People
133 lives across 6 eras. 133 have a finished profile so far, and the rest are in research.
The ancient world 6th century BCE to the 2nd century CE
Xenophanes
Xenophanes was exiled from Colophon at twenty-five, for reasons no source gives, and spent sixty-seven years as a wandering poet. He mocked the gods of Homer and Hesiod as thieves and adulterers, said that every people paints its gods in its own likeness, and proposed instead one god, unlike mortals in body or in thought. He never denied that gods exist, but he said no one could know the truth about them: his was the first critique of the gods, not yet atheism.
Ajita Kesakambali
Ajita Kesakambali was a wandering teacher of the Ganges valley around 500 BCE. He taught that a person is four elements and nothing more, that gifts and sacrifices earn nothing, and that the wise and the foolish alike are annihilated at death. No motive, life or writing of his survives. We know the doctrine only because the Buddhist and Jain schools that wanted to refute it wrote it down; the later Cārvāka school, often made his heir, was in large part described by its enemies too.
Protagoras
Protagoras, the first professed sophist and a friend of Pericles, opened his book On the Gods by saying he could not know whether they exist, because the question is obscure and life is short. He doubted rather than denied. Late writers say Athens burned the book and drove him to his death at sea; Plato's Socrates says he kept his good name to the end. The sources cannot settle it.
Diagoras of Melos
Diagoras of Melos was a poet whose lost hymns were thought pious. By 423 BCE he was the Athenian stage's byword for godlessness. In 415, in a city panicked by the mutilation of the herms, a year after it had crushed his island, he was condemned with a bounty on his head for profaning the Mysteries. No word of his own survives, and the sources leave open whether he denied the gods, mocked their rites, or was punished for being a Melian.
Prodicus of Ceos
Prodicus of Ceos was the fee-taking sophist famous for fine distinctions and for the fable of the Choice of Heracles. He left no surviving word on the gods. Later writers report that he explained them as the ancients' names for what fed and helped them: bread as Demeter, wine as Dionysus, the Nile as a god. From the third century BCE they listed him among the "so-called atheists". His unbelief is a reported theory and a label others fixed on him, not a declaration of his own.
Critias
Critias was Plato's aristocratic kinsman and the hardest of the Thirty who ruled Athens in blood in 404–403 BCE. He left no word about his own belief. His name as an unbeliever rests on one verse speech, quoted by Sextus Empiricus six centuries later, in which the trickster Sisyphus says a clever man invented the fear of gods to police secret crimes. Ancient and modern readers give that speech either to Critias or to Euripides, so his unbelief is an attribution, not a confession.
Epicurus
Epicurus was a Samian schoolboy who, by his own account, turned to philosophy at fourteen. In his Garden he taught that the gods exist, blessed and far away, and neither punish nor reward, so that the two great fears, of the sky and of death, could be cured by understanding nature. He never revised it. His critics, from Cicero to the Christians, called it atheism in polite words.
Theodorus the Atheist
Theodorus of Cyrene was trained in the Cyrenaic school of pleasure and in the art of argument. He was remembered as the ancient world's plainest denier of the city's gods, and was driven out of Athens and of Cyrene for it. Nothing he wrote survives, and no source records why he stopped believing. "Atheist" meant something different to each of the writers who called him one.
Euhemerus
Euhemerus, a friend of King Cassander, wrote a Sacred Record claiming that the gods had been early kings, whose deeds were found on a golden pillar on an island no one else ever reached. The book is lost, and nothing records what he himself believed. He survives only as each later reader needed him: a liar to the Greek geographers, an atheist to Plutarch and Theophilus, and to the Christian apologists the best witness that the pagan gods had been men.
Lucretius
Almost nothing is known of Lucretius. He took Epicurus as his master for reasons no source records, and wrote a single unfinished poem to free its reader from religio, the fear of the gods and of death, keeping the gods only as remote and indifferent. His view never changes in the poem. His life was replaced by a Christian legend of madness, his text survived in one monastery copy, and it came back in 1417 to be read, imitated and answered as the oracle of atheists.
Wang Chong
Wang Chong was a poor Confucian scholar of Kuaiji who read his way through the Luoyang bookstalls and could not accept what he found. He wrote the Lunheng to weigh the orthodox claims of his age against observation: Heaven has no mouth to rebuke rulers, thunder is a clash of natural forces, and the dead do not become conscious ghosts. He kept fate and omens as natural signs, and wrote partly to stop ruinous funerals. He never recanted, and ended his life accepting that people, like animals, live a while and die.
Lucian of Samosata
Lucian was a Syrian who escaped a sculptor's workshop for rhetoric, and then gave up on philosophy. In his forties he laughed at the gods of Olympus, their oracles, their sacrifices and their prophets, through comic characters whose masks he never removed. Only late in life did he declare for Epicurus. He never called himself an atheist, and what the surviving texts show is less a denial of the gods than a refusal to be frightened by them.
From Liang China to Amsterdam 400 to 1600, by birth
Fan Zhen
Fan Zhen was a poor Confucian scholar among carriage-riding classmates. He answered a Buddhist prince's karma with a fallen flower, and wrote that the spirit is the body's working as sharpness is the knife's, because he saw a court draining its wealth, and its pity for the poor, into monasteries. He was pressed by a prince, a bribe, an emperor and sixty-two courtiers. He was never punished for the argument, was exiled for something else, and is not recorded as giving it up.
Jayarāśi Bhaṭṭa
Jayarāśi is known only from one book that survived in one manuscript. He began as an heir of the materialist Bṛhaspati, who denied the other world and the soul that would go to it. He then turned the materialists' own weapons on every school's means of knowledge, perception included, leaving no ground for a God who watches and judges, and promising only that life is delightful once nothing has to be proved. His readers have been relabelling his unbelief ever since.
Ibn al-Rawandi
Ibn al-Rawandi was a gifted Mu'tazili theologian of ninth-century Baghdad. He broke with his school, by his enemies' account out of wounded pride and ambition, and went on to argue that prophecy and revelation were unnecessary. His books perished. His unbelief, like the story that he repented, survives only in the words of the men who refuted him.
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was sent to Cambridge on a scholarship meant for future clergy. He took his degrees and never took orders, and wrote stage heroes who dared God and mocked hell. In May 1593 he was named an atheist by a tortured fellow playwright and an unsworn informer, days before he was killed at Deptford. He left no word of his own on what he believed, so his unbelief survives only as an accusation that his enemies, after his death, turned into a sermon.
Uriel da Costa
Uriel da Costa was a Portuguese New Christian who despaired of salvation by the Church's rules. He crossed Europe to live by the one revelation Jews and Christians shared, and found, on reading it strictly, that it promised nothing after death. He was banned, jailed and scourged for saying so. He ended by holding every revealed law a human invention and calling himself only a man: a search for certainty that left him outside every community, and that his editor saw as the place where Spinoza began.
The Enlightenment 1600 to 1780, by birth
Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza was a promising Talmud pupil who came to think the rabbis rested only on their own authority. At twenty-three he was cast out of Amsterdam's Portuguese synagogue for heresies no one wrote down. He spent his life arguing that the Bible is a human book, that God acts only through the laws of nature, and that a free state lets people think what they like. He rejected the word atheist and never said there was no God, but his "God or Nature" sounded to nearly everyone like no God at all.
Kazimierz Łyszczyński
Kazimierz Łyszczyński was a Brest nobleman who had spent eight years with the Jesuits. In private he wrote a manuscript arguing that man created God and that religion is a fraud of the powerful on the simple. Denounced by a debtor, he said it was a disputation meant to be refuted, and recanted on the church's script. He was beheaded and burned in Warsaw in 1689, so his unbelief survives only in the words of those who condemned him.
Matthias Knutzen
Matthias Knutzen was an orphaned organist's son from Holstein who trained in theology and preached until his superiors silenced him in 1673. He left no account of why he lost his faith. In September 1674 he scattered at Jena, Coburg and Altdorf a signed Latin letter denying God, magistrate, temples and priests, and putting conscience in their place, on behalf of a "sect" no one could find. He provoked a generation of refutations, and then vanished from the record without recanting.
Jean Meslier
Jean Meslier was ordained to please his parents and, by his own account, was never a believer. He served a village parish for thirty-seven years while writing a Testament against all gods, kings and priests, for his parishioners to read after his death. His unbelief never changed, but after 1729 others remade it: Voltaire into a penitent deist's prayer, and d'Holbach's publishers into a name on another man's book.
Andō Shōeki
Andō Shōeki was a country physician in Hachinohe who watched farmers starve while those who did not till ate their grain. He came to hold that the world is only self-moving nature, with no god or Buddha above it and no reward or punishment from beyond, and that sages and creeds were inventions of those who lived off the farmers. He judged this too dangerous to print in full. He published a softened version and left the rest for readers a hundred years later, who nearly lost it to fire.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie
Julien Offray de La Mettrie was destined for the Church and was briefly a Jansenist. He became a physician for money and learned the body under Boerhaave. As Frederick the Great told it, in his own fever at Freiburg in 1744 he saw that thought depends on the machine of the body. He said so veiled in 1745 and plainly in Man a Machine (1747–48), and lost his post, his country and his Dutch refuge for it. At Frederick's court he held to his materialism while declining to call himself an atheist, and refused the priest at his death in 1751.
David Hume
David Hume lost the faith of his devout mother before he was twenty, gradually and, by his own account, against his will. He then spent fifty years deciding how much of his doubt to print: he cut the miracles essay from his first book, lost two professorships to the charge of atheism, withdrew his essays on suicide and immortality, and held back the Dialogues until after his death. He called himself only a sceptic. He died so calmly that his calm became the believers' argument.
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a tonsured Jesuit pupil who briefly wore a hair shirt. He argued for God as a deist in 1746, then in 1749 handed that argument to a blind man to destroy, while telling Voltaire that belief hardly mattered. Prison at Vincennes taught him to keep his boldest thoughts out of print, and he wrote his materialism into dialogues he would not publish. On his deathbed he refused a retraction as an impudent lie, saying that the first step towards philosophy is incredulity.
Claude Adrien Helvétius
Claude Adrien Helvétius was schooled by Jesuits and turned by Locke into an empiricist. As a tax farmer he published in 1758 a licensed book that explained mind by the senses and morals by self-interest, without ever denying God. King, archbishop, Parlement, Pope and Sorbonne condemned him as a materialist friend of atheists, and he signed three retractions to protect his mother, his post and his censor. He kept his plainest words on priests, the soul and honest atheists for a manuscript book and private notes, printed after his death.
Baron d'Holbach
The Baron d'Holbach was raised a Catholic, and his translations of earth science first set the evidence against Genesis. He taught atheism openly at his own table and published it only under dead men's names, from Christianity Unveiled in 1761 to the System of Nature in 1770, while the pedlars who sold his books were flogged and branded. Late in life he turned from destroying belief to building a secular morals and politics. He was named as the author only after his death.
Yamagata Bantō
Yamagata Bantō was an Osaka merchant's clerk, schooled in the rational Confucianism of the Kaitokudō and in European astronomy learned through Dutch books. He had no creed to lose. In a private book begun at fifty-four and finished blind, he set down that there are no gods, buddhas or ghosts, because a teaching should say plainly what exists, and the measured globe held no paradise. He kept that conclusion to his death verses.
Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham was a Church of England child who "believed as hard as I could". At Oxford he signed the Thirty-nine Articles against his conscience, and never forgot it. He kept his doubts to private notes for decades. In his seventies he attacked the Church under his own name (1818), and natural religion and St Paul under invented ones (1822–23), never calling himself an atheist. He arranged his death so that his body served science, and his preserved figure stood in place of a religious rite.
Sylvain Maréchal
Sylvain Maréchal had no recorded faith to lose. The Paris poet declared himself "a peaceful atheist" in verse by 1781, and paid for a calendar without saints with a burned book and a cell in Saint-Lazare in 1788. He carried the same unbelief through the Revolution and Babeuf's conspiracy. In 1800 he made it into a list, the Dictionary of Atheists, whose preface defined the true atheist as one who says "I can be wise without a God". He never revised it, only narrowed it to "the virtuous man", and died at Montrouge without recanting.
Constantin-François Volney
Constantin-François Volney was schooled by priests and met d'Holbach's circle in Paris. In 1782 he went east to see where the opinions that govern us were born, and came back to set the world's religions side by side in The Ruins of 1791, speaking only as a meditating traveller. He kept God as the name of nature's order. In 1797 he refused Priestley's demand for a creed, on the ground that no one had the right to ask it, and in old age he regretted provocation more than doubt.
Abner Kneeland
Abner Kneeland was a Baptist lay preacher turned Universalist minister. He put his first doubts about the Bible to Hosea Ballou in 1814 and was reassured. Through Priestley, Owen and his own reading he lost his faith in a future life and a personal God, and the Universalists suspended him in 1829. In 1833 he declared himself "not an Atheist, but a Pantheist". He spent four years in the courts and sixty days in a Boston jail (1838) for a letter saying the Universalists' god was a chimera, never recanted, and ended his life in a freethinkers' colony in Iowa.
The nineteenth century 1780 to 1850, by birth
Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer was baptised and confirmed in a Danzig church by a family for whom religion was a formality. At fifteen he wrote against English bigotry, and at twenty-three that no one who really philosophizes is religious. From Kant and the Upanishads he built a philosophy with no creator in it (1818). He refused the name "atheist" as absurd and malicious, and proposed "Non-Judaism" in its place. In old age he made a truce with religion as a necessary evil, pleased that his irreligious teaching served some readers as a religion.
Richard Carlile
Richard Carlile was a Devon tinman who burned Paine in effigy as a boy. He turned to radical publishing in the hunger of 1816–17. The prosecutions he courted, and six years of study in Dorchester gaol, made him a Deist and then an atheist. After 1833 he recast his unbelief as an allegorical Christianity, while insisting he had not recanted a sentence.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley hated the cruelty of believers before he doubted their God. He reasoned his way from Hume and Locke to The Necessity of Atheism at eighteen, was expelled from Oxford for it, and later lost his children partly on the same ground. In his last years he turned the word atheist from a creed into a gauntlet thrown down against superstition and oppression.
Frances Wright
Frances Wright was an orphan who lost a devout childhood faith to the libraries around her and to Epicurus. She kept her unbelief private for fifteen years while she worked for liberty and against slavery. She went public in 1828 because she believed the American churches were reaching for political power through women's minds. In middle age she took back the word "religion" for a human bond of union, while still declining to speak of God.
Harriet Martineau
Harriet Martineau was a devout Unitarian child. At twenty she took the doctrine of Necessity from her brother James, and watched it wear her faith away over many years. She let go of the last of it in five years of illness and bereavement at Tynemouth, and on her Eastern journey of 1846–47 she saw every religion as human history. In 1851 she said in print that she knew nothing whatever about God, an atheist only "in the vulgar sense", at the cost of her brother's lasting enmity and with no dread of the annihilation she expected.
Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Feuerbach left theology for Hegel's philosophy at twenty, and lost his academic career to an anonymous book against immortality. In The Essence of Christianity he argued that God is humanity's own nature, projected and worshipped. He meant that unbelief as a translation of religion into plain speech. Love of man later pushed it toward materialism.
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was raised by his father without any religion, and "never had" a faith to lose. His crisis of 1826 was one of feeling, not belief, but it opened him to religion's emotional side. In 1834 he told Carlyle privately that he had only "a merely probable God". He kept public silence on religion by his father's rule, even as an MP, then defended the atheist Bradlaugh and lost his seat for it. In his last essay he stated the same probable God as a hope he called "legitimate and philosophically defensible", but never belief.
Max Stirner
Max Stirner was a Bayreuth Lutheran with a theology student's training and no recorded crisis of faith. He moved among Bauer's Berlin radicals until, in The Ego and Its Own (1844), he rejected not only God but the "Man" that Feuerbach and the humanist atheists had put in God's place. He refused the name atheist, because he counted those atheists among the pious. He restated the position once against his critics in 1845, and then fell silent into translation, debt and an early death.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a would-be country clergyman who believed every word of the Bible. Between 1836 and 1839 he gave up Christianity as a revelation "at a very slow rate" and without distress, by reasoning about miracles, the Gospels and other religions. He kept a designing God until his own theory left design little to do, and ended "content to remain an Agnostic". He kept the whole road private, for his family's sake and from his own judgement that attacks on religion did no good.
Ernestine Rose
Ernestine Rose was a rabbi's daughter who could not love a God who wanted suffering, and she gave up her father's faith at fourteen. She spent thirty years in America fighting for women's property and rights, while keeping her religious arguments off the movement's platform. In 1861 she called herself, in print and without retreat, an atheist who believed in man.
Vissarion Belinsky
Vissarion Belinsky was a village priest's grandson, and his own young faith was the idealism of the Moscow circle ("the presence of God", 1837). He lost it to grief at Stankevich's death in 1840 and to his break with Hegel, and wrote privately in 1841 that "negation is my God". He said it in public only once, from abroad, in the 1847 Letter to Gogol: the Church was the prop of the knout, and Christ the teacher of freedom it had betrayed. The letter was banned in Russia, copied by hand, and read aloud by Dostoevsky at the price of a death sentence.
Mikhail Bakunin
Mikhail Bakunin's Orthodox boyhood cooled at cadet school, and his early philosophy was a religion he used to defend the state. He became a revolutionary in Dresden in 1842 while still speaking of "a new religion", and believed in a personal God into his late forties. He turned to open atheism only in the 1860s, in his fight with Mazzini's religious republicanism. After that, God, the state and every master stood or fell together for him.
George Holyoake
George Jacob Holyoake was a devout Birmingham Sunday-school teacher whose sister died over a church-rate. He lost his belief in God when his friend Southwell was jailed for blasphemy in 1842, and went to prison himself that year professing "disbelief" rather than denial. He then spent sixty years renaming the absence, from atheism to Secularism in 1851 to agnosticism, so that unbelief would be judged by the good it did rather than by the quarrel over God.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx, the grandson of rabbis, was baptised a Lutheran at six into his father's Enlightenment deism. He lost his idealist "gods" at nineteen and took Prometheus for his motto at twenty-three. By twenty-five, after Feuerbach, he held the criticism of religion finished: religion was the sigh of the oppressed and the heart of a heartless world, a symptom that would fade only when the world stopped needing it. So he spent his life on economics, and had little time for atheist campaigners.
Ignacio Ramírez
Ignacio Ramírez was the son of a liberal family driven out by a clerical government. He read his way through the friars' and the cathedral's forbidden books, and at eighteen read a paper headed "No hay Dios" to the Academia de Letrán. He never retreated from it, but turned it from provocation into law: he fought "divine right" in the 1856 Congress and closed the convents as Juárez's minister. He held that a government should be neither Catholic nor atheist, and belief left to each conscience.
George Eliot
George Eliot was an ultra-Evangelical girl who lost the creed in 1841, reading Hennell among the Brays. She quarrelled with her father over church and regretted it all her life. In 1843 she gave up proselytising as "the quackery of infidelity", and she put her name only to Feuerbach's argument that God is human nature. She ended reverent toward the great religions, holding the idea of God to be "the ideal of a goodness entirely human" and unbelief to be the discipline of doing without opium.
Ernest Renan
Ernest Renan was a Breton boy who never doubted his priests. He lost his faith not to a woman or to politics but to Hebrew philology at Saint-Sulpice, and walked out of the seminary in 1845 because he could not become a priest without hypocrisy. He told the life of Jesus as the life of an incomparable man (1863), and lost his chair for it. He ended neither believer nor atheist, writing that atheism is logical in this universe but that we may be atheists for not seeing far enough, and addressing "a hidden God".
Ludwig Büchner
Ludwig Büchner was marked young by his brother Georg's death in exile, and set on his course by the 1848 thesis that the soul is unthinkable without matter. The Darmstadt physician wrote Force and Matter (1855) in a few weeks after the failed revolution, and lost his Tübingen post for it. He spent forty years defending and renaming his unbelief, from "atheistic" (1869) to "monism" (1891), founding a freethinkers' league and arguing atheism against Darwin's agnosticism. His brother saw a private pessimist who said he had missed his vocation.
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley was a self-taught boy who learned from Hamilton that some questions have no answers. He never had a creed to lose, but at his son's grave in 1860 he refused to pretend to one. In 1869 he named that refusal "agnostic", and defended the word against the bishops as a method rather than a sect. He ended by holding that morality runs against nature, and never once called himself an atheist.
Leslie Stephen
Leslie Stephen was an evangelical's grandson who took holy orders for a Cambridge tutorship rather than from conviction. He read his way out of the creed through Comte, Kant and Mill, gave up his teaching in 1862 rather than read services he did not believe, and renounced his orders as soon as the law allowed. In 1876 he gave English unbelief its modest public name, agnostic. He always insisted that he had not lost a faith but discovered he had never had one.
Charles Bradlaugh
A Sunday-school teacher's honest question got Charles Bradlaugh called an atheist before he was one. Driven from home at sixteen for refusing to pretend, he thought his way from deism to a defined atheism alone in a barrack-room. He then spent forty years turning his unbelief into law: the right to testify, to publish, and to sit in Parliament without swearing to a God he found meaningless.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Robert Ingersoll was a preacher's son who kept the preacher's voice but not the creed. He turned unbelief into the most popular lecture ticket in America. In the end he let his agnosticism soften from attack into hope.
Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel's liberal Protestant faith, still defended in his letters at twenty-one, wore away between 1855 and 1857, under medicine, his teachers and what he saw of Catholic practice. Darwin (1860) and the death of his wife Anna (1864) drove him to build a "monistic" system in its place. He declared it as a pantheist's confession (1892) and as a "new monistic religion" that accepted atheism as its negative side (1899), organised it in the Monist League (1906), and made it outward only in 1910, when he left the church for political reasons. The creed did not change after that, and it carried his ranking of the races with it.
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie was raised among Dunfermline radicals who had walked out of Calvinism over the damnation of infants. He kept a mild Swedenborgian faith into his teens, and lost it with a circle of Pittsburgh friends who "voted down" the dogmas in the 1850s. By the 1880s he had found "a philosophy at last" in Spencer and Darwin. In public he preached a gospel of wealth in Christ's name and gave organs to churches for the music. He said plainly that he "had got rid of theology and the supernatural" only in an autobiography published after his death, and hedged even there with a "hope of immortality".
Mark Twain
Mark Twain grew from a Hannibal boy terrified of hell into a man who could not sit through his wife's Bible readings without feeling a hypocrite. In private he denied every Christian doctrine while keeping a distant God. Out of love for his family and caution with his public, he put his sharpest writing on religion away for after his death.
Winwood Reade
Winwood Reade was a failed Oxford novelist who wrote as a loyal Anglican in 1861. He went twice to West Africa and read Darwin and Spencer. In The Martyrdom of Man (1872), against his publisher's advice, he declared supernatural Christianity false and God-worship idolatry, while affirming a Supreme Power "higher than a Mind" and a religion of humanity. Reviewers called him an honest unbeliever. In the novel he wrote while dying, his narrator kept an incomprehensible God and allowed, of the afterlife, "I may be mistaken".
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy was a church-musician's son who dreamed of the pulpit. In his twenties he lost his faith to the new biblical criticism, to Darwin, and to Newman's Apologia, whose chain of reasoning, he wrote in his notebook, had "no first link". He kept the loss private for thirty years, and said it in public only after Jude the Obscure drove him from the novel to verse. He spoke it as grief rather than triumph, refused the word atheist, and never ceased to love the church he could not believe in.
Ambrose Bierce
Ambrose Bierce was raised in a revivalist settlement whose religion he and his brother resented. He was wounded at Kennesaw, and his San Francisco colleagues remembered him as an author of atheistic tracts. He turned his unbelief into satire in The Devil's Dictionary (1881–1906), called himself an "infidel" who wished he were not one, and defended Ingersoll. In his last years, "not a Christian" but admiring Jesus next to Buddha, he asked a believing friend to pray for him before he vanished in Mexico at the end of 1913.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche was a pastor's son who chose truth over peace at twenty. In 1882 he announced the death of God as a catastrophe Europe had not yet understood. He came to see his own unbelief not as the opposite of the faith he was raised in but as its last consequence: a Christian love of truth turned on Christianity itself.
Manuel González Prada
Manuel González Prada was the son of a noble and conservative Lima family, and his early beliefs are disputed: deist verses in 1871, a "resolute atheist" by his own late account. The lost War of the Pacific made him a public unbeliever, and he attacked the Church as a pillar of the order that had ruined Peru. He then told freethinkers that hating priests was not a philosophy, and moved on to anarchism. At the end he admitted doubts about his own disbelief, without returning to faith.
W. K. Clifford
W. K. Clifford was an ardent High Churchman at Trinity who tried to defend dogma with science. He gave up that faith in the late 1860s, under Darwin and Spencer, after a struggle his friend Pollock could not date. In "The Ethics of Belief" (1876–77) he turned his loss into a rule: it is wrong for anyone to believe on insufficient evidence. He never called himself an atheist in print, grieved openly for "the Great Companion", revered the believers he knew, and died at thirty-three without fear or retraction.
Annie Besant
Annie Besant left Christianity because she could not call good a God who let her baby suffer. She paid for her atheism with her marriage and her daughter. In 1889 she left atheism for Theosophy, because atheism gave her no motive strong enough to make people serve one another. She never unsaid her case against the supernatural.
Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison was raised by a Baptist minister's daughter and set loose at thirteen on his father's shelf of Paine. He never lost a faith he is known to have held. In 1910 he told the New York Times that there were no gods of the religions, no soul and no use for a future life, while speaking in the same year of an Intelligence behind nature. In 1920 he revised the denial into a laboratory theory of indestructible "life entities" and an apparatus to test survival. He ended as Paine's defender and, like Paine, no atheist by his own word.
Luther Burbank
Luther Burbank was raised in a stern New England Baptist church. In his youth, as a friend told it, he lost its God of hell and judgement, and found in Darwin a new world. He spoke against "misleading theology" for forty years while keeping a reverence for nature he called God. In January 1926 he declared himself "an infidel" in the dictionary's sense, "a doubter, a questioner, a skeptic" who still recognised "a great universal power", and restated it from a pulpit. He died eleven weeks later without recanting.
The twentieth century 1850 to 1940, by birth
G. W. Foote
G. W. Foote was a Plymouth boy raised Anglican and Unitarian, who read himself into scepticism and reached London in 1868 "with very little religion". He became Bradlaugh's disciple, then a moderate Secularist. After Parliament's treatment of Bradlaugh he turned to ridicule, founding The Freethinker (1881) on the principle that superstition hates laughter. He served twelve months for blasphemy in 1883 with "Religion none" on his cell card, and succeeded Bradlaugh in 1890 as "an Atheist, and a teacher of Atheism".
Shibli Shumayyil
Shibli Shumayyil was a Catholic boy from Mount Lebanon who lost his religion training as a doctor in France, and then lost his last "cause of causes" to the question "what is the cause of your cause?" In 1884 he carried Büchner's Darwin into Arabic, with a preface tracing the gods to fear and ignorance. He spent thirty years in Cairo denying a hidden power that watches and judges human deeds, while defending the faith of others. He renamed his unbelief "natural monism" and "the religion of humanity", and never called it atheism.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was a Jewish boy in Catholic Vienna, turned to science by Goethe and trained in Brücke's laboratory. He left no public-domain account of losing a faith. From 1907 he made unbelief clinical, treating religion as a wish-fulfilment rooted in the child's longing for a father: an "illusion" in 1927 that was not necessarily an error, and a "mass-delusion" by 1930. He kept a pastor as a friend, and granted religion's history respect.
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow was raised by a doubting father in a churchgoing village. He came to unbelief through a philosophy of pity, the view that every person is made by heredity and circumstance, and he gave up the hope of immortality reluctantly. At Dayton in 1925 he accepted the word agnostic as a compliment, while cross-examining the Bible's most famous defender.
Francisco Ferrer
Francisco Ferrer was raised by devout Catholic farmers at Alella, and broke with their faith and politics as a young Republican. In his Paris years he called himself "a convinced atheist". He spent a Catholic pupil's legacy on a Barcelona school meant to banish religion from children's minds. He was acquitted once, and then shot at Montjuïc in 1909 as "author and chief" of a rising no single act of his was shown to have caused. He refused the priests to the last, and forbade any cult, even of himself.
Voltairine de Cleyre
Voltairine de Cleyre was named for Voltaire by a freethinking father who then returned to the church and put her in a convent. She came out "a freethinker" after refusing to say what she did not feel. She lectured a nature-theist freethought until the Chicago hangings of 1887 turned it against the state. In her last years she held that belief in God had little to do with freedom, while her own view stayed "no God in the soul or out of it". The refusal to lie held the whole life together.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was a devout Catholic girl in Russian-ruled Warsaw who lost her eldest sister and then her mother. By her daughter's account she felt revolt against the God she had prayed to. She let her faith lapse among the Warsaw positivists while keeping up appearances. From 1895 she declared her unbelief by acts rather than words: a civil marriage, unbaptised daughters and funerals without ceremony. She left only one published sentence of her own: "I myself did not practice any."
Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman had no faith to lose, only a religion she met as discipline in a Jewish childhood. Her atheism grew out of her pity for the hanged and out of her anarchism, and by 1893 it was a flat public statement. In 1913 and 1916 it became an argument for the earth over heaven. In Soviet Russia it turned on the revolution's own church.
Kōtoku Shūsui
Kōtoku Shūsui was schooled in the Confucian classics and formed as the pupil of Nakae Chōmin, whose last book denied God and the soul. In 1901 he refused his Christian friend Uchimura's God, for a morality without fear or future judgment. In politics he moved from socialism to anarchism. He spent his last months in Tokyo Prison writing a book to obliterate Christ from history, and went to the gallows in 1911 having, as his last poem says, prayed to no god.
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell was raised in his grandmother's devout Unitarian household after his freethinking parents died. At eighteen he gave up the First Cause over a sentence of Mill's. He tried for twenty years to keep a religion without God, then declared himself a dissenter from all religions, and paid for it in 1940. He never claimed more than that there was no evidence for God.
E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar)
Periyar was a merchant's son who said he could never remember believing. He fought caste first and God second. His paper denied saying "there is no God" in the 1920s; after his Soviet journey he called God each member's private business; he rejected the word "atheist" while asking what God had ever done for anyone. Only at ninety-one did he give the flat formula that his followers carved on his statues.
Chen Duxiu
Chen Duxiu left no record of a lost faith. A boy who mocked a village spirit-medium became, in a political fight against Kang Youwei's Confucian state religion (1916), the New Culture editor who called all religions idols and chose "the godless road of light" (1918). He paused in 1920 to offer Jesus's character and feeling as a new faith, turned on the church in 1922, and refused even the agnostic's doubt in 1923. At the end he used "religion" as his word for blind faith in his own party's doctrine.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a devout boy in a freethinking Jewish household, and at twelve he lost his "deep religiosity" to popular science books. In 1929–30, under a cardinal's charge of atheism, he declared that he believed in Spinoza's God and a "cosmic religious sense", but not in a God who rewards and punishes. In his last decades he grew harder on religion, as in the Gutkind letter of 1954. He refused to be enlisted by the atheists, whom he thought as dogmatic as the believers.
E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster came from an evangelical Clapham family and left no record of how or when he lost his faith, only the unfussed unbelief of King's, Cambridge. For thirty years he gave unbelief to his characters: an agnostic Cambridge, a freethinking father, an echo that turned Christianity to "boum". He said it in his own voice only in 1938, "I do not believe in belief", putting personal relationships in place of creed. In old age he lent his name to the humanist movement.
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger was raised in Catholic Corning by a freethinking stonecutter who brought Ingersoll to town and taught her to question God as a "baker". She told no story of lost faith. She aimed her inherited unbelief, under the 1914 slogan "No Gods, No Masters", at the power of the churches over women's bodies. After the 1921 Town Hall raid she met the Catholic hierarchy as her chief opponent, and insisted she quarrelled with the Church's authority rather than its faith. Late in life she was reported to call herself an Episcopalian.
H. L. Mencken
H. L. Mencken was raised in a family two generations indifferent to religion, and was confirmed in his first long trousers. He never had a faith to lose. He took up Nietzsche in his twenties, and spent his thirties and forties ridiculing American piety, with Dayton as the great set piece. At fifty he studied what he had mocked, and came out an "amiable" sceptic who thought religion unproved and unnecessary, but no longer a mere aberration.
Lu Xun
Lu Xun lost faith first in the doctors who failed his dying father. By way of Huxley and the Sendai dissecting room he came to "don't know" about the soul. He defended the farmers' gods against the reformers in 1908, attacked "ghost-talk" in the name of science from 1918, and wrote of the Shaoxing ghosts with love in 1926. Only in the last month of his life, never calling himself an atheist, did he say he was certain that when people die there are no ghosts.
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born to a clergyman who had resigned his orders to become an agnostic, and a mother who wrote for "agnostic women". She never had a faith to lose. She tried unbelief out through her characters from 1915 to 1927, and declared it privately in 1928, when Eliot's conversion struck her as obscene. In Three Guineas (1938) she turned it on the Church as an institution. In her last memoir she wrote that there was certainly no God, but a pattern behind the cotton wool of the world.
Diego Rivera
Diego Rivera was the son of a Freemason father and a devout mother, and said he had been an atheist since he was five or six, with no faith to lose. His unbelief was a painter's weapon against priests who blessed the powerful. In 1947 he put it into three words borrowed from Ignacio Ramírez, "Dios no existe", and in June 1948 defended them against an archbishop, the press and a student mob. In April 1956, ill with cancer, he painted them out, and by one report called himself a Catholic. His own explanation spoke of peace, national symbols and historical truth, so whether it was conversion, reconciliation or self-censorship the sources do not settle.
M. N. Roy
M. N. Roy was a priest's son who began among the Bengal revolutionaries "fanatically believing in the spiritual mission of their Motherland". He left that spiritual nationalism for Marx in New York and Mexico (1916–19), and declared in 1922 that liberation could not be fought with religious ideology. In jail in the 1930s he rebuilt his materialism on natural science, against Marxism's certainties. At the end he judged Marxism itself a faith, and offered a humanism that would claim "neither finality nor infallibility". In no text found did he call himself an atheist.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru was raised by a father who treated religion as a woman's affair, and was initiated into Theosophy by Annie Besant at thirteen. At Harrow and Cambridge it faded into a scientific humanism without "the religious temper", and Gandhi's fasts sharpened him against religion in politics. In his prison Autobiography (1934–35) he declared that organised religion filled him with horror and that he preferred the open sea. In 1944 he softened to "I do not know". As Prime Minister he kept his agnosticism apart from a state that guaranteed every faith and named no God.
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was a Baptist preacher's daughter in Eatonville who said she loved God because it was the expected answer. Her childhood questions slept until college, where history and philosophy woke them. As Boas's anthropologist she learned belief from the inside, even taking hoodoo initiation, without sharing it. In Dust Tracks (1942) she refused prayer and organized creeds for herself while leaving others their consolation, called herself one with the infinite, and never took the label atheist.
Hu Shih
Hu Shih was raised among his mother's Buddhist devotions. At about eleven he lost his fear of hell from two old sentences by Sima Guang and Fan Zhen. He kept his unbelief from his mother, and declared it in print only after her death, in the 1919 essay that offered "social immortality" as his religion. In 1923 he called himself an atheist on the evidence, ready to change if the evidence changed. In old age he held the same view, with a new insistence on tolerance for believers.
Abraham Kovoor
Abraham Kovoor was a Kerala vicar general's son who lost his faith as a student in Calcutta. He kept silent through thirty years of teaching in religious schools, because he needed the salary. In his retirement in Ceylon he said plainly that no god made the world, that no soul survives death, and that the godmen were frauds. He backed it with a standing cash challenge that, by his own account, nobody ever took up.
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel's "really blind" faith of medieval Calanda went in three stages: a Jesuit schoolboy's doubt about Hell at fourteen, the loss completed by Darwin at seventeen, and a declaration made not in words but in L'Âge d'or (1930), which right-wing leagues attacked and the police banned. The unbelief was blasphemy in his thirties. In his sixties it calmed into "still an atheist, thank God" (1959), and in his 1982 memoir into a meditation on chance in which believing and not believing came to the same thing.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (Gora)
Gora was a Brahmin boy who lost faith in a packet of holy ash. He read his way to the conclusion that people had made God, and lost two teaching posts for saying so. He kept the word atheism against Gandhi's advice, and made it into a programme of eating, marrying and living across caste. It never softened into belief.
Margaret Knight
Margaret Knight had a nominally Christian education and a quiet loss of belief at Cambridge in the mid-1920s. In January 1955 she said on the BBC Home Service, carefully and for doubting parents, that children need not be taught a God any more than Santa Claus, and that Scientific Humanism could ground morals. The national uproar sent her, at her critics' urging, to the Bible and church history. In 1975 she judged Christianity far more harshly than she had on the radio.
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in St Petersburg, and left no account of a childhood faith or its loss. From her first philosophic journal in 1934 she made the rejection of faith the foundation of a philosophy of reason, and said so plainly from the 1940s to the 1960s. Late in life she changed only the label ("Objectivist") and the tone ("intransigent, though not militant"), never the position.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre was baptised into a family whose faith was more form than conviction. By his own account the belief never took root: it went first through his grandparents' indifference, and then, one morning at La Rochelle in 1917, in a single thought that God did not exist. He made that absence the premise of a philosophy of freedom, and spent years expelling the substitute faith of writing as salvation. In old age he admitted that traces of the idea of God remained in him.
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn did not lose a faith but inherited an unbelief, from Ingersoll-going grandparents and a father who called Christianity bunk. She held it through her brother's death when she was thirteen. She stated it plainly only once, at eighty-four, in 1991. In her last talks she softened the word to a "higher power", while keeping the same creed of kindness without heaven or hell.
Bhagat Singh
Bhagat Singh was an Arya Samaj schoolboy who prayed for hours. He read his way out of belief in God during a crisis in his revolutionary party in 1925–26, and in 1927 refused prayer when the police offered it as a way out. In the condemned cell in 1930 he answered the charge that his atheism was vanity. What he revised in his last months was the bomb, not the unbelief.
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir was raised by a devout mother and an unbelieving father as an exalted Catholic girl who thought of becoming a nun. She lost her faith gradually at about fourteen, and at eighteen felt its meaning as the word "alone". She did not campaign against belief but built an ethics on its absence (1944–47), arguing that without God we are wholly responsible, and wrote The Second Sex (1949), which the Vatican banned. She held to the position through the death of her believing mother (1963) and what she saw as Sartre's last turn toward religious language (1980).
Ismail Adham
Ismail Adham was raised, by his own account, between a father who forced Islam on him and sisters who mocked miracles, and told his father at thirteen that he was a Darwinian. In 1937 he published in Arabic, under his own name, an essay defining atheism as the positive belief that nothing lies beyond the universe, and arguing it from a mathematics of chance. He was answered courteously by al-Azhar's editor and harshly by others. He died at twenty-nine without retracting it, leaving a life story that rested largely on his own word and an essay that does not depend on it.
Alan Turing
Alan Turing was a confirmed Anglican schoolboy at Sherborne. He met the death of his friend Christopher Morcom in 1930 not with lost faith but with a deeper hope that the spirit survives, and worked that hope out through Eddington's physics in "Nature of Spirit" (1932). At some undated point before the end of the war he gave it up for what his biographer calls a determinist and atheistic view. In 1950 he answered the soul argument against thinking machines with a theologian's joke. In nothing read did he give his unbelief a name.
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was raised in a household that was Catholic only by custom, and never lost a faith he never held. The absence of God became his starting point in the essays of 1936 and The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. From 1944 he turned that unbelief from opposition into alliance. He told the Dominicans in 1948 that he could not accept their truth but would not call it an illusion, and asked Christians to remain Christians and speak out against evil.
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman was raised in a Reform Jewish community by an unbelieving father who taught him that names and uniforms are not knowledge. He left Sunday school at almost thirteen because its history mixed fiction with fact, and refused his father's Kaddish in 1946. In 1956 he argued that science turns "Is there a God?" into "How sure is it?", and in 1967 he refused to be counted among Jewish Nobel winners. Late in life he called himself as strong an atheist as anyone was likely to find, at ease with doubt and not knowing.
Madalyn Murray O'Hair
Madalyn Murray O'Hair was baptised a Presbyterian. In her own later telling she dated her unbelief to a weekend reading of the Bible in grade school. She declared it in 1960 by petitioning Baltimore's schools with her son, and won the 1963 Supreme Court case against required Bible reading. She spent the rest of her life in confrontation as "the Atheist", never revising her unbelief but paying for it with flight, an estranged son and, in the end, a murder that had nothing to do with it.
Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov was raised in Brooklyn by Orthodox parents who, by his memoirs' account, did not press their religion on him. He was an atheist for years before he would use the word, holding to "humanist" and "agnostic" as the honest labels. In 1982 he declared himself an atheist outright. In his last essay, with death close, he thanked atheism for taking away his fear of it.
José Saramago
José Saramago never had a faith to lose, so his unbelief is the story of where he aimed it. He aimed it at a Church allied with the landlords (1980), and at the God of the Gospels after what he called "the lesson of doubt" (1991). When the Portuguese government kept his Gospel from a European prize in 1992, it became a public quarrel, and he left for Lanzarote. In 2001 he signed his own word, "atheism". In 2009, while attacking the God of the Bible in Caim, he admitted that "atheist" was only a word, that he was steeped in Christian values, and that there are no absolute atheists.
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut inherited his unbelief from a line of German-American freethinkers, beginning with a great-grandfather who asked for no prayers at his coffin. He never had a faith to lose, and found his unbelief confirmed by war and anthropology. In later life he turned not toward God but toward the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. He called himself a Christ-loving atheist, and a humanist in honour of his parents.
Barbara Smoker
Barbara Smoker was a convent child who wanted to be a Carmelite, and saw no halfway house between the Church and atheism. The war in Ceylon, a confessor's charge of intellectual pride and a reading programme meant to save her faith wore it down, until on 5 November 1949, at a library's philosophy shelves, she found she was no longer a theist of any kind. She never doubted again. She spent the rest of her life on the unbelief in public, at the head of the National Secular Society, at thousands of secular funerals and beside the 1989 march against Rushdie, insisting that atheists had not lost their faith but outgrown it.
Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg was born to Jewish parents, with no faith on record to lose. From cosmology he drew the conclusion that the universe has no purpose built into it. He said so first as physics softened by "the grace of tragedy" (1977), then as a moral charge against religion grounded in his own family's deaths (1999). In "Without God" (2008) he gave an honest account of what living without God costs and how it can be done with good humour. In print he never called himself an atheist.
Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan was raised in a Jewish household in Brooklyn and told no story of lost faith, though as a teenager he filled a notebook with arguments about God. From 1979 he stated in print a position that refused both the certainty of belief and the certainty of atheism. He argued all his life that religious claims should be tested like any others, and found his awe in nature. He faced his death in 1996 calling himself an agnostic and expressly not an atheist, with no revision and no deathbed conversion.
Gloria Steinem
Gloria Steinem had no faith to lose, only an inheritance of Theosophist grandmothers, a Jewish father, a Protestant mother and a childhood baptism. Feminism, from 1969, made her see religion as power. She said so in 1970 (the church as a support of myth), in 2001 ("politics made sacred") and in 2014 ("politics in the sky"). In 2012 she named herself a humanist, and a spiritual one, refusing "atheist" as a definition by absence.
John Lennon
John Lennon was brought up lightly Anglican by his Aunt Mimi at St Peter's, Woolton, and drifted from belief with fame. In 1966 he stumbled into an accidental declaration that he had to apologise for. He looked for a teacher in the Maharishi and came away disappointed. He chose his declaration in the song "God" (1970), renouncing every authority from Jesus to the Beatles. In 1980 he revised the tone, calling himself neither anti-Christ nor antireligious, but a man who refused every package, Christian, Buddhist or Marxist.
Recent born after 1940
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins was a devout Anglican schoolboy, confirmed at thirteen. He first doubted at nine, on hearing that religions contradict one another. He gave up the Church at fourteen or fifteen, and at about sixteen gave up the creator he had kept for the design of living things, when a friend showed him the full force of Darwin's idea. The God Delusion (2006) made that biology-based unbelief public. His later talk of being a "cultural Anglican" renamed a loyalty to the Church's music and language that was already in print in 2006.
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett was raised in a mild New England Christianity and stopped believing as a teenager, without any crisis. Only in 2003, alarmed by theocratic talk after 11 September, did he declare himself a "bright" in public. He then turned from arguing against God to studying religion, and the unbelieving clergy who serve it, as natural phenomena. He met his own brush with death in 2006 by thanking goodness, not God.
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking was never a believer. He watched his schoolfriends' Christian enthusiasm with amused detachment, and asked from boyhood whether the universe needed a God to start it. For decades he kept "God" as a figure of speech for the laws of physics, the "mind of God" of 1988. From 2010 to 2011 he said plainly that God was unnecessary and heaven a fairy story, and in 2014 he called himself an atheist. In his posthumous book he still kept the word "God" as an impersonal name for the laws of nature.
Narendra Dabholkar
Narendra Dabholkar was a Satara doctor who had long since stopped believing in God. In 1982 he gave up medicine to fight superstition, and built a movement that, against his first wish, stayed neutral on God and attacked only fraud and exploitation. He defended that compromise as right for the cause. He was shot dead in Pune in 2013, and the law he fought for, which protects worship and never mentions God, was issued within days of his death.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie was raised in a secular Muslim family with an atheist father. He left no record of a crisis of faith, only an undated drift from childhood belief in the stories. He made his unbelief public through The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel about revelation "from the point of view of an unbeliever", which brought the 1989 fatwa. Under that threat he signed the Muslim creed in December 1990 and disowned it by 1992. After that his unbelief hardened, through "hard-line atheist" in 2006 to a stabbing in 2022 that brought, he said, no revelation.
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens was brought up in a Church of England that his household did not press. He dated his unbelief to a teacher's lesson about green grass at nine and a headmaster's talk of comfort at thirteen, and assumed it through twenty years of Marxist politics. After the Rushdie fatwa and 11 September he turned it into a campaign, with god is not Great in 2007. He spent his last eighteen months defending it in advance against the deathbed conversion that, as he predicted, was claimed for him after his death.
Douglas Adams
Douglas Adams was a committed schoolboy Christian who lost his faith in two steps fifteen years apart. At about eighteen a street evangelist showed him that the standards of proof he had learned at school did not apply to religion, and he became an agnostic without an alternative explanation of life. In his thirties Dawkins's books gave him one, and he became, in his own careful words, convinced that there is no god. He held that position to the end, while his tone moved from comedy to the puddle and the "artificial god", keeping the carols and the Bach.
Annie Laurie Gaylor
Annie Laurie Gaylor is a third-generation freethinker raised without religion, with no faith to lose. She met religion first as "under God" in a fifth-grade pledge, and then as the force her mother blamed for women's oppression. From 1976, when at twenty she co-founded the Freedom From Religion Foundation, she expressed her unbelief as a single demand: keep religion out of government. She pressed it through pickets, books and lawsuits the courts mostly turned away on standing, and after 2004, as co-president, through billboards and bus signs. The method changed; the conviction, as far as the record shows, did not.
Penn Jillette
Penn Jillette came from a churchgoing family in Greenfield. At about sixteen he became an atheist by reading the Bible through, and told his pastor so. He kept the unbelief unchanged for fifty years while its voice grew from a private remark into a radio credo (2005), books and a skeptic's stage persona. He restated its label ("beyond atheism", then agnostic on knowledge and atheist on belief), and untied it from the libertarian politics he had once said came from the same "I don't know".
Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry was brought up "in no faith at all". He went through an adolescent love of the Anglican church before deciding, in a phrase he called grand, that he was too "Hellenic" to believe. His unbelief never changed after that, but its forms did: "reason is my religion" (2005), a campaign against the Catholic Church (2009), and an angry hypothetical answer about God on Irish television (2015) that was reported under a blasphemy law he had once half-defended, a law Ireland then voted away (2018). Finally came his retellings of the Greek myths.
Ricky Gervais
Ricky Gervais dates his unbelief, by his own later telling, to a moment at about eight, when his brother asked why he believed in God and his mother's "Bob!" told him something was being hidden. The unbelief has not moved since, but its voice has. It went from a film about a world without lies (2009) and an essay complaining that the honest answer sounds rude (2010), to a plea to "just be kind" (2013), and to the label "agnostic atheist", with the argument of "one less god", put to a Catholic talk-show host (2017).
Taslima Nasrin
Taslima Nasrin was born into a Muslim family in Mymensingh. As a child she decided that her mother's preacher's God was cruel, and she became an atheist, she said, through scientific training. Her unbelief came out in her columns on what clerics did to women, and in a 1994 letter calling every scripture "out of place and out of time", and it cost her Bangladesh. In exile she wanted all religion banned (1995). Over thirty years she softened the demand without giving up the conviction, ending in 2025 with criticism "proportionate to the harm" and a right to believe or not.
Aron Ra
Aron Ra was a boy who believed in God but never in the Bible. He lost the Bible at twelve, God at nineteen, when a friend told him to keep telling himself it was Jesus until he believed it, and the paranormal in his twenties. He learned the word "atheist" only years later. He has spent his public life defending the teaching of evolution to other people's children rather than arguing about God, a stance he kept through the atheist movement, a Senate run and The Satanic Temple.
Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll was raised Episcopalian near Philadelphia, and the family's church-going ended when his grandmother died, when he was about ten. He drifted from belief gradually, with no crisis, and first called himself an atheist aloud at Villanova, a Catholic university, after hearing a rock song that treated unbelief as something to be happy about. His first public argument was a 2003 Notre Dame paper, published in 2005, that treated God as a hypothesis to be rejected on scientific grounds; his blog, his refusal of Templeton money (2013) and his 2014 debate with William Lane Craig followed. From about 2009 he changed his method rather than his conclusion: he gave up arguing that God does not exist in favour of "poetic naturalism" (2016), saying he had no interest in attacking religion and preferred the constructive work of following naturalism through.
Sam Harris
Sam Harris was raised with no religion to rebel against. At thirteen, after a friend's death, he went looking for what religion said about death, and then for spiritual experience, through drugs and years of meditation in India and Nepal. The attacks of 11 September 2001 turned that private seeking into a public argument against religious certainty, in The End of Faith (2004). Waking Up (2014) brought the contemplative interest, which had come first, back to the centre: a change of emphasis rather than a reversal.
Seth Andrews
Seth Andrews was a Tulsa boy raised on a literal Bible, and became a Christian radio host. He put the doubts raised by Rich Mullins's death and 9/11 into storage for years. In his late thirties, after a Hitchens video and an unfiltered reading of the Bible, he let them out, and in 2008 he told his parents he was an atheist. Since then he has widened his unbelief into politics, while looking back more gently on the believer he was.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali's childhood Islam was built on fear of Hell, and then on Brotherhood zeal in Nairobi. She kept her doubts behind a "shutter" through her Leiden years, let it fall after 11 September 2001, and said "I don't believe in God" on Corfu in May 2002. She paid for her public unbelief with a murdered collaborator, armed protection and a lost parliamentary seat. In 2023, after a decade of despair, and with civilisational as well as personal reasons, she called herself a lapsed atheist and a Christian.
Matt Dillahunty
Matt Dillahunty was a Southern Baptist who had meant to become a minister. He lost his job in 2001 and set out to rebuild his faith by study, and the study destroyed it in stages, beginning with a Bible story he found immoral. By 2006 he was hosting a weekly television argument with believers. His unbelief has widened since into a self-described skepticism, but has not reversed.
Leo Igwe
Leo Igwe was an altar boy and a seminarian from twelve. He lost his faith slowly in the seminary, through a grieving woman's question at a funeral he led at nineteen, and through the philosophers' arguments for God, which came to seem absurd. He waited years before leaving in 1994, and founded Nigeria's humanist movement in 1996. He turned his unbelief from an argument with the church into a dangerous campaign against witchcraft accusations. His 2017 thesis reframed that campaign around the accused's own agency, widening its aim without changing its substance.
Avijit Roy
Avijit Roy had no faith to lose. He was a Hindu by label, and his physics-professor father planted, he said, "the first seed of free thought and doubt". His disbelief in a creator came in his student years. From 2001 he gave it a home online for Bengali freethinkers in Mukto-Mona, and in books (2011, 2014) arguing that atheism was freedom from belief and that faith could spread like a virus. After 2013, as bloggers were jailed and killed, he campaigned for them and warned his own side that atheism did not free anyone from hatred. He was murdered in Dhaka in 2015 by men a court found had branded him an atheist.
Hemant Mehta
Hemant Mehta was raised in Jainism, a faith with karma, rebirth, heaven and hell but no creator God. He stopped believing at about fourteen. In 2006 he made his unbelief an open invitation to be proved wrong, by auctioning church visits on eBay. The "Friendly Atheist" manner that grew from it has been tested from both sides, bluntest in 2014 and chastened the same year, while the unbelief itself has not moved.
Mubarak Bala
Mubarak Bala was raised in Kano's strict Islamic schools, and answered a child's doubts with more devotion. He lost his faith slowly and privately between 2003 and 2009, and was afraid of the word "atheist" until about 2012. Boko Haram's violence drove him to say it openly in 2013. The cost was eighteen days in a psychiatric ward in 2014 and, after Facebook posts in 2020, a twenty-four-year sentence for insulting religion that a UN body called detention for his atheism. He came out of prison in 2025 reaffirming his unbelief.