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Sat 15 Sep, 2007 10:34 am
In America, Nonbelievers Find Strength in Numbers
By Jacqueline L. Salmon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2007; A14
A legion of the godless is rising up against the forces of religiosity in American society.
"People who were ashamed to say there is no God now say, 'Wow, there are others out there who think like me, and it feels damned good,' " said Margaret Downey, president of the Atheist Alliance International, whose membership has almost doubled in the past year to 5,200. It has a 500-person waiting list for its convention in Crystal City later this month.
Focusing fresh attention on atheism in the United States was the publication last week of a book about Mother Teresa that lays out her secret struggle with her doubts about God. "Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light" has led some high-profile atheists to say that her spiritual wavering was actually atheism.
"She couldn't bring herself to believe in God, but she wished she could," said Christopher Hitchens, a Washington-based columnist and author of "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," the latest atheist bestseller.
In the past two years, five books touting atheism have hit the bestseller lists, outselling such religious tomes as Pope Benedict XVI's book on Jesus, and popular Christian novelist Tim LaHaye's latest book, "Kingdom Come," according to Nielsen BookScan.
Representatives of atheist and humanist groups say the books probably haven't converted many religious people. But, said Lori Lipman Brown, a lobbyist for the Secular Coalition for America, which represents eight atheist or humanist organizations, the books "tremendously increase the visibility of nontheist rights."
Nontheist is another term for atheist, or someone who does not believe in a supreme being.
A study released in June by the Barna Group, a religious polling firm, found that about 5 million adults in the United States call themselves atheists. The number rises to about 20 million -- about one in every 11 Americans -- if people who say they have no religious faith or are agnostic (they doubt the existence of a God or a supreme deity) are included.
They tend to be more educated, more affluent and more likely to be male and unmarried than those with active faith, according to the Barna study. Only 6 percent of people over 60 have no faith in God, and one in four adults ages 18 to 22 describe themselves as having no faith.
Javier Sanchez-Yoza, 21, a biology major at George Mason University, is a former born-again Christian who gave up his belief in God two years ago and is starting an atheist club at school. He turned atheist after growing skeptical of Christian friends' arguments for creationism.
"If they can be wrong about creationism, what else can they be wrong about?" Sanchez-Yoza said.
For the younger generations, charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida. CampQuest, an Albany-based group, runs five overnight camps around the country for atheist kids.
The budget of the Council for Secular Humanism has climbed 40 percent in the past two years, approaching $8 million this year. The council opened a public-policy think tank in Washington last year to push leaders of both parties for policies based on the humanist principles of "science, reason and secularism" instead of religious faith, said Paul Kurtz, the council chairman.
In March, Congress had its first self-avowed atheist when Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) said he does not believe in a supreme being.
The movement formed its first political action committee in 2005, when American Atheists, which advocates for the separation of church and state, formed the Godless Americans PAC.
Despite atheists' increased vocalism and visibility, it seems that the rest of America isn't buying in.
In a nationwide poll last year by University of Minnesota researchers, Americans rated atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society." They also associated atheists with everything from criminal behavior to rampant materialism. According to a recent USA Today/Gallup Poll, more than half would not vote for an atheist for president.
Maggie Ardiente, 24, of Silver Spring faced the disapproval of her family and some friends because of her atheist beliefs. "It's hard for them even to comprehend," she said.
Be Rational
Consult any statistics.
Non-believers are slowly and stedily are on the record..
Non-belivers have got no lobby religious salesman like
Pope, Dalai lama, Sankarachariya, or xyz impersonal intellectuals.
Quote:Non-belivers have got no lobby religious salesman like
Pope, Dalai lama, Sankarachariya, or xyz impersonal intellectuals/
you're unfamiliar with csi then.
i have nothing against groups arguing for secular education, and there's a place for arguing against pseudoscience, but they seem to be on a very "religious" crusade to wipe out any non-scientific thinking on planet earth.
kind of pathetic, in my view- and a bit scary. reminds me of bookburners. and i'm not talking about the television show, i'm referring to:
http://csicop.org - and if you need to know how overzealous they are, check out my new favorite offering from them: the cover of "the secular society
and its enemies"
http://www.centerforinquiry.net/media/secularsociety/secularsociety-ad.jpg
what... the... hell? they do put out skeptical inquirer, which is a good magazine, but i wouldn't give these people any money if i had all the funds on earth- they're the closest thing atheism has to a cult, and i don't like cults.
I agree to disagree with you while I uphold your beliefs .
My wife is a Christian.
I am an athiest.
Today I had been to the local churrch.
There were less than 30 people( including me)
Some months back there were around 100 people.
Why?
I wish not to influence the people to become non-blievers ( that job is being done nicely by religious heads)
Let me draw your kind attention to the relevant statistics by the religious insitution.
Religious extremism boosts ranks of atheists
Religious extremism boosts ranks of atheists
By Mary Jordan
The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 09/16/2007
Burgess Hill, England - Every morning on his walk to work, high school teacher Graham Wright recited a prayer and asked God for strength in the day ahead. Then two years ago, he just stopped.
Wright said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a negative influence in his life and the world. Although he had once considered becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in God's name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem-cell research.
"I stopped praying because I lost my faith," said Wright, 59. "Now I truly loathe any sight or sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe."
Wright is now an avowed atheist and part of a growing number of vocal nonbelievers in Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic, membership in once-quiet groups of nonbelievers is rising, and books attempting to debunk religion have been surprise best sellers, including "The God Delusion," by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins.
New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious blogs are expanding across the Internet and, in general, more people are publicly saying they have no religious faith.
More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of people are saying they don't believe there is a heaven or a hell or anything other than this life.
9/11 changed viewpoints
Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the "nonreligious movement" to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning - and rejecting - all religion.
"This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment," said Terry Sanderson, president of the National Secular Society of Britain. "Religion in this country was very quiet until Sept. 11, and now it is at the center of everything."
Since the 2001 attacks, a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London transport system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid, Spain, trains in 2004.
People apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year for trying to blow up transatlantic jetliners. And this month in Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned to blow up American facilities there.
Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate Islam, Europe's fastest-growing religion, which has as many as 20 million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to wear in classrooms and court.
Religious militancy
Christian fundamentalist groups that want to halt certain science research, reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution in schools are also angering people, say Sanderson and others.
"There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy," Sanderson said.
Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics say it's impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view. Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife. Others are not sure what they believe.
The term atheist can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don't believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists, freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.
"Where religion is weak, people don't feel a need to organize against it," said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about atheism around the globe.
Fighting violent tenets
One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe: the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded this year in Germany, the group now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the continent.
"You can't tell us religion is peaceful - look around at the misery it is causing," said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group's British chapter.
"We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth," but to make it a private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.
The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme and want, for example, people to blot out the words "In God We Trust" from every dollar bill they carry.
Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and celebrate, as they say, "this one life we know."
Re: Religious extremism boosts ranks of atheists
BumbleBeeBoogie wrote:Religious extremism boosts ranks of atheists.
In other words, religious extremism is resulting in the natural 'herding of cats' (congregating of athiests).
I guess if a sufficient force of irrational fundamentalists begins to gather, it's only natural for a counter-force of rational atheists to counter-gather. Yin-Yang and all that.
Re: Religious extremism boosts ranks of atheists
rosborne979 wrote:I guess if a sufficient force of irrational fundamentalists begins to gather, it's only natural for a counter-force of rational atheists to counter-gather. Yin-Yang and all that.
at first, it might be a bit frightening, even repulsive, to think we might all be so intimately linked.
I suspect agnostics and atheists (me, waves) are not very much joiners. That might be interesting to research, for someone besides myself. Perhaps that's been studied already (and it might be a chicken and egg phenomenon). It might vary in the US and elsewhere. Or in regions of the US. Saying that, I've joined some efforts on occasion, and may yet again.
(I posted without reading everything else but the first post, back tomorrow).
I find myself in Austin Texas on a business trip today, and to my surprise, what do I see on local access TV but an Atheist TV show.
http://www.atheist-community.org
It's two guys sitting at a table taking phone calls and fielding questions on atheism and religion. We don't even have this up near Boston. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, but I was.
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