It was on this date, November 19, 1962, that American film actress and director Jodie Foster was born Alicia Christian Foster in Los Angeles, California. One of the brighter intellectual lights in Hollywood, Foster graduated magna cum laude from Yale University with a BA in Literature in 1985. To read more, go to THIS LINK. […]

I absolutely believe ... that there is no direct evidence, so how could you ask me to believe in God when there's absolutely no evidence that I can see?

“Jewish Shoes” This meme, using a photograph of Jewish shoes piled up in the “luggage room” at the Auschwitz II–Birkenau concentration/extermination camp (museum), employs a particularly despicable argument against gun control, sometimes known by its portmanteau term: Reductio ad Hitlerum. It is an argument claiming that victims of the Holocaust could have resisted oppression under […]

Personalities Adams, Douglas (1952) Adams, John (1735) Adams, John Quincy (1767) Addams, Jane (1860) Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) Allen, Woody (1935) Altman, Robert (1925) Anders, Günther (1902) Angier, Natalie (1958) Anthony, Susan B. (1820) Arago, François (1786) Aristotle (d. 32BCE) Arnold, Matthew (1822) Arrhenius, Svante (1859) Asimov, Isaac (1920) Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal (1881) Augustine of […]

Read about “Frailty” and doing what God commands, English experimental physicist Patrick Blackett, American film actress and director Jodie Foster, English Romantic poet Thomas Chatterton, Voltaire, American comedian Rodney Dangerfield, American poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht, and more …

Read about the King of Siam’s Eclipse, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft, What is a saint?, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, What is a church?, comedian Stephen Fry and more …

January January 1 Sir James George Frazer (1854) January 1 Huldrych Zwingli (1484) January 2 Isaac Asimov (1920) January 3 Franz Valery-Marie Cumont (1868) January 3 Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BCE) January 4 The Fabian Society Founded (1884) January 5 Umberto Eco (1932) January 5 Anabaptist Felix Manz Executed by “Baptism” (1527) January 6 Joan […]

Here’s your Week in Freethought History: This is more than just a calendar of events or mini-biographies – it’s a reminder that, no matter how isolated and alone we may feel at times, we as freethinkers are neither unique nor alone in the world. Last Sunday, November 18, but in 1978, over 900 members of […]

It was on this date, February 1, 1902, that American poet James Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the son of a schoolteacher mother and a storekeeper father. As Hughes himself noted, “I grew up in a not very religious family, but I had a foster aunt who saw that I went to church […]

Ani DiFranco (1970) It was on this date, September 23, 1970, that recording artist and entrepreneur Ani DiFranco was born in Buffalo, New York. She got her first lessons in performance from Buffalo bar talent, which left her with no illusions about the music business. DiFranco began singing and playing acoustic guitar before she was […]