Just discovered that, a mere two hundred years ago, being an outspoken atheist was enough to get you expelled from Oxford:
In 1811, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley published his second Gothic novel St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian and a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. This gained the attention of the university administration and he was called to appear before the College’s fellows, including the Dean, George Rowley. His refusal to repudiate the authorship of the pamphlet resulted in his being sent down from Oxford on 25 March 1811, along with Hogg. The rediscovery in mid-2006 of Shelley’s long-lost ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things,’ a long, strident anti-monarchical and anti-war poem printed in 1811 in London by Crosby and Company as “by a gentleman of the University of Oxford,” gives a new dimension to the expulsion, reinforcing Hogg’s implication of political motives (‘an affair of party’). Shelley was given the choice to be reinstated after his father intervened, on the condition that he would have had to recant his avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling-out with his father.