Going Godless: Does Secularism Make People More Ethical? - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International. Barry Kosmin is a different kind of market researcher. His data focuses on consumers targeted by companies like Lifechurch.tv or World Overcomers Christian Church TM. The sociologist analyzes church-affiliated commercial entities, from souvenir shops to television channels and worship services. But the most significant target of Kosmin's research is the consumer group most likely to shy away from such commercial products: secularists. "The non-religious, or Nones, hold the fastest-growing world view in the market," says Kosmin. "In the past 20 years, their numbers in the United States have doubled to 15 percent. " The director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in the US state of Connecticut, Kosmin is among the few researchers focused on the study of non-believers. Secularists make up some 15 percent of the global population, or about 1 billion people.
US Churches Losing Millions of Members But the numbers of secularists are growing. An Atheist on Easter Sunday. This is just a personal essay, written one Easter Sunday. For me, atheism means not a disbelief in any god in particular. Atheism instead means a disbelief in all gods, just as many disbelieve in fairies or goblins. This is not to say that I would still disbelieve in gods in the event of good evidence to the contrary; but that is not really different from saying I would also believe in fairies and goblins, should there be good evidence for such magical folk. In this way, my atheism differs from what I understand to be “agnosticism”.
It is not that I do not know whether gods exist or not. For me, it is not an open question. I positively disbelieve in gods, and I have never encountered any good evidence that they exist. I believe that every god I could ever hear about in human history, and there have probably been thousands, to not exist; that each and every god is nothing more than a human construct; and that just because someone believes in a god does not mean that god exists.
A secularist manifesto | Evan Harris. Secularism is unfairly characterised and attacked by religious leaders as a way of seeking to protect their privileges. Secularism is not atheism (lack of belief in God) and nor is it humanism (a nonreligious belief system). It is a political movement seeking specific policy end-points. Many secularists are religious and many religious people – recognising the value of keeping government and religion separate – are secular. Secularism seeks to defend the absolute freedom of religious and other belief, seeks to maximise freedom of religious and other expression and protect the right to manifest religious belief insofar as it does not impinge disproportionately on the rights and freedoms of others. A manifesto for secularist change would look like this: 1.
This is why secularists: 2. . • Protected religious broadcasting slots.• Committees that draw up the syllabus for religious studies.• Bodies that advise the government on matters relating to religion. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A secularist manifesto | Evan Harris. Challenging Religious Privilege | National Secular Society.