Posted: Dec 30, 2010 9:36 pm
Clive Durdle wrote:http://talkrational.org/showthread.php?t=34025Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.
Which is almost as bad. Because it doesn't matter to religious authorities whether people genuinely believe or not, as long as they can keep up the impression that they're culturally relevant or representative of mainstream opinion. Which is why the atheist and secular movement is so much more important in America than any other developed country, because it's also the place where you're likely to see the biggest apparent shift in opinion.