Gosh, who turned on the time machine and threw us all back to 2008? Some genius came up with a poll on “the most influential non-believer” with a long long list to choose from, including some dead guys, and guess how many women.
Three.
Christopher Hitchens
Richard Dawkins
Sam Harris
Daniel Dennett
Steven Pinker
Victor Stenger
Richard Carrier
Lawrence Krauss
Michael Shermer
Peter Singer
Paul Kurtz
Steven Weinberg
Susan Blackmore
William Provine
Jennifer Hecht
EO Wilson
David Sloan Wilson
Barbara Forrest
Peter Atkins
Philip Pullman
PZ Myers
Ray Kurzweil
Stephen Hawking
Kai Nielsen
Penn Jillette
James Randi
Bill Maher
Ricky Gervais
Matt Dillahunty
Seth Andrews (The Thinking Atheist)
Hemant Mehta (The Friendly Atheist)
Thunderf00t (YouTube Icon)
Aron Ra (YouTube Icon)
Dan Barker
Bart Ehrman
David Silverman (American Atheists)
33 men, and 3 women.
Staggering, isn’t it. No Susan Jacoby, Katha Pollitt, Taslima Nasreen, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Barbara Ehrenreich, Amanda Knief, Polly Toynbee, Sikivu Hutchinson, Louise Antony, Kate Smurthwaite, Maryam Namazie, Julia Sweeney, Jamila Bey, Vyckie Garrison…
Why do we even bother.
Molly Ivins
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B Anthony
Germaine Greer
Madalyn Murray O’Hair
Simone de Beauvoir
Barbara Ehrenreich
Eugenie Scott
Margaret Sanger
They haven’t even put Ayaan Hirsi Ali on their list, and she’s surely more influential than some v-bloggers on YouTube who purport to be amongst her greatest fans. No Ayn Rand either.
No Greta freaking Christina either! Humbug.
I like the apparently random decision to add parentheticals to certain entries. Like
Oh, good thing you clarified. I thought you meant Thunderf00t the concert violinist.
Yeah, but at least they included ME.
Personally, I would have voted for Susan Jacoby & Stephen J. Gould (setting aside Rocks of Ages), but they aren’t on the list. And that’s the thing: most influential will be a personal thing. Lots of people were strongly influenced by Dawkins or Harris, full credit to them, but I wasn’t: Dawkins was just saying stuff I’d already figured out, while I always found Harris kind of annoying.
Not even Susan Jacoby. And, seriously, Thunderf00t?
Well at least the (cough cough) Amazing Atheist wasn’t on there. Nor (surprisingly) Jerry Coyne.
It’s of little solace now, but I have a feeling the representation on these sorts of polls will be much more balanced in 10-20 years. I have zero evidence to support this claim, but I’d still bet on it.
I was about to say “but if they included women, then there might be some feminists on that list and SOCIAL JUSTICE BAD,” but I see they didn’t even include Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Huh.
I’m also chipping in Emma Goldman, Vyckie Garrison, Laci Green, Melissa McEwan, Sikivu Hutchinson, and Amanda Marcotte. And no Robert Ingersol or Bertrand Russell? And if you bend the rules a bit you can also include Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie (ok she was an agnostic, but close enough), Alan Turing…
‘Tis a silly poll.
I also want to add Allison Kilkenny, Zinnia Jones, Kayley Whalen, Danielle Muscato, Leighann Lord, Debbie Goddard, Heina Dadabhoy, Rebecca Watson, Amy Davis Roth, Melody Hensley, Miri Mogilevsky, and… sorry, but you, Ophelia…
Though I must admit… even with my additions, I still don’t feel like the list of influential atheists who are women is as intersectional as it could be…
Hmm…
I actually also wanted to include Imani Gandy, but then realized that I don’t actually know if she’s an atheist… it’s just that when This Week in Blackness gets in to religious stories, she does tend to get… heretical? Rational?
I’m saying that she often sounds like an atheist. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she is one…
I confess to being somewhat startled that they left out Madalyn Murray O’Hair and Julia Sweeney. Wonderful Katha Pollitt and horrible Ayn Rand are also such blindingly obvious candidates that you’d almost have to exclude them on purpose.
I confess to a dry, cynical laugh at the four cowboys at the top of the list. If you think about who is actually influencing people, I think you could make a good argument that say, Stephen Fry reaches more people than Dawkins. And some other pretty obvious men are missing, too. Are we meant to confine the list to “professional atheists” (whatever that would be)?
Ooh, I’m having a flash of deja-vu. Did something like this happen, like, 3 or 4 years ago in Scienceblogs days? Isn’t it nice that we’ve come so far?
My Mother isn’t on the list.
Yep, it’s not even a good list of men.
No Richard Feynman? He told the story of abandoning his family’s religion (a mild Reform Judaism, at that) in a bestselling book. No Isaac Asimov? He admitted his atheism on the back cover of his autobiography. They both had seriously problematic histories with women—problematic for us now precisely because their work was so accomplished and influential.
No Carl Sagan? As I recall, he didn’t self-describe as “atheist,” basically because that word came across to him as too rigid; but Ehrman, who is on the list, identifies as agnostic or agnostic-atheist. And Sagan was up-front about religions making empirical claims which can in principle be tested scientifically—no separate magisteria for him.
No Neil deGrasse Tyson? He doesn’t like the label “atheist” very much either, but it seems foolish to leave him off a list of well-known irreligious folk.
If, when making a list of people you’re proposing are “most influential”, you feel the need to include a set of brackets after their name and an explanation why anyone might even have heard of them, this should be a clue that that person doesn’t belong on the list.
Also, “most influential” doesn’t necessarily equate to “best”, or even “best influence”.
Finally, a list of influential unbelievers that includes Thunderf00t and doesn’t include Bertrand Russell? Hahahahahahahahahaha
And why, pray tell, am I not on the list? Hmmph!
Ah… I laughed, and then it occurred to me that I know someone who almost certainly really feels that way. I has a sad now.
Also, I like some of the ordering:
This atheist thinks. This next atheist? He’s friendly.
I know that’s just their ‘nyms, but it makes me giggle. I like Seth, he comes across as rather friendly too.
The actual question is NOT “who’s the most influential unbeliever”. If that was the question, it implies influence outside the echo-chamber of atheist activism. Most of those suggestions (and most of the well-meaning suggestions below the line) are just stupid, because they’re obscure people nobody but “movement atheists” would even have heard of. I’m a fairly voracious reader of this stuff, and my response to at least ten of those names is “Who?”. But that’s beside the point. That wasn’t the question.
The actual question is: Who do you feel has had the greatest impact on the Atheist Movement?
You want to put Capital Letters on it? Like it’s a thing? That’s pretty recent. There’ve been active atheists about for millenia, but they’ve mostly been individual high profile men (sorry) like Diagorus or Diderot. Organised, out-and-proud, grassroots “movement” atheism is recent, and Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris and Dennet are part of it. But IF you accept this premise, there can surely only be one answer to the question of who has had the greatest impact on that (capital letters now) Atheist Movement.
Rebecca Watson.
No contest, surely? And it got to post EIGHT here before anyone even mentioned her???
sonofrojblake @ 15,
Do you realise that there are several men on that list who have never been heard of beyond the carefully guarded bounds of the Head-in-Arse School of Atheism?
Also, how recent is recent? My list of well-known atheists goes back to William Godwin and includes Charles Bradlaugh, Annie Besant (who got into woo a bit later) and Robert Ingersoll. Apart from Bertrand Russell who was everywhere as I was growing up – in academe, in parliament and all over the media.
Teresa MacBain
And a third vote for Rebecca Watson
Maureen Brian @16:
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough when I said “my response to at least ten of those names is “Who?””. I meant the names on the original list. The 90% men list. In other words – yes, I do realise perfectly well ” that there are several men on that list who have never been heard of beyond the carefully guarded bounds of the Head-in-Arse School of Atheism?” because that was precisely my point.
And I’m fascinated by your list of well-known atheists, really I am (sarcasm), but as I’m pretty sure I pointed out, the poll is NOT ABOUT being “well known” or even being “influential”, despite what the original post says. The actual question on the poll is “Who do you feel has had the greatest impact on the Atheist Movement?”, and in order for that question to even make sense, there has to be an Atheist Movement with capital letters to have an impact on. And ubiquitous as Bertrand Russell was in the olden days, he was one guy. He wasn’t representing a Movement.
You ask how recent is recent, and I’d hesitate to put a number on it because that’s reductionist and might seem to elevate some single event (e.g. the publication of a particular book, say) to the status of First Cause when we all know this has been a continuum. What I can say is that there definitely is an identifiable Atheist Movement with a public profile now, and I think as recently as 1990 there wasn’t.
Stanley Ann Dunham?
The list seems biased against actual philosophers. Bertrand Russell and J L Mackie are absent. Dead white men, both. As is Susan Haack, well and alive, and one of our generation’s best defenders of science and critics of religion.
Say what you will, but he’s great with Wagner overtures. /yes, the Godwin was deliberate
I voted for Kodos.
@PZ, 4:
Well, yes… if the question had said “most influential to you“. Which it doesn’t. It says “had the greatest impact on the Atheist Movement”, or, if you like, “is most influential”. Period. The attitude that says “Well Dawkins didn’t influence me” is hilariously self-centred and indignant. Nobody said he did, dude, and nobody cares. They perhaps did imply, with some justification, that for good or ill he influenced one or more orders of magnitude more people than you did, though.
It really does seem like most people here didn’t even read or understand the question. In fact, it seems like the guy who posed the question didn’t understand the question, given the list he offered.
To leave off MM O’Hair seems bizarre. She quite literally was the atheist movement back in the 60s-70s.
I think the list-maker is probably under the age of 40.
If you can with any degree of seriousness suggest at any time that one person, any single person, male or female, is the atheist movement, that’s evidence that there is no atheist movement. Isn’t it?
@23 Kevin Kehris
Yes, the list maker is under 40 based solely on the Thunder foot (YouTube icon ). Based on the omissions (O’Hair) and calling someone a YouTube icon indicates to me that the list maker receives a lot of atheist information via that medium. Granted, YouTube is a useful medium for proejecting your message (comments eccluded) but using the word ‘icon’ leads leads me to be that the list maker grew up with the Internet and YouTube as a primary source of informa tion gathering.
Wouldn’t having Dawkins and Watson on the same list cause some kind of warping of the space-time continuum? …or maybe it would be a disturbance in the force?
I have to wonder if the famous freethinkers who won’t identify themselves as “atheists” would feel the need to avoid the term if we had not all accepted the vilification and censure Christians have colored that term with. Atheists, after all, are the most hated minority in the US – numerous studies have confirmed this. Some believe atheists to be the last group it is considered socially acceptable to discriminate against! So yeah – considering that identifying oneself as “atheist” has gotten students thrown off sports teams and expelled, and people fired from their jobs, I can certainly understand the reluctance.
But “atheist” is now where “gay/homosexual” was a few years ago. What helped the gay community? High-profile people not being afraid to identify as such. Are we simply having a lack-of-spine crisis in the nonreligious community??
The demonizing of a word can backfire spectacularly – in the US, the majority of people polled now identify as “pro-life”. This is the effect of the Christian demonizing of the term “pro-choice”. Yet if you look closer, a huge majority of the “pro-life” group wants abortion to remain available and accessible, under certain conditions. That means they’re actually “pro-choice”! They’re just now afraid of the term!
But during the Republican National Convention leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Republicans told each other that “pro-life” meant “against all abortion” and adopted a “no abortion under any circumstances” plank to their platform. (This nicely illustrates the dangers of the “echo chamber” effect as well.) And, not surprisingly, they got their asses handed to them at the polls. Since many people are afraid to openly identify as “atheist”, I suspect that the religious are strongly underestimating the amount of nonbelief out there – and how fast it is growing.
You really don’t understand, sonofrojblake @24? REALLY??
Because the lawsuit that led to abortion rights was called “Roe vs. Wade”, the fact that the plaintiff became a figurehead for abortion rights means that nobody else wanted abortion rights – is that how this appears to you?
Since Gloria Steinem WAS the face of the early feminist movement, there was no feminist movement.
So in the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of France, when Charles deGaulle stood up in London and declared, “I AM FRANCE!”, that meant there was no France?? You really aren’t familiar with this whole “figurehead” business?
Or are you just hoping that, if you cast doubt upon the atheist movement’s origins, the whole thing will just disappear in shame for having been finally exposed as a fiction?
That’s the really telling bit, isn’t it? He doesn’t belong on that list at all. Not if merit had anything to do with ending up on that list.
Even he should be able to see that just maaaybe privilege is a thing that exists.
Of course thunderbutt. Certain people (something to do with genitalia I think) are only supposed to use certain emotions in certain ways. Everything else is just “rude” or “illogical”.
@Blanche Quizno, 28:
Yes, I am perfectly familiar with the figurehead business. You seem to be unfamiliar with the idea that figureheads are, typically, attached to the front of actual ships that exist, rather than floating around as individuals, connected to nothing.
In your desperation to angrily disagree with me about something, anything, you appear to have gone completely off-piste into the territory of the bizarre. What you’ve said there doesn’t even make sense – how would that work?
Charitably, perhaps I was unclear. Today, there definitely *is* something you could describe as “movement atheism”, something you could even put capital letters on. This is a Good Thing. It is simply my contention that as recently as 25 years ago, there wasn’t. There were prominent, vocal, visibly individual non-believers, and some of them appear on the list (and many don’t), but there wasn’t the kind of organised, grassroots, *connected* movement there definitely is today. The internet is probably responsible for a good deal of that connectedness.
You’re not, surely, contending that atheism as a thing was as coherent or organised in, say, 1985 as it is today? And further, you’re surely not contending that that matters in any way to the validity of the movement now? There’s been progress. On what planet would that be a matter for shame? I really don’t understand what you’re objecting to in what I’ve said.
Out of curiosity – are you as angry and vociferous in your disagreement with my nominaton of Rebecca Watson as the person who’s had the most impact on the atheism movement?
@sonofrojblake, 31
So… was your comment about there having been no atheist movement merely pedantry over the use of the word “literally”? Because O’Hair was not actually the entirety of the movement in her time, she was just the most obvious example of it. Even if we assume that there were no other atheist organisations at the time, there were other people in her organisation.
Athywren: just read the rest of post 31. Past the bit you blockquoted.
@sonofrojblake
I did. It was unclear. Hence the question.
Also, do by all means please cite a source that contradicts this, from Wikipedia:
@34:
Then I shall ask the question to you: You’re not, surely, contending that atheism as a thing was as coherent or organised in, say, 1985 as it is today? And further, you’re surely not contending that that matters in any way to the validity of the movement now?
How is that remotely relevant? That’s a completely different question.
That’s also a completely different question.
Why would I need to contradict that? It proves my point. O’Hair was not the entirety of the movement. Even assuming that American Atheists was the only atheist organisation at the time, her son, her granddaughter, and that handful of support people are all people who were not O’Hair.
Athywren, 37:
I honestly don’t know what it is you’re arguing for, or against.
Which bit of my point from post 15 do you disagree with?
1. The “Atheism Movement” exists today as a broad, coherent, connected, organised thing, and in my opinion this is a Good Thing.
2. As recently as 25 years ago it didn’t. This is a neutral observation of fact, rather than an opinion.
3. The biggest impact on it AS IT EXISTS TODAY has been made by Rebecca Watson. This is my opinion.
Which one of those things do you have a problem with?
Suddenly I’m wondering if you read past the part I blockquoted… the very first line of my comment was my entire question:
I’m not sure I can do anything more than refer you to point 2 in post 38. But, perhaps pointlessly, I’m going to try again to help you understand.
No, it was not merely pedantry. Because, as I have repeatedly stated, it is my contention that as recently as 25 years ago, there was no atheist movement remotely like today’s broad, coherent, connected, organised thing. As recently as 25 years ago, an “organisation” calling itself “American Atheists” amounted to one woman, two of her relatives, and a “handful” of support personnel. Westboro fucking Baptists field a bigger team than that, even now Fred’s dead.
The corollary to that was that, in the context of the poll, in order for someone to have an impact on the Atheism Movement, you had to be talking about someone active during the time the Atheism Movement existed, i.e. fairly recently.
So: one more time with feeling – is it your contention that I’m wrong? Because I’m really struggling to see what point you’re trying to make.
sonofrojblake, I might ask you why you are concentrating on what O’Hair’s organisation was like in the 1990s when it was the 1960s when she won the landmark lawsuit that ended official Bible readings in public schools and when LIFE magazine declared her “the most hated woman in America” and when she started the USA’s first ever atheist magazine and hosted a nationally-syndicated cable talk show. In the 80s she was an adviser on Larry Flynt’s presidential campaign. I note that you didn’t give the link to the Wikipedia page where you cherrypicked the last of seven paragraphs about her involvement with American Atheists to make your point, bypassing the first paragraph where O’Hair was described as “the public voice and face of atheism in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s”.
The American Atheists organisation was tiny by the 1990s since regional chapters had dissolved their ties to the organisation because O’Hair’s son had alienated them in various ways since taking over from his mother as president, and they preferred to control their own finances. Those chapters didn’t stop being organised atheist groups though, who kept in touch with each other and coordinated activist events, so there was still an atheist movement in the USA outside American Atheists (and of course there were still organised atheist groups *gasp* outside the USA).
The internet has certainly allowed atheists to communicate more easily with each other. I question whether it has made organised atheism significantly more effective in its activism than the efforts of atheist groups of 50 years ago.
You know what? I give in. You’re right, I’m wrong. The atheist movement now, post internet, post Facebook, post blogging, post A+, post “God Delusion”, post four horsemen, post JREF, post “Bullsh!t”, post PZ’s cracker desecration, post “Dear Muslima”, post Sagan, post DeGrasse Tyson, post Kitzmiller vs. Dover Area School District, is EXACTLY as organised, effective and high profile as it was in the sixties when communication was effected by landline telephone and home-repro’d fanzine through the post. Sure it is.
And Rebecca Watson’s impact on it has been minimal. How foolish of me to suggest otherwise.
It’s almost as if we’re having completely different discussions…
There was no movement =/= the movement was smaller. Yes? No?
sonofrojblake #141: Such a strong reaction to being challenged on a few assertions – why? I’m a big fan of Rebecca’s and the Skepchick organisation as it happens, I also have a strong suspicion that I would find Watson much more pleasant company than I would have found O’Hair, and I don’t see anybody on this thread objecting to your proposal of her as worthy of being on this poll. However, in order to praise Rebecca Watson (who is as yet only internet famous no matter how much she deserves wider recognition (and who definitely deserves wider recognition than Thunderf00l)) you have drastically downplayed the achievements of a woman who was literally a household name in the USA long before the internet. Hell, I’m in Australia and I’d heard of O’Hair even before I had access to the internet. If they are going to have dead guys on the poll then the dead gals should get a showing too.
Regarding activist effectiveness, US Atheists in the 60s (without the internet) managed to organise themselves effectively enough to win several landmark rulings from the Supreme Court to mandate the provisions of the Establishment Clause in education and in public buildings/spaces, precedent-setting victories which made the Kitzmiller vs Dover ruling possible, and it was traditional newsletter and telephone organisations who brought it about. Non-theist forums certainly approved of it and signal-boosted some fundraising for those traditional organisations, but in terms of boots on the ground I suspect there are fewer actively campaigning activists per capita of those who identify as nonbelievers now than there were then, which is probably why “under God” and “in God we trust” are still daily microaggressions via the pledge and the currency. The connectivity of the internet seems to have made many atheists complacent about activism by comparison because now it’s easier to find and socialise with each other and the discrimination against atheists from the religious seems far less threatening when we have virtual communities where we can find digital validation.
I’m nonetheless a big fan of the social validation provided by internet atheism and the existence of bestselling atheist books (even when I sometimes side-eye some of those authors) and popular godless-science programs and the sense of social change that they represent. In the long term I have confidence that the growing everyday familiarity of atheist celebrities will have a welcome normalising effect on the public at large, but I temper that confidence with skepticism about celebrity culture in general, which is one of the reasons I am mocking this poll on multiple levels – the gender imbalance is more immediately offputting than the historical imbalance and the internet-centrism and USA-centrism, but they’re all worthy of facepalms.
clarification: “precedent-setting victories which made the Kitzmiller vs Dover ruling possible, and it was traditional newsletter and telephone organisations who brought it about” should have been less ambiguously worded to make it clearer that by “brought it about” I meant “brought the Kitzmiller vs Dover case about”.
No Alice Walker? Kate Bornstein? Hell, Dan Savage is WAY more widely read (and, probably, influential) than most of the people on that list. It seems to be mostly composed of ‘professional atheists’ – it’s people who do activism regarding atheism specifically and directly, as opposed to influential people who happen to be atheists. Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, or Johnny Depp are easily more influential than anyone listed, thanks to our mainstream celebrity-royalty culture. And, to be fair to the Libertarians (though I generally wouldn’t bother), as mentioned upthread, so is Ayn Rand (to an enormous, unjustified degree). That list is absurdly myopic; it should probably say “most influential within ‘movement atheism.'”