{"id":10734,"date":"2011-12-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/12\/31\/religious-americans-fear-atheists-study-shows\/"},"modified":"2011-12-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-31T12:00:00","slug":"religious-americans-fear-atheists-study-shows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2011\/12\/31\/religious-americans-fear-atheists-study-shows\/","title":{"rendered":"Religious Americans Fear Atheists, Study Shows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Religion News Service<\/p>\n<p>UNITED STATES, December 2011 (RNS by Kimberly Winston): A new study finds that atheists are among society&#8217;s most distrusted group. Psychologists at the University of British Columbia and the University of Oregon say that their study demonstrates that anti-atheist prejudice stems from moral distrust, not dislike, of nonbelievers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s pretty remarkable,&#8221; said Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, which appears in the current issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.<\/p>\n<p>The study is part of an attempt to understand what needs religion fulfills in people. Among the conclusions is a sense of trust in others. &#8220;People find atheists very suspect,&#8221; Shariff said. &#8220;They don&#8217;t fear God so we should distrust them; they do not have the same moral obligations of others. This is a common refrain against atheists. People fear them as a group.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Shariff, who studies atheism and religion, said the findings provide a clue to combating anti-atheism prejudice. &#8220;If you manage to offer credible counteroffers of these stereotypes, this can do a lot to undermine people&#8217;s existing prejudice,&#8221; he said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Religion News Service UNITED STATES, December 2011 (RNS by Kimberly Winston): A new study finds that atheists are among society&#8217;s,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}