Why wed be miserable in a world without religion

The actively religious also tend to drink less, although the findings are not as stark: In 11 of the 19 countries, people who attend services at least monthly are less likely than the rest of the population to drink several times a week. This is true in eight of the 26 countries surveyed. And in 12 countries, the religiously active are more likely than inactively religious people to join nonreligious groups.

In the U. In fact, there are no countries in which the actively religious are significantly less likely to vote than others. Countries where there are no significant differences in voting patterns by religion include Brazil, the Netherlands and New Zealand, as well as several other countries where voting is mandatory. Say "Alexa, enable the Pew Research Center flash briefing". It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.

Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics.

On the whole, Gray is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and what others regard as novel or promising he often sees as derivative or just plain dumb. He argues, for instance, that secular humanism is really monotheism in disguise, where humankind is God and salvation can be achieved through our own efforts rather than through divine intervention. Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly.

Religions are still thriving, as are wars between them, and secular regimes have wrought as much, if not more, havoc under the auspices of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism.

Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns.

Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea.

Instead of seeking surrogates for God, they try to acquiesce in something that transcends human understanding. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic.

Meanwhile, those who came to atheism via the new atheists might be startled to find that many of their intellectual forebears did not wage war on religion, or even feel any distaste for it. In fairness, contemporary American atheists may be inclined to wage war on religion because religion has been waging war on them for so long.

A brief truce was reached at the end of the Obama Administration, when Congress passed, and the President signed, a new version of the International Religious Freedom Act that officially included nonbelievers.

That law extended important new protections to atheists. Still, as Gray might have predicted, it is difficult, in this particular political moment, to believe that the circle of rights is expanding for atheists or for anyone else. Moore and Kramnick, who have written a thorough and useful history of the legal and political status of atheists in America, unsurprisingly believe that such work is salvific—that understanding the bias against atheists in the past can help end it in the future.

Gray holds no such hope, and yet his book offers a way forward. In it, he helps us understand how those who do not believe in God, or, for that matter, those who do, have oriented themselves in the universe. Faith, after all, drove the Puritans to Plymouth Rock but then led them to execute three of their Quaker neighbors; it inspired American slavers but also American abolitionists; and, whatever else atheism is accused of doing in this country, it sustained the scientific curiosity and profound pacifism of the two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the art and activism of Lorraine Hansberry.

All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to.

By Adam Gopnik. By James Wood. At Rucker Park in Harlem, players hone their basketball talent in a legendary tournament. More: Atheism Atheists Books Religion. Enter your e-mail address. Many atheists think that their atheism is the product of rational thinking.

Oddly perhaps, many religious people actually take a similar view of atheism. This comes out when theologians and other theists speculate that it must be rather sad to be an atheist, lacking as they think atheists do so much of the philosophical, ethical, mythical and aesthetic fulfilments that religious people have access to — stuck in a cold world of rationality only.

The problem that any rational thinker needs to tackle, though, is that the science increasingly shows that atheists are no more rational than theists. For example, religious and nonreligious people alike can end up following charismatic individuals without questioning them. And our minds often prefer righteousness over truth , as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has explored.

Even atheist beliefs themselves have much less to do with rational inquiry than atheists often think. We now know, for example, that nonreligious children of religious parents cast off their beliefs for reasons that have little to do with intellectual reasoning.

The latest cognitive research shows that the decisive factor is learning from what parents do rather than from what they say. Throughout our evolutionary history, humans have often lacked the time to scrutinise and weigh up the evidence — needing to make quick assessments. Even older children and adolescents who actually ponder the topic of religion may not be approaching it as independently as they think. Emerging research is demonstrating that atheist parents and others pass on their beliefs to their children in a similar way to religious parents — through sharing their culture as much as their arguments.