Lives of Unbelievers
The eras
The ancient world
Before there was a word for it, there were people who said the gods were made in our image, or that nothing could be known about them, or that they existed but took no interest in us, or that nothing of us survives death. Athens punished some of them; a Buddhist sutra preserved an Indian materialist's teaching in order to refute it; a Han scholar argued that ghosts do not exist; and one Roman poem carried the argument through a thousand years of silence.
From Liang China to Amsterdam
In the centuries when every state had an official faith, unbelief survived in the margins: a Chinese scholar who would not recant before his emperor, a Baghdad theologian known only from the books written against him, an English playwright accused of atheism days before he was killed, and a Portuguese exile flogged in an Amsterdam synagogue.
The Enlightenment
A village priest who served Mass for forty years while writing a secret testament against it; a salon host who published the most notorious book in Paris without his name on it; a traveller who laid the world's religions side by side and asked how anyone could choose. In the eighteenth century unbelief was written down, and hidden, and then printed.
The nineteenth century
The century in which unbelief went public: a publisher jailed for printing what he thought, a poet expelled from Oxford for a pamphlet, a lecturer who filled the largest halls in America, a member of Parliament kept from his seat for six years over an oath, a rabbi's daughter who lectured in defence of atheism, and a campaigner who left atheism for Theosophy.
The twentieth century
Unbelief in the courtroom, the lecture hall, the prison and the laboratory: a defence lawyer cross-examining the Bible, an anarchist deported for her politics, a philosopher who lost a professorship over his views, a novelist who loved the faith she did not share, a mother who took school prayer to the Supreme Court, and an astronomer who offered wonder in place of worship.
Recent
The public atheists of the last thirty years, and the ones who turned back: a biologist, a philosopher, a journalist facing death in public, a neuroscientist who kept the contemplative life, a former Baptist who made deconversion a method, and a woman who left Islam for atheism and then atheism for Christianity.