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Monday, November 21, 2011

Religion in Canada

There's news of an Ipsos Reid poll from September 2011 [Canadians Split On Whether Religion Does More Harm in the World than Good]. It surveyed Canadians about religion. Only 16% of Canadians attend church every week and about 30% of Canadian say they don't believe in God. Only 53% of Canadians say they believe in God. This is good news for those of us who think the trend is in the right direction. It's bad news for those who think that the religious views of society can't be changed.

Here's a news story from Global news on September 12, 2011 [Canadians divided on whether religion does more harm than good: poll]. Thanks to Canadian Atheist for bringing this to my attention.


4 comments :

The Other Jim said...

From the article, one of the more interesting quotes is

"Thirty three per cent of respondents who identified themselves as Catholics say they don’t believe in God, along with 28 per cent of Protestants who echo this sentiment."

Sort of kills kill any poll I have answered, where they ask for your religious denomination and then have "none" as the final choice. ~30% of those claiming a religious denomination in this poll would fall under "atheist" if the question was directly "do you believe in god".

David84 said...

Jim, I was also struck by this oddity. I didn't realize there were so many catholic and protestant atheists...

I'm curious why these individuals would self-identify with these denominations at all. Habit? To please family?

The Other Jim said...

In a way it reminds me of some Jewish friends from mt undergrad years. They identified as atheist, but as Jewish as well. "Jewish" was more the culture to them. But I found this more understandable based on Jewish history in Europe (culturally outsiders in Christian Europe). It seems odd that this would be the explanation from Christians within a basically Christian society.

Susannah Anderson said...

"Thirty three per cent of respondents who identified themselves as Catholics say they don’t believe in God, along with 28 per cent of Protestants who echo this sentiment."

I wonder how many of those 33 and 28 percenters are ministers or priests.