USA- In 1964, the American magazine Time referred to Madalyn Murray O’Hair as “the most hated woman in all of America.” O’Hair is the founder of Atheists of America (American Atheists) and, officially, she was president of the organization for 32 years: from 1963 to 1995.
In 1960, O’Hair rose to fame after filing a lawsuit against the Baltimore City Public System of Education (United States), in which he opposed his son Bill having to participate in Bible readings. which, back then, were common in schools, and Madalyn considered this unconstitutional.
Throughout the legal process, she alleged that her son’s refusal to participate in the readings had led to his classmates assaulting the boy, assaults that had been deliberately ignored by the center’s administration. The lawsuit reached the Supreme Court in 1963.
The Court voted in favor of Murray (eight votes in favor and one against), making firm the ban on prayers and reading the Bible in all public schools in the United States.
During the 1960s and 1970s, O’Hair was the voice and face of atheism in the United States. Because of this, he was a very controversial figure. Her own son William, who did not share her atheistic philosophy, would later describe as “profane and vulgar.”
Murray’s death adds even more intrigue to the story. In 1995, Murray, his son and his grandson disappeared. Nobody knew where they were. A few years later, it was revealed that a former worker for the Society of American Atheists, along with an accomplice, had killed the family.
His son’s conversion
Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s personal life was more turbulent. Her father, her brother and even her own son (William, the one who inspired the case) did not get along with her. William J. Murray eventually converted to Christianity and was ordained as a pastor. They remained estranged for the rest of their lives.
Today the boy who served as an excuse for that claim, Bill Murray, is a convinced Christian.
“The ban on school prayer was a watershed moment in the secularization of American culture,” explains Rob Schenck, a leader in the American Protestant community. “The consequences have been seen for 50 years and now the great-grandchildren of those responsible have to bear their weight.”
“I was born into a home of almost constant violence and rage,” explains Bill Murray.
“My mother never married my father or my brother’s father. As a result of her constant rages, she could not hold a job, so we had to live forever with my grandparents in a small house in Baltimore.”
“My grandfather,” says Murray, “had never done a tax return and most of what he did in his life was illegal or carried out on bad advice. He had no savings. My grandmother, for her part, dedicated herself to reading Tarot cards and magic. My uncle, who also didn’t do much, was addicted to pornography, and my mother filled the house with statues of animals in mating positions. She adored them.”
So who really was Madalyn Murray O’Hair? Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a militant atheist communist who in 1960 attempted to defect to the Soviet Union. Murray is very clear about the definition of her mother: “My mother was nothing more than the atheist leader that everyone knew. She was an evil person who led many to hell. It’s hard for me to say this about my own mother, but it’s the truth.”
Bill remembers that when he was ten or eleven years old, his mother used to come home bragging about spending the day at the X-theater: “She was proud of the fact that she was the only woman in the theater seeing this crap. My mother’s whole life circulated around those things. She even wrote articles for a pornographic magazine ”. There was a cabinet full of alcoholic beverages and a fridge full of foods high in fat and sugar: “she liked to live a life that she called ‘royal’”.
“My mother loved to hire criminals to work in her offices. She had a special affection for the convicted murderers who had already served her sentence. It was her ambition for power and her manipulation over her people that would ultimately cause not only her death, but my brother’s and my daughter’s as well.”
He hated his son when he turned
The great paradox of Madalyn Murray’s life is that her eldest son, William ‘Bill’ Murray, ended up converting to Christianity in 1980, at the age of 34. Exactly the son who served him to ensure that they did not pray in schools, would eventually find Christ and embrace a religious life.
When she found out, she couldn’t say more terrible words than these: “You could call this a postnatal abortion, I suppose. I disown Bill totally and completely for now and forever… He is beyond human forgiveness.”
Bill had learned to live an absolutely sensual life: alcohol, drugs, tobacco, total sexual debauchery: “I drank a liter of vodka a day and by the time I was thirty I had already been married twice. I lived only to eat, drink and have what I thought were sexual pleasures.
Fed up with the situation, Bill began to rethink his whole life and look for something transcendent and that could fill him: “I had seen all the evil in the world and now I wanted to see the other side of life.” He cried out to the Lord for help and he got it. He converted to Christianity and thanks to some good people who welcomed him, he took a step into an unknown world that he had never heard of.
Her mother’s resentment reached such a degree that she convinced her entire family to close their doors on her, starting with her brother and her daughter: “For twenty years I couldn’t talk to my brother. He hung up on me or tore up my letters, just like my daughter.” For them I was a traitor, an aborted.
His mother is murdered by another atheist
The end of this story came in September 1995. Madalyn Murray O’Hair was brutally murdered at the age of 76, her body dismembered and burned along with her son Jon and her granddaughter Robin. Her murderers were two employees of her atheist association who tried to steal $600,000 of her affiliates’ donations.
Who was the excuse for a campaign against faith and the experience of religion in the public sphere, Bill Murray, is now a Protestant pastor and has become the President of the “Coalition for Religious Liberty” in Washington, where he works for helping Christians who live in Muslim and communist countries and are persecuted for their beliefs.
But since his conversion, he was already pointing out ways: he was director of the “Friends of Liberty” association, an organization to support victims of communism anywhere in the world, and in the 1990s he founded the first company that managed to publish the Bible. in Russia.
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