April 30
Cloris Leachman
On this date in 1926, actress Cloris Leachman was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Her father owned a lumber company. After being crowned Miss Chicago in the 1946 Miss America competition, she won a scholarship to study at the Actor’s Studio in New York. Some of her earliest films include “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955), “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “The Last Picture Show” (1971), for which she won an Academy Award. She had roles in three Mel Brooks films: Frau Blücher in “Young Frankenstein” (1974), demented nurse Charlotte Diesel in “High Anxiety” (1977) and Madame Defarge in “History of the World: Part I.”
She played memorable roles on television, including Timmy’s mother on “Lassie” from 1957-58, and Phyllis Lindstrom on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970-77) and in her own series, “Phyllis” (1975-77). She made frequent appearances on “The Facts of Life” and other shows. She played a main character in 83 episodes of the comedy “Raising Hope” (2010-14).
In over 60 years of acting, in roles ranging from comedic to dramatic, Leachman won eight Emmys, appeared in over 100 TV shows and, in the fall of 2008, participated as the oldest contestant yet (age 82) on “Dancing With the Stars.”
From 1953-79 she was married to Hollywood impresario George Englund, with whom she had five children before divorcing. Asked in a 2012 Huffington Post interview if she considered herself an atheist, she replied, “Definitely.” Asked about religious miracles, she said, “Extraordinary miracles, billions and trillions of them, happen all the time but not because there’s a God. … It’s beyond belief. There are 7 billion people on the planet. Is he hearing 7 billion people at once?”
Interestingly, as an atheist in real life, in a classic “Twilight Zone” episode titled “It’s a Good Life” (1961), she played the mother of a son named Anthony Fremont whose godlike powers control all the inhabitants of an Ohio town — even his parents — and causes multiple supernatural events. Leachman reprised the role in a 2003 sequel titled “It’s Still a Good Life” that is set 40 years later with a godlike granddaughter.
She died at age 94 in Encinitas, Calif. (D. 2021)
PHOTO: Leachman in a 1970 publicity still.
“I don’t believe at all in God and I’m very relieved that I don’t.”
— Leachman interview, Huffington Post (June 20, 2012)
Compiled by Bonnie Gutsch
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Claude Shannon
On this date in 1916, Claude Elwood Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich. He grew up in Gaylord, where he attended public schools and showed a talent for mathematics and engineering. He received a B.S. in mathematics and electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1936, then went on to MIT for graduate studies. While working with a mechanical computer called the Differential Analyzer, Shannon came up with the idea for a computer in which numbers would be represented by states of electrical circuits rather than ratios of gears.
He published this work in a master’s thesis which outlined the use of Boolean logic and binary numbers in a digital computer. He then earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1940. In 1948 he published a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” which is regarded as the foundation of information theory, in which he defined the bit and discussed the mathematics of communication problems. At that time he was attached to Bell Labs, which had just developed the transistor, a technology that greatly improved the viability of the electronic computer.
Starting in the 1950s, technological advances which depended on Shannon’s work were changing the world on a regular basis. His later interests included artificial intelligence, card-counting, finance and juggling (the subject of his last published paper). In the 1950s he also devised a program for a chess-playing computer.
Shannon married Norma Levor, a wealthy Jewish intellectual in 1940 but divorced after about a year. In 1949 he married Mary Elizabeth “Betty” Moore when she was a numerical analyst at Bell Labs. She worked with him on some of his inventions. They had three children. Although Shannon lived into the digital age, he was unaware of later developments due to Alzheimer’s. He lived in a nursing home the last eight years of his life, dying at age 84. (D. 2001)
“Shannon described himself as an atheist and was outwardly apolitical.”
— William Poundstone, "Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System" (2005)
Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Annie Dillard (Quote)
“If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering. Deus otiosus: do-nothing God who, if he has power, abuses it.”
— Writer Annie Dillard was born on this date in 1945 in Pittsburgh. Her personal website lists her religion as "None," although she embraced Catholicism in the late 1980s and part of the 1990s. The quote is from her 1999 memoir "For the Time Being."
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
Jonathan Larsen
On this date in 1966, journalist Jonathan Larsen was born to Liv and Joseph Larsen in New York City. He has a younger brother. His son Jeremy is in college as of this writing in 2026.
He grew up New York City and then in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., “with no religious upbringing whatsoever,” Larsen says. “When I displayed concern as a child that the Tooth Fairy would be entering my room at night, I was informed by my mother that there is no Tooth Fairy. I also don’t believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny but nevertheless enjoy both holidays in the pagan spirit of their origin.” (Larsen email to FFRF)
He double-majored in English and philosophy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where his faculty adviser for philosophy was Daniel C. Dennett, whose scholarship earned him a place among the “Four Horsemen” of literary atheism along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. “[A]theism didn’t start off as a big preoccupation in my life, it’s only become so proportionate to the rise of politicized religion in this country,” Larsen told FFRF in 2026.
He worked on school publications and became editor-in-chief of the Tufts Daily. After graduation he worked as a reporter for a Brooklyn paper and for United Press International before being hired by ABC, where he wrote for “Good Morning America” and served as a writer-producer for “World News Now.”
Later landing at CNN, Larsen helped create and launch “Anderson Cooper 360” and “Greenfield at Large.” He worked for several years with anchor Keith Olbermann on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” that started airing on MSNBC in 2003. He broke several national stories, including insider accounts of the politicization of President George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives.
He helped launch Air America Radio, co-creating “Morning Sedition” with Marc Maron, co-producing “The Rachel Maddow Show” on radio and writing a blog titled Petty Larseny that he billed as “A foxhole for atheists and other thinkers.” He later worked with Chris Hayes to create his first show, “Up With Chris Hayes” that debuted in 2011.
As managing editor and executive producer of The Young Turks Investigates (TYY), Larsen delved deeply into the National Prayer Breakfast and discussed his reporting on FFRF’s Freethought Radio and “Ask an Atheist” TV show. He was named FFRF’s Secularist of the Week in January 2026 for his reporting on the breakfast and its ties to Christian nationalists: “For years, Larsen has provided the clearest and most unflinching coverage of the National Prayer Breakfast, an event that has long masqueraded as a harmless display of bipartisan faith while functioning as a shadowy hub for right-wing religious influence, elite networking and global theocratic ambitions.”
Larsen has also exposed how breakfast organizers and their allies have promoted extreme policies far beyond U.S. borders, including networks tied to anti-LGBTQ+ laws and attacks on reproductive rights. He has explored the role of the Fellowship Foundation (aka The Family) in U.S./Ukraine relations, its financial ties with Florida’s official legislative chaplain and how former Florida Democratic senator and NASA administrator Bill Nelson used NASA to benefit The Family, which has deep ties in Washington, D.C.
Larsen has two Substacks. One is JonathanLarsen.Substack.com, where he does original reporting. The other is a weekday-morning newsletter titled The Fucking News (TFN), which he describes as him aggregating, contextualizing and commenting rudely on the day’s news, often with a healthy dose of humor: “My goals with TFN are to screen out bullshit that doesn’t matter, help navigate bullshit that does, and surface bullshit you might not otherwise know about. … The two newsletters are what I live and breathe now.”
Though he encourages paid subscriptions, all TFN content is free: “It just means I hate paywalls. I despise the idea of cutting people off from journalism because they can’t afford it.”
He collects comic books and has written several, along with two Batman stories for DC Comics and a digital comic of his own, “The Endling” (about evolution).
“I like the paganism and the solstice and lights in the dead of winter in the longest nights. I love that Christmas has nothing to do with The Bible and is profoundly different in our culture from what religious zealots want it to be. I love that the right wing’s insistence on making Christmas universal has robbed it of its sectarian significance. You won, fuckers, Christmas is for everyone now!”
— Larsen blog on TFN, sharing what Christmas means to him (Dec. 25, 2024)
Compiled by Bill Dunn
© Freedom From Religion Foundation. All rights reserved.
