Ana Kasparian

News Reporter

Anahit Misak "Ana" Kasparian is a co-host and producer for the online news show 'The Young Turks'. [1]
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During a segment entitled "Jesus & Prophet Muhammed Outrage at University College London", she stated the following:
"Look, I have my spiritual beliefs, whatever, lack of spiritual beliefs. If someone is making fun of agnostics, right, and is writing like, or drawing ridiculous cartoons of agnostics and I see it on Facebook, I'm not going to cry about it. Like, okay, so that's what you think about agnostics. That's fine. I'm firm in my beliefs and that's not going to change anything." [2]

Ana recently had a conversation with John Iadarola on their show. He refers to her as an atheist as they talk about the Secular Student Alliance. On that show from September 25th, Ana recalls a story from her childhood. She talks about how she was bullied in grade school for going to church every weekend. Later in her schooling she contacted one of her elementary school friends and Ana found it funny that she was known for being religious, "which is really weird". To which John Iadarola said she hasn't been watching the show lately, and Ana replied "no she hasn't."

Kasparian appears to have recently shifted in her thinking and is now referring to herself as an atheist. While co-hosting an April 5, 2014 segment of The Young Turks entitled "Atheists Win Court Case, But That Might Be a Bad Thing", she stated "Right, and so look...I consider myself atheist and I agree with their message, but I don't want them to pass out the literature on campus. I certainly don't want Christian literature, Jewish literature. I don't care...any religion. I think that the way that you fight is by REALLY giving the students facts, by teaching them science and teaching them about evolution. Things that have scientific evidence backing it up." [3] (at 1:04) This is in stark contrast to what she stated on a Dec. 24, 2013 segment of Rubin Report entitled "Ana Kasparian Tells Dave Rubin why she's agnostic, not atheist." There are too many quotes to list from that segment, but one which basically distills the position she holds at this time is this: "As far as the whole agnostic vs. atheist thing, I just feel really uncomfortable calling myself an atheist and pretending as though I know without a shadow of a doubt that there is no higher being. The truth is, I don't know and no one really knows." [4] (at 1:58)

Cenk Uygur is also an atheist listed on our site, he is a host of The Young Turks.

Kasparian's full first name is the Armenian version of Anahita, an ancient Iranian deity of the waters, fertility, healing and wisdom. So she's a atheist who is named after a deity.