In no country in the world (save, possibly, for North Korea — although they do practice Juche, which is arguably a religion) are people who identify as atheists currently the majority of the population (most of the nonreligious in Scandinavian countries, as well as most Buddhists, do not choose to wear the “atheist” label, even as many don’t believe in God). Why are there so few, one may wonder? And what is changing for their numbers to organically rise in some countries? There may be several reasons; here are four possible ones.
1. The Criminalization Of Impiety
We saw, with Stalinist Russia, that the sword has the ability to deconvert millions of Christians – even though Christianity has an old and rich history. Millions of Christians flipped over, quickly, to atheism (possibly artificially, because much of the country flipped back to being Christian once there was freedom to do so). If this is the case with something as prevalent as Christianity was in Russia, it would be much more effective for Atheism, which has never taken hold of a country for more than a few decades (while religion has grasped and ruled countries despotically for thousands of years).
The thousands of years of torture and fear and social censure that have been applied to individuals deemed impious over the millennia was systematic and has demeaned the anti-religious for about as far back as we can trace impiety, it seems, with few exceptions. Back in 1200-1500 BC, which is about as far back as we can trace these accusations of impiety, we can find the following phrase written in the Rig Veda, of one tribe, the Aryans, accusing other tribes, the Dasa and the Dasayus, of impiety (which seems to be part of their logic for fighting and eventually defeating them) when declaring, “Far from the sun keep those who hate devotion, the godless, prospering in their vocation.”
More recently, in Ancient Greece, Anaxagoras, who lived from 500-428 BC, was sentenced to death for impiety. A contemporary – Socrates – was also famously sentenced to death for impiety. By this point, you could be sentenced to death merely for not being seen as religious enough — let alone being an outspoken atheist. In addition, the law of the Old Testament commands the killing of those who do not follow God in several locations. Indeed, before the 18th century, the word “atheist” was a slur more than a title someone might actually feel they could openly associate with themselves — in fact, the word was used to insult Christians, and Christians defended themselves against it as early as the second century AD by reassuring accusers that they were “innocent of atheism and impiety,” (according to the Cambridge Companion to Atheism pages 20-21). Near the end of the second century Christians were accused of being “the most atheist” of the pagan sects. Nor was this a recent slur — as the Cambridge Companion to Atheism notes, “The accusation of ‘atheism’ must have been very widespread, since the Christian apologists did their best to rebut the charge.”
In short, much of the reason why Christians were treated as badly as they were was because people thought they were more atheistic and impious than they actually were.
Many religions in general (and Christianity, as an example) have had several generations to ensure that atheists were kept to a minimum or, at least, silenced. Even today, when Facebook, Macs, and PCs are all the invention of atheists, there are few Christians who would trust an atheist to public office, and in many places a social marginalization is in effect regarding the title.
In places where the reputation of atheists is improving, the number of atheists seems to increase.
As a side note, comments from religious individuals rubbing in the fact that, for millennia, outspoken atheists tended to be in the minority (where the possibility wasn’t eliminated altogether) seems a bit uncouth, as their constant, systemic marginalization perpetuated over thousands of years was the main source of the low numbers.
Also, exceptions do not prove the rule. The fact that one might, with enough searching, be able to choose a couple outspoken atheists over the past thousand years who got away with criticism proves the point, it seems, that the majority were forced into silence – especially if those who spoke up could afford to because they were, for example, highly regarded geniuses and of noble ancestry (Hume – who has been cited as an exception to the rule although he never outright said he was an atheist – was both).
2. Lack of information
We don’t usually want to change our minds, and we tend to trust the authorities we grew up with. So many of us will tend to believe what our parents tell us. In addition, if an “expert” respected by the community said something about the world, you had to take their word for it, for the most part – it was very inconvenient to check and see if what they were believing was true. Now, we can do that. If someone makes an argument, in many developed countries people are apt to use their cell phones to double check that the information is correct. The easy access to information probably makes it harder to protect erroneous beliefs.
Correlation does not equal causation, but there is data to suggest that Internet use might be correlated with the lack of religiosity. For example, the MIT Technology Review published an article on this discussion with the following information:
…we get a possible answer [to the rise of the “nones”] thanks to the work of Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, who has analyzed the data in detail. He says that the demise is the result of several factors but the most controversial of these is the rise of the Internet. He concludes that the increase in Internet use in the last two decades has caused a significant drop in religious affiliation.
This decreasing amount of “nones” seems to indicate a decreasing interest in God. As a Harris poll indicated in 2013:
In a separate line of questioning, focused on Americans’ degree of certainty that there is or is not a God, two-thirds of Americans (68%) indicate being either absolutely or somewhat certain that there is a God, while 54% specify being absolutely certain; these figures represent drops of 11 and 12 percentage points, respectively, from 2003 testing, where combined certainty was at 79% and absolute certainty was at 66%.
Meanwhile, combined belief that there is no God (16%) and uncertainty as to whether or not there is a God (also 16%) are both up from 2003 findings (when these levels were 9% and 12%, respectively).
I’m not saying that atheists are going to be in the majority, or that it’s an open-shut case, but there does seem to be plausible evidence that the rising irreligiosity in the West is caused by the greater access to education and information.
(It might be noted here that some places with a high degree of access to information, like South Korea, are becoming more Christian. I would counter that, in many cases, this seems to be a result of the dynamic I explained in Reason 1 – where, due to relatively short (compared to Christianity and other religions) periods of enforced irreligiosity, the numbers of the irreligious were artificially lowered and then sprang back when they were free to do so.)
This would also explain why, where there are higher degrees of irreligiosity (as in several third-world countries), there is lower degrees of access to information. Indeed, the United States is already an anomaly as, arguably (as of 2009), the most religious country in the industrialized world.