21% of American atheists believe in God…words mean nothing anymore

It seems that the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has released a new comprehensive survey recently…how do I know? Well, beyond all of the news media quoting some part of it as a newsworthy header and then the people around me taking the ideas and drawing insane conclusions from it, I really wouldn’t know.

News writers must choose the snippets of information that will most capture the attentions of the unsuspecting reader. With religion, it’s usually not hard to come up with something that sizzles. However, when you can turn polarized assumptions on their heads…then you get fun stuff.

For example…it’s ho-hum and pedestrian news to raise that over 90% of Americans believe in some kind of god or unversal spirit. It’s new and exciting to find that most Americans are tolerant enough to believe that their church isn’t the only way to salvation. Even for evangelicals, whom people often like to pidgeonhole as the ones who are keeping us back, 57% of those polled believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life.” Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons are the only groups in which a majority of members believe theirs is the one, true religion leading to ultimate awesomeness.

While many go “Hip hip hooray!” at this news of tolerance, some religious leaders (naturally) find this troubling…when you have scriptures that clearly say…”I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me,” it might seem doctrinally impure to accept anything else. For a fundamentalist, this obviously is a tough place. You would think that some ideas you just can’t negotiate.

I feel the pain. But I’m looking in another spot. I was only caught on to the Pew data when someone pointed to me: “Well, 21% of atheists believe in a god!”

“What is this devilry?” I thought (OMG devil)…maybe they were just confusing the “unchurched” or “unaffiliated” with atheists.

Actually, 70% of the unaffiliated crowd either were absolutely, fairly or just not too certain about believing in a god or universal spirit…22% said they did not believe, and the rest refused to answer. Surely, 22% was larger than for any other big group…but DANG.

So, I looked deeper at the full pdf for this question:

For just atheists, 8% were “absolutely certain” they believed in God, 7% were fairly certain, and 6% were not to sure (but did not say they didn’t believe). 73% said they did not believe in a god…which would be suspected.

What’s the big deal? Just the definition of the words atheist and atheism. Now, there *are* different positions for these things…as someone I talk to always points out about agnosticism, agnostics aren’t in a void. You can believe in a God or not believe in a god, but still recognize that you *don’t* (soft/weak) or *can’t* (hard/strong) know the existence of a god (agnosticism)…so you can be an agnostic theist or an agnostic atheist. You can also say, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Similarly, in atheism, you can be positively atheist or negatively so. You can make the assertion “gods do not exist” or you can simply say, “I do not believe in gods.” The counterarguments necessarily become quite different (to the former, for example, how do you know gods do not exist? Yes, a celestial teapot is a funny concept, but at the same time, we don’t *know* that Zeus and the other forgotten gods don’t have tea parties with one.)

However…nowhere in these subsets is “I absolutely, certainly believe in a god.” So it seems like an atheist who does take such a position is being semantically silly. They are taking a meta-ethical definition that exists regardless of the way the world works and are breaking it. If a bachelor said they were married…this would make about as much sense as this case.

According to the New York Times article on the issue quoting John C. Green, one of the authors of the Pew Forum paper:

“What does atheist mean? It may mean they don’t believe in God, or it could be that they are hostile to organized religion,”

STOP! This just sounds a lot like angstheism.

You probably know an angstheist. They are another popular high school clique…like weird sporker penguin girl Katy. Angstheists, like high school *insert any movement that can be used as a social statement — e.g., “high school vegan”*, probably have read Marx or someone dead and European and want to show off.

Unfortunately, angstheists don’t really count as atheists. You can’t say, “BAWWW I hate church because my mommy makes me go so I’m going to be against it now” and then poof into the world of not believing in a god.

I guess the real issue is…people don’t really have to know anything to label themselves. So, is it possible that we are seeing doctrinal impurity at such a threatening level that allows people to practice indifferentism en masse while also not really knowing what their religion (or lack thereof) means?