Antireligion

Antireligion is opposition to religion.

Antireligion is distinct from atheism, although many antireligionists are also atheists. It can be indirect apathy toward organised mainstream religion, or can be extended to include any form of belief in the supernatural or the divine. Antireligion is also distinct from antitheism, which is opposition to belief in deities rather than opposition to religion itself.

Notable antireligious people

• Georges Bataille, Nietzsche-influenced surrealist, journalist and philosopher who held that modern Western civilization was characterized by the myth of "the absence of myth".
• William Blake, poet and painter. Although he remained very spiritual, he viewed organised religion as oppressive.
• Brandon Boyd, Incubus frontman, who although antireligious remains "spiritual".
• Richard Dawkins, a prominent atheist and evolutionary biologist. He wrote The God Delusion criticizing belief in god(s) in 2006.
• John Dewey, an atheistic American pragmatic philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, believed neither religion nor metaphysics could provide legitimate moral or social values, though scientific empiricism could.
• Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer, called religion "the last vestige of barbarism."
• Catherine Fahringer, campaigner in Texas for a strict separation of Church and State.
• Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder with her mother of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and, with her husband Dan Barker, the current co-president.
• Johann Hari, British atheist journalist and a self-described antitheist.
• Sam Harris, author and scientist, who argues that religious moderation provides cover for dangerous fundamentalism .
• Christopher Hitchens, outspoken and uncompromising antitheist, journalist and literary critic, author of the book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
• Alistair Horne, British historian, believes peace follows when prosperity reduces religious influence.
• Enver Hoxha, former head-of-state of Albania, the only state to ever officially ban religion..
• David Hume, the Scottish agnostic philosopher, known for his skepticism, who wrote that human reason is wholly inadequate to make any assumptions about the divine, whether through a priori reasoning or observation of nature .
• Robert Maynard Hutchins, past president of the University of Chicago. Although religious, thought religion was not adaquate for organizing modern universities and educational institutions, preferring metaphysics.
• Penn Jillette, illusionist, comic, actor, former-radiohost
• Elton John, British musician and gay activist, who claims he "would ban organized religion (except for the Roman Catholic Church and Metropolitan Community Church)" because it "promotes hatred and spite against gays" and "doesn't work." .
• Kerry King - Guitarist of American thrash metal band Slayer. Much of King's lyrics are satanic and anti-religious.
• Vladimir Lenin - Like most Marxists, he believed all religions to be "the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class".
• John Lennon, singer. Famously sang "and no religion too" in his song Imagine. Lennon commented that the song was "an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted."
• H.L. Mencken, American journalist and satirist who famously ridiculed the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial.
• Harvey Milk, gay rights activist and Member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He believed that religion was dangerous and said it was a perversion.
• PZ Myers, American biology professor and author of the blog Pharyngula.
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Der Antichrist, general anti-Christian statements in many other works. Nietzsche believed Christianity, and specifically Christian morality, to be the product of a transvaluation of values amongst the Jewish lower classes who bucked at Roman rule, and ascribed its other-worldly nature as the product of ressentiment, or the desire to devalue the things of this world out of spite. Famous for popularizing the phrase, "God is dead."
• Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, plaintiff of Murray v. Curlett, and self proclamed sexual liberitarian. Allegedly once said that she wanted to be buried in an anonymous grave because she "didn't want any christers comin' around and prayin' over [her] dead body".
• Michel Onfray, French anarchist philosopher
• Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist .
• Ayn Rand, novelist and philosopher, founder of the objectivist school of metaphysics, famous for writing Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness.
• Bertrand Russell, British logician, analytic philosopher and atheist
• Victor Stenger, astrophysicist and author of God: The Failed Hypothesis, who claims that the existence of a supreme Being has been disproven by the scientific establishment.
• Max Stirner, anarcho-egoist and proto-existentialist who penned The Ego And Its Own.
• Wiley Miller, author of the award-winning cartoon Non Sequitur, who has portrayed religion as either in the way of progress, idiotic, or hypocritical in just about every strip that mentions religion.

Antireligious organizations

• The Rational Response Squad, a group of American antitheists who lobby for atheism. They are most famous for their controversial "Blasphemy Challenge" on YouTube.
• The Society of the Godless, a mass volunteer antireligious organization of Soviet workers and others in 1925-1947.

See also

• Anti-Christian
• Anti-Judaism
• Anti-Catholicism
• Anti-Christian sentiment
• Anti-clericalism
• Anti-Mormonism
• Anti-Muslim
• Anti-Protestantism
• Antitheism
• Civil rights
• Conflict thesis
• Conversational intolerance
• Discrimination against atheists
• Faith and rationality
• Freethought
• Objectivism (Ayn Rand)
• Persecution of Christians
• Relationship between religion and science
• Religious persecution
• Religious segregation
• Religious intolerance