Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Those awful atheists (click to view)
Date: December 2, 2011
How many of your friends are atheists? Half? Most? All? Do they seem like okay people? If you think so, you're in more of a minortiy than you might think.
A new study released this week by the psychology department of the University of the British Columbia found that both Canadians and Americans have a deep-seeded bias against fellow citizens who don't believe in God, and assume them to be among the most untrustworthy of all minorities. As many sensationalistic headlines have noted, the study found that "only rapists" had a more universally negative reputation.
This comes on the heels of many similar studies in recent years, which routinely note that North Americans would generally prefer not to marry, live beside, have their children educated by, or vote for anyone who disbelieves, and when given the choice between an atheist and some other unpopular minority, such as a homosexual or Muslim, most will gladly take the latter.
What makes such findings odd — at times almost incomprehensible — is how jarringly this data clashes with what we all know about modern society, namely that everyone is getting less and less religious with the passage of time. Year after year, the census finds rates of respondents claiming "no religion" gradually climbing, while church attendance steadily falls. Notions of God and church traditions are routinely mocked in the popular culture, and rising rates of secular, post-secondary education spread ever-greater awareness of the flaws and paradoxes of purely religious reasoning. As I noted in the opening, if you're reading this I suspect you almost certainly have a lot of openly atheist friends — if not an atheist yourself — since Internet forums relating to politics and debate have proven to be a vibrant breeding ground of nonbeliever sentiment as well (a friend of mine recently admitted that he visits Reddit a lot less these days because of its obnoxiously evangelical atheism).
Clearly some of this is a generational thing. Data shows that that unbelief correlates pretty strongly with being raised by Baby Boomers, who are, in turn, considerably less churchy than their parents before them. Growing up in a mostly post-Cold War world, our generation was never subjected to fear-mongering over the "atheist tyranny" of the Soviet Union, and have instead been raised in a global climate where the most frightening and violent political movements seem to be motivated by
too much God, rather than too little. Closer to home, there are no shortages of causes near and dear to the heart of young people, from gay rights to prematrial sex, that seem frustratingly and irrationally opposed entirely out of deference to a supreme being that seems cruelly obsessed with restricting personal freedom.
Yet at the same time, the UBC study did not find a notable difference between the opinions of young Canadian college students and adult Americans on the atheist question. People who almost certainly know and like atheists were still inclined to view the group as suspicious and morally questionable, at least in the abstract.
Part of me wonders if "atheist" has simply evolved into a convenient shorthand describing a certain type of personality inclination that may be troubling out of context, but not necessarily as a feature of a larger whole. If, for example, we think about violent psychopaths, sociopaths, and nihilists, and the self-obsessed egoism that tends to motivate their crimes, it's only logical to suspect that such people are probably atheists too, since only atheism would be compatible with that kind of worldview. In other words, a classic "while not all fruits are apples, all apples are fruits" type situation, and the same sort of cautious bigotry that motivates NPR liberals like Juan Williams to avoid Muslims on airplanes or color-blind progressives like Grandma Obama to steer clear of blacks in dark alleys. Not all atheists are cold-hearted, insensitive, sadistic psychos, but if you're really obsessed with avoiding such types at all costs, maybe it's better to steer clear of the godless community just the same.
But I'm curious to hear what you guys think. Regardless as to whether or not you're an atheist yourself or have lots of atheist buddies, do you think atheists, as an abstract group, are a generally respectable, trustworthy, moral community? It's a different question than whether you believe their claims of a godless universe are factually correct, or whether religious people support irrational and odious causes. All things considered, if given the choice, would you prefer to have less of them in your life?
Statistically speaking, a lot of you will have to say yes.
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