George B. Whatley
From Philosopedia
Whatley, George B. (1921 - 12 August 2009 )
When a child, Whatley, his younger brother, and his mother contracted pneumonia. His mother died a few days before his ninth birthday. The oldest of four boys, he told a Freethought Today reporter, he asked the Children's Aid Society for help because of his father's alcoholism. The brothers were separated and placed in various boarding homes and orphanages. In the orphanage in which he was placed, he avidly read the Bible but became convinced that it was all "a bunch of junk." After high school, he went to Birmingham Southern College, studying pre-medicine. He borrowed $400 and took a job for 26 cents an hour at a delicatessen. "I was raised in poverty," he told friends.
In 1944, he was drafted, entered the U. S. Navy, and was assigned to operate radar on a ship that went to the Navy amphibian base near San Diego. Discharged in 1947, he returned to Alabama to finish medical school, then finished his medical degree at Birmingham Southern College. He opened his own pactice in Homewood, working there from 1955 through 1985.
With Willa, his wife, he traveled extensively to places such as Russia, China, South America, Greece, northern Africa, and Nepal.
In 1971 with other doctors, he founded Brookwood Hospital in Birmingham. It was sold to American Medical International ten years later, and he retired in 1985.
In 2009, Whatley wrote Brain, Mind/Soul/Memory/Immortality (Vantage, paperback), highlighting his views on freethought.
When his wife died in 1998 after their 55 years of marriage, he spread her ashes at Lake Hypatia, the headquarters of the AFA, where the main auditorium is named in her honor.
In “Scientific Medicine vs. Theology” (Freethought Today, April 1999), he lamented that “Through ignorance, superstition, and reliance on the bible as the ‘word of God,’ the Church opposed all scientific endeavors, including medicine.”
In 1999 he was awarded Freedom From Religion Foundation’s first “Freethought Medal of Honor.” Willa Mae Whatley, his late wife who died in 1998 , is the person after whom the Freedom From Religion Foundation auditorium at Lake Hypatia is named.
Just before his death, he had a stroke. Whatley's survivors included his brother William Monroe Whatley, Guntersville, Alabama; nieces, Suzanne E. Reeves, Guntersville, Alabama, Joyce Raley of Big Canoe, Georgia, Judy Robertson of Norcross, Georgia; nephew, Bobby Whatley of Birmingham, Alabama, and numerous great nieces and nephews.
