atheism amongst black Americans

[CapnAwesome]

Where is BrokenQuill to answer this?

It is somewhat difficult to understand what you are talking about, maybe because of a language barrier or your unfamiliarity with American race relations or something but I'm going to attempt to answer your question as best as I can.

First off I think statistics have shown that Atheism is more common amongst Whites and Asians than amongst Black and Hispanics in the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic...ted_States This could be because of the educational discrepancies between those groups and/or because of the extremely strong hold that religion has in those communities. I've only met a few black Atheists in my life, but then again I don't really live or travel in very black areas. I've met lots of Hispanic Atheists actually, normally younger people.

Once I was hitchhiking in Louisiana and was picked up by a black guy who brought up that he was an Atheist and talked about being literally the only Atheist in his family that was otherwise a very religious Southern Christian family. It was a pretty fascinating conversation and he didn't really seem to have a problem being an open Atheist in the south, although he also seemed like a very self confident individual so that probably helped.

As for the thing about gang violence, I don't really think that has much to do with Atheism or religion in general. I think a lot of those gangster or want to be gangsters are Christians or believers. I have a friend who used to sell pot and got involved with some other slightly sketchier drug deals who happened to be black. He said that the one time he went and bought a large quantity of pot with them that they asked God to bless their drug deal first. Ha. Overall though I doubt that a connection between religion and gang violence in the Black community has really been studied though and I doubt that any of the mostly white members of this forum really have much insight into what you are asking.