"Beyond Disbelief" Study Completed

"Beyond Disbelief" is a preliminary study meant to survey the attitudes of the nonreligious. You can get the full report here.

A lot of it is stuff that anyone in the skeptical community would already know, but there are a few quotes I have to pull out of it:

The nontheists [we studied] were remarkably liberal, with 91% rating themselves as left of centre.

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There was no relation between atheism [...] and family religiosity. Rated hostility to religion was not correlated with family background or negative family or other influences.

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Over 90% of atheists surveyed agree that religions are opposed to progress and social change, and over 80% believe that religions do more harm than good and that the world would be better off without religion. Across items, a clear plurality and often a majority of atheists selected the highest level of agreement for these anti-religious statements. Atheists not only believe in the separation of church and state, oppose tax exemptions for religious institutions but are also almost unanimous, at 99% agreement, that there is no place for religious symbols or rituals in the public sphere in a secular society. Similar percentages agree that religions are based on ignorance and uncritical thinking and lead to hypocrisy. Perhaps particularly revealing is that over 85% of our respondents agreed with the rather strong statement that the “It is a violation of the rights of children to indoctrinate them into religion without a choice among points of view;” a sentiment perhaps especially associated with the new atheism.

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As noted in our introductory remarks we did not treat categories as mutually exclusive and many respondents checked more than one label to describe themselves. For example, 2054 respondents checked atheist, and 1103 checked agnostic; but both boxes were checked by 674 respondents. Had we not allowed this it is possible that many or most of the 674 might have checked agnosticism only. Forced-choice surveys may therefore underestimate the number of atheists. This applies a fortiori to questions that add adjectives that convey a sense of absolute or dogmatic certainty such as the description “convinced atheist”. Our hypothesis is that, even beyond our sample, the majority of agnostics are, in fact, atheists and that many would so self-identify if given the opportunity to qualify their commitment.