Speakers
Dan Barker |
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Dan Barker served as a Christian preacher and musician for 19 years, before discarding his faith and becoming one of the nation’s most prominent atheists.
Dan was PR Director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation from 1987 to 2004. He was elected co-president of the Foundation with Annie Laurie Gaylor in 2004. He is a contributing editor of Freethought Today and is involved with the Foundation's state/church lawsuits. He is the author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists and president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. |
Richard Carrier |
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Richard Carrier is the renowned author of Sense and Goodness without God and Not the Impossible Faith, as well as numerous articles online and in print. He received his Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University in 2008, and now specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism, the origins of Christianity, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome.
Dr. Carrier has spoken at every Skepticon, which included last year's talk "Where the Hell is Jesus? A Look at the 'Trial Transcripts' of Peter and Paul." |
Greta Christina |
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She is a regular atheist correspondent for AlterNet, the online political magazine, and has been writing about atheism and skepticism for her own cleverly-named Greta Christina's Blog since 2005. Her writing has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, including Ms., Skeptical Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the anthology Everything You Know About God Is Wrong. She has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. |
John Corvino |
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John Corvino, Ph.D. is a philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he specializes in ethics. His weekly column "The Gay Moralist" appears at 365gay.com.
He is the editor of Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science and Culture of Homosexuality, and the co-author (with Maggie Gallagher) of Debating Same-Sex Marriage, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Once a candidate for the priesthood, he now says, "People sometimes describe me as a fallen Catholic. I didn't fall; I leapt." John speaks at dozens of campuses each year on moral issues, and recently appeared at Missouri State debating God's existence with Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family. His website is www.johncorvino.com. |
J.T. Eberhard |
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J.T. is an activist, blogger, and speaker on LGBT rights and the dangers of religion and faith who has given talks and participated in several debates on religion and science primarily throughout the Midwest. J.T. is the co-founder of the Skepticon series of events and served as production leader for Skepticon I & II. He also co-founded and has led the Missouri State Chapter of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, one of the nation's largest college skeptic groups. JT is on the speakers bureaus with both the Secular Student Alliance and the Center for Inquiry. |
David Fitzgerald |
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David Fitzgerald has been called “one of the busiest atheist activists in the Bay Area.” He is Action Coordinator for San Francisco Atheists, a board member of Center For Inquiry - San Francisco and founder/director of both San Francisco's annual Darwin Day celebration, "Evolutionpalooza!" and the world's first Atheist Film Festival. He lectures, debates, and writes on atheism, humanism, and religion, and works with several secular and scientific community organizations. His writings have appeared in American Atheist Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, SFAtheists.com, the Christian website GodRides.org, and in the groundbreaking study "Atheists" by researchers Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer; he has also been a repeat guest speaker at the American Atheists national convention.
He is an Associate of CSER, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, and has been researching the Historical Jesus problem for over ten years. In 2005, he helped director Brian Flemming launch his documentary film The God Who Wasn't There. His multimedia presentation "The Ten Thousand Christs and the Evaporating Jesus," is soon to be a book trilogy and DVD. |
Debbie Goddard |
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Debbie Goddard is a campus organizer at the Center for Inquiry. Before working for CFI, she volunteered for and participated in freethought and skeptic groups in the greater Philadelphia region, and helped organize and support campus groups internationally as a student volunteer. She has been involved with church-state separation and secular activism, as well as with GLBT and progressive activism, for over a decade. |
D.J. Grothe |
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D.J. Grothe once served as Vice President and Director of Outreach Programs at the Center for Inquiry. He has also been a host on the popular radio show and podcast Point of Inquiry and continues his role as an associate editor for Free Inquiry Magazine. As of January 1st, 2010, D.J. became president of the James Randi Educational Foundation, filling the vacancy left by Phil Plait. D.J. now hosts the podcast For Good Reason.
He is also a professional magician who has lectured all over the United States on a variety of topics relating to skepticism and freethought. |
Amanda Marcotte |
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Amanda is a blogger on the immensely popular blog Pandagon. She was blogmaster for the John Edwards campaign, during which she continued to publicly criticize the Catholic Church's position on womens rights such as birth control and access to abortion. Columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez branded Marcotte's criticism as "hostility to religion and in particular the Catholic Church" which is pretty much all the resume she needed to get an invite to Skepticon.
Marcotte is also the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. |
PZ Myers |
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Dr. Myers is biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris and the author of the science blog Pharyngula.
Myers is known for his criticism of creationism and religion, as well as an almost unnatural affinity for cephalopods. Like Richard Carrier, PZ has spoken at every Skepticon, and we are elated to have him, and his cracker-disrespecting ways, back at Missouri State. |
Joe Nickell |
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Joe Nickell is a well-known paranormal investigator and historical document consultant, and author of Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents, who has helped expose such famous forgeries as the purported diaries of Jack the Ripper and Adolf Hitler.
He's a senior Research Fellow for The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and a member of its Executive Council, writing regularly for their journal, the Skeptical Inquirer, and doing a boatload of other very impressive scholarly things. |
James Randi |
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James Randi has an international reputation as a magician and escape artist, but today he is best known as the world's most tireless investigator and demystifier of paranormal and pseudo-scientific claims.
Randi has pursued "psychic" spoon-benders, exposed the dirty tricks of faith healers, investigated homeopathic water "with a memory," and generally been a thorn in the sides of those who try to pull the wool over the public's eyes in the name of the supernatural. He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including a Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1986. On October 19, 1993, the PBS-TV "NOVA" program broadcast a one-hour special dealing with Randi's life work, particularly with his investigations of Uri Geller and various occult and healing claims being made by scientists in Russia. He is the author of numerous books, including The Truth About Uri Geller, The Faith Healers, Flim-Flam!, and An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. His lectures and television appearances have delighted — and vexed — audiences around the world. In 1996, the James Randi Education Foundation was established to further Randi's work. Randi's long-standing challenge to psychics now stands as a $1,000,000 prize administered by the Foundation. It remains unclaimed. |
Brother Sam Singleton |
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Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist is the fictional creation of Roger Scott Jackson. The character and his creator share a childhood of religious fundamentalism, an awakening and embracing of atheism at an early age, and a passion for relating the difficulty of making that transition in ways that are both thought and laughter inducing. Mr Jackson has been a high school English teacher, a journalist, a comedy writer, and a lifelong student of religious absurdities. His talent lies in his quick and deadly accurate humor in portraying the plight of the non-theist in the USA.
The author generally stays in the shadow of Brother Sam, while his creation commands an online presence through the website www.samsingleton.com, and his you tube channel, Atheist Evangelist. Sam Singleton Atheist Evangelist makes his greatest impact in his personal appearances and stage performances of the two act comedy “Patriarchs and Penises”, which has been staged in 19 cities across the US and Canada in 2009. |
Victor Stenger |
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Dr. Victor Stenger's research career helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos, and helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy.
He is the author of a number of popular science books also well received by professional scientists, including: God: The Failed Hypothesis, as well as Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, and The Comprehensible Comos, amongst many, many others. He has debated many of the top theologians of our time, which includes a team debate at Skepticon II against top scholars from the Assemblies of God. |
Rebecca Watson |
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Rebecca, who writes third person bios about herself, is the head blogger of Skepchick.org, the co-host of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, and the host of Curiosity, Aroused.
Rebecca has spoken all over the country, including at the Amaz!ng Meeting. There is an asteroid named in her honor. |
