atheism.davidrand.ca: Living Without Religion 
 > Table of Contents 
 > >  News Archive   en français 
 Previous page Next page

News Archive

January 2001


Bush imposes his religious agenda:

A series of articles, appearing on CNN.


Madalyn Murray O'Hair Disappearance Case —  Rationalist International Bulletin #63

Rationalist International, 2001-01-30

On 28 January, searchers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unearthed a shallow grave...in south-west Texas. They found remains of three humans, believed to be Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray and her adopted granddaughter Robin Murray O'Hair. The famous atheist leader and her children had disappeared in late 1995 under mysterious circumstances.
Dr. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was founder-president of American Atheists. Her major achievement was the Supreme Court ban on prayer and Bible reading in public schools of the USA in 1963. On 27 August 1995, she and her children left abruptly their home and their offices in the head quarters of American Atheists in Austin, Texas. They were never seen again by their friends and colleagues.
Her numerous open and clandestine enemies and enviers joined in a smear campaign against her and colored the victim as villain. They alleged that she had stage-managed the abduction in order to steal money from the organization. It was, in fact, her life-time work to build up American Atheists as one of the largest and most active atheist organizations in the world...

See also:


Britain: Opening the gate for a new era of medicine —  Rationalist International Bulletin #62

Rationalist International, 2001-01-28

Britain...has become the first country to allow human embryo cloning for research and therapeutic purposes... The new law, which will soon be in effect, allows scientists to clone human embryos up to 14 days old. Cloning after this period as well as cloning for other than research and therapeutic purposes (for example for reproduction) remains banned...
The whole spectrum of religious leaders from the Anglican church to British Catholics, Jews and Muslims stood hand in hand against the legislation...
Research on embryo stem cells could revolutionize medicine. Stem cells are master cells with the potential to become -- and substitute -- any type of human cells. Geneticists will be able to grow tissue for any part of the body, which needs repair. Organ transplant operations will become unnecessary...


Confessions of a Lonely Atheist
Natalie ANGIER

New York Times Magazine —  (Sundays), 2001-01-14

...nothing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism. Again and again the polls proclaim the United States to be a profoundly and persistently religious nation. ...while a mere 3.2 percent of Americans will agree flatly that they 'don't believe in God,' 17.2 percent of the Dutch concur with that statement, as do 19.1 of those in France, 16.8 percent of Swedes, 20.3 percent of people in the Czech Republic, 19.7 percent of Russians, 10.6 percent of Japanese and 9.2 percent of Canadians...
So who in her right mind would want to be an atheist in America today, a place where presidential candidates compete for the honor of divining 'what Jesus would do,' and where Senator Joseph Lieberman can declare that we shouldn't deceive ourselves into thinking that our constitutional 'freedom of religion' means 'freedom from religion,' or 'indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion,' and for his atheism-baiting receive the lightest possible slap on the wrist from his more secularized Jewish counterparts?... So, I'll out myself. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself...
...the canard that godliness and goodliness are linked in any way but typographically must be taken on faith, for no evidence supports it.



XHTML CSS