Are there really more atheists and agnostics now than before?

This sort of thing waxes and wanes with the times. Right now it’s the “fashion” (for lack of a better word) to be atheist, and certainly on Fluther, but people of faith are still out there and going strong.

I feel being an atheist is far from a popular position. It definitely is harder than being religious.

in real life I would rarely admit to being an atheist and most often would say I’m a Christian, if asked. Certainly if asked by a stranger. It’s just safer that way. I instructed my children to do the same.

Well, yes. Due to scientific advancements more people have become literate and now know how most things work. In the past lots of people where either uneducated or uninformed.
We can now explain how so many things work, some people do not have a need to believe in God to explain how things came about. Of course, people who believe in God nowadays say that God designed and created everything, and that the scientific facts are Gods work.
But the reason why there are so many more atheists/agnostics now than there were before, is because more and more people are beginning to believe in scientific facts.

I don’t know that there are necessarily more, I just think it is becoming more acceptable to admit it.
Not only that, the ads and stuff that you see are part of a movement to make it acceptable. There are organizations that are calling atheists out of the closet.

Right now it’s the “fashion”...

Examples? Name some prominent atheist US politicians. Popular films or TV shows which espouse atheism? How about popular music which claims there is no God. List all the people who stand up at the Oscars or Grammies and thank their parents for teaching them that religion and faith are no substitute for hard work and intelligence? Who did that?

Religion has become much more prominent in public life since I was young. Especially in politics.

@MilkyWay We can now explain how so many things work, some people do not have a need to believe in God to explain how things came about. Exactly what I was going to say. Couldn’t have phrased it better myself.

I dunno, but this fence is getting awfully crowded over here…..come on, budge up!

I agree with @whitenoise. I think it has more to do with political climate in a country. People tend to either turn to religion in times of crisis or use religion as a source to blame for their current predictament. So the numbers can be up one moment and down the next.
Can’t really say if their are more atheist today being that in the past people had to say what was expected of them to say. Whether they truly believed in God or whatever religion, no one would know. They all took their thoughts to the grave. It wasn’t popular to try to rock the boat. If you tried, you just died earlier than you should.

It used to be, if you were in a small town, people would ask which church you visited. The world is much smaller with instant communications and the non-theists have more of a voice in the world community (like Fluther). I don’t think the numbers have increased but the ability to find a village in virtuality has led to more vocalizing in the rest of the world (real life).

Yes thank God. The higher the number of people who believe in cretionism instead of evolution the higher the rate of murders, rapes and child abuse. (I have actual reference for this as well once i get to a computer I’ll post it).

I’d guess that it is true that there are more atheists and agnostics now, but how many more I’m not sure. It might not be that much. I say that because atheists and agnostics are now free to be more vocal about it; in the past professing lack of faith was enough to get you shunned by your family or an entire community. It still is in some places, but it’s much more acceptable to say you’re an agnostic/atheist now than it has been in the past. That doesn’t necessarily mean that rates of it are going up, but I would guess that advancements in science could cause it to go up. Not that science and religion are objectively mutually exclusively, but for many people, they are.

In the Middle Ages, the Church in some places had more power than secular rulers. It was a way of life, it had control over the people and most of the people were kept in the fog about what their religion truly meant; texts were in languages the common people couldn’t understand, priests were required to mediate the religion to the people. Those days are over. When that kind of thing ends, the likelihood that people will question religion increases.

And to add, just because I think rates of agnosticism/atheism are going up does not mean I don’t recognize that it’s still a very small number and they are still greatly the minority. There may be more on the internet; that doesn’t mean they are as common in “real life”.

It seems impossible to answer this question, unless one did an unbiased study of religion on a global aspect throughout history. Even then, we wouldn’t really know the answer.

It seems like, in these modern times, that people are more willing to admit to their atheist or agnostic viewpoints without repercussion from friends and family. It also depends upon the country. A few are more accepting about it than others.

Yes, there are.

According to the 2008 Religious Identification Survey:

“Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.”

I love the ironic twist of @Lightlyseared post.

—@Rarebear why thank you.

The previous quip was based on research published by the Journal of religion and society in 2005—

Yes. Atheism (that there are no gods) as a concept has been around since theism, but it waxes and wanes in how popular of a concept it is and how many people believe in it. Ancient Jews were familiar with the concept. But then it vanishes during the Middle Ages in Europe, and while you might not agree on who God is, or how to worship Him, He exists, no question about it. Then coming out of the Middle Ages, the concept reemerges (although it’s not like almost anyone is an atheist). But, we can see that the more we can explain with science, and the more developed a nation is, the more likely it is to have atheists. God is good when your most basic needs aren’t getting met, and when you don’t have any idea how to fix that. But once your needs for food, shelter, clothing, water, and health are met, and especially once you have money to spend on CDs, your need for a deity goes down. So it’s definitely bigger now than it ever has been.

I think there have always been people that didn’t believe the religious fairy tales. Just back in the past it has been dangerous to hold atheist views. I hope more people are coming to their senses about religion.

Probably not, they’re just more likely to admit that they are, in fact, atheists.

When I was 6 years old, I told my mother that there will be no religion in the future. When she asked me why not, I told her because it was all a lie.

Time exposes lies, the more days that pass, the more atheists there will be. Unless a new lie is told.

I hope so.

Fluther wise, certainly correct, a flood of Biblical proportion. The world in general I think it is like the gay movement, as it became less shocking more people ”came out”, so as it became more acceptable to be God haters, many stopped hiding and showed their real colors.

Atheists are not God haters.

It is, after all, difficult to hate what doesn’t exist.

Well being an atheist gets you out of a serious bunch of guilt trips that the average religious person would have to endure.

Based on that, I’d say it is probably more attractive to a lot of folks.

I have to disagree with you there, @the100thmonkey. I think people who hate Barney the purple dinosaur know he’s not real. You can love or hate comic book characters, fictional heroes and villains, and folk entities such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, not to mention the Great Pumpkin. In fact, I think Santa Claus is a great example. I believe in Santa Claus and Superman and Mickey Mouse and Amon-Ra and God all to exactly the same degree, and I don’t hate any of them.

I do hate Barney, though.

@jaytkay there are also tons of people who get up and thank God for tons of awards, whether it be a celeb or pro athlete. That doesn’t mean they are religious.

I believe that there are it is just that people have more of a voice to make their viewpoint more prominent. There weren’t similar technologies to twitter, facebook, email, or television in the 18th and 19th centuries. Also, having penalties for heresy probably kept some people who were on the fence from voicing their opinion :P.

I definitely see more people these days who are atheists. I think it’s more likely the result of people not having/seeing anything tangible in their life that makes them believe in God.

@anoop66 what would you consider tangible?

@Schroedes13 signs that kind of give you an inkling and make you go like.. “Hmm, there is definitely a force or energy behind this”

There are tons of miracles everyday! People are brought back from near death experiences and believe they saw beings or God. There are miraculous healings after people have been told they wouldn’t live past a certain date. It all depends how hard you look.

In the end religion/God is your personal expression.

truly, but even if it’s your personal expression, whether it be an organized religion or just pluralistic humanism, you can still see tangible things all around you if you look!

exactly, but I kind of see where the Atheists are coming from.. It’s to believe for some people cos of certain reasons sometimes

I would say no. Because Atheists generally do not indoctrinate. It’s a position you have to attain and because you’ve to arrive at it, it’s harder. Yes, even though children are born atheist, it’s rare that they’re not forced to adopt a religion by their parents or society they live in.

So given how many children are indoctrinated to the various religions I’d say that no. It may be a case for more Atheists coming out however – which could eventually change the tide. Although – it’d not be the same to be a groundless atheist just because everyone else is doing it – still better than faulty thinking.

there are also tons of people who get up and thank God for tons of awards, whether it be a celeb or pro athlete. That doesn’t mean they are religious.

??

I guess they could be simply caving in to pressure to appear religious, or just trying to fit in with their peers. I doubt that is common.

My point was religiosity is.fashionable. Atheism is not.

@Jeruba – I would suggest there is a distinction to be made between what exists in a literary fashion and what exists as an actual instantiation – Barney exists inasmuch he appears on your TV screen, like it or not, and annoys you. In that sense, Barney is real, and therefore the target of both adulation and hate.

In the sense I hold when I aver that I am an atheist, it is impossible to hate any deity, because there is simply nothing to hate. There is no proper object of the emotion. God does not appear on the Saturday morning kids’ TV slot here, unlike Pikachu. I guess it is possible to hate the idea of a God, but it’s not something I personally attach any emotion to.

In the sense that theistic beliefs are often propounded through holy books that include a narrative element, one could hate the characters in the story, as far as the suspension of disbelief allows, but that is a qualitatively different experience from coming face to face with the person who actually puts on the Barney costume. You might want to set fire to Barney when watching him on TV, but I would be willing to wager that you wouldn’t really set light to Barney in person.

I guess I’ve just said, in a very roundabout way, that fictional characters belong in a separate ontology to real beings. They exist, but in a different way. Theists do not make the claim of literary existence for their gods, they claim existence as an instantiation of “being A” with properties X, Y, and Z.

I believe they are wrong.

@the100thmonkey, I see your point, in that there is a “something” to hate when you see a character on a screen even if you know it’s a guy in a costume. However, believers claim much more reality than that for their deity, and so when some of them think you hate it, they think you are hating something real, and the evidence of that is that you claim it’s not real. (I know—it doesn’t seem to bother them not to make any more sense than that. At least some of the Christians I know are a bit more intelligent, and that, of course, is a different puzzle.)

From my point of view, the list of entities I named are all on an equal footing because they are all fictitious—all products of the human imagination, created for one human purpose or another. The fact that some are venerated changes nothing much as far as I am concerned, other than the degree of zeal I have to confront when braced by their admirers. Amon-Ra worshippers don’t ring my doorbell wielding pamphlets, whereas two nice ladies woke me up this morning on an urgent errand from Jesus.