The 50 Most Brilliant Atheists of All Time

[HarveyDarkey]

I have some quibbles with this list, but hopefully it will stir some discussion:

http://brainz.org/50-most-brilliant-atheists-all-time/

[LeftishBrit]

1. Interesting list...

would agree about the likes of Dirac, Hawking, Feynmann, etc.; but definitely NOT Ayn Rand!

[HarveyDarkey]

2. Agreed about Rand

and there's no Hitchens or Harris either.

[Warpy]

6. Rand's logic was flawless

but based as it was upon faulty first premises, it produced only garbage.

[LeftishBrit]

7. Also she is an awful writer IMO.

Was never able to get through anything she wrote. Incidentally, she's not very well known in the UK; seems to be mainly an American icon.

[Warpy]

8. We did get stuck with her

As for the horrible writing, English wasn't her first language so I can forgive some of the tortured prose. It's much harder to forgive the caricatures and tortured plot lines. Oh, and the long harangues passing for dialogue.

"The Fountainhead" is probably her most accessible book. It's also the only book most Randorrhoids have read all the way through, resorting to Cliff's Notes rather than trudging through the whole of "Atlas Shrugged."

You can almost buy the premise of "The Fountainhead" if you're either a teenager or emotionally stuck at about 15, when broad brush strokes and caricatures make sense. However, once people progress a bit in emotional development, they realize what a pile of crap it is.

There's something very wrong with people who cling to it beyond the age of 25 or so.

[skepticscott]

3. No Robert Green Ingersoll?

No Thomas Paine? No H.L. Mencken? Pretty much invalidates the whole list for me.

[HarveyDarkey]

4. Not to quibble too much

but Ingersoll was "The Great Agnostic", not technically an atheist. I won't argue with the other two though.

[skepticscott]

5. Well, I suspect that if you

dissected that list, you'd find more "agnostics" scattered in there. But Ingersoll believed in no gods, which to me makes him an atheist.

[pink-o]

9. Amazing how many of 'em are ethnically Jewish.

From Freud to Chomsky to Zuckerberg. Wow. I'm ethnically Jewish as well, but brought up secular (Mom was an avowed Atheist, Dad couldn't wait to toss the Yarmulke) and I'm agnostic, as are many members of my former Orthodox family.

I think Jews are encouraged to question and think critically--seriously, as a culture the worst thing your kids could be is stupid. ( Frizzy haired and obnoxious is okay, but don't be an idiot!)and the Old Testament is so Draconian and ridiculous and anachronistic, only someone stupid wouldn't question it.

Even that stupid bitch Ayn Rand's original name was Rosenbaum, so she's on the list as well.

[Duppers]

10. Mick Jagger brilliant? hahahaaaaaaaaaa!

dumbass list should be titled 'some famous atheists.'

Yep, they left off a number of the best brains.

Rand's and Jagger's names don't belong in the same sentence with the words 'most brilliant.'