Richard Busemeyer and his youngest son Dan

Since Richard’s passing, Dan has acted as President of The Foundation from 2006-2022 and is now the chairman of the board

Richard A. Busemeyer

Born July 15, 1924, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to devout Catholic parents, Richard was the first born of what became a family of ten children raised as Catholics who went on to marry and raise Catholic families of their own. This included Richard, who also married a Catholic gal, and like his parents, had ten children who were all baptized, completed their first communions, and attended Catholic church every Sunday.

Growing up during the Great Depression, his family didn’t have much, but they still found the means to send him and all his siblings to private Catholic schools.

Not long after high school, he received his orders to join the Army in 1943 and graduated to become an officer before being discharged at the end of the war in 1946.

Soon after returning from the war, he began noticing a cute girl who always carried a large prayer book as she passed his house on her way to church. Setting his sights on meeting her, he managed to do so at a dance at Xavier University. After dating Marjorie for some time, he proposed, and they married on June 26, 1948.

On July 18, 1949, the first of their ten children was born. After baby number two arrived, the Korean War was underway, and he was called back to active duty effective March 30, 1951.

Although still active in the Catholic church, sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he began to seriously question his faith. The baby of the family was born on October 11, 1964. At the time, all the school-aged children were attending Catholic schools, and he approached Marjorie about pulling them out and sending them to public school. With Marjorie being faithful to her Catholic upbringing, she was against it but compromised, agreeing to allow the younger ones to switch if he agreed to have them attend CCD and church on Sundays.

Once he started to question the church, faith, and religion, he eventually lost belief altogether and declared himself an atheist.

In 1992, he established our charitable foundation, The Richard A. Busemeyer Atheist Foundation. He intentionally included “Atheist” in the name in hopes of dispelling the negative connotations that many believers have of non-believers. In his book, he wrote: “I did so [put atheist in the name] only to show that atheists don’t have horns and that they can be humanitarian.” He was opposed to estates passing from generation to generation, so when he passed away in 2006, the foundation inherited his entire estate, which continues to give each year to many of the organizations he was so passionate about supporting.

  • “As the discussions progressed, I discovered more and more that no one could assuage the increasing doubts that I continued to have regarding the Catholic liturgy, the dogma, the history including the professed authority of the Pope to make decisions regarding faith and morals and which are to be followed without question. No one in the group could ever explain the meaning of Bible passages that made any sense. Questions concerning the church's apathy regarding racism, bigotry, poverty, hate, homosexuality, birth control, abortion and a myriad of other subjects could never be answered to my satisfaction. Eventually, I concluded that unless one continued with “blind faith” in the Catholic church and in religion as well as the belief in a supreme being and creation, you simply had to think and act in another direction. Once there's doubt, it all falls apart.”

    “In what was pretty much of a last-ditch effort to bolster my constantly waning religious beliefs, I agreed to attend a week-end religious exercise called the "Cursillo". This bordered on the "born again" idea with high powered sermons, meditations, prayers, reflection, repentance, self-denial and reaffirmation. I did my utmost to allay all my doubts and to renew my early convictions as to what I had been taught, but to no avail. My fervor was gone. I no longer believed.”

    In his book he talks about reactions to a letter to the editor he wrote titled ‘Stop Praying’ which was published November 16, 1971:

    “What happened to this good family man, who used to go to church every morning, not just on Sundays? Did the guy who read at the Mass on Sundays have a nervous breakdown? Has he lost his mind and gone berserk? Most of these people had to know that I was having doubts about religion, but never did they expect that I would make a public announcement to that effect. Little did they realize that this had become the culmination of a whole life of doubts and unresolved questions that had finally erupted. This kind of thing doesn't just happen overnight. The truth is that it rarely happens at all. That early Catholic brainwashing is almost impossible to overcome. There are those who become lukewarm to it all and who don't abide by it, but rarely do they come to the place where they disavow it all. None of my 9 brothers and sisters have ever rejected outright their Catholicity. None of Marjorie's relatives, none of our friends, no one else that we ever knew had ever done so. To this very day, none of these people have ever actually publicly disavowed their Catholic religion. There may well be those that have, but I certainly have no knowledge of it, if they have.”

    “That first letter to the Editor was a stimulating experience, given all the adverse reaction that I received. Since that time, I have written and had published hundreds of letters on just about every subject from religion to dogs and cats. It's a very uplifting experience, gets the monkey off the back and just might occasionally be instrumental in getting another person to think a little differently. As the years have gone by, I have never had any regrets about either my attitude concerning religion or about my decision to go public with it. I'm more convinced than ever that religion is at the base of most of our individual and our world unrest. My own children have been able to decide for themselves if and what they want to believe and to act accordingly. Some of them are Atheists, some are Agnostics, some continue as Catholics and others have either joined some other sect or they are apathetic toward the entire matter.”

    “How many of us ever get beyond the things that we were taught as children, the Bible stories, the religious conceptions, the dogma that was imposed indelibly on our spongy minds? How many of us ever come to the place where we decide to analyze all the things passed on to us and then to decide for ourselves how much of it makes sense and what we want to continue to believe is true? Not many.”

    “After having been born into a very Catholic family and, after having gone through 12 years of Catholic education, I found that it was no easy decision to break away from all that, to reject it and then to decide for myself what I believe and what I want to project to my family and to the world.”