by John Michael Spinelli

Created on: April 30, 2009   Last Updated: May 09, 2009

Ohio, Nation Less Religulous

Atheists, Humanists No Longer Fear Their Secular Orientation
April 30, 2009

COLUMBUS, OHIO: As the high tide of Republican control of government in Ohio and the nation recedes from the sea change made possible by the onset of the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, is the related retreat of religion among Americans being filled in part by atheists who no longer fear proclaiming their secular orientation?

The American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS ), performed in 2008 by investigators at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn, shows Americans are "slowly becoming less Christian," not because the dominant religious sect in America is being threatened by other world religions but from a general "rejection of all organized religions."

Whether "Religulous the documentary spoof released in 2008 about the absurdity of religion in general and the sheer goofiness of some true believers in particular, was a factor in the ARIS survey can only be attributed to either divine intervention sheer speculation. But such a movie would have been impossible to produce or show in public in decades past and would have been difficult to distribute just a few years ago. The times are indeed a changing

Other celebrity atheists like Christopher Hitchens , who believes religion poisons everything, or Richard Dawkins , who said he is against religion "because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world," have helped lead the charge out of the pew and into the public square, where others of their ilk will gather to brandish their status as non-believers.

Principal ARIS investigators Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, who conducted this third landmark series of large, nationally representative surveys that track changes in the religious loyalties of the U.S. adult population within the 48 contiguous states from 1990 to 2008 and that collected answers from over 54 thousand participants, said people who identified themselves as not being affiliated with any religious group grew by almost 20 million adults since 1990, or a rise from 8.2 to 15 percent of the total population.

More worrisome for traditional believers in "The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost," or as Bill Maher, the force behind Religulous, calls them, "people who believe in talking snakes." is that that figure rises to nearly 20 percent, or one in five adults, if those surveyed who didn't know their religious identification (0.9) or who refused to answer their key question

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