Atheism, as defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and other philosophy reference works, is the denial of the existence of God.[1] Beginning in the latter portion of the 20th century and continuing beyond, many agnostics/atheists have argued that the definition of atheism should be defined as a mere lack of belief in God or gods. [2][3][4]
Atheism has been examined by many disciplines in terms of its effects on individuals and society and these effects will be covered shortly.
As far as individuals adopting an atheistic worldview, atheism has a number of causal factors and these will be elaborated on below.
See also: Schools of atheist thought and Atheist factions
Atheists claim there are two main reasons for their denial of the existence of God and/or disbelief in God: the conviction that there is positive evidence or argument that God does not exist (Strong atheism which is also sometimes called positive atheism), and their claim that theists bear the burden of proof to show that God exists, that they have failed to do so, and that belief is therefore unwarranted (Weak atheism).
As as alluded to above, theists and others have posited a number of causes of atheism and this matter will be further addressed in this article.
Charles Bradlaugh, in 1876, proposed that atheism does not assert "there is no God," and by doing so he endeavored to dilute the traditional definition of atheism.[5][2] As noted above, in the latter portion of the 20th century, the proposition that the definition of atheism be defined as a mere lack of belief in God or gods began to be commonly advanced by agnostics/atheists.[2][6] It is now common for atheists/agnostics and theists to debate the meaning of the word atheism.[2][7]
Critics of a broader definition of atheism to be a mere lack of belief indicate that such a definition is contrary to the traditional/historical meaning of the word and that such a definition makes atheism indistinguishable from agnosticism.[2][4][8]
For more information, please see:
Below are three common ways that atheism manifests itself:
1. Militant atheism which continues to suppress and oppress religious believers today
Topics related to militant atheism
2. Philosophical atheism - Atheist philosophers assert that God does not exist. (See also: Naturalism)
3. Practical atheism: atheism of the life - that is, living as though God does not exist.[9]
See also: Atheist factions and Schools of atheist thought and Atheist cults and Atheism and intolerance
In 2015, Dr. J. Gordon Melton said about the atheist movement (organized atheism) that atheism is not a movement which tends to create community, but in the last few years there has been some growth of organized atheism.[10]
Jacques Rousseau wrote in the Daily Maverick: "Elevatorgate..has resulted in three weeks of infighting in the secular community. Some might observe that we indulge in these squabbles fairly frequently."[11] An ex-atheist wrote: "As an Atheist for 40 years, I noticed that there is not just a wide variety of Atheist positions, but there exists an actual battle between certain Atheist factions."[12]
See also: Atheist movement and Atheism and anger
Blair Scott served on the American Atheists board of directors.[13] Mr. Scott formerly served as a State Director for the American Atheists organization in the state of Alabama. On December 1, 2012 he quit his post as a director of outreach for the American Atheists due to infighting within the American atheist movement.[14]
Mr. Blair wrote:
See also: Antitheism and antisocial behavior
See also: Atheism has a lower retention rate compared to other worldviews and Desecularization and Atheism and apathy
In 2012, a Georgetown University study was published indicating that only about 30 percent of those who grow up in an atheist household remain atheists as adults.[15] Similarly, according to recent research by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, in the United States, a majority of those surveyed who were raised in atheist or agnostic households, or where there was no specific religious attachment, later chose to join a religious faith.[16] See also: Atheism and poor relationships with parents
A 2012 study by the General Social Survey of the social science research organization NORC at the University of Chicago found that belief in God rises with age, even in atheistic nations[17] See also: Atheism and immaturity.
In addition, in atheistic Communist China, Christianity is experiencing rapid growth (see: Growth of Christianity in China).
See also:
See also: Atheism and loneliness and Atheism and apathy and Internet atheism and American atheists and church attendance
In comparison to many religious groups, which have many meetings in numerous places in a given day or week which are convenient to attend, atheist meetings are sparse. The prime cause for this situation is the apathy of many atheists (see: Atheism and apathy).
In an essay entitled How the Atheist Movement Failed Me, an atheist woman noted that participation in the atheist community is often expensive due to the cost of attending atheist conferences and even local atheist meetings in restaurants and bars challenged her modest budget.[18] As a result of the challenges that atheists commonly have in terms of socializing in person, many atheists turn to the internet in terms of communicating with other atheists.[19] Often internet communication between atheists turns turns contentious (see: Atheist factions).
For more information, please see: Atheism and loneliness and Atheism and apathy
See also: Atheists doubting the validity of atheism
Hannah More wrote: "[T]he mind, which knows not where to fly, flies to God. In agony, nature is no Atheist. The soul is drawn to God by a sort of natural impulse; not always, perhaps by an emotion of piety; but from a feeling conviction, that every other refuge is 'a refuge of lies'."[20]
See also: Atheism and death and Atheist funerals and Atheism and Hell
Science Daily reported that Death anxiety increases atheists' unconscious belief in God.[22] In a Psychology Today article, Dr. Nathan A. Heflick reported similar results in other studies.[23] Under stress, the brain's processing works in a way that prefers unconscious thinking.[24]
A United States study and a Taiwanese study indicated that the irreligious fear death more than the very religious.[25]
For additional information, please see the article: Atheism and death
See also: Atheism and Hell
The journalist and ex-atheist Peter Hitchens, who is the brother of the late atheist Christopher Hitchens, said upon seeing an art exhibit of Michelangelo's painting The Last Judgment he came to the realization that he might be judged which startled him.[26] This started a train of thought within Peter Hitchens that eventually led him to become a Christian.[26]
For more information, please see: Atheism and Hell
See: Atheism and cryonics and Atheist cults
Cryonics is a pseudoscience that tries to extend life or achieve immortality in a non-theistic way after a person is legally dead (Cryonic procedures are performed shortly after a person's death).[27] Atheists Robert Ettinger and Isaac Asimov played a notable role in the founding of the cryonics movement.[28] According to The Cryonics Society, Asimov said of cryonics, "Though no one can quantify the probability of cryonics working, I estimate it is at least 90%..."[29] For more information, please see: Atheism and cryonics
See: Atheism and transhumanism
See also: There are no atheists in foxholes and Atheists doubting the validity of atheism
Reverend William T. Cummings is famous for declaring "There are no atheists in foxholes."[31] Chaplain F. W. Lawson of the 302d Machine Gun Battalion, who was wounded twice in wartime, stated "I doubt if there is such a thing as an atheist. At least there isn't in a front line trench."[32]On the other hand, the news organization NBC featured a story in which atheist veterans claimed that there are atheists in foxholes.[33]
Research indicates that heavy combat has a positive correlation to the strength of the religious faith in soldiers during the battles and subsequent to the war if they indicated their experience was a negative experience (for more information please see: There are no atheists in foxholes).
Also, due to research showing that death anxiety increases atheists' unconscious belief in God, Dr. Nathan Heflick declared in a Psychology Today article, "But, at a less conscious (or pre-conscious) level, this research suggests that there might be less atheism in foxholes than atheists in foxholes report."[23] Please see: Atheism and death
See also: Denials that atheists exist and Atheists doubting the validity of atheism and Atheism and apathy
It has been asserted by various theists that atheists do not exist and that atheists are actively suppressing their belief and knowledge of God and enigmatically engage in self-deception and in the deception of others (see: Denials that atheists exist and Atheism and deception). In atheistic Japan, researchers found that Japanese children see the world as designed.[34]
see also: Atheism and communism and Militant atheism and Atheism and economics and Atheism and mass murder and Atheist cults and Atheism and Karl Marx
Karl Marx said "[Religion] is the opium of the people". Marx also stated: "Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.[35]
Vladimir Lenin similarly wrote regarding atheism and communism: "A Marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i.e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could."[36]
In 1955, Chinese communist leader Zhou Enlai declared, "We Communists are atheists".[37] In 2015, the Communist Party of China reaffirmed that members of their party must be atheists.[38]
According to the University of Cambridge, historically, the "most notable spread of atheism was achieved through the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Marxist-Leninists to power."[39] Vitalij Lazarevi Ginzburg, a Soviet physicist, wrote that the "Bolshevik communists were not merely atheists but, according to Lenin's terminology, militant atheists."[40] However, prior to this, the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution established a state which was anti-Roman Catholicism/Christian in nature [41] (anti-clerical deism and anti-religious atheism and played a significant role in the French Revolution[42]), with the official ideology being the Cult of Reason; during this time thousands of believers were suppressed and executed by the guillotine.[43]
See also: Atheism vs. Christianity
The atheism in communist regimes has been and continues to be militant atheism and various acts of repression including the razing of thousands of religious buildings and the killing, imprisoning, and oppression of religious leaders and believers.[44]
The persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union was the result of the violently atheist Soviet government. In the first five years after the October Revolution, 28 bishops and 1,200 priests were murdered, many on the orders of Leon Trotsky. When Joseph Stalin came to power in 1927, he ordered his secret police, under Genrikh Yagoda to intensify persecution of Christians. In the next few years, 50,000 clergy were murdered, many were tortured, including crucifixion. "Russia turned red with the blood of martyrs", said Father Gleb Yakunin of the Russian Orthodox Church.[45] According to Orthodox Church sources, as many as fifty million Orthodox believers may have died in the twentieth century, mainly from persecution by Communists.[46]
In addition, in the atheistic and communist Soviet Union, 44 anti-religious museums were opened and the largest was the 'The Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism' in Leningrads Kazan cathedral.[47] Despite intense effort by the atheistic leaders of the Soviet Union, their efforts were not effective in converting the masses to atheism.[48]
China is a communist country. In 1999, the publication Christian Century reported that "China has persecuted religious believers by means of harassment, prolonged detention, and incarceration in prison or 'reform-through-labor' camps and police closure of places of worship." In 2003, owners of Bibles in China were sent to prison camps and 125 Chinese churches were closed.[50] China continues to practice religious oppression today.[51]
The efforts of China's atheist leaders in promoting atheism, however, is increasingly losing its effectiveness and the number of Christians in China is rapidly growing (see: Growth of Christianity in China). China's state sponsored atheism and atheistic indoctrination has been a failure and a 2007 religious survey in China indicated that only 15% of Chinese identified themselves as atheists.[52]
North Korea is a repressive communist state and is officially atheistic.[53] The North Korean government practices brutal repression and atrocities against North Korean Christians.[54]
See also: Atheism and mass murder
It has been estimated that in less than the past 100 years, governments under the banner of communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 to 259,432,000 human lives.[55] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.[56]Richard Dawkins has attempted to engage in historical revisionism concerning atheist atrocities and Dawkins was shown to be in gross error.
See also: Atheistic communism and torture
The website Victimsofcommunism.org declares concerning atheistic communism and the use of torture:
For more information, please see: Atheistic communism and torture
In atheistic communist regimes forced labor has often played a significant role in their economies and this practice continues to this day (see: Atheism and forced labor).[60]
See also: Communist China and involuntary organ harvesting
Several researchers for example, Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, former Canadian parliamentarian David Kilgour, and the investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann estimate that tens of thousands of Falun Gong prisoners in communist China have been killed to supply a financially lucrative trade in human organs and cadavers, and that these human rights abuses may be ongoing concern.[61] For more information, please see: Communist China and involuntary organ harvesting
Christian apologist Gregory Koukl wrote relative to atheism and mass murder that "the assertion is that religion has caused most of the killing and bloodshed in the world. There are people who make accusations and assertions that are empirically false. This is one of them."[62] Koukl details the number of people killed in various events involving theism and compares them to the much higher tens of millions of people killed under regimes which advocated atheism.[62] As noted earlier, Richard Dawkins has attempted to engage in historical revisionism concerning atheist atrocities and Dawkins was shown to be in gross error.
Koukl summarized by stating:
Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was asked to account for the great tragedies that occurred under the brutal communist regime he and fellow citizens suffered under.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote:
Since then I have spend well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."[63]
Theodore Beale notes concerning atheism and mass murder:
The total body count for the ninety years between 1917 and 2007 is approximately 148 million dead at the bloody hands of fifty-two atheists, three times more than all the human beings killed by war, civil war, and individual crime in the entire twentieth century combined.
The historical record of collective atheism is thus 182,716 times worse on an annual basis than Christianitys worst and most infamous misdeed, the Spanish Inquisition. It is not only Stalin and Mao who were so murderously inclined, they were merely the worst of the whole Hell-bound lot. For every Pol Pot whose infamous name is still spoken with horror today, there was a Mengistu, a Bierut, and a Choibalsan, godless men whose names are now forgotten everywhere but in the lands they once ruled with a red hand.
Is a 58 percent chance that an atheist leader will murder a noticeable percentage of the population over which he rules sufficient evidence that atheism does, in fact, provide a systematic influence to do bad things? If that is not deemed to be conclusive, how about the fact that the average atheist crime against humanity is 18.3 million percent worse than the very worst depredation committed by Christians, even though atheists have had less than one-twentieth the number of opportunities with which to commit them. If one considers the statistically significant size of the historical atheist set and contrasts it with the fact that not one in a thousand religious leaders have committed similarly large-scale atrocities, it is impossible to conclude otherwise, even if we do not yet understand exactly why this should be the case. Once might be an accident, even twice could be coincidence, but fifty-two incidents in ninety years reeks of causation![64]
See also:
See also: Irreligion/religion and war/peace
Louise Ridley (assistant news editor at the Huffington Post UK), Vox Day and others point out that academic studies and other research consistently challenge the link between religion and war.[65]
There is historical evidence indicating that Darwinism was a causal factor for WWI and WWII (see: Irreligion/religion and war/peace and World War I and Darwinism).
See also: Religion and education and Atheistic indoctrination and education and Atheism and intelligence and Atheism and academia and Atheism and academic performance
In the United States, religious belief is positively correlated to education; a study published in an academic journal titled the Review of Religious Research demonstrated that increased education is correlated with belief in God and that "education positively affects religious participation, devotional activities, and emphasizing the importance of religion in daily life."[66]
One of the reasons education is positively correlated with belief in God in the United States is that the demographics of people attending higher education has shifted due to more women and southerners attending higher education (these two groups are more likely to be theists. See: Atheism and women).[67]
Although atheistic indoctrination in school systems can have an effect on individuals (See: Atheist indoctrination), research indicates that social/economic insecurity often has a more significant impact.[68]
For more information, please see:
See also: Atheism and academia
In 2001, the atheist and philosopher Quentin Smith declared:
In 2004, Professor Alister McGrath, professor of historical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford University declared, "The golden age of atheism is over."[70]
For more information please see:
See also: Atheism and intelligence and Atheism and Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences and Causes of atheism
Within various countries, standardized intelligence test (IQ) scores related to the issue of atheists/agnostics vs. theists intelligence scores yield conflicting results.[71][72] Part of the problem is that social scientists use variant definitions of atheism.[73] See also: Atheism, intelligence and the General Social Survey
However, within individuals, families and societies irreligion/religion can have an effect on intelligence - especially over time (See: Atheism and intelligence).
The Flynn effect is the significant and long-sustained increase intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present.[74] In some secular, economically developed countries, the Flynn effect has ceased and their scores on standardized intelligence tests are falling.[75] However, the Flynn effect is continuing in developing countries which tend to be more religious (see: Intelligence trends in religious countries and secular countries).
See also: Atheism and the brain and Religiosity and larger frontal lobes
Brain researchers have conducted a number of studies focusing on the differences between atheists and the religious (see: Atheism and the brain and Religiosity and larger frontal lobes).
In many secular countries intelligence is falling, while in many religious countries intelligence is increasing. See: Intelligence trends in religious countries and secular countries
See: Atheism and the theory of multiple intelligences
Howard Gardner at Harvard University developed the theory of multiple intelligences which has identified various distinct intelligences: interpersonal, intrapersonal, visualspatial, verballinguistic, logicalmathematical, musicalrhythmic, bodilykinesthetic, and naturalistic.[76] Gardner later suggested that moral intelligence may merit being included in his multiple intelligence model.[77]
See also: Atheism and the brain
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