We’re a long way from the day when the United States could reasonably be described as a non-religious nation. But we’re getting there. It’s sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees, but the longer-term trends are pretty unambiguous. (Which is not to say it’s impossible they will someday reverse course.) I suspect that, hand-wringing about arrogance and “fundamentalist atheists” notwithstanding, the exhortations of Richard Dawkins and his ilk have had something to do with it. If nothing else, they provide clear examples of people who think it’s perfectly okay to not believe in God, and be proud of it. That’s not an insignificant factor. It’s most likely a small perturbation on top of more significant long-term cultural trends, but it’s there.
Newsweek reports the facts: the number of self-identified Christians in the U.S. has fallen by 10 points over the last twenty years, from 86 to 76 percent. The number of people who are unaffiliated with any religion has jumped forward, from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent today. And the number who are willing to label themselves “atheists” has, it’s reasonable to say, skyrocketed — from 1 million in 1990 to 3.6 million today. That’s still less than two percent of the population, so let’s not get carried away. But it’s double the number of Episcopalians! (I was raised as an Episcopalian. Always been a shameless front-runner.)
Here’s how Jon Meacham sums it up in Newsweek:
There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.
I’ve said it before, but it’s time for us atheists to diversify our portfolio, as far as popular culture is concerned — skepticism and mocking of creationists are all well and good, but we need to put forward a positive agenda for living our lives without the comforting untruths handed down by religion. I’m doing my part by joining the Epicurus fan page on Facebook.
I’m with you in spirit.
But — I work in a public position (in an elementary school). I worry that being open about my atheism could indirectly get me fired. We may be moving to a post-Christian America, but I’m still pretty hesitant about making it publicly and loudly known that I’m an atheist.
This isn’t just the usual caution about the church-state separation that my job requires, either. Christians have no problem identifying themselves where I work. I don’t think that it as easy for atheists.
And today, it’s essentially impossible to keep one’s private and public life separate on the internets, so I have to be rather less vociferous than I would like.
I admit that being on the faculty of a university makes life easier; announcing that one is an atheist is usually greeted by a shrug and a “so what”.
But yes, those who work in other professions and live in other areas (e. g., the Bible belt) are probably wise to be prudent.
I got my Ph.D. at the University of Texas. Most of the faculty that I ran into were non religious. But for a time I lived in the country (30 miles away) and the difference in culture was stark, to say the least.
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I agree it’s a positive trend that can strongly benefit mankind… dare I say even crucial to our survival as a species? I bet this shift in mindset was greatly helped by the internet.
Being a non-believer and looking at existence in a scientific way is more important today than ever before. It’s important we are comfortable and strong in our understanding but not arrogant. It’s true that changing the way things are in the world involves changing ourselves… not in “the secret” sort of way…oh no- I’m not going in that road – 😀 – but I do recognize that we can occasionally start chain reactions.
It’s important to not be shy about being an atheist or non-believer. Does this arise because saying we are atheists implies that we are immoral? That we are less compassionate? Feynman answers this well. We see more of the bigger and deeper picture, which should, in effect, make us more moral and compassionate. I strongly believe that one’s scientific and philosophical assumptions plays an immense role in shaping who we are and how we shape what’s around us. I’ve noticed a huge change in myself by being vegetarian for a little over a month, perspectives have radically change for the better, I hope.
> We’re a long way from the day when the US could reasonably be described as a non-religious nation
And why is this an accomplishment exactly? Should I really care if the US or any other country to that extend, is religious or not? Come on we have bigger problems than that.
Nevertheless I have to admit that the less of these religious braindead Creationists are out there the better. I can see no other reason for this.
> people who think it’s perfectly okay to not believe in God, and be proud of it
And I’m proud of being a fan of Man United, lets celebrate everybody 😀 Come on grow up…
I’m an atheist, but I certainly don’t want to be a part of any kind of movement. To suggest that there is an atheist movement is to say that atheism is, in fact, its own religion, with its own rules and dogma.
Furthermore, when an atheist takes a cheap shot at Christianity, they’re ‘enlightened intellectualism’ has unfortunately devolved into bigotry. Too many atheists are merely the antithesis of fundamentalists, equally annoying but without the concentrated power base. Suggesting we band together lends credence to a future American Inquisition.
To put it another way, when someone tells me I can be ‘saved’, I tell them ‘no thanks’ and they typically don’t push the issue (tolerance). Conversely, atheists, many of them younger, beat that dead horse until they feel satisfied that they’ve given their best shot in shaking that person’s belief structure (intolerance).
There are better ways to make sure your influence is felt. Don’t like the makeup of a school board? Work to get on it. Don’t like the way a textbook reads? Lobby for a change. And, in the end, teach your children to never stop asking questions and allow them to make their own choices. They’ll be better for it.
The real difference, it seems to me, is not between the religious and the non-religious, but between people who are satisfied entirely by hedonistic, small-fry pleasures and those who require a more “cosmic” kind of happiness.
What the religious fundamentalists argue, wrongly, is that nonbelievers are all mere hedonists and epicurians. Indeed, there are more than a few hedonists in their own ranks.
What science has provided for many of us is an alternative path to that cosmic happiness, toward the sense of deep satisfaction that comes from learning about and finding our place in the universe, and from the growing knowledge that we sentient creatures are extremely special and rare, being the only pieces of matter that have the ability to wonder.
There would be much to gain from emphasizing the hedonism-cosmic happiness dichotomy over the religious-nonbelieving dichotomy. There’s a bridge between peoples that is just waiting to be used.
As for the increasing number of “unaffiliated,” pah. I saw a poll recently that the unaffiliated are actually more likely to believe in superstition, pseudoscience, and hocus pocus than Christians are. If all you do is remove the structure of a formal religion, you just get chaos.
The real goal should be to teach people to exercise doubt, skepticism, and critical thinking skills, and to be terrified of falling into the comforting grip of any all-encompassing ideology, be it fundamentalist Christianity, communism, or libertarian free-market fundamentalism.
If I had the choice between eliminating all the world’s religions, or eliminating this human instinct toward the comfort of doubtless rigid orthodoxy, I’d eliminate the latter in a heart-beat. Sure, then you’d still have hundreds of millions of moderate Christians, Jews, Muslims, and so forth all over the world. But who cares?
I really have trouble understanding why some self described atheists are so comfortable with conflating their atheism with science/rational thought. Pontificating that there is no god takes an equally large leap of faith as pontificating that there is a god. And really, why is there the need to share one’s faith; whether that faith is in nothing or in something? From where I am sitting, hearing about somebody’s personal beliefs about existence is lame. Very few people actually enjoy being preached at no matter what the sermon is about.
Quite likely, Ryan, it’s because atheism is a rational conclusion for many of us. When we examine critically the claims of religion and find them wanting, we decrease our acceptance of an interventionist God. And with the teachings of religions that we either need to obey or commune with an interventionist god we find little purpose in adding religion to our lives if we don’t see any sort of sign of such an entity.
I don’t see how it takes such a huge leap of faith to believe that there is no God when that fact is consistent with the evidence. Faith is to believe despite contrary evidence, you know.
> Faith is to believe despite contrary evidence
No my friend, that’s stupidity or at best “blindness”.
The thing is that there is no evidence for or against the existence of God and I really doubt if science will provide it in either direction. We are able to calculate some weird quantity like g-2 to 10 digits of accuracy, so what? Does it mean that there is a God? Does it mean there is NO God? My guess is neither of the two.
Let’s not exaggerate here. It is not and will not be anything like it was during the Communist takeover in Eastern Europe when religious people were attacked or persecuted for their beliefs. There are already many countries in Europe that point the way to the future of America as a less religious nation, like the U.K. for instance (where I come from) where non-believers now make up around half the population.
Even with such a large number of non-believers, the amount of militancy is vanishingly small — basically the same people who hit the headlines over here in the US, give or take a few. The rest either just ignore the religious community, or treat them with indifference, tolerance and ambivalence.
I think the big difference with the US is a political one. The American political scene has a much larger and stronger conservative vein running through it, and the confluence of right wing politics and fundamentalism that resulted in the rise to power of the Religious Right has cast the conflict between belief and non-belief in a much starker light. More atheists are militant because they have more to be militant about — creationism, ID, stem-cell research, abstinence-only sex education, and so on. None of these things is a major issue in the UK — even the abortion debate is drive more by arguments when the fetus considered to be viable as opposed to religious arguments of personhood.
If, as I hope, the demographic changes result in a weakening of the political sway of the Religious Right then, as in other countries, there will be less for atheists to be militant about. But we’re still a long way from that happening, given that I fully expect at least one more round of right-wing Christian fundamentalist candidates to run strong for the Republican nomination (Palin and/or Jindal).
That is one of the lamest videos I have ever seen, at least in the context of this post. I do however agree that friends and “self-sufficiency” are the main ingredients of happiness. I am sure most religions do make the point about friends and “self-sufficiency”. And they package it much better too.
As for reflection, the third ingredient mentioned in the video, I am not too sure it always leads to happiness. In fact reflection, if done properly, is probably a major source of unhappiness unless you count rationalization as reflection, in which case most religions do a brilliant job at it.
So, with this lame video I do not see any reason for people to abandon one lame set of beliefs and adopt another set of lame beliefs.
Not buying It: “Conversely, atheists, many of them younger, beat that dead horse until they feel satisfied that they’ve given their best shot in shaking that person’s belief structure (intolerance).” I think you are quite right and I myself have been guilty of the charge several times. But to be fair, the stakes involved for a religious person in converting a non-believer is much too less than the other way round. When When the stakes were higher a few centuries ago, a lot more than “beating a dead horse” was done.
There’s not a problem with religion or religious ideas in the world, there’s a problem with shitheads. It’s only continually ameliorated through hard work and reason. Things have gotten a bit better in some of the world.
Dawkins helps teach us that even without religion, people are still assholes. Imagine if he were alive in the Spanish inquisition?
I suspect that the increase in self-identified atheists — and in the numbers of non-religious generally, have less to do with the likes of Richard Dawkins than with the likes of James Dobson, Albert Mohler, and Joseph Ratzinger (the current Pope Benedict), who have had considerable success in tying the brand name of “Christianity” with a combination of religious fundamentalism and political conservatism — which came to the point where the professed, practicing Catholic Democratic nominee for the President of the United States, John Kerry, was denied communion (or threatened with such) by bishops in his own church because he did not take the “correct” conservative political positions.
As the conservative ideology supported by the religious right shows more and more signs of collapse, many of those who in previous times would have identified themselves as religious or Christian may be more and more unwilling to tie themselves in this way to those who claim the only *true* Christians are those who think, vote, and act as the most conservative Republicans do.
Religion will never go away. You cannot prove that there is no God. Also, religion will at least be used as an answer to the question “What happens after I die?” Some people may be perturbed at the idea that after death there is nothing, pure nothingness for all eternity because our sensing, thinking, self-aware bodies are dead. They can’t (nor want to) imagine such a fate, so they believe in an afterlife, leading to a religion. So the correct position for non-believers is that of agnosticism, not atheism, for we simply do not know. Neither do we know what lies “beyond” death, so at least that will make some people want to believe in religion.
There is as much evidence for the existence of God as there is for the existence of unicorns. It is just as “irrational” not to believe in unicorns as it is not to believe in God. (Replace “unicorns” with whatever object of fantasy you wish until the point is made.) It’s more correct to say “there might as well not be a God” than “there is no God” from the empirical view of things, but the two are functionally identical, given the current extent of our knowledge of the universe. There’s a difference between believing in “no God” and not believing in God; the latter merely recognizes the unfulfilled burden of proof on the part of those asserting God, whereas the former is an assertion in itself.
As far as atheism putting forward a positive agenda: it’s not atheism’s place to do that. Atheists are not one unified group; people have different reasons for not believing in God, and all that unites them is their minority status. There are many atheists who have similar reasons for not believing (rational and empirical concerns), which can be summed up under the philosophy of freethought. That subset of atheists _should_ put forward this view as an alternative to religious ones, because it is an actual philosophy and therefore has the ability to compete in that field.
Personal question to Sean, because I am insatiably curious… Why aren’t you a Bright?
http://www.the-brights.net/
anonyme — I suppose I am a Bright, by the stated definition (naturalistic worldview, etc.). But I’m not sure what the benefit of joining groups like this might be, and I’m very sure that attaching the label “Brights” to people with naturalistic worldviews was one of the worst PR moves of all time.
I will say it again: you cannot prove God does not exist. Nor can you prove that unicorns do not exist. Perhaps they exist on some unseen planet. Or perhaps they exist on a planet in a universe which is part of the landscape predicted by string theory.
Later,
ree ree
Sean,
What do you think will “happen” to “you” “after” death?
Atheists, or at least atheists who spend more than a few moments thinking about this, will agree that “we simply do not know”. Richard Dawkins himself has said this on more than one occasion. The difference between atheists and agnostics is that while agnostics will usually hedge and stop at “we just don’t know” or “the jury’s still out”, atheists will argue that since there is no scientific evidence pointing to the existence of the supernatural, it’s highly unlikely (but not impossible) that it does exist.
So atheism is a perfectly ration position to take — you just have to use a definition that hasn’t been concocted by the religious right.
(Ugh! Sorry about the formatting — the second block and the last block are my comments)
Yup — I hated the term the first time I heard it being used. In my mind, there is nothing wrong with “atheist”, but if you think that may be too much to swallow for your audience, then “non-believer” will probably be a little more palatable for them. (I suspect because they will think they still have a chance at converting you). “Rationalist” and “secularist” are a couple of others, but sound a too clumsy to me and you would probably still have to explain your non-belief anyway.
Brights are just what Dawkins calls freethinkers. I prefer the latter term, personally.
ree ree: Say it all you want; it has no relevance to the lack of belief of myself or any other rational, freethinking atheist. You seem to have either missed or chosen to ignore my explanation of the difference between “not believing in God” and “believing in no God.”
Are you trying to say that those calling themselves atheists should also call themselves aunicornists, and so forth? That may be true, but it’s just not very important; being an atheist is a notable distinction from most of society, while being an aunicornist isn’t. Furthermore, I would think that we could sum up all such lacks of belief (they are infinite, since people can continuously invent objects of fantasy) under a term like “afantasist.” Of course, doing so puts us right back at the better-known synonym of this idea, “freethinker.” That’s my second point from the previous post: atheism is _not_ a philosophy in and of itself, just a distinction from those whose philosophies involve a certain conspicuous element (God).