OK got 81 so far...

[fshrink]

Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Albert Schweitzer
Andrew Carnegie
Arthur Miller
Arthur Schopenhauer
Benjamin Franklin
Bertrand Russell
Bill Gates
Butterfly McQueen
Carl Sagan
Charles Darwin
Charles Dickens
Charles Schultz
D. H. Lawrence
Douglas Adams
Edgar Allen Poe
Eleanor Roosevelt?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Emma Goldman
Ernest Hemingway
Ethan Allen
Frank Herbert
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Zappa
Friedrich Nietzsche
Gene Kelly
Gene Roddenberry
George C. Scott
George Orwell
Gloria Steinem
Gore Vidal
H.L. Mencken
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Stephens Salt
Isaac Asimov
Issac Newton?
James A. Michener
James Madison
James McNeill Whistler
Jean Paul Sartre
John Adams
John Chancellor
John Lennon
John Stuart Mill
Joseph Heller
Karl Marx
Katharine Hepburn
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Langston Hughes
Linus Torvalds
Luther Burbank
Madlyn Murray O'Hare
Marcel Proust
Marcello Mastroianni
Marie Curie
Mark Twain
Matilda Joslyn Gage
Oscar Wilde
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Quentin Crisp
R. Buckminster Fuller
Richard Burton
Richard Dawkins
Richard M. Stallman
Richard P. Feynman
Robert Ingersoll
Rod Steiger
Sigmund Freud
Stephan Jay Gould
T. E. Lawrence
Tennessee Williams
Thomas A. Edison
Thomas Hardy
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
Upton Sinclair
Virginia Woolf
W. E. B. DuBois
Warren Buffett

Add some more? How do we rank them? Would be a nice post somewhere else once a full list is drwan...

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Philip Pullman

author of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy (the thinking child's Harry Potter). He has publicly debated theology with the Archbishop of Canterbury (who respects him enough to think his books should be discussed in religious education in schools).

H.G. Wells

Celeb Atheists - a website devoted to this.

[progressoid]

2. Onager correctly pointed out that Isaac Newton doesn't belong.

He had serious issues with the church but probably still a believer. And I think Elanor Roosevelt's public statements mostly dealt with her stance on seperation of church and state, but she left her personal views on god to herself.

OK bye

[onager]

5. Thanks! Newton wrote some really weird stuff...

...combining the Bible and mathematics. For one example, if I'm remembering right, he tried to calculate the exact dimensions of Heaven. I think he was trying to prove their was plenty of room for the Real Xians...whoever the fuck THEY are.

[Synnical]

3. Ayn Rand

Hate to say it, 'cause I despise the majority of her "philosophy", but she was definitely an atheist.

[Warpy]

6. Her god was money

[Bill McBlueState]

13. Rand's followers

It's weird how a lot of Freeper types will praise Jesus out of one corner of their mouths and praise Ayn Rand out of the other. There's a huge gulf between the two, at least as they're traditionally interpreted.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Dave Allen (Irish comedian who recently died)

a blaspheming atheist on the side of the angels

[onager]

7. Wonder if Pearl S. Buck...

...would make the cut?

"I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings. Like Confucius of old, I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and the angels."

I don't know all that much about her beliefs. She was the daughter of missionaries in China, but married an atheist, according to some web bios.

[Synnical]

10. Then should we include Shakespeare?

I dunno.

http://www.bee.net/cardigan/attic/guest20.htm

Robert Ingersoll thought so. In a popular lecture, the nineteenth-century freethinker extolled a great infidel, "the sublimest man of the human race," who deemed all religions "simple phases of human thought, or the lack of thought." In 1783, Joseph Ritson had broached a similar view. In Remarks on the Last Edition of Shakespeare, Ritson said the poet was unshackled by "the reigning superstitions of the time, addicted to no system of bigotry Popish or Protestant, Paganism or Christianity." More recently, Walter Kaufmann descried a self-sufficient Nietzschean übermensch (superman) "abandoned to a life that ends in death, with nothing after that" (From Shakespeare to Existentialism).

Traditionally, most Shakespeareans have assumed the poet was a Christian. They note that he went to church all his life and his plays have a hefty inventory of Christian paraphernalia, including allusions to church homilies, the catechism, and forty or so books of the Bible. While some suspect him of papist sympathies, most, I think, would accede to the summation of A. L. Rowse: "He was a conforming member of the Church into which he had been baptized, in which he was brought up and married, his children reared and in whose arms he was buried at the last" (Shakespeare the Man).

Anti-theistians (so to say) needn't be daunted by the assessment. The Bard cannot be Christianized by fiat. Yes, he went to church. But it doesn't follow that he believed what he heard. An agile, ranging intelligence like his, conversant with pagan mythology and thought, isn't easily duped; it sifts and weighs every proposition. In Shakespeare's England, one attended the established church or risked a stiff fine--or worse. Truants might be forced to restrict their movement . . .

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Seems a bit of a stretch

His family history has good evidence that some remained secret Catholics - it sounds more likely than atheism, for which you really can't find much evidence.

Christopher Marlowe is a more likely candidate - he was actually accused of atheism (although that may have been political, or just that he tended towards 'free thought').

[opiate69]

8. Maynard James Keenan.

(Lead singer of the band Tool..)

[dwckabal]

9. Bill Hicks

R.I.P.

[Synnical]

11. Spinoza, Locke, Ambrose Bierce!

You did it alphabetically by first name, so forgive me if I repeat your effort.

Voltaire
David Hume
Van Goethe
Tolstoy
Santayana
Steve Allen
Margaret Sanger
Jean-Paul Sarte

And of course, Donatien Alphonse Francois Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade:

"Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change."

[Bzzzz]

14. Ron Reagan, Jr. n/t