“What Americans Really Believe” might surprise you

The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.“What Americans Really Believe,” a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians.

From Look Who’s Irrational Now, by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway (WSJ 9-19-08).  According to the survey, close to a fourth of professing atheists believe in a god or force, 10% pray weekly and 12% believe in Heaven.

And, even Bill Maher, whose anti-religion documentary is to be released soon, appears to be somewhat of a nut:

Mr. Maher told David Letterman — a quintuple bypass survivor — to stop taking the pills that his doctor had prescribed for him. He proudly stated that he didn’t accept Western medicine. On his HBO show in 2005, Mr. Maher said: “I don’t believe in vaccination. . . . Another theory that I think is flawed, that we go by the Louis Pasteur [germ] theory.” He has told CNN’s Larry King that he won’t take aspirin because he believes it is lethal and that he doesn’t even believe the Salk vaccine eradicated polio.

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2 Responses to “What Americans Really Believe” might surprise you

  1. me says:

    I’ve always wondered who Maher and Coulter make fun of when they’re together…

  2. People are weird, aren’t they? Maher is also a libertarian and a friend of Ann Coulter.

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