List of Jewish atheists and agnostics
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This page lists well-known Jewish atheists and agnostics. Based on Jewish law's emphasis on matrilineal descent, 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]
Entertainment
[edit]Cinema
[edit]
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- Woody Allen[3][4] – 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 (self -described agnostic)[9] – American actor [10]
- Sergei Eisenstein – Soviet Russian film director and film theorist[11][12][13]
- Harvey Fierstein[14] – American actor, playwright, winner of two Tony Awards
- Stephen Fry[15] – English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director and a director of Norwich City Football Club
- Keith Gordon[16] – American actor and film director
- Nina Hartley[17] – American pornographic actress, pornographic film director, sex educator, feminist, and author
- Alejandro Jodorowsky – Chilean director[18]
- Stanley Kubrick – American film director, writer, film producer, and photographer[19][20]
- John Landis[21] – American film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, collaborated with Michael Jackson
- Fritz Lang – Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.[22][23][24]
- Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) – American actress, model, and singer (converted to Reform Judaism to marry Arthur Miller, and remained within Judaism even after her divorce from him).[25]
- Daniel Radcliffe (self-described atheist)[26][27] – English actor, protagonist of Harry Potter film series
- Harold Ramis (irreligious,[28] agnostic[29]) – American actor, director, and writer specializing in comedy.
- Carl Reiner (self-described Jewish atheist[30]) – 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[31]
- Wallace Shawn, American actor, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, atheist.[32][33][34][35]
- Adrienne Shelly (agnostic[36]) – American actor, screenwriter and director
- Todd Solondz[37] – American independent film screenwriter and director known for his style of dark, thought-provoking, socially conscious satire
- Matt Stone[38][39] – American actor, voice actor, animator, screenwriter, producer, musician, South Park
- Gene Wilder – American actor[40]
Comedy
[edit]- Eric Andre (atheist and practitioner of Transcendental Meditation[41]) – American comedian, actor, producer, and musician.
- David Baddiel ("fundamentalist Jewish atheist"[42][43]) – British comedian and television presenter
- Jack Black[44][45] – American comedian, actor and musician, Frat Pack comedian group, Golden Globe award
- Michael Ian Black[46][47] – American comedian, actor, writer, director.
- Rodney Dangerfield (self-described "Logical atheist"[48]) – American stand-up comedian.
- David Cross – American actor and comedian[46][47][49]
- Larry David (1947–) – American actor, writer, comedian, and producer[50]
- Jay Foreman (1984–) – English YouTuber, singer-songwriter, and comedian.[51]
- Myq Kaplan[52] – American stand-up comedian
- Bill Maher (antitheist, self-described atheist,[53][54] apatheist[55][56] and agnostic[57]) – American stand-up comedian, author, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher
- Marc Maron (negative atheist[58]) – American stand-up comedian, radio and podcast host
- Sarah Silverman (irreligious[59][60] agnostic[61]) – American comedian, writer, actor, singer, musician
Comic book writers
[edit]
- Neil Gaiman (agnostic[62]) – 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
Comic book editors
[edit]
- Stan Lee (agnostic[63]) – American comic book writer, editor, actor, producer, publisher, television personality, and the former president and chairman of Marvel Comics
Music
[edit]
- Larry Adler[64] – American musician, widely acknowledged as one of the world's most skilled harmonica players
- Irving Berlin (agnostic[65]) – American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history
- Aaron Copland (agnostic[66]) – American composer
- Shalom Hanoch[67] – Israeli rock singer, lyricist, composer, father of Israeli rock[better source needed]
- Richard Hell – American singer, songwriter, bass guitarist, and writer[68]
- Billy Joel (1949–) – American pianist, singer-songwriter and composer.[69]
- Howard Kaylan – American rock and roll musician, best known as a founding member and lead singer of the 1960s band The Turtles, and as "Eddie" in the 1970s rock band Flo & Eddie.[70]
- Geddy Lee[71] – Canadian musician, best known as the lead vocalist, bassist, and keyboardist for the Canadian rock group Rush
- Tom Lehrer (agnostic atheist[72]) – American singer-songwriter, satirist, pianist, and mathematician
- Jenny Lewis[73] – American singer-songwriter musician and actress
- Gustav Mahler (agnostic[74][75][76][77][78][79][80][81]) – 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[82][83]
- Anton Rubinstein[84] – Russian pianist, composer and conductor who became a pivotal figure in Russian culture when he founded the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
- Kurt Weill (agnostic[85]) – German composer
Radio
[edit]- Ira Glass – host of This American Life[86]
- Larry King – American television and radio host.[87][88][89]
Sports/games
[edit]
- 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[90]
Humanities
[edit]Archaeology
[edit]- 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[91]
Arts
[edit]
- Ernst L. Freud[92] – Austrian architect, youngest son of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
- James Lipton – American writer, actor, dean emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University and host of Inside the Actors Studio[93]
- Arthur Miller[94][95] – American playwright and essayist.
- Jonathan Miller – English theatre and opera director.[96]
- Hannah Moscovitch[97] – Canadian playwright
- Julia Pascal[98] – British playwright and theater director
- Harold Rubin (positive atheist[99]) – South African-born Israeli visual artist and free jazz clarinettist
Historians
[edit]- Isaiah Berlin (agnostic[100]) – 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[101][102] – Austrian-born American political scientist, scholar of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews
- Derek J. de Solla Price – British-American historian of science[103]
- Adam Bruno Ulam (agnostic[104]) – 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
- Howard Zinn[105] – American historian, playwright, and activist.
- Yuval Noah Harari[106] – Israeli historian and popular science author. "History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods" [citation needed]
Law
[edit]- Cesare Lombroso[107] – Italian criminologist and physician, founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology
Literature
[edit]
- Isaac Asimov (atheist, humanist and rationalist,[108] identified as "non-observant Jew"[109]) – 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[110]
- Alain de Botton[111] – Swiss writer, philosopher, television presenter and entrepreneur, resident in the United Kingdom, author of Religion for Atheists
- Lawrence Bush[112] – 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"[113] and a secular humanist;[114] has hinted that the Baudelaires in his children's book series A Series of Unfortunate Events might be atheists[115]
- Franz Kafka (agnostic atheist[116][117][118][119][120][121][122]) – influential Czech-born German-language author of novels and short stories
- Janusz Korczak (agnostic[123][124][125]) – 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[126] – Italian chemist and writer best known for If This Is a Man, an account of his year in Auschwitz
- Sami Michael[127] – Iraqi-Israeli author, President of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI)
- Leonard Peikoff[128] – 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[129]
- Maurice Bernard Sendak[130] – American writer and illustrator of children's literature, Where the Wild Things Are
- Israel Zangwill[131] – British humorist and writer
Literary critics
[edit]- Calel Perechodnik (1916–1943) – Polish Jewish diarist and Jewish Ghetto policeman at the Warsaw Ghetto[132]
- Marcel Reich-Ranicki[133] – Polish-born German literary critic and member of the literary group Gruppe 47
Novelists
[edit]- Rebecca Goldstein[134] – American philosophical novelist, essayist, and "New New Atheist" who authored 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction
- Stanisław Lem – Polish science fiction novelist and essayist[135]
- Marcel Proust (agnostic atheist[136][137]) – French novelist, critic, and essayist; best known for his work In Search of Lost Time
- Ayn Rand[138][139] – Russian-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, ethical egoist, rationalist, free-market capitalist, founder of the Objectivist philosophy
- Philip Roth[140] – American novelist: Goodbye, Columbus; Portnoy's Complaint
- Boris Strugatsky (agnostic atheist)[141] – Russian science fiction novelist; known for co-writing the science fiction novel Roadside Picnic
Philosophy
[edit]
- Jacques Derrida[142] – French philosopher, deconstruction, continental philosophy
- Paul Edwards[143][144] – Austrian-American ethicist
- Sidney Hook (agnostic[145]) – 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[146][147]) – 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[148][149] – Australian ethicist at Princeton University, animal rights advocate
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (agnostic[150][151]) – 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
[edit]- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
Astronomy and cosmology
[edit]- Ralph Alpher (agnostic/humanist[152]) – 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[153][154]
- Carl Sagan (agnostic nontheist)[155][156][157] – American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences, Cornell University
- Dennis W. Sciama (1926–1999) – British physicist who played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. His most significant work was in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein-Cartan gravity. He is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.[158]
Biology and medicine
[edit]
- Julius Axelrod* – American biochemist, reuptake of catecholamine neurotransmitters, pineal gland, share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine[159]
- Rosalind Franklin (agnostic[160][161]) – 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[162]) – American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian and popularizer. Gould called himself a "Jewish agnostic".
- François Jacob*[163] – 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[164]
- 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[165]
- 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[166]
- Oliver Sacks – British neurologist, who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings.[167][168]
- Robert Sapolsky[169] – American neuroscientist, author, Stanford University[170]
- 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[171]
- Lewis Wolpert[172] – developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster
Chemistry
[edit]- Roald Hoffmann* – American theoretical chemist; recipient of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry[173]
- Jerome Karle* (agnostic[174]) – 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"[175]) – British chemist, share of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
- George Olah* (agnostic[176]) – 1994 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, discoverer of superacids
- Dan Shechtman* – 2011 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry[177]
Computer science and artificial intelligence
[edit]- Scott Aaronson (self-described "disbelieving atheist infidel heretic"[178]) – American theoretical computer scientist and professor at University of Texas at Austin[179]
- Jacob Appelbaum – American computer security researcher and hacker; a core member of the Tor project[180]
- 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[181][182]
- Marvin Minsky – American cognitive scientist and computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) at MIT; won the Turing Award in 1969[183][184]
- 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[185]
- Richard Stallman – American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer[186]
- 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[187]
- Eliezer Yudkowsky – American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence[188]
Engineering
[edit]- Hertha Marks Ayrton (agnostic[189]) – English engineer, mathematician and inventor
- Emile Berliner (agnostic[190][191]) – 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[192][193]
Mathematics
[edit]
- Richard E. Bellman – American applied mathematician, known for his invention of dynamic programming in 1953, and important contributions in other fields of mathematics.[194][195]
- Jacob Bronowski (agnostic[196]) – 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[197][198]) Hungarian mathematician, published more papers than any other mathematician in history[199]
- Jacques Hadamard – French mathematician; made major contributions in number theory, complex function theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations[200]
- Herbert A. Hauptman* – American mathematician; with Jerome Karle, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985[201]
- Samuel Karlin[202] – American mathematician, Stanford University
- John von Neumann (agnostic; converted to Roman Catholicism in his final days[203][204][205]) – Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, and statistics
- George Pólya (agnostic[206]) – 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[207]
- William James Sidis – American mathematician, cosmologist, inventor, linguist, historian and child prodigy[208]
- 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[209]
- Hugo Steinhaus – Polish mathematician and educator[210]
- Alfred Tarski – Polish logician and mathematician; prolific author known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic[211]
- Stanislaw Ulam (agnostic[212][213]) – 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[214][215]) – French mathematician; known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry
- Norbert Wiener (agnostic[216]) – 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[217]
Physics
[edit]
- 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[218]
- Hans Bethe* – German-American nuclear physicist; Nobel laureate in physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis;[219] 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[220]
- David Bohm (agnostic[221]) – 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[222][223][224][225][226]
- 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[227]
- Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) – Austrian-Dutch physicist; made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics[228][229]
- Richard Feynman* (positive atheist[230][231]) – 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[232]
- Jerome Isaac Friedman* (agnostic[233]) – 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[234][235][236]) – American physicist and linguist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles
- Vitaly Ginzburg*[237] – Soviet theoretical physicist; astrophysicist; member of the Russian Academy of Science; a father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb; Nobel Prize in Physics
- Sheldon Glashow* (1932–) – American theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory.[238]
- Roy J. Glauber* (agnostic[239]) – 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[239]) – 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[240]
- 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[241]
- Lev Landau* – Soviet physicist; received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of superfluidity[242][243][244]
- Leon M. Lederman* – American physicist; with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988 for their joint research on neutrinos[245]
- Albert A. Michelson* (agnostic[246][247]) – 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[248][249]
- 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[250]
- 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[251][252][253][254]
- Saul Perlmutter* (agnostic[255]) – 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[256]
- Joseph Rotblat* (agnostic[257]) – Polish-British physicist; along with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995
- Dennis W. Sciama British physicist who played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. His most significant work was in general relativity, with and without quantum theory, and black holes. He helped revitalize the classical relativistic alternative to general relativity known as Einstein–Cartan gravity. He is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.[258]
- Lee Smolin – American theoretical physicist; researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo[259]
- Jack Steinberger* (atheist/humanist[260][261]) – 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
- Leo Szilard (agnostic[262][263]) – Austro-Hungarian physicist and inventor
- Edward Teller (agnostic[264]) – 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)[265]
- Steven Weinberg*[266] – American theoretical physicist, unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, share of the Nobel Prize in Physics
- Victor Weisskopf – Austrian-born American theoretical physicist[267]
- 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 Xenon-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors (sometimes referred to as "Wigner poisoning"); important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems[268]
- Yakov Zeldovich – 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[269][270]
Public figures
[edit]- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
Activism
[edit]
- Saul Alinsky (agnostic[271][272][273]) – American community organizer and writer; noted for the book Rules for Radicals
- Hannah Arendt (agnostic[274]) – 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[275][276]
- Yaron Brook[277] – political activist, current president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute
- Ariel Dorfman (agnostic[278]) – Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist
- Norman Finkelstein[279] – American political scientist, activist and author whose primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust
- Betty Friedan (agnostic[280]) – 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[281] – anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches
- Nadine Gordimer*[282] – South African political activist, writer; active in the anti-apartheid movement; Nobel Prize in Literature
- Joe Slovo (1926–1995) [283] – South African Anti-Apartheid activist, General Secretary of the South African Communist Party from 1984 to 1991, Commander of uMkhonto we Sizwe, Later served as Minister of Housing of South Africa from 1994 until his death. Described himself as an atheist who retained respect for "the positive aspects of Jewish culture".
- Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) – American political and social activist[284]
- Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880–1940) (Agnostic) – Revisionist Zionist (nationalist) leader, author, orator, activist, soldier, and founder of the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa[285][286]
- Adam Kokesh – American libertarian anti-war activist and self-professed anarcho-capitalist[287]
- Henry Morgentaler[288] – Canadian physician and prominent pro-choice advocate who has fought numerous legal battles for that cause
- Rosika Schwimmer[289] – Hungarian-born pacifist, feminist, female suffragist
Entrepreneurs
[edit]
- George Soros – billionaire investor[290]
- Michael Steinhardt[291][292][293][294] – American hedge fund manager, investor, and philanthropist active in Jewish causes
Explorers
[edit]- Ármin Vámbéry – Hungarian Turkolog and traveler[295]
Military
[edit]
- 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[296][297]
- Leon Trotsky[298] – Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, founder and first leader of the Red Army
Politics
[edit]
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- Shulamit Aloni[299] – Israeli politician and left-wing activist
- Uri Avnery – Israeli journalist, left-wing peace activist, and former Knesset member[300]
- David Ben-Gurion – Polish-Israeli politician; a founder and the first Prime Minister of modern Israel[296][297]
- Jorge Sampaio – Agnostic. Served as the 18th President of Portugal, from 1996 to 2006[301]
- Job Cohen[302][303][304] – Dutch social democratic politician and former legal scholar
- Janet Jagan[305] – American-born socialist politician who was President of Guyana
- Béla Kun[306] – Hungarian revolutionary who led the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919
- Myriam Bregman[307] – Argentine lawyer, activist and politician.
- Mátyás Rákosi[308] – Hungarian Communist Politician involved with the Hungarian Soviet Republic and later led the Hungarian People's Republic as General Secretary of the Hungarian Working People's Party from 1948 to 1956.
- Golda Meir[297][309] – Israeli teacher, kibbutznik, fourth Prime Minister of Israel, Yom Kippur War
- David Miliband[310] – 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[311] – 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[312]
- Dove-Myer Robinson[313] – mayor of Auckland City, New Zealand 1959–1965, 1968—1980
- Sam Seder – American talk show host, host of The Majority Report and co-host of Ring of Fire[314]
- Einat Wilf – Israeli former member of the Knesset for the Labor Party.
Public atheists
[edit]
- Chapman Cohen[315] – leading English atheist, secularist writer and lecturer
- Sam Harris[316] – American author, philosopher, public intellectual, neuroscientist, co-founder and CEO of Project Reason
- Christopher Hitchens – antitheist,[317] author, journalist and orator
- Joseph Lewis,[318] president of Freethinkers of America
- Michael Newdow[319] – 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[320] – former president of American Atheists, a nonprofit atheist rights advocacy organization
Social sciences
[edit]Economics
[edit]
- Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*).
- David D. Friedman[321] – Chicago School economist, physicist, legal scholar, and libertarian theorist
- Milton Friedman* (negative atheist,[322] agnostic[322][323]) – 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[324]
- Karl Marx (self-described atheist[325][326][327]) – inventor of Marxist economics
- Ludwig von Mises (agnostic[328][329][330]) – Austrian economist, philosopher, free market capitalist, classical liberal, Austrian School of Economics, founding member of Mont Pelerin Society
- Murray Rothbard (self-described atheist[331]) – American economist, historian, political theorist, founder of anarcho-capitalism[332]
- 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[333][334]
- Piero Sraffa (agnostic[335]) – 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[336]
Futurist
[edit]- Robert Ettinger – American academic, known as "the father of cryonics" because of the impact of his 1962 book The Prospect of Immortality[337]
- 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[338]
- Ray Kurzweil (agnostic[339]) – American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google
Journalism
[edit]_(cropped).jpg)
- Isaac Deutscher[340] – 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
- Amy Goodman[341] – American journalist and host of Democracy Now!
- Glenn Greenwald[342] – American journalist and author
- Amos Oz[343] – Israeli writer, novelist, journalist, professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba
- Catherine Perez-Shakdam[344] – French journalist, political analyst and commentator; formerly a marital convert to Islam
Columnists
[edit]- Amy Alkon (negative atheist[345]) – writer of a weekly advice column, Ask the Advice Goddess, which is published in over 100 newspapers within North America
- Nat Hentoff[346] – American syndicated columnist and music critic
Psychology
[edit]
- Albert Ellis ("probabilistic atheist"[347]) – American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy[348]
- Jerry Fodor[349] – American philosopher and cognitive scientist, Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses
- Sigmund Freud[350][351] (antitheist[352]) – 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[353]
- Steven Pinker[354] – Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author
- Edwin Shneidman (1918–2009) – American suicidologist and thanatologist[355]
- Boris Sidis – American psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education[208]
- Carlo Strenger[356] – Swiss-Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst, public intellectual, Tel Aviv University
Sociology
[edit]- Émile Durkheim (agnostic[357]) – French sociologist
- Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) – French anthropologist and ethnologist; has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"[358]
- Ralph Miliband[359] – Belgian-born British sociologist known as a prominent Marxist thinker, father of David and Ed Miliband (see above)
See also
[edit]
| Part of a series on |
| Jews and Judaism |
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References
[edit]- ^ What Makes a Jew "Jewish"? – Jewish Identity
- ^ Winston, Kimberly (September 26, 2011). "Judaism without God? Yes, say American atheists". USA Today. Retrieved July 14, 2013.
- ^ Dart, John. Woody Allen, Theologian Archived January 8, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ 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) Archived March 7, 2013, at the Wayback Machine. (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." "Notable Atheist: David Cronenberg « God is Not Here". Archived from the original on September 5, 2012. Retrieved September 17, 2012.
- ^ Silverman, Stephen M. (1996). Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies. New York: Knopf. p. 312. ISBN 0-679-41412-6.
- ^ "Richard Dreyfuss: 'When I die I want to hit God in the face'". the Guardian. July 24, 2016. Retrieved November 10, 2022.
- ^ "Original Thinking: Richard Dreyfuss doesn't like to be called a hypocrite – but he is". The Jerusalem Post | Jpost.com. Retrieved November 10, 2022.
- ^ Mike O'Mahony (2008). Sergei Eisenstein. Reaktion Books. ISBN 9781861894496.
For example, as a scientific materialist and self-confessed atheist, Eisenstein was a harsh critic of religion and spirituality, and yet religious rituals and biblical references permeate his works to such an extent that he was frequently criticized for excessive religious zeal by the Soviet censors.
- ^ Al LaValley (2001). Eisenstein at 100. Rutgers University Press. p. 70. ISBN 9780813529714.
As a committed Marxist, Eisenstein outwardly turned his back on his Orthodox upbringing, and took pains in his memoirs to stress his atheism.
- ^ Sergei Eisenstein (1996). Richard Taylor (ed.). Beyond the stars: the memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, Volume 5. BFI Publishing. p. 414. ISBN 9780851704609.
My atheism is like that of Anatole France – inseparable from adoration of the visible forms of a cult.
- ^ McKinley, Jesse (January 2, 2005). "Fierstein as Tevye: Sounds Crazy, No?". The New York Times.
I mean, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in heaven or hell, but I pray three or four times a day.
- ^ "Fry, Stephen (2004) [1997]. Moab is my washpot. Arrow books. p. 382. ISBN 978-0-09-945704-6.
- ^ Cashiers du Cinemart Issue 10: Interview: Keith Gordon Archived September 27, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "The Humanist - a magazine of critical inquiry and social concern". Archived from the original on November 24, 2012. Retrieved September 24, 2013.
- ^ David Church (February 2007). "Alejandro Jodorowsky". Senses of Cinema. Retrieved October 13, 2013.
However, while Buñuel's attacks on religion are primarily confined to Catholicism, Jodorowsky not only violates but de-centres Western religious traditions by creating a hybrid amalgamation of Western, non-Western and occult beliefs. A self-described "atheist mystic", he has claimed to hate religion (for it "is killing the planet"), but he loves mysticism and occult practices like alchemy.
- ^ "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."
- ^ Tom Gunning, British Film Institute (2000). The films of Fritz Lang: allegories of vision and modernity. British Film Institute. p. 7. ISBN 9780851707426.
Lang, however, immediately cautions Prokosh, 'Jerry, don't forget, the gods have not created men, man has created the gods.' This is more than a simple statement of Feuerbach-like humanism or atheism.
- ^ Patrick Mcgilligan (1998). Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. St. Martin's Press. p. 477. ISBN 9780312194543.
In the final years of his life, Lang had written, in German, a 20- to 30-page short story called "The Wandering Jew." It was "a kind of fable about a Wandering Jew," according to Pierre Rissient. After Lang's death, Rissient asked Latte [Fritz Lang's third wife] if he might arrange for its publication. "No," she replied, "because Fritz would want to be known as an atheist."
- ^ Mark Kermode (2013). Hatchet Job: Love Movies, Hate Critics. Pan Macmillan. pp. 25–26. ISBN 9781447230526.
The Austrian-born film-maker Fritz Lang once commented that, although he was an atheist, he supported religious education because 'if you do not teach religion, how can you teach ethics?'
- ^ Jeffrey Meyers (2012). "Marriage and England". The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. University of Illinois Press. p. 157. ISBN 9780252078545.
Marilyn called herself a "Jewish atheist".
- ^ Final (February 12, 2012). "Daniel Radcliffe – militant atheist | Television New Zealand | News, Sport, Weather, TV ONE, TV2 | TVNZ | ENTERTAINMENT News". TVNZ. Retrieved June 13, 2012.
- ^ Kaplan, James (June 28, 2009). "Daniel Radcliffe Breaks Free". Parade. Parade Publications. Retrieved May 27, 2011.
- ^ Todd Leopold (February 24, 2014). "Harold Ramis of 'Ghostbusters,' 'Groundhog Day' fame dies". CNN.com. Retrieved February 25, 2014.
Asked by The New York Times about the existential questions raised by "Groundhog Day" -- and competing interpretations of the film's meaning -- he mentioned that he didn't practice any religion himself.
- ^ The Canadian Press (October 16, 2009). "Dan Aykroyd on his inspiration for 'Ghostbusters'". CTV News. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
Dan, who lives in the renovated Kingston homestead where the family seances took place, said he's never experienced a supernatural event himself but freely discussed his spiritual leanings with his "Ghostbusters" collaborators. "Harold Ramis was a complete non-believer, skeptic and agnostic full-on. Billy (Murray) of course is Irish and he knows ghosts exist and sometimes the dead do linger in the land of the living. Ivan Reitman, he's Jewish so he knows ... there's a lot of paranormal in the Kabbalah," he said.
- ^ Tom, Tugend (June 15, 2008). "Reiners honored by Israeli film fest". The Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Archived from the original on September 24, 2012. Retrieved July 21, 2009.
- ^ "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...." "Real Time with Bill Maher". YouTube. January 18, 2012.
- ^ Orel, Gwen (September 3, 2009). "Bag of Tricks". Tablet Magazine.
- ^ Nathan, John (April 7, 2009). "Interview: Wallace Shawn. He makes Woody look pretty, but he's a pop culture icon". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved November 2, 2020.
- ^ Jewish United Fund (2016). "Celebrities: Wallace Shawn". Jewish United Fund. Archived from the original on November 6, 2019.
- ^ "Councils, Staff and Board of Jewish Voice for Peace". Jewish Voice for Peace. Retrieved December 22, 2017.
- ^ Adrienne Shelly said: "I'm an optimistic agnostic. I'd like to believe." Rhys, Tim (August 1996), Suddenly Adrienne Shelly Archived March 8, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, MovieMaker Magazine. Retrieved February 12, 2007.
- ^ "The A.V. Club – Is There A God?". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on September 1, 2006. Retrieved September 26, 2006.
- ^ 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
- ^ "Well, I'm a Jewish-Buddhist-Atheist, I guess." Pogrebin, Abigail (2005). Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. New York: Broadway. pp. 91–99. ISBN 978-0-7679-1612-7.
- ^ "Grantland.com". Grantland.
- ^ "Interview: David Baddiel". Varsity. November 19, 2011.
- ^ "Five minutes with: David Baddiel". April 2009. BBC.
{{cite episode}}: Missing or empty|series=(help) - ^ "Jack Black: On Music, Mayhem And Murder". NPR. Fresh Air. April 23, 2012. Retrieved April 24, 2012.
I don't have any real spirituality in my life – I'm kind of an atheist – but when music can take me to the highest heights, it's almost like a spiritual feeling. It fills that void for me.
- ^ "Jack Black Will Do Anything To Get into Hebrew School". Conan. TBS. April 27, 2012. Retrieved April 30, 2012.
And there's a Hebrew school that we really liked. And I feel a little hypocritical cause i'm an atheist.
- ^ a b "R/IAmA - Comment by u/Michaelianblack on "I Am Michael Ian Black, Sexy Bitch"". June 8, 2012.
- ^ a b Katie Stroh (February 29, 2012). "Michael Ian Black bares soul, makes us laugh with memoir". The Daily Texan. Retrieved June 9, 2012. [permanent dead link]
- ^ "Dangerfield said he was an atheist during an interview with Howard Stern in May 2004. Stern asked Dangerfield if he believed in an afterlife. Dangerfield answered he was a "logical" atheist and added, "We're apes––do apes go anyplace?"". Ffrf.org. November 22, 1980.
- ^ Appearance on ABC's "Politically Incorrect" (March 9, 1998) "I was born Jewish, but I am an atheist. I don't believe in God."[1]
- ^ Dolan, Deirdre (2006). Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book. Gotham Books. p. Front Matter.
- ^ "TwitLonger — when you talk too much for Twitter". TwitLonger. March 30, 2018. Archived from the original on March 27, 2022.
- ^ About Myq Kaplan Archived November 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine 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 July 12, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/12/maher-on-religion/ Archived March 30, 2016, 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." [2]
- ^ Itzkoff, Dave (October 7, 2008). "Message to Your Grandma: Vote Obama". The New York Times. Retrieved February 16, 2009.
- ^ "Sarah Silverman". Slate. Retrieved February 16, 2009.
- ^ "CNN.com". CNN.
- ^ Neil Gaiman (January 1989). Neil Gaiman interviewed by Steve Whitaker. FA #109. pp. 24–29.
I think we can say that God exists in the DC Universe. I would not stand up and beat the drum for the existence of God in this universe. I don't know, I think there's probably a 50/50 chance. It doesn't really matter to me.
- ^ 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. (in Hebrew)
- ^ Steven Lee Lee Beeber (2007). The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. Chicago Review Press. p. 136. ISBN 9781569762288.
Richard Hell: "My father was born a Jew but he didn't believe in that. He didn't have anything to do with religion....[he] raised me as a communist and atheist."
- ^ Anna Menta (April 1, 2018). "'Atheist Day' 2018: Billy Joel, Emma Thompson and More On Why God May Not Exist". Newsweek. Newsweek Digital LLC. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
It's no surprise that the singer-songwriter behind "Only the Good Die Young"—which includes the lyrics "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints"—is an atheist. Joel confirmed his belief in a 2010 interview with Howard Stern when the host asked him if he believed in a god. "No, I'm an atheist," Joel replied.
- ^ Shell Shocked: My Life with the Turtles, Flo and Eddie, and Frank Zappa, etc. Hal Leonard Corporation. 2013. ISBN 9781480342934.
I was an atheist. Zappa was atheist.
- ^ Tannenbaum, Rob (March 17, 2009). "Dear Superstar: Geddy Lee". Maxim. Archived from the original on September 18, 2011. Retrieved March 26, 2011.
- ^ Warren Allen Smith (2002). "Tom Lehrer". Celebrities in hell. chelCpress. p. 72. ISBN 9781569802144.
He responded: No one is more dangerous than someone who thinks he has The Truth. To be an atheist is almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. But then again, I can get pretty arrogant.
- ^ Lewis, Genny. Born Secular. "God goes / where he wants, / and who knows / where he is not. / Not in me."
- ^ Warren Allen Smith (2002). Celebrities in Hell. chelCpress. pp. 76–77. ISBN 9781569802144.
He was born a Jew but has been described as a life-long agnostic. At one point he converted to Catholicism, purely for the purpose of obtaining a job that he coveted – director of the Court Opera of Vienna. It was unthinkable for a Jew to hold such a prestigious position, hence the utilitarian conversion to the state religion.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Stuart Feder (2004). "Mahler at Midnight". Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Yale University Press. pp. 63–64. ISBN 9780300103403.
Mahler had followed the common path of assimilationist Jews, particularly those who were German-speaking and university-educated: toward a dignified job, a position in the community, and a respectable income. Besides the fact that anti-Semitism was rife in Vienna, the post Mahler sought was a government position and normally open only to those who declared themselves to belong to the state religion, Catholicism. Mahler's superior, the intendant of the opera, reported directly to the emperor. Like the many Jews who were candidates for lesser government jobs, Mahler was officially baptized on 23 February 1897. His appointment arrived soon after.
- ^ Norman Lebrecht (2010). Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 84. ISBN 9780375423819.
In January 1897 Mahler is told that "under present circumstances it is impossible to engage a Jew for Vienna." "Everywhere", he bemoans, "the fact that I am a Jew has at the last moment proved an insurmountable obstacle." But he does not despair, having made arrangements to remedy his deficiency. On February 23, 1897, at Hamburgs Little Michael Church, Gustav Mahler is baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. He is the most reluctant, the most resentful, of converts. "I had to go through it," he tells Walter. "This action," he informs Karpath, "which I took out of self-preservation, and which I was fully prepared to take, cost me a great deal." He tells a Hamburg writer: "I've changed my coat." There is no false piety here, no pretense. Mahler is letting it be known for the record that he is a forced convert, one whose Jewish pride is undiminished, his essence unchanged. "An artist who is a Jew," he tells a critic, "has to achieve twice as much as one who is not, just as a swimmer with short arms has to make double efforts." After the act of conversion he never attends Mass, never goes to confession, never crosses himself. The only time he ever enters a church for a religious purpose is to get married.
- ^ John Bowden (2005). John Bowden; John Stephen Bowden (eds.). Christianity: the complete guide. Continuum. p. 813. ISBN 9780826459374.
Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) was more of an agnostic than a believer, but the symphonies which he wrote are deeply spiritual works. He was a Jew who became a Roman Catholic, a move perhaps dictated to some degree by political motives,...
- ^ Barrie Kosky (2008). On Ecstasy. Melbourne Univ. Publishing. p. 39. ISBN 9780522855340.
Mahler's ambivalent Jewish-Christian Nietzschean agnostic personality found a living, breathing, sweating counterpart in Bernstein's muscles, bones and flesh.
- ^ Otto Klemperer (1986). Martin J. Anderson (ed.). Klemperer on Music: Shavings from a Musician's Workbench. London: Toccata Press. pp. 133–147.
Mahler was a thoroughgoing child of the nineteenth century, an adherent of Nietzsche, and typically irreligious. For all that, he was – as all his compositions testify – devout in the highest sense, though his piety was not to be found in any church prayer-book.
- ^ Kenneth Lafave (2002). "Mahler, Gustav". Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Encyclopedia.com. Retrieved June 29, 2013.
From the beginning, Mahler declared that his music was not for his own time but for the future. An agnostic, he apparently saw long-term success as a real-world equivalent of immortality. "Mahler was a thoroughgoing child of the nineteenth century, an adherent of Nietzsche, and typically irreligious," the conductor Otto Klemperer recalled in his memoirs, adding that, in his music, Mahler evinced a "piety . . . not to be found in any church prayer-book." This appraisal is confirmed by the story of Mahler's conversion to Catholicism in 1897. Although his family was Jewish, Mahler was not observant, and when conversion was required in order to qualify as music director of the Vienna Court Opera—the most prestigious post in Europe—he swiftly acquiesced to baptism and confirmation, though he never again attended mass. Once on the podium, however, Mahler brought a renewed spirituality to many works, including Beethoven's Fidelio, which he almost single-handedly rescued from a reputation for tawdriness.
- ^ "Randy Newman". August 24, 1999.
- ^ "Celebrity jews". October 17, 2003.
- ^ Philip S. Taylor (2007). Anton Rubinstein: A Life in Music. Indiana University Press. p. 280. ISBN 9780253116758.
In the ecclesiastical and religious sense I am an atheist, but I am convinced that it would be a misfortune if people had no religion, no church, no God.
- ^ Stephen Hinton, ed. (1990). Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera. CUP Archive. p. 157. ISBN 9780521338882.
Weill's agnostic rather than atheistic chorale proceeds accordingly: while the loss of its tonal centre corresponds to the loss of the absolute faith implicit in its traditional models, the very choice of model still conveys some sense of continuity.
- ^ "Tribes". March 29, 2013.
- ^ Nick Gillespie (September 17, 2015). "Larry King Loves Cryonics & Rand Paul (!): "I Want to Be Around to Pick Up the Pieces."". Reason.com.
Reason: Are you still into cryonics? King: Yes. I'm putting it in my will. I'll tell you why. I'm an atheist. Most libertarians should be atheists.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|url=(help) - ^ Jessica Steinberg (August 25, 2015). "Larry King comes to Israel, opines on US Jews". timesofisrael.com. The Times of Israel. Retrieved July 6, 2016.
While King grew up in a Modern Orthodox household, he calls himself an atheist.
- ^ Interview on The Breakfast Club radio show
- ^ Andy Soltis (2014). Mikhail Botvinnik: The Life and Games of a World Chess Champion. McFarland. p. 74. ISBN 9780786473373.
By character they were absolutely opposites," their only child, Olga, recalled in 2012. Gayane was religious, while Botvinnik was fond of saying, "I am an atheist and a communist in the spirit of the first communist on earth, Jesus Christ." He reveled in his "hard character." She was apolitical. He was an ardent Marxist. As time went by, she found it hard to deal with the stress that he seemed to thrive on.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Sonia Rao (March 2, 2020). "The probing question James Lipton always asked his celebrity guests". The Washington Post. Retrieved February 5, 2021.
Lipton told CNN in 2012 that he found Ferrell's take on his personality flattering: "We're good friends — and I think he's got me cold, the rat," Lipton said. In that same interview, Lipton, an atheist, handed a few of his famous blue note cards over to the anchor and, after years of fans wondering, finally revealed to the public what he would want God to say to him upon arriving at heaven's pearly gates. "You see, Jim? You were wrong. I exist," Lipton said, waiting a beat. "But you may come in anyway."
- ^ 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..."
- ^ Matt Lebovic (October 20, 2015). "For Arthur Miller's 100th: To Jew or not to Jew?". The Times of Israel. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
Miller's Jewish characters were often apologetic about their Judaism, seeking to flee it. The playwright never hid his own origins, but he was most comfortable identifying with atheism, and considered anti-Semitism "a rather normal feature of everyday life."
- ^ Matthew Weaver (November 27, 2019). "Sir Jonathan Miller, writer and director, dies aged 85". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media Limited. Retrieved February 16, 2021.
In 2007 he made a foray into museum curation with an exhibition about camouflage at the Imperial War Museum. Miller who was a committed atheist, also wrote and presented a 2004 series on the history of disbelief. The National Secular Society said it "broke the hegemony of religion on the BBC".
- ^ Kaminer, Michael (February 23, 2013). "Canada's guiltiest playwright". Retrieved August 17, 2015.
- ^ Julia Pascal, interviewed for the article 'Sikh theatre row: Can censorship ever be justified?', The Guardian, December 22, 2004, Pg. 7.
- ^ Shalev, Ben (February 28, 2008). "It's Important to be a Neanderthal". Ha'aretz. Retrieved May 22, 2010.
- ^ Connie Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet (2006). Isaiah Berlin: A Value Pluralist and Humanist View of Human Nature and the Meaning of Life. Rodopi. p. 133. ISBN 978-90-420-1929-4.
The traditional religious strategies of grounding morality are blocked for Berlin. Being an agnostic, brought up in the empiricist tradition, he cannot refer to a holy book. With his Jewish background, he could have referred to the book of Genesis, to the Seven Laws of Noah as applying to the whole of humankind. As an agnostic, however, he needs a secular justification.
- ^ 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" Archived May 13, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, 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."
- ^ "...my father [Derek] was a British Atheist... from a rather well known Sephardic Jewish family..." de Solla Price, Mark (December 9, 2007). "Are you Jewish?". Archived from the original on April 30, 2008. Retrieved August 1, 2008.
- ^ Adam Bruno Ulam (2002). Understanding the Cold War: A Historian's Personal Reflections (2 ed.). Transaction Publishers. p. 24. ISBN 9781412840651.
While very religious when very young, by sixteen I had turned agnostic.
- ^ Gutsch, Bonnie (August 24, 1980). "Howard Zinn". Freedom From Religion Foundation. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
- ^ "Official Website".
- ^ 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 Archived February 7, 2012, at the Wayback Machine", 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 Archived June 6, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, 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 Archived June 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, by Marc Silver, U.S. News & World Report web exclusive, 5/20/02 (Accessed April 5, 2008)
- ^ Sander L. Gilman (2005). Franz Kafka. Reaktion Books. p. 31. ISBN 9781861892546.
Through his consumption of such books Kafka rejected both capitalism and religion as a teenager – declaring himself to be a socialist and an atheist.
- ^ "K". Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature. Merriam-Webster. 1995. p. 617. ISBN 9780877790426.
As an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but as a modern intellectual he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage.
- ^ J. E. Luebering, ed. (2009). "Franz Kafka". The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time. The Rosen Publishing Group. p. 272. ISBN 9781615300969.
Kafka's opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist.
- ^ Golgotha Press (2012). The Life and Times of Franz Kafka. BookCaps Study Guides. ISBN 9781621071518.
In time Kafka would become an atheist.
- ^ Leavitt, June (2011). The Mystical Life of Franz Kafka: Theosophy, Cabala, and the Modern Spiritual Revival. Oxford University Press. p. 8. ISBN 978-0-19-982783-1.
Undoubtedly, synagogue life appalled Kafka, but not because he was an atheist. It appalled him because, in his words, he was trying to "build his faith," and the conventional forms were not adequate.
- ^ Benjamin Lazarus (July 16, 2012). "Israel must relinquish ownership over Kafka". The Jewish Chronicle Online. Retrieved March 15, 2013.
Whilst Kafka had a brief interest in Kabbalah, mysticism, and Yiddish theatre, he rarely attended synagogue and considered himself an atheist.
- ^ C.D. Merriman (2005). "Franz Kafka". Jalic Inc. Retrieved March 15, 2013.
Kafka eventually declared himself a socialist atheist, Spinoza, Darwin and Nietzsche some of his influences.
- ^ Janusz Korczak (1978). Ghetto diary. Holocaust Library.
You know I am an agnostic, but I understood: Pedagogy, tolerance, and all that.
- ^ Chris Mullen (March 7, 1983). "Korczak's Children: Flawed Faces in a Warsaw Ghetto". The Heights. p. 24. Retrieved August 25, 2013.
An assimilated Jew, he changed his name from Henryk Goldschmidt and was an agnostic who did not believe in forcing religion on children.
- ^ The Month, Volume 39. Simpkin, Marshall, and Company. 1968. p. 350.
When Dr. Janusz Korczak, a Jewish philanthropist and agnostic, voluntarily chooses to follow the Jewish orphans under his care to the Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka...
- ^ 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, Sami. 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."
- ^ Joseph Leftwich (1957). Israel Zangwill. J. Clarke. p. 160.
Zangwill had no great bias in favour of Jewish atheists, though he had himself been one.
- ^ 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 Archived September 27, 2007, at the Wayback Machine by Peter Engel. The Missouri Review, Volume 7, Number 2, 1984.
- ^ Edmund White (2009). Marcel Proust: A Life. Penguin. ISBN 9780143114987.
Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He himself was baptized (on August 5, 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never practiced that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in a savior.
- ^ Proust, Marcel (1999). The Oxford dictionary of quotations. Oxford University Press. p. 594. ISBN 978-0-19-860173-9.
...the highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.
- ^ 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 Archived April 2, 2015, at the Wayback Machine', 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 Archived January 22, 2014, at the Wayback Machine". 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."
- ^ Boris Strugatsky. "Boris Strugatsky: "The seeds of culture do not die even in the soil, which seems to be frozen to the bottom,"". Cobepwehho Cekpetho. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
I was an atheist, or as it is now for some reason, say, an agnostic. I (unfortunately or fortunately) I can not bring myself to believe in the existence of a conscious self Omnipotence that controls my life and the life of humanity.
- ^ 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 Archived August 10, 2011, at the Wayback Machine, by Joe Barnhart, The Humanist magazine, July–August 1996. (Retrieved October 13, 2006)
- ^ May, Peter. Life after God? – The Ethics of Peter Singer Archived September 13, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. "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."
- ^ William Child (2011). Wittgenstein. Taylor & Francis. p. 218. ISBN 9781136731372.
"Was Wittgenstein religious? If we call him an agnostic, this must not be understood in the sense of the familiar polemical agnosticism that concentrates, and prides itself, on the argument that man could never know about these matters. The idea of a God in the sense of the Bible, the image of God as the creator of the world, hardly ever engaged Wittgenstein's attention..., but the notion of a last judgement was of profound concern to him." – (Engelmann)
- ^ Edward Kanterian (2007). Ludwig Wittgenstein. Reaktion Books. pp. 145–146. ISBN 9781861893208.
- ^ Ralph A. Alpher. "Cosmology and Humanism" (PDF). Humanism Today. p. 15. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 29, 2011. Retrieved January 17, 2013.
This leads inevitably to my identifying philosophically as an agnostic and a humanist, and explains my temerity in sharing my views with you.
- ^ "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 Archived May 27, 2008, at the Wayback Machine 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).
- ^ Head, Tom. "Conversations with Carl". Skeptic. 13 (1): 32–38.Excerpted in Head, Tom, ed. (2006). Conversations with Carl Sagan. University of Mississippi Press. ISBN 978-1-57806-736-7.
- ^ "Quotes from Atheist Carl Sagan on Religion". Archived from the original on February 6, 2012. Retrieved August 6, 2012.
- ^ Druyan, Ann (November–December 2003). "Ann Druyan talks about science, religion, wonder, awe ... and Carl Sagan". Skeptical Inquirer. 27 (6). Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. ISSN 0194-6730. Retrieved July 27, 2010.
- ^ George F. R. Ellis; Roger Penrose (May 26, 2010). "Biographical Memoirs – Dennis William Sciama" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 56. The Royal Society Publishing: 401–422. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2009.0023. S2CID 73035217.
Although having a distinct loyalty to his Jewish origins and friends, Dennis himself was an avowed atheist, as was his father, and neither generally followed Jewish religious practice.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Costantino Ceoldo (December 31, 2012). "Homage to Rita Levi Montalcini". Retrieved July 20, 2013.
Born and raised in a Sephardic Jewish family in which culture and love of learning were categorical imperatives, she abandoned religion and embraced atheism.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Charlie Rose, interviewing Oliver Sacks, asked him whether he believed in God. Sacks replied, "I can't imagine what it meant.... No, I guess not." Originally aired on Charlie Rose, 23 Feb. 1995; re-aired, in commemoration of Sacks' death, on 11 Sept. 2015.
- ^ "All of which makes the Wingate Prize a matter of bemusement. "Yes, tell me," he says, frowning. "What is it, and why are they giving it to an old Jewish atheist who has unkind things to say about Zionism?" "Oliver Burkeman interviewing Sacks, 'Inside Story: Sacks appeal', The Guardian, May 10, 2002, Features Pages, Pg. 4.
- ^ 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 "Salon | Sneak Peeks". Archived from the original on August 29, 2008. Retrieved October 1, 2012.
- ^ Shwartz, Mark (March 7, 2007). "Robert Sapolsky discusses physiological effects of stress". News. Stanford University. Retrieved October 13, 2012.
- ^ Donald E. Johnson (2010). Programming of Life. Big Mac Publishers. p. 123. ISBN 9780982355466.
Biologist George Wald dismissed anything besides physicalism with, "I will not believe that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution.
- ^ In the 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 from 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 [permanent dead link], page 1634.
- ^ "Jerome Karle". NNDB.com. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
- ^ "Harry Kroto – Autobiography". The Nobel Foundation. Retrieved August 21, 2011.
- ^ "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
- ^ "Dan Shechtman: 'Linus Pauling said I was talking nonsense'". TheGuardian.com. January 6, 2013.
- ^ Scott Aaronson (January 16, 2007). "Long-awaited God post". Shtetl-Optimized – The Blog of Scott Aaronson. Retrieved June 15, 2013.
If you'd asked, I would've told you that I, like yourself, am what most people would call a disbelieving atheist infidel heretic.
- ^ Aaronson, Scott. "Scott Aaronson". Archived from the original on September 13, 2023. Retrieved September 29, 2023.
I'm Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, and director of its Quantum Information Center.
- ^ "Jacob Appelbaum (Part 1/2) Digital Anti-Repression Workshop – April 26, 2012". YouTube. April 27, 2012. Retrieved June 28, 2013.
Like, for me, as an atheist, bisexual, Jew, I'm gonna go on, uh – oh and Emma Goldman is one of my great heroes and I really think that anarchism is a fantastic principle by which to fashion a utopian society even if we can't get there.
- ^ "About John McCarthy". Stanford University. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
- ^ McCarthy, John (March 7, 2003). "Commentary on World, US, and scientific affairs". Stanford University. Archived from the original on November 21, 2005. Retrieved February 1, 2013.
By the way I'm an atheist.
- ^ Leon M. Lederman; Judith A. Scheppler (2001). "Marvin Minsky: Mind Maker". Portraits of Great American Scientists. Prometheus Books. p. 74. ISBN 9781573929325.
Another area where he "goes against the flow" is in his spiritual beliefs. As far as religion is concerned, he's a confirmed atheist. "I think it [religion] is a contagious mental disease. . . . The brain has a need to believe it knows a reason for things.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Mathew Philips. "Tragedy and Opportunity: The parents of slain journalist Danny Pearl have devoted their lives to improving Muslim-Jewish relations". Retrieved July 12, 2013.
I turned secular at the age of 11, by divine revelation. [Laughs.] I was standing on the roof of the house my father built, looking down on the street and suddenly it became very clear to me that there is no God.
- ^ "Stallman's former personal ad". Stallman.org. Retrieved June 3, 2012.
- ^ Dina Kraft (March 14, 2013). "'Repairing the world' was Aaron Swartz's calling". Haaretz. Retrieved March 23, 2013.
And although the young technologist and activist grew up to call himself an atheist, the values he grew up with appeared foundational.
- ^ Eliezer Yudkowsky. "Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky". goodreads.com. Retrieved July 17, 2012.
[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting.
- ^ Brigham Narins, ed. (2001). Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present: A-C. Gale Group. p. 91. ISBN 978-0-7876-1752-3.
When she became a teenager, Sarah changed her name to Hertha as an expression of her independence, and, although she remained proud of her Jewish heritage, also regarded herself as an agnostic.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Brigham Narins (2001). Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present: D-H. Gale Group. p. 797. ISBN 9780787617530.
Although Gabor's family became Lutherans in 1918, religion appeared to play a minor role in his life. He maintained his church affiliation through his adult years but characterized himself as a "benevolent agnostic".
- ^ "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). [3]
- ^ Richard Bellman (June 1984). "Growing Up in New York City". Eye Of The Hurricane. World Scientific Publishing Company. p. 7. ISBN 9789814635707. Retrieved July 5, 2021.
Naturally, I was raised as an atheist. This was quite easy since the only one in the family that had any religion was my grandmother, and she was of German stock. Although she believed in God, and went to the synagogue on the high holy days, there was no nonsense about ritual. I well remember when I went off to the army, she said, "God will protect you." I smiled politely. She added, "I know you don't believe in God, but he will protect you anyway." I know many sophisticated and highly intelligent people who are practicing Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., feel strongly that religion, or lack of it, is a highly personal matter. My own attitude is like Lagrange's. One day, he was asked by Napoleon whether he believed in God. "Sire," he said, "I have no need of that hypothesis."
- ^ Robert S. Roth, ed. (1986). The Bellman Continuum: A Collection of the Works of Richard E. Bellman. World Scientific. p. 4. ISBN 9789971500900.
He was raised by his father to be a religious skeptic. He was taken to a different church every week to observe different ceremonies. He was struck by the contrast between the ideals of various religions and the history of cruelty and hypocrisy done in God's name. He was well aware of the intellectual giants who believed in God, but if asked, he would say that each person had to make their own choice. Statements such as "By the State of New York and God ..." struck him as ludicrous. From his childhood he recalled a particularly unpleasant scene between his parents just before they sent him to the store. He ran down the street saying over and over again, "I wish there was a God, I wish there was a God."
- ^ Jack Huberman (2006). The Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound. Nation Books. p. 52. ISBN 9781560259695.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
- ^ Colm Mulcahy (March 26, 2013). "Centenary of Mathematician Paul Erdős – Source of Bacon Number Concept". Huffington Post. Retrieved April 13, 2013.
In his own words, "I'm not qualified to say whether or not God exists. I kind of doubt He does. Nevertheless, I'm always saying that the SF has this transfinite Book that contains the best proofs of all mathematical theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect...You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book." (SF was his tongue- in-cheek reference to God as "the Supreme Fascist").
- ^ Jack Huberman (2008). Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound. Nation Books. p. 107. ISBN 9781568584195.
I kind of doubt He [exists]. Nevertheless, I'm always saying that the SF Supreme Fascist-Erdos's customary name for G-d has this transfinite Book ... that contains the best proofs of all theorems, proofs that are elegant and perfect.... You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in the Book.
- ^ Vithal C Nadkarni (April 28, 2011). "Are Facts Sacred?". The Economics Times. Archived from the original on January 3, 2013. Retrieved June 6, 2012.
The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos was a confirmed bachelor and atheist.
- ^ Shaposhnikova, T. O. (1999). Jacques Hadamard: A Universal Mathematician. American Mathematical Soc. pp. 33–34. ISBN 978-0-8218-1923-4.
In 1924, Hadamard recounted his meetings with Hermite: "...When Hermite loved to direct to me remarks such as: "He who strays from the paths traced by Providence crashes." These were the words of a profoundly religious man, but an atheist like me understood them very well, especially when he added at other times: "In mathematics, our role is more that of servant than master.""
- ^ "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. [4]
- ^ Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dies
- ^ Robert Dransfield; Don Dransfield (2003). Key Ideas in Economics. Nelson Thornes. p. 124. ISBN 9780748770816.
He was brought up in a Hungary in which anti-Semitism was commonplace, but the family were not overly religious, and for most of his adult years von Neumann held agnostic beliefs.
- ^ William Poundstone (1993). Prisoner's Dilemma. Random House Digital, Inc. ISBN 9780385415804.
Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heims, "He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic—it doesn't agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy." The conversion did not give von Neumann much peace. Until the end he remained terrified of death, Strittmatter recalled.
- ^ Abraham Pais (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. Oxford University Press. p. 109. ISBN 9780195166736.
He had been completely agnostic for as long as I had known him. As far as I could see this act did not agree with the attitudes and thoughts he had harbored for nearly all his life. On February 8, 1957, Johnny died in the Hospital, at age 53.
- ^ Harold D. Taylor; Loretta Taylor (1993). George Pólya: master of discovery 1887–1985. Dale Seymour Publications. p. 50. ISBN 9780866516112.
Plancherel was a military man, a colonel in the Swiss army, and a devout Catholic; Polya did not like military ceremonies or activities, and he was an agnostic who objected to hierarchical religions.
- ^ Laurent Schwartz (2001). A Mathematician Grappling With His Century. Springer. p. 193. ISBN 9783764360528.
My parents were atheists, I was an atheist, I never really felt Jewish.
- ^ a b Doug Renselle. "A Review of Amy Wallace's The Prodigy". Quantonics, Inc. Retrieved June 20, 2012.
Rabid atheist by age six. (His father, Boris, was too, but intensely studied great religious works.)
- ^ "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).
- ^ Steven G. Krantz (2002). Mathematical Apocrypha: Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical. Mathematical Association of America. p. 202. ISBN 9780883855393.
...Steinhaus answered that, "God is always present." It should be noted that Steinhaus was an outspoken atheist.
- ^ "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).
- ^ Budrewicz/, Olgierd (1977). The melting-pot revisited: twenty well-known Americans of Polish background. Interpress. p. 36. Retrieved September 11, 2012.
- ^ "Andre Weil was an agnostic but respected religions." I. Grattan-Guinness, Bhuri Singh Yadav, History of the Mathematical Sciences (2004).
- ^ Paul Betz, Mark Christopher Carnes, American Council of Learned Societies (2002). Paul Betz; Mark Christopher Carnes (eds.). American national biography: Supplement, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. p. 676. ISBN 9780195150636.
Although as a lifelong agnostic he may have been somewhat bemused by Simone Weil's preoccupations with Christian mysticism, he remained a vigilant guardian of her memory,...
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Flo Conway; Jim Siegelman (2006). Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, The Father of Cybernetics. Basic Books. p. 329. ISBN 978-0-465-01371-5.
On June 2, 1964, Swami Sarvagatananda presided over the memorial service at MIT in remembrance of Norbert Wiener – scion of Maimonides, father of cybernetics, avowed agnostic – reciting in Sanskrit from the holy books of Hinduism, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.
- ^ Carol Parikh (2008). The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski. Springer. p. 5. ISBN 9780387094298.
And yet it did, even though since moving into the boarding house he had become an atheist and most of his friends, including his best friend, were Russians.
- ^ "Zhores I. Alferov". NNDB.com. Retrieved April 21, 2012.
- ^ Horgan, J. (1992) Profile: Hans A. Bethe – Illuminator of the Stars, Scientific American 267 (4), 32–40.
- ^ Denis Brian (2001). The Voice of Genius: Conversations With Nobel Scientists And Other Luminaries. Basic Books. p. 117. ISBN 9780738204475.
Bethe: "I am an atheist."
- ^ F. David Peat (1997). Infinite Potential: The Life And Times Of David Bohm. Basic Books. p. 21. ISBN 978-0-201-32820-2.
If he identified Jewish lore and customs with his father, then this was a way he would distance himself from Samuel. By the time he reached his late teens, he had become firmly agnostic.
- ^ Simmons, John (1996). The Scientific 100: a rankings of the most influential scientists, past and present. Carol Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8065-1749-0.
His mother was warm and intelligent, and his father, as Bohr himself later recalled, recognized "that something was expected of me." The family was not at all devout, and Bohr became an atheist who regarded religious thought as harmful and misguided.
- ^ J. Faye; H. Folse, eds. (2010). Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. Springer. p. 88. ISBN 9789048142996.
Planck was religious and had a firm belief in God; Bohr was not, but his objection to Planck's view had no anti-religious motive.
- ^ Gunther S. Stent; Balazs Hargittai; István Hargittai (2005). Candid Science V: Conversations with Famous Scientists. Imperial College Press. p. 518. ISBN 9781860945052.
Gunther S. Stent: "Niels Bohr was one of the few five-star scientists who really was an atheist — and not merely paying lip service to atheism."
- ^ John L. Heilbron; Finn Aaserud (2013). Love, Literature and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 Trilogy Revisited. Oxford University Press. pp. 159–160. ISBN 9780191669736.
A statement about religion in the loose notes on Kierkegaard may throw light on the notion of wildness that appears in many of Bohr's letters. "I, who do not feel in any way united with, and even less, bound to a God, and therefore am also much poorer [than Kierkegaard], would say that the good [is] the overall lofty goal, as only by being good [can one] judge according to worth and right."
- ^ John L. Heilbron; Finn Aaserud (2013). Love, Literature and the Quantum Atom: Niels Bohr's 1913 Trilogy Revisited. Oxford University Press. p. 110. ISBN 9780191669736.
"Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately, humankind in general, are common traits of the Jewish intellectual. So too is a well-fortified atheism. Bohr ended with no religious belief and a dislike of all religions that claimed to base their teachings on revelations.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Ronald Clark (2011). Einstein: The Life and Times. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781448202706.
That Einstein's attitude was the result more of muddle than agnostic scruple seems clear from a letter which he wrote less than two years later when Paul Ehrenfest ruled himself out from becoming Einstein's successor by roundly declaring himself an atheist.
- ^ Thomas Levenson (2004). Einstein in Berlin. Random House of Canada. p. 172. ISBN 9780553378443.
The man he had hoped would succeed him in Prague, Paul Ehrenfest, refiased to compromise his true atheist's principles. Einstein scolded him. "Your refusal to acknowledge a religious affiliation" was just this side of "willful stupidity," he assured him, with the benefit of recent experience. Once he became a professor Ehrenfest could revert to unbelief.
- ^ Denis Brian (2008). The Voice of Genius: Conversations with Nobel Scientists and Other Luminaries. Basic Books. p. 49. ISBN 9780465011391.
Interviewer: Do you call yourself an agnostic or an atheist? Feynman: An atheist. Agnostic for me would be trying to weasel out and sound a little nicer than I am about this.
- ^ Feynman, Richard P. (1988). Ralph Leighton (ed.). What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. W. W. Norton & Co. p. 25. ISBN 978-0-393-02659-7.
- ^ David Nachmansohn (1979). German-Jewish pioneers in science, 1900–1933: highlights in atomic physics, chemistry, and biochemistry. Springer-Verlag. p. 62. ISBN 9780387904023.
James Franck was born in Hamburg, the son of a Jewish banker. ...As he said, science was his God and nature his religion. He did not insist that his daughters attend religious instruction classes (Religionsunterricht) in school. But he was very proud of his Jewish heritage...
- ^ "Jerome I. Friedman". NNDB.com. Retrieved July 18, 2012.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Nikonov, Vyacheslav (September 30, 2004). "Physicists have nothing to do with miracles". Social Sciences (3): 148–150. Retrieved September 9, 2007.
- ^ Victor M. Amela (June 20, 2017). "Sheldon Glashow, Nobel Prize in physics for the electroweak theory" (PDF). La Contra - La Vanguardia. Retrieved October 8, 2018.
I am a practising atheist.
- ^ a b JPararajasingham (August 6, 2011). "Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God". YouTube. Retrieved May 11, 2012.
- ^ "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."
- ^ Henry F. Schaefer (2003). Science and Christianity: Conflict Or Coherence?. The Apollos Trust. p. 9. ISBN 9780974297507.
I present here two examples of notable atheists. The first is Lev Landau, the most brilliant Soviet physicist of the twentieth century.
- ^ "Listed as an atheist in NNDB.com." Lev Landau, NNDB.com
- ^ James D. Patterson; Bernard C. Bailey (February 20, 2019). Solid-State Physics: Introduction to the Theory. Lev Landau - The Soviet Grand Master: Springer. p. 190. ISBN 9783319753225.
Landau's theoretical minimum exam was famous and only about forty students passed it in his time. This was Landau's entry-level exam for theoretical physics. It contained what Landau felt was necessary to work in that field. Like many Soviet era physicists he was an atheist.
- ^ Babu Gogineni (July 10, 2012). "It's the Atheist Particle, actually". Postnoon News. Archived from the original on July 11, 2012. Retrieved July 10, 2012.
Leon Lederman is himself an atheist and he regrets the term, and Peter Higgs who is an atheist too, has expressed his displeasure, but the damage has been done!
- ^ Naukowe, Łódzkie (2003). Bulletin de la Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź: Série, Recherches sur les déformations, Volumes 39–42. Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź. p. 162.
Michelson's biographers stress, that our hero was not conspicuous by religiousness. His father was a free-thinker and Michelson grew up in non-religious family and have no opportunity to acknowledge the belief of his forebears. He was agnostic through his whole life and only for the short period he was a member of the 21st lodge in Washington.
- ^ John D. Barrow (2002). The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe. Random House Digital, Inc. p. 136. ISBN 9780375726095.
Morley was deeply religious. His original training had been in theology and he only turned to chemistry, a self-taught hobby, when he was unable to enter the ministry. Michelson, by contrast, was a religious agnostic.
- ^ Yuval Ne'eman (2003). Studies in memory of Issai Schur. Springer. p. xxi. ISBN 9780817642082.
Unfortunately I am a 100% skeptic (an "Epicurus" in Yiddish), an atheist although not in an aggressive connotation.
- ^ Michael P. Prior (1997). The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 164. ISBN 978-1-85075-815-0.
Although an atheist, Neeman believes that traditions are important for a revolutionary movement, and he strongly defends the spiritual heritage of the Jewish people, preaches a return to biblical sources, and is in constant dialogue with the ultra-nationalist-religious groupings.
- ^ K. C. Cole (2012). Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium. University of Chicago Press. pp. 104–105. ISBN 9780226113470.
For the locals, it was as if aliens had landed. "The normal folks were wearing tight jeans and cowboy hats, and here was a rancher who didn't wear a hat," said Pete Richards, who lived on one of the neighboring ranches at the time. "He was skinnier than a rail, he was really hyper. Both he and Jackie swore like sailors. And they were atheists!".
- ^ Dronamraju, Krishna (2008). Emerging Consequences of Biotechnology: Biodiversity Loss and IPR Issues. World Scientific. p. 413. ISBN 978-981-277-500-9.
Most of them are either atheists like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, or agnostics like JBS Haldane.
- ^ Axelrod, Alan (2009). Risk: Adversaries and Allies: Mastering Strategic Relationships. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc. p. 127. ISBN 978-1-4027-5411-1.
He was a Jew and Groves was at least conventionally anti-Semitic; but perhaps worse, Oppenheimer practiced no religion at all and was almost certainly an atheist, whereas Groves was the sincerely believing son of an army chaplain.
- ^ Hensley Charles Woodbridge (1986). Jack London newsletter, Volume 19. H.C. Woodbridge. p. 98.
Oppenheimer, a materialist and proponent of the scientific method, argues that Standing's knowledge, say, of the life of a fourth century hermit comes from Standing's memory of his immediate past, either from his reading or hearing about such a person.
- ^ Scientifically Speaking: A Dictionary of Quotations, Second Edition, Volume 1. CRC Press. 2000. p. 43. ISBN 9780750306362.
There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.
- ^ Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God on YouTube
- ^ 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.
- ^ Joseph Rotblat; Daisaku Ikeda (2006). A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat. I.B.Tauris. p. 94. ISBN 9781845112783.
Rotblat: "I have to admit, however, that there are really many things that I do not know. I am not a particularly religious person, and this is the reason for my agnosticism. To be an agnostic simply means that I do not know and will keep seeking the answer for eternity. This is my response to questions about religion."
- ^ Ellis, George F. R.; Penrose, Sir Roger (2010). "Dennis William Sciama. 18 November 1926 — 19 December 1999" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 56: 401–422. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2009.0023. S2CID 73035217.
- ^ "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? Archived March 3, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, pbs.org.
- ^ Istva ́n Hargittai, Magdolna Hargittai (2006). Candid Science VI: More Conversations with Famous Scientists. Imperial College Press. p. 749. ISBN 9781860948855.
Jack Steinberger: "I'm now a bit anti-Jewish since my last visit to the synagogue, but my atheism does not necessarily reject religion."
- ^ The International Academy of Humanism Archived April 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine 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 Archived April 18, 2012, at the Wayback Machine website
- ^ William Lanouette; Bela A. Silard (1992). Genius in the shadows: a biography of Leo Szilard: the man behind the bomb. C. Scribner's Sons. p. 167. ISBN 9780684190112.
He is what he seems to be: an idealist devoted to the task. As his consciousness, however, is materialistic, leaning to experimenting, and agnostic, he fails to understand himself, same as the world...
- ^ Nina Byers. "Fermi and Szilard". Retrieved July 25, 2012.
Both Enrico and Leo were agnostics.
- ^ Edward Teller (2002). Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey In Science And Politics. Basic Books. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-7382-0778-0.
Religion was not an issue in my family; indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Eugene Paul Wigner; Andrew Szanton (1992). Andrew Szanton (ed.). The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner As Told to Andrew Szanton. Basic Books. pp. 60–61. ISBN 9780306443268.
Neither did I want to be a clergyman. I liked a good sermon. But religion tells people how to behave and that I could never do. Clergymen also had to assume and advocate the presence of God, and proofs of God's existence seemed to me quite unsatisfactory. People claimed that He had made our earth. Well, how had He made it? With an earth-making machine? Someone once asked Saint Augustine, "What did the Lord do before he created the world?" And Saint Augustine is said to have answered, "He created Hell for people who ask such questions." A retort perhaps made in jest, but I knew of none better. I saw that I could not know anything of God directly, that His presence was a matter of belief, I did not have that belief, and preaching without belief is repulsive. So I could not be a clergyman, however many people might gain salvation. And my parents never pressed the point.
- ^ Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich (2004). R.A. Sunyaev (ed.). Zeldovich: Reminiscences. CRC Press. p. 69. ISBN 9780415287906.
I think that you know me well enough: I am an absolute atheist, and all days of the week are completely the same to me.
- ^ Andrei Sakharov: Facets of a Life. Atlantica Séguier Frontières. 1991. p. 599. ISBN 9782863320969.
Speaking about religion, Yakov Borisovich could say unambiguously, "I'm an absolute atheist".
- ^ Nicholas Von Hoffman (2010). Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. Nation Books. pp. 108–109. ISBN 9781568586250.
He passed the word in the Back of the Yards that this Jewish agnostic was okay, which at least ensured that he would not be kicked out the door.
- ^ Charles E. Curran (2011). The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective. Georgetown University Press. p. 32. ISBN 9781589017436.
Saul D. Alinsky, an agnostic Jew, organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago in the late 1930s and started the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to promote community organizations and to train community organizers.
- ^ Deal Wyatt Hudson (1987). Deal Wyatt Hudson; Matthew J. Mancini (eds.). Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Mercer University Press. p. 40. ISBN 9780865542792.
Saul Alinsky was an agnostic Jew for whom religion of any kind held very little importance and just as little relation to the focus of his life's work: the struggle for economic and social justice, for human dignity and human rights, and for the alleviation of the sufferings of the poor and downtrodden.
- ^ Peter Baehr (2010). Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford University Press. p. 66. ISBN 9780804756501.
Both Hannah Arendt and Aron were assimilated, agnostic Jews (so were Mannheim and Riesman), who became politically radicalized only with the rise of the Nazi movement;...
- ^ David Burns (2013). The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus. Oxford University Press. p. 97. ISBN 9780199929504.
Alexander Berkman was a self-declared atheist attempting to lift the stultifying fog of the gods from the mind of humankind.
- ^ Paul Avrich; Karen Avrich (2012). "Impelling Forces". Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674067677.
Berkman, an atheist, refused to be sworn in.
- ^ " 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 Archived April 2, 2015, at the Wayback Machine', Charleston Daily Mail (West Virginia), June 1, 2009, Pg. P5A (accessed June 5, 2009).
- ^ Sophia A. McClennen (2009). Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope. Duke University Press. p. 94. ISBN 978-0-8223-4604-3.
Dorfman is a confirmed agnostic and it would be a mistake to ascribe too close an affinity between him and Jeremiah.
- ^ Ain, Stewart. "A Pariah In Exile [on Norman Finkelstein] ". The Jewish Week. July 2, 2008.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Goldman, Emma (February 1916). "The Philosophy of Atheism". Mother Earth. Retrieved December 7, 2007.
- ^ Paris Review, Interview with Gordimer Archived May 28, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ "OBITUARY: Joe Slovo". The Independent. January 7, 1995. Archived from the original on June 9, 2022.
- ^ Marty Jezer (1993). Abbie Hoffman: American Rebel. Rutgers University Press. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8135-2017-9.
According to Abbie, the teacher took issue with his defense of atheism.
- ^ Joanna Paraszczuk (April 28, 2011). "A revisionist's history". The Jerusalem Post. Retrieved February 25, 2013.
Even religious Zionist settlers in the West Bank have adopted Jabotinsky as a symbol – although he was an atheist who believed that the Arab minority would share equal rights with Jews in a future Jewish state, famously declaring: "In every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice versa."
- ^ Michael Stanislawski (2001). "Jabotinsky's Road to Zionism". Zionism and the Fin de Siècle: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky. University of California Press. p. 158. ISBN 9780520935754.
In sum, just as his turn to Symbolism and Decadence in the late 1890s was typical rather than idiosyncratic, Jabotinsky's abandonment of Symbolism and Decadence was also typical rather than idiosyncratic. A thoroughgoing atheist and rationalist, he could not, to the end of his days, comprehend any mystical or religious sensibility or even any metaphysical philosophical stance, idealist or not.
- ^ "AVTM shares Catholic-Atheist liberty hug with Tom Woods". Youtube. July 1, 2012. Retrieved May 26, 2013.
- ^ Olson, Carl. "What I learned from Henry Morgentaler Archived October 18, 2011, at the Wayback Machine". Ignatius Insight. July 8, 2008
- ^ Time Magazine. "WOMEN: Petition Denied". October 24, 1927. "When she told the board she was an atheist" etc.
- ^ "George Soros". georgesoros.com. Archived from the original on May 12, 2012. Retrieved July 8, 2012.
- ^ Only in America. "A conversation with Michael Steinhardt Archived October 29, 2013, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ 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 Archived January 4, 2014, at the Wayback Machine". The Jewish Week. February 11, 2010
- ^ Germany, Turkey, and Zionism 1897–1918. Transaction Publishers. 1997. p. 97. ISBN 9781412824569.
When Herzl met him on 16 June 1900 he was seventy years old, not clear about his own identity, whether a Turk or an Englishman, but his study of religions had made him an atheist.
- ^ a b Tariq Ali (2003). The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (2 ed.). Verso. p. 10. ISBN 9781859844571.
Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists.
- ^ a b c Giulio Meotti (2011). A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel's Victims of Terrorism. ReadHowYouWant.com. p. 147. ISBN 9781459617414.
Even atheist and socialist Israelis like David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir were marked by the stories and legends of King David and the prophets. In other words, their lives had been shaped by Hebron.
- ^ 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! Archived October 21, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Ramallah Online February 19, 2007(?) (accessed April 28, 2008).
- ^ See Portugal´s President: ´I am proud of my Jewish ancestry´, Michael Freund, retrieved from the Jerusalem Post of the 7th of November, 2003 Archived February 9, 2008, at the Wayback Machine:
Jerusalem Post: I understand that you have Jewish ancestry in your family. What is your personal connection to the Jewish people? Do you consider yourself to be a Jew?.
Jorge Sampaio: My grandmother belonged to a Jewish family that came from Morocco in the beginning of the 19th century. She married a non-Jewish naval officer who later was Foreign Affairs minister. I am naturally very proud of this ancestry and of all those that I call my "favorite Jewish cousins", one of whom is the president of the Lisbon Jewish Community, as I am proud of the ancestry on my non-Jewish father's side. Personally, I am agnostic, and I do not consider myself a Jew; but I am proud, as I said, of my ancestors.
- ^ (in Dutch) Job Cohen, promotor van het cynisme. Carel Brendel. Retrieved on 2010-09-09.
- ^ (in Dutch) Programma: Natafelen met Luuc Smit. Joodse Omroep. Retrieved on 2010-09-09.
- ^ (in Dutch) Job Cohen: 'Gelijke monniken, gelijke kappen’ Archived March 6, 2012, at the Wayback Machine. Het Vrije Volk. Retrieved on 2010-09-09.
- ^ " 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
- ^ "En los Medios. Quince preguntas a Myriam Bregman".
- ^ "Rákosi a hatalomért".
- ^ 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.
- ^ "Interview With David Miliband". CNN. July 5, 2009. Retrieved January 24, 2010.
- ^ Ed Miliband’s hope to be 'Britain’s first Jewish PM’
- ^ "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)
- ^ Vice Presidential Debate Recap With Ryan Grim – MR Live – 10/5/16
- ^ Cohen, Chapman. An Atheist's Approach to Christianity (1942) ASIN B0007KGF98
- ^ Harris, Sam (May 7, 2010). "A Science of Morality". The Huffington Post. The Huffington Post Media Group. Retrieved September 8, 2011.
- ^ Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great. Twelve Books. May 1, 2007 United States. ISBN 978-0-446-57980-3
- ^ Cornell, George W. (June 9, 1956). "Liberal Trend of Religion Scatters Atheist Groups". Eugene Register-Guard. Eugene, Oregon. p. 6. Retrieved May 2, 2016.
- ^ 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"
- ^ Friedman, David D. "Atheism and Religion", Ideas.
- ^ a b 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)
- ^ Asman, David (November 16, 2006). "'Your World' Interview With Economist Milton Friedman". Fox News. Archived from the original on February 6, 2011. Retrieved August 2, 2011.
- ^ John A. Weymark (2006), "John Charles Harsanyi", working paper no. 06-W07, Vanderbilt University
- ^ 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 [5]
- ^ "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.
- ^ Justin Raimondo (2000). An Enemy of the State: the Life of Murray N. Rothbard. Prometheus Books. p. 326. ISBN 9781573928090.
In the same letter, he reiterates his atheism: "On the religion question, we paleolibertarians are not theocrats," he writes. "Obviously, I could not be myself, both as a libertarian and as an atheist." However, he continued, "the left-libertarian hostility to religion, based as it is on ignorance and the bitterness of "aging adolescent rebels against bourgeois America", is "monstrous."
- ^ Gerard Casey; John Meadowcroft (2010). Murray Rothbard. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 15. ISBN 9781441142092.
Although Jewish by birth and upbringing, Rothbard was atheistic on religious matters. Despite being a Jewish atheist, Joseph Sobran notes, 'his sympathies were Catholic' (Rockwell 1995, 39). In his later work, his enthusiasm for the late Scholastics – in Rothbard's view, the precursors of Austrianism – gave rise to some speculation that he was about to convert to Catholicism. In the end, whatever may have been his inclinations, he didn't do so.
- ^ "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.
- ^ Hunter Crowther-Heyck (2005). Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America. JHU Press. p. 22. ISBN 9780801880254.
His secular, scientific values came well before he was old enough to make such calculating career decisions. For example, while still in middle school, Simon wrote a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal defending the civil liberties of atheists, and by high school he was "certain" that he was "religiously an atheist," a conviction that never wavered.
- ^ Roncaglia, Alessandro. "Piero Sraffa" (PDF). pp. 22–23. Retrieved July 24, 2012.
Sraffa liked walks and bike rides. In Cambridge, he always moved around by bike. He used to get up late in the morning and work late into the night. In Trinity as well as when associated with King's, he regularly dined in the college. As I noticed when he invited me to dinner at Trinity, he took care to arrive after supper was served, so as to skip the benedicite prayer (he was agnostic, with a leaning for atheism).
- ^ Kern, Jamie (December 17, 2007). "Interview with Professor Joseph Stiglitz". The Tamer Center for Social Enterprise. Retrieved February 1, 2016.
Do you follow any religion now?
Stiglitz: No. But I have a very strong Jewish background. - ^ "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.
- ^ "LIFE – 6 Dec 1968". Life. 1968. pp. 121–123.
Herman Kahn is an atheist who still likes rabbis, and a liberal who likes cops.
- ^ "Interview with Ray Kurzweil". CNN.com. May 30, 2008.
- ^ 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.
- ^ "April 13: Democracy Now!". Jewish Currents. Archived from the original on July 6, 2014. Retrieved June 12, 2016.
- ^ Myers, PZ (October 5, 2015). "Glenn Greenwald talks about the New Atheists". Pharyngula. Retrieved January 18, 2016.
- ^ Oz, Amos. The Silence of the Heavens: Agnon Amazed at God. 1993
- ^ "I'm no Mossad spy, says Jewish journalist who interviewed Raisi, worked for Iran TV". The Times of Israel. March 13, 2022.
Five years after her interview with the Iranian leader [Ebrahim Raisi], Perez-Shakdam has become an atheist and reconnected with her long-discarded Jewish identity.
- ^ "Advice Goddess Blog".
- ^ Joyce, Robert W. (Fall 1999). "PLLDF Century Dinner" (PDF). The Pro-Life Legal Defense Fund Newsletter. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 7, 2016. Retrieved March 3, 2016.
- ^ 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
- ^ Michael Martin (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Cambridge University Press. p. 310. ISBN 9780521842709.
Among celebrity atheists with much biographical data, we find leading psychologists and psychoanalysts. We could provide a long list, including...Albert Ellis...
- ^ 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) [6].
- ^ "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 Archived August 14, 2007, at the Wayback Machine. 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
