Atheists have often relied on the power of the state to promulgate its ideology and silence dissent (See: Atheist indoctrination).
I have some bad news for American, militant atheists: Evangélicos are causing secular leftists to quake in their boots. Evangélicos will beat militant atheism like a piñata. Olé! Olé! Olé!
In 2016, Voice of Americareported about Hispanic evangelicals:
A 2014 Pew study found 70 percent of evangelical Latinos think
abortion should be mostly or entirely illegal....
On homosexuality... 66 percent
of evangelicals opposing gay marriage.
In 2015, Pew Research indicated: "The Hispanic population reached a new high of 55.4 million in 2014 (or
17.4% of the total U.S. population), an increase of 1.2 million (2.1%)
from the year before."
In 2015, BloombergViewreported concerning the United States
According to a much-discussed 2012 report from the Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life, only 3 percent of U.S. atheists and agnostics are black, 6 percent are Hispanic, and 4 percent are Asian. Some 82 percent are white. (The relevant figures for the population at large at the time of the survey were 66 percent white, 11 percent black, 15 percent Hispanic, 5 percent Asian.):
More and more evidence keeps coming in indicating that in America atheism will be out! Señor Jesus and tangos will be in!
One of the core beliefs of many atheists is that supernatural events don't occur and supernatural entities don't exist. Philosophers commonly call this ideology "naturalism".
Friends of mine have noted lately how biting and critical the atheist community can be, not only toward outsiders, but even toward its own members. Has there ever been a subculture more prone to eating its own than this one? I really don’t know.
Before the internet, atheists were rather isolated. But now atheists can rip into each other mercilessly 24 hours a day via the internet. Atheistic cultures are still very lonely cultures compared to deeply religious cultures and there are plenty of lonely atheists, however now atheists can scream into their computer monitors and pound their fists in fury upon their computer desks in response to the unreasonableness of their fellow atheists (see: Atheism and loneliness and Atheism and socialability).
Prior to many people being online, Richard Dawkins could largely communicate with atheists/agnostics via his books. The social ineptness and abrasiveness of Richard Dawkins could be more readily hidden from the godless and various members of the wider public. But thanks to internet, Dawkins was able to grind into a fine dust all that goodwill he built up with his atheists, agnostics and others via his books. In addition, within the atheist movement he ignited a war between the sexes that still exists to this day (see: Elevatorgate ). Now the atheist movement is anemic and dying (see: New Atheism is dead. The atheist movement is anemic. Now what? ).
Second, the atheist Brendan O'Neillpublished an article in The Telegraph entitled "How Atheists Became the Most Colossally Smug and Annoying People on the Planet" which declared: "These days, barely a week passes without the emergence of yet more evidence that atheists are the most irritating people on Earth."
Previous to the the internet being very accessible, one could go years or decades without running into an unpleasant and wicked atheist. Granted Christians always believed the Bible verse "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'They are corrupt, they do abominable deeds there is none who does good." (Proverbs 14:1). At same time, with the advent of the internet now one has ready access to reams of data confirming the breadth and depth of atheist unpleasantness/wickedness.
For example, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have high rates of internet usage
The abstract of a 2014 peer-reviewed study entitled Everything Is Permitted? People Intuitively Judge Immorality as Representative of Atheists which was published in the journal Plos Onereported:
American participants intuitively judged a wide variety of immoral acts (e.g., serial murder, consensual incest, necrobestiality, cannibalism) as representative of atheists, but not of eleven other religious, ethnic, and cultural groups. Even atheist participants judged immoral acts as more representative of atheists than of other groups. These findings demonstrate a prevalent intuition that belief in God serves a necessary function in inhibiting immoral conduct, and may help explain persistent negative perceptions of atheists
On December 10, 2011, USA Todayreported in a story entitled Study: Atheists distrusted as much as rapists:
The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?
The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.
The study is part of an attempt to understand what needs religion fulfills in people. Among the conclusions is a sense of trust in others.
"People find atheists very suspect," Shariff said. "They don't fear God so we should distrust them; they do not have the same moral obligations of others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group."
In 2015, the Christian Postindicated in a story entitled Atheists Widely Distrusted, Even Among Themselves, UK Study Finds:
Distrust of atheists is "deeply and culturally ingrained" among people, and even many atheists are not able to trust each other, according to a new study carried out by the psychology department at Nottingham Trent University in England.
Published in the International Journal for The Psychology of Religion, the study, "The Robustness of Anti-Atheist Prejudice as Measured by Way of Cognitive Errors," was conducted with 100 participants from the U.K. ....
The study shows that "anti-atheist prejudice is not confined either to dominantly religious countries or to religious individuals, but rather appears to be a robust judgment about atheists."
Furthermore, the public's perception of atheists can be readily confirmed by a wealth of social science/historical data readily available via the internet (see: Moral failures of the atheiest population).
If this weren't enough, thanks to the modern marvel of the internet, the public now has at their fingertips rebuttals to a host of atheist claptrap (see: Rebuttals to atheist arguments). So now you can see with perfect clarity not only are atheists an unsavory lot, but they are wrong as well.
An atheist recently asked: "What's killing the atheist movement?". The prominent atheist PZ Myers responded with a post entitled What if the atheist movement needs to die?
2. Vastly outnumbered and this situation is expected to get significantly worse over time according to religious/irreligious demography scholars. Atheism has a 20+ year track record of losing global market share in terms of adherents. See: Atheist Population and Desecularization
3. Has a very poor reputation with those it wants to influence. Its bad reputation has existed for thousands of years. See: Views on atheists
4. Has poor leadership "leading" people who are traditionally apathetic, quarrelsome and arrogant. The atheist movement also put a very large portion of its eggs in the Richard Dawkins' basket only to see Richard Dawkins and the New Atheism movement implode. See: Atheism and leadership and Atheism and apathy and Atheism and arrogance
5. Atheists are not only distrusted by religious people, but atheists frequently distrusts each other. See: Views on atheists
8. It recently has developed a reputation for cowardly avoiding/backing out of debates (see: Atheism and cowardice).
9. Has often relied on the power of the state to promulgate its ideology and silence dissent. The historian Martin Van Crevel points out that sovereign states are
losing power/influence due to technology democratizing access to
information, welfare states increasingly failing, fourth-generation warfare being waged against countries and sovereign states increasingly losing their ability to maintain internal order. See: Atheist indoctrination
There are 7 pieces of GRIM news for the the atheist who recently asked: "What's killing the atheist movement?"
1.A majority of atheists lean politically to the left. The left often caters to atheists. Secular leftists are going to be more ornery and desperate as the far right continues to be ascendant in Europe and eventually gains more power in the USA.
Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment is not going away. Europe has an aging population and faces low economic growth. As the economic pie shrinks, anti-immigrant feelings will likely rise which will fuel right wing political parties. If I am wrong, religious immigrants will continue to pour into the West. Either way, secular leftism faces grim prospects long term.
In short, losing teams generally get more ornery with time and not less.
2. A 24 hour a day non-stop prayer movement has gripped China. The movement started in 2009 as can be seen by video below (see also the news story: Non-stop prayer movement has gripped atheist China).
China currently has the largest atheist population but Christianity is seeing explosive growth in China. By 2030, China is expected to have the largest Christian population in the world (and the type of Christianity in China is largely of the evangelical Christianity type). See: Growth of Christianity in China
Atheist, if fervent Christian prayer doesn't work, then why is the Christian non-stop prayer movement in China seeing such spectacular results?
The academic Eric Kaufmann told a secular audience in Australia: "The trends that are happening worldwide inevitably in an age of globalization are going to affect us". Don't be surprised if you open a fortune cookie and find a Bible verse!
The desecularization of China will have a future impact on the atheist movement in two ways. First, additional competition from Christianity. Second, the type of atheism/anti-religion in a region often is reactionary and a reflection of the dominant religion in an area.
One sign of the advancing state of Christianity in China is that it is reaching out to the larger world. Nine hundred Chinese pastors gathered in Hong Kong this fall for the Mission 2030 Conference. Their goal: To send out 20,000 missionaries from mainland China by 2030.
Christianity is having a positive effect on China (see articles below). China is expected to be a dominant power in the 21st century and Europe is expected to be a declining power. Various scholars and financial experts are predicting the 21st century to be an Asian century. On the other hand, there is reason to believe that America might remain largely the world's only superpower for much or all of the 21st century. Either way, the future could have two Christian powers being preeminent in the world. Please read the articles directly below for details.
In addition, China believes in "soft power". Soft power in the form of cultural influence on other countries (The East has a long tradition of achieving objectives through indirect methods). Part of a culture is certainly its religion. So again, the Christianization of China could easily have an effect on the rest of the world.
Friends of mine have noted lately how biting and critical the atheist community can be, not only toward outsiders, but even toward its own members. Has there ever been a subculture more prone to eating its own than this one? I really don’t know.
Human cultures absent of God's redemptive power and/or a cultural legacy of biblical Christianity are capable of great evil. It was no accident that atheistic communism resulted in the deaths of about 150 million people in the 20th century. See: Atheism and mass murder and Protestant cultural legacies
4. Vox Day, author of the brisk selling books SJWs Always Lie and The Irrational Atheist is coming out with his "Big Fork Project" in about 5 weeks which I believe is an alternative right project to provide an alternatives to internet platforms where the secular left has a lot of influence and censors individuals on the right end of the spectrum (Wikipedia, Twitter, and Facebook. See also: Why we need to replace Wikipedia by Vox Day). Do you think an alt-right wiki influenced by Vox Day will have an atheism article sympathetic to atheism? If so, you are sadly mistaken!
5. Desecularization is the process by which religion reasserts its societal influence though religious values, institutions, sectors of society and symbols in reaction to previous and/or co-occurring secularization processes.
Global desecularization is a trend that has been occurring since at least the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. All indications is that its pace will quicken this century.
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."
6. Few people are going to attend the funeral of the death of atheist movement. The demographic changes causing desecularization will happen over generations although the pace of desecularization will quicken in the 21st century and beyond. See: Acceleration of 21st desecularization
The religious have more children and the irreligious have a sub-replacement level of fertility. Even if immigration of religious immigrants is halted, this will merely slow down the process of deseculatiization as the religious will continue to have more children than their irreligious counterparts. See: Atheism and fertility rates
7. Should the atheist movement die in the 21st century or in the future, there are going to be a lot of religious fundamentalist rejoicing over the death of the atheist movement.
At a conference the scholar Eric Kaufmann said of religious demographic projections concerning the 21st century:
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
The Bible says: "Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, And do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles;Or the LORD will see it and be displeased, And turn His anger away from him." (Proverbs 24:17-18) While the Bible says not to rejoice over fall of enemies and to love your enemies, other religious traditions may not. Militant atheists expect religious fundamentalists to dance on the grave of the atheist movement so should that day come, you will not be so angry. Militant atheists do have a reputation for being angry (see: atheism and anger).
The atheist activist and leftist Greta Christina
told the journalist Chris Mooney on the Point of Inquiry podcast,
"there isn't one emotion" that affects atheists "but anger is one of the
emotions that many of us have ...[it] drives others to participate in
the movement".
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Anger#mediaviewer/File:Anger_during_a_protest_by_David_Shankbone.jpg
Photographer/uploader to Wikimedia: David Shankbone
Date: August 31, 2007
Description at Wikimedia: Two people in a heated argument about
religion when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University. Click
the audio button found here to listen to them.
License: Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
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There is a complete lack of disco songs which incorporate atheism. In addition, there is a complete absence of atheist dances.
If I had to pick the biggest reason why disco never caught on in a big way within the atheist movement, I would say it was because disco never really caught on among the white, male, atheist, nerd population.
From a global perspective, Europe is more secular/atheistic than the rest of the world although it does have a considerable amount of religious immigrants who have higher birth rates
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported about secular Europe:
Based on the latest estimates in European Union countries, overweight affects 30-70% and obesity affects 10-30% of adults. Estimates of the number of overweight infants and children in the WHO European Region rose steadily from 1990 to 2008. Over 60% of children who are overweight before puberty will be overweight in early adulthood.
Clearly, there needs to be more dancing in secular Europe!
The atheist PZ Myers declared, "If we're going to expand our base and we're going to draw in more people to recognize the virtues of living in a secular world, we need to appeal to more than just that geek and nerd subset of the population. We need to have a wider base." To my knowledge, in the mid 1970s and early 1980s, PZ Myers never attempted to assist the atheist movement to to break out of its nerd subset of the population by encouraging more atheists to engage in disco dancing. Professor Myers, leadership is by example!
Below are four disco songs. The first video is a Christian disco song. The second video is a pop disco song. The third video is Disco Nerds From White City. The fourth video isStar Trek Disco Dancing. In the videos below, please notice the complete absence of lyrics about atheism and atheistic figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, etc. Atheism and disco don't mix or remix!
Lastly, please see the section entitled below entitledThe closest atheist nerds get to being funky which features the essay Atheist militaries and goose stepping
