First and foremost I am compassionate, kind, moral human being who doesn’t need an imaginary friend to be compassionate, kind, and moral.
Your unrelenting zeal
[[ to point this out to the 90% of humanity who find the
[imaginary] perception of a divine presence to be rather comforting…
too comforting to fully engage skepticism ]]
is duly noted.
Feel free to avoid repetition repetition avoid repetition to avoid repetition
any time you think about it.
No, it is only 66% of humanity who find perception of a divine presence to be rather comforting. The other 33% has to slog along trying to make progress through science and reason without the comforting divine presence. What makes it harder is when the 66% insist that because we don’t have the comforting divine presence we can’t have wonderfully good and meaningful lives without being reminded about what we are missing.
All I need is a reasonable citation, and I will repeat your statistic as need requires. Thank you, Patrick.
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Maybe in the future you could force yourself to quote the number - - along with the sentence you find it in for context. In the article I find evidence for MY statement, rather than yours: it presents a global number somewhere between 85% and 90%!
My original statement was:
You countered that the number was closer to 66%.
Aside from the fact I couldn’t find anything more relevant than this chart which ranges
from age 18 to 40+ for the entire world…
You are implying either that my statement embraces “adults affiliated with a religious group” (as on this chart), or that my statement embraces some mysterious combination of “identify with a religion, believe in God or engage in religious practices”.
As found in this sentence at the top of page 5 of the article:
“In the United States, religious congregations have been graying for decades, and young adults are
now much less religious than their elders. Recent surveys have found that younger adults are far
less likely than older generations:
o to identify with a religion,
o believe in God or
o engage in a variety of religious practices.”
While the last of the 3 criteria seems closest to what I said in sociological terms (religious practices),
it doesn’t really sound like my statement: “who find the . . . perception of a divine presence to be rather comforting.”
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This conversation needs a new thread really, lest the disability/image of God theme be lost.
But it’s relevant that watching a YouTube video of a “Christian-Atheist Book Club”, the speaker asked for a show of hands to see where the balance lay. “How many Christians?” got the response you’d accept (around 50% in this unrepresentative assembly).
What was interesting was that “How many atheists?” got a very hesitant and sparse response and requests to allow more latitude, eventually ending in something like, “Atheists, skeptics, agnostics, people who don’t believe in the Christian God.” That got the other 50%. This, of course, was a US audience, which is very untypical of the wider world, of course.
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You are right Jon. Done.