Wednesday, January 30, 2008

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.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Question of the day - is atheism a religion?

Cynthia's and Lisa's comments to my last post led me to this question - is atheism a religion? I was raised a Roman Catholic, but I've been an atheist since I was 12 or 13. At the time, I was going through my confirmation and was also an altar boy (one thing about being an altar boy is that you become very familiar with the New Testament, much to the dismay of religious folks who have argued with me). This left me a lot of time to sit in church and think about religion. As I started thinking (true to that bumper sticker warning about "praying in schools and thinking in churches") and asking questions, my faith evaporated (if I ever did believe, it's hard to say what belief meant to me as a child). My anti-conversion (aversion?) was quick and clear.


I don't think atheism is a version of religion. Religions are based on an acceptance of things that can't be proven. Atheism is based on a refusal to accept anything that can't be proven. There are many different religions (okay, I'm stating the obvious) that have varying views of supreme beings, holy books, etc. But they are all alike in their reliance on faith. Atheism is unlike any religion in that it’s based on the scientific method. But the opinion that "atheism is just another religion" is something I hear a lot. I think there are two reasons for that.


One is the way religions compete with each other to win "mindshare". They evangelize to win converts and establish themselves as the "one true faith". Atheism, because it is a challenge to any religious doctrine, appears to be a religious contender, i.e. "if atheism challenges what my faith professes, it must be a competing religion". But there's no atheist church, there are no sacred atheist texts, there's no atheist creed (but I do think that oxymoron would be a good name for a rock band, The Atheist Creed :). One does not "join" atheism (religion comes from the Latin ligare:
to bind or join), atheists remain apart.


The other reason religious people think atheism is a religion is because they think it takes faith to believe there is no God. I've often been told that, since I can't prove that there is no God, I must base my lack of belief on faith. Hence Atheism is a faith. The problem with that logic is that you can’t equate the proof of a negative with the proof of a positive. The scientific method isn't built on disproving negative claims (prove to me there are no UFOs, prove to me that astrology doesn't work), but instead on proving positive claims. Atheists don’t claim that there is no God, but rather don’t believe in God because there is no testable proof of his/her existence. Atheism is a lack of faith in the supernatural, not a faith in "no God".


So which is it for you – is atheism just another religion, or is it a way of thinking that is different from any religion? (and what about agnostics - confused, fence-straddlers, or just too nice to take a stand?)

Monday, January 21, 2008

Tired of all this God stuff...

While the media pay a ridiculous amount of uncritical attention to religion in politics and public life, they ignore the gazillions of violations of the Constitutional separation of church & state made today by politicians and tax-exempt religious organizations. Politicos (Bush, Romney, Huckabee, Dobson, Perkins et al) who rail against secularism, and who try to cram God and Jesus into every public nook & cranny should be portrayed in the press for what they are - anti-American demagogues. Every time some religious huckster proclaims that "the founding fathers understood America to be a Christian nation" or that "our Constitution has to be amended to fit God's standards" the media should reply "That's utter hogwash! The founding fathers intended no such thing! You are a bunch of constitution-warping charlatans!". Jefferson was crystal clear in his writings - he left God and Jesus out on purpose. Jefferson explained that the 1st amendment's religious freedom clause means exactly what it says - that our public space should be secular and free of religion. Jefferson hated the idea of religion mixing with politics, and he hated the idea that politicians would wrap themselves in churchical vestments. Several quotes of note (from the many, many available here - http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1650.htm):

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21

"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.

The religious right counts on the meekness of the media and Joe Bob citizen's ignorance of the the Constitution, as they gleefully tear down the Constitutional wall of separation between church and state. The "Christian" proclamations of Huckabee, Romney, Thompson et al. are more than just tactics in the campaign game (the legacy of Karl Rove), they're part of a theocratic push to deny Jefferson and establish The United States of Jesus. As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, America is not to be a Christian or any other religious flavor of nation, and they would have been dismayed to hear Romney's campaign assurances that Mormons aren't devil worshipers (thank god for that :) because they established in article 6 of the Constitution that there is to be no religious test for political office. Not even for devil worshipers. Every time some politician claims that God is on our side the media should cry out, with megaphones and 72 point fonts "No sir, you are wrong! There's no God in the Constitution and America is a secular nation! Jefferson wrote the 1st amendment to keep folks like you from trampling on the rights of Jews, Muslims, Zoroastrians, atheists, etc. with those big clunky Christian Majority ($19.95 at Walmart) sandals. Now cut it out."

Or maybe we should hold a seance, and bring Jefferson back from the dead to explain these things for himself...?

JR