James A. Haught

Society rarely acknowledges the many and varied gifts that disbelievers give to the world. Churchmen generally contend that great figures in history, such as America's founders, were conventional believers. That isn't true, and this insightful, witty collection sets the record straight!

Intelligent, educated people tend to doubt the supernatural. So it is hardly surprising to find a high ratio of religious skeptics among major thinkers, scientists, writers, reformers, scholars, champions of democracy, and other world-changers -- people usually called great. The advance of Western civilization has been partly a story of gradual victory over oppressive religion, and much of progress was wrought by brilliant men and women who didn't pray, didn't kneel at altars, didn't make pilgrimages, didn't recite creeds.

This collection chronicles dozens of famous people such as Isaac Asimov, W.E.B. DuBois, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Omar Khayyam, Abraham Lincoln, James Madison, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Gene Roddenberry, Margaret Sanger, George Bernard Shaw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Voltaire, with many quotes that reveal their rejection of the supernatural.

James A. Haught (Charleston, WV) is editor of The Charleston Gazette. His journalism has won awards from the National Press Club, the American Bar Association, and People for the American Way.

325 pp (photos and illustrations throughout)
ISBN 1-57392-067-3 -- Cloth $26.95 (6x9)

For a superb review by Robert Sherrill, click HERE.

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