How Many Atheist Kids Convert To Belief? Ctd

A reader cries foul:

The headline of this post is badly misleading. It states that only 46 percent of the non-affiliateds’ kids remain unaffiliated, but the survey on which the data was based breaks down the “unaffiliated” demographic as follows:

Unaffiliated: 16.1% of the total US population

– Atheist: 1.6% of the total US population
– Agnostic: 2.4% of the population
– Nothing in particular: 12.1% of the population

– Secular unaffiliated: 6.3% of the population
– Religious unaffiliated 5.8% of the population

In other words, more than one-third of the unaffiliated in question are actually religious, and another one-third-plus are sufficiently noncommittal to eschew both religious and non-religious identification. As an atheist contemplating reproduction, I’m deeply interested in what happens to the children of the committed nonreligious (atheists and agnostics). But generalizations about the “unaffiliated” don’t really address that question at all.

A few more readers sound off:

The thing about the “nothing in particular” group is that they tend to believe in a god or universal spirit while being skeptical that organized religion has any special knowledge about that god or universal spirit. So you’re not looking at how many atheist kids convert to belief; you are looking at a group that mostly consists of mostly of disenfranchised theists.

All of that being said, the retention issue is one of the reasons I support the creation of atheist community centers: places where atheist parents can bring their children to be indoctrinated in reason, logic, evidence, and science in the same way that religious children are indoctrinated into the beliefs of their parents’ religion.

Another:

I’m an atheist, and my husband is on the belief fence. We are not raising our kids in any religious tradition (we were both raised Catholics – he much more traditionally than me). A kid from across the street who does go to church told my six-year-old that all she has to do is believe and then she won’t go to hell. Nice. So we talked about it. She is a thinking type of kid and says she doesn’t know if she believes or not. And at six years of age, I think that is the perfectly correct answer.