The Washington Post describes a new Pew report about people who answer "none" when asked about their religion:
As the nation’s fastest-growing segment of religion (or nonreligion) in recent decades, the nones may reflect the front line of future spirituality. Fifty-six percent say they believe in “some higher power” aside from the God of the Bible; 67 percent say they believe that humans have a soul or spirit, and majorities say they believe that nonhuman animals and parts of nature can have spiritual energies.
According to the Pew report, 28% of Americans are nones but 69% of them believe in God or a higher power. Only 29% don't. So true atheists come to only about 8% of the country.
But that's me! I believe the universe is just what you think it is: stars and galaxies, electrons and quarks, gauge fields and gravity, all described by quantum mechanics and general relativity. The universe and its components evolve via (surprisingly arcane) mathematical laws. There is nothing more.
We may be getting less religious as a society, but there are still damn few people who belong to my little clique.
POSTSCRIPT: What's kind of weird is that although 29% of nones don't believe in a higher power, neither do 24% of religious people. I'm a little unclear about which religions are compatible with no belief in God or a higher power. Isn't that sort of the whole point?
Reform Judaism is pretty open to atheists. At least I know a number of synagogue attending atheists and they fit in just fine.
Jewish atheists believe that there is only one god even if he doesn't exist.
| What the hell are you getting so upset about?' he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrive amusement. 'I thought you didn't believe in God.'
| I don't,' she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. 'But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him to be.'
| Yossarian laughed and turned her arms loose. 'Let's have a little more religious freedom between us,' he proposed obligingly. 'You don't believe in the God you want to, and I won't believe in the God I want to . Is that a deal?”
-- Catch 22
Reminds me about the description of a Unitarian open casket funeral: All dressed up and nowhere to go.
As a rabbi once told me: "zero gods or one god is fine. it's only two or more we have a problem with."
I believe Buddhists and Taoists do not necessarily believe in a "higher power" that is anything like the western idea of "God".
Westerners tend to be very myopic when thinking about religion and atheism. So many people talk about the concept of "God" as if that is a well defined term when in fact it is not. Hindus, to my knowledge, don't believe in anything like the biblical god and neither do animists around the world, or Buddhists or Taoists. This is what really bugs me about any discussion of atheism. It presupposes that the only concept under dispute is the biblical god.
Also, I would bet you a lot of observant Jews and Catholics don't actually believe any of the theology of their religions but want to continue practicing.
Yah. My understanding is that religious scholars count Buddhism as a religion because it makes specific truth claims about an afterlife.
If I remember right, the term agnostic as originated by Huxley did not refer to someone who doesn’t believe in any god, but rather someone who doesn’t believe in a god that interferes in or even cares about human affairs.
I will say something else. People are afraid of dying and are very sad about loved ones who have died and really really really want there to be an afterlife. Even atheists.
I really do think this is the long and the short of it.
Yet they must not believe in an afterlife, or they wouldn’t be so sad about someone dying.
There's the rub. I think very few people actually believe in an afterlife, no matter what they say.
I'm a little unclear about which religions are compatible with no belief in God or a higher power. Isn't that sort of the whole point?
Spiritual power isn't necessarily 'higher'.
I wonder if there are any religions centered around a belief in a _lower_ spiritual power. Like, there is a god or gods, but they are easily overcome by physical means, like with levers or pulleys or something.
Kevin, you may have uncovered one of the Great Secrets of Existence:
Many poll respondents either don't understand the question or are just fucking with the pollsters.
“What's kind of weird is that although 29% of nones don't believe in a higher power, neither do 24% of religious people.”
It’s not weird. The 24% cited above are all people who identify as Christian, Jew, whatever for social or cultural reasons and not for religious/spiritual ones. So they like everyone perceiving them as part of the flock, enjoying the rituals or food or social interaction or whatever, but just don’t believe the label itself means anything.
It’s very similar to the “straight” men who have sex with men not identifying as “gay.” They’re saying that they like sex with men but otherwise still like being married to a woman for social and cultural reasons.
It's 2%, not 24%. Kevin misread the chart.
"I believe the universe is just what you think it is: stars and galaxies, electrons and quarks, gauge fields and gravity, all described by quantum mechanics and general relativity. The universe and its components evolve via surprisingly arcane mathematical laws. There is nothing more."
There is always more.
From Scientific American (a few years ago): "For millennia, the greatest minds of our species have grappled to gain purchase on the vertiginous ontological cliffs of three great mysteries—consciousness, free will and God—without ascending anywhere near the thin air of their peaks. Unlike other inscrutable problems, such as the structure of the atom, the molecular basis of replication and the causes of human violence, which have witnessed stunning advancements of enlightenment, these three seem to recede ever further away from understanding, even as we race ever faster to catch them in our scientific nets."
There are a million articles out there on these and other mysteries, but I figure Scientific American is a bit more of a trustworthy name.
And the basic idea is that, among other things, we don't know what consciousness actually is. We don't know why we are aware of ourselves as ourselves. We don't know for certain what thoughts are. We also do not know what dreams are. Ultimately, and I believe this to be related, we do not really know what happiness is.
The objective perspective of science simply may not be able to penetrate very deeply into these ultimately subjective questions. But religion obviously doesn't supply satisfactory explanations for all that many people either (at least not anymore). Hence the rise of the nones, or the related and maybe overlapping spiritual-but-not-religious types. I personally suspect that most people are agnostics at heart. And that seems sensible to me.
I’ve always felt that there are a lot of people who are atheists but have a really hard time with coming to grips with admitting it, even to themselves. It’s kind of ironic that a lot of people who believe in god act like there isn’t one and people who don’t believe in god act like there is one.
"The universe and its components evolve via surprisingly arcane mathematical laws"
I'd say it evolves via surprisingly comprehensible mathematical laws (presuming our current understanding of the universe is about right). The fact we hairless apes have been able to use math to model so much so effectively is amazing.
+1 to both you and Kevin for precise verbs:
Kevin, for “evolves” (not “obeys”), and you for “model”, with its implication that our mathematics is an (imperfect) description.
I’m a geophysical fluid dynamicist; long ago I used to watch, say, waves breaking on a beach and marvel at how nature solved really difficult nonlinear PDEs on the fly. Then I realized that those equations and the models they enable are just the approximate (mathematically or computationally convenient) way we humans describe how nature works.
And yet, I was going to complain about "Evolves". The word is "Changes". Evolution is a specific type of change that is a reaction to environment that improves the survivability of offspring. Non-living things don't do that.
Like most words, "evolve" has more than one meaning. It need not always refer to the biological process of evolution. Kevin's usage is fine.
Nontheist Quakers
I identify as a particular religion, but it is more cultural than religious. I do agree with many of the ideals of my religion, although I do not believe in a God figure. A newspaper clipping on my refrigerator "I believe in the power of collective love. And the collective power of our better angels, our better selves". Although some days, I have to question even that.
A good number of people are religious because it provides a community not because the believe with every tenet (or even most) of the faith they belong to.
Sloppy reporting, Kevin. And poor terminology by PEW.
'In our latest data, 17% of “nones” identify as atheist, 20% say they are agnostic and 63% choose “nothing in particular.”'
People who say their religion is "nothing in particular" are the very opposite of "none". They DO have a religion, it's just that they don't identify as Catholic/Baptist/Muslim/Hindu/whatever. They believe in God, in other words, but don't think much about the implications. They'll say a prayer when they want something, and embrace some religious elements in Christmas and Easter. Probably most of them find organised religion hypocritical.
Years ago I dated a woman who insisted she was Christian *and* Buddhist. I don't know how she reconciled that, but I do know that she isn't unusual nowadays.
There have been Jesuit Zen masters, so it can't be too hard to mix.
I'm a card-carrying atheist too!
And despite what the polls say, the US has never been a "Christian" country. Just ask all the people massacred using the justification of "Christian" values, which have nothing to do with the exercise of the religion.
Hey, are you the same “Swami” from the Mother Jones days? If so, welcome back!
"which religions are compatible with no belief in God "
Buddhism.
I'm a hardcore atheist, as is my wife, but we got here via very different paths.
I was a Christian for most of my life, in the Evangelical side of things, but turned away 15 years ago or so when I couldn't stomach the contradictions anymore.
My wife, on the other hand, has been atheist her entire life, along with the rest of her family.
I'm a little unclear about which religions are compatible with no belief in God or a higher power. Isn't that sort of the whole point?
Hardly. I think there's a misconception that religion is about belief. Not just belief in God, but belief itself. Belief systems and religion are different things. Yes, various churches have their catechisms and creeds they teach with all the good things their faithful ought to believe (many of them do, others do not), but churches and religions are not the same. We should not confuse them. Churches are human institutions, prone to error and excess, easy to find fault with and ridicule. You can be religious without so-called beliefs. In fact, belief may be an obstacle to true religion. Belief may represent the end of thinking and questioning, and if you outsource your beliefs to others or to your church, you may be on the road to idiocy. Contrary to what some atheists believe, religion is not about idiocy.
Belief in no God is no less a belief than belief in God. In that way, the atheist is just another flavor of true believer. Since the existence of God is unknown (or unknowable, if you wish), debate can go on unresolved ad infinitum. You may find the atheist side has "won" by mocking (if not disproving) all the (often mockable) beliefs of the God-believing side, but at best the atheists can disprove a belief or belief system. They are not disproving religion.
Religion is not a belief about God or anything else. It's more about the questions one asks and the search for what is true. That sounds a bit like science perhaps, and why not? Religion and science are related, though religion is the older practice. Aristotle said that knowledge begins in wonder. Einstein, much later, echoed the same idea:
Humans tell stories. The main characters have changed and still are.
Nothing more? I think nearly all of us strive to live by some moral code that has a validity not conferred by ourselves alone; and we strive to find or create meaning in our lives. Science, although the only reliable way of knowing what is and how it works, can’t help us in either of these areas. The last attempt to derive morality from science gave us eugenics and ‘Social Darwinism’ — no thanks. In the end, to be human is to live with fundamentals that elude rationality. We can have rational discussions about the implications of our starting assumptions, but the assumptions always remain, well, beliefs; though they need not be religious.
Hmmm.... by this way of accounting, "attempts to derive morality from religion," gave us the Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, suppression of women, slavery and monarchies, to name but a few "moral acts" done in the name of Christianity. And of course in the US today the "religious right" does not seem overly concerned with even Biblical morals such as "love thy neighbor" etc.
Lucky for many of us, science taught us the evil of all these "religious moralities."
Science did nothing of the sort. Good and evil are statements about what ought and ought not to be, and science is only about what is or is not. See David Hume.
Secondly, one can, following your line of argument, blame science for pollution of the environment, global warming, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, ...
Does God (or any higher power) exist? Dunno, which makes me an agnostic, although I lean heavily atheist.
Psychology, does God play any role in my life? No, and that makes me an atheist.
I imagine that most people have vague beliefs in a higher power but live their lives in general indifference.
I'm in your clique, Kevin. But a quarter of religious people don't believe in God? These are strange times.
As usual, Country music has the answer. Lubbock-area songwriter Cary Swinney writes "I was born into the mystery / And into the mystery I will go" and Paragould, Arkansas songwriter Iris DeMent writes "Some say when you're gone you're gone and some say you're gonna come back / Some say you'll rest in the arms of the Savior of in sinful ways you lack / Some say you're coming back in the garden, bunch of carrots and little sweet peas / I think I'll just let the mystery be".
Although the existence of a god or gods was not a question that the Buddha was asked, he famously refused to comment on the eternity of the universe or the immortality of lifestreams. And the Buddha discouraged his followers from obsessing about these questions as "unwise reflections" that may lead to attachment to views relating to a self. But Buddhism makes no requirement of a belief in god on its followers. As a Buddhist, I'm still not sure why it's called a religion. It's more of an advanced self-help program. 😉
"It's more of an advanced self-help program." In the West. But I lived in Sri Lanka and it has all the trappings of an organized religion there. Ceremonies, pilgrimages, holy sites, holy objects, saintlihood, and even calls to war against believers in other faiths. In Tibet one might add belief in spirits and mountain gods.
If there is Destiny, does the Higher Power still need to hang around? On Judgment Day a clerk can read out the sentence decided during the Big Bang. So this might be (aside from Buddhism) a reason people can be religious and not care very much about God. He stopped doing things long ago anyway.
It's all about predictability. If things can go in any direction, prayer or magic can be seen as useful. But if things are preordained, God can take a stroll for all we care, like the laundry doesn't care if the programmer of the washing machine watches it turn.
Unitarian-Universalists are an American example of a contemporary non-theist religion with roots running back through the early 1800s Congregationalists to the Puritan Separatists (aka Pilgrims).
My family history, through the maternal line, runs all the way back to the Puritan Separatists and followed the religious path from Puritan to Congregationalist to Unitarian. It is very much an American journey.
On the postscript: You're misreading the chart on "believe in a higher power" (which is very badly formatted).
The categories are color-coded. So 73% of the religiously affiliated believe in the Biblical God, 24% believe in some other higher power, and 2% believe in neither, with the remaining sliver being unclear/don't know/refused to say.
Presumably those 2% are people who consider themselves affiliated with a religion for reasons other than buying into its belief system.
I am one of those who answer none and believe in a higher power. I believe that our beliefs create a higher power, that is, the mass of human minds who believe in "God" create God. God is not an independent being who is all powerful. God has the powers we believe strongly enough in as a mass. I believe prayer works- again, the power of the human mind. I believe in healers that are non-western medicine - again, the power of the human mind. Does it always work? Of course not.
That is the short version.