More Americans are nonreligious. Who are they and what do they believe?
More Americans are nonreligious. Who are they and what do they believe?
A new report by the Pew Research Center finds that the number of Americans with no religious affiliation — known as the “nones“ — is now nearly 30 percent.
Who am I?
Ulkesh
What do I believe?
Objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts.
I mean they didn’t need a whole article for this.
The title is pure clickbait lol. It's like "who could these mysterious people be???" meanwhile hey it's just some good old regular folks.
In all seriousness I am glad more people are doing their best to be reasonable and put science first. It's heartwarming to see.
Serious question: What do you do when your perceptions and experience contradicts the results of supposedly objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts?
Do you assume your perceptions are wrong, or do you assume that the supposed 'objective truth' you know to be incorrect?
You're gonna have to give us some examples. If this is just some 'well I didn't see anyone die from covid' shit, then yes, your perceptions would be wrong. It'd be like scooping a handful of water out of the ocean and declaring whales aren't real because you don't see any
Not OP, but I'm a gnostic atheist, so I'll give you my perspective:
The question you're asking doesn't make sense in my worldview. The idea of a supernatural cause doesn't even enter into my consciousness as an option. If my understanding of something does not match evidence, then either my understanding is incomplete, my understanding is incorrect, or the evidence wasn't measured/understood correctly.
More broadly, when science can't explain a phenomenon, that's the interesting part! It's at the edges of our understanding that scientific progress is made. In some cases, that's just because a system is so complex that we can't (yet) model the whole system, like nutrition research, or climate science, or understanding cognition. In other cases, it's because models made at one scale don't work at another, like quantum physics or what happened right after the Big Bang.
Reality is everything, so it's all that I consider. Non-reality based ideas are fiction—lots of fun, but not relevant to my decision making or worldview.
I live my life by facts and evidence and I am not reliant solely on my own experiential evidence.
If I come across something that seems to contradict what I believe to be a fact, I research it (to the best of my ability) to see if it’s just me who is wrong.
Of course, I am human, and fallable, and my emotions certainly can get in the way. But I try to be aware of them so I can put them into perspective.
Beyond that, I would need specific examples to address, as I’ve never had any experience that I can recall which contradicted anything already explained by science.
"supposedly objective, scientifically peer-reviewed facts" "supposed 'objective truth'"
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Please provide some specific examples. Anyone who paints science in such a negative light, as you have, usually has a specific personal example of where their feelings or internalized nonscientific beliefs conflicted with reality and became an issue for that person. If you are not being a troll, please follow through with the conversation sincerely.
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Perception is inherently flawed and for all intents and purposes cannot be as correct as objective, peer-reviewed science. The scientific method exists in large part to remove hand-waving guesswork and pure fictitious nonsense that is speculated from direct perception from our understanding of everything. Being sceptical of our perception and feelings is critically important, arguably even more important than being critical of scientific work.
A great example is a feather falling slower than a bowling ball in atmosphere. Your first perception would not lead you to understand the science of gravity as we now know it thanks to rigorous scientific proof. It would lead you astray, as it has lead many people astray before and today.
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I'm not religious. I believe the universe is an accident, and we are a consequence of its randomness. We exist not for a higher purpose, we just exist because stuff happened and we came out of it, like the rest of the universe. Life is random. Nothing is written, none of it is happening for a reason. It's all chaos and we're part of it.
We were cells in the ocean, which, the ocean by itself was already a miracle so big it's basically a mathematical impossibility. And from these cells, we eventually became these weird, mostly hairless apes that are so smart that they can think about the fact that they're on a giant ball lost in space, moving at ludicrous speed through the vastness of space, kept alive by a giant ball of fire that will give them cancer if they bask in it's glory for too long or make them blind if they look at it too long.
It's absolute chaos. And I find all of this to be oddly comforting. I even find it to be beautiful in it's own way. Life is amazing because it's all an accident, it's all random and it's astonoshing to see the results. But I also get how absolutely terrifying what I just said could be to a lot of people.
So the saying goes, "relax, nothing is under control."
I came out of and abandoned the evangelical Christianity that I was raised in. However, I did NOT throw the baby out with the bathwater. I went on to critically examine the Judaic-Christian tradition further. 20 years I spent studying academic biblical scholarship and founded Ask Bible Scholars and AskBibleScholars.com.
In the middle of this adventure, I discovered the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel. One of his best books, in my opinion, is entitled God in Search of Man : A Philosophy of Judaism.
Here are some quotes from said work:
Theology starts with dogmas. Philosophy sees the problem first; theology has the answer in advance. Philosophy is a kind of thinking that has a beginning but no end; the problems outlive all solutions.
We teach children how to measure and weigh, but fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. Modern man fell into the trap of believing all enigmas can be solved and wonder is a form of ignorance. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but for want of appreciation.
What is, is more than what you see; we are unable to attain insight into the ultimate meaning and purpose of things. We live on the fringe of reality and hardly know how to reach the core. Inaccessible to us are the insights into the nature of ultimate reality. Even what is revealed is incomplete and in disguise.
Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe is the awareness of transcendent meaning; loss of awe is a great blockage to insight.
"The ineffable" is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it. All creative thinking comes out of an encounter with the unknown. It is a fact of profound significance that we can sense more than we can say.
The world as scrutinized and depicted by science is but a thin surface of the profoundly unknown.
Accidents happen and, at the same time, I will embrace the ineffable.
A couple of these quotes come off as pretty condescending. I'm not sure if that is because of lack of context, or just a general failing of the author to see outside their worldview.
This seems to the worst offender.
We teach children how to measure and weigh, but fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. Modern man fell into the trap of believing all enigmas can be solved and wonder is a form of ignorance. Mankind will not perish for want of information, but for want of appreciation.
So many people around me have an appreciation for life and pass on wonder to their children. I think it is even more prevalent in my non-religious friends.
The rest of them are not as bad, but still don't sit right with me.
What is, is more than what you see; we are unable to attain insight into the ultimate meaning and purpose of things. We live on the fringe of reality and hardly know how to reach the core. Inaccessible to us are the insights into the nature of ultimate reality.
The author may not realize it, but this is a situation they supposed the answer in advance as they criticized in the first quote. They pre-supposed the existence of an ultimate meaning or that there is an ultimate reality beyond our current understanding.
Even what is revealed is incomplete and in disguise.
I am not sure what they mean by this. Are they claiming there is a supernatural element to everything?
Awe is an act of insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe is the awareness of transcendent meaning; loss of awe is a great blockage to insight.
“The ineffable” is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it. All creative thinking comes out of an encounter with the unknown.
These are both just kind of word salad that is trying to be deep. I could see if it was meant to be poetry, but if it is meant to be philosophy it kind of fails.
It is a fact of profound significance that we can sense more than we can say.
This is a very bold claim. What exactly is it that we can sense but not vocalize?
The world as scrutinized and depicted by science is but a thin surface of the profoundly unknown.
This is the entire basis of science. Science wants to find out the unknown. It is based in curiosity.
I am not trying to criticize belief. As long as your beliefs don't infringe on other people's lives, I am a-ok with them. What I am criticizing is the author's view on non-spiritually minded folks. The quotes presented here make it seem like those of us that aren't spiritual lack an awe for the world around us, lack curiosity, and lack creativity. That is condescending as hell.
Like I said, I may be missing context, but the quotes as presented rub me the wrong way.
Religion at it's best is about community. The rituals, the stories, are content/entertainment, extended games of telephone. Selling a product that can't possibly be vetted, the "afterlife". People get to like what they like, religion is not for me
I don't believe anything, I know some things, I'll guess at others. I'm aware when I'm pulling it out my arse :D Every question doesn't have to have an answer.
Keep it simple.
There is only one meaningful moral tenet, don't be a dick. Don't do things to others you wouldn't want to have happen to you.
Now I can craft an engaging narrative justifying all manner of bad behavior but, I know better, we all do. Even those with reduced empathy know better.
Don't Be a Dick!I grew up going to church and identifying myself as religious but I actually have never been. I was not popular in church and was never really included in anything unless I went out of my way to try to include myself in things. In hindsight it was obvious to others that I didn't belong. I was trying to be religious while they found what the church provided naturally appealing. They felt something from church while I felt nothing. I wasn't getting anything from or providing anything to the church experience. When I stopped going no one noticed or said anything about it if they did.
I didn't stop being religious after I stopped going to church. I had known from the sermons that when the preacher quoted the bible it was always completely removed of the context of the passage to mean something entirely different than what it meant in the bible (I knew because I looked the quotes up in the bible provided in front of me during the sermon). I figured that churches were a kind of con-job and not the real religion, so I read the bible myself. If I ran my own church it would be nothing more or less than me reading the beatitudes out loud from start to finish every week and my Bible would cut everything else out. Christ-like to my own satisfaction since I was living by Jesus's explicit instructions I continued to claim Christianity and even considered myself a better Christian than almost any other since my religion was unfiltered and uncompromised.
Over the years I grew out of this seriously misled attitude. I still like the beatitudes and consider them highly influential on my present values, but I no longer feel the need to attach that to a religious identity. I realized that if I had to try so hard to be religious while getting nothing out of it, it probably wasn't for me. Right now I consider religion like alcohol. Fine for most people, some people are highly prone to abusing it and should avoid it, and some people just don't find it appealing at all. If I didn't like to drink it wouldn't make sense for me to spend all my time around people who like to drink while poorly pretending I'm getting drunk with them. Anyone who gets what they need from religion and doesn't make their faith a problem for other people is fine with me, I just have different ways I prefer to spend my time.
It’s interesting to me that less people are religious but moral absolutism seems to be on the rise.
That's only because the ruling emperors of moral absolutism are so fuckdamn lound and persistent.
It creates the illusion that there are so many more of them than there actually are.
Do you remember the Westboro Baptist Church from a few years back? Constantly all over the media shouting their bigoted hate?
Yeah, it was a group of less than 100 people doing it mainly as a source of income.
But they managed to get themselves in front of every camera for like 5 years in a row. Turns out they didn't even really believe their hatespeech and just found that suing people who tried to interfere with their horrid protests was super profitable.
It is interesting.
I think it's because the people who don't have anything except moral absolutism are noticing that their group is dwindling, so they're getting louder because they are afraid.
i’m not religious, but boy howdy do i love a good secular ritual! i’ve been celebrating the equinoxes, solstices, and cross-quarters with bonfires recently. it’s a nice way to observe the passage of time. i also draw a tarot card once a day to reflect on, and an oracle card once a week.
a friend of my hosts full moon parties, which i also love.
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A report released Wednesday on the “nones” finds that they are diverse, young, left-leaning and may offer clues to the future of making meaning in a secularizing country.
The report, from the Pew Research Center, is one of the biggest yet on the nones, and it adds detail to this constituency that has been growing across a wide variety of demographic categories, including age, race, political leaning and education level.
Pew asked about various civic metrics, including whether respondents had volunteered in the past year, had voted in recent midterm elections or follow public affairs closely.
Along with the Pew report, other research and books over the past couple of years have found that the nones are more of a bellwether or a canary in the coal mine — depending on the point of view — than a cohesive group coalescing around a new belief system.
Another recent book about the nones is “Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America,” by Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and the sociology of religion at St. Mary’s University in London.
Cragun said he subscribes to a theory of Swiss sociologist Jörg Stolz that a key driving force behind religion’s decline is “the culmination of growing autonomy in society.
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