Posted by:
dogeatdog
(
)
Date: April 22, 2016 08:33PM
THE WORLD'S NEWEST MAJOR RELIGION: NO RELIGION
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/04/160422-atheism-agnostic-secular-nones-rising-religion/"The secularizing West is full of white men. The general U.S. population is 46 percent male and 66 percent white, but about 68 percent of atheists are men, and 78 percent are white. Atheist Alliance International has called the gender imbalance in its ranks 'a significant and urgent issue.”
I was not aware that there was a gender or racial imbalance in atheism/agnosticism....
"Around the world, the Pew Research Center finds that women tend to be more likely to affiliate with a religion and more likely to pray and find religion important in their lives. That changes when women have more opportunities. 'Women who are in the labor force are more like men in religiosity. Women out of the labor force tend to be more religious,” says Conrad Hackett with Pew. 'Part of that might be because they’re part of a religious group that enforces the power of women being at home."
"Atheism is also tied to education, measured by academic achievement (atheists in many places tend to have college degrees) or general knowledge of the panoply of beliefs around the world (hence theories that Internet access spurs atheism).
There’s some evidence that official state religions drive people away from faith entirely, which could help explain why the U.S. is more religious than most Western nations that technically have a state religion, even if it is rarely observed. The U.S. is also home to a number of homegrown churches—Scientology, Mormonism—that might scoop up those who are disenchanted with older faiths."