The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that about 12 percent of Americans say there is no God or it’s unknowable whether there is. The percentage of respondents who self-identified as atheists or agnostics, however, was much lower. The survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College’s Program on Public Values, followed previous large-scale religious identification surveys in […]

See a Feb. 17, 2010, report titled “Religion Among the Millennials: Less Religiously Active but Fairly Traditional in Other Ways.” The report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says 26 percent of Millennial adults (defined as those born after 1980) have no religious affiliation. But in some other ways, their attitudes about religion resemble […]

Read a May 21, 2010, Gallup story about the decline in religious identity among Americans over time. Twenty-eight percent now say religion is largely out-of-date, the story says.

U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., in 2007 became the first member of Congress in memory to publicly self-identify as an atheist.

An online “celebrity atheist” site lists hundreds of well-known actors, athletes and business leaders who it says are atheists, agnostics or skeptics.

The University of Cambridge posts a “Who’s Who” of atheists in history on its Investigating Atheism website.

See Beliefnet’s gallery of “Doubters Who Changed the World.”

The University of Cambridge launched a project called Investigating Atheism in response to the spate of books in recent years by New Atheists. The site aims to encourage informed opinion by providing historical context for the “God Wars” it says followed those books’ publication. An extensive resource, the project offers explanations, data and links on everything from […]

The Freethought Trail website traces west-central New York state’s pivotal role in the history of freethought. It is a project of the Council for Secular Humanism.