…so cue-up the Green Day because from Minnesota comes :-
Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M studyMINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (3/20/2006) — Americans increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesnt extend to those who dont believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesotas department of sociology.
From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in sharing their vision of American society. Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.
Even though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public. Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years, says Penny Edgell, associate sociology professor and the studys lead researcher.
Edgell also argues that todays atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the pastthey offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society. It seems most Americans believe that diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common core of values that make them trustworthy – and in America, that core has historically been religious, says Edgell. Many of the studys respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.
Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting social disorder is behind the findings. Americans believe they share more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens – they share an understanding of right and wrong, she said. Our findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good.
The researchers also found acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal religiosity, but also to ones exposure to diversity, education and political orientation – with more educated, East and West Coast Americans more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.
The study is co-authored by assistant professor Joseph Gerteis and associate professor Doug Hartmann. Its the first in a series of national studies conducted the American Mosaic Project, a three-year project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the contemporary United States. The study will appear in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.
My emphasis throughout.
Now here’s the funny thing: I know at least two sets of committed Christians, and one Mormon, all of whom have suggested to me that the best way to “find a nice girl to settle down with” is by getting myself down to Church and mixing it up.
Often, they’ve been doing the nudge nudge wink wink thing at the same time.
Now these people know me, my opinions, and that it’ll be a cold day in a nonexistent hell before I start believing in some sort of god; therefore I have to wonder whether they aren’t (a) trying to cause some mischevious amusement, (b) trying to corrupt their peers, or (c) hope that sex will achieve what prayer won’t.
Of course there is – in their sentiment – a variety of infix assumptions about “Church” and “Nice Girls”; to be honest I am at a loss to wonder from what angle they’re approaching the suggestion, since all the ex-convent-schoolgirls I’ve ever known have been right up there with the St Trinian’s mob for bad behaviour.
Or maybe that’s just Catholicism for you?
Not all of them are quite so blasé about the dangers of my unbelief – I was visiting Christian friends a few months ago when their weekly prayer-group trooped in, one of whom after introductions was positively gung-ho about the prospect of me talking to them.
I concured with my host that it was unwise – just think of the embarrassment lest I had actually convinced one of them that there is no point to life, that you do die when you die, that you are all alone and meaningless, and that because of this all life on earth is tremendously more valuable than you’ve ever previously conceived because there is no heaven in which the injustices can ever be sorted out, nor will the books ever be balanced…
…as social faux-pas go, it’d trounce “using the wrong fork”.
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