INDEPENDENCE FROM AUTHORITY A Freethinker Speaks Out by Anne Nicol Gaylor If you are an independent person, even reading the definition of the word authority can generate sparks and make the feathers fly! Listen to some of these definitions. Authority: the right to command and to enforce obedience. Authority: superiority derived from a status that carries with it the right to give orders and to expect obedience. Authority: the power to require and receive submission. I am sure some of you are feeling mutinous just reading these definitions! And I applaud that. Whether the authority is government, the army, religion, a teacher or parents, blind obedience is not palatable to the independent personality. Reason is palatable. Even a young child appreciates reasoning. Poor teachers will tell you, "Do this because I say so." Good teachers will explain why. What has freethought to do with authority? Why do freethinkers so often reject authority? A freethinker is someone who forms opinions, especially opinions about religion, on the basis of reason, and forms those opinions independent of authority, tradition and established belief. Therefore freethinkers reject authority if that authority is not based on reason. In matters of religion, freethinkers may label themselves in other ways. An atheist is a freethinker. An agnostic is a freethinker. A rationalist is a freethinker. So is a humanist. All of these come under the umbrella of freethought because they are people forming their opinions about religion on the basis of reason. You know, these are lovely words: Freethought, Freethinker, Reason, Humanist, Agnostic, Atheist. They may get bad press and raise the hackles of the Religious Right, but they are words rich in thought and filled with meaning. In my home state of Wisconsin, we have a wonderful history of freethought. It has been written out of the history books, but at the turn of the century in Wisconsin, there were 30 freethought congregations around the state. These were groups of people, primarily German immigrants, who rejected conventional religion and its deities. Their German name was "Freie Gemeinde," which literally translates as free community or free congregation. Most of these congregations had freethought halls where they met, and they ranged from the modest to the imposing. One of them, the century-old Freethought Hall in Sauk City, Wisconsin, still stands. It dominated the life of Sauk City for decades; it is the center of the social, intellectual and cultural life of this city on the Wisconsin River. It was the scene of many local theatricals as well as visiting professional productions and lectures. Even the public high school graduation exercises were held in it, since it offered the largest auditorium in town. Annual celebrations were a spring festival and a celebration in honor of Thomas Paine on his birthday. The Freie Gemeinde of Sauk City and their Freethought Hall enjoyed prestige and acceptance. There was no social stigma about being a freethinker — just the opposite was true. Make no mistake about that. These congregations did not establish churches; they established freethought halls. These German immigrants were strongly anti-clerical. In many instances they had been forced to leave Germany where, in the words of one descendant still connected to the present-day Sauk City Freethought Hall, "They had to ask permission even to publish a pamphlet." The Sauk City Freethought Hall, built in 1884, is still in remarkably good condition and stands in a whole city block with pretty trees. The auditorium or lecture room is the same today as it was 100 years ago, with beautiful birch flooring and the original benches lining the walls. It is used sparingly these days, but an occasional wedding or memorial service is held there. After all, where are freethinkers to go for these ceremonies? If you want to be free from the supernatural aura of a church, what's left to choose for a wedding is the bleakness of a judge's chambers. A church setting is anathema for those who believe in freethought. Now why should a church setting be repugnant to a freethinker? Why are there people like me who have vowed never to participate m or attend a religious service of any kind? It is because we know what great harm religion has done and continues to do — not just long ago in the Dark Ages, or today in countries like Ireland or Iran, but ongoing harm, all the time, right now in this country. We do not want to support the institution responsible for that harm, however token that support might appear to be. Every woman in the world would nave a special reason never to support a religion — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, whatever — because almost every religion throughout history has been a patriarchal institution that devotes a great deal of its time and treasure to keeping women in their place. Even those few Christian denominations that recognize women's rights to some extent still promote the Bible, that textbook of sexism, racism, meanness, murder and mayhem. And how does anyone trust or respect a religion that is based on that book? What good are so-called protestations or disclaimers of "But our church is different, our church is liberal" when that manual of misogyny is the basis of all Christian and Jewish belief? Let me quote just one Bible verse. If every other verse in the Bible were pure and pleasant, I would still be speaking out against the Bible because of this verse. It is a verse that historically may be the most influential verse in all the Bible, because it was employed as the direct justification for the murder and torture of countless women. That verse, Exodus 22:18, is: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. " That single verse, that single sentence with its divine sanction of belief in witches and its divine sanction of their death, gave Christians justification for the murder of thousands, some say millions, of women. This commandment was acted on by church and state, by clergy and king. It was the god-given rationale for the unspeakable torture and murder of women. Although it has been almost three centuries since the last so-called witch was put to death by Christians, that verse is still there in Exodus, unchanged. When clergy Sunday school teachers and the media tell everyone that Bible is a good book, they never say: "Watch out for verses like Exodus 22:18. That's not so good." Or, "Don't do everything that God tells you to do." Or, "Careful, kids, the Bible is not a dependable behavior guide." You will never hear admonishments such as these from the pulpit or read them in your daily paper or hear it on the radio. Only freethinkers are saying these things. Perhaps the Bible could be forgiven if it had only one terrible god-given verse. But it overflows with them. In fact, in the words of Ruth Hurmence Green, looking for something good in the Bible is like wading through a sewer to find a gem. "They told me the Bible was a book about love," she wrote, "but I studied every page of that Bible, and I couldn't find enough love to fill a salt shaker." Some critics of freethought will say, "But no one really believes in all of that Bible stuff any more." But the fact is that people do believe in the inerrancy of the Bible. The poll taker Gallup tells us that 38 percent of the people in this country say that they believe that everything in the Bible, everything e') is literally true, word for word. I would remind you that includes rising from the dead, walking on water, rivers parting, talking snakes, voices from burning bushes, magic wands and rods, demons, giants, angels, devils, ghosts, disembodied voices, unclean spirits and curing blindness with spit, to name just a few of the Bible's wonders. Now Gallup tells us that another 43 percent of the U.S. population say that the Bible is the word of a god, although everything in it may not be literally true. This 43 percent probably do not believe in disembodied voices and curing blindness with spit, but they still pay homage and respect to a book filled with myth and superstition, absurdities and gross teachings. So today it is a fact that a substantial number of citizens in this country are Bible literalists; they are fundamentalists. And we are told, again by pollsters, that fundamentalism is that part of the religious community that is on the increase. What that says to me is that there is an urgent need for education about what exactly is in the Bible. Aside from the fundamentalists, I think it is fair to say that we are a nation of Bible illiterates. The fundamentalists have read the Bible and to their discredit are still promoting it. They are the ones to watch. Let us go back to the Bible; let us check some of the things it says — some of the commandments to do this and not to do that. If you were to follow the god of the Bible's teachings, here are some, just a very few, of the things you would do, the actions you would take: You would kill a woman who was not a virgin when she married, even if she happened to be your own daughter. You would kill her in a terrible way, by stoning her to death. You are instructed to do this in Deuteronomy 22:21. It is part of the Mosaic Law, just as the Ten Commandments are part of it. And this commandment still is being carried out in parts of the Near East today. If your child hits you or swears that child to death. (Leviticus 20:9) It know of a child born out of wedlock who attends your church, you would see that the child was publicly exposed and could no longer be a member of the church. You would find the commandment for that in Deuteronomy, Chapter 23:2. "A bastard shall not enter the congregation of the Lord even unto the tenth generation." You would advocate death for homosexuals. It's very, very clear in the Bible. "If a man also lie with mankind as he lieth with a woman, I both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them" (Leviticus 20:13). There is further rationale for killing homosexuals in the New Testament where Paul tells us in Romans Chapter 1:27,32, that homosexuals are "worthy of death."Do you have a stubborn or rebellious son? Hearken to Deuteronomy; "If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: then shall his father and his mother lay hold of him . . . and all the men of his city shall stone him with stones that he die." (21:18-21) You would support slavery. It is entirely possible thatthe Civil War with all its devastation and death might have been avoided had the Bible not taught that slavery was god ordained. If you research slavery and Christianity and read the sermons that were given in the 1850's, both North and South, you will find that a majority are most erudite, well written and eloquent in their defense of slavery. God and the Bible enter all the arguments, all the sermons, all the editorials of the time in support of slavery. The Bible tells us how to buy and sell people, and that slaves are to obey their masters. Abolitionist Theodore Parker once said that if "the whole American church had dropped through the continent and disappeared altogether, the anti slavery cause would have been further on . . ." According to Genesis 9, the biblical deity first ordained slavery because of the behavior of Noah's son Ham who committed the apparently unpardonable sin of observing his drunken father's nakedness. God punished Ham, with typical biblical justice, by condemning Ham's son Canaan to be "a servant of servants." In some complex rules for slavery in Exodus, a father is allowed to sell his children, and a slave is referred to as his owner's "money." No wonder the slave holders brandished their Bibles. In Timothy (6:1), Paul tells slaves to honor their owners: "Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed." In Ephesians (6:5) servants are to be obedient "with fear and trembling." Titus (2:9) says they must please their own ers "in all things." Peter (2:18) orders "Servants, be subject to your masters in all fear." In the Epistle of Paul to Philemon Paul sends the slave Onesimus back to a servitude from which he had fled. As for Jesus, he left the laws of slaver exactly as he found them, and his terrible parables (as author Ruth Green calls them) are filled with references to slave and masters, none of which deni grates slavery in any way. Blacks who say they "love" the Bible truly revere the chains that used to bind them. Has your hand ever offended you? Has your eye offended you? I: you apply the teachings of the New Testament you would chop off that hand and gouge out that eye. A few people still do this in the United States today. Some deluded person "gets religion," which means being overcome with guilt and fear, studies the Bible and then cuts off a hand or foot or gouges out an eye, following the teachings of Jesus in Matthew. Following the teachings of both the Old and New Testaments, you must believe in and practice sexism. The gods of the Bible are sexist gods. In the United States today the Equal Rights Amendment would be the law of the land were it not for the Bible believers. They made the difference in keeping those last states from ratification. "Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." (Timothy 2:11-14) Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who worked all of her adult life for women's right to vote, said most succinctly: The Bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire . . . Here is the Bible's position of woman briefly summed up. The common assumption that the Bible is a book filled with beauty and wisdom dies hard. But open your Bible at random. Your eye may light on something respectable or some dull, obtuse passage, but it is just as apt to encounter a verse like this, straight from "the Lord:" "Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun." (Numbers 25:8) Or, "And this is the thing that ye shall do, ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man." (fudges 5:30) Or, "Behold, I will corrupt your seed, and spread dung upon your faces." (Malachi 2:3) and here is Jesus: "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I come not to send peace but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and a man's foes shall be they of his own household." Some Bible apologists will say, "But try Psalms. That's beautiful." Do try Psalms. On the very first page you will find this: Ask of me And I shall give thee the heathen! For shine inheritance And the uttermost parts of the earth For thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel Think about that. In one portion of one psalm the Bible and its god are mandating slavery, imperialism, the occupation of others' lands and mass murder and mayhem! There is a one-liner that is a Psalm they never teach in Sunday school for obvious reasons: "Happy shall be he who taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones" (Psalms 137:9). If teachings such as these are good, what possibly could be represented as bad? Other apologists, loath to let go their "good book," will point to the Song of Solomon. "This is beautiful, they say, such wonderful imagery. In the first place, the Song of Solomon is about four pages in length. Could those four pages, even if they were pure, make up for the grossness of the rest of the book? And the Song of Solomon is not pure; it is sexist. And what of its verses: "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door and my bowels were moved for him (6:4), and "We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?" Poor little sister — biblically doomed because she has a flat chest. Reflect on the past and religion's role in it. Reflect on what religion has wrought, from the bloody Crusades to spread Christianity by the sword, the Dark Ages when religion ruled the world, the Inquisition with all its horrors, the persecution of women under the Bible's mandate about witches, religion's support of slavery, and the war after war after war based on religious differences, with "God" somehow on both sides. Reflect on what religion has wrought in modern times. Religious wars still rage, in Ireland, in the Near East, in Yugoslavia. Not so long ago, Reverend Jim Jones, ordained minister in a mainstream church, who started his religious career with phony cancer cures, finally took 900 people to their deaths. Reflect on this needless tragedy, had only his church somewhere along the line held him accountable. Reflect on religion's indifference today where women struggle for equality, and where churches use their strength and power to keep women oppressed. Religion is the heavy; it is the reason a woman's right to control her own reproductive life constantly is in jeopardy. Robert Green Ingersoll, the agnostic orator of the last century whose views on such topics as racism, sexism, peace and equality would do credit to speakers today, once summed up authority and religion: There is no authority in churches or priests... No authority in number of majorities. The only authority is Nature, the facts we know . . . I stand by the religion of reason. Anne Nicol Gaylor is a founder and president since 1978 of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, whose headquarters are in Madison, Wisconsin. She has been a longtime activist for women's rights.