All posts tagged atheism

Ugly atheist buses

January 19, 2009

I was hoping someone else would’ve said this by now, but I think I’m going to have to be the jerk.

In my post about the British atheist bus campaign, I said I wasn’t interested until I actually saw the ads, which were attractive and well-done.

Because initially I was afraid they might look more like the following visual atrocities:

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The (non-misleading) Atheist Bus Campaign

January 7, 2009

I wasn’t terribly interested in the atheist bus campaign until I saw the photos – it’s a simple but rather nice design.

Also surprising, many of the photos and also this video are via sexblogger Zoe Margolis. Which reminds me I haven’t read Greta Christina for too long.

The New York Times article includes the following I-don’t-even-know-where-to-begin passage:

An interesting element of the bus slogan is the word “probably,” which would seem to be more suited to an Agnostic Bus Campaign than to an atheist one. Mr. Dawkins, for one, argued that the word should not be there at all.

But the element of doubt was necessary to meet British advertising guidelines, said Tim Bleakley, managing director for sales and marketing at CBS Outdoor in London, which handles advertising for the bus system.

For religious people, advertisements saying there is no God “would have been misleading,” Mr. Bleakley said.

(Hi-res photo here. That’s creator Ariane Sherine on the left, and I believe Polly Toynbee of the British Humanist Association on the right.)

Update: A.C. Grayling connects:

It would be misleading, eh? Thus the metaphysical authority of advertisers. You have to take your hat off to this one. If one wished to cite a better example of insidiousness, pusillanimity, timidity and absurdity, you would be hard pressed. There is something delicious about the thought of a functionary in an advertising agency doing ontology by arbitrating on the question of which fictional characters need a grey area of uncertainty around discussion of their existence – Little Red Riding Hood? Rumpelstiltskin? Santa? Betty Boop? Saint Veronica (who allegedly started out as sweat on a cloth and became a person)? Aphrodite? Wotan? Batman?

First thoughts on Friends General Conference

July 3, 2008

So I get it — FGC is like a bigger version of yearly meeting.

I had the pleasure of meeting Chris M. of Quaker blogging fame for the first time, as well as Karen Street. Chris has a list of other bloggers here, though Micah Bales is the only other one on the list I’ve talked to. (I’ve also seen Kody, and will probably see Staśa this afternoon. Update: Also ran into Peterson the day after his plenary performance, and had the pleasure of meeting Robin, Liz, and Jeanne.)

Nontheist Friends events, including my and Robin Alpern’s interest group “Theist and Nontheist Friends in Conversation,” are going very well — attendance is significantly up from last year, they tell me, and the energy is very clear.

In addition to our previously scheduled events, this afternoon there’s one billed as “The Great Theist-Nontheist Conversational Smackdown of 2008″ between Chuck Fager and David Boulton, which I will try to record and post here. (Apparently it was a last-minute idea of Chuck’s.)

Quaker nontheism, membership, and the recent YAF conference

June 20, 2008

The interest group on nontheistic Quakerism I facilitated at the aforementioned young adult Quaker conference went rather well – a report may be coming on the Nontheist Friends website. (I posted one to the email list, but would want to edit it down a bit.)

Both the interest group and the conference generally changed something for me, and I find a new sense of commitment to the Quaker experiment.

I first started attending Quaker meetings back in 2002 at North Shore Friends Meeting in Beverly, Mass., and officially became a member a few years later. I’ve been living in the city for two years now, and in the past few weeks finally decided I really really felt right about transferring membership to Friends Meeting at Cambridge. I just sent North Shore a long letter of transfer, which is found under the cut.

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Non-religious identification survey

June 17, 2008

How do nonreligious people identify themselves? Most religious surveys don’t look very closely at the nonreligious — the last Pew survey didn’t include the term “humanist,” for example. Personally, I like humanist, atheist or “nothing”, depending on the context.

So it’s good that a non-religious identification survey is being conducted by Dr. Luke Galen of Grand Valley State University. It aims to be

the first ever rigorous survey instrument designed specifically to gather demographic and attitudinal information exclusively about America’s non-religious community. Past surveys have been based on religious individuals, with the non-religious being little more than an afterthought. Professor Galen will begin data analysis soon, and later in 2008, he will give [Center for Inquiry Michigan] a special presentation to us on the results of the survey.

I got an invite through CFI and posted it somewhere for others, before realizing it was a unique URL meant for a single participant. (Oops.) The invite suggested the participant pool is restricted to members of atheist/etc. organizations (including members of their email lists, apparently), but if you really want to take it, try emailing survey@cfimichigan.org.

New survey on (ir)religion in the U.S.

February 26, 2008

A new Pew survey on religion in America was released yesterday.

The most interesting finding to me is the “Unaffiliated” group, which makes up 16.1 percent of the total adult population. About a third of those are at least somewhat religious, just not any religion in particular, leaving the nonreligious total at 10.3 percent — 1.6 atheist, 2.4 agnostic, and 6.3 just plain secular. A quick read might suggest that the whole 16.1 percent is nonreligious, so I want to emphasize the more accurate 10.3 percent figure.

[Update: I generally love the think tank Center for Inquiry, so I was slightly disappointed to see them eliding "unaffiliated" with "non-religious" this press release.]

Breaking it down by percentage, apparently about 16 percent of the nonreligious in the U.S. identify as atheist, 23 percent as agnostic, and 61 percent as secular. I suppose this might inform the debate about whether people should identify as atheists or not.

Unaffiliated is also the fastest-growing group: only 7.3 percent of the population says they were unaffiliated as a child, meaning it’s more than doubled in the past generation, despite not having a very high retention rate (many people raised unaffiliated later become religious), and the unaffiliated are disproportionately young.

The 16.1 percent figure basically confirms the 2001 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), which found 14.3 percent of the U.S. population identifying as nonreligious, as well as 16 percent having a secular outlook. (The two groups probably mostly overlapped.)

Other points of interest:

Unitarian Universalists come in a 0.3 percent. Assuming roughly 225 million adults in the U.S., that gives us about 675,000 UUs. (Another blogger estimates 683,000.) What’s shocking is that the Unitarian Universalist Association’s own figure is about a quarter of this figure, suggesting that most self-identified UUs aren’t a member of any UU church (society, etc.). More discussion at Philocrites and the above blogger, and elsewhere no doubt.
Quakers clock in at “less than 0.3 percent,” meaning “less than 675,000.” Perhaps a lot less, since our own count is only 87,000, but as with UUs, there are probably many who identify as Quaker who aren’t in the membership rolls. Don’t see much discussion of this yet, perhaps because it doesn’t actually tell us anything we didn’t already know.
“Spiritual but not religious” are also a tiny “less than 0.3 percent.” It would be interesting to compare this to the larger percentage (if I recall correctly) found by the ARIS.