adults, spurring worries among clergy, but also scholarly interest in secularism and secularity. From 20, according to the Pew Research Center, the religiously unaffiliated increased from 15% to 20% of all U.S. Other words for self-designation are rationalists, humanists, secularists, naturalists, or “brights,” a term coined in 2003 to avoid the A-word and thus encourage American atheists to come out of the closet. Many are atheists, but they also include agnostics, skeptics, or deists. Freethinkers include a wide range of people who challenge established belief, question traditional faith and reject supernatural claims on the basis of reason.
1By modern-day freethinkers I designate a complex constituency, at once distinct from the category “unaffiliated,” or “nones,” a term used in the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, to refer to people who do not identify with a specific group or faith when it comes to religion, and broader than the category “non-believers,” which gather people who say that they do not believe in a personal, institutionally defined god, or a higher power.
0 kommentar(er)
