6 ms·

90% of Atheists Have Been Vaccinated

55 points by donohoe 5y ago

slaymaker1907 5y ago
I think it's also notable how Catholics are doing in this regard as well.
- AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
  From personal experience (so not too sure how much you can generalize this), I've found the anti-science sentiment to be lower in Catholic communities compared to many of the protestant branches of Christianity I've interacted with. As for Catholics, even the pope / the vatican is pushing for vaccination: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-08/pope-francis-appeal-covid-19-vaccines-act-of-love.html https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-08/pope-francis...
  - sapientiae3 5y ago
    I’m sure the Catholic priest who first postulated the Big Bang theory would be pleased. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
  - beerandt 5y ago
    This pope pushing for just about anything will cause more Catholics to outright reject it than to embrace it.
krapp 5y ago
Checkmate, theists.
mistrial9 5y ago
Why can't I select text on that page? Why are conclusions regarding religious affiliation spoken in the same sentence as hostile and derogatory commentary ? Everyone reading this - check your weaponized language at the door !
- hansvs 5y ago
  That's weird, why would a website with a freely accessible article not allow text to be copied? Just wondering what the point is...
  - dkdk8283 5y ago
    I think the modern browser API allowing sites to block selections is the real problem. Same with intercepting copy.
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Might be paranoia about “ownership of their content” or it might be a misguided attempt to prevent the kinds of spam blogs that duplicate the content of other blogs and spam search engines with the content. Any spammer worth their salt would not be manually copying text, they would be automatically scraping sites.
- mikestew 5y ago
  Why can't I select text on that page? show_wpcp_message('You are not allowed to copy content or view source'); return false; Umm, I'm not so sure about that last part. They do seem worried that someone is going to steal their IPz, though. The double exclamation points means they take it seriously: var image_save_msg = 'You are not allowed to save images!'; var no_menu_msg = 'Context Menu disabled!'; var smessage = "Content is protected !!"; Again, not so sure about that last part.
  - MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
    Such code is often copied from other sources, unattributed.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    I think the point about not being able to copy text, is about the publishers and authors, not the specific javascript code which implements the policy and will of the aforementioned.
- 5y ago
dm319 5y ago
If you're brought up from an early age that the basis of your morals and values require pure 'faith', then it stands to reason that you will always be insecure about your ability to reason for yourself. As a result you will look to elders in your community for guidance, be that an evangelical preacher or the pope, rather than making the decision for yourself using your own faculties.
- AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
  For having dealt with various religious communities, mostly Catholic, you'd be surprised how little people care about what the pope / their priest thinks, especially on anything outside the sphere of religious matters. There is also a strong distinction between science and spirituality. It is pretty obvious that there is more at play than simply religious (community, culture etc...) Just look at education levels for the various religious/non-religious groups: Christians and Jewish people are the most educated groups (more than all non-affiliated even) worldwide. Look at individual countries and these levels are completely switched around. See: https://www.pewforum.org/interactives/educational-attainment/ https://www.pewforum.org/interactives/educational-attainment...
dragonsky 5y ago
The personal reveal on this is just how clueless I am about how many different definitions of religion there actually are. Who would have thought that religion was broken down by skin colour? That said, this information is meaningless unless you control for the physical distribution of the religions across areas and compare that with the actual vaccination rates. Does religion really matter or is it just the religions relationship with it's location?
- jfengel 5y ago
  It's not exactly breaking down religion by skin color. There's nothing preventing white people from joining the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for example. But they'd be a minority, and the church's beliefs and traditions are oriented around the social situation of most of its constituents. Similarly, as this poll shows, there is a significant difference in the behavior of white and black Evangelicals. It's not as formalized as the AME, but people still self-segregate by race, and that affects what they believe and how they interact.
- eesmith 5y ago
  Some examples of religion broken down by skin color: - Most Southern Baptists once rejected racial integration and accepted white supremacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Formation_and_separation_of_black_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Fo... - Nation of Islam, "open to people of color but not whites" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam - Racist restrictions on Black people in the LDS Church until 1978 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormon_priesthood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormon_priest... In this case, "white evangelical" refers to something more like this description from the magazine "The Christian Century" (representing US mainline Protestantism) at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/american-evangelicalism-and-politics-whiteness https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/amer... : > Over the course of the 20th century, the evangelical coalition entwined theology, whiteness, and conservative politics. The histories we tell about that movement demand attention to all three aspects. By using theological markers to define evangelicalism, we miss the ways cultural and political forces have shaped the movement. To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes. It’s next to impossible to understand these commitments through the prism of theology alone. But when we understand evangelical as an identity forged in the contexts of Jim Crow segregation, a struggle against second-wave feminism, and fears of a tyrannical federal government, the origin of these commitments becomes clearer. That well-written piece gives other examples of how "The racial segregation of American Protestantism facilitated deeper commingling of racist beliefs with evangelical religion", if you want to gain some clues. I'll add another quote, to allay the "not all evangelicals" crowd: > By the final decades of the 20th century, a commitment to right-wing political movements and white racial identity offered the most distinctive marks of evangelicalism. This characterization—like any characterization—leaves some people out. There were liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider. There were black evangelicals, particularly in the South, who refuse to cede the movement entirely to white believers. Perhaps most notably, American evangelicalism acquired a distinctly international following in the late 20th century, as millions of Christians from Latin America, East Asia, and Africa have poured into American churches.
badRNG 5y ago
There's a correlation between religiosity and anti-vaccine sentiment, but I'd go as far as to say we have good reason to think there isn't causation. Case in point: the LDS church leadership is insisting on vaccination and masks during services, however individual Mormons are fiercely opposed to these positions [1]. I think a better explanation for the correlation is that those who derive their identity from the white evangelical subculture feel that their own church leadership don't best represent what it means to be a part of that group. I assume thought leaders like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump hold more legitimacy in certain respects with evangelicals than explicitly religious leaders do. I don't think labels like "evangelical", "white", and "conservative" properly capture this group; it's more of a synthesis of these individual identities that have mobilized into a greater reactionary movement. [1] https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-religion-coronavirus-pandemic-f42772097cf7557086f12b549e03b18a https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-religion-coronav...
- vladTheInhaler 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand why you say that the position of the LDS leadership is an argument against causation. If anything that would seem to suggest that it's a a position related to being religious, since both religious and non-religious people are apparently subject to the same kinds of social pressure from authority figures, but the beliefs are persisting more among religious groups. Of course, it's not like there's any sort of clean intervention you can do to just make somebody religious or not and see what happens. So it's not clear to me what causality would even really mean here.
- armchairhacker 5y ago
  I don’t think it can be direct causation. People attribute religion to whatever they want. I doubt that anything in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most other religions say anything against vaccination. Most people who are Mormons live in cultures where more people are against vaccination. Most people who are atheists live in cultures where most people are pro vaccination.
- mint2 5y ago
  Is this how a religious person sees it? Man prays to god for a cure to a disease/good health. God grants mans prayer by giving humans the ability and insight to prevent disease through hard work and cooperation with others to create vaccines. Man refuses vaccine, spits in the face of gods gift and catches disease. End of story.
tu7001 5y ago
I'm an anti pattern of this. I'm an atheist and I'm 100% sure, that the health doesn't come at the and of the needle.
- doliveira 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that people will consider just about anything as "justifiable" as long as you can fit it in a single nice-sounding even if utterly nonsensical sentence. I mean, health has literally come at the end of a needle millions or billions of times.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ncmncm 5y ago
  In the US you can walk into any pharmacy and get your first or second shingles shot and Tdap booster, probably covered at no cost by your insurance. (Bonus for us older folks: A current Tdap seems to be, somehow, strongly protective against dementia.) In most other countries they would be covered by national health service, instead.
- badRNG 5y ago
  This is a good counterexample to those who believe that atheists arrive at their position through "good epistemology." Some atheists can be ideologically in lock-step with anti-science and conspiracy theorist movements often attributed to being a problem for only the religious. Atheism != rationalism or even naturalism.
ncmncm 5y ago
God favors atheists? Alternatively: God calls His own home first? But I think many more Americans may be dying of metabolic syndrome, caused in the US (among others) mostly by sugar delivered without accompanying fiber, than of COVID-19. It is hard to track, because death ultimately traceable to liver dysfunction shows up ascribed to so many other illnesses. I have no data on how well atheists are represented in the metabolic syndrome numbers. It seems ironic now that placebo, the canonically inactive substance, is usually described as "sugar pills".
t0bia_s 5y ago
Article sounds like antisemitism propaganda from Nazi germany. This narration really bothers me. Why we are not able to learn from history and need constantly repeat it?
tpoacher 5y ago
Just another "my religion is better than yours" post misusing arbitrary poll data. Nothing to see here.

55 points by donohoe 5y ago

slaymaker1907 5y ago

I think it's also notable how Catholics are doing in this regard as well.

AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
From personal experience (so not too sure how much you can generalize this), I've found the anti-science sentiment to be lower in Catholic communities compared to many of the protestant branches of Christianity I've interacted with. As for Catholics, even the pope / the vatican is pushing for vaccination: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-08/pope-francis-appeal-covid-19-vaccines-act-of-love.html https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2021-08/pope-francis...
- sapientiae3 5y ago
  I’m sure the Catholic priest who first postulated the Big Bang theory would be pleased. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lemaître
- beerandt 5y ago
  This pope pushing for just about anything will cause more Catholics to outright reject it than to embrace it.

krapp 5y ago

Checkmate, theists.

mistrial9 5y ago

Why can't I select text on that page? Why are conclusions regarding religious affiliation spoken in the same sentence as hostile and derogatory commentary ? Everyone reading this - check your weaponized language at the door !

hansvs 5y ago
That's weird, why would a website with a freely accessible article not allow text to be copied? Just wondering what the point is...
- dkdk8283 5y ago
  I think the modern browser API allowing sites to block selections is the real problem. Same with intercepting copy.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  Might be paranoia about “ownership of their content” or it might be a misguided attempt to prevent the kinds of spam blogs that duplicate the content of other blogs and spam search engines with the content. Any spammer worth their salt would not be manually copying text, they would be automatically scraping sites.
mikestew 5y ago
Why can't I select text on that page? show_wpcp_message('You are not allowed to copy content or view source'); return false; Umm, I'm not so sure about that last part. They do seem worried that someone is going to steal their IPz, though. The double exclamation points means they take it seriously: var image_save_msg = 'You are not allowed to save images!'; var no_menu_msg = 'Context Menu disabled!'; var smessage = "Content is protected !!"; Again, not so sure about that last part.
- MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
  Such code is often copied from other sources, unattributed.
- mistrial9 5y ago
  I think the point about not being able to copy text, is about the publishers and authors, not the specific javascript code which implements the policy and will of the aforementioned.
5y ago

dm319 5y ago

If you're brought up from an early age that the basis of your morals and values require pure 'faith', then it stands to reason that you will always be insecure about your ability to reason for yourself. As a result you will look to elders in your community for guidance, be that an evangelical preacher or the pope, rather than making the decision for yourself using your own faculties.

AStrangeMorrow 5y ago
For having dealt with various religious communities, mostly Catholic, you'd be surprised how little people care about what the pope / their priest thinks, especially on anything outside the sphere of religious matters. There is also a strong distinction between science and spirituality. It is pretty obvious that there is more at play than simply religious (community, culture etc...) Just look at education levels for the various religious/non-religious groups: Christians and Jewish people are the most educated groups (more than all non-affiliated even) worldwide. Look at individual countries and these levels are completely switched around. See: https://www.pewforum.org/interactives/educational-attainment/ https://www.pewforum.org/interactives/educational-attainment...

dragonsky 5y ago

The personal reveal on this is just how clueless I am about how many different definitions of religion there actually are. Who would have thought that religion was broken down by skin colour? That said, this information is meaningless unless you control for the physical distribution of the religions across areas and compare that with the actual vaccination rates. Does religion really matter or is it just the religions relationship with it's location?

jfengel 5y ago
It's not exactly breaking down religion by skin color. There's nothing preventing white people from joining the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for example. But they'd be a minority, and the church's beliefs and traditions are oriented around the social situation of most of its constituents. Similarly, as this poll shows, there is a significant difference in the behavior of white and black Evangelicals. It's not as formalized as the AME, but people still self-segregate by race, and that affects what they believe and how they interact.
eesmith 5y ago
Some examples of religion broken down by skin color: - Most Southern Baptists once rejected racial integration and accepted white supremacy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Formation_and_separation_of_black_Baptists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Baptist_Convention#Fo... - Nation of Islam, "open to people of color but not whites" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_Islam - Racist restrictions on Black people in the LDS Church until 1978 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormon_priesthood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_people_and_Mormon_priest... In this case, "white evangelical" refers to something more like this description from the magazine "The Christian Century" (representing US mainline Protestantism) at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/american-evangelicalism-and-politics-whiteness https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/amer... : > Over the course of the 20th century, the evangelical coalition entwined theology, whiteness, and conservative politics. The histories we tell about that movement demand attention to all three aspects. By using theological markers to define evangelicalism, we miss the ways cultural and political forces have shaped the movement. To identify as evangelical in the early 21st century signals commitments to gun rights, the abolition of legal abortion, and low taxes. It’s next to impossible to understand these commitments through the prism of theology alone. But when we understand evangelical as an identity forged in the contexts of Jim Crow segregation, a struggle against second-wave feminism, and fears of a tyrannical federal government, the origin of these commitments becomes clearer. That well-written piece gives other examples of how "The racial segregation of American Protestantism facilitated deeper commingling of racist beliefs with evangelical religion", if you want to gain some clues. I'll add another quote, to allay the "not all evangelicals" crowd: > By the final decades of the 20th century, a commitment to right-wing political movements and white racial identity offered the most distinctive marks of evangelicalism. This characterization—like any characterization—leaves some people out. There were liberal evangelicals like Jim Wallis and Ron Sider. There were black evangelicals, particularly in the South, who refuse to cede the movement entirely to white believers. Perhaps most notably, American evangelicalism acquired a distinctly international following in the late 20th century, as millions of Christians from Latin America, East Asia, and Africa have poured into American churches.

badRNG 5y ago

There's a correlation between religiosity and anti-vaccine sentiment, but I'd go as far as to say we have good reason to think there isn't causation. Case in point: the LDS church leadership is insisting on vaccination and masks during services, however individual Mormons are fiercely opposed to these positions [1]. I think a better explanation for the correlation is that those who derive their identity from the white evangelical subculture feel that their own church leadership don't best represent what it means to be a part of that group. I assume thought leaders like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump hold more legitimacy in certain respects with evangelicals than explicitly religious leaders do. I don't think labels like "evangelical", "white", and "conservative" properly capture this group; it's more of a synthesis of these individual identities that have mobilized into a greater reactionary movement. [1] https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-religion-coronavirus-pandemic-f42772097cf7557086f12b549e03b18a https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-health-religion-coronav...

vladTheInhaler 5y ago
I'm not sure I understand why you say that the position of the LDS leadership is an argument against causation. If anything that would seem to suggest that it's a a position related to being religious, since both religious and non-religious people are apparently subject to the same kinds of social pressure from authority figures, but the beliefs are persisting more among religious groups. Of course, it's not like there's any sort of clean intervention you can do to just make somebody religious or not and see what happens. So it's not clear to me what causality would even really mean here.
armchairhacker 5y ago
I don’t think it can be direct causation. People attribute religion to whatever they want. I doubt that anything in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and most other religions say anything against vaccination. Most people who are Mormons live in cultures where more people are against vaccination. Most people who are atheists live in cultures where most people are pro vaccination.
mint2 5y ago
Is this how a religious person sees it? Man prays to god for a cure to a disease/good health. God grants mans prayer by giving humans the ability and insight to prevent disease through hard work and cooperation with others to create vaccines. Man refuses vaccine, spits in the face of gods gift and catches disease. End of story.

tu7001 5y ago

I'm an anti pattern of this. I'm an atheist and I'm 100% sure, that the health doesn't come at the and of the needle.

doliveira 5y ago
I'm pretty sure that people will consider just about anything as "justifiable" as long as you can fit it in a single nice-sounding even if utterly nonsensical sentence. I mean, health has literally come at the end of a needle millions or billions of times.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ncmncm 5y ago
In the US you can walk into any pharmacy and get your first or second shingles shot and Tdap booster, probably covered at no cost by your insurance. (Bonus for us older folks: A current Tdap seems to be, somehow, strongly protective against dementia.) In most other countries they would be covered by national health service, instead.
badRNG 5y ago
This is a good counterexample to those who believe that atheists arrive at their position through "good epistemology." Some atheists can be ideologically in lock-step with anti-science and conspiracy theorist movements often attributed to being a problem for only the religious. Atheism != rationalism or even naturalism.

ncmncm 5y ago

God favors atheists? Alternatively: God calls His own home first? But I think many more Americans may be dying of metabolic syndrome, caused in the US (among others) mostly by sugar delivered without accompanying fiber, than of COVID-19. It is hard to track, because death ultimately traceable to liver dysfunction shows up ascribed to so many other illnesses. I have no data on how well atheists are represented in the metabolic syndrome numbers. It seems ironic now that placebo, the canonically inactive substance, is usually described as "sugar pills".

t0bia_s 5y ago

Article sounds like antisemitism propaganda from Nazi germany. This narration really bothers me. Why we are not able to learn from history and need constantly repeat it?

tpoacher 5y ago

Just another "my religion is better than yours" post misusing arbitrary poll data. Nothing to see here.