Hundreds of gay and lesbian couples across New York State to marry this weekend -
I haven’t gotten around to posting anything about gay marriage becoming legal in New York State yet, and now’s a good time to do so. Here’s a recent article from the New York Times about the hundreds of couples who are planning on getting married this Sunday, the first day that gay marriage will be legal in the state. Niagara Falls is lighting up in rainbow colors tonight in celebration of the occasion, while some couples are being wed there at midnight. Anyone who’s non-religious should care about this, since it represents a step forward in the larger battle to move past the antiquated, progress-stifling moral values of Christianity and other religions.
(Source: godbrain, via divineirony)
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“Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.” —
Carl Sagan
(via)
Here’s some interesting info from a relatively recent Gallup poll. This chart shows the percentage of Americans (18 and older) who believe in God or a “universal spirit.” Overall, about 92% of Americans believe in God, which is pretty consistent with the 2008 Religious Landscape Survey conducted by Pew, which sampled about 35,000 people, whereas this Gallup poll had about 1,000 participants. Still, it’s important to point out that the margin of error for this poll is ±4 percentage points (it was only ±0.6 percentage points for the 2008 Pew survey).
What’s really interesting, though, is seeing how much variability there is when you break it down into different demographic and political categories. Notice that for people aged 18-29, God belief is about 10 percentage points lower than it is for all other age groups. That’s more than double the amount of atheists! Holy cow.
One possible interpretation of this is that we’re witnessing a lasting cultural shift, and these 18-to-29-year-olds will continue to be atheists as they grow old (and, potentially, future cohorts of young adults will become increasingly non-religious). An alternative interpretation, however, is that non-belief is more common during this phase in people’s lives, but young adults tend to grow out of their non-belief as they get older. There are a few reasons to believe that this isn’t the case, though.
First of all, I don’t think it’s all that common for people to undergo major changes in their religious beliefs after the age of 30. Conversions and deconversions most likely occur during people’s formative years, and also during times of great change or upheaval in their lives (which are also a lot more common during adolescence and young adulthood). Anecdotally, at least, I’ve never known any atheists who’ve gone the other way and have become religious (or re-religious).
Second, I can think of at least one major cultural change that could possibly explain such a big increase in the number of non-believers among this cohort: the internet. It’s possible that steadfast religious belief depends in part on remaining ignorant to other cultures, other religious beliefs, and critical opinions or contradictory evidence towards one’s own beliefs. Given the incredible amount of information that’s become readily available to Americans as the internet has come to play a central role in all of our lives, it’s entirely plausible that the internet has been a big part of this increase in non-belief.
Third, there’s this chart from Gallup which shows that there really has been an overall increase in the number of non-believing Americans over the past 30+ years (which wouldn’t be the case if non-belief were only a phase that previous generations have also experienced during young adulthood):
(source: Gallup)
“Many Christians today may think that the canon of the New Testament simply appeared on the scene one day, soon after the death of Jesus, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As it turns out, we are able to pinpoint the first time that any Christian of record listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament as *the* books of the New Testament—neither more nor fewer. Surprising as it may seem, this Christian was writing in the second half of the fourth century, nearly three hundred years after the books of the New Testament had themselves been written. The author was the powerful bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius.” — Bart Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus
Facebook evolution debate, done properly
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There Are 10 Times As Many Atheists as Mormons: When Will Non-Believers Become a Political Force? -
Here’s a good article on the politics of religious belief (and non-belief) by Adam Lee at alternet.
American politics clearly has a “stained-glass ceiling,” a de facto barrier to atheists running for office. Despite the many great Americans who’ve been nonbelievers, despite the guarantees of secularism written into our Constitution, outspoken atheism is still seen as an insurmountable liability for anyone who seeks to serve our country as an elected officer of the government.
Why is this? It’s not because atheists are so rare that politicians can safely ignore us. On the contrary, nonbelief is far more common than many people realize.