There seems to be a dearth of prominent atheists in America. Can there really be just one in Hollywood?

News flash: an American congressman has acknowledged that he is not a religious believer. That’s one out of 535. Pete Stark, a leftwing Democrat from the San Francisco Bay Area, says he is a "a Unitarian who does not believe in a supreme being." The old joke is that Unitarians believe there is, at most, one God. But really, if you’re not a believer, why join a religion? Oh well, many of Pete Stark’s ideas are incomprehensible to me.

So the American Humanist Association celebrated the discovery of a nontheistic member of Congress by taking out an expensive quarter-page ad in the Washington Post. (It’s in colour online but not in the newspaper.) The ad notes that Stark and other humanistic, nontheistic Americans are in good company and includes photographs of some other impressive nontheists.