There are 2 entries for this date: Margaret Atwood and Pierre Bayle.

On this date in 1939, Canadian novelist and poet Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada. As a youngster, she spent many months of each year in the wilderness with her parents, due to her father's job as a forest entomologist, and began writing at age 6. Atwood, fittingly, was descended from a Salem woman, Mary Webster--accused of witchcraft and sentenced to be hanged in 1685, but allowed to live after the rope broke. Atwood made her notorious ancestor the subject of her poem "Half-Hanged Mary." Atwood earned a B.A. from the University of Toronto in 1961, her M.A. from Radcliffe College and attended Harvard for two years of postgraduate study. She has held a variety of positions at various colleges and universities in North America, including lecturer, instructor and writer in residence. Atwood has been published in 14 volumes of poetry, including Margaret Atwood Poems (1965-1975), published in 1991. Her novels include: Edible Woman (1969), Surfacing (1972), Lady Oracle (1976), Life Before Man (1979), Bodily Harm (1981), The Robber Bride (1993), The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000) and her latest, Oryx and Crake. She was named Canadian Humanist of the Year in 1987, as well as the American Humanist Association's 1987 Humanist of the Year. Handmaid's Tale, about a theocratic take-over of the United States, inspired the 1990 movie adapted by Harold Pinter. Atwood has called herself an agnostic: "A doctrinaire agnostic is different from someone who doesn't know what they believe. A doctrinaire agnostic believes quite passionately that there are certain things that you cannot know, and therefore ought not to make pronouncements about. In other words, the only things you can call knowledge are things that can be scientifically tested." (Quoted in Humanism as the Next Step by Lloyd and Mary Morain, cited by Who's Who in Hell edited by Warren Allen Smith.) Margaret Atwood lives with writer Graeme Gibson. They have three children, and, at last count, one cat.

On this date in 1647, 17th century skeptic and father of the Enlightenment, Pierre Bayle, was born in southern France. He was the son of a Protestant minister at a time when Huguenots endured severe persecution, and Protestant schools had been closed. He was therefore educated at a Jesuit college in Toulouse. Under pressure Bayle dallied with a conversion to Roman Catholicism, but ultimately rejected it, thereby becoming a "relaps" under French law--a person who becomes a heretic after abjuring heresy, and was subject to punishment. Bayle decided it was safer to study philosophy in Calvinist Geneva. He became professor of philosophy in 1675 at a Protestant academy in Sedan, until it was closed down by Catholic authorities in 1681. Bayle joined the community of French Protestant refugees in Rotterdam, where he taught at the Ecole Illustre. Bayle published a paper on a comet (working in the comment: "No nations are more warlike than those which profess Christianity," Thoughts on the Comet, 1682), then a critical account of a Jesuit history and a defense of Cartesianism. He edited one of the first academic journals, Nouvelles de la republique des lettres (1684-1687), and corresponded with intelligentsia such as Leibniz and Locke, making rejection of superstition and intolerance a centerpiece of his writings. His masterpiece was a philosophical analysis of the words of Jesus: "Constrain them to come in." Bayle protested conversion by force, and was the first to argue for complete religious toleration and freedom of conscience, including for Jews, Muslims and atheists. He quipped that he was a literal Protestant, protesting against everything. His writings, including biblical criticism and his denial that religiosity necessarily inspires moral behavior, were collected in The Historical and Critical Dictionary, published in Rotterdam in 1692 and translated into English in 1736. While successful, his dictionary was banned in France and even condemned by the Huguenots. Bayle continually updated it to answer attacks, writing that no religious beliefs were supported by reason. Voltaire later called it "the Arsenal of the Enlightenment." As freethought historian Joseph McCabe noted: "There are no articles on 'God,' 'Christ,' or 'Immortality,' and Bayle's opinions are not fully known, but may be inferred. The caustic and elaborately polite thrusts at both Catholic and Protestant doctrines, the vindication of Greek and Roman thought, and the firm advocacy of toleration and of the independence of ethics, gave the Dictionary, of which very numerous editions and translations appeared, a very large share in the spread of Rationalism" (A Biographical Dictionary of Rationalists, 1920). Bayle never left his Calvinist church, though many friends, future freethinkers and nearly all his critics regarded him as a "secret atheist." D. 1706.