Huff Post: by Yasmine Hafiz.
Researchers at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga report that atheists are just as heterogenous of a group as people of faith, in a study done by doctoral student Christoper F. Silver and project manager Thomas J. Coleman III.
Many previous religious surveys placed people without religious beliefs into a catch-all category known as the “religious nones,” but that oversimplifies the wide spectrum of opinions that fall into that group. The report idenfified six different groups of religious non-believers: Intellectual Atheist/Agnostics (IAA), Activist Atheist/Agnostics (AAA), Seeker Agnostics (SA), Antitheists, Non-theists and Ritual Atheist/Agnostics (RAA).
The research was born out of Silver’s dissertation project and takes a new approach to religious classification. Silver commented in a RawStory interview, “These categories are a first stab at this. In 30 years, we may be looking at a typology of 32 types.”