Posted on 05/21/2017 3:44:58 PM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
Will Gervais and Maxine Najle are co-authors of a study suggesting that far more Americans are atheist than previously thought.
The dubious claim by Gervais, director of the University of Kentucky’s Beliefs and Morality Lab (Bam! for short), and Najle, a grad student advised by Gervais, provided fodder for a fake news story posted this past week on the website FiveThirtyEight.
“Attitudes about atheists are quickly changing, driven by the same powerful force that transformed opinion on gay rights,” wrote Daniel Cox, who hyped the study by Gervais and Najle.
Dismissing recent studies in which no more than 3 percent of Americans identified themselves as atheist, the University of Kentucky academics insisted that the ranks of the God-less is more like 26 percent of the population. And they arrived at their conclusion by employing what can only be described as junk “research”
Indeed, the Gervais and Najle “adopted a novel way to measure atheist identity,” according to Cox. They conducted a survey in which they listed nine innocuous statements, such as “I own a dog” and “I am a vegetarian,” followed by a tenth statement, “I do not believe in God.” and then asked respondents, “How many of these statements are true to you.”
That’s how the study’s co-authors determined that there may be as many as ten times the atheists as previously thought.
Yet, the study came with a very important disclaimer from its co-authors, acknowledging in so many words that their findings are suspect because of their study’s “considerable estimate and method uncertainty.”
So why did Cox, whose day job is research director for the Public Religion Research Institute, neglect to mention the disclaimer in his article for FiveThirtyEight? Why did Nate Silver, founder and editor of FiveThirty Eight, green-light the story absent such salient information? And why did Gervais and Najle publish such junk research?
It’s because they are all agenda-driven members of the Irreligious Left. Their aim is to destigmatize atheism. Their insidious goal is to mainstream America’s God deniers; to “normalize” the hellbound who are brazenly anti-Christ.
That’s why Gervais pretends he is not atheist (as opposed to his co-author Najle, an out-of-the-closet atheist who, between her studies, is co-organizer of a Lexington, Kentucky atheist group).
As to Cox, he is an advocate of “religious tolerance of atheists,” as if they are some sort of persecuted minority. Taking a page out of the gay rights playbook, he used his FiveThirtyEight fake news story to lend credibility to the claim by Gervais and Najle that more than a quarter of Americans are atheist.
So why inflate the number of atheists? To mislead the public into believing that God deniers are America’s biggest minority, surpassing not only homosexuals, but also blacks, Latinos, immigrants, disabled Americans and seniors 65 and older.
To the twisted thinking of atheists, it stands to reason that, if the rights of homosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, legal and illegal immigrants, disabled Americans and retirement-age seniors are protected under federal and state law, the same ought to apply to atheists.
But why would Silver allow his website to be used to post Cox’s fake news story? Because FiveThirtyEight’s editor-in-chief is a two-fer – gay and atheist. Indeed, in 2012 Silver confided The Observer newspaper in Great Britain, “If you grow up gay, or in a household that’s agnostic when most people are religious, then, from the get-go, you are saying there are things that the majority of society believes that I don’t believe.”
Like the existence of God, through Whom all things were made, and without Whom nothing was made that has been made.
Those who shake their fists at God – like Gervais, Najle, Cox and Silver – delude themselves that there are no eternal consequences for their rebellion in this life. But a day of reckoning awaits when they will meet their Maker; when their fear and trembling on the day of judgment will give way to weeping and gnashing of teeth.
atheists are consumers of dogma. They have no evidence there is no God and look really stupid trying to profess singularity in thought. Morons all.
Virtually every atheist I have ever known has been a loud-mouthed bully. They are not persecuted. They are the persecutors.
Atheist bloggers in Pakistan being routinely murdered by knife wielding Muslim mobs while police do nothing ARE persecuted.
In the West, they are prosecuting the Christians.
As much as I detest atheists, at least most of them believe in some form of the Golden Rule.
Muslims don’t have a universal creed. The Golden Rule has no place in Islam. Non-Muslims have do not enjoy good treatment (and don’t deserve it under the sharia). There is only the duality of Muslims and kafirs, and if you’re a kafir then the only way you have rights under Islam is if you’re a dhimmi (half-slave), and then you only have partial rights.
I agree. They seem to be trying to claim they can prove a negative. Of course, they can’t and they should leave Christians alone.
It seems I never hear of them confronting Moslems.
Atheists are the children of Marx, and the enemies of America.
There is something of a paradox here. Muslims are supposed to afford God-believing “People of the Book” the courtesy of converting to Islam before attacking them. But atheists are afforded no such grace.
Atheists are one of the biggest targets for Islam, right up there with homosexuals and pagans. Yet those atheists who are killed are mostly ex-Muslims who now avow atheism.
So why haven’t Islamists systematically targeted atheists? In much of the west, atheists are often very open about it, which you would think would paint a big target on their back. They even hold mass meetings.
This means greatly increased chances of concentration camps and pogroms.
If they do then they made it up. Without God, there is no reason for anything.
Knowing how people can be sometimes, I have to agree.
Precisely. The character of atheism is denial of belief in God. It does not ascribe to anything more positive than one's own sense of superiority. 97% of all atheists are never Trumpers. The other 3% are confused.
Never met an atheist I didn’t dislike.
They like to try to pass off irritation as persecution.
Only atheists I didn’t dislike were those who said,
“Well, now, uh, I never said there absolutely is no divine being, you can’t prove that either, it’s uh, just that I haven’t been shown enough proof that there is one.”
Atheism has ruled this country for decades now; there is nothing an outsider would see today to indicate this is a Christian country.
Not only do they not understand the difficulty and impossible task of proving a negative, but they somehow think their choice to “not” belief is firmly based on science. In fact, science is not in their favor as far as probability theory, universal entropy, and believing in something that requires proving a negative. But hey, they are always the smartest guys in the room (according to them) and do not even understand that they are following a secular faith that requires more belief than a religious faith that they mock.
They don’t call it the “Golden Rule” but I have spoken to some who nonetheless espouse the idea of treating others as they would want to be treated themselves. All others.
But Muslims only treat other Muslims with respect. Everyone else is a kafir, and so don’t qualify to be respected.
Yes there are some very immoral (or should I say amoral) atheists, and though I don’t have respect for them, they don’t generally believe I should have my head cut off because I don’t submit to their god.
muslims too have “made it up”, their so-called faith, though by stealing long before established Hebrew scripture.
What charge are they prosecuting us for comitting?
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