Floating Boy

Atheists identified as America’s most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (3/20/2006) — American’s increasing acceptance
of religious diversity doesn’t extend to those who don’t believe in a
god, according to a national survey by researchers in the University of
Minnesota’s department of sociology.

From
a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university
researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent
immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing
their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group
most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry.

Even
though atheists are few in number, not formally organized and
relatively hard to publicly identify, they are seen as a threat to the
American way of life by a large portion of the American public.
“Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population,
offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance
over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, associate sociology
professor and the study’s lead researcher.

Edgell also argues
that today’s atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists
have played in the past—they offer a symbolic moral boundary to
membership in American society. “It seems most Americans believe that
diversity is fine, as long as every one shares a common ‘core’ of
values that make them trustworthy—and in America, that ‘core’ has
historically been religious,” says Edgell. Many of the study’s
respondents associated atheism with an array of moral indiscretions
ranging from criminal behavior to rampant materialism and cultural
elitism.

Edgell believes a fear of moral decline and resulting
social disorder is behind the findings. “Americans believe they share
more than rules and procedures with their fellow citizens—they share an
understanding of right and wrong,” she said. “Our findings seem to rest
on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not
concerned with the common good.”

The researchers also found
acceptance or rejection of atheists is related not only to personal
religiosity, but also to one’s exposure to diversity, education and
political orientation—with more educated, East and West Coast Americans
more accepting of atheists than their Midwestern counterparts.

The
study is co-authored by assistant professor Joseph Gerteis and
associate professor Doug Hartmann. It’s the first in a series of
national studies conducted the American Mosaic Project, a three-year
project funded by the Minneapolis-based David Edelstein Family
Foundation that looks at race, religion and cultural diversity in the
contemporary United States. The study will appear in the April issue of
the American Sociological Review.

my ears are on a strict diet.

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.” It wasn’t a murder. I think God just died of old age. And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me. It seemed natural and right.

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion. I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star. They were beautiful. They made you warm and happy to think about. But I didn’t believe them. The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington. Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true.

Religion was too vague. God was different. He was something real, something I could feel. But there were only certain times when I could eel it. I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I’d had a bath, after I had washed my hair and crubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth. Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God. “I am clean, now. I’ve never been as clean. I’ll never be cleaner.” And somehow, it was God. I wasn’t sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean.

That wasn’t religion, though. There was too much of the physical about it. I couldn’t get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops. And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn’t last. I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, “God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall. He watches over all his children.” That jumbled it all up for me. But I was sure of one thing. If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn’t God. So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, “I am clean. I am sleepy.” And then I went to sleep. It didn’t keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less. I just knew that God wasn’t there. He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget.

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important. After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes. “Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings.” It usually worked. God became a super-father that couldn’t spank me. But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it.

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always? I began to see that he didn’t have much to do about hats, people dying or anything. They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice. I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing. It seemed a waste of time to have him. After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one. It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too. God was gone. We were younger. We had reached past him. Why couldn’t they see it? It still puzzles me.

An Essay by Frances Farmer

Posted in memory of Brandy Jane Knight.

I got there too early. Unbeknownst to me, it was also open mic
night. The guy at the door asked me if I "played laptop". I think the blank stare answered the question.

The first act (Divided Like a Saint’s if I remember correctly) played in the middle of the bar area, completely opposite the stage. They had a drummer with a single snare and kick drum set up between the pool tables, a violin player and an accoustic guitar. No mics, no amplification. I enjoyed. It was completely preservative free, organic, free range music. The rest of the open mic acts, aside from the guy on the guitar directly after Divided Like a Saint’s, was just various forms of knob twisting and button pushing, testing the limits of hipster patience.

Grand Buffet’s new DJ (DJ Jester the Filipino Fist) warmed up the set. He was probably the only DJ "I’ve" seen spin that was actually good. At least I was able to see and appreciate the timing and style. In the end, everybody profited and felt refreshed. The cat in the hat ate all the baby carrots.