Sunday, November 12, 2006

Atheists! Who Are These People? .. by Alan Caruba


Atheists! Who Are These People?
By Alan Caruba

If you are expecting me to launch into a diatribe about people who do not believe in God or religion, forget it. I don’t much care what anyone believes so long as they are not trying to convert or kill me for what I believe. Unfortunately, history and our present times are a testament to the way religion has proven to be the justification for slaughters of every description.

“Atheists” is a groundbreaking study conducted by Bruce E. Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer, recently published by Prometheus Books ($20.00) and a slim, paperback volume best read by people such as psychologists, sociologists, and those interested in religious studies. Hunsberger was a professor of psychology until his death in 2003 as is his collaborator, Altemeyer, who teaches at the University of Manitoba. They had previously collaborated on “Amazing Conversion: Why Some Turn to Faith and Others Abandon Religion.”

To my surprise, virtually no studies have been conducted to determine why people become atheists. Most of us are aware of atheists only when one of them institutes a lawsuit involving the separation of church and state. The notion that children cannot pray in school, as do lawsuits to remove “One Nation Under God” from our coinage or to remove a religious symbol from display tend to annoy a lot of people.

Religion in American life became a hot political issue when the Supreme Court permitted abortions under the penumbra of “privacy” rights. It flared up again as a right to die issue, but again the courts ruled this was a private matter to be determined by individuals, family and the advice of physicians. It drives the debate about same-sex marriage. Despite the passion of the Religious Right, these issues, for good or ill, appear to have been settled in the minds of most people.

While America’s Founding Fathers all believed that religion served a useful purpose for the maintenance of a civil, secular society, they all knew well of the evils that ensue from too much church involvement in the affairs of state. They took care to protect freedom of religion, but also to create a form of government in which religious values might inform legislation, but not be “established” as a requirement of citizenship.

For the Founding Fathers, you could be a good American even if you did not believe in God. This is a good idea considering that two out of three American adults do not go to church every week. At 32%, those Americans who do attend church still outnumber the 20% in Canada and the 14% in England. By most definitions, America remains a nation in which religion plays a role in people’s lives, even if they are not active in either church or synagogue.

As the West either loses or ignores religious faith, the Middle East, the cradle of three major religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is a cauldron of religious fervor, pursuing an Islamic Jihad throughout its own region and exporting it in the form of terrorist attacks worldwide. Westerners are baffled and angered by a “religion” for which war and murder is a duty.

We have far less to concern ourselves when it comes to atheists. Indeed, one trait they tend to share in common is a saintly tolerance for all lifestyles including homosexuality, though “the rise in apostasy in the United states has occurred primarily among persons with weak ties to organized religion who have been driven from their faith by the behavior of the ‘religious right’” according to the study.

Atheists are people for whom the teachings of religion simply do not make any sense. Burning bushes, resurrection, the trinity, life after death, heaven and hell, are illogical by atheist standards. Science, however, is based on the logic of reproducible results and, not surprisingly, atheists have a great fondness for science, noting among other things that there are many more galaxies than the one in which we inhabit a tiny planet.

Almost always arriving at their rejection of religion on their own, atheists tend to keep their views to themselves. The study found that atheists are more self-aware and more resistant to conformity than others. They also tend to excel at critical thinking.

“Religion’s big enemy in losing the battle for these minds proved not to be Satan, but its own scriptures, its various teachings, and its history,” say the study’s authors.

As best as can be determined, only 3% of Americans are atheists. What matters most to them is their personal integrity. They are, almost by definition, the least authoritarian of groups you can find and the least likely to attempt to convert someone to their views.

The common perception is that Christian “fundamentalists” are growing by leaps and bounds, but those in America who identify themselves in this fashion peaked in 1987 and their numbers has since dropped to 30% of all Christians by 2004. Of any religious group, fundamentalists are those least liked by atheists.

Interestingly, American atheists are more likely to object to abuses of power by government than most people. A “Born Again” President such as George W. Bush is viewed as a danger to our constitutional system by atheists, as are members of Congress for whom religion is a determining factor in law making.

Conservative and Libertarian political values, smaller and less intrusive government, fiscal prudence, laissez faire capitalism, and individualism would seem to suit most, but not all, atheists better than some form of socialism or one-world government philosophy.

Whether we want to or not, all Americans and other Westerners find themselves locked in a life and death struggle with the newest religion on the world scene, Islam, barely 1,400 years old and a strange conglomeration of things borrowed from both Judaism and Christianity, but mostly reflecting the warring society of Arab tribes in the seventh century AD. It, too, has devolved into many sects, all convinced they possess the “true” Islam as cobbled together by the self-proclaimed prophet, Muhammad.

One can only imagine what atheists make of this insanity, but whether for God or nation, both or neither, we shall be fighting for our lives for decades to come.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, http://www.anxietycenter.com/. His book, “Right Answers: Separating Fact from Fantasy”, has recently been published by Merril Press.

© Alan Caruba, 2006

4 comments:

Longstreet said...

I left my church as a direct result of the take-over of the church by the religious and political left.

Longstreet

Kagehi said...

I never left any church myself. Sure, I knew people went to them, but I wasn't handed the claim that it was all true and I *had* to believe it from my parents. One odd moment that categorized my belief in the great spiritual Santa Claus was when, having read bits of one Bible my parents had, I was told to ignore one given to me by my uncle, because his "sect" of Christianity was somehow "wrong"... Sure, that's why the picture book was indistinguishable from the silly stories in my parents version, just with pictures. Always logical, slightly prone to consider a lot of the people around me as idiots for not getting things as fast as I did, but able to step down to their level and explain things to them, I have always found the simplistic answers that nearly everyone wanted to be unsatisfying. I didn't care of X was true, I wanted to know "why" it was true, and I stopped believing the answer, "Just because!", when I was two. At probably 8-9 I was already reading books for teens, no... more like stuff for adults. Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Anne McCaffrey, etc. Too many to name. In the period between 8 and 18, I probably read 90% of the 1500+ books I own, along with ones I read, but don't personally have copies of. All had the same underlying human themes, all of them talk about morals and ideals, and I rapidly got seriously sick of the few that spent most of their time not telling a good story, but babbling and whining about how they wanted or thought the world worked, according to their *religion*. It was blindingly obvious that such people had a huge blind spot. An inability to see past the fictions and justifications of their favorite flavor of God, to see that everyone else agreed, and it was damn stupid to punish people for "not" agreeing with some rule or demand that the faithful claimed was handed down to them, but for which there are not one damn logical argument to defend and no evidence that anything other than people being a lot happier would come from burying it in a hole and forgetting about it. I also read "lots" of science books and magazines, which only made some of the silliness of the arguments people made even more obvious.

In the end, I came to atheism by the simple luck of not having anyone force feed me anything else, and my own recognition that there was no justification for anyone to claim "better" morals than anyone else based on faith, and tons of evidence of just how corrupt, ugly, war mongering, deceitful, hate filled and evil it "can" make people, when it insists that you have to believe every nutty rule the priests give you, and attack everyone, verbally, physically and spiritually, for failing to fall for the same stupid false excuses for bigotry. Then I started to get interested in politics (fairly recently) and realized just how much of this, "I am better than you because I follow -insert random god here-, so you have to do everything the way I say!", BS actually dictates the kinds of things that "do" get done, as well as the kind of things that people refuse to bother doing, which they badly need to. I waste probably 60% of my time just wasting time, and I admit it. I am human. But these people waste more than 80% of their time, and actually *insist* they are accomplishing something doing it. And all of us wonder why we can "never" seem to solve some of the worlds, or just our own, problems. Gosh! I don't have a clue...

Now, the blog that has just linked here is populated with "lots" of people that got where I am from the opposite direction. Seems that as good as the general contradictions and silliness of religion push "some" people towards atheism, the people who are most likely to tell you that religion is a horrible disease and, being nice people, and not facists, they just wish the infected stayed in the leper colony, while they are actively being infectious, instead of insisting that its their duty to export it, **started out** as evangelicals and fundamentalists.

Kevin said...

Why does this seem like a fluff piece put up just because you have no idea what to do since the Democratic takeover last Tuesday?

Longstreet said...

Kevin: I assure you it is not a "fluff" piece. We conservatives have been on the defense for the past six years. Now, we switch to offense. Believe me when I tell you that after being in the wilderness for 40 years we really learned how to play offense.

It's gonna get nasty!

Strap in!

Best regards,

Longstreet