William Harwood

William Harwood, Ph.D., M.Litt. (Cambridge), is the author of forty-three books. He is a contributing editor of American Rationalist, and for the seven years that Free Inquiry maintained an advisory Editorial Board, he was a member of that Board. He has written over 600 articles for F.I., A.R., Skeptical Inquirer, The Humanist, Humanist in Canada, Australian Humanist, Open Society (NZ), Freethinker (UK), Humanism Ireland, Indian Skeptic, and a dozen other periodicals in nine countries. On completing a Ph.D. in Religious Studies, he applied for several advertised lectureships in universities in Canada and elsewhere, in the naïve belief that the author of a book disproving religion had any more hope of being hired by religion professors whose economic security depended on their maintaining the Big Lie that religion cannot be disproven, than Ralph Nader would have had of becoming publicity director of General Motors after writing Unsafe at Any Speed. (When a Fulbright Scholar, Dr Kaz Dziamka, editor of American Rationalist, can apply for a faculty position in fifty universities and, because he is known to have taught a course in Secular Humanism as well as editing a nontheist publication, not receive even the courtesy of a rejection letter—as Dr Harwood similarly did not—that is clear proof that North American higher learning institutions are part of the conspiracy to keep religious mindslaves brainwashed with that Big Lie.) After giving up the uneven struggle, he settled for teaching high school, before the reality became inescapable that North American schools are babysitting institutions in which any teacher who attempted to teach anything would be purged before he could raise the question, “How come nobody else is doing that?” Dr Harwood was born in the world’s largest culturally deprived environment, Australia, among people who lived in constant terror that some day, somewhere, someone might actually do something. He stayed there just long enough to recognize that there is something terribly wrong with a country that rejects moderate, pragmatic, middle-of-the road politics, and instead alternates between governments of the far right and the far left. Later, as a research student at Cambridge University, he discovered that the world’s largest insane asylum, England, has a similar deficiency. Before settling in Canada, Dr Harwood toured Australia, New Guinea, Fiji, Bermuda and the USA as advertising manager for three hypnotic stage shows that became household names in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Between shows, he obtained graduate degrees from universities in Canada, England and the USA, and spent eight years as a teacher. He joined Mensa for intelligent conversation, and left when he failed to find any. His most satisfying bread-and-butter job was general factotum at a now defunct private gambling establishment in Calgary (“It’s only temporary—just till we get a real geek”), not unlike the one depicted in A Vision of Murder and The Last Hypnotist, and mentioned briefly in The Great Zubrick. His proudest moment came when he learned that he was listed in the biographical dictionary, Who’s Who in Hell? alongside Steve Allen, Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, Carl Sagan, and many of his other heroes. Unfortunately, the pride somewhat dissipated when he learned that the dictionary’s compiler was not a braindead fundamentalist (tautology) but a humanist. His proudest moment as a Canadian came when his Prime Minister (the real Prime Minister, elected to three consecutive terms by a majority of Canadians, not the theofascist Quisling appointed to an office far beyond his competence by an anti-democratic voting system that produced a result that was the polar opposite of the expressed will of the voters) told the worst President in American history where to shove his Star Wars masturbation fantasy. Dr Harwood is currently a resident of what is politely called Canada’s Bible Belt, but is more accurately described as the redneck anus of the universe, where a theofascist majority believe that a referendum can give them the right to deprive minorities of basic human rights, strip women of sovereignty over their own bodies, and restore such barbarisms as capital punishment and probably heretic burning. He started life as a Protestant (Methodist father, Anglican mother), and turned Catholic when he discovered that Protestantism is repudiated by its own Bible. He remained Catholic until he took his first ancient history course at the University of Calgary, and learned that fifty other virgin-born savior gods had risen from the dead on the third day centuries and even millennia before Jesus. His discovery of the gospel authors’ sources explained why Jesus was a hybrid of Adonis, Mithra and Elyah. At that point, given the subculture in which he was currently immersed, he might easily have turned Jewish. What prevented that was the “once bitten” syndrome. But it was his discovery that the Torah authors were theofascist xenophobes who created a fanatically partisan Master of the Universe with the same qualities they saw in the mirror that explained why the character mistranslated as “God” in English bibles is the most sadistic, evil, insane mass murderer in all fiction. His desperate search for rebuttal evidence led to his learning that all claims of a god revealing its existence have been traced to the same authors who also assured their readers that the earth is flat, and eventually gave him the material to write Mythology’s Last Gods. But recognizing the falseness of religion at an intellectual level was not immediately sufficient. More than three years later, on a Sunday morning at Cambridge, England, he ate breakfast, got dressed, and opened the front door to go to mass, when it suddenly hit him, “If I participate in this 5,000-year-old Egyptian god-eating ritual even once more, I will throw up.” At that point he was cured—totally, permanently, irreversibly. For a while, however, he did maintain the neo-agnostic “Hughieist” philosophy attributed to characters in The Great Zubrick and The Last Hypnotist, and spelled out in detail in The Autobiography of God for others who are not ready to abandon all metaphysics cold turkey. Today he is an unequivocal nontheist: “Gods do not exist, have never existed in the past, and will not exist in the future.” His only encounter with religion since then occurred when he attended what he was promised would be a purely secular memorial, only to find himself subjected to fundamentalist triple-god worship, conducted by an Ayatollah of the Christian Taliban, that even a Unitarian would have recognized as an abominable and detestable crime against sanity. He was unsuccessful in demanding that the tinpot Hitler priest verbally raping a dead man be prosecuted for necrophilia. He has no quarrel with drones who, because their capacity for rational human thought is in permanent OFF, refuse to assimilate observable reality out of simple inertia. But he views persons who denounce the findings of scholars as a violation of their right to remain ignorant, as unworthy of respect or even politeness. The intestinally challenged bully whose reaction to his book disproving religion was an intemperate demand that he communicate with the bully’s imaginary playmate, is now someone he used to know. As for persons who believe that mass murder was evil when Hitler did it with gas chambers, but is not evil when their omnipotent Sky Führer does it with disease, famine, religious wars, natural disasters, transportation accidents, and old age (all of which they believe that their deity either created or consciously allowed to happen), he urges everyone who believes that to give serious consideration to a brain exchange with a cabbage. Since he is fully aware that reincarnation is as nonexistent as Heaven, Hell, a spirit world, an astral plane, Cloud Cuckoo Land, gods, devils, fairies, leprechauns, ghosts, poltergeists, angels, demons, humanoid aliens, the Great Pumpkin, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Intelligent Design, faster-than-light travel, channeling, extra sensory perception, hypnotism, multiple personality, yogic flying, recovered memory, psychic visions, foreknowledge of the future, and facilitated communication, persons who accuse him of believing that a recently deposed leader of Canada’s theofascist “Conservative” Party is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler do him a grave injustice. He is, as Isaac Asimov used to say, in his late youth. He tried smoking once, in third grade, and tried marriage once, in Calgary. Since neither experience provided the promised benefits, and both carried intolerable side effects, he has since adhered firmly to the “once bitten” principle. He joined Mensa for intelligent conversation, and quit when he failed to find any. And since his legacy to the world is a series of publications that have only to get past the censorship of an imaginary Sky Führer’s Quislings to free the brainwashed majority from the most oppressive, antihuman, sado-masochistic perversion that has ever existed on earth, he sees no reason to perpetuate his name by other means. Dr Harwood’s first book, Mythology’s Last Gods, based on his doctoral dissertation, which did to religion what the first close-up photographs of Mars did to the “canals” delusion, was published in 1992, his first four novels in 2001, and Dictionary of Contemporary Mythology and the first volumes of his bible translation in 2002. The most recent of his forty-three books are God, Jesus and the Bible, an updating of Mythology’s Last Gods; this one-volume abridgement (deleting all books not included in the King James Bible) of his two-volume The Fully Translated Bible (Booksurge, 2006, 2007); and Biblical Apocrypha, Books Excluded From the King James Version (World Audience, 2009). He considers North America the most near-perfect society on earth and, despite an obscene voting system that made the Christian Taliban the government of Canada even though two-thirds of the voters rejected them, the 2000 treasonous coup d’état and 2004 vote-rigging that made a scientifically illiterate religious maniac President of the United States, and the 2008 election of a Democratic President as addicted to the god psychosis as any Republican creationist, he would not wish to live anywhere else.