The below survey shows similar percentages of Christians and unaffiliated holding ‘new age beliefs’.
But the detailed results are interesting. Among self declared atheists, only 22% hold at least one of the three new age beliefs. But among those who chose ‘nothing in particular’ as their religious belief, 78% percent held at least one of the three. So it seems to depend greatly on what kind of non-religious people you’re talking about.
Among the Christians, Evangelicals were considerably less likely to hold new age beliefs, while several other denominations were almost as likely to hold them as the ‘nothing in particular’ group.
Yeah, I’ve seen that study before, and I think the fact that in every single category (spiritual energy located in physical things, belief in psychics, belief in reincarnation, belief in astrology) atheists numbered the lowest by a large margin makes your corollary the exception rather than the rule. Not only that, but your corollary was about people that stopped believing and became atheists, which the Pew survey didn’t cover at all.
That’s what our tour guide told us on a UK tour. Given that Europe was considered oppressively religious up until about 300 years ago, I estimate that’s how long it will take the US to catch up.
From your own cite:
“Moreover, religiously unaffiliated Americans (those who say their religion is atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) are about as likely as Christians to hold New Age beliefs. However, atheists are much less likely to believe in any of the four New Age beliefs than agnostics and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular.” Just 22% of atheists believe in at least one of four New Age beliefs, compared with 56% of agnostics and eight-in-ten among those whose religion is “nothing in particular.””
No it wasn’t. What I meant is that people who don’t have a religion to satisfy those needs will look to satisfy them in other ways. I certainly did not intend to limit it specifically to atheists as opposed to the much larger number of non-religious people, and I’m not sure how much it matters whether an individual used to be religious, or never was.
Seeing as both “non-religious” and “nothing in particular” are fairly elastic and wooly you can’t say anything with any certainty but I think that the two overlapping to a great extent would be a fairly safe assumption to make, certainly in the UK.
I know plenty of people who would give “nothing in particular” (or similar) as an answer and are nominally C of E with a hand-wavey feeling of general spirituality and they’d certainly say they are “non-religious” as well.
Are you assuming an atheist majority or a majority that includes people that say;
'I’m not religious I’m
Spiritual
A deist
In a relationship with Jesus
?
I’m not sure I agree. By definition, atheists don’t believe in any Supreme Being, including God. Those who trade their native religion for another belief system aren’t necessarily atheists. Refusing to worship God isn’t equivalent to Refusing to believe in God.
I don’t think of non-religious as being equivalent to atheist. There are plenty of people in the UK who don’t go to church, don’t believe in the various tenets of Christianity or whatever religion was part of their cultural tradition, but have some sort of vague belief in a higher being, or an afterlife/soul etc. These are the people I’d consider ‘spiritual but not religious’, and they are probably rather more common than the real atheists who don’t believe in anything non-material. (Maybe this is different in the US.)
Besides that, adopting another belief system doesn’t have to mean a supernatural one. It could be a political philosophy like communism that served as something of a state religion in the countries that practiced it. Or it could be something like Atheism+ that seems designed to address the ‘wanting justice’, and ‘finding community’ needs that @Senegoid mentioned.