Would it be fair to say that most Americans grew up in Christian households? Are atheists more likely to have grown up in that environment than Christians?
I don’t know. You would need another all-encompassing study to compare it to. I think it speaks more to the assumption some have that atheists are that way for the most part because they don’t know about whatever god is being discussed.
According to the survey atheists tend to vote, one could safely assume more often than non-atheists:
Registered to vote - 94.7%
Voted in 2016 - 87.0%
Always or nearly always vote - 86.5%
I don’t know if I’ve ever said to explicitly but I totally support you. You’re good people and thoughtful conscientious citizens and your rights need recognition, and the shit you’ve gone through needs to be acknowledged.
Interesting, thanks. I need to read the full report.
Even in the very atheist tolerant Bay Area, I usually don’t go broadcasting my atheism around. Which shows that the common theist canard that we aggressively push our “religion” of atheism is bull shit.
I worked with someone and I mentioned visiting the National Cathedral and she said she was an atheist. I said doesn’t matter, it’s still a very nice place to visit .
I knew someone who refused to sing in the community college choir (a six-part audition choir that sang with the city symphony) because they sang all that Christian music like Bach and Handel.
My guess is that this speaks to the assumption that people are Jewish because their parents were Jewish… and so forth. One way to be dismissive of atheist people is to say, “Oh, she doesn’t really actively disbelieve in our god. She just isn’t fully aware of our god because of how she was raised.” This suggests, of course, that anyone given the full facts and proper perspective would agree with a particular set of beliefs.
Pffft.
It’s weird how many people don’t go to church - sometimes for decades at a time. If you ask, “What religion are you?”, they’ll have an answer. “Oh, I’m Lutheran.” The truth is that they’re simply not religious in the traditional sense. They’ve chosen to allow themselves to drift away for whatever reason. Religion is not relevant to their lives. If you want to consider yourself part of the religious community at Christmas and say a prayer before you die, that’s fine with me. I’m not making a judgment. It’s fascinating to me, as an outsider, that there is such a wide variety of religious expression and level of adherence to religious tradition.
Since you feel the need to paint us atheists with such a broad brush would you care to back up your statement with a cite or were you just making an incendiary comment for shits and giggles?
Looking at the article, this was a self-selecting sample recruited through ads appealing for people to do their survey. I think it’ll be quite hard to disentangle whether this shows that atheists are highly likely to vote, or that people who volunteer to take part in in-depth online surveys are highly likely to vote. The sample size is 34,000 but as the Literary Digest could tell you sample size isn’t everything - what matters is that your sample is representative.
There’s a similar issue across most findings here, I’m afraid. The people who are more likely to participate in the survey are the people more likely to consider that atheism is an important part of their lives and/or an important social issue. I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t rush to share my experiences of it because it’s not really a factor for good or ill in my life. This self-selection will probably tend to increase the share of people reporting e.g. social stigma due to atheism.
So while the findings are true for this group of 34,000 people, I’d be really doubtful whether they do generalise to American atheists unless and until there’s good reason to think this sample is representative.
A recall a decade or more ago, hearing of a poll saying more people were less likely to vote for an atheist candidate than just about any other designation. Wonder how reliable that was, and whether it still holds.
What does this even mean? Since I know with a great deal of certainty how my state will go in a presidential election I shouldn’t bother voting? You do realize there are other things on a ballot?
Not being atheist myself, I cannot comment firsthand, but I do have an atheist sibling, and I think 3 factors often contribute towards atheists raised in Christian families:
When Christians are confronted about contradictions or problems in their religion, they often just double down or handwave away the problem rather than address it - “You just have to have faith” - which comes across as, “I’m wrong, but you need to believe I’m right anyway.”
Some Christian parents or elders mistake outward compliance for inward conversion. They think that because they have forced their children to sit in the pews at church on Sunday or go to Sunday school, church retreats, Bible camp etc. that they’ve actually somehow caused inner conversion as well when in fact often it spurs even more internal rebellion.
Many Christians are prone to sharing fake news, and when they do so, they discredit their other beliefs as well, even the real/true ones.
Somewhat interesting numbers. I think there are far more people who are atheist/agnostic/agnatheist than will admit it, but the numbers do tell us something about the people who are willing to say so, at least in a poll.
The category ‘None’ was mentioned, I assume meaning ‘No Religious Preference’, which still would include plenty of believers who just don’t accept any of the religions, but probably include a lot of people who should have their own category of “Don’t even think about it”.