 | This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject , potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral.(December 2021) |
Greta Christina | |
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 Christina speaking at the University of Missouri in March 2014 | |
| Born | 1961 (age 62–63) Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Reed College |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Website | https://the-orbit.net/greta/ |
Greta Christina (born 1961) is an American atheist, blogger, speaker, and author.
Christina was born in Chicago in 1961. She graduated from Reed College in 1983. [1] She legally changed her name in her twenties, dropping her family name and taking her middle name as her last name. [2]
Christina has written for AlterNet, Free Inquiry , and The Humanist . She started writing her own "Greta Christina's blog" in 2005; it was later incorporated in to the Freethought Blogs network. [3] In 2016 she co-founded The Orbit, which she described as "the first atheist media site founded explicitly to work on all forms of social justice". [4] In 2009, Hemant Mehta at The Friendly Atheist ranked Christina's blog in the Top Ten most popular atheist blogs. [5] She also created the "Atheist Meme of the Day" on Facebook.
She has been writing professionally since 1989, and has been a full-time freelance writer and speaker since 2012. [6] Her writing about atheism has appeared in print in Skeptical Inquirer and the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong, as well as in her own books Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why (2014) and Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless (2012). [7] [8] [9] [10]
Speaking to Chris Mooney for a Point of Inquiry podcast in 2012, she stated that "there isn't one emotion" affecting atheists "but anger is one of the emotions that many of us have ...[it] drives others to participate in the movement". She said that there are many goals for the atheist movement –more separation of church and state, ending "bigotry against atheism", and for some, persuading people "out of religion", and that it is a "valid goal" to work towards a world without religion. [11]
As a speaker, she is a member of the Speakers Bureau for the Secular Student Alliance and the Center for Inquiry. [7] She was a speaker on the Diversity in Skepticism panel at The Amaz!ng Meeting in July, 2011, the Reason Rally in 2012, [12] and the 50th annual convention of American Atheists in 2013. [13]
Rebecca Hensler founded the social media and internet support group 'Grief Beyond Belief' for grieving people who do not believe in God or an afterlife in 2011; [14] [15] [16] she was encouraged to found it by Christina. [15]
In 2013 Christina was named the International Team Honored Hero of the Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB). [3] The Foundation's teams raise money for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. [17] She is a past member of the Foundation Beyond Belief's Board of Directors. [18]
She received the 2013 LGBT Humanist Pride Award from the American Humanist Association. [19] [20]
Also in 2013, a photo of Christina with her wife Ingrid and a piece about the photo by Christina was featured in the book A Better Life, by Christopher Johnson, which is a book with photos of 100 atheists and pieces by them about how their atheism has enabled them to have, in their view, a better life. [21]
In 2015, Christina received the first Secular Student Alliance Ambassador Award, which was the 2015 Secular Student Alliance Ambassador Award. [22] [23] Christina is an Advisory Board member of the SSA and a donor at the Lifetime Membership level. [23]
Outside of her atheist work, she is the editor of Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients and of the Best Erotic Comic anthology series, and has written the erotic novella Bending and the erotic fiction collection Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. [8] [24] [25] [26] Her writing has also appeared in three volumes of Best American Erotica. [25] She has also written about cats for Catster, and has written for the magazine Femme Feminism. [27] [28] [29]
In San Francisco, Christina has worked at the underground book publisher Last Gasp and the Lusty Lady peep show, [6] [30] and has performed in pornography. [31] She has also co-organized and co-hosted the Godless Perverts Story Hour and the Godless Perverts Social Club. [32] [33] [34]
Christina's parents divorced when she was 12. [35] She began living in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1984. [1]
She is openly bisexual/pansexual [36] [37] as well as polyamorous, and has written about participating in BDSM. [38] [39] She wrote in 2010 that she and her wife Ingrid had been "happily married" for "six and a half years (or five years, or two and a half years, depending on which of our three weddings in the shifting 'same- sex marriage' winds you're talking about)". [40]
Christina's mother died of cancer at the age of 45, when Christina was 17. [41] In 2012, Christina was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. [42] She had a surgical hysterectomy and oophorectomy to treat it. [3] [43] [44]
Christina writes that she has struggled with depression off and on throughout most of her adult life, and considers herself chronically depressed and expects to take antidepressants for the rest of her life. [45] [46]
Christina has written that she is a sex-positive, pro-choice feminist [47] [48] [49] and that she supports same-sex marriage and group marriage. [50]
The Godless Americans March on Washington (GAMOW) occurred on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on November 2, 2002, with the participation of many atheists, freethinkers, agnostics and humanists. The public cable network C-SPAN documented the event on video.
Accurate demographics of atheism are difficult to obtain since conceptions of atheism vary considerably across different cultures and languages, ranging from an active concept to being unimportant or not developed. Also in some countries and regions atheism carries a strong stigma, making it harder to count atheists in these countries. In global studies, the number of people without a religion is usually higher than the number of people without a belief in a deity and the number of people who agree with statements on lacking a belief in a deity is usually higher than the number of people who self-identify as "atheists".
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Matthew Wade Dillahunty is an American atheist activist and former president of the Atheist Community of Austin, a position he held from 2006 to 2013. Between 2005 and October 2022, Dillahunty was host of the televised webcast The Atheist Experience.
Paul Zachary Myers is an American biologist who founded and writes the Pharyngula science blog. He is associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM) where he works in the field of developmental biology. He is a critic of intelligent design, the creationist movement, and other pseudoscientific concepts.
Minnesota Atheists is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that seeks to promote the positive contributions of atheism and to maintain the separation of state and church and is the largest atheist organization in the state of Minnesota. It is affiliated with Atheist Alliance International, and the American Atheists. Minnesota Atheists is also part of the Alliance of Secular Humanist Societies, which is connected to the Council for Secular Humanism. The organization publishes a monthly newsletter, a weekly radio show and podcast called Atheists Talk, and a community access television show by the same name.
Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive towards women.
Pitchstone Publishing is a publishing company based in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Kurt Volkan in 2003, Pitchstone Publishing has published numerous books by leading academics and scholars, particularly in the fields of secular humanism, new atheism, applied psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
Darrel Wayne Ray is an American organizational psychologist and author who focuses on topics such as workplace organizational culture, secular sexuality, and the treatment of religion-induced trauma. He is a public speaker, podcaster, and atheist activist, and founded the non-profit organization Recovering from Religion as well as the Secular Therapy Project.
Sikivu Hutchinson is an American author, playwright, director, and musician. Her multi-genre work explores feminism, gender justice, racial justice, LGBTQIA+ rights, humanism and atheism. She is the author of Humanists in the Hood: Unapologetically Black, Feminist, and Heretical (2020); White Nights, Black Paradise (2015); Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (2013); Moral Combat: Black Atheists; Gender Politics, and the Values Wars (2011); and Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles (2003). Her plays include "White Nights, Black Paradise", "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" and "Narcolepsy, Inc.". "Rock 'n' Roll Heretic" was among the 2023 Lambda Literary award LGBTQ Drama finalists. Moral Combat is the first book on atheism to be published by an African-American woman. In 2013 she was named Secular Woman of the year and was awarded Foundation Beyond Belief's 2015 Humanist Innovator award. She was also a recipient of Harvard's 2020 Humanist of the Year award.
Debbie Goddard is an American atheist activist and speaker, and the director of African Americans for Humanism (AAH). In 2019 she took on the role of vice president of programs at American Atheists. Since 2020, she has been on the board of directors of Humanists International.
David Niose is an attorney, author, and activist who has served as president of the American Humanist Association and the Secular Coalition for America. In these positions he has pursued legal and advocacy efforts on behalf of secularism.
Irreligion is prevalent in Germany. In a time of near-universal adoption of Christianity, Germany was an intellectual centre for European freethought and humanist thinking, whose ideas spread across Europe and the world in the Age of Enlightenment. Later, religious traditions in Germany were weakened by the twin onslaughts of Nazi rule during World War II and that of the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany during the Cold War. In common with most other European societies, a period of secularisation also continued in the decades that followed. While today Christianity remains prevalent in the west of Germany, in the east relatively few Germans identify with any religion whatsoever.
Kate Smurthwaite is a British comedian and political activist. She has appeared on British television and radio as a pundit, offering opinion and comment on subjects ranging from politics to religion.
Dale McGowan is an American author, educator, podcaster, and philanthropist who has written and edited several books related to nonreligious life, particularly parenting without religion.
Philip Joseph Zuckerman is a sociologist and professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. He specializes in the sociology of substantial secularity and is the author of eight books, including Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society (2023) What It Means to Be Moral: Why Religion Is Not Necessary for Living an Ethical Life (2019).
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.
Atheism in the African diaspora is atheism as it is experienced by black people outside of Africa. In the United States, black people are less likely than any other ethnic groups to be religiously unaffiliated, let alone identifying as atheist. The demographics are similar in the United Kingdom. Atheists are individuals who do not hold a belief in God or gods. Atheism is a disbelief in God or gods or a denial of God or gods, or it is simply a lack of belief in gods. Some, but not all, atheists identify as secular humanists, who are individuals who believe that life has meaning and joy without the need for the supernatural or religion and that all individuals should live ethical lives which can provide for the greater good of humanity. Black atheists and secular humanists exist today and in history, though many were not always vocal in their beliefs or lack of belief.
Niki Massey was an atheist blogger and speaker. She was on the advisory council of the American Humanist Association’s Feminist Humanist Alliance, and was one of the founding members of The Orbit, the "first atheist media site founded explicitly to work on all forms of social justice." She gave a presentation at Skepticon 8 in 2015 unexpectedly, when a scheduled speaker failed to arrive.
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