Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (64 page)
Read Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) Online
Authors: Dale McGowan
Part IV
Living a Full Life without Belief in God
In this part . . .
W
hat’s it actually like to be an atheist? How do they think about meaning, ethics, and death? How many nonbelievers are there in the world today, and how is their influence growing? How do the nonreligious get some of the benefits of church without the detriments . . . and without the actual church?
These are all good questions. This part answers these and dozens more. Here you can get a snapshot of atheism today — how disbelief differs by generation, gender, and ethnicity, where atheists live and how they express their beliefs, and just what it’s like to be an atheist, meeting the many challenges of being human without a supernatural safety net.
Chapter 14
Getting Personal with Atheism Today
In This Chapter
Counting atheists worldwide
Discovering who and where they are
Asking why they are (sometimes) angry
Seeking and celebrating diversity in the movement
I
n addition to grand questions and deep history, there are some simpler questions to answer about atheists — like who they are, what they’re like, where and how they live, and just how many we’re talking about.
This chapter attempts to get past common misconceptions and ask a few basic questions about atheists to provide a truer picture of people who just happen to think no gods are knocking about. Some of the answers may surprise you. I hope so, because they still surprise me.
Counting Heads: The Growing Nontheistic Presence around the World
Getting a handle on religious nonbelief worldwide is a tricky thing for several reasons:
In most cultures, atheism has a real stigma associated to it. As a result, many nonbelievers don’t admit their atheism when asked by a pollster. Many people even make false claims about their own churchgoing behavior. One poll in an Ohio county in the early 1990s counted heads in every church in the county on a given Sunday morning and found 20 percent of the population there. But when they conducted a countywide poll that week to ask whether people had been in church that Sunday, 36 percent said yes!
Asking the question worldwide: Are you religious?
In 2005 and again in 2012, Gallup asked 50,000 people worldwide the following question: “Do you consider yourself a religious person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?”
The wording isn’t great, because atheists can reasonably choose the second or third choices, and many people would see “convinced” as “certain,” which few atheists are (see
Chapter 2
). Even so, the results are interesting:
In Ireland, those who chose “religious” dropped from 69 percent to 47 percent in seven years — the largest drop in the world.
China had the highest percentage of “convinced atheists” in 2012 at 47 percent. Japan had 31 percent and France 29 percent.
The most religious countries are in Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.
Though “nonreligious” polls at 20 percent in other surveys, only 1 percent of US respondents in the Gallup poll chose “convinced atheist” in 2005; it rose to 5 percent in 2012 . . . the same as Saudi Arabia.
Atheism has its false negatives. If someone identifies as “Unitarian,” he will usually be counted as Christian, even though most Unitarian Universalists are nontheists of one stripe or another. The same goes with Buddhists, most of whom are also nontheistic.
How the questions are asked varies from country to country, year to year, and poll to poll, which makes them difficult to compare. Until recently, many polls of religious belief didn’t even include “None” as an option.
So you can get a pretty good idea how many Mormons and Muslims and Methodists exist in the world, but counting nonbelievers is like counting beads of mercury — while wearing plastic mittens — in the rain.
As of 2012, the best estimates put people who don’t believe in a supernatural God at around 16 percent of the world’s population, or 1.1 billion.
Figuring Out the Who, What, and Where of Atheism
