Hostility to Atheists

[archerships]

Lot's of fascinating research on public attitudes toward atheists at Volokh Conspiracy:

Moreover, there seems to be a great deal of hostility to atheists among the public: A July 7, 2005 Pew Research Center poll, for instance, asked people about their views of various religious and political grounds, and whether "your overall opinion of [the group] is very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable, or very unfavorable?" For Catholics, the total unfavorable percentage was 14%; for Jews, 7%; for "Evangelical Christians," 19%; for "Muslim Americans," 25%; for "Atheists, that is, people who don't believe in God," it was 50%, including 28% "very unfavorable" (only 35% said they had either a "very favorable" or "mostly favorable" view of atheists).

Comments

[pentomino.livejournal.com]

Looks like Atheists are the new Jews.

[istar.livejournal.com]

I like atheists! We have the best conversations.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

relevant link

[vyus.livejournal.com]

what does "uvery nfavorable" mean? would it be different if "unfavorable" was the middle option and "hostile" was the extreme?

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I don't know.

[kenmora.livejournal.com]

As an atheist, I'm not entirely surprised. Perhaps I should "proselytize" my atheism, or even "Evangelize" it.

Music: "Imagnine" by John Lenon

[bigleeh.livejournal.com]

One tends not to notice the excesses of the evangelists of ones own sect so it falls to me, an agnostic who has wandered into this athiest thread, to deliver the bad news that, of all the religions that one encounters routinely in the US, Athiesm is the pushiest and most annoying.

This is, of course, talking about the US only. In other countries the people who saw off heads with dull knives tend to edge the athiests out, if only briefly while one's head is being so removed.

[kenmora.livejournal.com]

Seriously? Maybe this is a geographic thing, because I generally don't find out someone else is an atheist until I've known them for awhile. That said, I've only discovered two others share my views.

Born-agains, on the other hand, almost routinely interject phrases like "as a Christian I..." within minutes of a first conversation with them, if they don't just come out and preface a response (on whatever topic, by the way) with "Are you a Christian?" Now THAT'S annoying.

I know a lot of Agnostics, but again, they never volunteer their theism unless it's germane to the conversation.

I notice Jews and Catholics don't tend to wear their religion on their sleeves as much as Christians, and when they do it's usually to comment on differences of cultural upbringing than to espouse a particular theosophical belief.

[herbaliser.livejournal.com]

Amazing. I never hear christians telling stories about people at work pushing their atheism onto them.