What responses to stigmatization look like
Below is a “word cloud” of the last 25 responses to the survey question, “Please provide a recent example of a social situation where you experienced stigmatization because you are an atheist.” So over 4000 people have done the survey and nearly 1200 responded to this open-ended question about personal stories related to stigma and atheism.
4 Comments
Born 82 years ago Atheist. When asked if I had morals, my answer is yes taught to me by a Catholic father & Lutheran mother.Good to me is the arts,science & mother earth,Bad is political parties,nationalism & all religions.
Yet another charmless pedant here: Most of the questions in the 3rd section are based on assumptions, e.g that atheism needs organisations, that the organisations need leaders, and that there are things that the organisations “should” be doing. You are making it seem as though atheism needs to be organised in the same way as religions. One of the appeals of atheism is that it frees us from religious models of organisation; you appear to assume that we should mimic them.
You also do not give some valid options for some questions: e.g. 7.2: What I feel in public gatherings where religion is invoked has nothing to do with discomfort; it is annoyance.
All in all, a very poorly designed questionnaire; if one of my GCSE students came up with something like that for a data-handling exercise, I’d get him/her to review the criteria for effective questionnaires and then to redo about half the questions.
I could not get past the first 3 questions of your survey. I had to duck when it started throwing rhetorical lead weights such as “morality” at me. As a careful thinker I avoid simplistic terms such as “good” and “bad”, and I have know idea what you mean by “psychologically healthy”. I guess that you could take this comment as evidence that atheists are charmless pedants, so, cheers, but I have little hope that this survey will yield any thing of value.
Another charmless pedant here who thought the first 3 questions were ridiculous. I did complete the survey, though as the questions were clearly rooted in US experience, there were plenty I couldn’t relate to at all.