It seems to me that each religion has a greater “natural rival” in other beliefs than lack of belief.
Atheism is essentially egalitarian, but each religion says some are chosen and those of other religions are not.
Because they get negative PR from ridiculing other religions. If Robertson goes on TV and says that Jews are all going to burn in hell, it creates a stir. If he goes on TV and says that you should start stoning suspected atheists in the street, nobody pays it a second thought.
Besides, they all think they just need to use the right sales pitch to swing those donation checks… ahem, immortal souls over from the otherly faithful. But an atheist represents the biggest threat to organized religion there is: someone who could care less how much screaming a witch doctor does at them about the invisible sky pixie and his monetary woes.
Modern religions can get good PR by being “politically correct” and claiming that other religions deserve respect because they are all about the search for God. Different people just have different paths to God is all.
Since atheists don’t believe in God at all, however, there’s no grounds for showing them respect.
My favorite line is when a new age Christian states that “we all believe in the same God.” Yeah, right! Is that the God who tells his followers to kill infidels? Or the God that tells his followers that the only path to salvation is to follow a strict code of ritual observance? Or the God that says that all you need to be saved is to “accept Jesus into your heart”? Or the God of vengenace who smites down those who disobey or displease him? Or the metaphysical God who started the universe rolling but doesn’t interfere with it any more? Or the God who responds to prayers of faith by healing the sick? Or the God who tells his followers to commit suicide in order to rendezvous with the space ship hiding behind the comet?
Funny, doesn’t sound like the “same God” to me…
Barry
Plus, atheists are a pretty small minority.
Partly, it might be the fact that the opposition to anti-religious sentiments are (obviously) more organized.
If someone in Boston starts baselessly insulting Catholics, or if someone on Dearborn starts railing out of ignorance against Muslims, they will certainly hear about it.
On the other hand, Atheism doesn’t really have a heiarchy or power structure to “mobilize its base” and influence public sentiment.
Maybe true down there in Florida, but worldwide, atheism is the 2nd largest ‘religion’ (Christianity, Catholicism, Orthodox Catholicism, et. al is the largest).
Atheists have very little organisation (compared to major religions) so are perceived as small numbers of individuals (instead of the large numbers of individuals we are), therefore easy targets. Worse than that, atheist’s belief’s are totally different from the faithful’s (of the major religions), least with the other religions the common dogma allows them to assume each other is just slightly wrong and can be corrected to the right path. And on top of that atheists are assiocated with Science, which never seems to be popular with the fundies of any shade.
Join the revolution!
I’m not contesting the claim, but I would be interested in a cite to that effect – I always figured Islam would be #2.
I’d also be interested to hear how they define “atheist” for statistical purposes. Does it include only those who have made an affirimative decision that deities do not exist, or does it also include those who don’t subscribe to any particular religious tradition out of apathy? And how do they count those heads anyway? Churches and mosques presumably have membership lists, but outside of the politically active no such records exist for atheists.
Non-believers or non-religious collectively are probably in third place, behind Christians and Muslims.
From the Encyclopedia Britannica’s “2003 Year in Review”, “Worldwide Adherents of All Religions by Six Continental Areas, Mid-2002”, there are a total of 2,038,905,000 Christians of all varieties (with Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and several other sub-categories also ennumerated), and 1,226,403,000 Muslims (not futher broken down, although at the very least Muslims are generally divided into Sunni and Shi’ite). There are 774,615,000 “Nonreligious” and 150,434,000 “Atheists”, in two completely separate categories. The definitions in Dewey Cheatem Undhow’s distinction between “those who have made an affirimative decision that deities do not exist” and “those who don’t subscribe to any particular religious tradition out of apathy” will probably be challenged by a lot of us atheists (even many “committed” atheists will say we don’t “disbelieve in God” but rather “lack a belief in any God or gods”), but I do sort of see what he’s driving at. On the other hand, the Britannica defines “Nonreligious” as “Persons professing no religion, nonbelievers, agnostics, freethinkers, uninterested, or dereligionized secularists indifferent to all religion but not militantly so” and “Atheists” as “Persons professing atheism, skepticism, disbelief, or irreligion, including the militantly antireligious (opposed to all religion)”, which does a truly piss-poor job of making any valid distinction whatsoever. (People who just don’t care are lumped in with “agnostics”, who may have carefully reasoned philosophical views about religion, God, and epistemology, and a lot of self-identified “freethinkers” I know are “militantly antireligious”; meanwhile, “skepticism” is lumped into the “atheist” category.) Since they do such a lousy job of defining their categories, I cheerfully add them together to get 925,049,000 “assorted godless heathens” of all flavors. This puts us ahead of the world’s 828,130,000 Hindus. The Big Four–Christians, Muslims, Atheists/Godless Infidels/Heathens/whatever, and Hindus–collectively account for about 80% of the world’s 6,203,789,000 people.
The way they’ve got followers of the “Eastern” religions and/or philosophies categorized is slightly screwy too, and points to some of the problems inherent in trying to compare apples to oranges this way. There are 364,014,000 adherents listed under the “Buddhist” category; 6,327,000 “Confucianists”; and 2,685,000 “Taoists”–but there’s another separate category of “Chinese folk religionists” with 389,543,000 adherents whose definition is “Followers of traditional Chinese religion (local deities, ancestor veneration, Confucian ethics, universism, divination, and some Buddhist and Taoist elements)”.
It looks like the Britannica will allow you to access the full table even if you’re not a logged-in subscriber, so here’s a link:
Worldwide Adherents of All Religions by Six Continental Areas, Mid-2002
Adherence is not going to be absolute. Just because you send your kids to sunday school doesn’t mean you think there’s really life after death, just that ethics are a good idea. Yet all those are counted in the totals as believers.