The following is the text of an address given by the founder of American Atheists at the Eighth Annual Convention of the American Rationalist Federation, on 25 August 1962, before the US Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case now known as Murray v Curlett. The indestructible foundation of the whole edifice of Atheism is its philosophy, materialism, or naturalism, as it is also known. That philosophy regards the world as it actually is, views it in the light of the data provided by progressive science and social experience.
Atheistic materialism is the logical outcome of scientific knowledge gained over the centuries.
We make a fundamental error, I think, as we tilt at the windmills of imagined gods. We need to review from where we have come, under what conditions, and to see the threshold upon which we stand now. Our history has been marked by a ceaseless struggle against ignorance and superstition. In ancient Greece the works of the materialist philosopher Democritus, who first taught the atomic theory of matter, were destroyed. Anaxagoras was banished from Athens for being an Atheist.