Fun from Kimberley Winston at the Washington Post (“Study: Atheists distrusted as much as rapists,”December 10, 2011):
The study, conducted among 350 Americans adults and 420 Canadian college students, asked participants to decide if a fictional driver damaged a parked car and left the scene, then found a wallet and took the money, was the driver more likely to be a teacher, an atheist teacher, or a rapist teacher?
The participants, who were from religious and nonreligious backgrounds, most often chose the atheist teacher.
The study sounds like junk, and the motive becomes pretty obvious when one of the authors advises,
“If you manage to offer credible counteroffers of these stereotypes, this can do a lot to undermine people’s existing prejudice,” he said. “If you realize there are all these atheists you’ve been interacting with all your life and they haven’t raped your children that is going to do a lot do dispel these stereotypes.”
Most of us haven’t been interacting with “all these atheists” all our lives, so if there were anything in the find, it would probably relate to the “new atheist,” of the sort we are always having to see off Uncommon Descent.
For them, atheism means never having to say “I should be sorry.”