> "...it's basically a psychological coping mechanism."
I think this isn't quite right. Religion is a social mechanism. It creates the right incentives for its members to buy into a kind of insurance program. When a member falls on hard times the other members will take care of them. Of course this is more appealing to people in financially or socially unstable circumstances.
In order to avoid free-loading, there might be something like a tithe where you actually have to pay money into a shared pool. But if you don't have money to spare then usually membership comes down to costly signalling, i.e. various forms of self-sacrifice. Usually the poorer the members the more extreme the religion.
The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in (which is why costly signals of buy-in are so important). It shifts the prisoner's dilemma payouts away from defect, toward cooperate. And a strange quirk of the human mind is that the more socially useful something is, the more it will prevent us from realizing it's not actually based on something true, and the more socially harmful it is the more it will prevent us from realizing it's actually true.
As society modernizes, people move away from religion because the costs don't seem to justify the benefits. Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true. Unfortunately I think we do lose something in the process. Modern society is more likely to be disconnected. Religiously active people generally tend to be happier. Looking around a lot of people I know have nothing like a weekly church meeting where they can socialize with a group of people that takes care of each other.
> Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true.
Can you clarify what you're trying to assert here please?
> The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in ...
Would you be able to cite some examples of where this has happened in the past few millennia?
My theory is that the church and priests have a giant fault at least for me an Orthodox Christian in Romania. When I was a child I become a super believer, they had a religios cartoon on the only TV channel and the stories were very nice. But then in school you have the priests(religion teachers) fight a losing battle against science by supporting the creation and myths instead on focusing on the more important parts.
I was also into conspiracies and aliens/UFOs and religion also makes sense as a tool to keep the poor suppressed So IMO when the priests were no longer the only source of education then the things collapse for the church, the people in my village are on paper part of the church but in practice based on what they do and not do the story is different. There are some different sects/versions that appeared after the revolution in 1989 that do a better job on converting and keeping their people more engaged but still are talking about the creation myths so this is invalidating some of my points( and I am still mystified how people that studied physics in university(including astronomy) will defend the Genesis as a correct historical thing).
Just so we don't start some mini comment war here, if you are a religious person I am fine with that and I am honestly happy for you, I never ever start discussion with people in the attempt to convert them, they start this conversations and I have to explain where my doubt come from. Also you don't need to try to defend creation her, it will not work and is not the main point for me anyway there are more deeper issues , philosophical issues that even a proof of God existence would not be enough for me to start woshiping him/it.
The story of genesis is likely just a robe used to make sure the soul of the text propagated forward in time. The truth about the text of genesis is likely that it is a technical document or map. I personally think it's from an ancient civilization that traveled here from the stars. But it's like a seed of higher consciousness, the patterns in the letter text trigger some type of awaking in our minds as they try to pattern match that opens our consciousness to a wider view of the world. Stan Tenen from the meru foundation discovered the patterning in the text that is incredible.
Yes, I found on youtube now, too late probably , priests/monks that are also scientists and have a better way of talking and focusing on the important things, IMO this kind of true scientist priests could save the church because they can combine them and drop the inaccurate biblical history and focus on the essential part of philosophy.
Yes, christians should really treat the Old Testament as something old. 'Logos' (the greek word describing Christ in the New Testament) means both reason and faith.
The hebrew letter text of the 5 books of moses is likely a map or a technical document. See Stan Tenens work from the meru foundation, they've posted all the lectures hes video tapes to YouTube. The first one from 1989 is still one of my favorites.
Looking at religion as a tool for the insecure (financially, emotionally, whatever) seems to miss the point, at least for the major religions. Buddhism answers the question "how do I deal with pain". Islam and Judaism answers the question "what does God expect from us" (at least that's what it seems to me from the outside). Christianity at its best answers the question "why am I here", to which the answer is that God made us like him to participate in his creation-project (see Gen 1). (Gen 3 shows how that got messed up, and the Gospels show how it got back on track.) More speculatively, it also seems like religion, at least some of theme, answers questions like "what is my place in the world", "how did we get here", "why does this exists", "how do I treat other people", which could maybe be broadly summarized "what is the meaning of life".
I don't think these questions are going away with wealth. Wealth doesn't answer the question of purpose or meaning, nor does it answer the question of why we desire connection with other people but we don't seem to be able to do it very well. I suspect the West is getting a lot of surrogate religions that just aren't called by that name, such as "changing the world!!"/activism as an answer for the meaning of life.
It seems to be missing a whole picture. I suspect places like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and UAE have both high average wealth and high religiosity. It highlights places like Bangladesh and Japan, but seems to note the US as an anomaly. Feels like it's cherry picking data to fit the story.
It would be nice to just see a graph of all the data and see how well the data really correlates.
This is not a fair way to compare them. Every country has some form of uncertainty. Countries like US and Japan have extreme debt. Europe has low economic growth and poor fertility rates making things worse. China and India have overpopulation and wealth inequality. Korea is in a similar position to Israel - strong tech but also nearly at war.
You can stamp the "uncertainty" label on everyone. The idea is to do it in a proper manner and be transparent about it.
Actually, it's a perfectly fair comparison. When people are worried if they'll make it through the year intact, they'll seek some form of certainty to help them feel less vulnerable to ruin.
China, India, and the USA have high inequality and few working programs for the poor. They also have high religiosity.
Japan and Northern European countries, on the other hand, have low religiosity, and low income inequality, and no threat of war or famine. Korea is in transition, with still fairly high inequality (and also fairly high religiosity), although that's on the decline.
You can of course stamp the "uncertainty" label on everyone if you want to play semantic games, but I'm not interested in that.
That's the case in any nation with wealth inequality. Religion doesn't make the rich behave better; it makes the poor better able to bear the inequality.
It certainly makes the rich virtue signal better (all major religions do). Considering the almost constant critique of Pharisees and similar throughout the ages, I doubt it affects them much beyond that.
It does not make them virtue signal if we look at what Islam teaches. As a matter of fact, being rich in Islam is a burden/test in its own way (we can see one reason why, as per this very article, and the fact that the rich will be asked about what they did with their wealth). Furthermore, and very importantly, virtue signaling is not only discouraged, but a very large sin (look up Riyaa').
I have a strong feeling that it is not an either/or situation. In the ladder of unknown, if spirituality is the first step, religion is the final. And I am seeing a huge increase in spirituality in developed and wealthy countries. It is as if you drop the current one only to eventually create/adopt a new one. For all we know it could be a variant of science the way people are appealing to scientists as high priests. It seems to me that it is too complex a phenomenon to categorise based on the average proportion at any given point in time.
Adam Smith has this wonderful quote on why it is difficult to model humans and societies in the theory of moral sentiments, which I feel holds even today:
> The man of the system. seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.
The huge difference between spiritualism and religion is that religion is dogmatic and systemically organised. In my opinion freeing spirituality from the clutch of religion is the final step, not the other way around. So being spiritual but not religious is in my opinion not something that inevitably leads to religion, but if we do it right there is no need for oppressive religion anymore.
I think this is because churches provide services that governments in developing countries cannot. People there are more likely to be religious because churches provide value to them.
> Paul's intention in creating the scale was to challenge the idea that religion is universal and innate to the human condition, and to show that societies that don't believe in God are not doomed, as some religious conservatives would have people believe.
Always an excellent idea to start off a study with an attempt to prove a preconceived point.
> Religion is highly variable, and therefore we need to ask why is it sometimes popular and why it isn't," Paul said. "One thing we do know is that it's only popular in societies that … have enough rate of dysfunction that people are anxious about their daily lives, so they're looking to the gods for help in their daily lives.
No Western European country has more than 20% atheists: https://www-pewresearch-org.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/www.pewre.... France is 15%, Germany is 10%. The US is 4%. People in developed countries are much less likely to participate in organized religion or subscribe to some general idea of spirituality, but atheists are still a small share of the population.
Atheism is only part of the picture. Most agnostics [1] are effectively irreligious.
If you look here [2], you can see that the USA is more on the religious end of the religion curve in terms of Western countries. You can also see a trend linking uncertainty, inequality, and religiosity.
At least for Germany that perspective is not quite right.
While most people in Germany formally belong to some Christian church or are Muslim or Jewish, in a lot of cases that does not extend past the entry on some registration form.
Look for example at [0] whose headline states: "Believe is irrelevant to majority of Germans".
Your link belies what you said. That survey was not in "every western country", but fifteen western countries. The Czech Republic is west of Finland (surveyed) and less than 20% of its population is religious.
Also you say from that survey people believe in God or a higher power, but it does not limit to that, they include people who believe in a spiritual force. That could be a Buddhist.
I meant to say “western Europe” so as to exclude the communist-influenced purge of religion from Eastern Europe. Also, most Americans would consider Buddhism a religion.
Curious about why you use "believe in god or some higher power" for religiosity but "identify as atheist" for lack of religiosity considering your first link has "do not believe in a higher power" as an option for non-theists.
Belief in a "higher power" could be the statistical likelihood of an alien race on the other side of the universe who have technology a little more advanced than ours.
A higher power could also be an omnipresent intelligence with no interest what so ever in human affairs.
In my opinion the whole debate should be using a terminology regarding spiritual awareness and not of religion since the latter is much more loaded with assumptions which biases the results. This way an atheist could actively be pursuing a personal spiritual program.
Certainly, but by that position, people who "do not believe in a higher power" is a subset of people who "do not believe in God" so Sweden has at least 41% non-theists then.
Are you saying that people who don't believe in advanced alien tech also do not believe in God? Or am I having a mental breakdown? I'm fairly sure I know what a subset is and its logical implications.
It is straightforward to prove this through mere syllogism, but perhaps the discrepancy arises because you interpret "do not believe in a higher power" as "do not believe in a singular higher power"? In English, "X does not believe in a higher power" translates to the logical statement "For any higher power H, X does not believe in H", and is equivalent to the English statement "X does not believe in any higher power".
To go from there to ((English ("X does not believe in a higher power")) logically implies (English ("X does not believe in God"))) is trivial. And that is the definition of a subset A of B: \forall x \in A, x \in B
I can't say that is my experience of the UK - I haven't been to a religious wedding or funeral for decades and the topic of religion never comes up in day to day conversation with anyone.
Religion doesn't come up as a topic in the US either. That means very little about the religiosity of the person, it just means that people are polite because they know that religious opinions differ.
And a religious wedding or funeral just informs us about your relatives not about the UK.
Pretty common for people to have discussed with partners what for of funeral you would want - I know I have and it was clear that the last funeral I attended (of a colleague who died in a climbing accident) that he had very strong opinions about what any funeral would be like.
Same for weddings - I can't think of any wedding I have attended where it wasn't very clear that the style of the wedding was determined by the people getting married.
I think people don't generally talk about religion in the UK because it is pretty irrelevant to most of the population.
> > Paul's intention in creating the scale was to challenge the idea that religion is universal and innate to the human condition, and to show that societies that don't believe in God are not doomed, as some religious conservatives would have people believe.
> Always an excellent idea to start off a study with an attempt to prove a preconceived point.
That's highly disingenuous.
The intention as stated was to disprove a preconceived point -- viz 'societies that don't believe in God are doomed'.
Is this a serious question. Religion is only there to give hope to the hopeless. As countries gets wealthier, less hopeless people exists in that country, in turn less need for the religions.
Who can say that I did not move a finger and god sent me all this wealth ? I mean other than the church charlatans. People wake up to the truth of "if I work more I get out of this poverty quicker" very simple premise if you think about it.
A point against religion but a point in favor for the truth of Jesus of Nazareth's words: "Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your comfort." (Luke 6:24)
In other words "God will even the score... somehow"
These kinds of teachings were necessary for organized religions in large societies, because people could plainly see the rich being rewarded over and over again, while the poor were screwed over. For a religion to gain traction in such an environment, it would have to teach of a Great Equalizer, such as karma or omniscient and omnibenevolent god(s).
Death is already the Great Equalizer. There is no need to invent one. Yet people still accumulate wealth, so desperately, unaware that they do not know how to use it after death.
People who live in wealth have comfort in life. People in poverty do not. That's the problem for which the downtrodden wish for answers, because they didn't ask to be poor.
That death leaves both poor and rich in the same situation is of little comfort to the man shivering in the cold as he watches the rich in their mansions. There needs to be another chapter to the story, where the poor man finally gets his share. Religions can provide this because they tell stories of life after death that are comforting to the downtrodden.
Oh I see. I didn't realize that Hawking was the prophet of the church of Atheism, and spoke for all atheists. Perhaps you have a copy of the Orthodox Atheist Beliefs to share?
It's not just Hawking, you'll hear similar arguments from Dawkins, Harris, Kraus, and many more, and guess what, from a purely atheistic materialistic point of view, they're right. They have made the arguments like incest cannot be shown to be wrong, or that suffering doesn't matter, that rape just is, like the stripes on a tiger, a phenomenon that is neither right nor wrong. That is the only rational ultimate conclusion of atheism.
> Yet people still accumulate wealth, so desperately, unaware that they do not know how to use it after death.
I won't be able to, but my genetic semi-copies with heavy memetic influence from me will be able to. It's not about me, the individual. It's about the genes and memes that compose me, and accumulating wealth does pretty well at ensuring replication of those genes and memes.
>Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24)
You know the original bible was lost and written from scratch by the wishes of the new author at least one time sometimes around year 100, right? The first schism. Jesus of Nazareth probably never said such thing.
The comment I replied to attributes the quote to Jesus of Nazareth, and presents it as evidence that he was an incredibly timelessly wise, even god-like being. Normally when people make out a person to be way too incredible, other people refute that with actual history.
Then it would make you believe someone else is so incredibly wise. Posts can contribute to the discussion and suggest side points at the same time. If they didn't want to suggest how much Jesus of Nazareth was wise, they would simply post the quote without the "truth of Jesus of Nazareth [the name used for Jesus the historical figure] words" part.
If the measure of religiosity is "participation in religious services", are we even measuring the same thing when participation can vary all the way from watching Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker on TV, to being blessed by the Pope in the Vatican, to receiving alms from Mother Teresa on the streets of Calcutta, or completing a Scientology audit graduation on a Friday?
I know many (my friends) who are in the process of losing their religion as they move up the salary scale.
Religion, for many, is a hope to be saved from their economic misery. Once they are out of penury then religious obligations become a bane on the newly found freedom that comes with money so the fallout is obvious. The developed west is a proof of this phenomenon. Software engineers in India would confirm the hypothesis in the next decade or two.
This quote from Marx is often misrepresented but I think he said it in a positive sense,
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people"
The link only talks about economic uncertainty. Clearly, there is more to it.
For example, I would say every single person is routinely perplexed by 50% of the rest of the planet (aka the opposite gender). That is a constant source of uncertainty, but doesn't cause us all to become religious.
Besides, even the richest substrata of economically developed countries just somehow automatically gravitate towards religion-influenced philanthropy. A lot of these philanthropy vehicles are predominantly religious in nature, e.g. a missionary to build schools in Africa. The economic certainty experienced by the rich folks isn't making them object to the religious nature of these organizations even if they themselves don't explicitly believe in religion. They could just stop donating, but something tells them the good outweighs the (in their view) bad.
I think there is a deep need for people to find meaning in their lives, but it is also a personal and subjective notion. Maybe richer countries are generally better set up for this because of the larger number of opportunities for people to find meaning in the way they define it.
> The link only talks about economic uncertainty. Clearly, there is more to it.
Of course. Economic uncertainty just happens to be the largest source of uncertainty in many parts of the modern world (unless you happen to live in a war zone or under an oppressive or corrupt government).
> For example, I would say every single person is routinely perplexed by 50% of the rest of the planet (aka the opposite gender).
What an odd thing to say!
> Besides, even the richest substrata of economically developed countries just somehow automatically gravitate towards religion-influenced philanthropy.
Religion is historically the driver of philanthropy [1], but in modern times you also have things like the Gates foundation.
> The economic certainty experienced by the rich folks isn't making them object to the religious nature of these organizations even if they themselves don't explicitly believe in religion. They could just stop donating, but something tells them the good outweighs the (in their view) bad.
You haven't explicitly stated it, but it sounds like your premise is that religious feeling is causing these people to donate, rather than them donating to any cause that reduces world suffering. In fact, the religious nature of so many philanthropic organizations is one of the driving reasons for the rise of secular philanthropic organizations in recent years. More and more people want to support evidence based help that doesn't also spread a religion.
The fallacy that articles like this fall into is that they group all religions into a single group and treat them the same. There are many rich Muslims for example, and they don't feel the need to "lose their religion" after becoming rich. They know they will be asked how they spent their wealth on Judgement Day.
> "There's no situation where you have a really highly religious nation that's highly successful socially."
I guess it all depends on how you are defining 'religious'. Without Christianity, the West wouldn't have universities, hospitals and democracies. It also looks like the decline of Christianity in modern society leads to stagnation and mimesis.
Without Christianity, the West wouldn't have universities, hospitals and democracies.
You don't really know that because we didn't try it. What is certain is those institutions have been increasing in size and number whilst religiosity has been decreasing in many nations.
It also looks like the decline of Christianity in modern society leads to stagnation and mimesis.
It certainly hasn't led to economic decline, we have never been so wealthy. We have never lived so long. The chance of dying from violence has never been so low.
The evidence looks pretty good, actually, to support this thesis (though it is overly narrow in using 'Christianity' instead of 'Organized Religion'). Non-free societies were very good at crunching through people to produce overall societal progress especially if they applied the Greater Good deceit and the Afterlife deceit.
Perhaps the real tragedy is that we are now all free, and I, a non-slave, choose not to enrich society at large but myself. But that's not a tragedy I have that much sympathy for. I'd rather be a non-slave on this Earth than have a galactic humanity where I'm a serf.
Some forms, maybe. But the first real hospital for strangers (hospitality) was by the Roman Catholic Church. That's why all hospitals in the West have the symbol of Christ.
The first real university was founded by the Roman Catholic Church and the first real democracy was a Christian nation.
The first "christian" democracies only gave the vote to men of the aristocracy (even less representation than in ancient Greece). Universal suffrage is not a christian victory.
I think this isn't quite right. Religion is a social mechanism. It creates the right incentives for its members to buy into a kind of insurance program. When a member falls on hard times the other members will take care of them. Of course this is more appealing to people in financially or socially unstable circumstances.
In order to avoid free-loading, there might be something like a tithe where you actually have to pay money into a shared pool. But if you don't have money to spare then usually membership comes down to costly signalling, i.e. various forms of self-sacrifice. Usually the poorer the members the more extreme the religion.
The idea of divine, absolute laws of conduct and an un-gameable entity that enforces these laws sounds fantastical but it's very effective at getting people to cooperate once they've bought in (which is why costly signals of buy-in are so important). It shifts the prisoner's dilemma payouts away from defect, toward cooperate. And a strange quirk of the human mind is that the more socially useful something is, the more it will prevent us from realizing it's not actually based on something true, and the more socially harmful it is the more it will prevent us from realizing it's actually true.
As society modernizes, people move away from religion because the costs don't seem to justify the benefits. Also without strong social incentives to believe, it becomes too hard to believe based only on the likelihood that it's actually true. Unfortunately I think we do lose something in the process. Modern society is more likely to be disconnected. Religiously active people generally tend to be happier. Looking around a lot of people I know have nothing like a weekly church meeting where they can socialize with a group of people that takes care of each other.