barehl
Master Poster
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2013
- Messages
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The statistics suggest that a lot more people say they are Christian than actually are Christian. I didn't have this material at hand when I started the thread about the usefulness of the terms theism and atheism. That thread is now useless. Perhaps this can be discussed here without falling into meaningless semantics.
Daniel Dennett - How To Tell Youre An Atheist (Full)
This was talk was quite interesting because it suggested that far less of the population in the UK are actually religious than say that they are religious. Church attendance in the UK is only about 6% with the average attendee being 51 years old. Yet, 54% claim to be Christian.
With this in mind, I decided to check on figures for the US. I wanted to do this because evangelical conservatives tend to claim that something like 90% of the world is religious. Gallup polls suggest that 40% of the population regularly attend church. If this were true then maybe most Americans would be religious. But I found another study from some people who acutally care about the practice of religion rather than public relations:
An Up Close Look at Church Attendance in America
The conclusion in this article matches Dennett's talk:
What Hadaway and Marler, along with Mark Chaves, author of the “National Congregations Study,” discovered was at play is what researchers call “the halo effect” — the difference between what people tell pollsters and what people actually do. Americans tend to over-report socially desirable behavior like voting and attending church and under-report socially undesirable behavior like drinking.
Regular church attendance in the US is less than 20%. It is projected to be down to 15.4% in 2020 and further down to 11.7% by 2050.
What good is a term like "atheist" if people who have no belief in God don't admit to being atheist? How accurate is professing to be Christian if you don't actually believe in God? Dennett's talk included actual ministers who don't believe in God. The terms theist and atheist are probably far less useful and accurate than they appear to be outside of esoteric philosophical discussions.
Daniel Dennett - How To Tell Youre An Atheist (Full)
This was talk was quite interesting because it suggested that far less of the population in the UK are actually religious than say that they are religious. Church attendance in the UK is only about 6% with the average attendee being 51 years old. Yet, 54% claim to be Christian.
With this in mind, I decided to check on figures for the US. I wanted to do this because evangelical conservatives tend to claim that something like 90% of the world is religious. Gallup polls suggest that 40% of the population regularly attend church. If this were true then maybe most Americans would be religious. But I found another study from some people who acutally care about the practice of religion rather than public relations:
An Up Close Look at Church Attendance in America
The conclusion in this article matches Dennett's talk:
What Hadaway and Marler, along with Mark Chaves, author of the “National Congregations Study,” discovered was at play is what researchers call “the halo effect” — the difference between what people tell pollsters and what people actually do. Americans tend to over-report socially desirable behavior like voting and attending church and under-report socially undesirable behavior like drinking.
Regular church attendance in the US is less than 20%. It is projected to be down to 15.4% in 2020 and further down to 11.7% by 2050.
What good is a term like "atheist" if people who have no belief in God don't admit to being atheist? How accurate is professing to be Christian if you don't actually believe in God? Dennett's talk included actual ministers who don't believe in God. The terms theist and atheist are probably far less useful and accurate than they appear to be outside of esoteric philosophical discussions.
