OK... 354 in alpha order,

That's enough to open a daily thread like the "Evil One of the Day"...
Any ideas to rank these? Perhaps by categories: philosophers, scientists etc... Of course, politicians...!

Forrest J. Ackerman
Douglas Adams
John Adams
Phillip Adams
Brandy Alexandre
Dave Allen
Ethan Allen
Steve Allen
Woody Allen
Shulamit Aloni
Thomas J. Altizer
Natalie Angier
Liv Arnesen
Madison Arnold
Peter William Atkins
Isaac Asimov
Russell Baker
Iain M. Banks
Clive Barker
Dan Barker
MC Paul Barman
Dave Barry
Richard Bartle
Steve Benson
Ingmar Bergman
Björk
Bill Blass
Jim Bohanan
Sir Herman Bondi
Pierre Boulez
T. Coraghessan Boyle
Nathaniel Branden
Marlon Brando
Richard Branson
Rodney Brooks
Andrew Brown
Peter Buck
Warren Buffett
Luther Burbank
Richard Burton
John Byrne
Dean Cameron
George Carlin
Andrew Carnegie
John Carmack
Adam Carolla
John Carpenter
Asia Carrera
Fidel Castro
Dick Cavett
John Chancellor
Stephen Chapman
Vic Chesnutt
Noam Chomsky
Mohammed Choukri
Chumbawamba
Paul and Patricia Churchland
Alexander Cockburn
John Conway
Alex Cox
Francis Crick
Quentin Crisp
David Cronenberg
David Cross
Alan Cumming
Marie Curie
Justin Currie
Ron Dakron
Julia Darling
Charles Darwin
William B. Davis
Richard Dawkins
Daniel Dennett
David Deutsch
Charles Dickens
Ani DiFranco
Micky Dolenz
Amanda Donohoe
Roddy Doyle
Paul Draper
W. E. B. DuBois
Patrick Duffy
Dean Edell
Thomas A. Edison
Paul Edwards
Greg Egan
Barbara Ehrenreich
Albert Einstein
Paul Ehrlich
Albert Ellis
Warren Ellis
Harlan Ellison
Garth Ennis
Brian Eno
Diane Farr
David Feherty
Jules Feiffer
Larry Fessenden
Richard P. Feynman
Harvey Fierstein
Nuno Filipe
Bob Fingerman
Antony Flew
Larry Flynt
Dario Fo
Dave Foley
James Forman
Jodie Foster
John Fowles
Robin Lane Fox
Benjamin Franklin
Sigmund Freud
Kinky Friedman
R. Buckminster Fuller
Matilda Joslyn Gage
Janeane Garofalo
Bill Gates
Bob Geldof
Jack Germond
Ira Glass
Jean Luc Godard
Friedrich (?) Goethe
Emma Goldman
Al Goldstein
Nadine Gordimer
Stephan Jay Gould
Greg Graffin
Spalding Gray
Seth Green
Stephen Greenblatt
Rachel Griffiths
Joe Haldeman
Alan Hale
Kathleen Hanna
Thomas Hardy
Harry Harrison
Nina Hartley
Roy Hattersley
James A. Haught
Bill Hayden
Judith Hayes
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
Nat Hentoff
Katharine Hepburn
Frank Herbert
Paul Hester
Bill Hicks
Christopher Hitchens
General Choi Hong-Hi
Langston Hughes
David Hume
Nicholas Humphrey
Derek Humphry
Thomas Henry Huxley
Robert Ingersoll
Thomas Jefferson
Stephan Jenkins
Penn Jillette
Angelina Jolie
Neil Jordan
Joachim Kahl
Jonathan Katz
Kawaljeet Kaur
Gene Kelly
Ludovic Kennedy
Margot Kidder
Florence King
Neil Kinnock
W. P. Kinsella
Michael Kinsley
Melvin Konner
Frank Kozik
Kramer
Paul Krassner
Milan Kundera
Paul Kurtz
Ring Lardner Jr.
Mr. Lavanam
D. H. Lawrence
Richard Leakey
Alexander I. Lebed
Tom Lehrer
Mike Leigh
Stanislaw Lem
John Lennon
Gerda Lerner
Michael Lewis
Tom Leykis
Abraham Lincoln
John Lydon
James Madison
John Malkovich
Barry Manilow
Shirley Manson
Michael Martin
Karl Marx
Nick Mason
Marcello Mastroianni
John McCarthy
Malachy McCourt
Ian McEwan
Todd McFarlane
Montana McGlynn
Sir Ian McKellen
Alexander McQueen
Butterfly McQueen
Jonathan Meades
Antonio Mendoza
H.L. Mencken
Tom Metzger
John Stuart Mill
Arthur Miller
Mike Mills
Marvin Minsky
Warren Mitchell
James A. Michener
Momus
John Money
Hans Moravec
Max More
Henry Morgentaler
Desmond Morris
James Morrow
John Mortimer
Frank Mullen
Taslima Nasrin
Ramendra Nath
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ted Nelson
Randy Newman
Mike Nichols
Jack Nicholson
Kai Nielsen
Oscar Niemeyer
Robert Nozick
Gary Numan
Ronald Numbers
Bob Odenkirk
Madlyn Murray O'Hare
George Orwell
Camille Paglia
Thomas Paine
Andy Partridge
Robert Patrick
Mark Pauline
Leonard Peikoff
Paul Pfalzner
Julia Phillips
Ferdinand Piech
Edgar Allen Poe
Katha Pollitt
Paula Poundstone
Vladimir Pozner
Terry Pratchett
Marcel Proust
Paul Provenza
Phillip Pullman
Ted Rall
Ayn Rand
James Randi
Ron Reagan Jr.
Christopher Reeve
Rick Reynolds
Griff Rhys-Jones
Mordecai Richler
Matt Ridley
Brian Ritchie
Brad Roberts
Chris Robinson
Gene Roddenberry
Neil Rogers
Eleanor Roosevelt?
Richard Rorty
Arundhati Roy
Jane Rule
Salman Rushdie
Bertrand Russell
D. A. F. de Sade
Carl Sagan
Mona Sahlin
Sebastião Salgado
Henry Stephens Salt
Margaret Sanger
Santayana
Robert Sapolsky
José Saramago
Pamela Sargent
Jean Paul Sartre
John Sayles
Arthur Schopenhauer
Charles Schultz
Albert Schweitzer
Eugenie Scott
George C. Scott
Captain Sensible
Nick Seymour
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Robert I. Sherman
Michael Shermer
Claude Simon
Upton Sinclair
Slayer
J.J.C. Smart
George H. Smith
Robert Smith
Lee Smolin
Steven Soderbergh
Ed Sorel
Annika Sörenstam
George Soros
Richard Stallman
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Peter Steele
Rod Steiger
Gloria Steinem
Bruce Sterling
Howard Stern
J. Michael Straczynski
Ken Stringfellow
Donald Sutherland
Julia Sweeney
Matthew Sweet
Teller
Studs Terkel
Henry David Thoreau
Leon Tolstoi
Tool
Linus Torvalds
Ted Turner
Mark Twain
Eddie Vedder
Gore Vidal
Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet)
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Sarah Vowell
Matt Wagner
Annika Walter
James Watson
Steven Weinberg
Joss Whedon
James McNeill Whistler
Oscar Wilde
Harland Williams
Tennessee Williams
Ian Wilmut
Lewis Wolpert
Virginia Woolf
Steve Wozniak
Bruce Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Zappa
Zarkov
Nick Zedd

Historical
Political
Scientists
Writers
Philosophers
Activists


Any candidate is listed in all applicable catagories.

If anyone can think of a grouping I missed feel free to add to it.

definately a worthwhile catagory.

Thanks!

:toast:

Winston Churchill (almost certainly)

Its no longer up to date as some have died ( :( ) and some others have been discovered. The website is http://www.celebatheists.com/

hometown hero.

:hi:

Stop by and see us more often!

Headline, San Francisco Bulletin, January 22, 1926: "I'm an Infidel, Declares Burbank, Casting Doubt on Soul Immortality Theory."

Burbank apparently decided to declare his...er...infidelity because of two things. The first was the 1925 Scopes trial, which horrified him with its attacks on Darwin. The second was Henry Ford, Burbank's friend, suddenly declaring a belief in reincarnation. Burbank seems to have thought that was crazy. Given some of Ford's other beliefs, Burbank was probably right.

</usual annoying anal-retentive trivia>

Many people believe Burbank, CA, was also named for Luther Burbank, but it wasn't. That Burbank was named for its founder, Dr. David Burbank, a New Hampshire dentist who moved west and became a hugely successful land speculator. The site of his ranch house later became part of the Warner Brothers studio backlot.

just don't post that often.

I'm swamped.

...for all the work on this list.

It really is useful for showing that atheists are not just a tiny minority of commie crackpots, etc.

Frankly, I don't know who some of these people are! I can make a start and use an "unknown" category and then others could chime in with their input??

http://www.celebatheists.com/

This is the list from Celebatheists. No one is maintaining the list anylonger. If someone has the time and the web skills it would be very cool if they took it over. This is a valuable commodity in the atheist community and it is just going to fade away. :(

And a sort of odd one, too. A DEATHBED confesssion of disbelief! This is the opposite of what we usually hear.

I've recently been reading the book Transatlantic by Stephen Fox. It's a history of the great passenger lines and the engineering that went into their ships. (Stop looking at me that way! Yes, I am a geek.)

Writing about the Canadian who founded Cunard Lines, Samuel Cunard, the author writes:

In his letters he would make passing religious references. "If it should please God that we should all live to see next year," he might write...

But this was just obeisance to an expected form, perhaps inserted simply to please a pious correspondent.

On his deathbed, when his son Ned suggested the attention of a clergyman, Sam declared "that he did not feel and admit and believe"--a dying confession that told the stark if unwanted truth.