We’re here
Ron Aronson points out that atheists and secularists get undercounted in the US.
Surveys regularly receive front-page coverage for reporting, as the 2008 Pew U.S. Religious Landscape Survey did, that nearly all Americans believe in God. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life concluded that 92% of Americans are believers and that only 5% of Americans don’t believe in God…But something is wrong with this picture. It erases vast numbers of Americans…It encourages the sense that there are two kinds of Americans, the overwhelming majority who believe and belong, and those few do not believe, and are outsiders. But the conventional wisdom that nearly all Americans believe in God is wrong.
A senior fellow at Pew says the issue is: What does one want to know? Yes it is, so one wonders why so many people who run opinion surveys want to know that nearly everyone believes in something that can (at the price of radical oversimplification and obliteration of distinctions) be called ‘God.’
This is exactly the point, which suggests that depending on the purposes of the study — and how the questions are posed — religion can appear more or less widespread, and secularists can be made to virtually disappear or to appear as a major component of contemporary American life.
Why does it matter? Because secularists (to say nothing of atheists) get ignored in US politics and discourse, while religious influence over laws and institutions keeps growing. Even believers shouldn’t want God making the laws, because God is completely unaccountable.
“At work, they get used to God-talk as an unstated norm, having to decide again and again whether to “out” themselves or to just remain silent.”
This is what I struggle with all the time. Here in Australia I don’t have to worry about offending Christians, but I have put many people offside for saying things like “I don’t think astrology is true” or “No, I don’t think co-incidences are meaningful” or “Sorry but I think Zeitgeist the movie is full of factual errors and fallacious reasoning”. I get labeled argumentative, confrontational or close-minded. I have noticed it doesn’t matter how polite or well-spoken I am, I am nearly always seen as rude.
I think it’s important that we are able to have open conversations with people about why we believe what we believe and why we think what we think. I don’t think we can leave it up to public discourse alone to take up the fight because I think those “water-cooler conversations” are actually really important in shaping people’s ideas. I try and encourage people that having these sorts of conversations makes life interesting and purposeful, and that “arguments” are not necessarily bad. It’s difficult because disagreement is seen as socially undesirable, and most people would rather be popular than right. I wonder if it’s possible to shift people’s perceptions so that disagreement about ideas is seen as not only enjoyable but necessary?
Rose, I find the same. I don’t get offended by non-belief but by unfair stereotyping. The core ‘expectation’ in the Australian work and general social scene is that your religion is not to be pushed down others throats. Even evangelists teaching how to evangelise operate with this.
And wow, to question ‘alternative’ medicine! So many people make a buck out of this, so many vested interests.
Its my opinion that in the 1970s we were taught a new core value of open-mindedness. Sadly, that value has resulted in many minds so open their brain has fallen out.
There were a whole suite of things included in teaching that value (I was a teenager then and actually watched public television). Racism was deprecated, gays were just like us, divorce was regrettable but better for the parties than the alternatives; and ‘alternative medicine’ and von Danikenesque theories of any kind were given airtime without any attempt to teach how to tell fantasy from reality.
Ron, I enjoyed your article tremendously. I’ve always suspected the “social desirability” aspect was at work, but until your article, I hadn’t seen anyone discuss it so openly and cogently.
I wish USA Today would be ballsy enough to print it in the paper, too.
It is on the increase, I think. Like Dawkins and Dennett say, memes are mind-viruses that can spread rapidly. Religion and all forms of “woo” offer people a security blanket and make them feel special in the universe. “Woo” allows people to think they are privileged with special knowledge (unlike the unenlightened masses), so it’s no wonder it’s spreading rapidly in secular places like Australia to fill the void left by religion.
To be honest, I think I can speak with some insight on the matter because I went through a year or two of a “spiritual phase”, albeit more of a flirtation really. In some ways I’m quite embarrassed by it, in other ways I think perhaps I do have some insight into how it feels to be caught in an “intellectual blackhole” (as Stephen Law refers to it).
I only wish someone had bailed me up directly and explained about reason and rationality explicitly . . . I suppose in a way Richard Dawkins did when I stumbled across the “God Delusion”. I’ve since started doing philosophy at uni, and I only wish I had started sooner. I’m sick of people giving Dawkins such a hard time, because to me he’s a bit of a liberator.
G Tingey, wow, dowsing! Wonder what they were up to. I have an Uncle, no slouch, a poet and activist all his life. He is also a gold prospector, and his technique is dowsing. I won’t go into the details but as a geologist I was privileged to test him out in the gold mine I was responsible for. When he didn’t set the situation up, dowsing did not cut the mustard.
Ah, dowsing. Dawlins seemed quite sympathetic to these eccentrics, who are probably nice people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4MPz8h9gYY
I watched a few documentories on water dowsers, It apeared to have a very high sucsess rate, is there an explanation for this Cris because I was half convinced that there was something(I dont know what)making it work?
Richard, the think is that its ‘success rate’ comes from situations that are mis-framed in the observers’ minds.
The first and most important point about water-well positioning is that there are not generally narrow underground streatms to be intersected, but broad flat-lying bodies of porous strata charged with water in the gaps between grains. The water table mimics the topography, so there is a very high chance of finding waterwell locations at random that look like successes. People only remember the successes.
Other uses of dowsing, like gold prospecting, can find ‘colour’ almost anywhere because colour is very easy to come across in gold regions. But finding 1 part in ten million is not ‘finding gold’ its finding rock, and counting it a success for finding gold.
Finally there is a spectrum to outright fakery of ‘demonstrations’. Here the knowledge of what is being tested is esentially in the hands of the dowser, so whatever happens that makes the stick or pendulum move, the mind of the operator is the most likely cause.