Atheism is also tied to education, measured by academic achievement atheists in many places tend to have college degrees or general knowledge of the panoply of beliefs around the world hence theories that Internet access spurs atheism. The U. The social factors that promote atheism—financial security and education—have long been harder to attain for women and people of color in the United States. Around the world, the Pew Research Center finds that women tend to be more likely to affiliate with a religion and more likely to pray and find religion important in their lives.
That changes when women have more opportunities. Religion has a place for women, people of color, and the poor. Prominent atheists Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have awful reputations for misogyny, as does the late Christopher Hitchens.
Bill Maher, the comedian and outspoken atheist, is no nonexistent angel , either. Even people who are white, male, and educated may fear the stigma of being labeled a nonbeliever. These were years of war, when Islam was painted as a threat and Christianity infused U. In the U. But the national backlash to religious legislation has become faster and fiercer than ever before.
Donald Trump is not outwardly religious and his attraction of evangelical voters has raised questions about the longevity and the motives of the religious right. Their reticence about religion reflects the second largest religious group in the country they hope to run. The number of Americans who seek divine intervention in the voting booth seems to be shrinking. For all the work secular groups do to promote acceptance of nonbelievers, perhaps nothing will be as effective as apathy plus time.
As the secular millennials grow up and have children of their own, the only Sunday morning tradition they may pass down is one everyone in the world can agree on: brunch.
All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren.
David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts. But are atheists a suspect class, or just a skeptical one? Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice.
Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view. Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise.
The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.
The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success. Auguste Comte and his fellow nineteenth-century positivists envisioned a Grand Pontiff of Humanity who would preside alongside scientist-priests; unfortunately, scientists at the time were practicing phrenology.
Today, the voguish version of science as religion is transhumanism, which claims that technology will overcome human limitations both physical and mental, perhaps through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or cyborgs that can carry around the contents of our brains. On the whole, Gray is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and what others regard as novel or promising he often sees as derivative or just plain dumb.
He argues, for instance, that secular humanism is really monotheism in disguise, where humankind is God and salvation can be achieved through our own efforts rather than through divine intervention. Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly. Religions are still thriving, as are wars between them, and secular regimes have wrought as much, if not more, havoc under the auspices of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism.
Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns.
Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea. Instead of seeking surrogates for God, they try to acquiesce in something that transcends human understanding. Although unenforceable, the bans periodically impede atheists wanting to hold public office.
In , Herb Silverman, an atheist activist and math professor, was denied a position as a notary public because of a ban in South Carolina. He had to sue the state before he could hold the position. Meanwhile in , Cecil Bothwell , a local Democratic candidate, won his city counsel race in Asheville, North Carolina — but had to fight critics who claimed he was ineligible on account of his atheism. These attacks continued for years after Bothwell was elected.
Atheists have tried to do just that. But politicians show little interest in removing the bans on atheists that exist in state constitutions. Even if it was still unenforceable, it would still be disgraceful and be removed. So why are we different? To many Americans, beliefs in God and Americanism has become synonymous. And while they can request otherwise, the default assumption is that Americans will make an oath to God when taking public office or testifying in court. The study's interactive map gives a good, broad, overview of which countries punish apostasy and blasphemy by death black , with prison time red , or place legal restrictions on non- religious speech and thought yellow :.
The report is a more comprehensive version of a similar study released last year that identified just seven countries where atheists faced capital punishment, only half of this year's total. It also found much more widespread discrimination against atheists around the world.
The authors, citing a Gallup study , estimate that about 13 percent of the world's population is atheist, while 23 percent identify as simply "not religious. Although not on the list of 13, Bangladesh receives some special attention in the report as a particular low-light. Several non-religious and atheist bloggers and journalists in the country have faced death threats and harassment this year in the wake of a series of government prosecutions for blasphemy.
0コメント