# Atheism, Agnosticism & the Unaffiliated · The Canon · The Atlas · The Congregation of Tomorrow

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← The Canon: all 125
The Canon · No. 125
Atheism, Agnosticism & the Unaffiliated
The Nones; irreligion; New Atheism
Antiquity; organised from the 19th century · Non-Theistic / Philosophical · Living · China, Europe, North America, Japan, Australia
VIII. POSTWAR & CONTEMPORARY — 1945 – PRESENT
### How many
### Who began it
### What it is for
### What it worships
### What it holds
### What it does
### After death
### Its texts
### Its branches
### Of note
### Its timeline
- c.6th c. BCE Charvaka in India; Ajita Kesakambali.
- c.99–55 BCE Lucretius' De Rerum Natura argues that fear of the gods and of death is the source of human misery.
- 1770 CE d'Holbach's The System of Nature, the first unambiguously atheist book published in Europe.
- 1880–1886 CE Charles Bradlaugh, elected to Parliament, is repeatedly refused his seat for declining to swear a religious oath; the affirmation he wins is now available to everyone.
- 1917–1991 CE State atheism in the USSR, and later in China, Albania and elsewhere. Churches, mosques, monasteries and temples destroyed; clergy imprisoned and killed on a very large scale. This is the part of irreligion's history that the movement's advocates most often omit and that belongs in any honest account.
- 1966 CE Time asks on its cover whether God is dead.
- <strong>2004–2007 CE</strong> New Atheism — a publishing and public-argument phenomenon following the September 11 attacks, unusually confrontational and unusually commercially successful.
- 2007–2015 CE The movement fragments over sexism, harassment and its stance toward Islam and Muslims; Elevatorgate in 2011 is the usual marker.
- <strong>2012–present</strong> The rise of the nones. The religiously unaffiliated become the largest single group in several Western countries. In the 2021 England and Wales census, for the first time, fewer than half the population identified as Christian.
- 2020s CE Pew projects the unaffiliated share of the global population to fall over the coming decades, because the unaffiliated are concentrated in low-fertility countries and religious populations are growing faster. Secularisation is advancing in the West and losing globally at the same time.
### Sources
Not yet checked against named sources. This entry is the house's reading; until it is checked, treat each claim as unverified. Correct it, with a source.
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