Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
8. Who Are the Most Famous Atheists?
Atheism in Five Minutes - Teemu Taira
Christopher R. Cotter [+]
The Open University
Christopher Cotter is Staff Tutor (Lecturer) in Sociology & Religious Studies at The Open University. He is co-founder of The Religious Studies Project, co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (Routledge, 2016) and author of The Critical Study of Non-Religion: Discourse, Identification, Locality (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Description
Who decides who is “famous”, and how might we assess varying degrees of fame? Does the title of this chapter refer to people who are famous for being atheists? People who are famous for other reasons but who are also atheists? Or those who are important to the history of atheism but who might not have (been) identified as atheists? Are we interested in fame among atheists or among general populations? This chapter will highlight some “famous atheists” from a variety of sociohistorical contexts while attempting to address some of these questions.