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Reasonable Doubts recently released a podcast on Dr. Luke Galen’s Profile of the Godless at CFI Michigan and CFI international. Dr. Galen combined several prior studies with an extensive study on non-belief with a large enough sample to go into sub-populations of unbelief.
Dr. Galen also produced this pdf of his statistical research so easy disaggregation of the data can be done.
Here’s some interesting facts about Humanists in CFI: most people who identify as humanists will primarily identify as atheists when pressed, humanists and atheists had stronger contentment ratings than agnostics and “spiritual but not religious” types, humanists tended to be five years older than atheists (although both tended to be in their 40s in the median and average), and that humanists tended to take a more “agreeable” attitude towards the community.
However, Dr. Galen’s research does seem to indicate that despite the fact that people have a less of a stigma against non-believers if they used words other than atheists, non-theists tended to define themselves as a oppositional movement.
My speculation on the implications is that voices like that of Paul Kurtz, Sherwine Wine, and even A.C. Grayling have been displaced by voices like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins. Also many people in the late forties came out of moderate religious households in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but people raised in the 1970s and 1980s grew up in polarized households.
One thing this leads me to worry about is that if we move away from being a marginalized group in the larger society we will many people lose a sense of direction.
What flaw I see in Dr. Galen’s study is that it almost strictly focuses on nontheists with formal group affiliations, but this misses probably a majority of the non-religious who have no such formal ties.
