Boro Nut

No, its purely because we can read. Simple as that.

Boro Nut

Hugh Jass

David Gould
You make very good points that even a non-socialist can agree with and I concur that America's isolation in the past is the main reason that religion hasn't taken the drubbing that it has in Europe.

Quote: Australia never threw off the european yoke, if such it may be called, and thus has a european outlook.

Thus speaketh the Australian republican.....fair enough except I think 'yoke' is a little strong and 'influence' might be more apt. This is off topic but isn't it interesting that republicanism is so weak in Canada, where I live, even although one third of the population is french-speaking?

Sandy

stryder2112

Quite true! A recent poll by <a href="http://207.178.254.238/cgi-bin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=103&Reference= F" target="_blank">Barna Research</a> demonstrated that 40% of senior pastors in US churches do not have a seminary degree. In many "non-denominational" churches that dote the US landscape the pastor is simply a passionate, unschooled, charismatic layman whom the parishners like to hear preach.

Stryder

Gregorius

Could the McCarthy days explain a part of the problem? In the 50's you people tried to fight communism by all means, including using religious tools.

/Gregorius

Talulah

1.) The Puritans
2.) The idea of Manifest Destiny

My two cents for what it is worth.

IvanK

Europe is not as religious as the U.S. IMHO because most European countries have established religions. Apparently being forced to contribute to religion makes people less overtly religious.

To say the U.S. is a "bastion of religious fundamentalism" seems to me a bit misleading. First, there are dozens of denominations, many of which are at theological war with each other and internally over issues like whether one should be dunked in water or sprinkled with it, whether a cracker can become a corpse and so forth. Second, the U.S. population has not always been as religious as it seems to be today. Third, even among U.S. residents who identify themselves as fundamentalist there are broad variations in church attendence, beliefs and even political views.

What we have in the U.S. it seems to be is a few conservative religious fundamentalists who have risen to political prominence, wield a certain amount of political power (enough to decide, say, a school board election or the odd statewide campaign) and so have attracted the attention of mostly Republican politicians. Some from their ranks have risen to elective political office themselves. Make no mistake, this Religious Right is a force to be reckoned with, one that calls for the kind of eternal vigilance that is the price of democracy. But at least so far its influence has been diffuse, controlled and contained within reasonable limits, except perhaps on certain bellweather issues like state-church separation and abortion rights.

Amos

If becoming and atheist is an act of courage would this mean that most Americans are cowards?

Radcliffe Emerson

Because Europeans are smarter than US people?

DMB

Some interesting answers her to a question that has long puzzled me.

David Gould said:

But it wasn't the US at that time and people had varied motives for settling on the western side of the pond. In the seventeenth century, Europe was much more religious than now. They were fighting all sorts of horrible wars about religion. So naturally, the Europeans who originally settled in America were fairly religious.

Everything I have seen about American religious history would suggest that in the early years of the USA the Americans were not on the whole very religious at all. The USA has gradually become more religious as time has gone by. I think Gregorius is right about McCarthyism. That's when "In God We Trust" and "One Nation Under God" and all that sort of thing became popular.

Pandora's idea:
may be a clue.

Over the past century and a half, the USA has been a nation of immigrants. Immigrants cling to the familiar, and this includes culture and religion. I have seen this with my own cousin, who lives in California. When he was in England, he was hardly religious, but he joined the local Episcopalian church where he lives in order to meet people and feel part of a community.

This doesn't answer the question of why fundamentalism, but surely that does correlate pretty well with poor education.

IvanK

Good, Amos, a simple declarative sentence. Keep it up and, as someone else noted earlier, you may eventually gain entry into the brave new world of communication with your fellow human beings.

Now, let's unpack it a little:

Not at all self-evident, even leaving alone the torturous discussion of just what "courage" might be. I'd say that in most people's journeys from belief toward skepticism they encounter real fears. It's how they face these fears, IMHO, that would determine whether or not their act, whether to adopt atheism or return to belief, is courageous or not. Not wanting to become an atheist out of fear of hell (or hope of heaven) would be equally as bad as wanting to become an athesit for the same reason.

Granting the first point for the sake of argument, even if becoming an atheist is courageous that doesn't mean that not becoming one is cowardly. In my experience, most people who become atheists do so because they are unsatisfied with the explanations religon offers to the questions they have. It would be entirely possible to be a brave believer and never question received religion, just as it would be possible to be a cowardly atheist.

So the answer to your question is, no, it doesn't.

Here's something to file for future reference: no one should be claiming that atheists are morally, intellectually or personally superior to believers or vice versa. All atheism means is that we don't choose to believe in the existence of any gods. Period, end of story.