| | From the article above:
"The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 reckoned that about 12 per cent of Americans were atheist or agnostic, though only 0.7 per cent self-identified as atheist and only 2.3 per cent said there was no such thing as God."
From "Atheists: Overlooked by Sociology" on my Washtenaw Justice website:
"Reliable public opinion polls from Harris Surveys and the Gallup Organization reveal that very small percentages of Americans admit to complete disbelief in God. The actual numbers can vary widely from 15% down to 0.3% depending on the nature of the survey. Open-ended online surveys tend to harvest larger numbers than telephone interviews on specific statements. Nonetheless, the numbers are small."
(The entire paper is a Google Document.)
I look at the murder of Madelyn Murray O'Hare and the assassination of Pat Tillman. Also, until a 1991 state supreme court case in South Carolina, in about a dozen states, you could not serve on a jury or hold office and perhaps not vote if you did not admit to the existence of God. When the southern states were re-admitted to the Union, many of them copied their constitutions from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. (Massachusetts collected taxes for the Congregational Church until about 1840.)
Searching Social Work Abstracts (1977-2007) via ERL WebSPIRS turned up no articles with the words “atheist” or “atheism” in the title. The same database yielded 337 articles with “crime” or “criminal” in the title. Sociology Abstracts yielded only two: A and B [see Appendix]. JSTOR’s database of 72 journals in Sociology also produced only two relevant articles.
When the range was widened to include academic journals about religion, more results came to the surface, of course. Even so, the harvest was thin: 37 articles from 1900-2007. Ultimately, these were of little use, being mostly reviews of books about atheism by those who deny its validity.
EconoLog's Bryan Caplan suggested an "Intellectual Turing Test" and one of his Yalies ran one on her website, "Unequally Yoked." I signed up and was outed as a fraud by both Christians and Atheists. I said that accepting Jesus as my Saviour is an act of faith that does not require proof. (Wrong.) I also said that while the universe could not have had a creator, Earth may have. (Wrong.) I think that part of the problem is that her judges were classmates: they all had the same expectations and any statement outside their norm was rejected.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 2/06, 11:09pm)
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