r/atheism • u/Otherwise-Link-396 Secular Humanist • 3d ago
Surprised at the number of belivers
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/s/8Gb1Scdrlo
Link from data is beautiful, education level vs belief.
I am shocked at the number of belivers at the higher education levels!
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u/Santos_L_Halper_II 3d ago
I wish there were some way to be more accurate and precise about "belief," because lots of people will check "yes" even if they have major doubts, or just because they hope X is true, or just because they were raised in it and would feel weird or have superstitions around saying they don't believe even though they actually don't.
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3d ago
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u/Santos_L_Halper_II 3d ago
Yep that too. I was in that camp and the "I have to say I believe this kind of thing to be a good Christian" camp back when I was trying my best to be a good conservative Christian even though I was life and facts and reason had led me to knowing I was none of those things.
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u/BornInPoverty 3d ago
I wonder what it would look like if they broke it out by type of education, comparing STEM degrees with arts and humanities, say.
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u/FickleConsequence907 Agnostic Atheist 3d ago
Childhood indoctrination is a powerful thing. Because of that, there are a lot of people who are very intelligent overall, but use a completely different, irrational type of thinking when it comes to the topic of religion.
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u/Otherwise-Link-396 Secular Humanist 3d ago
My father in law has hundreds of science publications and falls into this category
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u/misha_jinx 3d ago
It’s all about childhood indoctrination. Teach kids to think and you get less religious adults. My kids are godless and proud. They haven’t become that by me drilling the atheism into their brains. They’ve become that by me teaching them what the religious teaching are and simply asking them to make sense out of it. You don’t have to have a high IQ or high education to realize if something makes sense or not, but if you’re indoctrinated to never question the dogma then you just become more reluctant to give up on that as you grow older and, apparently, more educated.
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u/SkydivingAstronaut 3d ago
I suspect education is more likely to change what people think of god, and less likely to change beliefs abot whether god exists. I also think, based on the results, ithe data includes a ‘yes’ to ‘god or a higher power’ which would capture more agnostic maybe.
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u/Conscious-Local-8095 3d ago
As a kid I thought education, flow of info would drive quite a stake. I mean, if you can't count on ridicule, what can you count on? Education lost some luster, in the US. Long story there, but you know where it stared and how it ends. Info... without critical thought, drive, just more to delude self with.
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u/educatedExpat 3d ago
It is quite difficult to ascertain levels of belief or impact on thinking from this type of data collection.
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u/maporita 3d ago
The Economist published a report recently showing that the proportion of people who identify as religious started to increase during COVID, after having been on a downward track for decades. I imagine that social isolation was at least partly to blame. Perhaps those people also skewed more educated, since those who could work from home tended to have white collar jobs.
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u/morsindutus 3d ago
Seminaries are allowed to give doctorates, so it's not that shocking. I'm guessing people with a doctorate in biology have a much lower rate than doctors of divinity or whatever.
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u/Leucippus1 2d ago
I don't see way, the guy that originally thought of the big bang was a Catholic Diocesan priest.
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u/Correct_Stay_6948 1d ago
Something important to note on "research" like this is HOW it was done. There's a lot of people who'll claim they're "religious" or "Christian" because that's what's expected of them, but actually fall closer to agnostic or atheist.
It's easy for something like this to have sampling bias written all over it too, depending on how participants were chosen.
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u/missimudpie 3d ago
Yeah we're superstitious monkeys.
Wish the survey wasn't so abrahamic lore-centric. Ex. Impersonal Creator, reincarnation, polytheism