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Jeff Cliff's avatar

Access to social space. Elite professors probably have greater social environments than your average college professor to exist in -- at least I picture them that way. They can spend their time doing a lot of different things. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a poor schmuck your choice might be the church, the bar(with the same godfearing people after work (which in turn feeds on itself, given the people you work with are going to have similar constraints on their social environment)). college professors should be in between somewhere. While they may be exposed to pressure *in* the space they cohabit with others, what I'm trying to describe here is access *to* space itself. It's not impossible to be an atheist who goes to church...it wears on you, after awhile. If not you, your children.

This is interesting because it means that stuff like "Facebook" and blogs like Overcomingbias are really social space - - so they may change the dynamic with time.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I belong to a church (Seaside church in Encinitas) that explicitly does not believe in an anthropomorphized god. Indeed, they are "religious" about referring to god as "it."

Which isn't to say you are likely wrong about the majority. But is to support the idea that this survey answers more about social conditioning than it does about people's metaphysics.

I refer to my church as "my atheist church" since their concept of god is SO at odds with the Roman Catholic God I grew up with. I can feel the social pressure when I refer to it this way to stop calling me and my co-religionists atheists, they don't like it.

I think a good survey about metaphysics, if one were desired, would clearly need to ask about belief in various aspects of god rather than in such a loaded catchall label.

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