Serving Atheists

What is your view of the comparative psychological health of believers in God and atheists?

Here is a first look at some of the statistical data from the survey.  Below I have broken down the responses to the question probing what atheists think of the psychological health of believers versus non-believers broken down by male, female and those that identified as transgender:

What is your view of the comparative psychological health of believers in God and atheists?

As you can see from the above, the majority of non-believers –55.7%– feel that believers are less psychologically healthy than non-believers.

Here are just a few interesting comments that illustrate the depth of thought people have put into their responses:

• I’ve heard the same type of excuses made for abusive partners and “god” so many times it’s scary. Adherence to religious dogma is an abusive relationship. Your husband beats you because he’s afraid you’re cheating on him? He’s insecure and just wants to be sure you love him. You have cancer? God is testing your faith (he wants to be sure you love him). A massive power imbalance is not exactly a great predictor of a healthy relationship, is it? And what could be a bigger power imbalance than ANY HUMAN, and an omnipotent being? Here’s an interesting little article on the subject. http://atheism.about.com/od/whatisgod/p/AbuserAbusive.htm Or just Google “god religion abusive relationship”
• The research tells us that those who put their lives into (whoever’s) hands will be psychologically helahtier. Life is much less stressful when you don’t have to make deciusions for yourself, and all your friends are in complete agreement with you!
• To “believe”, which is to say, to have faith, is in this discussion meaning to accept a Theistic set of claims, without reasonable evidence that the claims are factual, and allow this acceptance to inform important decisions in life, including important moral choices. This is, to me, a sign of severe pshychological deficiency, and reflect an inability to deal with reality in a healthy way without the crutch of belief in the supernatural & dogmas.
• I don’t consider believing in an invisible being without rigorously tested and validated evidence to be psychologically healthy.

And, for comic relief,

• I would’ve chosen the last answer, but there are some atheists who believe in stupid shit, too.

Survey off-line as of 11:59PM 20 Jan 2013.

If there is anyone outside of the United States that would like to have the survey re-activated for research purposes please contact me.  Cross-national comparison data may be useful in some cases.

As of now we have 8,339 responses.

Beginning next week I will be posting results as will several collaborators.

Since the survey went “live” on December 1, 2012 the response has been extraordinarily good.  To date there have been 8,207 people that responded to the survey representing over 65 nations and every state in the US.  In 2008 I worked with Brother Richard on a similar survey that was live for three months and generated almost exactly the same number of responses.

Although we have generated an enormous amount of data -thanks to everyone that participated!- I have continued to keep the survey live because there are feelers (email messages describing the survey and other back channel efforts) out to non-believer groups in India, the UK and the Middle East and elsewhere with the hope being that we might get a flurry of responses from this or that nation that, ultimately, the data from which could be of service both to the the organizers and leaders in those nations and to those who hope to bring progress to international cooperation among and between organizations.

So, here we are in mid-January with about 20-40 responses per day, and I am considering pulling the plug, i.e., deactivating the survey.  So, if you know anyone or any organizational leader/blogger, etc. that might see some utility in rallying some additional responses, especially outside of the United States, now is the time.

The comment below was made in response to my last post regarding the difficulty in reaching out to non-believers in the Middle East. I think it is easy for many of us in the United States to be ignorant of the everyday struggles faced by our counterparts around the world, especially in Islamic nations.  This person’s comment, I think, is in some senses a call to action for those of us who are fortunate to be able to freely express our views.  How can we more demonstratively act in solidarity?

I agree. I myself originated from an Islamic country (unable to disclose) and are currently in the UK seeking asylum because of my Atheism. People in Islamic countries does not have any support for them facing the daily lives and tyranny of being forced into believing something that they don’t want to believe. Majority of Muslims are in the delusional state that they are in a war between forces of ‘good and evil’ in which for them being a Muslim and Islam is a force of good.

As of this morning there have been nearly 7500 respondents to the survey representing every state in the US and dozens of nations around the globe.  Canada, Australia and the UK are very well represented, fairly predictable since the survey is in English, but there are pockets of responses from Brazil, Germany and South Africa, among others.

But what, if anything, can be taken from these data?  Those that responded to the survey are demonstratively not a random sample of atheists world-wide, but rather very much a self-selected array of folks that most likely look somewhat different from the entire population of atheists.  But is a truly representative global sample of atheists possible?  I tend to think not, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I suspect that there are many, many atheists who are very closeted (even to themselves?) and that these individuals would never find the survey in the first place since visiting sites that might have a link to the survey (most prominently, Atheist Nexus) would be socially dangerous.  It is my position that exploratory data is better than none, though I am aware that some will disagree with this stance.

In the end, I feel that the narrative, qualitative data that is generated by the open-ended responses will be of the greatest value to those that are interested in moving forward issues of interest to atheists worldwide, especially in the United States.  The statistical, descriptive data will be interesting, to be sure, but I will be very mindful to stress that since the sample is not representative of the population of atheists any generalizations and/extrapolations must be critically examined.

As for the many “mini-polls” that accent this blog, everything above applies as well.

So, what are your thoughts?

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.