Thank you well named for digging deeper.

Here is a figure from that study:



This indeed seems to verify what ToothSayer said, though the sample size seems very small and it also allows for people going from "Atheist" to "Agnostic" or "Noting in particular" to count as non-retainers.

It seems to me that to someone without an agenda, the huge rise in unaffiliated people would be a bigger story than the lack of retention of Atheists.

Ah, there it is. I looked for like 5 minutes and couldn't find it :P

edit: If I'm not a total idiot then that should mean that if you start with 0.5% of respondents in atheist households, and 0.3% of respondents leave, then that means that the retention rate by this metric is 0.2/0.5 which is 40% rather than 30%.

I don't know if I'm just an idiot (likely) or CARA used some different weighting or something.

Are they lumping agnostics in with atheists?

Do atheist parents spend a lot of time trying to convince their kids that there is no God? Or threatening to abandon them if they leave the non-faith?

I think people need something to believe in. If it makes them feel better to know they'll see Sparky in heaven, then that's cool. Just don't use religion to **** over others.

LOL at calling atheism a religion. It's a religion like not watching tv is a favorite channel.

Yes, "non atheism" (or, as it's more commonly known, a belief in a god), clearly made more sense when people were ignorant, i.e. ancient times.

Yes, atheism is a "belief" in the same way I have a "belief system" that Santa isn't real and unicorns don't exist.

The beauty about being an atheist is that it requires so little of my time or effort. I simply reject your assertion that a god exists, and I base that rejection on your complete lack of evidence, in the same way I reject claims of Bigfoot, Santa and unicorns.

Nice try with the false equivalence.

It's a position on the state of ultimate reality/existence/spirituality. "No higher conscious power exists in any form" is a theological statement, whether you agree it is or not.

It's not a statement about the universe. It's not a statement about a mathematical or philosophical truth. It's a theological statement about the nature of everything that is or could be.

It's not based on evidence, since we can only imperfectly observe fragments of one part of this universe, which are wholly insufficient to reject all notions of a conscious superentity/creator. So what is it based on, if not theology?

You make a very common mistake here, when you assert that atheism is a belief. As an atheist, I absolutely do not make the statement you claim above. I simply do not join you in your belief of something for which there is no evidence. That is not to say that a god absolutely does not exist (much the same way I can't absolutely say that Santa or unicorns don't exist), but I see no reason to believe one does exist.

Again, not a belief system or a statement about reality/existence/spirituality. Just ain't buying what you're selling. You guys need to up your game and find some compelling evidence.

I think Toothsayer is more interested in riling people up than anything else.

I think he has made his point on "atheistic belief" about 50-60 times by now, and it's almost always accompanied by some sort of pretentious sarcasm.

No, it is not necessarily a theological statement. A theological statement is rooted in religion. You don't need religion to claim god does not exist, you don't even need religion to claim that god exists.

Before you make posts like this, perhaps you should check up on what theology actually is?

Meh i did not need your stinking science to become an atheist, or agnostic depending on your box. And i cant be alone.
The thing is if he holds to it he just ****ed up his survey since many atheists are no longer atheists.

I know the numbers would be the same more or less. Just think its funny he posts an atheist survey well booting a bunch in the survey out of atheism.

As a Atheist I never claim ultimate knowledge on reality, existence, or spirituality. That's what religious people do.

[My Bold]

Theology is a general outline and aspect of any religion- a specific theology can be based on a circumscribed specific religion or religious sect (i.e. Islam, or Greek Orthodox as opposed to Roman Catholic, both Christian in origin).

stanford.edu/natural-theology/

I'm sorry but this is a common tactic of atheists, and it's cowardly. They're a strong atheist in arguments and in their own head, and a weak one when challenged on their strong atheism.

The truth is that few people who call themselves atheists are weak atheists. Those people call themselves agnostics or "none". You for example have an active dislike of theology and a strong pride in your atheism, born of a certainty that you are right that there is no God, on par with your certainty that there are no unicorns. You didn't come to atheism by never having encountered ideas about God. You came to atheism by encountering ideas about God, weighing them, and believing them to be false, and further, believing all possible claims about all possible gods to be false. That's a belief, not an absence of one.

That's probably a rational belief, but let's call it what it is - a belief, even if enjoys the weight of probability in its favor. You have weighed and are actively rejecting all claims and likelihoods of any kind of gods.

I'm atheist.

The Christians would argue that the evidence is everywhere, but your heart and eyes are closed to it. How do you refute that?
If it's good enough for Bertrand Russell, it's good enough for me. The thinking world is broadly divided into three areas: science (what we can measure), philosophy (how we think and in what broad ways we can view the same thing from different angles, and how that fits together) and theology (untestable statements about the ultimate nature and existence of non-physical entities and worlds). An atheism claim is absolutely a theological claim.

what about the non-belief in a specific god? for example, rejecting the existence of the Hindu god (or the Pastafarian one). rejecting Pastafarianism feels closer to science than theology

Theology generally argues from the standpoint that some given religion is correct (or at the very least presumed to be). Academic inquiry into religion is generally sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy or whatnot.

Sure, you can call it "natural theology" when you argue about God's existence from evidence and reason - but it becomes a rather superfluous term, because you don't really need theology to do that.

But sure, if we accept "natural theology" as valid then we have moved from wrongful use of the word "theology" to Toothsayer positing a tautology.

What in science allows you to reject specific Gods or Hindu theology? Only three things I can see:

1. Claims made about the world in holy books are proven to be wrong by science, reducing their credibility as documents
2. God is on longer needed to have a credible model of existence.
3. Analyzing humans as the generators of claims and myths (i.e. the epistemology of human claims) leads one to conclude to a very high probability that the more specific religious claims are human generated ones.

(1) I think is too easily explained away. It's not compelling
(2) is nice but doesn't allow us to reject God claims. It merely provides an alternative hypothesis.
(3) seem compelling to me, but isn't really science - more epistemology and probability.

So I'm not sure how science allows us to reject God. They still seem like theological claims. And I contend that many atheists that reject God often do so because the God character is offensive or limiting to them, being an anachronism in the modern world with modern morality.That's a kind of theology - "God, if he existed, would be nothing like this, so I can't take your claims seriously".

Maybe you have better ideas, but I'm not seeing a path to reject God claims just using science. Making theological claims seems to be required:

- The universe looks nothing like what I'd expect if a god being being existed
- None of the God characters seem compelling to my personal morality/theology or sense of what should or could be out there
- The universe is materialistic or deterministic and impersonal by all accounts; such a system has no room for a god.

They all have elements of theology - ideas about the way a God being should be.

Science, strictly, takes no position on the god question. Scientists, injecting personal and worldviews in the public sphere, take a positon on god(s) or religions in general. The first is an official position taken by science organizations. The second is completely different in nature. It is a mistake to conflated the two.

That being said, the issue is not as clear cut as presented above, and in fact is an issue of serious contention, among scientists and many other people. It becomes convoluted in numerous ways - and even a simple synopsis is beyond the limits of a single post. The following book deals with this subject in general and in detail in some chapters: I recommend it.

https://books.google.com/books?id

"Theology" is consequential to a loss of direct vision of the spiritual/supersensible world . Along with this "loss" the intellect manifested itself (it was not always present in man but developed from ancient Greece and thusly the Greek philosophers ) and "theology" , an intellectual foray spoke to the common and higher natures of Man and his etiology.

Contrary to your reference in which it was stated that the Roman Catholic Church believed that one can get to the "G..." through "Theology' it was not the belief of Aquinas, the philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church.

He explicitly and implicitly states that one could not get to the "G.." with the intellect but did have a intuition of that very Entity to which the rules of logic fail. He did bring forth the concept of the "unmoved mover" but it should be realized that to intellectualize is not the same as the "experience" .

It is possible to write a book on the technique of a back flip without being able to do a back flip; but to have the experience one would have to perform the same.

The western ethos in these matters belongs to all of us and to just state that the" blank, blank, " believes this, is dismissive and of course I stopped reading at that point. The Protestants have definitely become extremely intellectualized whereas there is still some mystery in the world of Man for those who desire to "experience" and then present the matter intellectually, or another words within a structured comprehensible approach.

Finis.

What's more, the small sample could easily be affected by an equally small number of apologist-types who love to declare how they used to be 'hard-core atheists', if the survey presented in a way that this could have happened.

Whats Swedens retention rate for atheists.

No idea, but I feel a sudden urge to become Hindu.

Generations are meaningless when it comes down to one or another. Situation-like.

Any constant among generations is _______________?

Interchangeable with one another. When the old fashioned old os a radical change and the young declare more of the status quo, what? Hush your mouth?

Haven't found any hard data on it, but considering that surveys have shown about 8 in 10 in Sweden reports no personal religious conviction and only about 1 ten think religion is important, I'd say it is safe to the Pew Pew survey does not apply to Sweden.

These numbers often confuse people looking up statistics, as church membership is fairly high in Sweden. About 5 in 10 ten Swedes are member of the Church of Sweden, but in surveys only 15% of respondents state that they believe in Jesus.

In England my experience is that a lot of people still culturally consider themselves Christian in that they'd like a Church wedding and to have their kids Christened, but aren't really religious if you ask them. To the point that if you want to marry in a Church they make you attend for a few Sundays even knowing they'll probably never see you again afterwards. It would be interesting to know how that confounds data collection like this.

I'd also hazard a guess and say it would explain part of Judaism's retention rate. There's a fair bit of open acceptance for that kind of cultural identity and practice without the necessity to believe.