so religiousness = ignorance?
>;-)
Interesting figures about Australia and Ireland. Bear in mind though, that the Northeastern US was originally settled by religious bigots.
(Also bearing in mind that the Southeastern US was originally settled by racist slaveholders. People can change, but look what it takes!)
From a strictly historic standpoint, yes. God is (or gods are) used to explain things for which we have no logical, reasonable explanation. As human knowledge of the world expands and scientific explanations are found, “God” becomes the answer to fewer and fewer questions. God has evolved over the past 300 years so people can hang onto their religion and still accept scientific explanations for things that used to be attributed to God’s will (disease, geology, weather, etc.) Modern humans rely much more on logic and reason, and much less on prayer and blind faith than their predecessors did. Nowadays, sects that deny medical treatment in favor of fervent prayer are considered an anomaly, but at one time that was all we had. It seems only natural that as people assign fewer and fewer attributes to God, the number of people who let go of God completely increases.
Does that mean I think everybody who goes to church is an ignorant fool? Nope, and please don’t try to imply that I do.
I dont see how you can make a logical distinction between your explaination and this final sentence.
If I understand you correctly, you are saying that religiousness is the eqivalent of ignorance “historically”, but then, how does it not remain so today?
I mean, are you not implying that to the extent a person is “religious” is the same extent to which they choose to remain “ignorant”?
Dont get me wrong, I certainly DO believe that the evidence supports such a statement, I guess I was just hoping I wasn’t entirely isolated in that belief, like the OP in their “athiesm”, and your logic seemed to confirm you might be “one of us”.
Do you have a brochure?
I hate to sound “humourless” as brilliant as your satire is, but this is exactly the kind of statement that serves to underscore the common religious argument that to be without God is to be without Morals or regard for order and our fellow human.
I mean…ha ha ha and all…but this message board is certainly read by more than those who are “in” on your little joke.
Yes, because obviously being religious means having a total lack of a sense of humor and fundamental reading comprehension skills.
I can cite several examples such as a: a recent danish cartoon of mohammed, and b: Madonna’s recent uproar in Russia etc. if you want to debate there might be some evidence of whether being religious results in both a lack of humour and a lack of comprehension of subtle levels of sarcasm (I am assuming that is what you meant by reading comprehension skills)
Anyway, being a lone atheist among many fundamentalists and spiritualists, I tend to fight the perception that us “godless” types have a penchant for anarchy and immorality all the time, hence my comments in the context of this thread.
True enough, come to think of it. I probably tend to set my bar for sane behavior too high for the unwashed masses. Then again, they probably don’t read enough to stumble across this site anyway. 
I believe (and this is just my belief, based on many, many years of formal and informal education, and having read everything I can get my hands on concerning the subject of religion) that gods and, by distillation, God, were invented to explain the unexplainable. Why does the earth quake? Why does the river flood? Why do children mysteriously die? Where did we come from? Why are we here? We didn’t know the answers to those questions, so we made one up: God.
In the past three centuries, we’ve found a lot of scientifically proven answers to those questions: Tectonic plates, ground saturation and overabundant rainfall, underdeveloped immune systems, etc.
But having God around is just so damn comfortable, we can’t give him up. So while we accept that he doesn’t actually cause individual earthquakes and floods and deaths, we believe he’s sorta’ responsible because he created the universe in which these things happen.
Now, imagine that there is a vertical spectrum of belief in this God. At the top are people who fervently believe God is intimately involved in their every moment and has a detailed plan for each of us; the Bible is literally true, every word; and maintaining one’s faith requires constant diligence and hard work. These people have a deathgrip on their faith. At the bottom, just barely hanging onto the faith thing, are those who believe there’s a God, but not the kind described in any Bible, and frankly they’re a little skeptical about the whole Jesus thing, too. Below them are those of us who have slipped completely off of the religion thing and landed on our feet on solid ground and are making our way around the world quite nicely, thank you.
So, as scientific knowledge increases and people try to assimilate the provable knowledge with their belief system, their grip loosens on the belief spectrum and they slip lower and lower on the spectrum, with those at the bottom falling off as they find the last bit of knowledge they need to just let go.
But it’s a slow process. New people are being added at the top all the time, and not everyone slips down – many maintain their grip all their lives, leaving behind offspring with similar grips on faith.
I’m certainly not the first to propose that knowledge = enlightenment = loss of faith (or, inversely, that ignorance = religion.) Read Thomas Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” – all those little minnows swimming in their quiet streams believe fervently in God.
I mean no disrespect, and I detect no intentional maligning, but I would respectfully suggest that if atheists detect some chilliness from believers, it isn’t due to hostility about your lack of faith so much as to the corrolation of faith and ignorance which, no matter how genuinely arrived at, cannot be anything other than insulting to thinking people of faith.
As to the OP, if 5% is a significant improvement over 2%, then sincere congratulations.
No question. I cant speak for all athiests, but I for one am not particularly interested in a big “love in” with believers, I simply try to discourage other atheists from giving creedence to the notion that atheism=amorality/anarchy. No, I fully expect that telling someone “to the extent you are religious is the extent to which you are ignorant” will cause a negative reaction. Probably not as much as being told that I am wrong and am going to hell for eternity to burn causes a negative reaction in me, but certainly there is cause for negative feelings on both sides.
I detect not so much hostility as a complete lack of awareness that we exist. “In God We Trust,” “God Bless America,” the Prez talking about how “all Americans are united in prayer” and so-forth makes one feel rather . . . alienated?
I don’t think it’s ignorance; I think it’s the process of willfully ignoring the evidence in favor of a concept that feels good. Ignorance is quite a different thing.
So, then, is the ignorance meant to be fought by the Straight Dope:
A: never being made aware of some information by some external source (never heard it)
B: being either permanently or temporarily incapable of becoming aware of information due to some mental defect or subconcious predisposition (hoodwinked)
C: Willfully ignoring some information (head in the sand)
?
The information (i.e., Facts as we know them today) are there for everyone to evaluate. Once you know the facts you are no longer ignorant. What you choose to do with that information is what makes the 'dope go 'round.
There are different brands of religousness. Someone who believes in a god out of faith, or a desire to have a reason, is not ignorant at all. Someone who believes in a god because how else would a rainbow happen, or man come into existence is.
Ignorance in the historical sense isn’t even perjorative. If you don’t know anything about fusion, and think Apollo is responsible for the sun, you are ignorant, but can hardly be blamed for it. If you think the same thing today, in the West, you are either willfully ignorant, downright stupid, or have some sort of mental disorder. So, as science progressed, the scientific justification for god belief diminished, but not the spiritual justification - for some at least.
If you’re surrounded by spiritualists and fundamentalists, I can see how you might tend to see religiousness and ignorance as going together.
And anyone who didn’t get the jokes isn’t ignorant - humorless or stupid, perhaps, but not ignorant. It’s a common form of humor for an oppressed minority to pretend to magnify the very traits the majority assigns them.
Let me clarify just briefly how we got to this point in the discussion: mrrealtime flippantly posted “religiousness=ignorance?” I tried to explain that it’s not that simple. And yet again, discussion has devolved to the point that religiousness=ignorance.
Humans invented gods (which became a single God) because we didn’t know what made the earth work. Then we got knowledge. But we didn’t let go of God. That’s fine – there’s a wonderful story in Genesis about what happens when people gain knowledge. What that story means to you depends on whether you choose to retain religious faith. The ignorance that created religion is now gone. No, ignorance isn’t the continuing cause of religion. Ignorance was the birth of ancient, crude religion. Religion exists today in an enlightened world, and is practiced by enlightened people. (Remember, a sign of an intellectual mind is one that can hold two opposing concepts at the same time.) Some of us have chosen to ignore, discount or downplay the importance of scientific discovery, clinging tightly to a strict, complex religious faith. Some of us have loosened our grip on religion so we can embrace both it and the science that makes our lives better than the lives of those before us. Some, like me, have chosen to fall away from religion altogether, trusting entirely in science, logic and reason. (Any priest will tell you religion is illogical and unreasonable, and therein lies its attraction and its beauty.)
So don’t be insulted when a bunch of Carlylean eggheads sit around talking about the history of religion and the rise of enlightenment. Most of it’s just mental self-pleasuring.
What makes you say this? Rather monotheist-centric for an atheist, aren’t you? There are plenty of polytheists still in the world.
I read somewhere that the Czech Republic is the country with the highest percentage of atheists. Can anyone confirm that?