Thanks vjack at Atheist Revolution (and I suppose Debunking Christianity). This gives me some hope for the future of humanity.
Recent data shows there are more secular Americans than we originally thought:
We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don’t believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? The question is difficult to assess accurately because of the challenges of constructing survey questions that do not tap into the prevailing biases about religion. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, which interviewed more than 50,000 people, more than 29 million adults–one in seven Americans–declare themselves to be without religion. The more recent Baylor Religion Survey (“American Piety in the 21st Century”) of more than 1,700 people, which bills itself as “the most extensive and sensitive study of religion ever conducted,” calls for adjusting this number downward to exclude those who believe in a God but do not belong to a religion. Fair enough. But Baylor’s own Gallup survey is a bit shaky for at least two reasons. It counts anyone who believes in a “higher power” but not God as believing in God–casting a vast net over adherents of everything from spirit to history to love. Yet the study allows unbelievers only one option: to not believe in “anything beyond the physical world,” leaving no space for those who regard themselves as agnostics or skeptics, secularists or humanists. Contrast this with a more recent and more nuanced Financial Times/Harris poll of Europeans and Americans that allowed respondents to declare agnosticism as well as atheism: 18 percent of the more than 2,000 American respondents chose one or the other, while 73 percent affirmed belief in God or a supreme being.
It’s definitely hard to do these type of surveys and get close to accurate results. People don’t lie to say they are godless (as they would the other way around). So I guess it should give me some hope.
And here’s a video discussing this:
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