James Arthur Thrower (1936–1999) was an academic and writer on religion. After studying at the

University of Durham Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by royal charter in 1837. It was the first recognised university to ...

(BA Theology) and

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

(Philosophy), he lectured at the

University of Leicester The University of Leicester ( ) is a public university, public research university based in Leicester, England. The main campus is south of the city centre, adjacent to Victoria Park, Leicester, Victoria Park. The university's predecessor, Univ ...

University of Ghana The University of Ghana is a public university located in Accra, Ghana. It is the oldest public university in the country. The university was founded in 1948 as the University College of the Gold Coast in the British colony of the Gold Coast ...

, and University of Durham. He became a lecturer in religion at the

University of Aberdeen The University of Aberdeen (abbreviated ''Aberd.'' in List of post-nominal letters (United Kingdom), post-nominals; ) is a public university, public research university in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bis ...

in 1970. His PhD thesis there in 1981 was on ''Marxist-Leninist 'Scientific Atheism' and the Study of Religion and Atheism in the USSR''. He worked as a

visiting lecturer In academia, a visiting scholar, visiting scientist, visiting researcher, visiting fellow, visiting lecturer, or visiting professor is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university to teach, lecture, or perform research on a topic fo ...

at the Universities of

Helsinki Helsinki () is the Capital city, capital and most populous List of cities and towns in Finland, city in Finland. It is on the shore of the Gulf of Finland and is the seat of southern Finland's Uusimaa region. About people live in the municipali ...

Leningrad Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

and

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. He later became Professor of the History of Religions and Director of the Centre for Study of Religions at Aberdeen. His works include ''A Short History of Western Atheism'' (1971), ''The Alternative Tradition'' (1981) and ''Religion: The Classical Theories'' (1999). In 1996 he wrote the foreword for

Steuart Campbell Steuart Campbell (born 1937) is a British writer and skeptic who lives in Edinburgh. Career Campbell was born in 1937 in Birmingham. He trained as an architect and worked as one until the mid-1970s. He obtained a BA in mathematics and scienc ...

's work ''The Rise and Fall of Jesus'', which examines the Jesus myth and the origins of Christianity. It suggests that Jesus wanted to be crucified. He died suddenly on 14 November 1999, and his wife, Judith, died in 2016. They had three children, Penelope, Charlotte and Annabel.

Reza Aslan Reza Aslan (, ; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American scholar of sociology, writer, and television host. A convert to Evangelicalism, evangelical Christianity from Shia Islam as a youth, Aslan eventually reverted to Islam but continued to wr ...

used Thrower as an example of someone who thought that

atheism Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the Existence of God, existence of Deity, deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the ...

was a belief system in its own right and not just a negation of belief.

References

1936 births 1999 deaths Academics of the University of Aberdeen Alumni of St Chad's College, Durham Atheist philosophers {{UK-academic-bio-stub