Sunday, August 5, 2007

Not Agnostic, Not an Atheist? Maybe You are Apatheistic

Ran across this new term, apatheism, on the Double-Tongued Dictionary. It is defined as follows:

apatheism n. the attitude of not caring about religion or whether there is a God.

I'm just guessing, but I think there might be more apatheists in the USA than there are theists, atheists, and agnostics. I say this because a good many folks who claim to believe in god do nothing to back up that "belief" at all. They don't go to church, except maybe on Christmas and perhaps Easter, and then only because it is a family outing or tradition, of sorts.

Oh, most folks would never label themselves an apatheist, but their actions and lives tell a different story.

Then again, maybe I am delusional. A recent Newsweek poll indeed shows dismal numbers of those of us embracing reason in the good old US of A. Evidently, if this poll is to be believed (and it probably should), 91 percent of American adults surveyed believe in God—and 48 percent reject the scientific theory of evolution.

Maybe I should invent a new term:

apollplectic adj. pissed off at the results of recent polls and apparent stupidity of the poll-taking public

Here, I'll use it in a sentence... That blogger csm reacted in an apollplectic manner as he viewed the results of the Newsweek poll.

2 comments:

Ceroill said...

Good word, Apatheistic. I suspect you may be right, though. Growing up in a Unitarian-Universalist church, myself, I recall that it seemed the main reason just about all the adults went there was for the social hour after the service. From what I have seen over the years this is true of many people.

csm said...

Yes, there are likely to be quite a lot of folks who attend Sunday (or Saturday) services for the social aspect of it. And I bet many of them don't give much thought to the actual service. I recall a few years back a local church attended by someone close to me; that church always bought donuts and gave them away. But as the church grew it became too costly, so they stopped the donuts. You'd have thought that satan himself showed up and took those donuts away the way the "faithful" reacted... I guess they want part of their tithe to go to Krispy Kreme instead of the needy?