The question isn’t what an atheist society will be like, it’s how long will it last. I basically agree with all of the above, but I think that immigration will be the issue that will make or break it.
Outside of the US-Mexico border, people trying to sneak into a country to live isn’t actually all that high an occurance.
In general, a country just sets how many people they’re going to accept in a year, and you’re good to go.
:rolleyes: “Couldn’t resist” indeed; conflating Communism and atheism is the standard for the defenders of religion. The defenders of religion keep bringing up Communism and pretending it is atheism, because that’s the only way they can smear atheism to make it look remotely as malignant as religion. It’s not like they can bring up many other examples.
Communism, as many people have pointed out over the years, is essentially a nontheistic religion, officially at least. A ripoff of Christianity in many ways. The Party/Marx/Stalin ( etc ) are essentially God, and they kill in his name; whether it’s really “atheistic” in anything but name is debatable. They look like a religion, they act like a religion; if there was a “religion detector” that filtered out people so you could actually get an all atheist group for this experiment, I doubt that Communists would be allowed.
On average, according to every study I’ve heard of ( not many; for some reason, people are reluctant to study this ), when you sort people by religious beliefs, atheists are the one group that is at all above average. More honest, more charitable. A small cite; as said, it’s hard to find studies done on this. And the stronger religion is in society, the more dysfunctional it is.
Yes. And this hypothetical atheist country would have to set its quota to “zero.” People still might try to sneak in - they might even pretend to be atheists but secretly practice religion as soon as they get into the country. From there, it’s only a short time before there are hidden mosques or churches, and a thriving underground community of worshippers.
Der Trihs, I wasn’t trying to defend religion, it’s just that Communism was the only historical example of an officially atheist society that I can think of. I guess under your definition (which actually makes sense to me since I do think that Stalin probably thought of himself as a god) it wasn’t really atheist, but it was still the closest thing we’ve ever had to an atheist government.
:dubious:
Why? That I’ve ever seen, when people move to a country they pick up its language, religion, cultural mores, and whatever else within a generation or two so long as there isn’t a full community established that lives semi-separately and only marries within itself. Even then, those communities are almost always unable to become the majority because immigration (a static percentage) is lower than basic population growth (exponential) and eventually they fade away.
I don’t think it will be the nightmare scenario that you describe. True, there are going to be religious immigrants if immigration is permitted at any reasonable scale. But will there be the rates of conversion and the eventual ‘swamping’ that’s being imagined here?
Here are some key considerations:
[ul]
[li]Harder to start up a church because there won’t be any tax breaks or any other help/encouragement from the government. You will be free to preach about Zeus on a soap box or even acquire a building to use to worship him, but it’s gonna be off your own back and on your own dime.[/li][li]General atheist culture will likely have a negative effect on parent-child conversion. Little Joe Muslim will grow up in a society that places little stock in gods or religious beliefs, and will be part of a culture in which you won’t get off as easily when making unscientific assertions. [/li][li]Religious people are going to want to immigrate wholesale to a Godless heathen country in the first place.[/li][/ul]
You seem to be labouring under the misconception that religion is going to be banned or forced underground in this hypothetical nation. Would a bunch of atheist founding fathers really seek to establish such a country? I doubt it. Religion isn’t going to be forced underground with bibles hidden in porno mags, it’s just going to be laughed at or seen as irrelevant fantasy. You’ll still be free to print and buy bibles, they just won’t be as revered as they are now. People will treat them with the same respect as they treat books on healing crystals or cosmic ordering, and it’s not like there are healing crystal experts hidden in secret partitions in safe houses around the country today.
Define “Atheist government”. Is it a government composed largely or completely of atheists, or a government that enforces atheism. There are several majority atheist countries in existence right now; the only ones that enforced “atheism” that I know of were the Communist ones, as said. Really, it’s pretty obvious that Communism’s “atheism” was really an attempt to replace God with itself and/or it’s leaders, not to eliminate religion.
Also, people in our culture ( including me ) tend to treat “Atheism” and “Non-religious rationalist” as synonyms, which they aren’t. The OP seems to be using it that way, but you could technically fill up that colony with a bunch of believers in spirits, ghosts, fairies, magic, psychic powers, UFO cults, various non-theistic religions, and so on. You don’t need to believe in a God to be religious, much less superstitious.
I think that may be one reason why relatively few people who grew up atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated remain so.
I think most people are whatever religion they are because it’s what they grew up with, it’s what’s familiar, or it’s what their spouse wants, or its meetings give them a good opportunity to network and socialize, or some reason like that that has little to do with the actual beliefs and practices of the religion. I think people who consciously choose any religion or spend much or any time thinking about whether their religion is right for them are in a fairly small minority. I think that goes for people raised atheist as well as those raised religious- most people just don’t like thinking about whether their religion is right for them.
Nope, at least not like American public schools in non-Bible-Belt areas (I can’t speak for the Bible Belt ones, having never been to one). Public prayer in schools was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1962. There are no organized public prayers during the regular school day in American public schools, or at least there weren’t in the ones I went to.
There generally isn’t teaching of psalms or bible stories, either, because it’s so hard to do that in a way that keeps everybody happy. If they were taught as literature but not as true stories, that would offend some people. If they were taught as truth, that would offend others. Offending people is a good way to get the school district sued. It’s generally safest to avoid the topic of religion altogether. The only class I took that went into religion in any kind of depth was a comparative religion class in high school, which was an elective.
There are Christian schools in the US. They’re private schools. The parents and/or the church pay for the kids to go to them. AIUI (I didn’t go to one and I don’t know anyone who did), they do have classes on religion.
They might if the economy of the Godless heathen country was good enough and the immigration laws were liberal enough. Muslims immigrate to fairly godless (certainly so from their POV) European countries all the time. Eastern European Jews immigrated to the US in the 19th and 20th centuries, even though it was quite difficult for a lot of them to actually practice Judaism when they got here (if you worked in a factory, you couldn’t take Saturday off, for example).
Fanatism breeds fanatism. Tolerance breeds tolerance. Religion per se doesn’t have that much to do with that mechanism.
Atheist Holland has been afraid of that, twice; once in the 1950’s when Catholics temporarily, due to strong pressure form the Roman Catholic Chruch, had a far, far higher birthrate then the rest of the Dutch. And currently there is the same sentiment about Muslim immigrants.
If things go like they did last time with the Catholics, there won’t be a problem. The spirit of rationalism and freedom is just very contagious. Religion will just become one of the many, many aspects of public and private life. For many moslim immigrants, their muslim identity has currently been reduced to the question: “can muslim women wear a headscarf to work?”.
**Anne Neville, **then the position of schools in America (non-Bible belt) and Holland is very similar, apart from the “suing”-part, which would be replaced by “nagging parents and government intervention” here. Which amount to the same thing, in the end.
Thanks for fighting my ignorance.
All this is very logical, but keep in mind that there are thousands of people that buy into that healing-crystal and other new-age stuff. If Christians or Muslims would be on the same level as those people in this new atheist country, alright, but there would still be thousands of them. And they will be fucking each other.
The crucial question here is: how far is this government willing to go in preserving the atheist majority?
Who’s to say that this religious minority wouldn’t eventually out-breed the atheists? Even if they didn’t outbreed them, they could still gain enough of a population to make up a significant political force on the local level (what kind of government does this country have anyway? A democracy? If so, then we’re going to be looking at potential problems like local mayors of religious enclaves not enforcing the atheist laws of the federal government, not enforcing separation of church and school, etc.) What is the government going to do? Send in the troops?
That’s why I suggested that a space colony, especially an interstellar one, would work better as a thought experiment. An island in the modern world isn’t going to be isolated long enough to keep any small population from being swamped. On the other hand, a colony that might not see a second ship for a century or two ( or never ) would have lots of time to establish itself. To breed up it’s numbers, create a stable society, one too large to be swamped by a ship of a few thousand more immigrants arriving.
How long would such a society stay atheist ? IMHO, indefinitely.
There’s nothing intellectually special about atheists except they haven’t succumbed to one particular form of superstition.
One difference- most of our biology teachers, while they do teach evolution, won’t touch the idea of creationism with the proverbial ten-foot pole. Most of them won’t say creationism is misguided, for fear of offending someone.
Of course, there’s a practical reason why they might not mention it- it tends to lead to discussions that are only tangentially related to the subject matter of the class, and that eat up a lot of class time (the same reason why I banned discussion of Star Trek in my astronomy discussion sections when I was a teaching assistant).
Do you have moments of silence in Dutch public schools? We had them occasionally in the public schools I went to. They would happen during the morning announcements over the public-address system- whoever was doing the announcement would say there was going to be a moment of silence, would stop talking for a minute, and would then go on with the announcements. You could pray during it if you wanted to, but they didn’t mention that, or encourage people to do so. (I never saw anybody doing anything during them that was obviously prayer, like closing their eyes and folding their hands, but it was early and I was out of it.) Do you have anything like that? That’s the closest thing I ever experienced in a public school to public prayers.
**Der Trihs ** I agree with this. I think that an atheist society completely isolated from any religious influences would have a much better chance.
On the other hand, what if people on that colony started inventing religions? Would they be considered mentally ill, and treated in the same manner that schizophrenics are in our society?
If there’s one thing that people will always be suckers for, it’s a charismatic leader. Even if the religion was based on completely illogical, bullshit principles, it’s still conceivable that someone with enough charisma could gain a large following and start up a religious movement even within the context of an isolated atheist society.
You have hemmed your example in with so many pointless “isolations” that it is not really a society at all. It’s an experiment in a bell jar. I believe your ant farm would be smashed by the third generation from the inside. Humans are hard to keep in prisons.
Tris
I’m a little curious as to what kind of atheism we’re talking about here. Is this, “We’re going to pretend we have some rational basis for assigning arbitrary values to things.” atheism? Is it, “We will control the young and program however we see fit!” atheism? Are we shooting for, “Everything is whatever you want atheism?” Because those are likely to live and fail and eventually be altered in different ways. Nothing lasts forever, but what one expects would happen would be different depending on what we’re looking at.
Quite possibly. More likely, the way that members of tiny “oddball” religions are regarded here.
As I recall, there’s a fair amount of evidence that religiosity has a fairly strong genetic component. Given the founder effect, and assuming that’s true, most of the population will naturally incline atheist. Combined with it’s founding non-religious culture, I’d expect any locally invented religions to have a tough time getting traction.
I have my doubts about how large it would grow, for the reasons I mentioned. In fact, given that such a movement could easily turn violent even if greatly numbered, it could in the end make religion even less common when it’s followers get annihilated. If they do, that is.
If that was true, religion would be long dead. It’s a prison for the mind.
And it’s not “pointless”. It’s simply acknowledging that in the modern world, your tiny population of atheists ( or lefthanders, UFO cultists, whatever ) is going to get overwhelmed by sheer numbers. You need either legally or physically imposed isolation, to give the society the opportunity to establish itself.
Well, you’ve got kind of a dilemma if you take things to the point you are describing. You either adhere to rules of freedom and democracy, in which case the country eventually becomes theistic and the atheistic utopian dream is finished, or you start cracking down on religion, banning bibles and become the controlling, repressive organisation that you originally hated in the form of the church. Either way, the atheist values are fucked.
But the thing is, I don’t see how a country that is 90%+ atheist could ever end up becoming overwhelmed by a religious movement that seeks to override the atheistic laws and system of government (how? Through amendments to an atheistic constitution?). Not unless there was some serious violent revolutionary action taking place. The United States is a good few hundred years old, and it was still overwhelmingly Christian last time I checked (and still practically impossible for an atheist to be elected president or have any major political support and influence).
It’s like the torture hypotheticals that have no realistic chance of coming to pass. You either torture somebody that hasn’t been found guilty of anything (but you ‘know’ is aware of the bomb), or you let a bus full of white girls die. Either way, you end up an asshole.