It'd be fair to say that I'm taking this one personally.
According to a University of British Columbia study that was released just in the midst of the holiday season, people of faith distrust atheists as much as they would rapists.
I feel warm fuzzies inside just talking about it.
After surveying 350 American adults and 420 (really? 4:20?) Canadian university students,(all of whom were apparently too polite and Canadian to point out the street value of the number they were using) they concluded that these lovely people in the sample distrust atheists more than gay men, feminists, Muslims or Jews. This was a grand total of 770 people, a number it's hard not to put any Biblical significance behind.
Best bit? The study actually included everyone, so atheists are in there, too. The study actually acknowledges in a footnote that due to this, the data may be conservative if anything, which means actually, non-atheists probably distrust atheists even more than what this study implies. The distrust, according to the survey, stems from the fact that people of faith believe that atheists will attempt all kinds of evil random shit because they don't have the supernatural surveillance possessed by people of faith. Additionally, people of faith use religion (even what the study refers to as "competing religions") as a shorthand for trustworthiness because of the previously stated factor.
So - these people surveyed put atheists right in line with rapists as the most untrustworthy people on the planet, which means that they dislike atheists as well, since trust fosters affection, love and friendship. People rate atheists as the people most likely to steal money out of a stranger's wallet and commit insurance fraud, have dandruff and dirty clothes and the least desirable to hold an important or detail-oriented job or to marry their kids. (Presumably, this last is due to the aforementioned perceived hygiene issues.) Think this is hyperbole? Read the fucking study. You have to look at it like this; quiet old white people who are intimidated by a group of loud black youths, or the woman at the clinic being yelled at by right-to-lifers, or fundamentalist Christians at a Pride rally would all still rather deal with those situations than with an atheist street gang. Which we don't have, by the way, because something like "Hell's Angel's" doesn't really work, does it? We'd be the "Nowhere's Nothings," and that inspires more confusion than anything.
Which is really the problem. Confusion due to ignorance. People of faith are no more equipped to understand an atheist than a bird is non-flying animals. The process of having faith, taking leaps of faith, inclines one, I think because of the emotional satisfaction it grants, to continue to do it, like a runner who craves the endorphins that flood his body as his muscles get stronger. Conversely, the logic muscles atrophy during this process to the point that these same people - if not vigilant about situationally separating the things they make decisions about - begin to equate a rapist with an atheist, despite no empirical evidence to support that equation. It's easy, and requires no thought. Additionally, it's much easier for someone to assume someone else is trustworthy based on an appellation of faith than to invest time and discover if the person is really trustworthy. For people who would rather believe in unprovable invisible friends, ease of conclusion is a very important factor.
Finally, if you're the sort of person to find comfort in a book that aligns with your internal morality (or worse, if your morality is entirely drawn from a book) it is likely alienating, isolating, and disturbing to find someone who has no book - it means that their morality is entirely based upon their own thoughts, feelings and decisions, and that they're counting on situations to reward or punish them, and that's less definable, less knowable than a big book of rules. The comfort of authority, of definite knowing, of someone else making the final decisions, is removed, and people who don't do that don't understand it, and folks are often distrusting and hostile to that which they do not understand.
In my gut, I knew this already. Now, however, I'm just kind of bummed out.
