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The meaning of belief : religion from an atheist's point of view /
Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists' basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists' conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis
Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers.
Journal Article
The amoral atheist? A cross-national examination of cultural, motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, and their implications for morality
There is a widespread cross-cultural stereotype suggesting that atheists are untrustworthy and lack a moral compass. Is there any truth to this notion? Building on theory about the cultural, (de)motivational, and cognitive antecedents of disbelief, the present research investigated whether there are reliable similarities as well as differences between believers and disbelievers in the moral values and principles they endorse. Four studies examined how religious disbelief (vs. belief) relates to endorsement of various moral values and principles in a predominately religious (vs. irreligious) country (the U.S. vs. Sweden). Two U.S. M-Turk studies (Studies 1A and 1B, N = 429) and two large cross-national studies (Studies 2–3, N = 4,193), consistently show that disbelievers (vs. believers) are less inclined to endorse moral values that serve group cohesion (the binding moral foundations). By contrast, only minor differences between believers and disbelievers were found in endorsement of other moral values (individualizing moral foundations, epistemic rationality). It is also demonstrated that presumed cultural and demotivational antecedents of disbelief (limited exposure to credibility-enhancing displays, low existential threat) are associated with disbelief. Furthermore, these factors are associated with weaker endorsement of the binding moral foundations in both countries (Study 2). Most of these findings were replicated in Study 3, and results also show that disbelievers (vs. believers) have a more consequentialist view of morality in both countries. A consequentialist view of morality was also associated with another presumed antecedent of disbelief—analytic cognitive style.
Journal Article
Total Atheism
Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra
Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into
India's rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores
the social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement
of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a
practical and comprehensive way of life. On the basis of original
ethnographic material and engaged conceptual analysis, Total
Atheism develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of
secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asian
scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of
radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.
eBook
Testing a perceived uncommitted mating strategy account for atheist distrust and marriage disapproval
Recent research suggests presumptions about atheists’ uncommitted mating strategy causes atheists to seem less trustworthy, and that people who are more religious or espouse less agreeable attitudes toward uncommitted mating (i.e., more restricted sociosexual attitudes) tend to harbor greater anti-atheist attitudes. We provided additional tests of these ideas and addressed whether they could extend to discrimination against atheists in a “high-trust domain:” likelihood of granting approval to marry one’s adult child. An MTurk sample of U.S. parents (
N
= 301) self-reported their religiosity and sociosexual attitudes, then were randomly assigned to a condition wherein they read about their adult child’s fiancé who was either depicted as an atheist or devoted Christian. Participants reported their likelihood of approving of their child marrying the fiancé and estimated the fiancé’s committed mating strategy, trustworthiness, and dark personality characteristics. Participants with high religiosity presumed an atheist (vs. devoted Christian) fiancé endorsed a less committed mating strategy, which, apart from presumptions about the fiancé’s standing on dark personality characteristics, was associated with (a) perceiving the atheist as less trustworthy and (b) indicating less approval for their child marrying an atheist. Broadly, the research extends theorizing on how atheism relates to perceived threats to moral values and discrimination.
Journal Article
Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as Representative of Atheists
Scientific research yields inconsistent and contradictory evidence relating religion to moral judgments and outcomes, yet most people on earth nonetheless view belief in God (or gods) as central to morality, and many view atheists with suspicion and scorn. To evaluate intuitions regarding a causal link between religion and morality, this paper tested intuitive moral judgments of atheists and other groups. Across five experiments (N = 1,152), American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists.
Journal Article
Forms, Frequency, and Correlates of Perceived Anti-Atheist Discrimination
The tiolly representative 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that 41% of self-identified atheists reported experiencing discrimition in the last 5 years due to their lack of religious identification. This mixed-method study explored the forms and frequency of discrimition reported by 796 self-identified atheists living in the United States. Participants reported experiencing different types of discrimition to varying degrees, including slander; coercion; social ostracism; denial of opportunities, goods, and services; and hate crime. Similar to other minority groups with concealable stigmatized identities, atheists who more strongly identified with their atheism, who were “out” about their atheism to more people, and who grew up with stricter familial religious expectations reported experiencing more frequent discrimition. Implications for future research tied to the ongoing religion/spirituality-health debate are discussed.
Journal Article
Love Thy Neighbor… Or Not: Christians, but Not Atheists, Show High In-Group Favoritism
Atheists are among the most disliked groups in America, which has been explained in a variety of ways, one of which is that atheists are hostile towards religion and that anti-atheist prejudice is therefore reactive. We tested this hypothesis by using the 2018 American General Social Survey by investigating attitudes towards atheists, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims. We initially used a general sample of Americans, but then identified and isolated individuals who were atheists, theists, nonreligious atheists, religious theists, and/or theistic Christians. Logically, if atheists were inordinately hostile towards religion, we would expect to see a greater degree of in-group favouritism in the atheist group and a greater degree of out-group dislike. Results indicated several notable findings: 1). Atheists were significantly more disliked than any other religious group. 2). Atheists rated Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Hindus as favourably as they rated their own atheist in-group, but rated Muslims less positively (although this effect was small). 3). Christian theists showed pronounced in-group favouritism and a strong dislike towards atheists. No evidence could be found to support the contention that atheists are hostile towards religious groups in general, and towards Christians specifically, although this may have been a Type II error. If atheist groups do dislike religious groups, then this hypothetical dislike would be significantly smaller in magnitude than the dislike directed toward atheists by Christians.
Journal Article
Anti-Atheist Bias in the United States: Testing Two Critical Assumptions
Decades of opinion polling and empirical investigations have clearly demonstrated a pervasive anti-atheist prejudice in the United States. However, much of this scholarship relies on two critical and largely uddressed assumptions: (a) that when people report negative attitudes toward atheists, they do so because they are reacting specifically to their lack of belief in God; and (b) that survey questions asking about attitudes toward atheists as a group yield reliable information about biases against individual atheist targets. To test these assumptions, an online survey asked a probability-based random sample of American adults (N = 618) to evaluate a fellow research participant (“Jordan”). Jordan garnered significantly more negative evaluations when identified as an atheist than when described as religious or when religiosity was not mentioned. This effect did not differ as a function of labeling (“atheist” versus “no belief in God”), or the amount of individuating information provided about Jordan. These data suggest that both assumptions are teble: nonbelief—rather than extraneous connotations of the word “atheist”—seems to underlie the effect, and participants exhibited a marked bias even when confronted with an otherwise attractive individual.
Journal Article
