Ruth Green
From Philosopedia
Green, Ruth Hurmence (12 January1915 - 7 July 1981)
An Iowa native, Green received a journalism degree from Texas Tech in 1935, married, had three children, and settled in Missouri.
A "half-hearted Methodist," when convalescing from cancer in her early sixties and plodding through the Bible, she called the shock she suffered from reading the book worse than the trauma caused by her illness. "There wasn't a page of the Bible that didn't offend me in some way. There is no other book between whose covers life is so cheap," Ruth discovered, prompting her to write the enduring modern freethought classic, The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible (1979). In it, she wrote,
- I am now convinced that children should not be subjected to the frightfulness of the Christian religion . . . If the concept of a father who plots to have his own son put to death is presented to children as beautiful and as worthy of society's admiration, what types of human behavior can be presented to them as reprehensible?
“For his companions in eternity,” she said, God “prefers not the accomplished, the brilliant, the stimulating, not the outstanding achievers who may not conform, but the docile, the gullible, the child-like, the nondescript nonentities with nothing to recommend their selection but blind belief.” If these are the meek who will inherit the Earth, she reasoned, “Is it not your omnipotent, omniscient god who bestows such qualities? Where is the free will which would give justice to his reward and retribution?”
Green insisted, in her various talks to friends, that "There are atheists in foxholes."
When terminal cancer developed in 1981, her life became intolerable, she carried on normally as long as she could but eventually took her own life by swallowing painkillers.
In her last letter to Anne Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation on July 4, 1981, Ruth wrote: "Freedom depends upon freethinkers."
