>One question though: The study cites 3% as the number of people who
>could be defined as atheists. I seem to remember much larger
>numbers reported by people on this list (maybe as much as 30%). Are
>they off in their measurements, defining it differently, or just
>less prone to exaggeration? Or maybe I'm misremembering.
You're probably thinking of CUNY's 2001 American Religious Identification Survey, which was a successor to their 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification. Here's a bit of the key findings <http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm>: "[T]he greatest increase in absolute as well as in percentage terms has been among those adults who do not subscribe to any religious identification; their number has more than doubled from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.4 million in 2001; their proportion has grown from just eight percent of the total in 1990 to over fourteen percent in 2001." But that includes people who identify as atheists (just 0.4% of the pop), agnostics (0.5%), humanists (about 0.02%), seculars (also around 0.02%) - and those who merely say "no religion," 13%.
Doug