I am not at all surprised that I am out-of-step with 92 percent of Americans. I am certain there is no god. I’m only driven to declaring that when there is so much noise from the other side.
World news Feed Article | World news |
By many measures, Americans are strongly religious: 92 percent believe in God, 74 percent believe in life after death and 63 percent say their respective scriptures are the word of God.
But deeper investigation found that more than one in four Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and Orthodox Christians expressed some doubts about God’s existence, as did six in ten Jews.
Another finding almost defies explanation: 21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent “absolutely certain” of it.
It’s funnier that I am out of step with one in five atheists, in that I know what atheism is and they don’t. One can be a believer with doubts (that’s healthy), but a doubter who believes is an agnostic, at best. Of the 8 percent of Americans who don’t believe in God, what percentage are “self-identified atheists”? (Not believing in god isn’t the same as calling yourself an atheist, obviously.) Of that less than 8%, 21% — less than 2% of the whole — aren’t actually part of that 8%, unless this is recursive, in which case there are no non-believers.
Perhaps these ‘atheists’ who believe in god (even with certainty) are actually anti-theists or antaga-gnostics: Those who hate god. I was one of those for a long time. It’s a real waste of energy. peace, mjh
Religion in American Culture — Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
Welcome to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
Based on interviews with more than 35,000 American adults, this extensive survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life details the religious makeup, religious beliefs and practices as well as social and political attitudes of the American public. This online section includes dynamic tools that complement the full report. For a video overview and related material, go to the resource page.
Religion in American Culture — Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
I’ve always
wondered how much response distortion occurs in these polls, with some folks thinking to themselves “maybe if I answer the way I really
think, God will hear me (if such a thing exists) and find out what I really think.”
I know, sounds completely irrational, but this
is homo sapiens we’re talking about here. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts the distortion percentage is fairly large.
And I think
that 21% figure constitutes people who consider the rejection of “organized religion” to be atheism. Hence the “universal spirit”
claptrap.
As for me, I always liked the “radical atheist” answer given by Douglas Adams. It gets past the anti-organized religion
angle and gets at the bigger picture.
P.S.: of course vegetarians have the same definitional problem all the time. “But do you
eat chicken?”…that sort of thing.
I’m not sure he’d go so far as to say the human race is a fluke of the universe, but it
appears that after all was said and done, Einstein ended up an atheist. At least, in a letter written to philosopher Eric Gutkind in
January 1954, a year before his death, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human
weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”