A female atheist named Madalyn Murray O'Hair?

To quote Johnny Carson, yet again in this blog, "I did not know that!"

Yesterday, I was reading (and getting lost in) this meandering essay by Susan Jacoby (whose writings usually make a lot more sense than this one) in which I did come across some biting sentences and a whole lot of new stuff.  I loved the way she pointed out that just because we are atheists it doesn't mean that all the atheists agree on everything:

[One] of the big differences between atheism and religion is that no atheist is obliged to agree with every single thing another atheist says. Richard Dawkins is not the pope, Sam Harris is not a cardinal, Christopher Hitchens is not the Holy Ghost, and I am most definitely not a nun. 

Pretty cool the way she structured that argument.  Now, those are sentences that I fully agree with her :)

Jacoby writes:

I must also mention the seemingly anomalous fact that the best-known atheist in the United States in the 1950s and early ’60s was the founder of American Atheists, Madalyn Murray, known as “Mad Madalyn” to her detractors. (She later married a man named O’Hair and took his last name—something I found curious at a time when many women were beginning to keep their own last names.) Now she had not, for the most part, said anything more forthright or abrasive to Christians than have Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—but let’s not forget that she made her points at a time when atheism was much more demonized than it is now. And, above all, she was a woman. She frequently described religion as lunacy and silliness, and the fact that she was a female without any special academic or professional credentials made it much easier for the rest of society to dismiss her as a nut case.

Huh?  Mad who?  This was news to me.  After all, it is not that I have pursued atheism, ahem, very religiously, to know about such trailblazers.  Something new everyday, I thought.

And then today, I read this piece about how Buzz Aldrin had communion on the moon.  He did what? 

Before Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module on July 20, 1969, Aldrin unstowed a small plastic container of wine and some bread. He had brought them to the moon from Webster Presbyterian church near Houston, where he was an elder. Aldrin had received permission from the Presbyterian church's general assembly to administer it to himself. In his book Magnificent Desolation he shares the message he then radioed to Nasa: "I would like to request a few moments of silence … and to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way."
He then ate and drank the elements. The surreal ceremony is described in an article by Aldrin in a 1970 copy of Guideposts magazine: "I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements."
He also read a section of the gospel of John. During it all, Armstrong, reportedly a deist, is said to have watched respectfully but without making any comment.

Talk about lunacy right there on the lunar surface!

Intrigued, I continued to read it and Madalyn Murray O'Hair pops up there too:

The story of the secret communion service only emerged after the mission. Aldrin had originally planned to share the event with the world over the radio. However, at the time Nasa was still reeling from a lawsuit filed by the firebrand atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair, resulting in the ceremony never being broadcast. The founder of American Atheists and self-titled "most hated woman in America" had taken on Nasa, as well as many other public organisation. Most famously, she successfully fought mandatory school prayer and bible recitation in US public schools.After the Apollo 8 crew had read out the Genesis creation account in orbit, O'Hair wanted a ban on Nasa astronauts practising religion on earth, in space or "around and about the moon" while on duty. She believed it violated the constitutional separation between church and state.

Seriously?  The Genesis and communion on Apollo missions?  And one woman fought against it and made NASA understand the separation of church and state?  I did not know that!

I agree with my fellow-atheist, Susan Jacoby, when she concludes that in "our larger mission of freeing society from anti-rational, supernaturally based restrictions":

We need more women on the front lines of this battle, and we need them now.

Girl Power!

What does the world look like?

Could it be true that that only a few, other than real estate agents and geographers, understand the importance of location, location, and location?

I asked the students in one of my classes whether they considered Iraq and Iran as important enough for Americans to know more about. There was no hesitation—students unanimously, and loudly, voiced their affirmatives. The party-pooper that I am, I interrupted their enthusiastic comments by handing out blank outline maps of the Middle East and directed them to identify as many countries as they possibly could. Given how much Iraq has been dominating our lives, I was sure that a majority of the class would at least identify that country. Of course, the blank map included Iran and Afghanistan as well, which are equally newsworthy.

Well, it turns out that the familiarity that the class had about Iraq, Iran, and Saddam Hussein did not lead to a spatial understanding of that part of the world. Class discussions suggested that the actual location of Iraq or Iran did not matter to them. Iraq may as well be on Mars then?

After pointing out the countries, at the end of the exercise, I directed them to look at Sudan and Ethiopia. As they kept staring at the countries on the map, perhaps for the first time in their lives, it became apparent to them that it is a relatively narrow body of water, the Red Sea, which separates these countries from a larger contiguous land area that we refer to as the Middle East. For all purposes, Sudan and Ethiopia are, hence, only a metaphorical stone’s throw away from Saudi Arabia, and yet Ethiopia is imagined as a poor country in a remote part of Africa.

Of course, geography is not about memorizing maps, or random and trivial facts about places. It is about understanding relationships—such as economic or political relationships—between and amongst geographic areas. Such a framework, though, begins with knowing the actual location of a place, and its relationship with its surroundings. After all, if we didn’t know where exactly Ethiopia is, would we really be able to understand why that country seems to have so many problems, and how those spill over to neighboring Eritrea, for instance?

The fantastic and fortunate contrast to the disinterest in understanding locations is this: we live in a world in which information is freely and easily accessible. News media often include maps of countries in their reports. A simple Google search brings up detailed maps of practically any area of the world. This ease of obtaining information is all the more the reason educators like me want our students, and the general populace, to understand and appreciate the world.

Information was not so readily available sixty years ago. Which is why I find it simply remarkable how President Franklin Roosevelt emphasized the spatial understanding of the world, when the country was in the midst of one of the bloodiest wars. The author and public intellectual, Susan Jacoby, noted an interesting aspect of Roosevelt’s “fireside chats”—he urged Americans to buy maps of the world and then follow along with him details of the World War II battles that he “chatted” about in his radio addresses—with specific references to the geographic areas.

Roosevelt may have had in mind what a student in my class articulated in her assignment after the class exercise. She wrote: “One thing that stood out to me this week was …. I find that I get so caught up in these abstract, revolutionary concepts of how the world should be better without ever even taking into account what the world actually looks like.”

By urging Americans to look at the maps of the theatres of war, Roosevelt was making sure that his fellow citizens knew what the world looked like, even as America was playing a crucial role in reshaping it. I guess Roosevelt was a geography teacher-in-chief, while he was successfully carrying out his responsibilities as the commander-in-chief.

In the contemporary world, too, America is actively engaged in the international arena. To play a constructive role, we citizens need to be informed enough in order to be able to convey to elected leaders the changes we would like to make. A spatial understanding of the world is, therefore, essential to carry out civic responsibilities. Add a world atlas to your summer reading list.

Church and State: Do not tear down that wall

Susan Jacoby, author, most recently, of The Age of American Unreason, has a powerful op-ed in the NY Times, about the systematic chiseling away of the separation of church and state. She notes that it started with President Clinton, was massively expanded by President Bush, and is being continued on by President Obama. Jacoby writes:

President Obama might also take a moment to reread the religious freedom act passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786, with strong support from both Baptists and freethinkers. That law, which prohibited tax support for religious teaching in public schools, became the template for the establishment clause of the First Amendment and also helped establish our American tradition of government freedom from religious interference and religious freedom from government interference.

Yet we are moving blindly ahead with faith-based federal spending as if it were not a radical break with our past. If faith-based initiatives, first institutionalized by the executive fiat of a conservative Republican president, become even more entrenched under a liberal Democratic administration, there will be no going back. In place of the First Amendment, we will have a sacred cash cow.