Americans were asked "What percentage of American adults _____" compared with the true proportion.
Americans were asked "What percentage of American adults _____" compared with the true proportion.
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Wait, atheism is that low in the US?? 38.9% of Australians indicated no religion at the last census, I knew we had more but never expected a whole order of magnitude difference!
That number is wrong.
28% of people in the US don't have a religion. People here just don't like the word atheist.
"Don't have a religion" includes
- Atheists
- Agnostics
- Spiritual but not religious people
- Religious but unaffiliated people
Saying "don't have a religion" equals atheist is like claiming that everyone who didn't vote for Trump or Harris is an anarchist.
That 3% atheist figure is drastically lower than the global 10-15% and probably misleadingly low because identifying as an atheist on a survey and functionally being an atheist aren't the same thing.
I understand that no religion =/= atheist, but when you look at these other 'atheist adjacent' stats like "no religion", they don't reflect a population that's as religious as "3% atheist" would suggest.
We're probably just seeing problems with the word atheist in the US, not a true accounting of how religious people are here.
Not having a religion =/= atheist in surveys like this.
Believing there is no god is still a belief. Not having a religion means you dont subscribe to any belief
To paraphrase a famous quote: Saying atheism is a belief is like saying not playing tennis is a sport.
There's no proof for or against God, just by the simple fact that God could just not care and not get involved, and such a God would be neither provable or disprovable.
The only position that can be logically drawn from that is the agnostic one: "I don't know whether God exists or not, and I don't care. It doesn't affect me.".
Atheists on the other hand are in a position that doesn't logically follow from the evidence. They believe that there is no God. It is a belief, because it cannot be logically derived from the evidence. And there are lots of Atheists who live their atheism like a religion. They study their literature to build a belief system, to find evidence, to disprove others. They meet up (online or physically) to talk about their non-belief and to hone their arguments. They strongly defend their position in discussions. I've even met Atheist missionaries who stand on street corners preaching that God doesn't exist.
To respond to your quote: Not playing tennis would be agnosticism. Atheists are running around the field, following the players and shouting in their ears that tennis sucks. They are playing, just a different sport.
That doesn't make any sense. Believing the absence of something is still a belief.
The more famous, and more apt comparison would be, "if you choose not to decide, youve still made a choice."
You are conflating faith with acceptance. I don’t believe in science I accept science as fact and do not accept superstition as anything more than superstition. I don’t have a belief that there is no god I simply have no evidence to support their existence. If there were evidence to support the existence of a supreme being then there would no longer be any need for faith.
Which takes me back to my first point. Believing there is no god is not the same as "no religion." The survey has clearly delineated the two seeing as the atheist group is 3% and other surveys have shown "no religion/religious affilitation" to be as high as 30%
Your first point is wrong, you repeating it doesn't make it more true.
Look at the data in this thread. How can you say im wrong? 3% vs 30% is not a rounding error. These surveys clearly delineate between "no religion" and "atheist"
Shit, even just google it
Atheists don't necessarily believe there is no god. Not believing that there is is not the same as believing that there's not
I think we are saying the same thing
I think I get what you're saying. As far as the poll goes, it calls "a belief in the nonexistence of any gods" "atheist," and it calls "a lack of any religious beliefs" "no religion."
I just wanted to clarify that the poll is incorrect, and that "atheist" encompasses both sets of people
OP was talking about non-religiously identifying Australians, and comparing it to Americans who identify specifically with the term atheist, I was providing a more apt number.
Atheism still has a stigma associated with it here. Not sure now, but there were surveys less than 10 years ago saying that Americans were less likely to vote for an atheist than for a convicted felon (and this was before Trump!). Other polls often use the term "Nones" to refer to people who don't affiliate with a major religion, but that tends to include atheists, agnostics, areligious people, and some others thrown in there.
There's a good explainer here: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/01/24/religious-nones-in-america-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
That poll has 17% of Nones as atheist, which would be about 5% of the population, just above the 3% in the chart from OP. Although I bet part of the "agnostics" are agnostic atheists, but don't use the term. That being said, Pew also has this page: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/age-race-education-and-other-demographic-traits-of-us-religious-groups/#age
That shows that people under 50 are way different. 73% atheist of 69% None is about 50%, which means that a full half of Americans under 50 identify as atheist. So, a BIG generational gap.
I mean yeah, I don't identify with the term atheist because it ended up shifting meaning to anti-theist on the internet in my opinion. I guess I just conflated it with "no religion" in my head, which is what the Australian statistic is.
I also don't relate to the term cause I just don't participate in religion at all. From my experience most people who call themselves atheists are (ironically) religiously opposed to religion. It's just as exhausting as the fundamentalists even if I relate more to the belief.