He avowed himself an atheist.

'Agnostic, ' retorted Aveling, was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive.

In practice, what is an atheist?

Because I was almost an atheist since the incident.

It's not about he's an atheist , or Jewish, or Christian.

I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist.

Mark's father is an episcopal priest, and his mother is an atheist.

No atheist worth his salt will try to prove that God does not exist.

I think the best of the available alternatives for atheist is simply non theist.

I was the black atheist kid in the all white Catholic school run by nuns.

And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means.

Non theist will do for all that, yet unlike atheist, it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses.

Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist.

Darwin said, I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God.

But if we did achieve it with that dread word atheist itself, the political impact would be even greater.

And this is why my friend uses tooth fairy agnostic as a label for what most people would call atheist.

It doesn't matter what your religion is even if you're an atheist, you don't raise your kid telling him, you know,

An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf.

Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word atheist than with the word non theist, or some other non confrontational word.

Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub.

And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0.

But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, Well you know, I did pray the other day, you politely ignore it.

Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God, (Laughter) an atheist and a radically politicized artist who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan for the last nine years.

But I should say that my background my father was, you know, raised to be an Episcopalian and Republican, but after one year of college, he became an atheist and a Democrat.

I suspect that the word atheist itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves.

He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but agnostic on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non existence.

In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair.

Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling.