This is a review of the book: Atheists, A Ground Breaking Study of America's Nonbelievers by Bruce Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer. The late Bruce Hunsberger was a psychology professor in Canada and author of several other books relating to religion and the public. Robert Altemeyer, also a Canadian psychology professor is the author of the acclaimed book on right-wing authoritarians, The Authoritarian Specter.
The book which weighs in at about 150 pages is an examination of an atheist's place in society and society's attitudes towards atheists. Using a light-hearted tone, the authors discuss the statistics surrounding their surveys without getting bogged down by the numbers. The reader is asked to take several short surveys and tally them up before reading the discussion of the results.
The authors first describe the ideal survey they would have preferred to do and why that ideal was not feasible. Throughout the book, they offer advice on how to continue the research and what are the possible sources of error in their groundbreaking research.
The surveys conducted in 2002 were sent to people that actively participate in "Atheist" groups in San Francisco, Alabama, Idaho, and Manitoba. Parents of students attending a college in Manitoba, Canada were also sampled without regard to their religious persuasion. Within the Manitoba sample, a significant number of religious fundamentalists and agnostics were identified which were contrasted against all three atheist samples.
Prior to the discussions of the surveys, 40 case studies of San Francisco Atheists are summarized. The first 20 are examples of people that never experienced any strong religious indoctrination, while the other half recount the experiences of what the authors call "Amazing Atheists". These type of atheists grew up experiencing extreme religious indoctrination and moved to Atheism at some point in their life. Most report that they paid a heavy price for their lack of belief. The authors expressed surprise that most Atheists became Atheists not because of negative experiences among religious groups. A lot of Atheists reported that they became Atheists because they couldn't silence the doubt in their own minds. This result may point to a flaw in the author's definition of Atheism as a belief system as contrasted with a lack of being convinced of the existence of a proposed concept, named God.
It is customary in these types of surveys to not reveal any names. I couldn't help being reminded of a couple of "Amazing Atheists" . Two that immediately came to mind were Dan Barker and Ryan Sutter. Dan Barker was formerly an ordained Charismatic Christian pastor and is now an Atheist leader at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Ryan Sutter was a Jehovah's Witness who made his de-conversion process public in a weblog at ryansutter.net.
The surveys not only measured the degree of religiousness of participants, it also explored several other aspects of psychology. There were several subsections that attempted to measure other personality aspects. One chapter was devoted to measuring the degree to which beliefs are held dogmatically. The authors were surprised with their comparison of dogmatic measurements of atheists verses fundamentalists. The atheists turned out to be more dogmatic than expected.
Another chapter explored the degree of zeal participants exhibited when sharing their belief systems. The Christian fundamentalists results were as expected. Both their zeal for proselytizing and their dogmatic frame of mind were readily apparent in the data. Next, there was a chapter on religious ethnocentrism, which explored what atheists thought about religious groups. It's no surprise that Atheists in Alabama and Idaho had a low opinion of the fundamentalists. The San Francisco Atheists were less hostile toward the fundamentalists and as expected fundamentalists were hostile toward everyone outside their group.
The measurement of dogmatism seemed to be flawed from an Atheist's point of view, at the very least. The survey presented two hypothetical situations. The first one was a hypothetical discovery of an "Ancient Scroll" that was validated by scientific evidence to come from the Biblical time of Jesus. The scroll corroborated the stories in the Gospels. The authors made the assumption that this hypothetical discovery should be able to convert Atheists that are not dogmatic to Theists. Furthermore, the authors contrasted this measurement of dogmatism among Atheists with a different hypothetical event for the Theists. In the Theist's hypothetical event, a different ancient scroll was discovered and scientifically validated to come from a time much older than the Biblical time of Jesus and written in ancient Greek. In this scroll, along with the teachings of ancient "mystery religions", the story of Jesus in the Gospels was found. The only difference was that the Jesus figure was named Attis. Here, the authors posit that Theists that don't reject their beliefs are dogmatic. First of all, these hypothetical situations are not at equal ends of the belief spectrum. Second, the Theists should not be expected to respect scientific evidence of any kind. Next, many scholars would agree that hypothetical situation for the Theists is actually reality. May Theists already have a retort for that situation. They claim that the Devil planted the Jesus story in ancient myths in order to tempt their faith.
The book concludes with very interesting responses from the San Francisco Atheists that participated in the study. They were sent a manuscript of the book to review. None of them were surprised to learn that most Atheists turned out to be around 60, male, and highly educated. One countered that younger people are too busy to participate in Atheist groups. Just about all of them took issue with the test of dogmatism. One of them, self identified as a humanist, pointed out that "I [don't] need to deny there's cheese on the moon or that there's evidence for a benign all powerful deity, given all the needless suffering of innocents in the real world". Overall, the scientific study conducted by two Canadian psychology professors was a welcome examination of people who are often maligned by the general public.

Free-thought and Science programs on the Net

Recently a proliferation of Free-thought and science related podcasts, weblogs, and other content have been made available to the initiated. In this blog, I'm going to list some of my favorites.

Point of Inquiry: http://pointofinquiry.com
This is my favorite free-thought podcast. Every week there's a fascinating knowledgeable guest.

Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/

Skepticality: http://www.skepticality.info/index.php

Naturalisms.org: http://naturalisms.org/

Freedom From Religion Foundation: http://ffrf.org

Ex-Christian: http://exchristian.net/
This site has some very funny YouTube posts and podcasts. Check this link out: How do we know that Christians are delusional?