Natural Atheism Saturday, June 23, 2007
Posted by Henry in agnosticism, anthropology, atheism, book review, David Eller, Eller, faith, fundamentalism, God, logic, Natural Atheism, rationality, religion, science, secularism, spirituality, theism.4 comments
“I was born an Atheist. All humans are born Atheists.”
This is the powerful opening of a superbly written book, Natural Atheism, which I feel deserves as much attention, if not more, as the current best-selling atheism books such as The God Delusion and A Letter To Christian Nation. The author of the book is Dr. David Eller, an American anthropologist.
This atheism book is a fresh break from the usual passionate and vocal (or, aggressive and strident, to many people) tones of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – it is of a modest and thoughtful tone. Reading the book is rather like a typical scholarly textbook – impersonal, very well structured and presented, important words are critically defined and crucial points are argued in logical steps.
Quiz: What Kind of Atheist Are You? Saturday, May 26, 2007
Posted by Henry in agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, evolution, faith, funny, God, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, quiz, rationality, religion, science, secularism, Sikhism, spirituality.6 comments
Courtesy of Evolving Thoughts and the ever-resourceful Pharygula, here is the result of what type of an atheist I am… below is the result – I am a 100% “scientific atheist” – and somewhat surprisingly, a 25% of a theist!
Of course, there are questions regarding evolution.
You scored as Scientific Atheist, These guys rule. I’m not one of them myself, although I play one online. They know the rules of debate, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and can explain evolution in fifty words or less. More concerned with how things ARE than how they should be, these are the people who will bring us into the future.
What kind of atheist are you? |
Worldwide Atheism Trend and Pattern – A Summary Thursday, May 3, 2007
Posted by Henry in agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, China, Christianity, Europe, faith, God, Hinduism, Islam, Italy, Japan, Middle East, North Korea, Portugal, rationality, religion, Scandinavian, science, secularism, South Korea, statistics, survey, Sweden, United States, Vietnam, world.26 comments
This is the sort of article I have been long searching for – a comprehensive, analytical and scholarly summary – filled with hard data – of atheism trends in the world. This 2005 article is written by Phil Zuckerman and seems to have been part of a Cambridge University publication. Although slightly outdated, it nonetheless provides a reliable and useful source for anyone interested in the study of the atheist demographics.
It is not a short article, so I will take the liberty of summarising it further here. Firstly it outlines the difficulties in conducting a survey on the beliefs and disbeliefs of large populations. Then it provides a good statistics on the atheism population in many countries. Then, most importantly, the Top 50 list of non-believing countries is presented, which I will duplicate here (I have stripped out the population columns due to space limits):
| Country | % Atheist/actual # Agnostic/Non-believer in God | |
| 1 | Sweden | 46-85% |
| 2 | Vietnam | 81% |
| 3 | Denmark | 43-80% |
| 4 | Norway | 31-72% |
| 5 | Japan | 64-65% |
| 6 | Czech Republic | 54-61% |
| 7 | Finland | 28-60% |
| 8 | France | 43-54% |
| 9 | South Korea | 30%-52% |
| 10 | Estonia | 49% |
| 11 | Germany | 41-49% |
| 12 | Russia | 24-48% |
| 13 | Hungary | 32-46% |
| 14 | Netherlands | 39-44% |
| 15 | Britain | 39-44% |
| 16 | Belgium | 42-43% |
| 17 | Bulgaria | 34-40% |
| 18 | Slovenia | 35-38% |
| 19 | Israel | 15-37% |
| 20 | Canada | 19-30% |
| 21 | Latvia | 20-29% |
| 22 | Slovakia | 10-28% |
| 23 | Switzerland | 17-27% |
| 24 | Austria | 18-26% |
| 25 | Australia | 24-25% |
| 26 | Taiwan | 24% |
| 27 | Spain | 15-24% |
| 28 | Iceland | 16-23% |
| 29 | New Zealand | 20-22% |
| 30 | Ukraine | 20% |
| 31 | Belarus | 17% |
| 32 | Greece | 16% |
| 33 | North Korea | 15% (?) |
| 34 | Italy | 6-15% |
| 35 | Armenia | 14% |
| 36 | China | 8-14% (?) |
| 37 | Lithuania | 13% |
| 38 | Singapore | 13% |
| 39 | Uruguay | 12% |
| 40 | Kazakhstan | 11-12% |
| 41 | Estonia | 11% |
| 42 | Mongolia | 9% |
| 43 | Portugal | 4-9% |
| 44 | United States | 3-9% |
| 45 | Albania | 8% |
| 46 | Argentina | 4-8% |
| 47 | Kyrgyzstan | 7% |
| 48 | Dominican Rep. | 7% |
| 49 | Cuba | 7% (?) |
| 50 | Croatia | 7% |
where (?) indicates the relatively low certainty/validity. Note that rather than defining the terms “atheism”, “agnosticism” and “non-belief”, which is a tricky issue in itself, the article lumps all three together to simply mean people who do not believe in God. The range of percentages (for example the top non-believing country Sweden is 46% – 85%) gives an indication of the difficulties in reaching such figures. Finally, the author gives his own analysis on atheism trend and pattern using the data.
Evolution Space 