{"id":6931,"date":"2006-03-23T10:43:01","date_gmt":"2006-03-23T15:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6931"},"modified":"2006-03-23T10:43:01","modified_gmt":"2006-03-23T15:43:01","slug":"the-last-taboo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/the-last-taboo\/","title":{"rendered":"The last taboo"},"content":{"rendered":"

The University of Minnesota published an interesting study<\/a> this week on the last minority that Americans really<\/i> don’t like.<\/p>\n

American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 study’s lead researcher.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Edgell added that Americans seem to appreciate diversity, just as long as “every one shares a common ‘core’ of values that make them trustworthy,” and theism is that “core.” Respondents associated atheism “with an array of moral indiscretions ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural elitism.”<\/p>\n

This isn’t terribly surprising — similar polls have offered similar results<\/a> in recent years — but it strikes me as disconcerting anyway. I realize the poll suggests a fear among Americans about “moral decline” and “social disorder,” but do theists really see atheists as undermining society? Based on what, exactly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The University of Minnesota published an interesting study this week on the last minority that Americans really don’t like. American’s increasing acceptance of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of Minnesota’s department of sociology. From a telephone sampling of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}