This suggests that critical thinking and knowledge tends to lead one away from religion.
No it doesn't. Note I'm not arguing against the idea that critical thinking tends to lead you away from religion, I'm also not arguing for the idea. I'm arguing that what you quoted * doesn't support the idea. What that quote supports is that people who have changed, from religious belief to agnosticism, or atheism, from agnosticism or atheism to religious belief, or from one form of religious belief to another, will tend to do so after having thought about it a lot. Those who continue with what they where thought as a kid, on the average will not have thought about it quite as much (plenty have thought about it a lot, but the overall average would be less, maybe much less). You are relatively unlikely to make such a change without learning a lot about the new idea your starting to accept.
Mixing in people who are merely apathetic about religion would muddy the results in my opinion.
Mixing in people who are apathetic would balance the comparison better. Many people who self identify as members of some religious faith are relatively apathetic about it, they have some vague religious identity, but aren't strongly connected to the religion and its history, facts, dogma, and ideas. In this study such apathetic people are considered as members of the various religious groups that they identify as. Many irreligious people are also apathetic or vague about the issue, in fact its a strong majority of that group (12 percent with the entire irreligious group being 15 percent), but they are not counted along with the atheists. So the religious people get both the strongly committed and the apathetic lumped together, while the irreligious do not.
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* - "Another way of putting it is that self-described atheists are the religious converts of the irreligious world. Like someone who leaps from Lutheranism to Catholicism, or Christianity to Islam, they’ve made an intellectual decision about their faith — or the lack thereof, that is. And so it isn’t surprising that they’d be more knowledgeable about the subject than the much larger populations of part-time churchgoers and “nothing in particular” nonpractitioners alike." |
