I was all set to strike out in a new Blog direction – perhaps talk about the perils (to Democrats) of impeachment or the tragedy of Hillary, but there were some interesting points made in people’s comments on post #2 about atheism that I can’t resist responding to. So bear with me, for one more Blog post on atheism.

Lisa and Chrissy both asked a version of the question “is it really that difficult living in America as an atheist?”. For me, it’s not difficult at all. I am what I am and that’s all what I am, etc (notice that my arguments always sound stronger when I quote a great thinker like Popeye). I do have to admit that I tend to downplay my atheism when I’m with people that I don’t know well, or who I know are religious. I do that not to avoid a debate (I find debates delectable, like pistachios or pastrami) but to avoid offending. Back when I was a young whipper-snapper, more prone to shooting my mouth off, I found that people were put off by the very mention of atheism. The times I mentioned it in a group it was followed by an uncomfortable silence, an uneasiness. I’m not sure what was going on there, but nowadays I downplay it except when I’m with close friends (or people who really piss me off).

So why do Americans’ attitudes toward religion and atheists matter? There are two reasons, for me. The first I already covered in post #1. The second is that there’s nothing that Americans hate more than an atheist, not even African-American lesbian Mormons (really). In polls asking Americans who they are least likely to pick to be President, atheists are number 1! (you can read more here : http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/07/22/weekinreview/22luo.graphic.ready.html) Americans are less likely to vote for an atheist than an African American. Or a woman. Or a Mormon. Or a Jew. Or a homosexual. Or a Muslim. I don’t understand why not believing in a supreme being is the factor most likely to keep one out of the White House, not when there are so many other, better reasons to not vote for someone. Think how much better off we’d be right now if Americans had this same aversion to bass-fishing Texans who clear brush?

Ronn says that atheists are just as dumb as religious people. That got me to wondering - “is that really true”? I don’t know any dumb atheists, and I do know some dumb religious people (is it possible that I just happen to know the smart atheists?). I did some research (Google makes everything so much easier). It turns out that, as a group, atheists ARE smarter than religious people – by any number of measures. The correlation between non-belief and intelligence (or education) has been studied quite a lot over the past 80 years. Study after study shows that atheists score significantly higher on various IQ tests and have higher levels of education than theists (summaries and references to many of these studies are just below). Not only that, but most scientists are atheists (I was hoping to directly refute Ronn’s other claim – that atheism isn’t based on the scientific method, but I couldn’t find any data for that, so I’m hoping that y’all don’t notice). The data below are interesting, but what they reveal baffles me. Who are these people? Can I meet the college graduates who still believe in satanic possession? Why do more people believe in heaven than believe in hell – aren’t they a matched pair, like shoes? Angels, really?

Scientific American, September 1999 - "Whereas 90% of the general population has a distinct belief in a personal god and a life after death, only 40% of scientists on the B.S. level favor this belief in religion and merely 10 % of those who are considered 'eminent' scientists believe in a personal god or in an afterlife."

Terman, 1959 - Studied group with IQ's over 140. Of men, 10 percent held strong religious belief, of women 18 percent. Sixty-two percent of men and 57 percent of women claimed "little religious inclination" while 28 percent of the men and 23 percent of the women claimed religion was "not at all important."

Pew - A national survey by the Pew Research Center found that 92 percent of respondents who had less than a high school education believed in heaven as a real place, while this dropped to 73 percent for respondents with a postgraduate education. The percentage who accepted hell as an actual place fell from 80 percent for non-high school graduates to 56 percent for persons with a postgraduate education. And the same applies to belief in angels and the devil as materially real beings. Roughly 20 to 30 percent more of the least-educated respondents believe in angels than is true of the most well-educated ones. Possession by the devil is especially steeply graded by education. A recent Gallup poll revealed that a majority (or 56 percent) of the less than high school educated respondents believe that "people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil" while only 22 percent of the more than college-educated respondents do.

In 1975, Norman Poythress studied a sample of 234 US college undergraduates, grouping them into relatively homogeneous religious types based on the similarity of their religious beliefs, and compared their personality characteristics. He found that "Literally-oriented religious Believers did not differ significantly from Mythologically-oriented Believers on measures of intelligence, authoritarianism, or racial prejudice. Religious Believers as a group were found to be significantly less intelligent and more authoritarian than religious Skeptics." He used SAT's as a measure of intelligence for this study. ^[3]

Brown and Love, 1951 – A study at the University of Denver compared the IQ test scores and religious beliefs of 613 male and female students. The mean test scores of non-believers was 119 points, and for believers it was 100. The non-believers ranked in the 80th percentile, and believers in the 50th

Nature - 23 July 1998 - A recent survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences showed that 72% are outright atheists, 21% are agnostic and only 7% admit to belief in a personal God.