Hi, guys! (If this is the wrong place for this thread, please feel free to move it, mods.)
I am working on a new public access TV show with some of my friends. It's called Ask An Atheist, and the purpose is to provide community outreach and foster understanding of non-believers. It's going to be a live call-in show, much like The Atheist Experience, if any of you are familiar with that program.
For our first episode, we are going to discuss how the media portrays atheism as a philosophy and atheists as individuals. We are having a hard time finding a lot of examples (there really aren't a lot of "out" atheists in fiction, which says a lot right there!) and we need help coming up with more examples.
I am looking for any and all examples of atheists as characters. TV, movies, books, comics, etc. are all fair game, as long as they're fictional portrayals of atheists. In order to qualify for discussion on our show, the character has to have actually personally avowed nonbelief of some kind -- just not going to church, for example, wouldn't count. The character must self-identify as an atheist, agnostic, "non-believer", or must have made statements that are clearly indicative of a lack of religious beliefs, such as "I don't believe in an afterlife" or "this life is all there is" or "there's nobody watching us."
The character may be viewed as a positive or a negative character -- we're not looking only for examples of "good" atheist characters.
We've already got a pretty short list, including Dr. House, Brian from Family Guy, Mr. Terrific, and Ellen from The Pillars of the Earth.
Please toss out any ideas you can! If you have handy some explanations of how you know these characters are non-believers, that would be helpful in my research.
Thanks!
I am working on a new public access TV show with some of my friends. It's called Ask An Atheist, and the purpose is to provide community outreach and foster understanding of non-believers. It's going to be a live call-in show, much like The Atheist Experience, if any of you are familiar with that program.
For our first episode, we are going to discuss how the media portrays atheism as a philosophy and atheists as individuals. We are having a hard time finding a lot of examples (there really aren't a lot of "out" atheists in fiction, which says a lot right there!) and we need help coming up with more examples.
I am looking for any and all examples of atheists as characters. TV, movies, books, comics, etc. are all fair game, as long as they're fictional portrayals of atheists. In order to qualify for discussion on our show, the character has to have actually personally avowed nonbelief of some kind -- just not going to church, for example, wouldn't count. The character must self-identify as an atheist, agnostic, "non-believer", or must have made statements that are clearly indicative of a lack of religious beliefs, such as "I don't believe in an afterlife" or "this life is all there is" or "there's nobody watching us."
The character may be viewed as a positive or a negative character -- we're not looking only for examples of "good" atheist characters.
We've already got a pretty short list, including Dr. House, Brian from Family Guy, Mr. Terrific, and Ellen from The Pillars of the Earth.
Please toss out any ideas you can! If you have handy some explanations of how you know these characters are non-believers, that would be helpful in my research.
Thanks!
