{"id":41701,"date":"2011-06-07T00:08:06","date_gmt":"2011-06-07T08:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=12150"},"modified":"2011-06-07T00:08:06","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T08:08:06","slug":"more-curiosity-about-atheists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/07\/more-curiosity-about-atheists\/","title":{"rendered":"More curiosity about atheists?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Josh Rosenau<\/a> has a post up discussing the impact of “New Atheism” on public perceptions of atheists. He mentions offhand that “New Atheism” as a movement really only crystallized in the mid-2000s, which made me wonder: what does Google Trends tell us about interest in atheism?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately there wasn’t any information on “New Atheism.” The search query didn’t have enough volume, alas. But “atheist” did. So I compared “atheist,” “Christian,” “Buddhist,” “Hindu,” and “Muslim.” I limited the data set to the United States.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can’t really tell what’s going because the volume for “Christian” is very high. So let’s remove that.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The interest in Muslims is obviously news dependent. So removing them:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You can now discern that there has been a rise in the search for the term “atheist.” Finally, let’s compare atheist to “humanist” and “agnostic”:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This agrees with my intuition. Though the word atheist isn’t exactly novel, it has long had an air of disrepute (in past centuries the term “atheist” didn’t …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Josh Rosenau has a post up discussing the impact of “New Atheism” on public perceptions of atheists. He mentions offhand that “New Atheism” as a movement really only crystallized in the mid-2000s, which made me wonder: what does…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[155,13,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-religion","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41701"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41893,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41701\/revisions\/41893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}