The very public conflict around atheism and religion was at its height during the 2010s, with both sides being equally vocal. During that time, it was not uncommon for religious people to claim that atheists were simply angry at God. The common response from atheists was that they were not angry at God so much as they were at religion – a response which makes sense, given that they did not believe in God.
It was somewhat surprising, then, when I was doing some of my regular listening to a podcast which interviewed deconverts, and heard the hosts (themselves, deconverts) agree with the guests that going through a period of anger toward God seemed to be a common part of the deconversion experience.
As it happens, however, during the height of what was once called the “New Atheism,” a study was conducted on this exact topic, and bore interesting results.
The January 2011 edition of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published a study titled “Anger toward God: Social-cognitive predictors, prevalence, and links with adjustment to bereavement and cancer.”
This study showed that anger at God was prevalent through all groups and cultures within America. Anger was lowest in Protestant religions and in African Americans, and higher in people who were suffering from recent bereavement, cancer, and unresolved feelings related to loss.
Anger levels were also higher in Atheists and Agnostics who, when prompted with measures related to past experiences, or with images of a hypothetical God, responded with feelings of anger and bitterness.
A separate study done on non-believers at the University of Tennessee found that people most often abandon their belief because of their college education. Dr. Thomas Coleman (head researcher on the study) said that education, particularly college education, had a more deleterious effect on religious belief than any other single factor. He went on to state that people tend to lose their religion and then their belief in God slowly throughout the course of their schooling. This is related to a survey of studies that show that academic success tends to favor Atheistic belief over religious belief.
In the study on anger towards God, it was shown that 87% of college students who believe in God report being angry with him. Since the study indicates that education is a factor in anger toward God, this positively correlates with education as one factor in the loss of religious belief.
However, an article studying the relationship of education and atheism states that:
“…findings that intelligence is positively correlated with atheism cannot be taken as evidence of the truth of atheism. Even an intelligent source can be wrong about a belief, as the Genetic Fallacy shows. Furthermore, the atheist population of America is far smaller than the religious, which will tend to skew the numbers. Finally the academic environment tends to promote only a certain kind of intelligence, and tends to suppress religious expression or belief, especially at higher levels.”
While it remains true that the atheist part of the population is smaller than the religious portion, those numbers have seen significant movement in the decade since this study was published. The pairing of emotional expressions toward God with the loss of belief based on academic status are interesting, and may require further study.
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