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]

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.