You wouldn’t know it from our political discourse or Sunday morning TV programming, but that’s what the Guardian is reporting:
Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. “It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America,” says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF. The exact number of faithless is unclear. One study by the Pew Research Centre puts them at about 12% of the population, but another by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford puts that figure at around 20%. Most experts agree that the number of secular Americans has probably doubled in the past three decades – growing especially fast among the young. It is thought to be the fastest-growing major “religious” demographic in the country.
It’s odd to be classified with other religions, kinda like classifying not collecting stamps as a hobby. But if our little hell-bound group is growing by leaps and bounds, soon to dominate all of space and time, I can look the other way.
w00t! :)
JT
If we are doing so well, it begs the question regarding sunday morning religious programming….. at what percentage of the population do we start to push back and start to get rid of the likes of _______ ? <– fill in the blank ,televangelism. Is that totally dependent on the amount of money these creeps can rip people off for, to pay for these tv shows? Do we really have to wait until there just isn't enough people to make televangelism a viable business?
I say we increase the pressure, something is working.
Don’t think of it as “a religion”, think of it as “a class of belief that says which religious dogma is wrong”.
Catholic is the belief that non-Catholic religious dogma is wrong.
Hinduism is the belief that non-Hindu religious dogma is wrong.
Atheism is the belief that all religious dogma is wrong.
I like viewing it this way, for more than one reason.
There is little doubt that living in a country that is so “officially” religious makes many people reluctant to “come out” as being atheist. Also, the stigma attached to that word is a huge impediment as well.
I’ve been telling people for several years now that the numbers of the truly non-religious in this country would blow most people away if they only knew the real figures.
Christians are NOT a majority of the American population!
Personally, if I could put a name to it, I believe that the biggest plurality of people regarding religion in this country is a demographic I would like to call the “give-a-shits”. In other words, when it comes to religion, they don’t give a shit, even so much as to even identify themselves as part of one group or another. It just isn’t important to them.
Hence, the difficulty of trying to categorize peoples’ beliefs regarding a belief or non-belief in religion.
Atheism is a religion in a poll makers sense, to fit into a category. People refused to use the number zero when it was first becoming popular for the same reason. How can you count nothing? Is zero really a number, numbers are used to count things and zero doesn’t count anything, it counts nothing.
Let’s be careful with these statistics – they don’t count “atheists” but the “non-religious”, most of whom, in most surveys, still claim a belief in God. We always get over-excited about these stories and fail to read the actual studies. There are far fewer of us than most of us think.