Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Fundraising is way down for atheist organizations

In 2017, the atheist activist Lee Moore declared about American atheist organizations:
If you look at the major atheist groups right now, like the national groups, the ones that are doing the real activist work... They are not bringing in the kind of donations they used to. Most of them are starved for cash. They're downsizing left and right. Because people aren't just giving like they used to. And I talked to a lot of the major donors out there and they said, "Well, we're kind of tired of seeing the atheist community just fight amongst itself and not really get anything done. We'd rather not give money if we don't think it's going to go somewhere.

In 2018, it was reported reported that David Silverman, the president of the American Atheists organization, was fired after allegations of financial conflicts and sexual assault. See: Atheist organizations and scandals

Below is the 2017 tax exempt form of the American Atheists organization and it shows in 2016 the contributions and grants to the American Atheists organization was $1,160,208 and in 2017  contributions and grants to the American Atheists organization dropped to $480,922.

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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Evidence for Christianity

Christian apologetics is a discipline which focuses on the defense of the Christianity through the use of evidence and logical arguments. 

 General Christian apologetics websites

Historical and legal apologetics

Historical apologetics:

Bible archaeology

Bible archaeology and dating:

Christian worldview/Christian philosophy

Web articles and videos on atheism:

Bible prophecy apologetics

Analysis of Bible prophecy from Christian scholars/apologists

Presuppositional apologetics websites]

Biblical inerrancy resources


Evidence for atheism
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Atheism is not growing in the United States. Señor Atheist, the future of atheism in America is bleak. Olé! Olé! Olé!


Pew Research survey data indicates that the percentage of atheists in the United States has remained at 4% from 2015 to July of 2019.

 In June 2016, American Interest reported:
First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014.
The USA and Britain definitely have a culteral influence on each other.  The British new atheist Richard Dawkins and British born Christopher Hitchens were the among the "four horseman" of the New Atheism Movement.  And although New Atheism turned out to be a fad that petered out, it may have caused a modest uptick in the percentage of atheists/agnostics in the United States (In 2014, according to General Survey Service data 3% of Americans identified as atheists, and 5% identified as agnostics.  In 1991, 2% of Americans identified as atheist, and 4% identified as agnostic according to General Survey Service). The BBC points out that the Brexit vote was followed by the election of Donald Trump months later.  

 On December 2018, The Times stated: "The number of atheists in Britain has fallen in the past year, according to a survey suggesting that more people are attending church, albeit irregularly."

 The Guardian published an article in 2017 entitled Nearly 50% are of no religion – but has UK hit ‘peak secular’? which declared:
But, Bullivant told the Observer that the “growth of no religion may have stalled”. After consistent decline, in the past few years the proportion of nones appears to have stabilised. “Younger people tend to be more non-religious, so you’d expect it to keep going – but it hasn’t. The steady growth of non-Christian religions is a contributing factor, but I wonder if everyone who is going to give up their Anglican affiliation has done so by now? We’ve seen a vast shedding of nominal Christianity, and perhaps it’s now down to its hardcore.
 Concerning the future of religion/irreligion in Europe, professor Eric Kaufmann wrote in 2011:
We have performed these unprecedented analyses on several cases. Austria offers us a window into what the future holds. Its census question on religious affiliation permits us to perform cohort component projections, which show the secular population plateauing by 2050, or as early as 2021 if secularism fails to attract lapsed Christians and new Muslim immigrants at the same rate as it has in the past. (Goujon, Skirbekk et al. 2006). 
This task will arguably become far more difficult as the supply of nominal Christians dries up while more secularisation-resistant Muslims and committed rump Christians comprise an increasing share of the population.

 Hispanics are growing quickly in the United States. According to Wikipedia, a wiki founded by an atheist and agnostic, "Based on the 2010 census, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in 191 out of 366 metropolitan areas in the US. The projected Hispanic population of the United States for July 1, 2050 is 132.8 million people, or 30.2% of the nation's total projected population on that date."

 Christianity Today reported in 2019:
First-generation immigrants are leading the Latino evangelical expansion in the US—drawing in more unchurched believers and new converts than the average church plant, despite having smaller congregations, less funding, and tensions surrounding US immigration policy. 
The Latino population is growing, especially in the South, where 59 percent of the 218 new congregations surveyed are located (half are Southern Baptist). And the evangelical faith is growing with it.
The abtract for the 2006 journal article Spirituality Among Latinas/os Implications of Culture in Conceptualization and Measurement declares:

Latinos are now the largest minority group in the United States... 
Latino theological literature describes spirituality as integral with Latino culture. Although Latinos are not a monolithic or homogenous group, there are fundamental cultural influences that must be considered in an exploration of spirituality among Latinas/os.... 
Most of the empirical research in spirituality and religiosity among Latinos has targeted primarily Mexican Americans. These investigations indicate that spirituality and religiosity are interwoven with their daily lives and serve as foundations of strength in coping with life's struggles. For example, religious attendance was associated with psychological well-being across 3 generations of Mexican American families and with physical health status among Mexican American women. Latinos describe their faith as intimate and reciprocal relationships with God, family, and community, with these relationships playing an important role in health and well-being.

 Time Magazine reported in May of 2013 about the growth of evangelical/pentecostal Christianity among American Latinos:
According to Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life while “more than two-thirds of the 52 million-plus Latinos in the U.S. are Catholic, that number could be cut in half by 2030.” NHCLC also establishes that 35 percent of Hispanics in America now call themselves “born-again.”
Fox News reported in May 2013 concerning Hispanic evangelicalism in the United States: 
Alfredo De Jesus is a fire-and-brimstone preacher who represents a global groundswell of Hispanics who've left the Catholic Church to become Protestant Evangelical Christians.

De Jesus pastors the New Life Church in Chicago, helping to expand it from 120 members in 2000 to over 17,000 today on multiple campuses.

"In the Evangelical church, we find freedom to worship, and with Hispanics, it's in us to be able to love people. Naturally, we just love people. We are hugging people," De Jesus said.

Latinos make up the largest ethnic minority in the United States — 52 million, according to latest Census stats. The majority — two-thirds — are still traditionally Roman Catholic. But there's been a palpable shift from one generation to the next, with the newer ones being "born again."

Evangelicals now number about 20 percent of the Latino population, according to the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference.
In their 2010 journal article entitled, Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? The Religious Composition of the United States to 2043 published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon wrote: "The relatively low fertility of secular Americans and the religiosity of the immigrant inflow provide a countervailing force that will cause the secularization process within the total population to plateau before 2043." 


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Monday, December 9, 2019

Atheist activist David Silverman, the former head of American Atheists and current Executive Director for Atheist Alliance International (AAI), has been suspended by AAI pending an investigation into an alleged inappropriate touching incident



The atheist blogger David G. McAfee recently reports : "Atheist activist David Silverman, the former head of American Atheists and current Executive Director for Atheist Alliance International, has been suspended by AAI pending an investigation into an alleged inappropriate touching incident...".



Photo credits:

Title: David Silverman
Author: Kordite
Photo is of David Silverman, president of American Atheists, at the Reason Rally in D.C.
Taken: Taken on March 24, 2012

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Friday, December 6, 2019

Worldwide Google searches for atheism/agnosticism searches are greatly down from 10 years ago

Google Trends measures the interest in various words/phrases as far as Google searches over time.

Below is Google Trends data for various atheism/agnosticism terms for the world as a whole. Specifically, for the terms atheist, atheism, agnostic, agnosticism and Richard Dawkins. The data goes from 2004 to present. Worldwide Google searches for atheism/agnosticism searches are greatly down from 10 years ago.

In 2011, atheist Jacques Berlinerblau declared: "The Golden Age of Secularism has passed."


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Saturday, October 26, 2019

YouTube atheist/skeptic videos with a classical liberalism perspective see a decline in views from 2017 to present




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Friday, April 5, 2019

The world, the USA and the UK since the launch of the New Atheism movement back in 2004. The data shows the New Atheism movement failed




The term New Atheism, which first appeared in the November 2006 edition of Wired magazine, is frequently applied to a movement spawned by a series of six best-selling books by five authors that appeared in the period between 2004–2008. These authors include Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Victor J. Stenger.

 Richard Dawkins said about New Atheism, "[O]ur struggle is not so much an intellectual struggle, as a political one: What are we going to do about it?”. Steven Poole wrote in The Guardian about New Atheism: "New Atheism’s arguments were never very sophisticated or historically informed."

The current state of the New Atheism movement

On November 6, 2015, the New Republic published an article entitled, Is the New Atheism dead?.  In 2013, Theo Hobson wrote an article published at The Spectator entitled Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists. The atheist and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson wrote, "The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement..".  In March 2015, the atheist philosopher John Gray in an article at The Guardian titled What scares the new atheists reported:  "Today, it’s clear that no grand march is under way...The resurgence of religion is a worldwide development...For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values."

 In 2015, the atheist author Joshua Kelly wrote: 
...since the death of Hitchens: angry atheism lost its most charismatic champion. Call it what you like: New Atheism, fire-brand atheism, etc., had a surge with the Four Horsemen in the middle of the last decade and in the last four years has generally peetered out to a kind that is more docile, politically correct, and even apologetic.
YouTube's atheist Thunderfoot said about the atheist movement after Reason Rally 2016 had a very low turnout:
I'm not sure there is anything in this movement worth saving. Hitchens is dead. Dawkins simply doesn't have the energy for this sort of thing anymore. Harris went his own way. And Dennett just kind of blended into the background. So what do you think when the largest gathering of the nonreligious in history pulls in... I don't know. Maybe 2,000 people. Is there anything worth saving?
Professor James W. Jones wrote at a Oxford University Press website:
We seem to be witnessing a broad reaction against the New Atheism movement by atheists as well as religious believers, whether undermining the idea of a long-standing conflict between science and religion, or taking a critical view of their political agenda. James Ryerson recently examined three new books (including my own) in the New York Times Book Review – a small sample of a growing body of work... 
The New Atheism movement is receiving a powerful attack from another side as well — the politics implicit in their worldview. Two books published this year exemplify this critique, in which militant atheism is seen as an anti-progressive “secular fundamentalism.” C.J. Werleman, in The New Atheist Threat: The Dangerous Rise of Secular Extremists, himself formerly a militant atheist, describes the New Atheists’ uncritical devotion to science, their childish understanding of religion, their extreme Islamophobia, and intolerance of cultural diversity.

The World post New Atheism

On July 24, 2013, CNS News reported:
Atheism is in decline worldwide, with the number of atheists falling from 4.5% of the world’s population in 1970 to 2.0% in 2010 and projected to drop to 1.8% by 2020, according to a new report by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.
Professor Eric Kaufmann, who teaches at Birkbeck College, University of London, specializes in the academic area of how demographic changes affect religion/irreligion and politics. Kaufmann is an agnostic.

 On December 23, 2012, Kaufmann wrote:
I argue that 97% of the world's population growth is taking place in the developing world, where 95% of people are religious. 
On the other hand, the secular West and East Asia has very low fertility and a rapidly aging population... In the coming decades, the developed world's demand for workers to pay its pensions and work in its service sector will soar alongside the booming supply of young people in the third world. Ergo, we can expect significant immigration to the secular West which will import religious revival on the back of ethnic change. In addition, those with religious beliefs tend to have higher birth rates than the secular population, with fundamentalists having far larger families. The epicentre of these trends will be in immigration gateway cities like New York (a third white), Amsterdam (half Dutch), Los Angeles (28% white), and London, 45% white British.

Tables on the decline/growth of atheism/Christianity/other religions, by year

Data compiled by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS):

 The data in the tables above indicate the number of atheists in the world will drop in the 21st century. Recently, the number of atheists in the world started dropping.

 The United States post New Atheism

 According to the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS), the number of atheists and agnostics in the United States has remained relatively stable in the past 23 years. In 1991, 2% of Americans identified as atheist, and 4% identified as agnostic. In 2014, 3% of Americans identified as atheists, and 5% identified as agnostics.

 In June 2016, American Interest reported:
First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014.
The Pew Research Center reported in 2013:
First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014. 
The number of people who identify themselves as atheists in the United States has been rising, modestly but steadily, in recent years. Our aggregated data from 2012 show that 2.4% of American adults say they are atheists when asked about their religious identity, up from 1.6% in 2007.
For data/information about the future of American atheism, please see: The future of American atheism is bleak

The United Kingdom post Atheism

 The Guardian published an article in 2017 entitled Nearly 50% are of no religion – but has UK hit ‘peak secular’? which declared: 
But, Bullivant told the Observer that the “growth of no religion may have stalled”. After consistent decline, in the past few years the proportion of nones appears to have stabilised. “Younger people tend to be more non-religious, so you’d expect it to keep going – but it hasn’t. The steady growth of non-Christian religions is a contributing factor, but I wonder if everyone who is going to give up their Anglican affiliation has done so by now? We’ve seen a vast shedding of nominal Christianity, and perhaps it’s now down to its hardcore.
(In the United States, the vast majority of individuals who are "Nones"/"no religion" (people who are not part of organized religion) believe in the existence of God. Fewer than 15% of the "nones" consider themselves atheists.)

Conatus News reported in 2017:
Church of England worshippers increase 0.8 per cent since 2009. The number of non-religious people falls from 50.65% to 48.6% 
Rise in Church of England worshippers likely due to resurgence in patriotism and pride in Christianity, a report has found. 
According to a new report, for every person brought up in a non-religious household who becomes a churchgoer, 26 people raised as Christians now identify as non-believers.
The study, which is based on an analysis of the British Social Attitudes Survey and the European Social Survey, reported that the proportion of non-religious in the UK hit a high of 50.6 per cent in 2009. However, it has been decreasing ever since and hit 48.6 per cent in 2015. 
However, the proportion of those who identify as Church of England worshippers has seen a slight increased from 16.3 per cent in 2009 to 17.1 per cent in 2015.

 Google trends data

 Google trends measures the number of Google searches for various terms on a relative basis. As can be seen below,  the searches for the term "atheist" in the United States is now at its same level as it was as in January of 2004 (the level is at 32 as can be seen below). As far as the world, there are now less searches for the word "atheist" as there was in January 2005 (The level is at 37 now and it was at 45 in January of 2004 as can be seen below). Please wait a few seconds for the Google trends data to load.


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Thursday, March 28, 2019

Atheist author and advocate is absolutely TERRIFIED about the future growth of pentecostal Christianity


The atheist author and advocate David Madison, PhD wrote in March of 2019:
I remain haunted—and terrified—by what I read on a Christian website, not long after the turn of this century: that by 2025, there will be one billion (yes, that’s with a “b”) Pentecostals in the world. That should scare us as much as global warming.
The American sociologist and author Peter L. Berger introduced the concept of desecularization in 1999. According to Berger, "One can say with some confidence that modern Pentecostalism must be the fastest growing religion in human history."

 Professor Phillip Jenkins published the book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.

 Chuck Colson, citing the work of Jenkins, writes:
As Penn State professor Philip Jenkins writes in The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, predictions like Huntingtons betray an ignorance of the explosive growth of Christianity outside of the West. 
For instance, in 1900, there were approximately 10 million Christians in Africa. By 2000, there were 360 million. By 2025, conservative estimates see that number rising to 633 million. Those same estimates put the number of Christians in Latin America in 2025 at 640 million and in Asia at 460 million. 
According to Jenkins, the percentage of the worlds population that is, at least by name, Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.
Professor Eric Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century and the future growth of religious fundamentalism:
Part of the reason I think demography is very important, at least if we are going to speak about the future, is that it is the most predictable of the social sciences. 
...if you look at a population and its age structure now. You can tell a lot about the future. ...So by looking at the relative age structure of different populations you can already say a lot about the future... 
...Religious fundamentalism is going to be on the increase in the future and not just out there in the developing world..., but in the developed world as well.
Atheists, how long will you hide under your beds? Isn't it better to embrace your upcoming defeat and admit that the future belongs to religious believers?

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The future of American atheism is bleak


Numerous atheists have declared that the "atheist movement is dead" or that it is dying (see: Decline of the atheist movement ).

In June 2016, American Interest reported:
First of all, religious belief is still very powerful and widespread, and there is nothing inevitable about its decline. In fact, the proportion of people who say they believe in God actually ticked modestly upward, from 86 percent to 89 percent, since Gallup last asked the question in 2014.
In their 2010 journal article entitled, Secularism, Fundamentalism or Catholicism? The Religious Composition of the United States to 2043 published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vegard Skirbekk and Anne Goujon wrote:
We find considerable stability of religious groups over time, but there are some important shifts. Hispanic Catholics experience the strongest growth rates to 2043. Immigration, high fertility, and a young age structure will enable this group to expand from 10 to 18 percent of the American population between 2003 and 2043, despite a net loss of communicants to secularism and Protestantism. This will power the growth of Catholics as a whole, who will surpass Protestants by mid century within the nation’s youngest age groups. This represents a historic moment for a country settled by anti-Catholic Puritans, whose Revolution was motivated in part by a desire to spread dissenting Protestantism and whose populationon the eve of revolution was 98 percent Protestant (Huntington 2004; Kaufmann 2004). Another important development concerns the growth of the Muslim population and decline of the Jews. High Muslim fertility and a young Muslim age structure contrasts with low Jewish childbearing levels and a mature Jewish age structure. Barring an unforeseen shift in the religious composition and size of the immigrant flow, Muslims will surpass Jews in the population by 2023 and in the electorate by 2028. This could have profound effects on the course of American foreign policy. Within the non-Hispanic white population, we expect to see continued Liberal Protestant decline due to low fertility and a net loss in exchanges with other groups. White Catholics will also lose due to a net outflow of converts. Fundamentalist and Moderate Protestant denominations will hold their own within the white population, but will decline overall as the white share of the population falls. 
The finding that Protestant fundamentalism may decline in relative terms over the medium term contrasts with a prevailing view that envisions the continued growth of “strong religion” (Stark and Iannaccone 1994a). This is the result of an older age structure, which increases loss through mortality, and immigration, which reduces the size of all predominantly white denominations — all of which are poorly represented in the immigration flow. Fundamentalists’ relatively high fertility and net surplus from the religious marketplace is not sufficient to counteract the effects of immigration. Obviously, this could change if significant immigration begins to arrive from more Pentecostalist source countries such as Guatemala or parts of sub-Saharan Africa. 
Our work also sheds light on the religious restructuring paradigm, though we do not find a clear victor between secularism and fundamentalism. The secular population will grow substantially in the decades ahead because it has a young age structure and more people leave religion than enter it. The sharpest gains for secularism will be within the white population, where seculars will surpass fundamentalists by 2030. On the other hand, there are important demographic limits to secularism, demonstrating the power of religious demography. The relatively low fertility of secular Americans and the religiosity of the immigrant inflow provide a countervailing force that will cause the secularization process within the total population to plateau before 2043. This represents an important theoretical point in that demography permits society to become more religious even as individuals tend to become less religious over time.

 The Birkbeck College, University of London professor Eric Kaufmann wrote in his 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? concerning America:
High evangelical fertility rates more than compensated for losses to liberal Protestant sects during the twentieth century. In recent decades, white secularism has surged, but Latino and Asian religious immigration has taken up the slack, keeping secularism at bay. Across denominations, the fertility advantage of religious fundamentalists of all colours is significant and growing. After 2020, their demographic weight will begin to tip the balance in the culture wars towards the conservative side, ramping up pressure on hot-button issues such as abortion. By the end of the century, three quarters of America may be pro-life. Their activism will leap over the borders of the 'Redeemer Nation' to evangelize the world. Already, the rise of the World Congress of Families has launched a global religious right, its arms stretching across the bloody lines of the War on Terror to embrace the entire Abrahamic family.
Dr. Steve Turley wrote:
According to University of London scholar Eric Kaufmann’s detailed study on global demographic trends, we are in the early stages of nothing less than a demographic revolution. In Kaufmann’s words, "religious fundamentalists are on course to take over the world." There is a significant demographic deficit between secularists and conservative religionists. For example, in the U.S., while self-identified non-religionist women averaged only 1.5 children per couple in 2002, conservative evangelical women averaged 2.5 children, representing a 28 percent fertility edge. Kaufmann notes that this demographic deficit has dramatic effects over time. In a population evenly divided, these numbers indicate that conservative evangelicals would increase from 50 to 62.5 percent of the population in a single generation. In two generations, their number would increase to 73.5 percent, and over the course of 200 years, they would represent 99.4 percent. The Amish and Mormons provide contemporary illustrations of the compound effect of endogamous growth. The Amish double in population every twenty years, and projections have the Amish numbering over a million in the U.S. and Canada in just a few decades. Since 1830, Mormon growth has averaged 40 percent per decade, which means that by 2080, there may be as many as 267 million Mormons in the world, making them by 2100 anywhere from one to six percent of the world’s population.
(source: Text below the YouTube video Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth and the text was written by Dr. Steven Turley).

Michael Brown declared:
Several decades ago, church statistician and demographer David Barrett began to report the surprising news that around the world, the most rapidly growing faith was Spirit-empowered Christianity, marked by clear gospel preaching, belief in the literal truth of the Scriptures, and the reality of God’s presence. (The data were compiled in the prestigious “World Christian Encyclopedia,” published by Oxford University Press.)... 
This is confirmed in the new Pew Forum report, which showed that evangelical Protestant churches in America grew by 2 million from 2007 to 2014 whereas the so-called mainline (liberal) Protestant churches declined by 5 million, meaning that evangelical Protestants now make up the largest religious group in the nation. (Although this is not part of the Pew Forum survey, my surmise is that the evangelical churches that are most Bible-based and make the most serious, grace-empowered demands on their congregants are, generally speaking, the ones that are growing rather than declining.

Hispanics and the future of religion/irreligion in the United States


2018 American Atheists convention


At the 2018 American Atheists convention, the ex-president of the American Atheists organization David Silverman stated:

It is a hard time to be an atheist activist. This has affected us. And it has affected our community...  
...it has really affected us. We are suffering a level of defeatism that I have never seen before... 

We feel the loss. And we feel like we have lost. We feel like we lost the election... We see this cascade of attack coming down at us over and over from all different directions and we feel like it's over. I have heard so many times it makes me sick. It makes me sad. It feels like we lost. 

The apathy that follows. It doesn't matter. We can't win anyways. It's useless to fight. This apathy is infecting us. It's hurting us. 

And people are reacting to each other now. And so that is causing a division. Lots and lots of division in our movement. Hard, bad division... And that has resulted in a splintering and factioning of the movement that I have never seen before and none of us have. 

In other words, we're in a bad situation and it's getting worse.


Google trends shows that American Google searches for the words "atheist" and "atheism" are now below their 2004 levels





Hispanic evangelicalism

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