Reading Time: 3 minutes Last year, American Atheists released the results of what was arguably the largest survey ever conducted of atheists. While there are some obvious statistical limits to an online, self-selected survey, the sheer number of participants still tells us a lot about what a large group of self-described atheists thinks about a number of issues. Today, […]
Research
Research from a secular perspective at OnlySky, a secular community for nonreligious Americans.
Posted inLatest research
Prison ministries, on their own, don’t lead to better outcomes
Reading Time: 3 minutes If other obstacles await you outside of a prison cell, then no amount of Jesus is going to fix your situation.
Posted inAnalysis, Religion
The decline of religion: the bad news
Reading Time: 3 minutes In the Western world, like a cornered, injured animal, religion is both weaker and more dangerous than ever.
Posted inAnalysis
The decline of religion: the good news
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religion is declining throughout the Western world – here’s why we should be glad about it.
Posted inNonreligious News
Survey says: A record number of Americans have no religious affiliation
Reading Time: 4 minutes This massive shift away from organized religion has been taking place for years.
Posted inPsychology
Semantic paraphasia: The things we can’t help
Reading Time: 5 minutes I often mis-say specific words. I know the word I want and I’m thinking of the right thing at the time, but the wrong word consistently pops out. It turns out there’s a term for this situation: semantic paraphasia. Today, Lord Snow Presides over our brains — and the stuff we literally can’t help sometimes.
Posted inLeaving Religion
Barna Group Sure Hopes Gen Z Can Rescue Evangelicalism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Evangelical leaders’ attention was always fated to shift from Millennials to Gen Z. Millennials utterly failed to secure a turnaround in the tribe’s fortunes. So now those leaders look to Gen Z to save their bacon.
Posted inEthics and Morality
According to Pew Research, sometimes bad things just happen
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a lot of ways, this research really asks about how American Christians engage with the Problem of Evil. The Problem of Evil asks how suffering can possibly exist in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-good, and all-loving god. It shouldn’t exist at all, and yet here we are, in a world full of suffering.
Posted inCulture
The Cooperative Election Study Won’t Save Christianity
Reading Time: 7 minutes Solid information can only be good to have. If we can’t identify and describe something that’s happening, we’ll have very little chance of predicting outcomes from it or influencing it. That’s why I found Ryan Burge’s recent post on Religion News kinda frustrating.
Posted inHealthcare
Atheists, agnostics and humanists much more likely than Christians to get COVID-19 vaccine
Reading Time: 2 minutes Although on the one hand we nonreligious types don’t like to do what we’re told by a skydaddy god that we’ve made up ourselves in our gullible past, on the other hand, we do like to believe what we’re told by experts in the know who have used evidence and rationality to substantiate their conclusions. […]