Atheism in Pop Culture Part 7: The Motherlode

Ted Williams and Nina Hartley. David Cronenberg and Dave Barry. Brian Eno and Barry Manilow. Joss Whedon and Andy Rooney. Sarah Vowell and Ted Turner.

All atheists.

I've found the "atheism in pop culture" motherlode, people. It's the Celebrity Atheist List, "an offbeat collection of notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities."

And it's hilarious.

It's just such a fascinating mish-mosh. I'd be hard pressed to find any other characteristic that all these people have in common, apart from being carbon-based humanoid life forms.

I mean -- Barry Manilow?

Really?

And that's what I like about it. It's such a rich vein of counter-examples to the stereotype of atheists as sad, hopeless, amoral, unpatriotic, self-centered nihilists who only live for ourselves and only live for the moment.

After all, are you really going to call Dave Barry sad and hopeless? Andy Rooney unpatriotic? Studs Terkel nihilistic? Salman Rushdie self-centered and amoral? Did Pat Tillman live only for himself? Does Barbara Ehrenreich live only for the moment?

Plus it's just hilarious. I mean -- Mickey Dolenz and Ingmar Bergman! Jean-Luc Godard and Ani DiFranco! Ray Romano and Marie Curie! Noam Chomsky and Bjork!

Hours of time-wasting fun. Check it out. And tell me who your favorites are!

Comments

[Nentuaby]

Most of what I notice about that list is it seems to be full of crap...

It seems like perhaps as much as a majority of those listed under "atheist" are actually rather soft agnostics or even irreligious theists, according to their quotes.

[Nan]

Every atheist name I clicked included quotes stating in pretty clear terms that the person is an atheist, so I'm not sure where Nentuaby got the impression the majority were actually soft agnostics or irreligious theists.

Definitely an interestng list. Quite a few of the names were surprises to me.

[Nentuaby]

I may have just clicked very unluckily- but look at, for instance, Roddenberry and Gates.

[Greta Christina]

Well, I just did a spot-check of the list, in a pre-selected pattern to avoid unconsciously picking ones that I knew about. (I checked the first name of the A's, the second of the B's, the third of the C's, etc., until there weren't enough names in a letter to continue the pattern, at which point I checked the first name in that letter and started the pattern again.)

So I have no life. What's your point?

And out of 25 names that I checked, I only found one -- Louis Theroux -- who probably should have been listed as an agnostic instead of an atheist. Everyone else I checked looked like a clear atheist.

Yes, the list has a few categorization mistakes. I encourage you to write to the people who keep it and point them out. But while I haven't checked every single name on the list, it seems to me that it's mostly accurate.

[Elaine]

Lance Armstrong was an interesting surprise. Its usually the jocks, especially ones who have had a major illness, who tend to do a lot of preachin' and testifyin'. But then, cycling is a solo sport. Team sports usually have some coach forcing the team to pray, as if having a blue jersey makes you more worthy of that divine assistance than having a red jersey.

[Abbie]

I think we should pressure Sarah Vowell to write a book on being godless in America. I think she could do something nice on the subject.

You left off Ricky Gervais :-(

[Intergalactic Hussy]

Wow, Ted Turner? Working for TNT never seemed so cool! And Ani DiFranco I knew about but she's just the awesomest and wanted to say that. :)

Great!! thanks for the list!

[Mike Haubrich, FCD]

My regular series, "Friday Night Atheist" owes much to this list for its source material.

They break down the freethinkers into categories based on the "strength" of their disbelief; so I agree that the first comment on this post is off the mark.

[OzAtheist]

Linus Torvalds is my favourite, but I thought he was a god? TIC

[Rebecca]

And suddenly, finally, I have respect for Rodney Dangerfield. And I can't help slipping into fantasies of my ultimate atheist dinner party: Bob Geldof, Angelina Jolie, Sir Ian McKellen, Studs Terkel, Greta Christina...

[Dave Haaz-Baroque]

Yaay! Christopher Eccleston! Doctor Who is an Atheist!

[pussreboots]

Thanks for the link. I'll have fun checking out the site later.

[Kagehi]

"Wow, Ted Turner? Working for TNT never seemed so cool!"

I wouldn't have believed this without seeing it. I personally **despised** the turner networks because they had an unbelievable tendency to remove shows I liked, and run some of the most stupid, whiny, and/or apologetic and vacuous examples of religious shows, programming, movies and other garbage of "any" of the networks I had ever seen. It drove me nuts to turn on the channel to watch one of the few things I didn't mind on them, only to find them running some televangelathon or something on one of them.

I certainly wouldn't have been the way I would have run the stations, or at the bare minimum, I would have *tried* to have at least one that didn't run that stuff at all. But.. Given how the un-History channel, the un-Discovery channel, and the psychic-Animal planet channel, his are hardly the last to fall into such a pattern...

[Duncan]

"After all, are you really going to call Dave Barry sad and hopeless?" Well, yes, actually. Professional comics often are quite dour and sad, though I don't know anything about Dave Barry personally. Plus his politics have become overtly vile, especially since he married a reactionary Cuban exile. He thinks that Orlando Bosch, a known terrorist being sheltered by the US, is just amusing, even cute -- sorta like the guys he writes about who shoot themselves or hunting buddies after a few dozen beers.

I agree, it's interesting to know that such and such a celebrity is an atheist, though Barry Manilow doesn't count -- when I saw him on the Colbert Report, he was clearly an audioanimatronics android. Now if we could just get atheists to stop stereotyping fundamentalists ...

[TC]

I'm skeptical about this list as well. In the Manilow quote, for example, he doesn't say he's an atheist or express disbelief in God - he jokes that the head of his record company is his God, and then answers a question about his Judaism with a remark about humanism. This sounds to me more like an attempt to downplay his Judaism for a non-Jewish audience than a declaration of atheism. (It looks as though Manilow's Christmas album came out around the time of the interview, which might provide additional context.)