IF YOU’RE NOT AN ATHEIST, YOU’RE A DELUSIONAL, CHILD-LIKE CRETIN!
See also Why faith and science will remain worlds apart.
Pew study confirms non-religious are significant bloc
Survey shows Those Choosing No Religion Outnumber Those of Every Single Faith (But One)
The most detailed estimates to date of Americans’ religious affiliations reports that a significant portion of U.S. citizens claim “none of the above,” placing the unaffiliated second only to Roman Catholics in number. Monday’s release of the 35,000-respondent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that 16.1 percent of Americans have no particular religion at all, while 23.9 percent identify themselves as Catholic. The next largest “belief group” is Evangelical Baptist at 10.8 percent. All other denominational groupings show in the single digits or less.
The study also shows the number of Americans who identify as atheist or agnostic has risen from 3.2 percent to 4 percent, while a “remarkably high” 44 percent have rejected the religion placed on them in childhood.
“People are finding out that what they’ve been handed in youth doesn’t work, or isn’t important enough to defend when confronted with marriage or some other life situation that forces them to examine it,” said Paul Kurtz, founder of the Council for Secular Humanism. “But when the shuffling is done, this study shows that three people are dropping religion altogether for each one gaining a faith.”
The study also confirms the previous 2004 Pew Forum-University of Akron study findings that those who identify as strictly secular comprise more than 10 percent of the population, only on a much larger scale.
“The breakdown is interesting, in that it distinguishes between the vaguely religious and those who fall squarely in the secular camp,” Kurtz said. “But I would venture to say that there is a significant number of Americans who sympathize with secularism, but who may still be nominal members of religious organizations. It’s apparent that a significant percentage of the population identifies with secularism, and I trust politicians will bear this in mind.”
Susan Jacoby on American Unreason
Susan Jacoby, author and program director of the Center for Inquiry/New York City, has recently been seen making the rounds in the national media promoting her new book “The Age of American Unreason” (published by Pantheon). Jacoby’s trenchant analysis of America’s banal and disintegrative culture (and public sphere) is at once both arresting and troubling.
From the publisher:
This impassioned, tough-minded work of contemporary history paints a disturbing portrait of a mutant strain of public ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism that has developed over the past four decades and now threatens the future of American democracy. Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society—on the political right and the left. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.
Hear Susan Jacoby:
Interviewed on Bill Moyers Journal
NPR’s “Book Tour”
US News & World Report interview
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