The subject of Sunday’s Atheists Talk radio (9am Central) will be denialism, in an interview with PalMD. This should be a good one, tune in. Call in and tell him how horrible those vaccines are, too — let’s rile things up.
Our spring break is almost over. I hope none of our students wasted their time fishing for souls for Jesus. Follow that link; it’s a story on Salon.com of a young man who goes undercover at Liberty University and goes on a Spring Break proselytizing trip to Florida. It’s depressing — mindless zealots on fire for the Lord wander the streets, asking people if they’ve found Jesus, and almost always getting turned down. Even the few who say “Hallelujah!” are unlikely to join the church. This is truly desperate angling.
The issue of post-salvation behavior is an interesting one. I thought, when Scott was teaching us to evangelize, that we’d be told to do some sort of follow-up with successful converts, if we had any — guide them to a local church, maybe, or at least take their contact information. But there’s no such procedure. If Jason had decided to get saved (he didn’t), Martina would have led him through the Sinner’s Prayer (“Jesus, I am a sinner, come into my heart and be my Lord and Savior” or some variant thereof), she would have let him know he was saved, perhaps given him some Bible verses to read, and they never would have seen each other again. Cold-turkey evangelism provides the shortest, most non-committal conversion offer of any Western religion — which, I suspect, is part of the appeal.
If the new believer backslides, though, like Jason was suggesting he might, Christians are likely to believe that he wasn’t really saved. False conversions are a glaring wart on the face of Christian evangelism. In the book that accompanies our Way of the Master program, I found several sobering statistics about the percentage of apparent converts who stay involved with the church in the long term, including one from Peter Wagner, a seminary professor in California who estimated that only 3 to 16 percent of the converts at Christian crusades stay involved.
Coincidentally, I received an account of a similar attempt at hooking a Pharyngula reader, EH. It didn’t work.
Not all of my email consists of metaphorical daggers hurled my way. I actually get a fair amount of praise and comments about how I’ve won people over to the cause of atheism — I just tend not to post those, because of my awesome modesty and because you all know this stuff, anyway. This one is interesting because I didn’t convince the fellow to be an atheist, but instead made him think…which is what we’re all after, anyway.
The freethinkers of Montgomery, Alabama are looking to grow. There are lots of you out there, I’m sure — get in touch, link up, build!
I just got home at this absurdly late hour, after an exceptionally miserable long day of screwed-up air travel, but I’m still going to try to get up by 9a to listen to Atheists Talk radio.
There’s a sense of glee in the American atheist community over the results of a recent survey: religion is in decline. As the site summarizes, “Only 1.6 percent of Americans call themselves atheist or agnostic. But based on stated beliefs, 12 percent are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unsure), while 12 percent more are deistic (believe in a higher power but not a personal God). The number of outright atheists has nearly doubled since 2001, from 900 thousand to 1.6 million. Twenty-seven percent of Americans do not expect a religious funeral at their death.” The “New Atheist” approach is working, and more people are coming out of the dark closet of faith and standing in the light.
If you want to play with maps of the data, try
USA Today’s interactive map page or this Google maps page. It’s so nice to see all the growth visually, or the declining numbers of Catholics and Baptists.
Or you can read the take of the Friendly Atheist or Rieux.
Keep it up! There is hope that this world can become a less superstitious place!
A new poll gives me cheerful results:
A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.
Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.
Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.
Keep those godless numbers going up!
NEEERRRRRRRDDDS! They’re turning over the radio show to seriously geeky humanists: Scott Lohman, Minnesota’s King Trek Fan, will be interviewed on Atheists Talk radio on Sunday, at 9am Central time (keep in mind that tonight is the night we jigger our clocks forward an hour, just to make everything a little more confusing).
He just got here, and already Richard Dawkins is stirring things up in Minnesota. He was interviewed on MPR this morning — unfortunately, I had to miss it as I was scrambling to get ready for class — and it sounds like the interviewer was offended. The station live-blogged the interview, and it looks like some of the listeners were offended, too, while others are invigorated.
Get online quick and you might be able to hear the tag-end of the interview.
