Earl Doherty is a Canadian best known as the author of The Jesus Puzzle. With a degree in ancient history and classical languages, he has spent the last 25 years researching the question of the existence of Jesus and is now regarded as one of the world's leading advocates of Jesus mythicism. He has been published in English, German, Spanish and Korean. In the 1990s he was a director of the Humanist Association of Canada. He has spoken at atheist conferences across the continent, notably in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Winnipeg.
I will open with introductory remarks about the “New Atheist” wave of writers, including myself in that category in regard to my websites and books on the non-existence of Jesus. Also in that category I want to touch on the American writer/novelist Vardis Fisher (died 1968) whose series of novels on the evolution of humanity’s religious and moral ideas over two million years is undeservedly in eclipse, but have made him an important atheist writer. (I wrote a hefty series of review articles on Fisher’s “Testament of Man” for American Atheist magazine around 2000-1.) From that, I want to discuss some ideas surrounding reasons why believers and especially fundamentalists find atheism so objectionable and ‘scary’ and try to counter some of these. I will offer some justifications for our ‘new wave’ and a couple of concepts of my own in regard to atheism.
The latter part of the talk I will devote to my new book on the non-existence of Jesus (“Jesus: Neither God Nor Man”), bringing those readers familiar with my former “The Jesus Puzzle” up to date on some of the new research and arguments it includes.