I was wondering if anybody had any stats on the average age and educational background of the average skeptic/atheists is? I list both together because they are very often seen in the company of one another.
I find the average intelligence of a skeptic/atheists to be pleasantly above average so I am trying to see if there is a correlation between age, education (formal or otherwise).
We’re also uncommonly handsome.
No we’re not. Don’t listen to him.
[sub]Only a few of us get to be handsome[/sub]
Scribe has 7 pages of a report that may answer you questions. The chapter is called Who Are Americas Atheists and Agnostics written by Ariela Keysar.
To answer your questions the chapter says:
Age: 55% under 35. (20% over 50)
Education: 42% are college graduates
Keep in mind atheists are more common in many countries outside the US.
It depends on how you define atheist, [the table in this article](but Demographics of atheism - Wikipedia) at least shows a significant difference.
If you go to church every Sunday and pray every meal and bedtime, you don’t live longer but it will feel like it.
I meant to link to this: Demographics of atheism - Wikipedia
The trick with combining atheists and agnostics is that would put me and my ex-father-in-law in the same statistical bucket. I was born into an atheist family and just never thought much about religion. Just another thing like genies, vampires, ghosts, and leprechauns, that were fairy tales, not discussion topics. My ex-father-in-law was a semi-famous radio preacher for forty years until he stopped believing his own spiel. But he was then still steeped in religion, trying to un-preach all the believers in the family into the view that it’s all unknowable.
So his lifespan and intellect were really set in his religious years.
Though I’d been an atheist from the age of 13, I didn’t know any others until I got to college. There, I met a girl who let it be known that she was an atheist. Wow, I thought, a kindred spirit . . . another person who challenges the status quo and thinks about deep issues . . . another person of superb intelligence and analytical skills.
So I asked her why she was an atheist, hoping to engage her in a scintillating intellectual dialogue. Her reply: “I dunno. My parents are atheists, and I never really thought about it.”
That aint so bad. I’m guessing her parents didn’t indoctrinate her, send her to atheism church, force her to believe what they believe.
Heh, well that was pretty much my story. That and that the popular gods were pretty unconvincing.
I only really took a good hard look at the god hypothesis when I was in my late 20s, when more out of curiosity than anything else I tried a year or two as an agnostic, and as far as I can tell, my initial skepticism was justified.
Yeah same here. Religion as it deals with a belief in God has just never been part of my immediate family. My father is Jewish & my mother was brought up in a family that were Jehovah’s Witnesses but who never bought into any of that. My sister & I were raised with the God part of religion completely non-existent. We would celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas, as well as go to family gatherings for Passover & Rosh Hashanah, but the actual *belief *part never entered into it. Those religious holidays were simply a time to see cousins, aunts & grandparents, have food and get presents. We never went to Temple or Church, I don’t even know if there was any kind of a Bible in our house.
I can remember being in 3rd or 4th grade and having the teacher ask the class to raise our hands if we were Christian or Jewish (would such a thing even happen these days?) and I would raise my hand for both, which I remember thinking was so cool. To me it was no different than being asked if I liked vanilla or chocolate and the idea that they were mutually exclusive belief systems never even occurred to me.
Heard a radio programme recently - I’ll see if I can dig up a cite - which reported that atheists, relative to the population at large, are disproportionately male, older than average, and less likely to report themselves to be happy.
They’re grumpy old men, basically.
Uncommonly handsome grumpy old men.
And wise. I guess that goes without saying.
Atheists are one thing (and I think there’s as many of them young as old). Skeptics I find to be something different. More of cynics. I mean lots of people don’t believe in ghosts, but a ‘skeptic’ will go out of his way to dwell and poo on anything non-mainstream. I’d say those people are either quite old and bitter, or quite young and overemotional.
I became a skeptic in my teens and didnt become a full blown atheist until I was 19 or 20.
Id argue that a lot of skeptics do the world a whole lot of good. I think its easy to become cynical when you see that crazy things in your world that are just irrational like war based on religion, religion advocating killing infidels, religion being at the forefront of so much pain, good people turned into nutters by a media that feeds conspiracy theory, good people being taught to hate because of ancient scores to settle, churches covering up for pedophiles, etc. Its really psychologically easier to just join them, I think, but I refuse to.
And spectacularly hung.
Whatever happened to the idea that a skeptic is supposed to be uncertain?
I would think that someone who is skeptical about the existence of God would be more likely to be an agnostic than an atheist.
And modest.
Bear in mind that many self-identified atheists define the term to mean “an absence of belief in the existence of gods” (as opposed to “actively believing that God does not exist”), respectively referred to as “weak” and “strong” atheism. Since one definition of “skeptic” is simply someone who declines to accept a claim without evidence or rational arguments to back it up, it follows that those who are skeptical about the existence of God by this definition (i.e., they don’t believe any convincing evidence or arguments in favor of God’s existence have been presented) would be atheists by the “weak atheist” or “absence of belief in the existence of God” definition. Add to that that a person who is an atheist of the “absence of belief” sort with respect to God or gods in general might be an atheist of the “believes that God does not exist” sort with respect to some particular definition of God (for example, the God of Young Earth Creationists), regarding that particular definition at least to be not merely unsupported by the evidence but to have been actually falsified by the evidence.