“A New Breed of Atheist” Friday, August 3, 2007
Posted by Henry in atheism, Christianity, Christopher Hitchens, Dawkins, humanism, rationality, reason, religion, Richard Dawkins, secularism.10 comments
A writer at ChristianPost has joined a chorus of concerned religious lots in attacking the current atheism movement spearheaded by Dawkins and Hitchens and all. He identifies this new breed atheism, or anti-theism, as something that is:
There’s no substance, just anger and a lot of hot air.
The lack-of-substance argument has been widely used as a main criticism to these hot-selling anti-theism books such as The God Delusion; some even calls them naive and simplistic. I have stressed it previously that when criticising religion or any other ideology systems you need not to be a complete scholar in the subject – there is a difference between being completely ignorant and being knowledgeable enough.
Further, the writer notes:
They don’t argue; they yell. They’ve decided that, simply because they dislike religion, there is no reason to respect it. In their minds, it’s stupid, dangerous, and that’s all that needs to be said.
He also addresses the current atheism trend from the more concerned atheists (emphasis mine):
The old-guard secular humanists are questioning this new trend, and rightly so. Most traditional atheists simply had their own belief system, and if we wanted our belief system that was okay. The new breed reflects the death of truth. They’re like the communists who feared religion more than anything else because it was a competing truth claim.
How many wrongful claims can you find in this single paragraph along?
Incredibly atheism has been equated once again to a belief system. No it isn’t! If so, what is it and what is its faiths and beliefs?
We don’t fear religion. We are incredibly concerned about the dangers religion has shown over and over again, and these dangers are based on irrationality and blind faith. The dangers range from discrimination against non-believers, to religious-based practices such as honour-killing, genital-mutilation, creationism to name just a few, and to global-wide conflicts that I need not to mention here.
This is why the new atheism is being blunt and in-four-face, bringing the religion down from its pedestal.
Further, in a sweeping generalisation the new atheism movement is being labelled as a system that competes with religion to claim truth. Again this is wrong. Atheism keeps an open mind as to what the so-called truth is – it never claims truth. Religions do. And they do that based not on rational approaches but on dogmatic beliefs and ancient writings. Each religion claims it is the truth religion, let alone the plethora of cults and denominations.
The new atheism may be too loud and blunt – get used to it and get over it.
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.
Do Evolutionists Believe in God? A Study Friday, June 22, 2007
Posted by Henry in atheism, biology, Cornell Evolution Project, evolution, religion, science, secularism, survey, theism.10 comments
The relationship between science and religion has always been uneasy and sometimes controversial. The religious views of eniment scientists have been studied in a couple of surveys conducted in the early part of 1900’s. In a poll conducted in 1910 to 400 scientists, 32% of them believed in a “personal god”. The same poll was again carried out in 1933, and this time the belief in a personal god had dropped to a mere 13%, which is not all that surprising given the rapid advancement in our scientific understanding back then, and even more less surprising is the fact that biologists scored lower percentages in both polls.
Now, in 2003, we have another similar but more sophisticates survey conducted – this among eminent evolutionists. This is the website for the study, and here is the article featured in American Scientist Online.
This time, the concept of god is widened to include more choices for the participants, and the graph below shows the result:
Only a mere 4.8% of the evolutionists consider themselves to be a full theists i.e. believer of a personal god. Yes – only 4.8% of them believe in the personal God most of us are familiar with!
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 