Belief in Gods, Satan, angels, Heaven, and Hell at a twenty
three year low. This is a story that we found on the Baptist Press
dot com by Diana Chandler and it was written on July thirty one, twenty
twenty three. So Gallop, this polling organization, Gallup, asked Americans whether
or not they believed in God, Angels, Heaven, Hell, and the
Devil. And they could answer that they believed in it, that they don't
believe in it, or that they're not sure somehow. But in general,
they found that the belief in these entities was at a quote twenty three year
low, and there was about a ten to fifteen percent drop in each of
those in belief in each of those entities. They also found that there was
a positive correlation between belief and age, meaning that as your age increase,
your belief went up. And they also found negative correlations between belief and education
level, so as your education level goes up, your belief goes down,
and a negative relation between belief and household income level. Ben, what's your
take on this? Yeah, I mean all the stats line up kind of
with what I would hypothesize, but it is going in a good direction,
and I'm excited to see that, although we still have a long ways to
go, because as people are, you know, heading more towards disbelief in
deities, we still have people that believe in other supernatural entities. And so
while we're getting some more non religious people or just non non theist, I
don't even want to say they're in the camp of atheists yet because many of
them are still in that not really sure what they what they believe phase,
But many of them are still not skeptics, and they'll still accept other supernatural
ideas. But so we have ways to go there, and people aren't necessarily
evaluating their truth methods yet. So I think it's a step in the right
direction. But I think even as this number kind of goes down, I'd
still would like to see some more impact happening on, like people involved in
like anti vax ideas, people having issues with scientific literacy, natural medicine,
Charlatan's chiropractors, and other problematic people are just going to jump right on that.
Like once this one thing kind of becomes a minority, we're just going
to get other people kind of taking the place of that. So I think
unless we kind of shift how people problem solve this is still going to be
kind of the same issue, just new topics, And I guess that's why
the ACA exists at all, is to try to help people get into that
mindset. But it was interesting for me with this particular article, the idea
that even though, like I guess, the weird thing for me was that
a large amount of churchgoers no longer believe in Satan or Hell, which is
kind of odd, Like they still believe in God, but they don't believe
in Satan or Hell, which if they're claiming to be Christian or some variety
of Christian, that kind of throws a wrench in their theology because I mean,
as I understand it, the entire Bible's premise is that they were tempted
in the garden by Satan, and that the whole reason to believe in Jesus
is because of the threat of Hell. So you're taking it all out of
context, Ben, Yeah, Well, like I feel like now we're getting
some weird justification, like maybe people are shifting more to an orthodox view of
hell in that it's a separation from God, but in the sense of like
your spiritually separated from God, you're all still in heaven, but it's just
torture for you because no, I don't know if you've heard of it like
that. I've had Orthodox Christians explained to me their view on hell, like
many of them don't believe in a physical hell. It's like everyone's in the
presence of God. But if you don't want to be in the presence of
God, then it's torture for you for eternity because you're basically in the presence
of something you don't want to be in the presence of. So it's like,
yeah, so it's maybe people are going more in that direction, but
I just see that being the biggest inconsistency with this whole thing, and I
kind of need some more answers on that. And I wonder if Helen has
some answers. What do you think I have answers. I don't know if
they're correct, but I have answers. So, after all the bullshit we've
just been talking about to the previous episodes, if you go, if you
want to watch the previous episodes, if you want to know. While we
talked about earlier that made us all angry, but this gave me like a
little ray of hope some sunshine in my life, and because I do want
to see people kind of get away from supernatural beliefs. And yes I am.
I went on the religious to spiritual journey on my way to being an
atheist. I took a stop along there for thirteen years. And and basically
the more education I got, I went to school for psychology, and I
was like, holy crap, we fool ourselves all the time. And that
was a really really good thing to learn. And I'm glad to see people
that they're questioning if there's deities. Organized religionis and even has a role in
a modern society. And I'm glad that you know we are here because we're
trying to push back against you know, bad ideas. Because if a religion
was benign, you know the ACA, and you know the work I do
with recovering from a religion, though, we as organizations would not exist.
And but I think it's a good thing that we exist. But I'm hoping,
you know, maybe future generations, you know, won't need these organizations
anymore. And I want to really point out that we do have to work
on skeptical because you leave religion doesn't mean you leave bad ideas and we need
to be able to kind of break things down and teach people to be more
skeptical. So you know, that's my first little bits of opinions that are
going around in my big, big brain. So, Phoebe, you have
been waiting patiently to give your opinion, and I would like to hear it.
Always a pleasure person. I'm nice and patient, I'm calm, I'm
rational playlists in a tone. But whilst people have been talking about the article,
and yes, it is baby steps in the right direction, I had
a real problem with the article itself, and that is that the article made
the equivalency that a lot of articles seem to do, and it's tried to
equate poor people as stupid, and that argumentation is seen over and over and
over and over, and it is very damaging because it diminishes the quality of
the argumentation. Yes, the article goes on to say median household income,
the lower the median household income, the more likely you are to believe in
this, But that is not necessarily something which can therefore be extrapolated out because
it only looks at that one very narrow thing, that is, those very
poor communities, particularly within some parts of the United States. You have to
understand that there is a lack of opportunity in these areas. Therefore, this
spiral leads to a lack of educational opportunities, a lack of wider exposure to
things, and in a lot of poor communities, particularly poor non white communities,
they are built around religious centers that are very free to enter in both
the sense of liberty and gratuity kind of free. They are both there for
a very long and established time as part of the community, and the culture
is usually one that the community is built around these church communities, particularly in
places such as New England, because that's where the first settlers went to establish
their own religion. Freedom from well George the Third as he was. And
it is very irritating to see that median household income is used as a benchmark
for people believing in certain things when it is a lot more nuanced than that
I know personally. So she's my language here, dirt poor atheists who don't
believe a single word of this. And I have met some millionaire religious people
and it really irritates me when articles seem to equate your household income with your
likelihood of being skeptical, being a believer in certain things, voting in a
certain way. And what it does, and I'm guilty of this too,
is it makes me stereotype these groups as being well bigoted groups, which is
wrong because it means that I will bleed that bigotry over into other things associated
with what are poor communities, which are usually ethnic minority communities or communities where
there is a high level of deprivation. And the article going down this path
makes it so that its own arguments are diminished by having median household income as
one of the hooks, so to speak. I couldn't quite get the word
there to get its teeth into. So Scott, what are you getting your
teeth into? You know? I think you make a great point their phoebe
there there. It's very easy for us when we see a story like this,
and really it wasn't much of a story. I mean, the story
was basically just handpicked a few of the points that was done out of the
out of the Gallop poll, and so they didn't really give much background or
context to use that word. But but I think it make a good point.
They there there is research showing I mean that investigates why is there a
relationship between belief and income level? Why is there a relationship between belief and
education level? And it's not because believers are stupid, although that is admittedly
a very easy conclusion to come to when you see something like this. For
example, we know that individuals that feel like they have less control over their
lives, like would be the case if they were a lower income or if
they were a lower education level, if they feel like they're, uh,
there's too much out of their control, very often they can they can,
you know, use religion as a way to bolster that particular aspect of their
personality. So I think that there's there's a responsibility in reporting that that needs
to I mean, they need to at least comment on that kind of thing.
They didn't say specifically believers are dumb, but they didn't also didn't specifically
say that's not the case, okay, And so I think they're Like I
said, there's some responsibility there to at least put some of the context in.
But as far as the results of this survey, it's a feel good
story, right, It's a feel good story, and it gives me a
little bit of fatherly pride when I when I look at our country and it's
and it looks like we're growing up right. It reminds me of my favorite
Bible verse, and I do have a favorite Bible verse. It's out of
First Corinthians, or as a prominent member of society, said one Corinthians,
thirteen eleven. Uh. This verse says, when I was a child,
I spoke as a child, I understood as a child. I thought as
a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.
And so when I see a story like this, to me, we're
starting to put away childish things. The survey itself, I thought was very
focused, which can be which can be a good thing. It helps the
respondents to stay focused on the information that's that's of critical importance here. But
I wanted to find out a little bit more about the about what's going on
here, so I found another survey. This one was the General Social Survey
twenty twenty two by done by the University of Chicago, and many scholars consider
this to be the quote unquote gold standard of surveys relating to faith. This
survey was described at the Hill dot com and and here's a quote to some
extent, declining faith declining faith As a generational trend, the share of Americans
who claim no religion rises progressively younger age groups, but the rise in non
religious Americans is too steep to be fully explained by in terms of general generational
replacement, meaning the differences are more than just the believers dying off and the
younger people coming in. And this was I thought was the most interesting little
tidbit here. Scholars suspect many Americans are simply becoming more open about rejecting religion
and admission once clouded in stigma. So let's think about that for a second.
That's us. Okay, that's what we're doing here. That's what we're
doing on the nonprofits. We're helping to eliminate the stigma that was once attached
and still largely is that was attached to being a non believer. It's becoming
safer to say that you don't believe in these things. And I think that's
an effect that we as individuals on the nonprofits and on the ACA shows in
general, and then the atheist community in general. That's something that we can
put our that's something very practical. Kelly Laughlin likes to say, let's you
know what can we do what can we do? Right, Let's get up
and do something. Well, that's something that we can do. We can
normalize this idea that not believing in these things is okay. And now that
doesn't mean that, you know, our battles over here, right, this
battle for rational thinking isn't isn't over. But it does tell us that what
we're doing is not necessarily in vain. And I think that's something to smile
about. And I think it's a glimmer of hope, and I take it.
I don't know, it makes me feel warm to read things like that.
What do you got for us? Next? Phebe here roll atheists and
skipped this. Paul asks, well, what do you believe in? That
supernatural? So, what's the supernatural thing that you remember that you believed in
that was well most far wacky out there, Helen, I was a pagan,
so I can. I can. Let's have a whole let's of bullshit
if you want me to. So. I believed in magic. I believed
in psychics. I worked in a psychic education center for a little bit so
and talk to mediums and people that could see the future and all that type
of wooo weird shit. So you don't. We don't have time for me
to go into all the bullshit that I used to believe. That's a different
story. I've talked about it on other ACA shows like Truth Wanted, so
you can go hear me over there talk about it. But anyway, I
am really glad that these surveys are being done. And I also want to
point out something about education and income level. We are now in the age
of the Internet, and people have access to education information that they didn't have
access to before. And if you have a smartphone and you're connected online,
you have the ability to look up information to learn new thing. There are
plenty of websites at teach educational courses that you can sign up for very little
money. And I am encouraged by this because it helps people that may not
get that access to like a formal education where you're going to like, you
know, a college or you know you can get you know, but the
the arbitrary standard that we have sets in this country about like you need to
have a four year degree and blah blah blah. Okay, I get that,
because you know, there's some record story study that has to happen.
But the more access people have to education and it's available at your fingertips.
The more we're going to move into a society of people learning skeptical thinking,
learned how actually the world is. And I think that's a very encouraging And
I worry, as you know, the faultiness and the stuff and this data
is that if we're equating education and intelligence with income level, that's not a
fair way to look at it, because you could be very well educated and
make thirty thousand years, so I think that you know or less. So
I think that that's something that we need to have more nuance on, especially
going forward when we do these sort of studies, and also to understand that
just because someone says that they don't believe in religion, they might believe in
some weird woooo stuff, you know. And I think that if we push
more that skeptical inquiry where switch was Scott was saying, and we're going to
see people eventually get access to more information and we can and those of us
that are you know, our activists are pushing for that, and I think
that's a really really good thing to do. So anyway, Ben, do
you have more to add to this conversation as a super super smart person.
I did want to answer Phoebe's question, and you know, you can.
We can think of all the atypical things that that are supernatural that we believed
in, But it's the things that are so common that I still find to
be the most disturbing. Things that I believed in, such as blood sacrifice
to cleanse us of sin, Like, that's something I believed in, and
that's something that like most Christians would not bad an eye at because it's normal
to us, but it's it's very weird. It's a very weird idea,
and the fact that we've normalized that is pretty wild. So I'm gonna say,
I mean, the majority of Christianity is just a lot a lot of
that kind of weird stuff. But I don't need to think far into the
into paganism or other things like to find weird things that I believed in,
because oh, man like, Christianity has a lot of that and shares a
lot with paganism too, it's all different dressing basically. Absolutely well, my
answer, I think is much more boring. I don't remember ever believing anything
supernatural. I grew up in a religious family, but I don't I don't
remember ever believing it. Although I may have, I just don't remember it.
I don't. The only thing that I really remember believing was when I
was a little kid. I couldn't have been more than like six or seven.
I got one of those chain letters. I don't know, I don't
you kids out there. We used to get like paper letters in the mail
and it would show up at our house and you could tear it open and
read it. It was crazy. It was wacky stuff. But I got
a chain letter and it said, you know, if you have to send
this to ten people within three days or whatever like, and I missed the
deadline, and I was legitimately scared. I couldn't sleep for like two or
three days. It was. It was I thought some bad stuff was going
to happen, and and and you know, maybe that was my first step
on my path to skepticism. Maybe I was like, I thought something was
supposed to happen to me. Nothing nothing, nothing happened, and I was
okay. And I think that's maybe the closest I ever came to actually believing
anything kind of wacky like that. So you weren't one of those seed money
people. You didn't. You didn't seed your money there was From what I
remember, there wasn't any money involved. It was just you weren't seeding your
your your your pocket money or your allowance away. Then that's that's a relief.
But to band's my own question. I used to be a practicing Jew,
and I used to believe I could literally wash away my sins by going
to a special bath and washing them away. Literally they would all be washed
away if I dunked my head in everything under the water. And you think
of that now, and you just go just a bit cleaner physically. You're
not actually doing anything. It's just it's just did you pick up any sins
from the person I was in from ahead of you? No? I think
that they magically dissolved and then they were all, Oh, I forgot about
the magic dissolving. Okay, sorry, might see see it's like salts,
right, But it is weird what we all actually think of and what we
actually believe. But to see that the baby steps in the right direction are
happening. But I hate to use my mother as an example, but she
did hire a medium after my grandfather died, and that was out of step
for my mother. There we have to be aware that people will sometimes drift
into these things and sometimes drift out of these things. It's like you can
drift out of here and drift back in here and watch more non from its episodes