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- Jonathan Lewis
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Offline - Registered: 9/12/2015
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What is the demographic profile of the atheists? Who are they exactly
I have heard that most atheists are middle to upper class white men. Apparently you are more likely to be an atheist if you make more than $100,000 per year. Only certain parts of the world have significant numbers of atheists.
If this is true, then atheism isn't really a universal movement that includes all ethnicities and cultures. It is a very ethnically/culturally particular fringe movenment. It would be accurate to call it elitest.
What professions tend to attract the most atheists? Most people would think it is scientists, but I just heard of research that shows students of the arts are more likely to become atheists than those in other fields. This isn't surprising to me.
There were a huge number of prominent artists in the twentieth century who were atheists: painters, poets, playwrights, film-makers. Some of them were also communists because socialism was such a major force in Europe. I remember my first year literature class. The professor started off by talking about the Death of God as a major theme in Modernism. We read essays like those of Albert Camus who told us that life was pointless labour, and Virginia Woolf who stated that there was "certainly and emphatically no God." I actually heard a professor say that nobody believes in God anymore. I read the writings of many modern artists who were quite sure that we could no longer believe in anything transcendent. The painter Francis Bacon said "man is a useless animal" and he portrayed people that way in his paintings.
The profession that really seems to attract large numbers of atheists is journalism. I don't think I've ever heard the news media ever say anything positive about religion. Many times I have heard interviewers say "but isn't religion a matter of faith?"
So academia, the upper classes, the art world, and the news media seem to be the areas where atheism thrives.
- seigneur
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- Registered: 6/26/2015
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Re: What is the demographic profile of the atheists? Who are they exactly
Jonathan Lewis wrote:
I have heard that most atheists are middle to upper class white men. Apparently you are more likely to be an atheist if you make more than $100,000 per year. Only certain parts of the world have significant numbers of atheists.
If this is true, then atheism isn't really a universal movement that includes all ethnicities and cultures. It is a very ethnically/culturally particular fringe movenment. It would be accurate to call it elitest.
Except that this can only be true for a specific country at a specific time, not in general.
What professions tend to attract the most atheists? Most people would think it is scientists, but I just heard of research that shows students of the arts are more likely to become atheists than those in other fields. This isn't surprising to me.
There were a huge number of prominent artists in the twentieth century who were atheists: painters, poets, playwrights, film-makers. Some of them were also communists because socialism was such a major force in Europe.
And do you know how much an average artist or communist earns a year? Nothing really elitist about it.
To me it seems that philosophical trends, including atheism, come and go. Most people don't give them much thought. When the trend of atheism is prevalent, feels comfy or so (comfy for some other purpose than in and of itself, e.g. liberating from moral constraints), then people will readily identify with atheism, regardless of their behaviour or ideas otherwise. In ancient Rome people would generally say, "Of course Zeus et al. exist." Now it's trendy to compare any concept of God to Zeus or spaghetti monster and conclude with equal self-evident conviction that they don't exist. It's a kind of entertainment they do, not philosophical thinking.
Then there are other people who are passionate about philosophical ideas and some people who are thorough in the philosophical quest. Those who are passionate about philosophical ideas may be so because they found nothing better to do with their lives. In the end, only those who are thorough in the philosophical quest, those who face the results of their own reasoning, who take it seriously and do their best to live accordingly are worthy of attention. If there be atheists among those, they are the only real kind of atheists.
- iwpoe
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- From: Knoxville, TN
- Registered: 6/26/2015
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Re: What is the demographic profile of the atheists? Who are they exactly
I can paint a picture of my own generation: he is male, college educated, *likely* white, and opinionated (he doesn't think these out, necessarily, but he talks about them). The women are not particularly faithful themselves, but they are less likely to engage in the back slapping irreverence of the men. Whether he is in the arts or the sciences does not matter, though the man in the arts is inclined to think religion is oppressive while the man in the sciences thinks it's gobbledygook and silly. I suspect the money helps because the poor do not tend to learn or need fashionable opinions, and this is one.
Fighting to the death "the noonday demon" of Acedia.
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It is precisely “values” that are the powerless and threadbare mask of the objectification of beings, an objectification that has become flat and devoid of background. No one dies for mere values.
~Martin Heidegger
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