(September 13, 2011 at 6:54 pm)Fred Wrote: University of Minnesota Study on American Attitudes Towards Atheists & Atheism
Research Finds that Atheists are Most Despised, Most Distrusted Minority
The most recent data shows that atheists are more distrusted and despised than any other minority also that atheists seem to represent everything about modernity which Americans dislike or fear. . . . atheists ranked lower than "Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in 'sharing their vision of American society.'
Lead researcher Penny Edgell said that she was surprised by this . . . Nevertheless, the numbers are so extreme that she was led to conclude that they are "a glaring exception to the rule of increasing tolerance over the last 30 years. . . Our analysis shows that attitudes about atheists have not followed the same historical pattern as that for previously marginalized religious groups. . . ."
Some respondents associated atheism with "immoral people who threaten respectable community from the lower end of the social hierarchy." Others saw atheists as "rampant materialists and cultural elitists" who "threaten common values from above -- the ostentatiously wealthy who make a lifestyle out of consumption or the cultural elites who think they know better than everyone else."
Furthermore, dislike of atheists doesn’t correlate very highly with dislike of gays, immigrants, or Muslims. This means that dislike of atheists isn't simply part of a larger dislike of people who are "different." Why are atheists being singled out for special hatred and distrust?
To briefly answer your question, we get singled out because religiion, god, and deeply religious people are associated with (either on a concious or subconcious level with most people) love, respect, family, friends, and tradition.
We have been demonized in addition to being viewed as the opposite of all that. We hate god (according to them) therefore, we are depraved and amoral.
Not entirely logical, but hate and intolerance rarely are.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
