Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s Son Talks to Mike Huckabee About His Conversion to Christianity

“What’s amazing is that there’s absolutely no mention of the fact that so many Christian parents have treated their children basically the same way when their kids tell them they’re atheists.”

IOKWYAC

 What?

I’m pretty sure he’s just pointing out the irony of the situation.

 There are indeed atheists who are bad human beings, just as there are Christians who are good human beings. One can be a bad parent AND use Christianity as an excuse to be a bad parent. An atheist has no such excuse to fall back on, but it doesn’t mean there are no bad atheist parents simply because they cannot justify being turds with religion.  Humans are clever, if not smart; we can always come up with excuses for anything.
Now that I got THAT out of the way…
There are several verses in the Bible that call for the killing of children in the case of disobedience. There are also numerous instances of infanticide and child abuse in the Bible, not to mention the fact that Christ stated (Luke 13:26), “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple”.
There is nothing about atheism that suggests or proscribes any particular sort of behavior or treatment of others. Atheism is simply a lack of belief in deities. That Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a raging bitch says nothing about atheism, however, many an abusive Christian parent has used his/her religion as justification to do what they do. This speak volumes to the potential evil of religious belief. Religion can often provide justification for evil deeds. Atheism cannot provide any such rationalization.

Unfortunately, I think we atheists are still paying the price for O’Hair’s nasty personality and vicious tongue. She was a really repellant person. Which she had every right to be…but there is always going to be collateral damage when somebody exercises their rights to the extent she did hers.

”
Calling for a post-natal abortion? You’d have to be a pretty horrible human being to say something like that.”
Not really.  The term “postnatal abortion” is so absurd it ranks with “poopy-head” in lack of psychological power to wound.  A truly terrible person would know how to strike at an individual’s personal failings.

Was O’Hair really all that horrid?  I recall seeing her on TV when I was very young, and thought she was more challenging than vicious.  Let’s not automatically buy into the popular ideas about her without doing our own research.

Being an atheist doesn’t mean that a person is rational.  Human beings by nature tend to believe in irrational things.  I know atheists who believe that the world is being controlled by space aliens.

She was my kind of atheist.  She ceaselessly spoke the truth about religion and she did something about it by bringing one of the cases joined as Abingdon v. Schempp, that ended prayer in public schools.  She also started American Atheists, the group that David Silverman now leads.  That’s enough for people to hate you.  Think of all of the people who hate Hitchens, Dawkins, etc…. Dawkins is a very mild-mannered guy.  Do you think that makes a difference?  No.  If you want people to like you, being an out-atheist is a bad idea.  So what.  I’m sick and tired of religious people and their bullsh*t and I have no desire to be liked by them.

Thanks for the post, that was hilarious.

My take on this?  He’s getting older and feels like he needs religion and belief in his life.

I’m glad they at least mentioned how his mom and sister were murdered, which was horrific on it’s own level.

In the 1980’s Murray appeared on the exorcist Bob Larson’s radio talkshow. I called in to argue with him, and he said that atheism only “works” for healthy white males through the age of 40 or so. After that, he predicted, I would have to fall back into religion.

I turned 40 back in 1999. Why haven’t I become a christian yet? 

I suspect the growing visibility of atheists in the U.S. gives Murray the creeps because we validate his mother’s view of religion, even though we don’t depend on her example and many of the younger atheists may not even recognize her name.  If he had grown up in that sort of world himself, he would have attributed his troubled relationship with his mother to her personality & character independent from her atheism. 

BTW, try to hang around to the latter 2030’s, when psychologist Nigel Barber says that we’ll see a predominantly godless world:

http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Will-Replace-Religion-ebook/dp/B00886ZSJ6/

Do you have someone in mind besides Madeline Murray O’Hair?  I can’t imagine any of the current crop of atheist leaders (the Four Horseman – including the new set with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, since Hitch died – and others) that aren’t doing a fine job.

 Ramen!

In the video clips, I don’t find her offensive at all.  Outspoken, yes.  Direct, yes.  Opinionated, yes.  But not malicious or hateful or evil.  I wonder if she wasn’t the victim of simply not fitting the stereotype of the “good wife and mother” prevalent at that time.  The nerve of a woman speaking out about something like that!  Of all things!  Next we’ll have dogs preaching.

I remember my dad telling my sister that if they were living in the Old Testament times, he would have the right to kill her. And no, that wasn’t a lesson on how evil the Bible was, that was a lesson on how serious disobedience is.

 Another “Stopped believing in the Great Gas when I was 40” vote here.

I think the only reason an Atheist would take up Xianity in their elder years is the whole “Afraid of DEATH” thing.  You’re gonna die, why not take Pascal up on his sucker bet? After all, you’re not going to lose anything.

Unless you start sending 1/2 your Social Security cheque to Benny Hinn…

The point still stands.  christians (and people who claim not to be christians) are always whining about how horribly rude and offensive atheists are for merely mentioning that we exist.  The same thin-skinned asshats refuse to acknowledge the much greater rudeness, both current and historical, of christians.  So, anyone who wants to whine about how rude atheists supposedly are to christians has a few centuries of work to do before their bullshit deserves any response but ridicule.  So long as it is official christian dogma that I deserve to be burned alive forever, and christians will be rewarded with the opportunity to watch, nothing I could ever do can even come close to being “offensive”.  

It’s only evil when Atheists do it. It’s Godly when Christians do it to gays, or when their kids come out for other religions. 

 The same thin-skinned asshats refuse to acknowledge the much greater rudeness, both current and historical, of christians.

Tu quoque never really struck me as a morally persuasive line of thinking. What does Christians being asshats have to do with atheists being asshats?

In my experience, the only people who are persuaded by “you do it too! and you’re meaner!” are people who feel that they are locked in some kind of epic struggle or battle with an implacable adversary, the morally fraught nature of which conveniently justifies pretty much everything nasty a person could do. Do you feel that atheists are at war with Christians? 

What does Christians being asshats have to do with atheists being asshats?

Are you capable of noticing the double standard involved?  Have you been paying any attention at all? 

Atheists are routinely called “militant”, “crazy”, “offensive”, “hateful”, and so forth for things like daring to mention that atheists exist, or advocating that christians be required to obey the same laws as everyone else, or telling people that their religion is a load of bullshit, or suggesting that actual science should be taught in science class. 

Christians are not subject to the same criticism, even when they are seeking to undermine the Constitution, or branding children with crosses, or stealing tax money for proselytizing, or discriminating against gays, atheists and others by law.  In order for a christian to be considered a fair target for any criticism at all they have to do something grossly beyond the boundaries of human decency, like advocating concentration camps for gay people, or raping children and lying about it for decades.  Even then, they will still have hordes of brainwashed sheep defending them to the very end. 

Christians can get away putting up billboards slandering atheists and openly accusing them of murder.  Atheists trying to put up a sign that merely acknowledges their EXISTENCE are targeted with vandalism and death threats, on the rare occasions when their message is even allowed to be heard. 

I don’t think they’re trying to excuse it. What I’m saying, at least, is that they’re being hypocritical about it. It’s the downright holy thing to do when they do it, but it’s a sign of how horrible we are when someone from our camp does it.

It’s the double standard. It’s bullshit. 

“What’s amazing is that there’s absolutely no mention of the fact that so many Christian parents have treated their children basically the same way when their kids tell them they’re atheists. They kick them out of the house.”

Or if the kid tells them he/she is gay.  Dan Savage responded to a letter from an Aunt who was raising her nephew after his evangelical family kicked him out of their house.  Quite shocking.

Are you incapable of recognizing any distinction between FGM (which causes irreparable harm to actual living people) and insulting stupid people (which does not)?

I take it you’ve never been mercilessly bullied. The idea that words never hurt in a way that matters is as stupid as it is trite. It seems, though, that you’re focusing on an irrelevant and unintended implication of the metaphor (which, of course, is the danger of using metaphors). 

It’s not that being mean to people and female genital mutilation are morally equivalent (and I didn’t suggest that they were, though I can see how a person who parses uncharitably might read that into the post), it’s that prejudice and mistreatment have nothing to do with judging the morality of the victim of prejudice absent extremely narrow circumstances (like self-defense) that certainly don’t apply here. If it is wrong to be mean, it is wrong whether it is engaged in by the socially powerful or the socially powerless. Just because Arabs are discriminated against, it doesn’t mean that their actions are immune to criticism. Just because atheists are discriminated against, ditto.

Now, if you want to zoom out a bit and talk about the situation in terms of wider social effect, whether as a tactical matter it is beneficial to engage in unethical action to fight an asymmetrical battle, that’s an entirely different conversation. Extraethical justification of actions with moral weight is a fascinating topic. But it has no impact on whether the act itself is morally wrong.

If the rules don’t apply to everyone equally, they are illegitimate and apply to no one.

The perfect is always the enemy of the good. Babies, bathwater, etc.. The world is imperfect; it is an important struggle to make it better, a humanistic struggle. Implicit in that is not throwing away prior progress out of frustration with present imperfection. 

Nobody should be silent about injustice. That imperative gives nobody leave to be cruel while doing it, not least because it undercuts the moral authority of the complaint in the first place, not to mention that it’s wrong.

Just because society foolishly contends that Christians being mean is OK, it doesn’t mean that it is true that Christians being mean is OK. Once, US society supported slavery; that position has no bearing on whether slavery was wrong. It was still wrong when (nearly) everyone agreed it was right.

This is the disconnect that seems to be cropping up repeatedly in this discussion. You are focusing on the undeniable fact that there is an asymmetry in the way that people seem to judge whether an act is right or wrong depending on the religious identity of the person who does it. But that has nothing at all to do with whether the act itself is right or wrong. 

Yes, it’s unfair that Christians give themselves and each other free passes on bad acts. It’s just that for the purposes of a conversation about ethics, uh, so what? The popular apprehension of morality is not isomorphic with the reality of morality (for lots and lots of reasons).

There is nothing wrong with pointing out their double standard. There *is* something wrong with doing what kicked off this discussion here, giving a free pass to an atheist for (allegedly) being cruel to her son simply because Christian parents are often cruel to their own children.

My wife and I are both agnostic and are raising our elementary school kids to be moral.  If they later use any form of diety to frame it we’re fine with that.  A good person is a good person, and a schmuck is still a schmuck regardless of what you do on Sunday.  O’Hair was full of as much judgement and bile as a number of prominent Evangelical, which rubs her out of my philosophical radar and kind of makes her a schmuck.

“Can you not see that this argument could be used by religious groups and people in reverse?”

It could, but they’d be wrong. See my other comment in this thread.

Murray obviously has a need to be contrary.

He learned from the best, after all.

I doubt that he would be a Xtian today if his Mother had been a Xtian.

Precisely. I suspect that if you’d had Madalyn Murray O’Hair as a mother, and you had any damn sense, then when you grow up, you would try to be as different as possible from her, too.

I don’t know…There’s the whole “beat/stone your kid if he disobeys” part. And the instructions for how female children were to be treated as property and then sold off. 

Wow, Julie, you just freaked me out ~ because I just spent the evening with a dear friend whose father was Lebanese, and tonight she told me when she was a teenager (when they *surprise surprise* butted heads most intensely) he would say “If we were in Lebanon, you’d be dead by now.  You wouldn’t be allowed to act like this”

And just as you say, he wasn’t criticizing Lebanon, he was telling her how “unacceptable” her behaviour was.

 No, I didn’t “miss the point entirely”. In fact, you’ve attributed something to me that I did not write or agree with (tacitly or otherwise) at all. What you’re doing is stretching the bounds of reason to accommodate what you think is a fair and balanced way to approach a problem. The universe isn’t fair and there isn’t some cosmic scale of justice out there. Whether it makes you uncomfortable or not, religion provides a means by which to excuse or justify bad behavior, even if it is not the root or cause of such behavior. Atheism does not, not matter how much you may live in fear of an ignoramus claiming that this is so.
I can state that the sky is blue and you can state that it is red. Your incorrect claims about the hue of the sky will not cause me to second-guess my own assertion, nor will your claims invalidate mine simply because you blurted them out with conviction.
That the opposing side of a discussion can put forth something as asinine as you propose as a valid argument is no obstacle for those who are intellectually and morally honest with themselves and others and have the guts to stand by their convictions.
Boiled down to it’s basics, your argument is morally bankrupt, delusional and cowardly in the extreme.

You love to put words in my mouth. I never, ever once claimed that there aren’t atheists who treat their lack of belief as some sort of quasi religion or “belief system”. Many do, but this has no bearing on our exchange. Using a straw man to make your argument is unethical, not to mention infuriating. Stop moving the goalposts.

“It never used to be true that atheists behaved this way…

Horseshit. As long as there have been humans, there have been arrogant, know-it-all atheists.

“”The universe isn’t fair” is not something I see as reason to stop trying to make it fair. I’m just not built that way.”

Good for you and good luck with that. While that may be a laudable sentiment to some, that type of reasoning is a deal breaker when it comes to having an extended intelligent exchange with me. You can no more make the universe any fairer by imposing your humanist will upon it than religious nutcases can make the universe a better place to live by legislating their particular brand of  religious “morality”. The universe is a cold, unfeeling, uncaring, unaware and scary place to be.  The best we can do is to make our own particular little niche as pleasant as possible for the brief time we have in existence. That can usually (but admittedly not always) be accomplished by minding our own business and not fucking with others.

 For one thing Bob Larson himself turns out to be far less than virtuous. The guy is currently trying to sell himself as a “real exorcist”, parading his daughter and two other teens who look too much like his daughter as ” teen exorcists”. Simply put, Bob Larson is a charlatan.

 As for MMOH, I ‘ve read stories of her taking advantage of atheists, shamelessly so. including conning a number of the dying ones to give her all their property– much like some televangelist types.  William Murray IMO may be a “Christian” but  like others who trade in their celebrity status as a Christian, I personally would be skeptical on anything he says. And Huckabee, well when he was governor in Arkansas, he was well-known as the rev-gov and had accepted “gifts” of various types that he really shouldn’t have if he was as ethical as he presents himself.

 BTW please, please DO NOT elect Huckabee as President, EVER.