Back in the dim, distant past, I dispatched some of you to participate in a survey of atheists and theists. The data has come back now, and who knows, maybe you’re a few bits in this data set.
You’ll have to order the book to see the whole thing, but there were a few tidbits. You weirdos really do have some different perspectives than the god-believers, unsurprisingly.
We’re different, but that’s OK, because we’re also right.
I realize it’s a bit more nuanced than that, but does that basically say “atheists are atheists and theists are theists”?
Another interesting thing about those graphs: notice how much more similar “spiritual but not religious” is to “churchgoing christian” than to “atheists & agnostics”. There’s a rift in the “nones” that everyone is trying hard to ignore right now.
I remember that, I took part in the survey. I’ll have to get the book, but it will have to wait until next week.
PZ:
I don’t ignore it. Back in my Jesus Freak days, I would have categorized myself as a ‘none’, because at the time, I wasn’t affiliated with organized religion. I think a lot of people do that, and still believe some very silly stuff.
I admit that I’m more interested in the ‘spiritual, but not religious’ category, as I don’t know as much about why people ID as that as opposed to explicitly theistic*. They do seem a bit less willing to make firm statements than either the Christians or atheists, even if they lean more towards the theist than the atheist.
* Granted, many of my theist friends had a pretty bad experience with churches and organized religion (usually Christianity, given most of my friends are European-American, but I have heard stories about their local pagan groups), so that’s a reason to disassociate from organized religion but not religion.
Becca, you know you answered your own question, right?
I think the choice of graph type is unfortunate, because it doesn’t give equal visual weight to the extreme responses. They contribute only half the area under the graph compared to the same value in the middle three responses. Much better would be three horizontal bars of the same size, representing theists, nones and atheists, each divided horizontally into five differently shaded sections, representing ‘strongly disagree’, etc.
Wouldn’t “spiritual but not religious” exclude non-affiliated theists?
I don’t get in what sense someone could be “associated” with a disorganized religion, whatever that would be. What is that association supposed to be about, if it doesn’t count as organization? If there is some religion type of entity which is not organized, yet people somehow associate themselves with it, it’s probably the same thing as what a “spiritual but not religious” person tends to identify with.
There are people who don’t like religious leaders/organizations who are believed to be immoral in some way (because they’re thieves, liars, bigots, child molesters, etc.). They’re obviously not the only ones who conflate moral beliefs/behaviors/attitudes with “religious” or “spiritual” ones. What they’re often saying is simply that they believe they’re good people (or try to be), people who are aligning themselves with good stuff and opposing bad stuff (whatever they think that is, independently of its actual goodness or badness). So when asked about it, they’re not all offering coherent reliable information about their metaphysical views.
Of course, a lot of the time, they’ll have wacky views anyway, because people don’t just naturally have reasonable ideas without ever thinking about things seriously, gathering evidence, carefully considering a wide variety of different perspectives, and so forth. But the point is that their self-reporting on the subject doesn’t need to have any simple relationship with what they actually think (if anything) about the existence of gods or other supernatural entities.
Anyway, if you have some consistent idea of what counts a legitimate religion (presumably something having actual content about supernatural beings which are genuinely believed to exist), which doesn’t depend on just taking their word for it with no further questions, then many people aren’t a part of a religion even though they claim to be or use religious language. But of course that also doesn’t mean they’re in good shape in terms of what they actually think about all sorts of topics, just that they’re not saying what they think … and it can be incredibly difficult to get them to begin to do that.
On the other hand, if you identify as an atheist, I guess it’s more likely that you’ve thought enough about it to reject a certain kind of idea (you think a fairly definite set of factual claims are false), meaning that we can usually have a pretty good idea of what your stated belief is supposed to be about. That is, when you say that “god doesn’t exist,” you’re probably not making some kind of elliptical statement about being opposed to morality, being opposed to participating in a community, or whatever it may be that you’re confusing with actual religious subject matter. I know some self-described atheists are just antisocial/contrarian/rebellious assholes (with little or nothing to say about religious issues), but more often than not atheists do intend to make definite claims about the nonexistence of gods. That’s not so much the case with the “religious” or the “spiritual,” because changing the subject (without even realizing they’re doing it) can be a big part of what makes a person identify that way.
I prefer to think of myself as spiritedly non-religious, personally.
cr @9:
You really love the silly word games, don’t you? “Not organized” is not the same as “disorganized”. But you know that. Let’s look at a definition of religion;
This doesn’t have to be organized, and one can certainly be associated with it. Do you really think “organized religion” is redundant? If so, why do you think it is so commonly used?
Is this a Bayesian calculation, or are you just making shit up? Rhetorical question, of course.
I said I don’t get it. It’s not a game to me, and I don’t think it’s silly, when I’m trying to explain what I don’t get about some piece of natural language and hoping to gain some kind of clarification about it.
Honest question: would it have made a difference if I had used “unorganized” instead, and is that different from “not organized”? I’d be happy to talk about unorganized religion, if you prefer, but I’d still have plenty of questions about it.
Please tell me what you think it means. You’re saying that a “religion” is (or could be) an individual’s belief and worship? You could have your own personal religion, which applies to no one else — is that a fair characterization? Where did those ideas and behaviors come from, or does it not matter how they originate from anything else? If the latter, why does it not matter? Does a dictionary give us useful answers about that? And could you give me a coherent reason why anybody would speak of “associating” or “dissociating” with something like that, if in fact it is their own invention and they are aware of that fact?
Again, not a game. Sometimes, though, the words people use don’t make a lot of sense to me. So I simply ask things about them. Perhaps that’s upsetting to you. Maybe I had the wrong idea, maybe it’s totally my fault, maybe I’m a fucking idiot for not getting it. But clearing it up a bit might help me (and maybe others) participate in something like a productive conversation.
I could give you a rhetorical answer, but of course the rest of my comment did already try to give some explanation. Anyway, numerous surveys have been conducted which do support the conclusion that the “spiritual but not religious” are a hot mess of a category that don’t have definite and/or coherent views about gods. They typically identify as such for a huge variety of bizarre and confusing reasons that have (1) little or (2) nothing to do with the existence of gods. That conforms to my anecdotal experiences, so I’ve had no good reason to discount that evidence or to suspect there’s a problem with it — what about you?
I’m figuring there aren’t a lot of reasons people would have to identify with a religion that’s not an organized religion, whatever that’s supposed to amount to, and the others (which aren’t related/similar to those I described) appear to be at best a tiny fraction of cases. Maybe in some rare circumstances it’s done for literally no reason whatsoever. I don’t really know or care about that. So, I didn’t use Bayes’ theorem here, if that’s seriously what you’re asking about with my use of the word “probably,” but it’s not like there’s one alternative to it which is that I was making shit up.
@consciousness razor
There are non-denominational churches, as well as groups such as Universalist Unitarians (or whatever the UUs are called) that barely count as an organized religion. I’m not being dismissive of UUs or non-denominational churches, either, at least not any more than I would Catholic, Methodist, or any other churches.
Unorganized religion and disorganized religion have very different connotations, even if denotations could be identical, which they are not. Unorganized is more about not having been put into an order. Disorganized means having been taken out of an order. The dictionary definitions as well as the connotations of these words are very different.
I think all of this is more that you have a different worldview than many others. You might try to see it from another perspective, but you may not be able to. I know I am not always able to see different perspectives. If you have other issues with the way these words are used, hopefully others can be like me and try to help you understand, since you seem to want to understand other people. That has been my goal my whole life: understanding other people. I can sympathize and empathize.
I forgot to mention: For a long time, having been disgusted by the Catholic church in which I was raised and became very involved in, I became one of the “spiritual, but not religious” or otherwise talked about people that didn’t actually attend services of any specific church or feel any particular affiliation, but still believed much of it. At this point, I don’t believe very much, if any, of it.
Line graphs for Likert scale questions? That’s just poor, they should be multiple bar charts. You can still see the “shape” of each distribution without the incorrect impression that there are answers in between the options.
@consciousness razor #9
One can be “associated” with a religion while rejecting organized religion when one rejects the dogma and tenants of the organized religion while still believing in the basic premise of the religion.
In my own case, I was raised Catholic, but my first steps on the path to atheism began with rejecting the parts that I found morally objectionable, like the teachings against women, and the parts I found incomprehensible like transubstantiation. I still viewed myself as a Christian, but no longer a Catholic. Then I explored other Christian sects, like Baptist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, etc.. And when I rejected them for many of the same reasons, I viewed myself as not rejecting Christianity, but only rejecting “organized religion,” because I still accepted that God existed, and that Jesus was his only Son.
At that point, I would have considered myself “associated” with Christianity, but not with “organized religion.” I believed that one didn’t have to belong to a church, or to perform any particular rituals, or go to regular mass, but could still be religious and faithful to God and His Son.
Of course, later still, after learning more about other religions, like Bhuddism, Islam, Bahai, and what not, I started to believe that all faiths had some truth to them, but were all also equally corrupt and false, and that the “TRUTH” was somehow both greater and yet also more vague and undefined, and at that point I would have defined myself as spiritual but not religious.
For me, these were all steps on the path to realizing that the truths in religion are really secular truths. Moral lessons about how to live in society and how to treat other people that are true whether there is a supreme being or not. And that it wasn’t just the dogma and the wackadoo beliefs that were wrong, but the basic premise of supernaturalism. And that one could in fact conclude that those are simply factually incorrect, without necessarily having to abandon the moral lessons along with the supernatural beliefs.