Atheist Round Winners [Turing 2012]

May I have the envelope please?  (You may want to keep the answer key and the list of entries handy in another tab).  Drumroll….

The Most Atheist Atheist was Shawn (blogger at Belief in People and entry number four) who scored 81%.  Right behind him were two successful Christians: Gilbert from The Last Conformer (entry five, 78%) and Elliot from The Paraphasic (entry eleven, 71%).

All the other Christians clustered at the bottom of the heap.  The only actual atheist to get stuck down there with them, and pull less than 50% was Jacob, who has been a Christian and is feeling drawn to it again, according to his blog.  Now, let me draw you a picture:

The Christian answers are highlighted in red.  In case the legend is a little small to read, the first bar is the percent of atheist respondents rating the entry as “Very Likely Atheist” and the second is the percent rating it “Likely Atheist.”  The entries are sorted descending by the sum of the ratings.

People were rarely that confident in their picks.  Only Shawn and Gilbert approached 50% choosing “Very Likely Atheist.”  Everyone else, honest and fake, was below 30%.   Those numbers are lower than last year’s.

If you want to see a slightly more complete (and more confusing graph) the one below shows the full spectrum of atheists’ ratings for each entry.  This time, the answers are sorted descending according to percent rating the entry “Very Likely Atheist” so the rankings have changed.  The Christian participants are highlighed by setting their grayscale gradient to run backwards, so you can think of it as the more accurate the category for that essay, the darker the datapoint.