Atheists As “Other”: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society

Despite the declining salience of divisions among religious groups, the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in America remains strong. This article examines the limits of Americans’ acceptance of atheists. Using new national survey data, it shows atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious, and other minority groups. This distrust of atheists is driven by religious predictors, social location, and broader value orientations. It is rooted in moral and symbolic, rather than ethnic or material, grounds. We demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious, and present a theoretical framework for understanding the role of religious belief in providing a moral basis for cultural membership and solidarity in an otherwise highly diverse society.

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Believers deem atheists as untrustworthy as rapists.

By Randy Shore, Postmedia News December 1, 2011

VANCOUVER — Religious believers distrust atheists more than members of other religious groups, gays and feminists, according to a new study by University of B.C. researchers.

The only group the study's participants distrusted as much as atheists was rapists, said doctoral student Will Gervais, lead author of the study published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

That prejudice had a significant impact on what kinds of jobs people said they would hire atheists to do.

"People are willing to hire an atheist for a job that is perceived as low-trust, for instance as a waitress," said Gervais. "But when hiring for a high-trust job like daycare worker, they were like, nope, not going to hire an atheist for that job."

The antipathy does not seem to run both ways, though. Atheists are indifferent to religious belief when it comes to deciding who is trustworthy.

"Atheists don't necessarily favour other atheists over Christians or anyone else," he said. "They seem to think that religion is not an important signal for who you can trust."

The researchers found that religious believers thought that descriptions of untrustworthy people — people who steal or cheat — were more likely to be atheists than Christians, Muslims, Jews, gays or feminists.

Gervais was surprised that people harbour such strong feelings about a group that is hard to see or identify. He opines that religious believers are just more comfortable with other people who believe a deity with the power to reward and punish is watching them.

"If you believe your behaviour is being watched (by God) you are going to be on your best behaviour," said Gervais. "But that wouldn't apply for an atheist. That would allow people to use religious belief as a signal for how trustworthy a person is."

Religious belief is known to have a variety of social functions. Past research has found that common religious beliefs can promote co-operation within groups.

Gervais started his line of inquiry about the exclusion of atheists after seeing a Gallup poll that suggested the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist presidential candidate. Gervais and his colleagues conducted a series of six studies on a group of 350 American adults and a group 420 UBC students.

But even in more secular Canada, distrust of atheists ran high.

"We see consistently strong effects," he said. "Even here in Vancouver, our student participants still say atheists are really untrustworthy."

rshore@vancouversun.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

They [atheists] fail to qualify as Homo sapiens

....there is no first hand evidence that Neanderthals had or had not any religious belief system.

Calilasseia wrote:We already have a thread for this. I'll alert Mod Central and suggest a merge.

MarkP80 wrote:

Calilasseia wrote:We already have a thread for this. I'll alert Mod Central and suggest a merge.

Thanks, and sorry about that.

Oh look ... it's another outpouring of the ill-informed and thoroughly venomous bigotry we see all too often from supernaturalists. Never mind that none of them have ever provided anything other than blind assertions, to support their endless and utterly tedious panhandling about the existence of a magic man, never mind that the mythologies in question erect assertions that are known to be plain, flat wrong by anyone who has actually paid attention in a real science class, none of this inhibits supernaturalists in any way from erecting Streicher-esque hate propaganda of the sort we see above.

It's not the worst example I've seen, incidentally, of supernaturalists engaging in fulminatingly venomous dehumanising of other people, just because those other people refuse to treat 3,000 year old myths as fact, but the seething hatred contained in the above passage is noxiously reminiscent of "Der Giftpilz", a nasty little publication that was in circulation in the late 1930s.

Of course, if supernaturalists actually possessed real evidence for their various asserted magic entities, such tactics would be entirely superfluous to requirements and irrelevant. That such tactics are an integral part of the aetiology of supernaturalism, tells even the most casual of observers, that supernaturalism is both intellectually and morally bankrupt. Strange how adherents of a mythology that purports to tell its followers to love other human beings, and to avoid being judgemental, resort to hate-filled, bigoted and rampantly judgemental propaganda such as the above tedious and low-brow little screed.

Do Atheists Deserve Recognition?

By Tom Davis · Tuesday, January 10, 2012

That question begs another; recognition as what, taxonomically speaking, atheists would, on the surface appear to belong to the Domain, Eukarya; Kingdom, Animals; Phylum, Chordata; Class, Mammalia; Order, Primate; Family, Hominidae; and Genus, Homo. Whether or not atheists belong to the Species Homo sapiens is perplexing.

Though they look much like the other members of the Genus Homo, they open their mouths and spout foolishness. Atheists ask such dumb questions as, "Can you prove there is a God?" or even more unintelligent, "Can you see or hear Him or touch Him?"

Taxonomist have for years questioned whether or not Neanderthals should be included in the species Homo sapiens. However there is no first hand evidence that Neanderthals had or had not any religious belief system.

This all begs another question; does the atheistic denial of the existence of a deity or deities that there is no god or gods constitute a belief system for which atheists deserve recognition? Does a belief in nothing constitute a system?

There seems to be an endless list of notables who embrace atheism.

Their arguments are as diverse as their works and actions. Some are downright crude and nasty in defense of their non-belief system. Some activists such as the infamous Madelyn Murray O'Hare wreaked havoc, but failed to eliminate God from all American establishments.

Stephen Hawking, the famed English physicist has made some startling remarks, not specifically atheistic but tending to lead one to believe that he is an atheist. For example in his book, "A Brief History of Time" he stated, "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God." In the same work, "he suggested that God was unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe."

For a scientist, these are puzzling statements. When Hawking and others discovered or explained the origin of the universe, they called it "The Big Bang." Hawking renamed it the "Singularity."

That single act led me to conclude that Hawking realized but could or would not bring him to state the obvious; God is the Singularity. He is the Beginning, Middle and End of our universe.

Conclusion: Atheists fail to reach that level of development in which they can be included in the species Homo sapiens. They look but do not see; they see but do not recognize. These Godless souls are the world's true paupers. Atheists deserve no recognition beyond that of Genus Homo.

They fail to qualify as Homo sapiens.

Calilasseia wrote:The link to that article now yields "404: file not found". Hmm, wonder what happened? Perhaps the host was so ashamed of seeing this piece appear on his website that he pulled it.