Here's the result from a US Gallup Poll taken in May, 2007 [Religion].
Only 7% are potential atheists. How powerful are those people? PZ Myers has the answer from an article by Melanie Phillips on the financial crisis in America [Pharyngula: You mean it's all my fault?].I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the monetary expression of the broader degradation of our values - the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as 'rights' and the loss of self-discipline. And the root cause of that erosion is 'militant atheism' which, in junking religion, has destroyed our sense of anything beyond our material selves and the here and now and, through such hyper-individualism, paved the way for the onslaught on bedrock moral values expressed through such things as family breakdown and mass fatherlessness, educational collapse, widespread incivility, unprecedented levels of near psychopathic violent crime, epidemic drunkenness and drug abuse, the repudiation of all authority, the moral inversion of victim culture, the destruction of truth and objectivity and a corresponding rise in credulousness in the face of lies and propaganda -- and intimidation and bullying to drive this agenda into public policy.Makes you feel very sorry for the 93% who are being manipulated, doesn't it?
Poor Melanie Phillips. She is regularly taken to task by Oliver Kamm http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/
ReplyDeleteHe always does a neat job of dismantling her arguments. She is in a perpetual and almost terminal state of worry.
(I am trying to post with my google account but it seems a little crasnky at present.)
Is there ever, in this dribble, some statistical connection made between atheists and those defaulting on their loans, filing bankruptcy, fleeing from familial responsibility, etc.? It seems that one could follow the exact same logic used in this article and conclude that religion is to fault for the current economic speed bump.
ReplyDeleteI don't feel sorry for anyone who allows themselves to be manipulated by something as glaringly faulty and filled with non-logic as the article posted by Phillips. I feel sorry for the 7% that they're the minority!