This is my new screen saver.
Published by Lisa Kansas August 1st, 2008 in Godbaggery, sharing the awesome
UPDATED: For those of you who have expressed the irrational conviction that women somehow have existed as historically significant atheists, agnostics and/or freethinkers.* Disclaimer: I’m an engineer, not a graphic artist (pleading for mercy in advance for the no-doubt numerous flaws in my pictoral editing).
*Five bucks to the first person who can name all the famous female atheists, agnostics and/or freethinkers shown.
I would like it more if it included some famous atheist women. One reason I left the online atheist community is that the men in it believe they are the most oppressed of the oppressed, but they can be just as sexist as any other group of men who think of themselves as “geniuses.” Simone de Beauvoir is one possibility of whom there are pictures readily available on google.
why such a sausage-fest?
Marie Curie is another good example that should of definitely been on there.
Hhmm, you both inspire me…I’ll see what I can do…
Lincoln was an atheist? I had no idea.
And I agree: Let’s see some laydeez. Helen Keller was an atheist, as were most of the 19th-century American suffragettes.
*blinks* I never knew Einstein was an atheist.
Alternative caption: Atheism, Only Available In White Guy.
That’s because Einstein was NOT an athiest. In fact, he refused to believe in Quantum Theory because it went against his religious beliefs: “I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.” Yeah, not an athiest. Sorry. Some very smart people do believe in some kind of higher power. You can’t prove it ISN’T there either.
Your photobucket isn’t password protected. Sorry, it’s a bad habit. >.
If you are interested in the fine details, Einstein existed somewhere in the fuzzy realm between deist and agnostic. This is a pretty good article on the subject:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html
As far as being unable to prove that a “higher power” ISN’T there, I can’t prove that “a lot of things” AREN’T there, such as unicorns, Zeus, shapeshifting aliens that live among us and periodically kidnap solid American citizens for medical experimentation, and the Easter Bunny. Does the fact that I can’t prove they exist give their existence as much credence as that of a “higher power?”
LOL, thanks–I gotta get around to doing that, not that I think there are any pictures in there that would get me in trouble or anything.
PS, theoneguy–I don’t think the poster’s meant to imply that if you aren’t an atheist, you’re stupid. I think it’s trying to say that if you are an atheist, you’re in good company historically–a lot of people aren’t aware that several of the Founding Fathers, for instance, were atheists, agnostics or freethinkers, as well as several others of them being devout Christians.
The new version is pleasing (no, I can’t name them all); got any atheists of colour? (How crowded can this poster get?)
http://www.daylightatheism.org/2008/07/the-contributions-of-freethinkers-ii.html
Yeah, Einstein was an atheist.
You left out Ayn Rand.
Believe it or not, I didn’t forget her. I love a lot about her novels, and can sympathize (more empathize) with some of her philosophy, and I even understand WHY she participated in the McCarthy hearings–but I can’t put someone who did so on a poster of great freethinkers.
What, ‘cos of all those people who were killed, sent to Gulags or spent years in prison as a result of Joe’s Congressional Sideshow? Might want to check that.
…Which I just did. Turns out Rand was testifying before HUAC, the House Unamerican Activities Committee (McCarthy was a Senator, not a Representative; he wasn’t involved in HUAC). And she was testifying, not about people in Hollywood or elsehwere, but about a movie, Song Of Russia, produced during WW II as a kind of “the commies aren’t so bad” puff piece to make folks feel better about having the USSR as an ally. As a screenwriter and former Soviet citizen, she was in a nearly unique position to do so.
I was originally mildly tweaking you — people’s lists of “prominent thinkers” always reflect their own biases, that’s a very normal human thing; but I had not previously looked into Rand’s involvement with this particular episode. Turns out, for all she could be a real PITA to people, groups and ideas of which she did not approve, it’s quite innocent.
Yep, I misspoke–the HUAC hearings, while quite petals of the same flower of the McCarthy witchhunt in general, were nominally separate entities occurring during the same anti-Communist fervor period. (It’s been several years since I did my paper on Ayn Rand for my college history class. My bad.)
I am, however, very familiar with her testimony–I actually got to see the original transcripts in microfiche (part of my research for the selfsame college paper). I am also familiar with what she had to say later on about the whole anti-Communist effort and subsequent blacklisting of various Hollywood personnel, and it was far from innocent. She was a very intelligent woman; she knew perfectly well what she was participating in and deeply approved it. It was actually quite a blow to me–directly prior to engaging in writing the paper I was a huge Ayn Rand fan–after all my biographical research into her, I still loved a lot of things about her, but I had a lot more realistic picture of her than I’d previously had based on The Fountainhead, We the Living and Atlas Shrugged.