{"id":134,"date":"2006-03-22T14:33:45","date_gmt":"2006-03-22T14:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/22\/generations-of-atheism\/"},"modified":"2006-03-22T14:33:45","modified_gmt":"2006-03-22T14:33:45","slug":"generations-of-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/03\/22\/generations-of-atheism\/","title":{"rendered":"Generations of Atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Writing the previous post about religion reminded me that I never did comment on the two student panels on religious matters that I went to a couple of weeks ago. The details aren’t terribly important, but they provide some local anecdotal support for Sean’s demographic point<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Alternate post title: “I Believe the Children Are Our Future”)<\/p>\n

The two events were panel discussions featuring students talking about “Growing up X in America” where “X” is a religion of your choice. I missed the first two (X=”Muslim” and X=”Jewish”), because they fell during a hellishly busy part of the term for me, but I made it to the last two, X=”Atheist\/ Agnostic” and X=”Ethnic Catholic.”<\/p>\n

The Atheist\/ Agnostic panel was entirely made up of students, and mostly consisted of stories about how they had wandered into atheism at some point in their lives. The exception being a history major who delivered a ten-minute rant about how religion was historically a tool of class oppression, and we must smash the state, yadda, yadda, yadda. The Ethnic Catholic panel featured a group of students, but also the college Catholic chaplin, who held forth for far too long about Catholic doctrine, before the students took over to talk about the role of faith in their lives.<\/p>\n

As you might expect, the two panels were mostly very different in tone, but thinking about them together, I’m struck by the implications of the answers they gave to some questions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the case of the Atheist\/ Agnostic panel, the interesting element was that all of the students on the panel came from families of mixed religious backgrounds– one parent Christian, one Jewish, or one parent Buddhist, one Christian, etc. When I pointed that out, they speculated that this left them with a sense that there were other options, and noted that their parents hadn’t really pressured them to pick one or the other. One of them said “I asked my parents about it, and they said ‘What were we going to do? Flip a coin?'”<\/p>\n

In the case of the Catholic panel, the interesting response came when another faculty member asked the students whether they preferred to hang out with other Catholic students, or date other Catholic students. They had just gone on at some length about the vital role their relationship with the Church played in their lives, but every one of them turned out to be currently involved in a relationship with somebody of another faith. None of them were particularly bothered by this (though most of them admitted they hadn’t told their parents).<\/p>\n

Now, of course, “anecdote” is not the singular form of “data,” but it strikes me that both of these are sort of indicative of a loosening in the way people view religion. My parents’ generation wasn’t allowed to be quite so casual about that sort of thing– there’s a story on my father’s side of the family about the time one of my uncles had the temerity to start dating a Protestant, and Uncle Tony had to lay down the law. (It’s not quite as ominous as that description makes it sound…) My grandmother considered it a huge concession to allow all three of her sons to marry Irish girls, but non-Catholics would’ve been completely out of the question (she did concede that the Irish thing worked out all right…).<\/p>\n

Now, granted, I’m dealing with an effete liberal elite Northeastern private college demographic, here (though three or four of the students involved were children of recent immigrants), but I find this a hopeful sign. Given the increased prominance of fundamentalist Protestants, it’s easy to forget the degree to which most of our society has become more relaxed about religion over time. Forty years ago, the relationships they take for granted would’ve been much less casual, while today, they looked at the faculty asking questions like we were some sort of space aliens for finding it worthy of comment.<\/p>\n

So, the answer to the question I mentioned in a previous post<\/a>, “How do we make atheism more acceptable politically?” may just be “Wait until the old people die– their kids are much more sane.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing the previous post about religion reminded me that I never did comment on the two student panels on religious matters that I went to a couple of weeks ago. The details aren’t terribly important, but they provide some local anecdotal support for Sean’s demographic point. (Alternate post title: “I Believe the Children Are Our… Continue reading Generations of Atheism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}