Browsing by Author "Vuorikko, Salla"

Objectives An unbeliever is someone who doesn’t believe in God or gods. There are a lot of unbelievers in the World, especially in Europe. However, the scientific understanding of unbelief is limited. There is little research on different kinds of unbelievers. This study began to explore ritual atheists. Ritual atheists are unbelievers who find some religious rituals meaningful in their lives. The study explored conservative and liberal attitudes of unbelievers, ritual atheists and religious people. It was hypothesized that unbelievers are more liberal than ritual atheists and ritual atheists are more liberal than religious people. Methods The participants were from the 2008 EVS (European Values Study) data, which was collected from 45 different European countries. New variables were computed from the original items, and they represented attitudes concerning morals, family life, tolerance, immigrants and requirements of national identity. Most of the variables were computed by arithmetic means or by using factor analysis. The data was analyzed by multivariate and univariate analysis of variance, by t tests and by discriminant analysis. Results and conclusions With most of the attitudes, unbelievers were more liberal than ritual atheists who, for their part, were more liberal than religious people. This study provided entirely new information about the attitudes of ritual atheists. The results support the assumption that ritual atheism is a unique form of unbelief: a ritual atheist adopts some of the religious influences of the culture, without being religious.