Shake

Well, this is much like Catholics or Lutherans or Baptists, etc. saying they speak for all Xians.

Alonzo Fyfe

General comments:

First, let's set asside the "Christians distort statistics too" fallacy. This does not prevent the 14% figure from being a distortion. Indeed, this is a named fallacy: "ad hominem tu quoque", and I understand atheists to be particularly keen to prefer sound reason over fallacy.

The survey that I looked at is the <a href="http://pewforum.org/publications/surveys/religion.pdf" target="_blank">Pew Report on Religious Identification</a>.

However, the University of New York study cited by some respondents provides even less comfort.

The 13% of those who answered the survey as non-religious were further broken down as follows:

Atheist: 1 million (5%)
Agnostic: 1 million (5%)
No Religion: 27.9 million (90%)

What do we know about this 90%? What gives us the right to say that we speak for them?

I can think of a hundred different reasons to answer "No Religion." For personal or family reasons, they did not want to express a preference among major religious categories. They, themselves, are considering conversion from one major category to another. It was the easiest way possible to say "I don't want to answer the question" without sounding rude.

Perhaps some insight can be derived from the fact that 80% of those who answered "No Religion" were married -- compared to nearly 70% married for most other categories. For some reason, a huge portion of those who have "no religion" do not get married.

So, how about this for a theory: "No Religion" is the standard answer of the homosexual community who feel themselves shunned by most established religious institutions. Thus, they declare allegiance to none. But how many of them will argue that no God exists, or would actually support the atheist cause in disputes where we call upon their numbers in support of our positions?

The fact is, we know almost nothing about this Either way, we know nothing about these people, and have no reason to claim that 100% of these "No Religion" people would choose the atheist side in those debates where we claim to have their support.

Now, I could understand this exaggeration if we could gain some political mileage from it....

....well, no I can't, actually....

....but, there is no mileage to be gained. When we speak as if we have the support and endorsement of 100% of this 27.5 million people, we simply show ourselves to be despirate people clutching at straws and willing to use deception and manipulation in the pursuit of our ends.

Buffman

Alonso Fyfe

Gee, 2,000 years later and the Christian fairytale belief has been stuck at only a little over 30% of the world's population, while the Muslim and Hindu ones grow by leaps and bounds...percentage wise. Is there a message there?

As I said above, statistics can be used to support whichever bias you favor.

Alonzo Fyfe

No. Statistics can be abused to support whatever bias you favor.

Or statistics can be used to support the truth.

The fact that abusing statistical findings to support one's desired conclusion no more demononstrates a problem with statistical analysis, then the abuse of scientific findings to support Creationism by some demonstrates that there is a fundamental problem with science.

Indeed, the use of the 14% figure by Atheist organizations shows the same intellectual ingrity as claiming that the discovery of a new skull that does not fit into the traditional timeline of human evolution proves the superiority of Creationism.