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June 24, 2008

The Problem With Those Unaffiliated

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life just published the latest "US religious landscape survey" and it is deserving of more study than I am able to give it at this time.

There are a couple of rather strange "findings" that cast a certain doubt on the whole enterprise.

This reminds me of Camus' The Fall. Camus has his loquacious "hero" tell an Amsterdam bartender,

I knew an atheistic novelist who used to pray every night. That didn't stop anything: how he gave it to God in his books!. What a dusting off, as someone or other would say. A militant freethinker to whom I spoke of this raised his hands - with no evil intention, I assure you - to heaven: "You're telling me nothing new," that apostle sighed, "they are all like that. According to him, eighty percent of our writers, if only they could avoid signing, would write and hail the name of God. But they sign, according to him, because the love themselves and they hail nothing at all because they loathe themselves. Since, nevertheless, they cannot keep themselves from judging, they make up for it by moralizing. In short, their satanism is virtuous. An old epoch, indeed! It's not at all surprising that minds are confused and that one of my friends, an atheist when he was a model husband, got converted when he became a adulterer! . . . [an ellipsis of a page or so, I got tired typing]. . . . . " In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. . .

Whatever you think of the Camus passage, I hope you'll agree with me that something is wrong with the Pew survey: definitions?, methodology in polling?, sample size when it comes to atheists? Something when wrong. Literature is one thing, a meaningful survey is another. At a minimum Pew owes us an explanation for this but I sure can't find one. Telling us "the unaffiliated (36%) [of which atheists are a subset] say they view God not as a person but rather as an impersonal force" just doesn't cut it.

Among the more abnormally interesting things I found on the Pew website are a few of the captions to various charts and maps. This one caught my eye, "Percentage of Each State's Population that affiliates with Unaffiliated." For a few thousand dollars, I'd be more than happen to spend the ten minutes that it would take to write and test the two lines of code needed to keep that kind of thing from happening.

Update: I just noticed that yesterday Iyov made a similar point about those god believing atheists,

But I was surprised to see that a fifth of American atheists and a majority of American agnostics believe in God. That suggests to me that we have one very poorly designed survey or a country with plenty of people who have trouble with polysyllabic words.

Well said!

Posted by Duane Smith at June 24, 2008 7:43 PM | Read more on Religion |

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Comments

Reminds me of this street graffiti from Turkey that reads: "Thank Allah I am an atheist".

Posted by: Aydin at June 27, 2008 1:33 PM

I don't understand why that is so problematic. There are plenty of church employed clergy who are atheists and agnostics - like Darwin was. With all of our post-modern syncretism, we can have kosher pork chops and just about anything else imaginable.

Posted by: Looney at July 1, 2008 9:05 AM

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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