Reading Is Ephemeral

[substitute]

In American middle-class society, there's a list of things that are valued in the abstract and ignored in practice. Let's call them Institutional Hypocrises. Most of these totems are foisted off on children, including religion, the environment, and good nutrition. Adults avoid their churches, pollute, and eat chee-tos. Children are expected to go to Sunday School, take part in ecological cleanups, and eat "right".

To this list we should probably now add literacy. My library employee friends locally tell me that the library is now a Blockbuster mostly. People check out videos like crazy, and the books gather dust, except for the childrens books which are constantly in demand.

So now that I am a man, I suppose I should put away childish things and stop honoring my God, stop recycling, eat more chocolate pudding and less bran, and watch "Elimidate" instead of re-reading Joyce. I'm such an immature disaster.

Comments

[scromp.livejournal.com]

First I should state that some of my reply was mixed in support of substitute's allegations about people claiming to be religious, but not actually walking the walk. I wasn't so much trying to "prove you wrong" as raise some doubts about your apparent certainties about us here in "flyover country." I keep seeing so much "coasts vs the middle" talk here that it gets depressing.. It's not nearly as black and white as it's made out to be.

As far as the MA vs KY comparison went, no, it's not statistically relevant in regards to the entire country, that data's going to be hard to come by and I just don't care enough to find out; but I will note that MA has twice as many people as KY, and if 44% of them self-ID as Catholics, it's already almost double the entire population of religious people in KY put together. Does that map to the entire regions? Who knows.

And I wish they'd been more explicit about what a "western" state was. Colorado is both western and middle, in my view, and California only gets one slot.

Scientology is a dangerous cult. So's Christian Science. :)

Anyway, I wasn't trying to pick a fight. It was more of a reflexive "Oh not not Boston again. Didn't we just go through this?" Sometimes my friends page just melds together into one big mess in my head. :-)

I honestly think it comes down to at most 10-15% difference that ranges all over the place no matter where you go, and that's true of politics, literacy, religion, employment rates, riceboys and meth production.

If there's anything I hope we can all agree on in the future it's that we need a lot more "blue states" next time around.

[nuns.livejournal.com]

Oh -- I knew you weren't picking a fight. I actually spent a bunch of time trying to make my response less contentious while still pointing out the discrepancy I perceived between what I actually said and what you interpreted me to have said.

That confusing disclaimer out of the way, I've been crunching some numbers and here are the results (http://www.livejournal.com/users/nuns/50201.html).

In general, the Central parts of the country are more religious. But the difference is not as large as I had suggested. Depending on what states count as Central and what count as Coastal, it seems to be between in the 1%-2% range. Texas is the swing state.

[scromp.livejournal.com]

Interesting! While I was certainly pushing the notion that it wasn't all that different, I nevertheless would have expected a bigger percentage than that myself.

Thanks for taking the time to do the math.

[nuns.livejournal.com]

Oh! Glad to do it -- it was actually kinda fun, and anything is better than reading for my PhD exams. So far today I have not read the Lais of Marie de France.

I think the states that threw me off were Georgia and the Carolinas. While these states are undeniably on the east coast, they nevertheless seem culturally very different from say the New England states.

I imagine that a comparison of the actual west coast states (CA, OR, WA, and possibly TX), New England, and the TriState (NY, NJ, and PA?) to the hard core midwest and the deep south would yield very different results.

On the other hand:


1. The Central region includes 7 states with 10% or fewer atheists, while the Coastal region includes only 2.
   
2. Depending where you count WY and CO, the Coastal region includes 4-6 states with 20% or higher atheists, while the Central region includes at most 2.
   

Perhaps the extremes of atheism being dominantly located at the coasts while the extremes of religion are located dominantly in the center creates the illusion of a wider-than-actual gap by failing to consider the gigantic number of states with an "average" number of atheists (11%-19%), which are scattered much more evenly (19 states on the coasts and 15 in the center).

Also, of course, Hawaii and Alaska are not represented in the religion survey -- these would both be coastal, right? I wonder how they would modify the numbers.

In the end, probably the mental comparison I was doing (which led me to expect a much wider difference) was Urban versus Suburban/Rural areas -- I suspect that I associate big cities with the coasts, which is obviously silly.