Consider the Atheist

I'm asked to speak to you tonight on the question is atheism the religion of the future no that ends that speech why atheism won't to be the religion of the future is a subject that's very dear to me and we need only to consider the atheist to discover the answer and that's what I am here to do tonight consider the atheist I don't like atheists very much if at all this is highly unusual given that I am their principal and most articulate spokesman in America and what brought this situation about and why they cannot be the Messiah's in our culture is the subject matter of my discussion this evening since the prefix a in a word of Greek derivation gives a negative sense to that word and atheist is simply a person who is not the theistic whatever theistic means and I recognize and I'm sure you recognize what Webster has to say and it's always important to make a reference back the theism is a belief in the existence of god or gods especially belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man whatever creation means to the astronomers or physicists or to you or to me as the creative source of man and the world who not which but who transcends yet is imminent now I don't know what transcends means I do not know what imminent means and for that matter I do not know what eternal means will create means or transmigration or grace or prayer or go and I don't think anybody else in the world knows these are nonsense words which have special esoteric nonsense meanings to theistic idiots of all brands now an atheist is a person who simply does not accept that view the view of theism as I said whatever it is and properly stands in opposition to it because a used as a prefix is a privat of and negates the word now many people say that atheists are negative because of their appellation but the prefix in gives a negative sense - a word - as in independence and isn't that a negative word it simply means free of dependency and independence is a treasured world word in American culture as someday the word atheist will be to use a term of negative derivation does not mean that the philosophy of living the veldt unshown flowing from it is in any sense negative only the most uneducated would have so little respect for language as to make such a gross supposition but everything depends on what one means let's look at atheists known according to the degree of guts they possess also as agnostics ethical culture assume inist spree thinkers Objectivist secularists rationalists iconoclasts and god alone knows how many other names to hide what they are but tonight I'm going to call them all atheists because fundamentally they are against atheism there are primitive atheists philosophical atheists and practical atheists and I have been all three there are also hate ridden atheists who usually convert from Catholicism fanatical atheists who usually convert from Jehovah's Witnesses and the primitive atheists I meet everywhere in great numbers today usually on campus a primitive atheist is one who comes of intellectual age does a double take at Christianity finds it to be incredible as any thinking person would and announces I don't believe all that crap and lets it go at that these people usually joined the Unitarian Church [Music] or the ethical culture society and live happily ever after with substituted dogmas creeds and routines to fill a gap they imagined was left in their lives they float around in a small esoteric group which plays the game of discussion in private specifically the game of we exceptional few and our superior philosophy the philosophic atheist does a triple take of Christianity and gets hopelessly bogged down in reading Bible King James standard revised renewed re-edited reinterpreted and then he turns to the Vedas the Upanishads the Torah's the Book of Mormon science of life a waspy Urantia I Ching and other holy books all of which are trash he knows the teleological argument for God or the ontological argument or the epistemological argument or the pragmatic or the moral argument and how to refute them all in excess he delights in a two-hour discussion of Pascal's choice and he can use up hours of priceless living time analyzing all of the religious theories history diverse theologies these people have been 10 years in the American Humanist Association and they live every deep happily ever after deeply immersed in obscure ism reading in depth the genteel erudite and completely worthless articles in the journal of that society they play the game of beating ideas to death with words and they usually flunked PhDs I need to delineate the other kind of atheist to the who has a hatred reaction to it all he can recite an extraordinary number of incidents where priests were discovering discovered to be living living carnally with their housekeepers or he gleefully collects news items where ministers appropriated fifteen dollars and 73 cents from the roofing fund or where ministers were named as correspondence in divorce cases or where a young choirboy accused the male director of indecent advances all of these people belong to the friendship liberal league this type of atheist never gets beyond his hatred and usually this atheist has a trauma conversion to atheism and not an intellectual one and he can well have a trauma conversion back to theism and proliferate these atheists do through every other category of atheist then there is the sectarian atheist who flourish is only in Bichir internecine warfare in the atheist groups and in factional strife therein about who is the better atheist and they all belong to the American rationalist Association and a great number of them belong to the united secularists of america then there is another atheist a Maslow vien type who just has a natural human thrust to what is healthy and natural in life his is a gut reaction as well as an intellectual one he has a way of life as a way of life and underlying basic positivism he is grounded in life and its natural rules he has a freewheeling open-ended philosophy his emphasis is on the worth of the individual his human dignity his intelligence his ability to order his own life his ability to to enjoy the emotions with which he is endowed and his emphasis is on reason life experience and common sense his life this atheist is unadorned with creeds dogmas and rituals he does not feel that he is a part of a chosen people but only a part of mankind he knows no sacrificial redemptions he bends no knees and he bowels no head he is as negative as Columbus who denied the Flat Earth he is as destructive as was galilea who saw the earth as a part of a whole he is as anti as a physician curing a disease he is interested in here and now not in fantasy and he sees religion theism as simply being irrelevant to human life he has no negative emotion Laden reaction to religion simply because that isn't worth his time and I am here tonight I am certain with this type of atheist predominant in this audience [Applause] then there is the atheist who realizes finally that every aspect of living depends on the total living of all mankind he recognizes the need of a better cultural philosophic base and he looks at the old old poem with new eyes and recognizes it as a new truth and you know it all no man is an island entire of itself every man is a piece of the continent a part of the main if a clod be washed away by the sea Europe is the less any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind and therefore never send to know For Whom the Bell Tolls it tolls for thee at one time in our American history we had an entire body of men who recognized this and this entire body of men wrote a constitution for us which embodied several principles and these principles broke America away from the stream of history and made us particularly and significantly unique as a nation these men devised a government which was contractual with the people and which established certain unique features all of which you know separation of powers a grant of specific authority to government bodies with a large residue of the power retained by the people a curious rotating system of in office placement which would bring about an opportunity for removal from office on a constant and continuing basis but none of that was any good because as they played with these ideas they came to realize that there was a certain decision which had to be made in respect to religion theism before they could begin so as an underlying platform they programmed in complete and absolute separation of church and state a phenomena that had never occurred anywhere else in the history of man they'd established the church and as we review it we can see it was because actually they hated Christianity indeed a striking feature of the times was the evasion of the use of the word Christian in respect to the religion embodied in official national declarations the Constitution of the United States does not contain one word of reference to this religion which was then the dominant one of each State of the Union Article 2 section 8 was written as an escape clause for those who did not care to be identified with the oath-taking of Christianity the Declaration of Independence reform refers in ordinary deistic manner to nature and nature's God creator and divine providence and concentrated reading of any documents of this entire era brings one to an immediate realize that realization off to what extent the writers would go in order to avoid the mention of the word Christian and our national leaders were for the most part theists and included in their ranks were the first four presidents of the United States George Washington John Adams Thomas Jefferson Thomas Madison and they include Thomas Paine Benjamin Franklin George Mason Ethan Allen Thomas Paine's writings on this matter of deism versus the hated Christian religion were so widely known and accepted by the leaders of the revolutionary movement that they were cited in the arguments before the Supreme Court of that day indeed at the Constitutional Convention when Benjamin Franklin being aged attempted to have deliberations open with a prayer he was defeated by a parliamentarian move in 1783 when the same Benjamin Franklin came to Congress with the idea that a Catholic bishop Rick be established in an American city the Congress repudiated this idea also and one of the most wealthy men of the time in dying endowed a college Gerard College on the grounds of which he ordered in his will that no religious person should ever set foot on these grounds now you have all heard of the Treaty of Tripoli for the matter culminated not alone in that and many atheists try to wash away the Treaty of Tripoli but it's important the famous Treaty of Tripoli was concluded by the United States and treaties are the highest laws of our land with Tripoli On February 10th 1797 and the treaty was ratified by the Senate in June of the same year an article 11 of that treaty states as follows quote as the government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion as it has in itself no character of enmity against the law religion or tranquility of muscleman and as the states never have entered into any way or act of hostility against any Muhammad and nation it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinion shall ever produce an interruption of harmony existing between the two countries but more important this treaty was followed with exactly the same wording and the same kind of treaty with Algiers and later with Tunis but the federal government was one thing in the state governments another and nine of the thirteen states had established churches at the time of the Revolution and they had them from 1776 to 1787 saw the compelling necessity of disestablishment for the federal the government the states did not see it necessary for themselves and by the time of the adoption of the first amendment to the Constitution on December the 15th 1789 four states still retained established churches and they were Massachusetts Maryland Connecticut and New Hampshire now national leaders were strong in Virginia and Virginia is an example of how badly those national leaders wanted to disestablish the church that disestablishment was fierce and it did Center in Virginia in that state legislative acts in 1799 and 1802 provided for seizure of every type of property held by the churches the state took church buildings church grounds gleb's real estate the bells from church towers church furnishings books records of the parish and even communion silver everything which had belonged to the established Church of Virginia on July the 5th 1776 all properties were sold and the money was to be used for public purposes and religion was not a public purpose and did not get a penny [Applause] [Music] the Christian Church was embattled on the national level but it held on in the States everywhere it could and Connecticut Church did not yield its grip until the new constitution was adopted in 1818 and Massachusetts in a constitutional amendment never separated church and state until 1833 in New York and New England states assistance to churches in the form of land endowments persisted until about 1800 but after churches were stripped of taxes from general funds the churches still were given power to tax their people themselves a primary principle of Taxation was invested in corporate status in colonial days in corporation gave unusual rights notably the power to tax and it was remindful of the ecclesiastical corporation such as had existed in England and around which the very bitter strife of mortmain raged the battle was repeated in America when an effort was made to incorporate the Episcopal Church and that reached into the national level and James Madison was the president of the United States and he returned to the House of Representatives the bill to incorporate the Protestant Episcopal Church of Alexandria and he returned it On February the 21st 1811 and it is important to cite his veto message because they hated the churches it says quote the bill exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions and it winds up saying because the bill vests in the set incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same and authority which being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty I therefore veto the bill this was followed by the Virginia State Constitutional Convention in 1829 which did not permit the incorporation of a theological seminary by the state legislature and today this hatred is still evident in the constitution of both West Virginia and Virginia because it is still stated in those constitutions quote the General Assembly shall not grant a charter of incorporation to any church or religious denomination the virginia state constitutional convention however had to take one more swipe at the churches and it provided that one was not permitted to make a bequest in his will to any denomination or to any particular congregation now Madison wanted his position to be interpreted correctly and on two other occasions he demonstrated what he meant by separation of church and state don't you let anybody give you any business when they say our founding fathers didn't mean it because you hear this in a second veto while he was president On February the 28th 1811 he returned to the House of Representatives a bill concerning a question of land to be given to the Baptist Church in the Mississippi tarry Mississippi Territory and his veto message said quote because the bill in reserving a certain parcel of land of the States for the use of said Baptist Church comprises a principle and precedence for the appropriations of funds of the United States for the use and support of religious societies contrary to the articles of the Constitution which declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion I veto this bill he further expressed great concern less quote ecclesiastical body should gain excess position of property he feared that power would accompany in it and he particularly feared that theirs might be the land in perpetuity so he wrote a memorandum in which he said in the United States there is a double motive for fixing limits in this case because wealth may increase not only from additional gifts but from exorbitant advances in the value of the primitive one in grants of vacant lands and of lands in the vicinity of towns and cities the increase of value is often such as if frozen would essentially control the liberality which confirms them and in 1823 he sent a letter to edward everett and wrote further prior to the revolution the episcopal church was established by law in this state on the declaration of independence it was left with all other sects to self support and madison pointed to a horrible example quote see also the attempt in kentucky for example where it was proposed to exempt houses of worship from taxes and he deemed this to be an encroachment by ecclesiastical bodies inconsistent with our constitution and the separation between religion and government and jefferson too was up in his ears to this and i have a purpose to tell you all this night writing to John Cartwright concerned with a book of Cartwright's he wrote in a letter dated June the 5th 1824 I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction at length of the judicial usurpation of legislative powers for such the judges have usurped in their repeated decisions that Christianity is a part of the common law the proof is to the contrary and he went on with an elaborated document to show this Jefferson evaluated his best piece of work to be his bill for establishing religion religious freedom which was introduced into the virginia legislature in 1779 and writing about this in his autobiography listen to this where the preamble declares that coercion is a depart from the plant is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion an amendment was proposed to insert the words jesus christ so that it would read a departure from the plan of jesus christ the holy author of our religion the insertion was rejected by a great majority it's not a very well known fact that Jefferson was so critical of Jesus Christ that he created his own Bible he took some blank pages cut up his Bible and by pasting parts of the story of the life of Jesus Christ together tried to make that man into a coherent individual and he failed at the task the result was an octavio of 46 pages and it's called the Jefferson Bible and you can buy it in some bookstores where the churches don't have control of the bookstores and this is the point of all of this where worthy atheists in 1780 in 1780 only 4% of the US population were members of churches in a population of nearly 3 million by official census there were only 3,000 churches and very small ones at that we began our nation as one being specifically anti-christian we were involved federally only as worshippers of nature and nature's God it was an atheist stream and so what did they do and what did the religious people do I know what the atheist did they sat on their asses and they protected their Economic Security and their tenure in their employment and they protected their decent reputation by not aiding the deists at all but the religious went to work on October the 27th 1789 the first presbytery eastward in Massachusetts and New Hampshire made an official protest to George Washington because there was no explicit acknowledgment of the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent somewhere in the magna carta of our country and in 1793 the year Philadelphia was stricken by the yellow fever the Reverend John Mason preached a sermon which extended all over the land in which he declared that the plague was sent as a visitation from the Christian God because he Jesus Christ was not recognized in the supreme law of the land and at this time the capital of the United States was situated in Philadelphia Pennsylvania and the yellow fever came close to wiping out a very large percentage of the population in 1803 the Reverend Samuel B Wylie Doctor of Divinity University of Pennsylvania preached and distributed a sermon in which he said did not the framers of this instrument the Constitution resemble the fool mentioned in Psalm 14:1 three who said in his heart there is no God and in 1811 Samuel Austin Doctor of Divinity afterwards president of the University of Vermont preached and distributed a sermon in which he said that lack of recognition of God was the capital defect in the Constitution which will issue inevitably in the destruction of the nation and after the deaths of George Washington a prayer was forged to have him utter the only references to Jesus Christ in all of his writings the original letter from which the prayer was manufactured is found in his writings and the forgery persists to this day in a bronze tablet in Saint Paul's Chapel in New York City and were worthy atheists it has been important to the Christians of the nation to have at least the founding fathers squarely in the ranks of the Christians rather than a deists and they have rewritten our history you won't find this in your college your university or your library book you have to go to the law libraries of America to look up the cases in which these items were involved and the Atheist set while the Christians redirected our entire nation the religionists began to make their power felt' and legislators were persuaded to pass laws and statutes making first churches exempt from taxation however statutes can be declared unconstitutional and the churches saw that state constitutional provisions would only protect in their claim to exemptions so starting then they tried to change the constitutions of the various states in order to give them self tax exemption up to 1916 10 states with constitutions adopted immediately after 1780 had no provisions at all for tax exemptions but Pennsylvania was the first to adopt a constitutional amendment specifically exempting church property and you know what vested interests pressured for that Pennsylvania gave in in 1835 and exempted the churches massachusetts exempted them in 1836 virginia in 1841 new hampshire in 1842 and in the remaining 38 states 13 more adopted such exemptions between 1859 and 1911 and since 1911 the other states have given way and have given tax exemption across the board so you see the very first thing that the churches went after was money tax money and power and absolutely always money other than from their own members and they asked for the power of sanctions for their beliefs well the Atheist set and did nothing an established church as a finance Church and the struggle for this establishment has always revolved around financial issues and justice Douglas in the case of Murray in 1963 in Maryland defined an established mint of religion said that in this kind of configuration the church typically has a place in the state's budget so the struggle became apparently one then of reestablish of the churches and the religious people moved out while the atheist sat on their ass without the recognition that Christianity was a major force into the nation there could not be a call for indirect subsidy of tax exemption nor could they bear be a call for direct subsidy so it was important to transform us into a Christian nation and the idea of a Christian amendment soon took hold about the time of the civil war and this was introduced into Congress to the committee of the judiciary of the House of Representatives first on February the 18th 1874 I want to read this to you it's important how far we went from 1776 to 1874 and how far we have come from 1874 to 1971 this is what they're religious fanatics tried to do then they proposed to amend the preamble of the Constitution in this wise we the people of the United States in order to acknowledge Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government the Lord Jesus Christ as the ruler among the nation's and his will revealed in the Holy Scriptures as the supreme authority in order to constitute a Christian government form a more perfect union establish justice ensure domestic tranquility don't laugh it almost passed and this stupid amendment was reintroduced six times since then in 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 and don't you know I'm finding it in America today there may be another to pass it the religionists take a long view of history and the atheist sit on their asses with the notion that religion will someday die a convenient death someday the Pope's going to call me up and he's gonna say hey Madeline this Paul here I want you to know that I want you to take us over if you'll just come over to Rome hear fly over we'll give you our political power our banks our businesses our real estate what's the matter with you people you think they're going to give up so what have we now as a nation this nation that we started out with like this in 1776 listen what we have now in a nation started with such auspicious courage the atheists during this time permitted the abuse of Thomas Paine they permitted the destruction of the works of Ethan Allen the single anti-christian voice among the revolutionaries who fought really they failed to rally under Ingersoll they permitted Eugene B Debs to languish in prison they never even made a memorial out of Clarence Darryl's home nobody knows that Thomas Alva Edison was an atheist nobody knows that Mark Twain was Oh Mark Twain was a brave one he was a brain he was one of you he said 100 years after my last relative dies you can publish my work on atheism the last relative died six years ago [Applause] the only persons exempt from the draft in America our seminarians we have chaplains in jails Penitentiary's in the Armed Forces on taxpayers payrolls and at West Point the army still marches the trainees to church on Sunday our money since 1865 bears the legend one nation under God our pledge of allegiance is corrupted by it we must acknowledge God to obtain passports we must acknowledge God since June of 1966 a new law that's just passed we must acknowledge God in order to work for the federal government in civil service or in any other capacity and Christ is now an official part of the space program we cannot adopt children if we are atheists we cannot join the VFW if we are atheists we cannot join the Masons we cannot have our children in scouts unless we believe in God and this God means a male white American Christian Judeo God the churches are now officially through a United States Supreme Court decision of last year absolutely tax-exempt in everything they do real estate business and so Weiser and they will soon have their schools completely financed by federal taxpayers we lost the Parekh aid fight five years ago the Roman Catholic Church will win that hands down and the only thing that is left in question is will it be 18 months or three years but in no instance longer than three years because the atheists have been sitting on their asses doing nothing we as citizens and taxpayers support not only churches church lands church schools tuition for church children we support church businesses which are tax-free Church stock ownership ship which is tax-free and church control of our culture ask any woman who wants an abortion the greatest insult of all is the control of our culture but well after all I'm only talking about trifling matters I'm only talking about symbols and the money that I talk about is a trifle it's meaningless what the hell the Southern Baptist Convention only owns just merely Borden Milk Bemis bags Mack truck Hut rig brass meat fruit off trailers Burlington Mills Firestone rubber they're a small congregation they couldn't own more the direct and indirect tax subsidies of the churches by federal state county and city government only exceeds the cost of the war in Vietnam by 4 and 1/2 million dollars a year I'll repeat that the direct and indirect tax subsidized ation of the churches by federal state county and city governments only exceeds the cost of the war in Vietnam by four and a half million dollars a year it's really nothing don't be concerned meanwhile there are more atheists in America than there are Roman Catholics and they watch the Negroes they watch those poor blacks striving for ethnic pride they watch the saved but as the black struggle for the concept of black is beautiful for identity they struggle to ameliorate their civil conditions and the atheist see the American Indians and the Chicanos and women in women's linen struggling in the battle everywhere for human rights and the sophisticated intelligent educated atheist who is the doctor the lawyer the teacher the judge the person in actual control of our society because of his functions in it this sophisticated intelligent educated atheist sits on his ass and won't even do what the lowly black man in the gutter will do atheism the religion of the future oh don't make me laugh the average churchgoer today is age 32 he has a master's degree from college he sends his two children to Sunday school regularly his wife goes one day a week extra for some proselytizing church activity and he is an atheist atheists are faceless gutless and brainless and they cannot inherit the future they isolate themselves from the fight and there is a fight and it is in society not in esoteric groups hidden under meaningless names my god the ethical culture society I mean who could tell what they stood for disdaining to get their hands dirty and it's a war it's a war in which we need to reach the mass of people with the sophisticated instruments of mass communication and with some ideas not in little groups such as this nor through little unintelligible magazines or through irrelevant issues as we strive to be identified as everything that we can be identified as except an atheist well I'm an atheist and take a goddamn good look a hundred and eighty pounds on the hoof and I'm proud of it and as an atheist I have an understanding that many of you do not have I cannot take on all of the problems of the entire world piecemeal the superstructure of our culture for I have a more important job than that I work only on the basic philosophy the floor on which everything else sits and in a geopolitical sense and in a long-range view of a hundred years 200 years a thousand years in the stream of human history from this date forward that's the important thing that floor of that base but this is too big of an idea for the small minds of the atheists of America to encompass their interests are not in bettering the quality of human life at all their interest is not in defining this floor this base this magnificent life asserting philosophy the atheists are interested in job tenure the atheists are interested in saving their economic asses the atheists are interested in the pettiness of fear of being known as an atheist I can't tell my wife you can do something else to her really the atheists are interested in respectability they are interested in their quiet outward conformity to the notion of religion through which conformity they give it support religion continues because you support it every one of you here and you support it by your conformity with its notions and with your compliances with its demands upon you and the geometric progression now of religious games don't kid yourself when you look at the culture religion gains the gains were in arithmetic progression for some decades they're in geometric geometric progressions now and I think unless we have a significant breakthrough in the next two or three years we'll be able to fight 1776 all over again in 1976 the first amendment will mean little or nothing by them but separation of church and state the only protection for the atheist or for free man and a free society is meaningless and worthless as far as the atheist is concerned he would sell out his soul if he had one he would sell out his country he would sell out his family he would easily sell out the entire human race and he is doing it today in America for job security and for respectability and not to be labeled with the horrendous name of atheist I need therefore to end it as I began it I was asked to speak tonight on the question is atheism the religion of the future no it's not religion will revitalize and it will come out stronger from this it's period of strife because it has no enemy the Atheist is godless thank you you

Channel: AronRa

Views: 88,105

Rating: 4.9115043 out of 5

Keywords: Madelyn Murray O'Hair, American Atheists, atheist, secular, secularism, 1st amendment, constitution

Id: yflQd2jyp7Y

Length: 48min 30sec (2910 seconds)

Published: Sun May 11 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Tiny_Pay]

I love this womans voice her articulation is great