List of Jewish atheists and agnostics
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A number of Jewish atheists and agnostics: Albert Einstein • Woody Allen • Mark Zuckerberg • Karl Marx • Daniel Radcliffe • Nina Hartley • Sigmund Freud • Jack Black • Billy Joel • Ayn Rand • Bill Maher • Carl Sagan
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Based on Jewish law's emphasis on matrilineal descent, even religiously conservative Orthodox Jewish authorities would accept an atheist born to a Jewish mother as fully Jewish.[1] A 2011 study found that half of all American Jews have doubts about the existence of God, compared to 10–15% of other American religious groups.[2]
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Contents
Entertainment
Cinema
- Woody Allen[3][4] – influential American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician
- David Cronenberg[5][6][7] – Canadian filmmaker, screenwriter and actor, one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre
- Stanley Donen[8] – film director and choreographer whose most celebrated works are Singin' in the Rain and On the Town
- Richard Dreyfuss (agnostic[9]) – American actor
- Sergei Eisenstein – Soviet Russian film director and film theorist[10][11][12]
- Harvey Fierstein[13] – American actor, playwright, winner of two Tony Awards
- Stephen Fry[14] – English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director and a director of Norwich City Football Club
- Keith Gordon[15] – American actor and film director
- Nina Hartley[16] – American pornographic actor, pornographic film director, sex educator, feminist, and author
- Stanley Kubrick – American film director, writer, film producer, and photographer[17][18]
- John Landis[19] – American film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, collaborated with Michael Jackson
- Daniel Radcliffe (self-described atheist "and a militant atheist when religion starts impacting on legislation")[20][21] – English actor, protagonist of Harry Potter film series
- Harold Ramis (irreligious[22]) – American actor, director, and writer specializing in comedy
- Carl Reiner (self-described Jewish atheist[23]) – American actor, film director, producer, writer, comedian, won nine Emmy Awards and one Grammy Award
- Rob Reiner – American actor, film director, producer, and political activist[24]
- Adrienne Shelly (agnostic[25]) – American actor, screenwriter and director
- Todd Solondz[26] – American independent film screenwriter and director known for his style of dark, thought-provoking, socially conscious satire
- Matt Stone[27][28] – American actor, voice actor, animator, screenwriter, producer, musician, South Park
- Gene Wilder – American actor[29]
Comedy
- David Baddiel ("fundamentalist Jewish atheist"[30][31]) – British comedian and television presenter
- Jack Black[32][33] – American comedian, actor and musician, Frat Pack comedian group, Golden Globe award
- Michael Ian Black[34][35] – American comedian, actor, writer, director
- David Cross – American actor and comedian[34][35][36]
- Larry David (1947–) – American actor, writer, comedian, and producer[37]
- Myq Kaplan[38] – American stand-up comedian
- Bill Maher (antitheist, self-described atheist,[39][40] apatheist[41][42] and agnostic[43]) – American stand-up comedian, author, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher
- Marc Maron (negative atheist[44]) – American stand-up comedian, radio and podcast host
- Sarah Silverman (irreligious[45][46] agnostic[47]) – American comedian, writer, actor, singer, musician
- Gene Wilder – American actor[29]
Comic book writers
- Neil Gaiman (agnostic[48]) – English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre and films; works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book
- Stan Lee (agnostic[49]) – American comic book writer, editor, actor, producer, publisher, television personality, and the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics
Music
- Larry Adler[50] – American musician, widely acknowledged as one of the world's most skilled harmonica players
- Irving Berlin (agnostic[51]) – American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history
- Aaron Copland (agnostic[52]) – American composer
- Shalom Hanoch[53] – Israeli rock singer, lyricist, composer, father of Israeli rock[better source needed]
- Richard Hell – American singer, songwriter, bass guitarist, and writer[54]
- Billy Joel[55][56] – American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer
- Jerome Kern (nonbeliever[57]) – American composer of musical theatre and popular music
- Geddy Lee[58] – Canadian musician, best known as the lead vocalist, bassist, and keyboardist for the Canadian rock group Rush
- Tom Lehrer (agnostic atheist[59]) – American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician
- Jenny Lewis[60] – American singer-songwriter musician and actress
- Gustav Mahler (agnostic[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68]) – Late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation
- Randy Newman – American singer-songwriter, arranger, composer, and pianist, known for his distinctive voice, mordant (and often satirical) pop songs and for film scores[69][70]
- Anton Rubinstein[71] – Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
- Kurt Weill (agnostic[72]) – German composer
Radio
- Ira Glass – host of This American Life[73]
- Max Kellerman[74] – American boxing commentator and sports talk radio host based in LA
- Mike Mendoza – British radio presenter and politician best known for the overnight shows he presented on talkSPORT between 2004 and 2008
- Mike Rosen – conservative talk show host
- Howard Stern (agnostic atheist[75][76]) – American radio personality, television host, author, actor, and photographer
Sports/games
- Mikhail Botvinnik (1911–1995) – Soviet and Russian grandmaster and three-time World Chess Champion, widely considered one of the greatest chess players of all time[77]
Humanities
Archaeology
- Eleazar Sukenik – Israeli archaeologist and professor of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, undertaking excavations in Jerusalem, and recognising the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Israel[78]
Arts
- Ernst L. Freud[79] – Austrian architect, youngest son of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
- Arthur Miller[80] – American playwright and essayist
- Hannah Moscovitch[81] – Canadian playwright
- Julia Pascal[82] – British playwright and theater director
- Harold Rubin (positive atheist[83]) – South African-born Israeli visual artist and free jazz clarinettist
Historians
- Isaiah Berlin (agnostic[84]) – British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation
- Raul Hilberg[85][86] – Austrian-born American political scientist, scholar of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews
- Lisa Jardine[87] – British historian of the early modern period
- Derek J. de Solla Price – British-American historian of science[88]
- Adam Bruno Ulam (agnostic[89]) – Polish and American historian and political scientist at Harvard University; one of the world's foremost authorities on Russia and the Soviet Union; author of twenty books and many articles
Law
- Haim Cohn – Israeli jurist and politician
- Cesare Lombroso[90] – Italian criminologist and physician, founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology
- Ilya Somin – American law professor and constitutional scholar
- Helena Wolińska-Brus – military prosecutor in Poland with the rank of lieutenant-colonel (podpułkownik), involved in Stalinist regime show trials of the 1950s
Literature
- Isaac Asimov (atheist, humanist and rationalist,[91] identified as "non-observant Jew"[92]) – American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books
- Howard Bloom – American author and scientific thinker[93]
- Alain de Botton[94] – Swiss writer, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur, resident in the United Kingdom, author of Religion for Atheists
- Yosef Haim Brenner – Russian-born Hebrew-language author, one of the pioneers of modern Hebrew literature
- Lawrence Bush[95] – author of several books of Jewish fiction and non-fiction, including Waiting for God: The Spiritual Explorations of a Reluctant Atheist and Bessie: A Novel of Love and Revolution
- Daniel Handler – American author better known under the pen name of Lemony Snicket; has declared himself to be "pretty much an atheist"[96] and a secular humanist;[97] has hinted that the Baudelaires in his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events might be atheists[98]
- Franz Kafka (agnostic atheist[99][100][101][102][103][104][105]) – influential Czech-born German-language author of novels and short stories
- Janusz Korczak (agnostic[106][107][108]) – Polish-Jewish educator, children's author and pediatrician; after spending many years working as director of an orphanage in Warsaw, he refused freedom and remained with the orphans as they were sent to Treblinka extermination camp during the Grossaktion Warsaw of 1942
- Primo Levi[109] – Italian chemist and writer best known for If This is a Man, an account of his year in Auschwitz
- Sami Michael[110] – Israeli author, President of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI)
- Matthew Norman – journalist for The Telegraph and The Independent
- Leonard Peikoff[111] – author, philosopher, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute
- Harold Pinter* – Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor; one of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years[112]
- Maurice Bernard Sendak[113] – American writer and illustrator of children's literature, Where the Wild Things Are
- Shaul Tchernichovsky – Russian-born Hebrew poet, Lyrical-erotic Poetry, Epic Poetry
- Israel Zangwill[114] – British humorist and writer
Literary critics
- Barthold Fles – Dutch-American literary agent, author, translator, editor, and publisher
- Calel Perechodnik (1916–1943) – Polish Jewish diarist and Jewish Ghetto policeman at the Warsaw Ghetto[115]
- Marcel Reich-Ranicki[116] – Polish-born German literary critic and member of the literary group Gruppe 47
- Kazimiera Szczuka – literary historian, literary critic, television personality, feminist
Novelists
- Mike Gold – novelist, literary critic, and lifelong communist, known for novel Jews Without Money
- Rebecca Goldstein[117] – American philosophical novelist, essayist, and "New New Atheist" who authored 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
- Stanislaw Lem – Polish science fiction novelist and essayist[118]
- Marcel Proust (agnostic atheist[119][120]) – French novelist, critic, and essayist; best known for his work In Search of Lost Time
- Ayn Rand[121][122] – Russian-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, ethical egoist, rationalist, free-market capitalist, founder of the Objectivist philosophy
- Philip Roth[123] – American novelist: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's Complaint
- Boris Strugatsky (agnostic atheist)[124] – Russian science fiction novelist; known for co-writing the science fiction novel Roadside Picnic
Philosophy
- Andrew Bernstein – proponent of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, an author, and a professor of philosophy
- Noam Chomsky (irreligious[125][126]) – American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer; Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar
- Jacques Derrida[127] – French philosopher, deconstruction, continental philosophy
- Paul Edwards[128][129] – Austrian-American ethicist
- Sidney Hook (agnostic[130]) – American philosopher of the Pragmatist school, known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics
- Karl Popper (agnostic[131][132]) – Austro-British philosopher, advocate of liberal democracy and free markets, founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, professor at London School of Economics, falsifiability
- Peter Singer[133][134] – Australian ethicist at Princeton University, animal rights advocate
- Baruch Spinoza[135] (pandeist[136]) – influential Dutch philosopher, rationalist, laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment, modern biblical criticism and nontheism, Ethics
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (agnostic[137][138]) – Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
Formal, natural and applied sciences
-
- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
Astronomy
- Ralph Alpher (agnostic/humanist[139]) – American cosmologist; known for the seminal paper on Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the Alpher–Bethe–Gamow paper
- Hermann Bondi – Anglo-Austrian mathematician and cosmologist, developed steady-state theory, contributed to general theory of relativity[140][141]
- Carl Sagan (agnostic nontheist)[142][143][144] – American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences, Cornell University
Biology and medicine
- Julius Axelrod* – American biochemist, reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, pineal gland, share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine[145]
- Hans Baruch – American physiologist/inventor who is noted mainly for his contributions to scientific apparatus and instruments in the field of automated clinical chemistry
- Bernard Davis – American biologist who made major contributions in microbial physiology and metabolism, Harvard Medical School
- Rosalind Franklin (agnostic[146][147]) – British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite
- Stephen Jay Gould (agnostic[148]) – American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian and popularizer. Gould called himself a "Jewish agnostic".
- Dan Graur – Romania-born American Jewish evolutionary biologist, firm atheist, and scientific critic
- François Jacob*[149] – French biologist; with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription; Nobel Prize in Medicine
- Rita Levi-Montalcini* (1909–2012) – Italian neurologist; with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of nerve growth factor[150]
- Élie Metchnikoff* – Russian biologist, zoologist and protozoologist; known for his research into the immune system; received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908, shared with Paul Ehrlich[151]
- Max Perutz* – Austrian-born British molecular biologist; shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins[152]
- Samuel Mitja Rapoport – physician, biochemist, European Jewish émigré, and Communist
- Robert Sapolsky[153] – American neuroscientist, author, Stanford University[154]
- George Wald* – American scientist; known for his work with pigments in the retina; won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit[155]
- Lewis Wolpert[156] – developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster
Chemistry
- Roald Hoffmann* – American theoretical chemist; recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry[157]
- Jerome Karle* (agnostic[158]) – American physical chemist; with Herbert A. Hauptman, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985, for the direct analysis of crystal structures using X-ray scattering techniques
- Harry Kroto* ("devout atheist"[159]) – British chemist, share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- George Olah* (agnostic[160]) – 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, discoverer of superacids
Computer science and artificial intelligence
- Scott Aaronson (self-described "disbelieving atheist infidel heretic"[161]) – American theoretical computer scientist and faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT
- Jacob Appelbaum – American computer security researcher and hacker; a core member of the Tor project[162]
- John McCarthy – American computer scientist and cognitive scientist; coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) and was influential in its early development; developed the Lisp programming language family; significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language; popularized timesharing; won the Turing Award in 1971[163][164]
- Marvin Minsky – American cognitive scientist and computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) at MIT; won the Turing Award in 1969[165][166]
- Judea Pearl – Israeli American computer scientist and philosopher; known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks; won the Turing Award in 2011[167]
- Richard Stallman – American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer[168]
- Aaron Swartz (1986–2012) – American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist; was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py, and the social news site Reddit, in which he was an equal partner after its merger with his company Infogami[169]
- Eliezer Yudkowsky – American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence[170]
Engineering
- Hertha Marks Ayrton (agnostic[171]) – English engineer, mathematician and inventor
- Emile Berliner (agnostic[172][173]) – German-born American inventor; known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph)
- Dennis Gabor* – Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor; known for his invention of holography; received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics[174][175]
- Ray Kurzweil (1948–) – American author, scientist, inventor and futurist; author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism[176]
Mathematics
- Richard E. Bellman (agnostic[177]) – American applied mathematician, known for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics
- Jacob Bronowski (agnostic[178]) – Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor; presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book
- Paul Erdős – (agnostic atheist[179][180]) Hungarian mathematician, published more papers than any other mathematician in history[181]
- Jacques Hadamard – French mathematician; made major contributions in number theory, complex function theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations[182]
- Herbert A. Hauptman* – American mathematician; with Jerome Karle, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985[183]
- Samuel Karlin[184] – American mathematician, Stanford University
- John von Neumann (agnostic[185][186][187]) – Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, and statistics
- George Pólya (agnostic[188]) – Hungarian Jewish mathematician; professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University; made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory; noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education
- Laurent Schwartz (1915–2002) – French mathematician; awarded the Fields medal for his work on distributions[189]
- William James Sidis – American mathematician, cosmologist, inventor, linguist, historian and child prodigy[190]
- Alan Sokal (1955–) – American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University; known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996[191]
- Hugo Steinhaus – Polish mathematician and educator[192]
- Alfred Tarski – Polish logician and mathematician; prolific author known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic[193]
- Stanislaw Ulam (agnostic[194][195]) – Polish-Jewish mathematician; participated in America's Manhattan Project, originated the Teller–Ulam design of thermonuclear weapons, invented the Monte Carlo method of computation, and suggested nuclear pulse propulsion
- André Weil (agnostic[196][197]) – French mathematician; known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry
- Norbert Wiener (agnostic[198]) – American mathematician and child prodigy; regarded as the originator of cybernetics
- Oscar Zariski (1899–1986) – American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century[199]
Physics
- Zhores Alferov* – Soviet and Russian physicist and academic who contributed significantly to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics; inventor of the heterotransistor; winner of 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics[200][201]
- Hans Bethe* – German-American nuclear physicist; Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis;[202] versatile theoretical physicist; made important contributions to quantum electrodynamics, nuclear physics, solid-state physics and astrophysics; during World War II, he was head of the Theoretical Division at the secret Los Alamos laboratory which developed the first atomic bombs; there he played a key role in calculating the critical mass of the weapons, and did theoretical work on the implosion method used in both the Trinity test and the "Fat Man" weapon dropped on Nagasaki, Japan[203]
- David Bohm (agnostic[204]) – American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy of mind, and neuropsychology
- Niels Bohr* (1885–1962) – Danish physicist; known for his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922[205][206][207][208][209]
- David Deutsch – Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford; pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer[210]
- Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) – Austrian-Dutch physicist; made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics[211][212]
- Albert Einstein* (agnostic[213] nontheist,[214] self-described Spinozist[215]) – influential German-born physicist, developed general theory of relativity, father of modern physics,[216][217] Nobel Prize in Physics (see also Religious views of Albert Einstein)
- Richard Feynman* (positive atheist[218][219]) – American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics, Nobel Prize in Physics
- James Franck* – German physicist; won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925[220]
- Jerome I. Friedman* (agnostic[221]) – American physicist; in 1968–1969, commuting between MIT and California, he conducted experiments with Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later known to be quarks; for this, they shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics; Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
- Murray Gell-Mann* (agnostic[222][223][224]) – American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles
- Vitaly Ginzburg*[225] – Soviet theoretical physicist; astrophysicist; member of the Russian Academy of Science; a father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb; Nobel Prize in Physics
- Roy J. Glauber* (agnostic[226]) – American theoretical physicist; awarded half of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", with the other half shared by John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch
- David Gross* (agnostic[226]) – American particle physicist and string theorist; with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom
- Alan Guth – American theoretical physicist and cosmologist[227]
- Lawrence Krauss (1954–) – professor of physics at Arizona State University; popularizer of science; speaks regularly at atheist conferences like Beyond Belief and Atheist Alliance International[228]
- Lev Landau* – Soviet physicist; received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity[229][230]
- Leon M. Lederman* – American physicist; with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their joint research on neutrinos[231]
- Albert Abraham Michelson* (agnostic[232][233]) – American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson-Morley experiment; in 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics
- Yuval Ne'eman (1925–2006) – Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician; one of his greatest achievements in physics was his 1961 discovery of the classification of hadrons through the SU(3) flavour symmetry, now named the Eightfold Way, which was also proposed independently by Murray Gell-Mann[234][235]
- Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985) – American particle physicist; professor of physics at the University of Colorado; founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco; a younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment[236]
- J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) – American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley; along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project[237][238][239][240]
- Saul Perlmutter* (agnostic[241]) – American astrophysicist; shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Brian P. Schmidt and Adam Riess for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating
- Marshall Rosenbluth – American physicist, nicknamed "the Pope of Plasma Physics"; created the Metropolis algorithm in statistical mechanics, derived the Rosenbluth formula in high-energy physics, and laid the foundations for instability theory in plasma physics[242]
- Józef Rotblat* (agnostic[243]) – Polish-British physicist; along with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995
- Lee Smolin – American theoretical physicist; researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo[244]
- Jack Steinberger* (atheist/humanist[245][246]) – German-American-Swiss physicist; co-discovered the muon neutrino, along with Leon Lederman and Melvin Schwartz, for which they were given the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics
- Leonard Susskind – American theoretical physicist; a founding father of superstring theory; professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University[247]
- Leo Szilard (agnostic[248][249]) – Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor
- Edward Teller (agnostic[250]) – Hungarian-American theoretical physicist, known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb"; made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics
- Joseph Weber – American physicist; gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser; developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars)[251]
- Steven Weinberg*[252] – American theoretical physicist, unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, share of the Nobel Prize in Physics
- Victor Frederick Weisskopf – Austrian-born American theoretical physicist[253]
- Eugene Wigner* – Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician; with Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen, received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"; laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics; researched the structure of the atomic nucleus; first identified Xe-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors (sometimes referred to as "Wigner poisoning"); important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems[254]
- Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich – Soviet physicist born in Belarus; played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons; made important contributions to the fields of adsorption and catalysis, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, physical cosmology, and general relativity[255][256]
Public figures
-
- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
Activism
- Saul Alinsky (agnostic[257][258][259]) – American community organizer and writer; noted for the book Rules for Radicals
- Hannah Arendt (agnostic[260]) – German-American writer and political theorist
- Alexander Berkman – anarchist known for his political activism and writing; a leading member of the anarchist movement in the early 20th century; while living in France, he continued his work in support of the anarchist movement, producing the classic exposition of anarchist principles, Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism[261][262]
- Yaron Brook[263] – political activist, current president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute
- Tony Cliff – Trotskyist, was a founding member of the Socialist Review Group, which went on to become the Socialist Workers Party
- Ariel Dorfman (agnostic[264]) – Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist
- Marek Edelman – Polish political and social activist and cardiologist
- Norman Finkelstein[265] – American political scientist, activist and author whose primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust
- Clara Fraser – feminist and socialist political organizer who co-founded and led the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women
- Betty Friedan (agnostic[266]) – American writer, activist and feminist; a leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States; her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the 20th century
- Emma Goldman[267] – anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches
- Nadine Gordimer*[268] – South African political activist, writer; active in the anti-apartheid movement; Nobel Prize in Literature
- Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) – American political and social activist[269]
- Ze'ev Jabotinsky – Revisionist Zionist (nationalist) leader, author, orator, activist, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa[270][271]
- Naomi Klein[272] – Canadian author and activist
- Adam Kokesh – American libertarian anti-war activist and self-professed anarcho-capitalist[273]
- Rosa Luxemburg – Polish-German Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist
- Henry Morgentaler[274] – Canadian physician and prominent pro-choice advocate who has fought numerous legal battles for that cause
- Leonte Răutu – Bessarabiann-born Romanian communist activist and propagandist, chief ideologist of the Romanian Communist Party
- Rosika Schwimmer[275] – Hungarian-born pacifist, feminist, female suffragist
- Elie Wiesel* (agnostic[276]) – Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist and Holocaust survivor; author of 57 books, including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald concentration camps; awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986
Entrepreneurs
- Louis Fles (1872–1940) – Dutch businessman and freethought activist who opposed organised religion, Zionism and Nazism, and favoured complete Jewish assimilation, secular humanism and democratic socialism.
- George Soros – billionaire investor[277]
- Michael Steinhardt[278][279][280][281] – American hedge fund manager, investor, and philanthropist active in Jewish causes
- Alan Sugar – English business magnate, media personality, and political advisor.
- Mark Zuckerberg (self-described atheist[282][283][284]) – American Internet entrepreneur, computer programmer, founder and CEO of Facebook
Explorers
- Ármin Vámbéry – Hungarian Turkolog and traveler[285]
Military
- Moshe Dayan – Israeli military leader and politician; fourth Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (1953–58); became Defense Minister and later Foreign Minister of Israel[286][287]
- Yakov Kreizer – Soviet field commander
- Leon Trotsky[288] – Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, founder and first leader of the Red Army
Politics
- Shulamit Aloni[289] – Israeli politician and left-wing activist
- Uri Avnery – German-born Israeli journalist, left-wing peace activist, and former Knesset member[290]
- David Ben-Gurion – Polish-Israeli politician; a founder and the first Prime Minister of modern Israel[286][287]
- Jon Benjamin – Ambassador of the United Kingdom to Chile[291]
- Job Cohen[292][293][294] – Dutch social democratic politician and former legal scholar
- Theodor Herzl – Austro-Hungarian journalist who founded the modern political Zionism[295]
- Janet Jagan[296] – American-born socialist politician who was President of Guyana
- Béla Kun[297] – Hungarian revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919
- Vladimir Lenin[298][299] – Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist who served as the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924
- Golda Meir[287][287][300] – Israeli teacher, kibbutznik, fourth Prime Minister of Israel, Yom Kippur War
- David Miliband[301] – former British Labour Party politician; Member of Parliament from 2001 to 2013; Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs from 2007 to 2010; older brother of Ed and son of Ralph Miliband (see Sociology section )
- Ed Miliband[302] – British politician and former leader of the Labour Party; younger brother of David and son of Ralph Miliband
- Yitzhak Rabin* – Israeli politician, statesman and general; fifth Prime Minister of Israel; won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat[303]
- Dove-Myer Robinson[304] – mayor of Auckland City, New Zealand 1959—1965, 1968—1980
- Uri Rosenthal – Dutch politician of People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD)
Public atheists
- Chapman Cohen[305] – leading English atheist, secularist writer and lecturer
- Sam Harris[306] – American author, philosopher, public intellectual, neuroscientist, co-founder and CEO of Project Reason
- Christopher Hitchens – antitheist,[307] author, journalist and orator
- Michael Newdow[308] – American attorney, best known for his efforts to have recitations of the current-version Pledge of Allegiance in public schools declared unconstitutional for the phrase "under God"
- David Silverman[309] – current president of American Atheists, a nonprofit atheist rights advocacy organization
Religion
- Greg Epstein – current secular humanist chaplain at Harvard University, published author on the subject of secular humanism, author of Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe[310]
- Sherwin Wine[311] – rabbi, founding figure in Humanistic Judaism
Social sciences
Economics
-
- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
- David D. Friedman[312] – Chicago School economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
- Milton Friedman* (negative atheist,[313] agnostic[313][314]) – American economist, statistician, author, economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan, founding member of Mont Pelerin Society, free market capitalist, Free to Choose, University of Chicago, Chicago School of Economics, Nobel Prize in Economics
- John Harsanyi* – Hungarian-Australian-American economist and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner[315]
- Karl Marx (self-described atheist[316][317][318]) – inventor of Marxist economics
- Ludwig von Mises (agnostic[319][320][321]) – Austrian economist, philosopher, free market capitalist, classical liberal, Austrian School of Economics, founding member of Mont Pelerin Society
- David Ricardo (1772–1823) – English political economist, scientist and stock trader; often credited with systematising economics; one of the most influential of the classical economists[322][323]
- Murray Rothbard (self-described atheist[324]) – American economist, historian, political theorist, founder of anarcho-capitalism[325]
- Herbert A. Simon* (1916–2001) – American political scientist, economist, and computer scientist; one of the most influential social scientists of the 20th century; won the Turing Award in 1975 and the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978[326][327]
- Piero Sraffa (agnostic[328]) – influential Italian economist whose book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics
- Joseph Stiglitz* – American economist and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences winner[329]
Futurist
- Robert Ettinger – American academic, known as "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality[330]
- Herman Kahn – American futurist, military strategist and systems theorist; known for analyzing the likely consequences of nuclear war and recommending ways to improve survivability, a notoriety that made him an inspiration for the title character of Stanley Kubrick's classic black comedy film satire Dr. Strangelove[331]
- Ray Kurzweil (agnostic[332]) – American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google
Journalism
- Isaak Babel – Russian language journalist, playwright, literary translator, and short story writer, Red Cavalry[citation needed]
- Henryk Broder – Polish-born German journalist, author and TV personality[citation needed]
- Theodore Dalrymple – English journalist and psychiatrist who documented underclass life in Birmingham, West Midlands[citation needed]
- Isaac Deutscher[333] – Polish-born Jewish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs
- Glenn Greenwald[334] – American journalist and author
- Nigella Lawson[335] – English food writer, journalist and broadcaster
- Yaron London – Israeli media personality, journalist, actor and songwriter
- Amos Oz[336] – Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba
Columnists
- David Aaronovitch – British author, broadcaster, journalist, regular columnist for The Times[citation needed]
- Amy Alkon (negative atheist[337]) – writer of a weekly advice column, Ask the Advice Goddess, which is published in over 100 newspapers within North America
- Nat Hentoff[338] – American syndicated columnist and music critic
- Marty Nemko[339] – American career coach, author, columnist, and radio host specializing in career/workplace issues and higher education reform
- Daniel Seligman[340] – editor and columnist at Fortune magazine from 1950 to 1997, also writing for Forbes, Commentary, The American Mercury, Commonweal, and The New Leader
Psychology
- Albert Ellis ("probabilistic atheist"[341]) – American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy[342]
- Jerry Fodor[343] – American philosopher and cognitive scientist, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses
- Sigmund Freud[344][345] (antitheist[346]) – Austrian neurologist, founding father of psychoanalysis (see also Freud and religion)
- Erich Fromm (1900–1980) – Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory[347]
- Steven Pinker[348] – Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author
- Wilhelm Reich – Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry[citation needed]
- Edwin Shneidman (1918–2009) – American suicidologist and thanatologist[349]
- Boris Sidis – American psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education[190]
- Carlo Strenger[350] – Swiss-Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst, public intellectual, Tel Aviv University
Sociology
- Émile Durkheim (agnostic[351]) – French sociologist
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) – French anthropologist and ethnologist; has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"[352]
- Ralph Miliband[353] – Belgian-born British sociologist known as a prominent Marxist thinker, father of David Miliband (see above)
See also
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- Apostasy in Judaism
- Heresy in Judaism
- Jewish atheism
- Lists of Jews
- Lists of atheists
- Secular Jewish culture
References
- ↑ What Makes a Jew "Jewish"? – Jewish Identity
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Dart, John. Woody Allen, Theologian
- ↑ Woody Allen Quotes – The Quotations Page
- ↑ Snowden, Lynn. Which Is the Fly and Which Is the Human? (Interview with William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg). (February 1992).
- ↑ Warner, Rick. Cheery Atheist Cronenberg Lauds Insects, Pattinson: Interview. (November 2011). Bloomberg
- ↑ Film Threat. (1997). "For me, it's not even worth discussion. It doesn't interest me. It interests me only to be discarded. If I start there, I'm mired in a discussion that is very unfruitful to me. I'm simply a non-believer and have been forever. To discuss religion is to put me in a debate with myself." [1]
- ↑ Silverman 1996, pp. 312.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ "Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Cashiers du Cinemart Issue 10: Interview: Keith Gordon
- ↑ http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/10_sept_oct/Shaffer.html
- ↑ "The whole idea of god is absurd. If anything, 2001 shows that what some people call "god" is simply an acceptable term for their ignorance. What they don't understand, they call "god"... Everything we know about the universe reveals that there is no god. I chose to do Dr. [Arthur C.] Clarke's story as a film because it highlights a critical factor necessary for human evolution; that is, beyond our present condition. This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn't that obvious?" Smith, Warren (2010). Celebrities in Hell. ChelCbooks, pg. 68
- ↑ Claudio Masenza said of his friend: "He was an atheist Jew who celebrated Christmas." http://www.archiviokubrick.it/testimonianze/persone/aragno.html
- ↑ BBC Radio 4. The Film Programme on November 4th, 2011. "When people say that they're not afraid of this or not afraid of that, to me that's very much like people saying I don't like opera, I don't like ballet, or I don't like the theatre. What I've learnt is that means they've never seen a good one, that's all it means. You know, I'm an atheist, but when I saw the Exorcist I was really frightened because of the skill of William Friedkin and what's called the suspension of disbelief."
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- ↑ "We're not equal? How are we not equal?" Rob Reiner on Real Time with Bill Maher, in response to Maher's statement, "I would argue atheists are [not considered equal under the law]". Maher then stated, "For a group that is about 17 percent now... no representation in congress..." to which Reiner replied, "You're right about that-that we don't have that representation. I include myself in that same 17 percent...." Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Adrienne Shelly said: "I'm an optimistic agnostic. I'd like to believe." Rhys, Tim (August 1996), Suddenly Adrienne Shelly, MovieMaker Magazine. Retrieved February 12, 2007.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Nightline, ABC News, March 25, 2011, Quote: "I am an atheist, I live my life like I'm an atheist."
- ↑ Swanson, Carl. "Trey Parker and Matt Stone Talk About Why The Book of Mormon Isn’t Actually Offensive, and the Future of South Park", New York Magazine, March 11, 2011
- ↑ 29.0 29.1 "Well, I'm a Jewish-Buddhist-Atheist, I guess." Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ 34.0 34.1 http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/urj42/i_am_michael_ian_black_sexy_bitch/c4xwnuq?context=3
- ↑ 35.0 35.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Appearance on ABC's "Politically Incorrect" (March 9, 1998) "I was born Jewish, but I am an atheist. I don't believe in God."[2]
- ↑ Dolan, Deirdre (2006). Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book. Gotham Books. p. Front Matter.
- ↑ About Myq Kaplan at his official website
- ↑ On a November 1, 2009 airing of Imus in the Morning when asked by Don Imus about rumors of marriage, Maher: "I said, well, tell them the truth, neither me nor my girl believe in God or marriage, so there is not going to be a big church wedding." When asked whether he thought Christopher Hitchens was a 7 on Dawkins' scale of 1–7 (1 being absolutely certain there is a God and 7 being absolutely certain there isn't, a scale on which Dawkins considers himself 6.9), Maher answered with: "He may be, I think we are all just talking semantics at some point, we are all atheists which means we don't believe in the deity, we don't believe in a magic spaceman, and that we think people who do, have a neurological disorder and they need help."
- ↑ "I'm an atheist". PIERS MORGAN TONIGHT: Interview with Bill Maher, 3 March 2012
- ↑ "Bill Maher – APATHEIST", The Richard Dawkins Foundation, April 25, 2007 Archived August 27, 2012 at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ ", CNN Belief Blogs, July 12, 2011
- ↑ Believers, Skeptics and a Pool of Sitting Ducks; New York Times; September 30, 2008
- ↑ Maron, Marc. WTF Podcast, episode 254. (February 16, 2012). "And also, I talk to Bill a little bit about atheism, but I always wonder about the aging atheists. That....and I will put myself in amongst them, only because, as I said, you know, I am not seemingly willing to say categorically "there's no God." I don't know why I'm not willing to. There must be some primal fear in me of some kind. Or maybe there's a shred of hope somewhere. But I don't fight for the atheists' point of view. I'm certainly not religious in any way. I don't have God in my life. I'm not geared that way." [3]
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ The Onion: "Is there a God?" Stan Lee: "Well, let me put it this way... [Pauses.] No, I'm not going to try to be clever. I really don't know. I just don't know." Is There A God, The A.V. Club, October 9, 2002.
- ↑ I was among friends and family who packed a chapel at Golders Green crematorium on Friday to hear more than two hours of tributes to Adler. In accordance with Adler's wishes – he was an inveterate atheist who refused to recognise the supernatural in any shape or form – there were no religious observances." Richard Ingrams, 'Larry Adler: brilliant musician, formidable campaigner', The Observer, August 12, 2001, Observer News Pages, Pg. 24.
- ↑ ""God Bless America," a favorite song of believers, was written by Irving Berlin. It now turns out that Berlin was an agnostic. In Freethought Today (Madison, Wisconsin, Freedom From Religion Foundation, May 2004) Dan Barker documents that Berlin, the son of a Jewish cantor, was an agnostic, that "patriotism was his religion."" Warren Allen Smith, Gossip from Across the Pond: Articles Published in the United Kingdom's Gay and Lesbian Humanist, 1996–2005, page 106.
- ↑ "Arnold Dobrin similarly reported, "Aaron Copland has not followed the religion of his parents. He is an agnostic but one who is deeply aware of the grandeur and mystery of the universe."" Howard Pollack, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man, page 28.
- ↑ Hanoch, Shalom. God Single. "If there was a god," etc. (Hebrew)
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ During a 2010 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Joel referred to himself as an atheist.
- ↑ The Howard Stern Show (November 16, 2010) (Sirius XM) (Interview and musical performance)
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- ↑ Lewis, Genny. Born Secular. "God goes / where he wants, / and who knows / where he is not. / Not in me."
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "It is particularly poor salesmanship for Ms. Raabe to cite Mahler's supposed conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. In both law and common understanding, a choice made under duress is discounted as lacking in free will. Mahler converted as a mere formality under compulsion of a bigoted law that barred Jews from directorship of the Vienna Hofoper. Mahler himself joked about the conversion with his Jewish friends, and, no doubt, would view with bitter amusement the obtuseness of Ms. Raabe's understanding of the cruel choice forced on him: either convert to Christianity or forfeit the professional post for which you are supremely destined. When Mahler was asked why he never composed a Mass, he answered bluntly that he could never, with any degree of artistic or spiritual integrity, voice the Credo. He was a confirmed agnostic, a doubter and seeker, never a soul at rest or at peace." Joel Martel, MAHLER AND RELIGION; Forced to Be Christian, New York Times.
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- ↑ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/24/newman/
- ↑ http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/21842/celebrity-jews/
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- ↑ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/491/tribes?act=0#play
- ↑ Tucker, Carlson. Tucker. MSNBC. Primary source
- ↑ "I know intellectually there is no god. But in case there is, I don't want to piss him off by saying it." Howard Stern, Interview w/ Steppin’ Out, May 21, 2004.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ "I read a few sentences. It was written in beautiful Biblical Hebrew. The language was like that of the Psalms.' One of these was the Isaiah scroll, which I saw recently in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem: sections of goat-skin parchment, sewn together, 27 feet long. I felt in the presence of something numinous, although I have been a convinced atheist since boyhood. But this document is a testament to the inexplicable persistence of the human mind, in the face of all the evidence, in believing that we are on earth for a divine purpose." Eleazar Sukenik, quoted in Justin Cartwright, 'The indestructible power of belief', The Guardian, May 27, 2000, Saturday Pages, Pg. 3.
- ↑ Harriet Lane, 'Interview: The Freud who hates therapy: Sir Clement Freud', The Observer, October 14, 2001, Review Pages, Pg. 3.
- ↑ Miller, quoted in the program for the Sydney Theatre Company's production of his play Broken Glass, from an interview by Caroline Scott and Alexandra Lautenbacher in Sunday Times magazine (1995), says, "I have no formal religion but there's a space in my head for it. Maybe I would believe in God if he believed in me. But we're living in a reality that's so hard to understand. In the last 75 years the human race has been humiliated in a way we've never known before..."
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Julia Pascal, interviewed for the article 'Sikh theatre row: Can censorship ever be justified?', The Guardian, December 22, 2004, Pg. 7.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee; 1996, p. 36. "The fact is that I have had no God."
- ↑ "The war on truth", by DD Guttenplan, The Guardian, March 12, 2001. "I am an atheist. But there is ultimately, if you don't want to surrender to nihilism entirely, the matter of a [historical] record."
- ↑ BBC One September 6, 2010. Interview with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Described herself as "secular Jew"
- ↑ "...my father [Derek] was a British Atheist... from a rather well known Sephardic Jewish family..." Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Andrea Rondini, Cosa da pazzi: Cesare Lombroso e la letteratura, Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2001, p. 33.
- ↑ Isaac Asimov, "The Way of Reason," in In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday,, ed. Paul Levinson, Humanities Press, 1982, pp. ix–x.
- ↑ "I make no secret of the fact that I am a non-observant Jew", Asimov, Isaac. Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Volume 15, Issues 10–13. p. 8. Davis Publishing, 1991.
- ↑ Psychology Today: "The God Problem: An Interview with Howard Bloom – How does the universe account for its own creation? August 28, 2012
- ↑ Eagleton, Terry. "Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton – review". The Guardian. January 12, 2012.
- ↑ "The Rabbi and the Atheist", by Andrew Silow-Carroll. Described himself as "an atheist who has nevertheless worked intimately in Jewish religious institutions as a writer and editor for much of [his] adult life"
- ↑ "Handler says he's 'pretty much' an atheist..." Autumn of a book-lover’s contentment, Marvin Olasky, World Magazine, October 7, 2006 (Accessed April 5, 2008)
- ↑ "Mr. Handler... describes himself as a 'secular humanist.'", Lemony Snicket reaches 'The End', By Todd Leopold, CNN.com, October 5, 2006 (Accessed April 5, 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 April 5, 2008)
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- ↑ Christopher Hitchens' (see in Section "Public Atheists") book The Portable Atheist, a collection of extracts of atheist texts, is dedicated to the memory of Levi "who had the moral fortitude to refuse false consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process in Auschwitz". The dedication then quotes Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, asserting, "I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day."
- ↑ Michael, Semi. Unbounded Ideas (in Hebrew: Gvoolot ha-Roo'ah), 2000, ISBN 965-02-0138-6
- ↑ Peikoff, Leonard. "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand". Meridian; Reprint edition (December 1, 1993). ISBN 978-0452011014 "Every argument commonly offered for the notion of God leads to a contradiction of the axiomatic concepts of philosophy. At every point, the notion clashes with the facts of reality and with the preconditions of thought."
- ↑ "The Meeting is a about the afterlife, despite Pinter being well known as an atheist. He admitted it was a "strange" piece for him to have written." Pinter 'on road to recovery', BBC.co.uk, August 26, 2002.
- ↑ On Maurice Sendak's death (May 8, 2012), Terry Gross, host of National Public Radio's Fresh Air, aired 2003 and 2011 interviews she had conducted with Sendak. In September 2011 she said, "You're very secular, you don't believe in God." Sendak replied, "I don't," and elaborated. Among other things, he remarked, "It [religion, and belief in God] must have made life much easier [for some religious friends of his]. It's harder for us nonbelievers."
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- ↑ Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman
- ↑ Lewis, Tess. "A brighter, clearer light". The New Criterion. October 2002. " Completely assimilated and an atheist, Reich-Ranicki felt as much an outsider among Jews in his native Poland as in Berlin where he attended school from the age of nine to eighteen."
- ↑ Jenny Attiyeh (2010) Rebecca Goldstein, the atheist with a soul in an interview on Thoughtcast, which was also broadcast on WGBH
- ↑ An Interview with Stanislaw Lem by Peter Engel. The Missouri Review, Volume 7, Number 2, 1984.
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- ↑ Asked if Rand was an atheist, [Yaron] Brook said, "Yes, she was – and I have been since the age of 6, before I read Ayn Rand. But more than anti-religion, she was for reason. She spends time on the positive. She believed the way to evaluate things in life and reality is through reason, rational thought. That's what we try to emphasize." " George Hohmann, 'Ayn Rand relevant today, speaker says', Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia), June 1, 2009, Pg. P5A (accessed June 5, 2009).
- ↑ Ayn Rand on the Phil Donahue show. (1979). YouTube. Primary source
- ↑ Braver, Rita. "Philip Roth on Fame, Sex and God". October 3, 2010. CBS Sunday Morning. The Richard Dawkins Foundation. "When the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place."
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- ↑ "Like everyone participating I'm what's called here a "secular atheist," except that I can't even call myself an "atheist" because it is not at all clear what I'm being asked to deny." Noam Chomsky, Edge Discussion of Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival, November 2006 (Retrieved April 21, 2008).
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- ↑ Obituary for Jacques Derrida, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10/11/2004
- ↑ Edwards, Paul. Atheism (1967)
- ↑ Edwards, Paul. Ethics and Atheism (1969)
- ↑ "This faith in rationality emerged early in Hook's life. Even before he was a teenager he proclaimed himself to be an agnostic." Edward S. Shapiro, Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War, 1995, page 2.
- ↑ Popper, Karl; Eccles, John. The Self and Its Brain. (Routledge, 1983). "One of us [Eccles] is a believer in God and the supernatural, while the other [Popper] may be described as agnostic."
- ↑ "Referring to himself as an agnostic and an advocate of critical realism, Popper gained an early reputation as the chief exponent of the principle of falsification rather than verification." Karl Popper: philosopher of critical realism, by Joe Barnhart, The Humanist magazine, July–August 1996. (Retrieved October 13, 2006)
- ↑ May, Peter. Life after God? – The Ethics of Peter Singer. "We have no need to postulate gods who hand down commandments to us because we understand ethics as a natural phenomenon."
- ↑ In a debate with Christian, Dinesh D'Souza, Singer states, "Now, when we're talking about God, of course, that concept can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Since this is a Christian institution, since I know Dinesh D'Souza is a Christian, and since we are living in a society that is Christian in its culture, I am essentially going to talk about the Christian or the Judeo-Christian conception of God. And that's the being which I think I can claim does not exist....But of the Christian, the Judeo-Christian God, I think we can be clear that that being does not exist. And the reason we can be clear about that is by looking at the world around us."
- ↑ Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Portable Atheist (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 21.
- ↑ Roncelin de Fos, Christian Origins of U.S., 2004:
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- ↑ "Since his childhood in Vienna Bondi had been an atheist, developing from an early age a view on religion that associated it with repression and intolerance. This view, which he shared with Hoyle, never left him. On several occasions he spoke out on behalf of freethinking, so-called, and became early on active in British atheist or "humanist" circles. From 1982 to 1999, he was president of the British Humanist Association, and he also served as president of the Rationalist Press Association of United Kingdom." Helge Kragh: "Bondi, Hermann", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 19 p. 343. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. Accessed via Gale Virtual Reference Library April 29, 2008.
- ↑ In a letter to the Guardian, Jane Wynne Willson, Vice-President of the British Humanist Association, added to his obituary: "Also president of the Rationalist Press Association from 1982 until his death, and with a particular interest in Indian rationalism, Hermann was a strong supporter of the Atheist Centre in Andhra Pradesh. He and his wife Christine visited the centre a number of times, and the hall in the science museum there bears his name. When presented with a prestigious international award, he divided a large sum of money between the Atheist Centre and women's health projects in Mumbai." Obituary letter: Hermann Bondi, Guardian, September 23, 2005 (accessed April 29, 2008).
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- ↑ "Although he became an atheist early in life and resented the strict upbringing of his parents' religion, he identified with Jewish culture and joined several international fights against anti-Semitism." Craver, Carl F: "Axelrod, Julius", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 19 p. 122. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.
- ↑ "This flat declaration prompted Ellis Franklin to accuse his strong-willed daughter of making science her religion. He was right. Rosalind sent him a four-page declaration, eloquent for a young woman just over 20 let alone a scientist of any age. ..."It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what? […] I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it."" Brenda Maddox, Mother of DNA, NewHumanist.org.uk – Volume 117 Issue 3 Autumn 2002.
- ↑ Listed as an agnostic on NNDB.com. Rosalind Franklin, NNDB.com.
- ↑ "...I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief." Nonoverlapping Magisteria, by Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22; Reprinted from Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, New York: Harmony Books, 1998, pp. 269–283.
- ↑ Jacob, The Statue Within, pp 20–57. Quotes from pp 42 and 53.
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- ↑ "There is no clear record that he was professionally restricted in Russia because of his lineage, but he sympathized with the problem his Jewish colleagues suffered owing to Russian anti-Semitism; his personal religious commitment was to atheism, although he received strict Christian religious training at home." Alfred I. Tauber, Leon Chernyak, Metchnikoff and the origins of immunology: from metaphor to theory, page 5.
- ↑ "Dr Perutz, said: "It is one thing for scientists to oppose creationism which is demonstrably false but quite another to make pronouncements which offend people's religious faith – that is a form of tactlessness which merely brings science into disrepute. My view of religion and ethics is simple: even if we do not believe in God, we should try to live as though we did."" Kam Patel, Perutz rubbishes Popper and Kuhn, November 25, 1994.
- ↑ In a WIRED magazine article he describes himself as an "unbudgeable atheist" which he apparently also does in his book The Trouble with Testosterone as reported in Salon magazine at [4]
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- ↑ In March 9, 2001 edition of The London Times mentions that Wolpert had been named to a panel to select a 'Preacher of the Year' award sponsored by the paper: "[Wolpert] agreed to judge the award because he believes 'religion is in our genes'. After abandoning God because he felt his prayers were not being answered, Professor Wolpert is writing a book, The Biology of Belief, in which he argues that religion is a biological trait that emerged as part of evolution . . . He said that his decision to become an atheist was purely pragmatic. 'I did believe in God as a child. I used to pray and he did not answer my prayers. My parents were quite religious. But it did not seem to make any sense to me. I would certainly not be converted by judging this award.'"
- ↑ Liberato Cardellini: "A final and more personal question: You defined yourself as "an atheist who is moved by religion". Looking at the tenor of your life and the many goals you have achieved, one wonders where your inner force comes from." Roald Hoffmann: "The atheism and the respect for religion come form the same source. I observe that in every culture on Earth, absolutely every one, human beings have constructed religious systems. There is a need in us to try to understand,to see that there is something that unites us spiritually. So scientists who do not respect religion fail in their most basic task—observation. Human beings need the spiritual. The same observation reveals to me a multitude of religious constructions—gods of nature, spirits, the great monotheistic religions. It seems to me there can’t be a God or gods; there are just manifestations of a human-constructed spirituality." Liberato Cardellini, Looking for Connections: An Interview with Roald Hoffmann, page 1634.
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- ↑ "Today, I consider myself, in Thomas Huxley's terms, an agnostic. I don't know whether there is a God or creator, or whatever we may call a higher intelligence or being. I don't know whether there is an ultimate reason for our being or whether there is anything beyond material phenomena. I may doubt these things as a scientist, as we cannot prove them scientifically, but at the same time we also cannot falsify (disprove) them. For the same reasons, I cannot deny God with certainty, which would make me an atheist. This is a conclusion reached by many scientists." George Olah, A Life of Magic Chemistry
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- ↑ "When we reflect on anything for long enough, we're likely to end up with what we sometimes call "basic" questions – ones we can see no way at all to answer. For we have no perfect way to answer even this question: How can one tell when a question has been properly answered? What caused the universe, and why? What is the purpose of life? How can you tell which beliefs are true? How can you tell what is good? These questions seem different on the surface, but all of them share one quality that makes them impossible to answer: all of them are circular! You can never find a final cause, since you must always ask one question more: "What caused that cause?" You can never find any ultimate goal, since you're always obliged to ask, "Then what purpose does that serve?" Whenever you find out why something is good-or is true-you still have to ask what makes that reason good and true. No matter what you discover, at every step, these kinds of questions will always remain, because you have to challenge every answer with, "Why should I accept that answer?" Such circularities can only waste our time by forcing us to repeat, over and over and over again, "What good is Good?" and, "What god made God?" " Marvin Minsky. The Society of Mind.
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- ↑ "Concerning Emile Berliner, The Jew TO BE a Jew may mean one of several identities. For example, the Jew, Emile Berliner, the late inventor, called himself agnostic." B'nai B'rith, The National Jewish monthly: Volume 43; Volume 43.
- ↑ "In 1899, Berliner wrote a book, Conclusions, that speaks of his agnostic ideas on religion and philosophy." Seymour Brody, Jewish heroes & heroines of America: 151 true stories of Jewish American heroism (2003), page 119.
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- ↑ "The family adopted the Lutheran faith in 1918, and although Gabor nominally remained true to it, religion appears to have had little influence in his life. He later acknowledged the role played by an antireligious humanist education in the development of his ideas and stated his position as being that of a "benevolent agnostic."" "Gabor, Dennis." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (January 30, 2012). [5]
- ↑ "In his mythic book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil, serial inventor, technology enthusiast, and unabashed atheist, announces: "Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation.... So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal."" – Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010).
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- ↑ "Outside the field of scientific research, he was known for his outspoken atheism: belief in God, he once declared, is not only incompatible with good science, but is "damaging to the wellbeing of the human race." " The Telegraph. [6]
- ↑ Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dies
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- ↑ "Biblical scholar Jacques Berlinerblau points out, in an interesting recent book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), that most contemporary atheists and agnostics — myself included, I must confess — are astoundingly ignorant of the details of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an (not to mention the Bhagavad Gita and the Tripitaka, one could add). ... When all is said and done, I see no reason to amend my judgment that the existence of the Jewish, Christian, Islamic or Hindu gods is about as plausible, given the currently available evidence, as the existence of Zeus or Thor." — Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (2008).
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- ↑ "Most of the Socialist Party members were also in favor of assimilation, and Tarski's political allegiance was socialist at the time. So, along with its being a practical move, becoming more Polish than Jewish was an ideological statement and was approved by many, though not all, of his colleagues. As to why Tarski, a professed atheist, converted, that just came with the territory and was part of the package: if you were going to be Polish then you had to say you were Catholic." Anita Burdman Feferman, Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (2004), page 39.
- ↑ ""I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate..." Later Ulam expressed his opinions about matters that have very little in common with science." Polska Agencja Międzyprasowa, Poland: Issue 9 (1976).
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- ↑ "First of all, I do not believe in the supernatural, so I take it for granted that consciousness has a material explanation. I also do not believe in insoluble problems, therefore I believe that this explanation is accessible in principle to reason, and that one day we will understand consciousness just as we today understand what life is, whereas once this was a deep mystery." David Deutsch in an interview with Philosophy Now magazine, Philosophy Now, December/January 2001 issue.
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- ↑ Calaprice, Alice (2000). The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 216. Letter to M. Berkowitz, October 25, 1950; Einstein Archive 59–215.
- ↑ Calaprice, Alice (2000). The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 218.
- ↑ Calaprice, Alice (2000). The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 204.
- ↑ Zahar, Élie (2001), Poincaré's Philosophy. From Conventionalism to Phenomenology, Carus Publishing Company, Chapter 2, p.41, ISBN 0-8126-9435-X.
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- ↑ "Feynman, Gell-Man, Weinberg, and their peers accept Newton's incomparable stature and shrug off his piety, on the kindly thought that the old man got into the game too early. ...As for Gell-Mann, he seems to see nothing to discuss in this entire God business, and in the index to The Quark and the Jaguar God goes unmentioned. Life he called a "complex adaptive system" which produces interesting phenomena such as the jaguar and Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark. Gell-Mann is a Nobel-class tackler of problems, but for him the existence of God is not one of them." Herman Wouk, The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion (2010).
- ↑ "So we don’t have to assume these principles as separate metaphysical postulates. They follow from the fundamental theory. They are what we call emergent properties. You don’t need something more to get something more. That’s what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry, plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology, and a lot of accidents. The way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn’t diminish the importance of these subjects, to know that they follow from more fundamental things, plus accidents. That’s a general rule, and it’s critically important to realize that. You don’t need something more in order to get something more. People keep asking that when they read my book, The Quark and the Jaguar, and they say ‘isn’t there something more beyond what you have there?’ Presumably they mean something supernatural. Anyway, there isn’t. (laughs) You don’t need something more to explain something more." Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and truth in physics: Murray Gell-Mann on TED.com (2007), Ted.com.
- ↑ Listed as an agnostic on NNDB.com. Murray Gell-Mann, NNDB.com.
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- ↑ "The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science – everything can be created from nothing...it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch." Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (1998). q:Atheism
- ↑ "...I had the opportunity to participate in several exciting panel discussions at the World Science Festival in New York City. But the most dramatic encounter took place at the panel strangely titled 'Science, Faith and Religion.'... I ended up being one of two panelists labeled 'atheists.'..." God and Science Don't Mix: A scientist can be a believer. But professionally, at least, he can't act like one., Lawrence M. Krauss, The Wall Street Journal, page A15, June 26, 2009 (retrieved May 22, 2010). On June 21, 2012 Colbert Report, the author of A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing told Colbert: "There is no evidence for any deity.... You don't need him.... There's no need for God." The evolutions of the universe occur "without any supernatural shenanigans."
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- ↑ I was Rosenbluth's last student, and collaborated with him on numerous research projects during and after my graduation. Near the end of his life, we more frequently discussed personal and political issues. On more than one occasion, he freely admitted to me that he was an atheist. Statement by J. Candy, January 22, 2009.
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- ↑ "Another aspect of this is that a scientific cosmology can contain no residue of the idea that the world was constructed by some being who is not a part of it. As the creatures who makes things, it is our most natural impulse to ask: When we come upon something beautifully or intricately structured, who made it? We must learn to give up this impulse if we are to do scientific cosmology. As there can, by definition, be nothing outside the universe, a scientific cosmology must be based on a conception that the universe made itself." Lee Smolin, What is the Future of Cosmology?, pbs.org.
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- ↑ The International Academy of Humanism at the website of the Council for Secular Humanism. Retrieved October 18, 2007. Some of this information is also at the International Humanist and Ethical Union website
- ↑ In a review of Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Michael Duff writes that Susskind is "a card-carrying atheist." Life in a landscape of possibilities, December 2005. Retrieved May 30, 2007.
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- ↑ "We typically never squabbled very much. If we disagreed, it was about scientific issues. He didn't believe the observational evidence for the cosmological constant, and I think it's highly probable. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew and we both attended Temple Beth Emet in Anaheim. He was actually an atheist, who wanted to maintain Jewish traditions. It was another thing we didn't have to disagree about. We both agreed that modern cosmology provided a better picture of the early universe than does the book of Genesis." Virginia Trimble, Weber's wife, quoted in Physics and Society, Vol. 30 No. 4, p.24-25.
- ↑ Weinberg, Steven (September 25, 2008). "Without God." nybooks.com
- ↑ "...Victor Weisskopf, who describes himself as an atheist Viennese Jew...." Quoting from page 14 of The Prism of Science, by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Springer, 1986.
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- ↑ " Asked if Rand was an atheist, [Yaron] Brook said, "Yes, she was – and I have been since the age of 6, before I read Ayn Rand. But more than anti-religion, she was for reason. She spends time on the positive. She believed the way to evaluate things in life and reality is through reason, rational thought. That's what we try to emphasize." " George Hohmann, 'Ayn Rand relevant today, speaker says', Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia), June 1, 2009, Pg. P5A (accessed June 5, 2009).
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- ↑ "To be sure, when she wrote her groundbreaking book, Friedan considered herself an "agnostic" Jew, unaffiliated with any religious branch or institution." Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (2007), page 59.
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- ↑ Time Magazine. "WOMEN: Petition Denied". October 24, 1927. "When she told the board she was an atheist" etc.
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- ↑ Michaelson, Jay. "Memo to Michael Steinhardt: ‘Duh.’". The Jewish Daily Forward. October 17, 2007
- ↑ Treiman, Daniel. "Steinhardt vs. Steinsaltz: An Atheist Debates a Talmudist". The Jewish Daily Forward. June 22, 2007
- ↑ Rosenblatt, Gary. "On Being Michael Steinhardt". The Jewish Week. February 11, 2010
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- ↑ Robert Service (2009). Trotsky: A Biography. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 199–201. ISBN 0-674-03615-8
- ↑ "Aloni is an outspoken atheist who has been a very controversial figure in Israeli politics. As former Minister of Education, her efforts to secularize instruction in Israeli state schools had drawn the ire of the Orthodox rabbinate which possesses great political clout in Israel. In a country where conflicts between secular and religious Jews has intensified in recent years she has been unabashedly on the side of secularism. " [Celebatheists – Shulamit Aloni http://www.celebatheists.com/?title=Shulamit_Aloni]
- ↑ "Well, I myself am a 100% atheist. And I am increasingly worried that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, which dominates our entire life, is assuming a more and more religious character." Uri Avnery, A War of Religions? God Forbid!, Ramallah Online February 19, 2007(?) (accessed April 28, 2008).
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- ↑ (Dutch) Programma: Natafelen met Luuc Smit. Joodse Omroep. Retrieved on 2010-09-09.
- ↑ (Dutch) Job Cohen: 'Gelijke monniken, gelijke kappen’. Het Vrije Volk. Retrieved on 2010-09-09.
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- ↑ " She was respectfully called "bhowji" (elder brother's wife) by PPP supporters. Janet remained an atheist and did not convert to Hinduism. "I am an activist. People either hate me to infinity or love me to death", she once told an interviewer. " John Cherian, 'Guiding light' (Jagan's obituary), Frontline (India), Volume 26, Issue April 8, 11–24, 2009 (accessed April 7, 2009).
- ↑ The European, June 1955, No. 28, pp. 26–30
- ↑ Fischer 1964. p. 9.
- ↑ Service 2000. pp. 50–51, 64.
- ↑ See Emma Goldman, "The Philosophy of Atheism," in Christopher Hitchens, ed., The Portable Atheist (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2007), 129–33; Golda Meir is quoted by Jonathan Rosen in "So Was It Odd of God?", The New York Times, December 14, 2003.
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- ↑ "Rabin was an atheist. He had nothing to do with the religious calendar. Not to mention the fact that the "Jewish" calendar is really a Babylonian one, and that its months carry the names of Babylonian gods." Uri Avnery, The Real Rabin, Ma'ariv.
- ↑ Robinson, Dove-Myer (entry in the Dictionary of NZ Biography)
- ↑ Cohen, Chapman. An Atheist's Approach to Christianity (1942) ASIN B0007KGF98
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- ↑ Lucas, Greg. "Atheist dad ready for date at top court." San Francisco Chronicle, 2004-03-22
- ↑ FREEOK2012. "David Silverman". "has been an atheist since he was 6 years old"
- ↑ Reilly, Adam. "Greg Epstein, Atheist Superstar". The Phoenix. November 24, 2009
- ↑ Cogley, John, September 5, 1965, "Religion: Must a Rabbi Believe in God?" New York Times
- ↑ Friedman, David D. "Atheism and Religion", Ideas.
- ↑ 313.0 313.1 In correspondence with conservative Christian commentator John Lofton, Milton Friedman wrote: "I am an agnostic. I do not ‘believe in’ God, but I am not an atheist, because I believe the statement, ‘There is a god’ does not admit of being either confirmed or rejected." An Exchange: My Correspondence With Milton Friedman About God, Economics, Evolution And "Values", by John Lofton, The American View, October–December 2006, (Retrieved January 12, 2007)
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- ↑ Enzo Traverso, The Marxists and the Jewish Question, (Humanities Press, 1994): "Born into a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism, Marx received no religious education and grew up, under the influence of his father, in a liberal and aufklärerisch environment. He considered himself a German, an atheist and a Communist and recognized himself as neither a Jew nor a converted Jew" (p14)
- ↑ The famous Marxist historian and historiographer Eric Hobsbawm views Marx simply as a Jew, for example, in this October 2005 essay on the "Benefits of Diaspora" in the London Review of Books, in which he states "issues to do with the nature, structure and possible transformations of society in an era of radical historical change both in practice and in theory have attracted emancipated Jews disproportionately almost from the beginning, starting with the Saint Simonians and Marx".
- ↑ Julius Carlbach's Karl Marx and the Jewish Question has an interesting discussion of "The Jewishness of Marx" starting on page 310, in which he describes the views of a large number of sources. See also Dennis K. Fischman's 1991 work Political Discourse in Exile: Karl Marx and the Jewish Question.
- ↑ Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: The Cultural Background of Ludwig von Mises http://mises.org/pdf/asc/essays/kuehneltLeddihn.pdf
- ↑ "Indeed, for someone who was an agnostic, Mises wrote a great deal about religion. The number of references he makes to religion is staggering, actually numbering over twenty-five hundred in his published corpus." Laurence M. Vance, Mises Debunks the Religious Case for the State, Thursday, February 10, 2005.
- ↑ "Ludwig von Mises, who was agnostic, skeptical, and non-political." Block, Walter and Rockwell Jr., Llewellyn H., Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, page 168.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "The "ardent debater" championed unpopular causes, "but from conviction rather than cussedness", in high-school discussions: the single tax, free trade, unilateral disarmament, strengthening the League of Nations. Indeed, his first publication, whilst still in grade school, was a letter to the Editor of the Milwaukee Journal, defending atheism." K Vela Velupillai, 'Obituary: Professor Herbert Simon', The Independent (London), February 13, 2001, Pg. 6.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ "The son of Russian immigrants of Jewish stock, Robert Chester Wilson Ettinger was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 4, 1918. The family later moved to Detroit and young Robert was educated locally and at Wayne State University where he studied Physics and Maths. Despite his Jewish roots, he grew up a determined atheist." Robert Ettinger, The Telegraph, July 24, 2011.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0805/30/gb.01.html
- ↑ Deutscher, Isaac. "Who is a Jew?" In The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. Tamara Deutscher, ed. and Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. P. 51.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Sands, Sarah. I don't want to be some kitchen blow-up sex doll. Daily Mail, December 1, 2006. Retrieved on July 29, 2012.
- ↑ Oz, Amos. The Silence of the Heavens: Agnon Amazed at God. 1993
- ↑ http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2009/11/07/meet_the_victim.html#comments
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Nemko, Marty. "How I'm Overcoming Fear of Death". martynemko.com
- ↑ Brimelow, Peter. "Gambler Dan". Vdare. December 1, 2002
- ↑ Nielsen, Stevan Lars & Ellis, Albert. (1994). A discussion with Albert Ellis: Reason, emotion and religion, Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 13 (4), Win 1994. pp. 327–341
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Kainz, Howard. "Intelligent Design: Atheists to the Rescue". Center for Science & Culture. November 29, 2011
- ↑ Freud, S., The future of an illusion, translated by W.D. Robson-Scott, New York, Liveright, 1928.
- ↑ Judith Marks Mishne (1993). The Evolution and Application of Clinical Theory. Simon and Schuster.
- ↑ Even though Freud opposed religion and considered belief in God neurotic, he once urged a Jewish colleague to raise his son within the Jewish religion, arguing that "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else" (David S. Ariel, What Do Jews Believe? (New York: Shocken Books, 1995), p.248)."
- ↑ "About the same time he stopped observing Jewish religious rituals and rejected a cause he had once embraced, Zionism. He "just didn't want to participate in any division of the human race, whether religious or political," he explained decades later (Wershba, p. 12), by which time he was a confirmed atheist." Keay Davidson: "Fromm, Erich Pinchas", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed April 28, 2008) [7].
- ↑ "Steven Pinker: the mind reader" by Ed Douglas The Guardian Accessed 2006-02-03
- ↑ "The other day Vernette said he [Shneidman] was blessed. True enough, he thought, but not quite right, not blessed. On a napkin on the TV tray he scribbled down the Greek prefix, eu, for good, and then through association and sound, fell upon doria... this would be the word for his good fortune. Eudoria... gratitude without an object, no one to credit, no one to thank. No Jesus, no Yahweh, Muhammad, Vishnu or Buddha. Because he believes life isn't contingent upon god or upon prayers. There is no heaven, no hell. Happiness lies in te here and now and the satisfaction of living a good life without religion or myth to guide you." Waiting for death, alone and unafraid, Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2009 (Accessed May 18, 2009)
- ↑ Carlo Strenger (2002) From Yeshiva to Critical Pluralism, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 22: 534–558. http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=pi.022.0534a
- ↑ On Durkheim, Larry R. Ridener, referencing a book by Lewis A. Coser, wrote: "Shortly after his traditional Jewish confirmation at the age of thirteen, Durkheim, under the influence of a Catholic woman teacher, had a shortlived mystical experience that led to an interest in Catholicism. But soon afterwards he turned away from all religious involvement, though emphatically not from interest in religious phenomena, and became an agnostic." See Ridener's page on famous dead sociologists. See also Coser's book: Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd Ed., Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977: 143–144
- ↑ ""Personally, I've never been confronted with the question of God," says one such politely indifferent atheist, Dr. Claude Lévi-Strauss, professor of social anthropology at the Collège de France." Theology: Toward a Hidden God, Time.com.
- ↑ Shannon, Phil. "Ralph Miliband: accurate diagnosis, faulty prescription". Green Left. July 23, 2003
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