Madalyn Murray O'Hair was an American activist supporting atheism and separation of church and state. In 1963 she founded American Atheists and served as its president until 1986, after which her son Jon Garth Murray succeeded her. She created the first issues of American Atheist Magazine and identified as a "militant feminist".
American Atheists is a non-profit organization in the United States dedicated to defending the civil liberties of atheists and advocating complete separation of church and state. It provides speakers for colleges, universities, clubs, and the news media. It also publishes books and American Atheist Magazine.
Goparaju Ramachandra Rao was an Indian social reformer, atheist activist and a participant in the Indian independence movement. He authored many books on atheism and proposed atheism as self-confidence. He propagated positive atheism by his articles, speeches, books and his social work. He is the founder of Atheist Centre along with his wife Saraswathi Gora and a few volunteers. Social reformer G. Lavanam, politician Chennupati Vidya, and physician G. Samaram are his children.
Ellen Johnson is an American activist for the civil rights of atheists and for the separation of church and state in the United States. She served as the president of the organization American Atheists from 1995 to 2008.
Charles Chilton Moore was an American atheist, and the editor of the Blue Grass Blade, one of the United States' first newspapers promoting atheism. Due to his criticisms of religion, he was dubbed Kentucky's Most Hated Man.
William J. Murray III is an American author, Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist who serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. It lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.
Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library and Archives (CESAALA) is a collection of over 40,000 volumes of books, documents, and various other research tools located in Cranford, New Jersey, United States. It was founded by the American Atheists and currently records oral histories of various intellectuals and lecturers. The library also contains "historical pamphlets, leather-bound volumes, early free-thought publications, and other separationist arcana." The library is valued at between $1 million and $3 million and is one of American Atheists' most valuable assets. The American Atheist Press is a division of the Charles E. Stevens American Atheist Library.
Discrimination against atheists, sometimes called atheophobia, atheistophobia, or anti-atheism, both at present and historically, includes persecution of and discrimination against people who are identified as atheists. Discrimination against atheists may be manifested by negative attitudes, prejudice, hostility, hatred, fear, or intolerance towards atheists and atheism or even the complete denial of atheists existence. It is often expressed in distrust regardless of its manifestation. The main mechanism behind anti-atheist prejudice is the projection of believers' repressed desires. Perceived atheist prevalence seems to be correlated with reduction in prejudice.
Erkki Juhani Hartikainen was the chairman of Atheist Association of Finland. He qualified for a Master of Science in the University of Helsinki in 1967. His subjects were mathematics, theoretical philosophy and computer science. Hartikainen has been the chairman of Atheist Association of Finland since 1985. Hartikainen has served as the actuary since the late 1960s, for nearly 20 years as a teacher of mathematics and science in schools, and after that, since 1989, as teacher of information technology at a college in Vantaa. From 1994–1998, he worked as a statistician in Vantaa. Hartikainen retired in 2005.
John Eleazer Remsburg was an ardent religious skeptic in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his book 1909 book The Christ, Remsburg lists forty-two ancient writers who did not mention Jesus or whose mentions are suspect, and this list has appeared in many subsequent books that question the historicity of Jesus. Remsburg himself wrote that the man Jesus may have existed, but that the Christ of the gospels is mythical.
Charles Lee Smith was an American atheist and white supremacist author and activist widely known for being the last successful conviction for blasphemy in the United States.
Jon Garth Murray served as president of American Atheists, a non-governmental organization that lobbied on the separation of church and state. He was the second son of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an activist who founded American Atheists in 1963 and served as its first president. He was the half-brother of William J. Murray.
James Hervey Johnson was an American atheist freethinker, writer and editor of The Truth Seeker, formerly run by Charles Lee Smith.
Frank R. Zindler is an American atheist who served as interim president of the atheist organization American Atheists in 2008.
The Truth Seeker is an American periodical published since 1873. It was considered the most influential Freethought publication during the period following the Civil War into the first decades of the 20th century, known as the Golden Age of Freethought. Though there were other influential Freethought periodicals, Truth Seeker was the only one with a national circulation. The headquarters is in San Diego, California. The Truth Seeker is the world’s oldest freethought publication, and one of the oldest periodicals in America. Among general-readership titles, only Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and The Nation are older.
The secular movement refers to a social and political trend in the United States, beginning in the early years of the 20th century, with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism in 1925 and the American Humanist Association in 1941, in which atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, and other nonreligious and nontheistic Americans have grown in both numbers and visibility. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated, from under 10 percent in the 1990s to 20 percent in 2013. The trend is especially pronounced among young people, with about one in three Americans younger than 30 identifying as religiously unaffiliated, a figure that has nearly tripled since the 1990s.
The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism was an atheistic and antireligious organization established in 1925. It was founded by Charles Lee Smith, and the organization's "only creedal requirement was a formal profession of atheism".
Robert I. Sherman was an American political activist, perennial candidate, and businessman. He was known for his role as an Illinois Green Party candidate and for his atheist advocacy. He died in a plane crash outside Marengo, Illinois on December 9, 2016, at the age of 63.
Seth Andrews is an American activist, author, and speaker on the subject of atheism. He is the creator and host of The Thinking Atheist online community, podcast, and YouTube channel, as well as the author of four self-published books. Prior to his atheist activism, he was a fundamentalist Christian and had a ten-year career as a Christian radio host.
