Astral Codex Ten

atheists

3 min read

atheists

Article

atheists is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 09, 2021 and August 11, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion”; “The two most skeptical groups are … evangelicals and atheists”. It most often appears alongside 1960s America, 1964 Civil Rights Act, Amazon.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: February 09, 2021
  • Last seen: August 11, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Why We're Polarized
February 09, 2021 · Original source
Klein calls this "the Democratic party more successfully resisting polarization", and thinks of this as related to structural differences between the two parties. He says that the Republican Party represents the modal American on various characteristics, eg Christian (the most common religion), white (the most common race), straight (the most common sexual orientation), etc, whereas the Democrats represent everyone else (eg Muslims, Jews, atheists, and every minority religion; blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and every minority race; etc). That means the Republicans are more ideologically uniform - Christians are genuinely similar to other Christians, but Jews are only superficially similar to Muslims by virtue of their non-Christianness. That means ideology can't really capture the Democratic Party in the same way it captures the Republican Party. One point kind of in support of this - ask Democrats their favorite news source, and you get a long tail of stuff (most popular is CNN at 15%, then NPR at 13%, and so on). But ask conservatives and it's dominated by FOX (47%). Does this lack of news-source diversity reflect a lack of ideological diversity? Could be.
Will Nonbelievers Really Believe Anything?
August 11, 2022 · Original source
The two most skeptical groups are . . . evangelicals and atheists. Quite the Baptists and Bootleggers alliance.
Inline links: Baptists and Bootleggers
We find a similar pattern. Agnostics and people with “no particular religion” are more likely than Protestants to believe in astrology, but outright atheists are much less likely.
Strongly religious people and outright atheists were usually less likely to believe in conspiracy theories. The conspiracy believers were usually somewhere in the middle: either weakly religious people who never went to church, or vague agnostics.