Their 1969 table of “religious disposition by academic field” also shows that even the most religious group of them all includes 25% of avowed atheists plus 11% who oppose religion altogether, whereas they state the percentage of open atheists in the general population hovers around 7%.
Sure, if our judging criteria includes the bias that religion can only be victimized, as opposed to made irrelevant.
I guess one way to hasten the end of organized religion is to gradually do away with any laws or policies that favour it, like tax-exempt status or the ability to shield molesting priests from prosecution.
Though France is an exception, a liberal democracy with a state religion seems to be a good way of fostering atheism. My daughter teaches at a public school in southern Germany, and the kids get trooped off to Mass every morning - and as far as she can tell, don’t think about religion again.
If we made some religion the national one, enforced by the federal government, the Tea Partiers would turn atheist over night.
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What excluded middle am I overlooking? Agnostics?
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Folks who believe in stuff like Shinto or animists would fall into that middle as well. And the new-age crowd and Wiccans, as Bryan Ekers pointed out. My WAG is that there are more people who fall roughly in the middle ground between fervent theists and atheists than at either end of the spectrum.
That is completely untrue. I did not cherry pick my examples. I picked two stats that are obviously strongly linked to education and social problems, then I checked to see which countries performed worst and returned the result. I also checked to see how France, Sweden and Belgium measured up. I thought that was the intellectually honest thing to do and I still think so.
Huh. I wonder if the guy writing that is religious. Or if the site you got it from is connected to religion and thus has a vested interest (also known as: bias). The site is called “religionomics”, that is probably a clue.
The other clue would be that the statement is demonstrably false. The correlation between lack of education and religion, or education and lack of religion, is easily supported by statistics. You simply find out what education someone has and then find out whether they’re religious. You do this a bunch of times and find out. And people have. And they did find out. Over and over again. Whether religionomics or the founder of religionomics (who also happens to be the author of the linked material at religionomics) wants to believe it or not.
And you don’t seem to believe that the statement of religionomics is true either. If you believed that there WAS no statistical difference, why would you argue that statistical differences were insignificant?
The gold medal does not go to whoever treats religious people worst, but to whatever country has the largest percentage of people who don’t believe in god(s).
Let me answer this by a list of your three arguments:
The statistics are wrong…
And even if they are right they don’t mean anything!
I have read my own cite, and as a result I know that you’re trying to misrepresent what my cite says by clipping half a sentence out of context and removing relevant information. The first half-sentence that you quoted comes from the abstract. Here it is in its proper context.
The paper looks in depth at the religiosity of college professors and graduate students and corrects for the data from them based on race and gender.
The next paragraph should also be mentioned:
So, in short, the article comes down firmly against the claim that education in general or science education in particular causes people to become less religious. If you post small parts of the article out of context you can make it look otherwise, but that won’t work against those of us who have read the entire article.
I think so. I think it means not believing in deities, and that it comes from the Greek atheos meaning “without god(s)”, ‘a’ meaning without and theos of course meaning god(s). Does somthing in my previous posts seem to indicate something different or do you have an alternative meaning?
I’m not interested in the spin they try to give the stats, I directly looked up the polls results in the annex. The plain fact is that, contrary to what you’re trying to peddle, there are much more atheists in high academia (or at least were in 1969 - I wonder what the numbers would look like today…) then in the general population, period.
Whether it’s due to losing religion after graduating or religious people opting to remain uneducated in the first place is irrelevant to the debate, except perhaps if your argument is that religiosity is self-selecting for willful ignorance, or can only thrive in the poorer tiers of society who can’t afford high level education. Neither looks particularly good an argument in favour of religion.
Browsing the article linked to there, it does have some interesting conclusions. First, after controlling for gender, race, and other factors that are correlated with religiosity, the authors of the study still find a significant correlation:
To me, those seem like the most important areas. The authors have an important proviso, though: studying science doesn’t make you an atheist, though: rather, being an atheist makes you good at science:
Which to me actually sounds worse for theism than Der Trihs’ original hypothesis.
And of course there is always the famous Nature study that the most prestigious scientists (at least by one measure, membership in the National Academy of Sciences) have the highest rates of disbelief. FWIW.
As long as I’m not hurting anybody, my faith or lack thereof is none of the government’s business. Even if you hate religion in all its forms, it’s a far greater offense if the state tells you what to believe or not to believe. Also, people are more likely maintain their faith as an act of defiance if a nation tries to suppress its practice.
