Atheism has the lowest retention rates of all religions, according to Pew.



If atheism as a belief is so weak that parents can't even convince kids that atheism is the rational choice, why would anyone take it seriously?

I'm curious to hear from the atheists why there's such disdain for atheism among the kids of atheists. Retention rates are worse than even the most wacky religions.

People can be quite stupid.

This seems reasonable. Atheist parents typically don't do much to promote atheism at home. It isn't like kids are going to atheist Sunday school every week or saying atheist prayers at every dinner table. But outside the home, there are plenty of religious experiences. I went to chapel at school every week despite not going to church as a family. Other minority views might be impervious to the majority Christian culture because of the strength of reinforcement st home and their local communities. Further, to give up your religious views in, say, Muslim minority communities in the US can mean giving up a huge amount of family and community support, typically not so in atheist families.

You seem to be assuming here that religion is nothing more the affirmation/rejection of specific creeds, and that people behave rationally. Primarily, I would suggest that atheism has far fewer emotional reinforcement mechanisms.

Also, about 7% of atheists report a belief in God:

http://www.pewforum.org/religious-la...amily/atheist/

Huh? How does that work?

People's intellectual and emotional affiliations don't always align. It's one of the dangers of self-reporting.

And as we become more independent adults, we start to ponder more seriously why we deal with so much hardship and dissatisfaction. This issue doesn't concern kids very much. Religion provides a ready made solution, whereas atheism is more of a negation of the popular religious narratives without being able to resolve the problem in an emotionally sustained manner.

Religion is generally going to be more attractive than atheism unless someone has a reason to be suspicious or doubtful about it. The best religions are the ones that have layers of depth beyond the most simplistic initial understanding. The worst religions are the ones without that depth, relying on coercion, fear, and stagnated development to retain its followers.

If the point of the OP is that atheism is unsustainable, then I agree. We do not come into the world as blank slates, and the conditions of reality ensure that we can't just autopilot our way through life with peace of mind. Also, I guess the biggest reason why atheism is unsustainable, is that it becomes less true the more we pursue the solution to our dissatisfaction.

Thanks for your non-loaded insightful "question", I'm sure it will illuminate this issue.

I don't see why you think atheism is more attractive nor lacking compatibility with emotionally sustained resolutions to problems of hardship. I don't see most religious systems as attractive systems that resolve tensions in my life that lamentably I don't find to be true, quite the opposite. Some religious viewpoints claim one can spend an eternity suffering in hell if one's acts - or worse, one's faith - is deemed insufficient! That is neither attractive nor emotionally satisfying in my view.

Yes, but that's not among the emotionally appealing aspects that draw people in. I'm not saying it's only emotional appeal that drives religious behavior, just that it's a big difference between the average theist and atheist. I'm generalizing about the most superficial, lowest common denominator religious behavior which is useful when analyzing macro trends.

What's the alternative? As an atheist, do you think atheism hasn't become widespread due to a lack of intelligence among theists? I know that is an appealing belief among some atheists..

Is the difference really remarkable at all in an average theist and an average atheist? I have my doubts. I think on a forum like this we get a bit blinded because we meet outliers.

I agree, so I meant 'key' difference (controlling for environmental influencers).

Regarding my last post, I should also say that I'm aware that intelligence correlates with atheism, but a lack of intelligence is not solely what prevents theists from becoming atheists. Or rather, to be more specific, focusing on intelligence won't lead to understanding how a theist becomes an atheist and vice versa. I didn't mean to dismiss it as a factor, but to me it's a distraction from the more relevant factor(s).

I'm not sure that "lack of intelligence" is commonly presented as the reason for the theist/atheist breakdown among athiests. Yes, there is a sort of "religious people are stupid" underbelly, but among prominent atheists I would suggest this is a fringe explanation for this phenomenon at best. Something in the veins of cultural momentum (you believe what your parents and community and culture believe) is the more common explanation, no?

What are "Nones?" Are they the same as agnostic?

People who fill out "none in particular" on the survey.

The simple answer is that non atheism actually makes more sense than atheism unless you are familiar with the science that does a pretty good job of explaining lots of stuff that on the surface seems like it would take a supreme being to pull off. Its not just intelligence. (I believe that mathematicians are quite a bit more likely to be theists than scientists.)

Well, I think the findings in this particular survey has a lot to do with surrounding culture.

I don't have any raw data, but from my observation it is rare in my country to become religious if you weren't reared to be so. I mean it happens, but I have seen absolutely nothing to indicate that it is more common than losing your religion. Considering that my country is about evenly split between non-believers and believers and has been so for a long time (with non-believers slightly increasing) it is also, needless to say, very implausible that these statistics are repeated here

But again, in my country there is zero stigma attached to not having religion, very few people care about the religion or lack thereof in politicians, leaders or officials for example - whereas in the US, atheists still rank very low on trust in surveys.

So one can argue that it is very conceivable that in the US there is a pressure, intended or not, towards being religious which is hard to escape. It seems that in your country (if I'm mistaken about your nationality, my apologies) atheism closes a lot of doors for you, both professionally and socially.

This would imply that some of those who answer the survey are lying when they say they are something other than atheists. Either that or that the social pressures you speak of actually change people's (weak) minds where they persuade themselves to believe to avoid that pressure.

Interesting discussion. As far as the anomalies, it is possible that the people responding to these survey tend to think that atheism means not believing in the Abrahamic God rather than not believing in any version of god. So they report belief in their own version of God but report that they are “atheists’. Also some religious survey responders do not wish to be affiliated with a particular church so they go into the "none" category. These semantic issues show up dramatically in surveys of Japan where the majority of people are known to worship private Shinto versions of a god but will respond to survey questions as being atheist and also not belonging to a religion. See wiki on Religion in Japan for more info.

Flaw in OP.

Atheism is a belief like bald is a hair color.

Of course atheism is a belief. It's a mental model where god(s) are explicitly and consciously rejected as being valid.

aunicornism is a belief as a well.

Atheism can be understood as a belief or it can be understood as the absence of a belief. There's an overlap of the language usage.

I would say that the data suggests the importance of thinking about religions as social institutions and the role of institutions in socialization, rather than just thinking about religious affiliation as rational choice, or even primarily as some kind of individual choice in a "marketplace of ideas". Religious identification is reinforced, legitimated, and maintained in a bunch of institutional ways that don't generally exist for self-identified atheists, especially in the US.

This same kind of analysis also probably explains a bit about why religious traditions that are more tightly integrated with the cultures and social institutions of specific ethnic groups (Hinduism, Islam, Greek Orthodoxy) have the highest retention rates, and why religious traditions which are broadly seen as legitimate by other co-religionists enjoy higher retention rates than traditions which do not , i.e. the difference between being raised Methodist and being raised a Jehovah's Witness.

I would expect it to be the case that if atheism becomes more socially acceptable, and especially if there begin to exist more well defined social institutions and formal organizations concerned with atheistic worldviews (e.g. humanism), then you would see retention rates change. There is already some evidence that retention of non-religious affiliation is increasing over time in the US, and that is likely the result of increases in social acceptance as well as merely the increase in the number of "nones".

I was interested in the method Pew used to find this result. One would think that typing "pew religious retention rates" into google would turn up a Pew article about it, it didn't. (Technically it did, it was this article http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/a...ous-landscape/ but it didn't have that graph.)

Searching for images eventually led to this article: http://nineteensixty-four.blogspot.n...-and-came.html. In that article they state: In that quote they do have a link to Pew, but it is a dead link.

ToothSayer, please tell us how you found this graph and why you think it is "according to Pew"

It's explained in the update/note, after what you snipped:

I don't think the raw dataset is available from the Pew web site any longer. But the Pew report itself is available here: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/0...study-full.pdf

It looks like the differences between the Pew report and the Georgetown analysis, which is where the image comes from, is that they broke out Greek Orthodox from just "Orthodox" in the Pew report (49% vs 50%) and that the Pew report doesn't break out the unaffiliated group into atheists, agnostics, and so on. Or not for retention anyway. Because the number of atheists is so small, they may not have done so for sample size reasons? I don't know. The CARA blog mentions the number of "weighted" respondents but I'm not sure how crazy the weighting is.

However, whether the number for atheists specifically is 30% or closer to the 47% of the unaffiliated group as a whole, it doesn't surprise me if the retention rate for atheists is lower than most religious groups in the US for the reasons I gave above. The Georgetown blog basically makes the same sort of argument: