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