Michael Parenti’s address to the American Atheist Convention in Denver, Colorado in 1987.

A few years ago I went on a yoga retreat in the Caribbean, a little island. It's an ashram where people practice yoga. I went because I like yoga. Unfortunately, the head of this yoga sect was there, the head Swami, a very religious man and he gave sermons every morning, which the guests were required to attend, and every day he talked about love and the higher cosmic force of love and every day he talked about how spiritual things were everything and material things are nothing. He was an Indian you say “spiritual things are everything. Material things are nothing”. Then one day his yacht got loose from the pier and it began to float away and he started to scream and say “get my yacht”. He had a yacht and he had a seaplane. This man of love, I noticed, was filled with hate, he yelled at people. This man of god was full of ego, he got up and talked about how “no one is perfect, only I am perfect”. He kicked out a couple of people from the place because they raised some questions and he threatened to bring the police in and it occurred to me that this Swami was the perfect theocrat. That what we had here was a theocracy: using the power of the state to enforce your will and countenancing no alternative opinions and up to your ears in wealth. In a theocracy there's no democracy.

Now religionists say that they're anti-materialist: they're against materialism, but that word materialism is a very funny one, it’s subject to a number of misinterpretations. In fact there are two real quite different uses for the word. There's philosophical materialism: which argues, as you know, that ideas do not exist as independent forces, independent of material reality, as disembodied mystical forces. As the great materialist Karl Marx said, “Men sometimes get ideas in their head and they're so vivid that they then impute to these ideas an external existence of their own, as some force out there”.

Now the religionists, to be sure, are anti-materialist in that sense. That is they believe in these spirits and they believe in these externalized imaginings. There's a second use of the word materialism and when we use it we often use it, I think instinctively quite correctly; we associate it with consumerism, self-interest, power, possessiveness. What I would call acquisitive materialism. Now here most religious organizations really are very dedicated to this kind of materialism. They acquire, throughout the centuries they have acquired and in many different cultures, in many different countries, many different eras. The one thing all these religions have had in common, almost all of them, is that they have acquired vast properties and wealth and they have used political power. They've used the legitimated authority of the state, the legal use of organized force and violence, which is Max Weber's definition of the state, they've used political power to advance their own material interests, to win gain for themselves, to exploit people and in fact to maybe often win advantages over competing religious sects because they're often fights between each other for who's gonna grab the goodies and for centuries they've been involved in secular intrigues, in conflicts, in wars, in ways that have often violated their own religious precepts. 

Let me give you just one example, from the thousands of examples from history that I could give you; Martin Luther. Now we all know the Martin Luther, who started the reformation with his anti-materialist rebellion against Rome. But there's another, lesser known Luther. The other materialist kind of Luther: the apologist for the German Princes, the defender of the aristocratic class rule. The Martin Luther, who in 1525, when the peasants were starving, when their land had been taken, when they couldn't even get a decent amount of firewood to heat themselves, when their children were going hungry, when the rents were crushing them and they were desperate and they rose up in rebellion in 1525 and they took over the Cathedrals and they took over the Castles and they formed committees and they reorganized the use of the wealth and they reorganized the use of the land for themselves and they rose up with dignity; that Martin Luther got up and this is what he said. He said “this is a blasphemy”. He cursed the rebellion for turning quote “everything upside down like the worst disaster”. By the way, his own prince, his own Prince Frederick the wise says this, let me quote him first. He said “in many ways the poor folk have been wronged by the rulers”, take something when a prince admits that, “and now god is visiting his wrath upon us”. But not Luther, Luther knew which side god was on and god is on the side of the aristocracy and he said, I’ll quote him is “everything upside down like the worst disaster” and Martin Luther repeatedly urged quote “everyone who can to smite, slay and stab the peasants; secretly or openly. Remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog” and of course he quoted numerous passages from the bible to justify his call to butchery and the German princes didn't need too much encouragement, they slaughtered 100,000 peasants. Historians agree that that's pretty much the estimate that could stand. So this Luther, the great spokesman for the one true god of love and the prince of peace, was up to his neck in homicidal bloodletting, in a repressive class war on the side of those who have more than they know what to do with, against those who want a fair shake.

Now sometimes it works the other way. Sometimes the religionists use the state to advance their interests, that's what we mean by the religious uses of politics and sometimes the state uses religion to legitimate its own exploits and that's the political uses of religion. So politicians use religion and religionists use politicians. 

This is not to say that nothing's changed, indeed there have been remarkable historical developments over the centuries. There have been remarkable victories for our forces. There's been a rollback of theocratic power. Let me compare today to the 10th century, let's say, the diminishment of religious wars in the west and the secularization of social life, with the advent of science and with such forces as industrialization, urbanization and modern socialism. But these advances don't come and history doesn't work in a neat historical succession, just when we think it's going one way, much to our dismay, it starts going another way, but generally the move has been in a positive direction but remarkable residues of the past are still with us. 

When you think about it, it was just 30 years ago that there existed an age-old theocracy, I mean a theocracy that was about two thousand years old, the society was still organized that way in Tibet and when the People's Republic of China reclaimed its suzerainty over Tibet and sent its troops in and its organizers and its social welfare people all these people came in. The U.S media were filled with stories about these beautiful monks who had to be carried to India, who were now deprived of their religion. They weren't deprived of their religion, you could practice Buddhism in China if you want. What they were deprived of was their enormous wealth. The thing that the media didn't tell us about was that in Tibet, those monks ruled that country. Those peasants lined up and gave their food, their livestock and everything else. They exploited that peasantry. Those Monasteries were rich. It was a feudal theocracy that lived off the backs of these peasants and those monks had a good thing going for them and that class was blown away. What the media doesn't also tell you now, is that the average peasant in China, for whatever else you want to think about or say about the People's Republic of China, the average peasant in Tibet today goes to school, he gets enough to eat, his kids get enough to eat, he's got a Co-op a communal farm whatever it is to work on, he's got some place to go to, he gets medical attention when he needs it and those things did not exist when god ruled in Tibet.
 
We also could note how theocracy, I mean this thing about this erratic quality of religion sometimes, when one of the most murderous and repressive theocracies emerges today, in the last eight or nine years in Iran. The right-wing faction of the Shiite movement won a victory in Iran you know when they blew up all those Mullahs and those guys who came for a mass meeting. That was the sort of the Mujahedeen the reformist group they were all slaughtered in one blow. The Mullahs who rule in Iran and live off the people and live very well and are carrying out this endless murderous war against Iraq with the assistance of our cowboy in the white house there and also right here in America as the previous speaker pointed out there has been a real resurgence of this religious right. 

For generations, religionists have served corporate capitalism: they've preached obedience to the status quo, they've opposed workers trying to organize and form unions, they've opposed syndicalism, socialism, it was portrayed as the work of the devil and in turn capitalists, the big rich robber barons and the owners, were inclined to present themselves as the recipients of the deities highly selective blessings. Let me quote one of them, John D Rockefeller Sr., quote “I believe the power to make money is a gift of god. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and more money and more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience”. So from this, we may conclude that god is a financier.

So to today, social and political leaders constantly call upon god, every president of the United States feels compelled to do this, but no president more so than Ronald Reagan and it's a little scary. You know it's one thing for certain right-wing Evangelicals to announce that the Bible prophesizes an imminent apocalypse, that we are now in the third and final stage, the third and final millennium. That the antichrist forces from the east, as portrayed by Gorbachev in Russia, will meet destruction, Israel will convert and Christ will return triumphant to deliver death upon the non-believers and elevate the believers up to eternal life into heaven. It's one thing to hear that from Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart, it's quite something else when the President of the United States, the guy with his finger on the button, tells us, or is indicating that he embraces the same mythology, that we may be getting close to the apocalypse the final judgment between east and west and it's a matter of public record that he's entered into such conversations about this impending apocalypse with Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalists, who themselves have talked about it and his wonderful grasp of the bible and how the President really knows all this stuff.

Before the National Association of Evangelics, in March 1983, President Reagan proclaimed quote, “there is sin and evil in the world and we are enjoined by scripture and the lord Jesus to oppose it with all our might. The Soviet Union is an evil empire” unquote and the United States nuclear armed race against the Soviets is quote “a struggle between right and wrong, good and evil”. So god it seems, is a cold war militarist who is preparing us for a final nuclear confrontation. A lot of this of course was said before the Soviets kept coming and putting everything on the table and saying “come on let's negotiate” and all that and millions of people got out there and demonstrated and said “go to Geneva” and all that sort of thing. He's been dragged kicking and screaming to Geneva and so now he looks like he's interested, but he has managed to avoid any single arms agreement up to now and he may very well avoid any arms agreement.

Well they say that the Russians are scared of Reagan and I don't doubt it, because so are many Americans.

It's one thing when the fundamentalist Reverend Bailey Smith, then president of the Southern Baptist Convention, tells a right-wing political rally that god quote “does not hear the prayer of a Jew”. God is an anti-Semite turns out, that is after he converted. It's something else when the President of the United States announces that the United States is quote “a Christian nation” and this surely must come as news to a loyal citizenry which includes over 6 million Jews, several million Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists and millions upon millions of atheists, agnostics, sceptics and non-sectarian deists, who together probably compose a majority of our people. It's something when Reagan gets up there at a state of the union message and says “this country and our constitution could not have been formulated without divine guidance”. So, I sit there and I'm saying “so god is not only our father. He's our founding father?” 

As a matter of fact, the constitution is very clear on this. The frame is that Philadelphia left the deity very much out of it and when Benjamin Franklin suggested that their daily sessions should open with the prayer asking for divine guidance, they voted it down and Alexander Hamilton said “we don't need foreign aid”. The constitution is very clear, that ours is not a Christian nation. Article 6 reads quote “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States” and by the way that was a distinct and democratic advance. For one who has a very critical view of the constitution, who feels it wasn't a very democratically motivated constitution let's say, that was a democratic victory for the people. It was even ahead of many state constitutions, which in those days banned Jews, Catholics and non-believers from holding public office. 

Of course the most democratic victory came not with the founding fathers, but with the concession they had to make, they were forced to make, because of those democratic forces and that was the bill of rights. When Colonel Mason of Virginia got up and said “let's have a bill of rights”, that was voted down almost unanimously, I think Massachusetts abstained. Later on they realized their tactical error and they realized that if they wanted to get this thing ratified, if they're going to win some kind of popular support for it, they better give the people something besides what they gave themselves, in the commerce clause and all those other goodies and bills and credits and all the other stuff for themselves, they had to give the people something and they put through a bill of rights with the first amendment. 

Yet, the Reagan Justice Department is taking a regressive road back toward theocracy:
a)	ruling that the government can spend taxpayer money to subsidize religious schools;
b)	supporting a move to amend the Constitution, so as to allow teacher-led prayer sessions in public schools;
c)	pressuring the religionist crusade against safe and legal abortions.

Now, here again, we're witnessing not only the religious use of politics, but the politicians use of religion. Take that last issue of abortion. These guys don't care one way or another about abortion. As a matter of fact, they had the opposite position. A matter of fact, conservatives for years supported legal abortion because their view was that the poor had too many babies and there was too many kids on welfare, so let's have abortions, get rid of those kids. That was their position for years. Ronald Reagan, when he was Governor of California, he signed the most liberal abortion bill in the world and his daughter had an abortion, didn't bother them at all. George Bush supported legal abortions, they've all changed now they've all come over, and why they came over? Because they found political gold in that area, because Richard Viguerie got up and said “hey this is how we can split the Democratic Catholic vote. Hey this is how we can win more of the Protestant fundamentalist vote” and Viguerie even said it. When Reagan appointed Sandra O'Connor he said “is she soft on abortion we cannot give up this issue, this issue helps us split the democrats”. I mean it is the crassest, crassest case of political opportunism. Once more, as in Luther's day, using religion as an instrument of maintaining your power religion as an instrument of class control.

Reagan-ism has brought forth not only the politically more conservative religious spokesman, but also the theologically more reactionary ones. Those who evade all real social issues. You can watch these guys on television all day, you'd never know there was something called pollution, or acid rain, or poverty, or exploitation, or unemployment, or inflation, or unfair tax laws, ruinous tax laws. You never get a sense of that. You never get a sense that people are desperate, fighting, trying to stay ahead of themselves, wondering how they're going to get through their old age, you never get any of that. All you know is that you're to blame, you're weak and all you've got to do is open up your heart to Jesus and it'll all be saved it’ll all be worked out. They have no attention to poverty, to oppression, to militarism. What they do is focus on personal pieties, sectarian intolerance and a kind of prudish repressive moralism. In the face of all the things we have to struggle with today; they're targeting Playboy magazine. 

Their message is the same as it's been for centuries ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters: “don't organize and struggle for social justice and against the powers that be, against the powers that exploit you, against the powers that take the money out of your pay check before you can even get it home. Don't fight against them, just trust in god and god's love and above all keep those contributions coming in”. What a god it is they sell. 

We already know from reading the bible that the Judaeo-Christian God is vain, glorious, sadistic, murderously-partisan, vindictive. In fact, if you had a person like that you wouldn't want to associate with him for five minutes, let alone worship him. You might recall that God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, including all the unoffending and innocent children and infants in those cities, because he didn't like the lifestyle of certain citizens and what they were doing. He took great satisfaction when his Israelites acted like imperialists and massacred, you read the book of kings where he says “and the Israelites slew 20,000”. The first time I read that I was astonished, I was “my god?” and “god was pleased and the Israelites went out and they slew 35,000 and killed them all and god was happy”, I said “My god? Not, not my god” and today it hasn't changed all that much, to some degree, this whimsical, murderous god.

When Mother Teresa, just last year, when Mother Teresa's plane skid on the runway, killing five of her admirers, who were waiting there to receive her and maiming a whole bunch of others. She got off and she said “this was the will of god” and I'm saying to myself “but this god is Caligula…this god is one or some other homicidal mad despot”. 

We also know that god is a terrorist and an extortionist. Listen to Oral Roberts who says that “god's gonna zap me unless I come up with eight million smackers by the end of March”. By the way Oral Roberts made that same plea last year he said “unless I get it by the end of December 1986 god will take me” and he denied saying it, until they produced the tape the videotape with him saying it, he said “oh did I say that? Well I say so many things”. The truth is, he says, he frantically needs that eight million dollars for missionary scholarships, that's a lie ladies and gentlemen. His financial empire is in serious fiduciary trouble, it's been in trouble for a number of years and he is going to go under and that's what he needs that money for. It's not god that's after him, it's the bankers and what transpires in these money grabbing forays is something right out of the Dark Age. In one TV interview I saw Roberts was sitting there being interviewed, he and his wife were there and he was explaining his whole appeal to this other guy was talking to him. This is about three months ago, I saw this on TV and he said “well about three million dollars come in and then when the money stopped coming in Satan appeared” and I'm sitting there saying “what does he mean Satan appeared?” You thought that's bad, then his wife chimes in, she says “that's right. Satan appeared and I said ‘Satan you get on the way here you don't you leave my husband alone you get out of here’ and Satan he just ran off like that” and I said I said “where am I?” and the credulous audience actually applauded and I said “what is this? Where am I? Is this candid Camera? What is this? Am I little Johnny lollipop in Disneyland? Are they talking?” I mean the image of this plucky little woman standing there, with perhaps with her rolling pin and chasing off the prince of darkness. I said “is this the 12th century?” then I thought, they couldn't get away with this in the 12th century. If some priest got up and started talking like that, probably the courier would call him up and say “what are you? Hey what's this you're selling?” because they have a monopoly on those kind of contacts. 

On another occasion, I saw Jimmy Swaggart on TV fulminating, you know and going and twitching his frenetic bulk across the stage back and forth and he paused in one moment he says “hold on hold on”, as if a celestial long distance phone call suddenly came, said “god is calling me and god is telling me something” and then he stopped and then he told them, what it was. I forget, I didn't write it down, but and I'm sitting there saying “I can't believe it this guy actually now claims that he got this message and they're sitting there believing this”. 

I'd like to do, can I do an experiment here, please. Would you all just put your hands up like this, just put your hands up there, close your eyes wave them a little bit. Do you feel it coming down your hands? Well, I'm working a much harder room than Jimmy Swaggart did, you know, but it doesn't work. I don't have it down yet all right.

Then there’s of course Pat Robinson, a presidential republican presidential nominee, who turned a hurricane away from his home state with god's direct intervention and god if he's anything is a meteorologist.

There's the Baptist minister Everett Sullivan, now this guy ran in the Republican primary for Governor in Nebraska. Four candidates, he came in fourth and a woman won and to make matters worse, the democratic nomination, a woman won. So, here was the gubernatorial race, two women running against each other. So what did Sullivan say, he says “this was a curse, evidence of god's curse” he quotes from the good book “Jeremiah plainly tells us that when the people of a nation are willing to accept the leadership of a woman, it is a sure sign of god's curse” unquote, talk about a sore loser. Well we always knew god was a male supremacist too. 

Now, the point I want to make here is less a theological one, than a political one. Is that the crude religion-ism of the right, it demonstrates not only the obviously anthropomorphic origin of the god image, but also the exploitative opportunistic use of religion as an instrument of oppression, as an instrument of material acquisition, as an instrument of political power and political privilege. It is not merely that the god hucksters are silly and superstitious, rather they are keenly self-interested, manipulative and politically powerful. Not only do the religionists preach pie in the sky by and by, but they live high off the hog here and now. While preaching other worldliness to their followers, they're up to their ears in the crassest pursuits of wealth, power, class interest and if we can believe what's happening to Jimmy Baker other crass pursuits.

They talk about doing good for others, but they do well for themselves.

However, as I say, although history moves and I'll sort of wrap it up here, although history moves in fitful and often uncertain steps, the general thrust has really been forward. Important democratic victories have been won. Theocratic forces still menace us, they enjoy unexpected resurgence, but they no longer rule over the western world the way they once did. Even the Mullah theocracy in Iran is not as successful as it thought it would be in exporting the Ayatollah's fanaticism throughout the Middle East and even the Reaganite political religionist revivalism is not really doing all that well neither in congress, nor in the courts, nor in elections and primaries nor in the public opinion surveys. 

Jesse Helms had to quit that big filibuster he was doing, for school prayer and all that because he wasn't getting anywhere, because the response even from his own state, where people are hurting for real you know, they're losing their farms and this guy's sitting up there talking this hocus pocus he had to retreat on that issue.

Also today, in about a third of the world: in existing socialist countries, in communist countries; the oppressive horrible totalitarian communist countries. Theocracy has been thoroughly vanquished. Which is not to say that religion is prohibited; every traveller who's gone there, including Billy Graham, says that people are free to practice their religions. I was in Moscow, I was on a tour political-scientist and economist Fort Greer, another fellow political-scientist sociologist was on that tour, he can testify. We went into a church and there were all these people, Russian Orthodox Church they were praying and going on and I said “well if this state is repressing this religion it is doing a sloppy job of it I must say” and there's freedom for Synagogues, Churches, Baptists, Jews, Church of Christ, Roman Catholic denominations. The misrepresentation in the west on this issue and it’s constant, that religion isn't free in the USSR or other communist countries and I think it's again another political use of the religious issue, because for the religionists Communism is a threat, not only because atheism is not tolerated, but because atheism has an official status as a creed and this is what the religionists cannot forgive. 

The Soviet constitution reads that atheists have the free right to the open and free propagation of their creed, the freedom for atheist’s creed and by the way in socialist countries about the only ones I know, which explicitly give that constitutional protection to atheists. So, it's kind of ironic you know, in evil totalitarian Russia, atheism has achieved a pluralistic safeguard, superior to what is found in our own supposedly democratic pluralistic society and there's more open un-harassed freedom of belief in communist countries for religious believers than there is for atheists in the USA.

We can also witness a new revolutionary development within the ranks of religion itself, especially in Latin America with liberation theology. The threat of liberation theology is that it doesn't diminish man to god, but puts him as the center of god's concern. It also speaks for the interest of a different social class from the one that religionists usually represent; liberation theology is not for theocracy, but against it. It's not for what the French call: le prêtre du double-menton, the priest of the double chin, it's for the hungry and the immiserated. To the extent that liberation theology has this democratic-social content, it represents a historically progressive development, even if we can still disagree with them theologically about things. 

Instead of conjuring up a god who is the object of pietistic idolatry and interior imaginings, liberation theology sees god as manifest in social justice and economic betterment for all the people, a more decent life here on earth so that the lowliest among us shall be among the best and the parasitic, the exploitative, the oppressors, the plutocrats, the dictators shall be cast aside. That's really a subversive religion, that's really getting close to what Christianity really pretended it's supposed to be about. Also in the USA, there's a Christian left that's developed, it's emerged, which sides with the poor, with the political refugees from fascism and the peace movement and which does not support the kind of Reagan restrictions, the kind of breaking down of church and state walls and the kind of restrictions on other people's creeds. So, for some believers at least, it seems that god is not a jingoist or a militarist or a financier, but he's a pacifist and a progressive and maybe even a revolutionary. So it becomes clear that god is about as good as the people who believe in him, which is understandably so, since he is made in their image.

My own view on god is the one that's offered by the great American theologian Woody Allen, who once said that “maybe god does exist, but he's an underachiever”. Imagine being omnipotent and producing this right, tornadoes, plagues, fascists, all these things. 

Well, what is to be done? Three short points, then I'll sign off and I'm sure others will have other things to suggest here. The immediate goals that we might consider worth struggling for:
1)	First, we have to get the religionists off welfare. Make the rich churches and the multi-millionaire TV Evangelists pay a fair share of taxes on their immense holdings and investments. We have to get their hands, their loving beseeching hands, we have to get those hands out of our pockets. We've got to have them stop this theocratic rule, where the state forces us to subsidize them in their propagandizing of their faith, which is a violation of our beliefs and a violation of the constitution that is using the state in that way, not propagating their faith, they can do that;
2)	Second, free-thinkers liberation-theologists, atheists, agnostics etc. should have equal time on television. I just wrote a book called Inventing Reality which deals with the way that political ideas and information are controlled by the news media, but the same thing could be said about creed. Alternative views are systematically shut out, dissident opinions get no hearing, I mean occasionally a local radio show Madalyn Murray O'Hair will be interviewed or someone else like that, but for the most part you could just see that it's not a non-secular TV. Dissident opinions get no hearing, there's no free market of ideas;
3)	Third, we must roll back Reagan-ism and its war against the first amendment and its war against the separation of church and state and against our freedom and our beliefs. I think the Reaganites have been weakened by the Iran contra scandal and so there are new opportunities for us to fight back. Not just to complain, but to fight back and not to feel that “they're all so powerful and they're so dangerous”. No, they’re dangerous it's true, but you have to do what the great Italian communist Antonio Gramsci once said and what Madalyn Murray O'Hair practiced, even though I bet she didn't read Gramsci on this point. He said “you must have a pessimism of the mind”, be able to see the worst dangers, “and an optimism of the will”, to fight back and know that there are victories that we could win and more and more of them will be ours. 

This is what we want, even though some of us may not realize it, we are part of a long historical struggle. We are involved in making history a little, just a little bit of it, maybe a paragraph was made right out there today. 

To those who would make the world safe for hypocrisy; we say that our country needs something more than freedom of religion, we need freedom of belief, including the freedom not to believe in spirits and demons without putting our jobs and civil liberties at risk. Our historic task is not to vanquish religion, but to vanquish theocracy and with it all the abuses and privileges upon which it feeds. This, ladies and gentlemen would be and it will be, a great victory for humanity and for democracy.

Thank you