Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who also used multiple pseudonyms, was an American atheist activist, founder of American Atheists, and the organization's president from 1963 to 1986. She created the first issues of American Atheist Magazine. One of her sons, Jon Garth Murray, became the nominal president of the organization from 1986 to 1995, but she remained de facto president during these nine years...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth13 April 1919
CountryUnited States of America
Madalyn Murray O'Hair quotes about
The relationships that people have - that are sexual, psychological, emotional - these relationships are not open to supervision by parents, schools, churches, or government. Nobody has any right to intervene at all in any kind of relationship like that.
Religion has ever been anti-human, anti-woman, anti-life, anti-peace, anti-reason and anti-science. The god idea has been detrimental not only to humankind but to the earth. It is time now for reason, education and science to take over.
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.
We wish our Christian brothers would be honest and permit us our heroes. We do not deny them theirs.
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.
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.
The relationships that people have - that are sexual, psychological, emotional - these relationships are not open to supervision by parents, schools, churches, or government. Nobody has any right to intervene at all in any kind of relationship like that.
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.
Religion is induced insanity.
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.
I feel that everyone has a right to be insane.
In an unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable.
Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity - the glorious heritage of the Inquisition.