Traditionally¹, atheist means people without a belief in a god and agnostics means people that feel that “there must be something more, but no religion seems to fit more than the other”. I cannot see how you could not fit into either of these and still not be religious, except perhaps some forms of layman buddism.

Perhaps you are implying something else.

Saint Gasoline: Well, with that clarification, I can only agree wholeheartedly.

¹: Yeah, the word definitions might be a bit different. All people are agnostics according to the some of the definitions, but that would only be redundant in this text so I am not referring to those.

In the post previous to this one, for instance, my thesis is that science can never be truly popular, because people seem to be intuitively interested in mystery-mongering and other nonsense. This applies to atheists as well.

I also think that Benjamin is correct in that self-identifying atheists tend to be more skeptical in general than those who identify as members of the amorphous “nonreligious”. Atheists and agnostics tend to make up more than 70% of most skeptical organizations, for instance.

I live in Sweden, which has about 80-95% atheist/agnostic and free lower, middle and higher education (required by law up to our version of high school, actually). This should – by your arguments – lead to a population of people rejecting pseudoscience and move towards intellectual careers. My observation is that this isn’t true, since we cannot have 80% of our population in science, and the population self-corrects itself. We all being atheists/agnostics is a self-fulfilling situation, since we all raise our kids in non-religious homes, which makes them non-religious too.

Despite this, many people are now looking into “trendy” alternative remedies. We are also taking part of this “alternative medicine, being green” trend. Why is that? I had a thought about that a few days ago, and it’s regarding the current generation getting into the main parts of society. Most generations moves in cycles, so perhaps it’s the 60s returning again with all that hippie mumbo-jumbo.

I want to add the point that some people might just be “born” skeptics (perhaps due to early upbringing + slightly higher IQ + curiosity), and no matter how the people of the “general population” behave, there will always be just this subset of skeptics that really work in this way. The reason that USA have the small correlation of atheist = skeptic might be because you still have so few atheists there, and it’s the skeptic subset that end up atheists easiest. When the “hardcore” atheists disappear in the flood of layman atheists in America, perhaps you’ll see the same things that I do.

Of course, it might be that I’m overreacting. Living in Sweden certainly gives a person some standards in how to be a skeptic, and it’s generally known here that “USA is the country where all the lunatics live”. Perhaps our definition of drooling idiot is your definition of layman, and our definition of layman would be called “gifted people” in USA. I do not know. I do know – however – that the world will be a better place even though people might not stop believing in both religions and pseudoscience at the same time; getting rid of one of the two is certainly a good thing.

(I do not have time to proof-read. Apologies to all the typos that might be present)