Madalyn Murray O'Hair
The atheist must abandon his defensive positions, take up the cudgels and go forward, rather than into the retreat of apathy.Collection: Atheist
I decided that if nobody else was going to do anything to rectify this colossal inequity in taxation, I'd have to do it myself. So I instituted a suit against the city of Baltimore demanding that the city assessor be specifically ordered to assess the Church for its vast property holdings in the city, and that the city tax collector then be instructed to collect the taxes once the assessment has been made.Collection: Assessment
Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity - the glorious heritage of the Inquisition. It's no coincidence that most of my abusive mail - sentencing me to exquisite Oriental tortures and relegating me to hell-fire and damnation -comes from self-admitted Catholics.Collection: Fire
But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion.Collection: Children
I'd been a psychiatric social worker for 17 years, but within 24 hours after I started the case against studying reading Bible in school by my son, I was fired from my job as a supervisor in the city public welfare department. And I was unable to find another one. So my income was completely cut off.Collection: Jobs
I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God.Collection: Children
There are good, humanitarian people everywhere - occasionally even in the Church.Collection: People
When I learned that there was such a thing as an atheist, I looked it up - and found out that the definition fitted me to a tee. Finally, at the age of 24, I found out who and what I was. Better late than never.Collection: Atheist
If a humanist or an atheist or an agnostic says, "We'll bake you a pie," we can go right into the kitchen and bake it, and you can eat it an hour later. We don't promise you a pie in the sky by and by. It's charlatanry to promise people something that no one can be sure will ever be delivered. But it's even worse to offer people a reward, like children, for being good, and to threaten them with punishment if they're not.Collection: Atheist
As I grew a little bit older and got interested in law, I read that Clarence Darrow didn't believe in the Bible either. So I read everything he had ever written, all of his trials, everything - to search out the philosophy of his disbelief.But I couldn't find it.Collection: Philosophy
I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view - which is what, along with my reason, entitles me to refute it. You can't rationally reject something until you know all about it.Collection: Views
I was shamed.My son, Bill, who was 14 come to me and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him.Collection: Mother
I don't think the Church has ever contributed anything to anybody, anyplace, at any time.Collection: Thinking
My son Bill, who came to me in 1960-he was 14 then, quoted the old parable to me: "It is not by their words, but by their deeds that ye shall know them" -pointing out that if I was a true atheist, I would not permit the public schools of America to force him to read the Bible and say prayers against his will. He was right.Collection: Atheist
I decided that we'd have to take our chances with the law and get the hell out of Baltimore. I thought of seeking asylum in Canada or Australia or England, but I didn't want to leave the United States, because for better or worse I'm an American, and this is my land; so I decided to fight it out on home ground, and finally we hit upon Hawaii, because of the liberal atmosphere created by its racial admixture, and because of its relatively large population of Buddhists, who are largely nontheistic.Collection: Buddhist
Ill tell you, Mr. Thomas, why some Christians are afraid of me. They're not sure that what they believe is really true. If they were sure, I wouldn't be a threat to them at all.Collection: Christian
I want a strong man, but a gentle one. And, most unlikely of all, but most essential, I want a man with a capacity for love - to give it generously and accept it joyously. I also want somebody who, when I say, "Let's call it quits," won't hang on; who'll say, "All right, it was fun while it lasted. So long and good luck."Collection: Strong
I want to drink life to the dregs, to enlarge myself to the absolute limits of my being - and to strive for a society in which everyone -regardless of race, creed, color and especially religious conviction - has the same exhilarating raison d'être, and the same opportunity to fulfill it.Collection: Religious
Actually, I don't like Atheists very much - at least most of them ~ because they are not motivated to move into the community and attempt to correct the injustices which are everywhere apparent against them.Collection: Atheist
The neighborhood children, of course, were forbidden by their parents to play with my little boy, Garth, so I finally got him a little kitten to play with. A couple of weeks later we found it on the porch with its neck wrung.Collection: Couple
Scholars have found that references to Christ in Josephus were deliberately planted in the translation long after it was written, and the Latin references to Christ are not to a person of that name. In the Dead Sea Scrolls there was mention of a particular "teacher of righteousness" who had characteristics somewhat like those attributed to Christ, but it might easily have been someone else.Collection: Teacher
Sex is where you find it. I say take it and enjoy it. Give and receive freely, without fear, without guilt and without contractual obligations.Collection: Sex
Quite apart from the Church's financial self-interest in getting me out of the way, Baltimore is an overwhelmingly Catholic city and like most good Christians, they felt we ought to be punished for our unorthodox views.Collection: Christian
I'm not proud of having been married -I've had five affairs, all of them real wingdings. I've enjoyed every goddamned minute of them, but sooner or later I've outgrown every one of them, and when I did I got fed up and threw them out. If they can't keep up with me, the hell with them.Collection: Real
Once involved in the school-prayer fight, I rapidly became aware of, and appalled by, the political and economic power of the Church in America -all based on the violation of one of our nation's canon laws: the separation of church and state.Collection: Prayer
I've found that most people who are bound together legally would be a damn sight happier together -or apart -if they were released from the contract. A man-woman relationship is physical and emotional, not legal.Collection: Men
I don't feel that people should glom onto other people. I feel that relationships should be nice and easy and convenient and happy and not strictured with legality or jealousy.Collection: Nice
Kids should be taught about sex, sex hygiene and contraceptive methods starting in the sixth grade, and whenever they want to try it, they should be allowed to go at it without supervision or restriction -in their parents' bedroom, on the grass in a park, in a motel; it doesn't matter, as long as the setting is private and pleasant. If we did all this, our kids would grow up into happier, healthier human beings. But we won't, of course. It would make too much sense.Collection: Sex
On a nationwide basis, I would guess that the various churches would have to pay annually an amount at least equal to the national debt. But it's impossible for me to make an exact estimate, because the churches hide their wealth in every way they can - deliberate falsification as to the value of property, registering it under phony names in order to obscure the fact that the Church owns the property.Collection: Order
I don't care whether I succeed or whether I fail as long as I am trying. I hope that I succeed.Collection: Long
One of the things I did during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker was go around and find people with mental crutches, and every time I found one, I kicked those goddamn crutches until they flew. You know what happened? Every single one of those people has been able to walk without the crutches better, in fact. Were they giving up anything intrinsically valuable? Just their irrational reliance upon superstitions and supernatural nonsense. Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it.Collection: Giving Up
Let's distinguish between freedom and equality. The modern American woman may be more liberated sexually than her mother was, but I don't think she enjoys a bit more sexual equality. The American male continues to use her sexually for one thing: a means to the end of his own ejaculation.Collection: Mother
Let's face it: If a son of God was ever born, it was because of this wonderful sex act that Joseph and Mary enjoyed one night.Collection: Sex
We packed up all the worldly possessions we could carry with us and took the next flight to Hawaii from Washington. It took just about every cent my family had to our name just to pay the plane fare. When we arrived, we had about $15 left among us. We were really in pitiful shape. But we were together, and we were alive, and this was all that mattered.Collection: Names
As a militant feminist, I believe in complete equality with men: intellectual, professional, economic, social and sexual; they're all equally essential, and they're all equally lacking in American society today.Collection: Believe
Words divorced from action supporting them are meaningless and hypocritical.Collection: Action
I think this word 'disbelieve' would be the best of all possible worlds if everybody were an atheist or an agnostic or a humanist - his or her own particular brand - but as for compelling people to this, absolutely not.Collection: Atheist
I just want a man -a real, two-balled masculine guy -and there aren't many of them around, believe me. But I do want somebody my own age, and somebody who has brains enough to keep me interested and to earn enough money to support me in the style to which I've become accustomed.Collection: Real
This crusade to separate church and state is only one expression of my raison d'être. I'm an atheist, but I'm also an anarchist, and a feminist, and an integrationist.Collection: Atheist
I'm saying that there's absolutely no conclusive evidence that Jesus ever really existed, even as a mortal. I don't believe he was a historical figure at all.Collection: Jesus
My life and the life of my family has been completely disrupted in absolutely every way by starting the school-prayer case. But it's been worth it. It's uncovered a vast cesspool of illegitimate economic and political power in which the Church is immersed right up to its ears, and I intend to dive in headfirst and pull it out of there dripping wet for all the world to see -no matter how long it takes, no matter whose feet get stepped on in the process, no matter how much it costs, no matter how great the personal sacrifice.Collection: Prayer
I recall that I had a terrible struggle finding anything antireligious in the school libraries.But many years later my family moved into a house where a woman had left a box of books containing 20 volumes on the history of the Inquisition. I found out there was a word for people like me: "heretic." I was kind of delighted to find I had an identity.Collection: Book
I'd describe myself as a sexual libertarian - but I'm not a libertine. "To each his own" is my motto.Collection: Libertarian
I went off to college, a good, middle-class, very proper college, a Brethren institution, where two years of Bible study are required for graduation. It was a good, sound, thorough, but completely biased evaluation of the Bible, and I was delighted with it, because it helped to document my doubts; it gave me a framework within which I could be critical.My independent study continued for 20 years after this. So I do know the Bible very well from a Protestant point of view.Collection: Independent
By the time it's considered socially acceptable to start screwing, most of us are sexually constipated, and this is often an incurable condition. I think young people should be able to have their first sexual love affair whenever they feel like it. In the case of most girls, this would be around 13 or 14; with most boys, around 15 or 16.Collection: Girl
Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.Collection: Attitude
Long ago, when I was a very young girl, I said that I wanted to go everywhere, see everything, taste everything. hear everything, touch everything, try everything before I died. There isn't anything you can name that a woman can do that I haven't done. I don't intend to stand by and be a spectator. I want to be right in there in the midst of it, right up to my nose - totally involved in the community, in the world, in the stream of history, in the human image.Collection: Girl
Atheists have an excellent longevity record because we have no place to go after we die, so we take good care of ourselves and our world while we are here.Collection: Atheist
The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint.Collection: Acceptance