RELIGIONS and SPIRITUALITY / Atheism and Agnosticism

There are (and were) many well-known scientists who were atheists and or agnostic. Many of them would say things like that their views about God were complicated. In a letter written by Albert Einstein to a college which was recently sold for $404,000 in a London auction, he was saying exactly that.

Einstein wasn't the only one saying it. Below is a list of famous or well-known people who were very ambivalent or complicated in their views about faith in a God, or people who very strongly believed in God about as much as they believed in the Easter Bunny. There is a healthy sprinkling of Humanists in the group as well.

SECULARISM | The Culture of the West

In the West a culture has emerged which shares many of the characteristics of religions, called 'Secularism'. Secularism specifically repudiates any attempt to apply any sense of the supernatural to its interpretation of the world, and it uses similar techniques to impose intellectual and moral order on the chaos of existence.

Western Secularism has its own revealed truths and unexamined assumptions. Among its key contributions are democracy, capitalism, scientific skepticism, individualism, tolerance, human rights, freedom of choice and the Separation of Church and State. All this has its roots in a Judeo-Christian inheritance but, since the Enlightenment, has been shaped by a mix of other influences: Science, Rationalism, and the reductive determinism of Darwin and Freud.