Comments on: Comparing across American religions

By: razib

razib — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:00:29 +0000

The % of Muslims and Hindus was much lower than I expected......

you probably misperceived because of where you lived. these results are in line with the american religious identification survey.

By: McGraw

McGraw — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:15:38 +0000

The % of Muslims and Hindus was much lower than I expected……

By: razib

razib — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:24:47 +0000

I have no idea what those "atheists" think "atheist" means ...

well, humans are typically retarded ;-) but, some people do consider themselves atheists if they don't believe in a evangelical christian god though; i've run into born again christians who claim to have been atheists and it is clear that they were deists or unaffiliated theists before they accepted jesus as their lord & savior. i once saw catholic apologetic literature which once defined atheists who accepted moral principles in keeping with normality 'de facto believers' or something. so i think some people from religious backgrounds could be somewhat confused in the terminology.

there is an analogy between atheists who believe in god and muslims who don't believe in the literal word for word truth of the koran as a monologue from god. but, the latter case is far weaker, and while the former is tautologically contradictory, i don't think the latter is. there are some muslim groups who have always been 'heterodox' on this question. too often islam is defined by sunni orthodoxy. e.g., using christian terminology it is pretty clear to me that many american muslims are operational arminians even though the orthodox sunni position is anti-arminian. but this is not atypical for americans of any given religion, they simply rework things and deal with the details later or never at all (this is very in evidence with american catholicism, and goes back as far as the early 19th century when there were tensions between disproportionately french quebecois clerics and anglo parishoners).

By: bayesian

bayesian — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:16:45 +0000

Thanks, Razib.

It was suprising to me (probably not to you) how incompletely dominant Quranic literalism is, only about 50%, with 14% of self-identified Muslims saying that the Quran is not the Word of God - I guess those Muslims are analogous to the atheists who believe in a personal god, but then I note (full report, p 31) that 3% of the atheists think that ["Holy Book", not clear which book but I assume Teh Bible] is the literal Word. I have no idea what those "atheists" think "atheist" means ...

I went through Pew's 2007 survey of Muslim Americans, and while there was some interesting detail on the demographics, no crosstabs on literalism versus country of origin, etc. But pulling different pieces together I can see where the coalition of the non-literals might come together, e.g. about 4% of the US Muslim population are converts who converted for "family/marriage" (which presumably includes both marrying a Muslim and also going along when a dominant family member converts).