“People use cues of religiosity as a signal for trustworthiness,”

People? Which people? Do you think that atheists find the religious more trustworthy?

Go figure. In a world full of people with ideologies that teach them to loathe and distrust atheists, atheists are loathed and distrusted. Who woulda thunk it?

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“with the important exception of suicide, states and nations with a preponderance of nonreligious people actually fare better on most indicators of societal health than those without.”

This about says it all to me.  Sad that most people would rather choose a hate filled fear monger, so long as that person hates and fears the same things they do.

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Wouldn’t you find it hard to trust the responses of anyone who, when asked to assess which is the more likely outcome between “Event A ALONE” or “Event A AND Event B”, answers the latter, regardless of the two events involved?

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I think people are afraid of atheist because they generally don’t take showers and smell bad. I think if they just bought underarm deaordant that would go a long ways in dispelling this fear. Religious people are more likely than not to take regular showers and cut their hair. They certainly drive nicer cars, and their women keep their armpits shaved and clean.

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“Why are people still afraid of atheism?”
Because to believers in the supernatural, the world is divided in two, good and evil; and they are terrified that they won’t know until its too late that they have been hoodwinked by Satan! 
What a miserable way to live a life! What a waste!

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To calm the internal terror of the non-believers the article states:
“There is no actual evidence backing up the assumption that atheism somehow leads to a decline in morality.”

Feel better now, everyone?

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Under the context that society was indoctrinated for millenia in the lies that “faith is the ultimate highest virtue”, and that “unbelief is the worst possible sin”, what do you expect? A society doesn’t put down easily such a crazy but persistent meme.

Look to Europe: Luckily, in substantial parts of Europe people don’t care much about anyone’s religious beliefs or unbeliefs anymore, and atheism is mostly an accepted and even favoured worldview. But this was a process that started several centuries ago, against fierce resistance from organized religion, and it is still an ongoing process and not yet finished.

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I think the central reason is that religious belief depends on “consensual validation”, proof, in the scientific sense, being impossible.  The dividing line, then, is between those willing to believe, regardless of what is believed in, and those who demand proof that meets the criteria of rational thought and analysis.  That you believe is some religious gobbledegook is the first critical rung of the acceptance ladder…the following rungs get more and more specific.

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Religion is mythology but the Patriarchal System is the problem. That is why God or the top god is always addressed in the third person as a male. Substituting a woman as top god would change the nature of religion and give it a benign face. Make the next Pope and all priests women.

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