W.P. Kinsella (1935) It was on this date, May 25, 1935, that Canadian novelist W.P. Kinsella was born William Patrick Kinsella in Edmonton, Alberta. A writer of baseball fiction, Kinsella's bestselling 1982 novel, Shoeless Joe, was made into the very successful 1989 motion picture Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones. Kinsella […]

It was on this date, May 24, 1844, that Samuel F.B. Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought,” which inaugurated long-distance coded communication over the first telegraph line strung from Baltimore, Maryland, to his colleague Alfred Vail and an astonished Congress at the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol in Washington, […]

Having “little taste for the otherworldly speculations of dogmatic theology,” Wagner wrote his most powerful music in his “Ring” years, when he was an Atheist.

In an earlier age, a Deist of Pope's beliefs would have been tried and either burned or hanged for impiety. Today, no longer having the power to do that, they embrace him as a "Catholic poet."

Mill said he believed in a "probable God," or a "limited liability God," but disbelieved in miracles and immortality.

"I think of myself as an agnostic, but an agnostic is really a cowardly atheist," said Terkel.

"I'm an atheist, and that's it," said Hepburn. "Our Constitution was not intended to be used by ... any group to foist its personal religious beliefs on the rest of us."

"I am so glad that my God is not the God of the High Church or of the Low," said Nightingale. She despised the churches and was an advanced Rationalist.

“God was invented to explain mystery,” says Feynman. “Now, when you finally discover how something works, you don't need him anymore.”

It was on this date, May 10, 1900, that British-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born Cecilia Helena Payne in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, England. Losing her father when she was four years old, Cecelia’s mother portioned the family resources to educating her brothers instead of her, but she nevertheless won a scholarship to Newnham College, […]