There is a curious collection of the impious residing eternally in and around Westminster: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, John Dryden – and the admittedly agnostic Charles Darwin!

Crisp once quipped, "a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?'"

Arnold was a leading literary critic and wrote many essays, which displayed a seriously Rationalist streak. He denied belief in immortality and a personal God.

Like most public figures during the post-Revolutionary Royalist reaction, Champollion was compelled to keep his religious opinions discreet.

"My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can."

"As a set of cognitive beliefs, religion is a speculative hypothesis of low order of probability."

What enraged the clerics of Dickens' day was not capitalist excess, but that Dickens took Christ out of Christmas. Scrooge is shamed into changing his narrow, grasping, capitalist ways by being shown for the first time their human cost.

I believe it is man who created God in his image and not the other away around; also I see no reason to believe in life after death.

Sir George A. Macferren calls Beethoven a "freethinker" in his article in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography; the Catholic Encyclopedia does not dare to claim him.

As Dupont explained in his Philosophie de l'univers (1796), he was a Deist.