“Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
I'm going to shamelessly rip off this entire post from butcept at My Two Cents. Hopefully she won't sue me. Somehow I get threatened with lawsuits rather often from writing group people (butcept being one of the two facilitators)-- and I haven't done anything to them.
I write this for two reasons. 1. I think it's interesting. 2. I'm trying not to look at Twitter to see all of the Deathly Hallows reactions. Stupid Twitter.
Anyways, last meeting she did a poll of our religious views. There were only six of us there, but here are the results:
1 atheist
1 apatheist (technically atheist but doesn't really care)
1 apathetic (really doesn't care at all)
3 agnostics (or perhaps not; we maintain that it's impossible to know)
And I'll go ahead and add three people who have come to a lot of meetings despite none of them being there Wednesday night:
1 more atheist
1 non-denominational
1 belonging to a Quaker Meeting that has absolutely no "requirements" regarding theology
And the only thing we have in common by default is a love for writing. Most of us have done some amount of acting (or want to). We all read a lot, of course. Most are musicians of some sort or another. And the average writer (according to a random website I saw, so don't necessarily give it too much credence) apparently has an IQ far higher than the average human. Oh, and one more thing: we're all awesome. ;)
Now, nine people isn't really an accurate survey, but...I don't know. Take what you want from it.
(Note in regard to fairness: there is another member who would come regularly and meets all of the other similarities, except her church's youth group meets on Wednesdays so she skips out on us. And I'm not sure about the rest of the members, so for all I know this is pure coincidence, even if the six of us are the ones who come more often.)
(Another note: And now I'm incredibly angry because it turns out my aunt would have given me a ride home from the movie theater after the midnight showing of Harry Potter because she's always up late anyway, and...I have a pretty freaking awesome aunt. Dangitdangitdangit. Oh well.)
I think that it is more indicative of the 'youth of today'. I think that we, as a whole, are more likely to be atheists than probably those of a previous generation, as it is far more acceptable now.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think ,artistic people tend to be liberal and liberal people tend to be less religious than conservative people.
I don't know if it is a more common thing now than it was, say, during the Enlightenment. While it's certainly possible (and increasingly more common) to be both a theist and a humanist, humanism was originally something of a counter-movement to the Church, so there were clearly plenty of non-"religious" people then.
ReplyDeleteIt's just, as you said, more acceptable to be and to openly discuss.
But as for artistic -> liberal -> less religious, yes.
I agree about the fact that more of the younger generation is more humanist than . But I also think it feels more common to us, us being you, me, elfarmy, and the people around us because we live in a pretty high tech, strong science-and-mathematical community. It's really a small circle that doesn't share the rest of the views of our state (except for the last election, NC has been a guaranteed Red state) and most definitely, our country (we elected dubya a second time, even after he showed us what an idiot he was). Look at Bachmann going on with her anti-gay, pro-christian agenda to win the republican vote. And that there are actually people in this world that love that...
ReplyDelete