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Atheism is generating quite a lot of attention these days. Prominent atheists are getting the word out about their views in increasing numbers and generating lots of public debate on the proper place of religion in governments and Share societies in the modern world. And now more than ever, atheists have been able to network together and join forces because of the Internet.
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Today about 2.3 percent of the world's population identifies themselves as atheist, and nearly 12 percent more (a number that is quickly growing) describe themselves as nontheist - non-believers in any deity. The ranks of scientists boast probably the largest concentration of atheists, and many of those have been recognized as among the most brilliant of human beings for their work. But there are atheists in all walks of life and throughout history as well. Here's a look at 50 of the most prominent atheists of all time who also happen to be recognized as some of the most brilliant members of our species. As a note of clarification: we've ordered this list chronologically and we use the term "brilliant" to mean "brilliant at their craft" - not just pure brainiacs;-)
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1. Democritus
Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher, the most prolific and influential of the pre-Socratics and whose atomic theory is regarded as the intellectual culmination of early Greek thought. For this atomic theory, which echoes eerily the theoretical formulations of modern physicists, he is sometimes called the "father of modern science." He was well known to Aristotle, and a thorn in the side to Plato - who advised that all of Democritus' works be burned. A cheerful and popular man with the citizenry for his uncanny ability to predict events, his was known among his fans as the "Laughing Philosopher," a title that may well have referred more to his scoffing rejection of assigning to gods the mechanistic operations of nature itself. His cosmology and atomic theory held that the world was spheroid, that there were many worlds and many suns, and that all things manifest in nature were comprised of atoms bound together. There are varying accounts of his age at death, ranging from a ripe 90 all the way to 109 years.
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2. Diagoras of Melos
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The first and most ancient of recognized atheists must include a 5th century b.c.e. poet and sophist from Melos known as Diagoras the Atheist. Not content to simply speak against the popular pantheon of Greek gods, he also criticized the Eleusinian Mysteries. He became a disciple of Democritus after that notable philosopher paid a hefty ransom to free Diagoras from captivity following the subjugation of Melos in 416 b.c.e. Prosecuted by the Athenian democratic party for impiety in 415 b.c.e., he was forced to flee the city and died in Corinth. None of Diagoras' own writings survive, but in the 1st century b.c.e. Cicero wrote that one of Diagoras' friends tried to convince him that the gods did exist by citing the many people saved from storms by their pleas to their favorite gods, to which Diagoras was purported to reply, "there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and drowned at sea."
3. Epicurus
Born in 341 b.c.e. in Athens, Epicurus established the school of philosophy known as Epicureanism, and was a follower of Democritus even though his own philosophy denied the influence of strong determinism and often denounced other philosophies as confused. He was an important figure in the early development of the scientific methodology, insisting that nothing which cannot be tested through direct observation and defended through logical deduction should be believed. For Epicurus the purpose of philosophy was to attain peace of mind and a happy life, freedom from fear and absence of pain. He considered pleasure and pain the measures of that which is good or evil. He insisted that there were no gods to reward or punish humans after death, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that all things are ultimately material in nature. Epicurus himself was never able to escape a life of pain or a painful death, as he suffered greatly from kidney stones and died at the age of 72 of complications from that ailment.
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5. Andrew Carnegie
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Andrew Carnegie [1835-1919] was a noted American industrialist, businessman and philanthropist. A Scottish-born immigrant, he established the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh and later merged it with the Federal Steel Company to become U.S. Steel. He is regarded as the second richest man in history, then he gave most of his steel and railroad fortune away to establish libraries, schools and universities all over America. He limited himself to an income of $50,000 per year, everything else went into good works. He wrote many books on the subjects of wealth and its responsibilities, on social issues and on political philosophy. He self-identified as a positivist, and kept away from organized religion due to his distaste of sectarianism. Carnegie preferred naturalism and science, saying in his autobiography that, "not only had I got rid of the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of evolution."
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6. Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov [1849-1936] was a Russian physiologist, psychologist and physician. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904 for research on the digestive system. It was his investigation of the saliva of dogs that first led him to notice that the animals salivated more when they expected food, a phenomenon he termed "psychic secretion." He was particularly interested in studying conditioned behaviors as an experimental model of the induction of neuroses. His approach became known as "behaviorism," and after his death his work was extended by William Sargant and others in an attempt to develop a systematic method for brainwashing and implantation of false memories. Pavlov died in Leningrad, his laboratory in St. Petersburg was carefully preserved by the Soviet government as a museum. He had one of his students attend him on his deathbed to record the circumstances of his dying, as if it were just another psychological experiment.
7. Sigmund Freud
Born Sigismund Schlomo Freud [1856-1939], Freud was an Austrian psychiatrist founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Using his theories of the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms of repression, his psychoanalysis sought to cure sufferers of psychopathology through a dialogue between the patient and his psychoanalyst. He had an elaborate system for interpretation of dreams as indicators of unconscious desires, and did early neurological research on cerebral palsy. Despite his ideas falling out of favor or being modified in later years, his methodology and theoretics continue to exert influence in the humanities and some social sciences. Freud's family escaped after
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Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and moved to London. He suffered more than 30 operations for oral cancer in his late life, and convinced his physician friend Max Schur to assist his suicide in 1939. His philosophical writings established his strong advocacy for an atheistic world view, and he was eulogized as "the atheist's touchstone" for the 20th century.
8. Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow [1857-1938] was an American lawyer, a leading member of the ACLU and a notable defense attorney. Starting out as a corporate lawyer for a railroad company, he soon jumped the ideological tracks and represented the leader of the American Railway Union in the Pullman Strike of 1894. His most famous case was the defense of Tennessee teacher John Scopes in the "Monkey Trial" against the state law that barred the teaching of evolution. The prosecution side was argued by William Jennings Bryan, the the trial served as the story for the play and later film, Inherit the Wind. During the trial Darrow selfidentified as an agnostic by saying, "I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is all that agnosticism means." Yet he wrote essays with titles like "Absurdities of the Bible" and "The Myth of the Soul," suggesting that his agnosticism was strong enough to be considered atheism.
9. Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss [1864-1949] was a brilliant German composer who began writing music at the age of six and continued almost until his death. He was noted for his "tone poems" and operas such as Salome and Elektra, which made use of dissonance and generated much public outcry. During the Nazi period he was appointed president of the German State Music Bureau and composed the theme song for the infamous 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. He produced the opera Friedenstag in 1938, a thinly veiled criticism of the Third Reich. He is said to have stretched his influence very thin in his efforts to protect his son and Jewish daughter-in-law and their children from the Nazis. Strauss was dubious of all religion, except perhaps the religion of reason. "I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end," he declared shortly before his death.
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he could not prove the non-existence of God any more than he could prove the non-existence of the Homeric gods. But in his autobiography he stated, "At the age of eighteen, ...I read Mill's Autobiography, where I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him the question "Who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question "Who made God?" This led me to abandon the "First Cause" argument, and to become an atheist."
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Ayn Rand [1905-1982] was a Russian-born writer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. Her first play, Night of January 16th, was produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her autobiographical and anti-Soviet novel We the Living, was published in 1936. Best known for her sweeping intellectual masterpiece Atlas Shrugged, the fiction mystery allowed her to fully develop her philosophy of objectivism. For the rest of her life Rand lectured and wrote about objectivism, which she termed "a philosophy for living on earth." All of the books Rand published during her lifetime are still in print, and her philosophy is still taught at many major universities as one of the most important philosophical movements in the modern world. Objectivism is particularly prized by dedicated capitalists and economists and underpins much of the wider freethought movement.
Jacques Lucien Monod [1910-1976] was a French biologist who contributed greatly to the understanding of the Lac operon as a regulator of gene transcription in cells, suggested the existence of mRNA molecules in the process of protein synthesis, and further contributed to the field of enzymology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. He married archeologist and orientalist Odette Bruhl in 1938, they had twin sons, Oliver and Phillippe, one of whom became a geologist, the other a physicist. Monod wrote the book Chance and Necessity in 1970, which became a popular primer on the relationship between the roles of random chance and adaptation in biological evolution and provided much ammunition to the atheist community by proposing that the natural sciences revealed an entirely purposeless world that undermines the traditional claims of the world's religions. His views also contributed to the development of the idea of "Memes" that Richard Dawkins made famous in his writings.
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Padma Vibhushan Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar [1910-1995] better known by his nickname "Chandra" - has a space-based X-ray observatory named after him, launched by the space shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his important contributions to knowledge about the evolution of stars, he is probably better known for his 1995 opus >Newton's Principia for the Common Reader which explains the detailed arguments of Newton's original Principia using the language and methods of ordinary calculus. A naturalized American citizen born in Lahore, India, Chandra's family long displayed signs of brilliance, even genius. His father was a government worker and accomplished violinist who wrote several books on musicology. His mother was an intellectual noted for translating Ibsen's A Doll's House into the Tamil language. His paternal uncle was physicist C.V. Raman, who also won a Nobel Prize.
Alan Mathison Turing [1912-1954] was a mathematician, logician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst from England. He displayed distinct signs of genius early in his life, solving advanced problems without having studied elementary calculus. At the age of 16 he encountered Einstein's work and extrapolated it to question Newton's laws of motion from a text in which this challenge was not made explicit. Perhaps his most momentous achievement was his 1936 paper reformulating Kurt Godel's results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing Godel's arithmetic-based formal language with what are now known as Turing machines - formal and simple devices. It was the death of Turing's first love in their last year at Sherborne from complications of bovine tuberculosis (contracted from drinking infected milk as a boy) that shattered Turing's religious faith. He became an atheist with a firm conviction that all phenomena must be materialistic in nature.
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Claude Elwood Shannon [1916-2001] was an electronic engineer and mathematician known as "the father of information theory." While at the University of Michigan he was introduced to the works of George Boole, and once in grad school at MIT working with the 'differential analyzer', an early analog computer, he saw that Boole's concepts could be used used to simplify the complicated circuitry of the analyzer and wrote his master's thesis on what became known as Boolean logic. His PhD thesis at MIT applied this work to establish mathematical relationships in Mendelian genetics. He became a National Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and worked freely across disciplines with other notable scientists to shape the ideas that became information theory. Shannon and his wife Betty put their collective mathematical and analytical abilities together in a game theory for many successful visits to the gaming tables in Las Vegas and made a fortune. An even bigger fortune was made later by Shannon and colleague Ed Thorp when they applied the same theory (later known as the Kelly criterion) to the stock market.
Avram Noam Chomsky [b. 1928] is one of the most notable American philosophers of any age. Professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, and is considered a father of modern linguistics. Also a prolific writer, he has also become famous for being an outspoken political dissident, anarchist, humanist freethinker and libertarian socialist. Beginning with his 1959 critique of B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theory of language, Chomsky has iterated and refined his own theory of linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. This view drew much criticism from behaviorists, particularly his hypothesis that humans share an innate
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linguistic capability. On his views of religion, Chomsky said in a Common Sense interview in 2002, "...if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe in, and I've never seen an explanation."
Peter Ware Higgs [b. 1929] is a theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is a recipient of the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the European Physical Society, and the Wolf Prize in physics. If his predicted Higgs particle the field boson imparting mass to matter - is discovered as expected by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and he is still alive, Higgs is expected to receive the Nobel Prize in physics within the year. Higgs describes himself as an atheist, but expresses discomfort with one of the designations of his field boson, the "God Particle." That designation was popularized by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman in his book by that title, published in 1993 as part of a PR campaign in favor of the proposed Superconducting Super Collider [SSC] proposed to be built in Texas. Higgs lives a reserved life and is not anxious to offend religious believers.
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Warren Edward Buffett [b. 1930] is an American businessman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway rated by Forbes as the richest person in the world (in the first half of 2008, before the Wall Street meltdown). He is noted for adherence to the philosophy of "value investing" and for accepting an annual salary for himself of less than $200,000. Compare that to what taxpayers are now paying the CEOs of failed Wall Street investment firms! Buffett is further noted for his philanthropy, a passion he shares with fellow billionaire Bill Gates, along with a weekly bridge play date. In 2006 Buffett announced that 83% of his fortune would be going to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for further philanthropy. He describes himself as religiously agnostic. In Roger Lowenstein's 1995 biography Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, he is described and non-religious. "He adopted his father's ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity."
John Rogers Searle [b. 1932] is an American philosopher whose contributions to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and social philosophy made him an influential member and spokesperson for the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley during the late 1960s and early '70s. Drawing upon his theory of intentionality, Searle argued in his 1992 book The Rediscovery of the Mind that much of modern philosophy has attempted to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success among conscious people. The primary issue Searle identifies is a philosophical false dichotomy between strong materialism and subjective, first-person experience of the world. What emerged from his resolution is a view he calls "biological naturalism" - that consciousness is real, caused by the physical processes of the brain. Searle is regarded as an atheist who believes in freedom of will and has argued eloquently (and controversially) for that position.
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Carl Edward Sagan [1934-1996] was an American astronomer, astrochemist, and successful popularizer of science.Sagan was connected to the American space program from the beginning, working as an advisor to NASA from the 1950s. He contributed to many of the robotic missions that explored the solar system and arranged experiments to be conducted during manned moon missions. He designed the gold placque attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, a message that could be understood by an extraterrestrial intelligence that encountered it. Sagan was an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons and starred in the popular PBS television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Noted as a skeptic who advocated for humanist ideals, the public considered him an atheist. Sagan called himself an agnostic instead, explaining that "an atheist has to know a lot more than I know" in order to make a positive assertion that no deity exists.
George Denis Patrick Carlin [1937-2008] was one of the most popular and controversial comedians during his lifetime, having won five Grammy awards for his comedy albums. He was the very first guest host for Saturday Night Live and is considered one of the most brilliant satirists of American culture. He was most noted for his focus on psychology, religion, the English language and any other subject that might shock and delight his audiences. He came in second on the Comedy Central network's list of 100 Greatest Comedians of all time. Just four days before his death the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts announced that he would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. An
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outspoken atheist, Carlin joked in his book Brain Droppings that he worshipped the sun because he could actually see it. He also introduced in an HBO special the "Two Commandments," a condensed version of the ten ending with one additional commandment, "Thou Shalt keep thy religiion to thyself."
Leonard Susskind [b. 1940] is an American physicist specializing in string theory and quantum field theory. He is Felix Bloch professor of theoretical physics at Stanford. He is a notable promoter of public understanding of science, and his entire course on quantum physics can be downloaded on the iTunes platform from Stanford. His contrubutions to theoretical physics are voluminous, including the independent discovery of string theory, the theory of quark confinement, the development of Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory, the holography principle, the string theory of black hole entropy and the principle of "black hole complementarity." Susskind is also a popular speaker for both science and against religious creationism. In a review of the book, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Michael Duff wrote that Susskind is "a card-carrying atheist."
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Stephen Jay Gould [1941-2002] was a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science who became one of the most influential popularizers of evolutionary biology through his books and essays. Though a critic of the deterministic view of human behavior and society, he contributed much to expanding upon the mechanisms of natural evolution. He generated some controversy with A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, taking issue with the gradualism and reductionism of orthodox neodarwinists. He contributed "Punctuated Equilibrium" to the evolutionary lexicon to explain the fossil evidence of abrupt changes in organismic form interspersed with long periods of stability. Himself an atheist, Gould was an advocate for what he called "NonOverlapping Magisteria" [NOMA] as a way to resolve the conflicts between science and religion. "Science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience," he wrote in Rock of Ages. "Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each."
Clinton Richard Dawkins [b. 1941] is the most prominent scientific atheist in the world today, and was the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford until his retirement in 2008. Dawkins' particular brilliance is not so much reflected in radical discoveries in his field of biology, but in his popular science writings like his books The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. He has been called "Darwin's Rottweiler" in the press for his strong support of evolution by natural selection. He has also written against creationism in the book The Blind Watchmaker and against theism in A Devil's Chaplain and The God Delusion, both popular best-sellers. An engaging and energetic speaker, Dawkins promotes atheism as senior editor and columnist for the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine, and as a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since it was founded. In2006 Dawkins founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and in 2007 founded the atheist "Out" campaign, and in 2008 he supported the Atheist Bus Campaign, Britain's first atheist advertising blitz.
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Stephen William Hawking [b. 1942] is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton. He is recognized as one of the most creatively intelligent people of the modern scientific age, best known his contributions to the fields of cosmology, quantum gravity and general relativity, as well as for his best-selling popular science books. He developed ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in graduate school in Cambridge and has survived with the condition longer than was thought possible. he has almost no neuromuscular control and must communicate via a speech synthesizer. Hawking sometimes comes across quite like a deist in his popular writings, particularly in the book, A Brief History of Time, in which most of the questions posed of the universe also echo questions traditionally asked of God. In that book Hawking expounded upon his "no boundary" model by stating, "If the no boundary proposal is correct, He [God] had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions.". While he does not publicly profess atheism, Hawking does profess agnosticism.
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David Jon Gilmour [b. 1946] of the legendary rock group Pink Floyd was born in Cambridge, England, son of a senior lecturer in zoology at Cambridge University. His interest in music, writing and a life on the road led him into musical and busking adventures during the early 1960s, and finally to Pink Floyd in 1967, which went on to become one of the top grossing rock bands in history. On his 60th birthday he released his third solo album, On An Island, which debuted #1 on the UK charts. Gilmour has a penchant for philanthropy, support which includes housing funds for the homeless, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Lung Foundation and others. He was made a Commander in the Order of the British Empire in 2005, an honor just below full knighthood. His On An Island has been called "the most spiritual album ever made by an avowed atheist."
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Wozniak is a committed philanthropist, funding various educational projects, and has even taught fifth graders. Since leaving Apple he founded other ventures to produce things like the first universal remote and wireless GPS. He's a member of the Silicon Valley Aftershocks Segway polo team, which won the 2008 Woz Challenge Cup. Woz calls himself "atheist or agnostic," in that he says he doesn't know the difference between the designations.
45. PZ Myers
Paul Zachary Myers [b. 1957], better known as "PZ," is an evolutionary developmental biologist and professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris. He is an energetic promoter of science generally and evolution in particular. He got involved in the use of the internet for this purpose and was a founding member of the pro-evolution website The Panda's Thumb, and created his own web blog, Pharyngula, in 2002. PZ Myers has become the leader of the science-focused online atheist movement and his brilliance as an atheist might be said to be the remarkable success he has had in this position. Pharyngula received the Koufax Award in 2005 for 'Best Expert Blog', and Nature named it the top
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ranking blog written by a scientist. It was picked up by Seed Magazine that year and anchors their large stable of popular, multidisciplinary science blogs. His increasing popularity as a proponent of atheism have made him a popular speaker at freethought, atheist and humanist events.
Stephen Russell Davies [b. 1963] is a Welsh writer and producer of the modern version of the popular science fiction television series Doctor Who. A fan of the good doctor since childhood, his writing and direction of the new series has won critical acclaim and a new generation of fans. In 2005, Davies was tapped to write and produce a more adult spinoff called Torchwood, which featured darker science fiction drama and more sex and which Davies described as "The X-Files meets This Life." Davies was named the most influential gay person in Britain in 2006, spent several years on the top 100 list of influential media figures, and was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2008. His 2008 book Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale is a collection of autobiographical emails between Davies and journalist Benjamin Cook that has been described as "...a funny, revealing insight into the workings of the genius" behind the beloved Doctor Who.
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exchanges are still among the most valuable literature debating the philosophy of consciousness ever generated.
Sean M. Carroll [b. 1966] is a theoretical cosmologist specializing in general relativity and dark energy. Currently he is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at Caltech, writes scientific books and textbooks in his areas of expertise, contributes to the blog Cosmic Variance, writes articles for science magazines such as Nature, Seedm and and is a popular presenter and lecturer at scientific symposia. Carroll is perhaps better known for his strong advocacy of atheism, once going so far as to turn down an invitation to speak at a conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation because he didn't want to be seen as advocating a reconciliation between science and religion. He argues that scientific thinking must lead to a materialistic world view and a rejection of all notions of deity or spiritual nature. Which is why, Carroll wrote in 2003, (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.
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That's right, eat the slop that Fox News feeds you and regurgitate it here for us.
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in the rare case, woman) are white (because we don't have any prominent atheists of color, like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, promoting scientific literacy and a better understanding of our world without the dogma of religion - no we don't have those AT ALL).
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She was no atheist. Her ego was her god, and she serves as god to her followers (who must be polytheists, because they also worship Mammon).
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Many opportunities: there are a large number of university jobs available. So all that you need to do is search the internet for the job that suits you. The number of job options has increased in this field due to the ramped up funding that is being provided by the governments of all countries all around the world. Private funding is available at the same time too. Depending on the education and experience that you posses you can opt for the different higher ed jobs like that of the university jobs as well as the academic jobs. You should also take into account about the locality that you live in so that the university is nearer to you because you would not want to spend hours on your journey regularly.
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is an
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I notice the majority are Jews....the race that killed millions through communism
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