The website is notable for its over-the-top vituperation. Myers also has a flair for attention-getting stunts, like piercing a consecrated host with a rusty nail. Born in Canada, Randi has had a long career as a stage magician, TV personality, and prolific author.
He came to international attention in by revealing the tricks used by Uri Geller, an Israeli magician who claimed supernatural telekinetic powers. His career then became more and more dedicated to debunking paranormal claims. Most recently, he has become an outspoken atheist and critic of religion. Granddaughter of the famous historian, Arnold J. She has published several books on social and political topics, including Hard Work Bloomsbury Paperbacks, Newdow is an attorney and physician famous for his atheist-inspired litigation.
Though some of his lawsuits have gone all the way to the Supreme Court, so far all have been unsuccessful. Newdow is an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church. Based in San Francisco, Christina is an author and blogger. Hers has been named one of the Top Ten most popular atheist blogs on the Web. In addition to atheism, Christina writes and blogs about feminism and lesbianism.
She also publishes pornographic fiction. Shermer is an Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California, as well as a journalist, prolific author, TV personality, and cycling enthusiast. He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the highly speculative field of evolutionary psychology, which seeks to find evolutionary explanations for all fundamental aspects of human behavior.
Blackmore is an English popular-science author who holds a B. She later became disenchanted with parapsychology and made a career out of debunking paranormal claims. Born Ayaan Hirsi Magan in Mogadishu, Somalia, she was granted political asylum by The Netherlands in , after which she changed her name and renounced Islam. In , aged 33, Hirsi Ali was elected to the Dutch parliament. Pullman was born in Norwich, U. However, he only achieved real celebrity with the publication of his best-selling trilogy, His Dark Materials , between and It has been praised by atheists as an antidote to C.
He is outspoken on behalf of atheist causes in the U. Allen, a former stand-up comedian, is a playwright, jazz clarinetist, and world-renowned filmmaker. Born Allen Konigsberg in Brooklyn, he began selling jokes to newspapers while still in his teens.
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. Some of his subsequent films are less funny than unpleasantly bitter.
Born in Aldershot, Hampshire, McEwan is considered by many to be one of the finest novelists of his generation in the U.
From the beginning of his career, his work has been characterized by an extremism verging on cynical detachment with respect to his main subjects: sex, death, and moral evil. But it is with Black Dogs in that his books begin to acquire an explicitly theological dimension. Abandoned by his parents, he was raised by his paternal grandmother, whose maiden name he adopted. His books are graphic satires of the nihilism plaguing modern society in a godless universe.
Son of the famous English post-war comic novelist, Kingsley Amis, Amis fils is the author of nearly 30 books, including novels, short-story collections, and works of non-fiction. A perennial Nobel Prize candidate, he has won every major American literary prize. Roth grew up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, but his unsparing depictions of his largely Jewish characters have been controversial within the American Jewish community.
His always pronounced misanthropy has taken on an explicitly atheistic tenor in his late books, with their dominant theme of human frailty, futility, and the finality of death. In the s, his company, Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. Myers and others, but his ideas are the logical extension of premises most atheists share.
However, Brockman is perhaps best known as the founder of Edge. Jacoby, a former newspaper reporter, is a bestselling author and blogger. Though she is a strong atheist activist, her voice is one of relative moderation. He has done research on the properties of neutrinos and other elementary particles. He is best known, however, as a prolific author of popular-science books and as a crusader against paranormal claims and against religion.
Religion flies you into buildings. Hecht is a true polymath: she pursued advanced studies in France and received her Ph.
She also maintains a busy schedule of interviews, lectures, and poetry readings. Fang, who holds a Ph.
Some are avowed atheists. Others are agnostic. Organized around skepticism toward organizations and united by a common belief that they do not believe, nones as a group are just as internally complex as many religions.
And as with religions, these internal contradictions could keep new followers away. And 11 percent of Americans born after were raised in secular homes. And anyone who wants the companionship that might otherwise come from church can attend a secular Sunday Assembly or one of a plethora of Meetups for humanists, atheists, agnostics, or skeptics.
Guttormson says the goal of her group is to organize itself out of existence. The Center for Inquiry in Washington, D. On a Wednesday in late March, about a dozen people showed up to faithlessly imbibe, and all but one were white. He came from a religious family in New York and struggled internally with his skepticism until shortly after college. The only time he mentions having difficulty with others accepting his atheism was when he worked in Dallas, Texas, and race, he says, had little to do with it.
This pressure stems from the place religion—Christianity in particular—holds in African-American history. The secularizing West is full of white men.
The general U. There are a few theories about why people become atheists in large numbers. Some demographers attribute it to financial security, which would explain why European countries with a stronger social safety net are more secular than the United States, where poverty is more common and a medical emergency can bankrupt even the insured. Atheism is also tied to education, measured by academic achievement atheists in many places tend to have college degrees or general knowledge of the panoply of beliefs around the world hence theories that Internet access spurs atheism.
The U. The social factors that promote atheism—financial security and education—have long been harder to attain for women and people of color in the United States. Around the world, the Pew Research Center finds that women tend to be more likely to affiliate with a religion and more likely to pray and find religion important in their lives. That changes when women have more opportunities. Religion has a place for women, people of color, and the poor. Prominent atheists Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have awful reputations for misogyny, as does the late Christopher Hitchens.
Bill Maher, the comedian and outspoken atheist, is no nonexistent angel , either. Even people who are white, male, and educated may fear the stigma of being labeled a nonbeliever. These were years of war, when Islam was painted as a threat and Christianity infused U.
So when a stranger conducting a poll calls and asks the question, it may be uncomfortable for many to answer truthfully. Gervais and Najle recently conducted a new analysis on the prevalence of atheists in America.
And they conclude the number of people who do not believe in God may be even double that counted by these polling firms. First is the Pew Research Center. Most recently, Pew found that around 3 percent of Americans say they are atheists. It also found that a larger group — around 9 percent — say they do not believe in God or a universal spirit.
Which goes to show that you may not believe in God but could still be uncomfortable calling yourself an atheist — because that term implies a strong personal identity and an outright rejection of religious rituals. Study after study has shown that most people even other atheists believe atheists are less moral. Gervais and Najle set up a very subtle test. They sent a nationally representative poll to 2, Americans, who were randomly assigned to two conditions.
All the participants had to do was simply write down the number of statements that were true for them. That alone should zero out any embarrassment or hesitance to admit to a particular item.
One thing is clear from the results: Much more than 10 or 11 percent of the country as assessed in Gallup and Pew polling does not believe in God. But the most fundamental question he and Najle are asking here is do polling firms like Gallup and Pew undercount atheists?
And it seems the answer is yes. Gervais and Najle also concurrently replicated the study with a second sample of 2, participants, and got similar results. Even online, people might be uneasy answering the question. Bizarre indeed.
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