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Respondents to religious-belief polls may define "atheism" differently or draw different distinctions between atheism, non-religious beliefs, and non-theistic religious and spiritual beliefs. [180] A 2010 survey published in Encyclopædia Britannica found that the non-religious made up about 9.6% of the world's population, and atheists about 2.0%.
Marx believed that people turn to religion in order to dull the pain caused by the reality of social situations; that is, Marx suggests religion is an attempt at transcending the material state of affairs in a society—the pain of class oppression—by effectively creating a dream world, rendering the religious believer amenable to social ...
Jewish atheism usually refers to the atheism of people who are ethnically and (at least to some extent) culturally Jewish.Contrary to popular belief, the term "Jewish atheism" is not a contradiction because Jewish identity encompasses not only religious components, but also ethnic and cultural ones.
In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. [2] [3] Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. [3] [4] Atheism is contrasted with theism, [5] [6] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists. [6] [7]
David Hume was accused of atheism for his writings on the "natural history of religion"; [3] Pierre Bayle was accused of atheism for defending the possibility of an ethical atheist society in his Critical Dictionary, and Baruch Spinoza was frequently regarded as an atheist for his "pantheism". However, all three of these figures defended ...
[81] Jonathan Sacks, author of The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning, feels the new atheists miss the target by believing the "cure for bad religion is no religion, as opposed to good religion". He wrote: Atheism deserves better than the new atheists whose methodology consists of criticizing religion without ...
Catholic atheists accept the culture, traditions, rituals and norms of Catholicism, but deny the existence of God. Miguel de Unamuno 's 1930 novel San Manuel Bueno, Mártir depicts Catholic atheism. According to research in 2007, only 27% of Catholics in the Netherlands considered themselves theist ; 55% were ietsist or agnostic deist and 17% ...
Accurate demographics of atheism are difficult to obtain since conceptions of atheism and self-identification are context dependent by culture. [12] In 2009, Pew stated that only 5% of the US population did not have a belief in a god and out of that small group only 24% self-identified as "atheist", while 15% self-identified as "agnostic" and ...