And the answers are . . .

The last post was a list of famous people and a challenge: Which ones are religious, and which are unbelievers? Here are the answers.

Lance Armstrong: Nonbeliever

“If there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me,” the famous cyclist says in his autobiography It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, “I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I’d been baptized.”[1] On a lighter note, Armstrong -- who lost one of his testicles to cancer -- told ET Magazine, “If there was a God, I’d still have both nuts.”[2]

Thomas Edison: Nonbeliever

Edison, a shrewd businessman and celebrity who vigorously protected his public image, denied being an atheist -- “I am not, never have been, never said I was,” he told the New York Times in November 1910[3] -- but he sure talked like one. “Nature made us -- nature did it all -- not the gods of the religions,” he told the Times a month earlier. [4] And two months later, he went even further. “I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God.”[5]

Steve Jobs: Buddhist

The mind behind the iPhone, iTunes, and almost every other Apple product was a Buddhist since the 1970s.[6] He referred to the Buddhist phrase “beginner’s mind” as a way to take a fresh look at the world and its problems,[7] and Buddhist monk Kobun Chino officiated at his wedding.[8]

Angelina Jolie: Nonbeliever

Jolie hasn’t come out and explicitly called herself an atheist, but she’s come close. When the magazine The Onion asked her if there’s a god, she answered, “For some people. I hope so, for them. For the people who believe in it, I hope so. There doesn’t need to be a God for me.”[9] The man in her life, Brad Pitt, is an unbeliever as well. In 2009, he told the German magazine Bild, "I’m probably 20 percent atheist and 80 percent agnostic."[10]

Sir Isaac Newton: Protestant

Possibly the greatest scientist of the past thousand years, Newton didn’t follow every belief and practice of his Anglican faith -- he didn’t believe that Jesus was God-like, for instance -- but he did believe in God. “God is living, intelligent, and powerful,” Newton wrote in his classic science text The Principia. “He is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.”[11]

Shaquille O’Neal: Muslim

As early as 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that O’Neal and fellow player Hedo Turkoglu “hugged and touched both cheeks before the opening tip in every game of the Western Conference finals,” which O’Neal explained by saying, “It’s a Muslim thing.”[12] He’s even had an apparently friendly relationship with Louis Farrakhan, leader of the radical Muslim sect the Nation of Islam.[13]

Mark Twain: Nonbeliever

Twain had a low opinion of religion and of the God that the preachers of his time praised. Try these quotes on:

“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”[14]

“To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.”[15]

“I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.”[16]

Denzel Washington: Protestant

Son of a minister, and a member of Los Angeles’s West Angeles Church of God in Christ, Washington has made a number of films with religion at their center, including The Preacher’s Wife and The Book of Eli. Prayer, he says, is “how I start every day, and it’s how I end every day.”[17] He and his wife, Pauletta, recited the Song of Solomon on an audio Bible,[18] and he’s said, “I believe that Jesus is the Son of God. I’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit. I know it’s real.”[19]

---

[1] Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, (Putnam, 2000), http://books.google.com

[2] Uncredited, “Lance Armstrong,” Celeb Atheists website (2006), http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Lance_Armstrong

[3] Uncredited, “Edison Invents His Own Aeroplane,” New York Times (December 1, 1910), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9802E3DE1638E333A25752C0A9649D946196D6CF

[4] Edward Marshall, “No Immortality of the Soul, Says Thomas A. Edison,” New York Times (October 2, 1910), http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9903EEDC1F39E333A25751C0A9669D946196D6CF

[5] Edward Marshall, “The Great Inventor Declares Immortality Of The Soul Improbable,” Columbian (January 1911), transcribed in “Thomas Alva Edison: 1911 Columbian Interview,” American Atheists website, http://www.atheists.org/Thomas_Alva_Edison%3A_1911_Columbian_Interview

[6] Carrie Kirby and Matthew Yi, “Apple Turns 30,” SFGate website (March 26, 2006), http://articles.sfgate.com/2006-03-26/news/17285676_1_steve-jobs-steve-wozniak-electronics-project

[7] Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired (April 2002), http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

[8] Peter Elkind, “The Trouble with Steve Jobs,” Money (March 5, 2008), http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/02/news/companies/elkind_jobs.fortune/index2.htm

[9] Stephen Thompson, “Is There a God?”, The Onion (September 6, 2000), http://www.avclub.com/articles/is-there-a-god,1394/

[10] Norbert Körzdörfer, “Brad Pitt Interview,” Bild, (July 22, 2009), http://www.bild.de/BILD/news/bild-english/celebrity-gossip/2009/07/22/brad-pitt-interview/inglourious-basterd-star-on-angelina-jolie-and-six-kids.html

[11] Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687), 3rd edition (1726), http://www.todayinsci.com/N/Newton_Isaac/NewtonIsaac-Quotations.htm

^[12] Tim Brown and Bill Plaschke, “Shaq and Hedo Share a Moment,” Los Angeles Times (May 29, 2002), http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/29/sports/sp-lakerep29

[13] Tim Brown, “O’Neal Issues Apology,” Los Angeles Times (January 11, 2003), http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/11/sports/sp-shaq11

[14] Mark Twain, Following the Equator (American Publishing Company, 1897), http://www.twainquotes.com/Faith.html

[15] Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/twain.htm

[16] Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals (1979), Notebook 27 (August 1887-July 1888), edited by Frederick Anderson, http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/twain.htm

[17] Michael Kress, “Denzel Washington’s Ministry of Movies,” Beliefnet.com (2007) http://www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Movies/2007/12/Denzel-Washingtons-Ministry-Of-Movies.aspx

[18] Michael Kress, “The Twelve Most Powerful Christians in Hollywood,” Beliefnet.com (2008) http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/2008/09/The-12-Most-Powerful-Christians-in-Hollywood.aspx?p=3

[19] Brett McCracken, “Keeping the Faith,” Christianity Today (January 13, 2010), http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/movies/interviews/2010/denzelwashington-jan10.html

Quiz Time!

Chapter 1 Sidebar
 

Do You Know Your Famous Unbelievers?

Which of the people listed below are religious, and which ones are very much not? Go ahead, guess.

A. Lance Armstrong

B. Thomas Edison

C. Steve Jobs

D. Angelina Jolie

E. Sir Isaac Newton

F. Shaquille O’Neal

G. Mark Twain

H. Denzel Washington

Answers tomorrow!

Atheists of TV, movies and novels

Chapter 1 Sidebar

Famous, Fictional, and Faithless

Here are some prominent atheists from well-known works of fiction. For some reason, there seem to be more of them on television than in other media.

Bernard Rieux

The Plague, a novel by Albert Camus

Rieux, a small-town doctor, is the first person to realize that a plague is destroying the town’s people. As the people’s suffering rises and a quarantine cuts them off from the outside world, the humane and practical Rieux struggles to survive and stay sane.

Brian Griffin

Family Guy, a TV series created by Seth McFarlane

The martini-swilling animated dog is saner and more sensible than the humans around him. He’s consistently atheist, although he does pray in the episode “April in Quahog” -- when he believes that the world is ending.

Henry Drummond

Inherit the Wind, screenplay by Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee

In this movie derived from the notorious 1925 case in which a teacher was put on trial for teaching evolution, the nontheist Drummond declares, “In a child’s power to master the multiplication table, there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘amens’ and ‘holy holies’ and ‘hosannas.’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man’s knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned to snakes or the parting of the waters.”[1]

Dexter Morgan

Dexter, a TV series based on novels by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter’s a serial killer who works as a police blood-spatter expert and indulges his thirst for death by killing bad guys. In the episode “Waiting to Exhale,” Dexter enters a church and says, “If I believed in God -- if I believed in sin -- this is the place where I’d be sucked straight to Hell . . . if I believed in Hell.”[2]

Ivan Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov, a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In this gigantic, wildly complex story of (among many other things) four brothers who may have murdered their father, Ivan’s a brilliant intellectual who can’t believe in a God who allows human suffering. Or as he puts it, “It’s not that I don’t accept God, you must understand; it’s the world created by Him I don’t and cannot accept.”[3]

Gregory House

House, a TV series created by David Shore

Brilliant and cranky, Dr. House is the Sherlock Holmes of medicine, diagnosing diseases that baffle other doctors. “Faith -- that’s another word for ignorance, isn’t it?” he says in the episode “House vs. God.” “I never understood how people could be so proud of believing in something with no proof at all.”[4]

---

[1] Nedrick Young and Harold Jacob Smith, screenplay for Inherit the Wind (1960), based on the play by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053946/quotes

[2] Clyde Phillips, “Waiting to Exhale,” Dexter (2007) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013981/quotes

[3] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett, (Plain Label Books, 1960), http://books.google.com/

[4] Doris Egan, “House vs. God,” House (2006), http://www.housemd-guide.com/season2/219vsgod.php

Smart, Young Unbelievers

Are Teenage Atheists Smarter?

            “The higher the intelligence of [students] in junior high and high school, the less religious they grow up to be in their early adulthood.”[1] When Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the London School of Economics, put those words into a 2010 issue of Social Psychology Quarterly, all kinds of fury erupted -- even from atheists.

            Kanazawa came to his conclusion after studying a survey of about 20,000 students around the United States.[2] But he wasn’t the first to say that atheists were smart. “Very high-IQ individuals tend to be atheists,”[3] wrote psychologist Helmuth Nyborg of Denmark’s Aarhus University more than a year earlier, after he examined a national study covering 9,000 American teenagers.[4]

            Nyborg found that atheists scored about five IQ points higher than religious teenagers. Kanazawa revealed that students who called themselves “not at all religious” averaged about six IQ points higher than those who said they were very religious.

            That’s when the storm broke. “Show me the reliability of IQ as a measure of actual, you know, intelligence,” University of Minnesota biologist P.Z. Myers growled in the science blog Pharyngula after Kanazawa’s study began to gather publicity. “Show me that a six-point IQ difference matters at all in your interactions with other people, even if it were real. . . . You can just glance at [Kanazawa’s study] and see that it is complete crap.”[5] (Myers, by the way, is no religious zealot. “Christians are morons,” he declared in a post about half an hour before his blast at Kanazawa.[6])

            So maybe IQ’s debatable, but here’s a fact that’s tougher to argue: People with college degrees tend to be less religious than people with less education. In 2008, a university-sponsored poll called the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) revealed that 27% of all Americans were college graduates, but 31% of all American nontheists had their diplomas.[7]

            Still, ARIS also pointed out that more than half of all American Jews finished college, so nonbelief isn’t the only measurement of academic achievement. What’s more, a college degree doesn’t necessarily indicate how smart someone is. Psychologist Todd Shackelford of Florida Atlantic University and Oakland University in Michigan has studied dozens of surveys of believers and unbelievers, and he says that even if nonbelievers outperform believers in the classroom, “There’s no doubt there are people who are extremely intelligent who are also very religious.” [8]

            So who’s smarter? Depends on how you measure it.

What’s It All Mean?

            So now you know what an atheist is and who atheists are. But the unbelieving life is more complicated than a flat list of facts and explanations.

---

[1] Satoshi Kanazawa, “Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent,” Social Psychology Quarterly (2010), volume 73, issue 1, pages 33-57

[2] Robert Bock, “The Adolescent Health Study,” National Institutes of Health (September 9, 1997), http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/sept97/chd-09.htm

[3] Helmuth Nyborg, “The Intelligence-Religiosity Nexus: A Representative Study of White Adolescent Americans,” Intelligence (January-February 2009)

[4] Uncredited, “The NLSY97,” Bureau of Labor Statistics website (December 17, 2009), http://www.bls.gov/nls/nlsy97.htm

[5] P.Z. Myers, “Stop Patting Yourself on the Back over This Study” Pharyngula (February 25, 2010), http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_yourselves_on_the.php

[6] P.Z. Myers, “Representing for Christ,” Pharyngula (February 25, 2010), http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/representing_for_christ.php

[7] Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, “Percentage of College Graduates in the Population Age 25 and Over by Religious Tradition 1990-2008,” American Religious Identification Survey (March 2009), Trinity College, http://americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/reports/aris_report_2008.pdf

[8] Erin Anderson, “Scientists Investigate If Atheists’ Brains are Missing a ‘God Gene,’ ” The Globe and Mail (Toronto) (April 3, 2010)

A World of Unbelievers

            If you’re an atheist and you want to be around a lot of people who believe the way you do, go to Vietnam. Or Sweden. Here are the countries with the highest proportion of unbelievers in their population.

Nations with the highest percentage of unbelievers[1]

100															100
98															98
96															96
94															94
92															92
90															90
88															88
86															86
84															84
82															82
	Vietnam
80															80
	80%
78															78
76															76
74															74
72															72
70															70
68															68
66															66
64															64
62															62
60															60
58															58
56															56
54															54
52															52
50															50
48															48
		Sweden
46															46
		46%	France
44				Denmark											44
			44%		Netherlands
42				43%		Great Britain									42
					42%
40															40
38						39%									38
36															36
							Bulgaria
34															34
							34%	Hungary			South Korea
32									Germany	Norway					32
								32%
30									31%	31%					30
											30%
28															28
26															26
												Russia
24															24
												24%	New Zealand
22															22
20															20
													20%	Australia
18															18
														18%
16															16
14															14
12															12
10															10
8															8
6															6
4															4
2															2
0															0

            These are very conservative figures, by the way. In recent years, researchers have dug up a variety of poll numbers on religious belief, and the ones on this chart are the lowest. So when the chart says that 46 percent of all Swedish people are nonbelievers, take it to mean that the unreligious account for at least 46 percent of the Swedes -- and probably more.

            And worldwide? The number of atheists is nearly 150 million, up about three million from 2000 to 2009.[2]

            In other words, if you’re an atheist, you’re not alone.

---

[1] Andrew Greeley, Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ (2003), cited in “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns” by Phil Zuckerman; Kim Eungi, “Religion in Contemporary Korea: Change and Continuity,” Korea Focus (July-August 2003), cited in “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns” ; Nancy Wong and Vivienne Timmins, “Religious Views and Beliefs Vary Greatly by Country, According to the Latest Financial Times/Harris Poll,” Harris Interactive website (December 20, 2006), http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NEWS/allnewsbydate.asp?NewsID=1131; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, Cambridge University Press, New York (2004), cited in “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns” ; Ronald Inglehart, Miguel Basanez, Jaime Diez-Medrano, Loek Halman, and Ruud Luuijkx, Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross-Cultural Sourcebook Based on the 1999-2002 Value Surveys (Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2004), cited in “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns” by Phil Zuckerman in Cambridge Companion to Atheism, edited by Michael Martin, University of Cambridge Press (2007), www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Ath-Chap-under-7000.pdf; Ulla Bondeson, Nordic Moral Climates, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ (2003), cited in “Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns”; Uncredited, “Field Listing: Religions,” The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency website, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2122.html?countryCode=ag&rankAnchorRow=#ag; Uncredited, “Population by Religion, Sex and Urban/Rural Residence: Each Census, 1985 - 2004,” Demographic Yearbook, United Nations Statistics Division (June 30, 2006), http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/dyb/dybcensus/V2_table6.pdf; Uncredited, “What the World Thinks of God,” British Broadcasting Corporation (2004), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/ hi/programmes/wtwtgod/pdf/wtwtgod.pdf/

[2] Uncredited, “Global Table 5: Statistical Overview of the World’s 2.2 Billion Christians and Their Activities, Encompassing 2 Alternative Parallel but Different Groupings,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, January 2011, www.swamij.com/pdf/IBMR2009.pdf