Advisory board

Ed Buckner, Ph.D.

Ed Buckner is the president of American Atheists and the former executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, which he represented as a prominent speaker at the Godless Americans' March on Washington. A native of Georgia, Buckner is a freethought activist, writer, debater and speaker whose engagements have taken him throughout the U.S. He is one of the leaders of the Atlanta Freethought Society.

Buckner is co-editor, with his son Michael Buckner, of Quotations That Support the Separation of Church and State (1995), and author of the concluding chapter of Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America, ed. Kimberly Blaker (2003). He has also edited several publications by noted freethinkers and skeptics, and has written articles for freethought magazines such as Free Inquiry.

Buckner has served in various offices of the Georgia state chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. He speaks frequently on topics related to separation of religion and government, particularly about the Treaty of Tripoli and about the misperception that the U.S. is a "Christian nation."

Before embarking on his professional freethought career, Buckner was an administrator at what is now Atlanta Technical College and, earlier, an Assistant Professor at Georgia State University. His 1983 doctoral dissertation studied science teachers' attitudes towards curricular changes within the context of Cobb County, Georgia's creationism campaign.