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THE ATHEIST CONVENTION By William J. Murray I did my best to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the lost at the atheist convention in Millbrae, California during Easter. The circumstances were extremely difficult, but much was accomplished. The history of atheist conventions: My atheist mother, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founded what is now American Atheists in the early 1960's shortly after filing the lawsuit to remove prayer from the schools of this nation. The organization was actually founded by accident. My mother had no husband and could not hold down a job because of personality problems, and as a result our family was basically poor and we lived with my maternal grandparents. Shortly after my mother announced that she hated God and wanted prayer out of the schools, our little row house in Baltimore, Maryland was inundated by mail containing money from different kinds of perverts from all over the United States. They were nudists, wife-swapers, homosexuals, and other nonconformists. All proclaimed there was no God and therefore they were not sinners. They sent my mother money, a lot of money. In the first thirty days after proclaiming her hatred of religion and her desire for His word to be taken from the schools, our family received more money in the mail than my mother had earned in her entire life up to that point. In a few short years my mother learned how to "milk the suckers" as she called her supporters, and one form of "milking" was the atheist conventions she put on during Easter weekends. She had seen the profit-making potential of conventions by attending those of the American Humanist Association and the American Secularist Association. My mother, however, developed the conventions to an art form. After my mother was kidnapped and murdered by her former associates in 1995, Ellen Johnson took over the atheist organization before my mother's body had time to cool. While proclaiming her love for Madalyn Murray O'Hair, she moved in and changed the locks on the doors, dumped my mother's board of directors and appointed her own. She never filed a missing person's report for my mother, brother or daughter despite her claim that she cared what happened to them. She was too busy grabbing assets to do that. Ellen Johnson did not at first understand some of my mother's techniques for obtaining money and publicity, so the first atheist convention totally under her control was held in Washington, DC on a non-holiday weekend. Hardly anyone showed up. My mother had chosen Easter weekend for several reasons. First, convention facilities and hotels are dirt cheap because normal people don't hold conventions during Easter. Second, the media can be controlled in the city in which the convention is being held because little that is news worthy happens on Easter. All elected officials are with their families. Third, it is symbolically important to hold the convention during the hours Christ spent in the tomb. Those who hate Christ love to party during those hours because it is a way of being irreverent and rebellious. Fourth, my mother was able to spend huge amounts of money on herself at resort hotels, usually staying in the presidential suites. Very quickly Ellen Johnson went back to the old formula of holding the atheist conventions during Easter. Last year the atheist convention was during Easter near her hometown in New Jersey. However, because New Jersey is not exactly a resort area, the convention was still not up to the level my mother had them before. This year Ellen Johnson finally went to the full moneymaking formula developed by my mother, and she held the convention at the Westin Resort Hotel twenty-five miles south of San Francisco, facing the bay. I accepted Christ in 1980 but it was not until 1982 that I attempted to witness about the Lord to those attending the atheist conventions. Since then, trying to win souls to Jesus at these atheist conventions has been a core part of my ministry despite my work in Washington, DC. I learned very early that the media was for the most part on the side of the atheists. In the early years I was simply ignored by the media during these conventions. I learned that if I placed a large advertisement, an open letter to the atheists, in the local newspaper the media could not pretend I was not there.
What happened in California? California is a strange place, particularly the area north of San Jose, including San Francisco and the "silicon valley". Tomatoes can cost up to $5.00 each, and grocery clerks earn as much as $16.00 an hour. A small apartment can rent for upwards of $2,000 a month and many working families have to share an apartment with one or more other families, just to afford to live there. A "cheap" hotel room in a safe hotel in the San Francisco Bay area runs $100.00 a night. A "large" Baptist Church could have perhaps 200 members. There is not much time for leisure in the sunshine state because many have to hold down two jobs just to live there. Many people struggle so hard to meet the cost of living that there is just no time for church. California is a welfare state with the highest rate of single mothers in the nation. As a result of so many in the "care of the state," it is a liberal state and the media is radical left. Of all the radical newspapers in California, the San Francisco Chronicle is probably the farthest to the left. The paper caters first to the homosexual community and then gets worse from there. Normally, I would have placed our "Attention All Atheists" advertisement in the largest newspaper in the area, and that would have been the Chronicle. I decided against the Chronicle when I was informed that they reserved the right to censor what they call "advocacy" advertising. They claim they only "verify" what the advertisement says. When they received our ad copy, we were told it could take "weeks" to verify the content. In other words, they had made the decision to in some way censor or "tone down" our advertisement. This was the first time ever, in the entire United States, that I have been told by a newspaper that they reserved the right to censor an advertisement. The Chronicle does not censor advertising for homosexual activities that are outright offensive, but we were informed that our advertisement needed to be "verified". At this point our ministry does not have the finances to file a lawsuit against a newspaper the size of the Chronicle to get the advertisement in. Besides that, the suit would take years. For that reason I made the decision to purchase a much larger ad in the San Mateo Times than we could have afforded in the Chronicle. The San Mateo Times is the major daily newspaper for the twenty or so cities between San Francisco and San Jose. This is not a small newspaper; in fact, it has about the same circulation as the Washington Times. It is delivered to the door of each room in the major resort hotels around the San Francisco airport, including the Westin Hotel where the atheist convention was held. The advertisement was "tabloid page size;" that means it took up all but a few inches of a normal newspaper page. Even with this large ad, the San Francisco media ignored our presence here. We had no local TV coverage, although an NBC affiliate, Channel 4 from Los Angeles, sent a crew up to interview me. I did only two radio shows the entire time I was in California. The bright spot of undoing the media damage the atheists did was an Associated Press interview that did hit the wire. My comments about the atheist convention did appear in many newspapers across the nation, but not in the San Francisco Chronicle. In the Saturday edition of the Chronicle a large "profile" story was done on American Atheists and their convention. It was one-sided journalism at its worst. In California the ministry had the assistance of the Peninsula Christian Fellowship which is a conservative Baptist church in San Bruno just a few miles from the Westin Hotel in Millbrae. Most churches in California do not use their true denominational names. In spite of the willingness of the people at Peninsula Christian Fellowhip, it proved impossible to witness directly to the atheists this year. The Westin Hotel is set well back from the highway behind palm trees, and we would have been removed for trespassing on private property. Was it worth the money? YES. At the prayer meeting we held at the Peninsula Christian Fellowship on Good Friday night, there were those who came that accepted Christ as Savior. That was worth the whole trip. Besides that, tens of thousands of people who read the San Mateo Times got first hand information from our ministry as to what the atheists are really about, and what they really believe. The Associated Press story distributed nationwide turned out to be favorable to the cause of Christ, since the newsman who did the story was a believer! The total impact of what we did in California, considering the circumstances and negative atmosphere, was positive for the cause of Christ. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS BATTLE Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a battle over the Ten Commandments has been raging across America, and the Supreme Court is on the wrong side. In the last year even USA Today, which has traditionally been an anti-Christian newspaper, has begun to look at our side of the issue. (To give you an idea of how politically correct USA Today is, they have an editorial rule that regardless of the headline or the news content on the front page there always has to be a photograph of at least one woman.) In the March 30 edition of USA Today, there was a front page story entitled, "Morality Makes a Stand." The newspaper actually had a photograph of the Ten Commandments on the front page. The story dealt with Kentucky and the eleven other states that have passed laws allowing the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public places. The newspaper acknowledged that in their own survey, 74% of Americans supported displaying the Ten Commandments.Last year the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly that states should have the right to display the Ten Commandments publicly. Since the school shootings of 1998 and 1999, one quarter of the Democrat congressmen broke from their radical left leaders such as Al Gore, and voted for display of the Ten Commandments. Just before Easter, on April 20, USA Today ran a total of five stories that could be considered "pro-religion". One of those, entitled "Religious Literacy Touted for Schools," praised efforts of several groups to promote "religious literacy" in schools since the Columbine shootings. Perhaps some USA Today reporters have kids in schools and they have figured out that without the presence of God their children are in danger. Despite even the very liberal USA Today starting to come to the right viewpoint about the need for God in our schools, the Supreme Court is unmoved. On April 17, the court handed down a decision prohibiting the Ten Commandments from being displayed on a baseball fence. Yes, you read that right-- a baseball fence. The case began when a Downey, California businessman, Edward DiLoreto, wanted to post an ad that included the Ten Commandments on the fence of a high school baseball field. The Downey High School baseball booster club was selling the advertising space for $400 an ad. Anyone could purchase an ad to promote anything from soft drinks to cars, but not, according to the school board, to display God's word. Mr. DiLoreto, believing his rights to free speech had been violated, sued the school board. The case went to a lower court which said the school board had a right to censor ads "that would be disruptive to the educational purpose of the school." In my opinion it is the lack of the Ten Commandments that is disruptive to school discipline today. The Supreme Court sided with the school board and the lower court, and struck down Mr. DiLoreto's right to pay for the posting of the Ten Commandments as part of an advertisement. This clearly shows that the Court, as it is constituted today, is out of touch with the American people and clearly out of touch with the reality of the intention of the founders of this nation. The next president of the United States will probably appoint as many as three, or even five new Supreme Court justices. If Al Gore is the next president, all those appointees will be pro-abortion and stand against the display of the Ten Commandants. We must pray that God will touch the heart of the next president to do what is right in appointing Supreme Court justices who understand the intention of the founders of the Constitution and this nation. Last year the Religious Freedom Coalition worked hard to pass a Ten Commandments provision to the Juvenile Justice Act. A provision to allow the posting of the Ten Commandments was added to the House version of the bill. The bill has been in a conference committee now for almost a year because the Senate does not seem interested in the social legislation enacted by the House. Please write to the Majority Leader of the Senate, Trent Lott, and urge him to help with the passage of the Ten Commandments provision of the Juvenile Justice Act. RFC WASHINGTON UPDATE: THE PRESENCE OF LIFE
This is a brilliant resolution presented by Congressman Tom Coburn, MD. If we declare someone legally dead when there is no heartbeat or brain waves, then surely someone is alive when there is a heartbeat or brain waves. If a person is alive, then he or she is protected as a person under the Constitution of the United States. A human being develops a heartbeat and brain waves about forty days after conception. If this definition of life is applied to abortion, it will stop all late term abortions, including the gruesome practice of partial birth abortion. Dr. Coburn's resolution is based on simple scientific fact. If a seriously injured adult has a heartbeat and brain waves, a doctor will be charged with murder for refusing aid to keep that person alive. How then can we sanction the destruction of an unborn child who has a heartbeat and brain waves? The Presence of Life Resolution is also endorsed by the National Right to Life Committee and has 21 co-sponsors in Congress, including House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. WE ARE WINNING THE ABORTION BATTLE According to the latest Zogby polls conducted on social issues, we are winning the war for the mind of America about abortion. The most stunning find: ONLY 5.7% OF AMERICANS SUPPORT ABORTION ON DEMAND.Further, 52% of Americans believe that abortion is manslaughter and takes a human life. Also, 78% believe a parent should be informed before a minor can have an abortion. The real problem for the pro-abortionists is science. Modern technology allows younger and younger unborn babies to survive. Vivid pictures in science magazines and TV documentaries showing babies inside the womb at the earliest stages of development are also hurting the pro-death cause. Dr. Coburn's resolution will further harm the pro-abortiontists' argument that life does not exist in the womb. BABY BODY PARTS By Nancy M. Murray The practice of cannibalism inspires horror and revulsion in the minds of modern Americans. Yet, Americans are (in most cases unknowingly) funding a horrible practice equivalent to cannibalism. What is the difference between using human body parts as food to sustain life, and using human body parts to extend life by treating diseases? There really is little difference, except that in the latter case a lot of people are profiting financially from buying and selling human body parts. Abortion clinics, private companies and organizations are already making millions of dollars selling the eyes, limbs, hearts, brains and other parts from dissected unborn babies. Even more horrible, sometimes the dissection is done while the baby is still alive. Isn't this illegal? Yes, it is, but many are taking advantage of a large loophole in the law. While it is technically illegal to buy or sell fetal tissue, it is permissible to pay for "transportation, implantation, processing, preservation, quality control, or storage of human fetal tissue." This results in a profitable business for "wholesaler/harvesters" whose technicians prepare and deliver fetal tissue to researchers in return for "processing fees." How do abortion clinics profit? They are paid a "site fee" for access to the aborted babies. How do public tax dollars pay for any of this? The National Institutes of Health funds fetal tissue research (since President Clinton lifted the moratorium in 1993). This fuels a huge demand for fetal tissue by researchers competing for research grants. The largest abortion clinic operator, Planned Parenthood, (supposedly a "non profit" organization, although it receives millions of federal grant dollars each year), also profits from this gruesome trade in body parts. Some claim this research is done for a greater good, to find cures for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and many other terrible diseases. What moral human being would want to know that his life was extended a few days or months at the cost of the death and cannibalization of another human being? It is never right for one human being to benefit from the destruction of another human being. Only a cannibal would think so. The Subcommittee on Health and Environment held hearings on March 9, 2000, in which clear evidence was given that modern American medical practice does indeed employ the cannibalism of human body parts and does indeed trade those body parts for cash. The Religious Freedom Coalition urged the Justice Department to act upon the findings of the committee hearing and to vigorously prosecute those who violate not only the law, but the sanctity of human life. We also asked that the Clinton/Gore Administration show some moral courage and condemn the sale of human body parts. We asked the Clinton/Gore Administration to direct Attorney General Janet Reno to conduct an investigation, arrest and prosecute those violating the law by trading in human body parts. Two weeks later the F.B.I. opened an investigation into the sale of baby body parts by abortion clinics, including those operated by Planned Parenthood. The investigation was not ordered by Janet Reno, and I am sure whoever opened the investigation is in trouble with the Clinton White House and has endangered his or her career at the F.B.I.
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