Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Realmfighter]

Totally a thing

[Micro102]

If I recall correctly, it wasn't actually 21% atheists believe in god. It was somewhat more of a sum of certain beliefs.

[Zironic]

I believe in God. I don't believe in Organized religion. It's come out of my experiences in college so far as an engineer.

[Grimlocke]

Looking up atheism yieled:

–noun
1.
the doctrine or belief that there is no god.
2.
disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings.

So, atheism directelly contradicts believing in God. If this test is correct then an awfully large number of these 'atheists' dont know what they are saying.

[Micro102]

I think a tricky question is more probable. I bet the answers were twisted. You have fanatics doing stuff like that a lot. They actually posted a fake video about Dawkins.

[Muz]

Turn the question around the other way. Ask how many theists don't believe in God. If you play your methodologies and spin it right, you'd probably get like 21% of Christians, Muslims, etc not believing in a God (or at least unsure and admitting that there's not enough evidence).

A theist atheist (which is like a serious oxymoron) could simply be a "weak atheist" as some people put it. The people whose default stance is that a God doesn't exist, but don't hold strict to those beliefs. They're not fence sitters like agnostics, but they're not so certain of their belief.

He concluded that there is a relationship between hetrodoxy and intelligence: non-theists who believe in an afterlife are less intelligence than atheists who disbelieve in an afterlife, and some religious people (including Catholics) who disbelieve in an afterlife are less intelligence than religious people who believe in an afterlife.

Sounds like a fancy way of saying "People who claim to be atheists then believe in God are fricking stupid."

I don't believe that anyone who is completely stupid would be able to get past college.

Trying to correlate it is kinda funny, because you assume that people don't troll these surveys. In my years of experience as a research assistant, I was pretty much the link between the surveys on paper and them being stored as computerized data. I've seen a LOT of people purposely messing up those surveys for fun, or just entering crap in their surveys because people don't check them and they get paid for quantity. A lot or researchers don't like to do low level work and fail to see or check for that. I used to mark and complain about entries which were deliberately trolled or had suspicious patterns, but those were generally ignored.

If anything, the thing about your education correlation vs basing it off IQ is a good example as to why I don't trust research data. You can easily spin this stuff by choosing a method that twists it to prove a hypothesis that you want to prove.

[Ø]

There's definitely at least one troll who intentionally answered that way. I'd guess the rest just don't know the terms for the various shades of grey. "Atheist" is tossed around by a lot of people as a blanket term.

[Sowelu]

Some people use 'believe' and 'worship' interchangeably.  Some people might consider one or both of these to be atheism:
- Belief that a god exists, but there is no reason / no point in worshipping
- Disbelief or doubt that a god exists, but still being active in organized religion

I would consider the second one to be atheism or agnosticism.  Which means that yes you can have religious atheists.  Churches can be truly wonderful social outlets and charitable centers, or at least the good ones are.  They are community hubs.  And you can disbelieve in gods while still saying the words, without being dishonest to yourself--ritual is ritual, and it can be its own purpose.  Kind of like saying the Pledge of Allegiance even if you haven't completely and totally given yourself to the belief that your nation is always right.

[Micro102]

Some people use 'believe' and 'worship' interchangeably.  Some people might consider one or both of these to be atheism:
- Belief that a god exists, but there is no reason / no point in worshipping
- Disbelief or doubt that a god exists, but still being active in organized religion

I would consider the second one to be atheism or agnosticism.  Which means that yes you can have religious atheists.  Churches can be truly wonderful social outlets and charitable centers, or at least the good ones are.  They are community hubs.  And you can disbelieve in gods while still saying the words, without being dishonest to yourself--ritual is ritual, and it can be its own purpose.  Kind of like saying the Pledge of Allegiance even if you haven't completely and totally given yourself to the belief that your nation is always right.

Well put, I agree.

[Servant Corps]

Many people were wondering the reason why I want to use the word "Theist Atheist" to describe this 21% sub-group when the commonly accepted definition of atheism and theism makes it a contradiction. The reason is Steven Waldman.

Steven Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet, "a multi-faith spirituality website" that is best known for spamming my email account with junk. Steven Waldman became very influential, and in fact has currently landed himself a job in the federal government, advising the FCC.

When Steven Waldman encountered the Pew Survey, this was his response:

21% of Atheists believe in god. What this means is that Atheism has become a cultural designation, rather than a theological statement. Some are likely declaring themselves atheists as a statement of hostility to organized religion, rather than to God. This might help explain polls showing rising numbers of Atheists.

Dome, the Theist Atheist I quoted earlier, also seemed to support Steven Waldman's hypothesis, arguing that the common definition of atheism is just wrong: "Atheism is the rejection not of God, but of theism–or, to put it another way, the rejection of the God of theism."

Because of this "cultural atheism" designation hypothesis raised Mr. Waldman, I did not wish to use words that would describe this subgroup without getting rid of the 'atheist' part, lest this becomes true.

But now that I have the hard data, I can test this hypothesis. If "theist atheists" are declaring themselves as hostile to organized religion, then their views on organized religions should stay relatively similar to that of "atheist atheists". There are four questions in this survey that could help to determine hostility to organized religion. My goal is to determine the correlation between belief in god and views on religion. If there is no correlation between the two, then Mr. Waldman's hypothesis has been supported by the data.

There was one problem though...the R² value for each experiment is very, VERY low, indicating that the correlations that I find are invalid. I'll put in the correlations anyway though, relating belief in god to pro-religious sentiment (I excluded "don't know" for all correlations except for Q10D).

Q.5a.    Now I’m going to read you a few pairs of statements. For each pair, tell me whether the FIRST statement or the SECOND statement comes closer to your own views — even if neither is exactly right.  The first pair is... (READ AND RANDOMIZE ITEMS) 
1 - The government should do more to protect morality in society
OR
2 - I worry the government is getting too involved in the issue of morality

R² = 0.0102
Correlation = 0.0625

Q9:
In your opinion, should churches and other houses of worship keep out of political matters - or should they express their views on day-to-day social and political questions?

R² = 0.0009
Correlation = 0.0238

Q.10d    When it comes to questions of right and wrong, which of the following do you look to most for guidance?  Would you say (READ AND RANDOMIZE)

   1   Religious teachings and beliefs
   2   Philosophy and reason
   3   Practical experience and common sense (or)
   4   Scientific information
   9   Don’t know/refused (VOL)

R² = 0.0497
Correlation = 0.085

Q39C:
   Here are a few statements.  For each one, please tell me if you completely agree with it, mostly agree with it, mostly disagree with it, or completely disagree with it. The first/next one is [INSERT ITEM; RANDOMIZE]. 
Religion causes more problems in society than it solves.
Do you completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, or completely disagree?
(I combined completely agree/mostly agree as "agree" and mostly disagree/completly disagree as "disagree. If you feel you would rather have the breakdown in opinion, I'll create a separate graph.)

R² = 0.0371
Correlation = = 0.1835

If you look only at the graphs, Q5A, Q10D, and Q39C appears as though theist atheists are more pro-religious than atheist atheists, with varying degrees of effect (Q10D showing the least effect). If you look at Q9 though, theist atheists appear as if their views are very similar to that of atheist atheists.

If you look at correlation, you find that the correlation between belief in God and views towards religion is very, very small, with the highest correlation being seen in Q39C and the lowest correlation being seen in Q9.

R² is so low though that you cannot trust the correlation coexistent that I was able to come up with, however, in IRC:

<Blacken> if r!=0, then you cannot definitively say there is no correlation

...
<Blacken> there is a low probability of correlative effect
<Blacken> but that's getting a bit fancy, "it's not strongly correlated" is probably enough

...

<Warrigal> Corporation: a correlation coefficient can tell you that a correlation exists; it cannot tell you that no correlation exists.

...

<Warrigal> Corporation: if you have a low R^2, that means there's no significant effect.

...

<Warrigal> Corporation: a correlation coefficient can tell you that a correlation exists; it cannot tell you that no correlation exists.

Knowing what IRC said (and that correlation does not imply causation), I am going to make the conclusion that the lack of a significant correlation or of R² suggests that there is no correlation between theistic beliefs and religious views, but does not actually prove that no correlation exist. Therefore, I'm going to side with Steven Waldman's hypothesis: atheism has likely became a "cultural designation".
----

Turn the question around the other way. Ask how many theists don't believe in God. If you play your methodologies and spin it right, you'd probably get like 21% of Christians, Muslims, etc not believing in a God (or at least unsure and admitting that there's not enough evidence).

Here's the data for all people who said that they believe in God and a universal spirit, and a breakdown of their "unsureness". (Chart came from this PDF.)

(I was planning on examining the theists who do disbelieve in God, however, I decided that focusing on Theist Atheists first would help me give a better understanding for theists who do disbelieve in God.)

And since people are going to wonder what was the question that was asked in the Poll:

Now we have some questions about people’s religious beliefs.  First…

Q.30    Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?

1   Yes
2   No
3   Other (VOL)
9   Don’t know/refused (VOL.)
 
IF BELIEVE IN GOD/UNIVERSAL SPIRIT (Q.30=1), ASK:
Q.31     How certain are you about this belief? Are you absolutely certain, fairly certain, not too certain, or not at all certain?
 
   1   Absolutely certain
   2   Fairly certain
   3   Not too certain
   4   Not at all certain
   9   Don’t know/refused (VOL.)

IF BELIEVE IN GOD/UNIVERSAL SPIRIT (Q.30=1), ASK:
Q.32     Which comes closest to your view of God? God is a person with whom people can have a relationship or God is an impersonal force?

1   God is a person
2   God is an impersonal force
3   Both/Neither/Other (VOL.)
9   Don’t know/refused (VOL.)

[Leafsnail]

8% of atheists are "absolutely certain" there's a god.

Yeah, this survey was clearly beset by trolls.  4% of those in the othodox church apparently don't believe in a god.  Although the Jewish column illustrates a problem - "Jewish" is a cultural/ racial thing as much as a religious thing (you can be a non practising Jew).

[Muz]

Also, IIRC Buddhists are atheists. 39% of them being absolutely certain confuses me.
And WTF is it with Agnostics being fairly certain either way? Is an "agnostic" someone who is part of a religion, but isn't certain enough against God's existence to claim to be atheists? Or are they apatheists?

This might also be a good study in how inaccurate research surveys generally are


But... it looks like the theist atheists don't like government involvement in their life. They could be sort of like people who believe in organized anarchy... people who go under the atheist flag to oppose what they don't like the government doing. Atheism might not be their religious belief, it becomes more like a political belief.

Atheist theists could be similar. They'd be the type who don't believe in God, but identify themselves as followers of a religion for social reasons, even attending churches/mosques/religious events.

[Argembarger]

And WTF is it with Agnostics being fairly certain either way? Is an "agnostic" someone who is part of a religion, but isn't certain enough against God's existence to claim to be atheists? Or are they apatheists?

"Agnostic" is a rather blanket term.

They don't know, or they believe it can't be known, or they don't want to know, or whatever.
Basically, they're either undecided on the matter, or actively not making a decision.

The data on Agnostics in a perfect sample group should have been Not Sure Other/Don't Know = 100.

[Captain Hat]

Are these people sure that they're not just Deists or Pantheists?

It just sounds like they are, or that the survey was trolled.

[Servant Corps]

This might also be a good study in how inaccurate research surveys generally are

As well as the main limitations of surveys in general: you are forcing individuals to compartmentalize their beliefs (that they may not have even thought about seriously or systemically) into categories that you might be able to understand and generalize from, and won't be able to learn anything more about these individuals other than what you have asked them. I have likely learnt more useful information about theist atheism from Dome and Eagleon than I did from looking at the data (for now, at any event).