The First Person Who Says "Nones" Loses

It just happens that I came across several posts and articles about "Nones" yesterday, the category in surveys which means those who are unaffiliated or don't self-identify as any of the religious categories provided by those designing the surveys, quite a grab-bag of religious believers who are unaffiliated, people who merely don't believe in "any particular thing" but who fail to identify as agnostics or atheists, a small percent who do self-identify as agnostics and an even smaller percentage who self-identify as atheists.   Anyone who has read much of my blog may know that the category was invented by an active promoter of atheism, Barry Kosmin, for what I hold are the most obvious of ideological reasons.  I'll repost my argument below.   It is clearly not a scientific description of any real, coherent group, it is an artificially created set, not even a real representation of the people in the set as what defines their inclusion in that set is not any set thing, in itself.  The non-affiliation of a religious person, such as myself, who has chosen not to choose any of a number of very worthwhile religious affiliations is clearly not the same as that of an atheist who hates all of religion, yet, if I would be one of the about 8% of those who will even take a poll on this topic, Pew or Gallup or some other polling outfit would put me in the same category as them on the topic of religion.   Even the sub-categories are ill defined as I was surprised to find last night when I took another look at it, for example, 14% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit.  If it were me and I got those results it would lead me to the logical conclusion that self-reporting, self-identification was, in itself, unreliable and could not generate anything legitimately considered data for any scientific purpose.  But, then, I don't make my living by pretending that surveys and polling are science.

At any rate, the category "Nones", clearly and successfully introduced for purposes of the promotion of atheism at the expense of religion, was always a phony PR effort, not science.  Anyone in sociology who uses the term is clearly in on the fraud as it is a blatantly illegitimate categorization of disparate people lumping them together for dishonest purposes.   Here's why.

I Accuse Kosmin of Ideological Distortion In Creating the "Nones"

You will certainly in the next few days or weeks hear some reference to the "Nones,"  that category in the Pew surveys that is often claimed by atheists as proof-positive that they're going to win, man because the "nones" are the fastest growing group of people in the United States and.... something.  You know, the group which includes pretty much anyone who doesn't claim membership in a particular denomination of religion.   I have pointed out, many times, that, by the definitions provided by the Pew and other polling organizations, I'm considered a "none".

Well, I hadn't given a lot of thought as to who came up with the category until I came across this piece which names the man who invented the term, Barry A. Kosmin.   The piece describes him as:

...  the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and a professor at Trinity College, Kosmin had been helping to conduct the American Religion Identification Survey for nearly three decades. 

I was familiar with Kosmin for a different reason which I'll get to in a minute. 

His reasoning in coming up with the term is given as:

Once they’d evaluated data from the 1990s, Kosmin and

his team were determined to name a new category.

“Nonreligious” was a possibility. So was “non-faith” and “non-affiliated.”

But Kosmin rejected all of these. The “non” part bothered him. “Non-affiliated” would be like calling people “non-white,” he said. “We didn’t want to suggest that ‘affiliated’ was the norm, and every one else was an ‘other.’”

“Nomenclature,” he added, ” is quite important in these things.”

So Kosmin began calling this group the “nones,” a shortened version for “none of the above” — which is what people often said when asked to name their religion. He never thought the term would stick.

“It began as a joke,” he said, “but now, like many of these things, it has taken on its own life.”

Indeed. Today, “nones” are everywhere. Both in a literal sense and a literary one.

I will point out that, having looked up the dictionary meaning of the word "norm",  in the context of what Kosmin is engaged in doing, purportedly coming up with sociological and statistical information, based on the results of his own data, being religiously affiliated is the norm in the United States and, indeed, in most countries.  He might not like that but it is a fact, though like so many on his ideological side,  the actual meaning of words don't matter nearly as much as their ideological preferences.

If he had gone with the other alternatives he mentions and put only those who had no religious belief in that category, the percentage given as "Nones" would be less than half of what it generally is claimed to be and less newsy.  More of those included as "Nones" express some kind of religious belief than the percentage who are atheists, if not both atheists and agnostic combined, in most of the times I've seen a percentage break down given. 

Which gets me to how I knew of Kosmin, he's a member of the board of directors of the Center for Inquiry, one of the alphabet soup named groups begun by Paul Kurtz to promote atheism, primarily by attacking religion.  So the conflict of interest you may have suspected in his creation of that category so useful in atheist propaganda, is documented.