In article <ZpKdnf2Tg68wl-rbnZ2dnUVZ_qqrnZ2d@comcast.com>,
"Michelle Malkin" <hypatiab7@comcast.net> wrote:

That's about forty million possible American atheists,
agnostics, secularists, humanists, freethinkers
and skeptics, (18% definitely and 6% not saying-
that's 32-40million) not the paltry 3% (about 5
million) theist liars keep on bleating. It's time for
the fearful non-believers to come out of the closet
and for the non-voters to vote.

I agree and It's possible that the numbers could be higher. I know many
people who don't go to religious services, don't pray, and seem not to
include religion in any aspect of their lives. If asked what religion
they belong to, if they were born into a Catholic family they will say
"Catholic", a Jewish family "Jewish" etc. even though they don't
practice those religions.

In spite of what they call themselves, they live as if they were
atheists.

Rise of the New Atheists
http://www.alternet.org/story/54054
AlterNet
By Ronald Aronson, The Nation
Posted on June 16, 2007, Printed on June 17, 2007

What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a chance on a gutsy,
hyperbolic
and idiosyncratic attack on religion by a graduate student in
neuroscience
has grown into a remarkable intellectual wave. No fewer than five books
by
the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller lists in the past two
years --
Sam Harris's The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel
Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and now
Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great. The scandalized media have both
attacked and inflated the phenomenon. After the New York Times Book
Review,
for example, ran a thoughtful review of Harris and then a negative
front-page review of Dawkins, the daily paper published two weak op-ed
attacks on the writers and a vapid article on how atheists celebrate
Christmas, followed by tongue-in-cheek admiration in the Book Review for
Hitchens's ability to promote his career by saying the unexpected.

Despite such dubious blessings, the four have become must-read writers.
The
most remarkable fact is not their books themselves -- blunt,
no-holds-barred
attacks on religion in different registers -- but that they have
succeeded
in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers. Is this
because
Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past
several years? It would be comforting if we could explain this as a
cultural
signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such
speculations are probably wishful thinking -- book buyers are such a
small
slice of the population that few sociologists would stake their careers
on
claiming that book buyers' preferences reflect anything like a national
mood.

The success of the New Atheists may, however, reflect something
significant
among their audience. In the past generation in the United States,
atheists,
agnostics and secular humanists have been a timid minority -- almost
voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely derided, both warned against
and ignored. As Susan Jacoby pointed out in her book Freethinkers, it is
symptomatic of the situation that the most dramatic presidential address
in
generations took place in the National Cathedral three days after
September
11, 2001, so filled with religious language that it sounded like a
sermon.
It was delivered by a President flanked by Jewish, Muslim and Christian
representatives, a model of religious inclusiveness, without anyone
standing
alongside them representing the tens of millions of nonreligious
Americans.
At this most important collective moment in our recent history, it was as
if
they did not exist. This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually
everyone in America believes in God.

We know how zealously the conservative Christian denominations have
politicized themselves in the past generation, how the GOP has harnessed
this energy by embracing their demands -- opposing stem-cell research,
gay
marriage and abortion rights, championing government aid to religious
schools and faith-based social programs -- and by appointing sympathetic
judges. So effectively have they framed the issues that, according to the
Pew Research Center's 2006 report on religion and public life, fully 69
percent of Americans believe that liberals have "gone too far in trying
to
keep religion out of schools and government."

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don't believe
in
God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In
fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is
difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing
survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about
religion.
According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which
interviewed
more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults -- one in seven
Americans -- declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent
Baylor Religion Survey ("American Piety in the 21st Century") of more
than
1,700 people, which bills itself as "the most extensive and sensitive
study
of religion ever conducted," calls for adjusting this number downward to
exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair
enough. But Baylor's own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two
reasons.

It counts anyone who believes in a "higher power" but not God as
believing
in God -- casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to
history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not
believe in "anything beyond the physical world," leaving no space for
those
who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists.
Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris
poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare
agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000
American
respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in
God
or a supreme being.

A more general issue affects American surveys on religious beliefs,
namely,
the "social desirability effect," in which respondents are reluctant to
give
an unpopular answer in a society in which being religious is the norm.
What
happens when questions are framed to overcome this distortion? The FT/H
poll
tried to counteract it by allowing space not only for the customary "Not
sure" but also for "Would prefer not to say" -- and 6 percent of
Americans
chose this as their answer to the question of whether they believed in
God
or a supreme being. Add to this those who declared themselves as atheists
or
agnostics and, lo and behold, the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly
one
in four Americans.

All this helps explain the popularity of the New Atheists -- Americans as
a
whole may not be getting too much religion, but a significant
constituency
must be getting fed up with being routinely marginalized, ignored and
insulted. After all, unbelievers are concentrated at the higher end of
the
educational scale -- a recent Harris American poll shows that 31 percent
of
those with postgraduate education do not avow belief in God (compared
with
only 14 percent of those with a high school education or less). The
percentage rises among professors and then again among professors at
research universities, reaching 93 percent among members of the National
Academy of Sciences. Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those
whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also
have
developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual
faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.

But over the past generation they have come to feel beleaguered and,
except
for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher,
voiceless
in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have
reached them, both speaking to and for them. These writers are devoted,
with
sledgehammer force and angry urgency, to "breaking the spell" cast by the
religious ascendancy, to overcoming a situation in which every other area
of
life can be critically analyzed while admittedly irrational religious
faith
is made central to American life but exempted from serious discussion.

This does not make for restraint. Harris displays brash self-confidence,
Hitchens and Dawkins angry intellectual bite and Dennett an inexhaustible
theoretical energy and range of inquiry. Harris excoriates religious
moderates, accusing them of providing cover for fundamentalists at home
and
abroad by refusing to contest the extremists' premises -- because they
share
them. More upbeat, Dennett is devoted to creating the intellectual
conditions for future discussions, in which religion will be treated as
just
another "natural" phenomenon and accordingly subjected to critical
scrutiny.
Dawkins bulldozes his way through every major argument for religious
belief,
and a great many minor ones. And Hitchens endlessly catalogues religion's
crimes and absurdities. Each man is at war, writing as if no others had
preceded him, and with a passion that can only be described as political.

Above all, each sees himself as breaking a taboo. This explains not only
the
vigor and urgency of these books, their mainstream character and their
publishing success but also the common refrain in reviews that they have
"gone too far." Of course they have, because their many faults are often
inseparable from their strengths. Self-indulgence is their common flaw:
Dennett and Dawkins might have considered their readers more and
disciplined
their own need to follow out every line of thought, while Harris is so
full
of his point of view that he, like Hitchens, is unable to consider faith
as
anything but stupid. They show little understanding of religion or
interest
in it [see Daniel Lazare, "Among the Disbelievers," May 28]. Still, I am
surprised by the hostility and bemusement expressed toward them by their
fellow travelers in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The
London Review of Books. In attacking religion the four have been breaking
the taboo against talking about it seriously, and they may be forgiven
for
not being calmer, more expert or more measured. Doing battle with what
they
see as the most pervasive and bothersome phenomenon in American life
during
the past generation, Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and Hitchens deserve praise
for their courage and tenacity in shattering its spell.

Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have roused
a
significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what end? Living
without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent
secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital
questions.
Enlightenment optimism once supplied unbelievers with hope for a better
world, whether this was based on Marxism, science, education or
democracy.
After Progress, after Marxism, is it any wonder atheism fell on hard
times?
Restoring secular confidence will take much positive work as well as the
fierce attacks on religion by our atheist champions. On a societal level,
as
Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris point out in Sacred and Secular, living
without God requires creating conditions in which people are free from
the
kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies
until the advent of Europe's postindustrial welfare states. Markedly more
religious than any of them, the United States provides a life that is far
more unequal and far more insecure.

The surprising response to the New Atheist offensive should thus inspire
us
to think politically as well as philosophically. As a first step this
demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their natural
allies,
secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of
Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without
any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and
attend services but are "tacit atheists," living day in and day out with
only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who
accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include
members
of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice
in
accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the
National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by
Genesis while not needing to take it in "literal, factual terms." Many of
these turned up in the most significant finding of the Baylor survey,
namely
that more than one in four American "believers" does not mean by this a
personal God at all but a distant God who has little or nothing to do
with
the world or themselves. This sounds very much like the deist God of
"unbelievers" Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine.

These believers, along with those who think of themselves as "spiritual,"
as
well as professed unbelievers, help to explain why according to the Pew
study so many Americans -- 32 percent -- want less religious influence on
government. Twenty-four percent say that President Bush talks too much
about
his religious faith and prayer, and 28 percent deny that the United
States
is a Christian nation. Most dramatically, a whopping 49 percent believe
that
Christian conservatives have gone too far "in trying to impose their
religious values on the country." This, then, is an unreported secret of
American life: Considerable numbers of Americans, religious and secular,
are
becoming fed up with the in-your-face religion that has come to mark our
society.

Until now the most vocal left-of-center response to the Christian right,
for
example by Sojourners, has been to call for more religion in politics,
not
less. In early June the group organized a nationally televised forum at
which John Edwards, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton testified to their
faith, talking about the "hand of God" (Edwards), forgiveness (Obama) and
prayer (Clinton). Few loud-and-clear voices have been agitating in the
mainstream on behalf of the separation of church and state, for secular
and
public education, or demanding less rather than more political discussion
of
religion. Yet tens of millions of Americans worry about such things.

Whether most of them continue to believe in God matters much less than
that
they are comfortable with secular knowledge and America's secular
Constitution. Barry Lynn, for example, executive director of Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, is a Protestant minister.
Although Harris and Dawkins castigate all believers for sharing the
premises
of conservative Christians, the fact is that many believers could easily
be
working with out-and-out atheists and agnostics on key issues.

Such a coalition should take the offensive on behalf of American
constitutional promises of a secular society, increasingly under threat
from
Bush's Supreme Court appointments. It will gain support in unexpected
places: Judge John Jones III, a Bush appointee, delivered a devastating
blow
to the forces behind "intelligent design" in his December 2005 decision
in
the Dover School Board case. The first half of his impressive decision
contains a crystal-clear reflection on what science is and why
intelligent
design, a refurbished form of creationism, is religion, not science. The
second half reads like a whodunit, revealing how a minority on the school
board conspired to impose intelligent design on the district. It should
be a
rallying point for the nearly half of all Americans who are disturbed by
right-wing religious attempts to impose their faith on the rest of us. An
immediate goal should be a call for the publication and widest possible
distribution of the Dover decision. It could become another bestseller --
by
a conservative judge no less! -- and a text for civics, current events,
history, law and basic science classes.

A second goal of such a coalition might be a campaign to reorient
American
thinking about atheists and atheism. In recent polls, far more
respondents
have declared themselves willing to vote for a woman or African-American
for
President than for an atheist -- atheists are more unpopular than gays.
Television news viewers are encouraged to nod in agreement with such
ageless
gibes as "There are no atheists in foxholes" without seeing just how
nasty
they are. This obnoxious remark, by Katie Couric on NBC's Today show,
drew a
few complaints and letters, but no wider protests or apology. A coalition
determined to widen the range of socially acceptable belief could make a
significant difference on such issues.

A broad secular coalition could also demand more nuanced discussion of
the
range of belief and unbelief in America today. Rather than consciously or
unconsciously promoting religious belief, public opinion research should
try
to register a full range of beliefs, including the interesting and
perplexing ways in which people live secular as well as religious lives
and
their sometimes contradictory combinations. These are rejected by Harris,
Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens, and ignored by the media and mainstream
politicians.

Finally, such an alliance could become one place where Dennett's goal of
discussing religion openly and critically -- as well as atheism and
agnosticism -- could begin to be realized. A number of questions might be
explored: What, for example, is the common ground and what are the
differences between believers and unbelievers? And -- I save for last the
touchiest question of all -- shouldn't all Americans be instructed in the
great religious and secular traditions, as well as their greatest books?
After all, achieving literacy in both religion and secularism might allow
us
to discuss them more intelligently.

Ronald Aronson is the author of The Dialectics of Disaster, After Marxism
and Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That
Ended
It. His latest book is Living Without God, to be published next year by
Counterpoint. He teaches at Wayne State University.
C 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/54054/

--
John #1782

"We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be
white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."

- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Founder of the Jesuit Order.