c. 1998 Religion News Service

POCOPSON, Pa. _ Margaret Downey says her friends tell her she looks so wholesome she could crash a Christian Coalition meeting, and the mere mention of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the nation’s best-known atheist, who disappeared in 1995, makes her recoil.

“Mad, mad Madalyn,” she said. O’Hair, Downey believes, bullied her opponents with profanity.”And I was more fearful of disclosing my own atheism because of the stereotypes she created.”

An estimated 4 percent of Americans consider themselves atheist or agnostic, according to the Princeton Religion Research Center. And it’s a diverse group that has had as many factions and schisms as any religious denomination.

There’s O’Hair’s in-your-face American Atheists, based in Austin, Texas, whose Web site warns visitors they may find the material “blasphemous, profane and disrespectful of religious belief.” And there is the less combative Freedom from Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., of which Downey is a board member, which split from American Atheists.

The Amherst, N.Y.-based American Humanist Association includes atheists and agnostics who believe their affirmation of human dignity is a religious concern that doesn’t need God at the center. A leader from that group went on to found the Council for Secular Humanism in Amherst, which, on the other hand, sees humanism and its rejection of creed and dogma as distinctly non-religious.

Then there are numerous specialty groups like Atheists for Jesus, an Internet group who believes in Jesus’ teachings but not his divinity.

Rob Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington, D.C., notes that none of these organizations has a membership or subscription base exceeding 35,000, and the vast majority of atheists are unaffiliated. Indeed, some remain closeted for fear of being ostracized. Others feel attending a meeting of fellow freethinkers would be as much fun as going to church.

“I’m not interested in belonging to or affirming anything,”said Robert Weiss, a retired English professor who helps Downey in her work. Weiss said he would like to see less “deity and more sanity.”

What these groups and individuals do have in common is a passionate belief in preserving the wall between church and state, a commitment they share with religious separationists.

They’re staunch opponents of the Religious Freedom Amendment, approved March 4 by the House Judiciary Committee, permitting greater religious involvement in public institutions. They also oppose public funding of religious schools and of religious groups providing social services, and they are against the display of the Ten Commandments in courtrooms and of crosses in public parks.

Even Downey admired O’Hair for filing in 1959 her landmark Supreme Court case successfully challenging prayer and Bible recitation in public schools _ a battle that led to her moniker as”the most hated woman in America.” O’Hair, her son Jon Murray, and her granddaughter, Robin Murray O’Hair, disappeared in 1995 with $630,000 allegedly stolen from atheist organizations. Their whereabouts and welfare remain unknown.

Last February, new evidence linked the O’Hair group to a $608,000 money transfer from New Zealand in 1995 and $100,000 worth of gold coins abandoned in San Antonio. The IRS is investigating. The new American Atheists president, Ellen Johnson, said the organization has lost members who mistakenly think the current leadership is in cahoots with the O’Hairs.

“By the same token,” she said, “we’re getting new members all the time. They’re attracted to our activism.” The group is focusing less on education, she noted, and more on direct lobbying against anti-separationist legislation in Washington. “We want to have a presence on the Hill.”

Downey’s dispute with a Boy Scouts of America chapter that rejected her son because he wouldn’t worship God turned her from a private non-believer to a public renegade who formed The Freethinkers Society of Greater Pennsylvania.

The group now includes atheists, agnostics, rationalists and humanists, terms often used interchangeably by “people who don’t want to be bound by orthodoxy and who want to distinguish themselves from the prevailing religious belief,” said Roy Clouser, professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey.

(OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS)

Atheism emerged in ancient Greece, noted Clouser, among rationalists “who esteemed the principles of logic.” In the 18th century, Clouser notes, German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that God’s existence could never be proven.

“Kant thought God was a theory required to make sense of our ethical experience,” Clouser said, “therefore we need to believe in God.” Agnostics, however, draw on Kant’s teaching that no proof is possible while rejecting his claim that one needs to believe in reward and punishment and life after death as motivation for being ethical.

Atheists, he said, tend to take a more dogmatic position in maintaining God doesn’t exist.

Karl Marx brought atheism to the political realm when he called religion a byproduct of social and economic conditions. It is the “opium of the people,” he wrote. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men is a demand for their real happiness.”

Bertrand Russell was the most influential atheist of the 20th century, Clouser said. Russell accused the church of stifling intellectual and moral progress and fostering intolerance. Religion, he wrote, was “a disease borne of fear and a source of untold misery to the human race.”

Margaret Downey couldn’t agree more.

(OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

As a girl Downey used to listen to her Catholic mother praying for help in her Los Angeles home. “We still didn’t have enough food and enough clothes,” she said. “It still wasn’t safe walking from the bus to school because of the gangs. It seemed to me if prayer really worked, it would have had much more effect. I thought we should spend more time solving problems.”

She raised her two children without prayer and with the freedom to choose what to believe. And when her daughter decided to be baptized, Downey supported her, while hoping “in my heart of hearts she would question the religion.”

Her son never took to religion. And when he became a Boy Scout, he and his mother substituted the word God in the Scout workbook with terms such as nature and friend. The troop leaders approved. When they moved to Philadelphia, however, the Downeys were informed atheists could not be Scouts.

She went to the public library and found a state statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion, and she filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission. That was five years ago. Last year the commission ruled there was probable cause to support a finding of religious discrimination by the Boy Scouts, and the case is now scheduled for a pre-hearing conference.

In the meantime, her family has endured late-night harassment calls and e-mail like the one from an Eagle Scout who called her a witch who should be burned at the stake.

Downey regrets that fewer people understand atheists can be concerned about ethical and moral issues without believing in a higher power. Even the Rev. Jerry Falwell agreed: “Many atheists have a high moral standard based upon respect for people,” he said. “Based on that humanistic reference, they can subscribe to most of the things people of faith do.”

When it comes to winning followers, however, Falwell thinks Christians have the edge. “It’s pretty hard to evangelize as an atheist,” he said. “When they die, they’re all dressed up with no place to go.”

But heaven, Downey believes, is just one more illusion. She’d rather live a good life while she has the chance.

DEA END LIEBLICH