The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
The result was keep. As with any other list or category of people by religious/philosophical/political affiliation, the inclusion of any particular article is a matter for talk page discussion. postdlf (talk) 22:09, 28 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Why is this relevant? There isn't a list of atheist Brits, or atheist Chinese etc. Couldn't this be done as a category instead?
Specto73 (
talk) 18:36, 9 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete Fails
WP:LISTN. As nominator says, there are no other nationality-based lists of atheists. Additionally, there are no other religiously-based lists of Americans.
Presidentmantalk ·
contribs (
Talkback) 19:09, 9 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Delete A big problem is that atheism is defined by non-assertion, as opposed to assertion. Some of these people publicly and openly identified with a religion, and only philosophically supported atheism. Religions are a wholistic thing that one has to proactively embrace. Beyond this, it is open to question if the statement "I do not believe in God" is one of atheism or agnosticism.
John Pack Lambert (
talk) 07:45, 10 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Okay but isn't that an argument to delete every atheist people list and category?
Shawn in Montreal (
talk) 15:31, 10 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, MBisanztalk 01:15, 17 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Keep Every instance seems to be sourced to RS of person making a declaratory statement of their atheism. See no issues with BLP or GNG.
BlueSalix (
talk) 23:23, 17 August 2016 (UTC)reply
This begs the question of what counts as a declaration of atheism. A person could say "I don't believe in God" and yet believe in a different belief system (e.g., one with many gods) which would mean that they don't count as atheists. Besides this, there must be thousands of atheist Americans with Wikipedia pages; building a complete list would require vast amounts of manpower and would rely very heavily upon the interpretation of different editors as to a person's religious beliefs. That, perhaps, is why this has never been attempted for any other nationality.
Specto73 (
talk) 15:21, 18 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Comment Policy-wise, I'm unable to make a significant differentiation between this list and pretty much every list on
Lists of Americans. I'm not voting keep, since that would be an other stuff exists vote. However, I think it would be somewhat arbitrary to delete this list while allowing a hundred more similar ones to stand.
Spirit of Eagle (
talk) 05:22, 25 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Sandstein 18:43, 25 August 2016 (UTC)reply
Keep As I've stated above, we do have a number of lists for notable atheists, per
Category:Lists of atheists and master list
Lists of atheists. We also have a number of lists for Americans by religious affiliation. I'm not seeing a policy based argument to delete. We have a family of alphabetized lists beginning with
List of atheists (surnames A to B) -- eight in all -- but those lists are not sortable by nationality. So this American list would seem to be useful for readers and meets
WP:LISTBIO.
Shawn in Montreal (
talk) 19:33, 25 August 2016 (UTC)reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.