Your Morning Madalyn
For Wednesday, April 29th, 2026
“Oh, one of the things that I am most proud of is that people can say, "I am an atheist," in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist. I separated those two words. I think that's probably the best thing that I did. The other thing is, of course, that we are developing something that we call "modern atheism," or "American atheism," which is entirely different from the materialism of the Greek philosophers. What we are interested in is moving out, in order to see that there is a more viable life cycle for all people, and that the human condition can be ameliorated somewhat by human beings working in concert to do something. We must do something about the pollution. We must do something about the waste. We have to do something about the greed. We must stop war. And we're not going to do any of those things as long as we feel the solution is to go to church on Sunday, or funnel our energy into prayer or religious solutions. Everybody has to get mixed up in the problems, to try to solve them.” — Madalyn Murray O’Hair
She was willing to take atheism one step farther, to ask, so what does this mean? And to her, the usefulness of atheism would be the ability to look dispassionately at what others call "God's work," assessing how to assure that humans can continue to inhabit the planet as they transition from magical thinking to science. This progress is what MAGA's sponsors are trying to roll back, offering instead the joys of ignorance and the vaunted efficacy of prayer.
Thank you for this, Barry. In this vein, I call myself a Mormon atheist.