Well, see, Jackmannii, that’s just what I’m trying to find out. I can’t bring myself to read her new bio, as I recall her so unpleasantly. So I’m asking here if anyone does have any pro pr con specifics on her: was she, in the long run, good or bad for the “cause?”
This quote from an interview O’Hair did with Playboy left a bad taste in my mouth:
“Because religion is a crutch, and only the crippled need crutches. I can get around perfectly well on my own two feet, and so can everyone else with a backbone and a grain of common sense. One of the things I did during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker was go around and find people with mental crutches, and every time I found one, I kicked those goddamn crutches until they flew.”
I think that sure sounds like stamping out religion and converting the religious.
I really want to read the new bio, because I think the diary excerpts are going to be priceless. I wish just the diary, annotated or not, could be published in its entirety. This newspaper editorial gives us tantalizing hints of what the diary reveals of her inner life:
“…Mrs. O’Hair was something of a tortured soul, yearning all her life for wealth and notoriety: She wishes to “humiliate Billy Graham on television for money,” and to own a mink coat and Cadillac. She certainly gained notoriety, if not wealth, but it scarcely brought her happiness: Each new year, she resolves to achieve great things and conquer the world for disbelief, but by springtime she is deep in the slough of despond, blaming Jews, homosexuals and blacks for her distress.”
Musicat:
Not to continue your hijack, but does your library still have the Miller Art Center in it?
As to O’Hair, do any of you think she was villianized because of her minority beliefs (or lack of beliefs, rather)? After reading the ‘Playboy’ excerpt I may be able to understand why, but I am reminded of Michael Newdow and how he was percieved for standing up for the constitution. Maybe it is just how people react to any perception of having beliefs (or lack thereof) forced upon them.
How could anybody construe that as “stamping out religion?”
I don’t believe that psychiatric social workers should attempt to have any influence whatsoever on their clients’ religious beliefs or lack thereof. Now I read that quote “during my 17 years as a psychiatric social worker” not as saying that she went around espousing the concept of atheism only in her spare time during her 17-year tenure, but that she was “kick[ing] those goddamn crutches” of religion on the job, that she actively proselytized to clients and perhaps co-workers.
I think it’s pretty easy to construe it as “stamping out religion”
Her position is: religion is a crutch, I “go around and find people with crutches”, I remove the crutch.
Pretty clear in my opinion.
She seems to regret that she only had 17 years to do her work and did not have a chance to get to everyone.
That’s the one. Obviously you have been cruising around here before, or else you’re psychic.
She said she considered religion a crutch.She then said that, as a psychaitrist she would find people with mental crutches and she would “kick those crutches until they flew!”
She never said she was kicking their religions out from under them.She said she considered religion to be a crutch, not unlike the crutches she “kicked”.
Even IF she HAD made effort to go around advising people that they did not need religion, how does this equate to “trying to stamp out religion”?!?
That makes no sense.
O’hair got a bad rap time and again.She was no pillar of pleasantry but to equate her with the likes of Jack Chick takes a monstrous effort to wallow in presupposition and prejudice.
GodlessSkeptic
Proud member of American Atheists
Nit-pick: she was a psychiatric social worker, not a psychiatrist.
What, are you saying that she kicked all the “mental crutches” except religion for her patients? Well, that was very considerent of her, kicking around the religion like that. No, I can’t read it that way. We could have a semantic arguement for a while, but the meaning’s clear to me. All I’m saying, it left a bad taste in my mouth.
Now, I’ll give her her props: her final quote in that interview is all live and let live, and she does say that “At no time have I ever said that people should be stripped of their right to the insanity of belief in God.” Okay, there’s a gratious insult tossed in there, but it’s all about not compelling anyone to believe or not believe. However, I think there is something very telling when the interviewer asks her, “Madalyn, why are you an atheist?” and in reply to that, she talks about, not kicking away her own mental crutches, but kicking away the crutches of others. She also talks as much about the need for others to not be religious as she does about her own philosophy.
IANA social worker of any sort. But, if I were trying to help someone get back on their feet after tough times, and all they kept saying was “I’ll put my faith in Jee-sus to see me through”, then I’d figure they’re gonna be stuck where they are for awhile.
Sitting back and waiting for someone else to pull your life together is not the way to get it accomplished, no matter who that someone is. If somebody really is using their religion as a crutch, leaning on it constantly instead of trying to walk, they’re going to be stuck forever in whatever bad position they might be in, or at least constantly dependant on those around them.
To help such a person, perhaps you do have to kick the crutch out a little. If the crutch happens to be religious, so be it.
Actually I grew up in S.B. My father’s business is just down the alley from that library. Never thought I would see my old home town’s name on the SDMB! Plus I am psychic.
RexDart,
I don’t think that’s fair RexDart. I personally know a number of people whose lives were in the crapper (string of failed relationships, no career, problems with the law, substance abuse, etc.) and who were able to break their pattern of poor choices through finding, internalizing and implementing religion in their lives. Now, some may say that a non religious but strict adherence to a secular moral code may have produced the same results. Maybe. Maybe not. The fact is though that the introduction (or reintroduction for some of them) of religion into their lives was without question a net positive.
Well, you see I was talking about a specific sort of religious attitude. The one I was addressing is when people decide to simply lay back and let God (or Jesus) get them out of their mess. Some Christians take the “God helps those who help themselves” tack, and thus don’t fall into that trap. However, I sat through an entire evangelical protestant sermon one time that had the refutation of that point as its entire message, arguing more or less that God will help believers even if the believers take no action on their own behalf. I understand that alot of evangelicals feel that way.
Modern day evangelical protestantism tells people “you’re a worthless sinner”, and gives them a pretty low opinion of themselves. I don’t see how anybody could pull themselves out a mess if they thought themselves to be such a wretched creature as that religion says they are. That religion also teaches that all your successes, all your abilities, are due to God, not you. That doesn’t inspire confidence, it inspires people to believe themselves crippled and in need of a crutch, just as Ms. O’Hair said. To pull yourself back on your feet, you need to be confident of your abilities, confident in your own self-worth, and willing to work hard to set things straight. Maybe some religions help people do that, but I think that, at least in the case of evangelical protestant Christianity, religion could be very counterproductive in this regard.
Inspirational sermons typically aren’t very literal. I’ll bet you anything that when he feels hungry that preacher doesn’t sit quietly and wait for God to fill his belly with food. He goes into his kitchen and opens the cupboard. And when the cupboard is bare, he goes to the supermarket to buy food, and when his wallet is low, he does something to get money.
The specific sort of religious person you are refering to is about as common as the specific sort of atheist person who does any immoral thing he or she wants to because, after all, there’s no hell. Hardly either of those two types exist. The specific sort of religious person you sketch out is so rare that when they are discovered to be starving their babies or whatever, it makes the news and they get their own Pit thread here on the boards. So while I agree that the type certainly could use a psychiatric social worker, I am skeptical that Madalyn ran into very many of them.
The scenario that you laid out smacks of an authority figure implying to a person in need that they’ll get the help they need…if they say the right things. If they think the right things. It’s unethical. It’s no different than if a social worker attempted to convert her clients to Christianity.
Actually Sugaree, that sort of fundementalist is not all that rare.Of course they do not take it to the extremes that YOU outline(starving to death and such) and therein lies the hypocrisy, but still, I run into these types a LOT.
They express the position in various ways but the core is the always the same:All you really HAVE to do is accept Jesus/Let God into your heart/ask for forgiveness/etc. and everything else will be worked out according to God’s will.
Not necessarily a dangerous philosophy if you’re still bathing, working, paying the bills on time, and taking out the trash. It’s actually close to my own philosophy. I’m doing okay. I don’t need anyone kicking anything they interpret as a crutch.
Also note that O’Hair decided that religion itself was a crutch – not just the extreme case that RexDart referred to. In fact, Christianity only accounts for a portion of religious people, and the extreme cases that RD mentioned are a much smaller portion than that.
So even if we grant RexDart’s illustration to be accurate, O’Hair’s statement is still abominable.
As an aside, I’d be interested in debating whether my conception of the effect of protestant evangelicalism upon the masses is correct, in a general way. I think it’s a system of thought that trains people to be useless and dependant on their neighbors. Perhaps I will start a thread on this in the next day or so, and I’d appreciate your insight.
There has been no evidence presented here, and none that can be extrapolated from O’Hair’s quote, that she used her social worker position as a means of promoting atheism. I think you’re reading more into the quote than what’s warranted.
Atheists (of which I am not one) do a certain amount of public promotion of their views. They don’t get government funding (which is happening increasingly for “faith-based” enterprises under the Bush Administration), they don’t go door to door proselytizing, they don’t get tax breaks, they’re not on TV or in the streets emphasizing how believers are accursed and doomed to eternal suffering. They would like government and private enterprise not to discriminate in favor of believers.
A few of them can be obnoxious about all this.
And a reminder. O’Hair did not cause prayer to be removed from the public schools. You cannot possibly remove prayer from schools or, for that matter, from any venue. Government-sponsored/government-controlled prayer was proscribed. Any child can freely pray in any school in the country.
(Nit-pick- O’Hair’s organizations certainly were tax-exempt–just not the same kind of tax-exempt churches are)
Certainly there is no evidence that would convict O’Hair in a court of law. But what can I saw–I’m an English major. I look for the subtext.
Now, I believe O’Hair to be the most obnoxious of the obnoxious ones, one of the most abrasive people to ever walk the Earth. She was incapable of keeping her organization together through strong leadership–constant quarrels led to schisms and splinter groups. I think she was, because of her personality, perceived as a nutcase. However, I think nutcases do more for movements than they are given credit for. The extreme viewpoints (for example, Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam) get publicity for the movement, in the end, helping to make the more mainstream elements (for example, Martin Luther King and co) look more reasonable and more palatable to the general public. Who’s primarily responsible for the changes? The mainstream. Could it have done without the shrill, strident voices of those at the most radical of radical viewpoints? No.
So, meandering back to the OP, I’d say that, yes, through the sheer value of publicity, she did do good for the cause. I’d also say that she did very much want to stamp out religion.
But damn, I guess I’ll just have to go read the new book. I’ll come back when I’m done.