Leading religious scholars, sociologists and psychologists of the world for the first time studied in detail the psyche of atheists and other non-believers and dispelled some stereotypes about "atheists". They spoke about this at a meeting of the Pontifical Council for Culture in the Vatican, and the full version of their report was published on the website of the University of Kent.
Anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists have long been studying various factors that influence a person's tendency to believe in supernatural forces and beings. For example, in April 2012, scientists showed that people with an analytical mindset are less likely to believe in supernatural forces and phenomena than those who rely on intuition to solve problems.
Today, many researchers agree that religion could have arisen and entrenched in the groups of our ancestors for simple evolutionary reasons - the belief in the gods and the fact that they can punish the guilty, helped maintain order in groups and strengthened the bonds between members of their groups. This helped such religious groups to survive and continue their race.
For the same reason, these groups could develop an instinctive distrust of unbelievers, since the lack of fear in the face of God or gods allowed such individuals to behave immorally and profit from believing members of a tribe or family. Many Western critics of atheism think in a similar way today, saying that the lack of faith undermines the moral foundations of society and leads to its disintegration.
Lanman and his colleagues tested all these stereotypes as part of the Understanding Unbelief project, launched several years ago by several leading British universities and the American John Templeton Foundation, which traditionally supports controversial research on the border of science and religion.
Within its framework, leading sociologists, religious scholars, psychologists and anthropologists of the world tried to understand what unites and separates various groups of unbelievers and how they differ from representatives of different confessions. In addition, scientists were interested in how atheists, agnostics and other "atheists", as well as believers, relate to astrology, pseudoscience, life after death and other metaphysical phenomena.
These observations were carried out by scientists not only in Britain, but also in other countries where historically widespread or emphasized traditional Christian religious views, for example, in the USA and Brazil, and various pagan, agnostic and atheistic scientists, including in Japan, China and Denmark.
As shown by these polls, generally accepted ideas about the behavior and psyche of "atheists" had little in common with the real bearers of such beliefs. For example, most non-believers in all six countries did not call themselves atheists or agnostics and simply said that there was no religion in their lives.
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Interestingly, many of them considered themselves Christians, Muslims, Jews or Buddhists, associating themselves with the norms and traditions of those religious communities to which they previously belonged or where they grew up. In addition, the lack of religion in their lives did not prevent many atheists and agnostics from believing in aliens, the afterlife, astrology, Bigfoot, and other supernatural phenomena.
At the same time, many non-believers turned out to be less confident in their ideas about the absence of a single god or many deities than representatives of the dominant confession in their country or all believers in general.
As Lanman notes, this characteristic did not depend on the absence or presence of faith among the respondents, but on their nationality. For example, American atheists and believers were equally strongly convinced of their righteousness and were more active in defending their beliefs than residents of Japan or Denmark.
Similarly, the proportion of atheists who believed that there was no meaning in the existence of the universe and in their own life was quite low and did not differ much from the general prevalence of such ideas among all residents of their country.
Moreover, the typical set of higher personal and social values turned out to be approximately the same for both believers and non-believers. They all had “family” or “freedom” first, followed by concepts such as friendship, nature, empathy, positive thinking, or equality.