15 Percent of Americans Claim No Religion
First of all, this is not an atheist or agnostic organization. It is a skeptic organization and you don’t have to be a nontheist to be a member. I did, however, find this interesting. The study, conducted by the American Religious Identification Survey, estimated a 0.8% increase in people claiming to have no religion since their last survey in 2001. We should be wary of reading too much into these numbers since ‘no religion’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘atheist’ or ‘agnostic’. It could simply be that a person is spiritual but has no religious affiliation. On the other hand, atheists and agnostics might not answer correctly out of fear of being discovered (yes, even on an anonymous poll). So, what do these numbers mean? It’s hard to say, but I do think it indicates a trend.
The downside: non-denominational evangelical megachurches (think Rick Warren, Ted Haggard and Joel Osteen) are on the rise.
Source: MSNBC
Reckon 
03/09/2009 at 22:24
These were my thoughts as well; it does not mean disbelief; however, it does seem to indicate a souring towards traditional organized religion. I also found it interesting that sects such as LDS have remained steady. Do you think this is indicative of a self-sustaining community?
03/16/2009 at 12:00
I must admit that I am a bit confused how the first sentence of this post gets reconciled with what is stated below in the mission statement. It seems that any honest skeptic is going to end up at atheism.
03/16/2009 at 12:40
Hey, VJack. I’m in a bit of a bind considering I’m an atheist, myself, but I know for a fact not all of our group members are nontheists. It’s an odd phenomenon to me that people can be skeptics in some areas though not in others (i.e. religion) but it happens. Our goal is to help others learn to think critically and hope that they apply that to religion. There will be no exclusion of theists or deists, though. I hope that makes sense.
03/19/2009 at 05:44
Well, when asked if the JSS deals with theist issues, I always say “if you’ve got some proof we’ll talk about it. Until then, it’s all been said.”