Honorary Knight Commander
"We are working for a revolution, the site of which is between the ears."
I'll tell you what you did with Atheists for about 1500 years. You outlawed them from the universities or any teaching careers, besmirched their reputations, banned or burned their books or their writings of any kind, drove them into exile, humiliated them, seized their properties, arrested them for blasphemy. You dehumanised them with beatings and exquisite torture, gouged out their eyes, slit their tongues, stretched, crushed, or broke their limbs, tore off their breasts if they were women, crushed their scrotums if they were men, imprisoned them, stabbed them, disembowelled them, hanged� them, burnt them alive...And you have nerve enough to complain to me that I laugh at you.
Your petitioners are Atheists, and they define their lifestyle as follows. An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist accepts that heaven is something for which we should work now - here on earth - for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist accepts that he can get no help through prayer, but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it and to enjoy it. An Atheist accepts that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment.
What is incredible about the Bible is not its divine authorship; it's that such a concoction of contradictory nonsense could be believed by anyone to have been written by an omniscient god. To do so, one would first have to not read the book, which is the practice of most Christians; or, if one does read it, dump in the trash can one's rational intelligence � to become a fool for god, in other words.
To be an Atheist, one need only be able to laugh when such obvious nonsense is offered as being "divine" truth. If you are laughing, then you belong in the only organization dedicated to determined Atheist activism � dedicated to doing something about the intrusion of religion into all areas of our government and our private lives.
What we see demonstrated in the United States is a fundamentalist desire for an Armageddon, an egging on of President Reagan towards a nuclear holocaust. This will be a fullfilment of bible prophesy.
If you can be made to believe you are going to heaven when you die, you will be willing to spend your life in a slum or die in a nuclear holocaust. If you can be made to believe that prayer helps, you will sit on your ass and do nothing.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Founder � American Atheists
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