| − | {{cquote|This leads Silverman to make some wildly inaccurate claims. He argues that more than half of Jews and three-quarters of the rapidly growing religiously unaffiliated are atheists. But according to Pew, only 17% of Jews and 33% of the “nones” say they don’t believe in God. If you want to count the “don’t knows” or “others,” that gets to about 20% and 40%, respectively, at best. | + | {{cquote|This leads Silverman to make some wildly inaccurate claims. He argues that more than half of Jews and three-quarters of the rapidly growing religiously unaffiliated are atheists. But according to Pew, only 17% of Jews and 33% of the “[[nones]]” say they don’t believe in God. If you want to count the “don’t knows” or “others,” that gets to about 20% and 40%, respectively, at best. |
| | These are not small discrepancies, and based on these falsely inflated statistics, Silverman makes startlingly inaccurate claims, like that there are 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country....To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for [http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/08/07/fact-check-please/ more than four years]. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he [https://twitter.com/MrAtheistPants/status/581206498258325504 told me he would]. Yet here we are.<ref>[http://religiondispatches.org/how-not-to-defend-atheism/ How Not To Defend Atheism] by Vlad Chituc, University of Southern California's ''Religious Dispatches'', 2015</ref>}} | | These are not small discrepancies, and based on these falsely inflated statistics, Silverman makes startlingly inaccurate claims, like that there are 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country....To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for [http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/08/07/fact-check-please/ more than four years]. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he [https://twitter.com/MrAtheistPants/status/581206498258325504 told me he would]. Yet here we are.<ref>[http://religiondispatches.org/how-not-to-defend-atheism/ How Not To Defend Atheism] by Vlad Chituc, University of Southern California's ''Religious Dispatches'', 2015</ref>}} |