According to Pew Forum, in the United States:
“ | Atheists and agnostics are particularly likely to be non-Hispanic whites. Fully eight-in-ten atheists and agnostics (82%) are white, 3% are black, 6% are Hispanic, and the remainder is of some other race or of mixed race."[1] | ” |
For more information please see: Evolutionary racism
The agnostic Charles Darwin wrote in his work The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex:
“ | At some future period not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes...will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest Allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as the baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.[2][3] | ” |
See also: Atheism and evolutionary racism and Social effects of the theory of evolution
Since World War II a majority of the most prominent and vocal defenders of the evolutionary position which employs methodological naturalism have been agnostics/atheists.[4]
Evolutionary racism refers to a racist philosophy based on Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. It assumes that men have continually evolved, and thus some races are more evolved than others. It replaces Christian morality with the atheistic "survival of the fittest" ideology of Social Darwinism.
See also: Richard Dawkins' family fortune and the slave trade and Richard Dawkins and agnosticism
Richard Dawkins is a prominent agnostic (see: Richard Dawkins and agnosticism).
On February 20, 2012, the British newspaper the Daily Mail reported that Richard Dawkins' "family fortune came from the slave trade".[5] On February 19, 2012, The Daily Telegraph reported that Dawkins is being called to make reparations for his family's past.[6]
The Daily Mail reported:
“ | Ancestors of secularist campaigner Richard Dawkins made their fortune from the slave trade, it has been revealed.
The outspoken atheist, who once branded the Catholic Church 'evil', is the direct descendent of Henry Dawkins who owned 1,013 slaves in Jamaica until he died in 1744. His 400-acre family estate, Over Norton Park near Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, is believed to have been bought with money made through slave ownership hundreds of years ago... Richard's son, Henry, married into another of Jamaica's powerful slave trading families and left 1,013 slaves worth £40,736 when he died 1744. The links with slavery continue down the family tree and in 1796 another ancestor, James Dawkins, voted against William Wilberforce's plans to abolish the slave trade[5] |
” |
(William Wilberforce was a devout Christian, philanthropist,abolitionist, and the leader of the campaign against the Slave Trade)
Thomas Sowell wrote:
“ | While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history…not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all…. Moreover, within Western civilization, the principle impetus for the abolition of slavery came first from very conservative religious activists – people who would today be called ‘the religious right.’…this story is not ‘politically correct’ in today’s terms. Hence it is ignored, as if it never happened.”[7] | ” |
Categories: [Agnosticism]