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
