Graphic by Dan Adams
I’m a proponent of scratching one’s itches. If you’re like me you might occasionally stumble upon an idea that you find compelling. It might be a story, a computer program, a melody or whatever. Rather than ignoring it, you give the idea a small chance by taking it through its first steps — to write those first few lines of prose or code and see where it goes. There may be nothing there, allowing you to go on your way. But there exists a small chance you’ve stumbled upon something which can grow to be of great value.
Fifteen years ago I scratched such an itch, starting a quirky project on nothing more than a lark; a project that evolved in ways I’d never anticipated; a project that may ultimately have helped a staggering number of people.
The Celebrity Atheist List is born
My admittedly quirky project started with the posting of a list of famous atheists to the Usenet newsgroup alt.atheism back in 1995. I might have posted the list to a website, but the web was still in its infancy and nowhere near as dominant or accessible as it is now.
I solicited contributions, asking for names initially, and later for citations with good quotes to back them up. It was an early form of collaborative development that worked well. I collected the cites and edited them for inclusion in the list.
The project quickly found a home on the web. A noted secular and skeptical activist, Jim Lippard, offered to host the site where I’d be responsible for creating the content. It may have been around this time that the project acquired the name of the “Celebrity Atheist List” (CAL). I billed it simply as “An offbeat collection of notable individuals who have been public about their lack of belief in deities.” The CAL listed only the living, in part to reduce my editing effort. The deceased ended up in a site created by my friend Mark Gilbert who created a sister project called “Famous Dead Non-theists.”
Thanks to the “Way Back Machine” of archive.org you can see how the CAL appeared in these early days: here. Note that the site featured over 200 names listed in the atheist category at this early point.
Sometime around the year 2000 I moved the CAL to its own domain name, celebatheists.com. System administrators for the Secular Web graciously provided hosting space (though the CAL was never officially affiliated with the organization.)
The list grew steadily over the years following that very basic model of names with cited quotes. Traffic also increased, driven initially by directories like Yahoo and eventually by search engines like Google. Today the search engines drive daily visitors to the site in the thousands.
In spite of my efforts to reduce the maintenance effort, I eventually burned-out on the project and gave the CAL away a few years back. These days it’s in the hands of Brian Sapient of Rational Response Squad fame. Apart from his addition of advertising, the site remains pretty much the same and continues to grow.
The rationale shifts
Simple, open-ended ideas are powerful in that they can evolve in ways that their creators never anticipated. The CAL, or rather its rationale, evolved in ways that I never anticipated.
This project started largely out of fun, with a secondary attempt to demonstrate the diversity of atheists. Reading the blasphemous quotes of people you recognize and admire can be an entertaining diversion. Why is magician Penn Jillette an atheist? To answer you have to look no further than his entry in the CAL which excerpts a few of his quotes from published sources. (Of course today you wouldn’t have to look far to find other evidence of Jillette’s atheism.)
Fun sites can be a value in themselves. But the rationale for the CAL didn’t need to stop there.
The CAL could serve to put a human face on atheism. Back in the days when very few people were public about their godlessness, the site brought together a diverse group of recognizable and respected people (as well as a few nuts) speaking frankly about their lack of faith. It provided solid ammunition against those who sought to dehumanize atheists.
The other reason is psychological. A caveat: because I’m not a psychologist, you should take this with a grain of salt, but I’ll try to state the reason as clearly as possible.
In making a decision, rational argument isn’t sufficient for many of us. We need an emotional component to support the decision. For example, you may veto the purchase of a new car unless it’s available in a specific color you want. Your need for the emotionally satisfying color is at least as important as your meticulous research into pricing and features.
For those of us atheists considering stepping from the closet, rational argument similarly may be insufficient. An emotional component may be necessary. So where does the CAL come in?
Where we have established an emotional connection to another person, it might be enough to get us over the hump. It could be a recording artist whose music moves us. An actor who skillfully drew us into a role. An author whose work we admire, or possibly a comedian whose wit speaks to us. If they can step from the closet and survive intact, then maybe we can too.
No longer was the CAL merely a ‘fun’ project, but it had grown and could stand to help people in novel and unplanned ways.
The influence of search
The atheist bus ads and billboard campaigns of recent years are a good example of outreach to a broader audience who would not otherwise be aware of an atheist movement. The ads can be seen by millions, a few of whom will be intrigued and follow up.
Initially the CAL was visible only to those seeking atheist content. You’d find it listed prominently in the Yahoo Directory which drove much of its early traffic. However the net was about to change in a big way with the rise of the search engine.
The CAL was in the right place at the right time. When the search engines rendered web directories like Yahoo’s obsolete, the CAL was no longer merely frequented by atheists, but rather it was visited by a broader audience of web surfers. Celebrity names, it seems, are like honey to search rank algorithms, especially for websites with good reputations.
Though these algorithms are forever evolving in an attempt to stay a step ahead of the spammers, it’s not uncommon for someone to be searching on a celebrity name and find the celebrity’s page in the CAL listed at a respectable position in the results. (For a term like ‘atheist‘ the CAL often shows up high on the first page of results, a position that is enormously difficult to attain.)
The only concrete metric I’ve tracked over the years are page load counts. In the past year the CAL looks to have averaged 5,432 page loads a day. It’s not clear what that translates to in terms of visitors, or much less in providing value to those who visit. Complicating the picture are caching (artificially depressing the numbers) and web-crawling bots (raising the numbers.)
Nonetheless 5,432 page loads/day translates to nearly two million page loads a year. Of course the numbers weren’t always that high, but they’ve been at roughly this level for several years. That amounts to a staggering number of eyeballs over a 15 year period, many of which are encountering not a dry intellectual atheism but rather one to which their owners can make a human connection.
The CAL hasn’t been alone in trying to attract those eyeballs, however.
Others stepping into the space
Creating a list of famous atheists on the Internet is not an idea that would have escaped others. However, being first to the field conferred the CAL an authoritative position in this quirky niche. That lead could be easily maintained so long as I kept the content fairly fresh.
For example, there has been no shortage of ‘atheist quote’ sites which trod the same ground. However, I made an effort to keep the CAL a couple steps ahead and position it not as a quote site, but rather as a tool to measure the willingness of notable living people to be open about their godlessness.
In the end, Wikipedia was the only serious contender. Backed by a collaborative group of users whose numbers dwarfed my own, they quickly built up an impressive ‘List of Atheists’ page. However it failed in a fundamental way in bypassing the central value of the CAL. For each entry on their list they included references but notably omitted the salient quotes that provide so much value to the CAL. References are essential but are far more likely to be ignored rather than pursued. For all their effort and capability they constructed another threadbare list of atheists. In any case, they consigned their project to the search-engine sidelines in renaming it to the dry “List of Non-theists.” The threat was gone and the CAL would prevail!
A series of other projects arose that weren’t so much competitors but rather children or siblings to the CAL.
Warren Allen Smith drew upon the CAL to build his “Who’s Who in Hell” book, bringing at least a portion of the CAL into print form. (I incidentally merited a complimentary entry.) It’s pricey at $73.56 for a used copy.
In 2007 Richard Dawkins launched his OUT Campaign, a complementary effort inspired by the gay rights movement that encourages atheists to be more open about their unbelief.
More recently, Russell Blackford’s new book 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists with essays by prominent people talking about their unbelief. Very much like the CAL, but in long form.
You can find the ‘50 Most Brilliant Atheists of all Time‘ which filters the CAL (or the Wikipedia list) for its smarter members.
Most recently, with Ireland’s new anti-blasphemy law coming into effect, an Irish atheist organization published a list of “25 Blasphemous Quotes” for which they gained heavy international news coverage. A few of the quotes look to be sourced from my own edits to the CAL, such as that of Björk.
In closing
In spite of the page counts and anti-blasphemy publicity, it’s enormously difficult to quantify the value of the CAL. As a fun project it was worth giving it a start. Later it proved its ongoing value for its ability to put a human face on a difficult issue for many.
Over the years I’ve received a couple dozen emails from people thanking me for the CAL, but that may be all the concrete evidence I’ll ever have of it helping people. The actual numbers could be considerably larger, staggeringly so. But I can live with that uncertainty as the project didn’t start with a grand plan, but rather to scratch an itch.
The CAL’s days may be numbered even as it continues to prove its value as an aging workhorse in pulling the load of search-based outreach. With the rise of social media and new tools for collaboration, the next generation of outreach projects are likely to provide that human connection as a core feature.
However it won’t be me doing this. The CAL did give me a taste for ideas that can grow, but I’m most likely to be pursuing them in other domains. Nevertheless I am glad to have had an opportunity to contribute.
UPDATE: I should add Mark Gilbert’s rationale for his aforementioned Famous Dead Non-theists list, which applies to the CAL as well:
The purposes of this list are to combat the pervasive myth that atheists are terrible, immoral people and to convince the undecided that it is OK to be an atheist. Just like any other large group of people, some of these people lived exemplary lives and others did not. The point is not that these people are all heroes, but simply to notice that there are more nontheists out there than most people realize.
Skeptics take note. This coming weekend something special is afoot in Chicago. It’s their first open skeptic conference which they’re dubbing “Skepchicamp“, a portmanteau of Skepchick and SkeptiCamp.
The naive remedy is to program the event and take away the openness. This requires recruiting someone to act in the role of gatekeeper — a conference programmer who decides which talks and speakers are worthy of the event.
