List of atheist authors: Difference between revisions

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This page contains authors who are/were atheists.

Authors

File:Terry pratchett.jpg

Pratchett

File:Josesaramago.jpg

Saramago

David Aaronovitch (1954–): British journalist, author and broadcaster. Aaronovitch calls himself "Godless" and an atheist, but says that he has "no desire to proselytise for atheism".^[1]^[2]
Douglas Adams (1952–2001): British radio and television writer, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.^[3]
Tariq Ali (1943–): British-Pakistani historian, novelist, filmmaker, political campaigner and commentator.^[4]
Jorge Amado (1912–2001): Brazilian author.^[5]
Eric Ambler OBE (1909–1998): influential English writer of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre.^[6]
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992): Russian-born American author of science fiction and popular science books.^[7]
Diana Athill (1917–1992): British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the most important writers of the 20th century.^[8]
Iain Banks (1954–): Scottish author, writing mainstream fiction as Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M. Banks.^[9]
Pierre Berton CC, O.Ont (1920–2004): Noted Canadian author of non-fiction, especially Canadiana and Canadian history, and was a well-known television personality and journalist.^[10]
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922): English poet, writer and diplomat.^[11]
William Boyd CBE (1952–): Scottish novelist and screenwriter.^[12]
Aldo Braibanti (1922–): Italian writer and dramatist, famous for having been sentenced to nine years' imprisonment for 'plagiarism'.^[13]
Marshall Brain (1961–): Author of WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com and GodIsImaginary.com and HowStuffWorks founder.
Howard Brenton (1942–): English playwright, who gained notoriety for his 1980 play The Romans in Britain.^[14]
Brigid Brophy, Lady Levey (1929–1995): English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist.^[15]
Alan Brownjohn (1931–1995): English poet and novelist.^[16]
Jason Burke (1970–1995): British journalist, chief foreign correspondent of The Observer.^[17]
Lawrence Bush (19??–): Author of several books of Jewish fiction and non-fiction, including Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist.^[18]
Mary Butts (1890–1937): English modernist writer.^[19]
João Cabral de Melo Neto, (1920–1999): Brazilian poet, considered one of the greatest Brazilian poets of all time.^[20]
Angela Carter (1940–1992): English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism and science fiction works.^[21]
Luigi Cascioli (19??–): Italian author, who trained to become a Roman Catholic priest, but he left to become a pronounced atheist, arguing that Jesus never existed.^[22]
Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008): British scientist and science-fiction author.^[23]
Edward Clodd (1840–1930): English banker, writer and anthropologist, an early populariser of evolution, keen folklorist and chairman of the Rationalist Press Association.^[24]
Claud Cockburn (1904–1981): Renowned radical British writer and journalist, controversial for his communist sympathies.^[25]
Jonathan Coe (1961–): British novelist and satirical writer.^[26]
G. D. H. Cole (1889–1959): English political theorist, economist, writer and historian.^[27]
Ivy Compton-Burnett DBE (1884–1969): English novelist.^[28]
Edmund Cooper (1926–1982): English poet and prolific writer of speculative fiction and other genres, published under his own name and several pen names.^[29]
William Cooper (1910–2002): English novelist.^[30]
Jim Crace (1946–): English writer, winner of numerous awards.^[31]
Theodore Dalrymple (1949–): pen name of British writer and retired physician Anthony Daniels.^[32]
Rhys Davies (1901–1978): Welsh novelist and short story writer.^[33]
Isaac Deutscher (1907–1967): British journalist, historian and biographer.^[34]
John Diamond (journalist) (1953–2001): British broadcaster and journalist, noted for his column chronicling his fight with cancer.^[35]
Ruth Dudley Edwards (19??–): Irish historian, crime novelist, journalist and broadcaster.^[36]
Carol Ann Duffy (1955–): Award-winning British poet, playwright and freelance writer.^[37]
Turan Dursun (1934–1990): Islamic scholar, imam and mufti, and latterly, an outspoken atheist.^[38]
Greg Egan (1961–): Australian computer programmer and science fiction author.^[39]^[40]
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–): American feminist, socialist and political activist. She is a widely read columnist and essayist, and the author of nearly 20 books.^[41]
George Eliot (1819–1890): Mary Ann Evans, the famous novelist, was also a humanist and propounded her views on theism in an essay called Evangelical Teaching'.^[42].
Harlan Ellison (1934–): American science fiction author and screenwriter.^[43]
Gavin Ewart (1916–1995): British poet.^[44]
Oriana Fallaci (1929–2006): Italian journalist, author, and political interviewer.^[45]
Vardis Fisher (1895–1968): American writer, scholar. Author of atheistic Testament of Man series.^[46]
Robert Fisk (1946–): Multi-award-winning British journalist, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain" according to the New York Times.^[47]
Tom Flynn (19??–): American author and Senior Editor of Free Inquiry magazine.^[48]
Ken Follett (1949ndash;): British author of thrillers and historical novels.^[49]
Paul Foot (1937;2004): British investigative journalist, political campaigner, author, and long-time member of the Socialist Workers Party.^[50]
E. M. Forster OM (1879–1970): English novelist, short story writer, and essayist, best known for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th century British society.^[51]
John Fowles (1926–2005): English novelist and essayist, noted especially for The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus (novel).^[52]
Frederick James Furnivall (1825–1910): English philologist, one of the co-creators of the Oxford English Dictionary.^[53]
Alex Garland (1970–): British novelist and screenwriter, author of The Beach and the screenplays for 28 Days Later and Sunshine.^[54]
Constance Garnett (1861–1946): English translator, whose translations of nineteenth-century Russian classics which first introduced them widely to the English and American public.^[55]
Nadine Gordimer (1923–): South African writer and political activist. Her writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1991.^[56]^[57]
Linda Grant (journalist) (1951–): British journalist and novelist.^[58]
Robert Graves (1895–1985): English poet, scholar, translator and novelist, producing more than 140 works including his famous annotations of Greek myths and I, Claudius.^[59]
Graham Greene OM, CH (1904–1991): English]] novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, travel writer and critic.^[60]^[61]
Germaine Greer (1939–): Australian feminist writer. Greer describes herself as a "Catholic atheist".^[62]
Jan Guillou (1944–): Swedish author and Journalist.^[63]
Daniel Handler (1970–): American author better known under the pen name of Lemony Snicket. Handler has admitted to being both an atheist^[64] and a secular humanist.^[65] Handler has hinted that the Baudelaires in his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events might be atheists.^[66]
Sam Harris (1967–): American author, researcher in neuroscience, author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.^[67]
Harry Harrison (1925–): American science fiction author, anthologist and artist whose short story The Streets of Ashkelon took as its hero an atheist who tries to prevent a Christian missionary from indoctrinating a tribe of irreligious but ingenuous alien beings.^[68]
Tony Harrison (1937–): English poet, winner of a number of literary prizes.^[69]
Simon Heffer (1960–): British journalist and writer.^[70]
Zoë Heller (1965–): British journalist and novelist.^[71]
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961): American novelist, short story writer and journalist.^[72]
Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002): Australian feminist poet, novelist, librettist, and playwright.^[73]
Archie Hind (1928–2008): Scottish writer, author of The Dear Green Place, regarded as one of the greatest Scottish novels of all time.^[74]
Christopher Hitchens (1949–): Author of God Is Not Great, journalist and essayist.^[75]
Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792–1862): British biographer, and co-author with Percy Bysshe Shelley of The Necessity of Atheism.^[76]
R. J. Hollingdale (1930–2001): English biographer and translator of German philosophy and literature, President of The Friedrich Nietzsche Society, and responsible for rehabilitating Nietzsche's reputation in the English-speaking world.^[77]
Michel Houellebecq (1958–): French novelist.^[78]
Mick Hume (1959–): British journalist – columnist for The (London) Times and editor of Spiked. Described himself as "a longstanding atheist", but criticised the 'New Atheism' of Richard Dawkins and co.^[79]
A. E. Housman (1859–1936): English poet and classical scholar, best known for his cycle of poems A Shropshire Lad.^[80]
Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919–1970): American literary critic who wrote primarily about critical methods.^[81]
Susan Jacoby (1945–): an American atheist, secularist, and author, most recently of the New York Times best seller, The Age of American Unreason, which is about anti-intellectualism.^[82]
Robin Jenkins (1912–2005): Scottish writer of about thirty novels, though mainly known for The Cone Gatherers.^[83]
Simon Jenkins (1943–): British journalist, newspaper editor, and author. A former editor of The Times newspaper, he received a knighthood for services to journalism in the 2004 New Year honours.^[84]
S. T. Joshi (1958–): American editor and literary critic.^[85]
Ludovic Kennedy (1919–): British journalist, author, and campaigner for voluntary euthanasia.^[86]
Paul Krassner (1932–): American founder and editor of the freethought magazine The Realist, and a key figure in the 1960s counterculture.^[87]
Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974): Swedish author who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1951. He used religious motifs and figures from the Christian tradition without following the doctrines of the church.^[88]
Philip Larkin CH, CBE, FRSL (1922–1985): English poet, novelist and jazz critic.^[89]^[90]
Marghanita Laski (1915–1988): English journalist and novelist, also writing literary biography, plays and short stories.^[91]
Rutka Laskier (1929–1943): Polish Jew who was killed at Auschwitz concentration camp at the age of 14. Because of her diary, on display at Israel's Holocaust museum, she has been dubbed the "Polish Anne Frank."^[92]
Stanislaw Lem (1921–2006): Polish science fiction novelist and essayist.^[93]
Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837): Italian poet, linguist, essayist and philosopher. Leopardi is legendary as an out-and-out nihilist.^[94]
Primo Levi (1919–1987): Italian novelist and chemist, survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp.^[95]
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799): German scientist, satirist, philosopher and anglophile. Known as one of Europe's best authors of aphorisms. Satirized religion using aphorisms like "I thank the Lord a thousand times for having made me become an atheist."^[96]
Pierre Loti (1850–1923): French novelist and travel writer.^[97]
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937): American novelist.^[98]
Franco Lucentini (1920–2002): Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies.^[99]
Norman MacCaig (1910–1996): Scottish poet, whose work is known for its humour, simplicity of language and great popularity.^[100]
Heather Mallick (1959–): Canadian columnist, author and lecturer.^[101]
Lucy Mangan (19??–): British journalist, columnist for The Guardian.^[102]
W. Somerset Maugham CH (1874–1965): English playwright, novelist, and short story writer, one of the most popular authors of his era.^[103]^[104]
Charles Maurras (1868–1952): French author, poet, and critic, a leader and principal thinker of the reactionary Action Française.^[105]
Joseph McCabe (1867–1955): English writer, anti-religion campaigner.^[106]
Mary McCarthy (1912–1989): American writer and critic.^[107]
Ian McEwan, CBE (1948–): British author and winner of the Man Booker Prize.^[108]
China Miéville (1972–): British Science Fiction author.^[109]
Arthur Miller (1915–2005): American playwright and essayist, a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays, including celebrated plays such as The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, which are widely studied.^[110]
David Mills (author) (1959–): Author who argues in his book Atheist Universe that science and religion cannot be successfully reconciled.^[111]
Sir John Mortimer CBE QC (1923–): English barrister, dramatist and author, famous as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.^[112]
Martin O'Hagan (1950–2001): Northern Irish journalist, the most prominent journalist to be assassinated during the the Troubles.^[113]
John Oswald (activist) (c.1760–1793): Scottish journalist, poet, social critic and revolutionary.^[114]
Frances Partridge (1900–2004): English member of the Bloomsbury Group and a writer, probably best known for the publication of her diaries.^[115]
Camille Paglia (1947–): American post-feminist literary and cultural critic.^[116]
Matthew Parris (1949–): South African-born British journalist and former Conservative politician.^[117]
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975): Italian poet, intellectual, film director, and writer.^[118]
Harold Pinter (1930–): British playwright, screenwriter, poet, actor, director, author, and political activist, best known for his plays The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978). Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005.^[119]
Terry Pratchett (1948–): English Fantasy author known for his satirical Discworld series.^[120]
Philip Pullman CBE (1946–): British author of His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy for young adults, which have atheism as a major theme.^[121]
Craig Raine (1944–): English poet and critic, the best-known exponent of Martian poetry.^[122]
Ayn Rand (1905–1982): Russian-born American author and founder of Objectivism.^[123]
Derek Raymond (1931–1994): English writer, credited with being the founder of English noir.^[124]
Claire Rayner OBE (1931–): British journalist best-known for her role for many years as an agony aunt.

^[125]

Ron Reagan (1958–): American magazine journalist, board member of the politically activist Creative Coalition, son of former U. S. President Ronald Reagan.^[126]
Stan Rice (1942–2006): American poet and artist, Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and husband of writer Anne Rice.^[127]
Salman Rushdie (1947–): Indian-born British essayist and author of fiction.^[128]
José Saramago (1922–): Portuguese writer, playwright and journalist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998.^[129]
Dan Savage (1964–): Author and sex advice columnist.^[130] Despite his atheism, Savage considers himself Catholic "in a cultural sense."^[131]
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822): British Romantic poet, contemporary and associate of John Keats and Lord Byron, and author of The Necessity of Atheism.^[132]
Michael Shermer (1954–): Science writer and editor of Skeptic magazine. Has stated that he is an atheist, but prefers to be called a skeptic.^[133]
Joan Smith (1953–): English novelist, journalist and human rights activist.^[134]
Warren Allen Smith (1921–): Author of Who's Who in Hell.^[135]
David Ramsay Steele (19??–): Author of Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy.^[136]
George Warrington Steevens (1869ndash;1900): British journalist and writer.^[137]
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894): Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, especially famous for his works Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.^[138]
Matt Taibbi (1970–): American journalist and political writer, currently working at Rolling Stone.^[139]
Allen Tate (1899–1979): American poet, essayist and social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress 1943–1944.^[140]
Vladimir Tendryakov (1923–1984): Russian short story writer and novelist.^[141]
Tiffany Thayer (1902–1959): American author, advertising copywriter, actor and founder of the Fortean Society.^[142]
Bill Thompson (1960–): English technology writer, best known for his weekly column in the Technology section of BBC News Online and his appearances on Digital Planet, a radio show on the BBC World Service.^[143]
James Thomson ('B.V.') (1834–1882): British poet and satirist, famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874).^[144]
Nicholas Tomalin (1931–1973): British journalist and writer, one of the top 40 journalists of the modern era.^[145]
Freda Utley (1898–1978): English scholar, best-selling author and political activist.^[146]
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007): American author, writer of Cat's Cradle, among other books. Vonnegut said "I am an atheist (or at best a Unitarian who winds up in churches quite a lot)."^[147]
Ethel Lilian Voynich (1864–1960): Irish-born novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes.^[148]
Francis Wheen (1957–): British journalist, writer and broadcaster.^[149]
Leonard Woolf (1880–1969): Noted British political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant, husband of author Virginia Woolf.^[150]
Gao Xingjian (1940–): Chinese émigré novelist, dramatist, critic, translator, stage director and painter. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000.^[151]

Notes and references

^ "Like most of the Godless (or Godfree), I have no desire to proselytise for atheism or to persuade people out of religions that may offer them comfort and companionship." Wicked untruths from the Church, David Aaronovitch, Times Online, 25 March 2008 (Accessed 26 March 2008)
^ "What makes me think I "can reduce the function of religion to the provision of 'comfort and companionship'" instead of seeing it as a "public truth"? Being an atheist, I suppose. I see religion as a cultural and psychological construct, which fulfils certain almost universal needs and which, as a consequence, I am disinclined to condemn." Who wants to kill the elderly?, David Aaronovitch, Times Online, 31 March 2008 (Accessed 31 March 2008)
^ "I am a radical Atheist..." Adams in an interview by American Atheists[1].
^ "It is well known that I am not a religious person, I grew up and remain an atheist [...]". Tariq Ali, Interview: Tariq Ali, Socialist Review November 2006 (accessed 22 April 2008).
^ Amado is described as an "ateu convicto", or "convinced atheist". Cynara Menezes (8 August 2001). "Velório de Jorge Amado foi discreto" (in Portuguese). Folha de S. Paulo. Retrieved 2007-11-24. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
^ "Once, filming in Italy with the American director John Huston and a US army crew, Ambler and his colleagues were shelled so fiercely that his unconscious 'played a nasty trick on him' (Ambler, Here Lies, 208). A confirmed atheist, he heard himself saying, 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit.' " Michael Barber: 'Ambler, Eric Clifford (1909–1998)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, January 2007 [2] (accessed 29 April 2008).
^ "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it... I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." Isaac Asimov in "Free Inquiry", Spring 1982, vol.2 no.2, p. 9 (See Wikiquote.)
^ "Last week, looking through a book about 15th-century painting in Italy, I began to wonder why I loved these paintings so much. Almost all of them are illustrations of religious subjects, and I have been an atheist almost since the day I was confirmed in the Christian faith by the Bishop of Norwich in 1931. To describe the atheism first: it originated in a certainty that I was going to start breaking the rules as laid down by the god I'd been taught about, followed by a suspicion that if his rules were so easy to break he couldn't be all that he was cracked up to be. Then came its firmer base: the observation that many of the most hideous things done to each other by human beings have been done in his name. It can be argued that this is our fault, not God's. But the god we Europeans are supposed to believe in a) created us as well as everything else that is; b) is omnipotent; c) is Love. In which case, one must assume from the evidence rammed down our throats for century after century that he is liable to fits of serious derangement during which he is Not Himself." Diana Athill, 'I'm a believer - but only in a good story', The Guardian, 21 January 2004, Features Pages, Pg. 5.
^ "I'm an evangelical atheist so I'm not into supernatural effects - I hated The Exorcist - but John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is different." 'I was a brain-eating zombie... As the scary season descends [...] famous horror experts choose their most terrifying screen experiences', Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2004, Arts Pg. 04.
^ "Berton's book, The Comfortable Pew, in which as a lifelong atheist he attacked status quo religiosity, outraged churchgoers. But the wider public came to expect to be challenged by Berton's views." Cathryn Atkinson, 'Obituary: Pierre Berton', The Guardian, 7 December 2004, Pg. 27.
^ "Wilfred Scawen Blunt was notorious as an atheist, a libertine, an adventurer and a poet. Somehow he also found time to be a diplomat - one of the earliest in this country to make a real attempt to understand Islam - and an anti-imperialist, becoming the first British-born person to go to jail for Irish independence." Phil Daoust, The Guardian, 11 March 2008, G2: Radio: Pick of the day, Pg. 32.
^ " "What song would you like played at your funeral?" "We'll Meet Again. I'd like the congregation to join in. As a devout atheist, I should make it clear there are no religious connotations." " Rosanna Greenstreet, 'Q&A: William Boyd', The Guardian, 3 February 2007, Weekend Pages, Pg. 8.
^ "Braibanti is a fiercely intellectual left-wing atheist and so, apart from his sexual preferences, would be regarded by sections of Italian opinion as a dangerous character." 'Plagiarist's appeal', The Times, 15 November 1969; pg. 6; Issue 57718; col D.
^ Reviewing a production of The Romans in Britain, Charles Spencer wrote: "It strikes me as an exceptionally powerful study of the human need for belief in a higher power, notwithstanding the fact that Brenton himself is an atheist. And the dramatist examines the nature of Paul's faith with both sympathy and insight." 'A powerful and thrilling act of heresy', Daily Telegraph, 10 November 2005, Reviews, Pg. 30.
^ "It [her non-fiction book Black Ship to Hell (1962)] endeavoured to formulate a morality based on reason rather than religion—Brophy described herself as 'a natural, logical and happy atheist' (King of a Rainy Country, afterword, 276)." Peter Parker: 'Brophy, Brigid Antonia [married name Brigid Antonia Levey, Lady Levey] (1929–1995)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2006 [3] (accessed 29 April 2008).
^ Reviewing Brownjohn's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite wrote: "Brownjohn is 75 at the moment of publication. He has been on the literary scene - publishing, reviewing, judging, chairing, tutoring, giving readings - since the 1950s. He has also been a London borough councillor, a Labour parliamentary candidate (Richmond, Surrey, 1964), very much what I think of as decent, persistent, dogged "Old Labour" - sensitive but solid, inclining towards the puritan (though a self-confessed atheist in matters of religion) - and a strenuous campaigner for serious radio and television, anti-muzak, anti-destruction of libraries, for the proper traditional cultural concerns of the British Council, et al." 'Poetry: The vodka in the verse', The Guardian, 7 October 2006, Review Pages, Pg. 18
^ "The very practical nature of Islam, a religion that enjoins the faithful to act in the world to change it, is also a boon to activists, good and bad, as does its emphasis on public demonstration of faith. The sight of rows of believers facing Mecca to answer the call to prayer often moves me, an atheist, deeply. Yet the Arabic word for martyr - and currently suicide bomber - comes from the same linguistic stem as the word for bearing witness." Jason Burke, 'Ideology's violent face', The Guardian, 22 July 2005, Weekly Pages, Pg. 6.
^ Bush describes himself as "an atheist who has nevertheless worked intimately in Jewish religious institutions as a writer and editor for much of my adult life." The rabbi and the atheist, New Jersey Jewish News, 20 September 2007 (accessed 21 april 2008).
^ "By this time she had become an atheist and socialist." Nathalie Blondel: 'Butts , Mary Franeis (1890–1937)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [4] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "Though an atheist, Cabral had a deep, atavistic fear of the devil. When his wife died in 1986, he placed an emblem of Our Lady of Carmen around her neck, saying, in his mocking way, that this would make sure that she went directly to heaven, without being stopped at customs." 'Joao Cabral: His poetry voiced the sufferings of Brazil's poor', The Guardian, 18 October 1999, Leader Pages; Pg. 18.
^ "All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place." Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978) p. 5
^ "Italian judge Gaetano Mautone has, with that special blend of flamboyance and arrogance you really only see in the continental judiciary, ordered a priest to appear in court to prove that Jesus exists. Or at least existed. Luigi Cascioli, a militant atheist and author of The Fable of Christ, has brought a case against Father Enrico Righi after the priest lambasted the writer for questioning Christ's historical origins." Lucy Mangan, 'Proving Christ existed, and other resolution', The Guardian, 4 January 2006, Pg. 36.
^ "…Stanley [Kubrick] is a Jew and I'm an atheist". Clarke quoted in Jeromy Agel (Ed.) (1970). The Making of Kubrick's 2001: p.306
^ "We can only guess what Clodd would have thought of having an evangelical preacher owning his old house: he was a noted atheist, who rejected his parents' ambition for him to become a Baptist minister in favour of becoming chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. His contribution to literature was in popularising the work of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary scientists in the face of opposition from the church. "The story of creation," wrote Clodd, " is the story of gas into genius"." Rose Gibbs, 'A religious conversion', Sunday Telegraph, 14 August 2005, Section: House & Home, Pg. 004.
^ "For one whose life had been so full of ironies, it was fitting that five priests celebrated a requiem mass for him in Youghal, although he had been a committed atheist." Richard Ingrams: 'Cockburn, (Francis) Claud (1904–1981), rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006 [5] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "Or you can ask: was that you in The Rotters' Club, the schoolboy so crazed with fear of being seen naked that you prayed to God for deliverance and He was moved to fling a wet pair of bathers into your orbit. Yes and no. There was no such epiphanous moment, he says, and besides, he's an atheist." Sally Vincent interviewing Coe, 'A Bit of a Rotter', The Guardian, 24 February 2001, Pg. 36.
^ "An unlikely friendship developed between Reckitt and G. D. H. Cole. Although an unapproachable cold atheist, and at root an anarchist, Cole joined forces with Reckitt, the clubbable, romantic medievalist, archetypal bourgeois, and unswerving Anglican with a dogmatic faith, to found the National Guilds League in 1915." J. S. Peart-Binns, 'Reckitt, Maurice Benington (1888–1980)', rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "Like Margaret Jourdain, and most of her characters who are not fools or knaves, Ivy Compton-Burnett was a firm atheist, dismissing religion because ‘No good can come of it’ (Spurling, Ivy when Young, 77)." Patrick Lyons: 'Burnett, Dame Ivy Compton- (1884–1969)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [6] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "I'm an atheist. God is an abstract noun, he's not a Father Christmas up there in Heaven, he's an abstract bloody noun who has been exploited by men in order to exploit other men, through the centuries." Edmund Cooper, We must love one another or die: an interview with Edmund Cooper (pdf), c.1973.
^ 'Cooper' was the pen name of Harry Hoff. "As a militant atheist he was especially on his guard in churches, and at the wedding of a much younger friend had to be restrained from heckling the bride's clerical uncle, who was delivering an address." D. J. Taylor, 'Hoff, Harry Summerfield (1910–2002)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2006 (accessed 1 May 2008).
^ "The impulse of this book came when I was writing Quarantine. At the end of writing that book, I was no less of an atheist than I was before, yet it did make me think about my atheism. Thinking about the bleakness of my own atheism, and the inadequacy of the old fashioned kind of atheism when the big events of life-- especially death--came along, made me want to see whether I could come up with a narrative of comfort, a false narrative of comfort, but one that could match the narratives of comfort religions come up with to get you through death and bereavement." Jim Crace, Beatrice Interview: Jim Crace, c. 1999 (accessed 28 April 2008).
^ Criticising the 'New Atheists' (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Onfray, Grayling and co.), Dalrymple wrote: "Yet with the possible exception of Dennett's [book Breaking the Spell], they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design)." What the New Atheists Don't See, City Journal, Autumn 2007 (accessed 24 April 2008).
^ "As a boy he attended a nonconformist chapel, and later an Anglican church, but in later life was to declare himself an atheist." Meic Stephens: 'Davies, Rhys (1901–1978)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [7] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "He rejected his father's ambition to make him a rabbi. Instead he became an atheist and, following in the footsteps of Marx, Trotsky, and his countrywoman Rosa Luxemburg, a lifelong 'non-Jewish Jew' (Non-Jewish Jew, ed. Deutscher)." John McIlroy: 'Deutscher, Isaac (1907–1967)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [8] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "In recent years, he had begun to write an always witty column for the Jewish Chronicle and, after his diagnosis, had even joined a synagogue - though this, he told friends, was not because he had discovered God. He remained an atheist to the end, but, he said, he wanted his children, Cosima and Bruno, to know something of the Judaism into which they had been born." Jay Rayner and Roy Greenslade, 'Obituary: John Diamond', The Guardian, 3 March 2001, Pg. 22.
^ "Tariq likes permanent revolution, whereas I am a libertarian conservative. True, we are both atheists, but Tariq is evangelical while I am benign about religion and think the Throne should be occupied by a member of the Church of England." Ruth Dudley-Edwards, 'Will half of Ireland really back Cameroon? How will a win affect public sentiment? Or a defeat?', Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2002, Pg. 24.
^ "But the 21st century has done nothing to prevent two others from the Manchester area from reshaping and modernising the Christmas story -the poet Carol Ann Duffy and the composer Sasha Johnson Manning, who have written 16 new carols. Duffy, brought up a Catholic, pronounces herself an atheist; Johnson Manning is a committed Christian." Geoff Brown, 'O great big town of Manchester', The Times, 7 December 2007, Times2; Pg. 15.
^ "Turan Dursun, a former imam and an atheist writer..." A dark shadow over Turkey, Turkish Daily News, January 20, 2007 (Accessed 15 April 2008)
^ "I was raised as a Christian, and I still retain a lot of the values of Christianity. The trouble with basing values on religions, though, is that the premises of most of them are pure wishful thinking; you either have to refuse to scrutinise those premises - take them on faith, declare that they "transcend logic" - or reject them. As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more "modern" view than the average believer. But by the time you've "modernised" something like Christianity - starting off with "Genesis was all just poetry" and ending up with "Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God" - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God." Greg Egan, An Interview With Greg Egan, Eidolon 11, pp. 18-30, January 1993 (accessed 28 April 2008)
^ "When I discussed my own atheism and Peter his own belief, he wrote that he needed God as a "friend of loneliness, who does not speak, does not laugh, does not cry"." Greg Egan, Letters from the forgotten, The Age (Australia), 17 February 2005 (accessed 28 April 2008)
^ "Saturday, my last night at the [Motel] 6, and I refuse to spend it crushed in my room. But what is a person of limited means and no taste for "carousing" to do? Several times during the week, I have driven past the "Deliverance" church downtown, and the name alone exerts a scary attraction... The marquee in front of the church is advertising a Saturday night "tent revival," which sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own." Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Holt and Company, 2001, (p. 66-67) ISBN 0-8050-6389-7
^ Reprinted in Hitchens, Christopher (2007). The Portable Atheist. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6.
^ "Look, I'm an atheist. People say to me, do you believe in God? No, I don't believe in God." Harlan Ellison in clue book for the computer version of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream([9].)
^ "He died of prostate cancer in Trinity Hospice, in Clapham, south London, on 23 October 1995. He was a declared atheist and a member of the Humanist Society and he was cremated on 30 October at Putney Vale crematorium, south London." Paul Vaughan: 'Ewart, Gavin Buchanan (1916–1995)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 [10] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion." Prophet of Decline: An interview with Oriana Fallaci, Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2005 (accessed 10 April 2008).
^ American Atheists article on Fisher [11].
^ Criticising Desert Island Discs presenter Kirsty Young, Gillian Reynolds wrote: "Fisk is an atheist. Why didn't she pick up his constant conversational invocations of God, press him on his choice of Psalm 23 as disc six?" 'It's time to come off the fence on Kirsty's island', Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2006, Features: Arts, Pg. 28.
^ "I've been doing media appearances as a secular humanist activist for fifteen years now. I perennially underwent this exchange: REPORTER/HOST: Are you an atheist? ME: I call myself a secular humanist. Secular humanists disbelieve in the supernatural and prefer to use reason, compassion, and the methods of science to build the good life in this life. REPORTER/HOST: But you're an atheist, aren't you? I couldn't sidestep the "A" word. When I tried, it was all I'd get to talk about. Today, I handle this question differently: REPORTER/HOST: Are you an atheist? ME: Yes, but that's only the beginning." Tom Flynn, Why The "A" Word Won't Go Away, Council for Secular Humanism op-ed article (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "Follett, who is 58, was born in Cardiff, the son of a tax inspector. His family belonged to the puritanical Plymouth Brethren, so he was barred from watching films and television and even visiting other churches. Sounds like a strict upbringing. Perhaps too strict, given that he is now an atheist. 'Yeah, as soon as I reached the age of reason - about 16 - I stopped going to church. But I also have a sybaritic streak and could never have been happy in any puritanical religion. Self-denial is not my thing." Nigel Farndale, 'Damn Right I Got The Talent', Sunday Telegraph, 7 October 2007, Section 7 (Books), Pg.22.
^ "Describing his old friend as a "devout atheist", Ingrams said Paul Foot had been much upset to discover, after he suffered a near-fatal aneurysm five years ago, that some of his religious friends had been praying for him - and even more indignant to hear that some of them thought that their prayers had been answered when he survived to go on campaigning and writing." Duncan Campbell, 'Funeral of Paul Foot', The Guardian, 28 July 2004, Pg. 5.
^ "Some time in his middle teens, he had announced that he had become an atheist, and this had led to a violent flurry in the family, various clerical friends being called in, in vain, to shepherd him back to orthodoxy. [...] Despite his churchy friends, Forster was very ready to be parted from his faith, which did not go very deep. [...] Within a short time, under Meredith's ministrations, he had lost his faith completely." Extract from P. N. Furbank's E. M. Forster: A Life, the Growth of the Novelist 1879-1914, "which E. M. Forster invited P. N. Furbank to write", 'Saturday Review: Forster at Kings', The Times, 23 July 1977; pg. 7; Issue 60063; col A.
^ "In 1989 a stroke slightly impaired his memory. But the death of Elizabeth, who had been in all his novels, was an incomparably worse blow. "As an atheist, it made me very angry with someone - He, She or It - who doesn't exist," he said. It was the paradox his books had been written to solve." John Ezard, 'Obituary: John Fowles', The Guardian, 8 November 2005, Pg. 36.
^ "Frederick Furnivall was a man of diverse causes, all based on passionately held beliefs: vegetarianism, sculling, spelling reform, atheism (in his later years), socialism, egalitarianism, teetotalism, and above all the supreme importance of editing historic and literary texts that could shed light on the cultural and social life of England's past." William S. Peterson, 'Furnivall, Frederick James (1825–1910)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ In his introduction to the Sunshine screenplay (Faber and Faber 2007), Garland writes: "Aside from being a love letter to its antecedents, I wrote Sunshine as a film about atheism. A crew is en route to a God-like entity: the Sun. The Sun is larger and more powerful than we can imagine. The Sun gave us life, and can take it away. It is nurturing, in that it provides the means of our survival, but also terrifying and hostile [...] Ultimately, even the most rational crew member is overwhelmed by his sense of wonder and, as he falls into the star, he believes he is touching the face of God. But he isn't. The Sun is God-like, but not God. Not a conscious being. Not a divine architect. And the crew member is only doing what man has always done: making an awestruck category error when confronted with our small place within the vast and neutral scheme of things. The director, Danny Boyle, who is not atheistic in the way that I am, felt differently. He believed that the crew actually were meeting God. I didn't see this as a major problem, because the difference in our approach wasn't in conflict with the way in which the story would be told."
^ "Constance became a lifelong sceptic and atheist." Patrick Waddington: 'Garnett, Constance Clara (1861–1946)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2007 [12] (accessed 1 May 2008).
^ "I have no religion - I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in any afterlife..." looks towards end", BBC News, 2003-06-06. Retrieved on 2007-07-07.
^ "I am an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic." The Art of Fiction No. 77: Nadine Gordimer, Interview by the Paris Review Foundation, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-24.
^ "What's stopping me is that I don't believe in God. Not in an agnostic sense but in the spirit of pure atheism which asserts that man invented divinities to account for the temporarily inexplicable. [...] Jews were just as welcoming, as long as you're Jewish by birth or conversion. Would I, as an avowed atheist, be turned away, I asked Rabbi Pini [...]." Linda Grant, 'Almighty gamble', The Guardian, 25 June 1999, Art Pages, Pg. 2.
^ "In addition, between 1919 and 1924 Nancy gave birth to four children in under five years; while Graves (now an atheist like his wife) suffered from recurring bouts of shell-shock." Richard Perceval Graves, 'Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895–1985)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, Oct 2006 [13] (accessed 1 May 2008).
^ "Though Greene later objected to being called a 'Catholic novelist', he became celebrated for employing religious themes in his works, praised by Catholic critics during his lifetime for the powerful way in which his novels explore the subjects of sin, damnation, evil, and divine forgiveness. But Greene's relationship with the church was never easy, and he was often critical of the religion. In his last years he began referring to himself as a 'Catholic atheist' (Shelden, 6)." Michael Shelden: 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, January 2006 [14] (accessed 1 May 2008).
^ "I don't like conventional religious piety. I'm more at ease with the Catholicism of Catholic countries. I've always found it difficult to believe in God. I suppose I'd now call myself a Catholic atheist." Graham Greene, interviewed by VS Pritchett, Saturday Review: Graham Greene into the light', The Times, 18 March 1978; pg. 6; Issue 60260; col A.
^ "I am still a Catholic, I just don't believe in God. I am an atheist Catholic - there are a lot of them around. One thing lapsed Catholics do not do is go in for an "inferior" religion with less in the way of tradition and intellectual content."—Greer, Germaine (27 November 2003), The habit of a lifetime, The Guardian. Accessed February 12, 2008.
^ Template:Sv icon Translation: "I am [an] atheist, but Ann-Marie and I light a candle anyway. I have dedicated "Madame Terror" to her. Since she has helped me much with [my] books, not least with this one, the latest. Much talk on and forth, I've had a lot yellings." ""Det ska mycket till för att reta upp mig"". Expressen. 2006-12-03. Retrieved 2007-01-20. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
^ "Handler says he's 'pretty much' an atheist..." Autumn of a book-lover’s contentment, Marvin Olasky, World Magazine, October 07, 2006 (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ "Mr. Handler... describes himself as a 'secular humanist.'", Lemony Snicket reaches 'The End', By Todd Leopold, CNN.com, October 5, 2006 (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ Interviewer: "Are the Baudelaires Jewish?" Handler: "I think that if you had that many terrible things happen to you, you'd probably become an atheist." A Very Frustrating Dialogue, by Marc Silver, U.S. News & World Report web exclusive, 5/20/02 (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ Author of An Atheist Manifesto
^ "Harry Harrison is a self-confessed atheist" per official website HarryHarrison.com
^ "Although his parents never saw the poems he wrote about them, they are still included in his audience. "I'm a total atheist but I do write things for them." " The Guardian Profile: Tony Harrison, 1 April 2000 (accessed 15 April 2008)
^ "In a hideous act of precocity, I saw as a child that, having tried as hard as I could, I could not believe in God. I greatly regret this, but, despite extensive reflection, I can see no reason after all these years to revise my view." However, "... I rejoice wholeheartedly as an atheist that I live in a Christian culture". Stop apologising for being Christian, Simon Heffer, Telegraph, 21 December 2005 (Accessed 31 March 2008)
^ "I am not a believer. In fact, on religious matters, I am inclined to take the Christopher Hitchens line - not only am I atheist, I am anti-theist. (If God did exist, I would be against him on any number of grounds, not least of which is that He is always behaving in such an unreasonable, autocratic manner.)" Zoë Heller, 'God doesn't have the best tunes New York', Daily Telegraph, 27 March 2004, Features, Comment Pg. 22.
^ Ernest Hemingway is a noted atheist by several atheist and independent websites. [15] Also noted for saying "All thinking men are atheist".
^ "She was educated at home, by correspondence and at Perth College. This was run by Anglican nuns who, she said, informed her she would never enter the kingdom of heaven. Since she was already an atheist - which she remained all her life - she greeted this news with a certain nonchalance. She was amused when, in later life, she was designated as a patron saint of Australian writers." Philip Jones, 'Obituary: Dorothy Hewett', The Guardian, 5 September 2002, Pg. 26.
^ "Hind became a socialist and an atheist, and at 14 left Riverside high school, Carntyne, and became a process clerk at Britain's largest engineering firm, Beardmore." Jackie Kemp, 'Obituary: Archie Hind: Author of a novel of Glasgow working-class life which won the Guardian award', The Guardian, 29 February 2008, Pg. 41.
^ "Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. ... I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument..." Hitchens in Slate.com article, "Bush's Secularist Triumph".
^ "In March 1811 he was expelled along with Shelley for refusing to reveal who wrote The Necessity of Atheism. Though Shelley wrote the final version and arranged the printing and distribution, Hogg had garnered philosophical arguments for the essay and probably wrote an early draft. Consequently, his decision to share Shelley's expulsion was partly a matter of loyalty and partly of pride—he could not allow his friend to accept full credit (or blame) for their joint production." Carol L. Thoma, 'Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1792–1862)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "Grimly atheist, he appreciated Nietzsche's attempt to establish a philosophy that was simultaneously nihilist and life-affirming. He understood Nietzsche's keen wit, and was very funny in his own fashion, cracking many a joke, often at his own expense. ("A drink? Oh alright, just a large one!")" Carol Diethe, 'Obituary: RJ Hollingdale', The Guardian, 10 October 2001, Pg. 24.
^ Masson, Sophie (2003). "The Strange Case of Michel Houellebecq". Quadrant. XLVII (6). Retrieved 2007-04-20. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
^ The article is subtitled "At Easter I, a longstanding atheist, find myself feeling affinity with religious folk", and begins "As a godless, atheistic Marxist, I have never been less worried about religion. What does worry me is the rise of a New Atheism that, never mind God, appears to have lost faith in humanity." It looks like Man crucified, Mick Hume, Times Online, 21 March 2008 (Accessed 31 March 2008)
^ Jim Page, the chairman of the Housman Society, said: [...] "He writes about church bells in his poems and his ashes are buried at the church in Ludlow. He was an atheist but retained an affection for churches and the sound of the bells." Richard Savill, 'Housman's bells ring again at Bredon', Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2004, Pg. 08.
^ "Hyman blatantly proclaimed his biases: for example, he vigorously opposed any critical approach that took organized religion seriously (he often described himself as a "militant atheist"), and his dismissal of Eliot and Winters was based in part on their religious sympathies." Ann T. Keene: "Hyman, Stanley Edgar", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [16].
^ "In response to the popular atheist books of Susan Jacoby, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens..." Review by Fred Edwords of What's So Great about Christianity (by Dinesh D'Souza), expanded online version of that originally published in The Humanist, March/April 2008 (Accessed 14 April 2008)
^ Reviewing Jenkins's The Missionaries, Paul Binding wrote: "In addition to registering as a pacifist Jenkins became a member of the Independent Labour Party and was a declared atheist." Paul Binding, 'Saints and sinners', The Guardian, 5 November 2005, Review Pages, Pg. 17.
^ Jenkins wrote "I'm an atheist but still I resent this joker in Rome slighting my community. Sorry, Pope, but this 'proper church' declaration is surreal nonsense by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 13 July 2007 (Accessed 31 March 2008).
^ Joshi's book: God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong at amazon.com.
^ Kennedy's book: All in the Mind: A Farewell to God at amazon.com.
^ Krassner contributed a piece entitled 'Confessions of an Atheist' to the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion (The Disinformation Company 2007, ISBN 1932857591). Excerpt: "I had developed that habit of communicating with my imaginary friend when I was a kid who actually believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful Being. [...] My faith disappeared when I was thirteen. [...] On the day after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I would read that headline over and over and over and over again. That afternoon, I told God I couldn't believe in him any more because he had allowed such devastation to happen. "Allowed? Why do you think I gave humans free will?" "Okay, well, I'm exercising my free will to believe that you don't exist." "All right, it's your loss!" So at least we would remain on speaking terms."
^ "...Lagerkvist... wrote of himself that he was 'a believer without a belief, a religious atheist.'" The Religious Atheist, Time Magazine review of Lagerkvist's book The Death of Ahasuerus, February 23, 1962. Retrieved 24 July 2007.
^ "Larkin, a typical moody 20th-century atheist, thought religion was "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die". A.N. Wilson, 'Give me that old-time religion', Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2006, News section, End column, Pg. 19.
^ "It is a curious fact, but if I want a poet who will get me in an Easter frame of mind, I turn not to these orthodox followers of the Creed, but to that out-and-out atheist and self-confessed nihilist Philip Larkin." A.N. Wilson, 'This is the time when Larkin comes into his own', Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2003, World of Books section, Pg. 21.
^ "In view of the enduring influence of Moses Gaster it is a mark of Marghanita Laski's true independence of mind that, while remaining proud of her Jewishness, she renounced her faith even before she went up to Oxford and declared herself to be an atheist." R. W. Burchfield, 'Laski, Marghanita (1915–1988)', rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 (accessed 1 May 2008).
^ Laskier wrote "The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death." New Pages of Past Horror: Writings depict the innocence of a Jewish teen coming of age--and Nazi brutality, Aron Heller, Associated Press, 6 June 2006.
^ An Interview with Stanislaw Lem by Peter Engel. The Missouri Review, Volume 7, Number 2, 1984.
^ In his posthumously published Zibaldone, Leopardi writes, among other such arguments: "In sum, the foundation of everything, and of God himself, is nothing. Since nothing is absolutely necessary, there is no absolute reason why something could not be, or not be in a certain way...And everything is possible, that is there is no absolute reason why some arbitrary thing can not exist, or exist in a certain manner....And there is no absolute distinction between all these possibilities, nor absolute difference between all the possible perfections and so on....It is certain that since the Platonic forms that preexist all things have been destroyed, God is destroyed." (Zib. 1341-42, 18 July, 1821) —trans. Francesco Franco
^ Levi quoted as saying "There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God." Interview with Marlboro Press (1989)[17].
^ Waste Books E 252, 1765-1770
^ Repeatedly mentioned in Lesley Blanch's biography of him: Pierre Loti - Travels with the Legendary Romantic.
^ Joshi, The Scriptorium, "H. P. Lovecraft", section II.
^ "A convinced atheist, he had discussed the possibility of suicide with his friend Fruttero in the past, at one time contemplating driving his car into a canal with his companion, Simone Bennes Darses, at his side. On this occasion he rose early, leaving her sleeping undisturbed in bed." Philip Willan, 'Obituary: Franco Lucentini', The Guardian, 9 August 2002, Pg. 18.
^ "During the Second World War McCaig was a conscientious objector, though not on religious grounds for, as he asserted in an interview, 'I was born an atheist' (Murray, 88)." Hilda D. Spear, 'MacCaig , Norman Alexander (1910–1996)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "I'm an atheist. So is everyone I know, or maybe they're being Canadian and refraining from mentioning their religion. Don't poke atheists with a stick or we'll want our own morning manifesto." Religion in the public discourse? It's a can of worms (cbc.ca, 18 February 2008 (Accessed 25 Mars 2008).
^ "This distresses me on many levels. First because as a card-carrying atheist, I had transferred my faith to these secular deities and passionately believed in their perfect marriage." Lucy Mangan, 'The Beckhams - do we deserve any better?', The Guardian, 19 October 2005, Pg. 36.
^ "So why should Maugham, self-declared atheist, "continental" more than English, choose so inappropriate a burial place?" Shona Crawford Poole, 'Pilgrimage to the heart of England', The Times, 26 January 1985; pg. 12; Issue 62046; col D.
^ "In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man's innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism." 'Maugham, W. Somerset', Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 8 May 2008.
^ "The French right, to give it its due, has been astonishingly persistent throughout history. [...] In Action Francaise [sic] it found a congenial form of expression and a leader, Charles Maurras; the fact that Maurras was an atheist who believed that religion was a useful social cement [...] did not distress the Catholics on the French right as much as it should." Peter Hebblethwaite, 'Misguided catalogue of blame for the passing of the glory that was France', The Times, 4 January 1975; pg. 12; Issue 59285; col B.
^ Multiple quotes from McCabe substantiating his atheist view [18].
^ "Throughout her childhood, McCarthy took refuge in Catholicism, but, although she was schooled in convents and considered herself a devout Catholic, she tried to call attention to herself as a teenager by pretending to have lost her faith. Questioned about her claim, she found that she had in fact done so. She remained an atheist." Kathy D. Hadley: "McCarthy, Mary", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [19].
^ "Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you." Solomon, Deborah (December 2, 2007). "A Sinner's Tale: Questions for Ian McEwan". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-12-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
^ "My distaste for Lewis and Tolkien as writers does not stem from the fact that, as an atheist, I disagree with their religious beliefs or think that religious concerns cannot make great literature." – Reinvigorating the Fantastic, Accessed February 12, 2007.
^ Interviewed in 2004 by Jonathan Miller for his television series Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, Arthur Miller said: "Well I tried to be a religious person when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, it lasted about two years. And then it simply vanished. I simply lay down one evening to go to sleep and woke up the next day and it wasn't there anymore. [...] Of course, I could no longer believe. I quickly, at some point in my late teens, began reading and surmising that the idea of religion was a creation of man's longing to be a permanent part of the universe. [...] But myself, personally, I don't have the talent to believe. [...] It just seems to me so patent that what man has done is to project himself into the heavens, where he can be all-powerful as he's not here, and moral, and decent, and vengeful, and all the things he's not allowed to do on the earth, and to don that white garment and the beard and be what he wished in his dreams he could be... and I just can't get past that." The Atheism Tapes: Arthur Miller, 3.25–6.14, BBC television, first broadcast October 2004.
^ Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism.[20]
^ "I'm also obsessed by religion, being an atheist myself. There's something eternally fascinating about respectability gone wrong." Quoted in Sheridan Morley, 'Mortimer on Heaven and Hell', The Times, 27 May 1976; pg. 7; Issue 59714; col E.
^ " "Marty really rattled the paramilitaries because he had such good contacts," said John Keane, a friend and colleague of O'Hagan's. "He'd be able to tell you what they had for breakfast before they went out to kill. He had a cynical eye and he was very aware of the sub-structure of society, the unusual alliances, the way people weren't always what they seemed. He was an atheist and a Marxist, liable to start spouting Hegel if you gave him a chance. He used to say, my enemy's enemy is my friend. Very little that happened in Northern Ireland would have surprised Marty." " Susan McKay, 'Faith, Hate and Murder', The Guardian, 17 November 2001, Weekend Pages, Pg. 19.
^ "Oswald, a vegetarian and atheist, used the pseudonyms Ignotus (in the Political Herald, 1785–7), Sylvester Otway (London newspapers 1788–9), and H. K." T. F. Henderson, 'Oswald, John (c.1760–1793)', rev. Ralph A. Manogue, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "Frances Partidge was a pacifist long before she met Ralph. She says she cannot pinpoint the day with the same clarity with which she can remember discovering herself an atheist—at the age of 11 in an Isle of Wight boarding house—but hearing about the outbreak of World War I in the company of bellicose friends, and a feminist cousin who supported conscientious objectors, put her on the path." Caroline Moorehead, 'Love and laughter on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set', The Times, 12 August 1978; pg. 12; Issue 60378; col A.
^ Salon magazine 28 April 1999 [21]
^ "Tanya Byron: Former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris is proud to call himself an atheist. Matthew Parris: I don't have a lot of doubt any more. I think it's a mistake, religion. I think that God doesn't exist. I am not absolutely hundred percent certain of that, any more than I am not absolutely a hundred percent certain that there isn't an elephant in the next room. There may be, but I think it's highly unlikely. Of course I know lots of very nice Christians, and their Christianity doesn't make me angry at all. But I get irritated with laziness of mind, with bad arguments and with a reaching for the comfort of something that, in some part of their brain, they must know is unprovable, and perhaps not true." Am I Normal? episode 'Spirituality', BBC TV, first broadcast BBC2, 28 April 2008 21:00.
^ "Not since 1964 had Pasolini created such a stir, and even then it was not the content of his The Gospel According to St. Matthew that stunned people. It was the discovery that a director who was both a communist and an atheist could bring such fervor and insight to a religious subject. [...] There are times when Pasolini sounds remarkably religious for a self-acknowledged atheist. "I suffer from the nostalgia of a peasant-type religion, and that is why I am on the side of the servant," he says. "But I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. That is why my films are never naturalistic. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance." Guy Flatley, The Atheist who was Obsessed with God, 1969, located at Moviecrazed.com (accessed 25 April 2008).
^ "Pinter 'on road to recovery'". BBC News. 2002-08-26. Retrieved 2007-04-20. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
^ "I'm an atheist, at least to the extent that I don't believe in the objective existence of any big beards in the sky."—The Line One Interview with Terry Pratchett, Gay, Anne, 1999. Accessed December 24, 2006.
^ "As an atheist I'm rather on difficult ground here, but presumably this is what a Christian believes." The Dark Materials debate: life, God, the universe... (interview of Pullman by Rowan Williams), Telegraph.co.uk, 17 March 2004 (Accessed 12 November 2007).
^ Reviewing Raine's collection In Defence of T. S. Eliot, Charles Osborne and Sally Cousins wrote: "Raine, a fine poet, is also an entertaining and thought-provoking critic, and his subjects range widely from the Bible, which as an atheist he appreciates for its short stories, "some of the greatest ever written", to Bruce Chatwin, whom he sensibly does not take too seriously." Sunday Telegraph, 14 October 2001, Paperbacks, Pg. 14.
^ "I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one." Rand quoted in Michael S. Berliner (1995). Letters of Ayn Rand: March 20, 1965 [22]
^ Derek Raymond was the pen name of Robert Cook. "Cook was an atheist, but he described his probes into abjection and despair with almost religious intensity." Phil Baker: 'Cook, Robert William Arthur (1931–1994)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [23] (accessed 30 April 2008).
^ "I tell you something, in case anyone wonders, not a single out-of-body experience, no long corridors of light, I was an atheist when it started and I've remained one. People used to say to me, 'You wait until something really bad happens, you'll start praying', but I didn't and I can't. I don't put this down to any superior being, I put it down to the superb training and skill of the people looking after me. I remain the humanist I always was." Claire Rayner, interviewed by Libby Brooks, The Guardian, September 12, 2003, Features Pages, Pg. 6.
^ When asked by Larry King if he would ever run for office, Reagan Jr. responded by saying, "I'm an atheist so... I can't be elected to anything, because polls all say that people won't elect an atheist." Interview on Larry King Live, 26 June 2004. See clip.
^ Reviewing Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Matt Thorne noted: "In a long author's note, Rice explains how she experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, before leaving the Church at 18 due to sexual pressure and her desire to read authors she considered forbidden to her, such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. Two years later she married a passionate atheist, the poet and artist Stan Rice, and in 1974, began a literary career that she now retrospectively views as representing her 'quest for meaning in a world without God'." Sunday Telegraph, 18 December 2005, Section 7, Pg. 43.
^ Interview with Rushdie by Gigi Marzullo; Sottovoce, RAIUNO, March 31 2006.
^ CNN reports that: "Among these works are mythical stories through which Saramago, a communist and atheist, weaves his own brand of social and political commentary." In praise of Portuguese (Accessed 30 May 2007)
^ "If Osama bin Laden were in charge, he would slit my throat; my God, I'm an atheist, a hedonist, and a faggot." Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America, Dan Savage, Plume, 2002, p. 258.
^ Savage declared in his syndicated sex advice column: "I'm Catholic—in a cultural sense, not an eat-the-wafer, say-the-rosary, burn-down-the-women's-health-center sense. I attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests. I got to meet the Pope in 1979..." Savage Love (column), The Village Voice, April 12, 2005.
^ Listing of Shelley's The Necessity of Atheism at Amazon.com [24].
^ "I am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like — humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic." Why I Am An Atheist, Michael Shermer, June 2005 (accessed 31 March 2008).
^ "Like most atheists, I don't mind in the least being insulted for my beliefs, as long as I am not prevented from expressing them." Joan Smith, 'None of us has the right not to be offended', Independent on Sunday, 21 October 2001, Comment, Pg. 30.
^ Listing of Smith as a founder of Freethinkers New York.
^ Reviewing Steele's book, Victor J Stenger called it "A clear, concise, complete, and convincing presentation of the case for atheism."
^ "By early 1890 Steevens had broken with his family's Brethrenism, and he described himself as 'a discontented atheist' (Steevens to Browning; Oscar Browning MSS)." Sidney Lee, 'Steevens, George Warrington (1869–1900)', rev. Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "A decadent dandy who envied the manly Victorian achievements of his family, a professed atheist haunted by religious terrors, a generous and loving man who fell out with many of his friends - the Robert Louis Stevenson of Claire Harman's biography is all of these and, of course, a bed-ridden invalid who wrote some of the finest adventure stories in the language. [...] Worse still, he affected a Bohemian style, haunted the seedier parts of the Old Town, read Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and declared himself an atheist. This caused a painful rift with his father, who damned him as a "careless infidel". Theo Tait, review of Robert Louis Stevenson: a Biography by Claire Harman, Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2005, Books Pg.3
^ Matt Taibbi, interveiwed by 'Friendly Atheist' Hemant Mehta: "HM: What role should religion play in the political arena? MT: Well, I’m an atheist/agnostic, so I would say none. People should stick to solving the problems they have the tools to solve." 'Interview with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi', friendlyatheist.com, 29 April 2008 (accessed 10 May 2008).
^ In Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, biographer Thomas A. Underwood quotes Tate as saying: "I am an atheist, but a religious one—which means there is no organization for my religion."
^ Commenting on Tendryakov's obituary in the Times, Professor Geoffrey A. Hosking wrote: "Perhaps because of his concern for the human personality, Tendryakov was the first writer in the post-Stalin period to raise religious questions seriously in fiction. Though an atheist himself, he understood the intrinsic importance of religion, and did not treat it merely satirically or condescendingly." 'Vladimir Tendryakov', The Times, 17 August 1984; pg. 10; Issue 61912; col G.
^ "Characterizing himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a skeptic, he enjoyed his image of impudent prurience, though he revealed little to the public of his personal life." Dennis Wepman: "Thayer, Tiffany", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [25].
^ "Facebook knows I'm an atheist, and if Facebook knows it then the CIA probably knows it too, which could be a problem if I tried to stand for election in South Carolina, Mississippi or any of the other seven US States which require candidates to believe in a supreme being." Facebook knows I'm an atheist, New Humanist (web exclusive article), January 2008 (accessed 17 April 2008).
^ "His beliefs moved from pantheism to an atheism which causes less of a frisson now than it did in his own day, and his apocalyptic vision of the megalopolis in 'The City of Dreadful Night' continues to have resonance." Ann Margaret Ridler, 'Thomson , James (1834–1882)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 6 May 2008).
^ "B.B.C. 2 (Ch. 33) [...] 10.20 Doubts and Certainties: a Dean talks to an atheist, with Harry Williams, Nicholas Tomalin." 'Television and radio', The Times, 17 September 1968; pg. 18; Issue 57358; col A.
^ "Her parents were radicals in their outlook and they educated their daughter in a rationalist and humanist mode. As an atheist she saw religion only as the shield of tyranny, intolerance, and cruelty." D. A. Farnie, 'Utley, Winifred (1899–1978)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ Haught, James A. (1996). 2,000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt. Prometheus Books. pp. pp. 261-262. ISBN 1-57392-067-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
^ "She returned to England an atheist and radical, eager to view nihilism in Russia." Patrick Waddington, 'Voynich , Ethel Lilian (1864–1960)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, October 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ "[...] I'm an admirer of what you might call 'Enlightenment values' (though they go way beyond the Enlightenment). Things like scientific empiricism, the separation of church and state, the waning of absolutism and tyranny, yes, I cling to those. [...] It [his childhood home] was quite a religious household. I wouldn't be surprised, frankly, if I'm the first Wheen to be an atheist. And so, of course, there was a lot of church-going and all the rest of it, and gradually, through my childhood, I found myself rejecting more and more of it, until finally all I was left with was the Litany and the hymns. I know the Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern and the King James Bible practically backwards, and I'm very fond of them all." Interview with Francis Wheen by Simon Jones for Third Way magazine, reprinted in Wheen's 2004 book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Harper Collins paperback 'P.S.' section, p.2, ISBN 0-00-714097-5.
^ "He was brought up in Reform Judaism, became an atheist in his teens, and remained sceptical about the religious temperament." S. P. Rosenbaum, 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney (1880–1969)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).
^ Nobel Lecture by Gao Xingjian

[1] "Like most of the Godless (or Godfree), I have no desire to proselytise for atheism or to persuade people out of religions that may offer them comfort and companionship." Wicked untruths from the Church, David Aaronovitch, Times Online, 25 March 2008 (Accessed 26 March 2008)

[2] "What makes me think I "can reduce the function of religion to the provision of 'comfort and companionship'" instead of seeing it as a "public truth"? Being an atheist, I suppose. I see religion as a cultural and psychological construct, which fulfils certain almost universal needs and which, as a consequence, I am disinclined to condemn." Who wants to kill the elderly?, David Aaronovitch, Times Online, 31 March 2008 (Accessed 31 March 2008)

[3] "I am a radical Atheist..." Adams in an interview by American Atheists[1].

[4] "It is well known that I am not a religious person, I grew up and remain an atheist [...]". Tariq Ali, Interview: Tariq Ali, Socialist Review November 2006 (accessed 22 April 2008).

[5] Amado is described as an "ateu convicto", or "convinced atheist". Cynara Menezes (8 August 2001). "Velório de Jorge Amado foi discreto" (in Portuguese). Folha de S. Paulo. Retrieved 2007-11-24. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

[6] "Once, filming in Italy with the American director John Huston and a US army crew, Ambler and his colleagues were shelled so fiercely that his unconscious 'played a nasty trick on him' (Ambler, Here Lies, 208). A confirmed atheist, he heard himself saying, 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit.' " Michael Barber: 'Ambler, Eric Clifford (1909–1998)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, January 2007 [2] (accessed 29 April 2008).

[7] "I am an atheist, out and out. It took me a long time to say it... I don't have the evidence to prove that God doesn't exist, but I so strongly suspect he doesn't that I don't want to waste my time." Isaac Asimov in "Free Inquiry", Spring 1982, vol.2 no.2, p. 9 (See Wikiquote.)

[8] "Last week, looking through a book about 15th-century painting in Italy, I began to wonder why I loved these paintings so much. Almost all of them are illustrations of religious subjects, and I have been an atheist almost since the day I was confirmed in the Christian faith by the Bishop of Norwich in 1931. To describe the atheism first: it originated in a certainty that I was going to start breaking the rules as laid down by the god I'd been taught about, followed by a suspicion that if his rules were so easy to break he couldn't be all that he was cracked up to be. Then came its firmer base: the observation that many of the most hideous things done to each other by human beings have been done in his name. It can be argued that this is our fault, not God's. But the god we Europeans are supposed to believe in a) created us as well as everything else that is; b) is omnipotent; c) is Love. In which case, one must assume from the evidence rammed down our throats for century after century that he is liable to fits of serious derangement during which he is Not Himself." Diana Athill, 'I'm a believer - but only in a good story', The Guardian, 21 January 2004, Features Pages, Pg. 5.

[9] "I'm an evangelical atheist so I'm not into supernatural effects - I hated The Exorcist - but John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is different." 'I was a brain-eating zombie... As the scary season descends [...] famous horror experts choose their most terrifying screen experiences', Daily Telegraph, 30 October 2004, Arts Pg. 04.

[10] "Berton's book, The Comfortable Pew, in which as a lifelong atheist he attacked status quo religiosity, outraged churchgoers. But the wider public came to expect to be challenged by Berton's views." Cathryn Atkinson, 'Obituary: Pierre Berton', The Guardian, 7 December 2004, Pg. 27.

[11] "Wilfred Scawen Blunt was notorious as an atheist, a libertine, an adventurer and a poet. Somehow he also found time to be a diplomat - one of the earliest in this country to make a real attempt to understand Islam - and an anti-imperialist, becoming the first British-born person to go to jail for Irish independence." Phil Daoust, The Guardian, 11 March 2008, G2: Radio: Pick of the day, Pg. 32.

[12] " "What song would you like played at your funeral?" "We'll Meet Again. I'd like the congregation to join in. As a devout atheist, I should make it clear there are no religious connotations." " Rosanna Greenstreet, 'Q&A: William Boyd', The Guardian, 3 February 2007, Weekend Pages, Pg. 8.

[13] "Braibanti is a fiercely intellectual left-wing atheist and so, apart from his sexual preferences, would be regarded by sections of Italian opinion as a dangerous character." 'Plagiarist's appeal', The Times, 15 November 1969; pg. 6; Issue 57718; col D.

[14] Reviewing a production of The Romans in Britain, Charles Spencer wrote: "It strikes me as an exceptionally powerful study of the human need for belief in a higher power, notwithstanding the fact that Brenton himself is an atheist. And the dramatist examines the nature of Paul's faith with both sympathy and insight." 'A powerful and thrilling act of heresy', Daily Telegraph, 10 November 2005, Reviews, Pg. 30.

[15] "It [her non-fiction book Black Ship to Hell (1962)] endeavoured to formulate a morality based on reason rather than religion—Brophy described herself as 'a natural, logical and happy atheist' (King of a Rainy Country, afterword, 276)." Peter Parker: 'Brophy, Brigid Antonia [married name Brigid Antonia Levey, Lady Levey] (1929–1995)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2006 [3] (accessed 29 April 2008).

[16] Reviewing Brownjohn's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite wrote: "Brownjohn is 75 at the moment of publication. He has been on the literary scene - publishing, reviewing, judging, chairing, tutoring, giving readings - since the 1950s. He has also been a London borough councillor, a Labour parliamentary candidate (Richmond, Surrey, 1964), very much what I think of as decent, persistent, dogged "Old Labour" - sensitive but solid, inclining towards the puritan (though a self-confessed atheist in matters of religion) - and a strenuous campaigner for serious radio and television, anti-muzak, anti-destruction of libraries, for the proper traditional cultural concerns of the British Council, et al." 'Poetry: The vodka in the verse', The Guardian, 7 October 2006, Review Pages, Pg. 18

[17] "The very practical nature of Islam, a religion that enjoins the faithful to act in the world to change it, is also a boon to activists, good and bad, as does its emphasis on public demonstration of faith. The sight of rows of believers facing Mecca to answer the call to prayer often moves me, an atheist, deeply. Yet the Arabic word for martyr - and currently suicide bomber - comes from the same linguistic stem as the word for bearing witness." Jason Burke, 'Ideology's violent face', The Guardian, 22 July 2005, Weekly Pages, Pg. 6.

[18] Bush describes himself as "an atheist who has nevertheless worked intimately in Jewish religious institutions as a writer and editor for much of my adult life." The rabbi and the atheist, New Jersey Jewish News, 20 September 2007 (accessed 21 april 2008).

[19] "By this time she had become an atheist and socialist." Nathalie Blondel: 'Butts , Mary Franeis (1890–1937)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [4] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[20] "Though an atheist, Cabral had a deep, atavistic fear of the devil. When his wife died in 1986, he placed an emblem of Our Lady of Carmen around her neck, saying, in his mocking way, that this would make sure that she went directly to heaven, without being stopped at customs." 'Joao Cabral: His poetry voiced the sufferings of Brazil's poor', The Guardian, 18 October 1999, Leader Pages; Pg. 18.

[21] "All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway. Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives women emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place." Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (1978) p. 5

[22] "Italian judge Gaetano Mautone has, with that special blend of flamboyance and arrogance you really only see in the continental judiciary, ordered a priest to appear in court to prove that Jesus exists. Or at least existed. Luigi Cascioli, a militant atheist and author of The Fable of Christ, has brought a case against Father Enrico Righi after the priest lambasted the writer for questioning Christ's historical origins." Lucy Mangan, 'Proving Christ existed, and other resolution', The Guardian, 4 January 2006, Pg. 36.

[23] "…Stanley [Kubrick] is a Jew and I'm an atheist". Clarke quoted in Jeromy Agel (Ed.) (1970). The Making of Kubrick's 2001: p.306

[24] "We can only guess what Clodd would have thought of having an evangelical preacher owning his old house: he was a noted atheist, who rejected his parents' ambition for him to become a Baptist minister in favour of becoming chairman of the Rationalist Press Association. His contribution to literature was in popularising the work of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary scientists in the face of opposition from the church. "The story of creation," wrote Clodd, " is the story of gas into genius"." Rose Gibbs, 'A religious conversion', Sunday Telegraph, 14 August 2005, Section: House & Home, Pg. 004.

[25] "For one whose life had been so full of ironies, it was fitting that five priests celebrated a requiem mass for him in Youghal, although he had been a committed atheist." Richard Ingrams: 'Cockburn, (Francis) Claud (1904–1981), rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006 [5] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[26] "Or you can ask: was that you in The Rotters' Club, the schoolboy so crazed with fear of being seen naked that you prayed to God for deliverance and He was moved to fling a wet pair of bathers into your orbit. Yes and no. There was no such epiphanous moment, he says, and besides, he's an atheist." Sally Vincent interviewing Coe, 'A Bit of a Rotter', The Guardian, 24 February 2001, Pg. 36.

[27] "An unlikely friendship developed between Reckitt and G. D. H. Cole. Although an unapproachable cold atheist, and at root an anarchist, Cole joined forces with Reckitt, the clubbable, romantic medievalist, archetypal bourgeois, and unswerving Anglican with a dogmatic faith, to found the National Guilds League in 1915." J. S. Peart-Binns, 'Reckitt, Maurice Benington (1888–1980)', rev., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[28] "Like Margaret Jourdain, and most of her characters who are not fools or knaves, Ivy Compton-Burnett was a firm atheist, dismissing religion because ‘No good can come of it’ (Spurling, Ivy when Young, 77)." Patrick Lyons: 'Burnett, Dame Ivy Compton- (1884–1969)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [6] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[29] "I'm an atheist. God is an abstract noun, he's not a Father Christmas up there in Heaven, he's an abstract bloody noun who has been exploited by men in order to exploit other men, through the centuries." Edmund Cooper, We must love one another or die: an interview with Edmund Cooper (pdf), c.1973.

[30] 'Cooper' was the pen name of Harry Hoff. "As a militant atheist he was especially on his guard in churches, and at the wedding of a much younger friend had to be restrained from heckling the bride's clerical uncle, who was delivering an address." D. J. Taylor, 'Hoff, Harry Summerfield (1910–2002)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, Jan 2006 (accessed 1 May 2008).

[31] "The impulse of this book came when I was writing Quarantine. At the end of writing that book, I was no less of an atheist than I was before, yet it did make me think about my atheism. Thinking about the bleakness of my own atheism, and the inadequacy of the old fashioned kind of atheism when the big events of life-- especially death--came along, made me want to see whether I could come up with a narrative of comfort, a false narrative of comfort, but one that could match the narratives of comfort religions come up with to get you through death and bereavement." Jim Crace, Beatrice Interview: Jim Crace, c. 1999 (accessed 28 April 2008).

[32] Criticising the 'New Atheists' (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins, Onfray, Grayling and co.), Dalrymple wrote: "Yet with the possible exception of Dennett's [book Breaking the Spell], they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm's ontological argument for God's existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design)." What the New Atheists Don't See, City Journal, Autumn 2007 (accessed 24 April 2008).

[33] "As a boy he attended a nonconformist chapel, and later an Anglican church, but in later life was to declare himself an atheist." Meic Stephens: 'Davies, Rhys (1901–1978)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [7] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[34] "He rejected his father's ambition to make him a rabbi. Instead he became an atheist and, following in the footsteps of Marx, Trotsky, and his countrywoman Rosa Luxemburg, a lifelong 'non-Jewish Jew' (Non-Jewish Jew, ed. Deutscher)." John McIlroy: 'Deutscher, Isaac (1907–1967)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [8] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[35] "In recent years, he had begun to write an always witty column for the Jewish Chronicle and, after his diagnosis, had even joined a synagogue - though this, he told friends, was not because he had discovered God. He remained an atheist to the end, but, he said, he wanted his children, Cosima and Bruno, to know something of the Judaism into which they had been born." Jay Rayner and Roy Greenslade, 'Obituary: John Diamond', The Guardian, 3 March 2001, Pg. 22.

[36] "Tariq likes permanent revolution, whereas I am a libertarian conservative. True, we are both atheists, but Tariq is evangelical while I am benign about religion and think the Throne should be occupied by a member of the Church of England." Ruth Dudley-Edwards, 'Will half of Ireland really back Cameroon? How will a win affect public sentiment? Or a defeat?', Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2002, Pg. 24.

[37] "But the 21st century has done nothing to prevent two others from the Manchester area from reshaping and modernising the Christmas story -the poet Carol Ann Duffy and the composer Sasha Johnson Manning, who have written 16 new carols. Duffy, brought up a Catholic, pronounces herself an atheist; Johnson Manning is a committed Christian." Geoff Brown, 'O great big town of Manchester', The Times, 7 December 2007, Times2; Pg. 15.

[38] "Turan Dursun, a former imam and an atheist writer..." A dark shadow over Turkey, Turkish Daily News, January 20, 2007 (Accessed 15 April 2008)

[39] "I was raised as a Christian, and I still retain a lot of the values of Christianity. The trouble with basing values on religions, though, is that the premises of most of them are pure wishful thinking; you either have to refuse to scrutinise those premises - take them on faith, declare that they "transcend logic" - or reject them. As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more "modern" view than the average believer. But by the time you've "modernised" something like Christianity - starting off with "Genesis was all just poetry" and ending up with "Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God" - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God." Greg Egan, An Interview With Greg Egan, Eidolon 11, pp. 18-30, January 1993 (accessed 28 April 2008)

[40] "When I discussed my own atheism and Peter his own belief, he wrote that he needed God as a "friend of loneliness, who does not speak, does not laugh, does not cry"." Greg Egan, Letters from the forgotten, The Age (Australia), 17 February 2005 (accessed 28 April 2008)

[41] "Saturday, my last night at the [Motel] 6, and I refuse to spend it crushed in my room. But what is a person of limited means and no taste for "carousing" to do? Several times during the week, I have driven past the "Deliverance" church downtown, and the name alone exerts a scary attraction... The marquee in front of the church is advertising a Saturday night "tent revival," which sounds like the perfect entertainment for an atheist out on her own." Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich, Henry Holt and Company, 2001, (p. 66-67) ISBN 0-8050-6389-7

[42] Reprinted in Hitchens, Christopher (2007). The Portable Atheist. ISBN 978-0-306-81608-6.

[43] "Look, I'm an atheist. People say to me, do you believe in God? No, I don't believe in God." Harlan Ellison in clue book for the computer version of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream([9].)

[44] "He died of prostate cancer in Trinity Hospice, in Clapham, south London, on 23 October 1995. He was a declared atheist and a member of the Humanist Society and he was cremated on 30 October at Putney Vale crematorium, south London." Paul Vaughan: 'Ewart, Gavin Buchanan (1916–1995)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 [10] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[45] "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true. It's that simple! There must be some human truth here that is beyond religion." Prophet of Decline: An interview with Oriana Fallaci, Wall Street Journal, 23 June 2005 (accessed 10 April 2008).

[46] American Atheists article on Fisher [11].

[47] Criticising Desert Island Discs presenter Kirsty Young, Gillian Reynolds wrote: "Fisk is an atheist. Why didn't she pick up his constant conversational invocations of God, press him on his choice of Psalm 23 as disc six?" 'It's time to come off the fence on Kirsty's island', Daily Telegraph, 17 October 2006, Features: Arts, Pg. 28.

[48] "I've been doing media appearances as a secular humanist activist for fifteen years now. I perennially underwent this exchange: REPORTER/HOST: Are you an atheist? ME: I call myself a secular humanist. Secular humanists disbelieve in the supernatural and prefer to use reason, compassion, and the methods of science to build the good life in this life. REPORTER/HOST: But you're an atheist, aren't you? I couldn't sidestep the "A" word. When I tried, it was all I'd get to talk about. Today, I handle this question differently: REPORTER/HOST: Are you an atheist? ME: Yes, but that's only the beginning." Tom Flynn, Why The "A" Word Won't Go Away, Council for Secular Humanism op-ed article (accessed 30 April 2008).

[49] "Follett, who is 58, was born in Cardiff, the son of a tax inspector. His family belonged to the puritanical Plymouth Brethren, so he was barred from watching films and television and even visiting other churches. Sounds like a strict upbringing. Perhaps too strict, given that he is now an atheist. 'Yeah, as soon as I reached the age of reason - about 16 - I stopped going to church. But I also have a sybaritic streak and could never have been happy in any puritanical religion. Self-denial is not my thing." Nigel Farndale, 'Damn Right I Got The Talent', Sunday Telegraph, 7 October 2007, Section 7 (Books), Pg.22.

[50] "Describing his old friend as a "devout atheist", Ingrams said Paul Foot had been much upset to discover, after he suffered a near-fatal aneurysm five years ago, that some of his religious friends had been praying for him - and even more indignant to hear that some of them thought that their prayers had been answered when he survived to go on campaigning and writing." Duncan Campbell, 'Funeral of Paul Foot', The Guardian, 28 July 2004, Pg. 5.

[51] "Some time in his middle teens, he had announced that he had become an atheist, and this had led to a violent flurry in the family, various clerical friends being called in, in vain, to shepherd him back to orthodoxy. [...] Despite his churchy friends, Forster was very ready to be parted from his faith, which did not go very deep. [...] Within a short time, under Meredith's ministrations, he had lost his faith completely." Extract from P. N. Furbank's E. M. Forster: A Life, the Growth of the Novelist 1879-1914, "which E. M. Forster invited P. N. Furbank to write", 'Saturday Review: Forster at Kings', The Times, 23 July 1977; pg. 7; Issue 60063; col A.

[52] "In 1989 a stroke slightly impaired his memory. But the death of Elizabeth, who had been in all his novels, was an incomparably worse blow. "As an atheist, it made me very angry with someone - He, She or It - who doesn't exist," he said. It was the paradox his books had been written to solve." John Ezard, 'Obituary: John Fowles', The Guardian, 8 November 2005, Pg. 36.

[53] "Frederick Furnivall was a man of diverse causes, all based on passionately held beliefs: vegetarianism, sculling, spelling reform, atheism (in his later years), socialism, egalitarianism, teetotalism, and above all the supreme importance of editing historic and literary texts that could shed light on the cultural and social life of England's past." William S. Peterson, 'Furnivall, Frederick James (1825–1910)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[54] In his introduction to the Sunshine screenplay (Faber and Faber 2007), Garland writes: "Aside from being a love letter to its antecedents, I wrote Sunshine as a film about atheism. A crew is en route to a God-like entity: the Sun. The Sun is larger and more powerful than we can imagine. The Sun gave us life, and can take it away. It is nurturing, in that it provides the means of our survival, but also terrifying and hostile [...] Ultimately, even the most rational crew member is overwhelmed by his sense of wonder and, as he falls into the star, he believes he is touching the face of God. But he isn't. The Sun is God-like, but not God. Not a conscious being. Not a divine architect. And the crew member is only doing what man has always done: making an awestruck category error when confronted with our small place within the vast and neutral scheme of things. The director, Danny Boyle, who is not atheistic in the way that I am, felt differently. He believed that the crew actually were meeting God. I didn't see this as a major problem, because the difference in our approach wasn't in conflict with the way in which the story would be told."

[55] "Constance became a lifelong sceptic and atheist." Patrick Waddington: 'Garnett, Constance Clara (1861–1946)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2007 [12] (accessed 1 May 2008).

[56] "I have no religion - I'm an atheist, and I don't believe in any afterlife..." looks towards end", BBC News, 2003-06-06. Retrieved on 2007-07-07.

[57] "I am an atheist. I wouldn't even call myself an agnostic." The Art of Fiction No. 77: Nadine Gordimer, Interview by the Paris Review Foundation, 2005. Retrieved on 2007-07-24.

[58] "What's stopping me is that I don't believe in God. Not in an agnostic sense but in the spirit of pure atheism which asserts that man invented divinities to account for the temporarily inexplicable. [...] Jews were just as welcoming, as long as you're Jewish by birth or conversion. Would I, as an avowed atheist, be turned away, I asked Rabbi Pini [...]." Linda Grant, 'Almighty gamble', The Guardian, 25 June 1999, Art Pages, Pg. 2.

[59] "In addition, between 1919 and 1924 Nancy gave birth to four children in under five years; while Graves (now an atheist like his wife) suffered from recurring bouts of shell-shock." Richard Perceval Graves, 'Graves, Robert von Ranke (1895–1985)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, Oct 2006 [13] (accessed 1 May 2008).

[60] "Though Greene later objected to being called a 'Catholic novelist', he became celebrated for employing religious themes in his works, praised by Catholic critics during his lifetime for the powerful way in which his novels explore the subjects of sin, damnation, evil, and divine forgiveness. But Greene's relationship with the church was never easy, and he was often critical of the religion. In his last years he began referring to himself as a 'Catholic atheist' (Shelden, 6)." Michael Shelden: 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, January 2006 [14] (accessed 1 May 2008).

[61] "I don't like conventional religious piety. I'm more at ease with the Catholicism of Catholic countries. I've always found it difficult to believe in God. I suppose I'd now call myself a Catholic atheist." Graham Greene, interviewed by VS Pritchett, Saturday Review: Graham Greene into the light', The Times, 18 March 1978; pg. 6; Issue 60260; col A.

[62] "I am still a Catholic, I just don't believe in God. I am an atheist Catholic - there are a lot of them around. One thing lapsed Catholics do not do is go in for an "inferior" religion with less in the way of tradition and intellectual content."—Greer, Germaine (27 November 2003), The habit of a lifetime, The Guardian. Accessed February 12, 2008.

[63] Template:Sv icon Translation: "I am [an] atheist, but Ann-Marie and I light a candle anyway. I have dedicated "Madame Terror" to her. Since she has helped me much with [my] books, not least with this one, the latest. Much talk on and forth, I've had a lot yellings." ""Det ska mycket till för att reta upp mig"". Expressen. 2006-12-03. Retrieved 2007-01-20. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

[64] "Handler says he's 'pretty much' an atheist..." Autumn of a book-lover’s contentment, Marvin Olasky, World Magazine, October 07, 2006 (Accessed 5 April 2008)

[65] "Mr. Handler... describes himself as a 'secular humanist.'", Lemony Snicket reaches 'The End', By Todd Leopold, CNN.com, October 5, 2006 (Accessed 5 April 2008)

[66] Interviewer: "Are the Baudelaires Jewish?" Handler: "I think that if you had that many terrible things happen to you, you'd probably become an atheist." A Very Frustrating Dialogue, by Marc Silver, U.S. News & World Report web exclusive, 5/20/02 (Accessed 5 April 2008)

[67] Author of An Atheist Manifesto

[68] "Harry Harrison is a self-confessed atheist" per official website HarryHarrison.com

[69] "Although his parents never saw the poems he wrote about them, they are still included in his audience. "I'm a total atheist but I do write things for them." " The Guardian Profile: Tony Harrison, 1 April 2000 (accessed 15 April 2008)

[70] "In a hideous act of precocity, I saw as a child that, having tried as hard as I could, I could not believe in God. I greatly regret this, but, despite extensive reflection, I can see no reason after all these years to revise my view." However, "... I rejoice wholeheartedly as an atheist that I live in a Christian culture". Stop apologising for being Christian, Simon Heffer, Telegraph, 21 December 2005 (Accessed 31 March 2008)

[71] "I am not a believer. In fact, on religious matters, I am inclined to take the Christopher Hitchens line - not only am I atheist, I am anti-theist. (If God did exist, I would be against him on any number of grounds, not least of which is that He is always behaving in such an unreasonable, autocratic manner.)" Zoë Heller, 'God doesn't have the best tunes New York', Daily Telegraph, 27 March 2004, Features, Comment Pg. 22.

[72] Ernest Hemingway is a noted atheist by several atheist and independent websites. [15] Also noted for saying "All thinking men are atheist".

[73] "She was educated at home, by correspondence and at Perth College. This was run by Anglican nuns who, she said, informed her she would never enter the kingdom of heaven. Since she was already an atheist - which she remained all her life - she greeted this news with a certain nonchalance. She was amused when, in later life, she was designated as a patron saint of Australian writers." Philip Jones, 'Obituary: Dorothy Hewett', The Guardian, 5 September 2002, Pg. 26.

[74] "Hind became a socialist and an atheist, and at 14 left Riverside high school, Carntyne, and became a process clerk at Britain's largest engineering firm, Beardmore." Jackie Kemp, 'Obituary: Archie Hind: Author of a novel of Glasgow working-class life which won the Guardian award', The Guardian, 29 February 2008, Pg. 41.

[75] "Secularism is not just a smug attitude. It is a possible way of democratic and pluralistic life that only became thinkable after several wars and revolutions had ruthlessly smashed the hold of the clergy on the state. ... I have spent all my life on the atheist side of this argument..." Hitchens in Slate.com article, "Bush's Secularist Triumph".

[76] "In March 1811 he was expelled along with Shelley for refusing to reveal who wrote The Necessity of Atheism. Though Shelley wrote the final version and arranged the printing and distribution, Hogg had garnered philosophical arguments for the essay and probably wrote an early draft. Consequently, his decision to share Shelley's expulsion was partly a matter of loyalty and partly of pride—he could not allow his friend to accept full credit (or blame) for their joint production." Carol L. Thoma, 'Hogg, Thomas Jefferson (1792–1862)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[77] "Grimly atheist, he appreciated Nietzsche's attempt to establish a philosophy that was simultaneously nihilist and life-affirming. He understood Nietzsche's keen wit, and was very funny in his own fashion, cracking many a joke, often at his own expense. ("A drink? Oh alright, just a large one!")" Carol Diethe, 'Obituary: RJ Hollingdale', The Guardian, 10 October 2001, Pg. 24.

[78] Masson, Sophie (2003). "The Strange Case of Michel Houellebecq". Quadrant. XLVII (6). Retrieved 2007-04-20. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

[79] The article is subtitled "At Easter I, a longstanding atheist, find myself feeling affinity with religious folk", and begins "As a godless, atheistic Marxist, I have never been less worried about religion. What does worry me is the rise of a New Atheism that, never mind God, appears to have lost faith in humanity." It looks like Man crucified, Mick Hume, Times Online, 21 March 2008 (Accessed 31 March 2008)

[80] Jim Page, the chairman of the Housman Society, said: [...] "He writes about church bells in his poems and his ashes are buried at the church in Ludlow. He was an atheist but retained an affection for churches and the sound of the bells." Richard Savill, 'Housman's bells ring again at Bredon', Daily Telegraph, 28 June 2004, Pg. 08.

[81] "Hyman blatantly proclaimed his biases: for example, he vigorously opposed any critical approach that took organized religion seriously (he often described himself as a "militant atheist"), and his dismissal of Eliot and Winters was based in part on their religious sympathies." Ann T. Keene: "Hyman, Stanley Edgar", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [16].

[82] "In response to the popular atheist books of Susan Jacoby, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens..." Review by Fred Edwords of What's So Great about Christianity (by Dinesh D'Souza), expanded online version of that originally published in The Humanist, March/April 2008 (Accessed 14 April 2008)

[83] Reviewing Jenkins's The Missionaries, Paul Binding wrote: "In addition to registering as a pacifist Jenkins became a member of the Independent Labour Party and was a declared atheist." Paul Binding, 'Saints and sinners', The Guardian, 5 November 2005, Review Pages, Pg. 17.

[84] Jenkins wrote "I'm an atheist but still I resent this joker in Rome slighting my community. Sorry, Pope, but this 'proper church' declaration is surreal nonsense by Simon Jenkins, The Guardian, 13 July 2007 (Accessed 31 March 2008).

[85] Joshi's book: God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong at amazon.com.

[86] Kennedy's book: All in the Mind: A Farewell to God at amazon.com.

[87] Krassner contributed a piece entitled 'Confessions of an Atheist' to the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion (The Disinformation Company 2007, ISBN 1932857591). Excerpt: "I had developed that habit of communicating with my imaginary friend when I was a kid who actually believed in an all-knowing, all-powerful Being. [...] My faith disappeared when I was thirteen. [...] On the day after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I would read that headline over and over and over and over again. That afternoon, I told God I couldn't believe in him any more because he had allowed such devastation to happen. "Allowed? Why do you think I gave humans free will?" "Okay, well, I'm exercising my free will to believe that you don't exist." "All right, it's your loss!" So at least we would remain on speaking terms."

[88] "...Lagerkvist... wrote of himself that he was 'a believer without a belief, a religious atheist.'" The Religious Atheist, Time Magazine review of Lagerkvist's book The Death of Ahasuerus, February 23, 1962. Retrieved 24 July 2007.

[89] "Larkin, a typical moody 20th-century atheist, thought religion was "that vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die". A.N. Wilson, 'Give me that old-time religion', Daily Telegraph, 17 April 2006, News section, End column, Pg. 19.

[90] "It is a curious fact, but if I want a poet who will get me in an Easter frame of mind, I turn not to these orthodox followers of the Creed, but to that out-and-out atheist and self-confessed nihilist Philip Larkin." A.N. Wilson, 'This is the time when Larkin comes into his own', Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2003, World of Books section, Pg. 21.

[91] "In view of the enduring influence of Moses Gaster it is a mark of Marghanita Laski's true independence of mind that, while remaining proud of her Jewishness, she renounced her faith even before she went up to Oxford and declared herself to be an atheist." R. W. Burchfield, 'Laski, Marghanita (1915–1988)', rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2007 (accessed 1 May 2008).

[92] Laskier wrote "The little faith I used to have has been completely shattered. If God existed, He would have certainly not permitted that human beings be thrown alive into furnaces, and the heads of little toddlers be smashed with gun butts or shoved into sacks and gassed to death." New Pages of Past Horror: Writings depict the innocence of a Jewish teen coming of age--and Nazi brutality, Aron Heller, Associated Press, 6 June 2006.

[MisI-93] An Interview with Stanislaw Lem by Peter Engel. The Missouri Review, Volume 7, Number 2, 1984.

[94] In his posthumously published Zibaldone, Leopardi writes, among other such arguments: "In sum, the foundation of everything, and of God himself, is nothing. Since nothing is absolutely necessary, there is no absolute reason why something could not be, or not be in a certain way...And everything is possible, that is there is no absolute reason why some arbitrary thing can not exist, or exist in a certain manner....And there is no absolute distinction between all these possibilities, nor absolute difference between all the possible perfections and so on....It is certain that since the Platonic forms that preexist all things have been destroyed, God is destroyed." (Zib. 1341-42, 18 July, 1821) —trans. Francesco Franco

[95] Levi quoted as saying "There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God." Interview with Marlboro Press (1989)[17].

[96] Waste Books E 252, 1765-1770

[97] Repeatedly mentioned in Lesley Blanch's biography of him: Pierre Loti - Travels with the Legendary Romantic.

[98] Joshi, The Scriptorium, "H. P. Lovecraft", section II.

[99] "A convinced atheist, he had discussed the possibility of suicide with his friend Fruttero in the past, at one time contemplating driving his car into a canal with his companion, Simone Bennes Darses, at his side. On this occasion he rose early, leaving her sleeping undisturbed in bed." Philip Willan, 'Obituary: Franco Lucentini', The Guardian, 9 August 2002, Pg. 18.

[100] "During the Second World War McCaig was a conscientious objector, though not on religious grounds for, as he asserted in an interview, 'I was born an atheist' (Murray, 88)." Hilda D. Spear, 'MacCaig , Norman Alexander (1910–1996)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[101] "I'm an atheist. So is everyone I know, or maybe they're being Canadian and refraining from mentioning their religion. Don't poke atheists with a stick or we'll want our own morning manifesto." Religion in the public discourse? It's a can of worms (cbc.ca, 18 February 2008 (Accessed 25 Mars 2008).

[102] "This distresses me on many levels. First because as a card-carrying atheist, I had transferred my faith to these secular deities and passionately believed in their perfect marriage." Lucy Mangan, 'The Beckhams - do we deserve any better?', The Guardian, 19 October 2005, Pg. 36.

[103] "So why should Maugham, self-declared atheist, "continental" more than English, choose so inappropriate a burial place?" Shona Crawford Poole, 'Pilgrimage to the heart of England', The Times, 26 January 1985; pg. 12; Issue 62046; col D.

[104] "In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer's Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man's innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism." 'Maugham, W. Somerset', Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed 8 May 2008.

[105] "The French right, to give it its due, has been astonishingly persistent throughout history. [...] In Action Francaise [sic] it found a congenial form of expression and a leader, Charles Maurras; the fact that Maurras was an atheist who believed that religion was a useful social cement [...] did not distress the Catholics on the French right as much as it should." Peter Hebblethwaite, 'Misguided catalogue of blame for the passing of the glory that was France', The Times, 4 January 1975; pg. 12; Issue 59285; col B.

[106] Multiple quotes from McCabe substantiating his atheist view [18].

[107] "Throughout her childhood, McCarthy took refuge in Catholicism, but, although she was schooled in convents and considered herself a devout Catholic, she tried to call attention to herself as a teenager by pretending to have lost her faith. Questioned about her claim, she found that she had in fact done so. She remained an atheist." Kathy D. Hadley: "McCarthy, Mary", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [19].

[108] "Yes, I am an atheist, and probably Briony is, too. Atheists have as much conscience, possibly more, than people with deep religious conviction, and they still have the same problem of how they reconcile themselves to a bad deed in the past. It’s a little easier if you’ve got a god to forgive you." Solomon, Deborah (December 2, 2007). "A Sinner's Tale: Questions for Ian McEwan". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-12-02. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

[109] "My distaste for Lewis and Tolkien as writers does not stem from the fact that, as an atheist, I disagree with their religious beliefs or think that religious concerns cannot make great literature." – Reinvigorating the Fantastic, Accessed February 12, 2007.

[110] Interviewed in 2004 by Jonathan Miller for his television series Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, Arthur Miller said: "Well I tried to be a religious person when I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, it lasted about two years. And then it simply vanished. I simply lay down one evening to go to sleep and woke up the next day and it wasn't there anymore. [...] Of course, I could no longer believe. I quickly, at some point in my late teens, began reading and surmising that the idea of religion was a creation of man's longing to be a permanent part of the universe. [...] But myself, personally, I don't have the talent to believe. [...] It just seems to me so patent that what man has done is to project himself into the heavens, where he can be all-powerful as he's not here, and moral, and decent, and vengeful, and all the things he's not allowed to do on the earth, and to don that white garment and the beard and be what he wished in his dreams he could be... and I just can't get past that." The Atheism Tapes: Arthur Miller, 3.25–6.14, BBC television, first broadcast October 2004.

[111] Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism.[20]

[112] "I'm also obsessed by religion, being an atheist myself. There's something eternally fascinating about respectability gone wrong." Quoted in Sheridan Morley, 'Mortimer on Heaven and Hell', The Times, 27 May 1976; pg. 7; Issue 59714; col E.

[113] " "Marty really rattled the paramilitaries because he had such good contacts," said John Keane, a friend and colleague of O'Hagan's. "He'd be able to tell you what they had for breakfast before they went out to kill. He had a cynical eye and he was very aware of the sub-structure of society, the unusual alliances, the way people weren't always what they seemed. He was an atheist and a Marxist, liable to start spouting Hegel if you gave him a chance. He used to say, my enemy's enemy is my friend. Very little that happened in Northern Ireland would have surprised Marty." " Susan McKay, 'Faith, Hate and Murder', The Guardian, 17 November 2001, Weekend Pages, Pg. 19.

[114] "Oswald, a vegetarian and atheist, used the pseudonyms Ignotus (in the Political Herald, 1785–7), Sylvester Otway (London newspapers 1788–9), and H. K." T. F. Henderson, 'Oswald, John (c.1760–1793)', rev. Ralph A. Manogue, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[115] "Frances Partidge was a pacifist long before she met Ralph. She says she cannot pinpoint the day with the same clarity with which she can remember discovering herself an atheist—at the age of 11 in an Isle of Wight boarding house—but hearing about the outbreak of World War I in the company of bellicose friends, and a feminist cousin who supported conscientious objectors, put her on the path." Caroline Moorehead, 'Love and laughter on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set', The Times, 12 August 1978; pg. 12; Issue 60378; col A.

[116] Salon magazine 28 April 1999 [21]

[117] "Tanya Byron: Former MP and newspaper columnist Matthew Parris is proud to call himself an atheist. Matthew Parris: I don't have a lot of doubt any more. I think it's a mistake, religion. I think that God doesn't exist. I am not absolutely hundred percent certain of that, any more than I am not absolutely a hundred percent certain that there isn't an elephant in the next room. There may be, but I think it's highly unlikely. Of course I know lots of very nice Christians, and their Christianity doesn't make me angry at all. But I get irritated with laziness of mind, with bad arguments and with a reaching for the comfort of something that, in some part of their brain, they must know is unprovable, and perhaps not true." Am I Normal? episode 'Spirituality', BBC TV, first broadcast BBC2, 28 April 2008 21:00.

[118] "Not since 1964 had Pasolini created such a stir, and even then it was not the content of his The Gospel According to St. Matthew that stunned people. It was the discovery that a director who was both a communist and an atheist could bring such fervor and insight to a religious subject. [...] There are times when Pasolini sounds remarkably religious for a self-acknowledged atheist. "I suffer from the nostalgia of a peasant-type religion, and that is why I am on the side of the servant," he says. "But I do not believe in a metaphysical god. I am religious because I have a natural identification between reality and God. Reality is divine. That is why my films are never naturalistic. The motivation that unites all of my films is to give back to reality its original sacred significance." Guy Flatley, The Atheist who was Obsessed with God, 1969, located at Moviecrazed.com (accessed 25 April 2008).

[119] "Pinter 'on road to recovery'". BBC News. 2002-08-26. Retrieved 2007-04-20. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

[120] "I'm an atheist, at least to the extent that I don't believe in the objective existence of any big beards in the sky."—The Line One Interview with Terry Pratchett, Gay, Anne, 1999. Accessed December 24, 2006.

[121] "As an atheist I'm rather on difficult ground here, but presumably this is what a Christian believes." The Dark Materials debate: life, God, the universe... (interview of Pullman by Rowan Williams), Telegraph.co.uk, 17 March 2004 (Accessed 12 November 2007).

[122] Reviewing Raine's collection In Defence of T. S. Eliot, Charles Osborne and Sally Cousins wrote: "Raine, a fine poet, is also an entertaining and thought-provoking critic, and his subjects range widely from the Bible, which as an atheist he appreciates for its short stories, "some of the greatest ever written", to Bruce Chatwin, whom he sensibly does not take too seriously." Sunday Telegraph, 14 October 2001, Paperbacks, Pg. 14.

[123] "I am an intransigent atheist, but not a militant one." Rand quoted in Michael S. Berliner (1995). Letters of Ayn Rand: March 20, 1965 [22]

[124] Derek Raymond was the pen name of Robert Cook. "Cook was an atheist, but he described his probes into abjection and despair with almost religious intensity." Phil Baker: 'Cook, Robert William Arthur (1931–1994)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [23] (accessed 30 April 2008).

[125] "I tell you something, in case anyone wonders, not a single out-of-body experience, no long corridors of light, I was an atheist when it started and I've remained one. People used to say to me, 'You wait until something really bad happens, you'll start praying', but I didn't and I can't. I don't put this down to any superior being, I put it down to the superb training and skill of the people looking after me. I remain the humanist I always was." Claire Rayner, interviewed by Libby Brooks, The Guardian, September 12, 2003, Features Pages, Pg. 6.

[126] When asked by Larry King if he would ever run for office, Reagan Jr. responded by saying, "I'm an atheist so... I can't be elected to anything, because polls all say that people won't elect an atheist." Interview on Larry King Live, 26 June 2004. See clip.

[127] Reviewing Anne Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Matt Thorne noted: "In a long author's note, Rice explains how she experienced an old-fashioned, strict Roman Catholic childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, before leaving the Church at 18 due to sexual pressure and her desire to read authors she considered forbidden to her, such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus. Two years later she married a passionate atheist, the poet and artist Stan Rice, and in 1974, began a literary career that she now retrospectively views as representing her 'quest for meaning in a world without God'." Sunday Telegraph, 18 December 2005, Section 7, Pg. 43.

[128] Interview with Rushdie by Gigi Marzullo; Sottovoce, RAIUNO, March 31 2006.

[129] CNN reports that: "Among these works are mythical stories through which Saramago, a communist and atheist, weaves his own brand of social and political commentary." In praise of Portuguese (Accessed 30 May 2007)

[130] "If Osama bin Laden were in charge, he would slit my throat; my God, I'm an atheist, a hedonist, and a faggot." Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America, Dan Savage, Plume, 2002, p. 258.

[131] Savage declared in his syndicated sex advice column: "I'm Catholic—in a cultural sense, not an eat-the-wafer, say-the-rosary, burn-down-the-women's-health-center sense. I attended Quigley Preparatory Seminary North, a Catholic high school in Chicago for boys thinking of becoming priests. I got to meet the Pope in 1979..." Savage Love (column), The Village Voice, April 12, 2005.

[132] Listing of Shelley's The Necessity of Atheism at Amazon.com [24].

[133] "I am an atheist. There, I said it. Are you happy, all you atheists out there who have remonstrated with me for adopting the agnostic moniker? If "atheist" means someone who does not believe in God, then an atheist is what I am. But I detest all such labels. Call me what you like — humanist, secular humanist, agnostic, nonbeliever, nontheist, freethinker, heretic, or even bright. I prefer skeptic." Why I Am An Atheist, Michael Shermer, June 2005 (accessed 31 March 2008).

[134] "Like most atheists, I don't mind in the least being insulted for my beliefs, as long as I am not prevented from expressing them." Joan Smith, 'None of us has the right not to be offended', Independent on Sunday, 21 October 2001, Comment, Pg. 30.

[135] Listing of Smith as a founder of Freethinkers New York.

[136] Reviewing Steele's book, Victor J Stenger called it "A clear, concise, complete, and convincing presentation of the case for atheism."

[137] "By early 1890 Steevens had broken with his family's Brethrenism, and he described himself as 'a discontented atheist' (Steevens to Browning; Oscar Browning MSS)." Sidney Lee, 'Steevens, George Warrington (1869–1900)', rev. Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[138] "A decadent dandy who envied the manly Victorian achievements of his family, a professed atheist haunted by religious terrors, a generous and loving man who fell out with many of his friends - the Robert Louis Stevenson of Claire Harman's biography is all of these and, of course, a bed-ridden invalid who wrote some of the finest adventure stories in the language. [...] Worse still, he affected a Bohemian style, haunted the seedier parts of the Old Town, read Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, and declared himself an atheist. This caused a painful rift with his father, who damned him as a "careless infidel". Theo Tait, review of Robert Louis Stevenson: a Biography by Claire Harman, Daily Telegraph, 29 January 2005, Books Pg.3

[139] Matt Taibbi, interveiwed by 'Friendly Atheist' Hemant Mehta: "HM: What role should religion play in the political arena? MT: Well, I’m an atheist/agnostic, so I would say none. People should stick to solving the problems they have the tools to solve." 'Interview with Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi', friendlyatheist.com, 29 April 2008 (accessed 10 May 2008).

[140] In Allen Tate: Orphan of the South, biographer Thomas A. Underwood quotes Tate as saying: "I am an atheist, but a religious one—which means there is no organization for my religion."

[141] Commenting on Tendryakov's obituary in the Times, Professor Geoffrey A. Hosking wrote: "Perhaps because of his concern for the human personality, Tendryakov was the first writer in the post-Stalin period to raise religious questions seriously in fiction. Though an atheist himself, he understood the intrinsic importance of religion, and did not treat it merely satirically or condescendingly." 'Vladimir Tendryakov', The Times, 17 August 1984; pg. 10; Issue 61912; col G.

[142] "Characterizing himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a skeptic, he enjoyed his image of impudent prurience, though he revealed little to the public of his personal life." Dennis Wepman: "Thayer, Tiffany", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed 28 April 2008) [25].

[143] "Facebook knows I'm an atheist, and if Facebook knows it then the CIA probably knows it too, which could be a problem if I tried to stand for election in South Carolina, Mississippi or any of the other seven US States which require candidates to believe in a supreme being." Facebook knows I'm an atheist, New Humanist (web exclusive article), January 2008 (accessed 17 April 2008).

[144] "His beliefs moved from pantheism to an atheism which causes less of a frisson now than it did in his own day, and his apocalyptic vision of the megalopolis in 'The City of Dreadful Night' continues to have resonance." Ann Margaret Ridler, 'Thomson , James (1834–1882)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 6 May 2008).

[145] "B.B.C. 2 (Ch. 33) [...] 10.20 Doubts and Certainties: a Dean talks to an atheist, with Harry Williams, Nicholas Tomalin." 'Television and radio', The Times, 17 September 1968; pg. 18; Issue 57358; col A.

[146] "Her parents were radicals in their outlook and they educated their daughter in a rationalist and humanist mode. As an atheist she saw religion only as the shield of tyranny, intolerance, and cruelty." D. A. Farnie, 'Utley, Winifred (1899–1978)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[Haught-147] Haught, James A. (1996). 2,000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt. Prometheus Books. pp. pp. 261-262. ISBN 1-57392-067-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help)

[148] "She returned to England an atheist and radical, eager to view nihilism in Russia." Patrick Waddington, 'Voynich , Ethel Lilian (1864–1960)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, October 2007 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[149] "[...] I'm an admirer of what you might call 'Enlightenment values' (though they go way beyond the Enlightenment). Things like scientific empiricism, the separation of church and state, the waning of absolutism and tyranny, yes, I cling to those. [...] It [his childhood home] was quite a religious household. I wouldn't be surprised, frankly, if I'm the first Wheen to be an atheist. And so, of course, there was a lot of church-going and all the rest of it, and gradually, through my childhood, I found myself rejecting more and more of it, until finally all I was left with was the Litany and the hymns. I know the Book of Common Prayer and Hymns Ancient and Modern and the King James Bible practically backwards, and I'm very fond of them all." Interview with Francis Wheen by Simon Jones for Third Way magazine, reprinted in Wheen's 2004 book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, Harper Collins paperback 'P.S.' section, p.2, ISBN 0-00-714097-5.

[150] "He was brought up in Reform Judaism, became an atheist in his teens, and remained sceptical about the religious temperament." S. P. Rosenbaum, 'Woolf, Leonard Sidney (1880–1969)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed 2 May 2008).

[151] Nobel Lecture by Gao Xingjian

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@@ Line 130: / Line 130: @@
 * [[John Mortimer|Sir John Mortimer]] [[Order of the British Empire|CBE]] [[Queen's Counsel|QC]] (1923&ndash;): English [[barrister]], dramatist and author, famous as the creator of ''[[Rumpole of the Bailey]]''.<ref>"I'm also obsessed by religion, being an atheist myself. There's something eternally fascinating about respectability gone wrong." Quoted in Sheridan Morley, 'Mortimer on Heaven and Hell', ''The Times'', 27 May 1976; pg. 7; Issue 59714; col E.</ref>
 * [[Martin O'Hagan]] (1950&ndash;2001): Northern Irish journalist, the most prominent journalist to be assassinated during the the Troubles.<ref>" "Marty really rattled the paramilitaries because he had such good contacts," said John Keane, a friend and colleague of O'Hagan's. "He'd be able to tell you what they had for breakfast before they went out to kill. He had a cynical eye and he was very aware of the sub-structure of society, the unusual alliances, the way people weren't always what they seemed. He was an atheist and a Marxist, liable to start spouting Hegel if you gave him a chance. He used to say, my enemy's enemy is my friend. Very little that happened in Northern Ireland would have surprised Marty." " Susan McKay, 'Faith, Hate and Murder', ''The Guardian'', 17 November 2001, Weekend Pages, Pg. 19.</ref>
-* [[Ananda Selah Osel]] (1982&ndash;): poet, essayist, and magazine editor. Osel calls himself an atheist, Buddhist, and nihilist.<ref>"...I accept Buddhism... It’s an atheistic philosophy... I don’t expect them to be sympathetic to my atheism, my nihilism, or anything of the sort." [http://www.eloquentatheist.com/?p=197 An Interview with Atheist Poet Ananda Selah Osel], ''The Eloquent Atheist'' (Accessed 5 April 2008)</ref>
 * [[John Oswald (activist)]] (c.1760&ndash;1793): Scottish journalist, poet, social critic and revolutionary.<ref>"Oswald, a vegetarian and atheist, used the pseudonyms Ignotus (in the Political Herald, 1785–7), Sylvester Otway (London newspapers 1788–9), and H. K." T. F. Henderson, [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20922 'Oswald, John (c.1760–1793)'], rev. Ralph A. Manogue, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2006 (accessed 2 May 2008).</ref>
 * [[Frances Partridge]] (1900&ndash;2004): English member of the [[Bloomsbury Group]] and a writer, probably best known for the publication of her diaries.<ref>"Frances Partidge was a pacifist long before she met Ralph. She says she cannot pinpoint the day with the same clarity with which she can remember discovering herself an atheist—at the age of 11 in an Isle of Wight boarding house—but hearing about the outbreak of World War I in the company of bellicose friends, and a feminist cousin who supported conscientious objectors, put her on the path." Caroline Moorehead, 'Love and laughter on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set', ''The Times'', 12 August 1978; pg. 12; Issue 60378; col A.</ref>