Godless perspective

Data from The American Religious Identification Survey is floating around the blogosphere right now. One of the points noted is that the number of Americans who avow "No Religon" has gone from 8.2% to 14.1% of the American population between 1990 and 2001. Now, one meme floating around is conflating this increase with an increase in the number of atheists. But, one has to be careful, just because someone rejects organized religion does not imply that they reject theism ( belief in a personal God). In fact, just because someone rejects theism does not imply they reject organized religion (many Unitarian-Universalists, Buddhists and Jains and some Hindus reject theism but are members of an organized religion). The aggregate total for The American Religious Identification Survey for atheists and agnostics is ~1%, and this is probably an underestimate (the term "atheist" and "agnostic" are scary to many people), but it gets ...