Tag Archives: Atheist

News

Pew survey shows that evangelical Christian Republicans are the most rational

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The Pew Research survey is here.

They are trying to see which groups believe in superstitions and new age mysticism.

Here are the parts that I found interesting:

Click for full image.

Click for full image.

Notice the numbers for Republicans vs Democrats, conservatives vs. liberals, and church-attending vs non church-attending. The least superstitious people are conservative evangelical Republicans, while the most superstitious people are Democrat liberals who don’t attend church. I think there is something to be learned from that. It’s consistent with the results of a Gallup survey that showed that evangelical Christians are the most rational people on the planet.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal article about the Gallup survey entitled “Look Who’s Irrational Now“.

Excerpt:

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.

“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity.

[…]The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.

Even among Christians, there were disparities. While 36% of those belonging to the United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s former denomination, expressed strong beliefs in the paranormal, only 14% of those belonging to the Assemblies of God, Sarah Palin’s former denomination, did. In fact, the more traditional and evangelical the respondent, the less likely he was to believe in, for instance, the possibility of communicating with people who are dead.

Listen to William Lane Craig commenting on the Pew Research survey on the latest episode of the radio show Issues, Etc. with Todd Wilken.

Here is the MP3 file, if you don’t want to click through.

Polemics

Can atheists ground objective moral values and duties, just like theists?

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Consider this article from Thinking Matters in New Zealand.

Excerpt:

There is an objection to the moral argument for God’s existence, specifically the premise which states the best explanation for the foundation for objective moral values and duties is God. It is the idea that moral values and duties can be plausibly anchored in some transcendent, non-theistic ground. That moral values and duties exist objectively, but as brute facts, not needing an explanation for their existence. They are sort of eternal unchanging ideas that are necessary features of the universe. This position we shall call Atheistic Moral Platonism, and there are three ways we could respond.

Click here for the three ways to respond.

I actually used to hold to Deistic Platonism before I became a Christian, and that’s all documented in my testimony. To learn more about this topic, here is my series on how morality cannot be rationally grounded by atheism, and the series includes links to lectures and debates for further study. The relationship between a cosmic designer and objective moral values and duties is the easiest topic in the world to discuss with non-Christians. It takes only a little preparation, compared to more difficult issues like scientific evidence and the historicity of the resurrection.

News

Canadian Evangelicals and Catholics more opposed to secularism and socialism

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The Hill Times reports. (H/T Joanne from Blue Like You)

Excerpt:

According to the recently-released EFC study, “Canadian Evangelical Voting Trends by Region, 1996-2008,” which uses a series of electoral polls by Ipsos Reid and Angus Reid Strategies, in 1996 the Evangelical support for the Liberals was 35 per cent and it has been rapidly going down to 11 per cent in the last election, as the Conservative vote rose. The Conservatives’ support from evangelical Christians peaked in 2006, with 60 per cent of the Evangelical vote and then dropped to 48 per cent in 2008. The NDP vote in 2008 was at 16 per cent among evangelicals.

Evangelicals make up about 12 per cent of Canada’s population, or four million people distributed throughout Canada and to a lesser degree in Quebec.

[…]”There are two things that are fairly important for evangelicals, as they are important to Canadians who engage in the political system. The first thing is that there’s space created for engagement; so we have identified in the paper some of the incidents where it appeared that the Liberal Party was closing down the opportunity for evangelicals to engage on equal footing with non-evangelicals in the party and we’ve also identified where the Conservative Party had opened some place for evangelicals to engage on an equal footing,” said Don Hutchinson, EFC vice-president and co-author of the report.

[…]According to this research, Catholic support for the Liberal Party has dropped 24 points since 2000. In 2006 they were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal and by the 2008 election, they showed preference for the Conservative Party.

Joanne (who calls the Liberal leader “Iffy”) adds:

The question is less why it happened – because that is obvious, but rather why do the Liberals even bother?

Being religious usually involves having a moral compass and a set of strong values. It also means showing respect for other folks’ spiritual views.

Clearly Iffy is hardly the poster boy of unwavering commitment and sticking to principles and decisions. Furthermore, his strategists have have often shown contempt for people of faith and great delight in stirring up pseudo-scandals like Wafergate.

In other words, they are unable to walk the talk.

Michael Ignatieff appears to be an atheist. His Liberal party is anti-Christian, anti-marriage, anti-family, anti-liberty and anti-prosperity. I am surprised that anyone could vote for the Liberals, or worse, the New Democrats or the Bloc Quebecois. The left in Canada is hostile to publicly-expressed authentic Christianity across the board. The left is happy to violate the rights of authentic Christians in Canada.

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