Jonathan Miller is not someone known here in the United States. That should change. In England he is a well known television presenter. He is widely respected enough to have been knighted in 2002.
Earlier in his career he was a popular theatre and opera director. And before that he studied science and medicine at Cambridge, serving for a few years as a medical doctor afterwards. He has professed a love of science, particularly biology, throughout his life and has been recognized as a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Clearly a diverse and extremely intelligent man.
Mr. Miller has offered his talents of presenting and gifts of keen intellectual conversationalism in a 3 part series that was shown on the BBC in 2004 titled "A Brief History of Disbelief".
It is about atheism. Jonathan enlightens us about the first known ponderings of mankind about the Gods, and the inkling that there may not be any, starting all the back to antiquity in Greece and going all the way forward to Post 911 Modern. He introduces a series of other notable atheists, including Richard Dawkins, through deep and thoughtful interviews, and asks questions of himself, giving some of his own personal thoughts about what it means to be an atheist.
This is an excellent video series, and at this time all I can find on the BBC site is that they do not have any plans to release the video on DVD. It's a shame, because I would own one as fast as I can type my credit card number into the card number textbox.
Until then we'll have to settle for tiny grainy google videos:
Part I - Shadows of Doubt
http://video.google.com/...
Part II - Noughts and Crosses
http://video.google.com/...
Part III - The Final Hour
http://video.google.com/...
(anyone know how to embed google videos?)
This video had a profound strengthening effect on my belief that atheists are not scary evil assholes (although some of them can seem be intellectually impatient). Rather they are thoughtful, careful, and honest enough with their conversations that the lack of clarity in other moral leaders becomes clearer (it's interesting that I see here I compare them to "other" "moral" leaders). And it greatly reinforces my belief that the Founding Fathers intentions for our country had very little to do with pious righteousness in the name of God and everything to do with true equality and justice for the rights of men to be free from other men's gods, no matter how powerful other men believe their god is.
The BBC beleived the content was so good that they made another 3 hours of footage of the 6 original interviews from "Disbelief" into another set of tapes called "The Atheism Tapes: Jonathan Miller in Conversation".
(FYI - I won't be around for several hours to respond this morning. Sorry about that. Just wanted to share. Hope you enjoy when you get a chance.)