Discuss!
Well… atheism is a religion too, so..
Ok, seriously. Who are most opened atheists? Those who study religion, their arguments for god, read bible to find proofs against god’s existence or its benevolence or/and to troll christians etc. They simply put much more effort into this stuff than religious ones, who believe just because they usually have parents of the very same religion.. and eventually you have what you have - atheists know more about religion than theists.
That’s from my perspective, at least.
Atheists tend to want to debate about religion more(Or will necessarily run into debates for being atheist)- so they need to be prepared to defend their viewpoints/attack others. Immature Atheists suffer the same ego driven issue that religious people do when they find the “truth”, however, with a need to insult everyone who doesn’t believe the same way do and change the world on the basis that their belief will fix everything.
The purpose of a lot of different religions which is to minimize ego is usually lost in the western world.
Doesn’t surprise me (tho I rarely trust these kinds of “studies”).
Ya, what Maiku said ^^
The Los Angeles Times headline mentioned atheists and agnostics, not only atheists as suggested in your headline,Telpeurion.
Children adopt the religion of their parents. They do not have to understand it to subscribe to it. Faith is all one needs to be a religionist. Most atheists and agnostics I know were religious. As they studied their own religion and others, they came to the conclusion there is no strong evidence meriting belief in these religions. Thus, in the process of rejecting religious belief, many agnostics and atheists have acquired a greater religious knowledge than religionists.
For me and most other people I know, religion is more about the comfort of being in a voluntary group like a church. It’s comforting to have traditions like that. I tend to believe that atheists focus much more on the tangible elements of religion rather than the spiritual elements.
Not really surprising. Talking about religion is sort of irrelevant at this point. I could tolerate those sorts of petty debates from middle schoolers back in the day, but not really now. I guess it’s just that people who have fringe positions either have to work harder to arrive at them and defend them than anyone else. For example, I know more about economics now than I ever did as an ignorant sta-theist libtard simply by virtue of the fact that it’s not a de-facto position. I mean, wouldn’t you say that you understand neo-liberalism better than your average liberal arts under grad?
Of course, this is just a survey and so open to all the statistical fallacies of surveys. I agree that atheists have good reason to be more knowledgeable about religion than theists but I am sure that for instance, a theologian would be at least equally knowledgeable about catholicism than an atheist would be.
But for what reason? The latter is forced to debate his controversial views while the former is trained in his point of view.
I have a question though, is atheism something that has to be studied or is it something that just gets created de novo every generation? I mean to ask this because, people seem to work in paradigms and so atheism had to be developed by past thinkers. The implications of this is that, if atheism has an intellectual tradition, do atheists know it given that they are spending their time on theism. As an analogy, libertarians know AE but even with our research into other schools, we still need people like Student around to occasionally help us. If the survey is true, then atheism faces a different problem, they know too much religion but not much about themselves?
There isn’t really that much to atheism, I mean, scientologists and buddhists are atheists after all. Most “atheists” I know fancy themselves skeptics because they watched a few youtube videos talking about evolution and suddenly think they have all the relevant information, reminds me a lot of conservatives who read a summary of free market economics and call themselves experts, but I guess lack of belief in deities as a “common” philosophical position probably goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers at least. Though an abundance of anti-theistic literature started to pop up in the 60s and 70s. However, in recent years there seems to have been a flood of people who really don’t know what there talking about and would rather just insult theists than actually have a half decent discussion picking up the position. But more on topic, the “atheist” tradition is really just made up of using science to explain what god once explained. And by now depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics just about everything can be explained without god, even though the practice of trying to “disprove god” using science is sort of new, the actual science, and the attempts to “disprove god” are older than feudalism.