Imagine that an uninhabited island the size of Ireland appears, Brigadoon-like, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (and that the very miraculousness of its appearance is explained by science). The land is sufficently fertile for the island to allow agriculture. A group of atheists–a good number of them quite wealthy, so they can pay for technological infrastructre–lays claim to the island. The first wave of settlers–let’s say it’s about 10,000 persons–are all atheists and instend to raise their children thusly. They are well-educated and from a sufficient variety of backgrounds (tinker, tailor, candlestick maker, etc :D) that the island can be self-supporting.
How long could this colony remain both viable as a society and majority atheist? What internal stresses do you imagine would make things difficult? If you were colony leader, what would you do to solve whatever problems you envision?
I don’t think there would be any problem with the viability of an atheist society, I just don’t think they’d remain atheist very long. People WANT to believe in religion, just like they want to believe UFO sightings and that Crossing Over show. Nobody wants to die, and religion is the only real way people can be convinced that they wont really die.
I think it could last as long as a similar society where the majority was religious. Atheists don’t cause any more social problems than religious people do.
Over time. some of the children would adopt various religions, as long as there was freedom of religion and information available about various religions – but I suspect that you might get as many Wiccans as you would get mainstream Christians, Muslims, etc. Buddhism might get a few adherents too. But having some of the population religious shouldn’t cause any problems, either.
What, did the Buddhists all kill each other off? I think an atheist society would do alright. Some views might get elevated to the status of a religion over time, but assuming external issues don’t sink the colony I think it could survive indefinitely.
I think that in the absence of religion you would have to have something to venerate (maybe not worshipfully in the supernatural sense, but a “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” thing). I would nominate education or information and or the arts, but more likely it would ultimately become THE STATE or, worse, THE LEADER.
I think religion is ultimately a necessary ciphon to the Matrix we live in. It gives easy answers to complex questions and in its absence that job goes to the leaders, and we’ve reached a point where the people who need easy answers are probably safer getting them from religion.
They’d last until some religious crusaders came along from elsewhere and laid waste to them in the name of God.
I don’t see why an atheistic society would be doomed to failure. Atheists aren’t lawless savages, are they? How many of the world’s problems would be solved if religion disappeared overnight? Possibly a great deal of them. At least it would stop a good number of conflicts in several countries. If we didn’t expend so many resources fighting these battles, perhaps we could do something about the rest of our problems.
I’m curious–what about an atheist society do you see that makes it less likely to survive than a religious society? What about an isolated population made up of groups that all worship different gods, or follow different faiths under the same god? Is that major point of contention a strength over a group that all uniformly disbelieves?
Assume, if you wish, that one of the colonists is Superman.
Though in that case we’d probably see the Church of El founded before long.
I didn’t say it was doomed to failure. My real interest is in how long the society would remain non-atheist, but i threw in the viability issue partly because i foresaw some question as to how well any colony could survive under such a circumstance, and partly for the hell of it.
On one hand, I think it would be more viable then a religious society, if for no other reason then many religious societies end up sinking a lot of their resources into their religions (building pyramids, fighting unbelievers, sending their young away on missions, supporting the clergy, etc.)
But as others have said, I doubt such a society would remain 100% atheist for very long, at least some members would find religion or elevate some other superstition to its equivalent.
What happens to the inevitable child (or adult for that matter) on Atheist Island who decides that God does exist? If they are accepted, then I would guess in a few generations the island would have a significant theist population.
They would have to do some bad stuff to keep it atheist, like kicking theists off the island or worse. Perhaps the atheist majority might last a long a long time, though.
Well, as long as they required a minimum IQ for immigration…
If the majority of settlers were sufficiently wealthy and intelligent as you suggest, I’m not sure why one would suspect them to turn to religion. Folks generally do a pretty good job of passing their culture on to their kids. If they were able to start from a majority position and set the ground rules so that they did not favor religion, it would be tougher for religion to get a toehold.
By majority atheist, do you mean more atheists than all religion/sects combined? Or more atheists than any one religion? Either way, I’d expect it to last a pretty long time. Heck, the current religious majorities are doing a damned fine job of maintaining their position despite reason and common sense being against them.
Depends on how society is run. If religion is allowed, but received no funding from the state, I doubt it would ever gain much of a toehold. It would be specially important to control the immigration and building laws in regards to it. For example, the Christians might all have to share one cathedral as a requirement for admission into the state. How would the state deal with problematic religious zealotry, should it appear? I think that overall, it would be a pretty peaceful country, with only a minimal adherence to any faith, though I agree that the Buddhists, deists, and Wiccans would probably have the best shot of conversion. Considering that most popular culture is secular, I don’t see why anyone would go out of their way to restrict their own rights.
What percentage of children of atheist parents also identify as atheist?
Would that percentage be different in a majority-atheist society than it is in other societies?
The recent Pew Religious Survey (pdf) says that 46% of those raised atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated (I don’t think they differentiated here) in the US still consider themselves to be so. That’s a low retention rate, compared to other religions. 80% of people raised Protestant still self-identify as Protestant, 76% of people raised Jewish still self-identify as Jewish, and 68% of people raised Catholic still self-identify as Catholic, by comparison, and Hinduism has the highest retention rate at 84%.
The second question is, of course, more difficult to answer. I think the percentage would be different, but I’m not sure how different.
Subsequent waves of religious immigrants and their children (along with the occasional convert from atheism) would probably outnumber the atheists (both the descendants of the founders and more recent converts to atheism) inside of two centuries, unless the founding atheists forbade immigration or discriminated against the religious, in which case they’d probably get another fifty years.
A person is not an atheist in a vacuum, by which I mean that most atheists are so by conscious choice, based on reasoning rather than based on “wishing it were so”.
A society populated by such people would place a high value on educating its young in those same tenets of reason and logic, along with the moral values that can be derived from a careful consideration of the world as it is.*
In this environment, assuming free flow of ideas, I can see that some young people either through rebellion or the desire to be different might adopt some religion or other. I frankly doubt such religious impulses would thrive or be long-lived in any one individual, but that may be wishful thinking on my part.
I also think that the continued prosperity and freedom of such a land would attract the unwelcome attention of those poor and witless who want to smite the godless heathens, and teach them the true meaning of the love and faith that only these other societies (severally and individually) possess. So I hope that such a society would have the foresight to invest (voluntarily, of course, since such people would almost certainly be heavily libertarian) in an effective self defense force.
*Example - there is no afterlife, so killing someone is the ne plus ultra of crimes, than which there is nothing worse. Therefore, murder would be the most severely punished of crimes, and the convicted murderer (always assuming accurate knowledge of the facts) would lose all rights as a human being.
Roddy
