Reading Time: 4 minutes Via Orcinus, a truly incredible story about the latest survey to come out of the Barna Group, whose title is “A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity“. Over the last decade or so, the religious right has exercised virtually untrammeled power in America. They’ve commanded the allegiance of a majority of the […]
demographics
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Atheists at 25%
Reading Time: 3 minutes Atheist Revolution recently picked up on a stunning poll result described in The Nation: …a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed […]
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What Is Christianity Good For?
Reading Time: 4 minutes What is Christianity good for? I ask this question in all seriousness, not as an insult. I genuinely want to know. Eternal life in Heaven is usually held out as the greatest benefit of becoming a Christian, but that reward is said to be in the next life and is impossible for us to verify. […]
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An Address to Hispanic Freethinkers
Reading Time: 4 minutes This year, I made a New Year’s resolution to learn Spanish. In a world of many cultures, I’ve always felt somewhat embarrassed that I never learned to speak another language, and with the increasing influence of Hispanic people and culture in the United States, Spanish was a rational choice. Both while going to graduate school […]
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A Passionate Atheism
Reading Time: 5 minutes The new generation of bold and outspoken atheists, including Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are making waves in society with numerous media appearances, a welcome change of pace from the media’s previous policy of steadfast refusal to cover freethought and nonbelief. (Some things are slower to change than others – despite Time Newsweek‘s praiseworthy coverage […]
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We Are the Swing Vote
Reading Time: 3 minutes In a post from October titled “Tipping the Scales“, I wrote that although non-believers are still outnumbered by the conventionally religious, there are encouraging signs of recent growth and increasing organization among atheists and agnostics, signs which …may well be the grains of sand that presage a much larger slide in the near future, and […]
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A Godless Recount
Reading Time: 4 minutes Baylor University has recently released a study, titled “American Piety in the 21st Century”, on American religious affiliation and church attendance. This study has been widely described as casting doubt on previous studies which have found that religious belief is declining in America. In particular, the Baylor researchers have described their study as an explicit […]
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Receding Waters
Reading Time: 4 minutes Earlier this month, I wrote a post titled “The Roar of Many Waters“, a frank recognition of the despair I sometimes feel in the face of an overwhelming tide of anti-rational and confrontational religion. But although I closed that post on a brighter note, I did not within it provide any concrete reasons for nonbelievers […]
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We’ve Got Work to Do
Reading Time: 3 minutes My post yesterday, “The Quiet Revolution“, discussed some of the positive ways in which atheists are organizing and making inroads into society. But as much as I hate to follow up good news with bad, I feel I would be doing my readers a disservice if I played down the magnitude of what we atheists […]
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A Mile Wide and an Inch Deep
Reading Time: 3 minutes The United States of America is populated overwhelmingly by Christians. Poll after poll shows that between 75% and 85% of American citizens identify with some denomination of Christianity, and though this percentage has declined somewhat in recent years, it is still a great majority. It would be correct to say that the U.S. is, in […]