WMirza Fatali Akhundov, also known as Mirza Fatali Akhundzade or Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh, was a celebrated Iranian Azerbaijani author, playwright, ultra-nationalist, philosopher, and founder of Azerbaijani modern literary criticism, "who acquired fame primarily as the writer of European-inspired plays in the Azeri Turkic language". Akhundzade singlehandedly opened a new stage of development of Azerbaijani literature. He was also the founder of materialism and atheism movement in the Republic of Azerbaijan and one of forerunners of modern Iranian nationalism. He wrote in Azerbaijani, Persian and Russian. According to the historian and political scientist Zaur Gasimov, the entirety of Akhundzadeh's intellectual landscape was "densely entangled with Persian thought".
WDidier Dubucq was a mysterious Belgian cartoonist and journalist. Freethinker and anti-clerical, he founded the newspaper Les Corbeaux, which he directed between 1904 and 1909. He sometimes signed his caricatures as "Ashavérus".
WSonja Albertine Jeannine Eggerickx is a Belgian secular humanist who was president of Humanists International, a position she held for nine years until stepping down in 2015. In 2016 she was awarded the Distinguished Services to Humanism Award 2016 for her ground-breaking work in secular education and ethics.
WMiguel Humberto Enríquez Espinosa was a physician and one founder of the Chilean political party and former left-wing organization Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), founded 1965. He was General Secretary of the MIR between 1967 and his death in 1974.
WKacem El Ghazzali, is a secularist essayist and activist and is one of the few Moroccans to publicly announce to be an atheist. Kacem speaks English, as well as German, French, Arabic and Berber. Mostly known for his publicly voiced atheism, his writings stress the importance of freedom of thought which, in his view is lacking in countries dominated by Islam. His articles have been published in/by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, Huffington Post, Le Monde, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Basler Zeitung and others.
WMaría Teresa Giménez Barbat is a Spanish anthropologist, writer and politician. She advocates secular humanism, rationalist universalism and scepticism. She writes in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. She is member of the Spanish political party Union, Progress and Democracy (UPyD) and has participated in anti-nationalist movements before in Catalonia.
WSamuel Benjamin Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host. His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, psychedelics, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence. Harris came to prominence for his criticism of religion, and Islam in particular, and is described as one of the "Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse", along with Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett.
WPaul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, was a French-German philosopher, encyclopedist, writer, and prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon. He was well known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770).
WHelgi Hóseasson was an Icelandic carpenter, atheist and socialist.
WEnver Halil Hoxha was an Albanian communist revolutionary and statesman who served as the First Secretary of the Party of Labour of Albania, from 1941 until his death in 1985. He was also a member of the Politburo of the Party of Labour of Albania, chairman of the Democratic Front of Albania, commander-in-chief of the armed forces from 1944 until his death. He served as the 22nd Prime Minister of Albania from 1944 to 1954 and at various times served as foreign minister and defence minister of the People's Socialist Republic of Albania as well.
WWaleed Al-Husseini or Walid Husayin is a Palestinian atheist, secularist essayist, writer, blogger, ex-Muslim and founder of the Council of Ex-Muslims of France. Born and raised in Qalqilya in the West Bank, he has been living in France since 2012.
WLeo Igwe is a Nigerian human rights advocate and humanist. Igwe is a former Western and Southern African representative of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, and has specialized in campaigning against and documenting the impacts of child witchcraft accusations. He holds a Ph.D from the Bayreuth International School of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, having earned a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Calabar in Nigeria. Igwe's human rights advocacy has brought him into conflict with high-profile witchcraft believers, such as Liberty Foundation Gospel Ministries, because of his criticism of what he describes as their role in the violence and child abandonment that sometimes result from accusations of witchcraft.
WGeoff James Nugent, known professionally as Jim Jefferies, is an Australian-American stand-up comedian, actor, and writer. He created and starred in the American FX sitcom Legit (2013–2014) and the Comedy Central late-night show The Jim Jefferies Show (2017–2019).
WZara Kay is an ex-Muslim atheist, secular activist and women's rights activist, based in London. She is the founder of Faithless Hijabi, an international non-profit organisation that seeks to support the rights of Muslim-raised women, especially those who are in the process of leaving or have left Islam.
WJohn Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on metaethics, especially his defence of moral scepticism as well as his sophisticated defence of Atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1981) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as "one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century." Many considered Mackie one of the best defenders of philosophical atheism and he was considered perhaps the greatest atheist of the 20th century. In 1980 Time magazine called him "perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers", and he regularly debated Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and William Lane Craig.
WTimothy David Minchin is an Australian comedian, actor, writer, musician, and songwriter who refers to himself as a call comedic minstrel. He was born in Northampton, England, to Australian parents, and raised in Perth, Western Australia.
WYasmine Mohammed is an ex-Muslim Canadian educator, human rights activist and author who is critical of Islam. Mohammed, who escaped a forced, abusive marriage to an Al-Qaeda operative, became an advocate for women's rights through her non-profit organization Free Hearts, Free Minds. She is a member of the Center for Inquiry Speaker's Bureau and on the board of advisory for the Brighter Brains Institute.
WTaslima Nasrin Sarkar is a Bangladeshi-Swedish writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist and activist. She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion, despite forced exile. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. She has been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region.
WArmin Navabi is an Iranian Canadian ex-Muslim atheist activist, author and podcaster, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. In 2012, he founded the online freethought community Atheist Republic, a Canada-based non-profit organisation which now has hundreds of branches called "consulates" in several countries around the world such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, enabling non-believers to interact in societies where irreligion, apostasy and blasphemy are often criminalised and repressed. As an author, he debuted with the book Why There Is No God (2014), and in 2017 he became a co-host of the Secular Jihadists from the Middle East podcast with Ali A. Rizvi, Yasmine Mohammad and Faisal Saeed Al Mutar. In January 2018, the show was renamed Secular Jihadists for a Muslim Enlightenment, with Rizvi and Navabi as co-hosts.
WAndrzej Rusław Fryderyk Nowicki was a Polish philosopher of culture, a specialist in the history of philosophy and of atheism, in Italian philosophy of the Renaissance and in religious studies and a connoisseur of the fine arts, poet and diplomat.
WPiergiorgio Odifreddi is an Italian mathematician, logician, aficionado of the history of science, and popular science writer and essayist, especially on philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics. He is philosophically and politically near to Bertrand Russell and Noam Chomsky.
WMichel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher. Having a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist world view, he is a highly prolific author on philosophy, having written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism.
WOle Peter Arnulf Øverland was a Norwegian poet and artist. He is principally known for his poetry which served to inspire the Norwegian resistance movement during the German occupation of Norway during World War II.
WMassimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, former co-host of the Rationally Speaking Podcast, and former editor in chief for the online magazine Scientia Salon. He is a critic of pseudoscience and creationism, and an advocate for secularism and science education.
WMátyás Rákosi was a Hungarian communist politician who was the de facto leader of Hungary from 1947 to 1956. He served first as General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party from 1945 to 1948 and then as General Secretary of the Hungarian Working People's Party from 1948 to 1956.
WJohn B. Ridpath was a Canadian intellectual historian. He was an Objectivist and an associate professor of economics and intellectual history at York University in Toronto. He also taught courses at Duke University.
WAli Amjad Rizvi is a Pakistani-born Canadian ex-Muslim atheist and secular humanist writer and podcaster who explores the challenges of Muslims who leave their faith. He writes a column for the Huffington Post and co-hosts the Secular Jihadists for a Muslim Enlightenment podcast together with Armin Navabi.
WJacques André Rousseau is a South African academic, secular activist and social commentator.
WJosé de Sousa Saramago, GColSE, was a Portuguese writer and recipient of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works, some of which can be seen as allegories, commonly present subversive perspectives on historic events, emphasizing the theopoetic human factor. In 2003 Harold Bloom described Saramago as "the most gifted novelist alive in the world today" and in 2010 said he considers Saramago to be "a permanent part of the Western canon", while James Wood praises "the distinctive tone to his fiction because he narrates his novels as if he were someone both wise and ignorant." Bloom and Saramago met when Saramago presented Bloom with an honorary degree from the University of Coimbra; according to Bloom: "A warm acquaintanceship ensued, marked by an exegetical disagreement concerning The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, which continued in correspondence and at a later meeting in New York City".
WBautista van Schouwen Vasey was a medical doctor and one of the founders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), the Chilean guerrilla organization which earliest resisted the Military Coup of Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Five among the "Ten most wanted" opposition figures wanted by the military government after the 11 September coup were militants of MIR. Bautista van Schouwen was at the time member of MIR's "Comisión Política" and the "Secretariado", the highest executive organ of the MIR. The military had set a reward of 500 000 Escudos to anyone who would lead them to the capture of Van Schouwen. He was abducted in Santiago December 13, 1973, in the church Parroquia Capuchinos, after having been caught when the priest who was sheltering them, unwittingly let slip to his military cousins, that they were at the church. Father Enrique White was also detained and tortured, later exiled to England. Van Schouwen and his lieutenant Patricio Munita had previously obtained clandestine refuge in the Capuchinos church-premises. They were soon after their capture killed under torture in the Army-managed detention and torture centre of Villa Grimaldi. The assassinations of Van Schouwen and Munita were however concealed by the Pinochet government and the Van Schouwen case during several years labelled as desaparecido by Human-rights organizations in Chile.
WShelley Segal is an Australian singer and songwriter. She is most known for music with secular themes, including her 2011 album, An Atheist Album. She has toured Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, China, and the United States and has played at many atheist/secular events including the Reason Rally, the American Humanist Association conference, California Free Thought Day, the Global Atheist Convention, ReAsonCon, Gateway to Reason, and Reasonfest. Her first single, "Saved", is currently used as the opening theme by the webcast and cable access television show The Atheist Experience.
WSima Nan, real name Yu Li, is a Chinese television pundit, social commentator, and journalist. In the early 21st century, he is well known for his staunch support of Chinese Communist Party stances and nationalistic, anti-American sentiments. In the late 1990s, he was mostly known for his criticism of pseudoscience and supernatural phenomena, especially his opposition to what he called qigong-related fraud.
WIstván Vágó is a Hungarian television host and political activist, best known as the host of "Legyen ön is Milliomos!" the Hungarian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
WEtienne Vermeersch was a Belgian moral philosopher, skeptic, opinion maker and debater. He is one of the founding fathers of the abortion and euthanasia law in Belgium. He is also former Vice-Rector of Ghent University.
WJan Hertrich-Woleński is a Polish philosopher specializing in the history of the Lwów–Warsaw school of logic and in analytic philosophy.