Deng fused pro-market reforms with the rule of the atheistic Communist Party.
He began his priestly training, in 1942, in an underground seminary kept secret from the Nazis; after his ordination, in 1946, he worked in a church that was a brave alternative to atheistic secular power.
Philipp Blom's latest book tells the story of a set of remarkable individuals on the radical fringes of the 18th-century European Enlightenment, whose determinedly atheistic and materialist philosophies denied the existence of God or the soul.
Her fierce anti-Soviet views could have made her an important ally for America's cold-war warriors if she had not been militantly atheistic.
Indeed, when John Cornwell, a Catholic writer, wanted to pen a counter-tract in 2008 to Richard Dawkins's atheistic book, "The God Delusion", he boldly put it in the mouth of Charles Darwin's guardian angel, as if there was no problem there.
Mr Harbour does a strong job of defending atheism against some of the secondary charges that have been levelled against it—such as the complaint that atheistic political regimes have turned out to be worse than religious ones, or that atheists, if they follow through on what they believe, are bound to be amoral.
The minister curtly turned it down; this week she said a new law may be brought in that would, in effect, prevent churches from being turned into mosques.The row over the atheistic clergyman has stirred up other grievances.
I'm a non-believing but occasionally practicing Jew, and in terms of the question that guy was asking, I'm pretty sure it would have been more honest for me to say, "No, I'm an atheistic secular humanist".
One reason was their perception that Marxism, which is inherently atheistic, was the greater Satan.
One might look even further back: many of the Netherlands' firmest critics of religion belong to the country's strong Humanist movement, which traces its roots to the atheistic or pan-theistic philosophy of that greatest apostate of Amsterdam's Jewish community, Baruch Spinoza.
Both it and Taoism, a native religion, sit uncomfortably with an atheistic party doctrine.
