Notable antireligious people

• Georges Bataille, Nietzsche-influenced Surrealist, journalist and philosopher who held that modern Western civilization was characterized by the myth of "the absence of myth".
• William Blake, poet and painter. Although he remained very spiritual, he viewed organised religion as oppressive.
• Brandon Boyd, Incubus frontman, who although antireligious remains "spiritual".
• Richard Dawkins, a prominent atheist and evolutionary biologist. He wrote The God Delusion criticizing belief in god(s) in 2006.
• John Dewey, an atheistic American pragmatic philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, believed neither religion nor metaphysics could provide legitimate moral or social values, though scientific empiricism could.
• Harlan Ellison, science fiction writer, called religion "the last vestige of barbarism."
• Catherine Fahringer, campaigner in Texas for a strict separation of Church and State.
• Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-founder with her mother of the Freedom From Religion Foundation and, with her husband Dan Barker, the current co-president.
• Johann Hari, British atheist journalist and a self-described antitheist.
• Sam Harris, author and scientist, who argues that religious moderation provides cover for dangerous fundamentalism .
• Christopher Hitchens, antitheist, journalist and literary critic, author of the book .
• Alistair Horne, British historian, believes peace follows when prosperity reduces religious influence.
• Enver Hoxha, former head-of-state of Albania, the only state to ever officially ban religion..
• David Hume, the Scottish agnostic philosopher, known for his skepticism, who wrote that human reason is wholly inadequate to make any assumptions about the divine, whether through a priori reasoning or observation of nature .
• Robert Maynard Hutchins, past president of the University of Chicago. Although religious, thought religion wasn't adaquate for organizing modern universities and educational institutions, preferring metaphysics.
• Penn Jillette, illusionist, comic, actor, former-radiohost
• Elton John, singer .
• Vladimir Lenin - Like most Marxists, he believed all religions to be "the organs of bourgeois reaction, used for the protection of the exploitation and the stupefaction of the working class".
• John Lennon, singer. Famously sang "and no religion too" in his song Imagine. Lennon commented that the song was "an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic song, but because it's sugar-coated, it's accepted."
• Karl Marx, political philosopher who called religion the opium of the people, a source of illusory happiness which assists those with power and wealth in maintaining their position by reinforcing their right to a privileged position.
• H.L. Mencken, American journalist and satirist who famously ridiculed the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial.
• Friedrich Nietzsche - Der Antichrist, general anti-Christian statements in many other works. Nietzsche believed Christianity to be the product of a transvaluation of values amongst the Jewish lower classes who bucked at Roman rule, and ascribed its other-worldly nature as the product of ressentiment, or the desire to devalue the things of this world out of spite. Famous for popularizing the phrase, "God is dead."
• Michel Onfray, French anarchist philosopher
• Steven Pinker, cognitive scientist .
• Ayn Rand, novelist and libertarian philosopher famous for writing Atlas Shrugged and The Virtue of Selfishness, and forming her philosophy of objectivism
• Bertrand Russell, British analytic philosopher
• Victor Stenger, astrophysicist and author of, who claims that the existence of God has been disproven by the scientific establishment.
• Max Stirner, anarcho-egoist and proto-existentialist who penned The Ego And Its Own.

Antireligious organizations