OK guys we are GROWING! REALITY RULES!!http://pewresearch.org/pubs/743/united-states-religion
DENVER – The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for its sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.While much of the study confirms earlier findings ? mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing ? it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups….The majority of the unaffiliated ? 12 percent of the overall population ? describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.…One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution….More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small ? less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population
So, on average, people know at least twice as many Atheists as they know Jews, right?
reason,
That seems to be a commonly held belief in the United States. We need christianity to bind us together and to provide hope and comfort, provide us with morals so society doesn’t go crazy but, then you look at less religious countries and notice that they are also less violent. It seems likely that christianity and religion in general actually causes more problems than it solves.
Without religion we would live by laws that are passed, hopefully by the will of the people and wishfully by adding intelligent debate and honesty by lawmakers. Without religion we could actually have a chance at finding honesty, instead of the christian honesty were anything that is not an explicit and proven lie is honesty IF you state that you are afraid of the christian god-idea.
Evolution is a process, that doesn’t stop. Humans do alter the environment but, evolution does not stop. Evolution happens because the basic building blocks of life don’t get copied always exactly the same each and every time. That basic part of evolution has no direction or concept of higher, lower, best, worst or, anything else. Those concepts are assigned by humans.
People often only think of evolution as “survival of the fittest” but without human intervention “fittest” (and note in any case “fittest” isn’t the same as best) is only a description of what has a better chance to survive under specific circumstances at specific times. If events in Earth’s history had been different in any number of ways, the “intelligent” species at this time might be somewhat different.
Aren’t you more referring to groups of people being chosen by the processes of the societies that humans have built as opposed to chosen by nature?
If you are referring to skin color here, I have no problem accepting everyone, there just isn’t any significant difference. If you are asking how do I justify accepting christians that won’t quit trying to push their god-idea on everyone else, well, I don’t accept them as being decent people.
Ren,
Well, you had me going there for a moment. Good story.
I hope to never own a Honda Civic, but love driving our little red 1990 Miata, still running like a top after all these years
this reminds me of when people say “well, if we evolved from monkeys then whycome there’s still monkeys?”
like rna2dna said, evolution is not a goal-oriented process. every gene, and every combination of genes that exists in the world right now is equally fit. we can only call a gene combination unfit when it ceases to exist in the world.
that being said, if evolution had a chosen people it would be beetles if not bacteria.
Alatham,
Uh oh, Alatham used the dreaded “rejection of belief,”. Which implies that the ‘belief’ is valid and that one is simply rejecting it.
On the other hand, an absence of belief means I haven’t been indoctrinated into giving the ‘belief’ validity by rejecting it.
God I hate semantics.
Dvan,
I’m no fan of semantics either, but I think we atheists are misunderstood often enough to have to pay attention to it.
And I disagree with you here.
Rejected: cast off as valueless.
Absence: lack; want. OR the state of being away.
Let me clarify. An absence implies some level of ‘wanting,’ or implies that there was something there to begin with. I have no desire for religious belief so I instead cast it off as valueless.
You seem to be saying that your definition is similar to saying “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.” I like that approach, but that only fits with the use of ‘rejection’ and does not fit with ‘absence.’
To me, using ‘absence’ gives the god-belief far more validity than using ‘rejection.’
In the end though, the most generic definition is that atheists are not theists. Maybe that’s the one we should stick to.
Ren,
I disagree. I believe that there can be no valid belief in the supernatural. Anyone who says they believe in the supernatural is really just saying they can’t explain everything.
It implies that there’s something wrong with me because I can’t see what others plainly can. I reject this definition on the grounds that it seems to validate a belief in the supernatural.
Would you prefer to say (1) that Unicorns are missing, or (2) that a belief in Unicorns is unfounded? Saying there is an absence of Unicorns implies #1, but saying you reject a belief in Unicorns implies #2.
As I said before, I don’t like semantics either, but it’s important to communicate our atheism as unambiguously as possible.
What,
Are you proposing that we refer to atheism as an observation of reality? Or that we refer to atheism as a rejection of a particular faulty observation of deities?
Alatham
I am simply suggesting that we just leave the word “belief” out of any description of atheists. I too dislike the word “absence” when referring to atheism.