Think atheists don’t believe in the Easter Bunny?

  • The word ‘super­sti­tion’ has come to be a handy code word. By employ­ing it strate­gi­cally, a whole new gen­er­a­tion of athe­ists has been able to describe any beliefs that can’t be proved by empir­i­cal evi­dence, from belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God to the Loch Ness mon­ster to lucky horse­shoes. In lump­ing ortho­dox Chris­t­ian beliefs together with old wives’ tales and such, athe­ists are in a fine posi­tion to sound as if they’re not being faith­less, narrow-minded or big­oted, just ratio­nal. And by exten­sion, their attacks on Chris­tian­ity can be excused as pro­gres­sive, as a sim­ple wish to improve the lot of human­ity by culling out all of this unsci­en­tific back­ward­ness. In an upcom­ing doc­u­men­tary called “Religu­lous,” Bill Maher con­cludes that “The plain fact is, reli­gion must die for man to live.” Religion-haters visu­al­ize a grand new world where sci­ence is king and super­sti­tion is unheard of.

    The prob­lem is, less-religious or non-religious peo­ple are more super­sti­tious as a group than Chris­tians. And that’s not just a mat­ter of opin­ion — mul­ti­ple stud­ies have demon­strated it clearly and, um, empir­i­cally.

    Accord­ing to this arti­cle in today’s Wall Street Journal:

    “What Amer­i­cans Really Believe,” a com­pre­hen­sive new study released by Bay­lor Uni­ver­sity yes­ter­day, shows that tra­di­tional Chris­t­ian reli­gion greatly decreases belief in every­thing from the effi­cacy of palm read­ers to the use­ful­ness of astrol­ogy. It also shows that the irre­li­gious and the mem­bers of more lib­eral Protes­tant denom­i­na­tions, far from being resis­tant to super­sti­tion, tend to be much more likely to believe in the para­nor­mal and in pseu­do­science than evan­gel­i­cal Christians.

    The sur­vey asked adult Amer­i­cans their beliefs con­cern­ing dis­cred­ited hokums like Big­foot, the ‘lost city’ of Atlantis, and other good­ies about the occult and ‘para­nor­mal.’ The results: Those who never wor­shipped were almost four times more likely to strongly believe in these things than those who attended a house of wor­ship once a week.

    Oh, and being a college-educated smarty-pants doesn’t help, by the way:

    Sur­pris­ingly, while increased church atten­dance and mem­ber­ship in a con­ser­v­a­tive denom­i­na­tion has a pow­er­ful neg­a­tive effect on para­nor­mal beliefs, higher edu­ca­tion doesn’t. Two years ago two pro­fes­sors pub­lished another study in Skep­ti­cal Inquirer show­ing that, while less than one-quarter of col­lege fresh­men sur­veyed expressed a gen­eral belief in such super­sti­tions as ghosts, psy­chic heal­ing, haunted houses, demonic pos­ses­sion, clair­voy­ance and witches, the fig­ure jumped to 31% of col­lege seniors and 34% of grad­u­ate students.

    While it’s good to have vin­di­ca­tion for this, it didn’t sur­prise me too much to read. In my expe­ri­ence, the least reli­gious peo­ple I’ve met are the most gullible. A woman I knew who com­plained to me about the ridicu­lous things they tried to teach her in Sun­day School was a Wic­can priest­ess, and hence espoused total faith in feng shui, palm­istry, tarot read­ings, magic spells, astrol­ogy and … well, any­thing there was to believe in that wasn’t ortho­dox Christianity.

    There’s a quote ascribed to G. K. Chester­ton that speaks to this: “A man who won’t believe in God will believe in any­thing.” And St. Tikhon of Zadonsk takes it even fur­ther: “Wretched and poor is the man who does not fear God, for such a man is afraid of everything.”


    Related posts:

    1. Oprah and her reli­gious beliefs feelings
    2. Reli­gion, pol­i­tics and spin
    3. The dis­hon­esty of atheism
    4. More about Chris­t­ian percentages
    5. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea

    September 21st, 2008 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • James the Thickheade 09.21.2008

    Thanks Grace for post­ing this. I won­der how Bill Maher… who in ear­lier years was actu­ally funny and hasn’t been in a decade… can sub­scribe to this atheistic-scientism stuff as a step for­ward with­out actu­ally engag­ing with the tra­jec­tory of where ide­olo­gies of this sort went as it caught on in Europe 125 years ago? I mean… duh… Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao and the rest of the boys… maybe 100’s of mil­lions dead.… gee.. that’s an advance. In less than 50 years a body count prob­a­bly exceed­ing all reli­gious wars over all time com­bined. Okay, maybe not… but it’s not a record to be proud of… and it’s cer­tainly close to the record.

    I have “issues” with indul­gent anti-intellectualism of Maher’s sort com­ing off as cool. But it sure seems hard to unseat in the pop­u­lar cul­ture. At least… though these guys are imply­ing it with every eye­brow and facial expres­sion and word… they aren’t actu­ally claim­ing (yet) to be a mas­ter race and the rest of us believ­ers sim­ple nean­derthals whose evo­lu­tion­ary demise need be hur­ried by all right think­ing peo­ple.… but I imag­ine it’s just a ques­tion of time until the hubris of those in these assaults expands. Fred­er­ica makes the point that the cul­ture has shifted back and forth once or twice before on a num­ber of issues in the past 100 years… and I strongly believe the pen­du­luum will swing again, and in fact won­der that Maher’s child­ish­ness isn’t more of the scream of a declin­ing rather than ris­ing force.… but who knows?

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