Monday, July 11, 2016

2016: More BAD news for American atheists

New Atheism books started being published in 2004. The 2004 publication of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris was joined over the next few years by a series of books by other New Atheism authors. The New Atheism books had far higher sales than the vast majority of books about atheism.

Below is a graph of Google searches for the word "atheism" from Google trends and please allow a brief time for the graph to load. Please notice that there are less Google searches for the term atheism than in January of 2004. Also, notice the lowest previous point on the Google trends graph was July of 2006 and now it is even lower.

YouTube atheist Thunderf00t said about the atheist movement after Reason Rally 2016 had a very low turnout: :
I'm not sure there is anything in this movement worth saving. Hitchens is dead. Dawkins simply doesn't have the energy for this sort of thing anymore. Harris went his own way. And Dennett just kind of blended into the background. So what do you think when the largest gathering of the nonreligious in history pulls in... I don't know. Maybe 2,000 people. Is there anything worth saving?





There is some controversy within atheism circles whether of not atheists should call themselves atheists due to the bad reputation of atheism/atheists. New atheist Sam Harris said concerning the label of atheist, "It's right next to child molester as a designation."

Some atheists use euphemisms for the word atheist in public when people ask them what their religion is (rationalist, nonbeliever, etc.). And at the poorly attended Reason Rally 2016, atheist David Silverman (who is president of the American Atheist organization) had atheists/agnostics repeatedly yell the word "atheist" (see the video below). Notice all the empty chairs in the video.

There are more Google USA searches for the word "atheist" than in January of 2004 according to Google trends, but the bad news for atheists is that the general trend is currently downwards despite some atheist activists encouraging people to call themselves atheists (allow a brief time for the graph to load).

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