Freethought of the Day

Freethought of the Day
July 2, 2009

There are 2 entries for this date: Barbara G. Walker and George Sand.

Barbara G. Walker

On this date in 1930, Barbara G. Walker was born in Philadelphia. In early childhood, she had her first disappointment with religion, when a minister told Barbara her deceased pet dog wouldn't go to heaven. She threw an uncharacteristic tantrum, telling him: "I don't want anything to do with your rotten old God and nasty old heaven." First reading the King James bible as a young teenager, she decided: "It sounded cruel. A God who would not forgive the world until his son had been tortured to death--that did not strike me as the kind of father I would want to relate to." She majored in journalism at the university of Pennsylvania, married research chemist Gordon Walker, and moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the Washington Star. Relocating to Morristown, New Jersey, she taught the Martha Graham dance technique. She is a knitting expert, writing ten volumes, including the classics, Treasury of Knitting Patterns and A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. In the mid-seventies she became part of the "new feminist wave," writing the monumental feminist/freethought sourcebook, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983). Her many other books, published by Harper & Row, include The Skeptical Feminist. An atheist, she has also specialized in debunking irresponsible, New Age assertions about crystals.

In the mid-seventies she became part of the "new feminist wave," writing the monumental feminist/freethought sourcebook, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983), which is often banned, according to the American Library Association’s Banned Books (1998), because the book “is of no benefit to anyone.”

Her many other books include The Skeptical Feminist, in which she wrote,

* . . . the very fears and guilts imposed by religious training are responsible for some of history's most brutal wars, crusades, pogroms, and persecutions, including five centuries of almost unimaginable terrorism under Europe's Inquisition and the unthinkably sadistic legal murder of nearly nine million women. History doesn't say much very good about God.

In that book, she found “the archetypical Goddess image” to be of psychological importance to women and calls fortune-telling “just a parlor trick.”

Walker was named 1993 Humanist Heroine by the American Humanist Association. An atheist, she has also specialized in debunking irresponsible, New Age assertions about crystals.

“Our culture,” she has written, “has been deeply penetrated by the notion that ‘man’ . . . not woman . . . is created in the image of god. This notion persists, despite the likelihood that the creation goes in the other direction: that god is a human projection of the image of man.”