This morning, when I opened my local paper, I saw an article with the headline Godless By Choice. “Oh dear,” I sighed to myself, getting ready for the usual line about how people without religious faith are people without moral values, about how they don’t believe anything, blah, blah, blah.
I was pleasantly surprised when my prejudice was proven wrong. Writer Dennis M. Mahoney does a really fair job of interviewing people who are atheist or agnostic, letting them speak for themselves and define themselves without snarky aftercomment. Mahoney also nicely zooms out to provide demographic context, looking at national and world surveys to discuss the large number of people without religion in the world and their distribution by nation and profession. Mahoney points me to The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, published next month, which includes world survey results by Pitzer College professor of sociology Phil Zuckerman. It turns out that people without supernatural faith make up the fourth-largest religious group in the world.
