Atheist Cartoon Characters

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So, thinking about Brian on Family Guy being an atheist got me thinking, are there any other atheist cartoon characters?

I know they dabbled with it with Lisa Simpson considering it, but I think they had her come to some middle ground conclusion. And I remember an episode where she became a Buddhist, too, did that stick?

I'm having trouble coming up with others, though. Are there any other out atheists in cartoons? Are there any characters you think may be atheists even if it is not overtly said? It's actually a pretty big population segment now, big enough that it would probably be better represented if it weren't controversial.
 
Roronoa Zoro from One Piece is confirmed to be an atheist from Eiichiro Oda.

And on the topic of Seth MacFarlane created characters, Hayley Smith from American Dad. She's admitted that she believes "God is fake" though she did later in that episode did help Francine believe in her own faith again.
 
It's hard to tell - hardly any cartoon characters seem to be anything anymore.

I mean you've got the Simpsons as a church-going family, but then you've got Homer calling God his favorite fictional character, so they're kind of inconsistent.


Yeah, it gets brought up from time to time.
 
Lex Luthor is a atheist in the comics and Joker is a nihilist so I doubt he would believe in God, so it stands that those two are atheists in the cartoons as well.
 
Heero Yuy says that he doesn't believe in God one time in an episode of Gundam Wing. Rather like his occasional comment that "life is cheap," this is probably a result of his rough backstory. He basically was trained to be a perfect weapon to strike back against the global Government, which was actively repressing colonies in outer space. He's seen so much of war that he's very jaded for the majority of the series.

Setsuna F. Seiei in Gundam 00 (a separate show entirely) also decides that there is no God for much more personal reasons. We learn that when he was very young a fictional Middle Eastern terrorist group recruited him and many other children into the fold, using religious propaganda to keep them fighting and doing as they were told. The breaking point comes in the opening scene of the very first episode, where in a flashback we have child soldiers dying all around Setsuna as he struggles to survive a pitched battle. Even as this is going on a voice is feeding them propaganda over the radio about how God will bring them victory, and this spurs Setsuna to insist to himself that there is no God. It isn't a one-shot tragedy either, the whole thing is critical to his character throughout the series.
 
Well, whether a fictional character can be presumed to be atheistic or religious probably depends on what country said character comes from. Since the vast majority of Americans are religious, most American characters can probably be presumed to religious unless otherwise stated. In contrast, in my country, about 85% of the population claim to be non-religious (and as a footnote, a great deal of those 15% that are religious are Muslim immigrants, so the number of Christians here is very low), so any Swedish fictional character can probably be presumed to be non-religious unless otherwise stated. Of course, no Swedish cartoon characters are any famous in any other countries, so there would be no point in me giving plausible examples.:sweat:

On another note, from what i have understood, more and more people in Japan are denouncing Buddhism in favor of atheism, so im not really sure if at this point one should consider Japanese characters "Buddhist by default" or "atheist by default". Maybe "agnostic by default" would a good middle-ground?
 
There was an episode of Metalocalypse dealing with William Murderface's spiritual journey. After trying several churches, including a Satanist congregation among all the others, he concluded that they all delivered the same crap.


In the US, it's generally in most channels S&P for children's programming to avoid referring to religion at all, unless it's a very special episode about accepting the new kid from some minority faith. Sometimes religion can be brought up in a holiday special, but even then the focus tends to be on the more secular aspects of the day in question, or the broader cultural significance apart from the religious foundation.
 
That episode ("Religionklok) also revealed Toki and Swisgar were Nihlist since they don't believe in anything, and there was a church of Atheists in that episode so everyone in that church except for Dethklok were athesists so... there you go.
 
Shayera's atheism was actually revealed much earlier in the Justice League ep "The Terror Beyond," as a counterpoint to Grundy's quest to reclaim his soul. As someone who's godless himself, I thought it one of the more intriguing and thoughtprovoking JL/JLUs.
 
Yup. Greg was once asked about their religious beliefs, and... let me find it and post it.



At one of the Gatherings, he elaborated a little, and said Xanatos is an Atheist. But yes, he believes in himself.

And Puck's existence definitely doesn't mean there is an almighty. At least it wouldn't make me think so.
 
True, but I wasn't thinking almighty so much as any god or gods whatsoever. We do know that gods* of a sort do exist in the Gargoyles Universe, many of whome Puck is probably on a first name basis with.



*Of course this does raise the interesting question of how you define the word "god".
 
The Smurfs seem atheist, don't they? I've never seen any evidence that the Smurfs have any kind of religion.

I also think Batman, although clearly raised with a religious background, is now atheist. I mean that he knows that there are gods from first-hand experience and probably knows about DC's Presence (hell, he fought angels at least once with the Justice League), but he doesn't follow or pray to any of them. Maybe atheist is not the right technical term, what would you call someone who has scientific evidence of the existence of gods and God but chooses not to think of them as objects of worship?

There are so many interpretations of Batman that this could change from writer to writer. Chuck Dixon, for example, out of the blue made him overtly Christian in 2000s "Batman: The Chalice," a series that some criticized for portraying him as out-of-character.
 
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