Church wealth are moving into everything-gas stations, banks, television stations, supermarket chains, hotels, steel mills, resort areas, farms, wine factories, warehouses, bottling works, printing plants, schools, theaters-everything you could conceivably think of that has nothing to do with religion, they are moving into big. They're even coming in as stockholders in the big oil companies, and the Bank of America is almost entirely owned by the Catholic Church.
The relationships that people have - that are sexual, psychological, emotional - these relationships are not open to supervision by parents, schools, churches, or government. Nobody has any right to intervene at all in any kind of relationship like that.
My son Bill, who came to me in 1960-he was 14 then, quoted the old parable to me: "It is not by their words, but by their deeds that ye shall know them" -pointing out that if I was a true atheist, I would not permit the public schools of America to force him to read the Bible and say prayers against his will. He was right.
I'd been a psychiatric social worker for 17 years, but within 24 hours after I started the case against studying reading Bible in school by my son, I was fired from my job as a supervisor in the city public welfare department. And I was unable to find another one. So my income was completely cut off.
Once involved in the school-prayer fight, I rapidly became aware of, and appalled by, the political and economic power of the Church in America -all based on the violation of one of our nation's canon laws: the separation of church and state.
My life and the life of my family has been completely disrupted in absolutely every way by starting the school-prayer case. But it's been worth it. It's uncovered a vast cesspool of illegitimate economic and political power in which the Church is immersed right up to its ears, and I intend to dive in headfirst and pull it out of there dripping wet for all the world to see -no matter how long it takes, no matter whose feet get stepped on in the process, no matter how much it costs, no matter how great the personal sacrifice.
I recall that I had a terrible struggle finding anything antireligious in the school libraries.But many years later my family moved into a house where a woman had left a box of books containing 20 volumes on the history of the Inquisition. I found out there was a word for people like me: "heretic." I was kind of delighted to find I had an identity.
I was shamed.My son, Bill, who was 14 come to me and said: "Mother, you've been professing that you're an atheist for a long time now. Well, I don't believe in God either, but every day in school I'm forced to say prayers, and I feel like a hypocrite. Why should I be compelled to betray my beliefs?" I couldn't answer him.
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