July 2nd, 2012
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.
“. . . 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.”
— Barbara G. Walker, "The Skeptical Feminist," acceptance speech for
the "1993 Humanist Heroine" award by the Feminist Caucus of the
American Humanist Association, anthologized in Women Without Superstition
Compiled by Annie Laurie Gaylor ( FFRF)
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