Read about the first published atheist – Baron d’Holbach, American actor John Malkovich, Spanish Arab-Muslim philosopher Averroës, French composer Hector Berlioz, French novelist Gustave Flaubert, the failure of the Council of Trent, Sir John Oldcastle and the Lollard heresy, and more …

Read about American comedienne Sarah Silverman, Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes, American actress Julianne Moore, British writer Samuel Butler, “Monty Python’s” last “Flying Circus,” American inventor Thomas Edison, American linguist and progressive activist Noam Chomsky, and more …

Read about Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza, Andrew Carnegie, the First Thanksgiving, Chinese-American martial artist Bruce Lee, Randy Newman, Louis XVI recognizes Protestants, Mark Twain, and more …

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 …

It was on this date, November 23, 1965, that American poet, historian, philosopher, and author Jennifer Michael Hecht was born on Long Island, in New York. By 1995 she had earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University, where she now teaches poetry in the Graduate Writing Program, while also teaching poetry […]

Read about actor Richard Burton, science fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr, feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, feminist and atheist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, French painter Claude Monet, German philosopher and theologian Albert the Great, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and more …

It was on this date, November 16, 1993, that the U.S. Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (Pub. L. No. 103-141, 107 Stat. 1488). RFRA, as it is called, was introduced in March 1993 and was aimed at preventing laws that substantially burden a person's free exercise of their religion. Although invalidated at the […]

It was on this date, November 13, 1969, that Somali-born American feminist and atheist activist, writer and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born Ayaan Hirsi Magan in Mogadishu, Somalia. While her father, a leading figure in the Somalian Revolution, was in prison, Ayann’s grandmother had the 5-year-old young girl’s genitals ritually cut off in what […]

Read about Henry VIII joining church and state, American comedian Kathy Griffin, historian Will Durant, American film director Mike Nichols, French nuclear physicist Marie Curie, French statesman Émile Combes separating church and state, American science author Carl Sagan, and more …

Read about the devil’s violinist Niccolò Paganini, the late conversion of Constantine the Great, the religious tolerance of Cyrus the Great, the Deism of John Adams, Martin Luther’s Reformation, the free speech of pornographer Larry Flynt, Annie Laurie Gaylor’s fight for freedom from religion, and more …