Craig's Blog of Destiny

Next week Bill Maher has a movie coming out, Religulous.  Unfortunately, it’s from the same director as Borat (I really didn’t like Borat).  Religulous is a documentary about religion, and as you can imagine, coming form Bill Maher, it’s a comedy and will probably be pretty funny.  I’m a little ambivalent about seeing it – I’m worried that no matter how funny Bill Maher finds some things, those religious fanatics he’s bound to come across will irritate me.

What has caught my attention, and prompted this post, is something Bill Maher said on Larry King back in August.  You can see the segment here.  He says a lot of interesting things, I particularly like the way he ends the segment (“At some point, mankind is going to have to shed this skin if he’s going to move forward.”), but something that really struck me is what he says about the number of “rationalists.”  He says they represent “somewhere around 16% of people” which he says is a greater percentage than any other minority, “bigger than Blacks, or Jews, or Homosexuals, or NRA members, Teachers Union, Hispanics….”  I felt compelled to check his numbers, and found that indeed that seems to be the case.  According to census results from 2000 (which have been compiled into a Wikipedia article you can see here) the percentage of those that list themselves as No Religion/Atheist/Agnostic is 15%.  The next closest racial minority was Hispanics or Latinos at 14.8% and Blacks or African Americans at 13.4%.  Interestingly, the Jewish percentage is only 1.4%.  There are roughly 4 million NRA members, so that percentage would be about 1.3%.  The numbers I could find on Homosexuals indicate somewhere around 1.5%.  The NEA (National Education Association) has 3.2 million members, or about 1.1%.  So indeed it appears that the rationalists outnumber just about any other minority. 

A larger minority than any other minority, yet they’re surprisingly silent.  That got me wondering:  if there are so many of these folks, why so quiet?  I believe there are two major reasons for this.  First, rationalists have no compulsion to convert.  There is no need. The universe, the world, America…, it all is what it is and our “beliefs” or the “beliefs” or those around us are irrelevant.  “The universe is, so far as I know, indifferent to what you believe or disbelieve.” Secondly, the very nature of the dialogue precludes any positive outcome.  When one side of an argument uses as its proof un-documentable evidence there is no way to have meaningful discourse either in favor of or in opposition to that position.  A rationalist will always think:  “What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”  A religious or spiritual person will try to say that things are what they are despite the facts.

Encouragingly, the “rationalist” numbers are growing at a much more rapid pace than any other group, up 6.6% since 1990.  The total Christian categories are down 8.5%.  This becomes even more telling when you recognize that many of those Christian categories do have active proselytizing programs (LDS down 0.1%, Jehovah’s Witnesses down 0.1%) and the “rationalist” movement is noticeably quiet.  The largest increase among Christians was the “Christian – no denomination reported” which was up 2.5%.  That doesn’t strike me as real positive for the organized religions.