Obama and Religion

[kirisutogomen]

This is the sort of thing dpolicar usually posts, rather than me, but it was my mother who pointed me at it, and I figured people might be interested anyway: Obama and Religion.

Also, I saw the movie Traitor and it was better than I expected. It wasn't precisely the genre the ads had suggested, either, which had something to do with my pleasant surprise.

Comments

[psychohist.livejournal.com]

There was a person asking the questions? That seems like a particularly bad way to get honest answers from agnostics and atheists to me. Normally I wouldn't be too worried about offending the survey caller with my answers, but religion is an area where I might feel uncomfortable with it.

Given they have a "nothing in particular" category, I might be tempted to use that rather than atheist. I might also be tempted to say "Wiccan", because although I have atheistic religious beliefs, I do follow some Wiccan practices; our wedding was CUUP, and we hold vigil at Yule. Something similar might account for, for example, the roughly 1% of Christians and up to 10% of other monotheistic religious people who "do not believe in God". In fact, I suspect the 5% who answered "do not believe in God" might be a better measure of how many atheists there are than those who used the word "atheist".

I also think that "universal spirit" can be pretty broad, and when I get questions like that, I tend to ask for clarifications that Pew may not have anticipated. Their policy should really be that the interviewer shouldn't clarify, but I've rarely had interviewers that stuck to that.

The fact that "God" can end up being an "impersonal force" in this survey I think again shows that the survey is not drawing clear lines for the purpose of categorizing atheists or agnostics. The laws of physics can be argued to qualify for "God" by the definitions used in this survey.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Agreed on everything, except that (1) I think you're being too generous to refer to the survey as using definitions, (2) I am certain that the 5% who don't believe in God are a more accurate count of atheists, and (3) you would have to shove razor blades under my fingernails before I called myself Wiccan.

To the extent that there's anything to be gleaned from such a survey, I think the remarkably high number of people across all religions who believe in God as an impersonal force is the most interesting, and the large number of people who do not believe their religion holds a monopoly on entrance to paradise is also pretty nice to know.