Imagine If All Atheists Left America
- Thread starter canada-man
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I firmly believe (and the stats back me up) that the more highly educated you are, the less likely you are to believe in religion. In other words, as you learn more about the world you become less likely to believe that there's a mythical guy in the clouds controlling all our destinies.
But many people need religion because the alternative is downright scary to them. Many don't want to believe that this is all there is. Without being able to cling to the dream that the "next life" will be better than this one, a whole lot of people would be downright scary to be around.
But many people need religion because the alternative is downright scary to them. Many don't want to believe that this is all there is. Without being able to cling to the dream that the "next life" will be better than this one, a whole lot of people would be downright scary to be around.
The more educated you are, the more likely nuanced your religious or spiritual belief. Only the most simplistic religious beliefs envision an anthropomorphic deity in the sky shaped like a old man with a beard. Having some scientific knowledge encourages disbelief in simplistic "fundamentalist" religious views. Having more scientific knowledge, especially realizing how little we actually understand about the universe and the fabric of reality and how improbable our own existence actually is, can encourage more complicated theological views. Of course, reconciling a belief in the divine with increasing technological and scientific progress takes effort - which some people aren't willing to make.
Rather some wild suppositions. Parents of normal intelligence never have very intelligent children? Poverty and illiteracy would increase, actually most Christian Denominations in the U.S. have historically made a 'big deal' about literacy.
Of course the video is entirely based on "lies, damned lies and statistics" presuming that everything would remain unchanged save the population so that they can throw in that wonderful caveat "per capita."
Also I never knew that Stephen Hawking was an American.
Of course the video is entirely based on "lies, damned lies and statistics" presuming that everything would remain unchanged save the population so that they can throw in that wonderful caveat "per capita."
Also I never knew that Stephen Hawking was an American.
I tend to agree with both you and Narg on this one.
I would need to see some basic research and stats supporting those assumptions and assertions.
In addition a lot of well educated people that I meet are agnostics but not atheists. I can imagine the assertions and unsupported stats would better fit agnostics.
there is a continuum:
Fundamental Organized Religion
Organized Religion
Loosely Structured Belief in a deity
Belief in a deity but not religion
Agnostic
Atheist.
B
I find both ends of the spectrum are based to much on blind faith to make me feel comfortable.
For atheists this may be true only for some of the militant ones. A lot of atheists
are silent about their non-belief. Speaking for myself I never ever once in my life
had to tell someone face to face that there is no god.
atheist and blind faith is an oxymoron.
atheists are not the ones descriminating against thiests, issuing fatwas, etc
LOL I cannot agree. anyone who is convinced they KNOW something, are to one extent acting more or less on blind faith.
Science and knowledge are expanding the borders more and more. They knew the world was flat. They knew it was round. Both wrong.
They knew man would never fly.
They knew that bad air was the cause of TB.
They knew the world sat on a giant turtle.
They knew the atom was the smallest building block of matter.
Non-euclidean geometry is the answer to all time space questions.
I could go on for several thousand lines
Fundamentalists and Atheists both have theories they believe. Both claim they are correct. Both believe they have facts to back it up. Both do have facts, and have blind faith in their theories.
Only to your mind.
Does discriminating include dismissing out of hand, claiming to be less intelligent etc. . . if so 2 Samuel 12:12-7A applies
athiests don't believe in gods not the supernatural. you are repeating crap spouted by the religious
"
athiests unlike fundies don't assert beliefs without evidence. she is wrong. "theory" in layman's terms has a different meaning theory in scientific term is different.
Not quite Athiests, the hate filled ones anyways, cannot prove their faith as they will tell you they don't have one, but will gladly tell those who do have faith that what they believe in cannot be proven.
Anyways, any video that has Keanuu reeves in it cannot be taken seriously.
and atheists are pretty much as well grounded as people who say 2 + 2 always equals 4.
Just shallow conceited thinking.
That only if you look at the world as a whole. Studies have shown if you scratch a little deeper, you find it really depends.
From a couple of studies http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2012/07/does-education-mean-more-or-less.html
Gerhard Meisenberg, at Ross University Medical School in Dominica, and colleagues have conducted a new analysis of world-wide data using a novel approach.
Using data from the World Values Survey they showed that in all regions of the world except Sub-Saharan Africa, educated people tend to have lower religious beliefs. However, educated people were only less likely to go to religious services in ex-communist nations and in the Middle East, and they are actually more likely to go to religious services in English-speaking countries and in South/South-East Asia (as well as sub-Saharan Africa).
Then Meisenberg moved on to look at IQ. Now, IQ is only available as a crude estimate of average IQ in each nation, and should probably be regarded as a measure of 'cognitive development'. Countries with a better education system, but also with better health and better access to the sort of 'enrichment' activities common in wealthy nations, are going to do better at the abstract problem solving that typifies IQ tests.
When Meisenberg put these average national IQs into a model, he found that they were better able to predict religious belief than either education or GDP - or a variety of other factors, such as the dominant religion and level of corruption.
Digging further, he found that, the negative relationship between education and religious beliefs is strongest in countries with moderately high average IQ (as shown in the graphic).
Meisenberg concludes that, overall, there is a "negligible relationship between intelligence and religiosity in advanced societies".
However, when comparing between countries at different levels of economic development, "religious belief declines sharply with rising education and, especially, intelligence.
What Meisanberg thinks is that, at moderate levels of economic development, there is a 'clash of cultures' between scientific and religious worldviews. Religion in these countries is tha dogmatic, traditional religion that makes empirical claims about how the world works. Intelligent, educated people reject these claims.
In Sweden, the UK, Hong Kong and South Korea, educated people tend to be more religious. Meisenberg thinks that this is because religion in these countries (and other cognitively advanced countries) has evolved. In these countries religion variants have been developed that abandons claims about the real world. Instead religion is "assigned to a realm in which rational analysis is either off limits, or is applied to axioms that are not supported by observation and are, in this sense, irrational".
In other words, in the most developed countries, a new form of religion has developed that appeals to educated people.
David Voas, a demographer at the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex, has examined the UK data in detail. He thinks that what has happened is that both the educated and the uneducated have become less religious in recent decades - but the fall off has been faster for the uneducated. The result is that now the educated are more religious than the uneducated (even though they are less religious than before).
Of course, these two explanations are compatible. Perhaps the reason that the educated have hung on to religion is that they have developed sophisticated, counter-intuitive forms of religion. And the uneducated simply aren't interested in these new-fangled kinds of religion, any more than they are interested in the old sort!
atheism is the lack of belief in gods. athiests by definition don't have faith in gods and the supernatural because there is no evidence
the definition of faith is belief without evidence. get a dictionary.
