Women’s History Month: Madalyn Murray O’Hair
In honor of Women’s History Month 2011, I’ve selected one woman to profile every day from March 1st - March 31st, 2011.
Madalyn Murray O’Hair: Atheist activist
PLAYBOY: Why are you an atheist, Mrs. Murray?
MURRAY: Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. I can get around perfectly well on my own two feet, and so can everyone else with a backbone and a grain of common sense. 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. But we’re a grown-up world now, and it’s time to put away childish things. But people don’t, because most of them don’t even know what atheism is. It’s not a negation of anything. You don’t have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man’s ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. 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. Madalyn Murray’s going to solve her own problems, and nobody’s going to intervene. It’s about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: “Well, we are men. Let’s start acting like it.”
PLAYBOY: What led you to become an atheist?
MURRAY: Well, it started when I was very young. People attain the age of intellectual discretion at different times in their lives — sometimes a little early and sometimes a little late. I was about 12 or 13 years old when I reached this period. It was then that I was introduced to the Bible. We were living in Akron and I wasn’t able to get to the library, so I had two things to read at home: a dictionary and a Bible. Well, I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend — just as if it were a novel — very rapidly, and I’ve never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it — the whole thing shocked me profoundly. I remember l looked in the kitchen at my mother and father and I thought: Can they really believe in all that? Of course, this was a superficial survey by a very young girl, but it left a traumatic impression. Later, when I started going to church, my first memories are of the minister getting up and accusing us of being full of sin, though he didn’t say why; then they would pass the collection plate, and I got it in my mind that this had to do with purification of the soul, that we were being invited to buy expiation from our sins. So I gave it all up. It was too nonsensical.
A few years later, I went off to college, a good, middle-class, very proper college, where I studied with, and under, good, middle-class, very proper people; which is to say, the kind who regard sex as distasteful and religious doubts as unthinkable; the kind to whom it would never occur to scrutinize the mores of society, who absolutely and unquestioningly accept the social system. — Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Playboy interview (1965)
Madalyn Murray O’Hair didn’t really do much for history, except for a little thing called “getting mandatory prayers removed from public schools.” No big whoop. I’m sure you’ve cranked out more before guzzling your morning pot of coffee, right?
O’Hair remained an active atheist until her disappearance and murder in 1995; due to an incompetent police force (lol, betcha didn’t see that coming, huh?), her remains were not found until 2001.
Links: Wikipedia page
Abington School District v. Schempp (Wikipedia page)
Abington School District v. Schempp (Wikisource page)
American Atheists
Links to writings on Positive Atheism
Madalyn Murray O’Hair (Secular Web profile, includes links to writings)
PBS: God in America series
Snopes.com debunking of the “Madalyn Murray O’Hair wants to prevent religious programming” email forward.
Madalyn Murray: Playboy Magazine, October 1965
WHERE’S MADALYN?
Essay: THE SAD STATE OF ECCENTRICITY (3.14.69)
The Murder of Madalyn Murray O’Hair: America’s Most Hated Woman
Madalyn Murray O’Hair Murder: Religious Freedom Coalition (statement from William J. Murray [her son]; critical piece)
