Darrow Miller and Friends

To the Atheist Who Stood Up

Our post, Will the Real Atheists Please Stand Up? generated the following response from a dubious reader:

[The responder began by quoting from the post:] “We were opposed to morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom. (Aldous Huxley, Confessions of a Professional Free Thinker)”

Hate to break this to you, but Aldous Huxley almost certainly never said this. Certainly no one has ever been able to verify it. The lie is just a variant on what Julian Huxley is supposed to have said on a television talk show that no one seems to have ever seen or even been able to name. It’s just another David Barton-esque made-up Christian slander.

I’ll stack my life and my morals against yours any day.

The screen clip below, comprising pages 272-273 of Huxley’s book, Ends and Means: An Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization, published in 1941 by Chatto & Windus, London, contains the actual quote.

Technically, our reader/responder is correct. The actual quote is “We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom …”

We note also, in the interest of accuracy, that while the quote was apparently repeated in “Confessions of a Professional Free Thinker”, it originally appeared in Huxley’s 1941 book.

On the clip below, the quote can be found about mid-way down the right page.

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