A collection of essays and rants, inspired and taken from a series that I have been writing for several years concerning this subject. A stirring account of how certain issues are poisoned by organized religions and why we as a society would be much...
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"All thinking men are atheists."
– Ernest Hemmingway
As stated back in chapter 2, when I was attending University I took a course titled 'Introduction to Religious Ethics'. I had been an atheist since high school and had absolutely no intention of being quiet during this course. During that summer, a question was fielded that I thought was very interesting. Someone asked our professor what was in his opinion the number one cause of atheism. His answer was given without hesitation: education.
A lot of people in the class who were religious were infuriated by this answer, but he stood by it. Education is the number one way to becoming an atheist he said. The more educated a person is, the less likely they are to follow any organized religion. There are exceptions to this case, but his premise was and is true. The more education a person attains and the more that person learns to think for themselves, the more likely they are to make their own life choices and not follow the crowd.
This isn't just a theory; there are numbers to back it up. According to a recent Gallup poll conducted in the United States in 2011, almost twenty percent (17%) declared the Bible a book of fables written by people. That's only eight percent away from a full quarter of those polled. It's a far cry from the number I've heard from those who are devoutly religious. They are under the impression the number of atheists in America is roughly around six percent, which is not even close to the actual figures according to the previously mentioned Gallup poll.
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According to these figures, the percent of people who believe that the bible is the actual word of God drops by more than twenty percent just between high school and some college. That drop increases to thirty percent when you poll people who actually graduated from college. The number of people who believe the bible is nothing more than a book of fables increases in the same poll, going from thirteen percent and climbing as education increases up to twenty-five percent at the post grad level. These are solid numbers that cannot be ignored. The more a person is educated, the less likely they are to believe religious dogma. I'm willing to even speculate that if religion was forced onto people at such an early age before their education begins, I am confident that a lot more people wouldn't willingly follow or support organized religions.
