An Atheist Hate Letter Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Posted by Henry in atheism, Christianity, discrimination, faith, fundamentalism, hate-crime, hoax, OUT campaign, religion, Sam Harris, statistics, Texas, United States.19 comments
Update:
Several readers have kindly pointed out that the letter is actually a hoax – please see the comments for more details. My apologies for not being able to double check this before posting…
h3nry – 15 August 2007
Check out this reader’s letter to a newspaper – tell me if I should laugh it off or see it as some sort of hate-crime? Surely if we replace the word “atheists” with some other minority group, the letter would never have been published.
Courtesy of this page here (via Reddit). Unfortunately not much else information is given on this letter.
The ending sentence exemplifies the prejudice and religious bigotry of the writer of the letter:
I don’t care if they have never committed a crime, atheists are the reason crime is rampant.
Those of you who have read Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation might remember the interesting statistics correlating crime rates in the more religious areas of the United States in comparison to the less religious areas:
Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in “blue” states and 38 percent are in “red” states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, 24 percent in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the United States are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rate of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rate of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.
where the “red” states are the conservative religious states and the “blue” states are the more liberal states.
It is worth noting that the writer of the letter is not anonymous – which I suspect by choice – which to me seems to reflect the general anti-atheist sentiment held by the majority in the US.
I suppose it is precisely because of this sort of hatred that the OUT Campaign is designed for – although not unexpectedly it has also convinced atheists to continue to hide their views.
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.