelling disappeared and the opening
closed. When she opened that
eye, she was immediately able to
see, and that perfectly?

2Gordon Lindsay, John Alexander Dowie: A

Life Story of Trials, Tragedies and Triumphs
(Dallas, Texas: Christ for the Nations, Inc.,
1980), p. 74.

!' ,,,,,

Page 16

NUMHFR

7..

His next miracle was to restore to a

boy suffering from tuberculosis of the
bones the ability to not alone immediately walk but to stomp his feet.
Soon thereafter he founded "The International Divine Healing Association"
and began to use the title "doctor."

and the spine, and protruded into

her stomach so that she was unable
to take food."
The woman was instantly
through Dowie's prayers.

healed

Miracles galore
Troubles begin
Dowie next took to street preaching,
which was prohibited in Melbourne, and
he was quickly arrested, fined, and imprisoned for thirty days. His biographer
chronicles a litany of woes, failures,
obstacles, disappointments, and heartaches until Dowie left Australia on
March 3, 1888(at the age of forty-one),
arriving in San Francisco on June 7.
Once in the United States, he almost immediately began his "miracle" activity,
curing "a chronic cancer which had
eaten into the larynx of the throat" of a
sixty-nine-year-old woman. He began to
travel throughout the Northwest and
then headed east until he came to Chicago, in which he settled down in 1890.
There on August 7, he prayed for a dying woman who had a cancerous tumor,
... as large as a cocoanut. It had
grown fast to the blood vessels,

CHICAGO,

AUGUST 22, 1900.

March 1990

Since the World's Fair was scheduled

in Chicago, he decided to build a small
tabernacle (dubbed by the media as a
"little wooden hut") which he opened on
May 7, 1893, opposite the camp of Buffalo Bill. For the six months of his tenancy there, he floated over the hut a
"Christ is All" flag - and thus, he began
his ministry in Chicago. Here, miracles
came so thick and fast that the Chicago
Tribune newspaper announced in 1894
that the State Board of Health was preparing to investigate Dowie. Dowie had
leased and furnished several large rooming houses which he used as "Healing
Homes." In these he charged for meals
and lodgings and conducted healing
services. The Chicago Dispatch newspaper reported on them under the headline, "Dr. Dowie's Lunatic Asylums," de3Ibid., p. 103.

PRICE TEN

CENTS

American Atheist

News and Comments

The headquarters of Dowie's Christian

Catholic Church at Michigan Avenue
and Twelfth Street reflected the
growing strength of his movement.

scribing them as havens for prostitutes. Soon the Board of Health

swore out the first warrant for his
arrest for illegally"practicing medicine." In this instance he was fined
$100.But immediatelythe city passed
a "Hospital Ordinance" requiring
such "Houses" to meet certain
health care standards and on May 1,
1885, Dowie was confronted by the
commissioner of health, who ordered him to come into compliance.
A series of arrests followed until
warrants issued against Dowie totaled one hundred. A number of
these cases were heard, and during
initial hearings Dowie gained considerable support by the device of
affidavits of healing. Those presented in the court included testimony of healing from Amanda Hicks,
a first cousin of Abraham Lincoln, Miss
Jean Harrison, a niece of President Harrison, and Sadie Cody, the niece of
Colonel William E "Buffalo Bill" Cody.
The latter lady testified that Dowie had
caused one leg to grow three inches
longer after removing an abscess at the
base of her spine. When adverse decisions were made, appeals were taken to
a superior court. Before they were concluded, however, the Hospital Ordinance was found to be unconstitutional
and Dowie escaped the continuing
prosecutions.

Leaves of Healing
In 1884Dowie founded a weekly publication called The Leaves of Healing.
He fondly referred to this as The Little
White Dove. In the journal appeared his
sermons and writings and his attacks on
- of all people - the pope and on papal
infallibility, in a city where the postmaster was a Roman Catholic. When
these attacks were found out, the postmaster immediately charged that his
periodical was "an advertising sheet"
and therefore no longer mailable as
second class matter. Dowie had his constituents bombard the postmaster general of the United States and later PresAustin, Texas

ident McKinley with mail until he was

able to meet with both gentlemen and
have his second class mailing privilege
returned.

Robert G. Ingersoll
In 1895,Robert G. Ingersoll happened
to give a speech in Chicago and one of
Dowie's biographers goes to some
length to describe the event. One of
Ingersoll's statements apparently was,
"God must perish, because He is useless, and never answers prayers." According to Dowie, Ingersoll was immediately challenged to see for himself the
miracles that Dowie was performing.
The biographer concludes:
... but learning of the nature of the
challenge he [Ingersoll] would
have to meet, he decided not to
accept it and quickly left town.!

A church takes form

. In the following year, on January 22,
1896,Dowie held his first General Conference of Believers interested in the
organization of the Christian Catholic

4lbid. p. 151.
March 1990

Church. A second conference was

called on February 5, 1896.The scheme
that Dowie devised was for groups of
seventy persons to go out into Chicago
two by two and work to convert house
by house. This work began with the first
Zion Seventies being organized on September 18, 1898.There was "an army" of
six complete "Seventies," a total of 420
persons. This quickly increased to 3,000
men and women distributing "millions of
tracts" and copies of the Leaves of Healing. Tabernacles were begun in Chicago
and in other cities, such as Cincinnati,
Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York.
The movement soon spread to Europe,
Australia, South Africa, England, and
Scotland. His efforts were so successful
that he finally purchased a large office
building on the corner of 12th Street and
Michigan Avenue (still standing today)
opposite the Illinois Central Railway
Station. The number of his adherents
grew to tens of thousands.
With the success, in the fall of 1899
Dowie - now proclaiming himself to be
"General Overseer" of his church - announced the beginning of a three-month
"Holy War" which consisted primarily of
attacks upon the medical profession. He
relied upon the text of 2 Chron. 16:12-13
Page 17

News and Comments

Tot/a'l }~/1t 11"1 5(1ipl'H~ bUn Iv"d"'d

~'r"rJ-

0/

"&h(fJ,J.I;,nd
... MyM,JU"'9U
#1I17II/.,..11,,1'71# t*hghl!n
~ltoId

:',!;j,~':./:':'1j~,,~!(J::';t;';;/;i/J
Iwl~ II" 0",,1

L",,,((1,"#.-

52 Chron. 16:12-13: "And Asa in the thirty

and ninth year of his reign was diseased in
his feet, until his disease was exceeding
great: yet in his disease he sought not to the
Lord, but to the physicians. And Asa slept
with his fathers, and died in the one and
fortieth year of his reign."
Luke 8:43: "And a woman having an issue
of blood twelve years, which had spent all
her living upon physicians, neither could be
healed of any."
Luke 10:33-34: "But a certain Samaritan,
as he journeyed, came where he was: and
when he saw him, he had compassion on
him, And went to him, and bound up his
wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him
on his own beast, and brought him to an inn,
and took care of him."
Page 18

d.e.

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r."ufl'llht'~h"("n'
to
I"'" "nlf smllt: /h,
E,ulh ,..<lh(11 Cvo, -M~/.".IY G.'
'/lnd Jt'JVJ (lnjn"uJ'o"djilld.
C/,,,,J ,,,.
dud come/II am/ .snail ".,/,", o/llhi"1IS ."
'lInd hI! sh .l/ Iv,,", II"
/(llhf'.:h'/d,,17
aml'h'
1,1"" 1"lt;,'J. I,~, I

This cartoon from the January 1902

issue of A Voice from Zion, a monthly
publication, reflects Dowie's growing
fascination with his detractors, which
included not only the popular press but
other pulpiteers.
and Luke 8:43 and 10:33.340 which he
interpreted to mean that prayer alone
was the healer and that all faith must be
put in "the Living God." Consequently,
many medical students at diverse colleges in the area rioted outside Dowie's
lecture halls in Chicago,Hammond,
and
Oak Park, Illinois, on several occasions.
Riots involving as many as a thousand
persons occurred.
While all of this was going on, Dowie
was quietly obtaining options to purchase on approximately
six thousand
acres north of Chicago, a tract large
enough to accommodate
a city of two
hundred
thousand
inhabitants.
His
dreams of establishing Zion, "the ideal
nation or society envisaged by Judaism," was proclaimed to his followers on
New Year's Eve, 1899. Money poured
into the Zion Land Association, which
was to be the vehicle which would design and promote the city.
Dowie's plan was to lease the land for
1,100 years and each lease would forbid
the possession or use of tobacco, liquor,
and swine's flesh anywhere within the
limits of Zion. No drug store or doctor's
office was to be located there. No gambling house, theater, nor dance hall was
ever to receive a license to operate within the boundaries of the community.

Courtesy of the Illinois State

Historical Library.

P.phl'l

OilY "I

IIl'1d7#"./)/#

Ih~ C~,,h# c(lm"II,

M"uJ

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from

ort'lh';?' -;,_/.e

{d.-:
,.,rt;.yr:~,
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Jo,,,,,r

un/o 'Jov

h~ $hO"I/ lPtO"J.

A~/ .:zI~::

Visiting heaven
Two excursions were made by members of the congregation to the site, one
on Washington's birthday (February 22)
and the second on July 14, 1900. On the
latter date, Dowie turned the first sod
on the proposed site of the Zion Temple.
Such a city would need some industry, and a modern lace factory was imported, personnel and all, from Great
Britain. In fact the Leaves of Healing
publication had reached Nottingham,
England, and it encouraged a lace manufacturer there, Samuel Stevenson, to
"cast his lot with the Lord." In order to
keep it "all in the family," Stevenson
married a sister of Dowie while he was
in Chicago setting up the plant. She was
later to return with him to England. This
represented
the introduction of an altogether new industry into the United
States. On July 15, 1901, several subdivisions of the estate were opened and
lots were offered for lease. The boom
was on and soon many tents were
pitched, as construction
on homes
started. By spring 1902, the Elijah Hospice was completed as one of the largest frame buildings in the country and
by summer 1902 one could say that the
semblance of a city had begun.

to be firmly in the hands of the General

Overseer
- Dowie himself. As had
John Calvin- 350 years before in Zurich,
Switzerland, Dowie planned to assume
personal control over the smallest details of the community's existence and
the personal lives of its inhabitants. His
idea was to establish Zions all over the
world, with Jerusalem as the final objective, which he envisioned becoming
the capital of all his cities:
Zion will buy up Jerusalem for
the King. If we can establish three,
four, five, six, seven or more Zion
cities, and can get a million dollars
a year, we can buyout the Turk,
we can buyout the Mohammedan,
we can buyout the Jew, we can
buyout the infidel, and we can get
possession of the sacred site of
Jerusalem, and build it up in preparation for the Coming of Christ
our King to His holy hill of Zion.?
At this point, Dowie became so involved with his building of Zion that he
was diverted from his healing ministry
which was that which had brought him
to the point of Zion to begin. Many years
later other "healers" were to come from
Zion, but beginning in 1901 Dowie's only

A theocracy is born
At this point Dowie began to reveal
his plans of government,
which were
that "Zion is to be a theocracy, not a
democracy" and the rule of the city was
March 1990

6John Calvin (1509-64) (Jean Chauvin),

French theologian.
7Leaves of Healing, 7 June 1902.
American Atheist

News and Comments

concern was with Zion. He also had

come to the habit of taking no counsel
with others on any important matters.
Being then without consultation he relied on his own resources and judgment
- being alone in all decision making.

Below: Towards the end of his life,

Dowie abandoned the simple black and
white robes of his earlier career for an
elaborate costume which he imagined
copied that of Aaron, the high priest described in Leviticus. These he felt were
more appropriate to his role as "First
Apostle."

soap:
And he shall sit as a refiner and
purifier of silver: and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge
them as gold and silver, that they
may offer unto the Lord an offering
in righteousness.

Elijah
It was in this mode that in June of 1901
he declared himself to be Elijah" the
Restorer, whose return to earth was
spoken of many centuries before by the
prophets.
Additionally at this time he came to
identify himself also as the fulfillment of
a prophecy of Moses. He accepted particularly as referring to himself a statement of Moses reciting what the lord
had told Moses (Deut. 18:18-19):
I will raise them up a Prophet
from among their brethren, like
unto thee, and will put my words
in his mouth; and he shall speak
unto them all that I command him.
And it shall come to pass, that
whosoever will not hearken unto
my words which he shall speak in
my name, I willrequire it of him.
In addition, Dowie proclaimed that he
was also the Messenger of the Covenant
as foretold in Mal. 3:1-3:
Behold, I will send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way
before me: and the Lord, whom ye
seek, shall suddenly come to his
temple, even the messenger of the
covenant, whom ye delight in:
behold, he shall come, saith the
Lord of hosts.
But who may abide the day of
his coming? and who shall stand
when he appeareth? for he is like
a refiner's fire, and like fullers'

8Elijah, a Hebrew prophet of the ninth

century B.C. who according to the account
in 1 Kings championed the worship of
Jehovah as against Baal.
Austin, Texas

At this point then, Dowie regarded his

prophetic office as threefold: (1) as
Messenger of the Covenant; (2) as the
Prophet foretold by Moses; and (3) as
Elijah, the Restorer.
These statements were immediately
both challenged and denounced by religious leaders everywhere
and Dowie was in even
more difficulty with his
peers than was usual. Effectively he lost the confidence of every religious
leader in the country. His
only remedy was to spend
more time in his pulpit
denouncing and castigating
his enemies, while delivering what he designated the
"Elijah Restoration
messages." Apparently
while in the throes of conviction that he was indeed
Elijah, he wrote some
letters to his father in which
he repudiated kinship with
dear old dad.
As he turned to Zion he
decided to build a costly executive mansion, elaborately appointed with expensive
furnishings. Money was
coming into the Zion Land
Association and he began
to use it extravagantly. His
wife Jeanie, about this time,
took a trip to Paris, France,
to' come home with a number of "up-to-date" gowns
and jewelry. His son,
Gladstone, was in college,
and his second daughter
Esther was attending
school in Chicago.
March 1990

Tragedy
In the morning of May 14, 1902, Esther, while curling her hair by means of
an iron heated with an alcohol lamp,
spilled the lamp's contents onto her
dress and the carpet, both of which became engulfed in flames. Before she
could unlock the door of her room and
seek help, the skin on three-quarters of
her body was destroyed. She died the
same night. Seven thousand persons
attended the memorial service.
In all recountings of this story only
Dowie was considered and not one
word appeared as to the effect of the

Page 19

News and Comments

tragedy on his wife, or his son and

Esther's brother, Gladstone.

Bickering

Lo, the fruit of Zion

lamation:
Ideclare in the name of the Lord
Jesus Christ, in the power of the
Holy Spirit, in accordance with the
Will of God our Heavenly Father,
that I am, in these Times of Restoration of all things, the First Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, in the
Christian Catholic Apostolic
Church in Zion.

After his daughter's death, a bishop of

the Methodist church in Chicago and
the editor of the Christian World, published in New York, came to see him.
When he held to his Elijah Declaration
in talking with them, an excoriating article was released in the Christian World
regarding his delusions. Dowie immeHe immediately began to make a
diately decided that he would take his
entire congregation to New York, rent series of elaborate plans befitting his
station as the First Apostle. First, he
Madison Square Garden, and attack
both men in sermons. To do this, he first began to sign his name as "John Alexander, First Apostle," repudiating enneeded to disband the old "Seventies"
organizations. In their place he orga- tirely the name "Dowie," which he
nized the Zion Restoration Host. All claimed did not belong to him. He also
members of this group were required to shed the ordinary suits he had worn as
recognize him in his three prophetic of- a minister and began to appear in pretentious costuming. He had designed
fices "as Messenger of the Covenant,
the Prophet foretold by Moses, and for himself a high priest's garment simElijah the Restorer." He was then ready ilar to that described in the Book of Leto do battle in New York and conse- viticus, which was worn by Aaron as
quently chartered eight trains and left high priest.
for New York on October 15, 1903. His
anticipated victorious verbal slugfest did The Mexican caper
At this time, Zion was not enough and
not, however, give him either the satisfaction or the publicity which he desired. he began plans for a Zion Plantation
But it did cost a significant amount of Paradise on millions of acres of land in
money which he - and Zion - could ill Tamaulipas, Mexico. He decided, on
September 24, 1903, to give a last serafford.
The New York World meantime had mon before leaving for Mexico, but was
gained the letters Dowie had written to stricken at the pulpit with a stroke
his father and used these to attack him. which paralyzed his one side. Over all
But when one is a messenger of god, protestations he left for Mexico four
days later, staying in that nation for apone can hardly have a physical father.
proximately two months before returnFirst Apostle
ing to Zion. But as his health did not imWith his attempted counterattack
prove, he departed for Jamaica, where
behind him, Dowie decided it would be he stayed until the first of the next year.
best if he took off for an expensive sixSomewhere in this period, his wife left
month, round-the-world trip, returning him and repaired to the family summer
to Zion on June 30, 1904.His trip appar- home in White Lake, Michigan, together
ently gave him another idea, for he with his son Gladstone. Dowie had orforthwith began plans for declaring him- dained his wife as an elder in the church
self to be the First Apostle. He made the in 1898and had always considered that
formal announcement of this in Septem- she would be first his "Prime Minister"
ber of the same year. Standing in the and then his successor, but the estrangeShiloh Tabernacle and publicly assum- ment of his wife and son in the last years
ing office, he made the following proc- of his life precluded this.
Page 20

March 1990

While he was gone from Zion, at this

time, it was discovered that the money
which had been deposited in the bank
had been used to build up the city, to pay
high rates of interest on the loans given
for that purpose, and for the high standard of living of the Dowies. Everything
was gone. Billscould not be paid. Credit
was refused. There was no money for
payroll at the factories or plants. There
was no money for raw material or supplies to keep either operating. Finally
not even interest could be paid on the
loans of those who had invested in Zion.
By December 1903 a receivership was
appointed for the entire town when it
was found to be hopelessly bankrupt,
facing an indebtedness of six million
dollars. In December 1905, Dowie, then
in Mexico, felt the entire situation could
be saved if Wilbur Glenn Voliva, the
Overseer of the Zion work in Australia,
could be called in and Dowie asked him
to take the next ship to America, which
he did, arriving on February 12, 1906. It
was inevitable that the city ownership
had to be removed from Dowie and this
was effectuated on April 1, 1906,with 95
percent of the people in Zion ratifying
the move by vote. He was removed as
General Overseer, and every member
of the Zion Restoration Host was ordered to publicly renounce his (women
had never been considered for anything
in the church) oath of allegiance to Dowie. It was after this that Dowie, writing in
the summer of 1906, simply signed his
full name and left off the title "First
Apostle."

The end of Dowie

Dowie lived until March 9, 1907. His
last words to those surrounding his bed
were cryptic and bespoke of his idea of
Apostledom. "The millennium has come;
I willbe back for a thousand years." His
body was buried in the city of his dreams,
in a familyplot, in the Lake Mound Cemetery in Zion. His son Gladstone was
also later (1945)buried there, as was his
wife Jeanie in 1933. - M. O'Hair ~
American Atheist

News and Comments

Zion - the old

hen Zion was founded in 1903,
the United States was still basically an agricultural nation. It
had not, as yet, felt the strains of advanced technology, the burst of science,
the rapid proliferation of educational
institutions. Even Chicago was a small
town, and barely over the World's Fair
that had made of it a focus for the world
just a few years before. Almost in the
wilderness, near the shores of enormous
Lake Michigan, out of the small stream
of communications then in place, the
town was deliberately created Onbroad,
flat farmlands.

The history of a strange

little town that survived
almost intact for ninety
years until an Atheist
stumbled upon it.

Where god rules

The motto of the town chosen even
before its birth was "Where God Rules,
Man Prospers." And the declaration of
intent for its founding was put directly:

with the money invested in it purchased

6,500 acres (ten square miles) in Benton
township, Lake County, Illinois. He inspired many who flocked to the area,
erecting tents as temporary shelters as
they began to build their homes. Dowie
structured the city so that no One could
purchase the land. Instead his followers
willingly signed 1,100-year leases since Jesus Christ was expected to return before the leases expired. Everything in the town was biblical, with the
focus point on a beautiful "Shiloh Tabernacle" in the town's central square the first structure erected, large enough
to seat 6,000 persons - an astonishing
size for a church of that era. The large
motto of the church was equally impressive, "Christ Is All and In All."

God's industries and his

workmen

Religion permeated the city. Before

work in the morning in the various industries and at intervals during the
workday, prayer was regularly offered
by the whole community. The workers
were expected to pay tithes (10 percent
off the top of their income) into Jehovah's storehouse, which apparently was
coterminous with Dowie's bank accounts.
The principal industries were the lace
Zion, Illinois, however, was but a profactory imported from Great Britain, the
totype. And as other Zions marched
across the world, its founder knew that Zion Printing and Publishing Company
One day "The Zion" would be built near (which distributed the sermons, testimonies, literature, and the journals of
Jerusalem and would be:
Dowie), the Zion Land Investment Association, and the Zion Bank. The jourthe Seat of the Empire of Jesus
nals issued by the Zion Printing and PubChrist the Son of God when He
lishing Company included Leaves of
comes to reign as the All-conquerHealing, The Coming City, and the Zion
ing Sovereign of the entire world.
Banner.
John Alexander Dowie reached out
Since Dowie was a faith healer, the
to the world with his dream, and SOOn practice of medicine would be forbidden
had 40,000 supporters across the globe in this town. Since he was a teetotaler,
and he asked them each and all to sell so also was drinking forbidden. As he
everything that they owned and come to himself was reared with the biblical rule,
live in his first Zion in Illinois.
there would also be no profanity. The
On February 22,1899, he organized a old devil, tobacco, was used by men in
land development company, the Zion these times and as with their tobacco
Land and Investment Association, and cud it was the habit to spit, both spitZion City was founded, and is
being built, for the purpose of the
extension of the Kingdom of God
upon earth.
It is to this end that it is made a
City where God shall rule in every
department of family, industrial,
commercial, educational, ecclesiastical, and political life.

SUMMARY: Zion, Illinois, was

unashamedly founded as a theocracy,

in which the rules of a particular
Christian sect would be enforced
through the power of the city government. And for years, they were, as
women were forbidden to wear pants
and public school students were taught
that the earth was flat. But even as the
profane world slowly secularized the
town, the marks of religion remained
on all the city's property.

Austin, Texas

March 1990

Page 21

1
News and Comments

Zion Land and Investment

Association

Advertisements for the Zion Land and Investment Association stressed

that the new city would be under the "direct supervision and control of
the General Overseer of the Christian Catholic Church in Zion."

Zion is born

him to maintain his living style and the

The city was duly orga- retinue of a dozen persons who had acnized and incorporated un- companied him on the trip. When his
of
der the laws of Illinois, on health deteriorated, he moved on to
Jamaica where he ordered that $4,000 a
March 31,1902.A Theocratic
-===
====(political) Party was orga- month be remitted.
nized and offered a ticket of
Under the Direct Supervision And Control of the
Oeneral Overseer of the Chri.dJan Catholic Church In Zion
candidates for the municipal The lord does not provide
offices. Naturally, the party
Zion could not withstand the expenses.
won, unanimously, alloffices. Initially the Zion Land and Investment
o safer or better paying investment cau he found than Stock in this
Association.
Shares of Stock
this Association
arc for
each,
A corporate seal was then Association had sought loans promising
par value, upon which six per cent iutc rcst is ~uaralltl.'cd from the
devised on May 6, 1902. a high interest return on the money. As
date of the Certificate,
payable
the first day!'
January
and July in
each year, and a further contingent
dividend
two per cent
he added.
the money was used for the Dowie lifeAgain, with a unanimous
beginning
from July, 1902, provided
the profits of the Associatiuu warrant
vote, it was accepted - be- style, the printing and distribution of his
its heing declared.
Investors are amply secured
by all of the personal
property
interests
ing as it was an exact copy of inspired word, and the building of elabof Zion, amounting
to hundreds
of thousands
of dollnrs. including
the 6500
acres of land contracted
for along the shore of bcautiful Lake \lichig-an,
the
seal of the Christian
orate edifices, it gradually became de::;,
upwards of
acres of which have already been purcha sed I)lLtrig'ht, the
>pleted and the promised interest payCatholic Church which
balance to he taken up as fast as needed.
>'"Articles of Agreement
between the Association
and each Shareholder,
ments could not be met. In addition to
Dowie
headed.
:.J explaining quite fully the object for which this Association is Ionucd. will
Dowie's home was - of the above legitimate funding in Zion,
be forwarded
to prospective
investors
upon application.
These had better
Iii
be secured before remittance
is made.
Rcmittnuccs
can he made either
.S!
course - the first completed: Dowie spent huge sums in ventures
Draft on New York or Chicago, or any of the principa l c-ities in
otl theby Hank
United States, or hy Postofficc or Express
\lone)' Order, and should he
a twenty-five-room mansion such as the New York Visitation and his
this Association.
i payableYour tocorrespondence
at 1300Shiloh Boulevard, at trip around the world. The Zion Home
is solicited.
Any further iufuruunion concern
ro(;)'" this department of Zion will he cheerfully furnished upon upplic.ninu.
a cost of $75,000. Many of in Chicago, on Twelfth Street, also had
the fixtures for it were im- been given expensive alterations. At
'0
ported from Europe: the first, laboring men were encouraged to
Address Your Communications to

porcelain bath, the electric move to Zion to enjoy profit sharing in

-='0'" ZION LAND AND INVESTMENT ASSOCIATION ceiling lights of soft brass. the various industries, but this failed to
The north side of the house materialize and more and more emphaMICHIGAN
BOULEVARD,
CHICAGO
""
was set aside for servants'
sis was placed on a demonstration of re2
>::l
quarters,
with
maid
rooms,
ligious faith by the workers, which, of
Uo L~
kitchens, and other facilities. course, included response to religious
The finest of horses and car- authority. The workmen were expected
toons and spitting were also banned.
riages were housed in the stables at to eke out a meager living of ten or fifThe streets which crisscrossed the Shiloh House. Although $50,000 in fur- teen dollars a week, of which 10percent
acreage all bore biblical names: Elisha, niture was bought from the Tobey Fur- went to tithing. They lived in humble
Enoch, Ezekiel, Ezra, Gilead, Galilee, niture Company in Chicago, Dowie fi- dwellings, furnished with the barest of
Jethro, Nazareth, Bethany - even nally felt that the mansion was not im- necessities. Even so, there soon was no
Bethlehem. None of the streets bore pressive enough and made plans for an money for payrolls, for raw materials or
female names, and women were kept in even more expensive, palatial home at supplies, and the plants.had no operattheir place. The male dominated and Lewis Avenue and Carmel Boulevard. ing funds. One of the obligations of the
curiously the rule came that no woman This was to be built and fitted out for the industries had been to place their recould wear male attire, particularly
entertainment of nobility and the royal- ceipts in the bank's general fund, inpants.
ty of the world. In addition, more than stead of in their operating accounts.
Dowie's Leaves of Healing journal $25,000 was spent on BenMacDhui, his When the bank's general fund was finalwas widely distributed, and on July 14, summer home in White Lake, Michigan. ly exhausted, Dowie simply issued cou1900,ten thousand people assembled to
But there was soon to be questioning pons to the employees in lieu of legal
consecrate the land. Eleven trains trans- in god's ideal city on earth, for Dowie tender, which could be used in Zionported the crowds from Chicago, the suffered several strokes and his own owned stores. At this point, with the city
nearest big city. Just one year later, by prayers and faith healing failed to cor- $6 million in debt, it was impossible to
July 15, 1901, all the lots offered had rect the consequences of them. When continue to give money to the ailing
been leased and on August 15, 1901,the he traipsed off first to Mexico, he de- Dowie. In December 1903, with Dowie
first resident moved in.
manded that $2,000 a month be sent to again in Mexico, now demanding $2 milIs Organized for the Purpose of Securing the Site
and to Transact all Buslness in Connection
with
the Building up and the Permanent
Establbhment

ZION CITY

ill

!\IOO

011

IIf

(If

(II

1000

.D

ill).;"

<J)

1300

<J)

H. WORTHINGTON
JUDO,
Secretary and General

Page 22

DANIEL

nanacer

5LOAN,
Assistant

naNller

March 1990

American Atheist

News and Comments

Below: The fruit of tithing. Shiloh House

was Dowie's ample reward for building
his church.

lion to purchase land there for a Zion

Plantation Paradise, the city was placed
in receivership. Dowie then turned to
prayer and to an old cohort, Wilbur
Glenn Voliva, who had dutifully continued the work of the Christian Catholic
Church in Australia -when Dowie had
sent him there some years before.
Volivaagreed to come to the rescue, but
upon his arrival in Zion he found that the
town was, indeed, hopelessly bankrupt.

Dowie's bankruptcy
Dowie was totally unable to understand the ordinary laws that govern
either business or economics. He knew
only that the lord had called him to fulfillprophecy and that he was preparing
the world for the coming of the Millennium and the Return of J. e. He had
completely abandoned his ministry of
cancer (and other) healing and lived
only in his dreams. Meanwhile, Zion had
barely survived the winter of 1903. Because of the lack of raw materials, sev-

Right: Employee and employer working

together under Zion's banner was not
the only emphasis of this cartoon from
the June 27,1900, issue of Coming City.
The panel behind the figures gives biblical support for tithing, and the original
caption asked, "Shall Christ or Labor
Union Control?"

eral of the factories had to be shut

down. Many people had been thrown
out of work. Even the Leaves of Healing
was forced to suspend publication from
May 1907 to February 1908 because of
the lack of funds to purchase paper.
Overseer Voliva could find no way
out. Prayer was not efficacious. Therefore the entire estate was sold, for one
dollar, to one of the three men attempting to save the city. This man, Deacon
Alexander Granger, then executed a
deed of trust which declared that he
held all of the property in trust for the
creditors of Dowie, including all investors and members of the church. In
April 1906, when Dowie challenged Voliva, a court approved of the scheme to
try to save Zion. The mortgage on
Dowie's home was later paid off by an
admirer. At this time, the lace factory
was purchased by Marshall Field of Chicago which used it for the manufacture
of fine lace, lace tablecloths, and related
items until 1952, when it was sold to a

Courtesy of the Illinois State Historical Library.

television manufacturing firm.

A revitalization
Voliva attempted to bring business
methods into Zion and was probably responsible for its survival. He split the administration of the city into four cabinets: Ecclesiastical, Educational, Commercial, and Political as he focused on
the statement of J.e.: "Thy Kingdom
come. Thy will be done on earth as it is
in heaven."!

And the will of the lord was Zion

The city remained in receivership
from 1906 to 1909. The Zion Home, a
350-room structure was, during this
time, converted into the "The North
Shore Inn." Zion General Stores were
reopened, as was the Zion Department
Store. By 1910an offer was made to the
receiver to purchase the estate and this
was effectuated, with the city becoming
the property of the Christian Catholic
Church. Soon there was a Zion Candy
Factory, the Zion Bakery, Zion Feed
Store, Zion Dairy, Zion Curtain Factory,
and Zion Apron and Handkerchief Factory. Zion Fig Bars and Zion White Dove
Chocolates became known nationally.
At one point the bakery was putting out
more than a million fig bars per day. A

-Matt. 6:10.

Austin, Texas

March 1990

Page 23

News and Comments

Top: This cartoon from the church paper The Coming City (November 14, 1900)
succinctly explained the point of education in the city that Dowie built.
Bottom: What this theory of learning meant to science education was demonstrated
by articles which appeared in the May 10, 1930,edition of Leaves of Healing, a special issue devoted to debunking the theory of a spherical earth.

L ,.; A

E S

() F

II E .\ L [ " (i

Ten Reasons Why a Christian Should

Reject Modern Astronomy
By Apostle Anton Darms

CHRlSTL\~
has nn right to accept tilt: tt'<ll'hillJ,{ ~,i
Modern
Astronomy.
for it is in direct contrudictiou
to the Word of God. Hetwcen the teaching oi ~ltldtrtl
Astronomy
and the teaching
llf the
Bible on the l'tl~ll\llguny
\.1 the universe
there is a great gulf.
The Hible speaks of
the earth resting upon foundations
and of the :-;\10. muon and
<tars being placed above it to gi,'e light to the world.
Modern
Astronomy
stoutly denies this position. teaching that the earth
i:, globular
in form, traveling
with three different
motions at
{he sante time. in its course around
the sun. in a universe
composed
of untold millions "of worlds that fill the vast expause of space!
}l.LJt.

('1.IUlIl

ur

)hNtf'rll

Atltrunolll)"

The teaching of the Bible oil the cosmogony of the universe

I~ looked
upon by man)' as foolish and childish in the lil-:ht of
uodern science"
Modern Astrouomjclaims to Kivl;'" a better.
truer conception of the universe than is found in the writings
If Moses, Job. Isaiah and the teaching of Jesus the Christ.
It
3 no wonder that those accepting
the tenets of Modern Astron.my have lost faith in the Bible as the revelation of Cod. Some
.vell-meuuiug people: have snu~h( to apologize for till' so-called

Page 24

sidcrcd of little ur no importance is what the Bible teaches 011 tilt'

Iunuaticn of the universe.
However,
this should be of vital
importnuce
to every child of God-c-to know all hc can of the
world ill which we live. Co<..Isoug-ht to impart this vital knowledge
to man by the teaching of His Inspired \\ord. so that he would
have a proper understanding
of this important subject.
.\11 Hcrlpturf<l hi IIl~plrt'(l

Mnd :\IWlt. be At'N."pted a \\'hol

"All Scripture
is given by inspiration
of God.
. . that
the man uf God may be perfect. thoroughly
furnished
unto all
good works'
(II Timothy 3:16. 17). Ii the first chapters of
Genesis giving the story of Creation are unreliable. it holds true
that the last chapters of Revelation describing the Heavenly Jerusalem also are: unreliable.
A Cbristian-c-belicving
that the sacred
Scriptures are inspired uf tiod-e-should
be as ready and w illin~
III accept
the teaching of the Bible
the formation of the universe as he is to accept Cod's plan of Salvation and Redempriou
through Christ Jesus.
r\ Christian believes, with Peter that "we have a more SL'RE
WORD OF PROPHECY.
whereunto
ye do well that ye take
heed, as unto a lig-ht that shineth in a dark place" (II Peter 1 :19).
fin

March 1990

Christian Broadcasting Company was

begun in 1922and sermons and religious
music were broadcast daily on WCBD,
Zion.
A special purchase was the Shiloh
Tabernacle and in it Voliva placed one of
the largest pipe organs in the world,
combining seven organs with five thousand pipes built by the Felgemaker
Organ Company of Erie, Pennsylvania,
and dedicated on June 12, 1912. The
Choir Gallery was remodeled to accornmodate 304 choristers, and steel beams
were installed to support a vaulted
ceiling.
Meanwhile there was contention
about the theocracy and attempts were
made from time to time to convert Zion
into "an all-American City," complete
with democratic elections. This was resisted. In response to this, blue laws
were passed in 1913;and in 1914the sale
and possession of firearms were prohibited. Voliva staunchly believed that
the city was meant to be inhabited only
by people who had the purpose of extending "the Kingdom of God" and that
every life in the city needed to be consecrated to god. In addition he demanded that a "tithe of the young," i.e., 10percent of the youth population, must be
dedicated to evangelical duties "in every
land and nation, to tell of the Saviour,
the Healer, the Cleanser, the Keeper,
the Restorer of all men."

The flat earth

But Voliva, too, had a quirk. He, as
Dowie, was a literalist as far as the Bible
was concerned and since the Bible obviously depicts a flat earth," flat earth it
2Dan. 4:1011: "Thus were the visions of
mine head in my bed; I saw, and behold a
tree in the midst of the earth, and the height
thereof was great. The tree grew, and was
strong, and the height thereof reached unto
heaven, and the sight thereof to the end of
all the earth;" Matt. 4:8: "Again, the devil
taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of
the world, and the glory of them."
American Atheist

News and Comments

and healeth them.
Leaves of Healing was the flagship publication of the Christian Catholic Church.
It is still published today, though its
masthead now sports the seal of the
church, which is the same as the seal of
the city of Zion.
was. He could rebut anyone with a quick
biblical fillip about "the four corners of
the earth" from Isaiah 11:12.3 In his sermons as the new overseer of the church,
Voliva introduced the doctrine of the
"flat earth" and established this teaching in the schools of -Zion. His contention was that the North Pole was at the
center of the "flat earth" and the "socalled South Pole" was a hypothetical
area hemmed in with high impassable
mountains which could not be traversed.
He envisaged the world as a pancake
with the South Pole distributed around
its circumference. A huge wall of snow
and ice prevented ships from sailing off
the edge and falling into Hades. Hades
existed, for Voliva, as a subbasement
where the spirits of a race that flourished on earth before the time of Adam
now dwelt. The stars, he explained,
were much smaller than the earth and
rotate around it. The moon was self. luminous. As for the sun, Voliva explained it briefly:
The idea of a sun millions of
miles in diameter and 91,000,000
miles away is silly. The sun is only
thirty-two miles across and not
more than 3,000 miles from the
earth. It stands to reason it must
be so. God made the sun to light
the earth, and therefore
must
have placed it close to the task it
was designed to do."
Subscribing fully to the flat earth theory,
Voliva banned conventional astronomy
from the schools of Zion. The sixty-fourpage May 10, 1930, issue of Leaves of
Healing was, in fact, devoted completely
to an attack on astronomy. He regarded
all astronomers
as "poor, ignorant,

3See Robert J. Schadewald, "The Plane

Truth Confronts Creationism," American
Atheist, July 1988, pp. 3740.
4Martin Gardner, Fads and Fallacies in the
Name of Science (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1957), p. 17.
Austin, Texas

~~~~

OLUME LXVI. No.9.

ZION. ILLINOIS. U. S. A. SATURDAY. MAY 10. 1930

conceited fools" and for years offered

$5,000 to anyone who could prove to
him that the earth was spherical, and in
fact made several trips around the world
lecturing on the subject.
Although Voliva predicted the end of
the world to come in 1923, 1927, 1930,
and 1935, it did continue
and Zion
continued also but with financial difficulties. Voliva was so certain of the end of
the world that in 1936 he renamed the
Leaves of Healing publication The Final

Warning.

Where god rules, man prospers?

During the Great Depression (192932), taxes could not be paid on the vast
land holdings of the church and Zion
was again forced into receivership. A
large portion of the idle land had to be
sold, and with the money therefrom the
church was again reorganized. In 1937,
the great Shiloh Tabernacle
and the
50,000-watt radio station, WCBD (later
WAIT), were both set afire by an incendiarist and destroyed. Another tabernacle was built, but the radio station was
lost forever. But Voliva was determined
on survival and the lace factory was continued as was the manufacture
of fig
bars. By 1952, however, New York University owned controlling interest in
Zion Industries.
The teaching in the schools remained
evangelical until at least 1942, the year in
which Wilbur Glenn Voliva died. He had
maintained that he would live until the
age of 120 on a special diet of Brazil nuts
and buttermilk, but unfortunately
for
him, he did not make it. In later years,
a municipal election found sufficient
voters to repeal the "theocratic laws"
originally instituted
by Dowie. Both
tobacco and liquor came to be sold in
March 1990

Price

Fifty Cents

the city. Theatres and other places of

amusement were built.

The outreach of healing

The missionaries
did not go forth
from Zion as Dowie had hoped, but the
city did produce a number of ministers
who claimed to be able to heal through
prayer. These included E E Bosworth
and his brother B. B. Bosworth, whose
healing campaigns
filled auditoriums
throughout the land in the 1920s. John
G. Lake took the same message to
South Africa where he held forth into
the 1950s. Dr. Phineas Yoakum went to
Los Angeles to found the Pisgah Work.
And Raymond T. Richey's healing ministry became the phenomenon of a later
time.
Meanwhile, of course, the Christian
Catholic Church continued
its existence as an evangelical
Protestant
church headquartered
in Zion with ministerial outreaches in Australia, Canada,
Guyana, Israel, Japan, the Philippines,
South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
It continued to exist under the administration of an overseer and maintained its
"healing" outreach.
From the World War II era forward,
much of the religious dominance eroded away, but not without rancor and
infighting. In 1986 Zion consisted
of
18,000 citizens. Its industrial parks included twenty-two divergent industries,
including the world's largest nuclear
power plant. In the city are twenty-nine
churches representing that many brands
of religion. However, at that time, the
current mayor was a born-again Christian who continued daily religious broadcasting on the city's lone radio station.
And life went on as it always had. Madalyn O'Hair ~
Page 25

News and Comments

Zion - The New

n March 31, 1986,Robert I. Sherman, Midwest director of American Atheists, needed to drive to
Winthrop Harbor on the Wisconsin
border to visit a business client. On that
fateful day, he decided to take the shore
route with its lighter traffic. As he entered the city limits of Zion, he could
hardly accept that his eyes were registering correctly. The city's water tower
was adorned with an enormous seal
which depicted a cross, a dove, a crown
and scepter, and a ribbon on which
were the words "God
reigns." Stunned, he
turned to drive deliberately through
the town. The
signs for god
were everywhere not alone
on
the
townwater tower, but on
street signs,
on city vehicles
police cars
and ambulances - on the
shoulder patches
of police and firemen's uniforms, on garbage trucks, on the tax stickers affixed to the windshields of all of
the parked motor vehicles. Every street
carried the name of a biblical reference.
In all directions he saw the religious
symbols or the slogan "God Reigns,"
even alternately "Where God Rules,
Man Prospers."

t+J

Almost at the end of

the twentieth century,
Zion, Illinois, after nine
decades of theocratic
rule, finally enters the
modern world.

SUMMARY: Rob Sherman, Midwest di-

rector of the American Atheists,

attempted to persuade Zion, Illinois, to
stop its unconstitutional practice of
affixing religious slogans and symbols
to city property. Persuasion, however,
failed, so the Society of Separationists,
Inc. and a Zion citizen sued the city in
order to have the Christian emblems
lemoven - -ann won.

Page 26

What to do?
Upon his return to Chicago, he called
the American Atheist GHQ. Should he
do something about it? Was there a
member ot the organ\zati.on \n the
town? GHQ gave a sigh of relief; there
was one. Sherman could complain and
he immediately did. On April 2, just two
March 1990

days later, there was a city council meeting in Zion, and he drove north again to
attend it and to lodge a formal complaint
that the seal, originally that of the Christian Catholic Church which founded the
city, violated the "Establishment Clause"
of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as did the
two slogans.
But the city council opened with a
benediction by the city chaplain, and a
city commissioner told Mr. Sherman "to
go somewhere else where he was wanted." Amid the hubbub, one resident,
addressing Mr. Sherman, told him that
"this country was built on Christianity"
and if Robert Sherman didn't like that,
he could leave it.
Meanwhile it was discovered back at
the GHQ that our member with the address of Zion, lived three blocks outside
of the corporate limit of the city. All was
m vam.

Persuasion fails
Mr. Sherman was advised that perhaps nothing could be done legally unless he could find another actual resident of Zion who would agree to challenge the proliferating religious graffiti.
Did he want to try the avenue of persuasion? He did, and he went back to the
city council again and again. In one session he told the council,
This is the most clear-cut and
dramatic case in American history
of a town floutingthe constitutional
rule of separation of state and
church.
The Illinois Civil Liberties Union
counsel agreed with him but in an extended conversation with Dr. O'Hair at
the American Atheist GHQ, he felt that
"a more appropriate plaintiff" than an
Atheist would be needed. Meanwhile,
the mayor of the city began a campaign
on h\s rad\o -program, ""TheHeart and
Heaven Hour," to have the residents of
Zion pray for Robert I. Sherman's soul.
Unfortunately prayers began to ask god
American Atheist

News and Comments

The Zion-Benton News soon featured

full-page advertisements asking for
$100,000 to challenge a court decision
that the seal was unconstitutional.

to kill Sherman in an automobile accident Also, the city began a fund "to
finance a legal battle to keep the religious symbols in the Zion city seaL" The
Zion State Bank, owned by the church,
was set up to receive money coming in
to "Save Our Seal." Bumper stickers
began to appear all over town. Pat Robertson's National Legal Foundation
promised to help Zion, as did Emily
Sears, a member of the founding family
of Sears, Roebuck and Company. And
the Ku Klux Klan based in the city supported both the city and seaL The Chicago newspapers, in insulting editorials,
decried that Atheists would be concerned with such an "historical artifact"
in such an "obscure location." Meanwhile, supporters of the religious graffiti were suggesting that residents put
crosses atop their homes or buildings.
On April 16, 1986, four Klansmen in
full regalia turned up at the Zion city
council meeting. By this time, Mr. Sherman was wearing a bulletproof vest
every time he ventured out As he went
back again and again to the city council
a rule was made that Sherman had no
right to speak. This was based on a
statement of one commissioner regarding any city council meeting:

fusing Sherman, again, any right to

speak. The city attorney was, of course,
permitted to hold forth and decreed that
the city could continue the use of the
seal everywhere since it was of "historical significance."

A litigant is found
Sherman spent almost a year attempting to locate someone in Zion who
would agree, in this atmosphere of
hatred, to be a litigant challenging the religious symbolism everywhere. And he

found a professional photographer,

Clint Harris, an Atheist who lived in the
heart of the town.
American Atheists immediately agreed
to file suit seeking to enjoin the use of
the religious symbols with Clint Harris
and the Society of Separationists, Inc.,
as the plaintiffs.
The seal of the city particularly was
under fire. It represented, American
Atheists held, an endorsement of religion from the beginning of its use, identifvinq completely with the Christian

SAVE THE CITY

OF ZION SEAL
Attend the first meeting of the "Save the City of Zion
Seal Campaign" on Tuesday, March 27, at 7 p.m.,
in the Zion City Hall City Council Room.
The Save the City of Zion Seal Campaign needs
your help. We need to raise $100,000 to launch
a successful legal battle to restore the use of our
city's great seal.
A federal judge ruled that the symbol used in
the City of Zion's seal infringed the Consdturional guarantee of separation between church and
state.
Members of the Save the City of Zion Seal
Campaign Committee believe differently and are
ready to fight the legal decision which banned
use of the seal.

Fighting a legal decision is difficult. It takes

time. patience, great skill and a great deal of
money. And we need your help in each of these
areas to make our campaign a success.
Please attend the first meeting of the Save
the City of Zion Seal Campaign on Tuesday,
March 27, 7 p.m., in the City Council Room at
Cj,y Hall. 2828 Sheridan Road.
We will talk about what we need to do to win
our fight and what you can do to help. City of
Zion Mayor Adeline Gee-Karis will be the featured speaker.

Demonstrate your Constitutional right to assemble. The bigger the audience, the stronger our
resolve to fight and to win.
Please mail your contributions to: Save the
Seal Fund .P.O. Box 248, Zion, 11I.,60099. For
more information. please call 70Sn46-4460.
Save the City of Zion Seal Campaign
Chairpersons:
Judy McCullough
Irene Zukley
Finance Committee:
Carol Reusch
Stephen Weinstein

This is not a public meeting, it is

a meeting being held in public, and
we have the right to control who
speaks to us.
Sherman countered with a "Save Our
Constitution" campaign and the lone
Atheist in the Zion area sent a check for
$1,000 to kick it off. He was, however,
receiving death threats regularly and
depicted as at least a communist, but
more likely a Soviet spy. Despite it all,
the city attorney had promised to get
back to Sherman within six weeks of his
first complaint and to give his legal opinion then. That day arrived on May 21,
1986, and was characterized by nine
Klansmen showing up at the city council meeting, a rock-throwing incident in
the parking lot, and the city council reAustin, Texas

THIS AD IS PROVIDED AS A COMMUNITY SERVICE

BY AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL HOSPITAL
March 1990

Page 27

News and Comments

SAY]
Catholic Church. Not so, claimed Zion.
But then it was possible to obtain the
"Minutes of First Meeting of City Council Held at Zion City, Illinois, Tuesday
Evening, May 6, AD., 1902," and everything was clear. The minutes revealed
that Dowie himself presented the seal of
the Christian Catholic Church to the
council and asked that an ordinance be
passed to accept it as the city seal and
never to put the seal "to anything that
God does not approve" and for all to act
as "God's minister in the Eternal Covenant" for the use of the seal. He continued:
Look at that Dove which is the
emblem of the Holy Spirit, bearing
the message of Peace and Love
over the seas. The Cross represents everything to us in Redemption, Salvation, Healing, Cleansing,
and Keeping Power.
The Sword is the Sword of the
Spirit, which is the Word of God.
The Crown is the Crown of Glory, the Crown of Joy, the Crown of
High Righteousness, the Crown of
Rejoicing.
The first officialact of the council was
to adopt the Seal of Zion City - which
was the seal of the Christian Catholic
Church.

A suit is filed
On August 18, 1987,Jon Murray, the
president of American Atheists, flew to
Chicago and the three of them Robert I. Sherman, Clint Harris, and
Jon Murray - faced the press as they
filed a suit (Harris u. City of Zion) in the
United States [Federal] District Court in
Chicago, Illinois.The mayor of Zion was
furious: "You don't have to look at the
seal. No one inflicted it upon him. If he
wants a fight he is going to get it."
The city of Zion then hired a firm of
attorneys to defend its use of the religious seal and for the next eighteen
months American Atheists were hard
put to pursue the case in the war of atPage 28

trition that the attorneys devised - at

high cost. The court demanded the appearance of American Atheists' attorney
for every motion filed and airline and hotel expenses escalated as he flew back
and forth between Austin, Texas, and
Chicago, Illinois.The law firm demanded
depositions and both Jon Murray and
the American Atheists' attorney had to
attend for several days, in Chicago, as
did both Mr. Sherman and Mr. Harris.
The "Motions" battle was ferocious as
the Zion attorneys attempted to challenge the right of Harris and of Society
of Separationists to sue, attempted to
have the case thrown out of court, attempted to claim that the case did not
present an issue which could be decided by the court.
After this came the long fallow time
when everyone just waited to see what
the court would do.
March 1990

Victory
Then, eighteen months later, on February 9, 1990,the district court decision
was handed down. The seal was indeed
unconstitutional and the city of Zion
was ordered to remove it from all city
property.
The Chicago suburban area papers
screamed with headlines, "Zion city seal
ruled unconstitutional," "Judge rules
against Zion's Logo," "Zion's mayor
vows to fight judge's ban on use of city
seal," "City seal held unconstitutional."
But curiously, across the nation not a
word was seen in any other media. After
the highly publicized three-and-one-halfyear fight in which Mr. Sherman had engaged with Zion, suddenly with the win
in favor of American Atheists, the whole
story was no longer "newsworthy. "*
What the judge actually said in his
decision of February 9 was:
American Atheist

Left: Bumper stickers

were quickly
printed up to drum up support for the
symbol of a theocracy. No doubt it was
also hoped that they would help to distinguish "loyal citizens"
from First
Amendment-sympathizers.
Below left: Robert Sherman and Jon
Murray gave an impromptu press conference after filing the suit against Zion.
Below: Our hero, Clint Harris, the one
Zion resident brave enough to stand up
to an entrenched theocracy. He savors
the victory in front of a soon-to-be redecorated city water tower.

bN, ILLINOIS
In Harris u. City of Zion we [the
court] ...
hold that the seal,
emblem, and logo of the City of
Zion violate the First Amendment
of the United States Constitution,
and therefore enjoin the City of
Zion from their continued use.
The seal or logo appears on the
city flag, on the city letterhead, in
the City Council chambers, on the
city vehicle stickers of all vehicles
operated by city residents, on the
shoulder patch of the city police
officers and fire fighters, on the
city's water tower located near
Ninth Street in Zion, on all city
street signs, and on all city-owned
vehicles.
We find that the City of Zion's
seal, emblem, and logo have the
effect of endorsing a Christian
message ....
We therefore permanently enjoin the display of the
City of Zion's seal, emblem, and
logo in their current forms.

The mayor announced that she would

order the continued use of the seal, emblem, and logo until all appeals were
exhausted and Mr. Sherman announced
that he would seek an order for their
immediate removal - appeal pending
or not. On February 19 the city council
met and although the suit was not discussed, the consensus of opinion of the
media in the Chicago area was that Zion

will appeal the case.

But, like it or not, the town of Zion
must come fullinto the twenty-first century. It cannot retain its religious flavor,
its religious graffiti, its religious official
symbols. Inevitably, the Constitution of
the United States must lay the foundation for all political units in the nation whether Zion likes it or not. - Madalyn
O'Hair~

It was almost too good to be true. But

the Zion mayor, who said she "respectfully disagrees with the judge," immediately began a campaign to push the
city's inhabitants to support an appeal.
An entire page of the Zion-Benton News
newspaper was given over to "Comments on Zion seal case" with everyone
decrying that an Atheist had attacked
the town's history. A particularly cogent
recollection was repeated about the
costs of appeal of the suit by Zion.

*See story on "Zion" in the American Atheist, July 1986, pp. 8-14.
Austin, Texas

March 1990

Page 29

The Probing Mind

Race and religion

Are we genetically
programmed to be
religious and racist?

We are white Christian soldiers

standing against crime, evil, and
corruption ... Our king and leader
is God Almighty, our doctrine is the
Holy Bible. God is on our side.
- White Patriot Party leader
Glenn Miller
(Raleigh, North Carolina, 1986)

acist programming on television

has become a reality in a number
of American cities, as community
access cable television channels' spread
across the country. In Columbus, Ohio,
where I myself produce the local edition
of the "American Atheist TV Forum" for
cable consumption, the cable access
community recently was rocked by the
advent of the program "Race and Reason," a racist foray into the free speech
arena. Although many other cities have
tried to suppress this program - some
even contemplating closing down cable
access television to avoid hearing racist
propaganda - Columbus decided that
the sacrifice of free speech was too
great a price to pay for the exclusion of
repugnant programming. It allowed the
program to be aired during the half-hour
immediately preceding the "American
Atheist Forum."
Prior to the broadcast, however,
there was a great deal of hustle and
bustle on the part of the cable access
channel staff. A variety of religious and
civic organizations were asked to contribute opposing programs to be aired
during the evening hours preceding the
racist broadcast. Even American Atheists was approached for this purpose.

Formerly a professor of biology and

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

Frank R. Zindler
Page 30

lIn many cities serviced by cable television

companies, a part of the revenue received
from cable rentals is allocated for a special
studio facility used to produce television
programming created by ordinary members
of the community. Although such programs
can run the gamut of subjects from astrology
to Gay rights and Cajun cooking, the vast
majority of the programs are religious. Many
are little more than video recordings of local
Holy Roller meetings.
March 1990

(Due to logistical problems, however,

we were unable to broadcast our program until the following week.)
Predictably, B'nai B'rith produced a
moving documentary on the evils of racism when practiced outside of Israel.
Liberal Christians presented discussions of the subject. There was much
clucking of tongues and pious moralizing. Predictable also was the fact that no
one - from the first antidotal program
aired after supper up to the neverbefore-seen disclaimer ("The views expressed in the following program ... ")
flashed on the screen just before the
10:30 P.M. debut of "Race and Reason"
- mentioned the fact that racism has its
roots deep in the murky depths of religious reflexology. To compensate for
this deficiency, the Columbus edition of
the "American Atheist TV Forum"
broadcast the following week was titled
"Race and Religion."
The actual "Race and Reason" broadcast- must have been quite shocking to
liberal Christian viewers: not because of
hate-filled rhetoric in the program (there
was none), but because the main protagonist of the presentation was a clergyman - Pastor Robert Miles, of the
Mountain Church in Michigan. Reverend Miles espoused a variant of the
"Anglo-Israelite" doctrine, holding that
the Jews of today are not really Jews,
being Ashkenazim deriving from the
conversion of the Khazars. Precisely
how the English, Bulgarians, Bosnians,
and Scots have come to be descendants
of the true Jews was not discussed on
the program. (However, many persons
holding similar views believe these peoples to be descended from the "ten lost
tribes of Israel.") The central message of
the program was that racism and religion are sweetly compatible. And of
course, that message is largely true.

2The program aired only once, although it

was clearly intended to be a series. I have
been unable to learn why no further programs
were aired.
American

Atheist

Religious roots of racism

The roots of the relationship between
racism and religion run far back into the
evolutionary past. Racism is merely a
special form of xenophobia." Ifxenophobia involves fear of persons who are
merely "foreign," a fortiori it willinvolve
fear of persons of other races, who quite literally - wear their foreignness
upon their faces. In the present day,
when it is desperately necessary that
people of all sorts learn to live together
on the delicate spacecraft that supports
their odyssey through space and time,
xenophobia is a trait they well can do
without. In the remote past, however,
xenophobia appears to have served an
important evolutionary function. If the
theorizing of sociobiologists be correct
- and an increasing amount of evidence appears to indicate it is largely so
- xenophobia helped to accelerate the
course of evolution when our ancestors
were still at the evolutionary stage
where the largest social groups were
clans and tribes.
To oversimplify only a bit, xenophobia
helped to keep the gene pools of various
small groups fairly isolated from each
other. This allowed for "group selection"
to occur. Instead of individuals surviving
or perishing in the struggle for existence,
groups of individuals survived or perished. This presumably accelerated the
rate of genetic change in the species as
a whole. It is not unreasonable to suppose, therefore, that there may be a genetic factor biasing us towards xenophobic behavior.' The function of xenophobia, basically, is to sharpen the distinction between in-group and outgroups ("us" and "them") and to inten-

3Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary

defines "xenophobia" as "fear and hatred of
strangers or foreigners or of anything that is
strange or foreign." The word derives from
the Greek xenos, "strange." I prefer to define the term somewhat more broadly, as
"fear and hatred of anyone who differs noticeably from the norm of one's in-group."
Austin, Texas

sify competition, motivating the elimination of out-group gene pools.

For success in the struggle for group
survival, however, more than clear definition of group boundaries is necessary.
In-group cohesion and cooperation also
are essential - and that is where religion has come into the picture of human
evolution. Religion, harnessing the
forces of hypnosis and suggestion via
the medium of rhythmic chanting and
dancing, was just what was needed to
fuse the individuals of a tribe into a kind
of super-organism, a collective entity
that could combine the singleness of
purpose and efficiency of an individual
with the power of a mob. The all-night
war dances of certain Amerindian tribes
are suggestive of the original function
played by religion at the precivilized
stage of human evolution. Once the re4This bias is, of course, not absolute and can
be overridden by conditioning. In the absence
of conditioning, however, we willmore likely
than not respond xenophobically when opportunities present themselves - if this
sociobiological hypothesis be true.

",...--'-"'--

1
{

----,-- ----- ,,--- --- ,...".... ~

ligious shamans had gotten the warriors

into a trance, they could be sent off to
war as anxiety-free machines that could
be counted on to do their utmost to
wipe out the genetic competition. Thus,
there is the possibility that there may be
a genetic bias favoring religiosity (i.e.,
the ability to be hypnotized, brainwashed, and sent off to fight for the
survival of the in-group) as well as a bias
favoring xenophobia. While it is not yet
certain that genes for xenophobia and
religiosity exist, it is quite clear that religion and xenophobia have been partners since long before the appearance
of written records.
It is a fact that the racial features of
the gods and goddesses that people
have invented (ignoring, of course, the
deities modelled after animals) almost
always have coincided with those of
their creators. The African gods are
black, often with their race-defining features being exaggerated. The deities of
the Asians look Oriental. It comes as no
surprise that the gods of the Caucasoids
are depicted as white: Jesus, Thor,

-/
-:

1-

",.--

I,

..........-.

1
\
l

\ l \"-- /1'"
! --~" /~~~C
~

~"""'-- '""'--~
'-

~-\-r-------'"'-,-/
I

---J1

March 1990

Page 31

Once the religious shamans had gotten the warriors into a trance,
they could be sent off to war as anxiety-free machines
that could be counted on to do their utmost
to wipe out the genetic competition.
Zeus, Mithra - none of them could be
confused with a resident of the Congo
or Rangoon. In keeping with the notion
that each religion is responsible for enhancing the social cohesion of a particular group of people, it is not surprising to
learn that nearly every-religion considers its own little group to be "god's
chosen people."
If it be true that the original function
of religion in the course of evolution was
to enhance the selective advantage of
the in-group at the expense of outgroups, we should expect that religions
which have managed to survive from
ancient tribal times up to the present
would stillshow traces of their racist beginnings and would exhibit at least some
degree of self-definition along racial
lines. Unfortunately, almost all such reo
ligions went extinct long ago - at least
in the Middle East, where written records
survive in quantities great enough to
allowsome understanding of their nature.
To my knowledge, the only modern
Middle Eastern religions surviving from
ancient tribal times are Judaism and
Samaritanism.> Since Samaritanism is
nearly extinct - and thus not a very
good example ifone is studying religious
strategies conferring a survival advantage upon a group! - we are left with
Judaism as the only suitable religion
with which to test the hypothesis that
religion promotes racism and xenophobia in general, and that racism and
xenophobia in turn have been associated with increased survival rates."

The racist dimensions of Judaism

It is striking that the most common
definition of what constitutes a Jew is
biological, not theological: a Jew is a
person born to a Jewish mother. It is a
small step in "logic" from this genetic
definition of Jewishness to the notion
that the Jews constitute a special "race."
Hitler and his crackpot eugenicists did
not invent the idea of "the Jewish race";
they accepted the idea gratefully from
the Jews themselves. To the extent that
the Jews have succeeded in maintaining
Page 32

the "purity" of their "race," they have

succeeded in isolating and preserving
an in-group gene poo\.
One of the ways the "purity" of the
Jewish gene pool has been maintained
has been through strong prohibition or
discouragement of miscegenation intermarriage with Gentiles. The entire
ninth chapter of the book of Ezra is, in
fact, aimed at maintaining the racial
purity of the Jews. A few verses willsuffice as examples: 7
The people of Israel, the priests,
and the Levites have not held
themselves aloof from the peoples

SIslam,of course, also is a religion created in

a tribal environment. However, the lateness
of its creation and the fact that it incorporated material from Judaism and Christianity
long after they had become the religions of
civilized (i.e., non-tribal) peoples makes it
unclear to me how much can be learned
from a study of Islam. It is interesting, however, that Islam distinguishes between
"People of the Book" and heathens. At the
time of Mohammed, the "People of the
Book" were largely Semites like the Arabs.
The term included the Jews and the Christians. Although by the time of Mohammed
Christianity had infected a wide variety of
different peoples throughout the territory of
the Roman Empire, it is likely that the Christians known to Mohammed were of Semitic
derivation. Hence, the distinction between
in-group (People of the Book) and out-group
(heathens) was essentially the distinction
between Semites and non-Semites. Although
the subject of racism in Islam requires much
more study, cursory examination seems to
indicate that Islam, like Judaism, originally
functioned to enlarge a small gene pool (e.g.,
a small assemblage of Semitic tribes), and
thus was essentially racist in nature.
61tis important that we not fall into the fallacious Roman Catholic principle of "natural
law," the notion that what is natural is "right"
and that what is unnatural is "wrong." While
it may very well be true that we are here
today because of the xenophobic behavior
of our remote ancestors, it certainly does
not follow that we should behave that way!
March 1990

of the lands despite their abominations - from the Canaanites,

the Hittites, the Perizzites, the
Jebusites, the Ammonites, the
Moabites, the Egyptians, and the
Amorites - inasmuch as they and
their sons have married some of
their daughters, so that the holy
race has become contaminated by
the peoples of the lands .... (Ezra
9:1-2)
And now, 0 our God, what shall
we say after this, for we have abandoned your commandments . . .
saying, "The land you are going to
possess is a polluted land, polluted
by the peoples of the lands and
their abominations which have
filled it with their uncleanness
from one end to the other. So now,
do not give your daughters in marriage to their sons, nor marry their
daughters to your sons and do not
ever seek their peace or welfare
[emphasis added], that you may
be strong, eat the good things of
the land, and bequeath it to your
sons forever." After all that has
befallen us ... shall we again break
your commandments by entering
into marriage relationships with
the people who commit these
abominations? (Ezra 9:10-14)
Although we do not yet know what
particular genes are in the pool thus
guarded by Ezra and Jewish tradition, it
seems obvious that some of them have
been very useful, as viewed from the
perspective of more than three millennia of history. Although the Jews still
survive - indeed, flourish - most of
the ancient peoples with whom they
contended are nowhere to be found today. The Midianites, the Jebusites, the
Perizzites, the Hivites - all are without
descendants, and all are gone.

7Ezra verses are from The) Anchor Bible.

Ezra-Nehemiah, by Jacob M. Myers (Garden
City, New York: Doubleday, 1%5), pp. 7374.
American Atheist

An illumination from a 1470 Jewish

prayer book depicts Haman executed
with his ten sons at the express request
of Queen Esther, the Jewish wife of King
Ahasuerus (Xerxes I, ca. 519-465 B.C.).
The event is marked by the festival of
Purim (Esther 9:13-14).

We know from the Hebrew scriptures

just why it is that these out-group gene
pools no longer exist. Just as Hitler did
not have to invent the idea of a Jewish
race, so too was it unnecessary for him
to create the art of genocide: the Hebrew
scriptures constitute a textbook on how
to do it. In the thirty-first chapter of
Numbers we read that
the LORD spoke to Moses and
said, "You are to exact vengeance
for Israel on the Midianites .... " So
the men were called up from the
clans of Israel, a thousand from
each tribe . . . with Phinehas son
of Eleazar the priest, who was in
charge of the holy vessels and of
the trumpets to give the signal for
the battle-cry. They made war on
Midian as the LORD had commanded Moses, and slew all the
men .... The Israelites took captive the Midianite women and their
dependants, and carried off all
their beasts, their flocks, and their
property. They burnt all their
cities....
Moses and Eleazar the priest
and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside
the camp. Moses spoke angrily to
the officers of the army.... "Have
you spared all the women?" he
said. "Remember, it was they who,
on Balaam's departure, set about
seducing the Israelites into disloyalty to the LORD that day at
Peor, so that the plague struck the
community of the LORD. Now kill
every male dependant, and kill
every woman who has had intercourse with a man, but spare for
yourselves every woman among
them who has not had intercourse."8

8Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations

from the Bible are from the New English
Version.
Austin, Texas

While this lovely exercise did not

totally stamp out the Midianite gene
pool, it greatly reduced it in size. At the
same time, it allowed for an expansion of
the Israelite gene pool. A more detailed
recipe for genocidal elimination of genetic competitors can be found in the
twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy:
When you advance on a city to
attack it, make an offer of peace.
If the city accepts the offer and
opens its gates to you, then all the
people in it shall be put to forced
labour and shall serve you. If it
does not make peace with you but
offers battle, you shall besiege it,
and the LORD your God willdeliver it into your hands. You shall put
all its males to the sword, but you
may take the women, the dependants, and the cattle for yourselves, and plunder everything
else in the city. You may enjoy the
use of the spoil of your enemies
which the LORD your God gives
you. That is what you shall do to
cities at a great distance, as opposed to those which belong to
nations near at hand. In the cities
of these nations whose land the
LORD your God is giving you as a
patrimony, you shall not leave any
creature alive. You shall annihilate
them - Hittites, Amorites,
Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites,
Jebusites - as the LORD your
God commanded you.
Now it is not always possible or practical to practice genocide, and Judaism
often has had to settle for something
less thorough. Until the founding of the
modern state of Israel made quasigenocide possible once again, Judaism
has had to content itself with the practice of intense discrimination against
goyim (Gentiles) coupled with strong
favoritism of everyone born of a Jewish
mother. Quite brazen examples of this
practice can be found in both the Old
Testament and the Mishnah." In DeuMarch 1990

Page 33

In keeping with the notion that each religion is responsible for enhancing
the social cohesion of a particular group of people,
it is not surprising to learn that nearly every religion
considers its own little group to be "god's chosen people."
teronomy, for example, we have a commandment which clearly discriminates
against non-Jaws:
You shall not eat anything that
has died a natural death. You shall
give it to the aliens who live in your
settlements, and they may eat it,
or you may sell it to a foreigner; for
you are a people holy to the LORD
your God. You shall not boil a kid
in its mother's milk. (Deut. 14:21)10
From a sociobiological point of view,
this revealing verse appears to involve
more than ordinary discrimination. Animals that die by themselves ate likely to
be diseased. In some cases, such diseases can be transmitted to humans.
The Deuteronomic law thus willbe protective of the Jewish gene pool and may
actually help to reduce the size of the
Gentile gene pool. At a minimum, it
serves to make Gentile money available
for the advancement of Jewish genes.
A similarly gene pool-related law can
be found in the part of the Mishnah
known as Abodah Zarah (Idolatry):
The daughter of an Israelite may
not assist a gentile woman in childbirth since she would be assisting
to bring to birth a child for idolatry,
but a gentile woman may assist
the daughter of an Israelite. The
daughter of an Israelite may not

9The Mishnah is a compilation of the Jewish

oral laws which was made at the close of the
second century C.E.
laThe injunction against boiling a kid in its
mother's milk has no logical connection with
the rest of the verse, but it is nevertheless a
part of it. There is evidence to show that this
prohibition actually was the original form of
the "Tenth Commandment," as recorded in
the thirty-fourth chapter of Exodus. Although
not one of the ten commandments given in
Exodus 34 has any ethical significance whatsoever, Exod. 34:27-29 tells us that it is the
real set of Ten Taboos that Yahweh gave to
Moses.
Page 34

suckle the child of a gentile woman,

but a gentile woman may suckle
the child of the daughter of an
Israelite in this one's domain.'!
Laws with less obviously genetic implications can be found throughout the
Old Testament and Mishnah. For example, in Deut. 15:1, we are commanded:
At the end of every seventh year
you shall make a remission of
debts .... Everyone who holds a
pledge shall remit the pledge of
anyone indebted to him. He shall
not press a fellow-countryman for
repayment, for the LORD's year
of remission has been declared.
You may press foreigners; but if it
is a fellow-countryman that holds
anything of yours, you must remit
all claim upon it. ... The LORD
your God willbless you with great
prosperity in the land which he is
givingyou to occupy as your patrimony.
This particular passage has the effect
of increasing the survival potential of the
Jewish gene pool, while making it just a
bit harder on the genetic competition.
Its message is reinforced by Baba
Metzia 5:6 of the Mishnah, which forbids
usury among Jews, but allows Jews to
practice usury against Gentiles. For
good measure, the last part of the Deuteronomy verse creates the fiction that
a certain piece of geography is eternally
reserved for the support of that gene
pool. This fiction is further reinforced by
Gittin 4:9 of the Mishnah, which encourages Israelites not to sell land to Gentiles.
In the Mishnah section called Makshirin (Predisposers) we are told that "If
he [an Israelite] found lost property in
the city and most of the people were

Gentiles, he need not proclaim it; ifmost

of them were Israelites he must proclaim it."12Again, the net result of this
policy is that Gentile wealth will more
often be used to advance the Jewish
gene pool than vice versa.
Large parts of the Mishnah are as
racist as anything Hitler ever wrote. It is
shot through with the notion that Gentiles are "unclean" and inferior to Jews.
The Mishnah tells us that ifa Gentile enters a house, everything in it is rendered
unclean (Tohoroth 7:6). It claims that
animals slaughtered by Gentiles are to
be considered carrion (Hullin 1: 1). It declares that
The temple mount is still more
holy.... [T]he rampart is still more
holy, for no gentiles and none that
have contracted uncleanness from
a corpse may enter therein. (Kelim
1:8)

Imagine the fuss that would be made if

a Christian wrote that "meat prepared
by a Negro butcher is unfit for consumption," or that "the sanctuary of our
church is especially holy, because no
Negro is allowed to set foot in it." For
some reason, the equally racist material
in the Mishnah ruffles no feathers and
evokes no disavowals from the rabbis.
Other passages in the Mishnah simply
serve to reinforce Jewish xenophobia,
by suggesting that Gentiles cannot be
trusted and must be presumed to be
evil. Thus, part of Aboday Zarah 2: 1
states that
Cattle may not be left in the inns
of the gentiles since they are suspected of bestiality; nor may a
woman remain alone with them
since they are suspected of lewdness; nor may a man remain alone
with them since they are suspected
of shedding blood.

11 The Mishnah, trans. by Herbert Danby

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p.

l2Ibid., p. 760.

438.

March 1990

American Atheist

Nowhere are we told not to own slaves.

Working slaves on a particular day
is considered more heinous
than owning them.
The Jewish disdain of Gentiles was
carried over even into the Christian
New Testament. In Matt. 10:5-8 it is alleged that
these twelve Jesus sent out with
the followinginstructions: "Do not
take the road to gentile lands, and
do not enter any Samaritan town;
but go rather to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel. . . . Heal the
sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers,
cast out devils."
The original gospel stories, when it became necessary to curry favor with the
Roman authorities, were all revised to
make them rather anti-Semitic. However, it appears from this verse - which
somehow managed to elude the rewriters - that the "benefits" of the
Jewish proto-Christian religion originally were intended for Jews only. Only
after the triumph of St. Paul's party over
the Jerusalem Jewish-Christian party
could the blessings of full-fledged Christianity be wreaked upon the Gentiles.

forbids us to covet our neighbor's slave

or slave-girl. Coveting a slave is worse
than owning one!"
Slavery is justified more explicitly in
the ninth chapter of Genesis, where
hereditary slavery (i.e., genetically defined slavery) is cursed into existence:
Cursed be Canaan, slave of slaves
shall he be to his brothers. . . .
Bless, 0 LORD, the tents of Shem;
may Canaan be his slave. May
God extend Japheth's bounds, let
him dwell in the tents of Shem,
may Canaan be their slave.

Slavery and religion

To the writers of this passage, "Canaan"14

was considered to be the eponymous
ancestor of the Canaanites, the peoples
being displaced by the Hebrews. The
curse of Canaan thus justified the enslavement of the Canaanites. "Shem"
was the eponym whose name can be
seen in the word Semites - the Jews,
Arabs, Babylonians, and Syrians.
"Japheth" was the eponym of the Greeks
and other Gentiles to the north of the
Hebrew sphere of interest.
The declaration of the divinely or-

It is not necessary to carry out genocide to advance the cause of the gene
pool of which one is a part. Slavery also
is fine for the purpose. In slavery, one
gene pool is used for the advancement
of another. The breeding of slaves can
be controlled, and it is possible to
achieve a condition where benefits to
the in-group gene pool can be maximized,
and the size of the out-group (enslaved)
gene pool can be kept to the minimum
size adequate for that purpose. It should
come as no surprise, then, to learn that
the Hebrew scriptures accept slavery as
an institution to be practiced by Jews.
Two of the Ten Commandments presuppose slavery. The Fourth Commandment forbids Jews to work their
male or female slaves on the sabbath
day. Nowhere are we told not to own
slaves. Working slaves on a particular
day is considered more heinous than
owning them. The Tenth Commandment

13There is some evidence that the term

translated as "covet" actually referred to the
"curse of the evil eye." If that be true, this
otherwise trivial commandment becomes
the equivalent of "Don't harm your neighbor's property."
14Forreasons I have never been able to discover, many of the Christian defenders of
slavery in the nineteenth century considered Canaan, the son of Ham, to be the
ancestor of the Black race. According to
their opinion, Blacks were consigned to
slavery shortly after the grounding of Noah's
ark! According to A Commentary, Critical
and Explanatory, on the Old and New Testaments, vol. 1, published in 1872 by the Reverends Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset, and
David Brown (Hartford, Conn.: S. S. Scranton
& Co., p. 23), "this doom (i.e., the curse of
Canaan) has been fulfilledin the destruction
of the Canaanites - in the degradation of
Egypt, and the slavery of the Africans, the
descendants of Ham."

Austin, Texas

March 1990

dained superiority of the Jewish gene

pool and its ascendancy over the genetic
competition soars to poetic heights in
the forty-ninth and sixty-first chapters
of the book of Isaiah:
Foreigners shall serve as shepherds of your flocks, and aliens
shall till your land and tend your
vines; but you shall be called
priests of the LORD and be named
ministers of our God; you shall
enjoy the wealth of other nations
and be furnished with their riches.
(lsa. 61:5-6)
I will beckon to the nations and
hoist a signal to the peoples and
they shall bring your sons in their
arms and carry your daughters on
their shoulders; kings shall be
your foster-fathers and their princesses shall be your nurses. They
shall bow to the earth before you
and lick the dust from your feet. ...
I willcontend with all who contend
against you and save your children
from them. I will force your oppressors to feed on their own flesh
and make them drunk with their
own blood as if with fresh wine,
and all mankind shall know that it
is I, the LORD, who save you. (lsa.
40:22-26)
Like their ancient Jewish predecessors, the good Christian slaveholders of
America could find an even better biblical justification for their practice. Lev.
25:39-46 gave them a clear go-ahead to
make and hold slaves - provided that
slaves are part of a different gene pool:
When your brother is reduced
to poverty and sells himself to you,
you shall not use him to work for
you as a slave. His status shall be
that of a hired man or a stranger
lodging with you; he shall work for
you until the year of jubilee. He
shall then leave your service, with
his children, and go back to his
family and to his ancestral propPage 35

The world today is much different from

the world in which our reflexes evolved,
the world in which religion first crept into our bones.
We must change. We must adapt.
erty: because they are my slaves
whom I brought out of Egypt, they
shall not be sold as slaves are sold.
You shall not drive him with ruthless severity, but you shall fear
your God. Such slaves as you
have, male or female, shall come
from the nations round about you;
from them you may buy slaves.
You may also buy the children of
those who have settled and lodge
with you and such of their family
as are born in the land. These may
become your property, and you
may leave them to your sons after
you; you may use them as slaves
permanently.
But your fellowIsraelites you shall not drive with
ruthless severity.
It is not surprising that highly religious
people were the major defenders of
slavery at the time of the American civil
war. Nor is it surprising that the majority
of the antislavery thinkers were either
out-and-out infidels, such as Benjamin
Franklin,
John Stuart Mill, Robert
Owen, Frances Wright,15 and Abraham
Lincoln," or members of highly demythologized, liberal religions such as the
Universalists, Unitarians, and Quakers.

Racism in Christianity
Although we have devoted considerable space to the racist dimensions of
Judaism, we should not forget that the
most thoroughgoing practice of racism
in the West during the last thousand
years or so has involved Christians.

15Frances Wright (b. Dundee, Scotland,

Sept. 6, 1795,d. Cincinnati, Ohio, Dee. 13,
1852) published a Plan for the Gradual
Abolition of Slavery in 1825. It had the support of both Thomas Jefferson and James
Madison. Her freethought treatise, Course
of Popular Lectures On Free Inquiry, Religion, Morals, Opinions, etc.) appeared in 1829.
16Known as "the infidel Lincoln" when he
ran for president, twenty out of twenty-three
ministers of his home district voted against
him on account of his heterodox opinions.
Page 36

Although Christianity developed long

after tribalism had disappeared from the
Palestinian region, it became the emblem of the supertribalism
known as
nationalism after the breakup of the
Roman empire. On the basis of the sociobiological theory of the evolutionary
function of religion, it was quite predictable that the Roman Catholic Hitler
and the Anglican Churchill would invoke the same god to rally their people
behind them. In both German and English, people read and then obeyed the injunction in Romans chapter 13:
Every person must submit to the
supreme authorities. There is no
authority but by act of God, and
the existing authorities are instituted by him; consequently
anyone who rebels against authority is
resisting a divine institution, and
those who so resist have themselves to thank for the punishment
they will receive .... [T]he authorities ... are God's agents working
for your good.
The most virulent forms of racism in
America today all involve religious organizations.l? In addition to the "Christian
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan," there is
the so-called Christian Identity movement, which preaches hatred of Blacks
and Jews, an imminent apocalypse, and
the propriety of using armed violence to
achieve its goals. The movement includes
individual organizations
with names
such as "Church of Jesus Christ Christian" (run by Richard G. Butler, of Hay-

17Until the 1960s, the Mormon Church

would also have been listed here, due to its
refusal to allow Blacks to hold the "priesthood," and for its pervasive racist attitudes.
Just in time, however, when there was danger of losing funding from a newly "equalopportunity" federal government, the "Prophet, Seer and Revelator" of the church got the
word from god that Blacks could now hold
the priesthood. Mormon fundamentalists
are still quite racist, however.
March 1990

den Lake, Idaho), "Aryan Nations,"

"The Order," "The Covenant,"
"The
Sword and the Arm of the Lord," etc.
Even though civilization is now nearly
five thousand years old, many of the
world's religions dangerously continue
to reinforce archaic reflexes developed
during the Paleolithic era.
If the human species is to survive, it is
clear that religious reflexes and religious
modes of thought must be inhibited. We
should not deceive ourselves, however,
into thinking that all will be well if we can
but eliminate religion. If the theories of
sociobiology be correct, we will still have
to fight against the bias built into our
genes - the bias that makes it easier to
respond negatively to people who differ
from us, the bias that makes it easier to
follow a leader than to think for ourselves. Fortunately, the genetic bias - if
it exists - most certainly can be overridden by education and psychotherapies of various sorts.
The time is past when we could judge
people on the basis of race. We are all
members of the same endangered species, the human race, and we must all
make accommodation
for each other in
various ways. The inherent inequality of
people will continue to be a problem for
us. Good and bad, bright and dull, beautiful and ugly - except for identical
twins, no two people are "equal," and
daily we will be forced to pass judgement on our fellow planet -mates. But we
must judge people as individuals, not as
members of one or another race.
The world today is much different
from the world in which our reflexes
evolved, the world in which religion first
crept into our bones. We must change.
We must adapt. We must mute the inner
murmurings of primal religiosity, or our
kind shall vanish from the earth, a victim
of its own violence. ~

~.el igillU is

tttt!tq -informatinn.
American Atheist

Historical Notes

Below: The cover illustration of the August 1925issue of The Birth Control Review captured the pathos that could be
a woman's life in a society that forbids
birth control information.

65 years ago
The March 1, 1925,issue of The Freethinker, London, England, then under
the editorship of Chapman Cohen, featured a short statement on "The Modesty of Freethinkers" which is as valid
today as when writteh.
I have more than once expressed
the opinion that Freethinkers suffer from an excess of modesty. All
around them they see reforms
taking place, changes in ideas oc- .
curring, the gradual humanization
of life transpiring, much of which
may be traced directly to the efforts of Freethinkers of the past
four or five generations. Yet in the
majority of cases they are content
to stand quietly by and allow themselves, as Freethinkers,
to be
ignored or snubbed, treated as
though they were really very inconsiderable in numbers, and unimportant in influence. As a consequence, and without either intending or wishing it, Freethinkers
play into the hands of the common
enemy. Christians are permitted
to strut across the stage, claiming
credit for improvements they could
not prevent, but often struggled
hard to obstruct. Writers on phases
of social or mental history are induced quietly to ignore the part
played by Freethinkers in the past,
and to ignore their importance in
the present, the misrepresentations of Christians are condoned,
and, worst of all, injustices and unfairnesses can be perpetrated
against Freethinkers which would
simply be impossible if the latter
were a little more assertive than
they are. Where religious interests
are concerned all experience goes
to show that it is useless appealing
to a Christian's sense of justice or
of truthfulness. It is only when
they who are in opposition to
Christianity make their power felt
that they can be assured of approxAustin, Texas

imately fair play. And the sooner

Freethinkers get this truth into
their heads - and act upon it the better.

following interesting peep into the history of the group then meeting. Every
person mentioned was an Atheist so the
remarks are quoted in full:

The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian

and Birth Control Conference was held
in New York City on March 24, 1925.
The five prior conferences had been
held in Paris (1901), Liege (1905), The
Hague (1910),Dresden (1911)and London
(1922).
And The Birth Control Review, edited
by Margaret Sanger, reported the event
which met under the auspices of the
American Birth Control League, Inc., of
which Mrs. Sanger was the president.

[AI]most a century ago - just

ninety-five years, to be exact Robert Dale Owen published in
this city [New York] his brief and
plain treatise on the population
question and birth control, entitled
"Moral Physiology." And only two
years afterward, in 1832,Dr. Charles
Knowlton published in Boston his
epoch-making "Fruits of Philosophy." His little book wandered for
forty years around the world. It
was translated into several languages. It was reprinted again and
again. Its circulation was at first
unmolested. In 1857,it was edited
and revised Mr. President [Charles
V. Drysdale of London], by your
courageous uncle, George R. Drysdale. Its circulation in Great Britain led finally to the historic trial of
Mrs. Annie Besant and Charles
Bradlaugh. This was just a little
less than half a century ago. This
little book, written by a courageous American, republished by
courageous Englishmen, became
. internationally famous, and was
instrumental in the founding of the
first Neo-Malthusian league, by
Charles R. Drysdale and Alice
Drysdale Vickery, our honorary
president, and the illustrious, courageous parents of the president
of this conference, whom we welcome here today.

Those in attendance included Havelock Ellis, Julian Huxley, John Maynard

Keynes, and H. G. Wells. The address of
welcome was, of course, delivered by
Margaret Sanger and featured apologies
for the deliberate inconveniences and
delays which had been caused to personal delegates because of the American government.
Mrs. Sanger's remarks included the
March 1990

40 years ago
Margaret Sanger's troubles never
seemed to abate, for it was in March
1950 that General Douglas MacArthur
barred her from visiting Japan. A military government source attributed this
action directly to Roman Catholic pressures. The story news item was reported
the next month in The Progressive
World, published out of New Jersey.
Page'Sl

Below left: In 1955, the idea of the free

press in the United States did not include
permitting Avro Manhattan's Catholic
Imperialism and World Freedom to be
mailed.
Right: Was Robert Burns sympathetic to
the idea of Atheism?

35 years ago
Protestants and Other Americans
United, a state/ church separation group
out of Washington, DC, reported extensively in its Church and State magazine
on the dilemma of Avro Manhattan and
his then latest book Catholic Imperialism
and WorldFreedom, published by Watts
and Company, of London, England. The
publisher Watts was, of course, issuing
freethought books.

until complaints had been received from

offended Roman Catholics.
On the other side of the coin, the journal reported that the United States
government had steadfastly opposed
restrictions by foreign nations on publications from the United States on similar grounds. The editor opined that it
should not be left to any government authority to decide what literature is most
likelyto be conducive to racial, religious,
or social harmony.
30 years ago
The Liberal, out of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, in March 1%0, wanting to
prove that the Scottish poet Robert
Burns (1759-1796)was in fact a freethinker, printed the following:
Robert Burns, Freethinker
Robert Burns hated the shams
and hypocricy [sic] of British life,
with its lords and ladies on the one
hand and the poverty stricken
masses of England and Scotland
on the other. He was particularly
caustic in his writings of the Church
and its toadying clergy. His view is
well expressed in the following
quatrain:

The United States Post Office declared

the book to be "non-mailable" in the
country, relying on an Attorney General's Opinion dated from 1940 (39 Op.
A.G. 535). The book was deemed to be
foreign political propaganda under 18
U.S. Code 1717which defined "political
propaganda" as matter which was "designed to promote in the United States
racial, religious or social dissensions."
The ruling did not appear as a mystery
since Church and State pointed out that
the book had first been published in
1952,received in the United States and
distributed here. Apparently the Post
Office did not get around to banning it
Page 38

God knows I'm no the thing I

should be.
Nor am I even the thing I could be.
But, twenty times, I rather would
be
An atheist clean,
Than under gospel colors hid be.
Just for a screen.
But the Friendship Liberal League
which published The Liberal also was
quite tight onto the religious scene. In
the same issue, March 1%0, it reported
the following:
REBELLION IN DETROIT
Mayor Miriani, of Detroit, Mich.,
has issued an executive order to all
city department heads forbidding
them from forcing their subordiMarch 1990

nates to sell raffle tickets for

[Roman] Catholic charities. This
was caused by a veteran fireman,
Capt. Samuel Mason, himself a
[Roman] Catholic, returning 250
tickets to his superiors without attempting to compel the men of his
fire company to sell them. According to the Detroit News, Mason
said, "Somebody's got to be willing
to say no. If they fire me I'll get
another job." Robert Tighe, president of the Detroit Fire Fighters
Union, also a [Roman] Catholic, is
quoted as saying that Mason said
something that should have been
said long ago. Tighe said that firemen got hit up about once a month
to sell tickets for some cause. He
also said that ifthe men did not sell
enough tickets they were punished
in some way.
"Charity raffles for religious
organizations, such as those to
which Captain Mason referred,
are, by law, exempt from the surveillance of the Charity Solicitation Committee which is headed
by Police Commissioner Hart,"
says the News.
Captain Mason is further quoted
as demanding to know: "Why do
we have to push tickets for any
particular faith? We have [Roman]
Catholics, Protestants, Jews - all
faiths in the Fire Department."
Captain Samuel Mason must,
indeed, be a remarkable man, with
a remarkable sense of fairness to
buck his political and ecclesiastical superiors in this manner. And
this incident is a fine example of
clerical intrusion into municipal
affairs, and the complete subservience of politicians to clerical domination. ~
American Atheist

Report from India

Onward Christian Soldiers!

The Salvation Army

tried to bring
Christianity to the
masses of India
with all the pomp
and pageantry
of a military assault.

In 1978,your editors, assisted by

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

Margaret Bhatty
Austin, Texas

n January this year General Eva

[] Burrows, head of the Salvation Army,
visited India to tour centers of work
in various parts of the country. According to an interview she gave to the 21
January 1990 Times of India newspaper
(Bombay), the Salvation Army has a
membership of 300,000 in India. And its
mission has two hundred elementary
schools, twenty homes for orphans,
eight high schools, five general hospitals, five vocational training colleges,
two schools for the blind, two leprosy
hospitals, a junior college, and a school
for deaf mutes.
The news report refers to the founder
of the Indian branch of the Salvation
Army - Commissioner Booth-Tucker
- who left the Indian Civil Service and
opened the first branch in Bombay in
1882.
Tucker had an impressive ancestry of
knights, squires, captains, admirals,
generals, governors, and judges in the
service of the British monarchy. A
Thomas Tucker sailed with Sir Francis
Drake and was killed in Florida in 1568.
His brother George was in high favour
with Elizabeth 1. Readers will be more
interested in the American branch of
the family.It was George's son, Thomas
Tucker, who was governor of Bermuda
in 1616and founded Tucker's Town. His
descendants are still counted among
the most eminent citizens of this British
possession.
In America Tuckers fought on both
sides in the War of Independence, one
getting himself killed at Bunker's Hill.An
American Tucker married the mother of
John Randolph, ambassador to St.
Petersburg. Another was treasurer of
the United States for many years. I
The Indian branch of Tuckers started
with Henry St. George Tucker, who
came out as a midshipman at fifteen on
a merchantman, rose to the covenanted

IE A. Mackenzie, Booth- Tucker: Sadhu and

Saint (London: Hodder and Stoughton,
1930).
March 1990

service, was appointed accountantgeneral before he was thirty, and after a

remarkable career, retired as a director
of the East India Company, the quasitrading organization which constituted
the British raj in India until the rebellion
of 1857, when Victoria was declared empress instead.
As a grandson of Henry St. George,
Frederick Tucker followed the family
tradition and joined the elitist Indian
Civil Service. Posted to the Punjab, he
later married an earnest Christian lady
whose zeal for saving the "native heathens" matched his own. Their evangelizing activities were regarded with
much trepidation by higher officials.
Though the British government was
Christian in character and proclivity, it
did not approve of missionaries bent on
saving India for Christ.

Turbans, shawls,
and English boots
Tucker's long association with India
made him realize that the conventional
missionary, living like an English sahib,
and dressed in Western clothes, was not
one with his converts. Rather he stood
identified with "the superior culture of
the country's conquerors." Tucker decided to change that.
After attending a meeting in London
where the fiery General Booth moved
Tucker to offer himself as a volunteer,
Tucker set about preparing the first
contingent to invade India.
The news was received with great
uneasiness in official circles. The Salvationists' adoption of Indian dress and
living would degrade the prestige of the
White man. When Tucker, now a major,
came ashore at Apollo Bunder in Bombay on September 19, 1882, the police
superintendent was ready with a large
number of his men. He was astounded
to see just four Salvationists disembark.
"We expected you to be a thousand
strong," he exclaimed to Tucker.
The pioneers piled their baggage onto
a bullock cart and set off for their quarters to the sound of songs and tambouPage 39

Deep in the jungles of Gujarat lived the warlike warrior tribe

called the Bhils. Here the Salvation Army officers, in red coats, orange
dhotis and turbans, as proof of their Indian-ness,
also carried a bow and arrows and wore brass earrings.
other Indian religious leaders practised
allowing the use of sandals, better living
it. Grandfather has embellished his dia- quarters, and rest homes in hill resorts
ries with sketches of his fellow officers for them to recuperate.
and himself among the "natives." In
No other aspect of Christian proselyearly drawings he appears barebodied,
tizing so angered the Hindus than "mass
Eshwar Das Grundy
Among the earliest recruits who fol- with a dhoti wrapped round his waist, conversions," in which entire villages
lowed Tucker's campaign against hea- one end drawn up across a shoulder. are drawn away from their traditional
culture and belief. This "civilizing" prothenism on this subcontinent, came a Other drawings, and faded photographs,
young man named George Frederick show him with a turban, under which he cess also involved the adoption of
Western names, rejection of caste, and
Grundy, son of a wealthy solicitor from kept a curly queue like a Hindu topknot.
Croydon. He had abandoned a career in The three stripes on his forehead were the wearing of the White man's coat and
the merchant navy after being convert- caste marks of the Mukti Fauj (Salvation trousers. Today, this cultural inversion is
ed by General Booth. His family dis- Army) in red, yellow, and blue. His mu- practised by Hindu cults in the West
owned him, and his father disinherited sical talent never went beyond the tam- putting European devotees into Indian
him. This was my grandfather, born in bourine he holds aloft in one sketch. He garb and, like the Hare Krishna sect,
walked barefoot, begging his food from vigorously proselytizing and preaching
1867in Middlesex.
Grandfather had the very worthwhile door to door, an exercise in humility their glad news to the unenlightened.
Victorian hobby of keeping diaries. And which gave him chronic stomach trouble
The Great Gujarat Boom March
it is in these journals, now a century old, to the end of his life at ninety-one.
Assigned to the Bombay Presidency,
A section of Grandfather's journal for
that Ifound the material presented here.
In keeping with the Indianization of consisting of Maharastra, Gujarat, and the year 1892gives an incredible account
the Salvation Army, English cadets and Sind, he travelled into the wildest parts of the Great Gujarat Boom March unofficers assumed Indian names. Tucker and gives interesting information on the der his command as Major Eshwar Das
was known as Fakir Singh - Mendicant flora and fauna. Deep in the jungles of Grundy. He was aided by Captain Esu
and Lion; Grandfather became Eshwar Gujarat lived the warlike warrior tribe Charan (Feet of Jesus) Greet, and
Das - Servant of God; a former jewel- called the Bhils, reckoned to be the old- Major Jai Bhai (Joyful Brother) Paynter.
ler became Yesu Ratnam - Jewel of est aboriginal people of the Indian penin- Allthree were destined to quit the orgaJesus; a wealthy farmer's daughter was sula. Here the Salvation Army officers, nization together for reasons of conNurani - Shining Light; and others
science, but more of that later. The colin red coats, orange dhotis and turbans,
took names like Messenger of Truth, as proof of their Indian-ness, also carried umn was about a hundred strong - EuLion of Comfort, and so on. Attached to a bow and arrows and wore brass ear- ropean and Indian - and excerpts here
these names were their military rank. rings. According to a regulation, women are taken from the report of the War
With their adoption of a life of mendi- officers had to wear brass anklets like Correspondent. This was the plan of the
camp:
cancy, their red army jackets, their Bhil wives.
Many Europeans fell
names, and their bare feet and Indian
garb, they were a very incongruous lot, victim to the Indian clibut utterly Victorian in their ridiculous mate. They died of chol Sentry
Sentry.
mix of Indian asceticism with militant era, smallpox, dysentery,
Christianity.
malaria, and plague.
Ammunition
Advance
They carried their banner like a fetish, Among those "promoted
Wagons
Guard
emblazoned with the words "Blood and to Glory" was Fakir
Divisional HeadLads
Fire." Bullock carts, their main means of Singh Tucker's own wife.
quarters
Tent
Brigade
transport, were war chariots. Parades, (He later married Gendrillsand inspections, prayer and orders eral Booth's daughter,
I Band I
Jor the day were regular events. Mud Emma, and then became
huts in villages and seedy quarters in Booth-Tucker.)
Candidates
Field Marshall's
Europeans broken by
towns were barracks. Converts taken
Brigade
Tent
were prisoners-oj-war, and sorties into the rigorous conditions
Lassies
the countryside to evangelize the popu- were transferred to othBrigade
lation were planned as campaigns.
er countries. Some small
Sentry
Allthis sat strangely indeed with their concessions were made
Sentry.
profession of asceticism as Buddha and to human frailty by
rines. Seeing them dressed in turbans,
shawls, and English boots, the populace
took them for a travelling circus.

Page 40

March 1990

D
D

American Atheist

The Salvation Army was concerned

with bringing the greatest numbers of
persons it could to Christ. The Patidars
(Patels) mentioned in this announcement of a mass conversion are caste
Hindus. The rest are all out-castes (untouchables).

No. 1 Company was in charge of the

stores and baggage wagons. No.2 Company was the Band under a Bandmaster. There was also a Lassies' Soulsaving Brigade and a Lads' Soul-saving
Brigade. A Postal Runner carried news
and orders back and forth.
The War Correspondent's first despatch is datelined Tuesday, April 19,
1892.
This date willbe remarkable in the
history of the Gujarat War as the
day when the Division began the
biggest thing in the records of our
Indian fight. Today the troops to
take part in the march were
mobilised on the banks of the river
Vartak, just opposite the city of
Kaira.
Somewhat carried away, he describes
the stars shining brightly in the tropical
sky and the deep silence prevailing within the camp as everyone slept:
but it was the silence which precedes the noise and din of battle,
for on the morrow the troops would
be massed together, the conflict
with the powers of darkness would
begin in real earnest. The march
on the Kingdom of Satan.

and preach, from a safe distance off to

avoid pollution. Others sent word they
would attack them if they came, and
these poor misguided ones were left to
Satan.
On they marched, fired by the slogan
"Gujarat for God by Blood and Fire!
Forward!" The final day of the campaign
was May 3. A head count showed they
had far exceeded their first modest target.

Roused by the bugle at five, the column mustered at 9:30 for roll-call, inspection, a drill march round the fields,
then prayer and dismissal. The tents
were struck, baggage loaded, the column formed, and away they marched
over the scorching countryside to the
tune of "Strike! Strike for Victory!"
In April the Indian sun is relentless.
Temperatures in the shade were 108 F. Fraternization
But they "had linked together heart and with the natives
soul to suffer and to fight and to win
However, all this fraternizing between
1000 souls for the Kingdom."
European and Indian Salvationists as
Villages were bombarded, and "red- they travelled on foot and by bullock
hot meetings" held, with small bands of cart through their territory, led to comsoldiery fanning out in various directions plications. Major Eshwar Das Grundy
to bring in prisoners. Some high-caste fell in love with and married a Gujarati
Hindu villagers invited them to come lass, Major Jivee Raijee Patel, and Major
0

Austin, Texas

March 1990

Jai Bhai married a girl from Ceylon.

Some of the Europeans resigned from
the Division; others asked to be transferred. Saving the "dark souls" of the
Indians was all right, marrying them was
not. The breaking down of barriers between European missionaries and Indian
converts was commendable, but racial
niceties were not to be transgressed.
Common sense intervened. There
was a strong feeling against this
step and it received no support
from Tucker himself. It was no
purpose of the Salvation Army to
be the parent of a new race of
Eurasians."

2F. A. Mackenzie, Booth- Tucker.

Page 41

Grundy and his wife rose to the rank

of Colonel, visited England, met the
General, and toured the Continent to
see centers of the Army's work. In India
they were placed in charge of north
India. But the undisguised contempt of
some of the White officers for his wife
and family made him decide to leave in
18%. With him went Jai Bhai Paynter
and Esu Charan Greet, whose wife was
English but who deplored the racial
prejudice. I found voluminous correspondence among my grandfather's
papers between him and Booth-Tucker,
who was unconvinced that it existed at
all.
In her interview with the Times of
India, General Eva Burrows explained
that the
SA had adopted the military hierarchy because it believed that it
was campaigning against evil, suffering, poverty and everything
that degrades humanity.
This is a watered-down version of
what has really inspired Christian missionary activity anywhere in the world.
The truth is that all alien cultures still
appear to such fundamentalist perceptions as "everything that degrades humanity."
In India today we have severe strictures on mass conversions of the kind
described here. Even individual conversions often trigger off tensions, where
Hindu missions are also working the
fieldto bring animist tribals and outcastes
into their fold.
People persuaded to Islam or Christianity have their patriotism questioned.
The transformation of Nagas and other
tribals in the sensitive northeast frontier
regions into Baptist Christians has
made them resist the idea that they
identify with "Hindu" India. Santhal triballeaders in Bihar are demanding their
own small state, and they are largely
Christian. Mother Teresa is not allowed
to travel to centers of work in Arunachal
Pradesh where the Roman Catholic
Page 42

church is in confrontation with the Ramakrishna Mission. Most Christian missions, like the Salvation Army, now preferto confine their activity to maintain-

ing schools, homes, hospitals, and educational institutions, most of which are
reckoned to be some of the best we
have in India. ~

An Atheist Reports from India

by Margaret Bhatty
Every nation in the world is currently in a struggle with the
minions of religion, and India is, perhaps, more vulnerable than
other nations. This overpopulated and poverty-stricken country
is striving to enter the modern world, but ideas which date back
to the infancy of mankind survive through ignorance and fear,
thus complicating an already formidable task.
How does an educated, modern Indian view that struggle? What
eyes look upon the panorama of jostling sects, each trying to gain
ascendancy, adherents, and acclaim? Margaret Bhatty, teacher,
mother, Atheist, Indian, watches it all pass in review and carefully
reports on it for the American reader in her book An Atueis:.
Reports from India. If you recognize that no nation is isolated, that
all human communities of necessity interact each with the other,
you will want to pickup Margaret Bhatty's book and inform yourself of what goes on in an important part of your world. In this
book, a compilation of her monthly columns in the American
Atheist, she gives insight for the Western reader into:
the political problems associated with Jains, Hindus, Buddhists,
Sikhs, and Muslims
what it takes for a woman to have her "virtue" restored
the growing political power of astrologers in India
why a state government in India sacrificed horses in a religious
ritual
the religions of Zarathustra and Buddha
whether the Ganges is a miracle-working river
the theory of reincarnation
what karma is supposed to be
what makes J. Krishnamurti and the Bhagwan Rajneesh tick
how the caste system works
how religious dietary rules ("cookpot piety") divide communities
Stock #5026. $9.00 plus $1.50 postage and handling. Texas residents add 7% percent tax. Paperback. 267 pages.

Amer-ican Atheist Press

P.O. Box 140195
Austin, TX 78714-0195
Call (512)467-9525 to reach our automated order and FAX system.
VISA and MasterCard accepted.
March 1990

American Atheist

Poetry

'_.

lord god omnipotent

Purpose

god, if you exist,

And are all powerful;
You surely could have devised
More humane alternatives
To martyrdom;
Human sacrifice;
Or crucifixion,
To save us mere mortals
From our "sins"
And human frailty.

Let's have purpose in this life;

And so dispel much stress and strife.
In true communication there is no treachery
As we erase war and all of its tragedy.
Let's understand our fellow man;
A spark of love to fervently fan;
Greed and prejudice will be unknown
As we reap joy from kindness sown.
Our rightful heritage is the beauty of nature
To experience with wonder, delight and rapture.
Let's preserve this beauty with zeal
And invite all humanity to love what is real.

An omnipotent, loving god,

Would surely banish:
Evil;
Poverty;
Pain;
Illness
And suffering
From the face of the earth
you allegedly created.

Bird songs will be music to our ears;

Helping to drive away all fears.
Let's deny our bodies all foreign substance
As colorful flowers shed exotic fragrance.
Our purpose, then, is to cleanse mind, water and air;
This great planet to make more fair.
Come one and all - join in the pleasure!
Life will have ecstasy beyond all measure.

Since you did

None of the above;
Three possibilities exist:
you could be
an ineffectual wimp;
A fiendish monster;
Or, you do not exist.
I refuse to worship:
Wimps;
Monsters;
Or the non-existent figment
Of priest-ridden;
Fear ridden;
Superstitious
Human minds.
Drusilla Davis

Pauline Carman Howell

Mind alteration
Within the steepled edifice
brief sessions of exactitude
are dosed with everlasting myth
of heaven's actuality,
of gold and other opulence
where penitents will merit crowns.
More potent, yet more subtle
and deadly as a crack-house high
theism drugs the fragile mind
with mystical dependency.
Thought hangs in blurred remission ...
the pusher drones and promises,
the pusher deals and sells.
Angeline Bennett

Austin, Texas

March 1990

Page 43

American Atheist Radio Series

Prayers in space
have been receivinga lot of mail in
respect to my position on prayers
and Bible reading in space, and perhaps I should take the time tonight to
make my position quite clear.
Before I do that, I want to read to you
two letters which I have just received
today which reflect the general tenor of
what the Christian community feels in
respect to this matter.
The first letter is postmarked out of
Charleston, South Carolina, and is
dated November 25, 1969. This is what
it says:

[J
The first attempt of
Christianity to co-opt
the space program was
challenged
by American Atheists

Dear Heathen Communist Bitch:

Words cannot express my contempt for you. You should have
your tongue cut out and your
breast sliced off like slim sliced
roast beef to make it more painful.
The very idea of attempting to ban
prayer from space or any other
place. Shame on you! There is
more prayer in schools and colleges
than ever before in spite of your
outrageous efforts. Don't you
dare come to Charleston or we
will tear you limb from limb. People like you are what is wrong with
this country today. You should be
slowly burned at the stake with no
prayers allowed. We hate you with
a passion.
When the first installment of a
regularly scheduled, fifteen-minute,
weekly American Atheist radio series
on KLBJ radio (a station in Austin,
Texas, owned by then-President
Lyndon Baines Johnson) hit the
airwaves on June 3, 1968, the nation
was shocked. The programs had to be
submitted weeks in advance and were
heavily censored. The regular production of the series ended in September
1977, when no further funding was
available.
The following is the text of "American
Atheist Radio Series" program No. 76,
first broadcast on December 8,1969.

Madalyn O'H air

Page 44

This is an anonymous letter.

The one from York, Pennsylvania,
dated November 24, is signed with name
and address. This man writes:
Well,you low-lifemongrel, you're
at it again. It is too bad someone
does not take hold of you, fillyour
filthy mouth full of vitrolic acid,
bind you up and throw you into
some ravine.
If we had honest sincere men
sitting on the Judges' benches, as
wellas forthright honest attorneys,
your name would never reach the
newspapers except to announce
March 1990

your being sent either into prison

or out of these United States.
There is no room for such filthy
mouthed, damned traitors as you
in this country. There is only one
place for such as you, that is somewhere in deepest Africa. A filthy
low-down bum like you, an idiotic
damn fool half wit, should be allowed to remain here only if your
citizenship is revoked and you are
gagged.
I think it is appropriate for me to read
to you tonight, therefore, a part of the
record which we put into the United
States District Court here in Austin,
Texas, since this is not reflected in the
news media coverage of the case.
We said in this case:
The position of Madalyn Murray
O'Hair and the Society of Separationists, Inc., is clear. We represent those
persons who do interpret a founding
principle of our nation: the need for separation of state and church, as that
principle is in our Constitution. There
are two different parts to. the idea of
"separation of state and church"; one is
that there shall not, in the United States,
be an established church or an established religion supported by government. The second part of this principle
is that there should be freedom of religion. We interpret this to mean that
there should also be freedom from religion for those persons who want that,
and we do, and many other millions of
persons do also.
The letters which I receive would
deny us this right, at all levels, and punish us severely for even entertaining the
idea that we have that right. So, let us
now see what we think should happen
to those persons who want to believe in
religion and who want to pray and who
want to read the Bible.
We are bold enough to put it into a
legal document and present it in the
courts of the land. I will read it now.
The free exercise clause of the
American Atheist

First Amendment to the Constitution in respect to freedom of religion is interpreted in this wise by
the plaintiffs [that is, us].
Any citizen, including an astronaut, is free to pray, read holy
books (including the Bible), take
communion, say rosary beads,
carry or wear religious medallions
at any time ifthat citizen desires to
do so, and this may be in the privacy of his home, as he goes about
the nation, in his personal life, in
his church, synagogue or meeting
place, in his employment, consonant with the requirements of his
employer, in public places such as
schools, or in the privacy of such
public vehicles as a space ship.
When, however, any citizen
performs these essentially personal and private rituals in such a way
as to coerce others to participate
therein, or before television cameras in the capacity of official representatives of our secular government when performing a totally secular function supported by
tax expenditures from all our people, then this is an entirely different matter.
When they do these things in
this way, they become the witting
propaganda agents for particular
sectarian religious creeds, in this
instance before the court, Christianity, and by so doing make it
appear that this government officially sanctions those particular
creeds or beliefs, or that particular
religious book.
There is no attempt in this litigation to deprive these brave men,
the astronauts, of their god or the
comfort they may derive from calling upon their particular deity
while in the course of their mission.
The plaintiffs believe in the efficacy of separation of state and
church (that is to say: government
and religion) and are determined
Austin, Texas

only to stop the further encroachment of blatant religious practices

into still more government functions and programs. It is to them
bad enough that our coins and
currency, flag pledge, postage
stamps and the very halls of Congress and the courts make use of
religious phrases and supplications in open defiance of the Constitutional prohibitions which specifically bar this - without permitting these practices to grow to
the point where the wall of statechurch separation has been completely breached resulting in a
working partnership of government and religion.
Thus interpreted the plaintiffs
earnestly press that the First
Amendment affirmed and affirms,
yet, that religion is a private matter
in its free exercise and that government is barred from assisting in its
establishment in whatsoever form.
They extend this historical and
reaffirmed principled interpretation of the First Amendment to a
new area for judicial approval only
insofar as they contend that freedom of religion includes freedom
from religion for the plaintiffs and
those persons whose class they
represent.
In this case we point out that Congress appropriated money for exploration in space, and in and around the
moon. Congress did not appropriate
money for a Christian missionary adventure there. That body was concerned
with the engineering technology and
efficiency, the prestige of our nation and
in certain military goals.
NASA personnel were to carry out
the intent and the purpose of the NASA
Authorization Act and they were to use
the money appropriated by Congress
only for that end. Instead, NASA became
involved in something which that organization titled with the code name of
"Experiment P-one." Upon embarking
March 1990

Page 45

on this course of action to program

Christianity into the space explorations
our nation is doing, NASA used - or
rather misused - federal funds, federal programming, federal equipment, federal goals, federal personnel, federal
administrative processes, technical advice, to identify the space program with
the Christian religion to the nation and
before the world. NASA offered an opportunity, aided in the act, supplied
world attention, gained private network
affiliation, and gave ostensive government approval to religious ceremonies
in outer space and on the moon in defiance of our own constitutionally derived government, and our commitments to other nations, and our commitments to the world. NASA by executive policy or administrative direction,
or both, breathed life into this religious
programming, condoned it, encouraged
it, planned it, implemented it, and gave
pre-flight and post-flight approval to it.
By this overt act NASA altered the policy of Congressional intent and did this
without consulting Congress.
The function of NASA was explicitly
defined in the NASA Appropriations
Act. Funds were designated for space
exploration - not for personal religious
expression, or for government sponsorship of a Christian missionary adventure, no matter how well intentioned, no
matter how much in conformity with
majority religious opinion, no matter
how much government desired to be
the sponsor of such an experiment as
"Experiment P-one." All people in the
United States were required to finance
this religious exercise that only some
people wanted.
After the fact, when it was done, no
congressman, or senator, or political
public figure - American political life
being what it is in respect to god, Country, Motherhood, the Flag, and Apple
Pie - would jeopardize his political life
by becoming a statesman on this issue
- for simple "devotion" to these concepts traditionally brings in votes to
actual and potential office holders.
Page 46

We were the only ones in America to

challenge this blatant disrespect to our
founding principles, irrespective of and
in the face of the hostility of the majority "Christian" public at large. I have just
read to you some of the mail we receive
here because of what we are doing. I
have passed on to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation those actual threats upon
my life, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been good enough to act
upon those where the persons were susceptible of identification.
This is a sponsoring of the Christian
religion, a sectarian religion before the
world, and the sponsoring is by our government, which is prohibited, by law,
from such sponsoring. We feel that this
threatens more than my life,it threatens
one of the basic principles on which we
stand as a nation, for it puts a premium
on belief in the Christian religion and the
Christian god, as against other gods,
and against nonbelief. It subjects our
freedom of conscience to the rule of the
majority. It pronounces belief in god as
the source of seeking after peace in the
"prayers for peace" which were broadcast, it pronounced belief in god and in
the creation story as the source of living
and lifewhen a continuing fight is under
way in the schools of America in respect
to the creation story of theology and the
evolution theories of scientists. It pronounced belief in god as the source of
moral and spiritual values - such as giving courage for space flights; it pronounced a belief in the Christian god
and in his son Jesus Christ by celebrating the birthday of that particular deity
before the world.
In doing all of these things it rendered
sinister, alien and suspect the belief and
ideals of those of us who do not accept
these tenets, and it promoted doubt and
question of our morality, our good citizenship, our good faith and it has
caused us grievous harm.
The American government should
not be in the business of harming any of
its citizens.
.
Yet, the Christianization of the space
March 1990

program is not an incidental happening

or incidental expenditure. It was carefully planned and was substantial federal
government involvement in a scheme to
advance the Christian religion.
We need the help of everyone who is
concerned with this. We need it now. We
had a hearing before a three-judge federal court in Austin, Texas, this week on
this matter. Not one attorney in Austin,
Texas, would assist us because of the
emotional impact of this case. When
each one did not refuse us outright,
another method - simply pricing out of
our ability to pay - was the device
used. It was necessary for us, therefore,
to fly in an attorney from Baltimore,
Maryland, to fight the case here. ~

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American Atheist

Under the Covers

Three books about Jesus

On how to do
detective work on the
New Testament.

The following book review is reprinted from issue no. 14 of Ketzerbriefe, a periodical published by
Bunte Liste Freiburg, a West German
Atheist group. Its author is Dr. Fritz
Erik Hoevels, the founder of that organization.
Though this review is of the German editions of three books, one of
which is not available in English, we
felt that it would provide many insights to American readers interested in the history of the Jesus figure. Publishing information for the
two books available in American
editions appears at the end of the
article.

Three books are the subject of this

month's review:
Konig Jesus by Hyam Maccoby
(Tubingen: Rainer Wunderlich Verlag,
1982). ISBN: 3-8052-0359-4.
Jesus der Magier by Morton Smith
(List Verlag).
Der ge/alschte Glaube by Karlheinz
Deschner (Munchen: Knesebeck &
Schuler, 1988). ISBN: 3-926901-00-4.

veryone who tries to escape the

"trap of religion"! is and has always
been in danger of having such a
good look at it in order to get rid of it that
he may finally become more preoccupied with it than any believer. To a certain extent this result cannot be helped,
as religion has been forced on anyone
living in religious surroundings (i.e.,
everywhere on this planet with the
exception of Albania) in such manifold
shapes and derivations that one has to
develop considerable strength to be
able to protect oneself against it. In doing so, one cannot avoid clashing with it,
just like any state, however peaceful it
may be, that is exposed to a military aggressor cannot help dealing with that
aggressor in order to keep its ground.
To use medical terms: the antibodies
that one has to develop against religious
contamination to survive personally and
intellectually inevitably contain its sediment, the negative shadow of the whole
of religion. Secondly, religion is only one
ideology among innumerable others,
even ifit is the most classic and effective
one - the gaudy special case of ideol-

"Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 117-58, or 56

B.C.), Roman general and epicure, De rerum

natura (London: Oxford University Press,

1922),IV,7.
Austin, Texas

March 1990

ogy in general. Therefore, with luck, an

immune system which has become
stronger by protecting itself against religion will also and, as the statistics
show, more radically and successfully
cope with other ideological infections.
This results, so to speak, in crossimmunities, and is exactly the reason
why the state so determinedly protects
one religion or a successful group of religions against any kind of criticism or
other damage. This is why religion is
subsidized and allowed to go about its
filthy business in sheltered competition
with other ideologies. For exactly this
reason the state is also suspicious of and
ready to discriminate against those of its
citizens whom it suspects of having established such an immune system, one
that has gained strength due to its resistance against the religious virus.
On the other hand, this desirable case
- the establishment of which makes me
fight against religion with a perseverance and a persistence atypical for
Marxists - unfortunately does not always and automatically happen. When
the agents of religion succeed in evoking
in the victim who tries to wriggle out of
its bonds a bad conscience about not
having sniffed whatever inconsequential
brainfarts they have let, he may easily be
induced to walk straight back into the
maze those agents built with the inexpensive, since extorted, expenditure of
thousands of years and generations of
people. The person in this case then becomes ineffective in the fight for the general spiritual or even material liberation
of mankind or even his direct surroundings from that moment on, absolutely
neutralized by a kind of negative tie to
the object he has fought. Quite a few
well-known religion and church critics
of integrity, for instance the famous
Henry Charles Lea, have not - or not
completely - escaped this danger. By
the flood of their historical material,
they have run the risk of diluting or even
drowning the enlightening power of
their highly effective anti-religious antidote. In individuals less creative or
Page 47

strong, this negative fascination of the

threatening object very often rather
quickly takes a bizarrely individualistic
or grossly neurotic form. This danger is
not to be underestimated, but unfortunately often is.
Consequently one carries some responsibility and must weigh quite a few
ideas if one recommends relatively specialized, detailed historical books about
religion - in this case certainly a religion
from which at least four and a half continents suffered. Any religion, of course,
is chiefly an historical creation, so it cannot be sufficiently dealt with by psychological or critical examination alone.
Thus even its opponent, and in every
case near-victim, will not be able to
avoid learning a certain basic knowledge
that willturn out to be rather wide if he
uses what he reads to fight religion
effectively or just repel it completely.

An unholy trinity of criticism

With all these reservations, three
books that focus on the historical figure
of Jesus can especially be recommended among the great mass of such existing books. Each of them has the uncompromising advantage to, from a certain
delimited standpoint and with a lot of
knowledge, follow up a question by laying emphasis on selected issues. Thus
they escape both the danger of the kind
of eclecticism of Rudolf Augstein's Jesus
Menschensohn (Jesus Son of Man)2and
the ambiguity and secret insincerity of
all "enlightened" theologians who for all
their academic to-do can never quite
deny their secret partisan activity for the
dark side. On the other hand, for the
curious Atheist - mostly an upper
school pupil wanting to learn what has
actually happened - such books are
quite often the only source within reach.

2Rudolf Augstein, Jesus Menschensohn

(Munchen: C. Bertelsmann Verlag, 1972).
Translated by Hugh Young, under the title
Jesus Son oj Man (New York: Urizen Books,
1977).
Page 48

~
As I mentioned above, the three
books presented avoid these mistakes.
But their actual and, at least according
to my modest knowledge, unique peculiarity is to complement one another in
such a way as to form, against will and
knowledge, an integrated whole. This
they do to such an extent that they not
only neutralize their respective shortcomings when read one after another,
but even act as a real three-component
medicine against the Christian plague
which truly radically works only by complete combination. Each single component may attack and alleviate - and
often also heal the disease - but does
not exclude relapse in the case of taking
each component separately. To finally
give up the medical metaphor: only all
three together as a sufficient cure, convey a complete, rounded, in itself comprehensible and accurate image of
Jesus and the gospels.
And now the three books: (1) Konig
Jesus (King Jesus) by Hyam Maccoby;"
(2) Jesus der Magier (Jesus the Magician) by Morton Smith;' and (3) Der
gefalschte Glaube (The Falsified Creed)
by Karlheinz Deschner=

King Jesus
The first of these books, Konig Jesus,
owes its merits and shortcomings to the
rather unusual philosophical position of
the author. H. Maccoby, a really selfconfident and learned Jew, unshakable
in his issues, is speaking as the author.
The limitedness of his position becomes
at once evident when the late ancient
Greeks, his archenemies for two thou-

3Hyam Maccoby, Konig Jesus (Tubingen:

Rainer Wunderlich Verlag, 1982). Originally
published as Revolution in Judaea: Jesus
and the Jewish Resistance (London: 1973).
4Morton Smith, Jesus der Magier (List Verlag). Originally published as Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row Pubs. Inc.,
1978).
sKarlheinz Deschner, Der gejalschte Glaube
(Munchen: Knesebeck & Schuler, 1988).
March 1990

sand years, must take beating upon

beating from him. Yet he lacks the faintest idea of their characteristics and
achievements. Although an excellent
authority on Greek culture during all its
periods - and personally even a writer
of ancient Greek iambus - he has not
the smallest sympathy for its late Alexandrian shaping, in which the Greeks
for the first time collided with the Jews
and also developed for the first time
universalistic instead of Hellenocentric
ideas. One notices with annoyance
when he, without any compunction,
calls the Samaritans - usually known
to Christians and ex-Christians merely
from a mostly misunderstood parable
and objectively being some kind of
ancient orthodox Jews who resisted the
post-Exile distortions of the Bible promulgated since then by Jews and Christians - an "heretical sect" who even
"killed Jews" (p. 46). Of course the more
objective term "estranged confessions"
would be more accurate, as from Israelite history it becomes immediately
evident that the more authentic innerJewish minority faction had quite some
reason for hostility against the finally
successful majority.
More central than this confessional
narrow-mindedness, however, is Maccoby's lack of understanding of Hellenism, whose cultural superiority to the
Jews he resolutely denies (d. against
Sigmund Freud's judgment about the
same subject). The reason for this is and with the rejection of which Maccoby
stays as relentless as all Mea Schearim
against the weakening of Sabbath law that this Hellenism, apart from all decadence and perversion (which Maccoby
so accurately and independently diagnoses), for the first time in the history of
mankind brought hth enlightenment,
through which religious and national
narrows. could be radically overcome.
From that ancient enlightenment the
names of Epikur, 6 Theodor of Kvrene,'
6Epicurus (341-270 B.C.), Greek philosopher.
American Atheist

~
and Diagoras of Mel0s8 stillbeam through
the centuries. The late ancient Talmud
"Internationalist Vision" which Maccoby
wants to palm off on us as an alternative,
according to which mankind, united in
peace, should adore and emulate the
Jews as a kind of people of priests of
concentrated holiness in their midst, remains a relatively limp and not thoughtout matter.

Jesus as a Pharisee
The advantages of his book, however,
which by far outweigh its drawbacks,
the author himself reveals in the first
sentence: "As a Jew one has certain advantages reading the New Testament."
Maccoby makes use of these advantages for a both surprising and convincing reconstruction
of the historical
Jesus: Jesus was a Pharisee.' For quite
some time scholars have known that the
parables of Jesus, his "Golden Rule,"
etc., essentiallycome from or are adapted
from the rabbinical tradition of his time
and that their peculiarity is for obvious
reasons being grossly exaggerated on
the Christian part. But Maccoby is the
only one to make use of this isolated
knowledge. Even for me, i.e., a philologicallynot uneducated person, who for at
least twenty years again and again has
dealt with this topic and who has known
every detail as such, it was a real surprise to finally see the obvious conclusion drawn from long known TalmudNew Testament parallels about which I
myself probably would never have
thought and that all at once removed a
"Theodorus "the Atheist" (fl. fourth century
Cyrenaic philosopher.
8Diagoras of Melos, called the Atheist (fifth
century B.C.), Greek Sophist and poet, took
refuge in Corinth when condemned to death
by the Athenians for impiety.
9Pharisee, a member of a Jewish sect of the
intertestamental period, noted for strict observance of rites and ceremonies of the
written law and for insistence on the validity
of the Pharisees' own oral tradition concerning the Law.
B.C.),

Austin, Texas

jumble of contradictions in the Bible

text. Jesus was a "rabbi," i.e., a religious
local authority of the late ancient Jewry
in Roman Palestine, just like allthe other
traditional Torah commentators of that
time who - being mostly full-time manual workers or farmers - Waldensianly
practiced this occupation mainly in their
free time, but without being threatened
by a Jewish version of the Inquisition.
They were set against the priests and
the upper class that collaborated with
Rome. Since Flavius Josephus;'? these
rabbis have been known as Pharisees.
The Jews of today are their immediate
continuation. Jesus was part of this
milieu, which should not be imagined as
a clearly distinguished sect with regular
membership - on the one hand Pharisees, on the other Sadducees'! - but
as a more socially determined "tendentious group." It remained for his posthumous Roman-Greek followers to falsify this - for loyal citizens of the Empire a disagreeable if not dangerous fact into the opposite and to turn Jesus
into a Pharisee opponent as well as to
impute pacifist, masochist, and finally
pro-Roman and anti-Jewish tendencies
to him. The unerringness by which Maccoby so conclusively and accurately reconstructs this process is so fascinating
that I would recommend that one reads
this thesis in his book. There have been
many works to investigate Jesus in his
late ancient specific local milieu, e.g.,
Erich Fromm's Christusdogma,12 which
is not uninteresting, and many others.
But so far nobody has hit the nail on the
head as well as Maccoby. He starts at
10FlaviusJosephus (ca. A.D. 37-ca. 100),Jewish historian.
llSadducee, a member of a Jewish party of
the intertestamental period consisting of a
traditional ruling class of priests and rejecting doctrines not in the Law (as resurrection, retribution in a future life, and the existence of angels).
12Erich Fromm, Dogma of Christ & Other
Essays on Religion, Psychology & Culture
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1963).
March 1990

the question, "Where, after all, are the

Romans in the New Testament?" He
solves the Pharisee question as surprisingly as he does convincingly, which
makes large parts of the New Testament
comprehensible for the first time and
explains somewhat their initial composition. Jesus was a kind of religious rebel
leader who, as a restorer of the line of
David ("King of the Jews"), by a confused action for a short time occupied
the temple. Other historians before
Maccoby have had this idea, and in our
time an exact parallel occurred just as
unnoticed by history - the selfpronounced "Mahdi" in Mecca until
French special forces put a bloody end
to the matter.P afterwards finding the
same end that the Roman occupying
power dictated for their cases.

Angels for a revolutionary army

Jesus was a Jewish leader of revolt in
fact - but a pretty crazy one. In comparison to him - and Maccoby's book
is especially readable because of its actual historical comparisons; therefore it
is admitted by myself as well- the political strategy of the RAf14 appears to be
downright rational. The way Jesus expected the Romans at the Mount of
Olives armed with only two swords and
the heavenly hosts bringing his victory
seems definitely insane. Maccoby is far
too intelligent not to realize this; he
therefore, of course, brings up the question, though he at once negates it with
specious arguments such as "child of
this time" and "manic personality."
13This is a reference to the seizure of the
Grand Mosque in Mecca on November 19,
1979.The attack was led by a Saudi, Juseiman bin Seif, who called himself "Mahdi"
(Prophet) and demanded that the Saudi government ban radio, television, and soccer
and prohibit women from holding business
jobs. The rebellion was dispersed after five
days.
14RAF:Rote Armee Fraktion, a West German left wing terrorist group, mainly active
during the 1970s.
Page 49

An immune system which has become stronger

by protecting itself against religion will also ... more radically and
successfully cope with other ideological infections.
This results, so to speak, in cross-immunities.
After having saved Jesus as a Jewish
National Hero at the beginning of his
work, it is obviously painful for him to
put up with this flaw in a protagonist of
his beloved chosen people. Anyway, it
must be stated that more than 99 percent of the remaining children of Israel
and of their time did not rely on the
heavenly hosts and analogous auxiliary
troops. This is why our diagnosis of the
serious insanity from which their dubious Messiah obviously suffered remains
in all its oppressing gravity. One question remains open here, which Maccoby
wants to gloss over by touching it up for
transparent reasons. In doing so he also
avoids one of more serious consequences: why the followers of this most
unlucky fellow among the lions of Judaea
were not absorbed
again in general
Pharisaism after his death but, on the
contrary, grew to be the germ cell of the
most powerful and successful organizations ever founded. The obviously
historically most important feature of
Jesus, the pathological one, remains
unreflected.

The miracle man

Right at this point the book written by
Morton Smith starts. The blind spot
Maccoby has shifts into a bright light and vice versa. That is why both books
complement each other in a most fortunate way.
Maccoby, as said above, is a thorough
hater of the Greeks. As well as he knows
his Talmud and analogous scripts, he is
simply less versed in the Hellenistic
sphere. Smith, in contrast, is a most
learned and diligent ancient philologist
and historian who is familiar with even
the most obscure details of Hellenistic
life which come down to us by papyrus
findings and magic gems. His way of
writing is much more difficult, drier,
more scientific than that of his "ArchJewish" colleague, who often tends to a
kind of journalism. But he is in fact far
more learned. (This actually obstructed
him from the insight of the Pharisaism of
Jesus.) His book Jesus the Magician
Page 50

can be read with great profit by anyone

able to understand the numerous Greek
quotations - but no one should be deterred by this from reading the book, for
the notes are always paraphrased
and
commented. His way of writing is only
dry compared with Maccoby's, but one
can really read his book with pleasure
because even the most difficult parts he
always keeps clear and understandable.
In the reconstruction
of the trial of
Jesus, by the way, it is in accord with
Maccoby at all essential points, so that
we can leave this point at that and get to
the book's peculiar character.
What Maccoby avoided but what
must at once strike every reader of the
gospels as compelling are the numerous
tales of miracles, especially the miraculous healings which are attributed to the
master. They are one of the gospels'
most striking features - striking in
comparison
to the Talmud-Pharisaic
anecdotes about rabbis, which are utterly niggardly with miracles - and they
are so rich with insignificant details that
an authentic historical content must be
assumed in them. To make it short:
Smith proves that Jesus, at least in his
pre-Messianic
wandering time, must
have been a rather windy subject, at
least afflicted by Hellenism or, to say it
exactly: a magician of the EgyptianHellenistic
type. This type, slightly
homosexual
and quite similar to the
Apuleian Dea-Syria-Priests,
who lived
on dubious consecrations
and suggestive healings, undoubtedly had his place
in the late antique provincial world,
especially of the East. He received his
magic powers mainly by auto-suggestive
rituals of which we have knowledge
from numerous preserved prescription
books. He also, according to his opinion
at least, made various extraterrestrial
beings serve his purpose which, for example, might come down on him in the
body of a dove. Many other magical occurrences
one reads best in Smith's
book oneself.
This Hellenistic-decadent
queasiness
which was already virulent in the master
March 1990

himself, explains best how, after his

growing success as a miracle-doer and
initiator to mysteries, he could slip into
the role of the Messiah which unfortunately ended most unhappily for him.
The circling miracle stories about analogous prophets and others must have
turned his head. More important is that
above this finally unsolvable individual
psychologic question it becomes clear
how the Jewish-Hellenistic,
mixed-up
character
exactly representing
Christianity had already been established in
the person of its involuntary founder and
thus could fill up an ecological niche
within the ideological structure of his
time. But one comes to this conclusion
only after the synthesis of Smith and
Maccoby, which indeed has to be carried
out by oneself. Therefore the reading of
both books may be strongly recommended to the open-minded reader (to
get Smith's book one must make use of
a public library since it is unfortunately
out of print [in West Germany D. Even if
one may not be convinced by every detail - that Smith and Maccoby are right
in their basic features will be clearly
proved by them. (Thereby Smith, by the
way, succeeds with his unstable wandering charlatan to draw a portrait of Jesus
towards which even Atheists of no grim
attitude towards life will, for the first
time in the complete biographic and
pseudobiographic
work on Jesus, develop a certain kind of sympathy.)

The Jesus of history

After all this, however, a question
arises which cannot be turned down:
Maccoby and Smith treat Jesus mainly
as an historical person who somehow
could be stripped out of the tanglement
of legends. But it is not this person who
has become historically effective. It is a
purely fantastic person who became
perceptibly effective. The Jesus whom
we know, to whom we owe our nolensvolens 15 interest for the possible histori-

lsNolens volens: whether willing or not.

American Atheist

But nevertheless Jesus becomes understandable through Deschner the true Jesus who never lived,
in contrast to which his insignificant historical core
remains quite ephemeral.
belongs to the sadomasochistic
cal core of his figure, for whom innumer- the Ketzerbriefe; his weak spot remains
romanticism of the Hellenistic
able people have either been tortured to that he cannot really give up the idea of
mystery-cult ... (P.114of the Gerdeath or killed in religious wars, whose a historical pacifist Jesus which, howman edition).
ever, never existed and, as a legend of
stories we know well, and who preached
a certain kind of a masochist -paradox tendency, is only to be understood funcLet us remember that a very recent
doctrine - this historically effective tionally and in the context pointed out
Jesus actually never lived. This figure by Maccoby. During the centuries fol- issue of the Ketzerbriefe (no. 12)reported
whom, if Jew or Moslem or Hindu, lowing Jesus Christ remained a legend about the reluctant stay of proceeding,
nobody escapes in his childhood; who, of utter transparent functionality, as not achieved only by most efficient internahaving caused a massacre of children only the left and the right cheek of any tional attention, against a young opponear Bethlehem by his wondrous birth, medieval slave may confirm but today nent of mysticism who in Aachen dissticker
soon after had been worshipped by also any enlightened Nicaraguan, for played Birgit Romermann's
wandering minor monarches of uncer- example - to say nothing about the showing a crossed out crucified Jesus
tain origin; who like Mithras had been church-driven subversives in the Ger- and saying "Masochism is curable." The
adored by shepherds; and who like man Democratic Republic and their human sacrifices to this perverse late
Hellenistic figure of fantasy are far from
Caesar and Augustus evoked diverse pro-Western plowshares.
being brought to an end reliably.
miraculous phenomenons in heaven, in
Deschner makes perceptible this histhe temple, and on earth until he finally The Jesus of fiction
But nevertheless Jesus becomes un- torically effective but himself unhistoridisappeared in the former as a mere imitator of the first emperors - this figure derstandable through Deschner - the cal Jesus, the true Jesus thus, in the reviewed book as a Hellenistic mosaic of
of phantasy is effective only historically true Jesus who never lived, in contrast
and psychologically. His strange doc- to which his insignificant historical core wanderer legends, the winding paths of
trine is effective only on this merely remains quite ephemeral, and who which he reconstructs until they wind
up in the pathological figure described.
imaginary background of authority. Its bothered all of us in our childhood true character, being a mosaic of the that incarnated creator of the universe His book forms the dominant point in
Hellenistic-Oriental wandering legends, who for reasons of the theory of Karma the triad of the reviewed works, without
committed suicide and whose Nicaean which it does not round up. The haris only obscured by the troublesome
reconstruction of his irrelevant person- omnipotence in questions of amnesty
mony of historical understanding of the
al and historical core as uncovered by showed a lack particularly painful to gospels and their subject achieved by
Maccoby and Smith. Yet the elucidation himself - who demands a sacrificium this book may finally form a rational
of this character remains - to begin intellectus and a Paragraph 16617for all shelter against that pathology, into
which we are forced by our contamiwith Bruno Bauer" - the merit of in- those who do not want to understand
numerable scientists of the evil nine- this and who appeal for its omission. nated surroundings and against which
teenth century and their later followers; This historically effective, but unhistor- therapy and inoculation is urgently necits convincing synthesis and descrip- ical Jesus has been characterized by essary.
tion, however, remains to the perhaps Maccoby very appropriately as a proThe psychic feature of the pathologeven greater merit of Karlheinz Desch- duct of Hellenistic-decadent horror ro- ical process of the mass neurosis relimanticism:
gion, however, remains untouched by
ner.
its historical form; it is a subject of psyTherefore his excellent book Der
gefalschte Glaube (The Falsified Creed)
The whole idea of a god incarchoanalysis. - Fritz Erik Hoevels ~
is - besides Ein Jahrhundert Heilsnate who sacrifices himself to
geschichte (A Century of the Story of
American editions
atone for the sins of mankind, is
the Life and Sufferings of Christ), proMaccoby, Hyam. Revolution in Juunknown to Jewish tradition. It
bably the best he ever wrote - the indaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance.
dispensable completion to both books
New York: Taplinger Publishing Co.,
above reviewed. As far as his person is
Inc., 1980. Hardback, 256 pp. $9.95.
17Section 166 of the West German Criminal
concerned, I can keep that short since
Smith, Morton. Jesus the Magician.
Code imposes a fine or imprisonment of up
he is sufficiently known to the readers of to three years for publicly insulting a church San Francisco: Harper Religious Books,
1982.Paperback, 224 pages, $12.95.
or religion. For more information on this
16BrunoBauer (1809-82), German theologian
and historical writer.
Austin, Texas

blasphemy code, see "The Middle Ages Are

Alive" by Gottfried Niemietz, in the March
1989American Atheist.
March 1990

Page 51

MeToD

The confusion
of religious beliefs

Ii

A beginner's guide to
refuting common
religious arguments.

"Me Too" is a feature designed to

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

Page 52

his little article is for the persons

who have just found out about the
philosophy of Atheism. It is to
demonstrate to them the utter worthlessness of accepting anything that revolts one's common sense.
I would like to establish two points:
that existence supposes properties in
the thing that exists; and that ifthe ideas
about any of the gods or the god of the
generic genre are found to be in contradiction, this 'being' can be said definitely
not to exist.
The being 'god' purportedly has no
parts, takes up no place, cannot be felt,
. cannot be known, etc. - which perfectly describes nothing. Yet with all of this,
we are asked to believe that Mr. Being
is everywhere. Now we are told that god
is supernatural (outside of nature), yet
we are told that god is everywhere. But
if this pretended being is everywhere, it
stops being supernatural, for everywhere
would place it within nature. Ask the
religious person to prove that there is
not a super-super natural.
The word creation is also nonsense,
for if Mr. Being is indeed everywhere,
there was no room for the 'nothing' that
the clergy says the universe was made
of, and hence nature would be a part of
Mr. Being, which is just an insipid personification of allthe forms of substance.
It is obvious that one could not add on
to any 'infinite' Mr. Being.
What we call "life" is only the function
of substance and is a function of molecular attraction, or blind chance, as a
molecule has no consciousness by itself.
Life comes about by chance, as it is not
found everywhere, and is not by divine
design, due to the many imperfections
and/or malfunctions that exist.
Tell the religious person that if Mr.
Being is everywhere, then there is no
room for a hell or devil, plus Mr. Being
would be in our toilets! The believers
say that 'all is a mystery' - how then is
this known? If that illusion called the
'soul' is so powerful, why does it have to
remain in our bodies until the stroke of
death? If(as the clergy say) all was made
March 1990

from nothing, ask those idiots what was

the nothing made from. That will get
some more blank faces for you. Besides,
if at one time nothing existed, again the
clergy have bungled, for that would
mean that god-ah-mighty was not in
existence.
They will shout at you that our wisdom is nothing next to god's, so you
should quickly retaliate by asking how
do you know to call that quality of this
pretended god by the name of wisdom?
Then the threats shall come. You will
be told that it is the devil that makes you
speak such, and that you are going
against god's will.Answer that ifall good
is by god and all bad is because of the
devil, then how are we responsible? Plus
god is again said to be all-powerful, so
that to say that anything can happen
contra god's will is church thinking,
a.k.a. rubbish.
Don't stand for the line that we are all
being tested, for you will catch them
every time with the retort that an allknowing being would not need a test to
see the results of some action.
You will be accosted by "you don't
have the gift of faith" which is the petitio
de princeps (the begging the question
argument used by all religions, each
having the true gift of faith), so you can
quickly come back with the gift of faith
proved the earth was fiat, didn't it?
Besides, the religious cannot tell you
where the line of demarcation is between
the natural (world of substance - the
only world) and this pretended hogwash
called the supernatural. Ask them if
they can.
As matter (all substance) cannot be
destroyed but only transformed, the
Atheist realizes that we already possess
the phenomena of all. When, by the
aforesaid definition, the clergy says that
god is a spiritual, soul substance, this is
saying that god is a substance having no
mode of being, which is only a continuation of their line of garbage.
We can easily understand that there
is no motion without substance, as well
(See "Confusion" on page 56)
American Atheist

Letters to the Editor

Open up that closet door

~:n"'~~n~~bl
nyto

n,

liS'"

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

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

Austin, Texas

torious, which means killing the enemy!

A word of encouragement to those (Incidentally, the enemy are praying to
Atheists who are still hiding out in their the same god for their side to be vicclosets.
torious!)
Now, what kind of a man is he?
A lifelong Atheist, I discovered and
They are getting very large salaries
joined American Atheists several years
ago, though I kept it secret. I opened my for this double-switching role, and did
"closet door" only gradually. At first, I you ever hear of a chaplain being an enlet it come out in conversation with my listed man? - a corporal or a sergeant?
No, they automatically become officers!
friends, then with my office co-workers,
and finally with my car pool and neigh- . When the troops go into action and
killthe enemy, where are the chaplains?
bors.
The results? I didn't lose any friends, Turning a blind eye to all this carnage,
urging the troops on or discreetly lookwe have some interesting conversations
at the office (and I'm more frequently ing the other way and playing the part of
asked for objective advice), the most Dr. Jekyll! We should put an end to this
religious person in my car pool is more expensive farce and abolish them, thus
restrained and defensive now, and my saving the taxpayer huge sums of money
neighbors are as friendly as before. I annually and separating religion from
even wear my "American Atheists" cap war.
around town and have a "Caution:
Victor St. John
Atheist Aboard" sign in my car without
Florida
any problems.
Come out of the closet and stop forgPlaying the lottery
ing your own chains.
I've finally found the reply to the apparent enigma that such fine and marMark Spencer
Life Member #330 velously-mannered ladies and gentleMaryland men are Christians:
Religionis criminal at worst, a charade
at best, a slick yet self-righteous way of
Military chaplains
I suggest the employment of chap- gaining unfair advantages, a kind of perlains in Congress, in the legislatures, in fectly hither-worldly lottery.
the navy and militia, and in prisons,
Fred W. Kerstein
asylums, and all other institutions supCanada
ported by public money be discontinued. After all, what do they do to warrant earning huge salaries? They say a Seeing god
I was a devout Mormon for several
prayer, or invocation, then place themyears and have studied the story of
selves on call (whatever that means!).
The chaplain in the armed forces is a Joseph Smith with great interest. As
mockery unto himself! He is a Dr. Jekyll you may know, Smith was visited by god
and Mr. Hyde.
the father and his son Jesus Christ. He
In the Dr. Jekyll part, he is akin to a had other hard-to-believe incidences
priest - godly, abhors war and killing, which led to the formation of the Morpain and suffering, advocates being mon church. Some people claim that
good to your neighbor, etc. In the Mr. Smith did what he did for fame, power,
Hyde part, he wears a military uniform wealth, and/or women. I know that
and becomes an active part of the kill- Smith saw what he claimed to have
ing process, a complete change of char- seen. In fact, I have seen god too, at
acter! - goes into combat with the least when I was off my anti-psychotic
troops and prays for our side to be vie- medication. I am a paranoid schizoMarch 1990

Page 53

Once when asked what god looked like,

Joseph Smith pointed out this capstone
in the Nauvoo Temple. He explained,
however, that "the nose is just a thought
too broad."(Or perhaps he simply pointed
his cane skyward and exclaimed, "It's
Sonny.")

phrenic. I told my church leader about

my visions and he referred me to a
church psychiatrist. The doctor had a
hard time convincing me that I was
crazy, because I reasoned that if it was
crazy for me to see god then wasn't it
crazy for Smith to have seen god? I was
told that the good doctor left the church
shortly afterwards and tried to have me
committed. I think that now, to the
credit of the average Mormon, they
would reject Joseph Smith and take him
for what he was, a paranoid schizophrenic with delusions.
I do volunteer work and am a political
activist for the mentally ill and ran
across a psychologist who was familiar
with the Joseph Smith story, and he told
me that Smith had been diagnosed as a
paranoid schizophrenic. I just have to
chuckle sometimes when I see my Mormon friends spend two years on a mission and devote 10 percent of their income simply to perpetuate the delusions of a man who lived a long time ago.
Edwin P. Sly
California

Funerals
The article in the June 1989 issue,
"Funeral Rites," by Carol J. Peiffer,
closely matched a recent experience I
had. I went to the funeral for a young
man who lived nearby. He was a pilot for
an air freight company, and had died in
a plane crash followingan engine failure
Page 54

shortly after takeoff. He guided his crippled aircraft down, avoiding hitting any
houses in the residential area he was
over, preventing any harm to the people
below. I am an air traffic controller at the
local airport he flew from, and I went to
the funeral to pay my respects to this
man whom I had only ever "met" while
controlling some of his flights. The funeral was held at a nearby Forest Lawn
Cemetery. Upon entering the cemetery
grounds, I stopped at the "guard house"
to ask for directions. Along with the
directions, I was handed a slick, glossy
brochure extolling the Forest Lawn
Cemetery as a shrine and monument to
Christianity.
The memorial service itself made me
quite angry. The priest who gave the
memorial service made it sound more
like he was preaching the gospel at a
Sunday service. Instead of giving much
time and attention to the life and memory of the young man who had so bravely sacrificed his life in the successful
attempt to protect the lives of people on
the ground below, we were subjected to
a long sermon on Jesus Christ and how
important it was for us to serve the Lord
and be good Christians! I felt that this
priest had never known the man whose
body lay a few yards away from him, and
that he was just using the memorial service as one more opportunity to spread
the insanity of his religion (granted,
most of the people at the service were
Roman Catholics, but that still did not
March 1990

reduce the fact that this priest made only a very few mentions of the man who
had died).
The only part of the service that I felt
did the dead man honor was when one
of his best friends and fellow pilots
talked for a short while about their
friendship and personal experiences.
This latter man gave us a true insight
into what the dead man was like, and
how deeply this loss had affected so
many people. As we all filed out past the
coffin and expressed our condolences
to the family members, I felt like spitting
on that priest as I walked past him. I am
sure that there are thousands of funerals
every day wherein the preachers, priests,
ministers, and what have you will use
the occasion to proselytize their particular brand of insanity, instead of using it
to honor and remember the person who
had died. I have been considering giving
directions to the executrix of my will
that at my funeral service, if any members of the clergy show up and try to
speak, they should be shot on sight!
Every month I am very impressed
with the outstanding quality and articles
in American Atheist. Knowing how
hard-pressed all of you are for time,
money, and manpower there at the
GHQ, I can only marvel at the consistently high-quality work that keeps
coming from all of you! Allof us out here
really do appreciate all of your hard
work.
Willard T. Wheeler
California

The curse of religion

I watched the movie, on television,
"The Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds,"
intently following the lives of a deeply
rooted Roman Catholic family. I listened
for some revealing expression and in the
last sequence it came. Rose Kennedy's
daughter came home from England to
tell her parents of her intention to marry
a Protestant. Mother Rose exploded,
disowning her and saying she was putting a curse on her Irish Catholic heriAmerican Atheist

Why is Susan B. Anthony (right) picked

for more memorial honors than Elizabeth
Cady Stanton (below right)? Perhaps
Stanton's forthrightness on matters of
religion and sex has much to do with the
answer.

tion, because brain development in the

fetus in the early stages of development
is so primitive that it doesn't have emotions, a sense of self-identity, or even
feel pain. Its "soul" is not developed yet,
and this is a fundamental reason why it
is not ethically wrong to abort.

tage. Her daughter spat back with "The

curse of the Irish is religion!"
The following night, a news item announced the California State Lottery
winner (four sharing the prize) of $68
million.The first winner, who willreceive
$685 thousand for twenty years, was
asked what she was going to do with her
money. She said she wanted to build a
Pentecostal church. Isn't that a shame.

Neal Cary
Virginia

Bad press for a feminist

Helen E. Johnson
California

The ensoulment of an Atheist

I found the answers to the question,
"What happens to your soul when you
die" in the January 1990 issue of American Atheist to be inadequate when
dealing with religious zanies, and incomplete when evaluating the question for
ourselves as Atheists.
I think that the concept of a soul is a
valid one once the three extraneous religious concepts of: (a) it is immortal, (b)
it is god-given, '(c) it is separate from the
body, are removed. Then one can define the soul as simply the personal
hopes, desires, and fears - all the emotions that make us feel special to ourselves. It is this feeling of self-identity
and the possession of emotions that differentiates us from today's computers.
This is a better and more accurate
approach when dealing with the religious
because it does not deny aspects of our
humanity. Because religion is primarily
based in emotion, the religious cannot
deny the existence of a soul because it's
what they feel, and they can understand

this nonreligious concept of soul. Then,

as Atheists we can debunk the three
extraneous religious concepts. _
The first religious concept (that the
soul is immortal) relates to the question
you posed. It is a religious concept derived from the natural fear of death and
the will to survive. As we all know, the
church lives in a fantasy world and exploits human fears and desires at the
expense of a real examination of scientific truth. In fact, the soul is part of the
brain, is affected by the endocrine system, and it dies when the body dies. The
fear of death and the will to survive are
unpleasant emotions to deal with, but
they are precisely why Homo sapiens
are not extinct.
I also think this approach is a better
one when dealing with the issue of abor-

Should there be an Elizabeth Cady

Stanton dollar? Consider this: Susan B.
Anthony's speeches were for the most
part written by Ms. Stanton. Ms. Anthony
mellowed in her later years, while Elizabeth retained her fiery spirit throughout
her life.
Liz once wrote a "woman's bible," in
which she spoke highly of orgasms for
women. She expressed the right of
women to choose the size of their family; she argued for free love and a
woman's right to a divorce in the 1880s.
Perhaps these are some of the reasons Stanton was ignored throughout
history. Cady Stanton was also well-todo, whileSusan was quite poor. Elizabeth
wore fine clothes, but Susan dressed
very plainly. Obviously, Susan B. Anthony presented a clearer image of the
suffragist as a single woman and a
school teacher. Elizabeth Cady Stanton
was ahead of her times, and as such,
chose to ridicule the Bible, thereby
earning a negative public image.
Gerald P. Lunderville
California

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Confusion
(Continued from page 52)

as no substance without motion, as all

protons, electrons, etc., show motion
under the microscope.
And finally, they will say to you that
god has everything fixed from all eternity, even the pretended confusion that
the Atheist states, but this begs the
question and labels the being of the clergy as less than all-powerful, for it would
be bound to what it foresaw and could
not change things, as Mr. Being is said
to be perfect and perfection cannot
change.
To all new Atheists, rest assured that
there is nothing but what we call substance, that the supernatural is a fiction,
and that all religions are a lie.
Never again let the lies of religion's
charlatans as well as the lies of all religions trouble you.
-- James B. Pullen, Jr.
Florida
American Atheist

suggested

American Atheist
introductory reading list
Literature on Atheism is very hard to find in most public
and university libraries in the United States - and most of
the time when you do find a book catalogued under the
word Atheism it is a work against the Atheist position.
Therefore we suggest the following publications which are
available from American Atheist Press as an introduction
into the multifaceted areas of Atheism and state/ church separation. To achieve the best understanding of thought in
these areas the featured publications should be read in the
order listed. These by no means represent our entire collection of Atheist and separationist materials.
1. All the Questions You Ever Wanted to Ask American
Atheists with All of the Answers by Jon Murray and
Madalyn O'Hair. Paperback. 248 pp. #5356 __
. $9.00
2. The Case Against Religion: A Psychotherapist
by Dr. Albert Ellis. Stapled. 57 pp. #5096

View
$4.00

3. What on Earth Is an Atheist! by Madalyn O'Hair.

Paperback. 288 pp. #5412
$8.00
4. An Atheist Speaks by Madalyn O'Hair. Paperback. 321
pp. #5098
$8.00
5. All about Atheists by Madalyn O'Hair. Paperback. 407
pp. #5097
$8.00
6. Ingersoll the Magnificent by Joseph Lewis. Paperback.
342 pp. #5216 .
$10.00
7. Essays on American Atheism, vol. I by Jon G. Murray.
Paperback. 349 pp. #5349
$10.00
8. Essays on American Atheism, vol. II by Jon G. Murray. Paperback. 284 pp. #5350
._$10.00
9. Essays in Freethinking, vol. I by Chapman Cohen.
Paperback. 229 pp. #5052
$9.00
10. Essays in Freethinking, vo!' II by Chapman Cohen.
Paperback. 240 pp. #5056
$9.00
11. Life Story of Auguste Comte by F. J. Gould. Paperback. 179 pp. #5132
$6.50

Greatest Liars by Joseph McCabe. Paperback. 176 pp. #5524

$6.50

12. History's

13. Atheist Truth vs. Religion s Ghosts by Col. Robert G.

Ingersoll. Stapled. 57 pp. #5156
$4.00
14. Some Reasons I Am a Freethinker by Robert G. Ingersoll. Stapled. 37 pp. #5184
$4.00
15. Our Constitution - The Way It Was by Madalyn
O'Hair. Stapled. 70 pp. #5400
$4.00
16. Religion and Marx by Rick B. A. Wise. Paperback. 267
pp. #5521
.
$12.00
17. Fourteen Leading Cases on Education, Religion, and
Financing Schools. Paperback. 273 pp. #5500 __
.
$5.00
18. Sex Mythology
#5440

by Sha Rocco.
.
.

Stapled.

55 pp.
$4.00

19. Women and Atheism, The Ultimate Liberation by

Madalyn O'Hair. Stapled. 21 pp. #5420
$3.50
20. Christianity Before Christ by John G. Jackson. Paperback. 238 pp. #5200
$9.00
21. The Bible Handbook (All the contradictions, absurdities, and atrocities from the Bible) by G.W. Foote, W.P.
Ball, John Bowden, and Richard M. Smith. Paperback.
372 pp. #5008
$9.00
22. The X-Rated Bible by Ben Edward Akerley. Paper-

back. 428 pp. #5000

$10.00

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Amendment I
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof; or abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government
for a redress of grievances.

"All my work in the field of science and research

has come through a change in my earlier opinions
on religion. Growth is the law of life. Orthodoxy is
the death of scientific effort."
-

Luther Burbank
Burbank the Infidel by Joseph Lewis