Australia: choose “no religion” rather than “Jedi”

From AmeriNZ

Australia is about to conduct its latest census, and the topic of religion has become an issue. The question for them is whether people should choose “no religion” as a designation...

The graphic at left is a plea from the Atheist Foundation of Australia to choose “no religion” rather than “Jedi”. They say that if people choose Jedi, it’s classified as a “Not Defined” religion instead of “No Religion,” and that matters because it makes Australia seem more religious than it actually is, and would encourage the government to give more money to religious-based organisations than they otherwise would.

At the moment, some 61.1% of Australians chose some sort of Christianity, and a mere 22.3% chose “no religion”.

The problem here is that “no religion” doesn’t necessarily mean literally no religion: It often simply means no particular religion...

Study reaffirms link between conservative religious faith and climate change doubt

We already knew that conservative religiosity in the United States was closely tied to denying evolution. What wasn’t so obvious was why views of global warming, or the environment, would seem to so closely track views on where we humans (and the rest of all life on Earth) come from. Yet it seems they do.

The new study, which David Konisky of Georgetown authored with Matthew Arbuckle of the University of Cincinnati, draws on a vast dataset from the 2010 installment of the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, which not only asks people about their religious views, affiliations, and habits, but also samples a huge group of Americans — some 55,000 of them.

That large number allows the researchers to conduct a fine-grained analysis of the divergences in views on environmental matters between members of different major religious traditions (Catholics, Protestants, Jews) and also members of different denominations (Baptists, Methodists, Episcopalians, and so on) in the United States. That includes looking at how “religiosity,” a measure of how committed people are to their faiths and how much they’re involved in religious activities (like going to church), seems to influence those environmental views.

More from the Washington Post.

Why the country’s youth are abandoning religious conservatism

From SALON. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

There’s been a lot of media attention recently to the changing demographics of the United States, where, at current rates, people who identify as “white” are expected to become a minority by the year 2050. But in many ways, the shift in national demographics has been accelerated beyond even that. New data from the American Values Atlas shows that while white people continue to be the majority in all but 4 states in the country, white Christians are the minority in a whopping 19 states. And, nationwide, Americans who identify as Protestant are now in the minority for the first time ever, clocking in at a mere 47 percent of Americans and falling.

Warm Feelings for Christians

Just how warmly do Americans feel toward religious groups? A survey by the Public Religion Research Institute asked respondents to rate religious groups using a "feeling thermometer" with a scale ranging from 1 (coldest) to 100 (warmest). A temperature of 51 or higher means the respondent feels warmer toward a group. A temperature of 1 to 49 means the respondent feels colder toward a group. If the feeling is neither warm nor cold, the rating would be 50. Here are the temperatures...

74.6 degrees for Christians
67.8 degrees for Jews
64.8 degrees for Catholics
43.0 degrees for atheists
42.4 degrees for Muslims

Interestingly, Americans on the whole feel cold toward atheists (43.0) but more warmly toward "non-religious people," whose temperature on the feeling thermometer was a higher 56.1.

Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government Are Working?

Description by American Consumers: August 2013

A survey of religious beliefs combined with economic and social attitudes finds Americans falling into four philosophical camps:

38% religious moderates
28% religious conservatives
19% religious progressives
15% nonreligious

Not surprisingly, these four groups differ in size by political party, according to the timely report, Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government Are Working? by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution.

Restrictions on Religion Are Tightening

From the New York Times:

Government restrictions on religion around the world were highest in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly in the period before the Arab Spring uprisings, a new study has found, underscoring a factor that fueled hostilities in the region and led to the rise of political Islam after the revolts.

The study, by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, said that in 2010 government restrictions on religion were “high or very high” in most of the Arab Spring countries, where suppression of Islamist movements contributed to the uprisings and spurred subsequent incursions of Islamists into political power.

U.S. Religion Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study

This study, designed and carried out by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB), compiled data on the number of congregations and adherents for 236 religious groups. Participants included 217 Christian denominations, associations, or communions (including Latter-day Saints, Messianic Jews, and Unitarian/Universalist groups); counts of Jain, Shinto, Sikh, Tao and National Spiritualist Association congregations, and counts of congregations and adherents from Bahá'ís, three Buddhist groupings, four Hindu groupings, four Jewish groupings, Muslims and Zoroastrians. The 236 groups reported a total of 344,894 congregations with 150,686,156 adherents, comprising 48.8 percent of the total U.S. population of 308,745,538 in 2010.

Here's further explanation. The easiest way to access the data is to go to the home page of The Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA) website.

For deeper analysis, which involves downloading, go to:
County File
Metro File
State File

The World's Religious Composition

In the world today, there are over 10,000 distinct religious groups, each advocating a particular way of life, preaching a path to achieve lasting happiness. Many of these groups are connected to a larger central religious belief system, such as Catholicism is connected to Christianity, or Sunnism is connected to Islam. However regardless of any such connection their differences are large enough to warrant a separation from other groups in the overall group.


More HERE.

American Religious Identification Survey 2008

The American Religious Identification Survey 2008 survey was carried out during February-November 2008 and collected answers from 54,461 respondents who were questioned in English or Spanish.

The American population self-identifies as predominantly Christian but Americans are slowly becoming less Christian.

+ 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008.
+ The historic Mainline churches and denominations have experienced the steepest declines while the non- denominational Christian identity has been trending upward particularly since 2001.
+ The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.
+ 34% of American adults considered themselves "Born Again or Evangelical Christians" in 2008.
+ The U. S. population continues to show signs of becoming less religious, with one out of every five Americans failing to indicate a religious identity in 2008.
* The "Nones" (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.
* Asian Americans are substantially more likely to indicate no religious identity than other racial or ethnic groups.
+ One sign of the lack of attachment of Americans to religion is that 27% do not expect a religious funeral at their death.
+ Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).
America’s religious geography has been transformed since 1990. Religious switching along with Hispanic immigration has significantly changed the religious profile of some states and regions. Between 1990 and 2008, the Catholic population proportion of the New England states fell from 50% to 36% and in New York it fell from 44% to 37%, while it rose in California from 29% to 37% and in Texas from 23% to 32%.
Overall the 1990-2008 ARIS time series shows that changes in religious self-identification in the first decade of the 21st century have been moderate in comparison to the 1990s, which was a period of significant shifts in the religious composition of the United States.

Views of Religious Similarities and Differences

Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination in Pew poll

Eight years after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Americans see Muslims as facing more discrimination inside the U.S. than other major religious groups. Nearly six-in-ten adults (58%) say that Muslims are subject to a lot of discrimination, far more than say the same about Jews, evangelical Christians, atheists or Mormons. In fact, of all the groups asked about, only gays and lesbians are seen as facing more discrimination than Muslims, with nearly two-thirds (64%) of the public saying there is a lot of discrimination against homosexuals.

(When) are Religious People Nicer?

(When) are Religious People Nicer? Religious Salience and the ‘Sunday Effect’ on Pro-Social Behavior

Source: Harvard Business School

Prior research has found mixed evidence for the long-theorized link between religiosity and pro-social behavior. To help overcome this divergence, we hypothesize that pro-social behavior is linked not to religiosity per se, but rather to the salience of religion and religious norms. We report on a field experiment that examines when auction participants will respond to an appeal to continue bidding for secular charitable causes. The results reveal that religious individuals are more likely than non-religious individuals to respond to an appeal for charity only on days that they visit their place of worship; on other days of the week, religiosity has no effect. Notably, the result persists after controlling for a host of factors that may influence bidding, but disappears when the appeal for charity is replaced by an appeal to bid for other reasons. Implications for the link between religion and pro-social behavior are discussed.

Latino Evangelicals Urge Undocumented to Boycott 2010 Census

"NEW YORK – Hispanic evangelical pastors have made a decision to recommend that undocumented immigrants not participate in the 2010 U.S. Census unless Congress passes 'genuine immigration reform.'

"Opponents of such a reform routinely use Census data as 'a tool' to justify 'attacks on undocumented families with strategies of terror and lies that polarize public opinion,' the National Coalition of Latino Clergy & Christian Leaders, or Conlamic, said Monday."

How the boycott solves the problem is presently escaping me. As one pundit noted: "Let the fun begin ----"