Which Ideology has the greatest % of atheists?

Post Reply New Topic

Heh, I remember awhile that I used to include a poll in every thread, often also having a joke answer.

In hindsight, I really ought to have included "what ideological subdivision?" in my progressive leftist thread.

That's why I qualified myself by referring to Marxist communists and then Marxist-Leninists. A more generic communism, as with the Anabaptists you have mentioned, may emphasize communal cooperation as an act of holiness under their god. Certainly Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism are quite different beasts from this, though.

Right-libertarianism may at least theoretically permit a person to choose atheism, but my impression is that many libertarians are fairly socially conservative in their personal lives.

This is something I haven't actually heard of before, but I guess almost any synthesis of beliefs is possible.

The earliest Christian communities organized themselves along communist line. There was collective or mutual ownership of the property other than purely personal property such as clothing. See Agape.

ruveyn

Yes, they did, but when one considers the scale of "government" today, we meet with problems comparing the two, the colloquial apples and oranges.

Does the staunchest of Hudderites vote for a communist party? (I'm not 100% sure if they believe in voting, but my point is illustrated here)

What can work for a society of 100 to 1000 people, in an area of a few square miles doesn't work for a society in the millions... if not hundreds of millions, in an area of millions of square miles.

Now, that doesn't eliminate the political ideology from the political spectrum, but it does play an effect in whether an individual with a "consistent social philosophy" would support the political philosophy.

I wouldn't exactly know. I would imagine that a lot of the most conservative people might really fall into classical liberalism on Master_Pedant's categorization scheme, due to their ideas about "constitutions" and "founding fathers" and "states rights", with a lot of other ones really falling into neoliberalism, but this is still difficult.

I mean, as it stands, the group we're examining is pretty small to begin with, and I wouldn't know how to estimate how many objectivists there are and so on and so forth.

Even further, this isn't a matter of "conservative in personal lives" necessarily anyway, but rather as Greta Christina points out, there is a lot of religion among the LGBT:
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta ... unity.html

And the LGBT isn't socially conservative.


Right, well, the difficult question is just how many of these people there are. I mean, the anti-clericalism of many parts of the radical left might ward some people off, but I'd still think that there might be a lot of Christian socialists or Christian left-libertarians simply because those are possible ideologies, and given that atheism is a small group, even if a small fraction of Christians(or whatever sorts of theists one likes) they can still swamp atheists in that group.

I'd imagine its left-libertarians, even if there isn't an atheist majority in that group. The simple reason is because its a very small group now - most libertarians tend to be on the "RIGHT" and ex-hippie leftists with libertarian-ish views still subscribe to some variant of social welfare liberalism in the US - so there is greater propesenity for uncommon elements to swamp into it

Left-libertarian is pretty "extremist" - and (as you've noted) "extremist" groups tend to have higher IQs, but they also likely hold other beliefs radically different from the norm. I'd be surprised if this didn't apply to theology as well.

Furthermore, many important left-libertarians figures (Chomsky, Bakunin, and Goldman) tend to be atheists. I'd be surprised if fewer than 46% of left-libertarians were atheist.

I am very much tempted to agree with you, for very similar reasons. I just don't have very much of a feel for left-libertarianism or for the categories you put forward.

In hindsight, it was a pretty stupid idea to include what I consider the anachronism of "classical liberalism" and the redudancy of neoliberalism as poll options. I merely did it because I wanted to spread the meme that "classical liberalism" ≠ "modern right-libertarianism" and that a friend of mine (whose converting to right-libertarianism) took objection with conflating libertarianism and neoliberalism.

I agree. Nobody really knows who fits where in practice, so as a polling group you just complexified things.

I mean, classical liberalism is a doctrine that we are sort of far away from and modern right-libertarianism is just a memetic mutation of it.

Neoliberalism is just a more "pragmatic" pro-market ideology, but that could reasonably have overlaps given the numbers of pragmatic libertarians.

I really don't care that much, and honestly, my exposure to libertarianism is really more often from economics professors than the men on the street that other people often are closer to. Economics professors really don't bother with the distinctions drawn at all.

I tend to association classical liberalism with the desire to forum liberal-democratic institutions and create a post-mercantilist, roughly market economy then with the right-libertarian notion of purely unregulated free markets with a state servicing private contracts.

And I hereby demand that a moderator strike classical liberalism and neoliberalism from the poll!

I say communism because classic communism (to my knowledge) rejects formal religion ultimately saying the state is god.

Ah, but really.... if you believe the state is god... you are not an atheist.. You might call yourself one, but are you?

More like the state takes the place of God.

Also, communist countries, though discouraging religion, know better than to actively stamp it out. "The People" have a choice: They can go to the state-sponsored church or the can do nothing. But if there is only ONE church, and you disagree with church doctrine, and the church isn't anything more than a front for more propaganda, it isn't likely you're going to want to go. Churches like that eventually just become tourist attractions.

Belarus is very much like that. They have the (I think) Russian Orthodox Church. But other denominations setting up churches independently run the risk of being deported. Those churches tend to stay on the move to avoid the KGB, and efforts to convert people to Christianity usually happen under some other kind of front.

So, perhaps more people living under communism are 'atheists' but that doesn't mean more communist ideologists are 'atheists'

Though the churches set up in communist regimes are "theoretically like the dictatorship of the proletariat" they are supposedly passing things, that will only exist until they can fade away on their own. They are necessary evils for the transition to real communism.

If the communist regimes had worked, it would've been likely that by now, the buildings would've crumbled into dust because people would no longer "need" them.

And yes, the state replaces god, you are right, it doesn't become god. But that is only semantics. Because you, and most people define god in what I believe to be an errant way. And... I could get into a whole argument that that definition was at least in part the cause of the failure of soviet communism. (the ideologues that set up the system tried to apply the "infallible, inerrant, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, omnimoralistic" definition to the state as it replaced 'god'. When one does that, one opens up to horrible corruption.