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Irreligion is the absence or rejection of religious beliefs or practices.It encompasses a wide range of viewpoints drawn from various philosophical and intellectual perspectives, including atheism, agnosticism, religious skepticism, rationalism, secularism, and non-religious spirituality.
Atheists are between 4% and 7% of American adults. [1]: 18 [2] Agnostics make up between 4 and 5% of the adult population. [1]: 18 [2] [6] [7] [8] A growing proportion of people appear to be reporting no religious affiliation on surveys. [9] The percentage of Americans without religious affiliation, often labeled as "Nones", is between 22 and 31%.
Writers disagree on how best to define and classify atheism, [8] contesting what supernatural entities are considered gods, whether atheism is a philosophical position or merely the absence of one, and whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection; however, the norm is to define atheism in terms of an explicit stance against theism.
In 1811, The Necessity of Atheism was published by a young Oxford student, Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was one of the first printed, open avowals of irreligion in England. [citation needed] The Oracle of Reason, the first avowedly atheist periodical publication in British history, was published from 1841 to 1843 by Charles Southwell.
State atheism or atheist state is the incorporation of hard atheism or non-theism into political regimes. [27] It is considered the opposite of theocracy and may also refer to large-scale secularization attempts by governments. [ 28 ]
Atheist as a label of practical godlessness was used at least as early as 1577. [14] The term atheism was derived from the French athéisme, [15] and appears in English about 1587. [16] An earlier work, from about 1534, used the term atheonism. [17] [18] Related words emerged later: deist in 1621, [19] theist in 1662, [20] deism in 1675, [21 ...
The Soviet Union adopted the political ideology of Marxism–Leninism and by extension the policy of state atheism, which opposed the growth of religions. [7] It directed varying degrees of antireligious efforts at varying faiths, depending on what threat they posed to the Soviet state, and their willingness to subordinate themselves to political authority.
In Islam, atheists are categorized as kafir , a term that is also used to describe polytheists , and that translates roughly as "denier" or "concealer". Kafir carries connotations of blasphemy and disconnection from the Islamic community. In Arabic, "atheism" is generally translated ilhad , although this also means "heresy".